For man of you, your characteristic race, Here may he hardy, sweet, gigantic grow, here tower proportionate to Nature, Here climb the vast pure spaces unconfined, uncheck'd by wall or roof, Here laugh with storm or sun, here joy, here patiently inure, Here heed himself, unfold himself, (not others' formulas heed,) here fill his time, To duly fall, to aid, unreck'd at last, To disappear, to serve.
Tom, the Piper's Son
Tom, Tom, the piper's son, Stole a pig and away he run; The pig was eat and Tom was beat And Tom ran crying down the street.
There was not a worse vagabond in Shrewsbury than old Barney the piper.
He never did any work except to play the pipes, and he played so badly that few pennies ever found their way into his pouch.
It was whispered around that old Barney was not very honest, but he was so sly and cautious that no one had ever caught him in the act of stealing, although a good many things had been missed after they had fallen into the old man's way.
Barney had one son, named Tom; and they lived all alone in a little hut away at the end of the village street, for Tom's mother had died when he was a baby.
You may not suppose that Tom was a very good boy, since he had such a queer father; but neither was he very bad, and the worst fault he had was in obeying his father's wishes when Barney wanted him to steal a chicken for their supper or a pot of potatoes for their breakfast.
Tom did not like to steal, but he had no one to teach him to be honest, and so, under his father's guidance, he fell into bad ways.
One morning
Tom, Tom, the piper's son, Was hungry when the day begun; He wanted a bun and asked for one, But soon found out that there were none.
"What shall we do?" he asked his father
"Go hungry," replied Barney, "unless you want to take my pipes and play in the village.
Perhaps they will give you a penny."
"No," answered Tom, shaking his head; "no one will give me a penny for playing; but Farmer Bowser might give me a penny to stop playing, if I went to his house.
He did last week, you know."
So Tom took his father's pipes and walked over the hill to Farmer Bowser's house; for you must know that
Tom, Tom, the piper's son, Learned to play when he was young; But the only tune that he could play Was "Over the hills and far away."
And he played this one tune as badly as his father himself played, so that the people were annoyed when they heard him, and often begged him to stop.
When he came to Farmer Bowser's house, Tom started up the pipes and began to play with all his might.
The farmer was in his woodshed, sawing wood, so he did not hear the pipes; and the farmer's wife was deaf, and could not hear them.
But a little pig that had strayed around in front of the house heard the noise, and ran away in great fear to the pigsty.
Then, as Tom saw the playing did no good, he thought he would sing also, and therefore he began bawling, at the top of his voice,
"Over the hills, not a great ways off, The woodchuck died with the whooping cough!"
The farmer had stopped sawing to rest, just then; and when he heard the singing he rushed out of the shed, and chased Tom away with a big stick of wood.
The boy went back to his father, and said, sorrowfully, for he was more hungry than before,
"The farmer gave me nothing but a scolding; but there was a very nice pig running around the yard."
"How big was it?" asked Barney.
"Oh, just about big enough to make a nice dinner for you and me."
Tom knew very well what he meant by that, so he laid down the pipes, and went back to the farmer's house.
The piper was very glad to see the pig, and said to Tom,
"You are a good son, and the pig is very nice and fat.
We shall have a dinner fit for a king."
It was not long before the piper had the pig killed and cut into pieces and boiling in the pot.
Only the tail was left out, for Tom wanted to make a whistle of it, and as there was plenty to eat besides the tail his father let him have it.
The piper and his son had a fine dinner that day, and so great was their hunger that the little pig was all eaten up at one meal!
Now Farmer Bowser, when he had finished sawing the wood, found it was time to feed the pig, so he took a pail of meal and went to the pigsty.
But when he came to the sty there was no pig to be seen, and he searched all round the place for a good hour without finding it.
"Piggy, piggy, piggy!" he called, but no piggy came, and then he knew his pig had been stolen.
He was very angry, indeed, for the pig was a great pet, and he had wanted to keep it till it grew very big.
So he put on his coat and buckled a strap around his waist, and went down to the village to see if he could find out who had stolen his pig.
Up and down the street he went, and in and out the lanes, but no traces of the pig could he find anywhere.
And that was no great wonder, for the pig was eaten by that time and its bones picked clean.
Finally the farmer came to the end of the street where the piper lived in his little hut, and there he saw Tom sitting on a bench and blowing on a whistle made from a pig's tail.
"Where did you get that tail?" asked the farmer.
"I found it," said naughty Tom, beginning to be frightened.
"Let me see it," demanded the farmer; and when he had looked at it carefully he cried out,
"This tail belonged to my little pig, for I know very well the curl at the end of it!
Tell me, you rascal, where is the pig?"
Then Tom fell in a tremble, for he knew his wickedness was discovered.
"The pig is eat, your honor," he answered.
The farmer said never a word, but his face grew black with anger, and, unbuckling the strap that was about his waist, he waved it around his head, and whack! came the strap over Tom's back.
"Ow, ow!" cried the boy, and started to run down the street.
It was dark before he came back to his home, and his father was still asleep; so Tom crept into the hut and went to bed.
But he had received a good lesson and never after that could the old piper induce him to steal.
When Tom showed by his actions his intention of being honest he soon got a job of work to do, and before long he was able to earn a living more easily, and a great deal more honestly, than when he stole the pig to get a dinner and suffered a severe beating as a punishment.
"Oh, Little Bun Rabbit, so soft and so shy, Say, what do you see with your big, round eye?" "On Christmas we rabbits," says Bunny so shy, "Keep watch to see Santa go galloping by."
Little Dorothy had passed all the few years of her life in the country, and being the only child upon the farm she was allowed to roam about the meadows and woods as she pleased.
On the bright summer mornings Dorothy's mother would tie a sun bonnet under the girl's chin, and then she romped away to the fields to amuse herself in her own way.
She came to know every flower that grew, and to call them by name, and she always stepped very carefully to avoid treading on them, for Dorothy was a kind hearted child and did not like to crush the pretty flowers that bloomed in her path.
And she was also very fond of all the animals, and learned to know them well, and even to understand their language, which very few people can do.
And the animals loved Dorothy in turn, for the word passed around amongst them that she could be trusted to do them no harm.
For the horse, whose soft nose Dorothy often gently stroked, told the cow of her kindness, and the cow told the dog, and the dog told the cat, and the cat told her black kitten, and the black kitten told the rabbit when one day they met in the turnip patch.
Dorothy herself was afraid she might frighten him away, so she kept very quiet for a time, leaning silently against a tree and smiling encouragement at her timorous companion until the rabbit became reassured and blinked his big eyes at her thoughtfully.
For he was as much interested in the little girl as she in him, since it was the first time he had dared to meet a person face to face.
Finally Dorothy ventured to speak, so she asked, very softly and slowly,
"Oh, Little Bun Rabbit, so soft and so shy, Say, what do you see with your big, round eye?"
"Many things," answered the rabbit, who was pleased to hear the girl speak in his own language; "in summer time I see the clover leaves that I love to feed upon and the cabbages at the end of the farmer's garden.
I see the cool bushes where I can hide from my enemies, and I see the dogs and the men long before they can see me, or know that I am near, and therefore I am able to keep out of their way."
"Is that the reason your eyes are so big?" asked Dorothy.
"I suppose so," returned the rabbit; "you see we have only our eyes and our ears and our legs to defend ourselves with.
We cannot fight, but we can always run away, and that is a much better way to save our lives than by fighting."
"Where is your home, bunny?" enquired the girl.
"I live in the ground, far down in a cool, pleasant hole I have dug in the midst of the forest.
At the bottom of the hole is the nicest little room you can imagine, and there I have made a soft bed to rest in at night.
When I meet an enemy I run to my hole and jump in, and there I stay until all danger is over."
"You have told me what you see in summer," continued Dorothy, who was greatly interested in the rabbit's account of himself, "but what do you see in the winter?"
"In winter we rabbits," said Bunny so shy, "Keep watch to see Santa go galloping by."
"And do you ever see him?" asked the girl, eagerly.
"Oh, yes; every winter.
I am not afraid of him, nor of his reindeer. And it is such fun to see him come dashing along, cracking his whip and calling out cheerily to his reindeer, who are able to run even swifter than we rabbits.
I like to see the toys, for they are so bright and pretty, and every year there is something new amongst them.
Once I visited Santa, and saw him make the toys."
"Oh, tell me about it!" pleaded Dorothy.
"It was one morning after Christmas," said the rabbit, who seemed to enjoy talking, now that he had overcome his fear of Dorothy, "and I was sitting by the road side when Santa Claus came riding back in his empty sleigh.
He does not come home quite so fast as he goes, and when he saw me he stopped for a word.
"'You look very pretty this morning, Bun Rabbit,' he said, in his jolly way; 'I think the babies would love to have you to play with.'
"'I do n't doubt it, your honor,' I answered; 'but they 'd soon kill me with handling, even if they did not scare me to death; for babies are very rough with their playthings.'
"'That is true,' replied Santa Claus; 'and yet you are so soft and pretty it is a pity the babies can't have you.
"Of course I consented, for we all like to please old Santa, and a minute later I had jumped into the sleigh beside him and we were dashing away at full speed toward his castle.
I enjoyed the ride very much, but I enjoyed the castle far more; for it was one of the loveliest places you could imagine.
It stood on the top of a high mountain and is built of gold and silver bricks, and the windows are pure diamond crystals.
Santa Claus lives there all alone, except for old Mother Hubbard, who cooks the meals for him; and her cupboard is never bare now, I can promise you!
At the top of the castle there is one big room, and that is Santa's work shop, where he makes the toys.
On one side is his work bench, with plenty of saws and hammers and jack knives; and on another side is the paint bench, with paints of every color and brushes of every size and shape.
And in other places are great shelves, where the toys are put to dry and keep new and bright until Christmas comes and it is time to load them all into his sleigh.
"After Mother Hubbard had given me a good dinner, and I had eaten some of the most delicious clover I have ever tasted, Santa took me up into his work room and sat me upon the table.
"'If I can only make rabbits half as nice as you are,' he said, 'the little ones will be delighted.' Then he lit a big pipe and began to smoke, and soon he took a roll of soft fur from a shelf in a corner and commenced to cut it out in the shape of a rabbit.
He smoked and whistled all the time he was working, and he talked to me in such a jolly way that I sat perfectly still and allowed him to measure my ears and my legs so that he could cut the fur into the proper form.
And again he said, 'Good gracious! the ears are too short entirely!' So he had to get a needle and thread and sew on more fur to the ears, so that they might be the right size.
But after a time it was all finished, and then he stuffed the fur full of sawdust and sewed it up neatly; after which he put in some glass eyes that made the toy rabbit look wonderfully life like.
When it was all done he put it on the table beside me, and at first I did n't know whether I was the live rabbit or the toy rabbit, we were so much alike.
"So he immediately began to make another, and this time he cut the fur just the right size, so that it was even better than the first rabbit.
"'I must put a squeak in it,' said Santa.
"So he took a box of squeaks from a shelf and put one into the rabbit before he sewed it up.
When it was all finished he pressed the toy rabbit with his thumb, and it squeaked so naturally that I jumped off the table, fearing at first the new rabbit was alive.
Old Santa laughed merrily at this, and I soon recovered from my fright and was pleased to think the babies were to have such pretty playthings.
"'After this,' said Santa Claus, 'I can make rabbits without having you for a pattern; but if you like you may stay a few days longer in my castle and amuse yourself."
"I thanked him and decided to stay.
So for several days I watched him making all kinds of toys, and I wondered to see how quickly he made them, and how many new things he invented.
"'I almost wish I was a child,' I said to him one day, 'for then I too could have playthings.'
"'Ah, you can run about all day, in summer and in winter, and enjoy yourself in your own way,' said Santa; 'but the poor little children are obliged to stay in the house in the winter and on rainy days in the summer, and then they must have toys to amuse them and keep them contented."
"I knew this was true, so I only said, admiringly, 'You must be the quickest and the best workman in all the world, Santa.'
"'I suppose I am,' he answered; 'but then, you see, I have been making toys for hundreds of years, and I make so many it is no wonder I am skillful.
"'Oh, no,' said I, 'I prefer to run by myself, for I can easily find the way and I want to see the country.'
"'If that is the case,' replied Santa, 'I must give you a magic collar to wear, so that you will come to no harm.'
"So, after Mother Hubbard had given me a good meal of turnips and sliced cabbage, Santa Claus put the magic collar around my neck and I started for home.
I took my time on the journey, for I knew nothing could harm me, and I saw a good many strange sights before I got back to this place again."
"But what became of the magic collar?" asked Dorothy, who had listened with breathless interest to the rabbit's story.
"After I got home," replied the rabbit, "the collar disappeared from around my neck, and I knew Santa had called it back to himself again. He did not give it to me, you see; he merely let me take it on my journey to protect me.
The next Christmas, when I watched by the road side to see Santa, I was pleased to notice a great many of the toy rabbits sticking out of the loaded sleigh.
The babies must have liked them, too, for every year since I have seen them amongst the toys.
"Santa never forgets me, and every time he passes he calls out, in his jolly voice,
"'A merry Christmas to you, Bun Rabbit!
The babies still love you dearly.'"
The Rabbit paused, and Dorothy was just about to ask another question when Bunny raised his head and seemed to hear something coming.
"What is it?" enquired the girl.
So good bye, Dorothy; I hope we shall meet again, and then I will gladly tell you more of my adventures."
The next instant he had sprung into the wood, and all that Dorothy could see of him was a gray streak darting in and out amongst the trees.
CHAPTER thirty
The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House, the better I liked them.
In a few days I had so far recovered my health that I could sit up all day, and walk out sometimes.
I could join with Diana and Mary in all their occupations; converse with them as much as they wished, and aid them when and where they would allow me.
There was a reviving pleasure in this intercourse, of a kind now tasted by me for the first time-the pleasure arising from perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles.
I liked to read what they liked to read: what they enjoyed, delighted me; what they approved, I reverenced.
They loved their sequestered home.
I could comprehend the feeling, and share both its strength and truth.
I saw the fascination of the locality.
These details were just to me what they were to them-so many pure and sweet sources of pleasure.
Indoors we agreed equally well.
They were both more accomplished and better read than I was; but with eagerness I followed in the path of knowledge they had trodden before me.
I devoured the books they lent me: then it was full satisfaction to discuss with them in the evening what I had perused during the day.
Thought fitted thought; opinion met opinion: we coincided, in short, perfectly.
If in our trio there was a superior and a leader, it was Diana. Physically, she far excelled me: she was handsome; she was vigorous.
In her animal spirits there was an affluence of life and certainty of flow, such as excited my wonder, while it baffled my comprehension.
I could talk a while when the evening commenced, but the first gush of vivacity and fluency gone, I was fain to sit on a stool at Diana's feet, to rest my head on her knee, and listen alternately to her and Mary, while they sounded thoroughly the topic on which I had but touched.
Diana offered to teach me German.
I liked to learn of her: I saw the part of instructress pleased and suited her; that of scholar pleased and suited me no less.
Our natures dovetailed: mutual affection-of the strongest kind-was the result.
They discovered I could draw: their pencils and colour boxes were immediately at my service.
My skill, greater in this one point than theirs, surprised and charmed them.
Mary would sit and watch me by the hour together: then she would take lessons; and a docile, intelligent, assiduous pupil she made.
Thus occupied, and mutually entertained, days passed like hours, and weeks like days.
One reason of the distance yet observed between us was, that he was comparatively seldom at home: a large proportion of his time appeared devoted to visiting the sick and poor among the scattered population of his parish.
No weather seemed to hinder him in these pastoral excursions: rain or fair, he would, when his hours of morning study were over, take his hat, and, followed by his father's old pointer, Carlo, go out on his mission of love or duty-I scarcely know in which light he regarded it. Sometimes, when the day was very unfavourable, his sisters would expostulate.
He would then say, with a peculiar smile, more solemn than cheerful-
"And if I let a gust of wind or a sprinkling of rain turn me aside from these easy tasks, what preparation would such sloth be for the future I propose to myself?"
Diana and Mary's general answer to this question was a sigh, and some minutes of apparently mournful meditation.
But besides his frequent absences, there was another barrier to friendship with him: he seemed of a reserved, an abstracted, and even of a brooding nature.
Incommunicative as he was, some time elapsed before I had an opportunity of gauging his mind.
I first got an idea of its calibre when I heard him preach in his own church at Morton.
I wish I could describe that sermon: but it is past my power.
I cannot even render faithfully the effect it produced on me.
Meantime a month was gone.
"Yes; I wish to know whether you have heard of any service I can offer myself to undertake?"
"I found or devised something for you three weeks ago; but as you seemed both useful and happy here-as my sisters had evidently become attached to you, and your society gave them unusual pleasure-I deemed it inexpedient to break in on your mutual comfort till their approaching departure from Marsh End should render yours necessary."
"And they will go in three days now?" I said.
"Yes; and when they go, I shall return to the parsonage at Morton: Hannah will accompany me; and this old house will be shut up."
I waited a few moments, expecting he would go on with the subject first broached: but he seemed to have entered another train of reflection: his look denoted abstraction from me and my business.
I was obliged to recall him to a theme which was of necessity one of close and anxious interest to me.
"What is the employment you had in view, mr Rivers?
I hope this delay will not have increased the difficulty of securing it."
"Oh, no; since it is an employment which depends only on me to give, and you to accept."
He again paused: there seemed a reluctance to continue.
I grew impatient: a restless movement or two, and an eager and exacting glance fastened on his face, conveyed the feeling to him as effectually as words could have done, and with less trouble.
Before I explain, recall, if you please, my notice, clearly given, that if I helped you, it must be as the blind man would help the lame.
I am poor; for I find that, when I have paid my father's debts, all the patrimony remaining to me will be this crumbling grange, the row of scathed firs behind, and the patch of moorish soil, with the yew trees and holly bushes in front.
I am obscure: Rivers is an old name; but of the three sole descendants of the race, two earn the dependant's crust among strangers, and the third considers himself an alien from his native country-not only for life, but in death.
He resumed-
"And since I am myself poor and obscure, I can offer you but a service of poverty and obscurity.
I hold that the more arid and unreclaimed the soil where the Christian labourer's task of tillage is appointed him-the scantier the meed his toil brings-the higher the honour.
His, under such circumstances, is the destiny of the pioneer; and the first pioneers of the Gospel were the Apostles-their captain was Jesus, the Redeemer, Himself."
"Well?" I said, as he again paused-"proceed."
He looked at me before he proceeded: indeed, he seemed leisurely to read my face, as if its features and lines were characters on a page.
"I believe you will accept the post I offer you," said he, "and hold it for a while: not permanently, though: any more than I could permanently keep the narrow and narrowing-the tranquil, hidden office of English country incumbent; for in your nature is an alloy as detrimental to repose as that in mine, though of a different kind."
"I will; and you shall hear how poor the proposal is,--how trivial-how cramping.
I shall not stay long at Morton, now that my father is dead, and that I am my own master.
I shall leave the place probably in the course of a twelve month; but while I do stay, I will exert myself to the utmost for its improvement.
Morton, when I came to it two years ago, had no school: the children of the poor were excluded from every hope of progress.
I established one for boys: I mean now to open a second school for girls.
I have hired a building for the purpose, with a cottage of two rooms attached to it for the mistress's house.
Her salary will be thirty pounds a year: her house is already furnished, very simply, but sufficiently, by the kindness of a lady, Miss Oliver; the only daughter of the sole rich man in my parish-mr
Oliver, the proprietor of a needle factory and iron foundry in the valley.
The same lady pays for the education and clothing of an orphan from the workhouse, on condition that she shall aid the mistress in such menial offices connected with her own house and the school as her occupation of teaching will prevent her having time to discharge in person.
He put the question rather hurriedly; he seemed half to expect an indignant, or at least a disdainful rejection of the offer: not knowing all my thoughts and feelings, though guessing some, he could not tell in what light the lot would appear to me.
"I thank you for the proposal, mr Rivers, and I accept it with all my heart."
"But you comprehend me?" he said.
"It is a village school: your scholars will be only poor girls-cottagers' children-at the best, farmers' daughters.
Knitting, sewing, reading, writing, ciphering, will be all you will have to teach.
What will you do with your accomplishments? What, with the largest portion of your mind-sentiments-tastes?"
"Save them till they are wanted.
They will keep."
"You know what you undertake, then?"
"I do."
"And when will you commence the exercise of your function?"
"I will go to my house to morrow, and open the school, if you like, next week."
"Very well: so be it."
He rose and walked through the room.
Standing still, he again looked at me.
He shook his head.
"What do you disapprove of, mr Rivers?" I asked.
"You will not stay at Morton long: no, no!"
"Why?
What is your reason for saying so?"
"I read it in your eye; it is not of that description which promises the maintenance of an even tenor in life."
"I am not ambitious."
He started at the word "ambitious." He repeated, "no
What made you think of ambition?
I know I am: but how did you find it out?"
"I was speaking of myself."
"Well, if you are not ambitious, you are-" He paused.
"What?"
"I was going to say, impassioned: but perhaps you would have misunderstood the word, and been displeased.
I mean, that human affections and sympathies have a most powerful hold on you.
I am sure you cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude, and to devote your working hours to a monotonous labour wholly void of stimulus: any more than I can be content," he added, with emphasis, "to live here buried in morass, pent in with mountains-my nature, that God gave me, contravened; my faculties, heaven bestowed, paralysed-made useless.
You hear now how I contradict myself.
I, who preached contentment with a humble lot, and justified the vocation even of hewers of wood and drawers of water in God's service-I, His ordained minister, almost rave in my restlessness.
Well, propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means."
He left the room.
In this brief hour I had learnt more of him than in the whole previous month: yet still he puzzled me.
"He will sacrifice all to his long framed resolves," she said: "natural affection and feelings more potent still.
You would think him gentle, yet in some things he is inexorable as death; and the worst of it is, my conscience will hardly permit me to dissuade him from his severe decision: certainly, I cannot for a moment blame him for it.
It is right, noble, Christian: yet it breaks my heart!" And the tears gushed to her fine eyes.
Mary bent her head low over her work.
"We are now without father: we shall soon be without home and brother," she murmured.
At that moment a little accident supervened, which seemed decreed by fate purposely to prove the truth of the adage, that "misfortunes never come singly," and to add to their distresses the vexing one of the slip between the cup and the lip.
He entered.
"Our uncle john is dead," said he.
Both the sisters seemed struck: not shocked or appalled; the tidings appeared in their eyes rather momentous than afflicting.
"Dead?" repeated Diana.
"Yes."
She riveted a searching gaze on her brother's face.
"And what then?" she demanded, in a low voice.
"What then, Die?" he replied, maintaining a marble immobility of feature. "What then?
Why-nothing.
Read."
He threw the letter into her lap.
She glanced over it, and handed it to Mary.
Mary perused it in silence, and returned it to her brother.
All three looked at each other, and all three smiled-a dreary, pensive smile enough.
We can yet live," said Diana at last.
"At any rate, it makes us no worse off than we were before," remarked Mary.
For some minutes no one spoke.
Diana then turned to me.
"Jane, you will wonder at us and our mysteries," she said, "and think us hard hearted beings not to be more moved at the death of so near a relation as an uncle; but we have never seen him or known him.
He was my mother's brother.
My father and he quarrelled long ago.
It was by his advice that my father risked most of his property in the speculation that ruined him.
Mutual recrimination passed between them: they parted in anger, and were never reconciled.
My uncle engaged afterwards in more prosperous undertakings: it appears he realised a fortune of twenty thousand pounds.
He was never married, and had no near kindred but ourselves and one other person, not more closely related than we.
He had a right, of course, to do as he pleased: and yet a momentary damp is cast on the spirits by the receipt of such news.
This explanation given, the subject was dropped, and no further reference made to it by either mr Rivers or his sisters.
The next day I left Marsh End for Morton.
The day after, Diana and Mary quitted it for distant B .
Chapter eight THE MERMAIDS' LAGOON
The rock was not much larger than their great bed, but of course they all knew how not to take up much room, and they were dozing, or at least lying with their eyes shut, and pinching occasionally when they thought Wendy was not looking.
It was not, she knew, that night had come, but something as dark as night had come.
It had not come, but it had sent that shiver through the sea to say that it was coming.
There crowded upon her all the stories she had been told of Marooners' Rock, so called because evil captains put sailors on it and leave them there to drown.
But she was a young mother and she did not know this; she thought you simply must stick to your rule about half an hour after the mid day meal.
She stood over them to let them have their sleep out.
peter sprang erect, as wide awake at once as a dog, and with one warning cry he roused the others.
"Pirates!" he cried.
The boat drew nearer.
It was the pirate dinghy, with three figures in her, Smee and Starkey, and the third a captive, no other than Tiger Lily.
She was to be left on the rock to perish, an end to one of her race more terrible than death by fire or torture, for is it not written in the book of the tribe that there is no path through water to the happy hunting ground?
In the gloom that they brought with them the two pirates did not see the rock till they crashed into it.
"Luff, you lubber," cried an Irish voice that was Smee's; "here's the rock.
Wendy was crying, for it was the first tragedy she had seen.
peter had seen many tragedies, but he had forgotten them all.
"The captain!" said the pirates, staring at each other in surprise.
"Set her free," came the astonishing answer.
"But, captain-"
Of course Wendy was very elated over Peter's cleverness; but she knew that he would be elated also and very likely crow and thus betray himself, so at once her hand went out to cover his mouth.
But it was stayed even in the act, for "Boat ahoy!" rang over the lagoon in Hook's voice, and this time it was not peter who had spoken.
Now Wendy understood.
In the light of the lantern Wendy saw his hook grip the boat's side; she saw his evil swarthy face as he rose dripping from the water, and, quaking, she would have liked to swim away, but peter would not budge.
He was tingling with life and also top heavy with conceit.
The two pirates were very curious to know what had brought their captain to them, but he sat with his head on his hook in a position of profound melancholy.
"And yet a third time he sighs," said Smee.
Then at last he spoke passionately.
"The game's up," he cried, "those boys have found a mother."
Affrighted though she was, Wendy swelled with pride.
"O evil day!" cried Starkey.
"What's a mother?" asked the ignorant Smee.
"He doesn't know!" and always after this she felt that if you could have a pet pirate Smee would be her one.
peter pulled her beneath the water, for Hook had started up, crying, "What was that?"
There was a break in his voice, as if for a moment he recalled innocent days when-but he brushed away this weakness with his hook.
Smee, much impressed, gazed at the bird as the nest was borne past, but the more suspicious Starkey said, "If she is a mother, perhaps she is hanging about here to help peter."
Hook winced.
"Captain," said Smee, "could we not kidnap these boys' mother and make her our mother?"
"What was that?"
But they could see nothing.
"And there is my hook.
By this time they were on the rock, and suddenly Hook remembered Tiger Lily.
"Where is the redskin?" he demanded abruptly.
He had a playful humour at moments, and they thought this was one of the moments.
"That is all right, captain," Smee answered complacently; "we let her go."
"Let her go!" cried Hook.
"'twas your own orders," the bo'sun faltered.
"You called over the water to us to let her go," said Starkey.
"It is passing queer," Smee said, and they all fidgeted uncomfortably. Hook raised his voice, but there was a quiver in it.
"Spirit that haunts this dark lagoon to night," he cried, "dost hear me?"
Of course peter should have kept quiet, but of course he did not.
He immediately answered in Hook's voice:
Speak!" Hook demanded.
"I am james Hook," replied the voice, "captain of the JOLLY ROGER."
"You are not; you are not," Hook cried hoarsely.
"Brimstone and gall," the voice retorted, "say that again, and I'll cast anchor in you."
"If you are Hook," he said almost humbly, "come tell me, who am I?"
"A codfish," replied the voice, "only a codfish."
"A codfish!" Hook echoed blankly, and it was then, but not till then, that his proud spirit broke.
"Have we been captained all this time by a codfish!" they muttered.
They were his dogs snapping at him, but, tragic figure though he had become, he scarcely heeded them.
Against such fearful evidence it was not their belief in him that he needed, it was his own.
"Don't desert me, bully," he whispered hoarsely to it.
In his dark nature there was a touch of the feminine, as in all the great pirates, and it sometimes gave him intuitions.
"And another name?"
"Vegetable?" asked Hook.
"no"
"Mineral?"
"Animal?"
"Man?"
"Boy?"
"Yes."
"No!"
To Wendy's pain the answer that rang out this time was "Yes."
"no"
"Are you here?"
"Yes."
Hook was completely puzzled.
"You ask him some questions," he said to the others, wiping his damp brow.
Smee reflected.
"I can't think of a thing," he said regretfully.
"Can't guess, can't guess!" crowed peter.
"Do you give it up?"
"Yes, yes," they answered eagerly.
"Now we have him," Hook shouted.
He leaped as he spoke, and simultaneously came the gay voice of peter.
"Are you ready, boys?"
The fight was short and sharp.
First to draw blood was john, who gallantly climbed into the boat and held Starkey.
There was fierce struggle, in which the cutlass was torn from the pirate's grasp.
The dinghy drifted away.
Hook rose to the rock to breathe, and at the same moment peter scaled it on the opposite side.
The rock was slippery as a ball, and they had to crawl rather than climb.
After all, he was the only man that the Sea Cook had feared.
It was then that Hook bit him.
Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed peter.
It made him quite helpless.
He could only stare, horrified.
Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly.
After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy.
No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except peter.
"They must be swimming back or flying," the boys concluded.
They were not very anxious, because they had such faith in peter.
"Help, help!"
With a last effort peter pulled her up the rock and then lay down beside her.
peter, feeling her slip from him, woke with a start, and was just in time to draw her back.
"Shall we swim or fly, peter?"
"What is it?" she asked, anxious about him at once.
"I can't help you, Wendy.
I can neither fly nor swim."
"Do you mean we shall both be drowned?"
As they sat thus something brushed against peter as light as a kiss, and stayed there, as if saying timidly, "Can I be of any use?"
It was the tail of a kite, which Michael had made some days before.
"Michael's kite," peter said without interest, but next moment he had seized the tail, and was pulling the kite toward him.
"It lifted Michael off the ground," he cried; "why should it not carry you?"
"Both of us!"
"Let us draw lots," Wendy said bravely.
"And you a lady; never." Already he had tied the tail round her.
She clung to him; she refused to go without him; but with a "Good bye, Wendy," he pushed her from the rock; and in a few minutes she was borne out of his sight.
peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last.
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THE PARADISE MYSTERY
By j s Fletcher
CHAPTER one ONLY THE GUARDIAN
American tourists, sure appreciators of all that is ancient and picturesque in England, invariably come to a halt, holding their breath in a sudden catch of wonder, as they pass through the half ruinous gateway which admits to the Close of Wrychester.
Nowhere else in England is there a fairer prospect of old world peace.
There before their eyes, set in the centre of a great green sward, fringed by tall elms and giant beeches, rises the vast fabric of the thirteenth century Cathedral, its high spire piercing the skies in which rooks are for ever circling and calling.
The time worn stone, at a little distance delicate as lacework, is transformed at different hours of the day into shifting shades of colour, varying from grey to purple: the massiveness of the great nave and transepts contrasts impressively with the gradual tapering of the spire, rising so high above turret and clerestory that it at last becomes a mere line against the ether.
In morning, as in afternoon, or in evening, here is a perpetual atmosphere of rest; and not around the great church alone, but in the quaint and ancient houses which fence in the Close.
In some lights he looked no more than forty: a strong light betrayed the fact that his dark hair had a streak of grey in it, and was showing a tendency to whiten about the temples.
A strong, intellectually superior man, this, scrupulously groomed and well dressed, as befitted what he really was-a medical practitioner with an excellent connection amongst the exclusive society of a cathedral town.
The second person of the three was a boy of apparently seventeen-a well built, handsome lad of the senior schoolboy type, who was devoting himself in business like fashion to two widely differing pursuits-one, the consumption of eggs and bacon and dry toast; the other, the study of a Latin textbook, which he had propped up in front of him against the old-fashioned silver cruet.
His quick eyes wandered alternately between his book and his plate; now and then he muttered a line or two to himself.
It was not difficult to see that the third member of the party, a girl of nineteen or twenty, was the boy's sister.
Each had a wealth of brown hair, inclining, in the girl's case to a shade that had tints of gold in it; each had grey eyes, in which there was a mixture of blue; each had a bright, vivid colour; each was undeniably good looking and eminently healthy.
While the boy learnt the last lines of his Latin, and the doctor turned over the newspaper, the girl read a letter-evidently, from the large sprawling handwriting, the missive of some girlish correspondent.
She was deep in it when, from one of the turrets of the Cathedral, a bell began to ring.
At that, she glanced at her brother.
"You'll have to hurry."
And Dick Bewery, without a word, bolted half his coffee, snatched up his book, grabbed at a cap which lay with more books on a chair close by, and vanished through the open window.
The doctor laughed, laid aside his newspaper, and handed his cup across the table.
"I don't think you need bother yourself about Dick's ever being late, Mary," he said.
Dick could get to any given point in just about one fourth of the time that I could, for instance-moreover, he has a cunning knowledge of every short cut in the city."
Mary Bewery took the empty cup and began to refill it.
"I don't like him to be late," she remarked.
"It's the beginning of bad habits."
"He's pretty free from anything of that sort, you know.
I haven't even suspected him of smoking, yet."
"That's because he thinks smoking would stop his growth and interfere with his cricket," answered Mary.
"He would smoke if it weren't for that."
"That's giving him high praise, then," said Ransford.
"You couldn't give him higher!
An excellent thing-and most unusual, I fancy.
Most people-don't!"
He took his refilled cup, rose from the table, and opened a box of cigarettes which stood on the mantelpiece.
And the girl, instead of picking up her letter again, glanced at him a little doubtfully.
"That reminds me of-of something I wanted to say to you," she said. "You're quite right about people not repressing their inclinations.
I-I wish some people would!"
Ransford turned quickly from the hearth and gave her a sharp look, beneath which her colour heightened.
Her eyes shifted their gaze away to her letter, and she picked it up and began to fold it nervously.
"Bryce?" he asked.
The girl nodded her face showing distinct annoyance and dislike.
Before saying more, Ransford lighted a cigarette.
"Since last time?"
"Twice," she answered.
"I didn't like to tell you-I've hated to bother you about it.
But-what am I to do?
I dislike him intensely-I can't tell why, but it's there, and nothing could ever alter the feeling. And though I told him-before-that it was useless-he mentioned it again-yesterday-at mrs Folliot's garden party."
"Confound his impudence!" growled Ransford.
It's useless trifling with anything like that.
I gave him a quiet hint before.
And since he won't take it-all right!"
"But-what shall you do?" she asked anxiously.
"Not-send him away?"
"Don't you trouble yourself about it-I'm not at all keen about him.
He's a clever enough fellow, and a good assistant, but I don't like him, personally-never did."
"I don't want to think that anything that I say should lose him his situation-or whatever you call it," she remarked slowly.
"That would seem-"
"No need to bother," interrupted Ransford.
"He'll get another in two minutes-so to speak.
The fellow must be an ass!
When I was young-"
He stopped short at that, and turning away, looked out across the garden as if some recollection had suddenly struck him.
"When you were young-which is, of course, such an awfully long time since!" said the girl, a little teasingly.
"What?"
"Only that if a woman said No-unmistakably-once, a man took it as final," replied Ransford.
"At least-so I was always given to believe. Nowadays-"
"You forget that mr Pemberton Bryce is what most people would call a very pushing young man," said Mary.
But-if you must speak to him-and I really think you must!--will you tell him that he is not going to get-me?
Perhaps he'll take it finally from you-as my guardian."
"I don't know if parents and guardians count for much in these degenerate days," said Ransford.
"But-I won't have him annoying you. And-I suppose it has come to annoyance?"
"It's-irritating!"
"All right," said Ransford quietly.
"I'll speak to him.
There's going to be no annoyance for you under this roof."
The girl gave him a quick glance, and Ransford turned away from her and picked up his letters.
"Thank you," she said.
"But-there's no need to tell me that, because I know it already.
Now I wonder if you'll tell me something more?"
Ransford turned back with a sudden apprehension.
"Well?" he asked brusquely.
"What?"
"When are you going to tell me all about-Dick and myself?" she asked. "You promised that you would, you know, some day.
And-a whole year's gone by since then.
And-Dick's seventeen!
Will he, now?"
Ransford laid down his letters again, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, squared his shoulders against the mantelpiece.
"I'm just twenty-do you really think I shall be any wiser in twelve months?
Of course I shan't!"
"You don't know that," he replied.
"You may be-a great deal wiser."
"But what has that got to do with it?" she persisted.
She was looking at him with a certain amount of demand-and Ransford, who had always known that some moment of this sort must inevitably come, felt that she was not going to be put off with ordinary excuses.
He hesitated-and she went on speaking.
"You know," she continued, almost pleadingly.
"We don't know anything-at all.
"Once or twice, lately-yes," replied Mary.
"It's only natural." She laughed a little-a forced laugh.
"They say," she went on, "that it doesn't matter, nowadays, if you can't tell who your grandfather was-but, just think, we don't know who our father was-except that his name was john Bewery.
That doesn't convey much."
"I told you-always have told you-that he was an early friend of mine, a man of business, who, with your mother, died young, and I, as their friend, became guardian to you and Dick.
Is-is there anything much more that I could tell?"
"There's something I should very much like to know-personally," she answered, after a pause which lasted so long that Ransford began to feel uncomfortable under it.
"Don't be angry-or hurt-if I tell you plainly what it is.
It's this-have we been dependent on you?"
Ransford's face flushed and he turned deliberately to the window, and for a moment stood staring out on his garden and the glimpses of the Cathedral.
And just as deliberately as he had turned away, he turned back.
"No!" he said.
"Since you ask me, I'll tell you that.
You've both got money-due to you when you're of age.
It-it's in my hands.
Not a great lot-but sufficient to-to cover all your expenses. Education-everything.
Perhaps I ought to have told you all that before, but-I didn't think it necessary.
I-I dare say I've a tendency to let things slide."
"You've never let things slide about us," she replied quickly, with a sudden glance which made him turn away again.
"And I only wanted to know-because I'd got an idea that-well, that we were owing everything to you."
"Not from me!" he exclaimed.
"But-don't you understand? I-wanted to know-something.
Thank you.
I won't ask more now."
"I've always meant to tell you-a good deal," remarked Ransford, after another pause.
"You see, I can scarcely-yet-realize that you're both growing up!
You were at school a year ago.
And Dick is still very young. Are-are you more satisfied now?" he went on anxiously.
"If not-"
"I'm quite satisfied," she answered.
"Perhaps-some day-you'll tell me more about our father and mother?--but never mind even that now.
You're sure you haven't minded my asking-what I have asked?"
"Of course not-of course not!" he said hastily.
And-but we'll talk again.
I must get into the surgery-and have a word with Bryce, too."
"Wouldn't that solve the difficulty?"
Ransford shook his head and made no answer.
He was alone there when he had shut the door-and he relieved his feelings with a deep groan.
"Heaven help me if the lad ever insists on the real truth and on having proofs and facts given to him!" he muttered.
"I shouldn't mind telling her, when she's a bit older-but he wouldn't understand as she would. Anyway, thank God I can keep up the pleasant fiction about the money without her ever knowing that I told her a deliberate lie just now. But-what's in the future?
Here's one man to be dismissed already, and there'll be others, and one of them will be the favoured man.
That man will have to be told!
And-so will she, then.
She's no idea of it-and she shan't have; I must-must continue to be-only the guardian!"
CHAPTER six
THE NEW WORLD
How long I slept I do not know.
The cannibals beckoned to us from the peak, and we landed between the two volcanoes.
In the midst of this I awoke.
It was with a sudden start, and I looked all around in speechless bewilderment.
I had crossed the antarctic circle; I had been borne onward for an immense distance.
I had reached the antarctic pole.
Whatever the true one might be, I was utterly unable to form a conjecture.
But I had no time for such speculations as these.
So I hesitated, yet what could I do?
My hunger was beginning to be insupportable.
To go back was impossible.
No; return was impossible.
I must land here, venture among these people, and trust in that Providence which had hitherto sustained me.
After some hesitation I concluded to make signals to her, so as to attract attention; for, now that I had resolved to venture among the people here, I was anxious to end my suspense as soon as possible. So I continued rowing, and gradually drew nearer.
Their hair was black and straight, their features were quite regular, and their general expression was one of great gentleness.
With their half closed eyes they blinked at me, and then one who appeared to be their chief spoke to me.
Their costume varied.
They looked at me, examining me all over, inspecting my gun, pistol, coat, trousers, boots, and hat, and talking all the time among themselves.
They did not touch me, but merely showed the natural curiosity which is felt at the sight of a foreigner who has appeared unexpectedly.
There was a scrupulous delicacy and a careful and even ceremonious politeness in their attitude toward me which was at once amazing and delightful.
He led the way to the cabin, where, opening the door, he entered, and I followed, after which the others came in also and then the door was shut.
There were no windows whatever, and only one or two slight crevices through which the light came.
There was a large table and seats.
The food was of different kinds-some tasting like goose, others like turkey, others like partridge.
I noticed that the eyes of my new friends no longer blinked; they were wide open; and, so far as I could make them out, their faces were much improved.
After the repast they brought me water in a basin, and all stood around me.
Then the chief, who had stood looking on with a smile on his face took off his rich furred mantle and handed it to me.
Then they offered me various drinks, of which I tasted several kinds.
I now wished to show my generous entertainers that I was grateful; so I raised my cup, bowed to all of them, particularly the chief, and drank their health.
They all watched this ceremony with very sober faces, and I could not quite make out whether they took my meaning or not.
I followed, and the rest came after.
Their wings were short, and evidently could not be used for flight; their beaks were like that of a sea gull; each one had a man on his back, and was harnessed to a car.
Our road constantly ascended, and at length we came to a crossing.
This was a wide terrace at the slope of the mountain; on the lower side was a row of massive stone edifices with pyramidal roofs, while on the upper there were portals which seemed to open into excavated caverns. Here, too, on either side arose the giant ferns, overarching and darkening the terrace with their deep shadow.
We continued on our way without stopping, and passed several successive terraces like the first, with the same caverns on the upper side and massive edifices on the lower, until at last the ascent ended at the fifth terrace, and here we turned to the left. Now the view became more varied.
The tree ferns arose on either side, arching overhead; on my right were the portals that opened into caverns, on my left solid and massive houses, built of great blocks of stone, with pyramidal roofs.
We now went on until we reached the central portal of the range of caverns, and here we stopped.
THE BLACK PRINCE
BY the edge of the river they stopped and said farewell.
Afterwards, when the Doctor and his pets were going on alone, Polynesia said,
"We must tread softly and talk low as we go through the land of the Jolliginki.
If the King should hear us, he will send his soldiers to catch us again; for I am sure he is still very angry over the trick I played on him."
"What I am wondering," said the Doctor, "is where we are going to get another boat to go home in....
'Never lift your foot till you come to the stile.'"
One day, while they were passing through a very thick part of the forest, Chee Chee went ahead of them to look for cocoanuts.
And while he was away, the Doctor and the rest of the animals, who did not know the jungle paths so well, got lost in the deep woods.
Chee Chee, when he could not see them anywhere, was terribly upset.
He climbed high trees and looked out from the top branches to try and see the Doctor's high hat; he waved and shouted; he called to all the animals by name.
But it was no use.
They seemed to have disappeared altogether.
Indeed they had lost their way very badly.
They had strayed a long way off the path, and the jungle was so thick with bushes and creepers and vines that sometimes they could hardly move at all, and the Doctor had to take out his pocket knife and cut his way along.
There seemed no end to their troubles; and nowhere could they come upon a path.
At last, after blundering about like this for many days, getting their clothes torn and their faces covered with mud, they walked right into the King's back garden by mistake.
The King's men came running up at once and caught them.
"So you are caught again!
This time you shall not escape.
Take them all back to prison and put double locks on the door.
This White Man shall scrub my kitchen floor for the rest of his life!"
So the Doctor and his pets were led back to prison and locked up.
And the Doctor was told that in the morning he must begin scrubbing the kitchen floor.
"This is a great nuisance," said the Doctor.
Then Gub Gub began to cry again.
This was always a very bad sign with Polynesia.
Whenever she said nothing and blinked her eyes, it meant that somebody had been making trouble, and she was thinking out some way to put things right.
People who made trouble for Polynesia or her friends were nearly always sorry for it afterwards.
Presently she spied Chee Chee swinging through the trees still looking for the Doctor.
When Chee Chee saw her, he came into her tree and asked her what had become of him.
"We lost our way in the jungle and blundered into the palace garden by mistake."
"It was all that stupid pig's fault," said Polynesia.
And I was kept so busy catching him and bringing him back, that I turned to the left, instead of the right, when we reached the swamp.--Sh!--Look!
And there, sure enough, was Prince Bumpo, the King's son, opening the garden gate.
He carried a book of fairy tales under his arm.
He came strolling down the gravel walk, humming a sad song, till he reached a stone seat right under the tree where the parrot and the monkey were hiding.
Chee Chee and Polynesia watched him, keeping very quiet and still.
Then the parrot, talking in a small, high voice like a little girl, said aloud,
"Bumpo, some one might turn thee into a white prince perchance."
The King's son started up off the seat and looked all around.
Strange!"
For 'tis I, Tripsitinka, the Queen of the Fairies, that speak to thee.
"Oh tell me, Fairy Queen," cried Bumpo, clasping his hands in joy, "who is it can turn me white?"
Go to him, brave Bumpo, secretly, when the sun has set; and behold, thou shalt be made the whitest prince that ever won fair lady!
I have said enough.
"Farewell!" cried the Prince.
"A thousand thanks, good Tripsitinka!"
MEDICINE AND MAGIC
She found Gub Gub poking his nose through the bars of the window, trying to sniff the cooking smells that came from the palace kitchen. She told the pig to bring the Doctor to the window because she wanted to speak to him.
So Gub Gub went and woke the Doctor who was taking a nap.
And you've got to find some way to turn him white.
"But it isn't so easy to turn a black man white.
"I don't know anything about that," said Polynesia impatiently.
He'll do anything for you if you change his color.
It is your only chance to get out of prison."
"Well, I suppose it MIGHT be possible," said the Doctor.
Well, that night Prince Bumpo came secretly to the Doctor in prison and said to him,
"White Man, I am an unhappy prince.
But when she saw my face she cried out, 'Oh, he's black!' And she ran away and wouldn't marry me-but went to sleep again somewhere else.
So I came back, full of sadness, to my father's kingdom.
So I come to you for help.
If you will turn me white, so that I may go back to The Sleeping Beauty, I will give you half my kingdom and anything besides you ask."
"No," said Bumpo.
I must be a white prince."
"You know it is very hard to change the color of a prince," said the Doctor-"one of the hardest things a magician can do.
You only want your face white, do you not?"
"Yes, that is all," said Bumpo.
"Yes, all over," said Bumpo-"and I would like my eyes blue too, but I suppose that would be very hard to do."
"Yes, it would," said the Doctor quickly.
"Well, I will do what I can for you.
I might have to try two or three times.
You have a strong skin-yes?
Now come over here by the light-Oh, but before I do anything, you must first go down to the beach and get a ship ready, with food in it, to take me across the sea.
When he came back and said that it was done, the Doctor asked Dab Dab to bring a basin.
Then he mixed a lot of medicines in the basin and told Bumpo to dip his face in it.
He held it there a long time-so long that the Doctor seemed to get dreadfully anxious and fidgety, standing first on one leg and then on the other, looking at all the bottles he had used for the mixture, and reading the labels on them again and again.
A strong smell filled the prison, like the smell of brown paper burning.
At last the Prince lifted his face up out of the basin, breathing very hard.
Bumpo begged that he might keep the looking glass, as it was the only one in the Kingdom of Jolliginki, and he wanted to look at himself all day long.
Then the Prince, taking a bunch of copper keys from his pocket, undid the great double locks.
And the Doctor with all his animals ran as fast as they could down to the seashore; while Bumpo leaned against the wall of the empty dungeon, smiling after them happily, his big face shining like polished ivory in the light of the moon.
When they came to the beach they saw Polynesia and Chee Chee waiting for them on the rocks near the ship.
"I feel sorry about Bumpo," said the Doctor.
But I had to do something, didn't I?--I couldn't possibly scrub the King's kitchen for the rest of my life.
It was such a dirty kitchen!--I could see it from the prison window.--Well, well!--Poor Bumpo!"
"Oh, of course he will know we were just joking with him," said the parrot.
Serve him right, if he does turn black again!
I hope it's a dark black."
"But HE didn't have anything to do with it," said the Doctor.
And who knows?--he may stay white after all."
"Still, he had a good heart," said the Doctor-"romantic, of course-but a good heart.
After all, 'handsome is as handsome does.'"
"I don't believe the poor booby found The Sleeping Beauty at all," said Jip, the dog.
I wonder who he'll go and kiss this time.
Silly business!"
And when the Doctor stood upon the boat, he looked over the side across the water.
But even while he was wondering, they heard a strange whispering noise, high in the air, coming through the night.
And the animals all stopped saying Good by and listened.
It seemed to be coming nearer to them-a sound like the Autumn wind blowing through the leaves of a poplar tree, or a great, great rain beating down upon a roof.
And Jip, with his nose pointing and his tail quite straight, said,
"Birds!--millions of them-flying fast-that's it!"
And then they all looked up.
There were so many that for a little they covered the whole moon so it could not shine, and the sea grew dark and black-like when a storm cloud passes over the sun
And presently all these birds came down close, skimming over the water and the land; and the night sky was left clear above, and the moon shone as before.
When they began to settle on the sands, along the ropes of the ship-anywhere and everywhere except the trees-the Doctor could see that they had blue wings and white breasts and very short, feathered legs.
And in the silent moonlight john Dolittle spoke:
It will be nearly Summer when we get home.
For these are the swallows going back. Swallows, I thank you for waiting for us.
Pull up the anchor and set the sail!"
When the ship moved out upon the water, those who stayed behind, Chee Chee, Polynesia and the crocodile, grew terribly sad.
SAILING homeward, the Doctor's ship had to pass the coast of Barbary. This coast is the seashore of the Great Desert.
And it was here that the Barbary pirates lived.
These pirates, a bad lot of men, used to wait for sailors to be shipwrecked on their shores.
And often, if they saw a boat passing, they would come out in their fast sailing ships and chase it.
Then they used to make the people they had caught write home to their friends for money.
"I have a feeling it isn't a friendly ship.
Jip, who was lying near taking a nap in the sun, began to growl and talk in his sleep.
"I smell roast beef cooking," he mumbled-"underdone roast beef-with brown gravy over it."
"Good gracious!" cried the Doctor.
"What's the matter with the dog? Is he SMELLING in his sleep-as well as talking?"
"But what is he smelling?" asked the Doctor.
"Oh, yes, he could," said Dab Dab.
Then Jip, still fast asleep, began to growl again and his lip curled up angrily, showing his clean, white teeth.
I smell trouble.
I want to help him.
Then he barked, loud, and woke himself up with a surprised look on his face.
"See!" cried Dab Dab.
"That boat is nearer now.
You can count its three big sails-all red.
I wonder who they are."
"They are bad sailors," said Jip; "and their ship is very swift.
"Well, we must put up more sails on our boat," said the Doctor, "so we can go faster and get away from them.
The dog hurried downstairs and dragged up every sail he could find.
"This is a poor ship the Prince gave us," said Gub Gub, the pig-"the slowest he could find, I should think.
Look how near they are now!-- You can see the mustaches on the faces of the men-six of them.
What are we going to do?"
When the swallows heard this, they all came down on to the Doctor's ship; and they told him to unravel some pieces of long rope and make them into a lot of thin strings as quickly as he could.
Then the ends of these strings were tied on to the front of the ship; and the swallows took hold of the strings with their feet and flew off, pulling the boat along.
And although swallows are not very strong when only one or two are by themselves, it is different when there are a great lot of them together.
And all the animals on the ship began to laugh and dance about in the rushing air, for when they looked back at the pirates' ship, they could see that it was growing smaller now, instead of bigger.
A king has a great opportunity to make himself loved.
The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, between the Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest.
The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric a brac, scent and ice cream soda.
It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk-pills rolled out on its own pill tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round pasteboard pill boxes.
The store is on a corner about which coveys of ragged plumed, hilarious children play and become candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.
Ikey roomed and breakfasted at mrs Riddle's two squares away.
The circumlocution has been in vain-you must have guessed it-Ikey adored Rosy.
The fly in Ikey's ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk McGowan.
But he was no outfielder as Ikey was; he picked them off the bat. At the same time he was Ikey's friend and customer, and often dropped in at the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut rubber plastered after a pleasant evening spent along the Bowery.
"I guess already that you have been stuck in the ribs with a knife.
I have many times told you those Dagoes would do you up."
mr McGowan smiled.
"Not any Dagoes.
But you've located the diagnosis all right enough-it's under my coat, near the ribs.
Ikey's left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, holding it steady.
One day she says she will; the same evenin' she says nixy.
We've agreed on to night, and Rosy's stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole days.
But it's five hours yet till the time, and I'm afraid she'll stand me up when it comes to the scratch."
mr McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed-a condition opposed to his usual line of demeanour.
He made a patent medicine almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.
McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.
"I don't see then yet," said Ikey, shortly, "what makes it that you talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it."
"For a week he hasn't let Rosy step outside the door with me.
"You will excuse me, Chunk," said Ikey.
"I must make a prescription that is to be called for soon."
Ikey's lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued:
"Tim Lacy told me he got some once from a croaker uptown and fed 'em to his girl in soda water.
They was married in less than two weeks."
Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan.
At eight Rosy goes to bed with a headache.
At nine old Parvenzano lets me through to his back yard, where there's a board off Riddle's fence, next door.
It's all dead easy if Rosy don't balk when the flag drops.
Can you fix me one of them powders, Ikey?"
"Chunk," said he, "it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists must have much carefulness.
To you alone of my acquaintance would I intrust a powder like that.
There he crushed to a powder two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia.
Taken by an adult this powder would insure several hours of heavy slumber without danger to the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to administer it in a liquid if possible, and received the hearty thanks of the backyard Lochinvar.
mr Riddle was a stout man, brick dusty of complexion and sudden in action.
"Much obliged," he said, briefly, to Ikey.
"The lazy Irish loafer!
My own room's just above Rosy's.
I'll just go up there myself after supper and load the shot gun and wait.
She's up at the flat-she cooked eggs this mornin' in a blue kimono-Lord! how lucky I am!
You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with us.
I've got a job down near the bridge, and that's where I'm heading for now."
"The-the-powder?" stammered Ikey.
"Oh, that stuff you gave me!" said Chunk, broadening his grin; "well, it was this way.
I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle's, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, 'Chunk, if you get the girl get her on the square-don't try any hocus pocus with a thoroughbred like her.' And I keeps the paper you give me in my pocket.
THE CALIPH, CUPID AND THE CLOCK
Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna, sat on his favourite bench in the park.
The coolness of the September night quickened the life in him like a rare, tonic wine.
The benches were not filled; for park loungers, with their stagnant blood, are prompt to detect and fly home from the crispness of early autumn.
The moon was just clearing the roofs of the range of dwellings that bounded the quadrangle on the east. Children laughed and played about the fine sprayed fountain.
In the shadowed spots fauns and hamadryads wooed, unconscious of the gaze of mortal eyes.
A hand organ-Philomel by the grace of our stage carpenter, Fancy-fluted and droned in a side street.
And above the trees shone the great, round, shining face of an illuminated clock in the tower of an antique public building.
Prince Michael sat on his favourite bench and smiled.
It was a diverting thought to him that he was wealthy enough to buy every one of those close ranged, bulky, window lit mansions that faced him, if he chose.
For he had tasted of the fruit of the tree of life, and, finding it bitter in his mouth, had stepped out of Eden for a time to seek distraction close to the unarmoured, beating heart of the world.
These thoughts strayed dreamily through the mind of Prince Michael, as he smiled under the stubble of his polychromatic beard.
He found in altruism more pleasure than his riches, his station and all the grosser sweets of life had given him.
It was his chief solace and satisfaction to alleviate individual distress, to confer favours upon worthy ones who had need of succour, to dazzle unfortunates by unexpected and bewildering gifts of truly royal magnificence, bestowed, however, with wisdom and judiciousness.
And as Prince Michael's eye rested upon the glowing face of the great clock in the tower, his smile, altruistic as it was, became slightly tinged with contempt.
The comings and goings of people in hurry and dread, controlled by the little metal moving hands of a clock, always made him sad.
"I beg your pardon for addressing you," he said, "but I perceive that you are disturbed in mind.
If it may serve to mitigate the liberty I have taken I will add that I am Prince Michael, heir to the throne of the Electorate of Valleluna.
I appear incognito, of course, as you may gather from my appearance.
It is a fancy of mine to render aid to others whom I think worthy of it.
The young man looked up brightly at the Prince.
He laughed, and even then it did not.
But he accepted the momentary diversion.
"Glad to meet you, Prince," he said, good humouredly.
He was often rebuffed but never offensively.
His courteous manner and words forbade that.
I have observed you looking persistently at that clock.
"I carry a watch except when I've got my radiant rags on."
"I am a master of philosophy, a graduate in art, and I hold the purse of a Fortunatus.
There are few mortal misfortunes that I cannot alleviate or overcome.
I beg of you to accept my advice or aid.
The young man glanced at the clock again and frowned darkly.
The shades were drawn, and the lights in many rooms shone dimly through them.
"Ten minutes to nine!" exclaimed the young man, with an impatient gesture of despair.
"Remain!" commanded Prince Michael, in so potent a voice that the disturbed one wheeled around with a somewhat chagrined laugh.
"Sit down," said the Prince calmly.
If you will so far confide in me I would ask you to relate to me your story."
The young man threw himself upon the bench with a reckless laugh.
"Your Royal Highness, I will," he said, in tones of mock deference.
"Do you see yonder house-the one with three upper windows lighted?
I had been doing wrong, my dear Prince-I had been a naughty boy, and she had heard of it.
I wanted to be forgiven, of course-we are always wanting women to forgive us, aren't we, Prince?"
"'I want time to think it over,' said she.
'There is one thing certain; I will either fully forgive you, or I will never see your face again. There will be no half-way business.
At half past eight,' she said, 'at exactly half past eight you may be watching the middle upper window of the top floor.
If I decide to forgive I will hang out of that window a white silk scarf.
You will know by that that all is as was before, and you may come to me.
The time for the signal to appear has passed twenty three minutes ago.
Do you wonder that I am a little disturbed, my Prince of Rags and Whiskers?"
"Let me repeat to you," said Prince Michael, in his even, well modulated tones, "that women are the natural enemies of clocks.
Clocks are an evil, women a blessing.
"Never, on your principality!" exclaimed the young man, hopelessly.
"You don't know Marian-of course.
She's always on time, to the minute.
That was the first thing about her that attracted me.
I've got the mitten instead of the scarf.
The jig's up.
I'll try Jack's ranch awhile and top off with the Klondike and whiskey.
Prince Michael smiled his enigmatic, gentle, comprehending smile and caught the coat sleeve of the other.
"Wait," he said solemnly, "till the clock strikes.
I have wealth and power and knowledge above most men, but when the clock strikes I am afraid.
Stay by me until then.
This woman shall be yours.
You have the word of the hereditary Prince of Valleluna.
But there must be no clocks in that palace-they measure our follies and limit our pleasures.
Do you agree to that?"
He glanced again at the clock in the tower.
The hands stood at three minutes to nine.
"I think," said Prince Michael, "that I will sleep a little.
The day has been fatiguing."
"Come to me when your marriage day is set and I will give you a cheque for the money."
"It doesn't look as if I would need that palace on the Hudson, but I appreciate your offer, just the same."
His battered hat rolled from the bench to the ground.
The young man lifted it, placed it over the frowsy face and moved one of the grotesquely relaxed limbs into a more comfortable position.
Sonorous and startling came the stroke of nine from the clock tower.
The young man sighed again, turned his face for one last look at the house of his relinquished hopes-and cried aloud profane words of holy rapture.
"Twenty nine and a half minutes past eight, sir."
And then, from habit, he glanced at the clock in the tower, and made further oration.
"By George! that clock's half an hour fast!
This watch of mine never varies a-"
The park was deserted save for one dilapidated figure that sprawled, asleep, on a bench.
They stopped and gazed upon it.
"It's Dopy Mike," said one.
"He hits the pipe every night.
Park bum for twenty years.
The other policeman stooped and looked at something crumpled and crisp in the hand of the sleeper.
"He's doped out a fifty dollar bill, anyway.
Wish I knew the brand of hop that he smokes."
Chapter ten
A SUCCESSOR
Some of the Reverend Frank Milvey's brethren had found themselves exceedingly uncomfortable in their minds, because they were required to bury the dead too hopefully.
But, the Reverend Frank, inclining to the belief that they were required to do one or two other things (say out of nine and thirty) calculated to trouble their consciences rather more if they would think as much about them, held his peace.
Indeed, the Reverend Frank Milvey was a forbearing man, who noticed many sad warps and blights in the vineyard wherein he worked, and did not profess that they made him savagely wise.
He only learned that the more he himself knew, in his little limited human way, the better he could distantly imagine what Omniscience might know.
Wherefore, if the Reverend Frank had had to read the words that troubled some of his brethren, and profitably touched innumerable hearts, in a worse case than Johnny's, he would have done so out of the pity and humility of his soul.
There was grief in the aristocratic house, and there was joy in the Bower.
And why go beating about Brentford bushes, seeking orphans forsooth who had established no claims upon you and made no sacrifices for you, when here was an orphan ready to your hand who had given up in your cause, Miss Elizabeth, Master George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle Parker?
Mr Wegg chuckled, consequently, when he heard the tidings.
Nay, it was afterwards affirmed by a witness who shall at present be nameless, that in the seclusion of the Bower he poked out his wooden leg, in the stage ballet manner, and executed a taunting or triumphant pirouette on the genuine leg remaining to him.
john Rokesmith's manner towards Mrs Boffin at this time, was more the manner of a young man towards a mother, than that of a Secretary towards his employer's wife.
The completeness of his sympathy with her fancy for having a little john Harmon to protect and rear, he had shown in every act and word, and now that the kind fancy was disappointed, he treated it with a manly tenderness and respect for which she could hardly thank him enough.
'But I do thank you, Mr Rokesmith,' said Mrs Boffin, 'and I thank you most kindly.
You love children.'
'I hope everybody does.'
john Rokesmith replied, 'Some among us supply the short comings of the rest.
You have loved children well, Mr Boffin has told me.'
You speak rather sadly, Mr Rokesmith.'
'Do I?'
'It sounds to me so.
Were you one of many children?' He shook his head.
'An only child?'
'No there was another.
'And the rest of your relations?'
I never heard of any.'
She paused at the door a moment, hesitating whether to remain or retire; perplexed by finding that she was not observed.
'Now, don't mind an old lady's talk,' said Mrs Boffin, 'but tell me.
Why do you ask me?'
'Why, for this reason.
Sometimes you have a kind of kept down manner with you, which is not like your age.
You can't be thirty?'
'I am not yet thirty.'
Deeming it high time to make her presence known, Bella coughed here to attract attention, begged pardon, and said she would go, fearing that she interrupted some matter of business.
'No, don't go,' rejoined Mrs Boffin, 'because we are coming to business, instead of having begun it, and you belong to it as much now, my dear Bella, as I do.
Rokesmith departed on that errand, and presently returned accompanied by Mr Boffin at his jog trot.
Bella felt a little vague trepidation as to the subject matter of this same consultation, until Mrs Boffin announced it.
Now, you see, what I want to talk about, is this.
Mr and Mrs Milvey have sent me the kindest note possible (which Mr Rokesmith just now read to me out aloud, for I ain't good at handwritings), offering to find me another little child to name and educate and bring up.
Well.
This has set me thinking.'
'--This has set me thinking, I say,' repeated Mrs Boffin, cordially beaming under the influence of her husband's compliment, 'and I have thought two things.
It's an unfortunate name, and I fancy I should reproach myself if I gave it to another dear child, and it proved again unlucky.'
'Now, whether,' said Mr Boffin, gravely propounding a case for his Secretary's opinion; 'whether one might call that a superstition?'
It has now this new unfortunate association connected with it.
The name has died out.
Why revive it? Might I ask Miss Wilfer what she thinks?'
'It has not been a fortunate name for me,' said Bella, colouring-'or at least it was not, until it led to my being here-but that is not the point in my thoughts.
As we had given the name to the poor child, and as the poor child took so lovingly to me, I think I should feel jealous of calling another child by it.
'And that's your opinion?' remarked Mr Boffin, observant of the Secretary's face and again addressing him.
'I say again, it is a matter of feeling,' returned the Secretary.
'Now, give us your opinion, Noddy,' said Mrs Boffin.
'My opinion, old lady,' returned the Golden Dustman, 'is your opinion.'
'Then,' said Mrs Boffin, 'we agree not to revive john Harmon's name, but to let it rest in the grave.
It is, as Mr Rokesmith says, a matter of feeling, but Lor how many matters ARE matters of feeling!
Well; and so I come to the second thing I have thought of.
'Hear, hear!' cried Mr Boffin.
I meant that, I am sure, as much as I still mean it.
But this little death has made me ask myself the question, seriously, whether I wasn't too bent upon pleasing myself. Else why did I seek out so much for a pretty child, and a child quite to my liking?
Wanting to do good, why not do it for its own sake, and put my tastes and likings by?'
'Perhaps,' said Bella; and perhaps she said it with some little sensitiveness arising out of those old curious relations of hers towards the murdered man; 'perhaps, in reviving the name, you would not have liked to give it to a less interesting child than the original.
He interested you very much.'
'Well, my dear,' returned Mrs Boffin, giving her a squeeze, 'it's kind of you to find that reason out, and I hope it may have been so, and indeed to a certain extent I believe it was so, but I am afraid not to the whole extent.
However, that don't come in question now, because we have done with the name.'
'Laid it up as a remembrance,' suggested Bella, musingly.
'Much better said, my dear; laid it up as a remembrance.
'Not pretty then?' said Bella.
'No,' returned Mrs Boffin, stoutly.
'Nor prepossessing then?' said Bella.
'No,' returned Mrs Boffin.
That's as it may happen. A well disposed boy comes in my way who may be even a little wanting in such advantages for getting on in life, but is honest and industrious and requires a helping hand and deserves it.
If I am very much in earnest and quite determined to be unselfish, let me take care of HIM.'
Here the footman whose feelings had been hurt on the former occasion, appeared, and crossing to Rokesmith apologetically announced the objectionable Sloppy.
The four members of Council looked at one another, and paused.
'Shall he be brought here, ma'am?' asked Rokesmith.
'Yes,' said Mrs Boffin.
Whereupon the footman disappeared, reappeared presenting Sloppy, and retired much disgusted.
The consideration of Mrs Boffin had clothed Mr Sloppy in a suit of black, on which the tailor had received personal directions from Rokesmith to expend the utmost cunning of his art, with a view to the concealment of the cohering and sustaining buttons.
But, so much more powerful were the frailties of Sloppy's form than the strongest resources of tailoring science, that he now stood before the Council, a perfect Argus in the way of buttons: shining and winking and gleaming and twinkling out of a hundred of those eyes of bright metal, at the dazzled spectators.
The artistic taste of some unknown hatter had furnished him with a hatband of wholesale capacity which was fluted behind, from the crown of his hat to the brim, and terminated in a black bunch, from which the imagination shrunk discomfited and the reason revolted.
'Have you just come, Sloppy?'
'Yes, mum.'
'No, mum.
But I mean to it.
'How are the two poor little Minders?' asked Mrs Boffin.
'Striking right out, mum, and coming round beautiful.'
'Sloppy.'
'Yes, mum.'
'Come forward, Sloppy.
Should you like to dine here every day?'
'Yes.
'Oh, mum!--But there's Mrs Higden,' said Sloppy, checking himself in his raptures, drawing back, and shaking his head with very serious meaning. 'There's Mrs Higden.
Mrs Higden goes before all.
And she must be turned for, must Mrs Higden.
Where would Mrs Higden be if she warn't turned for!' At the mere thought of Mrs Higden in this inconceivable affliction, Mr Sloppy's countenance became pale, and manifested the most distressful emotions.
It shall be seen to.
If Betty Higden can be turned for all the same, you shall come here and be taken care of for life, and be made able to keep her in other ways than the turning.'
'Even as to that, mum,' answered the ecstatic Sloppy, 'the turning might be done in the night, don't you see?
I could be here in the day, and turn in the night.
I don't want no sleep, I don't.
Or even if I any ways should want a wink or two,' added Sloppy, after a moment's apologetic reflection, 'I could take 'em turning.
I've took 'em turning many a time, and enjoyed 'em wonderful!'
On the grateful impulse of the moment, Mr Sloppy kissed Mrs Boffin's hand, and then detaching himself from that good creature that he might have room enough for his feelings, threw back his head, opened his mouth wide, and uttered a dismal howl.
BOOK THE THIRD -- A LONG LANE
Chapter one
LODGERS IN QUEER STREET
Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City-which call Saint Mary Axe-it was rusty black.
But the light went out, and the main door opened, and Riah came forth with a bag under his arm.
But the eyes of this history can follow him westward, by Cornhill, Cheapside, Fleet Street, and the Strand, to Piccadilly and the Albany.
Arrived at the house in which his master's chambers were on the second floor, Riah proceeded up the stairs, and paused at Fascination Fledgeby's door.
Making free with neither bell nor knocker, he struck upon the door with the top of his staff, and, having listened, sat down on the threshold.
It was characteristic of his habitual submission, that he sat down on the raw dark staircase, as many of his ancestors had probably sat down in dungeons, taking what befell him as it might befall.
After a time, when he had grown so cold as to be fain to blow upon his fingers, he arose and knocked with his staff again, and listened again, and again sat down to wait.
Thrice he repeated these actions before his listening ears were greeted by the voice of Fledgeby, calling from his bed, 'Hold your row!--I'll come and open the door directly!' But, in lieu of coming directly, he fell into a sweet sleep for some quarter of an hour more, during which added interval Riah sat upon the stairs and waited with perfect patience.
At length the door stood open, and Mr Fledgeby's retreating drapery plunged into bed again.
Following it at a respectful distance, Riah passed into the bed chamber, where a fire had been sometime lighted, and was burning briskly.
'Why, what time of night do you mean to call it?' inquired Fledgeby, turning away beneath the clothes, and presenting a comfortable rampart of shoulder to the chilled figure of the old man.
Then it must be precious foggy?'
'Very foggy, sir.'
With a plunge of enjoyment, Fledgeby settled himself afresh.
'Any snow, or sleet, or slush, or anything of that sort?' he asked.
'No, sir, no Not quite so bad as that.
The streets are pretty clean.'
'But you're always bragging about something.
Got the books there?'
'All right.
With another comfortable plunge, Mr Fledgeby fell asleep again.
He was roused by Mr Fledgeby's appearing erect at the foot of the bed, in Turkish slippers, rose coloured Turkish trousers (got cheap from somebody who had cheated some other somebody out of them), and a gown and cap to correspond.
In that costume he would have left nothing to be desired, if he had been further fitted out with a bottomless chair, a lantern, and a bunch of matches.
You ain't asleep. Catch a weasel at it, and catch a Jew!'
'Not you!' returned Fledgeby, with a cunning look.
The old man shook his head, gently repudiating the imputation, and suppressed a sigh, and moved to the table at which Mr Fledgeby was now pouring out for himself a cup of steaming and fragrant coffee from a pot that had stood ready on the hob.
It was an edifying spectacle, the young man in his easy chair taking his coffee, and the old man with his grey head bent, standing awaiting his pleasure.
'Now!' said Fledgeby. 'Fork out your balance in hand, and prove by figures how you make it out that it ain't more.
First of all, light that candle.'
Riah obeyed, and then taking a bag from his breast, and referring to the sum in the accounts for which they made him responsible, told it out upon the table.
Fledgeby told it again with great care, and rang every sovereign.
'May I take the liberty to say something?'
'You may,' Fledgeby graciously conceded.
'Do you not, sir-without intending it-of a surety without intending it-sometimes mingle the character I fairly earn in your employment, with the character which it is your policy that I should bear?'
'I don't find it worth my while to cut things so fine as to go into the inquiry,' Fascination coolly answered.
'Not in justice?'
'Bother justice!' said Fledgeby.
'Not in generosity?'
'That's a good connexion!
Bring out your vouchers, and don't talk Jerusalem palaver.'
The vouchers were produced, and for the next half hour Mr Fledgeby concentrated his sublime attention on them.
'Next,' said Fledgeby, 'concerning that bill broking branch of the business; the branch I like best.
What queer bills are to be bought, and at what prices?
You have got your list of what's in the market?'
'Sir, a long list,' replied Riah, taking out a pocket book, and selecting from its contents a folded paper, which, being unfolded, became a sheet of foolscap covered with close writing.
'Queer Street is full of lodgers just at present!
These are to be disposed of in parcels; are they?'
'In parcels as set forth,' returned the old man, looking over his master's shoulder; 'or the lump.'
'Half the lump will be waste paper, one knows beforehand,' said Fledgeby. 'Can you get it at waste paper price?
That's the question.'
Riah shook his head, and Fledgeby cast his small eyes down the list. They presently began to twinkle, and he no sooner became conscious of their twinkling, than he looked up over his shoulder at the grave face above him, and moved to the chimney piece.
Making a desk of it, he stood there with his back to the old man, warming his knees, perusing the list at his leisure, and often returning to some lines of it, as though they were particularly interesting.
He took none that could be detected, but, aware of his employer's suspicions, stood with his eyes on the ground.
Mr Fledgeby was thus amiably engaged when a step was heard at the outer door, and the door was heard to open hastily.
'Hark!
That's your doing, you Pump of Israel,' said Fledgeby; 'you can't have shut it.' Then the step was heard within, and the voice of Mr Alfred Lammle called aloud, 'Are you anywhere here, Fledgeby?' To which Fledgeby, after cautioning Riah in a low voice to take his cue as it should be given him, replied, 'Here I am!' and opened his bedroom door.
'Come in!' said Fledgeby.
Can't I make ANY terms with you on my friend's part, Mr Riah?'
'I am but the representative of another, sir,' returned the Jew in a low voice.
'I do as I am bidden by my principal.
It is not my profit that arises therefrom.'
'Ha ha!' laughed Fledgeby.
'Lammle?'
'Ha ha!' laughed Lammle. 'Yes.
Of course.
We know.'
'Devilish good, ain't it, Lammle?' said Fledgeby, unspeakably amused by his hidden joke.
'He is only the representative of another!' cried Fledgeby. 'Does as he is told by his principal!
Saint Mary Axe, or of somebody: which is far from our intention.
Having closed it on him, Fledgeby returned to Lammle, standing with his back to the bedroom fire, with one hand under his coat skirts, and all his whiskers in the other.
'How do you know it?' demanded Lammle.
'Because you show it,' replied Fledgeby in unintentional rhyme.
'Well then; there is,' said Lammle; 'there IS something wrong; the whole thing's wrong.'
'I tell you, Fledgeby,' repeated Lammle, with a sweep of his right arm, 'the whole thing's wrong.
'What game's up?' demanded Fledgeby, as slowly as before, and more sternly.
OUR game.
Fledgeby took a note from his extended hand and read it aloud.
'Alfred Lammle, Esquire.
Sir: Allow Mrs Podsnap and myself to express our united sense of the polite attentions of Mrs Alfred Lammle and yourself towards our daughter, Georgiana.
'Perhaps,' suggested Fledgeby, after reflecting with a very discontented brow, 'somebody has been giving you a bad character.'
A certain remembrance connected with that feature operating as a timely warning, he took it thoughtfully between his thumb and forefinger, and pondered; Lammle meanwhile eyeing him with furtive eyes.
'Well!' said Fledgeby. 'This won't improve with talking about.
'No,' said Fledgeby; 'provided you have brought my promissory note in your pocket, and now hand it over.'
Lammle produced it, not without reluctance.
Fledgeby looked at it, identified it, twisted it up, and threw it into the fire.
They both looked at it as it blazed, went out, and flew in feathery ash up the chimney.
'No,' said Fledgeby.
'Yes.'
'Fledgeby, my hand.'
Mr Fledgeby took it, saying, 'And if we ever find out who did this, we'll mark that person.
And in the most friendly manner, let me mention one thing more.
I don't know what your circumstances are, and I don't ask.
You have sustained a loss here.
Never fall into his hands, Lammle, I beg of you as a friend!'
I didn't like his eye.
Of course if you are sure that you have no personal security out, which you may not be quite equal to meeting, and which can have got into his hands, it must have been fancy.
Still, I didn't like his eye.'
The brooding Lammle, with certain white dints coming and going in his palpitating nose, looked as if some tormenting imp were pinching it. Fledgeby, watching him with a twitch in his mean face which did duty there for a smile, looked very like the tormentor who was pinching.
'But I mustn't keep him waiting too long,' said Fledgeby, 'or he'll revenge it on my unfortunate friend.
How's your very clever and agreeable wife?
'I showed her the letter.'
'Oh!--She lays it upon me, then?'
'Don't break out, Lammle,' urged Fledgeby, in a submissive tone, 'because there's no occasion.
I only asked a question.
Then she don't lay it upon me?
To ask another question.'
'No, sir.'
'My compliments to her.
Good bye!'
They shook hands, and Lammle strode out pondering.
'You have a pair of whiskers, Lammle, which I never liked,' murmured Fledgeby, 'and which money can't produce; you are boastful of your manners and your conversation; you wanted to pull my nose, and you have let me in for a failure, and your wife says I am the cause of it.
Now a word about affairs that are not exactly mine. Where is she?'
'Oho!' said Fledgeby. 'Didn't expect it!
Showing that he was taken by surprise, the old man looked at his master with some passing confusion, which the master highly enjoyed.
'No, sir.'
'No, sir.'
'Where is she then?'
Riah bent his eyes upon the ground, as if considering whether he could answer the question without breach of faith, and then silently raised them to Fledgeby's face, as if he could not.
'Come!' said Fledgeby. 'I won't press that just now.
But I want to know this, and I will know this, mind you.
What are you up to?'
The old man, with an apologetic action of his head and hands, as not comprehending the master's meaning, addressed to him a look of mute inquiry.
'O, sir!' expostulated Riah.
'O, sir, sir, sir!'
'Then why,' retorted Fledgeby, with some slight tinge of a blush, 'don't you out with your reason for having your spoon in the soup at all?'
'Sir, I will tell you the truth.
But (your pardon for the stipulation) it is in sacred confidence; it is strictly upon honour.'
'Honour too!' cried Fledgeby, with a mocking lip.
Cut away.'
'It is upon honour, sir?' the other still stipulated, with respectful firmness.
'Oh, certainly.
Honour bright,' said Fledgeby.
The old man, never bidden to sit down, stood with an earnest hand laid on the back of the young man's easy chair.
The young man sat looking at the fire with a face of listening curiosity, ready to check him off and catch him tripping.
'Cut away,' said Fledgeby. 'Start with your motive.'
'Sir, I have no motive but to help the helpless.'
Mr Fledgeby could only express the feelings to which this incredible statement gave rise in his breast, by a prodigiously long derisive sniff.
'Did you?' said Fledgeby, distrustfully.
'Well.
Perhaps you did, though.'
'The better I knew her, the more interest I felt in her fortunes.
They gathered to a crisis.
I found her beset by a selfish and ungrateful brother, beset by an unacceptable wooer, beset by the snares of a more powerful lover, beset by the wiles of her own heart.'
'She took to one of the chaps then?'
'Sir, it was only natural that she should incline towards him, for he had many and great advantages.
Perils were closing round her, and the circle was fast darkening, when I-being as you have said, sir, too old and broken to be suspected of any feeling for her but a father's-stepped in, and counselled flight.
I said, "My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight." She answered, she had had this in her thoughts; but whither to fly without help she knew not, and there were none to help her.
I showed her there was one to help her, and it was i And she is gone.'
'What did you do with her?' asked Fledgeby, feeling his cheek.
'I placed her,' said the old man, 'at a distance;' with a grave smooth outward sweep from one another of his two open hands at arm's length; 'at a distance-among certain of our people, where her industry would serve her, and where she could hope to exercise it, unassailed from any quarter.'
Fledgeby's eyes had come from the fire to notice the action of his hands when he said 'at a distance.' Fledgeby now tried (very unsuccessfully) to imitate that action, as he shook his head and said, 'Placed her in that direction, did you?
Oh you circular old dodger!'
With one hand across his breast and the other on the easy chair, Riah, without justifying himself, waited for further questioning.
But, that it was hopeless to question him on that one reserved point, Fledgeby, with his small eyes too near together, saw full well.
'Lizzie,' said Fledgeby, looking at the fire again, and then looking up. 'Humph, Lizzie.
I'll be more communicative with you.
The other name's Hexam.'
Has he anything to do with the law?'
'I thought so.
'Wrayburn.'
'By Jupiter!' cried Fledgeby.
'That one, is it?
Got a beard besides, and presumes upon it.
Go on and prosper!'
Left alone, Mr Fledgeby locked his outer door, and came back to his fire.
'Well done you!' said Fascination to himself.
'Slow, you may be; sure, you are!' This he twice or thrice repeated with much complacency, as he again dispersed the legs of the Turkish trousers and bent the knees.
'A tidy shot that, I flatter myself,' he then soliloquised.
'And a Jew brought down with it!
Having got behind the hedge, and put him in the light, I took a shot at him and brought him down plump.
Another dry twist in place of a smile, made his face crooked here.
'As to Christians,' proceeded Fledgeby, 'look out, fellow Christians, particularly you that lodge in Queer Street!
I have got the run of Queer Street now, and you shall see some games there.
With this apostrophe Mr Fledgeby appropriately proceeded to divest himself of his Turkish garments, and invest himself with Christian attire.
Pending which operation, and his morning ablutions, and his anointing of himself with the last infallible preparation for the production of luxuriant and glossy hair upon the human countenance (quacks being the only sages he believed in besides usurers), the murky fog closed about him and shut him up in its sooty embrace.
If it had never let him out any more, the world would have had no irreparable loss, but could have easily replaced him from its stock on hand.
The gates of the Monastery stood wide open, the world lay beyond, and all was ready for departure.
Baron Conrad and his men at arms sat foot in stirrup, the milk white horse that had been brought for Otto stood waiting for him beside his father's great charger.
"Farewell, Otto," said the good old Abbot, as he stooped and kissed the boy's cheek.
"Farewell," answered Otto, in his simple, quiet way, and it brought a pang to the old man's heart that the child should seem to grieve so little at the leave taking.
"Farewell, Otto," said the brethren that stood about, "farewell, farewell."
Then poor brother john came forward and took the boy's hand, and looked up into his face as he sat upon his horse.
"We will meet again," said he, with his strange, vacant smile, "but maybe it will be in Paradise, and there perhaps they will let us lie in the father's belfry, and look down upon the angels in the court yard below."
"Aye," answered Otto, with an answering smile.
Down the steep winding pathway they rode, and out into the great wide world beyond, upon which Otto and brother john had gazed so often from the wooden belfry of the White Cross on the hill.
"Nay," said Otto; "we had no horse to ride, but only to bring in the harvest or the grapes from the further vineyards to the vintage."
"Nay," said Otto, with a smile, "I am not afeared."
But perhaps Otto's thought of fear and Baron Conrad's thought of fear were two very different matters.
The afternoon had passed by the time they had reached the end of their journey.
Up the steep, stony path they rode to the drawbridge and the great gaping gateway of Drachenhausen, where wall and tower and battlement looked darker and more forbidding than ever in the gray twilight of the coming night.
Little Otto looked up with great, wondering, awe struck eyes at this grim new home of his.
The next moment they clattered over the drawbridge that spanned the narrow black gulph between the roadway and the wall, and the next were past the echoing arch of the great gateway and in the gray gloaming of the paved court yard within.
Otto looked around upon the many faces gathered there to catch the first sight of the little baron; hard, rugged faces, seamed and weather beaten; very different from those of the gentle brethren among whom he had lived, and it seemed strange to him that there was none there whom he should know.
As he climbed the steep, stony steps to the door of the Baron's house, old Ursela came running down to meet him.
"My little child," she cried, and then fell to sobbing as though her heart would break.
His new home was all very strange and wonderful to Otto; the armors, the trophies, the flags, the long galleries with their ranges of rooms, the great hall below with its vaulted roof and its great fireplace of grotesquely carved stone, and all the strange people with their lives and thoughts so different from what he had been used to know.
And it was a wonderful thing to explore all the strange places in the dark old castle; places where it seemed to Otto no one could have ever been before.
It was the chapel into which Otto had made his way, now long since fallen out of use excepting as a burial place of the race.
At another time he clambered up into the loft under the high peaked roof, where lay numberless forgotten things covered with the dim dust of years.
There a flock of pigeons had made their roost, and flapped noisily out into the sunlight when he pushed open the door from below. Here he hunted among the mouldering things of the past until, oh, joy of joys! in an ancient oaken chest he found a great lot of worm eaten books, that had belonged to some old chaplain of the castle in days gone by.
They were not precious and beautiful volumes, such as the Father Abbot had showed him, but all the same they had their quaint painted pictures of the blessed saints and angels.
Again, at another time, going into the court yard, Otto had found the door of Melchior's tower standing invitingly open, for old Hilda, Schwartz Carl's wife, had come down below upon some business or other.
Then upon the shaky wooden steps Otto ran without waiting for a second thought, for he had often gazed at those curious buildings hanging so far up in the air, and had wondered what they were like.
Round and round and up and up Otto climbed, until his head spun.
At last he reached a landing stage, and gazing over the edge and down, beheld the stone pavement far, far below, lit by a faint glimmer of light that entered through the arched doorway.
Otto clutched tight hold of the wooden rail, he had no thought that he had climbed so far.
Then Otto turned and crept down the stairs, frightened at the height to which he had climbed.
At the doorway he met Mother Hilda.
Old Ursela seemed nearer to the boy than anyone else about the castle, excepting it was his father, and it was a newfound delight to Otto to sit beside her and listen to her quaint stories, so different from the monkish tales that he had heard and read at the monastery.
But one day it was a tale of a different sort that she told him, and one that opened his eyes to what he had never dreamed of before.
The mellow sunlight fell through the window upon old Ursela, as she sat in the warmth with her distaff in her hands while Otto lay close to her feet upon a bear skin, silently thinking over the strange story of a brave knight and a fiery dragon that she had just told him.
Suddenly Ursela broke the silence.
"Nay," said Otto, "but tell me, Ursela, how it was."
Otto listened with eyes that grew wider and wider, though not all with wonder; he no longer lay upon the bear skin, but sat up with his hands clasped.
For a moment or two after the old woman had ended her story, he sat staring silently at her.
Then he cried out, in a sharp voice, "And is this truth that you tell me, Ursela? and did my father seek to rob the towns people of their goods?"
Ah! me, those day's are all gone now." And she fetched a deep sigh.
"Then we lived in plenty and had both silks and linens and velvets besides in the store closets and were able to buy good wines and live in plenty upon the best.
But there is one comfort in it all, and that is that our good Baron paid back the score he owed the Trutz Drachen people not only for that, but for all that they had done from the very first."
Poor little Otto had never dreamed that such cruelty and wickedness could be.
He listened to the old woman's story with gaping horror, and when the last came and she told him, with a smack of her lips, how his father had killed his enemy with his own hand, he gave a gasping cry and sprang to his feet.
"Oh, father!" he cried, "oh, father!
"Aye," said the Baron, grimly, "it is true enough, and I think me I have killed many more than one.
But what of that, Otto?
Once he reached out his hand as though to stroke the boy's hair, but drew it back again.
Turning angrily upon the old woman, "Ursela," said he, "thou must tell the child no more such stories as these; he knowest not at all of such things as yet.
That night the father and son sat together beside the roaring fire in the great ball.
Otto looked for a while into his father's face.
eight.
In the House of the Dragon Scorner.
Such was the little baron's prison in Trutz Drachen.
Fastened to a bolt and hanging against the walls, hung a pair of heavy chains with gaping fetters at the ends.
They were thick with rust, and the red stain of the rust streaked the wall below where they hung like a smear of blood. Little Otto shuddered as he looked at them; can those be meant for me, he thought.
No sound from without was to be heard in that gloomy cell of stone, for the window pierced the outer wall, and the earth and its noises lay far below.
Suddenly a door crashed without, and the footsteps of men were heard coming along the corridor.
They stopped in front of Otto's cell; he heard the jingle of keys, and then a loud rattle of one thrust into the lock of the heavy oaken door.
The rusty bolt was shot back with a screech, the door opened, and there stood Baron Henry, no longer in his armor, but clad in a long black robe that reached nearly to his feet, a broad leather belt was girdled about his waist, and from it dangled a short, heavy hunting sword.
The two stood for a moment looking into the room, and Otto, his pale face glimmering in the gloom, sat upon the edge of the heavy wooden bench or bed, looking back at them out of his great blue eyes.
Then the two entered and closed the door behind them.
"Dost thou know why thou art here?" said the Baron, in his deep, harsh voice.
"Nay," said Otto, "I know not."
"So?" said the Baron.
"Nay, dear Lord Baron, I know not," said poor little Otto, and began to weep.
The Baron stood for a moment or two looking gloomily upon him, as the little boy sat there with the tears running down his white face.
Catch the boy, Casper, and hold him."
As the man in the mail shirt stepped toward little Otto, the boy leaped up from where he sat and caught the Baron about the knees.
"Oh! dear Lord Baron," he cried, "do not harm me; I am only a little child, I have never done harm to thee; do not harm me."
Baron Henry and the other came forth from the cell, carefully closing the wooden door behind them.
Otto lay upon the hard couch in his cell, covered with a shaggy bear skin.
His face was paler and thinner than ever, and dark rings encircled his blue eyes.
He was looking toward the door, for there was a noise of someone fumbling with the lock without.
Since that dreadful day when Baron Henry had come to his cell, only two souls had visited Otto.
One was the fellow who had come with the Baron that time; his name, Otto found, was Casper.
The other visitor was the leech or doctor, a thin, weasand little man, with a kindly, wrinkled face and a gossiping tongue, who, besides binding wounds, bleeding, and leeching, and administering his simple remedies to those who were taken sick in the castle, acted as the Baron's barber.
At last the bolts grated back, there was a pause, and then the door opened a little way, and Otto thought that he could see someone peeping in from without. By and by the door opened further, there was another pause, and then a slender, elfish looking little girl, with straight black hair and shining black eyes, crept noiselessly into the room.
She stood close by the door with her finger in her mouth, staring at the boy where he lay upon his couch, and Otto upon his part lay, full of wonder, gazing back upon the little elfin creature.
She, seeing that he made no sign or motion, stepped a little nearer, and then, after a moment's pause, a little nearer still, until, at last, she stood within a few feet of where he lay.
Why, I thought that thou wert a great tall fellow at least, and here thou art a little boy no older than Carl Max, the gooseherd." Then, after a little pause-"My name is Pauline, and my father is the Baron.
I heard him tell my mother all about thee, and so I wanted to come here and see thee myself: Art thou sick?"
"Yes," said Otto, "I am sick."
"And did my father hurt thee?"
Little Pauline stood looking seriously at him for a while.
And then, at her childish pity, he began crying in earnest.
This was only the first visit of many from the little maid, for after that she often came to Otto's prison, who began to look for her coming from day to day as the one bright spot in the darkness and the gloom.
One day the little maid sat for a long while silent after he had ended speaking.
At last she drew a deep breath.
"Yes," said Otto, "all are true."
"And do they never go out to fight other priests?"
"No," said Otto, "they know nothing of fighting."
"So!" said she.
I saw her the night thy father hurt me so, for I could not sleep and my head felt as though it would break asunder.
"But where did she come from, Otto?" said the little girl.
"From paradise, I think," said Otto, with that patient seriousness that he had caught from the monks, and that sat so quaintly upon him.
When I was sick my mother bade Gretchen carry me to a far part of the house, because I cried and so troubled her.
"Mine hath often struck me," said Pauline.
One day little Pauline came bustling into Otto's cell, her head full of the news which she carried.
There he had seen the Baron Conrad and six of his men, and that they were eating one of the swine that they had killed and roasted.
Maybe," said she, seating herself upon the edge of Otto's couch; "maybe my father will kill thy father, and they will bring him here and let him lie upon a black bed with bright candles burning around him, as they did my uncle Frederick when he was killed."
"God forbid!" said Otto, and then lay for a while with his hands clasped.
"Dost thou love me, Pauline?" said he, after a while.
"Yes," said Pauline, "for thou art a good child, though my father says that thy wits are cracked."
"Mayhap they are," said Otto, simply, "for I have often been told so before.
"Then listen, Pauline," said Otto; "if I go not away from here I shall surely die.
"Why dost thou cry, Otto?" said she, after a while.
"Because," said he, "I am so sick, and I want my father to come and take me away from here."
"If thy father takes thee away, thou canst not tell me any more stories."
Dear Pauline, canst thou not tell my father where I am, that he may come here and take me away before I die?"
"And for my sake, wilt thou tell him, Pauline?" said Otto.
"Yes," said Otto, very seriously, "I will promise."
THE SINGLE TAX.
This idea was first formulated by mr Henry George in eighteen seventy nine, and has grown steadily in favor.
They hold that this is the only rightful source of public revenue, and they would therefore abolish all taxation-local, state and national-except a tax upon the rental value of land exclusive of its improvements, the revenue thus raised to be divided among local, state and general governments, as the revenue from certain direct taxes is now divided between local and state governments.
The single tax would not fall on all land, but only on valuable land, and on that in proportion to its value.
It would thus be a tax, not on use or improvements, but on ownership of land, taking what would otherwise go to the landlord as owner.
In accordance with the principle that all men are equally entitled to the use of the earth, they would solve the transportation problem by public ownership and control of all highways, including the roadbeds of railroads, leaving their use equally free to all.
It would call upon men to contribute for public expenses in proportion to the natural opportunities they monopolize, and make it unprofitable for speculators to hold land unused or only partly used, thus opening to labor unlimited fields of employment, solving the labor problem and abolishing involuntary poverty.
THE MYSTERIES OF HYPNOTISM.
A Compend of the General Claims Made by Professional Hypnotists.
It may be transmitted from one person to another.
The transmitting force is the concentrated effort of will power, which sends the magnetic current through the nerves of the operator to the different parts of the body of his subject.
Its action in general should be soothing and quieting upon the nervous system; stimulating to the circulation of the blood, the brain and other vital organs of the body of the subject.
It is the use and application of this power or force that constitutes hypnotism.
From the intelligent operator using it to overcome disease, a patient experiences a soothing influence that causes a relaxation of the muscles, followed by a pleasant, drowsy feeling which soon terminates in refreshing sleep.
No one was ever induced to commit any crime under hypnosis, that could not have been induced to do the same thing much easier without hypnosis.
The hypnotic state is a condition of mind that extends from a comparatively wakeful state, with slight drowsiness, to complete somnambulism, no two subjects, as a rule, ever presenting the same characteristics.
The operator, to be successful, must have control of his own mind, be in perfect health and have the ability to keep his mind concentrated upon the object he desires to accomplish with his subject.
HOW TO CARE FOR A PIANO. By William h Damon
The most important thing in the preservation of a piano is to avoid atmospheric changes and extremes and sudden changes of temperature. Where the summer condition of the atmosphere is damp all precautions possible should be taken to avoid an entirely dry condition in winter, such as that given by steam or furnace heat.
Plants in the room are desirable and vessels of water of any kind will be of assistance.
The most potent means of avoiding extreme dryness is to place a single loaf bread pan half full of water in the lower part of the piano, taking out the lower panel and placing it on either side of the pedals inside.
In cases where stove heat is used these precautions are not necessary.
The action of a piano, like any other delicate piece of machinery, should be carefully examined, and, if necessary, adjusted each time it is tuned.
The hammers need occasional and careful attention to preserve original tone quality and elasticity.
This is ruinous to both the action and tuning.
When not in use the music rack and top should be closed to exclude dust.
The keyboard need never be closed, as the ivory needs both light and ventilation and will eventually turn yellow unless left open.
The case demands careful treatment to preserve its beauty and polish, Never use anything other than a soft piece of cotton cloth or cheese cloth to dust it with.
Never wipe it with a dry chamois skin or silk cloth.
Silk is not as soft as cotton and will scratch.
A dry chamois skin picks up the dust and grit and gradually scours off the fine finish.
In dusting never use a feather duster, nor rub the piano hard with anything.
The dust should be whipped off, and not rubbed into the varnish.
If the piano is dingy, smoky or dirty looking, it should be washed carefully with lukewarm water with a little ammonia in it to soften it.
Never use soap.
Use nothing but a small, soft sponge and a chamois skin.
Wipe over a small part at a time with the sponge, following quickly with the wet chamois skin wrung out of the same water. This will dry it immediately and leave it as beautiful and clean as new. Never use patent polishes.
If your piano needs polishing employ a competent polisher to give it a hand rubbing friction polish.
[Transcriber's Note: The highest point in New Guinea is Puncak Jaya (Mount Carstensz or the Carstensz Pyramid), at sixteen thousand twenty three feet.]
Scald this with new milk heated to the boiling point and mix to the thickness of mush.
This can be made in a cup.
"In the morning, when all is ready, take a one gallon stone jar and into this put one scant cupful of new milk.
Add a level teaspoonful of salt and one of sugar.
Scald this with three cupfuls of water heated to the boiling point.
Reduce to a temperature of one hundred and eight degrees with cold water, using a milk thermometer to enable you to get exactly the right temperature.
It should rise at least an inch and a half.
When it has raised mix to a stiff dough, make into loaves and put into pans.
Do not let the heat get out of the dough while working. Grease the loaves well on top and set your bread where it will be warm and rise.
After the loaves rise bake in a medium oven for one hour and ten minutes.
When you take the loaves from the oven wrap them in a bread cloth."
Take twelve ounces of dislike, one pound of resolution, two grains of common sense, two ounces of experience, a large sprig of time, and three quarts of cooling water of consideration.
Set them over a gentle fire of love, sweeten it with sugar of forgetfulness, skim it with the spoon of melancholy, put it in the bottom of your heart, cork it with the cork of clean conscience.
Let it remain and you will quickly find ease and be restored to your senses again.
These things can be had of the apothecary at the house of Understanding next door to Reason, on Prudent street.
DOING BUSINESS WITH A BANK
In opening your account with a bank it is proper that you should first be introduced to the cashier, or some other official.
If you are engaged in business, that officer will inquire as to your particular business or calling, your address, etc, and unless he is already satisfied on this point, he may make inquiries as to your business standing.
This being satisfactory, he will hand you a passbook, and some deposit tickets, whereupon you make your first deposit, entering the amount on the ticket.
You will then be asked to write your signature in a book provided for that purpose, or upon a card to be filed away for reference.
The Signature.
john h Smith or john Henry Smith, but whatever form you adopt should be used all the time. Once having adopted the form, it should be maintained in exactly that way.
In that case, supposing you had adopted the form j Henry Smith for your regular signature, and the check is made payable to john h Smith, you should first write on the back of that check "john h Smith," and immediately under this you should place your regular signature.
When making a deposit, always use the deposit ticket provided by the bank, filling it out yourself in ink.
From this ticket, which is first checked up by the receiving teller, the amount of your deposit is placed to your credit.
How to Avoid Mistakes.
Sometimes the requirements of the banks may seem arbitrary and troublesome, but reflection will show that they safeguard the depositor as well as the bank.
The simple rules here laid down will enable anyone who has business with a bank to do so with the least trouble and with absolute safety.
How to Make Out a Check.
The stub of your check book will furnish a permanent memorandum, and when the check is canceled and returned to you by the bank, it is an indisputable evidence that the debt has been paid, or that the remittance has been made.
[Illustration: A Check Properly Drawn.
The name and amount are against the left side of their fields.]
The first facsimile shows a check properly made.
It will be seen, in the first place, that this check is written very plainly, and that there is no room for the insertion of extra figures or words.
The writing of the amount commences as nearly as possible to the extreme left of the check. The figures are written close together and there is no space between the first figure and the dollar mark.
If you have made a mistake, tear a blank check from the back of your check book and use that in place of the one spoiled.
Some business men allow their clerks to fill out checks on the typewriter.
This is ill advised for two reasons: First, it is much easier to alter a typewritten check than one filled in with a pen; in the second place, a teller, in passing on the genuineness of a check, takes into consideration the character of the handwriting in the body of the check as well as in the signature.
The typewritten characters offer no clue to individuality.
Never mail a check drawn to "Bearer." Remember that if your check is made payable to "Bearer" or to "john Smith or Bearer" it may be cashed by anybody who happens to have it.
If you make your check payable say, to William Armstrong or order, nobody but William Armstrong, or some one to whom he indorses the check, can collect the amount, and if through fraud or otherwise some one not entitled to it gets the money which the check calls for, the responsibility is not yours, but the bank's.
It is for that reason that bankers and business men use such great care in accepting checks.
[Illustration: A Check Carelessly Drawn.
The text and numbers for the amount is in the center of their fields, leaving of space for extra text.]
[Illustration: The Same Check "Raised".
Checks or drafts received by you should be deposited as soon as possible.
Should you receive a check for a considerable amount and have no convenient bank account, you should go to the bank on which the check is drawn and have the cashier certify it by stamping "Accepted" or "Certified" across the face over his signature.
That formality makes the paper as good as money so long as the bank accepting it is solvent.
Paying Notes and Acceptances.
Whether it or other banks hold them for collection, they will be presented to your bank when due.
Banks will not pay notes or drafts without instructions.
Exchange.
"Exchange" means funds in other cities made available by bankers' drafts on such places.
These drafts afford the safest and cheapest means for remitting money.
Drafts on New York are worth their face value practically all over the United States in settlement of accounts.
Collections.
A draft is sometimes the most convenient form for collecting an account. The prevalence of the custom is due to the fact that most men will wait to be asked to pay a debt.
If a draft is a time draft it is accepted by the person on whom it is drawn by writing his name and date across the face.
This makes it practically a note, to be paid at maturity.
Borrowing.
Banks are always willing to loan their funds to responsible persons within reasonable limits.
That is what they exist for.
The customer should not hesitate, when occasion requires, to offer to the bank for discount such paper as may come into his hands in the course of business, if, in his opinion, the paper is good.
At the same time he should not be offended if his bank refuses to take it even without giving reasons.
Indorsing Checks, etc
The proper way to indorse a check or draft-this also applies to notes and other negotiable paper-is to write your name upon the back about one inch from the top.
The end which is then farthest from you is the top.
If, however, the check, draft or note has already been indorsed by another person, you should write your name directly under the other indorsement, even if that is on the wrong end.
If your own name on the face of the check, draft or note is misspelled, or has the wrong initials, but if the paper is clearly intended for you, you should first write your name as it appears on the face, and under it your regular signature.
You should indorse every check you deposit, even though it be payable to bearer.
Mistakes in Banking.
One wrong word, or figure, or letter-the right thing in the wrong way or the wrong place-the scratch of an eraser or the alteration of a word-or any one of these things, in the making or cashing of a check, is liable to become as expensive as a racing automobile.
The paying teller of a bank, says mr Woods, must keep his eyes open for new dangers as well as old ones.
The cleverest crooks in the country are pitting their brains against his.
After he has learned the proper guard for all the well-known tricks and forgeries it is still possible that an entirely new combination may leave him minus cash and plus experience.
But it is not the unique and novel swindle that is most dangerous, either to a bank or an individual.
It is the simple, ordinary mistake or the time worn trick that makes continuous trouble.
Apparently, every new generation contains a number of dishonest people who lay the same traps, and a number of careless people who fall into these traps in the same old way.
Check Raising Made Easy.
One of the first lessons, for instance, that a depositor should learn before he is qualified to own a check book is to commence writing the amount as near as possible to the extreme left of the check.
Those who forget this are often reminded of it in a costly way.
Some one "raises" their checks by writing another figure in front of the proper amount. "Five hundred" might be "raised" to "twenty five hundred" in this way, even by an unskilled forger.
The highest court has recently decided that a bank cannot be held responsible, when it pays a "raised" check, if the maker of the check failed in the first place to write it out correctly.
Altered Words and Figures.
The altered check is the bane of the paying teller's profession, and it is the general practice in conservative banks to accept no checks or other paper which shows signs of erasure or alteration in either words or figures.
By Lucretia p Hale
It would not take so long to write as a letter, and would not be so expensive.
But could they get the whole subject on a postal?
mr Peterkin believed there could be no difficulty, there was but one question:--
Shall the adventures of the Peterkin family be published?
Their card had been addressed to the lady from Philadelphia, with the number of her street.
"Publish them, of course."
And in time came the answer of the lady from Philadelphia:--"Yes, of course; publish them."
THIS was mrs Peterkin.
It was a mistake.
It tasted bad.
He could turn things into almost gold.
He came near throwing his crucible-that was the name of his melting pot-at their heads.
But he didn't.
First he looked at the coffee, and then stirred it.
Then he added some tartaric acid and some hypersulphate of lime.
But no; it was no better.
"I have it!" exclaimed the chemist,--"a little ammonia is just the thing!" No, it wasn't the thing at all.
Then he tried, each in turn, some oxalic, cyanic, acetic, phosphoric, chloric, hyperchloric, sulphuric, boracic, silicic, nitric, formic, nitrous nitric, and carbonic acids.
mrs Peterkin tasted each, and said the flavor was pleasant, but not precisely that of coffee.
The chemist was not discouraged.
The chemist said that all he had done ought to have taken out the salt.
He should like to be paid, and go.
He sat himself down to do it.
They knew her by her hat.
It was steeple crowned, without any vane.
They saw her digging with her trowel round a sassafras bush.
There she stopped, and stuffed her huge pockets with some of all the kinds of herbs.
Meanwhile mrs Peterkin was getting quite impatient for her coffee.
mrs
Then she tried a little flagroot and snakeroot, then some spruce gum, and some caraway and some dill, some rue and rosemary, some sweet marjoram and sour, some oppermint and sappermint, a little spearmint and peppermint, some wild thyme, and some of the other tame time, some tansy and basil, and catnip and valerian, and sassafras, ginger, and pennyroyal.
The children tasted after each mixture, but made up dreadful faces.
mrs Peterkin tasted, and did the same.
The more the old woman stirred, and the more she put in, the worse it all seemed to taste.
She believed the coffee was bewitched.
And all she would take for pay was five cents in currency.
Then the family were in despair, and all sat and thought a great while. It was growing late in the day, and mrs Peterkin hadn't had her cup of coffee.
At last Elizabeth Eliza said, "They say that the lady from Philadelphia, who is staying in town, is very wise.
Suppose I go and ask her what is best to be done." To this they all agreed, it was a great thought, and off Elizabeth Eliza went.
"Why didn't we think of that?" said Elizabeth Eliza; and they all went back to their mother, and she had her cup of coffee.
ELIZABETH ELIZA had a present of a piano, and she was to take lessons of the postmaster's daughter.
How could Elizabeth Eliza open it?
How could she reach the keys to play upon it?
It was very pleasant, too, moonlight evenings.
So did Elizabeth Eliza, only she had to have her back to the moon.
One day, when she was talking with the lady from Philadelphia, she spoke of this trouble.
"Why did we not think of that before?" said mrs Peterkin.
"It comes from books," said one of the family.
"People who have a great many books are very wise." Then they counted up that there were very few books in the house,--a few school books and mrs Peterkin's cook book were all.
"Let us think how we shall get one," said mrs Peterkin.
"That's the book case part," said Elizabeth Eliza; "but where are the books?"
"Yes," said Solomon john, "books will make us wise, but first I must make a book."
So they went into the parlor, and sat down to make a book.
But there was no ink.
What should he do for ink?
So they decided to make some. The little boys said they could find some nutgalls up in the woods. So they all agreed to set out and pick some.
mrs Peterkins put on her cape bonnet, and the little boys got into their india rubber boots, and off they went.
But it was already dark.
They set out in procession for the poultry yard.
When they got there, the fowls were all at roost, so they could look at them quietly.
But there were no geese!
"No geese but ourselves," said mrs Peterkin, wittily, as they returned to the house. The sight of this procession roused up the village.
After the crowd had dispersed, Solomon john sat down to think of his writing again.
The bookseller was just shutting up his shop.
So Solomon john sat down again, but there was no paper.
And now the bookstore was shut up.
Elizabeth Eliza shook the reins, and pulled them, and then she clucked to the horse; and mrs Peterkin clucked; and the little boys whistled and shouted; but still the horse would not go.
"We shall have to whip him," said Elizabeth Eliza.
So they tried this, but the horse would not stir.
"I have tried the whip," said Elizabeth Eliza.
"We might make those," said mrs Peterkin, thoughtfully.
"We have got plenty of cream," said Elizabeth Eliza.
They carried some out to the horse, who swallowed it down very quickly.
"That is just what he wanted," said mrs Peterkin; "now he will certainly go!"
The little boys jumped out as quickly as they could; they were eager to go and ask the lady from Philadelphia.
This was at dinner time.
mr Peterkin sat down to cut the ham.
Nobody had what he could eat.
It was a rule of the Peterkin family, that no one should eat any of the vegetables without some of the meat; so now, although the children saw upon their plates apple sauce and squash and tomato and sweet potato and sour potato, not one of them could eat a mouthful, because not one was satisfied with the meat.
"What shall be done now?" said mrs Peterkin.
At last said mrs Peterkin, rather uncertainly, "Suppose we ask the lady from Philadelphia what is best to be done."
But mr Peterkin said he didn't like to go to her for everything; let the children try and eat their dinner as it was.
And they all tried, but they couldn't.
"Very well, then." said mr Peterkin, "let them go and ask the lady from Philadelphia."
"All of us?" cried one of the little boys, in the excitement of the moment.
"Yes," said mrs Peterkin, "only put on your india rubber boots." And they hurried out of the house.
Agamemnon and Elizabeth Eliza told her all the difficulty, and the lady from Philadelphia said, "But why don't you give the slices of fat to those who like the fat, and the slices of lean to those who like the lean?"
"Why didn't we think of that?" said they, and ran home to tell their mother.
All had seated themselves at the dinner table, and Amanda had gone to take out the dinner she had sent up from the kitchen on the dumb waiter.
But something was the matter; she could not pull it up.
There was the dinner, but she could not reach it.
All the family, in turn, went and tried; all pulled together, in vain; the dinner could not be stirred.
"No dinner!" exclaimed Agamemnon.
At last mr Peterkin said, "I am not proud.
All consented to this.
Each one went down, taking a napkin.
Amanda went to the dumb waiter for the dinner, but she could not move it down.
"What is there for dinner?" asked mr Peterkin.
"Roast turkey," said mrs Peterkin.
"Squash, tomato, potato, and sweet potato," mrs Peterkin continued.
"Sweet potato!" exclaimed both the little boys.
"I am very glad now that I did not have cranberry," said mrs Peterkin, anxious to find a bright point.
"Let us sit down and think about it," said mr Peterkin.
"Let us hear it," said mr Peterkin.
"The turkey," said Agamemnon, "must be just above the kitchen door.
If I had a ladder and an axe, I could cut away the plastering and reach it."
"That is a great idea," said mrs Peterkin.
"If you think you could do it," said mr Peterkin.
"Would it not be better to have a carpenter?" asked Elizabeth Eliza.
"A carpenter might have a ladder and an axe, and I think we have neither," said mrs Peterkin.
"A carpenter!
A carpenter!" exclaimed the rest.
It was decided that mr Peterkin, Solomon john, and the little boys should go in search of a carpenter.
Agamemnon proposed that, meanwhile, he should go and borrow a book; for he had another idea.
"This affair of the turkey," he said, "reminds me of those buried cities that have been dug out,--Herculaneum, for instance."
"Oh, yes," interrupted Elizabeth Eliza, "and Pompeii."
Now, I should like to know how they did it; and I mean to borrow a book and read.
I think it was done with a pickaxe."
But when mr Peterkin reached the carpenter's shop, there was no carpenter to be found there.
"Happy man," exclaimed mr Peterkin, "he has a dinner to eat!"
They went to the carpenter's house, but found he had gone out of town for a day's job.
Time passed on, and the question arose about tea.
A part of the family thought it would not do; the rest wanted tea.
"Oh, yes," said mrs Peterkin.
"Let us try to think what she would advise us," said mr Peterkin.
"I wish she were here," said Elizabeth Eliza.
"I think," said mr Peterkin, "she would say, let them that want tea have it; the rest can go without."
So they had tea, and, as it proved, all sat down to it.
They asked him to bring a ladder, axes and pickaxe.
When the matter was explained to him, he went into the dining room, looked into the dumb waiter, untwisted a cord, and arranged the weight, and pulled up the dinner.
There was a family shout.
"The trouble was in the weight," said the carpenter.
"That is why it is called a dumb waiter," Solomon john explained to the little boys.
The dinner was put upon the table.
The Whigs saw that their time was come.
Sidney sounded Halifax. Shrewsbury took his part with a courage and decision which, at a later period, seemed to be wanting to his character.
The brow, the eye, and the mouth of Halifax indicated a powerful intellect and an exquisite sense of the ludicrous; but the expression was that of a sceptic, of a voluptuary, of a man not likely to venture his all on a single hazard, or to be a martyr in any cause.
He had passed years in a prison.
The whole plan was opened to him; and he approved of it. But in a few days he began to be unquiet.
He was still detached, an astonished spectator, still but half involved in life.
What is the danger?"
"We have our troubles," said Howard.
And, in fact, your appearance, your waking just now, has a sort of connexion-"
He spoke jerkily, like a man not quite sure of his breathing.
He stopped abruptly.
"I don't understand," said Graham.
"It will be clearer later," said Howard.
Anything.
Your counting, I understand, is different."
What place is it?"
"Was it a social trouble-that-in the great roadway place?
How are you governed?
"Several," said Howard.
"Several?"
"About fourteen."
"Very probably not.
To tell you the truth, I don't understand it myself very clearly.
You will, perhaps-bye and bye.
This Howard, it seemed, was a person of importance.
He asked Howard to slacken his speed.
"I want to see more of that," cried Graham, resisting.
As they crossed the gallery he heard a whisper from below, "The Sleeper," and was aware of a turning of heads, a hum of observation.
Then he stopped.
"Orders, Sire."
"Whose orders?"
"Our orders, Sire."
Graham looked his exasperation.
"Oh!" said Graham, and after an equally ineffectual attempt at the other man, went to the railing and stared at the distant men in white, who stood watching him and whispering together.
The Council?
And why should he be brought to them, and be looked at strangely and spoken of inaudibly? Howard appeared beneath, walking quickly across the polished floor towards them.
The two men in red stopped on either side of this door.
"You must understand," began Howard abruptly, avoiding Graham's eyes, "that our social order is very complex.
He stopped.
"Yes?" said Graham.
"Yes?"
"Things have come to such a pass that, in fact, it is advisable to seclude you here."
"Keep me prisoner!" exclaimed Graham.
"Well-to ask you to keep in seclusion."
"This is strange!" he said.
"No harm will be done you."
"No harm!"
"But you must be kept here-"
"Precisely."
Begin.
"Why not?"
Your awakening-no one expected your awakening.
"What council?"
"The Council you saw."
Graham made a petulant movement.
"This is not right," he said.
"I should be told what is happening."
"You must wait.
Really you must wait."
"That is better," said Howard.
For a space.
While I attend the discussion in the Council....
I am sorry."
There was an inkling of some vast inheritance already in his mind-a vast inheritance perhaps misapplied-of some unprecedented importance and opportunity. What had he to do?
And this room's secluded silence was eloquent of imprisonment!
For a moment he did not perceive this was himself.
But this thing before him was not a book as he understood it.
And they had spoken of the Sleeper; it had not really struck him vividly at the time that he was the Sleeper.
The music was unfamiliar.
Something snapped.
But here was no Utopia, no Socialistic state.
He began to talk to himself.
"Steady!"
"This new world," he said.
"It is not that.
"Am I a fool?"
"Certainly not."
"You were never expected to act at all.
And-but it is too complex.
We dare not suddenly---while you are still half awake."
Howard pulled his lip.
Is that it?"
It will be ill.
I am alive.
I am a man come back to life.
Is there any sort of company?"
He paused meaningly.
"Yes," said Graham thoughtfully.
"That," said Howard, "I am afraid-But-"
"What do you mean by company?"
We think it no scandal.
Graham stopped dead.
"It would pass the time," said Howard.
Graham hesitated.
There is a city, a multitude-.
He stopped.
He clung to his anger-because he was afraid of fear.
But what do they want?
He had dressed himself in cool white clothes, and was passing through the hall on his way to the council chamber, when a number of young nobles suddenly appeared before him, and one amongst them stepped forward and spoke.
'Sire, this morning we were all playing tennis in the court, the prince and this gentleman with the rest, when there broke out some dispute about the game.
'Yes, sire, he had arms; he always carries a dagger in his belt.
Then he came back, his face white and stern.
The young man raised his head as if to reply, but the king would not listen, and commanded his guards to put him under arrest, adding, however, that if the prisoner wished to visit any part of the city, he was at liberty to do so properly guarded, and in fifteen days he would be brought to trial before the highest judges in the land.
By their advice he spent the fourteen days that remained to him going about to seek counsel from wise men of all sorts, as to how he might escape death, but no one could help him, for none could find any excuse for the blow he had given to the prince.
The fourteenth night had come, and in despair the prisoner went out to take his last walk through the city.
He wandered on hardly knowing where he went, and his face was so white and desperate that none of his companions dared speak to him.
But there is none that can answer that question save only I myself, if you will promise to do all I ask.'
'You will not need to do that,' answered the old woman, 'you have only got to marry me, and you will soon be free.'
Oh, no, it is quite impossible.'
He spoke without thinking, but the flash of anger which darted from her eyes made him feel uncomfortable.
However, all she said was:
But at length, breathless and exhausted, he reached her side, and gasped out:
'Madam, pardon me for my hasty words just now; I was wrong, and will thankfully accept the offer you made me.'
The hall was full to overflowing when the prisoner entered it, and all marvelled at the brightness of his face.
The king inquired if he had any excuse to plead for the high treason he had committed by striking the heir to the throne, and, if so, to be quick in setting it forth.
With a low bow the youth made answer in a clear voice:
The queen saw this, and likewise that your love was going from her, and thought night and day of some plan that might put an end to this evil.
At length, when you were away fighting in distant countries, she decided what she would do, and adopted in secret the baby of a poor quarryman, sending a messenger to tell you that you had a son.
No one suspected the truth except a priest to whom the queen confessed the truth, and in a few weeks she fell ill and died, leaving the baby to be brought up as became a prince.
And now, if your highness will permit me, I will speak of myself.'
You were in a part of the country which you did not know, so seeing an orchard all pink and white with apple blossoms, and a girl tossing a ball in one corner, you went up to her to ask your way.
She only thought you a poor knight, and agreed that as you wished it, the marriage should be kept secret.
That, sire, I can now tell you,' and the young man paused and looked at the king, who coloured deeply.
Therefore one by one they all knelt before him and took the oath, and a message was sent to the false prince, forbidding him ever again to appear at court, though a handsome pension was granted him.
For the next few weeks little was seen of the prince, who spent all his days in hunting, and trying to forget the old wife at home.
Now I must tell you who I am, and what befell to cause me to take the shape of an old woman.
To this he replied that as my misfortune resulted from a spell, this was rather difficult, but he would do his best, and at any rate he could promise that before my fifteenth birthday I should be freed from the enchantment if I could get a man who would swear to marry me as I was.
'That is my history, and now you must beg the king to send messengers at once to Granada, to inform my father of our marriage, and I think,' she added with a smile, 'that he will not refuse us his blessing.'
'Wilt thou wed me, farmer's daughter?'
However, after a night's rest he was in a better temper, and thought that he might be more lucky the third time, so back he went to the old place.
'Wilt thou wed me, farmer's daughter?' he said to the youngest.
'Indeed I will wed thee; a pretty creature is the hoodie,' answered she, and on the morrow they were married.
By and bye they had a son, and very pleased they both were.
But in the night soft music was heard stealing close towards the house, and every man slept, and the mother slept also.
So they set out in a coach which was big enough to hold them, and had not gone very far when the hoodie suddenly said:
And when the sun rose she got up, and left the house, in search of the hoodie.
With the first spoonful he took up the ring, and a thrill ran through him; in the second he beheld the feather and rose from his chair.
'Who has cooked this feast?' asked he, and the real cook, who had come back from the race, was brought before him.
Still, at last they were over, and they went back the way she had come, and stopped at the three houses in order to take their little sons to their own home.
The prisoner expected that he would be at no expense that day, for like an economical man he had concealed half of his fowl and a piece of the bread in the corner of his cell.
He struggled against his thirst till his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth; then, no longer able to resist, he called out.
The sentinel opened the door; it was a new face.
He thought it would be better to transact business with his old acquaintance, so he sent for Peppino.
"What do you want?"
"Come, my friend," said Danglars, seeing that he made no impression on Peppino, "you will not refuse me a glass of wine?"
"They are all the same price."
"Twenty five thousand francs a bottle."
"It is possible such may be the master's intention."
"The master?--who is he?"
"Here."
"You sent for me?" he said to the prisoner.
"Are you, sir, the chief of the people who brought me here?"
What then?"
"How much do you require for my ransom?"
"Merely the five million you have about you." Danglars felt a dreadful spasm dart through his heart.
If you deprive me of that, take away my life also."
"We are forbidden to shed your blood."
"Yes, a chief."
"Probably."
"no"
"Two millions?--three?--four?
Come, four?
"Take all, then-take all, I tell you, and kill me!"
"Come, come, calm yourself.
You will excite your blood, and that would produce an appetite it would require a million a day to satisfy.
Be more economical."
"Then you must suffer hunger."
"no"
"Ah, that is a different thing."
"As your excellency pleases," said Vampa, as he left the cell.
Danglars, raving, threw himself on the goat skin.
What could be his intentions towards him?
But to die?
For the first time in his life, Danglars contemplated death with a mixture of dread and desire; the time had come when the implacable spectre, which exists in the mind of every human creature, arrested his attention and called out with every pulsation of his heart, "Thou shalt die!"
From this time the prisoner resolved to suffer no longer, but to have everything he wanted.
At the end of twelve days, after having made a splendid dinner, he reckoned his accounts, and found that he had only fifty thousand francs left.
He who for so long a time had forgotten God, began to think that miracles were possible-that the accursed cavern might be discovered by the officers of the Papal States, who would release him; that then he would have fifty thousand remaining, which would be sufficient to save him from starvation; and finally he prayed that this sum might be preserved to him, and as he prayed he wept.
Three days passed thus, during which his prayers were frequent, if not heartfelt.
Sometimes he was delirious, and fancied he saw an old man stretched on a pallet; he, also, was dying of hunger.
But Peppino did not answer.
On the fifth day he dragged himself to the door of the cell.
"Are you not a Christian?" he said, falling on his knees.
Oh, my former friends, my former friends!" he murmured, and fell with his face to the ground.
"Here I am," said Vampa, instantly appearing; "what do you want?"
"Take my last gold," muttered Danglars, holding out his pocket book, "and let me live here; I ask no more for liberty-I only ask to live!"
"Oh, yes, yes, cruelly!"
"Yes; those who have died of hunger."
"Yes," he said, "there have been some who have suffered more than I have, but then they must have been martyrs at least."
"Of what must I repent?" stammered Danglars.
And now eat and drink; I will entertain you to night.
Vampa, when this man is satisfied, let him be free." Danglars remained prostrate while the count withdrew; when he raised his head he saw disappearing down the passage nothing but a shadow, before which the bandits bowed.
According to the count's directions, Danglars was waited on by Vampa, who brought him the best wine and fruits of Italy; then, having conducted him to the road, and pointed to the post chaise, left him leaning against a tree.
The Beast with Five Fingers
BY w f
HARVEY
When I was a little boy I once went with my father to call on Adrian Borlsover.
I played on the floor with a black spaniel while my father appealed for a subscription.
Just before we left my father said, "mr Borlsover, may my son here shake hands with you?
It will be a thing to look back upon with pride when he grows to be a man."
He spoke to me kindly, and hoped that I should always try to please my father.
Then he placed his right hand on my head and asked for a blessing to rest upon me.
"Amen!" said my father, and I followed him out of the room, feeling as if I wanted to cry.
"That old gentleman, Jim," said he, "is the most wonderful man in the whole town.
"But I saw his eyes," I said.
"They were ever so black and shiny; they weren't shut up like Nora's puppies.
Can't he see at all?"
And so I learnt for the first time that a man might have eyes that looked dark and beautiful and shining without being able to see.
That was the only time I saw Adrian Borlsover.
But for a week I prayed that those dark tender eyes might see.
"His spaniel may have puppies," I said in my prayers, "and he will never be able to know how funny they look with their eyes all closed up. Please let old mr Borlsover see."
Adrian Borlsover, as my father had said, was a wonderful man.
He came of an eccentric family.
Borlsovers' sons, for some reason, always seemed to marry very ordinary women, which perhaps accounted for the fact that no Borlsover had been a genius, and only one Borlsover had been mad.
Adrian was an authority on the fertilization of orchids.
Occasionally he would relieve one or other of the local clergy.
"An excellent proof," he would add, "of the truth of the doctrine of direct verbal inspiration."
Adrian Borlsover was exceedingly clever with his hands.
His penmanship was exquisite.
He illustrated all his scientific papers, made his own woodcuts, and carved the reredos that is at present the chief feature of interest in the church at Borlsover Conyers.
In a wonderfully short time he had adapted himself to the new conditions of life.
He quickly learned to read Braille.
The mere passing of his long supple fingers over a flower was sufficient means for its identification, though occasionally he would use his lips.
I have found several letters of his among my father's correspondence.
In no case was there anything to show that he was afflicted with blindness and this in spite of the fact that he exercised undue economy in the spacing of lines.
Towards the close of his life the old man was credited with powers of touch that seemed almost uncanny: it has been said that he could tell at once the color of a ribbon placed between his fingers.
My father would neither confirm nor deny the story.
His elder brother George had married late in life, leaving one son, Eustace, who lived in the gloomy Georgian mansion at Borlsover Conyers, where he could work undisturbed in collecting material for his great book on heredity.
Like his uncle, he was a remarkable man.
The Borlsovers had always been born naturalists, but Eustace possessed in a special degree the power of systematizing his knowledge.
Uncle and nephew saw little of each other.
The visits of Eustace were confined to a week in the summer or autumn: long weeks, that dragged almost as slowly as the bath chair in which the old man was drawn along the sunny sea front.
Both men possessed, too, the reticence the Borlsovers had always shown, and which their enemies sometimes called hypocrisy.
Two years before his death Adrian Borlsover developed, unknown to himself, the not uncommon power of automatic writing.
Eustace made the discovery by accident.
Adrian was sitting reading in bed, the forefinger of his left hand tracing the Braille characters, when his nephew noticed that a pencil the old man held in his right hand was moving slowly along the opposite page.
He left his seat in the window and sat down beside the bed.
B, for Borlsover.
Honesty is the Best Policy.
Beautiful Belinda Borlsover."
"What curious nonsense!" said Eustace to himself.
He went along the promenade, but stopped at the first shelter, and seating himself in the corner best protected from the wind, he examined the book at leisure.
The whole thing, in fact, had the appearance of a copy book, and on a more careful scrutiny Eustace thought that there was ample evidence to show that the handwriting at the beginning of the book, good though it was was not nearly so good as the handwriting at the end.
But on his return he was at first disappointed.
His uncle, he thought, looked older.
He was listless too, preferring others to read to him and dictating nearly all his letters.
Not until the day before he left had Eustace an opportunity of observing Adrian Borlsover's new found faculty.
The old man, propped up in bed with pillows, had sunk into a light sleep.
His two hands lay on the coverlet, his left hand tightly clasping his right.
Eustace took an empty manuscript book and placed a pencil within reach of the fingers of the right hand.
Almost immediately it began to write.
"Never you mind," wrote the hand of Adrian.
"Is it my uncle who is writing?"
"Oh, my prophetic soul, mine uncle."
"Is it anyone I know?"
"Where shall you not?"
Instead of speaking his next question, Borlsover wrote it.
"What is the time?"
Then, picking up the pencil, they wrote:
"Ten minutes before four.
Put your book away, Eustace.
Adrian mustn't find us working at this sort of thing.
He doesn't know what to make of it, and I won't have poor old Adrian disturbed.
Adrian Borlsover awoke with a start.
"I've been dreaming again," he said; "such queer dreams of leaguered cities and forgotten towns.
You were mixed up in this one, Eustace, though I can't remember how.
Eustace, I want to warn you.
Don't walk in doubtful paths.
Choose your friends well.
Your poor grandfather----"
"It's too late, Adrian," he read.
"We're friends already; aren't we, Eustace Borlsover?"
On the following day Eustace Borlsover left.
He thought his uncle looked ill when he said good by, and the old man spoke despondently of the failure his life had been.
"Nonsense, uncle!" said his nephew.
"You have got over your difficulties in a way not one in a hundred thousand would have done.
Every one marvels at your splendid perseverance in teaching your hand to take the place of your lost sight.
To me it's been a revelation of the possibilities of education."
Marry some good, sensible girl.
And if by any chance I don't see you again, my will is at my solicitor's.
I've not left you any legacy, because I know you're well provided for, but I thought you might like to have my books.
Oh, and there's just one other thing.
You know, before the end people often lose control over themselves and make absurd requests.
Good by!" and he held out his hand.
Eustace took it.
There was, too, in its touch a subtle sense of intimacy.
"Poor old fellow!" he said.
"I wonder where I shall find room for all his books."
The question occurred to him again with greater force when three days later he found himself standing in the library at Borlsover Conyers, a huge room built for use, and not for beauty, in the year of Waterloo by a Borlsover who was an ardent admirer of the great Napoleon.
It was arranged on the plan of many college libraries, with tall, projecting bookcases forming deep recesses of dusty silence, fit graves for the old hates of forgotten controversy, the dead passions of forgotten lives.
At the end of the room, behind the bust of some unknown eighteenth century divine, an ugly iron corkscrew stair led to a shelf lined gallery. Nearly every shelf was full.
"I suppose that it will be necessary to have the billiard room fitted up with book cases."
The two men met for the first time after many weeks in the dining room that evening.
"Hullo!" said Eustace, standing before the fire with his hands in his pockets.
"How goes the world, Saunders?
Why these dress togs?" He himself was wearing an old shooting jacket.
"The world," said Saunders, "goes the same as usual, confoundedly slow.
The dress togs are accounted for by an invitation from Captain Lockwood to bridge."
"How are you getting there?"
"I've told your coachman to drive me in your carriage.
Any objection?"
"Oh, dear me, no! We've had all things in common for far too many years for me to raise objections at this hour of the day."
"You'll find your correspondence in the library," went on Saunders. "Most of it I've seen to.
There are a few private letters I haven't opened.
There's also a box with a rat, or something, inside it that came by the evening post.
Very likely it's the six toed albino.
I didn't look, because I didn't want to mess up my things but I should gather from the way it's jumping about that it's pretty hungry."
"Oh, I'll see to it," said Eustace, "while you and the Captain earn an honest penny."
"We'll have all the lights on at any rate," he said, as he turned the switches.
"And, Morton," he added, when the butler brought the coffee, "get me a screwdriver or something to undo this box.
What is it?
Why are you dawdling?"
"If you please, sir, when the postman brought it he told me that they'd bored the holes in the lid at the post office.
"It's culpably careless of the man, whoever he was," said Eustace, as he removed the screws, "packing an animal like this in a wooden box with no means of getting air.
Confound it all!
Now I suppose I shall have to get one myself."
As he came back into the library with an empty cage in his hand he heard the sound of something falling, and then of something scuttling along the floor.
"Bother it!
The beast's got out.
To search for it did indeed seem hopeless.
Eustace resolved to go on quietly reading.
Very likely the animal might gain confidence and show itself.
There were still the private letters.
What was that?
Two sharp clicks and the lights in the hideous candelabra that hung from the ceiling suddenly went out.
Then he stopped.
There was a noise at the other end of the room, as if something was crawling up the iron corkscrew stair.
"If it's gone into the gallery," he said, "well and good." He hastily turned on the lights, crossed the room, and climbed up the stair.
But he could see nothing.
His grandfather had placed a little gate at the top of the stair, so that children could run and romp in the gallery without fear of accident.
This Eustace closed, and having considerably narrowed the circle of his search, returned to his desk by the fire.
There was no sense of intimacy about the room.
They made the room feel cold, in spite of the heavy red damask curtains and great gilt cornices.
With a crash two heavy books fell from the gallery to the floor; then, as Borlsover looked, another and yet another.
"Very well; you'll starve for this, my beauty!" he said.
Go on! Chuck them down!
The letter was from the family solicitor.
It spoke of his uncle's death and of the valuable collection of books that had been left to him in the will.
He wished his body to be embalmed (he gave us the address of the man we were to employ-Pennifer, Ludgate Hill), with orders that his right hand was to be sent to you, stating that it was at your special request.
The other arrangements as to the funeral remained unaltered."
"Good Lord!" said Eustace; "what in the world was the old boy driving at?
And what in the name of all that's holy is that?"
Someone had pulled the cord attached to one of the blinds, and it had rolled up with a snap.
Someone must be in the gallery, for a second blind did the same.
"I haven't got to the bottom of this yet," said Eustace, "but I will do before the night is very much older," and he hurried up the corkscrew stair.
Quickly he stole on tiptoe in the dim moonshine in the direction of the noise, feeling as he went for one of the switches.
His fingers touched the metal knob at last.
He turned on the electric light.
Eustace stared at it in utter astonishment.
It was moving quickly, in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crab like motion to the whole.
While he was looking, too surprised to stir, the hand disappeared round the corner Eustace ran forward.
He no longer saw it, but he could hear it as it squeezed its way behind the books on one of the shelves.
In his fear lest it should escape him again, he seized the first book that came to his hand and plugged it into the hole.
Then, emptying two shelves of their contents, he took the wooden boards and propped them up in front to make his barrier doubly sure.
"I wish Saunders was back," he said; "one can't tackle this sort of thing alone." It was after eleven, and there seemed little likelihood of Saunders returning before twelve.
He did not dare to leave the shelf unwatched, even to run downstairs to ring the bell.
Morton the butler often used to come round about eleven to see that the windows were fastened, but he might not come.
Eustace was thoroughly unstrung.
At last he heard steps down below.
"Morton!" he shouted; "Morton!"
"Sir?"
"Well, bring me some brandy, and hurry up about it.
I'm up here in the gallery, you duffer."
"Thanks," said Eustace, as he emptied the glass.
"Don't go to bed yet, Morton.
There are a lot of books that have fallen down by accident; bring them up and put them back in their shelves."
That beast in the box got out, and I've been chasing it all over the place."
I think that's the carriage, sir; I'll go and call mr Saunders."
"All right, Morton, you can go now.
I'm up here, Saunders."
"What's all the row?" asked Saunders, as he lounged forward with his hands in his pockets.
The luck had been with him all the evening.
He was completely satisfied, both with himself and with Captain Lockwood's taste in wines.
"What's the matter?
You look to me to be in an absolute blue funk."
"That old devil of an uncle of mine," began Eustace-"oh, I can't explain it all.
But I've got it cornered behind these books.
You've got to help me catch it."
"What's up with you, Eustace?
"It's no game, you silly idiot!
If you don't believe me take out one of those books and put your hand in and feel."
"All right," said Saunders; "but wait till I've rolled up my sleeve.
The accumulated dust of centuries, eh?"
"There's something there right enough," he said.
"It's got a funny stumpy end to it, whatever it is, and nips like a crab.
"Shove in a book quickly.
Now it can't get out."
"What was it?" asked Eustace.
"It was something that wanted very much to get hold of me.
Give me some brandy."
"What about a landing net?"
"No good.
It would be too smart for us.
I tell you, Saunders, it can cover the ground far faster than I can walk.
But I think I see how we can manage it.
It certainly seemed to be the best plan.
One by one, as they took out the books, the space behind grew smaller and smaller.
Once they caught sight of fingers pressing outward for a way of escape.
At last they had it pressed between the two big books.
"It seems to be a hand right enough, too.
I suppose this is a sort of infectious hallucination.
I've read about such cases before."
"Infectious fiddlesticks!" said Eustace, his face white with anger; "bring the thing downstairs.
We'll get it back into the box."
It was not altogether easy, but they were successful at last.
"Drive in the screws," said Eustace, "we won't run any risks.
"Now let's hear more about your uncle."
This, if I am not mistaken, is a great error.
It was early evening of a day in the late fall and the Winesburg County Fair had brought crowds of country people into town.
The dust rolled away over the fields and the departing sun set it ablaze with colors.
Pushing his way through the crowds in Main Street, young George Willard concealed himself in the stairway leading to Doctor Reefy's office and looked at the people.
Thoughts kept coming into his head and he did not want to think.
He stamped impatiently on the wooden steps and looked sharply about.
Have I done all this waiting for nothing?" he muttered.
George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and new thoughts had been coming into his mind.
He was about to leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city newspaper and he felt grown up.
The mood that had taken possession of him was a thing known to men and unknown to boys.
He felt old and a little tired.
To his mind his new sense of maturity set him apart, made of him a half tragic figure.
He wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death.
There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life.
The boy is walking through the street of his town.
He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world.
Ambitions and regrets awake within him.
Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life.
From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure.
If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness.
He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun
The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity.
Already he hears death calling.
He wants, most of all, understanding.
When the moment of sophistication came to George Willard his mind turned to Helen White, the Winesburg banker's daughter.
Now he wanted to see her for another purpose.
He wanted to tell her of the new impulses that had come to him.
He had tried to make her think of him as a man when he knew nothing of manhood and now he wanted to be with her and to try to make her feel the change he believed had taken place in his nature.
As for Helen White, she also had come to a period of change.
She was no longer a girl and hungered to reach into the grace and beauty of womanhood.
She had come home from Cleveland, where she was attending college, to spend a day at the Fair.
During the day she sat in the grand stand with a young man, one of the instructors from the college, who was a guest of her mother's.
At the Fair she was glad to be seen in his company as he was well dressed and a stranger.
She knew that the fact of his presence would create an impression.
During the day she was happy, but when night came on she began to grow restless.
She wanted to drive the instructor away, to get out of his presence.
While they sat together in the grand stand and while the eyes of former schoolmates were upon them, she paid so much attention to her escort that he grew interested.
"A scholar needs money. I should marry a woman with money," he mused.
Helen White was thinking of George Willard even as he wandered gloomily through the crowds thinking of her. She remembered the summer evening when they had walked together and wanted to walk with him again.
She thought that the months she had spent in the city, the going to theaters and the seeing of great crowds wandering in lighted thoroughfares, had changed her profoundly.
The summer evening together that had left its mark on the memory of both the young man and woman had, when looked at quite sensibly, been rather stupidly spent. They had walked out of town along a country road.
Then they had stopped by a fence near a field of young corn and George had taken off his coat and let it hang on his arm.
"Well, I've stayed here in Winesburg-yes-I've not yet gone away but I'm growing up," he had said.
"I've been reading books and I've been thinking.
"Well," he explained, "that isn't the point.
Perhaps I'd better quit talking."
The confused boy put his hand on the girl's arm.
His voice trembled.
The two started to walk back along the road toward town.
In his desperation George boasted, "I'm going to be a big man, the biggest that ever lived here in Winesburg," he declared.
You see the point.
The boy's voice failed and in silence the two came back into town and went along the street to Helen White's house.
Speeches he had thought out came into his head, but they seemed utterly pointless.
"I thought-I used to think-I had it in my mind you would marry Seth Richmond.
Now I know you won't," was all he could find to say as she went through the gate and toward the door of her house.
In a room above one of the stores, where a dance was to be held, the fiddlers tuned their instruments.
He wanted to run away by himself and think.
"I wasn't afraid, I knew I had 'em beat all the time.
"Your life is still bound up with the life of this town?" he asked.
"There are people here in whom you are interested?" To the girl his voice sounded pompous and heavy.
In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling.
"George!
Where are you, George?" she cried, filled with nervous excitement.
He stopped and stared stupidly.
"Come on," he said and took hold of her hand.
Dry leaves rustled under foot.
It has never been painted and the boards are all warped out of shape.
The Fair Ground stands on top of a low hill rising out of the valley of Wine Creek and from the grand stand one can see at night, over a cornfield, the lights of the town reflected against the sky.
George and Helen climbed the hill to the Fair Ground, coming by the path past Waterworks Pond.
What he felt was reflected in her.
In youth there are always two forces fighting in people.
Sensing his mood, Helen walked beside him filled with respect.
In some way chastened and purified by the mood they had been in, they became, not man and woman, not boy and girl, but excited little animals.
Once, running swiftly forward, Helen tripped George and he fell.
He squirmed and shouted.
NOTWITHSTANDING mr Craig's prophecy, the dark blue cloud dispersed itself without having produced the threatened consequences.
But it was Adam's strength, not its correlative hardness, that influenced his meditations this morning.
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BY
It was very early Christmas morning, and in the stillness of the dawn, with the soft snow falling on the housetops, a little child was born in the Bird household.
They had intended to name the baby Lucy, if it were a girl; but they hadn't expected her on Christmas morning, and a real Christmas baby was not to be lightly named-the whole family agreed in that.
They were consulting about it in the nursery.
Hugh, the "hitherto baby," if that is a possible term, sat in one corner and said nothing, but felt, in some mysterious way, that his nose was out of joint; for there was a newer baby now, a possibility he had never taken into consideration; and the "first girl," too, a still higher development of treason, which made him actually green with jealousy.
She was a person of so great decision of character that she would have blushed at such a thing; she said that to let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling about without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life.
She also said that if one could not make up one's mind in twenty four hours it was a sign that-but I will not repeat the rest, as it might prejudice you against the most charming woman in the world.
Meanwhile dear mrs Bird lay in her room, weak, but safe and happy with her sweet girl baby by her side and the heaven of motherhood opening before her.
Nurse was making gruel in the kitchen, and the room was dim and quiet.
It was the boy choir singing Christmas anthems. Higher and higher rose the clear, fresh voices, full of hope and cheer, as children's voices always are.
Fuller and fuller grew the burst of melody as one glad strain fell upon another in joyful harmony:
mrs Bird thought, as the music floated in upon her gentle sleep, that she had slipped into heaven with her new baby, and that the angels were bidding them welcome.
She opened her eyes and drew the baby closer.
It looked like a rose dipped in milk, she thought, this pink and white blossom of girlhood, or like a pink cherub, with its halo of pale yellow hair, finer than floss silk.
"Why, my baby," whispered mrs Bird in soft surprise, "I had forgotten what day it was.
You are a little Christmas child, and we will name you 'Carol'--mother's little Christmas Carol!"
"What!" said mr Bird, coming in softly and closing the door behind him.
"I think it is a charming name, dear heart, and that it sounds just like you, and I hope that, being a girl, this baby has some chance of being as lovely as her mother," at which speech from the baby's papa, mrs Bird, though she was as weak and tired as she could be, blushed with happiness.
She talked little as a rule; but, in the pungent country phrase she never spoke but she said something.
"You're late this evening.
Keep any of the youngsters in?
"Well, you've missed Alexander Tracy.
But he met his match in mr West.
It's effective.
"Perhaps I met mr Tracy," said Eric.
No, sir!
Mother, pass the biscuits to the Master."
"Neil-Neil Gordon."
"Well, Master, it was this way.
Anyhow, they kept the baby.
He's always lived there.
But folks hereabouts don't like him.
They never go away anywheres, except to church-they never miss that-and nobody goes there.
And they kept talking TO mrs Foster and AT each other.
On such a night as this I saw the last crew go Out of a world too beautiful to leave. Only a chosen few Beside the crew Were gathered on the pier; And in the ebb and flow Of dark and moon, we saw them fare Straight past the row of coffins Where the fifth crew lay Waiting their last short voyage Across the bay.
And as each body spent out of its ebbing store Of strength and hope, I felt the forward thrust, At first so sure, Fail in its rhythm, Falter slow, And slower- Hang an endless moment- Till in a rush came fear- Fear of the sea, that it might win again, Gathering one crew more, Making them pay in vain.
Then through the horror of it, like a clear Sweet wind among the stars, I felt the lift And drive of heart and will Working their miracles until Spent muscles tensed again to offer all In one transcendent gift.
three
Out of the blackness wave on livid wave Leapt into being-thundered to our feet; Counting the moments for us, beat by beat, Until the last and smallest dwindled past, Trailing its pallor like a winding sheet Over the last crew and its chosen grave.
There would be eight of them. Here in the gathering light Were waiting eight women or more Who were destined forever to pay, Who never again would laugh back Into the eyes of life In the old glad, confident way. Each huddled dumbly to each; But eyes could not lift from the sea, Only hands touched in the dawn.
Brave, but with quivering lips, Each alone in the press of the crowd, Was saying it over and over.
"Here is April come!" said she, "I get quite anxious about you.
June will soon be here."
"But I have never fixed on June or any other month-merely looked forward to the summer in general."
"But have you really heard of nothing?"
A cousin of mr Suckling, mrs Bragge, had such an infinity of applications; every body was anxious to be in her family, for she moves in the first circle. Wax candles in the schoolroom!
You may imagine how desirable!
"Trouble!
You are afraid of giving me trouble; but I assure you, my dear Jane, the Campbells can hardly be more interested about you than I am.
I shall write to mrs Partridge in a day or two, and shall give her a strict charge to be on the look out for any thing eligible."
There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something-Offices for the sale-not quite of human flesh-but of human intellect."
"Oh! my dear, human flesh!
"Something that would do!" repeated mrs Elton.
"You may well class the delight, the honour, and the comfort of such a situation together," said Jane, "they are pretty sure to be equal; however, I am very serious in not wishing any thing to be attempted at present for me.
In this style she ran on; never thoroughly stopped by any thing till mr Woodhouse came into the room; her vanity had then a change of object, and Emma heard her saying in the same half whisper to Jane,
How do you like it?--Selina's choice-handsome, I think, but I do not know whether it is not over trimmed; I have the greatest dislike to the idea of being over trimmed-quite a horror of finery.
I must put on a few ornaments now, because it is expected of me.
Do you think it will look well?"
He had returned to a late dinner, and walked to Hartfield as soon as it was over.
He had been too much expected by the best judges, for surprize-but there was great joy.
He gave her a letter, it was from Frank, and to herself; he had met with it in his way, and had taken the liberty of opening it.
"Read it, read it," said he, "it will give you pleasure; only a few lines-will not take you long; read it to Emma."
"Well, he is coming, you see; good news, I think.
As to her illness, all nothing of course.
They will stay a good while when they do come, and he will be half his time with us.
Have you finished it?
Put it up, put it up; we will have a good talk about it some other time, but it will not do now.
mrs Weston was most comfortably pleased on the occasion.
mr Weston, however, too eager to be very observant, too communicative to want others to talk, was very well satisfied with what she did say, and soon moved away to make the rest of his friends happy by a partial communication of what the whole room must have overheard already.
CHAPTER four.
THE MOONLIGHT INTERVIEW.
"Barbara," was the whispered, eager answer, "don't you recognize me?"
In spite of his smock frock and his straw wisped hat, and his false whiskers, black as Erebus, she knew him for her brother.
"Did you know me, Barbara?" was his rejoinder.
A thought crossed my mind that it might be some one from you, and even that made me sick with terror.
"If you are discovered, it is certain death; death-upon-you know!"
"Upon the gibbet," returned Richard Hare.
"I do know it, Barbara."
"Then why risk it?
"I have been working in London ever since-"
"In London!" interrupted Barbara.
Perhaps my mother can let me have it; it is what I have come to ask for."
What at?"
"In a stable yard."
"A stable yard!" she uttered, in a deeply shocked tone.
"Richard!"
"Did you expect it would be as a merchant, or a banker, or perhaps as secretary to one of her majesty's ministers-or that I was a gentleman at large, living on my fortune?" retorted Richard Hare, in a tone of chafed anguish, painful to hear.
"I get twelve shillings a week, and that has to find me in everything!"
"Poor Richard, poor Richard!" she wailed, caressing his hand and weeping over it.
"I did not commit it at all," he replied.
"What!" she exclaimed.
"You surely do not mean to throw the guilt on Bethel?"
"Bethel!" lightly returned Richard Hare.
"He had nothing to do with it.
"The truth as to what he is may come out, some time.
Not that I wish it to come out; the man has done no harm to me, and he may go on poaching with impunity till doomsday for all I care.
"Richard," interrupted his sister, in a hushed voice, "mamma entertains one fixed idea, which she cannot put from her.
Why should she think so?"
"How the conviction arose at first, I cannot tell you; I do not think she knows herself.
"And-you say that you were not?"
"I was not even at the cottage at the time; I swear it to you.
The man who did the deed was Thorn."
"Thorn!" echoed Barbara, lifting her head.
"I don't know who.
I wish I did; I wish I could unearth him.
He was a friend of Afy's."
Barbara threw back her neck with a haughty gesture.
"Richard!"
"What?"
"You forget yourself when you mention that name to me."
"Well," returned Richard.
"Quite.
Richard's.' I think the woman did it heedlessly, not maliciously, to provoke papa; she was a good servant, and had been with us three years you know.
Papa took an oath-did you hear of it?"
"What oath?
He takes many."
"This was a solemn one, Richard.
After the delivery of the verdict, he took an oath in the justice room, in the presence of his brother magistrates, that if he could find you he would deliver you up to justice, and that he would do it, though you might not turn up for ten years to come.
You know his disposition, Richard, and therefore may be sure he will keep it.
Indeed, it is most dangerous for you to be here."
"If my health was delicate, causing my poor mother to indulge me, ought that to have been a reason for his ridiculing me on every possible occasion, public and private?
Barbara, I must be allowed an interview with my mother."
Barbara Hare reflected before she spoke.
"Why can't she come out to me as you have done?
Is she up, or in bed?"
"It is impossible to think of it to night," returned Barbara in an alarmed tone.
"It is hard to have been separated from her for eighteen months, and to go back without seeing her," returned Richard.
"And about the money?
It is a hundred pounds that I want."
I am terrified for your safety.
"Who is to prove it?
"Is he a myth?" said Barbara, in a low voice.
"So, even you doubt me?"
And you know that he is true as steel."
Where is it they suppose that I am, Barbara?"
A report arose that you had been seen at Liverpool, in an Australian bound ship, but we could not trace it to any foundation."
"It had none.
"Working in a stable yard?"
"I could not do better.
I was not brought up to anything, and I did understand horses.
"Be silent for your life," she whispered, "here's papa."
The latter walked on; the former came in.
The brother and sister cowered together, scarcely daring to breathe; you might have heard Barbara's heart beating.
mr Hare closed the gate and walked on up the path.
"I must go, Richard," said Barbara, hastily; "I dare not stay another minute.
Barbara, we are here alone in the still night, with God above us; as truly as that you and I must sometime meet Him face to face, I told you the truth.
It was Thorn murdered Hallijohn, and I had nothing whatever to do with it."
"Let me in, papa," she called out.
"I went down to the gate to look for you," she panted, "and had-had- strolled over to the side path.
Serve with melted butter or Maitre d'Hotel Sauce.
Drain, wipe dry, and soak for an hour in a marinade of oil and vinegar.
Cut the fish into cutlets, dredge with flour, dip into egg and crumbs, and saute in a frying pan.
Drain off the fat, add a little flour and cook to a smooth paste.
Add boiling water to make a sauce, and cook until thick, stirring constantly.
Cut sturgeon steaks into small cutlets.
Dip into egg and crumbs, fry in fat to cover, and serve with any preferred sauce.
Skin a large cut of sturgeon, parboil for fifteen minutes, drain, and cool.
Rub with a marinade of oil and vinegar, cover, and bake with enough water to keep from burning.
Serve with Caper Sauce.
Skin a six pound cut of sturgeon, soak in salted water for an hour, drain, and parboil in fresh water.
Make a stuffing of bread crumbs, chopped salt pork, sweet herbs, and enough melted butter to make a smooth paste.
Score the upper side of the fish deeply and fill the gashes with the stuffing.
Serve with Drawn Butter Sauce, seasoned with capers and catsup.
Cover a buttered baking pan with thin slices of salt pork.
Sprinkle with chopped carrot, turnip, and onion, and lay a thick cut of sturgeon upon it.
Season the fish with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, and cover with thin slices of pork.
Dredge with seasoned flour after each basting, and add more boiling water if necessary.
After the fish has cooked for an hour, remove the pork, and drop it into the pan.
Pour a wineglassful of Sherry over the fish, spread with butter, and dredge thickly with flour.
Bake until the fish is a rich brown color.
Take out the pork and add enough boiling water to the liquid in the pan to make the required quantity of sauce.
Thicken with butter and flour cooked together, strain, and serve with the fish.
STURGEON A l a CARDINAL
Add an onion, four cloves, a blade of mace, a sliced carrot, and a bunch of sweet herbs.
Skin and clean a five pound cut of sturgeon, and tie into shape with strings.
Add red wine and white stock in equal parts to cover.
Simmer until done, drain, and keep warm.
Take enough of the strained liquid to make a sauce, and thicken with butter and flour cooked together.
Take from the fire, add a tablespoonful of anchovy essence, a dash of paprika, two tablespoonfuls of butter, and the juice of a lemon.
Pour over the fish and serve.
STURGEON A l a NORMANDY
Remove the skin from a five pound cut of sturgeon, cover with thin slices of salt pork, and tie into shape with a string.
Cover and cook slowly for an hour, basting with the liquid frequently. When done, drain the fish, and keep warm.
Salt the fish and dip in equal parts of flour and corn meal, thoroughly mixed.
FRIED BROOK TROUT
Remove the fillets from slices of sea trout, dip in beaten egg, then in seasoned crumbs, and fry in deep fat.
Serve with Tartar Sauce.
Boil and cool a trout and divide into fillets, removing the bone. Season with lemon juice, chopped onion, and minced parsley, and cover with a very thick Cream Sauce.
Dip into crumbs, then into beaten egg, then into crumbs, fry in deep fat, and serve with any preferred sauce.
FRIED TROUT WITH MUSHROOM SAUCE
TROUT WITH REMOULADE SAUCE
Saute a small trout in butter, drain on brown paper, and serve with Remoulade Sauce.
FILLETS OF TROUT A L'AURORE
Saute the fillets of a cleaned trout in butter, seasoning with salt and pepper.
Scrape and clean the trout, stuff with seasoned crumbs, and put into a buttered baking dish.
Bake, basting frequently.
Thicken the liquid with butter and flour cooked together, pour over the fish, and serve.
Clean a large sea or lake trout.
Cook the stuffing for ten minutes, using as little water as possible.
Stuff the fish, put into a buttered baking pan with enough hot water to keep from burning.
Cover the fish with thin slices of salt pork and bake until done, adding more hot water if required.
Season with salt and pepper, add a few capers, pour around the fish, and serve.
Stuff a large sea or lake trout with mashed potatoes, seasoning with butter, pepper, salt, and grated onion.
Butter a baking pan and cover the bottom with thin slices of tomatoes.
Lay the fish upon it, sprinkle with salt and pepper, add two tablespoonfuls of butter and enough water to keep from burning.
Bake until done and serve with the tomatoes and sliced hard boiled eggs.
Clean and score small trout, dip in seasoned melted butter, and put in a buttered baking pan.
Serve with any preferred sauce.
Put in a buttered baking pan, sprinkle with minced parsley, and pour over half a cupful of stock to which two tablespoonfuls of butter have been added.
Bake for half an hour, basting as required.
Soak a cupful of bread crumbs in milk, squeeze dry, add two tablespoonfuls of butter, the yolk of an egg, and pepper, salt, thyme, and lemon juice to season.
Stuff the fish, sew up, put in a buttered baking pan, dredge with flour, dot with butter, and bake.
Cover with buttered paper and bake, basting with the liquid.
Take the fillets from a three pound trout and bake for ten minutes in a buttered baking pan.
Cook until thick, stirring constantly, and add two tablespoonfuls of butter, broken into bits.
Pour the sauce over the fillets and bake for fifteen minutes longer.
Split and bone the cleaned fish and put in a buttered baking pan skin side down.
Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and crumbs, and put into the oven.
Cover the bones and trimmings with cold water, adding two tablespoonfuls of butter, a sliced onion, and two cupfuls of stock. Boil for half an hour, strain, add a can of mushrooms, chopped, and enough crumbs to thicken.
Season with salt, pepper, and anchovy paste.
Put half a dozen cleaned trout in a buttered baking dish with half a glassful of white wine, and a finely chopped shallot.
Add also a small chopped onion, two shallots, twice the quantity of mushrooms, and a bean of garlic, all minced and fried in butter.
Season with salt, pepper, minced parsley, and lemon juice; pour over the fish and serve.
BAKED TROUT WITH MUSHROOM SAUCE
Butter a baking dish, sprinkle with bread crumbs, lay a sea trout upon it, cover with crumbs, dot with butter, squeeze over the juice of half a lemon, and bake, adding enough water to keep from burning. Brown a tablespoonful of flour in butter, add the liquid drained from the fish, one cupful each of mushroom and oyster liquor, and a wineglassful of Madeira.
Cook until thick, stirring constantly, take from the fire, and add a few cooked oysters, shrimps, and mushrooms.
Season with salt and pepper and serve separately.
BAKED TROUT WITH POLISH SAUCE
Sprinkle with crumbs, dot with butter, and bake slowly until done.
Melt one and one half cupfuls of butter and add a tablespoonful of minced parsley, and three hard boiled eggs chopped very fine.
Serve the sauce separately.
STUFFED TROUT
Put in a buttered baking dish, lay in the fish, season with salt and pepper, cover with crumbs, dot with butter, pour over a little white wine, and bake in the oven.
Serve in the dish in which they were baked.
Stuff trout with seasoned crumbs, cover each one with a thin slice of salt pork, and wrap in buttered paper, fastening the papers securely; bake and serve in the papers.
Lay a very thin slice of salt pork on each fish and wrap in buttered paper.
Bake in a hot oven.
Remove the string and serve in the paper.
TROUT IN CASES
Clean, parboil, and trim the fish, wrap in buttered paper, bake, and serve with Fine Herb Sauce.
Boil and skin the fish, put on a serving dish, cover with Allemande Sauce, and the chopped yolks of hard boiled eggs.
Brown in the oven and serve with Aurora Sauce.
Prepare six trout according to directions given in the recipe for Trout with Shrimp Sauce.
Serve with one cupful of Spanish Sauce, adding two chopped truffles, half a dozen chopped mushrooms, a dozen chopped olives, and three tablespoonfuls of stewed and strained tomato.
Pour over the fish and serve.
Stuff cleaned trout with chopped oysters or seasoned crumbs, and put into a buttered baking dish.
Add half a wineglassful of white wine, a sprig of celery, a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, two cloves, and salt and pepper to season.
Bake in the oven, basting frequently. Take up the fish, strain the liquid, and add it to a cupful of Spanish Sauce, with a chopped truffle, four cooked mushrooms, chopped, and a dozen cooked oysters.
Pour the sauce over the fish and serve.
Boil, skin, trim the fish, cover with very thick Cream Sauce and let cool.
Broil carefully.
Pour over the fish and serve.
Stuff a cleaned trout through the mouth with butter mixed with finely chopped sweet herbs.
Boil a large sea trout in salted water, drain, skin, and serve with Italian Sauce, seasoned with butter, anchovy paste, nutmeg, and lemon juice.
Strain over the fish, garnish with olives, and serve.
Stuff a large trout with seasoned crumbs, and cover it with Claret, adding mushrooms, parsley, chopped onion, thyme, a bay leaf, pepper corns, and mace to season.
Drain the fish and reduce the liquid by rapid boiling to one cupful.
BOILED TURBOT
With a sharp knife score the black skin in a straight line from head to tail.
BROILED TURBOT
Clean a small turbot and marinate for an hour in seasoned oil and vinegar or lemon juice.
Soak the fish for four hours in a marinade of oil and lemon juice, seasoned with sliced carrot, onion, bay leaf, thyme, parsley, and garlic.
Take up the fish, and add the remainder of the bottle of wine to the liquid.
Pour over the fish and serve.
BAKED TURBOT
Rub a small cleaned turbot with melted butter, sprinkle with minced parsley, powdered mace, and salt and pepper to season.
Let stand for an hour and put into a buttered baking dish.
Reheat cold flaked turbot in a Bechamel Sauce, adding a few cooked oysters.
TURBOT AU BEURRE NOIR
Cut cold cooked turbot into small fillets.
Brown half a cupful of butter, add tarragon vinegar to taste, and pepper, salt, and minced parsley to season.
Reheat the fish in the sauce and serve.
Cook together three tablespoonfuls each of butter and flour, add a quart of cream and cook until thick, stirring constantly.
Season with pepper, salt, minced parsley, and grated onion.
Butter a baking dish, put in a layer of cold cooked turbot flaked fine, cover with sauce, and repeat until the dish is full, having sauce on top.
Sprinkle with chopped eggs and parsley.
Remove the skin, fat, and bone from cold turbot, and flake fine with a fork.
Cook until thick, stirring constantly.
Season with salt and pepper and rub through a sieve.
Clean and dry the fish, cut into fillets, dip in seasoned crumbs, then in egg, then in crumbs, and fry quickly in fat to cover.
Serve with Tartar Sauce.
Garnish with lemon and parsley and serve with Tartar Sauce.
Put a cleaned and split whitefish on a wire broiler, season with salt and cayenne, lay a few thin slices of bacon on top, put the broiler on a baking pan, and cook in the oven without turning. Put on a platter, add a little butter, and rub hard boiled eggs through a sieve over the fish.
Garnish with parsley and lemon.
Pour over melted butter and serve.
Clean and split a large fish, remove the bone, and put in a buttered baking pan skin side down.
Serve with any preferred sauce.
Make a stuffing of one and one half cupfuls of dry bread crumbs, seasoning with salt and pepper.
Add a heaping tablespoonful of butter and one egg well beaten.
Stuff the fish and sew it up.
Put in a buttered baking pan, pour in one cupful of vinegar, and bake until done, basting with butter and hot water.
Dip the fillets of whitefish in beaten egg, then in crumbs, then in egg, then in crumbs, and lastly in beaten egg.
Bake in a buttered dripping pan for twenty five minutes and serve with Cream Sauce.
BAKED FILLETS OF WHITEFISH
Cut a large cleaned whitefish into fillets, removing as much as possible of the bone.
Bake in a thickly buttered baking dish, drain on brown paper, garnish with fried parsley, and serve with Parsley Sauce.
BAKED WHITEFISH A l a BORDEAUX
Stuff a large whitefish with seasoned crumbs, put into a buttered baking pan, rub with butter, dredge with seasoned flour, add one cupful of Claret, and bake.
STUFFED WHITEFISH
Make a stuffing of bread crumbs, seasoning with salt, pepper, sweet herbs, and melted butter.
Add a beaten egg to bind, stuff the fish, and sew up.
Bake slowly, basting with melted butter and water, and serve with Tartar Sauce.
STUFFED WHITEFISH WITH OYSTER SAUCE
Pour over a Cream Sauce to which cooked oysters and a little lemon juice and minced parsley have been added.
Cook the fish until done in boiling salted water, drain, and remove the large bones.
Season with salt, pepper, grated onion, minced parsley, and grated nutmeg, take from the fire and add half a cupful of butter.
Add also the white of an egg well beaten.
Put the fish on a serving dish, spread the sauce over it and brown in the oven.
Put into a buttered baking pan, sprinkle with chopped onion and minced parsley, seasoning with grated nutmeg, salt, and pepper.
Cover with Cream Sauce to which three tablespoonfuls of butter have been added, and put into a hot oven for ten or fifteen minutes.
Boil a whitefish in salted water and flake fine with a fork.
Butter a baking dish, put in a layer of fish, cover with sauce, season with grated nutmeg, and repeat until the dish is full.
Cover with crumbs, dot with butter, and brown in the oven.
Skin and bone the fish, cut into small squares, and season with salt and pepper.
Cook until thick, stirring constantly, seasoning with salt, pepper, lemon juice, minced parsley, grated onion, and a tablespoonful of vinegar.
Butter a baking dish, put in a layer of the fish, cover with sauce, and repeat until the dish is full.
Cover with crumbs, dot with butter, and brown in the oven.
WHITEFISH A l a MAITRE D'HOTEL
WHITEFISH A l a POINT SHIRLEY
Clean, split, and bone the fish, and put into a buttered baking pan, skin side down.
Season with salt, red pepper, and lemon juice, add enough boiling water to keep from burning, and bake.
Serve with Maitre d'Hotel Sauce.
Butter a fish plank and tack a large cleaned and split whitefish on it, skin side down.
Rub with butter, season with salt and pepper, and cook in the oven or under a gas flame.
Put a border of mashed potato mixed with the beaten white of egg around the fish, using a pastry tube and forcing bag.
BROTHER SQUARE TOES
Philadelphia
If you're off to Philadelphia in the morning, You mustn't take my stories for a guide. There's little left indeed of the city you will read of, And all the folk I write about have died. Now few will understand if you mention Talleyrand, Or remember what his cunning and his skill did. And the cabmen at the wharf do not know Count Zinnendorf, Nor the Church in Philadelphia he builded.
It is gone, gone, gone with lost Atlantis (Never say I didn't give you warning). In Seventeen Ninety three 'twas there for all to see, But it's not in Philadelphia this morning.
It is gone, gone, gone with Thebes the Golden (Never say I didn't give you warning). In Seventeen Ninety four 'twas a famous dancing floor- But it's not in Philadelphia this morning.
Brother Square Toes
It was almost the end of their visit to the seaside.
They had turned themselves out of doors while their trunks were being packed, and strolled over the Downs towards the dull evening sea.
The tide was dead low under the chalk cliffs, and the little wrinkled waves grieved along the sands up the coast to Newhaven and down the coast to long, grey Brighton, whose smoke trailed out across the Channel.
They walked to The Gap, where the cliff is only a few feet high.
The Coastguard cottages are a little farther on, and an old ship's figurehead of a Turk in a turban stared at them over the wall.
'This time tomorrow we shall be at home, thank goodness,' said Una.
'I hate the sea!'
'The edges are the sorrowful parts.'
Cordery, the coastguard, came out of the cottage, levelled his telescope at some fishing boats, shut it with a click and walked away.
'half-way to Newhaven,'said Dan.
'Then he'll meet the Newhaven coastguard and turn back.
He says if coastguards were done away with, smuggling would start up at once.'
A voice on the beach under the cliff began to sing:
Feet scrabbled on the flinty path.
A dark, thin faced man in very neat brown clothes and broad toed shoes came up, followed by Puck.
But his dark beady brown eyes still twinkled merrily in his lean face, and the children felt that they did not suit the straight, plain, snuffy brown coat, brown knee breeches, and broad brimmed hat.
'Oh, but it is, though,' said Una quickly.
'Aren't you English?' said Dan.
She was an Aurette, of course.
We Lees mostly marry Aurettes.
'Then where did you live?' said Una.
'Ah!' said Puck, squatted by the windlass.
'I remember a piece about the Lees at Warminghurst, I do:
'There was never a Lee to Warminghurst That wasn't a gipsy last and first.
'Admettin' that's true,' he said, 'my gipsy blood must be wore pretty thin, for I've made and kept a worldly fortune.'
'No, in the tobacco trade.'
'I'm sorry; but there's all sorts of tobacconists,' Pharaoh replied. 'How far out, now, would you call that smack with the patch on her foresail?' He pointed to the fishing boats.
'A scant mile,' said Puck after a quick look.
It's seven fathom under her-clean sand.
'"That means war again, when we was only just getting used to the peace," says Dad.
"Why can't King George's men and King Louis' men do on their uniforms and fight it out over our heads?"
'"Me too, I wish that," says Uncle Aurette.
You look out for yours."
"I'll be slipping off now before your Revenue cutter comes.
By the time we'd fished up the kegs the fog came down so thick Dad judged it risky for me to row 'em ashore, even though we could hear the ponies stamping on the beach.
'Presently I heard guns.
He didn't go naked about the seas after dark.
Then come more, which I reckoned was Captain Giddens in the Revenue cutter.
He was open handed with his compliments, but he would lay his guns himself.
I hadn't time to call or think.
I kicked back on our gunwale as it went under and slipped through that port into the French ship-me and my fiddle.'
'Didn't anybody see you come in?' said Dan.
The crew was standing by their guns up above.
I rolled on to a pile of dunnage in the dark and I went to sleep.
They had been up all night clearing for action on account of hearing guns in the fog.
'"What!
Bompard, he liked it.
I used to play the fiddle between 'em, sitting on the capstan.
I always helped drink any healths that was proposed-specially Citizen Danton's who'd cut off King Louis' head.
"You've missed it all.
We're sailing next week."
'"If that's your trouble," says old Pierre, "you go straight ashore. None'll hinder you.
They're all gone mad on these coasts-French and American together.
'My legs was pretty tottly, but I made shift to go on deck, which it was like a fair.
The frigate was crowded with fine gentlemen and ladies pouring in and out.
They shouted, "Down with England!"--"Down with Washington!"--"Hurrah for France and the Republic!" I couldn't make sense of it.
I wanted to get out from that crunch of swords and petticoats and sit in a field.
One of the gentlemen said to me, "Is that a genuine cap o' Liberty you're wearing?" 'twas Aunt Cecile's red one, and pretty near wore out.
"Oh yes!" I says, "straight from France." "I'll give you a shilling for it," he says, and with that money in my hand and my fiddle under my arm I squeezed past the entry port and went ashore.
It was like a dream-meadows, trees, flowers, birds, houses, and people all different!
They all was the fashion in the city.
He was a horseback behaving as if the place belonged to him-and commanding all and sundry to fight the British.
But I'd heard that before.
A man told me he was a real Red Indian called Red Jacket, and I followed him into an alley way off Race Street by Second Street, where there was a fiddle playing.
I'm fond o' fiddling.
Hearing what the price was I was going to have some too, but the Indian asked me in English if I was hungry.
I must have looked a sore scrattel.
We walked into a dirty little room full of flutes and fiddles and a fat man fiddling by the window, in a smell of cheese and medicines fit to knock you down.
The Indian never moved an eyelid.
'"Pick up the pills!
Pick up the pills!" the fat man screeches.
The fat man went back to his fiddling.
"I brought the boy to be fed, not hit."
"Himmel!" he says.
Why are you not Gert Schwankfelder?"
'"I don't know," I said.
'Says the Indian, "He is hungry, Toby.
Christians always feed the hungry.
So I bring him."
'"You should have said that first," said Toby.
'"You like pills-eh?" says Toby.
"No," I says.
"What's those?"
'"Calomel," I says.
'"Right," he says.
You like to fiddle?" he says.
"What note is this?" drawing his bow across.
'"My brother," he says to the Indian.
"I think this is the hand of Providence!
Now look at this boy and say what you think."
'The Indian looked me over whole minutes-there was a musical clock on the wall and dolls came out and hopped while the hour struck.
He looked me over all the while they did it.
'"Good," he says at last.
"This boy is good."
'"Good, then," says Toby.
"Now I shall play my fiddle and you shall sing your hymn, brother.
Boy, go down to the bakery and tell them you are young Gert Schwankfelder that was.
If you ask any questions you shall hear from me."
He wasn't at all surprised when I told him I was young Gert Schwankfelder that was.
He knew Toby.
His wife she walked me into the back yard without a word, and she washed me and she cut my hair to the edge of a basin, and she put me to bed, and oh! how I slept-how I slept in that little room behind the oven looking on the flower garden!
'I like Toby,' said Una.
'Who was he?' said Puck.
'Apothecary Tobias Hirte,' Pharaoh replied.
'One Hundred and Eighteen, Second Street-the famous Seneca Oil man, that lived half of every year among the Indians.
'Then why did he keep her in Davy Jones's locker?' Dan asked.
'That was his joke.
He kept her under David Jones's hat shop in the "Buck" tavern yard, and his Indian friends kept their ponies there when they visited him.
I looked after the horses when I wasn't rolling pills on top of the old spinet, while he played his fiddle and Red Jacket sang hymns. I liked it.
The women wore long eared caps and handkerchiefs.
I carried Toby's fiddle, and he played pretty much as he chose all against the organ and the singing.
'How very queer!' said Una.
Pharaoh's eyes twinkled.
Being a boy, it seemed to me it had lasted for ever, and was going on for ever.
As soon as the dancing clock struck midnight that Sunday-I was lying under the spinet-I heard Toby's fiddle.
Liberty and Independence for Ever!
'I rubbed my eyes, and fetched 'em out of the "Buck" stables.
Red Jacket was there saddling his, and when I'd packed the saddle bags we three rode up Race Street to the Ferry by starlight.
So we went travelling. It's a kindly, softly country there, back of Philadelphia among the German towns, Lancaster way.
Little houses and bursting big barns, fat cattle, fat women, and all as peaceful as Heaven might be if they farmed there.
Him and his long hilted umberell was as well known as the stage coaches.
He took orders for that famous Seneca Oil which he had the secret of from Red Jacket's Indians, and he slept in friends' farmhouses, but he would shut all the windows; so Red Jacket and me slept outside.
There's nothing to hurt except snakes-and they slip away quick enough if you thrash in the bushes.'
'I'd have liked that!' said Dan.
'I'd no fault to find with those days.
He's something to listen to.
And there's a smell of wild grape vine growing in damp hollows which you drop into, after long rides in the heat, which is beyond compare for sweetness.
And so we jogged 'into dozy little Lebanon by the Blue Mountains, where Toby had a cottage and a garden of all fruits.
The Senecas are a seemly, quiet people, and they'd had trouble enough from white men-American and English-during the wars, to keep 'em in that walk.
They lived on a Reservation by themselves away off by their lake.
Toby took me up there, and they treated me as if I was their own blood brother.
Red Jacket said the mark of my bare feet in the dust was just like an Indian's and my style of walking was similar.
I know I took to their ways all over.'
'Sometimes I think it did,' Pharaoh went on.
They gave me a side name which means "Two Tongues," because, d'ye see, I talked French and English.
They always called him Big Hand, for he was a large fisted man, and he was all of their notion of a white chief.
Cornplanter used to meet him at Epply's-the great dancing place in the city before District Marshal William Nichols bought it.
I came at it by degrees, after I was adopted into the tribe.
Toby wanted peace so as he could go about the Reservation buying his oils. But most of the white men wished for war, and they was angry because the President wouldn't give the sign for it.
The newspaper said men was burning Guy Fawkes images of General Washington and yelling after him in the streets of Philadelphia.
You'd have been astonished what those two fine old chiefs knew of the ins and outs of such matters.
Toby used to read the Aurora newspaper.
'I hate politics, too,' said Una, and Pharaoh laughed.
One hot evening late in August, Toby was reading the newspaper on the stoop and Red Jacket was smoking under a peach tree and I was fiddling.
Of a sudden Toby drops his Aurora.
'"I am an oldish man, too fond of my own comforts," he says.
"I will go to the Church which is in Philadelphia.
My brother, lend me a spare pony.
'"Good!" says Red Jacket, looking at the sun
"My brother shall be there.
'I went to pack the saddle bags.
Toby had cured me of asking questions. He stopped my fiddling if I did.
'"Get off," says Toby.
I wish He hadn't."
When I picked up the paper to wrap his fiddle strings in, I spelled out a piece about the yellow fever being in Philadelphia so dreadful every one was running away.
I was scared, for I was fond of Toby.
We never said much to each other, but we fiddled together, and music's as good as talking to them that understand.'
'Did Toby die of yellow fever?'Una asked.
'Not him!
There's justice left in the world still.
Down at heart all Indians reckon digging a squaw's business, and neither him nor Cornplanter, when he relieved watch, was a hard task Master.
When I found Toby didn't die the minute he reached town, why, boylike, I took him off my mind and went with my Indians again.
'But it's best,' he went on suddenly, 'after the first frosts.
Besides, I wasn't exactly dressed for it.'
'D'you mean you were dressed like an Indian?'Dan demanded.
Pharaoh looked a little abashed.
'Go on, Brother Square toes.'
My silly head was banged often enough by low branches, but they slipped through like running elk.
We had evening hymn singing every night after they'd blown their pipe smoke to the quarters of heaven.
Where did we go?
I'll tell you, but don't blame me if you're no wiser.
From Williams Ferry, across the Shanedore, over the Blue Mountains, through Ashby's Gap, and so south-east by south from there, till we found the President at the back of his own plantations.
I'd hate to be trailed by Indians in earnest.
'"Citizen-citizen!" the fellow spits in.
"I, at least, am a Republican!"
No gentleman!
'The others all assembled round Big Hand then, and, in their way, they said pretty much what Genet had said.
The French was searching American ships on pretence they was helping England, but really for to steal the goods.
His gentlemen put this very clear to Big Hand.
They wouldn't say whether that was right or wrong; they only wanted Big Hand to turn it over in his mind.
He did-for a while.
'No, nor yet was it what you might call swearing.
He asked them half a dozen times over whether the United States had enough armed ships for any shape or sort of war with any one.
'Everybody laughed except him.
"Oh, General, you mistake us entirely!" they says.
"But I know my duty.
We must have peace with England."
'"At any price?" says the man with the rook's voice.
'"At any price," says he, word by word.
"Our ships will be searched-our citizens will be pressed, but-"
'"Then what about the Declaration of Independence?" says one.
'"Deal with facts, not fancies," says Big Hand.
'"But think of public opinion," another one starts up.
"The feeling in Philadelphia alone is at fever heat."
'He held up one of his big hands.
"Gentlemen," he says-slow he spoke, but his voice carried far-"I have to think of our country.
Let me assure you that the treaty with Great Britain will be made though every city in the Union burn me in effigy."
'"At any price?" the actor like chap keeps on croaking.
'"The treaty must be made on Great Britain's own terms.
'Why it's what you-what we-it's the Sachems' way of sprinkling the sacred corn meal in front of-oh! it's a piece of Indian compliment really, and it signifies that you are a very big chief.
First he says quite softly, "My brothers know it is not easy to be a chief." Then his voice grew.
'His gentlemen were waiting, so they didn't delay him, only Cornplanter says, using his old side name, "Big Hand, did you see us among the timber just now?"
'"Surely," says he.
"You taught me to look behind trees when we were both young." And with that he cantered off.
Pharaoh stood up as though he had finished.
'Yes,' said Puck, rising too.
'And what came out of it in the long run?'
'Let me get at my story my own way,'was the answer.
'Look! it's later than I thought.
That Shoreham smack's thinking of her supper.' The children looked across the darkening Channel.
When they turned round The Gap was empty behind them.
'I expect they've packed our trunks by now,' said Dan. 'This time tomorrow we'll be home.'
IF-
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
THEY journeyed for three and a half months.
She felt strong.
The nobility of good sense.
It's a new start.
The wet snow drenched their gloves; the water underfoot splashed their itching ankles.
They scuffled inch by inch for three blocks.
"No, but----"
The driver stopped at a corner.
Their coats were soaked through.
Carol had forgotten her facile hopes.
Stripped of summer leaves the houses were hopeless-temporary shelters.
Kennicott chuckled, "By golly, look down there!
And look!
Chicken tight and dog tight.
They got the feed store all fixed up, and a new sign on it, black and gold.
Kennicott chuckled, "Look who's coming!
"Perhaps I should never have gone away.
I wish they would get it over!
"Does he like carrots yet?" replied Carol.
Nothing had changed.
He was standing before the furnace.
She smiled at him.
She saw a pencil mark on a window sill.
The Sam Clarks called that evening and encouraged her to describe the missions.
CHAPTER seventeen
The safe ways were "bushed" by a benevolent Government, and night and day the gay tinkle of the sleigh bells sounded on it.
But it's not in the power of my gift.
"Where's the laundry key kept?"
"It's kept in the door," Liddy snapped.
"That whole end of the cellar is kept locked, so nobody can get at the clothes, and then the key's left in the door?
so that unless a thief was as blind as-as some detectives, he could walk right in."
"That's the door," she said sulkily.
"The key's in it."
But the key was not in it.
mr Jamieson shook it, but it was a heavy door, well locked.
When he stood up his face was exultant.
"It's locked on the inside," he said in a low tone.
"Lord have mercy!" gasped Liddy, and turned to run.
"Liddy," I called, "go through the house at once and see who is missing, or if any one is.
"There's somebody locked in the laundry," I panted.
What have you locked in the laundry?"
If you came out for air, you'd better put on your overshoes." And then I noticed that Gertrude was limping-not much, but sufficiently to make her progress very slow, and seemingly painful.
"I fell over the carriage block," she explained.
He-he ought to be here."
As I went down the drive, my thoughts were busy.
If the fugitive had come from outside the house, how did he get in?
If it was some member of the household, who could it have been?
Gertrude and her injured ankle!
I tried to put the thought away, but it would not go.
If Gertrude had been on the circular staircase that night, why had she fled from mr Jamieson?
The mystery seemed to deepen constantly.
And yet, every way I turned I seemed to find something that pointed to such a connection.
"I-I think he's in bed, ma'm."
"Get him up," I said, "and for goodness' sake open the door, Thomas. I'll wait for Warner."
But my attention was busy with the room below.
It was filled with gold topped bottles and brushes, and it breathed opulence, luxury, femininity from every inch of surface.
How did it get there?
He was completely but somewhat incongruously dressed, and his open, boyish face looked abashed.
Warner, whose bag is this?"
He was in the doorway by this time, and he pretended not to hear.
"Warner," I called, "come back here.
Whose bag is this?"
"It's-it belongs to Thomas," he said, and fled up the drive.
To Thomas!
However, I put the bag in the back of my mind, which was fast becoming stored with anomalous and apparently irreconcilable facts, and followed Warner to the house.
At the door he was to force, Warner put down his tools and looked at it.
Then he turned the handle.
Without the slightest difficulty the door opened, revealing the blackness of the drying room beyond!
"Gone!" he said.
"Confound such careless work!
I might have known."
It was true enough.
We got the lights on finally and looked all through the three rooms that constituted this wing of the basement. Everything was quiet and empty.
The basket had been overturned, but that was all.
mr Jamieson examined the windows: one was unlocked, and offered an easy escape. The window or the door?
Which way had the fugitive escaped?
It is somewhat lacking in actuality, and the picturesque style in which it is written rather contributes to this effect, lending the story beauty but robbing it of truth.
The hero of the poem is a young clergyman of the muscular Christian school:
A gallant fish, all flashing in the sun In silver mail inlaid with scarlet gems, His back thick sprinkled as a leopard's hide With rich brown spots, and belly of bright gold.
They naturally fall in love with each other and marry, and for many years David Westren leads a perfectly happy life.
Suddenly calamity comes upon him, his wife and children die and he finds himself alone and desolate. Then begins his struggle.
He finds no comfort in contemplating Leviathan:
As if we lacked reminding of brute force, As if we never felt the clumsy hoof, As if the bulk of twenty million whales Were worth one pleading soul, or all the laws That rule the lifeless suns could soothe the sense Of outrage in a loving human heart! Sublime? majestic?
mr Hayes states the problem of life extremely well, but his solution is sadly inadequate both from a psychological and from a dramatic point of view.
David Westren ultimately becomes a mild Unitarian, a sort of pastoral Stopford Brooke with leanings towards Positivism, and we leave him preaching platitudes to a village congregation.
However, in spite of this commonplace conclusion there is a great deal in mr Hayes's poem that is strong and fine, and he undoubtedly possesses a fair ear for music and a remarkable faculty of poetical expression.
Some of his descriptive touches of nature, such as
In meeting woods, whereon a film of mist Slept like the bloom upon the purple grape,
are very graceful and suggestive, and he will probably make his mark in literature.
Lift thee o'er thy 'here' and 'now,' Look beyond thine 'I' and 'thou,'
are excessively tedious.
But when mr Rodd leaves the problem of the Unconditioned to take care of itself, and makes no attempt to solve the mysteries of the Ego and the non Ego, he is very pleasant reading indeed. A Mazurka of Chopin is charming, in spite of the awkwardness of the fifth line, and so are the verses on Assisi, and those on San Servolo at Venice.
These last have all the brilliancy of a clever pastel.
The prettiest thing in the whole volume is this little lyric on Spring:
We do not care for 'palely fair' in the first line, and the repetition of the word 'strikes' is not very felicitous, but the grace of movement and delicacy of touch are pleasing.
The Wind, by mr james Ross, is a rather gusty ode, written apparently without any definite scheme of metre, and not very impressive as it lacks both the strength of the blizzard and the sweetness of Zephyr.
Here is the opening:
Nothing could be much worse than this, and if the line 'Where fierce hyaenas seek their awful feast' is intended to frighten us, it entirely misses its effect.
The ode is followed by some sonnets which are destined, we fear, to be ludibria ventis.
Immortality, even in the nineteenth century, is not granted to those who rhyme 'awe' and 'war' together.
mr Isaac Sharp's Saul of Tarsus is an interesting, and, in some respects, a fine poem.
Saul of Tarsus, silently, With a silent company, To Damascus' gates drew nigh.
And his eyes, too, and his mien Were, as are the eagles, keen; All the man was aquiline-
are two strong, simple verses, and indeed the spirit of the whole poem is dignified and stately.
The rest of the volume, however, is disappointing.
Ordinary theology has long since converted its gold into lead, and words and phrases that once touched the heart of the world have become wearisome and meaningless through repetition.
If Theology desires to move us, she must re write her formulas.
There is something very pleasant in coming across a poet who can apostrophise Byron as
and can speak of Longfellow as a 'mighty Titan.' Reckless panegyrics of this kind show a kindly nature and a good heart, and mr Mackenzie's Highland Daydreams could not possibly offend any one.
It must be admitted that they are rather old-fashioned, but this is usually the case with natural spontaneous verse.
The Story of the Cross, an attempt to versify the Gospel narratives, is a strange survival of the Tate and Brady school of poetry.
mr Nash, who styles himself 'a humble soldier in the army of Faith,' expresses a hope that his book may 'invigorate devotional feeling, especially among the young, to whom verse is perhaps more attractive than to their elders,' but we should be sorry to think that people of any age could admire such a paraphrase as the following:
Foxes have holes, in which to slink for rest, The birds of air find shelter in the nest; But He, the Son of Man and Lord of all, Has no abiding place His own to call.
By Alfred Hayes, m a
(five) Highland Daydreams.
(six) The Story of the Cross.
mr Ian Hamilton's Ballad of Hadji is undeniably clever.
Hadji is a wonderful Arab horse that a reckless hunter rides to death in the pursuit of a wild boar, and the moral of the poem-for there is a moral-seems to be that an absorbing passion is a very dangerous thing and blunts the human sympathies.
In the course of the chase a little child is drowned, a Brahmin maiden murdered, and an aged peasant severely wounded, but the hunter cares for none of these things and will not hear of stopping to render any assistance.
Some of the stanzas are very graceful, notably one beginning
Yes-like a bubble filled with smoke- The curd white moon upswimming broke The vacancy of space;
but such lines as the following, which occur in the description of the fight with the boar-
I hung as close as keepsake locket On maiden breast-but from its socket He wrenched my bridle arm,
are dreadful, and 'his brains festooned the thorn' is not a very happy way of telling the reader how the boar died.
All through the volume we find the same curious mixture of good and bad.
To say that the sun kisses the earth 'with flame moustachoed lip' is awkward and uncouth, and yet the poem in which the expression occurs has some pretty lines.
mr Ian Hamilton should prune.
The volume is nicely printed, but mr Strang's frontispiece is not a great success, and most of the tail pieces seem to have been designed without any reference to the size of the page.
It is heavy, abstract and prosaic, and shows how intolerably dull a man can be who has the best intentions and the most earnest beliefs.
In the rest of the volume, where mr Catty does not take himself quite so seriously, there are some rather pleasing things.
The sonnet on Shelley's room at University College would be admirable but for the unmusical character of the last line.
Green in the wizard arms Of the foam bearded Atlantic, An isle of old enchantment, A melancholy isle, Enchanted and dreaming lies; And there, by Shannon's flowing In the moonlight, spectre thin, The spectre Erin sits.
are the first and last stanzas of mr Todhunter's poem The Banshee.
To throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is, as mr Swinburne once remarked, a wilful abdication of half the power and half the charm of verse, and we cannot say that mr Todhunter has given us much that consoles us for its loss.
It is an interesting specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art.
has, of course, an archaeological interest, but has no artistic value at all.
Indeed, from the point of view of art, the few little poems at the end of the volume are worth all the ambitious pseudo epics that mr Todhunter has tried to construct out of Celtic lore.
A Bacchic Day is charming, and the sonnet on the open air performance of The Faithfull Shepherdesse is most gracefully phrased and most happy in conception.
mr Peacock is an American poet, and Professor Thomas Danleigh Supplee, a m, p h d, f r s, who has written a preface to his Poems of the Plains and Songs of the Solitudes, tells us that he is entitled to be called the Laureate of the West.
Though a staunch Republican, mr Peacock, according to the enthusiastic Professor, is not ashamed of his ancestor King William of Holland, nor of his relatives Lord and Lady Peacock who, it seems, are natives of Scotland.
His poems seem to be extremely popular, and have been highly praised, the Professor informs us, by Victor Hugo, the Saturday Review and the Commercial Advertiser.
The preface is the most amusing part of the book, but the poems also are worth studying.
The Maniac, The Bandit Chief, and The Outlaw can hardly be called light reading, but we strongly recommend the poem on Chicago:
Chicago! great city of the West! All that wealth, all that power invest; Thou sprang like magic from the sand, As touched by the magician's wand.
The opening lines of The Vendetta also deserve mention:
When stars are glowing through day's gloaming glow, Reflecting from ocean's deep, mighty flow, At twilight, when no grim shadows of night, Like ghouls, have stalked in wake of the light.
The first line is certainly a masterpiece, and, indeed, the whole volume is full of gems of this kind.
The Professor remarks in his elaborate preface that mr Peacock 'frequently rises to the sublime,' and the two passages quoted above show how keenly critical is his taste in these matters and how well the poet deserves his panegyric.
He has a placid, pleasant way of writing, and, indeed, his verses cannot do any harm, though he really should not publish such attempts at metrical versions of the Psalms as the following:
The 'literary culture' that produced these lines is, we fear, not of a very high order.
'I study Poetry simply as a fine art by which I may exercise my intellect and elevate my taste,' wrote the late mr George Morine many years ago to a friend, and the little posthumous volume that now lies before us contains the record of his quiet literary life.
They are often distinguished by a grave and chastened beauty of style, and their solemn cadences have something of the 'grand manner' about them.
(two) Poems in the Modern Spirit, with The Secret of Content.
(five) Holiday Recreations and Other Poems.
(six) Poems.
During June the meetings of those who were in the secret were frequent. At length, on the last day of the month, the day on which the Bishops were pronounced not guilty, the decisive step was taken.
A formal invitation, transcribed by Sidney but drawn up by some person more skilled than Sidney, in the art of composition, was despatched to the Hague.
If his Highness would appear in the island at the head of some troops, tens of thousands would hasten to his standard.
The officers were discontented; and the common soldiers shared that aversion to Popery which was general in the class from which they were taken.
In the navy Protestant feeling was still stronger.
It was important to take some decisive step while things were in this state.
The enterprise would be far more arduous if it were deferred till the King, by remodelling boroughs and regiments, had procured a Parliament and an army on which he could rely.
The conspirators, therefore, implored the Prince to come among them with as little delay as possible.
On one point they thought it their duty to remonstrate with his Highness.
He had not taken advantage of the opinion which the great body of the English people had formed respecting the late birth.
He had, on the contrary, sent congratulations to Whitehall, and had thus seemed to acknowledge that the child who was called Prince of Wales was rightful heir of the throne.
This was a grave error, and had damped the zeal of many.
Not one person in a thousand doubted that the boy was supposititious; and the Prince would be wanting to his own interests if the suspicious circumstances which had attended the Queen's confinement were not put prominently forward among his reasons for taking arms.
This paper was signed in cipher by the seven chiefs of the conspiracy, Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Danby, Lumley, Compton, Russell and Sidney. Herbert undertook to be their messenger.
His errand was one of no ordinary peril.
He assumed the garb of a common sailor, and in this disguise reached the Dutch coast in safety, on the Friday after the trial of the Bishops.
He instantly hastened to the Prince.
Bentinck and Dykvelt were summoned, and several days were passed in deliberation.
The first result of this deliberation was that the prayer for the Prince of Wales ceased to be read in the Princess's chapel.
From his wife William had no opposition to apprehend.
Her understanding had been completely subjugated by his; and, what is more extraordinary, he had won her entire affection.
He had done all in his power to disturb her domestic happiness, and had established a system of spying, eavesdropping, and talebearing under her roof.
She had ventured to intercede with him on behalf of her old friend and preceptor Compton, who, for refusing to commit an act of flagitious injustice, had been suspended from his episcopal functions; but she had been ungraciously repulsed.
He had conspired with Tyrconnel and with France against Mary's rights, and had made arrangements for depriving her of one at least of the three crowns to which, at his death, she would have been entitled.
That she should love such a father was impossible. Her religious principles, indeed, were so strict that she would probably have tried to perform what she considered as her duty, even to a father whom she did not love.
On the present occasion, however, she judged that the claim of james to her obedience ought to yield to a claim more sacred.
This is the undoubted rule even when the husband is in the wrong; and to Mary the enterprise which William meditated appeared not only just, but holy.
But, though she carefully abstained from doing or saying anything that could add to his difficulties, those difficulties were serious indeed. They were in truth but imperfectly understood even by some of those who invited him over, and have been but imperfectly described by some of those who have written the history of his expedition.
The obstacles which he might expect to encounter on English ground, though the least formidable of the obstacles which stood in the way of his design, were yet serious.
He felt that it would be madness in him to imitate the example of Monmouth, to cross the sea with a few British adventurers, and to trust to a general rising of the population.
It was necessary, and it was pronounced necessary by all those who invited him over, that he should carry an army with him.
Yet who could answer for the effect which the appearance of such an army might produce?
The government was indeed justly odious.
But would the English people, altogether unaccustomed to the interference of continental powers in English disputes, be inclined to look with favour on a deliverer who was surrounded by foreign soldiers?
If any part of the royal forces resolutely withstood the invaders, would not that part soon have on its side the patriotic sympathy of millions?
A defeat would be fatal to the whole undertaking.
These considerations might well have made William uneasy; even if all the military means of the United Provinces had been at his absolute disposal.
The States General could not make war or peace, could not conclude any alliance or levy any tax, without the consent of the States of every province.
The States of a province could not give such consent without the consent of every municipality which had a share in the representation.
Every municipality was, in some sense, a sovereign state, and, as such, claimed the right of communicating directly with foreign ambassadors, and of concerting with them the means of defeating schemes on which other municipalities were intent.
In some town councils the party which had, during several generations, regarded the influence of the Stadtholders with jealousy had great power.
Propositions brought forward by the Stadtholder as indispensable to the security of the commonwealth, sanctioned by all the provinces except Holland, and sanctioned by seventeen of the eighteen town councils of Holland, had repeatedly been negatived by the single voice of Amsterdam.
The only constitutional remedy in such cases was that deputies from the cities which were agreed should pay a visit to the city which dissented, for the purpose of expostulation.
The number of deputies was unlimited: they might continue to expostulate as long as they thought fit; and meanwhile all their expenses were defrayed by the obstinate community which refused to yield to their arguments.
So Whitefoot found a hole in a stump near by and decided to camp out there for a few days.
So the next morning both were on hand when school opened.
"I told you yesterday that I would tell you about some of Danny's cousins," began Old Mother Nature just as Chatterer the Red Squirrel, who was late, came hurrying up quite out of breath.
Yet, strange to say, they are not called Mice at all, but Lemmings.
However, they belong to the Mouse family.
It covers the ground just as grass does here.
To migrate is to move from one part of the country to another.
They form a great army and push ahead, regardless of everything.
Of course, they eat everything eatable in their path."
I don't envy those cousins up there in the Far North a bit.
I ought to have sent word to him to be here this morning."
Hardly were the words out of Old Mother Nature's mouth when something landed in the leaves almost at her feet and right in the middle of school.
peter Rabbit bolted for a hollow log.
Striped Chipmunk vanished in a hole under an old stump.
Johnny Chuck backed up against the trunk of a tree and made ready to fight.
Only Happy Jack the Gray Squirrel and Chatterer the Red Squirrel and Prickly Porky the Porcupine, who were sitting in trees, kept their places. You see they felt quite safe.
Her eyes twinkled.
Before he could reply Johnny Chuck began to chuckle.
Now, as you know, laughter is catching.
In a minute or so everybody was laughing, and no one but Johnny Chuck knew what the joke was.
At last peter Rabbit stopped laughing long enough to ask Johnny what he was laughing at.
When they were through laughing Nimbleheels answered Old Mother Nature's questions.
He thought that if it was a good thing for Danny it would be a good thing for him, so he had come.
"He went right over my head, and I was sitting up at that!"
"Hop up on that log side of your Cousin Whitefoot, where all can see you."
Nimbleheels hopped up beside Whitefoot the Wood Mouse, and as the two little cousins sat side by side they were not unlike in general appearance, though of the two Whitefoot was the prettier.
Like Whitefoot he was white underneath.
His ears were much smaller than those of Whitefoot.
But the greatest differences between the two were in their hind legs and tails.
Whitefoot possessed a long tail, but the tail of Nimbleheels was much longer, slim and tapering.
When I say this, I mean the greatest ground jumper.
By the way, both Nimbleheels and Whitefoot have small pockets in their cheeks. Tell us where you live, Nimbleheels."
But I like best to be among the weeds because they are tall and keep me well hidden, and also because they furnish me plenty to eat.
"Do you make your home under the ground?" asked Striped Chipmunk.
I have little storerooms down there too, in which I put seeds, berries and nuts. Then when I do wake up I have plenty to eat."
Like Johnny Chuck he gets very fat before going to sleep.
This way and that way he went in great leaps.
His jumping is done only in times of danger.
"Lord!" said Adam, pausing with a chair under either arm, "Lord, mr Belloo sir,--I wonder what Miss Anthea will say?" with which remark he strode off with the two chairs to set them in their accustomed places.
Seldom indeed had the old hall despite its many years, seen such a running to and fro, heard such a patter of flying feet, such merry voices, such gay, and heart felt laughter.
For here was Miss Priscilla, looking smaller than ever, in a great arm chair whence she directed the disposal and arrangement of all things, with quick little motions of her crutch stick.
"Lord!" exclaimed Adam again, balanced now upon a ladder, and pausing to wipe his brow with one hand and with a picture swinging in the other, "Lord! what ever will Miss Anthea say, mr Belloo sir!"
"Ah!" nodded Bellew thoughtfully, "I wonder!"
"Which means," said Bellew, smiling down into Miss Priscilla's young, bright eyes, "that you don't know."
"But!" nodded Bellew, "yes, I understand."
Pride!--with a capital P!"
"Yes, she is very proud."
"I rose this morning-very early, mr Bellew,--Oh! very early!" said Miss Priscilla, following Adam's laden figure with watchful eyes, "couldn't possibly sleep, you see.
So I got up,--ridiculously early,--but, bless you, she was before me!"
"Ah!"
"Oh dear yes!--had been up-hours!
such great, big tears,--and so very quiet!
When she heard my little stick come tapping along she tried to hide them,--I mean her tears, of course, mr Bellew, and when I drew her dear, beautiful head down into my arms, she-tried to smile.
"Threw a kiss-from a minstrel's gallery, to a most unworthy individual, Aunt Priscilla?"
"Threw you a kiss, mr Bellew,--I had to,--the side board you know,--on her knees-you understand?"
"I understand!"
And when the hall was, once more, its old, familiar, comfortable self, when the floor had been swept of its litter, and every trace of the sale removed,--then Miss Priscilla sighed, and Bellew put on his coat.
"When do you expect-she will come home?" he enquired, glancing at the grandfather clock in the corner.
"Well, if she drove straight back from Cranbrook she would be here now,--but I fancy she won't be so very anxious to get home to day,--and may come the longest way round; yes, it's in my mind she will keep away from Dapplemere as long as ever she can."
"And I think," said Bellew, "Yes, I think I'll take a walk.
"The Sergeant!" said Miss Priscilla, "let me see,--it is now a quarter to six, it should take you about fifteen minutes to the village, that will make it exactly six o'clock.
You will find the Sergeant just sitting down in the chair on the left hand side of the fire place,--in the corner,--at the 'King's Head,' you know.
I am glad you are going," she went on, "because to day is-well, a day apart, mr Bellew.
You will find the Sergeant at the 'King's Head,'--until half past seven."
"Then I will go to the 'King's Head,'" said Bellew.
"And what message do you send him?"
For the most part, too, she drove in silence seemingly deaf to Small Porges' flow of talk, which was also very unlike in her.
But before her eyes were visions of her dismantled home, in her ears was the roar of voices clamouring for her cherished possessions,--a sickening roar, broken, now and then, by the hollow tap of the auctioneer's cruel hammer.
And, each time the clamouring voices rose, she shivered, and every blow of the cruel hammer seemed to fall upon her quivering heart.
Thus, she was unwontedly deaf and unresponsive to Small Porges, who presently fell into a profound gloom, in consequence; and thus, she held in the eager mare who therefore, shied, and fidgeted, and tossed her head indignantly.
But, slowly as they went, they came within sight of the house, at last, with its quaint gables, and many latticed windows, and the blue smoke curling up from its twisted chimneys,--smiling and placid as though, in all this great world, there were no such thing to be found as-an auctioneer's hammer.
Very slowly, for her, Anthea climbed down from the high dog cart, aiding Small Porges to earth, and with his hand clasped tight in hers, and with lips set firm, she turned and entered the hall.
But, upon the threshold, she stopped, and stood there utterly still, gazing, and gazing upon the trim orderliness of everything.
But Small Porges had seen, and stood aghast, and Miss Priscilla had seen, and now hurried forward with a quick tap, tap of her stick.
As she came, Anthea raised her head, and looked for one who should have been there, but was not.
And, in that moment, instinctively she knew how things came to be as they were,--and, because of this knowledge, her cheeks flamed with a swift, burning colour, and with a soft cry, she hid her face in Miss Priscilla's gentle bosom.
Then, while her face was yet hidden there, she whispered:
"Tell me-tell me-all about it."
And the woman, after that, lived all alone, and said to herself, "I have done my duty to the world, and now shall rest quietly for the balance of my life.
She lived in a peculiar little house, that looked something like this picture.
It was not like most of the houses you see, but the old woman had it built herself, and liked it, and so it did not matter to her how odd it was.
This misfortune ruined all the old woman's dreams of quiet; but the next day the children arrived-three boys and two girls-and she made the best of it and gave them the beds her own daughters had once occupied, and her own cot as well; and she made a bed for herself on the parlor sofa.
The youngsters were like all other children, and got into mischief once in awhile; but the old woman had much experience with children and managed to keep them in order very well, while they quickly learned to obey her, and generally did as they were bid.
But scarcely had she succeeded in getting them settled in their new home when Margaret, another of her daughters, died, and sent four more children to her mother to be taken care of.
The old woman scarcely knew where to keep this new flock that had come to her fold, for the house was already full; but she thought the matter over and finally decided she must build an addition to her house.
So she hired a carpenter and built what is called a "lean to" at the right of her cottage, making it just big enough to accommodate the four new members of her family.
But the old woman continued to look after them, as well as she was able, until Sarah, her third daughter, also died, and three more children were sent to their grandmother to be brought up.
She sent for the carpenter again, and had him build another addition to her house, as the picture shows.
Then she put three new cots in the new part for the babies to sleep in, and when they arrived they were just as cozy and comfortable as peas in a pod.
And now, to make the matter worse, her fourth daughter, who had been named Abigail, suddenly took sick and died, and she also had four small children that must be cared for in some way.
The old woman, having taken the other twelve, could not well refuse to adopt these little orphans also.
Once more she sent for the carpenter, and bade him build a third addition to the house; and when it was completed she added four more cots to the dozen that were already in use.
The house presented a very queer appearance now, but she did not mind that so long as the babies were comfortable.
"I shall not have to build again," she said; "and that is one satisfaction.
But the old woman did not complain at this; her time was too much taken up with the babies for her to miss the grass and the flowers.
It cost so much money to clothe them that she decided to dress them all alike, so that they looked like the children of a regular orphan asylum.
But it was a good and wholesome diet, and the children thrived and grew fat upon it.
"At your house," the stranger replied; "it looks for all the world like a big shoe!"
"Why, yes.
"Never mind," said the woman; "it may be a shoe, but it is full of babies, and that makes it differ from most other shoes."
And some were naughty and had to be whipped; and some were dirty and had to be washed; and some were good and had to be kissed. It was "Gran'ma, do this!" and "Gran'ma, do that!" from morning to night, so that the poor grandmother was nearly distracted.
The only peace she ever got was when they were all safely tucked in their little cots and were sound asleep; for then, at least, she was free from worry and had a chance to gather her scattered wits.
"There are so many children," she said one day to the baker man, "that I often really do n't know what to do!"
The baker man came every day to the shoe house, and brought two great baskets of bread in his arms for the children to eat with their milk and their broth.
Then a flight of arrows came from the bushes, and although they were blunt and could do him no harm they rattled all over his body; and one hit his nose, and another his chin, while several stuck fast in the loaves of bread.
Altogether, the baker man was terribly frightened; and when all the sixteen small Indians rushed from the bushes and flourished their tomahawks, he took to his heels and ran down the hill as fast as he could go!
When the grandmother returned she asked,
"Where is the bread for your supper?"
The children looked at one another in surprise, for they had forgotten all about the bread.
And then one of them confessed, and told her the whole story of how they had frightened the baker man for saying he would send them to the poor house.
"You are sixteen very naughty children!" exclaimed the old woman; "and for punishment you must eat your broth without any bread, and afterwards each one shall have a sound whipping and be sent to bed."
But she kept her promise, and made them eat their broth without any bread; for, indeed, there was no bread to give them.
They cried some, of course, but they knew very well they deserved the punishment, and it was not long before all of them were sound asleep.
They took care not to play any more tricks on the baker man, and as they grew older they were naturally much better behaved.
Before many years the boys were old enough to work for the neighboring farmers, and that made the woman's family a good deal smaller.
And then the girls grew up and married, and found homes of their own, so that all the children were in time well provided for.
How glorious!
What was it?
"I love them," said Dorothy.
Never tell me that Friday isn't unlucky."
She felt oddly like crying.
Chapter thirty seven
"I wish I were dead, or that it were tomorrow night," groaned Phil.
"If you live long enough both wishes will come true," said Anne calmly.
"It's easy for you to be serene.
I'm not-and when I think of that horrible paper tomorrow I quail.
If I should fail in it what would Jo say?"
How did you get on in Greek today?"
"I don't know.
Perhaps it was a good paper and perhaps it was bad enough to make Homer turn over in his grave.
I've studied and mulled over notebooks until I'm incapable of forming an opinion of anything.
How thankful little Phil will be when all this examinating is over."
"Words aren't made-they grow," said Anne.
"You don't act as if you were by times," said Aunt Jamesina severely.
"Oh, Aunt Jimsie, haven't we been pretty good girls, take us by and large, these three winters you've mothered us?" pleaded Phil.
"But I mistrust you haven't any too much sense yet.
It's not to be expected, of course.
"Have you learned anything at Redmond except dead languages and geometry and such trash?" queried Aunt Jamesina.
"Oh, yes.
"We've learned the truth of what Professor Woodleigh told us last Philomathic," said Phil.
When you've learned to laugh at the things that should be laughed at, and not to laugh at those that shouldn't, you've got wisdom and understanding."
"I think," said Anne slowly, "that I really have learned to look upon each little hindrance as a jest and each great one as the foreshadowing of victory.
Summing up, I think that is what Redmond has given me."
"Judging from what you all, say" remarked Aunt Jamesina, "the sum and substance is that you can learn-if you've got natural gumption enough-in four years at college what it would take about twenty years of living to teach you.
Well, that justifies higher education in my opinion.
It's a matter I was always dubious about before."
"But what about people who haven't natural gumption, Aunt Jimsie?"
If they live to be a hundred they really don't know anything more than when they were born.
It's their misfortune not their fault, poor souls.
But those of us who have some gumption should duly thank the Lord for it."
"Will you please define what gumption is, Aunt Jimsie?" asked Phil.
"No, I won't, young woman.
So there is no need of defining it."
Priscilla took Honors in Classics, and Phil in Mathematics. Stella obtained a good all round showing.
Then came Convocation.
"This is what I would once have called an epoch in my life," said Anne, as she took Roy's violets out of their box and gazed at them thoughtfully.
She meant to carry them, of course, but her eyes wandered to another box on her table.
She knew he was studying very hard, aiming at High Honors and the Cooper Prize, and he took little part in the social doings of Redmond.
Anne's own winter had been quite gay socially. She had seen a good deal of the Gardners; she and Dorothy were very intimate; college circles expected the announcement of her engagement to Roy any day.
Yet just before she left Patty's Place for Convocation she flung Roy's violets aside and put Gilbert's lilies of the valley in their place.
She could not have told why she did it.
The wonderful day had come and Roy's violets had no place in it.
It was of one strange, unaccountable pang that spoiled this long expected day for her and left in it a certain faint but enduring flavor of bitterness.
The Arts graduates gave a graduation dance that night.
When Anne dressed for it she tossed aside the pearl beads she usually wore and took from her trunk the small box that had come to Green Gables on Christmas day. In it was a thread like gold chain with a tiny pink enamel heart as a pendant.
She and Phil walked to Redmond together.
Did you hear anything of it?"
"I think it's true," said Phil lightly.
In the darkness she felt her face burning.
She slipped her hand inside her collar and caught at the gold chain.
One energetic twist and it gave way.
Her hands were trembling and her eyes were smarting.
"Moody Spurgeon MacPherson called here tonight after you left," said Aunt Jamesina, who had sat up to keep the fire on.
"He didn't know about the graduation dance.
That boy ought to sleep with a rubber band around his head to train his ears not to stick out.
It was I who suggested it to him and he took my advice, but he never forgave me for it."
CHAPTER thirty four
It was almost too much happiness to bear.
Oliver felt stunned and stupefied by the unexpected intelligence; he could not weep, or speak, or rest.
Looking round, he saw that it was a post chaise, driven at great speed; and as the horses were galloping, and the road was narrow, he stood leaning against a gate until it should have passed him.
As it dashed on, Oliver caught a glimpse of a man in a white nightcap, whose face seemed familiar to him, although his view was so brief that he could not identify the person.
In another second or two, the nightcap was thrust out of the chaise window, and a stentorian voice bellowed to the driver to stop: which he did, as soon as he could pull up his horses.
Then, the nightcap once again appeared: and the same voice called Oliver by his name.
'Here!' cried the voice.
Miss Rose!
Giles popped out his nightcap again, preparatory to making some reply, when he was suddenly pulled back by a young gentleman who occupied the other corner of the chaise, and who eagerly demanded what was the news.
'In a word!' cried the gentleman, 'Better or worse?'
'Better-much better!' replied Oliver, hastily.
'Thank Heaven!' exclaimed the gentleman.
'You are sure?'
'Quite, sir,' replied Oliver.
'The change took place only a few hours ago; and mr Losberne says, that all danger is at an end.'
The gentleman said not another word, but, opening the chaise door, leaped out, and taking Oliver hurriedly by the arm, led him aside.
'You are quite certain?
There is no possibility of any mistake on your part, my boy, is there?' demanded the gentleman in a tremulous voice. 'Do not deceive me, by awakening hopes that are not to be fulfilled.'
'I would not for the world, sir,' replied Oliver. 'Indeed you may believe me.
I heard him say so.'
The tears stood in Oliver's eyes as he recalled the scene which was the beginning of so much happiness; and the gentleman turned his face away, and remained silent, for some minutes.
All this time, mr Giles, with the white nightcap on, had been sitting on the steps of the chaise, supporting an elbow on each knee, and wiping his eyes with a blue cotton pocket handkerchief dotted with white spots.
That the honest fellow had not been feigning emotion, was abundantly demonstrated by the very red eyes with which he regarded the young gentleman, when he turned round and addressed him.
'I think you had better go on to my mother's in the chaise, Giles,' said he.
'I would rather walk slowly on, so as to gain a little time before I see her.
You can say I am coming.'
'I beg your pardon, mr Harry,' said Giles: giving a final polish to his ruffled countenance with the handkerchief; 'but if you would leave the postboy to say that, I should be very much obliged to you.
It wouldn't be proper for the maids to see me in this state, sir; I should never have any more authority with them if they did.'
'Well,' rejoined Harry Maylie, smiling, 'you can do as you like.
mr Giles, reminded of his unbecoming costume, snatched off and pocketed his nightcap; and substituted a hat, of grave and sober shape, which he took out of the chaise.
This done, the postboy drove off; Giles, mr Maylie, and Oliver, followed at their leisure.
As they walked along, Oliver glanced from time to time with much interest and curiosity at the new comer.
He seemed about five and twenty years of age, and was of the middle height; his countenance was frank and handsome; and his demeanor easy and prepossessing.
Notwithstanding the difference between youth and age, he bore so strong a likeness to the old lady, that Oliver would have had no great difficulty in imagining their relationship, if he had not already spoken of her as his mother.
mrs Maylie was anxiously waiting to receive her son when he reached the cottage.
The meeting did not take place without great emotion on both sides.
'I did,' replied mrs Maylie; 'but, on reflection, I determined to keep back the letter until I had heard mr Losberne's opinion.'
'I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can offer,' said mrs Maylie; 'I know that the devotion and affection of her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and lasting.
If I did not feel this, and know, besides, that a changed behaviour in one she loved would break her heart, I should not feel my task so difficult of performance, or have to encounter so many struggles in my own bosom, when I take what seems to me to be the strict line of duty.'
'This is unkind, mother,' said Harry. 'Do you still suppose that I am a boy ignorant of my own mind, and mistaking the impulses of my own soul?'
'I think, my dear son,' returned mrs Maylie, laying her hand upon his shoulder, 'that youth has many generous impulses which do not last; and that among them are some, which, being gratified, become only the more fleeting.
'Mother,' said the young man, impatiently, 'he would be a selfish brute, unworthy alike of the name of man and of the woman you describe, who acted thus.'
'You think so now, Harry,' replied his mother.
'And ever will!' said the young man.
On Rose, sweet, gentle girl!
my heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman.
I have no thought, no view, no hope in life, beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind.
'Harry,' said mrs Maylie, 'it is because I think so much of warm and sensitive hearts, that I would spare them from being wounded.
But we have said enough, and more than enough, on this matter, just now.'
'Let it rest with Rose, then,' interposed Harry.
'You will not press these overstrained opinions of yours, so far, as to throw any obstacle in my way?'
'I will not,' rejoined mrs Maylie; 'but I would have you consider-'
I have considered, ever since I have been capable of serious reflection.
My feelings remain unchanged, as they ever will; and why should I suffer the pain of a delay in giving them vent, which can be productive of no earthly good?
No!
'There is something in your manner, which would almost imply that she will hear me coldly, mother,' said the young man.
'How then?' urged the young man.
'She has formed no other attachment?'
'No, indeed,' replied his mother; 'you have, or I mistake, too strong a hold on her affections already.
'What do you mean?'
'That I leave you to discover,' replied mrs Maylie. 'I must go back to her.
God bless you!'
'I shall see you again to night?' said the young man, eagerly.
'You will tell her I am here?' said Harry.
'Of course,' replied mrs Maylie.
You will not refuse to do this, mother?'
The former now held out his hand to Harry Maylie; and hearty salutations were exchanged between them.
The doctor then communicated, in reply to multifarious questions from his young friend, a precise account of his patient's situation; which was quite as consolatory and full of promise, as Oliver's statement had encouraged him to hope; and to the whole of which, mr Giles, who affected to be busy about the luggage, listened with greedy ears.
'Have you shot anything particular, lately, Giles?' inquired the doctor, when he had concluded.
'Nothing particular, sir,' replied mr Giles, colouring up to the eyes.
'Nor catching any thieves, nor identifying any house breakers?' said the doctor.
'Well,' said the doctor, 'I am sorry to hear it, because you do that sort of thing admirably.
Pray, how is Brittles?'
'That's well,' said the doctor.
'Seeing you here, reminds me, mr Giles, that on the day before that on which I was called away so hurriedly, I executed, at the request of your good mistress, a small commission in your favour.
At this, the two women servants lifted up their hands and eyes, and supposed that mr Giles, pulling out his shirt frill, replied, 'No, no'; and that if they observed that he was at all haughty to his inferiors, he would thank them to tell him so.
And then he made a great many other remarks, no less illustrative of his humility, which were received with equal favour and applause, and were, withal, as original and as much to the purpose, as the remarks of great men commonly are.
The melancholy which had seemed to the sad eyes of the anxious boy to hang, for days past, over every object, beautiful as all were, was dispelled by magic.
Men who look on nature, and their fellow men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts.
The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.
It is worthy of remark, and Oliver did not fail to note it at the time, that his morning expeditions were no longer made alone.
If Oliver were behindhand in these respects, he knew where the best were to be found; and morning after morning they scoured the country together, and brought home the fairest that blossomed.
The window of the young lady's chamber was opened now; for she loved to feel the rich summer air stream in, and revive her with its freshness; but there always stood in water, just inside the lattice, one particular little bunch, which was made up with great care, every morning.
Oliver could not help noticing that the withered flowers were never thrown away, although the little vase was regularly replenished; nor, could he help observing, that whenever the doctor came into the garden, he invariably cast his eyes up to that particular corner, and nodded his head most expressively, as he set forth on his morning's walk.
Pending these observations, the days were flying by; and Rose was rapidly recovering.
Nor did Oliver's time hang heavy on his hands, although the young lady had not yet left her chamber, and there were no evening walks, save now and then, for a short distance, with mrs Maylie.
He applied himself, with redoubled assiduity, to the instructions of the white headed old gentleman, and laboured so hard that his quick progress surprised even himself.
The little room in which he was accustomed to sit, when busy at his books, was on the ground floor, at the back of the house.
It was quite a cottage room, with a lattice window: around which were clusters of jessamine and honeysuckle, that crept over the casement, and filled the place with their delicious perfume.
It looked into a garden, whence a wicket gate opened into a small paddock; all beyond, was fine meadow land and wood.
There was no other dwelling near, in that direction; and the prospect it commanded was very extensive.
One beautiful evening, when the first shades of twilight were beginning to settle upon the earth, Oliver sat at this window, intent upon his books.
He had been poring over them for some time; and, as the day had been uncommonly sultry, and he had exerted himself a great deal, it is no disparagement to the authors, whoever they may have been, to say, that gradually and by slow degrees, he fell asleep.
There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure.
Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon incidental to such a state.
Oliver knew, perfectly well, that he was in his own little room; that his books were lying on the table before him; that the sweet air was stirring among the creeping plants outside.
And yet he was asleep. Suddenly, the scene changed; the air became close and confined; and he thought, with a glow of terror, that he was in the Jew's house again. There sat the hideous old man, in his accustomed corner, pointing at him, and whispering to another man, with his face averted, who sat beside him.
'Hush, my dear!' he thought he heard the Jew say; 'it is he, sure enough.
'He!' the other man seemed to answer; 'could I mistake him, think you? If a crowd of ghosts were to put themselves into his exact shape, and he stood amongst them, there is something that would tell me how to point him out.
It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes; and they were gone.
But they had recognised him, and he them; and their look was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply carved in stone, and set before him from his birth.
CHAPTER forty one
CONTAINING FRESH DISCOVERIES, AND SHOWING THAT SUPRISES, LIKE MISFORTUNES, SELDOM COME ALONE
Her situation was, indeed, one of no common trial and difficulty.
While she felt the most eager and burning desire to penetrate the mystery in which Oliver's history was enveloped, she could not but hold sacred the confidence which the miserable woman with whom she had just conversed, had reposed in her, as a young and guileless girl.
Her words and manner had touched Rose Maylie's heart; and, mingled with her love for her young charge, and scarcely less intense in its truth and fervour, was her fond wish to win the outcast back to repentance and hope.
They purposed remaining in London only three days, prior to departing for some weeks to a distant part of the coast.
It was now midnight of the first day.
What course of action could she determine upon, which could be adopted in eight and forty hours?
Or how could she postpone the journey without exciting suspicion?
mr Losberne was with them, and would be for the next two days; but Rose was too well acquainted with the excellent gentleman's impetuosity, and foresaw too clearly the wrath with which, in the first explosion of his indignation, he would regard the instrument of Oliver's recapture, to trust him with the secret, when her representations in the girl's behalf could be seconded by no experienced person.
These were all reasons for the greatest caution and most circumspect behaviour in communicating it to mrs Maylie, whose first impulse would infallibly be to hold a conference with the worthy doctor on the subject.
As to resorting to any legal adviser, even if she had known how to do so, it was scarcely to be thought of, for the same reason.
Disturbed by these different reflections; inclining now to one course and then to another, and again recoiling from all, as each successive consideration presented itself to her mind; Rose passed a sleepless and anxious night.
After more communing with herself next day, she arrived at the desperate conclusion of consulting Harry.
'If it be painful to him,' she thought, 'to come back here, how painful it will be to me!
But perhaps he will not come; he may write, or he may come himself, and studiously abstain from meeting me-he did when he went away.
I hardly thought he would; but it was better for us both.' And here Rose dropped the pen, and turned away, as though the very paper which was to be her messenger should not see her weep.
She had taken up the same pen, and laid it down again fifty times, and had considered and reconsidered the first line of her letter without writing the first word, when Oliver, who had been walking in the streets, with mr Giles for a body guard, entered the room in such breathless haste and violent agitation, as seemed to betoken some new cause of alarm.
'What makes you look so flurried?' asked Rose, advancing to meet him.
'I hardly know how; I feel as if I should be choked,' replied the boy. 'Oh dear!
To think that I should see him at last, and you should be able to know that I have told you the truth!'
'I never thought you had told us anything but the truth,' said Rose, soothing him.
'But what is this?--of whom do you speak?'
'I have seen the gentleman,' replied Oliver, scarcely able to articulate, 'the gentleman who was so good to me-mr
Brownlow, that we have so often talked about.'
'Where?' asked Rose.
'Getting out of a coach,' replied Oliver, shedding tears of delight, 'and going into a house.
I didn't speak to him-I couldn't speak to him, for he didn't see me, and I trembled so, that I was not able to go up to him.
But Giles asked, for me, whether he lived there, and they said he did.
Oh, dear me, dear me!
What shall I do when I come to see him and hear him speak again!'
She very soon determined upon turning the discovery to account.
'Quick!' she said.
'Tell them to fetch a hackney coach, and be ready to go with me.
I will take you there directly, without a minute's loss of time.
I will only tell my aunt that we are going out for an hour, and be ready as soon as you are.'
Oliver needed no prompting to despatch, and in little more than five minutes they were on their way to Craven Street.
When they arrived there, Rose left Oliver in the coach, under pretence of preparing the old gentleman to receive him; and sending up her card by the servant, requested to see mr Brownlow on very pressing business.
The servant soon returned, to beg that she would walk upstairs; and following him into an upper room, Miss Maylie was presented to an elderly gentleman of benevolent appearance, in a bottle green coat.
At no great distance from whom, was seated another old gentleman, in nankeen breeches and gaiters; who did not look particularly benevolent, and who was sitting with his hands clasped on the top of a thick stick, and his chin propped thereupon.
'Dear me,' said the gentleman, in the bottle green coat, hastily rising with great politeness, 'I beg your pardon, young lady-I imagined it was some importunate person who-I beg you will excuse me.
Be seated, pray.'
'mr Brownlow, I believe, sir?' said Rose, glancing from the other gentleman to the one who had spoken.
'That is my name,' said the old gentleman.
'This is my friend, mr Grimwig.
Grimwig, will you leave us for a few minutes?'
'I believe,' interposed Miss Maylie, 'that at this period of our interview, I need not give that gentleman the trouble of going away. If I am correctly informed, he is cognizant of the business on which I wish to speak to you.'
mr Grimwig, who had made one very stiff bow, and risen from his chair, made another very stiff bow, and dropped into it again.
'I shall surprise you very much, I have no doubt,' said Rose, naturally embarrassed; 'but you once showed great benevolence and goodness to a very dear young friend of mine, and I am sure you will take an interest in hearing of him again.'
'Indeed!' said mr Brownlow.
'Oliver Twist you knew him as,' replied Rose.
He drew his chair nearer to Miss Maylie's, and said,
'Do me the favour, my dear young lady, to leave entirely out of the question that goodness and benevolence of which you speak, and of which nobody else knows anything; and if you have it in your power to produce any evidence which will alter the unfavourable opinion I was once induced to entertain of that poor child, in Heaven's name put me in possession of it.'
'He is a child of a noble nature and a warm heart,' said Rose, colouring; 'and that Power which has thought fit to try him beyond his years, has planted in his breast affections and feelings which would do honour to many who have numbered his days six times over.'
'I'm only sixty one,' said mr Grimwig, with the same rigid face.
'And, as the devil's in it if this Oliver is not twelve years old at least, I don't see the application of that remark.'
'Do not heed my friend, Miss Maylie,' said mr Brownlow; 'he does not mean what he says.'
'Yes, he does,' growled mr Grimwig.
'No, he does not,' said mr Brownlow, obviously rising in wrath as he spoke.
'He'll eat his head, if he doesn't,' growled mr Grimwig.
'He would deserve to have it knocked off, if he does,' said mr Brownlow.
'And he'd uncommonly like to see any man offer to do it,' responded mr Grimwig, knocking his stick upon the floor.
Having gone thus far, the two old gentlemen severally took snuff, and afterwards shook hands, according to their invariable custom.
'Now, Miss Maylie,' said mr Brownlow, 'to return to the subject in which your humanity is so much interested.
Rose, who had had time to collect her thoughts, at once related, in a few natural words, all that had befallen Oliver since he left mr Brownlow's house; reserving Nancy's information for that gentleman's private ear, and concluding with the assurance that his only sorrow, for some months past, had been not being able to meet with his former benefactor and friend.
'Thank God!' said the old gentleman.
'This is great happiness to me, great happiness.
But you have not told me where he is now, Miss Maylie.
'He is waiting in a coach at the door,' replied Rose.
'At this door!' cried the old gentleman.
With which he hurried out of the room, down the stairs, up the coachsteps, and into the coach, without another word.
When the room door closed behind him, mr Grimwig lifted up his head, and converting one of the hind legs of his chair into a pivot, described three distinct circles with the assistance of his stick and the table; sitting in it all the time.
After performing this evolution, he rose and limped as fast as he could up and down the room at least a dozen times, and then stopping suddenly before Rose, kissed her without the slightest preface.
'Don't be afraid.
I'm old enough to be your grandfather. You're a sweet girl.
I like you.
Here they are!'
In fact, as he threw himself at one dexterous dive into his former seat, mr Brownlow returned, accompanied by Oliver, whom mr Grimwig received very graciously; and if the gratification of that moment had been the only reward for all her anxiety and care in Oliver's behalf, Rose Maylie would have been well repaid.
'There is somebody else who should not be forgotten, by the bye,' said mr Brownlow, ringing the bell.
'Send mrs Bedwin here, if you please.'
The old housekeeper answered the summons with all dispatch; and dropping a curtsey at the door, waited for orders.
'Why, you get blinder every day, Bedwin,' said mr Brownlow, rather testily.
'Well, that I do, sir,' replied the old lady.
'People's eyes, at my time of life, don't improve with age, sir.'
'I could have told you that,' rejoined mr Brownlow; 'but put on your glasses, and see if you can't find out what you were wanted for, will you?'
The old lady began to rummage in her pocket for her spectacles.
But Oliver's patience was not proof against this new trial; and yielding to his first impulse, he sprang into her arms.
'God be good to me!' cried the old lady, embracing him; 'it is my innocent boy!'
'My dear old nurse!' cried Oliver.
'He would come back-I knew he would,' said the old lady, holding him in her arms.
'How well he looks, and how like a gentleman's son he is dressed again!
Leaving her and Oliver to compare notes at leisure, mr Brownlow led the way into another room; and there, heard from Rose a full narration of her interview with Nancy, which occasioned him no little surprise and perplexity.
Rose also explained her reasons for not confiding in her friend mr Losberne in the first instance.
The old gentleman considered that she had acted prudently, and readily undertook to hold solemn conference with the worthy doctor himself.
To afford him an early opportunity for the execution of this design, it was arranged that he should call at the hotel at eight o'clock that evening, and that in the meantime mrs Maylie should be cautiously informed of all that had occurred.
These preliminaries adjusted, Rose and Oliver returned home.
Rose had by no means overrated the measure of the good doctor's wrath. Nancy's history was no sooner unfolded to him, than he poured forth a shower of mingled threats and execrations; threatened to make her the first victim of the combined ingenuity of Messrs.
Blathers and Duff; and actually put on his hat preparatory to sallying forth to obtain the assistance of those worthies.
And, doubtless, he would, in this first outbreak, have carried the intention into effect without a moment's consideration of the consequences, if he had not been restrained, in part, by corresponding violence on the side of mr Brownlow, who was himself of an irascible temperament, and party by such arguments and representations as seemed best calculated to dissuade him from his hotbrained purpose.
'Are we to pass a vote of thanks to all these vagabonds, male and female, and beg them to accept a hundred pounds, or so, apiece, as a trifling mark of our esteem, and some slight acknowledgment of their kindness to Oliver?'
'Not exactly that,' rejoined mr Brownlow, laughing; 'but we must proceed gently and with great care.'
'Gentleness and care,' exclaimed the doctor.
'Never mind where,' interposed mr Brownlow. 'But reflect whether sending them anywhere is likely to attain the object we have in view.'
'What object?' asked the doctor.
'Simply, the discovery of Oliver's parentage, and regaining for him the inheritance of which, if this story be true, he has been fraudulently deprived.'
'Ah!' said mr Losberne, cooling himself with his pocket handkerchief; 'I almost forgot that.'
'You see,' pursued mr Brownlow; 'placing this poor girl entirely out of the question, and supposing it were possible to bring these scoundrels to justice without compromising her safety, what good should we bring about?'
'Hanging a few of them at least, in all probability,' suggested the doctor, 'and transporting the rest.'
'How?' inquired the doctor.
That can only be done by stratagem, and by catching him when he is not surrounded by these people.
For, suppose he were apprehended, we have no proof against him.
He is not even (so far as we know, or as the facts appear to us) concerned with the gang in any of their robberies.
If he were not discharged, it is very unlikely that he could receive any further punishment than being committed to prison as a rogue and vagabond; and of course ever afterwards his mouth would be so obstinately closed that he might as well, for our purposes, be deaf, dumb, blind, and an idiot.'
'Then,' said the doctor impetuously, 'I put it to you again, whether you think it reasonable that this promise to the girl should be considered binding; a promise made with the best and kindest intentions, but really-'
'Do not discuss the point, my dear young lady, pray,' said mr Brownlow, interrupting Rose as she was about to speak.
'The promise shall be kept.
I don't think it will, in the slightest degree, interfere with our proceedings.
She cannot be seen until next Sunday night; this is Tuesday.
I would suggest that in the meantime, we remain perfectly quiet, and keep these matters secret even from Oliver himself.'
Although mr Losberne received with many wry faces a proposal involving a delay of five whole days, he was fain to admit that no better course occurred to him just then; and as both Rose and mrs Maylie sided very strongly with mr Brownlow, that gentleman's proposition was carried unanimously.
'I should like,' he said, 'to call in the aid of my friend Grimwig.
'I have no objection to your calling in your friend if I may call in mine,' said the doctor.
'We must put it to the vote,' replied mr Brownlow, 'who may he be?'
Rose blushed deeply, but she did not make any audible objection to this motion (possibly she felt in a hopeless minority); and Harry Maylie and mr Grimwig were accordingly added to the committee.
'We stay in town, of course,' said mrs Maylie, 'while there remains the slightest prospect of prosecuting this inquiry with a chance of success.
I will spare neither trouble nor expense in behalf of the object in which we are all so deeply interested, and I am content to remain here, if it be for twelve months, so long as you assure me that any hope remains.'
'Good!' rejoined mr Brownlow.
Believe me, I make this request with good reason, for I might otherwise excite hopes destined never to be realised, and only increase difficulties and disappointments already quite numerous enough.
Come! Supper has been announced, and young Oliver, who is all alone in the next room, will have begun to think, by this time, that we have wearied of his company, and entered into some dark conspiracy to thrust him forth upon the world.'
With these words, the old gentleman gave his hand to mrs Maylie, and escorted her into the supper room.
In this age of the arduous pursuit of peace, prosperity and pleasure, the smallest contribution to the gaiety, if not to the wisdom, of nations can scarcely be unwelcome.
With this in mind, the author has prepared "The Foolish Dictionary," not in serious emulation of the worthier-and wordier-works of Webster and Worcester, but rather in the playful spirit of the parodist, who would gladly direct the faint rays from his flickering candle of fun to the shrine of their great memories.
With half a million English words to choose from, modesty has been the watchword, and the author has confined himself to the treatment of only about half a thousand.
How wise, flippant, sober or stupid, this treatment has been, it is for the reader alone to judge. However, if from epigram, derivative or pure absurdity, there be born a single laugh between the lids, the laborer will accredit himself worthy of his hire.
In further explanation it should be said that some slight deference has been made to other wits, and the definitions include a few quotations from the great minds of the past and present.
As for the rest, the jury will please acknowledge a plea of guilty from
It's a long lane that has no ashbarrel.
A
Distilled waters run deep.
Hence, water tankard, or "water wagon."
A political office known as the Crook's Road to Wealth.
Pain, just the same.
Contains twenty six letters and only three syllables.
Often shy on meal tickets but strong on technique and the price of tripe sandwiches.
eight.
Why, thou must wrest it from its present possessor!
Dost thou long for power?
Again, on how slight and perishable a possession do they rely who set before themselves bodily excellences!
Can ye ever surpass the elephant in bulk or the bull in strength?
Look upon the infinitude, the solidity, the swift motion, of the heavens, and for once cease to admire things mean and worthless.
SONG eight.
HUMAN FOLLY.
What curse shall I call down On hearts so dull?
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES
sixty seven.
"I did that," says my memory.
"I could not have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable.
sixty nine.
seventy one.
seventy six.
seventy nine.
eighty one.
Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she-forgets how to charm.
eighty six.
eighty nine.
ninety.
ninety five.
ninety six.
One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa-blessing it rather than in love with it.
ninety seven.
What?
A great man?
ninety nine.
one hundred.
"What!
Or-or---"
Even concubinage has been corrupted-by marriage.
Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the demigod everything becomes a satyr play; and around God everything becomes-what? perhaps a "world"?
What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.
Insanity in individuals is something rare-but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
Not only our reason, but also our conscience, truckles to our strongest impulse-the tyrant in us.
One may indeed lie with the mouth; but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.
To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame-and something precious.
Pity has an almost ludicrous effect on a man of knowledge, like tender hands on a Cyclops.
One occasionally embraces some one or other, out of love to mankind (because one cannot embrace all); but this is what one must never confess to the individual.
But the haughty monarch was incapable of the magnanimity which dares to acknowledge a fault.
He reviled, in the most intemperate language, their baseness, their ingratitude, their insolence.
OF THE ORIGIN AND DESIGN OF GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL, WITH CONCISE REMARKS ON THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION
Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices.
The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world.
Disease, nay even misfortune would be death, for though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die.
In this first parliament every man, by natural right, will have a seat.
And as this frequent interchange will establish a common interest with every part of the community, they will mutually and naturally support each other, and on this (not on the unmeaning name of king) depends the STRENGTH OF GOVERNMENT, AND THE HAPPINESS OF THE GOVERNED.
But that it is imperfect, subject to convulsions, and incapable of producing what it seems to promise, is easily demonstrated.
Absolute governments (tho' the disgrace of human nature) have this advantage with them, that they are simple; if the people suffer, they know the head from which their suffering springs, know likewise the remedy, and are not bewildered by a variety of causes and cures.
I know it is difficult to get over local or long standing prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new republican materials.
FIRST.
The remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king.
SECONDLY.
The new republican materials, in the persons of the commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England.
To say that the constitution of England is a UNION of three powers reciprocally CHECKING each other, is farcical, either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions.
To say that the commons is a check upon the king, presupposes two things.
FIRST.
That the king is not to be trusted without being looked after, or in other words, that a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy.
SECONDLY.
That the commons, by being appointed for that purpose, are either wiser or more worthy of confidence than the crown.
But as the same constitution which gives the commons a power to check the king by withholding the supplies, gives afterwards the king a power to check the commons, by empowering him to reject their other bills; it again supposes that the king is wiser than those whom it has already supposed to be wiser than him.
HOW CAME THE KING BY A POWER WHICH THE PEOPLE ARE AFRAID TO TRUST, AND ALWAYS OBLIGED TO CHECK?
Such a power could not be the gift of a wise people, neither can any power, WHICH NEEDS CHECKING, be from God; yet the provision, which the constitution makes, supposes such a power to exist.
That the crown is this overbearing part in the English constitution needs not be mentioned, and that it derives its whole consequence merely from being the giver of places and pensions is self evident; wherefore, though we have been wise enough to shut and lock a door against absolute monarchy, we at the same time have been foolish enough to put the crown in possession of the key.
Individuals are undoubtedly safer in England than in some other countries, but the WILL of the king is as much the LAW of the land in Britain as in France, with this difference, that instead of proceeding directly from his mouth, it is handed to the people under the more formidable shape of an act of parliament.
Keimer and I liv'd on a pretty good familiar footing, and agreed tolerably well, for he suspected nothing of my setting up.
We therefore had many disputations.
He agreed to try the practice, if I would keep him company.
I did so, and we held it for three months.
He invited me and two women friends to dine with him; but, it being brought too soon upon table, he could not resist the temptation, and ate the whole before we came.
Ralph was ingenious, genteel in his manners, and extremely eloquent; I think I never knew a prettier talker.
When the time of our meeting drew nigh, Ralph called on me first, and let me know his piece was ready.
He then show'd me his piece for my opinion, and I much approv'd it, as it appear'd to me to have great merit.
fifteen
QUARRELS WITH THE PROPRIETARY GOVERNORS
In my journey to Boston this year, I met at New York with our new governor, mr Morris, just arriv'd there from England, with whom I had been before intimately acquainted.
I said, "No; you may, on the contrary, have a very comfortable one, if you will only take care not to enter into any dispute with the Assembly." "My dear friend," says he, pleasantly, "how can you advise my avoiding disputes?
You know I love disputing; it is one of my greatest pleasures; however, to show the regard I have for your counsel, I promise you I will, if possible, avoid them." He had some reason for loving to dispute, being eloquent, an acute sophister, and, therefore, generally successful in argumentative conversation.
He had been brought up to it from a boy, his father, as I have heard, accustoming his children to dispute with one another for his diversion, while sitting at table after dinner; but I think the practice was not wise; for, in the course of my observation, these disputing, contradicting, and confuting people are generally unfortunate in their affairs.
I had my share of it; for, as soon as I got back to my seat in the Assembly, I was put on every committee for answering his speeches and messages, and by the committees always desired to make the drafts.
One afternoon, in the height of this public quarrel, we met in the street.
"Franklin," says he, "you must go home with me and spend the evening; I am to have some company that you will like;" and, taking me by the arm, he led me to his house.
They voted an aid of ten thousand pounds, to be laid out in provisions.
SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS
I say much practice, for my house was continually full, for some time, with people who came to see these new wonders.
This engag'd the public attention everywhere.
Forward were the crew; some asleep, others smoking, others playing cards.
The fourth member of the party, Melick, was seated near the mainmast, folding some papers in a peculiar way.
His occupation at length attracted the roving eyes of Featherstone, who poked forth his head from his hammock, and said in a sleepy voice:
By Jove! you're the only one aboard that's busy.
What are you doing?"
"Paper boats," said Melick, in a business like tone.
"Paper boats!
"What for?"
"Anything to kill time, you know."
"By Jove!" exclaimed Featherstone again, raising himself higher in his hammock, "that's not a bad idea.
By Jove! glowious! glowious!
I say, Oxenden, did you hear that?"
"Oh, I mean a race with these paper boats.
We can bet on them, you know."
At this Featherstone sat upright, with his legs dangling out of the hammock.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed again.
So we can.
Do you know, Melick, old chap, I think that's a wegular piece of inspiration. A wegatta! and we can bet on the best boat."
"Well, you know, that's the fun of it," said Melick, who went solemnly on as he spoke, folding his paper boats; "that's the fun of it.
For you see if there was a wind we should be going on ourselves, and the regatta couldn't come off; but, as it is, the water is just right. You pick out your boat, and lay your bet on her to race to some given point."
"A given point?
"Oh, easily enough; something or anything-a bubble'll do, or we can pitch out a bit of wood."
Upon this Featherstone descended from his perch, and came near to examine the proceedings, while the other two, eager to take advantage of the new excitement, soon joined him.
By this time Melick had finished his paper boats.
There were four of them, and they were made of different colors, namely, red, green, yellow, and white.
"I'll put these in the water," said Melick, "and then we can lay our bets on them as we choose.
But first let us see if there is anything that can be taken as a point of arrival.
If there isn't anything, I can pitch out a bit of wood, in any direction which may seem best."
Saying this, he went to the side, followed by the others, and all looked out carefully over the water.
"There's a black speck out there," said Oxenden.
"That'll do.
I wonder what it is?"
"Probably the spar of some ship."
"Oh, it's a spar," said Melick.
"It's one end of it, the rest is under water."
The spot thus chosen was a dark, circular object, about a hundred yards away, and certainly did look very much like the extremity of some spar, the rest of which was under water.
After this the four stood watching the little fleet in silence.
Gradually they drew apart, the green one drifting astern, the yellow one remaining under the vessel, while the red and the white were carried out in the direction where they were expected to go, with about a foot of space between them.
"Two to one on the red!" cried Featherstone, betting on the one which had gained the lead.
Oxenden made the same bet, which was taken by Melick and the doctor.
All took part in this; the excitement rose high and the betting went on merrily.
At length it was noticed that the white was overhauling the red.
The excitement grew intense; the betting changed its form, but was still kept up, until at last the two paper boats seemed blended together in one dim spot which gradually faded out of sight.
It was now necessary to determine the state of the race, so Featherstone ordered out the boat.
The four were soon embarked, and the men rowed out toward the point which had been chosen as the end of the race.
An animated discussion arose about this.
Some of the bets were off, but others remained an open question, and each side insisted upon a different view of the case.
In the midst of this, Featherstone's attention was drawn to the dark spot already mentioned as the goal of the race.
"Pull up, lads, a little; let's see what it is.
It doesn't look to me like a spar."
The others, always on the lookout for some new object of interest, were attracted by these words, and looked closely at the thing in question.
The men pulled.
The boat drew nearer.
"It's not a spar," said Melick, who was at the bow.
He failed to get it, and did no more than touch it.
It moved easily and sank, but soon came up again.
A second time he grasped at it, and with both hands. This time he caught it, and then lifted it out of the water into the boat.
These proceedings had been watched with the deepest interest; and now, as this curious floating thing made its appearance among them, they all crowded around it in eager excitement.
"It looks like a can of preserved meat," said the doctor.
"It certainly is a can," said Melick, "for it's made of metal; but as to preserved meat, I have my doubts."
The article in question was made of metal and was cylindrical in shape.
It was soldered tight and evidently contained something.
The nature of the metal was not easily perceptible, for it was coated with slime, and covered over about half its surface with barnacles and sea weed.
"It's some kind of preserved meat," said the doctor.
"Perhaps something good-game, I dare say-yes, Yorkshire game pie.
They pot all sorts of things now."
It must have been floating for ages."
So come, let's open it, and see what sort of diet the antediluvians had."
Melick shook his head.
It's odd, too.
I never saw anything like it before.
"By Jove!" cried Featherstone, "this is getting exciting.
Let's go back to the yacht and open it."
"I'm certain of that. It has come in good time.
"You may have my share, then," said Oxenden.
"Meat cans," said Melick, "are never so large as that."
"Oh, I don't know about that," said the doctor, "they make up pretty large packages of pemmican for the arctic expeditions."
"Copper!" exclaimed Oxenden.
"Is it copper?"
"Look for yourselves," said Melick, quietly.
They all looked, and could see, where the knife had cut into the vessel, that it was as he said.
It was copper.
"It's foreign work," said Melick.
"In England we make tin cans for everything.
It may be something that's drifted out from Mogadore or some port in Morocco."
By this time they had reached the yacht and hurried aboard.
All were eager to satisfy their curiosity.
Search was made for a cold chisel, but to no purpose.
Then Featherstone produced a knife which was used to open sardine boxes, but after a faithful trial this proved useless. At length Melick, who had gone off in search of something more effective, made his appearance armed with an axe.
With this he attacked the copper cylinder, and by means of a few dexterous blows succeeded in cutting it open.
Then he looked in.
"What do you see?" asked Featherstone.
"Something," said Melick, "but I can't quite make it out."
"If you can't make it out, then shake it out," said Oxenden.
Upon this Melick took the cylinder, turned it upside down, shook it smartly, and then lifted it and pounded it against the deck.
This served to loosen the contents, which seemed tightly packed, but came gradually down until at length they could be seen and drawn forth. Melick drew them forth, and the contents of the mysterious copper cylinder resolved themselves into two packages.
What could they be?
One of the packages was very much larger than the other.
It was enclosed in wrappers made of some coarse kind of felt, bound tight with strong cords.
This Melick seized and began to open.
"Wait a minute," said Featherstone.
"Let's make a bet on it.
"Done," said Oxenden.
Melick opened the package, and it was seen that Featherstone had lost. There were no jewels, but one or two sheets of something that looked like paper.
It was not paper, however, but some vegetable product which was used for the same purpose.
These sheets were covered with writing.
"Why, this is English!"
At this the others crowded around to look on, and Featherstone in his excitement forgot that he had lost his bet.
There were three sheets, all covered with writing-one in English, another in French, and a third in German.
It was as follows:
"To the finder of this:
"Sir,--I am an Englishman, and have been carried by a series of incredible events to a land from which escape is as impossible as from the grave.
I have written this and committed it to the sea, in the hope that the ocean currents may bear it within the reach of civilized man.
Oh, unknown friend! whoever you are.
I entreat you to let this message be made known in some way to my father, Henry More, Keswick, Cumberland, England, so that he may learn the fate of his son.
"ADAM MORE."
"This other package must be the manuscript," said Oxenden, "and it'll tell all about it."
"Such a manuscript'll be better than meat," said the doctor, sententiously.
Melick said nothing, but, opening his knife, he cut the cords and unfolded the wrapper.
He saw a great collection of leaves, just like those of the letter, of some vegetable substance, smooth as paper, and covered with writing.
"It looks like Egyptian papyrus," said the doctor.
"That was the common paper of antiquity."
"Let's have the contents of the manuscript.
CHAPTER five
The boat drifted on.
The light given by the aurora and the low moon seemed to grow fainter; and as I looked behind I saw that the distant glow from the volcanic fires had become more brilliant in the increasing darkness.
The sides of the channel grew steeper, until at last they became rocky precipices, rising to an unknown height.
The channel itself grew narrower, till from a width of two miles it had contracted to a tenth of those dimensions; but with this lessening width the waters seemed to rush far more swiftly.
Here I drifted helplessly, and saw the gloomy, rocky cliffs sweep past me as I was hurled onward on the breast of the tremendous flood.
I was in despair. The fate of Agnew had prepared me for my own, and I was only thankful that my fate, since it was inevitable, would be less appalling.
Death seemed certain, and my chief thought now was as to the moment when it would come.
I was prepared.
As I went on, the precipices rose higher and seemed to overhang, the channel grew narrower, the light grew fainter, until at last all around me grew dark.
I was floating at the bottom of a vast chasm, where the sides seemed to rise precipitously for thousands of feet, where neither watery flood nor rocky wall was visible, and where, far above, I could see the line of sky between the summits of the cliffs, and watch the glowing stars.
So I thought; and with these thoughts I drifted on, I cannot tell how long, until at length there appeared a vast black mass, where the open sky above me terminated, and where the lustre of the stars and the light of the heavens were all swallowed up in utter darkness.
This, then, I thought, is the end.
Here, amid this darkness, I must make the awful plunge and find my death I fell upon my knees in the bottom of the boat and prayed.
As I knelt there the boat drew nearer, the black mass grew blacker.
The current swept me on.
There were no breakers; there was no phosphorescent sparkle of seething waters, and no whiteness of foam.
I thought that I was on the brink of some tremendous cataract a thousand times deeper than Niagara; some fall where the waters plunged into the depths of the earth; and where, gathering for the terrific descent, all other movements-all dashings and writhings and twistings-were obliterated and lost in the one overwhelming onward rush.
Suddenly all grew dark-dark beyond all expression; the sky above was in a moment snatched from view; I had been flung into some tremendous cavern; and there, on my knees, with terror in my heart, I waited for death.
The moments passed, and death delayed to come.
The awful plunge was still put off; and though I remained on my knees and waited long, still the end came not.
The waters seemed still, the boat motionless. It was borne upon the surface of a vast stream as smooth as glass; but who could tell how deep that stream was, or how wide?
At length I rose from my knees and sank down upon the seat of the boat, and tried to peer through the gloom.
Nothing was visible.
It was the very blackness of darkness.
I listened, but heard nothing save a deep, dull, droning sound, which seemed to fill all the air and make it all tremulous with its vibrations.
I tried to collect my thoughts.
It was faint glow that at first caught my gaze; and, on turning to see it better, I saw a round red spot glowing like fire.
I had not seen this before.
It looked like the moon when it rises from behind clouds, and glows red and lurid from the horizon; and so this glowed, but not with the steady light of the moon, for the light was fitful, and sometimes flashed into a baleful brightness, which soon subsided into a dimmer lustre.
This, then, I thought, was to be the end of my voyage; this was my goal-a pit of fire, into which I should be hurled!
Would it be well, I thought, to wait for such a fate, and experience such a death agony?
Would it not be better for me to take my own life before I should know the worst?
I took my pistol and loaded it, so as to be prepared, but hesitated to use it until my fate should be more apparent.
So I sat, holding my pistol, prepared to use it, watching the light, and awaiting the time when the glowing fires should make all further hope impossible.
But time passed, and the light grew no brighter; on the contrary, it seemed to grow fainter.
All the time it continued to grow fainter, and it seemed certain that I was moving away from it rather than toward it.
I saw that I was still moving on away from that light as before, and that its changing position was due to the turning of the boat as the water drifted it along, now stern foremost, now sidewise, and again bow foremost.
From this it seemed plainly evident that the waters had borne me into some vast cavern of unknown extent, which went under the mountains-a subterranean channel, whose issue I could not conjecture.
But the old theory of the flow of water through the earth had taken hold of me and could not be shaken off.
I knew some scientific men held the opinion that the earth's interior is a mass of molten rock and pent up fire, and that the earth itself had once been a burning orb, which had cooled down at the surface; yet, after all, this was only a theory, and there were other theories which were totally different.
These, I knew, were only the creations of fiction; yet, after all, it seemed possible that the earth might contain vast hollow spaces in its interior-realms of eternal darkness, caverns in comparison with which the hugest caves on the surface were but the tiniest cells.
I was now being borne on to these.
In that case there might be no sudden plunge, after all.
There was no possible way of forming any estimate as to speed.
All was dark, and even the glow behind was fading away; nor could I make any conjecture whatever as to the size of the channel.
At the opening it had been contracted and narrow; but here it might have expanded itself to miles, and its vaulted top might reach almost to the summit of the lofty mountains.
While sight thus failed me, sound was equally unavailing, for it was always the same-a sustained and unintermittent roar, a low, droning sound, deep and terrible, with no variations of dashing breakers or rushing rapids or falling cataracts.
Vague thoughts of final escape came and went; but in such a situation hope could not be sustained.
That seemed to me to be my last sight of earthly things. After this nothing was left.
I struck a match.
I loaded both barrels of the rifle, keeping my pistol for another purpose, and then fired one of them.
There was a tremendous report, that rang in my ears like a hundred thunder volleys, and rolled and reverberated far along, and died away in endless echoes.
I saw a wide expanse of water, black as ink-a Stygian pool; but no rocks were visible, and it seemed as though I had been carried into a subterranean sea.
I loaded the empty barrel and waited.
The flash of light had revealed nothing, yet it had distracted my thoughts, and the work of reloading was an additional distraction.
Anything was better than inaction.
I did not wish to waste my ammunition, yet I thought that an occasional shot might serve some good purpose, if it was only to afford me some relief from despair.
And now, as I sat with the rifle in my hands, I was aware of a sound-new, exciting, different altogether from the murmur of innumerable waters that filled my ears, and in sharp contrast with the droning echoes of the rushing flood.
I heard quick, heavy pantings, as of some great living thing; and with this there came the noise of regular movements in the water, and the foaming and gurgling of waves.
It was as though some living, breathing creature were here, not far away, moving through these midnight waters; and with this discovery there came a new fear-the fear of pursuit.
This new fear aroused me to action.
So I stood up with my rifle and listened, with all my soul in my sense of hearing.
The sounds arose more plainly.
They had come nearer.
They were immediately in front.
I raised my rifle and took aim.
For there full before me I saw, though but for an instant, a tremendous sight.
It was a vast monster, moving in the waters against the stream and toward the boat.
Deprived of the objects of both intellect and emotion, he could not proceed to his work.
"And what good would that do?" said Fritz, the swineherd.
"How shall I find the Baron Conrad to bear a message to him, when our Baron has been looking for him in vain for two days past?"
"I will have nothing to do with it!" said Fritz, and he got up from the wooden block whereon he was sitting and stumped out of the house.
But, then, Katherine had heard him talk in that way before, and knew, in spite of his saying "no," that, sooner or later, he would do as she wished.
Rap tap tap!
Presently, with a click, a little square wicket that pierced the door was opened, and a woman's face peered out through the iron bars.
The one eyed Hans whipped off his leathern cap.
Hans held up a necklace of blue and white beads that glistened like jewels in the sun, and from them hung a gorgeous filigree cross.
"The necklace," said the girl, in a frightened whisper.
"It's thine," said he, "and now wilt thou not help me to a trade?"
Thou hussy!
He settled the cap more firmly upon his head, spat upon his hands, and once more stooping in the fireplace, gave a leap, and up the chimney he went with a rattle of loose mortar and a black trickle of soot.
By and by footsteps sounded outside the door.
Suddenly a shower of mortar came rattling down the chimney.
Bang! the door was clapped to and away they scurried like a flock of frightened rabbits.
But Falada observed everything, and laid it all to heart.
Then she spoke:
Then a puff of wind came and blew Curdken's hat far away, so that he had to run after it; and when he returned she had long finished putting up her golden locks, and he couldn't get any hair; so they watched the geese till it was dark.
"'Oh!
PLEASANT MEADOWS
Beth was soon able to lie on the study sofa all day, amusing herself with the well beloved cats at first, and in time with doll's sewing, which had fallen sadly behind hand.
As Christmas approached, the usual mysteries began to haunt the house, and Jo frequently convulsed the family by proposing utterly impossible or magnificently absurd ceremonies, in honor of this unusually merry Christmas.
The Unquenchables had done their best to be worthy of the name, for like elves they had worked by night and conjured up a comical surprise.
Out in the garden stood a stately snow maiden, crowned with holly, bearing a basket of fruit and flowers in one hand, a great roll of music in the other, a perfect rainbow of an Afghan round her chilly shoulders, and a Christmas carol issuing from her lips on a pink paper streamer.
THE JUNGFRAU TO BETH
Accept a ribbon red, I beg, For Madam Purrer's tail, And ice cream made by lovely Peg, A Mont Blanc in a pail.
Their dearest love my makers laid Within my breast of snow. Accept it, and the Alpine maid, From Laurie and from Jo.
How Beth laughed when she saw it, how Laurie ran up and down to bring in the gifts, and what ridiculous speeches Jo made as she presented them.
"I'm so full of happiness, that if Father was only here, I couldn't hold one drop more," said Beth, quite sighing with contentment as Jo carried her off to the study to rest after the excitement, and to refresh herself with some of the delicious grapes the 'Jungfrau' had sent her.
"I'm sure I am," echoed Amy, poring over the engraved copy of the Madonna and Child, which her mother had given her in a pretty frame.
"Of course I am!" cried Meg, smoothing the silvery folds of her first silk dress, for mr Laurence had insisted on giving it.
Half an hour after everyone had said they were so happy they could only hold one drop more, the drop came.
mrs March was the first to recover herself, and held up her hand with a warning, "Hush! Remember Beth."
But it was too late.
The study door flew open, the little red wrapper appeared on the threshold, joy put strength into the feeble limbs, and Beth ran straight into her father's arms.
It was not at all romantic, but a hearty laugh set everybody straight again, for Hannah was discovered behind the door, sobbing over the fat turkey, which she had forgotten to put down when she rushed up from the kitchen.
As the laugh subsided, mrs March began to thank mr Brooke for his faithful care of her husband, at which mr Brooke suddenly remembered that mr March needed rest, and seizing Laurie, he precipitately retired.
Then the two invalids were ordered to repose, which they did, by both sitting in one big chair and talking hard.
mr March told how he had longed to surprise them, and how, when the fine weather came, he had been allowed by his doctor to take advantage of it, how devoted Brooke had been, and how he was altogether a most estimable and upright young man.
Jo saw and understood the look, and she stalked grimly away to get wine and beef tea, muttering to herself as she slammed the door, "I hate estimable young men with brown eyes!"
The fat turkey was a sight to behold, when Hannah sent him up, stuffed, browned, and decorated.
mr Laurence and his grandson dined with them, also mr Brooke, at whom Jo glowered darkly, to Laurie's infinite amusement.
Two easy chairs stood side by side at the head of the table, in which sat Beth and her father, feasting modestly on chicken and a little fruit.
A sleigh ride had been planned, but the girls would not leave their father, so the guests departed early, and as twilight gathered, the happy family sat together round the fire.
"Just a year ago we were groaning over the dismal Christmas we expected to have.
Do you remember?" asked Jo, breaking a short pause which had followed a long conversation about many things.
"Rather a pleasant year on the whole!" said Meg, smiling at the fire, and congratulating herself on having treated mr Brooke with dignity.
"I'm glad it's over, because we've got you back," whispered Beth, who sat on her father's knee.
But you have got on bravely, and I think the burdens are in a fair way to tumble off very soon," said mr March, looking with fatherly satisfaction at the four young faces gathered round him.
"How do you know?
Did Mother tell you?" asked Jo.
"Not much.
Straws show which way the wind blows, and I've made several discoveries today."
A burnt offering has been made to vanity, this hardened palm has earned something better than blisters, and I'm sure the sewing done by these pricked fingers will last a long time, so much good will went into the stitches.
I'm proud to shake this good, industrious little hand, and hope I shall not soon be asked to give it away."
If Meg had wanted a reward for hours of patient labor, she received it in the hearty pressure of her father's hand and the approving smile he gave her.
"What about Jo?
Her face is rather thin and pale just now, with watching and anxiety, but I like to look at it, for it has grown gentler, and her voice is lower.
She doesn't bounce, but moves quietly, and takes care of a certain little person in a motherly way which delights me.
I rather miss my wild girl, but if I get a strong, helpful, tenderhearted woman in her place, I shall feel quite satisfied.
Jo's keen eyes were rather dim for a minute, and her thin face grew rosy in the firelight as she received her father's praise, feeling that she did deserve a portion of it.
"Now, Beth," said Amy, longing for her turn, but ready to wait.
But recollecting how nearly he had lost her, he held her close, saying tenderly, with her cheek against his own, "I've got you safe, my Beth, and I'll keep you so, please God."
"I observed that Amy took drumsticks at dinner, ran errands for her mother all the afternoon, gave Meg her place tonight, and has waited on every one with patience and good humor.
I made the music for Father, because he likes the verses."
News travels quickly through the Green Forest and over the Green Meadows, for the little people who live there are great gossips.
So it was not surprising that Striped Chipmunk heard all about Old Mother Nature's school.
"What have you come for, Striped Chipmunk?"
"I've come to try to learn.
Will you let me stay, Mother Nature?" replied Striped Chipmunk.
"Of course I'll let you stay," cried Old Mother Nature heartily. "I am glad you have come, especially glad you have come today, because to day's lesson is to be about you and your cousins.
Now, peter Rabbit, what are the differences between Striped Chipmunk and his cousins, the Tree Squirrels?"
"He is smaller than they are," began peter.
"Go on," said she.
"He wears a striped coat," continued peter.
"The stripes are black and yellowish white and run along his sides, a black stripe running down the middle of his back.
The rest of his coat is reddish brown above and light underneath.
His tail is rather thin and flat.
I never see him in the trees, so I guess he can't climb."
"Oh, yes, I can," interrupted Striped Chipmunk.
"I can climb if I want to, and I do sometimes, but prefer the ground."
"Go on, peter," said Old Mother Nature.
"He seems to like old stone walls and rock piles," continued peter, "and he is one of the brightest, liveliest, merriest and the most lovable of all my friends."
"Thank you, peter," said Striped Chipmunk softly.
"That is one of his secrets.
But I know it is in the ground.
"Very good, peter," said Old Mother Nature.
"But there are two very important differences which you have not mentioned.
Striped Chipmunk has a big pocket on the inside of each cheek, while his cousins of the trees have no pockets at all."
"Of course," cried peter.
"I don't see how I came to forget that. I've laughed many times at Striped Chipmunk with those pockets stuffed with nuts or seeds until his head looked three times bigger than it does now.
Those pockets must be very handy."
"They are," replied Striped Chipmunk.
"I couldn't get along without them.
"And the other great difference," said Old Mother Nature, "is that Striped Chipmunk sleeps nearly all winter, just waking up occasionally to pop his head out on a bright day to see how the weather is.
Supposing, Striped Chipmunk, you tell us where and how you make your home."
"I make my home down in the ground," replied Striped Chipmunk.
"I dig a tunnel just big enough to run along comfortably.
Down deep enough to be out of reach of Jack Frost I make a nice little bedroom with a bed of grass and leaves, and I make another little room for a storeroom in which to keep my supply of seeds and nuts. Sometimes I have more than one storeroom.
Also I have some little side tunnels."
"But why is it I never have been able to find the entrance to your tunnel?" asked peter, as full of curiosity as ever.
"Because I have it hidden underneath the stone wall on the edge of the Old Orchard," replied Striped Chipmunk.
"But even then, I should think that all the sand you must have taken out would give your secret away," cried peter.
Striped Chipmunk chuckled happily.
It was a throaty little chuckle, pleasant to hear.
"I looked out for that," said he.
I took it all out through another hole some distance away, a sort of back door, and then closed it up solidly.
If you please, Mother Nature, if I am not a Ground Squirrel, who is?"
He likes best the flat, open country.
He is called Spermophile because that means seed eater, and he lives largely on seeds, especially on grain.
"Seek Seek's family are the true Ground Squirrels.
Please remember that they never should be called Gophers, for they are not Gophers. One of the smallest members of the family is just about your size, Striped Chipmunk, and he also wears stripes, only he has more of them than you have, and they are broken up into little dots.
He is called the Thirteen lined Spermophile.
All the family do this, and all of them sleep through the winter.
They are called Gray Ground Squirrels and sometimes Gray Gophers.
One of the largest of these is the California Ground Squirrel.
He has a big, bushy tail, very like Happy Jack's.
This particular member of the family is quite as much at home among rocks and tree roots as in open ground.
He climbs low trees for fruit and nuts, but prefers to stay on the ground.
Now just remember that the Chipmunks are Rock Squirrels and their cousins the Spermophiles are Ground Squirrels.
Now who of you has seen Timmy the Flying Squirrel lately?"
"I haven't," said Striped Chipmunk.
"I haven't," said Happy Jack.
"I have," spoke up Jumper the Hare.
My, I wish I could fly the way he can!"
Old Mother Nature shook her head disapprovingly.
"Jumper," said she, "what is wrong with your eyes?
When did you ever see Timmy fly?"
"Last night," insisted Jumper stubbornly.
"Oh, no, you didn't," retorted Old Mother Nature.
"You didn't see him fly, for the very good reason that he cannot fly any more than you can.
You saw him simply jump.
Just remember that the only animals in this great land who can fly are the Bats.
"When he's flying, I mean jumping, he looks as if he had wings," insisted Jumper stubbornly.
"That is simply because I have given him a fold of skin between the front and hind leg on each side," explained Old Mother Nature. "When he jumps he stretches his legs out flat, and that stretches out those two folds of skin until they look almost like wings. This is the reason he can sail so far when he jumps from a high place.
You've seen a bird, after flapping its wings to get going, sail along with them outstretched and motionless.
Timmy does the same thing, only he gets going by jumping.
His tail helps him to keep his balance.
If there is anything in the way, he can steer himself around it.
When he reaches the tree he is jumping for he shoots up a little way and lands on the trunk not far above the ground.
Timmy likes the night, especially the early evening, and doesn't like the light of day."
"How big is he?" asked Happy Jack, and looked a little sheepish as if he were a wee bit ashamed of not being acquainted with one of his own cousins.
"He is, if anything, a little smaller than Striped Chipmunk," replied Old Mother Nature.
His coat is a soft yellowish brown above; beneath he is all white.
He has very large, dark, soft eyes, especially suited for seeing at night.
Then, he is very lively and dearly loves to play.
By nature he is gentle and lovable."
"Does he eat nuts like his cousins?" asked peter Rabbit.
"He certainly does," replied Old Mother Nature.
"Also he eats grubs and insects.
He dearly loves a fat beetle.
He likes meat when he can get it."
"Where does he make his home?" peter inquired.
He makes a comfortable nest of bark lining, grass, and moss, or any other soft material he can find.
Occasionally he builds an outside nest high up in a fork in the branches of a tree.
He likes to get into old buildings."
"Does he have many enemies?" asked Happy Jack.
"The same enemies the rest of you have," replied Old Mother Nature. "But the one he has most reason to fear is Hooty the Owl, and that is the one you have least reason to fear, because Hooty seldom hunts by day."
"Does he sleep all winter?" piped up Striped Chipmunk.
"Not as you do," said Old Mother Nature.
"In very cold weather he sleeps, but if he happens to be living where the weather does not get very cold, he is active all the year around.
Now I guess this is enough about the Squirrel family."
"You've forgotten Johnny Chuck," cried peter.
"So I have," said she.
"That will never do, never in the world.
Johnny and his relatives, the Marmots, certainly cannot be overlooked.
We will take them for our lesson to morrow.
INTRODUCTION
In former times every woman who gave birth to a child or passed through a miscarriage was exposed to grave danger of infection or child bed fever; but at present-thanks to the recognition of the bacterial origin of the disease and of its identity with wound infection-this danger can be practically eliminated by the rigid observance of surgical cleanliness and aseptic technique.
Furthermore, a careful examination some weeks before the expected date of confinement enables us to recognize the existence of abnormal presentations and of disproportion between the size of the mother's pelvis and that of the child's head.
Timely recognition of such conditions makes appropriate treatment possible and practically insures a successful outcome; while tardy recognition is frequently followed by disastrous results.
These few examples give some idea of the benefits of prophylaxis in the practice of obstetrics.
Prospective mothers should understand not only that there is an advantage in taking such precautions, but that they may be risking their lives, or at least their future well-being, unless they insist upon competent medical attention.
It is true, of course, that pregnancy and childbirth are generally normal processes, but they are not always so.
Fortunately, most of the abnormalities give timely warning of their occurrence, and in most instances may be relieved by comparatively simple measures; or, if not, they afford indications for treatment which should lead to a happy termination. The recognition of the existence of such conditions, however, is not always easy, and their ideal treatment requires careful training and sometimes the utmost nicety of judgment.
Consequently, if prospective mothers wish to be assured of the best care, they should be cautious in the choice of their medical attendant.
As the ordinary layman has no means of determining the real qualifications of a physician, the choice should not be made upon the advice of casual acquaintances; but, instead, the family physician should be consulted, who, should he feel unwilling to assume the responsibility of the case, will be able to recommend a thoroughly competent substitute.
From my own experience as a teacher and consultant, I state without hesitation that in no other branch of medicine or surgery are graver emergencies encountered than in certain obstetrical complications whose treatment involves the greatest responsibility and requires the highest order of ability to insure a successful outcome for the mother and her child.
For these reasons a physician should be chosen only after mature deliberation, and his services should be esteemed much more highly than is usually the case.
In order that the principles of prevention may receive their fullest application during pregnancy, labor, and the lying in period, it is also advisable that intelligent women should possess some knowledge of the Reproductive Process in human beings.
This information is imparted by Doctor Slemons' book, which I can thoroughly recommend to prospective mothers.
The subject matter has been carefully chosen, and the author has wisely refrained from giving advice with regard to treatment which can be satisfactorily directed only after careful study by a physician.
At the same time he has given a clear account of the physiology of pregnancy and labor, and has laid down sound rules for the guidance of the patient.
One of the most important facts emphasized by Doctor Slemons is the value of medical supervision for several weeks after the child is born; this precaution contributes greatly toward a rapid and complete convalescence.
During the lying in period the physician should supervise the care of the mother and the child, should insist upon the necessity for maternal nursing, and should keep the mother under observation until perfectly normal conditions are regained.
Although there have been notable advances in the science and in the art of obstetrics since the middle of the eighteenth century, a great many fundamental facts must yet be learned.
For example, we are almost totally ignorant of the stimulus which causes the mother to fall into labor approximately two hundred eighty days after the last normal menstruation.
Firstly, that the advance of the science of obstetrics, and consequently improvements in its practice, must depend greatly upon the cooperation of intelligent women.
They must come to realize that they will secure the best treatment only as they demand the highest standard of excellence from their attendants; and they can aid in securing this for their poorer sisters and their children by interesting themselves in obstetrical charities.
Secondly, they must realize that real progress in the science of obstetrics can be expected to proceed only from well equipped clinics connected with strong universities, and in charge of thoroughly trained and broad minded men.
As yet such institutions scarcely exist in this country.
Women who are anxious to promote the welfare of their sex can find no better way of doing so than by bringing this need to the attention of wealthy men interested in philanthropy and education.
Furthermore, they should bear in mind that most of our important discoveries would not have been made had animal experimentation not been available, as it is solely by this means that modern surgical and obstetrical technique has been brought to its present degree of perfection; and further progress can scarcely be expected without its aid.
Note, Women who have captivated men.
CHAPTER one
THE GUN CLUB
Simple tradesmen jumped their counters to become extemporized captains, colonels, and generals, without having ever passed the School of Instruction at West Point; nevertheless; they quickly rivaled their compeers of the old continent, and, like them, carried off victories by dint of lavish expenditure in ammunition, money, and men.
But the point in which the Americans singularly distanced the Europeans was in the science of gunnery.
In point of grazing, plunging, oblique, or enfilading, or point blank firing, the English, French, and Prussians have nothing to learn; but their cannon, howitzers, and mortars are mere pocket pistols compared with the formidable engines of the American artillery.
This fact need surprise no one.
Now when an American has an idea, he directly seeks a second American to share it.
Given four, they name a keeper of records, and the office is ready for work; five, they convene a general meeting, and the club is fully constituted.
The inventor of a new cannon associated himself with the caster and the borer.
Thus was formed the nucleus of the "Gun Club." In a single month after its formation it numbered one thousand eight hundred thirty three effective members and thirty thousand five hundred sixty five corresponding members.
The Gun Club once founded, it is easy to conceive the result of the inventive genius of the Americans.
Their military weapons attained colossal proportions, and their projectiles, exceeding the prescribed limits, unfortunately occasionally cut in two some unoffending pedestrians.
Some few of the more advanced and inveterate theorists set themselves again to work upon calculations regarding the laws of projectiles.
They reverted invariably to gigantic shells and howitzers of unparalleled caliber.
"This is horrible!" said Tom Hunter one evening, while rapidly carbonizing his wooden legs in the fireplace of the smoking room; "nothing to do! nothing to look forward to!
When again shall the guns arouse us in the morning with their delightful reports?"
"It was delightful once upon a time! One invented a gun, and hardly was it cast, when one hastened to try it in the face of the enemy!
But now the generals are gone back to their counters; and in place of projectiles, they despatch bales of cotton.
"Fact!" replied he.
"Still, what is the use of so many studies worked out, so many difficulties vanquished?
It's mere waste of time!
"Well?"
"And why not?" demanded the colonel.
"Because their ideas of progress in the Old World are contrary to our American habits of thought.
"Undoubtedly," replied Tom Hunter, stamping his crutch with fury.
"Bah!" growled Bilsby between the four teeth which the war had left him; "that will never do!"
"By Jove!" cried j t Maston, "he mustn't count on my vote at the next election!"
"In that case we will accompany you," cried the others.
Matters were in this unfortunate condition, and the club was threatened with approaching dissolution, when an unexpected circumstance occurred to prevent so deplorable a catastrophe.
On the morrow after this conversation every member of the association received a sealed circular couched in the following terms:
BALTIMORE, october third. The president of the Gun Club has the honor to inform his colleagues that, at the meeting of the fifth instant, he will bring before them a communication of an extremely interesting nature.
CHAPTER two
PRESIDENT BARBICANE'S COMMUNICATION
They overflowed into the adjoining rooms, down the narrow passages, into the outer courtyards.
There they ran against the vulgar herd who pressed up to the doors, each struggling to reach the front ranks, all eager to learn the nature of the important communication of President Barbicane; all pushing, squeezing, crushing with that perfect freedom of action which is so peculiar to the masses when educated in ideas of "self government."
On that evening a stranger who might have chanced to be in Baltimore could not have gained admission for love or money into the great hall.
That was reserved exclusively for resident or corresponding members; no one else could possibly have obtained a place; and the city magnates, municipal councilors, and "select men" were compelled to mingle with the mere townspeople in order to catch stray bits of news from the interior.
Nevertheless the vast hall presented a curious spectacle. Its immense area was singularly adapted to the purpose. Lofty pillars formed of cannon, superposed upon huge mortars as a base, supported the fine ironwork of the arches, a perfect piece of cast iron lacework.
Models of cannon, bronze castings, sights covered with dents, plates battered by the shots of the Gun Club, assortments of rammers and sponges, chaplets of shells, wreaths of projectiles, garlands of howitzers- in short, all the apparatus of the artillerist, enchanted the eye by this wonderful arrangement and induced a kind of belief that their real purpose was ornamental rather than deadly.
At the further end of the saloon the president, assisted by four secretaries, occupied a large platform.
His chair, supported by a carved gun carriage, was modeled upon the ponderous proportions of a thirty two-inch mortar.
It was pointed at an angle of ninety degrees, and suspended upon truncheons, so that the president could balance himself upon it as upon a rocking chair, a very agreeable fact in the very hot weather.
Bold in his conceptions, he contributed powerfully to the progress of that arm and gave an immense impetus to experimental researches.
The meeting felt that the president was now approaching the critical point, and redoubled their attention accordingly.
"For some months past, my brave colleagues," continued Barbicane, "I have been asking myself whether, while confining ourselves to our own particular objects, we could not enter upon some grand experiment worthy of the nineteenth century; and whether the progress of artillery science would not enable us to carry it out to a successful issue.
A thrill of excitement ran through the meeting.
"There is no one among you, my brave colleagues, who has not seen the Moon, or, at least, heard speak of it.
"Three cheers for the Moon!" roared the Gun Club, with one voice.
Selenographic charts have been constructed with a perfection which equals, if it does not even surpass, that of our terrestrial maps.
Photography has given us proofs of the incomparable beauty of our satellite; all is known regarding the moon which mathematical science, astronomy, geology, and optics can learn about her.
But up to the present moment no direct communication has been established with her."
"Permit me," he continued, "to recount to you briefly how certain ardent spirits, starting on imaginary journeys, have penetrated the secrets of our satellite.
He then distinctly perceived caverns frequented by hippopotami, green mountains bordered by golden lace work, sheep with horns of ivory, a white species of deer and inhabitants with membranous wings, like bats.
This journey, like all previous ones, was purely imaginary; still, it was the work of a popular American author- I mean Edgar Poe!"
"Cheers for Edgar Poe!" roared the assemblage, electrified by their president's words.
"I have now enumerated," said Barbicane, "the experiments which I call purely paper ones, and wholly insufficient to establish serious relations with the Queen of the Night.
Nevertheless, I am bound to add that some practical geniuses have attempted to establish actual communication with her.
Thus, a few days ago, a German geometrician proposed to send a scientific expedition to the steppes of Siberia.
It is reserved for the practical genius of Americans to establish a communication with the sidereal world.
The means of arriving thither are simple, easy, certain, infallible- and that is the purpose of my present proposal."
There was not a single person in the whole audience who was not overcome, carried away, lifted out of himself by the speaker's words!
As soon as the excitement had partially subsided, Barbicane resumed his speech in a somewhat graver voice.
At these words a murmur of amazement escaped from a thousand panting chests; then succeeded a moment of perfect silence, resembling that profound stillness which precedes the bursting of a thunderstorm.
In point of fact, a thunderstorm did peal forth, but it was the thunder of applause, or cries, and of uproar which made the very hall tremble.
The president attempted to speak, but could not.
It was fully ten minutes before he could make himself heard.
"I have looked at the question in all its bearings, I have resolutely attacked it, and by incontrovertible calculations I find that a projectile endowed with an initial velocity of twelve thousand yards per second, and aimed at the moon, must necessarily reach it.
CHAPTER three
EFFECT OF THE PRESIDENT'S COMMUNICATION
It was a scene of indescribable confusion and uproar.
People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary.
In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.
The Yankees all turned their gaze toward her resplendent orb, kissed their hands, called her by all kinds of endearing names.
About two a m, however, the excitement began to subside. President Barbicane reached his house, bruised, crushed, and squeezed almost to a mummy.
What kind of spectacle would its hidden hemisphere present to our terrestrial spheroid?
From that day forward Impey Barbicane became one of the greatest citizens of the United States, a kind of Washington of science. A single trait of feeling, taken from many others, will serve to show the point which this homage of a whole people to a single individual attained.
"Paper?"
"Yes, paper.
I'm going to have that paper."
"Look here, I give you one more chance," he squeaked; "if you don't-"
His manner changed.
Here, Sergeant!"
I knew what that meant.
"A small paper," he said eagerly.
The woman looked at me.
I knew that kind of look-I'd seen it at the Cruelty.
Me?
What?
Risk!
"It's been disagreeable but I'm obliged to you for-why, where's my purse!
I looked at her with respect; it was both real and feigned.
"I must have lost it."
Oh, that admirable woman!
And still I lingered.
But there was nothing for it.
Oh, we were friends, we two!
CHAPTER eight.
Although the pills were but twenty five cents per box, they were soon sold to such a great extent, that tons of huge cases filled with the "purely vegetable pill" were sent from the new and extensive manufactory every week.
"The laws of life are written upon the face of Nature.
He was delighted.
"Oh!" I replied, "I always bought my pills at the drug stores."
ZIP AT THE CANDY PULL
That evening the doctor had no calls to make, so Zip was left to amuse himself as best he could.
Looking up, he saw that the house was lighted more than was usual, and he knew right away that they must be having a little dance or a children's party of some kind.
Just then he thought he got a whiff of boiling molasses.
He stuck his nose up in the air and gave a long sniff.
Yes, it was molasses he smelled!
"They are having a candy pull.
That's what is going on!
But alas!
He was so busy gazing up at the lighted windows to see what was going on inside the house, that he neglected to look where he was stepping, and the first thing he knew, he was standing with all four feet in a pan of hot molasses candy.
The candy was just in that state of cooling when the top is a little hard and the bottom is soft and sticky.
So when he tried to lift his feet, the candy pulled up from the bottom of the pan and made long, stringy ends, but did not leave his feet.
Instead it got between his toes and held him still faster.
He tried to bite it off, but instead of coming off, it only stuck to his teeth and he found himself sticking to the pan with his mouth as well as his feet.
Indeed, he was held securely by the sticky, stringy candy.
Just then he thought he heard the children coming to see if their sweets were cool.
Yes, they were surely coming!
He could not stand it to have these children he saw every day find him in such a fix.
He would never hear the last of it.
So he made a frantic effort to loosen himself.
In doing this he pulled backwards so far that his feet slipped somehow, and he sat down in the candy.
For his four feet, mouth, one ear and tail were all sticking to the pan of candy.
As the children began to come down the back steps, he gave one yelp, doubled himself up and began to roll, so that what the children saw was a big ball of molasses candy rolling down the sloping walk.
All they could see in the semi darkness was the candy, for Zip was too balled up to show a bit of dog sticking out of the soft mess.
The children ran after it, screaming with laughter, but when they caught up to the rolling ball and discovered their well-known, mischievous Zip rolled up so tight he was helpless, they clapped their hands with delight. He looked so crestfallen and funny that they forgave him on the spot for the loss of their candy.
"I know the best way to get the sticky stuff off," said Helen Hardway, the little girl who was giving the party.
"Let's put him in the bath tub and soak it off."
"Just the very thing!" one of the boys replied.
"Wait till I get something to wrap him in so I won't get all stuck up with the candy."
On hearing this, Zip began to struggle and squirm, for he had visions of hot water and soapsuds in his eyes, with each one of the children feeling it was their duty to give him an extra scrub.
"Here, you Zip, keep still, or you'll slip out of the apron you're wrapped in and get my best suit all sticky," called the little boy who held him in his arms and was carrying him up to the bathroom.
One of the boys gave it a jerk to loosen it, but sad to relate, he gave too vigorous a pull and Zip dropped from the boy's arms, not into the tub, but at one side and by a mighty effort he gave himself two rolls which brought him to the head of the stairs.
Another roll sent him tumbling bumpety bump down the long flight that led to the kitchen.
The sudden appearance of a hamper apparently on legs coming toward her, surprised her, but nothing like the queer thing that was rolling about her feet, and which she could not see for the big tray in her hands.
She could not seem to escape it, and finally she stumbled and fell, sending the glasses of delicious lemonade flying in all directions.
Hearing a noise on the back stairs, as if the house was falling, mrs Hardway went to see what the trouble was, and opened the kitchen door just in time to receive a full glass of lemonade squarely on the chest.
When the waitress stumbled, she fell on Zip, pinning him under her.
In his roll down the stairs, he had lost some of the candy, so that now his mouth and nose were free, though he was minus a tooth and several of his long smeller whiskers.
Now he began to howl as if being killed.
This brought more of the guests to the spot, and you would have laughed could you have seen their faces when first they peered into the kitchen, which looked as if a cyclone had struck it.
A few feet from the door was the maid, sitting with limbs outspread, too dazed to move, while from under the corner of her skirt rolled a big, sticky ball of some kind that howled as it rolled.
Beyond him was an overturned hamper of soiled clothes, with stockings, collars, sheets and petticoats spilling out of it.
At the other end of the room stood mrs Hardway, wiping the lemonade off her dress, while all over the place were slices of lemon and pieces of fruit and Maraschino cherries.
He was so afraid of being drowned before the water would soak off the candy and when the children tried to pull it off it nearly killed him with pain, for it took all the little fine hairs of his coat with it.
The window of the bathroom was open and the doctor, coming out on his front porch to look at the sky before retiring, heard Zip howling somewhere across the street.
He was crying in such a pitiful, frightened manner that the doctor knew he must be fast somewhere or hurt so he could not get home.
Consequently he hurried across the street to see where his pet was, with the worried Tabby close at his heels.
The doctor made the circuit of the house and stable yard but could find no Zip.
He knocked repeatedly but no one answered.
As he still heard Zip howling and several people were talking all at once, he made bold to open the door and step in.
What he saw you already know.
As by this time the children had started to bathe Zip, the doctor was told to go right upstairs.
When he appeared in the door all the children stopped laughing and stepped back to give him a chance to see Zip.
And this is what he saw.
Just one of Zip's eyes stuck out of a hole where the candy had dropped off, and his poor little tail stuck out like a handle on the other side of the ball.
That was all that could be seen of Zip at that moment, for in his numerous rolls, the candy had spread all over him until he was no longer a dog with legs but just one round ball of molasses candy.
The children had never thought that the poor dog could not move his head to keep out of the water.
Now the doctor hurriedly took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and in a jiffy had Zip and the molasses ball in his hands and was holding it so that the water could not get to Zip's head.
Then with one hand he gently threw the water upon the candy until it began to loosen and fall off.
First he released the little dog's head, which had been bent down between his fore legs.
As the candy began to loosen and drop off, first one black ear stood up and then the other, and last the little legs began to shoot out.
All this made the children laugh to see what appeared to be a big ball of candy develop into a little dog.
At last when Zip was entirely clean and had been wrapped in a big bath towel to dry, Doctor Elsworth apologized to Helen for his little dog spoiling her candy pull.
But she declared that he had given them more fun than if he had not come over, and the molasses had cooled and they had had a regular candy pull.
Besides, the doctor had been her family physician for years, and they were all very, very fond of him as well as of Zip.
It was hard to think of the doctor without Zip, as they were always together.
THE Sunday was a bright Sunday in autumn, clear and cool, when early in the morning Sissy and Rachael met, to walk in the country.
Though the green landscape was blotted here and there with heaps of coal, it was green elsewhere, and there were trees to see, and there were larks singing (though it was Sunday), and there were pleasant scents in the air, and all was over arched by a bright blue sky.
Under their feet, the grass was fresh; beautiful shadows of branches flickered upon it, and speckled it; hedgerows were luxuriant; everything was at peace.
Engines at pits' mouths, and lean old horses that had worn the circle of their daily labour into the ground, were alike quiet; wheels had ceased for a short space to turn; and the great wheel of earth seemed to revolve without the shocks and noises of another time.
They walked on across the fields and down the shady lanes, sometimes getting over a fragment of a fence so rotten that it dropped at a touch of the foot, sometimes passing near a wreck of bricks and beams overgrown with grass, marking the site of deserted works.
They followed paths and tracks, however slight.
They had seen no one, near or distant, for a long time; and the solitude remained unbroken.
As Sissy said it, her eyes were attracted by another of those rotten fragments of fence upon the ground.
She got up to look at it.
Here are footsteps too.—O Rachael!'
She ran back, and caught her round the neck.
Rachael had already started up.
'What is the matter?'
'I don't know.
There is a hat lying in the grass.' They went forward together.
Rachael took it up, shaking from head to foot.
She broke into a passion of tears and lamentations: Stephen Blackpool was written in his own hand on the inside.
'O the poor lad, the poor lad!
He has been made away with.
'Is there—has the hat any blood upon it?' Sissy faltered.
They were afraid to look; but they did examine it, and found no mark of violence, inside or out.
They looked fearfully about them, without moving, but could see nothing more.
'Rachael,' Sissy whispered, 'I will go on a little by myself.'
She had unclasped her hand, and was in the act of stepping forward, when Rachael caught her in both arms with a scream that resounded over the wide landscape.
Before them, at their very feet, was the brink of a black ragged chasm hidden by the thick grass.
'O, my good Lord!
Down there!' At first this, and her terrific screams, were all that could be got from Rachael, by any tears, by any prayers, by any representations, by any means.
'Rachael, dear Rachael, good Rachael, for the love of Heaven, not these dreadful cries!
Think of Stephen, think of Stephen, think of Stephen!'
By an earnest repetition of this entreaty, poured out in all the agony of such a moment, Sissy at last brought her to be silent, and to look at her with a tearless face of stone.
'Rachael, Stephen may be living.
You wouldn't leave him lying maimed at the bottom of this dreadful place, a moment, if you could bring help to him?'
'No, no, no!'
'Don't stir from here, for his sake!
Let me go and listen.'
She shuddered to approach the pit; but she crept towards it on her hands and knees, and called to him as loud as she could call.
She did this, twenty, thirty times.
The wide prospect, so beautiful in its stillness but a few minutes ago, almost carried despair to her brave heart, as she rose and looked all round her, seeing no help.
'Rachael, we must lose not a moment.
Think of Stephen, think of Stephen!'
She knew by Rachael's face that she might trust her now.
Don't stop for breath.
One of the men was in a drunken slumber, but on his comrade's shouting to him that a man had fallen down the Old Hell Shaft, he started out to a pool of dirty water, put his head in it, and came back sober.
Then a horse was found; and she got another man to ride for life or death to the railroad, and send a message to Louisa, which she wrote and gave him.
In the midst of this, Rachael returned; and with her party there was a surgeon, who brought some wine and medicines.
There being now people enough present to impede the work, the sobered man put himself at the head of the rest, or was put there by the general consent, and made a large ring round the Old Hell Shaft, and appointed men to keep it.
It was five o'clock in the afternoon of the bright autumnal Sunday, before a candle was sent down to try the air, while three or four rough faces stood crowded close together, attentively watching it: the man at the windlass lowering as they were told.
The candle was brought up again, feebly burning, and then some water was cast in.
The signal was given and the windlass stopped, with abundant rope to spare.
But the surgeon who held the watch, declared five minutes not to have elapsed yet, and sternly admonished them to keep silence.
The rope came in tight and strained; and ring after ring was coiled upon the barrel of the windlass, and all eyes were fastened on the pit.
The sobered man was brought up and leaped out briskly on the grass.
When he said 'Alive!' a great shout arose and many eyes had tears in them.
'But he's hurt very bad,' he added, as soon as he could make himself heard again.
'Where's doctor?
He's hurt so very bad, sir, that we donno how to get him up.'
As these were made, they were hung upon an arm of the pitman who had last come up, with instructions how to use them: and as he stood, shown by the light he carried, leaning his powerful loose hand upon one of the poles, and sometimes glancing down the pit, and sometimes glancing round upon the people, he was not the least conspicuous figure in the scene.
It was dark now, and torches were kindled.
It appeared from the little this man said to those about him, which was quickly repeated all over the circle, that the lost man had fallen upon a mass of crumbled rubbish with which the pit was half choked up, and that his fall had been further broken by some jagged earth at the side.
He had come straight away from his work, on being written to, and had walked the whole journey; and was on his way to mr Bounderby's country house after dark, when he fell.
The Old Hell Shaft, the pitman said, with a curse upon it, was worthy of its bad name to the last; for though Stephen could speak now, he believed it would soon be found to have mangled the life out of him.
Every one waited with his grasp set, and his body bent down to the work, ready to reverse and wind in.
At length the signal was given, and all the ring leaned forward.
That gently done, he called to him Rachael and Sissy.
They gave him drink, moistened his face with water, and administered some drops of cordial and wine.
A muddle!
He would'n ha' suspect'n me.
But look up yonder, Rachael!
Look aboove!'
'It ha' shined upon me,' he said reverently, 'in my pain and trouble down below.
But in our judgments, like as in our doins, we mun bear and forbear.
'Shall I bring him to you?'
Louisa returned with her father.
This I leave to yo.'
mr Gradgrind was troubled and asked how?
We may walk toogether t'night, my dear!'
'I will hold thy hand, and keep beside thee, Stephen, all the way.'
'Bless thee!
Will soombody be pleased to coover my face!'
Chapter forty six.
Then, throwing himself back in his carriage, Danglars called out to his coachman, in a voice that might be heard across the road, "To the Chamber of Deputies."
Ali," cried he, striking at the same time on the brazen gong.
Ali appeared.
"Summon Bertuccio," said the count.
"I did," replied the count.
"Then how comes it," said Monte Cristo with a frown, "that, when I desired you to purchase for me the finest pair of horses to be found in Paris, there is another pair, fully as fine as mine, not in my stables?" At the look of displeasure, added to the angry tone in which the count spoke, Ali turned pale and held down his head.
Then offer him double that sum; a banker never loses an opportunity of doubling his capital."
"At five o'clock," replied the count.
"I beg your excellency's pardon," interposed the steward in a deprecating manner, "for venturing to observe that it is already two o'clock."
The steward entered.
"And the yacht."
"And the steamboat?"
I took the trouble this morning to call on the pretended count-if he were a real count he wouldn't be so rich. But, would you believe it, 'He was not receiving.' So the master of Monte Cristo gives himself airs befitting a great millionaire or a capricious beauty.
But," pursued Danglars with one of his sinister smiles, "an order for unlimited credit calls for something like caution on the part of the banker to whom that order is given.
'They laugh best who laugh last!'"
The count bowed.
Danglars felt the irony and compressed his lips.
"So much so," replied Monte Cristo, "that while you call yourself baron you are not willing to call anybody else count."
"Indeed?"
"By what right, sir?"
"Whatever you say, my dear count; I am at your orders."
"Oh, my dear count," exclaimed Danglars, "I never for an instant entertained such a feeling towards you."
"How would you like to have it?
in gold, silver, or notes?"
If you will permit me, I shall be happy to show you my picture gallery, composed entirely of works by the ancient masters-warranted as such.
Not a modern picture among them.
"And alone?"
"Ah, ha, you are acquainted with the young viscount, are you?"
It will be recollected by the reader that peter, before he set out on his tour, took every possible precaution to guard against the danger of disturbances in his dominions during his absence.
The Princess Sophia was closely confined in her convent.
Moscow itself was garrisoned with troops selected expressly with reference to their supposed fidelity to his interests, and the men who were to command them, as well as the great civil officers to whom the administration of the government was committed during his absence, were appointed on the same principle.
But, notwithstanding all these precautions, peter did not feel entirely safe.
At such times he would utter most dreadful imprecations against those who should dare to oppose him, and would work himself up into such a fury as to give those who conversed with him an exceedingly unfavorable opinion of his temper and character.
The ugly aspect which his countenance and demeanor exhibited at such times was greatly aggravated by a nervous affection of the head and face which attacked him, particularly when he was in a passion, and which produced convulsive twitches of the muscles that drew his head by jerks to one side, and distorted his face in a manner that was dreadful to behold.
However this may have been, the affection seemed to increase as he grew older, and as the attacks of it were most decided and violent when he was in a passion, they had the effect, in connection with his coarse and dreadful language and violent demeanor, to make him appear at such times more like some ugly monster of fiction than like a man.
The result, in respect to the conduct of his enemies during his absence, was what he feared.
After he had been gone away for some months they began to conspire against him.
Their plan was, first, to take possession of the city by means of the Guards, who were to be recalled for this purpose from their distant posts, and by their assistance to murder all the foreigners.
In executing this plan, negotiations were first cautiously opened with the Guards, and they readily acceded to the proposals made to them.
The government-that is, the regency that peter had left in charge-sent out deputies, who attempted to pacify them, but could not succeed.
The Guards insisted that they would go with their complaints to Moscow.
The number of men was about ten thousand.
They pretended that they were only going to the city to represent their case themselves directly to the government, and then to march back again in a peaceable manner.
They could not depend upon the rumors which came to them at so great a distance, and they were determined to inform themselves on the spot whether he were alive or dead, and when he was coming home.
The deputies returned with all speed to Moscow, and reported that the Guards were on their march in full strength toward the city.
The whole city was thrown into a state of consternation.
Many of the leading families, anticipating serious trouble, moved away.
Others packed up and concealed their valuables.
The government, too, though not yet suspecting the real design of the Guards in the movement which they were making, were greatly alarmed.
General Gordon came up with the rebels about forty miles from Moscow.
But the Guards refused to be satisfied.
They were determined, they said, to march to Moscow.
They wished to ascertain for themselves whether peter was dead or alive, and if alive, what had become of him.
They therefore were going on, and, if General Gordon and his troops attempted to oppose them, they would fight it out and see which was the strongest.
In civil commotions of this kind occurring in any of the ancient non Protestant countries in Europe, it is always a question of the utmost moment which side the Church and the clergy espouse.
It is true that the Church and the clergy do not fight themselves, and so do not add any thing to the physical strength of the party which they befriend, but they add enormously to its moral strength, that is, to its confidence and courage.
But if they have the Church and the clergy on their side, this state of things is quite changed.
The sanction of religion-the thought that they are fighting in the cause of God and of duty, nerves their arms, and gives them that confidence in the result which is almost essential to victory.
It was so in this case.
It is not that they are really opposed to improvement itself for its own sake, but that they are so afraid of change.
They call themselves Conservatives, and wish to preserve every thing as it is.
They hate the process of pulling down.
Now, if a thing is good, it is better, of course, to preserve it; but, on the other hand, if it is bad, it is better that it should be pulled down.
If it is good, let it stand.
If it is bad, let it be destroyed.
In the case of Peter's proposed improvements and reforms the Church and the clergy were Conservatives of the most determined character.
It was this sympathy on the part of the clergy which gave the officers and soldiers of the Guards their courage and confidence in daring to persist in their march to Moscow in defiance of the army of General Gordon, brought out to oppose them.
The two armies approached each other.
General Gordon, as is usual in such cases, ordered a battery of artillery which he had brought up in the road before the Guards to fire, but he directed that the guns should be pointed so high that the balls should go over the heads of the enemy. His object was to intimidate them.
But the effect was the contrary.
They were fighting for the honor of his cause and for the defense of his holy religion, and they might rely upon it that he would not suffer them to be harmed.
But these assurances of the priests proved, unfortunately for the poor Guards, to be entirely unfounded.
A furious battle followed, in which the Guards were entirely defeated.
Two or three thousand of them were killed, and all the rest were surrounded and made prisoners.
After enduring their tortures as long as human nature could bear them, they confessed that the movement was a concerted one, made in connection with a conspiracy within the city, and that the object was to subvert the present government, and to liberate the Princess Sophia and place her upon the throne.
It was in this state of the affair that the tidings of what had occurred reached peter in Vienna, as is related in the last chapter.
He immediately set out on his return to Moscow in a state of rage and fury against the rebels that it would be impossible to describe.
From the agony of these sufferers he extorted the names of innumerable victims, who, as fast as they were named, were seized and put to death.
It is said that peter took such a savage delight in these punishments, that he executed many of the victims with his own hands.
He took a drink of brandy after each execution while the officers were bringing forward the next man.
This story is almost too horrible to be believed, but, unfortunately, it comports too well with the general character which peter has always sustained in the opinion of mankind in respect to the desperate and reckless cruelty to which he could be aroused under the influence of intoxication and anger.
About two thousand of the Guards were beheaded.
They covered more than an acre of ground.
Here they were allowed to lie all the remainder of the winter, as long, in fact, as the flesh continued frozen, and then, when the spring came on, they were thrown together into a deep ditch, dug to receive them, and thus were buried.
As for the Princess Sophia, she was still in the convent where peter had placed her, the conspirators not having reached the point of liberating her before their plot was discovered.
peter, however, caused the three authors of the address, which was to have been made to Sophia, calling upon her to assume the crown, to be sent to the convent, and there hung before Sophia's windows.
Such were the horrible means by which peter attempted to strike terror into his subjects, and to put down the spirit of conspiracy and rebellion.
The rebellion was completely suppressed, and all open opposition to the progress of the Czar's proposed improvements and reforms ceased.
The Princess Sophia, worn out with the agitations and dangers through which she had passed, and crushed in spirit by the dreadful scenes to which her brother had exposed her, now determined to withdraw wholly from the scene.
She took the veil in the convent where she was confined, and went as a nun into the cloisters with the other sisters.
The name that she assumed was Marpha.
Of course, all her ambitious aspirations were now forever extinguished, and the last gleam of earthly hope faded away from her mind.
CHAPTER ten
So he set a train of negotiations on foot for making a long truce with the Turks, not wishing to have two wars on his hands at the same time. When he had accomplished this object, he formed a league with the kingdoms of Poland and Denmark to make war upon Sweden.
So exactly were all his plans laid, that the war with Sweden was declared on the very next day after the truce of the Turks was concluded.
The King of Sweden at this time was Charles the twelfth.
Narva, as appears by the map, is situated on the sea coast, near the frontier-much nearer than Riga.
He also calculated that when Narva was in his hands the way would be open for him to advance on Riga.
Indeed, at the same time while he was commencing the siege of Narva, his ally, the King of Poland, advanced from his own dominions to Riga, and was now prepared to attack that city at the same time that the Czar was besieging Narva.
The only cause of quarrel which peter pretended to have against the king was the uncivil treatment which he had received at the hands of the Governor of Riga in refusing to allow him to see the fortifications when he passed through that city on his tour.
Still, the negotiations had not been closed, and the government of Sweden had no idea that the misunderstanding would lead to war.
The preparations were made with great dispatch, and the fleet sailed for Riga.
The news, too, of this war occasioned great dissatisfaction among the governments of western Europe.
The government of Holland was particularly displeased, on account of the interference and interruption which the war would occasion to all their commerce in the Baltic.
Riga was a very important commercial port, and there were a great many wealthy Dutch merchants there, whose interests the Dutch government were very anxious to protect.
Augustus, for that was the name of the King of Poland, finding that now, since so great a force had arrived to succor and strengthen the place, there was no hope for success in any of his operations against it, concluded to make a virtue of necessity, and so he drew off his army, and sent word to the Dutch government that he did so in compliance with their wishes.
The King of Sweden had, of course, nothing now to do but to advance from Riga to Narva and attack the army of the Czar.
The person whom the Czar had made commander in chief at the siege of Narva was a German officer.
His name was General Croy.
General Croy had been many weeks before Narva at the time when the King of Sweden arrived at Riga, but he had made little progress in taking the town.
The place was strongly fortified, and the garrison, though comparatively weak, defended it with great bravery.
Although his army was very much smaller than that of the Russians, he immediately set out on his march to Narva; but, instead of moving along the regular roads, and so falling into the ambuscade which the Russians had laid for him, he turned off into back and circuitous by ways, so as to avoid the snare altogether.
It was in the dead of winter, and the roads which he followed, besides being rough and intricate, were obstructed with snow, and the Russians had thought little of them, so that at last, when the Swedish army arrived at their advanced posts, they were taken entirely by surprise.
The advanced posts were driven in, and the Swedes pressed on, the Russians flying before them, and carrying confusion to the posts in the rear.
The surprise of the Russians, and the confusion consequent upon it, were greatly increased by the state of the weather; for there was a violent snow storm at the time, and the snow, blowing into the Russians' faces, prevented their seeing what the numbers were of the enemy so suddenly assaulting them, or taking any effectual measures to restore their own ranks to order when once deranged.
When at length the Swedes, having thus driven in the advanced posts, reached the Russian camp itself, they immediately made an assault upon it.
The camp was defended by a rampart and by a double ditch, but on went the assaulting soldiers over all the obstacles, pushing their way with their bayonets, and carrying all before them.
The Russians were entirely defeated and put to flight.
Indeed, the officers do not wish to arrest them until it is sure that the enemy is so completely overwhelmed that their rallying again is utterly impossible.
In this case twenty thousand of the Russian soldiers were left dead upon the field.
The Swedes, on the other hand, lost only two or three thousand.
Besides those who were killed, immense numbers were taken prisoners. General Croy, and all the other principal generals in command, were among the prisoners.
The number of prisoners was so very great that it was not possible for the Swedes to retain them, on account of the expense and trouble of feeding them, and keeping them warm at that season of the year; so they determined to detain the officers only, and to send the men away.
They cut their clothes in such a manner that they could only be prevented from falling off by being held together by both hands; and the weather was so cold-the ground, moreover, being covered with snow-that the men could only save themselves from perishing by keeping their clothes around them.
In this pitiful plight the whole body of prisoners were driven off, like a flock of sheep, by a small body of Swedish soldiery, for a distance of about a league on the road toward Russia, and then left to find the rest of the way themselves.
He said that he expected to be beaten at first by the Swedes.
"They have beaten us once," said he, "and they may beat us again; but they will teach us in time to beat them."
He set about raising recruits in all parts of the empire.
At the time of the death of Alexis the Czar's hopes in respect to a successor fell upon his little son, peter Petrowitz, the child of Catharine, who was born about the time of the death of Alexis's wife, when the difficulties between himself and Alexis were first beginning to assume an alarming form.
This child was now about three years old, but he was of a very weak and sickly constitution, and the Czar watched him with fear and trembling.
His apprehensions proved to be well founded, for about a year after the unhappy death of Alexis he also died.
peter was entirely overwhelmed with grief at this new calamity.
He was seized with the convulsions to which he was subject when under any strong excitement, his face was distorted, and his neck was twisted and stiffened in a most frightful manner.
In ordinary attacks of this kind Catharine had power to soothe and allay the spasmodic action of the muscles, and gradually release her husband from the terrible gripe of the disease, but now he would not suffer her to come near him.
He could not endure it, for the sight of her renewed so vividly the anguish that he felt for the loss of their child, that it made the convulsions and the suffering worse than before.
It is said that on this occasion peter shut himself up alone for three days and three nights in his own chamber, where he lay stretched on the ground in anguish and agony, and would not allow any body to come in.
At length the Czar allowed the door to be opened, and the minister, with all the senators, came together into the room.
The sudden appearance of so many persons, and the boldness of the minister in taking this decided step, made such an impression on the mind of the Czar as to divert his mind for the moment from his grief, and he allowed himself to be led forth and to be persuaded to take some food.
He had no farther serious difficulty with the opponents of his policy, though he was always under apprehensions that difficulties might arise after his death.
He had the right, according to the ancient constitution of the monarchy, to designate his own successor, choosing for this purpose either one of his sons or any other person.
And now, since both his sons were dead, his mind revolved anxiously the question what provision he should make for the government of the empire after his decease.
He finally concluded to leave it in the hands of Catharine herself, and, to prepare the way for this, he resolved to cause her to be solemnly crowned empress during his lifetime.
This declaration, printed forms of which were sent all over the kingdom, was signed by the people very readily.
It was generally supposed that a certain Prince Naraskin would be appointed to the succession.
In this proclamation peter cited many instances from history in which great sovereigns had raised their consorts to a seat on the throne beside them, and then he recapitulated the great services which Catharine had rendered to him and to the state, which made her peculiarly deserving of such an honor.
He therefore declared his intention of joining her with himself in the supreme power, and to celebrate this event by a solemn coronation.
The steps of the altar, and all that part of the pavement of the church over which the Czarina would have to walk in the performance of the ceremonies, were covered with rich tapestry embroidered with gold, and the seats on which the bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries were to sit were covered with crimson cloth.
This platform, with the steps leading to it, was carpeted with crimson velvet, and it was surmounted by a splendid canopy made of silk, embroidered with gold.
The canopy was ornamented, too, on every side with fringes, ribbons, tufts, tassels, and gold lace, in the richest manner.
When the appointed hour arrived the procession was formed at the royal palace, and moved toward the Cathedral through a dense and compact mass of spectators that every where thronged the way.
Every window was filled, and the house tops, wherever there was space for a footing, were crowded.
There were troops of guards mounted on horseback and splendidly caparisoned-there were bands of music, and heralds, and great officers of state, bearing successively, on cushions ornamented with gold and jewels, the imperial mantle, the globe, the sceptre, and the crown.
His death took place on the twenty eighth of January, seventeen twenty five.
Thus was brought to an end the earthly personal career of peter the Great.
Notwithstanding the stern severity of Peter's character, the terrible violence of his passions, and the sort of savage grandeur which marked all his great determinations and plans, there was a certain vein of playfulness running through his mind; and, when he was in a jocose or merry humor, no one could be more jocose and merry than he.
It was only two years before his death that a striking instance of this occurred.
This skiff was built at Moscow, where it remained for twenty or thirty years, an object all this time, in Peter's mind, of special affection and regard.
At length, when the naval power of the empire was firmly established, peter conceived the idea of removing this skiff from Moscow to Petersburg, and consecrating it solemnly there as a sort of souvenir to be preserved forever in commemoration of the small beginnings from which all the naval greatness of the empire had sprung.
The name which he had given to the skiff was The Little Grandfather, the name denoting that the little craft, frail and insignificant as it was, was the parent and progenitor of all the great frigates and ships of the line which were then at anchor in the Roads about Cronstadt and off the mouth of the Neva.
A grand ceremony was accordingly arranged for the "consecration of the Little Grandfather." The little vessel was brought in triumph from Moscow to Petersburg, where it was put on board a sort of barge or galliot to be taken to Cronstadt.
All the great officers of state and all the foreign ministers were invited to be present at the consecration. The company embarked on board yachts provided for them, and went down the river following the Little Grandfather, which was borne on its galliot in the van-drums beating, trumpets sounding, and banners waving all the way.
The next day the whole fleet, which had been collected in the bay for this purpose, was arranged in the form of an amphitheatre.
The emperor went on board of it.
He was accompanied by the admirals and vice admirals of the fleet, who were to serve as crew.
The admiral stationed himself at the helm to steer, and the vice admirals took the oars.
These grand officials were not required, however, to do much hard work at rowing, for there were two shallops provided, manned by strong men, to tow the skiff.
In this way the skiff rowed to and fro over the sea, and then passed along the fleet, saluted every where by the shouts of the crews upon the yards and in the rigging, and by the guns of the ships. Three thousand guns were discharged by the ships in these salvos in honor of their humble progenitor.
Hell is paved with good intentions-also asbestos.
In the United States, only Twain.
Both halves are eminently successful.
"Hello, Central!
A swift kick for the people.
Time and tide wait for no man-But time always stands still for a woman of thirty.
Breaking the hair brush on the disobedient scion, then making him pay for a new one.
At sea, the king of the elements; on shore, a mere surf.
A never present help in time of trouble.
For example, Progress and Congress.
Good for countrymen.
Mill yarns are highly colored; those spun at sea much more so.
While baking prepare the filling.
Bake in one loaf.
When light beat in a little at a time, a half cupful milk and a teaspoonful vanilla.
Bake about twenty minutes, take from pan and cool.
Add one cup of milk, one well beaten egg, three tablespoons of melted butter and a teaspoon of vanilla or lemon flavoring or a level teaspoon of mixed spices.
Beat hard and bake in a loaf in a moderate oven about half an hour.
Bake, when cool, together with jelly, having the dark layer in the center.
Make a boiled icing.
Bake slowly.
Place them on a floured baking sheet and cook in a quick oven.
Do not slice this cake, but cut through the crust with a sharp knife and break apart.
Serve hot. If any are left over, split, toast and butter them.
Fry in deep hot fat.
Bake in a hot oven, then split and butter.
Take a part at a time, roll half an inch thick, cut in rings and fry.
Beauchamp.
Caderousse's knife, dark lantern, bunch of keys, and clothing, excepting the waistcoat, which could not be found, were deposited at the registry; the corpse was conveyed to the morgue.
It was expected that this wedding would shortly take place, as the young man was received at the banker's as the betrothed.
The baron adored Count Andrea Cavalcanti: not so Mademoiselle Eugenie Danglars.
He cherished the thought of the duel, hoping to conceal its true cause even from his seconds.
He found Beauchamp pacing the room; on perceiving him Beauchamp stopped.
"I will facilitate it by repeating the question, 'Will you, or will you not, retract?'"
"What must then be done?"
"Yes."
"Impossible!"
Will you believe the government of a republic, a kingdom, and an empire?" Albert cast his eyes on the passport, then raised them in astonishment to Beauchamp.
I took a week to go, another to return, four days of quarantine, and forty eight hours to stay there; that makes three weeks.
"What circumlocution!
"You hesitate?"
"Yes,--I fear."
Acknowledge it, Beauchamp; your courage cannot be doubted."
Albert turned frightfully pale; he endeavored to speak, but the words died on his lips.
"But what?"
"The paragraph was correct, my friend."
"What?
That French officer"--
"Yes."
"Fernand?"
"Yes."
After a moment's mournful silence, his heart overflowed, and he gave way to a flood of tears.
Oh, Beauchamp, Beauchamp, how shall I now approach mine?
Let no trace of emotion be visible on your countenance, bear your grief as the cloud bears within it ruin and death-a fatal secret, known only when the storm bursts. Go, my friend, reserve your strength for the moment when the crash shall come."
"Why do you ask me now?"
Chapter eighty seven.
The Challenge.
"Then," continued Beauchamp, "I took advantage of the silence and the darkness to leave the house without being seen.
I rely on your friendship to assist me, Beauchamp, if contempt has not banished it from your heart."
"Contempt, my friend?
How does this misfortune affect you?
Review your life, Albert; although it is only just beginning, did a lovely summer's day ever dawn with greater purity than has marked the commencement of your career?
"Be it so," said Beauchamp; "if you must have me descend to earth, I submit; and if you will seek your enemy, I will assist you, and I will engage to find him, my honor being almost as deeply interested as yours."
"Well, listen, Morcerf."
"Tell me; satisfy my impatience."
"Say on."
"'How, and why?'
"'Because a fortnight since I was questioned on the same subject.'
"'Whose name is'--
"'Danglars.'"
"Make inquiries, Albert, but do not be angry without reason; make inquiries, and if it be true"--
"Oh, yes, if it be true," cried the young man, "he shall pay me all I have suffered."
Act prudently."
"Oh, do not fear; besides, you will accompany me.
Let us go immediately." They sent for a cabriolet.
You appear to forget yourself sadly."
"No, sir," said Albert, coldly; "there are circumstances in which one cannot, except through cowardice,--I offer you that refuge,--refuse to admit certain persons at least."
Is it my fault that your father has dishonored himself?"
"Yes, miserable wretch!" cried Morcerf, "it is your fault." Danglars retreated a few steps.
Have I travelled in that country?
"No; it is not you who have directly made this exposure and brought this sorrow on us, but you hypocritically provoked it."
"I?"
How came it known?"
"I suppose you read it in the paper in the account from Yanina?"
"Who wrote to Yanina?"
"To Yanina?"
"Yes.
"One only?"
"I, doubtless, wrote.
"I, indeed?
"Who, then, urged you to write?
Tell me."
"The Count of Monte Cristo told you to write to Yanina?"
"I accuse no one, sir," said Danglars; "I relate, and I will repeat before the count what I have said to you."
"Does the count know what answer you received?"
"Yes; I showed it to him."
In short, why should I have any more to do with the affair?
Danglars defended himself with the baseness, but at the same time with the assurance, of a man who speaks the truth, at least in part, if not wholly-not for conscience' sake, but through fear. Besides, what was Morcerf seeking?
And, in addition to this, everything forgotten or unperceived before presented itself now to his recollection.
Monte Cristo knew everything, as he had bought the daughter of Ali Pasha; and, knowing everything, he had advised Danglars to write to Yanina.
Lastly, he had taken Albert to Normandy when he knew the final blow was near.
Albert took Beauchamp aside, and communicated these ideas to him.
CHAPTER twelve.
Also I beseech your good grace that I may take my leave at my lady, your daughter, and at all the barons and knights.
I will well, said the king.
And therewithal she wept heartily.
And if there be any that will proffer me wrong, or say of me wrong or shame behind my back, say it now or never, and here is my body to make it good, body against body.
CHAPTER thirteen.
Then King Mark understood that and was jealous, for King Mark loved her passingly well.
And with this answer the dwarf departed.
Now, said King Mark, go where thou wilt, and upon pain of death that thou say no word that thou spakest with me; so the dwarf departed from the king.
CHAPTER fourteen.
CHAPTER fifteen.
So when Bleoberis was gone with this lady, King Mark and all the court was wroth that she was away.
Then was King Mark heavy thereof, and all the court.
CHAPTER sixteen.
Whereby ask ye it? said Sir Tristram.
When Sir Sagramore saw his fellow have such a fall he marvelled what knight he might be.
And he dressed his spear with all his might, and Sir Tristram against him, and they came together as the thunder, and there Sir Tristram smote Sir Sagramore a strong buffet, that he bare his horse and him to the earth, and in the falling he brake his thigh.
Chapter thirty one
Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an after life in the city of ghosts, while from others-and thus was the death of Wickham Place-the spirit slips before the body perishes.
It had decayed in the spring, disintegrating the girls more than they knew, and causing either to accost unfamiliar regions.
By September it was a corpse, void of emotion, and scarcely hallowed by the memories of thirty years of happiness.
Through its round topped doorway passed furniture, and pictures, and books, until the last room was gutted and the last van had rumbled away.
Then it fell.
Navvies came, and spilt it back into the grey.
Margaret demurred, but Tibby accepted the offer gladly; it saved him from coming to any decision about the future.
The plate and the more valuable pictures found a safer home in London, but the bulk of the things went country ways, and were entrusted to the guardianship of Miss Avery.
They have weathered the storm, and may reasonably expect peace.
The heart of mrs Wilcox was alone hidden, and perhaps it is superstitious to speculate on the feelings of the dead.
They were married quietly-really quietly, for as the day approached she refused to go through another Oniton.
Paul did send a cablegram.
Henry knew of a reliable hotel there, and Margaret hoped for a meeting with her sister.
Evidently she disliked meeting Henry.
She moved south again, and spoke of wintering in Naples.
mr Wilcox was not sorry that the meeting failed.
His affection for his present wife grew steadily.
Her cleverness gave him no trouble, and, indeed, he liked to see her reading poetry or something about social questions; it distinguished her from the wives of other men.
He had only to call, and she clapped the book up and was ready to do what he wished.
She cannot win in a real battle, having no muscles, only nerves.
Margaret had a bad attack of these nerves during the honeymoon.
She showed her annoyance, and asked rather crossly why she had not been consulted.
"I didn't want to bother you," he replied.
"Besides, I have only heard for certain this morning."
"Where are we to live?" said Margaret, trying to laugh.
"I loved the place extraordinarily.
Don't you believe in having a permanent home, Henry?"
But he did not believe in a damp home.
I never heard till this minute that Oniton was damp."
"My dear girl!"--he flung out his hand-"have you eyes?
have you a skin?
How could it be anything but damp in such a situation?
In the first place, the Grange is on clay, and built where the castle moat must have been; then there's that destestable little river, steaming all night like a kettle.
Feel the cellar walls; look up under the eaves.
Ask Sir james or anyone.
Margaret could not resist saying, "Why did you go there, then?"
One might go on asking such questions indefinitely."
Don't let this go any further."
No sooner did I sign the agreement than she got engaged.
Poor little girl!
She has had her country wedding, and I've got rid of my house to some fellows who are starting a preparatory school."
Margaret was silent.
Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux.
Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth.
"It is now what?" continued Henry.
"If possible, something permanent.
"I see your point," said Margaret, getting up.
"If Oniton is really damp, it is impossible, and must be inhabited by little boys.
Only, in the spring, let us look before we leap.
What's it been reading?
Theo-theo-how much?"
He did not rely upon the sandwich for lunch, but liked to have it by him in case he grew hungry at eleven.
When he had gone, there was the house to look after, and the servants to humanize, and several kettles of Helen's to keep on the boil.
No doubt Leonard was worth helping, but being Henry's wife, she preferred to help someone else.
She began to "miss" new movements, and to spend her spare time re reading or thinking, rather to the concern of her Chelsea friends.
Yet the main cause lay deeper still; she had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things.
"Do you prefer reading to cards?" said he; "that is rather singular."
She is now about Miss Elizabeth Bennet's height, or rather taller."
"Yes, all of them, I think.
Said I: "How do you manage with politics?"
"I will," said i
CHAPTER fourteen: HOW MATTERS ARE MANAGED
"Does not that make the world duller?" said i
"Why?" said the old man.
"The obliteration of national variety," said i
"Cross the water and see.
"Well-I don't know how," said i
Do you assert that there are none?"
Said I: "Why, nothing, I should hope.
"Human nature!" cried the old boy, impetuously; "what human nature?
Which?
Come, tell me that!"
"I should think so, indeed," said he.
As a rule, the immediate outcome shows which opinion on a given subject is the right one; it is a matter of fact, not of speculation.
"How is that managed?" said i
"Well," said he, "let us take one of our units of management, a commune, or a ward, or a parish (for we have all three names, indicating little real distinction between them now, though time was there was a good deal).
In such a district, as you would call it, some neighbours think that something ought to be done or undone: a new town hall built; a clearance of inconvenient houses; or say a stone bridge substituted for some ugly old iron one,--there you have undoing and doing in one.
Well, at the next ordinary meeting of the neighbours, or Mote, as we call it, according to the ancient tongue of the times before bureaucracy, a neighbour proposes the change, and of course, if everybody agrees, there is an end of discussion, except about details.
Equally, if no one backs the proposer,--'seconds him,' it used to be called-the matter drops for the time being; a thing not likely to happen amongst reasonable men, however, as the proposer is sure to have talked it over with others before the Mote.
If the division is a close one, the question is again put off for further discussion; if the division is a wide one, the minority are asked if they will yield to the more general opinion, which they often, nay, most commonly do.
"Very good," said I; "but what happens if the divisions are still narrow?"
"But do you know," said I, "that there is something in all this very like democracy; and I thought that democracy was considered to be in a moribund condition many, many years ago."
The old boy's eyes twinkled.
"Well," said I, "I don't know."
Said he: "The only alternatives to our method that I can conceive of are these.
"Yes," I said, "and besides, it does not press hardly on the minority: for, take this matter of the bridge, no man is obliged to work on it if he doesn't agree to its building.
He smiled, and said: "Shrewdly put; and yet from the point of view of the native of another planet.
The man is benefited by the bridge building if it turns out a good thing, and hurt by it if it turns out a bad one, whether he puts a hand to it or not; and meanwhile he is benefiting the bridge builders by his work, whatever that may be.
In fact, I see no help for him except the pleasure of saying 'I told you so' if the bridge building turns out to be a mistake and hurts him; if it benefits him he must suffer in silence.
He sat musing for a little, and then started and said: "Are there any more questions, dear guest?
CHAPTER twenty five.
In that snug anchorage he found his fleet awaiting him-the four ships which had been separated in that gale off the Lesser Antilles, and some seven hundred men composing their crews.
Guns were fired in his honour and the ships made themselves gay with bunting. The town, aroused by all this noise in the harbour, emptied itself upon the jetty, and a vast crowd of men and women of all creeds and nationalities collected there to be present at the coming ashore of the great buccaneer.
His mood was taciturn; his face grim and sneering.
At first the buccaneers jumped to the conclusion that Wolverstone was following with some rare prize of war, but gradually from the reduced crew of the Arabella a very different tale leaked out to stem their satisfaction and convert it into perplexity.
Partly out of loyalty to their captain, partly because they perceived that if he was guilty of defection they were guilty with him, and partly because being simple, sturdy men of their hands, they were themselves in the main a little confused as to what really had happened, the crew of the Arabella practised reticence with their brethren in Tortuga during those two days before Wolverstone's arrival.
The sight of the Arabella at anchor in the bay had at first amazed him as he sailed round the rocky headland that bore the fort.
Dyke repeated his question.
This time Wolverstone answered him.
"But I see the Arabella."
"Of course, since there she rides.
What else was you expecting?"
"Expecting?" Dyke stared at him, open mouthed.
"Was you expecting to find the Arabella here?"
Wolverstone looked him over in contempt, then laughed and spoke loud enough to be heard by all around him.
"Of course.
Wolverstone congratulated himself upon the discretion he had used with Dyke.
"It's not his way to be sounding his own praises.
Why, it was like this.
The Captain damned his soul to hell for answer.
So I goes to him, and 'accept this poxy commission,' says I; 'turn King's man and save your neck and ours.' He took me at my word, and the London pimp gave him the King's commission on the spot, and Bishop all but choked hisself with rage when he was told of it.
But happened it had, and he was forced to swallow it.
But Bishop didn't trust us.
He knew too much.
But that hound Bishop had passed the word, and the fort kept a sharp lookout.
In the end, though it took a fortnight, Blood bubbled him.
His game-as he'd secretly told me-was to follow and give chase.
There was a great historian lost in Wolverstone.
He had the right imagination that knows just how far it is safe to stray from the truth and just how far to colour it so as to change its shape for his own purposes.
Having delivered himself of his decoction of fact and falsehood, and thereby added one more to the exploits of peter Blood, he enquired where the Captain might be found.
Being informed that he kept his ship, Wolverstone stepped into a boat and went aboard, to report himself, as he put it.
As Wolverstone came in, the Captain raised bloodshot eyes to consider him.
A moment they sharpened in their gaze as he brought his visitor into focus.
Then he laughed, a loose, idiot laugh, that yet somehow was half a sneer.
"Ah!
The Old Wolf!" said he.
"Got here at last, eh?
Old Wolverstone stared at him in sombre silence.
He had looked with untroubled eye upon many a hell of devilment in his time, but the sight of Captain Blood in this condition filled him with sudden grief.
It was his only expression for emotion of all kinds.
Then he rolled forward, and dropped into a chair at the table, facing the Captain.
"Rum, from Jamaica." He pushed bottle and glass towards Wolverstone.
"I'm asking you what ails you?" he bawled.
"I've done it," said Wolverstone.
The Captain steadied himself to grasp it.
"Meanwhile ye'll please to remember the tale I've told, and say nothing that'll make me out a liar.
"We'll talk again to morrow."
Rum was in itself an effect, and not by any means the cause of the Captain's listless apathy.
He cursed all things that daggled petticoats, and, knowing his world, waited for the sickness to pass.
But it did not pass.
His friends at Government House, bewildered at this change in him, sought to reclaim him.
Later, as the rainy season approached its end, he was sought by his captains with proposals of remunerative raids on Spanish settlements. But to all he manifested an indifference which, as the weeks passed and the weather became settled, begot first impatience and then exasperation.
Christian, who commanded the Clotho, came storming to him one day, upbraiding him for his inaction, and demanding that he should take order about what was to do.
Christian departed fuming, and on the morrow the Clotho weighed anchor and sailed away, setting an example of desertion from which the loyalty of Blood's other captains would soon be unable to restrain their men.
Neither backward nor forward could he move, it seemed.
He had entirely lost the almost foppish concern for his appearance, and was grown careless and slovenly in his dress.
Wolverstone, the only one who held the clue to this degeneration, ventured once-and once only-to beard him frankly about it.
The blue eyes glared at him from under the jet black eyebrows, and something of their old fire began to kindle in them.
That's not the Old Wolf's way.
If there's no other expedition'll tempt you, why not Port Royal?
What a plague do it matter if it is an English settlement?
It's commanded by Colonel Bishop, and there's no lack of rascals in your company'd follow you to hell if it meant getting Colonel Bishop by the throat.
It could be done, I tell you.
There's enough plunder in the town to tempt the lads, and there's the wench for you.
And Wolverstone, in terror before that fury, went out without another word.
The subject was not raised again, and Captain Blood was left to his idle abstraction.
"You have a good force here under your command, my Captain," said he.
"News has reached us from France that there is war with Spain."
"I am speaking officially, my Captain.
I am not alluding to unofficial skirmishes, and unofficial predatory measures which we have condoned out here.
There is war-formally war-between France and Spain in Europe.
I have letters from him desiring me to equip a supplementary squadron and raise a body of not less than a thousand men to reenforce him on his arrival.
Blood looked at him with a faint kindling of interest.
"You are offering to take us into the French service?" he asked.
"On what terms, monsieur?"
"With the rank of Capitaine de Vaisseau for yourself, and suitable ranks for the officers serving under you.
You will enjoy the pay of that rank, and you will be entitled, together with your men, to one tenth share in all prizes taken."
"My men will hardly account it generous.
They will tell you that they can sail out of here to morrow, disembowel a Spanish settlement, and keep the whole of the plunder."
So that the one tenth in this case may be equal to more than the whole in the other."
Captain Blood considered.
"I will consult my officers," he said; and he sent for them.
For one fifth of the prizes, the officers would answer for their men; not for less.
He had his instructions.
It was taking a deal upon himself to exceed them.
The buccaneers were firm.
After that followed days of activity in Tortuga, refitting the ships, boucanning meat, laying in stores.
In these matters which once would have engaged all Captain Blood's attention, he now took no part. He continued listless and aloof.
But his consent remained passive.
"Goodness gracious!" cried Betsy.
"Brother!
Brother!"
"Free!
"Do you know what they have done to me?" came the answer through the closed door.
"no Tell me, Brother, what have they done?"
"She was right!
"Poor Brother!" repeated Shaggy.
Shaggy looked at the little square of cloth and shook his head.
Then it closed again.
CHAPTER forty six.
DODSON AND FOGG
Lastly, the two vixenish ladies and the heavy gentleman were giving the driver contradictory directions, all tending to the one point, that he should stop at mrs Bardell's door; which the heavy gentleman, in direct opposition to, and defiance of, the vixenish ladies, contended was a green door and not a yellow one.
'Stop at the house with a green door, driver,' said the heavy gentleman.
'Oh!
'Now vere am I to pull up?' inquired the driver.
'Settle it among yourselves.
'Aggrawatin' thing!' said the vixenish lady last mentioned, darting a withering glance at the heavy gentleman.
'My dear, it's not my fault,' said the gentleman.
'Don't talk to me, you creetur, don't,' retorted the lady.
'The house with the red door, cabmin.
Oh!
'You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Raddle,' said the other little woman, who was no other than mrs Cluppins. 'What have I been a doing of?' asked mr Raddle.
'Don't talk to me, don't, you brute, for fear I should be perwoked to forgit my sect and strike you!' said mrs Raddle.
The whole edge of the thing had been taken off-it was flatter than walking.
'Well, Tommy,' said mrs Cluppins, 'how's your poor dear mother?'
'Oh, she's very well,' replied Master Bardell. 'She's in the front parlour, all ready.
I'm ready too, I am.' Here Master Bardell put his hands in his pockets, and jumped off and on the bottom step of the door.
'mrs
Sanders is going, she is,' replied Tommy; 'I'm going too, I am.'
'Drat the boy,' said little mrs Cluppins. 'He thinks of nobody but himself.
Here, Tommy, dear.'
'Who else is a goin', lovey?' said mrs Cluppins, in an insinuating manner.
'Oh! mrs Rogers is a goin',' replied Master Bardell, opening his eyes very wide as he delivered the intelligence.
'What?
The lady as has taken the lodgings!' ejaculated mrs Cluppins.
Master Bardell put his hands deeper down into his pockets, and nodded exactly thirty five times, to imply that it was the lady lodger, and no other.
'Bless us!' said mrs Cluppins.
'It's quite a party!'
'What is there, Tommy?' said mrs Cluppins coaxingly.
Come, Tommy, tell your dear Cluppy.'
'Mother said I wasn't to,' rejoined Master Bardell, 'I'm a goin' to have some, I am.' Cheered by this prospect, the precocious boy applied himself to his infantile treadmill, with increased vigour.
'It's put me all over in such a tremble, Betsy,' replied mrs Raddle. 'Raddle ain't like a man; he leaves everythink to me.'
This was scarcely fair upon the unfortunate mr Raddle, who had been thrust aside by his good lady in the commencement of the dispute, and peremptorily commanded to hold his tongue.
'Ah, poor thing!' said mrs Rogers, 'I know what her feelin's is, too well.' 'Ah, poor thing! so do I,' said mrs Sanders; and then all the ladies moaned in unison, and said they knew what it was, and they pitied her from their hearts, they did.
Even the lodger's little servant, who was thirteen years old and three feet high, murmured her sympathy.
'Ah, what has decomposed you, ma'am?' inquired mrs Rogers.
'I have been a good deal flurried,' replied mrs Raddle, in a reproachful manner.
Thereupon the ladies cast indignant glances at mr Raddle.
All the ladies concurred in this opinion; so mr Raddle was pushed out of the room, and requested to give himself an airing in the back yard. Which he did for about a quarter of an hour, when mrs Bardell announced to him with a solemn face that he might come in now, but that he must be very careful how he behaved towards his wife.
'Why, mrs Rogers, ma'am,' said mrs Bardell, 'you've never been introduced, I declare!
mr Raddle, ma'am; mrs Cluppins, ma'am; mrs Raddle, ma'am.'
'Which is mrs Cluppins's sister,' suggested mrs Sanders.
'Oh, indeed!' said mrs Rogers graciously; for she was the lodger, and her servant was in waiting, so she was more gracious than intimate, in right of her position.
'Oh, indeed!'
mrs Raddle smiled sweetly, mr Raddle bowed, and mrs Cluppins said, 'she was sure she was very happy to have an opportunity of being known to a lady which she had heerd so much in favour of, as mrs Rogers.' A compliment which the last named lady acknowledged with graceful condescension.
'Well, mr Raddle,' said mrs Bardell; 'I'm sure you ought to feel very much honoured at you and Tommy being the only gentlemen to escort so many ladies all the way to the Spaniards, at Hampstead.
'Indeed, to tell you the truth, I said, as we was a coming along in the cabrioily-'
mrs Bardell was unanimously voted into the chair, and mrs Rogers being stationed on her right hand, and mrs Raddle on her left, the meal proceeded with great merriment and success.
'How sweet the country is, to be sure!' sighed mrs Rogers; 'I almost wish I lived in it always.'
'Oh, you wouldn't like that, ma'am,' replied mrs Bardell, rather hastily; for it was not at all advisable, with reference to the lodgings, to encourage such notions; 'you wouldn't like it, ma'am.'
'Oh!
'Perhaps I am, ma'am.
Perhaps I am,' sighed the first floor lodger.
'For lone people as have got nobody to care for them, or take care of them, or as have been hurt in their mind, or that kind of thing,' observed mr Raddle, plucking up a little cheerfulness, and looking round, 'the country is all very well.
The country for a wounded spirit, they say.'
Now, of all things in the world that the unfortunate man could have said, any would have been preferable to this.
Of course mrs Bardell burst into tears, and requested to be led from the table instantly; upon which the affectionate child began to cry too, most dismally.
'Would anybody believe, ma'am,' exclaimed mrs Raddle, turning fiercely to the first floor lodger, 'that a woman could be married to such a unmanly creetur, which can tamper with a woman's feelings as he does, every hour in the day, ma'am?'
'My dear,' remonstrated mr Raddle, 'I didn't mean anything, my dear.'
'You didn't mean!' repeated mrs Raddle, with great scorn and contempt. 'Go away.
I can't bear the sight on you, you brute.'
'You must not flurry yourself, Mary Ann,' interposed mrs Cluppins.
'You really must consider yourself, my dear, which you never do.
Now go away, Raddle, there's a good soul, or you'll only aggravate her.'
mrs Sanders, who, according to custom, was very busy with the bread and butter, expressed the same opinion, and mr Raddle quietly retired.
But that description of fainting fits, which is contagious among ladies, seldom lasts long; so when he had been well kissed, and a little cried over, mrs Bardell recovered, set him down again, wondering how she could have been so foolish, and poured out some more tea.
It was at this moment, that the sound of approaching wheels was heard, and that the ladies, looking up, saw a hackney coach stop at the garden gate.
'More company!' said mrs Sanders.
'It's a gentleman,' said mrs Raddle.
Surely mr Pickwick can't have paid the damages.'
'Or hoffered marriage!' said mrs Cluppins.
'Dear me, how slow the gentleman is,'exclaimed mrs Rogers.
'Why doesn't he make haste!'
As the lady spoke these words, mr Jackson turned from the coach where he had been addressing some observations to a shabby man in black leggings, who had just emerged from the vehicle with a thick ash stick in his hand, and made his way to the place where the ladies were seated; winding his hair round the brim of his hat, as he came along.
'Is anything the matter?
'Nothing whatever, ma'am,' replied mr Jackson.
mrs Rogers whispered mrs Raddle that he was really an elegant young man.
'I called in Goswell Street,' resumed mr Jackson, 'and hearing that you were here, from the slavey, took a coach and came on.
'Lor!' ejaculated that lady, starting at the sudden nature of the communication.
'Yes,' said mr Jackson, biting his lip.
'It's very important and pressing business, which can't be postponed on any account.
I've kept the coach on purpose for you to go back in.'
The ladies agreed that it WAS very strange, but were unanimously of opinion that it must be very important, or Dodson and Fogg would never have sent; and further, that the business being urgent, she ought to repair to Dodson and Fogg's without any delay.
There was a certain degree of pride and importance about being wanted by one's lawyers in such a monstrous hurry, that was by no means displeasing to mrs Bardell, especially as it might be reasonably supposed to enhance her consequence in the eyes of the first floor lodger.
'But won't you refresh yourself after your walk, mr Jackson?' said mrs Bardell persuasively.
'Oh, ask your friend to come here, Sir,' said mrs Bardell. 'Pray ask your friend here, Sir.'
'Why, thank'ee, I'd rather not,' said mr Jackson, with some embarrassment of manner.
'He's not much used to ladies' society, and it makes him bashful.
If you'll order the waiter to deliver him anything short, he won't drink it off at once, won't he!--only try him!' mr Jackson's fingers wandered playfully round his nose at this portion of his discourse, to warn his hearers that he was speaking ironically.
The waiter was at once despatched to the bashful gentleman, and the bashful gentleman took something; mr Jackson also took something, and the ladies took something, for hospitality's sake.
mr Jackson then said he was afraid it was time to go; upon which, mrs Sanders, mrs Cluppins, and Tommy (who it was arranged should accompany mrs Bardell, leaving the others to mr Raddle's protection), got into the coach.
'Isaac,' said Jackson, as mrs Bardell prepared to get in, looking up at the man with the ash stick, who was seated on the box, smoking a cigar.
'Well?'
'This is mrs Bardell.'
mrs Bardell got in, mr Jackson got in after her, and away they drove. mrs Bardell could not help ruminating on what mr Jackson's friend had said.
Shrewd creatures, those lawyers.
Lord bless us, how they find people out!
'Sad thing about these costs of our people's, ain't it,' said Jackson, when mrs Cluppins and mrs Sanders had fallen asleep; 'your bill of costs, I mean.'
'I'm very sorry they can't get them,' replied mrs Bardell. 'But if you law gentlemen do these things on speculation, why you must get a loss now and then, you know.'
'Yes.
'Certainly,' replied Jackson drily.
Quite.'
On they drove, and mrs Bardell fell asleep.
She was awakened, after some time, by the stopping of the coach.
'Bless us!' said the lady.'Are we at Freeman's Court?'
'We're not going quite so far,' replied Jackson.
'Have the goodness to step out.'
mrs Bardell, not yet thoroughly awake, complied.
'Now, ladies,' cried the man with the ash stick, looking into the coach, and shaking mrs Sanders to wake her, 'Come!' Rousing her friend, mrs Sanders alighted.
mrs Bardell, leaning on Jackson's arm, and leading Tommy by the hand, had already entered the porch.
They followed.
The room they turned into was even more odd looking than the porch.
Such a number of men standing about!
And they stared so!
'What place is this?' inquired mrs Bardell, pausing.
'Only one of our public offices,' replied Jackson, hurrying her through a door, and looking round to see that the other women were following. 'Look sharp, Isaac!'
'Safe and sound,' replied the man with the ash stick.
The door swung heavily after them, and they descended a small flight of steps.
'Here we are at last.
'What do you mean?' said mrs Bardell, with a palpitating heart.
It was their duty in the way of business, to take you in execution for them costs; but they were anxious to spare your feelings as much as they could.
What a comfort it must be, to you, to think how it's been done!
This is the Fleet, ma'am. Wish you good night, mrs Bardell.
Good night, Tommy!'
As Jackson hurried away in company with the man with the ash stick another man, with a key in his hand, who had been looking on, led the bewildered female to a second short flight of steps leading to a doorway.
mrs Bardell screamed violently; Tommy roared; mrs Cluppins shrunk within herself; and mrs Sanders made off, without more ado.
'Don't bother the woman,' said the turnkey to Weller; 'she's just come in.'
'A prisoner!' said Sam, quickly replacing his hat.
'Who's the plaintives?
What for?
Speak up, old feller.'
I want him directly.
I see some good in this.
IS CHIEFLY DEVOTED TO MATTERS OF BUSINESS, AND THE TEMPORAL ADVANTAGE OF DODSON AND FOGG-mr
WINKLE REAPPEARS UNDER EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES-mr
PICKWICK'S BENEVOLENCE PROVES STRONGER THAN HIS OBSTINACY
mr Lowten had still to be ferreted out from the back parlour of the Magpie and Stump; and Job had scarcely accomplished this object, and communicated Sam Weller's message, when the clock struck ten.
'There,' said Lowten, 'it's too late now.
You can't get in to night; you've got the key of the street, my friend.'
'I can sleep anywhere.
But won't it be better to see mr Perker to night, so that we may be there, the first thing in the morning?'
Summoning the cab of most promising appearance, he directed the driver to repair to Montague Place, Russell Square.
mr Perker had had a dinner party that day, as was testified by the appearance of lights in the drawing room windows, the sound of an improved grand piano, and an improvable cabinet voice issuing therefrom, and a rather overpowering smell of meat which pervaded the steps and entry.
'Now, Lowten,' said little mr Perker, shutting the door,'what's the matter?
No important letter come in a parcel, is there?'
'No, Sir,' replied Lowten.
'This is a messenger from mr Pickwick, Sir.'
'From Pickwick, eh?' said the little man, turning quickly to Job. 'Well, what is it?'
'Dodson and Fogg have taken mrs Bardell in execution for her costs, Sir,' said Job.
'No!' exclaimed Perker, putting his hands in his pockets, and reclining against the sideboard.
'By Jove!' said Perker, taking both hands out of his pockets, and striking the knuckles of his right against the palm of his left, emphatically, 'those are the cleverest scamps I ever had anything to do with!'
When they had in some measure recovered from their trance of admiration, Job Trotter discharged himself of the rest of his commission.
Perker nodded his head thoughtfully, and pulled out his watch.
'Sam is quite right.
Tell him so.
Will you take a glass of wine, Lowten?' 'No, thank you, Sir.'
As Lowten DID mean yes, he said no more on the subject, but inquired of Job, in an audible whisper, whether the portrait of Perker, which hung opposite the fireplace, wasn't a wonderful likeness, to which Job of course replied that it was.
The wine being by this time poured out, Lowten drank to mrs Perker and the children, and Job to Perker.
The gentleman in the plush shorts and cottons considering it no part of his duty to show the people from the office out, consistently declined to answer the bell, and they showed themselves out.
The attorney betook himself to his drawing room, the clerk to the Magpie and Stump, and Job to Covent Garden Market to spend the night in a vegetable basket.
Punctually at the appointed hour next morning, the good humoured little attorney tapped at mr Pickwick's door, which was opened with great alacrity by Sam Weller.
I rather think the gov'nor wants to have a word and a half with you, Sir.'
Perker nodded and smiled.
mr Samuel Weller looked at the little lawyer, then at mr Pickwick, then at the ceiling, then at Perker again; grinned, laughed outright, and finally, catching up his hat from the carpet, without further explanation, disappeared.
'What does this mean?' inquired mr Pickwick, looking at Perker with astonishment.
'What has put Sam into this extraordinary state?'
'Oh, nothing, nothing,' replied Perker. 'Come, my dear Sir, draw up your chair to the table.
I have a good deal to say to you.'
'What papers are those?' inquired mr Pickwick, as the little man deposited on the table a small bundle of documents tied with red tape.
'The papers in Bardell and Pickwick,' replied Perker, undoing the knot with his teeth.
'No, I do not indeed,' replied mr Pickwick.
'Sorry for that,' resumed Perker, 'because it will form the subject of our conversation.'
'I would rather that the subject should be never mentioned between us, Perker,' interposed mr Pickwick hastily.
'Pooh, pooh, my dear Sir,' said the little man, untying the bundle, and glancing eagerly at mr Pickwick out of the corners of his eyes.
'It must be mentioned.
I have come here on purpose.
Now, are you ready to hear what I have to say, my dear Sir?
No hurry; if you are not, I can wait.
There!' Hereupon, the little man threw one leg over the other, and made a show of beginning to read with great composure and application.
'Well, well,' said mr Pickwick, with a sigh, but softening into a smile at the same time.
'Say what you have to say; it's the old story, I suppose?'
'With a difference, my dear Sir; with a difference,' rejoined Perker, deliberately folding up the paper and putting it into his pocket again. 'mrs
Bardell, the plaintiff in the action, is within these walls, Sir.'
'I know it,' was mr Pickwick's reply.
'Very good,' retorted Perker.
'And you know how she comes here, I suppose; I mean on what grounds, and at whose suit?'
'Yes; at least I have heard Sam's account of the matter,' said mr Pickwick, with affected carelessness.
'Sam's account of the matter,' replied Perker, 'is, I will venture to say, a perfectly correct one.
Well now, my dear Sir, the first question I have to ask, is, whether this woman is to remain here?'
'To remain here!' echoed mr Pickwick.
'It rests with Dodson and Fogg; you know that very well.'
'I know nothing of the kind,' retorted Perker firmly.
'It does NOT rest with Dodson and Fogg; you know the men, my dear Sir, as well as I do.
It rests solely, wholly, and entirely with you.'
'With me!' ejaculated mr Pickwick, rising nervously from his chair, and reseating himself directly afterwards.
The little man gave a double knock on the lid of his snuff box, opened it, took a great pinch, shut it up again, and repeated the words, 'With you.'
'I say, my dear Sir,' resumed the little man, who seemed to gather confidence from the snuff-'I say, that her speedy liberation or perpetual imprisonment rests with you, and with you alone.
mr Pickwick, whose face had been undergoing most surprising changes during this speech, and was evidently on the verge of a strong burst of indignation, calmed his wrath as well as he could.
Perker, strengthening his argumentative powers with another pinch of snuff, proceeded-
'I have seen the woman, this morning.
'If I pay her costs for her,' said mr Pickwick indignantly.
'A valuable document, indeed!'
'No "if" in the case, my dear Sir,' said Perker triumphantly.
'There is the very letter I speak of.
'Is this all you have to say to me?' inquired mr Pickwick mildly.
'Not quite,' replied Perker.
I do mean to say, however, that the whole facts, taken together, will be sufficient to justify you, in the minds of all reasonable men.
And now, my dear Sir, I put it to you.
This one hundred and fifty pounds, or whatever it may be-take it in round numbers-is nothing to you.
A jury had decided against you; well, their verdict is wrong, but still they decided as they thought right, and it IS against you.
Who is that?'
'Me, Sir,' replied Sam Weller, putting in his head.
'I can't speak to you just now, Sam,' said mr Pickwick. 'I am engaged at this moment, Sam.'
'I can't see any lady,' replied mr Pickwick, whose mind was filled with visions of mrs Bardell.
'Who is it?' inquired mr Pickwick.
'I suppose I must,' said mr Pickwick, looking at Perker.
As Sam Weller spoke, he threw the door open, and there rushed tumultuously into the room, mr Nathaniel Winkle, leading after him by the hand, the identical young lady who at Dingley Dell had worn the boots with the fur round the tops, and who, now a very pleasing compound of blushes and confusion, and lilac silk, and a smart bonnet, and a rich lace veil, looked prettier than ever.
'Miss Arabella Allen!' exclaimed mr Pickwick, rising from his chair.
'mrs
Winkle.
'Can you forgive my imprudence?'
'Why, my dear girl,' said mr Pickwick, 'how has all this come about?
Come!
Sit down, and let me hear it all.
How well she looks, doesn't she, Perker?' added mr Pickwick, surveying Arabella's face with a look of as much pride and exultation, as if she had been his daughter.
'Delightful, my dear Sir,' replied the little man.
'I shall not forget your exertions in the garden at Clifton.'
'Mary, my dear, sit down,' said mr Pickwick, cutting short these compliments.
Arabella looked bashfully at her lord and master, who replied, 'Only three days.'
'Only three days, eh?' said mr Pickwick. 'Why, what have you been doing these three months?'
'Ah, to be sure!' interposed Perker; 'come, account for this idleness. You see mr Pickwick's only astonishment is, that it wasn't all over, months ago.'
And when I had persuaded her, it was a long time more before we could find an opportunity.
And is your brother acquainted with all this, my dear?'
'Oh, no, no,' replied Arabella, changing colour.
'Dear mr Pickwick, he must only know it from you-from your lips alone.
He is so violent, so prejudiced, and has been so-so anxious in behalf of his friend, mr Sawyer,' added Arabella, looking down, 'that I fear the consequences dreadfully.'
'Ah, to be sure,' said Perker gravely.
'You must take this matter in hand for them, my dear sir.
You must prevent mischief, my dear Sir.
Hot blood, hot blood.' And the little man took a warning pinch, and shook his head doubtfully.
'You forget, my love,' said mr Pickwick gently, 'you forget that I am a prisoner.'
'No, indeed I do not, my dear Sir,' replied Arabella. 'I never have forgotten it.
I have never ceased to think how great your sufferings must have been in this shocking place.
If my brother hears of this, first, from you, I feel certain we shall be reconciled.
He is my only relation in the world, mr Pickwick, and unless you plead for me, I fear I have lost even him.
I have done wrong, very, very wrong, I know.'Here poor Arabella hid her face in her handkerchief, and wept bitterly.
mr Pickwick's nature was a good deal worked upon, by these same tears; but when mrs Winkle, drying her eyes, took to coaxing and entreating in the sweetest tones of a very sweet voice, he became particularly restless, and evidently undecided how to act, as was evinced by sundry nervous rubbings of his spectacle glasses, nose, tights, head, and gaiters.
mr Tupman and mr Snodgrass arrived, most opportunely, in this stage of the pleadings, and as it was necessary to explain to them all that had occurred, together with the various reasons pro and con, the whole of the arguments were gone over again, after which everybody urged every argument in his own way, and at his own length.
At three o'clock that afternoon, mr Pickwick took a last look at his little room, and made his way, as well as he could, through the throng of debtors who pressed eagerly forward to shake him by the hand, until he reached the lodge steps.
He turned here, to look about him, and his eye lightened as he did so.
In all the crowd of wan, emaciated faces, he saw not one which was not happier for his sympathy and charity.
'Very good, my dear Sir,' replied Perker, looking hard at Jingle. 'You will see me again, young man, to morrow.
I hope you may live to remember and feel deeply, what I shall have to communicate, Sir.'
Jingle bowed respectfully, trembled very much as he took mr Pickwick's proffered hand, and withdrew.
'Job you know, I think?' said mr Pickwick, presenting that gentleman.
'I know the rascal,' replied Perker good humouredly.
'See after your friend, and be in the way to morrow at one.
Do you hear?
Now, is there anything more?'
'You have delivered the little parcel I gave you for your old landlord, Sam?'
'I have, Sir,' replied Sam.
As mr Pickwick uttered this adieu, the crowd raised a loud shout.
Many among them were pressing forward to shake him by the hand again, when he drew his arm through Perker's, and hurried from the prison, far more sad and melancholy, for the moment, than when he had first entered it.
'Sir,' called out mr Weller to his master.
forty eight A FAMILY AFFAIR
Athos had invented the phrase, family affair.
A family affair was not subject to the investigation of the cardinal; a family affair concerned nobody.
People might employ themselves in a family affair before all the world.
Therefore Athos had invented the phrase, family affair.
Aramis had discovered the idea, the lackeys.
Porthos had discovered the means, the diamond.
D'Artagnan alone had discovered nothing-he, ordinarily the most inventive of the four; but it must be also said that the very name of Milady paralyzed him.
Ah! no, we were mistaken; he had discovered a purchaser for his diamond.
D'Artagnan would have been at the height of his wishes if he had not constantly seen Milady like a dark cloud hovering in the horizon.
After breakfast, it was agreed that they should meet again in the evening at Athos's lodging, and there finish their plans.
D'Artagnan passed the day in exhibiting his Musketeer's uniform in every street of the camp.
In the evening, at the appointed hour, the four friends met.
Everyone offered his own.
Athos talked of the discretion of Grimaud, who never spoke a word but when his master unlocked his mouth.
Aramis, confiding in the address of Bazin, made a pompous eulogium on his candidate.
These four virtues disputed the prize for a length of time, and gave birth to magnificent speeches which we do not repeat here for fear they should be deemed too long.
"Unfortunately," said Athos, "he whom we send must possess in himself alone the four qualities united."
"But where is such a lackey to be found?"
"Not to be found!" cried Athos.
"I know it well, so take Grimaud."
"Take Bazin."
"Gentlemen," said Aramis, "the principal question is not to know which of our four lackeys is the most discreet, the most strong, the most clever, or the most brave; the principal thing is to know which loves money the best."
"What Aramis says is very sensible," replied Athos; "we must speculate upon the faults of people, and not upon their virtues.
"Doubtless," said Aramis, "for we not only require to be well served in order to succeed, but moreover, not to fail; for in case of failure, heads are in question, not for our lackeys-"
"Speak lower, Aramis," said Athos.
"That's wise-not for the lackeys," resumed Aramis, "but for the master-for the masters, we may say.
Are our lackeys sufficiently devoted to us to risk their lives for us?
no"
"My faith," said d'Artagnan.
"They will promise everything for the sake of the money, and on the road fear will prevent them from acting.
Once taken, they will be pressed; when pressed, they will confess everything.
What the devil!
we are not children.
A passport for embarkation must be obtained; and the party must be acquainted with English in order to ask the way to London.
Really, I think the thing very difficult."
"Not at all," cried d'Artagnan, who was anxious the matter should be accomplished; "on the contrary, I think it very easy.
It would be, no doubt, parbleu, if we write to Lord de Winter about affairs of vast importance, of the horrors of the cardinal-"
"Speak lower!" said Athos.
"--of intrigues and secrets of state," continued d'Artagnan, complying with the recommendation.
I will write to him, then, nearly in these terms."
"Let us see," said Athos, assuming in advance a critical look.
"Monsieur and dear friend-"
Dear friend to an Englishman," interrupted Athos; "well commenced!
Bravo, d'Artagnan!
"Well, perhaps.
I will say, then, Monsieur, quite short."
"Well, then, we will put simply, My Lord, do you remember a certain little enclosure where your life was spared?"
"My dear d'Artagnan, you will never make anything but a very bad secretary.
Where your life was spared!
that's unworthy.
A man of spirit is not to be reminded of such services.
A benefit reproached is an offense committed."
"The devil!" said d'Artagnan, "you are insupportable.
If the letter must be written under your censure, my faith, I renounce the task."
"And you will do right.
Handle the musket and the sword, my dear fellow. You will come off splendidly at those two exercises; but pass the pen over to Monsieur Abbe.
That's his province."
"Well, so be it," said d'Artagnan.
"I ask no better," said Aramis, with that ingenious air of confidence which every poet has in himself; "but let me be properly acquainted with the subject.
I have heard here and there that this sister in law was a hussy.
I have obtained proof of it by listening to her conversation with the cardinal."
"Lower!
SACRE BLEU!" said Athos.
"But," continued Aramis, "the details escape me."
"And me also," said Porthos.
D'Artagnan and Athos looked at each other for some time in silence.
At length Athos, after serious reflection and becoming more pale than usual, made a sign of assent to d'Artagnan, who by it understood he was at liberty to speak.
"Bah!" cried Porthos.
What do you say-that she wanted to have her brother in law killed?"
"Yes."
"She was married?" asked Aramis.
"Yes."
"And her husband found out that she had a fleur de lis on her shoulder?" cried Porthos.
These three yeses had been pronounced by Athos, each with a sadder intonation.
"And who has seen this fleur de lis?" inquired Aramis.
"d'Artagnan and i Or rather, to observe the chronological order, I and d'Artagnan," replied Athos.
"And does the husband of this frightful creature still live?" said Aramis.
"He still lives."
"Are you quite sure of it?"
"I am he."
There was a moment of cold silence, during which everyone was affected according to his nature.
"This time," said Athos, first breaking the silence, "d'Artagnan has given us an excellent program, and the letter must be written at once."
The chancellor himself would be puzzled how to write such a letter, and yet the chancellor draws up an official report very readily.
Never mind!
Be silent, I will write."
Aramis accordingly took the quill, reflected for a few moments, wrote eight or ten lines in a charming little female hand, and then with a voice soft and slow, as if each word had been scrupulously weighed, he read the following:
As you have several times since declared yourself the friend of that person, he thinks it his duty to respond to that friendship by sending you important information.
Twice you have nearly been the victim of a near relative, whom you believe to be your heir because you are ignorant that before she contracted a marriage in England she was already married in France.
But the third time, which is the present, you may succumb. Your relative left La Rochelle for England during the night.
Watch her arrival, for she has great and terrible projects.
If you require to know positively what she is capable of, read her past history on her left shoulder."
"Well, now that will do wonderfully well," said Athos.
"My dear Aramis, you have the pen of a secretary of state.
Lord de Winter will now be upon his guard if the letter should reach him; and even if it should fall into the hands of the cardinal, we shall not be compromised.
But as the lackey who goes may make us believe he has been to London and may stop at Chatellerault, let us give him only half the sum promised him, with the letter, with an agreement that he shall have the other half in exchange for the reply.
Have you the diamond?" continued Athos.
"I have what is still better.
I have the price;" and d'Artagnan threw the bag upon the table.
At the sound of the gold Aramis raised his eyes and Porthos started.
As to Athos, he remained unmoved.
"How much in that little bag?"
"It appears so," said Athos, "since here they are.
I don't suppose that our friend d'Artagnan has added any of his own to the amount."
"But, gentlemen, in all this," said d'Artagnan, "we do not think of the queen.
Let us take some heed of the welfare of her dear Buckingham.
That is the least we owe her."
"That's true," said Athos; "but that concerns Aramis."
"Well," replied the latter, blushing, "what must I say?"
"Oh, that's simple enough!" replied Athos.
Aramis resumed his pen, reflected a little, and wrote the following lines, which he immediately submitted to the approbation of his friends.
"My dear cousin."
"This clever person is your relative, then?"
"Cousin german."
"Go on, to your cousin, then!"
"My dear Cousin, His Eminence, the cardinal, whom God preserve for the happiness of France and the confusion of the enemies of the kingdom, is on the point of putting an end to the hectic rebellion of La Rochelle. It is probable that the succor of the English fleet will never even arrive in sight of the place.
His Eminence is the most illustrious politician of times past, of times present, and probably of times to come.
He would extinguish the sun if the sun incommoded him.
Give these happy tidings to your sister, my dear cousin.
I have dreamed that the unlucky Englishman was dead.
I cannot recollect whether it was by steel or by poison; only of this I am sure, I have dreamed he was dead, and you know my dreams never deceive me.
Be assured, then, of seeing me soon return."
You speak like the Apocalypse, and you are as true as the Gospel.
There is nothing now to do but to put the address to this letter."
He folded the letter fancifully, and took up his pen and wrote:
The three friends looked at one another and laughed; they were caught.
"Now," said Aramis, "you will please to understand, gentlemen, that Bazin alone can carry this letter to Tours.
My cousin knows nobody but Bazin, and places confidence in nobody but him; any other person would fail.
Besides, Bazin is ambitious and learned; Bazin has read history, gentlemen, he knows that Sixtus the Fifth became Pope after having kept pigs.
You can understand that a man who has such views will never allow himself to be taken, or if taken, will undergo martyrdom rather than speak."
If your arrangements at Tours are your arrangements, Aramis, those of London are mine.
With that you may be satisfied he can make his way, both going and returning."
Will that do?"
"My dear Athos," said Aramis, "you speak like Nestor, who was, as everyone knows, the wisest among the Greeks."
The matter had been named to him by d'Artagnan, who in the first place pointed out the money to him, then the glory, and then the danger.
"Well, but then you will not be able to fulfill your commission," said d'Artagnan.
"You will give me a copy this evening, which I shall know by heart tomorrow."
D'Artagnan looked at his friends, as if to say, "Well, what did I tell you?"
"Now," continued he, addressing Planchet, "you have eight days to get an interview with Lord de Winter; you have eight days to return-in all sixteen days.
Remember, if you talk, if you babble, if you get drunk, you risk your master's head, who has so much confidence in your fidelity, and who answers for you.
But remember, also, that if by your fault any evil happens to d'Artagnan, I will find you, wherever you may be, for the purpose of ripping up your belly."
"And I," said Porthos, rolling his large eyes, "remember, I will skin you alive."
"Ah, monsieur!"
"And I," said Aramis, with his soft, melodius voice, "remember that I will roast you at a slow fire, like a savage."
"Ah, monsieur!"
We will not venture to say whether it was from terror created by the threats or from tenderness at seeing four friends so closely united.
D'Artagnan took his hand.
It was decided that Planchet should set out the next day, at eight o'clock in the morning, in order, as he had said, that he might during the night learn the letter by heart.
He gained just twelve hours by this engagement; he was to be back on the sixteenth day, by eight o'clock in the evening.
In the morning, as he was mounting his horse, d'Artagnan, who felt at the bottom of his heart a partiality for the duke, took Planchet aside.
"When you have given the letter to Lord de Winter and he has read it, you will further say to him: Watch over his Grace Lord Buckingham, for they wish to assassinate him.
The four friends, during the period of these two absences, had, as may well be supposed, the eye on the watch, the nose to the wind, and the ear on the hark.
Their days were passed in endeavoring to catch all that was said, in observing the proceeding of the cardinal, and in looking out for all the couriers who arrived.
More than once an involuntary trembling seized them when called upon for some unexpected service.
They had, besides, to look constantly to their own proper safety; Milady was a phantom which, when it had once appeared to people, did not allow them to sleep very quietly.
The four friends exchanged a joyful glance; half of the work was done. It is true, however, that it was the shorter and easier part.
Aramis, blushing in spite of himself, took the letter, which was in a large, coarse hand and not particular for its orthography.
"What does you mean by boor Michon?" said the Swiss, who was chatting with the four friends when the letter came.
"Oh, pardieu, less than nothing," said Aramis; "a charming little seamstress, whom I love dearly and from whose hand I requested a few lines as a sort of keepsake."
Aramis read the letter, and passed it to Athos.
"My cousin,
"My sister and I are skillful in interpreting dreams, and even entertain great fear of them; but of yours it may be said, I hope, every dream is an illusion.
Take care of yourself, and act so that we may from time to time hear you spoken of.
"And what dream does she mean?" asked the dragoon, who had approached during the reading.
"Well, pardieu!" said Aramis, "it was only this: I had a dream, and I related it to her."
"You are very fortunate," said Athos, rising; "I wish I could say as much!"
"Neffer," replied the Swiss, enchanted that a man like Athos could envy him anything.
"Neffer, neffer!"
D'Artagnan, seeing Athos rise, did likewise, took his arm, and went out.
But, as we have said, Bazin had not, by his fortunate return, removed more than a part of the uneasiness which weighed upon the four friends. The days of expectation are long, and d'Artagnan, in particular, would have wagered that the days were forty four hours.
He forgot the necessary slowness of navigation; he exaggerated to himself the power of Milady.
Still further, his confidence in the worthy Picard, at one time so great, diminished day by day.
This anxiety became so great that it even extended to Aramis and Porthos.
"Really," said Athos to them, "you are not men but children, to let a woman terrify you so!
And what does it amount to, after all?
To be imprisoned.
Well, but we should be taken out of prison; Madame Bonacieux was released.
To be decapitated?
Why, every day in the trenches we go cheerfully to expose ourselves to worse than that-for a bullet may break a leg, and I am convinced a surgeon would give us more pain in cutting off a thigh than an executioner in cutting off a head.
"But if he does not come?" said d'Artagnan.
"Well, if he does not come, it will be because he has been delayed, that's all.
He may have fallen from his horse, he may have cut a caper from the deck; he may have traveled so fast against the wind as to have brought on a violent catarrh.
Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile.
"That's all very well," replied d'Artagnan; "but I am tired of fearing when I open a fresh bottle that the wine may come from the cellar of Milady."
"You are very fastidious," said Athos; "such a beautiful woman!"
"A woman of mark!" said Porthos, with his loud laugh.
Athos started, passed his hand over his brow to remove the drops of perspiration that burst forth, and rose in his turn with a nervous movement he could not repress.
The day, however, passed away; and the evening came on slowly, but finally it came.
The bars were filled with drinkers.
They were playing together, as usual, when seven o'clock sounded; the patrol was heard passing to double the posts.
At half past seven the retreat was sounded.
"Come, gentlemen," said he, "they are beating the tattoo.
Let us to bed!"
Aramis mumbled verses to himself, and Porthos from time to time pulled a hair or two from his mustache, in sign of despair.
But all at once a shadow appeared in the darkness the outline of which was familiar to d'Artagnan, and a well-known voice said, "Monsieur, I have brought your cloak; it is chilly this evening."
He promised to be back by eight o'clock, and eight is striking.
"That's well," said Athos, "let us go home and read it."
He wished to hasten their steps; but Athos took his arm and passed it under his own, and the young man was forced to regulate his pace by that of his friend.
It contained half a line, in a hand perfectly British, and with a conciseness as perfectly Spartan:
Thank you; be easy.
d'Artagnan translated this for the others.
Athos took the letter from the hands of d'Artagnan, approached the lamp, set fire to the paper, and did not let go till it was reduced to a cinder.
"Well!" cried d'Artagnan, "tell us all about it."
"So be it," said d'Artagnan.
"Go to bed, Planchet, and sleep soundly."
"My faith, monsieur! that will be the first time I have done so for sixteen days."
"And me, too!" said d'Artagnan.
"And me, too!" said Aramis.
A thick cloak, gathered by a belt at the waist, enwraps the stalwart figure.
Aaron founded a settlement.
POETRY AND PRISON
(Pall Mall Gazette, january third eighteen eighty nine.)
Prison has had an admirable effect on mr Wilfrid Blunt as a poet.
Their subject was not of high or serious import.
'Imprisonment,' says mr Blunt in his preface, 'is a reality of discipline most useful to the modern soul, lapped as it is in physical sloth and self indulgence.
Like a sickness or a spiritual retreat it purifies and ennobles; and the soul emerges from it stronger and more self-contained.' To him, certainly, it has been a mode of purification.
They are, of course, intensely personal in expression.
But the personality that they reveal has nothing petty or ignoble about it.
The petulant cry of the shallow egoist which was the chief characteristic of the Love Sonnets of Proteus is not to be found here.
In its place we have wild grief and terrible scorn, fierce rage and flame like passion. Such a sonnet as the following comes out of the very fire of heart and brain:
God knows, 'twas not with a fore reasoned plan I left the easeful dwellings of my peace, And sought this combat with ungodly Man, And ceaseless still through years that do not cease Have warred with Powers and Principalities. My natural soul, ere yet these strifes began, Was as a sister diligent to please And loving all, and most the human clan.
God knows it.
And He knows how the world's tears Touched me.
And He is witness of my wrath, How it was kindled against murderers Who slew for gold, and how upon their path I met them.
Since which day the World in arms Strikes at my life with angers and alarms.
And this sonnet has all the strange strength of that despair which is but the prelude to a larger hope:
I thought to do a deed of chivalry, An act of worth, which haply in her sight Who was my mistress should recorded be And of the nations.
And, when thus the fight Faltered and men once bold with faces white Turned this and that way in excuse to flee, I only stood, and by the foeman's might Was overborne and mangled cruelly.
The sonnet beginning
A prison is a convent without God- Poverty, Chastity, Obedience Its precepts are:
is very fine; and this, written just after entering the gaol, is powerful:
Naked I came into the world of pleasure, And naked come I to this house of pain. Here at the gate I lay down my life's treasure, My pride, my garments and my name with men. The world and I henceforth shall be as twain, No sound of me shall pierce for good or ill These walls of grief.
Nor shall I hear the vain Laughter and tears of those who love me still.
Within, what new life waits me!
Yet, Lord of Might, Still in Thy light my spirit shall see light.
Literature is not much indebted to mr Balfour for his sophistical Defence of Philosophic Doubt which is one of the dullest books we know, but it must be admitted that by sending mr Blunt to gaol he has converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and deep thinking poet.
The narrow confines of the prison cell seem to suit the 'sonnet's scanty plot of ground,' and an unjust imprisonment for a noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature.
If any one could point out an intermediate and yet a tenable position between the complete independence and the entire subjection of the public expression of opinion, I should perhaps be inclined to adopt it; but the difficulty is to discover this position.
If it is your intention to correct the abuses of unlicensed printing and to restore the use of orderly language, you may in the first instance try the offender by a jury; but if the jury acquits him, the opinion which was that of a single individual becomes the opinion of the country at large.
Too much and too little has therefore hitherto been done.
Too much has still been done to recede, too little to attain your end; you must therefore proceed.
If you establish a censorship of the press, the tongue of the public speaker will still make itself heard, and you have only increased the mischief.
The powers of thought do not rely, like the powers of physical strength, upon the number of their mechanical agents, nor can a host of authors be reckoned like the troops which compose an army; on the contrary, the authority of a principle is often increased by the smallness of the number of men by whom it is expressed.
The words of a strong minded man, which penetrate amidst the passions of a listening assembly, have more power than the vociferations of a thousand orators; and if it be allowed to speak freely in any public place, the consequence is the same as if free speaking was allowed in every village.
The liberty of discourse must therefore be destroyed as well as the liberty of the press; this is the necessary term of your efforts; but if your object was to repress the abuses of liberty, they have brought you to the feet of a despot.
You have been led from the extreme of independence to the extreme of subjection without meeting with a single tenable position for shelter or repose.
There are certain nations which have peculiar reasons for cherishing the liberty of the press, independently of the general motives which I have just pointed out.
For in certain countries which profess to enjoy the privileges of freedom every individual agent of the Government may violate the laws with impunity, since those whom he oppresses cannot prosecute him before the courts of justice.
In this case the liberty of the press is not merely a guarantee, but it is the only guarantee, of their liberty and their security which the citizens possess.
If the rulers of these nations propose to abolish the independence of the press, the people would be justified in saying: Give us the right of prosecuting your offences before the ordinary tribunals, and perhaps we may then waive our right of appeal to the tribunal of public opinion.
But in the countries in which the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people ostensibly prevails, the censorship of the press is not only dangerous, but it is absurd.
When the right of every citizen to co-operate in the government of society is acknowledged, every citizen must be presumed to possess the power of discriminating between the different opinions of his contemporaries, and of appreciating the different facts from which inferences may be drawn.
The first newspaper over which I cast my eyes, upon my arrival in America, contained the following article:
He succeeded at the time, but the hour of retribution approaches, and he will be obliged to disgorge his winnings, to throw aside his false dice, and to end his days in some retirement, where he may curse his madness at his leisure; for repentance is a virtue with which his heart is likely to remain forever unacquainted.
It is not uncommonly imagined in France that the virulence of the press originates in the uncertain social condition, in the political excitement, and the general sense of consequent evil which prevail in that country; and it is therefore supposed that as soon as society has resumed a certain degree of composure the press will abandon its present vehemence.
I am inclined to think that the above causes explain the reason of the extraordinary ascendency it has acquired over the nation, but that they do not exercise much influence upon the tone of its language.
The periodical press appears to me to be actuated by passions and propensities independent of the circumstances in which it is placed, and the present position of America corroborates this opinion.
In America, as in France, it constitutes a singular power, so strangely composed of mingled good and evil that it is at the same time indispensable to the existence of freedom, and nearly incompatible with the maintenance of public order.
Its power is certainly much greater in France than in the United States; though nothing is more rare in the latter country than to hear of a prosecution having been instituted against it.
The reason of this is perfectly simple: the Americans, having once admitted the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, apply it with perfect consistency.
It was never their intention to found a permanent state of things with elements which undergo daily modifications; and there is consequently nothing criminal in an attack upon the existing laws, provided it be not attended with a violent infraction of them.
They are moreover of opinion that courts of justice are unable to check the abuses of the press; and that as the subtilty of human language perpetually eludes the severity of judicial analysis, offences of this nature are apt to escape the hand which attempts to apprehend them.
They hold that to act with efficacy upon the press it would be necessary to find a tribunal, not only devoted to the existing order of things, but capable of surmounting the influence of public opinion; a tribunal which should conduct its proceedings without publicity, which should pronounce its decrees without assigning its motives, and punish the intentions even more than the language of an author.
Whosoever should have the power of creating and maintaining a tribunal of this kind would waste his time in prosecuting the liberty of the press; for he would be the supreme master of the whole community, and he would be as free to rid himself of the authors as of their writings.
In this question, therefore, there is no medium between servitude and extreme license; in order to enjoy the inestimable benefits which the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils which it engenders.
To expect to acquire the former and to escape the latter is to cherish one of those illusions which commonly mislead nations in their times of sickness, when, tired with faction and exhausted by effort, they attempt to combine hostile opinions and contrary principles upon the same soil.
The small influence of the American journals is attributable to several reasons, amongst which are the following:
The Anglo Americans have enjoyed this liberty ever since the foundation of the settlements; moreover, the press cannot create human passions by its own power, however skillfully it may kindle them where they exist.
In America politics are discussed with animation and a varied activity, but they rarely touch those deep passions which are excited whenever the positive interest of a part of the community is impaired: but in the United States the interests of the community are in a most prosperous condition.
A single glance upon a French and an American newspaper is sufficient to show the difference which exists between the two nations on this head.
In France the space allotted to commercial advertisements is very limited, and the intelligence is not considerable, but the most essential part of the journal is that which contains the discussion of the politics of the day.
In America three quarters of the enormous sheet which is set before the reader are filled with advertisements, and the remainder is frequently occupied by political intelligence or trivial anecdotes: it is only from time to time that one finds a corner devoted to passionate discussions like those with which the journalists of France are wont to indulge their readers.
It has been demonstrated by observation, and discovered by the innate sagacity of the pettiest as well as the greatest of despots, that the influence of a power is increased in proportion as its direction is rendered more central.
In France the press combines a twofold centralization; almost all its power is centred in the same spot, and vested in the same hands, for its organs are far from numerous.
The influence of a public press thus constituted, upon a sceptical nation, must be unbounded.
It is an enemy with which a Government may sign an occasional truce, but which it is difficult to resist for any length of time.
Neither of these kinds of centralization exists in America.
The United States have no metropolis; the intelligence as well as the power of the country are dispersed abroad, and instead of radiating from a point, they cross each other in every direction; the Americans have established no central control over the expression of opinion, any more than over the conduct of business.
These are circumstances which do not depend on human foresight; but it is owing to the laws of the Union that there are no licenses to be granted to printers, no securities demanded from editors as in France, and no stamp duty as in France and formerly in England.
The consequence of this is that nothing is easier than to set up a newspaper, and a small number of readers suffices to defray the expenses of the editor.
The number of periodical and occasional publications which appears in the United States actually surpasses belief.
The most enlightened Americans attribute the subordinate influence of the press to this excessive dissemination; and it is adopted as an axiom of political science in that country that the only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely.
The Governments of Europe seem to treat the press with the courtesy of the knights of old; they are anxious to furnish it with the same central power which they have found to be so trusty a weapon, in order to enhance the glory of their resistance to its attacks.
In America there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper. It may readily be imagined that neither discipline nor unity of design can be communicated to so multifarious a host, and each one is consequently led to fight under his own standard.
All the political journals of the United States are indeed arrayed on the side of the administration or against it; but they attack and defend in a thousand different ways.
They cannot succeed in forming those great currents of opinion which overwhelm the most solid obstacles.
This division of the influence of the press produces a variety of other consequences which are scarcely less remarkable.
The facility with which journals can be established induces a multitude of individuals to take a part in them; but as the extent of competition precludes the possibility of considerable profit, the most distinguished classes of society are rarely led to engage in these undertakings.
But such is the number of the public prints that, even if they were a source of wealth, writers of ability could not be found to direct them all.
The will of the majority is the most general of laws, and it establishes certain habits which form the characteristics of each peculiar class of society; thus it dictates the etiquette practised at courts and the etiquette of the bar.
The characteristics of the French journalist consist in a violent, but frequently an eloquent and lofty, manner of discussing the politics of the day; and the exceptions to this habitual practice are only occasional.
Nothing can be more deplorable than this abuse of the powers of thought; I shall have occasion to point out hereafter the influence of the newspapers upon the taste and the morality of the American people, but my present subject exclusively concerns the political world.
It cannot be denied that the effects of this extreme license of the press tend indirectly to the maintenance of public order.
The individuals who are already in the possession of a high station in the esteem of their fellow citizens are afraid to write in the newspapers, and they are thus deprived of the most powerful instrument which they can use to excite the passions of the multitude to their own advantage.
The personal opinions of the editors have no kind of weight in the eyes of the public: the only use of a journal is, that it imparts the knowledge of certain facts, and it is only by altering or distorting those facts that a journalist can contribute to the support of his own views.
But although the press is limited to these resources, its influence in America is immense.
It is the power which impels the circulation of political life through all the districts of that vast territory.
Its eye is constantly open to detect the secret springs of political designs, and to summon the leaders of all parties to the bar of public opinion. It rallies the interests of the community round certain principles, and it draws up the creed which factions adopt; for it affords a means of intercourse between parties which hear, and which address each other without ever having been in immediate contact.
When a great number of the organs of the press adopt the same line of conduct, their influence becomes irresistible; and public opinion, when it is perpetually assailed from the same side, eventually yields to the attack.
The opinions established in the United States under the empire of the liberty of the press are frequently more firmly rooted than those which are formed elsewhere under the sanction of a censor.
But the general principles of the Government are more stable, and the opinions most prevalent in society are generally more durable than in many other countries.
When once the Americans have taken up an idea, whether it be well or ill founded, nothing is more difficult than to eradicate it from their minds.
The same tenacity of opinion has been observed in England, where, for the last century, greater freedom of conscience and more invincible prejudices have existed than in all the other countries of Europe.
The nations amongst which this liberty exists are as apt to cling to their opinions from pride as from conviction. They cherish them because they hold them to be just, and because they exercised their own free will in choosing them; and they maintain them not only because they are true, but because they are their own.
Several other reasons conduce to the same end.
It was remarked by a man of genius that "ignorance lies at the two ends of knowledge." Perhaps it would have been more correct to have said, that absolute convictions are to be met with at the two extremities, and that doubt lies in the middle; for the human intellect may be considered in three distinct states, which frequently succeed one another.
A man believes implicitly, because he adopts a proposition without inquiry.
He doubts as soon as he is assailed by the objections which his inquiries may have aroused.
But he frequently succeeds in satisfying these doubts, and then he begins to believe afresh: he no longer lays hold on a truth in its most shadowy and uncertain form, but he sees it clearly before him, and he advances onwards by the light it gives him.
When the liberty of the press acts upon men who are in the first of these three states, it does not immediately disturb their habit of believing implicitly without investigation, but it constantly modifies the objects of their intuitive convictions.
The human mind continues to discern but one point upon the whole intellectual horizon, and that point is in continual motion.
Such are the symptoms of sudden revolutions, and of the misfortunes which are sure to befall those generations which abruptly adopt the unconditional freedom of the press.
The circle of novel ideas is, however, soon terminated; the touch of experience is upon them, and the doubt and mistrust which their uncertainty produces become universal.
We may rest assured that the majority of mankind will either believe they know not wherefore, or will not know what to believe.
It has been remarked that in times of great religious fervor men sometimes change their religious opinions; whereas in times of general scepticism everyone clings to his own persuasion.
The same thing takes place in politics under the liberty of the press.
In countries where all the theories of social science have been contested in their turn, the citizens who have adopted one of them stick to it, not so much because they are assured of its excellence, as because they are not convinced of the superiority of any other.
This Chronicle still subsists, and from what I observed, when I was abroad, has a more extensive circulation upon the Continent than any of the English newspapers.
The reason (said he) why I wish for it, is this: when dr Madden came to London, he submitted that work to my castigation; and I remember I blotted a great many lines, and might have blotted many more, without making the poem worse.
About this period he was offered a living of considerable value in Lincolnshire, if he were inclined to enter into holy orders.
'SIR,
'What relation there is between the Welch and Irish language, or between the language of Ireland and that of Biscay, deserves enquiry.
Of these provincial and unextended tongues, it seldom happens that more than one are understood by any one man; and, therefore, it seldom happens that a fair comparison can be made.
I hope you will continue to cultivate this kind of learning, which has too long lain neglected, and which, if it be suffered to remain in oblivion for another century, may, perhaps, never be retrieved.
'Your most obliged,
'SAM.
JOHNSON.'
'London, april ninth seventeen fifty seven.'
THOMAS WARTON.
'DEAR SIR,
'I long to see you all, but cannot conveniently come yet.
You might write to me now and then, if you were good for any thing.
I am,
JOHNSON.'
'[London,] june twenty first seventeen fifty seven.'
Your's is the only letter of goodwill that I have received; though, indeed, I am promised something of that sort from Sweden.
May I enquire after her?
'Your most obliged,
JOHNSON.'
'I must indeed have slept very fast, not to have been awakened by your letter.
None of your suspicions are true; I am not much richer than when you left me; and, what is worse, my omission of an answer to your first letter, will prove that I am not much wiser.
But I go on as I formerly did, designing to be some time or other both rich and wise; and yet cultivate neither mind nor fortune.
Do you take notice of my example, and learn the danger of delay.
When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty nine, what I now am.
'But you do not seem to need my admonition.
You are busy in acquiring and in communicating knowledge, and while you are studying, enjoy the end of study, by making others wiser and happier.
I was much pleased with the tale that you told me of being tutour to your sisters.
It sometimes, indeed, happens, that some supervenient cause of discord may overpower this original amity; but it seems to me more frequently thrown away with levity, or lost by negligence, than destroyed by injury or violence.
mrs Langton is as wise as Sibyl, and as good; and will live, if my wishes can prolong life, till she shall in time be as old.
'Your affectionate, humble servant,
'SAM.
JOHNSON.'
'january ninth seventeen fifty eight.'
'TO mr
BURNEY, AT LYNNE, NORFOLK.
'SIR,
'I have, likewise, enclosed twelve receipts; not that I mean to impose upon you the trouble of pushing them, with more importunity than may seem proper, but that you may rather have more than fewer than you shall want.
The proposals you will disseminate as there shall be an opportunity.
I have not the collection by me, and therefore cannot draw out a catalogue of my own parts, but will do it, and send it.
It has more variety of real life, and greater facility of language.
mr Langton having signified a wish to read it, 'Sir, (said he) you shall not do more than I have done myself.' He then folded it up and sent it off.
In this series of essays he exhibits admirable instances of grave humour, of which he had an uncommon share.
CHAPTER twenty eight.
This was a slight that at another time Captain Blood would not have borne for a moment.
But at present, in his odd frame of mind, and its divorcement from piracy, he was content to smile his utter contempt of the French General.
Resentment smouldered amongst them for a while, to flame out violently at the end of that week in Cartagena.
It was only by undertaking to voice their grievance to the Baron that their captain was able for the moment to pacify them.
He found him in the offices which the Baron had set up in the town, with a staff of clerks to register the treasure brought in and to cast up the surrendered account books, with a view to ascertaining precisely what were the sums yet to be delivered up.
The Baron sat there scrutinizing ledgers, like a city merchant, and checking figures to make sure that all was correct to the last peso.
A choice occupation this for the General of the King's Armies by Sea and Land.
He looked up irritated by the interruption which Captain Blood's advent occasioned.
"I must speak frankly; and you must suffer it.
My men are on the point of mutiny."
If there is a mutiny, you and your captains shall be held personally responsible.
Blood contained himself with difficulty.
"You may define our positions as you please," said he.
"But I'll remind you that the nature of a thing is not changed by the name you give it. I am concerned with facts; chiefly with the fact that we entered into definite articles with you.
Those articles provide for a certain distribution of the spoil.
My men demand it.
They are not satisfied."
"Of what are they not satisfied?" demanded the Baron.
A blow in the face could scarcely have taken the Frenchman more aback. He stiffened, and drew himself up, his eyes blazing, his face of a deathly pallor.
The clerks at the tables laid down their pens, and awaited the explosion in a sort of terror.
Then the great gentleman delivered himself in a voice of concentrated anger.
"Do you really dare so much, you and the dirty thieves that follow you?
God's Blood!
"I will remind you," said Blood, "that I am speaking not for myself, but for my men.
It is they who are not satisfied, they who threaten that unless satisfaction is afforded them, and promptly, they will take it."
"Let them attempt it, and...."
"Now don't be rash.
"God give me patience!
How can we share the spoil before it has been completely gathered?"
"My men have reason to believe that it is gathered; and, anyway, they view with mistrust that it should all be housed aboard your ships, and remain in your possession.
They say that hereafter there will be no ascertaining what the spoil really amounts to."
"But-name of Heaven!--I have kept books.
They are there for all to see."
"They do not wish to see account books.
They want to view the treasure itself.
They know-you compel me to be blunt-that the accounts have been falsified.
The men know-and they are very skilled in these computations-that it exceeds the enormous total of forty millions.
They insist that the treasure itself be produced and weighed in their presence, as is the custom among the Brethren of the Coast."
"I know nothing of filibuster customs." The gentleman was disdainful.
"But you are learning quickly."
"What do you mean, you rogue?
I am a leader of armies, not of plundering thieves."
"Oh, but of course!" Blood's irony laughed in his eyes.
Am I to understand that you are threatening me?"
I warn you of the trouble that a little prudence may avert.
You do not know on what a volcano you are sitting. You do not know the ways of buccaneers.
That shifted the basis of the argument to less hostile ground.
He gave it with an extreme ill grace, and only because Blood made him realize at last that to withhold it longer would be dangerous.
In an engagement, he might conceivably defeat Blood's followers.
But conceivably he might not.
And even if he succeeded, the effort would be so costly to him in men that he might not thereafter find himself in sufficient strength to maintain his hold of what he had seized.
But when the next dawn broke over Cartagena, they had the explanation of it.
The French ships were gone.
The two parties were fused into one by their common fury, and before the exhibition of it the inhabitants of that ill fated town were stricken with deeper terror than they had yet known since the coming of this expedition.
"We must follow," he declared.
"Follow and punish."
At first that was the general cry.
Then came the consideration that only two of the buccaneer ships were seaworthy-and these could not accommodate the whole force, particularly being at the moment indifferently victualled for a long voyage.
After all, there would be a deal of treasure still hidden in Cartagena.
They would remain behind to extort it whilst fitting their ships for sea.
Let Blood and Hagthorpe and those who sailed with them do as they pleased.
Blood was reduced to despair.
If he went off now, Heaven knew what would happen to the town, the temper of those whom he was leaving being what it was.
Yet if he remained, it would simply mean that his own and Hagthorpe's crews would join in the saturnalia and increase the hideousness of events now inevitable.
Unable to reach a decision, his own men and Hagthorpe's took the matter off his hands, eager to give chase to Rivarol.
Not only was a dastardly cheat to be punished but an enormous treasure to be won by treating as an enemy this French commander who, himself, had so villainously broken the alliance.
When Blood, torn as he was between conflicting considerations, still hesitated, they bore him almost by main force aboard the Arabella.
Within an hour, the water casks at least replenished and stowed aboard, the Arabella and the Elizabeth put to sea upon that angry chase.
I found him sitting alone in his cabin, his head in his hands, torment in the eyes that stared straight before him, seeing nothing."
Surely 't isn't the thought of Rivarol!"
"No," said Blood thickly.
And for once he was communicative.
It may well be that he must vent the thing that oppressed him or be driven mad by it.
And Pitt, after all, was his friend and loved him, and, so, a proper man for confidences.
"But if she knew!
If she knew!
O God!
I had thought to have done with piracy; thought to have done with it for ever.
Think of Cartagena!
Think of the hell those devils will be making of it now!
And I must have that on my soul!"
"Nay, peter--'t isn't on your soul; but on Rivarol's.
What could you have done to prevent it?"
"I would have stayed if it could have availed."
So why repine?"
"There is more than that to it," groaned Blood.
"What now?
Loyal service with France has led to this; and that is equally impossible hereafter. What to live clean, I believe the only thing is to go and offer my sword to the King of Spain."
But something remained-the last thing that he could have expected-something towards which they were rapidly sailing over the tropical, sunlit sea.
All this against which he now inveighed so bitterly was but a necessary stage in the shaping of his odd destiny.
Setting a course for Hispaniola, since they judged that thither must Rivarol go to refit before attempting to cross to France, the Arabella and the Elizabeth ploughed briskly northward with a moderately favourable wind for two days and nights without ever catching a glimpse of their quarry.
The wind, to which they were sailing very close, was westerly, and it bore to their ears a booming sound which in less experienced ears might have passed for the breaking of surf upon a lee shore.
"Guns!" said Pitt, who stood with Blood upon the quarter deck.
Blood nodded, listening.
"Ten miles away, perhaps fifteen-somewhere off Port Royal, I should judge," Pitt added.
"Does it concern us?" he asked.
"Guns off Port Royal... that should argue Colonel Bishop at work.
And against whom should he be in action but against friends of ours I think it may concern us.
Anyway, we'll stand in to investigate.
Bid them put the helm over."
Close hauled they tacked aweather, guided by the sound of combat, which grew in volume and definition as they approached it.
Thus for an hour, perhaps.
Then, as, telescope to his eye, Blood raked the haze, expecting at any moment to behold the battling ships, the guns abruptly ceased.
They held to their course, nevertheless, with all hands on deck, eagerly, anxiously scanning the sea ahead.
And presently an object loomed into view, which soon defined itself for a great ship on fire.
As the Arabella with the Elizabeth following closely raced nearer on their north westerly tack, the outlines of the blazing vessel grew clearer. Presently her masts stood out sharp and black above the smoke and flames, and through his telescope Blood made out plainly the pennon of saint George fluttering from her maintop.
"An English ship!" he cried.
They took in sail and hove to as they came up with the drifting boats, laden to capacity with survivors.
Chapter two.
The Lair of the Wolf
The words came in a cold snarl that curdled the hearer's blood.
The speaker leaned forward, his fist pounding emphasis on the rude table between them.
He was a tall, rangy built man, supple as a leopard and with a lean, cruel, predatory face.
His eyes danced and glittered with a kind of reckless mockery.
The fellow spoken to replied sullenly, "This Solomon Kane is a demon from Hell, I tell you."
Dolt!
Ask the mountain wolves that tore the flesh from their dead bones.
Where does this Kane hide?
We have searched the mountains and the valleys for leagues, and we have found no trace.
The Wolf strummed impatiently upon the table.
His keen face, despite lines of wild living and dissipation, was the face of a thinker.
The superstitions of his followers affected him not at all.
"Faugh!
I say again.
The fellow has found some cavern or secret vale of which we do not know where he hides in the day."
"And at night he sallies forth and slays us," gloomily commented the other.
The first we know of this man is when we find Jean, the most desperate bandit unhung, nailed to a tree with his own dagger through his breast, and the letters s l k carved upon his dead cheeks.
By the demons of perdition, it seems he met him!
For we found his sword pierced corpse upon a cliff.
What now? Are we all to fall before this English fiend?"
"True, our best men have been done to death by him," mused the bandit chief.
"Soon the rest return from that little trip to the hermit's; then we shall see.
Kane can not hide forever.
Then-ha, what was that?"
The two turned swiftly as a shadow fell across the table.
Into the entrance of the cave that formed the bandit lair, a man staggered.
His eyes were wide and staring; he reeled on buckling legs, and a dark red stain dyed his tunic.
He came a few tottering steps forward, then pitched across the table, sliding off onto the floor.
"Hell's devils!" cursed the Wolf, hauling him upright and propping him in a chair.
All dead!"
"How?
Satan's curses on you, speak!"
The Wolf shook the man savagely, the other bandit gazing on in wide eyed horror.
"I stayed outside-to watch-the others went in-to torture the hermit-to make him reveal-the hiding place-of his gold."
"Yes, yes!
Then what?"
The Wolf was raging with impatience.
"Then the world turned red-the hut went up in a roar and a red rain flooded the valley-through it I saw-the hermit and a tall man clad all in black-coming from the trees-"
"Solomon Kane!" gasped the bandit.
"I knew it!
I-"
"Silence, fool!" snarled the chief.
"Go on!"
"I fled-Kane pursued-wounded me-but I outran-him-got-here- first-"
The man slumped forward on the table.
"Saints and devils!" raged the Wolf.
"What does he look like, this Kane?"
"Like-Satan-"
The voice trailed off in silence.
"Like Satan!" babbled the other bandit.
"I told you!
'tis the Horned One himself!
I tell you-"
He ceased as a frightened face peered in at the cave entrance.
"Kane?"
"Keep close watch, La Mon; in a moment the Rat and I will join you."
The face withdrew and Le Loup turned to the other.
"You, I, and that thief La Mon are all that are left.
What would you suggest?"
"You are right.
Let us take the gems and gold from the chests and flee, using the secret passageway."
"And La Mon?"
"He can watch until we are ready to flee.
Then-why divide the treasure three ways?"
A faint smile touched the Rat's malevolent features.
Then a sudden thought smote him.
"He," indicating the corpse on the floor, "said, 'I got here first.' Does that mean Kane was pursuing him here?" And as the Wolf nodded impatiently the other turned to the chests with chattering haste.
The chests were empty, their treasure lying in a shimmering mass upon the bloodstained floor.
The Wolf stopped and listened.
Outside was silence.
There was no moon, and Le Loup's keen imagination pictured the dark slayer, Solomon Kane, gliding through the blackness, a shadow among shadows.
He grinned crookedly; this time the Englishman would be foiled.
"There is a chest yet unopened," said he, pointing.
The Rat, with a muttered exclamation of surprize, bent over the chest indicated.
With a single, catlike motion, the Wolf sprang upon him, sheathing his dagger to the hilt in the Rat's back, between the shoulders.
The Rat sagged to the floor without a sound.
"Why divide the treasure two ways?" murmured Le Loup, wiping his blade upon the dead man's doublet.
"Now for La mon"
He stepped toward the door; then stopped and shrank back.
A tall man, as tall as Le Loup he was, clad in black from head to foot, in plain, close fitting garments that somehow suited the somber face.
Long arms and broad shoulders betokened the swordsman, as plainly as the long rapier in his hand.
A kind of dark pallor lent him a ghostly appearance in the uncertain light, an effect heightened by the satanic darkness of his lowering brows.
Eyes, large, deep set and unblinking, fixed their gaze upon the bandit, and looking into them, Le Loup was unable to decide what color they were.
Strangely, the mephistophelean trend of the lower features was offset by a high, broad forehead, though this was partly hidden by a featherless hat.
That forehead marked the dreamer, the idealist, the introvert, just as the eyes and the thin, straight nose betrayed the fanatic.
An observer would have been struck by the eyes of the two men who stood there, facing each other.
Eyes of both betokened untold deeps of power, but there the resemblance ceased.
The eyes of the man in black, on the other hand, deep set and staring from under prominent brows, were cold but deep; gazing into them, one had the impression of looking into countless fathoms of ice.
Now the eyes clashed, and the Wolf, who was used to being feared, felt a strange coolness on his spine.
The sensation was new to him-a new thrill to one who lived for thrills, and he laughed suddenly.
"I am Solomon Kane." The voice was resonant and powerful.
"Are you prepared to meet your God?"
"No doubt I stated my inquiry wrongly," Kane said grimly.
"I will change it: Are you prepared to meet your master, the Devil?"
"Your last question is easily answered, sir," Kane replied.
"I myself had the tale spread that the hermit possessed a store of gold, knowing that would draw your scum as carrion draws vultures.
For days and nights I have watched the hut, and tonight, when I saw your villains coming, I warned the hermit, and together we went among the trees back of the hut.
Then, when the rogues were inside, I struck flint and steel to the train I had laid, and flame ran through the trees like a red snake until it reached the powder I had placed beneath the hut floor.
Then the hut and thirteen sinners went to Hell in a great roar of flame and smoke.
True, one escaped, but him I had slain in the forest had not I stumbled and fallen upon a broken root, which gave him time to elude me."
Yet tell me this: Why have you followed me as a wolf follows deer?"
You know the details better than i There was a girl there, a mere child, who, hoping to escape your lust, fled up the valley; but you, you jackal of Hell, you caught her and left her, violated and dying.
I found her there, and above her dead form I made up my mind to hunt you down and kill you."
"Yes, I remember the wench.
"Le Loup, take care!" Kane exclaimed, a terrible menace in his voice, "I have never yet done a man to death by torture, but by God, sir, you tempt me!"
The tone, and more especially the unexpected oath, coming as it did from Kane, slightly sobered Le Loup; his eyes narrowed and his hand moved toward his rapier.
The air was tense for an instant; then the Wolf relaxed elaborately.
"Who was the girl?" he asked idly.
"Your wife?"
"That, sir, is my own affair; it is sufficient that I do so."
Kane could not have explained, even to himself, nor did he ever seek an explanation within himself.
A true fanatic, his promptings were reasons enough for his actions.
There on the floor is the equivalent to an emperor's ransom.
Kane leaned forward, a terrible brooding threat growing in his cold eyes.
He seemed like a great condor about to launch himself upon his victim.
"Sir, do you assume me to be as great a villain as yourself?"
Suddenly Le Loup threw back his head, his eyes dancing and leaping with a wild mockery and a kind of insane recklessness.
His shout of laughter sent the echoes flying.
No, you fool, I do not class you with myself!
"Shades of death!
Shall I waste time in parleying with this base scoundrel!" Kane snarled in a voice suddenly blood thirsting, and his lean frame flashed forward like a bent bow suddenly released.
At the same instant Le Loup with a wild laugh bounded backward with a movement as swift as Kane's.
His timing was perfect; his back flung hands struck the table and hurled it aside, plunging the cave into darkness as the candle toppled and went out.
Kane's rapier sang like an arrow in the dark as he thrust blindly and ferociously.
The taunt came from somewhere in front of him, but Kane, plunging toward the sound with the savage fury of baffled wrath, caromed against a blank wall that did not yield to his blow.
From somewhere seemed to come an echo of a mocking laugh.
APPENDIX
We shall present these together with our reply as they appeared on the Sunday Programs of the Independent Religious Society.
Criticism is welcome.
If the criticism is just, it prevents us from making the same mistake twice; if it is unjust, it gives us an opportunity to correct the error our critic has fallen into.
No one's knowledge is perfect.
But the question is, does a teacher suppress the facts?
Does he insist on remaining ignorant of the facts?
FROM THE SUNDAY PROGRAMS
Now that the debate on one of the most vital questions of modern religious thought-The Historicity of Jesus-is in print, a few further reflections on some minor points in dr Crapsey's argument may add to the value of the published copy.
REV. dr
ANSWER: The only way this question can be settled is by appealing to history.
Mithraism is a variant religion, which at one time spread over the Roman Empire and came near outclassing Christianity.
Religions, as well as their variations, appear as new branches do upon an old tree.
But the popular imagination craves a Maker for the Universe, a founder for Rome, a first man for the human race, and a great chief as the starter of the tribe.
Because Mohammed is historical, it does not follow that Moses is also historical.
REV. dr
REV. dr
ANSWER: But in the same sentence the doctor takes all this back by adding: "There are a great many things in his history that are not historical." If so, then we do not possess "a very distinctly outlined history," but at best a mixture of fact and fiction.
REV. dr
ANSWER: How long was "the time from the opening of Jesus' public career until the time that it closed?"--One year!--according to the three gospels.
It sounds quite a period to speak of "following his public career" from beginning to end, especially when compared with Caesar's, until it is remembered that the entire public career of Jesus covers the space of only one year.
With the exception of one year, his whole life is hid in impenetrable darkness.
We know nothing of his childhood, nothing of his old age, if he lived to be old, and of his youth, we know just enough to fill up a year.
Under the circumstances, there is no comparison between the public career of a Caesar or a Socrates covering from fifty to seventy years of time, and that of a Jesus of whose life only one brief year is thrown upon the canvas.
REV. dr
But if the 'Christ' which the hebrews expected was "purely mythical," what makes the same 'Christ' in the supposed Tacitus passage historical?
William Tell is a myth-not the name, but the man the name stands for.
To answer that Jesus is historical, but The Anointed is not, is to evade the question.
When Mosheim declares that "The prevalent opinion among early Christians was that Christ existed in appearance only," he could not have meant by 'Christ' only a title.
The Hebrew illusion said, Christ was coming; the Christian illusion says, Christ has come.
The minister of the South Congregational Church, who heard the debate, has publicly called your lecturer an "unscrupulous sophist," who "practices imposition upon a popular audience" and who "put forth sentence after sentence which every scholar present knew to be a perversion of the facts so outrageous as to be laughable."
Invited by several people to prove these charges, the Reverend replies: "In the absence of any full report of what he (M.
One instance, however, he is able to remember which "when it fell upon my ears," he writes, "it struck me with such amazement, that it completely drove from my mind a series of most astonishing statements of various sorts which had just preceded it."
We refrain from commenting on the excuse given to explain so significant a failure of memory.
And what was the statement which, while it crippled his memory, it did not moderate his zeal?
This is his most serious complaint.
Does it justify hasty language?
All church historians admit the existence of sects that denied the New Testament Jesus-the Gnostics, the Essenes, the Ebionites, the Marcionites, the Cerinthians, etc
As the debate is now in print, further comment on this would not be necessary.
Incidents like the above, however, should change every lukewarm rationalist into a devoted soldier of truth and honor.
To us, more important than anything presented on this subject, is this evidence of the existence of a very early dispute among the first disciples of Jesus on the question of whether he was real or merely an apparition.
As early as John's time, if he is the writer of the epistle, Jesus' historicity was questioned.
The gospel of john also hints at the existence in the primitive church of Christians who did not accept the reality of Jesus.
three
The strength of a given criticism is determined by asking: Does it in any way impair the soundness of the argument against which it is directed?
Critics have discovered mistakes in Darwin and Haeckel, but are these mistakes of such a nature as to prove fatal to the theory of evolution?
It is the blow that disables which counts.
To charge that we have said 'Gospel,' where we should have said 'Epistle,' or 'Trullum' instead of 'Trullo'; that it was not Barnabas, but Nicholas who denied the Gospel Jesus, and that there were variations of this denial, does not at all disprove the fact that, according to the Christian scriptures themselves, among the apostolic followers there were those to whom Jesus Christ was only a phantom.
Was ever such a view entertained of Caesar, Socrates or of any other historical character?
"The Apostle john never made any such complaint.
Critical scholarship is pretty well agreed that he did not write the epistles ascribed to him."
In his recent letter he denies that the apostle ever made such a complaint.
john did not write the epistles, then, which the Christian church for two thousand years, and at a cost of millions of dollars, and at the greater sacrifice of truth and progress has been proclaiming to the world as the work of the inspired john!
Our desire, in engaging in this argument, is to turn the thought and love of the world from a mythical being, to humanity, which is both real and present.
Paul tells us that he lived in Jerusalem at a time when Jesus must have been holding the attention of the city; yet he never met him." To this the clergyman replies:
"Paul tells us nothing of the kind.
john did not write the epistles, and Paul's speech in the Book of Acts was put into his mouth!
In other words, only those passages in the bible are authentic which the clergy quote; those which the rationalists quote are spurious.
I personally believe Jesus lived.
But I have no proof for this beyond my feeling that the movement with which the name is associated could even for Paul not have taken its nomenclature without a personal substratum.
The News reports the Rabbi as saying, "But we know through the Rabbinical Books that Jesus lived."
The editor promised to locate the responsibility for the contradiction.
But it is with pleasure that the Independent Religious Society gives Rabbi Hirsch this opportunity to explain his position.
It is a stock argument and not to the point."
This is extraordinary; and as the Rabbi does not question the statement, we infer that it is a correct report of what he said.
w e Barton, of Oak Park, is one of the ablest Congregational ministers in the West.
He has recently expressed himself on the Mangasarian Crapsey Debate.
The Reverend gentleman begins by an uncompromising denial of our statements, and ends by virtually admitting all that we contend for. This morning we will write of his denials; next Sunday, of his admissions.
"mr Mangasarian," says dr Barton, "has not given evidence of his skill as a logician or of his accuracy in the use of history." Then he proceeds to apologize, in a way, for the character of his reply to our argument, by saying that "mr
Mangasarian's arguments, fortunately, do not require to be taken very seriously, for they are not in themselves serious."
Notwithstanding this protest, dr Barton proceeds to do his best to reply to our position.
Yet Paul never seems to have met Jesus, or to have heard of his teachings or miracles.
The above reply, we are compelled to say, much to our regret, is not even honest.
Without actually telling any untruths, it suggests indirectly two falsehoods: First, that Jesus was not much in Jerusalem-that he was there only on a few occasions; and that, therefore, it is not strange that Paul did not see him or hear of his preaching or miracles; and second, that Paul was absent from the city when Jesus was there.
The question is not how often Jesus visited Jerusalem, but how conspicuous was the part he played there.
The Reverend debater attempts to belittle the Jerusalem career of Jesus, by suggesting that he was not there much, when according to the Gospels, it was in that city that his ministry began and culminated.
We say Paul gives not a single quotation to prove that he knew of a teaching Jesus.
There is not a single miracle, parable or moral teaching attributed to Jesus in the Gospels of which Paul seems to possess any knowledge whatever.
Nor is it true that it is of no consequence that "Paul seldom quotes the words of Jesus." For it proves that the Gospel Jesus was unknown to Paul, and that he was created at a later date.
Once more; we say that the only Jesus Paul knew was the one he met in a trance on his way to Damascus.
To this the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Oak Park replies in the same we do not care to explain style.
He says: "Nor is it of consequence that Paul values comparatively lightly, having known him in the flesh."
The clergyman's words, however, convey the impression that Paul knew Jesus in the flesh, but he valued that, knowledge "comparatively lightly," that is to say, he did not think much of it.
And dr Barton is one of the foremost divines of the country.
After two thousand years, it is still uncertain to whom we are indebted for the story of Jesus.
What, in dr Barton's opinion, could have influenced the framers of the life of Jesus to suppress their identity?
"At the very least, four of Paul's epistles are genuine," says the same clergyman.
Only four?
Paul has thirteen epistles in the bible, and of only four of them is dr Barton certain.
What are the remaining nine doing in the Holy Bible?
And which 'four' does the clergyman accept as doubtlessly "genuine?" Only yesterday all thirteen of Paul's letters were infallible, and they are so still wherever no questions are asked about them.
It is only where there is intelligence and inquiry that "four of them" at least are reliable.
As honesty and culture increase, the number of inspired epistles decreases.
three.
We wonder how many kinds of flesh there are according to dr Barton.
The good man controls his appetites and passions, but his flesh is not any different from anybody else's.
Our point is, that if the New Testament is reliable, in the time of the apostles themselves, the Gnostics, an influential body of Christians, denied that Jesus was any more than an imaginary existence.
How does the Reverend Barton like the conclusion to which his own reasoning leads him?
The doctor admits the charge, except that he calls it by another name.
The difference between fiction and forgery is this: the former is, what it claims to be; the latter is a lie parading as a truth.
Fiction is honest because it does not try to deceive.
Forgery is dishonest because its object is to deceive.
If the Gospel was a novel, no one would object to its mythology, but pretending to be historical, it must square its claims with the facts, or be branded as a forgery.
It concedes all that higher criticism contends for.
We are not sure either of Jesus' words or of his character, intimates the Reverend preacher.
Precisely.
In commenting on our remark that in the eighth century "Pope Hadrian called upon the Christian world to think of Jesus as a man," dr Barton replies with considerable temper: "To date people's right to think of Jesus as a man from that decree is not to be characterized by any polite term." Our neighbor, in the first place, misquotes us in his haste.
seven
"In answer to your query, which I received, I beg to give the following statement.
Facts, not theories.
The date of your own letter nineteen o eight tells what?
one thousand nine hundred eight years after what?
The looking forward of the world to Him."
reverend Shayler has an original way of proving the historicity of Jesus. Every time we date our letters, suggests the clergyman, we prove that Jesus lived.
The ancient Greeks reckoned time by the Olympiads, which fact, according to this interesting clergyman, ought to prove that the Olympic games were instituted by the God Heracles or Hercules, son of Zeus; the Roman Chronology began with the building of Rome by Romulus, which by the same reasoning would prove that Romulus and Remus, born of Mars, and nursed by a she wolf, are historical.
This date prevailed in many countries until seventeen forty five.
According to this clergyman, scientists, instead of studying the crust of the earth and making geological investigations to ascertain the probable age of the earth, ought to look at the date in the margin of the bible which tells exactly the world's age.
reverend Shayler continues: "The places where he was born, labored and died are still extant, and have no value apart from such testimony."
While this is amusing, we are going to deny ourselves the pleasure of laughing at it; we will do our best to give it a serious answer.
If the existence of such a country as Palestine proves that Jesus is real, the existence of Switzerland must prove that William Tell is historical; and the existence of an Athens must prove that Athene and Apollo really lived; and from the fact that there is an England, reverend Shayler would prove that Robin Hood and his band really lived in eleven sixty.
"A line of apostles and bishops coming right down from him by his appointment to Anderson of Chicago," shows that Jesus is historical. It does, but only to Episcopalians.
The Catholics and the other sects do not believe that Anderson is a descendant of Jesus.
Did the priests of Baal or Moloch prove that these beings existed?
Your own church began with Henry the Eighth in fifteen thirty four, with persecution and murder, when the king, his hands wet with the blood of his own wives and ministers, made himself the supreme head of the church in England.
Gibbon writes of Constantine that "the same year of his reign in which he convened the council of Nice was polluted by the execution, or rather murder, of his eldest son."
But our clerical neighbor from Oak Park has one more argument: "Why is Sunday observed instead of Saturday?" Well, why?
If Jesus rose at all, he rose on a certain day, and the apostles must have known the date.
Why then is there a different date every year?
reverend Shayler concludes: "Haven't time to go deeper now," and he intimates that to deny his 'facts' is either to be a fool or a "liar." We will not comment on this.
eight
One of our Sunday programs, the other day, found its way into a church.
It went farther; it made its appearance in the pulpit.
"This, too, just as though Paul never bore testimony."
This gave the clergyman a splendid opportunity to present in clear and convincing form the evidence for the reality of Jesus.
But one thing prevented him:--the lack of evidence.
Therefore, after announcing the subject, he dismissed it, by remarking that Paul's testimony was enough.
Morton Culver Hartzell, in a letter, offers the same argument.
"Let mr Mangasarian first disprove Paul," he writes.
The argument in a nutshell is this: Jesus is historical because he is guaranteed by Paul.
Let us see how much the church scholars themselves know about Paul:
Edwin Hatch, d d, Vice Principal, saint Mary Hall, Oxford, England.
But we are satisfied to rest the case on orthodox admissions alone.
Jesus is historical because a man by the name of Paul says so, though we do not know much about Paul.
Goldwin Smith to exclaim: "Jesus has flown.
I believe the legend of Jesus was made by many minds working under a great religious impulse-one man adding a parable, another an exhortation, another a miracle story;"--and George Eliot to write: "The materials for a real life of Christ do not exist."
In the effort to untie the Jesus knot by Paul, the church has increased the number of knots to two.
In other words, the church has proceeded on the theory that two uncertainties make a certainty.
Speaking in this city, Rev.
w h Wray Boyle of Lake Forest, declared that unbelief was responsible for the worst crimes in history.
He mentioned the placing.
The story of a "nude woman," etc, is pure fiction, and that the two murders were caused by unbelief is mere assumption.
To help his creed, the preacher resorts to fable.
Her innocent blood stained the hands of the clergy, who also handle the Holy Sacraments.
She was murdered not by a crazed individual but by the orders of the bishop of Alexandria.
How does the true story of Hypatia compare with the fable of "a nude woman placed on a pedestal in the city of Paris?" The Reverend must answer, or never tell an untruth again.
Hypatia was murdered in church, and by the clergy, because she was not orthodox.
three. james CLEMENT, a Catholic, assassinated Henry the third.
For this act the clergy placed his portrait on the altar in the churches between two great lighted candle sticks.
Sisera, a heathen, having lost a battle, begged for shelter at the tent of Jael, a friendly woman, but of the Bible faith.
The tired warrior fell asleep from great weariness. Then Jael picked a tent peg and with a hammer in her hand "walked softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground...So he died."
But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn.
"At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne's forehead.
Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!"
"This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die; is there not law for it?
That is the hardest word yet!
"Make way, good people-make way, in the King's name!" cried he.
"What is it?"
"Why shouldn't she?"
"Really?"
CHAPTER eight
GREETINGS
"This is all?" Jack said.
The message stared up at them cryptically.
Can you hear me?
Then a voice came whispering through the static.
"We need your co ordinates in order to tell," Tiger said.
"Who are you?"
"Check these out fast," he told Jack.
We are all dying, but if you must have a contract to come...."
"We're coming.
A planet calling for help, with no Hospital Earth contract!"
"They sound desperate," Dal said.
Tiger was right; this was almost too good to be true.
Says it's an Earth type planet, and not much else.
Gives reference to the full report in the Confederation files.
"Contract!" Jack said.
"It doesn't even say there are any people there. Not a word about any kind of life form."
Jack stared at him.
We can't do that, they'd skin us alive.
Tiger got the request off while Jack and Dal strapped down for the conversion to Koenig drive.
But things were different now.
"I did not!" the Black Doctor snapped.
What do you think?
The Black Doctor looked up, and beamed.
dr Arnquist laughed.
"My name?"
"You didn't know that you were a guinea pig, did you?" the Black Doctor said.
The Black Doctor smiled.
What about you?
What are your plans?
What do you propose to do now that you have that star on your collar?"
They talked then about the future.
"Then go along," dr Arnquist said, "with my congratulations and blessing.
But now I think I've changed my mind."
He reached out and placed Fuzzy gently in the Black Doctor's hand.
"I want you to keep him," he said.
"I don't think I'll need him any more. I'll miss him, but I think it would be better if I don't have him now. Be good to him, and let me visit him once in a while."
The Black Doctor looked at Dal, and then lifted Fuzzy up to his own shoulder.
For a moment the little creature shivered as if afraid.
Then he blinked twice at Dal, trustingly, and snuggled in comfortably against the Black Doctor's neck.
He was a Star Surgeon from Hospital Earth.
He pulled his scarlet cape tightly around his throat.
Then out from among the trees marched Private Files, bearing the banner of Oogaboo, which fluttered from a long pole.
This pole he stuck in the ground just in front of the well and then he cried in a loud voice:
"I hereby conquer this territory in the name of Queen Ann Soforth of Oogaboo, and all the inhabitants of the land I proclaim her slaves!"
"Is the coast clear, Private Files?"
"There is no coast here," was the reply, "but all's well."
Spare us, and we will be your slaves forever!"
Files turned around and, seeing the strangers for the first time, examined them with much curiosity.
"Permit us to introduce ourselves," replied Shaggy, stepping forward. "This is Tik Tok, the Clockwork Man-who works better than some meat people.
I'm sorry I've conquered you."
"But you haven't conquered us yet," called Betsy indignantly.
"No," agreed Files, "that is a fact.
But if my officers will kindly command me to conquer you, I will do so at once, after which we can stop arguing and converse more at our ease."
The officers had by this time risen from their knees and brushed the dust from their trousers.
"That's all right," replied Shaggy.
"We'll see about that," retorted the Queen, angrily.
"Advance, Private Files, and bind the enemy hand and foot!"
But Private Files looked at pretty Betsy and fascinating Polychrome and the beautiful Rose Princess and shook his head.
"It would be impolite, and I won't do it," he asserted.
"You must!" cried Ann.
"It is your duty to obey orders."
All this noise annoyed Hank, who had been eyeing the Army of Oogaboo with strong disfavor.
The mule now dashed forward and began backing upon the officers and kicking fierce and dangerous heels at them.
Betsy laughed joyously at the comical rout of the "noble army," and Polychrome danced with glee.
"Private Files, I command you to do your duty!" she cried again, and then she herself ducked to escape the mule's heels-for Hank made no distinction in favor of a lady who was an open enemy.
Betsy grabbed her champion by the forelock, however, and so held him fast, and when the officers saw that the mule was restrained from further attacks they crept fearfully back and picked up their discarded swords.
"Private Files, seize and bind these prisoners!" screamed the Queen.
"No," said Files, throwing down his gun and removing the knapsack which was strapped to his back, "I resign my position as the Army of Oogaboo. I enlisted to fight the enemy and become a hero, but if you want some one to bind harmless girls you will have to hire another Private."
"Nonsense," said Files.
"Indeed you haven't!" retorted the Queen.
"If you resign it will break up my Army, and then I cannot conquer the world." She now turned to the officers and said: "I must ask you to do me a favor.
I know it is undignified in officers to fight, but unless you immediately capture Private Files and force him to obey my orders there will be no plunder for any of us.
The prospect of this awful fate so frightened the officers that they drew their swords and rushed upon Files, who stood beside Shaggy, in a truly ferocious manner.
Quite disconcerted by this unexpected effect of the Magnet, Shaggy disengaged himself from the Queen's encircling arms and quickly hid the talisman in his pocket.
The adventurers from Oogaboo were now his firm friends, and there was no more talk about conquering and binding any of his party.
To conquer the world, as you have set out to do, you must conquer everyone under its surface as well as those upon its surface, and no one in all the world needs conquering so much as Ruggedo."
"Of course," answered Shaggy.
"Ah!" exclaimed General Apple, heaving a deep sigh, "that would be plunder worth our while.
Let's conquer him, Your Majesty."
The Queen looked reproachfully at Files, who was sitting next to the lovely Princess and whispering in her ear.
I have plenty of brave officers, indeed, but no private soldier for them to command.
Therefore I cannot conquer Ruggedo and win all his wealth."
"Why don't you make one of your officers the Private?" asked Shaggy; but at once every officer began to protest and the Queen of Oogaboo shook her head as she replied:
"That is impossible.
They are exceptionally brave in commanding others to fight, but could not themselves meet the enemy and conquer."
"Very true, Your Majesty," said Colonel Plum, eagerly.
"There are many kinds of bravery and one cannot be expected to possess them all.
"You see," said Ann, "how helpless I am.
Had not Private Files proved himself a traitor and a deserter, I would gladly have conquered this Ruggedo; but an Army without a private soldier is like a bee without a stinger."
"I am not a traitor, Your Majesty," protested Files.
"I resigned in a proper manner, not liking the job.
But there are plenty of people to take my place.
Why not make Shaggy Man the private soldier?"
"He might be killed," said Ann, looking tenderly at Shaggy, "for he is mortal, and able to die.
If anything happened to him, it would break my heart."
"It would hurt me worse than that," declared Shaggy.
This prospect was so tempting that the officers began whispering together and presently Colonel Cheese said: "Your Majesty, by combining our brains we have just evolved a most brilliant idea.
We will make the Clockwork Man the private soldier!"
"Who?
Me?" asked Tik Tok.
"At that time you had no gun," said Polychrome.
"I'll keep you wound up, Tik Tok," promised Betsy.
And, since a private soldier seems to be necessary to this Army, Tik Tok is the only one of our party fitted to undertake the job."
"What must I do?" asked Tik Tok.
"When the officers command you to do anything, you must do it; that is all."
"And that's enough, too," said Files.
Then Ann strapped the knapsack to Tik Tok's copper back and said: "Now we are ready to march to Ruggedo's Kingdom and conquer it.
Officers, give the command to march."
Tik Tok looked at them and then around him in surprise.
"Fall in what?
The well?" he asked.
"No," said Queen Ann, "you must fall in marching order."
"Shoulder your gun and stand ready to march," advised Files; so Tik Tok held the gun straight and stood still.
"What next?" he asked.
"But this is absurd!" said Ann with a frown.
"If we can't get to Ruggedo, it is certain that we can't conquer him."
"Well, then, get busy and discover it," snapped the Queen.
They all stood looking from one road to another in perplexity.
Files and the Rose Princess, who had by this time become good friends, advanced a little way along one of the roads and found that it was bordered by pretty wild flowers.
"Of course," said Files.
She looked more closely at the flowers.
There were hundreds of white daisies, golden buttercups, bluebells and daffodils growing by the roadside, and each flower head was firmly set upon its slender but stout stem.
There were even a few wild roses scattered here and there and perhaps it was the sight of these that gave the Princess courage to ask the important question.
She dropped to her knees, facing the flowers, and extended both her arms pleadingly toward them.
"Tell me, pretty cousins," she said in her sweet, gentle voice, "which way will lead us to the Kingdom of Ruggedo, the Nome King?"
"That's it!" cried Files joyfully.
Chapter Ten
A Terrible Tumble Through a Tube
But no one suspected any especial danger until after they had entered Ruggedo's cavern, and so they were journeying along in quite a contented manner when Tik Tok, who marched ahead, suddenly disappeared.
The officers thought he must have turned a corner, so they kept on their way and all of them likewise disappeared-one after another. Queen Ann was rather surprised at this, and in hastening forward to learn the reason she also vanished from sight.
Betsy Bobbin had tired her feet by walking, so she was now riding upon the back of the stout little mule, facing backward and talking to Shaggy and Polychrome, who were just behind.
Suddenly Hank pitched forward and began falling and Betsy would have tumbled over his head had she not grabbed the mule's shaggy neck with both arms and held on for dear life.
All around was darkness, and they were not falling directly downward but seemed to be sliding along a steep incline.
Hank's hoofs were resting upon some smooth substance over which he slid with the swiftness of the wind.
Once Betsy's heels flew up and struck a similar substance overhead.
They were, indeed, descending the "Hollow Tube" that led to the other side of the world.
After several minutes had passed and no harm had befallen them, Betsy gained courage.
She could see nothing at all, nor could she hear anything except the rush of air past her ears as they plunged downward along the Tube.
Whether she and Hank were alone, or the others were with them, she could not tell.
There was Tik Tok, flat upon his back and sliding headforemost down the incline.
And there were the Officers of the Army of Oogaboo, all tangled up in a confused crowd, flapping their arms and trying to shield their faces from the clanking swords, which swung back and forth during the swift journey and pommeled everyone within their reach.
"This is awful, Hank!" cried Betsy in a loud voice, and Queen Ann heard her and called out: "Are you safe, Betsy?"
"Don't ask her that, please don't!" said Shaggy, who was not too far away to overhear them.
"Why?" said Betsy.
"Be patient and you'll find out, my dear," said Polychrome.
"But isn't this an odd experience?
"How do you know we're in the center of the earth?" asked Betsy, her voice trembling a little through nervousness.
"I have often heard of this passage, which was once built by a Magician who was a great traveler.
He thought it would save him the bother of going around the earth's surface, but he tumbled through the Tube so fast that he shot out at the other end and hit a star in the sky, which at once exploded."
"The star exploded?" asked Betsy wonderingly.
"And what became of the Magician?" inquired the girl.
"But I don't think it matters much."
"It matters a good deal, if we also hit the stars when we come out," said Queen Ann, with a moan.
"Don't worry," advised Polychrome.
"Couldn't you manage to fall all by yourself, my dear?"
"I'll try," laughed the Rainbow's Daughter.
All this time they were swiftly falling through the Tube, and it was not so easy for them to talk as you may imagine when you read their words.
But although they were so helpless and altogether in the dark as to their fate, the fact that they were able to converse at all cheered them, considerably.
Then, just as they began to fear the Tube would never end, Tik Tok popped out into broad daylight and, after making a graceful circle in the air, fell with a splash into a great marble fountain.
Out came the officers, in quick succession, tumbling heels over head and striking the ground in many undignified attitudes.
"What can all this mean?"
For answer, Queen Ann sailed up from the Tube, took a ride through the air as high as the treetops, and alighted squarely on top of the Peculiar Person's head, smashing a jeweled crown over his eyes and tumbling him to the ground.
The mule was heavier and had Betsy clinging to his back, so he did not go so high up.
Fortunately for his little rider he struck the ground upon his four feet.
But as yet the only inhabitant to greet them was the Peculiar Person just mentioned, who had shaken off the grasp of the officers without effort and was now trying to pull the battered crown from off his eyes.
Shaggy, who was always polite, helped him to do this and when the man was free and could see again he looked at his visitors with evident amazement.
"Where did you come from and how did you get here?"
Betsy tried to answer him, for Queen Ann was surly and silent.
"I can't say, exac'ly where we came from, cause I don't know the name of the place," said the girl, "but the way we got here was through the Hollow Tube."
"Don't call it a 'hollow' Tube, please," exclaimed the Peculiar Person in an irritated tone of voice.
"If it's a tube, it's sure to be hollow."
"Why?" asked Betsy.
"Because all tubes are made that way.
But this Tube is private property and everyone is forbidden to fall into it."
"We didn't do it on purpose," explained Betsy, and Polychrome added: "I am quite sure that Ruggedo, the Nome King, pushed us down that Tube."
"Ha! Ruggedo!
Did you say Ruggedo?" cried the man, becoming much excited.
"That is what she said," replied Shaggy, "and I believe she is right. We were on our way to conquer the Nome King when suddenly we fell into the Tube."
"Then you are enemies of Ruggedo?" inquired the peculiar Person.
"Not exac'ly enemies," said Betsy, a little puzzled by the question, "'cause we don't know him at all; but we started out to conquer him, which isn't as friendly as it might be."
"True," agreed the man.
He looked thoughtfully from one to another of them for a while and then he turned his head over his shoulder and said: "Never mind the fire and pincers, my good brothers.
It will be best to take these strangers to the Private Citizen."
"Very well, Tubekins," responded a Voice, deep and powerful, that seemed to come out of the air, for the speaker was invisible.
All our friends gave a jump, at this.
Even Polychrome was so startled that her gauze draperies fluttered like a banner in a breeze.
But soon they gained courage to look more closely at the Peculiar Person.
As he was a type of all the inhabitants of this extraordinary land whom they afterward met, I will try to tell you what he looked like.
His face was beautiful, but lacked expression.
His eyes were large and blue in color and his teeth finely formed and white as snow.
His hair was black and bushy and seemed inclined to curl at the ends.
So far no one could find any fault with his appearance.
He wore a robe of scarlet, which did not cover his arms and extended no lower than his bare knees.
On the bosom of the robe was embroidered a terrible dragon's head, as horrible to look at as the man was beautiful.
His arms and legs were left bare and the skin of one arm was bright yellow and the skin of the other arm a vivid green.
He had one blue leg and one pink one, while both his feet-which showed through the open sandals he wore-were jet black.
Betsy could not decide whether these gorgeous colors were dyes or the natural tints of the skin, but while she was thinking it over the man who had been called "Tubekins" said:
"Follow me to the Residence-all of you!"
But just then a Voice exclaimed: "Here's another of them, Tubekins, lying in the water of the fountain."
"Gracious!" cried Betsy; "it must be Tik Tok, and he'll drown."
"Water is a bad thing for his clockworks, anyway," agreed Shaggy, as with one accord they all started for the fountain.
But before they could reach it, invisible hands raised Tik Tok from the marble basin and set him upon his feet beside it, water dripping from every joint of his copper body.
He next made an attempt to walk but after several awkward trials found he could not move his joints.
Peals of jeering laughter from persons unseen greeted Tik Tok's failure, and the new arrivals in this strange land found it very uncomfortable to realize that there were many creatures around them who were invisible, yet could be heard plainly.
"Shall I wind him up?" asked Betsy, feeling very sorry for Tik Tok.
At once an oil can appeared before him, held on a level with his eyes by some unseen hand.
Shaggy took the can and tried to oil Tik Tok's joints.
As if to assist him, a strong current of warm air was directed against the copper man which quickly dried him.
"Come!" commanded Tubekins, and turning his back upon them he walked up the path toward the castle.
"Shall we go?" asked Queen Ann, uncertainly; but just then she received a shove that almost pitched her forward on her head; so she decided to go.
The officers who hesitated received several energetic kicks, but could not see who delivered them; therefore they also decided-very wisely-to go.
CHAPTER seven
"I'm so glad you've come back!" she exclaimed.
"We are not in danger at present," she said, "but one never knows when one will be, so we must move; and that will be more dangerous than staying where we are."
"Then let us stay," said Dot.
"That won't do," replied the Kangaroo.
"This is the conclusion I have jumped to.
If we stay here, the Blacks might come this way and their dingo dogs hunt us to death.
To get to a safe place we must pass their camp.
That is a little risky, but we must go that way.
We can do this easily if the dogs don't get scent of us, as all the Blacks are prancing about and making a noise, having a kind of game in fact, and they are so amused that we ought to get past quite safely.
I've done it many times before at night."
Dot looked round to say good bye to the Koala, but the little animal had heard the Kangaroo speak of Blacks, and that word suggested to its empty little head that it must keep its skin whole, so, without waiting to be polite to Dot, it had sneaked up its gum tree and was well out of sight.
Without wasting time, Dot settled in the Kangaroo's pouch, and they started upon their perilous way.
For some distance the Kangaroo hopped along boldly, with an occasional warning to Dot to shut her eyes as they plunged through the bushes; but after crossing a watercourse, and climbing a stiff hill, she whispered that they must both keep quite silent, and told Dot to listen as she stopped for a moment.
"Their camp is over there," said the Kangaroo, "that is the sound of their game."
"Can't we go some other way?" asked Dot.
We shall have to pass quite close to their playground." So in perfect silence they went on.
If they had gone on their way it is possible that they would have slipped past the Blacks without danger.
But although the Kangaroo is as timid an animal as any in the bush, it is also very curious, and Dot's Kangaroo wished to peep at the corroboree.
She whispered to Dot that it would be nice for a little Human to see some other Humans after being so long amongst bush creatures, and said, also, that there would be no great danger in hopping to a rock that would command a view of the open ground where the corroboree was being held.
Of course Dot thought this would be great fun, so the Kangaroo took her to the rock, where they peeped through the trees and saw before them the weird scene and dance.
Dot nearly screamed with fright at the sight.
She had thought she would see a few Black folk, not a crowd of such terrible people as she beheld. They did not look like human beings at all, but like dreadful demons, they were so wicked and ugly in appearance.
The men who were dancing were without clothes, but their black bodies were painted with red and white stripes, and bits of down and feathers were stuck on their skin. Some had only white stripes over the places where their bones were, which made them look like skeletons flitting before the fire, or in and out of the surrounding darkness.
The dancing men were divided from the rest of the tribe by a row of fires, which, burning brightly, lit the horrid scene with a lurid red light.
The firelight seemed to make the ferocious faces of the tribe still more hideous.
Sometimes the women would cease beating the skin bags to clap their hands and strike their sides, yelling the words of the corroboree song, as the painted figures, like fiends and skeletons, danced before the row of fires.
It was a terrifying sight to Dot.
"Oh, Kangaroo!" she whispered, "they are dreadful, horrid creatures."
"But white Humans are not like that," said Dot.
"All Humans are the same underneath, they all kill kangaroos," said the Kangaroo.
"Look there! they are playing at killing us in their dance."
Dot looked once more at the hideous figures as they left the fire and began acting like actors.
One of the Blackfellows had come from a little bower of trees, and wore a few skins so arranged as to make him look as much like a kangaroo as possible, whilst he worked a stick which he pretended was a kangaroo's tail, and hopped about.
"What an idea of a kangaroo!" sniffed Dot's friend, "why, a real kangaroo would have smelt or heard those Humans, and have bounded away far out of sight by now."
"But it's all sham," said Dot; "the Black man couldn't be a real kangaroo."
"Humans think themselves so clever," she continued, "but just see what bad kangaroos they make-such a simple thing to do, too!
But their legs bend the wrong way for jumping, and that stick isn't any good for a tail, and it has to be worked with those big, clumsy arms.
Just see, too, how those skins fit!
Why it's enough to make a kangaroo's sides split with laughter to see such foolery!" Dot's friend peeped at the Black's acting with the contempt to be expected of a real kangaroo, who saw human beings pretending to be one of those noble animals.
Dot thought the Kangaroo had never looked so grand before.
She was so tall, so big, and yet so graceful: a really beautiful creature.
"Well, I forgive their killing such a silly creature!
There wasn't a jump in it."
After more dancing to the singing and noise of the on lookers, a Blackfellow came from the little bower in the dim background, with a battered straw hat on, and a few rags tied round his neck and wrist, in imitation of a collar and cuffs.
"Now this is better!" said the Kangaroo, with a smile.
Dot thought that if men behaved like that in towns it must be very strange.
She had not seen any like the acting Blackfellow at her cottage home.
But she did not say anything, for it was quite clear in her little mind that Blackfellows, kangaroos, and willy wagtails had a very poor opinion of white people.
She felt that they must all be wrong; but, all the same, she sometimes wished she could be a noble kangaroo, and not a despised human being.
"I wish I were not a little white girl," she whispered to the Kangaroo.
The gentle animal patted her kindly with her delicate black hands.
"You are as nice now as my baby kangaroo," she said sadly, "but you will have to grow into a real white Human.
For some reason there have to be all sorts of creatures on the earth.
There are hawks, snakes, dingoes and humans, and no one can tell for what good they exist.
They must have dropped on to this world by mistake for another, where there could only have been themselves.
After all," said the kind animal, "it wouldn't do for every one to be a kangaroo, for I doubt if there would be enough grass; but you may become an improved Human."
"Never do what?" enquired Dot, anxious to know all that she should do, so as to be improved.
"Never, never eat kangaroo tail soup!" said the Kangaroo, solemnly.
Perhaps this was because the kangaroo cannot think, but it quickly jumped to the conclusion that they were in danger.
Whilst they had been peeping at the corroboree, and talking, the dingo dogs that had been prowling around the camp, had caught scent of the Kangaroo; and, following the trail, had set up an angry snapping and howling.
I hardly see my way.
He importuned his priests for comfort, prayed, confessed, and communicated: but his faith was weak; and he owned that, in spite of all his devotions, the strong terrors of death were upon him.
He then withdrew, and left them to deliberate unrestrained by his presence.
Three of these bodies consisted of Tories.
His victory, by relieving the nation from the strong dread of Popish tyranny, had deprived him of half his influence.
Their old theory, sound or unsound, was at least complete and coherent.
For what satisfactory guarantee could he give?
james could not be King in effect: but he must still continue to be King in semblance.
BOOK two.
So it befell on a time when King Arthur was at London, there came a knight and told the king tidings how that the King Rience of North Wales had reared a great number of people, and were entered into the land, and burnt and slew the king's true liege people.
If this be true, said Arthur, it were great shame unto mine estate but that he were mightily withstood.
It is truth, said the knight, for I saw the host myself.
Well, said the king, let make a cry, that all the lords, knights, and gentlemen of arms, should draw unto a castle called Camelot in those days, and there the king would let make a council general and a great jousts.
And when she came before King Arthur, she told from whom she came, and how she was sent on message unto him for these causes.
Then she let her mantle fall that was richly furred; and then was she girt with a noble sword whereof the king had marvel, and said, Damosel, for what cause are ye girt with that sword? it beseemeth you not.
Then Arthur took the sword by the sheath and by the girdle and pulled at it eagerly, but the sword would not out.
Sir, said the damosel, you need not to pull half so hard, for he that shall pull it out shall do it with little might.
By my faith, said Arthur, here are good knights, as I deem, as any be in the world, but their grace is not to help you, wherefore I am displeased.
CHAPTER two.
And so he went privily into the court, and saw this adventure, whereof it raised his heart, and he would assay it as other knights did, but for he was poor and poorly arrayed he put him not far in press.
And as the damosel took her leave of Arthur and of all the barons, so departing, this knight Balin called unto her, and said, Damosel, I pray you of your courtesy, suffer me as well to assay as these lords; though that I be so poorly clothed, in my heart meseemeth I am fully assured as some of these others, and meseemeth in my heart to speed right well.
And then she said unto the knight, Sir, it needeth not to put me to more pain or labour, for it seemeth not you to speed there as other have failed.
Ah! fair damosel, said Balin, worthiness, and good tatches, and good deeds, are not only in arrayment, but manhood and worship is hid within man's person, and many a worshipful knight is not known unto all people, and therefore worship and hardiness is not in arrayment.
Then Balin took the sword by the girdle and sheath, and drew it out easily; and when he looked on the sword it pleased him much.
Nay, said Balin, for this sword will I keep, but it be taken from me with force.
Anon after, Balin sent for his horse and armour, and so would depart from the court, and took his leave of King Arthur.
Then the most part of the knights of the Round Table said that Balin did not this adventure all only by might, but by witchcraft.
CHAPTER three.
And she came on horseback, richly beseen, and saluted King Arthur, and there asked him a gift that he promised her when she gave him the sword.
The name of it, said the lady, is Excalibur, that is as much to say as Cut steel.
I will ask none other thing, said the lady.
Then Balin took up the head of the lady, and bare it with him to his hostelry, and there he met with his squire, that was sorry he had displeased King Arthur and so they rode forth out of the town.
Now, said Balin, we must depart, take thou this head and bear it to my friends, and tell them how I have sped, and tell my friends in Northumberland that my most foe is dead.
In King Arthur's court, said Balin.
Then the king buried her richly.
CHAPTER four.
Say not so, said they.
She hath a brother, a passing good knight of prowess and a full true man; and this damosel loved another knight that held her to paramour, and this good knight her brother met with the knight that held her to paramour, and slew him by force of his hands.
This was the cause that the damosel came into this court.
Peradventure, said Balin, it had been better to have holden you at home, for many a man weeneth to put his enemy to a rebuke, and oft it falleth to himself.
CHAPTER six.
And therewith she took the sword from her love that lay dead, and fell to the ground in a swoon.
And when she arose she made great dole out of measure, the which sorrow grieved Balin passingly sore, and he went unto her for to have taken the sword out of her hand, but she held it so fast he might not take it out of her hand unless he should have hurt her, and suddenly she set the pommel to the ground, and rove herself through the body.
Then Balan said, I little weened to have met with you at this sudden adventure; I am right glad of your deliverance out of your dolorous prisonment, for a man told me, in the castle of Four Stones, that ye were delivered, and that man had seen you in the court of King Arthur, and therefore I came hither into this country, for here I supposed to find you.
Anon the knight Balin told his brother of his adventure of the sword, and of the death of the Lady of the Lake, and how King Arthur was displeased with him.
Now go we hence, said Balin, and well be we met.
For I would wit it, said the dwarf.
As for that, said Balin, I fear not greatly, but I am right heavy that I have displeased my lord King Arthur, for the death of this knight.
So as they talked together, there came a king of Cornwall riding, the which hight King Mark.
CHAPTER eight.
Then said Merlin to Balin, Thou hast done thyself great hurt, because that thou savest not this lady that slew herself, that might have saved her an thou wouldest.
Therewith Merlin vanished away suddenly.
First, said the king, tell me your name.
We have little to do, said the two knights, to tell thee.
Ah! said Balin, ye are Merlin; we will be ruled by your counsel.
Come on, said Merlin, ye shall have great worship, and look that ye do knightly, for ye shall have great need.
As for that, said Balin, dread you not, we will do what we may.
CHAPTER nine.
Abide, said Merlin, here in a strait way ye shall meet with him; and therewith he showed Balin and his brother where he rode.
Then said he thus: Knights full of prowess, slay me not, for by my life ye may win, and by my death ye shall win nothing.
By whom? said King Arthur.
But, sir, are ye purveyed, said Merlin, for to morn the host of Nero, King Rience's brother, will set on you or noon with a great host, and therefore make you ready, for I will depart from you.
In the meanwhile came one to King Lot, and told him while he tarried there Nero was destroyed and slain with all his people.
Now what is best to do?
said King Lot of Orkney; whether is me better to treat with King Arthur or to fight, for the greater part of our people are slain and destroyed?
Alas he might not endure, the which was great pity, that so worthy a knight as he was one should be overmatched, that of late time afore had been a knight of King Arthur's, and wedded the sister of King Arthur; and for King Arthur lay by King Lot's wife, the which was Arthur's sister, and gat on her Mordred, therefore King Lot held against Arthur.
CHAPTER eleven.
SO at the interment came King Lot's wife Margawse with her four sons, Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth.
All this made Merlin by his subtle craft, and there he told the king, When I am dead these tapers shall burn no longer, and soon after the adventures of the Sangreal shall come among you and be achieved.
Also he told Arthur how Balin the worshipful knight shall give the dolorous stroke, whereof shall fall great vengeance.
As for Pellinore, said Merlin, he will meet with you soon; and as for Balin he will not be long from you; but the other brother will depart, ye shall see him no more.
By my faith, said Arthur, they are two marvellous knights, and namely Balin passeth of prowess of any knight that ever I found, for much beholden am I unto him; would God he would abide with me.
So after, for great trust, Arthur betook the scabbard to Morgan le Fay his sister, and she loved another knight better than her husband King Uriens or King Arthur, and she would have had Arthur her brother slain, and therefore she let make another scabbard like it by enchantment, and gave the scabbard Excalibur to her love; and the knight's name was called Accolon, that after had near slain King Arthur.
CHAPTER twelve.
WITHIN a day or two King Arthur was somewhat sick, and he let pitch his pavilion in a meadow, and there he laid him down on a pallet to sleep, but he might have no rest.
Sir, said Balin, I pray you make you ready, for ye must go with me, or else I must fight with you and bring you by force, and that were me loath to do.
That shall I do, said Balin, and that I make vow unto knighthood; and so he departed from this knight with great sorrow.
So King Arthur let bury this knight richly, and made a mention on his tomb, how there was slain Herlews le Berbeus, and by whom the treachery was done, the knight Garlon.
CHAPTER thirteen.
And as they came by an hermitage even by a churchyard, there came the knight Garlon invisible, and smote this knight, Perin de Mountbeliard, through the body with a spear.
Alas, said Balin, it is not the first despite he hath done me; and there the hermit and Balin buried the knight under a rich stone and a tomb royal.
Then he went up into the tower, and leapt over walls into the ditch, and hurt him not; and anon he pulled out his sword and would have foughten with them.
Well, said Balin, she shall bleed as much as she may bleed, but I will not lose the life of her whiles my life lasteth.
And so Balin made her to bleed by her good will, but her blood helped not the lady.
There is, consequently, such a Being; that is, there is a Deity.
In such a chain, too, or succession of objects, each part is caused by that which preceded it, and causes that which succeeds it.
Did I show you the particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable, should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty.
It is observed by arithmeticians, that the products of nine, compose always either nine, or some lesser product of nine, if you add together all the characters of which any of the former products is composed.
They rose up against the first magistrate merely in order to assert the supremacy of the law.
They were for the most part strongly attached to the Church established by law.
In Scotland the course of events was very different.
William saw that he must not think of paying to the laws of Scotland that scrupulous respect which he had wisely and righteously paid to the laws of England.
It was absolutely necessary that he should determine by his own authority how that Convention which was to meet at Edinburgh should be chosen, and that he should assume the power of annulling some judgments and some statutes.
He accordingly summoned to the parliament house several Lords who had been deprived of their honours by sentences which the general voice loudly condemned as unjust; and he took on himself to dispense with the Act which deprived Presbyterians of the elective franchise.
The consequence was that the choice of almost all the shires and burghs fell on Whig candidates.
The defeated party complained loudly of foul play, of the rudeness of the populace, and of the partiality of the presiding magistrates; and these complaints were in many cases well founded.
Nor was it only at the elections that the popular feeling, so long and so severely compressed, exploded with violence.
Unhappily throughout a large part of Scotland the clergy of the Established Church were, to use the phrase then common, rabbled. The morning of Christmas day was fixed for the commencement of these outrages.
For nothing disgusted the rigid Covenanter more than the reverence paid by the prelatist to the ancient holidays of the Church. That such reverence may be carried to an absurd extreme is true.
But a philosopher may perhaps be inclined to think the opposite extreme not less absurd, and may ask why religion should reject the aid of associations which exist in every nation sufficiently civilised to have a calendar, and which are found by experience to have a powerful and often a salutary effect.
To these austere fanatics a holiday was an object of positive disgust and hatred.
Each band marched to the nearest manse, and sacked the cellar and larder of the minister, which at that season were probably better stocked than usual.
He was then carried to the market place, and exposed during some time as a malefactor.
About two hundred curates-so the episcopal parish priests were called-were expelled.
The graver Covenanters, while they applauded the fervour of their riotous brethren, were apprehensive that proceedings so irregular might give scandal, and learned, with especial concern, that here and there an Achan had disgraced the good cause by stooping to plunder the Canaanites whom he ought only to have smitten.
The Scottish Bishops, in great dismay, sent the Dean of Glasgow to plead the cause of their persecuted Church at Westminster.
But, though he had, at the request of a large number of the noblemen and gentlemen of Scotland, taken on himself provisionally the executive administration of that kingdom, the means of maintaining order there were not at his command.
He had not a single regiment north of the Tweed, or indeed within many miles of that river.
It was vain to hope that mere words would quiet a nation which had not, in any age, been very amenable to control, and which was now agitated by hopes and resentments, such as great revolutions, following great oppressions, naturally engender.
But this proclamation, not being supported by troops, was very little regarded.
It was a Sunday; but to rabble a congregation of prelatists was held to be a work of necessity and mercy.
CLOVER BLOSSOM.
"Ah, that is very lovely," cried the Elves, gathering round little Sunbeam as she ceased, to place a garland in her hair and praise her song.
"Now," said the Queen, "call hither Moon light and Summer Wind, for they have seen many pleasant things in their long wanderings, and will gladly tell us them."
"Most joyfully will we do our best, dear Queen," said the Elves, as they folded their wings beside her.
Rice.
As a rule rice is badly cooked in the average American home.
In the first place, very few know how to cook just plain boiled rice. Many know that there is a way of preparing it so that when done it will be a fluffy mass of separate grains, but they have no idea how to go about making it look like this.
The process is very simple.
Always use the unpolished rice.
fifty two.
Plain Boiled Rice.
For every cup of rice have about eight cups of water.
Do not add the rice until the water is boiling briskly.
Then throw in the rice, and give it an occasional stir until the water begins to boil again.
After that it need not be stirred.
Cook until a grain feels soft when rubbed between the thumb and finger, then turn into a colander.
Drain off the water and pour over the rice several cups of cold water.
Drain that off, too, and place the rice where it can have moist heat for a while before serving.
Rice served with curry is always prepared in this way.
It may be served in place of potatoes with meat, and may also be used as a basis for many inexpensive and attractive dishes, just as macaroni and spaghetti are.
There is one objection, however, to rice prepared in this way.
In India this is not the case, for every ounce of rice water is there carefully saved. It is used in various ways.
Usually it is fed to the babies and weaker children.
Often it is given to ducks and fowl to fatten them, and sometimes it is put into the curry pot.
There is another method of preparing rice which is almost as satisfactory, and by which all the nutrition is retained.
That is by cooking it in a regular rice boiler.
Put just enough water over the rice to well cover it.
After the water in the lower vessel has boiled a while, if the rice seems a little dry, add more water.
Cook until the rice is soft, then turn the fire very low, so that the water in the lower vessel does not boil but retains its heat.
fifty three.
Baby's Pesh Pash.
This is the first solid food that babies of English or American parents in India are allowed.
Shred it finely and return to the broth.
Cook a tablespoonful of rice in this broth and shredded mutton.
Cook slowly and let every grain swell to its utmost.
fifty four.
Pullao.
Pullao is the most festive dish in India.
It stands for all that roast turkey does in this country.
At weddings, feasts, and holidays it is the chief dish.
Among the Hindustani Christians it is the Christmas dinner. Sometimes it is served with rivers of hot curry flowing over it, but often it is eaten without the curry.
In India it is usually made with chicken, but any kind of meat does nicely.
For chicken pullao, take a good fat hen, not too old, cut up and stew until almost tender.
Put a little bag of "mixed spices," such as are used in making pickles, on to cook with the fowl.
When the chicken is nearly done, add the fried rice and onions to the chicken and chicken broth.
Put all in a rice boiler if you have it and cook slowly until the rice is done. Retain the spices.
If rice boiler is used there should be at least two inches of broth above the mixture.
If you have no rice boiler, but must boil it on the stove, more broth will be required.
In the latter case do not cook until it becomes soggy.
Cook until the broth is absorbed, then steam.
When the pullao is ready to be served, pile on a platter, then strew thickly over the pullao the fried onions, almonds, and raisins.
fifty five.
Beef or Mutton Pullao.
Very delicious pullao may be made from the cheapest cuts of beef and mutton.
Get about two pounds of beef or mutton, cut in bits.
Cook until it is very tender.
Boil with this a little bag of mixed spices and two onions.
Two cups of rice will be the right amount to use with two pounds of meat. Use the same method that is used in making chicken pullao.
fifty six.
Fry three onions, six tomatoes, two peppers or pimentos together.
They must all be cut into small bits.
In another pan fry a cup of rice in a very little oil or crisco.
After the rice has browned a little, add the two together, turn into a rice boiler or steamer and cook until rice is tender.
A half cupful of grated or diced cheese is an improvement to this dish.
In case tomatoes are not in season, a can of tomatoes, or, better, a large sized can of tomato soup will do nicely.
In that case fry the onions and peppers and rice together.
fifty seven.
Pea Pullao.
Pour over the mixture a half cupful of milk or cream; add a tablespoonful of butter or crisco, and cook in a rice boiler or steamer until the peas are nicely done.
fifty eight.
Cocoanut Rice.
A ten cent tin of Baker's cocoanut does very nicely if one doesn't care to prepare the fresh cocoanut.
Boil the rice and cocoanut together, being sure to add to the water the cocoanut milk.
There should be about three inches of liquid above the rice.
fifty nine.
A very nice way of making hash is to use rice instead of potatoes.
Take cold meat and gravy and stew together with onion.
When the onion is nearly done, add to the broth the rice.
A quarter as much uncooked rice as there is meat is a good proportion.
Cook all together until rice is thoroughly done.
Be sure and have plenty of liquid to start with.
sixty.
Rice Cutlets.
Fried Rice (Parsi).
(A fine dish for a missionary tea.)
Fry a cup of uncooked rice and a cup of brown sugar in a tablespoonful of butter or crisco.
Cook until the sugar melts and begins to bubble; then quickly add two cups of boiling water.
It can hardly be cooked too much.
Remove from the fire, pour over all a half ounce of rose water and stir well.
Press in plates and sprinkle well with minced almonds, or any kind of nuts will do.
When cold, cut into squares and serve like fudge.
ENTREES
Sweetbreads with Mushrooms
Lay half a dozen sweetbreads in cold water for twelve hours, changing the water several times.
Then boil them five minutes, drop into cold water, remove the skin and lard with fat bacon.
Put them in a saucepan with a pint of stock, two small onions and one carrot chopped, a teaspoonful of minced parsley, salt, pepper, cayenne, and a little mace.
Stew until tender.
Serve with a mushroom sauce, made as follows: Take a small bottle of mushrooms or one dozen fresh mushrooms sliced and boil them five minutes in water and lime juice.
Drain and place in a stew pan with two ounces of butter, one ounce of flour and a pint of well seasoned stock or gravy.
Cook until the sauce is reduced one half.
Pour over the hot sweetbreads.
Terrapin
Boil the terrapin for one hour, and clean carefully.
Rub into a paste the yolks of six hard boiled eggs, half the white of one egg chopped, one tablespoonful of butter, one teaspoonful of flour, three whole cloves, salt, pepper, cayenne and mace.
Cook slowly for twenty minutes.
Add three glasses of sherry and madeira and allow it to boil once, when it is ready to serve.
Frogs a la Poulette
Joint the hind legs and backs of twelve frogs; put in a closely covered saucepan with some truffles, a small can of mushrooms sliced, a glass of white wine, salt, white pepper, cayenne, mace and four ounces of butter.
Stew gently fifteen minutes, stirring once or twice. If then tender, add one teaspoonful cornstarch rubbed into one ounce of butter.
Let it cook two minutes, take from the fire and stir in the yolks of six eggs beaten well with one half cup of cream.
Place this mixture where it will keep hot without cooking.
Cut the crust from a loaf of bread, scoop out the center, brush with butter and brown in the oven.
Pour the frogs legs and sauce into the bread cup, garnish with mushrooms and truffles.
Simmer a calves' head for two hours.
Tie the brains in a cloth, put them in the saucepan with the head and cook two hours longer.
Then extract the bones and cut the meat in pieces, return it to the saucepan without the brains, adding two ounces of butter, two dozen stoned olives, one dozen cloves, salt, pepper, cayenne, and a cup of white wine.
Cook for one hour, then add the brains cut in bits, the shaved peel and piece of one lemon and three hard boiled eggs sliced. Cook thirty minutes.
Thicken the sauce with flour rubbed into butter and serve with the calves' head.
Trim twelve lamb chops very closely and fry lightly in six ounces of butter.
Remove them and in the same butter place two onions, sliced, four green peppers minced, one can of mushrooms minced, and two stalks of celery chopped; salt, pepper, cayenne, and the juice of a lime. Cook until these ingredients are soft.
Stir in six ounces of flour. Then add two cups of milk and cook until the mixture is thick and smooth.
Dust a plate with cracker crumbs and on this place a spoonful of the fried mixture.
Place a chop on top of this, cover it with another spoonful of the mixture and dust with cracker crumbs.
Repeat with each chop, and when cold roll each in beaten egg and cracker crumbs, and fry a light brown.
Boil four calves' feet until tender.
Then remove from the fire and beat in the yolks of two eggs which have been mixed with the juice of a lime and a tablespoonful of water.
When cold cut into slices, brush with egg and bread crumbs and fry in butter until a light brown.
Puree of Chestnuts with Chops
Boil chestnuts in salted water for twenty minutes.
Shell them, season with salt and pepper, add a piece of butter and wet with milk.
Mash through a colander and heap lightly on a platter, arranging broiled chops around the puree.
Lamb Chops a la Nesselrode
Trim carefully one dozen young lamb chops.
Then add a glass of sherry and stir it well before adding also a cup of rice, four cups of stock, several sweet Chili peppers chopped and some salt.
Cook for half an hour or until pasty.
Then with a biscuit cutter, cut it into rounds about the size of a chop.
On each one of these rounds place a chop and cover the top with Bechamel sauce.
When cold dip in egg and bread crumbs and fry a light brown.
A good recipe for the Bechamel sauce is the following: One ounce of butter browned with one ounce of flour.
To this add half a glass of sherry, some finely chopped truffles, one cup and a half of stock, salt and pepper, and cook for ten minutes.
Add the juice of a lime, take from the fire and stir in the well beaten yolks of two eggs.
Devil Chops
Make a dressing of the following ingredients mixed together: One ounce of butter, one teaspoonful of made mustard, one half teaspoonful of French mustard, one teaspoonful of grated horseradish, one teaspoonful of chutney, a little Chili vinegar, the juice of one lime, salt, pepper and cayenne.
Rub this on the chops and broil rare.
Serve the remaining sauce over them in a very hot dish.
Fry one dozen lamb chops in butter and set aside to cool.
Put in a stew pan two ounces of butter with half a can of mushrooms, one small onion and a teaspoonful of parsley, all minced fine; salt, pepper, cayenne and a little mace.
Cook this gently for ten minutes and add a cup of milk thickened with flour and butter, the juice of a lemon and one teaspoonful of sugar.
Cook a few minutes.
Take from the fire and add the yolks of four eggs well beaten.
Cover the chops with this and set aside to cool.
Brush them with the well beaten yolk of an egg, sprinkle with fine bread crumbs, and fry in butter to a light brown. Serve with green peas in the center of the dish.
Lamb Cutlets a la Condi
Lard lamb cutlets with strips of truffle, anchovy and gherkin.
Put this on each side of the cutlets and cover with crepinette.
Serve with a browned veal gravy and sliced lemon.
Eggs with Tomatoes
Fry in two ounces of butter two small dry onions and two green peppers, chopped.
Add half a dozen tomatoes peeled and cut up, salt and pepper.
Simmer fifteen minutes.
Add the corn cut from half a dozen ears, and cook fifteen minutes longer.
Pour the mixture into a baking dish, and break over it six eggs.
Place in the oven until set.
Macaroni a la Rossini
Cook a pint or less of macaroni in well salted water; drain and put into a stew pan, with a little good gravy.
Simmer very slowly until the gravy is all absorbed, shaking the pan occasionally.
Put a layer of the macaroni in a baking dish, sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese and sliced truffles mixed with a little good sauce espagnole.
Fill the dish and on the top layer put truffles.
Place in the oven a few minutes and serve with grated Parmesan cheese on a separate dish.
Timbale of Macaroni for Twelve Persons
Boil one half pound of macaroni in water for five minutes.
Cut in inch length pieces and simmer for twenty minutes in one quart of milk, being careful that it does not boil.
Season with salt, pepper, mace and cayenne.
Add one cup of cream, stir until very smooth, add the beaten yolks of eight eggs and one can of mushrooms sliced.
Stir well and then add the macaroni with one pound of sweetbreads, cut in small pieces and two dozen Eastern oysters.
"Good!
Good again!" he cried.
"We'll have the first decent breakfast we've had this year.
The mind, like the body, grows quickly hard, simple, uncomplex.
Some folk, of course, who talk glibly about the simple life when it is safely out of reach, betray themselves in camp by for ever peering about for the artificial excitements of civilisation which they miss.
"I declare, Hubbard, you're tanned like an aboriginal, and you look like one, too," laughed Maloney.
"But what makes you think the creature is starved?"
He asked the question with his eyes straight on the other's face.
I propose a swim and then bed.
"Exactly," he said.
"The wind's gusty and we've got hardly any ballast."
Suddenly the prince said to me, "Cousin, we have no time to lose; be so kind as to conduct this lady to a certain spot, where you will find a dome like tomb, newly built.
At the top, however, he looked at me.
"My cousin," he exclaimed, "I do not know how to thank you for your kindness.
Farewell."
"I don't understand."
"No matter," he replied, "go back by the path that you came."
My persecutor, however, did not stop here.
He shut me up in a large case and ordered his executioner to carry me into a desert place, to cut off my head, and then to abandon my body to the birds of prey.
"My dear nephew," he said, "your story gives me some hope.
However, we passed through the smoke into a large chamber, which at first seemed quite empty.
This horrible sight turned me faint, but, to my surprise, my uncle did not show so much surprise as anger.
It was sunset, and I paused for a little to look about me, and to decide which way to turn my steps.
"I am satisfied," replied Zobeida; "you can go when you like."
"Madam," said the young man, addressing Zobeida, "if you wish to know how I lost my right eye, I shall have to tell you the story of my whole life."
I was taught first to read and write, and then to learn the Koran, which is the basis of our holy religion, and the better to understand it, I read with my tutors the ablest commentators on its teaching, and committed to memory all the traditions respecting the Prophet, which have been gathered from the mouth of those who were his friends.
I also learnt history, and was instructed in poetry, versification, geography, chronology, and in all the outdoor exercises in which every prince should excel.
However, as was my duty, I took with me ten camels, laden with rich presents for the Sultan.
I managed to jump off without any injury, and looked about to see if I was pursued.
Luckily my wound was only a slight one, and after binding it up as well as I could, I walked on for the rest of the day, till I reached a cave at the foot of a mountain, where I passed the night in peace, making my supper off some fruits I had gathered on the way.
The tailor listened with attention, but his reply, instead of giving me consolation, only increased my trouble.
"Beware," he said, "of telling any one what you have told me, for the prince who governs the kingdom is your father's greatest enemy, and he will be rejoiced to find you in his power."
This counsel was very distasteful to me, but I thought I could not do otherwise than adopt it.
So the next morning I set out with a company of poor wood cutters, to whom the tailor had introduced me.
I was hacking at the root of a tree, when I beheld an iron ring fastened to a trapdoor of the same metal.
I soon cleared away the earth, and pulling up the door, found a staircase, which I hastily made up my mind to go down, carrying my hatchet with me by way of protection.
When I reached the bottom I discovered that I was in a huge palace, as brilliantly lighted as any palace above ground that I had ever seen, with a long gallery supported by pillars of jasper, ornamented with capitals of gold.
Down this gallery a lady came to meet me, of such beauty that I forgot everything else, and thought only of her.
To save her all the trouble possible, I hastened towards her, and bowed low.
"A man, madam," I replied; "I have nothing to do with genii."
For a long while I did nothing but weep, and would not suffer the genius to come near me; but time teaches us submission, and I have now got accustomed to his presence, and if clothes and jewels could content me, I have them in plenty.
"What you ask is impossible," she answered; "but stay here with me instead, and we can be happy, and all you will have to do is to betake yourself to the forest every tenth day, when I am expecting my master the genius.
Awful though you think him, he shall feel the weight of my arm, and I herewith take a solemn vow to stamp out the whole race."
"If you do, it will be the ruin of both of us," said she; "I know genii much better than you." But the wine I had drunk had confused my brain; I gave one kick to the talisman, and it fell into a thousand pieces.
"Princess!" I cried, "what is happening?"
But I was too late.
The palace opened and the genius appeared, who, turning angrily to the princess, asked indignantly,
"A pain in my heart," she replied hastily, "obliged me to seek the aid of this little bottle.
Feeling faint, I slipped and fell against the talisman, which broke.
"You are an impudent liar!" cried the genius.
"I never saw them before," she answered, "and you came in such a hurry that you may have picked them up on the road without knowing it." To this the genius only replied by insults and blows.
While I was thus indulging my grief my host entered, and said, "There is an old man downstairs who has brought your hatchet and slippers, which he picked up on the road, and now restores to you, as he found out from one of your comrades where you lived.
"I am a genius," he said, "the son of the daughter of Eblis, prince of the genii.
When he touched the ground, he rapped it with his foot; it opened, and we found ourselves in the enchanted palace, in the presence of the beautiful princess of the Ebony Isle. But how different she looked from what she was when I had last seen her, for she was lying stretched on the ground covered with blood, and weeping bitterly.
She lifted up her eyes slowly, and looked sadly at me.
"Very well," said the genius, drawing his sword, "take this, and cut off his head."
"How should I, when I never saw her before?"
"Cut her head off," then, "if she is a stranger to you, and I shall believe you are speaking the truth, and will set you at liberty."
But the look of gratitude she gave me shook my courage, and I flung the sabre to the earth.
The genius, however, paid no attention to my prayers, but said sternly, "That is the way in which a genius treats the woman who has betrayed him.
"O genius!" I cried, "as you wish to spare my life, be generous, and spare it altogether.
STUDY two
MAN'S RESPONSIBILITY FOR HIS ACTS.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eye, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her and he did eat.
Do they thereby commit a sin?
Is the act necessarily wrong in itself?
Most primitive peoples defined it as failure to perform certain ceremonial acts, or to bring tribute to the gods.
The Hebrew people were the first to define right and wrong in terms of personal life and service.
The temptation came from within rather than from without, and the responsibility of not choosing the best rested with the individual.
One god, Ormuzd, was the embodiment of light and goodness. The other, Ahriman, represented darkness and evil.
They traced all sin to the direct influence of Ahriman and the evil spirits that attended him.
three.
The serpent's words represent the natural inclinations that were struggling in the mind of the woman against her sense of duty. Note that in the story the temptation did not come to man through his appetite or his curiosity or his esthetic sense but through his wife whom God had given him.
Are they thereby excused?
How far did her experience reflect common human experience?
What was the real nature of her act?
The Hebrew word for sin (which means to miss the mark placed before each individual) vividly and aptly describes the real nature of sin.
When the news reached Norman William, hunting in his park at Rouen, he dropped his bow, returned to his palace, called his nobles to council, and presently sent ambassadors to Harold, calling on him to keep his oath and resign the Crown.
The Pope sent to Normandy a consecrated banner, and a ring containing a hair which he warranted to have grown on the head of Saint peter.
He blessed the enterprise; and cursed Harold; and requested that the Normans would pay 'Peter's Pence'--or a tax to himself of a penny a year on every house-a little more regularly in future, if they could make it convenient.
This brother, and this Norwegian King, joining their forces against England, with Duke William's help, won a fight in which the English were commanded by two nobles; and then besieged York. Harold, who was waiting for the Normans on the coast at Hastings, with his army, marched to Stamford Bridge upon the river Derwent to give them instant battle.
He found them drawn up in a hollow circle, marked out by their shining spears.
Riding round this circle at a distance, to survey it, he saw a brave figure on horseback, in a blue mantle and a bright helmet, whose horse suddenly stumbled and threw him.
'Who is that man who has fallen?' Harold asked of one of his captains.
'The King of Norway,' he replied.
'He is a tall and stately king,' said Harold, 'but his end is near.'
He added, in a little while, 'Go yonder to my brother, and tell him, if he withdraw his troops, he shall be Earl of Northumberland, and rich and powerful in England.'
'Seven feet of earth for a grave,' replied the captain.
'No more?' returned the brother, with a smile.
'Ride back!' said the brother, 'and tell King Harold to make ready for the fight!'
He did so, very soon.
They had been tossed about by contrary winds, and some of their ships had been wrecked.
But they had once more made sail, led by the Duke's own galley, a present from his wife, upon the prow whereof the figure of a golden boy stood pointing towards England.
By day, the banner of the three Lions of Normandy, the diverse coloured sails, the gilded vans, the many decorations of this gorgeous ship, had glittered in the sun and sunny water; by night, a light had sparkled like a star at her mast head.
Harold broke up the feast and hurried to London.
Within a week, his army was ready.
He sent out spies to ascertain the Norman strength.
William took them, caused them to be led through his whole camp, and then dismissed.
'The Normans,' said these spies to Harold, 'are not bearded on the upper lip as we English are, but are shorn.
They are priests.' 'My men,' replied Harold, with a laugh, 'will find those priests good soldiers!'
'The Saxons,' reported Duke William's outposts of Norman soldiers, who were instructed to retire as King Harold's army advanced, 'rush on us through their pillaged country with the fury of madmen.'
Some proposals for a reconciliation were made, but were soon abandoned. In the middle of the month of October, in the year one thousand and sixty six, the Normans and the English came front to front.
All night the armies lay encamped before each other, in a part of the country then called Senlac, now called (in remembrance of them) Battle.
On an opposite hill, in three lines, archers, foot soldiers, horsemen, was the Norman force.
The English answered with their own battle cry, 'God's Rood!
Holy Rood!' The Normans then came sweeping down the hill to attack the English.
There was one tall Norman Knight who rode before the Norman army on a prancing horse, throwing up his heavy sword and catching it, and singing of the bravery of his countrymen.
Another English Knight rode out, and he fell too.
But then a third rode out, and killed the Norman.
The English, keeping side by side in a great mass, cared no more for the showers of Norman arrows than if they had been showers of Norman rain. When the Norman horsemen rode against them, with their battle axes they cut men and horses down.
The Normans gave way.
The English pressed forward.
A cry went forth among the Norman troops that Duke William was killed.
Duke William took off his helmet, in order that his face might be distinctly seen, and rode along the line before his men.
This gave them courage.
As they turned again to face the English, some of their Norman horse divided the pursuing body of the English from the rest, and thus all that foremost portion of the English army fell, fighting bravely.
The main body still remaining firm, heedless of the Norman arrows, and with their battle axes cutting down the crowds of horsemen when they rode up, like forests of young trees, Duke William pretended to retreat.
The eager English followed.
The Norman army closed again, and fell upon them with great slaughter.
Shoot upward, Norman archers, that your arrows may fall down upon their faces!'
The sun rose high, and sank, and the battle still raged.
Through all the wild October day, the clash and din resounded in the air.
In the red sunset, and in the white moonlight, heaps upon heaps of dead men lay strewn, a dreadful spectacle, all over the ground.
His brothers were already killed.
The English broke and fled.
The Normans rallied, and the day was lost.
On their journey back to Portray, the ladies were almost too tired for talking; and Sir Griffin was sulky.
Sir Griffin had as yet heard nothing about Greystock's adventure, and did not care to be told. But when once they were at the castle, and had taken warm baths, and glasses of sherry, and got themselves dressed and had come down to dinner, they were all very happy.
And she had by heart every kind word that Lord George had said to her,--and she loved the sweet, pleasant, Corsair like intimacy that had sprung up between them.
It was all delightful;--and so much more delightful because mrs Carbuncle had not gone quite so well as she liked to go, and because Lucinda had fallen into the water.
"Yes." "Well?"
"He proposed; but of course I could not answer him when I was wet through." There had been but a moment, and in that moment this was all that Lucinda would say.
"Now I don't mean to stir again," said Lizzie, throwing herself into a corner of a sofa, "till somebody carries me to bed.
"You only killed one fox," said mr Emilius, pretending a delightfully clerical ignorance, "and on Monday you killed four.
"About ten, perhaps," said Lord George.
"I'm sure it was thirty," said Lizzie, forgetting her fatigue in her energy.
"It was just whatever is best," said Lizzie.
"I know Frank's friend, mr Nappie, said it was twenty.
"I thought so," said Frank; "but I couldn't take the liberty myself."
"I felt that blow," said Frank.
"I shall always call you Cousin Greystockings," said Lizzie.
If the horse had been on the roadside, he or his men could have protected him.
"It was cruel," said Frank.
"If it had happened to me, I should have been very angry," said mrs Carbuncle.
"But Frank wouldn't have had a horse at all," said Lizzie, "unless he had taken mr Nappie's."
"There's something in that, certainly; but, still, I agree with mrs Carbuncle.
I can't conceive anything so terrible.
"He'd send you grey stockings instead," said Lizzie.
But these Corsairs are known to be dangerous, and it would not be wise that she should sacrifice any future prospect of importance on behalf of a feeling, which, no doubt, was founded on poetry, but which might too probably have no possible beneficial result.
In a ride across the country the Corsair was all that a Corsair should be; but knowing, as she did, but very little of the Corsair, she could not afford to throw over her cousin for his sake.
"It was a matter of course.
"I did like it;--and so did you.
"Certainly not."
She did not look into his face as she asked this question, but stood with her eyes fixed on the stair carpet.
"Indeed no"
"Good night, Frank."
"Good night, Lizzie." Then she went, and he returned to a room below which had been prepared for purposes of tobacco and soda water and brandy.
"Why, Griff, you're rather out of sorts to night," said Lord George to his friend, before Frank had joined them.
I don't like young women when they're damp and smell of mud."
"How would you like me to ask you questions?
And if you don't, what do you mean to do; and all the rest of it?"
"As for marrying the widow, I should like to know the facts first. As to mrs c, she wouldn't object in the least.
"I wonder if he'd take a twenty pound note if I sent it to him," said Frank, when they broke up for the night.
Quints or Semitenths
"I think so," said mr Palliser.
"But squint is an easier," said mr Gresham, with all a prime minister's jocose authority.
Without pockets in which to carry the seeds, I am afraid some of them would never be able to store up enough food for winter," began Old Mother Nature, as soon as everybody was on hand the next morning.
"I wouldn't be without my pockets for any thing," spoke up Striped Chipmunk.
Old Mother Nature smiled.
"But there are others who have even greater need of pockets, and among them are the Pocket Mice.
All of these pretty little fellows live in the dry parts of the Far West and Southwest in the same region where Longfoot the Kangaroo Rat lives.
He weighs less than an ounce and is a dear little fellow.
His back and sides are yellow, and beneath he is white.
In each cheek is a pocket opening from the outside, and these pockets are lined with hair. He is called Silky Pocket Mouse because of the fineness and softness of his coat.
He has some larger cousins, one of them being a little bigger than Nibbler the House Mouse.
Neighbors and close relatives are the Spiny Pocket Mice."
"Do they have spines like Prickly Porky?" demanded peter Rabbit.
Old Mother Nature laughed.
"I don't wonder you ask," said she. "I think it is a foolish name myself, for they haven't any spines at all.
The smallest of the Spiny Pocket Mice is about the size of Nibbler the House Mouse and the largest is twice as big.
They are more slender than their Silky cousins, and their tails are longer in proportion to their size and have little tufts of hair at the ends.
Of course, they have pockets in their cheeks.
By day the entrances are closed with earth from inside, for the Mice are active only at night. Sometimes the burrows are hidden under bushes, and sometimes they are right out in the open.
"Another Mouse of the West looks almost enough like Whitefoot to be a member of his branch of the family.
He has a beautiful yellowish brown coat and white waistcoat, and his feet are white. But his tail is short in comparison with Whitefoot's and instead of being slim is quite thick.
His fur is like velvet.
He is called the Grasshopper Mouse."
"Is that because he eats Grasshoppers?" asked peter Rabbit at once.
"You've guessed it," laughed Old Mother Nature.
"He is very, very fond of Grasshoppers and Crickets.
He eats many kinds of insects, Moths, Flies, Cutworms, Beetles, Lizards, Frogs and Scorpions. Because of his fondness for the latter he is called the Scorpion Mouse in some sections.
He is fond of meat when he can get it. He also eats seeds of many kinds.
He is found all over the West from well up in the North to the hot dry regions of the Southwest. When he cannot find a convenient deserted burrow of some other animal, he digs a home for himself and there raises several families each year.
In the early evening he often utters a fine, shrill, whistling call note.
"Another little member of the Mouse family found clear across the country is the Harvest Mouse.
In fact, he is one of the smallest of the entire family.
In appearance he is much like Nibbler, but his coat is browner and there are fine hairs on his tail.
"As a rule he does little harm to man, for his food is chiefly seeds of weeds, small wild fruits and parts of wild plants of no value to man.
But this does not happen often.
The most interesting thing about this little Mouse is the way he builds his home.
Sometimes he uses a hole in a tree or post and sometimes a deserted birds' nest, but more frequently he builds a nest for himself-a little round ball of grass and other vegetable matter.
This is placed in thick grass or weeds close to the ground or in bushes or low trees several feet from the ground.
Inside is a warm, soft bed made of milkweed or cattail down, the very nicest kind of a bed for the babies.
"Now this is all about the native Mice and-what is it, peter?"
"How impatient some little folks are and how fearful that their curiosity will not be satisfied," remarked Old Mother Nature.
"As I was saying, this is all about our native Mice; that is, the Mice who belong to this country.
And now we come to Nibbler the House Mouse, who, like Robber the Brown Rat, has no business here at all, but who has followed man all over the world and like Robber has become a pest to man."
peter Rabbit looked rather sheepish when he discovered that Old Mother Nature hadn't for gotten, and resolved that in the future he would hold his tongue.
"Have any of you seen Nibbler?" asked Old Mother Nature.
"I have," replied Danny Meadow Mouse.
"Once I was carried to Farmer Brown's barn in a shock of corn and I found Nibbler living in the barn."
"Probably other members of his family were. He is perfectly at home in any building put up by man, just as is Robber the Rat.
Because of his small size he can go where Robber cannot.
He eats all sorts of food, but spoils more for man, by running about over it, than he eats.
"It is largely because of Robber the Rat and Nibbler that men keep the Cats you all hate so.
A Cat is Nibbler's worst enemy.
Nibbler is slender and graceful, with a long, hairless tail and ears of good size.
He is very timid, ready to dart into his hole at the least sound.
"If mr and mrs Nibbler are living in a house, their nest is made of scraps of paper, cloth, wool and other soft things stolen from the people who live in the house.
In getting this material they often do great damage.
If they are living in a barn, they make their nest of hay and any soft material they can find.
"While Nibbler prefers to live in or close to the homes of men, he sometimes is driven out and then takes to the fields, especially in summer.
There he lives in all sorts of hiding places, and isn't at all particular what the place is, if it promises safety and food can be obtained close by.
Man brought him here and now he is here to stay and quite as much at home as if he belonged here the way the rest of you do.
I suspect these are the only ones in whom you take any interest, and so you will not care to come to school any more.
"No, marm," answered Happy Jack the Gray Squirrel, who, you remember, had laughed at peter Rabbit for wanting to go to school.
Isn't that so?" Happy Jack turned to the others and every one nodded, even Prickly Porky.
"There is one little fellow living right near here who looks to me as if he must be a member of the Mouse family, but he isn't like any of the Mice you have told us about," continued Happy Jack.
"He is so small he can hide under a leaf.
"He isn't a Mouse.
He isn't even a Rodent.
You see, all felt they must be there so that they might learn all they possibly could about one they so feared.
"Striped Chipmunk," said Old Mother Nature, "you know something about Shadow the Weasel, tell us what you know."
"I know I hate him!" declared Striped Chipmunk, and all the others nodded their heads in agreement.
"I don't know a single good thing about him," he continued, "but I know plenty of bad things.
Any hole I can get into he can.
"What did he look like?" asked Old Mother Nature.
"Like a snake on legs," declared Striped Chipmunk.
He was about as long as Chatterer the Red Squirrel but looked longer because of his slim body and long neck.
He was brown above and white below.
His front feet were white, and his hind feet rather whitish, but not clear white.
His short, round tail was black at the end.
I don't like to think about him!"
Striped Chipmunk is all wrong, excepting about the end of his tail," interrupted Jumper the Hare.
"He was all white, every bit of him but the end of his tail, that was black."
"Striped Chipmunk is quite right and so are you," declared Old Mother Nature.
"Striped Chipmunk saw him in summer and you saw him in winter. He changes his coat according to season, just as you do yourself, Jumper.
"You are lucky to be alive," declared Chatterer the Red Squirrel.
"I know it," replied Striped Chipmunk and shivered again.
"I know it.
"He was hunting me just the same way, running with his nose in the snow and following every twist and turn I had made.
But for that black tipped tail I wouldn't have seen him until too late."
"Pooh!" exclaimed Jimmy Skunk.
"I may be ever so much bigger, but he is so quick I wouldn't stand the least chance in the world.
When I suspect Shadow is about, I go somewhere else, the farther the better.
If I could climb a tree like Chatterer, it would be different."
"No, it wouldn't!" interrupted Chatterer.
He had found a hole in a certain tree where I was living, and it was just luck that I wasn't at home when he called.
I was just returning when he popped out.
I ran for my life."
"He is the most awful fellow in all the Great World," declared Whitefoot the Wood Mouse.
"A lot you know about the Great World," he said.
"I just know, that's all," retorted Whitefoot in a very positive though squeaky voice.
I can forgive them for that.
Every one must eat to live.
But Shadow hunts me even when his stomach is so full he cannot eat another mouthful.
That fellow just loves to kill. He takes pleasure in it.
"Whitefoot is right," declared Old Mother Nature, and she spoke sadly.
He is hot blooded, quick tempered and fearless.
"Hasn't he any enemies?" asked peter Rabbit.
You see he moves so quickly, dodging out of sight in a flash, that whoever catches him must be quick indeed.
It is because of his wonderful ability to disappear in an instant that he is called Shadow.
"Shadow is known as the Common Weasel, Short tailed Weasel, Brown Weasel, Bonaparte Weasel and Ermine, and is found all over the forested parts of the northern part of the country.
A little farther south in the East is a cousin very much like him called the New York Weasel.
His smallest cousin is the Least Weasel. The latter is not much longer than a Mouse.
In winter he is all white, even the tip of his tail.
In summer he is a purer white underneath than his larger cousins.
He is about the size of Billy Mink, but instead of the rich dark brown of Billy's coat his coat is a creamy yellow.
His feet are black and so is the tip of his tail.
Robber, as you know, is big and savage and always ready for a fight when cornered.
STORY OF THE THREE CALENDERS, SONS OF SULTANS; AND OF THE FIVE LADIES OF BAGDAD.
In the reign of Caliph Haroon al Rusheed, there was at Bagdad, a porter, who, notwithstanding his mean and laborious business, was a fellow of wit and good humour.
In a short time the lady stopped before a gate that was shut, and knocked: a Christian, with a venerable long white beard, opened it; and she put money into his hand, without speaking; but the Christian, who knew what she wanted, went in, and in a little time, brought a large jug of excellent wine.
As she went by a butcher's stall, she made him weigh her twenty five pounds of his best meat, which she ordered the porter to put also into his basket.
At another shop, she took capers, tarragon, cucumbers, sassafras, and other herbs, preserved in vinegar: at another, she bought pistachios, walnuts, filberts, almonds, kernels of pine apples, and such other fruits; and at another, all sorts of confectionery.
She then went to a druggist, where she furnished herself with all manner of sweet scented waters, cloves, musk, pepper, ginger, and a great piece of ambergris, and several other Indian spices; this quite filled the porter's basket, and she ordered him to follow her.
They walked till they came to a magnificent house, whose front was adorned with fine columns, and had a gate of ivory. There they stopped, and the lady knocked softly.
Just as he was about to ask her some questions upon this head, another lady came to open the gate, and appeared to him so beautiful, that he was perfectly surprised, or rather so much struck with her charms, that he had nearly suffered his basket to fall, for he had never seen any beauty that equalled her.
"Pray, Sister," said the beautiful portress, "come in, what do you stay for?
The porter was well satisfied with the money he had received; but when he ought to have departed, he could not summon sufficient resolution for the purpose.
The ladies fell a laughing at the porter's reasoning; after which Zobeide gravely addressed him, "Friend, you presume rather too much; and though you do not deserve that I should enter into any explanation with you, I have no objection to inform you that we are three sisters, who transact our affairs with so much secrecy that no one knows any thing of them.
We have but too much reason to be cautious of acquainting indiscreet persons with our counsel; and a good author that we have read, says, Keep thy own secret, and do not reveal it to any one.
If thy own breast cannot keep thy counsel, how canst thou expect the breast of another to be more faithful?'"
"My ladies," replied the porter, "by your very air, I judged at first that you were persons of extraordinary merit, and I conceive that I am not mistaken.
Soon after, the ladies took their places, and made the porter sit down by them, who was overjoyed to see himself seated with three such admirable beauties.
That as the wind bears with it the sweet scents of the purfumed places over which it passes, so the wine he was going to drink, coming from her fair hands, received a more exquisite flavour than it naturally possessed.
The song pleased the ladies much, and each of them afterwards sung one in her turn.
In short, they were all very pleasant during the repast, which lasted a considerable time, and nothing was wanting that could serve to render it agreeable.
The day drawing to a close, Safie spoke in the name of the three ladies, and said to the porter, "Arise, it is time for you to depart." But the porter, not willing to leave good company, cried, "Alas! ladies, whither do you command me to go in my present condition?
What with drinking and your society, I am quite beside myself.
The porter went and read these words, written in large characters of gold: "He who speaks of things that do not concern him, shall hear things that will not please him." Returning again to the three sisters, "Ladies," said he, "I swear to you that you shall never hear me utter a word respecting what does not relate to me, or wherein you may have any concern."
When they were all in the best humour possible, they heard a knocking at the gate.
There are three calenders at our gate, at least they appear to be such by their habit; but what will surprise you is, they are all three blind of the right eye, and have their heads, beards, and eye brows shaved.
They care not what place we put them in, provided they may be under shelter; they would be satisfied with a stable.
But I cannot without laughing think of their amusing and uniform figure." Here Safie laughed so heartily, that the two sisters and the porter could not refrain from laughing also.
At their entrance they made a profound obeisance to the ladies, who rose up to receive them, and told them courteously that they were welcome, that they were glad of the opportunity to oblige them, and to contribute towards relieving the fatigues of their journey, and at last invited them to sit down with them.
"Honest man," said the calender, "do not put yourself in a passion; we should be sorry to give you the least occasion; on the contrary, we are ready to receive your commands." Upon which, to put an end to the dispute, the ladies interposed, and pacified them.
When the calenders were seated, the ladies served them with meat; and Safie, being highly pleased with them, did not let them want for wine.
Each man took the instrument he liked, and all three together began to play a tune The ladies, who knew the words of a merry song that suited the air, joined the concert with their voices; but the words of the song made them now and then stop, and fall into excessive laughter.
In the height of this diversion, when the company were in the midst of their jollity, a knocking was heard at the gate; Safie left off singing, and went to see who it was.
The caliph Haroon al Rusheed was frequently in the habit of walking abroad in disguise by night, that he might discover if every thing was quiet in the city, and see that no disorders were committed.
The vizier, in vain represented to him that the noise proceeded from some women who were merry making, that without question their heads were warm with wine, and that it would not be proper he should expose himself to be affronted by them: besides, it was not yet an unlawful hour, and therefore he ought not to disturb them in their mirth.
"No matter," said the caliph, "I command you to knock." Jaaffier complied; Safie opened the gate, and the vizier, perceiving by the light in her hand, that she was an incomparable beauty, with a very low salutation said, "We are three merchants of Mossoul, who arrived here about ten days ago with rich merchandise, which we have in a warehouse at a caravan serai, where we have also our lodging.
Night being come on, and the music and dancers making a great noise, the watch, passing by, caused the gate to be opened and some of the company to be taken up; but we had the good fortune to escape by getting over the wall.
Being strangers, and somewhat overcome with wine, we are afraid of meeting that or some other watch, before we get home to our khan.
Safie made the business known to her sisters, who considered for some time what to do: but being naturally of a good disposition, and having granted the same favour to the three calenders, they at last consented to let them in.
The caliph, his grand vizier, and the chief of the eunuchs, being introduced by the fair Safie, very courteously saluted the ladies and the calenders.
But before I proceed farther, I hope you will not take it ill if we desire one favour of you." "Alas!" said the vizier, "what favour?
We are not censorious, nor impertinently curious; it is enough for us to notice affairs that concern us, without meddling with what does not belong to us." Upon this they all sat down, and the company being united, they drank to the health of the new comers.
While the vizier, entertained the ladies in conversation, the caliph could not forbear admiring their extraordinary beauty, graceful behaviour, pleasant humour, and ready wit; on the other hand, nothing struck him with more surprise than the calenders being all three blind of the right eye.
She went towards Safie and opened the case, from whence she took a lute, and presented it to her: and after some time spent in tuning it, Safie began to play, and accompanying the instrument with her voice, sung a song about the torments that absence creates to lovers, with so much sweetness, that it charmed the caliph and all the company.
However, this gave her no ease, for she fell into a fit.
We shall be still more to blame, if any mischief befall us; for it is not likely that they would have extorted such a promise from us, without knowing themselves to be in a condition to punish us for its violation."
The next business was to settle who should carry the message.
What are you disputing about?"
The frightened porter interrupted her thus: "In the name of heaven, do not put me to death for another man's crime.
Those who tell us their history, and the occasion of their coming, do them no hurt, let them go where they please; but do not spare those who refuse to give us that satisfaction."
This, madam, is my history."
I went regularly every year to see my uncle, at whose court I amused myself for a month or two, and then returned again to my father's.
These journeys cemented a firm and intimate friendship between the prince my cousin and myself.
The last time I saw him, he received me with greater demonstrations of tenderness than he had done at any time before; and resolving one day to give me a treat, he made great preparations for that purpose.
We continued a long time at table, and after we had both supped; "Cousin," said he, "you will hardly be able to guess how I have been employed since your last departure from hence, about a year past.
But first you are to promise me upon oath, that you will keep my secret, according to the confidence I repose in you."
I very readily took the oath required of me: upon which he said to me, "Stay here till I return, I will be with you in a moment; and accordingly he came with a lady in his hand, of singular beauty, and magnificently apparelled: he did not intimate who she was, neither did I think it would be polite to enquire.
We sat down again with this lady at table, where we continued some time, conversing upon indifferent subjects; and now and then filling a glass to each other's health.
After which the prince said, "Cousin, we must lose no time; therefore pray oblige me by taking this lady along with you, and conducting her to such a place, where you will see a tomb newly built in form of a dome: you will easily know it; the gate is open; enter it together, and tarry till I come, which will be very speedily."
We were scarcely got thither, when we saw the prince following us, carrying a pitcher of water, a hatchet, and a little bag of mortar.
The hatchet served him to break down the empty sepulchre in the middle of the tomb; he took away the stones one after another, and laid them in a corner; he then dug up the ground, where I saw a trap door under the sepulchre, which he lifted up, and underneath perceived the head of a staircase leading into a vault.
Then my cousin, speaking to the lady, said, "Madam, it is by this way that we are to go to the place I told you of:" upon which the lady advanced, and went down, and the prince began to follow; but first turning to me, said, "My dear cousin, I am infinitely obliged to you for the trouble you have taken; I thank you.
As I returned to my uncle's palace, the vapours of the wine got up into my head; however, I reached my apartment, and went to bed.
I was sensibly afflicted, and went to the public burying place, where there were several tombs like that which I had seen: I spent the day in viewing them one after another, but could not find that I sought for, and thus I spent four days successively in vain.
You must know, that all this while the sultan my uncle was absent, and had been hunting for several days; I grew weary of waiting for him, and having prayed his ministers to make my apology at his return, left his palace, and set out towards my father's court.
I arrived at my father's capital, where, contrary to custom, I found a numerous guard at the gate of the palace, who surrounded me as I entered.
But the usurper's cruelty did not stop here; he ordered me to be shut up in a machine, and commanded the executioner to carry me into the country, to cut off my head, and leave me to be devoured by birds of prey.
Being in such a condition, I could not travel far at a time; I retired to remote places during the day, and travelled as far by night as my strength would allow me.
I gave him a long detail of the tragical cause of my return, and of the sad condition he saw me in.
His majesty listened to me with some sort of comfort, and when I had done, "Nephew," said he, "what you tell me gives me some hope.
From this antechamber we came into another, very large, supported by columns, and lighted by several branched candlesticks.
The sultan went up, and opening the curtains, perceived the prince his son and the lady in bed together, but burnt and changed to cinder, as if they had been thrown into a fire, and taken out before they were consumed.
This tenderness increased as they grew in years, and to such a height, that I dreaded the end of it.
But that unfortunate creature had swallowed so much of the poison, that all the obstacles which by my prudence I could lay in the way served only to inflame her love.
After a while, casting his eyes upon me, "Dear nephew," cried he, embracing me, "if I have lost that unworthy son, I shall happily find in you what will better supply his place." The reflections he made on the doleful end of the prince and princess his daughter made us both weep afresh.
"I shall move him to compassion," said I to myself, "by the relation of my uncommon misfortunes, and without doubt he will take pity on a persecuted prince, and not suffer me to implore his assistance in vain."
But good fortune having brought us to your gate, we made bold to knock, when you received us with so much kindness, that we are incapable of rendering suitable thanks.
"This, madam," said he, "is, in obedience to your commands, the account I was to give how I lost my right eye, wherefore my beard and eye brows are shaved, and how I came to be with you at this time."
He put an end to differences, he prevented lawsuits, he reconciled enemies.
Every one took him for the judge, and with good reason.
It seemed as though he had for a soul the book of the natural law.
It was like an epidemic of veneration, which in the course of six or seven years gradually took possession of the whole district.
One single man in the town, in the arrondissement, absolutely escaped this contagion, and, whatever Father Madeleine did, remained his opponent as though a sort of incorruptible and imperturbable instinct kept him on the alert and uneasy.
In any case, I am not his dupe."
His name was Javert, and he belonged to the police.
Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy, which is complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority. Javert possessed this physiognomy minus the baseness.
On the contrary, our souls being realities and having a goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on them intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education.
Having made this reservation, let us pass on.
He observed that society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,--those who attack it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung.
He entered the police; he succeeded there.
At forty years of age he was an inspector.
During his youth he had been employed in the convict establishments of the South.
As for the rest, he had very little skull and a great deal of jaw; his hair concealed his forehead and fell over his eyebrows; between his eyes there was a permanent, central frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure; his mouth pursed up and terrible; his air that of ferocious command.
This man was composed of two very simple and two very good sentiments, comparatively; but he rendered them almost bad, by dint of exaggerating them,--respect for authority, hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes, murder, robbery, all crimes, are only forms of rebellion.
He was stoical, serious, austere; a melancholy dreamer, humble and haughty, like fanatics.
His glance was like a gimlet, cold and piercing.
His whole life hung on these two words: watchfulness and supervision.
He had introduced a straight line into what is the most crooked thing in the world; he possessed the conscience of his usefulness, the religion of his functions, and he was a spy as other men are priests.
And he would have done it with that sort of inward satisfaction which is conferred by virtue.
It was implacable duty; the police understood, as the Spartans understood Sparta, a pitiless lying in wait, a ferocious honesty, a marble informer, Brutus in Vidocq.
His brow was not visible; it disappeared beneath his hat: his eyes were not visible, since they were lost under his eyebrows: his chin was not visible, for it was plunged in his cravat: his hands were not visible; they were drawn up in his sleeves: and his cane was not visible; he carried it under his coat.
In his leisure moments, which were far from frequent, he read, although he hated books; this caused him to be not wholly illiterate.
This could be recognized by some emphasis in his speech.
He did not even put a question to Javert; he neither sought nor avoided him; he bore that embarrassing and almost oppressive gaze without appearing to notice it. He treated Javert with ease and courtesy, as he did all the rest of the world.
"Gentlemen of the jury, order the prisoner to be released!
"Is there a physician present?"
But, pardon me, you cannot understand what I am saying.
Do not, at least, condemn this man!
That was clear.
It was an impression which vanished speedily, but which was irresistible at the moment.
He traversed the crowd slowly.
Then he addressed the audience:--
"All of you, all who are present-consider me worthy of pity, do you not?
Good God!" "He has been arrested." "Arrested!"
"In prison, in the city prison, while waiting to be transferred." "Until he is transferred!" "He is to be transferred!" "Where is he to be taken?" "He will be tried at the Assizes for a highway robbery which he committed long ago." "Well!
I suspected as much.
That man was too good, too perfect, too affected. He refused the cross; he bestowed sous on all the little scamps he came across.
I always thought there was some evil history back of all that."
One old lady, a subscriber to the Drapeau Blanc, made the following remark, the depth of which it is impossible to fathom:--
It will be a lesson to the Bonapartists!"
It was only at the expiration of two hours that she roused herself from her revery, and exclaimed, "Hold!
At that moment the small window in the lodge opened, a hand passed through, seized the key and the candlestick, and lighted the taper at the candle which was burning there.
The portress raised her eyes, and stood there with gaping mouth, and a shriek which she confined to her throat.
She stopped; the conclusion of her sentence would have been lacking in respect towards the beginning.
He finished her thought.
"I was there; I broke a bar of one of the windows; I let myself drop from the top of a roof, and here I am.
From a cupboard he pulled out one of his old shirts, which he tore in pieces.
In the strips of linen thus prepared he wrapped the two silver candlesticks.
He betrayed neither haste nor agitation; and while he was wrapping up the Bishop's candlesticks, he nibbled at a piece of black bread.
There came two taps at the door.
She was pale; her eyes were red; the candle which she carried trembled in her hand.
The peculiar feature of the violences of destiny is, that however polished or cool we may be, they wring human nature from our very bowels, and force it to reappear on the surface.
The paper was not folded.
She read:--
The sister tried to speak, but she only managed to stammer a few inarticulate sounds.
A man responded:--
The door opened.
Javert entered.
It will be remembered that the fundamental point in Javert, his element, the very air he breathed, was veneration for all authority.
This was impregnable, and admitted of neither objection nor restriction.
In his eyes, of course, the ecclesiastical authority was the chief of all; he was religious, superficial and correct on this point as on all others. In his eyes, a priest was a mind, who never makes a mistake; a nun was a creature who never sins; they were souls walled in from this world, with a single door which never opened except to allow the truth to pass through.
On perceiving the sister, his first movement was to retire.
But there was also another duty which bound him and impelled him imperiously in the opposite direction.
This was Sister Simplice, who had never told a lie in her life.
Javert knew it, and held her in special veneration in consequence.
A terrible moment ensued, during which the poor portress felt as though she should faint.
"Then," resumed Javert, "you will excuse me if I persist; it is my duty; you have not seen a certain person-a man-this evening?
He has escaped; we are in search of him-that Jean Valjean; you have not seen him?"
The sister replied:--
She had lied twice in succession, one after the other, without hesitation, promptly, as a person does when sacrificing herself.
It has been established by the testimony of two or three carters who met him, that he was carrying a bundle; that he was dressed in a blouse.
Where had he obtained that blouse?
No one ever found out. But an aged workman had died in the infirmary of the factory a few days before, leaving behind him nothing but his blouse.
Perhaps that was the one.
One last word about Fantine.
We all have a mother,--the earth.
Fantine was given back to that mother.
Who was concerned, after all?
A convict and a woman of the town.
That is why he had a very simple funeral for Fantine, and reduced it to that strictly necessary form known as the pauper's grave.
She was thrown into the public grave.
Her grave resembled her bed.
Absolutely vulgarized by too perpetual a parroting
Accidents which perpetually deflect our vagrant attention
Across the gulf of years
Administering a little deft though veiled castigation
Affected an ironic incredulity
Affecting a tone of gayety
After a first moment of reluctance
After an eternity of resolutions, doubts, and indecisions
Aghast at his own helplessness
All embrowned and mossed with age
All her gift of serene immobility brought into play
All hope of discreet reticence was ripped to shreds
All the lesser lights paled into insignificance
All the place is peopled with sweet airs
All the sky was mother of pearl and tender
All was instinctive and spontaneous
An air half quizzical and half deferential
An air of affected civility
An air of inimitable, scrutinizing, superb impertinence
An air of uncanny familiarity
An answering glow of gratitude
An antagonist worth her steel
An artful stroke of policy
An atmosphere thick with flattery and toadyism
An attack of peculiar virulence and malevolence
An eager and thirsty ear
An eternity of silence oppressed him
An expression of mildly humorous surprise
An expression of rare and inexplicable personal energy
An exquisite perception of things beautiful and rare
An impenetrable screen of foliage
An impersonal and slightly ironic interest
An increased gentleness of aspect
An inexpressible fervor of serenity
An oppressive sense of strange sweet odor
An unsuspected moral obtuseness
And day peers forth with her blank eyes
And what is all this pother about?
Appalled in speechless disgust
Appealing to the urgent temper of youth
Apprehensive solicitude about the future
Ardent words of admiration
Artless and unquestioning devotion
As if smitten by a sudden spasm
Join us, please, when you have time
Just trust to the inspiration of the moment
Justify it if you can
Let me persuade you
Let me say how deeply indebted I feel for your kindness
Let me speak frankly
Many thanks-how kind and good you are!
May I ask to whom you allude?
May I be privileged to hear it?
May I speak freely?
Most dangerous!
My attitude would be one of disapproval
My idea of it is quite the reverse
No, I am speaking seriously
No, I don't understand it
Not at all
Now is it very plain to you?
Now you are flippant
Of course I am delighted
Of course you will do what you think best
Oh, do not form an erroneous impression
Oh, that's mere quibbling
Oh, that was a manner of speaking
Oh, yes, I quite admit that
Oh, yes, you may take that for granted
On the contrary, I agree with you thoroughly
One assumption you make I should like to contest
One must be indulgent under the circumstances
One thing I beg of you
Pardon me, I meant something different
Perhaps not in the strictest sense
Perhaps you think me ungrateful
Please continue to be frank
Pray don't apologize
Pray go on!
Precisely, that is just what I meant
Quibbling, I call it
Quite so
Really?
Really-you must go?
Relatively speaking
Shall we have a compact?
She seems uncommonly appreciative
Show me that the two cases are analogous
So I inferred
So much the better for me
Speaking with all due respect
Still, you might make an exception
Strangely it's true
Such conduct seems to me unjustifiable
Surely there can be no question about that
Surely we can speak frankly
I do, indeed, recollect
I do not argue
I do not at this moment remember
I do not believe it possible
I do not belong to those who
I do not choose to consume
I do not complain of
I do not contend
I do not countenance for a moment
I do not desire to call in question
I do not desire to put too much emphasis
I do not despair of surmounting
I do not disguise the fact
I do not fail to admire
I do not fear a contradiction
I do not forget the practical necessity
I do not imagine
I do not in the least degree
I do not know with what correctness
I do not mean now to go further than
I do not mean to impute
I do not myself pretend to be
I do not, of course, deny
I do not pretend to argue
I do not propose to take up your time
I do not question for a moment
I do not recount all
I do not see how it is possible
I do not see much difference between
I do not seek to palliate
I do not speak exclusively
I do not stop to discuss
I do not think it possible
I do not think myself obliged to dwell
I do not think that I need further discuss
I do not think this at all an exaggeration
I do not think you will often hear
I do not vouch for
I do not want to discourage you
I dwell with pleasure on the considerations
I especially hail with approval
I even add this
I fear lest I may
I fearlessly appeal
I feel bound to add my expression
I feel constrained to declare
I feel it a proud privilege
I feel keenly myself impelled by every duty
I feel only a great emotion of gratitude
I feel respect and admiration
I feel some explanation is due
I feel tempted to introduce here
I feel that I have a special right to
I feel that it is not true
I feel the greatest satisfaction
I feel the task is far beyond my power
I fervently trust
I find it difficult to utter in words
I find it more easy
I find my reference to this
I find myself called upon to say something
I find no fault with
I flatter myself
I, for my part, would rather
I, for one, greatly doubt
I forbear to inquire
I foresaw the consequence
I fully recognize
I give you, in conclusion, this sentence
I go further
I grant all this
I gratefully accept
I greatly deplore
I had a kind of hope
I had almost said
I had in common with others
I had occasion to criticize
I happen to differ
I hardly dare to dwell longer
I have a dark suspicion
I have a profound pity for those
I have a right to consider
I have a strong belief
I have a very high respect for
I have all but finished
I have already stated, and now repeat
I have always been under the impression
I have anticipated the objection
I have attempted thus hastily
I have barely touched some of the points
I have been asked several times
I have been requested to say a word
I have been told by an eminent authority
I have been trying to show
I have before me the statistics
I have but one more word to add
I have demonstrated to you
I have depicted
I have felt it almost a duty to
I have found great cause for wonder
I have generally observed
I have gone so far as to suggest
I have long been of the conviction
I have never whispered a syllable
I have no doubt whatever
I have not accustomed myself
I have not been able to deny
I have not particularly referred to
I have not time to present
I have noticed of late years
I have now explained to you
I have now made bold to touch upon
I have now rather more than kept my word
I have now said all that occurs to me
I have often been struck with the resemblance
I have often lingered in fancy
I have one step farther to go
I have only partially examined
I have partly anticipated
I have pride and pleasure in quoting
I have racked this brain of mine
I have read with great regret
I have said and I repeat
I have scant patience
I have still two comments to make
I have the honor to propose
I have thought it incumbent on me
I have thought it right on this day
I have thus been led by my feelings
I have touched very cursorily
I have tried to convey to you
I have undertaken to speak
I have very much less feeling of
I have watched with some attention
I have witnessed the extraordinary
I have yet to learn
I hold it to be clearly expedient
I hold the maxim no less applicable
I hold to the principle
I hope by this time we are all convinced
I hope I have expressed myself explicitly
I hope not to occupy more than a few minutes
I hope the day may be far distant
I hope the time may come again
I hope to be excused if
I hope we may forget
S
Sacrificed to a futile sort of treadmill
Sadness prevailed among her moods
Scorched with the lightning of momentary indignation
Scorning such paltry devices
Scotched but not slain
Scrupulous morality of conduct
Seem to swim in a sort of blurred mist before the eyes
Seething with suppressed wrath
Seize on greedily
Serenity beamed from his look
Serenity of paralysis and death
Seriousness lurked in the depths of her eyes
Served to recruit his own jaded ideas
Set anew in some fresh and appealing form
Setting all the sane traditions at defiance
Shadowy vistas of sylvan beauty
She affected disdain
She assented in precisely the right terms
She bandies adjectives with the best
She challenged his dissent
She cherished no petty resentments
She curled her fastidious lip
She curled her lip with defiant scorn
She did her best to mask her agitation
She disclaimed fatigue
She fell into a dreamy silence
She fell into abstracted reverie
She felt herself carried off her feet by the rush of incoherent impressions
She flushed an agitated pink
She forced a faint quivering smile
She frowned incomprehension
She had an air of restrained fury
She had an undercurrent of acidity
She hugged the thought of her own unknown and unapplauded integrity
She lingered a few leisurely seconds
She nodded mutely
She nourished a dream of ambition
She permitted herself a delicate little smile
She poured out on him the full opulence of a proud recognition
She recaptured herself with difficulty
She regarded him stonily out of flint blue eyes
She sat eyeing him with frosty calm
She seemed the embodiment of dauntless resolution
She seemed wrapped in a veil of lassitude
She shook hands grudgingly
She softened her frown to a quivering smile
She spoke with hurried eagerness
She spoke with sweet severity
She stilled and trampled on the inward protest
She stood her ground with the most perfect dignity
She strangled a fierce tide of feeling that welled up within her
She swept away all opposing opinion with the swift rush of her enthusiasm
She thrived on insincerity
She twitted him merrily
She was both weary and placated
She was conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensations
She was demure and dimly appealing
She was exquisitely simple
She was gripped with a sense of suffocation and panic
She was in an anguish of sharp and penetrating remorse
She was oppressed by a dead melancholy
She was stricken to the soul
She wore an air of wistful questioning
Sheer superfluity of happiness
Sickening contrasts and diabolic ironies of life
Silence fell
Singing lustily as if to exorcise the demon of gloom
Skirmishes and retreats of conscience
Slender experience of the facts of life
Slope towards extinction
Slow the movement was and tortuous
Slowly disengaging its significance from the thicket of words
Soar into a rosy zone of contemplation
Solitary and sorely smitten souls
Some dim remembered and dream like images
Some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain
Some flash of witty irrelevance
Something curiously suggestive and engaging
Something eminently human beaconed from his eyes
Something full of urgent haste
Something indescribably reckless and desperate in such a picture
Something that seizes tyrannously upon the soul
Sore beset by the pressure of temptation
Specious show of impeccability
Spectacular display of wrath
Spur and whip the tired mind into action
Stale and facile platitudes
Stamped with unutterable and solemn woe
Startled into perilous activity
Startling leaps over vast gulfs of time
Stem the tide of opinion
Stern emptying of the soul
Stimulated to an ever deepening subtlety
Stirred into a true access of enthusiasm
Strange laughings and glitterings of silver streamlets
Stripped to its bare skeleton
Struck by a sudden curiosity
Struck dumb with strange surprise
Stung by his thoughts, and impatient of rest
Stung by the splendor of the prospect
Subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty
Sublime indifference to contemporary usage and taste
Submission to an implied rebuke
Subtle indications of great mental agitation
Such things as the eye of history sees
Such was the petty chronicle
Suddenly overawed by a strange, delicious shyness
Suddenly smitten with unreality
Suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes
Suffered to languish in obscurity
Sugared remonstrances and cajoleries
Suggestions of veiled and vibrant feeling
Summer clouds floating feathery overhead
Sunk in a phraseological quagmire
Sunk into a gloomy reverie
Sunny silence broods over the realm of little cottages
Supreme arbiter of conduct
Susceptibility to fleeting impressions
Sweet smoke of burning twigs hovered in the autumn day
It is a curious fact
It is a great pleasure to meet you
It is a huge undertaking
It is a rather melancholy thought
It is an admirable way of putting it
It is an error of taste
It is an extreme case, but the principle is sound
It is an ingenious theory
It is an uncommonly fine description
It is extremely interesting, I can assure you
It is for you to decide
It is historically true
It is incredible!
It is inexplicable
It is interesting, as a theory
It is most unfortunate
It is my deliberately formed opinion
It is my opinion you are too conscientious
It is nevertheless true
It is not always fair to judge by appearances
It is not so unreasonable as you think
It is often very misleading
It is one of the grave problems of the day
It is only a fancy of mine
It is perfectly defensible
It is perfectly trite
It is permissible to gratify such an impulse
It is quite an easy matter
It is quite conceivable
It is quite too absurd
It is really impressive
It is really most callous of you to laugh
It is sheer madness
It is sickening and so insufferably arrogant
It is simply a coincidence
It is the most incomprehensible thing in the world
It is to you that I am indebted for all this
It is true, I am grieved to say
It is true none the less
It is very amusing
It is very far from being a fiction
It is very good of you to do this for my pleasure
It is very splendid of you
It is wanton capriciousness
It is your privilege to think so
It's a difficult and delicate matter to discuss
It's a matter of immediate urgency
It's absolute folly
It's absurd-it's impossible
It's all nonsense
It's as logical as it can be under the circumstances
It's been a strange experience for you
It's deliciously honest
It's going to be rather troublesome
It's inconceivable that it should ever be necessary
It's mere pride of opinion
It's my chief form of recreation
It's not a matter of vast importance
It's past my comprehension
It's quite wonderful how logical and simple you make it
It's really very perplexing
It's the natural sequence
It's too melancholy
It's very wonderful
It makes it all quite interesting
It may sound strange to you
It must be fascinating
It seems entirely wonderful to me
It seems incredible
It seems like a distracting dream
It seems preposterous
It seems the height of absurdity
It seems to me that you have a perfect right to do so
It seems unspeakably funny to me
It should not be objectionable
It sounds plausible
It sounds rather appalling
It strikes me as rather pathetic
It was an unpardonable liberty
It was not unkindly meant
It was peculiarly unfortunate
It was really an extraordinary experience
It will create a considerable sensation
It will divert your thoughts from a mournful subject
It will give me pleasure to do it
It would be ill advised
It would interest me very much
An accidental encounter
An air of artificial constraint
An air of round eyed profundity
An almost excessive exactness
An ample and imposing structure
An appreciable menace
An ardent and gifted youth
An arid dictum
An artful and malignant enemy
An entirely negligible quantity
An eternal and imperishable example
An expression at once confident and appealing
An honest and unquestioning pride
An immeasurable advantage
An imperturbable demeanor and steadiness of mind
An incongruous spectacle
An incredible mental agility
An indescribable frankness and simplicity of character
An indomitable and unselfish soul
An inevitable factor of human conduct
An inexhaustible copiousness and readiness of speech
An insatiable appetite for trifles
An insatiable voracity
An intentional breach of politeness
An interchange of civilities
An intolerable deal of guesswork
An itching propensity for argument
An object of indestructible interest
An obnoxious member of society
An ominous lull and silence
An open and violent rupture
An unpatriotic and ignoble act
An unreasoning form of coercion
Announced in a tone of pious satisfaction
Anticipated with lively expectation
Apparent rather than real
Appeal to a tardy justice
Appreciably above the level of mediocrity
Arbitrary assumption of power
Ardently and enthusiastically convinced
Arrayed with scrupulous neatness
Arrogance and untutored haughtiness
As an impartial bystander
As belated as they are fallacious
As by a secret of freemasonry
As odious as it is absurd
As ridiculous as it was unnecessary
As we scan the vague unknown
Assailed by poignant doubts
Assumed almost heroic proportions
At the mercy of small prejudices
Attained by rigorous self restraint
Attended by insuperable difficulties
Averted by some happy stroke of fortune
Await the sentence of impartial posterity
B
Bandied to and fro
Based on a fundamental error
Beguile the tedium of the journey
Bemoaning and bewailing his sad fortune
Beset with external dangers
Betrayed into deplorable error
Bewildering multiplication of details
Blended with courage and devotion
Blind leaders of the blind
Blunt the finer sensibilities
Blustering desire for publicity
Bound up with impossibilities and absurdities
Breathed an almost exaggerated humility
Brilliant display of ingenious argument
Bring odium upon the individual
Brisk directness of speech
Brutal recognition of failure
Bursts of unpremeditated frankness
But that is beside the mark
But this is a digression
By a curious perversity of fate
By a happy turn of thinking
By a whimsical diversion
By common consent
By means of crafty insinuations
By no means inconsolable
By temperament incompatible
By the common judgment of the thinking world
By the sheer centripetal force of sympathy
By virtue of a common understanding
C
Calculated to create disgust
Calm strength and constancy
Capacity for urbanity and moderation
Carried into port by fair winds
Caught unawares by a base impulse
Ceaseless tramp of humanity
Championing the cause of religious education
Chastened and refined by experience
Checked by the voice of authority
Cherished the amiable illusion
Cherishing a huge fallacy
Childishly inaccurate and absurd
Chivalrous loyalty and high forbearance
Clever and captivating eloquence
Coarse and glittering ostentation
Coherent and continuous trend of thought
Commended by perfect suavity
Common ground of agreement
Complicated and infinitely embittered
Conceded from a sense of justice
Conceived with imperfect knowledge
Concentrated and implacable resolve
Conditions of unspeakable humiliation
Conducive to well-being and efficiency
Confused rumblings presaging a different epoch
Constrained by the sober exercise of judgment
Consumed by a demon of activity
Continuous and stubborn disregard
Contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment
Couched in terms of feigned devotion
Credulous and emotionally extravagant
Criticized with unsparing vigor
Crude undigested masses of suggestion
Cynically repudiate all obligations
D
Daily usages and modes of thinking
Dangerously near snobbery
Darkly insinuating what may possibly happen
Dazzled by their novelty and brilliance
Debased by common use
Deeply engrossed in congenial work
Deeply moved as well as keenly stung
Deeply rooted in the heart of humanity
Defiant of analysis and rule
Degenerated into deadness and formality
Degrading and debasing curiosity
Deliberate and cautious reflection
Delicacy of perception and quick tact
Delude many minds into acquiescence
Dense to the point of stupidity
Devices generally held to be discreditable
Devious and perilous ways
Devoid of hysteria and extravagance
Dexterous modes of concealment
Dictated by an overweening partiality
Diffidence overwhelmed him
Diffusing beneficent results
Dignified by deliberation and privacy
Dimly implying some sort of jest
Discreditable and insincere support
Disdaining the guidance of reason
Disenchanting effect of time and experience
Disfigured by glaring faults
Disguised in sentimental frippery
Dispel all anxious concern
Displayed enormous power and splendor
Distracted by contending desires
Divested of all personal feelings
Dogged and shameless beyond all precedent
Dominated by no prevailing taste or fashion
Doomed by inexorable fate
Doomed to impermanence and transiency
Draw back in distrust and misgiving
Dreaded and detested rival
Due to historical perspective
Dull and trite commonplaces
Half suffocated by his triumph
Haughtiness and arrogance were largely attributed to him
He braced himself to the exquisite burden of life
He conversed with a colorless fluency
He drank of the spirit of the universe
He drew near to a desperate resolve
He felt an unaccountable loathing
He felt the ironic rebound of her words
He flushed crimson
He gave her a baffled stare
He gave himself to a sudden day dream
He held his breath in admiring silence
He laughed away my protestations
He mused a little while in grave thought
He paused, stunned and comprehending
He ruled autocratically
He sacrificed the vulgar prizes of life
He sat on thorns
He threw a ton's weight of resolve upon his muscles
He was born to a lively and intelligent patriotism
He was dimly mistrustful of it
He was discreetly silent
He was empty of thought
He was most profoundly skeptical
He was nothing if not grandiloquent
He was quaking on the precipice of a bad bilious attack
Her blank gaze chilled you
Her eyes danced with malice
Her eyes dilated with pain and fear
Her haughty step waxed timorous and vigilant
Her heart fluttered with a vague terror
Her heart pounded in her throat
Her interest flagged
Her life had dwarfed her ambitions
Her smile was linked with a sigh
Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest
Her stumbling ignorance which sought the road of wisdom
Her thoughts outstripped her erring feet
Her voice trailed off vaguely
His accents breathed profound relief
His conscience leapt to the light
His curiosity is quenched
His eyes literally blazed with savage fire
His face caught the full strength of the rising wind
His face dismissed its shadow
His face torn with conflict
His heart rebuked him
His heart was full of enterprise
His impatient scorn expired
His last illusions crumbled
His mind echoed with words
His mouth quivered with pleasure
His thoughts galloped
Hope was far and dim
I remember a reference made
I remember an intimation
I remember to have heard
I repeat, I am not speaking
I respectfully counsel
I respectfully submit
I rest my opinion on
I rise to thank you
I rise with some trepidation
I return you my most grateful thanks
I said a little way back
I said that I thought
I salute with profound reverence
I sanction with all my heart
I saw an ingenious argument the other day
I say it is extremely important
I say it most confidently
I say no more of these things
I say this is no disparagement of
I say without fear of contradiction
I see around me
I see no exception
I see no reason for doubting
I set out with saying
I shall add a few words
I shall ask you to look very closely
I shall consider myself privileged
I shall desist from
I shall endeavor to be guided
I shall here use the word to denote
I shall invite you to follow me
I shall just give the summary of
I shall never cease to be grateful
I shall not acknowledge
I shall not attempt a detailed narrative
I shall not end without appealing
I shall not enlarge upon
I shall not force into the discussion
I shall not tax your patience
I shall not undertake to prophesy
I shall now proceed to show
I shall often have to advert to
I shall pass by all this
I shall show that I am not
I shall speak first about
I shall take a broader view of the subject
I shall take it for granted here
I shall therefore endeavor
I shall waste no time in refuting
I should be surprised if
I should be the last man to deny
I should have forfeited my own self respect
I should like to go a step farther
I should like to refer to two events
I should like to day to examine briefly
I should much prefer
I should not be satisfied with myself
I should think it too absurd
I shudder at the doctrine
I solemnly declare
I speak from no little personal observation
I speak of this to show
I speak the secret feeling of this company
I speak what I know when I say
I speak wholly without authority
I speak with feeling upon this point
I speak within the hearing of
I submit it to every candid mind
I suppose it to be entirely true
I suppose there is no one here
I suppose we are all of one opinion
I take a broader and bolder position
I take it for granted
I take leave to say
I take two views of
I tell him in reply
I tell you, gentlemen
I thank you for having allowed me
I thank you for your most generous greeting
I thank you for your thoughtful courtesy
I thank you from the bottom of my heart
I thank you very gratefully
I think I am not the first to utter
I think I can claim a purpose
I think I have rightly spoken
I think it is not too much to say
I think it is quite right
I think it will be granted
I think no Wise man can be indifferent
I think, on the contrary
I think that I can explain
I think that, in these last years
I think that none of us will deny
I think there is no call on me to listen
I think we are justified
I think we may ask in reply
I think we may say, therefore
I think we may well be proud of
I think we must draw a distinction
I think when we look back upon
I think you will all agree
I tremble at the task
I use very plain language
I very confidently submit
I was not slow to accept and believe
I was overwhelmed
I was very much interested
I was very much thrilled
I will accept the general proposition
I will ask you to accompany me
I will dwell a little longer
I will endeavor in a brief way
I will enlarge no further
I will illustrate this point by
I will not allude
I will not attempt to note
I will not condescend to
I will now consider with you
I will only speak to one point
I will take the precaution to add
I will venture to express the hope
I wish at the outset
I wish emphatically to reaffirm
I wish it first observed
I wish rather to call your attention
I wish to ask if you honestly and candidly believe
I wish to begin my statement
I wish to do full justice to
I wish to draw your attention
I wish to express my profound gratification
I wish you to observe
I would also gratefully acknowledge
I would enter a protest
I would further point out to you
I would not be understood as belittling
I would suggest first of all
I would urge upon you
I would venture to point out
From the New York Packet.
HAMILTON
To the People of the State of New York:
THE tendency of the principle of legislation for States, or communities, in their political capacities, as it has been exemplified by the experiment we have made of it, is equally attested by the events which have befallen all other governments of the confederate kind, of which we have any account, in exact proportion to its prevalence in those systems.
This exceptionable principle may, as truly as emphatically, be styled the parent of anarchy: It has been seen that delinquencies in the members of the Union are its natural and necessary offspring; and that whenever they happen, the only constitutional remedy is force, and the immediate effect of the use of it, civil war.
It remains to inquire how far so odious an engine of government, in its application to us, would even be capable of answering its end.
It would rarely happen that the delinquency to be redressed would be confined to a single member, and if there were more than one who had neglected their duty, similarity of situation would induce them to unite for common defense.
Independent of this motive of sympathy, if a large and influential State should happen to be the aggressing member, it would commonly have weight enough with its neighbors to win over some of them as associates to its cause.
Specious arguments of danger to the common liberty could easily be contrived; plausible excuses for the deficiencies of the party could, without difficulty, be invented to alarm the apprehensions, inflame the passions, and conciliate the good will, even of those States which were not chargeable with any violation or omission of duty.
This would be the more likely to take place, as the delinquencies of the larger members might be expected sometimes to proceed from an ambitious premeditation in their rulers, with a view to getting rid of all external control upon their designs of personal aggrandizement; the better to effect which it is presumable they would tamper beforehand with leading individuals in the adjacent States.
If associates could not be found at home, recourse would be had to the aid of foreign powers, who would seldom be disinclined to encouraging the dissensions of a Confederacy, from the firm union of which they had so much to fear.
The suggestions of wounded pride, the instigations of irritated resentment, would be apt to carry the States against which the arms of the Union were exerted, to any extremes necessary to avenge the affront or to avoid the disgrace of submission.
The first war of this kind would probably terminate in a dissolution of the Union.
This may be considered as the violent death of the Confederacy.
Its more natural death is what we now seem to be on the point of experiencing, if the federal system be not speedily renovated in a more substantial form. It is not probable, considering the genius of this country, that the complying States would often be inclined to support the authority of the Union by engaging in a war against the non complying States.
They would always be more ready to pursue the milder course of putting themselves upon an equal footing with the delinquent members by an imitation of their example.
And the guilt of all would thus become the security of all.
Our past experience has exhibited the operation of this spirit in its full light.
There would, in fact, be an insuperable difficulty in ascertaining when force could with propriety be employed.
The pretense of the latter would always be at hand.
And the case must be very flagrant in which its fallacy could be detected with sufficient certainty to justify the harsh expedient of compulsion.
It seems to require no pains to prove that the States ought not to prefer a national Constitution which could only be kept in motion by the instrumentality of a large army continually on foot to execute the ordinary requisitions or decrees of the government.
And yet this is the plain alternative involved by those who wish to deny it the power of extending its operations to individuals.
Such a scheme, if practicable at all, would instantly degenerate into a military despotism; but it will be found in every light impracticable.
The result of these observations to an intelligent mind must be clearly this, that if it be possible at any rate to construct a federal government capable of regulating the common concerns and preserving the general tranquillity, it must be founded, as to the objects committed to its care, upon the reverse of the principle contended for by the opponents of the proposed Constitution.
It must carry its agency to the persons of the citizens.
It must stand in need of no intermediate legislations; but must itself be empowered to employ the arm of the ordinary magistrate to execute its own resolutions.
The majesty of the national authority must be manifested through the medium of the courts of justice.
The government of the Union, like that of each State, must be able to address itself immediately to the hopes and fears of individuals; and to attract to its support those passions which have the strongest influence upon the human heart.
It must, in short, possess all the means, and have aright to resort to all the methods, of executing the powers with which it is intrusted, that are possessed and exercised by the government of the particular States.
The plausibility of this objection will vanish the moment we advert to the essential difference between a mere NON COMPLIANCE and a DIRECT and ACTIVE RESISTANCE.
The State leaders may even make a merit of their surreptitious invasions of it on the ground of some temporary convenience, exemption, or advantage.
But if the execution of the laws of the national government should not require the intervention of the State legislatures, if they were to pass into immediate operation upon the citizens themselves, the particular governments could not interrupt their progress without an open and violent exertion of an unconstitutional power.
No omissions nor evasions would answer the end.
They would be obliged to act, and in such a manner as would leave no doubt that they had encroached on the national rights. An experiment of this nature would always be hazardous in the face of a constitution in any degree competent to its own defense, and of a people enlightened enough to distinguish between a legal exercise and an illegal usurpation of authority.
If the judges were not embarked in a conspiracy with the legislature, they would pronounce the resolutions of such a majority to be contrary to the supreme law of the land, unconstitutional, and void.
If opposition to the national government should arise from the disorderly conduct of refractory or seditious individuals, it could be overcome by the same means which are daily employed against the same evil under the State governments.
The magistracy, being equally the ministers of the law of the land, from whatever source it might emanate, would doubtless be as ready to guard the national as the local regulations from the inroads of private licentiousness.
And as to those mortal feuds which, in certain conjunctures, spread a conflagration through a whole nation, or through a very large proportion of it, proceeding either from weighty causes of discontent given by the government or from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm, they do not fall within any ordinary rules of calculation.
When they happen, they commonly amount to revolutions and dismemberments of empire.
No form of government can always either avoid or control them.
It is in vain to hope to guard against events too mighty for human foresight or precaution, and it would be idle to object to a government because it could not perform impossibilities.
"Yonder we maun be this night," quo' the bull; "for my auld brither lives yonder"; and presently they were at the place.
At length they set the stranger damosel to wark; and whenever she began the stains came out pure and clean, but the auld wife made the knight believe it was her dochter had washed the sarks.
So she bethought her of her apple, and breaking it, found it filled with gold and precious jewelry, the richest she had ever seen.
Next day she kentna what to do for grief.
Tethered to earth
The lights winked
The preternatural pomposities of the pulpit
The purple vaulted night
The rosy twilight of boyhood
They escaped the baffled eye
Thus spake Zarathustra.
Once on a time, Zarathustra also cast his fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen.
The work of a suffering and tortured God, did the world then seem to me.
The dream-and diction-of a God, did the world then seem to me; coloured vapours before the eyes of a divinely dissatisfied one.
Good and evil, and joy and woe, and I and thou-coloured vapours did they seem to me before creative eyes.
The creator wished to look away from himself,--thereupon he created the world.
Intoxicating joy and self forgetting, did the world once seem to me.
This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction's image and imperfect image-an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator:--thus did the world once seem to me.
Thus, once on a time, did I also cast my fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen.
Beyond man, forsooth?
Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!
A man was he, and only a poor fragment of a man and ego.
And verily, it came not unto me from the beyond!
What happened, my brethren?
I surpassed myself, the suffering one; I carried mine own ashes to the mountain; a brighter flame I contrived for myself.
And lo!
Thereupon the phantom WITHDREW from me!
To me the convalescent would it now be suffering and torment to believe in such phantoms: suffering would it now be to me, and humiliation.
Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a death leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created all Gods and backworlds.
It was the body which despaired of the body-it groped with the fingers of the infatuated spirit at the ultimate walls.
Believe me, my brethren!
It was the body which despaired of the earth-it heard the bowels of existence speaking unto it.
And then it sought to get through the ultimate walls with its head-and not with its head only-into "the other world."
But that "other world" is well concealed from man, that dehumanised, inhuman world, which is a celestial naught; and the bowels of existence do not speak unto man, except as man.
Verily, it is difficult to prove all being, and hard to make it speak. Tell me, ye brethren, is not the strangest of all things best proved?
Yea, this ego, with its contradiction and perplexity, speaketh most uprightly of its being-this creating, willing, evaluing ego, which is the measure and value of things.
A new pride taught me mine ego, and that teach I unto men: no longer to thrust one's head into the sand of celestial things, but to carry it freely, a terrestrial head, which giveth meaning to the earth!
The sick and perishing-it was they who despised the body and the earth, and invented the heavenly world, and the redeeming blood drops; but even those sweet and sad poisons they borrowed from the body and the earth!
From their misery they sought escape, and the stars were too remote for them.
Then they sighed: "O that there were heavenly paths by which to steal into another existence and into happiness!" Then they contrived for themselves their by paths and bloody draughts!
Beyond the sphere of their body and this earth they now fancied themselves transported, these ungrateful ones.
But to what did they owe the convulsion and rapture of their transport?
To their body and this earth.
Gentle is Zarathustra to the sickly.
May they become convalescents and overcomers, and create higher bodies for themselves!
Neither is Zarathustra indignant at a convalescent who looketh tenderly on his delusions, and at midnight stealeth round the grave of his God; but sickness and a sick frame remain even in his tears.
Many sickly ones have there always been among those who muse, and languish for God; violently they hate the discerning ones, and the latest of virtues, which is uprightness.
Backward they always gaze toward dark ages: then, indeed, were delusion and faith something different.
Raving of the reason was likeness to God, and doubt was sin.
Too well do I know those godlike ones: they insist on being believed in, and that doubt is sin.
Too well, also, do I know what they themselves most believe in.
Verily, not in backworlds and redeeming blood drops: but in the body do they also believe most; and their own body is for them the thing in itself.
But it is a sickly thing to them, and gladly would they get out of their skin.
Therefore hearken they to the preachers of death, and themselves preach backworlds.
Hearken rather, my brethren, to the voice of the healthy body; it is a more upright and pure voice.
More uprightly and purely speaketh the healthy body, perfect and square built; and it speaketh of the meaning of the earth.--
Thus spake Zarathustra.
seventeen.
Tarry yet a little and hearken unto me.
"He who seeketh may easily get lost himself.
All isolation is wrong": so say the herd.
And long didst thou belong to the herd.
The voice of the herd will still echo in thee.
And when thou sayest, "I have no longer a conscience in common with you," then will it be a plaint and a pain.
Lo, that pain itself did the same conscience produce; and the last gleam of that conscience still gloweth on thine affliction.
Then show me thine authority and thy strength to do so!
Art thou a new strength and a new authority?
A first motion?
A self rolling wheel?
Canst thou also compel stars to revolve around thee?
Alas! there is so much lusting for loftiness!
There are so many convulsions of the ambitions!
Show me that thou art not a lusting and ambitious one!
Alas! there are so many great thoughts that do nothing more than the bellows: they inflate, and make emptier than ever.
Free, dost thou call thyself?
Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.
Art thou one ENTITLED to escape from a yoke?
Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.
Free from what?
Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT?
Canst thou give unto thyself thy bad and thy good, and set up thy will as a law over thee?
Canst thou be judge for thyself, and avenger of thy law?
Terrible is aloneness with the judge and avenger of one's own law. Thus is a star projected into desert space, and into the icy breath of aloneness.
There are feelings which seek to slay the lonesome one; if they do not succeed, then must they themselves die!
But art thou capable of it-to be a murderer?
Hast thou ever known, my brother, the word "disdain"?
And the anguish of thy justice in being just to those that disdain thee?
Thou forcest many to think differently about thee; that, charge they heavily to thine account.
Thou camest nigh unto them, and yet wentest past: for that they never forgive thee.
Thou goest beyond them: but the higher thou risest, the smaller doth the eye of envy see thee.
Most of all, however, is the flying one hated.
"How could ye be just unto me!"--must thou say-"I choose your injustice as my allotted portion."
Injustice and filth cast they at the lonesome one: but, my brother, if thou wouldst be a star, thou must shine for them none the less on that account!
And be on thy guard against the good and just!
They would fain crucify those who devise their own virtue-they hate the lonesome ones.
Be on thy guard, also, against holy simplicity!
All is unholy to it that is not simple; fain, likewise, would it play with the fire-of the fagot and stake.
And be on thy guard, also, against the assaults of thy love!
Too readily doth the recluse reach his hand to any one who meeteth him.
To many a one mayest thou not give thy hand, but only thy paw; and I wish thy paw also to have claws.
But the worst enemy thou canst meet, wilt thou thyself always be; thou waylayest thyself in caverns and forests.
Thou lonesome one, thou goest the way to thyself!
And past thyself and thy seven devils leadeth thy way!
A heretic wilt thou be to thyself, and a wizard and a sooth sayer, and a fool, and a doubter, and a reprobate, and a villain.
Thou lonesome one, thou goest the way of the creating one: a God wilt thou create for thyself out of thy seven devils!
To create, desireth the loving one, because he despiseth!
What knoweth he of love who hath not been obliged to despise just what he loved!
With my tears, go into thine isolation, my brother.
I love him who seeketh to create beyond himself, and thus succumbeth.--
Thus spake Zarathustra.
It seems evident, that, when the mind looks forward to discover the event, which may result from the throw of such a dye, it considers the turning up of each particular side as alike probable; and this is the very nature of chance, to render all the particular events, comprehended in it, entirely equal.
If we allow, that belief is nothing but a firmer and stronger conception of an object than what attends the mere fictions of the imagination, this operation may, perhaps, in some measure, be accounted for.
The concurrence of these several views or glimpses imprints the idea more strongly on the imagination; gives it superior force and vigour; renders its influence on the passions and affections more sensible; and in a word, begets that reliance or security, which constitutes the nature of belief and opinion.
The case is the same with the probability of causes, as with that of chance.
There are some causes, which are entirely uniform and constant in producing a particular effect; and no instance has ever yet been found of any failure or irregularity in their operation.
Though we give the preference to that which has been found most usual, and believe that this effect will exist, we must not overlook the other effects, but must assign to each of them a particular weight and authority, in proportion as we have found it to be more or less frequent.
Here then it seems evident, that, when we transfer the past to the future, in order to determine the effect, which will result from any cause, we transfer all the different events, in the same proportion as they have appeared in the past, and conceive one to have existed a hundred times, for instance, another ten times, and another once.
Let any one try to account for this operation of the mind upon any of the received systems of philosophy, and he will be sensible of the difficulty.
All our reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on a species of Analogy, which leads us to expect from any cause the same events, which we have observed to result from similar causes.
Where the causes are entirely similar, the analogy is perfect, and the inference, drawn from it, is regarded as certain and conclusive: nor does any man ever entertain a doubt, where he sees a piece of iron, that it will have weight and cohesion of parts; as in all other instances, which have ever fallen under his observation.
But where the objects have not so exact a similarity, the analogy is less perfect, and the inference is less conclusive; though still it has some force, in proportion to the degree of similarity and resemblance.
We shall make trial of this, with regard to the hypothesis, by which we have, in the foregoing discourse, endeavoured to account for all experimental reasonings; and it is hoped, that this new point of view will serve to confirm all our former observations.
The ignorance and inexperience of the young are here plainly distinguishable from the cunning and sagacity of the old, who have learned, by long observation, to avoid what hurt them, and to pursue what gave ease or pleasure.
A horse, that has been accustomed to the field, becomes acquainted with the proper height which he can leap, and will never attempt what exceeds his force and ability.
An old greyhound will trust the more fatiguing part of the chace to the younger, and will place himself so as to meet the hare in her doubles; nor are the conjectures, which he forms on this occasion, founded in any thing but his observation and experience.
Is it not experience, which renders a dog apprehensive of pain, when you menace him, or lift up the whip to beat him?
Is it not even experience, which makes him answer to his name, and infer, from such an arbitrary sound, that you mean him rather than any of his fellows, and intend to call him, when you pronounce it in a certain manner, and with a certain tone and accent?
For if there be in reality any arguments of this nature, they surely lie too abstruse for the observation of such imperfect understandings; since it may well employ the utmost care and attention of a philosophic genius to discover and observe them.
Has not the same custom the same influence on all?
We shall here endeavour briefly to explain the great difference in human understandings: After which the reason of the difference between men and animals will easily be comprehended.
When we have lived any time, and have been accustomed to the uniformity of nature, we acquire a general habit, by which we always transfer the known to the unknown, and conceive the latter to resemble the former.
By means of this general habitual principle, we regard even one experiment as the foundation of reasoning, and expect a similar event with some degree of certainty, where the experiment has been made accurately, and free from all foreign circumstances.
It is therefore considered as a matter of great importance to observe the consequences of things; and as one man may very much surpass another in attention and memory and observation, this will make a very great difference in their reasoning.
Where there is a complication of causes to produce any effect, one mind may be much larger than another, and better able to comprehend the whole system of objects, and to infer justly their consequences.
One man is able to carry on a chain of consequences to a greater length than another.
Few men can think long without running into a confusion of ideas, and mistaking one for another; and there are various degrees of this infirmity.
The circumstance, on which the effect depends, is frequently involved in other circumstances, which are foreign and extrinsic.
The separation of it often requires great attention, accuracy, and subtilty.
The forming of general maxims from particular observation is a very nice operation; and nothing is more usual, from haste or a narrowness of mind, which sees not on all sides, than to commit mistakes in this particular.
When we reason from analogies, the man, who has the greater experience or the greater promptitude of suggesting analogies, will be the better reasoner.
After we have acquired a confidence in human testimony, books and conversation enlarge much more the sphere of one man's experience and thought than those of another.
It would be easy to discover many other circumstances that make a difference in the understandings of men.
These we denominate Instincts, and are so apt to admire as something very extraordinary, and inexplicable by all the disquisitions of human understanding.
Let us live happily then, though we call nothing our own!
Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy.
He who has given up both victory and defeat, he, the contented, is happy.
There is no fire like passion; there is no losing throw like hatred; there is no pain like this body; there is no happiness higher than rest.
Health is the greatest of gifts, contentedness the best riches; trust is the best of relationships, Nirvana the highest happiness.
He who has tasted the sweetness of solitude and tranquillity, is free from fear and free from sin, while he tastes the sweetness of drinking in the law.
The sight of the elect (Arya) is good, to live with them is always happiness; if a man does not see fools, he will be truly happy.
He who walks in the company of fools suffers a long way; company with fools, as with an enemy, is always painful; company with the wise is pleasure, like meeting with kinsfolk.
Chapter sixteen.
Pleasure
He who gives himself to vanity, and does not give himself to meditation, forgetting the real aim (of life) and grasping at pleasure, will in time envy him who has exerted himself in meditation.
Let no man ever look for what is pleasant, or what is unpleasant. Not to see what is pleasant is pain, and it is pain to see what is unpleasant.
Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil. Those who love nothing and hate nothing, have no fetters.
From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear; he who is free from pleasure knows neither grief nor fear.
He who possesses virtue and intelligence, who is just, speaks the truth, and does what is his own business, him the world will hold dear.
In like manner his good works receive him who has done good, and has gone from this world to the other;--as kinsmen receive a friend on his return.
Chapter seventeen.
Anger
Let a man leave anger, let him forsake pride, let him overcome all bondage!
No sufferings befall the man who is not attached to name and form, and who calls nothing his own.
He who holds back rising anger like a rolling chariot, him I call a real driver; other people are but holding the reins.
Beware of bodily anger, and control thy body!
Leave the sins of the body, and with thy body practise virtue!
Leave the sins of the tongue, and practise virtue with thy tongue!
The wise who control their body, who control their tongue, the wise who control their mind, are indeed well controlled.
Chapter eighteen.
Impurity
Thou art now like a sear leaf, the messengers of death (Yama) have come near to thee; thou standest at the door of thy departure, and thou hast no provision for thy journey.
Make thyself an island, work hard, be wise!
Thy life has come to an end, thou art come near to death (Yama), there is no resting place for thee on the road, and thou hast no provision for thy journey.
Make thyself an island, work hard, be wise!
When thy impurities are blown away, and thou art free from guilt, thou wilt not enter again into birth and decay.
As the impurity which springs from the iron, when it springs from it, destroys it; thus do a transgressor's own works lead him to the evil path.
But there is a taint worse than all taints,--ignorance is the greatest taint.
O mendicants! throw off that taint, and become taintless!
Life is easy to live for a man who is without shame, a crow hero, a mischief maker, an insulting, bold, and wretched fellow.
But life is hard to live for a modest man, who always looks for what is pure, who is disinterested, quiet, spotless, and intelligent.
And the man who gives himself to drinking intoxicating liquors, he, even in this world, digs up his own root.
O man, know this, that the unrestrained are in a bad state; take care that greediness and vice do not bring thee to grief for a long time!
There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.
RINALDO AND BAYARD
CHARLEMAGNE was overwhelmed with grief at the loss of so many of his bravest warriors at the disaster of Roncesvalles, and bitterly reproached himself for his credulity in resigning himself so completely to the counsels of the treacherous Count Gan.
Yet he soon fell into a similar snare when he suffered his unworthy son, Charlot, to acquire such an influence over him, that he constantly led him into acts of cruelty and injustice that in his right mind he would have scorned to commit.
Rinaldo and his brothers, for some slight offence to the imperious young prince, were forced to fly from Paris, and to take shelter in their castle of Montalban; for Charles had publicly said, if he could take them he would hang them all.
He sent numbers of his bravest knights to arrest them, but all without success.
At last Charles himself raised a great army, and went in person to compel the paladin to submit.
His brothers had been taken prisoners in a skirmish, and his only hope of saving their lives was in making terms with the king.
So he sent a messenger, offering to yield himself and his castle if the king would spare his and his brothers' lives.
While the messenger was gone Rinaldo, impatient to learn what tidings he might bring, rode out to meet him.
Then he sat down, and, as he waited, he fell asleep.
Just then came along some country people, who said to one another, "Look, is not that the great horse Bayard that Rinaldo rides?
Let us take him, and carry him to King Charles, who will pay us well for our trouble." They did so, and the king was delighted with his prize, and gave them a present that made them rich to their dying day.
When Rinaldo woke he looked round for his horse, and, finding him not, he groaned, and said, "O unlucky hour that I was born! how fortune persecutes me!" So desperate was he that he took off his armor and his spurs, saying, "What need have I of these, since Bayard is lost?" While he stood thus lamenting, a man came from the thicket, seemingly bent with age.
He had a long beard hanging over his breast, and eyebrows that almost covered his eyes.
He bade Rinaldo good day.
Rinaldo thanked him, and said, "A good day I have hardly had since I was born." Then said the old man, "Signor Rinaldo, you must not despair, for God will make all things turn to the best." Rinaldo answered, "My trouble is too heavy for me to hope relief.
The king has taken my brothers, and means to put them to death.
I thought to rescue them by means of my horse Bayard, but while I slept some thief has stolen him." The old man replied, "I will remember you and your brothers in my prayers.
I am a poor man, have you not something to give me?" Rinaldo said, "I have nothing to give," but then he recollected his spurs.
He gave them to the beggar, and said, "Here, take my spurs.
They are the first present my mother gave me when my father, Count Aymon, dubbed me knight.
They ought to bring you ten pounds."
The old man took the spurs, and put them into his sack, and said, "Noble sir, have you nothing else you can give me?" Rinaldo replied, "Are you making sport of me?
I tell you truly if it were not for shame to beat one so helpless, I would teach you better manners." The old man said, "Of a truth, sir, if you did so you would do a great sin.
The pilgrim took the mantle, folded it up, and put it into his bag. Then a third time he said to Rinaldo, "Sir, have you nothing left to give me that I may remember you in my prayers?"
When Rinaldo heard that he stayed his hand, and gazed doubtingly on the old man, who now threw aside his disguise, and appeared to be indeed Malagigi.
"Dear cousin," said Rinaldo, "pray forgive me.
I did not know you.
Next to God, my trust is in you.
Help my brothers to escape out of prison, I entreat you.
They looked like two pilgrims, very old and poor.
Malagigi said to Rinaldo, "I will go meet the monks, and see what news I can learn."
Malagigi then hastened back to Rinaldo, and told him what he had learned.
The morning of the feast day Rinaldo and Malagigi came to the place where the sports were to be held.
Malagigi gave Rinaldo his spurs back again, and said, "Cousin, put on your spurs, for you will need them." "How shall I need them," said Rinaldo, "since I have lost my horse?" Yet he did as Malagigi directed him.
When the two had taken their stand on the border of the field among the crowd the princes and ladies of the court began to assemble.
When they were all assembled the king came also, and Charlot with him, near whom the horse Bayard was led, in the charge of grooms, who were expressly enjoined to guard him safely.
It seems to be worth a hundred ducats." "That is true," said Charlot; "Let us go and ask where they got it." So they rode to the place where the pilgrims stood, and Charlot stopped Bayard close to them.
Then the king said to Malagigi, "Give me a morsel from your cup, that I may be cleared of my sins." Malagigi answered, "Illustrious lord, I dare not do it, unless you will forgive all who have at any time offended you.
These two shall never live in my kingdom again.
If I catch them I will certainly have them hanged. But tell me, pilgrim, who is that man who stands beside you?" "He is deaf, dumb, and blind," said Malagigi.
When this was done, the king said to Charlot, "Son, I request that you will let this sick pilgrim sit on your horse, and ride if he can, for by so doing he will be healed of all his infirmities." Charlot replied, "That will I gladly do." So saying, he dismounted, and the servants took the pilgrim in their arms, and helped him on the horse.
"Yes," said Rinaldo, "I am healed of all my infirmities." When the king heard it he said to Bishop Turpin, "My lord bishop, we must celebrate this with a procession, with crosses and banners, for it is a great miracle."
Malagigi pretended to be in great alarm.
"O noble king and master," he cried, "my poor companion is run away with; he will fall and break his neck." The king ordered his knights to ride after the pilgrim, and bring him back, or help him if need were.
They did so, but it was in vain.
Rinaldo left them all behind him, and kept on his way till he reached Montalban.
Malagigi was suffered to depart, unsuspected, and he went his way, making sad lamentation for the fate of his comrade, who he pretended to think must surely be dashed to pieces.
Malagigi did not go far, but having changed his disguise, returned to where the king was, and employed his best art in getting the brothers of Rinaldo out of prison.
In a second I clapped spurs into my tricycle and was off.
"The stag!
The stag!" I cried.
"Let go of me," I cried, "we shall lose the stag.
In an instant I was free.
And for fear he would make for the hedge and jump over it, not minding me, I jerked out my handkerchief and shook it at him.
He turned sharp to the right, dashed up the hill, cleared a hedge and was gone.
It was trembling all over and fairly tired to death.
"Don't you touch that deer," said I-my voice was so husky I could hardly speak-"don't you see it's surrendered?
The man's eyes looked as if they would burst out of his head.
Your mother-"
"Confound my mother!" yelled the man.
He had been to Chedcombe, and was coming back.
"And you say they are gone?" cried Mary Louise in surprise, as she came down to breakfast the next morning and found the table laid for one and old Eben waiting to serve her.
"There is no night train," said the girl, seating herself thoughtfully at the table.
"How could they go, Uncle?"
"I understand, Uncle Eben."
She reflected upon this seemingly unnecessary secrecy as she ate her breakfast.
"What are you and Aunt Polly going to do, Uncle?"
Since the move was inevitable, she would be glad to go to Miss Stearne as soon as possible.
She helped Aunt Polly pack her trunk and suit case, afterwards gathering into a bundle the things she had forgotten or overlooked, all of which personal belongings Uncle Eben wheeled over to the school.
Then she bade the faithful servitors good bye, promising to call upon them at their humble home, and walked slowly over the well-known path to Miss Stearne's establishment, where she presented herself to the principal.
It being Saturday, Miss Stearne was seated at a desk in her own private room, where she received Mary Louise and bade her sit down.
Miss Stearne was a woman fifty years of age, tall and lean, with a deeply lined face and a tendency to nervousness that was increasing with her years.
She was a very clever teacher and a very incompetent business woman, so that her small school, of excellent standing and repute, proved difficult to finance.
In character Miss Stearne was temperamental enough to have been a genius.
She was kindly natured, fond of young girls and cared for her pupils with motherly instincts seldom possessed by those in similar positions.
Not always were her rules and regulations dictated by good judgment.
Therefore her girls usually found as much fault as other boarding school girls are prone to do, and with somewhat more reason.
On the other hand, no one could question the principal's erudition or her skill in imparting her knowledge to others.
"Sit down, Mary Louise," she said to the girl.
"This is an astonishing change in your life, is it not?
Colonel Weatherby came to me last evening and said he had been suddenly called away on important matters that would brook no delay, and that your mother was to accompany him on the journey.
He begged me to take you in as a regular boarder and of course I consented.
You have been one of my most tractable and conscientious pupils and I have been proud of your progress.
But the school is quite full, as you know; so at first I was uncertain that I could accommodate you here; but Miss Dandler, my assistant, has given up her room to you and I shall put a bed for her in my own sleeping chamber, so that difficulty is now happily arranged.
I suppose your family left Beverly this morning, by the early train?"
"They have gone," replied Mary Louise, non committally.
"You will be lonely for a time, of course, but presently you will feel quite at home in the school because you know all of my girls so well. It is not like a strange girl coming into a new school.
And remember, Mary Louise, that you are to come to me for any advice and assistance you need, for I promised your grandfather that I would fill your mother's place as far as I am able to do so."
Mary Louise reflected, with a little shock of pain, that her mother had never been very near to her and that Miss Stearne might well perform such perfunctory duties as the girl had been accustomed to expect.
But no one could ever take the place of Gran'pa Jim.
"Thank you, Miss Stearne," she said.
"I am sure I shall be quite contented here.
Is my room ready?"
"Yes; and your trunk has already been placed in it.
Let me know, my dear, if there is anything you need."
Mary Louise went to her room and was promptly pounced upon by Dorothy Knerr and Sue Finley, who roomed just across the hall from her and were delighted to find she was to become a regular boarder.
They asked numerous questions as they helped her to unpack and settle her room, but accepted her conservative answers without comment.
At the noon luncheon Mary Louise was accorded a warm reception by the assembled boarders and this cordial welcome by her school mates did much to restore the girl to her normal condition of cheerfulness.
She even joined a group in a game of tennis after luncheon and it was while she was playing that little Miss Dandler came with, a message that Mary Louise was wanted in Miss Stearne's room at once.
"Take my racquet," she said to Jennie Allen; "I'll be back in a minute."
When she entered Miss Stearne's room she was surprised to find herself confronted by the same man whom she and her grandfather had encountered in front of Cooper's Hotel the previous afternoon-the man whom she secretly held responsible for this abrupt change in her life.
The principal sat crouched over her desk as if overawed by her visitor, who stopped his nervous pacing up and down the room as the girl appeared.
"This is Mary Louise Burrows," said Miss Stearne, in a weak voice.
"I do not know to whom you refer," she answered quietly.
"Aren't you his granddaughter?"
"I am the granddaughter of Colonel james Weatherby, sir."
"It's all the same; Hathaway or Weatherby, the scoundrel can't disguise his personality.
Where is he?"
She did not reply.
"Miss Stearne," Mary Louise said, turning to the principal, "unless you request your guest to be more respectful I shall leave the room."
"Not yet you won't," said the man in a less boisterous tone.
"Don't annoy me with your airs, for I'm in a hurry.
Where is Hathaway-or Weatherby-or whatever he calls himself?"
"I do not know."
"You don't, eh?
"no"
"I don't believe you.
Where did he go?"
He uttered a growl and then threw back his coat, displaying a badge attached to his vest.
"I'm a federal officer," he asserted with egotistic pride, "a member of the Government's Secret Service Department.
I've been searching for james j Hathaway for nine years, and so has every man in the service. Last night I stumbled upon him by accident, and on inquiring found he has been living quietly in this little jumping off place.
I wired the Department for instructions and an hour ago received orders to arrest him, but found my bird had flown.
No nonsense, girl!
The Federal Government's not to be trifled with.
Tell me where to find your grandfather."
"If you have finished your insolent remarks," she answered with spirit, "I will go away.
You have interrupted my game of tennis."
He gave a bark of anger that made her smile, but as she turned away he sprang forward and seized her arm, swinging her around so that she again faced him.
"Great Caesar, girl!
Don't you realize what you're up against?" he demanded.
"I seem to be in the power of a brute.
If a law exists that permits you to insult a girl, there must also be a law to punish you.
I shall see a lawyer and try to have you properly punished for this absolute insolence."
He regarded her keenly, still frowning, but when he spoke again he had moderated both his tone and words.
"I do not intend to be insolent, Miss Burrows, but I have been greatly aggravated by your grandfather's unfortunate escape and in this emergency every moment is precious if I am to capture him before he gets out of America, as he has done once or twice before.
It is your duty, as a loyal subject of the United States, to assist an officer of the law by every means in your power, especially when he is engaged in running down a criminal.
Therefore, whether you dislike to or not, you must tell me where to find your grandfather."
"My grandfather is not a criminal, sir."
"The jury will decide that when his case comes to trial.
Where is he?"
"I do not know," she persisted.
"He-he left by the morning train, which goes west," stammered Miss Stearne, anxious to placate the officer and fearful of the girl's stubborn resistance.
I was at the station myself-two miles from this forsaken place-to make sure that Hathaway didn't skip while I was waiting for orders.
Therefore, he is either hidden somewhere in Beverly or he has sneaked away to an adjoining town.
The old serpent is slippery as an eel; but I'm going to catch him, this time, as sure as fate, and this girl must give me all the information she can."
He began to pace the room again, casting at her shrewd and uncertain glances.
"He didn't say where he was going?"
"What DID he say?"
"That he was going away and would arrange with Miss Stearne for me to board at the school."
"Huh!
I see.
Foxy old guy.
Knew I would question you and wouldn't take chances.
"I thought not." He turned toward the principal.
"How about this girl's board money?" he asked.
"When did he say he'd send it?"
"Foxy old boy!
Seemed to think of everything.
Keep the secret.
If nothing gets out, Hathaway may think the coast is clear and it's safe for him to come back.
In that case I-or someone appointed by the Department-will get a chance to nab him.
That's all.
"It-it's-dreadful!" stammered the teacher, shrinking back with a moan.
"It would be, if it were true," said the girl.
"But Gran'pa Jim is no criminal, we all know.
He's the best man that ever lived, and the whole trouble is that this foolish officer has mistaken him for someone else. I heard him, with my own ears, tell the man he was mistaken."
Miss Stearne reflected.
"Then why did your grandfather run away?" she asked.
Presently she realized that a logical explanation of her grandfather's action was impossible with her present knowledge.
"I cannot answer that question, Miss Stearne," she admitted, candidly, "but Gran'pa Jim must have had some good reason."
There was unbelief in the woman's eyes-unbelief and a horror of the whole disgraceful affair that somehow included Mary Louise in its scope.
The girl read this look and it confused her.
She mumbled an excuse and fled to her room to indulge in a good cry.
For instance, I once dreamt about a kind of swimming bath where the bathers suddenly separated in all directions; at one place on the edge a person stood bending towards one of the bathers as if to drag him out.
First of all came the little episode from the time of my courting, of which I have already spoken; the pressure of a hand under the table gave rise in the dream to the "under the table," which I had subsequently to find a place for in my recollection.
The dream work proceeds like Francis Galton with his family photographs.
The different elements are put one on top of the other; what is common to the composite picture stands out clearly, the opposing details cancel each other.
When there is nothing in common between the dream thoughts, the dream work takes the trouble to create a something, in order to make a common presentation feasible in the dream.
I will not pursue the further result of the thought.
The dream work is peculiarly adept at representing two contradictory conceptions by means of the same mixed image.
There is evidence of a third factor, which deserves careful consideration.
Small wonder, says the dream thought, if this person is grateful to me for this-this love is not cost free.
The first dream thoughts which are unravelled by analysis frequently strike one by their unusual wording.
The causal connection between two ideas is either left without presentation, or replaced by two different long portions of dreams one after the other.
In the latter case they appear obscure, intricate, incoherent.
When the dream appears openly absurd, when it contains an obvious paradox in its content, it is so of purpose.
As this explanation is in entire disagreement with the view that the dream owes its origin to dissociated, uncritical cerebral activity, I will emphasize my view by an example:
He complains very bitterly of this at a dinner party, but his respect for Goethe has not diminished through this personal experience.
Goethe died in eighteen thirty two.
The derogatory reception of my friend's work had made a deep impression upon me.
In my judgment, it contained a fundamental biological discovery which only now, several years later, commences to find favor among the professors.
It seemed to me that this view had something in it, because the unfortunate youth afterwards mutilated his genital organs.
The first person in the dream thoughts behind the ego was my friend who had been so scandalously treated.
A trait, after the manner of the find in the Lido, forces itself upon me here.
Its mode of action thus consists in so cooerdinating the parts of the dream that these coalesce to a coherent whole, to a dream composition.
The motives for this part of the dream work are easily gauged.
If we keep closely to the definition that dream work denotes the transference of dream thoughts to dream content, we are compelled to say that the dream work is not creative; it develops no fancies of its own, it judges nothing, decides nothing.
It is, perhaps, not superfluous to support these assertions by examples:
three.
Her husband tells her, Elise L---- and her fiance had intended coming, but could only get some cheap seats, three for one florin fifty kreuzers, and these they would not take.
Whence came the one florin fifty kreuzers?
"It's beastly expensive at the Astor," said Mike.
"The place has that drawback also.
"On Fourth Avenue," said Billy Windsor, "you can get quite good flats very cheap.
Furnished, too.
I don't know if you mind that?"
Are you with me, Comrade Jackson?"
"All right," said Mike.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
If you've got the nerve, read on."
His mouth was wide, his jaw prominent.
"mr Windsor?" he said to the company at large.
His face lit up.
More, he was the founder and originator of it.
Bat had accepted the offer.
Shamrock Hall became a place of joy and order; and-more important still-the nucleus of the Groome Street Gang had been formed.
The work progressed.
Small thieves, pickpockets and the like, flocked to mr Jarvis as their tribal leader and protector and he protected them.
"Pipe de collar," said mr Jarvis, touching the cat's neck.
"Mine, mister."
"There's a basket here, if you want it," said Billy.
"Nope.
Here, kit."
mr Jarvis stooped, and, still whistling softly, lifted the cat.
"Obliged," he added.
"Shake!" he said.
Billy did so.
"Obliged.
p smith nodded approvingly.
"And rightly," he said.
"Rightly, Comrade Jarvis.
No diner out can afford to be without such a cat.
Such a cat spells death to boredom."
"Any time you're in bad.
Groome Street.
Bat Jarvis.
Good night. Obliged."
"Not garrulous, perhaps, but what of that?
I guess there's no harm done by getting him grateful."
Comrade Jackson, here is one for you.
THE HONEYED WORD
Five brows were corrugated with wrathful lines.
I am observed!" he murmured.
The words broke the spell.
"Are you the acting editor of this paper?"
There was a pause.
"Where is mr Windsor?"
"When will he return?"
"So did I," chimed in the rest.
"If it is in my power to do so, it shall be done, Comrade-I have not the pleasure of your name."
We are both at a loss to make head or tail of it."
"It is an outrage.
Who is w Windsor?
Where is mr Wilberfloss?"
It seemed that that was what they all wanted to know: Who was w Windsor?
The Reverend Edwin's frosty face thawed into a bleak smile.
"Where's this fellow Windsor?
I write 'Moments of Mirth.'"
You don't know.
"Where is mr White?" he asked.
The point was well received.
But-"
"I fear that there is nothing to be done, except wait.
"Ten weeks!"
He cannot brook interference.
"I guess I can wait," he said.
That is the watch word.
Our tissues require restoring.
"You're up against a big proposition."
The man behind is a big bug."
CHAPTER five.
George awoke next morning with a misty sense that somehow the world had changed.
Then he sat up in bed with a jerk.
He had remembered that he was in love.
There was no doubt about it.
He felt young and active.
The sun was shining.
Even the sound of someone in the street below whistling one of his old compositions, of which he had heartily sickened twelve months before, was pleasant to his ears, and this in spite of the fact that the unseen whistler only touched the key in odd spots and had a poor memory for tunes.
George sprang lightly out of bed, and turned on the cold tap in the bath room.
It had come at last.
George had never been in love before.
Not really in love.
During the last five years women had found him more or less cold.
Some had kicked about their musical numbers, some about their love scenes; some had grumbled about their exit lines, others about the lines of their second act frocks.
They had kicked in a myriad differing ways-wrathfully, sweetly, noisily, softly, smilingly, tearfully, pathetically and patronizingly; but they had all kicked; with the result that woman had now become to George not so much a flaming inspiration or a tender goddess as something to be dodged-tactfully, if possible; but, if not possible, by open flight.
The psychological effect of such a state of things is not difficult to realize.
Take a man of naturally quixotic temperament, a man of chivalrous instincts and a feeling for romance, and cut him off for five years from the exercise of those qualities, and you get an accumulated store of foolishness only comparable to an escape of gas in a sealed room or a cellarful of dynamite.
A flicker of a match, and there is an explosion.
This girl's tempestuous irruption into his life had supplied flame for George.
Her bright eyes, looking into his, had touched off the spiritual trinitrotoluol which he had been storing up for so long. Up in the air in a million pieces had gone the prudence and self restraint of a lifetime.
In the first place, he did not know the girl's name.
This thing wanted thinking over.
His faith in his luck sustained him.
He had gained much; it now remained for him to push his success to the happy conclusion.
The driver of Luck must be replaced by the spoon-or, possibly, the niblick-of Ingenuity.
To fail now, to allow this girl to pass out of his life merely because he did not know who she was or where she was, would stamp him a feeble adventurer.
A fellow could not expect Luck to do everything for him.
He must supplement its assistance with his own efforts.
Well, nothing much, if it came to that, except the knowledge that she lived some two hours by train out of London, and that her journey started from Waterloo Station.
What would Sherlock Holmes have done?
Concentrated thought supplied no answer to the question; and it was at this point that the cheery optimism with which he had begun the day left George and gave place to a grey gloom.
A dreadful phrase, haunting in its pathos, crept into his mind.
"Ships that pass in the night!"
It might easily turn out that way.
Indeed, thinking over the affair in all its aspects as he dried himself after his tub, George could not see how it could possibly turn out any other way.
He dressed moodily, and left the room to go down to breakfast. Breakfast would at least alleviate this sinking feeling which was unmanning him.
And he could think more briskly after a cup or two of coffee.
He opened the door.
On a mat outside lay a letter.
It was also in pencil, and strange to him.
He opened the envelope.
"Dear mr Bevan" (it began).
With a sudden leap of the heart he looked at the signature.
"DEAR mr
BEVAN,
I had to.
I saw Percy driving up in a cab, and knew that he must have followed us. He did not see me, so I got away all right.
"Thank you ever so much again for all your wonderful kindness.
What a girl!
The resource of her, to think of pawning that brooch!
The sweetness of her to bother to send him a note!
More than ever before was he convinced that he had met his ideal, and more than ever before was he determined that a triviality like being unaware of her name and address should not keep him from her. It was not as if he had no clue to go upon.
It narrowed the thing down absurdly.
Especially a man with luck like his.
Luck is a goddess not to be coerced and forcibly wooed by those who seek her favours.
From such masterful spirits she turns away.
But it happens sometimes that, if we put our hand in hers with the humble trust of a little child, she will have pity on us, and not fail us in our hour of need.
On George, hopefully watching for something to turn up, she smiled almost immediately.
This particular happening the writer had apparently considered worthy of being dignified by rhyme.
"THE PEER AND THE POLICEMAN."
"Outside the 'Carlton,' 'tis averred, these stirring happenings occurred.
The day was fair, the sky was blue, and everything was peaceful too, when suddenly a well dressed gent engaged in heated argument and roundly to abuse began another well dressed gentleman.
His suede gloved fist he raised on high to dot the other in the eye.
'What means this conduct? Prithee stop!' exclaimed that admirable slop.
With which he placed a warning hand upon the brawler's collarband.
No subject here for flippant jest.
Let us be brief.
He gave the constable a punch just where the latter kept his lunch.
The constable said 'Well!
Well!
But British Justice is severe alike on pauper and on peer; with even hand she holds the scale; a thumping fine, in lieu of gaol, induced Lord b to feel remorse and learn he mustn't punch the Force."
George's mutton chop congealed on the plate, untouched.
The French fried potatoes cooled off, unnoticed.
This was no time for food. Rightly indeed had he relied upon his luck.
It had stood by him nobly.
He paid his bill and left the restaurant.
Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and what the book with its customary curtness called "one d."--Patricia Maud.
In the pocket closest to his throbbing heart was a single ticket to Belpher.
CHAPTER seventeen.
The gift of hiding private emotion and keeping up appearances before strangers is not, as many suppose, entirely a product of our modern civilization.
Centuries before we were born or thought of there was a widely press agented boy in Sparta who even went so far as to let a fox gnaw his tender young stomach without permitting the discomfort inseparable from such a proceeding to interfere with either his facial expression or his flow of small talk.
But, while this feat may be said to have established a record never subsequently lowered, there is no doubt that almost every day in modern times men and women are performing similar and scarcely less impressive miracles of self restraint.
Of all the qualities which belong exclusively to Man and are not shared by the lower animals, this surely is the one which marks him off most sharply from the beasts of the field.
Animals care nothing about keeping up appearances.
Observe Bertram the Bull when things are not going just as he could wish.
He stamps.
He snorts.
He paws the ground.
He throws back his head and bellows.
He is upset, and he doesn't care who knows it.
Instances could be readily multiplied.
Deposit a charge of shot in some outlying section of Thomas the Tiger, and note the effect.
In the days which followed Lord Marshmoreton's visit to George at the cottage, not a few of the occupants of Belpher Castle had their mettle sternly tested in this respect; and it is a pleasure to be able to record that not one of them failed to come through the ordeal with success.
Lord Belpher, for example, though he limped rather painfully, showed nothing of the baffled fury which was reducing his weight at the rate of ounces a day.
His uncle Francis, the Bishop, when he tackled him in the garden on the subject of Intemperance-for Uncle Francis, like thousands of others, had taken it for granted, on reading the report of the encounter with the policeman and Percy's subsequent arrest, that the affair had been the result of a drunken outburst-had no inkling of the volcanic emotions that seethed in his nephew's bosom.
He came away from the interview, indeed, feeling that the boy had listened attentively and with a becoming regret, and that there was hope for him after all, provided that he fought the impulse.
He little knew that, but for the conventions (which frown on the practice of murdering bishops), Percy would gladly have strangled him with his bare hands and jumped upon the remains.
Lord Belpher's case, inasmuch as he took himself extremely seriously and was not one of those who can extract humour even from their own misfortunes, was perhaps the hardest which comes under our notice; but his sister Maud was also experiencing mental disquietude of no mean order.
Everything had gone wrong with Maud. Barely a mile separated her from George, that essential link in her chain of communication with Geoffrey Raymond; but so thickly did it bristle with obstacles and dangers that it might have been a mile of No Man's Land.
Twice, since the occasion when the discovery of Lord Marshmoreton at the cottage had caused her to abandon her purpose of going in and explaining everything to George, had she attempted to make the journey; and each time some trifling, maddening accident had brought about failure.
Once, just as she was starting, her aunt Augusta had insisted on joining her for what she described as "a nice long walk"; and the second time, when she was within a bare hundred yards of her objective, some sort of a cousin popped out from nowhere and forced his loathsome company on her.
Foiled in this fashion, she had fallen back in desperation on her second line of attack.
She had written a note to George, explaining the whole situation in good, clear phrases and begging him as a man of proved chivalry to help her.
It had taken up much of one afternoon, this note, for it was not easy to write; and it had resulted in nothing.
She had given it to Albert to deliver and Albert had returned empty handed.
"No answer!
But there must be an answer!"
He had not even bothered to read it.
A deep, dangerous, dastardly stripling this, who fought to win and only to win.
The ticket marked "R.
Maud could not understand it.
That is to say, she resolutely kept herself from accepting the only explanation of the episode that seemed possible.
In black and white she had asked George to go to London and see Geoffrey and arrange for the passage-through himself as a sort of clearing house-of letters between Geoffrey and herself.
She had felt from the first that such a request should be made by her in person and not through the medium of writing, but surely it was incredible that a man like George, who had been through so much for her and whose only reason for being in the neighbourhood was to help her, could have coldly refused without even a word.
And yet what else was she to think?
Now, more than ever, she felt alone in a hostile world.
Yet, to her guests she was bright and entertaining.
Albert, I am happy to say, was thoroughly miserable.
The little brute was suffering torments.
He was showering anonymous Advice to the Lovelorn on Reggie Byng-excellent stuff, culled from the pages of weekly papers, of which there was a pile in the housekeeper's room, the property of a sentimental lady's maid-and nothing seemed to come of it.
Every day, sometimes twice and thrice a day, he would leave on Reggie's dressing table significant notes similar in tone to the one which he had placed there on the night of the ball; but, for all the effect they appeared to exercise on their recipient, they might have been blank pages.
The choicest quotations from the works of such established writers as "Aunt Charlotte" of Forget Me Not and "Doctor Cupid", the heart expert of Home Chat, expended themselves fruitlessly on Reggie.
So far from rendering himself indispensable to Maud by constant little attentions, Reggie, to the disgust of his backer and supporter, seemed to spend most of his time with Alice Faraday.
On three separate occasions had Albert been revolted by the sight of his protege in close association with the Faraday girl-once in a boat on the lake and twice in his grey car.
It was enough to break a boy's heart; and it completely spoiled Albert's appetite-a phenomenon attributed, I am glad to say, in the Servants' Hall to reaction from recent excesses.
He works in his rose garden with a new vim, whistling or even singing to himself stray gay snatches of melodies popular in the 'eighties.
Hear him now as he toils.
He has a long garden implement in his hand, and he is sending up the death rate in slug circles with a devastating rapidity.
And the boom is a death knell.
As it rings softly out on the pleasant spring air, another stout slug has made the Great Change.
It is peculiar, this gaiety.
It gives one to think.
Wherein Freckles Wins Honor and Finds a Footprint on the Trail
Considering what they had been through, they never would come again.
His heart sank until he had palpitation in his wading boots.
Stretching the length of the limb, he thought deeply, though he was not thinking of Black Jack or Wessner.
Would the Bird Woman and the Angel come again?
No other woman whom he ever had known would.
What were the people in the big world like?
His knowledge was so very limited.
There had been people at the Home, who exchanged a stilted, perfunctory kindness for their salaries.
They made him feel they cared that he was there, and that they would have been glad to see him elsewhere.
Now here was another class, that had all they needed of the world's best and were engaged in doing work that counted.
They had things worth while to be proud of; and they had met him as a son and brother.
With them he could, for the only time in his life, forget the lost hand that every day tortured him with a new pang.
What kind of people were they and where did they belong among the classes he knew?
He failed to decide, because he never had known others similar to them; but how he loved them!
In the world where he was going soon, were the majority like them, or were they of the hypocrite and bun throwing classes?
He had forgotten the excitement of the morning and the passing of time when distant voices aroused him, and he gently lifted his head.
Nearer and nearer they came, and as the heavy wagons rumbled down the east trail he could hear them plainly.
The gang were shouting themselves hoarse for the Limberlost guard.
Freckles did not feel that he deserved it.
He would have given much to be able to go to the men and explain, but to McLean only could he tell his story.
At the sight of Freckles the men threw up their hats and cheered.
McLean shook hands with him warmly, but big Duncan gathered him into his arms and hugged him as a bear and choked over a few words of praise.
The gang drove in and finished felling the tree.
McLean was angry beyond measure at this attempt on his property, for in their haste to fell the tree the thieves had cut too high and wasted a foot and a half of valuable timber.
When the last wagon rolled away, McLean sat on the stump and Freckles told the story he was aching to tell.
The Boss scarcely could believe his senses.
Also, he was much disappointed.
"I have been almost praying all the way over, Freckles," he said, "that you would have some evidence by which we could arrest those fellows and get them out of our way, but this will never do.
We can't mix up those women in it.
"No, indeed; nor the Angel, either, sir," said Freckles.
"The Angel?" queried the astonished McLean.
"I know her father well," said McLean at last, "and I have often seen her.
The man isn't made who wouldn't lay down the life of him for her.
"Did you say she handled one of the revolvers?" asked McLean.
"She scared all the breath out of me body," admitted Freckles.
"Seems that her father has taught her to shoot.
The Bird Woman told her distinctly to lie low and blaze away high, just to help scare them.
I never saw much shooting, but if that wasn't the nearest to miss I ever want to see!
Scared the life near out of me body with the fear that she'd drop one of them.
"Now, will they come back?" asked McLean.
"Of course!" said Freckles.
"They're not going to be taking that.
You could stake your life on it, they'll be coming back.
At least, Black Jack will.
Wessner may not have the pluck, unless he is half drunk.
Then he'd be a terror.
And the next time-" Freckles hesitated.
"What?"
As soon as I feel that we have the rarest of the stuff out below, we will come.
It won't do to leave you here longer alone.
Jack has been shooting twenty years to your one, and it stands to reason that you are no match for him.
"No one, sir," said Freckles emphatically.
I'll just be getting wind of them, and then make tracks for you.
I'll need to come like lightning, and Duncan has no extra horse, so I'm thinking you'd best get me one-or perhaps a wheel would be better.
I used to do extra work for the Home doctor, and he would let me take his bicycle to ride around the place.
A wheel would cost less and be faster than a horse, and would take less care.
I believe, if you are going to town soon, you had best pick up any kind of an old one at some second-hand store, for if I'm ever called to use it in a hurry there won't be the handlebars left after crossing the corduroy."
"Yes," said McLean; "and if you didn't have a first-class wheel, you never could cross the corduroy on it at all."
As they walked to the cabin, McLean insisted on another guard, but Freckles was stubbornly set on fighting his battle alone.
If the Bird Woman was going to give up the Little Chicken series, he would yield to the second guard, solely for the sake of her work and the presence of the Angel in the Limberlost.
He did not propose to have a second man unless it were absolutely necessary, for he had been alone so long that he loved the solitude, his chickens, and flowers.
The thought of having a stranger to all his ways come and meddle with his arrangements, frighten his pets, pull his flowers, and interrupt him when he wanted to study, so annoyed him that he was blinded to his real need for help.
With McLean it was a case of letting his sober, better judgment be overridden by the boy he was growing so to love that he could not endure to oppose him, and to have Freckles keep his trust and win alone meant more than any money the Boss might lose.
The following morning McLean brought the wheel, and Freckles took it to the trail to test it.
In the excitement of yesterday all of them had forgotten it.
He went and picked it up, oh! so carefully, gazing at it with hungry eyes, but touching it only to carry it to his case, where he hung it on the shining handlebar of the new wheel and locked it among his treasures.
Then he went to the trail, with a new expression on his face and a strange throbbing in his heart.
He was not in the least afraid of anything that morning.
What Black Jack's next move would be he could not imagine, but that there would be a move of some kind was certain.
The big bully was not a man to give up his purpose, or to have the hat swept from his head with a bullet and bear it meekly.
Moreover, Wessner would cling to his revenge with a Dutchman's singleness of mind.
She had stepped in one mucky spot and left a sharp impression.
The afternoon sun had baked it hard, and the horses' hoofs had not obliterated any part of it, as they had in so many places.
Freckles stood fascinated, gazing at it.
He would not have ventured a caress on her hat any more than on her person, but this was different. Surely a footprint on a trail might belong to anyone who found and wanted it.
He stooped under the wires and entered the swamp.
When he reached his room, he tenderly laid the hat upon his bookshelf, and to wear off his awkwardness, mounted his wheel and went spinning on trail again.
It was like flying, for the path was worn smooth with his feet and baked hard with the sun almost all the way.
When he came to the bark, he veered far to one side and smiled at it in passing.
Suddenly he was off the wheel, kneeling beside it.
He removed his hat, carefully lifted the bark, and gazed lovingly at the imprint.
"I wonder what she was going to say of me voice," he whispered.
"She never got it said, but from the face of her, I believe she was liking it fairly well.
That's what they all thought at the Home.
Well, if it is, I'll just shut me eyes, think of me little room, the face of her watching, and the heart of her beating, and I'll raise them.
Damn them, if singing will do it, I'll raise them from the benches!"
With this dire threat, Freckles knelt, as at a wayside spring, and deliberately laid his lips on the footprint.
Then he arose, appearing as if he had been drinking at the fountain of gladness.
CHAPTER one
They seldom come nearer to it than planting time, harvest time, cherry time, spring time, or fall time.
I was not allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it.
She was the daughter of Isaac and Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark.
He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage.
The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me.
She was hired by a mr Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home.
She was with me in the night.
I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial.
She was gone long before I knew any thing about it.
I have had two masters.
He was generally called Captain Anthony-a title which, I presume, he acquired by sailing a craft on the Chesapeake Bay. He was not considered a rich slaveholder.
It required extraordinary barbarity on the part of an overseer to affect him.
He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave.
I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood.
I was quite a child, but I well remember it.
It struck me with awful force.
It was a most terrible spectacle.
This occurrence took place very soon after I went to live with my old master, and under the following circumstances.
Aunt Hester went out one night,--where or for what I do not know,--and happened to be absent when my master desired her presence.
Why master was so careful of her, may be safely left to conjecture.
She now stood fair for his infernal purpose.
Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes.
I was so terrified and horror stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over.
I expected it would be my turn next.
It was all new to me. I had never seen any thing like it before.
My master's family consisted of two sons, Andrew and Richard; one daughter, Lucretia, and her husband, Captain Thomas Auld.
The principal products raised upon it were tobacco, corn, and wheat.
Their names were peter, Isaac, Rich, and Jake.
His career was short.
He was a very different man.
All the mechanical operations for all the farms were performed here.
He was called the smartest and most trusty fellow, who had this honor conferred upon him the most frequently.
Especially would they do this, when leaving home.
CHAPTER eight
He died while on a visit to see his daughter at Hillsborough.
Cut off thus unexpectedly, he left no will as to the disposal of his property.
I was immediately sent for, to be valued with the other property.
Prior to this, I had become, if not insensible to my lot, at least partly so.
I took passage with Captain Rowe, in the schooner Wild Cat, and, after a sail of about twenty four hours, I found myself near the place of my birth.
Not a slave was left free. All remained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest.
The hearth is desolate.
But it was not to them that I was attached.
I sailed from Baltimore for saint Michael's in the sloop Amanda, Captain Edward Dodson.
On my passage, I paid particular attention to the direction which the steamboats took to go to Philadelphia.
"If it ain't asking what I ought not to ask, mr Angelo, how did you come to be so friendless and in such trouble when you were little?
Do you mind telling?
But don't, if you do."
His estates were confiscated, his personal property seized, and there we were, in Germany, strangers, friendless, and in fact paupers.
But what they wouldn't consent to do, we had to do without the formality of consent.
When we escaped from that slavery at twelve years of age, we were in some respects men.
Experience had taught us some valuable things; among others, how to take care of ourselves, how to avoid and defeat sharks and sharpers, and how to conduct our own business for our own profit and without other people's help.
We traveled everywhere-years and years-picking up smatterings of strange tongues, familiarizing ourselves with strange sights and strange customs, accumulating an education of a wide and varied and curious sort.
It was a pleasant life.
We went to Venice-to London, Paris, Russia, India, China, Japan-"
Rowena was in the clouds, she walked on air; this was to be the greatest day, the most romantic episode in the colorless history of that dull country town.
The twins took a position near the door, the widow stood at Luigi's side, Rowena stood beside Angelo, and the march past and the introductions began.
"Good mornin', Sister Cooper"--handshake.
"Good morning, Brother Higgins-Count Luigi Capello, mr Higgins" --handshake, followed by a devouring stare and "I'm glad to see ye," on the part of Higgins, and a courteous inclination of the head and a pleasant "Most happy!" on the part of Count Luigi.
"Good mornin', Roweny"--handshake.
None of these visitors was at ease, but, being honest people, they didn't pretend to be.
A few tried to rise to the emergency, and got out an awkward "My lord," or "Your lordship," or something of that sort, but the great majority were overwhelmed by the unaccustomed word and its dim and awful associations with gilded courts and stately ceremony and anointed kingship, so they only fumbled through the handshake and passed on, speechless.
General conversation followed, and the twins drifted about from group to group, talking easily and fluently and winning approval, compelling admiration and achieving favor from all.
Napoleon and all his kind stood accounted for-and justified.
Again she was besieged by eager questioners, and again she swam in sunset seas of glory.
When the forenoon was nearly gone, she recognized with a pang that this most splendid episode of her life was almost over, that nothing could prolong it, that nothing quite its equal could ever fall to her fortune again.
Here a prodigious slam banging broke out below, and everybody rushed down to see.
The young strangers were kept long at the piano.
The villagers were astonished and enchanted with the magnificence of their performance, and could not bear to have them stop.
CHAPTER sixteen -- Sold Down the River
It made him wince, secretly-for she was a "nigger." That he was one himself was far from reconciling him to that despised race.
Roxana poured out endearments upon him, to which he responded uncomfortably, but as well as he could.
And she tried to comfort him, but that was not possible.
These intimacies quickly became horrible to him, and within the hour he began to try to get up courage enough to tell her so, and require that they be discontinued or very considerably modified.
But he was afraid of her; and besides, there came a lull now, for she had begun to think.
She was trying to invent a saving plan.
Finally she started up, and said she had found a way out.
Tom was dazed.
Dat's de plan."
Tom's hopes began to rise, and his spirits along with them.
He said:
"It's lovely of you, Mammy-it's just-"
White folks ain't partic'lar.
He did not want to commit this treachery, but luck threw the man in his way, and this saved him the necessity of going up country to hunt up a purchaser, with the added risk of having to answer a lot of questions, whereas this planter was so pleased with Roxy that he asked next to none at all.
So Tom argued with himself that it was an immense advantaged for Roxy to have a master who was pleased with her, as this planter manifestly was.
When she went to her foul steerage bunk at last, between the clashing engines, it was not to sleep, but only to wait for the morning, and, waiting, grieve.
It had been imagined that she "would not know," and would think she was traveling upstream.
Why, she had been steamboating for years.
For one moment her petrified gaze fixed itself there.
AUTHOR'S NOTE TO "THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS"
No-that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six page tale.
Much the same thing happened with PUDD'NHEAD WILSON.
I had a sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it-a most embarrassing circumstance.
It took me months to make that discovery.
I carried the manuscript back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay.
I had no further trouble.
I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other-a kind of literary Caesarean operation.
Originally the story was called THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS.
I meant to make it very short.
Among them came a stranger named Pudd'nhead Wilson, and a woman named Roxana; and presently the doings of these two pushed up into prominence a young fellow named Tom Driscoll, whose proper place was away in the obscure background.
I hunted about and found them-found them stranded, idle, forgotten, and permanently useless.
I didn't know what to do with her.
I thought and thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing.
I finally saw plainly that there was really no way but one-I must simply give her the grand bounce.
It grieved me to do it, for after associating with her so much I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding she was such an ass and said such stupid, irritating things and was so nauseatingly sentimental.
So at the top of Chapter seventeen I put a "Calendar" remark concerning July the Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic:
It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn't notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else.
Still the story was unsatisfactory.
There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must search it out and cure it.
Also I took the twins apart and made two separate men of them.
It is unusual to find an encampment of the natives, like those of the more instructed whites, guarded by the presence of armed men.
Well informed of the approach of every danger, while it is yet at a distance, the Indian generally rests secure under his knowledge of the signs of the forest, and the long and difficult paths that separate him from those he has most reason to dread.
When Duncan and David, therefore, found themselves in the center of the children, who played the antics already mentioned, it was without the least previous intimation of their approach.
But so soon as they were observed the whole of the juvenile pack raised, by common consent, a shrill and warning whoop; and then sank, as it were, by magic, from before the sight of their visitors.
The naked, tawny bodies of the crouching urchins blended so nicely at that hour, with the withered herbage, that at first it seemed as if the earth had, in truth, swallowed up their forms; though when surprise permitted Duncan to bend his look more curiously about the spot, he found it everywhere met by dark, quick, and rolling eyeballs.
Gathering no encouragement from this startling presage of the nature of the scrutiny he was likely to undergo from the more mature judgments of the men, there was an instant when the young soldier would have retreated.
It was, however, too late to appear to hesitate.
The cry of the children had drawn a dozen warriors to the door of the nearest lodge, where they stood clustered in a dark and savage group, gravely awaiting the nearer approach of those who had unexpectedly come among them.
David, in some measure familiarized to the scene, led the way with a steadiness that no slight obstacle was likely to disconcert, into this very building.
It was the principal edifice of the village, though roughly constructed of the bark and branches of trees; being the lodge in which the tribe held its councils and public meetings during their temporary residence on the borders of the English province.
His blood curdled when he found himself in absolute contact with such fierce and implacable enemies; but he so far mastered his feelings as to pursue his way into the center of the lodge, with an exterior that did not betray the weakness.
So soon as their visitor had passed, the observant warriors fell back from the entrance, and arranging themselves about him, they seemed patiently to await the moment when it might comport with the dignity of the stranger to speak.
By far the greater number stood leaning, in lazy, lounging attitudes, against the upright posts that supported the crazy building, while three or four of the oldest and most distinguished of the chiefs placed themselves on the earth a little more in advance.
But his ingenuity availed him little, against the cold artifices of the people he had encountered. The chiefs in front scarce cast a glance at his person, keeping their eyes on the ground, with an air that might have been intended for respect, but which it was quite easy to construe into distrust.
Duncan soon detected their searching, but stolen, looks which, in truth, scanned his person and attire inch by inch; leaving no emotion of the countenance, no gesture, no line of the paint, nor even the fashion of a garment, unheeded, and without comment.
At length one whose hair was beginning to be sprinkled with gray, but whose sinewy limbs and firm tread announced that he was still equal to the duties of manhood, advanced out of the gloom of a corner, whither he had probably posted himself to make his observations unseen, and spoke.
He used the language of the Wyandots, or Hurons; his words were, consequently, unintelligible to Heyward, though they seemed, by the gestures that accompanied them, to be uttered more in courtesy than anger.
The latter shook his head, and made a gesture indicative of his inability to reply.
Though more than one had turned, as if to catch the meaning of his words, they remained unanswered.
"I should be grieved to think," continued Duncan, speaking slowly, and using the simplest French of which he was the master, "to believe that none of this wise and brave nation understand the language that the 'Grand Monarque' uses when he talks to his children.
A long and grave pause succeeded, during which no movement of a limb, nor any expression of an eye, betrayed the expression produced by his remark.
Duncan, who knew that silence was a virtue among his hosts, gladly had recourse to the custom, in order to arrange his ideas.
"When our Great Father speaks to his people, is it with the tongue of a Huron?"
"He knows no difference in his children, whether the color of the skin be red, or black, or white," returned Duncan, evasively; "though chiefly is he satisfied with the brave Hurons."
"In what manner will he speak," demanded the wary chief, "when the runners count to him the scalps which five nights ago grew on the heads of the Yengeese?"
"Our Canada father does not think it.
Instead of looking forward to reward his Indians, his eyes are turned backward.
He sees the dead Yengeese, but no Huron.
What can this mean?"
"A great chief, like him, has more thoughts than tongues.
He looks to see that no enemies are on his trail."
"It cannot be.
See; he has bid me, who am a man that knows the art of healing, to go to his children, the red Hurons of the great lakes, and ask if any are sick!"
Every eye was simultaneously bent on his person, as if to inquire into the truth or falsehood of the declaration, with an intelligence and keenness that caused the subject of their scrutiny to tremble for the result.
"When an Indian chief comes among his white fathers," returned Duncan, with great steadiness, "he lays aside his buffalo robe, to carry the shirt that is offered him.
My brothers have given me paint and I wear it."
A low murmur of applause announced that the compliment of the tribe was favorably received.
Duncan began to breathe more freely, believing that the weight of his examination was past; and, as he had already prepared a simple and probable tale to support his pretended occupation, his hopes of ultimate success grew brighter.
After a silence of a few moments, as if adjusting his thoughts, in order to make a suitable answer to the declaration their guests had just given, another warrior arose, and placed himself in an attitude to speak.
The sudden and terrible interruption caused Duncan to start from his seat, unconscious of everything but the effect produced by so frightful a cry.
Unable to command himself any longer, the youth broke from the place, and presently stood in the center of a disorderly throng, that included nearly everything having life, within the limits of the encampment.
Though astounded, at first, by the uproar, Heyward was soon enabled to find its solution by the scene that followed.
There yet lingered sufficient light in the heavens to exhibit those bright openings among the tree tops, where different paths left the clearing to enter the depths of the wilderness.
Beneath one of them, a line of warriors issued from the woods, and advanced slowly toward the dwellings.
One in front bore a short pole, on which, as it afterwards appeared, were suspended several human scalps.
The startling sounds that Duncan had heard were what the whites have not inappropriately called the "death hallo"; and each repetition of the cry was intended to announce to the tribe the fate of an enemy.
When at the distance of a few hundred feet from the lodges the newly arrived warriors halted.
Their plaintive and terrific cry, which was intended to represent equally the wailings of the dead and the triumph to the victors, had entirely ceased.
The whole encampment, in a moment, became a scene of the most violent bustle and commotion.
The warriors drew their knives, and flourishing them, they arranged themselves in two lines, forming a lane that extended from the war party to the lodges.
The squaws seized clubs, axes, or whatever weapon of offense first offered itself to their hands, and rushed eagerly to act their part in the cruel game that was at hand.
Even the children would not be excluded; but boys, little able to wield the instruments, tore the tomahawks from the belts of their fathers, and stole into the ranks, apt imitators of the savage traits exhibited by their parents.
Large piles of brush lay scattered about the clearing, and a wary and aged squaw was occupied in firing as many as might serve to light the coming exhibition.
The whole scene formed a striking picture, whose frame was composed of the dark and tall border of pines.
The warriors just arrived were the most distant figures.
While one stood erect and firm, prepared to meet his fate like a hero, the other bowed his head, as if palsied by terror or stricken with shame.
He watched his slightest movement, however, with eager eyes; and, as he traced the fine outline of his admirably proportioned and active frame, he endeavored to persuade himself, that, if the powers of man, seconded by such noble resolution, could bear one harmless through so severe a trial, the youthful captive before him might hope for success in the hazardous race he was about to run.
Insensibly the young man drew nigher to the swarthy lines of the Hurons, and scarcely breathed, so intense became his interest in the spectacle.
The more abject of the two victims continued motionless; but the other bounded from the place at the cry, with the activity and swiftness of a deer.
Instead of rushing through the hostile lines, as had been expected, he just entered the dangerous defile, and before time was given for a single blow, turned short, and leaping the heads of a row of children, he gained at once the exterior and safer side of the formidable array.
The artifice was answered by a hundred voices raised in imprecations; and the whole of the excited multitude broke from their order, and spread themselves about the place in wild confusion.
Turning like a headed deer, he shot, with the swiftness of an arrow, through a pillar of forked flame, and passing the whole multitude harmless, he appeared on the opposite side of the clearing.
Here, too, he was met and turned by a few of the older and more subtle of the Hurons.
Once more he tried the throng, as if seeking safety in its blindness, and then several moments succeeded, during which Duncan believed the active and courageous young stranger was lost.
The awful effect was heightened by the piercing shrieks of the women and the fierce yells of the warriors.
Now and then Duncan caught a glimpse of a light form cleaving the air in some desperate bound, and he rather hoped than believed that the captive yet retained the command of his astonishing powers of activity.
Suddenly the multitude rolled backward, and approached the spot where he himself stood.
The heavy body in the rear pressed upon the women and children in front, and bore them to the earth.
The stranger reappeared in the confusion.
Human power could not, however, much longer endure so severe a trial.
Of this the captive seemed conscious.
A tall and powerful Huron, who had husbanded his forces, pressed close upon his heels, and with an uplifted arm menaced a fatal blow.
Thought itself is not quicker than was the motion with which the latter profited by the advantage; he turned, gleamed like a meteor again before the eyes of Duncan, and, at the next moment, when the latter recovered his recollection, and gazed around in quest of the captive, he saw him quietly leaning against a small painted post, which stood before the door of the principal lodge.
He followed the crowd, which drew nigh the lodges, gloomy and sullen, like any other multitude that had been disappointed in an execution.
Curiosity, or perhaps a better feeling, induced him to approach the stranger.
He found him, standing with one arm cast about the protecting post, and breathing thick and hard, after his exertions, but disdaining to permit a single sign of suffering to escape.
His person was now protected by immemorial and sacred usage, until the tribe in council had deliberated and determined on his fate.
It was not difficult, however, to foretell the result, if any presage could be drawn from the feelings of those who crowded the place.
To all this the captive made no reply; but was content to preserve an attitude in which dignity was singularly blended with disdain.
Exasperated as much by his composure as by his good fortune, their words became unintelligible, and were succeeded by shrill, piercing yells.
Just then the crafty squaw, who had taken the necessary precaution to fire the piles, made her way through the throng, and cleared a place for herself in front of the captive.
The squalid and withered person of this hag might well have obtained for her the character of possessing more than human cunning.
Throwing back her light vestment, she stretched forth her long, skinny arm, in derision, and using the language of the Lenape, as more intelligible to the subject of her gibes, she commenced aloud:
Your squaws are the mothers of deer; but if a bear, or a wildcat, or a serpent were born among you, ye would flee.
The Huron girls shall make you petticoats, and we will find you a husband."
A burst of savage laughter succeeded this attack, during which the soft and musical merriment of the younger females strangely chimed with the cracked voice of their older and more malignant companion.
His head was immovable; nor did he betray the slightest consciousness that any were present, except when his haughty eye rolled toward the dusky forms of the warriors, who stalked in the background silent and sullen observers of the scene.
Infuriated at the self command of the captive, the woman placed her arms akimbo; and, throwing herself into a posture of defiance, she broke out anew, in a torrent of words that no art of ours could commit successfully to paper.
Her breath was, however, expended in vain; for, although distinguished in her nation as a proficient in the art of abuse, she was permitted to work herself into such a fury as actually to foam at the mouth, without causing a muscle to vibrate in the motionless figure of the stranger.
The effect of his indifference began to extend itself to the other spectators; and a youngster, who was just quitting the condition of a boy to enter the state of manhood, attempted to assist the termagant, by flourishing his tomahawk before their victim, and adding his empty boasts to the taunts of the women.
Then, indeed, the captive turned his face toward the light, and looked down on the stripling with an expression that was superior to contempt.
At the next moment he resumed his quiet and reclining attitude against the post.
But the change of posture had permitted Duncan to exchange glances with the firm and piercing eyes of Uncas.
Breathless with amazement, and heavily oppressed with the critical situation of his friend, Heyward recoiled before the look, trembling lest its meaning might, in some unknown manner, hasten the prisoner's fate.
Just then a warrior forced his way into the exasperated crowd.
Motioning the women and children aside with a stern gesture, he took Uncas by the arm, and led him toward the door of the council lodge. Thither all the chiefs, and most of the distinguished warriors, followed; among whom the anxious Heyward found means to enter without attracting any dangerous attention to himself.
In the very center of the lodge, immediately under an opening that admitted the twinkling light of one or two stars, stood Uncas, calm, elevated, and collected.
His high and haughty carriage was not lost on his captors, who often bent their looks on his person, with eyes which, while they lost none of their inflexibility of purpose, plainly betrayed their admiration of the stranger's daring.
Heyward profited by the first opportunity to gaze in his face, secretly apprehensive he might find the features of another acquaintance; but they proved to be those of a stranger, and, what was still more inexplicable, of one who bore all the distinctive marks of a Huron warrior.
Instead of mingling with his tribe, however, he sat apart, a solitary being in a multitude, his form shrinking into a crouching and abject attitude, as if anxious to fill as little space as possible.
When each individual had taken his proper station, and silence reigned in the place, the gray haired chief already introduced to the reader, spoke aloud, in the language of the Lenni Lenape.
Rest in peace till the morning sun, when our last words shall be spoken."
A short and sullen pause succeeded this bold assertion.
Duncan, who understood the Mohican to allude to the fatal rifle of the scout, bent forward in earnest observation of the effect it might produce on the conquerors; but the chief was content with simply retorting:
"If the Lenape are so skillful, why is one of their bravest warriors here?"
"He followed in the steps of a flying coward, and fell into a snare.
The cunning beaver may be caught."
As Uncas thus replied, he pointed with his finger toward the solitary Huron, but without deigning to bestow any other notice on so unworthy an object.
Every eye rolled sullenly toward the individual indicated by the simple gesture, and a low, threatening murmur passed through the crowd.
The ominous sounds reached the outer door, and the women and children pressing into the throng, no gap had been left, between shoulder and shoulder, that was not now filled with the dark lineaments of some eager and curious human countenance.
In the meantime, the more aged chiefs, in the center, communed with each other in short and broken sentences.
Not a word was uttered that did not convey the meaning of the speaker, in the simplest and most energetic form.
Again, a long and deeply solemn pause took place.
It was known, by all present, to be the brave precursor of a weighty and important judgment.
They who composed the outer circle of faces were on tiptoe to gaze; and even the culprit for an instant forgot his shame in a deeper emotion, and exposed his abject features, in order to cast an anxious and troubled glance at the dark assemblage of chiefs.
The silence was finally broken by the aged warrior so often named.
He arose from the earth, and moving past the immovable form of Uncas, placed himself in a dignified attitude before the offender.
At that moment, the withered squaw already mentioned moved into the circle, in a slow, sidling sort of a dance, holding the torch, and muttering the indistinct words of what might have been a species of incantation.
Though her presence was altogether an intrusion, it was unheeded.
Approaching Uncas, she held the blazing brand in such a manner as to cast its red glare on his person, and to expose the slightest emotion of his countenance.
The Mohican maintained his firm and haughty attitude; and his eyes, so far from deigning to meet her inquisitive look, dwelt steadily on the distance, as though it penetrated the obstacles which impeded the view and looked into futurity.
Satisfied with her examination, she left him, with a slight expression of pleasure, and proceeded to practise the same trying experiment on her delinquent countryman.
The woman was commencing a low and plaintive howl at the sad and shameful spectacle, when the chief put forth his hand and gently pushed her aside.
"Reed that bends," he said, addressing the young culprit by name, and in his proper language, "though the Great Spirit has made you pleasant to the eyes, it would have been better that you had not been born.
Your tongue is loud in the village, but in battle it is still.
Three times have they called on you to come, and as often did you forget to answer.
Your name will never be mentioned again in your tribe-it is already forgotten."
As the chief slowly uttered these words, pausing impressively between each sentence, the culprit raised his face, in deference to the other's rank and years.
Shame, horror, and pride struggled in its lineaments. His eye, which was contracted with inward anguish, gleamed on the persons of those whose breath was his fame; and the latter emotion for an instant predominated.
He arose to his feet, and baring his bosom, looked steadily on the keen, glittering knife, that was already upheld by his inexorable judge.
As the weapon passed slowly into his heart he even smiled, as if in joy at having found death less dreadful than he had anticipated, and fell heavily on his face, at the feet of the rigid and unyielding form of Uncas.
The squaw gave a loud and plaintive yell, dashed the torch to the earth, and buried everything in darkness.
In short, he was much honoured and courted by all ranks.
People came from afar to recommend themselves to his prayers; and all who visited him, published what blessings they received through his means.
When the envious man saw that he was alone with this good man, he began to tell him his errand, walking side by side in the court, till he saw his opportunity; and getting the good man near the brink of the well, he gave him a thrust, and pushed him into it, without being seen by any one.
He perceived that there was something extraordinary in his fall, which must otherwise have cost him his life; but he neither saw nor felt anything.
But I well know how this good head of the dervises may cure her; the thing is very easy, and I will explain it to you.
The next morning, as soon as daylight appeared, and he could discern the nature of his situation, the well being broken down in several places, he saw a hole, by which he crept out with ease.
The sultan himself also died without heirs male; upon which the religious orders and the militia consulted together, and the good man was declared and acknowledged sultan by general consent.
"Quit," said he, "the form of a man, and take that of an ape." He instantly disappeared, and left me alone, transformed into an ape, and overwhelmed with sorrow in a strange country, not knowing whether I was near or far from my father's dominions.
I descended the mountain, and entered a plain level country, which took me a month to travel over, and then I came to the sea side.
I launched out in this posture, and rowed towards the ship.
In the meantime I got on board, and laying hold of a rope, jumped upon the deck, but having lost my speech I found myself in great perplexity: and indeed the risk I ran was not less than when I was at the mercy of the genie.
The merchants, being both superstitious and scrupulous, thought if they received me on board I should be the occasion of some misfortune to them during their voyage.
This action, together with the tears which he saw gush from my eyes, moved his compassion.
Our vessel was instantly surrounded with an infinite number of boats full of people, who came to congratulate their friends on their safe arrival, or to inquire for those they had left behind them in the country from whence they had come, or out of curiosity to see a ship that had performed so long a voyage.
Amongst the rest, some officers came on board, desiring in the name of the sultan to speak with the merchants.
The merchants appearing, one of the officers told them, "The sultan our master hath commanded us to acquaint you, that he rejoices in your safe arrival, and beseeches each of you to take the trouble to write a few lines upon this roll.
That you may understand the design of this request, you must know that we had a prime vizier, who besides possessing great abilities for the management of public affairs could write in the highest perfection.
This minister a few days since died.
Many have presented specimens of their skill; but to this day, no one in the empire has been judged worthy to supply the vizier's place."
Those of the merchants who thought they could write well enough to aspire to this high dignity, wrote one after another what they thought fit.
However, as they had never seen an ape that could write, and could not be persuaded that I was more ingenious than others of my kind, they wished to take the roll out of my hand; but the captain took my part once more.
If he only scribbles the paper, I promise you that I will immediately punish him.
My writing not only excelled that of the merchants, but was such as they had not before seen in that country.
The sultan was incensed at their rudeness, and would have punished them had they not explained: "Sir," said they, "we humbly beg your majesty's pardon: these hands were not written by a man, but by an ape." "What do you say?" exclaimed the sultan.
The officers returned to the vessel and shewed the captain their order, who answered, "The sultan's command must be obeyed." Whereupon they clothed me with the rich brocade robe, and carried me ashore, where they set me on horseback, whilst the sultan waited for me at his palace with a great number of courtiers, whom he gathered together to do me the more honour.
I found the prince on his throne in the midst of the grandees; I made my obeisance three times very low, and at last kneeled and kissed the ground before him, and afterwards took my seat in the posture of an ape.
In short, the usual ceremony of the audience would have been complete, could I have added speech to my behaviour; but apes never speak, and the advantage I had of having been a man did not now yield me that privilege.
He went from his chamber of audience into his own apartment, where he ordered dinner to be brought.
When the things were removed, they brought him a particular liquor, of which he caused them to give me a glass.
I drank, and wrote upon the glass some new verses, which explained the state I was reduced to, after many sufferings.
The sultan read these likewise, and said, "A man that was capable of doing so much would be above the greatest of his species."
I kissed the ground, and laying my hand upon my head, signified that I was ready to receive that honour.
That seeming ape is a young prince, son of a powerful sultan, and has been metamorphosed into an ape by enchantment.
Finding I could not speak, I put my hand to my head' to signify that what the princess spoke was correct.
She placed herself in the middle of the court, where she made a great circle, and within it she wrote several words in Arabian characters, some of them ancient.
As soon as the princess perceived this monster, "Dog," said she, "instead of creeping before me, dare you present yourself in this shape, thinking to frighten me?"
The two parts of the lion disappeared, while the head changed into a large scorpion.
Immediately the princess turned herself into a serpent, and fought the scorpion, who, finding himself worsted, took the shape of an eagle, and flew away: but the serpent at the same time took also the shape of an eagle, that was black and much stronger, and pursued him, so that we lost sight of them both.
The wolf had in the meanwhile transformed itself into a cock, and now fell to picking up the seeds of the pomegranate one after another; but finding no more, he came towards us with his wings spread, making a great noise, as if he would ask us whether there were any more seed.
There was one lying on the brink of the canal, which the cock perceiving as he went back, ran speedily thither; but just as he was going to pick it up, the seed rolled into the river, and turned into a little fish.
We must all have perished had not the princess, running to our assistance, forced him to retire, and defend himself against her; yet, notwithstanding all her exertions, she could not hinder the sultan's beard from being burnt, and his face scorched, the chief of the eunuchs from being stifled, and a spark from entering my right eye, and making it blind.
The sultan and I expected but death, when we heard a cry of "Victory! Victory!" and instantly the princess appeared in her natural shape, but the genie was reduced to a heap of ashes.
Public mourning was observed for seven days, and many ceremonies were performed.
The ashes of the genie were thrown into the air, but those of the princess were collected into a precious urn, to be preserved, and the urn was deposited in a superb mausoleum, constructed for that purpose on the spot where the princess had been consumed.
The grief of the sultan for the loss of his daughter confined him to his chamber for a whole month.
No consideration whatever shall hinder me from making you repent your temerity should you violate my injunction." I was going to speak, but he prevented me by words full of anger; and I was obliged to quit the palace, rejected, banished, an outcast from the world.
I began my journey, not so much deploring my own miseries, as the death of the two fair princesses, of which I have been the occasion.
I passed through many countries without making myself known; at last I resolved to come to Bagdad, in hopes of getting myself introduced to the commander of the faithful, to move his compassion by relating to him my unfortunate adventures.
I arrived this evening, and the first man I met was this calender, our brother, who spoke before me.
You know the remaining part, madam, and the cause of my having the honour to be here.
TROUBLES IN THE FOLD-A MESSAGE
"Sixty!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
"Seventy!" said Moon.
"--And got into a field of young clover," said Tall.
"--Young clover!" said Moon.
"--Clover!" said Joseph Poorgrass.
"That they be," said Joseph.
With Bathsheba it was a moment when thought was speech and speech exclamation.
"What way?
Tell me quick!"
"Can you do it?
Can I?"
Not even a shepherd can do it, as a rule."
"He could cure 'em all if he were here."
"Who is he?
Let's get him!"
"Shepherd Oak," said matthew.
"I told you never to allude to him, nor shall you if you stay with me. Ah!" she added, brightening, "Farmer Boldwood knows!"
Isn't it, Joseph?"
"That's what 'tis."
Get somebody to cure the sheep instantly!"
All then stalked off in consternation, to get somebody as directed, without any idea of who it was to be.
The leap was an astonishing one.
Bathsheba went up to it.
The sheep was dead.
No, I won't!"
Laban answered to her signal.
"Where is Oak staying?"
"Across the valley at Nest Cottage!"
"Jump on the bay mare, and ride across, and say he must return instantly-that I say so."
He diminished down the hill.
Bathsheba walked up and down.
Nothing availed.
Bathsheba continued walking.
The horse was seen descending the hill, and the wearisome series had to be repeated in reverse order: Whitepits, Springmead, Cappel's Piece, The Flats, Middle Field, Sheeplands, Sixteen Acres.
It was Tall.
"Oh, what folly!" said Bathsheba.
Gabriel was not visible anywhere.
"He says BEGGARS MUSTN'T BE CHOOSERS," replied Laban.
"What!" said the young farmer, opening her eyes and drawing in her breath for an outburst.
Joseph Poorgrass retired a few steps behind a hurdle.
"Oh, oh, that's his answer!
Who am I, then, to be treated like that?
The men looked grave, as if they suppressed opinion.
The strait she was in through pride and shrewishness could not be disguised longer: she burst out crying bitterly; they all saw it; and she attempted no further concealment.
"Why not ask him softer like?
Gable is a true man in that way."
"And he drives me to do what I wouldn't; yes, he does!--Tall, come indoors."
"DO NOT DESERT ME, GABRIEL!"
The note was despatched as the message had been, and Bathsheba waited indoors for the result.
She went out when the horse was heard, and looked up.
Gabriel looked at her.
She knew from the look which sentence in her note had brought him.
Bathsheba followed to the field.
Gabriel was already among the turgid, prostrate forms.
It has been said that mere ease after torment is delight for a time; and the countenances of these poor creatures expressed it now. Forty nine operations were successfully performed.
Four had died; three recovered without an operation.
"Gabriel, will you stay on with me?" she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon.
Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town.
Standing before this abraded pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity throughout-a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the permanence of the idea which had heaped it up.
Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock frock, by the breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase.
In these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his present is futurity.
So the chatter was all on her side.
"Cain Ball!"
"Yes, Mister Oak; here I be!"
Cainy now runs forward with the tar pot.
Boldwood always carried with him a social atmosphere of his own, which everybody felt who came near him; and the talk, which Bathsheba's presence had somewhat suppressed, was now totally suspended.
What they conversed about was not audible to Gabriel, who was too independent to get near, though too concerned to disregard.
Concerning the flock?
Apparently not.
Gabriel theorized, not without truth, that in quiet discussion of any matter within reach of the speakers' eyes, these are usually fixed upon it.
The animal plunged; Bathsheba instantly gazed towards it, and saw the blood.
"Bottle!" he shouted, in an unmoved voice of routine.
Take my place in the barn, Gabriel, and keep the men carefully to their work."
The horses' heads were put about, and they trotted away.
"Well, better wed over the mixen than over the moor," said Laban Tall, turning his sheep.
"So I said, 'Mistress Everdene, there's places empty, and there's gifted men willing; but the spite'--no, not the spite-I didn't say spite-'but the villainy of the contrarikind,' I said (meaning womankind), 'keeps 'em out.' That wasn't too strong for her, say?"
"Passably well put."
"Yes; and I would have said it, had death and salvation overtook me for it.
"You see the artfulness?
That was my depth! ...
However, let her marry an she will.
Perhaps 'tis high time.
"What a lie!" said Gabriel.
"Ah, neighbour Oak-how'st know?" said, Henery, mildly.
However, I look round upon life quite cool.
But I have my depths; ha, and even my great depths!
But no-O no!"
Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms?
'tis a poor thing to be sixty, when there's people far past four score-a boast weak as water."
"Weak as water!
"Nobody," said Joseph Poorgrass.
"'Ithout doubt you was-'ithout doubt."
He did not covet the post relatively to the farm: in relation to herself, as beloved by him and unmarried to another, he had coveted it.
His lecture to her was, he thought, one of the absurdest mistakes.
Far from coquetting with Boldwood, she had trifled with himself in thus feigning that she had trifled with another.
This was mere exclamation-the froth of the storm.
He adored Bathsheba just the same.
CHAPTER TEN
We reached Rustchuk on january tenth, but by no means landed on that day.
Something had gone wrong with the unloading arrangements, or more likely with the railway behind them, and we were kept swinging all day well out in the turbid river.
He had done me well, and I reckoned I would stand by him.
So I got his ship's papers, and the manifests of cargo, and undertook to see to the trans shipment.
It wasn't the first time I had tackled that kind of business, and I hadn't much to learn about steam cranes.
I told him I was going on to Constantinople and would take peter with me, and he was agreeable.
He would have to wait at Rustchuk to get his return cargo, and could easily inspan a fresh engineer.
I worked about the hardest twenty four hours of my life getting the stuff ashore.
The landing officer was a Bulgarian, quite a competent man if he could have made the railways give him the trucks he needed. There was a collection of hungry German transport officers always putting in their oars, and being infernally insolent to everybody.
But the big trouble came the next morning when I had got nearly all the stuff aboard the trucks.
I gave him them and he looked carefully through them, marking certain items with a blue pencil.
'Look here, I want these back,' I said.
I said nothing, reflecting that the stuff was for the Turks and they naturally had to have some say in its handling.
He handed me a neatly typed new set of way bills.
'Here, this won't do,' I cried.
'Give me back the right set.
This thing's no good to me.'
For answer he winked gently, smiled like a dusky seraph, and held out his hand.
In it I saw a roll of money.
'For yourself,' he said.
'It is the usual custom.'
It was the first time anyone had ever tried to bribe me, and it made me boil up like a geyser.
I saw his game clearly enough.
Turkey would pay for the lot to Germany: probably had already paid the bill: but she would pay double for the things not on the way bills, and pay to this fellow and his friends.
This struck me as rather steep even for Oriental methods of doing business.
'Now look here, Sir,' I said, 'I don't stir from this place till I get the correct way bills.
If you won't give me them, I will have every item out of the trucks and make a new list.
But a correct list I have, or the stuff stays here till Doomsday.'
He was a slim, foppish fellow, and he looked more puzzled than angry.
'I offer you enough,' he said, again stretching out his hand.
At that I fairly roared.
'If you try to bribe me, you infernal little haberdasher, I'll have you off that horse and chuck you in the river.'
He began to curse and threaten, but I cut him short.
'Come along to the commandant, my boy,' I said, and I marched away, tearing up his typewritten sheets as I went and strewing them behind me like a paper chase.
I said it was my business, as representing the German Government, to see the stuff delivered to the consignee at Constantinople ship shape and Bristol fashion.
I told him it wasn't my habit to proceed with cooked documents.
He couldn't but agree with me, but there was that wrathful Oriental with his face as fixed as a Buddha.
'I have authority from the Committee to receive the stores,' he said sullenly.
'Those are not my instructions,' was the answer.
The man shrugged his shoulders.
The harassed commandant grinned.
'You've offended his Lordship, and he is a bad enemy.
All those damned Comitadjis are.
'And have that blighter in the red hat loot the trucks on the road? No, thank you.
I am going to see them safe at Chataldja, or whatever they call the artillery depot.'
I said a good deal more, but that is an abbreviated translation of my remarks.
But I didn't see that at the time.
My professional pride was up in arms, and I couldn't bear to have a hand in a crooked deal.
'You will have a guard for the trucks, of course, and I will pick you good men.
They may hold you up all the same.
I still think you would have been wiser to humour Rasta Bey.'
As I was leaving he gave me a telegram.
'Here's a wire for your Captain Schenk.' I slipped the envelope in my pocket and went out.
Schenk was pretty sick, so I left a note for him.
Presently I remembered Schenk's telegram, which still reposed in my pocket.
I took it out and opened it, meaning to wire it from the first station we stopped at.
It was from some official at Regensburg, asking him to put under arrest and send back by the first boat a man called Brandt, who was believed to have come aboard at Absthafen on the thirtieth of December.
I whistled and showed it to peter.
For my back had fairly got stiffened about these munitions, and I was going to take any risk to see them safely delivered to their proper owner.
peter couldn't understand me at all.
He still hankered after a grand destruction of the lot somewhere down the railway.
But then, this wasn't the line of Peter's profession, and his pride was not at stake.
We had a mortally slow journey.
It was bad enough in Bulgaria, but when we crossed the frontier at a place called Mustafa Pasha we struck the real supineness of the East.
We stopped at a station and were stretching our legs on the platform when I saw a familiar figure approaching.
It was Rasta, with half a dozen Turkish gendarmes.
I called peter, and we clambered into the truck next our horse box.
The Turk swaggered up and addressed us.
'You can get back to Rustchuk,' he said.
'I take over from you here.
Hand me the papers.'
'Is this Chataldja?' I asked innocently.
'It is the end of your affair,' he said haughtily.
'Quick, or it will be the worse for you.'
'You are in Turkey,' he cried, 'and will obey the Turkish Government.'
'I'll obey the Government right enough,' I said; 'but if you're the Government I could make a better one with a bib and a rattle.'
'Please don't begin shooting,' I said.
'There are twelve armed guards in this train who will take their orders from me.
Besides, I and my friend can shoot a bit.'
'Fool!' he cried, getting very angry.
'I can order up a regiment in five minutes.'
'Maybe you can,' I said; 'but observe the situation.
If you dare to come aboard I will shoot you.
If you call in your regiment I will tell you what I'll do.
I'll fire this stuff, and I reckon they'll be picking up the bits of you and your regiment off the Gallipoli Peninsula.'
He had put up a bluff-a poor one-and I had called it.
He saw I meant what I said, and became silken.
'Good bye, sir,' he said.
'You have had a fair chance and rejected it. We shall meet again soon, and you will be sorry for your insolence.'
He strutted away and it was all I could do to keep from running after him.
He was the regular gunner officer, not thinking about anything except his guns and shells.
I had to wait about three hours while he was checking the stuff with the invoices, and then he gave me a receipt which I still possess.
I told him about Rasta, and he agreed that I had done right.
It didn't make him as mad as I expected, because, you see, he got his stuff safe in any case.
It was only that the wretched Turks had to pay twice for the lot of it.
He gave peter and me luncheon, and was altogether very civil and inclined to talk about the war.
Finally he lent us a car to take us the few miles to the city.
So it came about that at five past three on the sixteenth day of January, with only the clothes we stood up in, peter and I entered Constantinople.
I don't quite know what I had expected-a sort of fairyland Eastern city, all white marble and blue water, and stately Turks in surplices, and veiled houris, and roses and nightingales, and some sort of string band discoursing sweet music.
I had forgotten that winter is pretty much the same everywhere.
It was a drizzling day, with a south-east wind blowing, and the streets were long troughs of mud.
I saw what I took to be mosques and minarets, and they were about as impressive as factory chimneys.
By and by we crossed a bridge, and paid a penny for the privilege.
If I had known it was the famous Golden Horn I would have looked at it with more interest, but I saw nothing save a lot of moth eaten barges and some queer little boats like gondolas.
Then we came into busier streets, where ramshackle cabs drawn by lean horses spluttered through the mud.
I saw one old fellow who looked like my notion of a Turk, but most of the population had the appearance of London old clothes men.
All but the soldiers, Turk and German, who seemed well set-up fellows.
peter had paddled along at my side like a faithful dog, not saying a word, but clearly not approving of this wet and dirty metropolis.
'Do you know that we are being followed, Cornelis?' he said suddenly, 'ever since we came into this evil smelling dorp.'
peter was infallible in a thing like that.
It was more likely my friend Rasta.
I found the ferry of Ratchik by asking a soldier and a German sailor there told me where the Kurdish Bazaar was.
He pointed up a steep street which ran past a high block of warehouses with every window broken.
Sandy had said the left hand side coming down, so it must be the right-hand side going up.
We plunged into it, and it was the filthiest place of all.
The wind whistled up it and stirred the garbage.
The street corkscrewed endlessly.
Sometimes it seemed to stop; then it found a hole in the opposing masonry and edged its way in.
Often it was almost pitch dark; then would come a greyish twilight where it opened out to the width of a decent lane.
To find a house in that murk was no easy job, and by the time we had gone a quarter of a mile I began to fear we had missed it.
It was no good asking any of the crowd we met. They didn't look as if they understood any civilized tongue.
At last we stumbled on it-a tumble down coffee house, with a Kuprasso above the door in queer amateur lettering.
There was a lamp burning inside, and two or three men smoking at small wooden tables.
We ordered coffee, thick black stuff like treacle, which peter anathematized.
He paid no attention, so I shouted louder at him, and the noise brought a man out of the back parts.
He was a fat, oldish fellow with a long nose, very like the Greek traders you see on the Zanzibar coast.
I beckoned to him and he waddled forward, smiling oilily.
'I wanted to show this place to my friend.
He has heard of your garden house and the fun there.'
'The Signor is mistaken.
I have no garden house.'
'Rot,' I said; 'I've been here before, my boy.
I recall your shanty at the back and many merry nights there.
What was it you called it?
He put his finger to his lip and looked incredibly sly.
The people here are too poor to dance and sing.'
'All the same I would like to have another look at it,' I said, and I slipped an English sovereign into his hand.
He glanced at it in surprise and his manner changed.
Then he unlocked a door and with a swirl the wind caught it and blew it back on us.
We were looking into a mean little yard, with on one side a high curving wall, evidently of great age, with bushes growing in the cracks of it.
Some scraggy myrtles stood in broken pots, and nettles flourished in a corner.
At one end was a wooden building like a dissenting chapel, but painted a dingy scarlet.
Its windows and skylights were black with dirt, and its door, tied up with rope, flapped in the wind.
'Behold the Pavilion,' Kuprasso said proudly.
'That is the old place,' I observed with feeling.
'What times I've seen there!
Tell me, Mr Kuprasso, do you ever open it now?'
He put his thick lips to my ear.
It is sometimes open-not often.
The police approve-but not often, for this is no time for too much gaiety.
I will tell you a secret. Tomorrow afternoon there will be dancing-wonderful dancing!
Only a few of my patrons know.
Who, think you, will be here?'
He bent his head closer and said in a whisper-
'Oh, indeed,' I said with a proper tone of respect, though I hadn't a notion what he meant.
'Sure,' I said.
'Both of us.
We're all for the rosy hours.'
'Then the fourth hour after midday.
Walk straight through the cafe and one will be there to unlock the door.
You are new comers here?
Take the advice of Angelo Kuprasso and avoid the streets after nightfall. Stamboul is no safe place nowadays for quiet men.' I asked him to name a hotel, and he rattled off a list from which I chose one that sounded modest and in keeping with our get up.
It was not far off, only a hundred yards to the right at the top of the hill.
When we left his door the night had begun to drop.
We hadn't gone twenty yards before peter drew very near to me and kept turning his head like a hunted stag.
'We are being followed close, Cornelis,' he said calmly.
I could see in the waning light a crowd of people who seemed to be moving towards us.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A spasm of incredulity, a vast relief, and that sharp joy which comes of reaction chased each other across my mind.
I dropped into the nearest chair and tried to grapple with something far beyond words.
'Sandy,' I said, as soon as I got my breath, 'you're an incarnate devil.
'It was the only way, Dick.
If I hadn't come mewing like a tom cat at your heels yesterday, Rasta would have had you long before you got to your hotel.
You two have given me a pretty anxious time, and it took some doing to get you safe here.
However, that is all over now.
Make yourselves at home, my children.'
'You may call it my humble home'--it was Blenkiron's sleek voice that spoke.
'We've been preparing for you, Major, but it was only yesterday I heard of your friend.'
I introduced peter.
'Mr Pienaar,' said Blenkiron, 'pleased to meet you.
Well, as I was observing, you're safe enough here, but you've cut it mighty fine. Officially, a Dutchman called Brandt was to be arrested this afternoon and handed over to the German authorities.
When Germany begins to trouble about that Dutchman she will find difficulty in getting the body; but such are the languid ways of an Oriental despotism.
He will have ceased upon the midnight without pain, as your poet sings.'
'My men,' said Sandy. 'We have a bit of a graft here, and it wasn't difficult to manage it.
Old Moellendorff will be nosing after the business tomorrow, but he will find the mystery too deep for him.
But, by Jove, Dick, we hadn't any time to spare.
If Rasta had got you, or the Germans had had the job of lifting you, your goose would have been jolly well cooked.
I had some unquiet hours this morning.'
The thing was too deep for me.
I looked at Blenkiron, shuffling his Patience cards with his old sleepy smile, and Sandy, dressed like some bandit in melodrama, his lean face as brown as a nut, his bare arms all tattooed with crimson rings, and the fox pelt drawn tight over brow and ears.
It was still a nightmare world, but the dream was getting pleasanter.
peter said not a word, but I could see his eyes heavy with his own thoughts.
Blenkiron hove himself from the sofa and waddled to a cupboard.
'You boys must be hungry,' he said.
'My duo denum has been giving me hell as usual, and I don't eat no more than a squirrel.
But I laid in some stores, for I guessed you would want to stoke up some after your travels.'
He brought out a couple of Strassburg pies, a cheese, a cold chicken, a loaf, and three bottles of champagne.
'Fizz,' said Sandy rapturously.
'And a dry Heidsieck too!
We're in luck, Dick, old man.'
I never ate a more welcome meal, for we had starved in that dirty hotel.
But I had still the old feeling of the hunted, and before I began I asked about the door.
'That's all right,' said Sandy.
'My fellows are on the stair and at the gate.
Blenkiron's the man you've got to thank for that.
He was pretty certain you'd get here, but he was also certain that you'd arrive in a hurry with a good many inquirers behind you.
So he arranged that you should leak away and start fresh.'
'Your name is Richard Hanau,' Blenkiron said, 'born in cleveland ohio, of German parentage on both sides.
One of our brightest mining engineers, and the apple of Guggenheim's eye.
You arrived this afternoon from Constanza, and I met you at the packet.
The clothes for the part are in your bedroom next door.
But I guess all that can wait, for I'm anxious to get to business.
We're not here on a joy ride, Major, so I reckon we'll leave out the dime novel adventures.
I'm just dying to hear them, but they'll keep.
I want to know how our mutual inquiries have prospered.'
He gave peter and me cigars, and we sat ourselves in armchairs in front of the blaze.
Sandy squatted cross legged on the hearthrug and lit a foul old briar pipe, which he extricated from some pouch among his skins.
And so began that conversation which had never been out of my thoughts for four hectic weeks.
'If I presume to begin,' said Blenkiron, 'it's because I reckon my story is the shortest.
I have to confess to you, gentlemen, that I have failed.'
'If you were looking for something in the root of the hedge, you wouldn't want to scour the road in a high-speed automobile.
And still less would you want to get a bird's eye view in an aeroplane.
That parable about fits my case.
I had the wrong stunt, Major.
I was too high up and refined.
I've been processing through Europe like Barnum's Circus, and living with generals and transparencies.
Not that I haven't picked up a lot of noos, and got some very interesting sidelights on high politics.
But the thing I was after wasn't to be found on my beat, for those that knew it weren't going to tell.
In that kind of society they don't get drunk and blab after their tenth cocktail.
So I guess I've no contribution to make to quieting Sir Walter Bullivant's mind, except that he's dead right.
Yes, Sir, he has hit the spot and rung the bell.
There is a mighty miracle working proposition being floated in these parts, but the promoters are keeping it to themselves.
They aren't taking in more than they can help on the ground floor.'
Blenkiron stopped to light a fresh cigar.
That is what your statesmen don't figure enough on. She'll give up Belgium and Alsace Lorraine and Poland, but by God! she'll never give up the road to Mesopotamia till you have her by the throat and make her drop it.
Sir Walter is a pretty bright eyed citizen, and he sees it right enough.
If the worst happens, Kaiser will fling overboard a lot of ballast in Europe, and it will look like a big victory for the Allies, but he won't be beaten if he has the road to the East safe.
Germany's like a scorpion: her sting's in her tail, and that tail stretches way down into Asia.
'I got that clear, and I also made out that it wasn't going to be dead easy for her to keep that tail healthy.
Turkey's a bit of an anxiety, as you'll soon discover.
But Germany thinks she can manage it, and I won't say she can't.
I tried to find out, but they gave me nothing but eyewash.
I had to pretend to be satisfied, for the position of john s wasn't so strong as to allow him to take liberties.
If I asked one of the highbrows he looked wise and spoke of the might of German arms and German organization and German staff work.
I used to nod my head and get enthusiastic about these stunts, but it was all soft soap.
She has a trick in hand-that much I know, but I'm darned if I can put a name to it.
His tone was quite melancholy, and I was mean enough to feel rather glad.
He had been the professional with the best chance.
It would be a good joke if the amateur succeeded where the expert failed.
I looked at Sandy.
He filled his pipe again, and pushed back his skin cap from his brows.
'I went straight to Smyrna,' he said.
'It wasn't difficult, for you see I had laid down a good many lines in former travels.
But I found out that the Company of the Rosy Hours was not what I had known it in nineteen ten.
But it was uncommon powerful in the provinces, and Enver and Talaat daren't meddle with it.
The dangerous thing about it was that it said nothing and apparently did nothing.
It just bided its time and took notes.
'You can imagine that this was the very kind of crowd for my purpose. I knew of old its little ways, for with all its orthodoxy it dabbled a good deal in magic, and owed half its power to its atmosphere of the uncanny.
The Companions could dance the heart out of the ordinary Turk.
You saw a bit of one of our dances this afternoon, Dick-pretty good, wasn't it?
They could go anywhere, and no questions asked.
It would have been as much as the life of the Committee or its German masters was worth to lay a hand on us, for we clung together like leeches and we were not in the habit of sticking at trifles.
I travelled from Smyrna by the new railway to Panderma on the Marmora, and got there just before Christmas.
That was after Anzac and Suvla had been evacuated, but I could hear the guns going hard at Cape Helles.
From Panderma I started to cross to Thrace in a coasting steamer.
And there an uncommon funny thing happened-I got torpedoed.
'It must have been about the last effort of a British submarine in those waters.
She gave us ten minutes to take to the boats, and then sent the blighted old packet and a fine cargo of six-inch shells to the bottom.
'I gave Tommy the surprise of his life.
As we bumped past him, I started the "Flowers of the Forest"--the old version-on the antique stringed instrument I carried, and I sang the words very plain. Tommy's eyes bulged out of his head, and he shouted at me in English to know who the devil I was.
'Tommy spotted me in a second.
He never much approved of my wanderings, and thought I was safely anchored in the battalion.
'Well, to make a long story short, I got to Constantinople, and pretty soon found touch with Blenkiron.
The rest you know.
And now for business.
'Sir Walter was right, as Blenkiron has told us.
There's a great stirring in Islam, something moving on the face of the waters.
They make no secret of it.
Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one was due about now.
And they are quite clear about the details.
All the orthodox believers have them by heart.
They believe they are on the eve of a great deliverance.
They are unpopular and unorthodox, and no true Turks. But Germany has.
How, I don't know, but I could see quite plainly that in some subtle way Germany was regarded as a collaborator in the movement.
'They talk about the thing quite openly.
The prophet himself is known as Zimrud-"the Emerald"--and his four ministers are called also after jewels-Sapphire, Ruby, Pearl, and Topaz.
All that I could learn was that he and his followers were coming from the West.
That puzzled me dreadfully, for no one used the phrase.
The Home of the Spirit!
'But by and by I discovered that there was an inner and an outer circle in this mystery.
Every creed has an esoteric side which is kept from the common herd.
That tale tells of the coming of a prophet, and I found that the select of the faith spoke of the new revelation in terms of it.
The curious thing is that in that tale the prophet is aided by one of the few women who play much part in the hagiology of Islam.
That is the point of the tale, and it is partly a jest, but mainly a religious mystery.
The prophet, too, is not called Emerald.'
'I know,' I said; 'he is called Greenmantle.'
Sandy scrambled to his feet, letting his pipe drop in the fireplace.
'Now how on earth did you find out that?' he cried.
Then I told them of Stumm and Gaudian and the whispered words I had not been meant to hear.
'Germany's in the heart of the plan.
The secret's in Germany. Dick, you should not have crossed the Danube.'
'But on the other hand it is obvious that the thing must come east, and sooner rather than later.
I take it they can't afford to delay too long before they deliver the goods.
If we can stick it out here we must hit the trail ...
I've got another bit of evidence.
Sandy's eyes were very bright and I had an audience on wires.
'Yes,' said Sandy; 'what of that?'
'Only that the same thing is true of Greenmantle.
I can give you her name.'
I fetched a piece of paper and a pencil from Blenkiron's desk and handed it to Sandy.
'Write down Harry Bullivant's third word.'
Then I told them of the other name Stumm and Gaudian had spoken.
'Good old Harry,' said Sandy softly.
Who and where is she? for if we find her we have done the trick.'
'I reckon I can put you wise on that, gentlemen,' he said.
Both Sandy and I began to laugh.
It was too comic to have stumbled across Europe and lighted on the very headquarters of the puzzle we had set out to unriddle.
But Blenkiron did not laugh.
'I don't like it, gentlemen,' he said.
'I would rather you had mentioned any other name on God's earth.
They haven't much to them.
I reckon they wouldn't stand up against what we could show them in the U nited States.
The man that will understand her has got to take a biggish size in hats.'
'Why, that is just what I can't tell you.
She was a great excavator of Babylonish and Hittite ruins, and she married a diplomat who went to glory three years back.
It isn't what she has been, but what she is, and that's a mighty clever woman.'
Blenkiron's respect did not depress me.
I asked where she lived.
'That I don't know,' said Blenkiron. 'You won't find people unduly anxious to gratify your natural curiosity about Frau von Einem.'
'I can find that out,' said Sandy. 'That's the advantage of having a push like mine.
Meantime, I've got to clear, for my day's work isn't finished.
Dick, you and peter must go to bed at once.'
Sandy spoke like a medical adviser.
'Because I want your clothes-the things you've got on now.
I'll take them off with me and you'll never see them again.'
'You've a queer taste in souvenirs,' I said.
'Say rather the Turkish police.
The current in the Bosporus is pretty strong, and these sad relics of two misguided Dutchmen will be washed up tomorrow about Seraglio Point.
CHAPTER thirteen.
A World of High Medical Knowledge.
With abounding interest I visited all the inhabited worlds of this vast system.
How long it took I have no way of knowing.
Some of these worlds sustain a low order of human creatures, while on others there are races that have reached a high degree in the scale of advancement.
I have named this world Dore lyn.
It is fifty times as large as our Earth and of greater specific gravity.
There are no conflicting schools of medicines such as Allopathic, Homeopathic, Hydropathic, Eclectic and Osteopathic.
Everything is duly tested and proved to be a success by a corps of experts before it is given to the practicing fraternity. The government holds certain rights in experimenting that no physician or medical school would think of having in our world.
Nothing is spared that money or talent can furnish.
The full graduates of these schools are only "the survival of the fittest." Others take a secondary degree and can act as assistants or retire from the list.
When a physician suspects that the blood is poisoned he at once proceeds to a chemical analysis, and if certain kinds of poison are found, the blood is filtered by the use of a fine instrument.
A blood vessel is exposed and cut, and the two ends fastened to the delicate filter.
Following is a list:
"Ashes of wolf's skull, stag's horn, the heads of mice, the eyes of crabs, owl's brains, liver of frogs, viper's fat, grasshoppers, bats, etc, these supplied the alkalis which were prescribed.
For colic, powdered horse's teeth, dung of swine, asses' kidneys, mice excretion made into a plaster, and other equally vile and unsavory compounds.
For sore throat, snail slime was a favorite prescription, and mouse flesh was considered excellent for disease of the lungs.
Boiled snails and powdered bats were prescribed for intestinal disorders."
Alcohol is unknown to them, but they have had a two thousand year's battle against three liquids that affect them as opium affects us.
Being interested in these things, I examined more closely into their past medical history, and saw more clearly the present folly of a certain part of our medicinal practice.
This simple act renders the spinal cord insensitive, which condition may be maintained for hours without injuring the patient.
A diseased body is looked upon as being in possession of a certain brood of microbes which are destroyed either by the blood filter or the "Vaccine bath, or injection." (I know no better name by which to call it.) A few diseases are treated by doses of medicines given in a manner similar to the prescription system of our country.
In performing operations, the experts of Dore lyn have reached a marvelous degree of perfection.
It took three and one half thousand years of continual experimenting on this delicate creation before it was pronounced satisfactory.
The false eye is not of flesh but one of manufacture.
It is placed in sensitive connection with the optic nerve, on which images are thrown by the delicate mechanism of the false eye.
Fatty tissues are removed and other obstructions eradicated during the regular heart beats.
CHAPTER thirty six.
Beverages, consisting of water, containing a considerable quantity of carbonic acid.
three.
Beverages composed partly of fermented liquors.
Of the common class of beverages, consisting of water impregnated with carbonic acid gas, we may name soda water, single and double, ordinary effervescing draughts, and ginger beer.
The beverages composed partly of fermented liquors, are hot spiced wines, bishop, egg flip, egg hot, ale posset, sack posset, punch, and spirits and water.
We will, however, forthwith treat on the most popular of our beverages, beginning with the one which makes "the cup that cheers but not inebriates."
Pepys says, in his Diary,--"september twenty fifth sixteen sixty one.--I sent for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I had never drunk before." Two years later it was so rare a commodity in England, that the English East India Company bought two pounds. two ounces. of it, as a present for his majesty.
Linnaeus was induced to think that there were two species of tea plant, one of which produced the black, and the other the green teas; but later observations do not confirm this.
When the leaves of black and green tea are expanded by hot water, and examined by the botanist, though a difference of character is perceived, yet this is not sufficient to authorize considering them as distinct species.
The tea tree flourishes best in temperate regions; in China it is indigenous.
The part of China where the best tea is cultivated, is called by us the "tea country." The cultivation of the plant requires great care.
It is raised chiefly on the sides of hills; and, in order to increase the quantity and improve the quality of the leaves, the shrub is pruned, so as not to exceed the height of from two to three feet, much in the same manner as the vine is treated in France.
They pluck the leaves, one selecting them according to the kinds of tea required; and, notwithstanding the tediousness of the operation, each labourer is able to gather from four to ten or fifteen pounds a day.
Teas of the finest flavour consist of the youngest leaves; and as these are gathered at four different periods of the year, the younger the leaves the higher flavoured the tea, and the scarcer, and consequently the dearer, the article.
There are about a dozen different kinds; but the principal are Bohea, Congou, and Souchong, and signify, respectively, inferior, middling, and superior.
Tea, when chemically analyzed, is found to contain woody fibre, mucilage, a considerable quantity of the astringent principle, or tannin, a narcotic principle, which is, perhaps, connected with a peculiar aroma.
The tannin is shown by its striking a black colour with sulphate of iron, and is the cause of the dark stain which is always formed when tea is spilt upon buff coloured cottons dyed with iron.
We have in tea, of many kinds, a beverage which contains the active constituents of the most powerful mineral springs, and, however small the amount of iron may be which we daily take in this form, it cannot be destitute of influence on the vital processes."
The leaves of the sloe, white thorn, ash, elder, and some others, have been employed for this purpose; such as the leaves of the speedwell, wild germander, black currants, syringa, purple spiked willow herb, sweet brier, and cherry tree.
Some of these are harmless, others are to a certain degree poisonous; as, for example, are the leaves of all the varieties of the plum and cherry tribe, to which the sloe belongs.
Adulteration by means of these leaves is by no means a new species of fraud; and several acts of parliament, from the time of George the second., have been passed, specifying severe penalties against those guilty of the offence, which, notwithstanding numerous convictions, continues to the present time.
The greatest care should be taken that it has not been exposed to the air, which destroys its flavour.
It would be impossible, in the space at our command, to enumerate the various modes adopted in different countries for "making coffee;" that is, the phrase commonly understood to mean the complete preparation of this delicious beverage for drinking.
For performing this operation, such recipes or methods as we have found most practical will be inserted in their proper place; but the following facts connected with coffee will be found highly interesting.
It appears that coffee was first introduced into England by Daniel Edwards, a Turkey merchant, whose servant, Pasqua, a Greek, understood the manner of roasting it.
This servant, under the patronage of Edwards, established the first coffee house in London, in George Yard, Lombard Street.
Of the various kinds of coffee the Arabian is considered the best. It is grown chiefly in the districts of Aden and Mocha; whence the name of our Mocha coffee.
Mocha coffee has a smaller and rounder bean than any other, and likewise a more agreeable smell and taste.
A considerable change takes place in the arrangement of the constituents of coffee by the application of heat in roasting it. Independently of one of the objects of roasting, namely, that of destroying its toughness and rendering it easily ground, its tannin and other principles are rendered partly soluble in water; and it is to the tannin that the brown colour of the decoction of coffee is owing.
The roasting of coffee in the best manner requires great nicety, and much of the qualities of the beverage depends upon the operation. The roasting of coffee for the dealers in London and Paris has now become a separate branch of business, and some of the roasters perform the operation on a great scale, with considerable skill.
Roasted coffee loses from twenty to thirty per cent, by sufficient roasting, and the powder suffers much by exposure to the air; but, while raw, it not only does not lose its flavour for a year or two, but improves by keeping.
If a cup of the best coffee be placed upon a table boiling hot, it will fill the room with its fragrance; but the coffee, when warmed again after being cold, will be found to have lost most of its flavour.
To have coffee in perfection, it should be roasted and ground just before it is used, and more should not be ground at a time than is wanted for immediate use, or, if it be necessary to grind more, it should be kept closed from the air.
With respect to the quantity of coffee used in making the decoction, much depends upon the taste of the consumer.
The next morning they drove to town again, passing slowly up the street of the little village to examine each building that might be a possible location for a newspaper office.
Here is a map that Patsy drew of Millville, which gives a fair idea of its arrangement:
[Illustration: Village Street]
Counting the dwellings there were exactly twelve buildings, and they all seemed occupied.
When they reached the hardware store, opposite Cotting's, mr West, the proprietor, was standing on the broad platform in front of it.
In many respects Bob West was the most important citizen of Millville.
A widower of long standing, without children or near relatives, he occupied a suite of well appointed rooms over the hardware store and took his meals at the hotel.
He was an authority in the town, too, and a man of real importance.
mr Merrick stopped his horse to speak with the hardware man, an old acquaintance.
"West," said he, "my girls are going to start a newspaper in Millville."
The merchant bowed gravely, perhaps to cover the trace of a smile he was unable to repress.
"It's to be a daily paper, you know," continued mr Merrick, "and it seems there's a lot of machinery in the outfit.
It'll need quite a bit of room, in other words, and we're looking for a place to install it."
West glanced along the street-up one side and down the other-and then shook his head negatively.
"Plenty of land, but no buildings," said he.
"You might buy the old mill and turn it into a newspaper office.
"It's too dusty and floury," said Patsy.
"We'd never get it clean, I'm sure."
West turned and looked at the shed reflectively.
"That is where I store my stock of farm machinery," he said.
In fact, I'm pretty well cleaned out of all surplus stock.
But next spring I shall need the place again."
"Good!" cried mr Merrick.
"That solves our problem.
Has it a floor?"
"Yes; an excellent one; but only one small window."
"We can remedy that," declared Uncle john.
If it is, we'll build a fine new building for it; if it don't seem to prosper, we'll give you back the shed.
What do you say?"
West thought it over.
All right, mr Merrick; I'll move the truck out and give you possession.
It won't make a bad newspaper office.
But of course you are to fit up the place at your own expense."
"Thank you very much, sir!" exclaimed Uncle john.
"I'll set Lon Taft at work at once.
Where can he be found?"
"Playing billiards at the hotel, usually.
I suppose he is there now."
"Very good; I'll hunt him up.
What do you think of our newspaper scheme, West?"
The old merchant hesitated.
Then he said slowly:
"Whatever your charming and energetic nieces undertake, sir, will doubtless be well accomplished.
Money is the keystone to success."
"mr West," said Louise, with dignity, "we are depending chiefly on the literary merit of our newspaper to win recognition."
"Of course; of course!" said he hastily.
"Put me down as a subscriber, please, and rely upon my support at all times.
It is possible, young ladies-nay, quite probable, I should say-that your originality and genius will yet make Millville famous."
That speech pleased Uncle john, and as the hardware merchant bowed and turned away, mr Merrick said in his cheeriest tones: "He's quite right, my dears, and we're lucky to have found such a fine, roomy place for our establishment.
Over the long distance telephone mr Marvin reported that he had bought the required outfit and it was even then being loaded on the freight cars.
"I've arranged for a special engine," he added, "and if all goes well the freight will be on the sidetrack at Chazy Junction on Monday morning.
But he asks if you have arranged for your workmen.
How about it, mr Merrick? have you plenty of competent printers and pressmen at Millville?"
"There are none at all," was the reply.
And, by the way, hire women or girls for every position they are competent to fill.
"I understand, sir."
Uncle john ordered everything he could think of and told his agent to add whatever the supply man thought might be needed.
This business being accomplished, he found Lon Taft at the hotel and instructed the carpenter to put rows of windows on both sides of the shed and to build partitions for an editorial office and a business office at the front.
This was the beginning of a busy period, especially for poor Uncle john, who had many details to attend to personally.
This rendered it necessary for mr Merrick to make a trip to Royal, to complete his arrangement with mr Skeelty, the manager.
He drove over with Arthur Weldon, in the buggy-four miles of hill climbing, over rough cobble stones, into the pine forest.
Adjoining the mill was the factory building where the pulp was rolled into print paper. Surrounding these huge buildings were some sixty small dwellings of the bungalow type, for the use of the workmen, built of rough boards, but neat and uniform in appearance.
The electric power plant was a building at the edge of Royal Waterfall, the low and persistent roar of which was scarcely drowned by the rumble of machinery.
Finally, at the edge of the clearing nearest the mills, stood the business office, and to this place mr Merrick and Arthur at once proceeded.
They found the office a busy place.
The young fellow had improved in appearance, having discarded his frayed gray suit for one of plain brown khaki, such as many of the workmen wore, a supply being carried by the company's store. He was clean shaven and trim, and a gentlemanly bearing had replaced the careless, half defiant attitude of the former hobo.
It was evident he remembered meeting mr Merrick, for he smiled and returned the "nabob's" nod.
mr Skeelty had a private enclosed office in a corner of the room.
Being admitted to this sanctum, the visitors found the manager to be a small, puffy individual about forty five years of age, with shrewd, beadlike black eyes and an insolent assumption of super importance.
Skeelty interrupted his task of running up columns of impressive figures to ask his callers to be seated, and opened the interview with characteristic abruptness.
"You're Merrick, eh?
I remember.
You want to buy power, and we have it to sell.
How much will you contract to take?"
"I don't know just how much we need," answered Uncle john.
"We want enough to run a newspaper plant at Millville, and will pay for whatever we use.
I've ordered a meter, as you asked me to do, and my men are now stringing the cables to make the connection."
"Pah! a newspaper.
How absurd," said mr Skeelty with scornful emphasis. "Your name, Merrick, is not unknown to me.
It stands for financial success, I understand; but I'll bet you never made your money doing such fool things as establishing newspapers in graveyards."
Uncle john looked at the man attentively.
"I shall refrain from criticising your conduct of this mill, mr Skeelty," he quietly observed, "nor shall I dictate what you may do with your money-provided you succeed in making any."
The manager smiled broadly, as if the retort pleased him.
"Give an' take, sir; that's my motto," he said.
"But you prefer to take?"
"I do," was the cheerful reply.
"I'll take your paper, for instance-if it isn't too high priced."
mr Skeelty stared at him a moment.
Then he laughed.
"They're mostly foreigners, mr Merrick, who haven't yet fully mastered the English language.
But," he added, thoughtfully, "a few among them might subscribe, if your country sheet contains any news of interest at all.
Don't appreciate the advantages of country life, you see, and I've an idea they'll begin to desert, pretty soon.
"It's a penny paper," said Uncle john.
"The subscription is only thirty cents a month."
"Delivered?"
"I suppose so."
"Well, I'll pay you twenty cents, and keep the balance for commission. That's fair enough."
"Very well, mr Skeelty.
Get all you can, at that rate."
After signing a contract for the supply of electrical power, whereby he was outrageously robbed but the supply was guaranteed, mr Merrick and Arthur returned to the farm.
"That man," said Louise's young husband, referring to the manager of the paper mill, "is an unmitigated scoundrel, sir."
"I won't deny it," replied mr Merrick.
No wonder the poor fellows get dissatisfied."
OF LIBERTY AND NECESSITY.
PART one
Such a uniformity in every particular, is found in no part of nature.
He also expects that, when he carries his goods to market, and offers them at a reasonable price, he shall find purchasers, and shall be able, by the money he acquires, to engage others to supply him with those commodities which are requisite for his subsistence.
I shall therefore change the suppositions.
For these are plain and acknowledged matters of fact.
But if the foregoing explication of the matter be received, this must be absolutely impracticable.
Before the gods that made the gods Had seen their sunrise pass, The White Horse of the White Horse Vale Was cut out of the grass.
Before the gods that made the gods Had drunk at dawn their fill, The White Horse of the White Horse Vale Was hoary on the hill.
For the White Horse knew England When there was none to know; He saw the first oar break or bend, He saw heaven fall and the world end, O God, how long ago.
For the end of the world was long ago, And all we dwell to day As children of some second birth, Like a strange people left on earth After a judgment day.
When Caesar's sun fell out of the sky And whoso hearkened right Could only hear the plunging Of the nations in the night.
When the ends of the earth came marching in To torch and cresset gleam. And the roads of the world that lead to Rome Were filled with faces that moved like foam, Like faces in a dream.
And men rode out of the eastern lands, Broad river and burning plain; Trees that are Titan flowers to see, And tiger skies, striped horribly, With tints of tropic rain.
Where Ind's enamelled peaks arise Around that inmost one, Where ancient eagles on its brink, Vast as archangels, gather and drink The sacrament of the sun
And men brake out of the northern lands, Enormous lands alone, Where a spell is laid upon life and lust And the rain is changed to a silver dust And the sea to a great green stone.
And a Shape that moveth murkily In mirrors of ice and night, Hath blanched with fear all beasts and birds, As death and a shock of evil words Blast a man's hair with white.
And the cry of the palms and the purple moons, Or the cry of the frost and foam, Swept ever around an inmost place, And the din of distant race on race Cried and replied round Rome.
And there was death on the Emperor And night upon the Pope: And Alfred, hiding in deep grass, Hardened his heart with hope.
A sea folk blinder than the sea Broke all about his land, But Alfred up against them bare And gripped the ground and grasped the air, Staggered, and strove to stand.
He bent them back with spear and spade, With desperate dyke and wall, With foemen leaning on his shield And roaring on him when he reeled; And no help came at all.
He broke them with a broken sword A little towards the sea, And for one hour of panting peace, Ringed with a roar that would not cease, With golden crown and girded fleece Made laws under a tree.
The Northmen came about our land A Christless chivalry: Who knew not of the arch or pen, Great, beautiful half witted men From the sunrise and the sea.
Our towns were shaken of tall kings With scarlet beards like blood: The world turned empty where they trod, They took the kindly cross of God And cut it up for wood.
Their souls were drifting as the sea, And all good towns and lands They only saw with heavy eyes, And broke with heavy hands,
Their gods were sadder than the sea, Gods of a wandering will, Who cried for blood like beasts at night, Sadly, from hill to hill.
They seemed as trees walking the earth, As witless and as tall, Yet they took hold upon the heavens And no help came at all.
They bred like birds in English woods, They rooted like the rose, When Alfred came to Athelney To hide him from their bows
There was not English armour left, Nor any English thing, When Alfred came to Athelney To be an English king.
And the great kings of Wessex Wearied and sank in gore, And even their ghosts in that great stress Grew greyer and greyer, less and less, With the lords that died in Lyonesse And the king that comes no more.
And the God of the Golden Dragon Was dumb upon his throne, And the lord of the Golden Dragon Ran in the woods alone.
And if ever he climbed the crest of luck And set the flag before, Returning as a wheel returns, Came ruin and the rain that burns, And all began once more.
And naught was left King Alfred But shameful tears of rage, In the island in the river In the end of all his age.
It was wrought in the monk's slow manner, From silver and sanguine shell, Where the scenes are little and terrible, Keyholes of heaven and hell.
In the river island of Athelney, With the river running past, In colours of such simple creed All things sprang at him, sun and weed, Till the grass grew to be grass indeed And the tree was a tree at last.
Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colours of her coat Were better than good news.
She spoke not, nor turned not, Nor any sign she cast, Only she stood up straight and free, Between the flowers in Athelney, And the river running past.
One dim ancestral jewel hung On his ruined armour grey, He rent and cast it at her feet: Where, after centuries, with slow feet, Men came from hall and school and street And found it where it lay.
"Mother of God," the wanderer said, "I am but a common king, Nor will I ask what saints may ask, To see a secret thing.
"When our last bow is broken, Queen, And our last javelin cast, Under some sad, green evening sky, Holding a ruined cross on high, Under warm westland grass to lie, Shall we come home at last?"
And a voice came human but high up, Like a cottage climbed among The clouds; or a serf of hut and croft That sits by his hovel fire as oft, But hears on his old bare roof aloft A belfry burst in song.
"The gates of heaven are lightly locked, We do not guard our gain, The heaviest hind may easily Come silently and suddenly Upon me in a lane.
"And any little maid that walks In good thoughts apart, May break the guard of the Three Kings And see the dear and dreadful things I hid within my heart.
"The meanest man in grey fields gone Behind the set of sun, Heareth between star and other star, Through the door of the darkness fallen ajar, The council, eldest of things that are, The talk of the Three in One.
"The gates of heaven are lightly locked, We do not guard our gold, Men may uproot where worlds begin, Or read the name of the nameless sin; But if he fail or if he win To no good man is told.
"The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.
"The men of the East may search the scrolls For sure fates and fame, But the men that drink the blood of God Go singing to their shame.
"The wise men know what wicked things Are written on the sky, They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings, Hearing the heavy purple wings, Where the forgotten seraph kings Still plot how God shall die.
"Night shall be thrice night over you, And heaven an iron cope. Do you have joy without a cause, Yea, faith without a hope?"
He only heard the heathen men, Whose eyes are blue and bleak, Singing about some cruel thing Done by a great and smiling king In daylight on a deck.
King Guthrum lay on the upper land, On a single road at gaze, And his foe must come with lean array, Up the left arm of the cloven way, To the meeting of the ways.
And long ere the noise of armour, An hour ere the break of light, The woods awoke with crash and cry, And the birds sprang clamouring harsh and high, And the rabbits ran like an elves' army Ere Alfred came in sight.
The live wood came at Guthrum, On foot and claw and wing, The nests were noisy overhead, For Alfred and the star of red, All life went forth, and the forest fled Before the face of the King.
But halted in the woodways Christ's few were grim and grey, And each with a small, far, bird like sight Saw the high folly of the fight; And though strange joys had grown in the night, Despair grew with the day.
In the eyes Italian all things But a black laughter died; And Alfred flung his shield to earth And smote his breast and cried-
"I was a fool and wasted ale- My slaves found it sweet; I was a fool and wasted bread, And the birds had bread to eat.
"But yoke me my own oxen, Down to my own farm; My own dog will whine for me, My own friends will bend the knee, And the foes I slew openly Have never wished me harm."
And all were moved a little, But Colan stood apart, Having first pity, and after Hearing, like rat in rafter, That little worm of laughter That eats the Irish heart.
"Lift not my head from bloody ground, Bear not my body home, For all the earth is Roman earth And I shall die in Rome."
Then Alfred, King of England, Bade blow the horns of war, And fling the Golden Dragon out, With crackle and acclaim and shout, Scrolled and aflame and far.
And when they came to the open land They wheeled, deployed and stood; Midmost were Marcus and the King, And Eldred on the right-hand wing, And leftwards Colan darkling, In the last shade of the wood.
But the Earls of the Great Army Lay like a long half moon, Ten poles before their palisades, With wide winged helms and runic blades Red giants of an age of raids, In the thornland of Ethandune.
Midmost the saddles rose and swayed, And a stir of horses' manes, Where Guthrum and a few rode high On horses seized in victory; But Ogier went on foot to die, In the old way of the Danes.
Far to the King's left Elf the bard Led on the eastern wing With songs and spells that change the blood; And on the King's right Harold stood, The kinsman of the King.
But as he came before his line A little space along, His beardless face broke into mirth, And he cried: "What broken bits of earth Are here?
For Colan was hung with raiment Tattered like autumn leaves, And his men were all as thin as saints, And all as poor as thieves.
No bows nor slings nor bolts they bore, But bills and pikes ill made; And none but Colan bore a sword, And rusty was its blade.
And Colan's eyes with mystery And iron laughter stirred, And he spoke aloud, but lightly Not labouring to be heard.
Not less barbarian laughter Choked Harold like a flood, "And shall I fight with scarecrows That am of Guthrum's blood?
To his great gold ear ring Harold Tugged back the feathered tail, And swift had sprung the arrow, But swifter sprang the Gael.
Colan stood bare and weaponless, Earl Harold, as in pain, Strove for a smile, put hand to head, Stumbled and suddenly fell dead; And the small white daisies all waxed red With blood out of his brain.
And all at that marvel of the sword, Cast like a stone to slay, Cried out.
Verily Man shall not taste of victory Till he throws his sword away."
And the King said, "Do thou take my sword Who have done this deed of fire, For this is the manner of Christian men, Whether of steel or priestly pen, That they cast their hearts out of their ken To get their heart's desire.
"And whether ye swear a hive of monks, Or one fair wife to friend, This is the manner of Christian men, That their oath endures the end.
"Love with the shield of the Broken Heart Ever his bow doth bend, With a single shaft for a single prize, And the ultimate bolt that parts and flies Comes with a thunder of split skies, And a sound of souls that rend.
"So shall you earn a king's sword, Who cast your sword away." And the King took, with a random eye, A rude axe from a hind hard by And turned him to the fray.
As the sea flooding the flat sands Flew on the sea born horde, The two hosts shocked with dust and din, Left of the Latian paladin, Clanged all Prince Harold's howling kin On Colan and the sword.
But like a cloud of morning To eastward easily, Tall Eldred broke the sea of spears As a tall ship breaks the sea.
As the tall white devil of the Plague Moves out of Asian skies, With his foot on a waste of cities And his head in a cloud of flies;
Or purple and peacock skies grow dark With a moving locust tower; Or tawny sand winds tall and dry, Like hell's red banners beat and fly, When death comes out of Araby, Was Eldred in his hour.
Till on the helm of a high chief Fell shatteringly his brand, And the helm broke and the bone broke And the sword broke in his hand.
Seven spears, and the seventh Was wrought as the faerie blades, And given to Elf the minstrel By the monstrous water maids;
Thrice drowned was Elf the minstrel, And washed as dead on sand; And the third time men found him The spear was in his hand.
Centre and right the Wessex guard Grew pale for doubt and fear, And the flank failed at the advance, For the death light on the wizard lance- The star of the evil spear.
"Stand like an oak," cried Marcus, "Stand like a Roman wall! Eldred the Good is fallen- Are you too good to fall?
"The lamps are dying in your homes, The fruits upon your bough; Even now your old thatch smoulders, Gurth, Now is the judgment of the earth, Now is the death grip, now!"
But Mark was come of the glittering towns Where hot white details show, Where men can number and expound, And his faith grew in a hard ground Of doubt and reason and falsehood found, Where no faith else could grow.
Belief that grew of all beliefs One moment back was blown And belief that stood on unbelief Stood up iron and alone.
"Spears at the charge!" yelled Mark amain. "Death on the gods of death! Over the thrones of doom and blood Goeth God that is a craftsman good, And gold and iron, earth and wood, Loveth and laboureth.
"The fruits leap up in all your farms, The lamps in each abode; God of all good things done on earth, All wheels or webs of any worth, The God that makes the roof, Gurth, The God that makes the road.
Dealing far blows about the fight, Like thunder bolts a roam, Like birds about the battle field, While Ogier writhed under his shield Like a tortoise in his dome.
Then the great statue on the shield Looked his last look around With level and imperial eye; And Mark, the man from Italy, Fell in the sea of agony, And died without a sound.
"The blind gods roar for Rome fallen, And forum and garland gone, For the ice of the north is broken, And the sea of the north comes on.
"But whatso hap at the end of the world, Where Nothing is struck and sounds, It is not, by Thor, these monkish men These humbled Wessex hounds-
There was that in the wild men back of him, There was that in his own wild song, A dizzy throbbing, a drunkard smoke, That dazed to death all Wessex folk, And swept their spears along.
Vainly the sword of Colan And the axe of Alfred plied- The Danes poured in like a brainless plague, And knew not when they died.
Prince Colan slew a score of them, And was stricken to his knee; King Alfred slew a score and seven And was borne back on a tree.
The thorn woods over Ethandune Stand sharp and thick as spears, By night and furze and forest harms Far sundered were the friends in arms; The loud lost blows, the last alarms, Came not to Alfred's ears.
He may make, but he cannot conclude, a treaty; he may designate, but he cannot appoint, a public officer.
The President of the United States is responsible for his actions; but the person of the King is declared inviolable by the French Charter.
The fundamental principle of legislation-a principle essentially republican-is the same in both countries, although its consequences may be different, and its results more or less extensive. Whence I am led to conclude that France with its King is nearer akin to a republic than the Union with its President is to a monarchy.
Why The President Of The United States Does Not Require The Majority Of The Two Houses In Order To Carry On The Government It is an established axiom in Europe that a constitutional King cannot persevere in a system of government which is opposed by the two other branches of the legislature.
In Europe, harmony must reign between the Crown and the other branches of the legislature, because a collision between them may prove serious; in America, this harmony is not indispensable, because such a collision is impossible.
Election Of The President
It is clear that the greater the privileges of the executive authority are, the greater is the temptation; the more the ambition of the candidates is excited, the more warmly are their interests espoused by a throng of partisans who hope to share the power when their patron has won the prize.
To reduce hereditary royalty to the condition of an elective authority, the only means that I am acquainted with are to circumscribe its sphere of action beforehand, gradually to diminish its prerogatives, and to accustom the people to live without its protection.
In America the President exercises a certain influence on State affairs, but he does not conduct them; the preponderating power is vested in the representatives of the whole nation.
The political maxims of the country depend therefore on the mass of the people, not on the President alone; and consequently in America the elective system has no very prejudicial influence on the fixed principles of the Government.
In America society is so constituted that it can stand without assistance upon its own basis; nothing is to be feared from the pressure of external dangers, and the election of the President is a cause of agitation, but not of ruin.
The nation possessed two of the main causes of internal peace; it was a new country, but it was inhabited by a people grown old in the exercise of freedom.
This mode of election rendered a majority more probable; for the fewer the electors are, the greater is the chance of their coming to a final decision.
Ten of these elections took place simultaneously by the votes of the special electors in the different States.
The House of Representatives has only twice exercised its conditional privilege of deciding in cases of uncertainty; the first time was at the election of mr Jefferson in eighteen o one; the second was in eighteen twenty five, when mr Quincy Adams was named.
The Election may be considered as a national crisis-Why?--Passions of the people-Anxiety of the President-Calm which succeeds the agitation of the election.
She felt instinctively that this was wrong and mean, and whenever the feeling of remorse was strong within her she made a desperate effort to please her grim and difficult relative.
The searching look of the eyes, the sharp voice, the hard knotty fingers, the thin straight lips, the long silences, the "front piece" that didn't match her hair, the very obvious "parting" that seemed sewed in with linen thread on black net,--there was not a single item that appealed to Rebecca.
"I know.
But mr Watson says he'll take back part of it, and let us have pink and blue for the same price."
"What princes?
RIVERBORO SECRETS
First they had it I wanted to marry the minister, and when he took a wife in Standish I was known to be disappointed.
Let me wipe off that strawberry jam over your mouth."
"I'll take that piece of coral away from you, and I THINK I shall slap you besides!"
"You wouldn't darst," retorted Minnie.
"If you do, I'll tell my mother and the teacher, so there!"
"She THREATENED me," whispered Minnie, "but I never believe a word she says."
This was the note:--
R. Randall.
The effect of this piece of doggerel was entirely convincing, and for days afterwards whenever Minnie met the Simpsons even a mile from the brick house she shuddered and held her peace.
The morrow brought a very sober looking morning, the sun making only a few efforts to appear, and Catherine augured from it everything most favourable to her wishes.
She applied to mr Allen for confirmation of her hopes, but mr Allen, not having his own skies and barometer about him, declined giving any absolute promise of sunshine. She applied to mrs Allen, and mrs Allen's opinion was more positive. "She had no doubt in the world of its being a very fine day, if the clouds would only go off, and the sun keep out."
dear, I do believe it will be wet," broke from her in a most desponding tone.
"No walk for me today," sighed Catherine; "but perhaps it may come to nothing, or it may hold up before twelve."
"Perhaps it may, but then, my dear, it will be so dirty."
"Oh!
That will not signify; I never mind dirt."
"No," replied her friend very placidly, "I know you never mind dirt."
"So it does indeed.
If it keeps raining, the streets will be very wet."
"There are four umbrellas up already.
I would much rather take a chair at any time."
"It was such a nice looking morning!
"Anybody would have thought so indeed.
I hope mr Allen will put on his greatcoat when he goes, but I dare say he will not, for he had rather do anything in the world than walk out in a greatcoat; I wonder he should dislike it, it must be so comfortable."
Catherine went every five minutes to the clock, threatening on each return that, if it still kept on raining another five minutes, she would give up the matter as hopeless.
The clock struck twelve, and it still rained.
"You will not be able to go, my dear."
"I do not quite despair yet.
I shall not give it up till a quarter after twelve.
This is just the time of day for it to clear up, and I do think it looks a little lighter.
There, it is twenty minutes after twelve, and now I shall give it up entirely.
It was too dirty for mrs Allen to accompany her husband to the pump room; he accordingly set off by himself, and Catherine had barely watched him down the street when her notice was claimed by the approach of the same two open carriages, containing the same three people that had surprised her so much a few mornings back.
"Isabella, my brother, and mr Thorpe, I declare!
They are coming for me perhaps-but I shall not go-I cannot go indeed, for you know Miss Tilney may still call." mrs Allen agreed to it.
john Thorpe was soon with them, and his voice was with them yet sooner, for on the stairs he was calling out to Miss Morland to be quick.
"Make haste!
Make haste!" as he threw open the door.
"To Bristol!
But, however, I cannot go with you today, because I am engaged; I expect some friends every moment." This was of course vehemently talked down as no reason at all; mrs Allen was called on to second him, and the two others walked in, to give their assistance.
"My sweetest Catherine, is not this delightful?
Oh!
I am in such ecstasies at the thoughts of a little country air and quiet!
So much better than going to the Lower Rooms.
"I doubt our being able to do so much," said Morland.
"You croaking fellow!" cried Thorpe.
"We shall be able to do ten times more.
Kingsweston!
Aye, and Blaize Castle too, and anything else we can hear of; but here is your sister says she will not go."
"Blaize Castle!" cried Catherine.
"What is that?"
"The finest place in England-worth going fifty miles at any time to see."
"What, is it really a castle, an old castle?"
"The oldest in the kingdom."
"But is it like what one reads of?"
"Not go!
"I cannot go, because"--looking down as she spoke, fearful of Isabella's smile-"I expect Miss Tilney and her brother to call on me to take a country walk.
They promised to come at twelve, only it rained; but now, as it is so fine, I dare say they will be here soon."
"Not they indeed," cried Thorpe; "for, as we turned into Broad Street, I saw them-does he not drive a phaeton with bright chestnuts?"
"I do not know indeed."
"Did you indeed?"
"Did upon my soul; knew him again directly, and he seemed to have got some very pretty cattle too."
But I suppose they thought it would be too dirty for a walk."
"And well they might, for I never saw so much dirt in my life.
It has not been so dirty the whole winter; it is ankle deep everywhere."
Isabella corroborated it: "My dearest Catherine, you cannot form an idea of the dirt; come, you must go; you cannot refuse going now."
"Yes, yes, every hole and corner."
"But then, if they should only be gone out for an hour till it is dryer, and call by and by?"
"Make yourself easy, there is no danger of that, for I heard Tilney hallooing to a man who was just passing by on horseback, that they were going as far as Wick Rocks."
"Then I will.
mrs Allen was not inattentive to it: "Well, my dear," said she, "suppose you go." And in two minutes they were off.
She could not think the Tilneys had acted quite well by her, in so readily giving up their engagement, without sending her any message of excuse.
It was now but an hour later than the time fixed on for the beginning of their walk; and, in spite of what she had heard of the prodigious accumulation of dirt in the course of that hour, she could not from her own observation help thinking that they might have gone with very little inconvenience.
On the other hand, the delight of exploring an edifice like Udolpho, as her fancy represented Blaize Castle to be, was such a counterpoise of good as might console her for almost anything.
They passed briskly down Pulteney Street, and through Laura Place, without the exchange of many words.
Thorpe talked to his horse, and she meditated, by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap doors.
As they entered Argyle Buildings, however, she was roused by this address from her companion, "Who is that girl who looked at you so hard as she went by?"
"Who?
Where?"
"On the right-hand pavement-she must be almost out of sight now." Catherine looked round and saw Miss Tilney leaning on her brother's arm, walking slowly down the street.
She saw them both looking back at her. "Stop, stop, mr Thorpe," she impatiently cried; "it is Miss Tilney; it is indeed.
How could you tell me they were gone?
Still, however, and during the length of another street, she entreated him to stop.
"Pray, pray stop, mr Thorpe.
I cannot go on.
I must go back to Miss Tilney." But mr Thorpe only laughed, smacked his whip, encouraged his horse, made odd noises, and drove on; and Catherine, angry and vexed as she was, having no power of getting away, was obliged to give up the point and submit. Her reproaches, however, were not spared.
How could you say that you saw them driving up the Lansdown Road?
I would not have had it happen so for the world.
They must think it so strange, so rude of me!
To go by them, too, without saying a word! You do not know how vexed I am; I shall have no pleasure at Clifton, nor in anything else.
I had rather, ten thousand times rather, get out now, and walk back to them.
She listened reluctantly, and her replies were short.
It will never do.
I wonder whether it will be a full ball or not!
Why were not they more punctual? It was dirty, indeed, but what did that signify?
What a delightful hand you have got!
Early the next day, a note from Isabella, speaking peace and tenderness in every line, and entreating the immediate presence of her friend on a matter of the utmost importance, hastened Catherine, in the happiest state of confidence and curiosity, to Edgar's Buildings.
The two youngest Miss Thorpes were by themselves in the parlour; and, on Anne's quitting it to call her sister, Catherine took the opportunity of asking the other for some particulars of their yesterday's party.
It appeared that Blaize Castle had never been thought of; and, as for all the rest, there was nothing to regret for half an instant.
"She will never forgive me, I am sure; but, you know, how could I help it?
It sees through everything."
Catherine replied only by a look of wondering ignorance.
"Nay, my beloved, sweetest friend," continued the other, "compose yourself.
I am amazingly agitated, as you perceive.
Let us sit down and talk in comfort.
Well, and so you guessed it the moment you had my note? Sly creature!
Oh!
Your brother is the most charming of men.
But what will your excellent father and mother say?
Oh!
When I think of them I am so agitated!"
Can you-can you really be in love with james?"
This bold surmise, however, she soon learnt comprehended but half the fact.
The anxious affection, which she was accused of having continually watched in Isabella's every look and action, had, in the course of their yesterday's party, received the delightful confession of an equal love. Her heart and faith were alike engaged to james.
Never had Catherine listened to anything so full of interest, wonder, and joy.
Her brother and her friend engaged!
The strength of her feelings she could not express; the nature of them, however, contented her friend.
"You are so like your dear brother," continued Isabella, "that I quite doted on you the first moment I saw you.
Oh!
Catherine, the many sleepless nights I have had on your brother's account!
I am grown wretchedly thin, I know; but I will not pain you by describing my anxiety; you have seen enough of it.
Catherine felt that nothing could have been safer; but ashamed of an ignorance little expected, she dared no longer contest the point, nor refuse to have been as full of arch penetration and affectionate sympathy as Isabella chose to consider her.
"Indeed, Isabella, you are too humble.
Had I the command of millions, were I mistress of the whole world, your brother would be my only choice."
"For my own part," said Isabella, "my wishes are so moderate that the smallest income in nature would be enough for me.
A cottage in some retired village would be ecstasy.
"Richmond!" cried Catherine.
"You must settle near Fullerton.
I will not allow myself to think of such things, till we have your father's answer.
Morland says that by sending it tonight to Salisbury, we may have it tomorrow. Tomorrow?
"Indeed, Morland, I must drive you away.
For heaven's sake, waste no more time.
There, go, go-I insist on it."
But when it did come, where could distress be found?
"I have had no difficulty in gaining the consent of my kind parents, and am promised that everything in their power shall be done to forward my happiness," were the first three lines, and in one moment all was joyful security.
It was "dear john" and "dear Catherine" at every word; "dear Anne and dear Maria" must immediately be made sharers in their felicity; and two "dears" at once before the name of Isabella were not more than that beloved child had now well earned.
But for particulars Isabella could well afford to wait.
The needful was comprised in mr Morland's promise; his honour was pledged to make everything easy; and by what means their income was to be formed, whether landed property were to be resigned, or funded money made over, was a matter in which her disinterested spirit took no concern.
She saw herself at the end of a few weeks, the gaze and admiration of every new acquaintance at Fullerton, the envy of every valued old friend in Putney, with a carriage at her command, a new name on her tickets, and a brilliant exhibition of hoop rings on her finger.
"Well, Miss Morland," said he, on finding her alone in the parlour, "I am come to bid you good bye." Catherine wished him a good journey. Without appearing to hear her, he walked to the window, fidgeted about, hummed a tune, and seemed wholly self occupied.
He made no answer; but after a minute's silence burst out with, "A famous good thing this marrying scheme, upon my soul!
"Do you?
That's honest, by heavens!
I am glad you are no enemy to matrimony, however.
"And then you know"--twisting himself about and forcing a foolish laugh-"I say, then you know, we may try the truth of this same old song."
"May we?
I dine with Miss Tilney today, and must now be going home."
"Nay, but there is no such confounded hurry.
Not but that I shall be down again by the end of a fortnight, and a devilish long fortnight it will appear to me."
"That is kind of you, however-kind and good-natured.
Good morning to you."
"But I say, Miss Morland, I shall come and pay my respects at Fullerton before it is long, if not disagreeable."
"And I hope-I hope, Miss Morland, you will not be sorry to see me."
"Oh! dear, not at all.
"That is just my way of thinking.
And as to most matters, to say the truth, there are not many that I know my own mind about."
My notion of things is simple enough.
Fortune is nothing.
"Very true.
I think like you there.
If there is a good fortune on one side, there can be no occasion for any on the other.
And to marry for money I think the wickedest thing in existence.
We shall be very glad to see you at Fullerton, whenever it is convenient." And away she went.
It was not in the power of all his gallantry to detain her longer.
With such news to communicate, and such a visit to prepare for, her departure was not to be delayed by anything in his nature to urge; and she hurried away, leaving him to the undivided consciousness of his own happy address, and her explicit encouragement.
The agitation which she had herself experienced on first learning her brother's engagement made her expect to raise no inconsiderable emotion in mr and mrs Allen, by the communication of the wonderful event.
Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed.
He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion; never, at least, save in cases where to say such things seemed a kind of demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment.
And yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of actual or potential inconduite, as they said at Geneva?
He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone. Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this. Certainly she was very charming, but how deucedly sociable!
Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him. Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent.
Some people had told him that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others had told him that, after all, they were not.
He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt-a pretty American flirt.
He had known, here in Europe, two or three women-persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability's sake, with husbands-who were great coquettes-dangerous, terrible women, with whom one's relations were liable to take a serious turn.
But this young girl was not a coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a pretty American flirt.
He leaned back in his seat; he remarked to himself that she had the most charming nose he had ever seen; he wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations of one's intercourse with a pretty American flirt.
It presently became apparent that he was on the way to learn.
"Yes, formerly, more than once," said Winterbourne.
"You too, I suppose, have seen it?"
"No; we haven't been there.
I want to go there dreadfully.
Of course I mean to go there.
"It's a very pretty excursion," said Winterbourne, "and very easy to make.
You can drive, you know, or you can go by the little steamer."
"You can go in the cars," said Miss Miller.
"Yes; you can go in the cars," Winterbourne assented.
"We were going last week, but my mother gave out.
She suffers dreadfully from dyspepsia.
She said she couldn't go.
Randolph wouldn't go either; he says he doesn't think much of old castles.
But I guess we'll go this week, if we can get Randolph."
"He says he don't care much about old castles.
He wants to stay at the hotel.
"Couldn't you get some one to stay for the afternoon with Randolph?"
Miss Miller looked at him a moment, and then, very placidly, "I wish YOU would stay with him!" she said.
Winterbourne hesitated a moment.
"I should much rather go to Chillon with you."
She didn't rise, blushing, as a young girl at Geneva would have done; and yet Winterbourne, conscious that he had been very bold, thought it possible she was offended.
"With your mother," he answered very respectfully.
But it seemed that both his audacity and his respect were lost upon Miss Daisy Miller.
"I guess my mother won't go, after all," she said.
"She don't like to ride round in the afternoon.
"Then we may arrange it.
"Eugenio?" the young man inquired.
"Eugenio's our courier.
But he's a splendid courier.
I guess he'll stay at home with Randolph if mother does, and then we can go to the castle."
Possibly he would have done so and quite spoiled the project, but at this moment another person, presumably Eugenio, appeared.
"Oh, Eugenio!" said Miss Miller with the friendliest accent.
Eugenio's tone apparently threw, even to Miss Miller's own apprehension, a slightly ironical light upon the young girl's situation.
She turned to Winterbourne, blushing a little-a very little.
"I shall not be happy till we go!" he protested.
The young man, at least, thought his manner of looking an offense to Miss Miller; it conveyed an imputation that she "picked up" acquaintances.
"Oh yes, I have observed them.
Seen them-heard them-and kept out of their way." mrs Costello was a widow with a fortune; a person of much distinction, who frequently intimated that, if she were not so dreadfully liable to sick headaches, she would probably have left a deeper impress upon her time.
Her nephew, who had come up to Vevey expressly to see her, was therefore more attentive than those who, as she said, were nearer to her.
He had imbibed at Geneva the idea that one must always be attentive to one's aunt.
She admitted that she was very exclusive; but, if he were acquainted with New York, he would see that one had to be.
And her picture of the minutely hierarchical constitution of the society of that city, which she presented to him in many different lights, was, to Winterbourne's imagination, almost oppressively striking.
He immediately perceived, from her tone, that Miss Daisy Miller's place in the social scale was low.
"I am afraid you don't approve of them," he said.
"They are very common," mrs Costello declared.
"I can't, my dear Frederick.
I would if I could, but I can't."
"The young girl is very pretty," said Winterbourne in a moment.
"Of course she's pretty.
But she is very common."
"She has that charming look that they all have," his aunt resumed.
"I can't think where they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection-no, you don't know how well she dresses.
I can't think where they get their taste."
"She is a young lady," said mrs Costello, "who has an intimacy with her mamma's courier."
"An intimacy with the courier?" the young man demanded.
"Oh, the mother is just as bad!
They treat the courier like a familiar friend-like a gentleman.
I shouldn't wonder if he dines with them. Very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman.
He probably corresponds to the young lady's idea of a count.
He sits with them in the garden in the evening. I think he smokes."
Winterbourne listened with interest to these disclosures; they helped him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy.
Evidently she was rather wild. "Well," he said, "I am not a courier, and yet she was very charming to me."
"You had better have said at first," said mrs Costello with dignity, "that you had made her acquaintance."
And pray what did you say?"
"I am much obliged to you."
"And pray who is to guarantee hers?"
"You don't say that as if you believed it," mrs Costello observed.
"She is completely uncultivated," Winterbourne went on.
"But she is wonderfully pretty, and, in short, she is very nice.
"You two are going off there together?
I should say it proved just the contrary.
You haven't been twenty four hours in the house."
"I have known her half an hour!" said Winterbourne, smiling.
"What a dreadful girl!"
Her nephew was silent for some moments.
"Think what, sir?" said his aunt.
"That she is the sort of young lady who expects a man, sooner or later, to carry her off?"
"I haven't the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do.
But I really think that you had better not meddle with little American girls that are uncultivated, as you call them.
You have lived too long out of the country.
You will be sure to make some great mistake.
You are too innocent."
"My dear aunt, I am not so innocent," said Winterbourne, smiling and curling his mustache.
"You won't let the poor girl know you then?" he asked at last.
"I think that she fully intends it."
"Then, my dear Frederick," said mrs Costello, "I must decline the honor of her acquaintance.
I am an old woman, but I am not too old, thank Heaven, to be shocked!"
"But don't they all do these things-the young girls in America?" Winterbourne inquired.
mrs Costello stared a moment.
"I should like to see my granddaughters do them!" she declared grimly.
Winterbourne was impatient to see her again, and he was vexed with himself that, by instinct, he should not appreciate her justly.
Though he was impatient to see her, he hardly knew what he should say to her about his aunt's refusal to become acquainted with her; but he discovered, promptly enough, that with Miss Daisy Miller there was no great need of walking on tiptoe.
He found her that evening in the garden, wandering about in the warm starlight like an indolent sylph, and swinging to and fro the largest fan he had ever beheld.
It was ten o'clock.
"I have been walking round with mother.
But mother gets tired walking round," she answered.
"No; she doesn't like to go to bed," said the young girl.
"She doesn't sleep-not three hours.
She's dreadfully nervous.
She's gone somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to get him to go to bed.
He doesn't like to go to bed."
"Let us hope she will persuade him," observed Winterbourne.
"She will talk to him all she can; but he doesn't like her to talk to him," said Miss Daisy, opening her fan.
"She's going to try to get Eugenio to talk to him.
I don't believe he'll go to bed before eleven."
It appeared that Randolph's vigil was in fact triumphantly prolonged, for Winterbourne strolled about with the young girl for some time without meeting her mother.
"She's your aunt." Then, on Winterbourne's admitting the fact and expressing some curiosity as to how she had learned it, she said she had heard all about mrs Costello from the chambermaid.
She was very quiet and very comme il faut; she wore white puffs; she spoke to no one, and she never dined at the table d'hote.
Every two days she had a headache.
"I want to know her ever so much.
I know just what YOUR aunt would be; I know I should like her.
She would be very exclusive.
Well, we ARE exclusive, mother and i We don't speak to everyone-or they don't speak to us.
I suppose it's about the same thing.
Winterbourne was embarrassed.
The young girl looked at him through the dusk.
"She tells me she does," he answered at last, not knowing what to say.
Miss Daisy Miller stopped and stood looking at him.
Her prettiness was still visible in the darkness; she was opening and closing her enormous fan.
You needn't be afraid.
Winterbourne fancied there was a tremor in her voice; he was touched, shocked, mortified by it.
In the great city in which he lived there was always something going on; every day many strangers came there.
'Those must indeed be splendid clothes,' thought the Emperor.
'If I had them on I could find out which men in my kingdom are unfit for the offices they hold; I could distinguish the wise from the stupid!
Yes, this cloth must be woven for me at once.' And he gave both the impostors much money, so that they might begin their work.
'I should like very much to know how far they have got on with the cloth,' thought the Emperor.
But he remembered when he thought about it that whoever was stupid or not fit for his office would not be able to see it.
Both the impostors begged him to be so kind as to step closer, and asked him if it were not a beautiful texture and lovely colours.
I have never thought that, and nobody must know it!
No, I must certainly not say that I cannot see the cloth!'
'What a texture!
What colours!
'Yes, it is quite beautiful,' he said to the Emperor.
Now the Emperor wanted to see it himself while it was still on the loom.
With a great crowd of select followers, amongst whom were both the worthy statesmen who had already been there before, he went to the cunning impostors, who were now weaving with all their might, but without fibre or thread.
'Is it not splendid!' said both the old statesmen who had already been there.
What colours!' And then they pointed to the empty loom, for they believed that the others could see the cloth quite well.
'What!' thought the Emperor, 'I can see nothing!
Am I stupid?
Am I not fit to be Emperor?
That were the most dreadful thing that could happen to me.
'It has my gracious approval.' And then he nodded pleasantly, and examined the empty loom, for he would not say that he could see nothing.
BLOCKHEAD HANS
All the servants stood in the courtyard and saw them mount their steeds, and here by chance came the third brother; for the squire had three sons, but nobody counted him with his brothers, for he was not so learned as they were, and he was generally called 'Blockhead Hans.'
You are in your Sunday best clothes!'
'We are going to Court, to woo the Princess!
'Hurrah!
I'll go to!' cried Blockhead Hans; and the brothers laughed at him and rode off.
'Dear father!' cried Blockhead Hans, 'I must have a horse too.
What a desire for marriage has seized me!
'Stop that nonsense!' said the old man.
'I will not give you a horse. YOU can't speak; YOU don't know how to choose your words.
Your brothers! Ah! they are very different lads!'
'Well,' said Blockhead Hans, 'if I can't have a horse, I will take the goat which is mine; he can carry me!'
And he did so.
'Hullo!' bawled Blockhead Hans, 'here I am!
Just look what I found on the road!'--and he showed them a dead crow which he had picked up.
'Blockhead!' said his brothers, 'what are you going to do with it?'
'With the crow?
I shall give it to the Princess!'
'Do so, certainly!' they said, laughing loudly and riding on.
'Slap! bang! here I am again!
Look what I have just found!
Are you going to send that, too, to the Princess?'
'Slap! bang! here I am!' cried Blockhead Hans; 'better and better-it is really famous!'
'Oh,' said Blockhead Hans, 'it is really too good!
How pleased the Princess will be!'
'Why!' said the brothers, 'this is pure mud, straight from the ditch.'
'Of course it is!' said Blockhead Hans, 'and it is the best kind!
Look how it runs through one's fingers!' and, so saying, he filled his pocket with the mud.
This was a very good thing, for otherwise they would have torn each other in pieces, merely because the one was in front of the other.
'It doesn't matter!' said the Princess. 'Away! out with him!'
'It is hot in here, isn't it!' said the suitor.
My father is roasting young chickens to day!' said the Princess.
He was not prepared for such a speech; he did not know what to say, although he wanted to say something witty.
'Of course!
'How do you-um!' he said, and the reporters wrote down.
'How do you-um.'
'It doesn't matter!' said the Princess. 'Take him out!'
'Of course!
'That's good!' replied Blockhead Hans; 'then can I roast a crow with them?'
'With the greatest of pleasure!' said the Princess; 'but have you anything you can roast them in? for I have neither pot nor saucepan.'
'I have so much that I can quite well throw some away!' and he poured some mud out of his pocket.
'I like you!' said the Princess.
And the reporters giggled, and each dropped a blot of ink on the floor.
'That was neatly done!' said the Princess. 'I couldn't have done it; but I will soon learn how to!'
Blockhead Hans became King, got a wife and a crown, and sat on the throne; and this we have still damp from the newspaper of the editor and the reporters-and they are not to be believed for a moment.
This is a LibriVox recording.
The solution given by Socrates is as follows:--
Ion is confident that Socrates would never think him mad if he could only hear his embellishments of Homer.
Ion is compelled to admit that every man will judge of his own particular art better than the rhapsode.
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Ion.
ION: No, Socrates; but from Epidaurus, where I attended the festival of Asclepius.
SOCRATES: Well done; and I hope that you will do the same for us at the Panathenaea.
ION: Very true:
ION: A prophet.
ION: Clearly.
ION: Yes, Socrates; but not in the same way as Homer.
SOCRATES: What, in a worse way?
ION: Yes, in a far worse.
ION: Yes.
ION: Clearly the same.
ION: Yes.
ION: Yes; and I am right in saying so.
ION: That is true.
ION: Yes.
Would you like me to explain my meaning, Ion?
Let us consider this matter; is not the art of painting a whole?
ION: Yes.
SOCRATES: And there are and have been many painters good and bad?
ION: Yes.
ION: No indeed, I have never known such a person.
ION: No indeed; no more than the other.
ION: I cannot deny what you say, Socrates.
Nevertheless I am conscious in my own self, and the world agrees with me in thinking that I do speak better and have more to say about Homer than any other man.
The gift which you possess of speaking excellently about Homer is not an art, but, as I was just saying, an inspiration; there is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea.
In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration.
For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.
And this is true.
And Tynnichus the Chalcidian affords a striking instance of what I am saying: he wrote nothing that any one would care to remember but the famous paean which is in every one's mouth, one of the finest poems ever written, simply an invention of the Muses, as he himself says.
For in this way the God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods by whom they are severally possessed.
ION: Yes, indeed, Socrates, I feel that you are; for your words touch my soul, and I am persuaded that good poets by a divine inspiration interpret the things of the Gods to us.
SOCRATES: And you rhapsodists are the interpreters of the poets?
ION: Precisely.
Are you not carried out of yourself, and does not your soul in an ecstasy seem to be among the persons or places of which you are speaking, whether they are in Ithaca or in Troy or whatever may be the scene of the poem?
ION: That proof strikes home to me, Socrates.
For I must frankly confess that at the tale of pity my eyes are filled with tears, and when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end and my heart throbs.
ION: 'Bend gently,' he says, 'in the polished chariot to the left of them, and urge the horse on the right hand with whip and voice; and slacken the rein.
SOCRATES: Enough.
SOCRATES: And will the reason be that this is his art, or will there be any other reason?
SOCRATES: And every art is appointed by God to have knowledge of a certain work; for that which we know by the art of the pilot we do not know by the art of medicine?
ION: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: Nor do we know by the art of the carpenter that which we know by the art of medicine?
ION: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: And this is true of all the arts;--that which we know with one art we do not know with the other?
But let me ask a prior question: You admit that there are differences of arts?
ION: Yes.
ION: Yes.
SOCRATES: Yes, surely; for if the subject of knowledge were the same, there would be no meaning in saying that the arts were different,--if they both gave the same knowledge.
For example, I know that here are five fingers, and you know the same.
And if I were to ask whether I and you became acquainted with this fact by the help of the same art of arithmetic, you would acknowledge that we did?
ION: That is my opinion, Socrates.
ION: Very true.
SOCRATES: Then which will be a better judge of the lines which you were reciting from Homer, you or the charioteer?
ION: The charioteer.
ION: Yes.
ION: Yes.
SOCRATES: And if a different knowledge, then a knowledge of different matters?
ION: True.
SOCRATES: You know the passage in which Hecamede, the concubine of Nestor, is described as giving to the wounded Machaon a posset, as he says,
ION: The art of medicine.
SOCRATES: And when Homer says,
will the art of the fisherman or of the rhapsode be better able to judge whether these lines are rightly expressed or not?
ION: Clearly, Socrates, the art of the fisherman.
For there are many such passages, particularly in the Odyssee; as, for example, the passage in which Theoclymenus the prophet of the house of Melampus says to the suitors:--
'Wretched men! what is happening to you?
These are the sort of things which I should say that the prophet ought to consider and determine.
ION: And you are quite right, Socrates, in saying so.
SOCRATES: Not all, Ion, surely.
ION: Why, what am I forgetting?
ION: Yes, I remember.
SOCRATES: And you admitted that being different they would have different subjects of knowledge?
ION: Yes.
ION: I should exclude certain things, Socrates.
ION: Yes.
SOCRATES: Suppose the slave to be a cowherd; the rhapsode will know better than the cowherd what he ought to say in order to soothe the infuriated cows?
ION: No, he will not.
ION: no
SOCRATES: Well, but is the art of the rhapsode the art of the general?
ION: I am sure that I should know what a general ought to say.
But suppose I were to ask you: By the help of which art, Ion, do you know whether horses are well managed, by your skill as a horseman or as a performer on the lyre-what would you answer?
ION: Yes.
ION: To me there appears to be no difference between them.
SOCRATES: What do you mean?
Do you mean to say that the art of the rhapsode and of the general is the same?
SOCRATES: Then he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general?
ION: No; I do not say that.
SOCRATES: But you do say that he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general.
ION: Far the best, Socrates.
ION: To be sure, Socrates; and Homer was my master.
SOCRATES: My good Ion, did you never hear of Apollodorus of Cyzicus?
And will they not choose Ion the Ephesian to be their general, and honour him, if he prove himself worthy?
Were not the ephesians originally Athenians, and Ephesus is no mean city?
You have literally as many forms as Proteus; and now you go all manner of ways, twisting and turning, and, like Proteus, become all manner of people at once, and at last slip away from me in the disguise of a general, in order that you may escape exhibiting your Homeric lore.
And if you have art, then, as I was saying, in falsifying your promise that you would exhibit Homer, you are not dealing fairly with me.
But if, as I believe, you have no art, but speak all these beautiful words about Homer unconsciously under his inspiring influence, then I acquit you of dishonesty, and shall only say that you are inspired.
Which do you prefer to be thought, dishonest or inspired?
ION: There is a great difference, Socrates, between the two alternatives; and inspiration is by far the nobler.
SOCRATES: Then, Ion, I shall assume the nobler alternative; and attribute to you in your praises of Homer inspiration, and not art.
THE TOAD AND THE BOY
In the largest teepee sat a young mother wrapping red porcupine quills about the long fringes of a buckskin cushion.
Beside her lay a black eyed baby boy cooing and laughing.
Reaching and kicking upward with his tiny hands and feet, he played with the dangling strings of his heavy beaded bonnet hanging empty on a tent pole above him.
It was almost time for the return of her husband.
She was strong and swung an ax as skillfully as any man.
Her loose buckskin dress was made for such freedom.
Soon carrying easily a bundle of long willows on her back, with a loop of rope over both her shoulders, she came striding homeward.
There was nowhere any sign of the child.
Running with clinched fists to the nearest teepees, she called: "Has any one seen my baby?
He is gone!
My little son is gone!"
"Hinnu!
Hinnu!" exclaimed the women, rising to their feet and rushing out of their wigwams.
"We have not seen your child!
What has happened?" queried the women.
With great tears in her eyes the mother told her story.
"We will search with you," they said to her as she started off.
They met the returning husbands, who turned about and joined in the hunt for the missing child.
Along the shore of the lakes, among the high grown reeds, they looked in vain.
He was nowhere to be found.
After many days and nights the search was given up.
It was sad, indeed, to hear the mother wailing aloud for her little son.
It was growing late in the autumn.
The birds were flying high toward the south.
The teepees around the lakes were gone, save one lonely dwelling.
Till the winter snow covered the ground and ice covered the lakes, the wailing woman's voice was heard from that solitary wigwam.
Thus ten summers and as many winters have come and gone since the strange disappearance of the little child.
Every autumn with the hunters came the unhappy parents of the lost baby to search again for him.
Toward the latter part of the tenth season when, one by one, the teepees were folded and the families went away from the lake region, the mother walked again along the lake shore weeping.
One evening, across the lake from where the crying woman stood, a pair of bright black eyes peered at her through the tall reeds and wild rice.
His long, loose hair hanging down his brown back and shoulders was carelessly tossed from his round face.
He wore a loin cloth of woven sweet grass.
Crouching low to the marshy ground, he listened to the wailing voice.
At length, when the moaning ceased, he sprang to his feet and ran like a nymph with swift outstretched toes.
He rushed into a small hut of reeds and grasses.
"Mother!
Mother!
"It was the voice of a weeping woman you heard.
My son, do not say you like it.
Do not tell me it brought tears to your eyes.
You have never heard me weep.
I can please your ear and break your heart.
Listen!" replied the great old toad.
Stepping outside, she stood by the entrance way.
She was old and badly puffed out.
She had reared a large family of little toads, but none of them had aroused her love, nor ever grieved her.
Now, in her great desire to keep the stolen boy awhile longer, she ventured to cry as the Dakota woman does.
In a gruff, coarse voice she broke forth:
Hin hin, red blanket, with white border!"
Not knowing that the syllables of a Dakota's cry are the names of loved ones gone, the ugly toad mother sought to please the boy's ear with the names of valuable articles.
Having shrieked in a torturing voice and mouthed extravagant names, the old toad rolled her tearless eyes with great satisfaction.
"My son, did my voice bring tears to your eyes?
Do you not like my wailing better?"
"No, no!" pouted the boy with some impatience.
"I want to hear the woman's voice!
Tell me, mother, why the human voice stirs all my feelings!"
I cannot keep him longer, I fear.
Oh, no, I cannot give away the pretty creature I have taught to call me 'mother' all these many winters."
"Mother," went on the child voice, "tell me one thing.
The big, ugly toad, looking at her pudgy children, said: "The eldest is always best."
This reply quieted the boy for a while.
Very closely watched the old toad mother her stolen human son.
When by chance he started off alone, she shoved out one of her own children after him, saying: "Do not come back without your big brother."
Always at his feet hops a little toad brother.
One day an Indian hunter, wading in the deep waters, spied the boy.
He had heard of the baby stolen long ago.
"This is he!" murmured the hunter to himself as he ran to his wigwam.
"I saw among the tall reeds a black haired boy at play!" shouted he to the people.
At once the unhappy father and mother cried out, "'tis he, our boy!" Quickly he led them to the lake.
Peeping through the wild rice, he pointed with unsteady finger toward the boy playing all unawares.
I am going to the North country on a long hunt."
With these words of caution to the bent old rabbit grandmother with whom he had lived since he was a tiny babe, Manstin started off toward the north.
He was scarce over the great high hills when he heard the shrieking of a human child.
Shameless coward!
he delights in torturing helpless creatures!"
Muttering indistinct words, Manstin ran up the last hill and lo! in the ravine beyond stood the terrible monster with a face in front and one in the back of his head!
This brown giant was without clothes save for a wild cat skin about his loins.
In a laughing voice he hummed an Indian mother's lullaby, "A boo!
Aboo!" and at the same time he switched the naked baby with a thorny wild rose bush.
Now an arrow stuck above the ear of Double Face.
It was a poisoned arrow, and the giant fell dead.
Soon he came to a teepee from whence loud wailing voices broke.
It was the teepee of the stolen baby and the mourners were its heart broken parents.
When gallant Manstin returned the child to the eager arms of the mother there came a sudden terror into the eyes of both the Dakotas.
Do not fear."
That night a strange thing happened.
With his feet placed gently yet firmly upon the tiny toes of the little child, he drew upward by each small hand the sleeping child till he was a full grown man.
"Henceforth we are friends, to help each other," said Manstin, shaking a right hand in farewell.
"Ho! Be it so!" answered the newly made man.
His alert eye caught sight of a rawhide rope staked to the water's brink, which led away toward a small round hut in the distance. The ground was trodden into a deep groove beneath the loosely drawn rawhide rope.
"Hun he!" exclaimed Manstin, bending over the freshly made footprints in the moist bank of the brook.
This rope is his guide by which he comes for his daily water!" surmised Manstin, who knew all the peculiar contrivances of the people.
At once his eyes became fixed upon the solitary dwelling and hither he followed his curiosity,--a real blind man's rope.
Quietly he lifted the door flap and entered in.
An old toothless grandfather, blind and shaky with age, sat upon the ground.
He was not deaf however.
"How, grandchild," he mumbled, for he was old enough to be grandparent to every living thing, "how!
I cannot see you.
Pray, speak your name!"
"Grandfather, I am Manstin," answered the rabbit, all the while looking with curious eyes about the wigwam.
"Grandfather, what is it so tightly packed in all these buckskin bags placed against the tent poles?" he asked.
These are magic bags which never grow empty.
"Grandfather, I wish I lived in such sure luxury!
"My grandchild, your eyes are your luxury! you would be unhappy without them!" the old man replied.
"Grandfather, I would give you my two eyes for your place!" cried Manstin.
"How! you have said it.
Arise.
For a short time it was a most pleasant pastime to smoke willow bark and to eat from the magic bags.
Manstin grew thirsty, but there was no water in the small dwelling. Taking one of the rawhide ropes he started toward the brook to quench his thirst.
He was young and unwilling to trudge slowly in the old man's footpath.
He was full of glee, for it had been many long moons since he had tasted such good food.
Thus he skipped confidently along jerking the old weather eaten rawhide spasmodically till all of a sudden it gave way and Manstin fell headlong into the water.
All along the slippery bank he vainly tried to climb, till at last he chanced upon the old stake and the deeply worn footpath.
Exhausted and inwardly disgusted with his mishaps, he crawled more cautiously on all fours to his wigwam door.
Dripping with his recent plunge he sat with chattering teeth within his unfired wigwam.
"I go for some fire wood!" he said, following the rawhide rope which led into the forest.
Soon he stumbled upon thickly strewn dry willow sticks.
Eagerly with both hands he gathered the wood into his outspread blanket.
Manstin was naturally an energetic fellow.
Not even a night bird twittered to help him out of his predicament.
With a bold face, he made a start at random.
Manstin let go his bundle and began to lament having given away his two eyes.
The old oak tree grandfather has gone off with my eyes and I am lost in the woods!" he cried with his lips close to the earth.
Scarcely had he spoken when the sound of voices was audible on the outer edge of the forest.
Nearer and louder grew the voices-one was the clear flute tones of a young brave and the other the tremulous squeaks of an old grandfather.
It was Manstin's friend with the Earth Ear and the old grandfather. "Here Manstin, take back your eyes," said the old man, "I knew you would not be content in my stead, but I wanted you to learn your lesson.
I have had pleasure seeing with your eyes and trying your bow and arrows, but since I am old and feeble I much prefer my own teepee and my magic bags!"
The old grandfather crept into his wigwam, which is often mistaken for a mere oak tree by little Indian girls and boys.
CHAPTER eighteen.
CHAPTER twenty.
"I can't do it.
She gave him entire confidence, he gave her the help she needed, and both found consolation in the act.
Brooms and dishcloths never could be as distasteful as they once had been, for Beth had presided over both, and something of her housewifely spirit seemed to linger around the little mop and the old brush, never thrown away.
You are like a chestnut burr, prickly outside, but silky soft within, and a sweet kernal, if one can only get at it.
A little more sunshine to ripen the nut, then, not a boy's impatient shake, but a man's hand reached up to pick it gently from the burr, and find the kernal sound and sweet.
Now, if she had been the heroine of a moral storybook, she ought at this period of her life to have become quite saintly, renounced the world, and gone about doing good in a mortified bonnet, with tracts in her pocket.
She had often said she wanted to do something splendid, no matter how hard, and now she had her wish, for what could be more beautiful than to devote her life to Father and Mother, trying to make home as happy to them as they had to her?
"Why don't you write?
"We do.
I'm sure it would do you good, and please us very much."
An hour afterward her mother peeped in and there she was, scratching away, with her black pinafore on, and an absorbed expression, which caused mrs March to smile and slip away, well pleased with the success of her suggestion.
But you are right in one thing.
"Wait for me, my friend.
And holding the little paper fast, as if it were a promise yet to be fulfilled, Jo laid her head down on a comfortable rag bag, and cried, as if in opposition to the rain pattering on the roof.
Was it all self pity, loneliness, or low spirits?
Or was it the waking up of a sentiment which had bided its time as patiently as its inspirer?
For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.
The Diction viewed as a whole is made up of the following parts: the Letter (or ultimate element), the Syllable, the Conjunction, the Article, the Noun, the Verb, the Case, and the Speech. (one) The Letter is an indivisible sound of a particular kind, one that may become a factor in an intelligible sound.
In the Speech 'Cleon walks', 'Cleon' is an instance of such a part.
Whatever its structure, a Noun must always be either (one) the ordinary word for the thing, or (two) a strange word, or (three) a metaphor, or (four) an ornamental word, or (five) a coined word, or (six) a word lengthened out, or (seven) curtailed, or (eight) altered in form.
Thus a cup (B) is in relation to Dionysus (A) what a shield (D) is to Ares (C).
As the bee collects nectar and departs without injuring the flower, or its colour or scent, so let a sage dwell in his village.
They failed both with powdered felspar and quartz.
Even during our occasional visits to this part of South America, we heard of a ship, two churches, and a house having been struck.
The principal habitation, with its annexes-kitchen, offices, and cellars-was placed in the rear-or, let us say, stern of the craft-and formed a part reserved for the Garral family and their personal servants.
Such would have been useless.
If the pilot was the material director of this immense machine-for can we not justly call it so?--another personage was its spiritual director; this was Padre Passanha, who had charge of the mission at Iquitos.
They had proposed it to him, and he had accepted, and when arrived at Belem he was to marry the young couple, Minha and Manoel.
The parsonage was not enough for Padre Passanha; he ought to have a chapel.
All was ready to date, the fifth of June.
CHAPTER thirteen.
The mules are packed and away goes our train of lumber, rations, and camping equipage. The Indian trail is at the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs.
On rare occasions a stream flows down this valley, but now sand dunes stretch across it.
We find it at the Navajo Well. As we approach in the darkness the camp fire is a cheerful sight.
That painting, known as "The Chasm of the Colorado," is in a hall in the Senate wing of the Capitol of the United States.
In the morning we turn to the northeast and descend from Kaibab to the back of Marble Canyon and cross it at the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs, and find our packers camped at Jacob's Pool, where a spring bursts from the cliff at the summit of a great hill of talus.
At night we camp on the bank of the Colorado River, on the same spot where our boat party had camped the year before. Leaving the party in charge of mr Graves and mr Bishop, while they are building a ferryboat, I take some Indians to explore the canyon of the Paria.
Where the declivity of the stream is great the river corrades, or cuts its bottom deeper and still deeper, ever forming narrow clefts, but when the stream has cut its channel down until the declivity is greatly reduced, it can no longer carry the load of sand with which it is fed, but drops a part of it on the way.
Wherever it drops it in this manner a sand bank is formed.
At night we camp at a water pocket, a pool in a great limestone rock.
At night we come to the cliff, and under it, in a great cave, we find a lakelet.
They are eaten with much gusto by the party and highly praised.
Some days after we learned how they are made; they are prepared of goat's flesh, bread, and turnips, and kneaded by mastication.
The next morning we are up at daybreak.
So his talk is explained to us. Some must gather corn, others must go for wood, water must be brought from the distant wells, and the animals of the strangers must be cared for.
Ears of corn, vases of holy water, and trays of meal make up a part of the paraphernalia of worship. I try to record some of the prayers, but am not very successful, as it is difficult to hold my interpreter to the work.
After a while some one gets permanent possession of the charm and the music ceases.
Then we go around among the people and select the articles of pottery, stone implements, instruments and utensils made of bone, horn, shell, articles of clothing and ornament, baskets, trays, and many other things, and tell the people to bring them the next day to our rooms.
A little after sunrise they come in, and we have a busy day of barter.
The whole town comes to bid us good by.
"Good by; good by; good by!" At last we start.
To reach it from below, it must be climbed by niches and stairways in the rock.
It is a good site for defense.
All the water used in these three towns is derived from a well nearly a mile away-a deep pit sunk in the sand, over the site of a dune buried brook.
After supper the hours till midnight are passed in rather formal talk.
Here at Walpi the great snake dance is performed.
Most of these snakes are quite harmless, but rattlesnakes abound, and they are also caught, for they play the most important role in the great snake dance.
It is managed in this way: The snake is teased with the feather wand and his attention occupied by one man, while another, standing near, at a favorable moment seizes the snake just, back of the head.
The two bills had a common origin, and, to a great extent, a common object.
They were framed at the same time, and laid aside at the same time: they sank together into oblivion; and they were, after the lapse of several years, again brought together before the world.
Both were laid by the same peer on the table of the Upper House; and both were referred to the same select committee.
But it soon began to appear that they would have widely different fates. The Comprehension Bill was indeed a neater specimen of legislative workmanship than the Toleration Bill, but was not, like the Toleration Bill, adapted to the wants, the feelings, and the prejudices of the existing generation.
Accordingly, while the Toleration Bill found support in all quarters, the Comprehension Bill was attacked from all quarters, and was at last coldly and languidly defended even by those who had introduced it.
About the same time at which the Toleration bill became law with the general concurrence of public men, the Comprehension Bill was, with a concurrence not less general, suffered to drop.
The Comprehension Bill is forgotten.
No collector of antiquities has thought it worth preserving.
It is a fortunate circumstance that, in this copy, almost the whole history of the Bill can be read.
In spite of cancellations and interlineations, the original words can easily be distinguished from those which were inserted in the committee or on the report.
The first clause, as it stood when the bill was introduced, dispensed all the ministers of the Established Church from the necessity of subscribing the Thirty nine Articles.
For the Articles was substituted a Declaration which ran thus; "I do approve of the doctrine and worship and government of the Church of England by law established, as containing all things necessary to salvation; and I promise, in the exercise of my ministry, to preach and practice according thereunto." Another clause granted similar indulgence to the members of the two universities.
Then it was provided that any minister who had been ordained after the Presbyterian fashion might, without reordination, acquire all the privileges of a priest of the Established Church.
He must, however, be admitted to his new functions by the imposition of the hands of a bishop, who was to pronounce the following form of words; "Take thou authority to preach the word of God, and administer the sacraments, and to perform all other ministerial offices in the Church of England." The person thus admitted was to be capable of holding any rectory or vicarage in the kingdom.
Then followed clauses providing that a clergyman might, except in a few churches of peculiar dignity, wear the surplice or not as he thought fit, that the sign of the cross might be omitted in baptism, that children might be christened, if such were the wish of their parents, without godfathers or godmothers, and that persons who had a scruple about receiving the Eucharist kneeling might receive it sitting.
The concluding clause was drawn in the form of a petition.
It was proposed that the two Houses should request the King and Queen to issue a commission empowering thirty divines of the Established Church to revise the liturgy, the canons, and the constitution of the ecclesiastical courts, and to recommend such alterations as might on inquiry appear to be desirable.
The bill went smoothly through the first stages.
Compton, who, since Sancroft had shut himself up at Lambeth, was virtually Primate, supported Nottingham with ardour.
Why, these persons asked, was the docile and affectionate son of the Church to be disgusted by seeing the irreverent practices of a conventicle introduced into her majestic choirs?
Why should his feelings, his prejudices, if prejudices they were, be less considered than the whims of schismatics?
But, in truth, the scrupulosity of the Puritan was not that sort of scrupulosity which the Apostle had commanded believers to respect.
It sprang, not from morbid tenderness of conscience, but from censoriousness and spiritual pride; and none who had studied the New Testament could have failed to observe that, while we are charged carefully to avoid whatever may give scandal to the feeble, we are taught by divine precept and example to make no concession to the supercilious and uncharitable Pharisee.
Was every thing which was not of the essence of religion to be given up as soon as it became unpleasing to a knot of zealots whose heads had been turned by conceit and the love of novelty?
Painted glass, music, holidays, fast days, were not of the essence of religion.
Was the organ of Exeter to be silenced to please another?
Were all the village bells to be mute because Tribulation Wholesome and Deacon Ananias thought them profane? Was Christmas no longer to be a day of rejoicing?
And is it not probable that, by thus attempting to heal one schism, we may cause another?
It is remarkable that those who held this language were by no means disposed to contend for the doctrinal Articles of the Church.
One of the characteristic marks of that party is the disposition which it has always shown to appeal, on points of dogmatic theology, rather to the Liturgy, which was derived from Rome, than to the Articles and Homilies, which were derived from Geneva.
It does not appear that, in the debates on the Comprehension Bill, a single High Churchman raised his voice against the clause which relieved the clergy from the necessity of subscribing the Articles, and of declaring the doctrine contained in the Homilies to be sound.
As the clause finally stood, the ministers of the Church were required to declare, not that they approved of her constitution, but merely that they submitted to it.
The easy manner in which the zealous friends of the Church gave up her confession of faith presents a striking contrast to the spirit with which they struggled for her polity and her ritual.
The clause which permitted scrupulous persons to communicate sitting very narrowly escaped the same fate.
In the Committee it was struck out, and, on the report, was with great difficulty restored.
The majority of peers in the House was against the proposed indulgence, and the scale was but just turned by the proxies.
But by this time it began to appear that the bill which the High Churchmen were so keenly assailing was menaced by dangers from a very different quarter.
The truth is that the time for such a scheme had gone by.
If, a hundred years earlier, when the division in the Protestant body was recent, Elizabeth had been so wise as to abstain from requiring the observance of a few forms which a large part of her subjects considered as Popish, she might perhaps have averted those fearful calamities which, forty years after her death, afflicted the Church.
But the general tendency of schism is to widen. Had Leo the Tenth, when the exactions and impostures of the Pardoners first roused the indignation of Saxony, corrected those evil practices with a vigorous hand, it is not improbable that Luther would have died in the bosom of the Church of Rome.
But the opportunity was suffered to escape; and, when, a few years later, the Vatican would gladly have purchased peace by yielding the original subject of quarrel, the original subject of quarrel was almost forgotten.
The inquiring spirit which had been roused by a single abuse had discovered or imagined a thousand: controversies engendered controversies: every attempt that was made to accommodate one dispute ended by producing another; and at length a General Council, which, during the earlier stages of the distemper, had been supposed to be an infallible remedy, made the case utterly hopeless.
In this respect, as in many others, the history of Puritanism in England bears a close analogy to the history of Protestantism in Europe.
The Parliament of sixteen eighty nine could no more put an end to nonconformity by tolerating a garb or a posture than the Doctors of Trent could have reconciled the Teutonic nations to the Papacy by regulating the sale of indulgences.
In the sixteenth century Quakerism was unknown; and there was not in the whole realm a single congregation of Independents or Baptists.
At the time of the Revolution, the Independents, Baptists, and Quakers were a majority of the dissenting body; and these sects could not be gained over on any terms which the lowest of Low Churchmen would have been willing to offer.
The Independent held that a national Church, governed by any central authority whatever, Pope, Patriarch, King, Bishop, or Synod, was an unscriptural institution, and that every congregation of believers was, under Christ, a sovereign society.
The Baptist was even more irreclaimable than the Independent, and the Quaker even more irreclaimable than the Baptist.
Concessions, therefore, which would once have extinguished nonconformity would not now satisfy even one half of the nonconformists; and it was the obvious interest of every nonconformist whom no concession would satisfy that none of his brethren should be satisfied.
The more liberal the terms of comprehension, the greater was the alarm of every separatist who knew that he could, in no case, be comprehended.
There was but slender hope that the dissenters, unbroken and acting as one man, would be able to obtain from the legislature full admission to civil privileges; and all hope of obtaining such admission must be relinquished if Nottingham should, by the help of some wellmeaning but shortsighted friends of religious liberty, be enabled to accomplish his design.
If his bill passed, there would doubtless be a considerable defection from the dissenting body; and every defection must be severely felt by a class already outnumbered, depressed, and struggling against powerful enemies.
Every proselyte too must be reckoned twice over, as a loss to the party which was even now too weak, and as a gain to the party which was even now too strong.
Few indeed of the parochial clergy were so abundantly supplied with comforts as the favourite orator of a great assembly of nonconformists in the City.
The voluntary contributions of his wealthy hearers, Aldermen and Deputies, West India merchants and Turkey merchants, Wardens of the Company of Fishmongers and Wardens of the Company of Goldsmiths, enabled him to become a landowner or a mortgagee.
The best broadcloth from Blackwell Hall, and the best poultry from Leadenhall Market, were frequently left at his door.
His influence over his flock was immense.
Scarcely any member of a congregation of separatists entered into a partnership, married a daughter, put a son out as apprentice, or gave his vote at an election, without consulting his spiritual guide.
He might indeed hold a rectory or a vicarage, when he could get one.
Nor could he hope to have, as a minister of the Anglican Church, the authority and dignity which he had hitherto enjoyed.
He would always, by a large portion of the members of that Church, be regarded as a deserter.
One section of that party was for relieving the dissenters from the Test Act, and giving up the Comprehension Bill.
Another section was for pushing forward the Comprehension Bill, and postponing to a more convenient time the consideration of the Test Act.
The effect of this division among the friends of religious liberty was that the High Churchmen, though a minority in the House of Commons, and not a majority in the House of Lords, were able to oppose with success both the reforms which they dreaded.
The Comprehension Bill was not passed; and the Test Act was not repealed.
"Bartleby!
quick, I am waiting."
"The copies, the copies," said I hurriedly.
Is it not so?
Will you not speak?
Answer!"
Yes: his decision was irreversible.
"Turkey," said I, "what do you think of this?
"With submission, sir," said Turkey, with his blandest tone, "I think that you are."
"I think I should kick him out of the office."
A hot, spicy thing.
Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self approval.
The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me.
"Bartleby," said I, "when those papers are all copied, I will compare them with you."
"Think of it?" roared Turkey; "I think I'll just step behind his screen, and black his eyes for him!"
"Sit down, Turkey," said I, "and hear what Nippers has to say.
I staggered to my desk, and sat there in a deep study.
Shall I acknowledge it?
Another was kept by Turkey for convenience sake.
Nay, that was out of the question.
'Is good, then?'
'Of course.'
SONG two.
THE BONDAGE OF PASSION.
Commander of the faithful, the relation which I am about to give your majesty is singularly extraordinary.
After our father's death, the property that he left was equally divided among us, and as soon as these two sisters received their portions, they left me to live with their mother.
My other two sisters and myself stayed with our mother, who was then alive, and who when she afterwards died left each of us a thousand sequins.
I received her with every possible tenderness, and inquiring into the cause of her distress, she told me with tears how inhumanly her husband had behaved towards her.
Her misfortunes affected me: and I mingled my tears with hers.
I took her to a bath, clothed her with my own apparel, and thus addressed her: "Sister, you are the elder, and I esteem you as my mother: during your absence, God has blest the portion that fell to my share, and the employment I follow of breeding silk worms. Assure yourself there is nothing I have but is at your service, and as much at your disposal as my own."
We lived very comfortably together for some months.
I observed, that if putting me to expense was the only reason, they might lay those thoughts aside, and be welcome to remain: for what I had would be sufficient to maintain us all three, in a manner answerable to our condition.
"But," I added, "I rather believe you wish to marry again; I shall feel much surprised if such be the case.
After the experience you have had of the little satisfaction there is in wedlock, is it possible you dare venture a second time?
Believe what I say, and let us live together as comfortably as we can." All my persuasion was in vain; they were resolved to marry, and soon accomplished their wishes.
We continued thus a whole year in perfect love and harmony. Seeing that God had increased my small stock, I projected a voyage, to embark some of it in a commercial speculation.
We set sail with a fair wind, and soon cleared the Persian gulf; when we had reached the open sea, we steered our course to the Indies; and the twentieth day saw land.
It was a very high mountain, at the bottom of which we perceived a great town: having a fresh gale, we soon reached the harbour, and cast anchor.
I had not patience to wait till my sisters were dressed to go along with me, but went ashore alone in the boat.
I entered the town and passed through several streets, where at different intervals stood men in various attitudes, but all motionless and petrified. In the quarter inhabited by the merchants I found most of the shops shut, and in such as were open I likewise found the people petrified.
Having reached a vast square, in the heart of the city, I perceived a large folding gate, covered with plates of gold, which stood open; a curtain of silk stuff seemed to be drawn before it: a lamp hung over the entrance.
I entered; and in a large hall I found several black eunuchs turned into stone. I went from thence into a room richly furnished, where I perceived a lady in the same situation.
What surprised me most was a sparkling light which came from above the bed.
Several other rarities detained my curiosity in this room, which was inestimable in value, were it only for the diamond I mentioned.
I looked into the offices and store rooms, which were full of riches.
In short, the wonders that everywhere appeared so wholly engrossed my attention, that I forgot my ship and my sisters, and thought of nothing but gratifying my curiosity.
In the mean time night came on, which reminded me that it was time to retire.
I laid myself down upon a couch, not without some dread to be alone in a desolate place; and this fear hindered my sleep.
Being extremely glad to hear it, I immediately arose, and taking a torch in my hand, passed from one chamber to another on that side from whence the sound proceeded.
I came to the closet door, and stood still, not doubting that it came from thence.
It had, as we have in our mosques, a niche, to direct us whither we are to turn to say our prayers: there were also lamps hung up, and two candlesticks with large tapers of white wax burning.
At this sight I was transported with admiration.
I wondered how it came to pass that he should be the only living creature in a town where all the people were turned into stones, and I did not doubt but there was something in the circumstance very extraordinary.
Hear me, O Lord, and grant my request."
I told him in a few words whence I had come, what had made me undertake the voyage, and how I safely arrived at the port after twenty days' sailing; when I had done, I prayed him to perform his promise, and told him how much I was struck by the frightful desolation which I had seen in the city.
"Madam," said the young man, "by the prayer you just now addressed to him, you have given me to understand that you have a knowledge of the true God.
I will acquaint you with the most remarkable effect of his greatness and power.
As soon as I was capable of understanding it, she explained to me all the passages of this excellent book, and infused piety into my mind, unknown to my father or any other person.
She happened to die, but not before she had perfectly instructed me in all that was necessary to convince me of the truth of the Moosulmaun religion.
The words were these: Inhabitants, abandon the worship of Nardoun, and of fire, and worship the only God who shews mercy.'
"This voice was heard three years successively, but no one was converted.
The sultan, my father, shared the same fate, for he was metamorphosed into a black stone, as he is to be seen in this palace, and the queen, my mother, had the like destiny.
"I am the only person who did not suffer under that heavy judgment, and ever since I have continued to serve God with more fervency than before.
All these expressions, and particularly the last, greatly increased my love for him.
After I had presented my sisters to the prince, I told them what had hindered my return the day before, how I had met with the young prince, his story, and the cause of the desolation of so fine a city.
The young prince, my sisters and myself, enjoyed ourselves for some time very agreeably.
But alas!
They did the same to the prince, who was drowned.
I floated some minutes on the water, and by good fortune, or rather miracle, I felt ground.
I went towards a dark spot, that, by what I could discern, seemed to be land, and proved to be a flat on the coast, which, when day appeared, I found to be a desert island, lying about twenty miles from Bussorah.
I soon dried my clothes in the sun, and as I walked along I found several kinds of fruit, and likewise fresh water, which gave me some hopes of preserving my life.
I instantly arose, and perceived that it was pursued by a larger serpent which had hold of its tail, and was endeavouring to devour it.
The other, finding itself at liberty, took wing and flew away.
I looked after it for some time till it disappeared.
I then sought another shady spot for repose, and fell asleep.
Judge what was my surprise when I awoke, to see standing by me a black woman of lively and agreeable features, who held in her hand two bitches of the same colour, fastened together.
I sat up, and asked her who she was?
The treachery of your sisters was well known to me, and to avenge your wrongs, as soon as I was liberated by your generous assistance, I called together several of my companions, fairies like myself, conveyed into your storehouses at Bagdad all the lading of your vessel, and afterwards sunk it.
"These two black bitches are your sisters, whom I have transformed into this shape.
Since that time I have whipped them every night, though with regret, whereof your majesty has been a witness.
After the caliph had heard Zobeide with much astonishment, he desired his grand vizier to request Amene to acquaint him wherefore her breast was disfigured with so many scars.
CHAPTER twenty three
Each of these facts seemed struggling for complete possession of his thoughts.
The men in yellow, and men whom he fancied were called Ward Leaders, were either propelling him forward or following him obediently; it was hard to tell.
Perhaps some power unseen and unsuspected propelled them all.
Many little things happened, and then he found himself with the man in yellow entering a little room where this proclamation of his was to be made.
In the centre was a bright oval lit by shaded electric lights from above.
The huge ears of a phonographic mechanism gaped in a battery for his words, the black eyes of great photographic cameras awaited his beginning, beyond metal rods and coils glittered dimly, and something whirled about with a droning hum.
He walked into the centre of the light, and his shadow drew together black and sharp to a little blot at his feet.
"For a moment," he said, "I must wait.
While he was still hesitating there came an agitated messenger with news that the foremost aeroplanes were passing over Madrid.
"Ready!"
Aeroplanes at Madrid!
"Oh! what can it matter whether I speak well or ill?" he said, and felt the light grow brighter.
Abruptly it was perfectly clear to him that this revolt against Ostrog was premature, foredoomed to failure, the impulse of passionate inadequacy against inevitable things.
Even as he stood, awkward, hesitating, with an indiscreet apology for his inability trembling on his lips, came the noise of many people crying out, the running to and fro of feet.
"Wait," cried someone, and a door opened.
Graham turned, and the watching lights waned.
Through the open doorway he saw a slight girlish figure approaching.
His heart leapt.
It was Helen Wotton.
"This is the girl who told us what Ostrog had done," he said.
She came in very quietly, and stood still, as if she did not want to interrupt Graham's eloquence....
But his doubts and questionings fled before her presence.
He turned back to her.
"You have helped me," he said lamely-"helped me very much....
He addressed himself to the unseen multitudes who stared upon him through those grotesque black eyes.
At first he spoke slowly.
He stopped to gather words.
All your lives, it may be, you must fight.
Take no thought though I am beaten, though I am utterly overthrown.
He paused momentarily, and broke into vague exhortations, and then a rush of speech came upon him.
So we hoped in the days that are past.
How is it with man after two hundred years?
"Great cities, vast powers, a collective greatness beyond our dreams.
For that we did not work, and that has come.
How is it with the common lives?
As it has ever been-sorrow and labour, lives cramped and unfulfilled, lives tempted by power, tempted by wealth, and gone to waste and folly.
It does not matter if you understand. It does not matter if you seem to fail.
There is no promise, there is no security-nothing to go upon but Faith.
There is no faith but faith-faith which is courage...."
He spoke gustily, in broken incomplete sentences, but with all his heart and strength, of this new faith within him.
His eloquence limped no longer.
And at last he made an end to speaking.
To all of you.
I give it to you, and myself I give to you.
He found the light of his present exaltation reflected in the face of the girl.
I knew you would say these things...."
CHAPTER twenty four
WHILE THE AEROPLANES WERE COMING
He was saying that the south-west wards were marching.
"I never expected it so soon," he cried.
Graham stared at him absent mindedly.
Then with a start he returned to his previous preoccupation about the flying stages.
"Yes," he said.
He turned his eyes to Helen Wotton again.
His face expressed his struggle between conflicting ideas.
"We must capture the flying stages," he explained.
At all costs we must prevent that."
He saw a touch of surprise in her eyes.
He made the offer abruptly. He addressed the man in yellow, but he spoke to her.
He saw her face respond.
He explained elaborately.
He motioned towards the room where Graham must wait, he insisted no other course was possible.
"We must know where you are," he said.
"At any moment a crisis may arise needing your presence and decision."
But here was no spectacular battle field such as he imagined.
Section after section of the Labour Societies reported itself assembled, reported itself marching, and vanished from knowledge into the labyrinth of that warfare. What was happening there?
Now the door would be closed and Graham and Helen were alone together; they seemed sharply marked off then from all the unprecedented world storm that rushed together without, vividly aware of one another, only concerned with one another.
Then the door would open again, messengers would enter, or a sharp bell would stab their quiet privacy, and it was like a window in a well built brightly lit house flung open suddenly to a hurricane.
The dark hurry and tumult, the stress and vehemence of the battle rushed in and overwhelmed them.
Metallic voices were shouting "Victory!" Yes it was "Victory!"
Bursting through the curtains appeared the man in yellow, startled and dishevelled with excitement, "Victory," he cried, "victory!
The people are winning.
Ostrog's people have collapsed."
"Victory?"
"Tell me!
"It is all over," he cried.
"What matters it now that we have Roehampton?
"The Channel!" said the man in yellow.
He calculated swiftly. "Half an hour."
"They still have three of the flying stages," said the old man.
"Those guns?" cried Graham.
"We cannot mount them-in half an hour."
"Do you mean they are found?"
"If we could stop them another hour!" cried the man in yellow.
"Nothing can stop them now," said the old man.
"Now that we have found those guns.
If once we could get them out upon the roof spaces."
"How long would that take?" asked Graham suddenly.
"An hour-certainly."
"Even now-.
An hour!"
He tried to speak calmly, but his face was white.
You said there was a monoplane-?"
"Smashed?"
"no
It is lying crossways to the carrier.
It might be got upon the guides-easily.
But there is no aeronaut-."
He spoke after a long pause.
"None."
He turned suddenly to Helen.
"I must do it."
"Do what?"
"What do you mean?"
"I am an aeronaut.
After all-.
Those days for which you reproached me were not altogether wasted."
"Tell them to put it upon the guides."
The man in yellow hesitated.
"This monoplane-it is a chance-."
"To fight-yes.
I have thought before-.
A big aeroplane is a clumsy thing.
A resolute man-!"
"There has been no need.
But now the time has come.
Tell them now-send them my message-to put it upon the guides.
I see now why I am here!"
Helen made a step towards Graham.
"But, Sire!--How can one fight?
You will be killed."
"Perhaps.
Yet, not to do it-or to let some one else attempt it-."
Do you not see?
It may save-London!"
He stopped, he could speak no more, he swept the alternative aside by a gesture, and they stood looking at one another.
They were both clear that he must go.
There was no step back from these towering heroisms.
Her eyes brimmed with tears.
"To wake," she cried, "for this!"
Strange to say, the anger of the Raturans was not assuaged by the rebuff which they received at that time.
Poor Zeppa! till that day, since his mental break down, the idea of singing had never once occurred to him, and this reception of his first attempt to teach disconcerted him.
He renewed his efforts, but changed his plan.
In a short time he had the satisfaction of hearing Lippy attempt, of her own accord, to sing one of the hymns that had taken her fancy.
He took her on his knee, and told her, in her own tongue, to try it again.
Accordingly, she began in a sweet, tiny little voice, and her teacher gazed at her with intense pleasure depicted on his handsome face until she reached the note where she had formerly gone wrong.
"No-not so; sing thus," he said, giving the right notes.
The pupil took it up at once, and thus the singing lessons were fairly begun.
Gradually they grew bolder, and joined in the exercise.
Zeppa took pleasure in helping them, and at last permitted as many as could crowd into his hut to do so.
Those who could not get inside sat on the ground outside, and, as the hut was open in front, the gathering soon increased.
The assembling of these children for their lesson brought powerfully to Zeppa's mind, one day, the meetings of the Ratinga people for worship, and the appropriateness of beginning with prayer occurred to him. Accordingly, that morning, just as he was about to commence the hymns, he clasped his hands, raised his eyes, and briefly asked God's blessing on the work.
Profound astonishment kept the little ones quiet, and before they had time to recover the prayer was over.
When, therefore, he thought it time to close, he simply rose up and took himself off, leaving his congregation to disperse when and how it pleased!
One night, while he was thus absent, the men of Ratura delivered the attack which they had long meditated.
Such a night as is apt to fill the guilty conscience with unresting fears, as though it felt the near approach of that avenging sword which sooner or later it must meet.
And they were right.
Not knowing the Gospel method of blotting out the latter, their one resource lay in obliterating the former.
Leaving the aged men and boys to protect the women and children, those dark skinned warriors marched away to battle-not with the flaunting banners and martial music of civilised man, but with the profound silence and the stealthy tread of the savage.
Though the work in hand was the same, the means to the end were different; we will therefore describe them.
When you get there, yell, shriek-like- like-you know how!
As you did last time!
Fear not to be captured.
Your death is nothing.
Away!"
A kick facilitated Wapoota's flight, and the two chiefs returned at speed to rouse the sleeping camp.
Wapoota performed his part nobly-and without being captured, for he did not agree with Ongoloo as to the unimportance of his own death!
At the unexpected outcry in the rear the Raturans halted, and held a hasty council of war.
"Let us go back and fight them," said one.
"While we waste time here," said the leading chief, "the mountain dogs will get ready for us.
Forward!"
Meanwhile, at the first alarm, the women and children of the village had been sent off to the mountains for safety.
The women scattered and fled.
The savage warriors pursued, and several were taken, among them Lippy and her mother, who were promptly despatched to the rear.
His surprise on hearing that the village had been attacked was great and his anxiety considerable.
Although he had refused to go out to war with his entertainers, he felt no disposition to stand idly by when they were attacked.
"She is caught and carried away-with her mother."
They ran away from him in terror.
But Zeppa had heard enough.
Turning his face towards the village he sped over the ground at a pace that soon brought him in sight of the combatants, who seemed to be swaying to and fro-now here, now there-as the tide of battle flowed and victory leaned sometimes to one side sometimes to the other.
Zeppa was unarmed.
As he drew near he was observed by both parties to stop abruptly in his career, and wrench out of the ground a stake that had been meant for the corner post of a newly begun hut.
Whirling it like a feather round his head, the maniac rushed on.
He was thoroughly roused.
Before reaching him, however, his attention was arrested by a cry from some one in the midst of the enemy in front.
When Wapoota saw his deliverer, he ran to him, panting, and said-
"Come with me-this way-Lippy is here!"
That was sufficient.
This was briefly explained to Zeppa by Wapoota, who had chanced to encounter the party when returning from his yelling mission, if we may so express it.
The race was a long one, but neither the madman nor his friend flagged until they overtook the party.
As on former occasions of conquest, the Mountain men pursued the flying host into their swamps, but they did not, as in former times, return to slay the aged and carry the women and children into captivity.
The natives regarded his person as in some measure sacred, and would have deemed it not only dangerous but insolent to go up among the rocky heights when the madman was known to be there.
On the way up, Wapoota, who felt somewhat timorous about the visit, had made up his mind as to the best mode of address with which to approach his friend.
He had decided that, although he was not particularly youthful, the language and manner of a respectful son to a revered father would best befit the occasion.
Zeppa looked up with a frown, as if annoyed at the intrusion.
But he got no further.
He could not well have hit upon a more unfortunate phrase.
"My son!
The horrified intruder heard the terminal yell, and saw the maniac bound over the fire towards him, but he saw and heard no more, for his limbs became suddenly endued with something like electric vitality.
It was sufficiently soft to prevent death.
When Wapoota went over the precipice and disappeared, Zeppa halted and stood erect, gazing with a questioning aspect at the sky, and drawing his hand slowly across his brows with that wearied and puzzled aspect which had become characteristic.
The whole empire was deeply interested in the education of these five youths, the acknowledged successors of Constantine.
In the free intercourse of private life, and amidst the dangers of the court of Galerius, he had learned to command his own passions, to encounter those of his equals, and to depend for his present safety and future greatness on the prudence and firmness of his personal conduct.
The indulgence of Constantine admitted them, at a very tender age, to share the administration of the empire; and they studied the art of reigning, at the expense of the people intrusted to their care.
A just proportion of guards, of legions, and of auxiliaries, was allotted for their respective dignity and defence.
The ministers and generals, who were placed about their persons, were such as Constantine could trust to assist, and even to control, these youthful sovereigns in the exercise of their delegated power.
To oppose the inroad of this destroying host, the aged emperor took the field in person; but on this occasion either his conduct or his fortune betrayed the glory which he had acquired in so many foreign and domestic wars.
White villas peep from the birch forest; and, on a fine summer day, there is scarcely a turn of the pass at which may not be seen some angler casting his fly on the foam of the river, some artist sketching a pinnacle of rock, or some party of pleasure banqueting on the turf in the fretwork of shade and sunshine.
Some of them were quartered at such a distance that they did not arrive in time.
In truth james would have done better to withhold all assistance from the Highlanders than to mock them by sending them, instead of the well appointed army which they had asked and expected, a rabble contemptible in numbers and appearance.
You are also to understand, that even in pursuit of this wrong idea (enough in itself to have ruined any king) he never took a straight course, but always took a crooked one.
For all this, it became necessary to call another Parliament.
This happened in his hall.
Seven of the judges said that was quite true, and mr Hampden was bound to pay: five of the judges said that was quite false, and mr Hampden was not bound to pay.
But O! it would have been well for the King if he had let them go!
At first the King tried force, then treaty, then a Scottish Parliament which did not answer at all.
It is called the Short Parliament, for it lasted a very little while.
This great example set, other members took courage and spoke the truth freely, though with great patience and moderation.
We have now disposed of the Short Parliament.
SECOND PART
He was immediately taken into custody and fell from his proud height.
They were profoundly quiet.
Some think that he went to get proofs against the Parliamentary leaders in England of their having treasonably invited the Scottish people to come and help them. With whatever object he went to Scotland, he did little good by going.
It would take a good many Lord Mayors, however, to make a people, and the King soon found himself mistaken.
Not so soon, though, but that there was a great opposition in the Parliament to a celebrated paper put forth by Pym and Hampden and the rest, called 'THE REMONSTRANCE,' which set forth all the illegal acts that the King had ever done, but politely laid the blame of them on his bad advisers.
No one speaks, and then he calls john Pym by name. No one speaks, and then he calls Denzil Hollis by name.
They were taken by water.
When the Earl of Pembroke asked him whether he would not give way on that question for a time, he said, 'By God! not for one hour!' and upon this he and the Parliament went to war.
THIRD PART
But they came to nothing.
He, too, was buried in Westminster Abbey, with great state.
FOURTH PART
john BRADSHAW, serjeant at law, was appointed president.
It was granted.
Argyle was the first to act upon this contract.
He was completely broken.
He flourished Father Petre before the eyes of the people on all possible occasions.
This was on the night of the ninth of December.
There, he died.
THE Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached.
When it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.
It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand.
But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread.
"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come?" said Scrooge.
The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.
"You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us," Scrooge pursued.
"Is that so, Spirit?"
The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head. That was the only answer he received.
The Spirit paused a moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time to recover.
It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.
"Ghost of the Future!" he exclaimed, "I fear you more than any spectre I have seen.
Will you not speak to me?"
It gave him no reply.
The hand was pointed straight before them.
"Lead on!
The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know.
Lead on, Spirit!"
The Phantom moved away as it had come towards him. Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him up, he thought, and carried him along.
They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act.
But there they were, in the heart of it; on 'Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.
The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men. Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk.
I only know he's dead."
"When did he die?" inquired another.
"Why, what was the matter with him?" asked a third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff box. "I thought he'd never die."
"God knows," said the first, with a yawn.
"What has he done with his money?" asked a red faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey cock.
"Left it to his company, perhaps.
This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.
"I don't mind going if a lunch is provided," observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose.
"But I must be fed, if I make one."
Another laugh.
Bye, bye!"
Speakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed with other groups.
Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the Spirit for an explanation.
The Phantom glided on into a street.
Scrooge listened again, thinking that the explanation might lie here.
He knew these men, also, perfectly.
They were men of business: very wealthy, and of great importance.
He had made a point always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.
"How are you?" said one.
"How are you?" returned the other.
"Well!" said the first.
"Cold, isn't it?"
"no
Something else to think of.
Good morning!"
Not another word.
That was their meeting, their conversation, and their parting.
Nor could he think of any one immediately connected with himself, to whom he could apply them.
For he had an expectation that the conduct of his future self would give him the clue he missed, and would render the solution of these riddles easy.
He looked about in that very place for his own image; but another man stood in his accustomed corner, and though the clock pointed to his usual time of day for being there, he saw no likeness of himself among the multitudes that poured in through the Porch.
It gave him little surprise, however; for he had been revolving in his mind a change of life, and thought and hoped he saw his new born resolutions carried out in this.
Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its outstretched hand.
It made him shudder, and feel very cold.
The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly.
Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low browed, beetling shop, below a pent house roof, where iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were bought.
Upon the floor within, were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds.
But she had scarcely entered, when another woman, similarly laden, came in too; and she was closely followed by a man in faded black, who was no less startled by the sight of them, than they had been upon the recognition of each other.
After a short period of blank astonishment, in which the old man with the pipe had joined them, they all three burst into a laugh.
"Let the charwoman alone to be the first!" cried she who had entered first.
Stop till I shut the door of the shop. Ah!
Come into the parlour.
Come into the parlour."
The old man raked the fire together with an old stair rod, and having trimmed his smoky lamp (for it was night), with the stem of his pipe, put it in his mouth again.
While he did this, the woman who had already spoken threw her bundle on the floor, and sat down in a flaunting manner on a stool; crossing her elbows on her knees, and looking with a bold defiance at the other two.
"What odds then!
What odds, mrs Dilber?" said the woman.
"Every person has a right to take care of themselves. He always did."
"That's true, indeed!" said the laundress.
"No man more so."
"Why then, don't stand staring as if you was afraid, woman; who's the wiser?
We're not going to pick holes in each other's coats, I suppose?"
"No, indeed!" said mrs Dilber and the man together. "We should hope not."
"That's enough. Who's the worse for the loss of a few things like these? Not a dead man, I suppose."
"No, indeed," said mrs Dilber, laughing.
"If he wanted to keep 'em after he was dead, a wicked old screw," pursued the woman, "why wasn't he natural in his lifetime?
"It's the truest word that ever was spoke," said mrs Dilber.
"It's a judgment on him."
"I wish it was a little heavier judgment," replied the woman; "and it should have been, you may depend upon it, if I could have laid my hands on anything else.
Open that bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value of it.
Speak out plain.
It's no sin.
Open the bundle, Joe."
But the gallantry of her friends would not allow of this; and the man in faded black, mounting the breach first, produced his plunder.
It was not extensive.
A seal or two, a pencil case, a pair of sleeve buttons, and a brooch of no great value, were all.
"That's your account," said Joe, "and I wouldn't give another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it. Who's next?"
mrs Dilber was next.
Sheets and towels, a little wearing apparel, two old-fashioned silver teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, and a few boots.
Her account was stated on the wall in the same manner.
"I always give too much to ladies.
It's a weakness of mine, and that's the way I ruin myself," said old Joe.
"That's your account.
"And now undo my bundle, Joe," said the first woman.
Joe went down on his knees for the greater convenience of opening it, and having unfastened a great many knots, dragged out a large and heavy roll of some dark stuff.
"What do you call this?" said Joe.
"Bed curtains!"
"Ah!" returned the woman, laughing and leaning forward on her crossed arms.
"Bed curtains!"
"You don't mean to say you took 'em down, rings and all, with him lying there?" said Joe.
"Yes I do," replied the woman.
"Why not?"
"You were born to make your fortune," said Joe, "and you'll certainly do it."
"Don't drop that oil upon the blankets, now."
"His blankets?" asked Joe.
"He isn't likely to take cold without 'em, I dare say."
"I hope he didn't die of anything catching?
"Don't you be afraid of that," returned the woman.
It's the best he had, and a fine one too. They'd have wasted it, if it hadn't been for me."
"Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure," replied the woman with a laugh.
"Somebody was fool enough to do it, but I took it off again.
If calico an't good enough for such a purpose, it isn't good enough for anything.
It's quite as becoming to the body.
He can't look uglier than he did in that one."
Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror.
As they sat grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse itself.
"This is the end of it, you see!
"I see, I see.
The case of this unhappy man might be my own. My life tends that way, now.
The room was very dark, too dark to be observed with any accuracy, though Scrooge glanced round it in obedience to a secret impulse, anxious to know what kind of room it was.
A pale light, rising in the outer air, fell straight upon the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for, was the body of this man.
Scrooge glanced towards the Phantom.
Its steady hand was pointed to the head.
He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it; but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss the spectre at his side.
Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion!
But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious.
It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's.
Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!
No voice pronounced these words in Scrooge's ears, and yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed.
He thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be his foremost thoughts?
Avarice, hard dealing, griping cares? They have brought him to a rich end, truly!
A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth stone.
"Spirit!" he said, "this is a fearful place.
In leaving it, I shall not leave its lesson, trust me.
Let us go!"
Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the head.
But I have not the power, Spirit.
I have not the power."
Again it seemed to look upon him.
The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room by daylight, where a mother and her children were.
She was expecting some one, and with anxious eagerness; for she walked up and down the room; started at every sound; looked out from the window; glanced at the clock; tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and could hardly bear the voices of the children in their play.
At length the long expected knock was heard.
She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was careworn and depressed, though he was young.
There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.
He sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding for him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what news (which was not until after a long silence), he appeared embarrassed how to answer.
"no
There is hope yet, Caroline."
"If he relents," she said, amazed, "there is!
Nothing is past hope, if such a miracle has happened."
"He is past relenting," said her husband.
She was a mild and patient creature if her face spoke truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she said so, with clasped hands.
"What the half drunken woman whom I told you of last night, said to me, when I tried to see him and obtain a week's delay; and what I thought was a mere excuse to avoid me; turns out to have been quite true.
He was not only very ill, but dying, then."
"To whom will our debt be transferred?"
"I don't know.
But before that time we shall be ready with the money; and even though we were not, it would be a bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his successor.
We may sleep to night with light hearts, Caroline!"
Yes.
The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure.
The Ghost conducted him through several streets familiar to his feet; and as they went along, Scrooge looked here and there to find himself, but nowhere was he to be seen.
They entered poor Bob Cratchit's house; the dwelling he had visited before; and found the mother and the children seated round the fire.
Quiet.
Very quiet.
But surely they were very quiet!
"'And He took a child, and set him in the midst of them.'"
He had not dreamed them.
Why did he not go on?
The mother laid her work upon the table, and put her hand up to her face.
"The colour hurts my eyes," she said.
The colour?
Ah, poor Tiny Tim!
"It makes them weak by candle light; and I wouldn't show weak eyes to your father when he comes home, for the world.
It must be near his time."
They were very quiet again.
"And so have I," cried peter.
"Often."
"And so have I," exclaimed another.
So had all.
And there is your father at the door!"
She hurried out to meet him; and little Bob in his comforter --he had need of it, poor fellow-came in.
His tea was ready for him on the hob, and they all tried who should help him to it most.
Don't be grieved!"
Bob was very cheerful with them, and spoke pleasantly to all the family.
"Sunday!
You went to day, then, Robert?" said his wife.
"I wish you could have gone.
But you'll see it often.
I promised him that I would walk there on a Sunday.
My little, little child!" cried Bob.
"My little child!"
He broke down all at once.
He couldn't help it.
If he could have helped it, he and his child would have been farther apart perhaps than they were.
He left the room, and went up stairs into the room above, which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas. There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were signs of some one having been there, lately.
Poor Bob sat down in it, and when he had thought a little and composed himself, he kissed the little face.
He was reconciled to what had happened, and went down again quite happy.
They drew about the fire, and talked; the girls and mother working still.
"On which," said Bob, "for he is the pleasantest spoken gentleman you ever heard, I told him.
"Knew what, my dear?"
"Why, that you were a good wife," replied Bob.
"Everybody knows that!" said peter.
"Very well observed, my boy!" cried Bob.
"I hope they do.
'Heartily sorry,' he said, 'for your good wife.
Pray come to me.' Now, it wasn't," cried Bob, "for the sake of anything he might be able to do for us, so much as for his kind way, that this was quite delightful.
It really seemed as if he had known our Tiny Tim, and felt with us."
"I'm sure he's a good soul!" said mrs Cratchit.
"You would be surer of it, my dear," returned Bob, "if you saw and spoke to him.
I shouldn't be at all surprised- mark what I say!--if he got peter a better situation."
"Only hear that, peter," said mrs Cratchit.
"And then," cried one of the girls, "peter will be keeping company with some one, and setting up for himself."
"Get along with you!" retorted peter, grinning.
But however and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim-shall we-or this first parting that there was among us?"
"Never, father!" cried they all.
"And I know," said Bob, "I know, my dears, that when we recollect how patient and how mild he was; although he was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it."
"No, never, father!" they all cried again.
"I am very happy," said little Bob, "I am very happy!"
mrs Cratchit kissed him, his daughters kissed him, the two young Cratchits kissed him, and peter and himself shook hands.
Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from God!
"Spectre," said Scrooge, "something informs me that our parting moment is at hand.
I know it, but I know not how.
The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him, as before-though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there seemed no order in these latter visions, save that they were in the Future-into the resorts of business men, but showed him not himself.
Indeed, the Spirit did not stay for anything, but went straight on, as to the end just now desired, until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.
"This court," said Scrooge, "through which we hurry now, is where my place of occupation is, and has been for a length of time.
I see the house.
Let me behold what I shall be, in days to come!"
The Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed elsewhere.
"The house is yonder," Scrooge exclaimed.
"Why do you point away?"
The inexorable finger underwent no change.
Scrooge hastened to the window of his office, and looked in.
It was an office still, but not his.
The furniture was not the same, and the figure in the chair was not himself. The Phantom pointed as before.
He joined it once again, and wondering why and whither he had gone, accompanied it until they reached an iron gate. He paused to look round before entering.
A churchyard.
Here, then; the wretched man whose name he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground.
It was a worthy place.
Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite.
A worthy place!
The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One.
He advanced towards it trembling.
"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question.
Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.
"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge.
"But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.
Say it is thus with what you show me!"
The Spirit was immovable as ever.
Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.
"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon his knees.
The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.
"No, Spirit!
Oh no, no!"
The finger still was there.
Why show me this, if I am past all hope!"
For the first time the hand appeared to shake.
"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me.
The kind hand trembled.
"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.
"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed.
"They are not torn down," cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed curtains in his arms, "they are not torn down, rings and all.
They are here-I am here-the shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled.
They will be.
"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocooen of himself with his stockings.
He had frisked into the sitting room, and was now standing there: perfectly winded.
"There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!" cried Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace. "There's the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered!
There's the window where I saw the wandering Spirits!
Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!
I don't know anything.
I'm quite a baby.
Never mind.
I don't care.
He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard.
Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash!
Oh, glorious, glorious!
No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells.
Oh, glorious! Glorious!
"What's to day!" cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.
"EH?" returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.
"What's to day, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge.
"To day!" replied the boy.
"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself.
"I haven't missed it.
The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like.
Of course they can.
"Hallo!" returned the boy.
"Do you know the Poulterer's, in the next street but one, at the corner?" Scrooge inquired.
"A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?--Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?"
"What, the one as big as me?" returned the boy.
Yes, my buck!"
"Is it?" said Scrooge.
"Go and buy it."
"Walk ER!" exclaimed the boy.
"No, no," said Scrooge, "I am in earnest.
Come back with the man, and I'll give you a shilling.
Come back with him in less than five minutes and I'll give you half a crown!"
The boy was off like a shot.
He must have had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.
"I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's!" whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh.
The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down stairs to open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's man.
As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker caught his eye.
Whoop! How are you!
It was a Turkey!
He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird.
"Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town," said Scrooge.
"You must have a cab."
Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when you don't dance while you are at it.
But if he had cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of sticking plaister over it, and been quite satisfied.
He dressed himself "all in his best," and at last got out into the streets.
The people were by this time pouring forth, as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile.
He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good humoured fellows said, "Good morning, sir!
He had not gone far, when coming on towards him he beheld the portly gentleman, who had walked into his counting house the day before, and said, "Scrooge and Marley's, I believe?"
It sent a pang across his heart to think how this old gentleman would look upon him when they met; but he knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.
"My dear sir," said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and taking the old gentleman by both his hands.
"How do you do?
I hope you succeeded yesterday.
A merry Christmas to you, sir!"
"mr Scrooge?"
"Yes," said Scrooge.
Allow me to ask your pardon. And will you have the goodness"--here Scrooge whispered in his ear.
"Lord bless me!" cried the gentleman, as if his breath were taken away.
"My dear mr Scrooge, are you serious?"
"If you please," said Scrooge.
"Not a farthing less.
A great many back payments are included in it, I assure you. Will you do me that favour?"
"Don't say anything, please," retorted Scrooge.
"Come and see me.
Will you come and see me?"
"I will!" cried the old gentleman.
Bless you!"
He had never dreamed that any walk-that anything-could give him so much happiness.
In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew's house.
He passed the door a dozen times, before he had the courage to go up and knock.
But he made a dash, and did it:
Nice girl!
Very.
"Yes, sir."
"Where is he, my love?" said Scrooge.
"He's in the dining room, sir, along with mistress.
I'll show you up stairs, if you please."
He knows me," said Scrooge, with his hand already on the dining room lock.
"I'll go in here, my dear."
He turned it gently, and sidled his face in, round the door. They were looking at the table (which was spread out in great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous on such points, and like to see that everything is right.
"Fred!" said Scrooge.
"It's i Your uncle Scrooge.
I have come to dinner. Will you let me in, Fred?"
So did Topper when he came.
So did the plump sister when she came.
So did every one when they came.
Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, won der ful happiness!
Oh, he was early there.
If he could only be there first, and catch Bob Cratchit coming late!
That was the thing he had set his heart upon.
And he did it; yes, he did!
The clock struck nine.
No Bob.
No Bob.
He was full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time.
Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see him come into the Tank.
His hat was off, before he opened the door; his comforter too.
He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.
"I am behind my time."
"You are?" repeated Scrooge.
"Yes.
I think you are. Step this way, sir, if you please."
"It's only once a year, sir," pleaded Bob, appearing from the Tank.
"It shall not be repeated.
"Now, I'll tell you what, my friend," said Scrooge, "I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer.
And therefore," he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the Tank again; "and therefore I am about to raise your salary!"
Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler.
He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it, holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait waistcoat.
"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back.
"A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year!
Make up the fires, and buy another coal scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!"
Scrooge was better than his word.
He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father.
He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.
His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
Then they set forth, but the news of their coming ran swifter still, and Rhiannon and Kieva, wife of Pryderi, made haste to prepare a feast for them.
'What craft shall we follow?' asked Pryderi.
'We will make shields,' answered Manawyddan.
'Let us take to making shoes,' said Manawyddan, 'for there are not any among the shoemakers bold enough to fight us.'
'A thief,' he answered, 'that I caught robbing me.'
'From singing in England; but wherefore dost thou ask?'
'And what work art thou upon?'
Let it go free.'
'Good day to thee, lord; and what art thou doing?'
'What work art thou upon?' asked the bishop, drawing rein.
'I will not set it free.'
Some of these peculiarities are known, the others may easily be pointed out; but I shall confine myself to the most prominent amongst them.
The Americans have no neighbors, and consequently they have no great wars, or financial crises, or inroads, or conquest to dread; they require neither great taxes, nor great armies, nor great generals; and they have nothing to fear from a scourge which is more formidable to republics than all these evils combined, namely, military glory.
Now the people which is thus carried away by the illusions of glory is unquestionably the most cold and calculating, the most unmilitary (if I may use the expression), and the most prosaic of all the peoples of the earth.
At that same period North America was discovered, as if it had been kept in reserve by the Deity, and had just risen from beneath the waters of the deluge.
The Americans frequently term what we should call cupidity a laudable industry; and they blame as faint heartedness what we consider to be the virtue of moderate desires.
L
Laboring like a giant
Laughter like a beautiful bubble from the rosebud of baby hood
Laughter like the sudden outburst of the glad bird in the tree top
Let his frolic fancy play, like a happy child
Let thy mouth murmur like the doves
Light as a snowflake
Lights gleamed there like stars in a still sky
Like a ball of ice it glittered in a frozen sea of sky
Like a blade sent home to its scabbard
Like a blast from a horn
Like a bright window in a distant view
Like a caged lion shaking the bars of his prison
Like a calm flock of silver fleeced sheep
Like a cloud of fire
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue
Like a damp handed auctioneer
Like a dew drop, ill fitted to sustain unkindly shocks
Like a dipping swallow the stout ship dashed through the storm
Like a distant star glimmering steadily in the darkness
Like a dream she vanished
Like a festooned girdle encircling the waist of a bride
Like a flower her red lips parted
Like a game in which the important part is to keep from laughing
Like a golden shielded army
Like a great express train, roaring, flashing, dashing head long
Like a great ring of pure and endless light
Like a great tune to which the planets roll
Like a jewel every cottage casement showed
Like a joyless eye that finds no object worth its constancy
Like a knight worn out by conflict
Like a living meteor
Like a long arrow through the dark the train is darting
Like a noisy argument in a drawing room
Like a poet hidden
Like a sea of upturned faces
Like a shadow never to be overtaken
Like a shadow on a fair sunlit landscape
Like a sheeted ghost
Like a stalled horse that breaks loose and goes at a gallop through the plain
Like a star, his love's pure face looked down
Like a star that dwelt apart
Like a star, unhasting, unresting
Like a stone thrown at random
Like a summer dried fountain
Like a thing at rest
Like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the faraway past
Like a triumphing fire the news was borne
Like a vaporous amethyst
Like a wandering star I fell through the deeps of desire
Like a whirlwind they went past
Like a withered leaf the moon is blown across the bay
Like an eagle clutching his prey, his arm swooped down
Like an eagle dallying with the wind
Like an engine of dread war, he set his shoulder to the mountain side
Like an enraged tiger
Like an icy wave, a swift and tragic impression swept through him
Like an unbidden guest
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun
Like an unseen star of birth
Like an unwelcome thought
Like apparitions seen and gone
Like bells that waste the moments with their loudness
Like blasts of trumpets blown in wars
Like bright Apollo
Like bright lamps, the fabled apples glow
Like building castles in the air
Like bursting waves from the ocean
Like cliffs which have been rent asunder
Like crystals of snow
Like dead lovers who died true
Like Death, who rides upon a thought, and makes his way through temple, tower, and palace
Like dew upon a sleeping flower
Like dining with a ghost
Like earth's decaying leaves
Like echoes from an antenatal dream
Like fixed eyes, whence the dear light of sense and thought has fled
Like footsteps upon wool
Like ghosts, from an enchanter fleeing
Like ghosts the sentries come and go
Like golden boats on a sunny sea
Like great black birds, the demons haunt the woods
Like having to taste a hundred exquisite dishes in a single meal
Like Heaven's free breath, which he who grasps can hold not
Like laying a burden on the back of a moth
Like leviathans afloat
Like lighting a candle to the sun
Like making a mountain out of a mole hill
Like mariners pulling the life boat
Like mice that steal in and out as if they feared the light
Like mountain over mountain huddled
Like mountain streams we meet and part
Like music on the water
Like notes which die when born, but still haunt the echoes of the hill
Like one pale star against the dusk, a single diamond on her brow gleamed with imprisoned fire
Like one who talks of what he loves in dream
Like organ music came the deep reply
Like planets in the sky
Like pouring oil on troubled waters
Like rowing upstream against a strong downward current
Like separated souls
Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp
Like sheep from out the fold of the sky, stars leapt
Like ships that have gone down at sea
Like shy elves hiding from the traveler's eye
Like skeletons, the sycamores uplift their wasted hands
Like some grave night thought threading a dream
Like some new gathered snowy hyacinth, so white and cold and delicate it was
Like some poor nigh related guest, that may not rudely be dismist
Like some unshriven churchyard thing, the friar crawled
Like splendor winged moths about a taper
upon the cool and still piazza
Like straws in a gust of wind
Like sunlight, in and out the leaves, the robins went
Like sweet thoughts in a dream
Like the awful shadow of some unseen power
Like the bellowing of bulls
Like the cold breath of the grave
Like the cry of an itinerant vendor in a quiet and picturesque town
Like the dawn of the morn
Like the dew on the mountain
Like the dim scent in violets
Like the embodiment of a perfect rose, complete in form and fragrance
Like the faint cry of unassisted woe
Like the faint exquisite music of a dream
Like the foam on the river
Like the jangling of all the strings of some musical instrument
Like the jewels that gleam in baby eyes
Like the music in the patter of small feet
Like the quivering image of a landscape in a flowing stream
Like the rainbow, thou didst fade
Like the sap that turns to nectar, in the velvet of the peach
Like the shadow of a great hill that reaches far out over the plain
Like the Spring time, fresh and green
Like the stern lights of a ship at sea, illuminating only the path which has been passed over
Like the sudden impulse of a madman
Like the swell of Summer's ocean
Like the tattered effigy in a cornfield
Like the whole sky when to the east the morning doth return
Like those great rivers, whose course everyone beholds, but their springs have been seen by but few
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yielded proof that they were born for immortality
Like to diamonds her white teeth shone between the parted lips
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past
Like vaporous shapes half seen
Like village curs that bark when their fellows do
Like wine stain to a flask the old distrust still clings
Like winged stars the fire flies flash and glance
Lithe as a panther
Lofty as a queen
Loneliness struck him like a blow
Looked back with faithful eyes like a great mastiff to his master's face
Looking as sulky as the weather itself
Lost like the lightning in the sullen clod
Love as clean as starlight
Love brilliant as the morning
Love shakes like a windy reed your heart
Love smiled like an unclouded sun
Lovely as starry water
And Daniel said unto the king, Let it be according to thy word.
And he said, Yea, O king, they be whole.
CHAPTER fourteen
If Myles fancied that one single victory over his enemy would cure the evil against which he fought, he was grievously mistaken; wrongs are not righted so easily as that.
Other and far more bitter battles lay before him ere he could look around him and say, "I have won the victory."
For a day-for two days-the bachelors were demoralized at the fall of their leader, and the Knights of the Rose were proportionately uplifted.
The day that Blunt met his fall, the wooden tank in which the water had been poured every morning was found to have been taken away.
The bachelors made a great show of indignation and inquiry.
If they did but know, he should smart for it.
No one doubted that Wilkes had spoken the truth in his taunt, and that the bachelors had indeed stolen their own tank.
So no more water was ever carried for the head squires, but it was plain to see that the war for the upperhand was not yet over.
Even if Myles had entertained comforting thoughts to the contrary, he was speedily undeceived.
"Holloa, Falworth!" they cried.
"Knowest thou that Blunt is nigh well again?"
But I am right glad to hear it."
"Thou wilt sing a different song anon," said one of the bachelors.
Only this morning he told Philip Mowbray that he would have thy blood for the fall thou gavest him.
Look to thyself, Falworth; he cometh again Wednesday or Thursday next; thou standest in a parlous state."
"I know not," said Myles, boldly; "but I fear him not." Nevertheless his heart was heavy with the weight of impending ill.
"Blunt cometh again to morrow day."
Myles saw Gascoyne direct a sharp glance at him; but he answered nothing either to his enemy's words or his friend's look.
As the bachelor had said, Blunt came the next morning.
Myles was sitting on a bench along the wall, talking and jesting with some who stood by, when of a sudden his heart gave a great leap within him.
It was Walter Blunt.
He came walking in at the door as if nothing had passed, and at his unexpected coming the hubbub of talk and laughter was suddenly checked.
Even Myles stopped in his speech for a moment, and then continued with a beating heart and a carelessness of manner that was altogether assumed.
In his hand Blunt carried the house orders for the day, and without seeming to notice Myles, he opened it and read the list of those called upon for household service.
When Blunt had ended reading the list of names, he rolled up the parchment, and thrust it into his belt; then swinging suddenly on his heel, he strode straight up to Myles, facing him front to front.
A moment or two of deep silence followed; not a sound broke the stillness.
When Blunt spoke every one in the armory heard his words.
When Myles had seen his enemy turn upon him, he did not know at first what to expect; he would not have been surprised had they come to blows there and then, and he held himself prepared for any event.
He faced the other pluckily enough and without flinching, and spoke up boldly in answer.
"So be it, Walter Blunt; I fear thee not in whatever way thou mayst encounter me."
"Dost thou not?" said Blunt.
"I think naught," said Myles gruffly.
"He will not dare to touch me to harm me.
I fear him not." Nevertheless, he did not speak the full feelings of his heart.
"I know not, Myles," said Gascoyne, shaking his head doubtfully.
"I fear him not," said Myles again; but his heart foreboded trouble.
"Best let it be, Myles," said Wilkes.
"They will kill thee an thou cease not troubling them.
"No matter for that," said Myles; "it is not to be borne that they order others of us about as they do.
I mean to speak to them to night, and tell them it shall not be."
He was as good as his word.
That night, as the youngsters were shouting and romping and skylarking, as they always did before turning in, he stood upon his cot and shouted: "Silence!
Then he jumped down again from his elevated stand, and an uproar of confusion instantly filled the place.
What was the effect of his words upon the bachelors he could not see.
Suddenly that impish little page spoken of before, Robin Ingoldsby, thrust his shock head around the corner of the smithy, and said: "Ho, Falworth!
"There!" said he, still panting from the chase and seating the boy by no means gently upon the bench beside Wilkes.
It was by no means easy to worm the story from the mischievous little monkey; he knew Myles too well to be in the least afraid of his threats. But at last, by dint of bribing and coaxing, Myles and his friends managed to get at the facts.
The youngster had been sent to clean the riding boots of one of the bachelors, instead of which he had lolled idly on a cot in the dormitory, until he had at last fallen asleep.
He had been awakened by the opening of the dormitory door and by the sound of voices-among them was that of his taskmaster.
Fearing punishment for his neglected duty, he had slipped out of the cot, and hidden himself beneath it.
Blunt's companions were trying to persuade him against something, but without avail.
But tell me, Robin Ingoldsby, dost know aught more of this matter?
Prithee tell it me, Robin.
Where do they propose to lie in wait for Falworth?"
"Are they there now?" said Wilkes.
"So, comrades," said Myles at last, "what shall we do now?"
"Nay," said Myles, "I take no such coward's part as that.
I say an they hunger to fight, give them their stomachful."
The others were very reluctant for such extreme measures, but Myles, as usual, carried his way, and so a pitched battle was decided upon.
Then Wilkes started away to gather together those of the Knights of the Rose not upon household duty, and Myles, with the others, went to the armor smith to have him make for them a set of knives with which to meet their enemies-knives with blades a foot long, pointed and double edged.
The smith, leaning with his hammer upon the anvil, listened to them as they described the weapons.
With such blades, ere this battle is ended, some one would be slain, and so murder done.
Those who had much property, feared to risk its loss by embracing a doubtful struggle.
This was the best apology of any that had been offered; natural affection was the pleader; and though blinded to its true interest, such weakness had an amiable source, and so was pardoned.
"When Sir William Wallace is entering full sail, you will send your hirelings to tow him in! but if a plank could save him now, you would not throw it to him!
He was trying his eloquence among the clan at Lennox, when Ker arriving, stamped his persuasions with truth; and above five hundred men arranged themselves under their lord's standard.
Maxwell gladly explained himself to Wallace's lieutenant; and summoning his little reserve, they marched with flying pennons through the town of Dumbarton.
At sight of so much larger a power than they expected would venture to appear in arms, and sanctioned by the example of the Earl of Lennox (whose name held a great influence in those parts), several, who before had held back, from doubting their own judgment, now came forward; and nearly eight hundred well appointed men marched into the fortress.
So large a reinforcement was gratefully received by Wallace; and he welcomed Maxwell with a cordiality which inspired that young knight with an affection equal to his zeal.
A council being held respecting the disposal of the new troops, it was decided that the Lennox men must remain with their earl in garrison; while those brought by Maxwell, and under his command, should follow Wallace in the prosecution of his conquests along with his own especial people.
These preliminaries being arranged, the remainder of the day was dedicated to more mature deliberations-to the unfolding of the plan of warfare which Wallace had conceived.
Mar had seen the power of his arms; Murray had already drunk the experience of a veteran from his genius; hence they were not surprised on hearing that which filled strangers with amazement.
Maxwell, though equally astonished, was not so rapt.
"You have made arms the study of your life?" inquired he.
"But when Scotland lost her freedom, as the sword was not drawn in her defense, I looked not where it lay.
I then studied the arts of peace; that is over; and now the passion of my soul revives.
When the mind is bent on one object only, all becomes clear that leads to it; zeal, in such cases, is almost genius."
Soon after these observations, it was admitted that Wallace might attend Lord mar and his family on the morrow to the Isle of Bute.
When the dawn broke, he arose from his heather bed in the great tower; and having called forth twenty of the Bothwell men to escort their lord, he told Ireland he should expect to have a cheering account of the wounded on his return.
"But to assure the poor fellows," rejoined the honest soldier, "that something of yourself still keeps watch over them.
Wallace smiled.
"Were it our holy King David's we might expect such a miracle.
But you are welcome to it; and here let it remain till I take it hence.
A glow of conscious valor flushed the cheek of the veteran.
Wallace took the sword, and turned to meet Murray with Edwin in the portal.
When they reached the citadel, Lennox and all the officers in the garrison were assembled to bid their chief a short adieu.
Lord Mar, between Murray and Edwin, followed; and the servants and guard completed the suit.
Being well mounted, they pleasantly pursued their way, avoiding all inhabited places, and resting in the deepest recesses of the hills. Lord Mar proposed traveling all night; but at the close of the evening his countess complained of fatigue, declaring she could not advance further than the eastern bank of the River Cart.
Wallace ordered cloaks to be spread on the ground for the countess and her women; and seeing them laid to rest, planted his men to keep guard around the circle.
The moon had sunk in the west before the whole of his little camp were asleep; but when all seemed composed, he wandered forth by the dim light of the stars to view the surrounding country-a country he had so often traversed in his boyish days.
A little onward, in green Renfrewshire, lay the lands of his father; but that Ellerslie of his ancestors, like his own Ellerslie of Clydesdale, his country's enemies had leveled with the ground.
He turned in anguish of heart toward the south, for there less racking remembrances hovered over the distant hills.
Leaning on the shattered stump of an old tree, he fixed his eyes on the far stretching plain, which alone seemed to divide him from the venerable Sir Ronald Crawford and his youthful haunts at Ayr.
Full of thoughts of her who used to share those happy scenes, he heard a sigh behind him.
He turned round, and beheld a female figure disappear among the trees.
He stood motionless; again it met his view; it seemed to approach.
When he last passed these borders, he was bringing his bride from Ayr!
What then was this ethereal visitant?
His heart paused-it beat violently-still the figure advanced.
But it fled, and again vanished.
CHAPTER three
DON QUIXOTE
When Kenneth got home he told mr Watson of his discovery and asked the old gentleman to write to the sign painter and find out what could be done.
The lawyer laughed heartily at his young friend's whim, but agreed to help him.
"If you are going to try to prevent rural advertising," he remarked, "you'll find your hands full."
Kenneth looked up smiling.
"Thank you," he said.
"For what?"
"For finding me something to do.
I'm sick of this inaction."
Again the lawyer laughed.
"To remove such eyesores as advertising signs from the neighborhood of Elmhurst."
"It's a Titan's task, Ken."
"So much the better."
The lawyer grew thoughtful.
"I believe it's impossible," he ventured.
"Better yet.
I don't say I'll succeed, but I promise to try.
I want something to occupy myself-something really difficult, so that I may test my own powers."
"But, my dear boy!
This foolish proposition isn't worthy your effort.
If you want to be up and doing we'll find something else to occupy your mind."
"No, mr Watson; I'm set on this.
It's a crime to allow these signs to flaunt themselves in our prettiest scenes.
Besides, no one else seems to have undertaken the task of exterminating them."
"True enough.
If you're serious, Ken, I'll frankly say the thing can't be done.
You may, perhaps, buy the privilege of maintaining the rocks of the glen free from advertising; but the advertisers will paint more signs on all the approaches, and you won't have gained much."
"I'll drive every advertising sign out of this country."
"Impossible.
The great corporations who control these industries make their fortunes by this style of advertising.
And they must advertise or they can't sell their products."
"Let them advertise in decent ways, then.
What right has any soap maker to flaunt his wares in my face, whether I'm interested in them or not?"
"The right of custom.
I see no way to stop them."
"Nor I, at present.
"Drive out one, and another will take his place.
Ten dollars a year for a rock as big as a barn!"
"But they rent thousands of such positions, and in the aggregate our farmers get large sums from them."
"And ruin the appearance of their homes and farms."
mr Watson smiled.
"They need to be educated, that's all.
These farmers seem very honest, decent fellows."
I wish you knew them better."
This campaign ought to bring us closer together, for I mean to get them to help me."
"You'll have to buy them, I'm afraid."
"Not all of them.
There must be some refinement among them."
But the lawyer was not convinced.
However, it was not his desire to stifle this new born enthusiasm of Kenneth's, even though he believed it misdirected.
It would cost the boy something, but he would gain his money's worth in experience.
After a few days the sign painter answered the letter.
He would relinquish the three signs in the glen for a payment of fifty dollars each, with the understanding that no other competing signs were to take their place.
Kenneth promptly mailed a check for the amount demanded and early next morning started for the glen with what he called his "eliminators."
These "eliminators" consisted of two men with cans of turpentine and gasoline and an equipment of scrubbing brushes.
Parsons, the farmer, came over to watch this novel proceeding, happy in the possession of three crisp five dollar notes given in accordance with the agreement made with him.
All day the two men scrubbed the rocks faithfully, assisted at odd times by their impatient employer; but the thick splashes of paint clung desperately to the rugged surface of the rock, and the task was a hard one.
When evening came the letters had almost disappeared when viewed closely; but when Kenneth rode to the mouth of the glen on his way home and paused to look back, he could see the injunction "Take Smith's Liver Pills" staring at him, in grim defiance of the scrubbing brushes.
No one ever knew what it cost in labor and material to erase those three signs; but after ten days they had vanished completely, and the boy heaved a sigh of satisfaction and turned his attention to extending the campaign.
On the farm nearest to Elmhurst at the north, which belonged to a man named Webb, was a barn, facing the road, that displayed on its side a tobacco sign.
Kenneth interviewed mr Webb and found that he received no money for the sign; but the man contended that the paint preserved his barn from the weather on that side.
So Kenneth agreed to repaint the entire barn for him, and actually had the work done.
As it took many coats of paint to blot out the sign it was rather a expensive operation.
By this time the campaign of the youthful proprietor of Elmhurst against advertising signs began to be talked of throughout the county, and was the subject of much merriment among the farmers.
Some of them were intelligent enough to admire the young Quixote, and acknowledged frankly that it was a pity to decorate their premises with signs of patent medicines and questionable soaps.
But the majority of them sneered at the champion, and many refused point blank to consider any proposition to discard the advertisements. Indeed, some were proud of them, and believed it a mark of distinction to have their fences and sheds announce an eye remedy or several varieties of pickles.
mr Watson, at first an amused observer of the campaign, soon became indignant at the way that Kenneth was ridiculed and reviled; and he took a hand in the fight himself.
He decided to call a meeting of the neighboring farmers at the district school house on Saturday night, where Kenneth could address them with logical arguments and endeavor to win them over to his way of thinking.
Not that the Honorable Erastus cared a fig about this foolish talk of exterminating advertising signs.
These signs were not works of art, but they were distinctly helpful to business, and only a fool, in the opinion of the Honorable Erastus, would protest against the inevitable.
What brought the legislator to the meeting was the fact that he was coming forward for re-election in November, and believed that this afforded a good chance to meet some of his constituents and make a favorable impression.
Indeed, the gathering had at first the appearance of being a political one, so entirely did the Representative dominate it.
But mr Watson took the platform and shyly introduced the speaker of the evening.
The farmers all knew mr Watson, and liked him; so when Kenneth rose they prepared to listen in respectful silence.
He told them what he had been able to accomplish by himself, in a short time; how he had redeemed the glen from its disgraceful condition and restored it to its former beauty.
He asked them to observe Webb's pretty homestead, no longer marred by the unsightly sign upon the barn.
And then he appealed to them to help him in driving all the advertising signs out of the community.
When he ended they applauded his speech mildly; but it was chiefly for the reason that he had spoken so forcibly and well.
Then the Honorable Erastus Hopkins, quick to catch the lack of sympathy in the audience, stood up and begged leave to reply to young Forbes.
He said the objection to advertising signs was only a rich man's aristocratic hobby, and that it could not be indulged in a democratic community of honest people.
His own firm, he said, bought thousands of bushels of oats from the farmers and converted them into the celebrated Eagle Eye Breakfast Food, three packages for a quarter.
They sold this breakfast food to thousands of farmers, to give them health and strength to harvest another crop of oats.
Thus he "benefited the community going and coming." What!
What aristocratic notion could prevent him?
It was a mighty good thing for the farmers to be reminded, by means of the signs on their barns and fences, of the things they needed in daily life.
If the young man at Elmhurst would like to be of public service he might find some better way to do so than by advancing such crazy ideas.
But this, continued the Representative, was a subject of small importance. What he wished especially to call their attention to was the fact that he had served the district faithfully as Representative, and deserved their suffrages for renomination.
And then he began to discuss political questions in general and his own merits in particular, so that Kenneth and mr Watson, disgusted at the way in which the Honorable Erastus had captured the meeting, left the school house and indignantly returned to Elmhurst.
"This man Hopkins," said mr Watson, angrily, "is not a gentleman.
He's an impertinent meddler."
"He ruined any good effect my speech might have created," said Kenneth, gloomily.
"Give it up, my boy," advised the elder man, laying a kindly hand on the youth's shoulder.
"It really isn't worth the struggle."
"But I can't give it up and acknowledge myself beaten," protested Kenneth, almost ready to weep with disappointment.
"I can't do better than to make it clean-to do away with these disreputable signs," said the boy, stubbornly.
"You made a fine speech," declared mr Watson, gravely puffing his pipe. "I am very proud of you, my lad."
Kenneth flushed red.
He was by nature shy and retiring to a degree.
Only his pent up enthusiasm had carried him through the ordeal, and now that it was over he was chagrined to think that the speech had been so ineffective.
The person-owner or tenant, I forget which-who lived in the house was an old woman named Dona Pascuala, whom I never saw without a cigar in her mouth.
But nothing of the kind happened, although on two occasions I thought the wished moment had come.
A stranger at the meeting quickly responded to the call.
Yes, he could play to any man's singing-any tune he liked to call.
And this was soon settled.
I refuse to play to you!
I, too, suffered as you have suffered-"
And so there was no fight after all!
It is commonly said among the gauchos that when a man has proved his prowess by killing a few of his opponents, he is thereafter permitted to live in peace.
Oh, the subject!
The words mattered more than the air. For here we had before us not a small sweet singer, a goldfinch in a cage, but a cock-a fighting cock with well trimmed comb and tail and a pair of sharp spurs to its feet.
The stanza ended, Marcos resumed his comments.
It is not the proper number in this case.
One more is wanted to make the full dozen.
I thought him a coward.
I disliked the whole tribe, except a little girl of about eight, a child, it was said, of one of the unmarried sisters. I never discovered which of her aunts, as she called all these tall, white faced heavy browed women, was her mother.
He was, perhaps, of a better class, as his features were all good.
A heavy man as well as a big one, he was not so amusing and so fluent a talker out of school as his predecessor, nor, as we were delighted to discover, so exacting and tyrannical in school.
He would forget all about school hours, roam about the gardens and plantations, get into long conversations with the workmen, and eventually, when he found that he was somewhat too casual to please his employer, he enjoined us to "look him up" and let him know when it was school time.
Looking him up usually took a good deal of time.
When lessons were not learned he would sympathize with and comfort us by saying we had done our best and more could not be expected.
He was also glad of any excuse to let us off for half a day.
We found out that he was exceedingly fond of fishing-that with a rod and line in his hand he would spend hours of perfect happiness, even without a bite to cheer him, and on any fine day that called us to the plain we would tell him that it was a perfect day for fishing, and ask him to let us off for the afternoon.
But he didn't know, and in any case he would like to correspond on these important matters with one on the other side.
This letter met with a warm response, and there was much correspondence and meetings with other clerics Anglican or Episcopalian, I forget which.
But there were also Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodist ministers, all with churches of their own in the town, and he may have flirted a little with all of them.
Then he came for his year of waiting to us, during which he amused himself by teaching the little ones, smoothing the way for my mathematical brother, and fishing.
He had come, he told them, a Roman Catholic priest to a Roman Catholic country, and had found himself a stranger in a strange land.
He had waited patiently for months, and had been put off with idle promises or thrust aside, while every greedy pushing priest that arrived from Spain and Italy was received with open arms and a place provided for him.
He did not go so far as to accept that offer: he was wise in his generation, and eventually got his reward.
I had no inclination to do anything with books myself: books were lessons, therefore repellent, and that any one should read a book for pleasure was inconceivable.
However, one day he announced that he had a grand scheme to put before us.
We all agreed joyfully, and as the title had taken our fancy we started hunting for a blue pitcher all over the house, but couldn't find such a thing, and finally had to put up with a tin box with a wooden lid and a lock and key.
I was to say something about birds: there was never a week went by in which I didn't tell them a wonderful story of a strange bird I had seen for the first time: well, I could write about that strange bird and make it just as wonderful as I liked.
All went well for a few days.
He would exhibit him as the meanest, most contemptible insect that ever crawled on the surface of the earth.
It is not proposed to narrate minutely the incidents of their sojourn on this charming shore; though if it were convenient I might present a record of impressions nonetheless delectable that they were not exhaustively analyzed.
The young Englishmen were introduced to everybody, entertained by everybody, intimate with everybody.
He had meditated upon mrs Westgate's account of her sister, and he discovered for himself that the young lady was clever, and appeared to have read a great deal.
If she was shy, she carried it off very well.
How would you say it in England-his position?"
"His position?" Percy Beaumont repeated.
"He is a peer, then?"
"Oh, yes, he is a peer."
"And has he any other title than Lord Lambeth?"
"He is the son of the Duke of Bayswater," he added presently.
"And are his parents living?"
"And his mother?"
"Yes, there are two."
"And what are they called?"
She is the Countess of Pimlico."
"And the other?"
Bessie Alden looked at him a moment.
"Is she very plain?"
Beaumont began to laugh again.
"Depend upon it," he said, "that girl means to try for you."
"Damn my eyes!" exclaimed Lord Lambeth.
"In the first place, how do you know how fond I am of her?" asked Lord Lambeth.
"And, in the second place, why shouldn't I be fond of her?"
"What do you call my 'line'?
"Exactly so.
"All the better.
It's an animal I detest."
"You prefer a bluestocking."
"Is that what you call Miss Alden?"
"I don't know anything about that.
She is certainly very clever."
"In point of fact," Lord Lambeth rejoined, "I find it uncommonly lively."
After this, Percy Beaumont held his tongue; but on the tenth of August he wrote to the Duchess of Bayswater.
He was, as I have said, a man of conscience, and he had a strong, incorruptible sense of the proprieties of life.
She asked him a great many questions, some of which bored him a little; for he took no pleasure in talking about himself.
"Ah, but one doesn't make laws.
"It must be a great privilege, and I should think that if one thought of it in the right way-from a high point of view-it would be very inspiring."
"Do you want to buy up their leases?" he asked.
Bessie Alden listened with great interest and declared that she would give the world to see such a place.
Whereupon-"It would be awfully kind of you to come and stay there," said Lord Lambeth.
She's so devilish positive."
"What am I to do?"
"She is not interested-she is not!" Lord Lambeth repeated.
By the side of a wood, in a country a long way off, ran a fine stream of water; and upon the stream there stood a mill.
And round about the wheel went merrily; the work was quickly done, and the straw was all spun into gold.
When the king came and saw this, he was greatly astonished and pleased; but his heart grew still more greedy of gain, and he shut up the poor miller's daughter again with a fresh task.
till, long before morning, all was done again.
At the birth of her first little child she was very glad, and forgot the dwarf, and what she had said.
Chapter five
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?
His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful.
Great God!
I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body.
Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bed chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.
At length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before endured, and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain; I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams.
I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt.
He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.
His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.
He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs.
I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.
Oh!
I passed the night wretchedly.
Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness.
Mingled with this horror, I felt the bitterness of disappointment; dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!
Morning, dismal and wet, at length dawned and discovered to my sleepless and aching eyes the church of Ingolstadt, its white steeple and clock, which indicated the sixth hour.
I did not dare return to the apartment which I inhabited, but felt impelled to hurry on, although drenched by the rain which poured from a black and comfortless sky.
My heart palpitated in the sickness of fear, and I hurried on with irregular steps, not daring to look about me:
[Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner."]
Continuing thus, I came at length opposite to the inn at which the various diligences and carriages usually stopped.
Here I paused, I knew not why; but I remained some minutes with my eyes fixed on a coach that was coming towards me from the other end of the street.
Nothing could equal my delight on seeing Clerval; his presence brought back to my thoughts my father, Elizabeth, and all those scenes of home so dear to my recollection.
Clerval continued talking for some time about our mutual friends and his own good fortune in being permitted to come to Ingolstadt.
"It gives me the greatest delight to see you; but tell me how you left my father, brothers, and Elizabeth."
By the by, I mean to lecture you a little upon their account myself.
But, my dear Frankenstein," continued he, stopping short and gazing full in my face, "I did not before remark how very ill you appear; so thin and pale; you look as if you had been watching for several nights."
I trembled excessively; I could not endure to think of, and far less to allude to, the occurrences of the preceding night.
I walked with a quick pace, and we soon arrived at my college.
I then reflected, and the thought made me shiver, that the creature whom I had left in my apartment might still be there, alive and walking about.
I threw the door forcibly open, as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side; but nothing appeared.
I could hardly believe that so great a good fortune could have befallen me, but when I became assured that my enemy had indeed fled, I clapped my hands for joy and ran down to Clerval.
It was not joy only that possessed me; I felt my flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly.
"My dear Victor," cried he, "what, for God's sake, is the matter?
How ill you are!
Poor Clerval!
What must have been his feelings?
A meeting, which he anticipated with such joy, so strangely turned to bitterness.
He knew that I could not have a more kind and attentive nurse than himself; and, firm in the hope he felt of my recovery, he did not doubt that, instead of doing harm, he performed the kindest action that he could towards them.
By very slow degrees, and with frequent relapses that alarmed and grieved my friend, I recovered.
"Dearest Clerval," exclaimed I, "how kind, how very good you are to me. This whole winter, instead of being spent in study, as you promised yourself, has been consumed in my sick room.
"You will repay me entirely if you do not discompose yourself, but get well as fast as you can; and since you appear in such good spirits, I may speak to you on one subject, may I not?"
I trembled.
"If this is your present temper, my friend, you will perhaps be glad to see a letter that has been lying here some days for you; it is from your cousin, I believe."
CHAPTER five
Margaret made a good listener to all her mother's little plans for adding some small comforts to the lot of the poorer parishioners.
She could not help listening, though each new project was a stab to her heart.
By the time the frost had set in, they should be far away from Helstone.
Old Simon's rheumatism might be bad and his eyesight worse; there would be no one to go and read to him, and comfort him with little porringers of broth and good red flannel: or if there was, it would be a stranger, and the old man would watch in vain for her.
Mary Domville's little crippled boy would crawl in vain to the door and look for her coming through the forest.
These poor friends would never understand why she had forsaken them; and there were many others besides.
'Papa has always spent the income he derived from his living in the parish.
'Do you feel ill, my darling?' asked mrs Hale, anxiously, misunderstanding Margaret's hint of the uncertainty of their stay at Helstone. 'You look pale and tired.
It smells of the freshest, purest fragrance, after the smokiness of Harley Street.
But I am tired: it surely must be near bedtime.'
'Not far off-it is half past nine.
You had better go to bed at once dear. Ask Dixon for some gruel.
I will come and see you as soon as you are in bed.
Margaret went upstairs.
That morning when she had looked out, her heart had danced at seeing the bright clear lights on the church tower, which foretold a fine and sunny day.
This evening-sixteen hours at most had past by-she sat down, too full of sorrow to cry, but with a dull cold pain, which seemed to have pressed the youth and buoyancy out of her heart, never to return.
mr Henry Lennox's visit-his offer-was like a dream, a thing beside her actual life.
She looked out upon the dark gray lines of the church tower, square and straight in the centre of the view, cutting against the deep blue transparent depths beyond, into which she gazed, and felt that she might gaze for ever, seeing at every moment some farther distance, and yet no sign of God!
He came to her and touched her shoulder before she was aware that he was there.
'Margaret, I heard you were up.
I could not help coming in to ask you to pray with me-to say the Lord's Prayer; that will do good to both of us.'
mr Hale and Margaret knelt by the window seat-he looking up, she bowed down in humble shame.
God was there, close around them, hearing her father's whispered words.
She spoke not a word, but stole to bed after her father had left her, like a child ashamed of its fault.
If the world was full of perplexing problems she would trust, and only ask to see the one step needful for the hour.
mr Lennox-his visit, his proposal-the remembrance of which had been so rudely pushed aside by the subsequent events of the day-haunted her dreams that night.
He was climbing up some tree of fabulous height to reach the branch whereon was slung her bonnet: he was falling, and she was struggling to save him, but held back by some invisible powerful hand.
He was dead.
And yet, with a shifting of the scene, she was once more in the Harley Street drawing room, talking to him as of old, and still with a consciousness all the time that she had seen him killed by that terrible fall.
Miserable, unresting night!
Ill preparation for the coming day!
She awoke with a start, unrefreshed, and conscious of some reality worse even than her feverish dreams.
It all came back upon her; not merely the sorrow, but the terrible discord in the sorrow.
Where, to what distance apart, had her father wandered, led by doubts which were to her temptations of the Evil One?
She talked on, planning village kindnesses, unheeding the silence of her husband and the monosyllabic answers of Margaret. Before the things were cleared away, mr Hale got up; he leaned one hand on the table, as if to support himself:
I am going to Bracy Common, and will ask Farmer Dobson to give me something for dinner.
I shall be back to tea at seven.' He did not look at either of them, but Margaret knew what he meant.
mr Hale would have delayed making it till half past six, but Margaret was of different stuff.
She could not bear the impending weight on her mind all the day long: better get the worst over; the day would be too short to comfort her mother.
But while she stood by the window, thinking how to begin, and waiting for the servant to have left the room, her mother had gone up stairs to put on her things to go to the school.
She came down ready equipped, in a brisker mood than usual.
'Mother, come round the garden with me this morning; just one turn,' said Margaret, putting her arm round mrs Hale's waist.
They passed through the open window.
mrs Hale spoke-said something-Margaret could not tell what.
Her eye caught on a bee entering a deep belled flower: when that bee flew forth with his spoil she would begin-that should be the sign.
Out he came.
'Mamma!
'He's going to leave the Church, and live in Milton Northern.' There were the three hard facts hardly spoken.
'Papa himself,' said Margaret, longing to say something gentle and consoling, but literally not knowing how.
They were close to a garden bench.
Papa has written to the bishop, saying that he has such doubts that he cannot conscientiously remain a priest of the Church of England, and that he must give up Helstone.
He has also consulted mr Bell-Frederick's godfather, you know, mamma; and it is arranged that we go to live in Milton Northern.' mrs Hale looked up in Margaret's face all the time she was speaking these words: the shadow on her countenance told that she, at least, believed in the truth of what she said.
'He would surely have told me before it came to this.'
It came strongly upon Margaret's mind that her mother ought to have been told: that whatever her faults of discontent and repining might have been, it was an error in her father to have left her to learn his change of opinion, and his approaching change of life, from her better informed child.
'Dear, darling mamma! we were so afraid of giving you pain.
'When did he tell you, Margaret?'
'Yesterday, only yesterday,' replied Margaret, detecting the jealousy which prompted the inquiry.
'Poor papa!'--trying to divert her mother's thoughts into compassionate sympathy for all her father had gone through.
mrs Hale raised her head.
'Can't the bishop set him right?' asked mrs Hale, half impatiently.
'I'm afraid not,' said Margaret.
'But I did not ask.
He is going to leave Helstone in a fortnight.
I am not sure if he did not say he had sent in his deed of resignation.'
'In a fortnight!' exclaimed mrs Hale, 'I do think this is very strange-not at all right.
'He has doubts, you say, and gives up his living, and all without consulting me.
Mistaken as Margaret felt her father's conduct to have been, she could not bear to hear it blamed by her mother.
She knew that his very reserve had originated in a tenderness for her, which might be cowardly, but was not unfeeling.
'You can't think the smoky air of a manufacturing town, all chimneys and dirt like Milton Northern, would be better than this air, which is pure and sweet, if it is too soft and relaxing.
Fancy living in the middle of factories, and factory people!
Though, of course, if your father leaves the Church, we shall not be admitted into society anywhere.
It is well he is not alive to see what your father has come to!
Every day after dinner, when I was a girl, living with your aunt Shaw, at Beresford Court, Sir john used to give for the first toast-"Church and King, and down with the Rump."'
Margaret was glad that her mother's thoughts were turned away from the fact of her husband's silence to her on the point which must have been so near his heart.
Next to the serious vital anxiety as to the nature of her father's doubts, this was the one circumstance of the case that gave Margaret the most pain.
'You know, we have very little society here, mamma.
The Gormans, who are our nearest neighbours (to call society-and we hardly ever see them), have been in trade just as much as these Milton Northern people.'
'Yes,' said mrs Hale, almost indignantly, 'but, at any rate, the Gormans made carriages for half the gentry of the county, and were brought into some kind of intercourse with them; but these factory people, who on earth wears cotton that can afford linen?'
'Well, mamma, I give up the cotton spinners; I am not standing up for them, any more than for any other trades people.
Only we shall have little enough to do with them.'
'Why on earth has your father fixed on Milton Northern to live in?'
'Partly,' said Margaret, sighing, 'because it is so very different from Helstone-partly because mr Bell says there is an opening there for a private tutor.'
'Private tutor in Milton!
Why can't he go to Oxford, and be a tutor to gentlemen?'
'You forget, mamma!
He is leaving the Church on account of his opinions-his doubts would do him no good at Oxford.'
mrs Hale was silent for some time, quietly crying.
Margaret was inexpressibly relieved to find that her mother's anxiety and distress was lowered to this point, so insignificant to herself, and on which she could do so much to help.
She planned and promised, and led her mother on to arrange fully as much as could be fixed before they knew somewhat more definitively what mr Hale intended to do.
She dared not go to meet him, and tell him what she had done all day, for fear of her mother's jealous annoyance. She heard him linger, as if awaiting her, or some sign of her; and she dared not stir; she saw by her mother's twitching lips, and changing colour, that she too was aware that her husband had returned.
She went to him, and threw herself on his breast, crying out-
'Oh! Richard, Richard, you should have told me sooner!'
In consequence of this, Margaret felt herself touched, and started up into a sitting posture; she saw the accustomed room, the figure of Dixon in shadow, as the latter stood holding the candle a little behind her, for fear of the effect on Miss Hale's startled eyes, swollen and blinded as they were.
'Oh, Dixon!
I did not hear you come into the room!' said Margaret, resuming her trembling self restraint. 'Is it very late?' continued she, lifting herself languidly off the bed, yet letting her feet touch the ground without fairly standing down, as she shaded her wet ruffled hair off her face, and tried to look as though nothing were the matter; as if she had only been asleep.
'I hardly can tell what time it is,' replied Dixon, in an aggrieved tone of voice.
'Since your mamma told me this terrible news, when I dressed her for tea, I've lost all count of time.
When Charlotte told me just now you were sobbing, Miss Hale, I thought, no wonder, poor thing!
And master thinking of turning Dissenter at his time of life, when, if it is not to be said he's done well in the Church, he's not done badly after all.
I had a cousin, miss, who turned Methodist preacher after he was fifty years of age, and a tailor all his life; but then he had never been able to make a pair of trousers to fit, for as long as he had been in the trade, so it was no wonder; but for master! as I said to missus, "What would poor Sir john have said?
he never liked your marrying mr Hale, but if he could have known it would have come to this, he would have sworn worse oaths than ever, if that was possible!"'
To hear her father talked of in this way by a servant to her face!
'Dixon! you forget to whom you are speaking.' She stood upright and firm on her feet now, confronting the waiting maid, and fixing her with her steady discerning eye.
'I am mr Hale's daughter.
You have made a strange mistake, and one that I am sure your own good feeling will make you sorry for when you think about it.'
Dixon hung irresolutely about the room for a minute or two.
Margaret repeated, 'You may leave me, Dixon.
'No! not to night, thank you.' And Margaret gravely lighted her out of the room, and bolted the door.
From henceforth Dixon obeyed and admired Margaret.
She said it was because she was so like poor Master Frederick; but the truth was, that Dixon, as do many others, liked to feel herself ruled by a powerful and decided nature.
Dixon, true to her post of body guard, attended most faithfully to her mistress, and only emerged from mrs Hale's bed room to shake her head, and murmur to herself in a manner which Margaret did not choose to hear.
For he came home every evening more and more depressed, after the necessary leave taking which he had resolved to have with every individual parishioner.
The cook and Charlotte worked away with willing arms and stout hearts at all the moving and packing; and as far as that went, Margaret's admirable sense enabled her to see what was best, and to direct how it should be done.
But where were they to go to? In a week they must be gone.
Straight to Milton, or where?
He answered:
'My dear!
I have really had too much to think about to settle this.
What does your mother say?
What does she wish?
He met with an echo even louder than his sigh.
Dixon had just come into the room for another cup of tea for mrs Hale, and catching mr Hale's last words, and protected by his presence from Margaret's upbraiding eyes, made bold to say, 'My poor mistress!'
'You don't think her worse to day,' said mr Hale, turning hastily.
'I'm sure I can't say, sir.
It's not for me to judge.
mr Hale looked infinitely distressed.
'You had better take mamma her tea while it is hot, Dixon,' said Margaret, in a tone of quiet authority.
'Papa!' said Margaret, 'it is this suspense that is bad for you both.
And I think, papa, that I could get mamma to help me in planning, if you could tell me what to plan for.
She has never expressed any wish in any way, and only thinks of what can't be helped.
Have you taken a house there?'
'I suppose we must go into lodgings, and look about for a house.
'And pack up the furniture so that it can be left at the railway station, till we have met with one?'
'I suppose so.
Do what you think best.
Only remember, we shall have much less money to spend.'
They had never had much superfluity, as Margaret knew.
She felt that it was a great weight suddenly thrown upon her shoulders.
Four months ago, all the decisions she needed to make were what dress she would wear for dinner, and to help Edith to draw out the lists of who should take down whom in the dinner parties at home.
Nor was the household in which she lived one that called for much decision.
Once a year, there was a long discussion between her aunt and Edith as to whether they should go to the Isle of Wight, abroad, or to Scotland; but at such times Margaret herself was secure of drifting, without any exertion of her own, into the quiet harbour of home.
Now, since that day when mr Lennox came, and startled her into a decision, every day brought some question, momentous to her, and to those whom she loved, to be settled.
Her father went up after tea to sit with his wife.
Margaret remained alone in the drawing room.
Suddenly she took a candle and went into her father's study for a great atlas, and lugging it back into the drawing room, she began to pore over the map of England.
'I have hit upon such a beautiful plan.
Look here-in Darkshire, hardly the breadth of my finger from Milton, is Heston, which I have often heard of from people living in the north as such a pleasant little bathing place.
She would get a breath of sea air to set her up for the winter, and be spared all the fatigue, and Dixon would enjoy taking care of her.'
'Oh, yes!' said Margaret. 'Dixon quite intends it, and I don't know what mamma would do without her.'
'To be sure she does, papa,' replied Margaret; 'and if she has to put up with a different style of living, we shall have to put up with her airs, which will be worse.
But she really loves us all, and would be miserable to leave us, I am sure-especially in this change; so, for mamma's sake, and for the sake of her faithfulness, I do think she must go.'
I am resigned.
The breadth of one of your fingers does not give me a very clear idea of distance.'
'Not in distance, but in-.
If you really think it will do your mother good, let it be fixed so.'
This was a great step.
Now Margaret could work, and act, and plan in good earnest.
There may have been two happier and more excited girls somewhere in Canada or the United States at that moment, but I doubt it.
Every snip of the scissors, as rose and peony and bluebell fell, seemed to chirp, "mrs Morgan is coming today." Anne wondered how mr Harrison COULD go on placidly mowing hay in the field across the lane, just as if nothing were going to happen.
The parlor at Green Gables was a rather severe and gloomy apartment, with rigid horsehair furniture, stiff lace curtains, and white antimacassars that were always laid at a perfectly correct angle, except at such times as they clung to unfortunate people's buttons.
Even Anne had never been able to infuse much grace into it, for Marilla would not permit any alterations.
But it is wonderful what flowers can accomplish if you give them a fair chance; when Anne and Diana finished with the room you would not have recognized it.
A great blue bowlful of snowballs overflowed on the polished table.
The shining black mantelpiece was heaped with roses and ferns.
Every shelf of the what not held a sheaf of bluebells; the dark corners on either side of the grate were lighted up with jars full of glowing crimson peonies, and the grate itself was aflame with yellow poppies.
All this splendor and color, mingled with the sunshine falling through the honeysuckle vines at the windows in a leafy riot of dancing shadows over walls and floor, made of the usually dismal little room the veritable "bower" of Anne's imagination, and even extorted a tribute of admiration from Marilla, who came in to criticize and remained to praise.
"Now, we must set the table," said Anne, in the tone of a priestess about to perform some sacred rite in honor of a divinity.
The table was set in the sitting room, with Marilla's finest linen and the best china, glass, and silver.
You may be perfectly certain that every article placed on it was polished or scoured to the highest possible perfection of gloss and glitter.
And what about Davy all this time?
Was he redeeming his promise to be good?
To be sure, he insisted on remaining in the kitchen, for his curiosity wanted to see all that went on.
At half past eleven the lettuce salad was made, the golden circles of the pies were heaped with whipped cream, and everything was sizzling and bubbling that ought to sizzle and bubble.
We must have dinner at sharp one, for the soup must be served as soon as it's done."
"I do hope I'll be able to say something once in a while, and not sit like a mute," said Diana anxiously.
"All mrs Morgan's heroines converse so beautifully.
But I'm afraid I'll be tongue tied and stupid.
And I'll be sure to say 'I seen.' I haven't often said it since Miss Stacy taught here; but in moments of excitement it's sure to pop out.
And it would be almost as bad to have nothing to say."
"I'm nervous about a good many things," said Anne, "but I don't think there is much fear that I won't be able to talk."
And, to do her justice, there wasn't.
At half past twelve the Allans and Miss Stacy came.
Everything was going well but Anne was beginning to feel nervous.
It was surely time for Priscilla and mrs Morgan to arrive.
She made frequent trips to the gate and looked as anxiously down the lane as ever her namesake in the Bluebeard story peered from the tower casement.
"Suppose they don't come at all?" she said piteously.
"Don't suppose it.
She had, in accordance with her promise to mrs Lynde, written to Miss Barry of Charlottetown, asking for the loan of it.
It was examined and admired; then, just as Anne had taken it back into her own hands, a terrific crash and clatter sounded from the kitchen pantry. Marilla, Diana, and Anne fled out, the latter pausing only long enough to set the precious platter hastily down on the second step of the stairs.
Davy had finished ravelling out his herring net and had wound the twine into a ball.
Then he had gone into the pantry to put it up on the shelf above the table, where he already kept a score or so of similar balls, which, so far as could be discovered, served no useful purpose save to yield the joy of possession.
Davy had to climb on the table and reach over to the shelf at a dangerous angle . . . something he had been forbidden by Marilla to do, as he had come to grief once before in the experiment.
Davy slipped and came sprawling squarely down on the lemon pies.
His clean blouse was ruined for that time and the pies for all time.
It is, however, an ill wind that blows nobody good, and the pig was eventually the gainer by Davy's mischance.
"Davy Keith," said Marilla, shaking him by the shoulder, "didn't I forbid you to climb up on that table again?
Didn't I?"
"I forgot," whimpered Davy.
Perhaps you'll get them sorted out in your memory by that time.
I'm not punishing him because he spoiled your pies . . . that was an accident.
I'm punishing him for his disobedience.
Go, Davy, I say."
"Ain't I to have any dinner?" wailed Davy.
"You can come down after dinner is over and have yours in the kitchen."
"Oh, all right," said Davy, somewhat comforted.
"What shall we do for dessert?" asked Anne, looking regretfully at the wreck and ruin.
"Get out a crock of strawberry preserves," said Marilla consolingly. "There's plenty of whipped cream left in the bowl for it."
One o'clock came . . . but no Priscilla or mrs Morgan.
Everything was done to a turn and the soup was just what soup should be, but couldn't be depended on to remain so for any length of time.
"I don't believe they're coming after all," said Marilla crossly.
At half past one Marilla again emerged from the parlor.
"Girls, we MUST have dinner.
Priscilla and mrs Morgan are not coming, that's plain, and nothing is being improved by waiting."
Anne and Diana set about lifting the dinner, with all the zest gone out of the performance.
"I don't believe I'll be able to eat a mouthful," said Diana dolefully.
When Diana dished the peas she tasted them and a very peculiar expression crossed her face.
"Yes," said Anne, mashing the potatoes with the air of one expected to do her duty.
"I put a spoonful of sugar in.
We always do.
Don't you like it?"
Then she made a grimace.
I happened to think of it, for a wonder . . .
I'm always forgetting it . . . so I popped a spoonful in."
"It's a case of too many cooks, I guess," said Marilla, who had listened to this dialogue with a rather guilty expression.
The guests in the parlor heard peal after peal of laughter from the kitchen, but they never knew what the fun was about.
There were no green peas on the dinner table that day, however.
Let's carry the things in and get it over."
It cannot be said that that dinner was a notable success socially. The Allans and Miss Stacy exerted themselves to save the situation and Marilla's customary placidity was not noticeably ruffled.
But Anne and Diana, between their disappointment and the reaction from their excitement of the forenoon, could neither talk nor eat.
There is an old proverb that really seems at times to be inspired . . . "it never rains but it pours." The measure of that day's tribulations was not yet full.
Just as mr Allan had finished returning thanks there arose a strange, ominous sound on the stairs, as of some hard, heavy object bounding from step to step, finishing up with a grand smash at the bottom.
Everybody ran out into the hall.
At the bottom of the stairs lay a big pink conch shell amid the fragments of what had been Miss Barry's platter; and at the top of the stairs knelt a terrified Davy, gazing down with wide open eyes at the havoc.
"Davy," said Marilla ominously, "did you throw that conch down ON PURPOSE?"
"No, I never did," whimpered Davy.
"It was my fault.
I am properly punished for my carelessness; but oh, what will Miss Barry say?"
"Well, you know she only bought it, so it isn't the same as if it was an heirloom," said Diana, trying to console.
The guests went away soon after, feeling that it was the most tactful thing to do, and Anne and Diana washed the dishes, talking less than they had ever been known to do before.
Then Diana went home with a headache and Anne went with another to the east gable, where she stayed until Marilla came home from the post office at sunset, with a letter from Priscilla, written the day before.
"And oh, Anne dear," wrote Priscilla, "I'm so sorry, but I'm afraid we won't get up to Green Gables at all now, for by the time Aunty's ankle is well she will have to go back to Toronto.
She has to be there by a certain date."
"Well," sighed Anne, laying the letter down on the red sandstone step of the back porch, where she was sitting, while the twilight rained down out of a dappled sky, "I always thought it was too good to be true that mrs Morgan should really come.
But there . . . that speech sounds as pessimistic as Miss Eliza Andrews and I'm ashamed of making it.
After all, it was NOT too good to be true . . . things just as good and far better are coming true for me all the time.
And I suppose the events of today have a funny side too.
Perhaps when Diana and I are old and gray we shall be able to laugh over them.
But I feel that I can't expect to do it before then, for it has truly been a bitter disappointment."
"You'll probably have a good many more and worse disappointments than that before you get through life," said Marilla, who honestly thought she was making a comforting speech.
"It seems to me, Anne, that you are never going to outgrow your fashion of setting your heart so on things and then crashing down into despair because you don't get them."
"I know I'm too much inclined that, way" agreed Anne ruefully.
"When I think something nice is going to happen I seem to fly right up on the wings of anticipation; and then the first thing I realize I drop down to earth with a thud.
But really, Marilla, the flying part IS glorious as long as it lasts . . . it's like soaring through a sunset.
I think it almost pays for the thud."
"Well, maybe it does," admitted Marilla.
"I'd rather walk calmly along and do without both flying and thud.
But everybody has her own way of living . . .
What are you going to do about Miss Barry's platter?"
"Pay her back the twenty dollars she paid for it, I suppose.
I'm so thankful it wasn't a cherished heirloom because then no money could replace it."
"Maybe you could find one like it somewhere and buy it for her."
"I'm afraid not.
Platters as old as that are very scarce.
mrs Lynde couldn't find one anywhere for the supper.
I only wish I could, for of course Miss Barry would just as soon have one platter as another, if both were equally old and genuine.
Marilla, look at that big star over mr Harrison's maple grove, with all that holy hush of silvery sky about it.
"Where's Davy?" said Marilla, with an indifferent glance at the star.
"In bed.
Of course, the original agreement was that he must be good. But he TRIED to be good . . . and I hadn't the heart to disappoint him."
"You'll drown yourself or the twins, rowing about the pond in that flat," grumbled Marilla.
"I've lived here for sixty years and I've never been on the pond yet."
"Well, it's never too late to mend," said Anne roguishly.
"Suppose you come with us tomorrow.
We'll shut Green Gables up and spend the whole day at the shore, daffing the world aside."
"No, thank you," said Marilla, with indignant emphasis.
"I'd be a nice sight, wouldn't I, rowing down the pond in a flat?
I think I hear Rachel pronouncing on it.
"No, I'm sure there isn't.
He just called there one evening on business with mr Harmon Andrews and mrs Lynde saw him and said she knew he was courting because he had a white collar on.
I don't believe mr Harrison will ever marry.
He seems to have a prejudice against marriage."
"Well, you can never tell about those old bachelors.
"I think he only put it on because he wanted to conclude a business deal with Harmon Andrews," said Anne.
"I've heard him say that's the only time a man needs to be particular about his appearance, because if he looks prosperous the party of the second part won't be so likely to try to cheat him.
I really feel sorry for mr Harrison; I don't believe he feels satisfied with his life.
It must be very lonely to have no one to care about except a parrot, don't you think?
But I notice mr Harrison doesn't like to be pitied.
She turned her head at Davy's question and answered dreamily,
"'Over the mountains of the moon, Down the valley of the shadow.'"
Paul Irving would have known the meaning of this, or made a meaning out of it for himself, if he didn't; but practical Davy, who, as Anne often despairingly remarked, hadn't a particle of imagination, was only puzzled and disgusted.
"Of course, I was, dear boy.
Don't you know that it is only very foolish folk who talk sense all the time?"
"Oh, you are too little to understand," said Anne.
But she felt rather ashamed of saying it; for had she not, in keen remembrance of many similar snubs administered in her own early years, solemnly vowed that she would never tell any child it was too little to understand?
Yet here she was doing it . . . so wide sometimes is the gulf between theory and practice.
"Well, I'm doing my best to grow," said Davy, "but it's a thing you can't hurry much.
If Marilla wasn't so stingy with her jam I believe I'd grow a lot faster."
"Marilla is not stingy, Davy," said Anne severely.
"It is very ungrateful of you to say such a thing."
"I heard Marilla say she was it, herself, the other day."
"If you mean ECONOMICAL, it's a VERY different thing from being stingy. It is an excellent trait in a person if she is economical.
If Marilla had been stingy she wouldn't have taken you and Dora when your mother died.
Would you have liked to live with mrs Wiggins?"
"You just bet I wouldn't!" Davy was emphatic on that point.
"Nor I don't want to go out to Uncle Richard neither.
I don't want a fairy story.
Fortunately for Anne, Marilla called out at this moment from her room.
You'd better see what she wants."
"I've good news for you, Anne," said Diana.
"Mother and I have just got home from Carmody, and I saw Mary Sentner from Spencer vale in mr Blair's store.
She says the old Copp girls on the Tory Road have a willow ware platter and she thinks it's exactly like the one we had at the supper.
"I'll go right over to Spencervale after it tomorrow," said Anne resolutely, "and you must come with me.
It will be such a weight off my mind, for I have to go to town day after tomorrow and how can I face your Aunt Josephine without a willow ware platter?
It would be even worse than the time I had to confess about jumping on the spare room bed."
Both girls laughed over the old memory . . . concerning which, if any of my readers are ignorant and curious, I must refer them to Anne's earlier history.
The next afternoon the girls fared forth on their platter hunting expedition.
It was ten miles to Spencervale and the day was not especially pleasant for traveling.
It was very warm and windless, and the dust on the road was such as might have been expected after six weeks of dry weather.
"Everything is so parched up.
As for my garden, it hurts me every time I go into it.
I suppose I shouldn't complain about a garden when the farmers' crops are suffering so.
mr Harrison says his pastures are so scorched up that his poor cows can hardly get a bite to eat and he feels guilty of cruelty to animals every time he meets their eyes."
After a wearisome drive the girls reached Spencervale and turned down the "Tory" Road . . . a green, solitary highway where the strips of grass between the wheel tracks bore evidence to lack of travel.
Along most of its extent it was lined with thick set young spruces crowding down to the roadway, with here and there a break where the back field of a Spencervale farm came out to the fence or an expanse of stumps was aflame with fireweed and goldenrod.
"mr
Allan says it is on the principle of calling a place a grove because there are no trees in it," said Diana, "for nobody lives along the road except the Copp girls and old Martin Bovyer at the further end, who is a Liberal.
The Tory government ran the road through when they were in power just to show they were doing something."
Diana's father was a Liberal, for which reason she and Anne never discussed politics.
Green Gables folk had always been Conservatives.
Finally the girls came to the old Copp homestead . . . a place of such exceeding external neatness that even Green Gables would have suffered by contrast.
The house was a very old-fashioned one, situated on a slope, which fact had necessitated the building of a stone basement under one end.
The house and out buildings were all whitewashed to a condition of blinding perfection and not a weed was visible in the prim kitchen garden surrounded by its white paling.
"The shades are all down," said Diana ruefully.
"I believe that nobody is home."
This proved to be the case.
The girls looked at each other in perplexity.
"I don't know what to do," said Anne.
"If I were sure the platter was the right kind I would not mind waiting until they came home.
But if it isn't it may be too late to go to Wesley Keyson's afterward."
Diana looked at a certain little square window over the basement.
"That is the pantry window, I feel sure," she said, "because this house is just like Uncle Charles' at Newbridge, and that is their pantry window.
The shade isn't down, so if we climbed up on the roof of that little house we could look into the pantry and might be able to see the platter.
"No, I don't think so," decided Anne, after due reflection, "since our motive is not idle curiosity."
This important point of ethics being settled, Anne prepared to mount the aforesaid "little house," a construction of lathes, with a peaked roof, which had in times past served as a habitation for ducks.
The Copp girls had given up keeping ducks . . .
Although scrupulously whitewashed it had become somewhat shaky, and Anne felt rather dubious as she scrambled up from the vantage point of a keg placed on a box.
"I'm afraid it won't bear my weight," she said as she gingerly stepped on the roof.
"Lean on the window sill," advised Diana, and Anne accordingly leaned. Much to her delight, she saw, as she peered through the pane, a willow ware platter, exactly such as she was in quest of, on the shelf in front of the window.
So much she saw before the catastrophe came.
In her joy Anne forgot the precarious nature of her footing, incautiously ceased to lean on the window sill, gave an impulsive little hop of pleasure . . . and the next moment she had crashed through the roof up to her armpits, and there she hung, quite unable to extricate herself. Diana dashed into the duck house and, seizing her unfortunate friend by the waist, tried to draw her down.
See if you can put something under my feet . . . then perhaps I can draw myself up."
Diana hastily dragged in the previously mentioned keg and Anne found that it was just sufficiently high to furnish a secure resting place for her feet.
But she could not release herself.
"Could I pull you out if I crawled up?" suggested Diana.
"No . . . the splinters hurt too badly.
If you can find an axe you might chop me out, though.
Diana searched faithfully but no axe was to be found.
"I'll have to go for help," she said, returning to the prisoner.
"No, indeed, you won't," said Anne vehemently.
"If you do the story of this will get out everywhere and I shall be ashamed to show my face. No, we must just wait until the Copp girls come home and bind them to secrecy.
They'll know where the axe is and get me out.
I'm not uncomfortable, as long as I keep perfectly still . . . not uncomfortable in BODY I mean.
I wonder what the Copp girls value this house at.
I shall have to pay for the damage I've done, but I wouldn't mind that if I were only sure they would understand my motive in peeping in at their pantry window.
"If they're not back by sunset you'll have to go for other assistance, I suppose," said Anne reluctantly, "but you mustn't go until you really have to.
I wouldn't mind my misfortunes so much if they were romantic, as mrs Morgan's heroines' always are, but they are always just simply ridiculous.
Fancy what the Copp girls will think when they drive into their yard and see a girl's head and shoulders sticking out of the roof of one of their outhouses. Listen . . . is that a wagon?
No, Diana, I believe it is thunder."
Thunder it was undoubtedly, and Diana, having made a hasty pilgrimage around the house, returned to announce that a very black cloud was rising rapidly in the northwest.
"I believe we're going to have a heavy thunder shower," she exclaimed in dismay, "Oh, Anne, what will we do?"
"We must prepare for it," said Anne tranquilly.
A thunderstorm seemed a trifle in comparison with what had already happened.
"You'd better drive the horse and buggy into that open shed.
Fortunately my parasol is in the buggy.
Here . . . take my hat with you.
Diana untied the pony and drove into the shed, just as the first heavy drops of rain fell.
Occasionally Anne slanted back her parasol and waved an encouraging hand to her friend; But conversation at that distance was quite out of the question.
Finally the rain ceased, the sun came out, and Diana ventured across the puddles of the yard.
"Did you get very wet?" she asked anxiously.
"My head and shoulders are quite dry and my skirt is only a little damp where the rain beat through the lathes.
Don't pity me, Diana, for I haven't minded it at all.
I kept thinking how much good the rain will do and how glad my garden must be for it, and imagining what the flowers and buds would think when the drops began to fall.
I imagined out a most interesting dialogue between the asters and the sweet peas and the wild canaries in the lilac bush and the guardian spirit of the garden.
When I go home I mean to write it down.
I wish I had a pencil and paper to do it now, because I daresay I'll forget the best parts before I reach home."
Diana the faithful had a pencil and discovered a sheet of wrapping paper in the box of the buggy.
"Oh, Anne, it's sweet . . . just sweet.
"Oh, no, it wouldn't be suitable at all.
It's just a string of fancies.
I like writing such things, but of course nothing of the sort would ever do for publication, for editors insist on plots, so Priscilla says.
Oh, there's Miss Sarah Copp now. PLEASE, Diana, go and explain."
Miss Sarah Copp was a small person, garbed in shabby black, with a hat chosen less for vain adornment than for qualities that would wear well. She looked as amazed as might be expected on seeing the curious tableau in her yard, but when she heard Diana's explanation she was all sympathy.
She hurriedly unlocked the back door, produced the axe, and with a few skillfull blows set Anne free.
The latter, somewhat tired and stiff, ducked down into the interior of her prison and thankfully emerged into liberty once more.
"Miss Copp," she said earnestly.
"I assure you I looked into your pantry window only to discover if you had a willow ware platter.
I didn't see anything else-I didn't LOOK for anything else."
"Bless you, that's all right," said Miss Sarah amiably.
"You needn't worry-there's no harm done.
Thank goodness, we Copps keep our pantries presentable at all times and don't care who sees into them.
As for that old duckhouse, I'm glad it's smashed, for maybe now Martha will agree to having it taken down.
She never would before for fear it might come in handy sometime and I've had to whitewash it every spring.
But you might as well argue with a post as with Martha.
She went to town today-I drove her to the station.
And you want to buy my platter.
"Twenty dollars," said Anne, who was never meant to match business wits with a Copp, or she would not have offered her price at the start.
"Well, I'll see," said Miss Sarah cautiously.
Martha's the boss of this establishment I can tell you.
I'm getting awful tired of living under another woman's thumb.
But come in, come in.
You must be real tired and hungry.
Martha locked up all the cake and cheese and preserves afore she went.
She always does, because she says I'm too extravagant with them if company comes."
But it's worth twenty five dollars.
It's a very old platter."
She promptly agreed to give twenty five and Miss Sarah looked as if she felt sorry she hadn't asked for thirty.
"Well, I guess you may have it.
I want all the money I can scare up just now.
The fact is-" Miss Sarah threw up her head importantly, with a proud flush on her thin cheeks-"I'm going to be married-to Luther Wallace.
He wanted me twenty years ago.
Besides, I didn't know men were so skurse."
When the girls were safely away, Diana driving and Anne holding the coveted platter carefully on her lap, the green, rain freshened solitudes of the Tory Road were enlivened by ripples of girlish laughter.
We've had a rather trying time but it's over now.
I've got the platter, and that rain has laid the dust beautifully.
So 'all's well that ends well.'"
"We're not home yet," said Diana rather pessimistically, "and there's no telling what may happen before we are.
CHAPTER forty four
EASE NOT PEACE
'A dull rotation, never at a stay, Yesterday's face twin image of to day.' COWPER.
'Of what each one should be, he sees the form and rule, And till he reach to that, his joy can ne'er be full.' RUCKERT.
It was very well for Margaret that the extreme quiet of the Harley Street house, during Edith's recovery from her confinement, gave her the natural rest which she needed.
And she felt that it was almost ungrateful in her to have a secret feeling that the Helstone vicarage-nay, even the poor little house at Milton, with her anxious father and her invalid mother, and all the small household cares of comparative poverty, composed her idea of home.
Edith was impatient to get well, in order to fill Margaret's bed room with all the soft comforts, and pretty nick knacks, with which her own abounded.
Then her thoughts went back to Milton, with a strange sense of the contrast between the life there, and here.
There was a strange unsatisfied vacuum in Margaret's heart and mode of life; and, once when she had dimly hinted this to Edith, the latter, wearied with dancing the night before, languidly stroked Margaret's cheek as she sat by her in the old attitude,--she on a footstool by the sofa where Edith lay.
'Poor child!' said Edith.
'It is a little sad for you to be left, night after night, just at this time when all the world is so gay.
She was really very fond of him, excepting when he was anxiously attentive to Edith's dress and appearance, with a view to her beauty making a sufficient impression on the world.
'Oh, mr Bell!
'Have you dined?
How did you come?
But where are the others?
Left you alone?'
'Oh yes! and it is such a rest.
'Why, to tell you the truth, I dined at my club.
But never mind, never mind!
If their skill and their fires will stand it, their tempers won't.
You shall make me some tea, Margaret.
And now, what were you thinking of?
you were going to tell me.
Whose letters were those, god daughter, that you hid away so speedily?'
'Whew! is that all?
Who do you think came up in the train with me?'
'mr
Henry Lennox?' asked Margaret.
'Yes,' replied mr Bell.
'I liked him long ago,' said Margaret, glancing down for a moment.
What did you think of him?'
Do you call him good looking, Margaret?'
'Not i But I thought, perhaps, you might.
He has been on circuit now since I came.
But-mr
Bell-have you come from Oxford or from Milton?'
'Certainly.
But I thought that it might be the effect of the antiquities of Oxford.'
In Oxford, I could have managed all the landlords in the place, and had my own way, with half the trouble your Milton landlord has given me, and defeated me after all.
Luckily, mr Thornton found a tenant for it.
Why don't you ask after mr Thornton, Margaret?
Taken more than half the trouble off my hands.'
How is mrs Thornton?' asked Margaret hurriedly and below her breath, though she tried to speak out.
'I suppose they're well.
I've been staying at their house till I was driven out of it by the perpetual clack about that Thornton girl's marriage.
It was too much for Thornton himself, though she was his sister.
He's getting past the age for caring for such things, either as principal or accessory.
I thought mrs Thornton had been made of sterner stuff.'
'Perhaps so.
You've studied her, have you?
'I know it,' said Margaret.
'Oh, here is tea at last!' exclaimed she, as if relieved.
She could hardly tell what to say at first, and was thankful for all the tea table occupations, which gave her an excuse for keeping silence, and him an opportunity of recovering himself.
For, to tell the truth, he had rather forced himself up to Harley Street this evening, with a view of getting over an awkward meeting, awkward even in the presence of Captain Lennox and Edith, and doubly awkward now that he found her the only lady there, and the person to whom he must naturally and perforce address a great part of his conversation.
She began to talk on the subject which came uppermost in her mind, after the first flush of awkward shyness.
mr Lennox has discovered that he sailed for Australia only last August; only two months before Frederick was in England, and gave us the names of---- '
'Frederick in England! you never told me that!' exclaimed mr Bell in surprise.
I never doubted you had been told.
Of course, it was a great secret, and perhaps I should not have named it now,' said Margaret, a little dismayed.
'I have never named it to either my brother or your cousin,' said mr Lennox, with a little professional dryness of implied reproach.
I am not living in a talking, babbling world, nor yet among people who are trying to worm facts out of me; you needn't look so frightened because you have let the cat out of the bag to a faithful old hermit like me.
Stay!' (interrupting himself rather abruptly) 'was it at your mother's funeral?'
'To be sure!
To be sure!
Why, some one asked me if he had not been over then, and I denied it stoutly-not many weeks ago-who could it have been?
There was a pause for a moment or two.
Cannot you come here?
But I will certainly come if you wish it,' replied mr Lennox, with a little afterthought of extreme willingness, which made Margaret shrink into herself, and almost wish that she had not proposed her natural request.
mr Bell got up and looked around him for his hat, which had been removed to make room for tea.
'I believe I shall stay and see my brother and sister,' said mr Lennox, making no movement of departure.
'I want you to see Edith; and I want Edith to know you.
I suppose I am not much to "see," eh, Margaret?'
He joked, to give her time to recover from the slight flutter which he had detected in her manner on his proposal to leave; and she caught the tone, and threw the ball back.
To be sure, in her quiet black dress, she was a contrast to Edith, dancing in her white crape mourning, and long floating golden hair, all softness and glitter.
She dimpled and blushed most becomingly when introduced to mr Bell, conscious that she had her reputation as a beauty to keep up, and that it would not do to have a Mordecai refusing to worship and admire, even in the shape of an old Fellow of a College, which nobody had ever heard of.
mrs Shaw and Captain Lennox, each in their separate way, gave mr Bell a kind and sincere welcome, winning him over to like them almost in spite of himself, especially when he saw how naturally Margaret took her place as sister and daughter of the house.
And for mr Bell! for Margaret's mr Bell---- '
'Thank you.
I am much obliged to you.
I'm thankful they haven't a bed.
'I thought her looking remarkably well.
'She has had a great deal to go through,' said mr Bell.
'You must have heard some wrong statement.
'Perhaps I have been wrongly informed.
'I differ from you.
I do not think they are very apt to do as my poor friend Hale did.' mr Bell was inwardly chafing.
And you don't know Milton. Such a change from Helstone!
Do we part here?
FIRST SECTION
OF MORALITY TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL
It is the same with the gifts of fortune.
Moderation in the affections and passions, self control, and calm deliberation are not only good in many respects, but even seem to constitute part of the intrinsic worth of the person; but they are far from deserving to be called good without qualification, although they have been so unconditionally praised by the ancients.
For without the principles of a good will, they may become extremely bad, and the coolness of a villain not only makes him far more dangerous, but also directly makes him more abominable in our eyes than he would have been without it.
A good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition; that is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself is to be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought about by it in favour of any inclination, nay even of the sum total of all inclinations.
Its usefulness or fruitlessness can neither add nor take away anything from this value.
In the physical constitution of an organized being, that is, a being adapted suitably to the purposes of life, we assume it as a fundamental principle that no organ for any purpose will be found but what is also the fittest and best adapted for that purpose.
In a word, nature would have taken care that reason should not break forth into practical exercise, nor have the presumption, with its weak insight, to think out for itself the plan of happiness, and of the means of attaining it.
Nature would not only have taken on herself the choice of the ends, but also of the means, and with wise foresight would have entrusted both to instinct.
This will then, though not indeed the sole and complete good, must be the supreme good and the condition of every other, even of the desire of happiness.
Nay, it may even reduce it to nothing, without nature thereby failing of her purpose.
For reason recognizes the establishment of a good will as its highest practical destination, and in attaining this purpose is capable only of a satisfaction of its own proper kind, namely that from the attainment of an end, which end again is determined by reason only, notwithstanding that this may involve many a disappointment to the ends of inclination.
We have then to develop the notion of a will which deserves to be highly esteemed for itself and is good without a view to anything further, a notion which exists already in the sound natural understanding, requiring rather to be cleared up than to be taught, and which in estimating the value of our actions always takes the first place and constitutes the condition of all the rest.
In order to do this, we will take the notion of duty, which includes that of a good will, although implying certain subjective restrictions and hindrances.
These, however, far from concealing it, or rendering it unrecognizable, rather bring it out by contrast and make it shine forth so much the brighter.
I omit here all actions which are already recognized as inconsistent with duty, although they may be useful for this or that purpose, for with these the question whether they are done from duty cannot arise at all, since they even conflict with it.
I also set aside those actions which really conform to duty, but to which men have no direct inclination, performing them because they are impelled thereto by some other inclination.
For in this case we can readily distinguish whether the action which agrees with duty is done from duty, or from a selfish view.
Accordingly the action was done neither from duty nor from direct inclination, but merely with a selfish view.
For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.
But here again, without looking to duty, all men have already the strongest and most intimate inclination to happiness, because it is just in this idea that all inclinations are combined in one total.
But even in this case, if the general desire for happiness did not influence his will, and supposing that in his particular case health was not a necessary element in this calculation, there yet remains in this, as in all other cases, this law, namely, that he should promote his happiness not from inclination but from duty, and by this would his conduct first acquire true moral worth.
It is in this manner, undoubtedly, that we are to understand those passages of Scripture also in which we are commanded to love our neighbour, even our enemy.
For love, as an affection, cannot be commanded, but beneficence for duty's sake may; even though we are not impelled to it by any inclination nay, are even repelled by a natural and unconquerable aversion.
This is practical love and not pathological a love which is seated in the will, and not in the propensions of sense in principles of action and not of tender sympathy; and it is this love alone which can be commanded.
The second proposition is: That an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire.
It is clear from what precedes that the purposes which we may have in view in our actions, or their effects regarded as ends and springs of the will, cannot give to actions any unconditional or moral worth.
In what, then, can their worth lie, if it is not to consist in the will and in reference to its expected effect?
The third proposition, which is a consequence of the two preceding, I would express thus Duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law.
It is only what is connected with my will as a principle, by no means as an effect what does not subserve my inclination, but overpowers it, or at least in case of choice excludes it from its calculation in other words, simply the law of itself, which can be an object of respect, and hence a command.
The pre-eminent good which we call moral can therefore consist in nothing else than the conception of law in itself, which certainly is only possible in a rational being, in so far as this conception, and not the expected effect, determines the will.
This is a good which is already present in the person who acts accordingly, and we have not to wait for it to appear first in the result.
Accordingly it is something which is considered neither as an object of inclination nor of fear, although it has something analogous to both.
The object of respect is the law only, and that the law which we impose on ourselves and yet recognise as necessary in itself.
As a law, we are subjected too it without consulting self love; as imposed by us on ourselves, it is a result of our will.
In the former aspect it has an analogy to fear, in the latter to inclination.
Respect for a person is properly only respect for the law (of honesty, etc) of which he gives us an example.
As I have deprived the will of every impulse which could arise to it from obedience to any law, there remains nothing but the universal conformity of its actions to law in general, which alone is to serve the will as a principle, i e, I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.
Here, now, it is the simple conformity to law in general, without assuming any particular law applicable to certain actions, that serves the will as its principle and must so serve it, if duty is not to be a vain delusion and a chimerical notion.
The common reason of men in its practical judgements perfectly coincides with this and always has in view the principle here suggested.
But it is soon clear to me that such a maxim will still only be based on the fear of consequences.
Now it is a wholly different thing to be truthful from duty and to be so from apprehension of injurious consequences.
In the first case, the very notion of the action already implies a law for me; in the second case, I must first look about elsewhere to see what results may be combined with it which would affect myself.
For to deviate from the principle of duty is beyond all doubt wicked; but to be unfaithful to my maxim of prudence may often be very advantageous to me, although to abide by it is certainly safer.
For with such a law there would be no promises at all, since it would be in vain to allege my intention in regard to my future actions to those who would not believe this allegation, or if they over hastily did so would pay me back in my own coin.
Hence my maxim, as soon as it should be made a universal law, would necessarily destroy itself.
Thus, then, without quitting the moral knowledge of common human reason, we have arrived at its principle.
In the latter, if common reason ventures to depart from the laws of experience and from the perceptions of the senses, it falls into mere inconceivabilities and self contradictions, at least into a chaos of uncertainty, obscurity, and instability.
But in the practical sphere it is just when the common understanding excludes all sensible springs from practical laws that its power of judgement begins to show itself to advantage.
Nay, it is almost more sure of doing so, because the philosopher cannot have any other principle, while he may easily perplex his judgement by a multitude of considerations foreign to the matter, and so turn aside from the right way.
Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; only, on the other hand, it is very sad that it cannot well maintain itself and is easily seduced.
Against all the commands of duty which reason represents to man as so deserving of respect, he feels in himself a powerful counterpoise in his wants and inclinations, the entire satisfaction of which he sums up under the name of happiness.
Now reason issues its commands unyieldingly, without promising anything to the inclinations, and, as it were, with disregard and contempt for these claims, which are so impetuous, and at the same time so plausible, and which will not allow themselves to be suppressed by any command.
Hence there arises a natural dialectic, i e, a disposition, to argue against these strict laws of duty and to question their validity, or at least their purity and strictness; and, if possible, to make them more accordant with our wishes and inclinations, that is to say, to corrupt them at their very source, and entirely to destroy their worth a thing which even common practical reason cannot ultimately call good.
'So on those happy days of yore Oft as I dare to dwell once more, Still must I miss the friends so tried, Whom Death has severed from my side.
But ever when true friendship binds, Spirit it is that spirit finds; In spirit then our bliss we found, In spirit yet to them I'm bound.' UHLAND.
Margaret was ready long before the appointed time, and had leisure enough to cry a little, quietly, when unobserved, and to smile brightly when any one looked at her.
Later on in the year, this line of railway should be stirring and alive with rich pleasure seekers; but as to the constant going to and fro of busy trades people it would always be widely different from the northern lines.
The hot air danced over the golden stillness of the land, farm after farm was left behind, each reminding Margaret of German Idyls-of Herman and Dorothea-of Evangeline.
And now sharper feelings came shooting through her heart, whether pain or pleasure she could hardly tell.
The last time she had passed along this road was when she had left it with her father and mother-the day, the season, had been gloomy, and she herself hopeless, but they were there with her.
Nature felt no change, and was ever young.
mr Bell knew something of what would be passing through her mind, and wisely and kindly held his tongue.
'Why, bless me!' exclaimed she, as at the end of her apology, a glint of sunlight showed her Margaret's face, hitherto unobserved in that shady parlour.
'Come here, come directly, it's Miss Hale!' And then she went up to Margaret, and shook her hands with motherly fondness.
'And how are you all?
How's the Vicar and Miss Dixon?
God bless him!
Margaret tried to speak and tell her of her father's death; of her mother's it was evident that mrs Purkis was aware, from her omission of her name.
But never a word of the Vicar's being ailing!'
Come Margaret, my dear!
Her father was my oldest friend, and she's my god daughter, so I thought we would just come down together and see the old place; and I know of old you can give us comfortable rooms and a capital dinner.
You don't remember me I see, but my name is Bell, and once or twice when the parsonage has been full, I've slept here, and tasted your good ale.'
'To be sure; I ask your pardon; but you see I was taken up with Miss Hale.
Let me show you to a room, Miss Margaret, where you can take off your bonnet, and wash your face.
To think of the Vicar being dead!
Well, to be sure, we must all die; only that gentleman said, he was quite picking up after his trouble about mrs Hale's death.'
'Come down to me, mrs Purkis, after you have attended to Miss Hale.
I want to have a consultation with you about dinner.'
The little casement window in Margaret's bed chamber was almost filled up with rose and vine branches; but pushing them aside, and stretching a little out, she could see the tops of the parsonage chimneys above the trees; and distinguish many a well-known line through the leaves.
But I must go, miss, though I'm wanting to hear many a thing; I'll come back to you before long.
mr Bell had strawberries and cream, a loaf of brown bread, and a jug of milk, (together with a Stilton cheese and a bottle of port for his own private refreshment,) ready for Margaret on her coming down stairs; and after this rustic luncheon they set out to walk, hardly knowing in what direction to turn, so many old familiar inducements were there in each.
'Shall we go past the vicarage?' asked mr Bell.
'No, not yet.
We will go this way, and make a round so as to come back by it,' replied Margaret.
Here and there old trees had been felled the autumn before; or a squatter's roughly built and decaying cottage had disappeared.
They came past the spot where she and mr Lennox had sketched.
The white, lightning scarred trunk of the venerable beech, among whose roots they had sate down was there no more; the old man, the inhabitant of the ruinous cottage, was dead; the cottage had been pulled down, and a new one, tidy and respectable, had been built in its stead.
There was a small garden on the place where the beech tree had been.
'I did not think I had been so old,' said Margaret after a pause of silence; and she turned away sighing.
'Yes!' said mr Bell. 'It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious.
The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive.'
'With all my heart, though I have not an idea who little Susan may be. But I have a kindness for all Susans, for simple Susan's sake.'
'My little Susan was disappointed when I left without wishing her goodbye; and it has been on my conscience ever since, that I gave her pain which a little more exertion on my part might have prevented.
Are you sure you will not be tired?'
'Quite sure.
That is, if you don't walk so fast.
You see, here there are no views that can give one an excuse for stopping to take breath.
You would think it romantic to be walking with a person "fat and scant o' breath" if I were Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Have compassion on my infirmities for his sake.'
I like you twenty times better than Hamlet.'
'Perhaps so.
'I am content to take your liking me, without examining too curiously into the materials it is made of.
Only we need not walk at a snail's' pace.'
'Very well.
Walk at your own pace, and I will follow.
Or stop still and meditate, like the Hamlet you compare yourself to, if I go too fast.'
'Thank you.
But as my mother has not murdered my father, and afterwards married my uncle, I shouldn't know what to think about, unless it were balancing the chances of our having a well cooked dinner or not.
What do you think?'
'I am in good hopes.
She used to be considered a famous cook as far as Helstone opinion went.'
But she would rather have gone over these dear loved walks in silence, if indeed she were not ungrateful enough to wish that she might have been alone.
They reached the cottage where Susan's widowed mother lived.
Susan was not there.
She was gone to the parochial school.
'Oh! it is quite right,' said Margaret. 'I am very glad to hear it.
Only she used to stop at home with you.'
'Yes, she did; and I miss her sadly.
It were not much to be sure.
But I should say, that the child was getting a better and simpler, and more natural education stopping at home, and helping her mother, and learning to read a chapter in the New Testament every night by her side, than from all the schooling under the sun'
Margaret did not want to encourage him to go on by replying to him, and so prolonging the discussion before the mother.
So she turned to her and asked,
'How is old Betty Barnes?'
'We'se not friends.'
'Why not?' asked Margaret, who had formerly been the peacemaker of the village.
'She stole my cat.'
'I don't know.
'No! for she'd burnt it.'
'Burnt it!' exclaimed both Margaret and mr Bell.
'Roasted it!' explained the woman.
The poor woman evidently believed in its efficacy; her only feeling was indignation that her cat had been chosen out from all others for a sacrifice.
Margaret listened in horror; and endeavoured in vain to enlighten the woman's mind; but she was obliged to give it up in despair.
'You are a good girl not to triumph over me,' said mr Bell.
'How?
'I own, I am wrong about schooling.
Anything rather than have that child brought up in such practical paganism.'
'Oh!
I remember.
Poor little Susan!
I must go and see her; would you mind calling at the school?'
'Not a bit.
I am curious to see something of the teaching she is to receive.'
They did not speak much more, but thridded their way through many a bosky dell, whose soft green influence could not charm away the shock and the pain in Margaret's heart, caused by the recital of such cruelty; a recital too, the manner of which betrayed such utter want of imagination, and therefore of any sympathy with the suffering animal.
The buzz of voices, like the murmur of a hive of busy human bees, made itself heard as soon as they emerged from the forest on the more open village green on which the school was situated.
The door was wide open, and they entered.
She knew at once it was the present Vicar's wife, her mother's successor; and she would have drawn back from the interview had it been possible; but in an instant she had conquered this feeling, and modestly advanced, meeting many a bright glance of recognition, and hearing many a half suppressed murmur of 'It's Miss Hale.' The Vicar's lady heard the name, and her manner at once became more kindly.
Margaret wished she could have helped feeling that it also became more patronising.
I see it by the likeness.
Margaret explained that it was not her father, and stammered out the fact of his death; wondering all the time how mr Hale could have borne coming to revisit Helstone, if it had been as the Vicar's lady supposed. She did not hear what mrs Hepworth was saying, and left it to mr Bell to reply, looking round, meanwhile, for her old acquaintances.
'Ah!
I know it by myself.
First class stand up for a parsing lesson with Miss Hale.'
'A, an indefinite article,' said Margaret, mildly.
'An adjective absolute,' said half a dozen voices at once.
And Margaret sate abashed.
Margaret spoke no more during the lesson.
But after it was over, she went quietly round to one or two old favourites, and talked to them a little.
Still she was glad to have seen them all again, though a tinge of sadness mixed itself with her pleasure.
The parsonage was so altered, both inside and out, that the real pain was less than she had anticipated.
'Ah!' said mrs Hepworth, 'you must excuse this untidiness, Miss Hale. When the nursery is finished, I shall insist upon a little order.
How did you manage, Miss Hale, without a nursery?'
'We were but two,' said Margaret.
'Seven.
The whole family were quick, brisk, loud talking, kind hearted, and not troubled with much delicacy of perception.
But no! she took it all literally, and with such good faith, that Margaret could not help remonstrating with him as they walked slowly away from the parsonage back to their inn.
'Don't scold, Margaret.
If she had not shown you every change with such evident exultation in their superior sense, in perceiving what an improvement this and that would be, I could have behaved well.
But if you must go on preaching, keep it till after dinner, when it will send me to sleep, and help my digestion.'
There was change everywhere; slight, yet pervading all.
Households were changed by absence, or death, or marriage, or the natural mutations brought by days and months and years, which carry us on imperceptibly from childhood to youth, and thence through manhood to age, whence we drop like fruit, fully ripe, into the quiet mother earth.
A great improvement it was called; but Margaret sighed over the old picturesqueness, the old gloom, and the grassy wayside of former days.
She sate by the window on the little settle, sadly gazing out upon the gathering shades of night, which harmonised well with her pensive thought.
Who's there!
Where are we?
Who's that,--Margaret?
Shut the window, and come in and make tea.'
Margaret was silent for some time.
Then she sighed, and putting down her spoon, she began, apropos of nothing at all, and in the high pitched voice which usually shows that the speaker has been thinking for some time on the subject that they wish to introduce-'mr
'Last night.
Where was I? Oh, I remember!
Why it seems a week ago.
'Yes-and do you not remember that mr Lennox spoke about his having been in England about the time of dear mamma's death?' asked Margaret, her voice now lower than usual.
'I recollect.
I hadn't heard of it before.'
'And I thought-I always thought that papa had told you about it.'
But what about it, Margaret?'
'I told a lie;' and her face became scarlet.
'True, that was bad I own; not but what I have told a pretty round number in my life, not all in downright words, as I suppose you did, but in actions, or in some shabby circumlocutory way, leading people either to disbelieve the truth, or believe a falsehood.
You know who is the father of lies, Margaret?
Well! a great number of folk, thinking themselves very good, have odd sorts of connexion with lies, left hand marriages, and second cousins once removed.
The tainting blood of falsehood runs through us all.
I should have guessed you as far from it as most people.
What! crying, child?
Nay, now we'll not talk of it, if it ends in this way.
Margaret wiped her eyes, and tried to talk about something else, but suddenly she burst out afresh.
'Please, mr Bell, let me tell you about it-you could perhaps help me a little; no, not help me, but if you knew the truth, perhaps you could put me to rights-that is not it, after all,' said she, in despair at not being able to express herself more exactly as she wished.
mr Bell's whole manner changed.
'Tell me all about it, child,' said he.
'And he saw Frederick of course,' said mr Bell, helping her on with her story, as he thought.
'Yes; and then at the station a man came up-tipsy and reeling-and he tried to collar Fred, and over balanced himself as Fred wrenched himself away, and fell over the edge of the platform; not far, not deep; not above three feet; but oh!
mr Bell, somehow that fall killed him!'
'How awkward.
'Then he did not die directly?'
And then-oh, mr Bell! now comes the bad part,' said she, nervously twining her fingers together.
I knew nothing about it.
I had no conscience or thought but to save Frederick.'
'I say it was right.
You forgot yourself in thought for another.
It was wrong, disobedient, faithless.
At that very time Fred was safely out of England, and in my blindness I forgot that there was another witness who could testify to my being there.'
'mr
Thornton.
You know he had seen me close to the station; we had bowed to each other.'
'Well! he would know nothing of this riot about the drunken fellow's death.
I suppose the inquiry never came to anything.'
'No! the proceedings they had begun to talk about on the inquest were stopped.
mr Thornton did know all about it.
He was a magistrate, and he found out that it was not the fall that had caused the death.
Oh, mr Bell!' She suddenly covered her face with her hands, as if wishing to hide herself from the presence of the recollection.
'Did you have any explanation with him?
Did you ever tell him the strong, instinctive motive?'
'The instinctive want of faith, and clutching at a sin to keep myself from sinking,' said she bitterly.
How could I?
He knew nothing of Frederick.
Fred's last words had been to enjoin me to keep his visit a secret from all.
You see, papa never told, even you.
I could bear the shame-I thought I could at least.
I did bear it.
mr Thornton has never respected me since.'
But he always speaks of you with regard and esteem, though now I understand certain reservations in his manner.'
Margaret did not speak; did not attend to what mr Bell went on to say; lost all sense of it.
Like an old fool, I thought that every one would have the same opinions as I had; and he evidently could not agree with me.
I was puzzled at the time.
But he must be perplexed, if the affair has never been in the least explained.
There was first your walking out with a young man in the dark-'
'But it was my brother!' said Margaret, surprised.
'True.
But how was he to know that?'
I never thought of anything of that kind,' said Margaret, reddening, and looking hurt and offended.
'It was not.
I know it now.
I bitterly repent it.'
There was a long pause of silence.
Margaret was the first to speak.
'I am not likely ever to see mr Thornton again,'--and there she stopped.
'There are many things more unlikely, I should say,' replied mr Bell.
Still, somehow one does not like to have sunk so low in-in a friend's opinion as I have done in his.' Her eyes were full of tears, but her voice was steady, and mr Bell was not looking at her.
'And now that Frederick has given up all hope, and almost all wish of ever clearing himself, and returning to England, it would be only doing myself justice to have all this explained.
'Certainly.
I think he ought to know.
'Which I don't blame you for.
'What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong.
It is done-my sin is sinned.
I have now to put it behind me, and be truthful for evermore, if I can.'
'Very well.
If you like to be uncomfortable and morbid, be so.
I always keep my conscience as tight shut up as a jack in a box, for when it jumps into existence it surprises me by its size.
So I coax it down again, as the fisherman coaxed the genie.
"Wonderful," say I, "to think that you have been concealed so long, and in so small a compass, that I really did not know of your existence.
Her thoughts ran upon the idea, before entertained, but which now had assumed the strength of a conviction, that mr Thornton no longer held his former good opinion of her-that he was disappointed in her.
'To turn and look back when thou hearest The sound of my name.'
She kept choking and swallowing all the time that she thought about it. She tried to comfort herself with the idea, that what he imagined her to be, did not alter the fact of what she was.
But it was a truism, a phantom, and broke down under the weight of her regret.
She had twenty questions on the tip of her tongue to ask mr Bell, but not one of them did she utter.
A sense of change, of individual nothingness, of perplexity and disappointment, over powered Margaret. Nothing had been the same; and this slight, all pervading instability, had given her greater pain than if all had been too entirely changed for her to recognise it.
'I begin to understand now what heaven must be-and, oh! the grandeur and repose of the words-"The same yesterday, to day, and for ever." Everlasting!
"From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God." That sky above me looks as though it could not change, and yet it will.
I am so tired-so tired of being whirled on through all these phases of my life, in which nothing abides by me, no creature, no place; it is like the circle in which the victims of earthly passion eddy continually.
If I were a Roman Catholic and could deaden my heart, stun it with some great blow, I might become a nun.
But I should pine after my kind; no, not my kind, for love for my species could never fill my heart to the utter exclusion of love for individuals.
Perhaps it ought to be so, perhaps not; I cannot decide to night.'
'If the world stood still, it would retrograde and become corrupt, if that is not Irish.
I must not think so much of how circumstances affect me myself, but how they affect others, if I wish to have a right judgment, or a hopeful trustful heart.' And with a smile ready in her eyes to quiver down to her lips, she went into the parlour and greeted mr Bell.
'Ah, Missy! you were up late last night, and so you're late this morning.
Now I've got a little piece of news for you.
What do you think of an invitation to dinner?
Why, I've had the Vicar here already, on his way to the school. How much the desire of giving our hostess a teetotal lecture for the benefit of the haymakers, had to do with his earliness, I don't know; but here he was, when I came down just before nine; and we are asked to dine there to day.'
'But Edith expects me back-I cannot go,' said Margaret, thankful to have so good an excuse.
'Yes!
I know; so I told him.
I thought you would not want to go.
Still it is open, if you would like it.'
'Let us keep to our plan.
Let us start at twelve.
It is very good and kind of them; but indeed I could not go.'
Before they left Margaret stole round to the back of the Vicarage garden, and gathered a little straggling piece of honeysuckle.
She would not take a flower the day before, for fear of being observed, and her motives and feelings commented upon.
But as she returned across the common, the place was reinvested with the old enchanting atmosphere.
Oh, Helstone!
LOOKING SOUTH
He kept saying, 'I quite expected to have seen mr Thornton.
I'm a poor black feckless sheep-childer may clem for aught I can do, unless, parson, yo'd help me?'
'I've reckoned for that.
From the great number of cows which have been killed, there is a large proportion of bulls.
The Gauchos whom I asked, though asserting this to be the case, were unable to account for it, except from the strong attachment which horses have to any locality to which they are accustomed.
It is asserted that in Sweden, which any one would have thought a more favourable climate, the rabbit cannot live out of doors.
Of the latter I now possess a specimen, and it is marked about the head differently from the French specific description.
The geological structure of these islands is in most respects simple. The lower country consists of clay slate and sandstone, containing fossils, very closely related to, but not identical with, those found in the Silurian formations of Europe; the hills are formed of white granular quartz rock.
The quartz rock must have been quite pasty when it underwent such remarkable flexures without being shattered into fragments.
In many parts of the island the bottoms of the valleys are covered in an extraordinary manner by myriads of great loose angular fragments of the quartz rock, forming "streams of stones." These have been mentioned with surprise by every voyager since the time of Pernety.
It is not possible to ascertain their thickness, but the water of small streamlets can be heard trickling through the stones many feet below the surface.
Their little inclination is the most remarkable circumstance in these "streams of stones." On the hill sides I have seen them sloping at an angle of ten degrees with the horizon; but in some of the level, broad bottomed valleys, the inclination is only just sufficient to be clearly perceived.
In some places, a continuous stream of these fragments followed up the course of a valley, and even extended to the very crest of the hill.
Another day, having placed myself between a penguin (Aptenodytes demersa) and the water, I was much amused by watching its habits.
Two kinds of geese frequent the Falklands.
In the deep and retired channels of Tierra del Fuego, the snow white gander, invariably accompanied by his darker consort, and standing close by each other on some distant rocky point, is a common feature in the landscape.
These clumsy, loggerheaded ducks make such a noise and splashing, that the effect is exceedingly curious.
"How do you know that?" she retorted.
Now, to the point.
"I did; but I meant something quite different from what you seem to think."
CHAPTER three
I seemed to be advancing towards a second midnight.
In the midst of the intervening twilight, however, before I entered what appeared to be the darkest portion of the forest, I saw a country maiden coming towards me from its very depths.
I could hardly see her face; for, though she came direct towards me, she never looked up.
But when we met, instead of passing, she turned and walked alongside of me for a few yards, still keeping her face downwards, and busied with her flowers. She spoke rapidly, however, all the time, in a low tone, as if talking to herself, but evidently addressing the purport of her words to me.
"Trust the Oak," said she; "trust the Oak, and the Elm, and the great Beech.
Take care of the Birch, for though she is honest, she is too young not to be changeable.
Then she turned suddenly and left me, walking still with the same unchanging gait.
I could not conjecture what she meant, but satisfied myself with thinking that it would be time enough to find out her meaning when there was need to make use of her warning, and that the occasion would reveal the admonition.
I concluded from the flowers that she carried, that the forest could not be everywhere so dense as it appeared from where I was now walking; and I was right in this conclusion.
But even here I was struck with the utter stillness.
No insect hummed.
Yet somehow the whole environment seemed only asleep, and to wear even in sleep an air of expectation.
Then I remembered that night is the fairies' day, and the moon their sun; and I thought-Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different.
Soon, however, I became again anxious, though from another cause.
I had eaten nothing that day, and for an hour past had been feeling the want of food.
I wondered at finding a human dwelling in this neighbourhood; and yet it did not look altogether human, though sufficiently so to encourage me to expect to find some sort of food.
A woman sat beside it, preparing some vegetables for dinner.
This was homely and comforting.
As I came near, she looked up, and seeing me, showed no surprise, but bent her head again over her work, and said in a low tone:
"Did you see my daughter?"
Having said this, she rose and led the way into the cottage; which, I now saw, was built of the stems of small trees set closely together, and was furnished with rough chairs and tables, from which even the bark had not been removed.
As soon as she had shut the door and set a chair-
I think I see it."
"What do you see?"
"But how then do you come to live here?"
I noticed too that her hands were delicately formed, though brown with work and exposure.
"What did you mean by speaking so about the Ash?"
My eyes followed her; but as the window was too small to allow anything to be seen from where I was sitting, I rose and looked over her shoulder.
I had just time to see, across the open space, on the edge of the denser forest, a single large ash tree, whose foliage showed bluish, amidst the truer green of the other trees around it; when she pushed me back with an expression of impatience and terror, and then almost shut out the light from the window by setting up a large old book in it.
"But what danger is to be dreaded from him?"
Instead of answering the question, she went again to the window and looked out, saying she feared the fairies would be interrupted by foul weather, for a storm was brewing in the west.
"And the sooner it grows dark, the sooner the Ash will be awake," added she.
She replied-
If the cat were at home, she would have her back up; for the young fairies pull the sparks out of her tail with bramble thorns, and she knows when they are coming.
So do I, in another way."
"There, I told you!" said the woman.
Here, however, the young woman, whom I had met in the morning, entered.
A smile passed between the mother and daughter; and then the latter began to help her mother in little household duties.
"I should like to stay here till the evening," I said; "and then go on my journey, if you will allow me."
"You are welcome to do as you please; only it might be better to stay all night, than risk the dangers of the wood then.
Accordingly I sat down, and feeling rather tired, and disinclined for further talk, I asked leave to look at the old book which still screened the window.
The woman brought it to me directly, but not before taking another look towards the forest, and then drawing a white blind over the window.
It contained many wondrous tales of Fairy Land, and olden times, and the Knights of King Arthur's table.
I read on and on, till the shades of the afternoon began to deepen; for in the midst of the forest it gloomed earlier than in the open country.
At length I came to this passage-
Now it came about in this wise.
"Look there!" she said; "look at his fingers!"
"He is almost awake, mother; and greedier than usual to night."
"Shall I be able to see these things?" said i
"Are the trees fairies too, as well as the flowers?" I asked.
Sometimes they will act a whole play through before my eyes, with perfect composure and assurance, for they are not afraid of me.
Only, as soon as they have done, they burst into peals of tiny laughter, as if it was such a joke to have been serious over anything.
These I speak of, however, are the fairies of the garden. They are more staid and educated than those of the fields and woods. Of course they have near relations amongst the wild flowers, but they patronise them, and treat them as country cousins, who know nothing of life, and very little of manners.
"Do they live IN the flowers?" I said.
"I cannot tell," she replied.
"There is something in it I do not understand.
If I speak to one, he or she looks up in my face, as if I were not worth heeding, gives a little laugh, and runs away." Here the woman started, as if suddenly recollecting herself, and said in a low voice to her daughter, "Make haste-go and watch him, and see in what direction he goes."
I may as well mention here, that the conclusion I arrived at from the observations I was afterwards able to make, was, that the flowers die because the fairies go away; not that the fairies disappear because the flowers die.
The flowers seem a sort of houses for them, or outer bodies, which they can put on or off when they please.
Yet you would see a strange resemblance, almost oneness, between the flower and the fairy, which you could not describe, but which described itself to you.
I pulled out my purse, but to my dismay there was nothing in it.
The woman with a smile begged me not to trouble myself, for money was not of the slightest use there; and as I might meet with people in my journeys whom I could not recognise to be fairies, it was well I had no money to offer, for nothing offended them so much.
Here, to my great pleasure, all was life and bustle.
The whole garden was like a carnival, with tiny, gaily decorated forms, in groups, assemblies, processions, pairs or trios, moving stately on, running about wildly, or sauntering hither or thither.
From the cups or bells of tall flowers, as from balconies, some looked down on the masses below, now bursting with laughter, now grave as owls; but even in their deepest solemnity, seeming only to be waiting for the arrival of the next laugh. Some were launched on a little marshy stream at the bottom, in boats chosen from the heaps of last year's leaves that lay about, curled and withered.
These soon sank with them; whereupon they swam ashore and got others.
Those who took fresh rose leaves for their boats floated the longest; but for these they had to fight; for the fairy of the rose tree complained bitterly that they were stealing her clothes, and defended her property bravely.
"You can't wear half you've got," said some.
"All for the good of the community!" said one, and ran off with a great hollow leaf.
At last, after another good cry, she chose the biggest she could find, and ran away laughing, to launch her boat amongst the rest.
They talked singing, and their talk made a song, something like this:
"She'll come by and by." "You will never see her." "She went home to dies, "Till the new year." "Snowdrop!" "'tis no good To invite her." "Primrose is very rude, "I will bite her."
"Oh, you naughty Pocket! "Look, she drops her head." "She deserved it, Rocket, "And she was nearly dead." "To your hammock-off with you!" "And swing alone." "No one will laugh with you." "No, not one."
During the latter part of the song talk, they had formed themselves into a funeral procession, two of them bearing poor Primrose, whose death Pocket had hastened by biting her stalk, upon one of her own great leaves.
Pocket, who had been expelled from the company by common consent, went sulkily away towards her hammock, for she was the fairy of the calceolaria, and looked rather wicked.
When she reached its stem, she stopped and looked round.
I could not help speaking to her, for I stood near her.
I said, "Pocket, how could you be so naughty?"
"Why did you bite poor Primrose?"
"Because she said we should never see Snowdrop; as if we were not good enough to look at her, and she was, the proud thing!--served her right!"
"Oh, Pocket, Pocket," said I; but by this time the party which had gone towards the house, rushed out again, shouting and screaming with laughter.
Half of them were on the cat's back, and half held on by her fur and tail, or ran beside her; till, more coming to their help, the furious cat was held fast; and they proceeded to pick the sparks out of her with thorns and pins, which they handled like harpoons.
Indeed, there were more instruments at work about her than there could have been sparks in her.
"Now, Pussy, be patient.
You know quite well it is all for your good. You cannot be comfortable with all those sparks in you; and, indeed, I am charitably disposed to believe" (here he became very pompous) "that they are the cause of all your bad temper; so we must have them all out, every one; else we shall be reduced to the painful necessity of cutting your claws, and pulling out your eye teeth.
Quiet!
Pussy, quiet!"
"Never mind, never mind, we shall find her again; and by that time she will have laid in a fresh stock of sparks.
Their manners and habits are now so well known to the world, having been so often described by eyewitnesses, that it would be only indulging self conceit, to add my account in full to the rest. I cannot help wishing, however, that my readers could see them for themselves.
Especially do I desire that they should see the fairy of the daisy; a little, chubby, round eyed child, with such innocent trust in his look!
Even the most mischievous of the fairies would not tease him, although he did not belong to their set at all, but was quite a little country bumpkin.
CHAPTER one
THE PLAY BOX
At the sound of footsteps along the hall Miss Terry looked up from the letter which she was reading for the sixth time.
"Of course I would not see him," she said, pursing her lips into a hard line.
"Certainly not!"
A bump on the library door, as from an opposing knee, did duty for a knock.
"Set it down on the rug by the fire place.
I am going to look it over and burn up the rubbish this evening."
She glanced once more at the letter in her hand, then with a sniff tossed it upon the fire.
"Yes'm," said Norah, as she set down the box with a thump.
She stooped once more to pick up something which had fallen out when the cover was jarred open.
Norah stood holding it between thumb and finger, staring amazedly.
Who would think to find such a bit of frivolity in the house of Miss Terry!
Her mistress looked up from the fire, where the bit of writing was writhing painfully, and caught the expression of Norah's face.
"What have you there?" she asked, frowning, as she took the object into her own hands.
"The Christmas Angel!" she exclaimed under her breath.
"I had quite forgotten it." Then as if it burned her fingers she thrust the little image back into the box and turned to Norah brusquely.
"There, that's all. You can go now, Norah," she said.
"Yes'm," answered the maid.
She hesitated.
"If you please'm, it's Christmas Eve."
"Well, I believe so," snapped Miss Terry, who seemed to be in a particularly bad humor this evening.
"What do you want?"
Norah flushed; but she was hardened to her mistress's manner.
"Only to ask if I may go out for a little while to see the decorations and hear the singing."
"Decorations?
Singing?
Fiddlestick!" retorted Miss Terry, poker in hand. "What decorations?
What singing?"
"Why, all the windows along the street are full of candles," answered Norah; "rows of candles in every house, to light the Christ Child on his way when he comes through the city to night."
"Fiddlestick!" again snarled her mistress.
"And choir boys are going about the streets, they say, singing carols in front of the lighted houses," continued Norah enthusiastically.
"It must sound so pretty!"
"They had much better be at home in bed.
I believe people are losing their minds!"
"Please'm, may I go?" asked Norah again.
Moreover she was young and warm and enthusiastic.
It was so this Christmas Eve; but she made her request with apparent calmness.
"Yes, go along," assented her mistress ungraciously.
"Thank you, 'm," said the servant demurely, but with a brightening of her blue eyes.
And presently the area door banged behind her quick retreating footsteps.
Didn't take her long to get ready!" muttered Miss Terry, giving the fire a vicious poke.
Well, it was what she wanted.
It was of her own doing.
If she had wished-
A bit of paper there was crumbling into ashes. Alone on Christmas Eve!
Was there not a stalwart officer waiting for her on the nearest corner?
Even Norah could feel a simple childish pleasure in candles and carols and merriment, and the old, old superstition.
"Stuff and nonsense!" mused Miss Terry scornfully.
"What is our Christmas, anyway?
A time for shopkeepers to sell and for foolish folks to kill themselves in buying.
Christmas spirit?
No!
It is all humbug,--all selfishness, and worry; an unwholesome season of unnatural activities.
I am glad I am out of it.
I am glad no one expects anything of me,--nor I of any one.
I am quite independent; blessedly independent of the whole foolish business.
It is a good time to begin clearing up for the new year.
I'm glad I thought of it.
I've long threatened to get rid of the stuff that has been accumulating in that corner of the attic.
Now I will begin."
She tugged the packing case an inch nearer the fire.
It was like Miss Terry to insist upon that nearer inch.
Then she raised the cover.
It was a box full of children's battered toys, old-fashioned and quaint; the toys in vogue thirty-forty-fifty years earlier, when Miss Terry was a child.
She gave a reminiscent sniff as she threw up the cover and saw on the under side of it a big label of pasteboard unevenly lettered.
There was a great deal in that "humph." It meant: Yes, Tom's name had plenty of room, while poor little Angelina had to squeeze in as well as she could.
How like Tom!
This accounted for everything, even to his not being in his sister's house this very night. How unreasonable he had been!
Miss Terry shrugged impatiently.
Why think of Tom to night?
Years ago he had deliberately cut himself adrift from her interests.
No need to think of him now.
It was too late to appease her.
But here were all these toys to be got rid of.
The fire was hungry for them.
Why not begin?
Miss Terry stooped to poke over the contents of the box with lean, long fingers.
In one corner thrust up a doll's arm; in another, an animal's tail pointed heavenward.
She caught glimpses of glitter and tinsel, wheels and fragments of unidentifiable toys.
"What rubbish!" she said.
"Yes, I'll burn them all.
They are good for nothing else.
I suppose some folks would try to give them away, and bore a lot of people to death.
Nonsense!
I know better.
It is all foolishness, this craze for giving. Most things are better destroyed as soon as you are done with them.
Why, nobody wants such truck as this.
Now, could any child ever have cared for so silly a thing?" She pulled out a faded jumping jack, and regarded it scornfully.
"Idiotic!
Such toys are demoralizing for children-weaken their minds.
It is a shame to think how every one seems bound to spoil children, especially at Christmas time.
Well, no one can say that I have added to the shameful waste."
Miss Terry tossed the poor jumping jack on the fire, and eyed his last contortions with grim satisfaction.
But as she watched, a quaint idea came to her.
She was famous for eccentric ideas.
"I will try an experiment," she said.
"I will prove once for all my point about the 'Christmas spirit.' I will drop some of these old toys out on the sidewalk and see what happens.
It may be interesting."
CHAPTER two
JACK IN THE BOX
Miss Terry rose and crossed two rooms to the front window, looking out upon the street.
A flare of light almost blinded her eyes.
Every window opposite her along the block, as far as she could see, was illuminated with a row of lighted candles across the sash.
The soft, unusual glow threw into relief the pretty curtains and wreaths of green, and gave glimpses of cosy interiors and flitting happy figures.
"What a waste of candles!" scolded Miss Terry.
"Folks are growing terribly extravagant."
The street was white with snow which had fallen a few hours earlier, piled in drifts along the curb of the little traveled terrace.
But the sidewalks were neatly shoveled and swept clean, as became the eminently respectable part of the city where Miss Terry lived.
A long flight of steps, with iron railing at the side, led down from the front door, upon which a silver plate had for generations in decorous flourishes announced the name of Terry.
Miss Terry returned to the play box and drew out between thumb and finger the topmost toy.
It happened to be a wooden box, with a wire hasp for fastening the cover.
Half unconsciously she pressed the spring, and a hideous Jack in the box sprang out to confront her with a squeak, a leering smile, and a red nose.
Miss Terry eyed him with disfavor.
"I always did hate that thing," she said.
"Tom was continually frightening me with it, I remember." As if to be rid of unwelcome memories she shut her mouth tight, even as she shut Jack back into his box, snapping the spring into place.
"This will do to begin with," she thought.
She crossed to the window, which she opened quickly, and tossed out the box, so that it fell squarely in the middle of the sidewalk.
Then closing the window and turning down the lights in the room behind her, Miss Terry hid in the folds of the curtain and watched to see what would happen to Jack.
The street was quiet.
Few persons passed on either side.
At last she spied two little ragamuffins approaching.
They seemed to be Jewish lads of the newsboy class, and they eyed the display of candles appraisingly.
The smaller boy first caught sight of the box in the middle of the sidewalk.
"Hello!
Lemme look at it."
"Give it here!" commanded the bigger boy.
You let it alone!
It's mine!" asserted the other, edging away along the curbstone.
"I saw it first.
You can't have it."
"Give it here.
I saw it first myself.
Hand it over, or I'll smash you!"
The bigger boy advanced threateningly.
He started to run, but the bigger fellow was too quick for him.
He pounced across the sidewalk, and soon the twain were struggling in the snowdrift, pummeling one another with might and main.
"I told you so!" commented Miss Terry from behind the curtain.
"Here's the first show of the beautiful Christmas spirit that is supposed to be abroad. Look at the little beasts fighting over something that neither of them really wants!"
Just then Miss Terry spied a blue coated figure leisurely approaching.
At the same moment an instinct seemed to warn the struggling urchins.
"Cop!" said a muffled voice from the pile of arms and legs, and in an instant two black shadows were flitting down the street; but not before the bigger boy had wrenched the box from the pocket of the little chap.
"So that is the end of experiment number one," quoth Miss Terry, smiling grimly.
"It happened just about as I expected.
They will be fighting again as soon as they are out of sight.
They are Jews; but that doesn't make any difference about the Christmas spirit.
Now let's see what becomes of the next experiment."
CHAPTER three
She returned to the play box by the fire, and rummaged for a few minutes among the tangled toys.
Then with something like a chuckle she drew out a soft, pale creature with four wobbly legs.
"The Flanton Dog!" she said.
I had forgotten all about him. It was Tom who coined the name for him because he was made of Canton flannel."
She stood the thing up on the table as well as his weak legs would allow, and inspected him critically.
One of the black beads which had served him for eyes was gone.
His ears, which had originally stood up saucily on his head, now drooped in limp dejection.
One of them was a mere shapeless rag hanging by a thread.
He was dirty and discolored, and his tail was gone.
But still he smiled with his red thread mouth and seemed trying to make the best of things.
"I know there isn't a child in the city who wants such a looking thing.
This isn't going to bring out any Christmas spirit," she sneered.
"I will try it and see."
Once more she lifted the window and tossed the dog to the sidewalk.
He rolled upon his back and lay pathetically with crooked legs yearning upward, still smiling.
Hardly had Miss Terry time to conceal herself behind the curtain when she saw a figure approaching, airily waving a stick.
"No ragamuffin this time," she said.
"Hello!
It is that good for nothing young Cooper fellow from the next block.
They say he is a millionaire. Well, he isn't even going to see the Flanton Dog."
When he reached the spot in the sidewalk where the Flanton Dog lay, he paused a moment looking down.
Then he poked the object with his stick.
On the other side of the street a mother and her little boy were passing at the time.
The child's eyes caught sight of the dog on the sidewalk, and he hung back, watching to see what the young man would do to it.
But his mother drew him after her.
Just then an automobile came panting through the snow.
With a quick movement Cooper picked up the dog on the end of his stick and tossed it into the street, under the wheels of the machine.
The baby across the street uttered a howl of anguish at the sight.
Miss Terry herself was surprised to feel a pang shoot through her as the car passed over the queer old toy.
She retreated from the window quickly.
"I knew that fellow was a brute.
I might have expected something like that.
But it looked so-so-" She hesitated for a word, and did not finish her sentence, but bit her lip and sniffed cynically.
CHAPTER four
THE NOAH'S ARK
"Now, what comes next?" Miss Terry rummaged in the box until her fingers met something odd shaped, long, and smooth sided.
With some difficulty she drew out the object, for it was of good size.
The old Noah's ark," she said.
"I wonder if all the animals are in there."
She lifted the cover, and turned out into her lap the long imprisoned animals and their round bodied chief.
mrs Noah and her sons had long since disappeared.
But the ark builder, hatless and one armed, still presided over a menagerie of sorry beasts.
To few of them the years had spared a tail.
From their close resemblance in their misery, it was not hard to believe in the kinship of all animal life.
She took them up and examined them curiously one by one. Finally she selected a shapeless slate colored block from the mass.
"This was the elephant," she mused.
"I remember when Tom stepped on him and smashed his trunk.
'I guess I'm going to be an expressman when I grow up,' he said, looking sorry.
Tom was always full of his jokes.
Now I'll try this and see what happens to the ark on its last voyage."
Just then there was a noise outside.
An automobile honked past, and Miss Terry shuddered, recalling the pathetic end of the Flanton Dog, which had given her quite a turn.
"I hate those horrid machines!" she exclaimed.
"They seem like Juggernaut. I'd like to forbid their going through this street."
She crowded the elephant with Noah and the rest of his charge back into the ark and closed the lid.
"I can't throw this out of the window," she reflected.
"They would spill.
I must take it out on the sidewalk.
Land!
The fire's going out!
That girl doesn't know how to build fires so they will keep."
She laid the Noah's ark on the table, and going to the closet tugged out several big logs, which she arranged geometrically.
About laying fires, as about most other things, Miss Terry had her own positive theories.
Taking the bellows in hand she blew furiously, and was presently rewarded with a brisk blaze.
She smiled with satisfaction, and trotted upstairs to find her red knit shawl.
With this about her shoulders she was prepared to brave the December frost.
Down the steps she went, and deposited the ark discreetly at their foot; then returned to take up her position behind the curtains.
There were a good many people passing, but they seemed too preoccupied to glance down at the sidewalk.
They were nearly all hurrying in one direction.
Some were running in the middle of the street.
"They are in a great hurry," sniffed Miss Terry disdainfully.
"One would think they had something really important on hand.
I suppose they are going to hear the singing.
Fiddlestick!"
A man hastened by under the window; a woman; two children, a boy and a girl, running and gesticulating eagerly.
None of them noticed the Noah's ark lying at the foot of the steps.
Miss Terry began to grow impatient.
"Are they all blind?" she fretted. "What is the matter with them?
I wish somebody would find the thing.
I am tired of seeing it lying there."
She tapped the floor impatiently with her slipper.
Just then a woman approached.
She was dressed in the most uncompromising of mourning, and she walked slowly, with bent head, never glancing at the lighted windows on either side.
And sure enough, she did.
She stopped at the doorstep, drew her skirts aside, and bent over to look at the strange shaped box at her feet.
Finally she lifted it But immediately she shivered and acted so strangely that Miss Terry thought she was about to break the toy in pieces on the steps or throw it into the street. Evidently she detested the sight of it.
Just then up came a second woman with two small boys hanging at her skirts. They were ragged and sick looking.
There was something about the expression of even the tiny knot of hair at the back of the woman's head which told of anxious poverty.
With envious curiosity she hurried up to see what a luckier mortal had found, crowding to look over her shoulder.
The woman in black drew haughtily away and clutched the Noah's ark with a gesture of proprietorship.
"Go away!
This is my affair." Miss Terry read her expression and sniffed. "There is the Christmas spirit coming out again," she said to herself. "Look at her face!"
But the second woman caught hold of her skirt and began to speak earnestly.
She pointed to the Noah's ark, then to her two children.
Her eyes were beseeching.
The little boys crowded forward eagerly.
But some wicked spirit seemed to have seized the finder of the ark.
Angrily she shook off the hand of the other woman, and clutching the box yet more firmly under her arm, she hurried away.
Once, twice, she turned and shook her head at the ragged woman who followed her.
Then, with a savage gesture at the two children, she disappeared beyond Miss Terry's straining eyes.
The poor woman and her boys followed forlornly at a distance.
"They really wanted it, that old Noah's ark!" exclaimed Miss Terry in amazement.
"I can scarcely believe it.
But why did that other creature keep the thing?
I see!
Only because she found they cared for it.
Well, that is a happy spirit for Christmas time, I should say!
Humph!
He kept pretty fair health, though so old.
Early came the
Arcturus right overhead.
I was almost conscious of a definite presence, Nature silently near.
thirty five Jerry Barker
I never knew a better man than my new master.
He was kind and good, and as strong for the right as john Manly; and so good tempered and merry that very few people could pick a quarrel with him.
He was very fond of making little songs, and singing them to himself.
One he was very fond of was this:
"Come, father and mother, And sister and brother, Come, all of you, turn to And help one another."
And so they did; Harry was as clever at stable work as a much older boy, and always wanted to do what he could.
Then Polly and Dolly used to come in the morning to help with the cab-to brush and beat the cushions, and rub the glass, while Jerry was giving us a cleaning in the yard, and Harry was rubbing the harness.
They were always early in the morning, for Jerry would say:
He could not bear any careless loitering and waste of time; and nothing was so near making him angry as to find people, who were always late, wanting a cab horse to be driven hard, to make up for their idleness.
One day two wild looking young men came out of a tavern close by the stand, and called Jerry.
You shall have a shilling extra."
"I will take you at the regular pace, gentlemen; shillings don't pay for putting on the steam like that."
Larry's cab was standing next to ours; he flung open the door, and said, "I'm your man, gentlemen! take my cab, my horse will get you there all right;" and as he shut them in, with a wink toward Jerry, said, "It's against his conscience to go beyond a jog trot." Then slashing his jaded horse, he set off as hard as he could.
Jerry patted me on the neck: "No, Jack, a shilling would not pay for that sort of thing, would it, old boy?"
Although Jerry was determinedly set against hard driving, to please careless people, he always went a good fair pace, and was not against putting on the steam, as he said, if only he knew why.
I well remember one morning, as we were on the stand waiting for a fare, that a young man, carrying a heavy portmanteau, trod on a piece of orange peel which lay on the pavement, and fell down with great force.
Jerry was the first to run and lift him up.
"Can you take me to the south-eastern Railway?" said the young man; "this unlucky fall has made me late, I fear; but it is of great importance that I should not lose the twelve o'clock train.
I should be most thankful if you could get me there in time, and will gladly pay you an extra fare."
"I'll do my very best," said Jerry heartily, "if you think you are well enough, sir," for he looked dreadfully white and ill.
"I must go," he said earnestly, "please to open the door, and let us lose no time."
The next minute Jerry was on the box; with a cheery chirrup to me, and a twitch of the rein that I well understood.
"Now then, Jack, my boy," said he, "spin along, we'll show them how we can get over the ground, if we only know why."
It is always difficult to drive fast in the city in the middle of the day, when the streets are full of traffic, but we did what could be done; and when a good driver and a good horse, who understand each other, are of one mind, it is wonderful what they can do.
All this is what you have to be ready for. If you want to get through London fast in the middle of the day it wants a deal of practice.
Jerry and I were used to it, and no one could beat us at getting through when we were set upon it.
I was quick and bold and could always trust my driver; Jerry was quick and patient at the same time, and could trust his horse, which was a great thing too.
He very seldom used the whip; I knew by his voice, and his click, click, when he wanted to get on fast, and by the rein where I was to go; so there was no need for whipping; but I must go back to my story.
The streets were very full that day, but we got on pretty well as far as the bottom of Cheapside, where there was a block for three or four minutes.
The young man put his head out and said anxiously, "I think I had better get out and walk; I shall never get there if this goes on."
"I'll do all that can be done, sir," said Jerry; "I think we shall be in time.
This block up cannot last much longer, and your luggage is very heavy for you to carry, sir."
Just then the cart in front of us began to move on, and then we had a good turn.
At any rate, we whirled into the station with many more, just as the great clock pointed to eight minutes to twelve o'clock.
"Thank God! we are in time," said the young man, "and thank you, too, my friend, and your good horse.
You have saved me more than money can ever pay for.
Take this extra half crown."
"No, sir, no, thank you all the same; so glad we hit the time, sir; but don't stay now, sir, the bell is ringing.
Here, porter!
"'So glad!' he said, 'so glad!' Poor young fellow!
I wonder what it was that made him so anxious!"
Jerry often talked to himself quite loud enough for me to hear when we were not moving.
On Jerry's return to the rank there was a good deal of laughing and chaffing at him for driving hard to the train for an extra fare, as they said, all against his principles, and they wanted to know how much he had pocketed.
"A good deal more than I generally get," said he, nodding slyly; "what he gave me will keep me in little comforts for several days."
"He's a humbug," said another; "preaching to us and then doing the same himself."
"Look here, mates," said Jerry; "the gentleman offered me half a crown extra, but I didn't take it; 'twas quite pay enough for me to see how glad he was to catch that train; and if Jack and I choose to have a quick run now and then to please ourselves, that's our business and not yours."
"Well," said Larry, "you'll never be a rich man."
"Most likely not," said Jerry; "but I don't know that I shall be the less happy for that.
I have heard the commandments read a great many times and I never noticed that any of them said, 'Thou shalt be rich'; and there are a good many curious things said in the New Testament about rich men that I think would make me feel rather queer if I was one of them."
"If you ever do get rich," said Governor Gray, looking over his shoulder across the top of his cab, "you'll deserve it, Jerry, and you won't find a curse come with your wealth.
As for you, Larry, you'll die poor; you spend too much in whipcord."
"Well," said Larry, "what is a fellow to do if his horse won't go without it?"
Because you never give them any peace or encouragement."
"And you never will," said the governor.
"Good Luck is rather particular who she rides with, and mostly prefers those who have got common sense and a good heart; at least that is my experience."
Murrayana), above the Silver Fir zone, forms the bulk of the alpine forests up to a height of from eight thousand to nine thousand five hundred feet above the sea, growing in beautiful order on moraines scarcely changed as yet by post glacial weathering.
The average height of mature trees throughout the entire belt is probably not far from fifty or sixty feet with a diameter of two feet.
It is a well proportioned, rather handsome tree with grayish brown bark and crooked, much divided branches which cover the greater part of the trunk, but not so densely as to prevent it being seen.
The short, rigid needles in fascicles of two are arranged in comparatively long cylindrical tassels at the ends of the tough up curving branches.
Therefore this tree more than any other is subject to destruction by fire.
Then the leaves catch forming an immense column of fire, beautifully spired on the edges and tinted a rose purple hue.
It rushes aloft thirty or forty feet above the top of the tree, forming a grand spectacle, especially at night.
It lasts, however, only a few seconds, vanishing with magical rapidity, to be succeeded by others along the fire line at irregular intervals, tree after tree, upflashing and darting, leaving the trunks and branches scarcely scarred.
The heat, however, is sufficient to kill the tree and in a few years the bark shrivels and falls off.
Forests miles in extent are thus killed and left standing, with the branches on, but peeled and rigid, appearing gray in the distance like misty clouds.
Later the branches drop off, leaving a forest of bleached spars.
At length the roots decay and the forlorn gray trunks are blown down during some storm and piled one upon another, encumbering the ground until, dry and seasoned, they are consumed by another fire and leave the ground ready for a fresh crop.
I frequently found specimens fifty feet high less than five inches in diameter.
Being so slender and at the same time clad with leafy boughs, it is often bent and weighed down to the ground when laden with soft snow; thus forming fine ornamental arches, many of them to last until the melting of the snow in the spring.
The Mountain Pine
The Mountain Pine (Pinus monticola) is the noblest tree of the alpine zone-hardy and long lived towering grandly above its companions and becoming stronger and more imposing just where other species begin to crouch and disappear.
At its best it is usually about ninety feet high and five or six feet in diameter, though you may find specimens here and there considerably larger than this.
It is as massive and suggestive of enduring strength as an oak.
About two thirds of the trunk is commonly free of limbs, but close, fringy tufts of spray occur nearly all the way down to the ground.
On trees that occupy exposed situations near its upper limit the bark is deep reddish brown and rather deeply furrowed, the main furrows running nearly parallel to each other and connected on the old trees by conspicuous cross furrows.
The cones are from four to eight inches long, smooth, slender, cylindrical and somewhat curved. They grow in clusters of from three to six or seven and become pendulous as they increase in weight.
This species is nearly related to the sugar pine and, though not half so tall, it suggests its noble relative in the way that it extends its long branches in general habit.
The Western Juniper
The Juniper or Red Cedar (Juniperus occidentalis) is preeminently a rock tree, occupying the baldest domes and pavements in the upper silver fir and alpine zones, at a height of from seven thousand to nine thousand five hundred feet.
In such situations, rooted in narrow cracks or fissures, where there is scarcely a handful of soil, it is frequently over eight feet in diameter and not much more in height.
The tops of old trees are almost always dead, and large stubborn looking limbs push out horizontally, most of them broken and dead at the end, but densely covered, and imbedded here and there with tufts or mounds of gray green scalelike foliage.
Some trees are mere storm beaten stumps about as broad as long, decorated with a few leafy sprays, reminding one of the crumbling towers of old castles scantily draped with ivy.
It never makes anything like a forest; seldom even a grove. Usually it stands out separate and independent, clinging by slight joints to the rocks, living chiefly on snow and thin air and maintaining sound health on this diet for two thousand years or more.
Every feature or every gesture it makes expresses steadfast, dogged endurance.
The bark is of a bright cinnamon color and is handsomely braided and reticulated on thrifty trees, flaking off in thin, shining ribbons that are sometimes used by the Indians for tent matting.
Its fine color and picturesqueness are appreciated by artists, but to me the juniper seems a singularly strange and taciturn tree.
It seems to be a survivor of some ancient race, wholly unacquainted with its neighbors. Its broad stumpiness, of course, makes wind waving or even shaking out of the question, but it is not this rocky rigidity that constitutes its silence.
In calm, sun days the sugar pine preaches like an enthusiastic apostle without moving a leaf.
I have spent a good deal of time trying to determine the age of these wonderful trees, but as all of the very old ones are honey combed with dry rot I never was able to get a complete count of the largest.
Some are undoubtedly more than two thousand years old, for though on deep moraine soil they grow about as fast as some of the pines, on bare pavements and smoothly glaciated, overswept ridges in the dome region they grow very slowly.
The first fifteen inches from the bark of a medium size tree six feet in diameter, on the north Tenaya pavement, had eight hundred fifty nine layers of wood.
Beyond this the count was stopped by dry rot and scars.
Barring accidents, for all I can see they would live forever; even then overthrown by avalanches, they refuse to lie at rest, lean stubbornly on their big branches as if anxious to rise, and while a single root holds to the rock, put forth fresh leaves with a grim, never say die expression.
I looked round for some weapon.
Nothing.
Then with an inspiration I turned over the deck chair, put my foot on the side of it, and tore away the side rail.
He meant to lock the outer door! I raised this nailed stick of mine and cut at his face; but he sprang back.
I hesitated a moment, then turned and fled, round the corner of the house.
"Prendick, man!" I heard his astonished cry, "don't be a silly ass, man!"
Another minute, thought I, and he would have had me locked in, and as ready as a hospital rabbit for my fate.
He emerged behind the corner, for I heard him shout, "Prendick!"
Then he began to run after me, shouting things as he ran.
This time running blindly, I went northeastward in a direction at right angles to my previous expedition.
The wild scene about me lay sleeping silently under the sun, and the only sound near me was the thin hum of some small gnats that had discovered me.
After about an hour I heard Montgomery shouting my name, far away to the north.
That set me thinking of my plan of action. As I interpreted it then, this island was inhabited only by these two vivisectors and their animalised victims.
Some of these no doubt they could press into their service against me if need arose. I knew both Moreau and Montgomery carried revolvers; and, save for a feeble bar of deal spiked with a small nail, the merest mockery of a mace, I was unarmed.
At last in the desperation of my position, my mind turned to the animal men I had encountered.
I tried to find some hope in what I remembered of them. In turn I recalled each one I had seen, and tried to draw some augury of assistance from my memory.
Then suddenly I heard a staghound bay, and at that realised a new danger. I took little time to think, or they would have caught me then, but snatching up my nailed stick, rushed headlong from my hiding place towards the sound of the sea.
I remember a growth of thorny plants, with spines that stabbed like pen knives.
Then I heard no more, and presently began to think I had escaped.
I saw that it was the simian creature who had met the launch upon the beach.
He was clinging to the oblique stem of a palm tree.
I gripped my stick, and stood up facing him. He began chattering.
"You, you, you," was all I could distinguish at first.
Suddenly he dropped from the tree, and in another moment was holding the fronds apart and staring curiously at me.
"Yes," I said, "I came in the boat.
From the ship."
"Oh!" he said, and his bright, restless eyes travelled over me, to my hands, to the stick I carried, to my feet, to the tattered places in my coat, and the cuts and scratches I had received from the thorns. He seemed puzzled at something.
I did not grasp his meaning then; afterwards I was to find that a great proportion of these Beast People had malformed hands, lacking sometimes even three digits.
But guessing this was in some way a greeting, I did the same thing by way of reply. He grinned with immense satisfaction.
I pushed out of the brake after him, and was astonished to find him swinging cheerfully by one lank arm from a rope of creepers that looped down from the foliage overhead.
His back was to me.
He came down with a twisting jump, and stood facing me.
"Eat!" he said.
"At the huts."
"But where are the huts?"
"Oh!"
At that he swung round, and set off at a quick walk. All his motions were curiously rapid.
I went with him to see the adventure out.
I guessed the huts were some rough shelter where he and some more of these Beast People lived. I might perhaps find them friendly, find some handle in their minds to take hold of.
My ape like companion trotted along by my side, with his hands hanging down and his jaw thrust forward.
I wondered what memory he might have in him.
The creature was little better than an idiot.
I was so intent upon these peculiarities that I scarcely noticed the path we followed.
On our right, over a shoulder of bare rock, I saw the level blue of the sea.
The path coiled down abruptly into a narrow ravine between two tumbled and knotty masses of blackish scoriae. Into this we plunged.
It was extremely dark, this passage, after the blinding sunlight reflected from the sulphurous ground.
Blotches of green and crimson drifted across my eyes. My conductor stopped suddenly.
I became aware of a disagreeable odor, like that of a monkey's cage ill cleaned.
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A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
His education was irregular, and though he tried many professions-including engraving, music, and teaching-he found it difficult to support himself in any of them.
His most famous work, the "Confessions," was published after his death.
During Rousseau's later years he was the victim of the delusion of persecution; and although he was protected by a succession of good friends, he came to distrust and quarrel with each in turn.
He died at Ermenonville, near Paris, july second seventeen seventy eight, the most widely influential French writer of his age.
QUESTION PROPOSED BY THE ACADEMY OF DIJON
What is the Origin of the Inequality among Mankind; and whether such Inequality is authorized by the Law of Nature?
A DISCOURSE UPON THE ORIGIN AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG MANKIND
I shall therefore maintain with confidence the cause of mankind before the sages, who invite me to stand up in its defence; and I shall think myself happy, if I can but behave in a manner not unworthy of my subject and of my judges.
This species of inequality consists in the different privileges, which some men enjoy, to the prejudice of others, such as that of being richer, more honoured, more powerful, and even that of exacting obedience from them.
What therefore is precisely the subject of this discourse?
It is to point out, in the progress of things, that moment, when, right taking place of violence, nature became subject to law; to display that chain of surprising events, in consequence of which the strong submitted to serve the weak, and the people to purchase imaginary ease, at the expense of real happiness.
Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect the question.
Religion commands us to believe, that men, having been drawn by God himself out of a state of nature, are unequal, because it is his pleasure they should be so; but religion does not forbid us to draw conjectures solely from the nature of man, considered in itself, and from that of the beings which surround him, concerning the fate of mankind, had they been left to themselves.
This is then the question I am to answer, the question I propose to examine in the present discourse.
O man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your opinions may be, attend to my words; you shall hear your history such as I think I have read it, not in books composed by those like you, for they are liars, but in the book of nature which never lies.
All that I shall repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood, but where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own conceits.
How much you are changed from what you once were!
'tis in a manner the life of your species that I am going to write, from the qualities which you have received, and which your education and your habits could deprave, but could not destroy.
There is, I am sensible, an age at which every individual of you would choose to stop; and you will look out for the age at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped.
Uneasy at your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered, as the panegyric of your first parents, the condemnation of your contemporaries, and a source of terror to all those who may have the misfortune of succeeding you.
DISCOURSE FIRST PART
I could only form vague, and almost imaginary, conjectures on this subject.
Comparative anatomy has not as yet been sufficiently improved; neither have the observations of natural philosophy been sufficiently ascertained, to establish upon such foundations the basis of a solid system.
The earth left to its own natural fertility and covered with immense woods, that no hatchet ever disfigured, offers at every step food and shelter to every species of animals.
Had he a horse, would he with such swiftness shoot along the plain?
Hobbes would have it that man is naturally void of fear, and always intent upon attacking and fighting.
But savage man living among other animals without any society or fixed habitation, and finding himself early under a necessity of measuring his strength with theirs, soon makes a comparison between both, and finding that he surpasses them more in address, than they surpass him in strength, he learns not to be any longer in dread of them.
Allowing that nature intended we should always enjoy good health, I dare almost affirm that a state of reflection is a state against nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.
We need only call to mind the good constitution of savages, of those at least whom we have not destroyed by our strong liquors; we need only reflect, that they are strangers to almost every disease, except those occasioned by wounds and old age, to be in a manner convinced that the history of human diseases might be easily composed by pursuing that of civil societies.
Man therefore, in a state of nature where there are so few sources of sickness, can have no great occasion for physic, and still less for physicians; neither is the human species more to be pitied in this respect, than any other species of animals.
Ask those who make hunting their recreation or business, if in their excursions they meet with many sick or feeble animals.
Nature behaves towards all animals left to her care with a predilection, that seems to prove how jealous she is of that prerogative.
The horse, the cat, the bull, nay the ass itself, have generally a higher stature, and always a more robust constitution, more vigour, more strength and courage in their forests than in our houses; they lose half these advantages by becoming domestic animals; it looks as if all our attention to treat them kindly, and to feed them well, served only to bastardize them.
It is thus with man himself.
We may add, that there must be still a wider difference between man and man in a savage and domestic condition, than between beast and beast; for as men and beasts have been treated alike by nature, all the conveniences with which men indulge themselves more than they do the beasts tamed by them, are so many particular causes which make them degenerate more sensibly.
Nakedness therefore, the want of houses, and of all these unnecessaries, which we consider as so very necessary, are not such mighty evils in respect to these primitive men, and much less still any obstacle to their preservation.
As yet I have considered man merely in his physical capacity; let us now endeavour to examine him in a metaphysical and moral light.
Is it not, because he thus returns to his primitive condition?
Let moralists say what they will, the human understanding is greatly indebted to the passions, which, on their side, are likewise universally allowed to be greatly indebted to the human understanding. It is by the activity of our passions, that our reason improves: we covet knowledge merely because we covet enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a man exempt from fears and desires should take the trouble to reason.
But exclusive of the uncertain testimonies of history, who does not perceive that everything seems to remove from savage man the temptation and the means of altering his condition?
His imagination paints nothing to him; his heart asks nothing from him.
The spectacle of nature, by growing quite familiar to him, becomes at last equally indifferent.
His soul, which nothing disturbs, gives itself up entirely to the consciousness of its actual existence, without any thought of even the nearest futurity; and his projects, equally confined with his views, scarce extend to the end of the day.
How many ages perhaps revolved, before men beheld any other fire but that of the heavens?
How many different accidents must have concurred to make them acquainted with the most common uses of this element?
How often have they let it go out, before they knew the art of reproducing it?
And how often perhaps has not every one of these secrets perished with the discoverer?
In a word, how could this situation engage men to cultivate the earth, as long as it was not parcelled out among them, that is, as long as a state of nature subsisted.
I must now beg leave to stop one moment to consider the perplexities attending the origin of languages.
I might here barely cite or repeat the researches made, in relation to this question, by the Abbe de Condillac, which all fully confirm my system, and perhaps even suggested to me the first idea of it.
The first that offers is how languages could become necessary; for as there was no correspondence between men, nor the least necessity for any, there is no conceiving the necessity of this invention, nor the possibility of it, if it was not indispensable.
They parted with the same ease.
Let us suppose this first difficulty conquered: Let us for a moment consider ourselves at this side of the immense space, which must have separated the pure state of nature from that in which languages became necessary, and let us, after allowing such necessity, examine how languages could begin to be established.
The first language of man, the most universal and most energetic of all languages, in short, the only language he had occasion for, before there was a necessity of persuading assembled multitudes, was the cry of nature.
We must allow that the words, first made use of by men, had in their minds a much more extensive signification, than those employed in languages of some standing, and that, considering how ignorant they were of the division of speech into its constituent parts; they at first gave every word the meaning of an entire proposition.
Besides, general ideas cannot be conveyed to the mind without the assistance of words, nor can the understanding seize them without the assistance of propositions.
This is one of the reasons, why mere animals cannot form such ideas, nor ever acquire the perfectibility which depends on such an operation.
When a monkey leaves without the least hesitation one nut for another, are we to think he has any general idea of that kind of fruit, and that he compares these two individual bodies with his archetype notion of them?
Every general idea is purely intellectual; let the imagination tamper ever so little with it, it immediately becomes a particular idea.
Endeavour to represent to yourself the image of a tree in general, you never will be able to do it; in spite of all your efforts it will appear big or little, thin or tufted, of a bright or a deep colour; and were you master to see nothing in it, but what can be seen in every tree, such a picture would no longer resemble any tree.
Beings perfectly abstract are perceivable in the same manner, or are only conceivable by the assistance of speech.
The definition of a triangle can alone give you a just idea of that figure: the moment you form a triangle in your mind, it is this or that particular triangle and no other, and you cannot avoid giving breadth to its lines and colour to its area.
We must therefore make use of propositions; we must therefore speak to have general ideas; for the moment the imagination stops, the mind must stop too, if not assisted by speech.
mr
TOAD
It was a bright morning in the early part of summer; the river had resumed its wonted banks and its accustomed pace, and a hot sun seemed to be pulling everything green and bushy and spiky up out of the earth towards him, as if by strings.
The Mole and the Water Rat had been up since dawn, very busy on matters connected with boats and the opening of the boating season; painting and varnishing, mending paddles, repairing cushions, hunting for missing boat hooks, and so on; and were finishing breakfast in their little parlour and eagerly discussing their plans for the day, when a heavy knock sounded at the door.
'Bother!' said the Rat, all over egg.
The Mole went to attend the summons, and the Rat heard him utter a cry of surprise.
Then he flung the parlour door open, and announced with much importance, 'mr
Badger!'
This was a wonderful thing, indeed, that the Badger should pay a formal call on them, or indeed on anybody.
The Badger strode heavily into the room, and stood looking at the two animals with an expression full of seriousness.
'The hour has come!' said the Badger at last with great solemnity.
'Why, Toad's hour!
The hour of Toad!
'Toad's hour, of course!' cried the Mole delightedly.
'Hooray!
I remember now!
We must be up and doing, ere it is too late.
'Right you are!' cried the Rat, starting up.
We'll convert him!
They set off up the road on their mission of mercy, Badger leading the way.
Animals when in company walk in a proper and sensible manner, in single file, instead of sprawling all across the road and being of no use or support to each other in case of sudden trouble or danger.
They reached the carriage drive of Toad Hall to find, as the Badger had anticipated, a shiny new motor car, of great size, painted a bright red (Toad's favourite colour), standing in front of the house.
As they neared the door it was flung open, and mr Toad, arrayed in goggles, cap, gaiters, and enormous overcoat, came swaggering down the steps, drawing on his gauntleted gloves.
His hearty accents faltered and fell away as he noticed the stern unbending look on the countenances of his silent friends, and his invitation remained unfinished.
The Badger strode up the steps.
'Take him inside,' he said sternly to his companions.
Then, as Toad was hustled through the door, struggling and protesting, he turned to the chauffeur in charge of the new motor car.
'mr
Toad has changed his mind.
Please understand that this is final.
You needn't wait.' Then he followed the others inside and shut the door.
'What is the meaning of this gross outrage?
I demand an instant explanation.'
They had to lay Toad out on the floor, kicking and calling all sorts of names, before they could get to work properly.
Now that he was merely Toad, and no longer the Terror of the Highway, he giggled feebly and looked from one to the other appealingly, seeming quite to understand the situation.
'You knew it must come to this, sooner or later, Toad,' the Badger explained severely.
Now, you're a good fellow in many respects, and I don't want to be too hard on you. I'll make one more effort to bring you to reason.
He took Toad firmly by the arm, led him into the smoking room, and closed the door behind them.
He'll SAY anything.'
After some three quarters of an hour the door opened, and the Badger reappeared, solemnly leading by the paw a very limp and dejected Toad. His skin hung baggily about him, his legs wobbled, and his cheeks were furrowed by the tears so plentifully called forth by the Badger's moving discourse.
'Sit down there, Toad,' said the Badger kindly, pointing to a chair.
'Very good news indeed,' observed the Rat dubiously, 'if only-IF only----'
He was looking very hard at Toad as he said this, and could not help thinking he perceived something vaguely resembling a twinkle in that animal's still sorrowful eye.
'There's only one thing more to be done,' continued the gratified Badger. 'Toad, I want you solemnly to repeat, before your friends here, what you fully admitted to me in the smoking room just now.
First, you are sorry for what you've done, and you see the folly of it all?'
At last he spoke.
'No!' he said, a little sullenly, but stoutly; 'I'm NOT sorry.
And it wasn't folly at all!
'What?' cried the Badger, greatly scandalised.
'You backsliding animal, didn't you tell me just now, in there----'
But I've been searching my mind since, and going over things in it, and I find that I'm not a bit sorry or repentant really, so it's no earthly good saying I am; now, is it?'
'Certainly not!' replied Toad emphatically.
'Very well, then,' said the Badger firmly, rising to his feet.
'Since you won't yield to persuasion, we'll try what force can do.
You've often asked us three to come and stay with you, Toad, in this handsome house of yours; well, now we're going to.
When we've converted you to a proper point of view we may quit, but not before.
Take him upstairs, you two, and lock him up in his bedroom, while we arrange matters between ourselves.'
They descended the stair, Toad shouting abuse at them through the keyhole; and the three friends then met in conference on the situation.
'I've never seen Toad so determined.
However, we will see it out.
He must never be left an instant unguarded.
They arranged watches accordingly.
Each animal took it in turns to sleep in Toad's room at night, and they divided the day up between them.
At first Toad was undoubtedly very trying to his careful guardians.
When his violent paroxysms possessed him he would arrange bedroom chairs in rude resemblance of a motor car and would crouch on the foremost of them, bent forward and staring fixedly ahead, making uncouth and ghastly noises, till the climax was reached, when, turning a complete somersault, he would lie prostrate amidst the ruins of the chairs, apparently completely satisfied for the moment.
As time passed, however, these painful seizures grew gradually less frequent, and his friends strove to divert his mind into fresh channels.
But his interest in other matters did not seem to revive, and he grew apparently languid and depressed.
One fine morning the Rat, whose turn it was to go on duty, went upstairs to relieve Badger, whom he found fidgeting to be off and stretch his legs in a long ramble round his wood and down his earths and burrows. 'Toad's still in bed,' he told the Rat, outside the door.
Now, you look out, Rat!
I know him. Well, now, I must be off.'
He had to wait some minutes for an answer.
At last a feeble voice replied, 'Thank you so much, dear Ratty!
So good of you to inquire!
Now jump up, there's a good fellow, and don't lie moping there on a fine morning like this!'
But do not trouble about me.
I hate being a burden to my friends, and I do not expect to be one much longer.
Indeed, I almost hope not.'
And in weather like this, and the boating season just beginning!
'I can quite understand it.
It's natural enough.
You're tired of bothering about me.
I mustn't ask you to do anything further.
'But I tell you, I'd take any trouble on earth for you, if only you'd be a sensible animal.'
'If I thought that, Ratty,' murmured Toad, more feebly than ever, 'then I would beg you-for the last time, probably-to step round to the village as quickly as possible-even now it may be too late-and fetch the doctor.
But don't you bother.
'Why, what do you want a doctor for?' inquired the Rat, coming closer and examining him.
'Surely you have noticed of late----' murmured Toad. 'But, no-why should you?
Noticing things is only a trouble.
But you can hardly be bad enough for that yet.
Let's talk about something else.'
'I fear, dear friend,' said Toad, with a sad smile, 'that "talk" can do little in a case like this-or doctors either, for that matter; still, one must grasp at the slightest straw.
And, by the way-while you are about it-I HATE to give you additional trouble, but I happen to remember that you will pass the door-would you mind at the same time asking the lawyer to step up?
It would be a convenience to me, and there are moments-perhaps I should say there is A moment-when one must face disagreeable tasks, at whatever cost to exhausted nature!'
Outside, he stopped to consider.
'It's best to be on the safe side,' he said, on reflection.
'I've known Toad fancy himself frightfully bad before, without the slightest reason; but I've never heard him ask for a lawyer!
If there's nothing really the matter, the doctor will tell him he's an old ass, and cheer him up; and that will be something gained.
The Toad, who had hopped lightly out of bed as soon as he heard the key turned in the lock, watched him eagerly from the window till he disappeared down the carriage drive.
'He did it awfully well,' said the crestfallen Rat.
'However, talking won't mend matters.
Meanwhile, Toad, gay and irresponsible, was walking briskly along the high road, some miles from home.
At first he had taken by paths, and crossed many fields, and changed his course several times, in case of pursuit; but now, feeling by this time safe from recapture, and the sun smiling brightly on him, and all Nature joining in a chorus of approval to the song of self praise that his own heart was singing to him, he almost danced along the road in his satisfaction and conceit.
'Smart piece of work that!' he remarked to himself chuckling.
'Brain against brute force-and brain came out on the top-as it's bound to do.
My! won't he catch it when the Badger gets back! A worthy fellow, Ratty, with many good qualities, but very little intelligence and absolutely no education.
Filled full of conceited thoughts such as these he strode along, his head in the air, till he reached a little town, where the sign of 'The Red Lion,' swinging across the road halfway down the main street, reminded him that he had not breakfasted that day, and that he was exceedingly hungry after his long walk.
He marched into the Inn, ordered the best luncheon that could be provided at so short a notice, and sat down to eat it in the coffee room.
He was about half-way through his meal when an only too familiar sound, approaching down the street, made him start and fall a trembling all over.
Toad listened eagerly, all ears, for a time; at last he could stand it no longer.
The car stood in the middle of the yard, quite unattended, the stable helps and other hangers on being all at their dinner.
Toad walked slowly round it, inspecting, criticising, musing deeply.
'I wonder,' he said to himself presently, 'I wonder if this sort of car STARTS easily?'
Next moment, hardly knowing how it came about, he found he had hold of the handle and was turning it.
Let me see: he has been found guilty, on the clearest evidence, first, of stealing a valuable motor car; secondly, of driving to the public danger; and, thirdly, of gross impertinence to the rural police.
mr Clerk, will you tell us, please, what is the very stiffest penalty we can impose for each of these offences?
Without, of course, giving the prisoner the benefit of any doubt, because there isn't any.'
The Clerk scratched his nose with his pen.
'Some people would consider,' he observed, 'that stealing the motor car was the worst offence; and so it is.
But cheeking the police undoubtedly carries the severest penalty; and so it ought.
'First rate!' said the Chairman.
It's going to be twenty years for you this time.
And mind, if you appear before us again, upon any charge whatever, we shall have to deal with you very seriously!'
There at last they paused, where an ancient gaoler sat fingering a bunch of mighty keys.
'Oddsbodikins!' said the sergeant of police, taking off his helmet and wiping his forehead.
CHAPTER sixteen.
BOLDLY DOWN THE CRATER
Yet I slept particularly well; it was one of the best nights I had ever had, and I did not even dream.
Next morning we awoke half frozen by the sharp keen air, but with the light of a splendid sun
I rose from my granite bed and went out to enjoy the magnificent spectacle that lay unrolled before me.
I stood on the very summit of the southernmost of Snaefell's peaks. The range of the eye extended over the whole island.
It seemed as if one of Helbesmer's raised maps lay at my feet.
On my right were numberless glaciers and innumerable peaks, some plumed with feathery clouds of smoke.
The undulating surface of these endless mountains, crested with sheets of snow, reminded one of a stormy sea.
The eye could hardly tell where the snowy ridges ended and the foaming waves began.
I felt intoxicated with the sublime pleasure of lofty elevations without thinking of the profound abysses into which I was shortly to be plunged.
But I was brought back to the realities of things by the arrival of Hans and the Professor, who joined me on the summit.
My uncle pointed out to me in the far west a light steam or mist, a semblance of land, which bounded the distant horizon of waters.
"Greenland!" said he.
"Greenland?" I cried.
"Yes; we are only thirty five leagues from it; and during thaws the white bears, borne by the ice fields from the north, are carried even into Iceland.
Hans will tell us the name of that on which we are now standing."
The question being put, Hans replied:
"Scartaris."
My uncle shot a triumphant glance at me.
"Now for the crater!" he cried.
The crater of Snaefell resembled an inverted cone, the opening of which might be half a league in diameter.
Its depth appeared to be about two thousand feet.
Imagine the aspect of such a reservoir, brim full and running over with liquid fire amid the rolling thunder.
The bottom of the funnel was about two hundred fifty feet in circuit, so that the gentle slope allowed its lower brim to be reached without much difficulty.
Involuntarily I compared the whole crater to an enormous erected mortar, and the comparison put me in a terrible fright.
"What madness," I thought, "to go down into a mortar, perhaps a loaded mortar, to be shot up into the air at a moment's notice!"
But I did not try to back out of it.
Hans with perfect coolness resumed the lead, and I followed him without a word.
In certain parts of the cone there were glaciers.
Here Hans advanced only with extreme precaution, sounding his way with his iron pointed pole, to discover any crevasses in it.
Yet, notwithstanding the difficulties of the descent, down steeps unknown to the guide, the journey was accomplished without accidents, except the loss of a coil of rope, which escaped from the hands of an Icelander, and took the shortest way to the bottom of the abyss.
Just upon the edge appeared the snowy peak of Saris, standing out sharp and clear against endless space.
At the bottom of the crater were three chimneys, through which, in its eruptions, Snaefell had driven forth fire and lava from its central furnace.
Each of these chimneys was a hundred feet in diameter.
They gaped before us right in our path.
I had not the courage to look down either of them.
But Professor Liedenbrock had hastily surveyed all three; he was panting, running from one to the other, gesticulating, and uttering incoherent expressions.
Hans and his comrades, seated upon loose lava rocks, looked at him with as much wonder as they knew how to express, and perhaps taking him for an escaped lunatic.
Suddenly my uncle uttered a cry.
I thought his foot must have slipped and that he had fallen down one of the holes.
But, no; I saw him, with arms outstretched and legs straddling wide apart, erect before a granite rock that stood in the centre of the crater, just like a pedestal made ready to receive a statue of Pluto.
"Axel, Axel," he cried.
"Come, come!"
I ran.
"Look!" cried the Professor.
And, sharing his astonishment, but I think not his joy, I read on the western face of the block, in Runic characters, half mouldered away with lapse of ages, this thrice accursed name:
[At this point a Runic text appears]
"Do you yet doubt?"
I made no answer; and I returned in silence to my lava seat in a state of utter speechless consternation.
Here was crushing evidence.
How long I remained plunged in agonizing reflections I cannot tell; all that I know is, that on raising my head again, I saw only my uncle and Hans at the bottom of the crater.
The Icelanders had been dismissed, and they were now descending the outer slopes of Snaefell to return to Stapi.
Hans slept peaceably at the foot of a rock, in a lava bed, where he had found a suitable couch for himself; but my uncle was pacing around the bottom of the crater like a wild beast in a cage.
Thus the first night in the crater passed away.
The next morning, a grey, heavy, cloudy sky seemed to droop over the summit of the cone.
I did not know this first from the appearances of nature, but I found it out by my uncle's impetuous wrath.
I soon found out the cause, and hope dawned again in my heart.
For this reason.
Now, no sun no shadow, and therefore no guide.
Here was june twenty fifth.
If the sun was clouded for six days we must postpone our visit till next year.
My limited powers of description would fail, were I to attempt a picture of the Professor's angry impatience.
The day wore on, and no shadow came to lay itself along the bottom of the crater.
Hans did not move from the spot he had selected; yet he must be asking himself what were we waiting for, if he asked himself anything at all.
My uncle spoke not a word to me.
His gaze, ever directed upwards, was lost in the grey and misty space beyond.
On the twenty sixth nothing yet.
Hans built a hut of pieces of lava.
It was enough to irritate a meeker man than he; for it was foundering almost within the port.
But Heaven never sends unmixed grief, and for Professor Liedenbrock there was a satisfaction in store proportioned to his desperate anxieties.
My uncle turned too, and followed it.
At noon, being at its least extent, it came and softly fell upon the edge of the middle chimney.
I looked at Hans, to hear what he would say.
CHAPTER seventeen.
VERTICAL DESCENT
Now began our real journey.
Hitherto our toil had overcome all difficulties, now difficulties would spring up at every step.
I had not yet ventured to look down the bottomless pit into which I was about to take a plunge.
The supreme hour had come.
I might now either share in the enterprise or refuse to move forward.
But I was ashamed to recoil in the presence of the hunter.
Hans accepted the enterprise with such calmness, such indifference, such perfect disregard of any possible danger that I blushed at the idea of being less brave than he.
I have already mentioned that it was a hundred feet in diameter, and three hundred feet round.
I bent over a projecting rock and gazed down.
The bewildering feeling of vacuity laid hold upon me.
I felt my centre of gravity shifting its place, and giddiness mounting into my brain like drunkenness.
There is nothing more treacherous than this attraction down deep abysses.
I was just about to drop down, when a hand laid hold of me.
But, however short was my examination of this well, I had taken some account of its conformation.
Its almost perpendicular walls were bristling with innumerable projections which would facilitate the descent.
But how were we to unfasten it, when arrived at the other end?
My uncle employed a very simple expedient to obviate this difficulty. He uncoiled a cord of the thickness of a finger, and four hundred feet long; first he dropped half of it down, then he passed it round a lava block that projected conveniently, and threw the other half down the chimney.
Each of us could then descend by holding with the hand both halves of the rope, which would not be able to unroll itself from its hold; when two hundred feet down, it would be easy to get possession of the whole of the rope by letting one end go and pulling down by the other.
"Now," said my uncle, after having completed these preparations, "now let us look to our loads.
I will divide them into three lots; each of us will strap one upon his back.
I mean only fragile articles."
Of course, we were not included under that head.
"But," said I, "the clothes, and that mass of ladders and ropes, what is to become of them?"
"How so?" I asked.
"You will see presently."
My uncle was always willing to employ magnificent resources.
Obeying orders, Hans tied all the non fragile articles in one bundle, corded them firmly, and sent them bodily down the gulf before us.
I listened to the dull thuds of the descending bale.
My uncle, leaning over the abyss, followed the descent of the luggage with a satisfied nod, and only rose erect when he had quite lost sight of it.
Now I ask any sensible man if it was possible to hear those words without a shudder.
The Professor fastened his package of instruments upon his shoulders; Hans took the tools; I took the arms: and the descent commenced in the following order; Hans, my uncle, and myself.
It was effected in profound silence, broken only by the descent of loosened stones down the dark gulf.
I dropped as it were, frantically clutching the double cord with one hand and buttressing myself from the wall with the other by means of my stick.
One idea overpowered me almost, fear lest the rock should give way from which I was hanging.
I made as little use of it as possible, performing wonderful feats of equilibrium upon the lava projections which my foot seemed to catch hold of like a hand.
When one of these slippery steps shook under the heavier form of Hans, he said in his tranquil voice:
"Attention!" repeated my uncle.
In half an hour we were standing upon the surface of a rock jammed in across the chimney from one side to the other.
Hans pulled the rope by one of its ends, the other rose in the air; after passing the higher rock it came down again, bringing with it a rather dangerous shower of bits of stone and lava.
Leaning over the edge of our narrow standing ground, I observed that the bottom of the hole was still invisible.
I don't suppose the maddest geologist under such circumstances would have studied the nature of the rocks that we were passing.
I am sure I did trouble my head about them.
But the Professor, no doubt, was pursuing his observations or taking notes, for in one of our halts he said to me:
"The farther I go the more confidence I feel.
We are now among the primitive rocks, upon which the chemical operations took place which are produced by the contact of elementary bases of metals with water.
I repudiate the notion of central heat altogether.
We shall see further proof of that very soon."
My silence was taken for consent and the descent went on.
Another three hours, and I saw no bottom to the chimney yet.
When I lifted my head I perceived the gradual contraction of its aperture. Its walls, by a gentle incline, were drawing closer to each other, and it was beginning to grow darker.
Still we kept descending.
It seemed to me that the falling stones were meeting with an earlier resistance, and that the concussion gave a more abrupt and deadened sound.
As I had taken care to keep an exact account of our manoeuvres with the rope, which I knew that we had repeated fourteen times, each descent occupying half an hour, the conclusion was easy that we had been seven hours, plus fourteen quarters of rest, making ten hours and a half.
I stopped short just as I was going to place my feet upon my uncle's head.
"Where?" said I, stepping near to him.
"At the bottom of the perpendicular chimney," he answered.
"Is there no way farther?"
"Yes; there is a sort of passage which inclines to the right.
The darkness was not yet complete.
The provision case was opened; we refreshed ourselves, and went to sleep as well as we could upon a bed of stones and lava fragments.
When lying on my back, I opened my eyes and saw a bright sparkling point of light at the extremity of the gigantic tube three thousand feet long, now a vast telescope.
CHAPTER eighteen.
THE WONDERS OF TERRESTRIAL DEPTHS
At eight in the morning a ray of daylight came to wake us up.
The thousand shining surfaces of lava on the walls received it on its passage, and scattered it like a shower of sparks.
There was light enough to distinguish surrounding objects.
"Well, Axel, what do you say to it?" cried my uncle, rubbing his hands.
"Did you ever spend a quieter night in our little house at Koenigsberg?
No noise of cart wheels, no cries of basket women, no boatmen shouting!"
"Are you sure of that?"
"Quite sure.
In fact, the mercury, which had risen in the instrument as fast as we descended, had stopped at twenty nine inches.
And in truth this instrument would become useless as soon as the weight of the atmosphere should exceed the pressure ascertained at the level of the sea.
"But," I said, "is there not reason to fear that this ever increasing pressure will become at last very painful to bear?"
"No; we shall descend at a slow rate, and our lungs will become inured to a denser atmosphere.
Don't let us lose a moment.
I then remembered that we had searched for it in vain the evening before.
My uncle questioned Hans, who, after having examined attentively with the eye of a huntsman, replied:
And so it was.
The bundle had been caught by a projection a hundred feet above us.
Immediately the Icelander climbed up like a cat, and in a few minutes the package was in our possession.
Breakfast over, my uncle drew from his pocket a small notebook, intended for scientific observations.
He consulted his instruments, and recorded:
This last observation applied to the dark gallery, and was indicated by the compass.
At this precise moment the journey commences."
So saying, my uncle took in one hand Ruhmkorff's apparatus, which was hanging from his neck; and with the other he formed an electric communication with the coil in the lantern, and a sufficiently bright light dispersed the darkness of the passage.
Hans carried the other apparatus, which was also put into action. This ingenious application of electricity would enable us to go on for a long time by creating an artificial light even in the midst of the most inflammable gases.
"Now, march!" cried my uncle.
Each shouldered his package.
The lava, in the last eruption of twelve twenty nine, had forced a passage through this tunnel.
It still lined the walls with a thick and glistening coat.
The electric light was here intensified a hundredfold by reflection.
The only difficulty in proceeding lay in not sliding too fast down an incline of about forty five degrees; happily certain asperities and a few blisterings here and there formed steps, and we descended, letting our baggage slip before us from the end of a long rope.
But that which formed steps under our feet became stalactites overhead.
"My uncle, what a sight! Don't you admire those blending hues of lava, passing from reddish brown to bright yellow by imperceptible shades?
And these crystals are just like globes of light."
Now let us march: march!"
He had better have said slide, for we did nothing but drop down the steep inclines.
The compass, which I consulted frequently, gave our direction as south-east with inflexible steadiness.
This lava stream deviated neither to the right nor to the left.
Yet there was no sensible increase of temperature.
This justified Davy's theory, and more than once I consulted the thermometer with surprise.
Hans sat down at once.
The lamps were hung upon a projection in the lava; we were in a sort of cavern where there was plenty of air.
Certain puffs of air reached us.
What atmospheric disturbance was the cause of them?
I could not answer that question at the moment.
Hunger and fatigue made me incapable of reasoning.
A descent of seven hours consecutively is not made without considerable expenditure of strength.
I was exhausted.
The order to 'halt' therefore gave me pleasure.
Hans laid our provisions upon a block of lava, and we ate with a good appetite. But one thing troubled me, our supply of water was half consumed.
My uncle reckoned upon a fresh supply from subterranean sources, but hitherto we had met with none.
"More than that, I am anxious about it; we have only water enough for five days."
"Don't be uneasy, Axel, we shall find more than we want."
"When?"
How could springs break through such walls as these?"
"But perhaps this passage runs to a very great depth.
"This is my conclusion.
But certain local conditions may modify this rate.
Thus at Yakoutsk in Siberia the increase of a degree is ascertained to be reached every thirty six feet.
Let us therefore assume this last hypothesis as the most suitable to our situation, and calculate."
"Nothing is easier," said I, putting down figures in my note book. "Nine times a hundred and twenty five feet gives a depth of eleven hundred and twenty five feet."
"Very accurate indeed."
"Well?"
"By my observation we are at ten thousand feet below the level of the sea."
"Is that possible?"
"Yes, or figures are of no use."
The Professor's calculations were quite correct.
We had already attained a depth of six thousand feet beyond that hitherto reached by the foot of man, such as the mines of Kitz Bahl in Tyrol, and those of Wuttembourg in Bohemia.
one.
The Public Magician
THE READER may remember that we were led to plunge into the labyrinth of magic by a consideration of two different types of man god.
This is the clue which has guided our devious steps through the maze, and brought us out at last on higher ground, whence, resting a little by the way, we can look back over the path we have already traversed and forward to the longer and steeper road we have still to climb.
As a result of the foregoing discussion, the two types of human gods may conveniently be distinguished as the religious and the magical man god respectively.
This may also appropriately be called the inspired or incarnate type of man god.
In it the human body is merely a frail earthly vessel filled with a divine and immortal spirit.
Thus, whereas a man god of the former or inspired type derives his divinity from a deity who has stooped to hide his heavenly radiance behind a dull mask of earthly mould, a man god of the latter type draws his extraordinary power from a certain physical sympathy with nature.
He is not merely the receptacle of a divine spirit.
But the line between these two types of man god, however sharply we may draw it in theory, is seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and in what follows I shall not insist on it.
We have seen that in practice the magic art may be employed for the benefit either of individuals or of the whole community, and that according as it is directed to one or other of these two objects it may be called private or public magic.
Further, I pointed out that the public magician occupies a position of great influence, from which, if he is a prudent and able man, he may advance step by step to the rank of a chief or king.
Among the objects of public utility which magic may be employed to secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food.
The examples cited in preceding pages prove that the purveyors of food-the hunter, the fisher, the farmer-all resort to magical practices in the pursuit of their various callings; but they do so as private individuals for the benefit of themselves and their families, rather than as public functionaries acting in the interest of the whole people.
It is otherwise when the rites are performed, not by the hunters, the fishers, the farmers themselves, but by professional magicians on their behalf.
But a great step in advance has been taken when a special class of magicians has been instituted; when, in other words, a number of men have been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the whole community by their skill, whether that skill be directed to the healing of diseases, the forecasting of the future, the regulation of the weather, or any other object of general utility.
The impotence of the means adopted by most of these practitioners to accomplish their ends ought not to blind us to the immense importance of the institution itself.
Here is a body of men relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need of earning their livelihood by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay, expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret ways of nature.
The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.
Ridicule and blame are the just meed, not of those who devised these crude theories, but of those who obstinately adhered to them after better had been propounded.
To maintain at least a show of knowledge was absolutely necessary; a single mistake detected might cost them their life. This no doubt led them to practise imposture for the purpose of concealing their ignorance; but it also supplied them with the most powerful motive for substituting a real for a sham knowledge, since, if you would appear to know anything, by far the best way is actually to know it.
Thus, however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions which they have practised on mankind, the original institution of this class of men has, take it all in all, been productive of incalculable good to humanity.
They were the direct predecessors, not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science.
The Magical Control of Rain
OF THE THINGS which the public magician sets himself to do for the good of the tribe, one of the chief is to control the weather and especially to ensure an adequate fall of rain.
Water is an essential of life, and in most countries the supply of it depends upon showers.
Hence in savage communities the rain maker is a very important personage; and often a special class of magicians exists for the purpose of regulating the heavenly water supply.
The methods by which they attempt to discharge the duties of their office are commonly, though not always, based on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic.
If they wish to make rain they simulate it by sprinkling water or mimicking clouds: if their object is to stop rain and cause drought, they avoid water and resort to warmth and fire for the sake of drying up the too abundant moisture.
They are, or used to be, common enough among outwardly civilised folk in the moister climate of Europe.
I will now illustrate them by instances drawn from the practice both of public and private magic.
Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpat, in Russia, when rain was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir trees of an old sacred grove.
One of them drummed with a hammer on a kettle or small cask to imitate thunder; the second knocked two fire brands together and made the sparks fly, to imitate lightning; and the third, who was called "the rain maker," had a bunch of twigs with which he sprinkled water from a vessel on all sides.
Lastly, they squirt the water into the air, making a fine mist.
This saves the corn.
The pipes were perforated like the nozzle of a watering can, and through the holes the rain maker blew the water towards that part of the sky where the clouds hung heaviest.
When the rains do not come in due season the people of Central Angoniland repair to what is called the rain temple.
We must perish indeed.
Next they take branches of trees and dance and sing for rain. When they return to the village they find a vessel of water set at the doorway by an old woman; so they dip their branches in it and wave them aloft, so as to scatter the drops.
After that the rain is sure to come driving up in heavy clouds.
In these practices we see a combination of religion with magic; for while the scattering of the water drops by means of branches is a purely magical ceremony, the prayer for rain and the offering of beer are purely religious rites. In the Mara tribe of Northern Australia the rain maker goes to a pool and sings over it his magic song.
After that he throws water all over himself, scatters it about, and returns quietly to the camp.
They cut a branch from a certain tree in the desert, set it on fire, and then sprinkled the burning brand with water. After that the vehemence of the rain abated, just as the water vanished when it fell on the glowing brand.
Here the putting out the fire with water, which is an imitation of rain, is reinforced by the influence of the dead man, who, having been burnt to death, will naturally be anxious for the descent of rain to cool his scorched body and assuage his pangs.
Thus the Sulka of New Britain heat stones red hot in the fire and then put them out in the rain, or they throw hot ashes in the air.
That is supposed to stop the downpour.
In time of severe drought the Dieri of Central Australia, loudly lamenting the impoverished state of the country and their own half starved condition, call upon the spirits of their remote predecessors, whom they call Mura muras, to grant them power to make a heavy rain fall.
At the same time the two bleeding men throw handfuls of down about, some of which adheres to the blood stained bodies of their comrades, while the rest floats in the air.
The blood is thought to represent the rain, and the down the clouds.
Then the wizards who were bled carry away the two stones for about ten or fifteen miles, and place them as high as they can in the tallest tree.
Meanwhile the other men gather gypsum, pound it fine, and throw it into a water hole.
This the Mura muras see, and at once they cause clouds to appear in the sky.
Lastly, the men, young and old, surround the hut, and, stooping down, butt at it with their heads, like so many rams.
Thus they force their way through it and reappear on the other side, repeating the process till the hut is wrecked.
The Dieri also imagine that the foreskins taken from lads at circumcision have a great power of producing rain.
After the rains have fallen, some of the tribe always undergo a surgical operation, which consists in cutting the skin of their chest and arms with a sharp flint.
The wound is then tapped with a flat stick to increase the flow of blood, and red ochre is rubbed into it.
Raised scars are thus produced.
Apparently the operation is not very painful, for the patient laughs and jokes while it is going on.
However, they were not so well pleased next day, when they felt their wounds stiff and sore.
In Java, when rain is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each other with supple rods till the blood flows down their backs; the streaming blood represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to make it fall on the ground.
The people of Egghiou, a district of Abyssinia, used to engage in sanguinary conflicts with each other, village against village, for a week together every January for the purpose of procuring rain.
Some years ago the emperor Menelik forbade the custom.
There is a widespread belief that twin children possess magical powers over nature, especially over rain and the weather.
This curious superstition prevails among some of the Indian tribes of British Columbia, and has led them often to impose certain singular restrictions or taboos on the parents of twins, though the exact meaning of these restrictions is generally obscure.
Thus the Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia believe that twins control the weather; therefore they pray to wind and rain, "Calm down, breath of the twins." Further, they think that the wishes of twins are always fulfilled; hence twins are feared, because they can harm the man they hate.
In their childhood they can summon any wind by motions of their hands, and they can make fair or foul weather, and also cure diseases by swinging a large wooden rattle.
The Nootka Indians of British Columbia also believe that twins are somehow related to salmon. Hence among them twins may not catch salmon, and they may not eat or even handle the fresh fish.
They can make fair or foul weather, and can cause rain to fall by painting their faces black and then washing them, which may represent the rain dripping from the dark clouds.
The Shuswap Indians, like the Thompson Indians, associate twins with the grizzly bear, for they call them "young grizzly bears." According to them, twins remain throughout life endowed with supernatural powers.
In particular they can make good or bad weather.
They produce rain by spilling water from a basket in the air; they make fine weather by shaking a small flat piece of wood attached to a stick by a string; they raise storms by strewing down on the ends of spruce branches.
Further, the women must repair to the house of one of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and must drench her with water, which they carry in little pitchers.
Having done so they go on their way, shrieking out their loose songs and dancing immodest dances.
If they meet a man, they maul him and thrust him aside.
When they have cleansed the wells, they must go and pour water on the graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove.
It often happens, too, that at the bidding of the wizard they go and pour water on the graves of twins.
If all their efforts to procure rain prove abortive, they will remember that such and such a twin was buried in a dry place on the side of a hill.
"No wonder," says the wizard in such a case, "that the sky is fiery.
Some of the foregoing facts strongly support an interpretation which Professor Oldenberg has given of the rules to be observed by a Brahman who would learn a particular hymn of the ancient Indian collection known as the Samaveda.
The hymn, which bears the name of the Sakvari¯ song, was believed to embody the might of Indra's weapon, the thunderbolt; and hence, on account of the dreadful and dangerous potency with which it was thus charged, the bold student who essayed to master it had to be isolated from his fellow men, and to retire from the village into the forest.
Here for a space of time, which might vary, according to different doctors of the law, from one to twelve years, he had to observe certain rules of life, among which were the following.
If a man walked in the way of all these precepts, the rain god Parjanya, it was said, would send rain at the wish of that man.
It is clear, as Professor Oldenberg well points out, that "all these rules are intended to bring the Brahman into union with water, to make him, as it were, an ally of the water powers, and to guard him against their hostility.
It is interesting to observe that where an opposite result is desired, primitive logic enjoins the weather doctor to observe precisely opposite rules of conduct.
When a man is about to give a great feast in the rainy season and has invited many people, he goes to a weather doctor and asks him to "prop up the clouds that may be lowering." If the doctor consents to exert his professional powers, he begins to regulate his behaviour by certain rules as soon as his customer has departed.
He must observe a fast, and may neither drink nor bathe; what little he eats must be eaten dry, and in no case may he touch water.
The host, on his side, and his servants, both male and female, must neither wash clothes nor bathe so long as the feast lasts, and they have all during its continuance to observe strict chastity.
Akkemat is your country.
Put down your water cask, close it properly, that not a drop may fall out." While he utters this prayer the sorcerer looks upwards, burning incense the while.
So among the Toradjas the rain doctor, whose special business it is to drive away rain, takes care not to touch water before, during, or after the discharge of his professional duties.
He does not bathe, he eats with unwashed hands, he drinks nothing but palm wine, and if he has to cross a stream he is careful not to step in the water.
Having thus prepared himself for his task he has a small hut built for himself outside of the village in a rice field, and in this hut he keeps up a little fire, which on no account may be suffered to go out.
In the fire he burns various kinds of wood, which are supposed to possess the property of driving off rain; and he puffs in the direction from which the rain threatens to come, holding in his hand a packet of leaves and bark which derive a similar cloud compelling virtue, not from their chemical composition, but from their names, which happen to signify something dry or volatile.
If clouds should appear in the sky while he is at work, he takes lime in the hollow of his hand and blows it towards them.
Should rain afterwards be wanted, he has only to pour water on his fire, and immediately the rain will descend in sheets.
The one signifies his sympathy with water by receiving the rain on his person and speaking of it respectfully; the others light a lamp or a fire and do their best to drive the rain away.
Yet the principle on which all three act is the same; each of them, by a sort of childish make believe, identifies himself with the phenomenon which he desires to produce.
It is the old fallacy that the effect resembles its cause: if you would make wet weather, you must be wet; if you would make dry weather, you must be dry.
Among the Greeks of Thessaly and Macedonia, when a drought has lasted a long time, it is customary to send a procession of children round to all the wells and springs of the neighbourhood.
At the head of the procession walks a girl adorned with flowers, whom her companions drench with water at every halting place, while they sing an invocation, of which the following is part:
"Perperia all fresh bedewed, Freshen all the neighbourhood; By the woods, on the highway, As thou goest, to God now pray: O my God, upon the plain, Send thou us a still, small rain; That the fields may fruitful be, And vines in blossom we may see; That the grain be full and sound, And wealthy grow the folks around."
Thus disguised she is called the Dodola, and goes through the village with a troop of girls.
"We go through the village; The clouds go in the sky; We go faster, Faster go the clouds; They have overtaken us, And wetted the corn and the vine."
When they have thus visited all the houses, they strip the Rain King of his leafy robes and feast upon what they have gathered.
In Kursk, a province of Southern Russia, when rain is much wanted, the women seize a passing stranger and throw him into the river, or souse him from head to foot.
Later on we shall see that a passing stranger is often taken for a deity or the personification of some natural power.
It is recorded in official documents that during a drought in seventeen ninety the peasants of Scheroutz and Werboutz collected all the women and compelled them to bathe, in order that rain might fall.
An Armenian rain charm is to throw the wife of a priest into the water and drench her.
The Arabs of North Africa fling a holy man, willy nilly, into a spring as a remedy for drought.
In Minahassa, a province of North Celebes, the priest bathes as a rain charm.
Women are sometimes supposed to be able to make rain by ploughing, or pretending to plough.
Girls yoke themselves to a plough and drag it into a river, wading in the water up to their girdles.
The oldest woman, or the priest's wife, wears the priest's dress, while the others, dressed as men, drag the plough through the water against the stream.
In a district of Transylvania when the ground is parched with drought, some girls strip themselves naked, and, led by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the fields to a brook, where they set it afloat.
Next they sit on the harrow and keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour.
Thus in New Caledonia the rain makers blackened themselves all over, dug up a dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed them, and hung the skeleton over some taro leaves.
Some of the party beat the corpse, or what was left of it, about the head, exclaiming, "Give us rain!" while others poured water on it through a sieve.
When the land suffers from unseasonable drought, the people go to this grave, pour water on it, and say, "O grandfather, have pity on us; if it is your will that this year we should eat, then give rain."
Here, as in New Caledonia, we find religion blent with magic, for the prayer to the dead chief, which is purely religious, is eked out with a magical imitation of rain at his grave.
These wretched souls, therefore, do all in their power to prevent the rain from falling, and often their efforts are only too successful.
Then drought ensues, the most dreaded of all calamities in China, because bad harvests, dearth, and famine follow in its train.
Animals, again, often play an important part in these weather charms.
He catches a snake, puts it alive into the pool, and after holding it under water for a time takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the side of the creek.
Then he makes an arched bundle of grass stalks in imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake.
After that all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow; sooner or later the rain will fall.
Among the Wambugwe of East Africa, when the sorcerer desires to make rain, he takes a black sheep and a black calf in bright sunshine, and has them placed on the roof of the common hut in which the people live together.
After that he pours water and medicine into a vessel; if the charm has succeeded, the water boils up and rain follows.
On the other hand, if the sorcerer wishes to prevent rain from falling, he withdraws into the interior of the hut, and there heats a rock crystal in a calabash.
In order to procure rain the Wagogo sacrifice black fowls, black sheep, and black cattle at the graves of dead ancestors, and the rain maker wears black clothes during the rainy season.
The Garos of Assam offer a black goat on the top of a very high mountain in time of drought.
At the chosen spot they tether the beast to a stone, and make it a target for their bullets and arrows.
When its life blood bespatters the rocks, the peasants throw down their weapons and lift up their voices in supplication to the dragon divinity of the stream, exhorting him to send down forthwith a shower to cleanse the spot from its defilement.
Custom has prescribed that on these occasions the colour of the victim shall be black, as an emblem of the wished for rain clouds.
But if fine weather is wanted, the victim must be white, without a spot.
The intimate association of frogs and toads with water has earned for these creatures a widespread reputation as custodians of rain; and hence they often play a part in charms designed to draw needed showers from the sky.
Some of the Indians of the Orinoco held the toad to be the god or lord of the waters, and for that reason feared to kill the creature.
They have been known to keep frogs under a pot and to beat them with rods when there was a drought.
The Thompson Indians of British Columbia and some people in Europe think that to kill a frog will cause rain to fall.
"Send soon, O frog, the jewel of water! And ripen the wheat and millet in the field."
Sometimes, when a drought has lasted a long time, people drop the usual hocus pocus of imitative magic altogether, and being far too angry to waste their breath in prayer they seek by threats and curses or even downright physical force to extort the waters of heaven from the supernatural being who has, so to say, cut them off at the main.
The Chinese are adepts in the art of taking the kingdom of heaven by storm.
Thus, when rain is wanted they make a huge dragon of paper or wood to represent the rain god, and carry it about in procession; but if no rain follows, the mock dragon is execrated and torn to pieces.
At other times they threaten and beat the god if he does not give rain; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank of deity.
On the other hand, if the wished for rain falls, the god is promoted to a higher rank by an imperial decree.
This had a salutary effect.
The rain ceased and the god was restored to liberty.
So when the Siamese need rain, they set out their idols in the blazing sun; but if they want dry weather, they unroof the temples and let the rain pour down on the idols.
The reader may smile at the meteorology of the Far East; but precisely similar modes of procuring rain have been resorted to in Christian Europe within our own lifetime.
By the end of april eighteen ninety three there was great distress in Sicily for lack of water.
The drought had lasted six months.
Every day the sun rose and set in a sky of cloudless blue.
Food was becoming scarce.
The people were in great alarm.
Men, women, and children, telling their beads, had lain whole nights before the holy images.
Consecrated candles had burned day and night in the churches.
Palm branches, blessed on Palm Sunday, had been hung on the trees.
At Solaparuta, in accordance with a very old custom, the dust swept from the churches on Palm Sunday had been spread on the fields.
In ordinary years these holy sweepings preserve the crops; but that year, if you will believe me, they had no effect whatever. At Nicosia the inhabitants, bare headed and bare foot, carried the crucifixes through all the wards of the town and scourged each other with iron whips.
Even the great saint Francis of Paolo himself, who annually performs the miracle of rain and is carried every spring through the market gardens, either could not or would not help.
Masses, vespers, concerts, illuminations, fire works-nothing could move him.
At last the peasants began to lose patience.
Most of the saints were banished.
At Palermo they dumped saint Joseph in a garden to see the state of things for himself, and they swore to leave him there in the sun till rain fell.
Other saints were turned, like naughty children, with their faces to the wall.
Others again, stripped of their beautiful robes, were exiled far from their parishes, threatened, grossly insulted, ducked in horse ponds.
At Caltanisetta the golden wings of saint Michael the Archangel were torn from his shoulders and replaced with wings of pasteboard; his purple mantle was taken away and a clout wrapt about him instead.
Sometimes an appeal is made to the pity of the gods.
When their corn is being burnt up by the sun, the Zulus look out for a "heaven bird," kill it, and throw it into a pool.
Then the heaven melts with tenderness for the death of the bird; "it wails for it by raining, wailing a funeral wail." In Zululand women sometimes bury their children up to the neck in the ground, and then retiring to a distance keep up a dismal howl for a long time.
The sky is supposed to melt with pity at the sight.
Then the women dig the children out and feel sure that rain will soon follow.
In Kumaon a way of stopping rain is to pour hot oil in the left ear of a dog.
Sometimes the Toradjas attempt to procure rain as follows.
However, the foregoing ceremonies are religious rather than magical, since they involve an appeal to the compassion of higher powers.
In a Samoan village a certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the rain making god, and in time of drought his priests carried the stone in procession and dipped it in a stream.
In the Keramin tribe of New South Wales the wizard retires to the bed of a creek, drops water on a round flat stone, then covers up and conceals it.
Among some tribes of north-western Australia the rain maker repairs to a piece of ground which is set apart for the purpose of rain making.
Water is sprinkled on the stone and huge fires are kindled.
No layman may approach the sacred spot while the mystic ceremony is being performed.
When the Sulka of New Britain wish to procure rain they blacken stones with the ashes of certain fruits and set them out, along with certain other plants and buds, in the sun
Then a handful of twigs is dipped in water and weighted with stones, while a spell is chanted.
After that rain should follow.
In Manipur, on a lofty hill to the east of the capital, there is a stone which the popular imagination likens to an umbrella.
When rain is wanted, the rajah fetches water from a spring below and sprinkles it on the stone.
At Sagami in Japan there is a stone which draws down rain whenever water is poured on it.
When the Wakondyo, a tribe of Central Africa, desire rain, they send to the Wawamba, who dwell at the foot of snowy mountains, and are the happy possessors of a "rain stone." In consideration of a proper payment, the Wawamba wash the precious stone, anoint it with oil, and put it in a pot full of water.
After that the rain cannot fail to come.
In the arid wastes of Arizona and New Mexico the Apaches sought to make rain by carrying water from a certain spring and throwing it on a particular point high up on a rock; after that they imagined that the clouds would soon gather, and that rain would begin to fall.
After this the rain was sure to fall within twenty four hours.
In Mingrelia, when the crops are suffering from want of rain, they take a particularly holy image and dip it in water every day till a shower falls; and in the Far East the Shans drench the images of Buddha with water when the rice is perishing of drought.
In all such cases the practice is probably at bottom a sympathetic charm, however it may be disguised under the appearance of a punishment or a threat.
Like other peoples, the Greeks and romans sought to obtain rain by magic, when prayers and processions had proved ineffectual.
For example, in Arcadia, when the corn and trees were parched with drought, the priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain spring on Mount Lycaeus.
Thus troubled, the water sent up a misty cloud, from which rain soon fell upon the land.
A similar mode of making rain is still practised, as we have seen, in Halmahera near New Guinea.
The people of Crannon in Thessaly had a bronze chariot which they kept in a temple.
When they desired a shower they shook the chariot and the shower fell.
Indeed he declared that he was actually Zeus, and caused sacrifices to be offered to himself as such.
Let us take as an illustration a matter about which none of us, in fact, feel the slightest doubt.
We are all convinced that the sun will rise to morrow.
Why?
If we are challenged as to why we believe that it will continue to rise as heretofore, we may appeal to the laws of motion: the earth, we shall say, is a freely rotating body, and such bodies do not cease to rotate unless something interferes from outside, and there is nothing outside to interfere with the earth between now and to morrow.
If this doubt is raised, we find ourselves in the same position as when the doubt about the sunrise was first raised.
Now in dealing with this question we must, to begin with, make an important distinction, without which we should soon become involved in hopeless confusions.
'Unsupported bodies in air fall' is a general rule to which balloons and aeroplanes are exceptions.
This brings us back to the question: Have we any reason, assuming that they have always held in the past, to suppose that they will hold in the future?
We have experience of past futures, but not of future futures, and the question is: Will future futures resemble past futures?
We have therefore still to seek for some principle which shall enable us to know that the future will follow the same laws as the past.
The reference to the future in this question is not essential.
It can never quite reach certainty, because we know that in spite of frequent repetitions there sometimes is a failure at the last, as in the case of the chicken whose neck is wrung.
Thus probability is all we ought to seek.
The second is that the reign of law would seem to be itself only probable, and that our belief that it will hold in the future, or in unexamined cases in the past, is itself based upon the very principle we are examining.
As just stated, the principle applies only to the verification of our expectation in a single fresh instance.
We may therefore repeat the two parts of our principle as regards the general law, thus:
b)
But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed.
Thus all knowledge which, on a basis of experience tells us something about what is not experienced, is based upon a belief which experience can neither confirm nor confute, yet which, at least in its more concrete applications, appears to be as firmly rooted in us as many of the facts of experience.
The existence and justification of such beliefs-for the inductive principle, as we shall see, is not the only example-raises some of the most difficult and most debated problems of philosophy.
Some of these principles have even greater evidence than the principle of induction, and the knowledge of them has the same degree of certainty as the knowledge of the existence of sense data.
They constitute the means of drawing inferences from what is given in sensation; and if what we infer is to be true, it is just as necessary that our principles of inference should be true as it is that our data should be true.
In all our knowledge of general principles, what actually happens is that first of all we realize some particular application of the principle, and then we realize that the particularity is irrelevant, and that there is a generality which may equally truly be affirmed.
This is of course familiar in such matters as teaching arithmetic: 'two and two are four' is first learnt in the case of some particular pair of couples, and then in some other particular case, and so on, until at last it becomes possible to see that it is true of any pair of couples. The same thing happens with logical principles.
Suppose two men are discussing what day of the month it is.
Now such an argument is not hard to follow; and if it is granted that its premisses are true in fact, no one will deny that the conclusion must also be true.
But it depends for its truth upon an instance of a general logical principle.
Thus our principle states that if this implies that, and this is true, then that is true. In other words, 'anything implied by a true proposition is true', or 'whatever follows from a true proposition is true'.
Whenever one thing which we believe is used to prove something else, which we consequently believe, this principle is relevant.
If any one asks: 'Why should I accept the results of valid arguments based on true premisses?' we can only answer by appealing to our principle.
In fact, the truth of the principle is impossible to doubt, and its obviousness is so great that at first sight it seems almost trivial.
The above principle is merely one of a certain number of self evident logical principles.
When some of them have been granted, others can be proved, though these others, so long as they are simple, are just as obvious as the principles taken for granted.
For no very good reason, three of these principles have been singled out by tradition under the name of 'Laws of Thought'.
They are as follows:
But this is a large question, to which we must return at a later stage.
An example of such principles-perhaps the most important example is the inductive principle, which we considered in the preceding chapter.
One of the great historic controversies in philosophy is the controversy between the two schools called respectively 'empiricists' and 'rationalists'.
The empiricists-who are best represented by the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume-maintained that all our knowledge is derived from experience; the rationalists-who are represented by the Continental philosophers of the seventeenth century, especially Descartes and Leibniz-maintained that, in addition to what we know by experience, there are certain 'innate ideas' and 'innate principles', which we know independently of experience.
It must be admitted, for the reasons already stated, that logical principles are known to us, and cannot be themselves proved by experience, since all proof presupposes them.
In this, therefore, which was the most important point of the controversy, the rationalists were in the right.
It would certainly be absurd to suppose that there are innate principles in the sense that babies are born with a knowledge of everything which men know and which cannot be deduced from what is experienced.
For this reason, the word 'innate' would not now be employed to describe our knowledge of logical principles.
There is another point of great importance, in which the empiricists were in the right as against the rationalists.
That is to say, if we wish to prove that something of which we have no direct experience exists, we must have among our premisses the existence of one or more things of which we have direct experience.
Our belief that the Emperor of China exists, for example, rests upon testimony, and testimony consists, in the last analysis, of sense data seen or heard in reading or being spoken to.
Rationalists believed that, from general consideration as to what must be, they could deduce the existence of this or that in the actual world.
In this belief they seem to have been mistaken.
All knowledge that something exists must be in part dependent on experience.
I am not speaking of judgements as to what is useful or as to what is virtuous, for such judgements do require empirical premisses; I am speaking of judgements as to the intrinsic desirability of things.
If something is useful, it must be useful because it secures some end; the end must, if we have gone far enough, be valuable on its own account, and not merely because it is useful for some further end.
Thus all judgements as to what is useful depend upon judgements as to what has value on its own account.
We judge, for example, that happiness is more desirable than misery, knowledge than ignorance, goodwill than hatred, and so on.
But it is fairly obvious that they cannot be proved by experience; for the fact that a thing exists or does not exist cannot prove either that it is good that it should exist or that it is bad.
The pursuit of this subject belongs to ethics, where the impossibility of deducing what ought to be from what is has to be established.
If, however, this were the source of our knowledge that two and two are four, we should proceed differently, in persuading ourselves of its truth, from the way in which we do actually proceed.
In fact, a certain number of instances are needed to make us think of two abstractly, rather than of two coins or two books or two people, or two of any other specified kind.
Moreover, we feel some quality of necessity about the proposition 'two and two are four', which is absent from even the best attested empirical generalizations.
Such generalizations always remain mere facts: we feel that there might be a world in which they were false, though in the actual world they happen to be true.
In any possible world, on the contrary, we feel that two and two would be four: this is not a mere fact, but a necessity to which everything actual and possible must conform.
The case may be made clearer by considering a genuinely empirical generalization, such as 'All men are mortal.' It is plain that we believe this proposition, in the first place, because there is no known instance of men living beyond a certain age, and in the second place because there seem to be physiological grounds for thinking that an organism such as a man's body must sooner or later wear out.
Neglecting the second ground, and considering merely our experience of men's mortality, it is plain that we should not be content with one quite clearly understood instance of a man dying, whereas, in the case of 'two and two are four', one instance does suffice, when carefully considered, to persuade us that the same must happen in any other instance.
This may be made plain by the attempt to imagine two different worlds, in one of which there are men who are not mortal, while in the other two and two make five.
But a world where two and two make five seems quite on a different level.
We feel that such a world, if there were one, would upset the whole fabric of our knowledge and reduce us to utter doubt.
The fact is that, in simple mathematical judgements such as 'two and two are four', and also in many judgements of logic, we can know the general proposition without inferring it from instances, although some instance is usually necessary to make clear to us what the general proposition means.
We can now see that in certain cases, at least, it does do so.
If we already know that two and two always make four, and we know that Brown and Jones are two, and so are Robinson and Smith, we can deduce that Brown and Jones and Robinson and Smith are four.
This is new knowledge, not contained in our premisses, because the general proposition, 'two and two are four', never told us there were such people as Brown and Jones and Robinson and Smith, and the particular premisses do not tell us that there were four of them, whereas the particular proposition deduced does tell us both these things.
In regard to the former, deduction is the right mode of argument, whereas in regard to the latter, induction is always theoretically preferable, and warrants a greater confidence in the truth of our conclusion, because all empirical generalizations are more uncertain than the instances of them.
The question which must next occupy us is this: How is it possible that there should be such knowledge?
TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD
Whatever we are acquainted with must be something; we may draw wrong inferences from our acquaintance, but the acquaintance itself cannot be deceptive.
Thus there is no dualism as regards acquaintance.
But as regards knowledge of truths, there is a dualism.
We may believe what is false as well as what is true.
We know that on very many subjects different people hold different and incompatible opinions: hence some beliefs must be erroneous.
This is a question of the very greatest difficulty, to which no completely satisfactory answer is possible.
It is this preliminary question which is to be considered in this chapter.
In this chapter we are not asking how we can know whether a belief is true or false: we are asking what is meant by the question whether a belief is true or false.
There are three points to observe in the attempt to discover the nature of truth, three requisites which any theory must fulfil.
(one) Our theory of truth must be such as to admit of its opposite, falsehood.
A good many philosophers have failed adequately to satisfy this condition: they have constructed theories according to which all our thinking ought to have been true, and have then had the greatest difficulty in finding a place for falsehood.
In this respect our theory of belief must differ from our theory of acquaintance, since in the case of acquaintance it was not necessary to take account of any opposite.
(two) It seems fairly evident that if there were no beliefs there could be no falsehood, and no truth either, in the sense in which truth is correlative to falsehood.
(three) But, as against what we have just said, it is to be observed that the truth or falsehood of a belief always depends upon something which lies outside the belief itself.
If I believe that Charles the first died on the scaffold, I believe truly, not because of any intrinsic quality of my belief, which could be discovered by merely examining the belief, but because of an historical event which happened two and a half centuries ago.
If I believe that Charles the first died in his bed, I believe falsely: no degree of vividness in my belief, or of care in arriving at it, prevents it from being false, again because of what happened long ago, and not because of any intrinsic property of my belief.
Hence, although truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs, they are properties dependent upon the relations of the beliefs to other things, not upon any internal quality of the beliefs.
The third of the above requisites leads us to adopt the view-which has on the whole been commonest among philosophers-that truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact.
By this partly-and partly by the feeling that, if truth consists in a correspondence of thought with something outside thought, thought can never know when truth has been attained-many philosophers have been led to try to find some definition of truth which shall not consist in relation to something wholly outside belief.
It is said that the mark of falsehood is failure to cohere in the body of our beliefs, and that it is the essence of a truth to form part of the completely rounded system which is The Truth.
There is, however, a great difficulty in this view, or rather two great difficulties.
It may be that, with sufficient imagination, a novelist might invent a past for the world that would perfectly fit on to what we know, and yet be quite different from the real past.
In more scientific matters, it is certain that there are often two or more hypotheses which account for all the known facts on some subject, and although, in such cases, men of science endeavour to find facts which will rule out all the hypotheses except one, there is no reason why they should always succeed.
In philosophy, again, it seems not uncommon for two rival hypotheses to be both able to account for all the facts.
Thus, for example, it is possible that life is one long dream, and that the outer world has only that degree of reality that the objects of dreams have; but although such a view does not seem inconsistent with known facts, there is no reason to prefer it to the common sense view, according to which other people and things do really exist.
The other objection to this definition of truth is that it assumes the meaning of 'coherence' known, whereas, in fact, 'coherence' presupposes the truth of the laws of logic.
Two propositions are coherent when both may be true, and are incoherent when one at least must be false.
Now in order to know whether two propositions can both be true, we must know such truths as the law of contradiction.
For example, the two propositions, 'this tree is a beech' and 'this tree is not a beech', are not coherent, because of the law of contradiction.
But if the law of contradiction itself were subjected to the test of coherence, we should find that, if we choose to suppose it false, nothing will any longer be incoherent with anything else.
Thus the laws of logic supply the skeleton or framework within which the test of coherence applies, and they themselves cannot be established by this test.
It remains to define precisely what we mean by 'fact', and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.
In accordance with our three requisites, we have to seek a theory of truth which (one) allows truth to have an opposite, namely falsehood, (two) makes truth a property of beliefs, but (three) makes it a property wholly dependent upon the relation of the beliefs to outside things.
The necessity of allowing for falsehood makes it impossible to regard belief as a relation of the mind to a single object, which could be said to be what is believed.
If belief were so regarded, we should find that, like acquaintance, it would not admit of the opposition of truth and falsehood, but would have to be always true.
This may be made clear by examples.
Othello believes falsely that Desdemona loves Cassio.
We cannot say that this belief consists in a relation to a single object, 'Desdemona's love for Cassio', for if there were such an object, the belief would be true.
There is in fact no such object, and therefore Othello cannot have any relation to such an object.
Hence his belief cannot possibly consist in a relation to this object.
It might be said that his belief is a relation to a different object, namely 'that Desdemona loves Cassio'; but it is almost as difficult to suppose that there is such an object as this, when Desdemona does not love Cassio, as it was to suppose that there is 'Desdemona's love for Cassio'.
Hence it will be better to seek for a theory of belief which does not make it consist in a relation of the mind to a single object.
It is common to think of relations as though they always held between two terms, but in fact this is not always the case.
Some relations demand three terms, some four, and so on.
Take, for instance, the relation 'between'.
So long as only two terms come in, the relation 'between' is impossible: three terms are the smallest number that render it possible.
York is between London and Edinburgh; but if London and Edinburgh were the only places in the world, there could be nothing which was between one place and another.
Instances might be multiplied indefinitely, but enough has been said to show that there are relations which require more than two terms before they can occur.
When Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio, he must not have before his mind a single object, 'Desdemona's love for Cassio', or 'that Desdemona loves Cassio ', for that would require that there should be objective falsehoods, which subsist independently of any minds; and this, though not logically refutable, is a theory to be avoided if possible.
Thus it is easier to account for falsehood if we take judgement to be a relation in which the mind and the various objects concerned all occur severally; that is to say, Desdemona and loving and Cassio must all be terms in the relation which subsists when Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio.
This relation, therefore, is a relation of four terms, since Othello also is one of the terms of the relation.
When we say that it is a relation of four terms, we do not mean that Othello has a certain relation to Desdemona, and has the same relation to loving and also to Cassio.
Thus the actual occurrence, at the moment when Othello is entertaining his belief, is that the relation called 'believing' is knitting together into one complex whole the four terms Othello, Desdemona, loving, and Cassio.
What is called belief or judgement is nothing but this relation of believing or judging, which relates a mind to several things other than itself.
We are now in a position to understand what it is that distinguishes a true judgement from a false one.
For this purpose we will adopt certain definitions.
In every act of judgement there is a mind which judges, and there are terms concerning which it judges.
Thus, when Othello judges that Desdemona loves Cassio, Othello is the subject, while the objects are Desdemona and loving and Cassio.
Similarly, if Cassio judges that Desdemona loves Othello, the constituents of the judgement are still the same, but their order is different.
This property of having a 'sense' or 'direction' is one which the relation of judging shares with all other relations.
The 'sense' of relations is the ultimate source of order and series and a host of mathematical concepts; but we need not concern ourselves further with this aspect.
In this respect, judging is exactly like every other relation.
Whenever a relation holds between two or more terms, it unites the terms into a complex whole.
If Othello loves Desdemona, there is such a complex whole as 'Othello's love for Desdemona'.
Wherever there is a relation which relates certain terms, there is a complex object formed of the union of those terms; and conversely, wherever there is a complex object, there is a relation which relates its constituents.
When an act of believing occurs, there is a complex, in which 'believing' is the uniting relation, and subject and objects are arranged in a certain order by the 'sense' of the relation of believing.
But this relation, as it occurs in the act of believing, is not the relation which creates the unity of the complex whole consisting of the subject and the objects.
The relation 'loving', as it occurs in the act of believing, is one of the objects-it is a brick in the structure, not the cement.
The cement is the relation 'believing'.
This constitutes the definition of truth and falsehood that we were in search of.
This correspondence ensures truth, and its absence entails falsehood.
Thus a belief is true when there is a corresponding fact, and is false when there is no corresponding fact.
They create beliefs, but when once the beliefs are created, the mind cannot make them true or false, except in the special case where they concern future things which are within the power of the person believing, such as catching trains.
BOOK three
CHAPTER one
THE MIND HAS AN INCOMPLETE LIFE
The problem of the union of the mind and the body is not one of those which present themselves in pure speculation; it has its roots in experimental facts, and is forced upon us by the necessity of explaining observations such as those we are about to quote.
This is daily demonstrated by thousands upon thousands of observations.
The question is to know how this union of the body with the consciousness is to be explained, it being assumed that the two terms of this union present a great difference in their nature.
The easier it seems to demonstrate that this union exists, the more difficult it appears to explain how it is realised; and the proof of this difficulty is the number of divergent interpretations given to it. Were it a simple question of fact, the perpetual discussions and controversies upon it would not arise.
The first is that of the genesis or origin of the consciousness.
In general, one begins by supposing that the material phenomena are produced first; they consist, for instance, in the working of the nervous centres.
All this is physical or chemical, and therefore material.
Then at a given moment, after this mechanical process, a quite different phenomenon emerges.
This is thought, consciousness, emotion.
What is the nature of the link between them?
Is it a relation of cause to effect, of genesis? or a coincidence? or the interaction of two distinct forces? Is this relation constant or necessary?
Can the mind enjoy an existence independent of the brain?
Can it survive the death of the brain?
The second question is that of knowing what is the role, the utility, and the efficacity of the psychical phenomenon.
Does it exercise any action on these intra cerebral functions?
Does it exercise any action on the centrifugal currents which go to the motor nerves?
Is it capable of exciting a movement?
or is it deprived of all power of creating effect?
Some of the best known of these solutions bear the names of spiritualism, materialism, parallelism, and monism.
Before beginning our critical statement, let us recall some of the results of our previous analyses which here intrude themselves, to use the ambitious language of Kant, as the prolegomena to every future solution which claims the title of science.
We have had to acknowledge the exactness of certain facts, and we are bound to admit their consequences.
Notably, the definition of psychical phenomena at which we arrived, not without some trouble, will henceforth play a rather large part in our discussion.
It will force us to question a great metaphysical principle which, up till now, has been almost universally considered as governing the problem of the union of the mind with the body.
No philosopher has more clearly formulated it, and more logically deduced its consequences, than Flournoy.
Let us not hesitate to denounce as false this proposition which is presented to us as an axiom.
On looking closely into it, we shall perceive that the principle of heterogeneity does not contain the consequences it is sought to ascribe to it.
It seems to me it should be split up into two propositions of very unequal value: one, the mind and body are heterogeneous; two, by virtue of this heterogeneity it is not possible to understand any direct relation between the two.
The consciousness is not sufficient for itself; as we have said, it cannot exist by itself.
Mind and matter brought down to the essential, to the consciousness and its object, form a natural whole, and the difficulty does not consist in uniting but in separating them.
Consider the following fact: "I experience a sensation, and I have consciousness of it."
This is the coupling of two things-a sensation and a cognition.
They can only be separated by analysis, and a scrupulous mind might even ask whether one has the right to separate them.
I have a sensation, and I have consciousness of it.
If not two facts, they are one and the same.
Now, sensation is matter and my consciousness is mind.
If I am judging an assortment of stuffs, this assortment, or the sensation I have of them, is a particle of matter, a material state, and my judgment on this sensation is the psychical phenomenon.
We can neither believe, nor desire, nor do any act of our intelligence without realising this welding together of mind and matter.
They are as inseparable as motion and the object that moves; and this comparison, though far fetched, is really very convenient.
Motion cannot exist without a mobile object; and an object, on the other hand, can exist without movement.
In the same way, sensation may exist without the consciousness; but the converse proposition, consciousness without sensation, without an object, an empty consciousness or a "pure thought," cannot be understood.
We describe it after nature.
It is observation which reveals to us the union and the fusion of the two terms into one.
Or, rather, we do not even perceive their union until the moment when, by a process of analysis, we succeed in convincing ourselves that that which we at first considered single is really double, or, if you like, can be made into two by the reason, without being so in reality.
Thus it happens that we bring this big problem in metaphysics on to the field of observation.
There are many authors who maintain that the soul can act directly on the body and modify it, and this is what is called inter actionism.
Thereby is understood, if I mistake not, an action from cause to effect, produced between two terms which enjoy a certain independence with regard to each other.
This interpretation is indubitably close to ours, though not to be confused with it.
My personal interpretation sets aside the idea of all independence of the mind, since it attributes to the mind an incomplete and, as it were, a virtual existence.
If we had to seek paternity for ideas I would much rather turn to Aristotle.
It was not without some surprise that I was able to convince myself that the above theory of the relations between the soul and the body is to be found almost in its entirety in the great philosopher.
It is true that it is mixed up with many accessory ideas which are out of date and which we now reject; but the essential of the theory is there very clearly formulated, and that is the important point.
A few details on this subject will not be out of place.
I give them, not from the original source, which I am not erudite enough to consult direct, but from the learned treatise which Bain has published on the psychology of Aristotle, as an appendix to his work on the Senses and the Intelligence.
The whole metaphysics of Aristotle is dominated by the distinction between form and matter.
We may name a substance without troubling ourselves as to the form it possesses, and we may name the form without regard to the substance that it clothes.
Aristotle recognises between these two logical correlatives a difference in rank.
This difference in rank is so strongly marked, that these two correlations are likewise conceived in a different form-that of the potential and the actual.
Matter is the potential, imperfect, roughly outlined element which is not yet actual, and may perhaps never become so.
Form is the actual, the energy, the entelechy which actualises the potential and determines the final compound.
These few definitions will make clear the singularly ingenious idea of Aristotle on the nature of the body, the soul, and of their union.
The soul is form, the actual. By uniting with the body it constitutes the living subject.
Each has its formal side which concerns the soul, and its material side which concerns the body.
The soul actualises the body, and becomes, as he said, its entelechy.
These views are too close to those I have myself just set forth for it to be necessary to dwell on their resemblance.
The latter would become still stronger if we separated from the thought of Aristotle a few developments which are not essential, though he allowed them great importance: I refer to the continual comparison he makes with the form and matter of corporeal objects.
Let me add another point of comparison.
The form of thought, or the category, is nothing without the matter of cognition, and the latter is nothing without the application of form. "Thoughts without content given by sensation are empty; intuitions without concept furnished by the understanding are blind." There is nothing astonishing in finding here the same illustration, since there is throughout a question of describing the same phenomenon,--the relation of mind to matter.
There remains to us to review the principal types of metaphysical systems.
CHAPTER thirty four.
So the knight went his way unto King Mark, and brought him that rich horn, and said that Sir Lamorak sent it him, and thereto he told him the virtue of that horn.
Then the king made Queen Isoud to drink thereof, and an hundred ladies, and there were but four ladies of all those that drank clean.
Alas, said King Mark, this is a great despite, and sware a great oath that she should be burnt and the other ladies.
Then the barons gathered them together, and said plainly they would not have those ladies burnt for an horn made by sorcery, that came from as false a sorceress and witch as then was living.
For that horn did never good, but caused strife and debate, and always in her days she had been an enemy to all true lovers.
So there were many knights made their avow, an ever they met with Morgan le Fay, that they would show her short courtesy.
Also Sir Tristram was passing wroth that Sir Lamorak sent that horn unto King Mark, for well he knew that it was done in the despite of him.
And therefore he thought to quite Sir Lamorak.
And then by the assent of King Mark, and of Sir Andred, and of some of the barons, Sir Tristram was led unto a chapel that stood upon the sea rocks, there for to take his judgment: and so he was led bounden with forty knights.
Fie upon thee, said Sir Andred, false traitor that thou art, with thine avaunting; for all thy boast thou shalt die this day.
No! said Sir Andred, and therewith he drew his sword, and would have slain him.
So then Sir Tristram gat the chapel and kept it mightily.
When Sir Tristram saw the people draw unto him, he remembered he was naked, and sperd fast the chapel door, and brake the bars of a window, and so he leapt out and fell upon the crags in the sea.
SO when they were departed, Gouvernail, and Sir Lambegus, and Sir Sentraille de Lushon, that were Sir Tristram's men, sought their master. When they heard he was escaped then they were passing glad; and on the rocks they found him, and with towels they pulled him up.
Sir, said Gouvernail, she is put in a lazar cote.
So the good knight bade his men go from him: For at this time I may not help you.
So they departed all save Gouvernail.
And then when Sir Tristram came toward the old manor he found the track of many horses, and thereby he wist his lady was gone.
And then Sir Tristram took great sorrow, and endured with great pain long time, for the arrow that he was hurt withal was envenomed.
Then Sir Tristram and Gouvernail gat them shipping, and so sailed into Brittany.
And when King Howel wist that it was Sir Tristram he was full glad of him.
Then Gouvernail went to the king and said: Sir, I counsel you to desire my lord, Sir Tristram, as in your need to help you.
I will do by your counsel, said the king.
Sir, said Sir Tristram, I will go to the field and do what I may.
Then Sir Tristram issued out of the town with such fellowship as he might make, and did such deeds that all Brittany spake of him.
And then, at the last, by great might and force, he slew the Earl Grip with his own hands, and more than an hundred knights he slew that day.
And then Sir Tristram was received worshipfully with procession.
Then King Howel embraced him in his arms, and said: Sir Tristram, all my kingdom I will resign to thee. God defend, said Sir Tristram, for I am beholden unto you for your daughter's sake to do for you.
And at the last they were wedded, and solemnly held their marriage.
And then he took such a thought suddenly that he was all dismayed, and other cheer made he none but with clipping and kissing; as for other fleshly lusts Sir Tristram never thought nor had ado with her: such mention maketh the French book; also it maketh mention that the lady weened there had been no pleasure but kissing and clipping.
Then said Sir Tristram: Heard ye anything of me?
That me repenteth, said Tristram, for of all knights I loved to be in his fellowship.
So Sir Tristram made great moan and was ashamed that noble knights should defame him for the sake of his lady.
But in the end, Queen Guenever said, it shall be thus, that he shall hate her, and love you better than ever he did to fore.
And these fishers told Sir Lamorak all the guise of Sir Nabon; how there came never knight of King Arthur's but he destroyed him.
And at the last battle that he did was slain Sir Nanowne le Petite, the which he put to a shameful death in despite of King Arthur, for he was drawn limb meal.
That forthinketh me, said Sir Lamorak, for that knight's death, for he was my cousin; and if I were at mine ease as well as ever I was, I would revenge his death.
And then either saluted other.
And then Sir Segwarides brought Sir Tristram to a lady thereby that was born in Cornwall, and she told him all the perils of that valley, and how there came never knight there but he were taken prisoner or slain.
Then one told him there was a knight of King Arthur's that was wrecked on the rocks.
What is his name? said Sir Tristram.
We wot not, said the fishers, but he keepeth it no counsel but that he is a knight of King Arthur's, and by the mighty lord of this isle he setteth nought.
Then the lady prayed the fishers to bring him to her place.
So on the morrow they brought him thither in a fisher's raiment; and as soon as Sir Tristram saw him he smiled upon him and knew him well, but he knew not Sir Tristram.
Fair sir, said Sir Tristram, meseemeth by your cheer ye have been diseased but late, and also methinketh I should know you heretofore.
I will well, said Sir Lamorak, that ye have seen me and met with me.
Well, said Sir Lamorak, since ye have said so largely unto me, my name is Sir Lamorak de Galis, son unto King Pellinore.
What are ye, said Sir Lamorak, that knoweth me?
I am Sir Tristram de Liones.
Ah, sir, remember ye not of the fall ye did give me once, and after ye refused me to fight on foot.
Well, said he, an it were to do again, so would I do, for I had liefer strife and debate fell in King Mark's court rather than Arthur's court, for the honour of both courts be not alike.
Therefore, said Sir Tristram, ye shall leave all your malice, and so will I, and let us assay how we may win worship between you and me upon this giant Sir Nabon le Noire that is lord of this island, to destroy him.
Kitty hung up her hat and coat.
The coat tree stood at the right of the single window, and out of this window Kitty stared solemnly, at everything and at nothing.
And Cutty wanted her out of town for a few days.
Burlingame had intended sending Kitty out of town on an assignment during Easter week. An exchange of telegrams that morning had closed the gap in time.
"Well, you might say 'Good morning.'"
"I beg your pardon, Burly!"
In newspaper offices you belong at once or you never belong; and to belong is to have your name sheared to as few syllables as possible.
You are formal only to the city editor, the managing editor, and the auditor.
"What's the matter?"
"I've been set in the middle of a fairy story," said Kitty, "and I'm wondering if it's worth the trouble to try to find a way out.
A Knight of the Round Table, a prince of chivalry.
What would you say if you saw one in spats and a black derby?"
"Why," answered Burlingame, "I suppose I'd consider July first as the best thing that could happen to me."
Kitty laughed; and that was what he wanted.
What had that old rogue been doing now-offering Kitty his eighteen story office building?
"It's odd, isn't it, that I shouldn't possess a little histrionic ability.
"It is, Kitty; only not to mimic.
You're an actress, but the Big Dramatist writes your business for you.
Now, I've got some fairly good news for you.
An assignment."
"Work!
What is it?"
She is going to return to Broadway this autumn, and she has a trunkful of plays to read.
I have found your judgment ace high. Mornings you will read with her; afternoons you will visit.
So she will be quite as interested in you as you are in her.
I want you to note her ways, how she amuses herself, eats, exercises.
I want you to note the contents of her beautiful home; if she likes dogs or cats or horses. You will take a camera and get half a dozen good pictures, and a page yarn for Easter Sunday.
Stay as long as she wants you to."
"But who?"
Burlingame jerked his thumb toward a photograph on the wall.
"Oh!
This will be the most scrumptious event in my life.
I'm wild about her!
But I haven't any clothes!"
Burlingame waved his hands.
"I knew I'd hear that yodel.
Eve didn't have anything to speak of, but she travelled a lot.
Truth is, Kitty, you'd better dress in monotones.
She might wake up to the fact that you're a mighty pretty young woman and suddenly become temperamental.
She has a husband round the lot somewhere.
Make him think his wife is a lucky woman.
Here's all the dope-introduction, expenses, and tickets.
Train leaves at two fifty.
Run along home and pack.
Remember, I want a page yarn.
No flapdoodle or mush; straight stuff.
If you go at it right you two will react upon each other as a tonic."
Kitty realized that this little junket was the very thing she needed-open spaces, long walks in which to think out her problem. She hurried home and spent the morning packing.
When this heartrending business was over she summoned Tony Bernini.
"I am going out of town, mr Bernini.
I may be gone a week."
"All right, Miss Conover." Bernini hid a smile.
He knew all about this trip, having been advised by Cutty over the wire.
"Not that we know of.
Still, you never can tell.
"Better not go by train.
I can get a fast roadster and run you out in a couple of hours.
Right after lunch you go to the boss's garage and wait for me.
I'll take care of your grips and camera.
I'll follow on your heels."
"Anybody would consider that Karlov was after me instead of Hawksley."
Bernini smiled.
"Miss Conover, the moment Karlov puts his hands on you the whole game goes blooey.
That's the plain fact.
There is death in this game.
These madmen expect to blow up the United States on May first.
We are easing them along because we want the top men in our net. But if Karlov takes it into his head to get you, and succeeds, he'll have a stranglehold on the whole local service; because we'd have to make great concessions to free you."
"Why wasn't I told this at the start?"
We did not care to frighten you."
"I'm not frightened," said Kitty.
"Nope.
But we wish to the Lord you were, Miss Conover.
Another fragment.
Karlov's agent sought his chief and found him in the cellar of the old house, sinisterly engaged.
Had the New York bomb squad known of the existence of this den, the short hair on their necks would have risen.
"Well?" greeted Karlov, moodily.
"He and the Conover girl left that office building together this morning, and I followed them to Park Row.
This man uses the loft of the building for his home.
No elevator goes up unless you have credentials. Our man is hiding there, Boris."
Karlov dry washed his hands.
"Every day but Sunday."
"Good news.
Two bolts; one or the other will go home."
About the same time in Cutty's apartment rather an amusing comedy took place.
Professor Ryan, late physical instructor at one of the aviation camps, stood Hawksley in front of him and ran his hard hands over the young man's body.
Miss Frances stood at one side, her arms folded, her expression skeptical.
"Nothin' the matter with you, Bo, but the crack on the conk."
"Right o!" agreed Hawksley.
Soft.
Now stand on that threshold.
That's it.
Step lively."
"But," began Miss Frances in protest.
This was cruelty.
"I'm the doctor, miss," interrupted Ryan, crisply.
If he makes it, he follows my instructions."
When Hawksley returned to the starting line the walls rocked, there were two or three blinding stabs of pain; but he faced this unusual Irishman with never a hint of the torture.
A wild longing to be gone from this kindly prison-to get away from the thought of the girl.
"All right," said Ryan.
"Bed?"
"Yep.
He wasn't going to let them know, but that bed was going to be tolerably welcome.
"Well!" said Miss Frances.
"I don't see how he did it."
"I do," said the ex pugilist.
"I told him to.
Either he was a false alarm, or he'd attempt the job even if he fell down.
If he's got any pride, dig it up.
He hasn't lost any blood.
No serious body wound.
A crack on the conk.
It mighta killed him.
So my dope is right.
Believe me!
Cutty attended his conferences.
He learned immediately that he was booked to sail the first week in May.
His itinerary began at Piraeus, in Greece, and might end in Vladivostok.
But they detained him in Washington overtime because he was a fount of information the departments found it necessary to draw upon constantly.
The political and commercial aspects of the polyglot peoples, what they wanted, what they expected, what they needed; racial enmities.
What they wanted to know was an American's point of view, based upon long and intimate associations.
For Washington would go to sleep again, naturally.
He could dig up all this dry information with the precise accuracy of an economist, all the while his actual thoughts upon Kitty. His nights were nightmares.
And all this unhappiness because he had been touched with the lust for loot.
Fundamentally, this catastrophe could be laid to the drums of jeopardy.
At any rate, there would have been none of this peculiar intimacy-Kitty coming to him in tears, opening her young heart to him and discovering all its loneliness.
If she loved some chap it would not be so hard, the temptation would not be so keen-to cheat her.
This dogged his thoughts like a murderer's deed, terrible in the watches of the night. Marry her, and then tell her.
Cheat her.
Break her heart and break his own.
Fifty two.
Never before had he thought old.
His splendid health and vigorous mentality were the results of thinking young.
He would grow old swiftly, thunderously.
Kitty's youth would shore up the debacle, suspend it indefinitely.
Marry her, cheat her, and stay young. Green stones, accursed.
Kitty's days were pleasant enough, but her nights were sieges.
The Tschaikowsky waltz.
She got up suddenly, excused herself, and went to her room.
Six days, and her problem was still unsolved.
Something in her-she could not define it, she could not reach it, it defied analysis-something, then, revolted at the idea of marrying Cutty, divorcing him, and living on his money.
There was a touch of horror in the suggestion.
It was tearing her to pieces, this hidden repellence. And yet this occult objection was so utterly absurd.
If he died and left her a legacy she would accept it gratefully enough.
Why not?
It wasn't as if Cutty was asking her to be his wife; he wasn't.
Just wanted to dodge convention, and give her freedom and happiness.
Because he had loved her mother; because, but for an accident of chance, she, Kitty, might have been his daughter.
The ancient female fear of the trap?
That could not be it.
Comfy.
An evil thought had entered her head; fate had made it honourably possible.
Romance?
She was not surrendering her right to that.
What was a year out of her life if afterward she would be in comfortable circumstances, free to love where she willed?
She wasn't cheating herself or Cutty: she was cheating convention, a flimsy thing at best.
Windows.
We carry our troubles to our windows; through windows we see the stars.
So Kitty sought her window and added her question to the countless millions forlornly wandering about up there, and finding no answer.
But she would return to New York on the morrow.
She would go back by train, alone, unhampered.
Chapter sixteen
There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies?
That hour passed, the sun mounted high in the heavens, but the cottagers did not appear.
The inside of the cottage was dark, and I heard no motion; I cannot describe the agony of this suspense.
"'Do you consider,' said his companion to him, 'that you will be obliged to pay three months' rent and to lose the produce of your garden?
"I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair.
From you only could I hope for succour, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of hatred.
Nature decayed around me, and the sun became heatless; rain and snow poured around me; mighty rivers were frozen; the surface of the earth was hard and chill, and bare, and I found no shelter.
Oh, earth!
Soft tears again bedewed my cheeks, and I even raised my humid eyes with thankfulness towards the blessed sun, which bestowed such joy upon me.
"This was then the reward of my benevolence!
But the agony of my wound overcame me; my pulses paused, and I fainted.
"After some weeks my wound healed, and I continued my journey.
You dare not keep me.'
The crime had its source in her; be hers the punishment!
Chapter seventeen
He continued,
"I do refuse it," I replied; "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me.
I am malicious because I am miserable.
This passion is detrimental to me, for you do not reflect that YOU are the cause of its excess.
"You swear," I said, "to be harmless; but have you not already shown a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you?
His power and threats were not omitted in my calculations; a creature who could exist in the ice caves of the glaciers and hide himself from pursuit among the ridges of inaccessible precipices was a being possessing faculties it would be vain to cope with.
I felt as if I were placed under a ban-as if I had no right to claim their sympathies-as if never more might I enjoy companionship with them.
CHAPTER fourteen.
I call her peerless because she has no peer, whether it be in bodily stature or in the supremacy of rank and beauty.
"Calm yourself, sir knight," said Don Quixote, "and give ear to what I am about to say to you.
"Body of my father!" said Sancho, "see what marten and sable, and pads of carded cotton he is putting into the bags, that our heads may not be broken and our bones beaten to jelly!
"Very good," said he of the Grove; "God will send the dawn and we shall be all right."
Don Quixote examined his adversary, and found that he already had his helmet on and visor lowered, so that he could not see his face; he observed, however, that he was a sturdily built man, but not very tall in stature.
"Well then," said Don Quixote, "while we are mounting you can at least tell me if I am that Don Quixote whom you said you vanquished."
"That is understood," replied he of the Mirrors.
"It seems to me rather, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that thou wouldst mount a scaffold in order to see the bulls without danger."
"To tell the truth," returned Sancho, "the monstrous nose of that squire has filled me with fear and terror, and I dare not stay near him."
He saw, the history says, the very countenance, the very face, the very look, the very physiognomy, the very effigy, the very image of the bachelor Samson Carrasco!
As soon as he saw it he called out in a loud voice, "Make haste here, Sancho, and behold what thou art to see but not to believe; quick, my son, and learn what magic can do, and wizards and enchanters are capable of."
Sancho came up, and when he saw the countenance of the bachelor Carrasco, he fell to crossing himself a thousand times, and blessing himself as many more.
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INTRODUCTION
It is believed that the scene of this tale, and most of the information necessary to understand its allusions, are rendered sufficiently obvious to the reader in the text itself, or in the accompanying notes.
Few men exhibit greater diversity, or, if we may so express it, greater antithesis of character, than the native warrior of North America. In war, he is daring, boastful, cunning, ruthless, self denying, and self devoted; in peace, just, generous, hospitable, revengeful, superstitious, modest, and commonly chaste.
These are qualities, it is true, which do not distinguish all alike; but they are so far the predominating traits of these remarkable people as to be characteristic.
It is generally believed that the Aborigines of the American continent have an Asiatic origin.
There are many physical as well as moral facts which corroborate this opinion, and some few that would seem to weigh against it.
Climate may have had great influence on the former, but it is difficult to see how it can have produced the substantial difference which exists in the latter.
In this, perhaps, he does no more than any other energetic and imaginative race would do, being compelled to set bounds to fancy by experience; but the North American Indian clothes his ideas in a dress which is different from that of the African, and is oriental in itself.
His language has the richness and sententious fullness of the Chinese.
He will express a phrase in a word, and he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence by a syllable; he will even convey different significations by the simplest inflections of the voice.
Philologists have said that there are but two or three languages, properly speaking, among all the numerous tribes which formerly occupied the country that now composes the United States.
They ascribe the known difficulty one people have to understand another to corruptions and dialects.
They mutually exhorted each other to be of use in the event of the chances of war throwing either of the parties into the hands of his enemies.
Like nations of higher pretensions, the American Indian gives a very different account of his own tribe or race from that which is given by other people.
The whites have assisted greatly in rendering the traditions of the Aborigines more obscure by their own manner of corrupting names.
Thus, the term used in the title of this book has undergone the changes of Mahicanni, Mohicans, and Mohegans; the latter being the word commonly used by the whites.
When it is remembered that the Dutch (who first settled New York), the English, and the French, all gave appellations to the tribes that dwelt within the country which is the scene of this story, and that the Indians not only gave different names to their enemies, but frequently to themselves, the cause of the confusion will be understood.
In these pages, Lenni Lenape, Lenope, Delawares, Wapanachki, and Mohicans, all mean the same people, or tribes of the same stock.
The Mohicans were the possessors of the country first occupied by the Europeans in this portion of the continent.
They were, consequently, the first dispossessed; and the seemingly inevitable fate of all these people, who disappear before the advances, or it might be termed the inroads, of civilization, as the verdure of their native forests falls before the nipping frosts, is represented as having already befallen them.
There is sufficient historical truth in the picture to justify the use that has been made of it.
In point of fact, the country which is the scene of the following tale has undergone as little change, since the historical events alluded to had place, as almost any other district of equal extent within the whole limits of the United States.
Glen's has a large village; and while William Henry, and even a fortress of later date, are only to be traced as ruins, there is another village on the shores of the Horican.
But, beyond this, the enterprise and energy of a people who have done so much in other places have done little here.
The rest have disappeared, either from the regions in which their fathers dwelt, or altogether from the earth.
There is one point on which we would wish to say a word before closing this preface.
Hawkeye calls the Lac du Saint Sacrement, the "Horican." As we believe this to be an appropriation of the name that has its origin with ourselves, the time has arrived, perhaps, when the fact should be frankly admitted.
"Are such specters frequent in the woods, Heyward, or is this sight an especial entertainment ordered on our behalf?
"Yon Indian is a 'runner' of the army; and, after the fashion of his people, he may be accounted a hero," returned the officer.
"He has volunteered to guide us to the lake, by a path but little known, sooner than if we followed the tardy movements of the column; and, by consequence, more agreeably."
"Say, rather, Alice, that I would not trust you.
I do know him, or he would not have my confidence, and least of all at this moment.
He is said to be a Canadian too; and yet he served with our friends the Mohawks, who, as you know, are one of the six allied nations.
"If he has been my father's enemy, I like him still less!" exclaimed the now really anxious girl.
"Will you not speak to him, Major Heyward, that I may hear his tones?
Foolish though it may be, you have often heard me avow my faith in the tones of the human voice!"
But he stops; the private path by which we are to journey is, doubtless, at hand."
The conjecture of Major Heyward was true.
When they reached the spot where the Indian stood, pointing into the thicket that fringed the military road; a narrow and blind path, which might, with some little inconvenience, receive one person at a time, became visible.
"Here, then, lies our way," said the young man, in a low voice. "Manifest no distrust, or you may invite the danger you appear to apprehend."
"Cora, what think you?" asked the reluctant fair one.
"If we journey with the troops, though we may find their presence irksome, shall we not feel better assurance of our safety?"
"Being little accustomed to the practices of the savages, Alice, you mistake the place of real danger," said Heyward.
The route of the detachment is known, while ours, having been determined within the hour, must still be secret."
"Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?" coldly asked Cora.
It would seem that the domestics had been previously instructed; for, instead of penetrating the thicket, they followed the route of the column; a measure which Heyward stated had been dictated by the sagacity of their guide, in order to diminish the marks of their trail, if, haply, the Canadian savages should be lurking so far in advance of their army.
For many minutes the intricacy of the route admitted of no further dialogue; after which they emerged from the broad border of underbrush which grew along the line of the highway, and entered under the high but dark arches of the forest.
Here their progress was less interrupted; and the instant the guide perceived that the females could command their steeds, he moved on, at a pace between a trot and a walk, and at a rate which kept the sure footed and peculiar animals they rode at a fast yet easy amble.
If he possessed the power to arrest any wandering eye when exhibiting the glories of his altitude on foot, his equestrian graces were still more likely to attract attention.
The frown which had gathered around the handsome, open, and manly brow of Heyward, gradually relaxed, and his lips curled into a slight smile, as he regarded the stranger.
"Seek you any here?" demanded Heyward, when the other had arrived sufficiently nigh to abate his speed; "I trust you are no messenger of evil tidings?"
"You appear to possess the privilege of a casting vote," returned Heyward; "we are three, while you have consulted no one but yourself."
"Even so.
The first point to be obtained is to know one's own mind.
I have endeavored to do both, and here I am."
"A most arbitrary, if not a hasty decision!" exclaimed Heyward, undecided whether to give vent to his growing anger, or to laugh in the other's face.
"Of offense, I hope there is none, to either party: of defense, I make none-by God's good mercy, having committed no palpable sin since last entreating his pardoning grace.
I understand not your allusions about lines and angles; and I leave expounding to those who have been called and set apart for that holy office.
Nay, throw aside that frown, Heyward, and in pity to my longing ears, suffer him to journey in our train.
"I am glad to encounter thee, friend," continued the maiden, waving her hand to the stranger to proceed, as she urged her Narragansett to renew its amble.
"Partial relatives have almost persuaded me that I am not entirely worthless in a duet myself; and we may enliven our wayfaring by indulging in our favorite pursuit.
"Is he, then, much practiced in the art of psalmody?" demanded her simple companion.
Alice felt disposed to laugh, though she succeeded in suppressing her merriment, ere she answered:
"I apprehend that he is rather addicted to profane song.
"You have, then, limited your efforts to sacred song?"
"Even so.
As the psalms of David exceed all other language, so does the psalmody that has been fitted to them by the divines and sages of the land, surpass all vain poetry.
I never abide in any place, sleeping or waking, without an example of this gifted work.
The Indian muttered a few words in broken English to Heyward, who, in his turn, spoke to the stranger; at once interrupting, and, for the time, closing his musical efforts.
You will then, pardon me, Alice, should I diminish your enjoyments, by requesting this gentleman to postpone his chant until a safer opportunity."
"You will diminish them, indeed," returned the arch girl; "for never did I hear a more unworthy conjunction of execution and language than that to which I have been listening; and I was far gone in a learned inquiry into the causes of such an unfitness between sound and sense, when you broke the charm of my musings by that bass of yours, Duncan!"
Major Heyward was mistaken only in suffering his youthful and generous pride to suppress his active watchfulness.
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INTRODUCTION
As this work professes, in its title page, to be a descriptive tale, they who will take the trouble to read it may be glad to know how much of its contents is literal fact, and how much is intended to represent a general picture.
The author is very sensible that, had he confined himself to the latter, always the most effective, as it is the most valuable, mode of conveying knowledge of this nature, he would have made a far better book.
But in commencing to describe scenes, and perhaps he may add characters, that were so familiar to his own youth, there was a constant temptation to delineate that which he had known, rather than that which he might have imagined.
Otsego, in common with most of the interior of the province of New York, was included in the county of Albany previously to the war of the separation.
It then became, in a subsequent division of territory, a part of Montgomery; and finally, having obtained a sufficient population of its own, it was set apart as a county by itself shortly after the peace of seventeen eighty three.
There is a tradition which says that the neighboring tribes were accustomed to meet on the banks of the lake to make their treaties, and otherwise to strengthen their alliances, and which refers the name to this practice.
As the Indian agent of New York had a log dwelling at the foot of the lake, however, it is not impossible that the appellation grew out of the meetings that were held at his council fires; the war drove off the agent, in common with the other officers of the crown; and his rude dwelling was soon abandoned.
The author remembers it, a few years later, reduced to the humble office of a smoke house.
In seventeen seventy nine an expedition was sent against the hostile Indians, who dwelt about a hundred miles west of Otsego, on the banks of the Cayuga.
One brigade ascended the Mohawk until it reached the point nearest to the sources of the Susquehanna, whence it cut a lane through the forest to the head of the Otsego.
The boats and baggage were carried over this "portage," and the troops proceeded to the other extremity of the lake, where they disembarked and encamped.
The Susquehanna, a narrow though rapid stream at its source, was much filled with "flood wood," or fallen trees; and the troops adopted a novel expedient to facilitate their passage.
The Otsego is about nine miles in length, varying in breadth from half a mile to a mile and a half.
The water is of great depth, limpid, and supplied from a thousand springs. At its foot the banks are rather less than thirty feet high the remainder of its margin being in mountains, intervals, and points.
The outlet, or the Susquehanna, flows through a gorge in the low banks just mentioned, which may have a width of two hundred feet.
When all was ready the troops embarked, the damn was knocked away, the Otsego poured out its torrent, and the boats went merrily down with the current.
General james Clinton, the brother of George Clinton, then governor of New York, and the father of De Witt Clinton, who died governor of the same State in eighteen twenty seven, commanded the brigade employed on this duty.
During the stay of the troops at the foot of the Otsego a soldier was shot for desertion.
The grave of this unfortunate man was the first place of human interment that the author ever beheld, as the smoke house was the first ruin!
The swivel alluded to in this work was buried and abandoned by the troops on this occasion, and it was subsequently found in digging the cellars of the authors paternal residence.
Soon after the close of the war, Washington, accompanied by many distinguished men, visited the scene of this tale, it is said with a view to examine the facilities for opening a communication by water with other points of the country.
He stayed but a few hours.
In seventeen eighty five the author's father, who had an interest in extensive tracts of land in this wilderness, arrived with a party of surveyors.
The manner in which the scene met his eye is described by Judge Temple.
At the commencement of the following year the settlement began; and from that time to this the country has continued to flourish.
Although the settlement of this part of Otsego a little preceded the birth of the author, it was not sufficiently advanced to render it desirable that an event so important to himself should take place in the wilderness.
Perhaps his mother had a reasonable distrust of the practice of Dr Todd, who must then have been in the novitiate of his experimental acquirements.
Be that as it may, the author was brought an infant into this valley, and all his first impressions were here obtained.
He has inhabited it ever since, at intervals; and he thinks he can answer for the faithfulness of the picture he has drawn.
It sends forth its emigrants like any other old region, and it is pregnant with industry and enterprise.
Its manufacturers are prosperous, and it is worthy of remark that one of the most ingenious machines known in European art is derived from the keen ingenuity which is exercised in this remote region.
In order to prevent mistake, it may be well to say that the incidents of this tale are purely a fiction.
The literal facts are chiefly connected with the natural and artificial objects and the customs of the inhabitants.
They have all, long since, given place to other buildings of a more pretending character.
There is also some liberty taken with the truth in the description of the principal dwelling; the real building had no "firstly" and "lastly." It was of bricks, and not of stone; and its roof exhibited none of the peculiar beauties of the "composite order." It was erected in an age too primitive for that ambitious school of architecture.
The author has elsewhere said that the character of Leather Stocking is a creation, rendered probable by such auxiliaries as were necessary to produce that effect.
Had he drawn still more upon fancy, the lovers of fiction would not have so much cause for their objections to his work. Still, the picture would not have been in the least true without some substitutes for most of the other personages.
It may be well to say here, a little more explicitly, that there was no real intention to describe with particular accuracy any real characters in this book.
It has been often said, and in published statements, that the heroine of this book was drawn after the sister of the writer, who was killed by a fall from a horse now near half a century since.
So ingenious is conjecture that a personal resemblance has been discovered between the fictitious character and the deceased relative!
Circumstances rendered this sister singularly dear to the author.
From circumstances which, after this Introduction, will be obvious to all, the author has had more pleasure in writing "The Pioneers" than the book will probably ever give any of its readers.
Sense of pleasure we may well Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine, But live content, which is the calmest life: But pain is perfet miserie, the worst Of evils, and excessive, overturnes All patience.
He who therefore can invent With what more forcible we may offend Our yet unwounded Enemies, or arme Our selves with like defence, to mee deserves No less then for deliverance what we owe.
if on they rusht, repulse Repeated, and indecent overthrow Doubl'd, would render them yet more despis'd, And to thir foes a laughter; for in view Stood rankt of Seraphim another row In posture to displode thir second tire Of Thunder: back defeated to return They worse abhorr'd.
SATAN beheld thir plight, And to his Mates thus in derision call'd.
He said, and on his Son with Rayes direct Shon full, he all his Father full exprest Ineffably into his face receiv'd, And thus the filial Godhead answering spake.
CHAPTER eighteen.
"Edward," said Edith, "scold Pablo; he has been ill treating my poor cat; he is a cruel boy."
"Well, if pussy did, it didn't hurt you much; and what did I tell you this morning out of the Bible?--that you must forgive them who behave ill to you."
"Yes, Missy Edith, you tell me all that, and so I do; I forgive pussy 'cause she bite me, but I kick her for it."
"That's not forgiveness, is it, Edward?
You should have forgiven it at once, and not kicked it at all."
I forgive pussy with all my heart."
"Well, I will this time; but if he kicks pussy again he must be put in the pitfall-mind that, Pablo."
"Yes, Missy Edith, I go into pitfall, and then you cry, and ask Master Edward to take me out.
When you have me put in pitfall, then you not good Christian, 'cause you not forgive; when you cry and take me out, then you good Christian once more."
"Very true," replied Edward; "he offers me the post of secretary.
What do you think?"
If you do not like it, you can only go back to the cottage again.
"That I really believe," replied Edward; "and I have pretty well made up my mind to accept the office.
What is your reply?"
"I am very thankful to you for the offer, sir," replied Edward, "and will accept it if you think that I am fitting for it, and if I find that I am equal to it; I can but give it a trial, and leave if I find it too arduous or too irksome."
"Too arduous it shall not be-that shall be my concern; and too irksome I hope you will not find it.
You will therefore have to write chiefly what I shall dictate; but it is not only for that I require a person that I can confide in.
"Well, then, it is no use saying any more just now; you will have a chamber in this house, and you will live with me, and at my table altogether.
Neither shall I say any thing just now about remuneration, as I am convinced that you will be satisfied.
All that I require now is, to know the day that you will come, that every thing may be ready."
"I suppose, sir, I must change my attire?" replied Edward, looking at his forester's dress; "that will hardly accord with the office of secretary."
"You can provide yourself with a suit at Lymington.
"I thank you, sir, I have means, much more than sufficient," replied Edward, "although not quite so wealthy as little Clara appeared to be."
"Wealthy, indeed!" replied the intendant.
"I had no idea that poor Ratcliffe possessed so much ready money and jewels.
Well, then, this is Wednesday; can you come over next Monday?"
"Yes, sir," replied Edward; "I see no reason to the contrary."
Patience and Clara are in the next room.
You will, of course, dine with us to day, and sleep here to night."
"Then you have consented?" said Patience, inquiringly.
"Yes, I could not refuse such kindness," replied Edward.
"And when do you come?"
"Why, what have you to get ready?" said Clara.
I can wear that with a gun in my hand, but not with a pen: so I must go to Lymington and see what a tailor can do for me."
"Perhaps I may," said Edward, although he felt that such would not be the case, having been accustomed to much better clothes when at Arnwood than what were usually worn by secretaries; and this remembrance brought back Arnwood in its train, and Edward became silent and pensive.
Patience observed it, and after a time said-
You do not return till to morrow?
How did you come over?"
"Why do you call her Mistress Patience, Edward?" said Clara.
"You call me Clara; why not call her Patience?"
"You forget that I am only a forester, Clara," replied Edward, with a grave smile.
"No, you are a secretary now," replied Clara.
I call you Clara, because you are but a little girl; but I must not take that liberty with Mistress Heatherstone."
"Do you think so, Patience?" said Clara.
"Yes, if he gave himself leave, Clara," said Patience.
"But we will now show him his own room, Clara," continued Patience, wishing to change the subject of conversation.
"Why, he never saw any thing like it before," said Clara.
"Yes I have, Clara," replied Edward.
"Where did you?"
"At Arnwood; the apartments were on a much larger scale."
"Yes, it was burned down, and all the children burned to death!"
"So they say, Clara; but I was not there when it was burned."
Edward smiled, and said-
I should indeed be difficult to please if an apartment like this did not suit me.
Besides, allow me to observe, that although I stated that the apartments at Arnwood were on a grander scale, I never said that I had ever been a possessor of one of them."
"I hope you are hungry, Edward," said Clara; "dinner is almost ready."
"I am not yet eighteen, Clara, so that I can hardly be called a man."
mr Heatherstone, as was usual at that time with the people to whose party he ostensibly belonged, said a grace before meat, of considerable length, and then they sat down to table.
Is not that fellow Corbould, who is leaning against the wall?"
"Yes; he is to be discharged as he can not walk well, and the surgeon says he will always limp.
Edward bade Oswald farewell, and returned to the intendant's, and found that Oswald was correct, as supper was being placed on the table.
Alice and Edith did not quite so much approve of it, and a few tears were shed at the idea of Edward leaving the cottage.
The next day, Edward and Humphrey set off for Lymington, with Billy in the cart.
I will tell you: as many kids as I can, or goats and kids, I don't care which."
"Why, have you not stock enough already?
You will this year have four cows in milk, and you have two cow calves bringing up."
I will soon ascertain that for you, from the landlord of the hostelry," replied Edward.
On their arrival at Lymington, they went straight to the hostelry, and found the landlord at home.
He recommended a tailor to Edward, who sent for him to the inn, and was measured by him for a plain suit of dark cloth.
"Your dress, as I consider, is a sort of disgrace to a Cavalier born, and the heir of Arnwood; why not, therefore, take its hat as well?
"Here is the shop for the hat and for the sword belt."
Humphrey left Edward to put away these in the cart, while he went out a second time to see the goats; he made an agreement with the man who had them for sale, for a male and three females with two kids each at their sides, and ten more female kids which had just been weaned.
"We have dipped somewhat into the bag to day, Edward," said Humphrey, "but the money is well spent."
Certainly, when we think how we were left, by the death of old Jacob, to our own resources, we have much to thank God for, in having got on so well."
"I agree with you, and also that it has pleased Heaven to grant us all such good health.
Indeed, I shall insist upon coming over to you once a fortnight; and I hardly think the intendant will refuse me-indeed, I am sure that he will not."
As it is, look how poor Billy is loaded.
Where's Pablo?"
"In the garden.
He has been working there all day, and Edith is with him."
"Nothing I like better, my dear girl.
Pablo won't thank me for bringing this home," continued Humphrey, taking the long saw out of the cart; "he will have to go to the bottom of the pit again, as soon as the pit is made."
"Goat very good, kid better; always eat kid in Spain," said Pablo.
"Were you born in Spain, Pablo?"
"Not sure, but I think so.
First recollect myself in that country."
"Do you recollect your father?"
"Did your mother never talk about him?"
"All mothers do that.
What made you come to England?"
"I don't know, but I hear people say, plenty of money in England-plenty to eat-plenty to drink; bring plenty money back to Spain."
"One, two, three year; yes, three year and a bit."
"Which did you like best-England or Spain?"
"When with my people, like Spain best; warm sun-warm night.
England, little sun, cold night, much rain, snow, and air always cold; but now I live with you, have warm bed, plenty victuals, like England best."
"But when you were with the gipsies, they stole every thing, did they not?"
"Not steal every thing," replied Pablo, laughing; "sometimes take and no pay when nobody there; farmer look very sharp-have big dog."
"Did you ever go out to steal?"
"Make me go out.
Not bring back something, beat me very hard; suppose farmer catch me, beat hard too; nothing but beat, beat, beat."
"Suppose bring nothing home, first beat, and then not have to eat for one, two, three days.
How you like that, Master Humphrey?
I think you steal, after no victuals for three days!"
"I should hope not," replied Humphrey, "although I have never been so severely punished: and I hope, Pablo, you will never steal any more."
Now, I never hungry, always have plenty to eat; no one beat me now; sleep warm all night.
No, Master Humphrey, I never steal more, 'cause I have no reason why, and 'cause Missy Alice and Edith tell me how the good God up there say must not steal."
"Like to hear Missy Alice talk; she talk grave.
Missy Edith talk too, but she laugh very much; very fond Missy Edith, very happy little girl; jump about just like one of these kids we drive home; always merry. Hah! see cottage now; soon get home, Massa Humphrey.
Missy Edith like see kids very much.
Where we put them?"
CHAPTER twenty.
BETWEEN THE TWO MEN
Yes!
Probably so.
Your name is Dacosta!"
"You are Joam Dacosta," continued Torres, "who, twenty five years ago, were a clerk in the governor general's office at Tijuco, and you are the man who was sentenced to death in this affair of the robbery and murder!"
Had he made a mistake in accusing his host?
No!
For Joam Garral made no start at the terrible accusations.
Doubtless he wanted to know to what Torres was coming.
"Joam Dacosta, I repeat!
It was you whom they sought for this diamond affair, whom they convicted of crime and sentenced to death, and it was you who escaped from the prison at Villa Rica a few hours before you should have been executed!
Do you not answer?"
His elbow rested on a small table, and he looked fixedly at his accuser without bending his head.
"Will you reply?" repeated Torres.
"What reply do you want from me?" said Joam quietly.
"A reply," slowly answered Torres, "that will keep me from finding out the chief of the police at Manaos, and saying to him, 'A man is there whose identity can easily be established, who can be recognized even after twenty five years' absence, and this man was the instigator of the diamond robbery at Tijuco.
"Nothing, for neither you nor I will have any interest in talking about the matter."
"No!
Do not be in a hurry to reply by a formal refusal.
Remember that you are in my power."
Torres hesitated for a moment.
The attitude of this guilty man, whose life he held in his hands, was enough to astonish him.
"You have a daughter!--I like her-and I want to marry her!"
"All?"
"All, if necessary.
"You are a consummate scoundrel, Torres," quietly said Joam, whose coolness never forsook him.
"Really!"
"And I add," replied Joam, "that you hold the proof of his innocence, and are keeping it back to proclaim it on the day when you marry his daughter."
"I am listening, Torres."
"Well," said the adventurer, half keeping back his words, as if he was sorry to let them escape from his lips, "I know you are innocent!
"Is dead."
"Dead," repeated Torres; "but this man, whom I knew a long time after his crime, and without knowing that he was a convict, had written out at length, in his own hand, the story of this affair of the diamonds, even to the smallest details.
Feeling his end approaching, he was seized with remorse.
And this happiness he desired to add to the reputation to which he was entitled.
But death came-he intrusted to me, his companion, to do what he could no longer do.
"And the writing?"
Joam Garral was ready to throw himself on Torres, to search him, to snatch from him the proofs of his innocence.
"It is thus."
"And as I am not a criminal we were not made to understand one another."
You are condemned to death, and you know, in sentences for crimes of that nature, the government is forbidden the right of commuting the penalty.
Denounced, you are taken; taken, you are executed.
Master as he was of himself, Joam could stand it no longer.
He was about to rush on Torres.
A gesture from the rascal cooled his anger.
Joam Garral made him no answer.
Benito, Manoel, and all of them, under a feeling of deep anxiety, had risen.
In extraordinary contrast, Joam Garral was master of himself, and almost smiling.
Both of them stopped before Yaquita and her people.
"And here is my reply."
But at the words Manoel had felt his heart beat as if it would break. The girl arose, ashy pale, as if she would seek shelter by the side of her mother.
Yaquita opened her arms to protect, to defend her.
"Father," said Benito, who had placed himself between Joam Garral and Torres, "what were you going to say?"
Here Torres, with crossed arms, gave the whole family a look of inconceivable insolence.
"No, that is not my last word."
"What is it, then?"
"This, Torres.
I am master here.
"Yes, this instant!" exclaimed Benito, "or I will throw you overboard."
Torres shrugged his shoulders.
It suits me also to land, and without delay.
We shall not be long before we meet."
If you dare, meet me there!"
"At Judge Ribeiro's?" said Torres, evidently disconcerted.
The scoundrel at last disappeared.
And making a sign to Manoel, he retired to his room with him.
Manoel came out alone; his face glowed with generous resolution.
He knew that Joam Garral had boldly undertaken the voyage with the sole object of canceling the hateful proceedings of which he had been the victim, so as not to leave on his daughter and son in law the weight of the terrible situation which he had had to endure so long himself.
What he did not know was that the material proof of the innocence of the fazender existed, and that this proof was in the hands of Torres.
Manoel confined himself, then, to announcing that he was going to Padre Passanha to ask him to get things ready for the two weddings.
Next day, the twenty fourth of August, scarcely an hour before the ceremony was to take place, a large pirogue came off from the left bank of the river and hailed the jangada.
At these words Yaquita and Minha, struck with stupor, stopped without any power to move.
By a gesture his father silenced him.
"No," answered the chief of the police, "it was given to me, with an order for its immediate execution, by his substitute.
Judge Ribeiro was struck with apoplexy yesterday evening, and died during the night at two o'clock, without having recovered his consciousness."
"But speak, father!" shouted Benito, mad with despair; "say one word, and we shall contest even by force this horrible mistake of which you are the victim!"
I am in truth Joam Dacosta!
"All communication between you and yours is now forbidden," said the chief of the police.
Joam restrained by a gesture his dismayed children and servants.
And with his head unbent, he stepped into the pirogue.
CHAPTER fourteen.
There can be no doubt that the hope of finding reason to believe such theses as these has been the chief inspiration of many life-long students of philosophy.
This hope, I believe, is vain.
In this chapter we shall briefly consider the kind of way in which such reasoning is attempted, with a view to discovering whether we can hope that it may be valid.
Just as a comparative anatomist, from a single bone, sees what kind of animal the whole must have been, so the metaphysician, according to Hegel, sees, from any one piece of reality, what the whole of reality must be-at least in its large outlines.
Every apparently separate piece of reality has, as it were, hooks which grapple it to the next piece; the next piece, in turn, has fresh hooks, and so on, until the whole universe is reconstructed.
In this way Hegel advances until he reaches the 'Absolute Idea', which, according to him, has no incompleteness, no opposite, and no need of further development.
The Absolute Idea, therefore, is adequate to describe Absolute Reality; but all lower ideas only describe reality as it appears to a partial view, not as it is to one who simultaneously surveys the Whole.
Thus Hegel reaches the conclusion that Absolute Reality forms one single harmonious system, not in space or time, not in any degree evil, wholly rational, and wholly spiritual.
Any appearance to the contrary, in the world we know, can be proved logically-so he believes-to be entirely due to our fragmentary piecemeal view of the universe.
In this conception, there is undeniably something sublime, something to which we could wish to yield assent.
Nevertheless, when the arguments in support of it are carefully examined, they appear to involve much confusion and many unwarrantable assumptions.
The fundamental tenet upon which the system is built up is that what is incomplete must be not self subsistent, but must need the support of other things before it can exist.
It is held that whatever has relations to things outside itself must contain some reference to those outside things in its own nature, and could not, therefore, be what it is if those outside things did not exist.
It is of course the case that a truth which connects one thing with another thing could not subsist if the other thing did not subsist.
But if the word 'nature' is used in this sense, we shall have to hold that the thing may be known when its 'nature' is not known, or at any rate is not known completely.
There is a confusion, when this use of the word 'nature' is employed, between knowledge of things and knowledge of truths.
Thus, acquaintance with a thing does not involve knowledge of its 'nature' in the above sense.
And although acquaintance with a thing is involved in our knowing any one proposition about a thing, knowledge of its 'nature', in the above sense, is not involved.
I may be acquainted, for example, with my toothache, and this knowledge may be as complete as knowledge by acquaintance ever can be, without knowing all that the dentist (who is not acquainted with it) can tell me about its cause, and without therefore knowing its 'nature' in the above sense.
It follows that we cannot prove that the universe as a whole forms a single harmonious system such as Hegel believes that it forms.
And if we cannot prove this, we also cannot prove the unreality of space and time and matter and evil, for this is deduced by Hegel from the fragmentary and relational character of these things.
Most of the great ambitious attempts of metaphysicians have proceeded by the attempt to prove that such and such apparent features of the actual world were self contradictory, and therefore could not be real.
A good illustration of this is afforded by space and time.
Space and time appear to be infinite in extent, and infinitely divisible.
In time, similarly, however little time may elapse between two moments, it seems evident that there will be other moments between them.
Thus space and time appear to be infinitely divisible.
But as against these apparent facts-infinite extent and infinite divisibility-philosophers have advanced arguments tending to show that there could be no infinite collections of things, and that therefore the number of points in space, or of instants in time, must be finite.
Thus a contradiction emerged between the apparent nature of space and time and the supposed impossibility of infinite collections.
Kant, who first emphasized this contradiction, deduced the impossibility of space and time, which he declared to be merely subjective; and since his time very many philosophers have believed that space and time are mere appearance, not characteristic of the world as it really is.
Now, however, owing to the labours of the mathematicians, notably Georg Cantor, it has appeared that the impossibility of infinite collections was a mistake.
They are not in fact self contradictory, but only contradictory of certain rather obstinate mental prejudices.
The mathematicians, however, have not been content with showing that space as it is commonly supposed to be is possible; they have shown also that many other forms of space are equally possible, so far as logic can show.
By imagining worlds in which these axioms are false, the mathematicians have used logic to loosen the prejudices of common sense, and to show the possibility of spaces differing-some more, some less-from that in which we live.
Formerly it appeared that experience left only one kind of space to logic, and logic showed this one kind to be impossible.
Now, logic presents many kinds of space as possible apart from experience, and experience only partially decides between them.
Thus, while our knowledge of what is has become less than it was formerly supposed to be, our knowledge of what may be is enormously increased.
What has happened in the case of space and time has happened, to some extent, in other directions as well.
Thus knowledge as to what exists becomes limited to what we can learn from experience-not to what we can actually experience, for, as we have seen, there is much knowledge by description concerning things of which we have no direct experience.
Philosophical knowledge, if what has been said above is true, does not differ essentially from scientific knowledge; there is no special source of wisdom which is open to philosophy but not to science, and the results obtained by philosophy are not radically different from those obtained from science.
The essential characteristic of philosophy, which makes it a study distinct from science, is criticism.
If we adopt the attitude of the complete sceptic, placing ourselves wholly outside all knowledge, and asking, from this outside position, to be compelled to return within the circle of knowledge, we are demanding what is impossible, and our scepticism can never be refuted.
For all refutation must begin with some piece of knowledge which the disputants share; from blank doubt, no argument can begin.
Hence the criticism of knowledge which philosophy employs must not be of this destructive kind, if any result is to be achieved.
But it is not difficult to see that scepticism of this kind is unreasonable.
His 'methodical doubt' consisted in doubting whatever seemed doubtful; in pausing, with each apparent piece of knowledge, to ask himself whether, on reflection, he could feel certain that he really knew it.
This is the kind of criticism which constitutes philosophy.
In regard to such knowledge, philosophical criticism does not require that we should abstain from belief.
But there are beliefs-such, for example, as the belief that physical objects exactly resemble our sense data-which are entertained until we begin to reflect, but are found to melt away when subjected to a close inquiry.
Such beliefs philosophy will bid us reject, unless some new line of argument is found to support them. But to reject the beliefs which do not appear open to any objections, however closely we examine them, is not reasonable, and is not what philosophy advocates.
The criticism aimed at, in a word, is not that which, without reason, determines to reject, but that which considers each piece of apparent knowledge on its merits, and retains whatever still appears to be knowledge when this consideration is completed.
Philosophy may claim justly that it diminishes the risk of error, and that in some cases it renders the risk so small as to be practically negligible.
To do more than this is not possible in a world where mistakes must occur; and more than this no prudent advocate of philosophy would claim to have performed.
When a man prides himself on being able to understand and interpret the writings of Chrysippus, say to yourself:--
If Chrysippus had not written obscurely, this fellow would have had nothing to be proud of.
But what is it that I desire?
To understand Nature, and to follow her!
Accordingly I ask who is the Interpreter. On hearing that it is Chrysippus, I go to him.
But it seems I do not understand what he wrote.
So I seek one to interpret that.
So far there is nothing to pride myself on.
This itself is the only thing to be proud of.
But if I admire the interpretation and that alone, what else have I turned out but a mere commentator instead of a lover of wisdom?--except indeed that I happen to be interpreting Chrysippus instead of Homer.
So when any one says to me, Prithee, read me Chrysippus, I am more inclined to blush, when I cannot show my deeds to be in harmony and accordance with his sayings.
At feasts, remember that you are entertaining two guests, body and soul. What you give to the body, you presently lose; what you give to the soul, you keep for ever.
At meals, see to it that those who serve be not more in number than those who are served.
It is absurd for a crowd of persons to be dancing attendance on half a dozen chairs.
It is best to share with your attendants what is going forward, both in the labour of preparation and in the enjoyment of the feast itself.
Thus no sudden wrath will betray you into unreasonable conduct, nor will you behave harshly by irritating another.
When Xanthippe was chiding Socrates for making scanty preparation for entertaining his friends, he answered:--"If they are friends of ours they will not care for that; if they are not, we shall care nothing for them!"
Asked, Who is the rich man?
Epictetus replied, "He who is content."
On all occasions these thoughts should be at hand:--
Lead me, O God, and Thou, O Destiny Be what it may the goal appointed me, Bravely I'll follow; nay, and if I would not, I'd prove a coward, yet must follow still!
Again:
Who to Necessity doth bow aright, Is learn'd in wisdom and the things of God.
Once more:--
Crito, if this be God's will, so let it be.
As for me, Anytus and Meletus can indeed put me to death, but injure me, never!
We shall then be like Socrates, when we can indite hymns of praise to the Gods in prison.
It is hard to combine and unite these two qualities, the carefulness of one who is affected by circumstances, and the intrepidity of one who heeds them not.
But it is not impossible: else were happiness also impossible.
We should act as we do in seafaring.
"What can I do?"--Choose the master, the crew, the day, the opportunity. Then comes a sudden storm.
What matters it to me?
my part has been fully done.
The matter is in the hands of another-the Master of the ship. The ship is foundering.
What then have I to do?
I do the only thing that remains to me-to be drowned without fear, without a cry, without upbraiding God, but knowing that what has been born must likewise perish.
For I am not Eternity, but a human being-a part of the whole, as an hour is part of the day.
Diogenes, who was sent as a spy long before you, brought us back another report than this.
He says that Death is no evil; for it need not even bring shame with it.
He says that Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.
That to be clothed in sackcloth is better than any purple robe; that sleeping on the bare ground is the softest couch; and in proof of each assertion he points to his own courage, constancy, and freedom; to his own healthy and muscular frame.
"There is no enemy near," he cries, "all is perfect peace!"
Another supplies my food, whose care it is; another my raiment; another hath given me perceptions of sense and primary conceptions.
With thoughts like these, beholding the Sun, Moon, and Stars, enjoying earth and sea, a man is neither helpless nor alone!
If I might choose, I would be found doing some deed of true humanity, of wide import, beneficent and noble.
If death surprise me thus employed, it is enough if I can stretch forth my hands to God and say, "The faculties which I received at Thy hands for apprehending this thine Administration, I have not neglected.
Behold how I have used the senses, the primary conceptions which Thous gavest me.
Have I ever laid anything to Thy charge?
Have I ever murmured at aught that came to pass, or wished it otherwise?
Have I in anything transgressed the relations of life?
Take them back and place them wherever Thou wilt!
What life is fairer and more noble, what end happier than his?
(APPENDIX A)
Fragments Attributed to Epictetus
A life entangled with Fortune is like a torrent.
The soul that companies with Virtue is like an ever flowing source.
three
It is a shame that one who sweetens his drink with the gifts of the bee, should embitter God's gift Reason with vice.
Keep neither a blunt knife nor an ill disciplined looseness of tongue.
seven
eight
Give me by all means the shorter and nobler life, instead of one that is longer but of less account!
Freedom is the name of virtue: Slavery, of vice. . . .
None is a slave whose acts are free.
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty two
twenty three
twenty four
The above selection includes some of doubtful origin but intrinsic interest.--Crossley.
(APPENDIX B)
Of modified Tudor architecture, its deep red, mellowed bricks had achieved in three decades almost the same aged dignity and impressiveness as characterized the three century old mansion in England which Silas Hackett's architect had used as an inspiration.
Once before-on Sunday, the day after Nita Selim's murder, when he had come to interview Lydia Carr and had secured the alibi which had eliminated Dexter Sprague as a suspect-Dundee had driven his car up this hill between the tall yew hedges.
His approach must have been expected and observed, for it was the master of the house who opened the great, iron studded doors and invited the detective into the broad main hall, at the end of which, down three steps, lay the immense living room.
The detective's first glance took in stately armchairs of the Cromwell period, thick, mellow toned rugs, and, in the living room beyond, splendid examples of Jacobean furniture.
"A horrible thing to happen in a man's home, Dundee," Miles was saying, his plump, rosy face blighted with horror.
"What do you mean?" Dundee asked.
"Why, that the-the body wasn't discovered sooner," Miles explained.
A pale faced, bald headed butler had materialized while his master was speaking.
"Beg pardon, sir, but I did not close the trophy room windows because I thought you might be using the room again....
"I see," Dundee interrupted.
"I was, except Sprague, of course, and I had no idea he'd gone there. Drake wanted to play anagrams, and before the bridge game started, I went to the trophy room to get the box," Miles explained.
"I turned off the light when I left, and there was no light burning in there this morning when Celia, the parlor maid, went there to put the anagram box back in the cabinet, and found the body....
Flora-mrs
Miles-had brought the anagrams in from the porch and left them on a table in the living room, as our guests were getting ready to leave.
"Yes, I know," Dundee interrupted.
By the way, where is mrs Miles now?"
"In bed.
She is prostrated from the shock."
Just point it out.
It's on this floor, I understand."
Dundee cut him short by marching toward the door which was again closed. He entered so noiselessly that Captain Strawn, dr Price and the fingerprint expert, Carraway, did not hear him.
It was not a large room-twelve by fourteen feet, possibly-but it looked even smaller, crowded as it was with the long ping pong table, bags of golf clubs, fishing tackle, tennis racquets, skis and sleds.
Not until he had taken in the general aspect of the room did Dundee look at the thing over which Captain Strawn and the coroner were bending-the body of Dexter Sprague.
He lay on his side, his left cheek against the floor, the fingers of his left hand still clutching the powder burned bosom of his soft shirt, now stiff with dried blood, a pool of which had formed and then half congealed upon the rug.
The one visible eye was half open, but on the sallow, thin face, which had been strikingly handsome in an obvious sort of way, was a peace and dignity which Dundee had never seen upon Sprague's face when the man was alive.
The left leg was drawn upward so that the knee almost touched the bullet pierced stomach.
"How long has he been dead, doctor?" Dundee asked quietly.
"Hello, boy!" dr Price greeted him placidly.
"He may have lived an hour or more-unconscious, of course. For the indications are that he did not die instantly, but staggered a few steps, clutching at the wound.
Dundee crossed the room, stepping over the dead man's stick-a swank affair of dark, polished wood, with a heavy knob of carved onyx, which lay about a foot beyond the reach of the curled fingers of the stiff right hand.
"Sprague's hat?" he asked, pointing to a brightly banded straw which lay upon the top of the cabinet.
The sash of leaded panes was raised as high as it would go, and beneath it was a screen of the roller curtain type, raised about six inches from the window sill.
A pair of curved, nickel plated catches in the center of the inch wide metal band on the bottom of the coppernet curtain showed how the screen was raised or lowered.
Dundee nodded, frowning, and Strawn began eagerly:
"Yes?"
"Sure.
This is the way I figure it out: Sprague has good reason to be afraid he's next on the program.
He's nervous.
This crowd here-and I have Miles' word for it-ain't any too glad to see him, and shows it.
He phones for a taxi to go back to his hotel-about nine fifteen, that was, Miles says-but decides to walk down the hill to meet it.
Not much of a drop at that.
Of course, nobody knew Sprague was in here, and since his hat and stick was both missing from the hall closet, they took it for granted he'd beat it....
Any objections to that theory, boy?"
"Just a few-one in particular," Dundee said.
But Dundee was not allowed to finish his sentence, for Strawn was summoned to the telephone, by Whitson.
"That's funny....
Collins-the lad I sent to check up on the taxi companies-says he's located the driver that answered Sprague's call last night.
The driver says he was called about nine fifteen, told to come immediately, and to wait for Sprague at the foot of the hill, on the main road.
He says he waited there until half past ten, then went on back to town, sore'n a boiled owl."
"Sure!"
But again Captain Strawn looked uncomfortable.
There was no answer.
Why?"
He was too late-thanks to Captain Strawn.
CHAPTER sixty nine.
In the middle of the court was a catafalque, raised about two yards above the ground and covered completely by an immense canopy of black velvet, and on the steps all round it white wax tapers burned in more than a hundred silver candlesticks.
Upon the catafalque was seen the dead body of a damsel so lovely that by her beauty she made death itself look beautiful.
She lay with her head resting upon a cushion of brocade and crowned with a garland of sweet smelling flowers of divers sorts, her hands crossed upon her bosom, and between them a branch of yellow palm of victory.
Nor was this all, for Don Quixote had perceived that the dead body on the catafalque was that of the fair Altisidora.
As the duke and duchess mounted the stage Don Quixote and Sancho rose and made them a profound obeisance, which they returned by bowing their heads slightly.
At this moment an official crossed over, and approaching Sancho threw over him a robe of black buckram painted all over with flames of fire, and taking off his cap put upon his head a mitre such as those undergoing the sentence of the Holy Office wear; and whispered in his ear that he must not open his lips, or they would put a gag upon him, or take his life.
Sancho surveyed himself from head to foot and saw himself all ablaze with flames; but as they did not burn him, he did not care two farthings for them.
At this point one of the two that looked like kings exclaimed, "Enough, enough, divine singer!
No sooner had Minos the fellow judge of Rhadamanthus said this, than Rhadamanthus rising up said:
On hearing this Sancho broke silence and cried out, "By all that's good, I'll as soon let my face be smacked or handled as turn Moor.
Try those jokes on a brother in law; 'I'm an old dog, and "tus, tus" is no use with me.'"
"Thou shalt die," said Rhadamanthus in a loud voice; "relent, thou tiger; humble thyself, proud Nimrod; suffer and be silent, for no impossibilities are asked of thee; it is not for thee to inquire into the difficulties in this matter; smacked thou must be, pricked thou shalt see thyself, and with pinches thou must be made to howl.
Ho, I say, officials, obey my orders; or by the word of an honest man, ye shall see what ye were born for."
Here Don Quixote, too, broke silence, saying to Sancho, "Have patience, my son, and gratify these noble persons, and give all thanks to heaven that it has infused such virtue into thy person, that by its sufferings thou canst disenchant the enchanted and restore to life the dead."
"Less politeness and less paint, senora duenna," said Sancho; "by God your hands smell of vinegar wash."
Rhadamanthus bade Sancho put away his wrath, as the object they had in view was now attained.
To which Sancho made answer, "That's trick upon trick, I think, and not honey upon pancakes; a nice thing it would be for a whipping to come now, on the top of pinches, smacks, and pin proddings!
Leave me alone; or else by God I'll fling the whole thing to the dogs, let come what may."
Thereupon the duke seized the opportunity of practising this mystification upon him; so much did he enjoy everything connected with Sancho and Don Quixote.
O harder thou than marble to my plaint;
For of course that's where one who dies in despair is bound for."
If it should be good, faithful, and true, it will have ages of life; but if it should be bad, from its birth to its burial will not be a very long journey."
Don Stockfish, soul of a mortar, stone of a date, more obstinate and obdurate than a clown asked a favour when he has his mind made up, if I fall upon you I'll tear your eyes out!
All that you have seen to night has been make believe; I'm not the woman to let the black of my nail suffer for such a camel, much less die!"
The locality was Wellington, Sumner county kansas.
For example:
It is not open to argument, or academic treatment of any kind. The cold fact is:
SNAKES.--mr
There lived in Padua a gentleman named Baptista, who had two fair daughters.
But Baptista said the elder daughter must marry first.
A gentleman from Verona, named Petruchio, was the one they thought of, and, half in jest, they asked him if he would marry Katharine, the disagreeable scold.
Much to their surprise he said yes, that was just the sort of wife for him, and if Katharine were handsome and rich, he himself would undertake soon to make her good tempered.
And just then her music master rushed in, complaining that the naughty girl had broken her lute over his head, because he told her she was not playing correctly.
"Never mind," said Petruchio, "I love her better than ever, and long to have some chat with her."
"You've only heard half," said Katharine, rudely.
"Your wife!" cried Kate.
"Never!" She said some extremely disagreeable things to him, and, I am sorry to say, ended by boxing his ears.
"If you do that again, I'll cuff you," he said quietly; and still protested, with many compliments, that he would marry none but her.
When Baptista came back, he asked at once-
"How speed you with my daughter?"
"How should I speed but well," replied Petruchio-"how, but well?"
"How now, daughter Katharine?" the father went on.
"I don't think," said Katharine, angrily, "you are acting a father's part in wishing me to marry this mad cap ruffian."
"Ah!" said Petruchio, "you and all the world would talk amiss of her. You should see how kind she is to me when we are alone.
In short, I will go off to Venice to buy fine things for our wedding-for-kiss me, Kate! we will be married on Sunday."
With that, Katharine flounced out of the room by one door in a violent temper, and he, laughing, went out by the other.
But whether she fell in love with Petruchio, or whether she was only glad to meet a man who was not afraid of her, or whether she was flattered that, in spite of her rough words and spiteful usage, he still desired her for his wife-she did indeed marry him on Sunday, as he had sworn she should.
To vex and humble Katharine's naughty, proud spirit, he was late at the wedding, and when he came, came wearing such shabby clothes that she was ashamed to be seen with him.
His servant was dressed in the same shabby way, and the horses they rode were the sport of everyone they passed.
And his manner was so violent, and he behaved all through his wedding in so mad and dreadful a manner, that Katharine trembled and went with him. He mounted her on a stumbling, lean, old horse, and they journeyed by rough muddy ways to Petruchio's house, he scolding and snarling all the way.
So he welcomed her kindly to his house, but when supper was served he found fault with everything-the meat was burnt, he said, and ill served, and he loved her far too much to let her eat anything but the best.
At last Katharine, tired out with her journey, went supperless to bed.
Then her husband, still telling her how he loved her, and how anxious he was that she should sleep well, pulled her bed to pieces, throwing the pillows and bedclothes on the floor, so that she could not go to bed at all, and still kept growling and scolding at the servants so that Kate might see how unbeautiful a thing ill temper was.
The next day, too, Katharine's food was all found fault with, and caught away before she could touch a mouthful, and she was sick and giddy for want of sleep.
"I pray thee go and get me some repast.
I care not what."
"What say you to a neat's foot?" said the servant.
Would she like tripe?
"I don't think that is good for hasty tempered people," said the servant.
"What do you say to a dish of beef and mustard?"
"I love it," said Kate.
"But mustard is too hot."
"Why, then, the beef, and let the mustard go," cried Katharine, who was getting hungrier and hungrier.
"No," said the servant, "you must have the mustard, or you get no beef from me."
"Then," cried Katharine, losing patience, "let it be both, or one, or anything thou wilt."
Then Katharine saw he was making fun of her, and boxed his ears.
Just then Petruchio brought her some food-but she had scarcely begun to satisfy her hunger, before he called for the tailor to bring her new clothes, and the table was cleared, leaving her still hungry.
Katharine was pleased with the pretty new dress and cap that the tailor had made for her, but Petruchio found fault with everything, flung the cap and gown on the floor vowing his dear wife should not wear any such foolish things.
"I will have them," cried Katharine.
"All gentlewomen wear such caps as these-"
"When you are gentle you shall have one too," he answered, "and not till then." When he had driven away the tailor with angry words-but privately asking his friend to see him paid-Petruchio said-
"Come, Kate, let's go to your father's, shabby as we are, for as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, so honor peereth in the meanest habit.
It is about seven o'clock now.
"It's nearly two," said Kate, but civilly enough, for she had grown to see that she could not bully her husband, as she had done her father and her sister; "it's nearly two, and it will be supper time before we get there."
"It shall be seven," said Petruchio, obstinately, "before I start.
Why, whatever I say or do, or think, you do nothing but contradict.
At last they started for her father's house.
"Look at the moon," said he.
"It's the sun," said Katharine, and indeed it was.
"I say it is the moon.
Contradicting again!
It shall be sun or moon, or whatever I choose, or I won't take you to your father's."
Then Katharine gave in, once and for all.
"What you will have it named," she said, "it is, and so it shall be so for Katharine." And so it was, for from that moment Katharine felt that she had met her master, and never again showed her naughty tempers to him, or anyone else.
So they journeyed on to Baptista's house, and arriving there, they found all folks keeping Bianca's wedding feast, and that of another newly married couple, Hortensio and his wife.
But Katharine answered with such spirit and such moderation, that she turned the laugh against the new bride.
"You are wrong," said Petruchio, "let me prove it to you.
They proposed a wager of twenty crowns.
"Content," cried the others.
Then Lucentio sent a message to the fair Bianca bidding her to come to him.
And Baptista said he was certain his daughter would come.
But the servant coming back, said-
"Sir, my mistress is busy, and she cannot come."'
"You may think yourself fortunate if your wife does not send you a worse."
"I hope, better," Petruchio answered.
Then Hortensio said-
"Go and entreat my wife to come to me at once."
"Oh-if you entreat her," said Petruchio.
"She says you are playing some jest, she will not come."
"Better and better," cried Petruchio; "now go to your mistress and say I command her to come to me."
They all began to laugh, saying they knew what her answer would be, and that she would not come.
Then suddenly Baptista cried-
"What do you wish, sir?" she asked her husband.
"Where are your sister and Hortensio's wife?"
"Fetch them here."
"Here is a wonder!"
"I wonder what it means," said Hortensio.
"It means peace," said Petruchio, "and love, and quiet life."
"Well," said Baptista, "you have won the wager, and I will add another twenty thousand crowns to her dowry-another dowry for another daughter-for she is as changed as if she were someone else."
So Petruchio won his wager, and had in Katharine always a loving wife and true, and now he had broken her proud and angry spirit he loved her well, and there was nothing ever but love between those two.
"What are you about?" shouted Rostov, looking at him in an ecstasy of exasperation.
"Don't you hear it's His Majesty the Emperor's health?"
"Why don't you renew the acquaintance?" said Dolokhov to Rostov.
"Here's to the health of lovely women, Peterkin-and their lovers!" he added.
"How dare you take it?" he shouted.
"Don't!
Don't!
What are you about?" whispered their frightened voices.
"You...! you... scoundrel!
I challenge you!" he ejaculated, and, pushing back his chair, he rose from the table.
"Well then, till tomorrow at Sokolniki," said Dolokhov, as he took leave of Rostov in the club porch.
"And do you feel quite calm?" Rostov asked.
Can't I go away from here, run away, bury myself somewhere?" passed through his mind.
Are things ready?"
"Oh yes, it is horribly stupid," said Pierre.
"No!
"It's all the same....
Is everything ready?" he added.
CHAPTER fifteen.
The professor gave a great start at this almost reluctant suggestion, shrinking back with a look which fell not far short of being horrified. But then he rallied, forcing a laugh before speaking.
And, too; everything was so distinct and clearly outlined that one could-"
"Fairly feel those blessed bow arrows tickling a fellow in the short ribs," vigorously declared the younger Gillespie.
"Not but that-I say, uncle Phaeton?"
"What is it now, Waldo?"
"Reckon they're like any other people?
"Both boys and girls galore, I expect, Kid; but you needn't borrow trouble on either score.
You can outrun the lads, while as for the fairer sex,--well, they'll take precious good care to keep well beyond your reach,--especially if you wear such another fascinating grin as-"
"Oh, you go to thunder, Bruno Gillespie!"
Yet the gaze of Phaeton Featherwit as a rule kept turned towards that particular point, his eyes on fire, his lips twitching, his whole demeanour that of one who feels a discovery of tremendous importance lies just before him.
"Are we going to land, uncle Phaeton?" queried Bruno, taking note of that preoccupation, which might easily prove dangerous under existing circumstances.
That question served to recall the professor to more material points, and, after a keen, sweeping look around, he nodded assent.
I wish to see more-I must secure a fairer view of the-of yonder place."
"Will it not be too dangerous, though?
Not for us, especially, uncle, but for the aerostat?
Even if these be not the people you imagine-"
Yonder lies the true Lost City, and we are-oh, try to comprehend all that statement means, my lads!
Picture to yourselves what boundless fame and unlimited credit awaits our report to the outer world!
The benighted world!
The-the-"
"Time enough, lad, time enough, since we are going to land," coolly assured the professor, deftly manipulating the steering gear and still curying around those tree crowned hills.
Then it was with gravely earnest speech which suitably affected his nephews.
We do not come as conquerors, weapons in hand, hearts filled with lust of blood.
To the contrary, we are on a peaceful mission, hoping to learn, trusting to enlighten, with malice towards none, but honest love for all those who may wear the human shape, be they of our own colour or-or-otherwise."
"That's what's the matter with Hannah's cat!" cheerfully chipped in the irrepressible Waldo.
"I say, uncle Phaeton, is it just a lie low here until yonder fellows grow tired of looking for what they can't find, then a flight on our part; or will we-"
"Have we voyaged so far and seen so much, to rest content with so very little?" exclaimed the professor, hardly as precise of speech as under ordinary conditions.
Yonder lies the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century, and we are-Get a hustle on, boys! The day is waning, and with so much to see, to study, to-Come, I say!"
The story told by Cooper Edgecombe, backed up by the articles taken from the person of the warrior whom he had slain in self defence, certainly had its weight; while the brief and imperfect glimpse which he had won of yonder valley helped to bear out that astounding belief.
Still, half an hour's steady labour brought the little squad to the coveted point, and once again Professor Featherwit was almost literally stricken speechless,--for there, far below their present location, spread out in level expanse, lay the secret valley with all its marvels.
Numerous buildings stood in irregular array, for the most part of no great height, nor with many pretensions towards architectural beauty or grace of outline; but in the centre of the valley upreared its head a massive structure, pyramidal in shape, consisting of five comparatively narrow terraces, connected one with another only at each of the four corners, where stood a wide stepped flight of stones.
"Behold!" huskily gasped the professor, intensely excited, yet still able to control the field glass through which he was eagerly scanning yonder marvels.
And, yonder, the temple of sacrifice, unless my memory is-and look!
The people are-they wear just such garb as-Oh, marvellous!
Astounding!
Incredible-yet true!"
Flopping around like they hadn't any bigger business than to-Reckon they're looking for us to come back, Bruno?"
"Or watching for the monster bird of prey, rather," suggested the elder Gillespie.
"Poor, ignorant devils!" sympathetically sighed the youngster.
"Well, we'll have to do a little missionary work in this quarter, before taking our departure, eh, uncle Phaeton?"
Bruno listened with greater interest than his brother could summon at will.
For one thing, he had long been a lover of the genial Prescott, and, now that his memory was freshened in part, was able to closely follow the course of that little lecture, noting each strong point made by the professor in bolstering up his delightful theory.
"Look!
Schmidt.
Every morning he used to go out fishing, and whatever fish he caught he sold to the King.
When he came home he put all the fishes together into a great dish, but he kept the Crab separate because it shone so beautifully, and placed it upon a high shelf in the cupboard.
'Let down, let down thy petticoat That lets thy feet be seen.'
She turned round in surprise, and then she saw the little creature, the Golden Crab.
'What!
You can speak, can you, you ridiculous crab?' she said, for she was not quite pleased at the Crab's remarks.
When her husband came home and they sat down to dinner, they presently heard the Crab's little voice saying, 'Give me some too.' They were all very much surprised, but they gave him something to eat.
When the old man came to take away the plate which had contained the Crab's dinner, he found it full of gold, and as the same thing happened every day he soon became very fond of the Crab.
He said, therefore, to the fisherman's wife, 'Go, old woman, and tell the Crab I will give him my daughter if by to morrow morning he can build a wall in front of my castle much higher than my tower, upon which all the flowers of the world must grow and bloom.'
Then the Crab gave her a golden rod, and said, 'Go and strike with this rod three times upon the ground on the place which the King showed you, and to morrow morning the wall will be there.'
The old woman did so and went away again.
The next morning, when the King awoke, what do you think he saw?
The wall stood there before his eyes, exactly as he had bespoken it!
Then the old woman went back to the King and said to him, 'Your Majesty's orders have been fulfilled.'
'That is all very well,' said the King, 'but I cannot give away my daughter until there stands in front of my palace a garden in which there are three fountains, of which the first must play gold, the second diamonds, and the third brilliants.'
Answer him thus: ''Your master, the King, has sent me to tell you that you must send him his golden garment that is like the sun'' Make him give you, besides, the queenly robes of gold and precious stones which are like the flowery meadows, and bring them both to me.
No sooner had he said this than he shook himself, and immediately became a handsome youth, but the next morning he was forced to creep back again into his crab shell.
They suspected some secret, but though they spied and spied, they could not discover it.
Thus a year passed away, and the Princess had a son, whom she called Benjamin.
The Princess did so, and brought him what he desired.
For if you do this evil will come of it. Place yourself at the window with your sisters; I will ride by and throw you the silver apple.
Take it in your hand, but if they ask you who I am, say that you do not know.' So saying, he kissed her, repeated his warning once more, and went away.
The Princess went with her sisters to the window and looked on at the tournament.
But her father was much surprised that she did not seem to care about any of the Princes; he therefore appointed a second tournament.
He then repeated his warning and went away.
Then her mother flew into a passion, gave her a box on the ear, and cried out, 'Does not even that prince please you, you fool?'
The Princess in her fright exclaimed, 'That is the Crab himself!'
Then the poor Princess cried bitterly, but it was of no use; her husband did not come back.
The old man ran after him, but the dog reached a door, pushed it open, and ran in, the old man following him.
He did not overtake the dog, but found himself above a staircase, which he descended.
At this sight his fear became still greater.
'A health to my dearest lady, Long may she live and well! But a curse on the cruel mother That burnt my golden shell!'
And so saying he wept bitterly.
No sooner had he finished than the Princess asked him whether he could find the way to that palace.
'Yes,' he answered, 'certainly.'
The old man did so, and when they came to the palace he hid her behind the great picture and advised her to keep quite still, and he placed himself behind the picture also.
The youths seated themselves at the table; and now the Prince said again, while he took up the cup of wine:
'A health to my dearest lady, Long may she live and well! But a curse on the cruel mother That burnt my golden shell!'
But all that bad time is past.
Now listen to me: I must still remain enchanted for three months.
So the Princess stayed with him, and said to the old man, 'Go back to the castle and tell my parents that I am staying here.'
I should never have come home again out of the great wild wood if I had not come to an iron stove, to whom I have had to promise that I will go back to free him and marry him!' The old King was so frightened that he nearly fainted, for she was his only daughter.
So they consulted together, and determined that the miller's daughter, who was very beautiful, should take her place.
They took her there, gave her a knife, and said she must scrape at the iron stove.
She scraped for twenty four hours, but did not make the least impression.
The old King was frightened, and his daughter wept.
As soon as the day broke the voice from the stove called out, 'It seems to be daylight outside.' Then she answered, 'It seems so to me too; I think I hear my father blowing his horn.' 'So you are a swineherd's daughter!
Go away at once, and let the King's daughter come.
And say to her that what I foretell shall come to pass, and if she does not come everything in the kingdom shall fall into ruin, and not one stone shall be left upon another.' When the Princess heard this she began to cry, but it was no good; she had to keep her word.
She took leave of her father, put a knife in her belt, and went to the iron stove in the wood.
'Little green toad with leg like crook, Open wide the door, and look Who it was the latch that shook.'
Then the old toad said:
'Little green toad whose leg doth twist, Go to the corner of which you wist, And bring to me the large old kist.'
And the little toad went and brought out a great chest.
She would have need of them, for she had to cross a high glass mountain, three cutting swords, and a great lake.
So she was given three large needles, a plough wheel, and three nuts, which she was to take great care of.
At last she came to a great lake, and, when she had crossed that, arrived at a beautiful castle.
In the evening, when she had washed up and was ready, she felt in her pocket and found the three nuts which the old toad had given her.
Then she said she would not sell it unless she was granted one favour-namely, to sleep by the Prince's door.
When it was evening she said to her bridegroom, 'That stupid maid wants to sleep by your door.'
'If you are contented, I am,' he said.
And when she had washed up on the third night she bit the third nut, and there was a still more beautiful dress inside that was made of pure gold.
You are mine, and I am thine.' Though it was still night, he got into a carriage with her, and they took the false bride's clothes away, so that she could not follow them.
So they arrived at last at the little old house, but when they stepped inside it turned into a large castle.
But because the old man did not like being left alone, they went and fetched him.
THE DONKEY CABBAGE
Then take aim with your gun and shoot in the middle of them; they will let the cloak fall, but one of the birds will be hit and will drop down dead.
It is just as the old woman said'; and he took his gun on his shoulder, pulled the trigger, and shot into the midst of them, so that their feathers flew about.
Then the flock took flight with much screaming, but one fell dead, and the cloak fluttered down.
Then the Hunter did as the old woman had told him: he cut open the bird, found its heart, swallowed it, and took the cloak home with him.
But when he lifted up his pillow, there sparkled the gold piece, and the next morning he found another, and so on every time he got up.
'Drink to me now, my dearest,' she said.
Then he took the goblet, and when he had swallowed the drink the bird heart came out of his mouth. The maiden had to get hold of it secretly and then swallow it herself, for the old witch wanted to have it.
The old witch grew angry, and said, 'Such a cloak is a wonderful thing, it is seldom to be had in the world, and have it I must and will.' She beat the maiden, and said that if she did not obey it would go ill with her.
'Why are you standing there looking so sad?' asked the Hunter.
I have a great longing to go there, so that when I think of it I am very sad.
For who can fetch them? Only the birds who fly; a man, never.'
'If you have no other trouble,' said the Hunter, 'that one I can easily remove from your heart.'
The precious stones sparkled so brightly on all sides that it was a pleasure to see them, and they collected the most beautiful and costly together. But now the old witch had through her caused the Hunter's eyes to become heavy.
As soon as he was sound asleep she unfastened the cloak from his shoulders, threw it on her own, left the granite and stones, and wished herself home again.
But when the Hunter had finished his sleep and awoke, he found that his love had betrayed him and left him alone on the wild mountain.
The giants came up, and the first pushed him with his foot, and said, 'What sort of an earthworm is that?'
The second said, 'Crush him dead.'
But the third said contemptuously, 'It is not worth the trouble!
The Hunter then looked about him, saying, 'If only I had something to eat!
At last he got hold of another kind of cabbage, but scarcely had swallowed it when he felt another change, and he once more regained his human form.
When he awoke the next morning he broke off a head of the bad and a head of the good cabbage, thinking, 'This will help me to regain my own, and to punish faithlessness.' Then he put the heads in his pockets, climbed the wall, and started off to seek the castle of his love.
'I am so tired,' he said, 'I can go no farther.'
The witch asked, 'Countryman, who are you, and what is your business?'
'Why not?' he answered; 'I have brought two heads with me, and will give you one.'
Now the servant came into the kitchen, and when she saw the salad standing there ready cooked she was about to carry it up, but on the way, according to her old habit, she tasted it and ate a couple of leaves.
Then thought the Hunter, 'The cabbage must have already begun to work.' And he said, 'I will go to the kitchen and fetch it myself.'
The miller replied, 'Why not?
What shall I do with them?'
'The two others,' he added, 'are certainly not dead, and get their three meals every day, but they are so sad that they cannot last much longer.'
Then the Hunter took pity on them, laid aside his anger, and told the miller to drive them back again.
But he changed his mind, and said, 'Keep it; it makes no difference, for I will take you to be my own dear true wife.'
His prudence could not safely intrust the bulwark of Italy to such feeble and turbulent neighbors; and his justice might claim the lands which they oppressed, either as a part of his kingdom, or as the inheritance of his father.
He maintained, with a powerful hand, the balance of the West, till it was at length overthrown by the ambition of Clovis; and although unable to assist his rash and unfortunate kinsman, the king of the Visigoths, he saved the remains of his family and people, and checked the Franks in the midst of their victorious career.
From a tender regard to the expiring prejudices of Rome, the Barbarian declined the name, the purple, and the diadem, of the emperors; but he assumed, under the hereditary title of king, the whole substance and plenitude of Imperial prerogative.
And the subordinate care of justice and the revenue was delegated to seven consulars, three correctors, and five presidents, who governed the fifteen regions of Italy according to the principles, and even the forms, of Roman jurisprudence.
Theodoric loved the virtues which he possessed, and the talents of which he was destitute.
THE LINCOLN STORY BOOK
A Judicious Collection of the Best Stories and Anecdotes of the Great President, Many Appearing Here for the First Time in Book Form
COMPILED BY
PREFACE.
The Abraham Lincoln Statue at Chicago is accepted as the typical Westerner of the forum, the rostrum, and the tribune, as he stood to be inaugurated under the war cloud in eighteen sixty one.
But there is another Lincoln as dear to the common people-the Lincoln of happy quotations, the speaker of household words.
Instead of the erect, impressive, penetrative platform orator we see a long, gaunt figure, divided between two chairs for comfort, the head bent forward, smiling broadly, the lips curved in laughter, the deep eyes irradiating their caves of wisdom; the story telling Lincoln, enjoying the enjoyment he gave to others.
This talkativeness, as Lincoln himself realized, was a very valuable asset.
Leaving home, he found, in a venture at "Yankee notion pedling," that glibness meant three hundred per cent, in disposing of flimsy wares.
In the camp of the lumber jacks and of the Indian rangers he was regarded as the pride of the mess and the inspirator of the tent. From these stages he rose to be a graduate of the "college" of the yarn spinner-the village store, where he became clerk.
The store we know is the township vortex where all assemble to "swap stories" and deal out the news.
Lincoln, from behind the counter-his pulpit-not merely repeated items of information which he had heard, but also recited doggerel satire of his own concoction, punning and emitting sparks of wit.
Lincoln was hailed as the "capper" of any "good things on the rounds."
Even then his friends saw the germs of the statesman in the lank, homely, crack voiced hobbledehoy.
Their praise emboldened him to stand forward as the spokesman at schoolhouse meetings, lectures, log rollings, huskings auctions, fairs, and so on-the folk meets of our people.
One watching him in eighteen thirty said foresightedly: "Lincoln has touched land at last."
In commencing electioneering, he cultivated the farming population and their ways and diction.
He learned by their parlance and Bible phrases to construct "short sentences of small words," but he had all along the idea that "the plain people are more easily influenced by a broad and humorous illustration than in any other way."
It is the Anglo Saxon trait, distinguishing all great preachers, actors, and authors of that breed.
He stood upon his "imperfect education," his not belonging "to the first families, but the seconds"; and his shunning society as debarring him from the study he required.
Repulsed at the polls, he turned to the law as another channel, supplementing forensic failings by his artful story telling.
mrs Lincoln, the first to weigh this man justly, said proudly, that "Lincoln was the great favorite everywhere."
Such loquacious witchery fitted him for the Congress.
These formed the rapt ring around Lincoln in his own chair in the snug corner of the congressional chat room.
Here he perceived that his rusticity and shallow skimmings placed him under the trained politicians.
It was here, too, that his stereotyped prologue to his digressions-"That reminds me"--became popular, and even reached England, where a publisher so entitled a joke book.
Lincoln displaced "Sam Slick," and opened the way to Artemus Ward and Mark Twain.
The longing for elevation was fanned by the association with the notables-Buchanan, to be his predecessor as President; Andrew Johnson, to be his vice and successor; Jefferson Davis and Alex.
H. Stephens, President and Vice President of the c s a; Adams, Winthrop, Sumner, and the galaxy over whom his solitary star was to shine dazzlingly.
A sound authority who knew him of old pronounced him "as good at telling an anecdote as in the thirties." But the fluent chatterer reined in and became a good listener.
He imbibed all the political ruses, and returned home with his quiver full of new and victorious arrows for the Presidential campaign, for his bosom friends urged him to try to gratify that ambition, preposterous when he first felt it attack him. He had grown out of the sensitiveness that once made him beg the critics not to put him out by laughing at his appearance.
He worked out Euclid to brace his fantasies, as the steel bar in a cement fence post makes it irresistibly firm.
But he allowed his vehement fervor to carry him into such flights as left the reporters unable to accompany his sentences throughout.
He was not of the universities, but of the universe; the Mississippi of Eloquence, uncultivated, stupendous, enriched by sweeping into the innumerable side bayous and creeks.
Elected and re-elected President, he continued to be a surprise to those who shrank from levity.
Lincoln was their puzzle; for he had a sweet sauce for every "roast," and showed the smile of invigoration to every croaking prophet.
His state papers suited the war tragedies, but still he delighted the people with those tales, tagging all the events of what may be called the Lincoln era.
The camp and the press echoed them though the Cabinet frowned-secretaries said that they exposed the illustrious speaker to charges of "clownishness and buffoonery."
Even his official letters were in the same vein.
Time has refuted the purblind purists, the chilly "wet blankets"; and the Lincoln stories, bright, penetrative, piquant, and pertinent are our classics.
eighteen thirty one--Works for himself: boatbuilding and sailing, carpentering, hog sticking, sawmilling, blacksmithing, river pilot, logger, etc, in Menard County, Indiana.
eighteen thirty one--Election clerk at New Salem.
Captain and private (re enlisted) in Black Hawk War.
Store clerk and merchant, New Salem.
Studies for the law.
eighteen thirty two--First political speech.
Henry Clay, Whig platform.
Defeated through strong local vote.
Deputy surveyor, at three dollars a day, Sangamon County.
eighteen thirty four--Elected to State legislature as Whig. (Resides in Springfield till eighteen sixty one.
Law partner with john l Stuart till eighteen forty.)
eighteen thirty five--Postmaster, New Salem; appointed by President Jackson.
eighteen thirty eight to eighteen forty--Reelected to State legislature.
eighteen forty--Partner in law with s t Logan.
eighteen forty two--Married Miss Mary Todd, of Kentucky.
Of the four sons, Edward died in infancy; William ("Willie") at twelve at Washington; Thomas ("Tad") at Springfield, aged twenty; Robert m t, minister to Great Britain, presidential candidate, secretary of war to President Garfield.
His only grandson, Abraham, died in London, March, eighteen ninety.
eighteen forty four--Proposed for Congress.
eighteen forty five--Law partner with w h Herndon, for life.
eighteen forty six--Elected to Congress, the single Whig Illinois member; voted antislavery; sought abolition in the d c; voted Wilmot Proviso. Declined reelection.
eighteen forty eight--Electioneered for General Taylor.
eighteen forty nine--Defeated by Shields for United States senator.
eighteen fifty two--Electioneered for General Scott.
eighteen fifty four--Won the State over to the Republicans, but by arrangement transferred his claim to the senatorship to Trumbull.
October, debated with Douglas.
Declined the governorship in favor of Bissell.
eighteen fifty six--Organized the Republican Party and became its chief; nominated vice president, but was not chosen by its first convention; worked for the Fremont Dayton presidential ticket.
eighteen fifty eight--Lost in the legislature the senatorship to Douglas.
eighteen fifty nine--Placed for the presidential candidacy.
Made Eastern tour "to get acquainted."
eighteen sixty--may ninth, nominated for President, "shutting out" Seward, Chase, Cameron, Dayton, Wade, Bates, and McLean.
eighteen sixty two--september twenty second, emancipation announced.
eighteen sixty three--january first, emancipation proclaimed.
november nineteenth, Gettysburg Cemetery address.
december ninth, pardon to rebels proclaimed.
eighteen sixty four--Unanimous nomination as Republican presidential candidate for re-election, june seventh.
Reelected november eighth.
eighteen sixty five--march fourth, inaugurated for the second term.
april fourteenth, assassinated in Ford's Theater, Washington, by a mad actor, Wilkes Booth.
april nineteenth, body lay in state at Washington.
april twenty sixth, Booth slain in resisting arrest, by Sergeant Boston Corbett, near Port Royal.
april twenty first to may fourth, funeral train through principal cities North, to springfield illinois.
eighteen seventy one--Temporarily deposited in catacomb.
eighteen seventy four--In catacomb, in sarcophagus.
The completed monument dedicated.
eighteen seventy six--To frustrate repetition of body snatchers' attempt, reinterred deeper.
nineteen hundred--A fifth removal; the whole structure solidly rebuilt, containing the martyred President, his wife, and their three children, as well as the grandson bearing Abraham's name.
When he told the brethren, they commended his design, and advised him to carry out that which he purposed.
The king gave him Wilfrid for a companion, and bade Wilfrid conduct him to Rome.
But Wilfrid thanked him for the loving kindness which he was pleased to show to a stranger, and answered, that he had resolved upon another course of life, and for that reason had left his country and set out for Rome.
Hereupon the bishop sent him to Rome, furnishing him with a guide and supplying plenty of all things requisite for his journey, earnestly requesting that he would come that way, when he returned into his own country.
Eleven other bishops met at the consecration of the new bishop, and that function was most honourably performed.
This being read, the hearers were amazed, and the reader ceasing, they began to ask of one another, who that Bishop Wilfrid was.
This being heard, the Pope and all the rest said, that a man of so great authority, who had held the office of a bishop for nearly forty years, ought by no means to be condemned, but being altogether cleared of the faults laid to his charge, should return home with honour.
This man, straightway being called, came in, and seeing him somewhat recovered and able to speak, knelt down, and gave thanks to God, with all the brethren there present.
"A dread vision has even now appeared to me, which I would have you hear and keep secret, till I know what God will please to do with me.
And he also brought the holy season of Easter, returning in its course, to accord with the true teaching of the catholic rule which the Fathers fixed, and, banishing all doubt and error, gave his nation sure guidance in their worship.
And long time sore vexed by many a peril at home and abroad, when he had held the office of a bishop forty five years, he passed away and with joy departed to the heavenly kingdom.
Grant, O Jesus, that the flock may follow in the path of the shepherd."
He enriched the structure of his church, which is dedicated in honour of the blessed Apostle Andrew with manifold adornments and marvellous workmanship.
For he gave all diligence, as he does to this day, to procure relics of the blessed Apostles and martyrs of Christ from all parts, and to raise altars in their honour in separate side chapels built for the purpose within the walls of the same church.
Besides which, he industriously gathered the histories of their martyrdom, together with other ecclesiastical writings, and erected there a large and noble library.
He likewise carefully provided holy vessels, lamps, and other such things as appertain to the adorning of the house of God.
"It has now been fashionable, for near half a century, to defame and vilify the house of Stuart and, to exalt and magnify the reign of Elizabeth.
The Stuarts have found few apologists, for the dead cannot pay for praise; and who will, without reward, oppose the tide of popularity?
His majestick expression would have carried down to the latest posterity the glorious achievements of his country with the same fervent glow which they produced on the mind of the time.
He would have been under no temptation to deviate in any degree from truth, which he held very sacred, or to take a licence, which a learned divine told me he once seemed, in a conversation, jocularly to allow to historians.
'There are (said he) inexcusable lies, and consecrated lies.
For instance, we are told that on the arrival of the news of the unfortunate battle of Fontenoy, every heart beat, and every eye was in tears.
Again, towards the conclusion:
I take this opportunity to relate the manner in which an acquaintance first commenced between dr Johnson and mr Murphy.
mr Murphy then waited upon Johnson, to explain this curious incident.
'DEAR SIR,
'You that travel about the world, have more materials for letters, than I who stay at home; and should, therefore, write with frequency equal to your opportunities.
I should be glad to have all England surveyed by you, if you would impart your observations in narratives as agreeable as your last.
While you have been riding and running, and seeing the tombs of the learned, and the camps of the valiant, I have only staid at home, and intended to do great things, which I have not done.
mr Sharpe is of opinion that the tedious maturation of the cataract is a vulgar errour, and that it may be removed as soon as it is formed.
This notion deserves to be considered; I doubt whether it be universally true; but if it be true in some cases, and those cases can be distinguished, it may save a long and uncomfortable delay.
He had more company the second than the first night, and will make, I believe, a good figure in the whole, though his faults seem to be very many; some of natural deficience, and some of laborious affectation.
He has, I think, no power of assuming either that dignity or elegance which some men, who have little of either in common life, can exhibit on the stage.
His voice when strained is unpleasing, and when low is not always heard.
'Your most affectionate servant,
'SAM.
'october eighteenth seventeen sixty.'
'Sir, (said he) I never saw the man, and never read the book.
But he gave a more eminent proof of it in our sister kingdom, as dr Johnson informed me.
Rolt went over to Dublin, published an edition of it, and put his own name to it.
Akenside having been informed of this imposition, vindicated his right by publishing the poem with its real authour's name.
Several instances of such literary fraud have been detected.
They were, at length, very much surprised to see a pompous edition of it in folio, dedicated to the Princess Dowager of Wales, by a dr Douglas, as his own.
He had been at the pains to transcribe the whole book, with blottings, interlineations, and corrections, that it might be shewn to several people as an original.
I can conceive this kind of fraud to be very easily practised with successful effrontery.
'You reproach me very often with parsimony of writing: but you may discover by the extent of my paper, that I design to recompence rarity by length.
A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation;--a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.
Yet it must be remembered, that he who continues the same course of life in the same place, will have little to tell.
The silent changes made by time are not always perceived; and if they are not perceived, cannot be recounted.
I received your kind letter from Falmouth, in which you gave me notice of your departure for Lisbon, and another from Lisbon, in which you told me, that you were to leave Portugal in a few days.
To either of these how could any answer be returned?
I have had a third from Turin, complaining that I have not answered the former.
Your English style still continues in its purity and vigour.
With vigour your genius will supply it; but its purity must be continued by close attention.
'I know not whether I can heartily rejoice at the kind reception which you have found, or at the popularity to which you are exalted.
I would have you happy wherever you are: yet I would have you wish to return to England.
If ever you visit us again, you will find the kindness of your friends undiminished.
Yet I shall not wonder if all our invitations should be rejected: for there is a pleasure in being considerable at home, which is not easily resisted.
His relations will thank you for any such gratuitous attention: at least they will not blame you for any evil that may happen, whether they thank you or not for any good.
'You know that we have a new King and a new Parliament.
The young man is hitherto blameless; but it would be unreasonable to expect much from the immaturity of juvenile years, and the ignorance of princely education.
He has been long in the hands of the Scots, and has already favoured them more than the English will contentedly endure. But, perhaps, he scarcely knows whom he has distinguished, or whom he has disgusted.
This year was the second Exhibition.
They please themselves much with the multitude of spectators, and imagine that the English School will rise in reputation. Reynolds is without a rival, and continues to add thousands to thousands, which he deserves, among other excellencies, by retaining his kindness for Baretti.
This Exhibition has filled the heads of the Artists and lovers of art.
'I know my Baretti will not be satisfied with a letter in which I give him no account of myself: yet what account shall I give him?
I have not, since the day of our separation, suffered or done any thing considerable.
The only change in my way of life is, that I have frequented the theatre more than in former seasons.
But I have gone thither only to escape from myself.
I am digressing from myself to the play house; but a barren plan must be filled with episodes.
Of myself I have nothing to say, but that I have hitherto lived without the concurrence of my own judgment; yet I continue to flatter myself, that, when you return, you will find me mended.
I do not wonder that, where the monastick life is permitted, every order finds votaries, and every monastery inhabitants.
If I were to visit Italy, my curiosity would be more attracted by convents than by palaces: though I am afraid that I should find expectation in both places equally disappointed, and life in both places supported with impatience and quitted with reluctance.
Those who have endeavoured to teach us to die well, have taught few to die willingly: yet I cannot but hope that a good life might end at last in a contented death.
'You see to what a train of thought I am drawn by the mention of myself. Let me now turn my attention upon you.
You have given us good specimens in your letters from Lisbon.
CHAPTER two
THE HOUSE OF DREAMS
"When I was a child I heard an old minister say that a house was not a real home until it had been consecrated by a birth, a wedding and a death.
We've had deaths here-my father and mother died here as well as matthew; and we've even had a birth here.
Long ago, just after we moved into this house, we had a married hired man for a little while, and his wife had a baby here.
But there's never been a wedding before.
It does seem so strange to think of Anne being married.
I can't realize that she's grown up.
I shall never forget what I felt when I saw matthew bringing in a GIRL.
I wonder what HIS fate was."
"Well, it was a fortunate mistake," said mrs Rachel Lynde, "though, mind you, there was a time I didn't think so-that evening I came up to see Anne and she treated us to such a scene.
Many things have changed since then, that's what."
When weddings were in order mrs Rachel was ready to let the dead past bury its dead.
"I'm going to give Anne two of my cotton warp spreads," she resumed. "A tobacco stripe one and an apple leaf one.
But there's a month yet, and dew bleaching will work wonders."
Only a month!
"I'm giving Anne that half dozen braided rugs I have in the garret.
I never supposed she'd want them-they're so old-fashioned, and nobody seems to want anything but hooked mats now.
I made them of the nicest rags, and braided them in stripes.
And I'll make her enough blue plum preserve to stock her jam closet for a year.
And this last spring they were white, and such a crop of plums I never remember at Green Gables."
It's what I've always prayed for," said mrs Rachel, in the tone of one who is comfortably sure that her prayers have availed much.
He was rich, to be sure, and Gilbert is poor-at least, to begin with; but then he's an Island boy."
"He's Gilbert Blythe," said Marilla contentedly.
It is certain, at least, that some human beings do not.
If she thought she was getting any particular prize in young dr Blythe, or if she imagined that he was still as infatuated with her as he might have been in his salad days, it was surely their duty to put the matter before her in another light.
Yet these two worthy ladies were not enemies of Anne; on the contrary, they were really quite fond of her, and would have defended her as their own young had anyone else attacked her.
Human nature is not obliged to be consistent.
Her lines had fallen in pleasant places.
In spite of the fact-as mrs Rachel Lynde would say-that she had married a millionaire, her marriage had been happy.
Wealth had not spoiled her.
"Well, the Blythes generally keep their word when they've once passed it, no matter what happens.
Life had developed in her a sense of humor which helped her over many difficulties; but as yet nothing had availed to steel her against a reference to her hair.
"There's no telling what queer freaks fashion will take.
A long engagement doesn't often turn out well.
"Gilbert looks very young for a doctor.
What is it like?"
There's a splendid living room with a fireplace in it downstairs, and a dining room that looks out on the harbor, and a little room that will do for my office.
It is about sixty years old-the oldest house in Four Winds.
But it has been kept in pretty good repair, and was all done over about fifteen years ago-shingled, plastered and re floored.
It was well built to begin with.
I understand that there was some romantic story connected with its building, but the man I rented it from didn't know it."
"Who is Captain Jim?"
"Who owns the house?"
"Well, it's the property of the Glen saint Mary Presbyterian Church now, and I rented it from the trustees.
But it belonged until lately to a very old lady, Miss Elizabeth Russell.
She died last spring, and as she had no near relatives she left her property to the Glen saint Mary Church.
Her furniture is still in the house, and I bought most of it-for a mere song you might say, because it was all so old-fashioned that the trustees despaired of selling it.
"So far, good," said Anne, nodding cautious approval.
"But, Gilbert, people cannot live by furniture alone.
You haven't yet mentioned one very important thing.
Are there TREES about this house?"
"Heaps of them, oh, dryad!
There is a big grove of fir trees behind it, two rows of Lombardy poplars down the lane, and a ring of white birches around a very delightful garden.
Their boughs form an arch overhead."
"Oh, I'm so glad!
THAT would be expecting too much."
"But there IS a brook-and it actually cuts across one corner of the garden."
"dr Chilton!
It is a new doctor-a very famous doctor from New York, who-who knows a great deal about-about hurts like yours."
If-if you don't mind VERY much, I WOULD LIKE to have dr Chilton-truly I would!"
I mind very much.
And believe me, he can NOT know so much about-about your trouble, as this great doctor does, who will come from New York to morrow."
Pollyanna still looked unconvinced.
"But, Aunt Polly, if you LOVED dr Chilton-"
"WHAT, Pollyanna?" Aunt Polly's voice was very sharp now.
The New York doctor is coming to morrow."
Old Tom chuckled.
"She looks like FOLKS, now.
She's actually almost-"
"I told ye she wa'n't-old."
Nancy laughed.
Say, mr Tom, who WAS her A lover?
I hain't found that out, yet; I hain't, I hain't!"
"Maybe not.
"How is she, ter day-the little gal?"
Nancy shook her head.
She told me long ago." The old man hesitated, then went on, his lips twitching a little.
"MISS POLLY!"
Old Tom stiffened.
So she never told her."
An' Miss Polly-young as she was-couldn't never forgive him; she was that fond of Miss Jennie-in them days.
CHAPTER fourteen
JIMMY AND THE GREEN EYED MONSTER
This time Beldingsville did not literally welcome Pollyanna home with brass bands and bunting-perhaps because the hour of her expected arrival was known to but few of the townspeople.
But there certainly was no lack of joyful greetings on the part of everybody from the moment she stepped from the railway train with her Aunt Polly and dr Chilton.
Nor did Pollyanna lose any time in starting on a round of fly away minute calls on all her old friends.
Indeed, for the next few days, according to Nancy, "There wasn't no putting of your finger on her anywheres, for by the time you'd got your finger down she wa'n't there."
And always, everywhere she went, Pollyanna met the question: "Well, how did you like Boston?" Perhaps to no one did she answer this more fully than she did to mr Pendleton.
As was usually the case when this question was put to her, she began her reply with a troubled frown.
"Oh, I liked it-I just loved it-some of it."
"But not all of it?" smiled mr Pendleton.
There's parts of it-Oh, I was glad to be there," she explained hastily.
"I had a perfectly lovely time, and lots of things were so queer and different, you know-like eating dinner at night instead of noons, when you ought to eat it.
But everybody was so good to me, and I saw such a lot of wonderful things-Bunker Hill, and the Public Garden, and the Seeing Boston autos, and miles of pictures and statues and store windows and streets that didn't have any end.
And folks.
"Well, I'm sure-I thought you liked folks," commented the man.
"I do." Pollyanna frowned again and pondered.
And mrs Carew wouldn't let me.
She didn't know 'em herself.
She said folks didn't, down there."
There was a slight pause, then, with a sigh, Pollyanna resumed.
It would be such a lot nicer if they did!
Why, just think, mr Pendleton, there are lots of folks that live on dirty, narrow streets, and don't even have beans and fish balls to eat, nor things even as good as missionary barrels to wear.
Then there are other folks-mrs
Carew, and a whole lot like her-that live in perfectly beautiful houses, and have more things to eat and wear than they know what to do with.
Now if THOSE folks only knew the other folks-" But mr Pendleton interrupted with a laugh.
"My dear child, did it ever occur to you that these people don't CARE to know each other?" he asked quizzically.
"Oh, but some of them do," maintained Pollyanna, in eager defense. "Now there's Sadie Dean-she sells bows, lovely bows in a big store-she WANTS to know people; and I introduced her to mrs Carew, and we had her up to the house, and we had Jamie and lots of others there, too; and she was SO glad to know them!
But if they COULD know each other, so that the rich people could give the poor people part of their money-"
But again mr Pendleton interrupted with a laugh.
"Oh, Pollyanna, Pollyanna," he chuckled; "I'm afraid you're getting into pretty deep water.
"A-what?" questioned the little girl, dubiously.
"I-I don't think I know what a socialist is.
If it's anything like that, I don't mind being one, a mite.
I'd like to be one."
"I don't doubt it, Pollyanna," smiled the man.
"But when it comes to this scheme of yours for the wholesale distribution of wealth-you've got a problem on your hands that you might have difficulty with."
"That's the way mrs Carew talked.
She says I don't understand; that 'twould-er-pauperize her and be indiscriminate and pernicious, and-Well, it was SOMETHING like that, anyway," bridled the little girl, aggrievedly, as the man began to laugh.
"And, anyway, I DON'T understand why some folks should have such a lot, and other folks shouldn't have anything; and I DON'T like it.
And if I ever have a lot I shall just give some of it to folks who don't have any, even if it does make me pauperized and pernicious, and-" But mr Pendleton was laughing so hard now that Pollyanna, after a moment's struggle, surrendered and laughed with him.
"Well, anyway," she reiterated, when she had caught her breath, "I don't understand it, all the same."
"No, dear, I'm afraid you don't," agreed the man, growing suddenly very grave and tender eyed; "nor any of the rest of us, for that matter.
But, tell me," he added, after a minute, "who is this Jamie you've been talking so much about since you came?"
And Pollyanna told him.
In talking of Jamie, Pollyanna lost her worried, baffled look. Pollyanna loved to talk of Jamie.
Here was something she understood. Here was no problem that had to deal with big, fearsome sounding words.
Besides, in this particular instance-would not mr Pendleton be especially interested in mrs Carew's taking the boy into her home, for who better than himself could understand the need of a child's presence?
For that matter, Pollyanna talked to everybody about Jamie.
She assumed that everybody would be as interested as she herself was.
On most occasions she was not disappointed in the interest shown; but one day she met with a surprise.
It came through Jimmy Pendleton.
"Say, look a here," he demanded one afternoon, irritably.
"Wasn't there ANYBODY else down to Boston but just that everlasting 'Jamie'?"
"Why, Jimmy Bean, what do you mean?" cried Pollyanna.
The boy lifted his chin a little.
I'm Jimmy Pendleton.
And I mean that I should think, from your talk, that there wasn't ANYBODY down to Boston but just that loony boy who calls them birds and squirrels 'Lady Lancelot,' and all that tommyrot."
"Why, Jimmy Be-Pendleton!" gasped Pollyanna.
Then, with some spirit: "Jamie isn't loony!
He is a very nice boy.
And he knows a lot-books and stories!
Why, he can MAKE stories right out of his own head! Besides, it isn't 'Lady Lancelot,'--it's 'Sir Lancelot.' If you knew half as much as he does you'd know that, too!" she finished, with flashing eyes.
Jimmy Pendleton flushed miserably and looked utterly wretched.
Growing more and more jealous moment by moment, still doggedly he held his ground.
And I know somebody else that said so, too."
"Who was it?"
There was no answer.
"Your-dad?" repeated Pollyanna, in amazement.
"Why, how could he know Jamie?"
"He didn't. 'Twasn't about that Jamie. 'twas about me." The boy still spoke sullenly, with his eyes turned away.
Yet there was a curious softness in his voice that was always noticeable whenever he spoke of his father.
"YOU!"
We stopped 'most a week with a farmer.
Dad helped about the hayin'--and I did, too, some. The farmer's wife was awful good to me, and pretty quick she was callin' me 'Jamie.' I don't know why, but she just did.
And one day father heard her.
He got awful mad-so mad that I remembered it always-what he said.
He said 'Jamie' wasn't no sort of a name for a boy, and that no son of his should ever be called it.
He said 'twas a sissy name, and he hated it.
He wouldn't even stay to finish the work, but him and me took to the road again that night.
I was kind of sorry, 'cause I liked her-the farmer's wife, I mean.
She was good to me."
Pollyanna nodded, all sympathy and interest.
It was not often that Jimmy said much of that mysterious past life of his, before she had known him.
"And what happened next?" she prompted.
Pollyanna had, for the moment, forgotten all about the original subject of the controversy-the name "Jamie" that was dubbed "sissy."
The boy sighed.
"We just went on till we found another place.
And 'twas there dad-died.
Then they put me in the 'sylum."
"And then you ran away and I found you that day, down by mrs Snow's," exulted Pollyanna, softly.
"And I've known you ever since."
"Oh, yes-and you've known me ever since," repeated Jimmy-but in a far different voice: Jimmy had suddenly come back to the present, and to his grievance.
"But, then, I ain't 'JAMIE,' you know," he finished with scornful emphasis, as he turned loftily away, leaving a distressed, bewildered Pollyanna behind him.
CHAPTER seven
The same day, about seven o'clock in the evening, Raskolnikov was on his way to his mother's and sister's lodging-the lodging in Bakaleyev's house which Razumihin had found for them.
The stairs went up from the street.
Raskolnikov walked with lagging steps, as though still hesitating whether to go or not.
But nothing would have turned him back: his decision was taken.
"Besides, it doesn't matter, they still know nothing," he thought, "and they are used to thinking of me as eccentric."
He was appallingly dressed: his clothes torn and dirty, soaked with a night's rain.
His face was almost distorted from fatigue, exposure, the inward conflict that had lasted for twenty four hours.
He had spent all the previous night alone, God knows where.
He knocked at the door which was opened by his mother.
Even the servant happened to be out.
At first Pulcheria Alexandrovna was speechless with joy and surprise; then she took him by the hand and drew him into the room.
"Here you are!" she began, faltering with joy.
"Don't be angry with me, Rodya, for welcoming you so foolishly with tears: I am laughing not crying.
Did you think I was crying?
No, I am delighted, but I've got into such a stupid habit of shedding tears.
I've been like that ever since your father's death.
I cry for anything.
Sit down, dear boy, you must be tired; I see you are.
Ah, how muddy you are."
"No, no," Pulcheria Alexandrovna hurriedly interrupted, "you thought I was going to cross question you in the womanish way I used to; don't be anxious, I understand, I understand it all: now I've learned the ways here and truly I see for myself that they are better.
I've made up my mind once for all: how could I understand your plans and expect you to give an account of them?
But, my goodness!
why am I running to and fro as though I were crazy...?
I am reading your article in the magazine for the third time, Rodya.
Dmitri Prokofitch brought it to me.
Directly I saw it I cried out to myself: 'There, foolish one,' I thought, 'that's what he is busy about; that's the solution of the mystery!
Learned people are always like that.
He may have some new ideas in his head just now; he is thinking them over and I worry him and upset him.' I read it, my dear, and of course there was a great deal I did not understand; but that's only natural-how should I?"
Raskolnikov took the magazine and glanced at his article.
It lasted only a moment.
After reading a few lines he frowned and his heart throbbed with anguish.
He recalled all the inward conflict of the preceding months.
He flung the article on the table with disgust and anger.
"But, however foolish I may be, Rodya, I can see for myself that you will very soon be one of the leading-if not the leading man-in the world of Russian thought.
And they dared to think you were mad!
You don't know, but they really thought that.
Ah, the despicable creatures, how could they understand genius!
Your father sent twice to magazines-the first time poems (I've got the manuscript and will show you) and the second time a whole novel (I begged him to let me copy it out) and how we prayed that they should be taken-they weren't!
But now I see again how foolish I was, for you can attain any position you like by your intellect and talent.
No doubt you don't care about that for the present and you are occupied with much more important matters...."
"Dounia's not at home, mother?"
"No, Rodya.
Dmitri Prokofitch comes to see me, it's so good of him, and he always talks about you.
He loves you and respects you, my dear.
I am not complaining.
She has her ways and I have mine; she seems to have got some secrets of late and I never have any secrets from you two.
Of course, I am sure that Dounia has far too much sense, and besides she loves you and me... but I don't know what it will all lead to.
I shall know, anyway, that you are fond of me, that will be enough for me.
I shall read what you write, I shall hear about you from everyone, and sometimes you'll come yourself to see me.
What could be better?
Here you've come now to comfort your mother, I see that."
Here Pulcheria Alexandrovna began to cry.
My goodness, why am I sitting here?" she cried, jumping up.
"There is coffee and I don't offer you any.
I'll get it at once!"
"Mother, don't trouble, I am going at once.
I haven't come for that. Please listen to me."
Pulcheria Alexandrovna went up to him timidly.
"Mother, whatever happens, whatever you hear about me, whatever you are told about me, will you always love me as you do now?" he asked suddenly from the fullness of his heart, as though not thinking of his words and not weighing them.
How can you ask me such a question? Why, who will tell me anything about you?
Besides, I shouldn't believe anyone, I should refuse to listen."
I shall never cease to love you....
Well, that's enough: I thought I must do this and begin with this...."
"I don't know what is wrong with you, Rodya," she said at last.
"I've been thinking all this time that we were simply boring you and now I see that there is a great sorrow in store for you, and that's why you are miserable.
Forgive me for speaking about it.
I keep thinking about it and lie awake at nights.
Your sister lay talking in her sleep all last night, talking of nothing but you.
I caught something, but I couldn't make it out.
I felt all the morning as though I were going to be hanged, waiting for something, expecting something, and now it has come!
Rodya, Rodya, where are you going?
"Yes."
"That's what I thought!
I can come with you, you know, if you need me.
You see, I am glad to look upon her as a daughter even... Dmitri Prokofitch will help us to go together. But... where... are you going?"
"Good bye, mother."
"What, to day?" she cried, as though losing him for ever.
"I can't stay, I must go now...."
"And can't I come with you?"
"No, but kneel down and pray to God for me.
Your prayer perhaps will reach Him."
"Let me bless you and sign you with the cross.
That's right, that's right.
Yes, he was glad, he was very glad that there was no one there, that he was alone with his mother.
For the first time after all those awful months his heart was softened.
He fell down before her, he kissed her feet and both wept, embracing.
And she was not surprised and did not question him this time.
For some days she had realised that something awful was happening to her son and that now some terrible minute had come for him.
You would run like this to me and hug me and kiss me.
The first time I saw you, that evening, you remember, as soon as we arrived here, I guessed simply from your eyes.
My heart sank at once, and to day when I opened the door and looked at you, I thought the fatal hour had come.
"No!"
"You'll come again?"
"Yes...
I'll come."
"Rodya, don't be angry, I don't dare to question you.
I know I mustn't. Only say two words to me-is it far where you are going?"
"Very far."
"What is awaiting you there?
Some post or career for you?"
"What God sends... only pray for me." Raskolnikov went to the door, but she clutched him and gazed despairingly into his eyes.
"Enough, mother," said Raskolnikov, deeply regretting that he had come.
"Not for ever, it's not yet for ever?
You'll come, you'll come to morrow?"
"I will, I will, good bye." He tore himself away at last.
He wanted to finish all before sunset.
He did not want to meet anyone till then.
Going up the stairs he noticed that Nastasya rushed from the samovar to watch him intently.
"Can anyone have come to see me?" he wondered.
He had a disgusted vision of Porfiry.
But opening his door he saw Dounia.
He stopped short in the doorway.
She rose from the sofa in dismay and stood up facing him.
Her eyes, fixed upon him, betrayed horror and infinite grief.
"Am I to come in or go away?" he asked uncertainly.
We were both waiting for you. We thought that you would be sure to come there."
Raskolnikov went into the room and sank exhausted on a chair.
"I feel weak, Dounia, I am very tired; and I should have liked at this moment to be able to control myself."
He glanced at her mistrustfully.
"Where were you all night?"
"I don't remember clearly.
You see, sister, I wanted to make up my mind once for all, and several times I walked by the Neva, I remember that I wanted to end it all there, but...
"Thank God!
That was just what we were afraid of, Sofya Semyonovna and i Then you still have faith in life?
Thank God, thank God!"
Raskolnikov smiled bitterly.
"I haven't faith, but I have just been weeping in mother's arms; I haven't faith, but I have just asked her to pray for me.
"Have you been at mother's?
Have you told her?" cried Dounia, horror stricken.
"Surely you haven't done that?"
"No, I didn't tell her... in words; but she understood a great deal. She heard you talking in your sleep.
I am sure she half understands it already.
Perhaps I did wrong in going to see her.
"A contemptible person, but ready to face suffering!
You are, aren't you?"
At once.
"It's pride, Dounia."
"Pride, Rodya."
There was a gleam of fire in his lustreless eyes; he seemed to be glad to think that he was still proud.
"You don't think, sister, that I was simply afraid of the water?" he asked, looking into her face with a sinister smile.
Silence lasted for two minutes.
Suddenly he got up.
"It's late, it's time to go!
I am going at once to give myself up.
But I don't know why I am going to give myself up."
Big tears fell down her cheeks.
"You are crying, sister, but can you hold out your hand to me?"
"You doubted it?"
She threw her arms round him.
"Aren't you half expiating your crime by facing the suffering?" she cried, holding him close and kissing him.
"Crime?
What crime?" he cried in sudden fury.
"That I killed a vile noxious insect, an old pawnbroker woman, of use to no one!...
Killing her was atonement for forty sins.
She was sucking the life out of poor people.
Was that a crime?
'A crime! a crime!' Only now I see clearly the imbecility of my cowardice, now that I have decided to face this superfluous disgrace.
It's simply because I am contemptible and have nothing in me that I have decided to, perhaps too for my advantage, as that...
Porfiry... suggested!"
"Brother, brother, what are you saying?
Why, you have shed blood?" cried Dounia in despair.
"Which all men shed," he put in almost frantically, "which flows and has always flowed in streams, which is spilt like champagne, and for which men are crowned in the Capitol and are called afterwards benefactors of mankind.
Look into it more carefully and understand it!
But i.. I couldn't carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible, that's what's the matter!
And yet I won't look at it as you do.
If I had succeeded I should have been crowned with glory, but now I'm trapped."
"But that's not so, not so!
Brother, what are you saying?"
"Ah, it's not picturesque, not aesthetically attractive!
I've never, never been stronger and more convinced than now."
He felt that he had, anyway, made these two poor women miserable, that he was, anyway, the cause...
Good bye!
We won't dispute.
It's time, high time to go. Don't follow me, I beseech you, I have somewhere else to go....
But you go at once and sit with mother.
I entreat you to!
It's my last request of you.
Don't leave her at all; I left her in a state of anxiety, that she is not fit to bear; she will die or go out of her mind.
Be with her!
Razumihin will be with you.
Don't cry about me: I'll try to be honest and manly all my life, even if I am a murderer.
Perhaps I shall some day make a name.
I won't disgrace you, you will see; I'll still show....
Now good bye for the present," he concluded hurriedly, noticing again a strange expression in Dounia's eyes at his last words and promises.
"Why are you crying?
Don't cry, don't cry: we are not parting for ever!
Ah, yes!
Wait a minute, I'd forgotten!"
He went to the table, took up a thick dusty book, opened it and took from between the pages a little water colour portrait on ivory.
It was the portrait of his landlady's daughter, who had died of fever, that strange girl who had wanted to be a nun.
"I used to talk a great deal about it to her, only to her," he said thoughtfully.
Don't be uneasy," he returned to Dounia, "she was as much opposed to it as you, and I am glad that she is gone.
The great point is that everything now is going to be different, is going to be broken in two," he cried, suddenly returning to his dejection. "Everything, everything, and am I prepared for it?
Do I want it myself? They say it is necessary for me to suffer!
What's the object of these senseless sufferings?
shall I know any better what they are for, when I am crushed by hardships and idiocy, and weak as an old man after twenty years' penal servitude?
And what shall I have to live for then?
Why am I consenting to that life now?
At last they both went out.
It was hard for Dounia, but she loved him. She walked away, but after going fifty paces she turned round to look at him again.
He was still in sight.
At the corner he too turned and for the last time their eyes met; but noticing that she was looking at him, he motioned her away with impatience and even vexation, and turned the corner abruptly.
"I am wicked, I see that," he thought to himself, feeling ashamed a moment later of his angry gesture to Dounia.
"But why are they so fond of me if I don't deserve it?
Oh, if only I were alone and no one loved me and I too had never loved anyone!
Yes, that's it, that's it, that's what they are sending me there for, that's what they want.
Look at them running to and fro about the streets, every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at heart and, worse still, an idiot.
He fell to musing by what process it could come to pass, that he could be humbled before all of them, indiscriminately-humbled by conviction. And yet why not?
It must be so.
Would not twenty years of continual bondage crush him utterly?
INTRODUCTION
In giving to the world the record of what, looked at as an adventure only, is I suppose one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men, I feel it incumbent on me to explain what my exact connection with it is.
And so I may as well say at once that I am not the narrator but only the editor of this extraordinary history, and then go on to tell how it found its way into my hands.
One of these gentlemen was I think, without exception, the handsomest young fellow I have ever seen.
He was very tall, very broad, and had a look of power and a grace of bearing that seemed as native to him as it is to a wild stag.
In addition his face was almost without flaw-a good face as well as a beautiful one, and when he lifted his hat, which he did just then to a passing lady, I saw that his head was covered with little golden curls growing close to the scalp.
"Good gracious!" I said to my friend, with whom I was walking, "why, that fellow looks like a statue of Apollo come to life.
They call him 'the Greek god'; but look at the other one, he's Vincey's (that's the god's name) guardian, and supposed to be full of every kind of information.
They call him 'Charon.'" I looked, and found the older man quite as interesting in his way as the glorified specimen of humanity at his side.
He appeared to be about forty years of age, and was I think as ugly as his companion was handsome.
To begin with, he was shortish, rather bow legged, very deep chested, and with unusually long arms.
He had dark hair and small eyes, and the hair grew right down on his forehead, and his whiskers grew right up to his hair, so that there was uncommonly little of his countenance to be seen. Altogether he reminded me forcibly of a gorilla, and yet there was something very pleasing and genial about the man's eye.
I remember saying that I should like to know him.
I know Vincey; I'll introduce you," and he did, and for some minutes we stood chatting-about the Zulu people, I think, for I had just returned from the Cape at the time.
Presently, however, a stoutish lady, whose name I do not remember, came along the pavement, accompanied by a pretty fair haired girl, and these two mr Vincey, who clearly knew them well, at once joined, walking off in their company.
I remember being rather amused because of the change in the expression of the elder man, whose name I discovered was Holly, when he saw the ladies advancing.
He suddenly stopped short in his talk, cast a reproachful look at his companion, and, with an abrupt nod to myself, turned and marched off alone across the street.
I heard afterwards that he was popularly supposed to be as much afraid of a woman as most people are of a mad dog, which accounted for his precipitate retreat.
I cannot say, however, that young Vincey showed much aversion to feminine society on this occasion.
Indeed I remember laughing, and remarking to my friend at the time that he was not the sort of man whom it would be desirable to introduce to the lady one was going to marry, since it was exceedingly probable that the acquaintance would end in a transfer of her affections.
That same evening my visit came to an end, and this was the last I saw or heard of "Charon" and "the Greek god" for many a long day.
Indeed, I have never seen either of them from that hour to this, and do not think it probable that I shall.
"My dear Sir,--You will be surprised, considering the very slight nature of our acquaintance, to get a letter from me.
Indeed, I think I had better begin by reminding you that we once met, now some five years ago, when I and my ward Leo Vincey were introduced to you in the street at Cambridge.
To be brief and come to my business.
I have recently read with much interest a book of yours describing a Central African adventure.
I take it that this book is partly true, and partly an effort of the imagination.
However this may be, it has given me an idea.
Nor should we alter our determination were it not for a circumstance which has recently arisen.
We are for reasons that, after perusing this manuscript, you may be able to guess, going away again this time to Central Asia where, if anywhere upon this earth, wisdom is to be found, and we anticipate that our sojourn there will be a long one.
Possibly we shall not return.
Under these altered conditions it has become a question whether we are justified in withholding from the world an account of a phenomenon which we believe to be of unparalleled interest, merely because our private life is involved, or because we are afraid of ridicule and doubt being cast upon our statements.
"And now what am I to say further?
I really do not know beyond once more repeating that everything is described in the accompanying manuscript exactly as it happened.
Who was she?
How did she first come to the Caves of Kor, and what was her real religion?
We never ascertained, and now, alas! we never shall, at least not yet.
These and many other questions arise in my mind, but what is the good of asking them now?
"Will you undertake the task?
We give you complete freedom, and as a reward you will, we believe, have the credit of presenting to the world the most wonderful history, as distinguished from romance, that its records can show.
Read the manuscript (which I have copied out fairly for your benefit), and let me know.
"p s--Of course, if any profit results from the sale of the writing should you care to undertake its publication, you can do what you like with it, but if there is a loss I will leave instructions with my lawyers, Messrs.
Geoffrey and Jordan, to meet it.
We entrust the sherd, the scarab, and the parchments to your keeping, till such time as we demand them back again.
--l h h"
Well, that is all I have to say.
Of the history itself the reader must judge.
I give it him, with the exception of a very few alterations, made with the object of concealing the identity of the actors from the general public, exactly as it came to me.
At first I was inclined to believe that this history of a woman on whom, clothed in the majesty of her almost endless years, the shadow of Eternity itself lay like the dark wing of Night, was some gigantic allegory of which I could not catch the meaning.
Then I thought that it might be a bold attempt to portray the possible results of practical immortality, informing the substance of a mortal who yet drew her strength from Earth, and in whose human bosom passions yet rose and fell and beat as in the undying world around her the winds and the tides rise and fall and beat unceasingly.
But as I went on I abandoned that idea also.
To me the story seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face.
Its explanation I must leave to others, and with this slight preface, which circumstances make necessary, I introduce the world to Ayesha and the Caves of Kor.--The Editor.
p s--There is on consideration one circumstance that, after a reperusal of this history, struck me with so much force that I cannot resist calling the attention of the reader to it.
He is not even, at any rate to my view, particularly interesting.
Can it be that extremes meet, and that the very excess and splendour of her mind led her by means of some strange physical reaction to worship at the shrine of matter?
Was that ancient Kallikrates nothing but a splendid animal loved for his hereditary Greek beauty?
There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and little streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of old snow banks.
I did so regretfully, and the dim objects in the room emerged from the shadows and took their place about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds.
I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the Georgics where to morrow's lesson began.
Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have remembered that passage.
We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately enough to guess what that feeling was.
In the evening, as I sat staring at my book, the fervor of his voice stirred through the quantities on the page before me.
I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria. Before I had got far with my reading I was disturbed by a knock.
I hurried to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing in the dark hall.
She was so quietly conventionalized by city clothes that I might have passed her on the street without seeing her.
Her black suit fitted her figure smoothly, and a black lace hat, with pale blue forget me nots, sat demurely on her yellow hair.
I led her toward Cleric's chair, the only comfortable one I had, questioning her confusedly.
She looked about her with the naive curiosity I remembered so well.
I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim.
I'm in business for myself. I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O Street.
I've made a real good start."
I did n't know whether you'd be glad to see me." She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which. "You seem the same, though,--except you're a young man, now, of course.
Do you think I've changed?"
"Maybe you're prettier-though you were always pretty enough.
Perhaps it's your clothes that make a difference."
"You like my new suit?
I have to dress pretty well in my business." She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft, flimsy silk.
She was already at home in my place, had slipped quietly into it, as she did into everything.
She told me her business was going well, and she had saved a little money.
"This summer I'm going to build the house for mother I've talked about so long.
I won't be able to pay up on it at first, but I want her to have it before she is too old to enjoy it.
Next summer I'll take her down new furniture and carpets, so she'll have something to look forward to all winter."
I watched Lena sitting there so smooth and sunny and well cared for, and thought of how she used to run barefoot over the prairie until after the snow began to fly, and how Crazy Mary chased her round and round the cornfields.
It seemed to me wonderful that she should have got on so well in the world.
"Look at me; I've never earned a dollar, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to."
"She's fine.
She works for mrs Gardener at the hotel now.
She's housekeeper.
mrs Gardener's health is n't what it was, and she can't see after everything like she used to.
I guess they're engaged.
Tony talks about him like he was president of the railroad.
She won't hear a word against him.
She's so sort of innocent."
I said I did n't like Larry, and never would.
"Some of us could tell her things, but it would n't do any good.
She'd always believe him.
That's Antonia's failing, you know; if she once likes people, she won't hear anything against them."
"I think I'd better go home and look after Antonia," I said.
"It's a good thing the Harlings are friendly with her again.
Larry's afraid of them. They ship so much grain, they have influence with the railroad people. What are you studying?" She leaned her elbows on the table and drew my book toward her.
I caught a faint odor of violet sachet.
"So that's Latin, is it?
Don't you just love a good play, Jim?
I can't stay at home in the evening if there's one in town.
"Would you like to?
I'd be ever so pleased.
I board, to save time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself, and I'd be glad to cook one for you.
You've hardly told me anything yet."
"We can talk when you come to see me.
The old woman downstairs did n't want to let me come up very much.
How surprised mrs Burden would be!" Lena laughed softly as she rose.
When I caught up my hat she shook her head.
"No, I don't want you to go with me.
I'm to meet some Swedes at the drug store.
You would n't care for them.
I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it, but I must tell her how I left you right here with your books.
I walked with her to the door.
"Come and see me sometimes when you're lonesome.
But maybe you have all the friends you want.
Have you?" She turned her soft cheek to me.
"Have you?" she whispered teasingly in my ear.
In a moment I watched her fade down the dusky stairway.
When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than before.
How I loved to hear her laugh again!
It was so soft and unexcited and appreciative-gave a favorable interpretation to everything.
Lena had brought them all back to me.
If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.
I understood that clearly, for the first time.
I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience.
IN Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the good companies stopped off there for one night stands, after their long runs in New York and Chicago.
I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true.
She handed her feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.
Accessories of costume and scene meant much more to her than to me.
She sat entranced through "Robin Hood" and hung upon the lips of the contralto who sang, "Oh, Promise Me!"
Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name "Camille."
I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we walked down to the theater.
The weather was warm and sultry and put us both in a holiday humor.
We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the people come in.
There was a note on the programme, saying that the "incidental music" would be from the opera "Traviata," which was made from the same story as the play.
"The Count of Monte Cristo," which I had seen james O'Neill play that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I knew.
This play, I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family resemblance.
A couple of jack rabbits, run in off the prairie, could not have been more innocent of what awaited them than were Lena and i
Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine.
Decidedly, there was a new tang about this dialogue.
This introduced the most brilliant, worldly, the most enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon.
I seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the reddest of roses.
The men were dressed more or less after the period in which the play was written; the women were not.
I saw no inconsistency.
Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant world in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every pleasantry enlarged one's horizon.
One could experience excess and satiety without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one's hands in a drawing room!
When the characters all spoke at once and I missed some of the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery.
The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned, though historic.
She had been a member of Daly's famous New York company, and afterward a "star" under his direction.
She was a woman who could not be taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which carried with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not squeamish.
She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique curiously hard and stiff.
But what did it matter?
I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness.
I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure.
I wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim waisted Armand in the frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in the world.
Her sudden illness, when the gayety was at its height, her pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips, the cough she smothered under the laughter while Gaston kept playing the piano lightly-it all wrung my heart.
But not so much as her cynicism in the long dialogue with her lover which followed.
How far was I from questioning her unbelief!
Between the acts we had no time to forget.
The orchestra kept sawing away at the "Traviata" music, so joyous and sad, so thin and far away, so clap trap and yet so heart breaking.
As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I had not brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about the Junior dances, or whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth.
Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.
Her conception of the character was as heavy and uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and on the consonants.
At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by remorse. Lightness of stress or behavior was far from her.
But the lines were enough.
There were chandeliers hung from the ceiling, I remember, many servants in livery, gaming tables where the men played with piles of gold, and a staircase down which the guests made their entrance.
After all the others had gathered round the card tables, and young Duval had been warned by Prudence, Marguerite descended the staircase with Varville; such a cloak, such a fan, such jewels-and her face!
When Armand, with the terrible words, "Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!" flung the gold and bank notes at the half swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside me and covered her face with her hands.
I loved Nanine tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good fellow!
The New Year's presents were not too much; nothing could be too much now.
I wept unrestrainedly.
Even the handkerchief in my breast pocket, worn for elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time that moribund woman sank for the last time into the arms of her lover.
When we reached the door of the theater, the streets were shining with rain.
I had prudently brought along mrs Harling's useful Commencement present, and I took Lena home under its shelter.
After leaving her, I walked slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived.
The lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them after the rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together, blew into my face with a sort of bitter sweetness.
I tramped through the puddles and under the showery trees, mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only yesterday, sighing with the spirit of eighteen forty, which had sighed so much, and which had reached me only that night, across long years and several languages, through the person of an infirm old actress.
"What?
"One moment, yes," answered the queen.
"Speak, sir!
I beg you to do so."
"Mistaken!" cried the queen, almost suffocated by emotion; "mistaken! what has happened, then?"
Oh, my God! my God! what has happened?"
Our duty is fulfilled."
"You know well that I don't like to leave things half finished."
Come and converse with us for just five minutes, sword in hand, upon this deserted terrace."
Swear first, on your honor, not to inform him of our return."
"For what reason is all this fume and fury?" asked Athos.
"no"
"Why?"
Come, come."
"Where?"
The Road to Picardy.
Aramis shook his head.
Aramis stopped.
They both alighted.
"Well, what has happened to them?"
"Arrested, were they?" inquired Athos; "is it known why?"
"Where were they taken?" asked Athos.
He could, like the king, touch the greatest of us on the head, and touching them make such heads shake on their shoulders.
"To whom?"
"No, I thank you."
"For what purpose?"
The two friends departed-Aramis to return to Paris, Athos to take measures preparatory to an interview with the queen.
I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies.
And they were filthily cold to the touch.
'The next night I did not sleep well.
I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt.
Once or twice I had a feeling of intense fear for which I could perceive no definite reason.
Yet I could not face the mystery.
I don't know if you will understand my feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my back.
At first she watched me in amazement.
And not simply fatigued!
'I was in an agony of discomfort.
The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous!
If only I had thought of a Kodak!
With the last twenty or thirty feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me.
I fell upon my face.
There was once a man who loved his wife dearly.
After they had been married for a time they had a little boy.
Some time after that the woman grew sick and did not get well.
She was sick for a long time. The young man loved his wife so much that he did not wish to take a second woman.
Doctoring did not seem to do her any good.
At last she died.
For a few days after this, the man used to take his baby on his back and travel out away from the camp, walking over the hills, crying and mourning.
He felt badly, and he did not know what to do.
After a time he said to the little child, "My little boy, you will have to go and live with your grandmother.
I shall go away and try to find your mother and bring her back."
He took the baby to his mother's lodge and asked her to take care of it and left it with her.
Then he started away, not knowing where he was going nor what he should do.
When he left the camp, he travelled toward the Sand Hills.
On the fourth night of his journeying he had a dream.
He dreamed that he went into a little lodge in which was an old woman.
This old woman said to him, "Why are you here, my son?"
The young man replied, "I am mourning day and night, crying all the while.
"Well," asked the old woman, "for whom are you mourning?"
The young man answered, "I am mourning for my wife.
She died some time ago.
I am looking for her."
"Oh, I saw her," said the old woman; "she passed this way.
I myself have no great power to help you, but over by that far butte beyond, lives another old woman.
Go to her and she will give you power to continue your journey.
You could not reach the place you are seeking without help.
Beyond the next butte from her lodge you will find the camp of the ghosts."
The next morning the young man awoke and went on toward the next butte.
It took him a long summer's day to get there, but he found there no lodge, so he lay down and slept.
Again he dreamed.
In his dream he saw a little lodge, and saw an old woman come to the door and heard her call to him.
He went into the lodge, and she spoke to him.
"My son, you are very unhappy.
I know why you have come this way. You are looking for your wife who is now in the ghost country.
It is a very hard thing for you to get there.
You may not be able to get your wife back, but I have great power and I will do for you all that I can.
If you act as I advise, you may succeed."
Other wise words she spoke to him, telling him what he should do; also she gave him a bundle of mysterious things which would help him on his journey.
She went on to say, "You stay here for a time and I will go over there to the ghosts' camp and try to bring back some of your relations who are there.
If it is possible for me to bring them back, you may return there with them, but on the way you must shut your eyes.
If you should open them and look about you, you would die.
Then you would never come back.
When you come to the camp you will pass by a big lodge and they will ask you, 'Where are you going and who told you to come here?' You must answer, 'My grandmother, who is standing out here with me, told me to come.' They will try to scare you; they will make fearful noises and you will see strange and terrible things, but do not be afraid."
He went with this relation to the ghosts' camp. When they came to the large lodge some one called out and asked the man what he was doing there, and he answered as the old woman had told him.
Presently he came to another lodge, and the man who owned it came out and spoke to him, asking where he was going.
The young man said, "I am looking for my dead wife.
I mourn for her so much that I cannot rest.
My little boy too keeps crying for his mother.
They have offered to give me other wives, but I do not want them.
I want the one for whom I am searching."
The ghost said, "It is a fearful thing that you have come here; it is very likely that you will never go away.
Never before has there been a person here."
The ghost asked him to come into his lodge, and he entered.
This chief ghost said to him, "You shall stay here for four nights and you shall see your wife, but you must be very careful or you will never go back.
You will die here in this very place."
Now when these invited ghosts had reached the lodge they did not like to go in.
They said to each other, "There is a person here"; it seemed as if they did not like the smell of a human being.
The chief ghost said to them, "Now pity this son in law of yours.
He is looking for his wife.
Neither the great distance that he has come nor the fearful sights that he has seen here have weakened his heart.
You can see how tender hearted he is.
He not only mourns because he has lost his wife, but he mourns because his little boy is now alone, with no mother; so pity him and give him back his wife."
The ghosts talked among themselves, and one of them said to the man, "Yes; you shall stay here for four nights, and then we will give you a medicine pipe-the Worm Pipe-and we will give you back your wife and you may return to your home."
Now, after the third night the chief ghost called together all the people, and they came, and with them came the man's wife.
One of the ghosts was beating a drum, and following him was another who carried the Worm Pipe, which they gave to him.
Then the chief ghost said, "Now be very careful; to morrow you and your wife will start on your journey homeward.
During this time you must keep your eyes shut; do not open them, or you will return here and be a ghost forever.
Your wife is not now a person.
But in the middle of the fourth day you will be told to look, and when you have opened your eyes you will see that your wife has become a person, and that your ghost relations have disappeared."
Before the man went away his father in law spoke to him and said, "When you get near home you must not go at once into the camp.
Let some of your relations know that you have come, and ask them to build a sweat house for you.
Go into that sweat house and wash your body thoroughly, leaving no part of it, however small, uncleansed. If you fail in this, you will die.
There is something about the ghosts that it is difficult to remove.
It can only be removed by a thorough sweat.
Take care now that you do what I tell you.
Do not whip your wife, nor strike her with a knife, nor hit her with fire. If you do, she will vanish before your eyes and return here."
They left the ghost country to go home, and on the fourth day the wife said to her husband, "Open your eyes." He looked about him and saw that those who had been with them had disappeared, and he found that they were standing in front of the old woman's lodge by the butte.
She came out of her lodge and said to them, "Stop; give me back those mysterious medicines of mine, whose power helped you to do what you wished." The man returned them to her, and then once more became really a living person.
When they drew near to the camp the woman went on ahead and sat down on a butte.
Then some curious persons came out to see who this might be.
As they approached the woman called out to them, "Do not come any nearer.
The man told them where he had been and how he had managed to get his wife back, and that the pipe hanging over the doorway was a medicine pipe-the Worm Pipe-presented to him by his ghost father in law.
That is how the people came to possess the Worm Pipe.
That pipe belongs to the band of Piegans known as the Worm People.
Not long after this, once in the night, this man told his wife to do something, and when she did not begin at once he picked up a brand from the fire and raised it-not that he intended to strike her with it, but he made as if he would-when all at once she vanished and was never seen again.
THE FIRST QUARREL
"I'll give you three guesses, Madge." Dicky stood just inside the door of the living room, holding an immense parcel carefully wrapped.
His hat was on the back of his head, his eyes shining, his whole face aglow with boyish mischief.
"It's for you, my first housekeeping present, that is needed in every well regulated family," he burlesqued boastfully, "but you are not to see it until we have something to eat, and you have guessed what it is."
"I know it is something lovely, dear," I replied sedately, "but come to your dinner.
It is getting cold."
Dicky looked a trifle hurt as he followed me to the dining room.
I knew what he expected-enthusiastic curiosity and a demand for the immediate opening of the parcel, I can imagine the pretty enthusiasm, the caresses with which almost any other woman would have greeted a bridegroom of two weeks with his first present.
But it's simply impossible for me to gush.
I cannot express emotion of any kind with the facility of most women.
I worshipped my mother, but I rarely kissed her or expressed my love for her in words.
My love for Dicky terrifies me sometimes, it is so strong, but I cannot go up to him and offer him an unsolicited kiss or caress.
Respond to his caresses, yes! but offer them of my own volition, never!
There is something inside me that makes it an absolute impossibility.
"What's the menu, Madge?
The beef again?"
Dicky's tone was mildly quizzical, his smile mischievous, but I flushed hotly.
He had touched a sore spot.
The butcher had brought me a huge slab of meat for my first dinner when I had timidly ordered "rib roast," and with the aid of my mother's cook book and my own smattering of cooking, my sole housewifely accomplishment, I had been trying to disguise it for subsequent meals.
"This is positively its last appearance on any stage," I assured him, trying to be gay.
"Besides, it's a casserole, with rice, and I defy you to detect whether the chief ingredient be fish, flesh or fowl."
"Casserole is usually my pet aversion," Dicky said solemnly.
Look not on the casserole when it is table d'hote, is one of the pet little proverbs in my immediate set.
Too much like Spanish steak and the other good chances for ptomaines.
"Dicky, you surely do not think I would use meat that was doubtful, do you?" I asked, horror stricken.
"Don't eat it.
Wait and I'll fix up some eggs for you."
Dicky rose stiffly, walked slowly around to my side of the table, and gravely tapped my head in imitation of a phrenologist.
"Absolute depression where the bump called 'sense of humor' ought to be.
Too bad!
Pretty creature, too.
Cause her lots of trouble, in the days to come," he chanted solemnly.
Then he bent and kissed me.
"Don't be a goose, Madge," he admonished, "and never, never take me seriously.
I don't know the meaning of the word.
Come on, let's eat the thing um bob.
He uncovered the casserole and regarded the steaming contents critically.
"Smells scrumptious," he announced.
"What's in the other? Potatoes au gratin?" as he took off the cover of the other serving dish.
"Good!
One of my favorites."
He ate heartily of both dishes, ignoring or not noticing that I scarcely touched either dish.
For I was fast lapsing into one of the moods which my little mother used to call my "morbid streaks" and which she had vainly tried to cure ever since I was a tiny girl.
Dicky didn't like my cooking!
He was only pretending!
Dicky was disappointed in the way I received the announcement of his present! Probably he soon would find me wanting in other things.
When I brought on the baked apples which I had prepared with especial care for dessert, Dick gave them one glance which to my oversensitive mind looked disparaging.
Then he pushed back his chair.
"Don't believe I want any dessert today.
"Whatever in the world?" I began as Dicky lifted the lid and revealed a big Angora cat.
Then my voice changed.
"Why, Dicky, you don't mean-"
But Dicky was absorbed in lifting the cat out.
"Why not?" Dicky's tone was sharper than I had ever heard it.
He set the cat down on the floor and she walked over to me.
I pushed her away gently with my foot as I replied:
"Oh, get out of it, Madge," Dicky interrupted.
"Forget that scientific foolishness you absorbed when you were school ma'aming.
Besides, this cat is a thoroughbred, never been outside the home where she was born till now.
A cool two hundred, that's all.
It seems to me you might try to get over your prejudices, especially when I tell you that I am very fond of cats and like to see them around."
Dicky's voice held a note of appeal, but I chose to ignore it.
My particular little devil must have sat at my elbow.
"I am sorry," I said coldly, "but really, I do not see why it is any more incumbent on me to try to overcome my very real aversion to cats than it is for you to try to do without their society."
"Very well," Dicky exclaimed angrily, turning toward the door.
"If you feel that way about it, there is nothing more to be said."
Then Dicky slammed the living room door behind him to emphasize his words, went down the hall, slammed the apartment door and ran down the steps.
Back in the living room, huddled up in the big chair which is the chief pride of the woman who rents us the furnished apartment, I sat, as angry as Dicky, and heartsick besides.
Our first quarrel had come!
But the cat remained.
What was I to do with her?
There is no cure for a quarrel like loneliness and reflection.
Dicky had not been gone a half hour after our disagreement over the cat before I was wondering how we both could have been so silly.
I thought it out carefully.
I could see that Dicky was accustomed to having his own way unquestioned.
But I also had the common sense to see that there would be real issues in our lives without wasting our ammunition over a cat.
Then, too, the remembrance of Dicky's happy face when he thought he was surprising me tugged at my heart.
"If he wants a cat, a cat he shall have," I said to myself, and calling my unwelcome guest to me with a resolute determination to do my duty by the beast, no matter how distasteful the task, I was just putting a saucer of milk in front of her when the door opened and Dicky came in like a whirlwind.
"How do you wear sackcloth and ashes?" he cried, catching me in his arms as he made the query.
"If you've got any in the house bring 'em along and I'll put them on.
No nice thing getting angry at your bride, because she doesn't like cats.
I'll take the beast back tomorrow."
"Indeed, you'll do no such thing," I protested.
"You're not the only one who is sorry, I made up my mind before you came back not only to keep this cat, but to learn to like her."
Dicky kissed me.
"You're a brick, sweetheart," he said heartily, "and I've got a reward for you, a peace offering.
Get on your frills, for we're going to a first night.
"Your what?" I was mystified.
"Evening clothes, goose." Dicky threw the words over his shoulder as he took down the telephone receiver.
"Can you dress in half an hour? We have only that."
"I'll be ready."
As I closed the door of my room I heard Dicky ask for the number of the taxicab company where he kept an account.
Impulsively, I started toward him to remonstrate against the extravagance, but stopped as I heard the patter of rain against the windows.
Then, finding the want advertisements of the Sunday papers, I looked carefully through the columns headed "Situations Wanted, Female."
I clipped the advertisements and fastened each neatly to a sheet of notepaper.
Then I wrote beneath each one: "Please call Thursday or Friday.
Ask for mrs Richard Graham, Apartment four, forty six East Twenty ninth street."
I addressed the envelopes properly, inserted the answers in the envelopes, sealed and stamped them, then ran out to the post box on the corner with them.
I walked back very slowly, for there was nothing more that needed to be done, and I could put off no longer the settling of my problem.
I locked the door of my room, pulled down the shade and, exchanging my house dress for a comfortable negligee, lay down upon my bed to think things out.
I sat upright in bed as a thought flashed across my brain.
Was that the reason?
Were his objections to this plan of mine what he pretended they were?
Did he really fear that I might have unpleasant publicity thrust upon me, and that some of our pleasure plans might be spoiled by the weekly lecture engagement?
Or was he the type of man who could not bear his wife to have money or plans or even thoughts which did not originate with him?
A loud ringing at the doorbell awakened me.
For a moment I could not understand how I came to be in bed.
The ring had been the postman's.
The afternoon newspapers lay upon the floor.
It had been forwarded from my old boarding house.
"Miss Margaret Spencer," and then, in the crabbed handwriting of my dear old landlady, "care of mrs Richard Graham."
I opened the letter slowly.
It bore a New Orleans heading, and a date three days before.
"Dear little girl:
I wrote you twice, but have no hope that the letters ever reached you.
But now I am back in God's country, or shall be when I get North, and of course, my first line is to you.
"I shall be in New York two weeks from today, the twenty fourth.
Of course I shall go to my old diggings.
I am looking forward to a real dinner, at a real restaurant, with the realest girl in the world opposite me the first day I strike New York, so get ready for me.
I do hope you have been well and as cheerful as possible.
"JACK."
Joy was the stronger, however.
Dear old Jack was safe at home. But there were adjustments which I must make.
I had my marriage to explain to Jack, and Jack to explain to Dicky.
Nothing but this letter could have so revealed to me the strength of the infatuation for Dicky which had swept me off my feet and resulted in my marriage after only a six months' acquaintance.
Reading it I realized that the memory of Jack had been so pushed into the background during the past six months that I never had thought to tell Dicky about him.
She's planning a frolic for the crowd some night at your convenience."
"That is awfully kind of her.
Where did you see her." I prided myself on my careless tone, but Dicky gave me a shrewd glance.
"Why, at the studio, of course.
Atwood and Barker and she and I are all on one floor, and we often have a dish of tea together when we are not rushed."
How I hated these glimpses of the intimate friendship which must exist between my husband and this woman!
"I suppose we ought to have them all over some night," I said at last, "but I'll have to add a few things to our equipment, and wait until I get a maid."
"That will be fine," Dicky assented cordially, pushing back his chair. "Did the papers come?
I'll look them over for a little.
Whistle when you're ready and I'll wipe the dishes for you."
He strolled into the living room, and I suddenly remembered that I had laid my letter from Jack on the table, with its pages scattered so that any one picking them up could not help seeing them.
I had forgotten all about the letter.
I had meant to show it to Dicky after I had explained about Jack.
It was not quite the letter for a bridegroom to find without expectation.
I realized that.
I could not get the letter without attracting his attention.
I waited, every nerve tense, listening to the sounds in the next room.
I heard the rustling of the newspaper; then a sudden silence told me his attention had been arrested by something.
Would he read the letter?
I did not think so.
I knew his sense of honor was too keen for that, but I remembered that the last page with its signature was at the top of the sheets as I laid them down.
That was enough to make any loving husband reflect a bit.
How would Dicky take it?
I Heard him crush the paper in his hand, then come quickly to the kitchen.
"What does this mean?"
The last words of Jack's letter danced before my eyes, Dicky's hand was shaking so.
Always Jack."
Dicky's face was not a pleasant sight.
It repulsed and disgusted me. Subconsciously I was contrasting the way in which he calmly expected me to accept his friendship for Lillian Gale, and his behavior over this letter.
Five minutes earlier I would have explained to him fully. I resolved now to put my friendship for Jack upon the same basis as his for mrs Underwood.
"Have you read the letter?" I asked quietly.
"You know I have not read the letter." he snarled.
"It lay on the papers.
I could not help but see this-this-whatever it is," he finished lamely, "and I have come straight to you for an explanation."
"Better read the letter," I advised quietly.
"I give you full permission."
I could have laughed at Dicky, if I had been less angry.
"You have no brother.
Is this man a relative?"
"No," I returned demurely.
"An old lover then, I suppose a confident one, I should judge by the tone of the letter.
Dicky's tone fairly dripped with irony.
"He will be surprised certainly," I answered, "but as he never was my lover, I don't think it will be any blow to him."
What does he look like?"
Dicky fairly shot the questions at me.
I turned and went into my room. There I rummaged in a box of old photographs until I found two fairly good likenesses of Jack.
I carried them to the kitchen and put them in Dicky's hands.
He glared at them, then threw them on the table.
Looks like a gorilla with the mumps," he growled.
"Who is this precious party, then, if he is not a lover or a relative?"
Dicky stared at me a long, long look as if he had just discovered me. Then he turned on his heel.
"Well, I'll be-" I did not find out what he would be, for he went out and slammed the door.
I sat down to a humiliating half hour's thought.
It isn't a bad idea at times to "loaf and invite your soul," and then cast up account with it.
My account looked pretty discouraging.
Dicky and I had been married a little over two weeks.
Was this marriage-heights of happiness, depths of despair, with the humdrum of petty differences between?
Lemon Syrup.
If you like the taste of oil of lemon, add a few drops.
Pare the lemons very thin, and put the peel to boil in a quart of water; cover it, to keep in the flavor; put two pounds of loaf sugar to the peel of a dozen lemons, and boil it till it becomes a rich syrup; keep it corked up in a bottle, to season ice cream.
Pine Apple Syrup.
Almond Cream.
Tincture of Vanilla.
Vanilla beans, well bruised, half an ounce; French brandy, one gill; let it stand one week, and it will be fit for use.
Keep it corked tight. This article will keep any length of time, and is very convenient for seasoning ices.
One gallon of cream, two pounds rolled loaf sugar, one tea spoonful of oil of lemon.
If for vanilla cream; use a table spoonful of tincture of vanilla, two eggs beaten; mix well and freeze in the usual way.
The seasoning should be well mixed with the sugar, before it is added to the cream; by this means, it will be all flavored alike.
Coloring for ice cream, may be made in this way: take of powdered cochineal, cream of tartar and powdered alum, each two drachms; of salts of tartar, ten grains; pour upon the powders half a pint of boiling water; let it stand for two hours to settle, or filter through paper. Use as much of this infusion as will give the desired shade.
Freezing Ice Cream.
Take a bucket of ice and pound it fine; mix with it two quarts of salt; put your cream in a freezer; cover it close, and immerse it in the bucket; draw the ice round it, so as to touch every part; after it has been in a few minutes, put in a spoon, and stir it from the edge to the centre.
When the cream is put in a mould, close it and move it in the ice, as you cannot use a spoon without waste.
Ice Cream with Lemon.
Ice Cream with Fruit.
Pokeberry Juice to Stain Ices.
Mash and strain ripe pokeberries; to each pint of juice put a pound of sugar; boil them together till it becomes a jelly; when cold put it in a jar and tie it close; use a small quantity of this to stain ice cream or jelly.
Isinglass Jelly.
Shave an ounce of isinglass, and dissolve it in boiling water; then boil it in a quart of new milk; strain it and sweeten it to your taste; season as you prefer, with rose water, cinnamon, or vanilla.
Blancmange of Jelly.
Calf's Foot Jelly.
Raisins in Syrup.
Make a syrup of half a pound of sugar to a pint of water, boil and skim it; put in five bunches of raisins, and let them boil twenty minutes; if you prefer, you can pick off the stems.
To Blanch Almonds and Peach Kernels.
Pour boiling water on them, which will make them peel easily; either roll them with a bottle on the cake board or pound in a mortar, with a little loaf sugar; they should not be pounded too much or they will be oily; peach kernels make a fine flavoring for custard, but as they contain prussic acid, do not use too many.
Snow Cream.
Dusk
But, she uttered no sound; and so strong was the voice within her, representing that it was she of all the world who must uphold him in his misery and not augment it, that it quickly raised her, even from that shock.
"If I might touch him!
There was but a gaoler left, along with two of the four men who had taken him last night, and Barsad.
The people had all poured out to the show in the streets.
Barsad proposed to the rest, "Let her embrace him then; it is but a moment." It was silently acquiesced in, and they passed her over the seats in the hall to a raised place, where he, by leaning over the dock, could fold her in his arms.
"I can bear it, dear Charles.
I am supported from above: don't suffer for me.
"I send it to her by you.
I kiss her by you.
I say farewell to her by you."
"My husband.
I feel that this will break my heart by and bye; but I will do my duty while I can, and when I leave her, God will raise up friends for her, as He did for me."
"No, no! What have you done, what have you done, that you should kneel to us!
We know, now what you underwent when you suspected my descent, and when you knew it.
We know now, the natural antipathy you strove against, and conquered, for her dear sake.
We thank you with all our hearts, and all our love and duty.
Heaven be with you!"
"It could not be otherwise," said the prisoner.
"All things have worked together as they have fallen out.
Be comforted, and forgive me.
Heaven bless you!"
As he went out at the prisoners' door, she turned, laid her head lovingly on her father's breast, tried to speak to him, and fell at his feet.
Only her father and mr Lorry were with her.
His arm trembled as it raised her, and supported her head. Yet, there was an air about him that was not all of pity-that had a flush of pride in it.
"Shall I take her to a coach?
I shall never feel her weight."
He carried her lightly to the door, and laid her tenderly down in a coach.
Her father and their old friend got into it, and he took his seat beside the driver.
When they arrived at the gateway where he had paused in the dark not many hours before, to picture to himself on which of the rough stones of the street her feet had trodden, he lifted her again, and carried her up the staircase to their rooms.
"Don't recall her to herself," he said, softly, to the latter, "she is better so.
Don't revive her to consciousness, while she only faints."
"Oh, Carton, Carton, dear Carton!" cried little Lucie, springing up and throwing her arms passionately round him, in a burst of grief.
"Now that you have come, I think you will do something to help mamma, something to save papa!
O, look at her, dear Carton!
He bent over the child, and laid her blooming cheek against his face.
"Before I go," he said, and paused-"I may kiss her?"
The child, who was nearest to him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady, that she heard him say, "A life you love."
"You had great influence but yesterday, Doctor Manette; let it at least be tried.
These judges, and all the men in power, are very friendly to you, and very recognisant of your services; are they not?"
"Nothing connected with Charles was concealed from me.
I had the strongest assurances that I should save him; and I did." He returned the answer in great trouble, and very slowly.
"Try them again.
The hours between this and to morrow afternoon are few and short, but try."
"I intend to try.
"That's well.
But try!
Of little worth as life is when we misuse it, it is worth that effort.
It would cost nothing to lay down if it were not."
"I will go," said Doctor Manette, "to the Prosecutor and the President straight, and I will go to others whom it is better not to name.
I will write too, and-But stay!
"That's true.
Well!
I expect nothing!
When are you likely to have seen these dread powers, Doctor Manette?"
"Immediately after dark, I should hope.
Within an hour or two from this."
"It will be dark soon after four.
Let us stretch the hour or two.
If I go to mr Lorry's at nine, shall I hear what you have done, either from our friend or from yourself?"
"May you prosper!"
mr Lorry followed Sydney to the outer door, and, touching him on the shoulder as he was going away, caused him to turn.
"Nor have i"
"If any one of these men, or all of these men, were disposed to spare him-which is a large supposition; for what is his life, or any man's to them!--I doubt if they durst spare him after the demonstration in the court."
"And so do i I heard the fall of the axe in that sound."
"Don't despond," said Carton, very gently; "don't grieve.
"Yes.
He will perish: there is no real hope," echoed Carton.
And walked with a settled step, down stairs.
twelve. Darkness
Sydney Carton paused in the street, not quite decided where to go.
"At Tellson's banking house at nine," he said, with a musing face.
"Shall I do well, in the mean time, to show myself?
I think so.
But care, care, care! Let me think it out!"
Checking his steps which had begun to tend towards an object, he took a turn or two in the already darkening street, and traced the thought in his mind to its possible consequences.
His first impression was confirmed.
Defarge had described himself, that day, as the keeper of a wine shop in the Saint Antoine suburb.
It was not difficult for one who knew the city well, to find his house without asking any question.
Having ascertained its situation, Carton came out of those closer streets again, and dined at a place of refreshment and fell sound asleep after dinner.
It was as late as seven o'clock when he awoke refreshed, and went out into the streets again.
As he passed along towards Saint Antoine, he stopped at a shop window where there was a mirror, and slightly altered the disordered arrangement of his loose cravat, and his coat collar, and his wild hair.
This done, he went on direct to Defarge's, and went in.
There happened to be no customer in the shop but Jacques Three, of the restless fingers and the croaking voice.
As Carton walked in, took his seat and asked (in very indifferent French) for a small measure of wine, Madame Defarge cast a careless glance at him, and then a keener, and then a keener, and then advanced to him herself, and asked him what it was he had ordered.
"English?" asked Madame Defarge, inquisitively raising her dark eyebrows.
After looking at her, as if the sound of even a single French word were slow to express itself to him, he answered, in his former strong foreign accent.
I am English!"
Madame Defarge returned to her counter to get the wine, and, as he took up a Jacobin journal and feigned to pore over it puzzling out its meaning, he heard her say, "I swear to you, like Evremonde!"
Defarge brought him the wine, and gave him Good Evening.
"How?"
"Good evening."
"Oh!
Good evening, citizen," filling his glass.
"Ah! and good wine.
I drink to the Republic."
"Why stop?
There is great force in that.
"Well, well," reasoned Defarge, "but one must stop somewhere.
After all, the question is still where?"
"Magnificent!" croaked Jacques Three.
The Vengeance, also, highly approved.
But this Doctor has suffered much; you have seen him to day; you have observed his face when the paper was read."
I have observed his face to be not the face of a true friend of the Republic.
Let him take care of his face!"
I have observed her to day, and I have observed her other days.
I have observed her in the court, and I have observed her in the street by the prison.
Let me but lift my finger-!" She seemed to raise it (the listener's eyes were always on his paper), and to let it fall with a rattle on the ledge before her, as if the axe had dropped.
"She is an Angel!" said The Vengeance, and embraced her.
"Not if to lift this glass would do it!
I say, stop there."
Listen!
Ask my husband, is that so."
"In the beginning of the great days, when the Bastille falls, he finds this paper of to day, and he brings it home, and in the middle of the night when this place is clear and shut, we read it, here on this spot, by the light of this lamp.
"That night, I tell him, when the paper is read through, and the lamp is burnt out, and the day is gleaming in above those shutters and between those iron bars, that I have now a secret to communicate.
Ask him, is that so."
"I communicate to him that secret.
"It is so," assented Defarge once more.
"Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop," returned madame; "but don't tell me."
Both her hearers derived a horrible enjoyment from the deadly nature of her wrath-the listener could feel how white she was, without seeing her-and both highly commended it.
Defarge, a weak minority, interposed a few words for the memory of the compassionate wife of the Marquis; but only elicited from his own wife a repetition of her last reply.
"Tell the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me!"
The English customer paid for what he had had, perplexedly counted his change, and asked, as a stranger, to be directed towards the National Palace.
Madame Defarge took him to the door, and put her arm on his, in pointing out the road. The English customer was not without his reflections then, that it might be a good deed to seize that arm, lift it, and strike under it sharp and deep.
But, he went his way, and was soon swallowed up in the shadow of the prison wall.
He said he had been with Lucie until just now, and had only left her for a few minutes, to come and keep his appointment.
Her father had not been seen, since he quitted the banking house towards four o'clock.
He had been more than five hours gone: where could he be?
He waited and waited, and the clock struck twelve; but Doctor Manette did not come back.
Where could he be?
The instant he entered the room, it was plain that all was lost.
As he stood staring at them, they asked him no question, for his face told them everything.
"I cannot find it," said he, "and I must have it.
Where is it?"
I have been looking everywhere for my bench, and I can't find it.
What have they done with my work?
They looked at one another, and their hearts died within them.
Receiving no answer, he tore his hair, and beat his feet upon the ground, like a distracted child.
"Don't torture a poor forlorn wretch," he implored them, with a dreadful cry; "but give me my work!
It was so clearly beyond hope to reason with him, or try to restore him, that-as if by agreement-they each put a hand upon his shoulder, and soothed him to sit down before the fire, with a promise that he should have his work presently.
He sank into the chair, and brooded over the embers, and shed tears.
As if all that had happened since the garret time were a momentary fancy, or a dream, mr Lorry saw him shrink into the exact figure that Defarge had had in keeping.
Affected, and impressed with terror as they both were, by this spectacle of ruin, it was not a time to yield to such emotions.
His lonely daughter, bereft of her final hope and reliance, appealed to them both too strongly.
Again, as if by agreement, they looked at one another with one meaning in their faces.
Carton was the first to speak:
"The last chance is gone: it was not much.
Yes; he had better be taken to her.
But, before you go, will you, for a moment, steadily attend to me?
"I do not doubt it," answered mr Lorry.
"Say on."
Carton stooped to pick up the coat, which lay almost entangling his feet.
Carton took it up, and there was a folded paper in it.
"We should look at this!" he said.
mr Lorry nodded his consent.
"What is it?" asked mr Lorry, eagerly.
"A moment!
Let me speak of it in its place.
First," he put his hand in his coat, and took another paper from it, "that is the certificate which enables me to pass out of this city.
Look at it.
You see-Sydney Carton, an Englishman?"
mr Lorry held it open in his hand, gazing in his earnest face.
"Keep it for me until to morrow.
"Why not?"
"I don't know; I prefer not to do so.
Now, take this paper that Doctor Manette has carried about him.
It is a similar certificate, enabling him and his daughter and her child, at any time, to pass the barrier and the frontier!
You see?"
"Yes!"
"Perhaps he obtained it as his last and utmost precaution against evil, yesterday.
When is it dated?
But no matter; don't stay to look; put it up carefully with mine and your own.
It is good, until recalled.
"They are in great danger.
I know it from her own lips.
I have overheard words of that woman's, to night, which have presented their danger to me in strong colours.
He confirms me.
Don't look so horrified.
"Heaven grant I may, Carton!
But how?"
You know it is a capital crime, to mourn for, or sympathise with, a victim of the Guillotine.
She and her father would unquestionably be guilty of this crime, and this woman (the inveteracy of whose pursuit cannot be described) would wait to add that strength to her case, and make herself doubly sure.
You follow me?"
Your preparations have been completed for some days, to return to England.
Early to morrow have your horses ready, so that they may be in starting trim at two o'clock in the afternoon."
"It shall be done!"
His manner was so fervent and inspiring, that mr Lorry caught the flame, and was as quick as youth.
"You are a noble heart.
"For the sake of her child and her father, press upon her the necessity of leaving Paris, with them and you, at that hour.
Tell her that it was her husband's last arrangement.
"I thought so.
Quietly and steadily have all these arrangements made in the courtyard here, even to the taking of your own seat in the carriage. The moment I come to you, take me in, and drive away."
"I understand that I wait for you under all circumstances?"
"You have my certificate in your hand with the rest, you know, and will reserve my place.
Wait for nothing but to have my place occupied, and then for England!"
"Why, then," said mr Lorry, grasping his eager but so firm and steady hand, "it does not all depend on one old man, but I shall have a young and ardent man at my side."
Promise me solemnly that nothing will influence you to alter the course on which we now stand pledged to one another."
"Nothing, Carton."
I hope to do my part faithfully."
"And I hope to do mine.
Now, good bye!"
Though he said it with a grave smile of earnestness, and though he even put the old man's hand to his lips, he did not part from him then.
He helped him so far to arouse the rocking figure before the dying embers, as to get a cloak and hat put upon it, and to tempt it forth to find where the bench and work were hidden that it still moaningly besought to have.
He walked on the other side of it and protected it to the courtyard of the house where the afflicted heart-so happy in the memorable time when he had revealed his own desolate heart to it-outwatched the awful night.
He entered the courtyard and remained there for a few moments alone, looking up at the light in the window of her room.
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, did housemaid's work for them. Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond bone sirloins, three shilling tea and the best bottled stout.
They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.
And then it was long after ten o'clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife.
"O, mr Conroy," said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, "Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming.
Good night, mrs Conroy."
"Miss Kate, here's mrs Conroy."
Both of them kissed Gabriel's wife, said she must be perished alive, and asked was Gabriel with her.
"Is it snowing again, mr Conroy?" asked Lily.
Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.
Just... here's a little...."
He walked rapidly towards the door.
They both kissed Gabriel frankly.
"Don't mind him, Aunt Kate," she said.
"He's really an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom's eyes at night and making him do the dumb bells, and forcing Eva to eat the stirabout.
The poor child!
"Of course, you've seen about the room.
She's not the girl she was at all."
Julia! Julia!
Julia, there's Miss Daly and Miss Power will take some refreshment.
"God help me," he said, smiling, "it's the doctor's orders."
"And his poor mother made him take the pledge on New Year's Eve.
"In that case," said Tom Cecial, "I was a madman of my own accord when I volunteered to become your squire, and, of my own accord, I'll leave off being one and go home."
"That's your affair," returned Samson, "but to suppose that I am going home until I have given Don Quixote a thrashing is absurd; and it is not any wish that he may recover his senses that will make me hunt him out now, but a wish for the sore pain I am in with my ribs won't let me entertain more charitable thoughts."
Thus discoursing, the pair proceeded until they reached a town where it was their good luck to find a bone setter, with whose help the unfortunate Samson was cured.
CHAPTER sixteen.
Have I ever been by any chance his enemy?
Am I his rival, or does he profess arms, that he should envy the fame I have acquired in them?"
The trappings of the mare were of the field and jineta fashion, and of mulberry colour and green.
When the traveller came up with them he saluted them courteously, and spurring his mare was passing them without stopping, but Don Quixote called out to him, "Gallant sir, if so be your worship is going our road, and has no occasion for speed, it would be a pleasure to me if we were to join company."
"In truth," replied he on the mare, "I would not pass you so hastily but for fear that horse might turn restive in the company of my mare."
In short, to sum up all in a few words, or in a single one, I may tell you I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, otherwise called 'The Knight of the Rueful Countenance;' for though self praise is degrading, I must perforce sound my own sometimes, that is to say, when there is no one at hand to do it for me.
"I doubt it," said Don Quixote, "but never mind that just now; if our journey lasts long enough, I trust in God I shall show your worship that you do wrong in going with the stream of those who regard it as a matter of certainty that they are not true."
To this, he in the green gaban replied "I, Sir Knight of the Rueful Countenance, am a gentleman by birth, native of the village where, please God, we are going to dine today; I am more than fairly well off, and my name is Don Diego de Miranda.
I hear mass every day; I share my substance with the poor, making no display of good works, lest I let hypocrisy and vainglory, those enemies that subtly take possession of the most watchful heart, find an entrance into mine.
Seeing this the gentleman asked him, "What are you about, brother?
What are these kisses for?"
"I am no saint," replied the gentleman, "but a great sinner; but you are, brother, for you must be a good fellow, as your simplicity shows."
"I, Senor Don Quixote," answered the gentleman, "have one son, without whom, perhaps, I should count myself happier than I am, not because he is a bad son, but because he is not so good as I could wish.
Poetry, gentle sir, is, as I take it, like a tender young maiden of supreme beauty, to array, bedeck, and adorn whom is the task of several other maidens, who are all the rest of the sciences; and she must avail herself of the help of all, and all derive their lustre from her.
But this maiden will not bear to be handled, nor dragged through the streets, nor exposed either at the corners of the market places, or in the closets of palaces.
She is the product of an Alchemy of such virtue that he who is able to practise it, will turn her into pure gold of inestimable worth.
He, then, who shall embrace and cultivate poetry under the conditions I have named, shall become famous, and his name honoured throughout all the civilised nations of the earth.
The reason is, that art does not surpass nature, but only brings it to perfection; and thus, nature combined with art, and art with nature, will produce a perfect poet.
"Woolidge, ma'am."
Do you leave a family?"
"You see, Jim went last year, and got pretty well used up; so I felt as if I'd ought to take my turn now.
There was just time for this, a hearty shake of the big hand, and a grateful "Good by, ma'am;" then the word was given, and they were off.
As the inspiring music, the grand tramp, drew near, the old thrill went through the crowd, the old cheer broke out.
"Eat!
"All that's left of me.
"What is the matter?
Shot off as slick as a whistle.
"That is bad, but it might have been worse.
He must have been suffering terribly, but he thought of the women who loved him before himself, and, busy as I was, I snatched a moment to send a few words of hope to the old mother.
"He will have a hard time of it, but I think he will pull through, as he is a temperate fellow, with a splendid constitution," was the doctor's verdict, as he left us for the next man, who was past help, with a bullet through his lungs.
"Think so?
'Pears to me I couldn't ask her to take care of three invalids for my sake.
"All right, ma'am;" and Joe proved himself a good soldier by obeying orders, and falling asleep like a tired child, as the first step toward recovery.
I kept that card among my other relics, and hoped to meet Joe again somewhere in the world.
I don't know much about him, except that he was in the army, has been very ill with rheumatic fever, and is friendless.
He won't go to his own town, because there is nothing for him there but the almshouse, and he dreads a hospital; so struggles along, trying to earn his bread tending babies with his one arm.
I'll go and see him; I've a weakness for soldiers, sick or well."
How he managed with one arm to keep the baby from squirming on to the floor, the plate from upsetting, and to feed the hungry urchins who stood in a row with open mouths, like young birds, was past my comprehension.
But he did, trotting baby gently, dealing out sweet morsels patiently, and whistling to himself, as if to beguile his labors cheerfully.
For an instant I could not speak to him, and, encumbered with baby, dish, spoon, and children, he could only stare at me with a sudden brightening of the altered face that made it full of welcome before a word was uttered.
You go in the corner, and take turns lickin' the dish, while I see company," said Joe, disbanding his small troop, and shouldering the baby as if presenting arms in honor of his guest.
But my orders ain't come yet, and I am doing the fust thing that come along.
"Really, ma'am?
I used to lay and kind of dream about it when I couldn't stir without yellin' out; but I never thought it would ever come to happen.
I see a piece in the paper describing it, and it sounded dreadful nice.
You should have gone home to Woolwich, and let your friends help you," I said, feeling provoked with him for hiding himself.
"No, ma'am!" he answered, with a look I never shall forget, it was so full of mingled patience, pride, and pain.
As for asking help of folks I used to know, I couldn't do it; and if you think I'd go to Lucindy, though she is wal off, you don't know Joe Collins.
Hooray for Biddy Flanagin!
God bless her!" and, as if to find a vent for the emotion that filled his eyes with grateful tears, Joe led off the cheer, which the children shrilly echoed, and I joined heartily.
It won't take you long to pack up, will it?" I asked, as we subsided with a general laugh.
"I reckon not as I don't own any clothes but what I set in, except a couple of old shirts and them socks.
My hat's stoppin' up the winder, and my old coat is my bed cover.
I'm awful shabby, ma'am, and that's one reason I don't go out more.
There was such a beautiful absence of red tape about the new institution that it only needed a word in the right ear to set things going; and then, with a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together, Joe Collins was taken up and safely landed in the Home he so much needed and so well deserved.
mr MICAWBER'S TRANSACTIONS
As it was, an interval occurred before I fully knew my own distress; an interval, in which I even supposed that its sharpest pangs were past; and when my mind could soothe itself by resting on all that was most innocent and beautiful, in the tender story that was closed for ever.
I was to go abroad.
'Madam, you do us a great deal of honour,' he rejoined.
'Madam,' he replied, 'mrs
'mrs
'No doubt.
'mr
If so, that is their misfortune.
All I would say is, that I can go abroad without your family coming forward to favour me,--in short, with a parting Shove of their cold shoulders; and that, upon the whole, I would rather leave England with such impetus as I possess, than derive any acceleration of it from that quarter.
At the same time, my dear, if they should condescend to reply to your communications-which our joint experience renders most improbable-far be it from me to be a barrier to your wishes.'
'My dear Copperfield,' said Traddles, leaning back in his chair when they were gone, and looking at me with an affection that made his eyes red, and his hair all kinds of shapes, 'I don't make any excuse for troubling you with business, because I know you are deeply interested in it, and it may divert your thoughts.
'I am quite myself,' said I, after a pause.
'But even that is not all,' said i 'During the last fortnight, some new trouble has vexed her; and she has been in and out of London every day. Several times she has gone out early, and been absent until evening. Last night, Traddles, with this journey before her, it was almost midnight before she came home.
'I must do mr Micawber the justice to say,' Traddles began, 'that although he would appear not to have worked to any good account for himself, he is a most untiring man when he works for other people.
I never saw such a fellow.
If he always goes on in the same way, he must be, virtually, about two hundred years old, at present.
The heat into which he has been continually putting himself; and the distracted and impetuous manner in which he has been diving, day and night, among papers and books; to say nothing of the immense number of letters he has written me between this house and mr Wickfield's, and often across the table when he has been sitting opposite, and might much more easily have spoken; is quite extraordinary.'
Trot, you know it.'
'I am happy to say, Miss Wickfield,' pursued Traddles, at once with great delicacy and with great earnestness, 'that in your absence mr Wickfield has considerably improved.
At times, even his impaired power of concentrating his memory and attention on particular points of business, has recovered itself very much; and he has been able to assist us in making some things clear, that we should have found very difficult indeed, if not hopeless, without him.
Dear mr Traddles and dear Trotwood, papa once free with honour, what could I wish for!
So many people know me here, and think kindly of me, that I am certain.
'Next, Miss Trotwood,' said Traddles, 'that property of yours.'
'All I have got to say about it is, that if it's gone, I can bear it; and if it's not gone, I shall be glad to get it back.'
'Five thousand pounds,' said Traddles.
One, I paid for your articles, Trot, my dear; and the other two I have by me. When I lost the rest, I thought it wise to say nothing about that sum, but to keep it secretly for a rainy day.
'Don't congratulate me, anybody!' exclaimed my aunt.
'And indeed,' said Traddles, 'it was sold, by virtue of the power of management he held from you; but I needn't say by whom sold, or on whose actual signature.
It was afterwards pretended to mr Wickfield, by that rascal,--and proved, too, by figures,--that he had possessed himself of the money (on general instructions, he said) to keep other deficiencies and difficulties from the light.
mr Wickfield, being so weak and helpless in his hands as to pay you, afterwards, several sums of interest on a pretended principal which he knew did not exist, made himself, unhappily, a party to the fraud.'
Upon which I paid him a visit early one morning, called for a candle, burnt the letter, and told him if he ever could right me and himself, to do it; and if he couldn't, to keep his own counsel for his daughter's sake.---If anybody speaks to me, I'll leave the house!'
'Why, the fact is,' returned Traddles, 'mr
Micawber had so completely hemmed him in, and was always ready with so many new points if an old one failed, that he could not escape from us.
He said so to me, plainly.
'Ha!' said my aunt, knitting her brows thoughtfully, and glancing at Agnes. 'And what's become of him?'
'I don't know.
He seemed to consider himself hardly less indebted to me, than to mr Micawber; which I consider (as I told him) quite a compliment.'
He is such an incarnate hypocrite, that whatever object he pursues, he must pursue crookedly.
Always creeping along the ground to some small end or other, he will always magnify every object in the way; and consequently will hate and suspect everybody that comes, in the most innocent manner, between him and it.
'Really I don't know about that,' observed Traddles thoughtfully.
'Well!
'Yes, but I don't know when they may be proceeded on, or where they are,' rejoined Traddles, opening his eyes; 'and I anticipate, that, between this time and his departure, mr Micawber will be constantly arrested, or taken in execution.'
'What's the amount altogether?'
'Why, mr Micawber has entered the transactions-he calls them transactions-with great form, in a book,' rejoined Traddles, smiling; 'and he makes the amount a hundred and three pounds, five.'
What should it be?
Five hundred pounds?'
We both recommended a small sum in money, and the payment, without stipulation to mr Micawber, of the Uriah claims as they came in.
To this, I added the suggestion, that I should give some explanation of his character and history to mr Peggotty, who I knew could be relied on; and that to mr Peggotty should be quietly entrusted the discretion of advancing another hundred.
'There was-pardon me-really such a person, and at all in his power?' hinted Traddles.
'You are quite right,' she said.
And don't any of you speak to me!' With that she smoothed her dress, and sat, with her upright carriage, looking at the door.
We, being quite prepared for this event, which was of course a proceeding of Uriah Heep's, soon paid the money; and in five minutes more mr Micawber was seated at the table, filling up the stamps with an expression of perfect joy, which only that congenial employment, or the making of punch, could impart in full completeness to his shining face.
To see him at work on the stamps, with the relish of an artist, touching them like pictures, looking at them sideways, taking weighty notes of dates and amounts in his pocket book, and contemplating them when finished, with a high sense of their precious value, was a sight indeed.
We passed the night at the old house, which, freed from the presence of the Heeps, seemed purged of a disease; and I lay in my old room, like a shipwrecked wanderer come home.
'You understand it now, Trot,' said my aunt.
'Did he die in the hospital?'
When he knew his state in this last illness, he asked them to send for me.
He was sorry then.
'I went.
'He died the night before we went to Canterbury?' said i My aunt nodded.
'He was a fine looking man when I married him, Trot-and he was sadly changed!'
After the relief of tears, she soon became composed, and even cheerful.
So we rode back to her little cottage at Highgate, where we found the following short note, which had arrived by that morning's post from mr Micawber:
There was once a poor Prince.
On the grave of the Prince's father grew a rose tree, a very beautiful rose tree.
Its scent was so sweet that when you smelt it you forgot all your cares and troubles.
This rose and this nightingale the Princess was to have, and so they were both put into silver caskets and sent to her.
The Emperor had them brought to him in the great hall, where the Princess was playing 'Here comes a duke a riding' with her ladies in waiting.
'If only it were a little pussy cat!' she said.
But the rose tree with the beautiful rose came out.
'Yes,' said the Emperor; and then he wept like a little child.
'Yes, it is a real bird,' said those who had brought it.
'Then let the bird fly away,' said the Princess; and she would not on any account allow the Prince to come.
'But he was nothing daunted.
He painted his face brown and black, drew his cap well over his face, and knocked at the door.
'Yes,' said the Emperor, 'but there are so many who ask for a place that I don't know whether there will be one for you; but, still, I will think of you.
Stay, it has just occurred to me that I want someone to look after the swine, for I have so very many of them.'
And the Prince got the situation of Imperial Swineherd.
He had a wretched little room close to the pigsties; here he had to stay, but the whole day he sat working, and when evening was come he had made a pretty little pot.
'Where is Augustus dear? Alas! he's not here, here, here!'
But the most wonderful thing was, that when one held one's finger in the steam of the pot, then at once one could smell what dinner was ready in any fire place in the town.
Now the Princess came walking past with all her ladies in waiting, and when she heard the tune she stood still and her face beamed with joy, for she also could play 'Where is Augustus dear?'
'Why, that is what I play!' she said.
Listen!
Go down and ask him what the instrument costs.'
'What will you take for the pot?' asked the lady in waiting.
'I will have ten kisses from the Princess,' answered the Swineherd.
'Heaven forbid!' said the lady in waiting.
'Yes, I will sell it for nothing less,' replied the Swineherd.
'Well, what does he say?' asked the Princess.
'Where is Augustus dear? Alas! he's not here, here, here.'
'Listen!' said the Princess.
'No, thank you,' said the Swineherd. 'Ten kisses from the Princess, or else I keep my pot.'
'That is very tiresome!' said the Princess. 'But you must put yourselves in front of me, so that no one can see.'
And the ladies in waiting placed themselves in front and then spread out their dresses; so the Swineherd got his ten kisses, and she got the pot.
What happiness that was!
The whole night and the whole day the pot was made to boil; there was not a fire place in the whole town where they did not know what was being cooked, whether it was at the chancellor's or at the shoemaker's.
'But don't say anything about it, for I am the Emperor's daughter.'
'Oh, no, of course we won't!' said everyone.
'I have never heard a more beautiful composition.
Listen!
Go down and ask him what this instrument costs; but I won't kiss him again.'
'One ought to encourage art,' she said.
'I am the Emperor's daughter! Tell him he shall have, as before, ten kisses; the rest he can take from my ladies in waiting.'
'That's nonsense,' said the Princess; 'and if I can kiss him, you can too.
He rubbed his eyes and put on his spectacles. 'Why those are the ladies in waiting playing their games; I must go down to them.'
So he took off his shoes, which were shoes though he had trodden them down into slippers.
He stood on tiptoe.
'Be off with you!' said the Emperor, for he was very angry.
'Alas, what an unhappy creature I am!' sobbed the Princess.
'If only I had taken the beautiful Prince!
And the Swineherd went behind a tree, washed the black and brown off his face, threw away his old clothes, and then stepped forward in his splendid dress, looking so beautiful that the Princess was obliged to courtesy.
'I now come to this.
McLean entered the swale and hunted up the bark.
"Freckles james Ross McLean!" she was saying.
"You fill me with dark blue despair!
Answer me that, please."
"You are a fraud," she said.
"Well," said the Angel disgustedly, "it seems to me that if I had all the things to be proud of that you have, I'd lift up my head and sing!"
"And what is it I've to be proud of, ma'am?" politely inquired Freckles.
Proud!
Fancy England an appendage!
"In darkness I found thee" [She held it to the light],
"And gave all thy chords to light, freedom, and song" [She crashed into the notes of the accompaniment she had been playing for Freckles].
Now you go over there and do it!
She was smiling encouragingly now, and as she came toward him, she struck the chords full and strong.
The heart of poor Freckles almost burst with dull pain and his great love for her.
He literally burst forth:
He had given his best and his all.
Then she stepped back and faced him.
"Dear boy!
Freckles, when you go into the world, if you can face a big audience and sing like that, just once, you will be immortal, and anything you want will be yours."
"Anything!" gasped Freckles.
"Anything," said the Angel.
The Bird Woman stared across the gently waving swale.
"He took no advantage.
He never even offered to touch her.
McLean lifted his hat.
It was her first visit.
That was a happy day.
He stepped into the bright, cosy little kitchen, and as he reached down the wash basin he asked mrs Duncan a question.
"Mother Duncan, do kisses wash off?"
They dinna stay on the outside.
"What now, Freckles?" asked mrs Duncan.
I'm supposing it's my doings, but it all happened by accident, like.
I just cut the grass short all around it.
Then I started at the ground, trimmed up the trunk near the height of me shoulder, and left the top spreading.
You see, cutting off the limbs and trimming up the trunk sets the sap running.
"Why, just an army of black ants.
The snake feeders are too full to feed anything-even more sap to themselves.
There's a lot of hard backed bugs-beetles, I guess-colored like the brown, blue, and black of a peacock's tail.
You never saw the like of the beauties!
They come every color you could be naming, and every shape you could be thinking up.
He could find no trace of anything, yet he felt a tense nervousness, as if trouble might be brooding.
His heart tugged in his breast as he mentally measured the print, but he did not linger, for now the feeling arose that he was being watched.
Several times he locked the wheel and crossed the swamp on foot, zigzagging to cover all the space possible.
"So you could come?
"Were you expecting me?"
"Haven't you come to my party? Didn't you get my invitation?
"By mail?" asked Freckles.
"Then that's likely where it is at present," said Freckles.
Is she where I can see her?"
"What a disappointment!" she cried.
Can't you stay anyway?"
"It's too bad!
I think of you every day, and I just pray that those thieves are not getting ahead of you.
"I must not," said Freckles.
Won't that be fun?"
He almost stopped breathing.
"A laugh is always good," said the Angel.
Go ahead."
"But where does my laugh come in?" demanded the Angel, as if she had been defrauded.
The curtains parted and a woman came toward them.
She was smiling brightly; and until she spoke, Freckles had not realized fully that it was his loved Bird Woman.
Noticing his bewilderment, she cried: "Why, Freckles!
He did not say anything, but they understood it was not to be touched.
"I am a plain, rough man," pursued the Carrier "with very little to recommend me.
"I often thought that though I wasn't good enough for her, I should make her a kind husband, and perhaps know her value better than another; and in this way I reconciled it to myself, and came to think it might be possible that we should be married.
All left out of sight!
Hah!"
If, yesterday, I'd have struck that man down at a blow, who dared to breathe a word against her, to day I'd set my foot upon his face, if he was my brother!"
The toy merchant gazed at him in astonishment.
Never.
The toy merchant gazed at him without winking.
Poor child!
Poor Dot!
"She made a show of it," said Tackleton.
"She made such a show of it, that, to tell you the truth, it was the origin of my misgivings."
"Oh!
"Very much as if you meant it."
Staunch Cricket on the Hearth!
Last night she saw him, in the interview we witnessed. It was wrong.
She leaves me without blame, and she will live so I am sure.
Now, it's over!"
Not quite yet.
She had entered shortly after Tackleton, and had remained there.
She never looked at Tackleton, but fixed her eyes upon her husband.
"No hand can make the clock which will strike again for me the hours that are gone," replied the Carrier with a faint smile.
It will strike soon.
"Oh, quite!"
"And you'll remember what I have said?"
"The better for us both," returned the Carrier.
"Good bye.
I give you joy!"
Good bye!
"It's enough to dead and bury the Baby, so it is if you please."
"Mary!" said Bertha.
"I told her you would not be there, mum," whispered Caleb.
"I heard as much last night.
Ah!
"I knew it!" cried Bertha, proudly.
"Bertha, my dear!" said Caleb.
Hear me kindly!
I have a confession to make to you, my darling!"
"A confession, father?"
She turned her wonder stricken face towards him, and repeated "Cruel!"
"You'll say so presently.
"Not meaning it, my child," said Caleb.
Her afflicted father hung his head, and offered no reply but in his penitence and sorrow.
"It is a poor place, Bertha; very poor and bare indeed.
"Those presents that I took such care of; that came almost at my wish, and were so dearly welcome to me," she said, trembling; "where did they come from?
Did you send them?"
"no"
Dot saw she knew already, and was silent.
Mary, look across the room to where we were just now-to where my father is-my father, so compassionate and loving to me-and tell me what you see."
As if his child should comfort him, Bertha."
She will.
"He is an old man, worn with care and work.
He is a spare, dejected, thoughtful, grey haired man.
But, Bertha, I have seen him many times before, and striving hard in many ways, for one great sacred object.
Caleb managed to articulate, "My Bertha!"
"Father!" said Bertha, hesitating.
You've a quick ear, Bertha.
Are they wheels?"
Very close!
And now you hear them stopping at the garden gate!
"Is it over?" cried Dot.
"If my boy in the Golden South Americas was alive----!" said Caleb, trembling.
"Look at him!
All honour to the little creature for her transports!
"Look, john!" said Caleb, exultingly, "look here!
"Edward!
"You must know that when I left here a boy," said Edward, "I was in love, and my love was returned.
But I knew mine, and I had a passion for her."
I have ever since believed she did, and now I am sure she did."
"This is worse than all."
It would be small comfort, but it would be some, I thought, and on I came.
You had no suspicion of me; neither had-had she," pointing to Dot, "until I whispered in her ear at that fireside, and she so nearly betrayed me."
And it WAS right, john!
And here's the Bride!
"No; keep there, please, john!
Oh! here she is!
You understand me; that's enough.
"mr
"mr
Hark! how the Cricket joins the music with its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp; and how the kettle hums!
But what is this?
Very well.
Next there followed a few reflections of a correctitude so remarkable that I have no choice but to quote them.
In conclusion, the writer gave way to unconcealed despair, and wound up with the following verses:
True, the last line did not scan, but that was a trifle, since the quatrain at least conformed to the mode then prevalent.
Neither signature nor date were appended to the document, but only a postscript expressing a conjecture that Chichikov's own heart would tell him who the writer was, and stating, in addition, that the said writer would be present at the Governor's ball on the following night.
"I think that you have not met my daughter before?" said Madame.
"She is just fresh from school."
He replied that he HAD had the happiness of meeting Mademoiselle before, and under rather unexpected circumstances; but on his trying to say something further his tongue completely failed him.
Chichikov stood rooted to the spot, like a man who, after issuing into the street for a pleasant walk, has suddenly come to a halt on remembering that something has been left behind him.
Every one of them had made up her mind to use upon him her every weapon, and to exhibit whatsoever might chance to constitute her best point.
Yet the ladies' wiles proved useless, for Chichikov paid not the smallest attention to them, even when the dancing had begun, but kept raising himself on tiptoe to peer over people's heads and ascertain in which direction the bewitching maiden with the golden hair had gone.
But Chichikov never even noticed him; he saw in the distance only the golden haired beauty.
At that moment she was drawing on a long glove and, doubtless, pining to be flying over the dancing floor, where, with clicking heels, four couples had now begun to thread the mazes of the mazurka.
However, Chichikov slipped past the mazurka dancers, and, almost treading on their heels, made his way towards the spot where Madame and her daughter were seated.
Yet he approached them with great diffidence and none of his late mincing and prancing.
Nevertheless, something strange, something which he could not altogether explain, had come upon him.
It seemed as though the ball, with its talk and its clatter, had suddenly become a thing remote-that the orchestra had withdrawn behind a hill, and the scene grown misty, like the carelessly painted in background of a picture.
On perceiving an empty chair beside the mother and daughter, he hastened to occupy it, and though conversation at first hung fire, things gradually improved, and he acquired more confidence.
At this point I must reluctantly deviate to say that men of weight and high office are always a trifle ponderous when conversing with ladies. Young lieutenants-or, at all events, officers not above the rank of captain-are far more successful at the game.
This was unwise of him, since it never does to disregard ladies' opinions. Later but too late-he was destined to learn this to his cost.
In short, dissatisfaction began to display itself on every feminine face.
On sighting him in the distance, Chichikov at once decided to sacrifice himself.
That is to say, he decided to vacate his present enviable position and make off with all possible speed, since he could see that an encounter with the newcomer would do him no good.
"Ah, my fine landowner of Kherson!" he cried with a smile which set his fresh, spring rose pink cheeks a quiver.
"Have you been doing much trade in departed souls lately?" With that he turned to the Governor.
"I suppose your Excellency knows that this man traffics in dead peasants?" he bawled.
Yes, by God I would!"
Chichikov's discomfiture was complete.
And, behold, no sooner do I arrive here than I am told that he has bought three million roubles' worth of peasants for transferment!
For transferment, indeed!
And he wanted to bargain with me for my DEAD ones!
Yes, by God, you are an utter swine!
The half tipsy Nozdrev, without noticing them, continued his harangue as before.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Indeed, if you had stood there and said to me, 'Nozdrev, tell me on your honour which of the two you love best-your father or Chichikov?' I should have replied, 'Chichikov, by God!'" With that he tackled our hero again, "Come, come, my friend!" he urged.
"Let me imprint upon your cheeks a baiser or two.
No, do not resist me, Chichikov, but allow me to imprint at least one baiser upon your lily white cheek." And in his efforts to force upon Chichikov what he termed his "baisers" he came near to measuring his length upon the floor.
He felt much as does a man who, shod with well polished boots, has just stepped into a dirty, stinking puddle.
He tried to put away from him the occurrence, and to expand, and to enjoy himself once more.
But all was of no avail-matters kept going as awry as a badly bent hoop.
His heart ached with a dull, unpleasant sensation, with a sort of oppressive emptiness.
"The devil take those who first invented balls!" was his reflection. "Who derives any real pleasure from them?
In this province there exist want and scarcity everywhere: yet folk go in for balls!
How absurd, too, were those overdressed women!
One of them must have had a thousand roubles on her back, and all acquired at the expense of the overtaxed peasant, or, worse still, at that of the conscience of her neighbour. Yes, we all know why bribes are accepted, and why men become crooked in soul.
It is all done to provide wives-yes, may the pit swallow them up!--with fal lals.
And for what purpose?
That some woman may not have to reproach her husband with the fact that, say, the Postmaster's wife is wearing a better dress than she is-a dress which has cost a thousand roubles!
'Balls and gaiety, balls and gaiety' is the constant cry.
Yet what folly balls are!
A grown, middle aged man-a man dressed in black, and looking as stiff as a poker-suddenly takes the floor and begins shuffling his feet about, while another man, even though conversing with a companion on important business, will, the while, keep capering to right and left like a billy goat!
Mimicry, sheer mimicry!
No; a ball leaves one feeling that one has done a wrong thing-so much so that one does not care even to think of it.
Are, therefore, such functions right or wrong?
Such were the unfavourable comments which Chichikov passed upon balls in general.
With it all, however, there went a second source of dissatisfaction.
Still more, on viewing the matter clearly, he felt vexed to think that he himself had been so largely the cause of the catastrophe.
We will reserve it for the ensuing chapter.
HOW MARY PASSED THE NIGHT.
And now, where was Mary?
She came on meekly after him, scarcely thinking in her stupor where she was going, and glad (in a dead, heavy way) that some one was deciding things for her.
He led her to an old-fashioned house, almost as small as house could be, which had been built long ago, before all the other part of the street, and had a country town look about it in the middle of that bustling back street.
The boatman took it very quietly, never deigning to give any explanation, but sitting down in his own particular chair, and chewing tobacco, while he looked at Mary with the most satisfied air imaginable, half triumphantly, as if she were the captive of his bow and spear, and half defyingly, as if daring her to escape.
Both man and wife came quickly to her assistance.
They raised her up, still insensible, and he supported her on one knee, while his wife pattered away for some cold fresh water.
She threw it straight over Mary; but though it caused a great sob, the eyes still remained closed, and the face as pale as ashes.
"Well a well!" (in a soothing tone, such as you use to irritated children), and as if half to herself, "I only thought you might, you know, as you brought her home.
Poor thing! we must not ask aught about her, but that she needs help.
he's burning it!
Well! he is a bright one, my old man!
That I never thought of that, to be sure!" exclaimed she, as he produced a square bottle of smuggled spirits, labelled "Golden Wasser," from a corner cupboard in their little room.
"Bless the man!
It's just like him to be so tender and thoughtful!"
"Not a bit!" snarled he, as he was relieved by Mary's returning colour, and opened eyes, and wondering, sensible gaze; "not a bit! I never was such a fool afore."
His wife helped Mary to rise, and placed her in a chair.
"All's right now, young woman?" asked the boatman, anxiously.
I'm sure, sir, I don't know rightly how to thank you," faltered Mary, softly forth.
"Be hanged to you and your thanks." And he shook himself, took his pipe, and went out without deigning another word; leaving his wife sorely puzzled as to the character and history of the stranger within her doors.
Mary watched the boatman leave the house, and then, turning her sorrowful eyes to the face of her hostess, she attempted feebly to rise, with the intention of going away,--where she knew not.
Perhaps" (sinking her voice a little) "thou'rt a bad one; I almost misdoubt thee, thou'rt so pretty.
There was a man in it as might save a life at the trial to morrow.
The captain would not let him come, but he says he'll come back in the pilot boat." She fell to sobbing at the thought of her waning hopes, and the old woman tried to comfort her, beginning with her accustomed,
I know he will; so keep up your heart.
He's sure to be back."
For the spirits had thrown her into a burning heat, and rendered each impression received through her senses of the most painful distinctness and intensity, while her head ached in a terrible manner.
She disliked speaking, her power over her words seemed so utterly gone.
She used quite different expressions to those she intended.
So she kept silent, while mrs Sturgis (for that was the name of her hostess) talked away, and put her tea things by, and moved about incessantly, in a manner that increased the dizziness in Mary's head. She felt as if she ought to take leave for the night and go.
Presently the old man came back, crosser and gruffer than when he went away.
Mary attributed this to his finding her still there, and gathered up her strength for an effort to leave the house.
But she was mistaken.
By and bye, he said (looking right into the fire, as if addressing it), "Wind's right against them!"
I'd bet a penny it has changed sin' thou looked."
"No one!" answered Mary.
Sturgis saw it.
"Don't bother her with thy questions," said he to his wife.
I'll see after the wind, hang it, and the weather cock, too.
Tide will help 'em when it turns."
The sheets looked made out of sail cloth, but were fresh and clean in spite of their brownness.
"I cannot sleep, thank you.
Her looks won her suit.
"Well, I suppose I mun.
I shall catch it down stairs, I know.
And quietly, noiselessly, Mary watched the unchanging weather cock through the night.
She sat on the little window seat, her hand holding back the curtain which shaded the room from the bright moonlight without; her head resting its weariness against the corner of the window frame; her eyes burning and stiff with the intensity of her gaze.
Before I opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something had happened.
I heard excited voices in the kitchen-grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must be almost beside herself.
I looked forward to any new crisis with delight.
Perhaps the barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death; perhaps a neighbor was lost in the storm.
Their clothes and boots were steaming, and they both looked exhausted.
On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with a blanket.
I obeyed reluctantly.
Her lips were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself: "Oh, dear Saviour!" "Lord, Thou knowest!"
Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: "Jimmy, we will not have prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do.
Old mr Shimerda is dead, and his family are in great distress.
Ambrosch came over here in the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with him.
That is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench.
After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began to talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances.
I held my tongue, but I listened with all my ears.
One of 'em ripped around and got away from him-bolted clean out of the stable.
His hands is blistered where the rope run through.
"Poor soul, poor soul!" grandmother groaned.
"I'd like to think he never done it.
"I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, mrs Burden," Fuchs declared.
"He done everything natural.
He shaved after dinner, and washed hisself all over after the girls was done the dishes.
Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after he was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun and said he was going out to hunt rabbits.
He must have gone right down to the barn and done it then.
When we found him, everything was decent except,"--Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated,--"except what he could n't nowise foresee.
His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the bed.
He turned back his shirt at the neck and rolled up his sleeves."
"I don't see how he could do it!" grandmother kept saying.
"Why, mam, it was simple enough; he pulled the trigger with his big toe.
He layed over on his side and put the end of the barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger.
"Maybe he did," said Jake grimly.
"Now what do you mean, Jake?" grandmother asked sharply.
Grandmother broke in excitedly: "See here, Jake Marpole, don't you go trying to add murder to suicide.
We're deep enough in trouble.
Otto reads you too many of them detective stories."
They was blown up there by gunshot, no question."
"The body can't be touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be a matter of several days, this weather."
"Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort to them poor little girls.
The oldest one was his darling, and was like a right hand to him.
He's left her alone in a hard world." She glanced distrustfully at Ambrosch, who was now eating his breakfast at the kitchen table.
On the gray gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across the country with no roads to guide him.
"Don't you worry about me, mrs Burden," he said cheerfully, as he put on a second pair of socks.
"I've got a good nose for directions, and I never did need much sleep.
Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner.
After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch.
He was deeply, even slavishly, devout.
He did not say a word all morning, but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now silently, now aloud.
He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted his hands except to cross himself.
Several times the poor boy fell asleep where he sat, wakened with a start, and began to pray again.
No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken, and that would be a day's job.
Grandfather came from the barn on one of our big black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him.
She wore her black hood and was bundled up in shawls.
Grandfather tucked his bushy white beard inside his overcoat.
They looked very Biblical as they set off, I thought.
I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted cornfield.
I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to acquit myself creditably.
I remembered that in the hurry and excitement of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not been gathered.
Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn, emptied the ice from their drinking pan, and filled it with water.
After the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else to do, and I sat down to get warm.
The quiet was delightful, and the ticking clock was the most pleasant of companions.
I got "Robinson Crusoe" and tried to read, but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours.
If he could have lived with us, this terrible thing would never have happened.
I knew it was homesickness that had killed mr Shimerda, and I wondered whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his own country.
I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia, to Baltimore,--and then the great wintry ocean.
No, he would not at once set out upon that long journey.
Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever falling snow, was resting now in this quiet house.
I did not wish to disturb him. I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground, always seemed to me the heart and center of the house.
There, on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about mr Shimerda. Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow.
I went over all that Antonia had ever told me about his life before he came to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances.
I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone player, the great forest full of game,--belonging, as Antonia said, to the "nobles,"--from which she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights.
Such vivid pictures came to me that they might have been mr Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.
It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother was so tired that she went at once to bed.
Nobody could touch the body until the coroner came.
If any one did, something terrible would happen, apparently. The dead man was frozen through, "just as stiff as a dressed turkey you hang out to freeze," Jake said.
The horses and oxen would not go into the barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer any smell of blood.
They were stabled there now, with the dead man, because there was no other place to keep them.
A lighted lantern was kept hanging over mr Shimerda's head.
The crazy boy went with them, because he did not feel the cold.
I believed he felt cold as much as any one else, but he liked to be thought insensible to it.
He was always coveting distinction, poor Marek!
Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed him capable of; but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and about his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal for him.
"As I understand it," Jake concluded, "it will be a matter of years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment."
"I don't believe it," I said stoutly.
Nevertheless, after I went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me crushingly.
I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered. But mr Shimerda had not been rich and selfish; he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.
THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk.
All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitter hard times, and had got little schooling themselves.
The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.
Physically they were almost a race apart, and out of door work had given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.
That was before the day of high-school athletics.
Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied.
There was not a tennis court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well to do families.
Some of the high-school girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat.
When one danced with them their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing-not to be disturbed.
I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round shouldered and hollow chested.
The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief that they were "refined," and that the country girls, who "worked out," were not.
The American farmers in our county were quite as hard pressed as their neighbors from other countries.
All alike had come to Nebraska with little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue.
All had borrowed money on their land.
But no matter in what straits the Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters go out into service.
Unless his girls could teach a country school, they sat at home in poverty.
Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt, they had no alternative but to go into service.
Others, like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth they had lost.
But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and sent home those hard earned dollars.
One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous.
After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors,--usually of like nationality,--and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are to day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.
What did it matter?
All foreigners were ignorant people who could n't speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Antonia's father.
I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own, and I have.
To day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.
The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and living in a brand new little house with best chairs that must not be sat upon, and hand painted china that must not be used.
But sometimes a young fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating of his father's bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in her short skirt and striped stockings.
The country girls were considered a menace to the social order.
Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background.
But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm.
They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth.
Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy who swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the jolly country girls, but he himself must sit all evening in a plush parlor where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere.
If he went to the hotel to see a traveling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten.
If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing boards, with their white throats and their pink cheeks.
Mary Dusak had been housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from Boston, and after several years in his service she was forced to retire from the world for a short time.
Later she came back to town to take the place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed.
The three Marys were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers that they never had to look for a place.
The Vannis' tent brought the town boys and the country girls together on neutral ground.
Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father's bank, always found his way to the tent on Saturday night.
He took all the dances Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold enough to walk home with her.
If his sisters or their friends happened to be among the onlookers on "popular nights," Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood trees, smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression.
Several times I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I felt rather sorry for him.
In my ingenuousness I hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls a better position in the town.
Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work; had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books balance.
He was daft about her, and every one knew it.
This remedy worked, apparently.
So that was what they were like, I thought, these white handed, high collared clerks and bookkeepers!
I used to glare at young Lovett from a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt for him.
forty six.
At a quarter to six o'clock, Monsieur de Gondy, having finished his business, returned to the archiepiscopal palace.
The coadjutor glanced rapidly behind and saw that he was followed by another man.
"Your holiness," said the curate, "here is the person of whom I had the honor to speak to you."
Planchet saluted in the manner of one accustomed to fine houses.
"And you are disposed to serve the cause of the people?" asked Gondy.
"I am a Frondist from my heart.
You see in me, such as I am, a person sentenced to be hung."
"And on what account?"
"Ah! really, yes," said the coadjutor, "I have heard this affair mentioned.
You raised the whole district, so they told me!"
"That of a confectioner, in the Rue des Lombards."
"Explain to me how it happens that, following so peaceful a business, you had such warlike inclinations."
"Why does my lord, belonging to the church, now receive me in the dress of an officer, with a sword at his side and spurs to his boots?"
"Not badly answered, i'faith," said Gondy, laughing; "but I have, you must know, always had, in spite of my bands, warlike inclinations."
"Well, my lord, before I became a confectioner I myself was three years sergeant in the Piedmontese regiment, and before I became sergeant I was for eighteen months the servant of Monsieur d'Artagnan."
"The lieutenant of musketeers?" asked Gondy.
"Himself, my lord."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Nothing, my lord; Monsieur d'Artagnan belongs to the service; Monsieur d'Artagnan makes it his business to defend the cardinal, who pays him, as much as we make it ours, we citizens, to attack him, whom he robs."
"You are an intelligent fellow, my friend; can we count upon you?"
"You may count upon me, my lord, provided you want to make a complete upheaval of the city."
"'tis that exactly.
How many men, think you, you could collect together to night?"
"Two hundred muskets and five hundred halberds."
"Let there be only one man in every district who can do as much and by to morrow we shall have quite a powerful army.
Are you disposed to obey Count de Rochefort?"
"I would follow him to hell, and that is saying not a little, as I believe him entirely capable of the descent."
"By what sign to morrow shall we be able to distinguish friends from foes?"
"Every Frondist must put a knot of straw in his hat."
"Good!
Give the watchword."
"Do you want money?"
"Money never comes amiss at any time, my lord; if one has it not, one must do without it; with it, matters go on much better and more rapidly."
Gondy went to a box and drew forth a bag.
"Here are five hundred pistoles," he said; "and if the action goes off well you may reckon upon a similar sum to morrow."
"I will give a faithful account of the sum to your lordship," said Planchet, putting the bag under his arm.
"That is right; I recommend the cardinal to your attention."
"Make your mind easy, he is in good hands."
Planchet went out, the curate remaining for a moment.
"Are you satisfied, my lord?" he asked.
"Yes; he appears to be a resolute fellow."
"He will do wonders then."
The curate rejoined Planchet, who was waiting for him on the stairs.
As soon as the door of Gondy's study was opened a man rushed in.
It was the Count de Rochefort.
"'tis you, then, my dear count," cried Gondy, offering his hand.
"It has been made up a long time," said Gondy.
Well, we are going to give a ball to Mazarin."
"I hope so."
"And when will the dance begin?"
"The invitations are given for this evening," said the coadjutor, "but the violins will not begin to play until to morrow morning."
"Upon fifty soldiers?"
"Good, my dear Rochefort; but that is not all.
"He is in Vendome, where he will wait until I write to him to return to Paris."
"Yes, but he must make haste; for hardly will the people of Paris have revolted before we shall have a score of princes begging to lead them. If he defers he will find the place of honor taken."
"Yes certainly."
"Shall I tell him that he can count on you?"
"To the end."
"Of the war, yes, but in politics----"
"You must know it is not his element."
"He must leave me to negotiate for my cardinal's hat in my own fashion."
"You care about it, then, so much?"
"Since they force me to wear a hat of a form which does not become me," said Gondy, "I wish at least that the hat should be red."
"One must not dispute matters of taste and colors," said Rochefort, laughing.
"I answer for his consent."
"In five days."
"Let him come and he will find a change, I will answer for it."
"Therefore, go and collect your fifty men and hold yourself in readiness."
"For what?"
"For everything."
"A knot of straw in the hat."
"Very good.
Adieu, my lord."
"Adieu, my dear Rochefort."
"Ah, Monsieur Mazarin, Monsieur Mazarin," said Rochefort, leading off his curate, who had not found an opportunity of uttering a single word during the foregoing dialogue, "you will see whether I am too old to be a man of action."
He remarked that a light was burning in one of the highest windows of the tower.
"Good," said he, "our syndic is at his post."
He knocked and the door was opened.
The vicar himself awaited him, conducted him to the top of the tower, and when there pointed to a little door, placed the light which he had brought with him in a corner of the wall, that the coadjutor might be able to find it on his return, and went down again.
"Come in," said a voice which he recognized as that of the mendicant, whom he found lying on a kind of truckle bed.
He rose on the entrance of the coadjutor, and at that moment ten o'clock struck.
"Well," said Gondy, "have you kept your word with me?"
"Not exactly," replied the mendicant.
"How is that?"
"You asked me for five hundred men, did you not?
Well, I have ten thousand for you."
"You are not boasting?"
"Do you wish for a proof?"
"Yes."
There were three candles alight, each of which burnt before a window, one looking upon the city, the other upon the Palais Royal, and a third upon the Rue Saint Denis.
The man went silently to each of the candles and blew them out one after the other.
"What are you doing?" asked the coadjutor.
"I have given the signal."
"For what?"
"For the barricades.
Now remember that you are a general and do not go and drink."
"For twenty years I have tasted nothing but water."
The man took the bag from the hands of the coadjutor, who heard the sound of his fingers counting and handling the gold pieces.
The mendicant sighed and threw down the bag.
Oh, misery, oh, vanity!"
"You take it, however."
"Yes, but I make hereby a vow in your presence, to employ all that remains to me in pious works."
His face was pale and drawn, like that of a man who had just undergone some inward struggle.
"Singular man!" muttered Gondy, taking his hat to go away; but on turning around he saw the beggar between him and the door.
"Your holiness!" said Gondy; "my friend, you take me for some one else."
"No, your holiness, I take you for what you are, that is to say, the coadjutor; I recognized you at the first glance."
Gondy smiled.
"And you want my blessing?" he said.
"Yes, I have need of it."
The mendicant uttered these words in a tone of such humility, such earnest repentance, that Gondy placed his hand upon him and gave him his benediction with all the unction of which he was capable.
"Now," said Gondy, "there is a communion between us.
I have blessed you and you are sacred to me.
Come, have you committed some crime, pursued by human justice, from which I can protect you?"
The beggar shook his head.
"The crime which I have committed, my lord, has no call upon human justice, and you can only deliver me from it by blessing me frequently, as you have just done."
I have pursued it for six years only."
"In the Bastile."
"And before you went to the Bastile?"
"Good!
At whatsoever hour of the day or night you may present yourself, remember that I shall be ready to give you absolution."
"Thank you, my lord," said the mendicant in a hoarse voice.
"But I am not yet ready to receive it."
"Very well.
Adieu."
"Adieu, your holiness," said the mendicant, opening the door and bending low before the prelate.
CHAPTER thirty three
He had read of the murder, and had been shocked, and, in his way, grieved.
It was not to save Odette Rider that he sent his note to Scotland Yard, but rather to avenge himself upon the man who had killed the only woman in the world who had touched his warped nature.
He had the passports which he had secured a year before in readiness for such a step (he had kept that clerical uniform of his by him all that time) and was ready at a moment's notice to leave the country.
His tickets were in his pocket, and when he despatched the district messenger to Scotland Yard he was on his way to Waterloo station to catch the Havre boat train.
He turned to look into a brown mask of a face he had seen before.
He had asked the question in identical terms of Sam Stay-his brain told him that much, mechanically.
"It will be better for you if you do not make any trouble."
"You are making a mistake."
"If I am making a mistake," said Ling Chu calmly, "you have only to tell that policeman that I have mistaken you for Milburgh, who is wanted by the police on a charge of murder, and I shall get into very serious trouble."
Milburgh's lips were quivering with fear and his face was a pasty grey.
"I will come," he said.
He was not used to travelling on omnibuses, being something of a sybarite who spared nothing to ensure his own comfort.
Ling Chu on the contrary had a penchant for buses and seemed to enjoy them.
No word was spoken until they reached the sitting room of Tarling's flat. Milburgh expected to see the detective.
But there was no sign of Tarling.
"Now, my friend, what do you want?" he asked.
"It is true I am mr Milburgh, but when you say that I have committed murder you are telling a wicked lie."
He had gained some courage, because he had expected in the first place to be taken immediately to Scotland Yard and placed in custody.
He felt something like a wire loop slipped about his wrists, and suffered an excruciating pain as the Chinaman tightened the connecting link of the native handcuff.
"Get up," said Ling Chu sternly, and, exerting a surprising strength, lifted the man to his feet.
There was no answer.
Ling Chu gripped the man by one hand and opening the door with the other, pushed him into a room which was barely furnished. Against the wall there was an iron bed, and on to this the man was pushed, collapsing in a heap.
The Chinese thief catcher went about his work in a scientific fashion. First he fastened and threaded a length of silk rope through one of the rails of the bed and into the slack of this he lifted Milburgh's head, so that he could not struggle except at the risk of being strangled.
Ling Chu turned him over, unfastened the handcuffs, and methodically bound first one wrist and then the other to the side of the bed.
"What are you going to do?" repeated Milburgh, but the Chinaman made no reply.
He produced from a belt beneath his blouse a wicked looking knife, and the manager opened his mouth to shout.
He was beside himself with terror, but any cause for fear had yet to come.
"If you cry out," he said calmly, "the people will think it is I who am singing!
"You are acting illegally," breathed Milburgh, in a last attempt to save the situation.
"I shall be fortunate," said Ling Chu; "for prison is life.
He went to a cupboard in the wall, and took out a small brown bottle, which he placed on a table by the side of the bed.
Then he himself sat upon the edge of the bed and spoke.
His English was almost perfect, though now and again he hesitated in the choice of a word, and there were moments when he was a little stilted in his speech, and more than a little pedantic.
He spoke slowly and with great deliberation.
"You do not know the Chinese people?
You have not been or lived in China? When I say lived I do not mean staying for a week at a good hotel in one of the coast towns.
Your mr Lyne lived in China in that way.
It was not a successful residence."
"I know nothing about mr Lyne," interrupted Milburgh, sensing that Ling Chu in some way associated him with Thornton Lyne's misadventures.
It is said that the Chinaman does not fear death or pain, which is a slight exaggeration, because I have known criminals who feared both."
His thin lips curved for a second in the ghost of a smile, as though at some amusing recollection.
Then he grew serious again.
"From the Western standpoint we are a primitive people.
From our own point of view we are rigidly honourable.
Also-and this I would emphasise." He did, in fact, emphasise his words to the terror of mr Milburgh, with the point of his knife upon the other's broad chest, though so lightly was the knife held that Milburgh felt nothing but the slightest tingle.
"We do not set the same value upon the rights of the individual as do you people in the West.
For example," he explained carefully, "we are not tender with our prisoners, if we think that by applying a little pressure to them we can assist the process of justice."
"What do you mean?" asked Milburgh, a grisly thought dawning upon his mind.
You ask him questions and go on asking and asking, and you do not know whether he is lying or telling the truth."
mr Milburgh began to breathe heavily.
"Has that idea sunk into your mind?" asked Ling Chu.
Ling Chu stopped him with a gesture.
"I am perfectly well aware of what I am doing," he said.
"Now listen to me.
A week or so ago, mr Thornton Lyne, your employer, was found dead in Hyde Park.
He was killed in the flat of a small lady, whose name I cannot pronounce, but you will know her."
Milburgh's eyes never left the Chinaman's, and he nodded.
"That's a lie," roared Milburgh.
"It's a lie-I tell you it's a lie!"
"I shall discover whether it is a lie in a few moments," said Ling Chu.
He put his hand inside his blouse and Milburgh watched him fascinated, but he produced nothing more deadly than a silver cigarette case, which he opened.
He selected a cigarette and lit it, and for a few minutes puffed in silence, his thoughtful eyes fixed upon Milburgh.
Then he rose and went to the cupboard and took out a larger bottle and placed it beside the other.
He took up his knife and bent over the terror stricken man.
"For God's sake don't, don't," half screamed, half sobbed Milburgh.
"This will not hurt you," said Ling Chu, and drew four straight lines across the other's breast.
The keen razor edge seemed scarcely to touch the flesh, yet where the knife had passed was a thin red mark like a scratch.
Milburgh scarcely felt a twinge of pain, only a mild irritating smarting and no more.
The Chinaman laid down the knife and took up the smaller bottle.
"In this," he said, "is a vegetable extract.
In this bottle," he picked up the larger, "is a Chinese oil which immediately relieves the pain which capsicum causes."
"You dog!
You fiend!"
"With a little brush I will paint capsicum on these places." He touched Milburgh's chest with his long white ringers.
"Little by little, millimetre by millimetre my brush will move, and you will experience such pain as you have never experienced before.
He took out the cork and dipped a little camel hair brush in the mixture, withdrawing it moist with fluid.
He was watching Milburgh all the time, and when the stout man opened his mouth to yell he thrust a silk handkerchief, which he drew with lightning speed from his pocket, into the open mouth.
"Wait, wait!" gasped the muffled voice of Milburgh.
"I have something to tell you-something that your master should know."
"That is very good," said Ling Chu coolly, and pulled out the handkerchief.
"You shall tell me the truth."
"What truth can I tell you?" asked the man, sweating with fear.
Great beads of sweat were lying on his face.
"You shall confess the truth that you killed Thornton Lyne," said Ling Chu.
"That is the only truth I want to hear."
"I swear I did not kill him!
I swear it, I swear it!" raved the prisoner. "Wait, wait!" he whimpered as the other picked up the handkerchief.
The Chinaman checked his movement.
Brokenly, gaspingly, breathlessly, Milburgh told the story of his meeting with Sam Stay.
In his distress and mental anguish he reproduced faithfully not only every word, but every intonation, and the Chinaman listened with half closed eyes.
Then, when Milburgh had finished, he put down his bottle and thrust in the cork.
"My master would wish that the little woman should escape danger," he said.
"To night he does not return, so I must go myself to the hospital-you can wait."
"I will help you."
Ling Chu shook his head.
"You can wait," he said with a sinister smile.
"I will go first to the hospital and afterwards, if all is well, I will return for you."
CHAPTER fourteen.
STILL DESCENDING
An extra passenger was on board.
No one exactly knew.
He maintained a good deal of reserve, answering if addressed, but never provoking a reply.
If he appeared more open with any one, it was with Fragoso.
During the morning the raft passed by the picturesque group of islands situated in the vast estuary of the Javary.
They had passed the island of Araria, the Archipelago of the Calderon islands, the island of Capiatu, and many others whose names have not yet come to the knowledge of geographers.
Manoel and Benito had gone shooting in the neighborhood, and brought back some feathered game, which was well received in the larder.
It was a creature of a dark color, something like a large Newfoundland dog.
"Yes, little sister," replied Benito, "and you were not there to ask for mercy!
The ant eater looked superb, with his long tail and grizzly hair; with his pointed snout, which is plunged into the ant hills whose insects form its principal food; and his long, thin paws, armed with sharp nails, five inches long, and which can shut up like the fingers of one's hand.
When it has got hold of anything you have to cut it off to make it let go!
It is of this hand that the traveler, Emile Carrey, has so justly observed: "The tiger himself would perish in its grasp."
Many times they passed by the mouths of iguarapes, or little affluents, with black waters.
The coloration of these waters is a very curious phenomenon.
It is peculiar to a certain number of these tributaries of the Amazon, which differ greatly in importance.
Manoel remarked how thick the cloudiness was, for it could be clearly seen on the surface of the whitish waters of the river.
"They have tried to explain this coloring in many ways," said he, "but I do not think the most learned have yet arrived at a satisfactory explanation."
"Good!" exclaimed Benito.
"Perhaps," said Fragoso, "they might ask the opinions of the caymans, dolphins, and manatees, for they certainly prefer the black waters to the others to enjoy themselves in."
"They are particularly attractive to those animals," replied Manoel, "but why it is rather embarrassing to say.
There is nothing certain in the matter. Under any circumstances, they are excellent to drink, of a freshness quite enviable for the climate, and without after taste, and perfectly harmless.
Take a little of the water, Minha, and drink it; you will find it all right."
It may, perhaps, seem singular that the ancient lords of the country, Tupinambas and Tupiniquis, should find their principal occupation in making objects for the Catholic religion.
But, after all, why not?
These Indians are no longer the Indians of days gone by.
Instead of being clothed in the national fashion, with a frontlet of macaw feathers, bow, and blow tube, have they not adopted the American costume of white cotton trousers, and a cotton poncho woven by their wives, who have become thorough adepts in its manufacture?
At present the capital of the Upper Amazon, it began as a simple Mission, founded by the Portuguese Carmelites about sixteen ninety two, and afterward acquired by the Jesuit missionaries.
Like everything else, that has changed; heads have re taken their natural form, and there is not the slightest trace of the ancient deformity in the skulls of the chaplet makers.
Assuredly if the adventurer was taciturn he was not inquisitive.
He and the family received an excellent reception from the principal authorities of the town, the commandant of the place, and the chief of the custom house, whose functions did not in the least prevent them from engaging in trade.
The town is composed of some sixty houses, arranged on the plain which hereabouts crowns the river bank.
During dinner Torres showed himself more talkative than usual.
It was marked enough for even Benito to notice it, not without surprise, and he observed that his father gave particular attention to the questions so curiously propounded by Torres.
A peculiar phenomenon, for the river displaces itself to feed its own tributaries!
CHAPTER fifteen.
THE CONTINUED DESCENT
Large bats of ruddy color skimmed with their huge wings the current of the Amazon.
These were, in fact, the horrible vampires which suck the blood of the cattle, and even attack man if he is imprudent enough to sleep out in the fields.
"Oh, the dreadful creatures!" cried Lina, hiding her eyes; "they fill me with horror!"
"To be sure-very formidable," answered he.
They tell of people, unconsciously submitted to this hemorrhage for many hours, who have never awoke!"
"Never fear!" replied Manoel; "if necessary we will watch over them as they sleep."
"Certainly," answered Yaquita.
"What causes the noise?" asked Minha.
"Good!
"Tomorrow, at daybreak, there will be a rare treat for those who like fresh turtle eggs and little turtles!"
The operation commences with sunset and finishes with the dawn.
They watch for the arrival of the chelonians, and proceed to the extraction of the eggs to the sound of the drum; and the harvest is divided into three parts-one to the watchers, another to the Indians, a third to the state, represented by the captains of the shore, who, in their capacity of police, have to superintend the collection of the dues.
Turtles, or turtle eggs, are an object of very considerable trade throughout the Amazonian basin.
In this way they always have the meat of these animals fresh.
They proceed differently with the little turtles which are just hatched. There is no need to pack them or tie them up.
Their shell is still soft, their flesh extremely tender, and after they have cooked them they eat them just like oysters.
In this form large quantities are consumed.
On the morrow, at daybreak, Benito, Fragoso, and a few Indians took a pirogue and landed on the beach of one of the large islands which they had passed during the night.
They knew they could catch her up.
On the shore they saw the little hillocks which indicated the places where, that very night, each packet of eggs had been deposited in the trench in groups of from one hundred and sixty to one hundred and ninety.
These there was no wish to get out.
But an earlier laying had taken place two months before, the eggs had hatched under the action of the heat stored in the sand, and already several thousands of little turtles were running about the beach.
The hunters were therefore in luck.
The pirogue was filled with these interesting amphibians, and they arrived just in time for breakfast.
The booty was divided between the passengers and crew of the jangada, and if any lasted till the evening it did not last any longer.
The Putumayo is one of the most important affluents of the Amazon.
Here in the sixteenth century missions were founded by the Spaniards, which were afterward destroyed by the Portuguese, and not a trace of them now remains.
Representatives of different tribes of Indians are found in the neighborhood, which are easily recognizable by the differences in their tattoo marks.
The bad weather was at last met with.
It did not show itself in continual rains, but in frequent storms.
These could not hinder the progress of the raft, which offered little resistance to the wind.
Its great length rendered it almost insensible to the swell of the Amazon, but during the torrential showers the Garral family had to keep indoors. They had to occupy profitably these hours of leisure.
They chatted together, communicated their observations, and their tongues were seldom idle.
It was under these circumstances that little by little Torres had begun to take a more active part in the conversation.
The details of his many voyages throughout the whole north of Brazil afforded him numerous subjects to talk about.
The man had certainly seen a great deal, but his observations were those of a skeptic, and he often shocked the straightforward people who were listening to him.
On the other hand, Minha felt for him an instinctive repulsion which she was at no pains to conceal.
On the fifth of July the mouth of the Tunantins appeared on the left bank, forming an estuary of some four hundred feet across, in which it pours its blackish waters, coming from the west northwest, after having watered the territories of the Cacena Indians.
At this spot the Amazon appears under a truly grandiose aspect, but its course is more than ever encumbered with islands and islets.
It required all the address of the pilot to steer through the archipelago, going from one bank to another, avoiding the shallows, shirking the eddies, and maintaining the advance.
At this place the jangada halted for twelve hours, so as to give a rest to the crew.
Probably the hamlet has now finished with its nomadic existence, and has definitely become stationary.
Fonteboa has one thousand inhabitants, drawn from the Indians on both banks, who rear numerous cattle in the fields in the neighborhood.
These occupations do not end here, for they are intrepid hunters, or, if they prefer it, intrepid fishers for the manatee.
Six brown points were seen moving along the surface, and these were the two pointed snouts and four pinions of the lamantins.
Inexperienced fishermen would at first have taken these moving points for floating wreckage, but the natives of Fonteboa were not to be so deceived.
The fishermen continued their cautious advance.
One of them, armed with a very primitive harpoon-a long nail at the end of a stick-kept himself in the bow of the boat, while the other two noiselessly paddled on.
They waited till the necessity of breathing would bring the manatees up again.
In ten minutes or thereabouts the animals would certainly appear in a circle more or less confined.
In fact, this time had scarcely elapsed before the black points emerged at a little distance, and two jets of air mingled with vapor were noiselessly shot forth.
It was not a manatee of any size, for it only measured about three feet long.
These poor cetaceans have been so hunted that they have become very rare in the Amazon and its affluents, and so little time is left them to grow that the giants of the species do not now exceed seven feet.
What are these, after manatees twelve and fifteen feet long, which still abound in the rivers and lakes of Africa?
But it would be difficult to hinder their destruction.
The flesh of the manatee is excellent, superior even to that of pork, and the oil furnished by its lard, which is three inches thick, is a product of great value.
When the meat is smoke dried it keeps for a long time, and is capital food.
If to this is added that the animal is easily caught, it is not to be wondered at that the species is on its way to complete destruction.
On the nineteenth of July, at sunrise, the jangada left Fonteboa, and entered between the two completely deserted banks of the river, and breasted some islands shaded with the grand forests of cacao trees.
The sky was heavily charged with electric cumuli, warning them of renewed storms.
The Rio Jurua, coming from the southwest, soon joins the river on the left.
A vessel can go up it into Peru without encountering insurmountable obstacles among its white waters, which are fed by a great number of petty affluents.
"It is perhaps in these parts," said Manoel, "that we ought to look for those female warriors who so much astonished Orellana.
The jangada continued to descend; but what a labyrinth the Amazon now appeared!
Between them were canals, iguarapes, lagoons, temporary lakes, an inextricable network which renders the hydrography of this country so difficult.
But if Araujo had no map to guide him, his experience served him more surely, and it was wonderful to see him unraveling the chaos, without ever turning aside from the main river.
But the town of e g a is of some importance; it was worthy of a halt to visit it.
This would give a rest, which was deservedly due to the hard-working crew of the raft.
The night passed at the moorings near a slightly rising shore, and nothing disturbed the quiet.
"Yes, Benito."
"Ah!
"No!" replied Manoel.
"Decidedly not!
No, Benito!
But I dare not!"
You have remarked his attentions to my sister! Nothing can be truer!
"What are you talking about, Benito?
"No!
I know not-but to force my father to get rid of Torres would perhaps be imprudent!
Till then we must keep our eyes on him!"
I do not know!
By what mysterious bond could these two men-one nobleness itself, that was self evident-be connected with each other?
Not only can the old ones, the centenarians, be recognized by the greenish moss which carpets their carcass and is scattered over their protuberances, but by their natural ferocity, which increases with age.
"Bring the guns!
"She is not there!" replied Lina, who had just run to her mistress' room.
No reply.
Minha was flying aft, pursued by the monster, who was not six feet away from her.
Minha fell.
A second shot from Benito failed to stop the cayman.
He only struck the animal's carapace, and the scales flew to splinters but the ball did not penetrate.
Fragoso!" shrieked Lina, kneeling on the edge of the raft.
"Where is the Doctor?" I asked.
In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that had been sold for five thousand dollars.
The painter was a young scrub out of the West named Kraft, who had a favourite food and a pet theory.
His theory was fixed around corned beef hash with poached egg.
The idea of Kraft-but that is not the beginning of the story.
Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins (a poet), and I took our meals at Cypher's, on Eighth Avenue.
I say "took." When we had money, Cypher got it "off of" us, as he expressed it.
We had no credit; we went in, called for food and ate it.
We paid or we did not pay.
We had confidence in Cypher's sullenness and smouldering ferocity.
Now and then we paid up back scores.
But the chief thing at Cypher's was Milly.
You expected to see her colossal figure loom through that reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you expect the Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson River fog.
Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that they could be followed only with awe.
Cypher's store of eatables she poured out upon us with royal indifference to price and quantity, as from a cornucopia that knew no exhaustion.
Her voice rang like a great silver bell; her smile was many toothed and frequent; she seemed like a yellow sunrise on mountain tops.
It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held latently.
It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art at which we were hammering.
"There is a certain fate hanging over Milly," said Kraft, "and if it overtakes her she is lost to Cypher's and to us."
"She will grow fat?" asked Judkins, fearsomely.
"She will go to night school and become refined?" I ventured anxiously.
"It is this," said Kraft, punctuating in a puddle of spilled coffee with a stiff forefinger.
"Caesar had his Brutus-the cotton has its bollworm, the chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has his poison ivy, the hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan, the rose has its-"
"Speak," I interrupted, much perturbed.
"You do not think that Milly will begin to lace?"
We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her.
Few things were less improbable.
Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine woods, was made to catch the lumberman's eye.
Why, the alphabet itself connives.
It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that inspired us.
We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed by wealth and provincialism.
In Cypher's she belonged-in the bacon smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled ironstone china and rattling casters.
But Alaska and not Wisconsin bore the burden of the visitation.
We embraced him as a specimen, and in three minutes we had all but died for one another as friends.
He had just come off the "trail," he said, at one of the North River ferries.
The stuff the niggers feed you on Pullmans don't count.
And then Milly loomed up with a thousand dishes on her bare arm-loomed up big and white and pink and awful as Mount Saint Elias-with a smile like day breaking in a gulch.
At last the bollworm had attacked the cotton-the poison ivy was reaching out its tendrils to entwine the summer boarder-the millionaire lumberman, thinly disguised as the Alaskan miner, was about to engulf our Milly and upset Nature's adjustment.
Kraft was the first to act.
He leaped up and pounded the Klondiker's back.
"Come out and drink," he shouted.
"Drink first and eat afterward." Judkins seized one arm and I the other.
There he rumbled a roughly good humoured protest.
"That's the girl for my money," he declared.
"She can eat out of my skillet the rest of her life.
I guess she won't want to sling hash any more when she sees the pile of dust I've got."
"I thought you up country fellows were better sports."
Thus the work was accomplished.
With his own guns we drove him from the field.
And then we had him carted to a distant small hotel and put to bed with his nuggets and baby seal skins stuffed around him.
"He will never find Cypher's again," said Kraft.
And Milly-I mean the Natural Adjustment-is saved!"
And back to Cypher's went we three, and, finding customers scarce, we joined hands and did an Indian dance with Milly in the centre.
This, I say, happened three years ago.
And about that time a little luck descended upon us three, and we were enabled to buy costlier and less wholesome food than Cypher's.
Our paths separated, and I saw Kraft no more and Judkins seldom.
The title was "Boadicea," and the figure seemed to fill all out of doors.
But of all the picture's admirers who stood before it, I believe I was the only one who longed for Boadicea to stalk from her frame, bringing me corned beef hash with poached egg.
"I didn't know," I said to him.
"We've bought a cottage in the Bronx with the money," said he.
"Then," said I, "when you led us against the lumberman-the-Klondiker --it wasn't altogether on account of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature?"
"Well, not altogether," said Kraft, with a grin.
THE PENDULUM
"Eighty first street-let 'em out, please," yelled the shepherd in blue.
A flock of citizen sheep scrambled out and another flock scrambled aboard.
Ding ding!
The cattle cars of the Manhattan Elevated rattled away, and john Perkins drifted down the stairway of the station with the released flock.
john walked slowly toward his flat.
Slowly, because in the lexicon of his daily life there was no such word as "perhaps." There are no surprises awaiting a man who has been married two years and lives in a flat.
As he walked john Perkins prophesied to himself with gloomy and downtrodden cynicism the foregone conclusions of the monotonous day.
Katy would meet him at the door with a kiss flavored with cold cream and butter scotch.
He would remove his coat, sit upon a macadamized lounge and read, in the evening paper, of Russians and Japs slaughtered by the deadly linotype.
After dinner Katy would show him the new patch in her crazy quilt that the iceman had cut for her off the end of his four in hand. At half past seven they would spread newspapers over the furniture to catch the pieces of plastering that fell when the fat man in the flat overhead began to take his physical culture exercises.
Exactly at eight Hickey and Mooney, of the vaudeville team (unbooked) in the flat across the hall, would yield to the gentle influence of delirium tremens and begin to overturn chairs under the delusion that Hammerstein was pursuing them with a five hundred dollar a week contract.
And he knew that at a quarter past eight he would summon his nerve and reach for his hat, and that his wife would deliver this speech in a querulous tone:
"Now, where are you going, I'd like to know, john Perkins?"
Of late such had been john Perkins's habit.
At ten or eleven he would return.
Sometimes Katy would be asleep; sometimes waiting up, ready to melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the wrought steel chains of matrimony.
For these things Cupid will have to answer when he stands at the bar of justice with his victims from the Frogmore flats.
To night john Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the commonplace when he reached his door.
No Katy was there with her affectionate, confectionate kiss.
The three rooms seemed in portentous disorder.
All about lay her things in confusion.
Shoes in the middle of the floor, curling tongs, hair bows, kimonos, powder box, jumbled together on dresser and chairs-this was not Katy's way.
With a sinking heart john saw the comb with a curling cloud of her brown hair among its teeth.
Hanging conspicuously to the gas jet by a string was a folded paper. john seized it.
It was a note from his wife running thus:
Brother Sam is going to meet me at the depot there.
There is cold mutton in the ice box.
Pay the milkman fifty cents.
She had it bad last spring.
Don't forget to write to the company about the gas meter, and your good socks are in the top drawer. I will write to morrow.
Hastily, KATY.
Never during their two years of matrimony had he and Katy been separated for a night.
john read the note over and over in a dumbfounded way.
There on the back of a chair hung, pathetically empty and formless, the red wrapper with black dots that she always wore while getting the meals.
Her week day clothes had been tossed here and there in her haste.
A little paper bag of her favorite butter scotch lay with its string yet unwound.
A daily paper sprawled on the floor, gaping rectangularly where a railroad time table had been clipped from it. Everything in the room spoke of a loss, of an essence gone, of its soul and life departed.
When he touched her clothes a thrill of something like terror went through him.
He had never thought what existence would be without Katy.
She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed-necessary but scarcely noticed.
Now, without warning, she was gone, vanished, as completely absent as if she had never existed.
Of course it would be only for a few days, or at most a week or two, but it seemed to him as if the very hand of death had pointed a finger at his secure and uneventful home.
Bright among withdrawn blessings now appeared to him the ghosts of pot roasts and the salad with tan polish dressing.
His home was dismantled.
A quinzied mother in law had knocked his lares and penates sky high.
He did not care to smoke.
The night was his.
He might go forth unquestioned and thrum the strings of jollity as free as any gay bachelor there.
He might carouse and wander and have his fling until dawn if he liked; and there would be no wrathful Katy waiting for him, bearing the chalice that held the dregs of his joy. He might play pool at McCloskey's with his roistering friends until Aurora dimmed the electric bulbs if he chose.
Katy was gone.
john Perkins was not accustomed to analyzing his emotions.
He knew now that Katy was necessary to his happiness.
His feeling for her, lulled into unconsciousness by the dull round of domesticity, had been sharply stirred by the loss of her presence.
"I'm a double dyed dub," mused john Perkins, "the way I've been treating Katy.
The poor girl here all alone with nothing to amuse her, and me acting that way!
I'm going to make it up for the little girl.
I'll take her out and let her see some amusement.
And I'll cut out the McCloskey gang right from this minute."
And at McCloskey's the boys were knocking the balls idly into the pockets against the hour for the nightly game.
But no primrose way nor clicking cue could woo the remorseful soul of Perkins the bereft.
The thing that was his, lightly held and half scorned, had been taken away from him, and he wanted it.
Near the right hand of john Perkins stood a chair.
On the back of it stood Katy's blue shirtwaist.
It still retained something of her contour.
Midway of the sleeves were fine, individual wrinkles made by the movements of her arms in working for his comfort and pleasure.
A delicate but impelling odor of bluebells came from it.
john took it and looked long and soberly at the unresponsive grenadine.
Tears:--yes, tears-came into john Perkins's eyes.
He would make up for all his neglect.
What was life without her?
The door opened.
Katy walked in carrying a little hand satchel.
john stared at her stupidly.
"My! I'm glad to get back," said Katy.
"Ma wasn't sick to amount to anything.
So I took the next train back.
I'm just dying for a cup of coffee."
Nobody heard the click and rattle of the cog wheels as the third floor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of Things.
A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted and the wheels revolve in their old orbit.
john Perkins looked at the clock.
He reached for his hat and walked to the door.
"Now, where are you going, I'd like to know, john Perkins?" asked Katy, in a querulous tone.
THE BADGE OF POLICEMAN O'ROON
It cannot be denied that men and women have looked upon one another for the first time and become instantly enamored.
It is a risky process, this love at first sight, before she has seen him in Bradstreet or he has seen her in curl papers.
But these things do happen; and one instance must form a theme for this story-though not, thank Heaven, to the overshadowing of more vital and important subjects, such as drink, policemen, horses and earldoms.
During a certain war a troop calling itself the Gentle Riders rode into history and one or two ambuscades.
The Gentle Riders were recruited from the aristocracy of the wild men of the West and the wild men of the aristocracy of the East.
In khaki there is little telling them one from another, so they became good friends and comrades all around.
Ellsworth Remsen, whose old Knickerbocker descent atoned for his modest rating at only ten millions, ate his canned beef gayly by the campfires of the Gentle Riders.
The war was a great lark to him, so that he scarcely regretted polo and planked shad.
One of the troopers was a well set up, affable, cool young man, who called himself O'Roon.
To this young man Remsen took an especial liking.
The two rode side by side during the famous mooted up hill charge that was disputed so hotly at the time by the Spaniards and afterward by the Democrats.
After the war Remsen came back to his polo and shad.
One day a well set up, affable, cool young man disturbed him at his club, and he and O'Roon were soon pounding each other and exchanging opprobrious epithets after the manner of long lost friends.
O'Roon looked seedy and out of luck and perfectly contented.
But it seemed that his content was only apparent.
"Get me a job, Remsen," he said.
"No trouble at all," said Remsen.
Any particular line you fancy?"
"Yes," said O'Roon, with a look of interest.
"I took a walk in your Central Park this morning.
I'd like to be one of those bobbies on horseback.
That would be about the ticket.
Besides, it's the only thing I could do.
I can ride a little and the fresh air suits me. Think you could land that for me?"
Remsen was sure that he could.
And in a very short time he did.
And now at the extreme risk of wearying old gentlemen who carry leather fob chains, and elderly ladies who-but no! grandmother herself yet thrills at foolish, immortal Romeo-there must be a hint of love at first sight.
It came just as Remsen was strolling into Fifth avenue from his club a few doors away.
A motor car was creeping along foot by foot, impeded by a freshet of vehicles that filled the street.
In the car was a chauffeur and an old gentleman with snowy side whiskers and a Scotch plaid cap which could not be worn while automobiling except by a personage. Not even a wine agent would dare do it.
But these two were of no consequence-except, perhaps, for the guiding of the machine and the paying for it.
He could have flung himself under the very wheels that conveyed her, but he knew that would be the last means of attracting the attention of those who ride in motor cars. Slowly the auto passed, and, if we place the poets above the autoists, carried the heart of Remsen with it.
Yet he hoped to see her again; for each one fancies that his romance has its own tutelary guardian and divinity.
There were not many of them-perhaps a score-and there was wassail and things to eat, and speeches and the Spaniard was bearded again in recapitulation.
And when daylight threatened them the survivors prepared to depart.
But some remained upon the battlefield.
One of these was Trooper O'Roon, who was not seasoned to potent liquids. His legs declined to fulfil the obligations they had sworn to the police department.
"I'm stewed, Remsen," said O'Roon to his friend.
"Why do they build hotels that go round and round like catherine wheels? They'll take away my shield and break me.
I've got to go on duty in three hours.
The jig is up, Remsen.
The jig is up, I tell you."
"You see Mounted Policeman O'Roon.
Look at your face-no; you can't do that without a glass-but look at mine, and think of yours.
How much alike are we?
With your badge, on your horse, in your uniform, will I charm nurse maids and prevent the grass from growing under people's feet in the Park this day.
I will have your badge and your honor, besides having the jolliest lark I've been blessed with since we licked Spain."
Promptly on time the counterfeit presentment of Mounted Policeman O'Roon single footed into the Park on his chestnut steed.
In a uniform two men who are unlike will look alike; two who somewhat resemble each other in feature and figure will appear as twin brothers.
So Remsen trotted down the bridle paths, enjoying himself hugely, so few real pleasures do ten millionaires have.
Along the driveway in the early morning spun a victoria drawn by a pair of fiery bays.
There was something foreign about the affair, for the Park is rarely used in the morning except by unimportant people who love to be healthy, poor and wise.
In the vehicle sat an old gentleman with snowy side whiskers and a Scotch plaid cap which could not be worn while driving except by a personage.
At his side sat the lady of Remsen's heart-the lady who looked like pomegranate blossoms and the gibbous moon.
Remsen met them coming.
The bays had bolted.
There was work cut out for the impersonator of Policeman O'Roon.
The chestnut ranged alongside the off bay thirty seconds after the chase began, rolled his eye back at Remsen, and said in the only manner open to policemen's horses:
"Well, you duffer, are you going to do your share?
You're not O'Roon, but it seems to me if you'd lean to the right you could reach the reins of that foolish slow running bay-ah! you're all right; O'Roon couldn't have done it more neatly!"
The runaway team was tugged to an inglorious halt by Remsen's tough muscles.
The driver released his hands from the wrapped reins, jumped from his seat and stood at the heads of the team. The chestnut, approving his new rider, danced and pranced, reviling equinely the subdued bays.
And he was acutely conscious of a pair of violet eyes that would have drawn Saint Pyrites from his iron pillar-or whatever the allusion is-and of the lady's smile and look-a little frightened, but a look that, with the ever coward heart of a true lover, he could not yet construe.
They were asking his name and bestowing upon him wellbred thanks for his heroic deed, and the Scotch cap was especially babbling and insistent.
But the eloquent appeal was in the eyes of the lady.
A little thrill of satisfaction ran through Remsen, because he had a name to give which, without undue pride, was worthy of being spoken in high places, and a small fortune which, with due pride, he could leave at his end without disgrace.
He opened his lips to speak and closed them again.
Who was he?
Mounted Policeman O'Roon.
The badge and the honor of his comrade were in his hands.
Off his beat, exposed, disgraced, discharged.
Remsen touched his cap, looked between the chestnut's ears, and took refuge in vernacularity.
"Don't mention it," he said stolidly.
"We policemen are paid to do these things.
At the end of the day Remsen sent the chestnut to his stable and went to O'Roon's room.
The policeman was again a well set up, affable, cool young man who sat by the window smoking cigars.
O'Roon smiled with evident satisfaction.
"Good old Remsen," he said, affably, "I know all about it.
They trailed me down and cornered me here two hours ago.
There was a little row at home, you know, and I cut sticks just to show them.
I don't believe I told you that my Governor was the Earl of Ardsley. Funny you should bob against them in the Park.
If you damaged that horse of mine I'll never forgive you.
I'm going to buy him and take him back with me.
Oh, yes, and I think my sister-Lady Angela, you know-wants particularly for you to come up to the hotel with me this evening.
Didn't lose my badge, did you, Remsen?
Chapter seven
An Administration Protest Dudley Field Malone Resigns
He had known and supported the President from the beginning of the President's political career.
He had campaigned twice through New Jersey with mr Wilson as Governor; he had managed mr Wilson's campaigns in many states for the nomination before the Baltimore Convention; he had toured the country with mr Wilson in nineteen twelve ; and it was he who led to victory President Wilson's fight for California in nineteen sixteen.
mr Malone has consented to tell for the first time, in this record of the militant campaign, what happened at his memorable interview with President Wilson in July, nineteen seventeen, an interview which he followed up two months later with his resignation as Collector of the Port of New York.
I quote the story in his own words:
Frank p Walsh, amos Pinchot, Frederic c Howe, j a h Hopkins, Allen McCurdy and I were present throughout the trial of the sixteen women in July.
It was three o'clock.
I called a taxicab, drove direct to the executive offices and met him.
I began by reminding the President that in the seven years and a half of our personal and political association we had never had a serious difference.
I also informed him that I had offered to act as counsel for the suffragists on the appeal of their case.
He asked me for full details of my complaint and attitude.
I told mr Wilson everything I had witnessed from the time we saw the suffragists arrested in front of the White House to their sentence in the police court.
I observed that although we might not agree with the "manners" of picketing, citizens had a right to petition the President or any other official of the government for a redress of grievances.
He seemed to acquiesce in this view, and reminded me that the women had been unmolested at the White House gates for over five months, adding that he had even ordered the head usher to invite the women on cold days to come into the White House and warm themselves and have coffee.
"If the situation is as you describe it, it is shocking," said the President'.
"The manhandling of the women by the police was outrageous and the entire trial (before a judge of your own appointment) was a perversion of justice," I said.
This seemed to annoy the President and he replied with asperity, "Why do you come to me in this indignant fashion for things which have been done by the police officials of the city of Washington?"
"mr
The President asserted his ignorance of all this.
"Do you mean to tell me," he said, "that you intend to resign, to repudiate me and my Administration and sacrifice me for your views on this suffrage question?"
President, if there is any sacrifice in this unhappy circumstance, it is I who am making the sacrifice.
I was sent twice as your spokesman in the last campaign to the Woman Suffrage States of the West.
I told you that I found your strength with women voters lay in the fact that you had with great patience and statesmanship kept this country out of the European war.
But that your great weakness with women voters was that you had not taken any step throughout your entire Administration to urge the passage of the Federal Suffrage Amendment, which mr Hughes was advocating and which alone can enfranchise all the women of the nation.
You were pleased and approved of what I had done.
I returned to California and repeated this promise, and so far as I am concerned, I must keep my part of that obligation."
I reiterated to the President my earlier appeal that he assist suffrage as an urgent war measure and a necessary part of America's program for world democracy, to which the President replied: "The enfranchisement of women is not at all necessary to a program of democracy and I see nothing in
"mr
The President was visibly moved as I added, "You are the President now, reelected to office.
You ask if I am going to sacrifice you.
You sacrifice nothing by my resignation.
But I lose much.
I quit a political career.
I give up a powerful office in my own state.
I, who have no money, sacrifice a lucrative salary, and go back to revive my law practice.
But most of all I sever a personal association with you of the deepest affection which you know has meant much to me these past seven years.
But I cannot and will not remain in office and see women thrown into jail because they demand their political freedom."
The President earnestly urged me not to resign, saying, "What will the people of the country think when they hear that the Collector of the Port of New York has resigned because of an injustice done to a group of suffragists by the police officials of the city of Washington?"
My reply to this was, "With all respect for you, mr President, my explanation to the public will not be as difficult as yours, if I am compelled to remind the public that you have appointed to office and can remove all the important officials of the city of Washington."
"But," I said, "mr
I agreed to this, and we closed the interview with the President saying, "If you consider my personal request and do not resign, please do not leave Washington without coming to see me." I left the executive offices and never saw him again.
There was just a day and a half left to perfect the exceptions for the appeal under the rules of procedure.
No stenographic record of the trial had been taken, which put me under the greatest legal difficulties.
I was in the midst of these preparations for appeal the next day when I learned to my surprise that the President had pardoned the women.
He had not even consulted me as their attorney.
Moreover, I was amazed that since the President had said he considered the treatment of the women "shocking," he had pardoned them without stating that he did so to correct a grave injustice.
I felt certain that the high spirited women in the workhouse would refuse to accept the pardon as a mere "benevolent" act on the part of the President.
My opinion was confirmed.
I advised them that as a matter of law no one could compel them to accept the pardon, but that as a matter of fact they would have to accept it, for the Attorney
"The President's pardon is an acknowledgment by him of the grave injustice that has been done:"
This he never denied.
Under this published interpretation of his pardon the women at Occoquan accepted the pardon and returned to Washington.
The incident was closed.
I returned to New York.
During the next two months I carefully watched the situation.
Under this development it seemed to me that self respect demanded action, so I sent my resignation to the President, publicly stated my attitude and regretfully left his Administration."
mr Malone's resignation in September, nineteen seventeen, came with a sudden shock, because the entire country and surely the Administration thought him quieted and subdued by the President's personal appeal to him in July.
mr Wilson and his Administration were shocked that any one should care enough about the liberty of women to resign a lucrative post in the Government.
The nation was shocked into the realization that this was not a street brawl between women and policemen, but a controversy between suffragists and a powerful Administration.
We had said so but it would have taken months to convince the public that the President was in any way responsible.
mr Malone did what we could only have done with the greatest difficulty and after more pro
longed sacrifices.
He laid the responsibility squarely and dramatically where it belonged.
It is impossible to overemphasize what a tremendous acceleration mr Malone's fine, solitary and generous act gave to the speedy break down of the Administration's resistance.
His sacrifice lightened ours.
Women ought to be willing to make sacrifices for their own liberation, but for a man to have the courage and imagination to make such a sacrifice for the liberation of women is unparalleled.
mr Malone called to the attention of the nation the true cause of the obstruction and suppression.
He reproached the President and his colleagues after mature consideration, in the most honorable and vital way,-by refusing longer to associate himself with an Administration which backed such policies.
And mr Malone's resignation was not only welcomed by the militant group.
The conservative suffrage leaders, although they heartily disapproved of , picketing, were as outspoken in their gratitude.
Alice Stone Blackwell, the daughter of Lucy Stone, herself a pioneer suffrage leader and editor, wrote to mr Malone:
"May I express my appreciation and gratitude for the excellent and manly letter that you have written to President Wilson on woman suffrage?
I am sure that I am only one of many women who feel thankful to you for it.
"The picketing seems to me a very silly business, and I am sure it is doing the cause harm instead of good; but the picketers are being shamefully and illegally treated, and it is a thousand pities, for President Wilson's own sake, that he ever allowed the Washington authorities to enter on this course of persecution.
It was high time for some one to make a protest, and you have made one that has been heard far and wide . . . ."
mrs Carrie Chapman Catt, the President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, wrote:
It was the noblest act that any man
The letter itself was a high minded appeal . . . .
mrs Norman de r Whitehouse, the President of the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, with which mr Malone had worked for years, wired:
"Although we disagree with you on the question of picketing every suffragist must be grateful to you for the gallant support you are giving our cause and the great sacrifice you are making."
mrs james Lees Laidlaw, Vice Chairman of the New York Suffrage Party, said:
"No words of mine can tell you how our hearts have been lifted and our purposes strengthened in this tremendous struggle in New York State by the reading of your powerful and noble utterances in your letter to President Wilson.
There flashed through my mind all the memories of Knights of chivalry and of romance that I have ever read, and they all paled before your championship, and the sacrifice and the high spirited leadership that it signifies. Where you lead, I believe, thousands of other men will follow, even though at a distance, and most inadequately . . . ."
And from the women voters of California with whom mr Malone had kept faith came the message:
"The liberty loving women of California greet you as one of the few men in history who have been willing to sacrifice material interests for the liberty of a class to which they themselves do not belong.
We are deeply grateful for the incalculable benefit of your active assistance in the struggle of American women for political liberty and for a real Democracy."
I reprint mr Malone's letter of resignation which sets forth in detail his position.
september seventh nineteen seventeen.
The President, The White House, Washington, d c
Dear mr President:
Last autumn, as the representative of your Administration, I went into the woman suffrage states to urge your reelection.
The most difficult argument to meet among the seven million voters was the failure of the Democratic party, throughout four years of power, to pass the federal suffrage amendment looking toward the enfranchisement of all the women of the country.
Throughout those states, and particularly in California, which ultimately decided the election by the votes of women, the women voters were urged to support you, even though Judge Hughes had already declared for the federal suffrage amendment, because you and your party, through liberal leadership, were more likely nationally to enfranchise the rest of the women of the country than were your opponents.
And if the women of the West voted to reelect you, I promised them that I would spend all my energy, at any sacrifice to myself, to get the present Democratic Administration to pass the federal suffrage amendment.
But the present policy of the Administration, in permitting splendid American women to be sent to jail in Washington, not for carrying offensive banners, not for picketing, but on the technical charge of obstructing traffic, is a denial even of their constitutional right to petition for, and demand the passage of, the federal suffrage amendment.
It, therefore, now becomes my profound obligation actively to keep my promise to the women of the West.
In more than twenty states it is a practical impossibility to amend the state constitutions; so the women of those States can only be enfranchised by the passage of the federal suffrage amendment.
Since England and Russia, in the midst of the great war, have assured the national enfranchisement of their women, should we not be jealous to maintain our democratic leadership in the world by the speedy national enfranchisement of American women?
The women of
the nation are, and always will be, loyal to the country, and the passage of the suffrage amendment is only the first step toward their national emancipation.
For this reason many of your most ardent friends and supporters feel that the passage of the federal suffrage amendment is a war measure which could appropriately be urged by you at this session of Congress.
It is true that this amendment would have to come from Congress, but the present Congress shows no earnest desire to enact this legislation for the simple reason that you, as the leader of the party in power, have not yet suggested it.
For the whole country gladly acknowledges, mr President, that no vital piece of legislation has come through Congress these five years except by your extraordinary and brilliant leadership.
It will hearten the mothers of the nation, eliminate a just grievance, and turn the devoted energies of brilliant women to a more hearty support of the Government in this crisis.
As you well know, in dozens of speeches in many states I have advocated your policies and the war.
I was the first man of your Administration, nearly five years ago, to publicly advocate preparedness, and helped to found the first Plattsburg training camp.
And if, with our troops mobilizing in France, you will give American women this measure for their political freedom, they will support with greater enthusiasm your hope and the hope of America for world freedom.
I have not approved all the methods recently adopted by women in pursuit of their political liberty; yet, mr President, the Committee on Suffrage of the United States Senate was formed in eighteen eighty three, when I was one year old; this same federal
Will not this Administration, reelected to power by the hope and faith of the women of the West, handsomely reward that faith by taking action now for the passage of the federal suffrage amendment?
In every circumstance throughout those years I have served you with the most respectful affection and unshadowed devotion.
It is no small sacrifice now for me, as a member of your Administration, to sever our political relationship.
But I think it is high time that men in this generation, at some cost to themselves, stood up to battle for the national enfranchisement of American women.
So in order effectively
to keep my promise made in the West and more freely to go into this larger field of democratic effort, I hereby resign my office as Collector of the Port of New York, to take effect at once, or at your earliest convenience.
Yours respectfully,
(Signed) DUDLEY FIELD MALONE.
The President's answer has never before been published:
THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON
My dear mr Collector:
Your letter of september seventh reached me just before I left home and I have, I am sorry to say, been unable to reply to it sooner.
I must frankly say that I cannot regard your reasons for resigning your position as Collector of Customs as convincing, but it is so evidently your wish to be relieved from the duties of the office that I do not feel at liberty to withhold my acceptance of your resignation.
Indeed, I judge from your letter that any discussion of the reasons would not be acceptable to you and that it is your desire to be free of the restraints of public office.
I, therefore, accept your resignation, to take effect as you have wished.
I need not say that our long association in public affairs makes me regret the action you have taken most sincerely.
To this mr Malone replied:
The President, The White House, Washington, d c
Dear mr President:
After a most careful re reading of my letter, I am unable to understand how you could judge that any discussion by you of my reasons for resigning would not be acceptable to me since my letter was an appeal to you on specific grounds for action now by the Administration on the Federal Suffrage amendment.
However, I am profoundly grateful to you for your prompt acceptance of my resignation.
Chapter eight
The Administration Yields
It yielded on a point of machinery.
It gave us a report in the Senate and a committee in the House and expected us to be grateful.
We were now for a moment the object of sympathy; the Administration was the butt of considerable hostility.
Sensing their predicament and fearing any loss of prestige, they risked a slight advance.
Scarcely had the women recovered from the surprise of his visit when the Senator, on the following day, september fifteenth, filed the favorable report which had been lying with his Committee since may fifteenth, exactly six months.
The Report, which he had so long delayed because he wanted [he said] to make it a particularly brilliant and elaborate one, read:
"The Committee on Woman Suffrage, to which was referred the joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, conferring upon women the right of suffrage, having the same under consideration, beg leave to report it back to the Senate with the recommendation that the joint resolution do pass."
This vote was indicative of the strength of the amendment in the House.
The resolution was sponsored by Representative Pou, Chairman of the Rules Committee and Administration leader, himself an anti suffragist.
Scores of Congressmen, anxious to refute the idea that the indomitable picket had had anything to do with their action, revealed naively how surely it had.
Some indirectly and many, inadvertently, however, paid eloquent tribute to the suffrage picket.
mr Meeker of Missouri, Democrat, protested against Congress "yielding to the nagging of a certain group."
mr Cantrill of Kentucky, Democrat, believed that "millions of Christian women in the nation should not be denied the right of having a Committee in the House to study the problem of suffrage because of the mistakes of some few of their sisters."
of the banners of the pickets without permitting the women carrying them to be the objects of mob violence.
To see women roughly handled by rough men on the streets of the capital of the nation is not a pleasing sight to Kentuckians and to red blooded Americans, and let us hope the like will never again be seen here."
The subject of the creation of a committee on suffrage was almost entirely forgotten.
The Congressmen were utterly unable to shake off the ghosts of the pickets.
The pickets had not influenced their actions!
The very idea was appalling to Representative Stafford of Wisconsin, anti suffrage Republican, who joined in the Democratic protests.
He said:
If we keep up this sort of practices, we will compel the House, when they come to vote on the constitutional amendment, to surrender obediently likewise'."
He spoke the truth, and finished dramatically with:
"Gentlemen, there is only one question before the House today and that is, if you look at it from a political aspect, whether you wish to approve of the practices of these women who have been disgracing their cause here in Washington for the past several months."
Representative Volstead, of Minnesota, Republican, came the closest of all to real courage in his protest:-
While I do not approve of picketing, I disapprove more strongly of the hoodlum methods pursued in suppressing the practice.
I gather from the press that this is what took place.
Some women did in a peaceable, and perfectly lawful manner, display suffrage banners on the public street near the White House.
The Suffrage Committee in the House was appointed.
The creation of this committee, which had been pending since nineteen thirteen, was now finally granted in September, nineteen seventeen.
To be sure this was accomplished only after an inordinate amount of time, money and effort had been spent on a sustained and relentless campaign of pressure.
Help me up, boys."
"What for?"
"Folk?" cried he.
"Are ye daft?
"What?" say I; "not mr Ebenezer?"
"Hoot, hoot, hoot," said the barber, "nae kind of a man, nae kind of a man at all;" and began to ask me very shrewdly what my business was; but I was more than a match for him at that, and he went on to his next customer no wiser than he came.
What kind of a great house was this, that all the parish should start and stare to be asked the way to it? or what sort of a gentleman, that his ill fame should be thus current on the wayside?
My heart sank. "That!" I cried.
"That is the house of Shaws!" she cried.
"Blood built it; blood stopped the building of it; blood shall bring it down.
See here!" she cried again-"I spit upon the ground, and crack my thumb at it!
Black be its fall!
And the woman, whose voice had risen to a kind of eldritch sing song, turned with a skip, and was gone.
In those days folk still believed in witches and trembled at a curse; and this one, falling so pat, like a wayside omen, to arrest me ere I carried out my purpose, took the pith out of my legs.
The more I looked, the pleasanter that country side appeared; being all set with hawthorn bushes full of flowers; the fields dotted with sheep; a fine flight of rooks in the sky; and every sign of a kind soil and climate; and yet the barrack in the midst of it went sore against my fancy.
Country folk went by from the fields as I sat there on the side of the ditch, but I lacked the spirit to give them a good e'en.
Presently it brought me to stone uprights, with an unroofed lodge beside them, and coats of arms upon the top.
"I have come here with a letter," I said, "to mr Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws.
Is he here?"
"I will do no such thing," I cried.
"A what?" cried the voice, sharply.
MY curiosity, in a sense, was stronger than my fear, for I could not remain where I was, but crept back to the bank again, whence, sheltering my head behind a bush of broom, I might command the road before our door.
Three men ran together, hand in hand; and I made out, even through the mist, that the middle man of this trio was the blind beggar.
The next moment his voice showed me that I was right.
"Down with the door!" he cried.
"Aye, aye, sir!" answered two or three; and a rush was made upon the Admiral Benbow, the lantern bearer following; and then I could see them pause, and hear speeches passed in a lower key, as if they were surprised to find the door open.
But the pause was brief, for the blind man again issued his commands.
"In, in, in!" he shouted, and cursed them for their delay.
Four or five of them obeyed at once, two remaining on the road with the formidable beggar.
There was a pause, then a cry of surprise, and then a voice shouting from the house, "Bill's dead."
But the blind man swore at them again for their delay.
"Search him, some of you shirking lubbers, and the rest of you aloft and get the chest," he cried.
I could hear their feet rattling up our old stairs, so that the house must have shook with it.
Promptly afterwards, fresh sounds of astonishment arose; the window of the captain's room was thrown open with a slam and a jingle of broken glass, and a man leaned out into the moonlight, head and shoulders, and addressed the blind beggar on the road below him.
"Pew," he cried, "they've been before us.
"Is it there?" roared Pew.
"The money's there."
"Flint's fist, I mean," he cried.
"We don't see it here nohow," returned the man.
"Here, you below there, is it on Bill?" cried the blind man again.
At that another fellow, probably him who had remained below to search the captain's body, came to the door of the inn.
"It's these people of the inn-it's that boy.
I wish I had put his eyes out!" cried the blind man, Pew.
"Sure enough, they left their glim here," said the fellow from the window.
Then there followed a great to do through all our old inn, heavy feet pounding to and fro, furniture thrown over, doors kicked in, until the very rocks re echoed and the men came out again, one after another, on the road and declared that we were nowhere to be found.
I had thought it to be the blind man's trumpet, so to speak, summoning his crew to the assault, but I now found that it was a signal from the hillside towards the hamlet, and from its effect upon the buccaneers, a signal to warn them of approaching danger.
"There's Dirk again," said one.
"Twice!
We'll have to budge, mates."
"Budge, you skulk!" cried Pew.
They must be close by; they can't be far; you have your hands on it.
Scatter and look for them, dogs!
Oh, shiver my soul," he cried, "if I had eyes!"
This appeal seemed to produce some effect, for two of the fellows began to look here and there among the lumber, but half heartedly, I thought, and with half an eye to their own danger all the time, while the rest stood irresolute on the road.
"You have your hands on thousands, you fools, and you hang a leg!
You'd be as rich as kings if you could find it, and you know it's here, and you stand there skulking.
There wasn't one of you dared face Bill, and I did it-a blind man!
And I'm to lose my chance for you!
I'm to be a poor, crawling beggar, sponging for rum, when I might be rolling in a coach!
If you had the pluck of a weevil in a biscuit you would catch them still."
"Hang it, Pew, we've got the doubloons!" grumbled one.
"They might have hid the blessed thing," said another.
"Take the Georges, Pew, and don't stand here squalling."
Squalling was the word for it; Pew's anger rose so high at these objections till at last, his passion completely taking the upper hand, he struck at them right and left in his blindness and his stick sounded heavily on more than one.
This quarrel was the saving of us, for while it was still raging, another sound came from the top of the hill on the side of the hamlet-the tramp of horses galloping.
Almost at the same time a pistol shot, flash and report, came from the hedge side.
And that was plainly the last signal of danger, for the buccaneers turned at once and ran, separating in every direction, one seaward along the cove, one slant across the hill, and so on, so that in half a minute not a sign of them remained but Pew.
Him they had deserted, whether in sheer panic or out of revenge for his ill words and blows I know not; but there he remained behind, tapping up and down the road in a frenzy, and groping and calling for his comrades.
Just then the noise of horses topped the rise, and four or five riders came in sight in the moonlight and swept at full gallop down the slope.
At this Pew saw his error, turned with a scream, and ran straight for the ditch, into which he rolled.
But he was on his feet again in a second and made another dash, now utterly bewildered, right under the nearest of the coming horses.
Down went Pew with a cry that rang high into the night; and the four hoofs trampled and spurned him and passed by.
He fell on his side, then gently collapsed upon his face and moved no more.
They were pulling up, at any rate, horrified at the accident; and I soon saw what they were.
One, tailing out behind the rest, was a lad that had gone from the hamlet to dr Livesey's; the rest were revenue officers, whom he had met by the way, and with whom he had had the intelligence to return at once.
Some news of the lugger in Kitt's Hole had found its way to Supervisor Dance and set him forth that night in our direction, and to that circumstance my mother and I owed our preservation from death.
Pew was dead, stone dead.
In the meantime the supervisor rode on, as fast as he could, to Kitt's Hole; but his men had to dismount and grope down the dingle, leading, and sometimes supporting, their horses, and in continual fear of ambushes; so it was no great matter for surprise that when they got down to the Hole the lugger was already under way, though still close in.
He hailed her.
A voice replied, telling him to keep out of the moonlight or he would get some lead in him, and at the same time a bullet whistled close by his arm.
Soon after, the lugger doubled the point and disappeared.
mr Dance stood there, as he said, "like a fish out of water," and all he could do was to dispatch a man to B---- to warn the cutter.
"And that," said he, "is just about as good as nothing.
They've got off clean, and there's an end.
Only," he added, "I'm glad I trod on Master Pew's corns," for by this time he had heard my story.
mr Dance could make nothing of the scene.
"They got the money, you say?
More money, I suppose?"
"No, sir; not money, I think," replied i "In fact, sir, I believe I have the thing in my breast pocket; and to tell you the truth, I should like to get it put in safety."
"To be sure, boy; quite right," said he.
"I'll take it, if you like."
"I thought perhaps dr Livesey-" I began.
"Perfectly right," he interrupted very cheerily, "perfectly right-a gentleman and a magistrate.
And, now I come to think of it, I might as well ride round there myself and report to him or squire.
Master Pew's dead, when all's done; not that I regret it, but he's dead, you see, and people will make it out against an officer of his Majesty's revenue, if make it out they can.
Now, I'll tell you, Hawkins, if you like, I'll take you along."
I thanked him heartily for the offer, and we walked back to the hamlet where the horses were.
"Dogger," said mr Dance, "you have a good horse; take up this lad behind you."
As soon as I was mounted, holding on to Dogger's belt, the supervisor gave the word, and the party struck out at a bouncing trot on the road to dr Livesey's house.
CHAPTER fifty two.
What Occurred in Suffolk Street, Pall Mall.
mr Tombe had gained nothing for the cause by his crafty silence. George Vavasor felt perfectly certain, as he walked out from the little street which runs at the back of Doctors' Commons, that the money which he had been using had come, in some shape, through the hands of john Grey.
He did not care much to calculate whether the payments had been made from the personal funds of his rival, or whether that rival had been employed to dispense Alice's fortune. Under either view of the case his position was sufficiently bitter. The truth never for a moment occurred to him.
To him it seemed to be certain that Alice and mr Grey were in league;--and if they were in league, what must he think of Alice, and of her engagement with himself!
There are men who rarely think well of women,--who hardly think well of any woman.
I cannot say that such had been Vavasor's creed,--not entirely such.
Grey, as he thought, had been accepted by her cold prudence; but he thought, also, that she had found her prudence to be too cold, and had therefore returned where she had truly loved. Vavasor, though he did not love much himself, was willing enough to be the object of love.
This idea of his, however, had been greatly shaken by Alice's treatment of himself personally; but still he had not, hitherto, believed that she was false to him.
Now, what could he believe of her?
He hated her at this moment with even a more bitter hatred than that which he felt towards john Grey.
Or could it be that Kate, also, was lying to him?
If so, Kate also should be included in the punishment.
But why should they have conspired to feed him with these moneys? There had been no deceit, at any rate, in reference to the pounds sterling which Scruby had already swallowed.
They had been supplied, whatever had been the motives of the suppliers; and he had no doubt that more would be supplied if he would only keep himself quiet.
He was still walking westward as he thought of this, down Ludgate Hill, on his direct line towards Suffolk Street; and he tried to persuade himself that it would be well that he should hide his wrath till after provision should have been made for this other election.
They were his enemies,--Alice and mr Grey,--and why should he keep any terms with his enemies?
It was still a trouble to him to think that he should have been in any way beholden to john Grey; but the terrible thing had been done, the evil had occurred.
What would he gain by staying his hand now?
Exactly at the corner of Suffolk Street he met john Grey.
"mr Grey," he said, stopping himself suddenly, "I was this moment going to call on you at your lodgings."
"At my lodgings, were you?
Shall I return with you?"
"If you please," said Vavasor, leading the way up Suffolk Street. There had been no other greeting than this between them.
mr Grey himself, though a man very courteous in his general demeanour, would probably have passed Vavasor in the street with no more than the barest salutation.
"If you will allow me, I have the key," said Grey.
Then they both entered the house, and Vavasor followed his host up stairs.
mr Grey, as he went up, felt almost angry with himself in having admitted his enemy into his lodgings.
"No," said Vavasor; "I will stand up." And he stood up, holding his hat behind his back with his left hand, with his right leg forward, and the thumb of his right hand in his waistcoat pocket.
He looked full into Grey's face, and Grey looked full into his; and as he looked the great cicatrice seemed to open itself and to become purple with fresh blood stains.
This was a question which mr Grey could not answer very quickly.
"I think you heard me say so.
I have come here direct from mr Tombe's chambers.
"He is so."
"And I have come from him to ask you what interference you have lately taken in my money matters.
When you have answered that, I shall have other questions to ask you."
"But, mr Vavasor, has it occurred to you that I may not be disposed to answer questions so asked?"
Grey had now made up his mind that it would be better that he should tell the whole story,--better not only for himself, but for all the Vavasors, including this angry man himself.
The angry man evidently knew something, and it would be better that he should know the truth. "There has been such interference, mr Vavasor, if you choose to call it so.
"Well," said Vavasor, taking his right hand away from his waistcoat, and tapping the round table with his fingers impatiently.
"I dare say not; but, nevertheless, you must explain them."
Grey was a man tranquil in temperament, very little prone to quarrelling, with perhaps an exaggerated idea of the evil results of a row,--a man who would take infinite trouble to avoid any such scene as that which now seemed to be imminent; but he was a man whose courage was quite as high as that of his opponent.
To bully or be bullied were alike contrary to his nature.
"My difficulty in explaining it comes from consideration for you," he said.
"Then I beg that your difficulty will cease, and that you will have no consideration for me.
At any rate, I intend to have none for you.
Now, let me know why you have meddled with my matters."
"I think I might, perhaps, better refer you to your uncle."
We thought it better that her fortune should not be for the moment disturbed."
Then, as Vavasor simply sneered at him, but spoke nothing, he went on.
"And what was her fortune to you, sir?
Are you aware that she is engaged to me as my wife?
I ask you, sir, whether you are aware that Miss Vavasor is to be my wife?"
"I must altogether decline to discuss with you Miss Vavasor's present or future position."
"By heavens, then, you shall hear me discuss it!
If you had understood anything of the conduct which is usual among gentlemen, or if you had had any particle of pride in you, sir, you would have left her and never mentioned her name again.
I now find you meddling with her money matters, so as to get a hold upon her fortune."
"I have no hold upon her fortune."
"Yes, sir, you have.
The money shall be repaid at once, with any interest that can be due; and if I find you interfering again, I will expose you."
You must recall them."
I said that you were a pettifogging rascal.
Grey was much the larger man and much the stronger.
It may be doubted whether he knew himself the extent of his own strength, but such as it was he resolved that he must now use it.
"There is no help for it," he said, as he also prepared for action.
I doubt whether he had attempted to strike a blow, or whether he had so much as clenched his fist.
Vavasor had struck him repeatedly, but the blows had fallen on his body or his head, and he was unconscious of them.
He had but one object now in his mind, and that object was the kicking his assailant down the stairs.
Grey kicked at him as he went, but the kick was impotent.
Vavasor, when he raised himself, prepared to make another rush at the room, but before he could do so a man from below, hearing the noise, had come upon him and interrupted him.
"mr Jones," said Grey, speaking from above, "if that gentleman does not leave the house, I must get you to search for a policeman."
Vavasor, though the lodging house man had hold of the collar of his coat, made no attempt to turn upon his new enemy.
When two dogs are fighting, any bystander may attempt to separate them with impunity. The brutes are so anxious to tear each other that they have no energies left for other purposes.
"That man has ill used me, and I've punished him; that's all."
"I don't know much about punishing," said the tailor.
"It seems to me he pitched you down pretty clean out of the room above.
I think the best thing you can do now is to walk yourself off."
It was the only thing that Vavasor could do, and he did walk himself off.
I do not think that he was comfortable when he got there, or that he felt himself very well able to fight another battle that night on behalf of the River Bank.
Grey had probably received more personal damage than had fallen to his share; but Grey had succeeded in expelling him from the room, and he knew that he had been found prostrate on the landing place when the tailor first saw him.
But he might probably have got over the annoyance of this feeling had he not been overwhelmed by a consciousness that everything was going badly with him.
He was already beginning to hate his seat in Parliament.
What good had it done for him, or was it likely to do for him?
He found himself to be associated there with mr Bott, and a few others of the same class,--men whom he despised; and even they did not admit him among them without a certain show of superiority on their part.
He had looked forward to his entrance into that Chamber as the hour of his triumph; but he had entered it with mr Bott, and there had been no triumph to him in doing so.
This art of speaking in Parliament, which had appeared to him to be so grand, seemed already to be a humdrum, homely, dull affair.
To such as himself,--Members without an acquired name,--men did not seem to listen at all.
Vavasor had not as yet commenced his career as an orator; but night after night, as he sat there, the chance of commencing it with brilliance seemed to be further from him, and still further.
Two thousand pounds of his own money, and two thousand more of Alice's money,--or of mr Grey's,--he had already spent to make his way into that assembly.
He must spend, at any rate, two thousand more if he intended that his career should be prolonged beyond a three months' sitting;--and how was he to get this further sum after what had taken place to day?
He would get it.
That was his resolve as he walked in by the apple woman's stall, under the shadow of the great policeman, and between the two august lamps.
He would get it;--as long as Alice had a pound over which he could obtain mastery by any act or violence within his compass.
He would get it; though in doing so he might destroy his cousin Alice and ruin his sister Kate.
He had gone too far to stick at any scruples.
Had he not often declared how great had been that murderer who had been able to divest himself of all such scruples,--who had scoured his bosom free from all fears of the hereafter, and, as regarded the present, had dared to trust for everything to success?
He would go to Alice and demand the money from her with threats, and with that violence in his eyes which he knew so well how to assume.
He believed that when he so demanded it, the money would be forthcoming so as to satisfy, at any rate, his present emergencies.
If he would but die, there might yet be a hope remaining of permanent success!
Even though the estate might be entailed so as to give him no more than a life interest, still money might be raised on it.
His life interest in it would be worth ten or twelve years' purchase.
What a boon it would be if death could be made to overtake the old man before he did so!
On this very night he walked about the lobbies of the House, thinking of all this.
He went by himself from room to room, roaming along passages, sitting now for ten minutes in the gallery, and then again for a short space in the body of the House,--till he would get up and wander again out into the lobby, impatient of the neighbourhood of mr Bott.
Nor was mr Grey much happier when he was left alone, than was his assailant.
To give Vavasor his due, the memory of the affray itself did not long trouble him much.
To have been personally engaged in a fighting scramble with such a man as George Vavasor was to him terrible.
When ordering that his money might be expended with the possible object of saving Alice from her cousin, he had never felt a moment's regret; he had never thought that he was doing more than circumstances fairly demanded of him.
But now he was almost driven to utter reproach.
"Oh, Alice! that this thing should have come upon me through thy fault!"
When Vavasor was led away down stairs by the tailor, and Grey found that no more actual fighting would be required of him, he retired into his bedroom, that he might wash his mouth and free himself from the stains of the combat.
He had been told that he had advanced money on behalf of Alice, in order that he might obtain some power over Alice's fortune, and thus revenge himself upon Alice for her treatment of him.
Of that he was well aware.
But were not the circumstances of a nature to make it appear that the accusation was true?
Security for the money advanced by him, of course, he had none;--of course he had desired none;--of course the money had been given out of his own pocket with the sole object of saving Alice, if that might be possible; but of all those who might hear of this affair, how many would know or even guess the truth?
mr Jones had known him for some years, and entertained a most profound respect for his character.
His father had been a tradesman at Cambridge, and in this way Jones had become known to mr Grey.
But though given to sport, by which he meant modern prize fighting and the Epsom course on the Derby day, mr Jones was a man who dearly loved respectable customers and respectable lodgers.
mr Grey, with his property at Nethercoats, and his august manners, and his reputation at Cambridge, was a most respectable lodger, and mr Jones could hardly understand how any one could presume to raise his hand against such a man.
"Dear, dear, sir-this is a terrible affair!" he said, as he made his way into the room.
"It was very disagreeable, certainly," said Grey.
"Was the gentleman known to you?" asked the tailor.
"Yes; I know who he is."
"Any quarrel, sir?"
"Well, yes.
"Or we might manage to polish him off in any other way, you know."
It was some time before mr Grey could get rid of the tailor, but he did so at last without having told any part of the story to that warlike, worthy, and very anxious individual.
CHAPTER sixty five.
The First Kiss.
"Hush!" said the widow, "there's a carriage coming on the road-close to us." mrs Greenow, as she spoke these words, drew back from the Captain's arms before the first kiss of permitted ante nuptial love had been exchanged.
The scene was on the high road from Shap to Vavasor, and as she was still dressed in all the sombre habiliments of early widowhood, and as neither he nor his sweetheart were under forty, perhaps it was as well that they were not caught toying together in so very public a place.
But they were only just in time to escape the vigilant eyes of a new visitor.
Round the corner of the road, at a sharp trot, came the Shap post horse, with the Shap gig behind him,--the same gig which had brought Bellfield to Vavasor on the previous day,--and seated in the gig, looming large, with his eyes wide awake to everything round him, was-mr
Cheesacre.
As regarded her, her annoyance had chiefly reference to her two nieces, and especially to Alice. How was she to account for this second lover?
Before the wheels had stopped, mrs Greenow had begun to reflect whether it might be possible that she should send mr Cheesacre back without letting him go on to the Hall; but if mrs Greenow was dismayed, what were the feelings of the Captain?
"That man's wanted by the police," said Cheesacre, speaking while the gig was still in motion.
"He's wanted by the police, mrs Greenow," and in his ardour he stood up in the gig and pointed at Bellfield. Then the gig stopped suddenly, and he fell back into his seat in his effort to prevent his falling forward.
"He's wanted by the police," he shouted out again, as soon as he was able to recover his voice.
mrs Greenow turned pale beneath the widow's veil which she had dropped.
What might not her Captain have done?
"Oh, my!" she said, and dropped her hand from his arm, which she had taken.
"It's false," said Bellfield.
"It's true," said Cheesacre.
"I'll indict you for slander, my friend," said Bellfield.
"Pay me the money you owe me," said Cheesacre.
"You're a swindler!"
mrs Greenow cared little as to her lover being a swindler in mr Cheesacre's estimation.
Such accusations from him she had heard before.
But she did care very much as to this mission of the police against her Captain.
If that were true, the Captain could be her Captain no longer.
"What is this I hear, Captain Bellfield?" she said.
"It's a lie and a slander.
What police are after me, mr Cheesacre?"
"It's the police, or the sheriff's officer, or something of the kind," said Cheesacre.
Sheriff's officers can be paid, and there's an end of them."
"I'll indict him for the libel-I will, as sure as I'm alive," said Bellfield.
"Nonsense," said the widow.
"Don't you make a fool of yourself.
When men can't pay their way they must put up with having things like that said of them.
mr Cheesacre, where were you going?"
"I was going to Vavasor Hall, on purpose to caution you."
"It's too late," said mrs Greenow, sinking behind her veil.
"Why, you haven't been and married him since yesterday?
"I'm not one to intrude where I'm not wanted.
You may be sure of that.
Nevertheless, the widow had contrived to reconcile the two men before she reached the Hall.
They had actually shaken hands, and the lamb Cheesacre had agreed to lie down with the wolf Bellfield.
Cheesacre, moreover, had contrived to whisper into the widow's ears the true extent of his errand into Westmoreland.
This, however, he did not do altogether in Bellfield's hearing.
She merely frowned at him, and bade him begone, so that the walk which mrs Greenow began with one lover she ended in company with the other.
Bellfield, who was sent on to the house, found Alice and Kate surveying the newly arrived carpet bag.
"It belongs to your old friend, mr Cheesacre," said Bellfield to Kate.
He never had a chance in that quarter."
"Not enough of the rocks and valleys about him, was there, Captain Bellfield?" said Kate.
In the meantime Cheesacre was telling his story.
He first asked, in a melancholy tone, whether it was really necessary that he must abandon all his hopes.
"He wasn't going to say anything against the Captain," he said, "if things were really fixed.
He never begrudged any man his chance."
"Things are really fixed," said mrs Greenow.
He could, however, not keep himself from hinting that Oileymead was a substantial home, and that Bellfield had not as much as a straw mattress to lie upon.
In answer to this mrs Greenow told him that there was so much more reason why some one should provide the poor man with a mattress.
"If you look at it in that light, of course it's true," said Cheesacre.
mrs Greenow told him that she did look at it in that light.
He liked to have his own,--that was all.
That was his next subject.
Rumours as to the old Squire's will had no doubt reached him, and he was now willing to take advantage of that assistance which mrs Greenow had before offered him in this matter.
The time had come in which he ought to marry; of that he was aware.
He had told many of his friends in Norfolk that Kate Vavasor had thrown herself at his head, and very probably he had thought it true.
"You know you put it into my head your own self," pleaded mr Cheesacre.
"But things are so different since that," said the widow.
"How different?
I ain't different.
How are things different?"
"My niece has inherited property."
"And is that to make a change?
Oh!
mrs Greenow, who would have thought to find you mercenary like that?
Inherited property!
Is she going to fling a man over because of that?"
"Why, mr Cheesacre, I am quite sure she never gave you a word of encouragement in her life."
"But you always told me I might have her for the asking."
"And now I tell you that you mayn't.
It's of no use your going on there to ask her, for she will only send you away with an answer you won't like.
Look here, mr Cheesacre; you want to get married, and it's quite time you should.
There's my dear friend Charlie Fairstairs.
How could you get a better wife than Charlie?"
The man who marries her will have to find the money for the smock she stands up in."
"Who's mercenary now, mr Cheesacre?
Do you go home and think of it; and if you'll marry Charlie, I'll go to your wedding.
You shan't be ashamed of her clothing.
I'll see to that."
They were now close to the gate, and Cheesacre paused before he entered.
"I know there's none.
I've heard her speak about it."
"Somebody else, perhaps, is the happy man?"
"I can't say anything about that, but I know that she wouldn't take you.
I like farming, you know, but she doesn't."
"I might give that up," said Cheesacre readily,--"at any rate, for a time."
He still paused at the gate.
To this she made him no answer.
"There's a pride about me," he continued, "that I don't choose to go where I'm not wanted."
"I can't tell you, mr Cheesacre, that you are wanted in that light, certainly."
"Then I'll go.
Perhaps you'll be so good as to tell the boy with the gig to come after me?
Bellfield did it cheaper, of course; he travelled second class.
I heard of him as I came along."
"The expense does not matter to you, mr Cheesacre."
"Where is he?" Kate asked in a low voice, and everyone there felt how important was the question.
"He has gone," said the widow.
Kate's satisfaction was almost as intense.
"What on earth should we have done with him?"
"I have heard so much of mr Cheesacre, but have never seen him." Kate suggested that she should get into the gig and drive after him.
"He ain't a been and took hisself off?" suggested the boy, whose face became very dismal as the terrible idea struck him.
But, with juvenile craft, he put his hand on the carpet bag, and finding that it did not contain stones, was comforted.
"You drive after him, young gentleman, and you'll find him on the road to Shap," said mrs Greenow.
The absence of such joint stock fund is always felt when a small party is thrown together without such assistance.
"Yes, indeed.
Old Cheesacre, in spite of his absurdities, is not a bad sort of fellow at bottom;--awfully fond of his money, you know, Miss Vavasor, and always boasting about it." "That's not pleasant," said Alice.
"No, the most unpleasant thing in the world.
There's nothing I hate so much, Miss Vavasor, as that kind of talking.
My idea is this,--when a man has lots of money, let him make the best use he can of it, and say nothing about it.
Nobody ever heard me talking about my money." He knew that Alice knew that he was a pauper; but, nevertheless, he had the satisfaction of speaking of himself as though he were not a pauper.
In this way the afternoon went very pleasantly.
Why had he not told her?
Burgo Fitzgerald was a gentleman of high standing, and his creditors would have swallowed up every shilling that mrs Greenow possessed; but with Captain Bellfield she was comparatively safe.
Upon the whole I think that she was lucky in her choice; or, perhaps, I might more truly say, that she had chosen with prudence.
He was no forger, or thief-in the ordinary sense of the word; nor was he a returned convict.
Therefore, I say that mrs Greenow had been lucky in her choice, and not altogether without prudence.
"I think of taking this house," said she, "and of living here."
"What, in Westmoreland!" said the Captain, with something of dismay in his tone.
What on earth would he do with himself all his life in that gloomy place!
"Yes, in Westmoreland.
"I've been talking to my niece about it," continued mrs Greenow, "and I find that such an arrangement can be made very conveniently.
The property is left between her and her uncle,--the father of my other niece, and neither of them want to live here."
"But won't you be rather dull, my dear?"
"We could go to Yarmouth, you know, in the autumn." Then the Captain's visage became somewhat bright again.
"And perhaps, if you are not extravagant, we could manage a month or so in London during the winter, just to see the plays and do a little shopping." Then the Captain's face became very bright.
"And as for being dull," said the widow, "when people grow old they must be dull.
Dancing can't go on for ever." In answer to this the widow's Captain assured the widow that she was not at all old; and now, on this occasion, that ceremony came off successfully which had been interrupted on the Shap road by the noise of mr Cheesacre's wheels.
"What a goose you are!
What will Jeannette say?" "Bother Jeannette," said the Captain in his bliss.
"She can do another cap, and many more won't be wanted." Then I think the ceremony was repeated.
Upon the whole the Captain's visit was satisfactory-at any rate to the Captain.
Everything was settled.
Kate promised to be the solitary bridesmaid.
There was some talk of sending for Charlie Fairstairs, but the idea was abandoned.
And I'll get Cheesacre here, and make him marry her.
There's no good in paying for two journeys." The Captain was to be allowed to come over from Penrith twice a week previous to his marriage; or perhaps, I might more fairly say, that he was commanded to do so.
"Captain Bellfield, of Vavasor Hall, Westmoreland.
CHAPTER forty five
That knowledge was very present to her as she went to her cousin's hotel the day after she had invited Lord Warburton to give a tangible proof of his sincerity; and at this moment, as at others, she had a sufficient perception of the sources of Osmond's opposition.
He wished her to have no freedom of mind, and he knew perfectly well that Ralph was an apostle of freedom.
It was just because he was this, Isabel said to herself, that it was a refreshment to go and see him.
It will be perceived that she partook of this refreshment in spite of her husband's aversion to it, that is partook of it, as she flattered herself, discreetly.
She had not as yet undertaken to act in direct opposition to his wishes; he was her appointed and inscribed master; she gazed at moments with a sort of incredulous blankness at this fact.
Such a ceremony would be odious and monstrous; she tried to shut her eyes to it meanwhile.
Osmond would do nothing to help it by beginning first; he would put that burden upon her to the end.
He had not yet formally forbidden her to call upon Ralph; but she felt sure that unless Ralph should very soon depart this prohibition would come.
How could poor Ralph depart?
The weather as yet made it impossible.
She could perfectly understand her husband's wish for the event; she didn't, to be just, see how he COULD like her to be with her cousin.
Ralph never said a word against him, but Osmond's sore, mute protest was none the less founded.
If he should positively interpose, if he should put forth his authority, she would have to decide, and that wouldn't be easy.
The prospect made her heart beat and her cheeks burn, as I say, in advance; there were moments when, in her wish to avoid an open rupture, she found herself wishing Ralph would start even at a risk.
And it was of no use that, when catching herself in this state of mind, she called herself a feeble spirit, a coward. It was not that she loved Ralph less, but that almost anything seemed preferable to repudiating the most serious act-the single sacred act-of her life.
That appeared to make the whole future hideous. To break with Osmond once would be to break for ever; any open acknowledgement of irreconcilable needs would be an admission that their whole attempt had proved a failure.
For them there could be no condonement, no compromise, no easy forgetfulness, no formal readjustment.
They had attempted only one thing, but that one thing was to have been exquisite.
Once they missed it nothing else would do; there was no conceivable substitute for that success.
For the moment, Isabel went to the Hotel de Paris as often as she thought well; the measure of propriety was in the canon of taste, and there couldn't have been a better proof that morality was, so to speak, a matter of earnest appreciation.
Isabel's application of that measure had been particularly free to day, for in addition to the general truth that she couldn't leave Ralph to die alone she had something important to ask of him.
This indeed was Gilbert's business as well as her own.
She came very soon to what she wished to speak of.
"I want you to answer me a question.
It's about Lord Warburton."
"Very possibly you guess it.
Please then answer it."
"Oh, I don't say I can do that."
"You're intimate with him," she said; "you've a great deal of observation of him."
"Very true.
But think how he must dissimulate!"
"Why should he dissimulate?
That's not his nature."
"To a certain extent-yes.
"Very much, I think.
I can make that out."
"Ah!" said Isabel with a certain dryness.
Ralph looked at her as if his mild hilarity had been touched with mystification.
Isabel got up, slowly smoothing her gloves and eyeing them thoughtfully. "It's after all no business of mine."
"You're very philosophic," said her cousin.
"I thought you knew.
Lord Warburton tells me he wants, of all things in the world, to marry Pansy.
I've told you that before, without eliciting a comment from you.
You might risk one this morning, I think.
Is it your belief that he really cares for her?"
"Ah, for Pansy, no!" cried Ralph very positively.
"But you said just now he did."
Ralph waited a moment.
"That he cared for you, mrs Osmond."
Isabel shook her head gravely.
"That's nonsense, you know."
"Of course it is.
But the nonsense is Warburton's, not mine."
"That would be very tiresome." She spoke, as she flattered herself, with much subtlety.
"I ought to tell you indeed," Ralph went on, "that to me he has denied it."
"He has spoken very well of her-very properly.
He has let me know, of course, that he thinks she would do very well at Lockleigh."
"Ah, what Warburton really thinks-!" said Ralph.
Isabel fell to smoothing her gloves again; they were long, loose gloves on which she could freely expend herself.
It was the first time she had alluded to the need for help, and the words shook her cousin with their violence.
He gave a long murmur of relief, of pity, of tenderness; it seemed to him that at last the gulf between them had been bridged.
It was this that made him exclaim in a moment: "How unhappy you must be!"
He had no sooner spoken than she recovered her self possession, and the first use she made of it was to pretend she had not heard him.
"When I talk of your helping me I talk great nonsense," she said with a quick smile.
"The idea of my troubling you with my domestic embarrassments! The matter's very simple; Lord Warburton must get on by himself.
I can't undertake to see him through."
"He ought to succeed easily," said Ralph.
Isabel debated.
"Yes-but he has not always succeeded."
"Very true.
You know, however, how that always surprised me.
Is Miss Osmond capable of giving us a surprise?"
"It will come from him, rather.
I seem to see that after all he'll let the matter drop."
"He'll do nothing dishonourable," said Ralph.
She cares for another person, and it's cruel to attempt to bribe her by magnificent offers to give him up."
"Cruel to the other person perhaps-the one she cares for.
But Warburton isn't obliged to mind that."
"No, cruel to her," said Isabel.
He has the merit-for Pansy-of being in love with Pansy.
She can see at a glance that Lord Warburton isn't."
"He has been good to her already.
Fortunately, however, he has not said a word to disturb her.
"How would your husband like that?"
"Not at all; and he may be right in not liking it.
Only he must obtain satisfaction himself."
"Has he commissioned you to obtain it?" Ralph ventured to ask.
"It was natural that as an old friend of Lord Warburton's-an older friend, that is, than Gilbert-I should take an interest in his intentions."
"Take an interest in his renouncing them, you mean?"
Isabel hesitated, frowning a little.
"Let me understand.
Are you pleading his cause?"
"Not in the least.
I'm very glad he shouldn't become your stepdaughter's husband.
It makes such a very queer relation to you!" said Ralph, smiling.
"But I'm rather nervous lest your husband should think you haven't pushed him enough."
Isabel found herself able to smile as well as he.
"He knows me well enough not to have expected me to push.
I'm not afraid I shall not be able to justify myself!" she said lightly.
Her mask had dropped for an instant, but she had put it on again, to Ralph's infinite disappointment.
Ralph was certain that this was her situation; he knew by instinct, in advance, the form that in such an event Osmond's displeasure would take.
It could only take the meanest and cruellest.
He would have liked to warn Isabel of it-to let her see at least how he judged for her and how he knew.
It little mattered that Isabel would know much better; it was for his own satisfaction more than for hers that he longed to show her he was not deceived.
He tried and tried again to make her betray Osmond; he felt cold blooded, cruel, dishonourable almost, in doing so.
But it scarcely mattered, for he only failed.
What had she come for then, and why did she seem almost to offer him a chance to violate their tacit convention? Why did she ask him his advice if she gave him no liberty to answer her? How could they talk of her domestic embarrassments, as it pleased her humorously to designate them, if the principal factor was not to be mentioned?
These contradictions were themselves but an indication of her trouble, and her cry for help, just before, was the only thing he was bound to consider.
"You'll be decidedly at variance, all the same," he said in a moment.
And as she answered nothing, looking as if she scarce understood, "You'll find yourselves thinking very differently," he continued.
"That may easily happen, among the most united couples!" She took up her parasol; he saw she was nervous, afraid of what he might say.
"It's a matter we can hardly quarrel about, however," she added; "for almost all the interest is on his side.
That's very natural.
Pansy's after all his daughter-not mine." And she put out her hand to wish him goodbye.
Ralph took an inward resolution that she shouldn't leave him without his letting her know that he knew everything: it seemed too great an opportunity to lose.
"Do you know what his interest will make him say?" he asked as he took her hand.
She shook her head, rather dryly-not discouragingly-and he went on.
"It will make him say that your want of zeal is owing to jealousy." He stopped a moment; her face made him afraid.
"To jealousy?"
"To jealousy of his daughter."
She blushed red and threw back her head.
"You're not kind," she said in a voice that he had never heard on her lips.
"Be frank with me and you'll see," he answered.
But she made no reply; she only pulled her hand out of his own, which he tried still to hold, and rapidly withdrew from the room.
She made up her mind to speak to Pansy, and she took an occasion on the same day, going to the girl's room before dinner.
Isabel had a difficult task-the only thing was to perform it as simply as possible.
She felt bitter and angry, but she warned herself against betraying this heat.
She was afraid even of looking too grave, or at least too stern; she was afraid of causing alarm.
What Isabel wished to do was to hear from her own lips that her mind was not occupied with Lord Warburton; but if she desired the assurance she felt herself by no means at liberty to provoke it.
The girl's father would have qualified this as rank treachery; and indeed Isabel knew that if Pansy should display the smallest germ of a disposition to encourage Lord Warburton her own duty was to hold her tongue.
It was difficult to interrogate without appearing to suggest; Pansy's supreme simplicity, an innocence even more complete than Isabel had yet judged it, gave to the most tentative enquiry something of the effect of an admonition.
As she knelt there in the vague firelight, with her pretty dress dimly shining, her hands folded half in appeal and half in submission, her soft eyes, raised and fixed, full of the seriousness of the situation, she looked to Isabel like a childish martyr decked out for sacrifice and scarcely presuming even to hope to avert it.
"It's difficult for me to advise you," Isabel returned.
"I don't know how I can undertake that.
That's for your father; you must get his advice and, above all, you must act on it."
At this Pansy dropped her eyes; for a moment she said nothing.
"I love you very much, but your father loves you better."
"A lady can advise a young girl better than a man."
"I advise you then to pay the greatest respect to your father's wishes."
"But if I speak to you now about your getting married it's not for your own sake, it's for mine," Isabel went on.
"If I try to learn from you what you expect, what you desire, it's only that I may act accordingly."
Pansy stared, and then very quickly, "Will you do everything I want?" she asked.
"Before I say yes I must know what such things are."
Pansy presently told her that the only thing she wanted in life was to marry mr Rosier.
He had asked her and she had told him she would do so if her papa would allow it.
Now her papa wouldn't allow it.
"Very well then, it's impossible," Isabel pronounced.
"Yes, it's impossible," said Pansy without a sigh and with the same extreme attention in her clear little face.
"You must think of something else then," Isabel went on; but Pansy, sighing at this, told her that she had attempted that feat without the least success.
"You think of those who think of you," she said with a faint smile.
"I know mr Rosier thinks of me."
"He ought not to," said Isabel loftily.
"Your father has expressly requested he shouldn't."
"He can't help it, because he knows I think of HIM."
"You shouldn't think of him.
"I wish you would try to find one," the girl exclaimed as if she were praying to the Madonna.
"I should be very sorry to attempt it," said the Madonna with unusual frigidity.
"No one can think of me as mr Rosier does; no one has the right."
"Ah, but I don't admit mr Rosier's right!" Isabel hypocritically cried.
Pansy only gazed at her, evidently much puzzled; and Isabel, taking advantage of it, began to represent to her the wretched consequences of disobeying her father.
At this Pansy stopped her with the assurance that she would never disobey him, would never marry without his consent.
And she announced, in the serenest, simplest tone, that, though she might never marry mr Rosier, she would never cease to think of him.
She appeared to have accepted the idea of eternal singleness; but Isabel of course was free to reflect that she had no conception of its meaning. She was perfectly sincere; she was prepared to give up her lover.
This might seem an important step toward taking another, but for Pansy, evidently, it failed to lead in that direction.
She felt no bitterness toward her father; there was no bitterness in her heart; there was only the sweetness of fidelity to Edward Rosier, and a strange, exquisite intimation that she could prove it better by remaining single than even by marrying him.
"Your father would like you to make a better marriage," said Isabel. "mr
Rosier's fortune is not at all large."
"How do you mean better-if that would be good enough?
And I have myself so little money; why should I look for a fortune?"
"Your having so little is a reason for looking for more." With which Isabel was grateful for the dimness of the room; she felt as if her face were hideously insincere.
It was what she was doing for Osmond; it was what one had to do for Osmond!
Pansy's solemn eyes, fixed on her own, almost embarrassed her; she was ashamed to think she had made so light of the girl's preference.
"What should you like me to do?" her companion softly demanded.
The question was a terrible one, and Isabel took refuge in timorous vagueness.
"To remember all the pleasure it's in your power to give your father."
"To marry some one else, you mean-if he should ask me?"
For a moment Isabel's answer caused itself to be waited for; then she heard herself utter it in the stillness that Pansy's attention seemed to make.
"Yes-to marry some one else."
The child's eyes grew more penetrating; Isabel believed she was doubting her sincerity, and the impression took force from her slowly getting up from her cushion.
She stood there a moment with her small hands unclasped and then quavered out: "Well, I hope no one will ask me!"
"There has been a question of that.
Some one else would have been ready to ask you."
"I don't think he can have been ready," said Pansy.
"It would appear so if he had been sure he'd succeed."
"If he had been sure?
Then he wasn't ready!"
Isabel thought this rather sharp; she also got up and stood a moment looking into the fire.
"Lord Warburton has shown you great attention," she resumed; "of course you know it's of him I speak." She found herself, against her expectation, almost placed in the position of justifying herself; which led her to introduce this nobleman more crudely than she had intended.
"He has been very kind to me, and I like him very much.
But if you mean that he'll propose for me I think you're mistaken."
"Perhaps I am.
But your father would like it extremely."
Pansy shook her head with a little wise smile.
"Your father would like you to encourage him," Isabel went on mechanically.
"How can I encourage him?"
"I don't know.
Your father must tell you that."
Pansy said nothing for a moment; she only continued to smile as if she were in possession of a bright assurance.
"There's no danger-no danger!" she declared at last.
There was a conviction in the way she said this, and a felicity in her believing it, which conduced to Isabel's awkwardness.
She felt accused of dishonesty, and the idea was disgusting.
To repair her self respect she was on the point of saying that Lord Warburton had let her know that there was a danger.
But she didn't; she only said-in her embarrassment rather wide of the mark-that he surely had been most kind, most friendly.
"Yes, he has been very kind," Pansy answered.
"That's what I like him for."
"Why then is the difficulty so great?"
That's the meaning of his kindness.
It's as if he said to me: 'I like you very much, but if it doesn't please you I'll never say it again.' I think that's very kind, very noble," Pansy went on with deepening positiveness.
"That is all we've said to each other.
And he doesn't care for me either.
Isabel was touched with wonder at the depths of perception of which this submissive little person was capable; she felt afraid of Pansy's wisdom-began almost to retreat before it.
"You must tell your father that," she remarked reservedly.
"I think I'd rather not," Pansy unreservedly answered.
"You oughtn't to let him have false hopes."
"Perhaps not; but it will be good for me that he should.
So long as he believes that Lord Warburton intends anything of the kind you say, papa won't propose any one else.
And that will be an advantage for me," said the child very lucidly.
There was something brilliant in her lucidity, and it made her companion draw a long breath.
It relieved this friend of a heavy responsibility. Pansy had a sufficient illumination of her own, and Isabel felt that she herself just now had no light to spare from her small stock. Nevertheless it still clung to her that she must be loyal to Osmond, that she was on her honour in dealing with his daughter.
Under the influence of this sentiment she threw out another suggestion before she retired-a suggestion with which it seemed to her that she should have done her utmost.
"Your father takes for granted at least that you would like to marry a nobleman."
Pansy stood in the open doorway; she had drawn back the curtain for Isabel to pass.
"I think mr Rosier looks like one!" she remarked very gravely.
TWELVE.
The Train to Mariposa
It leaves the city every day about five o'clock in the evening, the train for Mariposa.
Strange that you did not know of it, though you come from the little town-or did, long years ago.
Odd that you never knew, in all these years, that the train was there every afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that you might have boarded it any day and gone home.
But of course "home" would hardly be the word you would apply to the little town, unless perhaps, late at night, when you'd been sitting reading in a quiet corner somewhere such a book as the present one.
Naturally you don't know of the Mariposa train now.
Years ago, when you first came to the city as a boy with your way to make, you knew of it well enough, only too well.
The price of a ticket counted in those days, and though you knew of the train you couldn't take it, but sometimes from sheer homesickness you used to wander down to the station on a Friday afternoon after your work, and watch the Mariposa people getting on the train and wish that you could go.
But if you have half forgotten Mariposa, and long since lost the way to it, you are only like the greater part of the men here in this Mausoleum Club in the city.
They all do.
Only they're half ashamed to own it.
Ask him if he ever tasted duck that could for a moment be compared to the black ducks in the rice marsh along the Ossawippi.
But no wonder they don't know about the five o'clock train for Mariposa. Very few people know about it.
Hundreds of them know that there is a train that goes out at five o'clock, but they mistake it.
Ever so many of them think it's just a suburban train.
Lots of people that take it every day think it's only the train to the golf grounds, but the joke is that after it passes out of the city and the suburbs and the golf grounds, it turns itself little by little into the Mariposa train, thundering and pounding towards the north with hemlock sparks pouring out into the darkness from the funnel of it.
Of course you can't tell it just at first.
All those people that are crowding into it with golf clubs, and wearing knickerbockers and flat caps, would deceive anybody.
That crowd of suburban people going home on commutation tickets and sometimes standing thick in the aisles, those are, of course, not Mariposa people.
Here and there in the crowd those people with the clothes that are perfectly all right and yet look odd in some way, the women with the peculiar hats and the-what do you say?--last year's fashions?
Ah yes, of course, that must be it.
That man with the two dollar panama and the glaring spectacles is one of the greatest judges that ever adorned the bench of Missinaba County.
That clerical gentleman with the wide black hat, who is explaining to the man with him the marvellous mechanism of the new air brake (one of the most conspicuous illustrations of the divine structure of the physical universe), surely you have seen him before.
Mariposa people!
Oh yes, there are any number of them on the train every day.
But of course you hardly recognize them while the train is still passing through the suburbs and the golf district and the outlying parts of the city area.
But wait a little, and you will see that when the city is well behind you, bit by bit the train changes its character.
I suppose, very probably, you haven't seen one of these wood engines since you were a boy forty years ago,--the old engine with a wide top like a hat on its funnel, and with sparks enough to light up a suit for damages once in every mile.
The stove is burning furiously at its sticks this autumn evening, for the air sets in chill as you get clear away from the city and are rising up to the higher ground of the country of the pines and the lakes.
Look from the window as you go.
There is a dull red light from the windows of the farmstead.
It must be comfortable there after the roar and clatter of the city, and only think of the still quiet of it.
As you sit back half dreaming in the car, you keep wondering why it is that you never came up before in all these years.
It is almost night now.
This is Lake Ossawippi surely enough.
You would know it anywhere by the broad, still, black water with hardly a ripple, and with the grip of the coming frost already on it.
Such a great sheet of blackness it looks as the train thunders along the side, swinging the curve of the embankment at a breakneck speed as it rounds the corner of the lake.
Don't tell me that the speed is only twenty five miles an hour.
I don't care what it is.
Yes, and the best too,--the most comfortable, the most reliable, the most luxurious and the speediest train that ever turned a wheel.
They are talking,--listen,--of the harvest, and the late election, and of how the local member is mentioned for the cabinet and all the old familiar topics of the sort.
What is it now-nine thirty?
Ah, then we must be nearing the town,--this big bush that we are passing through, you remember it surely as the great swamp just this side of the bridge over the Ossawippi?
Hear the clatter as we pass the semaphores and switch lights!
We must be close in now!
It must indeed.
No, don't bother to look at the reflection of your face in the window pane shadowed by the night outside.
Perhaps if you had come back now and again, just at odd times, it wouldn't have been so.
That night, in Olaf's cabin, Alan put himself back on the old track again.
Olaf loved the birds, and the cheer of their vesper song and bedtime twitter comforted Alan.
The next time he would know how to go about it, and he invited Alan to go with him.
You've got to combine that with Bolshevism, the menace of blackest Russia.
He stared into the fire, watching the embers flare up and die.
"I can't be, after the ruin their unintelligent propaganda and legislation have brought upon Alaska.
We can't take Alaska down to the States-we've got to bring them up to us.
We must bring a million of them up here before that danger flood we speak of comes beyond the Gulf of Anadyr.
And that fight will take place right here-in Alaska-and not in Siberia.
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A Chronicle of Wolfe
AUTHOR'S NOTE
But, since such treatment gives a totally false idea of his achievement, this little sketch, drawn straight from original sources, tries to show him as he really was, a co-worker with the British fleet in a war based entirely on naval strategy and inseparably connected with international affairs of world-wide significance. The only simplification attempted here is that of arrangement and expression.
w w
Quebec, april nineteen fourteen.
CHAPTER one -- THE BOY, seventeen twenty seven to seventeen forty one
Wolfe was a soldier born.
His father fought under the great Duke of Marlborough in the war against France at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Nor has the martial spirit deserted the descendants of the Wolfes in the generation now alive.
Many hundreds of years ago their forefathers lived in England and later on in Wales.
Later still, in the fifteenth century, before America was discovered, they were living in Ireland.
Wolfe's father, however, was born in England; and, as there is no evidence that any of his ancestors in Ireland had married other than English Protestants, and as Wolfe's mother was also English, we may say that the victor of Quebec was a pure bred Englishman.
Among his Anglo Irish kinsmen were the Goldsmiths and the Seymours.
Oliver Goldsmith himself was always very proud of being a cousin of the man who took Quebec.
She was eighteen years younger than his father, and was very tall and handsome.
Wolfe thought there was no one like her.
When he was a colonel, and had been through the wars and at court, he still believed she was 'a match for all the beauties.' He was not lucky enough to take after her in looks, except in her one weak feature, a cutaway chin.
His body, indeed, seems to have been made up of the bad points of both parents: he had his rheumatism from his father.
But his spirit was made up of all their good points; and no braver ever lived in any healthy body than in his own sickly, lanky six foot three.
Two other houses in the little country town of Westerham are full of memories of Wolfe.
One of these was his father's, a house more than two hundred years old when he was born.
It was built in the reign of Henry the seventh, and the loyal subject who built it had the king's coat of arms carved over the big stone fireplace.
Here Wolfe and his younger brother Edward used to sit in the winter evenings with their mother, while their veteran father told them the story of his long campaigns.
So, curiously enough, it appears that Wolfe, the soldier who won Canada for England in seventeen fifty nine, sat under the arms of the king in whose service the sailor Cabot hoisted the flag of England over Canadian soil in fourteen ninety seven.
The other house is Squerryes Court, belonging then and now to the Warde family, the Wolfes' closest friends.
Wolfe and George Warde were chums from the first day they met. Both wished to go into the Army; and both, of course, 'played soldiers,' like other virile boys.
Warde lived to be an old man and actually did become a famous cavalry leader.
Here he worked quietly enough till just before he entered on his 'teens.
Then the long pent rage of England suddenly burst in war with Spain.
The people went wild when the British fleet took Porto Bello, a Spanish port in Central America.
The news was cried through the streets all night.
Ships were fitting out in English harbours.
Soldiers were marching into every English camp.
Crowds were singing and cheering. First one boy's father and then another's was under orders for the front.
Among them was Wolfe's father, who was made adjutant general to the forces assembling in the Isle of Wight.
That was an old tale by this time; but the flames of anger threw it into lurid relief once more.
Wolfe was determined to go and fight.
Nothing could stop him.
So, one hot day in july seventeen forty, the lanky, red haired boy of thirteen and a half took his seat on the Portsmouth coach beside his father, the veteran soldier of fifty five.
His mother was a woman of much too fine a spirit to grudge anything for the service of her country; but she could not help being exceptionally anxious about the dangers of disease for a sickly boy in a far off land of pestilence and fever.
She had written to him the very day he left.
But he, full of the stir and excitement of a big camp, had carried the letter in his pocket for two or three days before answering it.
Newport, Isle of Wight, august sixth seventeen forty.
I received my dearest Mamma's letter on Monday last, but could not answer it then, by reason I was at camp to see the regiments off to go on board, and was too late for the post; but am very sorry, dear Mamma, that you doubt my love, which I'm sure is as sincere as ever any son's was to his mother.
Papa and I are just going on board, but I believe shall not sail this fortnight; in which time, if I can get ashore at Portsmouth or any other town, I will certainly write to you, and, when we are gone, by every ship we meet, because I know it is my duty. Besides, if it is not, I would do it out of love, with pleasure.
I am sorry to hear that your head is so bad, which I fear is caused by your being so melancholy; but pray, dear Mamma, if you love me, don't give yourself up to fears for us.
I will, as sure as I live, if it is possible for me, let you know everything that has happened, by every ship; therefore pray, dearest Mamma, don't doubt about it.
I am in a very good state of health, and am likely to continue so.
Pray my love to my brother.
Pray my service to Mr Streton and his family, to Mr and Mrs Weston, and to George Warde when you see him; and pray believe me to be, my dearest Mamma, your most dutiful, loving and affectionate son,
J. Wolfe.
To mrs Wolfe, at her house in Greenwich, Kent.
A long peace had made the country indifferent to the welfare of the Army and Navy.
Now men were suddenly being massed together in camps and fleets as if on Purpose to breed disease.
The ship in which Wolfe was to sail had been lying idle for years; and her pestilential bilge water soon began to make the sailors and soldiers sicken and die.
Most fortunately, Wolfe was among the first to take ill; and so he was sent home in time to save him from the fevers of Spanish America.
Wolfe was happy to see his mother again, to have his pony to ride and his dogs to play with.
But, though he tried his best to stick to his lessons, his heart was wild for the war.
He and George Warde used to go every day during the Christmas holidays behind the pigeon house at Squerryes Court and practise with their swords and pistols.
One day they stopped when they heard the post horn blowing at the gate; and both of them became very much excited when George's father came out himself with a big official envelope marked 'On His Majesty's Service' and addressed to 'james Wolfe, Esquire.' Inside was a commission as second lieutenant in the Marines, signed by George the second and dated at saint James's Palace, november third seventeen forty one.
Eighteen years later, when the fame of the conquest of Canada was the talk of the kingdom, the Wardes had a stone monument built to mark the spot where Wolfe was standing when the squire handed him his first commission.
And there it is to day; and on it are the verses ending,
This spot so sacred will forever claim A proud alliance with its hero's name.
Wolfe was at last an officer.
But the Marines were not the corps for him.
Their service companies were five thousand miles away, while war with France was breaking out much nearer home.
So what was his delight at receiving another commission, on march twenty fifth seventeen forty two, as an ensign in the twelfth Regiment of Foot!
He was now fifteen, an officer, a soldier born and bred, eager to serve his country, and just appointed to a regiment ordered to the front!
Within a month an army such as no one had seen since the days of Marlborough had been assembled at Blackheath. Infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers, they were all there when King George the second, the Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Cumberland came down to review them.
"All but the crazy boy," Jake put in.
Ambrosch come along by the cornfield yesterday where I was at work and showed me three prairie dogs he'd shot. He asked me if they was good to eat.
Grandmother looked up in alarm and spoke to grandfather.
Fuchs put in a cheerful word and said prairie dogs were clean beasts and ought to be good for food, but their family connections were against them. I asked what he meant, and he grinned and said they belonged to the rat family.
After breakfast grandmother and Jake and I bundled ourselves up and climbed into the cold front wagon seat.
As we approached the Shimerdas' we heard the frosty whine of the pump and saw Antonia, her head tied up and her cotton dress blown about her, throwing all her weight on the pump handle as it went up and down.
We went slowly up the icy path toward the door sunk in the drawside.
As soon as we entered he threw a grainsack over the crack at the bottom of the door.
The air in the cave was stifling, and it was very dark, too.
Then the poor woman broke down.
Grandmother paid no heed to her, but called Antonia to come and help empty the basket.
Tony left her corner reluctantly.
I had never seen her crushed like this before.
"You not mind my poor mamenka, mrs Burden.
This is no place to keep vegetables.
"We get from mr Bushy, at the post office,--what he throw out.
We got no potatoes, mrs Burden," Tony admitted mournfully.
He was clean and neat as usual, with his green neckcloth and his coral pin.
When I got up on one of the stools and peered into it, I saw some quilts and a pile of straw. The old man held the lantern.
"Yulka," he said in a low, despairing voice, "Yulka; my Antonia!"
Grandmother drew back.
"You mean they sleep in there,--your girls?" He bowed his head.
Tony slipped under his arm.
Grandmother sighed.
You'll have a better house after while, Antonia, and then you'll forget these hard times."
He left Bohemia with more than a thousand dollars in savings, after their passage money was paid.
He had in some way lost on exchange in New York, and the railway fare to Nebraska was more than they had expected.
Marek slid cautiously toward us and began to exhibit his webbed fingers.
I knew he wanted to make his queer noises for me-to bark like a dog or whinny like a horse,--but he did not dare in the presence of his elders.
Marek was always trying to be agreeable, poor fellow, as if he had it on his mind that he must make up for his deficiencies.
The woman had a quick ear, and caught up phrases whenever she heard English spoken.
As we rose to go, she opened her wooden chest and brought out a bag made of bed ticking, about as long as a flour sack and half as wide, stuffed full of something.
At sight of it, the crazy boy began to smack his lips.
When mrs Shimerda opened the bag and stirred the contents with her hand, it gave out a salty, earthy smell, very pungent, even among the other odors of that cave.
She measured a teacup full, tied it up in a bit of sacking, and presented it ceremoniously to grandmother.
"For cook," she announced.
All things for eat better in my country."
"I can't say but I prefer our bread to yours, myself."
Antonia undertook to explain.
"This very good, mrs Burden,"--she clasped her hands as if she could not express how good,--"it make very much when you cook, like what my mama say.
Cook with rabbit, cook with chicken, in the gravy,--oh, so good!"
They're wanting in everything, and most of all in horse sense.
"He's a worker, all right, mam, and he's got some ketch on about him; but he's a mean one.
It was full of little brown chips that looked like the shavings of some root.
He did not stop for the funeral.
mr Pembroke thought that he had a bad effect on Agnes, and prevented her from acquiescing in the tragedy as rapidly as she might have done.
As he expressed it, "one must not court sorrow," and he hinted to the young man that they desired to be alone.
Rickie went back to the Silts.
He was only there a few days.
The fair valley of Tewin Water, the cutting into Hitchin where the train traverses the chalk, Baldock Church, Royston with its promise of downs, were nothing in themselves, but dear as stages in the pilgrimage towards the abode of peace.
On the platform he met friends.
They had all had pleasant vacations: it was a happy world.
The atmosphere alters.
Cambridge, according to her custom, welcomed her sons with open drains. Pettycury was up, so was Trinity Street, and navvies peeped out of King's Parade.
Here it was gas, there electric light, but everywhere something, and always a smell.
Tilliard fled into a hansom, cursing himself for having tried to do the thing cheaply.
But Rickie was succouring a distressed female-mrs
Aberdeen.
"Oh, mrs Aberdeen, I never saw you: I am so glad to see you-I am so very glad." mrs Aberdeen was cold.
She did not like being spoken to outside the college, and was also distrait about her basket.
The basket was empty, and never would hold anything illegal.
She never will talk about him.
What's the other half?
I know she'd dislike it, but she oughtn't to dislike.
After all, bedders are to blame for the present lamentable state of things, just as much as gentlefolk.
She ought to want me to come.
She ought to introduce me to her husband."
They had reached the corner of Hills Road.
Rickie laughed.
"I expected it from your letter."
You can go to the bad.
But I refuse to accompany you.
Rickie was silent.
They dealt with so much and they had experienced so little.
Was it possible he would ever come to think Cambridge narrow? In his short life Rickie had known two sudden deaths, and that is enough to disarrange any placid outlook on the world.
They waited for the other tram by the Roman Catholic Church, whose florid bulk was already receding into twilight.
"Built out of doll's eyes to contain idols"--that, at all events, is the legend and the joke.
It watches over the apostate city, taller by many a yard than anything within, and asserting, however wildly, that here is eternity, stability, and bubbles unbreakable upon a windless sea.
A costly hymn tune announced five o'clock, and in the distance the more lovable note of saint Mary's could be heard, speaking from the heart of the town.
Then the tram arrived-the slow stuffy tram that plies every twenty minutes between the unknown and the marketplace-and took them past the desecrated grounds of Downing, past Addenbrookes Hospital, girt like a Venetian palace with a mantling canal, past the Fitz William, towering upon immense substructions like any Roman temple, right up to the gates of one's own college, which looked like nothing else in the world.
"Our luggage," explained Rickie, "comes in the hotel omnibus, if you would kindly pay a shilling for mine." Ansell turned aside to some large lighted windows, the abode of a hospitable don, and from other windows there floated familiar voices and the familiar mistakes in a Beethoven sonata.
It was not sufficient glory to be a Blue there, nor an additional glory to get drunk.
Many a maiden lady who had read that Cambridge men were sad dogs, was surprised and perhaps a little disappointed at the reasonable life which greeted her.
Miss Appleblossom in particular had had a tremendous shock.
They taught the perky boy that he was not everything, and the limp boy that he might be something.
They even welcomed those boys who were neither limp nor perky, but odd-those boys who had never been at a public school at all, and such do not find a welcome everywhere.
And they did everything with ease-one might almost say with nonchalance, so that the boys noticed nothing, and received education, often for the first time in their lives.
They were all he really possessed in the world, the only place he could call his own.
Over the door was his name, and through the paint, like a grey ghost, he could still read the name of his predecessor.
There was a beautiful fire, and the kettle boiled at once.
He made tea on the hearth rug and ate the biscuits which mrs Aberdeen had brought for him up from Anderson's. "Gentlemen," she said, "must learn to give and take." He sighed again and again, like one who had escaped from danger.
There was no ghost now; he was frightened at reality; he was frightened at the splendours and horrors of the world.
A letter from Miss Pembroke was on the table.
She wrote like the Sibyl; her sorrowful face moved over the stars and shattered their harmonies; last night he saw her with the eyes of Blake, a virgin widow, tall, veiled, consecrated, with her hands stretched out against an everlasting wind.
Why should she write?
Her letters were not for the likes of him, nor to be read in rooms like his.
"We are not leaving Sawston," she wrote.
Rickie burnt this letter, which he ought not to have done, for it was one of the few tributes Miss Pembroke ever paid to imagination.
But he felt that it did not belong to him: words so sincere should be for Gerald alone.
He saw it reach the outer air and beat against the low ceiling of clouds.
The clouds were too strong for it; but in them was one chink, revealing one star, and through this the smoke escaped into the light of stars innumerable.
"I am jolly unpractical," he mused.
Who wants visions in a world that has Agnes and Gerald?" He turned on the electric light and pulled open the table drawer.
It was called "The Bay of the Fifteen Islets," and the action took place on saint John's Eve off the coast of Sicily.
"Pooh, volcanic!" says the leading tourist, and the ladies say how interesting.
They start and quarrel and jabber.
Fingers burst up through the sand black fingers of sea devils.
But just before the catastrophe one man, integer vitae scelerisque purus, sees the truth.
Here are no devils.
And so Rickie deflected his enthusiasms.
Hitherto they had played on gods and heroes, on the infinite and the impossible, on virtue and beauty and strength.
eighteen
Perhaps his union should have been emphasized before.
The crown of life had been attained, the vague yearnings, the misread impulses, had found accomplishment at last.
So he reasoned, and at first took the accomplishment for granted.
Surely the dust would settle soon: in Italy, at Easter, he might perceive the infinities of love.
She ran about the house looking handsomer than ever.
Her cheerful voice gave orders to the servants.
The tone of their marriage life was soon set.
The air was pure and quiet.
Tomorrow the fog might be here, but today one said, "It is like the country." Arm in arm they strolled in the side garden, stopping at times to notice the crocuses, or to wonder when the daffodils would flower.
Suddenly he tightened his pressure, and said, "Darling, why don't you still wear ear rings?"
"Ear rings?"
"My taste has improved, perhaps."
So after all they never mentioned Gerald's name.
He did not want her to forget the greatest moment in her life.
He valued emotion-not for itself, but because it is the only final path to intimacy.
She, ever robust and practical, always discouraged him. She was not cold; she would willingly embrace him.
But his mother-he had never concealed it from himself-had glories to which his wife would never attain: glories that had unfolded against a life of horror-a life even more horrible than he had guessed.
He thought of her often during these earlier months.
Did she love his wife?
He tried to speak of her to Agnes, but again she was reluctant.
They conversed and differed healthily upon other topics.
A rifle corps was to be formed: she hoped that the boys would have proper uniforms, instead of shooting in their old clothes, as mr Jackson had suggested. There was Tewson; could nothing be done about him?
He would slink away from the other prefects and go with boys of his own age.
"He had to go somewhere," said Agnes.
"Oh, mrs Orr!
Who cares for her?
Her teeth are drawn.
mrs Orr, who was quite rich, had attempted no such thing.
She had taken the boy out of charity, and without a thought of being unconstitutional. But in had come this officious "Limpet" and upset the headmaster, and she was scolded, and mrs Varden was scolded, and mr Jackson was scolded, and the boy was scolded and placed with mr Pembroke, whom she revered less than any man in the world.
Naturally enough, she considered it a further attempt of the authorities to snub the day boys, for whose advantage the school had been founded.
"We say, 'Let them talk,'" persisted Rickie, "but I never did like letting people talk.
We are right and they are wrong, but I wish the thing could have been done more quietly.
The headmaster does get so excited.
He has given a gang of foolish people their opportunity.
My father found me a nuisance, and put me through the mill, and I can never forget it particularly the evenings."
It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts."
"I don't understand."
"Physical pain doesn't hurt-at least not what I call hurt-if a man hits you by accident or play.
But just a little tap, when you know it comes from hatred, is too terrible.
Boys do hate each other: I remember it, and see it again.
They can make strong isolated friendships, but of general good fellowship they haven't a notion."
"You see, the notion of good fellowship develops late: you can just see its beginning here among the prefects: up at Cambridge it flourishes amazingly.
That's why I pity people who don't go up to Cambridge: not because a University is smart, but because those are the magic years, and-with luck-you see up there what you couldn't see before and mayn't ever see again.
He laughed and hit at her.
"I'm getting somewhat involved.
But hear me, O Agnes, for I am practical.
Long may they, flourish.
But I do not approve of the boarding house system.
"Have you gone mad?"
"Silence, madam.
Don't betray me to Herbert, or I'll give us the sack. But seriously, what is the good of, throwing boys so much together? Isn't it building their lives on a wrong basis?
I wish they did, but they don't.
When they do, the whole of life changes, and you get the true thing.
But don't pretend you've got it before you have.
Patriotism and esprit de corps are all very well, but masters a little forget that they must grow from sentiment.
They cannot create one.
Cannot cannot-cannot.
I never cared a straw for England until I cared for Englishmen, and boys can't love the school when they hate each other.
"mr
"Aha!
It's just the kind of thing poor mr Ansell would say.
Well, I'm brutal.
Boys ought to rough it, or they never grow up into men, and your mother would have agreed with me.
It can, can, create a sentiment."
He wondered whether she was not right, and regretted that she proceeded to say, "My dear boy, you mustn't talk these heresies inside Dunwood House!
"The Jackson set have their points."
"The Dunwood House set has its points." For Rickie suffered from the Primal Curse, which is not-as the Authorized Version suggests-the knowledge of good and evil, but the knowledge of good and evil.
Why would he see the other side of things?
He rebuked his soul, not unsuccessfully, and then they returned to the subject of Varden.
I hate the look about his eyes."
"I hate the whole boy.
"No, you aren't," she cried, kissing him.
Could nothing be suggested?
He drew up some new rules-alterations in the times of going to bed, and so on-the effect of which would be to provide fewer opportunities for the pulling of Varden's ears.
So nothing was done.
At last he asked her to stop.
He felt uneasy about the boy-almost superstitious.
CHAPTER two
THE SEA LINK LOST seventeen forty five
Rome would not rest till she had ruined Carthage.
He was much disliked in Louisbourg.
The French did not.
The burning of Canso and the attack on Annapolis stirred up the wrath of New England.
A wild enthusiast, William Vaughan, urged Governor Shirley of Massachusetts to make an immediate counter-attack.
Nor could they be blamed.
Shirley was dejected and in doubt what to do next.
All the merchants were eager for attack.
The men volunteered eagerly.
On may fifth Warren sailed into Canso.
After a conference with Pepperrell he hurried off to begin the blockade of Louisbourg.
The news from Boston was not heeded.
The bibulous du Quesnel had died in October.
No reinforcements arrived after the first appearance of the British fleet.
The Provincials eyed the fortress eagerly.
But it looked hard enough, for all that.
Its signal cannon fired.
Vaughan then retired for the night.
But a ship builder colonel, Meserve of New Hampshire, came to the rescue by designing a gun sleigh, sixteen feet in length and five in the beam.
Most men's kits were of the very scantiest.
Very few had even a single change of clothing.
The walls were continually being smashed from without and patched up from within. The streets were ploughed from end to end.
But the rumour ran quickly through the whole camp, probably not without Pepperrell's own encouragement, and at once produced, not a panic, but the most excellent effect.
Discipline, never good, had been growing worse. Punishments were unknown.
Races, wrestling, and quoits were better; while fishing was highly commendable, both in the way of diet as well as in the way of sport.
A second vessel was forced aground.
Her captain fought her to the last; but Warren's boat crews took her. Some men who escaped from her brought du Chambon the news that a third French ship, the Vigilant, was coming to the relief of Louisbourg with ammunition and other stores. This ship had five hundred and sixty men aboard, that is, as many as all the regulars in Louisbourg.
Warren, who was just over forty, replied with some heat.
But Vaughan was not to lead.
But they came in by driblets, and most of them were drunk.
The commandant of the battery felt far from easy.
The first men up the rungs were shot, stabbed, or cut down.
The rest sheered off.
They had seized this position some time before and called it Gorham's Post, after the colonel whose regiment held it. Fourteen years later there was another and more famous Gorham's Post, on the south shore of the saint Lawrence near Quebec, opposite Wolfe's Cove.
The arming of this battery was a stupendous piece of work.
Their Royal Battery wrecked the whole inner water front of Louisbourg.
But when the drums began beating, it was to a parley, not to arms.
The French officer and he saluted.
The Provincials reported their own killed, quite correctly, at a hundred.
They amounted to about three hundred.
Warren was cursed, Pepperrell blamed; and a mutinous spirit arose.
Everything went off without a hitch.
'Good Lord!' he said, 'we have so much to thank Thee for, that Time will be too short.
She had one fair son, named Theseus, the bravest lad in all the land; and Aithra never smiled but when she looked at him, for her husband had forgotten her, and lived far away.
And when Theseus was full fifteen years old she took him up with her to the temple, and into the thickets of the grove which grew in the temple yard.
And she led him to a tall plane tree, beneath whose shade grew arbutus, and lentisk, and purple heather bushes.
And there she sighed, and said, 'Theseus, my son, go into that thicket and you will find at the plane tree foot a great flat stone; lift it, and bring me what lies underneath.'
Then Theseus pushed his way in through the thick bushes, and saw that they had not been moved for many a year.
And searching among their roots he found a great flat stone, all overgrown with ivy, and acanthus, and moss.
He tried to lift it, but he could not.
Let it be for another year.
Then she took him by the hand, and went into the temple and prayed, and came down again with Theseus to her home.
And when a full year was past she led Theseus up again to the temple, and bade him lift the stone; but he could not.
Then she sighed, and said the same words again, and went down, and came again the next year; but Theseus could not lift the stone then, nor the year after; and he longed to ask his mother the meaning of that stone, and what might lie underneath it; but her face was so sad that he had not the heart to ask.
And when his eighteenth year was past, Aithra led him up again to the temple, and said, 'Theseus, lift the stone this day, or never know who you are.' And Theseus went into the thicket, and stood over the stone, and tugged at it; and it moved.
Then his spirit swelled within him, and he said, 'If I break my heart in my body, it shall up.' And he tugged at it once more, and lifted it, and rolled it over with a shout.
And when he looked beneath it, on the ground lay a sword of bronze, with a hilt of glittering gold, and by it a pair of golden sandals; and he caught them up, and burst through the bushes like a wild boar, and leapt to his mother, holding them high above his head.
But when she saw them she wept long in silence, hiding her fair face in her shawl; and Theseus stood by her wondering, and wept also, he knew not why.
And when she was tired of weeping, she lifted up her head, and laid her finger on her lips, and said, 'Hide them in your bosom, Theseus my son, and come with me where we can look down upon the sea.'
Then they went outside the sacred wall, and looked down over the bright blue sea; and Aithra said-
'Do you see this land at our feet?'
Do you see that land beyond?'
'Yes; that is Attica, where the Athenian people dwell.'
There are twelve towns well peopled, the homes of an ancient race, the children of Kekrops the serpent king, the son of Mother Earth, who wear gold cicalas among the tresses of their golden hair; for like the cicalas they sprang from the earth, and like the cicalas they sing all day, rejoicing in the genial sun
What would you do, son Theseus, if you were king of such a land?'
Then Theseus stood astonished, as he looked across the broad bright sea, and saw the fair Attic shore, from Sunium to Hymettus and Pentelicus, and all the mountain peaks which girdle Athens round.
But Athens itself he could not see, for purple AEgina stood before it, midway across the sea.
Then his heart grew great within him, and he said, 'If I were king of such a land I would rule it wisely and well in wisdom and in might, that when I died all men might weep over my tomb, and cry, "Alas for the shepherd of his people!"'
And Aithra smiled, and said, 'Take, then, the sword and the sandals, and go to AEgeus, king of Athens, who lives on Pallas' hill; and say to him, "The stone is lifted, but whose is the pledge beneath it?"
Then show him the sword and the sandals, and take what the Gods shall send.'
But Theseus wept, 'Shall I leave you, O my mother?'
But she answered, 'Weep not for me.
That which is fated must be; and grief is easy to those who do nought but grieve.
Yet shall I be avenged, when the golden haired heroes sail against Troy, and sack the palaces of Ilium; then my son shall set me free from thraldom, and I shall hear the tale of Theseus' fame.
Yet beyond that I see new sorrows; but I can bear them as I have borne the past.'
BY
WITH A PREFACE BY j m BARRIE
"Effort," however, is an absurd word to use, as you may see by studying the triumphant countenance of the child herself, which is here reproduced as frontispiece to her sublime work.
This is no portrait of a writer who had to burn the oil at midnight (indeed there is documentary evidence that she was hauled off to bed every evening at six): it has an air of careless power; there is a complacency about it that by the severe might perhaps be called smugness.
It needed no effort for that face to knock off a masterpiece.
It probably represents precisely how she looked when she finished a chapter.
Fellow craftsmen will see that she is looking forward to this chapter all the time.
The manuscript is in pencil in a stout little note book (twopence), and there it has lain for years, for though the authoress was nine when she wrote it she is now a grown woman.
Chaperon seems to be one of the very few good words of which our authoress had never heard.
She read everything that came her way, including, as the context amply proves, the grown up novels of the period.
"I adored writing and used to pray for bad weather, so that I need not go out but could stay in and write." Her mother used to have early tea in bed; sometimes visitors came to the house, when there was talk of events in high society: there was mention of places called Hampton Court, the Gaiety Theatre and the "Crystale" Palace.
This is almost all that is now remembered, but it was enough for the blazing child.
She sucked her thumb for a moment (this is guesswork), and sat down to her amazing tale.
"Her mother used to have early tea in bed." Many authors must have had a similar experience, but they all missed the possibilities of it until this young woman came along.
Oh thank you my man said Mr Salteena rolling over in the costly bed.
She was particularly curious about the articles on your dressing table, including the little box containing a reddish powder, and she never desisted from watching you till she caught you dabbing it on your cheeks.
For instance, she is careful to put it on to be proposed to; and again its first appearance is excused in words that should henceforth be serviceable in every boudoir.
The novelist will find the tale a model for his future work.
How cunningly throughout she keeps us on the hooks of suspense, jumping to Mr Salteena when we are in a quiver about Ethel, and turning to Ethel when we are quite uneasy about Mr Salteena.
Her mind is such a rich pocket that as she digs in it (her head to the side and her tongue well out) she sends up showers of nuggets.
The first line of the tale etches him for all time: "Mr Salteena was an elderly man of forty two and fond of asking people to stay with him." On the next page Salteena draws a touching picture of himself in a letter accepting an invitation: "I do hope I shall enjoy myself with you.
Have you a couple of bedrooms for self and young lady he enquired in a lordly way." He is told that they have two beauties. "Thank you said Bernard we will go up if you have no objection.
Bernard's proposal should be carried in the pocket of all future swains.
He decides "whilst imbibing his morning tea beneath the pink silken quilt," that to propose in London would not be the "correct idear." He springs out of bed and knocks at Ethel's door.
"Are you up my dear?
he called.
Oh yes lets said Ethel." "Ethel he murmered in a trembly voice.
Ethel accepts him, faints and is brought back to life by a clever "idear" of Bernard's, who pours water on her.
"She soon came to and looked up with a sickly smile.
Ethel felt better after a few drops of champaigne and began to tidy her hair while Bernard packed the remains of the food.
Then arm in arm they tottered to the boat, I trust you have not got an illness my darling murmured Bernard as he helped her in, Oh no I am very strong said Ethel I fainted from joy she added to explain matters.
Oh I see said Bernard handing her a cushion well some people do he added kindly."
"So I will end my chapter," the authoress says; and we can picture her doing it complacently, and slowly pulling in her tongue.
This is perhaps the prettiest touch in the story and should make us all take off our hats to the innocent wondering mind that thought of it.
Poor Mr Salteena.
He was at the wedding, dressed in black and crying into his handkerchief.
However he recovered to an extent and married Another and had ten children, "five of each," none of them of course equal to Ethel's children, of whom in a remarkably short time there were seven, which the authoress evidently considers to be the right "idear."
THERE was once upon a time a king who was passionately fond of a princess; but she could not be married, because she was enchanted.
He went to consult a fairy, to ascertain what he ought to do to make the Princess love him.
The fairy said to him, "You know that the Princess has a large cat, of which she is very fond; well, she can marry that person only who can succeed in treading on her cat's tail." The King said to himself, "That will not be very difficult to accomplish"; and he quitted the fairy, determined rather to crush the cat's tail than to fail in treading on it.
He hastened to his mistress's palace; Master Puss came to meet him, very consequentially, as was his wont; the King lifted up his foot, but when he thought to have put it on the cat's tail, Puss turned round so quickly that he trod on nothing but the floor.
He was a week trying to tread on this fatal tail, which appeared to be full of quicksilver, for it was continually moving.
But, at last, the King had the good fortune to surprise Master Puss while he was asleep, and trod upon his tail with all his weight.
Puss awakened, mewing horribly, and immediately took the shape of a tall man, who, looking at the King with eyes full of anger, said to him: "You may now marry the Princess, since you have dissolved the enchantment which prevented you; but I will be revenged.
You shall have a son who will always be unfortunate until the time when he shall become aware that his nose is too long; and, if you take any umbrage at what I threaten, you shall immediately be put to death."
Although the King was frightened at the sight of this tall man, who was an enchanter, he could not help laughing at his threat.
"If my son's nose should be too long," said he to himself, "unless he should be either blind or silly, he will certainly be able to see or feel it." When the enchanter had disappeared, the King went to find the Princess, who consented to marry him.
However, he did not live long with her, for he died eight months after the wedding.
Shortly after his death, the Queen gave birth to a young Prince, who was called Desire.
The Queen was inconsolable when she saw this large nose; but the ladies who were with her told her that the nose was not so large as it appeared to her to be; that it was a Roman nose, and that history averred that all heroes had large noses.
The Queen, who loved her son to excess, was charmed with this discourse; and, by continually looking at Desire, his nose no longer appeared to be so very long.
The Prince was brought up very carefully; and, as soon as he could speak, all kinds of shocking stories were told him of people who had short noses.
When he became old enough to understand it, he was instructed in history; and, whenever any great prince or handsome princess was mentioned to him, he or she was always spoken of as having a long nose.
The room was hung round with pictures in which all the figures had large noses; and Desire grew so accustomed to regard length of nose as an ornament, that he would not for an empire have parted with an atom of his.
When he had reached the age of twenty, it was thought expedient for him to marry; and the portraits of various princesses were submitted to him.
He was in raptures with that of Mignonetta, the daughter of a great king, and heiress to several kingdoms; of the kingdoms, however, Desire thought not at all, he was so much struck with her beauty.
The Princess Mignonetta, although he was thus charmed with her, had a little turned up nose which harmonized admirably with her other features, but which very much perplexed the courtiers.
They had acquired such a habit of ridiculing small noses, that they sometimes could not forbear laughing at that of the Princess; but Desire would not suffer a jest on this subject; and he banished two courtiers from his presence, who dared to make insinuations against Mignonetta's nose.
The horse presently came to a large plain, which he traversed the whole day without seeing a single house.
Both horse and rider were ready to die with hunger; at last, as night was about to set in, they discovered a cave in which a light was burning. Desire entered, and saw a little old woman, who appeared to be more than a hundred years old.
She put on her spectacles to look at the Prince; but she was a long time adjusting them, for her nose was too short.
"With all my heart," answered the fairy.
"Although your nose is ridiculous, you are not the less the son of my best friend.
I loved the King, your father, like my own brother; but he had a very handsome nose." "And what is there wanting in mine?" asked Desire.
I was saying, then, that I was your father's friend; at that time he frequently came to see me; and you must know that in those days I was very pretty; your father told me so.
A long tongue is still more insufferable than a large nose; and I remember, when I was young, that I was admired for not being a great talker; the Queen, my mother, used frequently to have it mentioned to her; for, such as you see me, I am a great king's daughter.
My father-" "Your father ate when he was hungry," said the Prince, interrupting her.
He checked himself, however, for he wanted something of the fairy, and said: "I know that the pleasure I should take in listening to you would make me forget my own hunger; but my horse, who will not understand you, is in need of some food." This compliment made the fairy blush prettily.
One must be very stupid not to perceive one's own defects; that comes of her being born a princess: flatterers have spoiled her, and persuaded her that she is a little talker."
While that was passing in the Prince's mind, the servants laid the table; and the Prince wondered at the fairy, who kept asking them a thousand questions, solely to have the pleasure of talking: he was especially surprised at a waiting woman, who, in everything that she saw, praised her mistress for her discretion.
With regard to himself, he did not say a word, but ate away as fast as he could. "Prince," said the fairy to him, when he began to be satisfied, "move a little I entreat you; your nose makes so large a shadow that it prevents me from seeing what is on my plate.
In my time they used to go on the same day to the promenade, to the assembly, to the theater, to the ball-But how long your nose is!
I cannot grow used to it." "In truth, madam," answered Desire, "do not say any more about my nose; it is as it is, and in what does it concern you?
Desire, who had finished his supper, grew so tired of the fairy's tedious prattle about his nose that he sprang on his horse and rode away from the cavern.
He continued his journey; and wherever he went, he thought that everybody was mad, for everybody talked about his nose; nevertheless, he had been so accustomed to hear it asserted that his nose was handsome, that he could not reconcile to himself the idea that it was too long.
The old fairy, who wished to do him a service in spite of himself, determined to shut up Mignonetta in a crystal palace, and place this palace in the Prince's road.
Desire, transported with joy, strove to break it; but he could not succeed: in despair, he wished to approach near it, so as at least to speak to the Princess, who, on her part, stretched her hand close to the crystal wall of the palace.
He was very anxious to kiss her hand; but turn his head which way he would, he could not place his mouth near it, his nose constantly preventing him.
In this way self love conceals from us all the defects of our minds and bodies.
In vain reason endeavors to unveil them to us; we can never perceive them until the same self love that blinds us to them finds them to be opposed to its interests." Desire, whose nose had become an ordinary nose, profited by this lesson.
THE BELL
Those persons who were walking outside the town, where the houses were farther apart, with gardens or little fields between them, could see the evening sky still better, and heard the sound of the bell much more distinctly.
It was as if the tones came from a church in the still forest; people looked thitherward, and felt their minds attuned most solemnly.
A long time passed, and people said to each other-"I wonder if there is a church out in the wood?
The confectioner of the town came out, and set up his booth there; and soon after came another confectioner, who hung a bell over his stand, as a sign or ornament, but it had no clapper, and it was tarred over to preserve it from the rain.
The king of the country was also observant of it, and vowed that he who could discover whence the sounds proceeded, should have the title of "Universal Bell ringer," even if it were not really a bell.
However, he said that the sound proceeded from a very large owl, in a hollow tree; a sort of learned owl, that continually knocked its head against the branches.
But whether the sound came from his head or from the hollow tree, that no one could say with certainty.
So now he got the place of "Universal Bell ringer," and wrote yearly a short treatise "On the Owl"; but everybody was just as wise as before.
It was the day of confirmation.
The clergyman had spoken so touchingly, the children who were confirmed had been greatly moved; it was an eventful day for them; from children they become all at once grown up persons; it was as if their infant souls were now to fly all at once into persons with more understanding.
They all immediately felt a wish to go thither; all except three.
But two of the youngest soon grew tired, and both returned to town; two little girls sat down, and twined garlands, so they did not go either; and when the others reached the willow tree, where the confectioner was, they said, "Now we are there!
In reality the bell does not exist; it is only a fancy that people have taken into their heads!"
At the same moment the bell sounded deep in the wood, so clear and solemnly that five or six determined to penetrate somewhat further.
It was so thick, and the foliage so dense, that it was quite fatiguing to proceed.
Woodroof and anemonies grew almost too high; blooming convolvuluses and blackberry bushes hung in long garlands from tree to tree, where the nightingale sang and the sunbeams were playing: it was very beautiful, but it was no place for girls to go; their clothes would get so torn.
Large blocks of stone lay there, overgrown with moss of every color; the fresh spring bubbled forth, and made a strange gurgling sound.
"That surely cannot be the bell," said one of the children, lying down and listening.
"This must be looked to." So he remained, and let the others go on without him.
They afterwards came to a little house, made of branches and the bark of trees; a large wild apple tree bent over it, as if it would shower down all its blessings on the roof, where roses were blooming.
Was it that which people had heard?
A rustling was heard in the bushes, and a little boy stood before the King's Son, a boy in wooden shoes, and with so short a jacket that one could see what long wrists he had.
Both knew each other: the boy was that one among the children who could not come because he had to go home and return his jacket and boots to the innkeeper's son.
This he had done, and was now going on in wooden shoes and in his humble dress, for the bell sounded with so deep a tone, and with such strange power, that proceed he must.
But the poor child that had been confirmed was quite ashamed; he looked at his wooden shoes, pulled at the short sleeves of his jacket, and said that he was afraid he could not walk so fast; besides, he thought that the bell must be looked for to the right; for that was the place where all sorts of beautiful things were to be found.
The ugly apes sat upon the trees, and grinned.
"Shall we thrash him?
He is the son of a king!"
But on he went, without being disheartened, deeper and deeper into the wood, where the most wonderful flowers were growing.
Around the nicest green meads, where the deer were playing in the grass, grew magnificent oaks and beeches; and if the bark of one of the trees was cracked, there grass and long creeping plants grew in the crevices.
And there were large calm lakes there too, in which white swans were swimming, and beat the air with their wings.
The King's Son often stood still and listened.
He thought the bell sounded from the depths of these still lakes; but then he remarked again that the tone proceeded not from there, but farther off, from out the depths of the forest.
The sun now set: the atmosphere glowed like fire.
It was still in the woods, so very still; and he fell on his knees, sung his evening hymn, and said: "I cannot find what I seek; the sun is going down, and night is coming-the dark, dark night.
I will climb up yonder rock."
How magnificent was the sight from this height!
The sea-the great, the glorious sea, that dashed its long waves against the coast-was stretched out before him.
And yonder, where sea and sky meet, stood the sun, like a large shining altar, all melted together in the most glowing colors.
He had followed his own path, and had reached the spot just as soon as the son of the king had done.
CHAPTER seventeen.
DIAMOND GOES ON
Some may think it was not the best place in the world for him to be brought up in; but it must have been, for there he was.
At first, he heard a good many rough and bad words; but he did not like them, and so they did him little harm.
He did not know in the least what they meant, but there was something in the very sound of them, and in the tone of voice in which they were said, which Diamond felt to be ugly.
He never took any notice of them, and his face shone pure and good in the middle of them, like a primrose in a hailstorm.
At first, because his face was so quiet and sweet, with a smile always either awake or asleep in his eyes, and because he never heeded their ugly words and rough jokes, they said he wasn't all there, meaning that he was half an idiot, whereas he was a great deal more there than they had the sense to see.
When they talked to him nicely he had always a good answer, sometimes a smart one, ready, and that helped much to make them change their minds about him.
He sat on his withers, and reaching forward as he ate his hay, he curried and he brushed, first at one side of his neck, and then at the other.
When that was done he asked for a dressing comb, and combed his mane thoroughly.
Then he sat on his croup, and did his back and sides; then he turned around like a monkey, and attacked his hind quarters, and combed his tail.
But Jack fetched it again, and Diamond began once more, and did not leave off until he had done the whole business fairly well, if not in a first rate, experienced fashion.
All the time the old horse went on eating his hay, and, but with an occasional whisk of his tail when Diamond tickled or scratched him, took no notice of the proceeding. But that was all a pretence, for he knew very well who it was that was perched on his back, and rubbing away at him with the comb and the brush.
I won't vouch for what the old horse was thinking, for it is very difficult to find out what any old horse is thinking.
"Oh dear!" said Diamond when he had done, "I'm so tired!"
And he laid himself down at full length on old Diamond's back.
One of them lifted him down, and from that time he was a greater favourite than before.
And if ever there was a boy who had a chance of being a prodigy at cab driving, Diamond was that boy, for the strife came to be who should have him out with him on the box.
His mother, however, was a little shy of the company for him, and besides she could not always spare him.
Also his father liked to have him himself when he could; so that he was more desired than enjoyed among the cabmen.
Of course there was the man always on the box seat beside him, but before long there was seldom the least occasion to take the reins from out of his hands.
For one thing he never got frightened, and consequently was never in too great a hurry.
One day, which was neither washing day, nor cleaning day nor marketing day, nor Saturday, nor Monday-upon which consequently Diamond could be spared from the baby-his father took him on his own cab.
After a stray job or two by the way, they drew up in the row upon the stand between Cockspur Street and Pall Mall.
"Though, to be sure," said Diamond's father-with what truth I cannot say, but he believed what he said-"some ladies is very hard, and keeps you to the bare sixpence a mile, when every one knows that ain't enough to keep a family and a cab upon.
To be sure it's the law; but mayhap they may get more law than they like some day themselves."
As it was very hot, Diamond's father got down to have a glass of beer himself, and give another to the old waterman.
He left Diamond on the box.
A sudden noise got up, and Diamond looked round to see what was the matter.
There was a crossing near the cab stand, where a girl was sweeping.
Some rough young imps had picked a quarrel with her, and were now hauling at her broom to get it away from her.
Diamond was off his box in a moment, and running to the help of the girl.
He got hold of the broom at her end and pulled along with her.
But presently his father came back, and missing Diamond, looked about.
He had to look twice, however, before he could be sure that that was his boy in the middle of the tumult.
The girl thanked Diamond, and began sweeping as if nothing had happened, while his father led him away.
With the help of old Tom, the waterman, he was soon washed into decency, and his father set him on the box again, perfectly satisfied with the account he gave of the cause of his being in a fray.
"I couldn't let them behave so to a poor girl-could I, father?" he said.
"Certainly not, Diamond," said his father, quite pleased, for Diamond's father was a gentleman.
cab!"
Diamond's father turned instantly, for he was the foremost in the rank, and followed the girl.
When they reached the curbstone-who should it be waiting for the cab but mrs and Miss Coleman!
They did not look at the cabman, however.
When they reached the house, Diamond's father got down and rang the bell.
The ladies both stared for a moment, and then exclaimed together:
"Why, Joseph! can it be you?"
"Yes, ma'am; yes, miss," answered he, again touching his hat, with all the respect he could possibly put into the action.
"It's a lucky day which I see you once more upon it."
"Who would have thought it?" said mrs Coleman.
"It's changed times for both of us, Joseph, and it's not very often we can have a cab even; but you see my daughter is still very poorly, and she can't bear the motion of the omnibuses.
Indeed we meant to walk a bit first before we took a cab, but just at the corner, for as hot as the sun was, a cold wind came down the street, and I saw that Miss Coleman must not face it.
But to think we should have fallen upon you, of all the cabmen in London!
I didn't know you had got a cab."
The two ladies went near to pat the horse, and then they noticed Diamond on the box.
"Why, you've got both Diamonds with you," said Miss Coleman.
"How do you do, Diamond?"
Diamond lifted his cap, and answered politely.
"He'll be fit to drive himself before long," said his father, proudly. "The old horse is a teaching of him."
"Well, he must come and see us, now you've found us out.
Where do you live?"
Diamond's father gave the ladies a ticket with his name and address printed on it; and then mrs Coleman took out her purse, saying:
"And what's your fare, Joseph?"
"No, thank you, ma'am," said Joseph.
"It was your own old horse as took you; and me you paid long ago."
He jumped on his box before she could say another word, and with a parting salute drove off, leaving them on the pavement, with the maid holding the door for them.
It was a long time now since Diamond had seen North Wind, or even thought much about her.
Only he had been to the back of the north wind since-there could be no doubt of that; for when he woke every morning, he always knew that he had been there again.
And as he thought and thought, he recalled another thing that had happened that morning, which, although it seemed a mere accident, might have something to do with what had happened since.
His father had intended going on the stand at King's Cross that morning, and had turned into Gray's Inn Lane to drive there, when they found the way blocked up, and upon inquiry were informed that a stack of chimneys had been blown down in the night, and had fallen across the road.
Diamond's father turned, and made for Charing Cross.
That night the father and mother had a great deal to talk about.
"Poor things!" said the mother.
What has that to do with it?"
"Really, Diamond, a body would need to mind what they say to you."
"Why?" said Diamond.
No, thank Heaven! she's not come to that."
"Is it a great disgrace to be poor?" asked Diamond, because of the tone in which his mother had spoken.
CHAPTER twelve
A FALSE FRIEND
"What is it?
"What has happened, Ned?"
"I don't know, but Jacinto is yelling something about vampires!"
"Yes.
Big bats.
And he's warning us to be careful.
I stuck my head out just now and I felt that same sort of shadow I felt this evening when we were down near the river."
"Nonsense!"
At that instant Tom flashed a pocket electric lamp he had taken from beneath his pillow and in the gleam of it he and Ned saw fluttering about the tent some dark, shadow like form, at the sight of which Tom's chum cried:
That's the shadow!
Look out!" and he held up his hands instinctively to shield his face.
"Shadow!" yelled Tom, unconsciously adding to the din that seemed to pervade every part of the camp.
"That isn't a shadow.
It's substance. It's a monster bat, and here goes for a strike at it!"
"Look out!" yelled Ned.
"If it's a vampire it'll----"
"It won't do anything to me!" shouted Tom, as he struck the creature, knocking it into the corner of the tent with a thud that told it must be completely stunned, if not killed.
"What's the row?"
"Oshtoo!
Oshtoo!"
Mingled with them were calls of Jacinto, partly in Spanish, partly in the Indian tongue and partly in English.
"It is a raid by vampire bats!" was all Tom and Ned could distinguish. "We shall have to light fires to keep them away, if we can succeed. Every one grab up a club and strike hard!"
"You're not going out there, are you?" asked Ned.
If there's a fight I want to be in it, bats or anything else.
Here, you have a light like mine.
Then get a club and come on.
Tom's plan seemed to be a good one.
His lamp and Ned's had small hooks on them, so they could be carried in the upper coat pocket, showing a gleam of light and leaving the hands free for use.
Out of the tents rushed the young men to find Professor Bumper and mr Damon before them.
The two men had clubs and were striking about in the half darkness, for now the Indians had set several fires aglow. And in the gleams, constantly growing brighter as more fuel was piled on, the young inventor and his chum saw a weird sight.
Great bats they were, and a dangerous species, if Jacinto was to be believed.
But the increasing lights, and the attacks made by the Indians and the white travelers turned the tide of battle, and, with silent flappings of their soft, velvety wings, the bats flew back to the jungle whence they had emerged.
"We are safe-for the present!" exclaimed Jacinto with a sigh of relief.
"Do you think they will come back?" asked Tom.
"They may-there is no telling."
"Bless my speedometer!" cried mr Damon, "If those beasts or birds-whatever they are-come back I'll go and hide in the river and take my chances with the alligators!"
"The alligators aren't much worse," asserted Jacinto with a visible shiver.
"These vampire bats sometimes depopulate a whole village."
"Not quite.
Though they might if they got the chance," was the answer of the Spanish guide.
Then the villagers come back.
I do not think this lot will come back.
We have killed too many of them," and he looked about on the ground where many of the uncanny creatures were still twitching in the death struggle.
"Bless my skin!
I hope not!
I've had enough of bats-and mosquitoes," he added, as he slapped at his face and neck.
Tom and Ned kicked outside the bat the former had killed in their tent, and then both went back to their cots.
"That was some night!
If this is a sample of the wilds of Honduras, give me the tameness of Shopton."
"It's all in the day's work.
We've only got started.
I guess we're a bit soft, Ned, though we had hard enough work in that tunnel digging."
After breakfast, while the Indians were making ready the canoes, Professor Bumper, who, in a previous visit to Central America, had become interested in the subject, made a brief examination of some of the dead bats.
"This is a true blood sucking bat," went on the professor.
"This," and he pointed to the nose leaves, "is the sucking apparatus.
The bat makes an opening in the skin with its sharp teeth and proceeds to extract the blood.
"And a man, too?" asked Ned.
"Well a man has hands with which to use weapons, but a helpless quadruped has not.
Though if a sufficient number of these bats attacked a man at the same time, he would have small chance to escape alive.
Their bites, too, may be poisonous for all I know."
The Indians seemed glad to leave the "place of the bats," as they called the camp site.
The blood sucking bats were comparatively few, and the migratory sort fewer still.
"Well, we're on our way once more," remarked Tom as again they were in the canoes being paddled up the river.
"How much longer does your water trip take, Professor?"
"I hardly know," and Professor Bumper looked to Jacinto to answer.
"We go two more days in the canoes," the guide answered, "and then we shall find the mules waiting for us at a place called Hidjio.
From then on we travel by land until-well until you get to the place where you are going.
"I am leaving that part to you."
"Oh, I have a map, showing where I want to begin some excavations," was the answer.
After that-well, we shall trust to luck for what we shall find."
"You have mentioned buried cities.
Have you thought what may be in them-great heathen temples, idols, perhaps?"
For a moment none of the professor's companions spoke.
Finally the scientist said:
But we shall take whatever antiquities we find."
"Huh!" grunted Jacinto, and then he called to the paddlers to increase their strokes.
The journey up the river was not very eventful.
Toward the close of the third day's travel there was a cry from one of the rear boats, and an alarm of a man having fallen overboard was given.
Tom turned in time to see the poor fellow's struggles, and at the same time there was a swirl in the water and a black object shot forward.
"An alligator is after him!" yelled Ned.
Tom took quick aim and pulled the trigger.
The explosive electric bullet went true to its mark, and the great animal turned over in a death struggle.
There was a wild scream of agony and then a dark arm shot up above the red foam.
Tom fired bullet after bullet from his wonderful rifle into the spot, but though he killed some of the alligators this did not save the man's life.
His body was not seen again, though search was made for it.
The accident cast a little damper over the party, and there was a feeling of gloom among the Indians.
Professor Bumper announced that he would see to it that the man's family did not want, and this seemed to give general satisfaction, especially to a brother who was with the party.
Aside from being caught in a drenching storm and one or two minor accidents, nothing else of moment marked the remainder of the river journey, and at the end of the third day the canoes pulled to shore and a night camp was made.
"But where are the mules we are to use in traveling to morrow?" asked the professor of Jacinto.
"In the next village.
We shall march there in the morning.
No use to go there at night when all is dark."
"I suppose that is so."
The Indians made camp as usual, the goods being brought from the canoes and piled up near the tents.
Then night settled down.
"Hello!" cried Tom, awakening the next morning to find the sun streaming into his tent.
"We must have overslept, Ned.
"I didn't hear any one call us," remarked Ned.
"Nor i Wonder if we're the only lazy birds." He looked from the tent in time to see mr Damon and the professor emerging.
Then Tom noticed something queer.
The canoes were not on the river bank.
There was not an Indian in sight, and no evidence of Jacinto.
"I rather think they've gone back," was the professor's dry comment.
"Gone back?"
"Yes.
"Bless my time table!" cried mr Damon.
"You don't say so!
What does it mean?
What has becomes of our friend Jacinto?"
"Very well.
Do I practise what I preach?
five.
eleven.
thirteen.
fourteen.
A Goop that always makes me smile Is this one: Marmaduke Argyll. His mouth is full from cheek to cheek, Why should he then attempt to speak? It makes me smile, but still, the fact is, It is a most unpleasant practice.
Freddie Fisher fairly fussed When he came to eat his crust! Often on the floor he'd throw it, Hoping mother wouldn't know it! Goops all hate to eat the crust; If you're told to, then you must!
How thoughtless was Roberto Lees! (For only thoughtless children tease). He teased the little pussy cat, He teased the puppy! Think of that! He even teased his sister, too! I think he was a Goop-don't you?
Young Alexander b McGiff Each day had a clean handkerchief. In spite of this, if you'll believe, He wiped his nose upon his sleeve! Nobody but a Goop would do it; His mother'd scold him, if she knew it.
"I won't!" says young Amelia Pratt; "I won't do this!" "I won't do that!" Now isn't "won't" the naughtiest word That anyone has ever heard? Now isn't that the rudest way A Goop could answer? I should say!
Just look at Percival b Sloop, A most unpleasant sort of Goop; He pokes his fingers in his nose And wipes his hands upon his clothes; He does a lot of things that you, I know, would never, never do!
And often even after they got well, they did not want to go away-they liked the Doctor and his house so much.
So in this way he went on getting more and more pets.
So he took the monkey away from the Italian, gave the man a shilling and told him to go.
He asked couldn't he sleep in the fish pond at the bottom of the garden, if he promised not to eat the fish.
But to every one in the house he was always as gentle as a kitten.
But he wept such big tears, and begged so hard to be allowed to stay, that the Doctor hadn't the heart to turn him out.
This is the last straw.
"I don't care what you call it," said his sister.
"It's a nasty thing to find under the bed.
"But he has promised me," the Doctor answered, "that he will not bite any one.
Don't be so fussy."
With all these mouths to fill, and the house to look after, and no one to do the mending, and no money coming in to pay the butcher's bill, things began to look very difficult.
At least we can do that much.
So it was agreed that the monkey, Chee Chee, was to do the cooking and mending; the dog was to sweep the floors; the duck was to dust and make the beds; the owl, Too Too, was to keep the accounts, and the pig was to do the gardening.
But still they didn't seem to make enough money to pay all the bills-and still the Doctor wouldn't worry.
"Never mind.
So long as the hens lay eggs and the cow gives milk we can have omelettes and junket.
The Winter is still a long way off.
Don't fuss.
The Cow Bird.
The Turnip.
Observe the Turnip in the pot. The Tern is glad that he is not!
For Eskimos, perhaps, the Auk Performs the duties of the Stork.
The Cat bird.
The Cat nip.
The Shamrock.
These people are too strong.
"Much good him.
No black fellow.
"Yes.
Mass Joe no gun, no powder pop, no chopper, no knife, no fight works 'tall."
"Black fellow come along."
"Mass Joe, Mass Joe, he go eat up black fellow.
"Only a bit stunned," it said; and then I gasped out the one word:
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.
Good bye."
"I say, though, hadn't you better take Gyp?"
Where is my father?"
There."
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE.
He started and looked in the same direction as I did which was right down the gully, and saw what had taken my attention, namely, the stooping bodies of a couple of blacks hurrying away through the bushes at a pretty good rate.
"No!" he said.
"Jimmy go look 'bout.
Mr Francis turned his head without a word, and, leaning upon a stout stick, started at once; and we followed in silence, just as the stars were coming out.
Hist!
I'll creep forward and listen."
Why, we've found your father.
"How do you know?"
"He was to send the dog in search of us if we did not join him in two hours; and if we were in trouble I was either to tie something to his collar or take it off."
"Back, my boy! Francis, quick!"
"No, no!" I cried.
I recoiled shuddering.
"Come along."
Chapter two
Lady Russell was most anxiously zealous on the subject, and gave it much serious consideration.
She was a benevolent, charitable, good woman, and capable of strong attachments, most correct in her conduct, strict in her notions of decorum, and with manners that were held a standard of good breeding.
Herself the widow of only a knight, she gave the dignity of a baronet all its due; and Sir Walter, independent of his claims as an old acquaintance, an attentive neighbour, an obliging landlord, the husband of her very dear friend, the father of Anne and her sisters, was, as being Sir Walter, in her apprehension, entitled to a great deal of compassion and consideration under his present difficulties.
They must retrench; that did not admit of a doubt.
But she was very anxious to have it done with the least possible pain to him and Elizabeth.
She drew up plans of economy, she made exact calculations, and she did what nobody else thought of doing: she consulted Anne, who never seemed considered by the others as having any interest in the question.
She consulted, and in a degree was influenced by her in marking out the scheme of retrenchment which was at last submitted to Sir Walter.
She wanted more vigorous measures, a more complete reformation, a quicker release from debt, a much higher tone of indifference for everything but justice and equity.
"If we can persuade your father to all this," said Lady Russell, looking over her paper, "much may be done.
What will he be doing, in fact, but what very many of our first families have done, or ought to do?
We must be serious and decided; for after all, the person who has contracted debts must pay them; and though a great deal is due to the feelings of the gentleman, and the head of a house, like your father, there is still more due to the character of an honest man."
This was the principle on which Anne wanted her father to be proceeding, his friends to be urging him.
She considered it as an act of indispensable duty to clear away the claims of creditors with all the expedition which the most comprehensive retrenchments could secure, and saw no dignity in anything short of it.
She wanted it to be prescribed, and felt as a duty.
Her knowledge of her father and Elizabeth inclined her to think that the sacrifice of one pair of horses would be hardly less painful than of both, and so on, through the whole list of Lady Russell's too gentle reductions.
How Anne's more rigid requisitions might have been taken is of little consequence.
Lady Russell's had no success at all: could not be put up with, were not to be borne.
"What! every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table-contractions and restrictions every where!
To live no longer with the decencies even of a private gentleman!
No, he would sooner quit Kellynch Hall at once, than remain in it on such disgraceful terms."
"Quit Kellynch Hall." The hint was immediately taken up by Mr Shepherd, whose interest was involved in the reality of Sir Walter's retrenching, and who was perfectly persuaded that nothing would be done without a change of abode.
"Since the idea had been started in the very quarter which ought to dictate, he had no scruple," he said, "in confessing his judgement to be entirely on that side.
It did not appear to him that Sir Walter could materially alter his style of living in a house which had such a character of hospitality and ancient dignity to support.
In any other place Sir Walter might judge for himself; and would be looked up to, as regulating the modes of life in whatever way he might choose to model his household."
Sir Walter would quit Kellynch Hall; and after a very few days more of doubt and indecision, the great question of whither he should go was settled, and the first outline of this important change made out.
There had been three alternatives, London, Bath, or another house in the country.
All Anne's wishes had been for the latter.
A small house in their own neighbourhood, where they might still have Lady Russell's society, still be near Mary, and still have the pleasure of sometimes seeing the lawns and groves of Kellynch, was the object of her ambition.
She disliked Bath, and did not think it agreed with her; and Bath was to be her home.
Sir Walter had at first thought more of London; but Mr Shepherd felt that he could not be trusted in London, and had been skilful enough to dissuade him from it, and make Bath preferred.
It was a much safer place for a gentleman in his predicament: he might there be important at comparatively little expense.
It would be too much to expect Sir Walter to descend into a small house in his own neighbourhood.
And with regard to Anne's dislike of Bath, she considered it as a prejudice and mistake arising, first, from the circumstance of her having been three years at school there, after her mother's death; and secondly, from her happening to be not in perfectly good spirits the only winter which she had afterwards spent there with herself.
Lady Russell was fond of Bath, in short, and disposed to think it must suit them all; and as to her young friend's health, by passing all the warm months with her at Kellynch Lodge, every danger would be avoided; and it was in fact, a change which must do both health and spirits good.
Her spirits were not high.
A larger society would improve them.
She wanted her to be more known.
The undesirableness of any other house in the same neighbourhood for Sir Walter was certainly much strengthened by one part, and a very material part of the scheme, which had been happily engrafted on the beginning.
He was not only to quit his home, but to see it in the hands of others; a trial of fortitude, which stronger heads than Sir Walter's have found too much.
Kellynch Hall was to be let.
This, however, was a profound secret, not to be breathed beyond their own circle.
Mr Shepherd had once mentioned the word "advertise," but never dared approach it again.
How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!
Elizabeth had been lately forming an intimacy, which she wished to see interrupted. It was with the daughter of Mr Shepherd, who had returned, after an unprosperous marriage, to her father's house, with the additional burden of two children.
Lady Russell, indeed, had scarcely any influence with Elizabeth, and seemed to love her, rather because she would love her, than because Elizabeth deserved it.
She had never received from her more than outward attention, nothing beyond the observances of complaisance; had never succeeded in any point which she wanted to carry, against previous inclination.
CHAPTER three
He had not much intercourse with any families beyond that circle; his horror of late hours, and large dinner parties, made him unfit for any acquaintance but such as would visit him on his own terms.
Fortunately for him, Highbury, including Randalls in the same parish, and Donwell Abbey in the parish adjoining, the seat of mr Knightley, comprehended many such.
Not unfrequently, through Emma's persuasion, he had some of the chosen and the best to dine with him: but evening parties were what he preferred; and, unless he fancied himself at any time unequal to company, there was scarcely an evening in the week in which Emma could not make up a card table for him.
Real, long-standing regard brought the Westons and mr Knightley; and by mr Elton, a young man living alone without liking it, the privilege of exchanging any vacant evening of his own blank solitude for the elegancies and society of mr Woodhouse's drawing room, and the smiles of his lovely daughter, was in no danger of being thrown away.
After these came a second set; among the most come at able of whom were mrs and Miss Bates, and mrs Goddard, three ladies almost always at the service of an invitation from Hartfield, and who were fetched and carried home so often, that mr Woodhouse thought it no hardship for either james or the horses.
Had it taken place only once a year, it would have been a grievance.
mrs Bates, the widow of a former vicar of Highbury, was a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille.
She lived with her single daughter in a very small way, and was considered with all the regard and respect which a harmless old lady, under such untoward circumstances, can excite.
Her daughter enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married. Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect.
She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness.
Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible.
And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good will.
It was her own universal good will and contented temper which worked such wonders.
She loved every body, was interested in every body's happiness, quicksighted to every body's merits; thought herself a most fortunate creature, and surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother, and so many good neighbours and friends, and a home that wanted for nothing.
The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself.
She was a great talker upon little matters, which exactly suited mr Woodhouse, full of trivial communications and harmless gossip.
mrs Goddard's school was in high repute-and very deservedly; for Highbury was reckoned a particularly healthy spot: she had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter dressed their chilblains with her own hands.
It was no wonder that a train of twenty young couple now walked after her to church.
She was a plain, motherly kind of woman, who had worked hard in her youth, and now thought herself entitled to the occasional holiday of a tea visit; and having formerly owed much to mr Woodhouse's kindness, felt his particular claim on her to leave her neat parlour, hung round with fancy work, whenever she could, and win or lose a few sixpences by his fireside.
These were the ladies whom Emma found herself very frequently able to collect; and happy was she, for her father's sake, in the power; though, as far as she was herself concerned, it was no remedy for the absence of mrs Weston.
She was delighted to see her father look comfortable, and very much pleased with herself for contriving things so well; but the quiet prosings of three such women made her feel that every evening so spent was indeed one of the long evenings she had fearfully anticipated.
As she sat one morning, looking forward to exactly such a close of the present day, a note was brought from mrs Goddard, requesting, in most respectful terms, to be allowed to bring Miss Smith with her; a most welcome request: for Miss Smith was a girl of seventeen, whom Emma knew very well by sight, and had long felt an interest in, on account of her beauty.
A very gracious invitation was returned, and the evening no longer dreaded by the fair mistress of the mansion.
Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody.
Somebody had placed her, several years back, at mrs Goddard's school, and somebody had lately raised her from the condition of scholar to that of parlour boarder.
This was all that was generally known of her history. She had no visible friends but what had been acquired at Highbury, and was now just returned from a long visit in the country to some young ladies who had been at school there with her.
She was a very pretty girl, and her beauty happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired.
She was short, plump, and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness, and, before the end of the evening, Emma was as much pleased with her manners as her person, and quite determined to continue the acquaintance.
Those soft blue eyes, and all those natural graces, should not be wasted on the inferior society of Highbury and its connexions.
The acquaintance she had already formed were unworthy of her.
The friends from whom she had just parted, though very good sort of people, must be doing her harm.
It would be an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers.
Upon such occasions poor mr Woodhouses feelings were in sad warfare. He loved to have the cloth laid, because it had been the fashion of his youth, but his conviction of suppers being very unwholesome made him rather sorry to see any thing put on it; and while his hospitality would have welcomed his visitors to every thing, his care for their health made him grieve that they would eat.
Such another small basin of thin gruel as his own was all that he could, with thorough self approbation, recommend; though he might constrain himself, while the ladies were comfortably clearing the nicer things, to say:
"mrs Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs.
Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body.
I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else; but you need not be afraid, they are very small, you see-one of our small eggs will not hurt you.
Ours are all apple tarts.
I do not advise the custard.
I do not think it could disagree with you."
Emma allowed her father to talk-but supplied her visitors in a much more satisfactory style, and on the present evening had particular pleasure in sending them away happy.
The happiness of Miss Smith was quite equal to her intentions.
CHAPTER five
"I do not know what your opinion may be, mrs Weston," said mr Knightley, "of this great intimacy between Emma and Harriet Smith, but I think it a bad thing."
"A bad thing!
"I think they will neither of them do the other any good."
"You surprize me!
Emma must do Harriet good: and by supplying her with a new object of interest, Harriet may be said to do Emma good.
I have been seeing their intimacy with the greatest pleasure.
How very differently we feel!--Not think they will do each other any good!
"Perhaps you think I am come on purpose to quarrel with you, knowing Weston to be out, and that you must still fight your own battle."
"mr Weston would undoubtedly support me, if he were here, for he thinks exactly as I do on the subject.
We were speaking of it only yesterday, and agreeing how fortunate it was for Emma, that there should be such a girl in Highbury for her to associate with.
mr Knightley, I shall not allow you to be a fair judge in this case.
You are so much used to live alone, that you do not know the value of a companion; and, perhaps no man can be a good judge of the comfort a woman feels in the society of one of her own sex, after being used to it all her life.
I can imagine your objection to Harriet Smith.
She is not the superior young woman which Emma's friend ought to be.
But on the other hand, as Emma wants to see her better informed, it will be an inducement to her to read more herself.
"Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through-and very good lists they were-very well chosen, and very neatly arranged-sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule.
The list she drew up when only fourteen-I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now.
But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma.
She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding.
Where Miss Taylor failed to stimulate, I may safely affirm that Harriet Smith will do nothing.--You never could persuade her to read half so much as you wished.--You know you could not."
"But I," he soon added, "who have had no such charm thrown over my senses, must still see, hear, and remember.
Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family.
At ten years old, she had the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen.
She was always quick and assured: Isabella slow and diffident.
And ever since she was twelve, Emma has been mistress of the house and of you all.
In her mother she lost the only person able to cope with her.
She inherits her mother's talents, and must have been under subjection to her."
But you were preparing yourself to be an excellent wife all the time you were at Hartfield.
"Thank you.
There will be very little merit in making a good wife to such a man as mr Weston."
"Why, to own the truth, I am afraid you are rather thrown away, and that with every disposition to bear, there will be nothing to be borne.
We will not despair, however.
Weston may grow cross from the wantonness of comfort, or his son may plague him."
No, mr Knightley, do not foretell vexation from that quarter."
"Not I, indeed.
I only name possibilities.
I do not pretend to Emma's genius for foretelling and guessing.
I hope, with all my heart, the young man may be a Weston in merit, and a Churchill in fortune.--But Harriet Smith-I have not half done about Harriet Smith.
I think her the very worst sort of companion that Emma could possibly have.
She knows nothing herself, and looks upon Emma as knowing every thing.
How can Emma imagine she has any thing to learn herself, while Harriet is presenting such a delightful inferiority?
Hartfield will only put her out of conceit with all the other places she belongs to.
She will grow just refined enough to be uncomfortable with those among whom birth and circumstances have placed her home.
I am much mistaken if Emma's doctrines give any strength of mind, or tend at all to make a girl adapt herself rationally to the varieties of her situation in life.--They only give a little polish."
"I either depend more upon Emma's good sense than you do, or am more anxious for her present comfort; for I cannot lament the acquaintance. How well she looked last night!"
"Oh! you would rather talk of her person than her mind, would you?
Very well; I shall not attempt to deny Emma's being pretty."
"Pretty! say beautiful rather.
Can you imagine any thing nearer perfect beauty than Emma altogether-face and figure?"
"I do not know what I could imagine, but I confess that I have seldom seen a face or figure more pleasing to me than hers.
But I am a partial old friend."
mr Knightley, is not she?"
"I have not a fault to find with her person," he replied.
"I think her all you describe.
I love to look at her; and I will add this praise, that I do not think her personally vain.
Considering how very handsome she is, she appears to be little occupied with it; her vanity lies another way.
mrs Weston, I am not to be talked out of my dislike of Harriet Smith, or my dread of its doing them both harm."
"And I, mr Knightley, am equally stout in my confidence of its not doing them any harm.
Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend?
"Very well; I will not plague you any more.
Emma shall be an angel, and I will keep my spleen to myself till Christmas brings john and Isabella. john loves Emma with a reasonable and therefore not a blind affection, and Isabella always thinks as he does; except when he is not quite frightened enough about the children.
I am sure of having their opinions with me."
"I know that you all love her really too well to be unjust or unkind; but excuse me, mr Knightley, if I take the liberty (I consider myself, you know, as having somewhat of the privilege of speech that Emma's mother might have had) the liberty of hinting that I do not think any possible good can arise from Harriet Smith's intimacy being made a matter of much discussion among you.
Pray excuse me; but supposing any little inconvenience may be apprehended from the intimacy, it cannot be expected that Emma, accountable to nobody but her father, who perfectly approves the acquaintance, should put an end to it, so long as it is a source of pleasure to herself.
It has been so many years my province to give advice, that you cannot be surprized, mr Knightley, at this little remains of office."
"Not at all," cried he; "I am much obliged to you for it.
It is very good advice, and it shall have a better fate than your advice has often found; for it shall be attended to."
"Be satisfied," said he, "I will not raise any outcry.
I will keep my ill humour to myself.
Isabella does not seem more my sister; has never excited a greater interest; perhaps hardly so great.
There is an anxiety, a curiosity in what one feels for Emma.
I wonder what will become of her!"
"She always declares she will never marry, which, of course, means just nothing at all.
But I have no idea that she has yet ever seen a man she cared for.
It would not be a bad thing for her to be very much in love with a proper object.
I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of a return; it would do her good.
But there is nobody hereabouts to attach her; and she goes so seldom from home."
I do not recommend matrimony at present to Emma, though I mean no slight to the state, I assure you."
There were wishes at Randalls respecting Emma's destiny, but it was not desirable to have them suspected; and the quiet transition which mr Knightley soon afterwards made to "What does Weston think of the weather; shall we have rain?" convinced her that he had nothing more to say or surmise about Hartfield.
Stupidity militant.
Apparently.
Propensitate of prejudice.
A reproduction of a work of art, by the artist that made the original.
Obstinate in a course that we approve.
"The Sturdy Beggar"
Benefactor; philanthropist.
What, what!
j p Morgan
"That," he said, "is the story."
To destroy.
fifty.
She is eight years old and learns everything by heart. Something may come of her for she has talent, but not if she goes on as she is doing now; she will never acquire velocity because she purposely makes her hand heavy.
It goes, but she gets bored too quickly.
In vain.
Thereupon I wrote four measures of a minuet and said to her: 'Now look what an ass I am; I have begun a minuet and can't finish even the first part; be good enough to finish it for me.' She thought it impossible.
At length she produced a little something to my joy. Then I made her finish the minuet, i e only the first voice.
We shall see what comes of it tomorrow."
(Paris, may fourteenth seventeen seventy eight, to his father.
The pupil was the daughter of the Duke de Guines, an excellent flautist.
She is very clever and learns quickly.
fifty three.
It is preserved in the Court Library in Vienna.)
fifty four.
h e k])
That is your case."
fifty six.
His anger fled and he broke into a merry laugh.)
fifty seven.
That's the way to shriek."
fifty eight.
h e k])
"Whoever can see and hear her (the daughter of Stein) play without laughing must be a stone (Stein) like her father.
sixty.
sixty three.
Beethoven found the same fault with Mozart's playing that Mozart here condemns.)
(Vienna, april twenty eighth seventeen eighty four, to his father in Salzburg, whither the pianist Richter, whom he recommends to his father, is going on a concert trip.)
(Paris, june twelfth seventeen seventy eight, to his father.
Mozart obviously had in view, not the pianoforte which was just coming into use in his day, but the clavichord. This instrument was sounded by striking the strings with bits of brass placed in the farther end of the keys which were simple and direct levers.
h e k])
sixty six.
(Recorded by Rochlitz as a criticism by Mozart of Italian singers in seventeen eighty nine.)
sixty eight.
Mozart himself was plainly of another opinion.
h e k])
'It doesn't hurt me in the least; bad music leaves my nerves unaffected, but I sometimes get a headache from good music.' Then I thought to myself: Yes, such a shallow pate as you feels a pain as soon as he hears something which he can not understand."
(Mannheim, november thirteenth seventeen seventy seven, to his father.
Beecke was a conceited pianist.)
The orchestra is said to be large and good, and my principal favorites can be well performed there, that is to say choruses, and I am right glad that the Frenchmen are fond of them....Heretofore Paris has been used to the choruses of Gluck.
february twenty eighth seventeen seventy eight, to his father.
Whom should it please?
It is characterized by brevity and wealth of melody.)
seventy three.
seventy four.
Mozart was thinking of writing a French opera.)
seventy five.
It seems that wood wind instruments were still absent from the symphony orchestra in Salzburg.)
seventy six.
"Others know as well as you and I that tastes are continually changing, and that the changes extend even into church music; this should not be, but it accounts for the fact that true church music is now found only in the attic and almost eaten up by the worms."
(Vienna, april twelfth seventeen eighty three, to his father, who was active as Court Chapelmaster in Salzburg, and who had been asked by his son in the same letter, when it grew a little warmer, "to look in the attic and send some of your (his) church music.")
seventy seven.
seventy eight.
But what would you?
(Vienna, december twenty eighth seventeen eighty two, to his father.
Mozart replied: "Yes, I have heard of England's triumph, and, indeed, with great joy (for you know well that I am an arch Englishman)." The little book of criticism never appeared.)
eighty.
On no account!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna.
"At first I said I would not take any message to you.
Then he said that he would do his utmost to obtain an interview with you without my help. He assured me that his passion for you was a passing infatuation, now he has no feeling for you.
How did he strike you?"
But I may be mistaken; that may only be the part he assumes.
"I shall always, always pray for her!
Don't inquire about me.
Don't you see it?
I... perhaps I shall come... if I can.
What's the matter with you?
"Once for all, never ask me about anything.
CHAPTER four
Raskolnikov went straight to the house on the canal bank where Sonia lived.
It was an old green house of three storeys.
While he was wandering in the darkness, uncertain where to turn for Kapernaumov's door, a door opened three paces from him; he mechanically took hold of it.
On a broken chair stood a candle in a battered copper candlestick.
A minute later Sonia, too, came in with the candle, set down the candlestick and, completely disconcerted, stood before him inexpressibly agitated and apparently frightened by his unexpected visit.
She felt sick and ashamed and happy, too....
It was a large but exceedingly low pitched room, the only one let by the Kapernaumovs, to whose rooms a closed door led in the wall on the left. In the opposite side on the right hand wall was another door, always kept locked.
A wall with three windows looking out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light. The other corner was disproportionately obtuse.
There was scarcely any furniture in the big room: in the corner on the right was a bedstead, beside it, nearest the door, a chair.
Two rush bottom chairs stood by the table.
On the opposite wall near the acute angle stood a small plain wooden chest of drawers looking, as it were, lost in a desert.
The yellow, scratched and shabby wall paper was black in the corners.
There was every sign of poverty; even the bedstead had no curtain.
"I am late....
"My landlady's clock has just struck...
I heard it myself...."
"I may perhaps not see you again..."
"Are you... going away?"
"Then you are not coming to Katerina Ivanovna to morrow?" Sonia's voice shook.
"Why are you standing?
She sat down.
What a hand!
Sonia smiled faintly.
"Yes."
"Yes...."
"They live there, through that door?"
"I should be afraid in your room at night," he observed gloomily.
"They are very good people, very kind," answered Sonia, who still seemed bewildered, "and all the furniture, everything... everything is theirs. And they are very kind and the children, too, often come to see me."
"They all stammer, don't they?"
And his wife, too....
She is a very kind woman.
But where did you hear about them?" she added with some surprise.
He told me all about you....
"Father.
I was walking in the street, out there at the corner, about ten o'clock and he seemed to be walking in front.
I wanted to go to Katerina Ivanovna...."
"You were walking in the streets?"
"Ah, you don't....
Her mind is quite unhinged, you see... from sorrow.
And how clever she used to be... how generous... how kind!
Her pale cheeks flushed, there was a look of anguish in her eyes.
"Beat me! how can you?
And if she did beat me, what then?
What of it?
You know nothing, nothing about it....
And ill....
She has such faith that there must be righteousness everywhere and she expects it....
And if you were to torture her, she wouldn't do wrong.
Like a child, like a child.
She is good!"
Sonia looked at him inquiringly.
They were all on your hands before, though....
And your father came to you to beg for drink.
Well, how will it be now?"
"Will they stay there?"
"I don't know....
We are one, we live like one." Sonia was agitated again and even angry, as though a canary or some other little bird were to be angry.
"And how she cried to day!
Then she will be comforted again.
And she kisses and hugs me, comforts me, and you know she has such faith, such faith in her fancies!
One can't contradict her.
She dragged the wash tub into the room with her feeble hands and sank on the bed, gasping for breath.
We went this morning to the shops to buy shoes for Polenka and Lida for theirs are quite worn out.
And she picked out such dear little boots, for she has taste, you don't know.
"And aren't you sorry for them?
Aren't you sorry?" Sonia flew at him again.
"Why, I know, you gave your last penny yourself, though you'd seen nothing of it, and if you'd seen everything, oh dear!
Only last week!
I was cruel!
And how often I've done it!
"Yes, I-I.
They just reminded her of her old happy days.
She looked at herself in the glass, admired herself, and she has no clothes at all, no things of her own, hasn't had all these years! And she never asks anyone for anything; she is proud, she'd sooner give away everything.
And I was sorry to give them.
'What use are they to you, Katerina Ivanovna?' I said.
And she was so grieved, so grieved at my refusing her. And it was so sad to see....
"Yes....
Did you know her?" Sonia asked with some surprise.
"Katerina Ivanovna is in consumption, rapid consumption; she will soon die," said Raskolnikov after a pause, without answering her question.
"And the children?
What can you do except take them to live with you?"
"And, what, if even now, while Katerina Ivanovna is alive, you get ill and are taken to the hospital, what will happen then?" he persisted pitilessly.
"How can you?
That cannot be!"
What will happen to them then?
They will be in the street, all of them, she will cough and beg and knock her head against some wall, as she did to day, and the children will cry.... Then she will fall down, be taken to the police station and to the hospital, she will die, and the children..."
"Oh, no...
God will not let it be!" broke at last from Sonia's overburdened bosom.
Raskolnikov got up and began to walk about the room.
"And can't you save?
"And it didn't come off!
No need to ask."
Another minute passed.
"God would not allow anything so awful!"
"But, perhaps, there is no God at all," Raskolnikov answered with a sort of malignance, laughed and looked at her.
Sonia's face suddenly changed; a tremor passed over it.
She looked at him with unutterable reproach, tried to say something, but could not speak and broke into bitter, bitter sobs, hiding her face in her hands.
At last he went up to her; his eyes glittered.
He put his two hands on her shoulders and looked straight into her tearful face.
All at once he bent down quickly and dropping to the ground, kissed her foot.
And certainly he looked like a madman.
"What are you doing to me?" she muttered, turning pale, and a sudden anguish clutched at her heart.
He stood up at once.
An honour!
Why, I'm... dishonourable.... Ah, why did you say that?"
"It was not because of your dishonour and your sin I said that of you, but because of your great suffering.
Isn't that fearful?
It would be better, a thousand times better and wiser to leap into the water and end it all!"
She had not even noticed the cruelty of his words.
What held her up-surely not depravity?
The last idea was the most revolting, but he was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel, and so he could not help believing that the last end was the most likely.
"But can that be true?" he cried to himself.
"Can that creature who has still preserved the purity of her spirit be consciously drawn at last into that sink of filth and iniquity?
"No, what has kept her from the canal till now is the idea of sin and they, the children....
And if she has not gone out of her mind... but who says she has not gone out of her mind?
Does she expect a miracle?
No doubt she does.
He began looking more intently at her.
"Find it and read it to me," he said.
When I was at school.
Read!"
"And haven't you heard it in church?"
"I... haven't been.
Do you often go?"
"I understand....
I was at church last week, too...
"Were you friends with Lizaveta?"
We used to read together and... talk.
She will see God."
Sonia still hesitated.
Her heart was throbbing.
Sonia opened the book and found the place.
Her hands were shaking, her voice failed her.
There was a catch in her breath.
"She saith unto Him,"
He had expected it.
Her voice rang out like a bell; triumph and joy gave it power.
It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.
"And I knew that Thou hearest Me always; but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me.
Jesus saith unto them, Loose him and let him go.
She could read no more, closed the book and got up from her chair quickly.
"Let us go together....
I've come to you, we are both accursed, let us go our way together!"
"How do I know?
Haven't you done the same?
"What for?
What will happen, if you should really be taken to the hospital to morrow?
Haven't you seen children here at the street corners sent out by their mothers to beg?
At seven the child is vicious and a thief.
"What's to be done?
You'll understand later....
Freedom and power, and above all, power!
That's the goal, remember that!
If I don't come to morrow, you'll hear of it all, and then remember these words.
He went out.
It's awful!"
"Oh, he must be terribly unhappy!...
What for?
What has happened?
What did he say to her?
He had kissed her foot and said... said (yes, he had said it clearly) that he could not live without her....
CHAPTER forty two.
OF THE COUNSELS WHICH DON QUIXOTE GAVE SANCHO PANZA BEFORE HE SET OUT TO GOVERN THE ISLAND, TOGETHER WITH OTHER WELL CONSIDERED MATTERS
The duke and duchess were so well pleased with the successful and droll result of the adventure of the Distressed One, that they resolved to carry on the joke, seeing what a fit subject they had to deal with for making it all pass for reality.
So having laid their plans and given instructions to their servants and vassals how to behave to Sancho in his government of the promised island, the next day, that following Clavileno's flight, the duke told Sancho to prepare and get ready to go and be governor, for his islanders were already looking out for him as for the showers of May.
If your lordship would be so good as to give me ever so small a bit of heaven, were it no more than half a league, I'd rather have it than the best island in the world."
"Recollect, Sancho," said the duke, "I cannot give a bit of heaven, no not so much as the breadth of my nail, to anyone; rewards and favours of that sort are reserved for God alone.
What I can give I give you, and that is a real, genuine island, compact, well proportioned, and uncommonly fertile and fruitful, where, if you know how to use your opportunities, you may, with the help of the world's riches, gain those of heaven."
"Senor," said Sancho, "it is my belief it's a good thing to be in command, if it's only over a drove of cattle."
You, Sancho, shall go partly as a lawyer, partly as a captain, for, in the island I am giving you, arms are needed as much as letters, and letters as much as arms."
As for arms, I'll handle those they give me till I drop, and then, God be my help!"
"With so good a memory," said the duke, "Sancho cannot go wrong in anything."
Some will bribe, beg, solicit, rise early, entreat, persist, without attaining the object of their suit; while another comes, and without knowing why or wherefore, finds himself invested with the place or office so many have sued for; and here it is that the common saying, 'There is good luck as well as bad luck in suits,' applies.
Thou, who, to my thinking, art beyond all doubt a dullard, without early rising or night watching or taking any trouble, with the mere breath of knight errantry that has breathed upon thee, seest thyself without more ado governor of an island, as though it were a mere matter of course.
With a heart, then, inclined to believe what I have said to thee, attend, my son, to thy Cato here who would counsel thee and be thy polestar and guide to direct and pilot thee to a safe haven out of this stormy sea wherein thou art about to ingulf thyself; for offices and great trusts are nothing else but a mighty gulf of troubles.
"That's the truth," said Sancho; "but that was when I was a boy; afterwards when I was something more of a man it was geese I kept, not pigs.
"If thou carriest thy wife with thee (and it is not well for those that administer governments to be long without their wives), teach and instruct her, and strive to smooth down her natural roughness; for all that may be gained by a wise governor may be lost and wasted by a boorish stupid wife.
"When equity may and should be brought into play, press not the utmost rigour of the law against the guilty; for the reputation of the stern judge stands not higher than that of the compassionate.
"If perchance thou permittest the staff of justice to swerve, let it be not by the weight of a gift, but by that of mercy.
OF THE SECOND SET OF COUNSELS DON QUIXOTE GAVE SANCHO PANZA
Who, hearing the foregoing discourse of Don Quixote, would not have set him down for a person of great good sense and greater rectitude of purpose?
Sancho listened to him with the deepest attention, and endeavoured to fix his counsels in his memory, like one who meant to follow them and by their means bring the full promise of his government to a happy issue. Don Quixote, then, went on to say:
"Dine sparingly and sup more sparingly still; for the health of the whole body is forged in the workshop of the stomach.
"Take care, Sancho, not to chew on both sides, and not to eruct in anybody's presence."
"Eruct!" said Sancho; "I don't know what that means."
"In truth, senor," said Sancho, "one of the counsels and cautions I mean to bear in mind shall be this, not to belch, for I'm constantly doing it."
"Eruct, Sancho, not belch," said Don Quixote.
"Eruct, I shall say henceforth, and I swear not to forget it," said Sancho.
"God alone can cure that," said Sancho; "for I have more proverbs in me than a book, and when I speak they come so thick together into my mouth that they fall to fighting among themselves to get out; that's why my tongue lets fly the first that come, though they may not be pat to the purpose.
"Thy attire shall be hose of full length, a long jerkin, and a cloak a trifle longer; loose breeches by no means, for they are becoming neither for gentlemen nor for governors.
Besides I can pretend my right hand is disabled and make some one else sign for me, for 'there's a remedy for everything except death;' and as I shall be in command and hold the staff, I can do as I like; moreover, 'he who has the alcalde for his father,' and I'll be governor, and that's higher than alcalde.
Tell me, where dost thou pick them up, thou booby?
"That, Sancho, thou art not," said Don Quixote; "for not only art thou not sage silence, but thou art pestilent prate and perversity; still I would like to know what three proverbs have just now come into thy memory, for I have been turning over mine own-and it is a good one-and none occurs to me."
So that he 'who sees the mote in another's eye had need to see the beam in his own,' that it be not said of himself, 'the dead woman was frightened at the one with her throat cut;' and your worship knows well that 'the fool knows more in his own house than the wise man in another's.'"
THE INCANDESCENT LAMP
ALTHOUGH Edison's contributions to human comfort and progress are extensive in number and extraordinarily vast and comprehensive in scope and variety, the universal verdict of the world points to his incandescent lamp and system of distribution of electrical current as the central and crowning achievements of his life up to this time.
This view would seem entirely justifiable when we consider the wonderful changes in the conditions of modern life that have been brought about by the wide spread employment of these inventions, and the gigantic industries that have grown up and been nourished by their world-wide application.
For a short while the world outside of Menlo Park held Edison's claims in derision. His lamp was pronounced a fake, a myth, possibly a momentary success magnified to the dignity of a permanent device by an overenthusiastic inventor.
He KNEW that he had reached the goal.
Their efforts had been confined to low resistance burners of large radiating surface for their lamps, but he realized the utter futility of such devices.
He was convinced from the first that the true solution of the problem lay in a lamp which should have as its illuminating body a strip of material which would offer such a resistance to the flow of electric current that it could be raised to a high temperature-incandescence-and be of such small cross section that it would radiate but little heat.
At the same time such a lamp must require a relatively small amount of current, in order that comparatively small conductors could be used, and its burner must be capable of withstanding the necessarily high temperatures without disintegration.
It is interesting to note that these conceptions were in Edison's mind at an early period of his investigations, when the best expert opinion was that the subdivision of the electric current was an ignis fatuus. Hence we quote the following notes he made, november fifteenth eighteen seventy eight, in one of the laboratory note books:
"A given straight wire having one ohm resistance and certain length is brought to a given degree of temperature by given battery.
If the same wire be coiled in such a manner that but one quarter of its surface radiates, its temperature will be increased four times with the same battery, or, one quarter of this battery will bring it to the temperature of straight wire.
"This was actually determined by trial.
"The amount of heat lost by a body is in proportion to the radiating surface of that body.
If one square inch of platina be heated to one hundred degrees it will fall to, say, zero in one second, whereas, if it was at two hundred degrees it would require two seconds.
"Hence, in the case of incandescent conductors, if the radiating surface be twelve inches and the temperature on each inch be one hundred, or twelve hundred for all, if it is so coiled or arranged that there is but one quarter, or three inches, of radiating surface, then the temperature on each inch will be four hundred.
To carry out this law to the best advantage in regard to platina, etc, then with a given length of wire to quadruple the heat we must lessen the radiating surface to one quarter, and to do this in a spiral, three quarters must be within the spiral and one quarter outside for radiating; hence, a square wire or other means, such as a spiral within a spiral, must be used.
Of course, when Light is radiated in great quantities not quite these temperatures would be reached.
Proceeding logically upon these lines of thought and following them out through many ramifications, we have seen how he at length made a filament of carbon of high resistance and small radiating surface, and through a concurrent investigation of the phenomena of high vacua and occluded gases was able to produce a true incandescent lamp.
The work of Edison on incandescent lamps did not stop at this fundamental invention, but extended through more than eighteen years of a most intense portion of his busy life.
Although very many of these inventions were of the utmost importance and value, we cannot attempt to offer a detailed exposition of them in this necessarily brief article, but must refer the reader, if interested, to the patents themselves, a full list being given at the end of this Appendix.
The outline sketch will indicate the principal patents covering the basic features of the lamp.
All of the technical, expert, and professional skill and knowledge that money could procure or experience devise were availed of in the bitter fights that raged in the courts for many years.
And although the Edison interests had spent from first to last nearly two million dollars, and had only about three years left in the life of the fundamental patent, Edison was thoroughly sustained as to priority by the decisions in the various suits.
We shall offer a few brief extracts from some of these decisions.
He was the first to make a carbon of materials, and by a process which was especially designed to impart high specific resistance to it; the first to make a carbon in the special form for the special purpose of imparting to it high total resistance; and the first to combine such a burner with the necessary adjuncts of lamp construction to prevent its disintegration and give it sufficiently long life.
It is impossible to resist the conclusion that the invention of the slender thread of carbon as a substitute for the burners previously employed opened the path to the practical subdivision of the electric light."
An appeal was taken in the above suit to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, and on october fourth eighteen ninety two, the decree of the lower court was affirmed.
Application filed august twenty fourth eighteen ninety one.
There is nothing surprising in this, however, as the possibility of photographing and reproducing actual scenes of animate life are so thoroughly exemplified and rendered practicable by the apparatus and methods disclosed in the patents above cited, that these basic inventions in themselves practically constitute the art-its development proceeding mainly along the line of manufacturing details.
The mechanism of such a camera, as now used, consists of many parts assembled in such contiguous proximity to each other that an illustration from an actual machine would not help to clearness of explanation to the general reader.
A full view of this shutter is also represented, with its opening, D, in the small illustration to the right.
In practice, the operation would be somewhat as follows, generally speaking: The lens would first be focussed on the animate scene to be photographed.
While the film is passing through the various parts of the machine it is guided and kept straight by various sets of rollers between which it runs, as indicated in the diagram.
As in practice the pictures are taken at a rate of twenty or more per second, it will be quite obvious that each period of rest is infinitesimally brief, being generally one thirtieth of a second or less.
Still it is sufficient to bring the film to a momentary condition of complete rest, and to allow for a maximum time of exposure, comparatively speaking, thus providing means for taking clearly defined pictures.
The negatives so obtained are developed in the regular way, and the positive prints subsequently made from them are used for reproduction.
In appearance it is somewhat different; indeed, it is in two parts, the one containing the lighting arrangements and condensing lens, and the other embracing the mechanism and objective lens.
The "taking" camera must have its parts enclosed in a light tight box, because of the undeveloped, sensitized film, but the projecting kinetoscope, using only a fully developed positive film, may, and, for purposes of convenient operation, must be accessibly open.
The philosophy of reproduction is very simple, and is illustrated diagrammatically in Fig. three, reference letters being the same as in Fig. one.
As to the additional reference letters, I is a condenser J the source of light, and K a reflector.
The positive film is moved intermittently but swiftly throughout its length between the objective lens and a beam of light coming through the condenser, being exposed by the shutter during the periods of rest.
This results in a projection of the photographs upon a screen in such rapid succession as to present an apparently continuous photograph of the successive positions of the moving objects, which, therefore, appear to the human eye to be in motion.
It reads as follows:
eighteen.
EDISON'S NEW STORAGE BATTERY
GENERICALLY considered, a "battery" is a device which generates electric current.
On closing the circuit of a primary battery an electric current is generated by reason of the chemical action which is set up between the electrolyte and the elements. This involves a gradual consumption of one of the elements and a corresponding exhaustion of the active properties of the electrolyte.
By reason of this, both the element and the electrolyte that have been used up must be renewed from time to time, in order to obtain a continued supply of electric current.
To the lay mind a "storage" battery presents itself in the aspect of a device in which electric energy is STORED, just as compressed air is stored or accumulated in a tank.
This view, however, is not in accordance with facts.
It is exactly like the primary battery in the fundamental circumstance that its ability for generating electric current depends upon chemical action.
In strict terminology it is a "reversible" battery, as will be quite obvious if we glance briefly at its philosophy.
Thus, the positive plate becomes oxidized, and the negative plate reduced.
After the charging operation is concluded the battery is ready for use, and upon its circuit being closed through a translating device, such as a lamp or motor, a reversion ("discharge") takes place, the positive plate giving up its oxygen, and the negative plate being oxidized.
The storage battery, as a commercial article, was introduced into the market in the year eighteen eighty one.
At that time, and all through the succeeding years, until about nineteen o five, there was only one type that was recognized as commercially practicable-namely, that known as the lead sulphuric acid cell, consisting of lead plates immersed in an electrolyte of dilute sulphuric acid.
In the year last named Edison first brought out his new form of nickel iron cell with alkaline electrolyte, as we have related in the preceding narrative.
Early in the eighties, at Menlo Park, he had given much thought to the lead type of storage battery, and during the course of three years had made a prodigious number of experiments in the direction of improving it, probably performing more experiments in that time than the aggregate of those of all other investigators.
Even in those early days he arrived at the conclusion that the lead sulphuric acid combination was intrinsically wrong, and did not embrace the elements of a permanent commercial device.
He did not at that time, however, engage in a serious search for another form of storage battery, being tremendously occupied with his lighting system and other matters.
This type of cell, however, has many serious disadvantages inherent to its very nature.
The tremendously complex nature of the chemical reactions which take place in the lead acid storage battery also renders it an easy prey to many troublesome diseases.
He said that the intimate and continued companionship of an acid and a metal was unnatural, and incompatible with the idea of durability and simplicity.
The soundness of his reasoning is amply justified by the perfection of results obtained in the new type of storage battery bearing his name, and now to be described.
The essential technical details of this battery are fully described in an article written by one of Edison's laboratory staff, Walter e Holland, who for many years has been closely identified with the inventor's work on this cell The article was published in the Electrical World, New York, april twenty eighth nineteen ten; and the following extracts therefrom will afford an intelligent comprehension of this invention:
"The 'A' type Edison cell is the outcome of nine years of costly experimentation and persistent toil on the part of its inventor and his associates....
"The Edison invention involves the use of an entirely new voltaic combination in an alkaline electrolyte, in place of the lead lead peroxide combination and acid electrolyte, characteristic of all other commercial storage batteries.
Experience has proven that this not only secures durability and greater output per unit weight of battery, but in addition there is eliminated a long list of troubles and diseases inherent in the lead acid combination....
"The principle on which the action of this new battery is based is the oxidation and reduction of metals in an electrolyte which does not combine with, and will not dissolve, either the metals or their oxides; and an electrolyte, furthermore, which, although decomposed by the action of the battery, is immediately re-formed in equal quantity; and therefore in effect is a CONSTANT element, not changing in density or in conductivity.
Again, the active materials of the electrodes being insoluble in, and absolutely unaffected by, the electrolyte, are not liable to any sort of chemical deterioration by action of the electrolyte-no matter how long continued....
"The electrolyte of the Edison battery is a twenty one per cent. solution of potassium hydrate having, in addition, a small amount of lithium hydrate.
The active metals of the electrodes-which will oxidize and reduce in this electrolyte without dissolution or chemical deterioration-are nickel and iron.
four), are all made of nickel plated steel-a material in which lightness, durability and mechanical strength are most happily combined, and a material beyond suspicion as to corrosion in an alkaline electrolyte....
It is only when specially prepared iron oxide of exceeding fineness, and nickel hydrate conforming to certain physical, as well as chemical, standards can be made that the alkaline battery is practicable.
The article then treats of Edison's investigations into means for supporting and making electrical connection with the active materials, showing some of the difficulties encountered and the various discoveries made in developing the perfected cell, after which the writer continues his description of the "A" type cell, as follows:
"It will be seen at once that the construction of the two kinds of plate is radically different.
five) has the familiar flat pocket construction.
Each negative contains twenty four pockets-a pocket being one half inch wide by three inches long, and having a maximum thickness of a little more than one eighth inch.
The frame is slit at the inner horizontal edges, and then folded in such a way as to make individual clamping jaws for each end flange. The clamping in is done at great pressure, and the resultant plate has great rigidity and strength.
"The perforated tubes into which the nickel active material is loaded are made of nickel plated steel of high quality.
They are put together with a double lapped spiral seam to give expansion resisting qualities, and as an additional precaution small metal rings are slipped on the outside.
"It will be seen that the 'A' positive plate has been given the theoretically best design to prevent expansion and overcome trouble from that cause.
Actual tests, long continued under very severe conditions, have shown that the construction is right, and fulfils the most sanguine expectations."
"An idea of the conditions inside a loaded tube can best be had by microscopic examination.
The vertical bounding walls are edges of the perforated metal containing tube; the dark horizontal lines are layers of nickel flake, while the light colored thicker layers represent the nickel hydrate.
It should be noted that the layers of flake nickel extend practically unbroken across the tube and make contact with the metal wall at both sides.
In conclusion, the article enumerates the chief characteristics of the Edison storage battery which fit it preeminently for transportation service, as follows: one.
No loss of active material, hence no sediment short circuits. two.
No jar breakage.
three.
Possibility of quick disconnection or replacement of any cell without employment of skilled labor.
Impossibility of "buckling" and harmlessness of a dead short circuit.
five.
Simplicity of care required.
six.
Durability of materials and construction. seven.
Impossibility of "sulphation." eight.
Entire absence of corrosive fumes.
nine.
eleven.
CONCLUSION
By noon the next day, Gawayne and his host Rode side by side along the perilous coast Of the gray Mere, from whose unquiet sleep Reverberating murmurs of the deep Startled the still December's listening air. The baron, shuddering, pointed seaward.
"Well, my friend, I'll go no further with you.
But Gawayne chose the lower road, and passed Along the desolate shore.
You are punctual to the day; That's good!
Let me see;-- Suppose I brew a cup of hot green tea? You'ld rather not?
You're pressed for time?
There, that's right; And now your helmet?
Thanks; and if you please Perhaps you'll kindly kneel down on your knees, As I did when I came to Camelot; So! Are you all ready?
"Nay, nay, not so," The other softly said.
He died in the month of January; and before the end of the winter of the same year, the Gothic nation was in arms.
They stretched from east to west, to the edge of the sea shore; and left, between the precipice and the Malian Gulf, an interval of three hundred feet, which, in some places, was contracted to a road capable of admitting only a single carriage.
The same impatience urged him to prevent the delay and danger of a siege, by the offer of a capitulation; and as soon as the Athenians heard the voice of the Gothic herald, they were easily persuaded to deliver the greatest part of their wealth, as the ransom of the city of Minerva and its inhabitants.
The treaty was ratified by solemn oaths, and observed with mutual fidelity.
The Gothic prince, with a small and select train, was admitted within the walls; he indulged himself in the refreshment of the bath, accepted a splendid banquet, which was provided by the magistrate, and affected to show that he was not ignorant of the manners of civilized nations.
In an age of miracles, it would perhaps be unjust to dispute the claim of the historian Zosimus to the common benefit: yet it cannot be dissembled, that the mind of Alaric was ill prepared to receive, either in sleeping or waking visions, the impressions of Greek superstition.
Alaric appears to have seized the favorable moment to execute one of those hardy enterprises, in which the abilities of a general are displayed with more genuine lustre, than in the tumult of a day of battle.
The measures which Synesius recommends, are the dictates of a bold and generous patriot.
Perhaps the philosopher who addresses the emperor of the East in the language of reason and virtue, which he might have used to a Spartan king, had not condescended to form a practicable scheme, consistent with the temper, and circumstances, of a degenerate age.
Perhaps the pride of the ministers, whose business was seldom interrupted by reflection, might reject, as wild and visionary, every proposal, which exceeded the measure of their capacity, and deviated from the forms and precedents of office.
The use to which Alaric applied his new command, distinguishes the firm and judicious character of his policy.
He issued his orders to the four magazines and manufactures of offensive and defensive arms, Margus, Ratiaria, Naissus, and Thessalonica, to provide his troops with an extraordinary supply of shields, helmets, swords, and spears; the unhappy provincials were compelled to forge the instruments of their own destruction; and the Barbarians removed the only defect which had sometimes disappointed the efforts of their courage.
The provinces of Europe which belonged to the Eastern emperor, were already exhausted; those of Asia were inaccessible; and the strength of Constantinople had resisted his attack.
three.
CHAPTER thirty two.
At nine o'clock the next morning Melbury dressed himself up in shining broadcloth, creased with folding and smelling of camphor, and started for Hintock House.
He said nothing of his destination either to his wife or to Grace, fearing that they might entreat him to abandon so risky a project, and went out unobserved.
He had chosen his time with a view, as he supposed, of conveniently catching mrs Charmond when she had just finished her breakfast, before any other business people should be about, if any came.
Plodding thoughtfully onward, he crossed a glade lying between Little Hintock Woods and the plantation which abutted on the park; and the spot being open, he was discerned there by Winterborne from the copse on the next hill, where he and his men were working.
Knowing his mission, the younger man hastened down from the copse and managed to intercept the timber merchant.
"I have been thinking of this, sir," he said, "and I am of opinion that it would be best to put off your visit for the present."
But Melbury would not even stop to hear him.
His mind was made up, the appeal was to be made; and Winterborne stood and watched him sadly till he entered the second plantation and disappeared.
Melbury rang at the tradesmen's door of the manor house, and was at once informed that the lady was not yet visible, as indeed he might have guessed had he been anybody but the man he was.
"Never mind," said Melbury, retreating into the court, "I'll stand about here." Charged so fully with his mission, he shrank from contact with anybody.
But he walked about the paved court till he was tired, and still nobody came to him.
They had heard of his arrival, but had not seen him enter, and, imagining him still in the court, discussed freely the possible reason of his calling.
Melbury sat with his hands resting on the familiar knobbed thorn walking stick, whose growing he had seen before he enjoyed its use. The scene to him was not the material environment of his person, but a tragic vision that travelled with him like an envelope.
He waited thus an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. He began to look pale and ill, whereupon the butler, who came in, asked him to have a glass of wine.
Melbury roused himself and said, "No, no Is she almost ready?"
I am just going up to tell her you are here."
"What! haven't you told her before?" said Melbury.
"Oh no," said the other.
"You see you came so very early."
At last the bell rang: mrs Charmond could see him.
She was not in her private sitting room when he reached it, but in a minute he heard her coming from the front staircase, and she entered where he stood.
"Do sit down, mr Melbury.
You have felled all the trees that were to be purchased by you this season, except the oaks, I believe."
"Yes," said Melbury.
It must be so charming to work in the woods just now!"
Hence her words "very nice," "so charming," were uttered with a perfunctoriness that made them sound absurdly unreal.
"Yes, yes," said Melbury, in a reverie.
He did not take a chair, and she also remained standing.
Resting upon his stick, he began: "mrs Charmond, I have called upon a more serious matter-at least to me-than tree throwing.
And whatever mistakes I make in my manner of speaking upon it to you, madam, do me the justice to set 'em down to my want of practice, and not to my want of care."
She might have begun to guess his meaning; but apart from that, she had such dread of contact with anything painful, harsh, or even earnest, that his preliminaries alone were enough to distress her.
"Yes, what is it?" she said.
"I am an old man," said Melbury, "whom, somewhat late in life, God thought fit to bless with one child, and she a daughter.
Her mother was a very dear wife to me, but she was taken away from us when the child was young, and the child became precious as the apple of my eye to me, for she was all I had left to love.
But I saw it was the law of nature that this should be, and that it was for the maid's happiness that she should have a home when I was gone; and I made up my mind without a murmur to help it on for her sake.
Things came about which made me doubt if it would be for my daughter's happiness to do this, inasmuch as the young man was poor, and she was delicately reared.
Another man came and paid court to her-one her equal in breeding and accomplishments; in every way it seemed to me that he only could give her the home which her training had made a necessity almost. I urged her on, and she married him.
But, ma'am, a fatal mistake was at the root of my reckoning.
Some monstrous calumnies are afloat-of which I have known nothing until now!"
Melbury started, and looked at her simply.
"But surely, ma'am, you know the truth better than I?"
Her features became a little pinched, and the touches of powder on her handsome face for the first time showed themselves as an extrinsic film.
"Will you leave me to myself?" she said, with a faintness which suggested a guilty conscience.
"This is so utterly unexpected-you obtain admission to my presence by misrepresentation-"
This gossip-"
Tell me of it, I say."
"Tell you, ma'am-not i What the gossip is, no matter.
She loved you once, ma'am; you began by liking her.
"Certainly I would do her no harm-I-" Melbury's eye met hers.
"Oh, Melbury," she burst out, "you have made me so unhappy!
How could you come to me like this!
It is too dreadful!
Now go away-go, go!"
"I will," he said, in a husky tone.
She had never so clearly perceived till now that her soul was being slowly invaded by a delirium which had brought about all this; that she was losing judgment and dignity under it, becoming an animated impulse only, a passion incarnate.
While she sat, or rather crouched, unhinged by the interview, lunch time came, and then the early afternoon, almost without her consciousness.
Then "a strange gentleman who says it is not necessary to give his name," was suddenly announced.
"I cannot see him, whoever he may be.
I am not at home to anybody."
She disliked the woods, but they had the advantage of being a place in which she could walk comparatively unobserved.
Virginia went with this man passively-to an appointment which, but an hour ago, she had promised herself she would not keep.
Her inmost soul was stirred, just as before.
Then it had been few words, now it was a little common song.
But the strange power of the man held her close, so she realized that for the moment at least she would do as he desired.
In the amazement and consternation of this thought she found time to offer up a little prayer: "Dear God, make him kind to me."
They leaned against the old bronze guns, facing the river.
He pulled her shawl about her, masterfully yet with gentleness, and then, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, he drew her to him until she rested against his shoulder.
And she remained there, trembling, in suspense, glancing at him quickly, in birdlike, pleading glances, as though praying him to be kind.
He took no notice after that, so the act seemed less like a caress than a matter of course.
He began to talk, half humorously, and little by little, as he went on, she forgot her fears, even her feeling of strangeness, and fell completely under the spell of his power.
"My name is Ned Trent," he told her, "and I am from Quebec.
I have journeyed far.
I have been to the uttermost ends of the North, even up beyond the Hills of Silence."
And then, in his gay, half mocking, yet musical voice he touched lightly on vast and distant things.
He talked of the great Saskatchewan, of Peace River, and the delta of the Mackenzie, of the winter journeys beyond Great Bear Lake into the Land of the Little Sticks, and the half mythical lake of Yamba Tooh.
He spoke of life with the Dog Ribs and Yellow Knives, where the snow falls in midsummer.
Before her eyes slowly spread, like a panorama, the whole extent of the great North, with its fierce, hardy men, its dreadful journeys by canoe and sledge, its frozen barrens, its mighty forests, its solemn charm.
All at once this post of Conjuror's House, a month in the wilderness as it was, seemed very small and tame and civilized for the simple reason that Death did not always compass it about.
At night we had no other shelter than our blankets, and we could not keep a fire because the spruce burned too fast and threw too many coals.
Two or three times in the night we boiled tea.
We had to thaw our moccasins each morning by thrusting them inside our shirts.
A roaring fire in the fireplace could not prevent the ink from freezing on the pen.
This went on for five months."
Thus he spoke, as one who says common things.
He said little of himself, but as he went on in short, curt sentences the picture grew more distinct, and to Virginia the man became more and more prominent in it.
One thing she could not conceive-the indomitable spirit of the men.
She glanced timidly up at her companion's face.
He let her go without protest, almost without thought, it seemed.
"But not mine," said he.
She exclaimed, in astonishment, "Are you not of the Company?"
"I am no man's man but my own," he answered, simply.
"Then why do you stay in this dreadful North?" she asked.
"Because I love it.
It is my life.
I want to go where no man has set foot before me; I want to stand alone under the sky; I want to show myself that nothing is too big for me-no difficulty, no hardship-nothing!"
"Why did you come here, then?
Here at least are forests so that you can keep warm.
He fell suddenly sombre, biting in reflection at his lip.
"No-yes-why not?" he said, at length.
"I know you will come out of it safely," said she; "I feel it.
You are brave and used to travel.
Won't you tell me about it?"
He did not reply.
After a moment she looked up in surprise.
His brows were knit in reflection.
He turned to her again, his eyes glowing into hers.
Once more the fascination of the man grew big, overwhelmed her. She felt her heart flutter, her consciousness swim, her old terror returning.
"Listen," said he.
You are a Factor's daughter; you know what that means." He dropped his head.
"Ah, I am tired-tired with it all!" he cried, in a voice strangely unhappy.
"But yesterday I played the game with all my old spirit; to day the zest is gone!
I no longer care." He felt the pressure of her hand.
"Are you just a little sorry for me?" he asked.
"Sorry for a weakness you do not understand? You must think me a fool."
"I know you are unhappy," replied Virginia, gently.
"I am truly sorry for that."
"Are you?
"Ah, a star shoots!" he exclaimed, gayly.
"That means a kiss!"
Still laughing, he attempted to draw her to him.
Angry, mortified, outraged, she fought herself free and leaped to her feet.
"Oh!" she cried, in insulted anger.
Her calm broke.
She burst into the violent sobbing of a child, and turned and ran hurriedly to the factory.
Ned Trent stared after her a minute from beneath scowling brows.
He stamped his moccasined foot impatiently.
"Like a rat in a trap!" he jeered at himself.
"Like a rat in a trap, Ned Trent!
The fates are drawing around you close.
You need just one little thing, and you cannot get it.
Bribery is useless!
Force is useless!
Craft is useless!
This afternoon I thought I saw another way.
What I could get no other way I might get from this little girl. She is only a child.
I believe I could touch her pity-ah, Ned Trent, Ned Trent, can you ever forget her frightened, white face begging you to be kind?" He paced back and forth between the two bronze guns with long, straight strides, like a panther in a cage.
"Her aid is mine for the asking-but she makes it impossible to ask!
What wonderful eyes she has.
She thinks I am a brute-how she sobbed, as though her little heart had broken.
Well, it was the only way to destroy her interest in me.
I had to do it.
Now she will despise me and forget me.
It is better that she should think me a brute than that I should be always haunted by those pleading eyes." The door of the distant church house opened and closed.
He smiled bitterly.
I'll try it.
I'll call for help on the love of man, since I cannot on the love of woman.
CHAPTER thirty two.
IN WHICH BLUFF IS TRUMPS.
Having disposed of the girl for the moment, Travers Gladwin decided it was time to call Michael Phelan to his assistance.
There was no telling what this amazing crook might do now.
He was too much for him. That a thief and impostor could possess such superhuman nerve had never occurred to his untutored mind.
He was a perfect dub to have let the situation reach such a stage of complexity, though the one thought uppermost in his mind was to save Helen from public ridicule and contempt.
He had almost counted on the thief taking one craven look at his constabulary disguise and then leaping through the window-fleeing like a wolf in the night-he, Travers Gladwin, remaining a veritable hero of romance to sooth and console Helen and gently break the news to her that she had been the dupe of an unscrupulous criminal.
Instead of which-he ground his teeth, went to the little panel door and shouted Phelan's name.
He had been on his way.
He had been on the point of bursting through the window and somehow scrambling aloft to the rescue of that helpless being who was being ground and wrenched and pounded by that porcine monster, when the monster suddenly rose to view again with a dumb bell in each hand.
There was no passion in the stodgy movements of the great paddy arms.
Even so far away as he was Phelan could see that the man puffed and blew and that his vigor was slowly waning.
Then suddenly the huge man stooped and held up in plain view a dangling wrestling dummy.
The lone watcher swallowed a savage oath.
His anger was white hot.
Again he had been the victim of delusion and had wasted heroic emotions on a stuffed dummy that served merely as an inanimate instrument in a course of anti fat calisthenics.
"Here's your uniform; I've had enough of it," replied Gladwin, throwing him the coat and cap, "and get into it quick.
There's work for you right in this house."
"There is not, nor play neither," snapped Phelan.
I'm an hour overdue at the station."
"You'll square yourself with the captain all right if you just do what I tell you," said Gladwin eagerly, helping him on with his coat and pushing him toward the window recess.
Phelan took one look at the young man's face and muttered as he obeyed.
"This must be a hell of a joke."
But a glance at that young man meant volumes and there was no limit to his spontaneous resources.
He summoned a laugh and jerked out:
"Oh, so you've resigned from the force?"
"Yes," retorted Gladwin, "and let me tell you that this little excursion of yours has gone far enough.
I'll give you one chance-get away from here as quickly as you can."
The big fellow curled one corner of his lip in a contemptuous smile, then glanced about him quickly and asked:
"Where's the young lady?"
"Never mind the young lady," Gladwin flung back at him.
"It was only on her account that I let you go as far as this.
Now get out and keep away from that young lady-and drop my name."
"Easy, son-easy.
I don't like to have little boys talk to me like that," and turning to the doorway behind him he beckoned.
The obedient Watkins sidled in and stopped with head averted from Gladwin, who started with surprise at seeing him.
Stepping forward and making sure there could be no mistake, Gladwin turned to the thief and exclaimed:
This is what I get for not sending this man to jail where he belonged."
"Don't bother with him, Watkins," snarled the big fellow, as he noted his companion's complexion run through three shades of yellow.
"There's no time to bother with him," he went on, and reaching out he caught Travers Gladwin by the shoulder and whirled him half way across the room.
The young man spun half a dozen times as he reeled across the carpet and he had to use both hands to stop himself against a big onyx table. As he pulled himself up standing he saw that Watkins had lifted the trunk on his shoulders and was headed for the hallway.
"Phelan!" he gasped out.
"Here, quick!"
"Stop that man," cried the thief, pointing to Watkins, "he's trying to get out of here with a trunkful of pictures."
The man's hair trigger mind had thought this out before Phelan was half way round the table.
One lightning glance at the thickness of the patrolman's neck and the general contour of his rubicund countenance had translated to him the sort of man he had to deal with.
Watkins dropped the trunk and at a signal from his companion was gone.
Swiftly and silently as he vanished, he could not have been half way to the door before the thief urged Phelan:
"Quick-go after that man-he's a thief!"
"Stop Phelan!" cried Gladwin, who had begun to see through the pantomime.
"They're both thieves!"
Phelan tried to run four ways at once.
"It's a trick to get you out of the house," said Gladwin with his eyes on the big man, who was calmly smiling and who had fully made up his mind on a magnificent game of bluff.
"What the blazes kind of a joke is this?" blurted Phelan, looking from one to the other in utter bewilderment.
"You'll find it's no joke, officer," said the bogus Gladwin sharply-"not if he gets away."
"You'll find it's not so funny yourself," cut in the real Gladwin. Then to Phelan, "Arrest this man, Phelan."
"Do you mean it?" asked the astonished Phelan, sizing up the thief as the highest example of aristocratic elegance he had ever seen in the flesh.
"Look out for him-there he goes for the window."
The thief had started in that direction, but his purpose was not escape.
The idea had flashed upon him that Helen might be concealed there.
"Now be careful, officer, or you'll get yourself into a lot of trouble."
"You bet your life I won't," Phelan answered, though he was already bluffed.
He had come close enough for that astute individual to make out that he wore the same uniform young Gladwin had been masquerading in and he made capital of this on the instant.
"How do you think it is going to look," he said, impressively, "if I prove that you've tried to help a band of thieves rob this house?"
"I said a band of thieves," insisted the thief.
"Why he's got his pals hidden all over the house."
"I tell you he's lying to you," Gladwin cut in frantically, seeing that Phelan was falling under the spell of the big man's superb bluff, and at the same time remembering Helen and pressing the button in the wall to warn her that the time had come for her to flee.
"Then they've all escaped," said the thief, easily, thrusting his hands in his pockets to help out his appearance of imperturbability.
"You let one go out, Phelan, and there were two others beside this one."
In his seething gray matter there stirred the remembrance that Bateato had told him that women were robbing the house.
"You mean the women," he said, ignoring Gladwin and addressing the thief.
"I remember-when the little Japanaze called me oft me beat, he said there was women crooks here, too."
"He's lying to you, Phelan," persisted Gladwin, though with less vehemence, a great feeling of relief having visited him in the belief that Helen had made her escape.
"You can have the whole place searched just as soon as you've got this man where he can't get away.
CHAPTER nine.
"BILLY THE KID" IS SENTENCED TO HANG.
HE KILLS HIS TWO GUARDS AND MAKES GOOD HIS ESCAPE.
In the latter part of February, eighteen eighty one, "Billy the Kid" was taken to Mesilla to be tried for the murder of Roberts at Blazer's saw mill.
Judge Bristol presided over the District Court, and assigned Ira e Leonard to defend the "Kid." He was acquitted for the murder of Roberts.
This time he was convicted, and sentenced to hang on the thirteenth day of May, eighteen eighty one, in the Court House yard in Lincoln.
As Lincoln had no suitable jail, an upstairs room in the large adobe Court House was selected as the "Kid's" last home on earth-as the officers supposed, but fate decided otherwise.
The room selected for the "Kid's" home was large, and in the northeast corner of the building, upstairs.
There were two windows in it, one on the east side and the other on the north, fronting the main street.
In order to get out of this room one had to pass through a hall into another room, where a back stairs led down to the rear yard.
One room was assigned as the Sheriff's private office.
The "Kid's" furniture consisted of a pair of steel hand cuffs, steel shackles for his legs, a stool, and a cot.
He and the "Kid" were bitter enemies on account of having killed warm friends of each other during the bloody Lincoln County war.
Of course this cowardly act left a scar on "Billy the Kid's" heart, which only death could heal.
He had come from san antonio texas.
He held a grudge against the "Kid" for the killing of his friend, Jimmie Carlyle, otherwise there was no enmity between them.
In the latter part of April, Cowboy Charlie Wall had four Mexicans helping him irrigate an alfalfa field, above the Mexican village of Tularosa, on Tularosa river.
A large band of Tularosa Mexicans appeared on the scene one morning, to prevent young Wall from using water for his thirsty alfalfa.
When the smoke of battle cleared away, four Tularosa Mexicans lay dead on the ground and Charlie Wall had two bullet wounds in his body, though they were not dangerous wounds.
Now, to prevent being mobbed by the angry citizens of Tularosa, which was just over the line in Dona Ana County, Wall and his helpers made a run, on horseback, for Lincoln, to surrender to Sheriff Pat Garrett.
The Sheriff allowed them to wear their pistols and to sleep in the old jail.
At meal times they accompanied either Bob Ollinger or j w Bell, to the Ellis Hotel across the main street, which ran east and west through town.
On the morning of april twenty eighth eighteen eighty one, Sheriff Garrett prepared to leave for White Oaks, thirty five miles north, to have a scaffold made to hang the "Kid" on.
Garrett remarked to the two guards: "Say, boys, you must keep a close watch on the 'Kid,' as he has only a few more days to live, and might make a break for liberty."
Bob Ollinger answered: "Don't worry, Pat, we will watch him like a goat."
With the gun in his hand, and looking towards the "Kid," he said: "There are eighteen buckshot in each barrel, and I reckon the man who gets them will feel it."
With a smile, "Billy the Kid" remarked: "You may be the one to get them yourself."
Now Ollinger put the gun back in the armory, locking the door, putting the key in his pocket.
Then Garrett left for White Oaks.
About five o'clock in the evening, Bob Ollinger took Charlie Wall and the other four armed prisoners to the Ellis Hotel, across the street, for supper.
Bell was left to guard the "Kid."
According to the story "Billy the Kid" told mrs Charlie Bowdre, and other friends, after his escape, he had been starving himself so that he could slip his left hand out of the steel cuff.
The guards thought he had lost his appetite from worry over his approaching death.
j w Bell sat on a chair, facing the "Kid," several paces away.
He was reading a newspaper.
Bell threw up both hands to shield his head from another blow.
Then the "Kid" jerked Bell's pistol out of its scabbard.
Now Bell ran out of the door and received a bullet from his own pistol.
The body of Bell tumbled down the back stairs, falling on the jailer, a German by the name of Geiss, who was sitting at the foot of the stairs.
Of course Geiss stampeded.
He flew out of the gate towards the Ellis Hotel.
On hearing the shot, Bob Ollinger and the five armed prisoners, got up from the supper table and ran to the street.
Charlie Wall and the four Mexicans stopped on the sidewalk, while Ollinger continued to run towards the court house.
After killing Bell, the "Kid" broke in the door to the armory and secured Ollinger's shot gun.
Then he hobbled to the open window facing the hotel.
He walked the balance of the way.
When directly under the window, the "Kid" stuck his head out, saying: "Hello, Bob!"
He said, in a voice loud enough to be heard by Wall and the other prisoners across the street: "Yes, he has killed me, too!"
These words were hardly out of the guard's mouth when the "Kid" fired a charge of buckshot into his heart.
Now "Billy the Kid" hobbled back to the armory and buckled around his waist two belts of cartridges and two Colt's pistols.
Then taking a Winchester rifle in his hand, he hobbled back to the shot gun, which he picked up.
Then the chain holding his feet close together was filed in two.
When his legs were free, the "Kid" danced a jig on the little front porch, where many people, who had run out to the sidewalk across the street, on hearing the shots, were witnesses to this free show, which couldn't be beat for money.
Geiss was hailed again and told to saddle up Billy Burt's, the Deputy County Clerk's, black pony and bring him out on the street.
This black pony had formerly belonged to the "Kid."
When the pony stood on the street, ready for the last act, the "Kid" went down the back stairs, stepping over the dead body of Bell, and started to mount.
Being encumbered with the weight of two pistols, two belts full of ammunition, and the rifle, the "Kid" was thrown to the ground, when the pony began bucking, before he had got into the saddle.
Now the "Kid" faced the crowd across the street, holding the rifle ready for action.
Charlie Wall told the writer that he could have killed him with his pistol, but that he wanted to see him escape.
Many other men in the crowd felt the same way, no doubt.
When the pony was brought back the "Kid" gave Geiss his rifle to hold, while he mounted.
The rifle being handed back to him when he was securely seated in the saddle, then he dug the pony in the sides with his heels, and galloped west.
THE RELIC
It was upon an evening in Spain, but with nothing which that word evokes for us in the North-for it was merely a lessening of the light without dews, without mists, and without skies-that I came up a stony valley and saw against the random line of the plateau at its head the dome of a church.
The road I travelled was but faintly marked, and was often lost and mingled with the rough boulders and the sand, and in the shallow depression of the valley there were but a few stagnant pools.
The shape of the dome was Italian, and it should have stood in an Italian landscape, drier indeed than that to which Northerners are accustomed, but still surrounded by trees, and with a distance that could render things lightly blue.
It was now quite dark.
The darkness had come suddenly, and, to make all things consonant, there was no moon and there were not any stars; clouds had risen of an even and menacing sort, and one could see no heaven.
In the presence of so wonderful a thing I forgot the object of my journey and the immediate care of the moment, and I went through the great doors that opened on the Place.
Already at Saragossa, and several times during my walking south from thence, I had noted that what the Spaniards did had a strange affinity to the work of Flanders.
Both districts have been mingled in history, yet it is not the Spaniard who has invigorated the Delta of the Rhine and the high country to the south of it, nor the Walloons and the Flemings who have taught the Spaniards; but each of these highly separated peoples resembles the other when it comes to the outward expression of the soul: why, I cannot tell.
Go to the earliest of the basilicas in Rome, and you will see that sacred enclosure standing in the middle of the edifice and taking up a certain proportion of the whole.
We in the North, where the Faith lived uninterruptedly and, after the ninth century, with no great struggle, dwindled this feature and extended the open and popular space, keeping only the rood screen as a hint of what had once been the Secret Mysteries and the Initiations of our origins.
There was a young priest passing me at that moment, and I said to him in Latin of the common sort that I could speak no Spanish.
I asked him if he could speak to me slowly in Latin, as I was speaking to him.
To those inexperienced in the practice of such worship there might be more excuse for the novel impression which this sight suddenly produced upon me.
I wondered as I looked at that face whether he had fallen in protest against the Mohammedans, or, as have so many, in a Spanish endurance of torture, martyred by Pagans in the Pacific Seas.
They next intoned the Salve Regina.
But what an intonation!
Had I cared less for the human beings about me, so much suffering, so much national tradition of suffering would have revolted, as it did indeed appal, me.
The chant came to an end, and the three gracious epithets in which it closes were full of wailing, and the children's voices were very high.
Then the priest shut the doors and locked them, and a boy came and blew the candles out one by one, and I went out into the market place, fuller than ever of Spain.
"What?" said Hanson.
I won't hurt you."
"I know you won't," she remarked, half truthfully.
Stick 'em out.
Carrie obeyed.
"Say, that fits like a T, don't it?" he remarked, feeling the set of it at the waist and eyeing it from a few paces with real pleasure.
"What you need now is a new skirt.
Let's go to breakfast."
Carrie put on her hat.
The latter looked, not quite sure, and then turned her head and looked.
She actually started.
"You must be thinking," he said.
He touched it now as he spoke of going.
They looked about, and now the thing was sinking, and Minnie heard the low sip of the encroaching water.
Here, wake up," said Hanson, disturbed, and shaking her by the shoulder.
You're talking in your sleep."
"We'll have a nice game of euchre."
CHAPTER nine
He would not argue, he would not talk freely.
"Just think of that!" said Jessica.
"Is it?" said mrs Hurstwood.
At ten o'clock in the morning the Sieur de la Coste, ensign in the king's Guards, followed by two officers and several archers of that body, came to the city registrar, named Clement, and demanded of him all the keys of the rooms and offices of the hotel.
These keys were given up to him instantly.
At three o'clock came two companies of the Guards, one French, the other Swiss.
As fast as they entered, they were placed in the grand saloon, on the platforms prepared for them.
At nine o'clock Madame la Premiere Presidente arrived.
At ten o'clock, the king's collation, consisting of preserves and other delicacies, was prepared in the little room on the side of the church of saint Jean, in front of the silver buffet of the city, which was guarded by four archers.
At midnight great cries and loud acclamations were heard.
Half an hour after the entrance of the king, fresh acclamations were heard; these announced the arrival of the queen.
The queen entered the great hall; and it was remarked that, like the king, she looked dull and even weary.
All at once the king appeared with the cardinal at one of the doors of the hall.
The cardinal was speaking to him in a low voice, and the king was very pale.
Everybody looked and listened with astonishment, comprehending nothing of what passed.
On his part the king returned to his apartment.
This was the costume that best became the king.
She wore a beaver hat with blue feathers, a surtout of gray pearl velvet, fastened with diamond clasps, and a petticoat of blue satin, embroidered with silver.
On her left shoulder sparkled the diamond studs, on a bow of the same color as the plumes and the petticoat.
The only question was, had she ten or twelve?
At that moment the violins sounded the signal for the ballet.
A cold sweat covered the brow of the cardinal.
In fact the king counted them, and the twelve studs were all on her Majesty's shoulder.
The king called the cardinal.
"This means, sire," replied the cardinal, "that I was desirous of presenting her Majesty with these two studs, and that not daring to offer them myself, I adopted this means of inducing her to accept them."
The opening of this door disclosed a brilliant light, and she disappeared.
D'Artagnan placed the ring on his finger, and again waited; it was evident that all was not yet over.
After the reward of his devotion, that of his love was to come.
Supper was to be served at three, and the clock of saint Jean had struck three quarters past two.
"You at last?" cried d'Artagnan.
thirty two A PROCURATOR'S DINNER
Porthos knocked with his hand.
The cousin was received with resignation, that was all.
The time for wine came.
He looked to see if the dish of beans was still there; the dish of beans had disappeared.
Coquenard.
"Well, then!
Porthos smiled.
"Then," continued he, "there is a horse for my lackey, and my valise.
Madame uttered fresh sighs.
"Afraid of being heard?
"Afraid of being heard!
"I am going a few steps farther."
The appointed hour was about to strike.
Eleven o'clock sounded.
This glove, wherever it had not touched the muddy ground, was of irreproachable odor.
He ran along the high road, took the path he had before taken, and reaching the ferry, interrogated the boatman.
About seven o'clock in the evening, the boatman had taken over a young woman, wrapped in a black mantle, who appeared to be very anxious not to be recognized; but entirely on account of her precautions, the boatman had paid more attention to her and discovered that she was young and pretty.
Speak!"
"But as you spoke to him you must have seen him."
"Oh, it's a description you want?"
"Which?"
"The short one."
"You have promised to be secret, my good monsieur?" said the old man.
So are the people.
"He looks as if he wanted to kill the photographer," she said.
"He almost did-just after the picture was taken.
Not without good reason, though.
"Apparently there were large scale mining operations carried on there once; the world is rich enough in minerals and mining them is very simple.
But water came only from expensive extraction processes and I imagine most of the food came from offworld.
Dis was on its own.
What happened to the people there is a tribute to the adaptation possibilities of homo sapiens. Individuals died, usually in enormous pain, but the race lived. Changed a good deal, but still human.
They couldn't do it mechanically, but by the time the last machine collapsed, enough people were adjusted to the environment to keep the race going.
"Their descendants are still there, completely adapted to the environment.
I don't know the exact details, but the reports are very enthusiastic about symbiotic relationships.
"Wonderful!" Lea exclaimed.
"Perhaps from the abstract scientific point of view.
If you can keep notes perhaps you might write a book about it some time.
But I'm not interested.
We must either find out what makes these people tick-or we are going to have to stand by and watch the whole lot blown up!"
"Going to do what!" Lea gasped.
"Destroy them?
Wipe out this fascinating genetic pool?
Why?
They want to light the fuse and drop these bombs on Nyjord, the next planet.
Nothing said or done can convince them differently.
They demand unconditional surrender, or else.
They have tried every kind of compromise but none of them works.
The Disans are out to commit racial suicide.
That is what we must stop."
Bare, horny feet.
A bulky, ragged length of cloth around the waist was the only garment.
What looked like a piece of green vine was hooked over one shoulder.
From a plaited belt were suspended a number of odd devices made of hand beaten metal, drilled stone and looped leather.
I don't see how his kind can be any real threat to another planet."
"They are paying our Cultural Relationships Foundation a good sum to try and prevent this war.
"Dis has some spacers as well as the cobalt bombs-though these aren't the real threat.
While essentially a peaceful and happy people, the Nyjorders were justifiably annoyed at this and convinced the tramp's captain to give them some more information. It's all here.
"When is that deadline?" Lea asked.
"In ten more days.
But they will drop the bombs in order to assure their own survival."
"What am I supposed to do?" Lea asked, flipping the pages of the report.
I'm an exobiologist, with a supplementary degree in anthropology.
"My faith in our recruiters is restored," he said.
"No more bickering.
Our foundation has had six people killed-including my late predecessor in charge of the project.
He was a good man, but I think he went at this problem the wrong way.
I think it is a cultural one, not a physical one."
"Run it through again with the power turned up," Lea said, frowning. "All I hear is static."
Like Newton and the falling apple, Levy and the hysteresis in the warp field.
Everything has a beginning.
If we can find out why these people are so hell bent on suicide we might be able to change the reasons.
Not that I intend to stop looking for the bombs or the jump space generator either. We are going to try anything that will avert this planetary murder."
"You can count on me for complete cooperation.
Don't call me; I'll call you when I want breakfast."
"The top of her head is below my chin."
"That's the norm.
Earth is a reservoir of tired genes.
Weak backs, vermiform appendixes, bad eyes.
If they didn't have the universities and the trained people we need I would never use them."
"Why did you lie to her about the Foundation?"
"Better eat something.
Build up the strength.
If she joins up, there'll be time enough to tell her.
But I doubt if she will like the way we operate.
Particularly since I plan to drop some H bombs on Dis myself-if we can't turn off the war."
"I don't believe it!"
"You heard me correctly.
Don't bulge your eyes and look moronic. As a last resort I'll drop the bombs myself rather than let the Nyjorders do it.
That might save them."
"Save them-they'd all be radiated and dead!" Brion's voice rose in anger.
"Not the Disans.
I want to save the Nyjorders.
It's delicious.
The Nyjorders are all that counts here.
They have a planet blessed by the laws of chance.
You can survive there just by pulling fruit off a tree.
The population was small, educated, intelligent.
Not guiding so much as protecting them from any blows that might destroy this growing idea.
But we've fallen down on the job.
Nonviolence is essential to these people-they have vitality without needing destruction.
But if they are forced to blow up Dis for their own survival-against every one of their basic tenets-their philosophy won't endure.
Physically they'll live on, as just one more dog eat dog planet with an A bomb for any of the competition who drop behind."
"Don't be smug.
Now get below and study your Disan and read the reports.
eighteen
The magter knocked him down and beat him into silence.
Even if all life on the surface of the planet was dead, this would have no effect on the magter. They would go ahead as planned, without emotion or imagination enough to alter their set course.
As the technicians worked, their attitude changed from shocked numbness to anger.
Right and wrong were forgotten.
Swiftly they brought their work to completion, with a speed and precision they had concealed before.
They pushed it over to the latticework of the jump field.
In spite of everything he had done to prevent it, Nyjord had dropped the bombs. And this act alone may have destroyed their own planet.
Should he? Should he save the lives of his killers?
He literally had to do nothing.
The score would be even, and his and the Disans' death avenged.
The caveman first had this feeling for his mate, then for his family.
And beyond that to life of all kinds.
He pulled his gun out, and as he did he wondered what Ulv's answer might be.
It struck one of the technicians, who gasped and fell to the floor.
Brion's shots crashed into the control board, shorting and destroying it, removing the menace to Nyjord for all time.
A life form that cooperates and aids other life forms.
It may kill in self defense, but it is essentially not a killer or destroyer.
With this realization came the painful knowledge that the planet and the people that had produced this understanding were dead.
A believer in life, he destroyed the anti life.
They retreated into the darkness, still firing.
Let's find a spot we can defend and settle into it."
"Let's go!"
Once inside, they found cover behind a ridge and waited. The end was certain.
The beam passed over the two hidden men, and at the same instant Brion fired.
They waited for the attack.
It was not long in coming.
Two magter rushed in, and died.
Then one of the magter came in the entrance, but Brion hesitated before shooting.
As the magter turned, Ulv's breath pulsed once and death stung the back of the other man's hand. He collapsed into a crumpled heap.
"Don't shoot," a voice called from outside the cave, and a man stepped through the swirling dust and smoke to stand in the beam from the light.
The man in the light wore a protective helmet, thick boots and a pouch hung uniform.
He was a Nyjorder.
The realization was almost impossible to accept.
Brion had heard the bombs fall.
The two facts couldn't be accepted together.
"Would you keep a hold on his arm, sir, just in case," the soldier said, glancing warily at Ulv's blowpipe.
"I know what those darts can do." He pulled a microphone from one of his pockets and spoke into it.
More soldiers crowded into the cave, and Professor Commander Krafft came in behind them.
"Would you kindly explain what is going on?" Brion said thickly.
The bent form of the leader of the rebel Nyjord army pushed through the crowd of taller men until he stood next to Krafft.
After that it was just a matter of following tracks-and the transmitter you planted."
"Not only you, but the magter in this cave.
Enough to kill the guards without bringing the roof down.
And they did.
It worked like a charm.
We came in quietly and took them by surprise. Made a clean sweep-killed the ones we couldn't capture."
"Of course," Professor Krafft said, astonished at Brion's lack of understanding.
"What else could we do?
The magter are sick!"
"When it was a matter of war and killing, my planet could never agree on an intelligent course. War is so alien to our philosophy that it couldn't even be considered correctly.
You're easy prey for the first one that lands on your back.
Your mind parasite drew us back from the brink."
"A simple matter of definition.
Doctors and nurses are on the way here now. Plans were put under way to evacuate what part of the population we could until the bombs were found.
The planet is united again, and working hard."
"Exactly so," Professor Krafft said.
"We are civilized, after all. You can't expect us to fight a war-and you surely can't expect us to ignore the plight of sick neighbors?"
It could be no one else.
He was riding a very fine thoroughbred gray Arab horse with a crimson gold embroidered saddlecloth.
The battalions shouted "Hurrah!" and "Vive l'Empereur!" Napoleon said something to Alexander, and both Emperors dismounted and took each other's hands.
The crowd unexpectedly found itself so close to the Emperors that Rostov, standing in the front row, was afraid he might be recognized.
"Sire, I ask your permission to present the Legion of Honor to the bravest of your soldiers," said a sharp, precise voice, articulating every letter.
Alexander listened attentively to what was said to him and, bending his head, smiled pleasantly.
"But we must give him an answer."
"Lazarev!" the colonel called, with a frown, and Lazarev, the first soldier in the rank, stepped briskly forward.
Napoleon slightly turned his head, and put his plump little hand out behind him as if to take something.
Napoleon, without looking, pressed two fingers together and the badge was between them.
Napoleon merely laid the cross on Lazarev's breast and, dropping his hand, turned toward Alexander as though sure that the cross would adhere there.
And it really did.
Officious hands, Russian and French, immediately seized the cross and fastened it to the uniform.
The Preobrazhensk battalion, breaking rank, mingled with the French Guards and sat down at the tables prepared for them.
Two officers with flushed faces, looking cheerful and happy, passed by Rostov.
"What d'you think of the treat?
"Tomorrow, I hear, the Preobrazhenskis will give them a dinner."
"Yes, but what luck for Lazarev!
"Here's a cap, lads!" shouted a Preobrazhensk soldier, donning a shaggy French cap.
First rate!"
It has to be done.
He must respond in kind."
Boris, too, with his friend Zhilinski, came to see the Preobrazhensk banquet.
On his way back, he noticed Rostov standing by the corner of a house.
"Rostov!
"Nothing, nothing," replied Rostov.
"You'll call round?"
"Yes, I will."
Rostov stood at that corner for a long time, watching the feast from a distance.
He caught himself harboring such strange thoughts that he was frightened.
Nicholas ate and drank (chiefly the latter) in silence.
He feared to give way to his thoughts, yet could not get rid of them.
"But I never said a word about the Emperor!" said the officer, justifying himself, and unable to understand Rostov's outburst, except on the supposition that he was drunk.
But Rostov did not listen to him.
"If we are ordered to die, we must die.
If we're punished, it means that we have deserved it, it's not for us to judge.
If once we begin judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left!
"Yes, and to drink," assented Nicholas.
OF THE DIFFERENT PROGRESS OF OPULENCE IN DIFFERENT NATIONS
It consists in the exchange of rude for manufactured produce, either immediately, or by the intervention of money, or of some sort of paper which represents money. The country supplies the town with the means of subsistence and the materials of manufacture.
The town repays this supply, by sending back a part of the manufactured produce to the inhabitants of the country. The town, in which there neither is nor can be any reproduction of substances, may very properly be said to gain its whole wealth and subsistence from the country.
Smiths, carpenters, wheelwrights and ploughwrights, masons and bricklayers, tanners, shoemakers, and tailors, are people whose service the farmer has frequent occasion for.
The butcher, the brewer, and the baker, soon join them, together with many other artificers and retailers, necessary or useful for supplying their occasional wants, and who contribute still further to augment the town.
The smith erects some sort of iron, the weaver some sort of linen or woollen manufactory.
OF DRAWBACKS.
Of these encouragements, what are called drawbacks seem to be the most reasonable.
By the second of the rules, annexed to the act of parliament, which imposed what is now called the old subsidy, every merchant, whether English or alien. was allowed to draw back half that duty upon exportation; the English merchant, provided the exportation took place within twelve months; the alien, provided it took place within nine months.
It is under these regulations only that we can import wrought silks, French cambrics and lawns, calicoes, painted, printed, stained, or dyed, etc
These rules took place with regard to all places of lawful exportation, except the British colonies in America.
Upon the exportation of the greater part of commodities to other countries, half the old subsidy was drawn back.
The carrying trade, though it deserves no preference, ought not to be precluded, but to be left free, like all other trades.
The revenue of the customs, instead of suffering, profits from such drawbacks, by that part of the duty which is retained.
In a sense this is true, for no one is more impatient or intolerant of interruption when deeply engaged in some line of experiment.
Then the caller, no matter how important or what his mission, is likely to realize his utter insignificance and be sent away without accomplishing his object.
Man is a social animal, and that describes Edison; but it does not describe accurately the inventor asking to be let alone.
Edison never sought Society; but "Society" has never ceased to seek him, and to day, as ever, the pressure upon him to give up his work and receive honors, meet distinguished people, or attend public functions, is intense.
At that moment Edison, stripped pretty nearly down to the buff, was at the very crisis of an important experiment, and refused absolutely to be interrupted.
He had neither sought nor expected the medal; and if the delegate didn't care to leave it he could take it away.
At last Edison was overpersuaded, and, all dirty and perspiring as he was, received the medal rather than cause the visitor to come again. On one occasion, receiving a medal in New York, Edison forgot it on the ferry boat and left it behind him.
Nobody knew where it was; hours passed before it could be found; and when at last the accompanying letter was produced, it had an office date stamp right over the signature of the royal president.
"Oh yes," he said, "I have a couple of quarts more up at the house!" All this sounds like lack of appreciation, but it is anything else than that.
While in Paris, in eighteen eighty nine, he wore the decoration of the Legion of Honor whenever occasion required, but at all other times turned the badge under his lapel "because he hated to have fellow Americans think he was showing off." And any one who knows Edison will bear testimony to his utter absence of ostentation.
One evening, Robert l Cutting, of New York, brought her out to see the light.
She was a terrific 'rubberneck.' She jumped all over the machinery, and I had one man especially to guard her dress.
She wanted to know everything.
She would speak in French, and Cutting would translate into English.
She stayed there about an hour and a half.
Bernhardt gave me two pictures, painted by herself, which she sent me from Paris."
Reference has already been made to the callers upon Edison; and to give simply the names of persons of distinction would fill many pages of this record.
Some were mere consumers of time; others were gladly welcomed, like Lord Kelvin, the greatest physicist of the last century, with whom Edison was always in friendly communication.
"The first time I saw Lord Kelvin, he came to my laboratory at Menlo Park in eighteen seventy six." (He reported most favorably on Edison's automatic telegraph system at the Philadelphia Exposition of eighteen seventy six.) "I was then experimenting with sending eight messages simultaneously over a wire by means of synchronizing tuning forks.
I would take a wire with similar apparatus at both ends, and would throw it over on one set of instruments, take it away, and get it back so quickly that you would not miss it, thereby taking advantage of the rapidity of electricity to perform operations.
When Sir William Thomson (Kelvin) came in the room, he was introduced to me, and had a number of friends with him. He said: 'What have you here?' I told him briefly what it was.
He then turned around, and to my great surprise explained the whole thing to his friends.
Quite a different exhibition was given two weeks later by another well-known Englishman, also an electrician, who came in with his friends, and I was trying for two hours to explain it to him and failed."
Some dinners he had to attend, but a man who ate little and heard less could derive practically no pleasure from them.
I seldom went to dinners.
He insisted I should go-that a special car would leave New York.
It was for me to meet mr Joseph Chamberlain.
We had the private car of mr Roberts, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
We had one of those celebrated dinners that only mr Childs could give, and I heard speeches from Charles Francis Adams and different people.
When I came back to the depot, mr Roberts was there, and insisted on carrying my satchel for me.
I never could understand that."
Among the more distinguished visitors of the electric lighting period was President Diaz, with whom Edison became quite intimate.
"President Diaz, of Mexico, visited this country with mrs Diaz, a highly educated and beautiful woman.
She spoke very good English.
They both took a deep interest in all they saw.
I took them to railroad buildings, electric light plants, fire departments, and showed them a great variety of things.
We could make some very good pyrotechnics there, so we determined to give the Indians a scare.
But it didn't work. We had an arc there of a most terrifying character, but they never moved a muscle." Another episode at Goerck Street did not find the visitors quite so stoical.
One day one of the directors brought in three or four ladies to the works to see the new electric light system.
One of the ladies had a little poodle led by a string.
The belt was running so smoothly and evenly, the poodle did not notice the difference between it and the floor, and got into the belt before we could do anything.
The dog was whirled around forty or fifty times, and a little flat piece of leather came out-and the ladies fainted."
A very interesting period, on the social side, was the visit paid by Edison and his family to Europe in eighteen eighty nine, when he had made a splendid exhibit of his inventions and apparatus at the great Paris Centennial Exposition of that year, to the extreme delight of the French, who welcomed him with open arms.
It was not, of course, by way of theatrical antithesis that Edison appeared in Paris at such a time.
But the contrast was none the less striking and effective.
It was felt that, after all, that which the great exposition exemplified at its best-the triumph of genius over matter, over ignorance, over superstition-met with its due recognition when Edison came to participate, and to felicitate a noble nation that could show so much in the victories of civilization and the arts, despite its long trials and its long struggle for liberty.
It is no exaggeration to say that Edison was greeted with the enthusiastic homage of the whole French people.
They could find no praise warm enough for the man who had "organized the echoes" and "tamed the lightning," and whose career was so picturesque with eventful and romantic development.
In fact, for weeks together it seemed as though no Parisian paper was considered complete and up to date without an article on Edison.
The exuberant wit and fancy of the feuilletonists seized upon his various inventions evolving from them others of the most extraordinary nature with which to bedazzle and bewilder the reader.
At the close of the Exposition Edison was created a Commander of the Legion of Honor.
His own exhibit, made at a personal expense of over one hundred thousand dollars, covered several thousand square feet in the vast Machinery Hall, and was centred around a huge Edison lamp built of myriads of smaller lamps of the ordinary size.
Several instruments were provided, and every day, all day long, while the Exposition lasted, queues of eager visitors from every quarter of the globe were waiting to hear the little machine talk and sing and reproduce their own voices.
It was the first linguistic concourse since Babel times.
We must let Edison tell the story of some of his experiences:
As I had no intention of offering to sell anything I was showing, and was pushing no companies, the whole exhibition was made for honor, and without any hope of profit.
"While at the Exposition I visited the Opera House.
When I came into the box, the orchestra played the 'Star Spangled Banner,' and all the people in the house arose; whereupon I was very much embarrassed.
After I had been an hour at the play, the manager came around and asked me to go underneath the stage, as they were putting on a ballet of three hundred girls, the finest ballet in Europe.
In this instance it was not occupied, and I was given the position in the prompter's seat, and saw the whole ballet at close range.
As I could not understand or speak a word of French, I went to see our minister, mr Whitelaw Reid, and got him to send a deputy to answer for me, which he did, with my grateful thanks.
Then the telephone company gave me a dinner, and the engineers of France; and I attended the dinner celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of photography.
Then they sent to Reid my decoration, and they tried to put a sash on me, but I could not stand for that.
My wife had me wear the little red button, but when I saw Americans coming I would slip it out of my lapel, as I thought they would jolly me for wearing it."
Edison naturally met many of the celebrities of France: "I visited the Eiffel Tower at the invitation of Eiffel.
When my wife and I arrived at the top, we found that Gounod, the composer, was there.
We stayed a couple of hours, and Gounod sang and played for us.
We spent a day at Meudon, an old palace given by the government to Jansen, the astronomer. He occupied three rooms, and there were three hundred.
He had the grand dining room for his laboratory.
He showed me a gyroscope he had got up which made the incredible number of four thousand revolutions in a second.
A modification of this was afterward used on the French Atlantic lines for making an artificial horizon to take observations for position at sea.
In connection with this a gentleman came to me a number of years afterward, and I got out a part of some plans for him.
He wanted to make a gigantic gyroscope weighing several tons, to be run by an electric motor and put on a sailing ship.
Upon this platform he was going to mount a telescope to observe an eclipse off the Gold Coast of Africa.
His father was with him.
He had been bitten in the face, and was taking the treatment.
He was bitten too near the top of the spinal column, and came too late!'"
Edison has no opinion to offer as an expert on art, but has his own standard of taste: "Of course I visited the Louvre and saw the Old Masters, which I could not enjoy.
And I attended the Luxembourg, with modern masters, which I enjoyed greatly.
To my mind, the Old Masters are not art, and I suspect that many others are of the same opinion; and that their value is in their scarcity and in the variety of men with lots of money." Somewhat akin to this is a shrewd comment on one feature of the Exposition: "I spent several days in the Exposition at Paris.
I found several beautiful diamonds, but they seemed a little light weight to me when I was picking them out.
They were diamonds for exhibition purposes --probably glass."
This did not altogether complete the European trip of eighteen eighty nine, for Edison wished to see Helmholtz.
"After leaving Paris we went to Berlin.
The French papers then came out and attacked me because I went to Germany; and said I was now going over to the enemy.
When I started from Berlin on the trip, I began to tell American stories. Siemens was very fond of these stories and would laugh immensely at them, and could see the points and the humor, by his imagination; but Helmholtz could not see one of them.
Siemens would quickly, in German, explain the point, but Helmholtz could not see it, although he understood English, which Siemens could speak.
At Heidelberg, my assistant, mr Wangemann, an accomplished German American, showed the phonograph before the Association."
I had been over the ocean three times and did not know what seasickness was, so far as I was concerned myself.
I was told that while a man might not get seasick on the ocean, if he met a good storm on the Channel it would do for him.
I did not care about eating, and did not go to the restaurant, but my family did.
I walked out and tried to find the boat.
Going along the dock I saw two small smokestacks sticking up, and looking down saw a little boat.
'Where is the steamer that goes across the Channel?' 'This is the boat.' There had been a storm in the North Sea that had carried away some of the boats on the German steamer, and it certainly looked awful tough outside.
The managing director of the English railroad owning this line was Forbes, who heard I was coming over, and placed the private saloon at my disposal.
The moment my family got in the room with the French lady's maid and the rest, they commenced to get sick, so I felt pretty sure I was in for it.
We started out of the little inlet and got into the Channel, and that boat went in seventeen directions simultaneously.
I waited awhile to see what was going to occur, and then went into the smoking compartment.
Nobody was there.
By and by the fun began.
Sounds of all kinds and varieties were heard in every direction. They were all sick.
There must have been one hundred people aboard.
I didn't see a single exception except the waiters and myself.
I asked one of the waiters concerning the boat itself, and was taken to see the engineer, and went down to look at the engines, and saw the captain.
But I kept mostly in the smoking room.
The English Channel is a holy terror, all right, but it didn't affect me.
While in Paris, Edison had met Sir john Pender, the English "cable king," and had received an invitation from him to make a visit to his country residence: "Sir john Pender, the master of the cable system of the world at that time, I met in Paris.
He had the faculty of understanding and quickly seeing the point of the stories; and for three days after I could not get rid of him.
Finally I made him a promise that I would go to his country house at Foot's Cray, near London.
So I went there, and spent two or three days telling him stories.
"While at Foot's Cray, I met some of the backers of Ferranti, then putting up a gigantic alternating current dynamo near London to send ten or fifteen thousand volts up into the main district of the city for electric lighting.
At any rate the people invited to dinner were very much interested, and they questioned me as to what I thought of the proposition.
I thought that commercially the thing was too ambitious, that Ferranti's ideas were too big, just then; that he ought to have started a little smaller until he was sure.
Incidentally it may be noted here that during the same year (eighteen eighty nine) the various manufacturing Edison lighting interests in America were brought together, under the leadership of mr Henry Villard, and consolidated in the Edison General Electric Company with a capital of no less than twelve million dollars on an eight per cent.-dividend basis.
A few years later came the consolidation with the Thomson Houston interests in the General Electric Company, which under the brilliant and vigorous management of President c a Coffin has become one of the greatest manufacturing institutions of the country, with an output of apparatus reaching toward seventy five million dollars annually.
The net result of both financial operations was, however, to detach Edison from the special field of invention to which he had given so many of his most fruitful years; and to close very definitely that chapter of his life, leaving him free to develop other ideas and interests as set forth in these volumes.
It might appear strange on the surface, but one of the reasons that most influenced Edison to regrets in connection with the "big trade" of eighteen eighty nine was that it separated him from his old friend and ally, Bergmann, who, on selling out, saw a great future for himself in Germany, went there, and realized it.
Some of the stories were told for this volume.
"Bergmann came to work for me as a boy," says Edison.
"He started in on stock quotation printers.
As he was a rapid workman and paid no attention to the clock, I took a fancy to him, and gave him piece work.
He contrived so many little tools to cheapen the work that he made lots of money.
I even helped him get up tools until it occurred to me that this was too rapid a process of getting rid of my money, as I hadn't the heart to cut the price when it was originally fair.
After a year or so, Bergmann got enough money to start a small shop in Wooster Street, New York, and it was at this shop that the first phonographs were made for sale.
Finally came the electric light.
He rented power from a Jew who owned the building.
Power was supplied from a fifty horse power engine to other tenants on the several floors.
The landlord kept going among his tenants and finally discovered the dynamo.
'Oh!
mr Bergmann, now I know where my power goes to,' pointing to the dynamo.
Bergmann gave him a withering look of scorn, and said, 'Come here and I will show you.' Throwing off the belt and disconnecting the wires, he spun the armature around by hand.
'There,' said Bergmann, 'you see it's not here that you must look for your loss.' This satisfied the landlord, and he started off to his other tenants.
He did not know that that machine, when the wires were connected, could stop his engine.
"Soon after, the business had grown so large that e h Johnson and I went in as partners, and Bergmann rented an immense factory building at the corner of Avenue B and East Seventeenth Street, New York, six stories high and covering a quarter of a block.
Here were made all the small things used on the electric lighting system, such as sockets, chandeliers, switches, meters, etc
Over fifteen hundred men were finally employed.
This shop was very successful both scientifically and financially.
Bergmann was a man of great executive ability and carried economy of manufacture to the limit.
Among all the men I have had associated with me, he had the commercial instinct most highly developed."
One need not wonder at Edison's reminiscent remark that, "In any trade any of my 'boys' made with Bergmann he always got the best of them, no matter what it was.
There were a lot of representatives from the East, and a private car was hired.
At Jersey City a poker game was started by one of the delegates.
Bergmann was induced to enter the game.
This was played right through to Chicago without any sleep, but the boys didn't mind that.
I had gotten them immune to it.
Bergmann had won all the money, and when the porter came in and said 'Chicago,' Bergmann jumped up and said: 'What!
Chicago!
I thought it was only Philadelphia!'"
But perhaps this further story is a better indication of developed humor and shrewdness: "A man by the name of Epstein had been in the habit of buying brass chips and trimmings from the lathes, and in some way Bergmann found out that he had been cheated.
This hurt his pride, and he determined to get even.
One day Epstein appeared and said: 'Good morning, mr Bergmann, have you any chips to day?' 'No,' said Bergmann, 'I have none.' 'That's strange, mr Bergmann; won't you look?' No, he wouldn't look; he knew he had none.
Then he said: 'Well, Epstein, good bye, I've got to go down to Wall Street.' Epstein and his assistant then attempted to lift the boxes to carry them out, but couldn't; and then discovered that calculations as to quantity had been thrown out because the boxes had all been screwed down to the floor and mostly filled with boards with a veneer of brass chips.
Bergmann thought it real, and never after that would he permit the whistle to blow."
Another glimpse of the "social side" is afforded in the following little series of pen pictures of the same place and time: "I had my laboratory at the top of the Bergmann works, after moving from Menlo Park.
My father came there when he was eighty years of age.
In fact, when I was examined by the Mutual Life Insurance Company, in eighteen seventy three, my lung expansion was taken by the doctor, and the old gentleman was there at the time.
I think it was five and one half inches.
There were only three or four could beat it.
Little Bergmann hadn't much lung power.
The old man said to him, one day: 'Let's run up stairs.' Bergmann agreed and ran up.
When they got there Bergmann was all done up, but my father never showed a sign of it.
Being asked whether he did not get imposed upon with bad bank bills, he replied that he subscribed to a bank note detector and consulted it closely whenever a note of any size fell into his hands.
He was then less than fourteen years old.
He has confronted many a serious physical risk, and counts himself lucky to have come through without a scratch or scar.
Four instances of personal danger may be noted in his own language: "When I started at Menlo, I had an electric furnace for welding rare metals that I did not know about very clearly.
I was in the dark room, where I had a lot of chloride of sulphur, a very corrosive liquid.
I did not know that it would decompose by water.
I poured in a beakerful of water, and the whole thing exploded and threw a lot of it into my eyes.
But it was two weeks before I could see.
I was making some stuff to squirt into filaments for the incandescent lamp.
I made about a pound of it.
I had used ammonia and bromine.
I did not know it at the time, but I had made bromide of nitrogen.
I put the large bulk of it in three filters, and after it had been washed and all the water had come through the filter, I opened the three filters and laid them on a hot steam plate to dry with the stuff.
I said to Sadler: 'What is that?' 'I don't know,' he said, and we paid no attention.
The reason why those little preliminary explosions took place was that a little had spattered out on the edge of the filter paper, and had dried first and exploded.
Had the main body exploded there would have been nothing left of the laboratory I was working in.
"At another time, I had a briquetting machine for briquetting iron ore. I had a lever held down by a powerful spring, and a rod one inch in diameter and four feet long.
That was 'within an inch of your life,' as they say.
"In my experimental plant for concentrating iron ore in the northern part of New Jersey, we had a vertical drier, a column about nine feet square and eighty feet high.
At the bottom there was a space where two men could go through a hole; and then all the rest of the column was filled with baffle plates.
One day this drier got blocked, and the ore would not run down.
So I and the vice president of the company, mr Mallory, crowded through the manhole to see why the ore would not come down.
After we got in, the ore did come down and there were fourteen tons of it above us.
Such incidents brought out in narration the fact that many of the men working with him had been less fortunate, particularly those who had experimented with the Roentgen X ray, whose ravages, like those of leprosy, were responsible for the mutilation and death of at least one expert assistant.
In the early days of work on the incandescent lamp, also, there was considerable trouble with mercury.
The main pipe, which was full of mercury, was about seven and one half feet from the floor.
Along the length of the pipe were outlets to which thick rubber tubing was connected, each tube to a pump.
In a short time he became salivated, and his teeth got loose.
I was fortunately absent, and she was mollified somehow by my other assistants.
"When the first lamp works were started at Menlo Park, one of my experiments seemed to show that hot mercury gave a better vacuum in the lamp than cold mercury.
I thereupon started to heat it.
"I have often been surprised at Edison's wonderful capacity for the instant visual perception of differences in materials that were invisible to others until he would patiently point them out.
This had puzzled me for years, but one day I was unexpectedly let into part of the secret.
For some little time past mr Edison had noticed that he was bothered somewhat in reading print, and I asked him to have an oculist give him reading glasses.
He did so very conscientiously, and it was an interesting experience, for he was kept busy answering mr Edison's numerous questions.
When the oculist finished, he turned to me and said: 'I have been many years in the business, but have never seen an optic nerve like that of this gentleman.
An ordinary optic nerve is about the thickness of a thread, but his is like a cord.
He must be a remarkable man in some walk of life.
For instance, he had gone to bed the night before exactly at twelve and had arisen at four thirty a m to read some New York law reports.
It was suggested that the secret of it might be that he did not live in the past, but was always looking forward to a greater future, to which he replied: "Yes, that's it.
I don't live with the past; I am living for to day and to morrow.
I am interested in every department of science, arts, and manufacture. I read all the time on astronomy, chemistry, biology, physics, music, metaphysics, mechanics, and other branches-political economy, electricity, and, in fact, all things that are making for progress in the world.
I get all the proceedings of the scientific societies, the principal scientific and trade journals, and read them.
I have spilt lots of it, and while I have always felt it for a few days, it is quickly forgotten, and I turn again to the future." During another talk on kindred affairs it was suggested to Edison that, as he had worked so hard all his life, it was about time for him to think somewhat of the pleasures of travel and the social side of life.
To which he replied laughingly: "I already have a schedule worked out.
From now until I am seventy five years of age, I expect to keep more or less busy with my regular work, not, however, working as many hours or as hard as I have in the past.
It rather bores him.
Edison says: "I get a suit that fits me; then I compel the tailors to use that as a jig or pattern or blue print to make others by.
For many years a suit was used as a measurement; once or twice they took fresh measurements, but these didn't fit and they had to go back.
He said that some twenty years ago a suit was sent to him from Orange, and measurements were made from it, and that every suit since had been made from these measurements.
That he has had the usual experience in running machines will be evidenced by the following little story from mr Mallory: "About three years ago I had a motor car of a make of which mr Edison had already two cars; and when the car was received I made inquiry as to whether any repair parts were carried by any of the various garages in Easton, Pennsylvania, near our cement works.
I asked his advice as to what I should order, to which he replied: 'I don't think it will be necessary to order an extra top.'" Since that episode, which will probably be appreciated by most automobilists, Edison has taken up the electric automobile, and is now using it as well as developing it.
One of the cars equipped with his battery is the Bailey, and mr Bee tells the following story in regard to it: "One day Colonel Bailey, of Amesbury, Massachusetts, who was visiting the Automobile Show in New York, came out to the laboratory to see mr Edison, as the latter had expressed a desire to talk with him on his next visit to the metropolis.
As a rule we never wake mr Edison from sleep, but as he wanted to see Colonel Bailey, who had to go, I felt that an exception should be made, so I went and tapped him on the shoulder.
He awoke at once, smiling, jumped up, was instantly himself as usual, and advanced and greeted the visitor.
His very first question was: 'Well, Colonel, how did you come out on that experiment?'--referring to some suggestions he had made at their last meeting a year before.
It might be expected that Edison would have extreme and even radical ideas on the subject of education-and he has, as well as a perfect readiness to express them, because he considers that time is wasted on things that are not essential: "What we need," he has said, "are men capable of doing work.
I wouldn't give a penny for the ordinary college graduate, except those from the institutes of technology.
They aren't filled up with Latin, philosophy, and the rest of that ninny stuff." A further remark of his is: "What the country needs now is the practical skilled engineer, who is capable of doing everything.
At present we want engineers, industrial men, good business like managers, and railroad men." It is hardly to be marvelled at that such views should elicit warm protest, summed up in the comment: "mr
Invention does not smooth the way for the practical men and make them possible.
There is always too much danger of neglecting thoughts for things, ideas for machinery.
No theory of education that aggravates this danger is consistent with national well-being."
"After years of watching the processes of nature," he says, "I can no more doubt the existence of an Intelligence that is running things than I do of the existence of myself.
Ice, I say, doesn't, and it is rather lucky for us mortals, for if it had done so, we would all be dead.
Why?
Simply because if ice sank to the bottoms of rivers, lakes, and oceans as fast as it froze, those places would be frozen up and there would be no water left.
For over a score of years, dating from his marriage to Miss Miller, Edison's happy and perfect domestic life has been spent at Glenmont, a beautiful property acquired at that time in Llewellyn Park, on the higher slopes of Orange Mountain, New Jersey, within easy walking distance of the laboratory at the foot of the hill in West Orange.
As noted already, the latter part of each winter is spent at Fort Myers, Florida, where Edison has, on the banks of the Calahoutchie River, a plantation home that is in many ways a miniature copy of the home and laboratory up North.
Glenmont is a rather elaborate and florid building in Queen Anne English style, of brick, stone, and wooden beams showing on the exterior, with an abundance of gables and balconies.
It would be difficult to imagine Edison in a stiffly formal house, and this big, cozy, three story, rambling mansion has an easy freedom about it, without and within, quite in keeping with the genius of the inventor, but revealing at every turn traces of feminine taste and culture.
The lounging room on the ground floor is more or less of an Edison museum, for it is littered with souvenirs from great people, and with mementos of travel, all related to some event or episode.
A large cabinet contains awards, decorations, and medals presented to Edison, accumulating in the course of a long career, some of which may be seen in the illustration opposite.
Near by may be noticed a bronze replica of the Edison gold medal which was founded in the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the first award of which was made to Elihu Thomson during the present year (nineteen ten).
One of the most conspicuous features of the room is a phonograph equipment on which the latest and best productions by the greatest singers and musicians can always be heard, but which Edison himself is everlastingly experimenting with, under the incurable delusion that this domestic retreat is but an extension of his laboratory.
The big library-semi boudoir-up stairs is also very expressive of the home life of Edison, but again typical of his nature and disposition, for it is difficult to overlay his many technical books and scientific periodicals with a sufficiently thick crust of popular magazines or current literature to prevent their outcropping into evidence.
His hair has whitened, but is still thick and abundant, and though he uses glasses for certain work, his gray blue eyes are as keen and bright and deeply lustrous as ever, with the direct, searching look in them that they have ever worn.
His simplicity as to clothes has already been described.
One would be startled to see him with a bright tie, a loud checked suit, or a fancy waistcoat, and yet there is a curious sense of fastidiousness about the plain things he delights in.
No one ever goes away from Edison in doubt as to what he thinks or means, but he is ever shy and diffident to a degree if the talk turns on himself rather than on his work.
If the authors were asked, after having written the foregoing pages, to explain here the reason for Edison's success, based upon their observations so far made, they would first answer that he combines with a vigorous and normal physical structure a mind capable of clear and logical thinking, and an imagination of unusual activity.
What other factors are there to be taken into consideration to explain this phenomenon?
No better illustration of this characteristic can be found than in the development of the nickel pocket for the storage battery, an element the size of a short lead pencil, on which upward of five years were spent in experiments, costing over a million dollars, day after day, always apparently with the same tubes but with small variations carefully tabulated in the note books.
Another and second characteristic of Edison's personality contributing so strongly to his achievements is an intense, not to say courageous, optimism in which no thought of failure can enter, an optimism born of self confidence, and becoming-after forty or fifty years of experience more and more a sense of certainty in the accomplishment of success.
At the conclusion of the ore milling experiments, when practically his entire fortune was sunk in an enterprise that had to be considered an impossibility, when at the age of fifty he looked back upon five or six years of intense activity expended apparently for naught, when everything seemed most black and the financial clouds were quickly gathering on the horizon, not the slightest idea of repining entered his mind.
Nature at another point had outstripped him, yet he had broadened his own sum of knowledge to a prodigious extent.
It was only during the past summer (nineteen ten) that one of the writers spent a Sunday with him riding over the beautiful New Jersey roads in an automobile, Edison in the highest spirits and pointing out with the keenest enjoyment the many beautiful views of valley and wood.
The wanderings led to the old ore milling plant at Edison, now practically a mass of deserted buildings all going to decay. It was a depressing sight, marking such titanic but futile struggles with nature.
Hard work, nothing to divert my thought, clear air and simple food made my life very pleasant.
We learned a great deal.
To stop meant not only to pocket a great loss already incurred, facing a dark and uncertain future, but to most men animated by ordinary human feelings, it meant more than anything else, an injury to personal pride.
Pride?
He has often said that time meant very little to him, that he had but a small realization of its passage, and that ten or twenty years were as nothing when considering the development of a vital invention.
There are many individuals who derive an intense and not improper pleasure in regalia or military garments, with plenty of gold braid and brass buttons, and thus arrayed, in appearing before their friends and neighbors.
At that occasion it was pointed out to him that he should make every possible sacrifice to go, that the compliment was great, and that but few Americans had been so recognized.
It was hopeless-an appeal based on sentiment.
Before him was something real-work to be accomplished-a problem to be solved.
Any one having these capacities developed to the same extent, with the same opportunities for use, would probably accomplish as much.
It was taken home to Glenmont.
Edison had a few minor corrections to make, probably not more than a dozen all told.
How can such a trait-and scores of similar experiences could be given-be explained except by the fact that, evidently, he felt the need of special schooling in industry-that under no circumstances must he allow a thought of indolence to enter his mind?
Undoubtedly in the days to come Edison will not only be recognized as an intellectual prodigy, but as a prodigy of industry-of hard work.
His sense of humor is intense, but not of the hothouse, overdeveloped variety.
One of his favorite jokes is to enter the legal department with an air of great humility and apply for a job as an inventor!
The sanctimonious hypocrite, the sleek speculator, and others whom he has probably encountered in life are done "to the queen's taste."
One very cold winter's day he entered the laboratory library in fine spirits, "doing" the decayed dandy, with imaginary cane under his arm, struggling to put on a pair of tattered imaginary gloves, with a self satisfied smirk and leer that would have done credit to a real comedian.
This particular bit of acting was heightened by the fact that even in the coldest weather he wears thin summer clothes, generally acid worn and more or less disreputable.
For protection he varies the number of his suits of underclothing, sometimes wearing three or four sets, according to the thermometer.
If one could divorce Edison from the idea of work, and could regard him separate and apart from his embodiment as an inventor and man of science, it might truly be asserted that his temperament is essentially mercurial.
Often he is in the highest spirits, with all the spontaneity of youth, and again he is depressed, moody, and violently angry.
Anger with him, however, is a good deal like the story attributed to Napoleon:
"Sire, how is it that your judgment is not affected by your great rage?" asked one of his courtiers.
Edison has been seen sometimes almost beside himself with anger at a stupid mistake or inexcusable oversight on the part of an assistant, his voice raised to a high pitch, sneeringly expressing his feelings of contempt for the offender; and yet when the culprit, like a bad school boy, has left the room, Edison has immediately returned to his normal poise, and the incident is a thing of the past.
At other times the unsettled condition persists, and his spleen is vented not only on the original instigator but upon others who may have occasion to see him, sometimes hours afterward.
When such a fit is on him the word is quickly passed around, and but few of his associates find it necessary to consult with him at the time.
The genuine anger can generally be distinguished from the imitation article by those who know him intimately by the fact that when really enraged his forehead between the eyes partakes of a curious rotary movement that cannot be adequately described in words.
It is as if the storm clouds within are moving like a whirling cyclone.
As a general rule, Edison does not get genuinely angry at mistakes and other human weaknesses of his subordinates; at best he merely simulates anger.
But woe betide the one who has committed an act of bad faith, treachery, dishonesty, or ingratitude; THEN Edison can show what it is for a strong man to get downright mad.
But in this respect he is singularly free, and his spells of anger are really few.
People who come in contact with him and who may have occasion to oppose his views, may leave with the impression that he is hot tempered; nothing could be further from the truth.
Before the visitor can fully explain his side of the matter some point is brought up that starts Edison off again, and new arguments from his viewpoint are poured forth.
This constant interruption is taken by many to mean that Edison has a small opinion of any arguments that oppose him; but he is only intensely in earnest in presenting his own side.
If the visitor persists until Edison has seen both sides of the controversy, he is always willing to frankly admit that his own views may be unsound and that his opponent is right.
In fact, after such a controversy, both parties going after each other hammer and tongs, the arguments TO HIM being carried on at the very top of one's voice to enable him to hear, and FROM HIM being equally loud in the excitement of the discussion, he has often said: "I see now that my position was absolutely rotten."
In private life they show him to be a good citizen, a good family man, absolutely moral, temperate in all things, and of great charitableness to all mankind.
I REPENT
The more I thought of my behaviour to them, the more disgusted I became with myself.
"Will you take me with you now?
"Ah!" he returned, and looked up.
"I doubt it.
No one who will not sleep can ever wake."
"I do not at all understand you!"
"No; he is still in the Evil Wood, fighting the dead."
"You will not find him; but you will hardly miss the wood.
"I cannot understand you!"
"Naturally not.
"Tell me, please, how to recognise the nearest."
But you will get there; you must get there; you have to get there.
Everybody who is not at home, has to go home.
"Worse and worse!" I cried.
"If I am not to go home, at least direct me to some of my kind."
"You forget," said the raven, "that, when I brought you and you declined my hospitality, you reached what you call home in safety: now you are come of yourself!
Good night."
He turned and walked slowly away, with his beak toward the ground.
I stood dazed.
THE SEXTON'S OLD HORSE
I stood and watched the last gleam of the white leopardess melt away, then turned to follow my guide-but reluctantly.
What had I to do with sleep?
Besides, no one would wake me, and how could I be certain of waking early-of waking at all?--the sleepers in that house let morning glide into noon, and noon into night, nor ever stirred!
I murmured, but followed, for I knew not what else to do.
The librarian walked on in silence, and I walked silent as he.
Time and space glided past us.
The sun set; it began to grow dark, and I felt in the air the spreading cold of the chamber of death.
My heart sank lower and lower.
I began to lose sight of the lean, long coated figure, and at length could no more hear his swishing stride through the heather. But then I heard instead the slow flapping wings of the raven; and, at intervals, now a firefly, now a gleaming butterfly rose into the rayless air.
By and by the moon appeared, slow crossing the far horizon.
"You are tired, are you not, mr Vane?" said the raven, alighting on a stone.
"You must make acquaintance with the horse that will carry you in the morning!"
He gave a strange whistle through his long black beak.
A spot appeared on the face of the half risen moon.
To my ears came presently the drumming of swift, soft galloping hoofs, and in a minute or two, out of the very disc of the moon, low thundered the terrible horse.
His mane flowed away behind him like the crest of a wind fighting wave, torn seaward in hoary spray, and the whisk of his tail kept blinding the eye of the moon.
Nineteen hands he seemed, huge of bone, tight of skin, hard of muscle-a steed the holy Death himself might choose on which to ride abroad and slay!
Terrifically large, he moved with the lightness of a winged insect.
As he drew near, his speed slackened, and his mane and tail drifted about him settling.
It was pure greed, nay, rank covetousness, an evil thing in all the worlds.
I do not mean that I could have stolen him, but that, regardless of his proper place, I would have bought him if I could.
I laid my hands on him, and stroked the protuberant bones that humped a hide smooth and thin, and shiny as satin-so shiny that the very shape of the moon was reflected in it; I fondled his sharp pointed ears, whispered words in them, and breathed into his red nostrils the breath of a man's life.
What eyes he had!
Blue filmy like the eyes of the dead, behind each was a glowing coal!
"By all means!" he answered.
I twisted my hands in his mane and scrambled onto his back, not without aid from certain protuberant bones.
"He would outspeed any leopard in creation!" I cried.
"Not that way at night," answered the raven; "the road is difficult.--But come; loss now will be gain then!
Go on, my son-straight to the cottage.
It will rejoice my wife's heart to see son of hers on that horse!"
I sat silent.
The horse stood like a block of marble.
"Why do you linger?" asked the raven.
"I long so much to ride after the leopardess," I answered, "that I can scarce restrain myself!"
"You have promised!"
"Yield to the temptation and you will bring mischief upon them-and on yourself also."
I will go."
But the truth was, I forgot the children, infatuate with the horse.
"mr Vane," he said, "do you not know why you have not yet done anything worth doing?"
"Because I have been a fool," I answered.
"In everything."
"Which do you count your most indiscreet action?"
"Bringing the princess to life: I ought to have left her to her just fate."
"Nay, now you talk foolishly!
You could not have done otherwise than you did, not knowing she was evil!--But you never brought any one to life! How could you, yourself dead?"
"Yes," he answered; "and you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die."
"Back to the old riddling!" I returned scornfully.
"Be persuaded, and go home with me," he continued gently.
"The most-nearly the only foolish thing you ever did, was to run from our dead."
I gave him a pat on the side of the neck, and he went about in a sharp driven curve, "close to the ground, like a cat when scratchingly she wheels about after a mouse," leaning sideways till his mane swept the tops of the heather.
Through the dark I heard the wings of the raven.
Five quick flaps I heard, and he perched on the horse's head.
The horse checked himself instantly, ploughing up the ground with his feet.
"mr Vane," croaked the raven, "think what you are doing!
Twice already has evil befallen you-once from fear, and once from heedlessness: breach of word is far worse; it is a crime."
"--But indeed I will not break my word to you.
I will return, and spend in your house what nights-what days-what years you please."
But a false sense of power, a sense which had no root and was merely vibrated into me from the strength of the horse, had, alas, rendered me too stupid to listen to anything he said!
"Would you take from me my last chance of reparation?" I cried.
"This time there shall be no shirking!
It is my duty, and I will go-if I perish for it!"
"Go, then, foolish boy!" he returned, with anger in his croak.
"Take the horse, and ride to failure!
May it be to humility!"
He spread his wings and flew.
Again I pressed the lean ribs under me.
"After the spotted leopardess!" I whispered in his ear.
Suddenly he quickened his walk; broke into a trot; began to gallop, and in a few moments his speed was tremendous.
He seemed to see in the dark; never stumbled, not once faltered, not once hesitated.
I sat as on the ridge of a wave.
I felt under me the play of each individual muscle: his joints were so elastic, and his every movement glided so into the next, that not once did he jar me.
The wind met and passed us like a tornado.
Across the evil hollow we sped like a bolt from an arblast.
No monster lifted its neck; all knew the hoofs that thundered over their heads!
We rushed up the hills, we shot down their farther slopes; from the rocky chasms of the river bed he did not swerve; he held on over them his fierce, terrible gallop.
The moon, half-way up the heaven, gazed with a solemn trouble in her pale countenance.
Rejoicing in the power of my steed and in the pride of my life, I sat like a king and rode.
We were near the middle of the many channels, my horse every other moment clearing one, sometimes two in his stride, and now and then gathering himself for a great bounding leap, when the moon reached the key stone of her arch.
Then came a wonder and a terror: she began to descend rolling like the nave of Fortune's wheel bowled by the gods, and went faster and faster.
Like our own moon, this one had a human face, and now the broad forehead now the chin was uppermost as she rolled.
I gazed aghast.
Across the ravines came the howling of wolves.
The horse maintained his headlong swiftness, with ears pricked forward, and thirsty nostrils exulting in the wind his career created.
But there was the moon jolting like an old chariot wheel down the hill of heaven, with awful boding!
The mighty steed was in the act of clearing a wide shallow channel when we were caught in the net of the darkness.
I got up, kneeled beside him, and felt him all over.
Not a bone could I find broken, but he was a horse no more.
He was an inveterate old gossip, and was acquainted with the business of everybody in the neighborhood.
While he sat there pondering, the first stroke of the town bell proclaiming the hour was borne upon his ear.
Before the ringing had ceased, he caught the additional sound of a horse's hoofs rapidly advancing up the road.
"Ah," said he to himself, "here he comes.
I reckon his wife'll be apt to give him fits for being so late."
In another moment the horseman drew up before him, but only to exchange a word of greeting, as the gate was thrown wide open, and there was nothing to bar his progress.
The venerable gate keeper had conjectured right.
It was Savareen on his black mare.
"Well, Jonathan, a nice evening," remarked the young farmer.
"Yes, mr Savareen-a lovely night.
You've had a long day of it in town.
They'll be anxious about you at home.
Did you find the money all right, as you expected?"
"O, the money was there, right enough, and I've got it in my pocket.
I had some words with that conceited puppy, Shuttleworth, at the bank. He's altogether too big for his place, and I can tell you he'll have the handling of no more money of mine." And then, for about the twentieth time within the last few hours, he recounted the particulars of his interview with the bank clerk.
The old man expressed his entire concurrence in Savareen's estimate of Shuttleworth's conduct.
"I have to pay the gate money into the bank on the first of every month," he remarked, "and that young feller always acts as if he felt too uppish to touch it.
And so it will.
There's never any housebreaking hereabouts."
Jonathan responded by saying that, in so far as he knew, there hadn't been a burglary for many a year.
"But all the same," he continued, "I shouldn't like to keep such a sum as four hundred pound about me, even for a single night.
No more I shouldn't like to carry such a pot o' money home in the night time, even if nobody knew as I had it on me.
"I'll act upon it without more words.
Good night!" And so saying, Savareen continued his course homeward at a brisk trot.
The old man watched him as he sped away up the road, but could not keep him in view more than half a minute or so, as by this time the light of day had wholly departed.
Scarcely had he done so ere he heard the clatter of horse's hoofs moving rapidly towards the gate from the northward.
"Why," said he to himself, "this must be Savareen coming back again.
What's the matter now, I wonder?"
But this time he was out in his conjecture.
"O, good evening, mr Lapierre; I didn't know you till you spoke.
My eyesight's getting dimmer every day, I think.
Bound for town?"
I suppose you saw him on his way down?"
"Saw him!
On his way down!
What are you talking about?
Didn't you meet him just now?"
"Savareen."
"Where?
When?"
"Why, not two minutes ago.
He passed through here on his way home just before you came up."
"How long!
Why, don't I tell you, not two minutes.
Well, of course, the key to the situation was not hard to find. Savareen had left the toll gate and proceeded northward not more than two or three minutes before Lapierre, riding southward along the same road, had reached the same point.
The two had not encountered each other.
Therefore, one of them had deviated from the road.
But the space of time which had elapsed was too brief to admit of the latter's having ridden more than a hundred yards or thereabouts.
The only outlet from the road within four times that distance was the gateway leading into Stolliver's house.
The explanation, consequently, was simple enough.
Savareen had called in at Stollivers.
q e d
Strange, though, that he had said nothing to old Jonathan about his intention to call there.
He had ridden off as though intent upon getting home without delay, and hiding his money away in a safe place for the night.
He had never had any business or social relations of any kind with Stolliver, and in fact the two had merely a nodding acquaintance.
However, there was no use raising difficult problems, which could doubt less be solved by a moment's explanation. It was absolutely certain that Savareen was at Stolliver's because he could not possibly have avoided meeting Lapierre if he had not called there.
It was Lapierre's business to find him and take him home. Accordingly the landlord of the Royal Oak turned his horse's head and cantered back up the road till he reached the front of Stolliver's place.
Lapierre, as he drew rein, saw the three figures on the fence, but could not in the darkness, distinguish one from, another.
"Is that Mister Stollifer?" he asked.
Old Stolliver was a boorish, cross grained customer, who paid slight regard to the amenities, and did not show to advantage in conversation.
"Don't you know me?
I am Mister Lapierre."
Been a warm day."
"Yes.
"Mister who?"
"Here?
Hain't seen him."
Lapierre was astounded.
He explained the state of affairs to his interlocuter, who received the communication with his wonted stolidity, and proceeded to light his pipe, as much as to say that the affair was none of his funeral.
"Well," he remarked, with exasperating coolness, "I guess you must 'a' passed him on the road.
We hain't been out here more'n a minute or two. Nobody hain't passed since then."
This seemed incredible.
Where, then, was Savareen?
Had he sunk into the bowels of the earth, or gone up, black mare and all, in a balloon?
Of course it was all nonsense about the landlord having passed him on the road without seeing or hearing anything of him.
But what other explanation did the circumstances admit of?
At any rate, there was nothing for Lapierre to do but ride back to Savareen's house and see if he had arrived there.
Yes, one other thing might be done.
He might return to the toll gate and ascertain whether Jonathan Perry was certain as to the identity of the man from whom he had parted a few minutes before.
So Count Frontenac's head was once more turned southward.
A short trot brought him again to the toll house.
The gatekeeper was still sitting smoking at the door.
A moment's conference with him was sufficient to convince Lapierre that there could be no question of mistaken identity.
And then, didn't he tell me about his row with Shuttleworth, and that he had the four hundred pounds in his pocket.
"Now," resumed the old man, "just tell mr Lapierre whether you saw mr Savareen talking to me a few minutes since, and whether you saw him ride off up the road just before mr Lapierre came down.
mrs Perry's answer was decisive, and at the same time conclusive as to the facts.
She had not only seen Savareen sitting on his black mare at the door, immediately after the town bell ceased ringing for eight o'clock; but she had listened to the conversation between him and her husband, and had heard pretty nearly every word.
Lapierre cross examined her, and found that her report of the interview exactly corresponded with what he had already heard from old Jonathan.
Depend upon it, mr Lapierre, you've missed him somehow in the darkness, and he's safe and sound at home by this time."
Lapierre couldn't see it.
The facts, however, seemed to be wholly against him, as he bade the old couple a despondent good night and put Count Frontenac to his mettle.
In five minutes he reached Savareen's front gate.
mrs Savareen was waiting there, on the look out for her husband.
No, of course he had not got home.
She had neither seen nor heard anything of him, and was by this time very uneasy.
You may be sure that her anxiety was not lessened when she heard the strange tale which Lapierre had to tell her.
Even then, however, she did not give up the hope of her husband's arrival sometime during the night.
Dorry declared he wished there could be a Valentine's Day every week.
Katy felt the heat very much.
But Katy's long year of schooling had taught her self control, and, as a general thing, her discomforts were borne patiently.
She could not help growing pale and thin however, and Papa saw with concern that, as the summer went on, she became too languid to read, or study, or sew, and just sat hour after hour, with folded hands, gazing wistfully out of the window.
After a while she collected her books again, and tried to study as Cousin Helen had advised.
But so many idle weeks made it seem harder work than ever.
So the arrangement was made.
And if to hurt the back make you study, it would be well that some other of my young ladies shall do the same."
Katy laughed.
It is often so with sick people.
But as months go on, and everything grows an old story, and one day follows another day, all just alike and all tiresome, courage is apt to flag and spirits to grow dull.
Perhaps if you look in her room you'll find it."
She has some fever and a bad pain in her head.
I have told her that she had better lie still, and not try to get up this evening.
Blessings brighten as they take their flight.
"We all want her," said dr Carr, who looked disturbed and anxious.
The three girls didn't know much about sickness, but Papa's grave face, and the hushed house, weighed upon their spirits, and they missed the children very much.
"Oh dear!" sighed Elsie.
"We'll be real good to her when she does, won't we?" said Clover.
And I shall pick up the croquet balls and put them in the box every night."
Little people are apt to feel as if grown folks are so strong and so big, that nothing can possibly happen to them.
For the first time, the three girls, sobbing in each other's arms, realized what a good friend Aunt Izzie had been to them.
Her worrying ways were all forgotten now.
How they wished that they had never teased her, never said sharp words about her to each other!
But it was no use to wish.
For several days she saw almost nothing of her father.
Clover reported that he looked very tired and scarcely said a word.
"Did Papa eat any dinner?" asked Katy, one afternoon.
And mrs Jackson's boy came for him before we were through."
Oh, and ask Debby to make some cream toast for tea!
Katy studied his face anxiously.
It seemed to her that it had grown older of late, and there was a sad look upon it, which made her heart ache.
It wasn't much, to be sure, but I think Papa liked it.
"Oh, nothing, much," said Katy.
"I studied my French lesson this morning.
And after school, Elsie and john brought in their patchwork, and we had a 'Bee.' That's all."
"Oh, Papa!" cried Katy, in dismay, "must we have anybody?"
"Why, how did you suppose we were going to arrange it?
And beside, she is at school all day."
No, I'll tell you my plan.
I've been thinking about it all day.
Do let me try!
At the end of a month Katy was eager to go on. So he said,
Katy had plenty of quiet thinking time for one thing.
As soon as breakfast was over, and the dishes were washed and put away, Debby would tie on a clean apron, and come up stairs for orders.
Where all the things to eat are gone to, I can't imagine!"
She would stand by the door with her pleasant red face drawn up into a pucker, while Katy read aloud some impossible sounding rule.
"Please, Miss Katy, what's them?"
It must be something quite common, for it's in almost all the recipes."
"No, Miss Katy, I never heard tell of it before.
Miss Carr never gave me no shell outs at all at all!"
Poor Debby!
But she bore her trials meekly, except for an occasional grumble when alone with Bridget.
dr Carr had to eat a great many queer things in those days.
Dinner time became quite exciting, when nobody could tell exactly what any dish on the table was made of.
Dorry, who was a sort of dr Livingstone where strange articles of food were concerned, usually made the first experiment, and if he said that it was good, the rest followed suit.
After a while Katy grew wiser.
"My dear, you are overdoing it sadly," he said, as Katy opened her book and prepared to explain her views; "I am glad to have the children eat simple food-but really, boiled rice five times in a week is too much."
She also fidgeted the children about wearing india rubbers, and keeping on their coats, and behaved altogether as if the cares of the world were on her shoulders.
Katy was too much in earnest not to improve.
Month by month she learned how to manage a little better, and a little better still.
Her cares ceased to fret her.
Though she would not for the world have owned it to her parents, Undine was disappointed in the Fairford dinner.
The house, to begin with, was small and rather shabby.
Undine was too young to take note of culinary details, but she had expected to view the company through a bower of orchids and eat pretty coloured entrees in ruffled papers. Instead, there was only a low centre dish of ferns, and plain roasted and broiled meat that one could recognize-as if they'd been dyspeptics on a diet!
With all the hints in the Sunday papers, she thought it dull of mrs Fairford not to have picked up something newer; and as the evening progressed she began to suspect that it wasn't a real "dinner party," and that they had just asked her in to share what they had when they were alone.
But a glance about the table convinced her that mrs Fairford could not have meant to treat her other guests so lightly.
They were only eight in number, but one was no less a person than young mrs peter Van Degen-the one who had been a Dagonet-and the consideration which this young lady, herself one of the choicest ornaments of the Society Column, displayed toward the rest of the company, convinced Undine that they must be more important than they looked.
She liked mrs Fairford, a small incisive woman, with a big nose and good teeth revealed by frequent smiles.
In her dowdy black and antiquated ornaments she was not what Undine would have called "stylish"; but she had a droll kind way which reminded the girl of her father's manner when he was not tired or worried about money.
She had not expected much of mr Fairford, since married men were intrinsically uninteresting, and his baldness and grey moustache seemed naturally to relegate him to the background; but she had looked for some brilliant youths of her own age-in her inmost heart she had looked for mr Popple.
Undine sat between mr Bowen and young Marvell, who struck her as very "sweet" (it was her word for friendliness), but even shyer than at the hotel dance.
mrs Fairford talked so well that the girl wondered why mrs Heeny had found her lacking in conversation.
But though Undine thought silent people awkward she was not easily impressed by verbal fluency.
All the ladies in Apex City were more voluble than mrs Fairford, and had a larger vocabulary: the difference was that with mrs Fairford conversation seemed to be a concert and not a solo.
She took particular pains to give Undine her due part in the performance; but the girl's expansive impulses were always balanced by odd reactions of mistrust, and to night the latter prevailed.
This state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said.
"Yes-he's doing me," mrs peter Van Degen was saying, in her slightly drawling voice.
"He's doing everybody this year, you know-"
"That delightful Popple-he paints so exactly as he talks!" the white haired lady took it up.
"All his portraits seem to proclaim what a gentleman he is, and how he fascinates women!
They're not pictures of mrs or Miss So and so, but simply of the impression Popple thinks he's made on them."
mrs Fairford smiled.
Something in her tone made all Undine's perceptions bristle, and she strained her ears for the answer.
"I think he'll do you capitally-you must let me come and see some day soon." Marvell's tone was always so light, so unemphasized, that she could not be sure of its being as indifferent as it sounded.
She looked down at the fruit on her plate and shot a side glance through her lashes at mrs peter Van Degen.
mrs Van Degen was neither beautiful nor imposing: just a dark girlish looking creature with plaintive eyes and a fidgety frequent laugh.
But she was more elaborately dressed and jewelled than the other ladies, and her elegance and her restlessness made her seem less alien to Undine.
She had turned on Marvell a gaze at once pleading and possessive; but whether betokening merely an inherited intimacy (Undine had noticed that they were all more or less cousins) or a more personal feeling, her observer was unable to decide; just as the tone of the young man's reply might have expressed the open avowal of good fellowship or the disguise of a different sentiment.
Yet in the drawing room, with the ladies, where mrs Fairford came and sat by her, the spirit of caution once more prevailed.
She wanted to be noticed but she dreaded to be patronized, and here again her hostess's gradations of tone were confusing.
Undine did not even know that there were any pictures to be seen, much less that "people" went to see them; and she had read no new book but "When The Kissing Had to Stop," of which mrs Fairford seemed not to have heard.
The conversation was revived for a moment by her recalling that she had seen Sarah Bernhard in a play she called "Leg long," and another which she pronounced "Fade"; but even this did not carry them far, as she had forgotten what both plays were about and had found the actress a good deal older than she expected.
This discovery resulted in her holding her vivid head very high, and answering "I couldn't really say," or "Is that so?" to all mr Fairford's ventures; and as these were neither numerous nor striking it was a relief to both when the rising of the elderly lady gave the signal for departure.
In the hall, where young Marvell had managed to precede her.
Undine found mrs Van Degen putting on her cloak.
"Ralphie, dear, you'll come to the opera with me on Friday?
We'll dine together first-Peter's got a club dinner." They exchanged what seemed a smile of intelligence, and Undine heard the young man accept.
Then mrs Van Degen turned to her.
"Good bye, Miss Spragg.
I hope you'll come-"
"--TO DINE WITH ME TOO?" That must be what she was going to say, and Undine's heart gave a bound.
"--to see me some afternoon," mrs Van Degen ended, going down the steps to her motor, at the door of which a much furred footman waited with more furs on his arm.
Undine's face burned as she turned to receive her cloak.
He was going to "escort" her home, of course!
In which it is proved that first Impulses are oftentimes the best.
The three gentlemen took the road to Picardy, a road so well known to them and which recalled to Athos and Aramis some of the most picturesque adventures of their youth.
"If Mousqueton were with us," observed Athos, on reaching the spot where they had had a dispute with the paviers, "how he would tremble at passing this!
It was soon time for Grimaud to recall the past.
Boulogne was a strong position, then almost a deserted town, built entirely on the heights; what is now called the lower town did not then exist.
Athos and Aramis walked down toward the port.
This man, whom they had noticed from the first for the same reason they had themselves been remarked by others, was walking in a listless way up and down the jetty. From the moment he perceived them he did not cease to look at them and seemed to burn with the wish to speak to them.
On reaching the jetty Athos and Aramis stopped to look at a little boat made fast to a pile and ready rigged as if waiting to start.
"Hush!" said Athos, "we are overheard."
In truth, the walker, who, during the observations of the two friends, had passed and repassed behind them several times, stopped at the name of De Winter; but as his face betrayed no emotion at mention of this name, it might have been by chance he stood so still.
"He is and he is not," replied Athos; "that is to say, he is dismissed by one half of France, but by intrigues and promises he makes the other half sustain him; you will perceive that this may last a long time."
"Nothing warranted me to answer him otherwise; he was polite to me and I was so to him."
"But if he be a spy----"
"It matters not; you were wrong to reply to him as you did," continued Aramis, following with his eyes the young man, now vanishing behind the cliffs.
"A quarrel?" asked Athos.
"I am always afraid of a quarrel when I am expected at any place and when such a quarrel might possibly prevent my reaching it.
"In beauty or on the contrary?" asked Aramis, laughing.
"Ah! Egad!" cried Aramis, "you set me thinking.
"Ah! here is De Winter coming," said Athos.
"I see them about twenty paces behind my lord.
Tony carries our muskets."
Athos smiled sadly, for it was evident that he was thinking of other things as he listened to his friend and moved toward De Winter.
When De Winter perceived them, in his turn he advanced toward them with surprising rapidity.
Athos glanced at Aramis.
"But let us go," continued De Winter; "let us be off; the boat must be waiting for us and there is our sloop at anchor-do you see it there?
They had reached the ladder which led to the boat.
At this moment Athos perceived a man walking on the seashore parallel to the jetty, and hastening his steps, as if to reach the other side of the port, scarcely twenty steps from the place of embarking.
The latter, to make a short cut, had appeared on a sluice.
"He certainly bodes us no good," said Athos; "but let us embark; once out at sea, let him come."
And Athos sprang into the boat, which was immediately pushed off and which soon sped seawards under the efforts of four stalwart rowers.
She was obliged to pass between the point of the jetty, surmounted by a beacon just lighted, and a rock which jutted out.
"He who followed us and spoke to us awaits us there; behold!"
The beacon bathed with light the little strait through which they were about to pass and the rock where the young man stood with bare head and crossed arms.
"The monk!" exclaimed Grimaud.
"Fire!" cried Grimaud, unconsciously.
"Yes, but the son has done us no harm."
The young man burst into a laugh.
"Ah, it is certainly you!" he cried.
"Hold, Athos," said Aramis, "perhaps there is yet time.
See if he is still in the same place."
"Hold your tongue," replied Aramis; "you would make me weep, if such a thing were possible."
At this instant the three friends turned, in spite of themselves, a last look on the rock, upon the menacing figure which pursued them and now stood out with a distinctness still.
forty five.
D'Artagnan would have preferred money in hand to all that fine talk, for he knew well that to Mazarin it was easy to promise and hard to perform. But, though he held the cardinal's promises as of little worth, he affected to be completely satisfied, for he was unwilling to discourage Porthos.
Whilst the two friends were with the cardinal, the queen sent for him. Mazarin, thinking that it would be the means of increasing the zeal of his two defenders if he procured them personal thanks from the queen, motioned them to follow him.
D'Artagnan and Porthos pointed to their dusty and torn dresses, but the cardinal shook his head.
"Those costumes," he said, "are of more worth than most of those which you will see on the backs of the queen's courtiers; they are costumes of battle."
D'Artagnan and Porthos obeyed.
The court of Anne of Austria was full of gayety and animation; for, after having gained a victory over the Spaniard, it had just gained another over the people.
Without him I should probably at this moment be a dead fish in the nets at Saint Cloud, for it was a question of nothing less than throwing me into the river.
Speak, D'Artagnan, speak."
"Madame," replied D'Artagnan, "I have nought to say, save that my life is ever at your majesty's service, and that I shall only be happy the day I lose it for you."
"I know that, sir; I have known that," said the queen, "a long time; therefore I am delighted to be able thus publicly to mark my gratitude and my esteem."
"Permit me, madame," said D'Artagnan, "to reserve a portion for my friend; like myself" (he laid an emphasis on these words) "an ancient musketeer of the company of Treville; he has done wonders."
"These names are too numerous for me to remember them all, and I will content myself with the first," said the queen, graciously.
Porthos bowed.
At this moment the coadjutor was announced; a cry of surprise ran through the royal assemblage.
Although the coadjutor had preached that same morning it was well known that he leaned much to the side of the Fronde; and Mazarin, in requesting the archbishop of Paris to make his nephew preach, had evidently had the intention of administering to Monsieur de Retz one of those Italian kicks he so much enjoyed giving.
Although almost engaged to the leaders of the Fronde he had not gone so far but that retreat was possible should the court offer him the advantages for which he was ambitious and to which the coadjutorship was but a stepping stone.
Monsieur de Retz wished to become archbishop in his uncle's place, and cardinal, like Mazarin; and the popular party could with difficulty accord him favors so entirely royal.
He therefore hastened to the palace to congratulate the queen on the battle of Lens, determined beforehand to act with or against the court, as his congratulations were well or ill received.
The coadjutor possessed, perhaps, as much wit as all those put together who were assembled at the court to laugh at him.
His speech, therefore, was so well turned, that in spite of the great wish felt by the courtiers to laugh, they could find no point on which to vent their ridicule.
He concluded by saying that he placed his feeble influence at her majesty's command.
The Count de Villeroy said that "he did not know how any fear could be entertained for a moment, when the court had, to defend itself against the parliament and the citizens of Paris, his holiness the coadjutor, who by a signal could raise an army of curates, church porters and vergers."
The Marechal de la Meilleraie added that in case the coadjutor should appear on the field of battle it would be a pity that he should not be distinguished in the melee by wearing a red hat, as Henry the fourth. had been distinguished by his white plume at the battle of Ivry.
During this storm, Gondy, who had it in his power to make it most unpleasant for the jesters, remained calm and stern.
The queen at last asked him if he had anything to add to the fine discourse he had just made to her.
"Yes, madame," replied the coadjutor; "I have to beg you to reflect twice ere you cause a civil war in the kingdom."
The coadjutor bowed and left the palace, casting upon the cardinal such a glance as is best understood by mortal foes.
That glance was so sharp that it penetrated the heart of Mazarin, who, reading in it a declaration of war, seized D'Artagnan by the arm and said:
"If occasion requires, monsieur, you will remember that man who has just gone out, will you not?"
"Yes, my lord," he replied.
Then, turning toward Porthos, "The devil!" said he, "this has a bad look.
I dislike these quarrels among men of the church."
"Oh!" he murmured, as he left the threshold of the palace: "ungrateful court! faithless court! cowardly court!
But whilst they were indulging in extravagant joy at the Palais Royal, to increase the hilarity of the queen, Mazarin, a man of sense, and whose fear, moreover, gave him foresight, lost no time in making idle and dangerous jokes; he went out after the coadjutor, settled his account, locked up his gold, and had confidential workmen to contrive hiding places in his walls.
He hastened to his cabinet.
Broussel's son was there, still furious, and still bearing bloody marks of his struggle with the king's officers.
The only precaution he had taken in coming to the archbishopric was to leave his arquebuse in the hands of a friend.
The coadjutor went to him and held out his hand.
The young man gazed at him as if he would have read the secret of his heart.
"My dear Monsieur Louvieres," said the coadjutor, "believe me, I am truly concerned for the misfortune which has happened to you."
"Is that true, and do you speak seriously?" asked Louvieres.
"From the depth of my heart," said Gondy.
"In that case, my lord, the time for words has passed and the hour for action is at hand; my lord, in three days, if you wish it, my father will be out of prison and in six months you may be cardinal."
The coadjutor started.
"Oh! let us speak frankly," continued Louvieres, "and act in a straightforward manner.
Thirty thousand crowns in alms is not given, as you have done for the last six months, out of pure Christian charity; that would be too grand.
As for me, I hate the court and have but one desire at this moment-vengeance.
"You have been preparing long enough, my lord, for it to be welcome to you now."
"Never mind," said the coadjutor; "you must be well aware that this requires reflection."
"And how many hours of reflection do you ask?"
"If I should not be in, wait for me."
"Good! at midnight, my lord."
Two hours later, thirty officiating ministers from the most populous, and consequently the most disturbed parishes of Paris had assembled there.
The curates asked him what was to be done.
"You are the directors of all consciences.
Well, undermine in them the miserable prejudice of respect and fear of kings; teach your flocks that the queen is a tyrant; and repeat often and loudly, so that all may know it, that the misfortunes of France are caused by Mazarin, her lover and her destroyer; begin this work to day, this instant even, and in three days I shall expect the result.
For the rest, if any one of you have further or better counsel to expound, I will listen to him with the greatest pleasure."
"You think, then, that you can help me more efficaciously than your brothers?" said Gondy.
"We hope so," answered the curates.
"Let us hear.
"My lord, I have in my parish a man who might be of the greatest use to you."
"Who and what is this man?"
"What is his name?"
"And can you find him?"
"Very well, sir, find this man, and when you have found him bring him to me."
"We will be with you at six o'clock, my lord."
"Go, my dear curate, and may God assist you!"
Him I can place at your disposal; it is Count de Rochefort."
"My lord, he has been for three days at the Rue Cassette."
"And wherefore has he not been to see me?"
"He was told-my lord will pardon me----"
"Certainly, speak."
"That your lordship was about to treat with the court."
Gondy bit his lips.
"Better, my lord."
"Exactly your man."
"Yes, I have heard it said," replied the coadjutor.
"Well, the man whom I offer you is a general syndic."
"And what do you know of him?"
"Nothing, my lord, except that he is tormented with remorse."
"What makes you think so?"
"And think you that we should find him at this hour at his post?"
"Certainly."
"Let us go and see your beggar, sir, and if he is such as you describe him, you are right-it will be you who have discovered the true treasure."
Gondy dressed himself as an officer, put on a felt cap with a red feather, hung on a long sword, buckled spurs to his boots, wrapped himself in an ample cloak and followed the curate.
The people were in an excited mood, but, like a swarm of frightened bees, seemed not to know at what point to concentrate; and it was very evident that if leaders of the people were not provided all this agitation would pass off in idle buzzing.
On arriving at the Rue des Prouvaires, the curate pointed toward the square before the church.
"Stop!" he said, "there he is at his post."
I believe this man paid his predecessor a hundred pistoles for his."
"The rascal is rich, then?"
"Some of those men sometimes die worth twenty thousand and twenty five and thirty thousand francs and sometimes more."
In the meantime they were advancing toward the square, and the moment the coadjutor and the curate put their feet on the first church step the mendicant arose and proffered his brush.
He was a man between sixty six and sixty eight years of age, little, rather stout, with gray hair and light eyes.
His countenance denoted the struggle between two opposite principles-a wicked nature, subdued by determination, perhaps by repentance.
"With me!" said the mendicant; "it is a great honor for a poor distributor of holy water."
There was an ironical tone in his voice which he could not quite disguise and which astonished the coadjutor.
"Yes," continued the curate, apparently accustomed to this tone, "yes, we wish to know your opinion of the events of to day and what you have heard said by people going in and out of the church."
The mendicant shook his head.
As to what is said, everybody is discontented, everybody complains, but 'everybody' means 'nobody.'"
"I mean that all these cries, all these complaints, these curses, produce nothing but storms and flashes and that is all; but the lightning will not strike until there is a hand to guide it."
"My friend," said Gondy, "you seem to be a clever and a thoughtful man; are you disposed to take a part in a little civil war, should we have one, and put at the command of the leader, should we find one, your personal influence and the influence you have acquired over your comrades?"
"Yes, sir, provided this war were approved of by the church and would advance the end I wish to attain-I mean, the remission of my sins."
"The war will not only be approved of, but directed by the church.
As for the remission of your sins, we have the archbishop of Paris, who has the very greatest power at the court of Rome, and even the coadjutor, who possesses some plenary indulgences; we will recommend you to him."
"I think they have some esteem for me," said the mendicant with pride, "and that not only will they obey me, but wherever I go they will follow me."
"And could you count on fifty resolute men, good, unemployed, but active souls, brawlers, capable of bringing down the walls of the Palais Royal by crying, 'Down with Mazarin,' as fell those at Jericho?"
"I think," said the beggar, "I can undertake things more difficult and more important than that."
"I will undertake to throw up fifty, and when the day comes, to defend them."
"I answer for him," said the curate.
"It must be on some elevated place, whence a given signal may be seen in every part of Paris."
"Capital," answered the mendicant.
"Then," said the coadjutor, "this evening, at ten o'clock, and if I am pleased with you another bag of five hundred pistoles will be at your disposal."
The eyes of the mendicant dashed with cupidity, but he quickly suppressed his emotion.
Chapter one: Why Democratic Nations Show A More Ardent And Enduring Love Of Equality Than Of Liberty
Everybody has remarked that in our time, and especially in France, this passion for equality is every day gaining ground in the human heart.
It is possible to imagine an extreme point at which freedom and equality would meet and be confounded together.
As none is different from his fellows, none can exercise a tyrannical power: men will be perfectly free, because they will all be entirely equal; and they will all be perfectly equal, because they will be entirely free.
To this ideal state democratic nations tend.
Such is the completest form that equality can assume upon earth; but there are a thousand others which, without being equally perfect, are not less cherished by those nations.
The principle of equality may be established in civil society, without prevailing in the political world.
A kind of equality may even be established in the political world, though there should be no political freedom there.
A man may be the equal of all his countrymen save one, who is the master of all without distinction, and who selects equally from among them all the agents of his power.
Several other combinations might be easily imagined, by which very great equality would be united to institutions more or less free, or even to institutions wholly without freedom. Although men cannot become absolutely equal unless they be entirely free, and consequently equality, pushed to its furthest extent, may be confounded with freedom, yet there is good reason for distinguishing the one from the other.
Freedom cannot, therefore, form the distinguishing characteristic of democratic ages.
Ask not what singular charm the men of democratic ages find in being equal, or what special reasons they may have for clinging so tenaciously to equality rather than to the other advantages which society holds out to them: equality is the distinguishing characteristic of the age they live in; that, of itself, is enough to explain that they prefer it to all the rest.
But independently of this reason there are several others, which will at all times habitually lead men to prefer equality to freedom.
Its social condition must be modified, its laws abolished, its opinions superseded, its habits changed, its manners corrupted.
But political liberty is more easily lost; to neglect to hold it fast is to allow it to escape.
Men therefore not only cling to equality because it is dear to them; they also adhere to it because they think it will last forever.
That political freedom may compromise in its excesses the tranquillity, the property, the lives of individuals, is obvious to the narrowest and most unthinking minds.
They know that the calamities they apprehend are remote, and flatter themselves that they will only fall upon future generations, for which the present generation takes but little thought.
The evils which extreme equality may produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they are only seen at intervals, and at the moment at which they become most violent habit already causes them to be no longer felt.
Men cannot enjoy political liberty unpurchased by some sacrifices, and they never obtain it without great exertions.
But the pleasures of equality are self proffered: each of the petty incidents of life seems to occasion them, and in order to taste them nothing is required but to live.
Democratic nations are at all times fond of equality, but there are certain epochs at which the passion they entertain for it swells to the height of fury.
This occurs at the moment when the old social system, long menaced, completes its own destruction after a last intestine struggle, and when the barriers of rank are at length thrown down.
The passion for equality penetrates on every side into men's hearts, expands there, and fills them entirely.
Show them not freedom escaping from their grasp, whilst they are looking another way: they are blind-or rather, they can discern but one sole object to be desired in the universe.
What I have said is applicable to all democratic nations: what I am about to say concerns the French alone.
Absolute kings were the most efficient levellers of ranks amongst their subjects.
I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret.
But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism-but they will not endure aristocracy.
This is true at all times, and especially true in our own. All men and all powers seeking to cope with this irresistible passion, will be overthrown and destroyed by it.
In our age, freedom cannot be established without it, and despotism itself cannot reign without its support.
Chapter two: Of Individualism In Democratic Countries
Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism.
Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with his own person, and to prefer himself to everything in the world.
Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism.
A man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them.
He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him.
Aristocratic institutions have, moreover, the effect of closely binding every man to several of his fellow citizens.
As in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above the other, the result is that each of them always sees a man above himself whose patronage is necessary to him, and below himself another man whose co-operation he may claim.
Men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves.
It is true that in those ages the notion of human fellowship is faint, and that men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind; but they often sacrifice themselves for other men.
In democratic ages, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual to the race are much more clear, devoted service to any one man becomes more rare; the bond of human affection is extended, but it is relaxed.
Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself.
As each class approximates to other classes, and intermingles with them, its members become indifferent and as strangers to one another.
Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it.
The period when the construction of democratic society upon the ruins of an aristocracy has just been completed, is especially that at which this separation of men from one another, and the egotism resulting from it, most forcibly strike the observation.
Democratic communities not only contain a large number of independent citizens, but they are constantly filled with men who, having entered but yesterday upon their independent condition, are intoxicated with their new power.
They entertain a presumptuous confidence in their strength, and as they do not suppose that they can henceforward ever have occasion to claim the assistance of their fellow creatures, they do not scruple to show that they care for nobody but themselves.
An aristocracy seldom yields without a protracted struggle, in the course of which implacable animosities are kindled between the different classes of society.
These passions survive the victory, and traces of them may be observed in the midst of the democratic confusion which ensues.
They look upon all those whom this state of society has made their equals as oppressors, whose destiny can excite no sympathy; they have lost sight of their former equals, and feel no longer bound by a common interest to their fate: each of them, standing aloof, thinks that he is reduced to care for himself alone.
It is, then, commonly at the outset of democratic society that citizens are most disposed to live apart.
Chapter four: That The Americans Combat The Effects Of Individualism By Free Institutions
Despotism, which is of a very timorous nature, is never more secure of continuance than when it can keep men asunder; and all is influence is commonly exerted for that purpose.
No vice of the human heart is so acceptable to it as egotism: a despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other.
He does not ask them to assist him in governing the State; it is enough that they do not aspire to govern it themselves.
He stigmatizes as turbulent and unruly spirits those who would combine their exertions to promote the prosperity of the community, and, perverting the natural meaning of words, he applauds as good citizens those who have no sympathy for any but themselves.
Thus the vices which despotism engenders are precisely those which equality fosters.
These two things mutually and perniciously complete and assist each other.
When the members of a community are forced to attend to public affairs, they are necessarily drawn from the circle of their own interests, and snatched at times from self observation.
When the public is supreme, there is no man who does not feel the value of public goodwill, or who does not endeavor to court it by drawing to himself the esteem and affection of those amongst whom he is to live. Many of the passions which congeal and keep asunder human hearts, are then obliged to retire and hide below the surface.
Pride must be dissembled; disdain dares not break out; egotism fears its own self. Under a free government, as most public offices are elective, the men whose elevated minds or aspiring hopes are too closely circumscribed in private life, constantly feel that they cannot do without the population which surrounds them.
Men learn at such times to think of their fellow men from ambitious motives; and they frequently find it, in a manner, their interest to forget themselves.
Such evils are doubtless great, but they are transient; whereas the benefits which attend them remain.
Freedom engenders private animosities, but despotism gives birth to general indifference.
The Americans have combated by free institutions the tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued it.
The plan was a wise one.
The general affairs of a country only engage the attention of leading politicians, who assemble from time to time in the same places; and as they often lose sight of each other afterwards, no lasting ties are established between them.
They know that the rich in democracies always stand in need of the poor; and that in democratic ages you attach a poor man to you more by your manner than by benefits conferred.
The magnitude of such benefits, which sets off the difference of conditions, causes a secret irritation to those who reap advantage from them; but the charm of simplicity of manners is almost irresistible: their affability carries men away, and even their want of polish is not always displeasing.
This truth does not take root at once in the minds of the rich.
They might spend fortunes thus without warming the hearts of the population around them;--that population does not ask them for the sacrifice of their money, but of their pride.
When the vices and weaknesses, frequently exhibited by those who govern in America, are closely examined, the prosperity of the people occasions-but improperly occasions-surprise.
Elected magistrates do not make the American democracy flourish; it flourishes because the magistrates are elective.
I must say that I have often seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and I have remarked a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to each other.
The free institutions which the inhabitants of the United States possess, and the political rights of which they make so much use, remind every citizen, and in a thousand ways, that he lives in society.
They every instant impress upon his mind the notion that it is the duty, as well as the interest of men, to make themselves useful to their fellow creatures; and as he sees no particular ground of animosity to them, since he is never either their master or their slave, his heart readily leans to the side of kindness.
Many people in France consider equality of conditions as one evil, and political freedom as a second.
When they are obliged to yield to the former, they strive at least to escape from the latter.
But I contend that in order to combat the evils which equality may produce, there is only one effectual remedy-namely, political freedom.
Chapter seventeen: That In Times Marked By Equality Of Conditions And Sceptical Opinions, It Is Important To Remove To A Distance The Objects Of Human Actions
In the ages of faith the final end of life is placed beyond life.
Religions give men a general habit of conducting themselves with a view to futurity: in this respect they are not less useful to happiness in this life than to felicity hereafter; and this is one of their chief political characteristics.
But in proportion as the light of faith grows dim, the range of man's sight is circumscribed, as if the end and aim of human actions appeared every day to be more within his reach.
When men have once allowed themselves to think no more of what is to befall them after life, they readily lapse into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity, which is but too conformable to some propensities of mankind.
If the social condition of a people, under these circumstances, becomes democratic, the danger which I here point out is thereby increased.
The instability of society itself fosters the natural instability of man's desires.
In the midst of these perpetual fluctuations of his lot, the present grows upon his mind, until it conceals futurity from his sight, and his looks go no further than the morrow.
In those countries in which unhappily irreligion and democracy coexist, the most important duty of philosophers and of those in power is to be always striving to place the objects of human actions far beyond man's immediate range.
Circumscribed by the character of his country and his age, the moralist must learn to vindicate his principles in that position.
He must constantly endeavor to show his contemporaries, that, even in the midst of the perpetual commotion around them, it is easier than they think to conceive and to execute protracted undertakings.
The sudden and undeserved promotion of a courtier produces only a transient impression in an aristocratic country, because the aggregate institutions and opinions of the nation habitually compel men to advance slowly in tracks which they cannot get out of.
When men have accustomed themselves to foresee from afar what is likely to befall in the world and to feed upon hopes, they can hardly confine their minds within the precise circumference of life, and they are ready to break the boundary and cast their looks beyond.
I do not doubt that, by training the members of a community to think of their future condition in this world, they would be gradually and unconsciously brought nearer to religious convictions.
Chapter eighteen: That Amongst The Americans All Honest Callings Are Honorable
The notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence.
Not only is labor not dishonorable amongst such a people, but it is held in honor: the prejudice is not against it, but in its favor. In the United States a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit, or to public business.
He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living.
It is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work, that so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find some scattered remains of aristocratic society, amongst which idleness is still held in honor.
Equality of conditions not only ennobles the notion of labor in men's estimation, but it raises the notion of labor as a source of profit.
In aristocracies it is not exactly labor that is despised, but labor with a view to profit.
Yet in aristocratic society it constantly happens that he who works for honor is not insensible to the attractions of profit.
But these two desires only intermingle in the innermost depths of his soul: he carefully hides from every eye the point at which they join; he would fain conceal it from himself.
In aristocratic countries there are few public officers who do not affect to serve their country without interested motives.
Their salary is an incident of which they think but little, and of which they always affect not to think at all.
Thus the notion of profit is kept distinct from that of labor; however they may be united in point of fact, they are not thought of together.
In democratic communities these two notions are, on the contrary, always palpably united.
As the desire of well-being is universal-as fortunes are slender or fluctuating-as everyone wants either to increase his own resources, or to provide fresh ones for his progeny, men clearly see that it is profit which, if not wholly, at least partially, leads them to work.
Even those who are principally actuated by the love of fame are necessarily made familiar with the thought that they are not exclusively actuated by that motive; and they discover that the desire of getting a living is mingled in their minds with the desire of making life illustrious.
No profession exists in which men do not work for money; and the remuneration which is common to them all gives them all an air of resemblance.
He is paid for commanding, other men for obeying orders.
CHAPTER three.
DIMPLE.
one hundred two.
one hundred three.
A dimple in the chin is lucky.
Some say "it shows you're no fool."
one hundred four.
EARS.
Small ears indicate that a person is stingy.
one hundred six.
one hundred seven.
one hundred eight.
EYES AND EYEBROWS.
one hundred ten.
one hundred eleven.
A well-known children's rhyme runs:--
one hundred twelve.
one hundred thirteen.
one hundred fourteen.
FINGER NAILS.
one hundred fifteen.
one hundred sixteen.
A white spot in the nail, when it comes, means a present.
one hundred seventeen.
Count on finger nail spots:--
one hundred nineteen.
Another formula:--
An almost identical variant is found in Prince Edward Island.
FOOT.
one hundred twenty.
one hundred twenty one.
FOREHEAD.
one hundred twenty two.
one hundred twenty three.
Vertical wrinkles in the brow show the number of husbands one will have.
HAIR.
one hundred twenty four.
one hundred twenty five.
one hundred twenty six.
one hundred twenty seven.
The color of the hair growing on the neck indicates the color of the hair of one's future husband.
one hundred twenty eight.
A single white hair means genius; it must not be pulled out.
one hundred twenty nine.
one hundred thirty.
one hundred thirty one.
one hundred thirty five.
one hundred thirty six.
one hundred thirty seven.
Put some of your hair in the fire.
If it burns slowly you will have a long life.
HAND.
In clasping your own hand, you put uppermost either your right or your left thumb.
Clasp your fingers, and if the right thumb lap over the left you were born in the daytime.
If the left overlap, you were born at night.
If the ends of the fingers are capable of being bent far back, it indicates a thief.
MOLES.
A mole on the eyebrow denotes that one will be hanged.
Mole above breath Means wealth.
CHAPTER ten DON DIEGO
Then he uttered a moan, and closed his eyes again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache in his head.
And yet, stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance of reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that here something was not as it should be.
The low position of the sun, flooding the cabin with golden light from those square ports astern, suggested to him at first that it was early morning, on the assumption that the vessel was headed westward.
Then the alternative occurred to him.
They might be sailing eastward, in which case the time of day would be late afternoon. That they were sailing he could feel from the gentle forward heave of the vessel under him.
His mind went back over the adventure of yesterday, if of yesterday it was.
He was clear on the matter of the easily successful raid upon the Island of Barbados; every detail stood vividly in his memory up to the moment at which, returning aboard, he had stepped on to his own deck again.
There memory abruptly and inexplicably ceased.
He was beginning to torture his mind with conjecture, when the door opened, and to Don Diego's increasing mystification he beheld his best suit of clothes step into the cabin.
The suit paused to close the door, then advanced towards the couch on which Don Diego was extended, and inside the suit came a tall, slender gentleman of about Don Diego's own height and shape.
Seeing the wide, startled eyes of the Spaniard upon him, the gentleman lengthened his stride.
But he was too bewildered to make any answer.
The stranger's fingers touched the top of Don Diego's head, whereupon Don Diego winced and cried out in pain.
He took Don Diego's wrist between thumb and second finger.
And then, at last, the intrigued Spaniard spoke.
"Are you a doctor?"
"Among other things." The swarthy gentleman continued his study of the patient's pulse.
"Firm and regular," he announced at last, and dropped the wrist.
"You've taken no great harm."
Don Diego struggled up into a sitting position on the red velvet couch.
"And what the devil are you doing in my clothes and aboard my ship?"
This is not your ship.
This is my ship, and these are my clothes."
"Your ship?" quoth the other, aghast, and still more aghast he added: "Your clothes?
But... then...." Wildly his eyes looked about him.
They scanned the cabin once again, scrutinizing each familiar object.
"Am I mad?" he asked at last.
"Surely this ship is the Cinco Llagas?"
"The Cinco Llagas it is."
"Then...."
The Spaniard broke off.
"Will you tell me also that you are Don Diego de Espinosa?"
"Oh, no, my name is Blood-Captain peter Blood.
This ship, like this handsome suit of clothes, is mine by right of conquest.
Just as you, Don Diego, are my prisoner."
Startling as was the explanation, yet it proved soothing to Don Diego, being so much less startling than the things he was beginning to imagine.
"But...
Are you not Spanish, then?"
"You flatter my Castilian accent.
So it has-a miracle wrought by my genius, which is considerable."
It was a narrative that painted red and white by turns the Spaniard's countenance.
He put a hand to the back of his head, and there discovered, in confirmation of the story, a lump as large as a pigeon's egg.
Lastly, he stared wild eyed at the sardonic Captain Blood.
"And my son?
"He was in the boat that brought me aboard."
He composed himself.
After all, he possessed the stoicism proper to his desperate trade.
The dice had fallen against him in this venture.
He accepted the situation with the fortitude of a fatalist.
With the utmost calm he enquired:
For it means that you'll be put to the trouble of dying all over again."
"Ah!" Don Diego drew a deep breath.
"But is that necessary?" he asked, without apparent perturbation.
Captain Blood's blue eyes approved his bearing.
Captain Blood perched himself on the edge of the long oak table.
You and your ten surviving scoundrels are a menace on this ship. More than that, she is none so well found in water and provisions.
True, we are fortunately a small number, but you and your party inconveniently increase it.
So that on every hand, you see, prudence suggests to us that we should deny ourselves the pleasure of your company, and, steeling our soft hearts to the inevitable, invite you to be so obliging as to step over the side."
"I see," said the Spaniard pensively.
He swung his legs from the couch, and sat now upon the edge of it, his elbows on his knees.
"I confess," he admitted, "that there is much force in what you say."
"You take a load from my mind," said Captain Blood.
"But, my friend, I did not agree so much."
Don Diego stroked his pointed black beard.
My head aches so damnably that I am incapable of thought.
Captain Blood stood up.
From a shelf he took a half hour glass, reversed it so that the bulb containing the red sand was uppermost, and stood it on the table.
Captain Blood bowed, went out, and locked the door.
And what time he watched, the lines in his lean brown face grew deeper.
Punctually as the last grains ran out, the door reopened.
The Spaniard sighed, and sat upright to face the returning Captain Blood with the answer for which he came.
"I have thought of an alternative, sir captain; but it depends upon your charity.
It is that you put us ashore on one of the islands of this pestilent archipelago, and leave us to shift for ourselves."
Captain Blood pursed his lips.
"It has its difficulties," said he slowly.
"I feared it would be so." Don Diego sighed again, and stood up.
The light blue eyes played over him like points of steel.
"The question is offensive, sir."
"Then let me put it in another way-perhaps more happily: You do not desire to live?"
"Ah, that I can answer.
I do desire to live; and even more do I desire that my son may live.
But the desire shall not make a coward of me for your amusement, master mocker." It was the first sign he had shown of the least heat or resentment.
As before he perched himself on the corner of the table.
"To earn it?" said Don Diego, and the watchful blue eyes did not miss the quiver that ran through him.
"To earn it, do you say?
Why, if the service you would propose is one that cannot hurt my honour...."
"Could I be guilty of that?" protested the Captain.
"I realize that even a pirate has his honour." And forthwith he propounded his offer.
All day we have been sailing east before the wind with but one intent-to set as great a distance between Barbados and ourselves as possible.
And so it comes to this: We desire to make for the Dutch settlement of Curacao as straightly as possible.
Will you pledge me your honour, if I release you upon parole, that you will navigate us thither?
Don Diego bowed his head upon his breast, and strode away in thought to the stern windows.
That was in one scale; in the other were the lives of sixteen men.
Fourteen of them mattered little to him, but the remaining two were his own and his son's.
THEOSOPHY.
The name is from the Greek word theosophia-divine wisdom-and the object of theosophical study is professedly to understand the nature of divine things.
Since the Christian era we may class among theosophists such sects as Neo Platonists, the Hesychasts of the Greek Church, the Mystics of mediaeval times, and, in later times, the disciples of Paracelsus, Thalhauser, Bohme, Swedenborg and others.
It need hardly be said that the revelations they have claimed to receive have been, thus far, without element of benefit to the human race.
The first writer to suggest the transmutation of species among animals was Buffon, about seventeen fifty, and other writers followed out the idea.
The eccentric Lord Monboddo was the first to suggest the possible descent of man from the ape, about seventeen seventy four. In eighteen thirteen dr w c Wells first proposed to apply the principle of natural selection to the natural history of man, and in eighteen twenty two Professor Herbert first asserted the probable transmutation of species of plants.
The authorship of this book was never revealed until after the death of Robert Chambers, a few years since, it became known that this publisher, whom no one would ever have suspected of holding such heterodox theories, had actually written it.
But the two great apostles of the evolution theory were Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.
It is taken to be an established fact in nature, a valid induction from man's knowledge of natural order.
THE ENGLISH SPARROW.
The first English sparrow was brought to the United States in eighteen fifty, but it was not until eighteen seventy that the species can be said to have firmly established itself.
Since then it has taken possession of the country. Its fecundity is amazing.
In the latitude of New York and southward it hatches, as a rule, five or six broods in a season, with from four to six young in a brood.
FEMININE HEIGHT AND WEIGHT.
It is often asked how stout a woman ought to be in proportion to her height.
WHEN A MAN BECOMES OF AGE.
His cheeks were blanched as the flume head foam when the brown spring freshets flow; Deep in their dark, sin calcined pits were his sombre eyes aglow; They knew him far for the fitful man who spat forth blood on the snow.
"The Moose hides called it the devil fox, and swore that no man could kill; That he who hunted it, soon or late, must surely suffer some ill; But I laughed at them and their old squaw tales. Ha!
Ha!
"I tracked it up where the mountains hunch like the vertebrae of the world; I tracked it down to the death still pits where the avalanche is hurled; From the glooms to the sacerdotal snows, where the carded clouds are curled.
I was weary and sick and cold.
"So that was the end of the great black fox, and here is the prize I've won; And now for a drink to cheer me up-I've mushed since the early sun; We'll drink a toast to the sorry ghost of the fox whose race is run."
Wherefore it was beyond all laws that lusts of man restrain, A man drank deep and sank to sleep never to wake again; And the Yukon swallowed through a hole the cold corpse of the slain.
The black fox skin a shadow cast from the roof nigh to the floor; And sleek it seemed and soft it gleamed, and the woman stroked it o'er; And the man stood by with a brooding eye, and gnashed his teeth and swore.
When thieves and thugs fall out and fight there's fell arrears to pay; And soon or late sin meets its fate, and so it fell one day That Claw fingered Kitty and Windy Ike fanged up like dogs at bay.
A bird sang for the joy of spring, so piercing sweet and frail; And blinding bright the land was dight in gay and glittering mail; And with a wondrous black fox skin a man slid down the trail.
Grim shadows diapered the snow; the air was strangely mild; The valley's girth was dumb with mirth, the laughter of the wild; The still, sardonic laughter of an ogre o'er a child.
Mad!
Gold!
Gold!
Never was seen such an army, pitiful, futile, unfit; Never was seen such a spirit, manifold courage and grit. Never has been such a cohort under one banner unrolled As surged to the ragged edged Arctic, urged by the arch tempter-Gold.
"Farewell!" we cried to our dearests; little we cared for their tears. "Farewell!" we cried to the humdrum and the yoke of the hireling years; Just like a pack of school boys, and the big crowd cheered us good bye. Never were hearts so uplifted, never were hopes so high.
We landed in wind swept Skagway.
We joined the weltering mass, Clamoring over their outfits, waiting to climb the Pass. We tightened our girths and our pack straps; we linked on the Human Chain, Struggling up to the summit, where every step was a pain.
Gone was the joy of our faces, grim and haggard and pale; The heedless mirth of the shipboard was changed to the care of the trail. We flung ourselves in the struggle, packing our grub in relays, Step by step to the summit in the bale of the winter days.
"Klondike or bust!" rang the slogan; every man for his own. Oh, how we flogged the horses, staggering skin and bone! Oh, how we cursed their weakness, anguish they could not tell, Breaking their hearts in our passion, lashing them on till they fell!
For grub meant gold to our thinking, and all that could walk must pack; The sheep for the shambles stumbled, each with a load on its back; And even the swine were burdened, and grunted and squealed and rolled, And men went mad in the moment, huskily clamoring "Gold!"
Thus toiled we, the army of fortune, in hunger and hope and despair, Till glacier, mountain and forest vanished, and, radiantly fair, There at our feet lay Lake Bennett, and down to its welcome we ran: The trail of the land was over, the trail of the water began.
We built our boats and we launched them.
Each man worked like a demon, as prow to rudder we raced; The winds of the Wild cried "Hurry!" the voice of the waters, "Haste!" We hated those driving before us; we dreaded those pressing behind; We cursed the slow current that bore us; we prayed to the God of the wind.
Spring! and the hillsides flourished, vivid in jewelled green; Spring! and our hearts' blood nourished envy and hatred and spleen. Little cared we for the Spring birth; much cared we to get on- Stake in the Great White Channel, stake ere the best be gone.
We roused Lake Marsh with a chorus, we drifted many a mile; There was the canyon before us-cave like its dark defile; The shores swept faster and faster; the river narrowed to wrath; Waters that hissed disaster reared upright in our path.
Beneath us the green tumult churning, above us the cavernous gloom; Around us, swift twisting and turning, the black, sullen walls of a tomb. We spun like a chip in a mill race; our hearts hammered under the test; Then-oh, the relief on each chill face!--we soared into sunlight and rest.
But what of the others that followed, losing their boats by the score? Well could we see them and hear them, strung down that desolate shore. What of the poor souls that perished?
SIR KNIGHT PELLEAS, said the Damosel of the Lake, take your horse and come forth with me out of this country, and ye shall love a lady that shall love you.
And now such grace God hath sent me, that I hate her as much as ever I loved her, thanked be our Lord Jesus!
Thank me, said the Damosel of the Lake.
Anon Sir Pelleas armed him, and took his horse, and commanded his men to bring after his pavilions and his stuff where the Damosel of the Lake would assign.
CHAPTER twenty four.
NOW turn we unto Sir Marhaus, that rode with the damosel of thirty winter of age, southward.
What adventure is that that I shall have for my lodging? said Sir Marhaus.
Sir, what adventure so it be, bring me thither I pray thee, said Sir Marhaus; for I am weary, my damosel, and my horse.
Let him in, said the lord, it may happen he shall repent that they took their lodging here.
So Sir Marhaus was let in with torchlight, and there was a goodly sight of young men that welcomed him.
And then his horse was led into the stable, and he and the damosel were brought into the hall, and there stood a mighty duke and many goodly men about him.
Then this lord asked him what he hight, and from whence he came, and with whom he dwelt.
Is there no remedy but that I must have ado with you and your six sons at once? said Sir Marhaus.
What is your name? said Sir Marhaus; I require you tell me, an it please you.
That shall ye feel to morn, said the duke.
Shall I have ado with you? said Sir Marhaus.
CHAPTER twenty five.
And all this while Sir Marhaus touched them not.
And then some of his sons recovered, and would have set upon Sir Marhaus; then Sir Marhaus said to the duke, Cease thy sons, or else I will do the uttermost to you all.
And then they helped up their father, and so by their cominal assent promised to Sir Marhaus never to be foes unto King Arthur, and thereupon at Whitsuntide after to come, he and his sons, and put them in the king's grace.
And who that did best should have a rich circlet of gold worth a thousand besants.
And there Sir Marhaus did so nobly that he was renowned, and had sometime down forty knights, and so the circlet of gold was rewarded him.
So this earl made his complaint unto Sir Marhaus, that there was a giant by him that destroyed all his lands, and how he durst nowhere ride nor go for him.
Sir, said the knight, whether useth he to fight on horseback or on foot?
And there he was in great peril, for the giant was a wily fighter, but at last Sir Marhaus smote off his right arm above the elbow.
Then the giant fled and the knight after him, and so he drove him into a water, but the giant was so high that he might not wade after him.
Then he returned to the Earl Fergus, the which thanked him greatly, and would have given him half his lands, but he would none take.
So he departed to meet at his day aforeset.
CHAPTER twenty six.
So there were in the country two knights that were brethren, and they were called two perilous knights, the one knight hight Sir Edward of the Red Castle, and the other Sir Hue of the Red Castle; and these two brethren had disherited the Lady of the Rock of a barony of lands by their extortion.
And as this knight was lodged with this lady she made her complaint to him of these two knights.
Gramercy said the lady, and thereas I may not acquit you, God shall.
So on the morn the two knights were sent for, that they should come thither to speak with the Lady of the Rock, and wit ye well they failed not, for they came with an hundred horse.
That will we not, said they, for an we do battle, we two will fight with one knight at once, and therefore if ye will fight so, we will be ready at what hour ye will assign.
CHAPTER twenty seven.
And he of his gentleness received his sword, and took him by the hand, and went into the castle together.
Then the Lady of the Rock was passing glad, and the other brother made great sorrow for his brother's death.
Then the lady was restored of all her lands, and Sir Hue was commanded to be at the court of King Arthur at the next feast of Pentecost.
CHAPTER twenty eight.
And so within twelve days they came to Camelot, and the king was passing glad of their coming, and so was all the court.
Then the king made them to swear upon a book to tell him all their adventures that had befallen them that twelvemonth, and so they did.
And there was Sir Marhaus well known, for there were knights that he had matched aforetime, and he was named one of the best knights living.
Against the feast of Pentecost came the Damosel of the Lake and brought with her Sir Pelleas; and at that high feast there was great jousting of knights, and of all knights that were at that jousts, Sir Pelleas had the prize, and Sir Marhaus was named the next; but Sir Pelleas was so strong there might but few knights sit him a buffet with a spear.
And at that next feast Sir Pelleas and Sir Marhaus were made knights of the Table Round, for there were two sieges void, for two knights were slain that twelvemonth, and great joy had King Arthur of Sir Pelleas and of Sir Marhaus.
But Pelleas loved never after Sir Gawaine, but as he spared him for the love of King Arthur; but ofttimes at jousts and tournaments Sir Pelleas quit Sir Gawaine, for so it rehearseth in the book of French.
Explicit liber quartus.
AND when he came to the land he took off his harness, and sat roaring and crying as a man out of his mind.
It was indented with white and black, said the damosel.
Then was Sir Palomides ashamed.
My lord Arthur, said Launcelot, ye put upon me that I should be cause of his departition; God knoweth it was against my will.
But when men be hot in deeds of arms oft they hurt their friends as well as their foes.
And as for me, said Sir Launcelot, I promise you upon this book that an I may meet with him, either with fairness or foulness I shall bring him to this court, or else I shall die therefore.
So Sir Launcelot met with her and asked her why she fled.
And then Sir Launcelot returned unto Dame Bragwaine, and she thanked him of his great labour.
NOW will we speak of Sir Lucan the butler, that by fortune he came riding to the same place thereas was Sir Tristram, and in he came in none other intent but to ask harbour.
Then the porter asked what was his name.
Tell your lord that my name is Sir Lucan, the butler, a Knight of the Round Table.
So the porter went unto Sir Darras, lord of the place, and told him who was there to ask harbour.
So Sir Daname came forth on horseback, and there they met together with spears, and Sir Lucan smote down Sir Daname over his horse's croup, and then he fled into that place, and Sir Lucan rode after him, and asked after him many times.
Then Sir Dinadan said to Sir Tristram: It is shame to see the lord's cousin of this place defoiled.
Abide, said Sir Tristram, and I shall redress it.
And when Sir Dinadan understood that Sir Tristram had hurt Sir Lucan he would have ridden after Sir Lucan for to have slain him, but Sir Tristram would not suffer him.
And at that castle Sir Launcelot promised all his fellows to meet in the quest of Sir Tristram.
So when Sir Tristram was come to his lodging there came a damosel that told Sir Darras that three of his sons were slain at that tournament, and two grievously wounded that they were never like to help themself. And all this was done by a noble knight that bare the black shield, and that was he that bare the prize.
Then came there one and told Sir Darras that the same knight was within, him that bare the black shield.
Then Sir Darras yede unto Sir Tristram's chamber, and there he found his shield and showed it to the damosel.
Ah sir, said the damosel, that same is he that slew your three sons.
But when Sir Palomides saw the falling of sickness of Sir Tristram, then was he heavy for him, and comforted him in all the best wise he could.
And as the French book saith, there came forty knights to Sir Darras that were of his own kin, and they would have slain Sir Tristram and his two fellows, but Sir Darras would not suffer that, but kept them in prison, and meat and drink they had.
So Sir Tristram endured there great pain, for sickness had undertaken him, and that is the greatest pain a prisoner may have.
Right so did Sir Tristram when sickness had undertaken him, for then he took such sorrow that he had almost slain himself.
CHAPTER thirty eight.
But there was one knight that did marvellously three days, and he bare a black shield, and of all knights that ever I saw he proved the best knight.
And therewithal the king smote down his head, and in his heart he feared sore that Sir Tristram should get him such worship in the realm of Logris wherethrough that he himself should not be able to withstand him.
Then was the king wood wroth that he had no knights to answer him.
Then was King Mark sorry and wroth out of measure that he had no knight to revenge his nephew, Sir Andred.
Sir, said Sir Dinas, I am full loath to have ado with any knight of the Round Table.
Yet, said the king, for my love take upon thee to joust.
Alas, he said, have I no knight that will encounter with yonder knight?
Then King Mark armed him, and took his horse and his spear, with a squire with him.
Fie on you false knight, said Sir Kay, for ye of Cornwall are nought worth.
And so he departed.
CHAPTER thirty nine.
THEN there came Sir Kay, the Seneschal, unto King Mark, and there he had good cheer showing outward.
Sir, said Sir Kay, I will prove it.
And Sir Gaheris said he would be avised for King Mark was ever full of treason: and therewithal Sir Gaheris departed and rode his way.
And by the same way that Sir Kay should ride he laid him down to rest, charging his squire to wait upon Sir Kay; And warn me when he cometh.
So within a while Sir Kay came riding that way, and then Sir Gaheris took his horse and met him, and said: Sir Kay, ye are not wise to ride at the request of King Mark, for he dealeth all with treason.
Then said Sir Kay: I require you let us prove this adventure.
The meanwhile King Mark within the castle of Tintagil avoided all his barons, and all other save such as were privy with him were avoided out of his chamber.
And then he let call his nephew Sir Andred, and bade arm him and horse him lightly; and by that time it was midnight.
And so King Mark was armed in black, horse and all; and so at a privy postern they two issued out with their varlets with them, and rode till they came to that lake.
And King Mark rode against him, and smote each other full hard, for the moon shone as the bright day.
And there at that jousts Sir Kay's horse fell down, for his horse was not so big as the king's horse, and Sir Kay's horse bruised him full sore.
Then Sir Gaheris was wroth that Sir Kay had a fall.
And then they yode both on foot to them, and bade them yield them, and tell their names outher they should die.
Save my life, said King Mark, and I will make amends; and consider that I am a king anointed.
With that he lashed at King Mark without saying any more, and covered him with his shield and defended him as he might.
And then Sir Kay lashed at Sir Andred, and therewithal King Mark yielded him unto Sir Gaheris.
And then he kneeled adown, and made his oath upon the cross of the sword, that never while he lived he would be against errant knights.
And also he sware to be good friend unto Sir Tristram if ever he came into Cornwall.
And therewithal Sir Kay let him go.
And so Sir Kay and Sir Gaheris rode their way unto Dinas, the Seneschal, for because they heard say that he loved well Sir Tristram.
And so within a little while they met with Sir Launcelot that always had Dame Bragwaine with him, to that intent he weened to have met the sooner with Sir Tristram; and Sir Launcelot asked what tidings in Cornwall, and whether they heard of Sir Tristram or not.
Then they told Sir Launcelot word by word of their adventure.
So sir Dinas smote him down, that with the fall he brake his leg and his arm.
Nay, said sir Dinas, I shall never trust them that once betrayed me, and therefore, as ye have begun, so end, for I will never meddle with you.
Right so came in a damosel and said: Knights, be of good cheer, for ye are sure of your lives, and that I heard say my lord, Sir Darras.
Then were they glad all three, for daily they weened they should have died.
He said: Sir knight, me repenteth of thy sickness for thou art called a full noble knight, and so it seemeth by thee; and wit ye well it shall never be said that Sir Darras shall destroy such a noble knight as thou art in prison, howbeit that thou hast slain three of my sons whereby I was greatly aggrieved.
And if I had slain them by treason or treachery I had been worthy to have died.
Then Sir Tristram reposed him there till that he was amended of his sickness; and when he was big and strong they took their leave, and every knight took their horses, and so departed and rode together till they came to a cross way. Now fellows, said Sir Tristram, here will we depart in sundry ways.
And because Sir Dinadan had the first adventure of him I will begin.
CHAPTER forty one.
SO as Sir Dinadan rode by a well he found a lady making great dole. What aileth you? said Sir Dinadan.
Let him come, said Sir Dinadan, and because of honour of all women I will do my part.
With this came Sir Breuse, and when he saw a knight with his lady he was wood wroth.
And then he said: Sir knight, keep thee from me.
Jesu defend! said Sir Tristram, for I was but late a prisoner.
Who is that knight?
And because she deemed that Sir Launcelot loved Queen Guenever paramour, and she him again, therefore Queen Morgan le Fay ordained that shield to put Sir Launcelot to a rebuke, to that intent that King Arthur might understand the love between them.
Alas, my fair friend, ye shall find him the best knight that ever ye met withal, for I know him better than ye do.
And when he came nigh to Sir Tristram he cried on high: Sir knight, keep thee from me.
Then they rushed together as it had been thunder, and Sir Hemison brised his spear upon Sir Tristram, but his harness was so good that he might not hurt him.
And Sir Tristram smote him harder, and bare him through the body, and he fell over his horse's croup.
Then Sir Tristram turned to have done more with his sword, but he saw so much blood go from him that him seemed he was likely to die, and so he departed from him and came to a fair manor to an old knight, and there Sir Tristram lodged.
NOW leave to speak of Sir Tristram, and speak we of the knight that was wounded to the death.
Then his varlet alighted, and took off his helm, and then he asked his lord whether there were any life in him.
When Morgan le Fay saw him dead she made great sorrow out of reason; and then she let despoil him unto his shirt, and so she let him put into a tomb.
And about the tomb she let write: Here lieth Sir Hemison, slain by the hands of Sir Tristram de Liones.
Now turn we unto Sir Tristram, that asked the knight his host if he saw late any knights adventurous.
Sir, he said, the last night here lodged with me Ector de Maris and a damosel with him, and that damosel told me that he was one of the best knights of the world.
Why name ye not Sir Tristram? said his host, for I account him as good as any of them.
Thus they talked and bourded as long as them list, and then went to rest.
Then was there a damosel of Queen Morgan in a chamber by King Arthur, and when she heard King Arthur speak of that shield, then she spake openly unto King Arthur.
Sir King, wit ye well this shield was ordained for you, to warn you of your shame and dishonour, and that longeth to you and your queen.
And then anon that damosel picked her away privily, that no man wist where she was become.
Then Queen Guenever called to her Sir Ector de Maris, and there she made her complaint to him, and said: I wot well this shield was made by Morgan le Fay in despite of me and of Sir Launcelot, wherefore I dread me sore lest I should be destroyed.
Then ever Sir Tristram smote down knights wonderly to behold, what upon the right hand and upon the left hand, that unnethe no knight might withstand him.
And the King of Scots and the King of Ireland began to withdraw them.
A visit to mrs Manson Mingott was always an amusing episode to the young man.
The house in itself was already an historic document, though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue.
She seemed in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her confidence.
Meanwhile, as every one she cared to see came to HER (and she could fill her rooms as easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a single item to the menu of her suppers), she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.
A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late mr Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.
Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction, and architectural incentives to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed of.
That was how women with lovers lived in the wicked old societies, in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent propinquities that their novels described.
To the general relief the Countess Olenska was not present in her grandmother's drawing room during the visit of the betrothed couple. mrs Mingott said she had gone out; which, on a day of such glaring sunlight, and at the "shopping hour," seemed in itself an indelicate thing for a compromised woman to do.
But at any rate it spared them the embarrassment of her presence, and the faint shadow that her unhappy past might seem to shed on their radiant future.
The visit went off successfully, as was to have been expected.
Old mrs Mingott was delighted with the engagement, which, being long foreseen by watchful relatives, had been carefully passed upon in family council; and the engagement ring, a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws, met with her unqualified admiration.
"It's the new setting: of course it shows the stone beautifully, but it looks a little bare to old-fashioned eyes," mrs Welland had explained, with a conciliatory side glance at her future son in law.
"old-fashioned eyes?
I like all the novelties," said the ancestress, lifting the stone to her small bright orbs, which no glasses had ever disfigured.
But it's the hand that sets off the ring, isn't it, my dear mr Archer?" and she waved one of her tiny hands, with small pointed nails and rolls of aged fat encircling the wrist like ivory bracelets.
Her hand is large-it's these modern sports that spread the joints-but the skin is white.--And when's the wedding to be?" she broke off, fixing her eyes on Archer's face.
"Oh-" mrs Welland murmured, while the young man, smiling at his betrothed, replied: "As soon as ever it can, if only you'll back me up, mrs Mingott."
"We must give them time to get to know each other a little better, mamma," mrs Welland interposed, with the proper affectation of reluctance; to which the ancestress rejoined: "Know each other? Fiddlesticks!
These successive statements were received with the proper expressions of amusement, incredulity and gratitude; and the visit was breaking up in a vein of mild pleasantry when the door opened to admit the Countess Olenska, who entered in bonnet and mantle followed by the unexpected figure of Julius Beaufort.
There was a cousinly murmur of pleasure between the ladies, and mrs Mingott held out Ferrigiani's model to the banker.
"Thanks.
"Sit down-sit down, Beaufort: push up the yellow armchair; now I've got you I want a good gossip.
She had forgotten her relatives, who were drifting out into the hall under Ellen Olenska's guidance.
Old mrs Mingott had always professed a great admiration for Julius Beaufort, and there was a kind of kinship in their cool domineering way and their short cuts through the conventions.
In the hall, while mrs Welland and May drew on their furs, Archer saw that the Countess Olenska was looking at him with a faintly questioning smile.
"Of course you know already-about May and me," he said, answering her look with a shy laugh.
mrs van der Luyden still wore black velvet and Venetian point when she went into society-or rather (since she never dined out) when she threw open her own doors to receive it.
Her fair hair, which had faded without turning grey, was still parted in flat overlapping points on her forehead, and the straight nose that divided her pale blue eyes was only a little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait had been painted.
She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life in death.
Like all his family, he esteemed and admired mrs van der Luyden; but he found her gentle bending sweetness less approachable than the grimness of some of his mother's old aunts, fierce spinsters who said "No" on principle before they knew what they were going to be asked.
mrs van der Luyden's attitude said neither yes nor no, but always appeared to incline to clemency till her thin lips, wavering into the shadow of a smile, made the almost invariable reply: "I shall first have to talk this over with my husband."
She and mr van der Luyden were so exactly alike that Archer often wondered how, after forty years of the closest conjugality, two such merged identities ever separated themselves enough for anything as controversial as a talking over.
But as neither had ever reached a decision without prefacing it by this mysterious conclave, mrs Archer and her son, having set forth their case, waited resignedly for the familiar phrase.
mrs van der Luyden, however, who had seldom surprised any one, now surprised them by reaching her long hand toward the bell rope.
"I think," she said, "I should like Henry to hear what you have told me."
A footman appeared, to whom she gravely added: "If mr van der Luyden has finished reading the newspaper, please ask him to be kind enough to come."
The double doors had solemnly reopened and between them appeared mr Henry van der Luyden, tall, spare and frock coated, with faded fair hair, a straight nose like his wife's and the same look of frozen gentleness in eyes that were merely pale grey instead of pale blue.
"I had just finished reading the Times," he said, laying his long finger tips together.
"In town my mornings are so much occupied that I find it more convenient to read the newspapers after luncheon."
"Ah, there's a great deal to be said for that plan-indeed I think my uncle Egmont used to say he found it less agitating not to read the morning papers till after dinner," said mrs Archer responsively.
"Yes: my good father abhorred hurry.
But now we live in a constant rush," said mr van der Luyden in measured tones, looking with pleasant deliberation about the large shrouded room which to Archer was so complete an image of its owners.
"But I hope you HAD finished your reading, Henry?" his wife interposed.
"Quite-quite," he reassured her.
"Then I should like Adeline to tell you-"
"Oh, it's really Newland's story," said his mother smiling; and proceeded to rehearse once more the monstrous tale of the affront inflicted on mrs Lovell Mingott.
"Of course," she ended, "Augusta Welland and Mary Mingott both felt that, especially in view of Newland's engagement, you and Henry OUGHT TO KNOW."
"Ah-" said mr van der Luyden, drawing a deep breath.
There was a silence during which the tick of the monumental ormolu clock on the white marble mantelpiece grew as loud as the boom of a minute gun.
Archer contemplated with awe the two slender faded figures, seated side by side in a kind of viceregal rigidity, mouthpieces of some remote ancestral authority which fate compelled them to wield, when they would so much rather have lived in simplicity and seclusion, digging invisible weeds out of the perfect lawns of Skuytercliff, and playing Patience together in the evenings.
mr van der Luyden was the first to speak.
"I'm certain of it, sir.
"We'll hope it has not quite come to that," said mr van der Luyden firmly.
But instantly she became aware of her mistake.
The van der Luydens were morbidly sensitive to any criticism of their secluded existence. They were the arbiters of fashion, the Court of last Appeal, and they knew it, and bowed to their fate.
But being shy and retiring persons, with no natural inclination for their part, they lived as much as possible in the sylvan solitude of Skuytercliff, and when they came to town, declined all invitations on the plea of mrs van der Luyden's health.
Newland Archer came to his mother's rescue.
"Everybody in New York knows what you and cousin Louisa represent.
That's why mrs Mingott felt she ought not to allow this slight on Countess Olenska to pass without consulting you."
mrs van der Luyden glanced at her husband, who glanced back at her.
"It is the principle that I dislike," said mr van der Luyden.
"As long as a member of a well-known family is backed up by that family it should be considered-final."
"I had no idea," mr van der Luyden continued, "that things had come to such a pass." He paused, and looked at his wife again.
"It occurs to me, my dear, that the Countess Olenska is already a sort of relation-through Medora Manson's first husband.
At any rate, she will be when Newland marries." He turned toward the young man.
"Have you read this morning's Times, Newland?"
"Why, yes, sir," said Archer, who usually tossed off half a dozen papers with his morning coffee.
Husband and wife looked at each other again.
Their pale eyes clung together in prolonged and serious consultation; then a faint smile fluttered over mrs van der Luyden's face.
She had evidently guessed and approved.
mr van der Luyden turned to mrs Archer.
"If Louisa's health allowed her to dine out-I wish you would say to mrs Lovell Mingott-she and I would have been happy to-er-fill the places of the Lawrence Leffertses at her dinner." He paused to let the irony of this sink in. "As you know, this is impossible." mrs Archer sounded a sympathetic assent.
I am sure Louisa will be as glad as I am if Countess Olenska will let us include her among our guests." He got up, bent his long body with a stiff friendliness toward his cousin, and added: "I think I have Louisa's authority for saying that she will herself leave the invitation to dine when she drives out presently: with our cards-of course with our cards."
"But dr Carver-aren't you afraid of dr Carver?
I hear he's been staying with you at the Blenkers'."
She smiled.
"Oh, the Carver danger is over.
dr Carver is a very clever man.
He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is simply a good advertisement as a convert."
"A convert to what?"
"To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes.
But, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition-somebody else's tradition-that I see among our own friends.
It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country." She smiled across the table.
"Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?"
Archer changed colour.
"And Beaufort-do you say these things to Beaufort?" he asked abruptly.
But I used to; and he understands."
And you like Beaufort because he's so unlike us." He looked about the bare room and out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung along the shore.
"We're damnably dull.
We've no character, no colour, no variety.--I wonder," he broke out, "why you don't go back?"
Her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant rejoinder.
But she sat silent, as if thinking over what he had said, and he grew frightened lest she should answer that she wondered too.
At length she said: "I believe it's because of you."
It was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately, or in a tone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed.
Archer reddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock about it if it were left undisturbed.
"At least," she continued, "it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison.
"Exquisite pleasures-it's something to have had them!" he felt like retorting; but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent.
"I want," she went on, "to be perfectly honest with you-and with myself.
For a long time I've hoped this chance would come: that I might tell you how you've helped me, what you've made of me-"
Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows.
He interrupted her with a laugh.
"And what do you make out that you've made of me?"
She paled a little.
"Of you?"
Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush.
"I thought-you promised-you were not to say such things today."
None of you will ever see a bad business through!"
She lowered her voice.
He stood in the window, drumming against the raised sash, and feeling in every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken her cousin's name.
"For that's the thing we've always got to think of-haven't we-by your own showing?" she insisted.
"My own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still on the sea.
He turned around without moving from his place.
"And in that case there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?" he concluded for her.
Her eyes were clinging to him desperately.
"Oh, IS there no reason?"
"Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage.
You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one.
It's beyond human enduring-that's all."
"Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!" she burst out, her eyes filling.
"You too-oh, all this time, you too?"
For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly downward.
Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any show of moving.
He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.
His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone.
But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him.
There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart.
She sat motionless, with lowered lids.
"Oh-I shan't go yet!"
"Not yet?
At that she raised her clearest eyes.
"I promise you: not as long as you hold out.
Not as long as we can look straight at each other like this."
He dropped into his chair.
What her answer really said was: "If you lift a finger you'll drive me back: back to all the abominations you know of, and all the temptations you half guess." He understood it as clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept him anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred submission.
"What a life for you!--" he groaned.
"And mine a part of yours?"
"And that's to be all-for either of us?"
"Well; it IS all, isn't it?"
At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her face.
They fell into his, while her arms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her surrendered face say the rest.
They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few moments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered.
He must do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it.
"I won't go back," she said; and turning away she opened the door and led the way into the public dining room.
Frithiof was a Norwegian hero, grandson of Viking, who was the largest and strongest man of his time.
Viking had sailed the sea in a dragon ship, meeting with many adventures, and Thorsten, Frithiof's father, had likewise sailed abroad, capturing many priceless treasures and making a great name for himself.
The warning, however, came too late, for Frithiof already loved the fair maiden, and vowed that he would have her for his bride at any cost.
Soon after this the king died, leaving his kingdom to his two sons and giving instructions that his funeral mound should be erected in sight of that of his dear friend Thorsten, so that their spirits might not be separated even in death.
Frithiof was now one of the wealthiest and most envied of land owners. His treasures were richer by far than those of any king.
Great was his grief when the time came for her to sail away.
His ship was prepared and soon he touched the shore near the temple of the god Balder.
His request was not granted and Helge dismissed him contemptuously.
Soon after his departure another suitor, the aged King Ring of Norway sought the hand of Ingeborg in marriage, and being refused, collected an army and prepared to make war on Helge and Halfdan.
Then the two brothers were glad to send a messenger after Frithiof, asking his aid.
The hero, still angry, refused; but he hastened at once to Ingeborg.
He found her in tears at the shrine of Balder, and although it was considered a sin for a man and woman to exchange words in the sacred temple, he spoke to her, again making known his love.
But the kings had heard of how Frithiof had spoken to Ingeborg in the temple, and although they feared Sigurd they would not grant the request.
He comforted his crew, and then climbed the mast to keep a sharp lookout for danger.
From there he spied a huge whale, upon which the two witches were seated, delighted at the tempest they had stirred up.
Speaking to his good ship, which could both hear and obey, he bade it run down the whale and the witches.
But many of the crew were worn out by the battle with the elements and had to be carried ashore by Frithiof and Bjoern when they reached the Orkney Islands.
Frithiof had no weapons, but with a turn of his wrist he threw his opponent.
Horror stricken, Frithiof tried to stop the blaze, and when he could not, hurried away to his ship.
So Frithiof became an exile, and a wanderer on the face of the earth. For many years he lived the life of a pirate or viking, exacting tribute from other ships or sacking them if they would not pay tribute; for this occupation in the days of Frithiof was considered wholly respectable.
It was followed again and again by the brave men of the North.
But Frithiof was often homesick, and longed to enter a harbor, and lead again a life of peace.
At last he decided to visit the court of Sigurd Ring and find out whether Ingeborg was really happy.
Landing, he wrapped himself in an old cloak and approached the court.
At this Sigurd Ring invited the old man to remove his mantle and take a seat near him.
"Who are you who comes to us thus?" asked Sigurd Ring.
One spring day Sigurd and Frithiof had ridden away on a hunting expedition, and the old king being tired from the chase lay down on the ground to rest, feigning sleep.
But Frithiof was too fine and loyal to listen to such suggestions.
"You are Frithiof the Bold," he said, "and from the first I knew you. Be patient now a little longer and you shall have Ingeborg, for my end is near."
Soon after this Sigurd died, commending his wife to the young hero's loving care.
The people, admiring his bravery, wanted to make Frithiof king, but he would not listen to their pleadings.
Instead he lifted the little son of Sigurd upon his shield.
"Behold your king," he cried, "and until he is grown to manhood I will stand beside him."
CHAP.
MY SECOND STAGE
Bear not false witness, slander not, nor lie; Truth is the speech of inward purity.
In my first stage the reader will perceive that I was a comparatively weak and harmless little slander, with merely that taint of original sin which was to be expected in one of such parentage.
But I developed with great rapidity; and I believe men of science will tell you that this is always the case with low organisms.
That, for instance, while it takes years to develop the man from the baby, and months to develop the dog from the puppy, the baby monad will grow to maturity in an hour.
Personally I should have preferred to linger in mrs O'Reilly's pleasant drawing room, for, as I said before, my victim interested me, and I wanted to observe him more closely and hear what he talked about.
But I received orders to attend evensong at the parish church, and to haunt the mind of Lena Houghton.
As we passed down the High Street the bells rang out loud and clear, and they made me feel the same slight sense of discomfort that I had felt when I looked at Zaluski; however, I went on, and soon entered the church.
It was a fine old Gothic building, and the afternoon sunshine seemed to flood the whole place; even the white stones in the aisle were glorified here and there with gorgeous patches of colour from the stained glass windows.
But the strange stillness and quiet oppressed me, I did not feel nearly so much at home as in mrs O'Reilly's drawing room-to use a terrestrial simile, I felt like a fish out of water.
Try as I would, I could not distract her attention or gain the slightest hold upon her, and I really believe I should have been altogether baffled, had not the rector unconsciously come to my aid.
All through the prayers and psalms I had fought a desperate fight without gaining a single inch.
Then the rector walked over to the lectern, and the moment he opened his mouth I knew that my time had come, and that there was a very fair chance of victory before me.
Whether this clergyman had a toothache, or a headache, or a heavy load on his mind, I cannot say, but his reading was more lugubrious than the wind in an equinoctial gale.
Hardly had the rector announced, "Here beginneth the forty fourth verse of the sixteenth chapter of the book of the prophet ezekiel," than a sort of relaxation took place in the mind I was attacking.
Lena Houghton's attention could only have been given to the drearily read lesson by a very great effort; she was a little lazy and did not make the effort, she thought how nice it was to sit down again, and then the melancholy voice lulled her into a vague interval of thoughtless inactivity.
I promptly seized my opportunity, and in a moment her whole mind was full of me.
She was an excitable, impressionable sort of girl, and when once I had obtained an entrance into her mind I found it the easiest thing in the world to dominate her thoughts.
I crowded out the Magnificat with a picture of Zaluski and Gertrude Morley.
I led her through more terrible future possibilities in the second lesson than would be required for a three volume novel.
The congregation rose.
Lena Houghton, still dominated by me, knelt longer than the rest, but at last she got up and walked down the aisle, and I felt a great sense of relief and satisfaction.
We were out in the open air once more, and I had triumphed; I was quite sure that she would tell the first person she met, for, as I have said before, she was entirely taken up with me, and to have kept me to herself would have required far more strength and unselfishness than she at that moment possessed.
She walked slowly through the churchyard, feeling much pleased to see that the curate had just left the vestry door, and that in a few moments their paths must converge.
mr Blackthorne had only been ordained three or four years, and was a little younger, and much less experienced in the ways of the world, than Sigismund Zaluski.
He was a good well meaning fellow, a little narrow, a little prejudiced, a little spoiled by the devotion of the district visitors and Sunday School teachers; but he was honest and energetic, and as a worker among the poor few could have equalled him.
He seemed to fancy, however, that with the poor his work ended, and he was not always so wise as he might have been in Muddleton society.
"Good afternoon, Miss Houghton," he exclaimed.
"Do you happen to know if your brother is at home?
I want just to speak to him about the choir treat."
And they walked home together.
"I am so glad to have this chance of speaking to you," she began rather nervously.
"I wanted particularly to ask your advice."
mr Blackthorne, being human and young, was not unnaturally flattered by this remark.
True, he was becoming well accustomed to this sort of thing, since the ladies of Muddleton were far more fond of seeking advice from the young and good looking curate than from the elderly and experienced rector.
For though he liked the honour of being consulted, he did not always like the trouble it involved, and he remembered with a shudder that Miss Houghton had once asked him his opinion about the 'Ethical Concept of the Good.'
"It was only that I was so troubled about something mrs O'Reilly has just told me," said Lena Houghton.
"You won't tell any one that I told you?"
"On no account," said the curate, warmly.
"Well, you know mr Zaluski, and how the Morleys have taken him up?"
"Every one has taken him up," said the curate, with the least little touch of resentment in his tone.
"I knew that the Morleys were his special friends; I imagine that he admires Miss Morley."
"Yes, every one thinks they are either engaged or on the brink of it.
The curate looked startled.
"Why, I don't profess to like mr Zaluski," he said.
"But I don't know anything exactly against him."
"But I do.
"What did she tell you?" he asked with some curiosity.
"Why, she has found out that he is really a Nihilist-just think of a Nihilist going about loose like this, and playing tennis at the rectory and all the good houses!
And not only that, but she says he is altogether a dangerous, unprincipled man with a dreadful temper.
You can't think how unhappy she is about poor Gertrude, and so am I, for we were at school together and have always been friends."
"I am very sorry to hear about it," said mr Blackthorne, "but I don't see that anything can be done.
You see, one does not like to interfere in these sort of things.
It seems officious rather, and meddlesome."
"Yes, that is the worst of it," she replied, with a sigh.
"I suppose we can do nothing.
Still, it has been a great relief just to tell you about it and get it off my mind.
I suppose we can only hope that something may put a stop to it all-we must just leave it to chance."
This sentiment amused me not a little.
Leave it to chance indeed!
Had she not caused me to grow stronger and larger by every word she uttered? And had not the conversation revealed to me mr Blackthorn's one vulnerable part?
I knew well enough that I should be able to dominate his thoughts as I had done hers.
Finding me burdensome, she had passed me on to somebody else with additions that vastly increased my working powers, and then she talked of leaving it to chance!
The way in which mortals practise pious frauds on themselves is really delightful!
And yet Lena Houghton was a good sort of girl, and had from her childhood repeated the catechism words which proclaim that, "My duty to my neighbour is to love him as myself . . .
To keep my tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slandering." What is more, she took great pains to teach these words to a big class of Sunday School children, and went, rain or shine, to spend two hours each Sunday in a stuffy school room for that purpose.
It was strange that she should be so ready to believe evil of her neighbour, and so eager to spread the story.
But my progenitor is clever, and doubtless knows very well, whom to select as his tools.
For more information, or to volunteer, please visit librivox dot org.
vol five
In the connection of the church and state, I have considered the former as subservient only, and relative, to the latter; a salutary maxim, if in fact, as well as in narrative, it had ever been held sacred.
But I have reviewed, with diligence and pleasure, the objects of ecclesiastical history, by which the decline and fall of the Roman empire were materially affected, the propagation of Christianity, the constitution of the Catholic church, the ruin of Paganism, and the sects that arose from the mysterious controversies concerning the Trinity and incarnation.
The first introduction of a symbolic worship was in the veneration of the cross, and of relics.
At first, the experiment was made with caution and scruple; and the venerable pictures were discreetly allowed to instruct the ignorant, to awaken the cold, and to gratify the prejudices of the heathen proselytes.
The most audacious pencil might tremble in the rash attempt of defining, by forms and colors, the infinite Spirit, the eternal Father, who pervades and sustains the universe.
EGBERT
They learned much about Britain; for trading vessels, even at that early day, crossed the Channel.
After the Roman legions had left Britain, the Jutes, led, it is said, by two great captains named Hengist and Horsa, landed upon the southeastern coast and made a settlement.
Aid came to them in a singular way.
He asked the dealer who they were.
"Angles," was the answer.
Still, though both Angles and Saxons called themselves Christians, they were seldom at peace; and for more than two hundred years they frequently fought.
Soon after this a welcome message came to Egbert.
The mind of the people in Wessex had changed and they had elected him king.
ALFRED THE GREAT
Alfred was the son of Ethelwulf, king of the West Saxons.
When Alfred was a boy there were no printed books.
Moreover, the art of making paper had not yet been invented.
"Oh, what a lovely book!" exclaimed the boys.
Much to the surprise of his brothers, Alfred proved to be the best reader and his mother gave him the book.
It was a long and tiresome journey, made mostly on horseback.
Some great battles were fought, and Alfred's elder brother Ethelred, king of the West Saxons, was killed.
Thus Alfred became king.
They kept the people in constant alarm. Alfred therefore determined to meet the pirates on their own element, the sea.
Alfred himself was obliged to flee for his life.
Once, when very hungry, he went into the house of a cowherd and asked for something to eat.
three
At last, Guth'rum, the commander of the Danes, ordered the minstrel to be brought to his tent.
Alfred went.
Guthrum was taken prisoner and brought before Alfred.
HENRY THE FOWLER
Then they would swiftly dart at their prey and bear it to the ground.
Kneeling at his feet, the messenger said:
Then he exclaimed:
I cannot believe it.
The infantry also were carefully drilled.
"Our truce is ended."
His son Otto succeeded him.
As they were passing a deep mire they heard cries for help, and turning, saw a poor leper who was sinking in the mud.
One of the knights, a handsome young man, was touched by the cries.
After supper the knight shared his own bed with the leper.
If the knight had not done this, the leper would have been driven out of the town, with nothing to eat and no place in which to sleep.
At midnight, while the young man was fast asleep, the leper breathed upon his back.
This awakened the knight, who turned quickly in his bed and found that the leper was gone.
The knight called for a light and searched, but in vain.
With that the vision vanished.
The Saracens called him "The Cid," or Lord.
Each was to choose a champion. The champions were to fight, and the king whose champion won was to have the city.
To this they gladly agreed.
Soon they reached the town of Alcocer, and after a siege captured it and lived in it.
Suddenly and swiftly they poured from the gate of Alcocer, and a terrible battle was fought.
He was determined to capture Toledo.
Food became very scarce in Valencia.
Wheat, barley and cheese were all so dear that none but the rich could buy them.
Then on the fifteenth of June, ten ninety four, the governor went to the camp of the Cid and delivered to him the keys of the city.
They crossed from Africa to Spain and laid siege to Valencia.
In time the Cid's health began to fail.
The king awoke.
WARWICK THE KINGMAKER
LIVED FROM fourteen twenty eight to fourteen seventy one
The earl of Warwick, known as the "kingmaker," was the most famous man in England for many years after the death of Henry the fifth He lived in a great castle with two towers higher than most church spires. It is one of the handsomest dwellings in the world and is visited every year by thousands of people.
An armed troop was approaching.
The earl himself was behind them.
The gate was opened.
Passing through it and on to the castle, the earl and his company were soon within its strong stone walls.
The earl spoke the truth.
The earl of Warwick added: "You are the rightful heir to the throne. The claim of Henry the sixth comes through Lancaster, the fourth son of Edward the third-yours through Lionel, the second.
His claim comes through his father only-yours through both your father and mother.
It is a better claim and it is a double claim."
"That is true, my cousin of Warwick," replied the duke of York, "but we must not plunge England into war."
"Let us first ask for reform.
The king paid no attention to it.
Then a war began.
It lasted for thirty years.
Those who fought on the king's side were called Lancastrians, because Henry's ancestor, john of Gaunt, was the duke of Lancaster.
The duke of York was killed, and the queen ordered some of her men to cut off his head, put upon it a paper crown in mockery, and fix it over one of the gates of the city of York.
But the people were still discontented.
She left London and the kingmaker entered the city in triumph.
A robber met them, but Margaret, with wonderful courage, said to him, "I am your queen and this is your prince.
I entrust him to your care."
The man was pleased with the confidence that she showed.
three
But though Edward had fled, he was not discouraged.
But Richard was determined to make himself king.
So he put both the young princes in the Tower.
But he was mistaken.
One person did claim it.
Richard was a bad man, but he was brave, and he fought like a lion. However, it was all in vain.
With a purer spirit did Fanny rejoice in the intelligence.
She heard it at dinner, and felt it a blessing.
By all the others it was mentioned with regret; and his merits honoured with due gradation of feeling-from the sincerity of Edmund's too partial regard, to the unconcern of his mother speaking entirely by rote.
Another day or two, and mr Yates was gone likewise.
Sir Thomas had been quite indifferent to mr Crawford's going or staying: but his good wishes for mr Yates's having a pleasant journey, as he walked with him to the hall door, were given with genuine satisfaction.
CHAPTER fifteen
On their return from the park they found Willoughby's curricle and servant in waiting at the cottage, and mrs Dashwood was convinced that her conjecture had been just.
So far it was all as she had foreseen; but on entering the house she beheld what no foresight had taught her to expect.
He turned round on their coming in, and his countenance shewed that he strongly partook of the emotion which over powered Marianne.
"Is anything the matter with her?" cried mrs Dashwood as she entered-"is she ill?"
"Disappointment?"
"Yes, for I am unable to keep my engagement with you.
mrs Smith has this morning exercised the privilege of riches upon a poor dependent cousin, by sending me on business to London.
I have just received my dispatches, and taken my farewell of Allenham; and by way of exhilaration I am now come to take my farewell of you."
"To London!--and are you going this morning?"
"Almost this moment."
"This is very unfortunate.
But mrs Smith must be obliged;--and her business will not detain you from us long I hope."
He coloured as he replied, "You are very kind, but I have no idea of returning into Devonshire immediately.
My visits to mrs Smith are never repeated within the twelvemonth."
"And is mrs Smith your only friend?
For shame, Willoughby, can you wait for an invitation here?"
His colour increased; and with his eyes fixed on the ground he only replied, "You are too good."
mrs Dashwood looked at Elinor with surprise.
Elinor felt equal amazement.
For a few moments every one was silent.
mrs Dashwood first spoke.
"I have only to add, my dear Willoughby, that at Barton cottage you will always be welcome; for I will not press you to return here immediately, because you only can judge how far THAT might be pleasing to mrs Smith; and on this head I shall be no more disposed to question your judgment than to doubt your inclination."
"My engagements at present," replied Willoughby, confusedly, "are of such a nature-that-I dare not flatter myself"--
He stopt.
mrs Dashwood was too much astonished to speak, and another pause succeeded.
This was broken by Willoughby, who said with a faint smile, "It is folly to linger in this manner.
I will not torment myself any longer by remaining among friends whose society it is impossible for me now to enjoy."
He then hastily took leave of them all and left the room.
They saw him step into his carriage, and in a minute it was out of sight.
mrs Dashwood felt too much for speech, and instantly quitted the parlour to give way in solitude to the concern and alarm which this sudden departure occasioned.
Elinor's uneasiness was at least equal to her mother's.
She thought of what had just passed with anxiety and distrust.
Willoughby's behaviour in taking leave of them, his embarrassment, and affectation of cheerfulness, and, above all, his unwillingness to accept her mother's invitation, a backwardness so unlike a lover, so unlike himself, greatly disturbed her.
But whatever might be the particulars of their separation, her sister's affliction was indubitable; and she thought with the tenderest compassion of that violent sorrow which Marianne was in all probability not merely giving way to as a relief, but feeding and encouraging as a duty.
In about half an hour her mother returned, and though her eyes were red, her countenance was not uncheerful.
"Our dear Willoughby is now some miles from Barton, Elinor," said she, as she sat down to work, "and with how heavy a heart does he travel?"
"It is all very strange.
So suddenly to be gone!
It seems but the work of a moment.
And last night he was with us so happy, so cheerful, so affectionate?
He did not speak, he did not behave like himself.
YOU must have seen the difference as well as i What can it be?
Can they have quarrelled?
"It was not inclination that he wanted, Elinor; I could plainly see THAT.
He had not the power of accepting it.
"Can you, indeed!"
"Yes.
I am persuaded that mrs Smith suspects his regard for Marianne, disapproves of it, (perhaps because she has other views for him,) and on that account is eager to get him away;--and that the business which she sends him off to transact is invented as an excuse to dismiss him. This is what I believe to have happened.
He is, moreover, aware that she DOES disapprove the connection, he dares not therefore at present confess to her his engagement with Marianne, and he feels himself obliged, from his dependent situation, to give into her schemes, and absent himself from Devonshire for a while.
And now, Elinor, what have you to say?"
"Nothing, for you have anticipated my answer."
You had rather look out for misery for Marianne, and guilt for poor Willoughby, than an apology for the latter.
Are no probabilities to be accepted, merely because they are not certainties?
Is nothing due to the man whom we have all such reason to love, and no reason in the world to think ill of?
To the possibility of motives unanswerable in themselves, though unavoidably secret for a while?
And, after all, what is it you suspect him of?"
"I can hardly tell myself.
But suspicion of something unpleasant is the inevitable consequence of such an alteration as we just witnessed in him.
There is great truth, however, in what you have now urged of the allowances which ought to be made for him, and it is my wish to be candid in my judgment of every body.
Willoughby may undoubtedly have very sufficient reasons for his conduct, and I will hope that he has. But it would have been more like Willoughby to acknowledge them at once.
Secrecy may be advisable; but still I cannot help wondering at its being practiced by him."
"Do not blame him, however, for departing from his character, where the deviation is necessary.
But you really do admit the justice of what I have said in his defence?--I am happy-and he is acquitted."
"Not entirely.
It may be proper to conceal their engagement (if they ARE engaged) from mrs Smith-and if that is the case, it must be highly expedient for Willoughby to be but little in Devonshire at present.
But this is no excuse for their concealing it from us."
"Concealing it from us! my dear child, do you accuse Willoughby and Marianne of concealment?
This is strange indeed, when your eyes have been reproaching them every day for incautiousness."
"I want no proof of their affection," said Elinor; "but of their engagement I do."
"I am perfectly satisfied of both."
"Yet not a syllable has been said to you on the subject, by either of them."
"I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly.
Has not his behaviour to Marianne and to all of us, for at least the last fortnight, declared that he loved and considered her as his future wife, and that he felt for us the attachment of the nearest relation? Have we not perfectly understood each other?
Has not my consent been daily asked by his looks, his manner, his attentive and affectionate respect?
My Elinor, is it possible to doubt their engagement?
How could such a thought occur to you?
How is it to be supposed that Willoughby, persuaded as he must be of your sister's love, should leave her, and leave her perhaps for months, without telling her of his affection;--that they should part without a mutual exchange of confidence?"
"I confess," replied Elinor, "that every circumstance except ONE is in favour of their engagement; but that ONE is the total silence of both on the subject, and with me it almost outweighs every other."
"How strange this is!
You must think wretchedly indeed of Willoughby, if, after all that has openly passed between them, you can doubt the nature of the terms on which they are together.
Has he been acting a part in his behaviour to your sister all this time?
Do you suppose him really indifferent to her?"
"No, I cannot think that.
He must and does love her I am sure."
"You must remember, my dear mother, that I have never considered this matter as certain.
I have had my doubts, I confess; but they are fainter than they were, and they may soon be entirely done away.
If we find they correspond, every fear of mine will be removed."
"A mighty concession indeed!
If you were to see them at the altar, you would suppose they were going to be married.
Ungracious girl!
But I require no such proof.
Nothing in my opinion has ever passed to justify doubt; no secrecy has been attempted; all has been uniformly open and unreserved.
You cannot doubt your sister's wishes.
It must be Willoughby therefore whom you suspect.
But why?
Is he not a man of honour and feeling?
Has there been any inconsistency on his side to create alarm?
can he be deceitful?"
"I hope not, I believe not," cried Elinor.
"I love Willoughby, sincerely love him; and suspicion of his integrity cannot be more painful to yourself than to me.
It has been involuntary, and I will not encourage it.
But all this may be explained by such a situation of his affairs as you have supposed.
"You speak very properly.
Willoughby certainly does not deserve to be suspected.
It is an engagement in some respects not prosperously begun, for their marriage must be at a very uncertain distance; and even secrecy, as far as it can be observed, may now be very advisable."
They were interrupted by the entrance of Margaret; and Elinor was then at liberty to think over the representations of her mother, to acknowledge the probability of many, and hope for the justice of all.
Her eyes were red and swollen; and it seemed as if her tears were even then restrained with difficulty.
She avoided the looks of them all, could neither eat nor speak, and after some time, on her mother's silently pressing her hand with tender compassion, her small degree of fortitude was quite overcome, she burst into tears and left the room.
This violent oppression of spirits continued the whole evening.
She was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself.
CHAPTER eighteen
By the evening of the sixteenth the subtle hand of Hurstwood had made itself apparent.
He had given the word among his friends-and they were many and influential-that here was something which they ought to attend, and, as a consequence, the sale of tickets by mr Quincel, acting for the lodge, had been large.
mr Harry Quincel was looked upon as quite a star for this sort of work.
At times she wished that she had never gone into the affair; at others, she trembled lest she should be paralysed with fear and stand white and gasping, not knowing what to say and spoiling the entire performance.
It's the spirit of the part, you know, that is difficult."
The flare of the gas jets, the open trunks, suggestive of travel and display, the scattered contents of the make-up box-rouge, pearl powder, whiting, burnt cork, India ink, pencils for the eyelids, wigs, scissors, looking glasses, drapery-in short, all the nameless paraphernalia of disguise, have a remarkable atmosphere of their own.
This took her by the hand kindly, as one who says, "My dear, come in." It opened for her as if for its own.
It was to be a full dress affair.
The four boxes had been taken. dr Norman McNeill Hale and his wife were to occupy one.
This was quite a card.
Among the latter was Drouet.
They were the lights of a certain circle-the circle of small fortunes and secret order distinctions.
To night he was in his element.
He came with several friends directly from Rector's in a carriage.
In the lobby he met Drouet, who was just returning from a trip for more cigars.
"Why, how do you do, mr Hurstwood?" came from the first individual recognised.
"Yes, indeed," said the manager.
"I'm glad to see it."
"Wife here?"
He has a brick yard, you know."
"Felt pretty sore, I suppose, over his defeat."
"Perhaps," said the other, winking shrewdly.
Bother the show!"
He was just asking for you a moment ago."
Look at him any time within the half hour before the curtain was up, he was a member of an eminent group-a rounded company of five or more whose stout figures, large white bosoms, and shining pins bespoke the character of their success. The gentlemen who brought their wives called him out to shake hands. Seats clicked, ushers bowed while he looked blandly on.
CHAPTER thirteen.
It was Packard.
But Bill says:
"Hello, what's up?
Don't cry, bub.
"They're  they're  are you the watchman of the boat?"
"What wreck?"
"Why, there ain't but one."
Why, how you talk!
"Who?
Me? Go 'long.
Dare I say it?
At times I tell myself I dare not: that you will laugh, and cast me aside as a fabricator; and then again I pick up my pen and collect the scattered pages, for I MUST write it-the pallid splendour of that thing I loved, and won, and lost is ever before me, and will not be forgotten.
I must and will write-it relieves me; read and believe as you list.
Much else though I have forgotten, THAT fact remains as clear as the last sight of a well remembered shore in the mind of some wave tossed traveller.
It made no difference to me, of course.
"Is this your rug, captain?" asked a bystander just as we were driving off.
"Not mine," I answered somewhat roughly.
It belongs to this old chap here who has just dropped out of the skies on to his head; chuck it on top and shut the door!" And that rug, the very mainspring of the startling things which followed, was thus carelessly thrown on to the carriage, and off we went.
In five minutes the house surgeon on duty came in to see me, and with a shake of his head said briefly-
"Gone, sir-clean gone!
Broke his neck like a pipe stem.
Most strange looking man, and none of us can even guess at his age.
Not a friend of yours, I suppose?"
"Nothing whatever to do with me, sir.
He slipped on the pavement and fell in front of me just now, and as a matter of common charity I brought him in here.
Were there any means of identification on him?"
The bead was of no seeming value and slipped unintentionally into my waistcoat pocket as I chatted for a few minutes more with the doctor, and then, shaking hands, I said goodbye, and went back to the cab which was still waiting outside.
It was only on reaching home I noticed the hospital porters had omitted to take the dead man's carpet from the roof of the cab when they carried him in, and as the cabman did not care about driving back to the hospital with it, and it could not well be left in the street, I somewhat reluctantly carried it indoors with me.
In the centre appeared a round such as might be taken for the sun, while here and there, "in the field," as heralds say, were lesser orbs which from their size and position could represent smaller worlds circling about it.
Altogether, I thought as I kicked it out straight upon my floor, it was a strange and not unhandsome article of furniture-it would do nicely for the mess room on the Carolina, and if any representatives of yonder poor old fellow turned up tomorrow, why, I would give them a couple of dollars for it.
Little did I guess how dear it would be at any price!
How lonely I was!
What a fool I had been!
I made this apology to the good woman, and when she had set the table and closed the door took another turn or two about my den, continuing as I did so my angry thoughts.
"Yes, yes," I said at last, returning to the stove and taking my stand, hands in pockets, in front of it, "anything were better than this, any enterprise however wild, any adventure however desperate.
I WISH I WERE IN THE PLANET MARS!"
How can I describe what followed those luckless words?
Even as I spoke the magic carpet quivered responsively under my feet, and an undulation went all round the fringe as though a sudden wind were shaking it.
It humped up in the middle so abruptly that I came down sitting with a shock that numbed me for the moment.
I gave a wild yell and made one frantic struggle, but it was too late.
CHAPTER eight
Was it a real feast we had shared in overnight, or only a quaint dream? Was Heru real or only a lovely fancy?
And those hairy ruffians of whom a horrible vision danced before my waking eyes, were they fancy too? No, my wrists still ached with the strain of the tussle, the quaint, sad wine taste was still on my lips-it was all real enough, I decided, starting up in bed; and if it was real where was the little princess? What had they done with her?
And as I wondered a keen, bright picture of the hapless maid as I saw her last blossomed before my mind's eye, the ambassadors on either side holding her wrists, and she shrinking from them in horror while her poor, white face turned to me for rescue in desperate pleading-oh!
They peeped and peered all about the room, then one said, "Is Princess Heru with you, sir?"
"No," I answered roughly.
"Saints alive, man, do you think I would have you tumbling in here over each other's heels if she were?"
"What!" I roared, "Heru taken from the palace by a handful of men and none of you infernal rascals-none of you white livered abortions lifted a hand to save her-curse on you a thousand times.
Amongst the litter little sapphire coloured finches were feeding, twittering merrily to themselves as they hopped about, and here and there down the long tables lay asprawl a belated reveller, his empty oblivion phial before him, his curly head upon his arms, dreaming perhaps of last night's feast and a neglected bride dozing dispassionate in some distant chamber.
With hasty feet I rushed down the hall out into the cool, sweet air of the planet morning.
I would not listen to more.
"Good!" I shouted.
The big bullies are very few; the sea runs behind them; the maid in their clutch is worth fighting for; it needs but one good onset, five minutes' gallantry, and she is ours again.
But blue mantle, biting his thumbs, murmured he had not breakfasted yet and edged away behind his companions.
Wherever I looked eyes dropped and timid hands fidgeted as their owners backed off from my dangerous enthusiasm.
There was obviously no help to be had from them, and meantime the precious moments were flying, so with a disdainful glance I turned on my heels and set off alone as hard as I could go for the harbour.
But it was too late.
That last red beast turned on my blade, and as he fell dragged me half down with him.
I staggered up, and tugging the metal from him turned on the next.
As the full meaning of the scene dawned upon her she started to her feet, looking wonderfully beautiful amongst those dusky forms, and extending her hands to me began to cry in the most piteous way.
How long after I know not, but presently a tissue of daylight crept into my eyes, and I awoke again.
It was better than nothing perhaps, yet it was a poor awakening.
Where had we come to?
Nearer it came and nearer, right across my road, until I could see a black dot at the point, a head presently developed, then as we approached the ears and antlers of a swimming stag.
It was a huge beast as it loomed up against the glow, bigger than any mortal stag ever was-the kind of fellow traveller no one would willingly accost, but even if I had wished to get out of its path I had no power to do so.
Closer and closer we came, one of us drifting helplessly, and the other swimming strongly for the islands.
Be this as it may, the beast came hurtling down on me lip deep in the waves, a mighty brown head with pricked ears that flicked the water from them now and then, small bright eyes set far back, and wide palmated antlers on a mighty forehead, like the dead branches of a tree.
What that Martian mountain elk had hoped for can only be guessed, what he met with was a tangle of floating finery carrying a numbed traveller on it, and with a snort of disappointment he turned again.
Quick as thought the beast twisted his head aside and tossed his antlers so that the try was fruitless.
But was I to lose my only chance of shore?
With all my strength I hurled myself upon him, missing my clutch again by a hair's breadth and going headlong into the salt furrow his chest was turning up.
THE LAST OF THE SEA ROVERS
w b LORD
For years past the Governments of several European Powers have sought to put friendly pressure upon the Sultan of Morocco to effectually stop the depredations of the Riffian coast pirates.
No strong measures, however, were really taken until the above episode occurred.
It is said that in early days the Moors were some time in accustoming themselves to the perils of the deep.
One eminent ruler of ancient times, in that region, when asked what the sea was like, replied, "The sea is a huge beast which silly folk ride like worms on logs." But it afterwards became clear that the Moors had a strong fancy for the "worms" and "logs" too.
They gave up marvelling at those who went to sea, and went on it themselves in search of plunder.
The risk, the uncertainty, the danger, the sense of superior skill and ingenuity, that attract the adventurous spirit, and the passion for sport, are stated by some writers to have brought such a state of things into existence.
One fact seems to be pretty certain, that when these depredations were first made, they took the form of reprisals upon the Spaniards.
No sooner was Granada fallen, than thousands of desperate Moors left the land, disdaining to live under a Spanish yoke.
Settling along a portion of the northern coast of Africa, they immediately proceeded to first attack all Spanish vessels that could be found.
Probably this got monotonous in course of time, for in their wild sea courses they took to harrying the vessels belonging to other nations, and so laid the foundation for a race of pirates, which has continued down to quite recently.
As nowadays, the Moors cruised in boats from the commencement of their marauding expeditions.
Each man pulled an oar, and knew how to fight as well as row.
Drawing little water, a small squadron of these craft could be pushed up almost any creek, or lie hidden behind a rock, till the enemy came in sight.
Then oars out, and a quick stroke for a few minutes.
Next they were alongside their unsuspecting prey, and pouring in a first volley.
Ultimately the prize was usually taken, the crew put in irons, and the pirates returned home with their capture, no doubt being received with acclamation upon their arrival.
As far back as the sixteenth century the Spanish forts at Alhucemas-not to mention other places-were established for the purpose of repressing piracy in its vicinity.
Some of them went so far as to send warships to cruise along the Riffian coast.
This step apparently had some moral effect upon the pirates, for from that time onwards attacks upon foreign vessels practically ceased. Something more than this, however, was needed, for no one could say how soon the marauding expeditions might be renewed upon a larger scale than ever, so as to make up for lost opportunities.
Here she got becalmed, and while in that condition two boats approached her from the shore.
When, however, the latter got within a hundred yards or so of the helpless vessel, the suspicions of the crew were aroused.
There were only three revolvers on board the schooner, and with these the crew prepared to defend themselves.
Soon, however, their supply of ammunition became exhausted, and the pirates boarded the schooner without further opposition.
The ship's own boat was lowered, and into this the marauders put their booty, and took it ashore, also carrying the captain and one of the crew with them.
About an hour later another boat, containing about twenty pirates, came off and fired on the ship.
The crew, seeing that they could offer no effective resistance, hid themselves away in the hold.
The other pirates had left very little for the new arrivals to take, and this seemed to annoy them so much that they gave vent to their ill feelings in several ways, not the least wanton being the pollution of the ship's fresh water.
They also smashed the vessel's compass, and tore up the charts. For the next two days the crew existed on a few biscuits, which the pirates had left behind.
The crew of the schooner hoisted a shirt as a signal, which was fortunately seen, and a boat sent off in response thereto.
They then completely pillaged the ship, removing almost everything of any use or value.
The Spaniard was compelled to retire, leaving the captain of the barque in the hands of the Moors.
For some reason or other, the pirates seemed very much disinclined to part with these prisoners.
Only a short time before the attack on the French barque took place, a notice was issued by the British Board of Trade, in which the attention of ship owners and masters of vessels was called to the dangers attending navigation off the coast of Morocco.
Five of the crew managed to escape in the cutter's boat and were picked up some days later by a passing vessel.
Those who remained on board the cutter fared very badly.
After the vessel had been pillaged, the rigging and sails destroyed, the men were all securely bound and left to their fate.
When near enough they opened fire, and ordered the captain to lower his sails, which was done, as the Spaniards were, practically speaking, without arms.
When close to the land the captain was rowed ashore, and the pirates spent part of the night in unloading the cargo.
Probably thinking that some of their comrades were on the barque, but unable to set the necessary canvas to return, only two Moors were sent off with the captain, and these remained in the boat when the vessel was reached. Upon gaining the deck of the barque the captain was surprised to find himself alone.
Without hesitating for a moment he released the crew, who were confined below, hoisted sail and stood out to sea.
The Moors who had been left in the boat were speedily cut adrift, much to their amazement, for it so happened that none of the pirates had stayed on board.
Often, too, they were maltreated to such an extent that they were glad to escape with their lives.
Some of the neighboring tribes continually endeavored to purchase captives for the pleasure of killing them, but it is satisfactory to learn that no sales are recorded, as the anticipated ransom was always largely in excess of the sums offered by the bloodthirsty natives.
CHAPTER four
I stupidly gave permission for the third motor to be got out this morning.
This was done first thing and the motor placed on firm ice.
Later Campbell told me one of the men had dropped a leg through crossing a sludgy patch some two hundred yards from the ship.
I started for the shore with a single man load, leaving Campbell looking about for the best crossing for the motor.
I sent Meares and the dogs over with a can of petrol on arrival.
After some twenty minutes he returned to tell me the motor had gone through.
Soon after Campbell and Day arrived to confirm the dismal tidings.
It appears that getting frightened of the state of affairs Campbell got out a line and attached it to the motor-then manning the line well he attempted to rush the machine across the weak place.
A man on the rope, Wilkinson, suddenly went through to the shoulders, but was immediately hauled out.
The men kept hold of the rope, but it cut through the ice towards them with an ever increasing strain, obliging one after another to let go.
Half a minute later nothing remained but a big hole.
Perhaps it was lucky there was no accident to the men, but it's a sad incident for us in any case.
It's a big blow to know that one of the two best motors, on which so much time and trouble have been spent, now lies at the bottom of the sea.
The actual spot where the motor disappeared was crossed by its fellow motor with a very heavy load as well as by myself with heavy ponies only yesterday.
It was clear that we were practically cut off, certainly as regards heavy transport.
Bowers went back again with Meares and managed to ferry over some wind clothes and odds and ends.
At six I went to the ice edge farther to the north.
I found a place where the ship could come and be near the heavy ice over which sledging is still possible.
I went near the ship and semaphored directions for her to get to this place as soon as she could, using steam if necessary.
She is at present wedged in with the pack, and I think Pennell hopes to warp her along when the pack loosens.
Meares and I marked the new trail with kerosene tins before returning.
Meanwhile the hut proceeds; altogether there are four layers of boarding to go on, two of which are nearing completion; it will be some time before the rest and the insulation is on.
It's a big job getting settled in like this and a tantalising one when one is hoping to do some depot work before the season closes.
We had a keen north wind to night and a haze, but wind is dropping and sun shining brightly again.
To day seemed to be the hottest we have yet had; after walking across I was perspiring freely, and later as I sat in the sun after lunch one could almost imagine a warm summer day in England.
After breakfast I went on board and was delighted to find a good solid road right up to the ship.
A flag was hoisted immediately for the ponies to come out, and we commenced a good day's work.
All day the sledges have been coming to and fro, but most of the pulling work has been done by the ponies: the track is so good that these little animals haul anything from twelve to eighteen hundredweight.
The dogs, working five to a team, haul five to six hundredweight. and of course they travel much faster than either ponies or men.
Later in the day we made a start on the first of these, and got seven tons ashore before ceasing work.
We close with a good day to our credit, marred by an unfortunate incident-one of the dogs, a good puller, was seen to cough after a journey; he was evidently trying to bring something up-two minutes later he was dead.
Nobody seems to know the reason, but a post mortem is being held by Atkinson and I suppose the cause of death will be found.
We can't afford to lose animals of any sort.
All the ponies except three have now brought loads from the ship.
Oates thinks these three are too nervous to work over this slippery surface.
However, he tried one of the hardest cases to night, a very fine pony, and got him in successfully with a big load.
To morrow we ought to be running some twelve or thirteen of these animals.
Griffith Taylor's bolted on three occasions, the first two times more or less due to his own fault, but the third owing to the stupidity of one of the sailors.
It was still funnier when he brought his final load (an exceptionally heavy one) with a set face and ardent pace, vouchsafing not a word to anyone he passed.
Bowers checks every case as it comes on shore and dashes off to the ship to arrange the precedence of different classes of goods.
He proves a perfect treasure; there is not a single case he does not know or a single article of any sort which he cannot put his hand on at once.
Rennick and Bruce are working gallantly at the discharge of stores on board.
Williamson and Leese load the sledges and are getting very clever and expeditious.
Evans (seaman) is generally superintending the sledging and camp outfit.
Wilson, Cherry Garrard, Wright, Griffith Taylor, Debenham, Crean, and Browning have been driving ponies, a task at which I have assisted myself once or twice.
There was a report that the ice was getting rotten, but I went over it myself and found it sound throughout.
The accident with the motor sledge has made people nervous.
The weather has been very warm and fine on the whole, with occasional gleams of sunshine, but to night there is a rather chill wind from the south.
The hut is progressing famously.
Nothing like it has been done before; nothing so expeditious and complete.
This morning the main loads were fodder.
Some addition to our patent fuel was made in the morning, and later in the afternoon it came in a steady stream.
We have more than twelve tons and could make this do if necessity arose.
In addition to this oddments have been arriving all day-instruments, clothing, and personal effects.
Our camp is becoming so perfect in its appointments that I am almost suspicious of some drawback hidden by the summer weather.
The hut is progressing apace, and all agree that it should be the most perfectly comfortable habitation.
'It amply repays the time and attention given to the planning.' The sides have double boarding inside and outside the frames, with a layer of our excellent quilted seaweed insulation between each pair of boardings.
To add to the wall insulation the south and east sides of the hut are piled high with compressed forage bales, whilst the north side is being prepared as a winter stable for the ponies.
The stable will stand between the wall of the hut and a wall built of forage bales, six bales high and two bales thick.
This will be roofed with rafters and tarpaulin, as we cannot find enough boarding.
Some of the ponies are very troublesome, but all except two have been running to day, and until this evening there were no excitements.
After tea Oates suggested leading out the two intractable animals behind other sledges; at the same time he brought out the strong, nervous grey pony.
But whilst one of the sledges was being unpacked the pony tied to it suddenly got scared.
half-way over the floe my rear pony got his foreleg foul of his halter, then got frightened, tugged at his halter, and lifted the unladen sledge to which he was tied-then the halter broke and away he went.
But by this time the damage was done.
My pony snorted wildly and sprang forward as the sledge banged to the ground.
He galloped back and the party dejectedly returned.
Finally he was captured and led forth once more between Oates and Anton.
He remained fairly well on the outward journey, but on the homeward grew restive again; Evans, who was now leading him, called for Anton, and both tried to hold him, but to no purpose-he dashed off, upset his load, and came back to camp with the sledge.
All these troubles arose after he had made three journeys without a hitch and we had come to regard him as a nice, placid, gritty pony.
Now I'm afraid it will take a deal of trouble to get him safe again, and we have three very troublesome beasts instead of two.
The majority of our animals seem pretty quiet now, but any one of them may break out in this way if things go awry.
The weather has the appearance of breaking.
We had a strongish northerly breeze at midday with snow and hail storms, and now the wind has turned to the south and the sky is overcast with threatenings of a blizzard.
The floe is cracking and pieces may go out-if so the ship will have to get up steam again.
The post mortem on last night's death revealed nothing to account for it.
The threatened blizzard materialised at about four o'clock this morning.
The wind increased to force six or seven at the ship, and continued to blow, with drift, throughout the forenoon.
They started to go back, but the ship being blotted out, turned and gave us their company at breakfast.
The day was altogether too bad for outside work, so we turned our attention to the hut interior, with the result that to night all the matchboarding is completed.
The floor linoleum is the only thing that remains to be put down; outside, the roof and ends have to be finished.
It is a first rate building in an extraordinarily sheltered spot; whilst the wind was raging at the ship this morning we enjoyed comparative peace.
Campbell says there was an extraordinary change as he approached the beach.
I sent two or three people to dig into the hard snow drift behind the camp; they got into solid ice immediately, became interested in the job, and have begun the making of a cave which is to be our larder.
Already they have tunnelled six or eight feet in and have begun side channels.
We had been speculating as to the origin of this solid drift and attached great antiquity to it, but the diggers came to a patch of earth with skua feathers, which rather knocks our theories on the head.
The wind began to drop at midday, and after lunch I went to the ship.
As far as I can see the open water extends to an east and west line which is a little short of the glacier tongue.
I trust they may last for a few days at least.
I ran six journeys with five dogs, driving them in the Siberian fashion for the first time.
However, it's early days to decide such matters, and we shall learn much on the depot journey.
Early in the afternoon a message came from the ship to say that all stores had been landed.
Nothing remains to be brought but mutton, books and pictures, and the pianola.
We are LANDED eight days after our arrival-a very good record.
The hut could be inhabited at this moment, but probably we shall not begin to live in it for a week.
The grotto party are making headway into the ice for our larder, but it is slow and very arduous work.
To the south the land outlines were hazy with drift, so my dog tour was abandoned.
In the afternoon, with some moderation of conditions, the ballast party went to work, and wrought so well that more than ten tons were got off before night.
The organisation of this work is extremely good.
I slept on board the ship and found it colder than the camp-the cabins were below freezing all night and the only warmth existed in the cheery spirit of the company.
I shaved and bathed last night (the first time for ten days) and wrote letters from breakfast till tea time to day.
Meanwhile the ballast team has been going on merrily, and to night Pennell must have some twenty six tons on board.
The grotto has been much enlarged and is, in fact, now big enough to hold all our mutton and a considerable quantity of seal and penguin.
The hard ice of this slope is a godsend and both grottoes will be ideal for their purposes.
Some of the ponies are not turning out so well as I expected; they are slow walkers and must inevitably impede the faster ones.
'Then I am not quite sure they are going to stand the cold well, and on this first journey they may have to face pretty severe conditions.
Then, of course, there is the danger of losing them on thin ice or by injury sustained in rough places.
Although we have fifteen now (two having gone for the Eastern Party) it is not at all certain that we shall have such a number when the main journey is undertaken next season.
One can only be careful and hope for the best.'
We rose late, having breakfast at nine.
The morning promised well and the day fulfilled the promise: we had bright sunshine and practically no wind.
After Service I told Campbell that I should have to cancel his two ponies and give him two others.
He took it like the gentleman he is, thoroughly appreciating the reason.
After our talk we went together to explore the route, which we expected to find much crevassed.
I only intended to go a short way, but on reaching the snow above the uncovered hills of our Cape I found the surface so promising and so free from cracks that I went quite a long way.
Eventually I turned, leaving Campbell, Gran, and Nelson roped together and on ski to make their way onward, but not before I felt certain that the route to Cape Royds would be quite easy.
We took a little provision and a cooker and our sleeping bags.
The dogs pulled well, and we went towards the Glacier Tongue at a brisk pace; found much of the ice uncovered.
We found a good deal of compressed fodder and boxes of maize, but no grain crushed as expected.
The open water was practically up to the Glacier Tongue.
We came to a second crack, but avoided it by skirting to the west.
There was a small pool of open water and a longish crack off Hut Point.
I got my feet very wet crossing the latter.
We passed hundreds of seals at the various cracks.
On the arrival at the hut to my chagrin we found it filled with snow.
Shackleton reported that the door had been forced by the wind, but that he had made an entrance by the window and found shelter inside-other members of his party used it for shelter.
But they actually went away and left the window (which they had forced) open; as a result, nearly the whole of the interior of the hut is filled with hard icy snow, and it is now impossible to find shelter inside.
Meares and I were able to clamber over the snow to some extent and to examine the neat pile of cases in the middle, but they will take much digging out.
We got some asbestos sheeting from the magnetic hut and made the best shelter we could to boil our cocoa.
There was something too depressing in finding the old hut in such a desolate condition.
To camp outside and feel that all the old comfort and cheer had departed, was dreadfully heartrending.
I went to bed thoroughly depressed.
The ski run was completely cut through in two places, the Gap and Observation Hill almost bare, a great bare slope on the side of Arrival Heights, and on top of Crater Heights an immense bare table land.
How delighted we should have been to see it like this in the old days!
The hole which we had dug in the mound in the pond was still there, as Meares discovered by falling into it up to his waist and getting very wet.
On the south side we could see the Pressure Ridges beyond Pram Point as of old-Horseshoe Bay calm and unpressed-the sea ice pressed on Pram Point and along the Gap ice foot, and a new ridge running around c Armitage about two miles off.
The flagstaff was down, the stays having carried away, but in five minutes it could be put up again.
We got to camp about teatime.
Simpson has almost completed the differential magnetic cave next door.
I took Ponting out to see some interesting thaw effects on the ice cliffs east of the Camp.
I noted that the ice layers were pressing out over thin dirt bands as though the latter made the cleavage lines over which the strata slid.
It has occurred to me that although the sea ice may freeze in our bays early in March it will be a difficult thing to get ponies across it owing to the cliff edges at the side.
I heard that all the people who journeyed towards c Royds yesterday reached their destination in safety.
The space between my bulkhead and the men's I allotted to five: Bowers, Oates, Atkinson, Meares, and Cherry Garrard.
Simpson and Wright are near the instruments in their corner.
It is really wonderful to realise the amount of work which has been got through of late.
It snowed hard all last night; there were about three or four inches of soft snow over the camp this morning and Simpson tells me some six inches out by the ship.
The camp looks very white.
Here in this camp as usual we do not feel it much, but we see the anemometer racing on the hill and the snow clouds sweeping past the ship.
The floe is breaking between the point and the ship, though curiously it remains fast on a direct route to the ship.
Now the open water runs parallel to our ship road and only a few hundred yards south of it.
The big wedge of ice to which the ship is holding on the outskirts of the Bay can have very little grip to keep it in and must inevitably go out very soon.
I hope this may result in the ship finding a more sheltered and secure position close to us.
A big iceberg sailed past the ship this afternoon.
Atkinson declares it was the end of the Cape Barne Glacier.
I hope they will know in the ship, as it would be interesting to witness the birth of a glacier in this region.
It is clearing to night, but still blowing hard.
The ponies don't like the wind, but they are all standing the cold wonderfully and all their sores are healed up.
In the morning she secured to the ice edge on the same line as before but a few hundred yards nearer.
After getting things going at the hut, I walked over and suggested that Pennell should come round the corner close in shore.
The ice anchors were tripped and we steamed slowly in, making fast to the floe within two hundred yards of the ice foot and four hundred yards of the hut.
For the present the position is extraordinarily comfortable.
With a northerly blow she might turn rather close to the shore, where the soundings run to three fathoms, but behind such a stretch of ice she could scarcely get a sea or swell without warning.
It looks a wonderfully comfortable little nook, but, of course, one can be certain of nothing in this place; one knows from experience how deceptive the appearance of security may be.
Pennell is truly excellent in his present position-he's invariably cheerful, unceasingly watchful, and continuously ready for emergencies.
I have come to possess implicit confidence in him.
This afternoon it fell almost calm, but the sky clouded over again and now there is a gentle warm southerly breeze with light falling snow and an overcast sky.
The position of the ship makes the casual transport that still proceeds very easy, but the ice is rather thin at the edge.
In the hut all is marching towards the utmost comfort.
Bowers has completed a storeroom on the south side, an excellent place to keep our travelling provisions.
Every day he conceives or carries out some plan to benefit the camp.
But, indeed, it is hard to specialise praise where everyone is working so indefatigably for the cause.
Each man in his way is a treasure.
Anton and Demetri are both most anxious to help on all occasions; they are excellent boys.
We have made unto ourselves a truly seductive home, within the walls of which peace, quiet, and comfort reign supreme.
Such a noble dwelling transcends the word 'hut,' and we pause to give it a more fitting title only from lack of the appropriate suggestion.
What shall we call it?
'The word "hut" is misleading.
to the eaves.
North and south of us are deep bays, beyond which great glaciers come rippling over the lower slopes to thrust high blue walled snouts into the sea.
The horses don't like it, naturally, but it wouldn't do to pamper them so soon before our journey.
I think the hardening process must be good for animals though not for men; nature replies to it in the former by growing a thick coat with wonderful promptitude.
It seems to me that the shaggy coats of our ponies are already improving.
The dogs seem to feel the cold little so far, but they are not so exposed.
Bowers has completed his southern storeroom and brought the wing across the porch on the windward side, connecting the roofing with that of the porch.
The improvement is enormous and will make the greatest difference to those who dwell near the door.
The carpenter has been setting up standards and roof beams for the stables, which will be completed in a few days.
I have fixed the twenty fifth as the date for our departure.
Griffith Taylor and his companions have been seeking advice as to their Western trip.
Wilson, dear chap, has been doing his best to coach them.
Ponting has fitted up his own dark room-doing the carpentering work with extraordinary speed and to everyone's admiration.
Meares has become enamoured of the gramophone.
We find we have a splendid selection of records.
Oates goes steadily on with the ponies-he is perfectly excellent and untiring in his devotion to the animals.
Day and Nelson, having given much thought to the proper fitting up of their corner, have now begun work.
There seems to be little doubt that these ingenious people will make the most of their allotted space.
I have done quite a lot of thinking over the autumn journeys and a lot remains to be done, mainly on account of the prospect of being cut off from our winter quarters; for this reason we must have a great deal of food for animals and men.
Bowers' annexe is finished, roof and all thoroughly snow tight; an excellent place for spare clothing, furs, and ready use stores, and its extension affording complete protection to the entrance porch of the hut.
The stables are nearly finished-a thoroughly stout well roofed lean to on the north side.
Simpson has almost completed his ice cavern, light tight lining, niches, floor and all.
Wright and Forde have almost completed the absolute hut, a patchwork building for which the framework only was brought-but it will be very well adapted for our needs.
Gran has been putting 'record' on the ski runners.
Record is a mixture of vegetable tar, paraffin, soft soap, and linseed oil, with some patent addition which prevents freezing-this according to Gran.
p o Evans and Crean have been preparing sledges; Evans shows himself wonderfully capable, and I haven't a doubt as to the working of the sledges he has fitted up.
First the felt boots and felt slippers made by Jaeger and then summer wind clothes and fur mits-nothing could be better than these articles.
Finally to night we have overhauled and served out two pairs of finnesko (fur boots) to each traveller.
They are excellent in quality.
At first I thought they seemed small, but a stiffness due to cold and dryness misled me-a little stretching and all was well.
But indeed the whole time we are thinking of devices to make our travelling work easier.
'We have now tried most of our stores, and so far we have not found a single article that is not perfectly excellent in quality and preservation.
'Our clothing is as good as good.
An Emperor penguin was found on the Cape well advanced in moult, a good specimen skin.
Atkinson found cysts formed by a tapeworm in the intestines.
It seems clear that this parasite is not transferred from another host, and that its history is unlike that of any other known tapeworm-in fact, Atkinson scores a discovery in parasitology of no little importance.
The wind has turned to the north to night and is blowing quite fresh.
The pianola has been erected by Rennick.
Day has been explaining the manner in which he hopes to be able to cope with the motor sledge difficulty.
Everything looks hopeful for the depot journey if only we can get our stores and ponies past the Glacier Tongue.
It is the first time I have tasted seal without being aware of its particular flavour.
But even its own flavour is acceptable in our cook's hands-he really is excellent.
Pennell was getting up steam and his men struggling to replace the anchors.
We got out the men and gave some help.
At six steam was up, and I was right glad to see the ship back out to windward, leaving us to recover anchors and hawsers.
She stood away to the west, and almost immediately after a large berg drove in and grounded in the place she had occupied.
We spent the day measuring our provisions and fixing up clothing arrangements for our journey; a good deal of progress has been made.
Then as I went out on the floe came the report that she was ashore.
I ran out to the Cape with Evans and saw that the report was only too true.
She looked to be firmly fixed and in a very uncomfortable position.
Later Pennell told me he had been trying to look behind the berg and had been going astern some time before he struck.
My heart sank when I looked at her and I sent Evans off in the whaler to sound, recovered the ice anchors again, set the people to work, and walked disconsolately back to the Cape to watch.
The first ray of hope came when by careful watching one could see that the ship was turning very slowly, then one saw the men running from side to side and knew that an attempt was being made to roll her off.
The rolling produced a more rapid turning movement at first and then she seemed to hang again.
But only for a short time; the engines had been going astern all the time and presently a slight movement became apparent.
But we only knew she was getting clear when we heard cheers on board and more cheers from the whaler.
Then she gathered stern way and was clear.
The relief was enormous.
The wind dropped as she came off, and she is now securely moored off the northern ice edge, where I hope the greater number of her people are finding rest.
For here and now I must record the splendid manner in which these men are working.
I find it difficult to express my admiration for the manner in which the ship is handled and worked under these very trying circumstances.
From Pennell down there is not an officer or man who has not done his job nobly during the past weeks, and it will be a glorious thing to remember the unselfish loyal help they are giving us.
Campbell and his party returned late this afternoon-I have not heard details.
Meares and Oates went to the Glacier Tongue and satisfied themselves that the ice is good.
It only has to remain another three days, and it would be poor luck if it failed in that time.
this evening.
The Eastern Party ponies were put on board the ship this morning.
I got up at five this morning to find the weather calm and beautiful, but to my astonishment an opening lane of water between the land and the ice in the bay.
Meares and I walked till we came to the first ice.
It was plain that only the ponies could go by it-no loads.
One breathes a prayer that the Road holds for the few remaining hours.
It goes in one place between a berg in open water and a large pool of the glacier face-it may be weak in that part, and at any moment the narrow isthmus may break away.
In the Castle of Maucombe, which is so well known to you by description that I shall say no more of it, I found my room almost exactly as I left it; only now I can enjoy the splendid view it gives of the Gemenos valley, which my childish eyes used to see without comprehending.
After Leipsic no more was heard of him.
Who could have imagined, whilst fancy was leading us a giddy dance, that my destined husband was slowly traveling on foot through Russia, Poland, and Germany?
The rafters bend under the weight of this brick kiln. The windows, inserted casually, without any attempt at symmetry, have enormous shutters, painted yellow.
The garden in which it stands is a Provencal garden, enclosed by low walls, built of big round pebbles set in layers, alternately sloping or upright, according to the artistic taste of the mason, which finds here its only outlet.
The rooms are scantily furnished.
Nevertheless, the house of l'Estorade had done its best; the cupboards had been ransacked, and its last man beaten up for the dinner, which was served to us on old silver dishes, blackened and battered.
The exile, my darling pet, is like the railing, emaciated!
At thirty seven he might be fifty.
The once beautiful ebon locks of youth are streaked with white like a lark's wing.
His fine blue eyes are cavernous; he is a little deaf, which suggests the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.
I have demanded from my father, in set terms, a grant of water, which can be brought thither from Maucombe.
My turf, though Provencal, shall be always green.
I shall carry my park up the hillside and plant on the highest point some pretty kiosque, whence, perhaps, my eyes may catch the shimmer of the Mediterranean.
Orange and lemon trees, and all choicest things that grow, shall embellish my retreat; and there will I be a mother among my children.
The poetry of Nature, which nothing can destroy, shall hedge us round; and standing loyally at the post of duty, we need fear no danger.
This century will not see another Bonaparte; and my children, if I have any, will not be rent from me.
They will be mine to train and make men of-the joy of my life.
There will be nothing to fear, not even an admiration such as could only make a woman proud.
You, my dear Louise, will supply the romance of my life.
So you must narrate to me in full all your adventures, describe your balls and parties, tell me what you wear, what flowers crown your lovely golden locks, and what are the words and manners of the men you meet.
Your other self will be always there-listening, dancing, feeling her finger tips pressed-with you.
One kiss, then, on each cheek-my lips are still virginal, he has only dared to take my hand.
Oh! our deference and propriety are quite disquieting, I assure you.
There, I am off again.... Good bye, dear.
My dear Louise,--I was bound to wait some time before writing to you; but now I know, or rather I have learned, many things which, for the sake of your future happiness, I must tell you.
The difference between a girl and a married woman is so vast, that the girl can no more comprehend it than the married woman can go back to girlhood again.
The serious nature of what I was undertaking filled me at first with terror.
Marriage is a matter concerning the whole of life, whilst love aims only at pleasure.
Might it not therefore be that the only requisite for a happy marriage was friendship-a friendship which, for the sake of these advantages, would shut its eyes to many of the imperfections of humanity?
My married life will be no slavery, but rather a perpetual reign.
The important point of separating marriage from marital rights was settled in a conversation between Louis and me, in the course of which he gave proof of an excellent temper and a tender heart.
To grant nothing to duty or the law, to be guided entirely by one's own will, retaining perfect independence-what could be more attractive, more honorable?
A contract of this kind, directly opposed to the legal contract, and even to the sacrament itself, could be concluded only between Louis and me.
Although, at first, I may have made up my mind to accept anything rather than return to the convent, it is only in human nature, having got an inch, to ask for an ell, and you and I, sweet love, are of those who would have it all.
I drew him aside in the most natural manner on solitary walks, during which I discreetly sounded his feelings.
I made him talk, and got him to expound to me his ideas and plans for our future.
He got mixed up in his arguments, as people do when handicapped by fear; and before long it became clear that chance had given me for adversary one who was the less fitted for the contest because he was conscious of what you magniloquently call my "greatness of soul." Broken by sufferings and misfortune, he looked on himself as a sort of wreck, and three fears in especial haunted him.
First, we are aged respectively thirty seven and seventeen; and he could not contemplate without quaking the twenty years that divide us.
The consciousness of these three obvious drawbacks made him distrustful of himself; he doubted his power to make me happy, and guessed that he had been chosen as the lesser of two evils.
"I cannot deny it," was my grave reply.
The favor I am about to ask from you will demand unselfishness on your part, far nobler than the servitude to which a man's love, when sincere, is supposed to reduce him.
Friendship is the bond between a pair of kindred souls, united in their strength, and yet independent.
Let us be friends and comrades to bear jointly the burden of life.
Leave me absolutely free.
"Infuse with passion, then, if you will, this friendship, and let the voice of love disturb its calm.
I am neither whimsical nor prudish, and should be sorry to get that reputation; but I feel sure that I can trust to your honor when I ask you to keep up the outward appearance of wedded life."
It is the great desire I have for your respect which prompts my request.
If during the time that I remained indifferent to you (yielding only a passive obedience, such as my mother has just been urging on me) a child were born to us, do you suppose that I could feel towards it as I would towards one born of our common love?
A passionate love may not be necessary in marriage, but, at least, you will admit that there should be no repugnance.
Our position will not be without its dangers; in a country life, such as ours will be, ought we not to bear in mind the evanescent nature of passion?
We were married at the end of the week.
Now, in the solitude of a life like ours, marriage soon becomes intolerable unless the woman is the presiding spirit.
For how make a confidant of him?
My happiness would wound him, and has to be concealed.
In spite of my coldness, Louis grew bolder, and his nature expanded.
We celebrated our union in secret, and secret it must remain between us. When you are married you will approve this reserve.
Yet, in spite of all this enchantment, I once more stood out for my complete independence.
My one joy, and it is supreme, springs from the certainty of having brought new life to my husband before I have borne him any children. Louis has regained his youth, strength, and spirits.
He is not the same man.
With magic touch I have effaced the very memory of his sufferings. It is a complete metamorphosis.
We have English horses, a coupe, a barouche, and a tilbury.
I apply all my intellect (I am speaking quite seriously) to managing my household with economy, and obtaining for it the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of cost.
I insist too on his studying a great deal. Before long I hope to see him a member of the Council General of the Department, through the influence of my family and his mother's.
I have told him plainly that I am ambitious, and that I was very well pleased his father should continue to look after the estate and practise economies, because I wished him to devote himself exclusively to politics.
Under penalty, therefore, of forfeiting my esteem and affection, he must get himself chosen deputy for the department at the coming elections; my family would support his candidature, and we should then have the delight of spending all our winters in Paris.
"MY SWEET RENEE,--When you gave me permission to love you, I began to believe in happiness; now, I see it unfolding endlessly before me.
When I am with you, love so transports me that I am powerless to express the depth of my affection; I can but worship and admire.
No doubt the love of husband and wife depends less on outward beauty than on graces of character, which are yours also in perfection; still, let me say that the certainty of having your unchanging beauty, on which to feast my eyes, gives me a joy that grows with every glance.
There is a grace and dignity in the lines of your face, expressive of the noble soul within, and breathing of purity beneath the vivid coloring.
Our own impulse shall with us alone dictate the expression of feeling.
You cannot speak, breathe, act, or think, without adding to the admiration I feel for your charm both of body and mind.
So much for my pupil, dear!
Yet Louis is lovable; his temper is wonderfully even, and he performs, as a matter of course, acts on which most men would plume themselves.
Oh! Louise, don't spoil the splendid future which awaits us both!
Don't do the mad things with which you threaten me.
It made her think of things which she tried to forget, and to look into a little drawer at something soft and brown that lay in a curl there, wrapped in paper.
At last she could bear it no longer, and went downstairs.
'Where are you going?' said mrs Garland.
'Because you must not.
'Don't mention him, mother, don't!'
'Well then, dear, walk in the garden.'
So poor Anne, who really had not the slightest wish to throw her heart away upon a soldier, but merely wanted to displace old thoughts by new, turned into the inner garden from day to day, and passed a good many hours there, the pleasant birds singing to her, and the delightful butterflies alighting on her hat, and the horrid ants running up her stockings.
This garden was undivided from Loveday's, the two having originally been the single garden of the whole house.
It was a quaint old place, enclosed by a thorn hedge so shapely and dense from incessant clipping that the mill boy could walk along the top without sinking in-a feat which he often performed as a means of filling out his day's work.
The soil within was of that intense fat blackness which is only seen after a century of constant cultivation.
The paths were grassed over, so that people came and went upon them without being heard.
The grass harboured slugs, and on this account the miller was going to replace it by gravel as soon as he had time; but as he had said this for thirty years without doing it, the grass and the slugs seemed likely to remain.
The two households were on this account even more closely united in the garden than within the mill.
Out there they were almost one family, and they talked from plot to plot with a zest and animation which mrs Garland could never have anticipated when she first removed thither after her husband's death.
The brooks were so far overhung at their brinks by grass and garden produce that, had it not been for their perpetual babbling, few would have noticed that they were there.
She always spoke to him when she saw him there, and he replied in deep, firm accents across the gooseberry bushes, or through the tall rows of flowering peas, as the case might be.
He thus gave her accounts at fifteen paces of his experiences in camp, in quarters, in Flanders, and elsewhere; of the difference between line and column, of forced marches, billeting, and such like, together with his hopes of promotion.
Thus the month of July passed.
At length the earnest trumpet major obtained mrs Garland's consent to take her and her daughter to the camp, which they had not yet viewed from any closer point than their own windows.
The villagers were by this time driving a roaring trade with the soldiers, who purchased of them every description of garden produce, milk, butter, and eggs at liberal prices.
The figures of these rural sutlers could be seen creeping up the slopes, laden like bees, to a spot in the rear of the camp, where there was a kind of market place on the greensward.
They passed on to the tents of the German Legion, a well grown and rather dandy set of men, with a poetical look about their faces which rendered them interesting to feminine eyes.
Festus looked from Anne to the trumpet major, and from the trumpet major back to Anne, with a dark expression of face, as if he suspected that there might be a tender understanding between them.
'Are you offended with me?' he said to her in a low voice of repressed resentment.
'When are you coming to the hall again?'
'Never, perhaps.'
The widow looked unhappily in her daughter's face, distressed between her desire that Anne should encourage Festus, and her wish to consult Anne's own feelings.
'Leave her alone, leave her alone,' said Festus, his gaze blackening. 'Now I think of it I am glad she can't come with me, for I am engaged;' and he stalked away.
'Well, where's mr Loveday?' asked mrs Garland.
'Father's behind,' said john.
'I'll overtake you in a minute,' she said to the younger pair, and went back, her colour, for some unaccountable reason, rising as she did so. The miller and she then came on slowly together, conversing in very low tones, and when they got to the bottom they stood still.
'That you do not care for Derriman, and mean to encourage john Loveday. What's all the world so long as folks are happy!
'What a weathercock you are, mother!
But mrs Garland could not keep the secret long.
'I'm from aboard the Victory,' said the sailor.
After that he and some other lads jumped aboard the French ship, and I believe they was in her when she struck her flag.
What 'a did next I can't say, for the wind had dropped, and the smoke was like a cloud.
This was but for two or three moments.
'Her name is Caroline.
If so-'
When are they going to be married?'
Good God! what can a man be made of to go on as he does?
'If he had been dead I could have borne it, but this I cannot bear!'
CHAPTER two.
The journey from Montreal had been long and lonely, the parting from her parents hard, and the thought of meeting the unknown relatives had weighed upon her mind and helped to make her unusually subdued.
mrs Merrithew took the little newcomer to her room, had her trunks settled conveniently, and then left her to prepare for the late tea which was waiting for them all.
When Dora was ready, she sat down in the little armchair that stood near a table piled with books, and looked about her contentedly.
There was an air of solid comfort and cosiness about this house that rested her.
This room-which her aunt had told her was just opposite Marjorie's-was all furnished in the softest shades of brown and blue, her favourite colours.
Just over the side of the bed was a book shelf, quite empty, waiting for her favourite books.
While she sat and looked about in admiration, the door was pushed gently open, and a plump maltese kitten came in, gazed at her doubtfully a moment, and then climbed on her lap.
Then Marjorie's bright face appeared at the door, and, "May I come in?" she asked.
"Oh, please do," Dora cried.
"Kitty has made friends with me already, and I think that must be a good omen."
Marjorie laughed, as she patted the little bunch of blue gray fur in Dora's lap.
Dora's eyes opened wide with astonishment.
Then they both laughed, and Marjorie, obeying one of her sudden impulses, threw her arms around Dora's neck and gave her a cousinly hug. "You and I will be friends, too," she said.
"I knew it as soon as I looked at you."
Dora's dark brown eyes looked gravely into Marjorie's blue ones.
She seemed to be taking the proposition very seriously.
But you,--ah, yes!
You are like my father, and besides, we are cousins, and that makes us understand each other.
Let us be friends."
She clasped the slender hand with her own plump fingers, and shook it heartily.
So, in girlish romance and sudden resolution, the little maids sealed a compact which was never broken, and began a friendship which lasted and grew in beauty and strength all through their lives.
At the breakfast table the next morning there was a merry discussion as to what should be done first to amuse Dora.
Jackie, who had invited her to sit beside him and beamed at her approvingly over his porridge and cream, suggested a walk to his favourite candy store and the purchase of some sticks of "pure chocolate." Marjorie proposed a picnic at Old Government House.
This was approved of, but postponed for a day or two to allow for preparations and invitations.
mr Merrithew said "Let us go shooting bears," but even Jackie did not second this astounding proposition.
As usual, it was "mother" who offered the most feasible plan.
"Suppose, this morning," she said, "you just help Dora unpack, and make her thoroughly at home in the house and garden; then this afternoon perhaps your father will take you for a walk, and show Dora the house where mrs Ewing lived, and any other interesting places.
That would do for to day, wouldn't it?
Then, day after to morrow we could have the picnic; and for the next week I have a magnificent idea, but I want to talk it over with your father," and she nodded and smiled at that gentleman in a way which made him almost as curious as the children.
"That's the way with mother," Marjorie said to Dora after breakfast. "She never ends things up.
The walk that afternoon was one which Dora always remembered.
mr Merrithew had, as Jackie said, "the splendidest way of splaining things," and found something of interest to relate about almost every street of the little city.
They went through the beautiful cathedral, and he told them how it had been built through the earnest efforts of the well-known and venerated Bishop Medley, who was afterward Metropolitan of Canada.
These willows she had often sketched, and Dora carried away a spray of the pale gray green leaves, in memory of her favourite story writer.
It was one of Dora's ambitions, kept secret hitherto, but now confided to Marjorie, to write stories "something like mrs Ewing's."
They saw, too, the picturesque cottage in which a certain quaint old lady had attained to the ripe age of a hundred and six years,--a record of which Fredericton was justly proud.
There were other things, too, to see, and many anecdotes to hear, so that it was a somewhat tired, though happy and hungry party which trudged home just in time for tea.
And such a tea, suited to hearty outdoor appetites born of the good Canadian air!
I think life would be very dull without meals."
These philosophical remarks rather astonished Dora, who was not yet accustomed to the contrast between Jack's sage reflections and his tender years.
Just now they seemed especially funny, because he was almost falling asleep while he talked.
When mrs Merrithew saw him nodding, she rang, and the nurse-who, like Debby, was a family institution-came in and carried him off in her stalwart arms, to his little white bed.
"Now, Susan, my very favourite song!"
And then Susan sang, in her soft, crooning voice "The maple leaf, the maple leaf, the maple leaf for ever!"
THE WHIP HAND
Spargo, almost irritable from desire to get at close grips with the objects of his long journey, shook off Breton's hand with a growl of resentment.
"And how on earth can I waste time guessing?" he exclaimed.
"Who is he?"
Breton laughed softly.
"Steady, Spargo, steady!" he said.
"It's Myerst-the Safe Deposit man. Myerst!"
Spargo started as if something had bitten him.
"Myerst!" he almost shouted.
"Myerst!
Good Lord!--why did I never think of him?
Then----"
"I don't know why you should have thought of him," said Breton. "But-he's there."
Spargo took a step towards the cottage: Breton pulled him back.
"Wait!" he said.
"We've got to discuss this.
I'd better tell you what they're doing."
"Well," answered Breton.
"They're going through a quantity of papers. The two old gentlemen look very ill and very miserable.
"What notion?"
"Myerst is in possession of whatever secret they have, and he's followed them down here to blackmail them.
That's my notion."
Spargo thought awhile, pacing up and down the river bank.
"I daresay you're right," he said.
"Now, what's to be done?"
Breton, too, considered matters.
"I wish," he said at last, "I wish we could get in there and overhear what's going on.
But that's impossible-I know that cottage.
The only thing we can do is this-we must catch Myerst unawares.
He's here for no good.
Look here!"
"That's a useful thing to have, Spargo," he remarked.
Now it'll come in handy.
For anything we know Myerst may be armed."
"Well?" said Spargo.
"Come up to the cottage.
If things turn out as I think they will, Myerst, when he's got what he wants, will be off.
You can report to me, and when Myerst comes out I'll cover him.
Come on, Spargo; it's beginning to get light already."
Together, he and Spargo made their way to the front of the cottage.
Arrived at the door, Breton posted himself in the porch, motioning to Spargo to creep in behind the bushes and to look through the window.
And Spargo noiselessly followed his directions and slightly parting the branches which concealed him looked in through the uncurtained glass.
The interior into which he looked was rough and comfortless in the extreme.
At the table in the middle of the floor the three men sat
Cardlestone's face was in the shadow; Myerst had his back to the window; old Elphick bending over the table was laboriously writing with shaking fingers.
And Spargo twisted his head round to his companion.
"Elphick," he said, "is writing a cheque.
Myerst has another cheque in his hand.
Be ready!--when he gets that second cheque I guess he'll be off."
Breton smiled grimly and nodded.
A moment later Spargo whispered again.
"Look out, Breton!
He's coming."
Breton drew back into the angle of the porch; Spargo quitted his protecting bush and took the other angle.
The door opened.
And they heard Myerst's voice, threatening, commanding in tone.
"Good morning, mr Myerst," said Breton with cold and ironic politeness.
"We are glad to meet you so unexpectedly.
And-I must trouble you to put up your hands.
Quick!"
Myerst made one hurried movement of his right hand towards his hip, but a sudden growl from Breton made him shift it just as quickly above his head, whither the left followed it.
Breton laughed softly.
Spargo-may I trouble you to see what mr Myerst carries in his pockets?
Go through them carefully.
Not for papers or documents-just now.
We can leave that matter-we've plenty of time.
See if he's got a weapon of any sort on him, Spargo-that's the important thing."
And he forthwith drew out and exhibited a revolver, while Myerst, finding his tongue, cursed them both, heartily and with profusion.
"Excellent!" said Breton, laughing again.
"Sure he's got nothing else on him that's dangerous, Spargo?
All right.
Now, mr Myerst, right about face!
March!"
Myerst obeyed this peremptory order with more curses.
The three walked into the cottage.
Breton kept his eye on his captive; Spargo gave a glance at the two old men.
Cardlestone, white and shaking, was lying back in his chair; Elphick, scarcely less alarmed, had risen, and was coming forward with trembling limbs.
"Wait a moment," said Breton, soothingly.
"Don't alarm yourself.
We'll deal with mr Myerst here first.
Now, Myerst, my man, sit down in that chair-it's the heaviest the place affords.
Into it, now!
Spargo, you see that coil of rope there.
Tie Myerst up-hand and foot-to that chair.
All the knots to be double, Spargo, and behind him."
Myerst suddenly laughed.
"You damned young bully!" he exclaimed.
Mark that, my fine fellows!"
"We'll see about that later," answered Breton.
He kept Myerst covered while Spargo made play with the rope.
"Don't be afraid of hurting him, Spargo," he said.
"Tie him well and strong.
He won't shift that chair in a hurry."
Spargo spliced his man to the chair in a fashion that would have done credit to a sailor.
He dropped his revolver into his pocket and turned to the two old men.
"Guardian," continued Breton, "don't be frightened!
And don't you be frightened, either, mr Cardlestone.
There's nothing to be afraid of, just yet, whatever there may be later on.
It seems to me that mr Spargo and I came just in time.
Now, guardian, what was this fellow after?"
Old Elphick lifted his head and shook it; he was plainly on the verge of tears; as for Cardlestone, it was evident that his nerve was completely gone.
And Breton pointed Spargo to an old corner cupboard.
"Spargo," he said, "I'm pretty sure you'll find whisky in there.
Give them both a stiff dose: they've broken up.
Now, guardian," he continued, when Spargo had carried out this order, "what was he after? Shall I suggest it?
Was it-blackmail?"
Cardlestone began to whimper; Elphick nodded his head.
"Yes, yes!" he muttered.
"Blackmail!
That was it-blackmail.
He-he got money-papers-from us.
Breton turned on the captive with a look of contempt.
"I thought as much, mr Myerst," he said.
"Spargo, let's see what he has on him."
Spargo began to search the prisoner's pockets.
And there was an open cheque, signed by Cardlestone for ten thousand pounds, and another, with Elphick's name at the foot, also open, for half that amount.
He turned to old Elphick.
What hold has he on you?"
Old Cardlestone began to whimper afresh; Elphick turned a troubled face on his ward.
"Come-tell me the truth now."
"He's been investigating-so he says," answered Elphick.
And-and he says he's the fullest evidence against Cardlestone-and against me as an accessory after the fact."
"And-it's a lie?" asked Breton.
"A lie!" answered Elphick.
But-he's so clever that-that----"
That may account for a good many things.
Now we must have the police here." He sat down at the table and drew the writing materials to him.
"Look here, Spargo," he continued.
"I'm going to write a note to the superintendent of police at Hawes-there's a farm half a mile from here where I can get a man to ride down to Hawes with the note.
Elphick began to move in his corner.
"Must the police come?" he said.
"Must----"
"The police must come," answered Breton firmly.
"Go ahead with your wire, Spargo, while I write this note."
EDISON'S work in stock printers and telegraphy had marked him as a rising man in the electrical art of the period but his invention of quadruplex telegraphy in eighteen seventy four was what brought him very prominently before the notice of the public.
In the early part of eighteen seventy three, and for some time afterward, the system invented by Joseph Stearns was the duplex in practical use.
In April of that year, however, Edison took up the study of the subject and filed two applications for patents.
Thus there was introduced a new feature into the art of multiplex telegraphy, for, whereas duplexing (accomplished by varying the strength of the current) permitted messages to be sent simultaneously from opposite stations, diplexing (achieved by also varying the direction of the current) permitted the simultaneous transmission of two messages from the same station and their separate reception at the distant station.
The quadruplex was the tempting goal toward which Edison now constantly turned, and after more than a year's strenuous work he filed a number of applications for patents in the late summer of eighteen seventy four.
As the reader will probably be interested to learn something of the theoretical principles of this fascinating invention, we shall endeavor to offer a brief and condensed explanation thereof with as little technicality as the subject will permit.
This explanation will necessarily be of somewhat elementary character for the benefit of the lay reader, whose indulgence is asked for an occasional reiteration introduced for the sake of clearness of comprehension.
These phenomena are easy of comprehension and demonstration.
If a rod of soft iron be wound around with a number of turns of insulated wire, and a current of electricity be sent through the wire, the rod will be instantly magnetized and will remain a magnet as long as the current flows; but when the current is cut off the magnetic effect instantly ceases.
This instrument consists essentially of an electro magnet of horseshoe form with its two poles close together, and with its armature, a bar of iron, maintained in close proximity to the poles, but kept normally in a retracted position by a spring.
When the distant operator presses down his key the circuit is closed and a current passes along the line and through the (generally two) coils of the electromagnet, thus magnetizing the iron core.
Its attractive power draws the armature toward the poles.
When the operator releases the pressure on his key the circuit is broken, current does not flow, the magnetic effect ceases, and the armature is drawn back by its spring. These movements give rise to the clicking sounds which represent the dots and dashes of the Morse or other alphabet as transmitted by the operator.
With a simple circuit, therefore, between two stations and where an intermediate battery is not necessary, a relay is not used.
The arrows indicate the direction of flow.
All magnets have two poles, north and south.
If the direction is reversed, the polarity will also be reversed.
Assuming, for instance, the bar to be end on toward the observer, that end will be a south pole if the current is flowing from left to right, clockwise, around the bar; or a north pole if flowing in the other direction, as illustrated at the right of the figure.
Hence, the bar would remain non magnetic.
As the path to the quadruplex passes through the duplex, let us consider the Stearns system, after noting one other principle-namely, that if more than one path is presented in which an electric current may complete its circuit, it divides in proportion to the resistance of each path.
The flow of current will cause two equal opposing actions to be set up in the bar; one will exactly offset the other, and no magnetic effect will be produced.
A relay thus wound is known as a differential relay-more generally called a neutral relay.
The non technical reader may wonder what use can possibly be made of an apparently non operative piece of apparatus.
It must be borne in mind, however, in considering a duplex system, that a differential relay is used AT EACH END of the line and forms part of the circuit; and that while each relay must be absolutely unresponsive to the signals SENT OUT FROM ITS HOME OFFICE, it must respond to signals transmitted by a DISTANT OFFICE.
Hence, the next figure (four), with its accompanying explanation, will probably make the matter clear.
The result would be that these currents would oppose and neutralize each other, and, therefore, none would flow in wire a Inasmuch, however, as there is nothing to hinder, current would flow from battery C through wire B, and the bar would therefore be magnetized.
The artificial line, as well as that to which the two coils are joined, are connected to earth.
There is a battery, C, and a key, k When the key is depressed, current flows through the relay coils at A, but no magnetism is produced, as they oppose each other.
The current, however, flows out through the main line coil over the line and through the main line coil one at B, completing its circuit to earth and magnetizing the bar of the relay, thus causing its armature to be attracted.
On releasing the key the circuit is broken and magnetism instantly ceases.
In practice this is done by means of a special instrument known as a continuity preserving transmitter, or, usually, as a transmitter.
This consists of an electromagnet, T, operated by a key, K, and separate battery.
The armature lever, L, is long, pivoted in the centre, and is bent over at the end.
The relay coils are connected by wire to the spring piece, S, and the armature lever is connected to earth.
When the key is released the battery is again connected to earth.
The compensating resistances and condensers necessary for a duplex arrangement are shown in the diagram.
The relay at A would be unresponsive, but the core of the relay at B would be magnetized and its armature respond to signals from a In like manner, if the transmitter at B be closed, current would flow through similar parts and thus cause the relay at A to respond.
If both transmitters be closed simultaneously, both batteries will be placed to the line, which would practically result in doubling the current in each of the main line coils, in consequence of which both relays are energized and their armatures attracted through the operation of the keys at the distant ends.
Hence, two messages can be sent in opposite directions over the same line simultaneously.
To accomplish this object Edison introduced another and distinct feature-namely, the using of the same current, but ALSO varying its DIRECTION of flow; that is to say, alternately reversing the POLARITY of the batteries as applied to the line and thus producing corresponding changes in the polarity of another specially constructed type of relay, called a polarized relay.
An essential part of this relay consists of a swinging PERMANENT magnet, C, whose polarity remains fixed, that end between the terminals of the electromagnet being a north pole.
Inasmuch as unlike poles of magnets are attracted to each other and like poles repelled, it follows that this north pole will be repelled by the north pole of the electromagnet, but will swing over and be attracted by its south pole.
If the direction of flow of current be reversed, by reversing the battery, the electromagnetic polarity also reverses and the end of the permanent magnet swings over to the other side.
This device being a relay, its purpose is to repeat transmitted signals into a local circuit, as before explained.
This action of the pole changer is effected by movements of the armature of an electromagnet through the manipulation of an ordinary telegraph key by an operator at the home station, as in the operation of the "transmitter," above referred to.
By a combination of the neutral relay and the polar relay two operators, by manipulating two telegraph keys in the ordinary way, can simultaneously send two messages over one line in the SAME direction with the SAME current, one operator varying its strength and the other operator varying its polarity or direction of flow.
Thus far we have referred to two systems, one the neutral or differential duplex, and the other the combination of the neutral and polar relays, making a diplex system.
Besides these there are the compensating resistances and condensers.
It will be understood, of course, that the polar relay, as used in the quadruplex system, is wound differentially, and therefore its operation is somewhat similar in principle to that of the differentially wound neutral relay, in that it does not respond to the operation of the key at the home office, but only operates in response to the movements of the distant key.
It should be stated, however, that between the outline and the filling in of the details there was an enormous amount of hard work, study, patient plodding, and endless experiments before Edison finally perfected his quadruplex system in the year eighteen seventy four.
If it were attempted to offer here a detailed explanation of the varied and numerous operations of the quadruplex, this article would assume the proportions of a treatise.
An idea of their complexity may be gathered from the following, which is quoted from American Telegraphy and Encyclopedia of the Telegraph, by William Maver junior:
"It may well be doubted whether in the whole range of applied electricity there occur such beautiful combinations, so quickly made, broken up, and others reformed, as in the operation of the Edison quadruplex.
For example, it is quite demonstrable that during the making of a simple dash of the Morse alphabet by the neutral relay at the home station the distant pole changer may reverse its battery several times; the home pole changer may do likewise, and the home transmitter may increase and decrease the electromotive force of the home battery repeatedly.
With the duplex, as we have seen, the current on the main line is changed in strength only when both keys at OPPOSITE stations are closed together, so that a current due to both batteries flows over the main line.
This difficulty was solved by dividing the battery at each station into two unequal parts, the smaller battery being always in circuit with the pole changer ready to have its polarity reversed on the main line to operate the distant polar relay, but the spring retracting the armature of the neutral relay is made so stiff as to resist these weak currents.
The underlying phenomena were similar, the difference consisting largely in the arrangement of the circuits and apparatus.
Edison made another notable contribution to multiplex telegraphy some years later in the Phonoplex.
The name suggests the use of the telephone, and such indeed is the case.
The necessity for this invention arose out of the problem of increasing the capacity of telegraph lines employed in "through" and "way" service, such as upon railroads.
There is naturally much intercommunication, which would be greatly curtailed by a system having the capacity of only a single message at a time.
The duplexes above described could not be used on a railroad telegraph system, because of the necessity of electrically balancing the line, which, while entirely feasible on a through line, would not be practicable between a number of intercommunicating points. Edison's phonoplex normally doubled the capacity of telegraph lines, whether employed on way business or through traffic, but in actual practice made it possible to obtain more than double service.
It has been in practical use for many years on some of the leading railroads of the United States.
It is well known that the diaphragm of a telephone vibrates with the fluctuations of the current energizing the magnet beneath it.
If, therefore, there be placed in the same circuit a regular telegraph relay and a special telephone, an operator may, by manipulating a key, operate the relay (and its sounder) without producing a sound in the telephone, as the makes and breaks of the key are far below the limit of audibility.
Strange Sounds.--A Night Attack.--Kennedy and Joe in the Tree.--Two Shots.--"Help! help!"--Reply in French.--The Morning.--The Missionary.--The Plan of Rescue.
The night came on very dark.
As usual, he took the nine o'clock watch, and at midnight Dick relieved him.
"Keep a sharp lookout, Dick!" was the doctor's good night injunction.
"Is there any thing new on the carpet?"
"I'll do so, doctor; rest easy."
Was that the cry of an animal or of a night bird, or did it come from human lips?
"Let us speak below our breath."
"Has any thing happened?"
"Yes, let us waken Joe."
"Agreed!"
"Let us go down, then!" said Joe.
"Don't you hear that?" he whispered.
"Yes, and it's coming nearer."
"Suppose it should be a serpent?
"Keep watch on this side, and I'll take care of the other."
"Very good!"
"The blacks!
Joe gently brought his rifle to his shoulder as he spoke.
"Wait!" said Kennedy.
"Attention!" said Kennedy.
"Fire!"
But, in the midst of these yells and howls, a strange, unexpected-nay what seemed an impossible-cry had been heard!
"Help! help!"
"Did you hear that?" the doctor asked them.
"Undoubtedly, that supernatural cry, 'A moi! a moi!' comes from a Frenchman in the hands of these barbarians!"
"A missionary, perhaps."
"They are, doctor, and we are ready to obey you."
"Let us, then, lay our heads together to devise some plan, and in the morning we'll try to rescue him."
"It's quite clear to me, from the way in which they made off, that they are unacquainted with fire arms.
We must, therefore, profit by their fears; but we shall await daylight before acting, and then we can form our plans of rescue according to circumstances."
"The poor captive cannot be far off," said Joe, "because-"
"Help! help!" repeated the voice, but much more feebly this time.
"The savage wretches!" exclaimed Joe, trembling with indignation. "Suppose they should kill him to night!"
"Do you hear, doctor," resumed Kennedy, seizing the doctor's hand. "Suppose they should kill him to night!"
"It is not at all likely, my friends.
These savage tribes kill their captives in broad daylight; they must have the sunshine."
"Now, if I were to take advantage of the darkness to slip down to the poor fellow?" said Kennedy.
"Pause, my friends-pause!
"Why so?" asked Kennedy.
"Dick, I implore you, heed what I say.
I am acting for the common good; and if by any accident you should be taken by surprise, all would be lost."
"But, think of that poor wretch, hoping for aid, waiting there, praying, calling aloud.
"We can reassure him, on that score," said dr Ferguson-and, standing erect, making a speaking trumpet of his hands, he shouted at the top of his voice, in French: "Whoever you are, be of good cheer!
Three friends are watching over you."
A terrific howl from the savages responded to these words-no doubt drowning the prisoner's reply.
We must act!"
"Nothing more simple, doctor," said Kennedy.
"I, master?
why, I'd act more prudently, maybe, by telling the prisoner to make his escape in a certain direction that we'd agree upon."
"And how would you get him to know that?"
"Your plans are impracticable, my dear friends.
No! we must put ALL the chances on OUR side, and go to work differently."
"But let us act at once!" said the hunter.
"Perhaps we may," said the doctor, throwing considerable stress upon the words.
The doctor kept silent for a few moments; he was thinking.
Ferguson at last resumed:
"How do you expect to manage the balloon?" asked Kennedy.
"This is the idea, Dick: you will admit that if I can get to the prisoner, and throw out a quantity of ballast, equal to his weight, I shall have in nowise altered the equilibrium of the balloon.
Well, then, in throwing out this overplus of ballast at a given moment, I am certain to rise with great rapidity."
"That's plain enough."
Now, the gas is precious; but we must not haggle over it when the life of a fellow creature is at stake."
"Let us work, then, and get these bags all arranged on the rim of the car, so that they may be thrown overboard at one movement."
"But this darkness?"
"It hides our preparations, and will be dispersed only when they are finished.
Take care to have all our weapons close at hand.
Are you ready?"
The sacks were placed as requested, and the arms were put in good order.
"Very good!" said the doctor.
Joe will see to throwing out the ballast, and Dick will carry off the prisoner; but let nothing be done until I give the word.
He then took out the two perfectly isolated conducting wires, which served for the decomposition of the water, and, searching in his travelling sack, brought forth two pieces of charcoal, cut down to a sharp point, and fixed one at the end of each wire.
"Oh!" ejaculated the astonished friends.
Joe in a Fit of Rage.--The Death of a Good Man.--The Night of watching by the Body.--Barrenness and Drought.--The Burial.--The Quartz Rocks.--Joe's Hallucinations.--A Precious Ballast.--A Survey of the Gold bearing Mountains.--The Beginning of Joe's Despair.
"He'll not get over it!" sighed Joe.
"Poor young fellow-scarcely thirty years of age!"
"Heaven has given him a lovely night, Joe-his last on earth, perhaps! He will suffer but little more after this, and his dying will be only a peaceful falling asleep."
His breathing became difficult, and he asked for air.
May God requite you, and bring you to your safe harbor!
"You must still hope," replied Kennedy.
"This is but a passing fit of weakness.
"Death is at hand," replied the missionary, "I know it!
Let me look it in the face!
Place me upon my knees, my brethren, I beseech you!"
"My God! my God!" exclaimed the dying apostle, "have pity on me!"
His countenance shone.
"Dead!" said the doctor, bending over him, "dead!" And with one common accord, the three friends knelt together in silent prayer.
He therefore opened the valve of the outside balloon.
As soon as the car touched the ground, the doctor shut the valve.
Joe leaped out, holding on the while to the rim of the car with one hand, and with the other gathering up a quantity of stones equal to his own weight.
The soil, in fact, was bestrewn with quartz and porphyritic rocks.
"This is a singular discovery!" said the doctor, mentally.
In the mean while, Kennedy and Joe had strolled away a few paces, looking up a proper spot for the grave.
The noonday sun poured down its rays perpendicularly into it.
The first thing to be done was to clear the surface of the fragments of rock that encumbered it, and then a quite deep grave had to be dug, so that the wild animals should not be able to disinter the corpse.
The body of the martyred missionary was then solemnly placed in it.
"What are you thinking about, doctor?" asked Kennedy.
"About a singular freak of Nature, a curious effect of chance.
Do you know, now, in what kind of soil that man of self denial, that poor one in spirit, has just been buried?"
"No! what do you mean, doctor?"
"Yes, a gold mine," said the doctor, quietly.
"Those blocks which you are trampling under foot, like worthless stones, contain gold ore of great purity."
"Impossible!
impossible!" repeated Joe.
Joe at once rushed like a crazy man among the scattered fragments, and Kennedy was not long in following his example.
"Keep cool, Joe," said his master.
"What! a philosopher of your mettle-"
Let us reflect a little.
What good would all this wealth do you?
"We can't take any of it with us, indeed?"
"It's rather too heavy for our car!
I even hesitated to tell you any thing about it, for fear of exciting your regret!"
"Take care, my friend!
Would you yield to the thirst for gold?
"All that is true," replied Joe, "but gold!
"The millions are rather heavy, you know," resumed the doctor, "and cannot very easily be put into one's pocket."
"Very good!
"Yes, my friend, this is a reservoir in which Nature has been heaping up her wealth for centuries!
"Perhaps! but at all events, here's what I'll do to console you."
"Listen!
Let us fill our car with the precious mineral, and what remains at the end of the trip will be so much made."
And Joe went to work.
The doctor watched him with a smile; and, while Joe went on, he took the bearings, and found that the missionary's grave lay in twenty two degrees twenty three minutes east longitude, and four degrees fifty five minutes north latitude.
Then, casting one glance at the swelling of the soil, beneath which the body of the poor Frenchman reposed, he went back to his car.
"God will recognize it!" said Kennedy.
He had to feed his cylinder continually; and he even began to find that he had not enough to quench the thirst of his party.
Upon getting back to the car, he found it burdened with the quartz blocks that Joe's greed had heaped in it.
Kennedy took his customary place, and Joe followed, but not without casting a covetous glance at the treasures in the ravine.
The doctor rekindled the light in the cylinder; the spiral became heated; the current of hydrogen came in a few minutes, and the gas dilated; but the balloon did not stir an inch.
Joe looked on uneasily, but kept silent.
Joe made no reply.
"Joe!
Don't you hear me?"
"Do me the kindness to throw out some of that quartz!"
"But, doctor, you gave me leave-"
"I gave you leave to replace the ballast; that was all!"
"But-"
"Do you want to stay forever in this desert?"
"Then your cylinder don't work," said the obstinate fellow.
It was a fragment of about three or four pounds.
At last he threw it out.
"Humph!" said he; "we're not going up yet."
"Keep on throwing."
Joe now threw out some ten pounds, but the balloon stood still.
Joe got very pale.
"Poor fellow!" said the doctor.
"mr Kennedy, you and I weigh, unless I am mistaken, about four hundred pounds-so that you'll have to get rid of at least that weight, since it was put in here to make up for us."
The brave fellow, heaving deep sighs, began at last to lighten the balloon; but, from time to time, he would stop, and ask:
"Are you going up?"
"No, not yet," was the invariable response.
"Keep on!" replied the doctor.
"It's going up; I'm sure."
"Keep on yet," said Kennedy.
And Joe, picking up one more block, desperately tossed it out of the car.
"Now, Joe," resumed the doctor, "there still remains a handsome fortune for you; and, if we can only keep the rest of this with us until the end of our trip, there you are-rich for the balance of your days!"
"See, my dear Dick!" the doctor went on.
"Just see the power of this metal over the cleverest lad in the world!
What passions, what greed, what crimes, the knowledge of such a mine as that would cause!
It is sad to think of it!"
Ferguson's Anxieties.--The Situation flatly stated.--Energetic Replies of Kennedy and Joe.--One Night more.
Toward morning, the sky had resumed its brilliant purity and its heat. The balloon ascended, and, after several ineffectual attempts, fell into a current that, although not rapid, bore them toward the northwest.
"I hope so."
They conversed less, and were more wrapt in their own thoughts.
He kept entirely silent, and gazed incessantly upon the stony fragments heaped up in the car-worthless to day, but of inestimable value to morrow.
Barely a few dwarf plants could now be noticed, like those on the wild heaths of Scotland; then came the first tract of grayish sand and flint, with here and there a lentisk tree and brambles.
However, there was no going back; they must go forward; and, indeed, the doctor asked for nothing better; he would even have welcomed a tempest to carry him beyond this country.
Two gallons only then remained to supply the cylinder.
Consequently, they could not keep on longer than fifty four hours-and all this was a mathematical calculation!
"Yes, my dear Dick!"
At their evening meal, the water was strictly measured out, and the brandy was increased in quantity in the punch they drank.
This circumstance gave the doctor some hope, since it recalled to his mind the conjectures of geographers concerning the existence of a vast stretch of water in the centre of Africa.
It took six thousand years to invent propellers and screws; so we have time enough yet."
"You don't regret, though, what you did, doctor?"
"Here, at last, is Africa, such as you pictured it to yourself, Joe!
Was I not right in saying, 'Wait a little?' eh?"
Where he goes, there I'll go!"
"And you, Kennedy?"
"I, doctor, I'm not the man to despair; no one was less ignorant than I of the perils of the enterprise, but I did not want to see them, from the moment that you determined to brave them.
Besides, to return looks to me quite as perilous as the other course.
So onward, then! you may count upon us!"
"Thanks, my gallant friends!" replied the doctor, with much real feeling, "I expected such devotion as this; but I needed these encouraging words.
"Let us wait with resignation," said the hunter.
It was the Desert!
"Perhaps Joe is not lost after all," he said.
"Oh, he's just the lad to get safely out of the scrape, I repeat.
"I hope so.
He found that there were still left some thirty pounds of pemmican, a supply of tea and coffee, about a gallon and a half of brandy, and one empty water tank.
All the dried meat had disappeared.
The dilating apparatus appeared to be in good condition, and neither the battery nor the spiral had been injured.
"At the first streak of day, the doctor aroused Kennedy.
Speak!"
"Let us set out, then!" said the hunter.
We cannot be far away from the scene of our accident."
"We must absolutely come to a halt," said he, "and even alight.
One horrible thought glanced across the minds of both Kennedy and the doctor: caymans swarm in these waters!
Even if the stars stood fast, the motion of the solar system would gradually alter the configurations, as the elements of a landscape dissolve and recombine in fresh groupings with the traveler's progress amid them.
And yet this secular fluctuation of the constellation figures is not without keen interest for the meditative observer.
To the passing glance, which is all that we can bestow upon these figures, they appear so immutable that they have been called into service to form the most lasting records of ancient thought and imagination that we possess.
To emphasize the importance of these effects it is only necessary to recall that the constellations register the oldest traditions of our race.
At Izamal, in Yucatan, says Mr Stansbury Hagar, is a group of ruins perched, after the Mexican and Central American plan, on the summits of pyramidal mounds which mark the site of an ancient theogonic center of the Mayas.
Here the temples all evidently refer to a cult based upon the constellations as symbols.
And the same star figures, having the same significance, were familiar to the Peruvians, as shown by the temples at Cuzco.
Thus the imagination of ancient America sought in the constellations symbols of the unchanging gods.
As handled by the Greeks from prehistoric times, the constellation myths became the very soul of poetry.
The imagination of that wonderful race idealized the principal star groups so effectively that the figures and traditions thus attached to them have, for civilized mankind, displaced all others, just as Greek art in its highest forms stands without parallel and eclipses every rival.
Let us now study some of the effects of the stellar motions upon them.
As far as is known, the motion of the seven stars are not shared by the smaller stars scattered about them, but on the theory of currents there should be such a community of motion, and further investigation may reveal it.
Three of these stars are usually ranked as of the second magnitude, and two of the third; but to ordinary observation they appear of nearly equal brightness, and present a very striking picture.
Four of them, Beta, Alpha, Delta, and Epsilon are traveling eastwardly at various speeds, while the fifth, Gamma, moves in a westerly direction.
The motion of Beta is more rapid than that of any of the others.
It should be said, however, that no little uncertainty attaches to the estimates of the rate of motion of stars which are not going very rapidly, and different observers often vary considerably in their results.
The seven principle stars of the asterism, forming a surprisingly perfect coronet, have movements in three directions at right angles to one another.
The chief star of the group, Aldebaran, one of the finest of all stars both for its brilliance and its color, is the most affected by the easterly motion.
In time it will drift entirely out of connection with its present neighbors.
The great figure of Orion appears to be more lasting, not because its stars are physically connected, but because of their great distance, which renders their movements too deliberate to be exactly ascertained.
This most attractive asterism, which has never ceased to fascinate the imagination of Christendom since it was first devoutly described by the early explorers of the South, is but a passing collocation of brilliant stars.
Yet even in its transfigurations it has been for hundreds of centuries, and will continue to be for hundreds of centuries to come, a most striking object in the sky.
Our figures show its appearance in three successive phases: first, as it was fifty thousand years ago (viewed from the earth's present location); second, as it is in our day; and, third, as it will be an equal time in the future.
Only by showing the changes from some definite point of view can we arrive at a due comprehension of them.
As all the world knows, the sun, a blinding globe pouring forth an inconceivable quantity of light and heat, whose daily passage through the sky is caused by the earth's rotation on its axis, constitutes the most important phenomenon of terrestial existence.
But when an eclipse of the sun occurs, caused by the interposition of the opaque globe of the moon, we see its immediate surroundings, which in some respects are more wonderful than the glowing central orb. These surroundings, although not in the sense in which we apply the term to the gaseous envelope of the earth, may be called the sun's atmosphere.
The two combined, when well seen, make a spectacle without parallel among the marvels of the sky.
Although many attempts have been made to render the corona visible when there is no eclipse, all have failed, and it is to the moon alone that we owe its revelation.
To cover the sun's disk with a circular screen will not answer the purpose because of the illumination of the air all about the observer.
But the prominences are rarely large enough to be noticed by the naked eye, while the streamers of the corona, stretching far away in space, like ghostly banners blown out from the black circle of the obscuring moon, attract every eye, and to this weird apparition much of the fear inspired by eclipses has been due.
But if the corona has been a cause of terror in the past it has become a source of growing knowledge in our time.
The story of the first scientific observation of the corona and the prominences is thrillingly interesting, and in fact dramatic.
The interest centers in what happened at Pavia in Northern Italy, where the English astronomer Francis Baily had set up his telescope.
The eclipse had begun and Bailey was busy at his telescope when, to quote his own words in the account which he wrote for the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society:
But the most remarkable circumstance attending the phenomenon was the appearance of three large protuberances apparently emanating from the circumference of the moon, but evidently forming a portion of the corona.
They resembled the Alpine mountains in another respect, inasmuch as their light was perfectly steady, and had none of that flickering or sparkling motion so visible in other parts of the corona...
The whole of these protuberances were visible even to the last moment of total obscuration, and when the first ray of light was admitted from the sun they vanished, with the corona, altogether, and daylight was instantly restored.
I have quoted nearly all of this remarkable description not alone for its intrinsic interest, but because it is the best depiction that can be found of the general phenomena of a total solar eclipse.
Still, not every such eclipse offers an equally magnificent spectacle.
The eclipses of nineteen hundred and nineteen o five, for instance, which were seen by the writer, the first in South Carolina and the second in Spain, fell far short of that described by Bailey in splendor and impressiveness.
Of course, something must be allowed for the effect of surprise; Bailey had not expected to see what was so suddenly disclosed to him.
At Burgos it is said many made the sign of the cross.
Either of them, when seen in projection against the brilliant solar disk, appears white, not red, as against a background of sky. The quiescent prominences, whose elevation is often from forty thousand to sixty thousand miles, consist, as the spectroscope shows, mainly of hydrogen and helium.
The latter, it will be remembered, is an element which was known to be in the sun many years before the discovery that it also exists in small quantities on the earth.
It is known from mathematical considerations that the gravitation of the sun would not be able to bring back any body that started from its surface with a velocity exceeding three hundred and eighty three miles per second; so it is evident that some of the matter hurled forth in eruptive prominences may escape from solar control and go speeding out into space, cooling and condensing into solid masses.
Stars very far advanced in evolution, without showing variability, also exhibit similar spectra; so that there is much reason for regarding sunspots as emblems of advancing age.
The association of the corona with sun spots is less evident than that of the eruptive prominences; still such an association exists, for the form and extent of the corona vary with the sun spot period of which we shall presently speak.
The constitution of the corona remains to be discovered.
Experiment has proved, what mathematical considerations had previously pointed out as probable, that the waves of light exert a pressure or driving force, which becomes evident in its effects if the body acted upon is sufficiently small.
In that case the light pressure will prevail over the attraction of gravitation, and propel the attenuated matter away from the sun in the teeth of its attraction.
The earth itself would be driven away if, instead of consisting of a solid globe of immense aggregate mass, it were a cloud of microscopic particles.
If the diameter is still further decreased, the ratio of the surface to the volume will proportionally grow larger; in other words, the pressure will gain upon the attraction, and whatever their original ratio may have been, a time will come, if the diminution of size continues, when the pressure will become more effective than the attraction, and the body will be driven away.
This is beautifully shown in some of the photographs that have been made of the corona during recent eclipses.
Take, for instance, that of the eclipse of nineteen hundred.
Messages are abruptly cut off, sparks leap from the telegraph instruments, and the entire earth seems to have been thrown into a magnetic flurry.
After two or three years they begin to diminish in number, magnitude, and activity until they almost or quite disappear.
It was not very long after the discovery of the sun spot cycle that the curious observation was made that a striking coincidence existed between the period of the sun spots and another period affecting the general magnetic condition of the earth.
A final answer to this question cannot yet be given, for the evidence is contradictory, and the interpretations put upon it depend largely on the predilections of the judges.
Reference was made, a few lines above, to the resemblance of the spectra of sun spots to those of certain stars which seem to be failing through age.
The very inequalities in the sun spot cycle are suspicious.
Looking backward, we see a time when the sun must have been more brilliant than it is now.
The corona, as we have said, varies with the sun spot cycle.
It is then that the curved polar rays are most conspicuous.
Marvels of the Aurora
Toward the north the spectacle was appalling.
A huge arch spanned an unnaturally dark segment resting on the horizon, and above this arch sprang up beams and streamers in a state of incessant agitation, sometimes shooting up to the zenith with a velocity that took one's breath, and sometimes suddenly falling into long ranks, and marching, marching, marching, like an endless phalanx of fiery specters, and moving, as I remember, always from east to west.
The absolute silence with which these mysterious evolutions were performed and the quavering reflections which were thrown upon the ground increased the awfulness of the exhibition.
The spectacle continued with varying intensity for hours.
This exhibition occurred in Central New York, a latitude in which the Aurora Borealis is seldom seen with so much splendor.
The pages in the narratives of Arctic exploration that are devoted to descriptions of the wonderful effects of the Northern Lights are second to none that man has ever penned in their fascination.
The lights, as I have already intimated, display astonishing colors, particularly shades of red and green, as they flit from place to place in the sky.
After the invention of magnetic telegraphy it was found that whenever a great Aurora occurred the telegraph lines were interrupted in their operation, and the ocean cables ceased to work.
The first notable proof of the suspected connection was furnished with dramatic emphasis by an occurrence which happened on september first eighteen fifty nine.
Near noon on that day two intensely brilliant points suddenly broke out in a group of sun spots which were under observation by Mr r c Carrington at his observatory at Redhill, England.
The points remained visible for not more than five minutes, during which interval they moved thirty five thousand miles across the solar disk.
Mr r Hodgson happened to see the same phenomenon at his observatory at Highgate, and thus all possibility of deception was removed.
But neither of the startled observers could have anticipated what was to follow, and, indeed, it was an occurrence which has never been precisely duplicated.
The coincidence was even closer.
It is true that the late Lord Kelvin raised difficulties in the way of the hypothesis of a direct magnetic action of the sun upon the earth, because it seemed to him that an inadmissible quantity of energy was demanded to account for such action.
It was Lord Kelvin who, but a few years before the thing was actually accomplished, declared that aerial navigation was an impracticable dream, and demonstrated its impracticability by calculation.
In short, the coincidences are so numerous and significant that one would have to throw the doctrine of probability to the winds in order to be able to reject the conclusion to which they so plainly lead.
But still the question recurs: How is the influence transmitted?
He would give the Aurora the same lineage with the Zodiacal Light.
These coincidences are certainly very striking, and they have a cumulative force.
If we accept the theory, it would appear that we ought to congratulate ourselves that the inclination of the sun's equator is so slight, for as things stand the earth is never directly over the most active regions of the sun spots, and consequently never suffers from the maximum bombardment of charged particles of which the sun is capable.
First, the number of aurorae, according to his explanation, ought to be greatest in the daytime, when the face of the earth on the sunward side is directly exposed to the atomic bombardment.
Yet another singular fact, almost mystical in its suggestions, may be mentioned.
It seems that the dance of the auroral lights occurs most frequently during the absence of the moon from the hemisphere in which they appear, and that they flee, in greater part, to the opposite hemisphere when the moon's revolution in an orbit considerably inclined to the earth's equator brings her into that where they have been performing.
There are even other apparent confirmations of the hypothesis, but we need not go into them.
MARTHA
We had turned back to follow her, having encountered her coming towards us; and Westminster Abbey was the point at which she passed from the lights and noise of the leading streets.
She proceeded so quickly, when she got free of the two currents of passengers setting towards and from the bridge, that, between this and the advance she had of us when she struck off, we were in the narrow water side street by Millbank before we came up with her.
At that moment she crossed the road, as if to avoid the footsteps that she heard so close behind; and, without looking back, passed on even more rapidly.
A glimpse of the river through a dull gateway, where some waggons were housed for the night, seemed to arrest my feet.
There was, and is when I write, at the end of that low lying street, a dilapidated little wooden building, probably an obsolete old ferry house.
As soon as she came here, and saw the water, she stopped as if she had come to her destination; and presently went slowly along by the brink of the river, looking intently at it.
The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London.
There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison.
A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls.
Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity.
In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away.
Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year's handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb tide.
Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed into that nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of the polluted stream.
There were some boats and barges astrand in the mud, and these enabled us to come within a few yards of her without being seen.
I then signed to mr Peggotty to remain where he was, and emerged from their shade to speak to her.
I think she was talking to herself.
She uttered a terrified scream, and struggled with me with such strength that I doubt if I could have held her alone.
In a little while she sat among the stones, holding her wretched head with both her hands.
'Oh, the river!' she cried passionately.
'Oh, the river!'
'I know it's like me!' she exclaimed.
'I know that I belong to it. I know that it's the natural company of such as I am!
'I can't keep away from it.
I can't forget it.
It haunts me day and night.
It's the only thing in all the world that I am fit for, or that's fit for me.
Oh, the dreadful river!'
He shook as if he would have fallen; and his hand-I touched it with my own, for his appearance alarmed me-was deadly cold.
He made some motion with his mouth, and seemed to think he had spoken; but he had only pointed to her with his outstretched hand.
Knowing that this state must pass, before we could speak to her with any hope, I ventured to restrain him when he would have raised her, and we stood by in silence until she became more tranquil.
'Are you composed enough,' said I, 'to speak on the subject which so interested you-I hope Heaven may remember it!--that snowy night?'
Her sobs broke out afresh, and she murmured some inarticulate thanks to me for not having driven her away from the door.
'I want to say nothing for myself,' she said, after a few moments.
'I am bad, I am lost.
I have no hope at all.
'It was you, if I don't deceive myself,' she said, in a broken voice, 'that came into the kitchen, the night she took such pity on me; was so gentle to me; didn't shrink away from me like all the rest, and gave me such kind help!
'You are innocent of any part in it, we thoroughly believe,--we know.'
She never spoke a word to me but what was pleasant and right.
When, Heaven knows, I would have died to have brought back her good name!'
Long unused to any self control, the piercing agony of her remorse and grief was terrible.
'To have died, would not have been much-what can I say?---I would have lived!' she cried.
'How can I go on as I am, a solitary curse to myself, a living disgrace to everyone I come near!' Suddenly she turned to my companion.
'Stamp upon me, kill me!
I don't complain.
Oh, don't think that all the power I had of loving anything is quite worn out!
Kill me for being what I am, and having ever known her; but don't think that of me!'
'Martha,' said mr Peggotty, 'God forbid as I should judge you.
Forbid as I, of all men, should do that, my girl!
Well!' he paused a moment, then went on.
'You doen't understand how 'tis that this here gentleman and me has wished to speak to you.
She stood, shrinkingly, before him, as if she were afraid to meet his eyes; but her passionate sorrow was quite hushed and mute.
My dear niece,' he repeated steadily.
'I have heerd her tell,' said mr Peggotty, 'as you was early left fatherless and motherless, with no friend fur to take, in a rough seafaring way, their place.
Maybe you can guess that if you'd had such a friend, you'd have got into a way of being fond of him in course of time, and that my niece was kiender daughter like to me.'
As she was silently trembling, he put her shawl carefully about her, taking it up from the ground for that purpose.
I read, in every word of his plain impressive way of delivering himself, new evidence of his having thought of this one topic, in every feature it presented.
'According to our reckoning,' he proceeded, 'Mas'r Davy's here, and mine, she is like, one day, to make her own poor solitary course to London.
Bless her, I knew she was!
I knew she always was, to all.
You're thankful to her, and you love her.
She looked at him hastily, and for the first time, as if she were doubtful of what he had said.
'Will you trust me?' she asked, in a low voice of astonishment.
We both replied together, 'Yes!'
She lifted up her eyes, and solemnly declared that she would devote herself to this task, fervently and faithfully.
She did not raise her voice above her breath, or address us, but said this to the night sky; then stood profoundly quiet, looking at the gloomy water.
She listened with great attention, and with a face that often changed, but had the same purpose in all its varying expressions.
It seemed as if her spirit were quite altered, and she could not be too quiet.
She asked, when all was told, where we were to be communicated with, if occasion should arise.
She said, after a pause, in no place long.
She continued steadfast.
In this particular, his influence upon her was equally powerless with mine.
She gratefully thanked him but remained inexorable.
'There may be work to be got,' she said.
'I'll try.'
'I could not do what I have promised, for money,' she replied.
'I could not take it, if I was starving.
We can all do some good, if we will.'
'It has been put into your hearts, perhaps, to save a wretched creature for repentance.
I am afraid to think so; it seems too bold.
If any good should come of me, I might begin to hope; for nothing but harm has ever come of my deeds yet.
I am to be trusted, for the first time in a long while, with my miserable life, on account of what you have given me to try for.
Again she repressed the tears that had begun to flow; and, putting out her trembling hand, and touching mr Peggotty, as if there was some healing virtue in him, went away along the desolate road.
I had such implicit confidence in her declaration, that I then put it to mr Peggotty, whether it would not seem, in the onset, like distrusting her, to follow her any farther.
He accompanied me a good part of the way; and when we parted, with a prayer for the success of this fresh effort, there was a new and thoughtful compassion in him that I was at no loss to interpret.
It was midnight when I arrived at home.
Thinking that my aunt might have relapsed into one of her old alarms, and might be watching the progress of some imaginary conflagration in the distance, I went to speak to her.
He had a glass and bottle in his hand, and was in the act of drinking.
He was eating as well as drinking, and seemed to eat with a hungry appetite.
The light in the passage was obscured for a moment, and my aunt came out.
I heard it chink.
'What's the use of this?' he demanded.
'Then I can't go,' said he.
'Here!
You may take it back!'
'You bad man,' returned my aunt, with great emotion; 'how can you use me so?
But why do I ask?
It is because you know how weak I am!
What have I to do, to free myself for ever of your visits, but to abandon you to your deserts?'
'And why don't you abandon me to my deserts?' said he.
'What a heart you must have!'
'Is this all you mean to give me, then?'
'It is all I CAN give you,' said my aunt.
I have told you so.
Having got it, why do you give me the pain of looking at you for another moment, and seeing what you have become?'
'I have become shabby enough, if you mean that,' he said.
'I lead the life of an owl.'
You treated me falsely, ungratefully, and cruelly.
'Aye!' he returned.
'It's all very fine-Well!
I must do the best I can, for the present, I suppose.'
In spite of himself, he appeared abashed by my aunt's indignant tears, and came slouching out of the garden.
Taking two or three quick steps, as if I had just come up, I met him at the gate, and went in as he came out.
Let me speak to him.
Who is he?'
We sat down in her little parlour.
Then she came out, and took a seat beside me.
'Trot,' said my aunt, calmly, 'it's my husband.'
'Your husband, aunt?
I thought he had been dead!'
When she loved him, Trot, right well.
He repaid her by breaking her fortune, and nearly breaking her heart.
So she put all that sort of sentiment, once and for ever, in a grave, and filled it up, and flattened it down.'
'My dear, good aunt!'
He soon made ducks and drakes of what I gave him, sank lower and lower, married another woman, I believe, became an adventurer, a gambler, and a cheat.
She gave my hand a squeeze, and shook her head.
From Omaha,--department headquarters,--almost on the heels of the Laramie wire came cheery word from their gallant chief: "Coming to join you noon train to day. Cheyenne one thirty to morrow.
See!
"Lost anything, Captain Blake?"
"But I've found something," muttered he to himself, between his set teeth, and within five minutes more was again closeted with the post commander.
"Yes.
"Major, you told me to keep watch and let you know.
There's a courier coming-hard!
Mother saw him-too, through the-spyglass.
"Right!" cried Webb.
Those devils may indeed cut him off.
Theirs was the race, perhaps, but not the prize, for he had turned up far from the expected point.
Only for a second or two, however.
CHAPTER eight
"That means news of importance," said Webb, at the instant.
It was no surprise to Dade.
"Blake!
"Millions, be damned!" yelled Kennedy.
Come on, ye scut!" And down they went, full tilt at the Sioux, yet heading to cover and reach the beleaguered party in the hollow.
I heard him plainly.
"Picked it up by that pony yonder, sir," answered the corporal, with a salute.
Two, indeed, of Blake's horses were crippled, and it was high time to be going.
CHAPTER twenty two
Something had hit him from behind, but he couldn't tell what.
Flint's nerve was failing him, for here was confirmation of the general's theory, but there was worse to come and more of it.
And presently they came-mrs
CHAPTER thirty six.
I began the next day with another dive into the Roman bath, and then started for Highgate.
I was not dispirited now.
I was not afraid of the shabby coat, and had no yearnings after gallant greys.
My whole manner of thinking of our late misfortune was changed.
What I had to do, was, to show my aunt that her past goodness to me had not been thrown away on an insensible, ungrateful object.
And I went on at a mighty rate, as if it could be done by walking.
When I found myself on the familiar Highgate road, pursuing such a different errand from that old one of pleasure, with which it was associated, it seemed as if a complete change had come on my whole life. But that did not discourage me.
With the new life, came new purpose, new intention.
Great was the labour; priceless the reward.
Dora was the reward, and Dora must be won.
I got into such a transport, that I felt quite sorry my coat was not a little shabby already.
I wanted to be cutting at those trees in the forest of difficulty, under circumstances that should prove my strength. I had a good mind to ask an old man, in wire spectacles, who was breaking stones upon the road, to lend me his hammer for a little while, and let me begin to beat a path to Dora out of granite.
I stimulated myself into such a heat, and got so out of breath, that I felt as if I had been earning I don't know how much.
I came out again, hotter and faster than ever, and dashed up to Highgate, at such a rate that I was there an hour too early; and, though I had not been, should have been obliged to stroll about to cool myself, before I was at all presentable.
My first care, after putting myself under this necessary course of preparation, was to find the Doctor's house.
It was not in that part of Highgate where mrs Steerforth lived, but quite on the opposite side of the little town.
When I had made this discovery, I went back, in an attraction I could not resist, to a lane by mrs Steerforth's, and looked over the corner of the garden wall.
His room was shut up close. The conservatory doors were standing open, and Rosa Dartle was walking, bareheaded, with a quick, impetuous step, up and down a gravel walk on one side of the lawn.
She gave me the idea of some fierce thing, that was dragging the length of its chain to and fro upon a beaten track, and wearing its heart out.
I came softly away from my place of observation, and avoiding that part of the neighbourhood, and wishing I had not gone near it, strolled about until it was ten o'clock.
The church with the slender spire, that stands on the top of the hill now, was not there then to tell me the time.
An old red brick mansion, used as a school, was in its place; and a fine old house it must have been to go to school at, as I recollect it.
When I approached the Doctor's cottage-a pretty old place, on which he seemed to have expended some money, if I might judge from the embellishments and repairs that had the look of being just completed-I saw him walking in the garden at the side, gaiters and all, as if he had never left off walking since the days of my pupilage.
He had his old companions about him, too; for there were plenty of high trees in the neighbourhood, and two or three rooks were on the grass, looking after him, as if they had been written to about him by the Canterbury rooks, and were observing him closely in consequence.
Knowing the utter hopelessness of attracting his attention from that distance, I made bold to open the gate, and walk after him, so as to meet him when he should turn round.
When he did, and came towards me, he looked at me thoughtfully for a few moments, evidently without thinking about me at all; and then his benevolent face expressed extraordinary pleasure, and he took me by both hands.
How do you do?
I am delighted to see you.
My dear Copperfield, how very much you have improved!
You are quite-yes-dear me!'
'Oh dear, yes!' said the Doctor; 'Annie's quite well, and she'll be delighted to see you.
You were always her favourite.
She said so, last night, when I showed her your letter.
And-yes, to be sure-you recollect mr Jack Maldon, Copperfield?'
'Perfectly, sir.'
'To be sure.
He's pretty well, too.'
'Has he come home, sir?' I inquired.
'From India?' said the Doctor.
'Yes.
mr Jack Maldon couldn't bear the climate, my dear.
mrs Markleham-you have not forgotten mrs Markleham?'
Forgotten the Old Soldier!
And in that short time!
Markleham,' said the Doctor, 'was quite vexed about him, poor thing; so we have got him at home again; and we have bought him a little Patent place, which agrees with him much better.' I knew enough of mr Jack Maldon to suspect from this account that it was a place where there was not much to do, and which was pretty well paid.
'Now, my dear Copperfield, in reference to this proposal of yours.
It's very gratifying and agreeable to me, I am sure; but don't you think you could do better?
You are qualified for many good things.
You have laid a foundation that any edifice may be raised upon; and is it not a pity that you should devote the spring time of your life to such a poor pursuit as I can offer?'
I became very glowing again, and, expressing myself in a rhapsodical style, I am afraid, urged my request strongly; reminding the Doctor that I had already a profession.
'Well, well,' said the Doctor, 'that's true.
Certainly, your having a profession, and being actually engaged in studying it, makes a difference.
But, my good young friend, what's seventy pounds a year?'
'It doubles our income, Doctor Strong,' said i
'Dear me!' replied the Doctor.
'To think of that!
Not that I mean to say it's rigidly limited to seventy pounds a year, because I have always contemplated making any young friend I might thus employ, a present too. Undoubtedly,' said the Doctor, still walking me up and down with his hand on my shoulder.
'No, no,' interposed the Doctor.
'Pardon me!'
'If you will take such time as I have, and that is my mornings and evenings, and can think it worth seventy pounds a year, you will do me such a service as I cannot express.'
'Dear me!' said the Doctor, innocently.
'To think that so little should go for so much!
Dear, dear!
On your word, now?' said the Doctor,--which he had always made a very grave appeal to the honour of us boys.
'On my word, sir!' I returned, answering in our old school manner.
'Then be it so,' said the Doctor, clapping me on the shoulder, and still keeping his hand there, as we still walked up and down.
The Doctor stopped, smilingly clapped me on the shoulder again, and exclaimed, with a triumph most delightful to behold, as if I had penetrated to the profoundest depths of mortal sagacity, 'My dear young friend, you have hit it.
How could it be anything else!
His pockets were as full of it as his head.
It was sticking out of him in all directions.
His papers were in a little confusion, in consequence of mr Jack Maldon having lately proffered his occasional services as an amanuensis, and not being accustomed to that occupation; but we should soon put right what was amiss, and go on swimmingly.
The Doctor was quite happy in the prospect of our going to work together on that wonderful performance, and we settled to begin next morning at seven o'clock.
We were to work two hours every morning, and two or three hours every night, except on Saturdays, when I was to rest.
Our plans being thus arranged to our mutual satisfaction, the Doctor took me into the house to present me to mrs Strong, whom we found in the Doctor's new study, dusting his books,--a freedom which he never permitted anybody else to take with those sacred favourites.
They had postponed their breakfast on my account, and we sat down to table together.
We had not been seated long, when I saw an approaching arrival in mrs Strong's face, before I heard any sound of it.
A gentleman on horseback came to the gate, and leading his horse into the little court, with the bridle over his arm, as if he were quite at home, tied him to a ring in the empty coach house wall, and came into the breakfast parlour, whip in hand.
It was mr Jack Maldon; and mr Jack Maldon was not at all improved by India, I thought.
'mr Jack!' said the Doctor.
'Copperfield!'
mr Jack Maldon shook hands with me; but not very warmly, I believed; and with an air of languid patronage, at which I secretly took great umbrage.
But his languor altogether was quite a wonderful sight; except when he addressed himself to his cousin Annie. 'Have you breakfasted this morning, mr Jack?' said the Doctor.
'I hardly ever take breakfast, sir,' he replied, with his head thrown back in an easy chair. 'I find it bores me.'
'Is there any news today?' inquired the Doctor.
'Nothing at all, sir,' replied mr Maldon. 'There's an account about the people being hungry and discontented down in the North, but they are always being hungry and discontented somewhere.'
The Doctor looked grave, and said, as though he wished to change the subject, 'Then there's no news at all; and no news, they say, is good news.'
A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since.
I have known it very fashionable indeed.
I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.
Perhaps it impressed me the more then, because it was new to me, but it certainly did not tend to exalt my opinion of, or to strengthen my confidence in, mr Jack Maldon.
'I came out to inquire whether Annie would like to go to the opera tonight,' said mr Maldon, turning to her.
She is perfectly exquisite.
The Doctor, ever pleased with what was likely to please his young wife, turned to her and said:
You must go.'
'I would rather not,' she said to the Doctor. 'I prefer to remain at home.
I would much rather remain at home.'
But he saw nothing.
He told her, good naturedly, that she was young and ought to be amused and entertained, and must not allow herself to be made dull by a dull old fellow.
So the Doctor persisted in making the engagement for her, and mr Jack Maldon was to come back to dinner.
This concluded, he went to his Patent place, I suppose; but at all events went away on his horse, looking very idle.
I was curious to find out next morning, whether she had been.
She had not, but had sent into London to put her cousin off; and had gone out in the afternoon to see Agnes, and had prevailed upon the Doctor to go with her; and they had walked home by the fields, the Doctor told me, the evening being delightful.
I wondered then, whether she would have gone if Agnes had not been in town, and whether Agnes had some good influence over her too!
She did not look very happy, I thought; but it was a good face, or a very false one.
I often glanced at it, for she sat in the window all the time we were at work; and made our breakfast, which we took by snatches as we were employed.
When I left, at nine o'clock, she was kneeling on the ground at the Doctor's feet, putting on his shoes and gaiters for him.
There was a softened shade upon her face, thrown from some green leaves overhanging the open window of the low room; and I thought all the way to Doctors' Commons, of the night when I had seen it looking at him as he read.
I was pretty busy now; up at five in the morning, and home at nine or ten at night.
But I had infinite satisfaction in being so closely engaged, and never walked slowly on any account, and felt enthusiastically that the more I tired myself, the more I was doing to deserve Dora.
I had not revealed myself in my altered character to Dora yet, because she was coming to see Miss Mills in a few days, and I deferred all I had to tell her until then; merely informing her in my letters (all our communications were secretly forwarded through Miss Mills), that I had much to tell her.
In the meantime, I put myself on a short allowance of bear's grease, wholly abandoned scented soap and lavender water, and sold off three waistcoats at a prodigious sacrifice, as being too luxurious for my stern career.
Not satisfied with all these proceedings, but burning with impatience to do something more, I went to see Traddles, now lodging up behind the parapet of a house in Castle Street, Holborn.
mr Dick, who had been with me to Highgate twice already, and had resumed his companionship with the Doctor, I took with me.
I took mr Dick with me, because, acutely sensitive to my aunt's reverses, and sincerely believing that no galley slave or convict worked as I did, he had begun to fret and worry himself out of spirits and appetite, as having nothing useful to do.
In this condition, he felt more incapable of finishing the Memorial than ever; and the harder he worked at it, the oftener that unlucky head of King Charles the First got into it.
Seriously apprehending that his malady would increase, unless we put some innocent deception upon him and caused him to believe that he was useful, or unless we could put him in the way of being really useful (which would be better), I made up my mind to try if Traddles could help us.
Before we went, I wrote Traddles a full statement of all that had happened, and Traddles wrote me back a capital answer, expressive of his sympathy and friendship.
He received us cordially, and made friends with mr Dick in a moment.
mr Dick professed an absolute certainty of having seen him before, and we both said, 'Very likely.'
The first subject on which I had to consult Traddles was this,--I had heard that many men distinguished in various pursuits had begun life by reporting the debates in Parliament.
Traddles having mentioned newspapers to me, as one of his hopes, I had put the two things together, and told Traddles in my letter that I wished to know how I could qualify myself for this pursuit.
Traddles reasonably supposed that this would settle the business; but I, only feeling that here indeed were a few tall trees to be hewn down, immediately resolved to work my way on to Dora through this thicket, axe in hand.
Traddles looked astonished, as he well might; but he had no notion as yet of my rapturous condition.
'Dear me,' said Traddles, opening his eyes, 'I had no idea you were such a determined character, Copperfield!'
I passed that off, and brought mr Dick on the carpet.
'You see,' said mr Dick, wistfully, 'if I could exert myself, mr Traddles-if I could beat a drum-or blow anything!'
Poor fellow!
'But you are a very good penman, sir.
He wrote with extraordinary neatness.
'Don't you think,' said Traddles, 'you could copy writings, sir, if I got them for you?'
mr Dick looked doubtfully at me.
'Eh, Trotwood?'
I shook my head.
'Tell him about the Memorial,' said mr Dick.
I explained to Traddles that there was a difficulty in keeping King Charles the First out of mr Dick's manuscripts; mr Dick in the meanwhile looking very deferentially and seriously at Traddles, and sucking his thumb.
'mr
Dick has nothing to do with them.
Wouldn't that make a difference, Copperfield? At all events, wouldn't it be well to try?'
This gave us new hope.
Traddles and I laying our heads together apart, while mr Dick anxiously watched us from his chair, we concocted a scheme in virtue of which we got him to work next day, with triumphant success.
On a table by the window in Buckingham Street, we set out the work Traddles procured for him-which was to make, I forget how many copies of a legal document about some right of way-and on another table we spread the last unfinished original of the great Memorial.
Our instructions to mr Dick were that he should copy exactly what he had before him, without the least departure from the original; and that when he felt it necessary to make the slightest allusion to King Charles the First, he should fly to the Memorial.
We exhorted him to be resolute in this, and left my aunt to observe him.
'No starving now, Trotwood,' said mr Dick, shaking hands with me in a corner.
'I'll provide for her, Sir!' and he flourished his ten fingers in the air, as if they were ten banks.
I hardly know which was the better pleased, Traddles or i 'It really,' said Traddles, suddenly, taking a letter out of his pocket, and giving it to me, 'put mr Micawber quite out of my head!'
Micawber never missed any possible opportunity of writing a letter) was addressed to me, 'By the kindness of t Traddles, Esquire, of the Inner Temple.' It ran thus:--
'MY DEAR COPPERFIELD,
'You may possibly not be unprepared to receive the intimation that something has turned up.
I may have mentioned to you on a former occasion that I was in expectation of such an event.
'I am about to establish myself in one of the provincial towns of our favoured island (where the society may be described as a happy admixture of the agricultural and the clerical), in immediate connexion with one of the learned professions.
mrs Micawber and our offspring will accompany me.
Our ashes, at a future period, will probably be found commingled in the cemetery attached to a venerable pile, for which the spot to which I refer has acquired a reputation, shall I say from China to Peru?
If, on the eve of such a departure, you will accompany our mutual friend, mr Thomas Traddles, to our present abode, and there reciprocate the wishes natural to the occasion, you will confer a Boon
'On 'One 'Who 'Is 'Ever yours, 'WILKINS MICAWBER.'
I was glad to find that mr Micawber had got rid of his dust and ashes, and that something really had turned up at last.
Learning from Traddles that the invitation referred to the evening then wearing away, I expressed my readiness to do honour to it; and we went off together to the lodging which mr Micawber occupied as mr Mortimer, and which was situated near the top of the Gray's Inn Road.
I also became once more known to his sister, Miss Micawber, in whom, as mr Micawber told us, 'her mother renewed her youth, like the Phoenix'.
'My dear Copperfield,' said mr Micawber, 'yourself and mr Traddles find us on the brink of migration, and will excuse any little discomforts incidental to that position.'
Glancing round as I made a suitable reply, I observed that the family effects were already packed, and that the amount of luggage was by no means overwhelming.
I congratulated mrs Micawber on the approaching change.
'My dear mr Copperfield,' said mrs Micawber, 'of your friendly interest in all our affairs, I am well assured.
My family may consider it banishment, if they please; but I am a wife and mother, and I never will desert mr Micawber.'
Traddles, appealed to by mrs Micawber's eye, feelingly acquiesced.
'That,' said mrs Micawber, 'that, at least, is my view, my dear mr Copperfield and mr Traddles, of the obligation which I took upon myself when I repeated the irrevocable words, "I, Emma, take thee, Wilkins." I read the service over with a flat candle on the previous night, and the conclusion I derived from it was, that I never could desert mr Micawber.
And,' said mrs Micawber, 'though it is possible I may be mistaken in my view of the ceremony, I never will!'
'I am aware, my dear mr Copperfield,' pursued mrs Micawber, 'that I am now about to cast my lot among strangers; and I am also aware that the various members of my family, to whom mr Micawber has written in the most gentlemanly terms, announcing that fact, have not taken the least notice of mr Micawber's communication.
Indeed I may be superstitious,' said mrs Micawber, 'but it appears to me that mr Micawber is destined never to receive any answers whatever to the great majority of the communications he writes.
I may augur, from the silence of my family, that they object to the resolution I have taken; but I should not allow myself to be swerved from the path of duty, mr Copperfield, even by my papa and mama, were they still living.'
I expressed my opinion that this was going in the right direction.
'It may be a sacrifice,' said mrs Micawber, 'to immure one's self in a Cathedral town; but surely, mr Copperfield, if it is a sacrifice in me, it is much more a sacrifice in a man of mr Micawber's abilities.'
'Oh!
You are going to a Cathedral town?' said i
mr Micawber, who had been helping us all, out of the wash hand stand jug, replied:
'To Canterbury.
In fact, my dear Copperfield, I have entered into arrangements, by virtue of which I stand pledged and contracted to our friend Heep, to assist and serve him in the capacity of-and to be-his confidential clerk.'
I stared at mr Micawber, who greatly enjoyed my surprise.
The gauntlet, to which mrs Micawber referred upon a former occasion, being thrown down in the form of an advertisement, was taken up by my friend Heep, and led to a mutual recognition.
I have already some acquaintance with the law-as a defendant on civil process-and I shall immediately apply myself to the Commentaries of one of the most eminent and remarkable of our English jurists.
I believe it is unnecessary to add that I allude to mr justice Blackstone.'
I am convinced that mr Micawber, giving his mind to a profession so adapted to his fertile resources, and his flow of language, must distinguish himself.
Now, for example, mr Traddles,' said mrs Micawber, assuming a profound air, 'a judge, or even say a Chancellor.
Does an individual place himself beyond the pale of those preferments by entering on such an office as mr Micawber has accepted?'
'My dear,' observed mr Micawber-but glancing inquisitively at Traddles, too; 'we have time enough before us, for the consideration of those questions.'
'Micawber,' she returned, 'no!
Your mistake in life is, that you do not look forward far enough.
You are bound, in justice to your family, if not to yourself, to take in at a comprehensive glance the extremest point in the horizon to which your abilities may lead you.'
mr Micawber coughed, and drank his punch with an air of exceeding satisfaction-still glancing at Traddles, as if he desired to have his opinion.
'I mean the real prosaic fact, you know-'
'Just so,' said mrs Micawber, 'my dear mr Traddles, I wish to be as prosaic and literal as possible on a subject of so much importance.'
'--Is,' said Traddles, 'that this branch of the law, even if mr Micawber were a regular solicitor-'
'Exactly so,' returned mrs Micawber. ('Wilkins, you are squinting, and will not be able to get your eyes back.')
'--Has nothing,' pursued Traddles, 'to do with that.
Only a barrister is eligible for such preferments; and mr Micawber could not be a barrister, without being entered at an inn of court as a student, for five years.'
'Do I follow you?' said mrs Micawber, with her most affable air of business.
'Do I understand, my dear mr Traddles, that, at the expiration of that period, mr Micawber would be eligible as a Judge or Chancellor?'
'He would be ELIGIBLE,' returned Traddles, with a strong emphasis on that word.
'Thank you,' said mrs Micawber.
'That is quite sufficient.
I quite believe that mr Micawber saw himself, in his judicial mind's eye, on the woolsack.
He passed his hand complacently over his bald head, and said with ostentatious resignation:
'My dear, we will not anticipate the decrees of fortune.
If I am reserved to wear a wig, I am at least prepared, externally,' in allusion to his baldness, 'for that distinction.
I do not,' said mr Micawber, 'regret my hair, and I may have been deprived of it for a specific purpose.
I cannot say.
It is my intention, my dear Copperfield, to educate my son for the Church; I will not deny that I should be happy, on his account, to attain to eminence.'
'For the Church?' said I, still pondering, between whiles, on Uriah Heep.
'Yes,' said mr Micawber.
'He has a remarkable head voice, and will commence as a chorister.
Our residence at Canterbury, and our local connexion, will, no doubt, enable him to take advantage of any vacancy that may arise in the Cathedral corps.'
After many compliments on this performance, we fell into some general conversation; and as I was too full of my desperate intentions to keep my altered circumstances to myself, I made them known to mr and mrs Micawber.
I cannot express how extremely delighted they both were, by the idea of my aunt's being in difficulties; and how comfortable and friendly it made them.
When we were nearly come to the last round of the punch, I addressed myself to Traddles, and reminded him that we must not separate, without wishing our friends health, happiness, and success in their new career. I begged mr Micawber to fill us bumpers, and proposed the toast in due form: shaking hands with him across the table, and kissing mrs Micawber, to commemorate that eventful occasion.
It may be expected that on the eve of a migration which will consign us to a perfectly new existence,' mr Micawber spoke as if they were going five hundred thousand miles, 'I should offer a few valedictory remarks to two such friends as I see before me.
But all that I have to say in this way, I have said.
Whatever station in society I may attain, through the medium of the learned profession of which I am about to become an unworthy member, I shall endeavour not to disgrace, and mrs Micawber will be safe to adorn.
All I have to say on that score is, that the cloud has passed from the dreary scene, and the God of Day is once more high upon the mountain tops.
On Monday next, on the arrival of the four o'clock afternoon coach at Canterbury, my foot will be on my native heath-my name, Micawber!'
mr Micawber resumed his seat on the close of these remarks, and drank two glasses of punch in grave succession.
He then said with much solemnity:
'One thing more I have to do, before this separation is complete, and that is to perform an act of justice.
My friend mr Thomas Traddles has, on two several occasions, "put his name", if I may use a common expression, to bills of exchange for my accommodation.
On the first occasion mr Thomas Traddles was left-let me say, in short, in the lurch.
The fulfilment of the second has not yet arrived.
These sums, united, make a total, if my calculation is correct, amounting to forty one, ten, eleven and a half.
My friend Copperfield will perhaps do me the favour to check that total?'
I did so and found it correct.
'To leave this metropolis,' said mr Micawber, 'and my friend mr Thomas Traddles, without acquitting myself of the pecuniary part of this obligation, would weigh upon my mind to an insupportable extent.
I have, therefore, prepared for my friend mr Thomas Traddles, and I now hold in my hand, a document, which accomplishes the desired object.
With this introduction (which greatly affected him), mr Micawber placed his i o u in the hands of Traddles, and said he wished him well in every relation of life.
I am persuaded, not only that this was quite the same to mr Micawber as paying the money, but that Traddles himself hardly knew the difference until he had had time to think about it.
mr Micawber walked so erect before his fellow man, on the strength of this virtuous action, that his chest looked half as broad again when he lighted us downstairs.
We parted with great heartiness on both sides; and when I had seen Traddles to his own door, and was going home alone, I thought, among the other odd and contradictory things I mused upon, that, slippery as mr Micawber was, I was probably indebted to some compassionate recollection he retained of me as his boy lodger, for never having been asked by him for money.
"It's suicide," the taller guard grumbled.
"Mine, not yours, so don't worry about it," Brion barked at him. "Your job is to remember your orders and keep them straight. Now-let's hear them again."
The guard rolled his eyes up in silent rebellion and repeated in a toneless voice: "We stay here in the car and keep the motor running while you go inside the stone pile there.
We don't come in, no matter what happens or what it looks like, but wait for you here.
Unless you call on the radio, in which case we come in with the automatics going and shoot the place up, and it doesn't matter who we hit.
This will be done only as a last resort."
"See if you can't arrange that last resort thing," the other guard said, patting the heavy blue barrel of his weapon.
"If any guns go off without my permission you will pay for it, and pay with your necks.
I want that clearly understood.
You are here as a rear guard and a base for me to get back to.
Understood?"
He waited until all three men had nodded in agreement, then checked the charge on his gun-it was fully loaded.
It would be foolish to go in unarmed, but he had to.
He put it aside.
The button radio on his collar was working and had a strong enough signal to get through any number of walls.
He took off his coat, threw open the door and stepped out into the searing brilliance of the Disan noon.
There was only the desert silence, broken by the steady throb of the car's motor behind him.
Stretching away to the horizon in every direction was the eternal desert of sand.
The keep stood nearby, solitary, a massive pile of black rock.
Brion plodded closer, watching for any motion from the walls.
Nothing stirred.
The high walled, irregularly shaped construction sat in a ponderous silence.
Brion was sweating now, only partially from the heat.
He circled the thing, looking for a gate.
A slanting cleft in the stone could be climbed easily, but it seemed incredible that this might be the only entrance.
A complete circuit proved that it was.
Brion looked unhappily at the slanting and broken ramp, then cupped his hands and shouted loudly.
"I'm coming up.
Your radio doesn't work any more.
I'm bringing the message from Nyjord that you have been waiting to hear." This was a slight bending of the truth without fracturing it.
There was no answer-just the hiss of wind blown sand against the rock and the mutter of the car in the background.
He started to climb.
The rock underfoot was crumbling and he had to watch where he put his feet.
At the same time he fought a constant impulse to look up, watching for anything falling from above.
Nothing happened.
When he reached the top of the wall he was breathing hard; sweat moistened his body.
There was still no one in sight.
He stood on an unevenly shaped wall that appeared to circle the building.
Instead of having a courtyard inside it, the wall was the outer face of the structure, the domed roof rising from it.
At varying intervals dark openings gave access to the interior.
When Brion looked down, the sand car was just a dun colored bump in the desert, already far behind him.
Stooping, he went through the nearest door.
There was still no one in sight.
The room inside was something out of a madman's funhouse. It was higher than it was wide, irregular in shape, and more like a hallway than a room.
At one end it merged into an incline that became a stairwell.
At the other it ended in a hole that vanished in darkness below.
Light of sorts filtered in through slots and holes drilled into the thick stone wall.
Everything was built of the same crumble textured but strong rock.
After a number of blind passages and wrong turns he saw a stronger light ahead, and went on.
There was food, metal, even artifacts of the unusual Disan design in the different rooms he passed through.
Yet no people.
The light ahead grew stronger, and the last passageway opened and swelled out until it led into the large central chamber.
This was the heart of the strange structure.
All the rooms, passageways and halls existed just to give form to this gigantic chamber.
The walls rose sharply, the room being circular in cross section and growing narrower towards the top.
It was a truncated cone, since there was no ceiling; a hot blue disk of sky cast light on the floor below.
Out of the corner of his eyes, and with the very periphery of his consciousness, he was aware of the rest of the room-barrels, stores, machinery, a radio transceiver, various bundles and heaps that made no sense at first glance.
There was no time to look closer.
He had found the enemy.
Everything that had happened to him so far on Dis had been preparation for this moment.
The attack in the desert, the escape, the dreadful heat of sun and sand.
All this had tempered and prepared him.
It had been nothing in itself.
Now the battle would begin in earnest.
None of this was conscious in his mind.
His fighter's reflexes bent his shoulders, curved his hands before him as he walked softly in balance, ready to spring in any direction.
All the danger so far was nonphysical.
When he did give conscious thought to the situation he stopped, startled.
They were so muffled and wrapped in cloth that only their eyes were exposed.
In spite of muffled cloth and silence, he knew them for what they were.
The eyes were empty of expression and unmoving, yet were filled with the same negative emptiness as those of a bird of prey.
They could look on life, death, and the rending of flesh with the same lack of interest and compassion.
All this Brion knew in an instant of time, without words being spoken.
Between the time he lifted one foot and walked a step he understood what he had to face.
There could be no doubt, not to an empathetic.
From the group of silent men poured a frost white wave of unemotion. An empathetic shares what other men feel.
He gets his knowledge of their reaction by sensing lightly their emotions, the surges of interest, hate, love, fear, desire, the sweep of large and small sensations that accompany all thought and action.
The empathetic is always aware of this constant and silent surge, whether he makes the effort to understand it or not.
He is like a man glancing across the open pages of a tableful of books.
He can see that the type, words, paragraphs, thoughts are there, even without focusing his attention to understand any of it.
Then how does the man feel when he glances at the open books and sees only blank pages?
The books are there-the words are not.
He turns the pages of one, of the others, flipping the pages, searching for meaning.
There is no meaning.
Nothing more.
Brion reached for other sensations, but there was nothing there to grasp.
Either these men were without emotions, or they were able to block them from his detection; it was impossible to tell which.
Very little time had passed while Brion made these discoveries.
The knot of men still looked at him, silent and unmoving.
They weren't expectant, their attitude could not have been called one of interest.
But he had come to them and now they waited to find out why.
Any questions or statements they spoke would be superfluous, so they didn't speak.
The responsibility was his.
Who is he?" Brion didn't like the tiny sound his voice made in the immense room.
One of the men gave a slight motion to draw attention to himself. None of the others moved.
They still waited.
"I have a message for you," Brion said, speaking slowly to fill the silence of the room and the emptiness of his thoughts.
But what was right?
"I'm from the Foundation in the city, as you undoubtedly know.
They have a message for you."
The silence grew longer.
He needed facts to operate, to form an opinion.
Looking at the silent forms was telling him nothing.
Time stretched taut, and finally Lig magte spoke.
The enemy is going to surrender!"
This wasn't the meaning.
With a rising inflection on the end it would have been a question. "Are they going to surrender?" It was neither of these.
It had intellectual connotations, but these could only be gained from past knowledge, not from the sound of the words.
Therefore Brion was bringing the message. If that was not the message Brion was bringing the men here were not interested.
This was the vital fact.
Therefore he would be killed.
Because this was vital to his existence, Brion took the time to follow the thought through.
It made logical sense-and logic was all he could depend on now.
He could be talking to robots or alien creatures, for all the human response he was receiving.
"You can't win this war-all you can do is hurry your own deaths." He said this with as much conviction as he could, realizing at the same time that it was wasted effort.
No flicker of response stirred in the men before him.
They can't take any more chances.
They have pushed the deadline closer by an entire day.
Do you realize what that means-"
"Yes," Brion said.
Two things saved his life then.
He had guessed what would happen as soon as they had his message, though he hadn't been sure.
But even the suspicion had put him on his guard.
This, combined with the reflexes of a Winner of the Twenties, was barely enough to enable him to survive.
From frozen mobility Lig magte had catapulted into headlong attack. As he leaped forward he drew a curved, double edged blade from under his robes.
It plunged unerringly through the spot where Brion's body had been an instant before.
There had been no time to tense his muscles and jump, just the space of time to relax them and fall to one side.
Lig magte plunged by him, turning and bringing the knife down at the same time.
Brion's foot lashed out and caught the other man's leg, sending him sprawling.
They were both on their feet at the same instant, facing each other. Brion now had his hands clasped before him in the unarmed man's best defense against a knife, the two arms protecting the body, the two hands joined to beat aside the knife arm from whichever direction it came.
The Disan hunched low, flipped the knife quickly from hand to hand, then thrust it again at Brion's midriff.
Only by the merest fractional margin did Brion evade the attack for the second time.
Lig magte fought with utter violence.
There could be only one end to this unequal contest if Brion stayed on the defensive. The man with the knife had to win.
With the next charge Brion changed tactics.
He leaped inside the thrust, clutching for the knife arm.
They clamped down hard, grinding shut, compressing with the tightening intensity of a closing vise.
It was all he could do simply to hold on.
There was no science in it, just his greater strength from exercise and existence on a heavier planet.
All of this strength went to his clutching hand, because he held his own life in that hand, forcing away the knife that wanted to terminate it forever.
Nothing else mattered-neither the frightening force of the knees that thudded into his body nor the hooked fingers that reached for his eyes to tear them out.
He protected his face as well as he could, while the nails tore furrows through his flesh and the cut on his arm bled freely.
His life depended on the grasp of the fingers of his right hand.
They had reached stasis, standing knee to knee, their faces only a few inches apart.
The muffling cloth had fallen from the Disan's face during the struggle, and empty, frigid eyes stared into Brion's.
No flicker of emotion crossed the harsh planes of the other man's face.
A great puckered white scar covered one cheek and pulled up a corner of the mouth in a cheerless grimace.
It was false; there was still no expression here, even when the pain must be growing more intense.
Brion was winning-if none of the watchers broke the impasse. His greater weight and strength counted now.
The Disan would have to drop the knife before his arm was dislocated at the shoulder. He didn't do it.
A dull, hideous snap jerked through the Disan's body and the arm hung limp and dead.
No expression crossed the man's face.
The knife was still locked in the fingers of the paralyzed hand.
Brion raised his foot and kicked the knife free, sending it spinning across the room.
Lig magte made a fist of his good hand and crashed it into Brion's groin.
He was still fighting, as if nothing had changed.
Brion backed slowly away from the man.
"Stop it," he said.
It's impossible." He called to the other men who were watching the unequal battle with expressionless immobility.
No one answered him.
He would press the attack no matter what damage was done to him.
Brion had an insane vision of him breaking the man's other arm, fracturing both his legs, and the limbless broken creature still coming forward.
Crawling, rolling, teeth bared, since they were the only remaining weapon.
There was only one way to end it.
Brion feinted and the Lig magte's arm moved clear of his body.
The engulfing cloth was thin and through it Brion could see the outlines of the Disan's abdomen and rib cage, the clear location of the great nerve ganglion.
The stiffened hand moving forward in a sudden surge, all the weight and energy of his body concentrated in his joined fingertips.
Killing, not by accident or in sudden anger.
Killing because this was the only way the battle could possibly end.
Like a ruined tower of flesh, the Disan crumpled and fell.
Death filled the room.
On Brion's desk when he came in, were two neat piles of paper.
As he sat down and reached for them he was conscious of an arctic coldness in the air, a frigid blast.
Brion kicked at the cover plate until it buckled, then bent it aside.
After a careful look into the interior he disconnected one wire and shorted it to another.
"What do you have there?" Brion asked.
"Daily reports, hospital log...." His voice died away and stopped as Brion carefully pushed the stack off the edge of the desk into the wastebasket.
"Well, it's all filed."
One by one the progress reports followed the first stack into the basket, until the desk was clear.
It was just what he had expected.
They hadn't; they were all too busy specializing.
Outside the sky was darkening.
The front entrance guard had been told to let in anyone who came asking for the director.
It froze and shattered instantly.
Her microscope was hooded and she was gone.
"Of course she's here!" dr Stine grumbled.
"Where else should a girl in her condition be?
I've been handing out tranquilizers like aspirin all day.
They're falling apart."
"The world's falling apart.
How is Lea doing?"
"Considering her shape, she's fine.
I have other patients to look at."
"Are you that worried, Doctor?"
"Of course I am!
I'm just as prone to the weakness of the flesh as the rest of you.
We're sitting on a ticking bomb and I don't like it.
The only skin that I really feel emotionally concerned about right now is my own.
And if you want to be let in on a public secret-the rest of your staff feels the same way.
So don't look forward to too much efficiency."
Walking quietly, he went over to the bed.
A night's sleep now would do as much good as all the medication.
He should have gone then; instead, he sat down in the chair placed next to the head of the bed.
The guards knew where he was-he could wait here just as well as any place else.
It was a stolen moment of peace on a world at the brink of destruction.
He was grateful for it.
Her hand was outside of the covers and he took it in his own, obeying a sudden impulse.
"Is the boss man looking after the serfs, to see if they're fit for the treadmills in the morning?" she asked.
It was the kind of remark she had used with such frequency in the ship, though it didn't sound quite as harsh now.
And she was smiling.
Yet it reminded him too well of her superior attitude towards rubes from the stellar sticks. Here he might be the director, but on ancient Earth he would be only one more gaping, lead footed yokel.
"Terrible.
My mouth tastes like an old boot heel.
I wonder how fresh fruit ever got here.
"Did you ever think of going to Earth?"
Brion was startled.
This was too close to his own thoughts about planetary backgrounds.
There couldn't possibly be a connection though.
"Never," he told her.
"Nothing like that.
"Any exobiologists there?" Lea asked, with a woman's eternal ability to make any general topic personal.
We aren't organized that way at all.
I suppose you might call it an inbred survival trait."
"Up to a point," she said, biting delicately into the apple.
"Carry that sort of thing too far and you end up with no population at all. A certain amount of proximity is necessary for that."
And there must be some form of recognized relationship or control-that or complete promiscuity.
On Anvhar the emphasis is on personal responsibility, and that seems to take care of the problem.
You know-whenever this happens with you, I get the distinct impression that you are trying to cover up something. For Occam's sake, be specific!
Bring me together two of these hypothetical individuals and tell me what happens."
"Well-take a bachelor like myself.
Since I like cross-country skiing I make my home in this big house our family has, right at the edge of the Broken Hills.
We don't even have locks on our doors.
You accept and give hospitality without qualification.
Whoever comes.
Male ... female ... in groups or just traveling alone...."
"I get the drift.
Life must be dull for a single girl on your iceberg planet.
"Only if she wants to.
Otherwise she can go wherever she wishes and be welcomed as another individual.
"The same damn way they get made any place else!
But it's not just a reflexive process like a couple of rabbits that happen to meet under the same bush.
That's up to the girl.
But most women have an emotional bias towards having their husband's children.
"Of course.
Therefore the woman does the choosing.
It's a lot different from other planets, but so is our planet Anvhar.
It works well for us, which is the only test that applies."
"I guess you Anvharians would describe Earth as a planetary hotbed of sexuality.
The reverse of your system, and going full blast all the time.
There are far too many people there for comfort.
Birth control came late and is still being fought-if you can possibly imagine that.
The world's overcrowded.
Men, women, children, a boiling mob wherever you look.
And all of the physically mature ones seem to be involved in the Great Game of Love.
The male is always the aggressor.
Not physically-at least not often-and women take the most outrageous kinds of flattery for granted.
At parties there are always a couple of hot breaths of passion fanning your neck.
A girl has to keep her spike heels filed sharp."
"A figure of speech, Brion.
Meaning you fight back all the time, if you don't want to be washed under by the flood."
"From your point of view, it would be.
Sociologically speaking...." She stopped and looked at Brion's straight back and almost rigid posture.
"I'm being a fool," she said.
"You weren't speaking generally at all!
"All the time I thought you were being a frigid and hard hearted lump of ice, you were really being very sweet.
Waiting for a sign from me.
And I thought you were some kind of frosty offworld celibate." She let her hand go out and her fingers rustled through his hair.
Something she had been wanting to do for a long time.
"Because I thought so much of you, I couldn't have done anything to insult you.
Such as forcing my attentions on you.
But I'm still not sure of all the rules.
"Gently ..." she whispered.
And what is a sportsman to day?
Among other things, it is time for a list of species to be published which no man claiming to be either a gentleman or a sportsman can shoot for aught else than preservation in a public museum.
six.
eight.
eleven.
thirteen.
The Lewis and Clark Club, of Pittsburgh, john m Phillips, President.
LIFE.
Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to day Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break, agonized and clear!
Yes!
Life is but life, and death but death! Bliss is but bliss, and breath but breath! And if, indeed, I fail, At least to know the worst is sweet. Defeat means nothing but defeat, No drearier can prevail!
Glee!
How they will tell the shipwreck When winter shakes the door, Till the children ask, "But the forty? Did they come back no more?"
seven.
Within my reach! I could have touched! I might have chanced that way! Soft sauntered through the village, Sauntered as soft away! So unsuspected violets Within the fields lie low, Too late for striving fingers That passed, an hour ago.
eight.
Mirth is the mail of anguish, In which it cautions arm, Lest anybody spy the blood And "You're hurt" exclaim!
IN A LIBRARY.
twelve.
I asked no other thing, No other was denied. I offered Being for it; The mighty merchant smiled.
thirteen.
THE SECRET.
Some things that stay there be, -- Grief, hills, eternity: Nor this behooveth me.
fifteen.
We trust, in plumed procession, For such the angels go, Rank after rank, with even feet And uniforms of snow.
DAWN.
And get the dimples ready, And wonder we could care For that old faded midnight That frightened but an hour.
eighteen.
THE BOOK OF MARTYRS.
Read, sweet, how others strove, Till we are stouter; What they renounced, Till we are less afraid; How many times they bore The faithful witness, Till we are helped, As if a kingdom cared!
nineteen.
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN.
twenty three.
twenty five.
twenty six.
LOVE.
BEQUEST.
Alter?
Surfeit?
seven.
eight.
TRANSPLANTED.
THE OUTLET.
My river waits reply. Oh sea, look graciously!
I'll fetch thee brooks From spotted nooks, --
twelve.
I CANNOT live with you, It would be life, And life is over there Behind the shelf
I could not die with you, For one must wait To shut the other's gaze down, -- You could not.
And I, could I stand by And see you freeze, Without my right of frost, Death's privilege?
thirteen.
fourteen.
LOVE'S BAPTISM.
I'm ceded, I've stopped being theirs; The name they dropped upon my face With water, in the country church, Is finished using now, And they can put it with my dolls, My childhood, and the string of spools I've finished threading too.
Baptized before without the choice, But this time consciously, of grace Unto supremest name, Called to my full, the crescent dropped, Existence's whole arc filled up With one small diadem.
fifteen.
RESURRECTION.
No lifetime set on them, Apparelled as the new Unborn, except they had beheld, Born everlasting now.
sixteen.
THE WIFE.
eighteen.
CHAPTER three
They parted with mutual regret.
Soon after mid day, they reached the summit of one of those cliffs, which, bright with the verdure of palm trees, adorn, like gems, the tremendous walls of the rocks, and which overlooked the greater part of Gascony, and part of Languedoc.
Here was shade, and the fresh water of a spring, that, gliding among the turf, under the trees, thence precipitated itself from rock to rock, till its dashing murmurs were lost in the abyss, though its white foam was long seen amid the darkness of the pines below.
Rocks on rocks piled, as if by magic spell, Here scorch'd by lightnings, there with ivy green.
He looked again from the window, and then saw a young man spring from the bushes into the road, followed by a couple of dogs.
Here, light was admitted, and smoke discharged, through an aperture in the roof; and here the scent of spirits (for the travelling smugglers, who haunted the Pyrenees, had made this rude people familiar with the use of liquors) was generally perceptible enough.
But she thought not of herself, and the animated smile she gave him, told how much she felt herself obliged for the preference of her father.
This good woman seemed very willing to accommodate the strangers, who were soon compelled to accept the only two beds in the place.
He declared that his beasts were as honest beasts, and as good beasts, as any in the whole province; and that they had a right to be well treated wherever they went.
However, I ought rather to be thankful that I have so many years remained unmolested, than repine at my present embarrassment; since it proves, at least, that this wretched woman is at length awakened to remorse.
In regard to my answer, I must humbly request your Ladyship to write to this effect: "That I would not, upon any account, intentionally offend Madame Duval; but that I have weighty, nay unanswerable reasons for detaining her grand daughter at present in England; the principal of which is, that it was the earnest desire of one to whose will she owes implicit duty.
Madame Duval may be assured, that she meets with the utmost attention and tenderness; that her education, however short of my wishes, almost exceeds my abilities; and I flatter myself, when the time arrives that she shall pay her duty to her grand mother, Madame Duval will find no reason to be dissatisfied with what has been done for her."
Your Ladyship will not, I am sure, be surprised at this answer.
Madame Duval is by no means a proper companion or guardian for a young woman: she is at once uneducated and unprincipled; ungentle in temper, and unamiable in her manners.
I have long known that she has persuaded herself to harbour an aversion for me Unhappy woman!
I can only regard her as an object of pity!
Your Ladyship may probably have heard, that I had the honour to accompany mr Evelyn, the grandfather of my young charge, when upon his travels, in the capacity of a tutor.
He survived this ill judged marriage but two years.
Upon his death bed, with an unsteady hand, he wrote me the following note:
pity!
And relieve me!"
Had my circumstances permitted me, I should have answered these words by an immediate journey to Paris; but I was obliged to act by the agency of a friend, who was upon the spot, and present at the opening of the will.
mr Evelyn left to me a legacy of a thousand pounds, and the sole guardianship of his daughter's person till her eighteenth year; conjuring me, in the most affecting terms, to take the charge of her education till she was able to act with propriety for herself; but, in regard to fortune, he left her wholly dependent on her mother, to whose tenderness he earnestly recommended her.
She loved me as her father; nor was mrs Villars less valued by her; while to me she became so dear, that her loss was little less afflicting than that which I have since sustained of mrs Villars herself.
At that period of her life we parted; her mother, then married to Monsieur Duval, sent for her to Paris.
How often have I since regretted that I did not accompany her thither!
But, to be brief Madame Duval, at the instigation of her husband, earnestly, or rather tyrannically, endeavoured to effect a union between Miss Evelyn and one of his nephews.
And, when she found her power inadequate to her attempt, enraged at her non compliance, she treated her with the grossest unkindness, and threatened her with poverty and ruin.
Miss Evelyn, to whom wrath and violence had hitherto been strangers, soon grew weary of such usage; and rashly, and without a witness, consented to a private marriage with Sir john Belmont, a very profligate young man, who had but too successfully found means to insinuate himself into her favour.
He promised to conduct her to England he did.-O, Madam, you know the rest!-Disappointed of the fortune he expected, by the inexorable rancour of the Duvals, he infamously burnt the certificate of their marriage, and denied that they had ever been united.
She flew to me for protection.
With what mixed transports of joy and anguish did I again see her!
Every body believed her innocent, from the guiltless tenor of her unspotted youth, and from the known libertinism of her barbarous betrayer.
The rage of Madame Duval at her elopement, abated not while this injured victim of cruelty yet drew breath.
She probably intended, in time, to have pardoned her; but time was not allowed.
When she was informed of her death, I have been told, that the agonies of grief and remorse, with which she was seized, occasioned her a severe fit of illness.
But, from the time of her recovery to the date of her letter to your Ladyship, I had never heard that she manifested any desire to be made acquainted with the circumstances which attended the death of Lady Belmont, and the birth of her helpless child.
That child, Madam, shall never, while life is lent me, know the loss she has sustained.
Thus it has happened, that the education of the father, daughter, and grand daughter, has devolved on me.
What infinite misery have the two first caused me!
Should the fate of the dear survivor be equally adverse, how wretched will be the end of my cares the end of my days!
Even had Madame Duval merited the charge she claims, I fear my fortitude would have been unequal to such a parting; but being such as she is, not only my affection, but my humanity, recoils, at the barbarous idea of deserting the sacred trust reposed in me.
VILLARS TO LADY HOWARD Berry Hill, march twelfth.
In detaining my young charge thus long with myself in the country, I consulted not solely my own inclination.
The mind is but too naturally prone to pleasure, but too easily yielded to dissipation: it has been my study to guard her against their delusions, by preparing her to expect and to despise them.
I commit her to the protection of your Ladyship, and only hope she may be found worthy half the goodness I am satisfied she will meet with at your hospitable mansion.
Thus far, Madam, I cheerfully submit to your desire.
Permit me to ask, for what end, or for what purpose?
A youthful mind is seldom totally free from ambition; to curb that, is the first step to contentment, since to diminish expectation is to increase enjoyment.
Consider Madam, the peculiar cruelty of her situation.
And while he continues to persevere in disavowing his marriage with Miss Evelyn, she shall never, at the expense of her mother's honour, receive a part of her right as the donation of his bounty.
It seems, therefore, as if this deserted child, though legally heiress to two large fortunes, must owe all her rational expectations to adoption and friendship.
Yet her income will be such as may make her happy, if she is disposed to be so in private life; though it will by no means allow her to enjoy the luxury of a London fine lady.
Let Miss Mirvan, then, Madam, shine in all the splendour of high life; but suffer my child still to enjoy the pleasures of humble retirement, with a mind to which greater views are unknown.
I hope this reasoning will be honoured with your approbation; and I have yet another motive which has some weight with me: I would not willingly give offence to any human being; and surely Madame Duval might accuse me of injustice, if, while I refuse to let her grand daughter wait upon her, I consent that she should join a party of pleasure to London.
In sending her to Howard Grove, not one of these scruples arise; and therefore mrs Clinton, a most worthy woman, formerly her nurse, and now my housekeeper, shall attend her thither next week.
She must be very much altered since she was last at Howard Grove.
MR VILLARS TO LADY HOWARD Berry Hill, may second.
YOUR letter, Madam, has opened a source of anxiety, to which I look forward with dread, and which, to see closed, I scarcely dare expect.
I am unwilling to oppose my opinion to that of your Ladyship; nor, indeed, can I, but by arguments which I believe will rather rank me as a hermit ignorant of the world, and fit only for my cell, than as a proper guardian, in an age such as this, for an accomplished young woman.
On the fatal day that her gentle soul left its mansion, and not many hours ere she ceased to breathe, I solemnly plighted my faith, That her child if it lived, should know no father but myself, or her acknowledged husband.
You cannot, Madam, suppose that I found much difficulty in adhering to this promise, and forbearing to make any claim upon Sir john Belmont.
Could I feel an affection the most paternal for this poor sufferer, and not abominate her destroyer?
Could I wish to deliver to him, who had so basely betrayed the mother, the helpless and innocent offspring, who, born in so much sorrow, seemed entitled to all the compassionate tenderness of pity?
You wish to be acquainted with my intentions.-I must acknowledge they were such as I now perceive would not be honoured with your Ladyship's approbation; for though I have sometimes thought of presenting Evelina to her father, and demanding the justice which is her due, yet, at other times, I have both disdained and feared the application; disdained lest it should be refused; and feared, lest it should be accepted!
And often would she say, "Should the poor babe have any feelings correspondent with its mother's, it will have no want while under your protection." Alas! she had no sooner quitted it herself, than she was plunged into a gulph of misery, that swallowed up her peace, reputation, and life.
During the childhood of Evelina, I suggested a thousand plans for the security of her birth right;-but I as many times rejected them.
My plan, therefore, was not merely to educate and to cherish her as my own, but to adopt her the heiress of my small fortune, and to bestow her upon some worthy man, with whom she might spend her days in tranquility, cheerfulness, and good humour, untainted by vice, folly, or ambition.
So much for the time past.
It now remains to speak of the time to come.
And here, indeed, I am sensible of difficulties which I almost despair of surmounting according to my wishes.
But why should I perplex your Ladyship with reasoning that can turn to so little account?
for, alas! what arguments, what persuasions, can I make use of, with any prospect of success, to such a woman as Madame Duval?
Her character and the violence of her disposition, intimidate me from making the attempt: she is too ignorant for instruction, too obstinate for intreaty, and too weak for reason.
I will not, therefore, enter into a contest from which I have nothing to expect but altercation and impertinence.
As soon would I discuss the effect of sound with the deaf, or the nature of colours with the blind, as aim at illuminating with conviction a mind so warped by prejudice, so much the slave of unruly and illiberal passions.
I yield, therefore, to the necessity which compels my reluctant acquiescence; and shall now turn all my thoughts upon considering of such methods for the conducting this enterprise, as may be most conducive to the happiness of my child and least liable to wound her sensibility.
The law suit, therefore, I wholly and absolutely disapprove.
I am satisfied your Ladyship has not weighed this project.
There was a time, indeed, when to assert the innocence of Lady Belmont, and to blazon to the world the wrongs, not guilt, by which she suffered, I proposed, nay attempted, a similar plan: but then all assistance and encouragement was denied.
She was deaf to the voice of Nature, though she has hearkened to that of Ambition.
Never can I consent to have this dear and timid girl brought forward to the notice of the world by such a method; a method which will subject her to all the impertinence of curiosity, the sneers of conjecture, and the stings of ridicule.
And for what?-the attainment of wealth which she does not want, and the gratification of vanity which she does not feel.
A child to appear against a father!-no, Madam, old and infirm as I am, I would even yet sooner convey her myself to some remote part of the world, though I were sure of dying in the expedition.
But even this last consolation was withheld from her!
I will not, therefore, talk of its impropriety, but endeavour to prove its inutility.
She cannot do better herself than to remain quiet and inactive in the affair: the long and mutual animosity between her and Sir john will make her interference merely productive of debates and ill will.
Neither would I have Evelina appear till summoned.
My opinion is, that he would pay more respect to a letter from your Ladyship upon this subject, than from any other person.
I, therefore, advise and hope, that you will yourself take the trouble of writing to him, in order to open the affair.
The views of the Branghtons, in suggesting this scheme, are obviously interested.
They hope, by securing to Evelina the fortune of her father, to induce Madame Duval to settle her own upon themselves.
I have but one thing more to add, from which, however, I can by no means recede: my word so solemnly given to Lady Belmont, that her child should never be owned but with her self, must be inviolably adhered to.
VILLARS TO EVELINA.
Berry Hill, september twenty eighth.
DEAD to the world, and equally insensible to its pleasures or its pains, I long since bad adieu to all joy, and defiance to all sorrow, but what should spring from my Evelina,-sole source, to me, of all earthly felicity.
Alas, my child!-that innocence, the first, best gift of Heaven, should, of all others, be the blindest to its own danger,-the most exposed to treachery,-and the least able to defend itself, in a world where it is little known, less valued, and perpetually deceived!
Would to Heaven you were here!-then, by degrees, and with gentleness, I might enter upon a subject too delicate for distant discussion.
Hitherto I have forborne to speak with you upon the most important of all concerns, the state of your heart:-alas, I need no information!
I have been silent, indeed, but I have not been blind.
Long, and with the deepest regret, have I perceived the ascendancy which Lord Orville has gained upon your mind.-You will start at the mention of his name,-you will tremble every word you read;-I grieve to give pain to my gentle Evelina, but I dare not any longer spare her.
Your first meeting with Lord Orville was decisive.
Young, animated, entirely off your guard, and thoughtless of consequences, Imagination took the reins; and Reason, slow paced, though sure footed, was unequal to the race of so eccentric and flighty a companion.
How rapid was then my Evelina's progress through those regions of fancy and passion whither her new guide conducted her!-She saw Lord Orville at a ball,-and he was the most amiable of men!
-She met him again at another,-and he had every virtue under Heaven!
You flattered yourself that your partiality was the effect of esteem, founded upon a general love of merit, and a principle of justice; and your heart, which fell the sacrifice of your error, was totally gone ere you expected it was in danger.
But, now, since you have again met, and have become more intimate than ever, all my hope from silence and seeming ignorance is at an end.
Make a noble effort for the recovery of your peace, which now, with sorrow I see it, depends wholly upon the presence of Lord Orville.
This effort may indeed be painful; but trust to my experience, when I assure you it is requisite.
You must quit him!-his sight is baneful to your repose, his society is death to your future tranquillity!
Believe me, my beloved child, my heart aches for your suffering, while it dictates its necessity.
Your health, you tell me, is much mended:-Can you then consent to leave Bristol?-not abruptly, that I do not desire, but in a few days from the time you receive this?
I will write to mrs Selwyn, and tell her how much I wish your return; and mrs Clinton can take sufficient care of you.
I have meditated upon every possible expedient that might tend to your happiness, ere I fixed upon exacting from you a compliance which I am convinced will be most painful to you; but I can satisfy myself in none.
This will at least be safe; and as to success,-we must leave it to time.
I am very glad to hear of mr Macartney's welfare.
Heaven preserve and strengthen you!
PREFACE
A preface to the first edition of "Jane Eyre" being unnecessary, I gave none: this second edition demands a few words both of acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark.
My thanks are due in three quarters.
To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions.
To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to an obscure aspirant.
I mean the timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as "Jane Eyre:" in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong; whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry-that parent of crime-an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth.
Self righteousness is not religion.
To attack the first is not to assail the last.
Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world redeeming creed of Christ.
The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them; finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth-to let white washed walls vouch for clean shrines.
Why have I alluded to this man?
They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers.
Finally, I have alluded to mr Thackeray, because to him-if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger-I have dedicated this second edition of "JANE EYRE."
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION
If, therefore, the authorship of other works of fiction has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded where it is not merited; and consequently, denied where it is justly due.
CHAPTER one
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
A breakfast room adjoined the drawing room, I slipped in there.
I mounted into the window seat: gathering up my feet, I sat cross legged, like a Turk; and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I was shrined in double retirement.
At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.
With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way.
I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon.
Madam Mope!" cried the voice of john Reed; then he paused: he found the room apparently empty.
Georgy! (calling to his sisters) Joan is not here: tell mama she is run out into the rain-bad animal!"
"What do you want?" I asked, with awkward diffidence.
"Say, 'What do you want, Master Reed?'" was the answer.
john Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities.
john had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy to me.
I wonder if he read that notion in my face; for, all at once, without speaking, he struck suddenly and strongly.
"Show the book."
I returned to the window and fetched it thence.
"You are like a murderer-you are like a slave driver-you are like the Roman emperors!"
"What! what!" he cried.
but first-"
He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing.
"Take her away to the red room, and lock her in there." Four hands were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.
I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me.
"Master!
"No; you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep. There, sit down, and think over your wickedness."
"If you don't sit still, you must be tied down," said Bessie.
Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary ligature.
This preparation for bonds, and the additional ignominy it inferred, took a little of the excitement out of me.
"Don't take them off," I cried; "I will not stir."
"But it was always in her," was the reply.
I had nothing to say to these words: they were not new to me: my very first recollections of existence included hints of the same kind.
This reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible.
Miss Abbot joined in-
They will have a great deal of money, and you will have none: it is your place to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them."
"Besides," said Miss Abbot, "God will punish her: He might strike her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go?
Come, Bessie, we will leave her: I wouldn't have her heart for anything.
Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself; for if you don't repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away."
They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them.
The red room was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might say never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it contained: yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion.
Scarcely less prominent was an ample cushioned easy chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.
This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire; it was silent, because remote from the nursery and kitchen; solemn, because it was known to be so seldom entered.
I was not quite sure whether they had locked the door; and when I dared move, I got up and went to see.
Alas! yes: no jail was ever more secure.
I returned to my stool.
Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned?
Why could I never please?
Georgiana, who had a spoiled temper, a very acrid spite, a captious and insolent carriage, was universally indulged.
Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls, seemed to give delight to all who looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault.
What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon!
Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought!
I know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child-though equally dependent and friendless-mrs
That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die?
Or was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne?
In such vault I had been told did mr Reed lie buried; and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with gathering dread.
It must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hard wrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently intruded on her own family group.
I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest any sign of violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over me with strange pity.
This idea, consolatory in theory, I felt would be terrible if realised: with all my might I endeavoured to stifle it-I endeavoured to be firm.
Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark room; at this moment a light gleamed on the wall.
Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind?
"Miss Eyre, are you ill?" said Bessie.
"Take me out!
"What for?
Have you seen something?" again demanded Bessie.
"And what a scream!
If she had been in great pain one would have excused it, but she only wanted to bring us all here: I know her naughty tricks."
"Let her go," was the only answer.
"Loose Bessie's hand, child: you cannot succeed in getting out by these means, be assured.
I abhor artifice, particularly in children; it is my duty to show you that tricks will not answer: you will now stay here an hour longer, and it is only on condition of perfect submission and stillness that I shall liberate you then."
"O aunt! have pity!
Forgive me!
I shall be killed if-"
I was a precocious actress in her eyes; she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.
Bessie and Abbot having retreated, mrs Reed, impatient of my now frantic anguish and wild sobs, abruptly thrust me back and locked me in, without farther parley.
I heard her sweeping away; and soon after she was gone, I suppose I had a species of fit: unconsciousness closed the scene.
CHAPTER twenty seven.
THE ORDEAL OF BITTER APPLES
He had not felt very keenly over the matter of the sermons, and certainly the mere fact that peter could eat sour apples without making faces did not cast any reflection on the honour or ability of the other competitors.
But to Felix everything suddenly became flat, stale, and unprofitable, because peter continued to hold the championship of bitter apples.
It haunted his waking hours and obsessed his nights.
If anything could have made him thin the way he worried over this matter would have done it.
For myself, I cared not a groat.
But I had no burning desire to eat sour apples without grimacing, and I did not sympathize over and above with my brother.
When, however, he took to praying about it, I realized how deeply he felt on the subject, and hoped he would be successful.
Felix prayed earnestly that he might be enabled to eat a bitter apple without making a face.
And when he had prayed three nights after this manner, he contrived to eat a bitter apple without a grimace until he came to the last bite, which proved too much for him.
But Felix was vastly encouraged.
But this devoutly desired consummation did not come to pass.
In spite of prayers and heroic attempts, Felix could never get beyond that last bite.
Not even faith and works in combination could avail.
For a time he could not understand this.
But he thought the mystery was solved when Cecily came to him one day and told him that peter was praying against him.
"He's praying that you'll never be able to eat a bitter apple without making a face," she said.
"He told Felicity and Felicity told me.
She said she thought it was real cute of him.
I think that is a dreadful way to talk about praying and I told her so.
Felix was very indignant-and aggrieved as well.
"I don't see why God should answer Peter's prayers instead of mine," he said bitterly.
It isn't fair."
"Oh, Felix, don't talk like that," said Cecily, shocked.
"God MUST be fair.
I'll tell you what I believe is the reason.
peter prays three times a day regular-in the morning and at dinner time and at night-and besides that, any time through the day when he happens to think of it, he just prays, standing up.
"Well, he's got to stop praying against me, anyhow," said Felix resolutely.
Felix marched over to Uncle Roger's, and we trailed after, scenting a scene.
"Look here, peter," said Felix ominously, "they tell me that you've been praying right along that I couldn't eat a bitter apple.
Now, I tell you-"
"I never did!" exclaimed peter indignantly.
I never prayed that you couldn't eat a bitter apple.
I just prayed that I'd be the only one that could."
"Well, that's the same thing," cried Felix.
"You've just been praying for the opposite to me out of spite.
And you've got to stop it, peter Craig."
I s'pose you think a hired boy hasn't any business to pray for particular things, but I'll show you.
"All right.
I can fight as well as pray."
"Oh, don't fight," implored Cecily.
"I think it would be dreadful. Surely you can arrange it some other way.
Let's all give up the Ordeal, anyway.
There isn't much fun in it.
"I don't want to give up the Ordeal," said Felix, "and I won't."
"It's Felix.
If he don't interfere with my prayers there's no need of fighting.
But if he does there's no other way to settle it."
"That's fair enough.
If I'm licked I won't pray for that particular thing any more."
"It's dreadful to fight about anything so religious as praying," sighed poor Cecily.
"Why, they were always fighting about religion in old times," said Felix.
"The more religious anything was the more fighting there was about it."
"A fellow's got a right to pray as he pleases," said peter, "and if anybody tries to stop him he's bound to fight.
That's my way of looking at it."
"What would Miss Marwood say if she knew you were going to fight?" asked Felicity.
Felicity tried another tack.
After that, no moral force on earth could have prevented Felix from fighting.
He would have faced an army with banners.
"You might settle it by drawing lots," said Cecily desperately.
"What would Aunt Jane say if she knew you were going to fight?" Cecily demanded of peter.
"Don't you drag my Aunt Jane into this affair," said peter darkly.
"You said you were going to be a Presbyterian," persisted Cecily.
"Good Presbyterians don't fight."
"Oh, don't they!
I heard your Uncle Roger say that Presbyterians were the best for fighting in the world-or the worst, I forget which he said, but it means the same thing."
"I thought you said in your sermon, Master peter, that people shouldn't fight."
"This is different.
I know what I'm fighting for but I can't think of the word."
"I guess you mean principle," I suggested.
"Yes, that's it," agreed peter.
"It's all right to fight for principle. It's kind of praying with your fists."
"Oh, can't you do something to prevent them from fighting, Sara?" pleaded Cecily, turning to the Story Girl, who was sitting on a bin, swinging her shapely bare feet to and fro.
"It doesn't do to meddle in an affair of this kind between boys," said the Story Girl sagely.
It was ultimately arranged that the combat should take place in the fir wood behind Uncle Roger's granary.
It was a nice, remote, bosky place where no prowling grown up would be likely to intrude.
Do you think he will?"
"I don't know," I confessed dubiously.
"Felix is too fat.
He'll get out of breath in no time.
And this is Peter's first fight."
"Did you ever fight?" asked the Story Girl.
"Once," I said briefly, dreading the next question, which promptly came.
"Who beat?"
"The other fellow," I said with reluctant honesty.
"Well," said the Story Girl, "I think it doesn't matter whether you get whipped or not so long as you fight a good, square fight."
Her potent voice made me feel that I was quite a hero after all, and the sting went out of my recollection of that old fight.
Cecily was very pale, and Felix and peter were taking off their coats.
Cecily, keep quiet. Now, one-two-three!"
peter and Felix "pitched in," with more zeal than discretion on both sides.
As a result, peter got what later developed into a black eye, and Felix's nose began to bleed.
Cecily gave a shriek and ran out of the wood.
He was not angry.
But he took the combatants by their shirt collars and dragged them apart.
"This stops right here, boys," he said.
"You know I don't allow fighting."
"Oh, but Uncle Alec, it was this way," began Felix eagerly.
"peter--"
"I don't care what you were fighting about, but you must settle your quarrels in a different fashion.
Remember my commands, Felix.
peter, Roger is looking for you to wash his buggy.
Be off."
He turned his back on Cecily.
Cecily "caught it" after Uncle Alec had gone.
"They've been such friends, and it was dreadful to see them fighting."
"Uncle Roger would have let them fight it out," said the Story Girl discontentedly.
"Uncle Roger believes in boys fighting.
peter and Felix wouldn't have been any worse friends after it.
"I don't meddle with hired boys' prayers," she said haughtily.
"Just as much nonsense as praying about the bitter apples in the first place."
"There's something wrong somewhere," said Cecily perplexedly.
"We ought to pray for what we want, of that I'm sure-and peter wanted to be the only one who could pass the Ordeal.
I wish I could understand it."
"Peter's prayer was wrong because it was a selfish prayer, I guess," said the Story Girl thoughtfully.
We mustn't pray selfish prayers."
"Yes, but," said Dan triumphantly, "if you believe God answers prayers about particular things, it was Peter's prayer He answered.
What do you make of that?"
We only get more mixed up all the time.
Let's leave it alone and I'll tell you a story.
Aunt Olivia had a letter today from a friend in Nova Scotia, who lives in Shubenacadie.
And I did.
Of course we did.
We all sat down at the roots of the firs.
He would not look at Cecily, but every one else had forgiven her.
The Story Girl leaned that brown head of hers against the fir trunk behind her, and looked up at the apple green sky through the dark boughs above us.
Her cheeks were still flushed with the excitement of the evening.
One of the young braves was named Accadee.
He was the tallest and bravest and handsomest young man in the tribe-"
"Why are there never no stories about ugly people?"
"Perhaps ugly people never have stories happen to them," suggested Felicity.
I like them best that way.
"Pretty people are always conceited," said Felix, who was getting tired of holding his tongue.
"They're always so tall and slender.
"It doesn't matter what a man LOOKS like," I said, feeling that Felix and Dan were catching it rather too hotly.
"He must be a good sort of chap and DO heaps of things.
That's all that's necessary."
Never an arrow of his that did not go straight to the mark.
Her eyes were dark and soft, her foot was as light as a breeze, and her voice sounded like a brook in the woods, or the wind that comes over the hills at night.
She stole cautiously through the woods until she came to the brink of a little valley.
Below her stood the snow white moose.
She drew her arrow to her eye-alas, she knew the art only too well!--and took careful aim.
The next moment Accadee fell dead with her arrow in his heart."
The Story Girl paused-a dramatic pause.
It was quite dark in the fir wood.
We could see her face and eyes but dimly through the gloom.
The stars twinkled through the softly waving boughs.
"What did Shuben do when she found out she had killed Accadee?" asked Felicity.
"No," said Dan reluctantly.
"I suppose there'd be some drawback to everything, even being an Injun."
"Isn't it cold?" said Cecily, shivering again.
Felicity likes the winter, and so does the Story Girl, but I don't.
"The gods themselves cannot recall their gifts." They may rob us of our future and embitter our present, but our past they may not touch.
With all its laughter and delight and glamour it is our eternal possession.
fifteen
"I'm going there, too . . .
Paul's voice quivered and his lip trembled.
"No, indeed, I wouldn't . . . that's just the way I feel.
Nobody else understands so well . . . not even grandma, although she's so good to me.
Father understood pretty well, but still I couldn't talk much to him about mother, because it made him feel so bad.
Grandmothers are better, next to mothers.
"Father's not very easy to get acquainted with," Paul had said once.
"I never got really acquainted with him until after my little mother died. But he's splendid when you do get to know him.
She takes it right out as soon as she tucks me up because she says I mustn't be a coward. I'm NOT scared, but I'd RATHER have the light.
I expect she spoiled me.
It's very exciting to have a birthday, isn't it?
You'd never think it to look at me, would you?
"How are your rock people coming on?
He is really full of wickedness, I think."
"No; but I think she suspects.
Paul shook his head gravely.
But you could see rock people of your own.
"Isn't it splendid to be that kind, teacher?"
and both knew the way to that happy land.
The knowledge of that land's geography . . .
It is better to possess it, living in a garret, than to be the inhabitant of palaces without it.
They walked home together.
"Yes. . . .
I feel one of my old 'thrills' at the mere thought."
Life would be a sorry business without them.
"I shall try.
"Nonsense, dear, he deserved it.
"He may have deserved it, but that is not the point.
That is what humiliates me."
There goes Gilbert Blythe on his wheel . . . home for his vacation too, I suppose.
"Do you think you will ever get to college?"
"Marilla's eyes will never be much better than they are now, although we are so thankful to think that they will not get worse.
I think it is desecration to call that friendship.
"Friendship IS very beautiful," smiled mrs Allan, "but some day . . ."
Then she paused abruptly.
CHAPTER twenty seven
The next morning brought the following very unexpected letter from Isabella:
Bath, April
My dearest Catherine, I received your two kind letters with the greatest delight, and have a thousand apologies to make for not answering them sooner.
I really am quite ashamed of my idleness; but in this horrid place one can find time for nothing.
I have had my pen in my hand to begin a letter to you almost every day since you left Bath, but have always been prevented by some silly trifler or other.
Pray write to me soon, and direct to my own home.
Thank God, we leave this vile place tomorrow.
Since you went away, I have had no pleasure in it-the dust is beyond anything; and everybody one cares for is gone.
I believe if I could see you I should not mind the rest, for you are dearer to me than anybody can conceive.
Your kind offices will set all right: he is the only man I ever did or could love, and I trust you will convince him of it. The spring fashions are partly down; and the hats the most frightful you can imagine.
I hope you spend your time pleasantly, but am afraid you never think of me.
I will not say all that I could of the family you are with, because I would not be ungenerous, or set you against those you esteem; but it is very difficult to know whom to trust, and young men never know their minds two days together.
I rejoice to say that the young man whom, of all others, I particularly abhor, has left Bath.
Afterwards he got worse, and became quite my shadow.
Many girls might have been taken in, for never were such attentions; but I knew the fickle sex too well.
He went away to his regiment two days ago, and I trust I shall never be plagued with him again.
He is the greatest coxcomb I ever saw, and amazingly disagreeable.
The last two days he was always by the side of Charlotte Davis: I pitied his taste, but took no notice of him.
The last time we met was in Bath Street, and I turned directly into a shop that he might not speak to me; I would not even look at him.
He went into the pump room afterwards; but I would not have followed him for all the world.
Such a contrast between him and your brother!
I would write to him myself, but have mislaid his direction; and, as I hinted above, am afraid he took something in my conduct amiss.
We happened to sit by the Mitchells, and they pretended to be quite surprised to see me out.
I knew their spite: at one time they could not be civil to me, but now they are all friendship; but I am not such a fool as to be taken in by them.
You know I have a pretty good spirit of my own.
I wear nothing but purple now: I know I look hideous in it, but no matter-it is your dear brother's favourite colour.
Lose no time, my dearest, sweetest Catherine, in writing to him and to me, Who ever am, etc
Such a strain of shallow artifice could not impose even upon Catherine. Its inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehood struck her from the very first.
She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of having ever loved her.
Her professions of attachment were now as disgusting as her excuses were empty, and her demands impudent.
"Write to james on her behalf!
No, james should never hear Isabella's name mentioned by her again."
On Henry's arrival from Woodston, she made known to him and Eleanor their brother's safety, congratulating them with sincerity on it, and reading aloud the most material passages of her letter with strong indignation.
When she had finished it-"So much for Isabella," she cried, "and for all our intimacy!
She must think me an idiot, or she could not have written so; but perhaps this has served to make her character better known to me than mine is to her.
I see what she has been about.
She is a vain coquette, and her tricks have not answered.
I do not believe she had ever any regard either for james or for me, and I wish I had never known her."
"It will soon be as if you never had," said Henry.
"There is but one thing that I cannot understand.
I see that she has had designs on Captain Tilney, which have not succeeded; but I do not understand what Captain Tilney has been about all this time.
Why should he pay her such attentions as to make her quarrel with my brother, and then fly off himself?"
"I have very little to say for Frederick's motives, such as I believe them to have been.
He has his vanities as well as Miss Thorpe, and the chief difference is, that, having a stronger head, they have not yet injured himself.
If the effect of his behaviour does not justify him with you, we had better not seek after the cause."
"Then you do not suppose he ever really cared about her?"
"I am persuaded that he never did."
"And only made believe to do so for mischief's sake?"
Henry bowed his assent.
"Well, then, I must say that I do not like him at all.
Though it has turned out so well for us, I do not like him at all.
As it happens, there is no great harm done, because I do not think Isabella has any heart to lose.
But, suppose he had made her very much in love with him?"
"But we must first suppose Isabella to have had a heart to lose-consequently to have been a very different creature; and, in that case, she would have met with very different treatment."
"It is very right that you should stand by your brother."
But your mind is warped by an innate principle of general integrity, and therefore not accessible to the cool reasonings of family partiality, or a desire of revenge."
Catherine was complimented out of further bitterness.
Frederick could not be unpardonably guilty, while Henry made himself so agreeable.
She resolved on not answering Isabella's letter, and tried to think no more of it.
"You've got-"
"In my pocket!" I interrupted.
"Why?"
"Because I don't think he's guilty.
CHAPTER seven
They were obviously of the chorus girl type, a fact which they seemed to lack the ambition to conceal.
You know Bob, don't you?"
Philip for a moment was taken aback.
"Bob Millet," he repeated thoughtfully.
"Of course!
Good old Bob!
"Hilda and I are dying for a cocktail, mr Romilly."
They drank two cocktails and found themselves unfortunately devoid of cigarettes, a misfortune which it became his privilege to remedy.
Philip escaped after about an hour and made his way to where Elizabeth was reclining in her deck chair.
She smiled at him tolerantly.
An unopened book lay by her side.
She seemed to have been spending the last quarter of an hour in thought.
No, don't sit down," she went on.
He turned slowly away.
All his new found buoyancy of spirits had suddenly left him.
He was in the library, standing in front of those many sheets of typewritten messages, passing them all over, heedless of what their message might be, until he came to the last and most insignificant. Four lines, almost overlapped by another sheet-
STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF A LONDON ART TEACHER
SUICIDE FEARED
Philip Romilly, a teacher of art in a London school, visited Detton Magna on Friday afternoon and apparently started for a walk along the canal bank, towards dusk.
Nothing has since been heard of him or his movements, and arrangements have been made to drag the canal at a certain point.
He saw the whole ghastly business, the police on the canal banks, watching the slow progress of the men with their drags bringing to the surface all the miserable refuse of the turgid waters, the dripping black mud, perhaps at last....
He was back again on the deck, walking quite steadily yet seeing little. He made his way to the smoking room, asked almost indifferently for a brandy and soda, and drained it to the last drop.
"So I am missing," he remarked, almost in his ordinary tone.
Fancy reading of my own disappearance within a few days of its taking place, in the middle of the Atlantic!"
Yes, the whole thing was reasonable."
"And they are going to drag the canal," Elizabeth said thoughtfully.
"A difficult business," he assured her.
I don't envy the men who have to handle the drags."
"You do not believe, then, that they will find anything-interesting?"
"Don't!" she interrupted.
"You know what I mean.
What can they hope to find there in his place?"
His evil moments for that afternoon were over.
"Not what they are looking for.
Have you brought the paper and pencil you spoke of?
She drew a little nearer to him.
He shook his head.
"Chance," she declared, "is a wonderful thing.
Chance has pitchforked you here, absolutely to my side, I, the one woman who could understand what you mean, who could give your Mona life.
Don't think I am vain," she went on.
I simply know.
Listen.
Take this pencil and paper.
Let us leave off dreaming for a little time and give ourselves up to technicalities.
Bring your chair a little nearer-so.
Now take down these notes."
They worked until the first gong for dinner rang.
She sat up in her chair with a happy little laugh.
"Isn't it wonderful!" she exclaimed.
"I never knew time to pass so quickly.
There isn't any pleasure in the world like this," she added, a little impulsively, "the pleasure of letting your thoughts run out to meet some one else's, some one who understands.
She shook her head.
"I'd rather not," she admitted.
"My brain is too full.
Oh!
"Take off my rugs and help me up.
No, we'll leave them there. Perhaps, after dinner, we might walk for a little time."
"But the whole thing is tingling in my brain," he protested.
"Couldn't we go into the library?
We could find a corner by ourselves."
She turned and looked at him, standing up now, the wind blowing her skirts, her eyes glowing, her lips a little parted.
He looked away from her.
"We will talk, if you will."
They neither of them moved.
But," he added confidentially, dropping his voice and taking them both by the arm, "I have made a cocktail down in my stateroom-it's there in the shaker waiting for us, something I can't talk about.
I've given Lawton one, and he's following me about like a dog.
Come right this way, both of you.
Been to sleep, either of you?"
Elizabeth, as though by accident, had dropped her veil.
CHAPTER nine
The great buildings of New York, at which he had been gazing for hours, were standing, heterogeneous but magnificent, clear cut against an azure sky.
His fellow passengers, in unfamiliar costumes, were standing about with their eyes glued upon the distant docks.
"Really, I can't tell any of you a thing more," she went on, turning back to them, "only this, and I am sure it ought to be interesting.
mr Romilly, please wait for me," she called after him.
"I want to point out some of the buildings to you."
Philip was taken aback and for the moment remained speechless.
"We'd like to know your reason, mr Romilly, for paying us a visit," the young man continued, "in your own words.
What might your output be in England per week?
They'd have come down the harbour and held us up.
Don't think about that for a moment.
"I will not," he promised.
"Ninth floor!" Philip gasped.
"Been several people here enquiring for you.
No mail yet."
He handed the key to a small boy and waved Philip away.
"You just step this way, sir," he invited encouragingly.
"Those packages of yours will be all right.
You don't need to worry about them."
"I'll see after them myself."
He feed the linen coated porters and dismissed them as rapidly as possible.
"Just seen Henshaw.
Suggest you cable back the twenty thousand pounds lying our credit New York.
Please reply.
Potts."
His cousin's great wealth was a fiction.
Then he replaced it, a little dazed.
He left the cable carefully open upon the dressing table, and, picking up the small leather case, left the room.
COMMON SIMPLE DYES.
Allow a pound of logwood to each pound of goods that are to be dyed. Soak it over night in soft water, then boil it an hour, and strain the water in which it is boiled.
For each pound of logwood, dissolve an ounce of blue vitriol in lukewarm water sufficient to wet the goods.
Dip the goods in-when saturated with it, turn the whole into the logwood dye.
If the goods are cotton, set the vessel on the fire, and let the goods boil ten or fifteen minutes, stirring them constantly to prevent their spotting.
Silk and woollen goods should not be boiled in the dye stuff, but it should be kept at a scalding heat for twenty minutes. Drain the goods without wringing, and hang them in a dry, shady place, where they will have the air.
Let the goods remain in it till cold; then hang them where they will dry; (they should not be wrung.) Boiling hot suds is the best thing to set the color of black silk-let it remain in it till cold.
Soaking black dyed goods in sour milk, is also good to set the color.
For green dye, take a pound of oil of vitriol, and turn it upon half an ounce of Spanish indigo, that has been reduced to a fine powder.
Chemic blue is made in the same manner, only using half the quantity of vitriol.
For woollen goods, the East indigo will answer as well as the Spanish, and comes much lower.
This dye will not answer for cotton goods, as the vitriol rots the threads.
They should be dyed when the weather is dry-if not dried quick, they will not look nice.
When perfectly dry, wash them in lukewarm suds, to keep the vitriol from injuring the texture of the cloth.
If you wish for a lively bright green, mix a little of the above composition with yellow dye.
When dissolved, take it from the fire; when cool, put in the goods, which should previously be washed free from spots, and color; set them on a moderate fire, where they will keep hot, till the goods are of the shade you wish.
This dye will make a salmon or orange color, according to the strength of it, and the time the goods remain in.
Goods dyed in this manner should never be rinsed in clear water.
Peach leaves, fustic, and saffron, all make a good straw or lemon color, according to the strength of the dye.
When the dye stuff is strained, steep the articles in it.
Madder makes a good durable red, but not a brilliant color.
To make a dye of it, allow for half a pound of it three ounces of alum, and one of cream of tartar, and six gallons of water.
This proportion of ingredients will make sufficient dye for six or seven pounds of goods. Heat half of the water scalding hot, in a clean brass kettle, then put in the alum and cream of tartar, and let it dissolve.
When the water boils, stir the alum and tartar up in it, put in the goods, and let them boil a couple of hours; then rinse them in fair water-empty the kettle, and put in three gallons of water, and the madder; rub it fine in the water, then put in the goods, and set them where they will keep scalding hot for an hour, without boiling-stir them constantly.
When they have been scalding an hour, increase the fire till they boil.
Let them boil five minutes; then drain them out of the dye, and rinse them, without wringing, in fair water, and hang them in the shade, where they will dry.
Set the kettle on the fire, and let the water boil fifteen or twenty minutes; then put in sufficient cold water to make it lukewarm, put in the goods, and boil them an hour and a quarter-take them out without wringing, and dry them in a shady place.
The blossoms of the Balm of Gilead, steeped with fair water in a vessel, then strained, will dye silk a pretty red color.
The silk should be washed clean, and free from color, then rinsed in fair water, and boiled in the strained dye, with a small piece of alum.
To dye a fine delicate pink, use a carmine saucer-the directions for dyeing come with the saucers.
It is too expensive a dye for bulky goods, but for faded fancy shawls and ribbons, it is quite worth the while to use it, as it gives a beautiful shade of pink.
To make a good dark slate color, boil sugar loaf paper with vinegar, in an iron utensil-put in alum to set the color.
Tea grounds, set with copperas, makes a good slate color.
To produce a light slate color, boil white maple bark in clear water, with a little alum-the bark should be boiled in a brass utensil.
The dye for slate color should be strained before the goods are put into it.
They should be boiled in it, and then hung where they will drain and dry.
Turn it into a barrel, and fill it up with water.
Heat twenty six pounds of strained grease.
Let the whole stand in the sun, stirring it frequently.
In the course of a week, fill the barrel with weak lye.
This method of making soap is much easier than to make a lye of your ashes, while it is as cheap, if you sell your ashes to the soap boiler.
Heat twenty pounds of strained grease, then mix it with the dissolved potash, and boil them together till the whole becomes a thick jelly, which is ascertained by taking a little of it out to get cold.
Take it from the fire, stir in cold water till it grows thin, then put to each pailful of soap a pint of blown salt-stir it in well.
The succeeding day, separate it from the lye, and heat it over a slow fire.
Let it boil a quarter of an hour, then take it from the fire.
If you wish to have it a yellow color, put in a little palm oil, and turn it out into wooden vessels. When cold, separate it again from the lye, and cut, it in bars-let them remain in the sun several days to dry.
To make the celebrated Windsor soap, nothing more is necessary than to slice the best white soap as thin as possible, and melt it over a slow fire.
Take it from the fire when melted, and when it is just lukewarm, add enough of the oil of caraway to scent it.
Turn it into moulds, and let it remain in a dry situation for five or six days.
To make Castile soap, boil common soft soap in lamp oil three hours and a half.
This kind of soap is excellent for shaving, and chapped hands-it is also good for eruptions on the face.
RELIEF MEASURES INAUGURATED IN CALIFORNIA-DISTURBED CONDITIONS BECAUSE OF MEXICAN WAR-GENEROUS SUBSCRIPTIONS-THREE PARTIES ORGANIZE-"FIRST RELIEF," UNDER RACINE TUCKER; "SECOND RELIEF" UNDER REED AND GREENWOOD; AND RELAY CAMP UNDER WOODWORTH-FIRST RELIEF PARTY CROSSES SNOW BELT AND REACHES DONNER LAKE.
While the early sunlight of january nineteenth was flooding his room with cheer and warmth, he dictated a letter to mr john Sinclair, Alcalde of the Upper District of California, living near Sutter's Fort, in which he stated as briefly as possible the conditions and perils surrounding the snow bound travellers, and begged him to use every means in his power toward their immediate rescue.
Bear River was running high, and the plain between it and Sutter's Fort seemed a vast quagmire, but john Rhodes volunteered to deliver the letter.
He was ferried over the river on a raft formed of two logs lashed together with strips of rawhide.
It was dark when he reached Sutter's Fort, nevertheless from house to house he spread the startling report: "Men, women, and little children are snow bound in the Sierras, and starving to death!"
Captain Kerns in charge at the Fort, pledged his aid, and influence to the cause of relief.
While Captain Kerns at Sutter's Fort was sending messengers to different points, and mrs Sinclair was collecting clothing to replace the tattered garments of the members of the Forlorn Hope, her husband despatched an open letter to the people of San Francisco, describing the arrival of the survivors of the Forlorn Hope, and the heart rending condition of those remaining in the mountains.
Reed and McCutchen, who were known to be endeavoring to raise a second expedition.
The letter was taken to the City Hotel in San Francisco, and read aloud in the dining room.
Its contents aroused all the tender emotions known to human nature.
Some of the listeners had parted from members of the Donner Party at the Little Sandy, when its prospects appeared so bright, and the misfortunes which had since befallen the party seemed incredible.
Women left the room sobbing, and men called those passing, in from the street, to join the knots of earnest talkers.
All were ready and willing to do; but, alas, the obstacles which had prevented mr Reed getting men for the mountain work still remained to be overcome.
Existing war between Mexico and the United States was keeping California in a disturbed condition.
Most of the able bodied male emigrants had enlisted under Captain Fremont as soon as they reached the country, and were still on duty in the southern part of the province; and the non enlisted were deemed necessary for the protection of the colonies of American women and children encamped on the soil of the enemy.
Moreover, all felt that each man who should attempt to cross the snow belt would do so at the peril of his life.
Captain Mervine of the United States Navy, and mr Richardson, United States Collector, each subscribed fifty dollars to the cause on his own account.
As a result of these appeals, Alcalde Bartlett called a public meeting; and so intense was the feeling that mr Dunleary, "the first speaker, had scarcely taken his seat on the platform when the people rushed to the chairman's table from all parts of the house with their hands full of silver dollars," and could hardly be induced to stay their generosity until the meeting was organized.
A treasurer and two committees were appointed; the one to solicit subscriptions, and the other to purchase supplies.
The Alcalde was requested to act with both committees.
Seven hundred dollars was subscribed before the meeting adjourned.
It was decided to fit out an expedition, under charge of Past Midshipman Woodworth, who had tendered his services for the purpose, he to act under instructions of the Military Governor and cooeperate with the committee aiding Reed.
Soon thereafter "Old Trapper Greenwood" appeared in San Francisco, asking for assistance in fitting out a following to go to the mountains with himself and McCutchen, mr George Yount and others in and around Sonoma and Napa having recommended him as leader.
Donations of horses, mules, beef, and flour had already been sent to his camp in Napa Valley.
Greenwood urged that he should have ten or twelve men on whom he could rely after reaching deep snow.
These, he said, he could secure if he had the ready money to make advances and to procure the necessary warm clothing and blankets.
He had crossed the Sierras before, when the snow lay deep on the summit, and now proposed to drive over horses and kill them at the camps as provisions for the sufferers.
If this scheme should fail, he and his sons with others would get food to the camp on snowshoes.
Thornton says:
The Governor General of California, after due form, and trusting to the generosity and humanity of the Government which he represented, appropriated four hundred dollars on Government account toward outfitting this relief party.
Meanwhile, before Alcalde Sinclair's letter had time to reach San Francisco, he and Captain Sutter began outfitting the men destined to become the "First Relief." Aguilla Glover and r s
Tucker, Johnson, Richey and others, who, being anxious to assist in the good work, had killed, and were fire drying, beef to take up the mountains.
Here two days were spent making pack saddles, driving in horses, and getting supplies in shape.
Indians were kept at the handmill grinding wheat.
Part of the flour was sacked, and part converted into bread by the women in the vicinity.
When ready to mount, he shook hands with each man, and recorded the names in a note book as follows:
Racine Tucker, Aguilla Glover, r s
This party is generally known as the "First Relief." Their route to the snow belt lay through sections of country which had become so soft and oozy that the horses often sank in mire, flank deep; and the streams were so swollen that progress was alarmingly slow.
On the second day they were driven into camp early by heavy rains which drenched clothing, blankets, and even the provisions carefully stored under the saddles and leather saddle covers.
This caused a delay of thirty six hours, for everything had to be sun or fire dried before the party could resume travel.
Upon reaching Mule Springs, the party found the snow from three to four feet deep, and, contrary to expectations, saw that it would be impossible to proceed farther with the horses.
mr Eddy was now ill of fever, and unfit to continue the climb; whereupon his companions promised to bring out his loved ones if he would return with Joe Varro, whom mr Johnson had sent along to bring the pack animals home after they should cease to be of use.
At Mule Springs, the party built a brush store house for the extra supplies and appointed George Tucker and William Coon camp keepers. Then they prepared packs containing jerked beef, flour, and bread, each weighing between forty and seventy five pounds, according to the temperament and strength of the respective carriers.
The following morning ten men started on their toilsome march to Bear Valley, where they arrived on the thirteenth, and at once began searching for the abandoned wagon and provisions which Reed and McCutchen had cached the previous Autumn, after their fruitless attempt to scale the mountains. The wagon was found under snow ten feet in depth; but its supplies had been destroyed by wild beasts.
mr Tucker, fearing that others might become disheartened and do likewise, guaranteed each man who would persevere to the end, five dollars per diem, dating from the time the party entered the snow.
The remaining seven pushed ahead, and on the eighteenth, encamped on the summit overlooking the lake, where the snow was said to be forty feet in depth.
THE NORKA
They had three sons, two of them with their wits about them, but the third a simpleton.
Now the King had a deer park in which were quantities of wild animals of different kinds.
Into that park there used to come a huge beast-Norka was its name-and do fearful mischief, devouring some of the animals every night.
The King did all he could, but he was unable to destroy it. So at last he called his sons together and said, 'Whoever will destroy the Norka, to him will I give the half of my kingdom.'
Well, the eldest son undertook the task.
As soon as it was night, he took his weapons and set out.
But before he reached the park, he went into a traktir (or tavern), and there he spent the whole night in revelry.
When he came to his senses it was too late; the day had already dawned.
He felt himself disgraced in the eyes of his father, but there was no help for it.
The next day the second son went, and did just the same.
Their father scolded them both soundly, and there was an end of it.
Well, on the third day the youngest son undertook the task.
They all laughed him to scorn, because he was so stupid, feeling sure he wouldn't do anything.
Presently the midnight hour sounded.
The earth began to shake, and the Norka came rushing up, and burst right through the fence into the park, so huge was it.
The Prince pulled himself together, leapt to his feet, crossed himself, and went straight at the beast.
It fled back, and the Prince ran after it.
But he soon saw that he couldn't catch it on foot, so he hastened to the stable, laid his hands on the best horse there, and set off in pursuit.
Presently he came up with the beast, and they began a fight.
They fought and fought; the Prince gave the beast three wounds.
At last they were both utterly exhausted, so they lay down to take a short rest.
But the moment the Prince closed his eyes, up jumped the beast and took to flight.
Again the Prince gave the beast three wounds, and then he and the beast lay down again to rest.
Thereupon away fled the beast as before.
The Prince caught it up, and again gave it three wounds.
But all of a sudden, just as the Prince began chasing it for the fourth time, the beast fled to a great white stone, tilted it up, and escaped into the other world, crying out to the Prince: 'Then only will you overcome me, when you enter here.'
The Prince went home, told his father all that had happened, and asked him to have a leather rope plaited, long enough to reach to the other world.
His father ordered this to be done.
When the rope was made, the Prince called for his brothers, and he and they, having taken servants with them, and everything that was needed for a whole year, set out for the place where the beast had disappeared under the stone.
When they got there, they built a palace on the spot, and lived in it for some time. But when everything was ready, the youngest brother said to the others: 'Now, brothers, who is going to lift this stone?'
Neither of them could so much as stir it, but as soon as he touched it, away it flew to a distance, though it was ever so big-big as a hill. And when he had flung the stone aside, he spoke a second time to his brothers, saying:
'Who is going into the other world, to overcome the Norka?'
Neither of them offered to do so.
Then he laughed at them for being such cowards, and said:
'Well, brothers, farewell!
His brothers lowered him accordingly, and when he had reached the other world, underneath the earth, he went on his way.
'Hail, Prince Ivan!
Long have I awaited thee!'
He entered the courtyard, tied up his horse, and went indoors.
In one of the rooms a dinner was laid out. He sat down and dined, and then went into a bedroom.
There he found a bed, on which he lay down to rest.
Presently there came in a lady, more beautiful than can be imagined anywhere but in a fairy tale, who said:
'Thou who art in my house, name thyself!
If thou art an old man, thou shalt be my father; if a middle aged man, my brother; but if a young man, thou shalt be my husband dear.
Thereupon he came forth.
And when she saw him she was delighted with him, and said:
Then he told her all that had happened, and she said:
'That beast which thou wishest to overcome is my brother.
He is staying just now with my second sister, who lives not far from here in a silver palace.
I bound up three of the wounds which thou didst give him.'
Well, after this they drank, and enjoyed themselves, and held sweet converse together, and then the Prince took leave of her, and went on to the second sister, the one who lived in the silver palace, and with her also he stayed awhile.
So he went on to the youngest sister, who lived in a golden palace.
And when the Prince came to the blue sea, he looked-there slept the Norka on a stone in the middle of the sea; and when it snored, the water was agitated for seven miles around.
The Prince crossed himself, went up to it, and smote it on the head with his sword.
The head jumped off, saying the while, 'Well, I'm done for now!' and rolled far away into the sea.
After killing the beast, the Prince went back again, picking up all the three sisters by the way, with the intention of taking them out into the upper world: for they all loved him and would not be separated from him.
Each of them turned her palace into an egg-for they were all enchantresses-and they taught him how to turn the eggs into palaces, and back again, and they handed over the eggs to him.
And then they all went to the place from which they had to be hoisted into the upper world.
And when they came to where the rope was, the Prince took hold of it and made the maidens fast to it.
And when they had hauled it up, and had set eyes on the wondrous maidens, they went aside and said: 'Let's lower the rope, pull our brother part of the way up, and then cut the rope.
Perhaps he'll be killed; but then if he isn't, he'll never give us these beauties as wives.'
So when they had agreed on this, they lowered the rope.
But their brother was no fool; he guessed what they were at, so he fastened the rope to a stone, and then gave it a pull.
His brothers hoisted the stone to a great height, and then cut the rope.
Well, he walked and walked.
He went up to a tree in order to take shelter under it, and on that tree he saw some young birds which were being thoroughly drenched.
So he took off his coat and covered them over with it, and he himself sat down under the tree.
Presently there came flying a bird-such a big one that the light was blotted out by it.
It had been dark there before, but now it became darker still.
Thanks!
In return, ask of me anything thou desirest.
I will do anything for thee.'
'Then carry me into the other world,' he replied.
'Make me a large vessel with a partition in the middle,' she said; 'catch all sorts of game, and put them into one half of it, and into the other half pour water; so that there may be meat and drink for me.'
All this the Prince did.
Then the bird-having taken the vessel on her back, with the Prince sitting in the middle of it-began to fly.
And after flying some distance she brought him to his journey's end, took leave of him, and flew away back.
But he went to the house of a certain tailor, and engaged himself as his servant.
So much the worse for wear was he, so thoroughly had he altered in appearance, that nobody would have suspected him of being a Prince.
Having entered into the service of this master, the Prince began to ask what was going on in that country.
And his master replied: 'Our two Princes-for the third one has disappeared-have brought away brides from the other world, and want to marry them, but those brides refuse. For they insist on having all their wedding clothes made for them first, exactly like those which they used to have in the other world, and that without being measured for them.
'However can I undertake to make clothes of that sort?
I work for quite common folks,' says his master.
'Go along, master!
I will answer for everything,' says the Prince.
So the tailor went.
And the Prince said to him:
Midnight sounded.
The Prince arose, went out of the city into the fields, took out of his pocket the eggs which the maidens had given him, and, as they had taught him, turned them into three palaces.
Into each of these he entered, took the maidens' robes, went out again, turned the palaces back into eggs, and went home.
And when he got there he hung up the robes on the wall, and lay down to sleep.
He was delighted, and he seized them and carried them off to the King.
When the Princesses saw that the clothes were those which had been theirs in the other world, they guessed that Prince Ivan was in this world, so they exchanged glances with each other, but they held their peace.
And the master, having handed over the clothes, went home, but he no longer found his dear journeyman there.
By the time the princely workman had gone the round of all the artificers, the Princesses had received what they had asked for; all their clothes were just like what they had been in the other world. Then they wept bitterly because the Prince had not come, and it was impossible for them to hold out any longer; it was necessary that they should be married.
But when they were ready for the wedding, the youngest bride said to the King:
'Allow me, my father, to go and give alms to the beggars.'
So she seized him by the hand, and brought him into the hall, and said to the King:
'Here is he who brought us out of the other world.
His brothers forbade us to say that he was alive, threatening to slay us if we did.'
Then the King was wroth with those sons, and punished them as he thought best.
THOUGHT AND CHARACTER
Act is the blossom of thought, and joy and suffering are its fruits; thus does a man garner in the sweet and bitter fruitage of his own husbandry.
..If one endure In purity of thought, joy follows him As his own shadow-sure."
A noble and Godlike character is not a thing of favour or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long cherished association with Godlike thoughts.
An ignoble and bestial character, by the same process, is the result of the continued harbouring of grovelling thoughts.
Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armoury of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself; he also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.
Between these two extremes are all the grades of character, and man is their maker and master.
Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul which have been restored and brought to light in this age, none is more gladdening or fruitful of divine promise and confidence than this-that man is the master of thought, the moulder of character, and the maker and shaper of condition, environment, and destiny.
As a being of Power, Intelligence, and Love, and the lord of his own thoughts, man holds the key to every situation, and contains within himself that transforming and regenerative agency by which he may make himself what he wills.
Thought and character are one, and as character can only manifest and discover itself through environment and circumstance, the outer conditions of a person's life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state.
Every man is where he is by the law of his being; the thoughts which he has built into his character have brought him there, and in the arrangement of his life there is no element of chance, but all is the result of a law which cannot err.
As a progressive and evolving being, man is where he is that he may learn that he may grow; and as he learns the spiritual lesson which any circumstance contains for him, it passes away and gives place to other circumstances.
Every thought seed sown or allowed to fall into the mind, and to take root there, produces its own, blossoming sooner or later into act, and bearing its own fruitage of opportunity and circumstance. Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bad fruit.
As the reaper of his own harvest, man learns both by suffering and bliss.
Even at birth the soul comes to its own and through every step of its earthly pilgrimage it attracts those combinations of conditions which reveal itself, which are the reflections of its own purity and, impurity, its strength and weakness.
That cause may take the form of a conscious vice or an unconscious weakness; but whatever it is, it stubbornly retards the efforts of its possessor, and thus calls aloud for remedy.
Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.
The man who does not shrink from self crucifixion can never fail to accomplish the object upon which his heart is set.
This is as true of earthly as of heavenly things.
Even the man whose sole object is to acquire wealth must be prepared to make great personal sacrifices before he can accomplish his object; and how much more so he who would realize a strong and well poised life?
Such a man is totally unfit to have health, because he has not yet learned the first principles of a healthy life.
Here is an employer of labour who adopts crooked measures to avoid paying the regulation wage, and, in the hope of making larger profits, reduces the wages of his workpeople.
Circumstances, however, are so complicated, thought is so deeply rooted, and the conditions of happiness vary so, vastly with individuals, that a man's entire soul condition (although it may be known to himself) cannot be judged by another from the external aspect of his life alone.
Possessed of such knowledge, he will then know, looking back upon his past ignorance and blindness, that his life is, and always was, justly ordered, and that all his past experiences, good and bad, were the equitable outworking of his evolving, yet unevolved self.
Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results.
This is but saying that nothing can come from corn but corn, nothing from nettles but nettles.
Men understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world (though its operation there is just as simple and undeviating), and they, therefore, do not co-operate with it.
Blessedness, not material possessions, is the measure of right thought; wretchedness, not lack of material possessions, is the measure of wrong thought.
A man may be cursed and rich; he may be blessed and poor.
Blessedness and riches are only joined together when the riches are rightly and wisely used; and the poor man only descends into wretchedness when he regards his lot as a burden unjustly imposed.
They are both equally unnatural and the result of mental disorder.
Law, not confusion, is the dominating principle in the universe; justice, not injustice, is the soul and substance of life; and righteousness, not corruption, is the moulding and moving force in the spiritual government of the world.
This being so, man has but to right himself to find that the universe is right; and during the process of putting himself right he will find that as he alters his thoughts towards things and other people, things and other people will alter towards him.
The proof of this truth is in every person, and it therefore admits of easy investigation by systematic introspection and self analysis. Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.
A particular train of thought persisted in, be it good or bad, cannot fail to produce its results on the character and circumstances.
Let a man cease from his sinful thoughts, and all the world will soften towards him, and be ready to help him; let him put away his weakly and sickly thoughts, and lo, opportunities will spring up on every hand to aid his strong resolves; let him encourage good thoughts, and no hard fate shall bind him down to wretchedness and shame.
"It masters time, it conquers space; It cowes that boastful trickster, Chance, And bids the tyrant Circumstance Uncrown, and fill a servant's place.
THOUGHT AND PURPOSE
UNTIL thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.
With the majority the bark of thought is allowed to "drift" upon the ocean of life.
Aimlessness is a vice, and such drifting must not continue for him who would steer clear of catastrophe and destruction.
They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self pityings, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe.
A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it.
He should make this purpose the centralizing point of his thoughts.
It may take the form of a spiritual ideal, or it may be a worldly object, according to his nature at the time being; but whichever it is, he should steadily focus his thought forces upon the object, which he has set before him.
This is the royal road to self control and true concentration of thought.
Only in this way can the thoughts be gathered and focussed, and resolution and energy be developed, which being done, there is nothing which may not be accomplished.
As the physically weak man can make himself strong by careful and patient training, so the man of weak thoughts can make them strong by exercising himself in right thinking.
To put away aimlessness and weakness, and to begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment; who make all conditions serve them, and who think strongly, attempt fearlessly, and accomplish masterfully.
Doubts and fears should be rigorously excluded; they are disintegrating elements, which break up the straight line of effort, rendering it crooked, ineffectual, useless.
Thoughts of doubt and fear never accomplished anything, and never can.
They always lead to failure.
Purpose, energy, power to do, and all strong thoughts cease when doubt and fear creep in.
Doubt and fear are the great enemies of knowledge, and he who encourages them, who does not slay them, thwarts himself at every step.
He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.
His every thought is allied with power, and all difficulties are bravely met and wisely overcome.
His purposes are seasonably planted, and they bloom and bring forth fruit, which does not fall prematurely to the ground.
THE THOUGHT FACTOR IN ACHIEVEMENT
In a justly ordered universe, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute.
A man's weakness and strength, purity and impurity, are his own, and not another man's; they are brought about by himself, and not by another; and they can only be altered by himself, never by another.
His condition is also his own, and not another man's.
As he thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.
None but himself can alter his condition.
It has been usual for men to think and to say, "Many men are slaves because one is an oppressor; let us hate the oppressor." Now, however, there is amongst an increasing few a tendency to reverse this judgment, and to say, "One man is an oppressor because many are slaves; let us despise the slaves."
The truth is that oppressor and slave are co operators in ignorance, and, while seeming to afflict each other, are in reality afflicting themselves.
A perfect Knowledge perceives the action of law in the weakness of the oppressed and the misapplied power of the oppressor; a perfect Love, seeing the suffering, which both states entail, condemns neither; a perfect Compassion embraces both oppressor and oppressed.
He who has conquered weakness, and has put away all selfish thoughts, belongs neither to oppressor nor oppressed.
He is free.
A man can only rise, conquer, and achieve by lifting up his thoughts.
Before a man can achieve anything, even in worldly things, he must lift his thoughts above slavish animal indulgence.
He may not, in order to succeed, give up all animality and selfishness, by any means; but a portion of it must, at least, be sacrificed.
A man whose first thought is bestial indulgence could neither think clearly nor plan methodically; he could not find and develop his latent resources, and would fail in any undertaking.
He is not fit to act independently and stand alone.
All the great Teachers of the ages have declared this in varying forms, and to prove and know it a man has but to persist in making himself more and more virtuous by lifting up his thoughts.
Intellectual achievements are the result of thought consecrated to the search for knowledge, or for the beautiful and true in life and nature.
He who lives constantly in the conception of noble and lofty thoughts, who dwells upon all that is pure and unselfish, will, as surely as the sun reaches its zenith and the moon its full, become wise and noble in character, and rise into a position of influence and blessedness.
By the aid of self control, resolution, purity, righteousness, and well directed thought a man ascends; by the aid of animality, indolence, impurity, corruption, and confusion of thought a man descends.
Victories attained by right thought can only be maintained by watchfulness.
VISIONS AND IDEALS
Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after world, the architects of heaven.
The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, labouring humanity would perish.
Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all, heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.
Such is not the Law: such a condition of things can never obtain: "ask and receive."
The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream.
The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs.
Your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not long remain so if you but perceive an Ideal and strive to reach it.
But he dreams of better things; he thinks of intelligence, of refinement, of grace and beauty.
It has become so out of harmony with his mentality that it falls out of his life as a garment is cast aside, and, with the growth of opportunities, which fit the scope of his expanding powers, he passes out of it forever.
Years later we see this youth as a full grown man.
In his hands he holds the cords of gigantic responsibilities; he speaks, and lo, lives are changed; men and women hang upon his words and remould their characters, and, sunlike, he becomes the fixed and luminous centre round which innumerable destinies revolve.
He has realized the Vision of his youth.
He has become one with his Ideal.
And you, too, youthful reader, will realize the Vision (not the idle wish) of your heart, be it base or beautiful, or a mixture of both, for you will always gravitate toward that which you, secretly, most love.
Into your hands will be placed the exact results of your own thoughts; you will receive that which you earn; no more, no less. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain, or rise with your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal.
You may be driving sheep, and you shall wander to the city bucolic and open mouthed; shall wander under the intrepid guidance of the spirit into the studio of the master, and after a time he shall say, 'I have nothing more to teach you.' And now you have become the master, who did so recently dream of great things while driving sheep.
Seeing a man grow rich, they say, "How lucky he is!" Observing another become intellectual, they exclaim, "How highly favoured he is!" And noting the saintly character and wide influence of another, they remark, "How chance aids him at every turn!"
Chance is not.
Gifts, powers, material, intellectual, and spiritual possessions are the fruits of effort; they are thoughts completed, objects accomplished, visions realized.
"Great, good God!
"Iron has a taste."
Yes. Carry?
SNOW BOUND.
She early embraced the doctrine of the Second Advent, and felt it her duty to proclaim the Lord's speedy coming.
At the time referred to in Snow Bound she was boarding at the Rocks Village about two miles from us.
In my boyhood, in our lonely farm house, we had scanty sources of information; few books and only a small weekly newspaper.
My father when a young man had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of his adventures with Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn in the French villages.
Rest from all bitter thoughts and things! How many a poor one's blessing went With thee beneath the low green tent Whose curtain never outward swings!
CHAPTER four.
Narcissus Off Duty
"no
Somebody flunked out?
Or another ship sunk?"
"Worse than that.
About one third of the junior class are going to resign from their clubs."
"What!"
"Actual fact!"
"Why!"
"Well, what's the idea of the thing?"
"Oh, clubs injurious to Princeton democracy; cost a lot; draw social lines, take time; the regular line you get sometimes from disappointed sophomores.
Woodrow thought they should be abolished and all that."
"But this is the real thing?"
"Absolutely.
I think it'll go through."
"For Pete's sake, tell me more about it."
I was talking to Burne awhile ago, and he claims that it's a logical result if an intelligent person thinks long enough about the social system.
They had a 'discussion crowd' and the point of abolishing the clubs was brought up by some one-everybody there leaped at it-it had been in each one's mind, more or less, and it just needed a spark to bring it out."
"Fine!
"Wild, of course.
It's the same at all the clubs; I've been the rounds.
They get one of the radicals in the corner and fire questions at him."
"How do the radicals stand up?"
"Oh, moderately well.
Burne's a damn good talker, and so obviously sincere that you can't get anywhere with him.
It's so evident that resigning from his club means so much more to him than preventing it does to us that I felt futile when I argued; finally took a position that was brilliantly neutral.
In fact, I believe Burne thought for a while that he'd converted me."
"Lord-who'd have thought it possible!"
"Hello, Amory-hello, Tom."
Burne turned to him quickly.
"You probably know what I want to talk to Tom about, and it isn't a bit private.
Broad browed and strong chinned, with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerry's, Burne was a man who gave an immediate impression of bigness and security-stubborn, that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had in it no quality of dilettantism.
The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird.
But that night Amory was struck by Burne's intense earnestness, a quality he was accustomed to associate only with the dread stupidity, and by the great enthusiasm that struck dead chords in his heart.
Then Amory branched off and found that Burne was deep in other things as well.
"How about religion?" Amory asked him.
I'm in a muddle about a lot of things-I've just discovered that I've a mind, and I'm starting to read."
"Everything.
I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things to make me think.
I'm reading the four gospels now, and the 'Varieties of Religious Experience.'"
"What chiefly started you?"
"Wells, I guess, and Tolstoi, and a man named Edward Carpenter.
"Poetry?"
"Whitman?"
"Yes; he's a definite ethical force."
Tom nodded sheepishly.
"Well," continued Burne, "you may strike a few poems that are tiresome, but I mean the mass of his work.
They both look things in the face, and, somehow, different as they are, stand for somewhat the same things."
"You have me stumped, Burne," Amory admitted.
"I've read 'Anna Karenina' and the 'Kreutzer Sonata' of course, but Tolstoi is mostly in the original Russian as far as I'm concerned."
Burne Holiday was so evidently developing-and Amory had considered that he was doing the same.
Being Burne was suddenly so much realler than being clever. Yet he sighed... here were other possible clay feet.
In the course of the altercation the dean remarked that he "might as well buy the taxicab." He paid and walked off, but next morning he entered his private office to find the taxicab itself in the space usually occupied by his desk, bearing a sign which read "Property of Dean Hollister. Bought and Paid for."...
It took two expert mechanics half a day to dissemble it into its minutest parts and remove it, which only goes to prove the rare energy of sophomore humor under efficient leadership.
A certain Phyllis Styles, an intercollegiate prom trotter, had failed to get her yearly invitation to the Harvard Princeton game.
"If you ask me," cried Phyllis quickly.
"Of course I do," said Burne feebly.
Aside from loathing Phyllis, he had particularly wanted to stag that game and entertain some Harvard friends.
"This will be the last game she ever persuades any young innocent to take her to!"
But Burne only shook his head and muttered threats which consisted largely of the phrase: "She'll see, she'll see!"
The blithesome Phyllis bore her twenty five summers gayly from the train, but on the platform a ghastly sight met her eyes.
There were Burne and Fred Sloane arrayed to the last dot like the lurid figures on college posters.
They had bought flaring suits with huge peg top trousers and gigantic padded shoulders.
On a clanking chain they led a large, angry tom cat, painted to represent a tiger.
A good half of the station crowd was already staring at them, torn between horrified pity and riotous mirth, and as Phyllis, with her svelte jaw dropping, approached, the pair bent over and emitted a college cheer in loud, far carrying voices, thoughtfully adding the name "Phyllis" to the end.
She tried to walk a little ahead, she tried to walk a little behind-but they stayed close, that there should be no doubt whom she was with, talking in loud voices of their friends on the football team, until she could almost hear her acquaintances whispering:
That had been Burne, dynamically humorous, fundamentally serious.
About a hundred juniors and seniors resigned from their clubs in a final fury of righteousness, and the clubs in helplessness turned upon Burne their finest weapon: ridicule.
"Of course I don't.
What's prestige, at best?"
I suppose I have it coming."
"Of course health counts-a healthy man has twice the chance of being good," he said.
"I don't agree with you-I don't believe in 'muscular Christianity.'"
"I do-I believe Christ had great physical vigor."
"Oh, no," Amory protested.
"He worked too hard for that.
I imagine that when he died he was a broken down man-and the great saints haven't been strong."
"Well, even granting that, I don't think health has anything to do with goodness; of course, it's valuable to a great saint to be able to stand enormous strains, but this fad of popular preachers rising on their toes in simulated virility, bellowing that calisthenics will save the world-no, Burne, I can't go that."
"Well, let's waive it-we won't get anywhere, and besides I haven't quite made up my mind about it myself.
"Yes."
"That's what Tom and I figured," Amory agreed.
"People unconsciously admit it," said Amory.
If a blond girl doesn't talk we call her a 'doll'; if a light haired man is silent he's considered stupid.
"I'm not so sure." Amory was all for classical features.
"Oh, yes-I'll show you," and Burne pulled out of his desk a photographic collection of heavily bearded, shaggy celebrities-Tolstoi, Whitman, Carpenter, and others.
"Aren't they wonderful?"
Amory tried politely to appreciate them, and gave up laughingly.
Amory shook his head.
"No! Call them remarkable looking or anything you want-but ugly they certainly are."
Unabashed, Burne ran his hand lovingly across the spacious foreheads, and piling up the pictures put them back in his desk.
"I hate the dark," Amory objected.
"I didn't use to-except when I was particularly imaginative, but now, I really do-I'm a regular fool about it."
"Quite possibly."
"We'll go east," Burne suggested, "and down that string of roads through the woods."
"Doesn't sound very appealing to me," admitted Amory reluctantly, "but let's go."
"And this very walking at night is one of the things I was afraid about.
I'm going to tell you why I can walk anywhere now and not be afraid."
"Go on," Amory urged eagerly.
"I used to come out here alone at night, oh, three months ago, and I always stopped at that cross road we just passed.
Of course, I peopled the woods with everything ghastly, just like you do; don't you?"
That made it all right-as it always makes everything all right to project yourself completely into another's place.
Then I thought of my watch.
No; I decided, it's better on the whole that I should lose a watch than that I should turn back-and I did go into them-not only followed the road through them, but walked into them until I wasn't frightened any more-did it until one night I sat down and dozed off in there; then I knew I was through being afraid of the dark."
"Lordy," Amory breathed.
I'd have come out half-way, and the first time an automobile passed and made the dark thicker when its lamps disappeared, I'd have come in."
"Well," Burne said suddenly, after a few moments' silence, "we're half-way through, let's turn back."
On the return he launched into a discussion of will.
I've never met a man who led a rotten life and didn't have a weak will."
"How about great criminals?"
If not, they're weak.
"Burne, I disagree with you altogether; how about the superman?"
"Well?"
"He's evil, I think, yet he's strong and sane."
"I've never met him.
"I've met him over and over and he's neither.
"I'm sure I'm not-and so I don't believe in imprisonment except for the insane."
On this point Amory could not agree.
It seemed to him that life and history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often self deluding; in politics and business one found him and among the old statesmen and kings and generals; but Burne never agreed and their courses began to split on that point.
Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him.
Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point.
"It's a bad time to admit it-people are beginning to think he's odd."
Tom grew rather annoyed.
"What's he trying to do-be excessively holy?"
"No! not like anybody you've ever seen.
He has no faith in that rot.
He doesn't believe that public swimming pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it."
"Have you talked to him lately?"
"It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more amicable on the subject, "that the people who violently disapprove of Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class-I mean they're the best educated men in college-the editors of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger professors....
The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he's getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,' and pass on-the Pharisee class-Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully."
The next morning he met Burne hurrying along McCosh walk after a recitation.
"Whither bound, Tsar?"
"Over to the Prince office to see Ferrenby," he waved a copy of the morning's Princetonian at Amory.
"He wrote this editorial."
"Going to flay him alive?"
"No-but he's got me all balled up.
Either I've misjudged him or he's suddenly become the world's worst radical."
Burne had come into the editor's sanctum displaying the paper cheerfully.
"Hello, Jesse."
"Hello there, Savonarola."
"I just read your editorial."
"Jesse, you startled me."
"How so?"
"Like this morning."
"What the devil-that editorial was on the coaching system."
"Yes, but that quotation-"
Jesse sat up.
"What quotation?"
"Well-what about it?"
Jesse was puzzled but not alarmed.
THE HOLE IN THE CARPET
Hooray! hooray!
hooray! Mother comes home to day; Mother comes home to day, Hooray! hooray!
hooray!'
Jane sang this simple song directly after breakfast, and the Phoenix shed crystal tears of affectionate sympathy.
'She won't be home till past bedtime, though,' said Robert. 'We might have one more carpet day.'
He was glad that mother was coming home-quite glad, very glad; but at the same time that gladness was rudely contradicted by a quite strong feeling of sorrow, because now they could not go out all day on the carpet.
'I do wish we could go and get something nice for mother, only she'd want to know where we got it,' said Anthea. 'And she'd never, never believe it, the truth.
People never do, somehow, if it's at all interesting.'
'I'll tell you what,' said Robert. 'Suppose we wished the carpet to take us somewhere where we could find a purse with money in it-then we could buy her something.'
'Suppose it took us somewhere foreign, and the purse was covered with strange Eastern devices, embroidered in rich silks, and full of money that wasn't money at all here, only foreign curiosities, then we couldn't spend it, and people would bother about where we got it, and we shouldn't know how on earth to get out of it at all.'
Cyril moved the table off the carpet as he spoke, and its leg caught in one of Anthea's darns and ripped away most of it, as well as a large slit in the carpet.
But Anthea was a really first-class sister.
Cyril thumped her on the back.
He understood exactly how she had felt, and he was not an ungrateful brother.
'An obol is about twopence halfpenny,' the Phoenix replied.
'The situation,' remarked the Phoenix, 'does indeed bristle with difficulties.'
'Mother wouldn't believe THAT,' said more than one voice.
'Suppose,' said Robert-'suppose we asked to be taken where we could find a purse and give it back to the person it belonged to, and they would give us something for finding it?'
'No, THAT wouldn't do,' said Cyril. 'Let's chuck it and go to the North Pole, or somewhere really interesting.'
'No,' said the girls together, 'there must be SOME way.'
Don't speak.'
'I see.
Let's tell the carpet to take us somewhere where we can get the money for mother's present, and-and-and get it some way that she'll believe in and not think wrong.'
'Well, I must say you are learning the way to get the most out of the carpet,' said Cyril.
'Yes,' said the Phoenix, 'you certainly are.
Then every one put on its outdoor things, the Phoenix fluttered on to the mantelpiece and arranged its golden feathers in the glass, and all was ready.
I mean it's a PITY we aren't higher up,' said Anthea, as the edge of the carpet grazed a chimney pot.
'That's right.
Be careful,' said the Phoenix, in warning tones.
'We might go and have a look at the Palace.'
Part of them was on the carpet, and part of them-the heaviest part-was on the great central darn.
I feel as if I was going to have measles; everything looked awfully rum then, remember.'
'I feel just exactly the same,' Robert said.
'It's the hole,' said the Phoenix; 'it's not measles whatever that possession may be.'
The carpet seemed to awaken to new energy as soon as it had got rid of their weight, and it rose high in the air.
The others lay down flat and peeped over the edge of the rising carpet.
'Are you hurt?' cried Cyril, and Robert shouted 'No,' and next moment the carpet had sped away, and Jane and Robert were hidden from the sight of the others by a stack of smoky chimneys.
'Oh, how awful!' said Anthea.
'Yes, there's that,' said Cyril, recovering himself.
'They'll be all right.
They'll howl till some one gets them down, or drop tiles into the front garden to attract attention of passersby.
But Anthea would not be comforted.
'It's all my fault,' she said.
It's all my fault.
Let's go home and patch the carpet with your Etons-something really strong-and send it to fetch them.'
We must just chuck mother's present, that's all.
I wish-'
'Stop!' cried the Phoenix; 'the carpet is dropping to earth.'
And indeed it was.
It sank swiftly, yet steadily, and landed on the pavement of the Deptford Road.
It tipped a little as it landed, so that Cyril and Anthea naturally walked off it, and in an instant it had rolled itself up and hidden behind a gate post.
They were face to face with their pet uncle-their Uncle Reginald.
'We DID think of going to Greenwich Palace and talking about Nelson,' said Cyril, telling as much of the truth as he thought his uncle could believe.
'And where are the others?' asked Uncle Reginald.
'I don't exactly know,' Cyril replied, this time quite truthfully.
'Well,' said Uncle Reginald, 'I must fly.
I've a case in the County Court.
That's the worst of being a beastly solicitor.
If only I could come with you to the Painted Hall and give you lunch at the "Ship" afterwards!
But, alas!
The uncle felt in his pocket.
Take care of yourselves.
'Well!' said Anthea.
'Well!' said Cyril.
'Well!' said the Phoenix.
'Good old carpet!' said Cyril, joyously.
'It WAS clever of it-so adequate and yet so simple,' said the Phoenix, with calm approval.
'Oh, come on home and let's mend the carpet.
Anthea set to work at once to draw the edges of the broken darn together, and Cyril hastily went out and bought a large piece of the marble patterned American oil cloth which careful house wives use to cover dressers and kitchen tables.
It was the strongest thing he could think of.
Then they set to work to line the carpet throughout with the oil cloth. The nursery felt very odd and empty without the others, and Cyril did not feel so sure as he had done about their being able to 'tram it' home.
So he tried to help Anthea, which was very good of him, but not much use to her.
The Phoenix watched them for a time, but it was plainly growing more and more restless.
It fluffed up its splendid feathers, and stood first on one gilded claw and then on the other, and at last it said-
This suspense!
My Robert-who set my egg to hatch-in the bosom of whose Norfolk raiment I have nestled so often and so pleasantly!
I think, if you'll excuse me-'
'Yes-DO,' cried Anthea, 'I wish we'd thought of asking you before.'
Cyril opened the window.
The Phoenix flapped its sunbright wings and vanished.
But I had to tell you the other first.
That is one of the most annoying things about stories, you cannot tell all the different parts of them at the same time.
Robert's first remark when he found himself seated on the damp, cold, sooty leads was-
'Here's a go!'
Jane's first act was tears.
'Dry up, Pussy; don't be a little duffer,' said her brother, kindly, 'it'll be all right.'
And then he looked about, just as Cyril had known he would, for something to throw down, so as to attract the attention of the wayfarers far below in the street.
He could not find anything.
The roof was of slate, and every single slate knew its place and kept it.
But, as so often happens, in looking for one thing he found another.
There was a trap door leading down into the house.
And that trap door was not fastened.
'Lend a hand to heave this up.
'Discovered!' hissed Robert.
'Oh, my cats alive!'
They were indeed discovered.
They found themselves looking down into an attic, which was also a lumber room.
It had boxes and broken chairs, old fenders and picture frames, and rag bags hanging from nails.
In the middle of the floor was a box, open, half full of clothes.
Other clothes lay on the floor in neat piles.
And it was she who had screamed, and who, in fact, was still screaming.
'Don't!' cried Jane, 'please don't!
'The others have gone on, on the wishing carpet,' said Jane truthfully.
'The wishing carpet?' said the lady.
'Yes,' said Jane, before Robert could say 'You shut up!' 'You must have read about it.
The Phoenix is with them.'
She shut it behind her, and the two children could hear her calling 'Septimus!
'Now,' said Robert quickly; 'I'll drop first.'
I'll catch you.
Drop, I say.'
Jane dropped.
Robert tried to catch her, and even before they had finished the breathless roll among the piles of clothes, which was what his catching ended in, he whispered-
Then, when all is calm, we'll creep down the stairs and take our chance.'
A corner of an iron bedstead stuck into Robert's side, and Jane had only standing room for one foot-but they bore it-and when the lady came back, not with Septimus, but with another lady, they held their breath and their hearts beat thickly.
'Let me look out,' said the second lady, who was, if possible, older and thinner and primmer than the first.
So the two ladies dragged a box under the trap door and put another box on the top of it, and then they both climbed up very carefully and put their two trim, tidy heads out of the trap door to look for the 'mad children'.
'Now,' whispered Robert, getting the bedstead leg out of his side.
Robert and Jane tiptoed down the stairs-one flight, two flights.
Then they looked over the banisters.
Horror! a servant was coming up with a loaded scuttle.
The children with one consent crept swiftly through the first open door.
As they passed the table they saw on it a missionary box with its bottom label torn off, open and empty.
'Oh, how awful!' whispered Jane.
'I knew it,' said one.
I was certain of it from the first.
The children were not mad.
They were sent to distract our attention while their confederates robbed the house.'
'I am afraid you are right,' said Selina; 'and WHERE ARE THEY NOW?'
'Downstairs, no doubt, collecting the silver milk jug and sugar basin and the punch ladle that was Uncle Joe's, and Aunt Jerusha's teaspoons. I shall go down.'
Lock the door.
I WILL-I will-'
'Oh, don't!' said Jane; 'how can you be so unkind?
We AREN'T burglars, and we haven't any gang, and we didn't open your missionary box. We opened our own once, but we didn't have to use the money, so our consciences made us put it back and-DON'T!
You open the window at once and call "Murder!" as loud as you can.
Selina obeyed; but when she had opened the window, instead of calling 'Murder!' she called 'Septimus!' because at that very moment she saw her nephew coming in at the gate.
As he came into the room Jane and Robert each uttered a shriek of joy so loud and so sudden that the ladies leaped with surprise, and nearly let them go.
'It's our own clergyman,' cried Jane.
'Don't you remember us?' asked Robert. 'You married our burglar for us-don't you remember?'
'I KNEW it was a gang,' said Amelia. 'Septimus, these abandoned children are members of a desperate burgling gang who are robbing the house.
They have already forced the missionary box and purloined its contents.'
The Reverend Septimus passed his hand wearily over his brow.
'We never touched the beastly box,' said Robert.
'Then your confederates did,' said Miss Selina.
'No, no,' said the curate, hastily.
'Dream?
Search the house.
I insist upon it.'
The curate, still pale and trembling, searched the house, which, of course, was blamelessly free of burglars.
'Aren't you going to let us go?' asked Robert, with furious indignation, for there is something in being held by a strong lady that sets the blood of a boy boiling in his veins with anger and despair.
'Oh, my head!' said the curate.
'This is a judgement on me for something, I suppose,' said the Reverend Septimus, wearily, 'but I really cannot at the moment remember what.'
'Send for the police,' said Miss Selina.
'Send for a doctor,' said the curate.
'I think I am,' said the curate.
Jane had been crying ever since her capture.
Now she said- 'You aren't now, but perhaps you will be, if-And it would serve you jolly well right, too.'
You will realize it soon.
It has happened to me before.
As I said before, it was I who opened the box.'
Robert shook himself and stood in sulky resentment.
'You're a dear,' she said.
'It IS like a dream just at first, but you get used to it.
Now DO let us go.
There's a good, kind, honourable clergyman.'
'I don't know,' said the Reverend Septimus; 'it's a difficult problem. It is such a very unusual dream.
Perhaps it's only a sort of other life-quite real enough for you to be mad in.
But all the curate could now say was, 'Oh, my head!'
And Jane and Robert felt quite ill with helplessness and hopelessness.
A really conscientious curate is a very difficult thing to manage.
'I've had something like it before.
Then she said boldly-
You must have dropped off in your chair.'
The curate heaved a sigh of relief.
'Yes, I know it was an untruth, and I shall doubtless be punished for it in due course.
He couldn't have stood the strain of three dreams. It WAS odd, wasn't it?
We must never tell dear Seppy.
But I shall send an account of it to the Psychical Society, with stars instead of names, you know.'
Of course, you understand what had happened?
And, of course, they were at home at once.
Cyril and Anthea had not half finished mending the carpet.
When the joyful emotions of reunion had calmed down a little, they all went out and spent what was left of Uncle Reginald's sovereign in presents for mother.
They bought her a pink silk handkerchief, a pair of blue and white vases, a bottle of scent, a packet of Christmas candles, and a cake of soap shaped and coloured like a tomato, and one that was so like an orange that almost any one you had given it to would have tried to peel it-if they liked oranges, of course.
Also they bought a cake with icing on, and the rest of the money they spent on flowers to put in the vases.
'But, really, it's just as much good old Phoenix,' said Robert. 'Suppose it hadn't thought of getting the wish!'
'Ah!' said the Phoenix, 'it is perhaps fortunate for you that I am such a competent bird.'
'There's mother's cab,' cried Anthea, and the Phoenix hid and they lighted the candles, and next moment mother was home again.
'Good old carpet,' were Cyril's last sleepy words.
It was a large shell with many points upon it. These were coarse and rough, but the shell was most beautiful inside.
Marcella had seen the shell time and time again and often admired its lovely coloring, which could be seen when one looked inside the shell.
Here the dolls saw it that night, when all the house was still, and stood about it wondering what kind of toy it might be.
"It seems to be nearly all mouth!" said Henny, the Dutch doll.
"Perhaps it can talk."
"It has teeth!" the French doll pointed out.
"It may bite!"
"I do not believe it will bite," Raggedy Andy mused, as he got down upon his hands and knees and looked up into the shell.
"Marcella would not have it up here if it would bite!" And, saying this, Raggedy Andy put his rag arm into the lovely shell's mouth.
"It doesn't bite!
"Just feel how smooth it is inside!"
All the dolls felt and were surprised to find it polished so highly inside, while the outside was so coarse and rough.
With the help of Uncle Clem and Henny, Raggedy Andy turned the shell upon its back, so that all the dolls might look in.
The coloring consisted of dainty pinks, creamy whites and pale blues, all running together just as the coloring in an opal runs from one shade into another.
Raggedy Andy, stooping over to look further up inside the pretty shell, heard something.
"It's whispering!" he said, as he raised up in surprise.
All the dolls took turns putting their ears to the mouth of the beautiful shell.
Yes, truly it whispered, but they could not catch just what it said.
Finally Raggedy Andy suggested that all the dolls lie down upon the floor directly before the shell and keep very quiet.
"If we don't make a sound we may be able to hear what it says!" he explained.
So the dolls lay down, placing themselves flat upon the floor directly in front of the shell and where they could see and admire its beautiful coloring.
This is the story the shell told the dolls in the nursery that night:
Pretty silken sea weeds grew around my home and reached their waving branches up, up towards the top of the water.
"Through the pretty sea weeds, fishes of pretty colors and shapes darted here and there, playing at their games.
"They would stay inside until I whispered that the larger creature had gone, then they would leave me and return to their play.
"Pretty little sea horses with slender, curving bodies often went sailing above me, or would come to rest upon my back.
How the tiny sea creatures scurried to hide from him.
He took me within his hand and, giving his feet a thump upon the yellow sand, rose with me to the surface.
"He poured the water from me, and out came all the little creatures who had been hiding there!"
"Did the tiny creatures get back into the water safely?" he asked the beautiful shell.
"Oh, yes!" the shell whispered in reply.
"I am so glad!" Raggedy Andy said, with a sigh of relief.
"He must have been a kindly man!"
"Yes, indeed!" the beautiful shell replied.
"So I was placed along with a lot of other shells in the bottom of the boat and every once in a while another shell was placed amongst us.
We whispered together and wondered where we were going.
We were finally sold to different people and I have been at Gran'ma's house for a long, long time."
"You lived there when Gran'ma was a little girl, didn't you?" Raggedy Ann asked.
"Yes," replied the shell, "I have lived there ever since Gran'ma was a little girl.
"Raggedy Ann can play 'peter, peter, Pumpkin Eater' on the piano, with one hand," said Uncle Clem, "but none of us can sing.
Will you sing for us?" he asked the shell.
"I sing all the time," the shell replied, "for I cannot help singing, but my singing is a secret and so is very soft and low.
Put your head close to the opening in my shell and listen!"
The dolls took turns doing this, and heard the shell sing softly and very sweetly.
"How strange and far away it sounds!" exclaimed the French doll.
"Like fairies singing in the distance!
"It is queer that anything so rough on the outside could be so pretty within!" said Raggedy Andy.
"Indeed it is," replied the beautiful shell, "and I get a great happiness from singing all the time."
"And you will bring lots of pleasure to us, by being so happy!" said Raggedy Andy.
"I will tell you the secret of my singing," said the shell.
"How unselfish you are to say this!" said Raggedy Andy.
Aren't we?" he asked, turning to the rest of the dolls.
"Yes, indeed!" came the answer from all the dolls, even the tiny penny dolls.
"That is why the shell is so beautiful inside!" said Raggedy Ann.
CHAPTER twelve
THE BALEFUL SACRIFICE
I resolved to go on no more sacred hunts.
I was sickened at the horrible cruelty, the needless slaughter, the mad self sacrifice which distinguished them.
I was overwhelmed with horror at the merciless destruction of brave comrades, whose wounds, so gallantly received, should have been enough to inspire pity even in a heart of stone.
The gentleness, the incessant kindness, the matchless generosity of these people seemed all a mockery.
What availed it all when the same hand that heaped favors upon me, the guest, could deal death without compunction upon friends and relatives?
It seemed quite possible for the Kohen to kill his own child, or cut the throat of his wife, if the humor seized him.
And how long could I hope to be spared among a people who had this insane thirst for blood?
Some more joms had passed, and the light season had almost ended. The sun had been sinking lower and lower.
The time had at last come when only a portion of his disk would be visible for a little while above the hills, and then he would be seen no more for six months of our time.
This was the dark season, and, as I had already learned, its advent was always hailed with joy and celebrated with solemn services, for the dark season freed them from their long confinement, permitted them to go abroad, to travel by sea and land, to carry on their great works, to indulge in all their most important labors and favorite amusements.
The Kohen asked me to be present at the great festival, and I gladly consented.
There seemed to be nothing in this that could be repellent.
As I was anxious to witness some of their purely religious ceremonies, I wished to go.
When I told Almah, she looked sad, but said nothing.
I wondered at this, and asked her if she was going.
She informed me that she would have to go, whereupon I assured her that this was an additional reason why I should go.
I went with Almah.
The Kohen attended us with his usual kind and gracious consideration.
It seemed almost as though he was our servant. He took us to a place where we could be seated, although all the others were standing.
Almah wished to refuse, but I prevailed upon her to sit down, and she did so.
The scene was upon the semicircular terrace in front of the cavern, and we were seated upon a stone platform beside the chief portal.
A vast crowd was gathered in front.
Before us arose the half pyramid of which I have already spoken.
The light was faint.
It came from the disk of the sun, which was partly visible over the icy crest of the distant mountains.
Far away the sea was visible, rising high over the tops of the trees, while overhead the brighter stars were plainly discernible.
The Kohen ascended the pyramid, and others followed.
At the base there was a crowd of men, with emaciated forms and faces, and coarse, squalid attire, who looked like the most abject paupers, and seemed the lowest in the land.
As the Kohen reached the summit there arose a strange sound-a mournful, plaintive chant, which seemed to be sung chiefly by the paupers at the base of the pyramid.
The words of this chant I could not make out, but the melancholy strain affected me in spite of myself.
There was no particular tune, and nothing like harmony; but the effect of so many voices uniting in this strain was very powerful and altogether indescribable.
In the midst of this I saw the crowd parting asunder so as to make way for something; and through the passage thus formed I saw a number of youths in long robes, who advanced to the pyramid, singing as they went.
Then they ascended the steps, two by two, still singing, and at length reached the summit, where they arranged themselves in order.
There were thirty of them and they arranged themselves in three rows of ten each, and as they stood they never ceased to sing, while the paupers below joined in the strain.
The light was a softened twilight glow.
It was to be the last sight of the sun for six months, and this was the spectacle upon which he threw his parting beam.
So the sun passed away, and then there came the beginning of the long dark season.
At first, however, there was rather twilight than darkness, and this twilight continued long.
All this only served to heighten the effect of this striking scene; and as the light faded away, I looked with increasing curiosity upon the group at the top of the pyramid.
She said nothing, but looked at me with such an expression that I was filled with amazement.
I saw in her face something like a dreadful anticipation-something that spoke of coming evil.
Those fears were but too well founded, for now the dread ceremony began.
One of the youths came forward, stepped upon it, and lay down on his back with his head toward the Kohen.
The mournful chant still went on.
Then the Kohen raised his knife and plunged it into the heart of the youth.
"Be firm," she said, "or we are both lost.
"Don't move," she said, "for your life!
We are lost if you move.
Keep still-restrain yourself-shut your eyes."
I tried to do so, but could not.
There was a horrible fascination about the scene which forced me to look and see all.
The Kohen took the victim, and drawing it from the altar, threw it over the precipice to the ground beneath.
"Sibgu Sibgin!
Rejoice!
Give thanks to darkness!"
Then another of the youths went forward amid the singing, and laid himself down to meet the same fate; and again the corpse was flung from the top of the pyramid, and again the shout arose.
All the others came forward in the same manner.
Oh, horrible, horrible, thrice horrible spectacle!
I do not remember how I endured it.
After this there remained a dark mystery and an ever present horror.
I found myself among a people who were at once the gentlest of the human race and the most blood thirsty-the kindest and the most cruel.
This mild, amiable, and self sacrificing Kohen, how was it possible that he should transform himself to a fiend incarnate?
And for me and for Almah, what possible hope could there be?
What fate might they have in reserve for us?
Of what avail was all this profound respect, this incessant desire to please, this attention to our slightest wish, this comfort and luxury and splendor, this freedom of speech and action? Was it anything better than a mockery?
Might it not be the shallow kindness of the priest to the victim reserved for the sacrifice?
Was it, after all, in any degree better than the kindness of the cannibal savages on those drear outer shores who received us with such hospitality, but only that they might destroy us at last?
Might they not all belong to the same race, dwelling as they did in caverns, shunning the sunlight, and blending kindness with cruelty?
It was an awful thought!
Yet I had one consolation.
I tried for her sake to resist the feelings that were coming over me.
She felt as I did, and this despair of soul might wreck her young life if there were no alleviation.
And so I sought to alleviate her distress and to banish her sadness.
Almah was delighted at the proposal, and at once found a very clever workman, who under my direction succeeded in producing one which served my purpose well.
I was a good violinist, and in this I was able to find solace for myself and for Almah for many a long hour.
The first time that I played was memorable.
In these there was nothing artificial, nothing transient.
They were the utterance of the human heart, and in them there was that touch of nature which makes all men kin.
I played "Tara," "Bonnie Doon," "The Last Rose of Summer," "The Land of the Leal," "Auld Lang Syne," "Lochaber." They stood entranced, listening with all their souls.
They seemed to hunger and thirst after this music, and the strains of the inspired Celtic race seemed to come to them like the revelation of the glory of heaven.
Then I played more lively airs.
Some I played a second time, singing the words.
They seemed eager to have the same one played often.
At last a grisly thought came to me: it was that they would learn these sweet strains, and put their own words to them so as to use them at the awful sacrifices.
After that I would play no more.
It is a land of tender love and remorseless cruelty.
Music is all powerful to awaken the one, but powerless to abate the other; and the eyes that weep over the pathetic strains of "Lochaber" can gaze without a tear upon the death agonies of a slaughtered friend.
CHAPTER fourteen
I LEARN MY DOOM
Horror is a feeling that cannot last long; human nature is incapable of supporting it.
Sadness, whether from bereavement, or disappointment, or misfortune of any kind, may linger on through life. In my case, however, the milder and more enduring feeling of sadness had no sufficient cause for existence.
The sights which I had seen inspired horror, and horror only.
But when the first rush of this feeling had passed there came a reaction.
Calmness followed, and then all the circumstances of my life here conspired to perpetuate that calm.
I had light and luxury and amusements.
Around me there were thousands of faces, all greeting me with cordial affection, and thousands of hands all ready to perform my slightest wish.
Above all, there was Almah.
Everything combined to make her most dear to me.
My life had been such that I never before had seen anyone whom I loved; and here Almah was the one congenial associate in a whole world of aliens: she was beautiful and gentle and sympathetic, and I loved her dearly, even before I understood what my feelings were.
One day I learned all, and found that she was more precious to me than all the world.
On asking after her I learned that she was ill.
While she was absent, life was nothing; all its value, all its light, its flavor, its beauty, were gone.
I felt utterly crushed. I forgot all else save her illness, and all that I had endured seemed as nothing when compared with this.
In the midst of my own anxiety I was surprised to find that the whole community was most profoundly agitated.
Among all classes there seemed to be but one thought-her illness.
It seemed to be the one subject of interest, beside which all others were forgotten.
I was somewhat perplexed, however, at their manner.
They were certainly agitated and intensely interested, yet not exactly sad.
Indeed, from what I heard it seemed as though this strange people regarded sickness as rather a blessing than otherwise.
This, however, did not interfere in the slightest degree with the most intense interest in her, and the most assiduous attention.
The Kohen in particular was devoted to her. He was absent minded, silent, and full of care.
On the whole, I felt more than ever puzzled, and less able than ever to understand these people.
He looked like an anxious father, full of tenderest love for a sick child-full also of delicate sympathy with me; and yet I knew all the time that he was quite capable of plunging the sacrificial knife in Almah's heart and of eating her afterward.
I learned how dear she was. With her the brightness of life had passed; without her existence would be intolerable.
Her sweet voice, her tender and gracious manner, her soft touch, her tender, affectionate smile, her mournful yet trustful look-oh, heavens! would all these be mine no more?
I could not endure the thought.
At length on one blessed jom, the Kohen came to me with a bright smile.
"Eat, I beseech you.
But now all danger is past.
The physicians say that she will soon be well." There were tears in his eyes as he spoke.
It may have been caused by the bright light, but I attributed this to his loving heart, and I forgot that he was a cannibal.
I took his hands in mine and pressed them in deep emotion.
He looked at me with a sweet and gentle smile.
I pressed his hands harder, but said nothing.
Indeed, I could not trust myself to speak.
"I knew it," said he; "it is but natural.
You are both of a different race from us; you are both much alike, and in full sympathy with one another.
This draws you together.
When I first saw you I thought that you would be a fit companion for her here-that you would lessen her gloom, and that she would be pleasant to you.
I found out soon that I was right, and I felt glad, for you at once showed the fullest sympathy with one another.
At all this I was so full of amazement that I could not say one word.
"Pardon me," continued he, "if I have said anything that may seem like an intrusion upon your secret and most sacred feelings.
Saying this, he pressed my hand and left me.
It was not the custom here to shake hands, but with his usual amiability he had adopted my custom, and used it as naturally as though he had been to the manner born.
I was encouraged now.
The mild Kohen came often to cheer me.
In all this he seemed more like a man of my own race than before, and in his eager desire for her recovery he failed to exhibit that love for death which was his nature.
But just then all this was unknown, and I judged him by myself.
At last I learned that she was much better, and would be out on the following jom.
This intelligence filled me with a fever of eager anticipation, so great that I could think of nothing else.
Sleep was impossible.
I could only wait, and try as best I might to quell my impatience.
At last the time came.
The curtain was drawn aside.
I sprang up, and, hurrying toward her, I caught her in my arms and wept for joy.
Ah me, how pale she looked!
She bore still the marks of her illness.
She seemed deeply embarrassed and agitated at the fervor of my greeting; while I, instead of apologizing or trying to excuse myself, only grew more agitated still.
"I should have died if you had not come back to me!
Oh, forgive me, but I must tell you-and don't weep, darling."
She was weeping as I spoke.
She said nothing, but twined her arms around my neck and wept on my breast.
After this we had much to say that we had never mentioned before.
We had many things to say to one another, and long exchanges of confidence to make.
She now for the first time told me all the sorrow that she had endured in her captivity-sorrow which she had kept silent and shut up deep within her breast.
After this she had sunk into dull despair; she had grown familiar with horrors and lived in a state of unnatural calm.
From this my arrival had roused her.
The darkness, the bloodshed, the sacrifices, all these affected me as they had once affected her.
I had the same fear of death which she had.
"Then," said Almah, "I felt the full meaning of all that lies before us."
"What do you mean by that?" I asked, anxiously.
We have seen the worst; let us now try to shake off these grisly thoughts, and be happy with one another. Your strength will soon be back, and while we have one another we can be happy even in this gloom."
I could die happy now, since I know that you love me."
"Death!" said I; "do not talk of it-do not mention that word.
It is more abhorrent than ever.
No, Almah, let us live and love-let us hope-let us fly."
"We cannot fly.
There is no hope.
We must face the future, and make up our minds to bear our fate."
"Fate!" I repeated, looking at her in wonder and in deep concern. "What do you mean by our fate?
Is there anything more which you know and which I have not heard?"
For you and for me there is a fate-inconceivable, abhorrent, tremendous!--a fate of which I dare not speak or even think, and from which there is no escape whatever."
I looked at her in wonder, and could not say a word.
What is this fate which you fear so much?"
You came.
I saw it all at once.
I have known it-dreaded it-tried to fight against it.
"Our doom?
"The sacrifice!" exclaimed Almah, with another shudder.
In her voice and look there was a terrible meaning, which I could not fail to take. I understood it now, and my blood curdled in my veins.
"Do not leave me!" she cried-"do not leave me!
I have no one but you. The sacrifice, the sacrifice!
It is our doom the great sacrifice-at the end of the dark season.
It is at the amir.
"Oh!" she cried, "you will not understand.
The sacrifice is but a part-it is but the beginning.
Death is terrible; yet it may be endured-if there is only death.
Now the full meaning flashed upon me, and I saw it all.
Oh, horror, horror, horror!
I could not speak.
I caught her in my arms, and we both wept passionately.
The happiness of our love was now darkened by this tremendous cloud that lowered before us.
The shock of this discovery was overpowering, and some time elapsed before I could rally from it.
These feelings, however, grew fainter.
Hope is ever ready to arise; and I began to think that these people, though given to evil ways, were after all kind hearted, and might listen to entreaty.
Above all, there was the Kohen, so benevolent, so self denying, so amiable, so sympathetic.
I could not forget all that he had said during Almah's illness, and it seemed more than probable that an appeal to his better nature might not be without effect.
"The Kohen," said she; "why, he can do nothing."
"Why not?
He is the chief man here, and ought to have great influence."
"You don't understand," said she, with a sigh.
"The Kohen is the lowest and least influential man in the city."
"Why, who are influential if he is not?" I asked.
"The paupers," said Almah.
"The paupers!" I exclaimed, in amazement.
"Yes," said Almah.
This was incomprehensible.
All the way there David had saved this moment for himself, struggling not to peek until the proper time came.
When the car finally stopped, the rest of them got out stiffly and went into the new house.
But David walked slowly into the back yard with his eyes fixed on the ground.
Then he took a deep breath, clenched his hands tightly, and lifted his head.
It swept upward from the valley floor, beautifully shaped and soaring, so tall that its misty blue peak could surely talk face to face with the stars.
He felt so tight and shivery inside that he didn't know whether he wanted to laugh, or cry, or both.
And when he closed his eyes, he seemed to hear a voice which whispered, "Come along, then, and climb."
It would be so easy to go!
The back yard was hedged in (with part of the hedge growing right across the toes of the mountain), but there was a hole in the privet large enough to crawl through.
And just beyond the hedge the mountainside awaited him, going up and up in one smooth sweep until the green and tawny faded into hazy heights of rock.
It was waiting for him.
"Come and climb," it whispered, "come and climb."
But there was a great deal to do first.
The moving van was standing out in front, the car must be unloaded.
Regretfully, he waved his hand at the peak and whispered, "It shouldn't take long-I'll be back as soon as I can." Then he went around to the front door to see what could be done about speeding things up.
Inside, everything was in confusion.
Dad was pushing chairs and tables around in an aimless way.
Mother was saying, "They'll all have to go out again; we forgot to put down the rug first." Aunt Amy was making short dashes between the kitchen and the dining room, muttering to herself.
David asked, "Can I do anything?"--hoping that the answer would be no
"C'mere," Aunt Amy said, grabbing him by the arm.
"Help me look for that ironing board."
When the ironing board was finally located, Mother had something for him to do.
And when he was finished with that, Dad called for his help.
So the afternoon wore on without letup-and also without any signs of progress in their moving.
When David finally got a chance to sneak out for a breathing spell, he felt his heart sink.
Already the evening sun was throwing shadows across the side of the mountain and touching its peak with a ruddy blaze.
It was too late now.
He would have to wait until morning before he could climb.
As he gazed up miserably at the glowing summit, he thought he saw a tiny speck soar out from it in a brief circle.
Was it a bird of some sort, or just one of those dots that swim before your eyes when you stare too long at the sky?
It almost seemed like the mountain waving its hand, as if to say that it was quite all right for him to wait until morning.
It was long after dark before the moving van drove away.
Beckie crooned happily over her bottle, and the rest of them gathered in the kitchen for a late supper of sandwiches and canned soup.
But David could not eat until he had found the courage to ask one question:
"May I climb the mountain tomorrow?"
Aunt Amy muttered something about landslides, which were firmly fixed in her mind as the fate of people who climbed mountains.
But Dad said, "I don't see why not, do you?" and looked to Mother for agreement.
Mother said, "Well ... be very careful," in a doubtful tone, and that was that.
You never know what you will find when you climb a mountain, even if you have climbed them before-which, of course, David never had. Looking up from the foot of the mountain, he had thought that it was a smooth slope from bottom to top.
But he was discovering as he climbed that it was not smooth at all, but very much broken up.
There were terraces, ledges, knolls, ravines, and embankments, one after another.
The exciting part of it was that each feature concealed the ones above it.
At the top of a rise would be an outcropping of strangely colored rock, invisible from below.
And when the meadow had been discovered, there would be a something else beyond.
He was a real explorer now.
When he got to the top, he thought, he would build a little tower of stones, the way explorers always do.
But he did not care now.
He looked back.
Even the peak could not give him a better view than this.
Halfway up the scarp was a dark horizontal line of bushes, something like a hedge.
To scale the rock face itself was impossible, however: there were no hand or foot holds.
Then he started upward again.
Vines clutched at his feet, and the close set bushes seemed unwilling to let him pass.
He had one nasty slip, which might have been his last if he had not grabbed a tough clump of weeds at the crucial instant.
But, oh! it was worth it.
Truly it was an enchanted place!
David threw himself on the grass and rolled in it.
It was warm and soft and sweet smelling; it soothed away the hurt of his aching muscles and the sting of his scratches.
Then it would fade and be drowned out by the breeze.
David propped himself up on his elbows and listened more intently.
He sat up.
Now he noticed that the ledge was divided by a thicket which grew from the inner side to the outer.
The noise, whatever it was, came from the other side of the thicket.
David's curiosity was aroused, but it occurred to him that it might be wise to be cautious.
The noise did not sound dangerous, but-well, he had never been up a mountain before, and there was no telling what he might find.
He dropped into a crouch and crept silently up to the tangle of bushes.
His heart began to pound, and he swallowed to relieve the dryness in his throat.
Who could it possibly be?
Well, there was only one way to find out.
He dropped down on his stomach and carefully began to worm his way under the thicket.
Next day it took less than an hour to reach the ledge, and David was sure that he could shorten the time even more when he was familiar with the goat trail.
The Phoenix was not in sight when he arrived, and for an instant David was stricken with fright.
It came from the thicket, and it sounded very much like a snore.
David smiled to himself and shouted, "Hello, Phoenix!"
There was a thrashing sound in the thicket, and the Phoenix appeared, looking very rumpled and yawning behind its wing.
David thrust the bag of cookies behind his back.
"Now, Phoenix," he said firmly, "you have to promise me you won't go away to South America.
The Phoenix drew itself up indignantly.
You cut me to the quick.
It stopped and swallowed again.
"Oh, well," it continued, more mildly, "one does not fight fate, does one?
So they sat down on the grass together, and for a long time nothing was heard but sounds of munching.
"My boy," said the Phoenix at last, brushing the crumbs from its chest, "I take a modest pride in my way with words, but nothing in the language can do these-ah-baked poems justice.
"I'm glad you like them," David said politely.
"And now, my boy," continued the Phoenix, as it settled back comfortably, "I have been thinking.
Yesterday you showed an intelligent interest in my problems and asked intelligent questions. You did not scoff, as others might have done.
You have very rare qualities."
"Do not be so modest, my boy!
I speak the truth.
It came to me that such a mind as yours, having these qualities, should be further cultivated and refined.
And I should be avoiding my clear cut duty if I did not take this task in hand myself.
Of course, I suppose some attempt to educate you has already been made, has it not?"
"Well, I go to school, if that's what you mean.
"And what do they teach you there?"
"Oh, reading and writing and arithmetic, and things like that."
"Aha!" said the Phoenix triumphantly.
"Just as I suspected-a classical education.
Understand me-I have nothing against a classical education as such.
I realize that mathematics, Greek, and Latin are excellent for the discipline of the mind.
But in the broad view, a classical education is not a true education.
Life is real, life is earnest.
The problems of Life, my dear fellow!--classical education completely ignores them!
For example, how do you tell a true Unicorn from a false one?"
"I-I don't know."
"I thought not.
Where do you find the Philosopher's Stone?"
"I don't know."
What is the first rule of defense when attacked by a Chimera?"
"I'm afraid I don't know that, either," he said in a small voice.
"There you are!" cried the Phoenix.
"You do not have a true, practical education-you are not ready for Life.
"Do you mean-are you going to give me-lessons?" Through his mind flashed a picture of the Phoenix (with spectacles on its beak and a ruler in its wing) writing out sentences on a blackboard.
The thought gave him a sinking feeling.
After all, it was summer-and summer was supposed to be vacation time.
"Absolutely without equal!
The full benefit of my vast knowledge, plus a number of trips to-"
"That's different.
Oh, Phoenix, that'll be wonderful!
Where will we go?"
We shall visit my friends and acquaintances."
"Oh, do you have-"
"Of course, my boy!
"What were those last three, please?"
"Gryffins," explained the Phoenix, "are the small, reddish, friendly ones.
Gryffons are the quick tempered proud ones.
They are very stupid."
"I see," said David doubtfully.
"What do they look like?"
But to continue: Sea Monsters, Leprechauns, Rocs, Gnomes, Elves, Basilisks, Nymphs-ah-and many others.
And your education will cost you nothing.
"As many as you want, Phoenix.
Will we go to Africa?"
Your education will include-"
And Arabia?"
"Yes.
Your education will-"
"Oh, Phoenix, Phoenix!" David jumped up and began to caper, while the Phoenix beamed.
But suddenly he stopped.
"How are we going to travel, Phoenix?"
"Yes, but I don't."
"Do not be so dense, my dear fellow.
I shall carry you on my back, of course."
Are you sure that-isn't there some other-I mean, can you do it?"
The Phoenix drew itself up to its full height.
"I am hurt-yes, deeply hurt-by your lack of faith.
I shall give you proof positive."
David reluctantly followed the Phoenix to a spot on the edge of the shelf where there was a gap in the bushes.
He glanced over the brink. The sheer face of the scarp fell away beneath them, plunging down to the tiny trees and rocks below.
He stepped back quickly with a shudder.
"Let's-let's do it tomorrow," he quavered.
"No time like the present.
"On my back.
Ready?"
"No," said David faintly.
"Splendid!
The proof is to be demonstrated, the-to be brief, we are off!"
The great wings were outstretched.
He felt a hopping sensation, then a long, sickening downward swoop that seemed to leave his stomach far behind.
A tremendous rush of air snatched at his shirt.
He opened his eyes and choked with fright.
The Phoenix was breathing in hoarse gasps; its wings were pounding the air frantically.
The scarp loomed before them, solid and blank.
Above them-high above them-was the ledge.
It looked as though they would not get back to it.
Up ... up ... up....
They crawled through the air.
The wings flapped wildly, faster and faster.
They were gaining-slipping back-gaining again.
The Phoenix sobbed as it stretched its neck in the last effort. Fifty feet ... twenty feet ... ten....
David's legs slipped from the bird's back.
He dangled over the abyss from the outstretched neck, and prayed.
The bush saved them.
At last the Phoenix weakly raised its head.
I-puff-"
The earth reeled under him and would not stop no matter how tightly he clutched the grass.
"Puff-I repeat, I am-puff-an exceedingly powerful flyer.
The truth of the matter is that you are a lot-puff-heavier than you look.
I hope you are not being overfed at home?"
"Well, my course is clear," said the Phoenix firmly.
"I must practice. Setting up exercises, roadwork, and what not.
Rigorous diet.
Lots of sleep.
Courage, my dear fellow!
We shall do it yet!"
After this, the bird would jog trot up and down the ledge and practice jumping.
Then there would be a fifteen minute rest and refreshment period.
This was the part David liked best.
It was a magnificent sight.
The Phoenix dashed back and forth at top speed, wheeled in circles, shot straight up like a rocket-plunged, hovered, looped-rolled, soared, fluttered.
Now and then it would swoop back to the ledge beside David and wipe the sweat from its brow.
"I trust you see signs of progress, my boy?"
David would wrap the wet towel around the Phoenix's neck.
"You're doing better and better, Phoenix.
"I do perform that rather well, don't I?
But just the thing for acquiring (ouch!) muscle tone.
Are there any more cookies? Ah, there are.
As I was saying, let this be a lesson to you, my boy.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."
The Phoenix would take wing again.
And David would settle back against a rock and watch.
And sometimes he did not think at all, but just sat with his eyes half shut, feeling the sunlight on his face and listening to the rustle of the wind in the thicket.
At the end of the week the Phoenix, after a brilliant display of acrobatics, landed on the ledge, clasped its wings behind its back, and looked solemnly at David.
Are you ready?"
"Now, my boy," said the Phoenix, when they got back to the ledge that afternoon, "are the shops still open?"
"I think they're open till six," said David, shaking the sand out of his shoes.
"Are we going to buy something?"
"Precisely, my boy.
A hardware store should have what we need.
Now, you will take our gold and purchase the following." And the Phoenix listed the things it wanted, and told David which to bring to the ledge and which to leave below.
"... and a hatchet," the Phoenix concluded.
"We have one at home already," said David.
What are we going to do with it?"
"What did you say?"
"Curiosity killed the cat," explained the Phoenix.
"Oh.
But-"
"Now, run along, my boy.
A very important Thought has just come to me. I must Meditate a while." The Phoenix glanced at the thicket and hid a yawn behind one wing.
He couldn't spend pirate gold pieces, or even show them to anyone, without being asked a lot of embarrassing questions.
What to do?
More embarrassing questions.... Well, he would have to rob his bank.
But wait-why hadn't he remembered?
Just before they had moved, Uncle Charles had given him a ten dollar bill as a farewell present.
He had been saving it for a model airplane, but the excitement of the last few days had driven it completely out of his mind.
Of course the Phoenix's Plan was more important than any model plane could be.
Then he brought the package home, hid it behind the woodpile in the garage, and sat down to think. Wire-bell-pushbutton.
What could the Phoenix possibly want with them?
And what was the rope for?
And the hatchet?
The more he puzzled over it the more confused he became, and finally he just gave up. There was only one thing he was sure about: whatever the Plan was, they would have to carry it out as soon as possible.
Two days had passed since the Scientist had shown up.
Perhaps even today, when they had been digging up the pirate treasure, the Scientist had got his new rifle and had started to hunt through the mountains.
The thought gave David a creepy feeling on the back of his neck.
They certainly would have to hurry.
Early next morning David climbed up to the ledge, bringing with him the coil of rope and the hatchet.
As an afterthought he had added a paper bag full of cookies.
"Here's the stuff, Phoenix," he called out as he stepped onto the ledge.
There was a crash from the thicket as though someone had jumped up in it suddenly, and the Phoenix stumbled out, rubbing its eyes.
"Ah, splendid, my boy!
I was just-ah-Thinking."
"Phoenix," said David, "I'm not going to ask you again what your Plan is, because I know you'll tell me when it's time.
The Scientist may show up any minute."
"Precisely, my boy.
Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today.
One of my favorite proverbs.
We shall begin immediately-"
"You might have brought more," said the Phoenix, fifteen minutes later.
"Phoenix, please tell me what we're going to do.
I've been thinking about the rope and wire and bell all night, and I can't make heads or tails out of it."
The Phoenix gave a pleased laugh.
"Of course you cannot, my boy.
The Plan is far too profound for you to guess what it is.
I shall now explain the rope and hatchet."
David leaned forward eagerly.
"Now, scientists, you know, have fixed habits.
If you know those habits, you can predict just what they will do at any time.
Our particular Scientist is a daytime creature-that is to say, he comes at dawn and goes at dusk.
His invariable habit, my boy!"
"Well?"
"Oh," said David.
He thought about this a while, then asked, "But suppose the Scientist comes up on the ledge during the day and catches you asleep?"
"Aha!
That is where the rope and hatchet come in.
Never fear, my boy-I thought of that also.
We are going to construct a snare at each end of the ledge."
"How?"
"Hand me that twig, my boy." The Phoenix took the twig, found a bare spot of earth, and sketched a picture.
"First we find a sapling and clear the branches from it with the hatchet-like this.
Next we get a stake, cut a notch in it, and drive it into the ground-so.
The sapling is bent down to it and fitted into the notch, which holds it down.
Now we make a noose-so-from a piece of rope, tie it to the end of the sapling, and spread the loop out on the path-this way.
The whole snare is hidden under grass and leaves." The Phoenix beamed and flung out its wings in a dramatic gesture.
"Just picture it, my dear chap!
The Scientist, smiling evilly as he skulks along the path!
The unwary footstep!
The sapling, jarred out of the notch, springing upward!
And our archenemy dangling by the foot in mid-air, completely at our mercy! Magnificent!"
"Golly, Phoenix," said David, "that's pretty clever."
Better to say 'a stroke of genius.' Only I, Phoenix, could have thought of it.
And consider the poetic justice of it!
This is exactly the sort of trap that the Scientist once set for me!
Well, shall we begin?"
First they had to find the right kind of sapling, springy and strong.
The sapling had to be in the right place-one by the goat trail, the other at the far end of the ledge.
When they had been chosen, David had to shinny up them to lop off their branches.
Then he had to make two stakes from stout, hard wood, cut a notch at one end, and drive them into the ground with the flat of the hatchet.
But at last the saplings were set in the notches, the nooses were formed and fastened on.
Grass and leaves were strewn over the snares; chips, hewn branches, and other evidences of their work were removed.
They sat down and looked proudly at each other.
"My boy," said the Phoenix, "I have had a wide, and sometimes painful, experience with traps; so you may believe me when I say that these are among the best I have seen.
"They're sure strong enough," David agreed, flexing his fingers to take the stiffness out of them.
"But what are we going to do if the Scientist does get caught in one?"
Now, do you have the pliers, wire cutters, and screw driver below?"
"Yes, they're down in the cellar.
"Patience, patience!
You will be told when the time comes.
I shall meet you tonight after dark, as soon as it is safe for me to come down.
"Precisely, my boy.
A risk, I admit, but a necessary one.
There is a hedge at the back of your house, is there not?
Splendid.
You may await me there."
"Phoenix," he whispered, "how did you do it?
"I have been hunted long enough, my boy, to have learned a few tricks. It is merely a matter of gliding close to the ground, selecting the best shadows, and keeping a sharp lookout.
Well, let us get on with the Plan.
Have you the tools here?"
"Yes, here they are."
"Splendid!
Now, my boy, since we must continue your education during the night, it is necessary that we have some way of getting in touch with each other.
The question now is, how will you know when I have arrived?
That, my boy, is the nub, or crux, of the situation.
But I have worked out the solution."
"My boy, we are going to install this bell in your room, and the pushbutton on the base of that telephone pole.
When I arrive here at night, I shall press the button to let you know that I am ready to go. A magnificent idea, isn't it?"
It did not seem very practical to David.
"Well, Phoenix, that's a good idea," he said carefully.
"But how are we going to hide the wires? And what about the noise of the bell?"
"Nothing to it, my boy!
The wires?
There are wires between your house and the telephone pole already-one more would not be noticed.
The noise?
You have a pillow on your bed, under which the bell can be muffled."
"Yes, that's true." It still sounded impractical.
"Just imagine it!" the Phoenix continued enthusiastically.
"Perhaps later we can install another bell at this end.
Then we could learn Morse code and send messages to each other.
Exactly like a private telephone line!"
Put in this way, the idea had a certain appeal, and David found himself warming to it.
But there was another thing to consider.
"How about electricity, Phoenix?"
"Look above you, my boy!
The telephone pole is simply loaded down with power lines waiting to be tapped."
The Phoenix was evidently set on carrying out the Plan, and David did not want to wear out the bird's patience with more objections. And-well, why not?
They gathered up the tools and walked along the hedge to the telephone pole, which was in one corner of the yard.
"Electricity," said the Phoenix thoughtfully, "is a complicated and profound subject.
There are amperes, and there are volts, and there are kilowatt hours.
I might also mention positive and negative and-ah-all that sort of thing.
Most profound.
Perhaps I had better investigate up there.
Screw driver, please."
The Phoenix took the screw driver in one claw and flew up to the top of the pole.
David could hear the creak of the lines under the Phoenix's weight and the rattling of the screw driver against the porcelain insulators.
The power lines merely come up to the pole on one side, pass through the insulators, and go away from the pole on the other side.
Child's play!
The covering on the lines is rather tough, however.
We shall have to use the wire cutters."
The Phoenix returned to the top of the pole with the cutters, and worked on the wires for five more minutes.
One of the wires vibrated on a low note like a slack guitar string.
"We must not forget the difference between alternating and direct current, my boy," said the Phoenix as it flew down again.
"An important problem, that.
Where is our wire?
The pliers, please."
"Do you need any help up there?" David asked.
"No, everything is coming along beautifully, thank you.
I shall have everything finished in a flash."
Trailing one end of the wire in its beak, the Phoenix flew up into the darkness once more.
The tinkering sounds began again, and a spurt of falling debris rattled in the leaves of the hedge.
Suddenly it happened.
There was a terrific burst of blue light, a sharp squawk from the Phoenix, and a shower of sparks.
Another blue flash blazed up.
The lights in the house, and down the whole street, flickered and went out.
In the blackness which followed, each stage of the Phoenix's descent could be heard as clearly as cannon shots: the twanging and snapping as it tumbled through the wires, a drawn out squawk and the flop of wings in the air below, the crash into the hedge, the jarring thud against the ground.
Broken wires began to sputter ominously and fire out sparks.
A smell of singed feathers and burning rubber filled the air.
By the light of the sparks David saw the Phoenix staggering to its feet.
He jumped to the bird's side, but the Phoenix waved him away with its wing.
"Quick, my boy," it gasped.
"We must make a strategic retreat!
David had the presence of mind to gather up all the tools, the wire, bell, and pushbutton, and one of the Phoenix's feathers, which had been torn out during the fall.
He slipped through a cellar window, hid the equipment under a stack of old boxes, and ran noisily up the stairs into the kitchen.
"Hey!" he shouted.
"The lights are out!"
"Is that you, dear?" came Mother's anxious voice from the dining room.
"The telephone's dead!" Dad shouted from the hall.
Aunt Amy came bumping down the stairs with a candle.
"Turning out all the lights so he can murder us in our beds!"
"Look!" David shouted, "the line's broken in our back yard!"
They could hear the wailing of sirens now.
Fire trucks, repair trucks, and police cars pulled up in front of the house.
Everyone in the block turned out to see what had happened.
It took the repair men an hour to untangle the wires and fix them.
And all the time policemen were going through the crowd, asking questions and writing things down in their notebooks.
'twas with thoughts like this that I was busy while the short afternoon was spent, and the story went up and down the village, how that Elzevir Block and john Trenchard, who left so long ago, were come back to Moonfleet, and that the old lander was drowned saving the young man's life.
what use was freedom to me now?
Did you not think to tell me you were come?
Did you not see the light, did you not know there was a friend that waited for you?'
I said nothing, not being able to speak, but marvelling how she had come just in the point of time to prove me wrong to think I had no friend; and she went on:
And while she spoke I thought how Elzevir had gone to shoot her father, and only failed of it by a hair's breadth, and yet she spoke so well I thought he never really meant to shoot at all, but only to scare the magistrate.
And still I could not speak.
Said I not to you, Have a care how you touch the treasure, it was evilly come by and will bring a curse with it?
And so a dread which was just waking was laid to rest for ever; and when Ratsey went I made up the fire, and lay down in the blankets in front of it, for I was dog tired and longed for sleep.
I was already dozing, but not asleep, when there was a knock at the door, and in walked mr Glennie.
He looked at me curiously at first, as taking note of the bearded man that had grown out of the boy he remembered, but gave me very kindly greeting, and sat down beside me on a bench.
First, he lifted the sail from the dead body, and looked at the sleeping face.
After this I thought he was going, but he cleared his throat in such a way that I guessed he had something important to say, and he drew a long folded blue paper from his pocket.
And that this is so let what I am about to read to you prove; so light a candle and set it by me, for my eyes cannot follow the writing in this dancing firelight.'
It was addressed to the Reverend Horace Glennie, Perpetual Curate of Moonfleet, in the County of Dorset, England, and written in English by Heer Roosten, Attorney and Signariat of the Hague in the Kingdom of Holland.
He therefore left to john Trenchard everything of which he should die possessed, and being near death begged his forgiveness if he had wronged him in aught.
The candle had long burnt out, but the fire was bright, and he knelt a moment by the trestle table before he went out.
'He made a good end, john,' he said, rising from his knees, 'and I pray that our end may be in as good cause when it comes.
So fare you well, and remember that there are other treasures besides this, and that a good woman's love is worth far more than all the gold and jewels of the world-as I once knew.' And with that he left me.
What need to tell this tale at any more length, since you may know, by my telling it, that all went well? for what man would sit down to write a history that ended in his own discomfiture?
And of that money I never touched penny piece, having learnt a bitter lesson in the past, but laid it out in good works, with mr Glennie and Grace to help me.
First, we rebuilt and enlarged the almshouses beyond all that Colonel john Mohune could ever think of, and so established them as to be a haven for ever for all worn out sailors of that coast.
But that great vault below it, with its memories, was set in order, and then safely walled up, and after that nothing was more ever heard of Blackbeard and his lost Mohunes.
The village, too, renewed itself with the new almshouses and church. There were old houses rebuilt and fresh ones reared, and all are ours, except the Why Not? which still remains the Duchy Inn.
And that was let again, and men left the Choughs at Ringstave and came back to their old haunt, and any shipwrecked or travel worn sailor found board and welcome within its doors.
And of the Mohune Hospital-for that was what the alms houses were now called-Master Glennie was first warden, with fair rooms and a full library, and Master Ratsey head of the Bedesmen.
And of ourselves let me speak last.
THE NEW TIN GUTTER
All day Saturday the men had worked out upon the eaves of the house and the dolls facing the window could see them.
The men made quite a lot of noise with their hammers, for they were putting new gutters around the eaves, and pounding upon tin makes a great deal of noise.
"What are they doing now?" Raggedy Andy asked.
He was lying with his head beneath a little bed quilt, just as Marcella had dropped him when she left the nursery; so he could not see what was going on.
"We can only see the men's legs as they pass the window," answered Uncle Clem.
"But they are putting new shingles or something on the roof!"
After the men had left their work and gone home to supper and the house was quiet, Raggedy Andy cautiously moved his head out from under the little bed quilt and, seeing that the coast was clear, sat up.
This was a signal for all the dolls to sit up and smooth out the wrinkles in their clothes.
"Here's a grand place to have a lovely slide!" he said as he gave one of the penny dolls a scoot down the shiny tin gutter.
See her go!" Raggedy Andy cried.
All the other dolls climbed upon the window sill beside him.
Then Raggedy Andy climbed into the gutter himself and, taking a few steps, spread out his feet and went scooting down the shiny tin.
The other dolls followed his example and scooted along behind him.
When Raggedy Andy came to the place where he expected to find the penny dolls lying, they were nowhere about.
"Perhaps you scooted them farther than you thought!" Uncle Clem said.
"Perhaps I did!" Raggedy Andy said, "We will look around the bend in the eave!"
"Oh dear!" he exclaimed when he had peeped around the corner of the roof, "the gutter ends here and there is nothing but a hole!"
"They must have scooted right into the hole," Henny, the Dutch doll said.
Raggedy Andy lay flat upon the shiny tin and looked down into the hole.
"Are you down there, penny dolls?" he called.
"I hope their heads were not broken!" Raggedy Ann said.
"I'm so sorry I scooted them!" Raggedy Andy cried, as he brushed his hand over his shoe button eyes.
Uncle Clem and Henny each caught hold of a foot of Raggedy Andy and let him slide down into the hole.
It was a rather tight fit, but Raggedy Andy wiggled and twisted until all the dolls could see of him were his two feet.
"I can't find them!" he said in muffled tones.
"Let me down farther and I think I'll be able to reach them!"
Now Henny and Uncle Clem thought that Raggedy Andy meant for them to let go of his feet and this they did.
Raggedy Andy tried to wiggle backward up the pipe, but his clothes caught upon a little piece of tin which stuck out from the inside of the pipe and there he stayed.
He could neither go down nor come back up.
"What shall we do?" Uncle Clem cried, "The folks will never find him down there, for we can not tell them where he is, and they will never guess it!"
The dolls were all very sad.
They stayed out upon the shiny new tin gutter until it began raining and hoped and hoped that Raggedy Andy could get back up to them.
Then they went inside the nursery and sat looking out the window until it was time for the folks to get up and the house to be astir.
Then they went back to the position each had been in, when Marcella had left them.
And although they were very quiet, each one was so sorry to lose Raggedy Andy, and each felt that he would never be found again.
Then Raggedy Ann remembered that there was an opening at the bottom of the pipe.
"Tomorrow night if we have a chance, we dolls must take a stick and see if we can reach Raggedy Andy from the bottom of the pipe and pull him down to us!" she thought.
Marcella came up to the nursery and played all day, watching the rain patter upon the new tin gutter.
She wondered where Raggedy Andy was, although she did not get worried about him until she had asked Mama where he might be.
"He must be just where you left him!" Mama said.
"I cannot remember where I left him!" Marcella said.
All day Sunday it rained and all of Sunday night, and Monday morning when Daddy started to work it was still raining.
As Daddy walked out of the front gate, he turned to wave good bye to Mama and Marcella and then he saw something.
Daddy came right back into the house and called up the men who had put in the new shiny tin gutters.
"The drain pipe is plugged up.
Some of you must have left shavings or something in the eaves, and it has washed down into the pipe, so that the water pours over the gutter in sheets!"
"We will send a man right up to fix it!" the men said.
So along about ten o'clock that morning one of the men came to fix the pipe.
But although he punched a long pole down the pipe, and punched and punched, he could not dislodge whatever it was which plugged the pipe and kept the water from running through it.
Then the man measured with his stick, so that he knew just where the place was, and with a pair of tin shears he cut a section from the pipe and found Raggedy Andy.
The man laughed and carried little water soaked Raggedy Andy into the house.
"I guess your little girl must have dropped this rag doll down into the drain pipe!" the man said to Mama.
"I'm so glad you found him!" Mama said to the man.
And as he sat there he smiled and smiled, even though there was no one to see him.
He felt very happy within and he liked to smile, anyway, because his smile was painted on.
And another reason Raggedy Andy smiled was because he was not lonesome.
Inside his waist were the two little penny dolls.
The man had punched Raggedy Andy farther down into the pipe, and he had been able to reach the two little dolls and tuck them into a safe place.
We fetched an armful and hid it in the weeds, and set down to rest, and Tom says, kind of dissatisfied:
There ain't even a dog to give a sleeping mixture to.
And there's Jim chained by one leg, with a ten foot chain, to the leg of his bed: why, all you got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain.
And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key to the punkin headed nigger, and don't send nobody to watch the nigger.
Jim could a got out of that window hole before this, only there wouldn't be no use trying to travel with a ten foot chain on his leg.
Well, we can't help it; we got to do the best we can with the materials we've got.
Now look at just that one thing of the lantern.
Why, we could work with a torchlight procession if we wanted to, I believe.
"What do we want of a saw?"
Hain't we got to saw the leg of Jim's bed off, so as to get the chain loose?"
"Why, you just said a body could lift up the bedstead and slip the chain off."
"Well, if that ain't just like you, Huck Finn.
Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old maidy way as that?
It's gaudy, Huck.
I wish there was a moat to this cabin.
But he never heard me.
He had forgot me and everything else.
"No, it wouldn't do  there ain't necessity enough for it."
"For what?" I says.
And what would you want to saw his leg off for, anyway?"
"Well, some of the best authorities has done it.
They couldn't get the chain off, so they just cut their hand off and shoved.
But there's one thing  he can have a rope ladder; we can tear up our sheets and make him a rope ladder easy enough.
Huck, you don't ever seem to want to do anything that's regular; you want to be starting something fresh all the time.
ain't it there in his bed, for a clew, after he's gone? and don't you reckon they'll want clews? Of course they will.
And you wouldn't leave them any?
I never heard of such a thing."
Now, the way I look at it, a hickry bark ladder don't cost nothing, and don't waste nothing, and is just as good to load up a pie with, and hide in a straw tick, as any rag ladder you can start; and as for Jim, he ain't had no experience, and so he don't care what kind of a  "
Who ever heard of a state prisoner escaping by a hickry bark ladder?
Why, it's perfectly ridiculous."
He said that would do.
And that gave him another idea, and he says:
"Borrow a shirt, too."
"What do we want of a shirt, Tom?"
"Want it for Jim to keep a journal on."
"Why, Tom, we can pull a feather out of a goose and make him a better one; and quicker, too."
"Many makes it out of iron rust and tears; but that's the common sort and women; the best authorities uses their own blood.
Jim can do that; and when he wants to send any little common ordinary mysterious message to let the world know where he's captivated, he can write it on the bottom of a tin plate with a fork and throw it out of the window.
"Jim ain't got no tin plates.
They feed him in a pan."
"That ain't nothing; we can get him some."
Why, half the time you can't read anything a prisoner writes on a tin plate, or anywhere else."
"Well, then, what's the sense in wasting the plates?"
"Well, spos'n it is?
He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast horn blowing.
So we cleared out for the house.
Along during the morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the clothes line; and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we went down and got the fox fire, and put that in too.
He said we was representing prisoners; and prisoners don't care how they get a thing so they get it, and nobody don't blame them for it, either.
So we allowed we would steal everything there was that come handy.
And yet he made a mighty fuss, one day, after that, when I stole a watermelon out of the nigger patch and eat it; and he made me go and give the niggers a dime without telling them what it was for.
Well, I says, I needed the watermelon.
So I let it go at that, though I couldn't see no advantage in my representing a prisoner if I got to set down and chaw over a lot of gold leaf distinctions like that every time I see a chance to hog a watermelon.
Well, as I was saying, we waited that morning till everybody was settled down to business, and nobody in sight around the yard; then Tom he carried the sack into the lean to whilst I stood off a piece to keep watch.
By and by he come out, and we went and set down on the woodpile to talk.
"Everything's all right now except tools; and that's easy fixed."
"Tools?" I says.
"Yes."
"Tools for what?"
"Why, to dig with.
He turns on me, looking pitying enough to make a body cry, and says:
"Well, then," I says, "if we don't want the picks and shovels, what do we want?"
"A couple of case knives."
"To dig the foundations out from under that cabin with?"
"Yes."
"Confound it, it's foolish, Tom."
They always dig out with a case knife  and not through dirt, mind you; generly it's through solid rock.
And it takes them weeks and weeks and weeks, and for ever and ever.
"I don't know."
"I don't know.
A month and a half."
Neither did that other fellow.
Why can't you stick to the main point?"
But there's one thing, anyway  Jim's too old to be dug out with a case knife. He won't last."
"How long will it take, Tom?"
"Well, we can't resk being as long as we ought to, because it mayn't take very long for Uncle Silas to hear from down there by New Orleans. He'll hear Jim ain't from there.
Then his next move will be to advertise Jim, or something like that.
By rights I reckon we ought to be a couple of years; but we can't.
'I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about noon, deserted and falling into ruin.
It lay very high upon a turfy down, and looking north eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to see a large estuary, or even creek, where I judged Wandsworth and Battersea must once have been.
'The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown character.
I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to interpret this, but I only learned that the bare idea of writing had never entered her head.
She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.
'Within the big valves of the door-which were open and broken-we found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side windows.
At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor was thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was shrouded in the same grey covering.
I recognized by the oblique feet that it was some extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium.
Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel of a Brontosaurus.
My museum hypothesis was confirmed.
Going towards the side I found what appeared to be sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick dust, I found the old familiar glass cases of our own time.
But they must have been air tight to judge from the fair preservation of some of their contents.
'Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter day South Kensington!
And the cases had in some instances been bodily removed-by the Morlocks as I judged.
The place was very silent.
The thick dust deadened our footsteps.
Weena, who had been rolling a sea urchin down the sloping glass of a case, presently came, as I stared about me, and very quietly took my hand and stood beside me.
'And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of an intellectual age, that I gave no thought to the possibilities it presented.
Even my preoccupation about the Time Machine receded a little from my mind.
'To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain had a great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palaeontology; possibly historical galleries; it might be, even a library!
To me, at least in my present circumstances, these would be vastly more interesting than this spectacle of oldtime geology in decay. Exploring, I found another short gallery running transversely to the first.
This appeared to be devoted to minerals, and the sight of a block of sulphur set my mind running on gunpowder.
But I could find no saltpeter; indeed, no nitrates of any kind.
Doubtless they had deliquesced ages ago.
Yet the sulphur hung in my mind, and set up a train of thinking.
As for the rest of the contents of that gallery, though on the whole they were the best preserved of all I saw, I had little interest.
I am no specialist in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered.
Apparently this section had been devoted to natural history, but everything had long since passed out of recognition.
I was sorry for that, because I should have been glad to trace the patent readjustments by which the conquest of animated nature had been attained.
Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but singularly ill lit, the floor of it running downward at a slight angle from the end at which I entered.
At intervals white globes hung from the ceiling-many of them cracked and smashed-which suggested that originally the place had been artificially lit.
Here I was more in my element, for rising on either side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded and many broken down, but some still fairly complete.
You know I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these; the more so as for the most part they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest guesses at what they were for.
'Suddenly Weena came very close to my side.
So suddenly that she startled me.
Had it not been for her I do not think I should have noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all.
As you went down the length, the ground came up against these windows, until at last there was a pit like the "area" of a London house before each, and only a narrow line of daylight at the top.
Then I saw that the gallery ran down at last into a thick darkness.
Further away towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small narrow footprints.
My sense of the immediate presence of the Morlocks revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my time in the academic examination of machinery.
And then down in the remote blackness of the gallery I heard a peculiar pattering, and the same odd noises I had heard down the well.
'I took Weena's hand.
Then, struck with a sudden idea, I left her and turned to a machine from which projected a lever not unlike those in a signal box.
Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my hands, I put all my weight upon it sideways.
Suddenly Weena, deserted in the central aisle, began to whimper.
And I longed very much to kill a Morlock or so.
Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one's own descendants!
But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the things.
Only my disinclination to leave Weena, and a persuasion that if I began to slake my thirst for murder my Time Machine might suffer, restrained me from going straight down the gallery and killing the brutes I heard.
'Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books.
They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them.
Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified.
'Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a gallery of technical chemistry.
And here I had not a little hope of useful discoveries.
Except at one end where the roof had collapsed, this gallery was well preserved.
I went eagerly to every unbroken case.
And at last, in one of the really air tight cases, I found a box of matches.
Very eagerly I tried them.
They were perfectly good.
I turned to Weena.
"Dance," I cried to her in her own tongue.
For now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we feared.
For I am naturally inventive, as you know.
'Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the wear of time for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was a most fortunate thing.
Yet, oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier substance, and that was camphor.
In the universal decay this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries.
I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with a good bright flame-was, in fact, an excellent candle-and I put it in my pocket.
I found no explosives, however, nor any means of breaking down the bronze doors.
As yet my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I had chanced upon.
Nevertheless I left that gallery greatly elated.
It would require a great effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all the proper order.
I remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and how I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword.
I could not carry both, however, and my bar of iron promised best against the bronze gates.
The most were masses of rust, but many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound.
But any cartridges or powder there may once have been had rotted into dust.
One corner I saw was charred and shattered; perhaps, I thought, by an explosion among the specimens.
'As the evening drew on, my interest waned.
I went through gallery after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher.
In one place I suddenly found myself near the model of a tin mine, and then by the merest accident I discovered, in an air tight case, two dynamite cartridges!
I shouted "Eureka!" and smashed the case with joy.
Then came a doubt.
I hesitated.
Then, selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay.
I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course the things were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence.
I really believe that had they not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown Sphinx, bronze doors, and (as it proved) my chances of finding the Time Machine, all together into non existence.
'It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within the palace.
It was turfed, and had three fruit trees.
Towards sunset I began to consider our position.
But that troubled me very little now.
I had in my possession a thing that was, perhaps, the best of all defences against the Morlocks-I had matches!
I had the camphor in my pocket, too, if a blaze were needed.
It seemed to me that the best thing we could do would be to pass the night in the open, protected by a fire.
In the morning there was the getting of the Time Machine.
Towards that, as yet, I had only my iron mace.
But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt very differently towards those bronze doors.
Up to this, I had refrained from forcing them, largely because of the mystery on the other side.
CHAPTER three
TREACHERY
The day following the coming of Vas Kor to the palace of the Prince of Helium great excitement reigned throughout the twin cities, reaching its climax in the palace of Carthoris.
In the council chamber of john Carter, Warlord of Mars, was Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Helium; Mors Kajak, his son, Jed of Lesser Helium; Carthoris, and a score of the great nobles of the empire.
"That you are innocent of the charge that has been placed against you by insinuation, we well know; but Thuvan Dihn must know it well, too.
"There is but one who may convince him, and that one be you.
Bear with you the authority of the Warlord of Barsoom, and of the Jeddak of Helium to offer every resource of the allied powers to assist Thuvan Dihn to recover his daughter and punish her abductors, whomsoever they may be.
"Go!
I know that I do not need to urge upon you the necessity for haste."
Carthoris left the council chamber, and hastened to his palace.
Here slaves were busy in a moment setting things to rights for the departure of their master.
At last all was done.
But two armed slaves remained on guard. The setting sun hung low above the horizon.
In a moment darkness would envelop all.
One of the guardsmen, a giant of a fellow across whose right cheek there ran a thin scar from temple to mouth, approached his companion. His gaze was directed beyond and above his comrade.
When he had come quite close he spoke.
"What strange craft is that?" he asked.
The other turned about quickly to gaze heavenward.
Scarce was his back turned toward the giant than the short sword of the latter was plunged beneath his left shoulder blade, straight through his heart.
Voiceless, the soldier sank in his tracks-stone dead.
Quickly the murderer dragged the corpse into the black shadows within the hangar.
Then he returned to the flier.
Drawing a cunningly wrought key from his pocket pouch, he removed the cover of the right-hand dial of the controlling destination compass.
For a moment he studied the construction of the mechanism beneath.
Then he returned the dial to its place, set the pointer, and removed it again to note the resultant change in the position of the parts affected by the act.
A smile crossed his lips.
With a pair of cutters he snipped off the projection which extended through the dial from the external pointer-now the latter might be moved to any point upon the dial without affecting the mechanism below.
In other words, the eastern hemisphere dial was useless.
Now he turned his attention to the western dial.
Afterward he removed the cover of this dial also, and with keen tool cut the steel finger from the under side of the pointer.
As quickly as possible he replaced the second dial cover, and resumed his place on guard.
To all intents and purposes the compass was as efficient as before; but, as a matter of fact, the moving of the pointers upon the dials resulted now in no corresponding shift of the mechanism beneath-and the device was set, immovably, upon a destination of the slave's own choosing.
Presently came Carthoris, accompanied by but a handful of his gentlemen.
He cast but a casual glance upon the single slave who stood guard.
The fellow's thin, cruel lips, and the sword cut that ran from temple to mouth aroused the suggestion of an unpleasant memory within him.
It could not have been he, thought Carthoris, for on the very night that Thuvia was taken Astok had been in Dusar, and yet-
With a word of farewell he touched the button which controlled the repulsive rays, and as the flier rose lightly into the air, the engine purred in answer to the touch of his finger upon a second button, the propellers whirred as his hand drew back the speed lever, and Carthoris, Prince of Helium, was off into the gorgeous Martian night beneath the hurtling moons and the million stars.
Scarce had the flier found its speed ere the man, wrapping his sleeping silks and furs about him, stretched at full length upon the narrow deck to sleep.
But sleep did not come at once at his bidding.
Instead, his thoughts ran riot in his brain, driving sleep away. He recalled the words of Thuvia of Ptarth, words that had half assured him that she loved him; for when he had asked her if she loved Kulan Tith, she had answered only that she was promised to him.
Now he saw that her reply was open to more than a single construction. It might, of course, mean that she did not love Kulan Tith; and so, by inference, be taken to mean that she loved another.
But what assurance was there that the other was Carthoris of Helium?
The more he thought upon it the more positive he became that not only was there no assurance in her words that she loved him, but none either in any act of hers.
No, the fact was, she did not love him.
She loved another.
She had not been abducted-she had fled willingly with her lover.
With such pleasant thoughts filling him alternately with despair and rage, Carthoris at last dropped into the sleep of utter mental exhaustion.
The breaking of the sudden dawn found him still asleep.
His flier was rushing swiftly above a barren, ochre plain-the world old bottom of a long dead Martian sea.
The countless dismal windows, vacant and forlorn, stared, sightless, from their marble walls; the whole sad city taking on the semblance of scattered mounds of dead men's sun bleached skulls-the casements having the appearance of eyeless sockets, the portals, grinning jaws.
Above the central plaza it stopped, slowly settling Marsward. Within a hundred yards of the ground it came to rest, floating gently in the light air, and at the same instant an alarm sounded at the sleeper's ear.
Carthoris sprang to his feet.
Beside him, already, there should have been an air patrol.
He gazed about in bewildered astonishment.
No patrol boat lay ready with its familiar challenge.
Silent and empty lay the great city-empty and silent the surrounding air.
What had happened?
Carthoris examined the dial of his compass.
He would not believe it.
Quickly he unlocked the cover, turning it back upon its hinge.
A single glance showed him the truth, or at least a part of it-the steel projection that communicated the movement of the pointer upon the dial to the heart of the mechanism beneath had been severed.
Who could have done the thing-and why?
Carthoris could not hazard even a faint guess.
But the thing now was to learn in what portion of the world he was, and then take up his interrupted journey once more.
If it had been the purpose of some enemy to delay him, he had succeeded well, thought Carthoris, as he unlocked the cover of the second dial the first having shown that its pointer had not been set at all.
Beneath the second dial he found the steel pin severed as in the other, but the controlling mechanism had first been set for a point upon the western hemisphere.
Carthoris waited to see no more.
Reaching for the control board, he sent his craft racing plummet like toward the ground.
The green man was hurrying his captive toward a huge thoat that browsed upon the ochre vegetation of the once scarlet gorgeous plaza.
At the same instant a dozen red warriors leaped from the entrance of a nearby ersite palace, pursuing the abductor with naked swords and shouts of rageful warning.
'Well, I MUST say,' mother said, looking at the wishing carpet as it lay, all darned and mended and backed with shiny American cloth, on the floor of the nursery-'I MUST say I've never in my life bought such a bad bargain as that carpet.'
A soft 'Oh!' of contradiction sprang to the lips of Cyril, Robert, Jane, and Anthea.
Mother looked at them quickly, and said-
'Well, of course, I see you've mended it very nicely, and that was sweet of you, dears.'
'The boys helped too,' said the dears, honourably.
'But, still-twenty two and ninepence!
It's simply dreadful now.
'No, dear, we can't help our boots,' said mother, cheerfully, 'but we might change them when we come in, perhaps.
It was the work of a good many minutes and several persons to get the jam off him again, and this interesting work took people's minds off the carpet, and nothing more was said just then about its badness as a bargain and about what mother hoped for from coconut matting.
Mother was very clever, but even she could not quite understand the cook's accounts.
The Lamb was very glad to have his brothers and sisters to play with him.
He had not forgotten them a bit, and he made them play all the old exhausting games: 'Whirling Worlds', where you swing the baby round and round by his hands; and 'Leg and Wing', where you swing him from side to side by one ankle and one wrist.
There was also climbing Vesuvius. In this game the baby walks up you, and when he is standing on your shoulders, you shout as loud as you can, which is the rumbling of the burning mountain, and then tumble him gently on to the floor, and roll him there, which is the destruction of Pompeii.
'Well, you talk and decide,' said Anthea; 'here, you lovely ducky Lamb. Come to Panther and play Noah's Ark.'
The Lamb came with his pretty hair all tumbled and his face all dusty from the destruction of Pompeii, and instantly became a baby snake, hissing and wriggling and creeping in Anthea's arms, as she said-
'Crocky,' said the Lamb, and showed all his little teeth.
So Anthea went on-
'I love my little crocodile, I love his truthful toothful smile; It is so wonderful and wide, I like to see it-FROM OUTSIDE.'
Mother can't believe the real true truth about the carpet, and-'
'You speak sooth, O Cyril,' remarked the Phoenix, coming out from the cupboard where the blackbeetles lived, and the torn books, and the broken slates, and odd pieces of toys that had lost the rest of themselves.
'There is a society called that,' said Cyril.
'Where is it?
And what is a society?' asked the bird.
'It's a sort of joined together lot of people-a sort of brotherhood-a kind of-well, something very like your temple, you know, only quite different.'
'I take your meaning,' said the Phoenix. 'I would fain see these calling themselves Sons of the Phoenix.'
'But what about your words of wisdom?'
'Wisdom is always welcome,' said the Phoenix.
'Pretty Polly!' remarked the Lamb, reaching his hands towards the golden speaker.
The Phoenix modestly retreated behind Robert, and Anthea hastened to distract the attention of the Lamb by murmuring-
"I love my little baby rabbit; But oh! he has a dreadful habit Of paddling out among the rocks And soaking both his bunny socks.'
'I don't think you'd care about the sons of the Phoenix, really,' said Robert. 'I have heard that they don't do anything fiery.
They only drink a great deal.
'In your mind, perhaps,' said Jane; 'but it wouldn't be good in your body.
'Look here,' said Anthea; 'I really have an idea.
This isn't like a common carpet.
It's very magic indeed.
Don't you think, if we put Tatcho on it, and then gave it a rest, the magic part of it might grow, like hair is supposed to do?'
'It might,' said Robert; 'but I should think paraffin would do as well-at any rate as far as the smell goes, and that seems to be the great thing about Tatcho.'
But with all its faults Anthea's idea was something to do, and they did it.
'We mustn't take it all,' Jane said, 'in case father's hair began to come off suddenly.
I expect it's the smell that does the good really-and the smell's exactly the same.'
So a small teaspoonful of the Tatcho was put on the edges of the worst darn in the carpet and rubbed carefully into the roots of the hairs of it, and all the parts that there was not enough Tatcho for had paraffin rubbed into them with a piece of flannel.
Then the flannel was burned. It made a gay flame, which delighted the Phoenix and the Lamb.
'How often,' said mother, opening the door-'how often am I to tell you that you are NOT to play with paraffin?
It was no use telling mother what they had done to the carpet.
She did not know it was a magic carpet, and no one wants to be laughed at for trying to mend an ordinary carpet with lamp oil.
'Well, don't do it again,' said mother.
'And now, away with melancholy! Father has sent a telegram.
Look!' She held it out, and the children, holding it by its yielding corners, read-
'Box for kiddies at Garrick.
Stalls for us, Haymarket.
Run and get out your frocks.'
They were very nice tableaux, these, and I wish I could tell you about them; but one cannot tell everything in a story.
You would have been specially interested in hearing about the tableau of the Princes in the Tower, when one of the pillows burst, and the youthful Princes were so covered with feathers that the picture might very well have been called 'Michaelmas Eve; or, Plucking the Geese'.
Ironing the dresses and sewing the lace in occupied some time, and no one was dull, because there was the theatre to look forward to, and also the possible growth of hairs on the carpet, for which every one kept looking anxiously.
By four o'clock Jane was almost sure that several hairs were beginning to grow.
'I am not sick,' replied the golden bird, with a gloomy shake of the head; 'but I am getting old.'
'Time,' remarked the Phoenix, 'is measured by heartbeats.
I'm sure the palpitations I've had since I've known you are enough to blanch the feathers of any bird.'
Think of all the time that's before you.'
'Time,' said the Phoenix, 'is, as you are probably aware, merely a convenient fiction.
I have lived in these two months at a pace which generously counterbalances five hundred years of life in the desert.
I feel as if I ought to lay my egg, and lay me down to my fiery sleep.
What is the show at the theatre to night?
Wouldn't you like to come with us?'
Do come, Phoenix, old chap; it will cheer you up.
Robert pretended that he was too cold to take off his great coat, and so sat sweltering through what would otherwise have been a most thrilling meal. He felt that he was a blot on the smart beauty of the family, and he hoped the Phoenix knew what he was suffering for its sake.
Father's parting words were: 'Now, don't you stir out of this box, whatever you do.
I shall be back before the end of the play.
No?
Well, then, I should say you were sickening for something-mumps or measles or thrush or teething.
Goodbye.'
He went, and Robert was at last able to remove his coat, mop his perspiring brow, and release the crushed and dishevelled Phoenix.
When the lights went up fully, the Phoenix, balancing itself on the gilded back of a chair, swayed in ecstasy.
Tell me, my Robert, is it not that this, THIS is my true temple, and the other was but a humble shrine frequented by outcasts?'
'I don't know about outcasts,' said Robert, 'but you can call this your temple if you like.
Hush! the music is beginning.'
I am not going to tell you about the play.
As I said before, one can't tell everything, and no doubt you saw 'The Water Babies' yourselves.
What I must tell you is that, though Cyril and Jane and Robert and Anthea enjoyed it as much as any children possibly could, the pleasure of the Phoenix was far, far greater than theirs.
'What radiant rites!
And all to do honour to me!'
The choruses were choric songs in its praise.
The electric lights, it said, were magic torches lighted for its sake, and it was so charmed with the footlights that the children could hardly persuade it to sit still.
It flapped its golden wings, and cried in a voice that could be heard all over the theatre:
'Well done, my servants!
Little Tom on the stage stopped short in what he was saying.
A deep breath was drawn by hundreds of lungs, every eye in the house turned to the box where the luckless children cringed, and most people hissed, or said 'Shish!' or 'Turn them out!'
Then the play went on, and an attendant presently came to the box and spoke wrathfully.
'It wasn't us, indeed it wasn't,' said Anthea, earnestly; 'it was the bird.'
The man said well, then, they must keep their bird very quiet. 'Disturbing every one like this,' he said.
'Well, he is a beauty, and no mistake,' said the attendant, 'only I'd cover him up during the acts.
It upsets the performance.'
So now the Phoenix was quiet, but it kept whispering to the children.
It was not in the least the fault of the theatre people, and no one could ever understand afterwards how it did happen.
No one, that is, except the guilty bird itself and the four children.
I mean the grey one with the red tail.
All eyes were on the stage, where the lobster was delighting the audience with that gem of a song, 'If you can't walk straight, walk sideways!' when the Phoenix murmured warmly-
'No altar, no fire, no incense!' and then, before any of the children could even begin to think of stopping it, it spread its bright wings and swept round the theatre, brushing its gleaming feathers against delicate hangings and gilded woodwork.
Next moment it was perched again on the chair back-and all round the theatre, where it had passed, little sparks shone like tinsel seeds, then little smoke wreaths curled up like growing plants-little flames opened like flower buds.
People whispered-then people shrieked.
Fire!' The curtain went down-the lights went up.
'Fire!' cried every one, and made for the doors.
'A magnificent idea!' said the Phoenix, complacently.
'Oh, how COULD you!' cried Jane. 'Let's get out.'
'Father said stay here,' said Anthea, very pale, and trying to speak in her ordinary voice.
'No boys on burning decks for me, thank you.'
But a fierce waft of smoke and hot air made him shut it again.
It was not possible to get out that way.
They looked over the front of the box.
It would be possible, certainly; but would they be much better off?
'Look at the people,' moaned Anthea; 'we couldn't get through.'
'I wish we'd never seen the Phoenix,' cried Jane.
Even at that awful moment Robert looked round to see if the bird had overheard a speech which, however natural, was hardly polite or grateful.
The Phoenix was gone.
'Look here,' said Robert, 'I'm NOT frightened-no, I'm not.
'The Phoenix thanks you, O Robert,' said a golden voice at his feet, and there was the Phoenix itself, on the Wishing Carpet.
'Quick!' it said.
'Stand on those portions of the carpet which are truly antique and authentic-and-'
A sudden jet of flame stopped its words.
Alas! the Phoenix had unconsciously warmed to its subject, and in the unintentional heat of the moment had set fire to the paraffin with which that morning the children had anointed the carpet.
Only the fabric of the old carpet was left-and that was full of holes.
The four children got on to what was left of the carpet.
Jane had to sit on Anthea's lap.
They were all on the carpet still, and the carpet was lying in its proper place on the nursery floor, as calm and unmoved as though it had never been to the theatre or taken part in a fire in its life.
They presently found themselves all talking at once.
Oh, how awful!
Oh, let's go this minute and tell them we aren't.'
Only do wash your face first.
Mother will be sure to think you are burnt to a cinder if she sees you as black as that, and she'll faint or be ill or something.
Oh, I wish we'd never got to know that Phoenix.'
I suppose it can't help its nature.
Perhaps we'd better wash too.
No one had noticed the Phoenix since it had bidden them to step on the carpet.
All were partially clean, and Cyril was just plunging into his great coat to go and look for his parents-he, and not unjustly, called it looking for a needle in a bundle of hay-when the sound of father's latchkey in the front door sent every one bounding up the stairs.
'Are you all safe?' cried mother's voice; 'are you all safe?' and the next moment she was kneeling on the linoleum of the hall, trying to kiss four damp children at once, and laughing and crying by turns, while father stood looking on and saying he was blessed or something.
'Well, it was rather a rum thing.
We heard the Garrick was on fire, and of course we went straight there,' said father, briskly.
'We couldn't find you, of course-and we couldn't get in-but the firemen told us every one was safely out.
'I said it was the bird that spoke,' said mother, 'and so it was.
Or at least I thought so then.
It wasn't a pigeon.
It was an orange coloured cockatoo.
I don't care who it was that spoke.
Mother began to cry again, and father said bed was a good place after the pleasures of the stage.
So every one went there.
Do not distress yourself. I, like my high priests in Lombard Street, can undo the work of flames. Kindly open the casement.'
It flew out.
That was why the papers said next day that the fire at the theatre had done less damage than had been anticipated.
As a matter of fact it had done none, for the Phoenix spent the night in putting things straight. How the management accounted for this, and how many of the theatre officials still believe that they were mad on that night will never be known.
Next day mother saw the burnt holes in the carpet.
'It caught where it was paraffiny,' said Anthea.
'I must get rid of that carpet at once,' said mother.
CHAPTER nineteen
Presently, however, he spoke effectively.
"Here's another difference between Midas and chicken," Sheridan remarked, grimly.
"Midas can eat rooster, but rooster can't eat Midas.
Midas looks to me like he had the advantage there."
Bibbs retained enough presence of mind to transfer the capon breast to his plate without dropping it and to respond, "Yes-he crows over it."
Having returned his antagonists's fire in this fashion, he blushed-for he could blush distinctly now-and his mother looked upon him with pleasure, thought the reference to Midas and roosters was of course jargon to her.
"Did you ever see anybody improve the way that child has!" she exclaimed.
"I declare, Bibbs, sometimes lately you look right handsome!"
"He's got to be such a gadabout," Edith giggled.
"I found something of his on the floor up stairs this morning, before anybody was up," said Sheridan.
"I reckon if people lose things in this house and expect to get 'em back, they better get up as soon as I do."
"What was it he lost?" asked Edith.
"Seems to me like I forgot to bring it home with me.
I looked it over-thought probably it was something pretty important, belongin' to a busy man like him." He affected to search his pockets.
"What DID I do with it, now?
Oh yes!
Sheridan gave him a grin.
"Perhaps pretty soon you'll be gettin' up early enough to find things before I do!"
He spoke lightly, not sadly.
"Yes, it's come.
I've shirked and put off, but I can't shirk and put off any longer.
It's really my part to go to him-at least it would save my face.
He means what he says, and the time's come to serve my sentence. Hard labor for life, I think."
Mary shook her head.
"I don't think so.
He's too kind."
"You think my father's KIND?" And Bibbs stared at her.
I'm sure of it.
It's only that he has to be kind in his own way-because he can't understand any other way."
"If that's what you mean by 'kind'!"
She looked at him gravely, earnest concern in her friendly eyes.
"It's going to be pretty hard for you, isn't it?"
"This has been just the last flicker of revolt.
To morrow I'll be a day laborer."
"What is it like-exactly?"
"I get up at six," he said.
"I have a lunch basket to carry with me, which is aristocratic and no advantage.
The other workmen have tin buckets, and tin buckets are better.
I leave the house at six thirty, and I'm at work in my overalls at seven.
"But the work itself?"
"It wasn't muscularly exhausting-not at all.
They couldn't give me a heavier job because I wasn't good enough."
"But what will you do?
I want to know."
"But what is it?" she insisted.
Bibbs explained.
"It's very simple and very easy.
I feed long strips of zinc into a pair of steel jaws, and the jaws bite the zinc into little circles.
He had kept his voice cheerful as he spoke, but he had grown a shade paler, and there was a latent anguish deep in his eyes.
He may have known it and wished her not to see it, for he turned away.
She broke off, and then, after a keen glance at his face, she said: "I should think you WOULD have been a 'bad hand at it'!"
He laughed ruefully.
"I think it's the noise, though I'm ashamed to say it.
"How often is that?"
"The thing should make about sixty eight disks a minute-a little more than one a second."
"And you're close to it?"
"Oh, the workman has to sit in its lap," he said, turning to her more gaily.
"The others don't mind.
I have an idiotic way of flinching from the confounded thing-I flinch and duck a little every time the crash comes, and I couldn't get over it.
I was a treat to the other workmen in that room; they'll be glad to see me back.
She was staring at the wall, and her eyes had a burning brightness in them.
"It doesn't seem possible any one could do that to you," she said, in a low voice.
"no
He's not kind.
He ought to be proud to help you to the leisure to write books; it should be his greatest privilege to have them published for you-"
"Can't you SEE him?" Bibbs interrupted, a faint ripple of hilarity in his voice.
"If he could understand what you're saying-and if you can imagine his taking such a notion, he'd have had r t Bloss put up posters all over the country: 'Read b Sheridan.
Read the Poet with a Punch!' no
It's just as well he never got the-But what's the use?
I've never written anything worth printing, and I never shall."
"You could!" she said.
"That's because you've never seen the poor little things I've tried to do."
"You wouldn't let me, but I KNOW you could!
"It isn't," said BIBBS, honestly.
She gave him a flashing glance, and it was as kind as he said she was. "That sounds wrong," she said, impulsively.
Wouldn't you rather call me 'Mary'?"
Bibbs was dazzled; he drew a long, deep breath and did not speak.
"Wouldn't you?" she asked, without a trace of coquetry.
"If I CAN!" he said, in a low voice.
"Ah, that's very pretty!" she laughed.
"You're such an honest person, it's pleasant to have you gallant sometimes, by way of variety." She became grave again immediately.
"I hear myself laughing as if it were some one else.
It sounds like laughter on the eve of a great calamity." She got up restlessly, crossed the room and leaned against the wall, facing him.
"You've GOT to go back to that place?"
He nodded.
"And the other time you did it-"
"Just over it," said Bibbs.
"Two years.
"I want to say it, but-but I come to a dead balk when I try.
I-"
"Go on.
Say it, whatever it is," she bade him.
"You wouldn't know how to say anything I shouldn't like."
"I doubt if you'd either like or dislike what I want to say," he returned, moving uncomfortably in his chair and looking at his feet-he seemed to feel awkward, thoroughly.
"You see, all my life-until I met you-if I ever felt like saying anything, I wrote it instead.
Saying things is a new trick for me, and this-well, it's just this: I used to feel as if I hadn't ever had any sort of a life at all.
But now it's different-I'm still of no use to anybody, and I don't see any prospect of being useful, but I have had something for myself.
That's all; it's your letting me be near you sometimes, as you have, this strange, beautiful, happy little while!"
She did not speak, but a soft rustling of her garments let him know that she had gone back to her chair again.
The house was still; the shabby old room was so quiet that the sound of a creaking in the wall seemed sharp and loud.
And yet, when Mary spoke at last, her voice was barely audible.
"If you think it has been-happy-to be friends with me-you'd want to-to make it last."
"Yes," said Bibbs, as faintly.
"You'd want to go on being my friend as long as we live, wouldn't you?"
"Yes," he gulped.
"But you make that kind of speech to me because you think it's over."
He tried to evade her.
"Oh, a day laborer can't come in his overalls-"
"No," she interrupted, with a sudden sharpness.
"You said what you did because you think the shop's going to kill you."
"No, no!"
"Yes, you do think that!" She rose to her feet again and came and stood before him.
"Or you think it's going to send you back to the sanitarium. Don't deny it, Bibbs.
There!
You see I'm a friend, or I couldn't do it.
Well, if you meant what you said-and you did mean it, I know it!--you're not going to go back to the sanitarium. The shop sha'n't hurt you.
And now Bibbs looked up.
She stood before him, straight and tall, splendid in generous strength, her eyes shining and wet.
"If I mean THAT much to you," she cried, "they can't harm you!
Go back to the shop-but come to me when your day's work is done.
"You say-" he gasped.
"Every evening, dear Bibbs!"
He could only stare, bewildered.
I want you.
"If I could, I'd go and feed the strips of zinc to the machine with you," she said.
"But all day long I'll send my thoughts to you.
You must keep remembering that your friend stands beside you.
And when the work is done-won't the night make up for the day?"
Light seemed to glow from her; he was blinded by that radiance of kindness.
But all he could say was, huskily, "To think you're there-with me-standing beside the old zinc eater-"
And they laughed and looked at each other, and at last Bibbs found what it meant not to be alone in the world.
CHAPTER twenty
Bibbs went in and stood before him.
"I'm cured, father," he said.
"When do I go back to the shop?
I'm ready."
The desolate and grim old man did not relax.
"I was sittin' up to give you a last chance to say something like that.
I reckon it's about time! I just wanted to see if you'd have manhood enough not to make me take you over there by the collar.
Last night I made up my mind I'd give you just one more day.
Well, you got to it before I did-pretty close to the eleventh hour!
All right.
Think you can get up in time?"
"Six o'clock," Bibbs responded, briskly.
"That's YOUR lookout!" his father grunted.
"They'll put you back on the clippin'-machine.
You get nine dollars a week."
"That reminds me, I didn't mean YOU by 'Midas' in that nonsense I'd been writing.
I meant-"
"I just wanted you to know.
Good night, father."
"G'night!"
The sound of the young man's footsteps ascending the stairs became inaudible, and the house was quiet.
But presently, as Sheridan sat staring angrily at the fire, the shuffling of a pair of slippers could be heard descending, and mrs Sheridan made her appearance, her oblique expression and the state of her toilette being those of a person who, after trying unsuccessfully to sleep on one side, has got up to look for burglars.
"Papa!" she exclaimed, drowsily.
"Why'n't you go to bed?
"What's the matter?" she asked, sleep and anxiety striving sluggishly with each other in her voice.
You got something new on your mind besides Jim's bein' taken away like he was.
What's worryin' you now, papa?"
"Nothin'."
She jeered feebly.
"Just the same as he did before?"
"Until he KNOWS something!"
"He'll go back to the machine he couldn't learn to tend properly in the six months he was there, and he'll stick to it till he DOES learn it!
Do you suppose that lummix ever asked himself WHY I want him to learn it?
No!
And I ain't a goin' to tell him, either!
I sent him there to make him THOROUGH.
He didn't LIKE it!
I don't know what it is, but it's got to be worked out of him.
Now, labor ain't any more a simple question than what it was when we were young.
That's what he did, and the balk's lasted close on to three years.
"I knew there was something else," said mrs Sheridan, blinking over a yawn.
"Suppose something happened to Roscoe," he said.
"THEN what'd I have to look forward to?
THEN what could I depend on to hold things together?
A lummix!
A lummix that hasn't learned how to push a strip o' zinc along a groove!"
"You needn't worry about Roscoe, papa.
He's the strongest child we had.
I never did know anybody keep better health than he does.
I don't believe he's even had a cold in five years.
You better go up to bed, papa."
You don't know what it means, keepin' property together these days-just keepin' it ALIVE, let alone makin' it grow the way I do.
I've seen too many estates hacked away in chunks, big and little.
Carried off?
I've seen a big fortune behave like an ash barrel in a cyclone-there wasn't even a dust heap left to tell where it stood!
I tell you this business life is no fool's job nowadays-a man's got to have eyes in the back of his head.
This country's been fillin' up with it from all over the world for a good many years, and the old camp meetin' days are dead and done with.
Church ain't what it used to be.
There's an awful ruction goin' on, and you got to keep hoppin' if you're goin' to keep your balance on the top of it.
They run like bugs on the bottom of a board-after any piece o' money they hear is loose.
You got to FIGHT to keep your money after you've made it.
He strode up and down the long room, gesticulating-little regarding the troubled and drowsy figure by the fireside.
His throat rumbled thunderously; the words came with stormy bitterness.
I tell you there never was such a time before; there never was such opportunity.
The sluggard is despoiled while he sleeps-yes, by George! if a man lays down they'll eat him before he wakes!--but the live man can build straight up till he touches the sky!
This is the business man's day; it used to be the soldier's day and the statesman's day, but this is OURS!
And that's what my son Bibbs has been doin' all his life, and what he'd rather do now than go out and do his part by me.
And if anything happens to Roscoe-"
"Oh, do stop worryin' over such nonsense," mrs Sheridan interrupted, irritated into sharp wakefulness for the moment.
Aren't you EVER goin' to bed?"
Sheridan halted.
"All right, mamma," he said, with a vast sigh.
"Let's go up." And he snapped off the electric light, leaving only the rosy glow of the fire.
"Did you speak to Roscoe?" she yawned, rising lopsidedly in her drowsiness.
I will to morrow."
He waited.
Then, on the fourth day of the month, Roscoe walked into his father's office at nine in the morning, when Sheridan happened to be alone.
"They told me down stairs you'd left word you wanted to see me."
"Sit down," said Sheridan, rising.
Roscoe sat
His father walked close to him, sniffed suspiciously, and then walked away, smiling bitterly.
"Still at it!"
"Yes," said Roscoe.
What about it?"
"I reckon I better adopt some decent young man," his father returned. "I'd bring Bibbs up here and put him in your place if he was fit.
I would!"
"Better do it," Roscoe assented, sullenly.
"When'd you begin this thing?"
"I always did drink a little.
Ever since I grew up, that is."
"Leave that talk out!
"Well, I don't know as I ever had too much in office hours-until the other day."
Sheridan began cutting.
I've had Ray Wills up from your office.
He didn't want to give you away, but I put the hooks into him, and he came through.
You were drunk twice before and couldn't work.
You been leavin' your office for drinks every few hours for the last three weeks.
Your office is way behind.
You haven't done any work, to count, in a month."
"All right," said Roscoe, drooping under the torture.
"It's all true."
Roscoe's head was sunk between his shoulders.
"I can't stand very much talk about it, father," he said, pleadingly.
"No!" Sheridan cried.
Roscoe shook his head helplessly.
"You can't straighten me out."
"See here!" said Sheridan.
"You needn't worry about that," said Roscoe, looking up with a faint resentment.
"I'm not drinking because I've got a thirst."
"Well, what have you got?"
"Nothing.
Nothing you can do anything about.
Nothing, I tell you."
"We'll see about that!" said Sheridan, harshly.
You bring your wife to dinner to morrow.
You didn't come last Sunday-but you come to morrow.
You better be sure, because I'm going to send Abercrombie down to your office every little while, and he'll let me know."
Roscoe paused at the door.
"You told Abercrombie about it?" he asked.
"TOLD him!" And Sheridan laughed hideously.
CHAPTER nineteen.
DUPLICITY.
Aunt Jane had a bad night, as might have been expected after her trials of the previous day.
She sent for Patricia early in the forenoon, and when the girl arrived she was almost shocked by the change in her aunt's appearance.
"Don't ask me to do that, aunt," replied the girl, firmly.
"My mind is fully made up."
"I have made mistakes, I know," continued the woman feebly; "but I want to do the right thing, at last."
"Then I will show you how," said Patricia, quickly.
"You mustn't think me impertinent, aunt, for I don't mean to be so at all.
But tell me; why did you wish to leave me your money?"
"Because your nature is quite like my own, child, and I admire your independence and spirit."
"But my cousins are much more deserving," said she, thoughtfully. "Louise is very sweet and amiable, and loves you more than I do, while Beth is the most sensible and practical girl I have ever known."
I told you yesterday I should not try to be just.
I mean to leave my property according to my personal desire, and no one shall hinder me."
"But that is quite wrong, aunt, and if you desire me to inherit your wealth you will be disappointed.
Don't you know what that is?"
"Perhaps you will tell me," said Aunt Jane, curiously.
"With pleasure," returned Patsy.
"mr Bradley left you this property because he loved you, and love blinded him to all sense of justice. Such an estate should not have passed into the hands of aliens because of a lover's whim.
He should have considered his own flesh and blood."
I have done so.
When his mother died, I had the boy brought here, and he has lived here ever since."
"It would please me beyond measure to have you make your will in his favor, and you would be doing the right thing at last."
"I won't," said Aunt Jane, angrily.
"It would also be considerate and just to the memory of mr Bradley," continued the girl.
"I have left him five thousand," said the woman.
"Not enough to educate him properly," replied Patsy, with a shake of her head.
Aunt Jane coughed, unsympathetically.
"The boy is nothing to me," she said.
"But he ought to have Elmhurst, at least," pleaded the girl.
"no"
"As a matter of justice, the place should never have been yours, and I won't accept a dollar of the money if I starve to death!"
"Think of your father," suggested Aunt Jane, cunningly.
Also I'd like to go to a girl's college, like Smith or Wellesley, and get a proper education.
But not with your money, Aunt Jane.
It would burn my fingers.
Always I would think that if you had not been hard and miserly this same money would have saved my mother's life.
No!
I loathe your money.
Keep it or throw it to the dogs, if you won't give it to the boy it belongs to.
But don't you dare to will your selfish hoard to me."
"Let us change the subject, Patricia."
"Will you change your will?"
"no".
"Then I won't talk to you.
I'm angry and hurt, and if I stay here I'll say things I shall be sorry for."
With these words she marched out of the room, her cheeks flaming, and Aunt Jane looked after her with admiring eyes.
"She's right," she whispered to herself.
This interview was but the beginning of a series that lasted during the next fortnight, during which time the invalid persisted in sending for Patricia and fighting the same fight over and over again.
Always the girl pleaded for Kenneth to inherit, and declared she would not accept the money and Elmhurst; and always Aunt Jane stubbornly refused to consider the boy and tried to tempt the girl with pictures of the luxury and pleasure that riches would bring her.
The interviews were generally short and spirited, however, and during the intervals Patsy associated more than ever with her cousins, both of whom grew really fond of her.
With Patsy out of the field it was quite possible the estate would be divided between her cousins, or even go entire to one or the other of them; and this hope constantly buoyed their spirits and filled their days with interest as they watched the fight between their aunt and their cousin.
Patricia never told them she was pleading so hard for the boy.
Aunt Jane was really worn out with the constant squabbling with her favorite niece.
She had taken a turn for the worse, too, and began to decline rapidly.
So, her natural cunning and determination to have her own way enhanced by her illness, the woman decided to deceive Patricia and enjoy her few remaining days in peace.
"Suppose," she said to mr Watson, "my present will stands, and after my death the estate becomes the property of Patricia.
Can she refuse it?"
"Not legally," returned the lawyer.
"It would remain in her name, but under my control, during her minority.
"By that time she will have gained more sense," declared Aunt Jane, much pleased with this aspect of the case, "and it isn't reasonable that having enjoyed a fortune for a time any girl would throw it away. I'll stick to my point, Silas, but I'll try to make Patricia believe she has won me over."
Therefore, the very next time that the girl pleaded with her to make Kenneth her heir, she said, with a clever assumption of resignation:
Patricia could scarcely believe her ears.
"Do you really mean it, aunt?" she asked, flushing red with pleasure.
"I mean exactly what I say, and now let us cease all bickerings, my dear, and my few remaining days will be peaceful and happy."
Patricia thanked her aunt with eager words, and said, as indeed she felt, that she could almost love Aunt Jane for her final, if dilatory, act of justice.
mr Watson chanced to enter the room at that moment, and the girl cried out:
"Tell him, aunt!
Let him get the paper ready at once."
"There is no reason for haste," said Aunt Jane, meeting; the lawyer's questioning gaze with some embarrassment.
Silas Watson was an honorable and upright man, and his client's frequent doubtful methods had in past years met his severe censure. Yet he had once promised his dead friend, Tom Bradley, that he would serve Jane Merrick faithfully.
Her recent questionings had prepared him for some act of duplicity, but he had by no means understood her present object, nor did she mean that he should.
So she answered his questioning look by saying:
The lawyer regarded her with amazement.
Then his brow darkened, for he thought she was playing with the girl, and was not sincere.
"Tell him to draw up the paper right away, aunt!" begged Patricia, with sparkling eyes.
"As soon as you can, Silas," said the invalid.
"And, aunt, can't you spare a little more to Louise and Beth?
It would make them so happy."
"Double the amount I had allowed to each of them," the woman commanded her lawyer.
"Can it all be ready to sign tonight?" asked Patsy, excitedly.
"I'll try, my dear," replied the old lawyer, gravely.
Then he turned to Jane Merrick.
Patsy's heart suddenly sank.
"Yes," was the reply.
"I am tired of opposing this child's wishes. What do I care what becomes of my money, when I am gone?
All that I desire is to have my remaining days peaceful."
"They shall be, aunt!" she cried.
"I promise it."
CHAPTER four.
'And she won't, so you're quite safe.'
'Mother dear,' said Anthea.
'About cook,' said Anthea.
'It's not her fault,' said Anthea.
'May I tell you about it from the beginning?'
'It's like this,' said Anthea, in a hurry: 'that egg, you know, that came in the carpet; we put it in the fire and it hatched into the Phoenix, and the carpet was a wishing carpet-and-'
'Now do be quiet.
I've got a lot of letters to write.
I'm going to Bournemouth to morrow with the Lamb-and there's that bazaar.'
'But, mother,' said Anthea, when mother put down the pen to lick an envelope, 'the carpet takes us wherever we like-and-'
'I promised them, and I've no time to go to Liberty's now.'
'It shall,' said Anthea, 'but, mother-'
They thought her cap was a crown, and-'
'And daddy's got to go to Scotland.
'When's the bazaar?'
'On Saturday,' said mother, 'at the schools.
The Phoenix begged to be excused.
So they sat on the carpet, and thought and thought and thought till they almost began to squint.
But the faithful carpet had not deceived them.
Mother turned her dear head and looked straight at them, and DID NOT SEE THEM!
'We're invisible,' Cyril whispered: 'what awful larks!'
But to the girls it was not larks at all.
'I don't like it,' said Jane. 'Mother never looked at us like that before.
Just as if she didn't love us-as if we were somebody else's children, and not very nice ones either-as if she didn't care whether she saw us or not.'
Come to mother,' she cried, and jumped up and ran to the baby.
'It feels just exactly as if mother didn't love us.'
It would be different if you were a prince, or a bandit, or a burglar.'
And on Saturday morning, the first thing, they went.
There was no finding the Phoenix, so they sat on the beautiful wishing carpet, and said-
'We want Indian things for mother's bazaar.
'I can't understand a word,' said Cyril. 'How on earth are we to ask for things for our bazaar?'
'We asked the carpet to take us where we could get Indian things for bazaars,' said Anthea, 'and it will.'
Her faith was justified.
She asks do you lose yourselves, and do you desire to sell carpet?
She see you from her palkee.
And when the queen asked to buy the carpet, the children said 'no'
'Why?' asked the ranee.
And Jane briefly said why, and the interpreter interpreted.
The queen spoke, and then the interpreter said-
But Cyril said very firmly, 'No, thank you.
So then the queen sent out for little pretty things, and her servants piled the carpet with them.
And of course they were.
A crowd instantly collected.
I wonder why.
'Come out! whatever do you mean by creeping about under the stalls, like earwigs?'
'We were looking at the things in the corner.'
'Such nasty, prying ways,' said Mrs Biddle, 'will never make you successful in life.
There's nothing there but packing and dust.'
'Oh, isn't there!' said Jane.
'Little girl, don't be rude,' said Mrs Biddle, flushing violet.
No one would believe it; and if they did, and wrote to thank mother, she would think-well, goodness only knew what she would think.
The other three children felt the same.
'Then Charles has not forgotten, after all.'
Of course they are for me.'
'My stall touches yours at the corner,' said poor Miss Peasmarsh, timidly, 'and my cousin did promise-'
'That stiff starched PIG!'
'And after all our trouble!
I'm hoarse with gassing to that trousered lady in India.'
Who's got a pencil?'
'I don't understand about that blue paper,' said Mrs Biddle. 'It looks to me like the work of a lunatic.
Miss Peasmarsh was very willing, for now her stall, that had been SO neglected, was surrounded by people who wanted to buy, and she was glad to be helped.
But I am afraid they were not so sorry as they ought to have been.
It took some time to arrange the things on the stall.
'There's nothing to go back for,' said Miss Peasmarsh gaily; 'thanks to you dear children we've sold everything.'
'Oh,' said Miss Peasmarsh, radiantly, 'don't bother about the carpet. I've sold even that.
We had cook from her, and she told us so.'
But the others were struck dumb.
How could they say, 'The carpet is ours!' For who brings carpets to bazaars?
It was then that they dragged her away.
'Mrs Biddle, WE meant to have that carpet.
He found the others and said-
'Don't let's burgle-I mean do daring and dashing rescue acts-till we've given her a chance.
Be off, or I'll send for the police.'
'Don't be angry,' said Anthea, soothingly, 'we only wanted to ask you to let us have the carpet.
We have quite twelve shillings between us, and-'
Mrs Biddle actually stamped that booted foot of hers.
'You rude, barefaced child!' she said.
I'm sorry we vexed you at the bazaar to day.'
'Not another word,' said the changed Mrs Biddle.
How vexing!' said Mrs Biddle, kindly.
Have a piece of cake before you go!
'Yes, thank you,' said Robert.
'I say, you ARE good.'
'You ARE a dear,' said Anthea, and she and Mrs Biddle kissed each other heartily.
'Yes,' said Robert, 'and the odd part is that you feel just as if it was REAL-her being so jolly, I mean-and not only the carpet making her nice.'
"Good!
"To night!" Kauf's eyes went wide, then he started to flush.
CHAPTER five
It was time, indeed, that he helped himself.
"No!
"Never see them again?" she repeated, puzzled.
Good night!"
"The bathrooms are exactly opposite."
What am I to do?
BEATRICE."
"Dear mr Romilly,
"j l POTTS."
"I want to look at you," he confessed.
Why, you have quite light hair, and I thought it was dark!"
This morning-why, surely they are brown?"
And the story itself.
"Well?"
You couldn't.
Am I right?"
He laughed.
"Of course you are!
Paul Lawton of Brockton.
"What about luncheon?
"I'm with you," mr Raymond Greene chimed in.
"What the mischief is a last?" he inquired.
We love to hear the flickers call, and we readily pardon any one of their number which, as occasionally happens, is bold enough to wake us in the early morning by drumming on the shingles of the roof.
At Sagamore Hill we love a great many things-birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles and children and hard work and the joy of life.
We have great fireplaces, and in them the logs roar and crackle during the long winter evenings.
The big piazza is for the hot, still afternoons of summer.
Naturally, any man who has been President, and filled other positions, accumulates such things, with scant regard to his own personal merits.
I need scarcely add, but I will add for the benefit of those who do not know, that this attitude of self respecting identification of interest and purpose is not only compatible with but can only exist when there is fine and real discipline, as thorough and genuine as the discipline that has always obtained in the most formidable fighting fleets and armies.
The discipline and the mutual respect are complementary, not antagonistic.
The books are everywhere.
But the books have overflowed into all the other rooms too.
Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover's besetting sin, of what mr Edgar Allan Poe calls "the mad pride of intellectuality," taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.
I am not speaking of these, for they are not properly "books" at all; they come in the category of time tables, telephone directories, and other useful agencies of civilized life.
Personally, granted that these books are decent and healthy, the one test to which I demand that they all submit is that of being interesting.
If the book is not interesting to the reader, then in all but an infinitesimal number of cases it gives scant benefit to the reader.
Now, I am very proud of my big game library.
I suppose there must be many big game libraries in Continental Europe, and possibly in England, more extensive than mine, but I have not happened to come across any such library in this country.
Some of the originals go back to the sixteenth century, and there are copies or reproductions of the two or three most famous hunting books of the Middle Ages, such as the Duke of York's translation of Gaston Phoebus, and the queer book of the Emperor Maximilian.
Let me add that ours is in no sense a collector's library.
Each book was procured because some one of the family wished to read it.
We could never afford to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much interested in their insides.
Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and my answer is, poetry and novels-including short stories under the head of novels.
If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry.
He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse.
It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books; and if he is to go off for a year or so where he cannot get many books, it is an excellent thing to choose a five foot library of particular books which in that particular year and on that particular trip he would like to read.
But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times; and there is no such thing as a five foot library which will satisfy the needs of even one particular man on different occasions extending over a number of years.
Milton is best for one mood and Pope for another.
A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time.
He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like.
Now I am humbly and sincerely conscious that this is a demerit in me and not in Hamlet; and yet it would not do me any good to pretend that I like Hamlet as much as Macbeth when, as a matter of fact, I don't.
They must almost be AEschylus or Euripides, Goethe or Moliere, in order that I may not feel after finishing them a sense of virtuous pride in having achieved a task.
There is on our book shelves a little pre Victorian novel or tale called "The Semi Attached Couple." It is told with much humor; it is a story of gentlefolk who are really gentlefolk; and to me it is altogether delightful.
But outside the members of my own family I have never met a human being who had even heard of it, and I don't suppose I ever shall meet one.
Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.
In the three houses there were at one time sixteen of these small cousins, all told, and once we ranged them in order of size and took their photograph.
There are many kinds of success in life worth having.
It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful business man, or railroad man, or farmer, or a successful lawyer or doctor; or a writer, or a President, or a ranchman, or the colonel of a fighting regiment, or to kill grizzly bears and lions.
And as for a life deliberately devoted to pleasure as an end-why, the greatest happiness is the happiness that comes as a by-product of striving to do what must be done, even though sorrow is met in the doing.
There is a bit of homely philosophy, quoted by Squire Bill Widener, of Widener's Valley, Virginia, which sums up one's duty in life: "Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are."
The country is the place for children, and if not the country, a city small enough so that one can get out into the country.
One of these wagons, by the way, a gorgeous red one, had "Express" painted on it in gilt letters, and was known to the younger children as the "'spress" wagon.
They evidently associated the color with the term.
When we reached the store, we found to our dismay that the wagon which we had seen had been sold.
When their mother and I returned from a row, we would often see the children waiting for us, running like sand spiders along the beach.
They always liked to swim in company with a grown up of buoyant temperament and inventive mind, and the float offered limitless opportunities for enjoyment while bathing.
Well, we used to play stage coach on the float while in swimming, and instead of tamely getting up and turning round, the child whose turn it was had to plunge overboard.
In the effort to keep the children that were well and those that were sick apart, their mother and I had to camp out in improvised fashion.
When the eldest small boy was getting well, and had recovered his spirits, I slept on a sofa beside his bed-the sofa being so short that my feet projected over anyhow.
The small boy was convalescing, and was engaged in playing on the floor with some tin ships, together with two or three pasteboard monitors and rams of my own manufacture.
My pasteboard rams and monitors were fascinating-if a naval architect may be allowed to praise his own work-and as property they were equally divided between the little girl and the small boy.
The small boy was busily reciting the phases of the fight, which now approached its climax, and the little girl evidently suspected that her monitor was destined to play the part of victim.
Little boy.
"And then they steamed bang into the monitor."
Little girl.
"Brother, don't you sink my monitor!"
Little boy (without heeding, and hurrying toward the climax).
"And the torpedo went at the monitor!"
Little girl.
"My monitor is not to sink!"
Little girl.
"It didn't do any such thing.
My monitor always goes to bed at seven, and it's now quarter past.
My monitor was in bed and couldn't sink!"
Of course the children took much interest in the trophies I occasionally brought back from my hunts.
And will he bring me back a bear?" When, some five months later, I returned, of course in my uniform, this little boy was much puzzled as to my identity, although he greeted me affably with "Good afternoon, Colonel." Half an hour later somebody asked him, "Where's father?" to which he responded, "I don't know; but the Colonel is taking a bath."
Of course the children anthropomorphized-if that is the proper term-their friends of the animal world.
Among these friends at one period was the baker's horse, and on a very rainy day I heard the little girl, who was looking out of the window, say, with a melancholy shake of her head, "Oh!
there's poor Kraft's horse, all soppin' wet!"
On one occasion I was holding a conversation with one of the leaders in Congress, Uncle Pete Hepburn, about the Railroad Rate Bill.
The children were strictly trained not to interrupt business, but on this particular occasion the little boy's feelings overcame him.
He had been loaned a king snake, which, as all nature lovers know, is not only a useful but a beautiful snake, very friendly to human beings; and he came rushing home to show the treasure.
He was holding it inside his coat, and it contrived to wiggle partly down the sleeve.
It was real country, and-speaking from the somewhat detached point of view of the masculine parent-I should say there was just the proper mixture of freedom and control in the management of the children.
They were never allowed to be disobedient or to shirk lessons or work; and they were encouraged to have all the fun possible.
They loved pony Grant.
As he leaned over, his broad straw hat tilted on end, and pony Grant meditatively munched the brim; whereupon the small boy looked up with a wail of anguish, evidently thinking the pony had decided to treat him like a radish.
Then there were flying squirrels, and kangaroo rats, gentle and trustful, and a badger whose temper was short but whose nature was fundamentally friendly.
"He bites legs sometimes, but he never bites faces," said the little boy.
As for the dogs, of course there were many, and during their lives they were intimate and valued family friends, and their deaths were household tragedies.
He would never let the other dogs fight, and he himself never fought unless circumstances imperatively demanded it; but he was a murderous animal when he did fight.
He was not only exceedingly fond of the water, as was to be expected, but passionately devoted to gunpowder in every form, for he loved firearms and fairly reveled in the Fourth of July celebrations-the latter being rather hazardous occasions, as the children strongly objected to any "safe and sane" element being injected into them, and had the normal number of close shaves with rockets, Roman candles, and firecrackers.
It stood at the meeting spot of three fences.
A favorite amusement used to be an obstacle race when the barn was full of hay.
They rushed inside, clambered over or burrowed through the hay, as suited them best, dropped out of a place where a loose board had come off, got over, through, or under the three fences, and raced back to the starting point.
When they were little, their respective fathers were expected also to take part in the obstacle race, and when with the advance of years the fathers finally refused to be contestants, there was a general feeling of pained regret among the children at such a decline in the sporting spirit.
Another famous place for handicap races was Cooper's Bluff, a gigantic sand bank rising from the edge of the bay, a mile from the house.
If the tide was high there was an added thrill, for some of the contestants were sure to run into the water.
She held together well for a season or two after having been cleared of everything down to the timbers, and this gave us the chance to make camping out trips in which the girls could also be included, for we put them to sleep in the wreck, while the boys slept on the shore; squaw picnics, the children called them.
For nearly thirty years we have given the Christmas tree to the school.
We had a sleigh for winter; but if, when there was much snow, the whole family desired to go somewhere, we would put the body of the farm wagon on runners and all bundle in together.
When we were in Washington, the children usually went with their mother to the Episcopal church, while I went to the Dutch Reformed.
On one occasion, when the child's conduct fell just short of warranting such extreme measures, his mother, as they were on the point of entering church, concluded a homily by a quotation which showed a certain haziness of memory concerning the marriage and baptismal services: "No, little boy, if this conduct continues, I shall think that you neither love, honor, nor obey me!"
However, the culprit was much impressed with a sense of shortcoming as to the obligations he had undertaken; so the result was as satisfactory as if the quotation had been from the right service.
There was also much training that came as a by-product and was perhaps almost as valuable-not as a substitute but as an addition.
The children did not wish me to read the books they desired their mother to read, and I usually took some such book as "Hereward the Wake," or "Guy Mannering," or "The Last of the Mohicans" or else some story about a man eating tiger, or a man eating lion, from one of the hunting books in my library.
Besides profiting by the more canonical books on education, we profited by certain essays and articles of a less orthodox type.
I wish to express my warmest gratitude for such books-not of avowedly didactic purpose-as Laura Richards's books, Josephine Dodge Daskam's "Madness of Philip," Palmer Cox's "Queer People," the melodies of Father Goose and Mother Wild Goose, Flandreau's "mrs White's," Myra Kelly's stories of her little East Side pupils, and Michelson's "Madigans." It is well to take duties, and life generally, seriously.
Like other children, they were apt to take to bed with them treasures which they particularly esteemed.
Next morning dr Lambert rather enviously congratulated the boy on the fact that stones and roots evidently did not interfere with the soundness of his sleep; to which the boy responded, "Well, Doctor, you see it isn't very long since I used to take fourteen china animals to bed with me every night!"
As the children grew up, Sagamore Hill remained delightful for them. There were picnics and riding parties, there were dances in the north room-sometimes fancy dress dances-and open air plays on the green tennis court of one of the cousin's houses.
The children are no longer children now.
They have had their share of accidents and escapes; as I write, word comes from a far off land that one of them, whom Seth Bullock used to call "Kim" because he was the friend of all mankind, while bossing a dangerous but necessary steel structural job has had two ribs and two back teeth broken, and is back at work.
They have known and they will know joy and sorrow, triumph and temporary defeat.
But I believe they are all the better off because of their happy and healthy childhood.
It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.
No father and mother can hope to escape sorrow and anxiety, and there are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by.
But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.
There are many forms of success, many forms of triumph.
I would not even suggest a mistranslation; but the idea intended by the word has been so misunderstood and therefore mistaught, that it requires some consideration of the word itself to get at a right recognition of the moral fact it represents.
I think that here the same word is used for man's dismission of his sins, as is elsewhere used for God's dismission or remission of them.
In both uses, it is a sending away of sins, with the difference of meaning that comes from the differing sources of the action.
Both God and man send away sins, but in the one case God sends away the sins of the man, and in the other the man sends away his own sins.
That the phrase here intends repentance unto the ceasing from sin, the giving up of what is wrong, I will try to show at least probable.
The kind and scope of the repentance or change, and not any end to be gained by it, appears intended.
The change must be one of will and conduct-a radical change of life on the part of the man: he must repent-that is, change his mind-not to a different opinion, not even to a mere betterment of his conduct-not to anything less than a sending away of his sins.
This interpretation of the preaching of the Baptist seems to me, I repeat, the more direct, the fuller of meaning, the more logical.
They must cleanse, not the streets of their cities, not their houses or their garments or even their persons, but their hearts and their doings.
Again, observe that, when the Pharisees came to john, he said to them, 'Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance:' is not this the same as, 'Repent unto the sending away of your sins'?
Note also, that, when the multitudes came to the prophet, and all, with the classes most obnoxious to the rest, the publicans and the soldiers, asked what he would have them do-thus plainly recognizing that something was required of them-his instruction was throughout in the same direction: they must send away their sins; and each must begin with the fault that lay next him.
They could not rid themselves of their sins, but they could set about sending them away; they could quarrel with them, and proceed to turn them out of the house: the Lord was on his way to do his part in their final banishment.
Those who had repented to the sending away of their sins, he would baptize with a holy power to send them away indeed.
The operant will to get rid of them would be baptized with a fire that should burn them up.
I think, then, that the part of the repentant man, and not the part of God, in the sending away of sins, is intended here.
It is the man's one preparation for receiving the power to overcome them, the baptism of fire.
Not seldom, what comes in the name of the gospel of Jesus Christ, must seem, even to one not far from the kingdom of heaven, no good news at all.
God is doing his part, is undergoing the mighty toil of an age long creation, endowing men with power to be; but few as yet are those who take up their part, who respond to the call of God, who will to be, who put forth a divine effort after real existence.
To the many, the spirit of the prophet cries, 'Turn ye, and change your way!
Let God throne himself in you, that his liberty be your life, and you free men.
That he may enter, clear the house for him.
Send away the bad things out of it.
Depart from evil, and do good.
The duty that lieth at thy door, do it, be it great or small.'
For indeed in this region there is no great or small.
'Be content with your wages,' said the Baptist to the soldiers.
What is there for us when we discover that we are out of the way, but to bethink ourselves and turn?
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
CHAPTER one DOROTHY AND RICHARD.
It was the middle of autumn, and had rained all day.
The room to which the window having this prospect belonged was large and low, with a dark floor of uncarpeted oak.
At the opposite corner of the great low arched chimney sat a lady past the prime of life, but still beautiful, though the beauty was all but merged in the loveliness that rises from the heart to the face of such as have taken the greatest step in life-that is, as the old proverb says, the step out of doors.
She was plainly yet rather richly dressed, in garments of an old-fashioned and well preserved look.
Her hair was cut short above her forehead, and frizzed out in bunches of little curls on each side.
Close round her neck was a string of amber beads, that gave a soft harmonious light to her complexion.
The execution of lord Strafford was news that had not yet begun to 'hiss the speaker.'
'The world has seldom seen its like.'
'But tell me, master Herbert,' said the lady, 'why comes it in this our day?
'Be it far from me to presume to set forth the ways of Providence!' returned her guest.
Alas!' he went on, with a new suggestion from the image he had been using, 'if the beginning of strife be as the letting out of water, what shall be the end of that strife whose beginning is the letting out of blood?'
that such times of fierce ungodly tempest must ever follow upon seasons of peace and comfort?--even as your cousin of holy memory, in his verses concerning the church militant, writes:
"Thus also sin and darkness follow still The church and sun, with all their power and skill."'
To judge by the tokens the wise man gives us, the mourners are already going about my streets.
The almond tree flourisheth at least.'
'But think of those whom we must leave behind us, master Herbert. How will it fare with them?' said the lady in troubled tone, and glancing in the direction of the window.
In the window sat a girl, gazing from it with the look of a child who had uttered all her incantations, and could imagine no abatement in the steady rain pour.
'We shall leave behind us strong hearts and sound heads too,' said mr Herbert. 'And I bethink me there will be none stronger or sounder than those of your young cousins, my late pupils, of whom I hear brave things from Oxford, and in whose affection my spirit constantly rejoices.'
'You will be glad to hear such good news of your relatives, Dorothy,' said the lady, addressing her daughter.
Even as she said the words, the setting sun broke through the mass of grey cloud, and poured over the earth a level flood of radiance, in which the red wheat glowed, and the drops that hung on every ear flashed like diamonds.
The girl's hair caught it as she turned her face to answer her mother, and an aureole of brown tinted gold gleamed for a moment about her head.
But the girl rose, and, turning again to the window, stood for a moment rapt in the transfiguration passing upon the world.
The vault of grey was utterly shattered, but, gathering glory from ruin, was hurrying in rosy masses away from under the loftier vault of blue.
The ordered shocks upon twenty fields sent their long purple shadows across the flush; and the evening wind, like the sighing that follows departed tears, was shaking the jewels from their feathery tops.
The sunflowers and hollyhocks no longer cowered under the tyranny of the rain, but bowed beneath the weight of the gems that adorned them.
A flame burned as upon an altar on the top of every tree, and the very pools that lay on the distant road had their message of light to give to the hopeless earth.
As she gazed, another hue than that of the sunset, yet rosy too, gradually flushed the face of the maiden. She turned suddenly from the window, and left the room, shaking a shower of diamonds from the honeysuckle as she passed out through the porch upon the gravel walk.
Possibly her elders found her departure a relief, for although they took no notice of it, their talk became more confidential, and was soon mingled with many names both of rank and note, with a familiarity which to a stranger might have seemed out of keeping with the humbler character of their surroundings.
But when Dorothy Vaughan had passed a corner of the house to another garden more ancient in aspect, and in some things quaint even to grotesqueness, she was in front of a portion of the house which indicated a far statelier past-closed and done with, like the rooms within those shuttered windows.
Such, however, was the character of lady Vaughan, that, although she mingled little with the great families in the neighbourhood, she was so much respected, that she would have been a welcome visitor to most of them.
The reverend mr matthew Herbert was a clergyman from the Welsh border, a man of some note and influence, who had been the personal friend both of his late relative George Herbert and of the famous dr Donne.
Strongly attached to the English church, and recoiling with disgust from the practices of the puritans-as much, perhaps, from refinement of taste as abhorrence of schism-he had never yet fallen into such a passion for episcopacy as to feel any cordiality towards the schemes of the archbishop.
To those who knew him his silence concerning it was a louder protest against the policy of Laud than the fiercest denunciations of the puritans.
CHAPTER six.
Great was the merriment in Raglan Castle over the discomfiture of the bumpkins, and many were the compliments Tom received in parlour, nursery, kitchen, guard room, everywhere, on the success of his hastily formed scheme for the chastisement of their presumption.
The household had looked for a merry time on the occasion of the wedding, but had not expected such a full cup of delight as had been pressed out for them betwixt the self importance of the overweening yokels and the inventive faculties of Tom Fool.
For he knew that, in some shape or other, and that certainly not the true one, the affair would be spread over the country, where now prejudice against the Catholics was strong and dangerous in proportion to the unreason of those who cherished it.
Now, also, it was becoming pretty plain that except the king yielded every prerogative, and became the puppet which the mingled pride and apprehension of the Parliament would have him, their differences must ere long be referred to the arbitration of the sword, in which case there was no shadow of doubt in the mind of the earl as to the part befitting a peer of the realm.
The king was a protestant, but no less the king; and not this man, but his parents, had sinned in forsaking the church-of which sin their offspring had now to bear the penalty, reaping the whirlwind sprung from the stormy seeds by them sown.
For what were the puritans but the lawfully begotten children of the so called reformation, whose spirit they inherited, and in whose footsteps they so closely followed?
In the midst of such reflections, dawned slowly in the mind of the devout old man the enchanting hope that perhaps he might be made the messenger of God to lead back to the true fold the wandering feet of his king.
But, fail or speed in any result, so long as his castle held together, it should stand for the king.
Faithful catholic as he was, the brave old man was English to the backbone.
This visit of search, let it have originated how it might, and be as despicable in itself as it was ludicrous in its result, showed but too clearly how strong the current of popular feeling was setting against all the mounds of social distinction, and not kingly prerogative alone.
What preparations might be needful, must be prudent.
At length one of them, whom the others called Caspar, retired, and the earl was left with his son Edward, lord Herbert, the only person in the castle who had gone to neither window nor door to delight himself with the discomfiture of the parliamentary commissioners.
They entered the long picture gallery, faintly lighted from its large windows to the court, but chiefly from the oriel which formed the northern end of it, where they now sat down, the earl being, for the second time that night, weary.
Behind them was a long dim line of portraits, broken only by the great chimney piece supported by human figures, all of carved stone, and before them, nearly as dim, was the moon massed landscape-a lovely view of the woodland, pasture, and red tilth to the northward of the castle.
They sat silent for a while, and the younger said:
'I fear you are fatigued, my lord.
It is late for you to be out of bed; nature is mortal.'
But therein lies the comfort-it cannot last.
'Were it not for villanous saltpetre, my lord, the castle would hold out well enough.'
Be sure, Herbert, I shall not render the keep for the taking of the outworks.'
'Do not let us forecast evil, only prepare for it.'
'You shall lack nothing, Herbert, that either counsel or purse of mine may reach unto.'
'I thank your lordship, for much depends upon both.
And so I fear will his majesty find-if it conies to the worst.'
A brief pause followed.
'My father is pleased to say so.'
Bethink thee, son-what man can be pleased to part with his money?
And while my king is poor, I must be rich for him.
'So long as you still keep wherewithal to give, I shall be content, my lord.'
I will to bed.
We must go the round again to morrow-with the sun to hold as a candle.'
The next day the same party made a similar circuit three times-in the morning, at noon, and in the evening-that the full light might uncover what the shadows had hid, and that the shadows might show what a perpendicular light could not reveal.
After this came a review of the outer fortifications-if, indeed, they were worthy of the name-enclosing the gardens, the old tilting yard, now used as a bowling green, the home farmyard, and other such outlying portions under the stewardship of sir Ralph Blackstone and the governorship of Charles Somerset, the earl's youngest son.
It was here that the most was wanted; and the next few days were chiefly spent in surveying these works, and drawing plans for their extension, strengthening, and connection-especially about the stables, armourer's shop, and smithy, where the building of new defences was almost immediately set on foot.
At length, to conclude the inspection, lord Herbert and the master of the armoury held consultation with the head armourer, and the mighty accumulation of weapons of all sorts was passed under the most rigid scrutiny; many of them were sent to the forge, and others carried to the ground floor of the keep.
Some of them drove into the paved court, for here and there a buttress was wanted inside, and of the battlements not a few were weather beaten and out of repair.
The earl, however, although he yielded, maintained that the flying of the wall when struck was a more than counterbalancing danger.
The stock of provisions began to increase.
The dry larder, which lay under the court, between the kitchen and buttery, was by degrees filled with gammons and flitches of bacon, well dried and smoked. Wheat, barley, oats, and pease were stored in the granary, and potatoes in a pit dug in the orchard.
Strange faces in the guard room caused wonderings and questions amongst the women.
"Telemachus, you should not remain so far away from home any longer, nor leave your property with such dangerous people in your house; they will eat up everything you have among them, and you will have been on a fool's errand.
Go home, therefore, and put everything in charge of the most respectable woman servant that you have, until it shall please heaven to send you a wife of your own.
Let me tell you also of another matter which you had better attend to.
I do not much think they will succeed; it is more likely that some of those who are now eating up your property will find a grave themselves.
It will be morning soon; wait till Menelaus has brought his presents and put them in the chariot for us; and let him say good bye to us in the usual way.
So long as he lives a guest should never forget a host who has shown him kindness."
As he spoke day began to break, and Menelaus, who had already risen, leaving Helen in bed, came towards them.
"Menelaus," said he, "let me go back now to my own country, for I want to get home."
And Menelaus answered, "Telemachus, if you insist on going I will not detain you.
I do not like to see a host either too fond of his guest or too rude to him.
Moderation is best in all things, and not letting a man go when he wants to do so is as bad as telling him to go if he would like to stay.
One should treat a guest well as long as he is in the house and speed him when he wants to leave it.
No one will send us away empty handed; every one will give us something-a bronze tripod, a couple of mules, or a gold cup."
"Menelaus," replied Telemachus, "I want to go home at once, for when I came away I left my property without protection, and fear that while looking for my father I shall come to ruin myself, or find that something valuable has been stolen during my absence."
When Menelaus heard this he immediately told his wife and servants to prepare a sufficient dinner from what there might be in the house.
At this moment Eteoneus joined him, for he lived close by and had just got up; so Menelaus told him to light the fire and cook some meat, which he at once did.
I will now present you with the finest and most precious piece of plate in all my house.
It is a mixing bowl of pure silver, except the rim, which is inlaid with gold, and it is the work of Vulcan.
Phaedimus king of the Sidonians made me a present of it in the course of a visit that I paid him while I was on my return home. I should like to give it to you."
With these words he placed the double cup in the hands of Telemachus, while Megapenthes brought the beautiful mixing bowl and set it before him.
Hard by stood lovely Helen with the robe ready in her hand.
So saying she gave the robe over to him and he received it gladly.
A maid servant brought them water in a beautiful golden ewer, and poured it into a silver basin for them to wash their hands, and she drew a clean table beside them; an upper servant brought them bread and offered them many good things of what there was in the house.
Eteoneus carved the meat and gave them each their portions, while Megapenthes poured out the wine.
"We will be sure, sir," answered Telemachus, "to tell him everything as soon as we see him.
I wish I were as certain of finding Ulysses returned when I get back to Ithaca, that I might tell him of the very great kindness you have shown me and of the many beautiful presents I am taking with me."
As he was thus speaking a bird flew on his right hand-an eagle with a great white goose in its talons which it had carried off from the farm yard-and all the men and women were running after it and shouting.
It came quite close up to them and flew away on their right hands in front of the horses.
Menelaus was thinking what would be the most proper answer for him to make, but Helen was too quick for him and said, "I will read this matter as heaven has put it in my heart, and as I doubt not that it will come to pass.
As he spoke he lashed his horses and they started off at full speed through the town towards the open country.
There they passed the night and were treated hospitably.
When the child of morning, rosy fingered Dawn, appeared, they again yoked their horses and their places in the chariot.
They drove out through the inner gateway and under the echoing gatehouse of the outer court.
I know how obstinate he is, and am sure he will not let you go; he will come down here to fetch you, and he will not go back without you.
But he will be very angry."
With this he drove his goodly steeds back to the city of the Pylians and soon reached his home, but Telemachus called the men together and gave his orders.
"Now, my men," said he, "get everything in order on board the ship, and let us set out home."
He was descended from Melampus, who used to live in Pylos, the land of sheep; he was rich and owned a great house, but he was driven into exile by the great and powerful king Neleus.
Neleus seized his goods and held them for a whole year, during which he was a close prisoner in the house of king Phylacus, and in much distress of mind both on account of the daughter of Neleus and because he was haunted by a great sorrow that dread Erinys had laid upon him.
His sons were Alcmaeon and Amphilochus.
Telemachus said, "I will answer you quite truly.
Therefore I have taken this ship and got my crew together to see if I can hear any news of him, for he has been away a long time."
I am flying to escape death at their hands, and am thus doomed to be a wanderer on the face of the earth.
"I will not refuse you," replied Telemachus, "if you wish to join us. Come, therefore, and in Ithaca we will treat you hospitably according to what we have."
Give me your advice therefore, and let me have a good guide to go with me and show me the way.
I will go the round of the city begging as I needs must, to see if any one will give me a drink and a piece of bread.
"Heaven help me," he exclaimed, "what ever can have put such a notion as that into your head?
If you go near the suitors you will be undone to a certainty, for their pride and insolence reach the very heavens.
They would never think of taking a man like you for a servant.
Ulysses answered, "I hope you may be as dear to the gods as you are to me, for having saved me from going about and getting into trouble; there is nothing worse than being always on the tramp; still, when men have once got low down in the world they will go through a great deal on behalf of their miserable bellies.
Servants want sometimes to see their mistress and have a talk with her; they like to have something to eat and drink at the house, and something too to take back with them into the country.
Ulysses answered, "Then you must have been a very little fellow, Eumaeus, when you were taken so far away from your home and parents. Tell me, and tell me true, was the city in which your father and mother lived sacked and pillaged, or did some enemies carry you off when you were alone tending sheep or cattle, ship you off here, and sell you for whatever your master gave them?"
"Stranger," replied Eumaeus, "as regards your question: sit still, make yourself comfortable, drink your wine, and listen to me.
We too will sit here eating and drinking in the hut, and telling one another stories about our misfortunes; for when a man has suffered much, and been buffeted about in the world, he takes pleasure in recalling the memory of sorrows that have long gone by.
As regards your question, then, my tale is as follows:
It contains two communities, and the whole country is divided between these two.
"The man who had seduced her then said, 'Would you like to come along with us to see the house of your parents and your parents themselves? They are both alive and are said to be well off.'
I will bring as much gold as I can lay my hands on, and there is something else also that I can do towards paying my fare.
I am nurse to the son of the good man of the house, a funny little fellow just able to run about.
"On this she went back to the house.
In the fore part of the house she saw the tables set with the cups of guests who had been feasting with my father, as being in attendance on him; these were now all gone to a meeting of the public assembly, so she snatched up three cups and carried them off in the bosom of her dress, while I followed her, for I knew no better.
In the mean time Telemachus and his crew were nearing land, so they loosed the sails, took down the mast, and rowed the ship into the harbour.
Then Theoclymenus said, "And what, my dear young friend, is to become of me?
As he was speaking a bird flew by upon his right hand-a hawk, Apollo's messenger.
And Piraeus answered, "Telemachus, you may stay away as long as you please, but I will look after him for you, and he shall find no lack of hospitality."
But Telemachus bound on his sandals, and took a long and doughty spear with a head of sharpened bronze from the deck of the ship.
The Coral Realm
THE NEXT DAY I woke up with my head unusually clear.
Much to my surprise, I was in my stateroom.
I then considered leaving my stateroom.
Was I free or still a prisoner? Perfectly free.
I opened my door, headed down the gangways, and climbed the central companionway.
Hatches that had been closed the day before were now open.
I arrived on the platform.
I questioned them. They knew nothing.
Lost in a heavy sleep of which they had no memory, they were quite startled to be back in their cabin.
After renewing its air, the Nautilus stayed at an average depth of fifteen meters, enabling it to return quickly to the surface of the waves.
And, contrary to custom, it executed such a maneuver several times during that day of january nineteenth.
The chief officer would then climb onto the platform, and his usual phrase would ring through the ship's interior.
Near two o'clock I was busy organizing my notes in the lounge, when the captain opened the door and appeared.
I bowed to him. He gave me an almost imperceptible bow in return, without saying a word to me.
I resumed my work, hoping he might give me some explanation of the previous afternoon's events.
His face looked exhausted; his reddened eyes hadn't been refreshed by sleep; his facial features expressed profound sadness, real chagrin.
He walked up and down, sat and stood, picked up a book at random, discarded it immediately, consulted his instruments without taking his customary notes, and seemed unable to rest easy for an instant.
"Are you a physician, Professor Aronnax?"
This inquiry was so unexpected that I stared at him a good while without replying.
"That's right," I said, "I am a doctor, I used to be on call at the hospitals.
I was in practice for several years before joining the museum."
"Excellent, sir."
My reply obviously pleased Captain Nemo.
But not knowing what he was driving at, I waited for further questions, ready to reply as circumstances dictated.
"Professor Aronnax," the captain said to me, "would you consent to give your medical attentions to one of my men?"
"Someone is sick?"
"I'm ready to go with you."
I admit that my heart was pounding.
Captain Nemo led me to the Nautilus's stern and invited me into a cabin located next to the sailors' quarters.
I bent over him.
Not only was he sick, he was wounded. Swathed in blood soaked linen, his head was resting on a folded pillow. I undid the linen bandages, while the wounded man gazed with great staring eyes and let me proceed without making a single complaint.
The cranium had been smashed open by some blunt instrument, leaving the naked brains exposed, and the cerebral matter had suffered deep abrasions.
Blood clots had formed in this dissolving mass, taking on the color of wine dregs. Both contusion and concussion of the brain had occurred.
I took the wounded man's pulse.
"How did he get this wound?" I asked him.
My chief officer was standing beside him. This man leaped forward to intercept the blow.
"You may talk freely," the captain told me.
"This man doesn't understand French."
For a few moments more I observed the dying man, whose life was ebbing little by little.
He grew still more pale under the electric light that bathed his deathbed.
I looked at his intelligent head, furrowed with premature wrinkles that misfortune, perhaps misery, had etched long before.
I was hoping to detect the secret of his life in the last words that might escape from his lips!
That night I slept poorly, and between my fitful dreams, I thought I heard a distant moaning, like a funeral dirge.
Was it a prayer for the dead, murmured in that language I couldn't understand?
The next morning I climbed on deck.
"Professor," he said to me, "would it be convenient for you to make an underwater excursion today?"
"With my companions?" I asked.
"If they're agreeable."
"We're yours to command, captain."
"Then kindly put on your diving suits."
I informed them of Captain Nemo's proposition. Conseil was eager to accept, and this time the Canadian proved perfectly amenable to going with us.
A gentle slope gravitated to an uneven bottom whose depth was about fifteen fathoms.
This bottom was completely different from the one I had visited during my first excursion under the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Here I saw no fine grained sand, no underwater prairies, not one open sea forest.
In the zoophyte branch, class Alcyonaria, one finds the order Gorgonaria, which contains three groups: sea fans, isidian polyps, and coral polyps. It's in this last that precious coral belongs, an unusual substance that, at different times, has been classified in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms.
These polyps have a unique generating mechanism that reproduces them via the budding process, and they have an individual existence while also participating in a communal life.
We turned on our Ruhmkorff devices and went along a coral shoal in the process of forming, which, given time, will someday close off this whole part of the Indian Ocean.
Our lights produced a thousand delightful effects while playing over these brightly colored boughs.
Sheer chance had placed me in the presence of the most valuable specimens of this zoophyte.
This coral was the equal of those fished up from the Mediterranean off the Barbary Coast or the shores of France and Italy.
With its bright colors, it lived up to those poetic names of blood flower and blood foam that the industry confers on its finest exhibits.
Coral sells for as much as five hundred francs per kilogram, and in this locality the liquid strata hid enough to make the fortunes of a whole host of coral fishermen. This valuable substance often merges with other polyparies, forming compact, hopelessly tangled units known as "macciota," and I noted some wonderful pink samples of this coral.
The light from our glass coils produced magical effects at times, lingering on the wrinkled roughness of some natural arch, or some overhang suspended like a chandelier, which our lamps flecked with fiery sparks.
Finally, after two hours of walking, we reached a depth of about three hundred meters, in other words, the lowermost limit at which coral can begin to form.
But here it was no longer some isolated bush or a modest grove of low timber.
What an indescribable sight!
Oh, if only we could share our feelings! Why were we imprisoned behind these masks of metal and glass! Why were we forbidden to talk with each other!
Meanwhile Captain Nemo had called a halt.
My companions and I stopped walking, and turning around, I saw the crewmen form a semicircle around their leader.
Looking with greater care, I observed that four of them were carrying on their shoulders an object that was oblong in shape.
At this locality we stood in the center of a huge clearing surrounded by the tall tree forms of this underwater forest. Our lamps cast a sort of brilliant twilight over the area, making inordinately long shadows on the seafloor.
Past the boundaries of the clearing, the darkness deepened again, relieved only by little sparkles given off by the sharp crests of coral.
Ned Land and Conseil stood next to me.
We stared, and it dawned on me that I was about to witness a strange scene. Observing the seafloor, I saw that it swelled at certain points from low bulges that were encrusted with limestone deposits and arranged with a symmetry that betrayed the hand of man.
In the middle of the clearing, on a pedestal of roughly piled rocks, there stood a cross of coral, extending long arms you would have thought were made of petrified blood.
At a signal from Captain Nemo, one of his men stepped forward and, a few feet from this cross, detached a mattock from his belt and began to dig a hole.
I finally understood!
This clearing was a cemetery, this hole a grave, that oblong object the body of the man who must have died during the night!
Captain Nemo and his men had come to bury their companion in this communal resting place on the inaccessible ocean floor!
No!
My mind was reeling as never before!
Never had ideas of such impact raced through my brain!
Meanwhile the grave digging went slowly.
I heard the pick ringing on the limestone soil, its iron tip sometimes giving off sparks when it hit a stray piece of flint on the sea bottom.
The hole grew longer, wider, and soon was deep enough to receive the body.
Then the pallbearers approached.
The grave was then covered over with the rubble dug from the seafloor, and it formed a low mound.
When this was done, Captain Nemo and his men stood up; then they all approached the grave, sank again on bended knee, and extended their hands in a sign of final farewell. . . .
Then the funeral party went back up the path to the Nautilus, returning beneath the arches of the forest, through the thickets, along the coral bushes, going steadily higher.
Finally the ship's rays appeared.
Their luminous trail guided us to the Nautilus.
By one o'clock we had returned.
After changing clothes, I climbed onto the platform, and in the grip of dreadfully obsessive thoughts, I sat next to the beacon.
Captain Nemo rejoined me.
"So, as I predicted, that man died during the night?"
"Yes, Professor Aronnax," Captain Nemo replied.
"And now he rests beside his companions in that coral cemetery?"
"Yes, forgotten by the world but not by us!
We dig the graves, then entrust the polyps with sealing away our dead for eternity!"
"There lies our peaceful cemetery, hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the waves!"
"At least, captain, your dead can sleep serenely there, out of the reach of sharks!"
"Yes, sir," Captain Nemo replied solemnly, "of sharks and men!"
CHAPTER fourteen.
"FREE!
BUT A MONSTER!"
The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well nigh intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting phenomena of our psychology.
And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and cultivation-shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary.
On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts-or so he thinks.
But they are home to him!
Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation, some storm of emotion, some strength testing struggle, back into the shelter of the obvious; finding it an intellectual environment that demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative, strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.
I crave pardon for this digression.
I set it down because now I remember how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts occurred to me.
He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness that angered me until I realized his purpose.
"Get up, ruth," he ordered.
"He came back once and he'll come back again.
I'm hungry."
"Eat!" she exclaimed.
"You can be hungry?"
"Come on; we've got to make the best of it."
You must eat-and then rest."
"No use crying in the milk even if it's spilt," observed Drake, even more cheerfully brutal.
"I learned that at the front where we got so we'd yelp for food even when the lads who'd been bringing it were all mixed up in it."
She lifted Ventnor's head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose, eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.
"Oh-you brute!" she whispered.
"That's better," said Dick.
"Go ahead and hit me if you want.
The madder you get the better you'll feel."
"Thanks-Dick," she said quietly.
And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the stores, brewed tea over the spirit lamp with water from the bubbling spring.
In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so long.
To my surprise I found that I was hungry, and with deep relief I watched ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.
About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and disquieting.
Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, there fell upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquillity, of unearthly withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened Ventnor into his attack upon the Disk.
I watched her fight against it, drive it back.
And in her eyes I read both terror and-shame.
It came to me that painful as it might be for her the time for questioning had come.
"ruth," I said, "I know it's not necessary to remind you that we're in a tight place.
Every fact and every scrap of knowledge that we can lay hold of is of the utmost importance in enabling us to determine our course.
"I'm going to repeat your brother's question-what did Norhala do to you?
And what happened when you were floating before the Disk?"
The blaze of interest in Drake's eyes at these questions changed to amazement at her stricken recoil from them.
"There was nothing," she whispered-then defiantly-"nothing.
I don't know what you mean."
"ruth!" I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity.
"You do know.
You must tell us-for his sake." I pointed toward Ventnor.
She drew a long breath.
"You're right-of course," she said unsteadily.
"Only I-I thought maybe I could fight it out myself.
But you'll have to know it-there's a taint upon me."
I caught in Drake's swift glance the echo of my own thrill of apprehension for her sanity.
"Yes," she said, now quietly.
"Some new and alien thing within my heart, my brain, my soul.
It came to me from Norhala when we rode the flying block, and-he-sealed upon me when I was in-his"--again she crimsoned, "embrace."
"A thing that urges me to forget you two-and Martin-and all the world I've known.
"It whispered to me first," she said, "from Norhala-when she put her arm around me.
It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover me like-like a veil, and from head to foot.
It was a quietness and peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly tranquil and utterly free.
"I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies-and the life I had known only a dream-and you, all of you-even Martin, dreams within a dream.
You weren't-real-and you did not-matter."
"Hypnotism," muttered Drake, as she paused.
"no" She shook her head.
"No-more than that.
The wonder of it grew-and grew.
I thrilled with it.
I remember nothing of that ride, saw nothing-except that once through the peace enfolding me pierced warning that Martin was in peril, and I broke through to see him clutching Norhala and to see floating up in her eyes death for him.
"And I saved him-and again forgot.
Then, when I saw that beautiful, flaming Shape-I felt no terror, no fear-only a tremendous-joyous-anticipation, as though-as though-" She faltered, hung her head, then leaving that sentence unfinished, whispered: "and when-it-lifted me it was as though I had come at last out of some endless black ocean of despair into the full sun of paradise."
"ruth!" cried Drake, and at the pain in his cry she winced.
"Wait," she said, and held up a little, tremulous hand.
"You asked-and now you must listen."
She was silent; and when once more she spoke her voice was low, curiously rhythmic; her eyes rapt:
"I was free-free from every human fetter of fear or sorrow or love or hate; free even of hope-for what was there to hope for when everything desirable was mine?
And I was elemental; one with the eternal things yet fully conscious that I was-I.
"It was as though I were the shining shadow of a star afloat upon the breast of some still and hidden woodland pool; as though I were a little wind dancing among the mountain tops; a mist whirling down a quiet glen; a shimmering lance of the aurora pulsing in the high solitudes.
"And there was music-strange and wondrous music and terrible, but not terrible to me-who was part of it.
Vast chords and singing themes that rang like clusters of little swinging stars and harmonies that were like the very voice of infinite law resolving within itself all discords.
"Out of the Thing that held me, out from its fires pulsed vitality-a flood of inhuman energy in which I was bathed.
And it was as though this energy were-reassembling me, fitting me even closer to the elemental things, changing me fully into them.
I saw Martin-blasted.
"And, O Walter-Dick-it hurt-it hurt-and for a breath before I ran to him it was like-like coming from a world in which there was no disorder, no sorrow, no doubts, a rhythmic, harmonious world of light and music, into-into a world that was like a black and dirty kitchen.
"And it's there," her voice rose, hysterically.
"It's still within me-whispering, whispering; urging me away from you, from Martin, from every human thing; bidding me give myself up, surrender my humanity.
"No-HIS seal!
An alien consciousness sealed within me, that tries to make the human me a slave-that waits to overcome my will-and if I surrender gives me freedom, an incredible freedom-but makes me, being still human, a-monster."
She hid her face in her hands, quivering.
"If I could sleep," she wailed.
"But I'm afraid to sleep.
I think I shall never sleep again.
For sleeping how do I know what I may be when I wake?"
I caught Drake's eye; he nodded.
I slipped my hand down into the medicine case, brought forth a certain potent and tasteless combination of drugs which I carry upon explorations.
I dropped a little into her cup, then held it to her lips.
Like a child, unthinking, she obeyed and drank.
"But I'll not surrender." Her eyes were tragic.
"Never think it!
I can win-don't you know I can?"
"Win?" Drake dropped down beside her, drew her toward him.
And remember this-nine tenths of what you're thinking now is purely over wrought nerves and weariness.
You'll win-and we'll win, never doubt it."
"I don't," she said.
"I know it-oh, it will be hard-but I will-I will-"
CHAPTER fifteen.
COMING HOME.
Miss Carlyle, having resolved upon her course, quitted her own house, and removed to East Lynne with peter and her handmaidens.
In spite of mr Dill's grieved remonstrances, she discharged the servants whom mr Carlyle had engaged, all save one man.
On a Friday night, about a month after the wedding, mr Carlyle and his wife came home.
They were expected, and Miss Carlyle went through the hall to receive them, and stood on the upper steps, between the pillars of the portico.
An elegant chariot with four post horses was drawing up.
Miss Carlyle compressed her lips as she scanned it.
She was attired in a handsome dark silk dress and a new cap; her anger had had time to cool down in the last month, and her strong common sense told her that the wiser plan would be to make the best of it.
mr Carlyle came up the steps with Isabel.
"You here, Cornelia!
That was kind.
Isabel, this is my sister."
Lady Isabel put forth her hand, and Miss Carlyle condescended to touch the tips of her fingers.
"I hope you are well, ma'am," she jerked out.
mr Carlyle left them together, and went back to search for some trifles which had been left in the carriage.
Miss Carlyle led the way to a sitting room, where the supper tray was laid.
"Thank you.
I will go to my rooms, but I do not require supper.
"Then what would you like to take?" asked Miss Corny.
"Some tea, if you please, I am very thirsty."
"Tea!" ejaculated Miss Corny.
I don't know that they have boiling water.
You'd never sleep a wink all night, ma'am, if you took tea at eleven o'clock."
"Oh, then, never mind," replied Lady Isabel.
"It is of no consequence.
Do not let me give trouble."
Miss Carlyle whisked out of the room; upon what errand was best known to herself; and in the hall she and Marvel came to an encounter.
Marvel was very stylish, with five flounces to her dress, a veil, and a parasol.
Meanwhile, Lady Isabel sat down and burst into bitter tears and sobs.
A chill had come over her; it did not seem like coming to East Lynne.
mr Carlyle entered and witnessed the grief.
"Isabel!" he uttered in amazement, as he hastened up to her.
"My darling, what ails you?"
"I am tired, I think," she gently answered; "and coming into the house again made me think of papa.
I should like to go to my rooms, Archibald, but I don't know which they are."
Neither did mr Carlyle know, but Miss Carlyle came whisking in again, and said: "The best rooms; those next the library.
Should she go up with my lady?"
mr Carlyle preferred to go himself, and he held out his arm to Isabel.
She drew her veil over her face as she passed Miss Carlyle.
The branches were not lighted, and the room looked cold and comfortless.
"Things seem all sixes and sevens in the house," remarked mr Carlyle.
"I fancy the servants must have misunderstood my letter, and not have expected us until to morrow night."
On returning to the sitting room mr Carlyle inquired the cause of the servants' negligence.
"I sent them away because they were superfluous encumbrances," hastily replied Miss Carlyle.
"We have four in the house, and my lady has brought a fine maid, I see, making five.
I have come up here to live."
mr Carlyle felt checkmated.
He had always bowed to the will of Miss Corny, but he had an idea that he and his wife should be better without her.
"And your house?" he exclaimed.
"I have let it furnished; the people enter to day.
There'll be enough expense without our keeping on two houses; and most people in your place would jump at the prospect of my living here.
Your wife will be mistress.
I do not intend to take her honors from her; but I will save her a world of trouble in management-be as useful to her as a housekeeper.
She will be glad of that, inexperienced as she is.
I dare say she never gave a domestic order in her life."
This was a view of the case, to mr Carlyle, so plausibly put, that he began to think it might be all for the best.
Still he did not know.
"Did you buy that fine piano which has arrived?" angrily asked Miss Carlyle.
"It was my present to Isabel."
Miss Corny groaned.
"What did it cost?"
The old piano here was a bad one, and I bought a better."
"What did it cost?" repeated Miss Carlyle.
Obedience to her will was yet powerful within him.
Miss Corny threw up her hands and eyes.
But at that moment peter entered with some hot water which his master had rung for.
mr Carlyle rose and looked on the side board.
"Where is the wine, peter?"
The servant put it out, port and sherry.
mr Carlyle drank a glass, and then proceeded to mix some wine and water.
"Shall I mix some for you, Cornelia?" he asked.
"I'll mix for myself if I want any.
Who's that for?"
"Isabel."
He quitted the room, carrying the wine and water, and entered his wife's.
She was sitting half buried, it seemed, in the arm chair, her face muffled up.
As she raised it, he saw that it was flushed and agitated; that her eyes were bright, and her frame was trembling.
"What is the matter?" he hastily asked.
"I got nervous after Marvel went," she whispered, laying hold of him, as if for protection from terror.
"I came back to the chair and covered my head over, hoping some one would come up."
"I have been talking to Cornelia.
But what made you nervous?"
"Oh!
I was very foolish.
I kept thinking of frightful things.
They would come into my mind.
Do not blame me, Archibald.
This is the room papa died in."
"Blame you, my darling," he uttered with deep feeling.
"I thought of a dreadful story about the bats, that the servants told-I dare say you never heard it; and I kept thinking.
Yes, he was smiling; for he knew that these moments of nervous fear are best met jestingly.
He made her drink the wine and water, and then he showed her where the bell was, ringing it as he did so.
Its position had been changed in some late alterations to the house.
"Your rooms shall be changed to morrow, Isabel."
"No, let us remain in these.
I shall like to feel that papa was once their occupant.
But, even as she spoke, her actions belied her words.
mr Carlyle had gone to the door and opened it, and she flew close up to him, cowering behind him.
"Shall you be gone very long, Archibald?" she whispered.
"Not more than an hour," he answered.
But he hastily put back one of his hands, and held her tightly in his protecting grasp.
Marvel was coming along the corridor in answer to the ring.
"Have the goodness to let Miss Carlyle know that I am not coming down again to night," he said.
"Yes, sir."
mr Carlyle shut the door, and then looked at his wife and laughed.
"He is very kind to me," thought Isabel.
With the morning began the perplexities of Lady Isabel Carlyle.
But, first of all, just fancy the group at breakfast.
Miss Carlyle descended in the startling costume the reader has seen, took her seat at the breakfast table, and there sat bolt upright.
mr Carlyle came down next; and then Lady Isabel entered, in an elegant half mourning dress, with flowing black ribbons.
I hope you slept well," was Miss Carlyle's salutation.
"Quite well, thank you," she answered, as she took her seat opposite Miss Carlyle.
Miss Carlyle pointed to the top of the table.
"I should be glad if you would," answered Lady Isabel.
So Miss Carlyle proceeded to her duties, very stern and grim.
The meal was nearly over, when peter came in, and said the butcher had come up for orders.
Miss Carlyle looked at Lady Isabel, waiting, of course, for her to give them.
Isabel was silent with perplexity; she had never given such an order in her life.
Totally ignorant was she of the requirements of a household; and did not know whether to suggest a few pounds of meat or a whole cow.
It was the presence of that grim Miss Corny which put her out.
Alone with her husband she would have said, "What ought I to order, Archibald?
Tell me." peter waited.
"A----Something to roast and boil, if you please," stammered Lady Isabel.
She spoke in a low tone.
Embarrassment makes cowards of us; and mr Carlyle repeated it after her.
He knew no more about housekeeping than she did.
"Something to roast and boil, tell the man, peter."
Up started Miss Corny; she could not stand that.
"Are you aware, Lady Isabel, that an order such as that would only puzzle the butcher?
Shall I give the necessary orders for to day?
The fishmonger will be here presently!"
"Oh, I wish you would!" cried the relieved Lady Isabel.
"I have not been accustomed to it, but I must learn.
I don't think I know anything about housekeeping."
Miss Corny's answer was to stalk from the room.
Isabel rose from her chair, like a bird released from its cage, and stood by his side.
"Have you finished, Archibald?"
"I think I have, dear.
Oh!
Here's my coffee.
There; I have finished now."
"Let us go around the grounds."
He rose, laid his hands playfully on her slender waist, and looked at her.
"You may as well ask me to take a journey to the moon.
It is past nine, and I have not been to the office for a month."
"I wish you would be always with me!
East Lynne will not be East Lynne without you."
"I will be with you as much as ever I can, my dearest," he whispered.
She ran for her bonnet, gloves and parasol.
mr Carlyle waited for her in the hall, and they went out together.
He thought it a good opportunity to speak about his sister.
"She wishes to remain with us," he said.
"I do not know what to decide.
On the one hand I think she might save you the worry of household management; on the other, I fancy we shall be happier by ourselves."
Isabel's heart sank within her at the idea of that stern Miss Corny, mounted over her as resident guard; but, refined and sensitive, almost painfully considerate of the feelings of others, she raised no word of objection.
"As you and Miss Carlyle please," she answered.
"Isabel," he said, "I wish it to be as you please; I wish matters to be arranged as may best please you: and I will have them so arranged.
My chief object in life now is your happiness."
He spoke in all the sincerity of truth, and Isabel knew it: and the thought came across her that with him by her side, her loving protector, Miss Carlyle could not mar her life's peace.
"Let her stay, Archibald; she will not incommode us."
"At any rate it can be tried for a month or two, and we shall see how it works," he musingly observed.
They reached the park gates.
"I wish I could go with you and be your clerk," she cried, unwilling to release his hand.
"I should not have all that long way to go back by myself."
He laughed and shook his head, telling her that she wanted to bribe him into taking her back, but it could not be.
"A knight," said Miss Drew, who was struggling to inspire her class with enthusiasm for Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," "a knight was a person who spent his time going round succouring the oppressed."
"Suckin' wot?" said William, bewildered.
"How much did he get for it?" asked William.
"Nothing, of course," said Miss Drew, appalled by the base commercialism of the twentieth century.
He had a lot of adventures and fighting and he helped beautiful, persecuted damsels."
William's respect for the knight rose.
Suckin'--I mean helpin' people an' fightin' an' all that.
"Well," said William after a pause, "let's be squires in turn.
You first," he added hastily.
William considered.
It'll be three weeks off 'cause they're takin' the next two weeks to pay for an ole window wot my ball slipped into by mistake."
He spoke with the bitterness that always characterised his statements of the injustice of the grown up world.
"All right," said Ginger.
"I won't forget about the drink of ginger ale."
Well, let's set off."
Anyway she said we could still be knights an' help people, di'n't she?
Anyway, I'll get my bugle.
William's bugle had just returned to public life after one of its periodic terms of retirement into his father's keeping.
William took his bugle proudly in one hand and his pistol (the glorious result of a dip in the bran tub at a school party) in the other, and, sternly denying themselves the pleasures of afternoon school, off the two set upon the road of romance and adventure.
"I'll carry the bugle," said Ginger, "'cause I'm squire."
William was loth to give up his treasure.
They walked along for about a mile without meeting anyone.
"You're the squire.
You're not much of a squire not to have brought sumthin' for me to eat."
"You might go an' milk that," suggested William.
"No, I'm not squire.
I bet squires did the milkin'.
She turned her eyes upon them sadly.
"Go on!" said the knight to his reluctant squire.
"Well, I will, then!" said William with reckless bravado, and advanced boldly upon the animal.
Like lightning the gallant pair made for the road.
They walked on down the road till they came to a pair of iron gates and a drive that led up to a big house.
William's spirits rose.
His hunger was forgotten.
It looks like a place where there might be someone to rescue."
Unchallenged they went up to the house.
And she was speaking fast and passionately.
William, ready for all contingencies, marshalled his forces.
"Follow me!" he whispered and crept on all fours nearer the window. They could see a man now, an elderly man with white hair and a white beard.
"Crumbs!" ejaculated William.
"Golly!" murmured William.
"Will you kill him?" said the awed squire.
"How big was he?
Could you see?" said William the discreet.
"He was ever so big.
Great big face he had, too, with a beard."
"Then I won't try killin' him-not straight off.
William quivered with excitement.
"Here!" came an angry shout from inside.
What the devil----"
"You low ole caitiff!" said William through the keyhole.
"Who the deuce----?" exploded the voice.
"You mean ole oppressor!"
"Who the deuce are you?
What's this tomfool trick?
Do you hear?"
A resounding kick shook the door.
Go an' blow the bugle at the front door, then they'll know something's happened," he added simply.
"How did it go off?"
"Oh, quite well.
We knew our parts, anyway."
"I think the village will enjoy it."
"Anyway, it's never very critical, is it?
And it loves a melodrama."
"Yes.
He said he'd come straight back.
Perhaps I'd better go and find him."
"Oh, let me go, Miss Greene," said one of the youths ardently.
"Well, I don't know whether you'd find the place.
It's a shed in the garden that he uses.
"I'll go-"
He stopped.
Miss Greene sank back into her chair, suddenly white. One of the young men let a cup of tea fall neatly from his fingers on to the floor and there crash into fragments.
The young lady visitor emitted a scream that would have done credit to a factory siren.
Then at the open French window appeared a small boy holding a bugle, purple faced with the effort of his performance.
"Did you make that horrible noise?"
Miss Greene began to laugh hysterically.
"Do have some tea now you've come," she said to Ginger.
Ginger remembered the pangs of hunger, of which excitement had momentarily rendered him oblivious, and, deciding that there was no time like the present, took a cake from the stand and began to consume it in silence.
He looks mad.
He had a very mad look, I thought, when he was standing at the window."
I can't think why father doesn't come."
"It's all right now," he said.
He's shut up.
Me an' William shut him up."
Have another cake, darling boy," she said in a tone of honeyed sweetness.
Nothing loth, Ginger selected an ornate pyramid of icing.
At this point there came a bellowing and crashing and tramping outside and Miss Priscilla's father, roaring fury and threats of vengeance, hurled himself into the room.
"An abominable attack ... utterly unprovoked ... dastardly ruffians!"
"He's got out," he said reproachfully.
Then he brightened.
CHAPTER twelve
THE REFORM OF WILLIAM
To William the idea of reform was new and startling and not wholly unattractive.
It originated with the housemaid whose brother was a reformed burglar now employed in a grocer's shop.
"'E's got conversion," she said to William.
William was deeply interested.
The point was all innocently driven in later by the Sunday school mistress.
William's family had no real faith in the Sunday school as a corrective to William's inherent wickedness, but they knew that no Sabbath peace or calm was humanly possible while William was in the house.
Fortunately for William, most of his friends' parents were inspired by the same zeal, so that he met his old cronies of the week days-Henry, Ginger, Douglas and all the rest-and together they beguiled the monotony of the Sabbath.
But this Sunday the tall, pale lady who, for her sins, essayed to lead William and his friends along the straight and narrow path of virtue, was almost inspired.
She was like some prophetess of old.
She was so emphatic that the red cherries that hung coquettishly over the edge of her hat rattled against it as though in applause.
William's fascinated eye wandered from the cherries to the distant view out of the window.
He thought suddenly of the noble burglar who had turned his back upon the mysterious, nefarious tools of his trade and now dispensed margarine to his former victims.
Opposite him sat a small girl in a pink and white checked frock.
He often whiled away the dullest hours of Sunday school by putting out his tongue at her or throwing paper pellets at her (manufactured previously for the purpose).
But to day, meeting her serious eye, he looked away hastily.
Determined and eager was the eye that the small girl turned upon William, and William realised that his time had come.
He was to be converted.
He felt almost thrilled by the prospect.
He was so enthralled that he received absent mindedly, and without gratitude, the mountainous bull's eye passed to him from Ginger, and only gave a half hearted smile when a well aimed pellet from Henry's hand sent one of the prophetess's cherries swinging high in the air.
After the class the pink checked girl (whose name most appropriately was Deborah) stalked William for several yards and finally cornered him.
"William, I think you ought to turn.
I'll help you," she added sweetly.
William drew a deep breath.
"All right, I will," he said.
She heaved a sigh of relief.
William considered.
There were several things that he had wanted to do for some time, but hadn't managed to do yet.
There were, in short, whole fields of crime entirely unexplored.
All these things-and others-must be done before the reformation.
"Say day after to morrow."
She considered this for a minute.
"Very well," she said at last reluctantly, "day after to morrow."
The next day dawned bright and fair.
William arose with a distinct sense that something important had happened.
Then he thought of the reformation.
He saw himself leading a quiet and blameless life, walking sedately to school, working at high pressure in school, doing his homework conscientiously in the evening, being exquisitely polite to his family, his instructors, and the various foolish people who visited his home for the sole purpose (apparently) of making inane remarks to him.
He saw all this, and the picture was far from unattractive-in the distance.
In the immediate future, however, there were various quite important things to be done.
There was a whole normal lifetime of crime to be crowded into one day.
The gardener had a perfectly bald head.
William had sometimes idly imagined the impact of a pea sent violently from a pea shooter with the gardener's bald head.
Before there had been a lifetime of experiment before him, and he had put off this one idly in favour of something more pressing.
He took up his pea shooter and aimed carefully.
The pea did not embed itself deeply into the gardener's skull as William had sometimes thought it would. It bounced back.
It bounced back quite hard.
The gardener also bounced back with a yell of anger, shaking his fist at William's window.
But William had discreetly retired.
He hid the pea shooter, assumed his famous expression of innocence, and felt distinctly cheered.
The question as to what exactly would happen when the pea met the baldness was now for ever solved.
The gardener retired grumbling to the potting shed, so, for the present, all was well.
Later in the day the gardener might lay his formal complaint before authority, but later in the day was later in the day.
It did not trouble William.
He dressed briskly and went down to breakfast with a frown of concentration upon his face.
It was the last day of his old life.
No one else was in the dining room.
It was the work of a few minutes to remove the bacon from beneath the big pewter cover and substitute the kitten, to put a tablespoonful of salt into the coffee, and to put a two days'-old paper in place of that morning's.
They were all things that he had at one time or another vaguely thought of doing, but for which he had never yet seemed to have time or opportunity.
He surveyed the scene with a deep sigh of satisfaction.
Hearing, therefore, a heavy step on the stairs, he seized several pieces of toast and fled.
The kitten, a mass of fury and lust for revenge, came flying through the window. William hid behind a laurel bush till it had passed, then set off down the road.
School, of course, was impossible.
The precious hours of such a day as this could not be wasted in school.
He went down the road full of his noble purpose.
The wickedness of a lifetime was somehow or other to be crowded into this day.
To morrow it would all be impossible.
To morrow began the blameless life.
It must all be worked off to day.
He skirted the school by a field path in case any of those narrow souls paid to employ so aimlessly the precious hours of his youth might be there. They would certainly be tactless enough to question him as he passed the door.
Then he joined the main road.
The main road was empty except for a caravan-a caravan gaily painted in red and yellow.
It had little lace curtains at the window.
It was altogether a most fascinating caravan.
No one seemed to be near it. William looked through the windows.
There was a kind of dresser with crockery hanging from it, a small table and a little oil stove.
It appeared to be a mule-a mule with a jaundiced view of life.
It rolled a sad eye towards William, then with a deep sigh returned to its contemplation of the landscape.
William gazed upon caravan and steed fascinated.
Never, in his future life of noble merit, would he be able to annex a caravan.
It was his last chance.
Conscience stirred faintly in his breast, but he silenced it sternly.
William did not know how to drive, but it did not seem to matter.
He was driving a caravan.
He was driving a caravan.
He was driving a caravan. The very telegraph posts seemed to gape with envy and admiration as he passed.
What ultimately he was going to do with his caravan he neither knew nor cared.
All that mattered was, it was a bright sunny morning, and all the others were in school, and he was driving a red and yellow caravan along the high road.
He was intoxicated with pride.
Carelessly he flicked the mule with the whip.
There are several explanations of what happened then.
The mule may not have been used to the whip; a wasp may have just stung him at that particular minute; a wandering demon may have entered into him.
Mules are notoriously accessible to wandering demons.
Whatever the explanation, the mule suddenly started forward and galloped at full speed down the hill.
The reins dropped from William's hands; he clung for dear life on to his seat, as the caravan, swaying and jolting along the uneven road, seemed to be doing its utmost to fling him off.
There came a rattle of crockery from within.
It was a female scream.
William's hair stood on end.
He almost forgot to cling to the seat. For not one scream came but many.
They rent the still summer air, mingled with the sound of breaking glass and crockery.
The mule continued his mad career down the hill, his reins trailing in the dust.
In the distance was a little gipsy's donkey cart full of pots and pans.
But the mule refused to be warned.
He neatly escaped the donkey cart himself, but he crashed the caravan into it with such force that the caravan broke a shaft and overturned completely on to the donkey cart, scattering pots and pans far and wide.
From within the caravan came inhuman female yells of fear and anger.
William had fallen on to a soft bank of grass.
He was discovering, to his amazement, that he was still alive and practically unhurt.
The mule was standing meekly by and smiling to himself.
Then out of the window of the caravan climbed a woman-a fat, angry woman, shaking her fist at the world in general.
Her hair and face were covered with sugar and a fork was embedded in the front of her dress.
Otherwise she, too, had escaped undamaged.
She screamed at him furiously in reply. Then along the road could be seen the figure of a fat man carrying a fishing rod.
He began to run wildly towards the caravan.
The air was rent by their angry shouts. A group of highly appreciative villagers collected round them.
Then one of them pointed to William, who sat, feeling still slightly shaken, upon the bank.
With one wild glance at the scene of devastation and anger, William turned and fled through the wood.
The fat woman and the donkey man joined the pursuit.
To William it was like some ghastly nightmare after an evening's entertainment at the cinematograph.
But the fat man was very fat, and the fat woman was very fat, and the donkey man was very old, and William was young and very fleet, so in less than ten minutes they gave up the pursuit and returned panting and quarrelling to the road.
William sat on the further outskirts of the wood and panted.
He felt on the whole exhilarated by the adventure.
It was quite a suitable adventure for his last day of unregeneration.
But he felt also in need of bodily sustenance, so he purchased a bun and a bottle of lemonade at a neighbouring shop and sat by the roadside to recover.
He felt reluctant to return home.
It is always well to follow a morning's absence from school by an afternoon's absence from school.
A return in the afternoon is ignominious and humiliating.
William wandered round the neighbourhood experiencing all the thrill of the outlaw.
Certainly by this time the gardener would have complained to his father, probably the schoolmistress would have sent a note. Also-someone had been scratched by the cat.
William decided that all things considered it was best to make a day of it.
His aim was fairly good, and he succeeded in knocking off the hat and finally prostrating the wooden framework.
Followed-an exciting chase by an angry farmer.
His spirits sank a little as he approached the gate.
He could see through the trees the fat caravan owner gesticulating at the door.
Phrases floated to him through the summer air.
He could see the gardener smiling in the distance.
There was a small blue bruise on his shining head.
William judged from the smile that he had laid his formal complaint before authority.
William noticed that his father looked pale and harassed.
A small boy came down the road and saw William hesitating at the open gateway.
"They've wrote to say you wasn't in school."
William crept round to the back of the house beneath the bushes.
He felt that the time had come to give himself up to justice, but he wanted, as the popular saying is, to be sure of "getting his money's worth." There was the tin half full of green paint in the tool shed. He'd had his eye on it for some time.
He went quietly round to the tool shed.
Soon he was contemplating with a satisfied smile a green and enraged cat and a green and enraged hen.
Then, bracing himself for the effort, he delivered himself up to justice.
When all was said and done no punishment could be really adequate to a day like that.
Dusk was falling.
William gazed pensively from his bedroom window.
He was reviewing his day.
He had almost forgotten the stormy and decidedly unpleasant scene with his father.
mr Brown's rhetoric had been rather lost on William, because its pearls of sarcasm had been so far above his head.
And William had not been really loth to retire at once to bed.
After all, it had been a very tiring day.
Now his thoughts were going over some of its most exquisite moments-the moments when the pea and the gardener's head met and rebounded with such satisfactory force; the moment when he swung along the high road, monarch of a caravan and a mule and the whole wide world; the moment when the scarecrow hunched up and collapsed so realistically; the cat covered with green paint....
After all it was his last day.
He saw himself from to morrow onward leading a quiet and blameless life, walking sedately to school, working at high pressure in school, doing his homework conscientiously in the evening, being exquisitely polite to his family and instructors-and the vision failed utterly to attract.
CHAPTER thirty two.
OF THE REPLY DON QUIXOTE GAVE HIS CENSURER, WITH OTHER INCIDENTS, GRAVE AND DROLL
Pious, well meant reproof requires a different demeanour and arguments of another sort; at any rate, to have reproved me in public, and so roughly, exceeds the bounds of proper reproof, for that comes better with gentleness than with rudeness; and it is not seemly to call the sinner roundly blockhead and booby, without knowing anything of the sin that is reproved.
Come, tell me, for which of the stupidities you have observed in me do you condemn and abuse me, and bid me go home and look after my house and wife and children, without knowing whether I have any?
Is it, haply, an idle occupation, or is the time ill spent that is spent in roaming the world in quest, not of its enjoyments, but of those arduous toils whereby the good mount upwards to the abodes of everlasting life?
Some take the broad road of overweening ambition; others that of mean and servile flattery; others that of deceitful hypocrisy, and some that of true religion; but I, led by my star, follow the narrow path of knight errantry, and in pursuit of that calling I despise wealth, but not honour.
"Perhaps, brother," said the ecclesiastic, "you are that Sancho Panza that is mentioned, to whom your master has promised an island?"
"No, Sancho my friend, certainly not," said the duke, "for in the name of Senor Don Quixote I confer upon you the government of one of no small importance that I have at my disposal."
"Go down on thy knees, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "and kiss the feet of his excellence for the favour he has bestowed upon thee."
"That is true," said Don Quixote, "and the reason is, that he who is not liable to offence cannot give offence to anyone.
Women, children, and ecclesiastics, as they cannot defend themselves, though they may receive offence cannot be insulted, because between the offence and the insult there is, as your excellence very well knows, this difference: the insult comes from one who is capable of offering it, and does so, and maintains it; the offence may come from any quarter without carrying insult.
To take an example: a man is standing unsuspectingly in the street and ten others come up armed and beat him; he draws his sword and quits himself like a man, but the number of his antagonists makes it impossible for him to effect his purpose and avenge himself; this man suffers an offence but not an insult.
Another example will make the same thing plain: a man is standing with his back turned, another comes up and strikes him, and after striking him takes to flight, without waiting an instant, and the other pursues him but does not overtake him; he who received the blow received an offence, but not an insult, because an insult must be maintained.
If he who struck him, though he did so sneakingly and treacherously, had drawn his sword and stood and faced him, then he who had been struck would have received offence and insult at the same time; offence because he was struck treacherously, insult because he who struck him maintained what he had done, standing his ground without taking to flight.
Don Quixote finally grew calm, and dinner came to an end, and as the cloth was removed four damsels came in, one of them with a silver basin, another with a jug also of silver, a third with two fine white towels on her shoulder, and the fourth with her arms bared to the elbows, and in her white hands (for white they certainly were) a round ball of Naples soap.
The duke and duchess, who had not known anything about this, waited to see what came of this strange washing.
The barber damsel, when she had him a hand's breadth deep in lather, pretended that there was no more water, and bade the one with the jug go and fetch some, while Senor Don Quixote waited.
She did so, and Don Quixote was left the strangest and most ludicrous figure that could be imagined.
All those present, and there were a good many, were watching him, and as they saw him there with half a yard of neck, and that uncommonly brown, his eyes shut, and his beard full of soap, it was a great wonder, and only by great discretion, that they were able to restrain their laughter.
Sancho observed the ceremony of the washing very attentively, and said to himself, "God bless me, if it were only the custom in this country to wash squires' beards too as well as knights'.
For by God and upon my soul I want it badly; and if they gave me a scrape of the razor besides I'd take it as a still greater kindness."
"What are you saying to yourself, Sancho?" asked the duchess.
The duchess begged Don Quixote, as he seemed to have a retentive memory, to describe and portray to her the beauty and features of the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, for, judging by what fame trumpeted abroad of her beauty, she felt sure she must be the fairest creature in the world, nay, in all La Mancha.
"True," said the duke; "you must have lost your wits to ask such a question.
Nevertheless, Senor Don Quixote would greatly gratify us if he would depict her to us; for never fear, even in an outline or sketch she will be something to make the fairest envious."
"I would do so certainly," said Don Quixote, "had she not been blurred to my mind's eye by the misfortune that fell upon her a short time since, one of such a nature that I am more ready to weep over it than to describe it.
"God bless me!" said the duke aloud at this, "who can have done the world such an injury?
Who can have robbed it of the beauty that gladdened it, of the grace and gaiety that charmed it, of the modesty that shed a lustre upon it?"
"Who?" replied Don Quixote; "who could it be but some malignant enchanter of the many that persecute me out of envy-that accursed race born into the world to obscure and bring to naught the achievements of the good, and glorify and exalt the deeds of the wicked?
For to deprive a knight errant of his lady is to deprive him of the eyes he sees with, of the sun that gives him light, of the food whereby he lives.
"There is a good deal to be said on that point," said Don Quixote; "God knows whether there be any Dulcinea or not in the world, or whether she is imaginary or not imaginary; these are things the proof of which must not be pushed to extreme lengths.
Dulcinea, besides, has that within her that may raise her to be a crowned and sceptred queen; for the merit of a fair and virtuous woman is capable of performing greater miracles; and virtually, though not formally, she has in herself higher fortunes."
But I cannot help entertaining a doubt, and having a certain grudge against Sancho Panza; the doubt is this, that the aforesaid history declares that the said Sancho Panza, when he carried a letter on your worship's behalf to the said lady Dulcinea, found her sifting a sack of wheat; and more by token it says it was red wheat; a thing which makes me doubt the loftiness of her lineage."
And so, as I am not and, so far as one can judge, cannot be enchanted, she it is that is enchanted, that is smitten, that is altered, changed, and transformed; in her have my enemies revenged themselves upon me, and for her shall I live in ceaseless tears, until I see her in her pristine state.
I have mentioned this lest anybody should mind what Sancho said about Dulcinea's winnowing or sifting; for, as they changed her to me, it is no wonder if they changed her to him.
Dulcinea is illustrious and well born, and of one of the gentle families of El Toboso, which are many, ancient, and good.
My advice to him will be to take no bribe and surrender no right, and I have some other little matters in reserve, that shall be produced in due season for Sancho's benefit and the advantage of the island he is to govern."
The one with the trough pursued him and followed him everywhere he went, endeavouring with the utmost persistence to thrust it under his chin, while another kitchen boy seemed anxious to wash his beard.
"What is all this, brothers?" asked the duchess.
"What is it?
What do you want to do to this good man?
Do you forget he is a governor elect?"
To which the barber kitchen boy replied, "The gentleman will not let himself be washed as is customary, and as my lord and the senor his master have been."
The customs of countries and princes' palaces are only good so long as they give no annoyance; but the way of washing they have here is worse than doing penance.
Let them bring me a comb here, or what they please, and curry this beard of mine, and if they get anything out of it that offends against cleanliness, let them clip me to the skin."
I am a labouring man, my name is Sancho Panza, I am married, I have children, and I am serving as a squire; if in any one of these ways I can serve your highness, I will not be longer in obeying than your grace in commanding."
Rise, Sancho, my friend; I will repay your courtesy by taking care that my lord the duke makes good to you the promised gift of the government as soon as possible."
With this, the conversation came to an end, and Don Quixote retired to take his midday sleep; but the duchess begged Sancho, unless he had a very great desire to go to sleep, to come and spend the afternoon with her and her damsels in a very cool chamber.
Sancho replied that, though he certainly had the habit of sleeping four or five hours in the heat of the day in summer, to serve her excellence he would try with all his might not to sleep even one that day, and that he would come in obedience to her command, and with that he went off.
THE DETECTIVE DETECTOR
"But, my dear Knight," said I, "it sounds incredible.
"You pique my professional pride, doctor," he said in a nettled tone. "I will convince you."
About twelve yards in advance of us a prosperous looking citizen was rounding a clump of bushes where the walk curved.
Avery Knight stopped him.
"How goes the mysterious murder?" I asked.
I waited at my address until two, thinking he might call there."
I laughed, tauntingly.
On the next day Knight called for me in a cab.
"--Nor will you," I said, emphatically.
"Not by ordinary methods," said Knight.
"Nonsense, man," I replied.
At length he looked up brightly.
"Doc," said he, "I have it.
Put on your hat, and come with me.
Even yet I could not believe it possible.
"Well, doctor," said Knight, unable to repress a note of triumph in his voice, "have you seen?"
I call it the saltatorial theory.
It's too late now.
I will proceed.
"If homicides in New York went undiscovered, I reasoned, although the best detective talent was employed to ferret them out, it must be true that the detectives went about their work in the wrong way.
That was my clue.
"I slew the man in Central Park.
I have no money to speak of; I do not like oatmeal, and it is the one ambition of my life to die rich.
I have demonstrated to you that the theory is possible."
Therefore, he must necessarily set to work and trail a short man with a white beard who likes to be in the papers, who is very wealthy, is fond 'of oatmeal, wants to die poor, and is of an extremely generous and philanthropic disposition. When thus far is reached the mind hesitates no longer.
I will, however, commute your sentence to one of three months, with the option of a fine of twenty five per cent. of the money you have received from the insurance company."
They were absent for about ten minutes, and on their return the foreman pronounced the prisoner guilty.
I shall therefore order that you receive two tablespoonfuls of castor oil daily, until the pleasure of the court be further known."
"If this be so," said my opponent, "we must bear it as best we may."
This place is called Rosemary Lane.
Very little light enters it; very few people live in it; the floating population of Skeldergate passes it by; and visitors to the Walk on the Walls, who use it as the way up or the way down, get out of the dreary little passage as fast as they can.
He bore the external appearance of respectable poverty; he carried a gingham umbrella, preserved in an oilskin case; he picked his steps, with the neatest avoidance of all dirty places on the pavement; and he surveyed the scene around him with eyes of two different colors-a bilious brown eye on the lookout for employment, and a bilious green eye in a similar predicament.
In plainer terms, the stranger from Rosemary Lane was no other than-Captain Wragge.
The railway mania of that famous year had attacked even the wary Wragge; had withdrawn him from his customary pursuits; and had left him prostrate in the end, like many a better man.
He had lost his clerical appearance-he had faded with the autumn leaves.
His crape hat band had put itself in brown mourning for its own bereavement of black.
He was as courteous, as persuasive, as blandly dignified as ever.
He paced the streets of York, a man superior to clothes and circumstances-his vagabond varnish as bright on him as ever.
After a moment's hesitation, the captain sauntered after the cabs.
Captain Wragge gleaned the human field, and on that unoccupied afternoon the York terminus was as likely a corner to look about in as any other.
He reached the platform a few minutes after the train had arrived. That entire incapability of devising administrative measures for the management of large crowds, which is one of the characteristics of Englishmen in authority, is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than at York.
Three different lines of railway assemble three passenger mobs, from morning to night, under one roof; and leave them to raise a traveler's riot, with all the assistance which the bewildered servants of the company can render to increase the confusion.
The customary disturbance was rising to its climax as Captain Wragge approached the platform.
Dozens of different people were trying to attain dozens of different objects, in dozens of different directions, all starting from the same common point and all equally deprived of the means of information.
Offering his assistance in this emergency, with the polite alacrity which marked his character, Captain Wragge observed the three startling words, "Fifty Pounds Reward," printed in capital letters on the bills which he assisted in recovering; and instantly secreted one of them, to be more closely examined at the first convenient opportunity.
When a man happens not to be possessed of fifty pence in his own pocket, if his heart is in the right place, it bounds; if his mouth is properly constituted, it waters, at the sight of another man who carries about with him a printed offer of fifty pounds sterling, addressed to his fellow creatures.
With his back carefully turned on the traveler, Captain Wragge now possessed his mind of the following lines:
"FIFTY POUNDS REWARD.
Age-eighteen.
Dress-deep mourning.
Personal appearance-hair of a very light brown; eyebrows and eyelashes darker; eyes light gray; complexion strikingly pale; lower part of her face large and full; tall upright figure; walks with remarkable grace and ease; speaks with openness and resolution; has the manners and habits of a refined, cultivated lady.
Personal marks-two little moles, close together, on the left side of the neck.
Mark on the under clothing-'Magdalen Vanstone.' Is supposed to have joined, or attempted to join, under an assumed name, a theatrical company now performing at York.
Had, when she left London, one black box, and no other luggage.
Or to Messrs.
Wyatt, Pendril, and Gwilt, Serle Street, Lincoln's Inn, London."
The traveler was less observant; his whole attention was fixed on the opposite bank of the river, and he left the boat hastily the moment it touched the landing place.
Captain Wragge recovered himself, pocketed the handbill, and followed his leader for the second time.
"Does mr Huxtable live here?" asked the traveler.
"Yes, sir," was the answer, in a woman's voice.
"I think a young lady called here early in the day, did she not?"
"Yes; a young lady came this afternoon."
"Exactly; I come on the same business.
Did she see mr Huxtable?"
"No, sir; he has been away all day.
The young lady told me she would come back at eight o'clock."
"Any name, sir?"
"No; say a gentleman called on theatrical business-that will be enough. Wait one minute, if you please.
I am a stranger in York; will you kindly tell me which is the way to Coney Street?"
The woman gave the required information, the door closed, and the stranger hastened away in the direction of Coney Street.
On this occasion Captain Wragge made no attempt to follow him.
The first course was to do nothing in the matter at all.
The second course was to deserve the gratitude of the young lady's friends, rated at fifty pounds.
In the meantime, the first consideration was to be beforehand with the messenger from London, and to lay hands securely on the young lady herself.
Where was the adopted relative at that moment?
But if the inference which the handbill suggested was correct-if she was really alone at that moment in the city of York-where was she likely to be?
Not in the crowded thoroughfares, to begin with.
Doubtful, considering that she was entirely by herself.
In a pastry cook's shop? Far more likely.
Driving about in a cab?
Possible, certainly; but no more.
Loitering away the time in some quiet locality, out of doors? Likely enough, again, on that fine autumn evening.
Where?
Where next?
The captain stopped, looked across the river, brightened under the influence of a new idea, and suddenly hastened back to the ferry.
"The quietest place in York; and the place that every stranger goes to see."
In ten minutes more Captain Wragge was exploring the new field of search.
The sun had set more than half an hour since; the red light lay broad and low in the cloudless western heaven; all visible objects were softening in the tender twilight, but were not darkening yet.
The first few lamps lit in the street below looked like faint little specks of yellow light, as the captain started on his walk through one of the most striking scenes which England can show.
On his right hand, as he set forth, stretched the open country beyond the walls-the rich green meadows, the boundary trees dividing them, the broad windings of the river in the distance, the scattered buildings nearer to view; all wrapped in the evening stillness, all made beautiful by the evening peace.
On his left hand, the majestic west front of York Minster soared over the city and caught the last brightest light of heaven on the summits of its lofty towers.
Had this noble prospect tempted the lost girl to linger and look at it?
No; thus far, not a sign of her.
The captain looked round him attentively, and walked on.
He paused at this place-where the central activity of a great railway enterprise beats, with all the pulses of its loud clanging life, side by side with the dead majesty of the past, deep under the old historic stones which tell of fortified York and the sieges of two centuries since-he stood on this spot, and searched for her again, and searched in vain.
The captain glanced doubtfully at the darkening sky, and walked on.
He stopped again where the postern of Micklegate still stands, and still strengthens the city wall as of old.
The captain mounted the steps which led out from the postern and walked on.
He advanced with eager eyes and quickened step; for he saw before him the lonely figure of a woman, standing by the parapet of the wall, with her face set toward the westward view.
There she stood-not three months since the spoiled darling of her parents; the priceless treasure of the household, never left unprotected, never trusted alone-there she stood in the lovely dawn of her womanhood, a castaway in a strange city, wrecked on the world!
As she slowly turned her face and looked at him, he raised his hat, with the nearest approach to respect which a long life of unblushing audacity had left him capable of making.
She looked at him with a cold surprise.
"You are mistaken," she said, quietly.
"You are a perfect stranger to me."
I presented myself on that memorable occasion to an honored preceptress in your late father's family.
My name is Wragge."
By this time he had recovered complete possession of his own impudence; his party colored eyes twinkled cheerfully, and he accompanied his modest announcement of himself with a dancing master's bow.
Magdalen frowned, and drew back a step.
"W, R, A, double G, E-Wragge," said the captain, ticking off the letters persuasively on his fingers.
"I remember your name," said Magdalen.
"Excuse me for leaving you abruptly.
He instantly met the attempt by raising both hands, and displaying a pair of darned black gloves outspread in polite protest.
"Why not?" she asked haughtily.
In the ungovernable astonishment of hearing his reply she suddenly bent forward, and for the first time looked him close in the face. He sustained her suspicious scrutiny with every appearance of feeling highly gratified by it.
"What do you mean by mentioning him to me?"
The captain's curly lip took a new twist upward.
He immediately replied, to the best practical purpose, by producing the handbill from his pocket.
Before I enter upon the personal statement which your flattering inquiry claims from me, pray bestow a moment's attention on this Document."
She took the handbill from him.
No tender consideration had prepared her for the shock, no kind word softened it to her when it came.
The bill dropped from her hand; her face flushed deeply.
"Is this thing shown publicly?" she asked, stamping her foot on it.
"Is the mark on my neck described all over York?"
"Pray compose yourself," pleaded the persuasive Wragge.
Allow me to pick it up."
We all inherit our hot blood from my maternal grandfather."
"How did you come by it?" she asked, suddenly.
"How did you come by that handbill?" she repeated, passionately.
"I beg ten thousand pardons!
Briefly thus." Here Captain Wragge entered on his personal statement; taking his customary vocal exercise through the longest words of the English language, with the highest elocutionary relish.
Having, on this rare occasion, nothing to gain by concealment, he departed from his ordinary habits, and, with the utmost amazement at the novelty of his own situation, permitted himself to tell the unmitigated truth.
She was not startled; she was not irritated; she showed no disposition to cast herself on his mercy, and to seek his advice.
She looked him steadily in the face; and all she said, when he had neatly rounded his last sentence, was-"Go on."
"Go on?" repeated the captain.
"Shocked to disappoint you, I am sure; but the fact is, I have done."
"No, you have not," she rejoined; "you have left out the end of your story.
Those plain words so completely staggered Captain Wragge that for the moment he stood speechless.
But he had faced awkward truths of all sorts far too often to be permanently disconcerted by them.
"Smart," said the captain, laughing indulgently, and drumming with his umbrella on the pavement.
"It has just occurred to my mind that you might actually have spoken in earnest. My poor child! how can I earn the fifty pounds before the reward is offered to me?
Those handbills may not be publicly posted for a week to come.
Very good. Button them up in spite of me with your own fair fingers.
There is a train to London at nine forty five to night.
Submit yourself to your friend's wishes and go back by it."
"Never!" said Magdalen, firing at the bare suggestion, exactly as the captain had intended she should.
I forgive Norah," she added, turning away and speaking to herself, "but not mr Pendril, and not Miss Garth."
"Quite right!" said Captain Wragge.
I should have done the same myself at your age.
It runs in the blood.
Hark! there goes the clock again-half past seven.
You are young, you are inexperienced, you are in imminent danger.
"Suppose I choose to depend on nobody, and to act for myself?" said Magdalen.
"What then?"
Trap the first, at mr Huxtable's house; trap the second, at all the hotels; trap the third, at the railway station; trap the fourth, at the theater.
"If you knew me better, you would know that I depend on nobody but myself."
Those words decided the only doubt which now remained in the captain's mind-the doubt whether the course was clear before him.
The motive of her flight from home was evidently what the handbills assumed it to be-a reckless fancy for going on the stage.
"One of two things," thought Wragge to himself, in his logical way.
"She's worth more than fifty pounds to me in her present situation, or she isn't.
"I respect independence of character wherever I find it," he said, with an air of virtuous severity.
But (excuse the bold assertion), to walk on a way of your own, you must first have a way to walk on.
mr Huxtable is out of the question, to begin with."
"Granted with all my heart-a hit, a palpable hit.
Now for my turn.
To get to to morrow (excuse the bold assertion, once more), you must first pass through to night.
Where are you to sleep?"
"Excellent hotels for large families; excellent hotels for single gentlemen.
What is to prevent my sending the ticket for it?"
"Nothing-if you want to communicate your address by means of your box-nothing whatever.
Think; pray think!
Here is night coming on as fast as it can.
Can anything be more satisfactory, under all the circumstances?
Pray observe, I say nothing about to morrow-I leave to morrow to you, and confine myself exclusively to the night.
These are topics for the future.
For the present, I confine myself within my strict range of duty.
We are within five minutes' walk of my present address.
Allow me to offer you my arm.
No? You hesitate?
You distrust me?
"Quite possible," said Magdalen, without a moment's flinching from the answer.
"Don't spare my feelings; oblige me by speaking out.
In the plainest terms, now, what have you heard?"
She answered him with a woman's desperate disregard of consequences when she is driven to bay-she answered him instantly,
Well, I waive my privilege of setting you right on that point for a fitter time.
For the sake of argument, let us say I am a Rogue.
What is mr Huxtable?"
"A respectable man, or I should not have seen him in the house where we first met."
Magdalen laughed, bitterly.
"There is some truth in that," she said.
I have my end to gain-and who am I, to pick and choose the way of getting to it?
Absurd!
We know better than that, don't we, Captain Wragge? You are quite right.
Nobody's child must sleep under Somebody's roof-and why not yours?"
"This way," said the captain, dexterously profiting by the sudden change in her humor, and cunningly refraining from exasperating it by saying more himself.
She followed him a few steps, and suddenly stopped.
"Who has any authority over me?
Who can take me back, if I don't choose to go?
If they all find me to morrow, what then?
Can't I say No to mr Pendril? Can't I trust my own courage with Miss Garth?"
"Can you trust your courage with your sister?" whispered the captain, who had not forgotten the references to Norah which had twice escaped her already.
Her head drooped.
She shivered as if the cold night air had struck her, and leaned back wearily against the parapet of the wall.
"Not with Norah," she said, sadly.
Not with Norah."
"This way," repeated Captain Wragge.
She roused herself; looked up at the darkening heaven, looked round at the darkening view.
SMOKING BY WOMEN
Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon; They love no smoke, except the smoke of Town.
There is a tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself once smoked-with unpleasant results.
The cut, which is very rough, heads a bacchanalian ballad characteristic of the Elizabethan period, called "A Knotte of Good Fellows," and beginning:
The woman is plainly a convivial soul; but there is no pipe for her, and such provision was no doubt unusual.
There is direct evidence, too, besides the story in the first paragraph of this chapter, that women disliked the prevalence of smoking.
On the other hand, it is certain that from comparatively early in the seventeenth century there were to be found here and there women who smoked.
"George Thresher kept a shoppe in Romford and sold tobacco there.
Possibly she was not a smoker at all, but needed the tobacco for some medicinal purpose.
He tells us that according to the custom of the country the landladies sup with strangers and passengers, and if they have daughters, these also are of the company to entertain the guests at table with pleasant conceits where they drink as much as the men.
But what quite disgusted our visitor was "that when one drinks the health of any person in company, the custom of the country does not permit you to drink more than half the cup, which is filled up and presented to him or her whose health you have drunk.
Among women of the lowest class smoking was probably common enough.
Even Quakeresses sometimes smoked.
On this occasion the passage though stormy was very quick, for it lasted only thirty four days.
The list of provisions taken is truly formidable.
Nor has the practice by any means yet died out.
She said she had smoked it for twenty years, and "it always makes me giddy!" The writer, in august nineteen thirteen, saw a woman seated by the roadside in County Down, Ireland, calmly smoking a large briar pipe.
mrs Garbutt had been twice married, her husbands having been sailors during the Napoleonic wars.
Her death was caused by the accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the fire.
She had burned herself more than once before in performing the same operation; but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met her end.
The younger lady's conversation would have shocked the prim maids and matrons of that day.
She asked Dickens if he had ever "read such infernal trash" as mrs Gore's; and exclaimed "Oh God! what a sermon we had here, last Sunday." Dickens and his two daughters-"who were decidedly in the way, as we agreed afterwards"--dined by invitation with the mother and daughter.
But even this was not all.
She certainly smoked six or eight.
Mother gave in soon-I think she only did it out of vanity.
In eighteen fifty one, steady going folk were alarmed and shocked at a sudden and short-lived outburst of "bloomerism," imported from the United States.
But this was satire and hardly had much relation to fact.
However, he sent gifts in return to her Britannic Majesty, and among them were a West African state umbrella, a selection of highly coloured clothing materials, and some native pipes and tobacco for the Queen to smoke.
Many royal ladies of Europe, contemporaries of Queen Victoria and her son, have had the reputation of being confirmed smokers.
We are informed in the usual style of such pages, that "the well dressed woman has begun to consider the little smoking jacket indispensable." This jacket, we are told "is a very different matter to the braided velvet coats which were donned by our masculine forbears in the days of long drooping cavalry moustaches, tightly buttoned frock coats, and flexible canes.
There are many colours in the rainbow; so there are many tastes in people.
Lucy Morris
Poor Lizzie Greystock!--as men double her own age, and who had known her as a forward, capricious, spoilt child in her father's lifetime, would still call her.
In the meantime, let it be understood that poor little Lucy Morris was a governess in the house of old Lady Fawn, when our beautiful young widow established herself in Mount Street.
Lady Eustace and Lucy Morris had known each other for many years,--had indeed been children together,--there having been some old family friendship between the Greystocks and the Morrises.
She had often been a guest at the deanery.
Lucy, who was a year younger than Lizzie, had at that time been an orphan for the last four years.
The dean and the dean's wife and the dean's daughters had been her best friends, but they were not friends on whom she could be dependent.
They were in no way connected with her by blood.
The proposed engagement with Lady Fawn was thought to be a great thing for her.
Lady Fawn was known as a miracle of Virtue, Benevolence, and Persistency.
She must be able to teach music up to a certain point.
"Then it's all over," said Lucy to the dean with her pretty smile,--that smile which caused all the old and middle aged men to fall in love with her.
"It's not over at all," said the dean.
"You've got four months.
Our organist is about as good a teacher as there is in England.
You are clever and quick, and he shall teach you." So Lucy went to Bobsborough, and was afterwards accepted by Lady Fawn.
While she was at the deanery there sprung up a renewed friendship between her and Lizzie.
Now Lucy did not like to hear the Greystocks abused, and would say so.
This one was Frank Greystock, the barrister.
"Remember her position," said mrs Dean to her son.
"Her position!
Well;--and what is her position mother?"
But with a governess, unless you mean to marry her, you should be more careful than with another girl, because you may do her such a world of mischief."
"I don't see that at all."
Who can hinder it?"
"Yes-I do; well.
I don't suppose I can afford to marry Lucy Morris. At any rate, mother, I will never say a word to raise a hope in her,--if it would be a hope-"
"Of course it would be a hope."
"Oh, Frank, it would be impossible!" said mrs Dean.
mrs Dean was a very good woman, but she had aspirations in the direction of filthy lucre on behalf of her children, or at least on behalf of this special child, and she did think it would be very nice if Frank would marry an heiress.
A governess, if she were given to falling in love, could hardly perform her duties in life.
She was very fond of Lucy Morris, and treated her dependent with affectionate consideration;--but she did not approve of visits from mr Frank Greystock.
Lucy, blushing up to the eyes, had once declared that she desired to have no personal visitors at Lady Fawn's house; but that, as regarded her own friendships, the matter was one for her own bosom.
But then Lady Fawn hated Lady Linlithgow as only two old women can hate each other;--and she had not heard the story of the diamond necklace.
She was never forward, but never bashful.
They were good-natured, plain, unattractive girls, who spoke of her to her face as one who could easily do anything to which she might put her hand. Lady Fawn did really love her.
Lord Fawn had suffered a disappointment in love, but he had consoled himself with blue books, and mastered his passion by incessant attendance at the India Board. The lady he had loved had been rich, and Lord Fawn was poor; but nevertheless he had mastered his passion.
There was no fear that his feelings towards the governess would become too warm;--nor was it likely that Miss Morris should encounter danger in regard to him.
It was quite an understood thing in the family that Lord Fawn must marry money.
Lord Fawn was pompous, slow, dull, and careful; but even he had given way to it at once.
Lady Fawn, too, was very careful, but she had owned to herself long since that she could not bear to look forward to any permanent severance.
Of course Lucy would be made over to the Hittaways, whose mother lived in Warwick Square, and whose father was Chairman of the Board of Civil Appeals.
She was but a little thing;--and it cannot be said of her, as of Lady Eustace, that she was a beauty.
Her light brown hair was soft and smooth and pretty.
As hair it was very well, but it had no speciality.
Her mouth was somewhat large, but full of ever varying expression.
She would take up your subject, whatever it was, and make it her own.
There was forward just then a question as to whether the Sawab of Mygawb should have twenty millions of rupees paid to him and be placed upon a throne, or whether he should be kept in prison all his life.
What else can be said of her face or personal appearance that will interest a reader?
She was a little, thin, quick, graceful creature, whom it was impossible that you should see without wishing to have near you.
A most unselfish little creature she was, but one who had a well formed idea of her own identity.
She was the humblest little thing in the world in regard to any possible putting of herself forward or needful putting of herself back; and yet, to herself, nobody was her superior.
She coveted no man's possessions,--and no woman's; but she was minded to hold by her own.
Of present advantages or disadvantages,--whether she had the one or suffered from the other,--she thought not at all.
She had given her heart,--for good and all, as she owned to herself,--to Frank Greystock.
Frank was becoming a man of mark,--but was becoming a man of mark without much money.
Of all men he was the last who could afford to marry a governess.
And then, moreover, he had never said a word to make her think that he loved her.
Seeing that there had been friendship between the families for so many years, who could complain of that?
Lady Fawn, however, had-not complained, but just said a word.
A word in season, how good is it?
Lucy did not much regard the word spoken to herself; but when she reflected that a word must also have been spoken to mr Greystock,--otherwise how should it have been that he never came again?--that she did not like.
It is a great nuisance, a loss that maims the whole life,--a misfortune to be much regretted.
A man with a wooden leg may stump about through much action, and may enjoy the keenest pleasures of humanity.
He has his eyes left to him, and his ears, and his intellect.
He will not break his heart for the loss of that leg.
And so it was with Lucy Morris.
She would still stump about and be very active.
Eyes, ears, and intellect were left to her.
Lady Fawn, she thought, was right.
A governess should make up her mind to do without a lover.
She had given away her heart, and yet she would do without a lover.
"He is not going to prove a false knight?" asked Lady Eustace, in her lowest whisper.
"Nonsense, my dear; as if I didn't know.
Before the larger vessels could effect their entrance through Hatteras Inlet, captured in the previous August, a furious storm set in, which delayed the expedition nearly a month.
While the gradual occupation of the North Carolina coast was going on, two other expeditions of a similar nature were making steady progress. One of them, under the direction of General Quincy a Gillmore, carried on a remarkable siege operation against Fort Pulaski, standing on an isolated sea marsh at the mouth of the Savannah River.
Here not only the difficulties of approach, but the apparently insurmountable obstacle of making the soft, unctuous mud sustain heavy batteries, was overcome, and the fort compelled to surrender on april eleventh, after an effective bombardment.
The second was an expedition of nineteen ships, which, within a few days during the month of March, without serious resistance, occupied the whole remaining Atlantic coast southward as far as saint Augustine.
In due time she was raised by the Confederates, covered with a sloping roof of railroad iron, provided with a huge wedge shaped prow of cast iron, and armed with a formidable battery of ten guns.
The particular one of these three especially intended for this peculiar emergency was a ship of entirely novel design, made by the celebrated inventor john Ericsson, a Swede by birth, but American by adoption-a man who combined great original genius with long scientific study and experience.
His invention may be most quickly described as having a small, very low hull, covered by a much longer and wider flat deck only a foot or two above the water line, upon which was placed a revolving iron turret twenty feet in diameter, nine feet high, and eight inches thick, on the inside of which were two eleven inch guns trained side by side and revolving with the turret.
This unique naval structure was promptly nicknamed "a cheese box on a raft," and the designation was not at all inapt.
Naval experts at once recognized that her sea going qualities were bad; but compensation was thought to exist in the belief that her iron turret would resist shot and shell, and that the thin edge of her flat deck would offer only a minimum mark to an enemy's guns: in other words, that she was no cruiser, but would prove a formidable floating battery; and this belief she abundantly justified.
These saw the uncouth monster coming and prepared for action.
The Union officers who had witnessed the day's events with dismay, and were filled with gloomy forebodings for the morrow, while welcoming this providential reinforcement, were by no means reassured.
When the unwieldy rebel turtleback, with her slow, awkward movement, tried to ram the pointed raft that carried the cheese box, the little vessel, obedient to her rudder, easily glided out of the line of direct impact.
At that point the battle ended by mutual consent.
A tragic fate soon ended the careers of both vessels.
But the types of these pioneer ironclads, which had demonstrated such unprecedented fighting qualities, were continued.
Various preparations had been made and various plans discussed for an effective attempt against some prominent point on the Gulf coast.
With him were Commander David d Porter, in charge of a mortar flotilla of nineteen schooners and six armed steamships, and General Benjamin f Butler, at the head of an army contingent of six thousand men, soon to be followed by considerable reinforcements.
The first obstacle to be overcome was the fire from the twin forts Jackson and saint Philip, situated nearly opposite each other at a bend of the Mississippi twenty five miles above the mouth of the river, while the city of New Orleans itself lies seventy five miles farther up the stream.
These were formidable forts of masonry, with an armament together of over a hundred guns, and garrisons of about six hundred men each.
They also had auxiliary defenses: first, of a strong river barrier of log rafts and other obstructions connected by powerful chains, half a mile below the forts; second, of an improvised fleet of sixteen rebel gunboats and a formidable floating battery.
None of Farragut's ships were ironclad.
He had, from the beginning of the undertaking, maintained the theory that a wooden fleet, properly handled, could successfully pass the batteries of the forts.
He might not come back; but New Orleans would be won.
In his hazardous undertaking his faith was based largely on the skill and courage of his subordinate commanders of ships, and this faith was fully sustained by their gallantry and devotion.
Porter's flotilla of nineteen schooners carrying two mortars each, anchored below the forts, maintained a heavy bombardment for five days, and then Farragut decided to try his ships.
The first division of his fleet, eight vessels, led by Captain Bailey, successfully passed the barrier.
The second division of nine ships was not quite so fortunate.
The starlit night was quickly obscured by the smoke of the general cannonade from both ships and forts; but the heavy batteries of the latter had little effect on the passing fleet.
Farragut's flag ship was for a short while in great danger.
Immediately above the forts, the fleet of rebel gunboats joined in the battle, which now resolved itself into a series of conflicts between single vessels or small groups.
Aside from this, the Union fleet sustained much miscellaneous damage, but no serious injury in the furious battle of an hour and a half.
The city was promptly evacuated by the Confederate General Lovell.
Meanwhile, General Butler was busy moving his transports and troops around outside by sea to Quarantine; and, having occupied that point in force, Forts Jackson and saint Philip capitulated on april twenty eighth.
Farragut immediately despatched an advance section of his fleet up the Mississippi.
None of the important cities on its banks below Vicksburg had yet been fortified, and, without serious opposition, they surrendered as the Union ships successively reached them.
All the events would have favored an expedition of this kind.
This left Vicksburg as the single barrier to the complete opening of the Mississippi, and that barrier was defended by only six batteries and a garrison of six Confederate regiments at the date of Farragut's arrival before it.
But Farragut had with his expedition only two regiments of troops, and the rebel batteries were situated at such an elevation that the guns of the Union fleet could not be raised sufficiently to silence them.
Neither help nor promise of help came from Halleck's army, and Farragut could therefore do nothing but turn his vessels down stream and return to New Orleans.
Neither a bombardment from Porter's mortar sloops, nor the running of Farragut's ships past the batteries, where they were joined by the Union gunboat flotilla from above, sufficed to bring the Confederates to a surrender.
But on july fourteenth he reported definitely that it would be impossible for him to render the expected aid.
IS THERE ANY WAY OUT?
The right means, and the only entirely satisfactory means, of escape from it is through the undoing of the error which brought it about-that is, through the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Towards that end many earnest and patriotic citizens are working; but of course they realize the stupendous difficulty of the task they have undertaken.
A possible plan exists, however, which is not open to this objection, and yet the execution of which would not present such terrific difficulty as would the proposal of a simple repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.
That Amendment imbeds Prohibition in the organic law of the country, and thus not only imposes it upon the individual States regardless of what their desires may be, but takes away from the nation itself the right to legislate upon the subject by the ordinary processes of law making.
Now an Amendment repealing the Eighteenth Amendment but at the same time conferring upon Congress the power to make laws concerning the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors, would make it possible for Congress to pass a Volstead act, or a beer and wine act, or no Liquor act at all, just as its own judgment or desire might dictate.
It would give the Federal Government a power which I think it would be far more wholesome to reserve to the States; but it would get rid of the worst part of the Eighteenth Amendment.
And it would have, I think, an incomparably more favorable reception, from the start, than would a proposal of simple repeal.
The one strong argument which might be urged against the proposal-namely that such a provision would make Prohibition a constant issue in national elections, while the actual incorporation of Prohibition in the Constitution settles the matter once for all-has been deprived of all its force by our actual experience.
So far from settling the matter once for all, the Eighteenth Amendment has been a frightful breeder of unsettlement and contention, which bids fair to continue indefinitely.
I have offered this suggestion for what it may be worth as a practical proposal; it seems certainly deserving of discussion, and I could not refrain from putting it forward as a possible means of relief from an intolerable situation.
But I do not wish to wind up on that note.
The right solution-a solution incomparably better than this which I have suggested on account of its apparently better chance of acceptance-is the outright repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.
To the exposition of those fundamental issues this little book has been almost exclusively confined.
It has left untouched a score of aspects of the question of drink, and of the prohibition of drink, which it would have been interesting to discuss, and the discussion of which would, I feel sure, have added to the strength of the argument I have endeavored to present.
But there is an advantage, too, in keeping to the high points.
It is not to a multiplicity of details that one must trust in a case like this.
What is needed above all is a clear and wholehearted recognition of fundamentals.
And I do not believe that the American people have got so far away from their fundamentals that such recognition will be denied when the case is clearly put before them.
There is one and only one thing that could justify such a violation of liberty and of the cardinal principles of rational government as is embodied in the Eighteenth Amendment.
In the face of desperate necessity, there may be justification for the most desperate remedy.
It is unnecessary to appeal to statistics.
To shake off this tyranny is one of the worthiest objects to which good Americans can devote themselves.
If it is allowed to stand, there is no telling in what quarter the next invasion of liberty will be made by fanatics possessed with the itch for perfection.
To do that will be a splendid victory for all that we used to think of as American-for liberty, for individuality, for the freedom of each man to conduct his own life in his own way so long as he does not violate the rights of others, for the responsibility of each man for the evils he brings upon himself by the abuse of that freedom.
THE END
Then a curious thing happened.
This change has been made."
The enormous bag limits of thirty five rail and fifty each per day of plover, snipe and shore birds is a crime!
First of all, Connecticut needs a ten year close season law to save her remnant of shore birds before it is completely annihilated.
DELAWARE:
Stop all spring shooting, at once; stop killing shore birds for ten years, and protect swans indefinitely.
Enact bag limit laws, in very small figures.
I dare say they are afflicted with apathy, and game hogs.
The latter can easily back up General Apathy to an extent that spells "no game laws." In one act, and at one bold stroke, Delaware can step out of her position at the rear of the procession of states, and take a place in the front rank.
Will she do it?
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA:
If game shooting within the District is continued, on the marshes of the Eastern Branch and on the Potomac River, common decency demands the enactment of bag limit laws and long close season laws of the most modern pattern.
A general resident license should be required for hunting.
Once its bird life was one of the wonders of America.
But the gunners began early to shoot, and shoot, and shoot.
The following paragraphs are from that article:
Birds know no state lines, and while practically all the States lying to the north of Florida protect migratory birds and waterfowl, yet these are recklessly slaughtered in that state to such an extent as to be appalling to all sportsmen and bird lovers.
GEORGIA:
We are glad to report that Georgia has already begun to take up the white man's burden.
The protection of wild life is now a gentleman's proposition, and in it every real man with red blood in his veins has a duty to perform.
IDAHO:
The imperative duties of Idaho are as follows:
Stop all hunting of mountain sheep, mountain goat and elk.
Give the sage grouse and sharp tail ten year close seasons, at once, to forestall their extermination.
Enact the model law to protect non game birds.
Extend the State Warden's term to four years.
Like Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, the state of Idaho has wasted her stock of game, and it is to be feared that several species are now about to disappear from that state.
I am told that the sage grouse is almost "gone"; and I think that the antelope, caribou, and mountain sheep are in the same condition of scarcity.
If the people of Idaho wish to save their wild fauna, they must be up and doing.
The time to temporize, theorize, be conservative and easy going has gone by.
In nineteen ten, dr t s Palmer credited Idaho with the possession of about five hundred moose and two hundred antelope.
There is one feature of the Idaho game law that may well stand unchanged.
The open season on "ibex," of which one per year may be killed, may as well be continued.
One myth per year is not an extravagant bag for any intelligent hunter; and it seems that the "ibex" will not down.
ILLINOIS:
In Illinois the bag limits on birds are nearly all at least fifty per cent too high.
They should be as follows: No squirrels, doves or shore birds; six quail, five woodcock, ten coots, ten rail, ten ducks, three geese and three brant, with a total limit of ten waterfowl per day.
Doves should be removed from the game list.
All tree squirrels and chipmunks should be perpetually protected, as companions to man, unfit for food.
The use of all machine shotguns in hunting should be prohibited.
saint Louis cleared her record in nineteen o nine.
New York thoroughly cleaned her Augean stable in nineteen eleven, and Massachusetts won her Bayne law by a desperate battle in nineteen twelve.
In nineteen thirteen, Pennsylvania probably will enact a Bayne law.
Often the migratory game was located by telegraphic reports.
The present bag limits on Illinois game birds are fatally high.
The men of Illinois have just two alternatives between which to choose: drastic and immediate preservation, or a gameless state.
Which shall it be?
INDIANA:
A Bayne law, absolutely prohibiting the sale of all native wild game, should be enacted at once.
The use of pump and autoloading guns in hunting should be prohibited.
In Indiana the white tailed deer is extinct.
This means very close hunting, and a bad outlook for all other game larger than the sparrow. On october second nineteen twelve, eleven heads of greater bird of paradise, with plumes attached, were offered for sale within one hundred feet of the headquarters of the Fourth National Conservation Congress.
The prices ranged from thirty five dollars to forty seven dollars and fifty cents; and while we looked, two ladies came up, one of whom pointed to a bird of paradise corpse and said: "There!
IOWA:
Spring shooting should be stopped, at once and forever.
The killing of all tree squirrels and chipmunks should cease.
All shore birds that visit Iowa deserve a five year close season.
Especially is the shooting of plover, sandpiper, marsh and beach birds, rail, duck, geese and brant from september first, to april fifteenth, an outrage.
She boasts about her corn and hogs, but she is deaf to the appeals of the states surrounding her on the subject of spring shooting.
KANSAS:
Draw a line around the hog and corn area of the United States, and within it you will find more spring shooting, more sale of game and more extermination of species than in any other area in the United States.
I refer to Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
LOUISIANA:
In short,
Enact a Bayne law.
For good reasons, forty states of the American Union strictly prohibit the killing of song and insectivorous birds.
NEW LAWS NEEDED IN THE STATES (Continued)
MAINE:
For example:
Cow and calf moose are permanently protected.
Only bull moose, with at least two three-inch prongs on its horns, may be killed.
The open season for deer varies from ten weeks to four weeks, and in parts of three counties there is no open season at all.
MARYLAND:
Otherwise, the state is wide open!
At the last session of the Maryland legislature, the law preventing the use of power boats in wild fowl shooting was repealed.
MASSACHUSETTS:
The victory is highly instructive, as great victories usually are.
Very soon, also, her sportsmen will raise the standard of ethics in shotgun shooting, by barring out the automatic and pump shotguns so much beloved by the market shooters.
As matters stand at this date (nineteen twelve) the Old Bay State needs the following new laws:
Low bag limits on all game.
Expulsion of the automatic and pump shotguns, in hunting.
MICHIGAN:
All the game protected by the laws of the state is debarred from sale; squirrels, pinnated grouse, doves and wild turkeys enjoy long close seasons; the bag limits on deer and game birds are reasonably low; spring shooting still is possible on nine species of ducks; and this should be stopped without delay.
All spring shooting should be prohibited.
Two or three state game preserves, for deer, each at least four miles square, should be established without delay.
There should be five year close seasons enacted for quail, grouse, plover, woodcock, snipe, and all other shore birds.
The state should prohibit the use of machine guns in hunting.
MISSISSIPPI:
The legalized slaughter of robins, cedar birds, grosbeaks and doves should cease immediately, on the basis of economy of resources and a square deal to all the states lying northward of Mississippi.
Doves should be taken off the list of game birds, and protected throughout the year; and so should all tree squirrels.
It is said that in nineteen eleven, eleven thousand deer were killed in Montana, all in the western part of the state, seventy per cent of which were white tails.
The antelope need three or four small ranges, such as the Snow Creek Antelope Range, where the bad lands are too rough for ranchmen, but quite right for antelopes and other big game.
The splendid sage grouse is now extinct in many parts of its previous range.
Only seven states have failed in that respect.
The use of automatic and pump shotguns, and silencers, should immediately be prohibited.
Montana's bag limits are not wholly bad; but the grizzly bear has almost been exterminated, save in the Yellowstone Park.
And then we will hear enthusiastic talk about "restocking."
No other state has bestowed close seasons upon as many extinct species of game as Nebraska.
NEVADA:
All non game birds should have perpetual protection.
A corps of salaried game protectors should be chosen for active and aggressive game protection.
Nevada's bag limits are among the best of any state, the only serious flaw being "ten sage grouse" per day: which should be zero!
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
Gray Squirrel, none per day, or per year; duck (except wood duck), ten per day, or thirty per season; ruffed grouse, four per day, twelve per season; hare and rabbit, four per day, or twelve per season.
The use of automatic and pump guns in hunting should be barred,--through state pride, if for no other reason.
NEW JERSEY:
New Jersey enjoys the distinction of being the second state to break the strangle hold of the gun makers of Hartford and Ilion, and cast out the odious automatic and pump guns.
It was a pitched battle,--that of nineteen twelve, inaugurated by Ernest Napier, President of the State Game and Fish Commission and his fellow commissioners.
The longer the contest continued, the more did the press and the people of New Jersey awaken to the seriousness of the situation.
The moral is: Will the People apply this lesson to the ruffed grouse, quail and the shore birds generally before they, too, are too far gone to be brought back?
Prohibit the sale of all native wild game; but promote the sale of preserve bred game.
Prohibit the killing of squirrels as "game."
NEW MEXICO:
All things considered, the game laws of New Mexico are surprisingly up to date, and the state is to be congratulated on its advanced position. For example, there are long close seasons on antelope, elk (now extinct!), mountain sheep, bob white quail, pinnated grouse, wild pigeon and ptarmigan,--an admirable list, truly.
On two counts, her laws are not quite perfect.
There is no law prohibiting spring shooting, and there is no "model law" protecting the non game birds.
The sale of game will not trouble New Mexico, because the present laws prevent the sale of all protected game except plover, curlew and snipe,--all of them species by no means common in the arid regions of the Southwest.
The term of the State Warden should be extended to four years.
NEW YORK:
This proud position has been achieved partly through the influence of a great conservation Governor, john a Dix, and the State Conservation Commission proposed and created by his efforts.
Spring shooting was stopped in nineteen o three.
A comprehensive law protecting non game birds was enacted in eighteen sixty two. New York's first law against the sale of certain game during close seasons was enacted in eighteen thirty seven.
In nineteen twelve a new codification of the state game laws went into effect, through the initiative of Governor Dix and Conservation Commissioners Van Kennen, Moore and Fleming, assisted (as special counsel) by Marshall McLean, George a Lawyer and john b Burnham.
They sold many things besides coffee, and served a variety of purposes, but primarily they were temples of talk and good fellowship.
Chapter two
But the women had faith in their appeal.
The campaign became a very hot one during which most of the militancy seemed to be on the side of the political leaders. Heavy fists came down on desks.
Harsh words were spoken. Violent threats were made.
"You can do no good here.
Of course, the Democratic leaders did not welcome an issue raised unexpectedly, and one which forced them to spend an endless amount of time apologizing for and explaining the Democratic Party's record.
Nor did they relish spending more money publishing more literature, in short, adding greatly to the burdens of their campaign.
Our aim in this campaign was primarily to call to the attention of the public the bad suffrage record of the Democratic Party. The effect of our campaign was soon evident in Congress.
The most backward member realized for the first time that women had voted. Even the President perceived that the movement had gained new strength, though he was not yet politically moved by it.
This red herring drawn across the path had been accepted by the conservative suff ragists evidently in a moment of hopelessness, and their strength put behind it, but the politicians who persuade them to back it knew that it was merely an attempt to evade the issue.
Women from all the voting states assembled in a mass convention september fourteenth fifteen and sixteen.
These women from the deserts of Arizona, from the farms of Oregon, from the valleys of California, from the mountains of Nevada and Utah, were in deadly earnest.
They had answered the call and they meant to stay in the fight until it was won.
The envoys, symbolic of the new strength that was to come out of the West, made their journey across continent by automobile.
They created a sensation all along the way, received as they were by governors, by mayors, by officials high and low, and by the populace.
The action of the convention scarcely cold, and the envoys mid way across the continent, the President hastened to New Jersey to cast his vote for suffrage in a state referendum.
Casting a vote for it would help his case with women voters, and still not bring suffrage in the East a step nearer.
The envoys replied by asking that their message be carried by friends of the measure to the floor of the Senate and House, and this was done.
The envoys waited upon the President at the White House.
This visit of the representatives of women with power marked rather an advance in the President's position.
No more questions on mother and home!
It
"Sirs, that depends upon what you gentlemen do.
And so the hearing passed in something of a verbal riot, but with no doubt as to the fact that Congressmen were alarmed by the prospect of women voting as a protest group.
Oh, no, indeed; it was men's business to keep the nation out of war.
Logic must not be pressed too hard upon the "reasoning" sex.
This time, men would do it.
The exciting national election contest was approaching.
The instant response which met this appeal surpassed the most optimistic hopes.
For the first time in history, women came together to organize their political power into a party to free their own sex.
For the first time in history representatives of men's political parties came to plead before these women voters for the support of their respective parties.
All laid their claims for suffrage support before the women with the result that the convention resolved itself into another political party The Woman's Party.
power to free women; a party which became a potent factor of protest in the following national election.
The Republican National Convention, meeting immediately. after the Woman's Party Convention, and the Democratic National Convention the week following, both included suffrage planks in their national platforms for the first time in history.
To be sure, they were planks that failed to satisfy us.
But the mere hint of organized political action on suffrage had moved the two dominant parties to advance a step.
The new Woman's Party had declared suffrage a national political issue.
The two major parties acknowledged the issue by writing it into their party platforms.
The Democratic Party made its suffrage plank specific against action by Congress.
If the Republicans could afford to write a vague and indefinite plank, the President and his party could not.
They did so. The President chose the plank and his subordinates followed his lead.
It may be remarked in passing that this declaration so solidified the opposition within the President's party that when the President ultimately sought to repudiate it, he met stubborn resistance.
Protected by the President's plank, the Democratic Congress continued to block national suffrage.
It would not permit it even to be reported from the Judiciary Committee.
The party platform was written.
Meanwhile the women continued to protest.
Miss Mabel Vernon of Delaware, beloved and gifted crusader, was the first member of the Woman's Party to commit a "militant" act. President Wilson, speaking at the dedication services of the Labor Temple in Washington, was declaring his interest in all classes and all struggles.
Attention was focussed on the two rival presidential candidates, Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican nominee, upon whom the new Woman's Party worked diligently
We also went to the country.
The President accepted at once the opportunity to speak before a convention of suffragists at Atlantic City in an effort to prove his great belief in suffrage.
Enticing doctrine to women the peace lovers of the human race.
The people were excited to an almost unprecedented pitch over the issue of peace versus war.
At least a third of each speech was devoted to suffrage.
He urged.
He apologized.
He explained.
He pleaded.
He condemned.
Often he was heckled.
Space will not permit in this book to give more than a hint of the scope and strength of our campaign.
It must be made perfectly clear that the Woman's Party did not attempt to elect mr Hughes. It did not feel strong enough to back a candidate in its first battle, and did not conduct its fight affirmatively at all.
The appeal was to vote a vote of protest against mr Wilson and his Congressional candidates, because he and his party had had the power to pass the amendment through Congress and had refused to do so.
It was to be expected that the main strength of the vote taken from mr Wilson would go to mr Hughes, as few women perhaps threw their votes to the minority parties.
But just as the Progressive Party's protest had been effective in securing progressive legislation without winning the election, so the Woman's Party hoped its protest would bring results in Congress without attempting to win the election.
The women there voted two to one against mr Wilson and for mr Hughes.
Men outnumber women throughout the entire western territory; in some states, two and three to one; in Nevada, still higher.
The Democratic Judiciary Committee of the House which had refused to report suffrage to the House for a vote, had only one Democratic member from a suffrage state, mr Taggart of Kansas, standing for reelection.
This was the only spot where women could strike out against the action of this committee and mr Taggart. They struck with success.
He was defeated almost wholly by the women's votes.
As much literature was used on suffrage as on peace in the suffrage states.
Again, with more force, national suffrage had been injected into a campaign where it was not wanted, where the leaders had hoped the single issue of "peace" would hold the center of the stage. Again many women had stood together on this issue and put woman suffrage first.
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EXTRACTS FROM ADAM'S DIARY
by Mark Twain
Since then I have deciphered some more of Adam's hieroglyphics, and think he has now become sufficiently important as a public character to justify this publication.--M.
T.]
Monday
I don't like this; I am not used to company.
I wish it would stay with the other animals.
Where did I get that word?...
I remember now --the new creature uses it.
Tuesday
It is the finest thing on the estate, I think.
The new creature calls it Niagara Falls-why, I am sure I do not know.
Says it looks like Niagara Falls.
I get no chance to name anything myself.
The new creature names everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest.
And always that same pretext is offered-it looks like the thing.
There is the dodo, for instance.
Says the moment one looks at it one sees at a glance that it "looks like a dodo." It will have to keep that name, no doubt.
Dodo!
It looks no more like a dodo than I do.
Wednesday
Built me a shelter against the rain, but could not have it to myself in peace.
The new creature intruded.
I wish it would not talk; it is always talking.
That sounds like a cheap fling at the poor creature, a slur; but I do not mean it so.
I have never heard the human voice before, and any new and strange sound intruding itself here upon the solemn hush of these dreaming solitudes offends my ear and seems a false note.
And this new sound is so close to me; it is right at my shoulder, right at my ear, first on one side and then on the other, and I am used only to sounds that are more or less distant from me.
Friday
I had a very good name for the estate, and it was musical and pretty --GARDEN OF EDEN.
Privately, I continue to call it that, but not any longer publicly.
The new creature says it is all woods and rocks and scenery, and therefore has no resemblance to a garden. Says it looks like a park, and does not look like anything but a park.
Consequently, without consulting me, it has been new named --NIAGARA FALLS PARK.
This is sufficiently high handed, it seems to me.
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
My life is not as happy as it was.
Saturday
The new creature eats too much fruit.
We are going to run short, most likely.
"We" again-that is its word; mine too, now, from hearing it so much.
Good deal of fog this morning.
I do not go out in the fog myself.
The new creature does.
And talks. It used to be so pleasant and quiet here.
Sunday
Pulled through.
This day is getting to be more and more trying. It was selected and set apart last November as a day of rest.
I already had six of them per week, before.
This morning found the new creature trying to clod apples out of that forbidden tree.
Monday
The new creature says its name is Eve.
That is all right, I have no objections.
Says it is to call it by when I want it to come. I said it was superfluous, then.
The word evidently raised me in its respect; and indeed it is a large, good word, and will bear repetition.
It says it is not an It, it is a She.
This is probably doubtful; yet it is all one to me; what she is were nothing to me if she would but go by herself and not talk.
Tuesday
She has littered the whole estate with execrable names and offensive signs:
THIS WAY TO THE WHIRLPOOL.
THIS WAY TO GOAT ISLAND.
She says this park would make a tidy summer resort, if there was any custom for it.
Summer resort-another invention of hers-just words, without any meaning.
What is a summer resort?
But it is best not to ask her, she has such a rage for explaining.
Friday
She has taken to beseeching me to stop going over the Falls.
What harm does it do?
Says it makes her shudder.
I wonder why.
I supposed it was what the Falls were for.
They have no other use that I can see, and they must have been made for something.
She says they were only made for scenery-like the rhinoceros and the mastodon.
I went over the Falls in a barrel-not satisfactory to her.
Went over in a tub-still not satisfactory.
Swam the Whirlpool and the Rapids in a fig leaf suit.
It got much damaged.
Hence, tedious complaints about my extravagance.
Saturday
She engages herself in many foolish things: among others, trying to study out why the animals called lions and tigers live on grass and flowers, when, as she says, the sort of teeth they wear would indicate that they were intended to eat each other.
This is foolish, because to do that would be to kill each other, and that would introduce what, as I understand it, is called "death;" and death, as I have been told, has not yet entered the Park.
Sunday
Pulled through.
Monday
It seems a good idea....
She has been climbing that tree again.
Clodded her out of it.
She said nobody was looking.
Seems to consider that a sufficient justification for chancing any dangerous thing.
Told her that. The word justification moved her admiration-and envy too, I thought.
It is a good word.
Thursday
She told me she was made out of a rib taken from my body.
This is at least doubtful, if not more than that.
I have not missed any rib....
She is in much trouble about the buzzard; says grass does not agree with it; is afraid she can't raise it; thinks it was intended to live on decayed flesh.
The buzzard must get along the best it can with what is provided.
We cannot overturn the whole scheme to accommodate the buzzard.
Saturday
She fell in the pond yesterday, when she was looking at herself in it, which she is always doing.
When night comes I shall throw them out doors.
Sunday
Tuesday
She has taken up with a snake now.
The other animals are glad, for she was always experimenting with them and bothering them; and I am glad, because the snake talks, and this enables me to get a rest.
Friday
She says the snake advises her to try the fruit of that tree, and says the result will be a great and fine and noble education.
I told her there would be another result, too-it would introduce death into the world.
That was a mistake-it had been better to keep the remark to myself; it only gave her an idea-she could save the sick buzzard, and furnish fresh meat to the despondent lions and tigers.
I foresee trouble.
Will emigrate.
Wednesday
I have had a variegated time.
I escaped that night, and rode a horse all night as fast as he could go, hoping to get clear out of the Park and hide in some other country before the trouble should begin; but it was not to be.
I knew what it meant-Eve had eaten that fruit, and death was come into the world....
I found this place, outside the Park, and was fairly comfortable for a few days, but she has found me out.
Found me out, and has named the place Tonawanda-says it looks like that.
I was obliged to eat them, I was so hungry.
She did it, and after this we crept down to where the wild beast battle had been, and collected some skins, and I made her patch together a couple of suits proper for public occasions.
They are uncomfortable, it is true, but stylish, and that is the main point about clothes. ...
I will superintend.
She accuses me of being the cause of our disaster!
She says, with apparent sincerity and truth, that the Serpent assured her that the forbidden fruit was not apples, it was chestnuts.
I said I was innocent, then, for I had not eaten any chestnuts.
She said the Serpent informed her that "chestnut" was a figurative term meaning an aged and mouldy joke.
I turned pale at that, for I have made many jokes to pass the weary time, and some of them could have been of that sort, though I had honestly supposed that they were new when I made them.
She asked me if I had made one just at the time of the catastrophe.
It was this.
Next Year
We have named it Cain.
That is what she thinks, but this is an error, in my judgment.
I still think it is a fish, but she is indifferent about what it is, and will not let me have it to try.
I do not understand this.
Her mind is disordered-everything shows it.
Sometimes she carries the fish in her arms half the night when it complains and wants to get to the water.
At such times the water comes out of the places in her face that she looks out of, and she pats the fish on the back and makes soft sounds with her mouth to soothe it, and betrays sorrow and solicitude in a hundred ways.
She used to carry the young tigers around so, and play with them, before we lost our property; but it was only play; she never took on about them like this when their dinner disagreed with them.
The kangaroo still continues to grow, which is very strange and perplexing.
I never knew one to be so long getting its growth. It has fur on its head now; not like kangaroo fur, but exactly like our hair, except that it is much finer and softer, and instead of being black is red.
If I could tame it-but that is out of the question; the more I try, the worse I seem to make it.
I wanted to let it go, but she wouldn't hear of it.
That seemed cruel and not like her; and yet she may be right.
It might be lonelier than ever; for since I cannot find another one, how could it?
It is not a kangaroo.
No, for it supports itself by holding to her finger, and thus goes a few steps on its hind legs, and then falls down.
It is probably some kind of a bear; and yet it has no tail-as yet-and no fur, except on its head.
Bears are dangerous-since our catastrophe-and I shall not be satisfied to have this one prowling about the place much longer without a muzzle on.
I have offered to get her a kangaroo if she would let this one go, but it did no good-she is determined to run us into all sorts of foolish risks, I think.
She was not like this before she lost her mind.
A Fortnight Later
I examined its mouth.
There is no danger yet; it has only one tooth.
It has no tail yet.
It makes more noise now than it ever did before-and mainly at night.
I have moved out.
Four Months Later
Meantime the bear has learned to paddle around all by itself on its hind legs, and says "poppa" and "momma."
This resemblance to words may be purely accidental, of course, and may have no purpose or meaning; but even in that case it is still extraordinary, and is a thing which no other bear can do.
Next Day
I was going to stuff one of them for my collection, but she is prejudiced against it for some reason or other; so I have relinquished the idea, though I think it is a mistake.
It would be an irreparable loss to science if they should get away.
The old one is tamer than it was, and can laugh and talk like the parrot, having learned this, no doubt, from being with the parrot so much, and having the imitative faculty in a highly developed degree.
I shall be astonished if it turns out to be a new kind of parrot, and yet I ought not to be astonished, for it has already been everything else it could think of, since those first days when it was a fish.
She calls it Abel.
Ten Years Later
They are boys; we found it out long ago.
Blessed be the chestnut that brought us near together and taught me to know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit!
FAR away in the land to which the swallows fly when it is winter, dwelt a king who had eleven sons, and one daughter named Eliza.
The eleven brothers were princes, and each went to school with a star on his breast and a sword by his side.
Their sister Eliza sat on a little stool of plate glass, and had a book full of pictures which had cost as much as half a kingdom.
Their father, who was King of the country, married a very wicked Queen who did not love the poor children at all. They knew this from the very first day after the wedding.
The week after she sent little Eliza into the country to a peasant and his wife, and then she told the King so many untrue things about the young princes that he gave himself no more trouble respecting them.
"Go out into the world and get your own living," said the Queen.
Then, with a strange cry, they flew through the windows of the palace, over the park, to the forest beyond.
They hovered over the roof, twisted their long necks, and flapped their wings; but no one heard them or saw them, so they were at last obliged to fly away, high up in the clouds; and over the wide world they flew till they came to a thick, dark wood, which stretched far away to the seashore.
Poor little Eliza was alone in her room playing with a green leaf, for she had no other playthings, and she pierced a hole through the leaf and looked through it at the sun, and it was as if she saw her brothers' clear eyes, and when the warm sun shone on her cheeks she thought of all the kisses they had given her.
At fifteen she returned home, but when the Queen saw how beautiful she was, she became full of spite and hatred toward her.
Early one morning the Queen went into the bathroom; it was built of marble, and had soft cushions trimmed with the most beautiful tapestry.
As Eliza dipped her head under the water one of the toads sat on her hair, a second on her forehead, and a third on her breast, but she did not seem to notice them, and when she rose out of the water there were three red poppies floating upon it.
When the wicked Queen saw this, she rubbed her face with walnut juice, so that she was quite brown; then she tangled her beautiful hair and smeared it with disgusting ointment, till it was quite impossible to recognize the beautiful Eliza.
When her father saw her, he was much shocked and declared she was not his daughter.
No one but the watchdog and the swallows knew her, and they were only dumb animals and could say nothing.
Then poor Eliza wept, and thought of her eleven brothers who were all away.
All nature was still, and the soft, mild air fanned her forehead.
The light of hundreds of glowworms shone amidst the grass and the moss, like green fire; and if she touched a twig with her hand ever so lightly, the brilliant fireflies fell down around her like shooting stars.
She saw them writing with their diamond pencils on golden slates, while she looked at the beautiful picture book which had cost half a kingdom.
In the picture book, too, everything was living.
There was a sweet fragrance from the fresh verdure, and the birds almost perched upon her shoulders.
She heard water rippling from a number of springs, all flowing into a lake with golden sands. Bushes grew thickly around the lake, and at one spot an opening had been made by a deer, through which Eliza went down to the water.
She thought of her brothers, and felt sure that God would not forsake her.
It is God who makes the wild apples grow in the wood to satisfy the hungry, and He now led her to one of these trees, which was so loaded with fruit that the boughs bent beneath its weight.
Glass, iron, stones, everything that lay there mingled together, had taken its shape from the same power, and felt as smooth, or even smoother, than her own delicate hand.
Two days longer we can remain here, and then must we fly away to a beautiful land which is not our home; and how can we take you with us?
Toward evening the rest came back, and as the sun went down they resumed their natural forms.
Have you courage to go with us?
It was very large and strong.
Eliza laid herself down on the net, and when the sun rose and her brothers again became wild swans, they took up the net with their beaks and flew up to the clouds with their dear sister, who still slept. The sunbeams fell on her face, therefore one of the swans soared over her head, so that his broad wing might shade her.
By her side lay a branch full of beautiful ripe berries and a bundle of sweet roots; the youngest of her brothers had gathered them for her, and placed them by her side.
Altogether it formed a more beautiful picture than she had ever seen; but as the sun rose higher, and the clouds were left behind, the shadowy picture vanished away.
When the sun set they would change to men, fall into the sea, and be drowned.
Then she offered a prayer from her inmost heart, but still no appearance of the rock.
They sank so rapidly that at the moment their feet touched the rock the sun shone only like a star, and at last disappeared like the last spark in a piece of burned paper.
There was but just room enough for them, and not the smallest space to spare.
The heavens were lighted up with continual flashes, and peal after peal of thunder rolled.
So there continued to pass before her eyes a constant change of scene, till at last she saw the real land to which they were bound, with its blue mountains, its cedar forests, and its cities and palaces.
These you must gather even while they burn blisters on your hands.
Break them to pieces with your hands and feet, and they will become flax, from which you must spin and weave eleven coats with long sleeves; if these are then thrown over the eleven swans the spell will be broken.
The first word you utter will pierce through the hearts of your brothers like a deadly dagger. Their lives hang upon your tongue.
So she bruised the nettles with her bare feet and spun the flax.
At sunset her brothers returned and were very much frightened when they found her dumb.
She kept at her work all night, for she could not rest till she had released her dear brothers.
During the whole of the following day, while her brothers were absent, she sat in solitude, but never before had the time flown so quickly.
The sound came nearer and nearer; she heard the dogs barking, and fled with terror into the cave.
Immediately a great dog came bounding toward her out of the ravine, and then another and another; they barked loudly, ran back, and then came again.
In a very few minutes all the huntsmen stood before the cave, and the handsomest of them was the King of the country.
But Eliza shook her head.
She dared not speak, at the cost of her brothers' lives.
"Come with me," he said; "here you cannot remain.
If you are as good as you are beautiful, I will dress you in silk and velvet, I will place a golden crown on your head, and you shall dwell and rule and make your home in my richest castle." And then he lifted her on his horse.
She looked the very picture of grief.
Then the King opened the door of a little chamber in which she was to sleep; it was adorned with rich green tapestry, and resembled the cave in which he had found her.
These things had been brought away from the cave as curiosities by one of the huntsmen.
"Here you can dream yourself back again in the old home in the cave," said the King; "here is the work with which you employed yourself.
She thought of her brothers, and their release made her so joyful that she kissed the King's hand.
Then the archbishop whispered wicked words in the King's ear, but they did not sink into his heart.
But she loved the kind, handsome King, who did everything to make her happy, more and more each day; she loved him with her whole heart, and her eyes beamed with the love she dared not speak.
Oh, if she had only been able to confide in him and tell him of her grief!
Therefore at night she crept away into her little chamber, which had been decked out to look like the cave, and quickly wove one coat after another.
How should she get out there?
"I must venture; I shall not be denied help from heaven." Then with a trembling heart, as if she were about to perform a wicked deed, she crept into the garden in the broad moonlight, and passed through the narrow walks and the deserted streets till she reached the churchyard.
These hideous creatures took off their rags, as if they intended to bathe, and then, clawing open the grassy graves with their long skinny fingers, pulled out the bones and threw them about!
Now he thought his opinion was evidently correct.
All was not right with the Queen.
From day to day his brow became darker, and Eliza saw it and did not understand the reason, but it alarmed her and made her heart tremble for her brothers.
She thought with terror of the solitary walk, and of the horrible ghouls, but her will was firm, as well as her trust in Providence.
They saw her vanish through the wicket gate into the churchyard, and when they came nearer they saw the ghouls sitting on the tombstone as Eliza had seen them, and the King turned away his head, for he thought she was with them-she whose head had rested on his breast that very evening.
"The people must condemn her," said he, and she was very quickly condemned by everyone to suffer death by fire.
The archbishop withdrew, uttering bitter words against her; but poor Eliza knew that she was innocent, and diligently continued her work.
It was still twilight and at least an hour before sunrise when the eleven brothers stood at the castle gate and demanded to be brought before the King.
They were told it could not be, it was yet almost night, and as the King slept they dared not disturb him.
They threatened, they entreated.
Then the guard appeared, and even the King himself, inquiring what all the noise meant.
And now all the people came streaming forth from the gates of the city to see the witch burned.
An old horse drew the cart on which she sat They had dressed her in a garment of coarse sackcloth.
Her lovely hair hung loose on her shoulders, her cheeks were deadly pale, her lips moved silently, while her fingers still worked at the green flax.
Even on the way to death she would not give up her task.
The ten coats of mail lay at her feet, she was working hard at the eleventh, while the mob jeered her and said, "See the witch, how she mutters!
She sits there with her ugly sorcery.
Let us tear it in a thousand pieces."
And then they pressed toward her, and would have destroyed the coats of mail, but at the same moment eleven wild swans flew over her and alighted on the cart.
Then they flapped their large wings and the crowd drew on one side in alarm.
As the executioner seized her by the hand to lift her out of the cart, she hastily threw the eleven coats of mail over the swans, and they immediately became eleven handsome princes; but the youngest had a swan's wing instead of an arm, for she had not been able to finish the last sleeve of the coat.
"Now I may speak!" she exclaimed.
"I am innocent."
"Yes, she is innocent," said the eldest brother; and then he related all that had taken place, and while he spoke there rose in the air a fragrance as from millions of flowers.
Every piece of fagot in the pile had taken root, and thrown out branches, and appeared a thick hedge, large and high, covered with roses, while above all bloomed a white and shining blossom that glittered like a star.
This flower the King plucked and placed in Eliza's bosom, when she awoke from her swoon with peace and happiness in her heart.
And all the church bells rang of themselves and the birds came in great troops.
As they returned toward the castle, D'Artagnan thought of the miseries of poor human nature, always dissatisfied with what it has, ever desirous of what it has not.
In the position of Porthos, D'Artagnan would have been perfectly happy; and to make Porthos contented there was wanting-what? five letters to put before his three names, a tiny coronet to paint upon the panels of his carriage!
"I shall pass all my life," thought D'Artagnan, "in seeking for a man who is really contented with his lot."
Whilst making this reflection, chance seemed, as it were, to give him the lie direct.
The face of the steward, despite one slight shade of care, light as a summer cloud, seemed a physiognomy of absolute felicity.
"Here is what I am looking for," thought D'Artagnan; "but alas! the poor fellow does not know the purpose for which I am here."
"Sir," said the servant, "I have a favour to ask you."
"Speak out, my friend."
"I am afraid to do so.
Perhaps you will think, sir, that prosperity has spoiled me?"
"Art thou happy, friend?" asked D'Artagnan.
"As happy as possible; and yet, sir, you may make me even happier than I am."
"Well, speak, if it depends on me."
"I listen-I am waiting to hear."
You, sir, know how necessary subordination is in any large establishment of servants."
"Will monsieur remain long with us?" asked Mousqueton, with a serene and glowing countenance.
"I fear that is true," said D'Artagnan, in a low tone.
He was thinking of these matters when Porthos summoned him to dinner.
"What! to dinner?" said D'Artagnan.
"What time is it, then?"
"Your home is a paradise, Porthos; one takes no note of time.
I follow you, though I am not hungry."
"Come, if one can't always eat, one can always drink-a maxim of poor Athos, the truth of which I have discovered since I began to be lonely."
Meanwhile his misgivings in regard to Mousqueton recurred to his mind and with greater force because Mousqueton, though he did not himself wait on the table, which would have been beneath him in his new position, appeared at the door from time to time and evinced his gratitude to D'Artagnan by the quality of the wine he directed to be served.
Therefore, when, at dessert, upon a sign from D'Artagnan, Porthos had sent away his servants and the two friends were alone:
"Why," replied Porthos, "Mouston, of course."
This was a blow to D'Artagnan.
"That may be true," replied Porthos; "but I am used to him, and besides, he wouldn't be willing to let me go without him, he loves me so much."
"Oh, blind self love!" thought D'Artagnan.
"What is he, then?"
"With his sixteen hundred francs-you remember, the sixteen hundred francs he earned at the siege of La Rochelle by carrying a letter to Lord de Winter-he has set up a little shop in the Rue des Lombards and is now a confectioner."
How does it happen, then, that he is in your service?"
"I should not have believed him; but men are changed by events."
Taste of this; it is a Spanish wine which our friend Athos thought much of."
At that moment the steward came in to consult his master upon the proceedings of the next day and also with regard to the shooting party which had been proposed.
"Tell me, Mouston," said Porthos, "are my arms in good condition?"
"Your arms, my lord-what arms?"
"Zounds! my weapons."
"What weapons?"
"My military weapons."
"Yes, my lord; at any rate, I think so."
"Make sure of it, and if they want it, have them burnished up.
Which is my best cavalry horse?"
"Vulcan."
"What horse dost thou choose for thyself?"
"Strong, thinkest thou?"
"Half Norman, half Mecklenburger; will go night and day."
Polish up or make some one else polish my arms.
Then take pistols with thee and a hunting knife."
"Are we then going to travel, my lord?" asked Mousqueton, rather uneasy.
"Something better still, Mouston."
"Into the service-the king's service?" Mousqueton trembled; even his fat, smooth cheeks shook as he spoke, and he looked at D'Artagnan with an air of reproach; he staggered, and his voice was almost choked.
"Yes and no
We shall serve in a campaign, seek out all sorts of adventures-return, in short, to our former life."
These last words fell on Mousqueton like a thunderbolt.
It was those very terrible old days that made the present so excessively delightful, and the blow was so great he rushed out, overcome, and forgot to shut the door.
The two friends remained alone to speak of the future and to build castles in the air.
"But-formerly-it appears," began Mousqueton timidly.
"Oh!" said D'Artagnan, "we don't now make war as we did formerly.
Mousqueton inquired, therefore, the state of the case of his old friend, who confirmed the statement of D'Artagnan.
"But," he added, "in this war prisoners stand a chance of being hung."
Porthos, meantime, asked D'Artagnan to give him his instructions how to proceed on his journey.
"That's agreed," said Porthos.
The friends then took leave of each other on the very border of the estate of Pierrefonds, to which Porthos escorted his friend.
"My Lord,--I have already one man to offer to your eminence, and he is well worth twenty men.
I am just setting out for Blois.
twenty two.
In the first place he himself furbished a sword, which he drew from its perfumed leather sheath; he examined it to see if its hilt was well guarded and if the blade was firmly attached to the hilt.
At length, after occupying about an hour in these preparations, he opened the door of the room in which the vicomte slept, and entered.
The sun, already high, penetrated into the room through the window, the curtains of which Raoul had neglected to close on the previous evening. He was still sleeping, his head gracefully reposing on his arm.
Between the past and the present was an ineffable abyss.
In recalling all he had been through, he foresaw all that Raoul might suffer; and the expression of the deep and tender compassion which throbbed in his heart was pictured in the moist eye with which he gazed on the young man.
At this moment Raoul awoke, without a cloud on his face without weariness or lassitude; his eyes were fixed on those of Athos and perhaps he comprehended all that passed in the heart of the man who was awaiting his awakening as a lover awaits the awakening of his mistress, for his glance, in return, had all the tenderness of love.
"You are there, sir?" he said, respectfully.
"And you did not awaken me?"
"Perfectly well; quite rested, sir."
"And I was asleep," cried Raoul, "whilst you, sir, you had the kindness to attend to all these details.
"Monsieur le vicomte has no sword."
"'tis well," said Athos, "I will take care of that."
When they reached the steps Raoul saw three horses.
Athos mounted more slowly, after speaking in a low voice to the lackey, who, instead of following them immediately, returned to their rooms. Raoul, delighted at the count's companionship, perceived, or affected to perceive nothing of this byplay.
They set out, passing over the Pont Neuf; they pursued their way along the quay then called L'Abreuvoir Pepin, and went along by the walls of the Grand Chatelet.
After passing through the Porte Saint Denis, Athos looked at Raoul's way of riding and observed:
"Take care, Raoul!
See! your horse is tired already, he froths at the mouth, whilst mine looks as if he had only just left the stable.
You hold the bit too tight and so make his mouth hard, so that you will not be able to make him manoeuvre quickly.
The young man stored in his mind the admonition whilst he admired the delicate tenderness with which it was bestowed.
"I have remarked also another thing," said Athos, "which is, that in firing off your pistol you hold your arm too far outstretched.
So in twelve times you thrice missed the mark."
"Because I bent my arm and rested my hand on my elbow-so; do you understand what I mean?"
"Yes, sir.
I have fired since in that manner and have been quite successful."
Apropos, if you fire-and you will do so, for you are recommended to a young general who is very fond of powder-remember that in single combat, which often takes place in the cavalry, never to fire the first shot.
He who fires the first shot rarely hits his man, for he fires with the apprehension of being disarmed, before an armed foe; then, whilst he fires, make your horse rear; that manoeuvre has saved my life several times."
They are.
Then another important thing, Raoul: should you be wounded in a battle, and fall from your horse, if you have any strength left, disentangle yourself from the line that your regiment has formed; otherwise, it may be driven back and you will be trampled to death by the horses.
They arrived that very moment at the gate of the town, guarded by two sentinels.
"How do you make that out?" inquired Athos.
"By his manner, sir, and his age; he's the second to day."
"Faith, yes, with a haughty presence, a fine equipage; such as the son of a noble house would have."
The two gentlemen then went into the church.
A love as tender as that of a lover for his mistress dwells, undoubtedly, in some paternal hearts toward a son.
The sepulchral depths of the descent were dimly lighted by a silver lamp on the lowest step; and just below this lamp there was laid, wrapped in a flowing mantle of violet velvet, worked with fleurs de lis of gold, a catafalque resting on trestles of oak.
There was profound silence.
Then Athos raised his hand and pointing to the coffin:
If Richelieu made the king, by comparison, seem small, he made royalty great.
The Palace of the Louvre contains two things-the king, who must die, and royalty, which never dies.
The minister, so feared, so hated by his master, has descended into the tomb, drawing after him the king, whom he would not leave alone on earth, lest his work should be destroyed.
So blind were his contemporaries that they regarded the cardinal's death as a deliverance; and I, even I, opposed the designs of the great man who held the destinies of France within the hollow of his hand.
Raoul, learn how to distinguish the king from royalty; the king is but a man; royalty is the gift of God.
Whenever you hesitate as to whom you ought to serve, abandon the exterior, the material appearance for the invisible principle, for the invisible principle is everything.
Raoul, I seem to read your future destiny as through a cloud.
Different in your fate from us, you will have a king without a minister, whom you may serve, love, respect.
Should the king prove a tyrant, for power begets tyranny, serve, love, respect royalty, that Divine right, that celestial spark which makes this dust still powerful and holy, so that we-gentlemen, nevertheless, of rank and condition-are as nothing in comparison with the cold corpse there extended."
"I shall adore God, sir," said Raoul, "respect royalty and ever serve the king.
And if death be my lot, I hope to die for the king, for royalty and for God.
Have I, sir, comprehended your instructions?"
Athos smiled.
"Yours is a noble nature." he said; "here is your sword."
Raoul bent his knee to the ground.
"It was worn by my father, a loyal gentleman.
Should your hand still be too weak to use this sword, Raoul, so much the better.
You will have the more time to learn to draw it only when it ought to be used."
I will wear it, I swear to you, as a grateful man should do."
"Adieu," faltered the count, who felt his heart die away within him; "adieu, and think of me."
"Oh! for ever and ever!" cried the youth; "oh!
Raoul obeyed.
"Adieu, Raoul," said the count; "adieu, my dearest boy!"
"Adieu, sir, adieu, my beloved protector."
Athos waved his hand-he dared not trust himself to speak: and Raoul went away, his head uncovered.
Athos remained motionless, looking after him until he turned the corner of the street.
Then the count threw the bridle of his horse into the hands of a peasant, remounted the steps, went into the cathedral, there to kneel down in the darkest corner and pray.
The Place Royale.
They proceeded silently to the centre of the Place, but as at this very moment the moon had just emerged from behind a cloud, they thought they might be observed if they remained on that spot and therefore regained the shade of the lime trees.
After a few minutes of silent embarrassment, Athos spoke.
"Hear me, count," replied D'Artagnan; "instead of making compliments to each other, let us explain our conduct to each other, like men of right and honest hearts."
"I wish for nothing more; have you any cause of complaint against me or Monsieur d'Herblay?
If so, speak out," answered Athos.
"I have," replied D'Artagnan.
"When I saw you at your chateau at Bragelonne, I made certain proposals to you which you perfectly understood; instead of answering me as a friend, you played with me as a child; the friendship, therefore, that you boast of was not broken yesterday by the shock of swords, but by your dissimulation at your castle."
You ask what I have against you; I tell you.
And I have the same sincerity to show you, if you wish, Monsieur d'Herblay; I acted in a similar way to you and you also deceived me."
"You came seeking me to make to me certain proposals, but did you make them?
No, you sounded me, nothing more.
But that is all.
Were you a party man?
There is no doubt of that.
Well, why should not we, too, belong to a party?
You had your secret and we had ours; we didn't exchange them.
So much the better; it proves that we know how to keep our secrets."
"And what do you find in it that is worthy of blame?" asked Aramis, haughtily.
The blood mounted instantly to the temples of D'Artagnan, who arose, and replied:
"I consider it worthy conduct of a pupil of Jesuits."
On seeing D'Artagnan rise, Porthos rose also; these four men were therefore all standing at the same time, with a menacing aspect, opposite to each other.
Upon hearing D'Artagnan's reply, Aramis seemed about to draw his sword, when Athos prevented him.
"D'Artagnan," he said, "you are here to night, still infuriated by yesterday's adventure.
However, because I was prudent you must not take me for a fool.
"What are you meddling with?" cried Aramis, pale with anger, suspecting that D'Artagnan had acted as a spy on him and had seen him with Madame de Longueville.
Porthos, who had not spoken one word, answered merely by a word and a gesture.
Aramis started back and drew his.
D'Artagnan bent forward, ready either to attack or to stand on his defense.
Athos at that moment extended his hand with the air of supreme command which characterized him alone, drew out his sword and the scabbard at the same time, broke the blade in the sheath on his knee and threw the pieces to his right.
Then turning to Aramis:
"Aramis," he said, "break your sword."
Aramis hesitated.
"It must be done," said Athos; then in a lower and more gentle voice, he added.
"I wish it."
Then Aramis, paler than before, but subdued by these words, snapped the serpent blade between his hands, and then folding his arms, stood trembling with rage.
These proceedings made D'Artagnan and Porthos draw back.
D'Artagnan did not draw his sword; Porthos put his back into the sheath.
"Never!" exclaimed Athos, raising his right hand to Heaven, "never!
I swear before God, who seeth us, and who, in the darkness of this night heareth us, never shall my sword cross yours, never my eye express a glance of anger, nor my heart a throb of hatred, at you.
D'Artagnan, I have always loved you as my son; Porthos, we slept six years side by side; Aramis is your brother as well as mine, and Aramis has once loved you, as I love you now and as I have ever loved you.
I repeat my words, Aramis, and then, if you desire it, and if they desire it, let us separate forever from our old friends."
"I swear," he said, with a calm brow and kindly glance, but in a voice still trembling with recent emotion, "I swear that I no longer bear animosity to those who were once my friends.
I regret that I ever crossed swords with you, Porthos; I swear not only that it shall never again be pointed at your breast, but that in the bottom of my heart there will never in future be the slightest hostile sentiment; now, Athos, come."
Athos was about to retire.
"And as for me," said Porthos, "I swear nothing, but I'm choked. Forsooth!
"My friends," said Athos, "this is what I expected from such hearts as yours.
Yes, I have said it and I now repeat it: our destinies are irrevocably united, although we now pursue divergent roads.
I respect your convictions, and whilst we fight for opposite sides, let us remain friends.
Ministers, princes, kings, will pass away like mountain torrents; civil war, like a forest flame; but we-we shall remain; I have a presentiment that we shall."
"You speak charmingly," said Porthos.
"And are the first of men!" added D'Artagnan.
"You excel us all."
Athos smiled with ineffable pleasure.
Gentlemen, your hands; are we not pretty good Christians?"
"Egad!" said D'Artagnan, "by Heaven! yes."
"We should be so on this occasion, if only to be faithful to our oath," said Aramis.
Devil take me if I've ever been so happy as at this moment."
And he wiped his eyes, still moist.
Aramis smiled and drew from his vest a cross of diamonds, which was hung around his neck by a chain of pearls.
"Well," resumed Athos, "swear on this cross, which, in spite of its magnificent material, is still a cross; swear to be united in spite of everything, and forever, and may this oath bind us to each other, and even, also, our descendants!
Chapter twenty three
Dinner Time
But mr Mills, the butler, assured him that Captain Donnithorne had given particular orders about it, and would be very angry if Adam was not there.
"Nay, nay, lad," said Seth, "thy honour's our honour; and if thee get'st respect, thee'st won it by thy own deserts.
"Well, thee canst say thee wast ordered to come without being told the reason.
That's the truth.
Adam was not the only guest invited to come upstairs on other grounds than the amount he contributed to the rent roll.
There were other people in the two parishes who derived dignity from their functions rather than from their pocket, and of these Bartle Massey was one.
Opportunities of getting to Hetty's side would be sure to turn up in the course of the day, and Adam contented himself with that for he disliked any risk of being "joked" about Hetty-the big, outspoken, fearless man was very shy and diffident as to his love making.
"Ah!" said Bartle, pausing, with one hand on his back.
"Then there's something in the wind-there's something in the wind.
Have you heard anything about what the old squire means to do?"
"Why, yes," said Adam; "I'll tell you what I know, because I believe you can keep a still tongue in your head if you like, and I hope you'll not let drop a word till it's common talk, for I've particular reasons against its being known."
"Trust to me, my boy, trust to me.
If you trust a man, let him be a bachelor-let him be a bachelor."
But if anybody asks any questions upstairs, just you take no notice, and turn the talk to something else, and I'll be obliged to you.
"I know what to do, never fear," said Bartle, moving on.
"The news will be good sauce to my dinner.
Aye, aye, my boy, you'll get on.
When they got upstairs, the question which Arthur had left unsettled, as to who was to be president, and who vice, was still under discussion, so that Adam's entrance passed without remark.
I wasn't butler fifteen year without learning the rights and the wrongs about dinner."
"Why, the broadest man," said Bartle; "and then he won't take up other folks' room; and the next broadest must sit at bottom."
This happy mode of settling the dispute produced much laughter-a smaller joke would have sufficed for that mr Casson, however, did not feel it compatible with his dignity and superior knowledge to join in the laugh, until it turned out that he was fixed on as the second broadest man.
Martin Poyser the younger, as the broadest, was to be president, and mr Casson, as next broadest, was to be vice.
Owing to this arrangement, Adam, being, of course, at the bottom of the table, fell under the immediate observation of mr Casson, who, too much occupied with the question of precedence, had not hitherto noticed his entrance.
mr Casson, we have seen, considered Adam "rather lifted up and peppery like": he thought the gentry made more fuss about this young carpenter than was necessary; they made no fuss about mr Casson, although he had been an excellent butler for fifteen years.
"No, mr Casson," said Adam, in his strong voice, that could be heard along the table; "I've never dined here before, but I come by Captain Donnithorne's wish, and I hope it's not disagreeable to anybody here."
"Nay, nay," said several voices at once, "we're glad ye're come.
"That's a song I'm uncommon fond on."
I've never cared about singing myself; I've had something better to do.
But a second cousin o' mine, a drovier, was a rare hand at remembering the Scotch tunes.
He'd got nothing else to think on."
They're fit for nothing but to frighten the birds with-that's to say, the English birds, for the Scotch birds may sing Scotch for what I know.
"Why, the Scotch tunes are just like a scolding, nagging woman," Bartle went on, without deigning to notice mr Craig's remark.
Adam minded the less about sitting by mr Casson, because this position enabled him to see Hetty, who was not far off him at the next table. Hetty, however, had not even noticed his presence yet, for she was giving angry attention to Totty, who insisted on drawing up her feet on to the bench in antique fashion, and thereby threatened to make dusty marks on Hetty's pink and white frock.
No sooner were the little fat legs pushed down than up they came again, for Totty's eyes were too busy in staring at the large dishes to see where the plum pudding was for her to retain any consciousness of her legs.
Hetty got quite out of patience, and at last, with a frown and pout, and gathering tears, she said, "Oh dear, Aunt, I wish you'd speak to Totty; she keeps putting her legs up so, and messing my frock."
Adam was looking at Hetty, and saw the frown, and pout, and the dark eyes seeming to grow larger with pettish half gathered tears.
And it was quite true that if Hetty had been plain, she would have looked very ugly and unamiable at that moment, and no one's moral judgment upon her would have been in the least beguiled.
But really there was something quite charming in her pettishness: it looked so much more like innocent distress than ill humour; and the severe Adam felt no movement of disapprobation; he only felt a sort of amused pity, as if he had seen a kitten setting up its back, or a little bird with its feathers ruffled.
He could not gather what was vexing her, but it was impossible to him to feel otherwise than that she was the prettiest thing in the world, and that if he could have his way, nothing should ever vex her any more.
And presently, when Totty was gone, she caught his eye, and her face broke into one of its brightest smiles, as she nodded to him.
It was a bit of flirtation-she knew Mary Burge was looking at them.
He liked to feel his own importance, and besides that, he cared a great deal for the good will of these people: he was fond of thinking that they had a hearty, special regard for him.
The pleasure he felt was in his face as he said, "My grandfather and I hope all our friends here have enjoyed their dinner, and find my birthday ale good.
Hereupon a glorious shouting, a rapping, a jingling, a clattering, and a shouting, with plentiful da capo, pleasanter than a strain of sublimest music in the ears that receive such a tribute for the first time.
Arthur had felt a twinge of conscience during mr Poyser's speech, but it was too feeble to nullify the pleasure he felt in being praised.
Did he not deserve what was said of him on the whole?
If there was something in his conduct that Poyser wouldn't have liked if he had known it, why, no man's conduct will bear too close an inspection; and Poyser was not likely to know it; and, after all, what had he done?
Gone a little too far, perhaps, in flirtation, but another man in his place would have acted much worse; and no harm would come-no harm should come, for the next time he was alone with Hetty, he would explain to her that she must not think seriously of him or of what had passed.
It was necessary to Arthur, you perceive, to be satisfied with himself.
Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future, which can be formed so rapidly that he had time to be uncomfortable and to become easy again before mr Poyser's slow speech was finished, and when it was time for him to speak he was quite light-hearted.
In the course of things we may expect that, if I live, I shall one day or other be your landlord; indeed, it is on the ground of that expectation that my grandfather has wished me to celebrate this day and to come among you now; and I look forward to this position, not merely as one of power and pleasure for myself, but as a means of benefiting my neighbours.
But the pleasure I feel in having my own health drunk by you would not be perfect if we did not drink the health of my grandfather, who has filled the place of both parents to me.
Perhaps there was no one present except mr Irwine who thoroughly understood and approved Arthur's graceful mode of proposing his grandfather's health.
But the toast could not be rejected and when it had been drunk, Arthur said, "I thank you, both for my grandfather and myself; and now there is one more thing I wish to tell you, that you may share my pleasure about it, as I hope and believe you will.
I'm proud to say that I was very fond of Adam when I was a little boy, and I have never lost my old feeling for him-I think that shows that I know a good fellow when I find him.
It has long been my wish that he should have the management of the woods on the estate, which happen to be very valuable, not only because I think so highly of his character, but because he has the knowledge and the skill which fit him for the place.
I know you have all reason to love him, but no one of his parishioners has so much reason as i Come, charge your glasses, and let us drink to our excellent rector-three times three!"
The superior refinement of his face was much more striking than that of Arthur's when seen in comparison with the people round them.
"This is not the first time, by a great many," he said, "that I have had to thank my parishioners for giving me tokens of their goodwill, but neighbourly kindness is among those things that are the more precious the older they get.
That feeling is his value and respect for Adam Bede.
He is one of those to whom honour is due, and his friends should delight to honour him.
As mr Irwine paused, Arthur jumped up and, filling his glass, said, "A bumper to Adam Bede, and may he live to have sons as faithful and clever as himself!"
No hearer, not even Bartle Massey, was so delighted with this toast as mr Poyser.
"Tough work" as his first speech had been, he would have started up to make another if he had not known the extreme irregularity of such a course.
If Jonathan Burge and a few others felt less comfortable on the occasion, they tried their best to look contented, and so the toast was drunk with a goodwill apparently unanimous.
Adam was rather paler than usual when he got up to thank his friends.
But he felt no shyness about speaking, not being troubled with small vanity or lack of words; he looked neither awkward nor embarrassed, but stood in his usual firm upright attitude, with his head thrown a little backward and his hands perfectly still, in that rough dignity which is peculiar to intelligent, honest, well built workmen, who are never wondering what is their business in the world.
"I'm quite taken by surprise," he said.
And as to this new employment I've taken in hand, I'll only say that I took it at Captain Donnithorne's desire, and that I'll try to fulfil his expectations.
There was none of the strong ale here, of course, but wine and dessert-sparkling gooseberry for the young ones, and some good sherry for the mothers.
"What! you think you could have made it better for him?" said mr Irwine, laughing.
"Well, sir, when I want to say anything, I can mostly find words to say it in, thank God.
"I'm sure I never saw a prettier party than this," Arthur said, looking round at the apple cheeked children.
"My aunt and the Miss Irwines will come up and see you presently.
They were afraid of the noise of the toasts, but it would be a shame for them not to see you at table."
Arthur did not venture to stop near Hetty, but merely bowed to her as he passed along the opposite side.
The foolish child felt her heart swelling with discontent; for what woman was ever satisfied with apparent neglect, even when she knows it to be the mask of love?
THE HARPIES.
In their hands they bear either a dagger, scourge, torch, or serpent.
In a little village that stood on a wide plain, where you could see the sun from the moment he rose to the moment he set, there lived two couples side by side.
The men, who worked under the same master, were quite good friends, but the wives were always quarrelling, and the subject they quarrelled most about was-which of the two had the stupidest husband.
Unlike most women-who think that anything that belongs to them must be better than what belongs to anyone else-each thought her husband the more foolish of the two.
'He puts on the baby's frock upside down, and, one day, I found him trying to feed her with boiling soup, and her mouth was scalded for days after. Then he picks up stones in the road and sows them instead of potatoes, and one day he wanted to go into the garden from the top window, because he declared it was a shorter way than through the door.'
'That is bad enough, of course,' answered the other; 'but it is really NOTHING to what I have to endure every day from MY husband.
If, when I am busy, I ask him to go and feed the poultry, he is certain to give them some poisonous stuff instead of their proper food, and when I visit the yard next I find them all dead.
Once he even took my best bonnet, when I had gone away to my sick mother, and when I came back I found he had given it to the hen to lay her eggs in.
So, about the time that she expected her husband home from work, she got out her spinning wheel, and sat busily turning it, taking care not even to look up from her work when the man came in.
For some minutes he stood with his mouth open watching her, and as she still remained silent, he said at last:
'YOU may think that there is nothing on it,' answered she, 'but I can assure you that there is a large skein of wool, so fine that nobody can see it, which will be woven into a coat for you.'
'Dear me!' he replied, 'what a clever wife I have got!
At last she got up, and said to her husband: 'I am too tired to finish it to night, so I shall go to bed, and to morrow I shall only have the cutting and stitching to do.'
So the next morning she got up early, and after she had cleaned her house, and fed her chickens, and put everything in its place again, she bent over the kitchen table, and the sound of her big scissors might be heard snip!
snap! as far as the garden.
Her husband could not see anything to snip at; but then he was so stupid that was not surprising!
After the cutting came the sewing.
'That is because it is so fine,' answered she; 'you do not want it to be as thick as the rough clothes you wear every day.'
He DID, but was ashamed to say so, and only answered: 'Well, I am sure it must be beautiful since you say so, and I shall be smarter than anyone in the whole village.
"What a splendid coat!" they will exclaim when they see me.
Meanwhile the other wife was not idle.
'Why do you stare at me so?
Is there anything the matter?' asked he.
'Oh! go to bed at once,' she cried; 'you must be very ill indeed to look like that!'
The man was rather surprised at first, as he felt particularly well that evening; but the moment his wife spoke he became quite certain that he had something dreadful the matter with him, and grew quite pale.
'Oh, bad; very bad indeed,' answered he; 'I have not slept for a moment. Can you think of nothing to make me better?'
'I will get some dried herbs and make you a drink, but I am very much afraid that it is too late.
Why did you not tell me before?'
'I thought perhaps the pain would go off in a day or two; and, besides, I did not want to make you unhappy,' answered the man, who was by this time quite sure he had been suffering tortures, and had borne them like a hero.
'Of course, if I had had any idea how ill I really was, I should have spoken at once.'
'Well, well, I will see what can be done,' said the wife, 'but talking is not good for you.
Lie still, and keep yourself warm.'
All that day the man lay in bed, and whenever his wife entered the room and asked him, with a shake of the head, how he felt, he always replied that he was getting worse.
At last, in the evening, she burst into tears, and when he inquired what was the matter, she sobbed out:
'Oh, my poor, poor husband, are you really dead?
I must go to morrow and order your coffin.'
Indeed, I think I shall go out to work.'
'You will do no such thing,' replied his wife.
'Just keep quite quiet, for before the sun rises you will be a dead man.'
The man was very frightened at her words, and lay absolutely still while the undertaker came and measured him for his coffin; and his wife gave orders to the gravedigger about his grave.
That evening the coffin was sent home, and in the morning at nine o'clock the woman put him on a long flannel garment, and called to the undertaker's men to fasten down the lid and carry him to the grave, where all their friends were waiting them.
Just as the body was being placed in the ground the other woman's husband came running up, dressed, as far as anyone could see, in no clothes at all.
Then they rushed with one accord to the coffin, and lifted the lid so that the man could step out amongst them.
'And if not, why did you let yourself be buried?'
At this the wives both confessed that they had each wished to prove that her husband was stupider than the other.
Long, long ago, in the days when fairies, witches, giants and ogres still visited the earth, there lived a king who reigned over a great and beautiful country.
He was married to a wife whom he dearly loved, and had two most promising children-a son called Asmund, and a daughter who was named Signy.
The king and queen were very anxious to bring their children up well, and the young prince and princess were taught everything likely to make them clever and accomplished.
Prince Asmund dearly loved all outdoor sports and an open air life, and from his earliest childhood he had longed to live entirely in the forest close by.
'Now,' said he to his sister, 'I will have the trees hollowed out, and then I will make rooms in them and furnish them so that I shall be able to live out in the forest.'
'Oh, Asmund!' exclaimed Signy, 'what a delightful idea!
I will bring all my pretty things and ornaments, and the trees are so near home we shall be quite safe in them.'
Unfortunately sadder days were to come.
During his absence the queen fell ill, and after lingering for some time she died, to the great grief of her children.
Now, I must tell you, in another country a long way off, there reigned a king who had an only son named Ring.
Prince Ring had heard so much about the beauty and goodness of Princess Signy that he determined to marry her if possible.
So he begged his father to let him have a ship for the voyage, set sail with a favourable wind, and after a time landed in the country where Signy lived.
The prince lost no time in setting out for the royal palace, and on his way there he met such a wonderfully lovely woman that he felt he had never seen such beauty in all his life.
'I am Signy, the king's daughter,' was the reply.
Ring was quite deceived by her, and never guessed that she was not Princess Signy at all, but a strong, gigantic, wicked witch bent on deceiving him under a beautiful shape.
The witch listened to all he said and, much pleased, ended by accepting his offer; but she begged him to return to his ship for a little while as she wished to go some way further into the forest, promising to join him later on.
Here she resumed her own gigantic shape, tore up the trees by their roots, threw one of them over her back and clasped the other to her breast, carried them down to the shore and waded out with them to the ship.
She took care not to be noticed as she reached the ship, and directly she got on board she once more changed to her former lovely appearance and told the prince that her luggage was now all on board, and that they need wait for nothing more.
The prince gave orders to set sail at once, and after a fine voyage landed in his own country, where his parents and his only sister received him with the greatest joy and affection.
'Yes,' said she, quite pleased, 'I am quite ready to marry you whenever you like.'
'Then,' replied Ring, 'let us decide on this day fortnight.
And see, I have brought you some stuff to make your wedding dress of.' So saying he gave her a large piece of the most beautiful brocade, all woven over with gold threads, and embroidered with pearls and other jewels.
The prince had hardly left her before the witch resumed her proper shape and tore about the room, raging and storming and flinging the beautiful silk on the floor.
'What was SHE to do with such things?' she roared.
The horrid pair set to and greedily devoured it all, and when the chest was quite empty the giant put it on his shoulder and disappeared as he had come, without leaving any trace of his visit.
But his sister did not keep quiet for long, and tore and pulled at the rich brocade as if she wanted to destroy it, stamping about and shouting angrily.
Now, all this time Prince Asmund and his sister sat in their trees just outside the window and saw all that was going on.
'I will try,' said Signy; 'it won't be an easy matter, but it's worth while taking some trouble to have a little peace.'
So she watched for an opportunity and managed to carry off the brocade the first time the witch left her room.
Then she set to work, cutting out and sewing as best she could, and by the end of six days she had turned it into an elegant robe with a long train and a mantle.
When it was finished she climbed to the top of her tree and contrived to throw the clothes on to a table through the open window.
The next time Prince Ring came to see her she gave them to him, and he paid her many compliments on her skilful work, after which he took leave of her in the most friendly manner.
But he had scarcely left the house when the witch began to rage as furiously as ever, and never stopped till her brother Ironhead appeared.
He went to Prince Ring and said: 'Do come with me and see the strange things that are happening in the new princess's room.'
The prince was not a little surprised, but he consented to hide himself with Asmund behind the panelling of the room, from where they could see all that went on through a little slit.
The witch was raving and roaring as usual, and said to her brother:
'Once I am married to the king's son I shall be better off than now. I shall take care to have all that pack of courtiers put to death, and then I shall send for all my relations to come and live here instead. I fancy the giants will enjoy themselves very much with me and my husband.'
The prince was quite astonished at them and at all their contents, but still more so at the extreme beauty of Signy.
He fell in love with her at once, and entreated her to marry him, which, after a time, she consented to do.
Asmund, on his side, asked for the hand of Prince Ring's sister, which was gladly granted him, and the double wedding was celebrated with great rejoicings.
After this Prince Asmund and his bride returned to his country to live with the king his father.
And that is the end of the story.
"He would have taught you how you might employ Yourself; and many did to him repair, And, certes, not in vain; he had inventions rare." --WORDSWORTH.
These were from the public schools of the city.
Nearly all of the pupils, who were from ten to sixteen years of age, acquired two or three, if not all, of these arts, and then very easily found employment in factories or fabrics, etc
Many people believed that this was all waste of money and time, and, quite unknown to me, at their instigation an inquiry was made of all the teachers in the public schools as to the standing of my art pupils in their other classes, it being confidently anticipated that they would be found to have fallen behind.
And the result of the investigation was that the two hundred were in advance of the one hundred and ten thousand in every branch-geography, arithmetic, history, and so on.
It was not remarkable, because boys and girls who had, at an average age of twelve or thirteen, learned the principles of design and its practical application to several kinds of handiwork, and knew the differences and characteristics of Gothic, Arabesque, or Greek patterns, all developed a far greater intelligence in general thought and conversation than others.
They had at least one topic on which they could converse intelligently with any grown up person, and in which they were really superior to most.
The manner in which most artists form an idea, or project their minds to a plan or invention, be it a statue or picture; and the way they think it over and anticipate it-very often actually seeing the picture in a finished state in imagination-all amounts to foresight and hypnotic preparation in a crude, imperfect form.
It is probable that half the general average cleverness of men is due to their having learned, as boys, games, or the art of making something, or mending and repairing.
In any case, if they had learned to use their hands and their inventiveness or adaptability, they would have been the better for it.
That the innumerable multitude of people who can do nothing of the kind, and who take no real interest in anything except spending money and gossiping, are to be really pitied, is true.
Some of them once had minds-and these are the most pitiful or pitiable of all.
Those who desire to become artists, can greatly facilitate their work, if beginning for example with very simple outline decorative designs, and having learned the principles on which they are constructed, they would repeat or revise them to themselves before sleep, resolving to remember them.
The same principle is applicable to all kinds of designs, with the proviso that they be at first very easy.
CHAPTER four
Stephen Gresham was in his early sixties, but he could have still worn his World War one uniform without anything giving at the seams, and buckled the old Sam Browne at the same hole.
"Why, hello, Jeff!" he greeted the detective, grasping his hand heartily. "You haven't been around for months.
What have you been doing, and why don't you come out to Rosemont to see us?
Dot and Irene were wondering what had become of you."
"I'm afraid I've been neglecting too many of my old friends lately," Rand admitted, sitting down and getting his pipe out.
"Been busy as the devil.
Fact is, it was business that finally brought me around here.
I understand that you and some others are forming a pool to buy the Lane Fleming collection."
"Yes!" Gresham became enthusiastic.
"Want in on it?
We're going to need all the money we can scrape together, with this damned Rivers bidding against us."
"I'm afraid you will, at that, Stephen," Rand told him.
"And not necessarily on account of Rivers.
You see, the Fleming estate has just employed me to expertize the collection and handle the sale for them." Rand got his pipe lit and drawing properly.
Humphrey Goode isn't competent to handle that.
What we were all afraid of was a public auction at some sales gallery."
Rand shook his head.
"Worst thing they could do; a collection like that would go for peanuts at auction.
Why, here; I'm going to be in Rosemont, staying at the Fleming place, working on the collection, for the next week or so.
I suppose your crowd wouldn't want to make an offer until I have everything listed, but I'd like to talk to your associates, in a group, as soon as possible."
"Well, we all know pretty much what's in the collection," Gresham said. "We were neighbors of his, and collectors are a gregarious lot.
But we aren't anxious to make any premature offers.
I'm not obliged to call for sealed bids, or anything like that, so when I've heard from everybody, I'll give you a chance to bid against the highest offer in hand.
"Why, Jeff, I appreciate that," Gresham said.
"I think you're entirely within your rights, but naturally, we won't mention this outside.
I can imagine Arnold Rivers, for instance, taking a very righteous view of such an arrangement."
"Yes, so can i Of course, if he'd call me a crook, I'd take that as a compliment," Rand said.
"I wonder if I could meet your group, say tomorrow evening?
I want to be in a position to assure the Fleming family and Humphrey Goode that you're all serious and responsible."
You can look us up, if you wish.
Pierre was a Marine captain, invalided home after being wounded on Peleliu; he writes science fiction for the pulps.
Karen has a little general antique business in Rosemont.
They intend using their share of the collection, plus such culls and duplicates as the rest of us can consign to them, to go into the arms business, with a general antique sideline, which Karen can manage while Pierre's writing....
Tell you what; I'll call a meeting at my place tomorrow evening, say at eight thirty.
That suit you?"
That, Rand agreed, would be all right.
"About two years ago; right after I got back from Germany.
You remember, we went there together, one evening in March."
"Yes, that's right.
We didn't have time to see everything," Gresham said. "My God, Jeff!
Twenty five wheel locks!
Ten snaphaunces.
And about a hundred and fifty Colts, all models and most variants.
He got that one in nineteen twenty four, at the Fred Hines sale, at the old Walpole Galleries.
And seven Paterson Colts, including a couple of cased sets.
A Hall flintlock breech loader; an Elisha Collier flintlock revolver; a pair of Forsythe detonator lock pistols....
Oh, that's a collection to end collections."
"By the way, Humphrey Goode showed me a pair of big ball butt wheel locks, all covered with ivory inlay," Rand mentioned.
Gresham laughed heartily.
"Aren't they the damnedest ever seen, though?" he asked.
"Made in Germany, about eighteen seventy or 'eighty, about the time arms collecting was just getting out of the family heirloom stage, wouldn't you say?"
"I'd say made in Japan, about nineteen twenty," Rand replied.
"Remember, there were a couple of small human figures on each pistol, a knight and a huntsman? Did you notice that they had slant eyes?" He stopped laughing, and looked at Gresham seriously.
Gresham shook his head.
"They're all.
They were Lane Fleming's one false step.
Ordinarily, Lane was a careful buyer; he must have let himself get hypnotized by all that ivory and gold, and all that documentation on crested notepaper.
You know, Fleming's death was an undeserved stroke of luck for Arnold Rivers.
If he hadn't been killed just when he was, he'd have run Rivers out of the old arms business."
"No; the National Rifle Association stopped his ad, and lifted his membership card for good measure," Gresham said.
"Rivers sold a rifle to a collector down in Virginia, about three years ago, while you were still occupying Germany.
A fine, early flintlock Kentuck, that had been made out of a fine, late percussion Kentuck by sawing off the breech end of the barrel, rethreading it for the breech plug, drilling a new vent, and fitting the lock with a flint hammer and a pan and frizzen assembly, and shortening the fore end to fit.
I have an example of Umholtz's craftsmanship, myself.
The collector who bought this spurious flintlock spotted what had been done, and squawked to the Rifle Association, and to the postal authorities."
"Rivers claimed, I suppose, that he had gotten it from a family that had owned it ever since it was made, and showed letters signed 'D.
Boone' and 'Davy Crockett' to prove it?"
"No, he claimed to have gotten it in trade from some wayfaring collector," Gresham replied.
"Wasn't there some talk about Whitneyville Walker Colts that had been made out of eighteen forty eight Model Colt Dragoons?" Rand asked.
"Oh Lord, yes!
This fellow Umholtz was practically turning them out on an assembly line, for a while.
I hate to see him prostitute his talents the way he does by making these fake antiques for Rivers.
That story you find in Sawyer's book."
"Why, that story's been absolutely disproved," Rand said.
"Not till Umholtz made one," Gresham replied.
"This fellow who bought it, now; did he see Belden and Haven's Colt book, when it came out in nineteen forty?"
"Yes, and he was plenty burned up, but what could he do?
Rivers was dug in behind this innocent purchase and sale in good faith Maginot Line of his.
You know, that bastard took me, once, just one tenth as badly, with a fake u s North and Cheney Navy flintlock seventeen ninety nine Model that had been made out of a French seventeen seventy seven Model." The lawyer muttered obscenely.
"You might not have gotten anything, but you'd have given him a lot of dirty publicity. That's all Fleming was expecting to do about those wheel locks."
"I'm not Fleming.
He could afford litigation like that; I can't.
I want my money, and if I don't get it in cash, I'm going to beat it out of that dirty little swindler's hide," Gresham replied, an ugly look appearing on his face.
"I wouldn't blame you.
Gresham frowned.
"I really don't know; I didn't see it.
Rand nodded.
He was familiar with the type.
"The story is that Fleming found it hanging back of the counter at some roadside lunch stand, along with a lot of other old pistols, and talked the proprietor into letting it go for a few dollars," Gresham continued. "It was supposed to have been loaded at the time, and went off while Fleming was working on it, at home." He shook his head.
"I can't believe that, Jeff.
Lane Fleming would know a loaded revolver when he saw one.
I believe he deliberately shot himself, and the family faked the accident and fixed the authorities.
The police never made any investigation; it was handled by the coroner alone.
And our coroner, out in Scott County, is eminently fixable, if you go about it right; a pitiful little nonentity with a tremendous inferiority complex."
"But good Lord, why?" Rand demanded.
"I never heard of Fleming having any troubles worth killing himself over."
"Jeff, I'm not supposed to talk about this, but the fact is that I believe Fleming was about to lose control of the Premix Company," he said.
"Lane Fleming's death is on record as accidental, Jeff.
It's been written off as such.
CHAPTER thirty seven
WHAT WAS HIDDEN UNDER THE FLOOR
The cab pulled up in front of a tumbledown cheap 'villa' in an unfinished cheap neighbourhood,--the whole place a living monument of the defeat of the speculative builder.
Atherton leaped out on to the grass grown rubble which was meant for a footpath.
Nor did I,--I saw nothing but what appeared to be an unoccupied ramshackle brick abomination.
'What do you mean?'
He knocked.
While we waited for a response I questioned him.
'Why did you leave the door open when you went?'
'I hardly know,--I imagine that it was with some dim idea of Marjorie's being able to get in if she returned while I was absent,--but the truth is I was in such a condition of helter skelter that I am not prepared to swear that I had any reasonable reason.'
'I suppose there is no doubt that you did leave it open?'
'Was it open when you returned from your pursuit of Holt?'
'Wide open,--I walked straight in expecting to find her waiting for me in the front room,--I was struck all of a heap when I found she wasn't there.'
'None,--there were no signs of anything.
Everything was just as I had left it, with the exception of the ring which I trod on in the passage, and which Lessingham has.'
'If Miss Lindon has returned, it does not look as if she were in the house at present.'
It did not,--unless silence had such meaning.
'It strikes me that this is another case of seeking admission through that hospitable window at the back.'
Atherton led the way to the rear.
There was not even an apology for a yard, still less a garden,--there was not even a fence of any sort, to serve as an enclosure, and to shut off the house from the wilderness of waste land.
The kitchen window was open.
While he spoke, he scrambled over the sill.
We followed.
When he was in, he shouted at the top of his voice,
'Marjorie!
Marjorie!
The words echoed through the house.
Only silence answered.
He led the way to the front room.
Suddenly he stopped.
'Hollo!' he cried.
'The blind's down!' I had noticed, when we were outside, that the blind was down at the front room window.
'It was up when I went, that I'll swear.
That someone has been here is pretty plain,--let's hope it's Marjorie.'
'My stars!--here's a sudden clearance!--Why, the place is empty,-- everything's clean gone!'
'What do you mean?--was it furnished when you left?'
The room was empty enough then.
They seem to have evaporated into smoke,--which may be a way which is common enough among Eastern curiosities, though it's queer to me.'
Atherton was staring about him as if he found it difficult to credit the evidence of his own eyes.
'How long ago is it since you left?'
He referred to his watch.
'Something over an hour,--possibly an hour and a half; I couldn't swear to the exact moment, but it certainly isn't more.'
'Did you notice any signs of packing up?'
'Not a sign.' Going to the window he drew up the blind,--speaking as he did so.
Sydney perceived him too.
He threw up the sash.
'What's the matter with you?'
'Excuse me, sir, but who's the old gent?'
'Why the old gent peeping through the window of the room upstairs?'
I followed rather more soberly,--his methods were a little too flighty for me.
When I reached the landing, dashing out of the front room he rushed into the one at the back,--then through a door at the side.
He came out shouting.
'What's the idiot mean!--with his old gent!
I'd old gent him if I got him!--There's not a creature about the place!'
He returned into the front room,--I at his heels.
That certainly was empty,--and not only empty, but it showed no traces of recent occupation.
The dust lay thick upon the floor,--there was that mouldy, earthy smell which is so frequently found in apartments which have been long untenanted.
'Are you sure, Atherton, that there is no one at the back?'
Jehu's drunk.' Throwing up the sash he addressed the driver.
'What do you mean with your old gent at the window?--what window?'
'That window, sir.'
'Go to!--you're dreaming, man!--there's no one here.'
'Begging your pardon, sir, but there was someone there not a minute ago.'
I saw him peeping through that bottom broken pane on your left hand as plainly as I see you.
He must be somewhere about,--he can't have got away,--he's at the back.
Ain't there a cupboard nor nothing where he could hide?'
The cabman's manner was so extremely earnest that I went myself to see.
The room behind was small, and, despite the splintered glass in the window frame, stuffy.
Fragments of glass kept company with the dust on the floor, together with a choice collection of stones, brickbats, and other missiles,--which not improbably were the cause of their being there.
In the corner stood a cupboard,--but a momentary examination showed that that was as bare as the other.
The door at the side, which Sydney had left wide open, opened on to a closet, and that was empty.
I glanced up,--there was no trap door which led to the roof.
No practicable nook or cranny, in which a living being could lie concealed, was anywhere at hand.
I returned to Sydney's shoulder to tell the cabman so.
'There is no place in which anyone could hide, and there is no one in either of the rooms,--you must have been mistaken, driver.'
The man waxed wroth.
'Don't tell me!
How could I come to think I saw something when I didn't?'
'One's eyes are apt to play us tricks;--how could you see what wasn't there?'
'That's what I want to know.
When the gentleman took to knocking, back he came,--to the same old spot, and flopped down on his knees.
But when you pulls up the blind downstairs, to my surprise back he come once more.
He shoves his old nose right through the smash in the pane, and wags his old head at me like a chattering magpie.
But for you to say that he wasn't there, and never had been,--blimey! that cops the biscuit.
That the man was serious was unmistakable.
As he himself suggested, what inducement could he have had to tell a lie like that?
That he believed himself to have seen what he declared he saw was plain.
But, on the other hand, what could have become-in the space of fifty seconds!--of his 'old gent'?
Atherton put a question.
'What did he look like,--this old gent of yours?'
'Well, that I shouldn't hardly like to say.
It wasn't much of his face I could see, only his face and his eyes,--and they wasn't pretty.
He kept a thing over his head all the time, as if he didn't want too much to be seen.'
'Why,--one of them cloak sort of things, like them Arab blokes used to wear what used to be at Earl's Court Exhibition,--you know!'
This piece of information seemed to interest my companions more than anything he had said before.
'A burnoose do you mean?'
'How am I to know what the thing's called?
Mr Lessingham turned to me, all quivering with excitement.
It is strange, to say the least of it, that the cabman should be the only person to see or hear anything of him.'
'Some devil's trick has been played,--I know it, I feel it!--my instinct tells me so!'
I stared.
'By the Lord, I believe the Apostle's right,--the whole place reeks to me of hankey pankey,--it did as soon as I put my nose inside.
In matters of prestidigitation, Champnell, we Westerns are among the rudiments,--we've everything to learn,--Orientals leave us at the post.
He moved towards the door.
'Something tripped me up,--what's this?' He was stamping on the floor with his foot.
'Here's a board loose.
Who knows what mystery's beneath?'
I went to his aid.
His stepping on it unawares had caused his stumble.
Together we prised it out of its place,--Lessingham standing by and watching us the while.
Having removed it, we peered into the cavity it disclosed.
There was something there.
CHAPTER forty four
The Inspector spoke to me.
'If what the boy says is correct it sounds as if the person whom you are seeking may have had a finger in the pie.'
I was of the same opinion, as, apparently, were Lessingham and Sidney.
Atherton collared the youth by the shoulder which Mr Pleesman had left disengaged.
'What sort of looking bloke is it who's been murdered?'
"'Gustus Barley," she says, "a bloke's been murdered.
That's all I knows about it.'
We went four in the hansom which had been waiting in the street to Mrs Henderson's in Paradise Place,--the Inspector and we three.
'Mr Pleesman' and ''Gustus Barley' followed on foot.
The Inspector was explanatory.
'Mrs Henderson keeps a sort of lodging house,--a "Sailors' Home" she calls it, but no one could call it sweet.
It doesn't bear the best of characters, and if you asked me what I thought of it, I should say in plain English that it was a disorderly house.'
So far as could be seen in the dark it consisted of a row of houses of considerable dimensions,--and also of considerable antiquity.
They opened on to two or three stone steps which led directly into the street.
At one of the doors stood an old lady with a shawl drawn over her head.
This was Mrs Henderson.
She greeted us with garrulous volubility.
Mr Phillips dismissed her inquiry, curtly.
'Never you mind who they are.
'Don't you speak so loud, Mr Phillips.
No one don't know nothing about it as yet.
The parties what's in my 'ouse is most respectable,--most! and they couldn't abide the notion of there being police about the place.'
'We quite believe that, Mrs Henderson.'
The Inspector's tone was grim.
Mrs Henderson led the way up a staircase which would have been distinctly the better for repairs.
I locked the door so that nothing mightn't be disturbed.
I knows 'ow particular you pleesmen is.'
She turned the key.
We all went in-we, this time, in front, and she behind.
A candle was guttering on a broken and dilapidated single washhand stand.
A small iron bedstead stood by its side, the clothes on which were all tumbled and tossed.
I could see nothing in the shape of a murdered man.
Nor, it appeared, could the Inspector either.
I don't see anything here.'
We all four went hastily forward.
Atherton and I went to the head of the bed, Lessingham and the Inspector, leaning right across the bed, peeped over the side.
There, on the floor in the space which was between the bed and the wall, lay the murdered man.
At sight of him an exclamation burst from Sydney's lips.
'It's Holt!'
The relief in his tone was unmistakable.
That the one was gone was plainly nothing to him in comparison with the fact that the other was left.
Thrusting the bed more into the centre of the room I knelt down beside the man on the floor.
A more deplorable spectacle than he presented I have seldom witnessed.
I doubt if there was an ounce of flesh on the whole of his body.
His cheeks and the sockets of his eyes were hollow.
The skin was drawn tightly over his cheek bones,--the bones themselves were staring through.
Even his nose was wasted, so that nothing but a ridge of cartilage remained.
I put my arm beneath his shoulder and raised him from the floor; no resistance was offered by the body's gravity,--he was as light as a little child.
'I doubt,' I said, 'if this man has been murdered.
It looks to me like a case of starvation, or exhaustion,--possibly a combination of both.'
'What's that on his neck?' asked the Inspector,--he was kneeling at my side.
He referred to two abrasions of the skin,--one on either side of the man's neck.
'They look to me like scratches.
They seem pretty deep, but I don't think they're sufficient in themselves to cause death.'
'They might be, joined to an already weakened constitution.
Is there anything in his pockets?--let's lift him on to the bed.'
We lifted him on to the bed,--a featherweight he was to lift.
While the Inspector was examining his pockets-to find them empty --a tall man with a big black beard came bustling in.
He proved to be Dr Glossop, the local police surgeon, who had been sent for before our quitting the Station House.
His first pronouncement, made as soon as he commenced his examination, was, under the circumstances, sufficiently startling.
'I don't believe the man's dead.
Why didn't you send for me directly you found him?'
The question was put to Mrs Henderson.
'You'll find it a joke if you have to hang, as you ought to, you-' The doctor said what he did say to himself, under his breath.
I doubt if it was flattering to Mrs Henderson. 'Have you got any brandy in the house?'
'Then send for some,--to the tap downstairs, if that's the nearest!
If this man dies before you've brought it I'll have you locked up as sure as you're a living woman.'
The arrival of the brandy was not long delayed,--but the man on the bed had regained consciousness before it came.
Opening his eyes he looked up at the doctor bending over him.
that's more like the time of day!
How are you feeling?'
Atherton bent down beside the doctor.
'I'm glad to see you looking better, Mr Holt.
You know me don't you?
I've been running about after you all day long.'
'You are-you are-' The man's eyes closed, as if the effort at recollection exhausted him.
He kept them closed as he continued to speak.
'I know who you are.
And I daresay you're feeling pretty well done up, and in want of something to eat and drink,--here's some brandy for you.'
The doctor had some in a tumbler.
He raised the patient's head, allowing it to trickle down his throat.
The man swallowed it mechanically, motionless, as if unconscious what it was that he was doing.
The doctor laid him back upon the bed, feeling his pulse with one hand, while he stood and regarded him in silence.
Then, turning to the Inspector, he said to him in an undertone;
'If you want him to make a statement he'll have to make it now, he's going fast.
You won't be able to get much out of him,--he's too far gone, and I shouldn't bustle him, but get what you can.'
The Inspector came to the front, a notebook in his hand.
'I understand from this gentleman-' signifying Atherton-'that your name's Robert Holt.
I'm an Inspector of police, and I want you to tell me what has brought you into this condition.
Sydney, stooping over him, endeavoured to explain.
'The Inspector wants to know how you got here, has anyone been doing anything to you?
Has anyone been hurting you?'
The man's eyelids were partially closed.
Then they opened wider and wider.
His mouth opened too.
On his skeleton features there came a look of panic fear.
He was evidently struggling to speak.
At last words came.
'The beetle!' He stopped.
Then, after an effort, spoke again.
'The beetle!'
'What's he mean?' asked the Inspector.
Well, has the beetle done anything to you?'
'It took me by the throat!'
'Is that the meaning of the marks upon your neck?'
'The beetle killed me.'
The lids closed.
The man relapsed into a state of lethargy.
The Inspector was puzzled;--and said so.
'What's he mean about a beetle?'
Atherton replied.
'I think I understand what he means,--and my friends do too.
We'll explain afterwards.
There isn't much-only seconds.'
Sydney endeavoured to rouse the man from his stupor.
'You've been with Miss Lindon all the afternoon and evening, haven't you, Mr Holt?'
Atherton had reached a chord in the man's consciousness.
His lips moved,--in painful articulation.
'Yes-all the afternoon-and evening-God help me!'
'I hope God will help you my poor fellow; you've been in need of His help if ever man was.
Miss Lindon is disguised in your old clothes, isn't she?'
'Yes,--in my old clothes.
My God!'
'And where is Miss Lindon now?'
Now he opened them, wide; there came into them the former staring horror.
He became possessed by uncontrollable agitation,--half raising himself in bed.
Words came from his quivering lips as if they were only drawn from him by the force of his anguish.
'The beetle's going to kill Miss Lindon.'
A momentary paroxysm seemed to shake the very foundations of his being.
His whole frame quivered.
The doctor examined him in silence-while we too were still.
'This time he's gone for good, there'll be no conjuring him back again.'
I felt a sudden pressure on my arm, and found that Lessingham was clutching me with probably unconscious violence.
He trembled.
I turned to the doctor.
'Doctor, if there is any of that brandy left will you let me have it for my friend?'
The Inspector was speaking to the woman of the house.
'Now, Mrs Henderson, perhaps you'll tell us what all this means.
Who is this man, and how did he come in here, and who came in with him, and what do you know about it altogether?
MAGNETIC ORE MILLING WORK
DURING the Hudson Fulton celebration of October, nineteen o nine, Burgomaster Van Leeuwen, of Amsterdam, member of the delegation sent officially from Holland to escort the Half Moon and participate in the functions of the anniversary, paid a visit to the Edison laboratory at Orange to see the inventor, who may be regarded as pre-eminent among those of Dutch descent in this country.
In other words, mr Edison was at least a quarter of a century ahead of the times in the work now to be considered.
During the twenty eight years that have intervened it has never come back." This incident was really the prelude to the development set forth in this chapter.
This ore could be excavated very cheaply by means of improved mining facilities, and transported at low cost to lake ports.
Hence the iron and steel mills east of the Alleghanies-compelled to rely on limited local deposits of Bessemer ore, and upon foreign ores which were constantly rising in value-began to sustain a serious competition with Western mills, even in Eastern markets.
To pay railroad charges on ores carrying perhaps eighty to ninety per cent. of useless material would be prohibitive.
Hence the elimination of the worthless "gangue" by concentration of the iron particles associated with it, seemed to be the only solution of the problem.
Many attempts had been made in by gone days to concentrate the iron in such ores by water processes, but with only a partial degree of success. The impossibility of obtaining a uniform concentrate was a most serious objection, had there not indeed been other difficulties which rendered this method commercially impracticable.
At the time he took up the matter, however, no one seems to have realized the full meaning of the tremendous problems involved.
From eighteen eighty to eighteen eighty five, while still very busy in the development of his electric light system, Edison found opportunity to plan crushing and separating machinery.
His first patent on the subject was applied for and issued early in eighteen eighty.
It was his opinion that it was cheaper to quarry and concentrate lean ore in a big way than to attempt to mine, under adverse circumstances, limited bodies of high grade ore.
It may be stated as broadly true that Edison engineered to handle immense masses of stuff automatically, while his predecessors aimed chiefly at close separation.
Reduced to its barest, crudest terms, the proposition of magnetic separation is simplicity itself.
The non magnetic gangue descends in a straight line to the other side of the partition.
Thus a complete separation is effected.
Simple though the principle appears, it was in its application to vast masses of material and in the solving of great engineering problems connected therewith that Edison's originality made itself manifest in the concentrating works that he established in New Jersey, early in the nineties.
These are too numerous to specify in detail, as they extended throughout the various ramifications of the plant, but the principal ones are worthy of mention, such as:
His genius as an inventor is revealed in many details of the great concentrating plant....
A cursory glance at these problems will reveal their import.
"I knew it was a commercial problem to produce high grade Bessemer ore from these deposits, and took steps to acquire a large amount of the property.
I also planned a great magnetic survey of the East, and I believe it remains the most comprehensive of its kind yet performed.
I had a number of men survey a strip reaching from Lower Canada to North Carolina.
The only instrument we used was the special magnetic needle. We started in Lower Canada and travelled across the line of march twenty five miles; then advanced south one thousand feet; then back across the line of march again twenty five miles; then south another thousand feet, across again, and so on.
Thus we advanced all the way to North Carolina, varying our cross-country march from two to twenty five miles, according to geological formation.
We also knew the width, length, and approximate depth of every one of these deposits, which were enormous.
"The amount of ore disclosed by this survey was simply fabulous.
I also secured sixteen thousand acres in which the deposit was proportionately as large.
These few acres alone contained sufficient ore to supply the whole United States iron trade, including exports, for seventy years."
Edison realized from the start that the true solution of this problem lay in the continuous treatment of the material, with the maximum employment of natural forces and the minimum of manual labor and generated power.
It is hardly necessary to devote space to the beginnings of the enterprise, although they are full of interest.
They served, however, to convince Edison that if he ever expected to carry out his scheme on the extensive scale planned, he could not depend upon the market to supply suitable machinery for important operations, but would be obliged to devise and build it himself.
No such departure was as radical as that of the method of crushing the ore.
Existing machinery for this purpose had been designed on the basis of mining methods then in vogue, by which the rock was thoroughly shattered by means of high explosives and reduced to pieces of one hundred pounds or less.
These pieces were then crushed by power directly applied.
From a consideration of these facts, and with his usual tendency to upset traditional observances, Edison conceived the bold idea of constructing gigantic rolls which, by the force of momentum, would be capable of crushing individual rocks of vastly greater size than ever before attempted.
He reasoned that the advantages thus obtained would be fourfold: a minimum of machinery and parts; greater compactness; a saving of power; and greater economy in mining.
As this last named operation precedes the crushing, let us first consider it as it was projected and carried on by him.
The faith that "moves mountains" had a new opportunity.
Hence, he believed that only the minimum of work should be done with the costly explosive; and, therefore, planned to use dynamite merely to dislodge great masses of rock, and depended upon the steam shovel, operated by coal under the boiler, to displace, handle, and remove the rock in detail.
This was the plan that was subsequently put into practice in the great works at edison new jersey.
A series of three inch holes twenty feet deep were drilled eight feet apart, about twelve feet back of the ore bank, and into these were inserted dynamite cartridges.
The blast would dislodge thirty to thirty five thousand tons of rock, which was scooped up by great steam shovels and loaded on to skips carried by a line of cars on a narrow gauge railroad running to and from the crushing mill.
The problem included handling and crushing the "run of the mine," without selection.
The steam shovel did not discriminate, but picked up handily single pieces weighing five or six tons and loaded them on the skips with quantities of smaller lumps. When the skips arrived at the giant rolls, their contents were dumped automatically into a superimposed hopper.
The rolls were well named, for with ear splitting noise they broke up in a few seconds the great pieces of rock tossed in from the skips.
It is not easy to appreciate to the full the daring exemplified in these great crushing rolls, or rather "rock crackers," without having watched them in operation delivering their "solar plexus" blows.
To the faces of these rolls were bolted a series of heavy, chilled iron plates containing a number of projecting knobs two inches high.
The rolls were set face to face fourteen inches apart, in a heavy frame, and the total weight was one hundred and thirty tons, of which seventy tons were in moving parts.
The space between these two rolls allowed pieces of rock measuring less than fourteen inches to descend to other smaller rolls placed below.
The giant rolls were belt driven, in opposite directions, through friction clutches, although the belt was not depended upon for the actual crushing.
Previous to the dumping of a skip, the rolls were speeded up to a circumferential velocity of nearly a mile a minute, thus imparting to them the terrific momentum that would break up easily in a few seconds boulders weighing five or six tons each.
In other words, it was the kinetic energy of the rolls that crumbled up the rocks with pile driver effect.
The act of breaking and crushing would naturally decrease the tremendous momentum, but after the rock was reduced and the pieces had passed through, the belt would again come into play, and once more speed up the rolls for a repetition of their regular prize fighter duty.
On leaving the giant rolls the rocks, having been reduced to pieces not larger than fourteen inches, passed into the series of "Intermediate Rolls" of similar construction and operation, by which they were still further reduced, and again passed on to three other sets of rolls of smaller dimensions.
These latter rolls were also face lined with chilled iron plates; but, unlike the larger ones, were positively driven, reducing the rock to pieces of about one half inch size, or smaller.
The whole crushing operation of reduction from massive boulders to small pebbly pieces having been done in less time than the telling has occupied, the product was conveyed to the "Dryer," a tower nine feet square and fifty feet high, heated from below by great open furnace fires.
The crushed rock, being delivered at the top, would fall down from plate to plate, constantly exposing different surfaces to the heat, until it landed completely dried in the lower portion of the tower, where it fell into conveyors which took it up to the stock house.
This method of drying was original with Edison.
At the time this adjunct to the plant was required, the best dryer on the market was of a rotary type, which had a capacity of only twenty tons per hour, with the expenditure of considerable power.
As Edison had determined upon treating two hundred and fifty tons or more per hour, he decided to devise an entirely new type of great capacity, requiring a minimum of power (for elevating the material), and depending upon the force of gravity for handling it during the drying process.
His nature revolted at such an immense loss of power, especially as he proposed the crushing of vast quantities of ore.
A brief description of this remarkable machine will probably interest the reader.
In the two end pieces of a heavy iron frame were set three rolls, or cylinders-one in the centre, another below, and the other above-all three being in a vertical line.
In operation the material passed first through the upper and middle rolls, and then between the middle and lowest rolls.
This pressure was applied in a most ingenious manner.
The rocks having thus been reduced to fine powder, the mass was ready for screening on its way to the magnetic separators.
Here again Edison reversed prior practice by discarding rotary screens and devising a form of tower screen, which, besides having a very large working capacity by gravity, eliminated all power except that required to elevate the material.
The screening process allowed the finest part of the crushed rock to pass on, by conveyor belts, to the magnetic separators, while the coarser particles were in like manner automatically returned to the rolls for further reduction.
In a narrative not intended to be strictly technical, it would probably tire the reader to follow this material in detail through the numerous steps attending the magnetic separation.
This batch of material goes back for another crushing, so that everything is subjected to an equality of refining.
Obviously, at each step the percentage of felspar and phosphorus is less and less until in the final concentrates the percentage of iron oxide is ninety one to ninety three per cent.
This sand was transported automatically by belt conveyors to the rear of the works to be stored and sold.
The concentrate, in fine powdery form, was delivered in similar manner to a stock house.
Furnacemen object to more than a very small proportion of fine ore in their mixtures, particularly when the ore is magnetic, not easily reduced.
The problem to be solved was to market an agglomerated material so as to avoid the drawbacks of fine ore.
It must be hard enough to bear transportation, and to carry the furnace burden without crumbling to pieces.
In many respects the attainment of these somewhat conflicting ends was the most perplexing of the problems which confronted mr Edison.
The agglomeration of the concentrates having been decided upon, two other considerations, not mentioned above, were of primary importance-first, to find a suitable cheap binding material; and, second, its nature must be such that very little would be necessary per ton of concentrates.
These severe requirements were staggering, but mr Edison's courage did not falter. Although it seemed a well nigh hopeless task, he entered upon the investigation with his usual optimism and vim.
After many months of unremitting toil and research, and the trial of thousands of experiments, the goal was reached in the completion of a successful formula for agglomerating the fine ore and pressing it into briquettes by special machinery."
This was the final process requisite for the making of a completed commercial product.
Thus, with never failing persistence and patience, coupled with intense thought and hard work, Edison met and conquered, one by one, the complex difficulties that confronted him.
"The furnace at which the test was made produces from one hundred to one hundred and ten tons per day when running on the ordinary mixture.
The charging of briquettes was begun with a percentage of twenty five per cent., and was carried up to one hundred per cent.
The following is the record of the results:
"These figures prove that the yield of the furnace is considerably increased.
The Crane trial was too short to settle the question to what extent the increase in product may be carried.
This increase in output, of course, means a reduction in the cost of labor and of general expenses.
"The richness of the ore and its purity of course affect the limestone consumption.
In the case of the Crane trial there was a reduction from thirty per cent. to twelve per cent. of the ore charge.
"Finally, the fuel consumption is reduced, which in the case of the Eastern plants, with their relatively costly coke, is a very important consideration.
It is regarded as possible that Eastern furnaces will be able to use a smaller proportion of the costlier coke and correspondingly increase in anthracite coal, which is a cheaper fuel in that section.
So far as foundry iron is concerned, the experience at Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, brief as it has been, shows that a stronger and tougher metal is made."
They saw I was very anxious to sell it, and they would take advantage of my necessity.
They ought to help you, for it will help us out.
I am willing to help you.
I mix a little sentiment with business, and I will give you an order for one hundred thousand tons.' And he sat right down and gave me the order."
The Edison concentrating plant has been sketched in the briefest outline with a view of affording merely a bare idea of the great work of its projector.
Interesting as it might be to follow at length the numerous phases of ingenious and resourceful development that took place during those busy years, the limit of present space forbids their relation.
The second item was the ingenious and varied forms of conveyor belt, devised and used by Edison at the concentrating works, and subsequently developed into a separate and extensive business by an engineer to whom he gave permission to use his plans and patterns.
Edison's native shrewdness and knowledge of human nature was put to practical use in the busy days of plant construction.
It was found impossible to keep mechanics on account of indifferent residential accommodations afforded by the tiny village, remote from civilization, among the central mountains of New Jersey.
Fifty were quickly built and fully described in advertising for mechanics.
Three days' advertisements brought in over six hundred and fifty applications, and afterward Edison had no trouble in obtaining all the first-class men he required, as settlers in the artificial Yosemite he was creating.
During some of these waits mr Edison had seen me play billiards.
At the particular time this incident happened, mrs Edison and her family were away for the summer, and I was staying at the Glenmont home on the Orange Mountains.
I took off the cloth, got out the balls, picked out a cue for mr Edison, and when we banked for the first shot I won and started the game.
After making two or three shots I missed, and a long carom shot was left for mr Edison, the cue ball and object ball being within about twelve inches of each other, and the other ball a distance of nearly the length of the table.
mr Edison attempted to make the shot, but missed it and said 'Put the balls back.' So I put them back in the same position and he missed it the second time.
I continued at his request to put the balls back in the same position for the next fifteen minutes, until he could make the shot every time-then he said: 'I don't want to play any more.'"
In the patient solving of tremendous problems he had toiled up the mountain side of success-scaling its topmost peak and obtaining a view of the boundless prospect.
But, alas!
At the former price he could have supplied the market and earned a liberal profit on his investment, but at three dollars and fifty cents per ton he was left without a reasonable chance of competition.
Thus was swept away the possibility of reaping the reward so richly earned by years of incessant thought, labor, and care.
This great and notable plant, representing a very large outlay of money, brought to completion, ready for business, and embracing some of the most brilliant and remarkable of Edison's inventions and methods, must be abandoned by force of circumstances over which he had no control, and with it must die the high hopes that his progressive, conquering march to success had legitimately engendered.
The financial aspect of these enterprises is often overlooked and forgotten.
In this instance it was of more than usual import and seriousness, as Edison was virtually his own "backer," putting into the company almost the whole of all the fortune his inventions had brought him.
It is an absolute fact that the great electrical inventors and the men who stood behind them have had little return for their foresight and courage.
Let mr Mallory give an instance: "During the latter part of the panic of eighteen ninety three there came a period when we were very hard up for ready cash, due largely to the panicky conditions; and a large pay roll had been raised with considerable difficulty.
When I had finished he said: 'It is too bad the money is gone, but I will tell you what to do.
Go and see the president of the bank which paid the forged checks. Get him to admit the bank's liability, and then say to him that mr Edison does not think the bank should suffer because he happened to have a dishonest clerk in his employ.
Also say to him that I shall not ask them to make the amount good.' This was done; the bank admitting its liability and being much pleased with this action.
When I reported to mr Edison he said: 'That's all right.
This iron ore concentrating project had lain close to Edison's heart and ambition-indeed, it had permeated his whole being to the exclusion of almost all other investigations or inventions for a while.
For five years he had lived and worked steadily at Edison, leaving there only on Saturday night to spend Sunday at his home in Orange, and returning to the plant by an early train on Monday morning.
Even the scenery is austere.
"In the discussion that followed he suggested several kinds of work which he had in his mind, and which might prove profitable.
So these two lines of work were taken up by mr Edison with just as much enthusiasm and energy as is usual with him, the commercial failure of the concentrating plant seeming not to affect his spirits in any way.
It will have been gathered that the funds for this great experiment were furnished largely by Edison.
In fact, over two million dollars were spent in the attempt.
When we arrived at Dover, New Jersey, we got a New York newspaper, and I called his attention to the quotation of that day on General Electric.
mr Edison then asked: 'If I hadn't sold any of mine, what would it be worth to day?' and after some figuring I replied: 'Over four million dollars.' When mr Edison is thinking seriously over a problem he is in the habit of pulling his right eyebrow, which he did now for fifteen or twenty seconds.
CHAPTER five-AT BOMBARDA'S
The Russian mountains having been exhausted, they began to think about dinner; and the radiant party of eight, somewhat weary at last, became stranded in Bombarda's public house, a branch establishment which had been set up in the Champs Elysees by that famous restaurant keeper, Bombarda, whose sign could then be seen in the Rue de Rivoli, near Delorme Alley.
"They made beneath the table A noise, a clatter of the feet that was abominable,"
says Moliere.
This was the state which the shepherd idyl, begun at five o'clock in the morning, had reached at half past four in the afternoon.
The sun was setting; their appetites were satisfied.
The horses of Marly, those neighing marbles, were prancing in a cloud of gold.
Carriages were going and coming.
A squadron of magnificent body guards, with their clarions at their head, were descending the Avenue de Neuilly; the white flag, showing faintly rosy in the setting sun, floated over the dome of the Tuileries.
"Give us back our father from Ghent, Give us back our father."
"Taking all things into consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be feared from these people.
These are very pretty men, Sire.
There is nothing to be feared on the part of the populace of Paris the capital.
It is not dangerous.
In short, it is an amiable rabble."
The ingenuous police of the Restoration beheld the populace of Paris in too "rose colored" a light; it is not so much of "an amiable rabble" as it is thought.
Give him a pike, he will produce the tenth of August; give him a gun, you will have Austerlitz.
He is Napoleon's stay and Danton's resource.
Is it a question of country, he enlists; is it a question of liberty, he tears up the pavements.
Take care! he will make of the first Rue Grenetat which comes to hand Caudine Forks.
When the hour strikes, this man of the faubourgs will grow in stature; this little man will arise, and his gaze will be terrible, and his breath will become a tempest, and there will issue forth from that slender chest enough wind to disarrange the folds of the Alps.
It is, thanks to the suburban man of Paris, that the Revolution, mixed with arms, conquers Europe.
He sings; it is his delight.
Proportion his song to his nature, and you will see!
The dinner, as we have said, was drawing to its close.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
ADAPTED BY e NESBIT
Once upon a time there was a rich merchant, who had three daughters. They lived in a very fine house in a beautiful city, and had many servants in grand liveries to wait upon them.
The two eldest were called Marigold and Dressalinda.
Never a day passed but these two went out to some feast or junketing; but Beauty, the youngest, loved to stay at home and keep her old father company.
Now, it happened that misfortune came upon the merchant.
There was still left to him a little house in the country, and to this, when everything else had been sold, he retired.
His three daughters, of course, went with him.
Marigold and Dressalinda were very cross to think that they had lost all their money, and after being so rich and sought after, they must now live in a miserable cottage.
But Beauty's only thought was to cheer her old father, and while her two sisters sat on wooden chairs and cried and bewailed themselves, Beauty lighted the fire and got the supper ready, for the merchant was now so poor that he could not even keep a servant.
The two eldest sisters would do nothing but sulk in corners, while Beauty swept the floors and washed the dishes, and did her best to make the poor cottage pleasant.
They led their sister a dreadful life too, with their complaints, for not only did they refuse to do anything themselves, but they said that everything she did was done wrong.
But Beauty bore all their unkindness patiently, for her father's sake.
"My dear children," he said, "at last our luck has turned.
We shall not be so rich as before, but we shall have enough to keep us in comfort.
Get me my traveling cloak, Beauty.
I will set out at once to claim my ship.
And now tell me, girls, what shall I bring you when I come back?"
"I want a new silk dress," said Dressalinda, "an apple green one, sewn with seed pearls, and green shoes with red heels, and a necklace of emeralds, and a box of gloves."
"And what shall I bring for you, my Beauty?" asked the father, as his little daughter helped him to put on his traveling cloak.
"Oh, bring me a rose," said Beauty hastily.
Her father kissed her fondly, and set out.
"You silly girl," said Marigold, "you just want our father to think you are more unselfish than we are-that's what you want!
"Indeed, sister," said Beauty, "that was not the reason.
In the meantime the merchant went his way to the city, full of hope and great plans as to what he would do with his money.
But when he got there, he found that some one had played a trick on him, and no ship of his had come into harbor, so he was just as badly off as before.
He spent the whole day looking about to make sure there was no truth in the letter he had received, and it was beginning to get dusk when he started out, with a sad heart, to make the journey home again.
He knocked at the gates, but no one answered, and presently, driven by hunger and cold, he made bold to enter, and mounted the marble steps into the great hall.
There was a big fire in the hall, and when he had warmed himself, he set out to look for the master of the house.
But he did not look far, for behind the first door he opened was a cosy little room with supper set for one, a supper the mere look of which made you hungry.
So the merchant sat down as bold as you please, and made a very hearty supper, after which he again thought he would look for the master of the house.
He started off and opened another door, but there he saw a bed, merely to look at which made you sleepy, so he said to himself:
"This is some fairies' work.
I had better not look any farther for the master of the house."
And with that he tumbled into bed, and, being very tired, he went to sleep at once, and slept like a top till it was time to get up in the morning.
When he awoke he was quite surprised to find himself in such a soft and comfortable bed, but presently he remembered all that had happened to him.
"I must be going," he said to himself, "but I wish I could thank my host for my good rest and my good supper."
When he got out of bed he found he had something else to be grateful for, for on the chair by the bedside lay a fine suit of new clothes, marked with his name, and with ten gold pieces in every pocket.
When he went downstairs, he found a good breakfast waiting for him in the little room where he had supped the night before, and when he had made a good meal, he thought he would go for a stroll in the garden.
Down the marble steps he went, and when he came to the garden, he saw that it was full of roses, red and white and pink and yellow, and the merchant looked at them, and remembered Beauty's wish.
So he stretched out his hand and plucked the biggest red rose within his reach.
As the stalk snapped in his fingers, he started back in terror, for he heard an angry roar, and the next minute a dreadful Beast sprang upon him.
"Ungrateful wretch!" said the Beast.
"Mercy! mercy!" cried the merchant.
"No," said the Beast, "you must die!"
The poor merchant fell upon his knees and tried to think of something to say to soften the heart of the cruel Beast; and at last he said, "Sir, I only stole this rose because my youngest daughter asked me to bring her one.
I did not think, after all you have given me, that you would grudge me a flower."
"Is she a good girl?"
"Oh!" he cried, "what will my poor children do without me?"
"You should have thought of that before you stole the rose," said the Beast.
The wretched man promised.
"At any rate," he thought, "I shall have three months more of life."
Then the Beast said, "I will not let you go empty handed."
So the merchant followed him back into the palace.
There, on the floor of the hall, lay a great and beautiful chest of wrought silver.
And the merchant filled it up with precious things from the Beast's treasure house.
"I will send it home for you," said the Beast, shutting down the lid.
The merchant put these into Beauty's hand when she ran to meet him at the door of their cottage.
"Take them, my child," he said, "and cherish them, for they have cost your poor father his life."
And with that he sat down and told them the whole story.
The two elder sisters wept and wailed, and of course blamed Beauty for all that had happened.
Her father went with her, to show her the way.
Only this time the table was laid for two.
"Come, father dear," said Beauty, "take comfort.
I do not think the Beast means to kill me, or surely he would not have given me such a good supper."
But the next moment the Beast came into the room.
"Don't be frightened," said the Beast gently, "but tell me, do you come here of your own free will?"
"Yes," said Beauty, trembling.
They went to bed and slept soundly, and the next morning the father departed, weeping bitterly.
Beauty, left alone, tried not to feel frightened.
The most beautiful set of rooms in the palace had written over the doors, "Beauty's Rooms," and in them she found books and music, canary birds and Persian cats, and everything that could be thought of to make the time pass pleasantly.
"Oh, dear!" she said; "if only I could see my poor father I should be almost happy."
As she spoke, she happened to look at a big mirror, and in it she saw the form of her father reflected, just riding up to the door of his cottage.
That night, when Beauty sat down to supper, the Beast came in.
"May I have supper with you?" said he.
"That must be as you please," said Beauty.
So the Beast sat down to supper with her, and when it was finished, he said:
"I am very ugly, Beauty, and I am very stupid, but I love you; will you marry me?"
"No, Beast," said Beauty gently.
The poor Beast sighed and went away.
And every night the same thing happened.
He ate his supper with her, and then asked her if she would marry him.
And she always said, "No, Beast."
All this time she was waited on by invisible hands, as though she had been a queen.
Beautiful music came to her ears without her being able to see the musicians, but the magic looking glass was best of all, for in it she could see whatever she wished.
As the days went by, and her slightest wish was granted, almost before she knew what she wanted, she began to feel that the Beast must love her very dearly, and she was very sorry to see how sad he looked every night when she said "No" to his offer of marriage.
One day, she saw in her mirror that her father was ill, so that night she said to the Beast:
"Dear Beast, you are so good to me, will you let me go home to see my father?
He is ill, and he thinks that I am dead.
Do let me go and cheer him up, and I will promise faithfully to return to you."
When she wanted to come back, she was to do the same thing.
"I wish we had gone," said Marigold.
So Beauty, thinking it would amuse them to hear, told them, and their envy increased day by day.
At last Dressalinda said to Marigold:
"She has promised to return in a week.
If we could only make her forget the day, the Beast might be angry and kill her, and then there would be a chance for us."
So on the day before she ought to have gone back, they put, some poppy juice in a cup of wine which they gave her, and this made her so sleepy that she slept for two whole days and nights.
At the end of that time her sleep grew troubled, and she dreamed that She saw the Beast lying dead among the roses in the beautiful gardens of his palace; and from this dream she awoke crying bitterly.
She did not know where his rooms in the palace were, but she felt she could not wait till supper time before seeing him, so she ran hither and thither, calling his name.
But the palace was empty, and no one answered her when she called.
Then she ran through the gardens, calling his name again and again, but still there was silence.
"Oh! what shall I do if I cannot find him?" she said.
"I shall never be happy again."
Beauty flung herself on her knees beside him.
"Oh, dear Beast," she cried, "and are you really dead?
Alas! alas! then I, too, will die, for I cannot live without you."
Immediately the Beast opened his eyes, sighed, and said:
"Yes, yes, dear Beast, for I love you dearly."
He knelt at Beauty's feet and clasped her hands.
"Dear Beauty," he said, "nothing but your love could have disenchanted me.
So they returned to the palace, which by this time was crowded with courtiers, eager to kiss the hands of the Prince and his bride.
And the Prince whispered to one of his attendants, who went out, and in a very little time came back with Beauty's father and sisters.
But Beauty, happily married to her Prince, went secretly to the statues every day and wept over them.
And by her tears their stony hearts were softened, and they were changed into flesh and blood again, and were good and kind for the rest of their lives.
ION.
Ion was the son of Creusa (the beauteous daughter of Erechtheus, king of Athens) and the sun god Phoebus Apollo, to whom she was united without the knowledge of her father.
Fearing the anger of Erechtheus, Creusa placed her new born babe in a little wicker basket, and hanging some golden charms round his neck, invoked for him the protection of the gods, and concealed him in a lonely cave.
Apollo, pitying his deserted child, sent Hermes to convey him to Delphi, where he deposited his charge on the steps of the temple.
Next morning the Delphic priestess discovered the infant, and was so charmed by his engaging appearance that she adopted him as her own son.
The young child was carefully tended and reared by his kind foster mother, and was brought up in the service of the temple, where he was intrusted with some of the minor duties of the holy edifice.
And now to return to Creusa.
During a war with the Euboeans, in which the latter were signally defeated, Xuthus, son of AEolus, greatly distinguished himself on the side of the Athenians, and as a reward for his valuable services, the hand of Creusa, the king's daughter, was bestowed upon him in marriage.
The response was, that Xuthus should regard the first person who met him on leaving the sanctuary as his son.
When, upon the occasion of the public adoption of his son, Xuthus gave a grand banquet, the old servant of Creusa contrived to mix a strong poison in the wine of the unsuspecting Ion.
Unprepared for this sudden attack he admitted his guilt, but pointed to the wife of Xuthus as the instigator of the crime.
Ion was about to avenge himself upon Creusa, when, by means of the divine intervention of Apollo, his foster mother, the Delphic priestess appeared on the scene, and explained the true relationship which existed between Creusa and Ion.
DAEDALUS and ICARUS.
Daedalus, a descendant of Erechtheus, was an Athenian architect, sculptor, and mechanician.
But great as was his genius, still greater was his vanity, and he could brook no rival.
Now his nephew and pupil, Talus, exhibited great talent, having invented both the saw and the compass, and Daedalus, fearing lest he might overshadow his own fame, secretly killed him by throwing him down from the citadel of Pallas Athene.
The murder being discovered, Daedalus was summoned before the court of the Areopagus and condemned to death; but he made his escape to the island of Crete, where he was received by king Minos in a manner worthy of his great reputation.
Daedalus constructed for the king the world renowned labyrinth, which was an immense building, full of intricate passages, intersecting each other in such a manner, that even Daedalus himself is said, upon one occasion, to have nearly lost his way in it; and it was in this building the king placed the Minotaur, a monster with the head and shoulders of a bull and the body of a man.
In the course of time the great artist became weary of his long exile, more especially as the king, under the guise of friendship, kept him almost a prisoner.
Having awaited a favourable opportunity, father and son commenced their flight, and were well on their way when Icarus, pleased with the novel sensation, forgot altogether his father's oft repeated injunction not to approach too near the sun
The body of the unfortunate Icarus was washed up by the tide, and was buried by the bereaved father on an island which he called after his son, Icaria.
Cocalus feigned compliance and invited Minos to his palace, where he was treacherously put to death in a warm bath.
The body of their king was brought to Agrigent by the Cretans, where it was buried with great pomp, and over his tomb a temple to Aphrodite was erected.
Daedalus passed the remainder of his life tranquilly in the island of Sicily, where he occupied himself in the construction of various beautiful works of art.
'Every single thing's crooked,' Alice thought to herself, 'and she's all over pins!--may I put your shawl straight for you?' she added aloud.
'I don't know what's the matter with it!' the Queen said, in a melancholy voice.
'The brush has got entangled in it!' the Queen said with a sigh.
Alice carefully released the brush, and did her best to get the hair into order.
'Come, you look rather better now!' she said, after altering most of the pins.
'Twopence a week, and jam every other day.'
'It's very good jam,' said the Queen.
'Well, I don't want any TO DAY, at any rate.'
'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to day,"' Alice objected.
'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!'
'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first-'
'I can't remember things before they happen.'
'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.
'What sort of things do YOU remember best?' Alice ventured to ask.
'Suppose he never commits the crime?' said Alice.
Alice felt there was no denying THAT. 'Of course it would be all the better,' she said: 'but it wouldn't be all the better his being punished.'
'Only for faults,' said Alice.
'Yes, but then I HAD done the things I was punished for,' said Alice: 'that makes all the difference.'
'But if you HADN'T done them,' the Queen said, 'that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!' Her voice went higher with each 'better,' till it got quite to a squeak at last.
Alice was just beginning to say 'There's a mistake somewhere-,' when the Queen began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished.
'What IS the matter?' she said, as soon as there was a chance of making herself heard.
'Have you pricked your finger?'
'That accounts for the bleeding, you see,' she said to Alice with a smile.
'But why don't you scream now?' Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.
'Why, I've done all the screaming already,' said the Queen. 'What would be the good of having it all over again?'
By this time it was getting light.
'The crow must have flown away, I think,' said Alice: 'I'm so glad it's gone.
'Only I never can remember the rule.
'Oh, don't go on like that!' cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair.
'Consider what a great girl you are.
Consider what o'clock it is.
Consider anything, only don't cry!'
Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. 'Can YOU keep from crying by considering things?' she asked.
Let's consider your age to begin with-how old are you?'
'I'm seven and a half exactly.'
'I can't believe THAT!' said Alice.
'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone.
Alice laughed.
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day.
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
There goes the shawl again!'
The Queen spread out her arms again, and went flying after it, and this time she succeeded in catching it for herself.
'Then I hope your finger is better now?' Alice said very politely, as she crossed the little brook after the Queen.
'Oh, much better!' cried the Queen, her voice rising to a squeak as she went on.
She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in wool.
Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again.
She couldn't make out what had happened at all.
And was that really-was it really a SHEEP that was sitting on the other side of the counter?
'What is it you want to buy?' the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment from her knitting.
'I don't QUITE know yet,' Alice said, very gently.
'I should like to look all round me first, if I might.'
'And this one is the most provoking of all-but I'll tell you what-' she added, as a sudden thought struck her, 'I'll follow it up to the very top shelf of all.
It'll puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect!'
'Are you a child or a teetotum?' the Sheep said, as she took up another pair of needles.
Feather!' the Sheep cried again, taking more needles.
'You'll be catching a crab directly.'
'A dear little crab!' thought Alice. 'I should like that.'
'Didn't you hear me say "Feather"?' the Sheep cried angrily, taking up quite a bunch of needles.
'WHY do you say "feather" so often?' Alice asked at last, rather vexed. 'I'm not a bird!'
'Oh, please!
'There really are-and SUCH beauties!'
'No, but I meant-please, may we wait and pick some?' Alice pleaded.
'If you don't mind stopping the boat for a minute.'
'I only hope the boat won't tipple over!' she said to herself.
Only I couldn't quite reach it.' 'And it certainly DID seem a little provoking ('almost as if it happened on purpose,' she thought) that, though she managed to pick plenty of beautiful rushes as the boat glided by, there was always a more lovely one that she couldn't reach.
However, she wasn't hurt, and was soon up again: the Sheep went on with her knitting all the while, just as if nothing had happened.
'That was a nice crab you caught!' she remarked, as Alice got back into her place, very much relieved to find herself still in the boat.
'Was it?
I didn't see it,' Said Alice, peeping cautiously over the side of the boat into the dark water.
'Are there many crabs here?' said Alice.
'Crabs, and all sorts of things,' said the Sheep: 'plenty of choice, only make up your mind.
'I should like to buy an egg, please,' she said timidly.
'How do you sell them?'
'Fivepence farthing for one-Twopence for two,' the Sheep replied.
'Then two are cheaper than one?' Alice said in a surprised tone, taking out her purse.
'Only you MUST eat them both, if you buy two,' said the Sheep.
For she thought to herself, 'They mightn't be at all nice, you know.'
The Sheep took the money, and put it away in a box: then she said 'I never put things into people's hands-that would never do-you must get it for yourself.' And so saying, she went off to the other end of the shop, and set the egg upright on a shelf.
Why, it's got branches, I declare!
CHAPTER ten
There was of course the usual amount of gossip concerning him, but as he refrained from eccentricities of dress when asked to dinner, and did not bet that he would ride his horse into the smoking room of the Somerset Club, the gossip soon lost ground against the list of his good qualities.
But the scenes about him were too new, and very many of the faces he saw were too attractive, to allow of his brooding for long over his misfortune.
He had gone to see Joe, arriving during luncheon, in the expectation of seeing her alone again.
There would be a scene of solemn farewell, in which he would bid her be happy in her own way, in a tone of semi paternal benevolence, after which he would give her his blessing, and bid farewell to the pomps and vanities of society.
He would naturally retire gloomily from the gay world, and end his miserable existence in the approved Guy Livingstone fashion of life, between cavendish tobacco, deep drinking, and high play.
Joe would then repent of the ruin she had caused, and that would be a great satisfaction.
It serves my father right for not buying me my gloves." That was Ronald's state of mind.
But surely, for a disappointed lover there could be no course so proper as a speedy death by dissipation-which would serve Joe right.
Therefore, on his return to his hotel, he ordered whiskey, in a sepulchral tone of voice.
He tasted it, and thought it detestable.
On reflection, he would put off the commencement of his wild career until the evening after he had seen Joe again.
He changed his tie for one of a darker hue, ate sparingly of a beefsteak, and went back to bid Joe a last farewell.
Sybil Brandon and Miss Schenectady were elements in the solemn leave taking which Ronald had not anticipated.
Sybil, moreover, made a great effort, for she was anxious to help Joe as much as possible in her difficulties.
She talked to Ronald with a vivacity that was unusual, and Joe herself was astonished at the brilliance of her conversation.
She had always thought Sybil very reserved, if not somewhat shy.
Perhaps Sybil pitied Ronald a little.
He was grateful after a time, and he was also flattered.
Besides, he could not help noticing that his new acquaintance was extremely beautiful.
His conscience smote him as he realized that he was thinking of her appearance, and he immediately quieted the qualm by saying that it was but natural admiration for an artistic object.
Ronald did not know much about artists and that sort of people, but the expression formed itself conveniently in his mind.
The consequence was that he accepted an invitation to drive with the two girls after luncheon, and when they left him at his hotel, a proceeding against which he vehemently protested on the score of propriety, he reluctantly acknowledged to himself that he had enjoyed the afternoon very much.
"Come and see us after five o'clock," said Sybil.
Nine hundred and thirty six, Beacon Street," she added, laughing.
"With great pleasure-thanks," said Ronald.
"Good by, Ronald dear," said Joe pleasantly.
"Good by," he answered in a doubtful tone of voice, as he raised his hat; and the two girls drove away.
"Do not be frightened, Joe dearest," she said.
"Really, I do not believe he is-so very much, you know," Joe answered. But she was thoughtful, and did not speak again for some time.
It was on the morning after this that Joe read the article on John's speech, and met him by the Common.
Sybil did not go to parties, and john probably had too much to do.
But at supper Joe chanced to be standing near mrs Sam Wyndham.
"Oh, I so much wanted to see you, Miss Thorn," said the latter.
He came today, and I have asked him to dinner to morrow."
"Yes?" said Joe, turning a shade paler.
He is a very nice boy."
"He is perfectly lovely," said mrs Sam, enthusiastically.
"Oh my dear," said mrs Wyndham, "I always forget you are not one of us. Besides, you are, you see."
mrs Wyndham rarely said a tactless thing, but this evening she was in such good spirits that she said what came uppermost in her thoughts.
Joe was not offended; she was only bored.
"Will you not come and dine too, to morrow night?" asked mrs Wyndham, who was anxious to atone.
Pocock Vancouver, pale and exquisite as ever, came up to the two ladies.
"Can I get you anything, mrs Wyndham?" he inquired, after a double bow.
"No, thank you.
Johnny Hannibal is taking care of me," answered mrs Sam, coldly.
"Miss Thorn, what can I get you?" he asked, turning to Joe.
"Nothing, thanks," said Joe, "mr
Biggielow is getting me something." She did not look at Vancouver as she answered, and the angry color began to rise to her temples.
Vancouver, who was not used to repulses such as these, and was too old a soldier to give up a situation so easily, stood a moment playing with his coat tails.
A sudden thought passed through Joe's mind.
It struck her that, considering the situation of affairs, it would be unwise to break off her acquaintance with Vancouver at the present time.
In the first place, there might be more to be learnt which might be of service to john; secondly, people would talk about it if she cut him, and would invent some story to the effect that he had proposed to marry her, or that she had proposed to marry him.
It was contrary to her nature to pretend anything she did not feel, but it would nevertheless be a mistake to quarrel openly with Vancouver.
"On second thoughts-if you would get me a glass of water"--she said, speaking to him.
He instantly disappeared; but even in the moment before he departed to execute her command he had time to express by his look a sense of injury forgiven, which did not escape Joe.
"What a hypocrite the man is!" she thought.
Vancouver on his part could form no conception of the cause of the coldness the two ladies had shown him.
He could not know that Joe had discovered in him the writer of the article, still less could he have guessed that Joe had told john, and that john had told mrs Sam.
He could only suppose that the two had been talking of something, and were annoyed at being interrupted.
mr Bonamy Biggielow was a little poet.
"I ought to thank you, Miss Thorn, instead of you thanking me," said Vancouver, in a seductive voice, on one side of Joe.
"Why?" said Joe, eating her salad and looking straight before her.
mr Biggielow also answered Joe's interrogation.
"Well," he said, "I mean it is thronged with people.
"Youth and beauty?
That sort of thing?" said Joe to Biggielow.
Then turning to Vancouver, she added, "Why should I send you away?"
"I hope there is no reason," he said gravely.
"In fact, I am sure there is none, except that you would of course always do exactly as you pleased about that and everything else."
"Yes, indeed," Joe answered, and her lip curled a little proudly, "you are quite right about that.
But then, you know, I did not send you away."
"Thanks, again," said Vancouver.
"Do let me get you something more, Miss Thorn," suggested mr Biggielow. "No?
You always like"--
"Of course you have heard about Harrington?" said Vancouver in a low voice close to Josephine's ear.
"Will you take my plate?
"You mean about the senatorship?" asked Joe.
"Yes.
"Among whom you count yourself, doubtless," remarked Joe.
"Not politically, of course.
I take no active part"--
"Yes, I know." Joe knew the remainder of the sentence by heart.
"Oh, if it comes to that," said Vancouver mildly, "I would rather see Harrington senator than some of our own men.
At all events, he is honest."
"At all events!" Joe repeated.
"You think, perhaps, that some man of your own party may be elected who will not turn out to be honest?"
"Well, the thing is possible.
You see, politics are such a dirty business-all kinds of men get in."
Nevertheless, he was fascinated by her.
"It is not long since you told me that mr Harrington's very mild remark about extinguishing bribery and corruption was a piece of gross exaggeration," said Joe.
"Why do you say politics are dirty work?"
"There is a great difference," answered Vancouver.
"What difference?
Between what?"
"Between saying that the business of politics is not clean, and saying that all public officers are liars, like the Cretans."
"Who is exaggerating now?" asked Joe scornfully.
"Of course it is I," answered Vancouver, submissively.
"If it is not a rude question, did not that dress come from Egypt?"
Cut square at the neck, it showed her dazzling throat at its best advantage, and a knot of pink lilies at the waist harmonized delicately with the color of the whole.
"It is just like you," said Vancouver, "to have something different from everybody else.
"I am glad you like it," said Joe, indifferently.
"I am so anxious to meet your cousin, Miss Thorn," said Vancouver, trying a new subject.
"I hear there is to be a dinner for him to morrow night at mrs Sam Wyndham's.
But of course I am not asked."
"Why 'of course'?" inquired Joe quickly.
"I believe mrs Wyndham thinks I dislike Englishmen," said Vancouver at random.
"Really?"
"Yes-I should be willing to like any number of Englishmen for the sake of being liked by one Englishwoman." He looked at Joe expressively as he spoke.
"Really?"
"Oh, yes," said Joe.
"Why should I not believe you?" Her voice was calm, but that same angry flush that had of late so often shown itself began to rise slowly at her temples.
Vancouver saw it, and thought she was blushing at what he said.
"I trust you will," said Vancouver.
"I trust that some day you will let me tell you who that Englishwoman is."
It was horrible; he was making love to her, this wretch, whom she despised.
"Thanks-no, if you do not mind," said she.
"I do not care to receive confidences,--I always forget to forget them." It was not in order that Pocock Vancouver might make love to her that she had sent away Bonamy Biggielow, the harmless little poet.
She wished him back again, but he was embarked in an enterprise to dispute with Johnny Hannibal a place near Miss saint Joseph.
mrs Wyndham had long since disappeared.
"Will you please take me back to my aunt?" said Joe.
As they passed from the supper room they suddenly came upon john Harrington, who was wandering about in an unattached fashion, apparently looking for some one.
He bowed and stared a little at seeing Joe on Vancouver's arm, but she gave him a look of such earnest entreaty that he turned and followed her at a distance to see what would happen.
Seeing her sit down by her aunt, he came up and spoke to her, almost thrusting Vancouver aside with his broad shoulders.
It is amazing what a difference the common knowledge of a secret will make in the intimacy of two people.
"I was rather taken aback at seeing you with him," said john.
"Not that it can make any difference to you," he added quickly, "only you seemed so angry at him this morning."
"But it does"--Joe began, impulsively.
"That is, I began by meaning to cut him, and then I thought it would be a mistake to make a scandal."
Besides, I would not for all the world have you take a part in this thing.
It would do no good, and it might do harm."
"I think I have taken a part already," said Joe, somewhat hurt.
"Yes, I know.
I am very grateful, but I hope you will not think any more about it, nor allow it to influence you in any way."
john looked at her earnestly for a few seconds, and saw that she was perfectly sincere.
He had grown to like Josephine of late, and he was grateful to her for her friendship.
Her manner that morning, when she told him of her discovery, had made a deep impression on him.
"My dear Miss Thorn," he said earnestly, in a low voice, "you are too good and kind, and I thank you very heartily for your friendship.
But I think you were very wise not to cut Vancouver, and I hope you will not quarrel with anybody for any matter so trivial." The color came to Joe's face, but not for anger this time.
"Trivial!" she exclaimed.
"Yes, trivial," john repeated.
"Remember that it is the policy of that paper to abuse me, and that if Vancouver had not written the article, the editor could have found some one else easily enough who would have done it."
"He always says to every one that he has the greatest respect for you, and then he does a thing like this.
If I were you I would kill him-I am sure I would."
"Oh, I would not care about that," said Joe, hotly.
"You do not seem to mind it at all."
"It is not worth while to lose one's temper or one's soul for the iniquities of mr Pocock Vancouver," said john.
"The man may do me harm, but as I never expected his friendship or help, he neither falls nor rises in my estimation on that account.
"But one cannot help expecting men who have the reputation of being gentlemen to behave decently."
"Vancouver has a right to his political opinions, and a perfect right to express them in any way he sees fit," said john.
"This is a free country, and that sort of thing.
I think that writing violent articles in a newspaper is a very active part indeed.
And he should not go about saying that he has the highest reverence for a man, and then call him a lunatic and a charlatan in print, unless he is willing to sign his name to it, and take the consequences.
Should he?
I think it is vile, and horrid, and abominable, and nasty, and I hate him."
"Then why do you defend him?" asked Joe, with flashing eyes.
"Because, on general principles, I do not think a man is so much worse than his fellows because he does things they would very likely do in his place.
There are things done every day, all over the world, quite as bad as that, and no one takes much notice of them.
Almost every businessman is trying to get the better of some other business man by fair means or foul."
"You do not seem to have a very exalted idea of humanity," said Joe.
"A large part of humanity is sick," said john, "and it is as well to be prepared for the worst in any illness."
"I wish you were not so tremendously calm, you know," said Joe, looking thoughtfully into John's face.
"I am afraid it will injure you."
"Why in the world should it injure me?" asked john, much astonished at the remark.
"I have a presentiment"--she checked herself suddenly.
"I do not like to tell you," she added.
"I would like to hear what you think, if you will tell me," said john, gravely.
"Well, do not be angry.
I have a presentiment that you will not be made senator.
Are you angry?"
"No indeed.
But why?"
"Just for that very reason; you are too calm.
You are not enough of a partisan.
Every one is a partisan here."
john was silent, and his face was grave and thoughtful.
The remark was profound in its way, and showed a far deeper insight into political matters than he imagined Joe possessed.
He had long regarded mrs Wyndham as a woman of fine sense and judgment, and had often asked her opinion on important questions.
But in all his experience she had never said anything that seemed to strike so deeply at the root of things as this simple remark of Josephine's.
"I am afraid you are angry," said Joe, seeing that he was grave and silent.
"You have set me thinking, Miss Thorn," he answered.
"You think I may be right?" she said.
"The idea is quite new to me, I think it is perhaps the best definition of the fact that I ever heard.
But it is not what ought to be."
"Of course not," Joe answered.
"Nothing is just what it ought to be.
But one has to take things as they are."
"And make them what they should be," added john, and the look of strong determination came into his face.
"Ah, yes," said Joe, softly.
"Make things what they should be.
"Perhaps we might go home, Joe," said Miss Schenectady, who had been conversing for a couple of hours with another old lady of literary tastes.
"Shall I see you to morrow night at mrs Wyndham's dinner?" asked john, as they parted.
"No, I refused.
Good night."
As Joe sat by her aunt's side in the deep dark carriage on the way home, her hands were cold and she trembled from head to foot.
Chapter fourteen
MOUNT OLYMPUS
Wretched in spirit, groaning under the feeling of insult, self condemning, and ill satisfied in every way, Bold returned to his London lodgings.
Ill as he had fared in his interview with the archdeacon, he was not the less under the necessity of carrying out his pledge to Eleanor; and he went about his ungracious task with a heavy heart.
The attorneys whom he had employed in London received his instructions with surprise and evident misgiving; however, they could only obey, and mutter something of their sorrow that such heavy costs should only fall upon their own employer,--especially as nothing was wanting but perseverance to throw them on the opposite party.
He next thought of the newspapers.
He had been very intimate with Tom Towers, and had often discussed with him the affairs of the hospital.
He did not even know, as a fact, that they had been written by his friend.
Tom Towers had never said that such a view of the case, or such a side in the dispute, would be taken by the paper with which he was connected.
Nevertheless Bold believed that to him were owing those dreadful words which had caused such panic at Barchester,--and he conceived himself bound to prevent their repetition.
With this view he betook himself from the attorneys' office to that laboratory where, with amazing chemistry, Tom Towers compounded thunderbolts for the destruction of all that is evil, and for the furtherance of all that is good, in this and other hemispheres.
Who has not heard of Mount Olympus,--that high abode of all the powers of type, that favoured seat of the great goddess Pica, that wondrous habitation of gods and devils, from whence, with ceaseless hum of steam and never ending flow of Castalian ink, issue forth fifty thousand nightly edicts for the governance of a subject nation?
Velvet and gilding do not make a throne, nor gold and jewels a sceptre.
It is a throne because the most exalted one sits there,--and a sceptre because the most mighty one wields it.
Should a stranger make his way thither at dull noonday, or during the sleepy hours of the silent afternoon, he would find no acknowledged temple of power and beauty, no fitting fane for the great Thunderer, no proud facades and pillared roofs to support the dignity of this greatest of earthly potentates.
To the outward and uninitiated eye, Mount Olympus is a somewhat humble spot,--undistinguished, unadorned,--nay, almost mean.
"Is this Mount Olympus?" asks the unbelieving stranger.
"Is it from these small, dark, dingy buildings that those infallible laws proceed which cabinets are called upon to obey; by which bishops are to be guided, lords and commons controlled, judges instructed in law, generals in strategy, admirals in naval tactics, and orange women in the management of their barrows?" "Yes, my friend-from these walls.
From here issue the only known infallible bulls for the guidance of British souls and bodies. This little court is the Vatican of England.
With what endless care, with what unsparing labour, do we not strive to get together for our great national council the men most fitting to compose it.
Why should we look to Lord john Russell;--why should we regard Palmerston and Gladstone, when Tom Towers without a struggle can put us right?
Look at our generals, what faults they make; at our admirals, how inactive they are.
What money, honesty, and science can do, is done; and yet how badly are our troops brought together, fed, conveyed, clothed, armed, and managed. The most excellent of our good men do their best to man our ships, with the assistance of all possible external appliances; but in vain. All, all is wrong-alas! alas!
Tom Towers, and he alone, knows all about it.
Why, oh why, ye earthly ministers, why have ye not followed more closely this heaven sent messenger that is among us?
Would it not be wise in us to abandon useless talking, idle thinking, and profitless labour?
Is not Tom Towers here, able to guide us and willing?
Yes indeed, able and willing to guide all men in all things, so long as he is obeyed as autocrat should be obeyed,--with undoubting submission: only let not ungrateful ministers seek other colleagues than those whom Tom Towers may approve; let church and state, law and physic, commerce and agriculture, the arts of war, and the arts of peace, all listen and obey, and all will be made perfect.
From a bishopric in New Zealand to an unfortunate director of a north-west passage, is he not the only fit judge of capability?
No established religion has ever been without its unbelievers, even in the country where it is the most firmly fixed; no creed has been without scoffers; no church has so prospered as to free itself entirely from dissent.
It may probably be said that no place in this nineteenth century is more worthy of notice.
No treasury mandate armed with the signatures of all the government has half the power of one of those broad sheets, which fly forth from hence so abundantly, armed with no signature at all.
He rises in the morning degraded, mean, and miserable; an object of men's scorn, anxious only to retire as quickly as may be to some German obscurity, some unseen Italian privacy, or indeed, anywhere out of sight.
what has so afflicted him?
It was not to Mount Olympus that our friend Bold betook himself.
With such ideas, half ambitious and half awe struck, had Bold regarded the silent looking workshop of the gods; but he had never yet by word or sign attempted to influence the slightest word of his unerring friend.
On such a course was he now intent; and not without much inward palpitation did he betake himself to the quiet abode of wisdom, where Tom Towers was to be found o' mornings inhaling ambrosia and sipping nectar in the shape of toast and tea.
Not far removed from Mount Olympus, but somewhat nearer to the blessed regions of the West, is the most favoured abode of Themis.
Here, on the choicest spot of this choice ground, stands a lofty row of chambers, looking obliquely upon the sullied Thames; before the windows, the lawn of the Temple Gardens stretches with that dim yet delicious verdure so refreshing to the eyes of Londoners.
If doomed to live within the thickest of London smoke you would surely say that that would be your chosen spot.
Yes, you, you whom I now address, my dear, middle aged bachelor friend, can nowhere be so well domiciled as here.
No one here will ask whether you are out or at home; alone or with friends; here no Sabbatarian will investigate your Sundays, no censorious landlady will scrutinise your empty bottle, no valetudinarian neighbour will complain of late hours.
If you love books, to what place are books so suitable?
The whole spot is redolent of typography.
Would you worship the Paphian goddess, the groves of Cyprus are not more taciturn than those of the Temple. Wit and wine are always here, and always together; the revels of the Temple are as those of polished Greece, where the wildest worshipper of Bacchus never forgot the dignity of the god whom he adored.
Where can retirement be so complete as here?
where can you be so sure of all the pleasures of society?
It was here that Tom Towers lived, and cultivated with eminent success the tenth Muse who now governs the periodical press.
But let it not be supposed that his chambers were such, or so comfortless, as are frequently the gaunt abodes of legal aspirants.
He indulged in four rooms on the first floor, each of which was furnished, if not with the splendour, with probably more than the comfort of Stafford House.
This picture was not hung, as pictures usually are, against the wall; there was no inch of wall vacant for such a purpose: it had a stand or desk erected for its own accommodation; and there on her pedestal, framed and glazed, stood the devotional lady looking intently at a lily as no lady ever looked before.
Our modern artists, whom we style Pre Raphaelites, have delighted to go back, not only to the finish and peculiar manner, but also to the subjects of the early painters.
But they are anything but happy in their change.
It was easy, from his rooms, to see that Tom Towers was a Sybarite, though by no means an idle one.
He was lingering over his last cup of tea, surrounded by an ocean of newspapers, through which he had been swimming, when john Bold's card was brought in by his tiger.
This tiger never knew that his master was at home, though he often knew that he was not, and thus Tom Towers was never invaded but by his own consent.
On this occasion, after twisting the card twice in his fingers, he signified to his attendant imp that he was visible; and the inner door was unbolted, and our friend announced.
There was no very great difference in their ages, for Towers was still considerably under forty; and when Bold had been attending the London hospitals, Towers, who was not then the great man that he had since become, had been much with him.
It is true he wore no ermine, bore no outward marks of a world's respect; but with what a load of inward importance was he charged!
It is true his name appeared in no large capitals; on no wall was chalked up "Tom Towers for ever;"--"Freedom of the Press and Tom Towers;" but what member of Parliament had half his power?
This kind of hidden but still conscious glory suited the nature of the man.
He loved to watch the great men of whom he daily wrote, and flatter himself that he was greater than any of them.
Each of them was responsible to his country, each of them must answer if inquired into, each of them must endure abuse with good humour, and insolence without anger.
But to whom was he, Tom Towers, responsible?
No one could insult him; no one could inquire into him.
CONSTITUENTS OF THE APPLE.--All apples contain sugar, malic acid, or the acid of apples; mucilage, or gum; woody fibre, and water; together with some aroma, on which their peculiar flavour depends.
The hard acid kinds are unwholesome if eaten raw; but by the process of cooking, a great deal of this acid is decomposed and converted into sugar.
The sweet and mellow kinds form a valuable addition to the dessert.
twelve thirty.
The room should be dry, and well aired, but should not admit the sun
BAKED APPLE PUDDING.
twelve thirty one.
BOILED APPLE PUDDING.
twelve thirty two.
APPLE TART o r PIE.
twelve thirty three.
of unpared apples allow two ounces. of moist sugar, one half teaspoonful of finely minced lemon peel, one tablespoonful of lemon juice.
When it is three parts done, take it out of the oven, put the white of an egg on a plate, and, with the blade of a knife, whisk it to a froth; brush the pie over with this, then sprinkle upon it some sifted sugar, and then a few drops of water.
Put the pie back into the oven, and finish baking, and be particularly careful that it does not catch or burn, which it is very liable to do after the crust is iced.
QUINCES.--The environs of Corinth originally produced the most beautiful quinces, but the plant was subsequently introduced into Gaul with the most perfect success.
The ancients preserved the fruit by placing it, with its branches and leaves, in a vessel filled with honey or sweet wine, which was reduced to half the quantity by ebullition.
Quinces may be profitably cultivated in this country as a variety with other fruit trees, and may be planted in espaliers or as standards.
twelve thirty four.
of pared and cored apples, allow two ounces. of moist sugar, one half teaspoonful of minced lemon peel, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, one half pint of boiled custard.
Fill up with a nicely made boiled custard, grate a little nutmeg over the top, and the pie is ready for table.
APPLE SNOWBALLS.
twelve thirty five.
twelve thirty six.
Line a large round plate with the paste, place a narrow rim of the same round the outer edge, and lay the apples thickly in the middle.
This tourte may be eaten either hot or cold, and is sufficient to fill two large sized plates.
APPLES.--No fruit is so universally popular as the apple.
The apple, uncooked, is less digestible than the pear; the degree of digestibility varying according to the firmness of its texture and flavour.
Entremets of apples are made in great variety.
Apples, when peeled, cored, and well cooked, are a most grateful food for the dyspeptic.
ALMA PUDDING.
When all the ingredients are well stirred and mixed, butter a mould that will hold the mixture exactly, tie it down with a cloth, put the pudding into boiling water, and boil for five hours; when turned out, strew some powdered sugar over it, and serve.
BAKED APRICOT PUDDING.
APRICOT TART.
Line the edge of the dish with paste, put on the cover, and ornament the pie in any of the usual modes.
Short crust merely requires a little sifted sugar sprinkled over it before being sent to table.
APRICOTS.--The apricot is indigenous to the plains of Armenia, but is now cultivated in almost every climate, temperate or tropical.
There are several varieties.
A good apricot, when perfectly ripe, is an excellent fruit.
It has been somewhat condemned for its laxative qualities, but this has possibly arisen from the fruit having been eaten unripe, or in too great excess.
Delicate persons should not eat the apricot uncooked, without a liberal allowance of powdered sugar.
The apricot makes excellent jam and marmalade, and there are several foreign preparations of it which are considered great luxuries.
A BACHELOR'S PUDDING.
BAKEWELL PUDDING.
twelve forty three.
BARONESS PUDDING.
twelve forty four.
Serve merely with plain sifted sugar, a little of which may be sprinkled over the pudding.
The recipe was kindly given to her family by a lady who bore the title here prefixed to it; and with all who have partaken of it, it is an especial favourite.
In this respect, it nearly approaches the tamarind.
When boiled with sugar, it makes a very agreeable preserve or jelly, according to the different modes of preparing it.
Barberries are also used as a dry sweetmeat, and in sugarplums or comfits; are pickled with vinegar, and are used for various culinary purposes.
The berries, arranged on bunches of nice curled parsley, make an exceedingly pretty garnish for supper dishes, particularly for white meats, like boiled fowl a la Bechamel, the three colours, scarlet, green, and white, contrasting so well, and producing a very good effect.
BAKED BATTER PUDDING.
twelve forty six.
Baked in small cups, this makes very pretty little puddings, and should be eaten with the same accompaniments as above.
BAKED BATTER PUDDING, with Dried or Fresh Fruit.
It must be sent quickly to table, and covered plentifully with sifted sugar.
BOILED BATTER PUDDING.
twelve forty eight.
This pudding may also be boiled in a floured cloth that has been wetted in hot water; it will then take a few minutes less than when boiled in a basin.
ORANGE BATTER PUDDING.
As soon as it is turned out of the basin, put a small jar of orange marmalade all over the top, and send the pudding very quickly to table.
BAKED BREAD PUDDING.
twelve fifty.
VERY PLAIN BREAD PUDDING.
twelve fifty one.
Let these stand till the water is cool; then press it out, and mash the bread with a fork until it is quite free from lumps.
Measure this pulp, and to every quart stir in salt, nutmeg, sugar, and currants in the above proportion; mix all well together, and put it into a well buttered pie dish.
Boiling milk substituted for the boiling water would very much improve this pudding.
BOILED BREAD PUDDING.
twelve fifty two.
BREAD.--Bread contains, in its composition, in the form of vegetable albumen and vegetable fibrine, two of the chief constituents of flesh, and, in its incombustible constituents, the salts which are indispensable for sanguification, of the same quality and in the same proportion as flesh.
Put in the remaining ingredients; beat the pudding well for a few minutes; put it into a buttered basin or mould; tie it down tightly, and boil for nearly four hours.
Send sweet sauce to table with it.
MINIATURE BREAD PUDDINGS.
twelve fifty four.
Beat the eggs, mix these with the bread crumbs, add the remaining ingredients, and stir well until all is thoroughly mixed.
A few currants may be added to these puddings: about three ounces. will be found sufficient for the above quantity.
BAKED BREAD AND BUTTER PUDDING.
twelve fifty five.
This pudding may be very much enriched by adding cream, candied peel, or more eggs than stated above.
Our eyes beheld Messiah certainly now come, so long Expected of our fathers; we have heard His words, his wisdom full of grace and truth. 'Now, now, for sure, deliverance is at hand; The kingdom shall to Israel be restored:' Thus we rejoiced, but soon our joy is turned Into perplexity and new amaze. For whither is he gone?
what accident Hath rapt him from us?
But now, Full grown to man, acknowledged, as I hear, By john the Baptist, and in public shewn, Son owned from Heaven by his Father's voice, I looked for some great change.
To honour?
Some great intent Conceals him.
When twelve years he scarce had seen, I lost him, but so found as well I saw He could not lose himself, but went about His Father's business.
But these haunts Delight not all.
Four times ten days I have passed Wandering this woody maze, and human food Nor tasted, nor had appetite.
That fast To virtue I impute not, or count part Of what I suffer here.
Yet God Can satisfy that need some other way, Though hunger still remain.
Well, now I had come; there to the south was Tenedos, and here at my side was Imbros, all right, and according to the map, but aloft over Imbros, aloft in a far away heaven, was Samothrace, the watch tower of Neptune!
I'll go out with the mowers and mow, and you shall mind the house at home."
Yes, the husband thought that would do very well.
He was quite willing, he said.
He caught it, too, just as it ran out of doors, and gave it such a kick that piggy lay for dead on the spot.
Then all at once he remembered he had the tap in his hand; but when he got down to the cellar, every drop of ale had run out of the cask.
Now their house lay close up against a steep down, and he thought if he laid a plank across to the thatch at the back he'd easily get the cow up.
When he had done that, he thought the cow might perhaps fall off the thatch and break her legs or her neck.
So he got up on the house to tie her up.
There he stuck fast; and as for the cow, she hung half-way down the wall, swinging between heaven and earth, for she could neither get down nor up.
But now good advice is dear, and I do not know what to do."
"Go with us to Bremen.
The three vagabonds soon came near a farmyard, where, upon the barn door, the cock was sitting crowing with all his might.
"That is the way I prophesy fine weather," said the cock; "but because grand guests are coming for the Sunday, the housewife has no pity, and has told the cook maid to make me into soup for the morrow; and this evening my head will be cut off.
"Ah, but you, Red comb," replied the ass, "rather come away with us. We are going to Bremen, to find there something better than death; you have a good voice, and if we make music together it will have full play."
The cock consented to this plan, and so all four traveled on together. They could not, however, reach Bremen in one day, and at evening they came into a forest, where they meant to pass the night.
The ass and the dog laid themselves down under a large tree, the cat and the cock climbed up into the branches, but the latter flew right to the top, where he was most safe.
"What do you see, Gray horse?" asked the cock.
"That would be the right sort of thing for us," said the cock.
Then these animals took counsel together how they should contrive to drive away the robbers, and at last they thought of a way.
The messenger, finding all still, went into the kitchen to strike a light, and, taking the glistening, fiery eyes of the cat for live coals, he held a lucifer match to them, expecting it to take fire.
THE THREE SILLIES
ADAPTED BY JOSEPH JACOBS
Once upon a time there was a farmer and his wife who had one daughter, and she was courted by a gentleman.
Every evening he used to come and see her, and stop to supper at the farmhouse, and the daughter used to be sent down into the cellar to draw the beer for supper.
So one evening she had gone down to draw the beer, and she happened to look up at the ceiling while she was drawing, and she saw a mallet stuck in one of the beams.
It must have been there a long, long time, but somehow or other she had never noticed it before, and she began a thinking.
"Oh, mother!" says she, "look at that horrid mallet!
what a dreadful thing it would be!" said the mother, and she sat her down beside the daughter and started crying too.
Then after a bit the father began to wonder that they didn't come back, and he went down into the cellar to look after them himself, and there they two sat crying, and the beer running all over the floor.
And he ran straight and turned the tap. Then he said: "Whatever are you three doing, sitting there crying, and letting the beer run all over the floor?" "Oh!" says the father, "look at that horrid mallet!
Suppose you and our daughter was to be married, and was to have a son, and he was to grow up, and was to come down into the cellar to draw the beer, and the mallet was to fall on his head and kill him!" And then they all started crying worse than before.
Well, he set out, and he traveled a long way, and at last he came to a woman's cottage that had some grass growing on the roof.
And the woman was trying to get her cow to go up a ladder to the grass, and the poor thing durst not go.
So the gentleman asked the woman what she was doing.
"Why, lookye," she said, "look at all that beautiful grass.
And the gentleman went on his way, but he hadn't gone far when the cow tumbled off the roof, and hung by the string tied round her neck, and it strangled her.
Well, that was one big silly.
At last he stopped and wiped his face with his handkerchief.
I can't think who could have invented such things.
It takes me the best part of an hour to get into mine every morning, and I get so hot!
And they had rakes, and brooms, and pitchforks, reaching into the pond; and the gentleman asked what was the matter. "Why," they say, "matter enough!
So the gentleman turned back home again and married the farmer's daughter, and if they didn't live happy for ever after, that's nothing to do with you or me.
Like a servant of the Lord, with his bible and his sword, Our general rode along us, to form us for the fight. --Macaulay.
The captains and the armies that, after long years of dreary campaigning and bloody, stubborn fighting, brought the war to a close, have left us more than a reunited realm.
North and South, all Americans, now have a common fund of glorious memories.
We are the richer for each grim campaign, for each hard fought battle.
We are the richer for valor displayed alike by those who fought so valiantly for the right, and by those who, no less valiantly, fought for what they deemed the right.
We have in us nobler capacities for what is great and good because of the infinite woe and suffering, and because of the splendid ultimate triumph.
But we recognize gladly that, South as well as North, when the fight was once on, the leaders of the armies, and the soldiers whom they led, displayed the same qualities of daring and steadfast courage, of disinterested loyalty and enthusiasm, and of high devotion to an ideal.
The greatest general of the South was Lee, and his greatest lieutenant was Jackson.
Both were Virginians, and both were strongly opposed to disunion.
Lee went so far as to deny the right of secession, while Jackson insisted that the South ought to try to get its rights inside the Union, and not outside.
But when Virginia joined the Southern Confederacy, and the war had actually begun, both men cast their lot with the South.
It is often said that the Civil War was in one sense a repetition of the old struggle between the Puritan and the Cavalier; but Puritan and Cavalier types were common to the two armies.
In dash and light-hearted daring, Custer and Kearney stood as conspicuous as Stuart and Morgan; and, on the other hand, no Northern general approached the Roundhead type-the type of the stern, religious warriors who fought under Cromwell-so closely as Stonewall Jackson.
He was a man of intense religious conviction, who carried into every thought and deed of his daily life the precepts of the faith he cherished.
The vein of fanaticism that ran through his character helped to render him a terrible opponent.
He knew no such word as falter, and when he had once put his hand to a piece of work, he did it thoroughly and with all his heart.
It was quite in keeping with his character that this gentle, high minded, and religious man should, early in the contest, have proposed to hoist the black flag, neither take nor give quarter, and make the war one of extermination.
In the first battle in which Jackson took part, the confused struggle at Bull Run, he gained his name of Stonewall from the firmness with which he kept his men to their work and repulsed the attack of the Union troops.
From that time until his death, less than two years afterward, his career was one of brilliant and almost uninterrupted success; whether serving with an independent command in the Valley, or acting under Lee as his right arm in the pitched battles with McClellan, Pope, and Burnside.
Few generals as great as Lee have ever had as great a lieutenant as Jackson.
He was a master of strategy and tactics, fearless of responsibility, able to instil into his men his own intense ardor in battle, and so quick in his movements, so ready to march as well as fight, that his troops were known to the rest of the army as the "foot cavalry."
In the spring of eighteen sixty three Hooker had command of the Army of the Potomac. Like McClellan, he was able to perfect the discipline of his forces and to organize them, and as a division commander he was better than McClellan, but he failed even more signally when given a great independent command.
He had under him one hundred twenty thousand men when, toward the end of April, he prepared to attack Lee's army, which was but half as strong.
The Union army lay opposite Fredericksburg, looking at the fortified heights where they had received so bloody a repulse at the beginning of the winter.
Lee fully realized his danger, and saw that his only chance was, first to beat back Hooker, and then to turn and overwhelm Sedgwick, who was in his rear.
He consulted with Jackson, and Jackson begged to be allowed to make one of his favorite flank attacks upon the Union army; attacks which could have been successfully delivered only by a skilled and resolute general, and by troops equally able to march and to fight.
Lee consented, and Jackson at once made off.
The country was thickly covered with a forest of rather small growth, for it was a wild region, in which there was still plenty of game.
Shielded by the forest, Jackson marched his gray columns rapidly to the left along the narrow country roads until he was square on the flank of the Union right wing, which was held by the Eleventh Corps, under Howard.
The Union scouts got track of the movement and reported it at headquarters, but the Union generals thought the Confederates were retreating; and when finally the scouts brought word to Howard that he was menaced by a flank attack he paid no heed to the information, and actually let his whole corps be surprised in broad daylight.
Yet all the while the battle was going on elsewhere, and Berdan's sharpshooters had surrounded and captured a Georgia regiment, from which information was received showing definitely that Jackson was not retreating, and must be preparing to strike a heavy blow.
The Eleventh Corps had not the slightest idea that it was about to be assailed.
Many of them had stacked their muskets and were lounging about, some playing cards, others cooking supper, intermingled with the pack mules and beef cattle.
While they were thus utterly unprepared Jackson's gray clad veterans pushed straight through the forest and rushed fiercely to the attack.
The first notice the troops of the Eleventh Corps received did not come from the pickets, but from the deer, rabbits and foxes which, fleeing from their coverts at the approach of the Confederates, suddenly came running over and into the Union lines.
In another minute the frightened pickets came tumbling back, and right behind them came the long files of charging, yelling Confederates; With one fierce rush Jackson's men swept over the Union lines, and at a blow the Eleventh Corps became a horde of panicstruck fugitives.
Some of the regiments resisted for a few moments, and then they too were carried away in the flight.
For a while it seemed as if the whole army would be swept off; but Hooker and his subordinates exerted every effort to restore order.
It was imperative to gain time so that the untouched portions of the army could form across the line of the Confederate advance.
Keenan's regiment of Pennsylvania cavalry, but four hundred sabers strong, was accordingly sent full against the front of the ten thousand victorious Confederates.
Keenan himself fell, pierced by bayonets, and the charge was repulsed at once; but a few priceless moments had been saved, and Pleasanton had been given time to post twenty two guns, loaded with double canister, where they would bear upon the enemy.
The Confederates advanced in a dense mass, yelling and cheering, and the discharge of the guns fairly blew them back across the work's they had just taken.
Again they charged, and again were driven back; and when the battle once more began the Union reinforcements had arrived.
It was about this time that Jackson himself was mortally wounded.
He and his staff were fired at, at close range, by the Union troops, and, as they turned, were fired at again, through a mistake, by the Confederates behind them.
Jackson fell, struck in several places.
He was put in a litter and carried back; but he never lost consciousness, and when one of his generals complained of the terrible effect of the Union cannonade he answered:
"You must hold your ground."
For several days he lingered, hearing how Lee beat Hooker, in detail, and forced him back across the river.
Then the old Puritan died.
At the end his mind wandered, and he thought he was again commanding in battle, and his last words were.
"Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade."
Thus perished Stonewall Jackson, one of the ablest of soldiers and one of the most upright of men, in the last of his many triumphs.
What flag is this you carry Along the sea and shore? The same our grandsires lifted up- The same our fathers bore. In many a battle's tempest It shed the crimson rain- What God has woven in his loom Let no man rend in twain. To Canaan, to Canaan, The Lord has led us forth, To plant upon the rebel towers The banners of the North. --Holmes.
The complete possession of the Mississippi was absolutely essential to the National Government, because the control of that great river would cut the Confederacy in two, and do more, probably, than anything else, to make the overthrow of the Rebellion both speedy and certain.
The natural way to invest and capture so strong a place, defended and fortified as Vicksburg was, would have been, if the axioms of the art of war had been adhered to, by a system of gradual approaches.
A strong base should have been established at Memphis, and then the army and the fleet moved gradually forward, building storehouses and taking strong positions as they went.
To do this, however, it first would have been necessary to withdraw the army from the positions it then held not far above Vicksburg, on the western bank of the river.
But such a movement, at that time, would not have been understood by the country, and would have had a discouraging effect on the public mind, which it was most essential to avoid.
The elections of eighteen sixty two had gone against the government, and there was great discouragement throughout the North. Voluntary enlistments had fallen off, a draft had been ordered, and the peace party was apparently gaining rapidly in strength.
General Grant, looking at this grave political situation with the eye of a statesman, decided, as a soldier, that under no circumstances would he withdraw the army, but that, whatever happened, he would "press forward to a decisive victory."
In this determination he never faltered, but drove straight at his object until, five months later, the great Mississippi stronghold fell before him.
Efforts were made through the winter to reach Vicksburg from the north by cutting canals, and by attempts to get in through the bayous and tributary streams of the great river.
All these expedients failed, however, one after another, as Grant, from the beginning, had feared that they would.
He, therefore, took another and widely different line, and determined to cross the river from the western to the eastern bank below Vicksburg, to the south.
With the aid of the fleet, which ran the batteries successfully, he moved his army down the west bank until he reached a point beyond the possibility of attack, while a diversion by Sherman at Haines' Bluff, above Vicksburg, kept Pemberton in his fortifications.
On april twenty sixth, Grant began to move his men over the river and landed them at Bruinsburg.
"When this was effected," he writes, "I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equaled since.
Vicksburg was not yet taken, it is true, nor were its defenders demoralized by any of our previous movements.
I was now in the enemy's country, with a vast river and the stronghold of Vicksburg between me and my base of supplies, but I was on dry ground, on the same side of the river with the enemy."
The situation was this: The enemy had about sixty thousand men at Vicksburg, Haines' Bluff, and at jackson mississippi, about fifty miles east of Vicksburg.
Grant, when he started, had about thirty three thousand men.
It was absolutely necessary for success that Grant, with inferior numbers, should succeed in destroying the smaller forces to the eastward, and thus prevent their union with Pemberton and the main army at Vicksburg.
His plan, in brief; was to fight and defeat a superior enemy separately and in detail.
He lost no time in putting his plan into action, and pressing forward quickly, met a detachment of the enemy at Port Gibson and defeated them.
Thence he marched to Grand Gulf, on the Mississippi, which he took, and which he had planned to make a base of supply.
When he reached Grand Gulf, however, he found that he would be obliged to wait a month, in order to obtain the reinforcements which he expected from General Banks at Port Hudson.
He, therefore, gave up the idea of making Grand Gulf a base, and Sherman having now joined him with his corps, Grant struck at once into the interior.
He took nothing with him except ammunition, and his army was in the lightest marching order.
This enabled him to move with great rapidity, but deprived him of his wagon trains, and of all munitions of war except cartridges.
Everything, however, in this campaign, depended on quickness, and Grant's decision, as well as all his movements, marked the genius of the great soldier, which consists very largely in knowing just when to abandon the accepted military axioms.
Pressing forward, Grant met the enemy, numbering between seven and eight thousand, at Raymond, and readily defeated them.
He then marched on toward Jackson, fighting another action at Clinton, and at Jackson he struck General Joseph Johnston, who had arrived at that point to take command of all the rebel forces.
There was a sharp fight, but Grant easily defeated the enemy, and took possession of the town.
This was an important point, for Jackson was the capital of the State of Mississippi, and was a base of military supplies.
Grant destroyed the factories and the munitions of war which were gathered there, and also came into possession of the line of railroad which ran from Jackson to Vicksburg.
While he was thus engaged, an intercepted message revealed to him the fact that Pemberton, in accordance with Johnston's orders, had come out of Vicksburg with twenty five thousand men, and was moving eastward against him.
Pemberton, however, instead of holding a straight line against Grant, turned at first to the south, with the view of breaking the latter's line of communication.
This was not a success, for, as Grant says, with grim humor, "I had no line of communication to break"; and, moreover, it delayed Pemberton when delay was of value to Grant in finishing Johnston.
After this useless turn to the southward Pemberton resumed his march to the east, as he should have done in the beginning, in accordance with Johnston's orders; but Grant was now more than ready.
He did not wait the coming of Pemberton. Leaving Jackson as soon as he heard of the enemy's advance from Vicksburg, he marched rapidly westward and struck Pemberton at Champion Hills.
The forces were at this time very nearly matched, and the severest battle of the campaign ensued, lasting four hours.
Grant, however, defeated Pemberton completely, and came very near capturing his entire force.
With a broken army, Pemberton fell back on Vicksburg. Grant pursued without a moment's delay, and came up with the rear guard at Big Black River.
A sharp engagement followed, and the Confederates were again defeated.
Grant then crossed the Big Black and the next day was before Vicksburg, with his enemy inside the works.
"The bearer of the despatch insisted that I ought to obey the order, and was giving arguments to support the position, when I heard a great cheering to the right of our line, and looking in that direction, saw Lawler, in his shirt sleeves, leading a charge on the enemy.
I immediately mounted my horse and rode in the direction of the charge, and saw no more of the officer who had delivered the message; I think not even to this day." When Grant reached Vicksburg, there was no further talk of recalling him to Grand Gulf or Port Hudson.
The authorities at Washington then saw plainly enough what had been done in the interior of Mississippi, far from the reach of telegraphs or mail.
As soon as the National troops reached Vicksburg an assault was attempted, but the place was too strong, and the attack was repulsed, with heavy loss.
Grant then settled down to a siege, and Lincoln and Halleck now sent him ample reinforcements.
He no longer needed to ask for them.
His campaign had explained itself, and in a short time he had seventy thousand men under his command.
His lines were soon made so strong that it was impossible for the defenders of Vicksburg to break through them, and although Johnston had gathered troops again to the eastward, an assault from that quarter on the National army, now so largely reinforced, was practically out of the question.
On the same day Lee was beaten at Gettysburg, and these two great victories really crushed the Rebellion, although much hard fighting remained to be done before the end was reached.
Grant's campaign against Vicksburg deserves to be compared with that of Napoleon which resulted in the fall of Ulm.
It was the most brilliant single campaign of the war.
With an inferior force, and abandoning his lines of communication, moving with a marvelous rapidity through a difficult country, Grant struck the superior forces of the enemy on the line from Jackson to Vicksburg.
He crushed Johnston before Pemberton could get to him, and he flung Pemberton back into Vicksburg before Johnston could rally from the defeat which had been inflicted.
With an inferior force, Grant was superior at every point of contest, and he won every fight.
Measured by the skill displayed and the result achieved, there is no campaign in our history which better deserves study and admiration.
So, since they refused to pay for their mending any more she was preparing to make them pay, pretty smartly too, in other ways.
The pattern was of little bunches of pink roses peeping out through trellis work, and it was these which she had just begun to cut out.
The hot weather had continued late into September and showed no signs of breaking yet, and it would be agreeable to her and acutely painful to others that just at the end of the summer she should appear in a perfectly new costume, before the days of jumpers and heavy skirts and large woollen scarves came in.
She was preparing, therefore, to take the light white jacket which she wore over her blouse, and cover the broad collar and cuffs of it with these pretty roses.
The jacket and skirt had already gone to the dyer's, and would be back in a day or two, white no longer, but of a rich purple hue, and by that time she would have hundreds of these little pink roses ready to be tacked on.
Perhaps a piece of the chintz, trellis and all, could be sewn over the belt, but she was determined to have single little bunches of roses peppered all over the collar and cuffs of the jacket, and, if possible, round the edge of the skirt.
When carefully sewn on they looked as if they were a design in the stuff.
She let the circumcised roses fall on to the window seat, and from time to time, when they grew numerous, swept them into a cardboard box.
Though she worked with zealous diligence, she had an eye to the movements in the street outside, for it was shopping hour, and there were many observations to be made.
It was odd to go to your grocer's every day like that: groceries twice a week was sufficient for most people.
From here on the floor above the street she could easily look into Elizabeth's basket, and she certainly was carrying nothing away with her from the grocer's, for the only thing there was a small bottle done up in white paper with sealing wax, which, Diva had no need to be told, certainly came from the chemist's, and was no doubt connected with too many plums.
Miss Mapp crossed the street to the pavement below Diva's house, and precisely as she reached it, Diva's maid opened the door into the drawing room, bringing in the second post, or rather not bringing in the second post, but the announcement that there wasn't any second post.
Diva managed to beat most of them down again, but two fluttered out of the window.
Precisely then, and at no other time, Miss Mapp looked up, and one settled on her face, the other fell into her basket.
Her trained faculties were all on the alert, and she thrust them both inside her glove for future consideration, without stopping to examine them just then.
She only knew that they were little pink roses, and that they had fluttered out of Diva's window. . . .
Diva's head looked out like a cuckoo in a clock preparing to chime the hour.
"Want me?"
"May I pop up for a moment, dear?" said Miss Mapp.
"That's to say if you're not very busy."
She was quite aware that Miss Mapp said "pop" in crude inverted commas, so to speak, for purposes of mockery, and so she said it herself more than ever.
"I'll tell my maid to pop down and open the door."
While this was being done, Diva bundled her chintz curtains together and stored them and the roses she had cut out into her work cupboard, for secrecy was an essential to the construction of these decorations.
Even among her sweet flowers.
Her eye fell on it the moment she entered the room, and she tucked the two chintz roses more securely into her glove.
"I thought I would just pop across from the grocer's," she said. "What a pretty scarf, dear!
This was clearly ironical, and had best be answered by irony.
Diva was no coward.
"Couldn't say, I'm sure," she said.
Miss Mapp appeared to recollect, and smiled as far back as her wisdom teeth. (Diva couldn't do that.)
"It was the wool I ordered at Heynes's, and then he sold it you, and I couldn't get any more."
"Upset you a bit.
There was the wool in the shop.
I bought it."
"Yes, dear; I see you did.
But that wasn't what I popped in about. This coal strike, you know."
"Got a cellar full," said Diva.
"Diva, you've not been hoarding, have you?" asked Miss Mapp with great anxiety.
"They can take away every atom of coal you've got, if so, and fine you I don't know what for every hundredweight of it."
"Yes, love, pooh by all means, if you like poohing!" said Miss Mapp.
"But how much do they allow you to have?" she asked.
"Oh, quite a little: enough to go on with.
I just took the trouble to come and warn you."
Diva did remember something about hoarding; there had surely been dreadful exposures of prudent housekeepers in the papers which were very uncomfortable reading.
"But all these orders were only for the period of the war," she said.
"No doubt you're right, dear," said Miss Mapp brightly.
Food hoarding, too.
Twemlow-such a civil man- tells me that he thinks we shall have plenty of food, or anyhow sufficient for everybody for quite a long time, provided that there's no hoarding.
Not been hoarding food, too, dear Diva?
You naughty thing: I believe that great cupboard is full of sardines and biscuits and Bovril."
"You shall see for yourself"--and then she suddenly remembered that the cupboard was full of chintz curtains and little bunches of pink roses, neatly cut out of them, and a pair of nail scissors.
There was a perfectly perceptible pause, during which Miss Mapp noticed that there were no curtains over the window.
There certainly used to be, and they matched with the chintz cover of the window seat, which was decorated with little bunches of pink roses peeping through trellis.
That she humbly hoped that she had accomplished.
She got up.
"Must be going," she said.
"Such a lovely little chat!
But what has happened to your pretty curtains?"
"Liar," thought Miss Mapp, as she tripped downstairs.
"Diva would have sent the cover of the window seat too, if that was the case. Liar," she thought again as she kissed her hand to Diva, who was looking gloomily out of the window.
As soon as Miss Mapp had gained her garden room, she examined the mysterious treasures in her left hand glove.
Without the smallest doubt Diva had taken down her curtains (and high time too, for they were sadly shabby), and was cutting the roses out of them.
But what on earth was she doing that for?
For what garish purpose could she want to use bunches of roses cut out of chintz curtains?
Miss Mapp had put the two specimens of which she had so providentially become possessed in her lap, and they looked very pretty against the navy blue of her skirt.
Diva was very ingenious: she used up all sorts of odds and ends in a way that did credit to her undoubtedly parsimonious qualities.
There was one-it had once adorned the sofa in the garden room-covered with red poppies (very easy to cut out), and Miss Mapp dragged it dustily from its corner, setting in motion a perfect cascade of cardboard lids and some door handles.
Withers had answered the telephone, and came to announce that Twemlow the grocer regretted he had only two large tins of corned beef, but-
"Then say I will have the tongue as well, Withers," said Miss Mapp. "Just a tongue-and then I shall want you and Mary to do some cutting out for me."
The three went to work with feverish energy, for Diva had got a start, and by four o'clock that afternoon there were enough poppies cut out to furnish, when in seed, a whole street of opium dens. The dress selected for decoration was, apart from a few mildew spots, the colour of ripe corn, which was superbly appropriate for September.
"Poppies in the corn," said Miss Mapp over and over to herself, remembering some sweet verses she had once read by Bernard Shaw or Clement Shorter or somebody like that about a garden of sleep somewhere in Norfolk. . . .
"No one can work as neatly as you, Withers," she said gaily, "and I shall ask you to do the most difficult part.
I want you to sew my lovely poppies over the collar and facings of the jacket, just spacing them a little and making a dainty irregularity.
I shall be at home to nobody, Withers, this afternoon, even if the Prince of Wales came and sat on my doorstep again.
We'll all work together in the garden, shall we, and you and Mary must scold me if you think I'm not working hard enough.
It will be delicious in the garden."
Thanks to this pleasant plan, there was not much opportunity for Withers and Mary to be idle. . . .
Just about the time that this harmonious party began their work, a far from harmonious couple were being just as industrious in the grand spacious bunker in front of the tee to the last hole on the golf links.
That about settles it," said Major Flint boisterously. "Bad place to top a ball!
Give me the hole?"
This insolent question needed no answer, and Major Flint drove, skying the ball to a prodigious height.
But it had to come to earth sometime, and it fell like Lucifer, son of the morning, in the middle of the same bunker. . . .
So the Army played three more, and, sweating profusely, got out.
Then it was the Navy's turn, and the Navy had to lie on its keel above the boards of the bunker, in order to reach its ball at all, and missed it twice.
"Better give it up, old chap," said Major Flint.
"Unplayable."
"We shall miss the tram," said the Major, and, with the intention of giving annoyance, he sat down in the bunker with his back to Captain Puffin, and lit a cigarette.
At his third attempt nothing happened; at the fourth the ball flew against the boards, rebounded briskly again into the bunker, trickled down the steep, sandy slope and hit the Major's boot.
"Hit you, I think," said Captain Puffin.
"Ha!
So it's my hole, Major!"
Major Flint had a short fit of aphasia.
He opened and shut his mouth and foamed.
Then he took a half crown from his pocket.
"Give that to the Captain," he said to his caddie, and without looking round, walked away in the direction of the tram.
Weak and trembling from passion, Major Flint found that after a few tottering steps in the direction of Tilling he would be totally unable to get there unless fortified by some strong stimulant, and turned back to the club house to obtain it.
Summoning his last remaining strength Major Flint roared for whisky, and was told that, according to regulation, he could not be served until six.
There was lemonade and stone ginger beer. . . .
Even the threat that he would instantly resign his membership unless provided with drink produced no effect on a polite steward, and he sat down to recover as best he might with an old volume of Punch.
This seemed to do him little good.
His forced abstemiousness was rendered the more intolerable by the fact that Captain Puffin, hobbling in immediately afterwards, fetched from his locker a large flask of the required elixir, and proceeded to mix himself a long, strong tumblerful. After the Major's rudeness in the matter of the half crown, it was impossible for any sailor of spirit to take the first step towards reconciliation.
Thirst is a great leveller.
By the time the refreshed Puffin had penetrated half-way down his glass, the Major found it impossible to be proud and proper any longer.
He hated saying he was sorry (no man more) and he wouldn't have been sorry if he had been able to get a drink.
"A man's no business to let a game ruffle him."
Puffin gave his alto cackling laugh.
"Oh, that's all right, Major," he said.
"I know it's awfully hard to lose like a gentleman."
"Have a drink, old chap?"
Major Flint flew to his feet.
"Now where's that soda water you offered me just now?" he shouted to the steward.
This one had been a shade more acute than most, and the drop into amity again was a shade more precipitous.
Major Flint in his eagerness had put most of his moustache into the life giving tumbler, and dried it on his handkerchief.
"After all, it was a most amusing incident," he said.
I must remember that.
I'll serve you with the same spoon some day, at least I would if I thought it sportsmanlike.
Captain Puffin helped himself to rather more than half of what now remained in the flask.
"Help yourself, Major," he said.
"Well, thank ye, I don't mind if I do," he said, reversing the flask over the tumbler.
"There's a good tramp in front of us now that the last tram has gone.
Tram and tramp!
Upon my word, I've half a mind to telephone for a taxi."
This casual drink did not constitute the usual drink stood by the winner, and paid for with cash over the counter.
A drink (or two) from a flask was not the same thing. . . .
Puffin naturally saw it in another light.
He had paid for the whisky which Major Flink had drunk (or owed for it) in his wine merchant's bill.
That was money just as much as a florin pushed across the counter.
But he was so excessively pleased with himself over the adroitness with which he had claimed the last hole, that he quite overstepped the bounds of his habitual parsimony.
"Done with you," said the other.
"Lunching at the Poppit's to morrow?" asked Major Flint.
Meet you there?
Good.
Bridge afterwards I suppose."
"Sure to be.
"Camouflage for the fair sex," he said.
"A woman will lick up half a bottle of brandy if it's called plum pudding, and ask for more, whereas if you offered her a small brandy and soda, she would think you were insulting her."
"Bless them, the funny little fairies," said the Major.
"Well, what I tell you is true, Major," said Puffin.
"There's old Mapp.
"So she was," said the Major.
Said good bye to us on her doorstep as if she thought she was a perfect Venus Ana-Ana something."
"Now none of your sailor talk ashore, Captain," said the Major, in high good humour.
"I'm not a marrying man any more than you are. Better if I had been perhaps, more years ago than I care to think about.
Dear me, my wound's going to trouble me to night."
Think of old times a bit over my diaries."
"No, sir, I am not," said Major Flint.
"Perhaps a hundred years hence-the date I have named in my will for their publication- someone may think them not so uninteresting.
The ice was not broken, but it was cracking in all directions under this unexampled thaw.
The two had clearly indicated a mutual suspicion of each other's industrious habits after dinner. . . . They had never got quite so far as this before: some quarrel had congealed the surface again.
"Yes, that's true enough," said Puffin.
"Long roads they were, and dry roads at that, and if I stuck to them from after my supper every evening till midnight or more I should be smothered in dust."
"Unless you washed the dust down just once in a while," said Major Flint.
"Just so.
Brain work's an exhausting process; requires a little stimulant now and again," said Puffin.
"I sit in my chair, you understand, and perhaps doze for a bit after my supper, and then I'll get my maps out, and have them handy beside me.
Tiresome to go into long explanations.
In fact," added Puffin in a burst of confidence, "the study I've done on Roman roads these last six months wouldn't cover a threepenny piece."
Major Flint gave a loud, choking guffaw and beat his fat leg.
"Well, if that's not the best joke I've heard for many a long day," he said.
"There I've been in the house opposite you these last two years, seeing your light burning late night after night, and thinking to myself: 'There's my friend Puffin still at it!
Fine thing to be an enthusiastic archæologist like that.
Puffin added his falsetto cackle to this merriment.
The Major's laughter boomed out again.
"And I never kept a diary in my life!" he cried.
"Why there's enough cream in this situation to make a dishful of meringues.
You and I, you know, the students of Tilling!
Recommended me to get earlier to bed, and do my work between six and eight in the morning!
Six and eight in the morning!
That's a queer time of day to recommend an old campaigner to be awake at!
Often she's talked to you, too, I bet my hat, about sitting up late and exhausting the nervous faculties."
Major Flint choked and laughed and inhaled tobacco smoke till he got purple in the face.
"And you sitting up one side of the street," he gasped, "pretending to be interested in Roman roads, and me on the other pulling a long face over my diaries, and neither of us with a Roman road or a diary to our names.
Let's have an end to such unsociable arrangements, old friend; you lining your Roman roads and the bottle to lay the dust over to me one night, and I'll bring my diaries and my peg over to you the next.
I'm blessed if I ever heard of two such pompous old frauds as you and I, Captain!
But no more solitary confinement of an evening for Benjamin Flint, as long as you're agreeable."
The advent of the taxi was announced, and arm in arm they limped down the steep path together to the road.
A little way off to the left was the great bunker which, primarily, was the cause of their present amity.
The window of his bedroom was dark too: he must have already put out his light, and Miss Mapp made haste over her little tidyings so that she might not be found a transgressor to her own precepts.
But there was a light in Captain Puffin's house: he had a less impressionable nature than the Major and was in so many ways far inferior.
Miss Mapp sincerely hoped that he did, and that it was nothing else of less pure and innocent allurement that kept him up. . . .
But she would now cross him-dear man-and his late habits, out of the list of riddles about Tilling which awaited solution.
Whatever it had been (diaries or what not) that used to keep him up, he had broken the habit now, whereas Captain Puffin had not.
She took her poppy bordered skirt over her arm, and smiled her thankful way to bed.
She could allow herself to wonder with a little more definiteness, now that the Major's lights were out and he was abed, what it could be which rendered Captain Puffin so oblivious to the passage of time, when he was investigating Roman roads.
How glad she was that the Major was not with him. . . . "Benjamin Flint!" she said to herself as, having put her window open, she trod softly (so as not to disturb the slumberer next door) across her room on her fat white feet to her big white bed. "Good night, Major Benjy," she whispered, as she put her light out.
"But we've had a good supply all the summer," added agreeable mr Wootten, "and all my customers have got their cellars well stocked."
"Oh, but, mr Wootten," she said, "Miss Mapp popped-dropped in to see me just now.
Told me she had hardly got any."
mr Wootten turned up his ledger.
It was not etiquette to disclose the affairs of one client to another, but if there was a cantankerous customer, one who was never satisfied with prices and quality, that client was Miss Mapp. . . .
He allowed a broad grin to overspread his agreeable face.
"Well, ma'am, if in a month's time I'm short of coal, there are friends of yours in Tilling who can let you have plenty," he permitted himself to say. . . .
Had she not been so prudent as to make inquiries, as likely as not she would have sent a ton of coal that very day to the hospital, so strongly had Elizabeth's perfidious warning inflamed her imagination as to the fate of hoarders, and all the time Elizabeth's own cellars were glutted, though she had asserted that she was almost fuelless.
And all because of a wretched piece of rose madder worsted. . . .
By degrees she calmed down, for it was no use attempting to plan revenge with a brain at fever heat.
As the cooling process went on she began to wonder whether it was worsted alone that had prompted her friend's diabolical suggestion.
It seemed more likely that another motive (one strangely Elizabethan) was the cause of it.
He spoke in a lucid telephone voice.
"We've only two of the big tins of corned beef," he said; and there was a pause, during which, to a psychic, Diva's ears might have seemed to grow as pointed with attention as a satyr's.
But she could only hear little hollow quacks from the other end.
"Tongue as well.
Very good.
I'll send them up at once," he added, and came forward into the shop.
"Good morning," said Diva.
Her voice was tremulous with anxiety and investigation.
"Got any big tins of corned beef?
The ones that contain six pounds."
"Very sorry, ma'am.
We've only got two, and they've just been ordered."
"A small pot of ginger then, please," said Diva recklessly.
"Will you send it round immediately?"
"Yes, ma'am.
The boy's just going out."
That was luck.
This was a favourite place for observation, for you appeared to be quite taken up by the topics of the day, and kept an oblique eye on the true object of your scrutiny. . . .
Having refreshed himself he turned up the steep street.
He had no errand to the Major's house or to the Captain's.
He put the basket on his head and came down the street again, shrilly whistling.
Now she had already noticed that Elizabeth had paid visits to the grocer's on three consecutive days (three consecutive days: think of it!), and given that her purchases on other occasions had been on the same substantial scale as to day, it became a matter of thrilling interest as to where she kept these stores.
She could not keep them in the coal cellar, for that was already bursting with coal, and Diva, who had assisted her (the base one) in making a prodigious quantity of jam that year from her well stocked garden, was aware that the kitchen cupboards were like to be as replete as the coal cellar, before those hoardings of dead oxen began.
Then there was the big cupboard under the stairs, but that could scarcely be the site of this prodigious cache, for it was full of cardboard and curtains and carpets and all the rubbishy accumulations which Elizabeth could not bear to part with.
It lay embedded in the wall of the garden room, cloaked and concealed behind the shelves of a false book case, which contained no more than the simulacra of books, just books with titles that had never yet appeared on any honest book.
There were twelve volumes of "The Beauties of Nature", a shelf full of "Elegant Extracts", there were volumes simply called "Poems", there were "Commentaries", there were "Travels" and "Astronomy" and the lowest and tallest shelf was full of "Music".
She attacked her chintz curtains again with her appetite for the pink roses agreeably whetted.
Another hour's work would give her sufficient bunches for her purpose, and unless the dyer was as perfidious as Elizabeth, her now purple jacket and skirt would arrive that afternoon.
She would attempt it, anyhow, and if it proved to be beyond her, she could entrust the more difficult parts to that little dressmaker whom Elizabeth employed, and who was certainly very capable.
It was certainly very odd that, having gone to bed at so respectable an hour last night, he should be calling for his porridge only now, but with an impulse of unusual optimism, she figured him as having been at work on his diaries before breakfast, and in that absorbing occupation having forgotten how late it was growing.
That, no doubt, was the explanation, though it would be nice to know for certain, if the information positively forced itself on her notice. . . .
Sometimes in moments of gallantry he called her "Miss Elizabeth", and she meant, when she had got accustomed to it by practice, to say "Major Benjy" to him by accident, and he would, no doubt, beg her to make a habit of that friendly slip of the tongue. . . .
"Tongue" led to a new train of thought, and presently she paused in her work, and pulling the card table away from the deceptive book case, she pressed the concealed catch of the door, and peeped in.
There was still room for further small precautions against starvation owing to the impending coal strike, and she took stock of her provisions.
This with considerable exertion she transferred to a high shelf in the cupboard, instead of allowing it to remain standing on the floor, for Withers had informed her of an unpleasant rumour about a mouse, which Mary had observed, lost in thought in front of the cupboard.
"So mousie shall only find tins on the floor now," thought Miss Mapp.
"Mousie shall try his teeth on tins." . . .
There was tea and coffee in abundance, jars of jam filled the kitchen shelves, and if this morning she laid in a moderate supply of dried fruits, there was no reason to face the future with anything but fortitude.
She would see about that now, for, busy though she was, she could not miss the shopping parade.
That would be fun!
That made it clear that he was still at breakfast, and that if he had been working at his diaries in the fresh morning hours and forgetting the time, early rising, in spite of his early retirement last night, could not be supposed to suit his Oriental temper.
But a change of habits was invariably known to be upsetting, and Miss Mapp was hopeful that in a day or two he would feel quite a different man.
Farther down the street was quaint Irene lounging at the door of her new studio (a converted coach house), smoking a cigarette and dressed like a jockey.
"Come and have a look round my new studio.
You haven't seen it yet.
Bridge party!"
Miss Mapp tried to steel herself for the hundredth time to appear quite unconscious that she was being addressed when Irene said "Mapp" in that odious manner.
But she never could summon up sufficient nerve to be rude to so awful a mimic. . . .
"Good morning, dear one," she said sycophantically.
"Shall I peep in for a moment?"
There was a German stove in the corner made of pink porcelain, the rafters and roof were painted scarlet, the walls were of magenta distemper and the floor was blue.
In the corner was a very large orange coloured screen.
The walls were hung with specimens of Irene's art, there was a stout female with no clothes on at all, whom it was impossible not to recognize as being Lucy; there were studies of fat legs and ample bosoms, and on the easel was a picture, evidently in process of completion, which represented a man.
From this Miss Mapp instantly averted her eyes.
Miss Mapp naturally guessed that the gentleman who was almost in the same costume was Adam, and turned completely away from him.
"And what a lovely idea to have a blue floor, dear," she said. "How original you are.
And that pretty scarlet ceiling.
"Not a bit: they stimulate your sense of colour."
Miss Mapp moved towards the screen.
"What a delicious big screen," she said.
"Yes, but don't go behind it, Mapp," said Irene, "or you'll see my model undressing."
Terrible though it all was, she was conscious of an unbridled curiosity to know who Adam was.
It was dreadful to think that there could be any man in Tilling so depraved as to stand to be looked at with so little on. . . .
"How clever!
Legs and things!
But when you have your bridge party, won't you perhaps cover some of them up, or turn them to the wall?
They were approaching the corner of the room where the screen stood, when a movement there as if Adam had hit it with his elbow made Miss Mapp turn round.
The screen fell flat on the ground and within a yard of her stood mr Hopkins, the proprietor of the fish shop just up the street.
Often and often had Miss Mapp had pleasant little conversations with him, with a view to bringing down the price of flounders.
He had little bathing drawers on. . . .
"Hullo, Hopkins, are you ready," said Irene.
"You know Miss Mapp, don't you?"
Miss Mapp had not imagined that Time and Eternity combined could hold so embarrassing a moment.
She did not know where to look, but wherever she looked, it should not be at Hopkins.
But (wherever she looked) she could not be unaware that Hopkins raised his large bare arm and touched the place where his cap would have been, if he had had one.
"Good morning, Hopkins," she said.
"Well, Irene darling, I must be trotting, and leave you to your-" she hardly knew what to call it- "to your work."
She tripped from the room, which seemed to be entirely full of unclothed limbs, and redder than one of mr Hopkins's boiled lobsters hurried down the street.
Her head was in a whirl at the brazenness of mankind, especially womankind.
How had Irene started the overtures that led to this?
CHAPTER seventeen.
BARTON'S NIGHT ERRAND.
ANONYMOUS.
The events recorded in the last chapter took place on a Tuesday.
On Thursday afternoon Mary was surprised, in the midst of some little bustle in which she was engaged, by the entrance of Will Wilson. He looked strange, at least it was strange to see any different expression on his face to his usual joyous beaming appearance.
He had a paper parcel in his hand.
He came in, and sat down, more quietly than usual.
"Why, Will! what's the matter with you?
You seem quite cut up about something!"
I'm come to say good bye; and few folk like to say good bye to them they love."
"Good bye!
Bless me, Will, that's sudden, isn't it?"
Mary left off ironing, and came and stood near the fire place.
She had always liked Will; but now it seemed as if a sudden spring of sisterly love had gushed up in her heart, so sorry did she feel to hear of his approaching departure.
"No, it isn't;" rousing himself, to think of what he was saying.
"The captain told me in a fortnight he would be ready to sail again; but it comes very sudden on me, I had got so fond of you all."
Mary understood the particular fondness that was thus generalised. She spoke again.
"But it's not a fortnight since you came.
Not a fortnight since you knocked at Jane Wilson's door, and I was there, you remember.
Nothing like a fortnight!"
But, you see, I got a letter this afternoon from Jack Harris, to tell me our ship sails on Tuesday next; and it's long since I promised my uncle (my mother's brother, him that lives at Kirk Christ, beyond Ramsay, in the Isle of Man) that I'd go and see him and his, this time of coming ashore.
I must go.
I'm sorry enough; but I mustn't slight poor mother's friends.
I must go.
Don't try to keep me," said he, evidently fearing the strength of his own resolution, if hard pressed by entreaty.
"I'm not a going, Will.
"To night.
I shan't see you again."
"To night! and you go to Liverpool!
May be you and father will go together.
He's going to Glasgow, by way of Liverpool."
"No! I'm walking; and I don't think your father will be up to walking."
You can get by railway for three and sixpence."
"It's a fine clear night, and I shall set off betimes, and get in afore the Manx packet sails. Where's your father going?
To Glasgow, did you say?
Perhaps he and I may have a bit of a trip together then, for, if the Manx boat has sailed when I get into Liverpool, I shall go by a Scotch packet. What's he going to do in Glasgow?--Seek for work?
Trade is as bad there as here, folk say."
It's very hard to keep up one's heart.
I wish I were a boy, I'd go to sea with you. It would be getting away from bad news at any rate; and now, there's hardly a creature that crosses the door step, but has something sad and unhappy to tell one.
Father is going as a delegate from his Union, to ask help from the Glasgow folk.
He's starting this evening."
"You say no one crosses the threshold but has something sad to say; you don't mean that Margaret Jennings has any trouble?" asked the young sailor, anxiously.
"No!" replied Mary, smiling a little, "she's the only one I know, I believe, who seems free from care.
Her blindness almost appears a blessing sometimes; she was so downhearted when she dreaded it, and now she seems so calm and happy when it's downright come.
No! Margaret's happy, I do think."
"I could almost wish it had been otherwise," said Will, thoughtfully. "I could have been so glad to comfort her, and cherish her, if she had been in trouble."
"And why can't you cherish her, even though she is happy?" asked Mary.
I don't know.
And her voice! When I hear it, and think of the wishes that are in my heart, it seems as much out of place to ask her to be my wife, as it would be to ask an angel from heaven."
Mary could not help laughing outright, in spite of her depression, at the idea of Margaret as an angel; it was so difficult (even to her dress making imagination) to fancy where, and how, the wings would be fastened to the brown stuff gown, or the blue and yellow print.
Then he said-
It was unkind of him.
He did not notice her change of look and of complexion.
"I thought-I think, that when I come back from this voyage, I will speak.
Mary had a very decided opinion of her own on the subject, but she did not feel as if she had any right to give it.
"You must ask Margaret, not me, Will; she's never named your name to me." His countenance fell.
"But I should say that was a good sign from a girl like her.
I've no right to say what I think; but, if I was you, I would not leave her now without speaking."
I cannot speak!
I have tried.
I've been in to wish them good bye, and my voice stuck in my throat.
So, will you give it to her, Mary, when I'm gone?
and, if you can slip in something tender,--something, you know, of what I feel,--may be she would listen to you, Mary."
Mary promised that she would do all that he asked.
You'll often speak of me to her, Mary?
And if I should meet with any mischance, tell her how dear, how very dear, she was to me, and bid her, for the sake of one who loved her well, try and comfort my poor aunt Alice.
How pleased I used to be when she would take me into the fields with her to gather herbs! I've tasted tea in China since then, but it wasn't half so good as the herb tea she used to make for me o' Sunday nights.
And she knew such a deal about plants and birds, and their ways!
Dear! and how different it is!
Here is she still in a back street o' Manchester, never likely to see her own home again; and I, a sailor, off for America next week.
I wish she had been able to go to Burton once afore she died."
"She would may be have found all sadly changed," said Mary, though her heart echoed Will's feeling.
I dare say it's best.
Oh Mary! many a hasty word comes sorely back on the heart, when one thinks one shall never see the person whom one has grieved again!"
They both stood thinking.
Suddenly Mary started.
"That's father's step.
And his shirt's not ready!"
She hurried to her irons, and tried to make up for lost time.
john Barton came in.
He looked at Will, but spoke no word of greeting or welcome.
"I'm come to bid you good bye," said the sailor, and would in his sociable friendly humour have gone on speaking.
But john answered abruptly,
There was that in his manner which left no doubt of his desire to get rid of the visitor, and Will accordingly shook hands with Mary, and looked at john, as if doubting how far to offer to shake hands with him.
"You'll think on me on Tuesday, Mary.
That's the day we shall hoist our blue peter, Jack Harris says."
He was so restless; not speaking (she wished he would), but starting up and then sitting down, and meddling with her irons; he seemed so fierce, too, to judge from his face.
She wondered if he disliked Will being there; or if he were vexed to find that she had not got further on with her work.
At last she could bear his nervous way no longer, it made her equally nervous and fidgetty.
She would speak.
"When are you going, father?
"And why shouldst thou know?" replied he, gruffly.
"I wanted to get you something to eat first," answered she, gently.
"Thou dost not know that I'm larning to do without food," said he.
Mary looked at him to see if he spoke jestingly.
No! he looked savagely grave.
She finished her bit of ironing, and began preparing the food she was sure her father needed; for by this time her experience in the degrees of hunger had taught her that his present irritability was increased, if not caused, by want of food.
"If thou'rt doing that for me, Mary, thou may'st spare thy labour.
I telled thee I were not for eating."
"Just a little bit, father, before starting," coaxed Mary, perseveringly.
It was not often he came, but when he did pay visits, Mary knew from past experience they were any thing but short.
Her father's countenance fell back into the deep gloom from which it was but just emerging at the sound of Mary's sweet voice, and pretty pleading.
Job, however, did not stand upon ceremony.
He had come to pay a visit, and was not to be daunted from his purpose.
He was interested in john Barton's mission to Glasgow, and wanted to hear all about it; so he sat down, and made himself comfortable, in a manner that Mary saw was meant to be stationary.
"When art starting?"
"To night."
But by what train?"
That was just what Mary wanted to know; but what apparently her father was in no mood to tell.
He got up without speaking, and went up stairs.
Mary knew from his step, and his way, how much he was put out, and feared Job would see it, too.
But no! Job seemed imperturbable.
So much the better, and perhaps she could cover her father's rudeness by her own civility to so kind a friend.
"When does thy father start, Mary?"
That plaguing question again.
I'm just getting him a bit of supper.
Is Margaret very well?"
"Yes, she's well enough.
"Yes, they've given him a sovereign.
there's no harm in that.
But then they won't let me be silly in peace and quietness, but will force me to be as wise as they are; now that's not British liberty, I say.
I'm forced to be wise according to their notions, else they parsecute me, and sarve me out."
What could her father be doing up stairs?
Or why did not Job go?
The supper would be spoilt.
But Job had no notion of going.
"You see my folly is this, Mary.
I would take what I could get; I think half a loaf is better than no bread.
I would work for low wages rather than sit idle and starve.
But, comes the Trades' Union, and says, 'Well, if you take the half loaf, we'll worry you out of your life.
Creak, creak, went the stairs.
Her father was coming down at last.
Yes, he came down, but more doggedly fierce than before, and made up for his journey, too; with his little bundle on his arm.
He went up to Job, and, more civilly than Mary expected, wished him good bye.
He then turned to her, and in a short cold manner, bade her farewell.
"Oh! father, don't go yet.
Your supper is all ready.
Stay one moment!"
But he pushed her away, and was gone.
She followed him to the door, her eyes blinded by sudden tears; she stood there looking after him. He was so strange, so cold, so hard.
Suddenly, at the end of the court, he turned, and saw her standing there; he came back quickly, and took her in his arms.
"God bless thee, Mary!--God in heaven bless thee, poor child!" She threw her arms round his neck.
"Don't go yet, father; I can't bear you to go yet.
Come in, and eat some supper; you look so ghastly; dear father, do!"
"No," he said, faintly and mournfully.
"It's best as it is.
I couldn't eat, and it's best to be off.
I cannot be still at home. I must be moving."
So saying, he unlaced her soft twining arms, and kissing her once more, set off on his fierce errand.
And he was out of sight!
She did not know why, but she had never before felt so depressed, so desolate.
She turned in to Job, who sat there still.
Her father, as soon as he was out of sight, slackened his pace, and fell into that heavy listless step, which told as well as words could do, of hopelessness and weakness.
It was getting dark, but he loitered on, returning no greeting to any one.
A child's cry caught his ear.
His thoughts were running on little Tom; on the dead and buried child of happier years.
So, aided by inquiries here and there from a passer by, he led and carried the little fellow home, where his mother had been too busy to miss him, but now received him with thankfulness, and with an eloquent Irish blessing.
When john heard the words of blessing, he shook his head mournfully, and turned away to retrace his steps.
Let us leave him.
Mary took her sewing after he had gone, and sat on, and sat on, trying to listen to Job, who was more inclined to talk than usual. She had conquered her feeling of impatience towards him so far as to be able to offer him her father's rejected supper; and she even tried to eat herself.
But her heart failed her.
A leaden weight seemed to hang over her; a sort of presentiment of evil, or perhaps only an excess of low spirited feeling in consequence of the two departures which had taken place that afternoon.
She wondered how long Job Legh would sit.
She did not like putting down her work, and crying before him, and yet she had never in her life longed so much to be alone in order to indulge in a good hearty burst of tears.
Only I wonder as Margaret is not come back."
"But perhaps she is," suggested Mary.
Look ye here!" and he pulled out the great house key.
At first I were afraid o' trusting her, and I used to follow her a bit behind; never letting on, of course.
But, bless you! she goes along as steadily as can be; rather slow, to be sure, and her head a bit on one side as if she were listening.
Hark! that's her!"
"What's the matter, my wench?" said Job, hastily.
"Oh! grandfather!
Alice Wilson's so bad!" She could say no more, for her breathless agitation.
"What is it?
Do tell us, Margaret!" said Mary, placing her in a chair, and loosening her bonnet strings.
She spoke a bit, but not much; but that were only natural, for mrs Wilson likes to have the talk to hersel, you know.
"Where was Jem?
Why didn't he go for the doctor?"
"No, no," said Margaret.
"But, oh!
grandfather; it's now I feel how hard it is to have lost my sight.
I should have so loved to nurse her; and I did try, until I found I did more harm than good.
Oh! grandfather; if I could but see!"
She sobbed a little; and they let her give that ease to her heart. Then she went on-
"No!
I went round by mrs Davenport's, and she were hard at work; but, the minute I told my errand, she were ready and willing to go to Jane Wilson, and stop up all night with Alice."
"And what does the doctor say?" asked Mary.
He's ordered her leeches to her head."
Margaret, having told her tale, leant back with weariness, both of body and mind.
Mary hastened to make her a cup of tea; while Job, lately so talkative, sat quiet and mournfully silent.
"It's perhaps as well he shouldn't see her now, for they say her face is sadly drawn.
With a few more sorrowful remarks they separated for the night, and Mary was left alone in her house, to meditate on the heavy day that had passed over her head.
Will gone; her father gone-and so strangely too!
And to a place so mysteriously distant as Glasgow seemed to be to her!
She had felt his presence as a protection against Harry Carson and his threats; and now she dreaded lest he should learn she was alone.
Her heart began to despair, too, about Jem.
She feared he had ceased to love her; and she-she only loved him more and more for his seeming neglect.
CHAPTER four
Kirsty
My father had a housekeeper, a trusty woman, he considered her.
I suppose she was about forty.
She was not pleasant, for she was grim faced and censorious, with a very straight back, and a very long upper lip.
Indeed the distance from her nose to her mouth was greater than the length of her nose.
When I think of her first, it is always as making some complaint to my father against us.
The consequence was that the older we grew, the more our minds were alienated from her, and the more we came to regard her as our enemy. If she really meant to be our friend after the best fashion she knew, it was at least an uncomely kind of friendship, that showed itself in constant opposition, fault finding, and complaint.
The real mistake was that we were boys.
There was something in her altogether antagonistic to the boy nature.
On reflection, I think a little better; but the girl would have been worse off, because she could not have escaped from her as we did.
"Very well, mrs Mitchell; I will speak to them about it."
Then he would set forth to us where we had been wrong, if we were wrong, and send us away with an injunction not to provoke mrs Mitchell, who couldn't help being short in her temper, poor thing!
She was saving even to stinginess.
"God didn't make the fees, Kirsty!"
Davie was silent for a while.
Then he opened his mouth and spake like a discontented prophet of old:
All this set me thinking.
It was, in fact, the same question, only with a more important object in the eye of it.
"Oh! she's not a bad sort," said Kirsty; "though I must say, if I was her, I would try to be a little more agreeable."
Oh! she was dear, and good, and kind, our Kirsty!
And then her stories!
There was nothing like them in all that countryside.
It was delight indeed to sit by her fire and listen to them. That would be after the men had had their supper, early of a winter night, and had gone, two of them to the village, and the other to attend to the horses.
Other Defects of the Present Confederation
For the Independent Journal.
wednesday december twelfth seventeen eighty seven
HAMILTON
HAVING in the three last numbers taken a summary review of the principal circumstances and events which have depicted the genius and fate of other confederate governments, I shall now proceed in the enumeration of the most important of those defects which have hitherto disappointed our hopes from the system established among ourselves.
To form a safe and satisfactory judgment of the proper remedy, it is absolutely necessary that we should be well acquainted with the extent and malignity of the disease.
The United States, as now composed, have no powers to exact obedience, or punish disobedience to their resolutions, either by pecuniary mulcts, by a suspension or divestiture of privileges, or by any other constitutional mode.
It will appear, from the specimens which have been cited, that the American Confederacy, in this particular, stands discriminated from every other institution of a similar kind, and exhibits a new and unexampled phenomenon in the political world.
The want of a mutual guaranty of the State governments is another capital imperfection in the federal plan.
Usurpation may rear its crest in each State, and trample upon the liberties of the people, while the national government could legally do nothing more than behold its encroachments with indignation and regret.
A successful faction may erect a tyranny on the ruins of order and law, while no succor could constitutionally be afforded by the Union to the friends and supporters of the government.
The tempestuous situation from which Massachusetts has scarcely emerged, evinces that dangers of this kind are not merely speculative.
Who can predict what effect a despotism, established in Massachusetts, would have upon the liberties of New Hampshire or Rhode Island, of Connecticut or New York?
It could be no impediment to reforms of the State constitution by a majority of the people in a legal and peaceable mode.
This right would remain undiminished.
Towards the preventions of calamities of this kind, too many checks cannot be provided.
The peace of society and the stability of government depend absolutely on the efficacy of the precautions adopted on this head.
The natural cure for an ill administration, in a popular or representative constitution, is a change of men.
A guaranty by the national authority would be as much levelled against the usurpations of rulers as against the ferments and outrages of faction and sedition in the community.
I speak of it now solely with a view to equality among the States.
Those who have been accustomed to contemplate the circumstances which produce and constitute national wealth, must be satisfied that there is no common standard or barometer by which the degrees of it can be ascertained.
This, however, is an evil inseparable from the principle of quotas and requisitions.
Imposts, excises, and, in general, all duties upon articles of consumption, may be compared to a fluid, which will, in time, find its level with the means of paying them.
The amount to be contributed by each citizen will in a degree be at his own option, and can be regulated by an attention to his resources.
The rich may be extravagant, the poor can be frugal; and private oppression may always be avoided by a judicious selection of objects proper for such impositions.
If inequalities should arise in some States from duties on particular objects, these will, in all probability, be counterbalanced by proportional inequalities in other States, from the duties on other objects.
They prescribe their own limit; which cannot be exceeded without defeating the end proposed, that is, an extension of the revenue.
When applied to this object, the saying is as just as it is witty, that, "in political arithmetic, two and two do not always make four." If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption; the collection is eluded; and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds.
This forms a complete barrier against any material oppression of the citizens by taxes of this class, and is itself a natural limitation of the power of imposing them.
Impositions of this kind usually fall under the denomination of indirect taxes, and must for a long time constitute the chief part of the revenue raised in this country.
Those of the direct kind, which principally relate to land and buildings, may admit of a rule of apportionment. Either the value of land, or the number of the people, may serve as a standard.
The state of agriculture and the populousness of a country have been considered as nearly connected with each other.
And, as a rule, for the purpose intended, numbers, in the view of simplicity and certainty, are entitled to a preference.
In every country it is a herculean task to obtain a valuation of the land; in a country imperfectly settled and progressive in improvement, the difficulties are increased almost to impracticability.
CHAPTER thirty two.
IT WAS Friday night, and Diamond, like the rest of the household, had had very little to eat that day.
The mother would always pay the week's rent before she laid out anything even on food.
His father had been very gloomy-so gloomy that he had actually been cross to his wife.
This comes of not having faith enough in God, and shows how necessary this faith is, for when we lose it, we lose even the kindness which alone can soothe the suffering.
Diamond in consequence had gone to bed very quiet and thoughtful-a little troubled indeed.
When Diamond went to his bed, which was in a tiny room in the roof, he heard it like the sea moaning; and when he fell asleep he still heard the moaning.
All at once he said to himself, "Am I awake, or am I asleep?" But he had no time to answer the question, for there was North Wind calling him.
He jumped out of bed, and looked everywhere, but could not see her.
"Diamond, come here," she said again and again; but where the here was he could not tell.
"Dear North Wind," said Diamond, "I want so much to go to you, but I can't tell where."
"Come here, Diamond," was all her answer.
Diamond opened the door, and went out of the room, and down the stair and into the yard.
His little heart was in a flutter, for he had long given up all thought of seeing her again.
It blew him right up to the stable door, and went on blowing.
"She wants me to go into the stable," said Diamond to himself, "but the door is locked."
He ran to the place, however: just as he reached it there came a wild blast, and down fell the key clanging on the stones at his feet.
He picked it up, and ran back and opened the stable door, and went in.
This is what he saw.
But what do you think he heard?
He heard the two horses talking to each other-in a strange language, which yet, somehow or other, he could understand, and turn over in his mind in English.
The first words he heard were from Diamond, who apparently had been already quarrelling with Ruby.
"There's no harm in being fat," said Ruby in a deprecating tone.
"No harm?" retorted Diamond.
"I must attend to my own master's interests, and eat all that is given me, and be sleek and fat as I can, and go no faster than I need."
"Now really if the rest of the horses weren't all asleep, poor things-they work till they're tired-I do believe they would get up and kick you out of the stable.
You make me ashamed of being a horse.
You dare to say my master ain't your master!
That's your gratitude for the way he feeds you and spares you!
Pray where would your carcass be if it weren't for him?"
"He doesn't do it for my sake.
If I were his own horse, he would work me as hard as he does you."
"And I'm proud to be so worked.
He's something like a horse-all skin and bone.
And his master ain't over kind to him either.
He put a stinging lash on his whip last week.
But that old horse knows he's got the wife and children to keep-as well as his drunken master-and he works like a horse.
I daresay he grudges his master the beer he drinks, but I don't believe he grudges anything else."
"Well, I don't grudge yours what he gets by me," said Ruby.
"Gets!" retorted Diamond.
"What he gets isn't worth grudging.
It comes to next to nothing-what with your fat and shine.
"Well, at least you ought to be thankful you're the better for it.
You go along like a buttock of beef upon castors-you do."
"Kick!
You might heave your rump up half a foot, but for lashing out-oho!
It's my belief, once out, they'd stick out for ever.
Talk of kicking!
Why don't you put one foot before the other now and then when you're in the cab?
The abuse master gets for your sake is quite shameful.
No decent horse would bring it on him.
Depend upon it, Ruby, no cabman likes to be abused any more than his fare.
Indeed they are."
"Well, you see, Diamond, I don't want to go lame again."
"I don't believe you were so very lame after all-there!"
"Oh, but I was."
"Then I believe it was all your own fault.
There you are with your huge carcass crushing down your poor legs all night long.
You don't even care for your own legs-so long as you can eat, eat, and sleep, sleep.
You a horse indeed!"
"But I tell you I was lame."
But my belief is, it wasn't even grease-it was fat."
"I tell you I put my foot on one of those horrid stones they make the roads with, and it gave my ankle such a twist."
"Ankle indeed!
Why should you ape your betters?
And so long as you don't lift your feet better, but fall asleep between every step, you'll run a good chance of laming all your ankles as you call them, one after another.
It's not your lively horse that comes to grief in that way.
I tell you I believe it wasn't much, and if it was, it was your own fault.
There!
I'll try to think as well of you as I can.
If you would but step out a bit and run off a little of your fat!"
"I say, Diamond, I can't bear to have an honest old horse like you think of me like that.
I will tell you the truth: it was my own fault that I fell lame."
At the words, the old horse arose with a scramble like thunder, shot his angry head and glaring eye over into Ruby's stall, and said-
"You grease tub!
I thought you were a humbug!
Why did you want to get fat?
There's no truth to be got out of you but by cross questioning.
You ain't fit to be a horse."
"Because once I am fat, my nature is to keep fat for a long time; and I didn't know when master might come home and want to see me."
"You conceited, good for nothing brute!
You're only fit for the knacker's yard.
You wanted to look handsome, did you?
Hold your tongue, or I'll break my halter and be at you-with your handsome fat!"
"Never mind, Diamond.
You can't hurt me."
"Can't hurt you!
Just let me once try."
"No, you can't."
"Why then?"
"Because I'm an angel."
"What's that?"
"Of course you don't know."
"I know you don't.
An ignorant, rude old human horse, like you, couldn't know it.
But there's young Diamond listening to all we're saying; and he knows well enough there are horses in heaven for angels to ride upon, as well as other animals, lions and eagles and bulls, in more important situations.
Well, I'm one of them."
"Never before.
But you've confessed to shamming lame."
"Nothing of the sort.
It was necessary I should grow fat, and necessary that good Joseph, your master, should grow lean.
I could have pretended to be lame, but that no horse, least of all an angel horse would do.
So I must be lame, and so I sprained my ankle-for the angel horses have ankles-they don't talk horse slang up there-and it hurt me very much, I assure you, Diamond, though you mayn't be good enough to be able to believe it."
Old Diamond made no reply.
When young Diamond found this, he thought he might venture to take up the dropt shuttlecock of the conversation.
"I'm good enough to believe it, Ruby," he said.
But Ruby never turned his head, or took any notice of him.
I suppose he did not understand more of English than just what the coachman and stableman were in the habit of addressing him with.
Finding, however, that his companion made no reply, he shot his head over the partition and looking down at him said-
"You just wait till to morrow, and you'll see whether I'm speaking the truth or not.--I declare the old horse is fast asleep!--Diamond!--No I won't."
Ruby turned away, and began pulling at his hayrack in silence.
CHAPTER thirty four.
IN THE COUNTRY
BEFORE the end of the month, Ruby had got respectably thin, and Diamond respectably stout.
They really began to look fit for double harness.
Joseph and his wife got their affairs in order, and everything ready for migrating at the shortest notice; and they felt so peaceful and happy that they judged all the trouble they had gone through well worth enduring.
Besides, she was more attached to Jim than to Diamond: Jim was a reasonable being, Diamond in her eyes at best only an amiable, over grown baby, whom no amount of expostulation would ever bring to talk sense, not to say think it.
Now that she could manage the baby as well as he, she judged herself altogether his superior.
But when at length she went to live with Diamond's family, Jim was willing enough to go and see her.
It was after one of his visits, during which they had been talking of her new prospects, that Nanny expressed to Diamond her opinion of the country.
"Ain't they?
They're so beautiful, they make you happy to look at them."
Diamond smiled with a far away look, as if he were gazing through clouds of green leaves and the vision contented him.
"Ah! how do you do, Diamond?" said mr Raymond; "I am glad to see you."
And he was indeed, for he had grown very fond of him.
His opinion of him was very different from Nanny's.
What is it now?"
"There's a friend of Nanny's, a lame boy, called Jim."
"I've heard of him," said mr Raymond.
"Well?"
"Nanny doesn't care much about going to the country, sir."
That is, if you can show good reason for it."
"He's a good boy, sir."
"Well, so much the better for him."
"I know he can shine boots, sir."
"So much the better for us."
"You want your boots shined in the country-don't you, sir?"
"Yes, to be sure."
"It wouldn't be nice to walk over the flowers with dirty boots-would it, sir?"
"Then Nanny would be better pleased to go, sir."
I don't quite see it."
"No, sir; I didn't mean that.
I meant, if you would take Jim with you to clean your boots, and do odd jobs, you know, sir, then Nanny would like it better.
"Now you come to the point, Diamond.
I see what you mean, exactly.
I will turn it over in my mind.
"I'll try, sir.
What mr Raymond thought, I dare hardly attempt to put down here.
People's kind to lame boys, you know, sir.
But after dark, there ain't so much doing."
Diamond succeeded in bringing Jim to mr Raymond, and the consequence was that he resolved to give the boy a chance.
All I will say is, that Diamond, who is my only care, was full of quiet delight-a gladness too deep to talk about.
So they have their fun over, and are ready to go to bed again by the time the trees are dressed.
But all the time, he was dreaming of the country at the back of the north wind, and trying to recall the songs the river used to sing.
These were very different times from those when he used to drive the cab, but you must not suppose that Diamond was idle.
mr Raymond advised his father to give him plenty of liberty.
Joseph assented heartily, smiling to himself at the idea of pushing Diamond.
After doing everything that fell to his share, the boy had a wealth of time at his disposal.
And a happy, sometimes a merry time it was.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CANTANKEROUS OLD LADY
On the day when I found myself with twopence in my pocket, I naturally made up my mind to go round the world.
It was my stepfather's death that drove me to it.
I had never seen my stepfather.
I owed him nothing, except my poverty.
He married my dear mother when I was a girl at school in Switzerland; and he proceeded to spend her little fortune, left at her sole disposal by my father's will, in paying his gambling debts.
So, when the Colonel died, in the year I was leaving college, I did not think it necessary to go into mourning for him.
Especially as he chose the precise moment when my allowance was due, and bequeathed me nothing but his consolidated liabilities.
'Of course you will teach,' said Elsie Petheridge, when I explained my affairs to her.
I looked at her, aghast.
That's just like you dear good schoolmistresses!
You go to Cambridge, and get examined till the heart and life have been examined out of you; then you say to yourselves at the end of it all, "Let me see; what am I good for now?
Nature did not cut me out for a high-school teacher.
I couldn't swallow a poker if I tried for weeks.
Pokers don't agree with me.
Between ourselves, I am a bit of a rebel.'
'You are, Brownie,' she answered, pausing in her papering, with her sleeves rolled up-they called me 'Brownie,' partly because of my dark complexion, but partly because they could never understand me.
'We all knew that long ago.'
I laid down the paste brush and mused.
I was a bomb shell in your midst in those days; why, you yourself were almost afraid at first to speak to me.'
'You see, you had a bicycle,' Elsie put in, smoothing the half papered wall; 'and in those days, of course, ladies didn't bicycle.
You terrified us so.
And yet, after all, there isn't much harm in you.'
'I hope not,' I said devoutly.
'I was before my time, that was all; at present, even a curate's wife may blamelessly bicycle.'
'But if you don't teach,' Elsie went on, gazing at me with those wondering big blue eyes of hers, 'whatever will you do, Brownie?' Her horizon was bounded by the scholastic circle.
'I haven't the faintest idea,' I answered, continuing to paste.
I couldn't teach' (teaching, like mauve, is the refuge of the incompetent); 'and I don't, if possible, want to sell bonnets.'
'As a milliner's girl?' Elsie asked, with a face of red horror.
'As a milliner's girl; why not?
'tis an honest calling.
Earls' daughters do it now.
But you needn't look so shocked.
I tell you, just at present, I am not contemplating it.'
I paused and reflected.
I submit myself to fate; or, if you prefer it, I leave my future in the hands of Providence.
I shall stroll out this morning, as soon as I've "cleaned myself," and embrace the first stray enterprise that offers. Our Bagdad teems with enchanted carpets.
Let one but float my way, and, hi, presto, I seize it.
I go where glory or a modest competence waits me.
I snatch at the first offer, the first hint of an opening.'
Elsie stared at me, more aghast and more puzzled than ever.
'But, how?' she asked.
'Where?
When?
What will you do to find one?'
'Put on my hat and walk out,' I answered.
Omnibuses traverse it from end to end-even, I am told, to Islington and Putney; within, folk sit face to face who never saw one another before in their lives, and who may never see one another again, or, on the contrary, may pass the rest of their days together.'
I had a lovely harangue all pat in my head, in much the same strain, on the infinite possibilities of entertaining angels unawares, in cabs, on the Underground, in the aerated bread shops; but Elsie's widening eyes of horror pulled me up short like a hansom in Piccadilly when the inexorable upturned hand of the policeman checks it.
You don't understand the language.
No, no; I am going out, simply in search of adventure.
What adventure may come, I have not at this moment the faintest conception.
The fun lies in the search, the uncertainty, the toss up of it.
What is the good of being penniless-with the trifling exception of twopence-unless you are prepared to accept your position in the spirit of a masked ball at Covent Garden?'
'I have never been to one,' Elsie put in.
'Gracious heavens, neither have I! What on earth do you take me for?
But I mean to see where fate will lead me.'
'I may go with you?' Elsie pleaded.
'That would spoil all.
Your dear little face would be quite enough to scare away a timid adventure.' She knew what I meant.
So, when we had finished that wall, I popped on my best hat, and popped out by myself into Kensington Gardens.
I am told I ought to have been terribly alarmed at the straits in which I found myself-a girl of twenty one, alone in the world, and only twopence short of penniless, without a friend to protect, a relation to counsel her.
Nature had endowed me with a profusion of crisp black hair, and plenty of high spirits.
I croak with difficulty.
So I accepted my plight as an amusing experience, affording full scope for the congenial exercise of courage and ingenuity.
How boundless are the opportunities of Kensington Gardens-the Round Pond, the winding Serpentine, the mysterious seclusion of the Dutch brick Palace!
Genii swarm there.
One jostles possibilities.
It is a land of romance, bounded on the north by the Abyss of Bayswater, and on the south by the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall.
But for a centre of adventure I choose the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the north-west Passage beckoned my seafaring ancestors-the buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon.
I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron.
Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already-very grand looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages.
For frank hideousness, commend me to the noble dowager.
They were talking confidentially as I sat down; the trifling episode of my approach did not suffice to stem the full stream of their conversation.
She had a Roman nose, and her skin was wrinkled like a wilted apple; she wore coffee coloured point lace in her bonnet, with a complexion to match.
'But what could I do, my dear?
So there was the end of it.'
'Still, you go to Schlangenbad on Monday?'
'That's the point.
Now, there the difficulty comes in.
'You could get a temporary maid,' her friend suggested, in a lull of the tornado.
The Cantankerous Old Lady flared up.
'Yes, and have my jewel case stolen!
Or nurse her on the boat when I want to give my undivided attention to my own misfortunes.
I put my foot down there.
I saw my chance.
This was a delightful idea.
Why not start for Schlangenbad with the Cantankerous Old Lady?
Of course, I had not the slightest intention of taking a lady's maid's place for a permanency.
Nor even, if it comes to that, as a passing expedient.
The Rhine leads you on to the Danube, the Danube to the Black Sea, the Black Sea to Asia; and so, by way of India, China, and Japan, you reach the Pacific and San Francisco; whence one returns quite easily by New York and the White Star Liners.
I began to feel like a globe trotter already; the Cantankerous Old Lady was the thin end of the wedge-the first rung of the ladder!
I proceeded to put my foot on it.
'Excuse me,' I said, in my suavest voice, 'but I think I see a way out of your difficulty.'
My first impression was that the Cantankerous Old Lady would go off in a fit of apoplexy.
She grew purple in the face with indignation and astonishment, that a casual outsider should venture to address her; so much so, indeed, that for a second I almost regretted my well meant interposition.
Then she scanned me up and down, as if I were a girl in a mantle shop, and she contemplated buying either me or the mantle.
At last, catching my eye, she thought better of it, and burst out laughing.
'What do you mean by this eavesdropping?' she asked.
I flushed up in turn.
The Cantankerous Old Lady regarded me once more from head to foot.
I did not quail.
Then she turned to her companion.
'The girl has spirit,' she remarked, in an encouraging tone, as if she were discussing some absent person.
'Upon my word, Amelia, I rather like the look of her.
Well, my good woman, what do you want to suggest to me?'
'Merely this,' I replied, bridling up and crushing her.
'I am a Girton girl, an officer's daughter, no more a good woman than most others of my class; and I have nothing in particular to do for the moment.
I don't object to going to Schlangenbad.
I would convoy you over, as companion, or lady help, or anything else you choose to call it; I would remain with you there for a week, till you could arrange with your Gretchen, presumably unsophisticated; and then I would leave you.
I accept the chance as a cheap opportunity of attaining Schlangenbad.'
The yellow faced old lady put up her long handled tortoise shell eyeglasses and inspected me all over again.
'Well, I declare,' she murmured.
'What are girls coming to, I wonder?
You speak Greek, of course; but how about German?'
'Like a native,' I answered, with cheerful promptitude.
'I was at school in Canton Berne; it is a mother tongue to me.'
'Pardon me,' I answered, in German. 'What I say, that I mean.
The never to be forgotten music of the Fatherland's speech has on my infant ear from the first beginning impressed itself.'
The old lady laughed aloud.
'Don't jabber it to me, child,' she cried.
'I hate the lingo.
It's the one tongue on earth that even a pretty girl's lips fail to render attractive.
You yourself make faces over it.
What's your name, young woman?'
'Lois Cayley.'
I never heard of any Lois in my life before, except Timothy's grandmother.
'Not to my knowledge,' I answered, gravely.
She burst out laughing again.
'Well, you'll do, I think,' she said, catching my arm.
I adore originality.
It was clever of you to catch at the suggestion of this arrangement.
Lois Cayley, you say; any relation of a madcap Captain Cayley whom I used once to know, in the Forty second Highlanders?'
'His daughter,' I answered, flushing.
'Ha!
I remember; he died, poor fellow; he was a good soldier-and his'--I felt she was going to say 'his fool of a widow,' but a glance from me quelled her; 'his widow went and married that good looking scapegrace, Jack Watts Morgan.
Never marry a man, my dear, with a double barrelled name and no visible means of subsistence; above all, if he's generally known by a nickname.
So you're poor Tom Cayley's daughter, are you?
Well, well, we can settle this little matter between us.
Mind, I'm a person who always expects to have my own way.
She smiled at my audacity.
We passed on to terms.
They were quite satisfactory.
She wanted no references.
'Do I look like a woman who cares about a reference?
You take my fancy; that's the point!
And poor Tom Cayley!
'I will not contradict your wildest misstatement,' I answered, smiling.
'My dear,' she murmured, 'my name is the one thing on earth I'm really ashamed of.
My parents chose to inflict upon me the most odious label that human ingenuity ever devised for a Christian soul; and I've not had courage enough to burst out and change it.'
A gleam of intuition flashed across me, 'You don't mean to say,' I exclaimed, 'that you're called Georgina?'
The Cantankerous Old Lady gripped my arm hard.
'What an unusually intelligent girl!' she broke in.
'How on earth did you guess?
'Fellow feeling,' I answered.
'So is mine, Georgina Lois.
But as I quite agree with you as to the atrocity of such conduct, I have suppressed the Georgina.
It ought to be made penal to send innocent girls into the world so burdened.'
'My opinion to a T! You are really an exceptionally sensible young woman.
There's my name and address; I start on Monday.'
I glanced at her card.
The very copperplate was noisy.
'Lady Georgina Fawley, forty nine Fortescue Crescent, w'
It had taken us twenty minutes to arrange our protocols.
As I walked off, well pleased, Lady Georgina's friend ran after me quickly.
'You've caught a Tartar.'
'So I suspect,' I answered.
'She has an awful temper.'
'That's nothing.
So have i Appalling, I assure you.
And if it comes to blows, I'm bigger and younger and stronger than she is.'
'Well, I wish you well out of it.'
'Thank you.
It is kind of you to give me this warning.
But I think I can take care of myself.
I come, you see, of a military family.'
I nodded my thanks, and strolled back to Elsie's.
Dear little Elsie was in transports of surprise when I related my adventure.
'Will you really go?
And what will you do, my dear, when you get there?'
'I haven't a notion,' I answered; 'that's where the fun comes in.
But, anyhow, I shall have got there.'
'Oh, Brownie, you might starve!'
'And I might starve in London.
In either place, I have only two hands and one head to help me.'
You might stop with me for ever.'
I kissed her fluffy forehead.
I came here to help you.
I couldn't go on eating your hard earned bread and doing nothing.
I know how sweet you are; but the last thing I want is to add to your burdens.
Now let us roll up our sleeves again and hurry on with the dado.'
'But, Brownie, you'll want to be getting your own things ready. Remember, you're off to Germany on Monday.'
I shrugged my shoulders.
'tis a foreign trick I picked up in Switzerland.
'What have I got to get ready?' I asked.
I cut out half her clothes for her; her own ideas were almost entirely limited to differential calculus.
And cutting out a blouse by differential calculus is weary, uphill work for a high-school teacher.
By Monday I had papered and furnished the rooms, and was ready to start on my voyage of exploration.
I met the Cantankerous Old Lady at Charing Cross, by appointment, and proceeded to take charge of her luggage and tickets.
Oh my, how fussy she was!
'You will drop that basket!
You have to change there.
Now, mind you notice how much the luggage weighs in English pounds, and make the man at the office give you a note of it to check those horrid Belgian porters.
Foreigners have no consciences.
They just go to the priest and confess, you know, and wipe it all out, and start fresh again on a career of crime next morning.
The only country in the world fit to live in is England.
No mosquitoes, no passports, no-goodness gracious, child, don't let that odious man bang about my hat box!
Have you no immortal soul, porter, that you crush other people's property as if it was blackbeetles?
No, I will not let you take this, Lois; this is my jewel box-it contains all that remains of the Fawley family jewels.
I positively decline to appear at Schlangenbad without a diamond to my back.
It's hard enough nowadays to keep body and skirt together.
We got into our first-class carriage.
It was clean and comfortable; but the Cantankerous Old Lady made the porter mop the floor, and fidgeted and worried till we slid out of the station.
Fortunately, the only other occupant of the compartment was a most urbane and obliging Continental gentleman-I say Continental, because I couldn't quite make out whether he was French, German, or Austrian-who was anxious in every way to meet Lady Georgina's wishes.
Did madame desire to have the window open?
Oh, certainly, with pleasure; the day was so sultry.
No?
Then perhaps she would like this valise for a footstool?
This is Kent that we traverse; ah, the garden of England!
'Monsieur is attached to the Embassy in London?' Lady Georgina inquired, growing affable.
What gaiety!
'If mystery means fog, it challenges the world,' I interposed.
He gazed at me with fixed eyes.
'Whatever your great country attempts-were it only a fog-it achieves consummately.'
I have quick intuitions.
I felt the foreign gentleman took an instinctive dislike to me.
To make up for it, he talked much, and with animation, to Lady Georgina. They ferreted out friends in common, and were as much surprised at it as people always are at that inevitable experience.
'Ah yes, madame, I recollect him well in Vienna.
He was a charming man; you read his masterly paper on the Central Problem of the Dual Empire?'
'You were in Vienna then!' the Cantankerous Old Lady mused back.
'Lois, my child, don't stare'--she had covenanted from the first to call me Lois, as my father's daughter, and I confess I preferred it to being Miss Cayley'd.
'We must surely have met.
Dare I ask your name, monsieur?'
I could see the foreign gentleman was delighted at this turn.
He had played for it, and carried his point.
He meant her to ask him.
'I think you knew my husband, Sir Evelyn Fawley, and my father, Lord Kynaston.'
The Count looked profoundly surprised and delighted.
'What! you are then Lady Georgina Fawley!' he cried, striking an attitude.
'Indeed, miladi, your admirable husband was one of the very first to exert his influence in my favour at Vienna.
If I recall him!
But your face had impressed itself on my sub conscious self!' (I did not learn till later that the esoteric doctrine of the sub conscious self was Lady Georgina's favourite hobby.) 'The moment chance led me to this carriage this morning, I said to myself, "That face, those features: so vivid, so striking: I have seen them somewhere.
I have it. Vienna, a carriage with footmen in red livery, a noble presence, a crowd of wits-poets, artists, politicians-pressing eagerly round the landau." That was my mental picture as I sat and confronted you: I understand it all now; this is Lady Georgina Fawley!'
I thought the Cantankerous Old Lady, who was a shrewd person in her way, must surely see through this obvious patter; but I had under estimated the average human capacity for swallowing flattery.
Instead of dismissing his fulsome nonsense with a contemptuous smile, Lady Georgina perked herself up with a conscious air of coquetry, and asked for more.
'Yes, they were delightful days in Vienna,' she said, simpering; 'I was young then, Count; I enjoyed life with a zest.'
'Growing old is a foolish habit of the stupid and the vacant.
'I have had my moments,' Lady Georgina murmured, with her head on one side.
Thenceforward to Dover, they talked together with ceaseless animation. The Cantankerous Old Lady was capital company.
She had a tang in her tongue, and in the course of ninety minutes she had flayed alive the greater part of London society, with keen wit and sprightliness.
I laughed against my will at her ill tempered sallies; they were too funny not to amuse, in spite of their vitriol.
As for the Count, he was charmed.
He talked well himself, too, and between them I almost forgot the time till we arrived at Dover.
It was a very rough passage.
The Count helped us to carry our nineteen hand packages and four rugs on board; but I noticed that, fascinated as she was with him, Lady Georgina resisted his ingenious efforts to gain possession of her precious jewel case as she descended the gangway.
She clung to it like grim death, even in the chops of the Channel. Fortunately I am a good sailor, and when Lady Georgina's sallow cheeks began to grow pale, I was steady enough to supply her with her shawl and her smelling bottle.
She fidgeted and worried the whole way over.
Those horrid Belgians had no right to stick their deck chairs just in front of her.
Did the baggages pretend they considered themselves ladies?
Oh, that placid old gentleman in the episcopal gaiters was their father, was he?
The working classes were driving trade out of the country, and the consequence was, we couldn't build a boat which didn't reek like an oil shop.
But the children of the lower classes never learnt their catechism nowadays; they were too much occupied with literatoor, jography, and free 'and drawrin'.
Happily for my nerves, a good lurch to leeward put a stop for a while to the course of her thoughts on the present distresses.
She had a fixed habit, I believe, of sticking fast to that jewel case; for she was too overpowered by the Count's urbanity, I feel sure, to suspect for a moment his honesty of purpose.
But whenever she travelled, I fancy, she clung to her case as if her life depended upon it; it contained the whole of her valuable diamonds.
To my great amazement, I found the Cantankerous Old Lady and the egregious Count comfortably seated there.
'Monsieur has been good enough to accept a place in our carriage,' she observed, as I entered.
He bowed and smiled.
'Would you like some lunch, Lady Georgina?' I asked, in my chilliest voice.
'An admirable inspiration,' the Count murmured.
'You will come, Lois?' Lady Georgina asked.
'No, thank you,' I answered, for I had an idea.
'I hope you won't allow them to stick in any horrid foreigners!
They will try to force them on you unless you insist.
You have the tickets, I trust?
Don't let those dreadful porters touch my cloaks.
And if anybody attempts to get in, be sure you stand in front of the door as they mount to prevent them.'
The Count handed her out; he was all high courtly politeness.
I don't think she noticed it, but automatically once more she waved him aside.
Then she turned to me.
'Here, my dear,' she said, handing it to me, 'you'd better take care of it.
But mind, don't let it out of your hands on any account.
Hold it so, on your knee; and, for Heaven's sake, don't part with it.'
By this time my suspicions of the Count were profound.
From the first I had doubted him; he was so blandly plausible.
But as we landed at Ostend I had accidentally overheard a low whispered conversation when he passed a shabby looking man, who had travelled in a second class carriage from London. 'That succeeds?' the shabby looking man had muttered under his breath in French, as the haughty nobleman with the waxed moustache brushed by him.
'That succeeds admirably,' the Count had answered, in the same soft undertone.
I understood him to mean that he had prospered in his attempt to impose on Lady Georgina.
I gripped it hard with both hands.
'You mistrust me?' he cried, looking black.
'You doubt my honour?
'But I have Lady Georgina's orders to stick to this case; and till Lady Georgina returns I stick to it.'
He murmured some indignant remark below his breath, and walked off.
The shabby looking passenger was pacing up and down the platform outside in a badly made dust coat.
As they passed their lips moved.
However, he did not desist even so.
I saw he meant to go on with his dangerous little game.
I felt sure it would be useless to warn her, so completely had the Count succeeded in gulling her; but I took my own steps.
I examined the jewel case closely.
It had a leather outer covering; within was a strong steel box, with stout bands of metal to bind it.
I took my cue at once, and acted for the best on my own responsibility.
When Lady Georgina and the Count returned, they were like old friends together.
The quails in aspic and the sparkling hock had evidently opened their hearts to one another.
Lady Georgina was now in her finest vein of spleen: her acid wit grew sharper and more caustic each moment.
Not a reputation in Europe had a rag left to cover it as we steamed in beneath the huge iron roof of the main central junction.
But he waved me aside, with one lordly hand.
I had not told Lady Georgina of his vain attempt to take possession of her jewel case; and the bare fact of my silence made him increasingly suspicious of me.
'Pardon me, mademoiselle,' he said, coldly; 'you do not understand these lines as well as I do.
The Count, however, was still unsatisfied.
Then he returned to us, all fuming.
'It is as I said,' he exclaimed, flinging open the door.
'These rogues have deceived us.
You must dismount at once, miladi, and take the train just opposite.'
I felt sure he was wrong, and I ventured to say so.
But Lady Georgina cried, 'Nonsense, child!
Get out at once! Bring my bag and the rugs!
Mind that cloak!
Don't forget the sandwich tin!
Thanks, Count; will you kindly take charge of my umbrellas?
Hurry up, Lois; hurry up! the train is just starting!'
The Count jumped in, jumped about, arranged our parcels, jumped out again.
He spoke to a porter; then he rushed back excitedly.
You were right, after all, mademoiselle!
With singular magnanimity, I refrained from saying, 'I told you so.'
Both trains were just starting.
In her hurry, at last, she let the Count take possession of her jewel case. I rather fancy that as he passed one window he handed it in to the shabby looking passenger; but I am not certain.
At any rate, when we were comfortably seated in our own compartment once more, and he stood on the footboard just about to enter, of a sudden he made an unexpected dash back, and flung himself wildly into a Paris carriage.
Some Grave Talk In Gay Company
He shook hands with her warmly, and looked inquiringly in her face, and then drew her into a quiet corner in a window seat, where they could talk without being much observed.
Elsie did not sit beside them, but left them to their own conversation, assured that she would hear all that she cared to know by and by; yet she was not neglected, for Miss Rennie had taken a great fancy to her, and was determined, if possible, to get her partners.
Miss Rennie had judged hardly of Jane's personal appearance at first sight, but she thought Elsie a most elegant and interesting creature.
"No news," said Jane.
"I wrote to you of Elsie's last bitter disappointment.
"Ah!
Jane, my cup of prosperity has very many bitter drops in it."
If any one had told me beforehand of these months that I have passed since my uncle's death, I should have thought them absolutely intolerable, and would have preferred death. But there is no human lot without its mitigations and ameliorations. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.
I am not happy, perhaps; but I am not miserable.
He will make a figure in the world, and I will help him to do so.
"Very much, indeed; all the more as I acquired the language.
"So far as I can see, she appears to be happy.
"Indeed!" said Jane, "I thought it would have pleased you to be acknowledged."
I had a mother who did not care for me, and a father who did his duty, as he fancied, by me, but who disliked me, and they appear to have hated one another."
She was prettier than her daughter, at least in repose; but neither of them were at all like my ideal; for I forgot the French class of face, and embodied my fancy portraits in an English type."
"Very much, indeed.
The art of conversing these French people carry to great perfection.
I should like to try an experiment.
You know that sand flat, that is worth very little but for scanty pasture, at the back of the Black Hill, as it is called.
"What an excellent idea!" said Jane.
I have got plans for the cottages which I wanted you to look at this morning; I think they will do."
"You must let Peggy see them; she was brought up in one of those cottages you speak of, and will know all their deficiencies.
It will set a good example to the neighbourhood," said Jane.
"And, after all, it will not cost me more to build these cottages, and make thirty families more comfortable and more self respecting, than it would to enlarge Cross Hall, as mr Chalmers advises me strongly to do-by building a new wing and adding a conservatory in the place of your modest little greenhouse.
Our picked men, and many of our picked women, emigrate to America and Australia.
I confess that if I were in their place I should do the same; but let my experiment succeed, it may be imitated."
I will watch the result with the greatest interest.
You know nothing could give me greater pleasure than your success in such a noble work," said Jane, with sparkling eyes.
For myself, I think just as highly of my own abilities and acquirements as ever I did.
I am sorry that your minister has left his church, for I hoped to become acquainted with him; and he looked so cheerful that I thought he might do Elsie good. This new clergyman does not strike me as being so genial or kindly, though I certainly like his sermons and his devotional services very much.
"Can you not place your sister in the same care?" asked Francis.
"How did our friends get acquainted with mr Dalzell?" said Jane.
mr Dalzell, I forgot you."
Miss Wilson was ward of mrs Rennie's, as Jane had heard, a West Indian heiress, somewhat stupid, and very much impressed with her own wealth and importance.
She had just left school, having made all the progress which money without natural ability or any of the usual incentives to application could attain, and was to live at the Rennies', which she thought a very dull place.
"Now," said Miss Rennie, "I have done my best for mr Dalzell.
I must attend to my other stranger before I fulfil my engagement to you, mr Hogarth, and I hope you will excuse me, when it is to get a partner for Alice.
Miss Melville, I suppose, does not care about dancing, she is so dreadfully matter of fact.
It was not mere fancy on Jane's part that Elsie was ill and unhappy. She had magnanimously made up her mind to go to work with industry and spirit, and mrs Dunn was perfectly satisfied with her.
But they formed a pleasant little clique of their own, less exclusive than most cliques, and generally disposed to hold up each one his own particular colony as preferable to the others.
They might contrast it unfavourably with Britain, but as compared with the other colonies, it ought to bear the palm.
When she came home after a long day's work, she thought she ought to try to keep up a little of her sister's discipline with the Lowries, and went over their lessons with them.
It was not far from Peggy's house to mrs Dunn's place of business, and it was a very monotonous walk.
The white regular houses, all of one size and height, with their thousands of windows exactly on the same model, seemed always staring her out of countenance, and made her feel depressed even in the early morning.
Elsie would rather not have had dealings with so many old acquaintances, but mrs Dunn thought it was a just reward for her kindness that she had this increase of custom.
"It is really a case; Laura is engaged to mr Dalzell, your old friend and neighbour, and she is going to give one of her wedding orders here. mrs Dunn should be greatly obliged to you, for we never would have come to the house but for you.
After all, what better luck could she look for than to be married for her money?
"Well, Laura dear, have you made up your mind about the dresses?" continued Miss Rennie, in a louder voice.
"I must keep to my own department."
"Oh, Laura wants your taste to help us to decide; you know better what suits than mademoiselle," said Miss Rennie.
"This is one of your nieces, I suppose?" said Miss Rennie.
"Yes, this is Grace Forrester, my youngest niece, who has been doing so well at school, and been such a good girl altogether, that I must needs give her a new frock for a party she is invited to next week, and get it fashionably made, too, no doubt."
We must go to the next room for Grace's frock," said Miss Rennie.
"I can make to please Peggy Walker," said Elsie, smiling; "but you will wish for more style-a compromise between fashion and comfort."
"Are you still living with Peggy Walker?
I hope, however, to see her soon, for mrs Phillips has been so good as to ask me to spend a few weeks in London, and mrs Dunn is going to spare me."
"He told us about them."
"Well, I'm not clear about the allotments; but the cottages I do most highly approve of, and I am coming upon my landlord to build me eight or nine, after the same plan, as near as may be.
If I asked for five hundred pounds to add to the farmhouse, I would get it at once, for I am a good tenant; but my landlord demurred at such an expenditure for cot houses. I think I will carry my point, however."
dr Phillips had wished that Elsie should join her sister before she left Derbyshire, and spend a week or so at his house, for he had been so delighted with Jane that he had a desire to become acquainted with Elsie also; so that mr Brandon had come sooner than he had intended, and proposed an early departure.
THE LARGER SYNTHESIS
We have seen that the essential process arising out of the growth of science and mechanism, and more particularly out of the still developing new facilities of locomotion and communication science has afforded, is the deliquescence of the social organizations of the past, and the synthesis of ampler and still ampler and more complicated and still more complicated social unities.
The nations and boundaries of to day do no more than mark claims to exemptions, privileges, and corners in the market-claims valid enough to those whose minds and souls are turned towards the past, but absurdities to those who look to the future as the end and justification of our present stresses.
The claim to political liberty amounts, as a rule, to no more than the claim of a man to live in a parish without observing sanitary precautions or paying rates because he had an excellent great grandfather.
Against all these old isolations, these obsolescent particularisms, the forces of mechanical and scientific development fight, and fight irresistibly; and upon the general recognition of this conflict, upon the intelligence and courage with which its inflexible conditions are negotiated, depends very largely the amount of bloodshed and avoidable misery the coming years will hold.
We may cherish animosities, we may declare imperishable distances, we may plot and counter plot, make war and "fight to a finish;" the net tightens for all that.
Already the need of some synthesis at least ampler than existing national organizations is so apparent in the world, that at least five spacious movements of coalescence exist to day; there is the movement called Anglo Saxonism, the allied but finally very different movement of British Imperialism, the Pan Germanic movement, Pan Slavism, and the conception of a great union of the "Latin" peoples.
Under the outrageous treatment of the white peoples an idea of unifying the "Yellow" peoples is pretty certain to become audibly and visibly operative before many years.
These are all deliberate and justifiable suggestions, and they all aim to sacrifice minor differences in order to link like to like in greater matters, and so secure, if not physical predominance in the world, at least an effective defensive strength for their racial, moral, customary, or linguistic differences against the aggressions of other possible coalescences.
The greater the social organism the more complex and varied its parts, the more intricate and varied the interplay of culture and breed and character within it.
And the difficulties in the way of the pan Slavic dream are far graver.
Its realization is enormously hampered by the division of its languages, and the fact that in the Bohemian language, in Polish and in Russian, there exist distinct literatures, almost equally splendid in achievement, but equally insufficient in quantity and range to establish a claim to replace all other Slavonic dialects.
She will be an Ireland without emigration, a place for famines.
So much for the Pan Slavic synthesis.
The intellectual development of the Germans is defined to a very large extent by a court directed officialdom.
A great number of fine and capable persons must be failing to develop, failing to tell, under the shadow of this too prepotent monarchy.
That, after all, is the vital question, and not whether her policy is wise or foolish, or her commercial development inflated or sound.
Moreover, before Germany can unify to the East she must fight the Russian, and to unify to the West she must fight the French and perhaps the English, and she may have to fight a combination of these powers.
Upon this matter m Bloch should be read.
She will fight for Switzerland or Luxembourg, or the mouth of the Rhine.
She will fight with the gravity of remembered humiliations, with the whole awakened Slav race at the back of her antagonist, and very probably with the support of the English speaking peoples.
Europe will have her Irelands as well as her Scotlands, her Irelands of unforgettable wrongs, kicking, squalling, bawling most desolatingly, for nothing that any one can understand. There will be great scope for the shareholding dilettanti, great opportunities for literary quacks, in "national" movements, language leagues, picturesque plotting, and the invention of such "national" costumes as the world has never seen.
Bread and Salt.
"But you," he said, "with that light dress, and without anything to cover you but that gauze scarf, perhaps you feel cold?"
"Do you know where I am leading you?" said the countess, without replying to the question.
"No, madame," replied Monte Cristo; "but you see I make no resistance."
The count looked at Mercedes as if to interrogate her, but she continued to walk on in silence, and he refrained from speaking.
They reached the building, ornamented with magnificent fruits, which ripen at the beginning of July in the artificial temperature which takes the place of the sun, so frequently absent in our climate.
"Pray excuse me, madame," replied Monte Cristo, "but I never eat Muscatel grapes."
Mercedes drew near, and plucked the fruit.
"Take this peach, then," she said.
A long silence followed; the peach, like the grapes, fell to the ground.
"But," said the countess, breathlessly, with her eyes fixed on Monte Cristo, whose arm she convulsively pressed with both hands, "we are friends, are we not?"
The count became pale as death, the blood rushed to his heart, and then again rising, dyed his cheeks with crimson; his eyes swam like those of a man suddenly dazzled.
"Thank you," she said.
And they walked on again.
"Doubtless," replied the count, "since no one hears me complain."
"And your present happiness, has it softened your heart?"
"My present happiness equals my past misery," said the count.
"Are you not married?" asked the countess.
"I, married?" exclaimed Monte Cristo, shuddering; "who could have told you so?"
"She is a slave whom I bought at Constantinople, madame, the daughter of a prince.
"I do."
"You have no sister-no son-no father?"
"I have no one."
I thought she loved me well enough to wait for me, and even to remain faithful to my memory.
This is the history of most men who have passed twenty years of age.
Perhaps my heart was weaker than the hearts of most men, and I suffered more than they would have done in my place; that is all." The countess stopped for a moment, as if gasping for breath.
"Never."
"Never?"
"I never returned to the country where she lived."
"To Malta?"
"Yes; Malta."
"She is, then, now at Malta?"
"I think so."
"Her,--yes."
"I hate them?
The countess placed herself before Monte Cristo, still holding in her hand a portion of the perfumed grapes.
"Take some," she said.
"Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes," replied Monte Cristo, as if the subject had not been mentioned before. The countess dashed the grapes into the nearest thicket, with a gesture of despair.
Monte Cristo remained as unmoved as if the reproach had not been addressed to him.
Albert at this moment ran in.
"Oh, mother," he exclaimed, "such a misfortune has happened!"
"What?
What has happened?" asked the countess, as though awakening from a sleep to the realities of life; "did you say a misfortune?
Indeed, I should expect misfortunes."
"Well?"
"Ah, indeed?"
"Albert, Albert," said Madame de Morcerf, in a tone of mild reproof, "what are you saying?
Ah, count, he esteems you so highly, tell him that he has spoken amiss." And she took two or three steps forward. Monte Cristo watched her with an air so thoughtful, and so full of affectionate admiration, that she turned back and grasped his hand; at the same time she seized that of her son, and joined them together.
"We are friends; are we not?" she asked.
"Oh, madame, I do not presume to call myself your friend, but at all times I am your most respectful servant." The countess left with an indescribable pang in her heart, and before she had taken ten steps the count saw her raise her handkerchief to her eyes.
"Do not my mother and you agree?" asked Albert, astonished.
"On the contrary," replied the count, "did you not hear her declare that we were friends?"
They re-entered the drawing room, which Valentine and Madame de Villefort had just quitted.
JACOB BOeHMEN.
It is now time to speak of Jacob Boehmen, who thought he could discover the secret of the transmutation of metals in the Bible, and who invented a strange heterogeneous doctrine of mingled alchymy and religion, and founded upon it the sect of the Aurea crucians.
He was born at Goerlitz, in Upper Lusatia, in fifteen seventy five, and followed till his thirtieth year the occupation of a shoemaker.
In this obscurity he remained, with the character of a visionary and a man of unsettled mind, until the promulgation of the Rosicrucian philosophy in his part of Germany, toward the year sixteen o seven or sixteen o eight.
From that time he began to neglect his leather, and buried his brain under the rubbish of metaphysics.
But he was nothing daunted by the miseries and privations of the flesh; his mind was fixed upon the beings of another sphere, and in thought he was already the new apostle of the human race.
He contended that the divine grace operated by the same rules, and followed the same methods, that the divine providence observed in the natural world; and that the minds of men were purged from their vices and corruptions in the very same manner that metals were purified from their dross, namely, by fire.
Besides the sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders, he acknowledged various ranks and orders of demons.
He pretended to invisibility and absolute chastity.
He neglected this good advice, and continued his studies; burning minerals and purifying metals one day, and mystifying the Word of God on the next.
He afterwards wrote three other works, as sublimely ridiculous as the first.
Boehmen died in sixteen twenty four, leaving behind him a considerable number of admiring disciples.
He applied to the States General to grant him a public audience, that he might explain the tenets of the sect, and disclose a plan for rendering Holland the happiest and richest country on the earth, by means of the philosopher's stone and the service of the elementary spirits.
The States General wisely resolved to have nothing to do with him.
He thereupon determined to shame them by printing his book, which he did at Leyden the same year.
Poetry and romance are deeply indebted to the Rosicrucians for many a graceful creation.
The literature of England, France, and Germany contains hundreds of sweet fictions, whose machinery has been borrowed from their day dreams.
Sir Walter Scott also endowed the White Lady of Avenel with many of the attributes of the undines or water sprites.
German romance and lyrical poetry teem with allusions to sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders; and the French have not been behind in substituting them, in works of fiction, for the more cumbrous mythology of Greece and Rome.
Having these obligations to the Rosicrucians, no lover of poetry can wish, however absurd they were, that such a sect of philosophers had never existed.
Just at the time that Michael Mayer was making known to the world the existence of such a body as the Rosicrucians, there was born in Italy a man who was afterwards destined to become the most conspicuous member of the fraternity.
At the age of sixteen Joseph was sent to finish his education at the Jesuits' college in Rome, where he distinguished himself by his extraordinary memory.
He learned every thing to which he applied himself with the utmost ease.
By the aid of his friends he established himself as a physician in Rome, and also obtained some situation in the pope's household.
At the age of thirty seven he found that he could not live by the practice of medicine, and began to look about for some other employment.
All at once a sudden change was observed in his conduct.
The abandoned rake put on the outward sedateness of a philosopher; the scoffing sinner proclaimed that he had forsaken his evil ways, and would live thenceforth a model of virtue.
To his friends this reformation was as pleasing as it was unexpected; and Borri gave obscure hints that it had been brought about by some miraculous manifestation of a superior power.
He pretended that he held converse with beneficent spirits; that the secrets of God and nature were revealed to him; and that he had obtained possession of the philosopher's stone.
Like his predecessor, Jacob Boehmen, he mixed up religious questions with his philosophical jargon, and took measures for declaring himself the founder of a new sect.
The reputation of his great sanctity had gone before him; and he found many persons ready to attach themselves to his fortunes.
"Whoever shall refuse," said he, "to enter into my new sheepfold shall be destroyed by the papal armies, of whom God has predestined me to be the chief.
To those who follow me all joy shall be granted.
I shall soon bring my chemical studies to a happy conclusion, by the discovery of the philosopher's stone, and by this means we shall all have as much gold as we desire.
I am assured of the aid of the angelic hosts, and more especially of the archangel Michael's.
In sign of it I saw a palm tree, surrounded with all the glory of paradise.
The angels come to me whenever I call, and reveal to me all the secrets of the universe.
They were to the full as ridiculous as his philosophical pretensions.
As the number of his followers increased, he appears to have cherished the idea of becoming one day a new Mahomet, and of founding, in his native city of Milan, a monarchy and religion of which he should be the king and the prophet.
Borri's trial proceeded in his absence, and lasted for upwards of two years.
He afterwards went to Strasbourg, intending to fix his residence in that town.
He was received with great cordiality, as a man persecuted for his religious opinions, and withal a great alchymist.
He found that sphere too narrow for his aspiring genius, and retired in the same year to the more wealthy city of Amsterdam.
He performed several able cures, and increased his reputation so much that he was vaunted as a prodigy.
This hope never abandoned him, even in the worst extremity of his fortunes; and in his prosperity it led him into the most foolish expenses: but he could not long continue to live so magnificently upon the funds he had brought from Italy; and the philosopher's stone, though it promised all for the wants of the morrow, never brought any thing for the necessities of to day.
With this diminution of splendour came a diminution of renown.
Borri now thought it high time to change his quarters.
With this view he borrowed money wherever he could get it, and succeeded in obtaining two hundred thousand florins from a merchant named De Meer, to aid, as he said, in discovering the water of life.
He also obtained six diamonds of great value, on pretence that he could remove the flaws from them without diminishing their weight.
With this booty he stole away secretly by night, and proceeded to Hamburgh.
On his arrival in that city, he found the celebrated Christina, the ex queen of Sweden.
He procured an introduction to her, and requested her patronage in his endeavour to discover the philosopher's stone.
This prince was a firm believer in the transmutation of metals.
He became in time much attached to him; and defended him from the jealous attacks of his courtiers, and the indignation of those who were grieved to see their monarch the easy dupe of a charlatan.
He lived six years in this manner at the court of Frederick; but that monarch dying in sixteen seventy he was left without a protector.
He went first to Saxony; but met so little encouragement, and encountered so much danger from the emissaries of the Inquisition, that he did not remain there many months.
In vain he protested his innocence, and divulged his real name and profession.
He was detained in prison, and a letter despatched to the Emperor Leopold, to know what should be done with him.
The request was complied with; and Borri, closely manacled, was sent under an escort of soldiers to the prison of the Inquisition at Rome.
He was too much of an impostor to be deeply tinged with fanaticism, and was not unwilling to make a public recantation of his heresies, if he could thereby save his life.
When the proposition was made to him, he accepted it with eagerness.
Queen Christina, during her residence at Rome, frequently visited the old man, to converse with him upon chemistry and the doctrines of the Rosicrucians.
She even obtained permission that he should leave his prison occasionally for a day or two, and reside in her palace, she being responsible for his return to captivity.
She encouraged him to search for the great secret of the alchymists, and provided him with money for the purpose.
It may well be supposed that Borri benefited most by this acquaintance, and that Christina got nothing but experience.
Besides the pretenders to the philosopher's stone whose lives have been already narrated, this and the preceding century produced a great number of writers, who inundated literature with their books upon the subject.
He says, that, sitting one day in his study, a man, who was dressed as a respectable burgher of North Holland, and very modest and simple in his appearance, called upon him, with the intention of dispelling his doubts relative to the philosopher's stone.
After his departure, Helvetius procured a crucible and a portion of lead, into which, when in a state of fusion, he threw the stolen grain from the philosopher's stone.
He was disappointed to find that the grain evaporated altogether, leaving the lead in its original state.
Some weeks afterwards, when he had almost forgotten the subject, he received another visit from the stranger.
They tried the experiment, and succeeded to their heart's content.
Helvetius repeated the experiment alone, and converted six ounces of lead into very pure gold.
All the alchymists were in arms immediately, to refute this formidable antagonist.
It was also pretended that Gustavus Adolphus transmuted a quantity of quicksilver into pure gold.
The learned Borrichius relates, that he saw coins which had been struck of this gold; and Lenglet du Fresnoy deposes to the same circumstance.
He pretended to find the elixir of life, and Louis expected by his means to have enjoyed the crown for a century.
Van Helmont also pretended to have once performed with success the process of transmuting quicksilver, and was in consequence invited by the Emperor Rudolph the second. to fix his residence at the court of Vienna.
The trick to which they oftenest had recourse was to use a double bottomed crucible, the under surface being of iron or copper, and the upper one of wax, painted to resemble the same metal.
Between the two they placed as much gold or silver dust as was necessary for their purpose.
They then put in their lead, quicksilver, or other ingredients, and placed their pot upon the fire.
The same result was produced in many other ways.
Some of them used a hollow wand, filled with gold or silver dust, and stopped at the ends with wax or butter.
M. Geoffroy produced several of these nails to the Academy of Sciences, and shewed how nicely the two parts were soldered together.
A nail of this description was, for a long time, in the cabinet of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Nothing at one time was more common than to see coins, half gold and half silver, which had been operated upon by alchymists, for the same purposes of trickery.
He then disguised himself as a pilgrim, and returned to France.
"I have something to relate to you, my dear cousin, which will be interesting to you and your friends.
He turns lead into gold, and iron into silver, by merely heating these metals red hot, and pouring upon them in that state some oil and powder he is possessed of; so that it would not be impossible for any man to make a million a day, if he had sufficient of this wondrous mixture.
He also sold twenty pounds weight of it to a merchant of Digne, named Taxis.
He promised to give me one of them, in a long conversation which I had with him the other day, by order of the Bishop of Senes, who saw his operations with his own eyes, and detailed all the circumstances to me.
This excellent workman received, a short time ago, a very kind letter from the superintendent of the royal household, which I read.
He offered to use all his influence with the ministers to prevent any attempts upon his liberty, which has twice been attacked by the agents of government.
He told me that it generally took him six months to make all his preparations.
I told him that, apparently, the king wanted to see him.
He replied that he could not exercise his art in every place, as a certain climate and temperature were absolutely necessary to his success. The truth is, that this man appears to have no ambition.
He only keeps two horses and two men servants.
Besides, he loves his liberty, has no politeness, and speaks very bad French; but his judgment seems to be solid.
At all events, posterity will hear of him."
A good deal of that was only hearsay, but now I am enabled to speak from my own experience.
I have in my possession a nail, half iron and half silver, which I made myself.
All the country have their eyes upon this gentleman; some deny loudly, others are incredulous; but those who have seen acknowledge the truth.
I have read the passport that has been sent to him from court, with orders that he should present himself at Paris early in the spring.
He told me that he would go willingly, and that it was himself who fixed the spring for his departure; as he wanted to collect his materials, in order that, immediately on his introduction to the king, he might make an experiment worthy of his majesty, by converting a large quantity of lead into the finest gold.
As I had the honour to dine with him on Thursday last, the twentieth of this month, being seated at his side, I told him in a whisper that he could, if he liked, humble all the enemies of France.
He did not deny it, but began to smile.
In fact, this man is the miracle of art.
For five years this man was looked upon as a madman or a cheat; but the public mind is now disabused with respect to him.
Delisle transmutes his metals in public.
He rubs the lead or iron with his powder, and puts it over burning charcoal.
Delisle is altogether an illiterate person.
He is unpolite, fantastic, and a dreamer, and acts by fits and starts."
Delisle, it would appear, was afraid of venturing to Paris.
He knew that his sleight of hand would be too narrowly watched in the royal presence; and upon some pretence or other he delayed the journey for more than two years.
I offered him some iron nails, which he changed into silver in the chimney place before six or seven credible witnesses.
Still, however, I was not quite satisfied.
I therefore summoned the alchymist to come to me at Castellane.
He came; and I had him escorted by eight or ten vigilant men, to whom I had given notice to watch his hands strictly. Before all of us he changed two pieces of lead into gold and silver.
My former bad opinion of Delisle was now indeed shaken.
A hundred persons in my diocese have been witnesses of these things.
My reason was convinced by my eyes; and the phantoms of impossibility which I had conjured up were dissipated by the work of my own hands.
This mere suspicion, without any proof whatever, had caused him to be condemned for contumacy; a common case enough with judges, who always proceed with much rigour against those who are absent.
His year, strictly speaking, consists only of the four summer months; and when by any means he is prevented from making the proper use of them, he loses a whole year.
What I have now told you, sir, removes the third objection, and is the reason why, at the present time, he cannot go to Paris to the king, in fulfilment of his promises made two years ago.
Two, or even three, summers have been lost to him, owing to the continual inquietude he has laboured under.
He has, in consequence, been unable to work, and has not collected a sufficient quantity of his oil and powder, or brought what he has got to the necessary degree of perfection.
"Permit me, sir, in conclusion, to repeat, that such an artist as this should not be driven to the last extremity, nor forced to seek an asylum offered to him in other countries, but which he has despised, as much from his own inclinations as from the advice I have given him.
You risk nothing in giving him a little time, and in hurrying him you may lose a great deal.
That Delisle was no ordinary impostor, but a man of consummate cunning and address, is very evident from this letter.
But this did not suit the plans of Delisle.
In the provinces he was regarded as a man of no small importance; the servile flattery that awaited him wherever he went was so grateful to his mind that he could not willingly relinquish it, and run upon certain detection at the court of the monarch.
Delisle performed the part of a father towards him, and thought he could shew no stronger proof of his regard, than by giving him the necessary instructions to carry on the deception which had raised himself to such a pitch of greatness.
He discoursed learnedly upon projections, cimentations, sublimations, the elixir of life, and the universal alkahest; and on the death of Delisle gave out that the secret of that great adept had been communicated to him, and to him only.
The fate of Delisle was no inducement for them to stop in France.
They travelled about the Continent for several years, sponging upon credulous rich men, and now and then performing successful transmutations by the aid of double bottomed crucibles and the like.
The duke afterwards boasted to Lenglet du Fresnoy of his achievements as an alchymist, and regretted that he had not been able to discover the secret of the precious powder by which he performed them.
It was his usual practice to pretend that he possessed only a few grains of his powder, with which he would operate in any house where he intended to fix his quarters for the season.
Suspecting that all was not right, he left Aix secretly the same evening, and proceeded to Marseilles.
As the proofs against him were too convincing to leave him much hope of an acquittal, he planned an escape from durance.
When he left Marseilles, he had not a shoe to his foot or a decent garment to his back, but was provided with some money and clothes by his wife in a neighbouring town.
They then found their way to Brussels, and by dint of excessive impudence, brought themselves into notice.
He took a house, fitted up a splendid laboratory, and gave out that he knew the secret of transmutation.
He withdrew secretly in the night, and retired to Paris.
Here all trace of him is lost.
Reflection (reflexio) is not occupied about objects themselves, for the purpose of directly obtaining conceptions of them, but is that state of the mind in which we set ourselves to discover the subjective conditions under which we obtain conceptions.
It is the consciousness of the relation of given representations to the different sources or faculties of cognition, by which alone their relation to each other can be rightly determined.
The first question which occurs in considering our representations is to what faculty of cognition do they belong?
To the understanding or to the senses?
Many judgements are admitted to be true from mere habit or inclination; but, because reflection neither precedes nor follows, it is held to be a judgement that has its origin in the understanding.
All judgements do not require examination, that is, investigation into the grounds of their truth.
For, when they are immediately certain (for example: "Between two points there can be only one straight line"), no better or less mediate test of their truth can be found than that which they themselves contain and express.
But all judgement, nay, all comparisons require reflection, that is, a distinction of the faculty of cognition to which the given conceptions belong.
The act whereby I compare my representations with the faculty of cognition which originates them, and whereby I distinguish whether they are compared with each other as belonging to the pure understanding or to sensuous intuition, I term transcendental reflection.
The proper determination of these relations rests on the question, to what faculty of cognition they subjectively belong, whether to sensibility or understanding?
For, on the manner in which we solve this question depends the manner in which we must cogitate these relations.
For this reason we ought to call these conceptions, conceptions of comparison (conceptus comparationis).
We shall now proceed to fulfil this duty, and thereby throw not a little light on the question as to the determination of the proper business of the understanding.
one.
Identity and Difference.
Agreement and Opposition.
three.
The Internal and External.
In an object of the pure understanding, only that is internal which has no relation (as regards its existence) to anything different from itself.
Substance in space we are cognizant of only through forces operative in it, either drawing others towards itself (attraction), or preventing others from forcing into itself (repulsion and impenetrability).
But what other internal attributes of such an object can I think than those which my internal sense presents to me?
Matter and Form.
These two conceptions lie at the foundation of all other reflection, so inseparably are they connected with every mode of exercising the understanding.
The former denotes the determinable in general, the second its determination, both in a transcendental sense, abstraction being made of every difference in that which is given, and of the mode in which it is determined.
Logicians formerly termed the universal, matter, the specific difference of this or that part of the universal, form.
In respect to things in general, unlimited reality was regarded as the matter of all possibility, the limitation thereof (negation) as the form, by which one thing is distinguished from another according to transcendental conceptions.
The understanding demands that something be given (at least in the conception), in order to be able to determine it in a certain manner.
But being merely sensuous intuitions, in which we determine all objects solely as phenomena, the form of intuition (as a subjective property of sensibility) must antecede all matter (sensations), consequently space and time must antecede all phenomena and all data of experience, and rather make experience itself possible.
The Populace with loud Acclamations attended him to the Palace Gate.
The Queen, who had heard of his Arrival, was in the utmost Agony, between Hope and Despair.
Every Eye was surpriz'd, tho' charm'd at the same Time to see him again: But then none were to be admitted into the Assembly Room except the Knights.
As the Reputation of his being a Man of the strictest Honour and Veracity was so strongly imprinted on their Minds, the Motion of his Admittance was carried in the Affirmative, without the least Opposition.
His reply was, that a Man of his Merit had something else to think on, than idle Riddles; 'twas enough for him, that he was acknowledg'd the Hero of the Circus.
Nothing, said he, can be longer, since 'tis the Measure of Eternity; Nothing is shorter, since there is Time always wanting to accomplish what we aim at.
It's Extent is to Infinity, in the Whole; and divisible to Infinity in part.
All Men neglect it in the Passage; and all regret the Loss of it when 'tis past.
Nothing can possibly be done without it; it buries in Oblivion whatever is unworthy of being transmitted down to Posterity; and it renders all illustrious Actions immortal.
The next Question that was started, was, What is the Thing we receive, without being ever thankful for it; which we enjoy, without knowing how we came by it; which we give away to others, without knowing where 'tis to be found; and which we lose, without being any ways conscious of our Misfortune?
Each pass'd his Verdict.
What Pity 'tis, said some who were present, that one of so comprehensive a Genius, should make such a scurvy Cavalier?
He imagin'd, it is plain, that it would do him more Honour than his own Green one.
The Queen and He ador'd the Divine Providence.
The envious Informer indeed, died with Shame and Vexation.
The Empire was glorious abroad, and in the full Enjoyment of Tranquility, Peace and Plenty, at home: This, in short, was the true golden Age.
The whole Country was sway'd by Love and Justice.
After sensations and images, we have to name among the phenomena of consciousness, the whole series of affective states-our pleasures and our pains, our joys and our griefs, our sentiments, our emotions, and our passions.
It is I who suffer, we say, I who complain, I who hope.
It is true that this attribution is not absolutely characteristic of mental phenomena, for it happens that we put a part of our Ego into material objects, such as our bodies, and even into objects separate from our bodies, and whose sole relation to us is that of a legal proprietorship.
We must guard against the somewhat frequent error of identifying the Ego with the psychical.
These two reasons sufficiently explain the tendency to see only psychological states in the emotional ones; and, in fact, those authors who have sought to oppose mind to matter have not failed to introduce emotion into their parallel as representing the essence of mind.
On this point I will recall the fine ironical image used by Tyndall, the illustrious English physicist, to show the abyss which separates thought from the molecular states of the brain.
We should then know that when we love, a movement is produced in one direction, and when we hate, in another.
But the Why would remain without an answer."
The question of knowing what place in our metaphysical theory we ought to secure for emotion seems difficult to resolve, and we even find some pleasure in leaving it in suspense, in order that it may be understood that a metaphysician is not compelled to explain everything.
Besides, the difficulties which atop us here are peculiarly of a psychological order.
They proceed from the fact that studies on the nature of the emotions are still very little advanced. The physical conditions of these states are pretty well known, and their psychical and social effects have been abundantly described; but very little is known as to what distinguishes an emotion from a thought.
Two principal opinions may be upheld in the actual state of our acquaintance with the psychology of the feelings.
When we endeavour to penetrate their essential and final nature, we have a choice between two contrary theories.
The second bears the name of the intellectualist theory.
It consists in expunging the characteristic of the affective states.
However, this particular point is of slight Importance.
The intellectualist theory is more vast than Herbartism; it exists in all doctrines in which the characteristic difference between thought and feeling is expunged and feeling is brought back to thought.
To perceive is, in fact, the property of intelligence; to reason, to imagine, to judge, to understand, is always, in a certain sense, to perceive.
It has been imagined that emotion is nothing else than a perception of a certain kind, an intellectual act strictly comparable to the contemplation of a landscape.
Only, in the place of a landscape with placid features you must put a storm, a cataclysm of nature; and, instead of supposing this storm outside us, let it burst within us, let it reach us, not by the outer senses of sight and condition, but by the inner senses.
What we then perceive will be an emotion.
Their theory, at first sight, appears singular, like everything which runs counter to our mental habits.
Or it is the heart, which hastens or slackens its beats, or makes them irregular, or enfeebles, or augments them.
Or else it is the secretion of the saliva or of the sweat, which flows in abundance or dries up.
Or the muscular force, which is increased or decays.
Or the almost undefinable organic troubles revealed to us by the singing in the ears, constriction of the epigastrium, the jerks, the trembling, vertigo, or nausea-all this collection of organic troubles which comes more or less confusedly to our consciousness under the form of tactile, muscular, thermal, and other sensations.
Until now this category of phenomena has been somewhat neglected, because we saw in it effects and consequences of which the role in emotion itself seemed slight, since, if they could have been suppressed, it was supposed that emotion would still remain.
The new theory commences by changing the order of events.
The change is directed to the nature of emotion.
It is considered to exist in the organic derangements indicated above.
These derangements are the basis of emotion, its physical basis, and to be moved is to perceive them.
Take away from the consciousness this physical reflex, and emotion ceases. It is no longer anything but an idea.
This theory has at least the merit of originality.
It eliminates all difference which may exist between a perception and an emotion.
Emotion is no longer anything but a certain kind of perception, the perception of the organic sensations.
This reduction, if admitted, would much facilitate the introduction of emotion into our system, which, being founded on the distinction between the consciousness and the object, is likewise an intellectualist system.
The definition of emotion, as it is taught by w james, seems expressly made for us who are seeking to resolve all intellectual states into physical impressions accompanied by consciousness.
By the side of emotion we may place, as demanding the same analytical study, the feeling of effort.
It is again the same author, that true genius, w james, who has attempted this reduction.
I do not know whether he has taken into account the parallelism of the two theories, but it is nevertheless evident.
To be conscious of an effort would then be nothing else than to receive all these centripetal sensations; and what proves this is, that the consciousness of effort when most clearly manifested is accompanied by some muscular energy, some strong contraction, or some respiratory trouble, and yields if we render the respiration again regular and put the muscles back into repose.
To my great regret I can state nothing very clear regarding these problems.
But we remain perplexed, and we ask ourselves whether this clearness of perception is not somewhat artificial, whether affectivity, emotivity, tendency, will, are really all reduced to perceptions, or whether they are not rather irreducible elements which should be added to the consciousness.
Does not, for instance, desire represent a complement of the consciousness?
This question I leave unanswered.
That it was far above the earth was no expression for it; to the two men in it, it seemed to be far above the stars.
The professor had himself invented the flying machine, and had also invented nearly everything in it.
Every sort of tool or apparatus had, in consequence, to the full, that fantastic and distorted look which belongs to the miracles of science.
For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.
All the tools of Professor Lucifer were the ancient human tools gone mad, grown into unrecognizable shapes, forgetful of their origin, forgetful of their names.
That thing which looked like an enormous key with three wheels was really a patent and very deadly revolver.
That object which seemed to be created by the entanglement of two corkscrews was really the key.
The thing which might have been mistaken for a tricycle turned upside-down was the inexpressibly important instrument to which the corkscrew was the key.
This he had been born too late actually to inaugurate, but he believed at least, that he had considerably improved it.
There was, however, another man on board, so to speak, at the time.
Him, also, by a curious coincidence, the professor had not invented, and him he had not even very greatly improved, though he had fished him up with a lasso out of his own back garden, in Western Bulgaria, with the pure object of improving him.
He was an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely covered with white hair.
You could see nothing but his eyes, and he seemed to talk with them.
They were really very plausible and thoughtful heresies, and it was really a creditable or even glorious circumstance, that the old monk had been intellectual enough to detect their fallacy; the only misfortune was that nobody in the modern world was intellectual enough even to understand their argument.
And now that his luck had lifted him above all the mountains in the society of a wild physicist, he made himself happy still.
"I have no intention, my good Michael," said Professor Lucifer, "of endeavouring to convert you by argument.
It is folly to talk of this or that demonstrating the rationalist philosophy.
Everything demonstrates it.
Rubbing shoulders with men of all kinds----"
"An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of the Middle Ages," replied the Professor, calmly, "but even upon your own basis I will illustrate my point.
We are up in the sky.
In your religion and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything), the sky is made the symbol of everything that is sacred and merciful.
Well, now you are in the sky, you know better.
Phrase it how you like, twist it how you like, you know that you know better.
You know what are a man's real feelings about the heavens, when he finds himself alone in the heavens, surrounded by the heavens.
You know that since our science has spoken, the bottom has fallen out of the Universe.
Now, heaven is the hopeless thing, more hopeless than any hell.
And the time will come when you will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars."
"I hope you will excuse my interrupting you," said Michael, with a slight cough, "but I have always noticed----"
"Come, come," said the Professor, encouragingly, "I'll help you out.
"Well, the truth is, I know I don't express it properly, but somehow it seemed to me that you always convey ideas of that kind with most eloquence, when-er-when----"
"Oh! get on," cried Lucifer, boisterously.
"Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to run into something.
I thought you wouldn't mind my mentioning it, but it's running into something now."
Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon the handle that acted as a helm to the vessel.
Now, through a sort of purple haze, could be seen comparatively near to them what seemed to be the upper part of a huge, dark orb or sphere, islanded in a sea of cloud.
The Professor's eyes were blazing like a maniac's.
This star and not that other vulgar one shall be 'Lucifer, sun of the morning.' Here we will have no chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods.
Here man shall be as innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as cruel-here the intellect----"
"There seems," said Michael, timidly, "to be something sticking up in the middle of it."
"So there is," said the Professor, leaning over the side of the ship, his spectacles shining with intellectual excitement.
"What can it be?
Then a shriek indescribable broke out of him of a sudden, and he flung up his arms like a lost spirit.
As the flying ship swept towards it, this plain of cloud looked as dry and definite and rocky as any grey desert.
Hence it gave to the mind and body a sharp and unearthly sensation when the ship cut and sank into the cloud as into any common mist, a thing without resistance.
It was as if they had cloven into ancient cliffs like so much butter.
For a moment their eyes and nostrils were stopped with darkness and opaque cloud; then the darkness warmed into a kind of brown fog.
And far, far below them the brown fog fell until it warmed into fire.
Through the dense London atmosphere they could see below them the flaming London lights; lights which lay beneath them in squares and oblongs of fire.
The fog and fire were mixed in a passionate vapour; you might say that the fog was drowning the flames; or you might say that the flames had set the fog on fire.
Beside the ship and beneath it (for it swung just under the ball), the immeasurable dome itself shot out and down into the dark like a combination of voiceless cataracts.
Or it was like some cyclopean sea beast sitting above London and letting down its tentacles bewilderingly on every side, a monstrosity in that starless heaven.
For the clouds that belonged to London had closed over the heads of the voyagers sealing up the entrance of the upper air.
They had broken through a roof and come into a temple of twilight.
Above it the cross already draped in the dark mists of the borderland was shadowy and more awful in shape and size.
Professor Lucifer slapped his hand twice upon the surface of the great orb as if he were caressing some enormous animal.
"This is the fellow," he said, "this is the one for my money."
So satisfied.
Not like that scraggy individual, stretching his arms in stark weariness." And he pointed up to the cross, his face dark with a grin.
What could possibly express your philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross and the shape of this ball?
This globe is reasonable; that cross is unreasonable.
It is a four legged animal, with one leg longer than the others.
The globe is inevitable.
Above all the globe is at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all things at enmity with itself.
The cross is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable direction.
That silent thing up there is essentially a collision, a crash, a struggle in stone.
Pah! that sacred symbol of yours has actually given its name to a description of desperation and muddle.
The very shape of it is a contradiction in terms."
"What you say is perfectly true," said Michael, with serenity.
"But we like contradictions in terms.
Man is a contradiction in terms; he is a beast whose superiority to other beasts consists in having fallen.
Every form of life is a struggle in flesh.
The shape of the cross is irrational, just as the shape of the human animal is irrational.
But surely the cross is the lower development and the sphere the higher.
After all it is easy enough to see what is really wrong with Wren's architectural arrangement."
"And what is that, pray?" inquired Michael, meekly.
"The cross is on top of the ball," said Professor Lucifer, simply.
The ball should be on top of the cross.
The cross is a mere barbaric prop; the ball is perfection.
"Oh!" said the monk, a wrinkle coming into his forehead, "so you think that in a rationalistic scheme of symbolism the ball should be on top of the cross?"
"It sums up my whole allegory," said the professor.
You would see, I think, that thing happen which is always the ultimate embodiment and logical outcome of your logical scheme."
"What are you talking about?" asked Lucifer.
"What would happen?"
"I mean it would fall down," said the monk, looking wistfully into the void.
"I once knew a man like you, Lucifer," he said, with a maddening monotony and slowness of articulation.
"He took this----"
"There is no man like me," cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the ship.
"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all unreason.
It is also a perfect allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself.
Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic country.
Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars.
Then one still summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration which changes the world.
Not a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together over hill and dale.
And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at it as if at an army.
Mile after mile along his homeward path he broke it down and tore it up.
For he hated the cross and every paling is a wall of crosses.
When he returned to his house he was a literal madman.
He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the cross bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image.
Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.
"Is that story really true?" he asked.
"Oh, no," said Michael, airily.
"It is a parable.
We leave you saying that nobody ought to join the Church against his will.
When we meet you again you are saying that no one has any will to join it with.
We find you saying that there is no such place as Ireland.
You start by hating the irrational and you come to hate everything, for everything is irrational and so----"
"Ah," he screamed, "to every man his madness.
You are mad on the cross.
Let it save you."
And with a herculean energy he forced the monk backwards out of the reeling car on to the upper part of the stone ball.
Michael, with as abrupt an agility, caught one of the beams of the cross and saved himself from falling.
At the same instant Lucifer drove down a lever and the ship shot up with him in it alone.
"For practical purposes of support," replied Michael grimly, "it is at any rate a great deal better than the ball.
"Yes, yes.
I mount!
I mount!" cried the professor in ungovernable excitement.
My path is upward."
"How often have you told me, Professor, that there is really no up or down in space?" said the monk.
"I shall mount up as much as you will."
"Indeed," said Lucifer, leering over the side of the flying ship.
"May I ask what you are going to do?"
The monk pointed downward at Ludgate Hill.
"I am going," he said, "to climb up into a star."
Those who look at the matter most superficially regard paradox as something which belongs to jesting and light journalism.
Paradox of this kind is to be found in the saying of the dandy, in the decadent comedy, "Life is much too important to be taken seriously." Those who look at the matter a little more deeply or delicately see that paradox is a thing which especially belongs to all religions.
Paradox of this kind is to be found in such a saying as "The meek shall inherit the earth." But those who see and feel the fundamental fact of the matter know that paradox is a thing which belongs not to religion only, but to all vivid and violent practical crises of human living.
This kind of paradox may be clearly perceived by anybody who happens to be hanging in mid space, clinging to one arm of the Cross of saint Paul's.
Father Michael in spite of his years, and in spite of his asceticism (or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy and happy old gentleman.
And as he swung on a bar above the sickening emptiness of air, he realized, with that sort of dead detachment which belongs to the brains of those in peril, the deathless and hopeless contradiction which is involved in the mere idea of courage.
He was a happy and healthy old gentleman and therefore he was quite careless about it.
And he felt as every man feels in the taut moment of such terror that his chief danger was terror itself; his only possible strength would be a coolness amounting to carelessness, a carelessness amounting almost to a suicidal swagger.
His one wild chance of coming out safely would be in not too desperately desiring to be safe.
There might be footholds down that awful facade, if only he could not care whether they were footholds or no
If he were foolhardy he might escape; if he were wise he would stop where he was till he dropped from the cross like a stone.
Now he knew the truth that is known to all fighters, and hunters, and climbers of cliffs.
He knew that even his animal life could only be saved by a considerable readiness to lose it.
Some will think it improbable that a human soul swinging desperately in mid-air should think about philosophical inconsistencies.
But such extreme states are dangerous things to dogmatize about.
And if it is impossible to dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible to describe them.
To this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's mind succeeded a spasm of the elemental terror; the terror of the animal in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy; which, when it is victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is defeated has no imaginable hope.
And of this ultimate resignation or certainty it is even less possible to write; it is something stranger than hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the secrets of God.
At the highest crisis of some incurable anguish there will suddenly fall upon the man the stillness of an insane contentment. It is not hope, for hope is broken and romantic and concerned with the future; this is complete and of the present.
It is not knowledge, for the intellect seems to have no particular part in it.
Nor is it (as the modern idiots would certainly say it is) a mere numbness or negative paralysis of the powers of grief.
It is not negative in the least; it is as positive as good news.
It seems almost as if there were some equality among things, some balance in all possible contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we should learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.
Michael certainly could not have given any sort of rational account of this vast unmeaning satisfaction which soaked through him and filled him to the brim.
He felt with a sort of half witted lucidity that the cross was there, and the ball was there, and the dome was there, that he was going to climb down from them, and that he did not mind in the least whether he was killed or not.
This mysterious mood lasted long enough to start him on his dreadful descent and to force him to continue it.
By the time he had reached that place of safety he almost felt (as in some impossible fit of drunkenness) that he had two heads; one was calm, careless, and efficient; the other saw the danger like a deadly map, was wise, careful, and useless.
He had fancied that he would have to let himself vertically down the face of the whole building.
When he dropped into the upper gallery he still felt as far from the terrestrial globe as if he had only dropped from the sun to the moon.
He paused a little, panting in the gallery under the ball, and idly kicked his heels, moving a few yards along it.
And as he did so a thunderbolt struck his soul. A man, a heavy, ordinary man, with a composed indifferent face, and a prosaic sort of uniform, with a row of buttons, blocked his way.
He merely let his mind float in an endless felicity about the man.
A moment before he had been dying alone.
In the gallery below the ball Father Michael had found that man who is the noblest and most divine and most lovable of all men, better than all the saints, greater than all the heroes-man Friday.
He also seemed to be asking how Michael "got up" there.
This beautiful man evidently felt as Michael did that the earth was a star and was set in heaven.
At length Michael sated himself with the mere sensual music of the voice of the man in buttons.
Michael realized that the image of God in nickel buttons was asking him how he had come there.
On his giving this answer the demeanour of the image of God underwent a remarkable change.
He seemed particularly anxious to coax him away from the balustrade.
He led him by the arm towards a door leading into the building itself, soothing him all the time.
Michael followed him, however, if only out of politeness, down an apparently interminable spiral of staircase.
At one point a door opened.
But he only wished to stand; to stand and stare. He had stepped as it were into another infinity, out under the dome of another heaven.
But this was a dome of heaven made by man.
Michael felt almost as if he were a god, and all the voices were hurled at him.
"No, the pretty things aren't here," said the demi god in buttons, caressingly.
"The pretty things are downstairs.
Evidently the man in buttons did not feel like a god, so Michael made no attempt to explain his feelings to him, but followed him meekly enough down the trail of the serpentine staircase.
He had no notion where or at what level he was.
He felt suddenly happy and suddenly indescribably small.
Men who have escaped death by a hair have it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men whose sins are forgiven them.
Everything his eye fell on it feasted on, not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating buns.
He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean angles as if he had just cut them with a knife.
The lit squares of the shop windows excited him as the young are excited by the lit stage of some promising pantomime.
He happened to see in one shop which projected with a bulging bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted meat, and it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a hundred streets of the world.
He was, perhaps, the happiest of all the children of men.
For in that unendurable instant when he hung, half slipping, to the ball of saint Paul's, the whole universe had been destroyed and re created.
And the police already had their hands on a very tall young man, with dark, lank hair and dark, dazed eyes, with a grey plaid over his shoulder, who had just smashed the shop window with a single blow of his stick.
Did you see what it said?
"Father, did you see what they said?" he cried, trembling.
"Did you see what they dared to say?
I didn't understand it at first.
I read it half through before I broke the window."
Michael felt he knew not how.
The whole peace of the world was pent up painfully in his heart.
The new and childlike world which he had seen so suddenly, men had not seen at all.
Here they were still at their old bewildering, pardonable, useless quarrels, with so much to be said on both sides, and so little that need be said at all.
They should not move till they saw their own sweet and startling existence.
They should not go from that place till they went home embracing like brothers and shouting like men delivered.
Perhaps if he had spoken there for an hour in his illumination he might have founded a religion on Ludgate Hill. But the heavy hand of his guide fell suddenly on his shoulder.
"This poor fellow is dotty," he said good humouredly to the crowd.
"I found him wandering in the Cathedral.
Says he came in a flying ship.
Is there a constable to spare to take care of him?"
There was a constable to spare.
Two other constables attended to the tall young man in grey; a fourth concerned himself with the owner of the shop, who showed some tendency to be turbulent.
They took the tall young man away to a magistrate, whither we shall follow him in an ensuing chapter.
SLAVES
I glanced at Perry as the thing passed me to inspect him.
When it passed on, he turned to me.
"A rhamphorhynchus of the Middle Olitic, David," he said, "but, gad, how enormous!
As we continued on through the main avenue of Phutra we saw many thousand of the creatures coming and going upon their daily duties. They paid but little attention to us.
The streets are broad and of a uniform height of twenty feet.
At intervals tubes pierce the roof of this underground city, and by means of lenses and reflectors transmit the sunlight, softened and diffused, to dispel what would otherwise be Cimmerian darkness.
In like manner air is introduced.
The method of communication between these two was remarkable in that no spoken words were exchanged.
They employed a species of sign language.
As I was to learn later, the Mahars have no ears, not any spoken language.
Among themselves they communicate by means of what Perry says must be a sixth sense which is cognizant of a fourth dimension.
I never did quite grasp him, though he endeavored to explain it to me upon numerous occasions.
I suggested telepathy, but he said no, that it was not telepathy since they could only communicate when in each others' presence, nor could they talk with the Sagoths or the other inhabitants of Pellucidar by the same method they used to converse with one another.
"What they do," said Perry, "is to project their thoughts into the fourth dimension, when they become appreciable to the sixth sense of their listener.
Do I make myself quite clear?"
"You do not, Perry," I replied.
He shook his head in despair, and returned to his work.
They had set us to carrying a great accumulation of Maharan literature from one apartment to another, and there arranging it upon shelves.
During this period my thoughts were continually upon Dian the Beautiful.
So great were the number of slaves who waited upon the inhabitants of Phutra that none of us was apt to be overburdened with work, nor were our masters unkind to us.
We hid our new weapons beneath the skins which formed our beds, and then Perry conceived the idea of making bows and arrows-weapons apparently unknown within Pellucidar.
We had completed these arrangements for our protection after leaving Phutra when the Sagoths who had been sent to recapture the escaped prisoners returned with four of them, of whom Hooja was one.
Dian and two others had eluded them.
What had become of them he had not the faintest conception-they might be wandering yet, lost within the labyrinthine tunnel, if not dead from starvation.
I was now still further apprehensive as to the fate of Dian, and at this time, I imagine, came the first realization that my affection for the girl might be prompted by more than friendship.
During my waking hours she was constantly the subject of my thoughts, and when I slept her dear face haunted my dreams.
"Diminutive world!" he scoffed.
"Look," he cried, pointing to it, "this is evidently water, and all this land.
Do you notice the general configuration of the two areas? Where the oceans are upon the outer crust, is land here.
These relatively small areas of ocean follow the general lines of the continents of the outer world.
"We know that the crust of the globe is five hundred miles in thickness; then the inside diameter of Pellucidar must be seven thousand miles, and the superficial area one hundred sixty five million four hundred eighty thousand square miles.
Think of it!
Our own world contains but fifty three million square miles of land, the balance of its surface being covered by water.
Just as we often compare nations by their relative land areas, so if we compare these two worlds in the same way we have the strange anomaly of a larger world within a smaller one!
The proposition was a corker.
Perry and I sought him out and put the question straight to him.
"They will set the thipdars upon us," he said, "and then we shall be killed; but-" he hesitated-"I would take the chance if I thought that I might possibly escape and return to my own people."
"Could you find your way back to your own land?" asked Perry.
"Yes."
"But how," persisted Perry, "could you travel to strange country without heavenly bodies or a compass to guide you?"
He seemed surprised to think that we found anything wonderful in it.
Perry said it must be some sort of homing instinct such as is possessed by certain breeds of earthly pigeons.
I didn't know, of course, but it gave me an idea.
"Then Dian could have found her way directly to her own people?" I asked.
I didn't see what accident could befall a whole community in a land of perpetual daylight where the inhabitants had no fixed habits of sleep.
At first I thought they were dead, but later their regular breathing convinced me of my error.
Hastening back to Perry where he pored over a musty pile of, to me, meaningless hieroglyphics, I explained my plan to him.
To my surprise he was horrified.
"It would be murder, David," he cried.
"Murder to kill a reptilian monster?" I asked in astonishment.
"Here they are the dominant race-we are the 'monsters'--the lower orders.
These terrible convulsions of nature time and time again wiped out the existing species-but for this fact some monster of the Saurozoic epoch might rule today upon our own world.
We see here what might well have occurred in our own history had conditions been what they have been here.
"Life within Pellucidar is far younger than upon the outer crust.
They look upon us as we look upon the beasts of our fields, and I learn from their written records that other races of Mahars feed upon men-they keep them in great droves, as we keep cattle.
They breed them most carefully, and when they are quite fat, they kill and eat them."
"What is there horrible about it, David?" the old man asked.
Why, I have come across here very learned discussions of the question as to whether gilaks, that is men, have any means of communication.
One writer claims that we do not even reason-that our every act is mechanical, or instinctive.
The dominant race of Pellucidar, David, have not yet learned that men converse among themselves, or reason.
It is thus that we reason in relation to the brutes of our own world.
They know that the Sagoths have a spoken language, but they cannot comprehend it, or how it manifests itself, since they have no auditory apparatus.
They believe that the motions of the lips alone convey the meaning.
That the Sagoths can communicate with us is incomprehensible to them.
"Yes, David," he concluded, "it would entail murder to carry out your plan."
"Very well then, Perry." I replied.
"I shall become a murderer."
"I wonder, David," he said at length, "as you are determined to carry out your wild scheme, if we could not accomplish something of very real and lasting benefit for the human race of Pellucidar at the same time. Listen, I have learned much of a most surprising nature from these archives of the Mahars.
"Once the males were all powerful, but ages ago the females, little by little, assumed the mastery.
Science took vast strides.
Finally a certain female scientist announced the fact that she had discovered a method whereby eggs might be fertilized by chemical means after they were laid-all true reptiles, you know, are hatched from eggs.
"What happened?
Immediately the necessity for males ceased to exist-the race was no longer dependent upon them.
More ages elapsed until at the present time we find a race consisting exclusively of females.
But here is the point.
"For two reasons they hide it away and guard it jealously.
The very thought of it fairly overpowered me.
Why, we two would be the means of placing the men of the inner world in their rightful place among created things.
Only the Sagoths would then stand between them and absolute supremacy, and I was not quite sure but that the Sagoths owed all their power to the greater intelligence of the Mahars-I could not believe that these gorilla like beasts were the mental superiors of the human race of Pellucidar.
"Why, Perry," I exclaimed, "you and I may reclaim a whole world! Together we can lead the races of men out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of advancement and civilization.
At one step we may carry them from the Age of Stone to the twentieth century.
It's marvelous-absolutely marvelous just to think about it."
"David," said the old man, "I believe that God sent us here for just that purpose-it shall be my life work to teach them His word-to lead them into the light of His mercy while we are training their hearts and hands in the ways of culture and civilization."
"You are right, Perry," I said, "and while you are teaching them to pray I'll be teaching them to fight, and between us we'll make a race of men that will be an honor to us both."
When I had outlined it to him, he seemed about as horror struck as Perry had been; but for a different reason.
There were no nights to mask our attempted escape.
All must be done in broad daylight-all but the work I had to do in the apartment beneath the building.
What the purpose or nature of the general exodus we did not know, but presently through the line of captives ran the rumor that two escaped slaves had been recaptured-a man and a woman-and that we were marching to witness their punishment, for the man had killed a Sagoth of the detachment that had pursued and overtaken them.
"Naught," he replied.
Along the crowded avenue we marched, the guards showing unusual cruelty toward us, as though we, too, had been implicated in the murder of their fellow.
The occasion was to serve as an object lesson to all other slaves of the danger and futility of attempted escape, and the fatal consequences of taking the life of a superior being, and so I imagine that Sagoths felt amply justified in making the entire proceeding as uncomfortable and painful to us as possible.
They jabbed us with their spears and struck at us with the hatchets at the least provocation, and at no provocation at all.
Benches surrounded this open space upon three sides, and along the fourth were heaped huge bowlders which rose in receding tiers toward the roof.
At first I couldn't make out the purpose of this mighty pile of rock, unless it were intended as a rough and picturesque background for the scenes which were enacted in the arena before it, but presently, after the wooden benches had been pretty well filled by slaves and Sagoths, I discovered the purpose of the bowlders, for then the Mahars began to file into the enclosure.
They marched directly across the arena toward the rocks upon the opposite side, where, spreading their bat like wings, they rose above the high wall of the pit, settling down upon the bowlders above.
These were the reserved seats, the boxes of the elect.
Here they lolled, blinking their hideous eyes, and doubtless conversing with one another in their sixth sense fourth dimension language.
For the first time I beheld their queen.
And then the music started-music without sound!
They beat their great wings up and down, and smote their rocky perches with their mighty tails until the ground shook. Then the band started another piece, and all was again as silent as the grave.
I leaned forward in my seat to scrutinize the female-hoping against hope that she might prove to be another than Dian the Beautiful.
Presently a door in one side of the arena wall was opened to admit a huge, shaggy, bull like creature.
"His kind roamed the outer crust with the cave bear and the mammoth ages and ages ago.
We have been carried back a million years, David, to the childhood of a planet-is it not wondrous?"
I could not at first see the beast from which emanated this fearsome challenge, but the sound had the effect of bringing the two victims around with a sudden start, and then I saw the girl's face-she was not Dian!
I could have wept for relief.
In contour and markings it was not unlike the noblest of the Bengals of our own world, but as its dimensions were exaggerated to colossal proportions so too were its colorings exaggerated.
Its vivid yellows fairly screamed aloud; its whites were as eider down; its blacks glossy as the finest anthracite coal, and its coat long and shaggy as a mountain goat.
That it is a beautiful animal there is no gainsaying, but if its size and colors are magnified here within Pellucidar, so is the ferocity of its disposition.
Never in my life had I heard such an infernal din as the two brutes made, and to think it was all lost upon the hideous reptiles for whom the show was staged!
There ensued a battle royal which for sustained and frightful ferocity transcends the power of imagination or description.
For a while the man and woman busied themselves only with keeping out of the way of the two creatures, but finally I saw them separate and each creep stealthily toward one of the combatants.
The tiger was now upon the bull's broad back, clinging to the huge neck with powerful fangs while its long, strong talons ripped the heavy hide into shreds and ribbons.
It was with difficulty that the girl avoided the first mad rush of the wounded animal.
Before him slaves and gorilla men fought in mad stampede to escape the menace of the creature's death agonies, for such only could that frightful charge have been.
I ran to the right, passing several exits choked with the fear mad mob that were battling to escape.
When Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every purpose in the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, it was a source of regret that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart.
Therefore Jehovah said, I will destroy from the face of the ground man whom I have created, for I regret that I have made mankind.
And without faith it is impossible to be well pleasing with God; for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that seek after him.
Rare is the man who can look back over his life and not confess, at least to himself, that the things which have made him most a man are the very things from which he tried with all his soul to escape.
If we would attain happiness, We must first attain helpfulness.
THE TWO BIBLICAL ACCOUNTS OF THE FLOOD.
These fundamental variations and the presence of duplicate versions of the same incidents point, some writers think, to two originally distinct accounts of the flood which have been closely woven together by the final editor of the book of genesis.
It has the flowing, vivid, picturesque, literary style and the point of view of the prophetic teacher.
In this account the number seven prevails.
Seven of each clean beast and bird are taken into the ark to provide food for Noah and his family.
Seven days the waters rose, and at intervals of seven days he sent out a raven and a dove.
The flood from its beginning to the time when Noah disembarked continued sixty eight days.
The style is that of a legal writer-formal, exact and repetitious.
In this account only two of each kind of beast and bird are taken into the ark.
The flood lasts for over a year and is universal, covering even the tops of the highest mountains.
No animals are sacrificed, for according to the priestly writer this custom was first instituted by Moses.
This later account is dated by this group of modern Biblical scholars about four hundred b c
THE CORRESPONDING BABYLONIAN FLOOD STORIES.
The older Babylonian account is found in the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, which comes from the library of Asshurbanipal.
This great conqueror lived contemporaneously with Manasseh during whose reign Assyrian influence was paramount in the kingdom of Judah.
In response to Gilgamesh's question as to how he, a mortal, attained immortality the Babylonian Noah recounts the story of the flood.
It was brought about by the Babylonian gods in order to destroy the city of Shurippak, situated on the banks of the Euphrates.
A detailed account then follows of the building of the ark.
Its dimensions were one hundred and twenty cubits in each direction. It was built in six stories, each of which was divided into nine parts.
Plentiful provisions were next carried on board and a great feast was held to commemorate the completion of the ark.
All the living creatures of all kinds I loaded on it. I brought on board my family and household; Cattle of the field, beasts of the field, the craftsmen, All of them I brought on board.
In the evening at the command of the god Shamash the rains began to descend.
The description of the tempest that follows is exceedingly vivid and picturesque.
For six days and nights the storm raged, but on the seventh day it subsided and the flood began to abate.
Of the race of mortals, however, every voice was hushed.
At last the ship approached the mountain Nisir which lay on the northern horizon, as viewed from the Tigris Euphrates valley.
Here the ship grounded.
Then,
At the command of the god he built a great ship fifteen stadia long and two in width.
Into this he took not only his family and provisions, but quadrupeds and birds of all kinds. When the flood began to recede, he sent out a bird, which quickly returned.
After a few days he sent forth another bird, which returned with mud on its feet.
When the third bird failed to return, he took off the cover of the ship and found that it had stranded on a mountain of Armenia.
The mountain in the Biblical account is identified with Mount Ararat.
Disembarking, the Babylonian Noah kissed the earth and, after building an altar, offered a sacrifice to the gods.
Which Biblical account does the earliest Babylonian narrative resemble most closely?
In what details do they agree?
Are these coincidences merely accidental or do they point possibly to a common tradition?
How far do the later Biblical and Babylonian accounts agree?
What is the significance of these points of agreement?
three.
HISTORY OF THE BIBLICAL FLOOD STORIES.
On the basis of the preceding comparisons some writers attempt to trace tentatively the history of the flood tradition current among the peoples of southwestern Asia.
A fragment of the Babylonian flood story, coming from at least as early as two thousand b c, has recently been discovered.
The probability is that the tradition goes back to the earliest beginnings of Babylonian history.
The description of the construction of the ark in genesis chapter six verses fourteen to sixteen is not only closely parallel to that found in the Babylonian account, but the method-the smearing of the ark within and without with bitumen-is peculiar to the Tigris Euphrates valley.
Many scholars believe, therefore, that Babylonia was the original home of the Biblical flood story.
Its exact origin, however, is not so certain.
Many of its details were doubtless suggested by the annual floods and fogs which inundate that famous valley and recall the primeval chaos so vividly pictured in the corresponding Babylonian story of the creation.
It may have been based on the remembrances of a great local inundation, possibly due to the subsidence of great areas of land.
In the earliest Hebrew records there is no trace of this tradition, although it may have been known to the Aramean ancestors of the hebrews.
Even in the temple at Jerusalem the Babylonians' gods, the host of heaven, were worshipped by certain of the hebrews.
The few literary inscriptions which come from this period, those found in the mound at Gezer, are written in the Assyrian script and contain the names of Assyrian officials.
Later when the Jewish exiles were carried to Babylonia, they naturally came into contact again with the Babylonian account of the flood, but in its later form, as the comparisons already instituted clearly indicate.
AIM OF THE BIBLICAL WRITERS IN RECOUNTING THE FLOOD STORY.
Is it possible that the prophetic and priestly historians found these stories on the lips of the people and sought in this heroic way to divest them of their polytheistic form and, in certain respects, immoral implications?
In this respect the two variant Biblical narratives are in perfect agreement.
The destruction of mankind came not as the fiat of an arbitrary Deity, but because of the purpose which God had before him in the work of creation, and because that purpose was good.
Men by their sins and wilful failure to observe his benign laws were thwarting that purpose.
Hence in accord with the just laws of the universe their destruction was unavoidable, and it came even as effect follows cause.
On the other hand, these ancient teachers taught with inimitable skill that God would not destroy that which was worthy of preservation.
The story as told is not merely an illustration of the truth that righteousness brings its just reward, but of the profounder principle that it is the morally fit who survive.
In both of the versions Noah in a very true sense represents the beginning of a new creation: he is the traditional father of a better race.
To him are given the promises which God was eager to realize in the life of humanity.
In the poetic fancy of the ancient East even the resplendent rainbow, which proclaimed the return of the sun after the storm, was truly interpreted as evidence of God's fatherly love and care for his children.
In the light of these profound religious teachings may any one reasonably question the right of these stories to a place in the Bible?
Is it not evidence of superlative teaching skill to use that which is familiar and, therefore, of interest to those taught, in order to inculcate the deeper moral and religious truths of life?
It is interesting and illuminating to note how the ancient Hebrew prophets in their religious teaching forecast the discoveries and scientific methods of our day.
This was because they had grasped universal principles.
This principle, since that day, has been thoroughly worked out in practically all the important fields of both the plant and animal world.
Moreover, the doctrine of evolution, dependent upon this principle, has exerted so great an influence upon the process of investigation and thinking in all fields of activity that the resulting change in method has amounted to a revolution.
The principle is applied not only in the field of biology, but also in the realm of astronomy, where we study the evolution of worlds, and in psychology, history, social science, where we speak of the development of human traits and of the growth of economic, political and social institutions.
It is, therefore, one of the most suggestive and interesting of the writings of the early Israelites.
Business success in the long run, is so strongly based upon mutual confidence and trust, that, especially in these later days of credit organization, the dishonest man or even the tricky man cannot prosper long.
A sales manager of a prominent institution said lately that the chief difficulty that he had with his men was to make them always tell the truth.
For the sake of making an important sale they were often inclined to misrepresent his goods.
It may perhaps have been true in the days of Machiavelli that cruelty and treachery would aid the unscrupulous petty despot of Italy to secure and at times to maintain his dukedom; but certainly in modern days, when in all civilized countries permanently prosperous government is based ultimately upon the will of the people, the successful ruler can no longer be treacherous and cruel.
Even among our so-called "spoils" politicians and corrupt bosses, who hold their positions by playing upon the selfishness of their followers and the ignorance and apathy of the public, there must be rigid faithfulness to promises, and, at any rate, the appearance of promoting the public welfare.
Otherwise their term of power is short.
If we look back through the history of modern times, we shall find that the statesmen who rank high among the successful rulers of their countries are men of unselfish patriotism, and almost invariably men of personal uprightness and morality, and usually of deep religious feeling.
Pick out the leading statesmen of the last half century in England, Germany and Italy. Do they not all stand for unselfish, patriotic purpose in their actions, and in character for individual honor and integrity?
The same is true in our social intercourse.
Brilliancy of intellect, however important in many fields of activity, counts for relatively little in home and social life, if not accompanied by graciousness of manner, kindness of heart, uprightness of character.
It may sometimes seem that the brilliant rascal succeeds, that the unscrupulous business man becomes rich, and that the hypocrite prospers through his hypocrisy.
Or, even there, would the adage, "There must be honor among thieves," hold, when it came to permanent organization?
But, whatever your answer, society fortunately is not made up of hypocrites or rascals of any kind.
With all the weakness of human nature found in every society, the growing success of the rule of the people throughout the world proves that fundamentally men and women are honest and true.
Generally common human nature is for the right.
Almost universally, if a mooted question touching morals can be put simply and squarely before the people, they will see and choose the right.
How do you explain the striking points of similarity between the flood stories of peoples far removed from each other?
Is there geological evidence that the earth, during human history, has been completely inundated?
What do you mean by a calamity?
What were the effects of the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake upon these cities?
To what extent is the modern progress in sanitation due to natural calamities?
What calamities?
What illustrations can you cite?
How do circumstances affect the kind of act that will be successful?
During the Chinese revolution of nineteen twelve in Peking and Nanking, looting leaders of mobs and plundering soldiers when captured were promptly decapitated without trial.
Was such an act right?
Was it necessary?
Would the same act tend equally to preserve the government in both countries?
(one) Flood Stories among Primitive Peoples.
Did these different methods under the special circumstances result in the survival of the fittest?
The fittest morally?
"'Little goat, if you're able, Pray deck out my table,'
"'Little goat, when you're able, Remove my nice table,'
"Little goat, if you're able, Come and deck my pretty table."
"Little goat, when you're able, Remove my nice table."
"Little goat, when you are able, Come and clear away my table."
On saying this the wise woman vanished.
"Three Eyes," said the mother, "climb up, and try what you can do; perhaps you will be able to see better with your three eyes than One Eye can."
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
FINDING AND LOSING A FORTUNE
OUR youthful dream of becoming farmers was now realized in fullest measure.
The comfort and plenty we had hoped and struggled for was attained.
This unexpected prosperity came to us through the hop growing industry, upon which we entered with all our force.
The business was well started by the time of my father's death in eighteen sixty nine, and in the fifteen years following the acreage planted to hops was increased until the crop yield of eighteen eighty two, a yield of more than seventy one tons, gave the Puyallup valley the banner crop, as to quantity, of the United States-and, some persons asserted, of the world.
Therefore it seems fitting to tell here the story of the beginnings of an industry that came to have great importance.
In March of eighteen sixty five, Charles Wood of Olympia sent about three pecks of hop roots to Steilacoom for my father, Jacob r Meeker, who then lived on his claim in the Puyallup valley.
This was sold for eighty five cents a pound, or a little more than a hundred and fifty dollars for the bale.
This sum was more money than had been received by any of the settlers in the Puyallup valley, except perhaps two, from the products of their farms for that year.
My father's near neighbors obtained a barrel of hop roots from California the next year, and planted them the following spring-four acres.
I obtained what roots I could get that year, but not enough to plant an acre.
The following year (eighteen sixty seven) I planted four acres, and for twenty six successive years thereafter we added to the area planted, until our holdings reached past the five hundred acre mark and our production was more than four hundred tons a year.
None of us knew anything about the hop business, and it was entirely by accident that we engaged in it.
But seeing that there were possibilities of great gain, I took pains to study hop culture, and found that by allowing our hops to mature thoroughly, curing them at a low temperature, and baling them while hot, we could produce hops that would compete with any product in the world.
Others of my neighbors planted them, and so did many people in Oregon, until soon there came to be a field for purchasing and shipping hops.
Finally, during the failure of the world's hop crop in the year eighteen eighty two, there came to be unheard of prices for hops, and fully one third of the crop of the Puyallup valley was sold for a dollar a pound.
It still stands in Pioneer Park in Puyallup.
We frequently employed more than a thousand people during harvest time.
Many of these were Indians, some of whom would come for a thousand miles down the coast from British Columbia and even the confines of Alaska; they came in the great cedar log canoes manned with twenty paddlers or more.
Once I had to tie up two of them to a tree for getting drunk; their friends came and stole away the prisoners-which was what I intended they should do.
I had to go through the mud to the Columbia River, then out over the bar to the Pacific Ocean, and down to San Francisco.
Then there was the seven days' journey over the Central and Union Pacific and connecting lines; this meant sitting bolt upright all the way, for there were no sleeping cars then, and no diners either.
Finally our annual shipments reached eleven thousand bales a year, or the equivalent in value of half a million dollars-said at that time to be the largest export hop business of any one concern in the United States.
At one time I had two full trainloads between the Pacific and the Atlantic, on their way to London.
I spent four winters in London dealing in the hop market.
Little as I had thought ever to handle an international business, still less had I thought ever to write a book.
My first publication was an eighty page pamphlet descriptive of Washington Territory, printed in eighteen seventy.
I mention this fact simply as one instance out of the many that could be given of the unexpected lines of development that life in the new land opened out to the pioneers.
We actually pressed the English growers so closely that more than fifteen thousand acres of hops were destroyed in that country.
Our great prosperity was not to last.
One evening in eighteen ninety two, as I stepped out of my office and cast my eyes toward one group of hop houses, it struck me that the hop foliage of a field near by was off color-did not look natural.
One of my clerks from the office said the same thing-the vines did not look natural.
I walked down to the yards, a quarter of a mile away, and there first saw the hop louse.
I issued a hop circular, sending it to more than six hundred correspondents all along the coast in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and before the week was out I began to receive samples from them, and letters asking what was the matter with the hops.
It appeared that the attack of lice was simultaneous in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, extending over a distance coastwise of more than five hundred miles, and even inland up the Skagit River, where there was an isolated yard.
This plague was like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky to us.
I sent my second son, Fred Meeker, to London to learn the English methods of fighting the pest and to import some spraying machinery.
We found to our cost, however, in the course of time, that the English methods did not suit our different conditions; for while we could kill the lice, we had to use so much spraying material on the dense foliage that, in killing them, we virtually destroyed the hops.
Instead of being able to sell our hops at the top price of the market, we saw our product fall to the foot of the list.
The last crop I raised cost me eleven cents a pound and sold for three under the hammer at sheriff's sale.
At that time I had advanced to my neighbors and others upon their hop crops more than a hundred thousand dollars, which was lost.
These people simply could not pay, and I forgave the debt, taking no judgments against them, and I have never regretted the action.
All my accumulations were swept away, and I quit the business-or, rather, the business quit me.
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ARMY LETTERS FROM AN OFFICER'S WIFE
PREFACE
PERHAPS it is not necessary to say that the events mentioned in the letters are not imaginary-perhaps the letters themselves tell that! They are truthful accounts of experiences that came into my own life with the Army in the far West, whether they be about Indians, desperadoes, or hunting-not one little thing has been stolen.
All flowery descriptions have been omitted, as it seemed that a simple, concise narration of events as they actually occurred, was more in keeping with the life, and that which came into it.
KIT CARSON, COLORADO TERRITORY, October, eighteen seventy one.
They looked, in the moonlight, like huge cakes of clay, where spooks and creepy things might be found.
The hotel is much like the houses, and appears to have been made of dirt, and a few drygoods boxes.
Even the low roof is of dirt.
The whole place is horrible, and dismal beyond description, and just why anyone lives here I cannot understand.
I am all upset!
Faye has just been in to say that only one of my trunks can be taken on the stage with us, and of course I had to select one that has all sorts of things in it, and consequently leave my pretty dresses here, to be sent for-all but the Japanese silk which happens to be in that trunk.
And then, to make my shortcomings the more vexatious, Faye will be simply fine all the time, in his brand new uniform!
FORT LYON, COLORADO TERRITORY, October, eighteen seventy one.
AFTER months of anticipation and days of weary travel we have at last got to our army home!
As you know, Fort Lyon is fifty miles from Kit Carson, and we came all that distance in a funny looking stage coach called a "jerkey," and a good name for it, too, for at times it seesawed back and forth and then sideways, in an awful breakneck way.
The day was glorious, and the atmosphere so clear, we could see miles and miles in every direction.
It was dark when we reached the post, so of course we could see nothing that night.
General and mrs Phillips gave us a most cordial welcome-just as though they had known us always.
Dinner was served soon after we arrived, and the cheerful dining room, and the table with its dainty china and bright silver, was such a surprise-so much nicer than anything we had expected to find here, and all so different from the terrible places we had seen since reaching the plains.
It was apparent at once that this was not a place for spooks!
I was so disappointed when I was told this, but Faye says that he is very much afraid that I will have cause, sooner or later, to think that the grade of captain is quite high enough.
He thinks this way because, having graduated at West Point this year, he is only a second lieutenant just now, and General Phillips is his captain and company commander.
At least that is what they tell me.
Most girls would.
A soldier in uniform waited upon us at dinner, and that seemed so funny.
I wanted to watch him all the time, which distracted me, I suppose, for once I called General Phillips "Mister!"
It so happened, too, that just that instant there was not a sound in the room, so everyone heard the blunder. General Phillips straightened back in his chair, and his little son gave a smothered giggle-for which he should have been sent to bed at once. But that was not all!
That soldier, who had been so dignified and stiff, put his hand over his mouth and fairly rushed from the room so he could laugh outright.
And how I longed to run some place, too-but not to laugh, oh, no!
When I told Faye about it, he looked vexed and said I must never laugh at an enlisted man-that it was not dignified in the wife of an officer to do so.
I wanted to say more, but Faye suddenly left the room.
There is no high wall around it as there is at Fort Trumbull.
A little ditch-they call it acequia-runs all around the post, and brings water to the trees and lawns, but water for use in the houses is brought up in wagons from the Arkansas River, and is kept in barrels.
Yesterday morning-our first here-we were awakened by the sounds of fife and drum that became louder and louder, until finally I thought the whole Army must be marching to the house.
I stumbled over everything in the room in my haste to get to one of the little dormer windows, but there was nothing to be seen, as it was still quite dark.
The drumming became less loud, and then ceased altogether, when a big gun was fired that must have wasted any amount of powder, for it shook the house and made all the windows rattle.
Then three or four bugles played a little air, which it was impossible to hear because of the horrible howling and crying of dogs-such howls of misery you never heard-they made me shiver.
There was the same performance this morning, and at breakfast I asked General Phillips why soldiers required such a beating of drums, and deafening racket generally, to awaken them in the morning.
So it is apparent to me that the safest thing to do is to call everyone general-there seem to be so many here.
If I make a mistake, it will be on the right side, at least.
But instead of the smile and gracious acquiescence I had expected, there was another straightening back in the chair, and a silence that was ominous and chilling.
Finally, he recovered sufficient breath to tell me that at present, there were no good carpenters in the company.
Later on, however, I learned that only captains and officers of higher rank can have such things.
The captains seem to have the best of everything, and the lieutenants are expected to get along with smaller houses, much less pay, and much less everything else, and at the same time perform all of the disagreeable duties.
Faye is wonderfully amiable about it, and assures me that when he gets to be a captain I will see that it is just and fair.
But I happen to remember that he told me not long ago that he might not get his captaincy for twenty years.
Just think of it-a whole long lifetime-and always a Mister, too-and perhaps by that time it will be "just and fair" for the lieutenants to have everything!
It has a hall with a pretty stairway, three rooms and a large shed downstairs, and two rooms and a very large hall closet on the second floor.
A soldier is cleaning the windows and floors, and making things tidy generally.
Many of the men like to cook, and do things for officers of their company, thereby adding to their pay, and these men are called strikers.
There are four companies here-three of infantry and one troop of cavalry.
You must always remember that Faye is in the infantry.
With the cavalry he has a classmate, and a friend, also, which will make it pleasant for both of us.
In my letters to you I will disregard army etiquette, and call the lieutenants by their rank, otherwise you would not know of whom I was writing-an officer or civilian.
Lieutenant Baldwin has been on the frontier many years, and is an experienced hunter of buffalo and antelope.
He says that I must commence riding horseback at once, and has generously offered me the use of one of his horses.
mrs Phillips insists upon my using her saddle until I can get one from the East, so I can ride as soon as our trunks come.
And I am to learn to shoot pistols and guns, and do all sorts of things.
We are to remain with General and mrs Phillips several days, while our own house is being made habitable, and in the meantime our trunks and boxes will come, also the colored cook.
I have not missed my dresses very much-there has been so much else to think about.
There is a little store just outside the post that is named "Post Trader's," where many useful things are kept, and we have just been there to purchase some really nice furniture that an officer left to be sold when he was retired last spring.
We got only enough to make ourselves comfortable during the winter, for it seems to be the general belief here that these companies of infantry will be ordered to Camp Supply, Indian Territory, in the spring.
It must be a most dreadful place-with old log houses built in the hot sand hills, and surrounded by almost every tribe of hostile Indians.
FORT LYON, COLORADO TERRITORY, October, eighteen seventy one.
Well, I have seen an Indian-a number of Indians-but they were not Red Jackets, neither were they noble red men.
They were simply, and only, painted, dirty, and nauseous smelling savages!
There are several small stores in the half Mexican village, where curious little things from Mexico can often be found, if one does not mind poking about underneath the trash and dirt that is everywhere.
As they came toward us in their imperious way, never once looking to the right or to the left, they seemed like giants, and to increase in size and numbers with every step.
Their coming was so sudden we did not have a chance to get out of their way, and it so happened that mrs Phillips and I were in their line of march, and when the one in the lead got to us, we were pushed aside with such impatient force that we both fell over on the counter.
The others passed on just the same, however, and if we had fallen to the floor, I presume they would have stepped over us, and otherwise been oblivious to our existence.
As soon as they got to the counter they demanded powder, balls, and percussion caps, and as these things were given them, they were stuffed down their muzzle loading rifles, and what could not be rammed down the barrels was put in greasy skin bags and hidden under their blankets.
I saw one test the sharp edge of a long, wicked looking knife, and then it, also, disappeared under his blanket.
All this time the other Indians were on their ponies in front, watching every move that was being made around them.
It was an awful situation to be in, and one to terrify anybody.
We were actually prisoners-penned in with all those savages, who were evidently in an ugly mood, with quantities of ammunition within their reach, and only two white men to protect us.
Even the few small windows had iron bars across.
They could have killed every one of us, and ridden far away before anyone in the sleepy town found it out.
Well, when those inside had been given, or had helped themselves to, whatever they wanted, out they all marched again, quickly and silently, just as they had come in.
They instantly mounted their ponies, and all rode down the street and out of sight at race speed, some leaning so far over on their little beasts that one could hardly see the Indian at all. The pony that was ridden into the store door was without a bridle, and was guided by a long strip of buffalo skin which was fastened around his lower jaw by a slipknot.
The Utes and Cheyennes are bitter enemies.
He said that the Utes were very cross-ready for the blood of Indian or white man-therefore he had permitted them to do about as they pleased while in the store, particularly as we were there, and he saw that we were frightened.
That young man did not know that his own swarthy face was a greenish white all the time those Indians were in the store!
Not one penny did they pay for the things they carried off.
There was hatred in their eyes as they approached us in that store, and there was restrained murder in the hand that pushed mrs Phillips and me over.
They were all hideous-with streaks of red or green paint on their faces that made them look like fiends.
These were their scalp locks.
They were not tall, but rather short and stocky.
The odor of those skins, and of the Indians themselves, in that stuffy little shop, I expect to smell the rest of my life!
We heard this morning that those very savages rode out on the plains in a roundabout way, so as to get in advance of the Cheyennes, and then had hidden themselves on the top of a bluff overlooking the trail they knew the Cheyennes to be following, and had fired upon them as they passed below, killing two and wounding a number of others.
You can see how treacherous these Indians are, and how very far from noble is their method of warfare!
They are so disappointing, too-so wholly unlike Cooper's red men.
We were glad enough to get in the ambulance and start on our way to the post, but alas! our troubles were not over.
The mules must have felt the excitement in the air, for as soon as their heads were turned toward home they proceeded to run away with us.
We had the four little mules that are the special pets of the quartermaster, and are known throughout the garrison as the "shaved tails," because the hair on their tails is kept closely cut down to the very tips, where it is left in a square brush of three or four inches.
They are perfectly matched-coal black all over, except their little noses, and are quite small.
They are full of mischief, and full of wisdom, too, even for government mules, and when one says, "Let's take a sprint," the others always agree-about that there is never the slightest hesitation.
But we got over the narrow bridge without meeting more than one man, who climbed over the railing and seemed less anxious to meet us than we were to meet him. As soon as we got on the road again, those mules, with preliminary kicks and shakes of their big heads, began to demonstrate how fast they could go.
When we reached the post they made a wonderful turn and took us safely to the government corral, where they stopped, just when they got ready.
One leader looked around at us and commenced to bray, but the driver was in no mood for such insolence, and jerked the poor thing almost down.
Three tired, disheveled women walked from the corral to their homes; and very glad one of them was to get home, too!
Hereafter I shall confine myself to horseback riding-for, even if john is frisky at times, I prefer to take my chances with the one horse, to four little long eared government mules!
But I have learned to ride very well, and have a secure seat now.
My teachers, Faye and Lieutenant Baldwin, have been most exacting, but that I wanted.
Of course I ride the army way, tight in the saddle, which is more difficult to learn.
Any attempt to "rise" when on a trot is ridiculed at once here, and it does look absurd after seeing the splendid and graceful riding of the officers.
IN many of my letters I have written about learning to ride and to shoot, and have told you, also, of having followed the greyhounds after coyotes and rabbits with Faye and Lieutenant Baldwin.
These hunts exact the very best of riding and a fast horse, for coyotes are very swift, and so are jack rabbits, too, and one look at a greyhound will tell anyone that he can run-and about twice as fast as the big eared foxhounds in the East.
But I started to write you about something quite different from all this-to tell you of a really grand hunt I have been on-a splendid chase after buffalo!
A week or so ago it was decided that a party of enlisted men should be sent out to get buffalo meat for Thanksgiving dinner for everybody-officers and enlisted men-and that Lieutenant Baldwin, who is an experienced hunter, should command the detail.
You can imagine how proud and delighted I was when asked to go with them.
Lieutenant Baldwin saying that the hunt would be worth seeing, and well repay one for the fatigue of the hard ride.
So, one morning after an early breakfast, the horses were led up from the stables, each one having on a strong halter, and a coiled picket rope with an iron pin fastened to the saddle.
These were carried so that if it should be found necessary to secure the horses on the plains, they could be picketed out.
The bachelors' set of quarters is next to ours, so we all got ready together, and I must say that the deliberate way in which each girth was examined, bridles fixed, rifles fastened to saddles, and other things done, was most exasperating.
But we finally started, about seven o'clock, Lieutenant Baldwin and I taking the lead, and Faye and Lieutenant Alden following.
Two large army wagons followed us, each drawn by four mules, and carrying several enlisted men.
Mounted orderlies led extra horses that officers and men were to ride when they struck the herd.
Well, we rode twelve miles without seeing one living thing, and then we came to a little adobe ranch where we dismounted to rest a while.
By this time our feet and hands were almost frozen, and Faye suggested that I should remain at the ranch until they returned; but that I refused to do-to give up the hunt was not to be thought of, particularly as a ranchman had just told us that a small herd of buffalo had been seen that very morning only two miles farther on.
So, when the horses were a little rested, we started, and, after riding a mile or more, we came to a small ravine, where we found one poor buffalo, too old and emaciated to keep up with his companions, and who, therefore, had been abandoned by them, to die alone.
He had eaten the grass as far as he could reach, and had turned around and around until the ground looked as though it had been spaded.
He got up on his old legs as we approached him, and tried to show fight by dropping his head and throwing his horns to the front, but a child could have pushed him over.
One of the officers tried to persuade me to shoot him, saying it would be a humane act, and at the same time give me the prestige of having killed a buffalo!
But the very thought of pointing a pistol at anything so weak and utterly helpless was revolting in the extreme.
He was very tall, had a fine head, with an uncommonly long beard, and showed every indication of having been a grand specimen of his kind.
We left him undisturbed, but only a few minutes later we heard the sharp report of a rifle, and at once suspected, what we learned to be a fact the next day, that one of the men with the wagons had killed him. Possibly this was the most merciful thing to do, but to me that shot meant murder.
The pitiful bleary eyes of the helpless old beast have haunted me ever since we saw him.
We must have gone at least two miles farther before we saw the herd we were looking for, making fifteen or sixteen miles altogether that we had ridden.
We immediately fell back a short distance and waited for the wagons, and when they came up there was great activity, I assure you.
Faye would not join in the hunt, but remained with me the entire day.
He and I rode over the hill, stopping when we got where we could command a good view of the valley and watch the run.
It seemed only a few minutes when we saw the buffalo start, going from some of the men, of course, who at once began to chase them.
This kept them running straight ahead, and, fortunately, in Lieutenant Baldwin's direction, who apparently was holding his horse in, waiting for them to come.
We saw through our field glasses that as soon as they got near enough he made a quick dash for the herd, and cutting one out, had turned it so it was headed straight for us.
But he would not go back one step, assuring me that my horse was a trained hunter and accustomed to such sights.
Lieutenant Baldwin gained steadily on the buffalo, and in a wonderfully short time both passed directly in front of us-within a hundred feet, Faye said.
Lieutenant Baldwin was close upon him then, his horse looking very small and slender by the side of the grand animal that was taking easy, swinging strides, apparently without effort and without speed, his tongue lolling at one side.
But we could see that the pace was really terrific-that Lieutenant Baldwin was freely using the spur, and that his swift thoroughbred was stretched out like a greyhound, straining every muscle in his effort to keep up.
My horse behaved very well-just whirling around a few times-but Faye was kept busy a minute or two by his, for the poor horse was awfully frightened, and lunged and reared and snorted; but I knew that he could not unseat Faye, so I rather enjoyed it, for you know I had wanted to go back a little!
Lieutenant Baldwin and the buffalo were soon far away, and when our horses had quieted down we recalled that shots had been fired in another direction, and looking about, we saw a pathetic sight.
Lieutenant Alden was on his horse, and facing him was an immense buffalo, standing perfectly still with chin drawn in and horns to the front, ready for battle.
It was plain to be seen that the poor horse was not enjoying the meeting, for every now and then he would try to back away, or give a jump sideways.
The buffalo was wounded and unable to run, but he could still turn around fast enough to keep his head toward the horse, and this he did every time Lieutenant Alden tried to get an aim at his side.
There was no possibility of his killing him without assistance, and of course the poor beast could not be abandoned in such a helpless condition, so Faye decided to go over and worry him, while Lieutenant Alden got in the fatal shot.
As soon as Faye got there I put my fingers over my ears so that I would not hear the report of the pistol.
After a while I looked across, and there was the buffalo still standing, and both Faye and Lieutenant Alden were beckoning for me to come to them.
I saw no glory in shooting a wounded animal, so I turned my horse back again, but had not gone far before I heard the pistol shot.
They said he was a magnificent specimen-unusually large, and very black-what they call a blue skin-with a splendid head and beard.
Very soon after that Faye and I came on home, reaching the post about seven o'clock.
But I got through the day very well, considering the very short time I have been riding-that is, really riding.
The rest of the party did not come in until several hours later; but they brought the meat and skins of four buffalo, and the head of Lieutenant Alden's, which he will send East to be mounted.
The skin he intends to take to an Indian camp, to be tanned by the squaws. Lieutenant Baldwin followed his buffalo until he got in the position he wanted, and then killed him with one shot.
Faye says that only a cool head and experience could have done that.
Much depends upon the horse, too, for so many horses are afraid of a buffalo, and lunge sideways just at the critical moment.
Several experienced hunters tell marvelous tales of how they have stood within a few yards of a buffalo and fired shot after shot from a Springfield rifle, straight at his head, the balls producing no effect whatever, except, perhaps, a toss of the head and the flying out of a tuft of hair.
Every time the ball would glance off from the thick skull. The wonderful mat of curly hair must break the force some, too.
FORT LYON, COLORADO TERRITORY, December, eighteen seventy one.
OUR first Christmas on the frontier was ever so pleasant, but it certainly was most vexatious not to have that box from home.
And I expect that it has been at Kit Carson for days, waiting to be brought down.
We had quite a little Christmas without it, however, for a number of things came from the girls, and several women of the garrison sent pretty little gifts to me.
All the little presents were spread out on a table, and in a way to make them present as fine an appearance as possible.
I did this to let everyone know that we had not been forgotten by home people.
They have such a charming custom in the Army of going along the line Christmas morning and giving each other pleasant greetings and looking at the pretty things everyone has received.
This is a rare treat out here, where we are so far from shops and beautiful Christmas displays. We all went to the bachelors' quarters, almost everyone taking over some little remembrance-homemade candy, cakes, or something of that sort.
I had a splendid cake to send over that morning, and I will tell you just what happened to it.
At home we always had a large fruit cake made for the holidays, long in advance, and I thought I would have one this year as near like it as possible.
But it seemed that the only way to get it was to make it.
So, about four weeks ago, I commenced.
Well, for two long, tiresome days I worked over that cake, preparing with my own fingers every bit of the fruit, which I consider was a fine test of perseverance and staying qualities.
After the ingredients were all mixed together there seemed to be enough for a whole regiment, so we decided to make two cakes of it.
They looked lovely when baked, and just right, and smelled so good, too!
I wrapped them in nice white paper that had been wet with brandy, and put them carefully away-one in a stone jar, the other in a tin box-and felt that I had done a remarkably fine bit of housekeeping.
The bachelors have been exceedingly kind to me, and I rejoiced at having a nice cake to send them Christmas morning.
But alas!
I forgot that the little house was fragrant with the odor of spice and fruit, and that there was a man about who was ever on the lookout for good things to eat.
It is a shame that those cadets at West Point are so starved.
They seem to be simply famished for months after they graduate.
It so happened that there was choir practice that very evening, and that I was at the chapel an hour or so.
Before I was quite in the room they all stood up and began to praise the cake.
I think Faye was the first to mention it, saying it was a "great success"; then the others said "perfectly delicious," and so on, but at the same time assuring me that a large piece had been left for me.
For one minute I stood still, not in the least grasping their meaning; but finally I suspected mischief, they all looked so serenely contented. So I passed on to the dining room, and there, on the table, was one of the precious cakes---at least what was left of it, the very small piece that had been so generously saved for me.
And there were plates with crumbs, and napkins, that told the rest of the sad tale-and there was wine and empty glasses, also.
Their early Christmas had been a fine one.
There was nothing for me to say or do-at least not just then-so I went back to the little living room and forced myself to be halfway pleasant to the four men who were there, each one looking precisely like the cat after it had eaten the canary!
The cake was scarcely cold, and must have been horribly sticky-and I remember wondering, as I sat there, which one would need the doctor first, and what the doctor would do if they were all seized with cramps at the same time.
But they were not ill-not in the least-which proved that the cake was well baked.
We sang our Christmas music, and received many compliments.
Both General Phillips and Major Pierce have fine voices.
One of the infantry sergeants plays the organ now, for it was quite too hard for me to sing and work those old pedals.
Once I forgot them entirely, and everybody smiled-even the chaplain!
From the chapel we-that is, the company officers and their wives-went to the company barracks to see the men's dinner tables.
When we entered the dining hall we found the entire company standing in two lines, one down each side, every man in his best inspection uniform, and every button shining.
With eyes to the front and hands down their sides they looked absurdly like wax figures waiting to be "wound up," and I did want so much to tell the little son of General Phillips to pinch one and make him jump.
He would have done it, too, and then put all the blame upon me, without loss of time.
The first sergeant came to meet us, and went around with us.
There were three long tables, fairly groaning with things upon them: buffalo, antelope, boiled ham, several kinds of vegetables, pies, cakes, quantities of pickles, dried "apple duff," and coffee, and in the center of each table, high up, was a huge cake thickly covered with icing. These were the cakes that mrs Phillips, mrs Barker, and I had sent over that morning.
It is the custom in the regiment for the wives of the officers every Christmas to send the enlisted men of their husbands' companies large plum cakes, rich with fruit and sugar.
The hall was very prettily decorated with flags and accoutrements, but one missed the greens.
There are no evergreen trees here, only cottonwood.
Before coming out, General Phillips said a few pleasant words to the men, wishing them a "Merry Christmas" for all of us. Judging from the laughing and shuffling of feet as soon as we got outside, the men were glad to be allowed to relax once more.
At six o'clock Faye and I, Lieutenant Baldwin, and Lieutenant Alden dined with Doctor and mrs Wilder.
It was a beautiful little dinner, very delicious, and served in the daintiest manner possible.
But out here one is never quite sure of what one is eating, for sometimes the most tempting dishes are made of almost nothing.
At holiday time, however, it seems that the post trader sends to saint Louis for turkeys, celery, canned oysters, and other things.
We have no fresh vegetables here, except potatoes, and have to depend upon canned stores in the commissary for a variety, and our meat consists entirely of beef, except now and then, when we may have a treat to buffalo or antelope.
The music consisted of one violin with accordion accompaniment.
This would seem absurd in the East, but I can assure you that one accordion, when played well by a German, is an orchestra in itself.
And Doos plays very well.
The girls East may have better music to dance by, and polished waxed floors to slip down upon, but they cannot have the excellent partners one has at an army post, and I choose the partners!
The officers are excellent dancers-every one of them-and when you are gliding around, your chin, or perhaps your nose, getting a scratch now and then from a gorgeous gold epaulet, you feel as light as a feather, and imagine yourself with a fairy prince.
Of course the officers were in full dress uniform Friday night, so I know just what I am talking about, scratches and all.
Every woman appeared in her finest gown.
I wore my nile green silk, which I am afraid showed off my splendid coat of tan only too well.
The party was given for Doctor and mrs Anderson, who are guests of General Bourke for a few days.
mrs Anderson was very handsome in an elegant gown of London smoke silk.
I am to assist mrs Phillips in receiving New Year's day, and shall wear my pearl colored Irish poplin.
We are going out now for a little ride.
CHAPTER nine.
The three of us went back towards the pavilion.
"That's where the murderer came from to get into the pavilion."
"That path is as you see, topped with gravel," he said; "the man must have passed along it going to the pavilion, since no traces of his steps have been found on the soft ground.
The man didn't have wings; he walked; but he walked on the gravel which left no impression of his tread.
"After all it is very possible," I said.
I begged of him not to be angry; but he was too much irritated to listen to me and declared, ironically, that he admired the prudent doubt with which certain people approached the most simple problems, risking nothing by saying "that is so, or 'that is not so." Their intelligence would have produced about the same result if nature had forgotten to furnish their brain pan with a little grey matter.
As I appeared vexed, my young friend took me by the arm and admitted that he had not meant that for me; he thought more of me than that.
"If I did not reason as I do in regard to this gravel," he went on, "I should have to assume a balloon!--My dear fellow, the science of the aerostation of dirigible balloons is not yet developed enough for me to consider it and suppose that a murderer would drop from the clouds!
So don't say a thing is possible, when it could not be otherwise.
The fact of the presence of the chambermaid-who had come to clean up The Yellow Room-in the laboratory, when Monsieur Stangerson and his daughter returned from their walk, at half past one, permits us to affirm that at half past one the murderer was not in the chamber under the bed, unless he was in collusion with the chambermaid.
What do you say, Monsieur Darzac?"
Monsieur Darzac shook his head and said he was sure of the chambermaid's fidelity, and that she was a thoroughly honest and devoted servant.
"Besides," he added, "at five o'clock Monsieur Stangerson went into the room to fetch his daughter's hat."
It was an act which would necessarily draw the attention of those who had left it open."
"And what is your hypothesis?"
"You will never know if it does not turn out to be the truth.
I could not but observe that Monsieur Darzac was deeply moved; and I suspected that Rouletabille's confident assertion was not pleasing to him.
We were passing by the thicket, of which the young reporter had spoken to us a minute before.
Having said this, he asked me for the paper pattern of the footprint which he had given me to take care of, and applied it to a very clear footmark behind the thicket.
"Aha!" he said, rising.
See, just in front of the little path leading to the lake, that was his nearest way to get out."
There must be some important marks there."
A few minutes later we reached the lake.
The great Fred may have seen us approaching, but we probably interested him very little, for he took hardly any notice of us and continued to be stirring with his cane something which we could not see.
The man continued his flight to Paris."
"What makes you think that?" I asked, "since these footmarks are not continued on the path?"
"What makes me think that?--Why these footprints, which I expected to find!" he cried, pointing to the sharply outlined imprint of a neat boot.
"See!"--and he called to Frederic Larsan.
"Monsieur Fred, these neat footprints seem to have been made since the discovery of the crime."
"You see, there are steps that come, and steps that go back."
"And the man had a bicycle!" cried the reporter.
Here, after looking at the marks of the bicycle, which followed, going and coming, the neat footprints, I thought I might intervene.
"The bicycle explains the disappearance of the murderer's big foot prints," I said.
"The murderer, with his rough boots, mounted a bicycle.
His accomplice, the wearer of the neat boots, had come to wait for him on the edge of the lake with the bicycle.
It might be supposed that the murderer was working for the other."
"I have expected to find these footmarks from the very beginning.
These are not the footmarks of the murderer!"
"Then there were two?"
"Very good!--Very good!" cried Frederic Larsan.
If there had been a man on the bicycle, the wheels would have sunk deeply into the soil.
No, no; there was but one man there, the murderer on foot."
"Bravo!--bravo!" cried Fred again, and coming suddenly towards us and, planting himself in front of Monsieur Robert Darzac, he said to him:
"If we had a bicycle here, we might demonstrate the correctness of the young man's reasoning, Monsieur Robert Darzac.
Do you know whether there is one at the chateau?"
"No!" replied Monsieur Darzac.
"There is not.
"Yes," said my young friend; "I have an idea."
There are no two ways of reasoning in this affair.
I am waiting for the arrival of my chief before offering any explanation to the examining magistrate."
"Ah!
"Yes, this afternoon.
He is going to summon, before the magistrate, in the laboratory, all those who have played any part in this tragedy.
"Really-you are an extraordinary fellow-for your age!" replied the detective in a tone not wholly free from irony.
"You'd make a wonderful detective-if you had a little more method-if you didn't follow your instincts and that bump on your forehead.
You have seen the stain on the wall, but I have only seen the handkerchief."
You are right, when you say that Mademoiselle Stangerson fired her revolver, but you are wrong when you say that she wounded the murderer in the hand."
Fred, imperturbable, interrupted him:
The great Fred spoke quite seriously.
However, I could not refrain from uttering an exclamation.
The reporter looked gravely at Fred, who looked gravely at him.
"The man allowed the blood to flow into his hand and handkerchief, and dried his hand on the wall.
After a moment he said:
"There is something-a something, Monsieur Frederic Larsan, much graver than the misuse of logic the disposition of mind in some detectives which makes them, in perfect good faith, twist logic to the necessities of their preconceived ideas.
You, already, have your idea about the murderer, Monsieur Fred.
And laughing a little, in a slightly bantering tone, his hands in his pockets, Rouletabille fixed his cunning eyes on the great Fred.
Frederic Larsan silently contemplated the young reporter who pretended to be as wise as himself.
Shrugging his shoulders, he bowed to us and moved quickly away, hitting the stones on his path with his stout cane.
"I shall beat him!" he cried.
"I shall beat the great Fred, clever as he is; I shall beat them all!"
And he danced a double shuffle.
Suddenly he stopped.
My eyes followed his gaze; they were fixed on Monsieur Robert Darzac, who was looking anxiously at the impression left by his feet side by side with the elegant footmarks.
We thought he was about to faint.
His eyes, bulging with terror, avoided us, while his right hand, with a spasmodic movement, twitched at the beard that covered his honest, gentle, and now despairing face.
He, also, appeared to be deeply concerned.
From his pocket book he took a piece of white paper as I had seen him do before, and with his scissors, cut out the shape of the neat bootmarks that were on the ground.
Then he fitted the new paper pattern with the one he had previously made-the two were exactly alike.
CHAPTER ten "We Shall Have to Eat Red Meat-Now"
The Donjon Inn was of no imposing appearance; but I like these buildings with their rafters blackened with age and the smoke of their hearths-these inns of the coaching days, crumbling erections that will soon exist in the memory only.
They belong to the bygone days, they are linked with history.
They make us think of the Road, of those days when highwaymen rode.
I saw at once that the Donjon Inn was at least two centuries old-perhaps older.
When we were close to him, he deigned to see us and asked us, in a tone anything but engaging, whether we wanted anything.
He was, no doubt, the not very amiable landlord of this charming dwelling place.
As we expressed a hope that he would be good enough to furnish us with a breakfast, he assured us that he had no provisions, regarding us, as he said this, with a look that was unmistakably suspicious.
"I'm not afraid of the police-I'm not afraid of anyone!" replied the man.
I had made my friend understand by a sign that we should do better not to insist; but, being determined to enter the inn, he slipped by the man on the doorstep and was in the common room.
"Come on," he said, "it is very comfortable here."
The room was a tolerably large one, furnished with two heavy tables, some stools, a counter decorated with rows of bottles of syrup and alcohol.
A coloured advertisement lauded the many merits of a new vermouth.
On the mantelpiece was arrayed the innkeeper's collection of figured earthenware pots and stone jugs.
"We have no chicken-not even a wretched rabbit," said the landlord.
"I know," said my friend slowly; "I know-We shall have to eat red meat-now."
Meantime the man had pushed open a little side door and called to somebody to bring him half a dozen eggs and a piece of beefsteak.
The innkeeper said to her roughly:
She disappeared.
The landlord let us do our own cooking and set our table near one of the windows.
There was no need for me to draw Rouletabille's attention; he had already left our omelette and had joined the landlord at the window.
He carried a fowling piece slung at his back.
He wore eye glasses and appeared to be about five and forty years of age.
"He has done well not to come in here to day!" he hissed.
"Don't you know him?
Then all the better for you.
He is not an acquaintance to make.--Well, he is Monsieur Stangerson's forest keeper."
He's an upstart who must once have had a fortune of his own; and he forgives nobody because, in order to live, he has been compelled to become a servant.
He'll not let a poor creature eat a morsel of bread on the grass his grass!"
"Does he often come here?"
"Too often.
But I've made him understand that his face doesn't please me, and, for a month past, he hasn't been here.
Why, the concierges of the chateau would turn their eyes away from a picture of him!"
"The concierges of the chateau are honest people, then?"
"Yes, they are, as true as my name's Mathieu, monsieur.
"Yet they've been arrested?"
"What does that prove?--But I don't want to mix myself up in other people's affairs."
"Of the murder of poor Mademoiselle Stangerson?--A good girl much loved everywhere in the country.
The innkeeper looked at him sideways and said gruffly:
"Not even yours."
And she entered, followed by a cat, larger than any I had ever believed could exist.
The beast looked at us and gave so hopeless a miau that I shuddered.
As the Green Man entered, Daddy Mathieu had started violently; but visibly mastering himself he said:
"I've no more cider; I served the last bottles to these gentlemen."
"Quite well, thank you."
Mother Angenoux was still standing, leaning on her stick, the cat at her feet.
"Yes, Monsieur keeper.
There was no one to care for me but the Bete du bon Dieu!"
"Did she not leave you?"
"Are you sure of that?"
Mother Angenoux planted herself in front of the forest keeper and struck the floor with her stick.
"I don't know anything about it," she said.
"But shall I tell you something?
There are no two cats in the world that cry like that.
I crossed myself when I heard that, as if I had heard the devil."
I looked at the keeper when he put the last question, and I am much mistaken if I did not detect an evil smile on his lips.
The Green Man quickly rose and hurried to the door by the side of the fireplace; but it was opened by the landlord who appeared, and said to the keeper:
He held out a packet to the old woman, who took it eagerly and went out by the door, closely followed by her cat.
Take yourself off."
The Green Man quietly refilled his pipe, lit it, bowed to us, and went out.
"I don't know who you are who tell me 'We shall have to eat red meat-now'; but if it will interest you to know it-that man is the murderer!"
"Now we'll grill our steak.
How do you like the cider?--It's a little tart, but I like it."
We saw no more of Daddy Mathieu that day, and absolute silence reigned in the inn when we left it, after placing five francs on the table in payment for our feast.
Rouletabille at once set off on a three mile walk round Professor Stangerson's estate.
"You don't think, then, that the keeper knows anything of it?" I asked.
"We shall see that, later," he replied.
The landlord hates him.
With the skill of an acrobat, he got into the lodge by an upper window which had been left open, and returned ten minutes later.
He said only, "Ah!"--a word which, in his mouth, signified many things.
We were about to take the road leading to the chateau, when a considerable stir at the park gate attracted our attention.
Their substance we consider absolutely and in relation to corporeal things.
Concerning their substance absolutely considered, there are five points of inquiry:
Objection one: It would seem that an angel is not entirely incorporeal. For what is incorporeal only as regards ourselves, and not in relation to God, is not absolutely incorporeal.
Therefore, every creature is corporeal.
For what is principally intended by God in creatures is good, and this consists in assimilation to God Himself.
And the perfect assimilation of an effect to a cause is accomplished when the effect imitates the cause according to that whereby the cause produces the effect; as heat makes heat.
Hence the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures.
Now intelligence cannot be the action of a body, nor of any corporeal faculty; for every body is limited to "here" and "now." Hence the perfection of the universe requires the existence of an incorporeal creature.
The ancients, however, not properly realizing the force of intelligence, and failing to make a proper distinction between sense and intellect, thought that nothing existed in the world but what could be apprehended by sense and imagination.
But the very fact that intellect is above sense is a reasonable proof that there are some incorporeal things comprehensible by the intellect alone.
Now the medium compared to one extreme appears to be the other extreme, as what is tepid compared to heat seems to be cold; and thus it is said that angels, compared to God, are material and corporeal, not, however, as if anything corporeal existed in them.
Therefore an angel is called an ever mobile substance, because he is ever actually intelligent, and not as if he were sometimes actually and sometimes potentially, as we are.
Whether an Angel Is Composed of Matter and Form?
Objection one: It would seem that an angel is composed of matter and form.
For everything which is contained under any genus is composed of the genus, and of the difference which added to the genus makes the species.
Therefore everything which is in a genus is composed of matter and form.
Therefore he is composed of matter and form.
Therefore an angel is composed of matter and form.
So what is form only is pure act.
But an angel is not pure act, for this belongs to God alone.
So the form which is not in matter is an infinite form.
But the form of an angel is not infinite, for every creature is finite.
Therefore the form of an angel is in matter.
Now as regards incorporeal substance, the intellect apprehends that which distinguishes it from corporeal substance, and that which it has in common with it.
Hence he concludes that what distinguishes incorporeal from corporeal substance is a kind of form to it, and whatever is subject to this distinguishing form, as it were something common, is its matter.
Therefore, he asserts the universal matter of spiritual and corporeal things is the same; so that it must be understood that the form of incorporeal substance is impressed in the matter of spiritual things, in the same way as the form of quantity is impressed in the matter of corporeal things.
But one glance is enough to show that there cannot be one matter of spiritual and of corporeal things.
For it is not possible that a spiritual and a corporeal form should be received into the same part of matter, otherwise one and the same thing would be corporeal and spiritual.
Hence it would follow that one part of matter receives the corporeal form, and another receives the spiritual form.
Therefore it would follow that the matter of spiritual things is subject to quantity; which cannot be.
Therefore it is impossible that corporeal and spiritual things should have the same matter.
It is, further, impossible for an intellectual substance to have any kind of matter.
For the operation belonging to anything is according to the mode of its substance.
Now to understand is an altogether immaterial operation, as appears from its object, whence any act receives its species and nature.
For a thing is understood according to its degree of immateriality; because forms that exist in matter are individual forms which the intellect cannot apprehend as such.
Hence it must be that every individual substance is altogether immaterial.
But things distinguished by the intellect are not necessarily distinguished in reality; because the intellect does not apprehend things according to their mode, but according to its own mode.
Hence material things which are below our intellect exist in our intellect in a simpler mode than they exist in themselves.
Nevertheless, this differs in our mode of conception; for, inasmuch as our intellect considers it as indeterminate, it derives the idea of their genus; and inasmuch as it considers it determinately, it derives the idea of their "difference."
But this is clearly false. For matter receives the form, that thereby it may be constituted in some species, either of air, or of fire, or of something else.
And this can be made evident if we consider the nature of material things which contain a twofold composition.
The first is that of form and matter, whereby the nature is constituted.
Such a composite nature is not its own existence but existence is its act.
Hence the nature itself is related to its own existence as potentiality to act.
And such a kind of composition is understood to be in the angels; and this is what some say, that an angel is composed of, "whereby he is," and "what is," or "existence," and "what is," as Boethius says.
But there is nothing against a creature being considered relatively infinite.
Material creatures are infinite on the part of matter, but finite in their form, which is limited by the matter which receives it.
But immaterial created substances are finite in their being; whereas they are infinite in the sense that their forms are not received in anything else; as if we were to say, for example, that whiteness existing separate is infinite as regards the nature of whiteness, forasmuch as it is not contracted to any one subject; while its "being" is finite as determined to some one special nature.
Whether the Angels Exist in Any Great Number?
Objection one: It would seem that the angels are not in great numbers. For number is a species of quantity, and follows the division of a continuous body.
Therefore the angels cannot exist in any great number.
But among other created natures the angelic nature approaches nearest to God. Therefore since God is supremely one, it seems that there is the least possible number in the angelic nature.
But the movements of the heavenly bodies fall within some small determined number, which we can apprehend.
Therefore the angels are not in greater number than the movements of the heavenly bodies.
Therefore it seems that the multiplication of intellectual substances can only be according to the requirements of the first bodies-that is, of the heavenly ones, so that in some way the shedding form of the aforesaid rays may be terminated in them; and hence the same conclusion is to be drawn as before.
Plato contended that the separate substances are the species of sensible things; as if we were to maintain that human nature is a separate substance of itself: and according to this view it would have to be maintained that the number of the separate substances is the number of the species of sensible things.
Consequently the separate substances cannot be the exemplar species of these sensible things; but have their own fixed natures, which are higher than the natures of sensible things.
It is, however, quite foreign to the custom of the Scriptures for the powers of irrational things to be designated as angels.
Hence it must be said that the angels, even inasmuch as they are immaterial substances, exist in exceeding great number, far beyond all material multitude.
We see, in fact, that incorruptible bodies, exceed corruptible bodies almost incomparably in magnitude; for the entire sphere of things active and passive is something very small in comparison with the heavenly bodies.
Hence it is reasonable to conclude that the immaterial substances as it were incomparably exceed material substances as to multitude.
For thus the immaterial substances would exist to no purpose, unless some movement from them were to appear in corporeal things.
But it is not true that the immaterial substances exist on account of the corporeal, because the end is nobler than the means to the end.
He was forced to make use of this argument, since only through sensible things can we come to know intelligible ones.
Objection one: It would seem that the angels do not differ in species. For since the "difference" is nobler than the 'genus,' all things which agree in what is noblest in them, agree likewise in their ultimate constitutive difference; and so they are the same according to species.
But all angels agree in what is noblest in them-that is to say, in intellectuality.
But the angels seem to differ only from one another according to more and less-namely, as one is simpler than another, and of keener intellect.
Therefore the angels do not differ specifically.
But this would not be so if there were but one individual under one species.
But this is impossible.
For such things as agree in species but differ in number, agree in form, but are distinguished materially.
For it would be necessary for matter to be the principle of distinction of one from the other, not, indeed, according to the division of quantity, since they are incorporeal, but according to the diversity of their powers; and such diversity of matter causes diversity not merely of species, but of genus.
Hence it is much better for the species to be multiplied in the angels than for individuals to be multiplied in the one species.
Whether the Angels Are Incorruptible?
Therefore, since the angels were made by God, it would appear that they are corruptible of their own nature.
The reason for this is, that nothing is corrupted except by its form being separated from the matter.
For what belongs to anything considered in itself can never be separated from it; but what belongs to a thing, considered in relation to something else, can be separated, when that something else is taken away, in view of which it belonged to it.
Roundness can never be taken from the circle, because it belongs to it of itself; but a bronze circle can lose roundness, if the bronze be deprived of its circular shape.
Now to be belongs to a form considered in itself; for everything is an actual being according to its form: whereas matter is an actual being by the form.
Consequently a subject composed of matter and form ceases to be actually when the form is separated from the matter.
Now the species and nature of the operation is understood from the object.
But an intelligible object, being above time, is everlasting.
Hence it is not repugnant to a necessary or incorruptible being to depend for its existence on another as its cause.
Therefore, when it is said that all things, even the angels, would lapse into nothing, unless preserved by God, it is not to be gathered therefrom that there is any principle of corruption in the angels; but that the nature of the angels is dependent upon God as its cause.
QUESTION fifty one
We next inquire about the angels in comparison with corporeal things; and in the first place about their comparison with bodies; secondly, of the angels in comparison with corporeal places; and, thirdly, of their comparison with local movement.
Objection one: It would seem that angels have bodies naturally united to them.
Therefore angels have bodies naturally united to them.
For whatever belongs to any nature as an accident is not found universally in that nature; thus, for instance, to have wings, because it is not of the essence of an animal, does not belong to every animal.
Consequently not all intellectual substances are united to bodies; but some are quite separated from bodies, and these we call angels.
Whether Angels Assume Bodies?
Objection one: It would seem that angels do not assume bodies.
For there is nothing superfluous in the work of an angel, as there is nothing of the kind in the work of nature.
Therefore an angel does not assume a body.
Yet Divine Scripture from time to time introduces angels so apparent as to be seen commonly by all; just as the angels who appeared to Abraham were seen by him and by his whole family, by Lot, and by the citizens of Sodom; in like manner the angel who appeared to Tobias was seen by all present.
Now by such a vision only a body can be beheld.
Moreover that angels assumed bodies under the Old Law was a figurative indication that the Word of God would take a human body; because all the apparitions in the Old Testament were ordained to that one whereby the Son of God appeared in the flesh.
Objection one: It would seem that the angels exercise functions of life in assumed bodies.
For pretence is unbecoming in angels of truth.
Consequently, the angel perceives by the assumed body; and this is the most special function of life.
But it is evident from many passages of Sacred Scripture that angels spoke in assumed bodies.
Therefore in their assumed bodies they exercise functions of life.
Therefore they cannot exercise functions of life through assumed bodies.
For the bodies are assumed merely for this purpose, that the spiritual properties and works of the angels may be manifested by the properties of man and of his works.
This could not so fittingly be done if they were to assume true men; because the properties of such men would lead us to men, and not to angels.
Consequently it can in no way be said that the angels perceive through the organs of their assumed bodies.
Yet the angels are moved accidentally, when such bodies are moved, since they are in them as movers are in the moved; and they are here in such a way as not to be elsewhere, which cannot be said of God.
Accordingly, although God is not moved when the things are moved in which He exists, since He is everywhere; yet the angels are moved accidentally according to the movement of the bodies assumed.
But the food taken by angels was neither changed into the assumed body, nor was the body of such a nature that food could be changed into it; consequently, it was not a true eating, but figurative of spiritual eating.
Hence it is folly to deny it.
Hence by the sons of God are to be understood the sons of Seth, who were good; while by the daughters of men the Scripture designates those who sprang from the race of Cain.
Part one
He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania.
He had never been "captain" of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and meddled with lawsuits.
He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost quixotically honest.
Her mouth was as kind as her spirited eyes, but it drooped.
Not that she wanted to be a teacher!
Of course she would teach!
Una was facing the feminist problem, without knowing what the word "feminist" meant.
This she knew scientifically.
Una crossed blessed matrimony off the list as a commercial prospect.
While she trudged home-a pleasant, inconspicuous, fluffy haired young woman, undramatic as a field daisy-a cataract of protest poured through her.
There was no place to which she could flee.
"Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and I've got to go and scold you," Una agonized.
She pounced on it.
mr and mrs Albert Sessions, of Panama, had gone to New York.
They liked New York.
"Mumsie!" she cried, "we're going to New York!
Is it the letter from Emma Sessions?
"She suggested it, but we are going up independent."
"But can we afford to?...
Published his second book containing these laws in sixteen o nine.
Death of Rudolph in sixteen twelve, and subsequent increased misery and misfortune of Kepler.
Ultimately discovered the connection between the times and distances of the planets for which he had been groping all his mature life, and announced it in sixteen eighteen:--
The book in which this law was published ("On Celestial Harmonies") was dedicated to james of England.
In sixteen twenty had to intervene to protect his mother from being tortured for witchcraft.
Accepted a professorship at Linz.
Published the Rudolphine tables in sixteen twenty seven, embodying Tycho's observations and his own theory.
Made a last effort to overcome his poverty by getting the arrears of his salary paid at Prague, but was unsuccessful, and, contracting brain fever on the journey, died in November, sixteen thirty, aged fifty nine.
A man of keen imagination, indomitable perseverance, and uncompromising love of truth, Kepler overcame ill health, poverty, and misfortune, and placed himself in the very highest rank of scientific men.
His laws, so extraordinarily discovered, introduced order and simplicity into what else would have been a chaos of detailed observations; and they served as a secure basis for the splendid erection made on them by Newton.
LECTURE three
KEPLER AND THE LAWS OF PLANETARY MOTION
The one, rich, noble, vigorous, passionate, strong in mechanical ingenuity and experimental skill, but not above the average in theoretical and mathematical power.
The other, poor, sickly, devoid of experimental gifts, and unfitted by nature for accurate observation, but strong almost beyond competition in speculative subtlety and innate mathematical perception.
The one is the complement of the other; and from the fact of their following each other so closely arose the most surprising benefits to science.
The outward life of Kepler is to a large extent a mere record of poverty and misfortune.
I shall only sketch in its broad features, so that we may have more time to attend to his work.
His parents seem to have been of fair condition, but by reason, it is said, of his becoming surety for a friend, the father lost all his slender income, and was reduced to keeping a tavern.
Young john Kepler was thereupon taken from school, and employed as pot boy between the ages of nine and twelve.
He was a sickly lad, subject to violent illnesses from the cradle, so that his life was frequently despaired of.
Ultimately he was sent to a monastic school and thence to the University of Tuebingen, where he graduated second on the list.
Meanwhile home affairs had gone to rack and ruin. His father abandoned the home, and later died abroad.
An astronomical lectureship at Graz happening to offer itself, he was urged to take it, and agreed to do so, though stipulating that it should not debar him from some more brilliant profession when there was a chance.
For astronomy in those days seems to have ranked as a minor science, like mineralogy or meteorology now.
It had little of the special dignity with which the labours of Kepler himself were destined so greatly to aid in endowing it.
Well, he speedily became a thorough Copernican, and as he had a most singularly restless and inquisitive mind, full of appreciation of everything relating to number and magnitude-was a born speculator and thinker just as Mozart was a born musician, or Bidder a born calculator-he was agitated by questions such as these: Why are there exactly six planets?
Is there any connection between their orbital distances, or between their orbits and the times of describing them? These things tormented him, and he thought about them day and night.
Nowadays, we should simply record the fact and look out for a seventh.
Once more, the further the planet the slower it moved; there seemed to be some law connecting speed and distance.
This also Kepler made continual attempts to discover.
One of his ideas concerning the law of the successive distances was based on the inscription of a triangle in a circle.
Then try inscribing and circumscribing squares, hexagons, and other figures, and see if the circles thus defined would correspond to the several planetary orbits. But they would not give any satisfactory result.
Brooding over this disappointment, the idea of trying solid figures suddenly strikes him. "What have plane figures to do with the celestial orbits?" he cries out; "inscribe the regular solids." And then-brilliant idea-he remembers that there are but five.
On the other hand, he inscribes in the sphere of the earth's orbit an icosahedron; and inside the sphere determined by that, an octahedron; which figures he takes to inclose the spheres of Venus and of Mercury respectively.
The imagined discovery is purely fictitious and accidental.
First of all, eight planets are now known; and secondly, their real distances agree only very approximately with Kepler's hypothesis.
Nevertheless, the idea gave him great delight.
He says:--"The intense pleasure I have received from this discovery can never be told in words. I regretted no more the time wasted; I tired of no labour; I shunned no toil of reckoning, days and nights spent in calculation, until I could see whether my hypothesis would agree with the orbits of Copernicus, or whether my joy was to vanish into air."
He then went on to speculate as to the cause of the planets' motion. The old idea was that they were carried round by angels or celestial intelligences.
Kepler tried to establish some propelling force emanating from the sun, like the spokes of a windmill.
This first book of his brought him into notice, and served as an introduction to Tycho and to Galileo.
Tycho immediately replied, "Come, not as a stranger, but as a very welcome friend; come and share in my observations with such instruments as I have with me, and as a dearly beloved associate." After this visit, Tycho wrote again, offering him the post of mathematical assistant, which after hesitation was accepted.
Part of the hesitation Kepler expresses by saying that "for observations his sight was dull, and for mechanical operations his hand was awkward.
He suffered much from weak eyes, and dare not expose himself to night air." In all this he was, of course, the antipodes of Tycho, but in mathematical skill he was greatly his superior.
On his way to Prague he was seized with one of his periodical illnesses, and all his means were exhausted by the time he could set forward again, so that he had to apply for help to Tycho.
It is clear, indeed, that for some time now he subsisted entirely on the bounty of Tycho, and he expresses himself most deeply grateful for all the kindness he received from that noble and distinguished man, the head of the scientific world at that date.
To illustrate Tycho's kindness and generosity, I must read you a letter written to him by Kepler.
Tycho's secretary replied quietly enough, pointing out the groundlessness and ingratitude of the accusation.
Kepler repents instantly, and replies:--
"MOST NOBLE TYCHO," (these are the words of his letter), "how shall I enumerate or rightly estimate your benefits conferred on me?
For two months you have liberally and gratuitously maintained me, and my whole family; you have provided for all my wishes; you have done me every possible kindness; you have communicated to me everything you hold most dear; no one, by word or deed, has intentionally injured me in anything; in short, not to your children, your wife, or yourself have you shown more indulgence than to me.
Tycho accepted the apology thus heartily rendered, and the temporary breach was permanently healed.
In sixteen o one, Kepler was appointed "Imperial mathematician," to assist Tycho in his calculations.
While Bohemia suffered, however, the world has benefited at his hands; and the tables upon which Tycho was now engaged are well called the Rudolphine tables.
These tables of planetary motion Tycho had always regarded as the main work of his life; but he died before they were finished, and on his death bed he intrusted the completion of them to Kepler, who loyally undertook their charge.
The Imperial funds were by this time, however, so taxed by wars and other difficulties that the tables could only be proceeded with very slowly, a staff of calculators being out of the question.
In fact, Kepler could not get even his own salary paid: he got orders, and promises, and drafts on estates for it; but when the time came for them to be honoured they were worthless, and he had no power to enforce his claims.
So everything but brooding had to be abandoned as too expensive, and he proceeded to study optics.
He gave a very accurate explanation of the action of the human eye, and made many hypotheses, some of them shrewd and close to the mark, concerning the law of refraction of light in dense media: but though several minor points of interest turned up, nothing of the first magnitude came out of this long research.
The true law of refraction was discovered some years after by a Dutch professor, Willebrod Snell.
We must now devote a little time to the main work of Kepler's life.
All the time he had been at Prague he had been making a severe study of the motion of the planet Mars, analyzing minutely Tycho's books of observations, in order to find out, if possible, the true theory of his motion.
Aristotle had taught that circular motion was the only perfect and natural motion, and that the heavenly bodies therefore necessarily moved in circles.
So firmly had this idea become rooted in men's minds, that no one ever seems to have contemplated the possibility of its being false or meaningless.
The carrying circle was called the Deferent.
If for any reason the earth had to be placed out of the centre, the main planetary orbit was called an Excentric, and so on.
But although the planetary paths might be roughly represented by a combination of circles, their speeds could not, on the hypothesis of uniform motion in each circle round the earth as a fixed body.
But now that Kepler had the accurate observations of Tycho to refer to, he found immense difficulty in obtaining the true positions of the planets for long together on any such theory.
He specially attacked the motion of the planet Mars, because that was sufficiently rapid in its changes for a considerable collection of data to have accumulated with respect to it.
He tried all manner of circular orbits for the earth and for Mars, placing them in all sorts of aspects with respect to the sun
The problem to be solved was to choose such an orbit and such a law of speed, for both the earth and Mars, that a line joining them, produced out to the stars, should always mark correctly the apparent position of Mars as seen from the earth.
He had to arrange the size of the orbits that suited best, then the positions of their centres, both being supposed excentric with respect to the sun; but he could not get any such arrangement to work with uniform motion about the sun
The equants might divide the line in any arbitrary ratio.
All sorts of combinations had to be tried, the relative positions of the earth and Mars to be worked out for each, and compared with Tycho's recorded observations.
It was easy to get them to agree for a short time, but sooner or later a discrepancy showed itself.
Grope he did, however, with unexampled diligence.
At length he hit upon a point that seemed nearly right.
He thought he had found the truth; but no, before long the position of the planet, as calculated, and as recorded by Tycho, differed by eight minutes of arc, or about one eighth of a degree.
No, he had known Tycho, and knew that he was never wrong eight minutes in an observation.
So he set out the whole weary way again, and said that with those eight minutes he would yet find out the law of the universe.
He proceeded to see if by making the planet librate, or the plane of its orbit tilt up and down, anything could be done.
He was rewarded by finding that at any rate the plane of the orbit did not tilt up and down: it was fixed, and this was a simplification on Copernicus's theory.
To simplify calculation, he divided the orbit into triangles, and tried if making the triangles equal would do.
A great piece of luck, they did beautifully: the rate of description of areas (not arcs) is uniform.
Over this discovery he greatly rejoices.
He feels as though he had been carrying on a war against the planet and had triumphed; but his gratulation was premature.
Thus he announces it himself:--
"While thus triumphing over Mars, and preparing for him, as for one already vanquished, tabular prisons and equated excentric fetters, it is buzzed here and there that the victory is vain, and that the war is raging anew as violently as before.
For the enemy left at home a despised captive has burst all the chains of the equations, and broken forth from the prisons of the tables."
Still, a part of the truth had been gained, and was not to be abandoned any more.
The law of speed was fixed: that which is now known as his second law.
But what about the shape of the orbit-Was it after all possible that Aristotle, and every philosopher since Aristotle, had been wrong?
that circular motion was not the perfect and natural motion, but that planets might move in some other closed curve?
Suppose he tried an oval.
Well, there are a great variety of ovals, and several were tried: with the result that they could be made to answer better than a circle, but still were not right.
Now, however, the geometrical and mathematical difficulties of calculation, which before had been tedious and oppressive, threatened to become overwhelming; and it is with a rising sense of despondency that Kepler sees his six years' unremitting labour leading deeper and deeper into complication.
One most disheartening circumstance appeared, viz. that when he made the circuit oval his law of equable description of areas broke down.
This coincidence, in his own words, woke him out of sleep; and for some reason or other impelled him instantly to try making the planet oscillate in the diameter of its epicycle instead of revolve round it-a singular idea, but Copernicus had had a similar one to explain the motions of Mercury.
Away he started through his calculations again.
A long course of work night and day was rewarded by finding that he was now able to hit off the motions better than before; but what a singularly complicated motion it was.
Could it be expressed no more simply?
Yes, the curve so described by the planet is a comparatively simple one: it is a special kind of oval-the ellipse.
Strange that he had not thought of it before. It was a famous curve, for the Greek geometers had studied it as one of the sections of a cone, but it was not so well known in Kepler's time. The fact that the planets move in it has raised it to the first importance, and it is familiar enough to us now.
But did it satisfy the law of speed?
Could the rate of description of areas be uniform with it?
Well, he tried the ellipse, and to his inexpressible delight he found that it did satisfy the condition of equable description of areas, if the sun was in one focus.
So, moving the planet in a selected ellipse, with the sun in one focus, at a speed given by the equable area description, its position agreed with Tycho's observations within the limits of the error of experiment.
Mars was finally conquered, and remains in his prison house to this day.
The orbit was found.
In a paroxysm of delight Kepler celebrates his victory by a triumphant figure, sketched actually on his geometrical diagram-the diagram which proves that the law of equable description of areas can hold good with an ellipse.
The above is a tracing of it.
Such is a crude and bald sketch of the steps by which Kepler rose to his great generalizations-the two laws which have immortalized his name.
All the complications of epicycle, equant, deferent, excentric, and the like, were swept at once away, and an orbit of striking and beautiful properties substituted.
Well might he be called, as he was, "the legislator," or law interpreter, "of the heavens."
He concludes his book on the motions of Mars with a half comic appeal to the Emperor to provide him with the sinews of war for an attack on Mars's relations-father Jupiter, brother Mercury, and the rest-but the death of his unhappy patron in sixteen twelve put an end to all these schemes, and reduced Kepler to the utmost misery.
While at Prague his salary was in continual arrear, and it was with difficulty that he could provide sustenance for his family.
He had been there eleven years, but they had been hard years of poverty, and he could leave without regret were it not that he should have to leave Tycho's instruments and observations behind him.
While he was hesitating what best to do, and reduced to the verge of despair, his wife, who had long been suffering from low spirits and despondency, and his three children, were taken ill; one of the sons died of small pox, and the wife eleven days after of low fever and epilepsy.
No money could be got at Prague, so after a short time he accepted a professorship at Linz, and withdrew with his two quite young remaining children.
He is continually attacking and throwing sarcasm at astrology, but it was the only thing for which people would pay him, and on it after a fashion he lived.
We do not find that his circumstances were ever prosperous, and though eight thousand crowns were due to him from Bohemia he could not manage to get them paid.
About this time occurred a singular interruption to his work.
His old mother, of whose fierce temper something has already been indicated, had been engaged in a law suit for some years near their old home in Wuertemberg.
A change of judge having in process of time occurred, the defendant saw his way to turn the tables on the old lady by accusing her of sorcery.
She was sent to prison, and condemned to the torture, with the usual intelligent idea of extracting a "voluntary" confession. Kepler had to hurry from Linz to interpose.
He succeeded in saving her from the torture, but she remained in prison for a year or so.
Her spirit, however, was unbroken, for no sooner was she released than she commenced a fresh action against her accuser.
But fresh trouble was averted by the death of the poor old dame at the age of nearly eighty.
This narration renders the unflagging energy shown by her son in his mathematical wrestlings less surprising.
It might well have been that there was no connection, that it was purely imaginary, like his old idea of the law of the successive distances of the planets, and like so many others of the guesses and fancies which he entertained and spent his energies in probing.
But fortunately this time there was a connection, and he lived to have the joy of discovering it.
The connection is this, that if one compares the distance of the different planets from the sun with the length of time they take to go round him, the cube of the respective distances is proportional to the square of the corresponding times.
In other words, the ratio of r cubed to T squared for every planet is the same.
The product of the distance into the square of the speed is the same for each planet.
This (however stated) is called Kepler's third law.
It welds the planets together, and shows them to be one system.
His rapture on detecting the law was unbounded, and he breaks out into an exulting rhapsody:--
It is not eighteen months since I got the first glimpse of light, three months since the dawn, very few days since the unveiled sun, most admirable to gaze upon, burst upon me.
If you forgive me, I rejoice; if you are angry, I can bear it; the die is cast, the book is written, to be read either now or by posterity, I care not which; it may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer."
This honour, however, gave Kepler no satisfaction-it rather occasioned him dismay, especially as it deprived him of all pecuniary benefit, and made it almost impossible for him to get a publisher to undertake another book.
Still he worked on at the Rudolphine tables of Tycho, and ultimately, with some small help from Vienna, completed them; but he could not get the means to print them.
He applied to the Court till he was sick of applying: they lay idle four years.
At last he determined to pay for the type himself.
This great publication marks an era in astronomy.
After this, the Grand Duke of Tuscany sent Kepler a golden chain, which is interesting inasmuch as it must really have come from Galileo, who was in high favour at the Italian Court at this time.
Once more Kepler made a determined attempt to get his arrears of salary paid, and rescue himself and family from their bitter poverty.
His body was buried at Ratisbon, and a century ago a proposal was made to erect a marble monument to his memory, but nothing was done.
It matters little one way or the other whether Germany, having almost refused him bread during his life, should, a century and a half after his death, offer him a stone.
The contiguity of the lives of Kepler and Tycho furnishes a moral too obvious to need pointing out.
What Kepler might have achieved had he been relieved of those ghastly struggles for subsistence one cannot tell, but this much is clear, that had Tycho been subjected to the same misfortune, instead of being born rich and being assisted by generous and enlightened patrons, he could have accomplished very little.
His instruments, his observatory-the tools by which he did his work-would have been impossible for him.
Frederick and Sophia of Denmark, and Rudolph of Bohemia, are therefore to be remembered as co-workers with him.
Kepler, with his ill health and inferior physical energy, was unable to command the like advantages.
Much, nevertheless, he did; more one cannot but feel he might have done had he been properly helped.
Besides, the world would have been free from the reproach of accepting the fruits of his bright genius while condemning the worker to a life of misery, relieved only by the beauty of his own thoughts and the ecstasy awakened in him by the harmony and precision of Nature.
He maps out his route like a traveller.
In fact he compares himself to Columbus or Magellan, voyaging into unknown lands, and recording his wandering route.
This being remembered, it will be found that his methods do not differ so utterly from those used by other philosophers in like case.
His imagination was perhaps more luxuriant and was allowed freer play than most men's, but it was nevertheless always controlled by rigid examination and comparison of hypotheses with fact.
Brewster says of him:--"Ardent, restless, burning to distinguish himself by discovery, he attempted everything; and once having obtained a glimpse of a clue, no labour was too hard in following or verifying it.
A few of his attempts succeeded-a multitude failed.
Those which failed seem to us now fanciful, those which succeeded appear to us sublime.
But his methods were the same.
When in search of what really existed he sometimes found it; when in pursuit of a chimaera he could not but fail; but in either case he displayed the same great qualities, and that obstinate perseverance which must conquer all difficulties except those really insurmountable."
Astronomy is so clear and so thoroughly explored now, that it is difficult to put oneself into a contemporary attitude.
But take some other science still barely developed: meteorology, for instance.
The science of the weather, the succession of winds and rain, sunshine and frost, clouds and fog, is now very much in the condition of astronomy before Kepler.
We have passed through the stage of ascribing atmospheric disturbances-thunderstorms, cyclones, earthquakes, and the like-to supernatural agency; we have had our Copernican era: not perhaps brought about by a single individual, but still achieved.
Something of the laws of cyclone and anticyclone are known, and rude weather predictions across the Atlantic are roughly possible.
Observation is heaped on observation; tables are compiled; volumes are filled with data; the hours of sunshine are recorded, the fall of rain, the moisture in the air, the kind of clouds, the temperature-millions of facts; but where is the Kepler to study and brood over them?
CHAPTER two
THE ESCAPE OF THE DEAD
I attempted to spring to my feet but was horrified to discover that my muscles refused to respond to my will.
I was now thoroughly awake, but as unable to move a muscle as though turned to stone.
It was then, for the first time, that I noticed a slight vapor filling the cave.
There also came to my nostrils a faintly pungent odor, and I could only assume that I had been overcome by some poisonous gas, but why I should retain my mental faculties and yet be unable to move I could not fathom.
I lay facing the opening of the cave and where I could see the short stretch of trail which lay between the cave and the turn of the cliff around which the trail led.
I remember that I hoped they would make short work of me as I did not particularly relish the thought of the innumerable things they might do to me if the spirit prompted them.
The fellow, instead of approaching, merely stood and stared; his eyes bulging and his jaw dropped.
And then another savage face appeared, and a third and fourth and fifth, craning their necks over the shoulders of their fellows whom they could not pass upon the narrow ledge.
Each face was the picture of awe and fear, but for what reason I did not know, nor did I learn until ten years later.
That there were still other braves behind those who regarded me was apparent from the fact that the leaders passed back whispered word to those behind them.
So frantic were their efforts to escape from the unseen thing behind me that one of the braves was hurled headlong from the cliff to the rocks below.
Their wild cries echoed in the canyon for a short time, and then all was still once more.
The sound which had frightened them was not repeated, but it had been sufficient as it was to start me speculating on the possible horror which lurked in the shadows at my back.
Fear is a relative term and so I can only measure my feelings at that time by what I had experienced in previous positions of danger and by those that I have passed through since; but I can say without shame that if the sensations I endured during the next few minutes were fear, then may God help the coward, for cowardice is of a surety its own punishment.
To be held paralyzed, with one's back toward some horrible and unknown danger from the very sound of which the ferocious Apache warriors turn in wild stampede, as a flock of sheep would madly flee from a pack of wolves, seems to me the last word in fearsome predicaments for a man who had ever been used to fighting for his life with all the energy of a powerful physique.
Several times I thought I heard faint sounds behind me as of somebody moving cautiously, but eventually even these ceased, and I was left to the contemplation of my position without interruption.
And then something gave, there was a momentary feeling of nausea, a sharp click as of the snapping of a steel wire, and I stood with my back against the wall of the cave facing my unknown foe.
I looked first at my lifeless clay there upon the floor of the cave and then down at myself in utter bewilderment; for there I lay clothed, and yet here I stood but naked as at the minute of my birth.
My first thought was, is this then death!
Have I indeed passed over forever into that other life!
But I could not well believe this, as I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs from the exertion of my efforts to release myself from the anaesthesis which had held me.
My breath was coming in quick, short gasps, cold sweat stood out from every pore of my body, and the ancient experiment of pinching revealed the fact that I was anything other than a wraith.
My carbine was in its boot, strapped to my saddle, and as my horse had wandered off I was left without means of defense.
Unable longer to resist the temptation to escape this horrible place I leaped quickly through the opening into the starlight of a clear Arizona night.
The crisp, fresh mountain air outside the cave acted as an immediate tonic and I felt new life and new courage coursing through me.
I reasoned with myself that I had lain helpless for many hours within the cave, yet nothing had molested me, and my better judgment, when permitted the direction of clear and logical reasoning, convinced me that the noises I had heard must have resulted from purely natural and harmless causes; probably the conformation of the cave was such that a slight breeze had caused the sounds I heard.
I decided to investigate, but first I lifted my head to fill my lungs with the pure, invigorating night air of the mountains.
As I did so I saw stretching far below me the beautiful vista of rocky gorge, and level, cacti studded flat, wrought by the moonlight into a miracle of soft splendor and wondrous enchantment.
As I stood thus meditating, I turned my gaze from the landscape to the heavens where the myriad stars formed a gorgeous and fitting canopy for the wonders of the earthly scene.
My attention was quickly riveted by a large red star close to the distant horizon.
As I gazed upon it I felt a spell of overpowering fascination-it was Mars, the god of war, and for me, the fighting man, it had always held the power of irresistible enchantment.
As I gazed at it on that far gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron.
My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space.
There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness.
CHAPTER eight
A FAIR CAPTIVE FROM THE SKY
The third day after the incubator ceremony we set forth toward home, but scarcely had the head of the procession debouched into the open ground before the city than orders were given for an immediate and hasty return.
As though trained for years in this particular evolution, the green Martians melted like mist into the spacious doorways of the nearby buildings, until, in less than three minutes, the entire cavalcade of chariots, mastodons and mounted warriors was nowhere to be seen.
Sola and I had entered a building upon the front of the city, in fact, the same one in which I had had my encounter with the apes, and, wishing to see what had caused the sudden retreat, I mounted to an upper floor and peered from the window out over the valley and the hills beyond; and there I saw the cause of their sudden scurrying to cover.
A huge craft, long, low, and gray painted, swung slowly over the crest of the nearest hill.
Following it came another, and another, and another, until twenty of them, swinging low above the ground, sailed slowly and majestically toward us.
I could see figures crowding the forward decks and upper works of the air craft.
Whether they had discovered us or simply were looking at the deserted city I could not say, but in any event they received a rude reception, for suddenly and without warning the green Martian warriors fired a terrific volley from the windows of the buildings facing the little valley across which the great ships were so peacefully advancing.
The fire from the vessels was most ineffectual, owing, as I afterward learned, to the unexpected suddenness of the first volley, which caught the ship's crews entirely unprepared and the sighting apparatus of the guns unprotected from the deadly aim of our warriors.
Twenty minutes after the first volley the great fleet swung trailing off in the direction from which it had first appeared.
Several of the craft were limping perceptibly, and seemed but barely under the control of their depleted crews.
One by one, however, the ships managed to dip below the crests of the outlying hills until only one barely moving craft was in sight.
Slowly she swung from her course, circling back toward us in an erratic and pitiful manner.
Instantly the warriors ceased firing, for it was quite apparent that the vessel was entirely helpless, and, far from being in a position to inflict harm upon us, she could not even control herself sufficiently to escape.
As she neared the city the warriors rushed out upon the plain to meet her, but it was evident that she still was too high for them to hope to reach her decks.
From my vantage point in the window I could see the bodies of her crew strewn about, although I could not make out what manner of creatures they might be.
Not a sign of life was manifest upon her as she drifted slowly with the light breeze in a southeasterly direction.
As the craft neared the building, and just before she struck, the Martian warriors swarmed upon her from the windows, and with their great spears eased the shock of the collision, and in a few moments they had thrown out grappling hooks and the big boat was being hauled to ground by their fellows below.
After making her fast, they swarmed the sides and searched the vessel from stem to stern.
I could see them examining the dead sailors, evidently for signs of life, and presently a party of them appeared from below dragging a little figure among them.
The creature was considerably less than half as tall as the green Martian warriors, and from my balcony I could see that it walked erect upon two legs and surmised that it was some new and strange Martian monstrosity with which I had not as yet become acquainted.
This operation required several hours, during which time a number of the chariots were requisitioned to transport the loot, which consisted in arms, ammunition, silks, furs, jewels, strangely carved stone vessels, and a quantity of solid foods and liquids, including many casks of water, the first I had seen since my advent upon Mars.
This operation concluded, they hastily clambered over her sides, sliding down the guy ropes to the ground.
The last warrior to leave the deck turned and threw something back upon the vessel, waiting an instant to note the outcome of his act.
As a faint spurt of flame rose from the point where the missile struck he swung over the side and was quickly upon the ground.
Scarcely had he alighted than the guy ropes were simultaneously released, and the great warship, lightened by the removal of the loot, soared majestically into the air, her decks and upper works a mass of roaring flames.
The sight was awe inspiring in the extreme as one contemplated this mighty floating funeral pyre, drifting unguided and unmanned through the lonely wastes of the Martian heavens; a derelict of death and destruction, typifying the life story of these strange and ferocious creatures into whose unfriendly hands fate had carried it.
Much depressed, and, to me, unaccountably so, I slowly descended to the street.
Close at my heel, in his now accustomed place, followed Woola, the hound, and as I emerged upon the street Sola rushed up to me as though I had been the object of some search on her part.
The cavalcade was returning to the plaza, the homeward march having been given up for that day; nor, in fact, was it recommenced for more than a week, owing to the fear of a return attack by the air craft.
Lorquas Ptomel was too astute an old warrior to be caught upon the open plains with a caravan of chariots and children, and so we remained at the deserted city until the danger seemed passed.
She did not see me at first, but just as she was disappearing through the portal of the building which was to be her prison she turned, and her eyes met mine.
Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.
She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.
Just a moment we gazed upon each other, and then the look of hope and renewed courage which had glorified her face as she discovered me, faded into one of utter dejection, mingled with loathing and contempt.
I realized I had not answered her signal, and ignorant as I was of Martian customs, I intuitively felt that she had made an appeal for succor and protection which my unfortunate ignorance had prevented me from answering.
CHAPTER nine
I LEARN THE LANGUAGE
As I came back to myself I glanced at Sola, who had witnessed this encounter and I was surprised to note a strange expression upon her usually expressionless countenance.
As I reached the doorway of our building a strange surprise awaited me. A warrior approached bearing the arms, ornaments, and full accouterments of his kind.
These he presented to me with a few unintelligible words, and a bearing at once respectful and menacing.
Later, Sola, with the aid of several of the other women, remodeled the trappings to fit my lesser proportions, and after they completed the work I went about garbed in all the panoply of war.
From then on Sola instructed me in the mysteries of the various weapons, and with the Martian young I spent several hours each day practicing upon the plaza.
I was not yet proficient with all the weapons, but my great familiarity with similar earthly weapons made me an unusually apt pupil, and I progressed in a very satisfactory manner.
They make the powder, the cartridges, the firearms; in fact everything of value is produced by the females.
In time of actual warfare they form a part of the reserves, and when the necessity arises fight with even greater intelligence and ferocity than the men.
They make the laws as they are needed; a new law for each emergency.
They are unfettered by precedent in the administration of justice.
In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers.
After they had retired for the night it was customary for the adults to carry on a desultory conversation for a short time before lapsing into sleep, and now that I could understand their language I was always a keen listener, although I never proffered any remarks myself.
On the night following the prisoner's visit to the audience chamber the conversation finally fell upon this subject, and I was all ears on the instant.
I had feared to question Sola relative to the beautiful captive, as I could not but recall the strange expression I had noted upon her face after my first encounter with the prisoner.
That it denoted jealousy I could not say, and yet, judging all things by mundane standards as I still did, I felt it safer to affect indifference in the matter until I learned more surely Sola's attitude toward the object of my solicitude.
Sarkoja, one of the older women who shared our domicile, had been present at the audience as one of the captive's guards, and it was toward her the question turned.
"When," asked one of the women, "will we enjoy the death throes of the red one? or does Lorquas Ptomel, Jed, intend holding her for ransom?"
"What will be the manner of her going out?" inquired Sola.
"She is very small and very beautiful; I had hoped that they would hold her for ransom."
"It is sad, Sola, that you were not born a million years ago," snapped Sarkoja, "when all the hollows of the land were filled with water, and the peoples were as soft as the stuff they sailed upon.
In our day we have progressed to a point where such sentiments mark weakness and atavism.
"I see nothing wrong with my expression of interest in this red woman," retorted Sola.
"She has never harmed us, nor would she should we have fallen into her hands.
It is only the men of her kind who war upon us, and I have ever thought that their attitude toward us is but the reflection of ours toward them.
They live at peace with all their fellows, except when duty calls upon them to make war, while we are at peace with none; forever warring among our own kind as well as upon the red men, and even in our own communities the individuals fight amongst themselves.
This wild outbreak on the part of Sola so greatly surprised and shocked the other women, that, after a few words of general reprimand, they all lapsed into silence and were soon asleep.
But where to go, and how, was as much of a puzzle to me as the age old search for the spring of eternal life has been to earthly men since the beginning of time.
I decided that at the first opportunity I would take Sola into my confidence and openly ask her to aid me, and with this resolution strong upon me I turned among my silks and furs and slept the dreamless and refreshing sleep of Mars.
It is the story of the Butterfly that Stamped.
He understood what the beasts said, what the birds said, what the fishes said, and what the insects said.
When he turned it once, Afrits and Djinns came Out of the earth to do whatever he told them.
When he turned it twice, Fairies came down from the sky to do whatever he told them; and when he turned it three times, the very great angel Azrael of the Sword came dressed as a water carrier, and told him the news of the three worlds, Above-Below-and Here.
Once he tried to feed all the animals in all the world in one day, but when the food was ready an Animal came out of the deep sea and ate it up in three mouthfuls.
So, when they quarrelled too much, he only walked by himself in one part of the beautiful Palace gardens and wished he had never been born.
And Balkis the Most Beautiful said, 'O my Lord and Treasure of my Soul, what will you do?'
Presently two Butterflies flew under the tree, quarrelling.
Don't you know that if I stamped with my foot all Suleiman bin Daoud's Palace and this garden here would immediately vanish in a clap of thunder.'
What made you tell that awful fib to your wife?--for doubtless she is your wife.'
She is my wife; and you know what wives are like.
Suleiman bin Daoud smiled in his beard and said, 'Yes, I know, little brother.
I said that to quiet her.'
Go back to your wife, little brother, and let me hear what you say.'
Back flew the Butterfly to his wife, who was all of a twitter behind a leaf, and she said, 'He heard you!
'Gracious!' said his wife, and sat quite quiet; but Suleiman bin Daoud laughed till the tears ran down his face at the impudence of the bad little Butterfly.
She thought, 'If I am wise I can yet save my Lord from the persecutions of these quarrelsome Queens,' and she held out her finger and whispered softly to the Butterfly's Wife, 'Little woman, come here.' Up flew the Butterfly's Wife, very frightened, and clung to Balkis's white hand.
The Butterfly's Wife looked at Balkis, and saw the most beautiful Queen's eyes shining like deep pools with starlight on them, and she picked up her courage with both wings and said, 'O Queen, be lovely for ever.
They never mean half they say.
If it pleases my husband to believe that I believe he can make Suleiman bin Daoud's Palace disappear by stamping his foot, I'm sure I don't care.
He'll forget all about it to morrow.'
Ask him to stamp, and see what will happen.
We know what men folk are like, don't we?
Away flew the Butterfly's Wife to her husband, and in five minutes they were quarrelling worse than ever.
'Remember!' said the Butterfly.
'Remember what I can do if I stamp my foot.'
'I don't believe you one little bit,' said the Butterfly's Wife.
'I should very much like to see it done.
Suppose you stamp now.'
'I promised Suleiman bin Daoud that I wouldn't,' said the Butterfly, 'and I don't want to break my promise.'
'It wouldn't matter if you did,' said his wife.
'You couldn't bend a blade of grass with your stamping.
I dare you to do it,' she said. Stamp!
Stamp!
Stamp!'
Suleiman bin Daoud, sitting under the camphor tree, heard every word of this, and he laughed as he had never laughed in his life before.
He just laughed with joy, and Balkis, on the other side of the tree, smiled because her own true love was so joyful.
Presently the Butterfly, very hot and puffy, came whirling back under the shadow of the camphor tree and said to Suleiman, 'She wants me to stamp!
'Slaves,' said Suleiman bin Daoud, 'when this gentleman on my finger' (that was where the impudent Butterfly was sitting) 'stamps his left front forefoot you will make my Palace and these gardens disappear in a clap of thunder.
When he stamps again you will bring them back carefully.'
'Now, little brother,' he said, 'go back to your wife and stamp all you've a mind to.'
Away flew the Butterfly to his wife, who was crying, 'I dare you to do it!
I dare you to do it!
Stamp!
Stamp now!
The Djinns jerked the Palace and the gardens a thousand miles into the air: there was a most awful thunder clap, and everything grew inky black.
The Butterfly's Wife fluttered about in the dark, crying, 'Oh, I'll be good!
I'm so sorry I spoke.
The Butterfly was nearly as frightened as his wife, and Suleiman bin Daoud laughed so much that it was several minutes before he found breath enough to whisper to the Butterfly, 'Stamp again, little brother.
Give me back my Palace, most great magician.'
'Yes, give him back his Palace,' said the Butterfly's Wife, still flying about in the dark like a moth.
Of course it doesn't make any difference to me-I'm used to this kind of thing-but as a favour to you and to Suleiman bin Daoud I don't mind putting things right.'
So he stamped once more, and that instant the Djinns let down the Palace and the gardens, without even a bump.
The sun shone on the dark green orange leaves; the fountains played among the pink Egyptian lilies; the birds went on singing, and the Butterfly's Wife lay on her side under the camphor tree waggling her wings and panting, 'Oh, I'll be good!
I'll be good!'
He leaned back all weak and hiccoughy, and shook his finger at the Butterfly and said, 'O great wizard, what is the sense of returning to me my Palace if at the same time you slay me with mirth!'
They stood on the marble steps one hundred abreast and shouted, 'What is our trouble?
We were living peacefully in our golden palace, as is our custom, when upon a sudden the Palace disappeared, and we were left sitting in a thick and noisome darkness; and it thundered, and Djinns and Afrits moved about in the darkness!
That is our trouble, O Head Queen, and we are most extremely troubled on account of that trouble, for it was a troublesome trouble, unlike any trouble we have known.'
Then up and spoke an Egyptian Queen-the daughter of a Pharoah-and she said, 'Our Palace cannot be plucked up by the roots like a leek for the sake of a little insect.
No! Suleiman bin Daoud must be dead, and what we heard and saw was the earth thundering and darkening at the news.'
Go in peace, little folk!' And he kissed them on the wings, and they flew away.
Then they put their veils over their heads, and they put their hands over their mouths, and they tiptoed back to the Palace most mousy quiet.
And Suleiman bin Daoud, still looking after the Butterflies where they played in the sunlight, said, 'O my Lady and Jewel of my Felicity, when did this happen?
Balkis-The tender and Most Lovely Balkis-said, 'O my Lord and Regent of my Existence, I hid behind the camphor tree and saw it all.
It was I who told the Butterfly's Wife to ask the Butterfly to stamp, because I hoped that for the sake of the jest my Lord would make some great magic and that the Queens would see it and be frightened.' And she told him what the Queens had said and seen and thought.
Then Suleiman bin Daoud rose up from his seat under the camphor tree, and stretched his arms and rejoiced and said, 'O my Lady and Sweetener of my Days, know that if I had made a magic against my Queens for the sake of pride or anger, as I made that feast for all the animals, I should certainly have been put to shame.
But by means of your wisdom I made the magic for the sake of a jest and for the sake of a little Butterfly, and-behold-it has also delivered me from the vexations of my vexatious wives!
Tell me, therefore, O my Lady and Heart of my Heart, how did you come to be so wise?' And Balkis the Queen, beautiful and tall, looked up into Suleiman bin Daoud's eyes and put her head a little on one side, just like the Butterfly, and said, 'First, O my Lord, because I loved you; and secondly, O my Lord, because I know what women folk are.'
There was never a King like Solomon, Not since the world began; But Solomon talked to a butterfly As a man would talk to a man.
A step startled her, and looking up she saw her brother coming down the path with folded arms, bent head, and the absent air of one absorbed in deep thought.
'What are you at here, Mischief?' asked Demi, with an Irvingesque start, as he felt rather than saw a disturbing influence in his day dream.
'Getting flowers for "our brides".
'A bride or a flower?' asked Demi calmly, though he eyed the blooming bush as if it had a sudden and unusual interest for him.
'Both; you get the one, and I'll give you the other.'
'Wish I could!' and Demi picked a little bud, with a sigh that went to Josie's warm heart.
It's lovely to see people so happy.
'Don't be a hypocrite.
Now, Jack, I'm fond of you, and want to help; it's so interesting-all these lovers and weddings and things, and we ought to have our share.
'You are very kind, child.
'Oh, well, there are various ways, you know.
You've tried it, I dare say.'
I want to tell her so; but I lose my head when I try, and don't care to make a fool of myself.
'I've got it! perfectly lovely!
just suit her, and you too, being a poet!' cried Josie, with a skip.
'What is it?
Don't be ridiculous, please,' begged the bashful lover, eager, but afraid of this sharp tongued bit of womanhood.
She is coming to dress with Daisy, so I can do it nicely.'
DEAR ALICE, You know what the flowers mean.
'I trust you, Jo.
No jokes, dear, if you love me.'
Was it wise and kind to ask him to wait, to bind him by any promise, or even to put into words the love and honour she felt for him?
No; it would be more generous to make the sacrifice alone, and spare him the pain of hope deferred.
He was young; he would forget; and she would do her duty better, perhaps, if no impatient lover waited for her.
With eyes that saw but dimly, and a hand that lingered on the stem he had stripped of thorns, she laid the half blown flower by the rose, and asked herself if even the little bud might be worn.
It looked very poor and pale beside the others; yet being in the self sacrificing mood which real love brings, she felt that even a small hope was too much to give, if she could not follow it up with more.
As she sat looking sadly down on the symbols of an affection that grew dearer every moment, she listened half unconsciously to the murmur of voices in the adjoining room.
Open windows, thin partitions, and the stillness of summer twilight made it impossible to help hearing, and in a few moments more she could not refrain; for they were talking of john.
'Yes, mother.
Did you see him jump up when Alice ended her oration? He'd have gone to her if I hadn't held him back.
I don't wonder he was pleased and proud.
I spoilt my gloves clapping, and quite forgot my dislike of seeing women on platforms, she was so earnest and unconscious and sweet after the first moment.'
'No; and I guess why.
The kind boy thinks it would make me unhappy.
It wouldn't.
'It must.
He told me last night, and I've had no time since to tell you.
He was in despair, sick and poor, and too proud to beg; and our dear boy found it out, and took every penny he had, and never told even his mother till she made him.'
Alice did not hear what Daisy answered, for she was busy with her own emotions-happy ones now, to judge from the smile that shone in her eyes and the decided gesture with which she put the little bud in her bosom, as if she said: 'He deserves some reward for that good deed, and he shall have it.'
Mrs Meg was speaking, and still of john, when she could hear again:
'It is his having nothing to offer that keeps him silent, I think.
But he forgets that love is everything.
I know he's rich in that; I see and feel it; and any woman should be glad to get it.'
'Right, dear.
'So she will be, and I hope they will find it out.
But she is so dutiful and good, I'm afraid she won't let herself be happy.
You would like it, mother?'
'Heartily; for a better, nobler girl doesn't live.
She is all I want for my son; and I don't mean to lose the dear, brave creature if I can help it.
Her heart is big enough for both love and duty; and they can wait more happily if they do it together-for wait they must, of course.'
'I'm so glad his choice suits you, mother, and he is spared the saddest sort of disappointment.'
Daisy's voice broke there; and a sudden rustle, followed by a soft murmur, seemed to tell that she was in her mother's arms, seeking and finding comfort there.
As she thought thus, the half blown rose went to join the bud; and then, after a pause, she slowly kissed the perfect rose, and added it to the tell tale group, saying to herself with a sort of sweet solemnity, as if the words were a vow:
Demi meantime was escorting certain venerable personages about the college, and helping his grandfather entertain them with discussion of the Socratic method of instruction, Pythagoras, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and the rest, whom he devoutly wished at the bottom of the Red Sea, and no wonder, for his head and his heart were full of love and roses, hopes and fears.
Yes, she has a flower at her throat; one, two, oh, blessed sight! he saw it all across the room, and gave a rapturous sigh which caused Miss Perry's frizzled crop to wave with a sudden gust.
'I saw no wine at any of the spreads; but it is plain that young Brooke has had too much.
Quite gentlemanly, but evidently a trifle intoxicated, my dear.'
He saw her standing by the piano now, idly turning over music as she talked with several gentlemen.
Hiding his impatience under an air of scholastic repose, Demi hovered near, ready to advance when the happy moment came, wondering meantime why elderly persons persisted in absorbing young ones instead of sensibly sitting in corners with their contemporaries.
The elderly persons in question retired at length, but only to be replaced by two impetuous youths who begged Miss Heath to accompany them to Parnassus and join the dance. Demi thirsted for their blood, but was appeased by hearing George and Dolly say, as they lingered a moment after her refusal:
'Really, you know, I'm quite converted to co education and almost wish I'd remained here.
'Yes, by Jove! we fellows will have to look out or you'll carry off all the honours.
You were superb today, and held us all like magic, though it was so hot there, I really think I couldn't have stood it for anyone else,' added Dolly, labouring to be gallant and really offering a touching proof of devotion; for the heat melted his collar, took the curl out of his hair, and ruined his gloves.
'There is room for all; and if you will leave us the books, we will cheerfully yield the baseball, boating, dancing, and flirting, which seem to be the branches you prefer,' answered Alice sweetly.
'Ah, now you are too hard upon us!
We can't grind all the time and you ladies don't seem to mind taking a turn at the two latter "branches" you mention,' returned Dolly, with a glance at George which plainly said, 'I had her there.'
'Some of us do in our first years.
Later we give up childish things, you see.
'You got it there, Doll.
Better not try to fence with these superior girls.
Sure to be routed, horse, foot, and dragoons,' said Stuffy, lumbering away, somewhat cross with too many spreads.
'So deuced sarcastic!
I'm faint with so much talking.
Old Plock cornered me and made my head spin with Kant and Hegel and that lot.'
'I promised Dora West I'd give her a turn.
Must look her up; she's a jolly little thing, and doesn't bother about anything but keeping in step.'
As she bent to turn a page, the eager young man behind the piano saw the rose and was struck speechless with delight.
A moment he gazed, then hastened to seize the coveted place before a new detachment of bores arrived.
'Alice, I can't believe it-did you understand-how shall I ever thank you?' murmured Demi, bending as if he, too, read the song, not a note or word of which did he see, however.
I understood-I don't deserve it-we are too young, we must wait, but-I'm very proud and happy, john!'
'Music?
People are thinning out, and we all want a little refreshment.
My brain fairly reels with the 'ologies and 'isms I've heard discussed tonight.
Yes, give us this; sweet thing!
Scotch songs are always charming.'
BIDE A WEE
'I fear me sair they're failing baith; For when I sit apart, They talk o' Heaven so earnestly, It well nigh breaks my heart. So, laddie, dinna urge me now, It surely winna be; I canna leave the auld folk yet. We'd better bide a wee.'
The room was very still before the first verse ended; and Alice skipped the next, fearing she could not get through; for John's eyes were on her, showing that he knew she sang for him and let the plaintive little ballad tell what her reply must be.
He took it as she meant it, and smiled at her so happily that her heart got the better of her voice, and she rose abruptly, saying something about the heat.
'Yes, you are tired; come out and rest, my dearest'; and with a masterful air Demi took her into the starlight, leaving Tom to stare after them winking as if a sky rocket had suddenly gone off under his nose.
'Bless my soul! the Deacon really meant business last summer and never told me.
Won't Dora laugh?' And Tom departed in hot haste to impart and exult over his discovery.
What was said in the garden was never exactly known; but the Brooke family sat up very late that night, and any curious eye at the window would have seen Demi receiving the homage of his womankind as he told his little romance.
"Where are you going?"
He might get away."
"Anywhere you say suits me," he answered.
I'll look after ruth--er-I mean Miss Ventnor."
Then we'll make a start.
Now I could see that the ring was not continuous.
He was a crippled old mountain man, with a profound contempt for "tenderfeet," a contempt that in my case was accentuated by the fact that I wore spectacles-which at that day and in that region were usually held to indicate a defective moral character in the wearer.
He was very rheumatic and liked to lie abed late, so that I usually had to get breakfast, and, in fact, do most of the work around camp.
I answered "all right," that if I could not I could not, and began to move around to get some flour and salt pork.
Managing to get near it, I whipped it up and threw the bead on him, calling, "Hands up!" He of course put up his hands, and then said, "Oh, come, I was only joking"; to which I answered, "Well, I am not.
Now straighten your legs and let your rifle go to the ground." He remonstrated, saying the rifle would go off, and I told him to let it go off.
I then made him move back, and picked up the rifle.
By this time he was quite sober, and really did not seem angry, looking at me quizzically.
I then traveled till dark, and that night, for the only time in my experience, I used in camping a trick of the old time trappers in the Indian days.
I did not believe I would be followed, but still it was not possible to be sure, so, after getting supper, while my pony fed round, I left the fire burning, repacked the mare and pushed ahead until it literally became so dark that I could not see.
It was while hunting in vain for a grouse that I came on the bear and killed it as above described.
It was midwinter.
I could not help grinning when I found out that they did not even allude to me as the Vice President elect, let alone as a hunter, but merely as "Johnny Goff's tourist."
When I worked on a ranch, I needed no form of exercise except my work, but when I worked in an office the case was different. A couple of summers I played polo with some of my neighbors.
My two ponies were the only occupants of my stable except a cart horse.
My wife and I rode and drove them, and they were used for household errands and for the children, and for two afternoons a week they served me as polo ponies.
Polo is a good game, infinitely better for vigorous men than tennis or golf or anything of that kind.
But at Oyster Bay our great and permanent amusements were rowing and sailing; I do not care for the latter, and am fond of the former.
I suppose it sounds archaic, but I cannot help thinking that the people with motor boats miss a great deal.
But I rarely took exercise merely as exercise.
Primarily I took it because I liked it. Play should never be allowed to interfere with work; and a life devoted merely to play is, of all forms of existence, the most dismal.
But the joy of life is a very good thing, and while work is the essential in it, play also has its place.
I dropped the wrestling earliest.
The oarsman turned out to know very little about wrestling.
He could not even take care of himself, not to speak of me.
After that I took up boxing again.
While President I used to box with some of the aides, as well as play single stick with General Wood.
After a few years I had to abandon boxing as well as wrestling, for in one bout a young captain of artillery cross countered me on the eye, and the blow smashed the little blood vessels.
Accordingly I thought it better to acknowledge that I had become an elderly man and would have to stop boxing.
I then took up jiu jitsu for a year or two.
When I was in the Legislature and was working very hard, with little chance of getting out of doors, all the exercise I got was boxing and wrestling.
Naturally, being fond of boxing, I grew to know a good many prize fighters, and to most of those I knew I grew genuinely attached. I have never been able to sympathize with the outcry against prize fighters.
The only objection I have to the prize ring is the crookedness that has attended its commercial development.
But this is true of football games and of most other rough and vigorous sports.
Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals at all, but they had to have some outlet for their activities.
I do not like to see young Christians with shoulders that slope like a champagne bottle.
Of course boxing should be encouraged in the army and navy.
It is idle to compare them with bull fighting; the torture and death of the wretched horses in bull fighting is enough of itself to blast the sport, no matter how great the skill and prowess shown by the bull fighters. Any sport in which the death and torture of animals is made to furnish pleasure to the spectators is debasing.
Of course the men who look on ought to be able to stand up with the gloves, or without them, themselves; I have scant use for the type of sportsmanship which consists merely in looking on at the feats of some one else.
Take Mike Donovan, of New York.
He and his family represent a type of American citizenship of which we have a right to be proud.
It culminated in a lively set to between myself and a Tammany Senator who was a very good fellow, but whose ideas of temperance differed radically from mine, and, as the event proved, from those of the majority of the meeting.
Mike evidently regarded himself as my backer-he was sitting on the platform beside me-and I think felt as pleased and interested as if the set to had been physical instead of merely verbal.
Afterward I grew to know him well both while I was Governor and while I was President, and many a time he came on and boxed with me.
Bob Fitzsimmons was another good friend of mine.
When I went to Africa he presented me with a gold mounted rabbit's foot for luck.
I carried it through my African trip; and I certainly had good luck.
He was my sister's favorite son, and I always took a special interest in him myself.
I did my best to bring him up the way he ought to go.
But there was just nothing to be done with him.
His tastes were naturally low.
Often, especially in the winters and early springs, we would arrange for a point to point walk, not turning aside for anything-for instance, swimming Rock Creek or even the Potomac if it came in our way.
If we swam the Potomac, we usually took off our clothes.
Once I invited an entire class of officers who were attending lectures at the War College to come on one of these walks; I chose a route which gave us the hardest climbing along the rocks and the deepest crossings of the creek; and my army friends enjoyed it hugely-being the right sort, to a man.
At the end of the lunch Seth Bullock suddenly reached forward, swept aside a mass of flowers which made a centerpiece on the table, and revealed a bronze cougar by Proctor, which was a parting gift to me.
The lunch party and the cougar were then photographed on the lawn.
This seems unbelievable; but Leonard assures me it is true. He did not inform me at the time, being afraid to "get in wrong" with his permanent superiors.
"To such men the book is invaluable.
They will look at the pictures and say it is a good book, but they won't read it.
They take no exercise.
But he can do so, if only he will take the trouble.
I once made a speech to which I gave the title "The Strenuous Life." Afterwards I published a volume of essays with this for a title.
From the study of the first he can learn inspiration, he can get uplift and lofty enthusiasm. From the study of the second he can, if he chooses, find out how to win a similar success himself.
(I am using my own language, not Marryat's.) This was the theory upon which I went.
THE LIFE, CAREER AND DEATH OF CAPTAIN THOMAS WHITE.
She took great care of his education, and when he was grown up, as he had an inclination to the sea, procured him the king's letter.
White's story obliges me, though I beg leave to take notice of their barbarity to the English prisoners, for they would set them up as a butt or mark to shoot at; several of whom were thus murdered in cold blood, by way of diversion.
After some time cruising along the coast, the pirates doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and shaped their course for Madagascar, where, being drunk and mad, they knocked their ship on the head, at the south end of the island, at a place called by the natives Elexa.
His humanity not only provided for such, but the first European vessel that came in, he always obliged to take in the unfortunate people, let the vessel be what it would; for he had no notion of any difference between pirates and merchants.
At the expiration of the above term, a pirate brigantine came in, on board which the king obliged them to enter, or travel by land to some other place, which they durst not do; and of two evils chose the least, that of going on board the pirate vessel, which was commanded by one William Read, who received them very civilly.
His crew, however, did not exceed forty men.
However, it was impracticable, for the French pretending to lord it over the natives, whom they began to treat inhumanly, were set upon by them, one half of their number cut off, and the other half made slaves.
Read, with this gang, and a brigantine of sixty tons, steered his course for the Persian Gulf, where they met a grab, (a one masted vessel) of about two hundred tons, which was made a prize.
Read fell ill and died, and was succeeded by one james.
They stayed here all the monsoon time, which is about six months; after which they resolved for Madagascar.
They gave chase on both sides, so that they soon met.
The pirates, who were headed by George Booth, now commander of the ship, went on board, (as they had often done,) to the number of ten, and carried money with them under pretence of purchasing what they wanted. This Booth had formerly been gunner of a pirate ship, called the Dolphin.
They were all searched, but they however contrived to get on board four pistols, which were all the arms they had for the enterprise, though Fourgette had twenty hands on board, and his small arms on the awning, to be in readiness.
The captain invited them into the cabin to dinner, but Booth chose to dine with the petty officer, though one Johnson, Isaac and another, went down.
Standing near the awning, and being a nimble fellow, at one spring he threw himself upon it, drew the arms to him, fired his pistol among the men, one of whom he wounded, (who jumping overboard was lost) and gave the signal.
Three, I said, were in the cabin, and seven upon deck, who with handspikes and the arms seized, secured the ship's crew.
I hope this digression, as it was in a manner needful, will be excused. I shall now proceed.
Mosson's ship lay at anchor, between the island and the main.
This gentleman and his whole ship's company had been cut off at the instigation of Ort Vantyle, a Dutchman of New York.
White.
They joined company, came to an anchor together in the above named river, where they had cleaned, salted and took in their provisions, and were ready to go to sea, when a large ship appeared in sight, and stood into the same river.
The pirates knew not whether she was a merchantman or man of war.
She had been the latter, belonging to the French king, and could mount fifty guns; but being taken by the English, she was bought by some London merchants, and fitted out from that port to slave at Madagascar, and go to Jamaica.
The captain was a young, inexperienced man, who was put in with a nurse.
The captain of the Speaker sent his purser ashore, to go up the country to the king, who lived about twenty four miles from the coast, to carry a couple of small arms inlaid with gold, a couple of brass blunderbusses, and a pair of pistols, as presents, and to require trade.
As soon as the purser was ashore, he was taken prisoner, by one Tom Collins, a Welshman, born in Pembroke, who lived on shore, and had belonged to the Charming Mary, of Barbadoes, which went out with a commission but was converted to a pirate.
He told the purser he was his prisoner, and must answer the damage done to two merchants who were slaving.
The purser answered, that he was not commander; that the captain was a hot rash youth, put into business by his friends, which he did not understand; but however, satisfaction should be made.
However, he, for a hundred pounds, undertook to wet all the priming, and assist in taking the ship.
After some days the captain of the Speaker came on shore, and was received with great civility by the heads of the pirates, having agreed before to make satisfaction.
In a day or two after, he was invited by them to eat a barbacued shoat, which invitation he accepted.
Bowen, who was, I have already said, a prisoner on board the French pirate, but now become one of the fraternity, and master of the grab, went out, and returned with a case of pistols in his hand, and told the Captain of the Speaker, whose name I won't mention, that he was his prisoner.
He asked, upon what account?
Bowen answered, "they wanted his ship, his was a good one, and they were resolved to have her, to make amends for the damage he had done them."
At eight o'clock they manned the twelve oared boat, and the one they found at Mayotta, with twenty four men, and set out for the ship.
Booth asked what he wanted!
"All well," said the mate, "get the lights over the side;" but spying the second boat, he asked what boat that was?
They boarded in the instant, and made themselves masters of her, without the loss of a man on either side.
james, a pirate.
The long boat, which lay off a grappling, was immediately put in by those who looked after her.
The quarter master ran down sword in hand, and though he was attacked by many, he behaved himself so well, that he got into a little canoe, put off, and reached the long boat.
Things being thus settled, they came to the mouth of the Red Sea, and fell in with thirteen sail of Moor ships, which they kept company with the greater part of the day, but afraid to venture on them, as they took them for Portuguese men of war.
At length part were for boarding, and advised it.
The adventures of these pirates on this coast are already set down in Captain Bowen's life, to which I refer the reader, and shall only observe, that Captain White was all this time before the mast, being a forced man from the beginning.
They came on board in the night and surprised her, though not without resistance, in which the captain and chief mate were killed, and several others wounded.
Those who were ashore with Captain White, resolving to enter in this ship, determined him to go also, rather than be left alone with the natives, hoping, by some accident or other, to have an opportunity of returning home.
They touched at Augustin, expecting the ship, but she not appearing in a week, the time they waited, the king ordered them to be gone, telling them they imposed on him with lies, for he did not believe they had any ship: however he gave them fresh provision: they took in water, and made for Methelage.
Here as Captain White was known to the king, they were kindly received, and staid about a fortnight in expectation of the ship, but she not appearing they raised their boat a streak, salted the provision the king gave them, put water aboard, and stood for the north end of the island, designing to go round, believing their ship might be at the island of saint Mary.
Wherefore they got into a harbor, of which there are many for small vessels.
At length, having fine weather, and the strength of the current abating, they got round; and after sailing about forty miles on the east side, they went into a harbor, where they found a piece of a jacket, which they knew belonged to one of those men who had left them to go over land.
He had been a forced man, and a ship carpenter.
This they supposed he had torn to wrap round his feet; that part of the country being barren and rocky.
The latter was given them, but they could get no information of their companions.
They knew it to be the hand of one of their former shipmates.
The rest of them were settled in small companies of about twelve or fourteen together, more or less, up the said river, and along the coast, every nation by itself, as the English, French, Dutch, and c.
But the others did not think it reasonable he should have the boat, but that it should be set to sale for the benefit of the company.
Captain White, finding these men proposed joining him, and going round to Ambonavoula, to make up a company, it was agreed upon, and they unanimously chose him commander.
They accordingly put to sea, and stood away round the south end of the island, and touched at Don Mascarenhas, where he took in a surgeon, and stretching over again to Madagascar, fell in with Ambonavoula, and made up his complement of sixty men.
From hence he shaped his course for the island of Mayotta, where he cleaned his ship, and waited for the season to go into the Red Sea.
His provisions being taken in, the time proper, and the ship well fitted, he steered for Babel Mandeb, and running into a harbor, waited for the Mocha ships.
These he plundered of what was for his turn, kept them a fortnight by him, and let them go.
A few days after, they met with a large ship of about one thousand tons and six hundred men, called the Malabar, which they chased, kept company with her all night, and took in the morning, with the loss of only their boatswain, and two or three men wounded.
They answered in the affirmative, but the captain could not believe them.
However they took what they liked, and kept him with them.
After two days they met with the Dorothy, an English ship, Captain Penruddock, commander, coming from Mocha.
On a vote, they gave Captain Penruddock (from whom they took a considerable quantity of money) the Portuguese ship and cargo, with what bale he pleased to take out of his own, bid him go about his business, and make what he could of her.
Besides, they made a gathering among themselves, and made a present to Stacy's mate, and other of his inferior officers, and about one hundred twenty dollars to the children.
They then discharged Stacy and his crew, and made the best of their way out of the Red Sea.
They came into the bay of Defarr, where they found a ketch at anchor, which the people had made prize of, by seizing the master and boat's crew ashore.
They found a French gentleman, one Monsieur Berger, on board, whom they carried with them, took out about two thousand dollars, and sold the ketch to the chief ashore for provisions.
Here taking in fresh provisions, White steered for Madagascar, and fell in with Hopeful Point where they shared their goods, and took up settlements ashore, where White built a house, bought cattle, took off the upper deck of ship, and was fitting her up for the next season.
TO FRANCES, MY WIFE
IN MEMORY OF THAT BEAUTIFUL SUMMER IN THE OZARK HILLS, WHEN, SO OFTEN, WE FOLLOWED THE OLD TRAIL AROUND THE RISE OF MUTTON HOLLOW-THE TRAIL THAT IS NOBODY KNOWS HOW OLD-AND FROM SAMMY'S LOOKOUT WATCHED THE DAY GO OVER THE WESTERN RIDGES.
"That all with one consent praise new born gawds, Tho they are made and moulded of things past, And give to dust that is a little gilt More laud than gilt o'er dusted."
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.
CHAPTER one
It was corn planting time, when the stranger followed the Old Trail into the Mutton Hollow neighborhood.
All day a fine rain had fallen steadily, and the mists hung heavy over the valley.
The lower hills were wrapped as in a winding sheet; dank and cold.
The trees were dripping with moisture.
The stranger looked tired and wet.
His form stooped a little in the shoulders, perhaps with weariness, but he carried himself with the unconscious air of one long used to a position of conspicuous power and influence; and, while his well kept hair and beard were strongly touched with white, the brown, clear lighted eyes, that looked from under their shaggy brows, told of an intellect unclouded by the shadows of many years.
It was a face marked deeply by pride; pride of birth, of intellect, of culture; the face of a scholar and poet; but it was more-it was the countenance of one fairly staggering under a burden of disappointment and grief.
As the stranger walked, he looked searchingly into the mists on every hand, and paused frequently as if questioning the proper course.
As the figure of the traveler emerged from the mists, the native checked his horse to greet the newcomer with the customary salutation of the backwoods, "Howdy."
The man returned Jed's greeting cordially, and, resting his satchel on a rock beside the narrow path, added, "I am very glad to meet you.
I fear that I am lost."
The voice was marvelously pure, deep, and musical, and, like the brown eyes, betrayed the real strength of the man, denied by his gray hair and bent form.
The boy looked at the speaker in wide eyed wonder; he had a queer feeling that he was in the presence of a superior being.
"Where am I trying to get to?" As the man repeated Jed's question, he drew his hand wearily across his brow; "I-I-it doesn't much matter, boy.
Do you live near here?"
Hit'll be plumb dark 'gin I git home.
What might YER name be, Mister?"
The other, looking back over the way he had come, seemed not to hear Jed's question, and the native continued, "Mine's Holland. Pap an' Mam they come from Tennessee.
"Very true, very true, indeed," he mused.
"Jim Lane lives up the trail 'bout half a quarter.
Ever hear tell o' Jim?"
I'll hep you hunt hit, if you want me to, Mister."
"No," said the other, "I am not looking for mines of lead or zinc; there is greater wealth in these hills and forests, young man."
Lemme hep you, Mister.
You know the Matthews's, I reckon?"
Will mr Matthews keep me, do you think?"
"What is it?" he asked.
The native shook his head.
"Durned if I know, Mister.
"A hant, a ghost, some calls 'em," explained Jed.
The other interrupted.
Again Jed's question was ignored.
"You think then that mr Matthews will keep me?"
They'll take anybody in.
I know they're to home 'cause they was a fixin' t' leave the mill when I left 'bout an hour ago. Was the river up much when you come acrost?" As the native spoke he was still peering uneasily into the woods.
"I did not cross the river.
How far is it to this Matthews place, and how do I go?"
"Jest foller this Old Trail.
'bout three mile, I'd say.
Thank you, very much, for your assistance.
I will go on, now, for I must hurry, or night will overtake me, and I shall not be able to find the path."
"Reckon you must be from Kansas City or Chicago?
I heard tell they're mighty big towns."
The stranger's only answer was a curt "Good by," as his form vanished in the mist.
Must be from New York, sure!"
Slowly the old man toiled up the mountain; up from the mists of the lower ground to the ridge above; and, as he climbed, unseen by him, a shadowy form flitted from tree to tree in the dim, dripping forest.
As the stranger came in sight of the Lane cabin, a young woman on a brown pony rode out of the gate and up the trail before him; and when the man reached the open ground on the mountain above, and rounded the shoulder of the hill, he saw the pony, far ahead, loping easily along the little path.
A moment he watched, and horse and rider passed from sight.
The clouds were drifting far away.
In an old tree that leaned far out over the valley, a crow shook the wet from his plumage and dried himself in the warm light; while far below the mists rolled, and on the surface of that gray sea, the traveler saw a company of buzzards, wheeling and circling above some dead thing hidden in its depth.
CHAPTER two.
mr Matthews was a giant.
Fully six feet four inches in height, with big bones, broad shoulders, and mighty muscles.
And still, throughout the country side, the old folks tell with pride tales of the marvelous feats of strength performed in the days when "Old Matt" was young.
Of the son, "Young Matt," the people called him, it is enough to say that he seemed made of the same metal and cast in the same mold as the father; a mighty frame, softened yet by young manhood's grace; a powerful neck and well poised head with wavy red brown hair; and blue eyes that had in them the calm of summer skies or the glint of battle steel.
It was a countenance fearless and frank, but gentle and kind, and the eyes were honest eyes.
Anyone meeting the pair, as they walked with the long swinging stride of the mountaineer up the steep mill road that gray afternoon, would have turned for a second look; such men are seldom seen.
When they reached the big log house that looks down upon the Hollow, the boy went at once with his axe to the woodpile, while the older man busied himself with the milking and other chores about the barn.
Young Matt had not been chopping long when he heard, coming up the hill, the sound of a horse's feet on the Old Trail.
The horse stopped at the house and a voice, that stirred the blood in the young man's veins, called, "Howdy, Aunt Mollie."
mrs Matthews appeared in the doorway; by her frank countenance and kindly look anyone would have known her at a glance as the boy's mother.
How are you, honey?"
"It's about time you was a comin' over," replied the woman in the doorway; "I was a tellin' the menfolks this mornin' that you hadn't been nigh the whole blessed week.
mr Matthews 'lowed maybe you was sick."
The other returned with a gay laugh, "I was never sick a minute in my life that anybody ever heard tell.
I'm powerful hungry, though. You'd better put in another pan of corn bread." She turned her pony's head toward the barn.
"Seems like you are always hungry," laughed the older woman, in return.
Operations at the woodpile suddenly ceased and Young Matt was first at the barn yard gate.
But what is the use?
When all this is written, those who knew Sammy will say, "'tis but a poor picture, for she is something more than all this." Uncle Ike, the postmaster at the Forks, did it much better when he said to "Preachin' Bill," the night of the "Doin's" at the Cove School, "Ba thundas!
WHAT!
What!" And the little shrivelled up old hillsman, who keeps the ferry, removed his cob pipe long enough to reply, with all the emphasis possible to his squeaky voice, "She sure do, Ike. She sure do.
"I've been a lookin' for you over," said Sammy, a teasing light in her eyes.
"Didn't you know that Mandy was stoppin' with me?
"Why didn't you tell me before?
I reckon she'll get over it alright, though," he added with a smile, as he raised his arms to assist the girl to dismount.
The teasing light vanished as the young woman placed her hands on the powerful shoulders of the giant, and as she felt the play of the swelling muscles that swung her to the ground so easily, her face flushed with admiration.
When the girl was gone, the big fellow led the horse away to the stable, where he crossed his arms upon the saddle and hid his face from the light.
mr Matthews coming quietly to the door a few minutes later saw the boy standing there, and the rugged face of the big mountaineer softened at the sight.
Quietly he withdrew to the other side of the barn, to return later when the saddle and bridle had been removed, and the young man stood stroking the pony, as the little horse munched his generous feed of corn.
The elder man laid his hand on the broad shoulder of the lad so like him, and looked full into the clear eyes.
"Is it alright, son?" he asked gruffly; and the boy answered, as he returned his father's look, "It's alright, Dad."
"Then let's go to the house; Mother called supper some time ago."
Just as the little company were seating themselves at the table, the dog in the yard barked loudly.
Young Matt went to the door. The stranger, whom Jed had met on the Old Trail, stood at the gate.
CHAPTER three.
THE VOICE FROM OUT THE MISTS.
While Young Matt was gone to the corral in the valley to see that the sheep were safely folded for the night, and the two women were busy in the house with their after supper work, mr Matthews and his guest sat on the front porch.
"My name is Howitt, Daniel Howitt," the man said in answer to the host's question.
But, as he spoke, there was in his manner a touch of embarrassment, and he continued quickly as if to prevent further question, "You have two remarkable children, sir; that boy is the finest specimen of manhood I have ever seen, and the girl is remarkable-remarkable, sir.
The grim face of the elder Matthews showed both pleasure and amusement.
I doubt if there's a man in the hills can match him to day; not excepting Wash Gibbs; an' he's a mighty good boy, too.
But the girl is a daughter of a neighbor, and no kin at all."
The amused smile left the face of the old mountaineer, as he answered slowly, "There was six boys, sir; this one, Grant, is the youngest.
The others lie over there." He pointed with his pipe to where a clump of pines, not far from the house, showed dark and tall, against the last red glow in the sky.
The stranger glanced at the big man's face in quick sympathy.
The boy grew to be a man, and now he has left me." The deep voice faltered.
There is a bond of fellowship in sorrow that knows no conventionalities.
As the two men sat in the hush of the coming night, their faces turned toward the somber group of trees, they felt strongly drawn to one another.
The mountaineer's companion spoke again half to himself; "I wish that my dear ones had a resting place like that.
For some time the stranger sat thus, while his host spoke no word. Then lifting his head, the man looked away over the ridges just touched with the lingering light, and the valley below wrapped in the shadowy mists.
"This is good for me; it somehow seems to help me know how big God is.
The mountaineer puffed hard at his pipe for a while, then said gruffly, "Seems that way, Mister, to them that don't know.
I used to feel like you do, but I can't no more.
They 'mind me now of him that blackened my life; he used to take on powerful about the beauty of the country and all the time he was a turnin' it into a hell for them that had to stay here after he was gone."
As he spoke, anger and hatred grew dark in the giant's face, and the stranger saw the big hands clench and the huge frame grow tense with passion.
It'll fair up by morning, I reckon.
You can see a long way from here, of a clear day, Mister."
"Yes, indeed," replied mr Howitt, in an odd tone.
"You live in the city, then, when you are at home?" asked mr Matthews, looking curiously at his guest.
Old Matt leaned forward in his chair as if to speak again; then paused; someone was coming up the hill; and soon they distinguished the stalwart form of the son.
Sammy coming from the house with an empty bucket met the young man at the gate, and the two went toward the spring together.
It was a weird scene, almost supernatural in its beauty.
Howitt, you've got education; it's easy to see that; I've always wanted to ask somebody like you, do you believe in hants?
Do you reckon folks ever come back once they're dead and gone?"
The man from the city saw that his big host was terribly in earnest, and answered quietly, "No, I do not believe in such things, mr Matthews; but if it should be true, I do not see why we should fear the dead."
The other shook his head; "I don't know-I don't know, sir; I always said I didn't believe, but some things is mighty queer." He seemed to be shaping his thought for further speech, when again the girl's laugh rang clear along the mountain side.
The young people were returning from the spring.
The mountaineer relighted his pipe, while Young Matt and Sammy seated themselves on the step, and mrs Matthews coming from the house joined the group.
"We've just naturally got to find somebody to stay with them sheep, Dad," said the son; "there ain't nobody there to night, and as near as I can make out there's three ewes and their lambs missing.
There ain't a bit of use in us trying to depend on Pete."
"I'll ride over on Bear Creek to morrow, and see if I can get that fellow Buck told us about," returned the father.
"You find it hard to get help on the ranch?" inquired the stranger.
"Yes, sir, we do," answered Old Matt.
But with some a stayin' out on the range, an' not comin' in, an' the wolves a gettin' into the corral at night, we'll lose mighty nigh all the profits this year.
The worst of it is, there ain't much show to get a man; unless that one over on Bear Creek will come.
I reckon, though, he'll be like the rest." He sat staring gloomily into the night.
"Is the work so difficult?" mr Howitt asked.
"Difficult, no; there ain't nothing to do but tendin' to the sheep.
The man has to stay at the ranch of nights, though."
mr Howitt was wondering what staying at the ranch nights could have to do with the difficulty, when, up from the valley below, from out the darkness and the mists, came a strange sound; a sound as if someone were singing a song without words.
So wild and weird was the melody; so passionately sweet the voice, it seemed impossible that the music should come from human lips.
It was more as though some genie of the forest clad hills wandered through the mists, singing as he went with the joy of his possessions.
Young Matt rose to his feet and moved closer to the girl, who was also standing.
Mr Jones during this interval attempted once or twice to speak, but was absolutely incapable, muttering only, or rather sighing out, some broken words; when Sophia at length, partly out of pity to him, and partly to turn the discourse from the subject which she knew well enough he was endeavouring to open, said-
Justice I know must condemn me.--Yet not for the letter I sent to Lady Bellaston.
Indeed, you have acted strangely.
Think, most adorable creature, of my unhappy situation, of my despair.
No repentance was ever more sincere.
You must expect, however, that if I can be prevailed on by your repentance to pardon you, I will at least insist on the strongest proof of its sincerity." "Name any proof in my power," answered Jones eagerly.
"Time," replied she; "time alone, Mr Jones, can convince me that you are a true penitent, and have resolved to abandon these vicious courses, which I should detest you for, if I imagined you capable of persevering in them." "Do not imagine it," cries Jones.
"On my knees I intreat, I implore your confidence, a confidence which it shall be the business of my life to deserve." "Let it then," said she, "be the business of some part of your life to shew me you deserve it.
I think I have been explicit enough in assuring you, that, when I see you merit my confidence, you will obtain it. After what is past, sir, can you expect I should take you upon your word?"
"What is that?" said Sophia, a little surprized.
Impossible! my Sophia; they would fix a Dorimant, a Lord Rochester.
The first moment of hope that my Sophia might be my wife taught it me at once; and all the rest of her sex from that moment became as little the objects of desire to my sense as of passion to my heart." "Well," says Sophia, "the proof of this must be from time.
I will not dare to press anything further than you permit me.
Nay, I will not."--"O! don't look unkindly thus, my Sophia," cries he.
"I do not, I dare not press you.--Yet permit me at least once more to beg you would fix the period.
"O! my Sophia," cries he, "you have named an eternity."--"Perhaps it may be something sooner," says she; "I will not be teazed.
At this instant Western, who had stood some time listening, burst into the room, and, with his hunting voice and phrase, cried out, "To her, boy, to her, go to her.----That's it, little honeys, O that's it! Well! what, is it all over?
Come, confess, and be an honest girl for once.
What, art dumb?
Why dost not speak?"
All the spirit of contrary, that's all.
Dost repent heartily of thy promise, dost not, Sophia?"
In which the history is concluded.
There likewise he met his uncle, who was returned to town in quest of his new married daughter.
This marriage was the luckiest incident which could have happened to the young gentleman; for these brothers lived in a constant state of contention about the government of their children, both heartily despising the method which each other took.
As for the other, who really loved his daughter with the most immoderate affection, there was little difficulty in inclining him to a reconciliation.
He was no sooner informed by his nephew where his daughter and her husband were, than he declared he would instantly go to her.
There have not, I believe, been many instances of a number of people met together, where every one was so perfectly happy as in this company.
These were the charms which he could not bear to think his son had sacrificed to the daughter of Mrs Miller.
Mr Western!"
He began, indeed, once to debate the matter, and assert his right to talk to his own daughter as he thought fit; but, as nobody seconded him, he was soon reduced to order.
In confidence of this secrecy she went through the day pretty well, till the squire, who was now advanced into the second bottle, could contain his joy no longer, but, filling out a bumper, drank a health to the bride.
These two, therefore, sat stoutly to it during the whole evening, and long after that happy hour which had surrendered the charming Sophia to the eager arms of her enraptured Jones.
Thus, reader, we have at length brought our history to a conclusion, in which, to our great pleasure, though contrary, perhaps, to thy expectation, Mr Jones appears to be the happiest of all humankind; for what happiness this world affords equal to the possession of such a woman as Sophia, I sincerely own I have never yet discovered.
He is also lately turned Methodist, in hopes of marrying a very rich widow of that sect, whose estate lies in that part of the kingdom.
Square died soon after he writ the before mentioned letter; and as to Thwackum, he continues at his vicarage.
Mrs Fitzpatrick is separated from her husband, and retains the little remains of her fortune.
She lives in reputation at the polite end of the town, and is so good an economist, that she spends three times the income of her fortune, without running into debt.
She maintains a perfect intimacy with the lady of the Irish peer; and in acts of friendship to her repays all obligations she owes her husband.
Black George, hearing the discovery that had been made, ran away, and was never since heard of; and Jones bestowed the money on his family, but not in equal proportions, for Molly had much the greatest share.
We now return to take leave of Mr Jones and Sophia, who, within two days after their marriage, attended Mr Western and Mr Allworthy into the country.
They preserve the purest and tenderest affection for each other, an affection daily encreased and confirmed by mutual endearments and mutual esteem.
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By Jane Austen
CHAPTER one
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in mr Woodhouse's family, less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma.
Sorrow came-a gentle sorrow-but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness.--Miss Taylor married.
It was Miss Taylor's loss which first brought grief.
The wedding over, and the bride people gone, her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening.
Her father composed himself to sleep after dinner, as usual, and she had then only to sit and think of what she had lost.
The event had every promise of happiness for her friend.
mr Weston was a man of unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age, and pleasant manners; and there was some satisfaction in considering with what self denying, generous friendship she had always wished and promoted the match; but it was a black morning's work for her.
She recalled her past kindness-the kindness, the affection of sixteen years-how she had taught and how she had played with her from five years old-how she had devoted all her powers to attach and amuse her in health-and how nursed her through the various illnesses of childhood.
A large debt of gratitude was owing here; but the intercourse of the last seven years, the equal footing and perfect unreserve which had soon followed Isabella's marriage, on their being left to each other, was yet a dearer, tenderer recollection.
How was she to bear the change?--It was true that her friend was going only half a mile from them; but Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a mrs Weston, only half a mile from them, and a Miss Taylor in the house; and with all her advantages, natural and domestic, she was now in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude.
She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her.
He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful.
Highbury, the large and populous village, almost amounting to a town, to which Hartfield, in spite of its separate lawn, and shrubberies, and name, did really belong, afforded her no equals.
All looked up to them.
It was a melancholy change; and Emma could not but sigh over it, and wish for impossible things, till her father awoke, and made it necessary to be cheerful.
His spirits required support.
He was a nervous man, easily depressed; fond of every body that he was used to, and hating to part with them; hating change of every kind.
"Poor Miss Taylor!--I wish she were here again.
What a pity it is that mr Weston ever thought of her!"
"I cannot agree with you, papa; you know I cannot.
"My dear, how am I to get so far?
Randalls is such a distance.
I could not walk half so far."
"No, papa, nobody thought of your walking.
We must go in the carriage, to be sure."
But james will not like to put the horses to for such a little way;--and where are the poor horses to be while we are paying our visit?"
"They are to be put into mr Weston's stable, papa.
We talked it all over with mr Weston last night.
You got Hannah that good place.
Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her-james is so obliged to you!"
"I am very glad I did think of her.
It was very lucky, for I would not have had poor james think himself slighted upon any account; and I am sure she will make a very good servant: she is a civil, pretty spoken girl; I have a great opinion of her.
Emma spared no exertions to maintain this happier flow of ideas, and hoped, by the help of backgammon, to get her father tolerably through the evening, and be attacked by no regrets but her own.
The backgammon table was placed; but a visitor immediately afterwards walked in and made it unnecessary.
mr Knightley, a sensible man about seven or eight and thirty, was not only a very old and intimate friend of the family, but particularly connected with it, as the elder brother of Isabella's husband.
It was a happy circumstance, and animated mr Woodhouse for some time.
mr Knightley had a cheerful manner, which always did him good; and his many inquiries after "poor Isabella" and her children were answered most satisfactorily.
When this was over, mr Woodhouse gratefully observed, "It is very kind of you, mr Knightley, to come out at this late hour to call upon us.
I am afraid you must have had a shocking walk."
"Not at all, sir.
I wish you may not catch cold."
"Dirty, sir!
Not a speck on them."
"Well! that is quite surprising, for we have had a vast deal of rain here.
It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour while we were at breakfast.
I wanted them to put off the wedding."
Being pretty well aware of what sort of joy you must both be feeling, I have been in no hurry with my congratulations; but I hope it all went off tolerably well.
How did you all behave?
Who cried most?"
"Ah! poor Miss Taylor!
"My dearest papa!
What a horrible idea!
mr Knightley loves to find fault with me, you know-in a joke-it is all a joke.
We always say what we like to one another."
"Emma knows I never flatter her," said mr Knightley, "but I meant no reflection on any body.
Miss Taylor has been used to have two persons to please; she will now have but one.
The chances are that she must be a gainer."
"Well," said Emma, willing to let it pass-"you want to hear about the wedding; and I shall be happy to tell you, for we all behaved charmingly.
Every body was punctual, every body in their best looks: not a tear, and hardly a long face to be seen.
I made the match, you know, four years ago; and to have it take place, and be proved in the right, when so many people said mr Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for any thing."
mr Knightley shook his head at her.
Her father fondly replied, "Ah! my dear, I wish you would not make matches and foretell things, for whatever you say always comes to pass.
"I promise you to make none for myself, papa; but I must, indeed, for other people.
It is the greatest amusement in the world!
And after such success, you know!--Every body said that mr Weston would never marry again.
Oh dear, no! mr Weston, who had been a widower so long, and who seemed so perfectly comfortable without a wife, so constantly occupied either in his business in town or among his friends here, always acceptable wherever he went, always cheerful-mr
Some people even talked of a promise to his wife on her deathbed, and others of the son and the uncle not letting him.
All manner of solemn nonsense was talked on the subject, but I believed none of it.
I planned the match from that hour; and when such success has blessed me in this instance, dear papa, you cannot think that I shall leave off match making."
"I do not understand what you mean by 'success,'" said mr Knightley. "Success supposes endeavour.
A worthy employment for a young lady's mind!
But if, which I rather imagine, your making the match, as you call it, means only your planning it, your saying to yourself one idle day, 'I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Taylor if mr Weston were to marry her,' and saying it again to yourself every now and then afterwards, why do you talk of success?
What are you proud of?
There is always some talent in it.
You have drawn two pretty pictures; but I think there may be a third-a something between the do nothing and the do all.
If I had not promoted mr Weston's visits here, and given many little encouragements, and smoothed many little matters, it might not have come to any thing after all.
I think you must know Hartfield enough to comprehend that."
"Emma never thinks of herself, if she can do good to others," rejoined mr Woodhouse, understanding but in part.
"Only one more, papa; only for mr Elton.
Poor mr Elton!
You like mr Elton, papa,--I must look about for a wife for him.
I think very well of mr Elton, and this is the only way I have of doing him a service."
That will be a much better thing.
"With a great deal of pleasure, sir, at any time," said mr Knightley, laughing, "and I agree with you entirely, that it will be a much better thing.
Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken, but leave him to chuse his own wife.
CHAPTER three
He liked very much to have his friends come and see him; and from various united causes, from his long residence at Hartfield, and his good nature, from his fortune, his house, and his daughter, he could command the visits of his own little circle, in a great measure, as he liked.
He had not much intercourse with any families beyond that circle; his horror of late hours, and large dinner parties, made him unfit for any acquaintance but such as would visit him on his own terms.
Not unfrequently, through Emma's persuasion, he had some of the chosen and the best to dine with him: but evening parties were what he preferred; and, unless he fancied himself at any time unequal to company, there was scarcely an evening in the week in which Emma could not make up a card table for him.
mrs Bates, the widow of a former vicar of Highbury, was a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille.
Her daughter enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married. Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect.
She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness.
Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible.
The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself.
She was a great talker upon little matters, which exactly suited mr Woodhouse, full of trivial communications and harmless gossip.
It was no wonder that a train of twenty young couple now walked after her to church.
She was a plain, motherly kind of woman, who had worked hard in her youth, and now thought herself entitled to the occasional holiday of a tea visit; and having formerly owed much to mr Woodhouse's kindness, felt his particular claim on her to leave her neat parlour, hung round with fancy work, whenever she could, and win or lose a few sixpences by his fireside.
These were the ladies whom Emma found herself very frequently able to collect; and happy was she, for her father's sake, in the power; though, as far as she was herself concerned, it was no remedy for the absence of mrs Weston.
As she sat one morning, looking forward to exactly such a close of the present day, a note was brought from mrs Goddard, requesting, in most respectful terms, to be allowed to bring Miss Smith with her; a most welcome request: for Miss Smith was a girl of seventeen, whom Emma knew very well by sight, and had long felt an interest in, on account of her beauty.
Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody.
Somebody had placed her, several years back, at mrs Goddard's school, and somebody had lately raised her from the condition of scholar to that of parlour boarder.
This was all that was generally known of her history. She had no visible friends but what had been acquired at Highbury, and was now just returned from a long visit in the country to some young ladies who had been at school there with her.
The acquaintance she had already formed were unworthy of her.
The friends from whom she had just parted, though very good sort of people, must be doing her harm.
Such another small basin of thin gruel as his own was all that he could, with thorough self approbation, recommend; though he might constrain himself, while the ladies were comfortably clearing the nicer things, to say:
"mrs Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs.
An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome.
Ours are all apple tarts.
I do not advise the custard.
I do not think it could disagree with you."
Emma allowed her father to talk-but supplied her visitors in a much more satisfactory style, and on the present evening had particular pleasure in sending them away happy.
The happiness of Miss Smith was quite equal to her intentions.
CHAPTER sixty nine
NOT TO BE PUT UP WITH
The coat of arms, devised for me by the Royal heralds, was of great size, and rich colours, and full of bright imaginings.
They did me the honour to consult me first, and to take no notice of my advice.
But the gentlemen would not hear of this; and to find something more appropriate, they inquired strictly into the annals of our family.
Moreover, the name of our farm was pure proof; a plover being a wild bird, just the same as a raven is.
Upon this chain of reasoning, and without any weak misgivings, they charged my growing escutcheon with a black raven on a ground of red.
All this was very fierce and fine; and so I pressed for a peaceful corner in the lower dexter, and obtained a wheat sheaf set upright, gold upon a field of green.
Here I was inclined to pause, and admire the effect; for even De Whichehalse could not show a bearing so magnificent.
But the heralds said that it looked a mere sign board, without a good motto under it; and the motto must have my name in it.
Thirdly, they gave me, 'Ridd never be ridden,' and fearing to make any further objections, I let them inscribe it in bronze upon blue.
Now being in a hurry-so far at least as it is in my nature to hurry-to get to the end of this narrative, is it likely that I would have dwelled so long upon my coat of arms, but for some good reason?
And half in fun, and half in earnest, she called me 'Sir john' so continually, that at last I was almost angry with her; until her eyes were bedewed with tears; and then I was angry with myself.
Beginning to be short of money, and growing anxious about the farm, longing also to show myself and my noble escutcheon to mother, I took advantage of Lady Lorna's interest with the Queen, to obtain my acquittance and full discharge from even nominal custody.
It had been intended to keep me in waiting, until the return of Lord Jeffreys, from that awful circuit of shambles, through which his name is still used by mothers to frighten their children into bed.
And right glad was I-for even London shrank with horror at the news-to escape a man so bloodthirsty, savage, and even to his friends (among whom I was reckoned) malignant.
Earl Brandir was greatly pleased with me, not only for having saved his life, but for saving that which he valued more, the wealth laid by for Lord Alan.
And he introduced me to many great people, who quite kindly encouraged me, and promised to help me in every way when they heard how the King had spoken.
As for the furrier, he could never have enough of my society; and this worthy man, praying my commendation, demanded of me one thing only-to speak of him as I found him.
Lorna was moved with equal longing towards the country and country ways; and she spoke quite as much of the glistening dew as she did of the smell of our oven.
And here let me mention-although the two are quite distinct and different-that both the dew and the bread of Exmoor may be sought, whether high or low, but never found elsewhere.
Now while I was walking daily in and out great crowds of men (few of whom had any freedom from the cares of money, and many of whom were even morbid with a worse pest called 'politics'), I could not be quit of thinking how we jostle one another.
God has made the earth quite large, with a spread of land large enough for all to live on, without fighting. Also a mighty spread of water, laying hands on sand and cliff with a solemn voice in storm time; and in the gentle weather moving men to thoughts of equity.
This, as well, is full of food; being two thirds of the world, and reserved for devouring knowledge; by the time the sons of men have fed away the dry land.
Yet before the land itself has acknowledged touch of man, upon one in a hundred acres; and before one mile in ten thousand of the exhaustless ocean has ever felt the plunge of hook, or combing of the haul nets; lo, we crawl, in flocks together upon the hot ground that stings us, even as the black grubs crowd upon the harried nettle!
Surely we are too much given to follow the tracks of each other.
Such a man must be very wretched in this pure dearth of morality; like a fisherman where no fish be; and most of us have enough to do to attend to our own morals.
Enough that I resolved to go; and as Lorna could not come with me, it was even worse than stopping.
Nearly everybody vowed that I was a great fool indeed, to neglect so rudely-which was the proper word, they said-the pushing of my fortunes.
But I answered that to push was rude, and I left it to people who had no room; and thought that my fortune must be heavy, if it would not move without pushing.
They shook hands with me; and said that they could not deny but that there was reason in my view of the matter.
And although they themselves must be the losers-which was a handsome thing to say-they would wait until I was a little older and more aware of my own value.
I have seen at times, a little, both of one and of the other, and making more than due allowance for the difficulties of language, and the difference of training, upon the whole, the balance is in favour of our people.
Yet some people may be surprised that men with any love of justice, whether inborn or otherwise, could continue to abide the arrogance, and rapacity, and tyranny of the Doones.
Twenty sheep a week, and one fat ox, and two stout red deer (for wholesome change of diet), as well as threescore bushels of flour, and two hogsheads and a half of cider, and a hundredweight of candles, not to mention other things of almost every variety which they got by insisting upon it-surely these might have sufficed to keep the people in their place, with no outburst of wantonness.
Now these two maidens were known, because they had served the beer at an ale house; and many men who had looked at them, over a pint or quart vessel (especially as they were comely girls), thought that it was very hard for them to go in that way, and perhaps themselves unwilling.
And their mother (although she had taken some money, which the Doones were always full of) declared that it was a robbery; and though it increased for a while the custom, that must soon fall off again.
And who would have her two girls now, clever as they were and good?
Before we had finished meditating upon this loose outrage-for so I at least would call it, though people accustomed to the law may take a different view of it-we had news of a thing far worse, which turned the hearts of our women sick.
This I will tell in most careful language, so as to give offence to none, if skill of words may help it.
Mistress Margery Badcock, a healthy and upright young woman, with a good rich colour, and one of the finest hen roosts anywhere round our neighbourhood, was nursing her child about six of the clock, and looking out for her husband.
Now this child was too old to be nursed, as everybody told her; for he could run, say two yards alone, and perhaps four or five, by holding to handles.
And he had a way of looking round, and spreading his legs, and laughing, with his brave little body well fetched up, after a desperate journey to the end of the table, which his mother said nothing could equal.
Christopher Badcock was a tenant farmer, in the parish of Martinhoe, renting some fifty acres of land, with a right of common attached to them; and at this particular time, being now the month of February, and fine open weather, he was hard at work ploughing and preparing for spring corn.
Therefore his wife was not surprised although the dusk was falling, that farmer Christopher should be at work in 'blind man's holiday,' as we call it.
But she was surprised, nay astonished, when by the light of the kitchen fire (brightened up for her husband), she saw six or seven great armed men burst into the room upon her; and she screamed so that the maid in the back kitchen heard her, but was afraid to come to help.
In spite of tears, and shrieks, and struggles, they tore the babe from the mother's arms, and cast it on the lime ash floor; then they bore her away to their horses (for by this time she was senseless), and telling the others to sack the house, rode off with their prize to the valley.
And from the description of one of those two, who carried off the poor woman, I knew beyond all doubt that it was Carver Doone himself.
The other Doones being left behind, and grieved perhaps in some respects, set to with a will to scour the house, and to bring away all that was good to eat.
And being a little vexed herein (for the Badcocks were not a rich couple) and finding no more than bacon, and eggs, and cheese, and little items, and nothing to drink but water; in a word, their taste being offended, they came back, to the kitchen, and stamped; and there was the baby lying.
By evil luck, this child began to squeal about his mother, having been petted hitherto, and wont to get all he wanted, by raising his voice but a little.
Now the mark of the floor was upon his head, as the maid (who had stolen to look at him, when the rough men were swearing upstairs) gave evidence.
And she put a dish cloth under his head, and kissed him, and ran away again.
If it had been her own baby, instinct rather than reason might have had the day with her; but the child being born of her mistress, she wished him good luck, and left him, as the fierce men came downstairs.
And being alarmed by their power of language (because they had found no silver), she crept away in a breathless hurry, and afraid how her breath might come back to her.
While this good maid was in the oven, by side of back kitchen fireplace, with a faggot of wood drawn over her, and lying so that her own heart beat worse than if she were baking; the men (as I said before) came downstairs, and stamped around the baby.
Fetch down the staves of the rack, my boy.
What was farmer to have for supper?'
'No game!
Then let us have a game of loriot with the baby!
It will be the best thing that could befall a lusty infant heretic.
The cruelty of this man is a thing it makes me sick to speak of; enough that when the poor baby fell (without attempt at cry or scream, thinking it part of his usual play, when they tossed him up, to come down again), the maid in the oven of the back kitchen, not being any door between, heard them say as follows,--
TEMPERATURES THE BODY CAN ENDURE.
Everybody knows that if it is not too hot the water will spread over the surface and evaporate; but if it is too hot, the water will glance off without wetting the iron, and if this drop be allowed to fall on the hand it will be found that it is still cool.
The fact is that the water never touches the hot iron at all, provided the heat is sufficiently intense, but assumes a slightly elliptical shape and is supported by a cushion of vapor.
If, instead of a flat iron, we use a concave metal disk about the size and shape of a watch crystal, some very interesting results may be obtained.
By a careful manipulation of the dropper, the disk may be filled with water which, notwithstanding the intense heat, never reaches the boiling point.
On the other hand, if boiling water be dropped on the superheated disk its temperature will immediately be REDUCED to six degrees below the boiling point; thus the hot metal really cools the water.
By taking advantage of the fact that different liquids assume a spheroidal form at widely different temperatures, one may obtain some startling results.
Even mercury can be frozen in this way by a combination of chemicals.
Through the action of this principle it is possible to dip the hand for a short time into melted lead, or even into melted copper, the moisture of the skin supplying a vapor which prevents direct contact with the molten metal; no more than an endurable degree of heat reaches the hand while the moisture lasts, although the temperature of the fusing copper is one thousand nine hundred ninety six degrees.
The natural moisture of the hand is usually sufficient for this result, but it is better to wipe the hand with a damp towel.
Beckmann, in his History of Inventions, vol
He then squeezed the fingers of his horny hand close together, put it for a few minutes under his armpit, to make it sweat, as he said; and, taking it again out, drew it over a ladle filled with melted copper, some of which he skimmed off, and moved his hand backwards and forwards, very quickly, by way of ostentation.
While I was viewing this performance, I remarked a smell like that of singed horn or leather, though his hand was not burnt.
They told him that if the hand had been wet it would have been badly scalded.
Thus far our interest in heat resistance has uncovered secrets of no very great practical value, however entertaining the uses to which we have seen them put.
As long ago as eighteen twenty nine, for instance, an English newspaper printed the following:
His experiment is stated to have given satisfaction.
The pompiers were clothed in asbestos, over which was a network of iron. Some of them, it was stated, who wore double gloves of amianthus, held a red hot bar during four minutes.
Sir David says:
In our own times the art of defending the hands and face, and indeed the whole body, from the action of heated iron and intense fire, has been applied to the nobler purpose of saving human life, and rescuing property from the flames.
Sir h Davy had long ago shown that a safety lamp for illuminating mines, containing inflammable air, might be constructed of wire gauze, alone, which prevented the flame within, however large or intense, from setting fire to the inflammable air without.
This valuable property, which has been long in practical use, he ascribed to the conducting and radiating power of the wire gauze, which carried off the heat of the flame, and deprived it of its power. The Chevalier Aldini conceived the idea of applying the same material, in combination with other badly conducting substances, as a protection against fire.
The incombustible pieces of dress which he uses for the body, arms, and legs, are formed out of strong cloth, which has been steeped in a solution of alum, while those for the head, hands, and feet, are made of cloth of asbestos or amianthus.
The head dress is a large cap which envelops the whole head down to the neck, having suitable perforations for the eyes, nose, and mouth.
All these pieces are made of iron wire gauze, having the interval between its threads the twenty fifth part of an inch.
In order to prove the efficacy of this apparatus, and inspire the firemen with confidence in its protection, he showed them that a finger first enveloped in asbestos, and then in a double case of wire gauze, might be held a long time in the flame of a spirit lamp or candle before the heat became inconvenient.
On other occasions the fireman handled blazing wood and burning substances, and walked during five minutes upon an iron grating placed over flaming fagots.
In order to show how the head, eyes, and lungs are protected, the fireman put on the asbestos and wire gauze cap, and the cuirass, and held the shield before his breast.
A fire of shavings was then lighted, and kept burning in a large raised chafing dish; the fireman plunged his head into the middle of the flames with his face to the fuel, and in that position went several times round the chafing dish for a period longer than a minute.
In a subsequent trial, at Paris, a fireman placed his head in the middle of a large brazier filled with flaming hay and wood, and resisted the action of the fire during five or six minutes and even ten minutes.
In the experiments which were made at Paris in the presence of a committee of the Academy of Sciences, two parallel rows of straw and brushwood supported by iron wires, were formed at the distance of three feet from each other, and extended thirty feet in length.
Two towers were erected two stories high, and were surrounded with heaps of inflamed materials consisting of fagots and straw.
The firemen braved the danger with impunity.
The violence of the fire was so great that he could not be seen, while a thick black smoke spread around, throwing out a heat which was unsupportable by spectators.
The fireman remained so long invisible that serious doubts were entertained of his safety. He at length, however, issued from the fiery gulf uninjured, and proud of having succeeded in braving so great a danger.
It is a remarkable result of these experiments, that the firemen are able to breathe without difficulty in the middle of the flames.
This effect is owing not only to the heat being intercepted by the wire gauze as it passes to the lungs, in consequence of which its temperature becomes supportable, but also to the singular power which the body possesses of resisting great heats, and of breathing air of high temperatures.
Whenever they breathed upon a thermometer it sunk several degrees; every expiration, particularly if strongly made, gave a pleasant impression of coolness to their nostrils, and their cold breath cooled their fingers whenever it reached them.
Hence they concluded that the human body possesses the power of destroying a certain degree of heat when communicated with a certain degree of quickness.
A familiar instance of this occurred in the heated room.
All the pieces of metal there, even their watch chains, felt so hot that they could scarcely bear to touch them for a moment, while the air from which the metal had derived all its heat was only unpleasant.
Sir Charles Blagden went into a room where the heat was one degree or two degrees above two hundred sixty degrees, and remained eight minutes in this situation, frequently walking about to all the different parts of the room, but standing still most of the time in the coolest spot, where the heat was above two hundred forty degrees.
The air, though very hot, gave no pain, and Sir Charles and all the other gentlemen were of opinion that they could support a much greater heat.
His pulse was then one hundred forty four, double its ordinary quickness.
In order to prove that there was no mistake respecting the degree of heat indicated by the thermometer, and that the air which they breathed was capable of producing all the well-known effects of such a heat on inanimate matter, they placed some eggs and a beef steak upon a tin frame near the thermometer, but more distant from the furnace than from the wall of the room.
In the space of twenty minutes the eggs were roasted quite hard, and in forty seven minutes the steak was not only dressed, but almost dry.
Another beef steak, similarly placed, was rather overdone in thirty three minutes.
The furnace which he employs for drying his moulds is about fourteen feet long, twelve feet high, and twelve feet broad.
When it is raised to its highest temperature, with the doors closed, the thermometer stands at three hundred fifty degrees, and the iron floor is red hot.
The workmen often enter it at a temperature of three hundred forty degrees, walking over the iron floor with wooden clogs, which are of course charred on the surface.
On one occasion Sir f Chantrey, accompanied by five or six of his friends, entered the furnace, and, after remaining two minutes, they brought out a thermometer which stood at three hundred twenty degrees.
Yes, I agree.
Yes, he said, that is the only adequate image of him.
Yes, he said, that is the way in which the tyrannical man is generated.
I should not wonder.
He has.
And next, how does he live?
Yes; and every day and every night desires grow up many and formidable, and their demands are many.
His revenues, if he has any, are soon spent.
Then comes debt and the cutting down of his property.
Yes, that is sure to be the case.
Yes, probably.
Yes, indeed, he said; I believe that he would.
Yes, indeed, he said.
Exactly.
Certainly not.
Also they are utterly unjust, if we were right in our notion of justice?
And must not the tyrannical man be like the tyrannical State, and the democratical man like the democratical State; and the same of the others?
Yes, he said, I see that there are-a few; but the people, speaking generally, and the best of them are miserably degraded and enslaved.
Yes, indeed.
One of whom I am about to speak.
Who is that?
Yes, I replied, but in this high argument you should be a little more certain, and should not conjecture only; for of all questions, this respecting good and evil is the greatest.
The case of rich individuals in cities who possess many slaves: from them you may form an idea of the tyrant's condition, for they both have slaves; the only difference is that he has more slaves.
Yes, that is the difference.
Yes; the reason is, that the whole city is leagued together for the protection of each individual.
Yes, he said, he will be in the utmost fear.
The time has arrived when he will be compelled to flatter divers of his slaves, and make many promises to them of freedom and other things, much against his will-he will have to cajole his own servants.
Yes, he said, that will be the only way of saving himself.
And suppose the same god, who carried him away, to surround him with neighbours who will not suffer one man to be the master of another, and who, if they could catch the offender, would take his life?
And is not this the sort of prison in which the tyrant will be bound-he who being by nature such as we have described, is full of all sorts of fears and lusts?
Yes, he said, the similitude is most exact.
Very true, he said.
Moreover, as we were saying before, he grows worse from having power: he becomes and is of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more friendless, more impious, than he was at first; he is the purveyor and cherisher of every sort of vice, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable, and that he makes everybody else as miserable as himself.
Make the proclamation yourself, he said.
Let the words be added.
Then this, I said, will be our first proof; and there is another, which may also have some weight.
What is that?
The second proof is derived from the nature of the soul: seeing that the individual soul, like the State, has been divided by us into three principles, the division may, I think, furnish a new demonstration.
Of what nature?
It seems to me that to these three principles three pleasures correspond; also three desires and governing powers.
How do you mean?
he said.
Again, is not the passionate element wholly set on ruling and conquering and getting fame?
Suppose we call it the contentious or ambitious-would the term be suitable?
Extremely suitable.
Far less.
'Lover of wisdom,' 'lover of knowledge,' are titles which we may fitly apply to that part of the soul?
Certainly.
Yes.
Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men-lovers of wisdom, lovers of honour, lovers of gain?
Exactly.
Now, if you examine the three classes of men, and ask of them in turn which of their lives is pleasantest, each will be found praising his own and depreciating that of others: the money maker will contrast the vanity of honour or of learning if they bring no money with the solid advantages of gold and silver?
And the lover of honour-what will be his opinion?
Will he not think that the pleasure of riches is vulgar, while the pleasure of learning, if it brings no distinction, is all smoke and nonsense to him?
Very true.
Since, then, the pleasures of each class and the life of each are in dispute, and the question is not which life is more or less honourable, or better or worse, but which is the more pleasant or painless-how shall we know who speaks truly?
I cannot myself tell, he said.
Well, but what ought to be the criterion?
There cannot be a better, he said.
Then, I said, reflect.
Of the three individuals, which has the greatest experience of all the pleasures which we enumerated?
The philosopher, he replied, has greatly the advantage; for he has of necessity always known the taste of the other pleasures from his childhood upwards: but the lover of gain in all his experience has not of necessity tasted-or, I should rather say, even had he desired, could hardly have tasted-the sweetness of learning and knowing truth.
Yes, very great.
Far better.
Certainly.
What faculty?
Yes.
And reasoning is peculiarly his instrument?
Certainly.
Assuredly.
Or if honour or victory or courage, in that case the judgment of the ambitious or pugnacious would be the truest?
The only inference possible, he replied, is that pleasures which are approved by the lover of wisdom and reason are the truest.
Unquestionably, he said, the wise man speaks with authority when he approves of his own life.
And what does the judge affirm to be the life which is next, and the pleasure which is next?
Clearly that of the soldier and lover of honour; who is nearer to himself than the money maker.
Last comes the lover of gain?
Twice in succession, then, has the just man overthrown the unjust in this conflict; and now comes the third trial, which is dedicated to Olympian Zeus the saviour: a sage whispers in my ear that no pleasure except that of the wise is quite true and pure-all others are a shadow only; and surely this will prove the greatest and most decisive of falls?
Yes, the greatest; but will you explain yourself?
There is.
Yes.
That after all nothing is pleasanter than health.
Yes, I know, he said.
And when persons are suffering from acute pain, you must have heard them say that there is nothing pleasanter than to get rid of their pain?
I have.
Yes, he said; at the time they are pleased and well content to be at rest.
Again, when pleasure ceases, that sort of rest or cessation will be painful?
Doubtless, he said.
Then the intermediate state of rest will be pleasure and will also be pain?
But can that which is neither become both?
I should say not.
Yes.
Yes.
How, then, can we be right in supposing that the absence of pain is pleasure, or that the absence of pleasure is pain?
Impossible.
This then is an appearance only and not a reality; that is to say, the rest is pleasure at the moment and in comparison of what is painful, and painful in comparison of what is pleasant; but all these representations, when tried by the test of true pleasure, are not real but a sort of imposition?
Look at the other class of pleasures which have no antecedent pains and you will no longer suppose, as you perhaps may at present, that pleasure is only the cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.
What are they, he said, and where shall I find them?
There are many of them: take as an example the pleasures of smell, which are very great and have no antecedent pains; they come in a moment, and when they depart leave no pain behind them.
Most true, he said.
Let us not, then, be induced to believe that pure pleasure is the cessation of pain, or pain of pleasure.
no
Still, the more numerous and violent pleasures which reach the soul through the body are generally of this sort-they are reliefs of pain.
That is true.
Yes.
I should.
To be sure, he said; how can he think otherwise?
No doubt.
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INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR.
seven. OF ABSTRACT IDEAS.
PART two.
three. OF THE OTHER QUALITIES OF OUR IDEA OF SPACE AND TIME. SECT.
OF THE IDEA OF EXISTENCE, AND OF EXTERNAL EXISTENCE.
PART three.
OF THE COMPONENT PARTS OF OUR REASONINGS CONCERNING CAUSE AND EFFECT. SECT.
eight.
thirteen.
fifteen.
PART four.
OF THE SCEPTICAL AND OTHER SYSTEMS OF PHILOSOPHY.
VOLUME two
BOOK two OF THE PASSIONS
PART one OF PRIDE AND HUMILITY
twelve OF THE PRIDE AND HUMILITY OF ANIMALS
PART two OF LOVE AND HATRED
SECT.
three DIFFICULTIES SOLVED SECT.
twelve OF THE LOVE AND HATRED OF ANIMALS
PART three OF THE WILL AND DIRECT PASSIONS
SECT.
BOOK three OF MORALS
two MORAL DISTINCTIONS DERIVED FROM A MORAL SENSE
PART two OF JUSTICE AND INJUSTICE
SECT.
three OF THE RULES WHICH DETERMINE PROPERTY SECT.
twelve OF CHASTITY AND MODESTY
PART three OF THE OTHER VIRTUES AND VICES
SECT.
INTRODUCTION.
Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced from them, want of coherence in the parts, and of evidence in the whole, these are every where to be met with in the systems of the most eminent philosophers, and seem to have drawn disgrace upon philosophy itself.
Nor is there required such profound knowledge to discover the present imperfect condition of the sciences, but even the rabble without doors may, judge from the noise and clamour, which they hear, that all goes not well within.
There is nothing which is not the subject of debate, and in which men of learning are not of contrary opinions.
The most trivial question escapes not our controversy, and in the most momentous we are not able to give any certain decision.
Amidst all this bustle it is not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence; and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours.
From hence in my opinion arises that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds, even amongst those, who profess themselves scholars, and have a just value for every other part of literature.
By metaphysical reasonings, they do not understand those on any particular branch of science, but every kind of argument, which is any way abstruse, and requires some attention to be comprehended.
And indeed nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics.
For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse: and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous.
I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious.
Even.
From this station we may extend our conquests over all those sciences, which more intimately concern human life, and may afterwards proceed at leisure to discover more fully those, which are the objects of pore curiosity. There is no question of importance, whose decision is not comprised in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science.
In pretending, therefore, to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security.
And as the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation.
Locke, my Lord Shaftesbury, dr Mandeville, mr Hutchinson, dr Butler, etc] in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing, and have engaged the attention, and excited the curiosity of the public.
Nor ought we to think, that this latter improvement in the science of man will do less honour to our native country than the former in natural philosophy, but ought rather to esteem it a greater glory, upon account of the greater importance of that science, as well as the necessity it lay under of such a reformation.
For to me it seems evident, that the essence of the mind being equally unknown to us with that of external bodies, it must be equally impossible to form any notion of its powers and qualities otherwise than from careful and exact experiments, and the observation of those particular effects, which result from its different circumstances and situations.
And though we must endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, it is still certain we cannot go beyond experience; and any hypothesis, that pretends to discover the ultimate original qualities of human nature, ought at first to be rejected as presumptuous and chimerical.
I do not think a philosopher, who would apply himself so earnestly to the explaining the ultimate principles of the soul, would show himself a great master in that very science of human nature, which he pretends to explain, or very knowing in what is naturally satisfactory to the mind of man.
For nothing is more certain, than that despair has almost the same effect upon us with enjoyment, and that we are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of satisfying any desire, than the desire itself vanishes.
But if this impossibility of explaining ultimate principles should be esteemed a defect in the science of man, I will venture to affirm, that it is a defect common to it with all the sciences, and all the arts, in which we can employ ourselves, whether they be such as are cultivated in the schools of the philosophers, or practised in the shops of the meanest artizans.
Moral philosophy has, indeed, this peculiar disadvantage, which is not found in natural, that in collecting its experiments, it cannot make them purposely, with premeditation, and after such a manner as to satisfy itself concerning every particular difficulty which may be.
When I am at a loss to know the effects of one body upon another in any situation, I need only put them in that situation, and observe what results from it.
But should I endeavour to clear up after the same manner any doubt in moral philosophy, by placing myself in the same case with that which I consider, it is evident this reflection and premeditation would so disturb the operation of my natural principles, as must render it impossible to form any just conclusion from the phenomenon.
We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men's behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures.
PART one OF IDEAS, THEIR ORIGIN, COMPOSITION, CONNEXION, ABSTRACTION, etc
All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS.
The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness.
Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions: and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul.
By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning; such as, for instance, are all the perceptions excited by the present discourse, excepting only those which arise from the sight and touch, and excepting the immediate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion.
Every one of himself will readily perceive the difference betwixt feeling and thinking.
Thus in sleep, in a fever, in madness, or in any very violent emotions of soul, our ideas may approach to our impressions, As on the other hand it sometimes happens, that our impressions are so faint and low, that we cannot distinguish them from our ideas.
But notwithstanding this near resemblance in a few instances, they are in general so very different, that no one can make a scruple to rank them under distinct heads, and assign to each a peculiar name to mark the difference [Footnote one.].
I here make use of these terms, impression and idea, in a sense different from what is usual, and I hope this liberty will be allowed me.
Perhaps I rather restore the word, idea, to its original sense, from which Mr LOCKE had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions.
This division is into SIMPLE and COMPLEX.
Though a particular colour, taste, and smell, are qualities all united together in this apple, it is easy to perceive they are not the same, but are at least distinguishable from each other.
The one seem to be in a manner the reflexion of the other; so that all the perceptions of the mind are double, and appear both as impressions and ideas.
When I shut my eyes and think of my chamber, the ideas I form are exact representations of the impressions I felt; nor is there any circumstance of the one, which is not to be found in the other.
In running over my other perceptions, I find still the same resemblance and representation. Ideas and impressions appear always to correspond to each other.
This circumstance seems to me remarkable, and engages my attention for a moment.
Upon a more accurate survey I find I have been carried away too far by the first appearance, and that I must make use of the distinction of perceptions into simple and complex, to limit this general decision, that all our ideas and impressions are resembling.
We may next consider how the case stands with our simple, perceptions.
After the most accurate examination, of which I am capable, I venture to affirm, that the rule here holds without any exception, and that every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it, and every simple impression a correspondent idea.
That the case is the same with all our simple impressions and ideas, it is impossible to prove by a particular enumeration of them.
The full examination of this question is the subject of the present treatise; and therefore we shall here content ourselves with establishing one general proposition, THAT ALL OUR SIMPLE IDEAS IN THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE ARE DERIVED FROM SIMPLE IMPRESSIONS, WHICH ARE CORRESPONDENT TO THEM, AND WHICH THEY EXACTLY REPRESENT.
In seeking for phenomena to prove this proposition, I find only those of two kinds; but in each kind the phenomena are obvious, numerous, and conclusive.
I first make myself certain, by a new, review, of what I have already asserted, that every simple impression is attended with a correspondent idea, and every simple idea with a correspondent impression.
Such a constant conjunction, in such an infinite number of instances, can never arise from chance; but clearly proves a dependence of the impressions on the ideas, or of the ideas on the impressions.
That I may know on which side this dependence lies, I consider the order of their first appearance; and find by constant experience, that the simple impressions always take the precedence of their correspondent ideas, but never appear in the contrary order.
To give a child an idea of scarlet or orange, of sweet or bitter, I present the objects, or in other words, convey to him these impressions; but proceed not so absurdly, as to endeavour to produce the impressions by exciting the ideas.
Our ideas upon their appearance produce not their correspondent impressions, nor do we perceive any colour, or feel any sensation merely upon thinking of them.
To confirm this I consider Another plain and convincing phaenomenon; which is, that, where ever by any accident the faculties, which give rise to any impressions, are obstructed in their operations, as when one is born blind or deaf; not only the impressions are lost, but also their correspondent ideas; so that there never appear in the mind the least traces of either of them.
We cannot form to ourselves a just idea of the taste of a pine apple, without having actually tasted it.
Now if this be true of different colours, it must be no less so of the different shades of the same colour, that each of them produces a distinct idea, independent of the rest.
For if this should be denied, it is possible, by the continual gradation of shades, to run a colour insensibly into what is most remote from it; and if you will not allow any of the means to be different, you cannot without absurdity deny the extremes to be the same.
Suppose therefore a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, and to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue, for instance, which it never has been his fortune to meet with.
Ideas produce the images of themselves in new ideas; but as the first ideas are supposed to be derived from impressions, it still remains true, that all our simple ideas proceed either mediately or immediately, from their correspondent impressions.
This then is the first principle I establish in the science of human nature; nor ought we to despise it because of the simplicity of its appearance.
We may observe, that in order to prove the ideas of extension and colour not to be innate, philosophers do nothing but shew that they are conveyed by our senses.
But the youngest wished something better still.
So, when they had all wished their wishes, the two elder were for setting out to see the world; and Boots, their youngest brother, asked if he mightn't go along with them; but they wouldn't hear of such a thing.
'Wherever we go', they said, 'we shall be treated as counts and kings; but you, you starveling wretch, who haven't a penny, and never will have one, who do you think will care a bit about you?'
At last, after begging and praying, he got leave to go with them, if he would be their servant, else they wouldn't hear of it.
'I don't care a farthing for such a pack of rubbish', said the wife; 'if they don't like what they get they may lump it, and eat what they brought with them.
'Into the kitchen with you, and don't stand glowering after lads', he said.
But Boots, he had to stand outside here too, and look after the things in the carriage.
'Well! well!' she said, 'as for them, I don't care a pin.
If they can't wait till the custards are baked, they may go without-that's all.
Oh! what a darling!
What a darling!'
So the wife had off to her custards as fast as she could, for she knew that her husband would stand no nonsense; but as she stood there over the fire she stole out into the yard, and gave Boots a tap.
'If you only turn this tap', she said; 'you'll get the finest drink of whatever kind you choose, both mead, and wine, and brandy; and this you shall have because you are so handsome.'
This the king had ordered, because he wouldn't have the mirth at the palace spoilt by those dirty blackguards; and thither, too, only just as much food as would keep body and soul together was sent over everyday.
Now Boots' brothers saw very well that the guard was rowing him over to the island, but they were glad to be rid of him, and didn't pay the least heed to him.
But when Boots got over there, he just pulled out his scissors and began to snip and cut in the air; so the scissors cut out the finest clothes any one would wish to see; silk and satin both, and all the beggars on the island were soon dressed far finer than the king and all his guests in the palace.
After that, Boots pulled out his table cloth, and spread it out, and so they got food too, the poor beggars. Such a feast had never been seen at the king's palace, as was served that day at the Beggars' Isle.
'And as for the porridge and cheese we took, they wouldn't even taste them, so proud have they got', they said.
One of them, too, had smelt out that the lad had a pair of scissors which he cut out the clothes with.
'When he only snips with those scissors up in the air he snips and cuts out nothing but silk and satin', said he.
So, when the Princess heard that, she had neither peace nor rest till she saw the lad and his scissors that cut out silk and satin from the air; such a pair was worth having, she thought, for with its help she would soon get all the finery she wished for.
Well, she begged the king so long and hard, he was forced to send a messenger for the lad who owned the scissors; and when he came to the palace, the Princess asked him if it were true that he had such and such a pair of scissors, and if he would sell it to her.
Yes, it was all true he had such a pair, said Boots, but sell it he wouldn't; and with that he took the scissors out of his pocket, and snipped and snipped with them in the air till strips of silk and satin flew all about him.
'No! sell them I won't', said Boots; 'but all the same, if I can get leave to sleep one night on the floor of the Princess' bedroom, close by the door, I'll give her the scissors.
Yes! the Princess was glad enough to give him leave, for she was ready to grant him anything if she only got the scissors.
So Boots lay on the floor inside the Princess' bedroom that night, and two men stood watch there too; but the Princess didn't get much rest after all; for when she ought to have been asleep, she must open her eyes to look at Boots, and so it went on the whole night.
But one of those who brought the food contrived to smell out that the lad who had owned the scissors owned also a table cloth, which he only needed to spread out, and it was covered with all the good things he could wish for.
So when he got back to the palace, he wasn't long before he said:
'Such hot joints and such custards I never saw the like of in the king's palace.'
The Princess must and would have the cloth of him, and offered him gold and green woods for it, but Boots wouldn't sell it at any price.
'But if I may have leave to lie on the bench by the Princess' bed side to night, she shall have the cloth; but if she's afraid, she is welcome to set four men to watch inside the room.'
Yes! the Princess agreed to this, so Boots lay down on the bench by the bed side, and the four men watched; but if the Princess hadn't much sleep the night before, she had much less this, for she could scarce get a wink of sleep; there she lay wide awake looking at the lovely lad the whole night through, and after all, the night seemed too short.
So when he came back to the palace, he couldn't keep his mouth shut this time any more than before; he went about telling high and low about the tap, and how easy it was to draw all sorts of drink out of it.
So when the Princess heard that, she was all for getting the tap, and was nothing loath to strike a bargain with the owner either.
So when Boots came up to the palace, the Princess asked whether it were true he had a tap which could do such and such things?
'Yes! he had such a tap in his waistcoat pocket', said Boots; but when the Princess wished with all her might to buy it, Boots said, as he had said twice before, he wouldn't sell it, even if the Princess bade half the kingdom for it.
'But all the same', said Boots; 'if I may have leave to sleep on the Princess' bed to night, outside the quilt, she shall have my tap. I'll not do her any harm; but, if she's afraid, she may set eight men to watch in her room.'
'Will you come and serve me?' said the man.
If you do, I'll take your life when I come back.'
But when the man had been gone three or four days, the lad couldn't bear it any longer, but went into the first room, and when he got inside he looked round, but he saw nothing but a shelf over the door where a bramble bush rod lay.
So when the eight days were out, the man came home, and the first thing he said was:
'No, no; that I haven't', said the lad.
Then the lad begged and prayed so hard that he got off with his life, but the man gave him a good thrashing.
Some time after the man set off again, and said he should be away fourteen days; but before he went he forbade the lad to go into any of the rooms he had not been in before; as for that he had been in, he might go into that, and welcome.
In this room, too, he saw nothing but a shelf over the door, and a big stone, and a pitcher of water on it.
But when the man came back, he asked if he had been into any of the rooms.
No, the lad hadn't done anything of the kind.
Then after fourteen days the lad couldn't bear it, but crept into the room, but he saw nothing at all in there but a trap door on the floor; and when he lifted it up and looked down, there stood a great copper cauldron which bubbled and boiled away down there; but he saw no fire under it.
'Well, I should just like to know if it's hot,' thought the lad, and stuck his finger down into the broth, and when he pulled it out again, lo! it was gilded all over.
So the lad scraped and scrubbed it, but the gilding wouldn't go off, so he bound a piece of rag round it; and when the man came back, and asked what was the matter with his finger, the lad said he'd given it such a bad cut.
But the man tore off the rag, and then he soon saw what was the matter with the finger.
So after a while the man started off again, and this time he was to be away a month.
But before he went, he said to the lad, if he went into the fourth room he might give up all hope of saving his life.
Then the lad thought this all wrong, so he changed them about, and put the hay at his head.
'Since you are so good at heart as to let me have some food, I'll set you free, that I will.
For if the Troll comes back and finds you here, he'll kill you outright.
But now you must go up to the room which lies just over this, and take a coat of mail out of those that hang there; and mind, whatever you do, don't take any of the bright ones, but the most rusty of all you see, that's the one to take; and sword and saddle you must choose for yourself just in the same way.'
When he came back, the Horse told him to pull off his clothes and get into the cauldron which stood and boiled in the other room, and bathe himself there.
'If I do', thought the lad, 'I shall look an awful fright'; but for all that, he did as he was told.
So when he had taken his bath, he became so handsome and sleek, and as red and white as milk and blood, and much stronger than he had been before.
'Do you feel any change?' asked the Horse.
'Try to lift me, then', said the Horse.
Oh yes! he could do that, and as for the sword, he brandished it like a feather.
'Now saddle me', said the Horse, 'and put on the coat of mail, and then take the bramble bush rod, and the stone, and the pitcher of water, and the pot of ointment, and then we'll be off as fast as we can.'
So when the lad had got on the horse, off they went at such a rate, he couldn't at all tell how they went.
'I think I hear a noise; look round! can you see anything?'
'Yes; there are ever so many coming after us, at least a score', said the lad.
'Aye, aye, that's the Troll coming', said the Horse; 'now he's after us with his pack.'
'Now throw your bramble bush rod behind you, over your shoulder', said the Horse; 'but mind you throw it a good way off my back.'
So the lad did that, and all at once a close, thick bramble wood grew up behind them.
But at last, the Horse said again.
'Look behind you! can you see anything now?'
'Yes, ever so many', said the lad, 'as many as would fill a large church.'
'Aye, aye, that's the Troll and his crew', said the Horse; 'now he's got more to back him; but now throw down the stone, and mind you throw it far behind me.'
And as soon as the lad did what the Horse said, up rose a great black hill of rock behind him.
But still the Horse begged him to look behind him, and then he saw a troop like a whole army behind him, and they glistened in the sunbeams.
'Aye, aye', said the Horse, 'that's the Troll, and now he's got his whole band with him, so throw the pitcher of water behind you, but mind you don't spill any of it upon me.'
So the lad did that; but in spite of all the pains he took, he still spilt one drop on the horse's flank.
So it became a great deep lake; and because of that one drop, the horse found himself far out in it, but still he swam safe to land.
But when the Trolls came to the lake, they lay down to drink it dry; and so they swilled and swilled till they burst.
So when they had gone a long, long while, they came to a green patch in a wood.
'Now, strip off all your arms', said the Horse, 'and only put on your ragged clothes, and take the saddle off me, and let me loose, and hang all my clothing and your arms up inside that great hollow lime tree yonder.
Then make yourself a wig of fir moss, and go up to the king's palace, which lies close here, and ask for a place.
Whenever you need me, only come here and shake the bridle, and I'll come to you.'
Then he went up to the king's palace and begged first for leave to be in the kitchen, and bring in wood and water for the cook, but then the kitchen maid asked him:
'No, I can't do that', said the lad; 'for I'm not quite right in my head.'
'You'd best go down to the gardener', said he; 'you're best fit to go about and dig in the garden.'
So he got leave to be with the gardener, but none of the other servants would sleep with him, and so he had to sleep by himself under the steps of the summerhouse.
It stood upon beams, and had a high staircase.
Under that he got some turf for his bed, and there he lay as well as he could.
So, when he had been some time at the palace, it happened one morning, just as the sun rose, that the lad had taken off his wig, and stood and washed himself, and then he was so handsome, it was a joy to look at him.
'Do you think I'll do any such thing?' said the lad.
'Why they'd say next there was something between me and the Princess.'
So, when he was to go up the steps in the evening, he tramped and stamped so on the way, that they had to beg him to tread softly lest the King should come to know it.
So he came into the Princess' bedroom, lay down, and began to snore at once.
'Go gently, and just pull his wig off'; and she went up to him.
After that he lay down again, and began to snore.
Then the Princess gave her maid a wink, and this time she whisked off the wig; and there lay the lad so lovely, and white and red, just as the Princess had seen him in the morning sun
After that the lad slept every night in the Princess' bedroom.
All that she begged, and all that she prayed, for the lad and herself, was no good.
The King was only more wroth than ever.
So he got that, and an old broken down hack besides, which went upon three legs and dragged the fourth after it.
Then they went out to meet the foe; but they hadn't got far from the palace before the lad got stuck fast in a bog with his hack.
There he sat and dug his spurs in, and cried, 'Gee up, gee up!' to his hack. And all the rest had their fun out of this, and laughed, and made game of the lad as they rode past him.
But when the lad came up the battle had begun, and the king was in a sad pinch; but no sooner had the lad rushed into the thick of it than the foe was beaten back, and put to flight.
Every one wondered what strange champion it could be that had helped them, but no one got so near him as to say a word to him; and no one guessed it could be the lad; that's easy to understand.
So when they went home at night, and saw the lad still sitting there on his hack, they burst out laughing at him again, and one of them shot an arrow at him and hit him in the leg.
So he began to shriek and to bewail; 'twas enough to break one's heart; and so the king threw his pocket handkerchief to him to bind his wound.
'Gee up! gee up!' he said to his hack.
'Nay, nay', said the king's men; 'if he won't stick there till he's starved to death.'
And then they rode on, and laughed at him till they were fit to fall from their horses.
When they were gone, he ran again to the lime, and came up to the battle just in the very nick of time.
This day he slew the enemy's king, and then the war was over at once.
Then he took the pot of ointment and rubbed himself on the leg, and after that he rubbed all the wounded, and so they all got well again in a moment.
'Now I have helped you on, and now I won't live any longer.
So just take the sword, and cut my head off.'
'Well', said the Horse, 'If you don't do as I tell you, see if I don't take your life somehow.'
But as soon as ever he had cut off the head, there stood the loveliest Prince on the spot where the horse had stood.
'Why, where in all the world did you come from?' asked the king.
He it was who threw this Troll's shape over me, and sold me to the Troll.
But now he is slain I get my own again, and you and I will be neighbour kings, but war we will never make on one another.'
CHAPTER three
TORNADOES
Keep your radio or television set tuned to a local station for information and advice from your local government or the Weather Bureau.
Also, keep watching the sky, especially to the south and southwest.
(When a tornado watch is announced during the approach of a hurricane, however, keep watching the sky to the east.) If you see any revolving, funnel shaped clouds, report them by telephone immediately to your local police department, sheriff's office or Weather Bureau office.
The warning means that a tornado has actually been sighted, and this (or other tornadoes) may strike in your vicinity.
Your best protection is an underground shelter or cave, or a substantial steel framed or reinforced concrete building. But if none of these is available, there are other places where you can take refuge:
If not, go to a corner of your home basement and take cover under a sturdy workbench or table (but not underneath heavy appliances on the floor above).
If your home has no basement, take cover under heavy furniture on the ground floor in the center part of the house, or in a small room on the ground floor that is away from outside walls and windows.
Do not remain in a trailer or mobile home if a tornado is approaching; take cover elsewhere.
In a factory, go to a shelter area, or to the basement if there is one.
If there isn't time to do this-or if you are walking-take cover and lie flat in the nearest depression, such as a ditch, culvert, excavation, or ravine.
CHAPTER four
WINTER STORMS
Here is advice that will help you protect yourself and your family against the hazards of winter storms-blizzards, heavy snows, ice storms, freezing rain, or sleet.
Use your radio, television and newspapers to keep informed of current weather conditions and forecasts in your area.
You should also understand the terms commonly used in weather forecasts:
It combines cold air, heavy snow, and strong winds that blow the snow about and may reduce visibility to only a few yards.
If you live in a rural area, make sure you could survive at home for a week or two in case a storm isolated you and made it impossible for you to leave.
You should:
--Keep an adequate supply of heating fuel on hand and use it sparingly, as your regular supplies may be curtailed by storm conditions.
If necessary, conserve fuel by keeping the house cooler than usual, or by "closing off" some rooms temporarily.
This could be a camp stove with fuel, or a supply of wood or coal if you have a fireplace.
If your furnace is controlled by a thermostat and your electricity is cut off by a storm, the furnace probably would not operate and you would need emergency heat.
--Stock an emergency supply of food and water, as well as emergency cooking equipment such as a camp stove.
Some of this food should be of the type that does not require refrigeration or cooking.
--Make sure you have a battery powered radio and extra batteries on hand, so that if your electric power is cut off you could still hear weather forecasts, information and advice broadcast by local authorities.
Also, flashlights or lanterns would be needed.
--Consult page seventy two of this handbook for other supplies and equipment that you may need if isolated at home.
Be sure to keep on hand the simple tools and equipment needed to fight a fire.
Also, be certain that all family members know how to take precautions that would prevent fire at such a time, when the help of the fire department may not be available.
Avoid all unnecessary trips.
If you must travel, use public transportation if possible.
However, if you are forced to use your automobile for a trip of any distance, take these precautions:
--Make sure your car is in good operating condition, properly serviced, and equipped with chains or snow tires.
--Take another person with you if possible.
--Make sure someone knows where you are going, your approximate schedule, and your estimated time of arrival at your destination.
--Have emergency "winter storm supplies" in the car, such as a container of sand, shovel, windshield scraper, tow chain or rope, extra gasoline, and a flashlight.
It also is good to have with you heavy gloves or mittens, overshoes, extra woolen socks, and winter headgear to cover your head and face.
--Travel by daylight and use major highways if you can.
Keep the car radio turned on for weather information and advice.
--Drive with all possible caution.
Don't try to save time by travelling faster than road and weather conditions permit.
--Don't be daring or foolhardy.
Stop, turn back, or seek help if conditions threaten that may test your ability or endurance, rather than risk being stalled, lost or isolated.
If your car breaks down during a storm, or if you become stalled or lost, don't panic.
Think the problem through, decide what's the safest and best thing to do, and then do it slowly and carefully.
If you are on a well traveled road, show a trouble signal.
Set your directional lights to flashing, raise the hood of your car, or hang a cloth from the radio aerial or car window.
Then stay in your car and wait for help to arrive.
If you run the engine to keep warm, remember to open a window enough to provide ventilation and protect you from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Wherever you are, if there is no house or other source of help in sight, do not leave your car to search for assistance, as you may become confused and get lost.
Every winter many unnecessary deaths occur because people-especially older persons, but younger ones as well-engage in more strenuous physical activity than their bodies can stand.
If you add to this physical exercise, especially exercise that you are not accustomed to-such as shovelling snow, pushing an automobile, or even walking fast or far-you are risking a heart attack, a stroke, or other damage to your body.
In winter weather, and especially in winter storms, be aware of this danger, and avoid overexertion.
CHAPTER five
EARTHQUAKES
If your area is one of the places in the United States where earthquakes occur, keep these points in mind:
Don't run or panic.
If you take the proper precautions, the chances are you will not be hurt.
--REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE.
If you are outdoors, stay outdoors; if indoors, stay indoors.
In earthquakes, most injuries occur as people are entering or leaving buildings (from falling walls, electric wires, etc).
--If you are indoors, sit or stand against an inside wall (preferably in the basement), or in an inside doorway; or else take cover under a desk, table or bench (in case the wall or ceiling should fall).
Stay away from windows and outside doors.
--If you are outdoors, stay away from overhead electric wires, poles or anything else that might shake loose and fall (such as the cornices of tall buildings).
Remain in the car until the disturbance subsides.
When you drive on, watch for hazards created by the earthquake, such as fallen or falling objects, downed electric wires, and broken or undermined roadways.
AFTER AN EARTHQUAKE
CHAPTER one
ESTER'S HOME.
She did not look very much as if she were asleep, nor acted as though she expected to get a chance to be very soon.
There was no end to the things which she had to do, for the kitchen was long and wide, and took many steps to set it in order, and it was drawing toward tea time of a Tuesday evening, and there were fifteen boarders who were, most of them, punctual to a minute.
So Ester hurried to and from the pantry, with quick, nervous movements, as the sun went toward the west, saying to Maggie who was ironing with all possible speed:
Then: "No, no, Birdie, don't touch!" in quite a different tone to Minnie, who laid loving hands on a box of raisins.
Sadie Ried opened the door that led from the dining room to the kitchen, and peeped in a thoughtless young head, covered with bright brown curls:
"How are you, Ester?"
And she emerged fully into the great warm kitchen, looking like a bright flower picked from the garden, and put out of place.
Her pink gingham dress, and white, ruffled apron-yes, and the very school books which she swung by their strap, waking a smothered sigh in Ester's heart.
"O, my patience!" was her greeting.
Then school is out".
"We've been down to the river since school."
"Sadie, won't you come and cut the beef and cake, and make the tea?
I did not know it was so late, and I'm nearly tired to death."
Sadie looked sober.
Besides, mr Hammond said he would show me about my algebra if I'd go out on the piazza this minute."
"Here, Julia"--to the ten year old newcomer-"Go away from that raisin box, this minute.
Go up stairs out of my way, and Alfred too. Sadie, take Minnie with you; I can't have her here another instant. You can afford to do that much, perhaps."
"O, Ester, you're cross!" said Sadie, in a good humored tone, coming forward after the little girl.
"Come, Birdie, Auntie Essie's cross, isn't she?
And Minnie-Ester's darling, who never received other than loving words from her-went gleefully off, leaving another heartburn to the weary girl.
Back and forth, from dining room to pantry, from pantry to dining room, went the quick feet At last she spoke:
"I'm just ironing mr Holland's shirt," objected Maggie.
The tall clock in the dining room struck five, and the dining bell pealed out its prompt summons through the house.
There was a moment's hush while mr Hammond asked a blessing on the food; then the merry talk went on.
"This has been one of the scorching days," mr Holland said.
"It was as much as I could do to keep cool in the store, and we generally ARE well off for a breeze there."
"I gave it up long ago in despair."
Ester's lip curled a little.
mrs Holland had nothing in the world to do, from morning until night, but to keep herself cool.
"Miss Ester looks as though the heat had been too much for her cheeks," mrs Brookley said, laughing.
"Something besides keeping cool," Ester answered soberly.
"Which is a difficult thing to do, however," dr Van Anden said, speaking soberly too.
"I don't know, sir; if I had nothing to do but that, I think I could manage it."
"I have found trouble sometimes in keeping myself at the right temperature even in January."
Ester's cheeks glowed yet more.
She understood dr Van Anden, and she knew her face did not look very self controlled.
No one knows what prompted Minnie to speak just then.
Were you, Auntie Essie?"
The household laughed, and Sadie came to the rescue.
"Why, Minnie! you must not tell what Aunt Sadie says.
Sadie hovered around the pale, sad faced woman while she ate.
I've been worried half to pieces about you all day."
"O, yes; I'm better.
Ester, you look dreadfully tired.
Have you much more to do?"
"Only to trim the lamps, and make three beds that I had not time for this morning, and get things ready for breakfast, and finish Sadie's dress."
"Can't Maggie do any of these things?"
"Maggie is ironing."
mrs Ried sighed.
Sadie, are you going to the lyceum tonight?"
"Yes, ma'am.
Ester, can't you go down?
Never mind that dress; let it go to Guinea."
"You wouldn't think so by to morrow evening," Ester said, shortly. "No, I can't go."
The work was all done at last, and Ester betook herself to her room. How tired she was!
Every nerve seemed to quiver with weariness.
It was a pleasant little room, this one which she entered, with its low windows looking out toward the river, and its cosy furniture all neatly arranged by Sadie's tasteful fingers.
CHAPTER nineteen
A COUNTRY WITH A THOUSAND RIVERS-VENEZUELA
Years ago two miners worked together for months and finally came to know each other as Tom and Jack.
One day Tom was not well and could not do much but watch Jack dig.
After noting some movements of the body that seemed familiar he said: "Jack, where did you come from?" The two men sat down and talked of boyhood days and found that they were born in the same community and had played together when they were small boys.
Here they had worked together for months without knowing that they were neighbors; they actually got up and shook hands with each other.
Venezuela is our nearest neighbor to the south.
This country is nearer to Florida than New Orleans is to New York and yet we have lived side by side for four hundred years and hardly knew we were neighbors.
We might have been friends and greatly assisted each other all these years.
Is it not about time we were getting acquainted and shaking hands with each other?
It is surprising to know that Venezuela is as large as Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, the two Virginias, North and South Carolina and Georgia combined.
It is a country that has a thousand rivers.
In some parts of it you can travel for days in regions where as yet no white man has ever set his foot.
One writer says that of all the countries in the world Venezuela is the one for which God has done the most and man has done the least.
Its treasury has been looted again and again.
Even the president of Venezuela was for years a criminal.
He robbed merchants of other countries who tried to do business with his government.
He imprisoned those who refused to assist him and ran things in a high handed way.
Business firms of other lands found this out and did not care to do business with such a country or help develop its resources in any way.
We are not ashamed of our revolution in seventeen seventy six for its purpose was to gain our independence.
During the past seventy or eighty years Venezuela has had more than a half hundred revolutions but generally they were gotten up to give an excuse for pillage and robbery rather than to make a better country or government.
Things are better now, however, and a new day is dawning for these unhappy people.
The main port or entrance to this country is La Guaira and sailors say it is about the worst port to enter in the world.
This port city contains about fifteen thousand people and has but a single street.
The high mountains are so near the sea that there is only a narrow strip of land at the foot and on this narrow strip the city is built.
The sea is nearly always rough and the weather always hot.
How people can endure such extreme heat all the time is a mystery.
All along this coast strip of Venezuela are plantations generally covered with cocoa trees.
From the beans of this tree are made cocoa and chocolate.
Coffee is also a staple crop.
At the piers will be noticed bags of coffee and cocoa beans, great quantities of rubber and piles of hides.
As we are nearer to them than other foreign countries we now use much of their products.
The population of this great country is only a little more than that of the state of Iowa.
This city, Caracas, is about as large as Sioux city iowa, but to get to it is some job.
It is only about twenty five miles by rail and this railroad was about as difficult to build as any of our mountain railroads.
The tracks cling to the mountain sides almost like vines cling to brick walls, and the curves are so short that one riding in the end coach can nearly reach the engineer.
One can look hundreds of feet into caverns and gorges that seem almost like the bottomless pit.
Venezuela got its name from Venice, Italy, in the following way.
Here lived Las Casas, a priest who was the Indian's greatest champion in the early days and who is said to be the father of African Slavery in the new world.
It was he who suggested that negroes be imported to labor in the fields and mines that the Indians might have an easier time. Brought from Africa to work that the Indians might rest, these black people became the slaves of all.
Even the coins of the old days were stamped with Bolivar's name and everywhere he is revered as the George Washington of that country.
In one of the large museums is a room in which are kept the great liberator's clothing, saddle, boots and spears and these things are as sacred to them as the Ark of the Covenant was to the Jews.
In this same room is a portrait of Washington upon which is the inscription: "This picture of the liberator of North America is sent by his adopted son to him who acquired equal glory in South America."
Through this country runs one of the world's greatest rivers, the Orinoco, which with its tributaries furnishes more than four thousand miles of navigable rivers.
This great river system drains a territory of three hundred and sixty thousand square miles.
It is rather strange that in this country with lovely and productive valleys whose irrigated orchards and gardens make a regular paradise, that the farming classes should be poor and ignorant, without ambition or education and be satisfied to live in comfortless, tumble down huts without furniture or any of the improvements that make life worth living.
Here where there are millions of coffee trees, fields of sugar cane and orchards of oranges, lemons and all kinds of tropical fruit, where the farmer could be happiest, he is about the most miserable creature that could be found.
In his miserable home he has no lamp or candle, no books or papers of any sort.
This is asphalt, or mineral pitch as it is sometimes called.
This makes the smoothest street paving of any material known.
It is also used extensively for calking vessels, making waterproof roofs, lining cold storage plants, making varnishes as well as shoe blacking as well as in a hundred other ways.
At the mouth of the Orinoco river is the Island of Trinidad upon which is the famous pitch lake.
This is the most noted deposit of asphalt known.
This lake is a mile and a half across and looks, from a distance, like a pond surrounded with trees.
This material is of a dark green color and at the border is hard and strong enough to bear quite a heavy weight, but near the center it is almost like a boiling mass.
The asphalt is dug from the edges of the lake, loaded on carts, hauled to the port and from there shipped to nearly every country on the globe.
Two hundred thousand tons per year have been taken from the lake and yet there is no hole to be seen.
The government of Trinidad has leased the asphalt lake to an American company and the income amounts to nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year.
Nobody knows how deep the asphalt bed is for borings have been made a hundred feet or more deep and there was no bottom.
The heat is intense all around this lake.
Some believe that the two deposits are connected by a subterranean passage and supplied from the same source.
It was from this inland lake of asphalt that the material was procured to protect the New York subway tunnels from moisture, so it is said.
The chief industry here is cattle raising.
More than two million head of cattle feed, upon these llanos, but they are capable of feeding many times that number.
One reason why the people of this country have no ambition to lay up for the future or even get large herds of cattle has been because of the numerous revolutions of the past.
Every time they have succeeded in getting large herds of cattle or stores of grain a revolution would come and their property be seized and often destroyed.
No people can be prosperous and happy without a stable government, schools and colleges and the influences that are uplifting.
This is the great need of many of the countries of South America today.
Just here it is well for the farmers of this country to congratulate themselves.
It is therefore with pride that one can say that considering all the complex problems with which the American farmer has to grapple, he is a hundred times better off than his brother farmers in any country in the world.
THE PEARL OF THE ORIENT-PHILIPPINES
Of all the islands in the eastern seas, none are more interesting than our own Philippines.
This is a land where the storms of winter never blow but where from month to month and age to age there is good old summer time.
Children are born, grow to manhood, old age, and die without ever seeing fire to keep them warm for they never need it.
A range of twenty degrees is about all that the spirits in the thermometer ever show, for the minimum is seventy two and the maximum ninety two degrees.
About the most unpleasant feature is the little tiny ants.
They find their way into everything.
Table legs must be placed in jars of water and yet they find their way to the top of the tables.
Then there is dampness everywhere.
Books soon become mildewed or unglued and the finest library will soon have the appearance of a secondhand bookshop.
I drove out from Manila to the home of mr Lyon, who is a regular Burbank. He located on some of the worst soil to be found and undertook to demonstrate that anything that will grow on any spot on the earth will grow there and he practically succeeded.
The story of how these islands came into our possession is still fresh and vivid in the memory of thousands.
The transformation brought about since that memorable day is almost unbelievable.
This force is somewhat similar to the mounted police system of Saskatchewan in Canada and is a terror to evil doers.
The number of cases of small pox has been reduced from forty thousand to a few hundred per year.
With a dozen or more great hospitals and more than three hundred boards of health, great things have been accomplished.
America was criticised and even ridiculed for her altruism in dealing with this problem.
The idea of training tropical people for independence was thought to be idealistic and impracticable.
The city contains an area of more than fifteen square miles and is more densely populated per mile of street than New York.
The river and dirty canals divided and subdivided the city.
There was practically no water system and disease and death lurked in almost every shadow.
Now the city is fast becoming one of the world's great cities and one of the most healthful cities on the globe.
The streets have been widened, many of them, and are kept clean.
A water system brings pure water to almost every household and a great sewer system takes away the filth. The Manila Hotel is worth a million and a park or square on the water front covers hundreds of acres of ground.
The great y m c a buildings were thronged as in no other city the writer ever visited.
This prison covers seventeen acres of ground, making it one of the largest in the world. Many of its fifty buildings are built around a circle and in the tower at the center, watchmen, who can see the entire prison, stand night and day.
Through the kindness of the officials the writer was allowed to go into this tower one afternoon as the five thousand prisoners came from the shops, formed into companies and went through a thirty minute drill.
The band played throughout and as the men were formed into companies we from the tower could see each individual company although they were hidden from each other.
They stood, knelt, touched hands, lay down, arose, walked and exercised, keeping time with the music in a way that was wonderful to behold.
They mingle in companies in large sunny, clean, dormitories, where they visit, read and sing.
It is the old, old capital city and its story is the story of the Philippines.
The old walls of this inner city were built some four hundred years ago and could they speak, the whole world would listen with amazement and horror.
There were seven gates in this old wall and they were closed and opened by means of gigantic windlasses.
The stories that center around this old fort make one shudder to hear them. Possibly they are exaggerated, but there are many today who believe them.
The child had never had even a glimpse of the sunlight.
For a whole week they were afraid to venture from their homes.
mr Stuntz said the whole thing seemed so strange to him that he was silent for a moment, when the man continued: "Sir, this is a very important question to us Filipinos.
I want to know if it is safe."
POSTSCRIPT
I therefore add this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy but little the defect.
Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature long ago, and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a familiar head.
If not regular transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough to bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of phenomenal events.
In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence.
For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points.
The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts.
It appertains to a different "-ology," and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain.
It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must.
It takes the facts of physical science at their face value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad.
It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism proves.
In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate.
We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all.
"A world" of fact!--that exactly is the trouble.
An entire world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in at single points.
Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too late.
We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born.
I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked.
I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest.
At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs.
The difference in natural "fact" which most of us would assign as the first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I imagine, be personal immortality.
God is the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial.
Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves, and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide.
It seems to me that it is eminently a case for facts to testify.
Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove "spirit return," though I have the highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs.
Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions.
I consequently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why immortality got no mention in the body of this book.
Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief.
Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both "pass to the limit" and identify the something with a unique God who is the all inclusive soul of the world.
Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set.
All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves.
Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so still to day) that unless there be one all inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect.
In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, ALL is saved.
If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some portion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our religious consolation would thus fail to be complete.
The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part.
Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details.
Some men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that their cause will prevail-all of us are willing, whenever our activity excitement rises sufficiently high.
I think, in fact, that a final philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it.
For practical life at any rate, the CHANCE of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance.
OF THE DELECTABLE DISCOURSE WHICH THE DUCHESS AND HER DAMSELS HELD WITH SANCHO PANZA, WELL WORTH READING AND NOTING
It was the duchess, however, who spoke first, saying:
They gnaw me now, they gnaw me now, There where I most did sin.
And according to that the gentleman has good reason to say he would rather be a labouring man than a king, if vermin are to eat him."
The duchess could not help laughing at the simplicity of her duenna, or wondering at the language and proverbs of Sancho, to whom she said, "Worthy Sancho knows very well that when once a knight has made a promise he strives to keep it, though it should cost him his life.
My lord and husband the duke, though not one of the errant sort, is none the less a knight for that reason, and will keep his word about the promised island, in spite of the envy and malice of the world.
For in truth and earnest, I know from good authority that the coarse country wench who jumped up on the ass was and is Dulcinea del Toboso, and that worthy Sancho, though he fancies himself the deceiver, is the one that is deceived; and that there is no more reason to doubt the truth of this, than of anything else we never saw.
But, senora, your excellence must not therefore think me ill disposed, for a dolt like me is not bound to see into the thoughts and plots of those vile enchanters.
"That is true," said the duchess; "but tell me, Sancho, what is this you say about the cave of Montesinos, for I should like to know."
Sancho upon this related to her, word for word, what has been said already touching that adventure, and having heard it the duchess said, "From this occurrence it may be inferred that, as the great Don Quixote says he saw there the same country wench Sancho saw on the way from El Toboso, it is, no doubt, Dulcinea, and that there are some very active and exceedingly busy enchanters about."
"So I say," said Sancho, "and if my lady Dulcinea is enchanted, so much the worse for her, and I'm not going to pick a quarrel with my master's enemies, who seem to be many and spiteful.
The truth is that the one I saw was a country wench, and I set her down to be a country wench; and if that was Dulcinea it must not be laid at my door, nor should I be called to answer for it or take the consequences.
In fact, to speak in his own style, 'under a bad cloak there's often a good drinker.'"
"Indeed, senora," said Sancho, "I never yet drank out of wickedness; from thirst I have very likely, for I have nothing of the hypocrite in me; I drink when I'm inclined, or, if I'm not inclined, when they offer it to me, so as not to look either strait laced or ill bred; for when a friend drinks one's health what heart can be so hard as not to return it?
But if I put on my shoes I don't dirty them; besides, squires to knights errant mostly drink water, for they are always wandering among woods, forests and meadows, mountains and crags, without a drop of wine to be had if they gave their eyes for it."
"What is Dapple?" said the duchess.
"That will do," said the duchess; "no more of this; hush, Dona Rodriguez, and let Senor Panza rest easy and leave the treatment of Dapple in my charge, for as he is a treasure of Sancho's, I'll put him on the apple of my eye."
"Take him to your government, Sancho," said the duchess, "and there you will be able to make as much of him as you like, and even release him from work and pension him off."
CHAPTER thirty four.
Having, therefore, instructed their servants in everything they were to do, six days afterwards they took him out to hunt, with as great a retinue of huntsmen and beaters as a crowned king.
Sancho, however, took what they gave him, meaning to sell it the first opportunity.
The appointed day having arrived, Don Quixote armed himself, and Sancho arrayed himself, and mounted on his Dapple (for he would not give him up though they offered him a horse), he placed himself in the midst of the troop of huntsmen.
The duke and Don Quixote likewise dismounted and placed themselves one at each side of her.
Sancho took up a position in the rear of all without dismounting from Dapple, whom he dared not desert lest some mischief should befall him.
As soon as he saw him Don Quixote, bracing his shield on his arm, and drawing his sword, advanced to meet him; the duke with boar spear did the same; but the duchess would have gone in front of them all had not the duke prevented her.
Sancho alone, deserting Dapple at the sight of the mighty beast, took to his heels as hard as he could and strove in vain to mount a tall oak.
Don Quixote went over and unhooked Sancho, who, as soon as he found himself on the ground, looked at the rent in his huntingcoat and was grieved to the heart, for he thought he had got a patrimonial estate in that suit.
"That," said Don Quixote, "was a Gothic king, who, going a hunting, was devoured by a bear."
In their fear, silence fell upon them, and a postillion, in the guise of a demon, passed in front of them, blowing, in lieu of a bugle, a huge hollow horn that gave out a horrible hoarse note.
"Ho there! brother courier," cried the duke, "who are you?
"By God and upon my conscience," said the devil, "I never observed it, for my mind is occupied with so many different things that I was forgetting the main thing I came about."
"This demon must be an honest fellow and a good Christian," said Sancho; "for if he wasn't he wouldn't swear by God and his conscience; I feel sure now there must be good souls even in hell itself."
This was done, and he came to himself by the time that one of the carts with the creaking wheels reached the spot.
Then another cart came by at the same pace, but the occupant of the throne was not old like the others, but a man stalwart and robust, and of a forbidding countenance, who as he came up said in a voice far hoarser and more devilish, "I am the enchanter Archelaus, the mortal enemy of Amadis of Gaul and all his kindred," and then passed on.
THE BLUE BELT
Once on a time there was an old beggar woman, who had gone out to beg.
She had a little lad with her, and when she had got her bag full, she struck across the hills towards her own home.
So when they had gone a bit up the hill side, they came upon a little blue belt, which lay where two paths met, and the lad asked his mother's leave to pick it up.
'No', said she, 'maybe there's witchcraft in it'; and so with threats she forced him to follow her.
But when they had gone a bit further, the lad said he must turn aside a moment out of the road, and meanwhile his mother sat down on a tree stump.
But the lad was a long time gone, for as soon as he got so far into the wood, that the old dame could not see him, he ran off to where the belt lay, took it up, tied it round his waist, and lo! he felt as strong as if he could lift the whole hill.
'Dear mother', said the lad, 'mayn't I just go up to the top of this high crag while you rest, and try if I can't see some sign of folk hereabouts?'
Yes! he might do that; so when he had got to the top, he saw a light shining from the north.
So he ran down and told his mother.
'We must get on, mother; we are near a house, for I see a bright light shining quite close to us in the north.' Then she rose and shouldered her bag, and set off to see; but they hadn't gone far, before there stood a steep spur of the hill, right across their path.
'Just as I thought!' said the old dame; 'now we can't go a step farther; a pretty bed we shall have here!'
But the lad took the bag under one arm, and his mother under the other, and ran straight up the steep crag with them.
'Now, don't you see!
don't you see that we are close to a house! don't you see the bright light?'
But the old dame said those were no Christian folk, but Trolls, for she was at home in all that forest far and near, and knew there was not a living soul in it, until you were well over the ridge, and had come down on the other side.
But they went on, and in a little while they came to a great house which was all painted red.
'What's the good?' said the old dame, 'we daren't go in, for here the Trolls live.'
'Don't say so; we must go in.
There must be men where the lights shine so', said the lad.
'Good evening, grandfather!' said the lad.
'But what's come over your mother?' said the man, after they had chattered a while.
'I think she swooned away; you had better look after her.'
So the lad went and took hold of the old dame; and dragged her up the hall along the floor.
That brought her to herself, and she kicked, and scratched, and flung herself about, and at last sat down upon a heap of firewood in the corner; but she was so frightened that she scarce dared to look one in the face.
After a while, the lad asked if they could spend the night there.
'Yes, to be sure', said the man.
'Of course', said the man, 'that might be got too.' And after he had sat a while longer, he rose up and threw six loads of dry pitch pine on the fire.
This made the old hag still more afraid.
'Oh! now he's going to roast us alive', she said, in the corner where she sat
And when the wood had burned down to glowing embers, up got the man and strode out of his house.
'Heaven bless and help us! what a stout heart you have got', said the old dame; 'don't you see we have got amongst Trolls?'
'Stuff and nonsense!' said the lad; 'no harm if we have.'
In a little while back came the man with an ox so fat and big, the lad had never seen its like, and he gave it one blow with his fist under the ear, and down it fell dead on the floor.
When that was done, he took it up by all the four legs, and laid it on the glowing embers, and turned it and twisted it about till it was burnt brown outside.
After that, he went to a cupboard and took out a great silver dish, and laid the ox on it; and the dish was so big that none of the ox hung over on any side.
This he put on the table, and then he went down into the cellar, and fetched a cask of wine, knocked out the head, and put the cask on the table, together with two knives, which were each six feet long.
When this was done, he bade them go and sit down to supper and eat.
So they went, the lad first and the old dame after, but she began to whimper and wail, and to wonder how she should ever use such knives.
But her son seized one, and began to cut slices out of the thigh of the ox, which he placed before his mother.
'Well!
As for beds', he said, 'I don't know what's to be done.
'Thank you kindly, that'll do nicely', said the lad; and with that he pulled off his clothes and lay down in the cradle; but, to tell you the truth; it was quite as big as a four poster.
'Well!' thought the lad to himself, ''twill never do to go to sleep yet.
I'd best lie awake and listen how things go as the night wears on.'
So after a while the man began to talk to the old dame, and at last he said:
'But do you know how to settle him?
Is that what you're thinking of?' said she.
'Nothing easier', said he; at any rate he would try.
All this the lad lay and listened to.
Next day the Troll-for it was a Troll as clear as day-asked if the old dame would stay and keep house for him a few days; and as the day went on he took a great iron crowbar, and asked the lad if he had a mind to go with him up the hill and quarry a few corner stones.
'Oh!' said the lad to the Troll, 'now I see what you mean to do with me.
You want to crush me to death; so just go down yourself and look after the cracks and refts in the rock, and I'll stand up above.'
The Troll did not dare to do otherwise than the lad bade him, and the end of it was that the lad rolled down a great rock, which fell upon the Troll, and broke one of his thighs.
'Well! you are in a sad plight', said the lad, as he strode down, lifted up the rock, and set the man free.
After that he had to put him on his back and carry him home; so he ran with him as fast as a horse, and shook him so that the Troll screamed and screeched as if a knife were run into him.
'Well', said the old dame, 'if you can't hit on a plan to get rid of him, I'm sure I can't.'
'Let me see', said the Troll; 'I've got twelve lions in a garden; if they could only get hold of the lad they'd soon tear him to pieces.'
She would sham sick, and say she felt so poorly, nothing would do her any good but lion's milk.
All that the lad lay and listened to; and when he got up in the morning his mother said she was worse than she looked, and she thought she should never be right again unless she could get some lion's milk.
'Then I'm afraid you'll be poorly a long time, mother', said the lad, 'for I'm sure I don't know where any is to be got.'
'Oh! if that be all', said the Troll, 'there's no lack of lion's milk, if we only had the man to fetch it'; and then he went on to say how his brother had a garden with twelve lions in it, and how the lad might have the key if he had a mind to milk the lions.
So the lad took the key and a milking pail, and strode off; and when he unlocked the gate and got into the garden, there stood all the twelve lions on their hind paws, rampant and roaring at him.
So when the rest saw that, they were so afraid that they crept up and lay at his feet like so many curs.
After that they followed him about wherever he went, and when he got home, they lay down outside the house, with their fore paws on the door sill.
'Now, mother, you'll soon be well', said the lad, when he went in, 'for here is the lion's milk.'
He had just milked a drop in the pail.
He was sure the lad was not the man to milk lions.
When the lad heard that, he forced the Troll to get out of bed, threw open the door, and all the lions rose up and seized the Troll, and at last the lad had to make them leave their hold.
That night the Troll began to talk to the old dame again.
'Well!' said the Troll, 'I have two brothers in a castle; they are twelve times as strong as I am, and that's why I was turned out and had to put up with this farm.
They hold that castle, and round it there is an orchard with apples in it, and whoever eats those apples sleeps for three days and three nights.
If we could only get the lad to go for the fruit, he wouldn't be able to keep from tasting the apples, and as soon as ever he fell asleep my brothers would tear him in pieces.'
The old dame said she would sham sick, and say she could never be herself again unless she tasted those apples; for she had set her heart on them.
All this the lad lay and listened to.
Oh! the lad was ready to go that instant; but the eleven lions went with him.
So when he came to the orchard, he climbed up into the apple tree and ate as many apples as he could, and he had scarce got down before he fell into a deep sleep; but the lions all lay round him in a ring.
The third day came the Troll's brothers, but they did not come in man's shape.
They came snorting like man eating steeds, and wondered who it was that dared to be there, and said they would tear him to pieces, so small that there should not be a bit of him left.
But up rose the lions and tore the Trolls into small pieces, so that the place looked as if a dung heap had been tossed about it; and when they had finished the Trolls they lay down again.
The lad did not wake till late in the afternoon, and when he got on his knees and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, he began to wonder what had been going on, when he saw the marks of hoofs.
But when he went towards the castle, a maiden looked out of a window who had seen all that had happened, and she said:
'You may thank your stars you weren't in that tussle, else you must have lost your life.'
'What!
No fear of that, I think,' said the lad.
So she begged him to come in, that she might talk with him, for she hadn't seen a Christian soul ever since she came there.
She never wished it, she said; 'twas quite against her will. They had seized her by force, and she was the King of Arabia's daughter.
So they talked on, and at last she asked him what he would do; whether she should go back home, or whether he would have her to wife.
Of course he would have her, and she shouldn't go home.
After that they went round the castle, and at last they came to a great hall, where the Trolls' two great swords hung high up on the wall.
'Who?--I?' said the lad.
''Twould be a pretty thing if I couldn't wield one of these.'
After he had thus got down, he thrust the sword under his arm and carried it about with him.
So, when they had lived a little while in the castle, the Princess thought she ought to go home to her parents, and let them know what had become of her; so they loaded a ship, and she set sail from the castle.
After she had gone, and the lad had wandered about a little, he called to mind that he had been sent on an errand thither, and had come to fetch something for his mother's health; and though he said to himself, 'After all, the old dame was not so bad but she's all right by this time'--still he thought he ought to go and just see how she was.
So he went and found both the man and his mother quite fresh and hearty.
'What wretches you are to live in this beggarly hut', said the lad. 'Come with me up to my castle, and you shall see what a fine fellow I am.'
Well! they were both ready to go, and on the way his mother talked to him, and asked, 'How it was he had got so strong?'
'Have you got it still?' asked she.
'Yes'--he had.
It was tied round his waist.
Then she seized it with both hands, tore it off, and twisted it round her fist.
'Now', she cried, 'what shall I do with such a wretch as you?
I'll just give you one blow, and dash your brains out!'
'No! let's first burn out his eyes, and then turn him adrift in a little boat.'
So they burned out his eyes and turned him adrift, in spite of his prayers and tears; but, as the boat drifted, the lions swam after, and at last they laid hold of it and dragged it ashore on an island, and placed the lad under a fir tree.
They caught game for him, and they plucked the birds and made him a bed of down; but he was forced to eat his meat raw, and he was blind.
At last, one day the biggest lion was chasing a hare which was blind, for it ran straight over stock and stone, and the end was, it ran right up against a fir stump and tumbled head over heels across the field right into a spring; but lo! when it came out of the spring it saw its way quite plain, and so saved its life.
So, when he had got his sight again, he went down to the shore and made signs to the lions that they should all lie close together like a raft; then he stood upon their backs while they swam with him to the mainland.
When he had reached the shore he went up into a birchen copse, and made the lions lie quiet.
Then he stole up to the castle, like a thief, to see if he couldn't lay hands on his belt; and when he got to the door, he peeped through the keyhole, and there he saw his belt hanging up over a door in the kitchen.
'Thank you kindly', said he.
'Now you shall have the doom you passed on me', and he fulfilled it on the spot.
'Well, you may live', said the lad, 'but you shall undergo the same punishment you gave me'; and so he burned out the Troll's eyes, and turned him adrift on the sea in a little boat, but he had no lions to follow him.
So he loaded four ships and set sail for Arabia.
For some time they had fair wind and fine weather, but after that they lay wind bound under a rocky island.
So the sailors went ashore and strolled about to spend the time, and there they found a huge egg, almost as big as a little house.
So they began to knock it about with large stones, but, after all, they couldn't crack the shell.
Then the lad came up with his sword to see what all the noise was about, and when he saw the egg, he thought it a trifle to crack it; so he gave it one blow and the egg split, and out came a chicken as big as an elephant.
Yes! they were good to do that, they said, so they set sail with a fine breeze, and got to Arabia in three and twenty hours.
As soon as they landed, the lad ordered all the sailors to go and bury themselves up to the eyes in a sandhill, so that they could barely see the ships. The lad and the captains climbed a high crag and sate down under a fir.
In a little while came a great bird flying with an island in its claws, and let it fall down on the fleet, and sunk every ship.
After it had done that, it flew up to the sandhill and flapped its wings, so that the wind nearly took off the heads of the sailors, and it flew past the fir with such force that it turned the lad right about, but he was ready with his sword, and gave the bird one blow and brought it down dead.
After that he went to the town, where every one was glad because the king had got his daughter back; but now the king had hidden her away somewhere himself, and promised her hand as a reward to any one who could find her, and this though she was betrothed before.
At last the news came to the king's ears, that there never had been such fun in the town before, for here was a white bear that danced and cut capers just as it was bid.
So a messenger came to say the bear must come to the castle at once, for the king wanted to see its tricks.
So when it got to the castle every one was afraid, for such a beast they had never seen before; but the captain said there was no danger unless they laughed at it.
They mustn't do that, else it would tear them to pieces.
When the king heard that, he warned all the court not to laugh.
But while the fun was going on, in came one of the king's maids, and began to laugh and make game of the bear, and the bear flew at her and tore her, so that there was scarce a rag of her left.
Then all the court began to bewail, and the captain most of all.
'It's no good your going away, when it's so late', said the king.
'The bear had best sleep here.'
'Perhaps it might sleep in the ingle by the kitchen fire', said the captain.
But at midnight the king came with a lamp in his hand and a big bunch of keys, and carried off the white bear.
He passed along gallery after gallery, through doors and rooms, up stairs and down stairs, till at last he came to a pier which ran out into the sea.
Then the king began to pull and haul at posts and pins, this one up and that one down, till at last a little house floated up to the water's edge. There he kept his daughter, for she was so dear to him that he had hid her, so that no one could find her out.
He left the white bear outside while he went in and told her how it had danced and played its pranks.
So they brought the bear in, and locked the door, and it danced and played its tricks; but just when the fun was at its height, the Princess's maid began to laugh.
Then the lad flew at her and tore her to bits, and the Princess began to cry and sob.
'Stuff and nonsense', cried the king; 'all this fuss about a maid! I'll get you just as good a one again.
'Well!' said the Princess, 'if it sleeps here, I'm sure I won't.'
But just then the bear curled himself up and lay down by the stove; and it was settled at last that the Princess should sleep there too, with a light burning.
But as soon as the king was well gone, the white bear came and begged her to undo his collar.
The Princess was so scared she almost swooned away; but she felt about till she found the collar, and she had scarce undone it before the bear pulled his head off.
So in the morning when they heard the king rattling at the posts outside, the lad drew on the hide, and lay down by the stove.
'Well, has it lain still?' the king asked.
'I should think so', said the Princess; 'it hasn't so much as turned or stretched itself once.'
When they got up to the castle again, the captain took the bear and led it away, and then the lad threw off the hide, and went to a tailor and ordered clothes fit for a prince; and when they were fitted on he went to the king, and said he wanted to find the Princess.
'You're not the first who has wished the same thing', said the king, 'but they have all lost their lives; for if any one who tries can't find her in four and twenty hours his life is forfeited.'
Yes; the lad knew all that.
Still he wished to try, and if he couldn't find her, 'twas his look out.
Now in the castle there was a band that played sweet tunes, and there were fair maids to dance with, and so the lad danced away.
When twelve hours were gone, the king said:
'I pity you with all my heart.
'Stuff!' said the lad; 'while there's life there's hope!
So the lad went the same way which the king had led him the night before, and he bade the king unlock door after door till they came down to the pier which ran out into the sea.
'Still five minutes more', said the lad, as he pulled and pushed at the posts and pins, and the house floated up.
'Now the time is up', bawled the king; 'come hither, headsman, and take off his head.'
'Nay, nay!' said the lad; 'stop a bit, there are still three minutes! Out with the key, and let me get into this house.'
But there stood the king and fumbled with his keys, to draw out the time.
At last he said he hadn't any key.
At the door the Princess met him, and told her father this was her deliverer, on whom her heart was set.
NOT A PIN TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THEM
Once on a time there was a man, and he had a wife.
Now this couple wanted to sow their fields, but they had neither seed corn nor money to buy it with.
But they had a cow, and the man was to drive it into town and sell it, to get money to buy corn for seed.
But when it came to the pinch, the wife dared not let her husband start for fear he should spend the money in drink, so she set off herself with the cow, and took besides a hen with her.
Close by the town she met a butcher, who asked:
'Will you sell that cow, Goody?'
I must have five shillings for the cow, but you shall have the hen for ten pounds.'
'Very good!' said the man; 'I don't want the hen, and you'll soon get it off your hands in the town, but I'll give you five shillings for the cow.'
Well, she sold her cow for five shillings, but there was no one in the town who would give ten pounds for a lean tough old hen, so she went back to the butcher, and said:
'Do all I can, I can't get rid of this hen, master! you must take it too, as you took the cow.'
But while she slept, the butcher took and dipped her into a tar barrel, and then laid her down on a heap of feathers; and when she woke up, she was feathered all over, and began to wonder what had befallen her.
'Is it me, or is it not me?
No, it can never be me; it must be some great strange bird.
But what shall I do to find out whether it is me or not.
Oh!
I know how I shall be able to tell whether it is me; if the calves come and lick me, and our dog Tray doesn't bark at me when I get home, then it must be me, and no one else.'
'Ah, deary me', said she, 'I thought so; it can't be me surely.' So she went to the straw yard, and the calves wouldn't lick her, when they snuffed in the strong smell of tar.
'No, no!' she said, 'it can't be me; it must be some strange outlandish bird.'
So she crept up on the roof of the safe and began to flap her arms, as if they had been wings, and was just going to fly off.
'If it's you', said her husband, 'don't stand up there like a goat on a house top, but come down and let me hear what you have to say for yourself.'
So she crawled down again, but she hadn't a shilling to shew, for the crown she had got from the butcher she had thrown away in her drunkenness.
So he toddled off, and when he had walked a little way he saw a Goody, who was running in and out of a newly built wooden cottage with an empty sieve, and every time she ran in, she threw her apron over the sieve just as if she had something in it, and when she got in she turned it upside down on the floor.
'Why, Goody!' he asked, 'what are you doing?'
'Oh', she answered, 'I'm only carrying in a little sun; but I don't know how it is, when I'm outside, I have the sun in my sieve, but when I get inside, somehow or other I've thrown it away.
But in my old cottage I had plenty of sun, though I never carried in the least bit.
I only wish I knew some one who would bring the sun inside; I'd give him three hundred dollars and welcome.'
'Have you got an axe?' asked the man.
So he got an axe and cut windows in the cottage, for the carpenters had forgotten them; then the sun shone in, and he got his three hundred dollars.
'That was one of them', said the man to himself, as he went on his way.
After a while he passed by a house, out of which came an awful screaming and bellowing; so he turned in and saw a Goody, who was hard at work banging her husband across the head with a beetle, and over his head she had drawn a shirt without any slit for the neck.
'No', she said, 'I only must have a hole in this shirt for his neck to come through.'
All the while the husband kept on screaming and calling out:
So he got a pair of scissors, and snipped a hole in the neck, and went off with his three hundred dollars.
'That was another of them', he said to himself, as he walked along.
Last of all, he came to a farm, where he made up his mind to rest a bit.
So when he went in, the mistress asked him:
'Whence do you come, master?'
'Oh!' said he, 'I come from Paradise Place', for that was the name of his farm.
'From Paradise Place!' she cried, 'you don't say so!
Why, then, you must know my second husband peter, who is dead and gone, God rest his soul.'
For you must know this Goody had been married three times, and as her first and last husbands had been bad, she had made up her mind that the second only was gone to heaven.
'Well', asked the Goody, 'how do things go with him, poor dear soul?'
As for money, he hasn't a sixpence to bless himself with.'
'Mercy on me', cried out the Goody; 'he never ought to go about such a figure when he left so much behind him.
Why, there's a whole cupboard full of old clothes up stairs which belonged to him, besides a great chest full of money yonder.
Now, if you will take them with you, you shall have a horse and cart to carry them.
As for the horse, he can keep it, and sit on the cart, and drive about from house to house, and then he needn't trudge on foot.'
So the man got a whole cart load of clothes, and a chest full of shining dollars, and as much meat and drink as he would; and when he had got all he wanted, he jumped into the cart and drove off.
'That was the third', he said to himself, as he went along.
'Well, well, if I ever!' he said, as peter the third came riding up. 'No!
Then peter stood and looked at him for some time, wondering what had come over him; but at last he asked:
'What do you lie there staring at?'
'No', kept on the man, 'I never did see anything like it!--here is a man going straight up to heaven on a black horse, and here you see his horse's tail still hanging in this birch; and yonder up in the sky you see the black horse.'
peter looked first at the man, and then at the sky, and said:
'I see nothing but the horse hair in the birch; that's all I see!'
'Of course you can't where you stand', said the man; 'but just come and lie down here, and stare straight up, and mind you don't take your eyes off the sky; and then you shall see what you shall see.'
But while peter the third lay and stared up at the sky till his eyes filled with tears, the man from Paradise Place took his horse and jumped on its back and rode off both with it and the cart and horse.
When the hoofs thundered along the road, peter the third jumped up; but he was so taken aback when he found the man had gone off with his horse that he hadn't the sense to run after him till it was too late.
He was rather down in the mouth when he got home to his Goody; but when she asked him what he had done with the horse, he said,
'I gave it to the man too for peter the second, for I thought it wasn't right he should sit in a cart, and scramble about from house to house; so now he can sell the cart and buy himself a coach to drive about in.'
'Thank you heartily!' said his wife; 'I never thought you could be so kind.'
Well, when the man reached home, who had got the six hundred dollars and the cart load of clothes and money, he saw that all his fields were ploughed and sown, and the first thing he asked his wife was, where she had got the seed corn from.
THE JOCOSE GODS
WAR
mr Bennet had very often wished before this period of his life that, instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him.
Had he done his duty in that respect, Lydia need not have been indebted to her uncle for whatever of honour or credit could now be purchased for her.
He was seriously concerned that a cause of so little advantage to anyone should be forwarded at the sole expense of his brother in law, and he was determined, if possible, to find out the extent of his assistance, and to discharge the obligation as soon as he could.
The son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for.
This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving.
mrs Bennet had no turn for economy, and her husband's love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their income.
This was one point, with regard to Lydia, at least, which was now to be settled, and mr Bennet could have no hesitation in acceding to the proposal before him.
In terms of grateful acknowledgment for the kindness of his brother, though expressed most concisely, he then delivered on paper his perfect approbation of all that was done, and his willingness to fulfil the engagements that had been made for him.
He had never before supposed that, could Wickham be prevailed on to marry his daughter, it would be done with so little inconvenience to himself as by the present arrangement.
He would scarcely be ten pounds a year the loser by the hundred that was to be paid them; for, what with her board and pocket allowance, and the continual presents in money which passed to her through her mother's hands, Lydia's expenses had been very little within that sum.
His letter was soon dispatched; for, though dilatory in undertaking business, he was quick in its execution.
He begged to know further particulars of what he was indebted to his brother, but was too angry with Lydia to send any message to her.
The good news spread quickly through the house, and with proportionate speed through the neighbourhood.
It was borne in the latter with decent philosophy.
No sentiment of shame gave a damp to her triumph.
The marriage of a daughter, which had been the first object of her wishes since Jane was sixteen, was now on the point of accomplishment, and her thoughts and her words ran wholly on those attendants of elegant nuptials, fine muslins, new carriages, and servants.
She was busily searching through the neighbourhood for a proper situation for her daughter, and, without knowing or considering what their income might be, rejected many as deficient in size and importance.
"Haye Park might do," said she, "if the Gouldings could quit it-or the great house at Stoke, if the drawing room were larger; but Ashworth is too far off!
I could not bear to have her ten miles from me; and as for Pulvis Lodge, the attics are dreadful."
But when they had withdrawn, he said to her: "mrs Bennet, before you take any or all of these houses for your son and daughter, let us come to a right understanding.
I will not encourage the impudence of either, by receiving them at Longbourn."
A long dispute followed this declaration; but mr Bennet was firm.
It soon led to another; and mrs Bennet found, with amazement and horror, that her husband would not advance a guinea to buy clothes for his daughter.
He protested that she should receive from him no mark of affection whatever on the occasion.
mrs Bennet could hardly comprehend it.
That his anger could be carried to such a point of inconceivable resentment as to refuse his daughter a privilege without which her marriage would scarcely seem valid, exceeded all she could believe possible.
She was more alive to the disgrace which her want of new clothes must reflect on her daughter's nuptials, than to any sense of shame at her eloping and living with Wickham a fortnight before they took place.
From such a connection she could not wonder that he would shrink.
The wish of procuring her regard, which she had assured herself of his feeling in Derbyshire, could not in rational expectation survive such a blow as this.
She was convinced that she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet.
His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes.
But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was.
How Wickham and Lydia were to be supported in tolerable independence, she could not imagine.
But how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.
mr Gardiner soon wrote again to his brother.
The principal purport of his letter was to inform them that mr Wickham had resolved on quitting the militia.
"It was greatly my wish that he should do so," he added, "as soon as his marriage was fixed on.
It is mr Wickham's intention to go into the regulars; and among his former friends, there are still some who are able and willing to assist him in the army.
It is an advantage to have it so far from this part of the kingdom.
He promises fairly; and I hope among different people, where they may each have a character to preserve, they will both be more prudent.
And will you give yourself the trouble of carrying similar assurances to his creditors in Meryton, of whom I shall subjoin a list according to his information?
He has given in all his debts; I hope at least he has not deceived us.
Haggerston has our directions, and all will be completed in a week.
GARDINER."
But mrs Bennet was not so well pleased with it.
"She is so fond of mrs Forster," said she, "it will be quite shocking to send her away!
His daughter's request, for such it might be considered, of being admitted into her family again before she set off for the North, received at first an absolute negative.
Elizabeth was surprised, however, that Wickham should consent to such a scheme, and had she consulted only her own inclination, any meeting with him would have been the last object of her wishes.
Chapter fifty one
The carriage was sent to meet them at ----, and they were to return in it by dinner time.
Their arrival was dreaded by the elder Miss Bennets, and Jane more especially, who gave Lydia the feelings which would have attended herself, had she been the culprit, and was wretched in the thought of what her sister must endure.
They came.
Smiles decked the face of mrs Bennet as the carriage drove up to the door; her husband looked impenetrably grave; her daughters, alarmed, anxious, uneasy.
Lydia's voice was heard in the vestibule; the door was thrown open, and she ran into the room.
Their reception from mr Bennet, to whom they then turned, was not quite so cordial.
His countenance rather gained in austerity; and he scarcely opened his lips.
The easy assurance of the young couple, indeed, was enough to provoke him.
Elizabeth was disgusted, and even Miss Bennet was shocked.
She turned from sister to sister, demanding their congratulations; and when at length they all sat down, looked eagerly round the room, took notice of some little alteration in it, and observed, with a laugh, that it was a great while since she had been there.
Wickham was not at all more distressed than herself, but his manners were always so pleasing, that had his character and his marriage been exactly what they ought, his smiles and his easy address, while he claimed their relationship, would have delighted them all.
Elizabeth had not before believed him quite equal to such assurance; but she sat down, resolving within herself to draw no limits in future to the impudence of an impudent man.
There was no want of discourse.
The bride and her mother could neither of them talk fast enough; and Wickham, who happened to sit near Elizabeth, began inquiring after his acquaintance in that neighbourhood, with a good humoured ease which she felt very unable to equal in her replies.
They seemed each of them to have the happiest memories in the world.
Her father lifted up his eyes.
Elizabeth could bear it no longer.
She got up, and ran out of the room; and returned no more, till she heard them passing through the hall to the dining parlour.
It was not to be supposed that time would give Lydia that embarrassment from which she had been so wholly free at first.
Her ease and good spirits increased.
"Well, mamma," said she, when they were all returned to the breakfast room, "and what do you think of my husband?
I am sure my sisters must all envy me.
They must all go to Brighton.
What a pity it is, mamma, we did not all go."
"Very true; and if I had my will, we should.
But my dear Lydia, I don't at all like your going such a way off.
I shall like it of all things.
We shall be at Newcastle all the winter, and I dare say there will be some balls, and I will take care to get good partners for them all."
"I should like it beyond anything!" said her mother.
"I thank you for my share of the favour," said Elizabeth; "but I do not particularly like your way of getting husbands."
Their visitors were not to remain above ten days with them.
mr Wickham had received his commission before he left London, and he was to join his regiment at the end of a fortnight.
These parties were acceptable to all; to avoid a family circle was even more desirable to such as did think, than such as did not.
One morning, soon after their arrival, as she was sitting with her two elder sisters, she said to Elizabeth:
You were not by, when I told mamma and the others all about it.
Are not you curious to hear how it was managed?"
"No really," replied Elizabeth; "I think there cannot be too little said on the subject."
But I must tell you how it went off.
We were married, you know, at saint Clement's, because Wickham's lodgings were in that parish.
And it was settled that we should all be there by eleven o'clock.
My uncle and aunt and I were to go together; and the others were to meet us at the church.
Well, Monday morning came, and I was in such a fuss!
I longed to know whether he would be married in his blue coat."
Not one party, or scheme, or anything.
But, luckily, he came back again in ten minutes' time, and then we all set out.
"mr Darcy!" repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.
"Oh, yes!--he was to come there with Wickham, you know.
But gracious me!
I quite forgot!
I promised them so faithfully!
"If it was to be secret," said Jane, "say not another word on the subject.
You may depend upon my seeking no further."
"Oh! certainly," said Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity; "we will ask you no questions."
"Thank you," said Lydia, "for if you did, I should certainly tell you all, and then Wickham would be angry."
On such encouragement to ask, Elizabeth was forced to put it out of her power, by running away.
But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible; or at least it was impossible not to try for information.
"You may readily comprehend," she added, "what my curiosity must be to know how a person unconnected with any of us, and (comparatively speaking) a stranger to our family, should have been amongst you at such a time.
When all the world outside is dark and damp and cold, the light and warmth of the place are comforting.
There is a pleasant air of solidity about the interior of a bank.
The green shaded lamps look cosy.
And, the outside world offering so few attractions, the worker, perched on his stool, feels that he is not so badly off after all.
Mike, except for a fortnight at the beginning of his career in the New Asiatic Bank, had not had to stand the test of sunshine.
At present, the weather being cold and dismal, he was almost entirely contented. Now that he had got into the swing of his work, the days passed very quickly; and with his life after office hours he had no fault to find at all.
His life was very regular.
That was at ten o'clock.
From ten to eleven he would potter.
From eleven to half past twelve he would put in a little gentle work.
More work from two till half past three.
From half past three till half past four tea in the tearoom, with a novel.
And from half past four till five either a little more work or more pottering, according to whether there was any work to do or not.
Then there was no doubt that it was an interesting little community, that of the New Asiatic Bank.
The employees of the New Asiatic Bank, having plenty of time on their hands, were able to retain their individuality.
They had leisure to think of other things besides their work.
Indeed, they had so much leisure that it is a wonder they thought of their work at all.
The place was full of quaint characters.
There was West, who had been requested to leave Haileybury owing to his habit of borrowing horses and attending meets in the neighbourhood, the same being always out of bounds and necessitating a complete disregard of the rules respecting evening chapel and lock up.
He was a small, dried up youth, with black hair plastered down on his head.
He went about his duties in a costume which suggested the sportsman of the comic papers.
There was also Hignett, who added to the meagre salary allowed him by the bank by singing comic songs at the minor music halls.
He confided to Mike his intention of leaving the bank as soon as he had made a name, and taking seriously to the business.
He told him that he had knocked them at the Bedford the week before, and in support of the statement showed him a cutting from the Era, in which the writer said that 'Other acceptable turns were the Bounding Zouaves, Steingruber's Dogs, and Arthur Hignett.' Mike wished him luck.
Mike found himself, by degrees, growing quite attached to the New Asiatic Bank.
No action of this young prodigy was withheld from Mike.
On this particular day, however, the cashier was silent and absent minded.
Mike could not make it out.
He did not like to ask if there was anything the matter.
Mr Waller's face had the unreasonable effect on him of making him feel shy and awkward.
He had always envied the cooing readiness of the hero on the stage when anyone was in trouble.
It was his hour for pottering, so he pottered round to the Postage Department, where he found the old Etonian eyeing with disfavour a new satin tie which Bristow was wearing that morning for the first time.
Mike led the way to a quiet corner of the Telegrams Department.
The fight is beginning to be too much for me.
It's hard, Comrade Jackson, it's hard, I tell you.'
'Look here, Smith,' said Mike, 'I wish you'd go round to the Cash and find out what's up with old Waller.
He's got the hump about something. He's sitting there looking absolutely fed up with things.
I hope there's nothing up.
He's not a bad sort.
'So other people have troubles as well as myself,' he murmured musingly.
I will reel round and make inquiries.'
'Good man,' said Mike.
'His kid's ill, poor chap,' he said briefly.
'Pretty badly too, from what I can gather.
Pneumonia.
Waller was up all night.
He oughtn't to be here at all today.
Look here, you'd better nip back and do as much of the work as you can.
I shouldn't talk to him much if I were you.
Buck along.'
Mike went.
Mr Waller was still sitting staring out across the aisle. There was something more than a little gruesome in the sight of him.
He wore a crushed, beaten look, as if all the life and fight had gone out of him.
A customer came to the desk to cash a cheque.
Mike could guess what he was feeling, and what he was thinking about.
It was this which drew to him those who had intelligence enough to see beyond his sometimes rather forbidding manner, and to realize that his blunt speech was largely due to shyness.
In spite of his prejudice against Edward, he could put himself into Mr Waller's place, and see the thing from his point of view.
Psmith's injunction to him not to talk much was unnecessary.
Mike, as always, was rendered utterly dumb by the sight of suffering.
He sat at his desk, occupying himself as best he could with the driblets of work which came to him.
The habit of years had made his work mechanical.
Probably few of the customers who came to cash cheques suspected that there was anything the matter with the man who paid them their money.
After all, most people look on the cashier of a bank as a sort of human slot machine.
It is no affair of yours whether life is treating the machine well or ill that day.
The hours dragged slowly by till five o'clock struck, and the cashier, putting on his coat and hat, passed silently out through the swing doors.
He walked listlessly.
He was evidently tired out.
twenty.
Concerning a Cheque
Things never happen quite as one expects them to.
Mike came to the office next morning prepared for a repetition of the previous day.
He was amazed to find the cashier not merely cheerful, but even exuberantly cheerful.
The cashier was overflowing with happiness and goodwill towards his species.
His attitude towards the latest actions of His Majesty's Government was that of one who felt that, after all, there was probably some good even in the vilest of his fellow creatures, if one could only find it.
All was joy, jollity, and song.
I may now think of my own troubles.
Comrade Bristow has blown into the office today in patent leather boots with white kid uppers, as I believe the technical term is.
Henceforth my services, for what they are worth, are at the disposal of Comrade Bickersdyke.
My time from now onward is his.
He shall have the full educative value of my exclusive attention.
Made straight for the corner flag, you understand,' he added, as Mr Rossiter emerged from his lair, 'and centred, and Sandy Turnbull headed a beautiful goal.
I was just telling Jackson about the match against Blackburn Rovers,' he said to Mr Rossiter.
'Just so, just so.
But get on with your work, Smith.
I think perhaps it would be as well not to leave it just yet.'
The day passed quickly.
Mr Waller, in the intervals of work, talked a good deal, mostly of Edward, his doings, his sayings, and his prospects.
Most of the goals towards which the average man strives struck him as too unambitious for the prodigy.
By the end of the day Mike had had enough of Edward.
We do not claim originality for the statement that things never happen quite as one expects them to.
We repeat it now because of its profound truth.
The Edward's pneumonia episode having ended satisfactorily (or, rather, being apparently certain to end satisfactorily, for the invalid, though out of danger, was still in bed), Mike looked forward to a series of days unbroken by any but the minor troubles of life.
For these he was prepared.
What he did not expect was any big calamity.
The sky was blue and free from all suggestions of approaching thunderbolts.
Mr Waller, still chirpy, had nothing but good news of Edward.
Mike went for his morning stroll round the office feeling that things had settled down and had made up their mind to run smoothly.
When he got back, barely half an hour later, the storm had burst.
There was no one in the department at the moment of his arrival; but a few minutes later he saw Mr Waller come out of the manager's room, and make his way down the aisle.
It was the same limp, crushed walk which Mike had seen when Edward's safety still hung in the balance.
Mr Waller caught sight of him and quickened his pace.
'Jackson,' he said.
Mike came forward.
'Yes.
It came in the morning, rather late.'
Mike remembered the cheque perfectly well, owing to the amount.
It was the only three figure cheque which had come across the counter during the day.
He recollected the man who had presented it, a tallish man with a beard.
The former had been so very cheery and breezy, the latter so dazed and silent.
'Why,' he said.
'It was a forgery,' muttered Mr Waller, sitting down heavily.
Mike could not take it in all at once.
He was stunned.
All he could understand was that a far worse thing had happened than anything he could have imagined.
'A forgery?' he said.
'A forgery.
And a clumsy one.
Oh it's hard.
I should have seen it on any other day but that.
I could not have missed it.
I could not believe that I had passed it.
I don't remember doing it.
My mind was far away.
I don't remember the cheque or anything about it.
Yet there it is.'
Once more Mike was tongue tied.
For the life of him he could not think of anything to say.
But he could find nothing that would not sound horribly stilted and cold.
He sat silent.
They are both furious.
I shall be dismissed.
I shall lose my place.
I shall be dismissed.' He was talking more to himself than to Mike.
It was dreadful to see him sitting there, all limp and broken.
'I shall lose my place.
Mr Bickersdyke has wanted to get rid of me for a long time.
He never liked me.
I shall be dismissed.
What can I do? I'm an old man.
I can't make another start.
I am good for nothing. Nobody will take an old man like me.'
His voice died away.
There was a silence.
Mike sat staring miserably in front of him.
Then, quite suddenly, an idea came to him.
The whole pressure of the atmosphere seemed to lift.
He saw a way out.
It was a curious crooked way, but at that moment it stretched clear and broad before him.
He got up, smiling.
The cashier did not notice the movement.
Somebody had come in to cash a cheque, and he was working mechanically.
The manager was in his chair at the big table.
Opposite him, facing slightly sideways, was a small, round, very red faced man.
Mr Bickersdyke was speaking as Mike entered.
'I can assure you, Sir john--' he was saying.
He looked up as the door opened.
'Well, Mr Jackson?'
Mike almost laughed.
'Mr Waller has told me-' he began.
'I have already seen Mr Waller.'
'I know.
He told me about the cheque.
I came to explain.'
'Explain?'
'Yes.
He didn't cash it at all.'
'I don't understand you, Mr Jackson.'
twenty one.
Focusing his attention with some reluctance upon this blot on the horizon, he discovered that the exploiter of rainbow waistcoats and satin ties was addressing him.
He spoke in rather an awed voice.
'You have our ear. You would seem to have something on your chest in addition to that Neapolitan ice garment which, I regret to see, you still flaunt.
If it is one tithe as painful as that, you have my sympathy.
Jerk it out, Comrade Bristow.'
'Jackson isn't half copping it from old Bick.'
What exactly did you say?'
'He's getting it hot on the carpet.'
Bristow chuckled.
Blooming hurricane, more like it.
I was in Bick's room just now with a letter to sign, and I tell you, the fur was flying all over the bally shop.
There was old Bick cursing for all he was worth, and a little red faced buffer puffing out his cheeks in an armchair.'
'Jackson wasn't saying much.
He jolly well hadn't a chance.
Old Bick was shooting it out fourteen to the dozen.'
He has, as you suggest, a ready flow of speech.
What, exactly was the cause of the turmoil?'
'I couldn't wait to hear.
I was too jolly glad to get away.
Old Bick looked at me as if he could eat me, snatched the letter out of my hand, signed it, and waved his hand at the door as a hint to hop it.
Which I jolly well did.
He had started jawing Jackson again before I was out of the room.'
Comrade Jackson is essentially a Sensitive Plant, highly strung, neurotic.
I cannot have his nervous system jolted and disorganized in this manner, and his value as a confidential secretary and adviser impaired, even though it be only temporarily.
I must look into this.
I will go and see if the orgy is concluded.
I will hear what Comrade Jackson has to say on the matter.
I shall not act rashly, Comrade Bristow.
If the man Bickersdyke is proved to have had good grounds for his outbreak, he shall escape uncensured.
I may even look in on him and throw him a word of praise.
But if I find, as I suspect, that he has wronged Comrade Jackson, I shall be forced to speak sharply to him.'
He felt confused and rattled.
But, then, trouble is such an elastic word.
Mike had expected sentence of dismissal, and he had got it.
But he had not expected it to come to him riding high on the crest of a great, frothing wave of verbal denunciation.
He had thundered at Mike as if Mike had been his Majesty's Government or the Encroaching Alien, or something of that sort.
And that kind of thing is a little overwhelming at short range.
Mike's head was still spinning.
It continued to spin; but he never lost sight of the fact round which it revolved, namely, that he had been dismissed from the service of the bank.
And for the first time he began to wonder what they would say about this at home.
Up till now the matter had seemed entirely a personal one.
Mike's was one of those direct, honest minds which are apt to concentrate themselves on the crisis of the moment, and to leave the consequences out of the question entirely.
That was the point.
Again, what could he do by way of earning a living?
He did not know much about the City and its ways, but he knew enough to understand that summary dismissal from a bank is not the best recommendation one can put forward in applying for another job.
And if he did not get another job in the City, what could he do?
If it were only summer, he might get taken on somewhere as a cricket professional.
Cricket was his line.
He could earn his pay at that.
When my informant left, he tells me, Comrade b had got a half Nelson on you, and was biting pieces out of your ear.
Is this so?'
'Look here, Smith,' he said, 'I want to speak to you.
I'm in a bit of a hole, and perhaps you can tell me what to do.
I can't tell you about it here.'
Naturally I shall be missed, if I go out.
But my absence will not spell irretrievable ruin, as it would at a period of greater commercial activity.
Comrades Rossiter and Bristow have studied my methods.
They know how I like things to be done.
They are fully competent to conduct the business of the department in my absence.
Let us, as you say, scud forth.
We will go to a Mecca.
Why so-called I do not know, nor, indeed, do I ever hope to know.
The Mecca, except for the curious aroma which pervades all Meccas, was deserted.
'Dominoes,' he said, 'is one of the few manly sports which have never had great attractions for me.
A cousin of mine, who secured his chess blue at Oxford, would, they tell me, have represented his University in the dominoes match also, had he not unfortunately dislocated the radius bone of his bazooka while training for it.
Tell me all.'
He listened gravely while Mike related the incidents which had led up to his confession and the results of the same.
At the conclusion of the narrative he sipped his coffee in silence for a moment.
'This habit of taking on to your shoulders the harvest of other people's bloomers,' he said meditatively, 'is growing upon you, Comrade Jackson.
You must check it.
If you had stopped there, all might have been well.
But the thing, once started, fascinated you.
When you were free and without ties, it did not so much matter.
Your secretarial duties must be paramount.
Nothing must be allowed to interfere with them.
Yes.
The thing must stop before it goes too far.'
'It seems to me,' said Mike, 'that it has gone too far.
I've got the sack.
I don't know how much farther you want it to go.'
You must recollect that Comrade Bickersdyke spoke in the heat of the moment.
That generous temperament was stirred to its depths.
He did not pick his words.
But calm will succeed storm, and we may be able to do something yet.
I have some little influence with Comrade Bickersdyke.
If he sees that I am opposed to this step, he may possibly reconsider it.
However, we shall see.'
'I bet we shall!' said Mike ruefully.
Naturally, to pacify the aggrieved bart., Comrade b had to lay it on regardless of expense.
In America, as possibly you are aware, there is a regular post of mistake clerk, whose duty it is to receive in the neck anything that happens to be coming along when customers make complaints.
He is hauled into the presence of the foaming customer, cursed, and sacked.
Now, possibly, in your case-'
'In my case,' interrupted Mike, 'there was none of that rot. Bickersdyke wasn't putting it on.
He meant every word.
'Get some of his own back!' he repeated.
I yield to nobody in my respect for our manager.
No!
I prefer to think that Comrade Bickersdyke regards me as his friend and well wisher, and will lend a courteous ear to any proposal I see fit to make.
No, Halbert!
Besides, look at our country; God's gift of freedom is stamped upon it.
Our mountains are his seal.
Lady Mar looked at her.
"Then it is worthy its destination.
Thus time flew, till the sand glass told her it was the eighth hour.
"Oh!" cried she, "to what am I betrayed?
Thunder now peaked over her head, and lightning shot across the mountains.
"My lord," answered the affrighted woman, "you know best.
You terrified the poor young creature.
You have slain her!"
CHAPTER thirty seven.
WHEREIN IS CONTINUED THE NOTABLE ADVENTURE OF THE DISTRESSED DUENNA
God bless me, how he hated them, that same apothecary! And so what I'm thinking is, if all duennas, of whatever sort or condition they may be, are plagues and busybodies, what must they be that are distressed, like this Countess Three skirts or Three tails!--for in my country skirts or tails, tails or skirts, it's all one."
"Hush, friend Sancho," said Don Quixote; "since this lady duenna comes in quest of me from such a distant land she cannot be one of those the apothecary meant; moreover this is a countess, and when countesses serve as duennas it is in the service of queens and empresses, for in their own houses they are mistresses paramount and have other duennas to wait on them."
"For all that," said Sancho, "there's so much to be clipped about duennas, so my barber said, that 'it will be better not to stir the rice even though it sticks.'"
By my faith, if it were permitted me and time allowed, I could prove, not only to those here present, but to all the world, that there is no virtue that is not to be found in a duenna."
To which Sancho replied, "Ever since I have sniffed the governorship I have got rid of the humours of a squire, and I don't care a wild fig for all the duennas in the world."
They would have carried on this duenna dispute further had they not heard the notes of the fife and drums once more, from which they concluded that the Distressed Duenna was making her entrance.
The duchess asked the duke if it would be proper to go out to receive her, as she was a countess and a person of rank.
"In respect of her being a countess," said Sancho, before the duke could reply, "I am for your highnesses going out to receive her; but in respect of her being a duenna, it is my opinion you should not stir a step."
"Sancho is right," said the duke; "we'll see what the countess is like, and by that measure the courtesy that is due to her."
CHAPTER thirty eight.
WHEREIN IS TOLD THE DISTRESSED DUENNA'S TALE OF HER MISFORTUNES
On seeing this the duke, the duchess, and Don Quixote went some twelve paces forward to meet her.
I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, whose calling it is to give aid to the needy of all sorts; and that being so, it is not necessary for you, senora, to make any appeal to benevolence, or deal in preambles, only to tell your woes plainly and straightforwardly: for you have hearers that will know how, if not to remedy them, to sympathise with them."
Then, it must not be supposed her intelligence was childish; she was as intelligent as she was fair, and she was fairer than all the world; and is so still, unless the envious fates and hard hearted sisters three have cut for her the thread of life.
But that they have not, for Heaven will not suffer so great a wrong to Earth, as it would be to pluck unripe the grapes of the fairest vineyard on its surface.
Another time he sang:
Come Death, so subtly veiled that I Thy coming know not, how or when, Lest it should give me life again To find how sweet it is to die.
No, no, not that; marriage must come first in any business of this sort that I take in hand.
"I will," replied the countess.
By every word that Sancho uttered, the duchess was as much delighted as Don Quixote was driven to desperation.
"She died, no doubt," said Sancho.
"Thou art right, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for with a knight errant, if he has but two fingers' breadth of good fortune, it is on the cards to become the mightiest lord on earth.
But let senora the Distressed One proceed; for I suspect she has got yet to tell us the bitter part of this so far sweet story."
Don Quixote and Sancho were overwhelmed with amazement, and the bystanders lost in astonishment, while the Trifaldi went on to say: "Thus did that malevolent villain Malambruno punish us, covering the tenderness and softness of our faces with these rough bristles!
What father or mother will feel pity for her?
CHAPTER eleven.
THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LIFE HAS ALREADY ARISEN IN OUR SOCIETY, AND WILL INFALLIBLY PUT AN END TO THE PRESENT ORGANIZATION OF OUR LIFE BASED ON FORCE-WHEN THAT WILL BE.
The position of Christian humanity with its prisons, galleys, gibbets, its factories and accumulation of capital, its taxes, churches, gin palaces, licensed brothels, its ever increasing armament and its millions of brutalized men, ready, like chained dogs, to attack anyone against whom their master incites them, would be terrible indeed if it were the product of violence, but it is pre eminently the product of public opinion.
And what has been established by public opinion can be destroyed by public opinion-and, indeed, is being destroyed by public opinion.
And to bring this to pass, nothing new need be brought before men's minds.
Only let the mist, which veils from men's eyes the true meaning of certain acts of violence, pass away, and the Christian public opinion which is springing up would overpower the extinct public opinion which permitted and justified acts of violence.
But the rising Christian ideal, which must at a certain stage of development replace the heathen ideal of life, already makes its influence felt.
A dead tree stands apparently as firmly as ever-it may even seem firmer because it is harder-but it is rotten at the core, and soon must fall.
It is just so with the present order of society, based on force.
The external aspect is unchanged.
The oppressors, that is, those who take part in government, and those who profit by oppression, that is, the rich, no longer imagine, as they once did, that they are the elect of the world, and that they constitute the ideal of human happiness and greatness, to attain which was once the highest aim of the oppressed.
The position of a government official or of a rich man is no longer, as it once was, and still is among non Christian peoples, regarded as necessarily honorable and deserving of respect, and under the special blessing of God.
The most delicate and moral people (they are generally also the most cultivated) avoid such positions and prefer more humble callings that are not dependent on the use of force.
They are the men whose praises are celebrated in poetry, who are honored by sculpture and received with triumphant jubilations.
The best men of our day are all striving for such places of honor. Consequently the class from which the wealthy and the government officials are drawn grows less in number and lower in intelligence and education, and still more in moral qualities.
One may often nowadays hear from persons in authority the naive complaint that the best people are always, by some strange-as it seems to them-fatality, to be found in the camp of the opposition.
And even this duty they perform less and less successfully.
The majority of them do not keep up their old unapproachable majesty, but become more and more democratized and even vulgarized, casting aside the external prestige that remained to them, and thereby destroying the very thing it was their function to maintain.
It is just the same with the army.
In the last plots against the Russian Government many of the conspirators were in the army.
And it often happens (there was a case, indeed, within the last few days) that when called upon to quell disturbances they refuse to fire upon the people.
Military exploits are openly reprobated by the military themselves, and are often the subject of jests among them.
The prosecutors themselves often refuse to proceed, and even when they do proceed, often in spite of the law, really defend those they ought to be accusing.
The learned jurists whose business it is to justify the violence of authority, are more and more disposed to deny the right of punishment and to replace it by theories of irresponsibility and even of moral insanity, proposing to deal with those they call criminals by medical treatment only.
Jailers and overseers of galleys generally become the champions of those whom they ought to torture.
Governors, police officials, tax collectors often have compassion on the people and try to find pretexts for not collecting the tax from them.
The rich are not at ease in spending their wealth only on themselves, and lavish it on works of public utility.
Millowners and manufacturers build hospitals, schools, savings banks, asylums, and dwellings for their workpeople.
Some of them form co-operative associations in which they have shares on the same terms as the others. Capitalists expend a part of their capital on educational, artistic, philanthropic, and other public institutions.
All these phenomena might seem to be mere exceptions, except that they can all be referred to one common cause.
Just as one might fancy the first leaves on the budding trees in April were exceptional if we did not know that they all have a common cause, the spring, and that if we see the branches on some trees shooting and turning green, it is certain that it will soon be so with all.
And when there are no longer men willing to fill these offices, these offices themselves will disappear too.
But this is not the only way in which public opinion is leading men to the abolition of the prevailing order and the substitution of a new order.
As the positions based on the rule of force become less attractive and fewer men are found willing to fill them, the more will their uselessness be apparent.
Everywhere throughout the Christian world the same rulers, and the same governments, the same armies, the same law courts, the same tax gatherers, the same priests, the same rich men, landowners, manufacturers, and capitalists, as ever, but the attitude of the world to them, and their attitude to themselves is altogether changed.
One year, ten, twenty years pass by.
And it becomes less and less possible to rely on the army for the pacification of riots, and more and more evident, consequently, that generals, and officers, and soldiers are only figures in solemn processions-objects of amusement for governments-a sort of immense-and far too expensive-CORPS DE BALLET.
The same lawyers and judges, and the same assizes, but it becomes more and more evident that the civil courts decide cases on the most diverse grounds, but regardless of justice, and that criminal trials are quite senseless, because the punishments do not attain the objects aimed at by the judges themselves.
The same priests and archbishops and churches and synods, but it becomes more and more evident that they have long ago ceased to believe in what they preach, and therefore they can convince no one of the necessity of believing what they don't believe themselves.
The same tax collectors, but they are less and less capable of taking men's property from them by force, and it becomes more and more evident that people can collect all that is necessary by voluntary subscription without their aid.
The same rich men, but it becomes more and more evident that they can only be of use by ceasing to administer their property in person and giving up to society the whole or at least a part of their wealth.
Wouldn't it be better, as some humorist suggested, to make a queen of india rubber?"
And what good to us are these armies with their generals and bands and horses and drums?
And what is the use of these lawyers and judges who don't decide civil cases with justice and recognize themselves the uselessness of punishments in criminal cases?
And what is the use of tax collectors who collect the taxes unwillingly, when it is easy to raise all that is wanted without them?
And what is the use of capital in the hands of private persons, when it can only be of use as the property of all?
But even before those who support these institutions decide to abolish them, the men who occupy these positions will be reduced to the necessity of throwing them up.
And hence they must become more and more superfluous.
I once took part in Moscow in a religious meeting which used to take place generally in the week after Easter near the church in the Ohotny Row.
It was absolutely unnecessary for the officer to disperse it.
A group of twenty men was no obstruction to anyone, but he had been standing there the whole morning, and he wanted to do something.
It might do you good"; and turning round he continued his discourse.
The policeman turned his horse and went off without a word.
That is just what should be done in all cases of violence.
The officer was bored, he had nothing to do.
He had been put, poor fellow, in a position in which he had no choice but to give orders.
And this is the position in which all these unlucky rulers, ministers, members of parliament, governors, generals, officers, archbishops, priests, and even rich men find themselves to some extent already, and will find themselves altogether as time goes on.
They can do nothing but give orders, and they give orders and send their messengers, as the officer sent the policeman, to interfere with people.
And because the people they hinder turn to them and request them not to interfere, they fancy they are very useful indeed.
The time will come and is inevitably coming when all institutions based on force will disappear through their uselessness, stupidity, and even inconvenience becoming obvious to all.
And to him came two tailors, who promised to make him some extraordinary clothes.
The emperor engages them and they begin to sew at them, but they explain that the clothes have the extraordinary property of remaining invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position.
The day of the procession comes in which the emperor is to go out in his new clothes.
The emperor undresses and puts on his new clothes, that is to say, remains naked, and naked he walks through the town.
But remembering the magic property of the clothes, no one ventures to say that he has nothing on till a little child cries out: "Look, he is naked!"
All those things are the work of men.
And already they are beginning to understand it.
But when will it be?
For it may come any time, in such an hour as ye think not.
Men cannot know when the day and the hour of the kingdom of God will come, because its coming depends on themselves alone.
The answer is like that of the wise man who, when asked whether it was far to the town, answered, "Walk!"
How can we tell whether it is far to the goal which humanity is approaching, when we do not know how men are going toward it, while it depends on them whether they go or do not go, stand still, slacken their pace or hasten it?
All we can know is what we who make up mankind ought to do, and not to do, to bring about the coming of the kingdom of God.
And that we all know.
If You Read It in Stanley Browne
Going to a bartending machine, von Schlichten dialed the cocktail they had decided upon and inserted his key to charge the drinks to his account, filling a four portion jug.
As they turned away, they almost collided with Hideyoshi O'Leary and Paula Quinton.
"Feel better, now?...
Miss Quinton, this is Lieutenant Governor Blount.
Eric, Miss Paula Quinton."
"Delighted, Miss Quinton," Blount said.
"Carlos tells us he found you standing over poor Mohammed Ferriera, fighting like a commando.
No danger, I hope; we all like him."
Mohammed Ferriera was still unconscious, the girl reported; he had a minor concussion, but the medics were not greatly disturbed, and expected him to be fully recovered in a few weeks.
Von Schlichten invited her and her escort to join him and Blount.
"I suppose you think it's a joke, our being nearly murdered by the people we came to help," Paula began, a trifle defensively.
"It's been played on us till it's lost its humor."
"When you get up north, watch how the peasants kill these little things like six legged iguanas that they raise for food."
"That isn't the reason, though," von Schlichten said.
"As we use it, the word's pure onomatopoeia.
Even in the absence of any native, she used her handkerchief to mask the act.
"Why, that's exactly how they'd pronounce it!"
That's Rakkeed the Prophet's whole gospel."
"So you see," Eric Blount rammed home the moral, "this is just another case of nobody with any right to call anybody else's kettle black.... Cigarette?"
"I suspect that of being a principle you'd like me to bear in mind at the polar mines, when I see, let's say, some laborer being beaten by a couple of overseers with three foot lengths of three quarter inch steel cable."
And most of the geek landowners are bitterly critical of the way we treat our labor at the mines; they claim we make them dissatisfied with the treatment they get at home."
"Of course, they're always glad to have the peasants taken off their hands during a slack agricultural season," Blount added, "and we train workers to handle contragravity power equipment.
I won't deny that there's a lot of unnecessary brutality on the part of the native foremen and overseers, which we're trying, gradually, to eliminate. You'll have to remember, though, that we're dealing with a naturally brutal race."
"That's been SOP on every planet our Association's had any experience with."
"Well, I must admit, the Ullerans who work there are very well treated.
"I put in two years there, too," Blount supported him.
You know what the setup is, there, don't you? The Terran Federation Space Navy discovered and explored both Uller and Niflheim, which made both planets public domain.
"You know what the seasons are like, at the poles of this planet.
There's the most intense sort of thermal erosion you can imagine-the ice cap melts in the spring to a sea, which boils away completely by the middle of the summer.
Then, when the winds fall, we move in for a couple of months. It isn't really mining, or even quarrying; we just scoop up ore from the surface, load it onto ore boats, and fly it down to Skilk and Krink and Grank, where it's smelted through the winter.
In the north, metallurgy and food preparation have always been combined that way."
"That's a fair question," Blount replied, inverting a cocktail jug over his glass to extract the last few drops.
"They're the nomads who hire out to the northern merchants as caravan drivers, and also prey, or used to prey, on the caravans as brigands.
Both jugs were empty.
At Skilk, Rakkeed comes and goes openly; at Krink he has a price on his head."
"Oh, but they're just a parasite race on the Terrans," dr Paula Quinton objected.
"You find races like that all through the explored galaxy-pathetic cultural mongrels."
Blount told him.
"Ha!
"Stanley Browne is one author you can depend on," O'Leary assured her. "If you read it in Stanley Browne, it's wrong.
Von Schlichten allowed himself to be smitten by an idea.
That's four days from today."
"I'm sure I could.
Why?"
That would give us about two to three hours.
If you think the Kragans are 'pathetic cultural mongrels,' what you'll see there will open your eyes.
They raided into Konkrook and Keegark territory, too.
Well, we had to break that up.
We've taught them a lot-you'll see how much when you visit their town-but they aren't cultural mongrels.
You'll like them."
"Well, general, I'll take you up," she said.
"But I warn you; if this is some scheme to indoctrinate me with the Uller Company's side of the case and blind me to unjust exploitation of the natives here, I don't propagandize very easily."
Just stay scientific about it and I'll be satisfied.
CHAPTER five
Being all come aboard, they consider where to get provisions, especially flesh, seeing they scarce eat anything else; and of this the most common sort is pork; the next food is tortoises, which they salt a little: sometimes they rob such or such hog yards, where the Spaniards often have a thousand head of swine together.
No prey, no pay.
First, therefore, they mention how much the captain is to have for his ship; next, the salary of the carpenter, or shipwright, who careened, mended, and rigged the vessel: this commonly amounts to one hundred or one hundred and fifty pieces of eight, according to the agreement.
Afterwards, for provisions and victualling, they draw out of the same common stock about two hundred pieces of eight; also a salary for the surgeon, and his chest of medicaments, which usually is rated at two hundred or two hundred and fifty pieces of eight.
All which sums are taken out of the common stock of what is gotten by their piracy, and a very exact and equal dividend is made of the remainder.
They refresh themselves at one island or another, but especially at those on the south of Cuba; here they careen their vessels, while some hunt, and others cruise in canoes for prizes.
The pirates knowing these seasons (being very diligent in their inquiries) always cruise between the places above mentioned; but in case they light on no considerable booty, they commonly undertake some more hazardous enterprises: one remarkable instance of which I shall here give you.
Every vessel has at least two negroes in it, who are very dextrous in diving to the depth of six fathoms, where they find good store of pearls.
All of which would have made this a greater prize than he could desire, which he had certainly carried off, if his main mast had not been lost, as we said before.
Another bold attempt like this, no less remarkable, I shall also give you.
A certain pirate of Portugal, thence called Bartholomew Portugues, was cruising in a boat of thirty men and four small guns from Jamaica, upon the Cape de Corriente in Cuba, where he met a great ship from Maracaibo and Carthagena, bound for the Havannah, well provided with twenty great guns and seventy men, passengers and mariners; this ship he presently assaulted, which they on board as resolutely defended.
The Portuguese lost only ten men, and had four wounded; so that he had still remaining twenty fighting men, whereas the Spaniards had double the number.
Having possessed themselves of the ship, the wind being contrary to return to Jamaica, they resolved to steer to Cape saint Anthony (which lies west of Cuba), there to repair and take in fresh water, of which they were then in great want.
Two days after this misfortune, there arose a great storm, which separated the ships from one another.
Those of the city next day made diligent search for him in the woods, where they concluded him to be.
Being masters of the ship, they immediately weighed anchor and set sail from the port, lest they should be pursued by other vessels.
Nor less considerable are the actions of another pirate who now lives at Jamaica, who on several occasions has performed very surprising things. He was born at Groninghen in the United Provinces.
One day some of the mariners quarrelled with their captain to that degree, that they left the boat. Brasiliano following them, was chosen their leader, who having fitted out a small vessel, they made him captain.
To the Spaniards he was always very barbarous and cruel, out of an inveterate hatred against that nation.
Of these he commanded several to be roasted alive on wooden spits, for not showing him hog yards where he might steal swine.
Brasiliano, perceiving their imminent danger, encouraged his companions, telling them they were better soldiers, and ought rather to die under their arms fighting, as it became men of courage, than surrender to the Spaniards, who would take away their lives with the utmost torments.
The pirates were but thirty; yet, seeing their brave commander oppose the enemy with such courage, resolved to do the like: hereupon they faced the troop of Spaniards, and discharged their muskets on them so dextrously, that they killed one horseman almost with every shot.
The fight continued for an hour, till at last the Spaniards were put to flight.
They stripped the dead, and took from them what was most for their use; such as were also not quite dead they dispatched with the ends of their muskets.
Having vanquished the enemy, they mounted on horses they found in the field, and continued their journey; Brasiliano having lost but two of his companions in this bloody fight, and had two wounded.
Having given notice to their companions, they boarded them, and also took the little man of war, their convoy.
Being thus masters of this fleet, they wanted only provisions, of which they found little aboard those vessels: but this defect was supplied by the horses, which they killed, and salted with salt, which by good fortune the wood cutters had brought with them, with which they supported themselves till they could get better.
Such of these pirates will spend two or three thousand pieces of eight in a night, not leaving themselves a good shirt to wear in the morning.
My own master would buy sometimes a pipe of wine, and, placing it in the street, would force those that passed by to drink with him, threatening also to pistol them if they would not.
He would do the like with barrels of beer or ale; and very often he would throw these liquors about the streets, and wet peoples' clothes without regarding whether he spoiled their apparel.
In taverns and alehouses they have great credit; but at Jamaica they ought not to run very deep in debt, seeing the inhabitants there easily sell one another for debt.
This happened to my patron, to be sold for a debt of a tavern wherein he had spent the greatest part of his money.
They got in this voyage, all together, five hundred pieces of eight; so that they tarried not long there after their arrival.
Providing themselves with necessaries, they returned to Jamaica, from whence they set forth again to sea, committing greater robberies and cruelties than before; but especially abusing the poor Spaniards, who fell into their hands, with all sorts of cruelty.
But neither was this of any service; for the pirates, finding few ships at sea, began to gather into companies, and to land on their dominions, ruining cities, towns, and villages; pillaging, burning, and carrying away as much as they could.
But the bold attempts and actions of john Davis, born at Jamaica, ought not to be forgotten, being some of the most remarkable; especially his rare prudence and valour showed in the fore mentioned kingdom of Granada.
This pirate, having long cruised in the Gulf of Pocatauro, on the ships expected to Carthagena, bound for Nicaragua, and not meeting any of them, resolved at last to land in Nicaragua, leaving his ship hid on the coast.
His intent was to rob the churches, and rifle the houses of the chief citizens of Nicaragua.
Being arrived at the city the third night, the sentinel, who kept the post of the river, thought them to be fishermen that had been fishing in the lake: and most of the pirates understanding Spanish, he doubted not, as soon as he heard them speak. They had in their company an Indian who had run away from his master, who would have enslaved him unjustly.
He went first ashore, and instantly killed the sentinel: this done, they entered the city, and went directly to three or four houses of the chief citizens, where they knocked softly.
These, believing them to be friends, opened the doors; and the pirates, suddenly possessing themselves of the houses, stole all the money and plate they could find.
Nor did they spare the churches and most sacred things; all of which were pillaged and profaned, without any respect or veneration.
Thus they got to their ship, and with all speed put to sea, forcing the prisoners, before they let them go, to procure them as much flesh as was necessary for their voyage to Jamaica.
But no sooner had they weighed anchor, when they saw a troop of about five hundred Spaniards, all well armed, at the sea side: against these they let fly several guns, wherewith they forced them to quit the sands, and retire, with no small regret to see these pirates carry away so much plate of their churches and houses, though distant at least forty leagues from the sea.
He began his new command by directing his fleet to the north of Cuba, there to wait for the fleet from New Spain; but missing his design, they determined for Florida.
Our pirates therefore had many canoes of the Indians in the isle of Sambale, five leagues from the coasts of Jucatan.
Here is great quantity of amber, but especially when any storm arises from towards the east; whence the waves bring many things, and very different.
Through this sea no vessels can pass, unless very small, it being too shallow.
In the lands that are surrounded by this sea, is found much Campechy wood, and other things that serve for dyeing, much esteemed in Europe, and would be more, if we had the skill of the Indians, who make a dye or tincture that never fades.
The ship being taken, they found not in her what they thought, being already almost unladen.
They brought away some of the inhabitants as prisoners, with all they had, which was of no great importance, by reason of the poverty of the place, which exerciseth no other trade than working in the mines, where some of the inhabitants constantly attend, while none seek for gold, but only slaves.
From the bottom of the sea I saw them take up an anchor of six hundredweight, tying a cable to it with great dexterity, and pulling it from a rock.
Their arms are made of wood, without any iron point; but some instead thereof use a crocodile's tooth.
The nimble Frenchman escaped; but the Spaniard being not so swift, was taken and heard of no more.
They had good provision of Spanish wheat, bananas, racoven, and other things; with the wheat they made bread, and baked it in portable ovens, brought with them.
Hither Lolonois came (brought by his evil conscience that cried for punishment), thinking to act his cruelties; but the Indians within a few days after his arrival took him prisoner, and tore him in pieces alive, throwing his body limb by limb into the fire, and his ashes into the air, that no trace or memory might remain of such an infamous, inhuman creature.
One of his companions gave me an exact account of this tragedy, affirming that himself had escaped the same punishment with the greatest difficulty; he believed also that many of his comrades, who were taken in that encounter by those Indians, were, as their cruel captain, torn in pieces and burnt alive.
This fellow came from Jamaica, with intent to land at Gracias a Dios, and from thence to enter the river with his canoes, and take the city of Carthagena.
These, because they were now considerably strengthened, to effect with greater satisfaction their designs. Hereupon, as soon as they were arrived at Gracias a Dios, they all put themselves into canoes, and entered the river, being five hundred men, leaving only five or six persons in each ship to keep them.
When Sir Percivale saw him do so he marvelled what he meant.
Alas, said Sir Percivale, what have I done?
I was sent by the queen for to seek you, and so I have sought you nigh this two year, and yonder is Sir Ector de Maris, your brother abideth me on the other side of the yonder water.
Now for God's sake, said Sir Percivale, forgive me mine offences that I have here done.
It is soon forgiven, said Sir Launcelot.
CHAPTER nine.
NOW leave we Sir Launcelot in the Joyous Isle with the Lady Dame Elaine, and Sir Percivale and Sir Ector playing with them, and turn we to Sir Bors de Ganis and Sir Lionel, that had sought Sir Launcelot nigh by the space of two year, and never could they hear of him.
And as they thus rode, by adventure they came to the house of Brandegore, and there Sir Bors was well known, for he had gotten a child upon the king's daughter fifteen year to fore, and his name was Helin le Blank.
And when Sir Bors saw that child it liked him passing well.
And so those knights had good cheer of the King Brandegore.
Sir, said the king, ye may well take him with you, but he is over tender of age.
As for that, said Sir Bors, I will have him with me, and bring him to the house of most worship of the world.
So when Sir Bors should depart there was made great sorrow for the departing of Helin le Blank, and great weeping was there made.
But Sir Bors and Sir Lionel departed, and within a while they came to Camelot, where was King Arthur.
Now will we turn to our matter of Sir Launcelot.
It befell upon a day Sir Ector and Sir Percivale came to Sir Launcelot and asked him what he would do, and whether he would go with them unto King Arthur or not.
Nay, said Sir Launcelot, that may not be by no mean, for I was so entreated at the court that I cast me never to come there more.
Sir, said Sir Ector, I am your brother, and ye are the man in the world that I love most; and if I understood that it were your disworship, ye may understand I would never counsel you thereto; but King Arthur and all his knights, and in especial Queen Guenever, made such dole and sorrow that it was marvel to hear and see.
And when Sir Launcelot should depart Dame Elaine made great sorrow.
My lord, Sir Launcelot, said Dame Elaine, at this same feast of Pentecost shall your son and mine, Galahad, be made knight, for he is fully now fifteen winter old.
As for that, said Dame Elaine, I doubt not he shall prove the best man of his kin except one.
Then shall he be a man good enough, said Sir Launcelot.
THEN they departed, and within five days' journey they came to Camelot, that is called in English, Winchester.
And when Sir Launcelot was come among them, the king and all the knights made great joy of him.
And ever as Sir Ector and Sir Percivale told these tales of Sir Launcelot, Queen Guenever wept as she should have died. Then the queen made great cheer.
O Jesu, said King Arthur, I marvel for what cause ye, Sir Launcelot, went out of your mind.
And therewithal the king spake no more. But all Sir Launcelot's kin knew for whom he went out of his mind.
And then there were great feasts made and great joy; and many great lords and ladies, when they heard that Sir Launcelot was come to the court again, they made great joy.
CHAPTER eleven.
Alas, said Sir Tristram, that caused some debate betwixt him and Queen Guenever.
Thereof am I glad, said Sir Tristram, and now shall ye and I make us ready, for both ye and I will be at the feast.
What shall be said among all knights?
See how Sir Tristram hunteth, and hawketh, and cowereth within a castle with his lady, and forsaketh your worship.
Also what shall queens and ladies say of me? It is pity that I have my life, that I will hold so noble a knight as ye are from his worship.
But there shall no man nor child ride with me, but myself.
CHAPTER twelve.
Then Sir Tristram repented him that he was not armed, and then he hoved still.
That is truth, said Sir Tristram, I understand thy valiantness well.
Ye say well, said Sir Palomides; now, I require you, tell me a question that I shall say to you.
As for that I may choose, said Sir Tristram, either to ride or to abide.
CHAPTER thirteen.
By my head, said Tristram, as for one battle thou shalt not seek it no longer.
For God defend, said Sir Tristram, that through my default thou shouldst longer live thus a Saracen, for yonder is a knight that ye, Sir Palomides, have hurt and smitten down.
As ye will, said Palomides, so it shall be.
Sir knight, said Sir Tristram, I require you tell me your right name.
Sir, he said, my name is Sir Galleron of Galway, and knight of the Table Round.
Sir, said the hurt knight, ye shall have it with a good will; but ye must beware, for I warn you that knight is wight.
So God me help, said Sir Tristram, either he shall slay me or I him but that he shall be christened or ever we depart in sunder. My lord Sir Tristram, said Sir Galleron, your renown and worship is well known through many realms, and God save you this day from shenship and shame.
Then Sir Tristram unarmed Galleron, the which was a noble knight, and had done many deeds of arms, and he was a large knight of flesh and bone.
And when he was unarmed he stood upon his feet, for he was bruised in the back with a spear; yet so as Sir Galleron might, he armed Sir Tristram.
CHAPTER fourteen.
Then Palomides stood still and beheld his sword with a sorrowful heart. How now, said Sir Tristram unto Palomides, now have I thee at advantage as thou haddest me this day; but it shall never be said in no court, nor among good knights, that Sir Tristram shall slay any knight that is weaponless; and therefore take thou thy sword, and let us make an end of this battle.
And for this cause, said Palomides: mine offence to you is not so great but that we may be friends.
And as for her, I dare say she is peerless above all other ladies, and also I proffered her never no dishonour; and by her I have gotten the most part of my worship.
And then will we all ride together unto the court of Arthur, that we be there at the high feast.
Now take your horse, said Sir Tristram, and as ye say so it shall be, and all thine evil will God forgive it you, and I do.
And here within this mile is the Suffragan of Carlisle that shall give you the sacrament of baptism.
Then they took their horses and Sir Galleron rode with them.
And then soon after they departed, riding toward Camelot, where King Arthur and Queen Guenever was, and for the most part all the knights of the Round Table.
And so the king and all the court were glad that Sir Palomides was christened.
And so therewithal departed and dissevered all the knights of the Round Table.
And Sir Tristram returned again unto Joyous Gard, and Sir Palomides followed the Questing Beast.
But here is no rehersal of the third book.
And then he came into a fair meadow, and there was a fair lodge of boughs.
Also there were cloths covered upon the earth, and many delicious meats set thereon.
Sir Melias beheld this adventure, and thought it marvellous, but he had no hunger, but of the crown of gold he took much keep; and therewith he stooped down and took it up, and rode his way with it.
Then Sir Melias blessed him and said: Fair lord of heaven, help and save thy new made knight.
And then they let their horses run as fast as they might, so that the other knight smote Sir Melias through hauberk and through the left side, that he fell to the earth nigh dead.
And then he took the crown and went his way; and Sir Melias lay still and had no power to stir.
In the meanwhile by fortune there came Sir Galahad and found him there in peril of death.
And then he said: Ah Melias, who hath wounded you? therefore it had been better to have ridden the other way.
And when Sir Melias heard him speak: Sir, he said, for God's love let me not die in this forest, but bear me unto the abbey here beside, that I may be confessed and have my rights.
With that Sir Galahad heard in the leaves cry on high: Knight, keep thee from me.
Sir Galahad answered: Sir knight, come on your peril.
Then either dressed to other, and came together as fast as their horses might run, and Galahad smote him so that his spear went through his shoulder, and smote him down off his horse, and in the falling Galahad's spear brake.
With that came out another knight out of the leaves, and brake a spear upon Galahad or ever he might turn him.
Then Galahad drew out his sword and smote off the left arm of him, so that it fell to the earth.
And then he fled, and Sir Galahad pursued fast after him.
And then he turned again unto Sir Melias, and there he alighted and dressed him softly on his horse to fore him, for the truncheon of his spear was in his body; and Sir Galahad stert up behind him, and held him in his arms, and so brought him to the abbey, and there unarmed him and brought him to his chamber.
And when he had received Him he said unto Sir Galahad: Sir, let death come when it pleaseth him.
And therewith he drew out the truncheon of the spear out of his body: and then he swooned.
And anon he ransacked him; and then he said unto Sir Galahad: I shall heal him of his wound, by the grace of God, within the term of seven weeks.
Then was Sir Galahad glad, and unarmed him, and said he would abide there three days.
Then he said he was turned unto helping, God be thanked.
CHAPTER fourteen.
Sir, said a good man, for his sin he was thus wounded; and I marvel, said the good man, how ye durst take upon you so rich a thing as the high order of knighthood without clean confession, and that was the cause ye were bitterly wounded.
For the way on the right hand betokeneth the highway of our Lord Jesu Christ, and the way of a good true good liver.
And the other way betokeneth the way of sinners and of misbelievers.
And when the devil saw your pride and presumption, for to take you in the quest of the Sangreal, that made you to be overthrown, for it may not be enchieved but by virtuous living. Also, the writing on the cross was a signification of heavenly deeds, and of knightly deeds in God's works, and no knightly deeds in worldly works.
And pride is head of all deadly sins, that caused this knight to depart from Galahad.
And where thou tookest the crown of gold thou sinnest in covetise and in theft: all this were no knightly deeds.
And this Galahad, the holy knight, the which fought with the two knights, the two knights signify the two deadly sins which were wholly in this knight Melias; and they might not withstand you, for ye are without deadly sin.
Sir Melias said: My lord Galahad, as soon as I may ride I shall seek you. God send you health, said Galahad, and so took his horse and departed, and rode many journeys forward and backward, as adventure would lead him.
And at the last it happened him to depart from a place or a castle the which was named Abblasoure; and he had heard no mass, the which he was wont ever to hear or ever he departed out of any castle or place, and kept that for a custom.
CHAPTER fifteen.
Therefore, I counsel you, sir knight, to turn again.
Sir, said Galahad, wit you well I shall not turn again.
Then looked Sir Galahad on his arms that nothing failed him, and then he put his shield afore him; and anon there met him seven fair maidens, the which said unto him: Sir knight, ye ride here in a great folly, for ye have the water to pass over.
Why should I not pass the water? said Galahad.
So rode he away from them and met with a squire that said: Knight, those knights in the castle defy you, and defenden you ye go no further till that they wit what ye would.
Fair sir, said Galahad, I come for to destroy the wicked custom of this castle.
Then the squire entered into the castle.
And when they saw Galahad they cried: Knight, keep thee, for we assure thee nothing but death.
Why, said Galahad, will ye all have ado with me at once?
Then Galahad put forth his spear and smote the foremost to the earth, that near he brake his neck.
And therewithal the other smote him on his shield great strokes, so that their spears brake.
Then Sir Galahad drew out his sword, and set upon them so hard that it was marvel to see it, and so through great force he made them to forsake the field; and Galahad chased them till they entered into the castle, and so passed through the castle at another gate.
And there met Sir Galahad an old man clothed in religious clothing, and said: Sir, have here the keys of this castle.
Then Sir Galahad opened the gates, and saw so much people in the streets that he might not number them, and all said: Sir, ye be welcome, for long have we abiden here our deliverance.
Then came to him a gentlewoman and said: These knights be fled, but they will come again this night, and here to begin again their evil custom.
What will ye that I shall do? said Galahad. Sir, said the gentlewoman, that ye send after all the knights hither that hold their lands of this castle, and make them to swear for to use the customs that were used heretofore of old time.
I will well, said Galahad.
And there she brought him an horn of ivory, bounden with gold richly, and said: Sir, blow this horn which will be heard two mile about this castle.
When Sir Galahad had blown the horn he set him down upon a bed.
And then they took the maiden and the treasure of the castle.
And then by great force they held all the knights of this castle against their will under their obeissance, and in great service and truage, robbing and pilling the poor common people of all that they had.
So it happened on a day the duke's daughter said: Ye have done unto me great wrong to slay mine own father, and my brother, and thus to hold our lands: not for then, she said, ye shall not hold this castle for many years, for by one knight ye shall be overcome.
Well, said the seven knights, sithen ye say so, there shall never lady nor knight pass this castle but they shall abide maugre their heads, or die therefore, till that knight be come by whom we shall lose this castle.
And therefore is it called the Maidens' Castle, for they have devoured many maidens.
Now, said Galahad, is she here for whom this castle was lost? Nay sir, said the priest, she was dead within these three nights after that she was thus enforced; and sithen have they kept her younger sister, which endureth great pains with mo other ladies.
By this were the knights of the country come, and then he made them do homage and fealty to the king's daughter, and set them in great ease of heart.
I suppose well, said Sir Galahad, and took his armour and his horse, and commended them unto God.
Sir, said he, for ye be wicked and sinful, and he is full blessed.
Right as they thus stood talking there came in riding Sir Gareth.
And then they made joy either of other.
And either promised other of the three knights not to depart while they were in that quest, but if fortune caused it.
And then they took the way under the castle, and there they lost the way that Sir Galahad rode, and there everych of them departed from other; and Sir Gawaine rode till he came to an hermitage, and there he found the good man saying his evensong of Our Lady; and there Sir Gawaine asked harbour for charity, and the good man granted it him gladly.
Then the good man asked him what he was.
For certes had ye not been so wicked as ye are, never had the seven brethren been slain by you and your two fellows.
For Sir Galahad himself alone beat them all seven the day to fore, but his living is such he shall slay no man lightly. Also I may say you the Castle of Maidens betokeneth the good souls that were in prison afore the Incarnation of Jesu Christ.
Well, said the good man, and then he held his peace.
And by adventure he met with Sir Aglovale and Sir Griflet, two knights of the Table Round.
And they two rode four days without finding of any adventure, and at the fifth day they departed. And everych held as fell them by adventure.
CHAPTER seventeen.
So when Sir Galahad was departed from the Castle of Maidens he rode till he came to a waste forest, and there he met with Sir Launcelot and Sir Percivale, but they knew him not, for he was new disguised.
Right so Sir Launcelot, his father, dressed his spear and brake it upon Sir Galahad, and Galahad smote him so again that he smote down horse and man.
This jousts was done to fore the hermitage where a recluse dwelled.
And when she saw Sir Galahad ride, she said: God be with thee, best knight of the world.
Ah certes, said she, all aloud that Launcelot and Percivale might hear it: An yonder two knights had known thee as well as I do they would not have encountered with thee.
Then perceived they both that he was Galahad; and up they gat on their horses, and rode fast after him, but in a while he was out of their sight.
And then they turned again with heavy cheer.
Let us spere some tidings, said Percivale, at yonder recluse.
When Sir Percivale came to the recluse she knew him well enough, and Sir Launcelot both.
But Sir Launcelot rode overthwart and endlong in a wild forest, and held no path but as wild adventure led him.
And within he found a fair altar, full richly arrayed with cloth of clean silk, and there stood a fair clean candlestick, which bare six great candles, and the candlestick was of silver.
And when Sir Launcelot saw this light he had great will for to enter into the chapel, but he could find no place where he might enter; then was he passing heavy and dismayed.
Then he returned and came to his horse and did off his saddle and bridle, and let him pasture, and unlaced his helm, and ungirt his sword, and laid him down to sleep upon his shield to fore the cross.
CHAPTER eighteen.
And when he was nigh the cross he there abode still.
With that Sir Launcelot saw the candlestick with the six tapers come before the cross, and he saw nobody that brought it.
Then the sick knight dressed him up and kissed the cross; anon his squire brought him his arms, and asked his lord how he did.
Certes, said he, I thank God right well, through the holy vessel I am healed.
I dare right well say, said the squire, that he dwelleth in some deadly sin whereof he was never confessed.
And when he was clean armed he took Sir Launcelot's horse, for he was better than his; and so departed they from the cross.
CHAPTER nineteen.
THEN anon Sir Launcelot waked, and set him up, and bethought him what he had seen there, and whether it were dreams or not.
Right so heard he a voice that said: Sir Launcelot, more harder than is the stone, and more bitter than is the wood, and more naked and barer than is the leaf of the fig tree; therefore go thou from hence, and withdraw thee from this holy place.
And when Sir Launcelot heard this he was passing heavy and wist not what to do, and so departed sore weeping, and cursed the time that he was born.
For then he deemed never to have had worship more.
And then he called himself a very wretch, and most unhappy of all knights; and there he said: My sin and my wickedness have brought me unto great dishonour.
For when I sought worldly adventures for worldly desires, I ever enchieved them and had the better in every place, and never was I discomfit in no quarrel, were it right or wrong.
So thus he sorrowed till it was day, and heard the fowls sing: then somewhat he was comforted.
But when Sir Launcelot missed his horse and his harness then he wist well God was displeased with him.
Then he departed from the cross on foot into a forest; and so by prime he came to an high hill, and found an hermitage and a hermit therein which was going unto mass.
And then Launcelot kneeled down and cried on Our Lord mercy for his wicked works.
So when mass was done Launcelot called him, and prayed him for charity for to hear his life.
With a good will, said the good man.
CHAPTER twenty.
THEN Sir Launcelot wept with heavy cheer, and said: Now I know well ye say me sooth.
Sir, said the good man, hide none old sin from me.
Truly, said Sir Launcelot, that were me full loath to discover.
For this fourteen year I never discovered one thing that I have used, and that may I now wite my shame and my disadventure.
And then he told there that good man all his life.
Then Sir Launcelot said: I pray you counsel me.
And then Sir Launcelot promised him he nold, by the faith of his body.
Holy father, said Sir Launcelot, I marvel of the voice that said to me marvellous words, as ye have heard to forehand.
Now shall I shew thee why thou art more naked and barer than the fig tree.
It befell that Our Lord on Palm Sunday preached in Jerusalem, and there He found in the people that all hardness was harboured in them, and there He found in all the town not one that would harbour him.
And then He went without the town, and found in midst of the way a fig tree, the which was right fair and well garnished of leaves, but fruit had it none.
Then Our Lord cursed the tree that bare no fruit; that betokeneth the fig tree unto Jerusalem, that had leaves and no fruit.
Certes, said Sir Launcelot, all that you have said is true, and from henceforward I cast me, by the grace of God, never to be so wicked as I have been, but as to follow knighthood and to do feats of arms.
I will well, said Sir Launcelot, for I have neither helm, nor horse, nor sword.
As for that, said the good man, I shall help you or to morn at even of an horse, and all that longed unto you.
We soon became good friends, my purse was his, but, twenty years later, he assisted me to a far greater extent in Munich.
Zawoiski was honest, he had only a small dose of intelligence, but it was enough for his happiness.
I will speak of him in another part of these Memoirs.
This amiable young man, who was a favourite with everybody and was thought a free thinker because he frequented the society of Angelo Querini and Lunardo Venier, presented me one day, as we were out walking, to an unknown countess who took my fancy very strongly.
We called on her in the evening, and, after introducing me to her husband, Count Rinaldi, she invited us to remain and have supper.
The count made a faro bank in the course of the evening, I punted with his wife as a partner, and won some fifty ducats.
Very much pleased with my new acquaintance, I called alone on the countess the next morning.
The count, apologizing for his wife who was not up yet, took me to her room.
She received me with graceful ease, and, her husband having left us alone, she had the art to let me hope for every favour, yet without committing herself; when I took leave of her, she invited me to supper for the evening.
After supper I played, still in partnership with her, won again, and went away very much in love.
I did not fail to pay her another visit the next morning, but when I presented myself at the house I was told that she had gone out.
I called again in the evening, and, after she had excused herself for not having been at home in the morning, the faro bank began, and I lost all my money, still having the countess for my partner.
I went away in great sorrow.
I was bound in honour to pay the next morning, and I did not possess a groat.
He kindly encouraged me to confess my troubles to him.
I took an oath to that effect, and kissing his hand, I went out for a walk, relieved from a great load.
I felt that it gave new strength to my hopes, and that feeling prevented me from regretting my heavy loss, but grateful for the great generosity of my benefactor I was fully determined on keeping my promise.
"Here is a parcel for you."
I opened it, and found some forty sequins.
My wife begs to send him half of the gold which he has lost in cash.
"COUNT RINALDI."
"This evening," said my clever physician, "you can have a gay supper with the charming countess."
"This evening, my dear, respected benefactor, I will have supper with you.
You have given me a masterly lesson."
"The next time you lose money upon trust, you had better not pay it."
"But I should be dishonoured."
"Never mind.
It is therefore more prudent not to wait until then."
"No doubt of it, for then you will save both your honour and your purse. But, as you are fond of games of chance, I advise you never to punt. Make the bank, and the advantage must be on your side."
"Yes, but only a slight advantage."
"As slight as you please, but it will be on your side, and when the game is over you will find yourself a winner and not a loser.
The punter is excited, the banker is calm.
The last says, 'I bet you do not guess,' while the first says, 'I bet I can guess.' Which is the fool, and which is the wise man?
"Why an idiot?
Fortune is very fickle."
Leave off playing, believe me, the very moment you see luck turning, even if you should, at that moment, win but one groat."
I did not think it necessary to undeceive him, but I did not go again to Count Rinaldi's, whom I saw sixteen years afterwards in Milan.
As to Zawoiski, I did not tell him the story till I met him in Carlsbad, old and deaf, forty years later.
I had become acquainted, through Zawoiski, with a Frenchman called L'Abbadie, who was then soliciting from the Venetian Government the appointment of inspector of the armies of the Republic. The senate appointed, and I presented him to my protector, who promised him his vote; but the circumstance I am going to relate prevented him from fulfilling his promise.
"I should not dare to do so, dear father."
"Try him; I am certain that he will be glad to lend you that sum."
"I doubt it, but I will try."
I called upon L'Abbadie on the following day, and after a short exchange of compliments I told him the service I expected from his friendship.
He excused himself in a very polite manner, drowning his refusal in that sea of commonplaces which people are sure to repeat when they cannot or will not oblige a friend.
Zawoiski came in as he was still apologizing, and I left them together.
He merely remarked that the Frenchman was deficient in intelligence.
It just happened that it was the very day on which the appointment of the inspectorship was to be brought before the senate.
I went out to attend to my business (I ought to say to my pleasure), and as I did not return home till after midnight I went to bed without seeing my father. In the morning I said in his presence that I intended to call upon L'Abbadie to congratulate him upon his appointment.
"You may spare yourself that trouble; the senate has rejected his nomination."
"How so?
"He was right then, for he would have been appointed if I had not made up my mind to speak against him.
I have proved to the senate that a right policy forbade the government to trust such an important post to a foreigner."
"I am much surprised, for your excellency was not of that opinion the day before yesterday."
That refusal has cost him an important appointment and an income of three thousand crowns, which would now be his."
When I was taking my walk on the same day I met Zawoiski with L'Abbadie, and did not try to avoid them.
The Frenchman's resentment proved very useful to me, because he related the circumstance to everybody.
It was the converted Jew who had purchased for His Majesty the gallery of the Duke of Modena for one hundred thousand sequins. Guarienti and my brother left Venice for Rome, where Jean remained in the studio of the celebrated painter Raphael Mengs, whom we shall meet again hereafter.
In the early part of October, seventeen forty six, the theatres being opened, I was walking about with my mask on when I perceived a woman, whose head was well enveloped in the hood of her mantle, getting out of the Ferrara barge which had just arrived.
She hesitates, I insist, and she gives way.
I take off my mask, and out of politeness she must put down the hood of her mantle.
A large muslin head dress conceals half of her face, but her eyes, her nose, and her pretty mouth are enough to let me see on her features beauty, nobleness, sorrow, and that candour which gives youth such an undefinable charm.
I need not say that, with such a good letter of introduction, the unknown at once captivated my warmest interest.
"You have then some hope of recalling him to the path of duty?
I suppose he has promised you marriage?"
"He has engaged his faith to me in writing.
The only favour I claim from your kindness is to take me to his house, to leave me there, and to keep my secret."
Have entire confidence in me, for I already take a deep interest in all your concerns.
Tell me his name."
"Alas! sir, I give way to fate."
With these words, she takes out of her bosom a paper which she gives me; I recognize the handwriting of Zanetto Steffani.
When I have read the paper, I return it to her, saying that I knew the writer quite well, that he was connected with the chancellor's office, known as a great libertine, and deeply in debt, but that he would be rich after his mother's death.
"For God's sake take me to his house."
"I will do anything you wish; but have entire confidence in me, and be good enough to hear me.
I advise you not to go to his house.
He has already done you great injury, and, even supposing that you should happen to find him at home, he might be capable of receiving you badly; if he should not be at home, it is most likely that his mother would not exactly welcome you, if you should tell her who you are and what is your errand.
Trust to me, and be quite certain that God has sent me on your way to assist you.
"Good God! where shall I go to night?"
"To a respectable house, of course."
I knew an honest widow who resided in a lane, and who had two furnished rooms.
I persuade the young countess to follow me, and we take a gondola.
"I was unfortunate enough," she continued, "to inspire him with love, and he postponed his departure.
He remained one month in C----, never going out but in the evening, and spending every night under my windows conversing with me.
He would beg of me to make up my mind to run away with him, unknown to everybody, promising that my honour should not suffer from such a step, because, three days after my departure, everybody should receive notice of my being his wife, and he assured me that he would bring me back on a visit to my native place shortly after our marriage.
Alas, sir! what shall I say now?
Love blinded me; I fell into the abyss; I believed him; I agreed to everything.
He gave me the paper which you have read, and the following night I allowed him to come into my room through the window under which he was in the habit of conversing with me.
"I consented to be guilty of a crime which I believed would be atoned for within three days, and he left me, promising that the next night he would be again under my window, ready to receive me in his arms.
Could I possibly entertain any doubt after the fearful crime I had committed for him?
I prepared a small parcel, and waited for his coming, but in vain. Oh! what a cruel long night it was!
I adopted the only plan that despair could suggest, and that, of course, was not the right one.
I walked all night and nearly the whole day, without taking any food, until I got into the barge, which brought me here in twenty four hours. I travelled in the boat with five men and two women, but no one saw my face or heard my voice, I kept constantly sitting down in a corner, holding my head down, half asleep, and with this prayer book in my hands.
"You know all now, sir; but I entreat you not to judge me too severely; I have been virtuous all through my life; one month ago I had never committed a fault which could call a blush upon my face, and the bitter tears which I shed every day will, I hope, wash out my crime in the eyes of God.
I have been carefully brought up, but love and the want of experience have thrown me into the abyss.
I am in your hands, and I feel certain that I shall have no cause to repent it."
I told her unsparingly that Steffani had seduced and abandoned her of malice aforethought, and that she ought to think of him only to be revenged of his perfidy.
We reached the widow's house.
I then took an affectionate leave of her, promising to see her early in the morning.
On leaving this interesting but hapless girl, I proceeded to the house of Steffani.
Very early the next morning I called upon her.
She was still asleep.
The widow told me that she had made a pretty good supper, but without speaking a single word, and that she had locked herself up in her room immediately afterwards.
Her features bore the stamp of deep sorrow, but she looked calmer, and her complexion was no longer pale.
Without giving her time to answer I told her all the particulars I had learned concerning her honourable family, which caused her real satisfaction.
"I have no objection," she said, "to your going to C----, and I thank you for the generosity of your offer, but I beg you will postpone your journey.
I still hope that Steffani will return, and then I can take a decision."
"I think you are quite right," I said.
"Will you allow me to have some breakfast with you?"
"Do you suppose I could refuse you?"
"I should be very sorry to disturb you in any way.
"I am very fond of books and music; my harpsichord was my delight."
She blushed, and thanked me with great feeling.
She had walked a long distance, her shoes were evidently worn out, her feet sore, and she appreciated the delicacy of my present. As I had no improper design with regard to her, I enjoyed her gratitude, and felt pleased at the idea she evidently entertained of my kind attentions.
I had no other purpose in view but to restore calm to her mind, and to obliterate the bad opinion which the unworthy Steffani had given her of men in general.
I never thought of inspiring her with love for me, and I had not the slightest idea that I could fall in love with her.
Situated as she was, I could not suppose her heart susceptible of harbouring a new affection, and I would have despised myself if I had tried to seduce her by any means in my power.
That singular meeting, which gave me the useful opportunity of finding myself endowed with generous dispositions, stronger even than my love for pleasure, flattered my self love more than I could express.
On the third day, in the midst of expressions of gratitude which I could not succeed in stopping she told me that she could not conceive why I shewed her so much sympathy, because I ought to have formed but a poor opinion of her in consequence of the readiness with which she had followed me into the cafe.
She smiled when I answered that I could not understand how I had succeeded in giving her so great a confidence in my virtue, when I appeared before her with a mask on my face, in a costume which did not indicate a very virtuous character.
"It was easy for me, madam," I continued, "to guess that you were a beauty in distress, when I observed your youth, the nobleness of your countenance, and, more than all, your candour.
Your fault was that of a warm heart seduced by love, over which reason could have no sway, and your flight- the action of a soul crying for reparation or for revenge fully justifies you.
Your cowardly seducer must pay with his life the penalty due to his crime, and he ought never to receive, by marrying you, an unjust reward, for he is not worthy of possessing you after degrading himself by the vilest conduct."
"Everything you say is true.
My brother, I hope, will avenge me."
"You are greatly mistaken if you imagine that Steffani will fight your brother; Steffani is a coward who will never expose himself to an honourable death."
As I was speaking, she put her hand in her pocket and drew forth, after a few moments' consideration, a stiletto six inches long, which she placed on the table.
"What is this?" I exclaimed.
"It is a weapon upon which I reckoned until now to use against myself in case I should not succeed in obtaining reparation for the crime I have committed.
But you have opened my eyes.
Take away, I entreat you, this stiletto, which henceforth is useless to me.
I trust in your friendship, and I have an inward certainty that I shall be indebted to you for my honour as well as for my life."
I was struck by the words she had just uttered, and I felt that those words, as well as her looks, had found their way to my heart, besides enlisting my generous sympathy.
I took the stiletto, and left her with so much agitation that I had to acknowledge the weakness of my heroism, which I was very near turning into ridicule; yet I had the wonderful strength to perform, at least by halves, the character of a Cato until the seventh day.
It seemed to me that the best way to thank me for my attentive kindness would have been to give me a specimen of her musical talent.
Had she deceived me? If so, she would lose my esteem.
But, unwilling to form a hasty judgment, I kept on my guard, with a firm determination to make good use of the first opportunity that might present itself to clear up my doubts.
I called upon her the next day after dinner, which was not my usual time, having resolved on creating the opportunity myself.
I tendered my apologies for my sudden appearance at an unusual hour; she excused herself for not having completed her toilet, and the widow went on with her work.
I remained in silent contemplation.
I blushed for very shame, for I ought to have thought of that.
He is two years older than I, and is an officer in the papal army."
I feared she might be offended, and I assured her of my respect.
"Ah, sir!" she answered, "in the situation in which I am placed, I must think of defending myself against my own self much more than against you."
Yet I felt my love taking such proportions that I did not know how to keep it a mystery any longer.
I was in ecstacy.
I entreated her to sing; after some little ceremony, she took one of the music books I had given her, and she sang at sight in a manner which fairly ravished me.
I begged that she would allow me to kiss her hand, and she did not say yes, but when I took it and pressed my lips on it, she did not oppose any resistance; I had the courage to smother my ardent desires, and the kiss I imprinted on her lovely hand was a mixture of tenderness, respect, and admiration.
I took leave of her, smitten, full of love, and almost determined on declaring my passion.
'Look here!
Biscuits.'
Rather broken and crumbled, certainly, but still biscuits.
'I got them this morning — cook — and I'd quite forgotten,' he explained as he divided them with scrupulous fairness into four heaps.
'Yes, but look here, Squirrel,' said Robert; 'you're so clever at explaining about invisibleness and all that.
'Then if we HAD the mutton it would be real,' said Robert. 'Oh, don't I wish we could find it!'
It is true that, directly he bit a piece off, the rest vanished; but it was all right, because he knew he had it in his hand though he could neither see nor feel it.
'I think I'm glad it's only a game; it IS only a game, isn't it?' said Jane.
She went to Martha and said, 'May we have just biscuits for tea?
And I'll tell the others to fetch theirs.'
They looked at Robert with surprised respect.
'He's been getting ready to be brave all the afternoon.
'No,' bawled Robert, 'of course we don't!
Never,
Never, NEVER!'
'Cheer,' said Robert in a fierce whisper.
'Cheer to show them we aren't afraid, and rattle the daggers to make more noise.
Another man had swum over, and his fingers were on the window ledge.
But he saw the clinging fingers, and hit them as hard as he could with an iron bar that he caught up from the floor.
Then they stood in the arched gate house, breathing hard and looking at each other.
'Cheer up, jenny,' said Robert - 'it won't last much longer.'
The pavement they stood on seemed to tremble.
'I should just hope we HAD!' he said; 'I'd give something for a jolly good boiling kettle of lead.
They heard a splash below, but no one below seemed to have felt it.
'Look here,' she said, 'it's just come into my head.
A new cap, and everything!'
But the number of students, of both sexes, continued to increase.
As a result, we finally decided to undertake the construction of a still larger building-a building that would contain rooms for the girls and boarding accommodations for all.
We decided to call the proposed building Alabama Hall, in honour of the state in which we were labouring.
Again Miss Davidson began making efforts to enlist the interest and help of the coloured and white people in and near Tuskegee.
They responded willingly, in proportion to their means. The students, as in the case of our first building, Porter Hall, began digging out the dirt in order to allow the laying of the foundations.
When we seemed at the end of our resources, so far as securing money was concerned, something occurred which showed the greatness of General Armstrong-something which proved how far he was above the ordinary individual.
When we were in the midst of great anxiety as to where and how we were to get funds for the new building, I received a telegram from General Armstrong asking me if I could spend a month travelling with him through the North, and asking me, if I could do so, to come to Hampton at once.
On arriving there I found that the General had decided to take a quartette of singers through the North, and hold meetings for a month in important cities, at which meetings he and I were to speak.
Imagine my surprise when the General told me, further, that these meetings were to be held, not in the interests of Hampton, but in the interests of Tuskegee, and that the Hampton Institute was to be responsible for all the expenses.
A weak and narrow man would have reasoned that all the money which came to Tuskegee in this way would be just so much taken from the Hampton Institute; but none of these selfish or short sighted feelings ever entered the breast of General Armstrong.
He was too big to be little, too good to be mean.
The General knew, too, that the way to strengthen Hampton was to make it a centre of unselfish power in the working out of the whole Southern problem.
He said: "Give them an idea for every word." I think it would be hard to improve upon this advice; and it might be made to apply to all public speaking.
From that time to the present I have always tried to keep his advice in mind.
Meetings were held in New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and other large cities, and at all of these meetings General Armstrong pleased, together with myself, for help, not for Hampton, but for Tuskegee.
At these meetings an especial effort was made to secure help for the building of Alabama Hall, as well as to introduce the school to the attention of the general public.
In both these respects the meetings proved successful.
As far as the science of what is called begging can be reduced to rules, I would say that I have had but two rules.
First, always to do my whole duty regarding making our work known to individuals and organizations; and, second, not to worry about the results.
In order to be successful in any kind of undertaking, I think the main thing is for one to grow to the point where he completely forgets himself; that is, to lose himself in a great cause.
I know wealthy people who receive as much as twenty calls a day for help.
More than once when I have gone into the offices of rich men, I have found half a dozen persons waiting to see them, and all come for the same purpose, that of securing money.
And all these calls in person, to say nothing of the applications received through the mails. Very few people have any idea of the amount of money given away by persons who never permit their names to be known.
As an example of this, there are two ladies in New York, whose names rarely appear in print, but who, in a quiet way, have given us the means with which to erect three large and important buildings during the last eight years.
And they not only help Tuskegee, but they are constantly seeking opportunities to help other worthy causes.
I have usually proceeded on the principle that persons who possess sense enough to earn money have sense enough to know how to give it away, and that the mere making known of the facts regarding Tuskegee, and especially the facts regarding the work of the graduates, has been more effective than outright begging.
Such work gives one a rare opportunity to study human nature.
It also has its compensations in giving one an opportunity to meet some of the best people in the world-to be more correct, I think I should say the best people in the world.
It is a privilege to have a share in it.
In the early years of the Tuskegee school I walked the streets or travelled country roads in the North for days and days without receiving a dollar.
After some difficulty I succeeded in securing an interview with him.
Two years after this visit a letter came to Tuskegee from this man, which read like this: "Enclosed I send you a New York draft for ten thousand dollars, to be used in furtherance of your work.
I recall with pleasure your visit to me two years ago."
It was by far the largest single donation which up to that time the school had ever received.
In our case I felt a double responsibility, and this made the anxiety all the more intense.
If the institution had been officered by white persons, and had failed, it would have injured the cause of Negro education; but I knew that the failure of our institution, officered by Negroes, would not only mean the loss of a school, but would cause people, in a large degree, to lose faith in the ability of the entire race.
The receipt of this draft for ten thousand dollars, under all these circumstances, partially lifted a burden that had been pressing down upon me for days.
From the beginning of our work to the present I have always had the feeling, and lose no opportunity to impress our teachers with the same idea, that the school will always be supported in proportion as the inside of the institution is kept clean and pure and wholesome.
The first time I ever saw the late Collis p Huntington, the great railroad man, he gave me two dollars for our school.
Between these two gifts there were others of generous proportions which came every year from both mr and mrs Huntington.
No, it was not luck.
Nothing ever comes to me, that is worth having, except as the result of hard work.
I noted that just in proportion as the usefulness of the school grew, his donations increased.
Never did I meet an individual who took a more kindly and sympathetic interest in our school than did mr Huntington.
He not only gave money to us, but took time in which to advise me, as a father would a son, about the general conduct of the school.
More than once I have found myself in some pretty tight places while collecting money in the North.
One morning I found myself in providence rhode island, without a cent of money with which to buy breakfast.
In crossing the street to see a lady from whom I hoped to get some money, I found a bright new twenty five cent piece in the middle of the street track.
At one of our Commencements I was bold enough to invite the Rev. e Winchester Donald, d d, rector of Trinity Church, Boston, to preach the Commencement sermon.
It was not very long before the rain ceased and dr Donald finished his sermon; and an excellent sermon it was, too, in spite of the weather. After he had gone to his room, and had gotten the wet threads of his clothes dry, dr Donald ventured the remark that a large chapel at Tuskegee would not be out of place.
A short time ago we received twenty thousand dollars from mr Andrew Carnegie, to be used for the purpose of erecting a new library building. Our first library and reading room were in a corner of a shanty, and the whole thing occupied a space about five by twelve feet.
It required ten years of work before I was able to secure mr Carnegie's interest and help.
The first time I saw him, ten years ago, he seemed to take but little interest in our school, but I was determined to show him that we were worthy of his help.
We have over twelve thousand books, periodicals, etc, gifts from our friends, but we have no suitable place for them, and we have no suitable reading room.
Our graduates go to work in every section of the South, and whatever knowledge might be obtained in the library would serve to assist in the elevation of the whole Negro race.
All of the work for the building, such as brickmaking, brick masonry, carpentry, blacksmithing, etc, would be done by the students.
If you wish further information, I shall be glad to furnish it.
Yours truly,
Booker t Washington, Principal.
I have found that strict business methods go a long way in securing the interest of rich people.
It has been my constant aim at Tuskegee to carry out, in our financial and other operations, such business methods as would be approved of by any New York banking house.
I have spoken of several large gifts to the school; but by far the greater proportion of the money that has built up the institution has come in the form of small donations from persons of moderate means. It is upon these small gifts, which carry with them the interest of hundreds of donors, that any philanthropic work must depend largely for its support.
In my efforts to get money I have often been surprised at the patience and deep interest of the ministers, who are besieged on every hand and at all hours of the day for help.
In a large degree it has been the pennies, the nickels, and the dimes which have come from the Sunday schools, the Christian Endeavour societies, and the missionary societies, as well as from the church proper, that have helped to elevate the Negro at so rapid a rate.
This speaking of small gifts reminds me to say that very few Tuskegee graduates fail to send us an annual contribution.
These contributions range from twenty five cents up to ten dollars.
Soon after beginning our third year's work we were surprised to receive money from three special sources, and up to the present time we have continued to receive help from them.
First, the State Legislature of Alabama increased its annual appropriation from two thousand dollars to three thousand dollars; I might add that still later it increased this sum to four thousand five hundred dollars a year.
Foster, the member of the Legislature from Tuskegee.
Second, we received one thousand dollars from the john f Slater Fund.
Our work seemed to please the trustees of this fund, as they soon began increasing their annual grant.
This was at first five hundred dollars, but it has since been increased to fifteen hundred dollars.
j l m Curry, of Washington, who is the general agent for these two funds, and mr Morris k Jessup, of New York.
I shall never forget the first time I met him.
I had heard much about him.
When I first went into his presence, trembling because of my youth and inexperience, he took me by the hand so cordially, and spoke such encouraging words, and gave me such helpful advice regarding the proper course to pursue, that I came to know him then, as I have known him ever since, as a high example of one who is constantly and unselfishly at work for the betterment of humanity.
mr Morris k Jessup, the treasurer of the Slater Fund, I refer to because I know of no man of wealth and large and complicated business responsibilities who gives not only money but his time and thought to the subject of the proper method of elevating the Negro to the extent that is true of mr Jessup.
THE MASTER THIEF
Once upon a time there was a poor cottager who had three sons.
He had nothing to leave them when he died, and no money with which to put them to any trade, so that he did not know what to make of them.
At last he said he would give them leave to take to anything each liked best, and to go whithersoever they pleased, and he would go with them a bit of the way; and so he did.
So it fell out one night as he was going through a great wood that such bad weather overtook him.
It blew, and sleeted, and drove so that he could scarce keep his eyes open; and in a trice, before he knew how it was, he got bewildered, and could not find either road or path.
But as he went on and on, at last he saw a glimmering of light far far off in the wood.
There it was in a large house, and the fire was blazing so brightly inside, that he could tell the folk had not yet gone to bed; so he went in and saw an old dame bustling about and minding the house.
'Good evening!' said the youth.
'Good evening!' said the old dame.
'So it is', said she.
'Can I get leave to have a bed and shelter here to night?' asked the youth.
'You'll get no good by sleeping here', said the old dame; 'for if the folk come home and find you here, they'll kill both me and you.'
And a bad lot of them too', said the old dame.
'They stole me away when I was little, and have kept me as their housekeeper ever since.'
'Well, for all that, I think I'll just go to bed', said the youth. 'Come what may, I'll not stir out at night in such weather.'
With that the youth got into a bed which stood there, but he dared not go to sleep, and very soon after in came the robbers; so the old dame told them how a stranger fellow had come in whom she had not been able to get out of the house again.
'Such a one as he money!' said the old dame, 'the tramper!
Why, if he had clothes to his back, it was as much as he had.'
Then the robbers began to talk among themselves what they should do with him; if they should kill him outright, or what else they should do.
Meantime the youth got up and began to talk to them, and to ask if they didn't want a servant, for it might be that he would be glad to enter their service.
'It's all one to me what trade I follow', said the youth; 'for when I left home, father gave me leave to take to any trade I chose.'
'I don't care', said the youth, for he thought it would not take long to learn that trade.
Now there lived a man a little way off who had three oxen.
So when the man came by he saw the shoe at once.
'That's a nice shoe', said he.
Then the youth took up the shoe, and made all the haste he could to get before the man by a short cut through the wood, and laid it down before him in the road again.
So he set off, and hunted and hunted up and down for the shoe, but no shoe did he find; and at length he had to go back with the one he had.
But, meanwhile the youth had taken the ox and gone off with it; and when the man came and saw his ox gone, he began to cry and bewail, for he was afraid his old dame would kill him outright when she came to know that the ox was lost.
But just then it came across his mind that he would go home and take the second ox, and drive it to the town, and not let his old dame know anything about the matter. So he did this, and went home and took the ox without his dame's knowing it, and set off with it to the town.
But the robbers knew all about it, and they said to the youth, if he could get this ox too, without the man's knowing it, and without his doing him any harm, he should be as good as any one of them.
If that were all, the youth said, he did not think it a very hard thing.
This time he took with him a rope, and hung himself up under the arm pits to a tree right in the man's way.
So the man came along with his ox, and when he saw such a sight hanging there he began to feel a little queer.
Down slipped the youth from the tree, and ran by a footpath, and got before the man, and hung himself up right in his way again.
Aye, aye! you may hang for all I care, whether you are a ghost or whatever you are.' So he passed on with his ox.
Now the youth did just as he had done twice before; he jumped down from the tree, ran through the wood by a footpath, and hung himself up right in the man's way again.
But when the man saw this sight for the third time, he said to himself:
'Well! this is an ugly business!
Is it likely now that they should have been so heavy at heart as to hang themselves, all these three? No!
I cannot think it is anything else than a piece of witchcraft that I see.
But now I'll soon know for certain; if the other two are still hanging there, it must be really so; but if they are not, then it can be nothing but witchcraft that I see.'
So he tied up his ox, and ran back to see if the others were still really hanging there.
But while he went and peered up into all the trees, the youth jumped down and took his ox and ran off with it. When the man came back and found his ox gone, he was in a sad plight, and, as any one might know without being told, he began to cry and bemoan; but at last he came to take it easier, and so he thought:
'There's no other help for it than to go home and take the third ox without my dame's knowing it, and to try and drive a good bargain with it, so that I may get a good sum of money for it.'
So he went home and set off with the ox, and his old dame knew never a word about the matter.
But the robbers, they knew all about it, and they said to the youth, that if he could steal this ox as he had stolen the other two, then he should be master over the whole band. Well, the youth set off, and ran into the wood; and as the man came by with his ox he set up a dreadful bellowing, just like a great ox in the wood.
When the man heard that, you can't think how glad he was, for it seemed to him that he knew the voice of his big bullock, and he thought that now he should find both of them again; so he tied up the third ox, and ran off from the road to look for them in the wood; but meantime the youth went off with the third ox.
Now, when the man came back and found he had lost this ox too, he was so wild that there was no end to his grief.
He cried and roared and beat his breast, and, to tell the truth, it was many days before he dared go home; for he was afraid lest his old dame should kill him outright on the spot.
As for the robbers, they were not very well pleased either, when they had to own that the youth was master over the whole band.
So he drove up to the door as if he were any other great man.
After that he went in and asked if he could have a lodging?
'You always were a stingy old hunks', said the youth, 'and so you are still, when you won't take your own son in.'
'What, you my son!' said the man.
'Don't you know me again?' said the youth.
Well, after a little while he did know him again.
'Oh!
I'll soon tell you', said the youth.
'You said I might take to any trade I chose, and so I bound myself apprentice to a pack of thieves and robbers, and now I've served my time out, and am become a Master Thief.'
Now there lived a Squire close by to his father's cottage, and he had such a great house, and such heaps of money, he could not tell how much he had.
He had a daughter too, and a smart and pretty girl she was.
'If he asks by what trade I get my living, you can say I'm a Master Thief.'
'I think you've lost your wits', said the man, 'for you can't be in your right mind when you think of such stuff.'
No! he had not lost his wits, his father must and should go to the Squire, and ask for his daughter.
Yes, there was no help for it, said the Master Thief; he should go whether he would or no; and if he did not go by fair means, he would soon make him go by foul.
But the man was still loath to go; so he stepped after him, and rubbed him down with a good birch cudgel, and kept on till the man came crying and sobbing inside the Squire's door.
'How now, my man! what ails you?' said the Squire.
So he told him the whole story; how he had three sons who set off one day, and how he had given them leave to go whithersoever they would, and to follow whatever calling they chose.
'And here now is the youngest come home, and has thrashed me till he has made me come to you and ask for your daughter for him to wife; and he bids me say, besides, that he's a Master Thief.' And so he fell to crying and sobbing again.
'Never mind, my man', said the Squire, laughing; 'just go back and tell him from me, he must prove his skill first.
Just go and tell him that.'
So he went back and told the youth, who thought it would be an easy job.
So he set about and caught three hares alive, and put them into a bag, and dressed himself in some old rags, until he looked so poor and filthy that it made one's heart bleed to see; and then he stole into the passage at the back door of the Squire's house on the Sunday forenoon, with his bag, just like any other beggar boy.
But the Squire himself and all his household were in the kitchen watching the roast.
'Oh, just look at that hare!' said the folk in the kitchen, and were all for running out to catch it.
Yes, the Squire saw it running too.
'Oh, let it run', said he; 'there's no use in thinking to catch a hare on the spring.'
A little while after, the youth let the second hare go, and they saw it in the kitchen, and thought it was the same they had seen before, and still wanted to run out and catch it; but the Squire said again it was no use.
Now, they saw it from the kitchen, and still thought it was the same hare that kept on running about, and were all eager to be out after it.
'Well, it is a fine hare', said the Squire; 'come let's see if we can't lay our hands on it.'
So out he ran, and the rest with him-away they all went, the hare before, and they after; so that it was rare fun to see.
But meantime the youth took the roast and ran off with it; and where the Squire got a roast for his dinner that day I don't know; but one thing I know, and that is, that he had no roast hare, though he ran after it till he was both warm and weary.
'Very well-only keep a sharp look out', said the Squire; 'maybe he'll come to see you before you know a word of it.' But the Priest stuck to his text-that he did, and made game of the Squire because he had been so taken in.
Later in the afternoon came the Master Thief, and wanted to have the Squire's daughter, as he had given his word.
But the Squire began to talk him over, and said, 'Oh, you must first prove your skill a little more; for what you did to day was no great thing, after all. Couldn't you now play off a good trick on the Priest, who is sitting in there, and making game of me for letting such a fellow as you twist me round his thumb.'
'Well, as for that, it wouldn't be hard', said the Master Thief.
And when the Priest came home in the evening, the youth began to bawl out:
'Father Laurence!
Father Laurence!'--for that was the Priest's name.
'Who is that calling me?' said the Priest.
'I am an angel', said the Master Thief, 'sent from God to let you know that you shall be taken up alive into heaven for your piety's sake.
Next Monday night you must hold yourself ready for the journey, for I shall come then to fetch you in a sack; and all your gold and your silver, and all that you have of this world's goods, you must lay together in a heap in your dining room.'
'This is the narrow way which leadeth unto the kingdom of heaven', said the Master Thief, who went on dragging him along till he had nearly broken every bone in his body.
At last he tumbled him into a goose house that belonged to the Squire, and the geese began pecking and pinching him with their bills, so that he was more dead than alive.
'Now you are in the flames of purgatory, to be cleansed and purified for life everlasting', said the Master Thief; and with that he went his way, and took all the gold which the Priest had laid together in his dining room.
The next morning, when the goose girl came to let the geese out, she heard how the Priest lay in the sack, and bemoaned himself in the goose house.
'Oh!' said the Priest, 'if you are an angel from heaven, do let me out, and let me return again to earth, for it is worse here than in hell.
The little fiends keep on pinching me with tongs.'
'Oh!' groaned the Priest, 'this is all that Master Thief's doing.
Ah! my gold and my silver, and my fine clothes.' And he beat his breast, and hobbled home at such a rate that the girl thought he had lost his wits all at once.
'You must do one masterpiece better still, that I may see plainly what you are fit for.
Now, I have twelve horses in my stable, and on them I will put twelve grooms, one on each.
'Very well, I daresay I can do it', said the Master Thief; 'but shall I really have your daughter if I can?'
'Yes, if you can, I'll do my best for you', said the Squire.
So the Master Thief set off to a shop, and bought brandy enough to fill two pocket flasks, and into one of them he put a sleepy drink, but into the other only brandy.
After that he hired eleven men to lie in wait at night, behind the Squire's stable yard; and last of all, for fair words and a good bit of money, he borrowed a ragged gown and cloak from an old woman; and so, with a staff in his hand, and a bundle at his back, he limped off, as evening drew on, towards the Squire's stable.
Just as he got there they were watering the horses for the night, and had their hands full of work.
'What the devil do you want?' said one of the grooms to the old woman.
'To the devil with your leave', said one.
'Oh! the poor old bag of bones', said another, whose heart took pity on her, 'the old hag may sit inside and welcome; such a one as she can do no harm.'
As the night wore on, the men found it rather cold work to sit so still and quiet on horseback.
'That it is', said another; 'I freeze so, that my teeth chatter.'
Then she pulled out the flask with brandy in it, and her hand shook so that the spirit splashed about in the flask, and then she took such a gulp, that it went 'bop' in her throat.
'What's that you've got in your flask, old girl?' said one of the grooms.
Do let me have a drop', screamed the whole twelve, one after another.
Then the Master Thief threw off his beggar's rags, and took one groom after the other so softly off their horses, and set them astride on the beams between the stalls; and so he called his eleven men, and rode off with the Squire's twelve horses.
But when the Squire got up in the morning, and went to look after his grooms, they had just begun to come to; and some of them fell to spurring the beams with their spurs, till the splinters flew again, and some fell off, and some still hung on and sat there looking like fools.
'Ho! ho!' said the Squire; 'I see very well who has been here; but as for you, a pretty set of blockheads you must be to sit here and let the Master Thief steal the horses from between your legs.'
So they all got a good leathering because they had not kept a sharper look out.
Further on in the day came the Master Thief again, and told how he had managed the matter, and asked for the Squire's daughter, as he had promised; but the Squire gave him one hundred dollars down, and said he must do something better still.
I daresay I could', said the Master Thief, 'if I were really sure of getting your daughter.'
Well, well, the Squire would see what he could do; and he told the Master Thief a day when he would be taking a ride on a great common where they drilled the troops.
So the Master Thief soon got hold of an old worn out jade of a mare, and set to work, and made traces and collar of withies and broom twigs, and bought an old beggarly cart and a great cask.
No harm should happen to her; she should only be driven about a little; and if he took his finger out more than once, she was to have ten dollars more.
Then he threw a few rags and tatters over himself, and stuffed himself out, and put on a wig and a great beard of goat's hair, so that no one could know him again, and set off for the common, where the Squire had already been riding about a good bit.
At last the Squire rode right up to him, and asked if he had seen any one lurking about in the wood thereabouts.
'No', said the man, 'I haven't seen a soul.'
'Harkye, now', said the Squire, 'if you have a mind to ride into the wood, and hunt about and see if you can fall upon any one lurking about there, you shall have the loan of my horse, and a shilling into the bargain, to drink my health, for your pains.'
'Ride off', said the Squire; 'I'll look after your horse and cask.'
At last the Squire grew weary of standing there with his finger in the taphole, so he took it out.
The day after, he came to the Squire and would have his daughter, as he had given his word; but the Squire put him off again with fine words, and gave him two hundred dollars, and said he must do one more masterpiece.
If he could do that, he should have her.
'Do you think, now', said the Squire, 'you can steal the sheet off our bed, and the shift off my wife's back.
Do you think you could do that?'
'It shall be done', said the Master Thief. 'I only wish I was as sure of getting your daughter.'
So when night began to fall, the Master Thief went out and cut down a thief who hung on the gallows, and threw him across his shoulders, and carried him off.
Then he got a long ladder and set it up against the Squire's bedroom window, and so climbed up, and kept bobbing the dead man up and down, just for all the world like one that was peeping in at the window.
'That's the Master Thief, old lass!' said the Squire, and gave his wife a nudge on the side.
'Now see if I don't shoot him, that's all.'
So saying he took up a rifle which he had laid at his bedside.
'No! no! pray don't shoot him after telling him he might come and try', said his wife.
'Well', said the Squire, 'it is quite true that I am the chief magistrate in these parts; but people are fond of talking, and it would be a bore if they came to see this dead man's body.
'You must do as you think best, dear', said his wife.
'Why, dear, back already!' said she, for she thought it was her husband.
'O yes, I only just put him into a hole, and threw a little earth over him.
But just let me have the sheet to wipe myself with-he was so bloody-and I have made myself in such a mess with him.'
So he got the sheet.
After a while he said:
'Do you know I am afraid you must let me have your nightshift too, for the sheet won't do by itself; that I can see.'
But just then it came across his mind that he had forgotten to lock the house door, so he must step down and look to that before he came back to bed, and away he went with both shift and sheet.
A little while after came the true Squire.
'Why! what a time you've taken to lock the door, dear!' said his wife; 'and what have you done with the sheet and shift?'
'What do you say?' said the Squire.
'Why, I am asking what you have done with the sheet and shift that you had to wipe off the blood', said she.
So the Master Thief lived well and happily from that time forward.
"Well, then what?" Harrington asked.
Von Schlichten dropped ash from his cigarette into the tray that served all three of them.
"Nothing much," he replied.
We picked up a few of his ragtag and bobtail, and they're being questioned now, but I doubt if they'll tell us anything we don't know already.
The dog had been kept in a lean to back of the house; it had been removed, probably as soon as Keeluk called in his goon gang.
At least one of the rabbits had been kept on the premises, too, some time ago.
No trace of the goat."
He watched Blount move one of his pieces and nodded approvingly.
There is also the equivalent of a regiment of King Jaikark's infantry-spearmen, crossbowmen, and a few riflemen-and two of those outsize cavalry companies of his, helping hold the lid down.
They're making mass arrests, indiscriminately.
More slaves for Jaikark's court favorite, of course."
"Or else Gurgurk wants them to use for patronage," Blount added.
"He's been building quite a political organization, lately.
Getting ready to shove Jaikark off the throne, I'd say."
Harrington pushed one of his pieces out along a radial line toward the rim.
He shifted another piece, a sort of combination knight and bishop, to threaten the piece Harrington had moved.
"Oh, Gurgurk wouldn't dare try anything like that," the Governor General said.
"He knows we wouldn't let him get away with it. We have too much of an investment in King Jaikark."
"Then why's Gurgurk been supporting this damned Rakkeed?" Blount wanted to know, hastily interposing a piece.
"Gurgurk can follow one of two lines of policy.
He can undertake to heave Jaikark off the throne and seize power, or he has to support Jaikark on the throne. We're subsidizing Jaikark.
Rakkeed has been preaching this crusade against the Terrans, and against Jaikark, whom we control.
Gurgurk has been subsidizing Rakkeed...."
"You haven't any proof of that," Harrington protested.
"My Intelligence Section has," von Schlichten put in.
"We can give sums of money, and dates, and the names of the intermediaries through whom they were paid to Rakkeed.
Eric is absolutely correct in making that statement."
That will put him in the position of the friend of the Company, and most of his dupes will be rounded up and sold as slaves, and King Gurgurk'll pocket the proceeds.
The only question is, will Rakkeed let himself be used that way?
I think Rakkeed's bigger than Gurgurk ever can be.
And more of a threat to the Company.
Everywhere we turn, Rakkeed's at the bottom of whatever happens to be wrong.
This business, for instance; Keeluk's one of Rakkeed's followers."
"Eric, you have Rakkeed on the brain!" Harrington exclaimed impatiently, then moved the threatened piece counterclockwise on the circle where he had placed it.
"He's just a barbarian caravan driver."
Eric Blount moved the piece that had taken Harrington's pawn.
"Your king's in danger," he warned.
"And Hitler was just a paper hanger."
"Rakkeed has no following, except among the rabble." Harrington puffed furiously at his pipe, trying to figure the best protection for his king.
"Here in Konkrook, he's always entertained by one or another of the big ship owning nobles. They probably deprecate his table manners, but they just love his politics.
"The last time Rakkeed was in Konkrook, he was the guest of the Keegarkan Ambassador," von Schlichten stated.
"Intelligence got that from a spy we'd planted among the embassy servants."
"You sure this spy wasn't just romancing?" Harrington asked.
"You get so confounded many wild stories about Rakkeed.
"No mystery to that," von Schlichten said.
"He travels on our ships, in disguise, coolie class, on the geek deck."
"One of the lower deck loading ports could be left unlocked, by carelessness, and he could blunder overboard at about five thousand feet." He watched Harrington make a deceptively pointless looking move.
"Sid, this damn dog business worries me."
"Worries me, too.
I'm fond of that mutt, and God only knows what sort of stuff he's been getting to eat.
And I hate to think of why those geeks stole him, too."
"A mr Keeluk, a clergyman," von Schlichten quoted.
He chain lit another cigarette and stubbed out the old one.
"Maybe the Rev.
Keeluk wanted Stalin for sacramental purposes."
"Ritual killing?" he asked.
"Or sympathetic magic?"
Von Schlichten shrugged.
"Take your choice.
Maybe Rakkeed wanted the dog, to kill before a congregation of his followers, killing us by proxy, or in effigy.
That wasn't the first time he'd made that wish.
At the same time, the average Ulleran probably had complexes and neuroses that would have had Freud talking to himself, and they certainly indulged in practices that would have even stood Krafft Ebing's hair on end.
"It doesn't take any Ulleran psychologist to know that about eighty percent of them hate us poisonously."
"Oh, rubbish!" Harrington blew the exclamation out around his pipe stem with a gush of smoke.
"A few fanatics hate us, and a few merchants who lost money when we replaced this primitive barter economy of theirs, but nine tenths of them have benefited enormously from us, and continue to benefit...."
"And hate us more deeply with each new benefit," Blount added.
"They resent everything we've done for them."
"Yes, this spaceport proposition of King Orgzild of Keegark looks like it, now doesn't it?" Harrington retorted.
"He hates and resents us so much that he's offered us a spaceport at his city...."
"What's it going to cost him?" Blount asked.
"He furnishes the land-sequestered from the estate of some noble he executed for treason-and the labor-all forced.
We furnish the structural steel, the machine equipment, the engineering.
He made a move.
Instantly, Harrington slashed out from the middle of the board with one of his heavy duty, all purpose pieces and took a piece, then moved again.
"Now look whose king's threatened!" he crowed.
"Yes, I see." Blount brought a piece clockwise around the board and took the threatening piece, then moved again.
"I hope you see whose king's threatened, now."
Harrington swore, reached out to move a piece, and then jerked his hand back as though the piece were radioactive.
For a while, he sat puffing his pipe and staring at the board.
"Where's he getting the plutonium?" von Schlichten asked.
"Where can he get it?" Harrington replied.
"That's a hell of a lot of plutonium," Blount said.
"I wonder if he mightn't have some idea of what else plutonium can be used for, beside generating power."
"Oh, God, I hope not!" Harrington exclaimed.
"You're going to get me started seeing burglars under the bed, next...."
"Maybe there are burglars," Blount said, pointing with his cigarette holder to Harrington's threatened king.
"Can't you do something about that, Sid?" Then he turned to von Schlichten.
"Before we get off the subject, how about those letters the Rev.
Keeluk gave to the Quinton girl?"
"All addressed to Skilkans known to be Rakkeed disciples and rabidly anti Terran," von Schlichten replied.
"We radioed the list to Skilk; Colonel Cheng Li, our intelligence man there, teleprinted us back a lot of material on them that looks like the Newgate Calendar.
We turned the letters themselves over to Doc Petrie, the Ulleran philology sharp, who is a pretty fair cryptanalyst.
He couldn't find any indications of cipher, but there was a lot of gossip about Keeluk's friends and parishioners which might have arbitrary code meanings.
Harrington had gotten his king temporarily out of danger, losing a piece doing it.
"Think she'll listen to you?" he asked.
"These Extraterrestrials' Rights Association people are a lot of blasted fanatics, themselves. We're a gang of bloody handed, flint hearted, imperialistic sons of bitches in their book, and anything we say's sure to be a Hitler sized lie."
"Oh, they're not as bad as all that.
I never met the girl before today, but old Mohammed Ferriera's a decent bloke.
For one thing, they put an end to the peonage system on Yggdrasill, and I know what conditions were like, there, before they did."
A calculating look came into Harrington's eye.
He puffed slowly at his pipe and slid a piece from the center toward the sector of the board nearest him.
Blount whistled softly and made a quick re arrangement.
"Carlos, did you say she told you she was going to Skilk, in the near future?" Harrington asked.
Why don't you invite her to make the trip with you?
You can be quite attractive to young ladies, when you try, and she'll be grateful for that rescue this afternoon, which is always a good foundation.
Maybe you can plant a couple of ideas where they'll do the most good.
You know and I know and we all know that there are a lot of things up there at the polar mines that would look like hell to anybody who didn't understand local conditions...."
"I won't guarantee anything, of course...."
He flipped a switch and spoke into the box.
"Governor," a voice replied out of it, "there's a geek procession just landed from a water barge in front, and is coming up the roadway to Company House.
A platoon of Jaikark's Household Guards, with rifles; the Spear of State; a royal litter; about thirty geek nobles, on foot; a gift litter; another platoon of riflemen, if you say the last syllable quick enough."
"That'll be Gurgurk, coming to tell us how unhappy his Sodden and Inebriated Geekship is about that fracas on Seventy second Street," Harrington said.
Take them to the Reception Hall, and hold them there till I signal from the Audience Hall, and then herd them in."
He came back and made a move.
Immediately, Blount took one of his pieces, moved again, took another, and made the third move to which he was entitled.
"I'll mate you in four moves," he predicted.
"Want to play it out, before we go down?"
"Sure; what's time to a geek?
Good Lord!
He didn't look particularly regal, even on that high seat-with his ruddy outdoorsman's face and his ragged gray mustache and his old tweed coat spotted with pipe ashes, he might have been any of the dozen odd country gentleman neighbors of von Schlichten's boyhood in the Argentine.
He took the false palate and tongue clicker, officially designated as an "enunciator, Ulleran" and, colloquially, as a geek speaker, out of his coat pocket and shoved it into his mouth.
Von Schlichten and Blount put in theirs, and Harrington pressed the floor button with his toe.
After a brief interval, the wide doors at the other end of the hall slid open, and the Konkrookan notables, attended by a dozen Company native officers and a guard of Kragan Rifles, entered.
The honor guard advanced in two columns; between them marched an unclad and heavily armed native carrying an ornate spear with a three foot blade upright in front of him with all four hands.
It was the Konkrookan Spear of State; it represented the proxy presence of King Jaikark.
He was considerably past the Ulleran prime of life-seventy or eighty, to judge from the worn appearance of his opal teeth, the color of his skin, and the predominantly reddish tint of his quartz speckles.
An immature Ulleran would be a very light gray, white under the arms, and his quartz specks would run from white to pale yellow.
Four slaves brought up the rear carrying an ornately inlaid box on poles.
When the spear bearer reached the exact middle of the hall, he halted and grounded his regalia weapon with a thump.
Von Schlichten regarded the assemblage sourly through his monocle.
Out of the corner of his eye, von Schlichten watched a couple of Kragan mercenaries with fifty shot machine rifles move unobtrusively to positions from whence they could, if necessary, spray the visitors with bullets without endangering the Terrans.
"Welcome, Gurgurk," Harrington gibbered through his false palate.
"The Company is honored by this visit."
More protocol about welcoming Gorkrink.
Then Gurgurk cleared his throat with a series of barking sounds.
He probably hadn't even heard of the riot.
"Within minutes, Your Excellency," von Schlichten replied gravely. "Their promptness, valor, and efficiency were most exemplary."
Gurgurk spoke at length, expressing himself as delighted, on behalf of his royal master, at hearing such high praise from so distinguished a soldier.
He also managed to convey King Orgzild's pleasure at having obtained the plutonium.
When a geek prince hired out as a laborer for a year on Niflheim, he did so for only one purpose-to learn Terran technologies.
Gurgurk then announced that so enormous a crime against the friends of His Sublime etcetera had not been allowed to go unpunished, signaling behind him with one of his lower hands for the box to be brought forward.
On this, from the box, they placed twenty four newly severed opal grinning heads, in four neat rows.
They had all been freshly scrubbed and polished, but they still smelled like crushed cockroaches.
The three Terrans looked at them gravely.
A double dozen heads was standard payment for an attack in which no Terran had been killed. Ostensibly, they were the heads of the ringleaders: in practice, they were usually lopped from the first two dozen prisoners or over age slaves at hand, without regard for whether the victims had even heard of the crime which they were expiating.
If the Extraterrestrial's Rights Association were really serious about the rights of these geeks, they'd advocate booting out all these native princes and turning the whole planet over to the Company.
That had been the Terran Federation's idea, from the beginning; why else give the Company's chief representative the title of Governor General?
There was another long speech from Gurgurk, with the nobles behind him murmuring antiphonal agreement-standard procedure, for which there was a standard pun, geek chorus-and a speech of response from Sid Harrington.
They walked back from the door, whence they had escorted the delegation, and stood looking down at the saurian heads on the rug. Harrington raised his voice and called to a Kragan sergeant whose chevrons were painted on all four arms.
"See that head, there?" he asked, rolling it over with his toe.
"I killed that geek, myself, with my pistol, while Them and Hid were getting Ferriera into the car.
Miss Quinton killed that one with the bolo; see where she chopped him on the back of the neck?
The cut that took off the head was a little low, and missed it.
I don't like this butchery of worn out slaves and petty thieves any better than anybody else, but this I don't like either. Six months ago, Gurgurk wouldn't have tried to pull anything like this.
Now he's laughing up his non-existent sleeve at us."
"That's what I've been preaching, all along," Eric Blount took up after him.
"These geeks need having the fear of Terra thrown into them."
"Oh, nonsense, Eric; you're just as bad as Carlos, here!" Harrington tut tutted.
"Next, you'll be saying that we ought to depose Jaikark and take control ourselves."
"Well, what's wrong with that, for an idea?" von Schlichten demanded. "Don't you think we could?
Our Kragans could go through that army of Jaikark's like fast neutrons through toilet paper."
"My God!" Harrington exploded.
"Don't let me hear that kind of talk again!
He turned and walked away, out of the Audience Hall, leaving von Schlichten and Blount to watch the removal of the geek heads.
"You know, I went a little too far," von Schlichten confessed.
"Or too fast, rather.
He's got to be conditioned to accept that idea."
"We can't go too slowly, either," Blount replied.
"If we wait for him to change his mind, it'll be the same as waiting for him to retire. And that'll be waiting too long."
Von Schlichten nodded seriously.
"Did you notice the green specks in the hide of that Prince Gorkrink?" he asked.
You know, four of our best native Intelligence operatives have been murdered in Keegark in the last three months, and six more have just vanished there."
"Well, I'm going there in a few days, myself, to talk to Orgzild about this spaceport deal," Blount said.
"I'll have a talk with Hendrik Lemoyne and MacKinnon.
And I'll see what I can find out for myself."
From The Taking Of Jerusalem By Antiochus Epiphanes, To The Death Of Herod The Great.
CHAPTER one.
How The City Jerusalem Was Taken, And The Temple Pillaged [By Antiochus Epiphanes].
As Also Concerning The Actions Of The Maccabees, Matthias And Judas; And Concerning The Death Of Judas.
The king being thereto disposed beforehand, complied with them, and came upon the Jews with a great army, and took their city by force, and slew a great multitude of those that favored Ptolemy, and sent out his soldiers to plunder them without mercy.
He also spoiled the temple, and put a stop to the constant practice of offering a daily sacrifice of expiation for three years and six months.
three.
So he came to the government by this his success, and became the prince of his own people by their own free consent, and then died, leaving the government to Judas, his eldest son.
He also built another altar, and began to offer the sacrifices; and when the city had already received its sacred constitution again, Antiochus died; whose son Antiochus succeeded him in the kingdom, and in his hatred to the Jews also.
five.
So this Antiochus got together fifty thousand footmen, and five thousand horsemen, and fourscore elephants, and marched through Judea into the mountainous parts.
He then took Bethsura, which was a small city; but at a place called Bethzacharis, where the passage was narrow, Judas met him with his army.
Now he that governed the elephant was but a private man; and had he proved to be Antiochus, Eleazar had performed nothing more by this bold stroke than that it might appear he chose to die, when he had the bare hope of thereby doing a glorious action; nay, this disappointment proved an omen to his brother [Judas] how the entire battle would end.
And when a great many of his men were slain, Judas took the rest with him, and fled to the toparchy of Gophna.
So Antiochus went to Jerusalem, and staid there but a few days, for he wanted provisions, and so he went his way.
He left indeed a garrison behind him, such as he thought sufficient to keep the place, but drew the rest of his army off, to take their winter quarters in Syria.
six.
Now, after the king was departed, Judas was not idle; for as many of his own nation came to him, so did he gather those that had escaped out of the battle together, and gave battle again to Antiochus's generals at a village called Adasa; and being too hard for his enemies in the battle, and killing a great number of them, he was at last himself slain also.
Nor was it many days afterward that his brother john had a plot laid against him by Antiochus's party, and was slain by them.
CHAPTER two.
one.
When Jonathan, who was Judas's brother, succeeded him, he behaved himself with great circumspection in other respects, with relation to his own people; and he corroborated his authority by preserving his friendship with the romans.
He also made a league with Antiochus the son.
two.
However, Simon managed the public affairs after a courageous manner, and took Gazara, and Joppa, and Jamnia, which were cities in his neighborhood.
He also got the garrison under, and demolished the citadel.
He also sent his sons with a band of strong men against Antiochus, while he took part of the army himself with him, and fell upon him from another quarter.
He also laid a great many men in ambush in many places of the mountains, and was superior in all his attacks upon them; and when he had been conqueror after so glorious a manner, he was made high priest, and also freed the Jews from the dominion of the Macedonians, after one hundred and seventy years of the empire [of Seleucus].
three.
four.
Now John's case was this: When he considered the courage of his mother, and heard her entreaty, he set about his attacks; but when he saw her beaten, and torn to pieces with the stripes, he grew feeble, and was entirely overcome by his affections.
five.
Moreover, he was the first of the Jews that had money enough, and began to hire foreign auxiliaries also.
six.
He also proceeded as far as Samaria, where is now the city Sebaste, which was built by Herod the king, and encompassed it all round with a wall, and set his sons, Aristobulus and Antigonus, over the siege; who pushed it on so hard, that a famine so far prevailed within the city, that they were forced to eat what never was esteemed food.
So they returned back to Samaria, and shut the multitude again within the wall; and when they had taken the city, they demolished it, and made slaves of its inhabitants.
And as they had still great success in their undertakings, they did not suffer their zeal to cool, but marched with an army as far as Scythopolis, and made an incursion upon it, and laid waste all the country that lay within Mount Carmel.
eight.
But then these successes of john and of his sons made them be envied, and occasioned a sedition in the country; and many there were who got together, and would not be at rest till they brake out into open war, in which war they were beaten.
So john lived the rest of his life very happily, and administered the government after a most extraordinary manner, and this for thirty three entire years together.
He died, leaving five sons behind him.
He was certainly a very happy man, and afforded no occasion to have any complaint made of fortune on his account.
He it was who alone had three of the most desirable things in the world,--the government of his nation, and the high priesthood, and the gift of prophecy.
CHAPTER three.
one.
For after the death of their father, the elder of them, Aristobulus, changed the government into a kingdom, and was the first that put a diadem upon his head, four hundred seventy and one years and three months after our people came down into this country, when they were set free from the Babylonian slavery.
He also put his mother in bonds, for her contesting the government with him; for john had left her to be the governess of public affairs.
He also proceeded to that degree of barbarity as to cause her to be pined to death in prison.
But vengeance circumvented him in the affair of his brother Antigonus, whom he loved, and whom he made his partner in the kingdom; for he slew him by the means of the calumnies which ill men about the palace contrived against him.
three.
five.
And truly any one would be surprised at Judas upon this occasion.
He was of the sect of the Essens, and had never failed or deceived men in his predictions before.
six.
Hereupon Aristobulus repented of the great crime he had been guilty of, and this gave occasion to the increase of his distemper.
O thou most impudent body!
How long shall I myself spend my blood drop by drop? let them take it all at once; and let their ghosts no longer be disappointed by a few parcels of my bowels offered to them." As soon as he had said these words, he presently died, when he had reigned no longer than a year.
CHAPTER four.
What Actions Were Done By Alexander Janneus, Who Reigned Twenty Seven Years.
one.
And now the king's wife loosed the king's brethren, and made Alexander king, who appeared both elder in age, and more moderate in his temper than the rest; who, when he came to the government, slew one of his brethren, as affecting to govern himself; but had the other of them in great esteem, as loving a quiet life, without meddling with public affairs.
Whereupon Theodopus marched against him, and took what belonged to himself as well as the king's baggage, and slew ten thousand of the Jews.
However, Alexander recovered this blow, and turned his force towards the maritime parts, and took Raphia and Gaza, with Anthedon also, which was afterwards called Agrippias by king Herod.
three.
However, when he fought with Obodas, king of the Arabians, who had laid an ambush for him near Golan, and a plot against him, he lost his entire army, which was crowded together in a deep valley, and broken to pieces by the multitude of camels.
And when he had made his escape to Jerusalem, he provoked the multitude, which hated him before, to make an insurrection against him, and this on account of the greatness of the calamity that he was under.
However, he was then too hard for them; and, in the several battles that were fought on both sides, he slew not fewer than fifty thousand of the Jews in the interval of six years.
But this mutability and irregularity of his conduct made them hate him still more.
And when he asked them why they so hated him, and what he should do in order to appease them, they said, by killing himself; for that it would be then all they could do to be reconciled to him, who had done such tragical things to them, even when he was dead.
Now, before they joined battle, the kings made proclamation, and endeavored to draw off each other's soldiers, and make them revolt; while Demetrius hoped to induce Alexander's mercenaries to leave him, and Alexander hoped to induce the Jews that were with Demetrius to leave him.
But since neither the Jews would leave off their rage, nor the Greeks prove unfaithful, they came to an engagement, and to a close fight with their weapons.
In which battle Demetrius was the conqueror, although Alexander's mercenaries showed the greatest exploits, both in soul and body.
Yet did the upshot of this battle prove different from what was expected, as to both of them; for neither did those that invited Demetrius to come to them continue firm to him, though he was conqueror; and six thousand Jews, out of pity to the change of Alexander's condition, when he was fled to the mountains, came over to him.
Yet could not Demetrius bear this turn of affairs; but supposing that Alexander was already become a match for him again, and that all the nation would [at length] run to him, he left the country, and went his way.
However, the rest of the [Jewish] multitude did not lay aside their quarrels with him, when the [foreign] auxiliaries were gone; but they had a perpetual war with Alexander, until he had slain the greatest part of them, and driven the rest into the city Berneselis; and when he had demolished that city, he carried the captives to Jerusalem.
Nay, his rage was grown so extravagant, that his barbarity proceeded to the degree of impiety; for when he had ordered eight hundred to be hung upon crosses in the midst of the city, he had the throats of their wives and children cut before their eyes; and these executions he saw as he was drinking and lying down with his concubines.
Upon which so deep a surprise seized on the people, that eight thousand of his opposers fled away the very next night, out of all Judea, whose flight was only terminated by Alexander's death; so at last, though not till late, and with great difficulty, he, by such actions, procured quiet to his kingdom, and left off fighting any more.
seven.
But still he was not able to exclude Antiochus, for he burnt the towers, and filled up the trenches, and marched on with his army.
eight.
About this time it was that the people of Damascus, out of their hatred to Ptolemy, the son of Menhens, invited Aretas [to take the government], and made him king of Celesyria.
This man also made an expedition against Judea, and beat Alexander in battle; but afterwards retired by mutual agreement.
CHAPTER five.
Alexandra Reigns Nine Years, During Which Time The Pharisees Were The Real Rulers Of The Nation.
Now Alexander left the kingdom to Alexandra his wife, and depended upon it that the Jews would now very readily submit to her, because she had been very averse to such cruelty as he had treated them with, and had opposed his violation of their laws, and had thereby got the good will of the people.
Nor was he mistaken as to his expectations; for this woman kept the dominion, by the opinion that the people had of her piety; for she chiefly studied the ancient customs of her country, and cast those men out of the government that offended against their holy laws.
But she retained the younger, Aristobulus, with her as a private person, by reason of the warmth of his temper.
And now the Pharisees joined themselves to her, to assist her in the government.
She was a sagacious woman in the management of great affairs, and intent always upon gathering soldiers together; so that she increased the army the one half, and procured a great body of foreign troops, till her own nation became not only very powerful at home, but terrible also to foreign potentates, while she governed other people, and the Pharisees governed her.
three.
Now she was so superstitious as to comply with their desires, and accordingly they slew whom they pleased themselves.
But when Alexandra sent out her army to Damascus, under pretense that Ptolemy was always oppressing that city, she got possession of it; nor did it make any considerable resistance.
In the mean time, Alexandra fell sick, and Aristobulus, her younger son, took hold of this opportunity, with his domestics, of which he had a great many, who were all of them his friends, on account of the warmth of their youth, and got possession of all the fortresses.
It was, as I have already said, of old called the Citadel; but afterwards got the name of Antonia, when Antony was [lord of the East], just as the other cities, Sebaste and Agrippias, had their names changed, and these given them from Sebastus and Agrippa.
But Alexandra died before she could punish Aristobulus for his disinheriting his brother, after she had reigned nine years.
CHAPTER six.
At Last Pompey Is Made The Arbitrator Of The Dispute Between The Brothers.
one.
three.
However, neither was Aristobulus wanting to himself in this case, as relying on the bribes that Scaurus had received: he was also there himself, and adorned himself after a manner the most agreeable to royalty that he was able.
five.
But when he had passed by Pella and Scythopolis, and was come to Corea, where you enter into the country of Judea, when you go up to it through the Mediterranean parts, he heard that Aristobulus was fled to Alexandrium, which is a strong hold fortified with the utmost magnificence, and situated upon a high mountain; and he sent to him, and commanded him to come down.
Now his inclination was to try his fortune in a battle, since he was called in such an imperious manner, rather than to comply with that call.
And when his brother invited him again [to plead his cause], he came down and spake about the justice of it, and then went away without any hinderance from Pompey; so he was between hope and fear.
And when he came down, it was to prevail with Pompey to allow him the government entirely; and when he went up to the citadel, it was that he might not appear to debase himself too low.
However, Pompey commanded him to give up his fortified places, and forced him to write to every one of their governors to yield them up; they having had this charge given them, to obey no letters but what were of his own hand writing.
six.
So Pompey pitched his camp in that place one night, and then hasted away the next morning to Jerusalem; but Aristobulus was so affrighted at his approach, that he came and met him by way of supplication.
He also promised him money, and that he would deliver up both himself and the city into his disposal, and thereby mitigated the anger of Pompey.
Until Prince Andrew settled in Bogucharovo its owners had always been absentees, and its peasants were of quite a different character from those of Bald Hills.
They differed from them in speech, dress, and disposition.
They were called steppe peasants.
The old prince used to approve of them for their endurance at work when they came to Bald Hills to help with the harvest or to dig ponds, and ditches, but he disliked them for their boorishness.
Rumors of the war with Bonaparte and his invasion were connected in their minds with the same sort of vague notions of Antichrist, the end of the world, and "pure freedom."
In the vicinity of Bogucharovo were large villages belonging to the crown or to owners whose serfs paid quitrent and could work where they pleased.
One instance, which had occurred some twenty years before, was a movement among the peasants to emigrate to some unknown "warm rivers." Hundreds of peasants, among them the Bogucharovo folk, suddenly began selling their cattle and moving in whole families toward the southeast.
Now in eighteen twelve, to anyone living in close touch with these people it was apparent that these undercurrents were acting strongly and nearing an eruption.
He learned from domestic serfs loyal to him that the peasant Karp, who possessed great influence in the village commune and had recently been away driving a government transport, had returned with news that the Cossacks were destroying deserted villages, but that the French did not harm them.
Alpatych also knew that on the previous day another peasant had even brought from the village of Visloukhovo, which was occupied by the French, a proclamation by a French general that no harm would be done to the inhabitants, and if they remained they would be paid for anything taken from them.
As proof of this the peasant had brought from Visloukhovo a hundred rubles in notes (he did not know that they were false) paid to him in advance for hay.
Yet there was no time to waste.
On the fifteenth, the day of the old prince's death, the Marshal had insisted on Princess Mary's leaving at once, as it was becoming dangerous.
He had told her that after the sixteenth he could not be responsible for what might happen.
On the evening of the day the old prince died the Marshal went away, promising to return next day for the funeral.
But this he was unable to do, for he received tidings that the French had unexpectedly advanced, and had barely time to remove his own family and valuables from his estate.
Soon after the migration to the "warm rivers," in which he had taken part like the rest, Dron was made village Elder and overseer of Bogucharovo, and had since filled that post irreproachably for twenty three years.
Though the peasants paid quitrent, Alpatych thought no difficulty would be made about complying with this order, for there were two hundred and thirty households at work in Bogucharovo and the peasants were well to do.
Dron replied that the horses of these peasants were away carting.
Alpatych named others, but they too, according to Dron, had no horses available: some horses were carting for the government, others were too weak, and others had died for want of fodder.
It seemed that no horses could be had even for the carriages, much less for the carting.
Alpatych looked intently at Dron and frowned.
He noticed this hesitation in Dron's look and therefore frowned and moved closer up to him.
"Now just listen, Dronushka," said he.
His excellency Prince Andrew himself gave me orders to move all the people away and not leave them with the enemy, and there is an order from the Tsar about it too.
Anyone who stays is a traitor to the Tsar.
"Eh, Dron, drop it!" Alpatych repeated, withdrawing his hand from his bosom and solemnly pointing to the floor at Dron's feet.
"You drop this nonsense and tell the people to get ready to leave their homes and go to Moscow and to get carts ready for tomorrow morning for the princess' things.
And don't go to any meeting yourself, do you hear?"
Take the keys from me and discharge me, for Christ's sake!"
"Stop that!" cried Alpatych sternly.
What are you thinking of, eh?"
"What am I to do with the people?" said Dron.
"They're quite beside themselves; I have already told them..."
"'Told them,' I dare say!" said Alpatych.
"Are they drinking?" he asked abruptly.
"Quite beside themselves, Yakov Alpatych; they've fetched another barrel."
"Well, then, listen!
I'll go to the police officer, and you tell them so, and that they must stop this and the carts must be got ready."
"I understand."
He had managed people for a long time and knew that the chief way to make them obey is to show no suspicion that they can possibly disobey.
And so it was, for when evening came no carts had been provided.
Pierre stepped out of his carriage and, passing the toiling militiamen, ascended the knoll from which, according to the doctor, the battlefield could be seen.
It was about eleven o'clock.
From above on the left, bisecting that amphitheater, wound the Smolensk highroad, passing through a village with a white church some five hundred paces in front of the knoll and below it.
This was Borodino.
Below the village the road crossed the river by a bridge and, winding down and up, rose higher and higher to the village of Valuevo visible about four miles away, where Napoleon was then stationed.
Here and there over the whole of that blue expanse, to right and left of the forest and the road, smoking campfires could be seen and indefinite masses of troops-ours and the enemy's.
The ground to the right-along the course of the Kolocha and Moskva rivers-was broken and hilly.
Between the hollows the villages of Bezubova and Zakharino showed in the distance.
On the left the ground was more level; there were fields of grain, and the smoking ruins of Semenovsk, which had been burned down, could be seen.
All that Pierre saw was so indefinite that neither the left nor the right side of the field fully satisfied his expectations.
Nowhere could he see the battlefield he had expected to find, but only fields, meadows, troops, woods, the smoke of campfires, villages, mounds, and streams; and try as he would he could descry no military "position" in this place which teemed with life, nor could he even distinguish our troops from the enemy's.
"I must ask someone who knows," he thought, and addressed an officer who was looking with curiosity at his huge unmilitary figure.
"May I ask you," said Pierre, "what village that is in front?"
"Borodino," the other corrected him.
The officer, evidently glad of an opportunity for a talk, moved up to Pierre.
"Are those our men there?" Pierre inquired.
"Yes, and there, further on, are the French," said the officer.
"There they are, there... you can see them."
"Where?
Where?" asked Pierre.
"One can see them with the naked eye...
Why, there!"
"Ah, those are the French!
And over there?..." Pierre pointed to a knoll on the left, near which some troops could be seen.
"That's his again," said the officer. (It was the Shevardino Redoubt.) "It was ours yesterday, but now it is his."
"Our position?" replied the officer with a smile of satisfaction.
"I can tell you quite clearly, because I constructed nearly all our entrenchments.
"That's where one crosses the Kolocha.
That's our center.
Our right flank is over there"--he pointed sharply to the right, far away in the broken ground-"That's where the Moskva River is, and we have thrown up three redoubts there, very strong ones.
The left flank..." here the officer paused.
"Well, you see, that's difficult to explain....
Yesterday our left flank was there at Shevardino, you see, where the oak is, but now we have withdrawn our left wing-now it is over there, do you see that village and the smoke?
That's Semenovsk, yes, there," he pointed to Raevski's knoll.
"But the battle will hardly be there.
His having moved his troops there is only a ruse; he will probably pass round to the right of the Moskva.
An elderly sergeant who had approached the officer while he was giving these explanations had waited in silence for him to finish speaking, but at this point, evidently not liking the officer's remark, interrupted him.
"Gabions must be sent for," said he sternly.
"Well, send number three company again," the officer replied hurriedly.
"And you, are you one of the doctors?"
There they are...
The Iberian Mother of God!" someone cried.
"The Smolensk Mother of God," another corrected him.
Following the battalion that marched along the dusty road came priests in their vestments-one little old man in a hood with attendants and singers.
At the summit of the hill they stopped with the icon; the men who had been holding it up by the linen bands attached to it were relieved by others, the chanters relit their censers, and service began.
The singing did not sound loud under the open sky.
Behind the priest and a chanter stood the notabilities on a spot reserved for them.
A bald general with a saint George's Cross on his neck stood just behind the priest's back, and without crossing himself (he was evidently a German) patiently awaited the end of the service, which he considered it necessary to hear to the end, probably to arouse the patriotism of the Russian people.
The crowd round the icon suddenly parted and pressed against Pierre.
Someone, a very important personage judging by the haste with which way was made for him, was approaching the icon.
Pierre recognized him at once by his peculiar figure, which distinguished him from everybody else.
With a long overcoat on his exceedingly stout, round shouldered body, with uncovered white head and puffy face showing the white ball of the eye he had lost, Kutuzov walked with plunging, swaying gait into the crowd and stopped behind the priest.
He crossed himself with an accustomed movement, bent till he touched the ground with his hand, and bowed his white head with a deep sigh.
Behind Kutuzov was Bennigsen and the suite.
Despite the presence of the commander in chief, who attracted the attention of all the superior officers, the militiamen and soldiers continued their prayers without looking at him.
His white head twitched with the effort.
In a few days these arrived and were speedily set to work, and immense masses of stone were hurled at the walls.
Walter continued to act as the countess's especial squire.
The effect of the new machines was speedily visible.
The wily bishop set to work, and the consequences were soon visible.
Open grumbling broke forth at the hardships which were endured, and at the prospect of the wholesale slaughter which would attend a storm when all hope of a successful resistance was at an end.
I point out to them that contrary winds have been blowing, and that at any moment he may arrive; but they will not hear me.
The breaches were open, and the enemy might pour in at any time and put all to the sword.
"Come with me, Walter," he said, "we must fain persuade the countess.
Such resistance as we can offer will but inflame them to fury, and all the horrors of a sack will be inflicted upon the inhabitants. There she is, poor lady, on the turret, gazing, as usual, seaward."
The English fleet are coming!"
"Run up, Walter," Sir john exclaimed, "maybe the countess is distraught with her sorrows."
Walter dashed up to the turret, and looking seaward beheld rising over the horizon a number of masts.
Sir john," he shouted, "we are saved, the English fleet is in sight."
Many others heard the shout, and the tidings ran like lightning through the town.
In wild excitement the people ran to the battlements and roofs, and with cheering and clapping of hands hailed the appearance of the still far distant fleet.
I had given you up for lost.
And now, sir, will you follow me?
In a few minutes the knights were armed and mounted.
Three hundred knights and esquires were to take part in the sortie, they were to be followed by a strong body of men at arms.
Sir Walter himself and his mounted companions dashed forward to the nearer tents of the French camps, cut down all who opposed them, and setting fire to the huts retired towards the city.
Turning their horses, therefore, and laying their lances in rest, they charged the pursuing French.
The knights wheeled and presented a firm face to the enemy, covering the entrance of their followers into the gate.
The arrival of the reinforcements and the proof of skill and vigour given by the English leader, together with the terror caused by the terrible effect of the English arrows, shook the resolution of Don Louis and his troops.
Accordingly the French laid siege to and captured many small towns and castles.
On his way the Spaniard captured the small fortress of Conquet and put the garrison to the sword.
He now sent back to Charles of Blois the greater part of the French troops who accompanied him, and embarked with the Genoese and Spanish, eight thousand in number, and sailed to Quimperle, a rich and populous town in Lower Brittany.
Anchoring in the River Leita, he disembarked his troops, and leaving a guard to protect the vessels marched to the interior, plundering and burning, and from time to time despatching his booty to swell the immense mass which he had brought in his ships from the sack of Guerande.
The English columns marched at a short distance apart so as to be able to give each other assistance in case of attack.
The English fought desperately, but the odds of seven to one were too great, and they would have been overpowered had not the other two divisions arrived on the spot and fallen upon the enemy's flanks. After a severe and prolonged struggle the Genoese and Spaniards were completely routed.
Most of them were killed in the attempt, but a few escaped and made their way to Hennebon.
The king was not yet ready, but at the beginning of August he despatched a force under the command of the Earl of Northampton and Robert of Artois.
Hennebon was, however, much better prepared than at first for resistance.
The walls had been repaired, provisions and military stores laid up, and machines constructed.
The garrison was very much larger, and was commanded by one of the most gallant knights of the age, and the citizens beheld undaunted the approach of the great French army.
So furious did the Spanish prince become that he took a step unprecedented in those days of chivalry.
"These English," he said, "have pursued, discomforted, and wounded me, and have killed the nephew whom I loved so well, and as I have none other mode of vengeance I will cut off their heads before their companions who lie within those walls."
At first they could not believe that he was in earnest, for such a proceeding was so utterly opposed to the spirit of the times that it seemed impossible to them.
Finding that he was in earnest they warned him of the eternal stain which such a deed would bring upon his name.
The news, therefore, of what was intended speedily reached the garrison, whom it filled with indignation and horror.
A council was immediately called, and Sir Walter Manny proposed a plan, which was instantly adopted.
The latter took post at once along the edge of the ditches.
Here he was joined by the archers, who with bent bows prepared to resist the advance of the French.
In the meantime Sir Walter Manny, with one hundred men at arms and five hundred horse archers, issued by a sally port on the other side of the town, and with all speed rode round to the rear of the French camp.
Accordingly, next morning he drew off his army and marched to Carhaix.
During the darkness a tremendous storm burst upon them and the combatants separated.
The Spaniards captured four small ships which had been separated in the storm from their consorts, but did not succeed in regaining the coast of Brittany, being driven south by the storm as far as Spain.
The walls, however, were so strong that there seemed little prospect of success attending such an attempt, and a plan was therefore determined upon by which the enemy might be thrown off their guard.
The assault commenced at three points in the early morning and was continued all day.
No great vigour, however, was shown in these attempts which were repulsed at all points.
The assailants, however, did not disarm, but after a sufficient time had elapsed to allow the garrison to lay aside their armour two strong parties attacked the principal gates of the town, while Sir Walter Manny and the Earl of Oxford moved round to the opposite side with ladders for an escalade. The plan was successful.
The garrison, snatching up their arms, hurried to repel their attack upon the gates, every man hastening in that direction.
Sir Walter Manny with his party were therefore enabled to mount the walls unobserved and make their way into the town; here they fell upon the defenders in the rear, and the sudden onslaught spread confusion and terror among them.
Robert of Artois, with the Earl of Stafford, was left with a garrison to hold the town.
"It is possible," he said to Walter, "that we may have fighting here.
Sir John's previsions were speedily verified.
The little garrison prepared for the defence.
"The outlook is bad, Walter," Sir john Powis said.
CHAPTER ten: A PLACE OF REFUGE
Sir john Powis and his party repulsed over and over again the efforts of the assailants against that part of the wall entrusted to them, but at other points the French gained a footing, and swarming up rushed along the walls, slaying all whom they encountered.
"All is lost," Sir john exclaimed; "let us fall back to the castle and die fighting there."
The bucket hung at the windlass.
With great efforts they managed to rid themselves of their armour, and then held on with ease to the rope.
Putting their feet in this, they were able to stand with their heads above the surface without difficulty.
"This is a nice fix," Ralph exclaimed.
"But we are no better off if they don't," Ralph remarked, "for we must die here if we are not hauled out.
Ten minutes later they saw two heads appear above, and instantly withdrew their feet from the bucket and made a stroke to the side, which was but four feet distant, being careful as they did that no motion was imparted to the rope.
Then though it was too dark to see anything, they heard the bucket lifted from the water.
A minute later it fell back again with a splash, then all was quiet.
And now we must think about climbing up."
If we tie them four feet apart we can go up step by step; I don't see much difficulty about that."
The rope was cut up and unravelled, and the strands cut into pieces about two feet long.
This was done by tying a knot close to one end of a piece of the strand, then sufficient was left to form the loop, and the remainder was wound round the rope in such a way that the weight only served to tighten its hold.
"Shall we begin at once?" Ralph said, when success was achieved.
"Do you think we have sufficient bits of rope," Ralph asked.
In a short time the fading brightness of the circle of light far overhead told them that twilight had commenced, and shortly afterwards they attached the first strand to the rope some three feet above the water.
"Now," Walter said, "I will go first, at any rate for a time.
They now set to work, and step by step mounted the rope.
They found the work less arduous than they had expected.
Descending a step or two he held parley with Ralph.
"I am ready to try it, Master Walter," Ralph replied, "for I ache from head to foot with holding on to this rope.
In another minute both stood in the courtyard.
It was a retired spot, and none were passing.
Going along the passage they issued into the main yard.
He also picked up a sword for Ralph-his own still hung in its sheath-and then he joined his companion, and the two putting on the steel caps and cloaks walked quietly to the gate.
At first Walter and his friend feared that their retreat was cut off for the night, but several other people presently arrived, and the officer on guard said, coming out, "You must wait a while; the last batch have only just gone, and I cannot keep opening and closing the gate; in half an hour I will let you out."
Before that time elapsed some fifty or sixty people, anxious to return to their villages, gathered round the gate.
"Best lay aside your steel cap, Ralph, before we join them," Walter said.
"In the dim light of that lamp none will notice that we have head gear, but if it were to glint upon the steel cap the officer might take us for deserters and question us as to who we are."
Presently the officer came out from the guard room again.
There was a forward movement of the little crowd, and Walter and Ralph closed in to their midst.
The gates were opened, and without any question the villagers passed out, and the gates were shut instantly behind them.
They were, too, dog tired, and were asleep a few minutes after they lay down.
"I feel ravenous too, Ralph, but there is no help for it.
Draw your belt an inch or two tighter, it will help to keep out the wolf."
It was well that it was no further, for both were so exhausted from want of food that they could with difficulty drag their legs along.
Sir Walter had just risen, and was delighted at the sight of his esquire.
"I had given you up for dead," he exclaimed.
"By what miracle could you have escaped?
"I have with me only my faithful follower Ralph Smith, who is below; but, Sir Walter, for mercy's sake order that some food be placed before us, or we shall have escaped from the French only to die of hunger here. We have tasted nought since the attack on Vannes began.
Have any beside us escaped?"
In a few minutes a cold capon, several manchets of bread, and a stoop of wine were placed before Walter, while Ralph's wants were attended to below.
All present joined in expressions of praise at the lad's coolness and presence of mind.
In the meantime Edward opened negotiations with many of the Breton lords, who, seeing that such powerful aid had arrived for the cause of the Countess of Montford, were easily persuaded to change sides.
Uniting their forces they advanced towards the town.
Before the force of the French, forty thousand strong, the Earl of Norfolk had fallen back and rejoined the king, but even after this junction the French forces exceeded those of Edward fourfold.
It was agreed that the truce should embrace not only the sovereigns, but all the adherents of each of them.
The time now for a while passed very quietly.
Walter learned to bear himself well on horseback and to tilt in the ring.
He was already a skilful swordsman, but he spared no pains to improve himself with his weapons.
CHAPTER eight: THE CRAB SPIDER
What will posterity do in face of the rising tide of a barbarous vocabulary which, under the pretence of progress, stifles real knowledge? It will relegate the whole business to the quagmire of oblivion.
Like the Crab, the Thomisus walks sideways; she also has forelegs stronger than her hind legs.
The only thing wanting to complete the resemblance is the front pair of stone gauntlets, raised in the attitude of self defence.
The Spider with the Crab like figure does not know how to manufacture nets for catching game.
Without springs or snares, she lies in ambush, among the flowers, and awaits the arrival of the quarry, which she kills by administering a scientific stab in the neck.
The Thomisus, in particular, the subject of this chapter, is passionately addicted to the pursuit of the Domestic Bee.
The Bee appears, seeking no quarrel, intent upon plunder.
She tests the flowers with her tongue; she selects a spot that will yield a good return.
While she is filling her baskets and distending her crop, the Thomisus, that bandit lurking under cover of the flowers, issues from her hiding place, creeps round behind the bustling insect, steals up close and, with a sudden rush, nabs her in the nape of the neck.
In vain, the Bee protests and darts her sting at random; the assailant does not let go.
Besides, the bite in the neck is paralysing, because the cervical nerve centres are affected.
The murderess now sucks the victim's blood at her ease and, when she has done, scornfully flings the drained corpse aside.
She hides herself once more, ready to bleed a second gleaner should the occasion offer.
These hateful discords amid the general harmony perplex the thinker, all the more as we shall see the cruel vampire become a model of devotion where her family is concerned.
The comparison is not inappropriate as regards many Spiders who tie their prey with a thread to subdue it and consume it at their ease; but it just happens that the Thomisus is at variance with her label.
She does not fasten her Bee, who, dying suddenly of a bite in the neck, offers no resistance to her consumer.
The fact that the Bee huntress carries a heavy paunch is no reason to refer to this as a distinctive characteristic.
Nearly all Spiders have a voluminous belly, a silk warehouse where, in some cases, the rigging of the net, in others, the swan's down of the nest is manufactured.
When all is said, the scientific term is composed of a misconception and a worthless epithet.
How difficult it is to name animals rationally!
As the technical name tells the reader nothing, how shall he be informed? I see but one means, which is to invite him to the May festivals, in the waste lands of the South.
This glorious efflorescence goes on for five or six weeks.
Their persecutrix knows of this affluence.
She posts herself in her watch house, under the rosy screen of a petal.
The thug has struck her blow; she is draining the blood of the departed.
After all, this cutter of Bees' throats is a pretty, a very pretty creature, despite her unwieldy paunch fashioned like a squat pyramid and embossed on the base, on either side, with a pimple shaped like a camel's hump.
The skin, more pleasing to the eye than any satin, is milk white in some, in others lemon yellow.
There are fine ladies among them who adorn their legs with a number of pink bracelets and their back with carmine arabesques.
A narrow pale green ribbon sometimes edges the right and left of the breast.
Novice fingers, which shrink from touching any other Spider, allow themselves to be enticed by these attractions; they do not fear to handle the beauteous Thomisus, so gentle in appearance.
Well, what can this gem among Spiders do?
In the first place, she makes a nest worthy of its architect.
Herself a lover of high places, the Thomisus selects as the site of her nest one of the upper twigs of the rock rose, her regular hunting ground, a twig withered by the heat and possessing a few dead leaves, which curl into a little cottage.
When the eggs are laid, the mouth of the receptacle is hermetically closed with a lid of the same white silk.
Lastly, a few threads, stretched like a thin curtain, form a canopy above the nest and, with the curved tips of the leaves, frame a sort of alcove wherein the mother takes up her abode.
Greatly emaciated by the laying of her eggs and by her expenditure of silk, she lives only for the protection of her nest.
Should some vagrant pass near by, she hurries from her watch tower, lifts a limb and puts the intruder to flight.
If I tease her with a straw, she parries with big gestures, like those of a prize fighter.
She uses her fists against my weapon.
When I propose to dislodge her in view of certain experiments, I find some difficulty in doing so.
She clings to the silken floor, she frustrates my attacks, which I am bound to moderate lest I should injure her.
She is no sooner attracted outside than she stubbornly returns to her post.
Even so does the Narbonne Lycosa struggle when we try to take away her pill.
Those hallowed words, maternal love, were out of place here: it is an impetuous, an almost mechanical impulse, wherein real affection plays no part whatever.
When moved from her nest to another of the same kind, she settles upon it and never stirs from it, even though the different arrangement of the leafy fence be such as to warn her that she is not really at home.
Provided that she have satin under her feet, she does not notice her mistake; she watches over another's nest with the same vigilance which she might show in watching over her own.
The Lycosa surpasses her in maternal blindness.
She fastens to her spinnerets and dangles, by way of a bag of eggs, a ball of cork polished with my file, a paper pellet, a little ball of thread.
In order to discover if the Thomisus is capable of a similar error, I gathered some broken pieces of silk worm's cocoon into a closed cone, turning the fragments so as to bring the smoother and more delicate inner surface outside.
My attempt was unsuccessful.
When removed from her home and placed on the artificial wallet, the mother Thomisus obstinately refused to settle there.
Perhaps so.
Let us not be too extravagant with our praise, however; the imitation of the bag was a very clumsy one.
The work of laying is finished by the end of May, after which, lying flat on the ceiling of her nest, the mother never leaves her guard room, either by night or day.
Seeing her look so thin and wrinkled, I imagine that I can please her by bringing her a provision of Bees, as I was wont to do.
The Bee, hitherto her favourite dish, tempts her no longer.
She lives exclusively upon maternal devotion, a commendable but unsubstantial fare.
What is the withered thing waiting for, before expiring?
She is waiting for her children to emerge; the dying creature is still of use to them.
There is none to come to their assistance; and they have not the strength to free themselves unaided.
The balloon has to split automatically and to scatter the youngsters and their flossy mattress all mixed up together.
The Thomisus' wallet, sheathed in leaves over the greater part of its surface, never bursts; nor does the lid rise, so carefully is it sealed down.
Who contrived this window, which was not there at first?
The fabric is too thick and tough to have yielded to the twitches of the feeble little prisoners.
She persists in living for five or six weeks, despite her shattered health, so as to give a last helping hand and open the door for her family.
After performing this duty, she gently lets herself die, hugging her nest and turning into a shrivelled relic.
When July comes, the little ones emerge.
All of them pass through the wire gauze and form a group on the summit of the brushwood, where they swiftly weave a spacious lounge of criss cross threads.
Here they remain, pretty quietly, for a day or two; then foot bridges begin to be flung from one object to the next.
I put the bunch laden with beasties on a small table, in the shade, before the open window.
There are hesitations, retrogressions, perpendicular falls at the end of a thread, ascents that bring the hanging Spider up again. In short much ado for a poor result.
As matters continue to drag, it occurs to me, at eleven o'clock, to take the bundle of brushwood swarming with the little Spiders, all eager to be off, and place it on the window sill, in the glare of the sun
After a few minutes of heat and light, the scene assumes a very different aspect. The emigrants run to the top of the twigs, bustle about actively.
I do not see the ropes manufactured and sent floating at the mercy of the air; but I guess their presence.
Three or four Spiders start at a time, each going her own way in directions independent of her neighbours'.
All are moving upwards, all are climbing some support, as can be perceived by the nimble motion of their legs.
Moreover, the road is visible behind the climber, it is of double thickness, thanks to an added thread.
Then, at a certain height, individual movement ceases.
The tiny animal soars in space and shines, lit up by the sun
Softly it sways, then suddenly takes flight.
What has happened?
There is a slight breeze outside.
The floating cable has snapped and the creature has gone off, borne on its parachute.
I see it drifting away, showing, like a spot of light, against the dark foliage of the near cypresses, some forty feet distant.
Others follow, some higher, some lower, hither and thither.
But the throng has finished its preparations; the hour has come to disperse in swarms.
The comparison is correct down to the dazzling light itself.
What a glorious send off!
What an entrance into the world!
Sooner or later, nearer or farther, the fall comes.
The Crested Lark crumbles the mule droppings in the road and thus picks up his food, the oaten grain which he would never find by soaring in the sky, his throat swollen with song.
We have to descend; the stomach's inexorable claims demand it.
Gravity, tempered by the parachute, is kind to her.
The rest of her story escapes me.
What infinitely tiny Midges does she capture before possessing the strength to stab her Bee?
CHAPTER fifteen: THE LABYRINTH SPIDER
Some of them are celebrities of long-standing renown, who are mentioned in all the books.
The Lycosa surrounds the mouth of her shaft with a simple parapet, a mere collection of tiny pebbles, sticks and silk; the others fix a movable door to theirs, a round shutter with a hinge, a groove and a set of bolts.
If the aggressor persist and seek to raise the trap door, the recluse pushes the bolt, that is to say, plants her claws into certain holes on the opposite side to the hinge, props herself against the wall and holds the door firmly.
Another, the Argyroneta, or Water Spider, builds herself an elegant silken diving bell, in which she stores air.
Thus supplied with the wherewithal to breathe, she awaits the coming of the game and keeps herself cool meanwhile.
At times of scorching heat, hers must be a regular sybaritic abode, such as eccentric man has sometimes ventured to build under water, with mighty blocks of stone and marble.
If I possessed documents derived from personal observation, I should like to speak of these ingenious workers; I would gladly add a few unpublished facts to their life history.
But I must abandon the idea.
The Water Spider is not found in my district.
Opportunity, as we know, is fleeting.
The opportunity fled and has never returned.
Let us make up for it with trivial things of frequent encounter, a condition favourable to consecutive study.
What is common is not necessarily unimportant.
Give it our sustained attention and we shall discover in it merits which our former ignorance prevented us from seeing.
When patiently entreated, the least of creatures adds its note to the harmonies of life.
In the open country and especially in hilly places laid bare by the wood man's axe, the favourite sites are tufts of bracken, rock rose, lavender, everlasting and rosemary cropped close by the teeth of the flocks.
This is where I resort, as the isolation and kindliness of the supports lend themselves to proceedings which might not be tolerated by the unfriendly hedge.
Several times a week, in July, I go to study my Spiders on the spot, at an early hour, before the sun beats fiercely on one's neck.
They lend me their good eyes and supple limbs.
The expedition promises to be fruitful.
We soon discover high silk buildings, betrayed at a distance by the glittering threads which the dawn has converted into dewy rosaries.
A splendid spectacle indeed is that of our Spider's labyrinth, heavy with the tears of the night and lit up by the first rays of the sun
Accompanied as it is by the Thrushes' symphony, this alone is worth getting up for.
Half an hour's heat; and the magic jewels disappear with the dew.
Now is the moment to inspect the webs.
Here is one spreading its sheet over a large cluster of rock roses; it is the size of a handkerchief.
There is not a twig but supplies a contact point.
Entwined on every side, surrounded and surmounted, the bush disappears from view, veiled in white muslin.
The central portion is a cone shaped gulf, a funnel whose neck, narrowing by degrees, dives perpendicularly into the leafy thicket to a depth of eight or nine inches.
At the entrance to the tube, in the gloom of that murderous alley, sits the Spider, who looks at us and betrays no great excitement at our presence.
She is grey, modestly adorned on the thorax with two black ribbons and on the abdomen with two stripes in which white specks alternate with brown.
At the tip of the belly, two small, mobile appendages form a sort of tail, a rather curious feature in a Spider.
The crater shaped web is not of the same structure throughout.
The Spider never ceases working at her carpet, which represents her investigation platform.
Every night she goes to it, walks over it, inspecting her snares, extending her domain and increasing it with new threads.
The work is done with the silk constantly hanging from the spinnerets and constantly extracted as the animal moves about.
The neck of the funnel, being more often walked upon than the rest of the dwelling, is therefore provided with a thicker upholstery.
Beyond it are the slopes of the crater, which are also much frequented regions.
This part has been strengthened by the nightly rounds of inspection.
Lastly come the less visited expanses, which consequently have a thinner carpet.
At the bottom of the passage dipping into the brushwood, we might expect to find a secret cabin, a wadded cell where the Spider would take refuge in her hours of leisure.
It is well to know this arrangement of the home, if you wish to capture the Spider without hurting her.
When attacked from the front, the fugitive runs down and slips through the postern gate at the bottom.
To look for her by rummaging in the brushwood often leads to nothing, so swift is her flight; besides, a blind search entails a great risk of maiming her.
Let us eschew violence, which is but seldom successful, and resort to craft.
If practicable, squeeze the bottom of the tuft, containing the neck of the funnel, with both hands.
Feeling its retreat cut off, it readily darts into the paper bag held out to it; if necessary, it can be stimulated with a bit of straw.
In this way, I fill my cages with subjects that have not been demoralized by contusions.
The surface of the crater is not exactly a snare.
It is just possible for the casual pedestrian to catch his legs in the silky carpets; but giddy pates who come here for a walk must be very rare.
What is wanted is a trap capable of securing the game that hops or flies.
The Epeira has her treacherous limed net; the Spider of the bushes has her no less treacherous labyrinth.
Look above the web.
What a forest of ropes!
There are long ropes and short ropes, upright and slanting, straight and bent, taut and slack, all criss cross and a tangle, to the height of three feet or so in inextricable disorder.
We have here nothing similar to the lime threads used by the Garden Spiders.
The threads are not sticky; they act only by their confused multitude.
Throw a small Locust into the rigging.
Unable to obtain a steady foothold on that shaky support, he flounders about; and the more he struggles the more he entangles his shackles.
The Spider, spying on the threshold of her abyss, lets him have his way.
She does not run up the shrouds of the mast work to seize the desperate prisoner; she waits until his bonds of threads, twisted backwards and forwards, make him fall on the web.
He falls; the other comes and flings herself upon her prostrate prey.
The attack is not without danger.
The Locust is demoralized rather than tied up; it is merely bits of broken thread that he is trailing from his legs. The bold assailant does not mind.
The bite is usually given at the lower end of a haunch: not that this place is more vulnerable than any other thin skinned part, but probably because it has a better flavour.
The different webs which I inspect to study the food in the larder show me, among other joints, various Flies and small Butterflies and carcasses of almost untouched Locusts, all deprived of their hind legs, or at least of one.
Locusts' legs often dangle, emptied of their succulent contents, on the edges of the web, from the meat hooks of the butcher's shop.
In my urchin days, days free from prejudices in regard to what one ate, I, like many others, was able to appreciate that dainty.
It is the equivalent, on a very small scale, of the larger legs of the Crayfish.
The rigging builder, therefore, to whom we have just thrown a Locust attacks the prey at the lower end of a thigh.
The bite is a lingering one: once the Spider has planted her fangs, she does not let go.
She drinks, she sips, she sucks.
When this first point is drained, she passes on to others, to the second haunch in particular, until the prey becomes an empty hulk without losing its outline.
The Labyrinth Spider knows nothing of the diversions of the table; she flings the drained remnants out of her web, without chewing them.
Although it lasts long, the meal is eaten in perfect safety.
From the first bite, the Locust becomes a lifeless thing; the Spider's poison has settled him.
It is hardly more than a shapeless scaffolding, run up anyhow.
And yet, like the others, the builder of this slovenly edifice must have her own principles of beauty and accuracy.
As it is, the prettily latticed mouth of the crater makes us suspect this; the nest, the mother's usual masterpiece, will prove it to the full.
When laying time is at hand, the Spider changes her residence; she abandons her web in excellent condition; she does not return to it.
Whoso will can take possession of the house.
But where?
Mornings are spent in fruitless searches.
In vain I ransack the bushes that carry the webs: I never find aught that realizes my hopes.
I learn the secret at last.
I chance upon a web which, though deserted, is not yet dilapidated, proving that it has been but lately quitted. Instead of hunting in the brushwood whereon it rests, let us inspect the neighbourhood, to a distance of a few paces.
If these contain a low, thick cluster, the nest is there, hidden from the eye.
It carries an authentic certificate of its origin, for the mother invariably occupies it.
By this method of investigation, far from the labyrinth trap, I become the owner of as many nests as are needed to satisfy my curiosity.
They do not by a long way come up to my idea of the maternal talent.
They are clumsy bundles of dead leaves, roughly drawn together with silk threads. Under this rude covering is a pouch of fine texture containing the egg casket, all in very bad condition, because of the inevitable tears incurred in its extrication from the brushwood.
No, I shall not be able to judge of the artist's capacity by these rags and tatters.
The insect, in its buildings, has its own architectural rules, rules as unchangeable as anatomical peculiarities.
Each group builds according to the same set of principles, conforming to the laws of a very elementary system of aesthetics; but often circumstances beyond the architect's control-the space at her disposal, the unevenness of the site, the nature of the material and other accidental causes-interfere with the worker's plans and disturb the structure.
Then virtual regularity is translated into actual chaos; order degenerates into disorder.
We might discover an interesting subject of research in the type adopted by each species when the work is accomplished without hindrances.
As yet, what I have seen of her work is but an unsightly bundle.
Toiling in the midst of a dense thicket, among a tangle of dead leaves and twigs, she may well produce a very inaccurate piece of work; but compel her to labour when free from all impediment: she will then-I am convinced of it beforehand-apply her talents without constraint and show herself an adept in the building of graceful nests.
As laying time approaches, towards the middle of August, I instal half a dozen Labyrinth Spiders in large wire gauze cages, each standing in an earthen pan filled with sand.
A sprig of thyme, planted in the centre, will furnish supports for the structure, together with the trellis work of the top and sides.
By way of provision, Locusts, every day.
They are readily accepted, provided they be tender and not too large.
The experiment works perfectly.
The latitude of the workshop has enabled the spinstress to follow the inspiration of her instinct without serious obstacles; and the result is a masterpiece of symmetry and elegance, if we allow for a few angularities demanded by the suspension points.
It is an oval of exquisite white muslin, a diaphanous abode wherein the mother must make a long stay to watch over the brood.
The cabin is open at either end.
The front entrance broadens into a gallery; the back entrance tapers into a funnel neck.
As for the opening in front, which is wider, this is, beyond a doubt, a victualling door.
I see the Spider, at intervals, standing here on the look out for the Locust, whom she consumes outside, taking care not to soil the spotless sanctuary with corpses.
The structure of the nest is not without a certain similarity to that of the home occupied during the hunting season.
In front of the bell shaped mouth is a tangle of threads wherein the passers by are caught.
Each species, in this way, possesses a primary architectural model which is followed as a whole, in spite of altered conditions.
The animal knows its trade thoroughly, but it does not know and will never know aught else, being incapable of originality.
Now this palace of silk, when all is said, is nothing more than a guard house.
Behind the soft, milky opalescence of the wall glimmers the egg tabernacle, with its form vaguely suggesting the star of some order of knighthood.
It is a large pocket, of a splendid dead white, isolated on every side by radiating pillars which keep it motionless in the centre of the tapestry.
These pillars are about ten in number and are slender in the middle, expanding at one end into a conical capital and at the other into a base of the same shape.
The mother walks gravely to and fro under the arches of her cloisters, she stops first here, then there; she makes a lengthy auscultation of the egg wallet; she listens to all that happens inside the satin wrapper.
To disturb her would be barbarous.
For a closer examination, let us use the dilapidated nests which we brought from the fields.
Apart from its pillars, the egg pocket is an inverted conoid, reminding us of the work of the Silky Epeira.
Its material is rather stout; my pincers, pulling at it, do not tear it without difficulty.
Let us put everything into a glass tube to study the hatching.
We will now retrace our steps a little.
When laying time comes, the mother forsakes her dwelling, her crater into which her falling victims dropped, her labyrinth in which the flight of the Midges was cut short; she leaves intact the apparatus that enabled her to live at her ease. Thoughtful of her natural duties, she goes to found another establishment at a distance.
She has still a few long months to live and she needs nourishment.
Were it not better, then, to lodge the eggs in the immediate neighbourhood of the present home and to continue her hunting with the excellent snare at her disposal?
The watching of the nest and the easy acquisition of provender would go hand in hand.
The Spider is of another opinion; and I suspect the reason.
The sheet net and the labyrinth that surmounts it are objects visible from afar, owing to their whiteness and the height whereat they are placed.
Whoso comes to look at the bright thing too closely dies the victim of his curiosity.
There is nothing better for playing upon the folly of the passer by, but also nothing more dangerous to the safety of the family.
Harpies will not fail to come running at this signal, showing up against the green; guided by the position of the web, they will assuredly find the precious purse; and a strange grub, feasting on a hundred new laid eggs, will ruin the establishment.
I do not know these enemies, not having sufficient materials at my disposal for a register of the parasites; but, from indications gathered elsewhere, I suspect them.
The Banded Epeira, trusting to the strength of her stuff, fixes her nest in the sight of all, hangs it on the brushwood, taking no precautions whatever to hide it.
Nothing but empty shells was left inside the central keg; the germs were completely exterminated.
There are other Ichneumon flies, moreover, addicted to robbing Spiders' nests; a basket of fresh eggs is their offspring's regular food.
Like any other, the Labyrinth Spider dreads the scoundrelly advent of the pickwallet; she provides for it and, to shield herself against it as far as possible, chooses a hiding place outside her dwelling, far removed from the tell tale web.
When she feels her ovaries ripen, she shifts her quarters; she goes off at night to explore the neighbourhood and seek a less dangerous refuge.
The points selected are, by preference, the low brambles dragging along the ground, keeping their dense verdure during the winter and crammed with dead leaves from the oaks hard by.
Rosemary tufts, which gain in thickness what they lose in height on the unfostering rock, suit her particularly.
So far, there is no departure from current usage.
Very few neglect this precaution; each, in her own manner, conceals the eggs she lays.
In the case of the Labyrinth Spider, the protection of the brood is complicated by another condition.
In the vast majority of instances, the eggs, once lodged in a favourable spot, are abandoned to themselves, left to the chances of good or ill fortune.
The Spider of the brushwood, on the contrary, endowed with greater maternal devotion, has, like the Crab Spider, to mount guard over hers until they hatch.
With a few threads and some small leaves joined together, the Crab Spider builds, above her lofty nest, a rudimentary watch tower where she stays permanently, greatly emaciated, flattened into a sort of wrinkled shell through the emptying of her ovaries and the total absence of food.
And this mere shred, hardly more than a skin that persists in living without eating, stoutly defends her egg sack, shows fight at the approach of any tramp.
She does not make up her mind to die until the little ones are gone.
The Labyrinth Spider is better treated.
After laying her eggs, so far from becoming thin, she preserves an excellent appearance and a round belly.
Moreover, she does not lose her appetite and is always prepared to bleed a Locust.
She therefore requires a dwelling with a hunting box close to the eggs watched over.
Remember the magnificent oval guard room, running into a vestibule at either end; the egg chamber slung in the centre and isolated on every side by half a score of pillars; the front hall expanding into a wide mouth and surmounted by a network of taut threads forming a trap.
Her cloister of vaulted passages enables her to proceed to any point of the star shaped pouch containing the eggs. Indefatigable in her rounds, she stops here and there; she fondly feels the satin, listens to the secrets of the wallet.
If I shake the net at any point with a straw, she quickly runs up to enquire what is happening. Will this vigilance frighten off the Ichneumon and other lovers of omelettes?
Perhaps so.
But, though this danger be averted, others will come when the mother is no longer there.
Her attentive watch does not make her overlook her meals.
One of the Locusts whereof I renew the supply at intervals in the cages is caught in the cords of the great entrance hall.
The Spider arrives hurriedly, snatches the giddy pate and disjoints his shanks, which she empties of their contents, the best part of the insect.
The meal is taken outside the guard room, on the threshold, never indoors.
These are not capricious mouthfuls, serving to beguile the boredom of the watch for a brief while; they are substantial repasts, which require several sittings.
Such an appetite astonishes me, after I have seen the Crab Spider, that no less ardent watcher, refuse the Bees whom I give her and allow herself to die of inanition.
Can this other mother have so great a need as that to eat?
Yes, certainly she has; and for an imperative reason.
The walls never seem thick enough; the Spider is always working at them.
To satisfy this lavish expenditure, she must incessantly, by means of feeding, fill her silk glands as and when she empties them by spinning.
Food is the means whereby she keeps the inexhaustible factory going.
A month passes and, about the middle of September, the little ones hatch, but without leaving their tabernacle, where they are to spend the winter packed in soft wadding.
The mother continues to watch and spin, lessening her activity from day to day.
She recruits herself with a Locust at longer intervals; she sometimes scorns those whom I myself entangle in her trap.
This increasing abstemiousness, a sign of decrepitude, slackens and at last stops the work of the spinnerets.
For four or five weeks longer, the mother never ceases her leisurely inspection rounds, happy at hearing the new born Spiders swarming in the wallet.
At length, when October ends, she clutches her offspring's nursery and dies withered.
She has done all that maternal devotion can do; the special providence of tiny animals will do the rest.
When spring comes, the youngsters will emerge from their snug habitation, disperse all over the neighbourhood by the expedient of the floating thread and weave their first attempts at a labyrinth on the tufts of thyme.
Accurate in structure and neat in silk work though they be, the nests of the caged captives do not tell us everything; we must go back to what happens in the fields, with their complicated conditions.
We inspect the stunted rosemaries along the edge of a path sheltered by a rocky, wooded slope; we lift the branches that spread over the ground.
In a couple of hours, I am the owner of some nests.
It needs the eyes of faith to see in these ruins the equivalent of the edifices built inside my cages.
Fastened to the creeping branch, the unsightly bundle lies on the sand heaped up by the rains.
Oak leaves, roughly joined by a few threads, wrap it all round.
One of these leaves, larger than the others, roofs it in and serves as a scaffolding for the whole of the ceiling.
If we did not see the silky remnants of the two vestibules projecting and feel a certain resistance when separating the parts of the bundle, we might take the thing for a casual accumulation, the work of the rain and the wind.
Let us examine our find and look more closely into its shapelessness. Here is the large room, the maternal cabin, which rips as the coating of leaves is removed; here are the circular galleries of the guard room; here are the central chamber and its pillars, all in a fabric of immaculate white.
The dirt from the damp ground has not penetrated to this dwelling protected by its wrapper of dead leaves.
Now open the habitation of the offspring.
What is this?
Put aside that idea, says the satin wall, which itself is perfectly clean inside.
The grains of sand are stuck together with a cement of silk; and the whole resists the pressure of the fingers.
If we continue to unshell the kernel, we find, below this mineral layer, a last silken tunic that forms a globe around the brood.
No sooner do we tear this final covering than the frightened little ones run away and scatter with an agility that is singular at this cold and torpid season.
To sum up, when working in the natural state, the Labyrinth Spider builds around the eggs, between two sheets of satin, a wall composed of a great deal of sand and a little silk.
To stop the Ichneumon's probe and the teeth of the other ravagers, the best thing that occurred to her was this hoarding which combines the hardness of flint with the softness of muslin.
This means of defence seems to be pretty frequent among Spiders.
Other species, living in the open under stones, work in the same way.
They wrap their eggs in a mineral shell held together with silk.
The same fears have inspired the same protective methods.
Then how comes it that, of the five mothers reared in my cages, not one has had recourse to the clay rampart?
After all, sand abounded: the pans in which the wire gauze covers stood were full of it.
On the other hand, under normal conditions, I have often come across nests without any mineral casing.
These incomplete nests were placed at some height from the ground, in the thick of the brushwood; the others, on the contrary, those supplied with a coating of sand, lay on the ground.
The method of the work explains these differences.
The concrete of our buildings is obtained by the simultaneous manipulation of gravel and mortar.
The operation would be impossible if, after cementing each grain of sand, it were necessary to stop the work of the spinnerets and go to a distance to fetch further stony elements.
Those materials have to be right under her legs; otherwise the Spider does without and continues her work just the same.
In my cages, the sand is too far off.
To obtain it, the Spider would have to leave the top of the dome, where the nest is being built on its trellis work support; she would have to come down some nine inches.
The worker refuses to take this trouble, which, if repeated in the case of each grain, would make the action of the spinnerets too irksome.
She also refuses to do so when, for reasons which I have not fathomed, the site chosen is some way up in the tuft of rosemary.
But, when the nest touches the ground, the clay rampart is never missing.
No inference is permissible in either direction.
The Labyrinth Spider has simply taught us that instinct possesses resources which are employed or left latent according to the conditions of the moment.
Place sand under her legs and the spinstress will knead concrete; refuse her that sand, or put it out of her reach, and the Spider will remain a simple silk worker, always ready, however, to turn mason under favourable conditions.
Answer my questions truthfully and it may be that we shall return through that door."
I can show it to you."
I had not been blind to the flash of malice, of cunning, that had shot across the wrinkled face.
Does your way lead to them, Yuruk?"
"The way leads to them; to their place.
"Those who are unlike us smote those who are like us and drove them back when they would have taken and slain us.
"Cherkis would forgive much for her.
He spat-in a way that made me want to kill him.
"Cherkis?" I asked.
"Cherkis," he whined.
Much, I think.
Go then to him-unafraid."
Cherkis?
There was a familiar sound to that.
Cherkis?
Of course-it was the name of Xerxes, the Persian Conqueror, corrupted by time into this-Cherkis.
And Iskander?
Equally, of course-Alexander.
Ventnor had been right.
"Long ago," he answered; "long, long ago there was trouble in their city, even in the great dwelling place of Cherkis.
The goddess was born here.
Was not the father of Iskander the god Zeus Ammon, who came to Iskander's mother in the form of a great snake?
Well?
"Cleave to your kind!
Cleave to your kind.
Over the floor he slid, still holding fast to me, and pressed against the farther wall.
"Follow it." He pointed.
"Take those who came with you and follow it."
"You will take them and go by that path?"
"Not yet," I answered absently.
"Not yet."
And was brought abruptly to full alertness, vigilance, by the flame of rage that filled the eyes thrust so close.
"Lead back," I directed curtly.
He slid the door into place, turned sullenly.
And by that curious human habit of seeking for the complex when the simple answer lies close, failed to recognize that it was jealousy of us that was the root of his behavior; that he wished to be, as it would seem he had been for years, the only human thing near Norhala; failed to realize this, and with ruth and Drake was terribly to pay for this failure.
"Sit," I ordered the eunuch.
"And turn your back to me."
Clearly it came to me that these were sense organs!
A secretion of the brain? The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells that form us?
Is it what many call the soul?
So thinking I became aware of increasing light; strode past Yuruk to the door and peeped out.
I stooped over Drake, shook him.
On the instant he was awake, alert.
"I only need a little sleep, Dick," I said.
"Why, it's dawn," he whispered.
"Goodwin, you ought not to have let me sleep so long.
I feel like a damned pig."
"But watch the eunuch closely."
As the Thenardier hostelry was in that part of the village which is near the church, it was to the spring in the forest in the direction of Chelles that Cosette was obliged to go for her water.
The poor child found herself in the dark.
She plunged into it.
Is it a werewolf child?"
Then the woman recognized Cosette.
"Well," said she, "it's the Lark!"
But in proportion as she advanced, her pace slackened mechanically, as it were.
When she had passed the corner of the last house, Cosette paused.
Black and desert space was before her.
She took a good look, and heard the beasts walking on the grass, and she distinctly saw spectres moving in the trees.
What was she to do?
What was to become of her?
Where was she to go?
She only paused in her course when her breath failed her; but she did not halt in her advance.
On the one hand, all shadow; on the other, an atom.
Strange to say, she did not get lost.
A remnant of instinct guided her vaguely.
A brook ran out of it, with a tranquil little noise.
Cosette did not take time to breathe.
It was very dark, but she was in the habit of coming to this spring.
While thus bent over, she did not notice that the pocket of her apron had emptied itself into the spring.
She drew out the bucket nearly full, and set it on the grass.
She would have liked to set out again at once, but the effort required to fill the bucket had been such that she found it impossible to take a step.
She was forced to sit down.
Overhead the sky was covered with vast black clouds, which were like masses of smoke.
Jupiter was setting in the depths.
The darkness was bewildering.
Man requires light.
Whoever buries himself in the opposite of day feels his heart contract.
When the eye sees black, the heart sees trouble.
Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more terrible even than terror; she shivered.
Then, by a sort of instinct, she began to count aloud, one, two, three, four, and so on up to ten, in order to escape from that singular state which she did not understand, but which terrified her, and, when she had finished, she began again; this restored her to a true perception of the things about her.
Her hands, which she had wet in drawing the water, felt cold; she rose; her terror, a natural and unconquerable terror, had returned: she had but one thought now,--to flee at full speed through the forest, across the fields to the houses, to the windows, to the lighted candles.
Her glance fell upon the water which stood before her; such was the fright which the Thenardier inspired in her, that she dared not flee without that bucket of water: she seized the handle with both hands; she could hardly lift the pail.
After some seconds of repose she set out again. She walked bent forward, with drooping head, like an old woman; the weight of the bucket strained and stiffened her thin arms.
This anguish was mingled with her terror at being alone in the woods at night; she was worn out with fatigue, and had not yet emerged from the forest.
At that moment she suddenly became conscious that her bucket no longer weighed anything at all: a hand, which seemed to her enormous, had just seized the handle, and lifted it vigorously.
She raised her head.
CHAPTER one-THE ZIGZAGS OF STRATEGY
The author of this book, who regrets the necessity of mentioning himself, has been absent from Paris for many years.
Paris has been transformed since he quitted it.
There is no need for him to say that he loves Paris: Paris is his mind's natal city.
He must be permitted to speak of that Paris as though it still existed.
May we, then, be permitted to speak of the past in the present?
That said, we beg the reader to take note of it, and we continue.
Jean Valjean instantly quitted the boulevard and plunged into the streets, taking the most intricate lines which he could devise, returning on his track at times, to make sure that he was not being followed.
This manoeuvre is peculiar to the hunted stag.
The moon was full that night.
He did not, perhaps, take sufficiently into consideration the fact that the dark side escaped him.
Cosette walked on without asking any questions.
Moreover,--and this is a remark to which we shall frequently have occasion to recur,--she had grown used, without being herself aware of it, to the peculiarities of this good man and to the freaks of destiny.
And then she was with him, and she felt safe.
Was not he disguised?
Yes, I said; and you may add that they are only fed, and not paid in addition to their food, like other men; and therefore they cannot, if they would, take a journey of pleasure; they have no money to spend on a mistress or any other luxurious fancy, which, as the world goes, is thought to be happiness; and many other accusations of the same nature might be added.
You mean to ask, I said, what will be our answer?
Yes.
Our potters also might be allowed to repose on couches, and feast by the fireside, passing round the winecup, while their wheel is conveniently at hand, and working at pottery only as much as they like; in this way we might make every class happy-and then, as you imagine, the whole State would be happy.
But do not put this idea into our heads; for, if we listen to you, the husbandman will be no longer a husbandman, the potter will cease to be a potter, and no one will have the character of any distinct class in the State.
But, if so, we mean different things, and he is speaking of something which is not a State.
And therefore we must consider whether in appointing our guardians we would look to their greatest happiness individually, or whether this principle of happiness does not rather reside in the State as a whole.
And thus the whole State will grow up in a noble order, and the several classes will receive the proportion of happiness which nature assigns to them.
I think that you are quite right.
What may that be?
What are they?
Wealth, I said, and poverty.
How do they act?
Certainly not.
Very true.
And the result will be that he becomes a worse potter?
Certainly not.
That is evident.
What evils?
Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
How so?
That is true, he said.
And do you not suppose, Adeimantus, that a single boxer who was perfect in his art would easily be a match for two stout and well to do gentlemen who were not boxers?
Hardly, if they came upon him at once.
What, now, I said, if he were able to run away and then turn and strike at the one who first came up?
And supposing he were to do this several times under the heat of a scorching sun, might he not, being an expert, overturn more than one stout personage?
And yet rich men probably have a greater superiority in the science and practise of boxing than they have in military qualities.
Likely enough.
That is not likely; and yet there might be a danger to the poor State if the wealth of many States were to be gathered into one.
Why so?
You ought to speak of other States in the plural number; not one of them is a city, but many cities, as they say in the game.
That is most true, he said.
And what, I said, will be the best limit for our rulers to fix when they are considering the size of the State and the amount of territory which they are to include, and beyond which they will not go?
I would allow the State to increase so far as is consistent with unity; that, I think, is the proper limit.
Very good, he said.
Here then, I said, is another order which will have to be conveyed to our guardians: Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but one and self sufficing.
Yes, he said; that is not so difficult.
What may that be?
he asked.
Also, I said, the State, if once started well, moves with accumulating force like a wheel.
Very possibly, he said.
they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited.
So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him;--he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.
Yes, he said; the lawlessness of which you speak too easily steals in.
Yes, I replied, in the form of amusement; and at first sight it appears harmless.
Is that true?
I said.
That is my belief, he replied.
Very true, he said.
And when they have made a good beginning in play, and by the help of music have gained the habit of good order, then this habit of order, in a manner how unlike the lawless play of the others! will accompany them in all their actions and be a principle of growth to them, and if there be any fallen places in the State will raise them up again.
Very true, he said.
What do you mean?
Yes.
Does not like always attract like?
To be sure.
That is not to be denied.
And for this reason, I said, I shall not attempt to legislate further about them.
CHAPTER three
Merlin was the son of no mortal father, but of an Incubus, one of a class of beings not absolutely wicked, but far from good, who inhabit the regions of the air.
At this time Vortigern reigned in Britain.
The edifice, when brought by the workmen to a certain height, three times fell to the ground, without any apparent cause.
The red dragon was slain, and the white one, gliding through a cleft in the rock, disappeared.
Merlin became his chief adviser, and often assisted the king by his magical arts.
At one time he appeared as a dwarf, at others as a damsel, a page, or even a greyhound or a stag.
After this event Merlin was never more known to hold converse with any mortal but Viviane, except on one occasion.
But do thou hasten to King Arthur, and charge him from me to undertake, without delay, the quest of the Sacred Graal.
[Footnote: Buried under beare.
The following is the address which I delivered:--
This, this, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.
october sixth eighteen ninety five.
Yours very truly,
He is too great for that.
The picture painted was a rather black one-or, since I am black, shall I say "white"?
If he is right, time will show it.
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,
President's Office, september thirtieth eighteen ninety five.
A line by telegraph will be welcomed.
Yours very truly,
d c Gilman
Let me illustrate my meaning.
I do not think so.
But will you let me assume, without reciting them, that these things are true?
Certainly, he said, what you say is true.
Yes, he said; and they are fair and lasting.
ROMAN WOMEN.
The time when the Roman women began to appear in public, marks a particular era in history.
The Roman women, for many ages, were respected over the whole world. Their victorious husbands re visited them with transport, at their return from battle.
They laid at their feet the spoils of the enemy, and endeared themselves in their eyes by the wounds which they had received for them and for the state.
Those warriors often came from imposing commands upon kings, and in their own houses accounted it an honor to obey.
In vain the too rigid laws made them the arbiters of life and death.
More powerful than the laws, the women ruled their judges.
In vain the legislature, foreseeing the wants which exist only among a corrupt people, permitted divorce.
The indulgence of the polity was proscribed by the manners.
Such was the influence of beauty at Rome before the licentious intercourse of the sexes had corrupted both.
The Roman matrons do not seem to have possessed that military courage which Plutarch has praised in certain Greek and barbarian women; they partook more of the nature of their sex; or, at least, they departed less from its character.
Their first quality was decency.
To these austere manners, the Roman women joined an enthusiastic love of their country, which discovered itself upon many great occasions.
On the death of Brutus, they all clothed themselves in mourning.
In the time of Coriolanus they saved the city.
The senate decreed them public thanks, ordered the men to give place to them upon all occasions, caused an altar to be erected for them on the spot where the mother had softened her son, and the wife her husband; and the sex were permitted to add another ornament to their head dress.
The Roman women saved the city a second time, when besieged by Brennus. They gave up all their gold as its ransom.
For that instance of their generosity, the senate granted them the honor of having funeral orations pronounced in the rostrum, in common with patriots and heroes.
The women sought an orator to defend their cause, but found none.
Nobody would reason against those who had the power of life and death.
The daughter of the celebrated Hortensius alone appeared.
She revived the memory of her father's abilities, and supported with intrepidity her own cause and that of her sex.
The ruffians blushed and revoked their orders.
Hortensia was conducted home in triumph, and had the honor of having given, in one day, an example of courage to men, a pattern of eloquence to women, and a lesson of humanity to tyrants.
They were desirous to join admiration to esteem, 'till they learned to exceed esteem itself.
For in all countries, in proportion as the love of virtue diminishes, we find the love of talents to increase.
The vast inequality of ranks, the enormous fortunes of individuals, the ridicule, affixed by the imperial court to moral ideas, all contributed to hasten the period of corruption.
Portia, the daughter of Cato, and wife of Brutus, showed herself worthy to be associated with the first of human kind, and trusted with the fate of empires.
The example of Portia was followed by that of Arria, who seeing her husband hesitating and afraid to die, in order to encourage him, pierced her own breast, and delivered to him the dagger with a smile.
But the empress Julia the wife of Septimius Severus, possessed a species of merit so very different from any of those already mentioned, as to claim particular attention.
This lady was born in Syria, and a daughter of a priest of the sun
It was predicted that she would rise to sovereign dignity; and her character justified the prophecy.
Julia, while on the throne, loved, or pretended passionately to love, letters.
Either from taste, from a desire to instruct herself, from a love of renown, or possibly from all these together, she spent her life with philosophers.
Her rank of empress would not, perhaps, have been sufficient to subdue those bold spirits; but she joined to that the more powerful influences of wit and beauty.
These three kinds of empire rendered less necessary to her that which consists only in art; and which, attentive to their tastes and their weaknesses, govern great minds by little means.
It is said she was a philosopher.
Julia was, in short, an empress and a politician, occupied at the same time about literature, and affairs of state, while she mingled her pleasures freely with both.
She had courtiers for her lovers, scholars for her friends, and philosophers for her counsellors.
Julia arrived at the highest celebrity; but as among all her excellencies, we find not those of her sex, the virtues of a woman, our admiration is lost in blame.
In her life time she obtained more praise than respect; and posterity, while it has done justice to her talents and her accomplishments, has agreed to deny her esteem.
LAWS AND CUSTOMS RESPECTING THE ROMAN WOMEN.
The Roman women, as well as the Grecian, were under perpetual guardianship; and were not at any age, nor in any condition, ever trusted with the management of their own fortunes.
Every father had power of life and death over his own daughters: but this power was not restricted to daughters only; it extended also to sons.
The Oppian law prohibited women from having more than half an ounce of gold employed in ornamenting their persons, from wearing clothes of divers colors, and from riding in chariots, either in the city, or a thousand paces round it.
For either of these faults they were liable to be divorced by their husbands.
Fabius Pictor relates, that the parents of a Roman lady, having detected her picking the lock of a chest which contained some wine, shut her up and starved her to death.
They were also liable to be divorced for barrenness, which, if it could be construed into a fault, was at least the fault of nature, and might sometimes be that of the husband.
A few sumptuary laws, a subordination to the men, and a total want of authority, do not so much affect the sex, as to be coldly and indelicately treated by their husbands.
Such a treatment is touching them in the tenderest part.
The principal eunuch of Justinian the Second, threatened to chastise the Empress, his master's wife, in the manner that children are chastised at school, if she did not obey his orders.
With regard to the private diversions of the Roman ladies, history is silent.
Their public ones, were such as were common to both sexes; as bathing, theatrical representations, horse races, shows of wild beasts, which fought against one another, and sometimes against men, whom the emperors, in the plenitude of their despotic power, ordered to engage them.
The romans, of both sexes, spent a great deal of time at the baths; which at first, perhaps, were interwoven with their religion, but at last were only considered as refinements in luxury.
They were places of public resort, where people met with their acquaintances and friends, where public libraries were kept for such as chose to read, and where poets recited their works to such as had patience to hear.
In the earlier periods of Rome, separate baths were appropriated to each sex.
Luxury, by degrees getting the better of decency, the men and women at last bathed promiscuously together.
SPANISH WOMEN.
As the Spanish ladies are under a greater seclusion from general society, than the sex is in other European countries, their desires of an adequate degree of liberty are consequently more strong and urgent.
A free and open communication being denied them, they make it their business to secure themselves a secret and hidden one.
Hence it is that Spain is the country of intrigue.
The Spanish women are little or nothing indebted to education.
Thus in Spain, as in all countries where the sex is kept much out of sight, the thoughts of men are continually employed in devising methods to break into their concealments.
There is in the Spaniards a native dignity; which, though the source of many inconveniences, has nevertheless this salutary effect, that it sets them above almost every species of meanness and infidelity.
This quality is not peculiar to the men; it diffuses itself, in a great measure, among the women also.
Their affections are not to be gained by a bit of sparkling lace, or a tawdry set of liveries.
Their deportment is rather grave and reserved; and, on the whole, they have much more of the prude than the coquette in their composition.
A lady to whom a gentleman pays his addresses, is sole mistress of his time and money; and, should he refuse her any request, whether reasonable or capricious, it would reflect eternal dishonor upon him among the men, and make him the detestation of all the women.
But, in no situation does their character appear so whimsical, or their power so conspicuous, as when they are pregnant.
In this case, whatever they long for, whatever they ask, or whatever they have an inclination to do, they must be indulged in.
ENGLISH WOMEN.
The women of England are eminent for many good qualities both of the head and of the heart.
There we meet with that inexpressible softness and delicacy of manners, which, cultivated by education, appears as much superior to what it does without it, as the polished diamond appears superior to that which is rough from the mine.
In England they consist not only in abstinence from evil, but in doing good.
There we see the sex every day exerting themselves in acts of benevolence and charity, in relieving the distresses of the body, and binding up the wounds of the mind; in reconciling the differences of friends, and preventing the strife of enemies; and, to sum up all, in that care and attention to their offspring, which is so necessary and essential a part of their duty.
The king's wife is considered as a subject; but is exempted from the law which forbids any married woman to possess property in her own right during the lifetime of her husband; she may sue any person at law without joining her husband in the suit; may buy and sell lands without his interference; and she may dispose of her property by will, as if she were a single woman.
She cannot be fined by any court of law; but is liable to be tried and punished for crimes by peers of the realm.
A peeress can only be tried by a jury of peers.
A piece of sharp iron entered the mouth, and severely pricked the tongue whenever the culprit attempted to move it.
Misconduct and divorces are not unfrequent among the former, because their mode of life corrupts their principles, and they deem themselves above the jurisdiction of popular opinion; the latter feel as if they were beneath the influence of public censure, and find it very difficult to be virtuous, on account of extreme poverty, and the consequent obstructions in the way of marriage.
But the general character of English women is modest, reserved, sincere, and dignified. They have strong passions and affections, which often develope themselves in the most beautiful forms of domestic life.
They are in general remarkable for a healthy appearance, and an exquisite bloom of complexion.
Perhaps the world does not present a lovelier or more graceful picture than the English home of a virtuous family.
RUSSIAN WOMEN.
A late empress of Russia, as a punishment for some female frailties, ordered a most beautiful young lady of family to be publicly chastised, in a manner which was hardly less indelicate than severe.
As soon as a young man is old enough to be married, his parents seek a wife for him, and all is settled before the young couple know any thing of the matter.
Their nuptial ceremonies are peculiar to themselves; and formerly consisted of many whimsical rites, some of which are now disused.
On her wedding day, the bride is crowned with a garland of wormwood; and, after the priest has tied the nuptial knot, his clerk or sexton throws a handful of hops upon the head of the bride, wishing that she might prove as fruitful as that plant.
She is then led home, with abundance of coarse ceremonies, which are now wearing off even among the lowest ranks; and the barbarous treatment of wives by their husbands is either guarded against by the laws of the country, or by particular stipulations in the marriage contract.
In the conversation and actions of the Russian ladies, there is hardly any thing of that softness and delicacy which distinguishes the sex in other parts of Europe.
Even their exercises and diversions have more of the masculine than the feminine.
The present empress, with the ladies of her court, sometimes divert themselves by shooting at a mark. Drunkenness, the vice of almost every cold climate, they are so little ashamed of, that not many years ago, when a lady got drunk at the house of a friend, it was customary for her to return next day, and thank him for the pleasure he had done her.
Females, however, in Russia, possess several advantages.
They share the rank and splendor of the families from which they are sprung, and are even allowed the supreme authority.
This a few years ago, was enjoyed by an empress, whose head did honor to her nation and to her sex; although, on some occasions, the virtues of her heart have been much suspected. The sex, in general, are protected from insult, by many salutary laws; and, except among the peasants, are exempted from every kind of toil and slavery.
"Tally one for me," said the Scarecrow, calmly "What's wrong, my man?" he added, addressing the Soldier.
The City is conquered!" gasped the Royal Army, who was all out of breath.
"This is quite sudden," said the Scarecrow.
"Good afternoon, noble parent!" he cried, delightedly.
"I'm glad to see you are here.
That terrible Saw Horse ran away with me."
"I suspected it," said Tip.
"Did you get hurt?
Are you cracked at all?"
"No, I arrived safely," answered Jack, "and his Majesty has been very kind indeed to me.
"By the way, who has conquered me?"
"Where can you go?" asked Jack Pumpkinhead.
"But we also are in danger," said the Pumpkinhead, anxiously.
"If any of these girls understand cooking, my end is not far off!"
"Nonsense!" exclaimed the Scarecrow.
"they're too busy to cook, even if they know how!"
"Ah! then you would not be fit to associate with," returned the Scarecrow. "The matter is more serious than I suspected."
"You," said the Pumpkinhead, gloomily, "are liable to live for many years. My life is necessarily short.
"There, there!
Don't worry," answered the Scarecrow soothingly; "if you'll keep quiet long enough for me to think, I'll try to find some way for us all to escape."
"Where is the Saw Horse you rode here?" he asked the Pumpkinhead.
"It was the only place I could think of your Majesty," added the Soldier, fearing he had made a blunder.
"It pleases me very much," said the Scarecrow.
"Has the animal been fed?"
"Excellent!" cried the Scarecrow.
"Bring the horse here at once."
"He doesn't seem especially graceful!" he remarked, musingly.
"but I suppose he can run?"
"He can't carry four!" objected Tip.
For, from the ease with which he was conquered, I have little confidence in his powers."
"I expected this blow" said the Soldier, sulkily; "but I can bear it.
"Perhaps you are right," observed his Majesty.
"But, for my part, not being a soldier, I am fond of danger.
Now, my boy, you must mount first.
"Fetch a clothesline," said the King to his Army, "and tie us all together. Then if one falls off we will all fall off."
"I have to be as careful as you do," said Jack.
"Not exactly," replied the Scarecrow.
"Now throw open the gates," commanded the Scarecrow, "and we will make a dash to liberty or to death."
"Now," said Tip to the horse, "you must save us all.
Run as fast as you can for the gate of the City, and don't let anything stop you."
Tip got one small prick in his left arm, which smarted for an hour afterward; but the needles had no effect upon the Scarecrow or Jack Pumpkinhead, who never even suspected they were being prodded.
As for the Saw Horse, he made a wonderful record upsetting a fruit cart, overturning several meek looking men, and finally bowling over the new Guardian of the Gate-a fussy little fat woman appointed by General Jinjur.
"My straw is all shaking down into my legs."
Tip awoke soon after dawn, but the Scarecrow had already risen and plucked, with his clumsy fingers, a double handful of ripe berries from some bushes near by.
These the boy ate greedily, finding them an ample breakfast, and afterward the little party resumed its Journey.
Is the Tin Woodman the Emperor of the Winkies?" asked the horse.
"Yes, indeed.
"I thought that 'Emperor' was the title of a person who rules an empire," said Tip, "and the Country of the Winkies is only a Kingdom."
"Don't mention that to the Tin Woodman!" exclaimed the Scarecrow, earnestly. "You would hurt his feelings terribly.
He is a proud man, as he has every reason to be, and it pleases him to be termed Emperor rather than King."
"I'm sure it makes no difference to me," replied the boy.
The Saw Horse now ambled forward at a pace so fast that its riders had hard work to stick upon its back; so there was little further conversation until they drew up beside the palace steps.
Said the Scarecrow to his personage:
"Show us at once to your master, the Emperor."
"How is that?" enquired the Scarecrow, anxiously." I hope nothing has happened to him."
"Oh, no; nothing serious," returned the man.
"But this is his Majesty's day for being polished; and just now his august presence is thickly smeared with putz pomade."
"My friend was ever inclined to be a dandy, and I suppose he is now more proud than ever of his personal appearance."
"He is, indeed," said the man, with a polite bow.
"Good Gracious!" the Scarecrow exclaimed at hearing this.
"If his wit bears the same polish, how sparkling it must be!
The travelers were at first somewhat awed by their surroundings, and even the Scarecrow seemed impressed as he examined the rich hangings of silver cloth caught up into knots and fastened with tiny silver axes.
Upon a handsome center table stood a large silver oil can, richly engraved with scenes from the past adventures of the Tin Woodman, Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow: the lines of the engraving being traced upon the silver in yellow gold.
"Well! well!
And then the door burst open and Nick Chopper rushed into their midst and caught the Scarecrow in a close and loving embrace that creased him into many folds and wrinkles.
"My dear old friend!
But, alas! the face of the Scarecrow and many portions of his body bore great blotches of putz pomade; for the Tin Woodman, in his eagerness to welcome his friend, had quite forgotten the condition of his toilet and had rubbed the thick coating of paste from his own body to that of his comrade.
"Dear me!" said the Scarecrow dolefully.
"But tell me, how came your Majesty here?
and who are your companions?"
The Scarecrow, with great politeness, introduced Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead, and the latter personage seemed to interest the Tin Woodman greatly.
"You are not very substantial, I must admit," said the Emperor.
"I hope you are enjoying good health?" continued the Woodman.
"At present, yes;" replied the Pumpkinhead, with a sigh; "but I am in constant terror of the day when I shall spoil."
"Nonsense!" said the Emperor-but in a kindly, sympathetic tone.
"Do not, I beg of you, dampen today's sun with the showers of tomorrow.
For before your head has time to spoil you can have it canned, and in that way it may be preserved indefinitely."
He rattled and clanked a little, as he moved, but in the main he seemed to be most cleverly constructed, and his appearance was only marred by the thick coating of polishing paste that covered him from head to foot.
The boy's intent gaze caused the Tin Woodman to remember that he was not in the most presentable condition, so he begged his friends to excuse him while he retired to his private apartment and allowed his servants to polish him. This was accomplished in a short time, and when the emperor returned his nickel plated body shone so magnificently that the Scarecrow heartily congratulated him on his improved appearance.
"That nickel plate was, I confess, a happy thought," said Nick; "and it was the more necessary because I had become somewhat scratched during my adventurous experiences.
You will observe this engraved star upon my left breast.
"It is, I am convinced, a strictly orthodox heart, although somewhat larger and warmer than most people possess."
Then he turned to the Scarecrow and asked:
"Are your subjects happy and contented, my dear friend?"
"I cannot, say" was the reply.
"Great Goodness!" cried the Tin Woodman, "What a calamity!
What an extraordinary idea!" cried the Emperor, who was both shocked and surprised.
"I was sure you would help me," remarked the Scarecrow in a pleased voice. "How large an army can you assemble?"
"We five," corrected the Pumpkinhead.
"Five?" repeated the Tin Woodman.
The Tin Woodman looked around him in a puzzled way, for the Saw Horse had until now remained quietly standing in a corner, where the Emperor had not noticed him.
How came this creature alive?"
"I did it with a magic powder," modestly asserted the boy.
"He enabled us to escape the rebels," added the Scarecrow.
"A live Saw Horse is a distinct novelty, and should prove an interesting study.
Does he know anything?"
"Well, I cannot claim any great experience in life," the Saw Horse answered for himself.
"Perhaps you do," said the emperor; "for experience does not always mean wisdom.
But time is precious Just now, so let us quickly make preparations to start upon our Journey.
Meanwhile the Scarecrow was taken apart and the painted sack that served him for a head was carefully laundered and restuffed with the brains originally given him by the great Wizard.
His clothes were also cleaned and pressed by the Imperial tailors, and his crown polished and again sewed upon his head, for the Tin Woodman insisted he should not renounce this badge of royalty.
The Scarecrow now presented a very respectable appearance, and although in no way addicted to vanity he
While this was being done Tip mended the wooden limbs of Jack Pumpkinhead and made them stronger than before, and the Saw Horse was also inspected to see if he was in good working order.
"It is but honest that I should acknowledge at the beginning of my recital that I was born an ordinary Woggle Bug," began the creature, in a frank and friendly tone.
"Knowing no better, I used my arms as well as my legs for walking, and crawled under the edges of stones or hid among the roots of grasses with no thought beyond finding a few insects smaller than myself to feed upon.
"The chill nights rendered me stiff and motionless, for I wore no clothing, but each morning the warm rays of the sun gave me new life and restored me to activity.
"But Destiny had singled me out, humble though I was, for a grander fate! One day I crawled near
"No one noticed so small a creature as a Woggle Bug, and when I found that the hearth was even warmer and more comfortable than the sunshine, I resolved to establish my future home beside it.
Not one of them was more attentive than the humble, unnoticed Woggle Bug, and I acquired in this way a fund of knowledge that I will myself confess is simply marvelous.
That is why I place 't e' Thoroughly Educated upon my cards; for my greatest pride lies in the fact that the world cannot produce another Woggle Bug with a tenth part of my own culture and erudition."
"I do not blame you," said the Scarecrow.
"Education is a thing to be proud of.
I'm educated myself.
"Nevertheless," interrupted the Tin Woodman, "a good heart is, I believe, much more desirable than education or brains."
"To me," said the Saw Horse, "a good leg is more desirable than either."
"Could seeds be considered in the light of brains?" enquired the Pumpkinhead, abruptly.
"Keep quiet!" commanded Tip, sternly.
"Very well, dear father," answered the obedient Jack.
The Woggle Bug listened patiently-even respectfully-to these remarks, and then resumed his story.
"I must have lived fully three years in that secluded school house hearth," said he, "drinking thirstily of the ever flowing fount of limpid knowledge before me."
"Quite poetical," commented the Scarecrow, nodding his head approvingly.
"But one, day" continued the Bug, "a marvelous circumstance occurred that altered my very existence and brought me to my present pinnacle of greatness.
The
"'My dear children,' said he, 'I have captured a Woggle Bug-a very rare and interesting specimen.
"'No!' yelled the scholars, in chorus.
"The students stood up on their stools and craned their heads forward to get a better view of me, and two little girls jumped upon the sill of an open window where they could see more plainly.
My action, being unexpected, must have startled them, for one of the little girls perched upon the window sill gave a scream and fell backward out the window, drawing her companion with her as she disappeared.
"The Professor uttered a cry of horror and rushed away through the door to see if the poor children were injured by the fall.
The scholars followed after him in a wild mob, and I was left alone in the school room, still in a Highly Magnified state and free to do as I pleased.
"It immediately occurred to me that this was a good opportunity to escape.
I was proud of my great size, and realized that now I could safely travel anywhere in the world, while my superior culture would make me a fit associate for the most learned person I might chance to meet.
"Wonderful!" exclaimed the Pumpkinhead, admiringly.
"It was, indeed," agreed the Woggle Bug.
"I
"I didn't know before," said Tip, looking at the
"Nor do they, in their natural state," returned the stranger.
"But in the course of my wanderings I had the good fortune to save the ninth life of a tailor-tailors having, like cats, nine lives, as you probably know.
The fellow was exceedingly grateful, for had he lost that ninth life it would have been the end of him; so he begged permission to furnish me with the stylish costume I now wear.
"He must have been a good tailor," said the Scarecrow, somewhat enviously.
"He was a good hearted tailor, at any rate," observed Nick Chopper.
"But where were you going, when you met us?" Tip asked the Woggle Bug.
"Nowhere in particular," was the reply, "although it is my intention soon to visit the Emerald City and arrange to give a course of lectures to select audiences on the 'Advantages of Magnification.'"
"We are bound for the Emerald City now," said the Tin Woodman; "so, if it pleases you to do so, you are welcome to travel in our company."
The Woggle Bug bowed with profound grace.
"That is true," acknowledged the Pumpkinhead.
"We are quite as congenial as flies and honey."
"Not more so than yourself," answered the Scarecrow.
"Everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it."
"What rare philosophy!" exclaimed the Woggle Bug, admiringly.
"Yes; my brains are working well today," admitted the Scarecrow, an accent of pride in his voice.
"Then, if you are sufficiently rested and refreshed, let us bend our steps toward the Emerald City," suggested the magnified one.
"We can't," said Tip.
And there is no wood around to make him a new limb from.
"How very unfortunate!" cried the Woggle Bug.
Then he looked the party over carefully and said:
"If the Pumpkinhead is to ride, why not use one of his legs to make a leg for the horse that carries him?
I judge that both are made of wood."
"Now, that is what I call real cleverness," said the Scarecrow, approvingly. "I wonder my brains did not think of that long ago!
Get to work, my dear Nick, and fit the Pumpkinhead's leg to the Saw Horse."
Jack was not especially pleased with this idea; but he submitted to having his left leg amputated by the Tin Woodman and whittled down to fit the left leg of the Saw Horse.
Nor was the Saw Horse especially pleased with the operation, either; for he growled a good deal about being "butchered," as he called it, and afterward declared that the new leg was a disgrace to a respectable Saw Horse.
"I beg you to be more careful in your speech," said the Pumpkinhead, sharply.
"Remember, if you please, that it is my leg you are abusing."
"I cannot forget it," retorted the Saw Horse, "for it is quite as flimsy as the rest of your person."
"Flimsy! me flimsy!" cried Jack, in a rage.
"How dare you call me flimsy?"
"Because you are built as absurdly as a jumping
"Even your head won't stay straight, and you never can tell whether you are looking backwards or forwards!"
"Friends, I entreat you not to quarrel!" pleaded the Tin Woodman, anxiously." As a matter of fact, we are none of us above criticism; so let us bear with each others' faults."
"An excellent suggestion," said the Woggle Bug, approvingly.
"You must have an excellent heart, my metallic friend."
"I have," returned Nick, well pleased.
"My heart is quite the best part of me.
The Tin Woodman was usually a peaceful man, but when occasion required he could fight as fiercely as a Roman gladiator.
Some of them pecked at the eyes of the Gump, which hung over the nest in a helpless condition; but the Gump's eyes were of glass and could not be injured. Others of the Jackdaws rushed at the Saw Horse; but that animal, being still upon his back, kicked out so viciously with his wooden legs that he beat off as many assailants as did the Woodman's axe.
Finding themselves thus opposed, the birds fell upon the Scarecrow's straw, which lay at the center of the nest, covering Tip and the Woggle Bug and Jack's pumpkin head, and began tearing it away and flying off with it, only to let it drop, straw by straw into the great gulf beneath.
When the last foe had disappeared, Tip crawled from under the sofas and assisted the Woggle Bug to follow him.
"We are saved!" shouted the boy, delightedly.
"We are, indeed!" responded the Educated Insect, fairly hugging the stiff head of the Gump in his joy.
"and we owe it all to the flopping of the Thing, and the good axe of the Woodman!"
He also set the Saw Horse upright, and said to it:
"I really think we have escaped very nicely," remarked the Tin Woodman, in a tone of pride.
"Not so!" exclaimed a hollow voice.
At this they all turned in surprise to look at the Scarecrow's head, which lay at the back of the nest.
"I am completely ruined!" declared the Scarecrow, as he noted their astonishment.
The awful question startled them all.
The
"The Scarecrow's clothing is still safe."
"Yes," answered the Tin Woodman; "but our friend's clothes are useless without stuffing."
"Why not stuff him with money?" asked Tip.
"Money!" they all cried, in an amazed chorus.
"To be sure," said the boy.
Why not use the money?"
There was an immense fortune lying in that inaccessible nest; and Tip's suggestion was, with the Scarecrow's consent, quickly acted upon.
The Scarecrow's left leg and boot were stuffed with five dollar bills; his right leg was stuffed with ten dollar bills, and his body so closely filled with fifties, one hundreds and one thousands that he could scarcely button his jacket with comfort.
"You are now" said the Woggle Bug, impressively, when the task had been completed, "the most valuable member of our party; and as you
"Thank you," returned the Scarecrow, gratefully.
"Well, the emergency is here," observed Tip; "and unless your brains help us out of it we shall be compelled to pass the remainder of our lives in this nest."
"How about these wishing pills?" enquired the Scarecrow, taking the box from his jacket pocket.
"Not unless we can count seventeen by twos," answered the Tin Woodman.
"But our friend the Woggle Bug claims to be highly educated, so he ought easily to figure out how that can be done."
"Stop! stop!" cried the Pumpkinhead.
"You're making my head ache."
"And mine," added the Scarecrow.
"Your mathematics seem to me very like a bottle of mixed pickles the more you fish for what you want the less chance you have of getting it.
I am certain that if the thing can be accomplished at all, it is in a very simple manner."
"Yes," said Tip.
"Why not start counting at a half of one?" asked the Saw Horse, abruptly. "Then anyone can count up to seventeen by twos very easily."
They looked at each other in surprise, for the Saw Horse was considered the most stupid of the entire party.
"I wonder I didn't think of that myself," said the Pumpkinhead.
"I don't," returned the Scarecrow.
"You're no wiser than the rest of us, are you?
But let us make a wish at once.
Who will swallow the first pill?"
"Suppose you do it," suggested Tip.
"I can't," said the Scarecrow.
"Yes; but my mouth is painted on, and there's no swallow connected with it,' answered the Scarecrow.
"In fact," he continued, looking from one to another critically, "I believe the boy and the Woggle Bug are the only ones in our party that are able to swallow."
Observing the truth of this remark, Tip said:
"Then I will undertake to make the first wish.
Give me one of the Silver Pills."
This the Scarecrow tried to do; but his padded gloves were too clumsy to clutch so small an object, and he held the box toward the boy while Tip selected one of the pills and swallowed it.
"Count!" cried the Scarecrow.
"One half, one, three, five, seven, nine, eleven,!" counted Tip.
thirteen, fifteen, seventeen.
"Now wish!" said the Tin Woodman anxiously:
But Just then the boy began to suffer such fearful pains that he became alarmed.
Murder! Fire!
"What can we do for you.
Speak, I beg!" entreated the Tin Woodman, tears of sympathy running down his nickel cheeks.
"What's happened?" asked the boy, a little ashamed of his recent exhibition.
"Why, the three pills are in the box again!" said the Scarecrow.
"Of course they are," the Woggle Bug declared.
So of course they are all three in the box."
"That may be; but the pill gave me a dreadful pain, just the same," said the boy.
"Impossible!" declared the Woggle
And as your wish, being granted, proves you did not swallow the pill, it is also plain that you suffered no pain."
We've wasted one wish already."
"Oh, no, we haven't!" protested the Scarecrow.
"Now you're making my head ache," said Tip.
"I can't understand the thing at all.
But I won't take another pill, I promise you!" and with this remark he retired sulkily to the back of the nest.
"Well," said the Woggle Bug, "it remains for me to save us in my most Highly Magnified and Thoroughly Educated manner; for I seem to be the only one able and willing to make a wish.
Chapter twenty three
Elizabeth was sitting with her mother and sisters, reflecting on what she had heard, and doubting whether she was authorised to mention it, when Sir William Lucas himself appeared, sent by his daughter, to announce her engagement to the family.
With many compliments to them, and much self gratulation on the prospect of a connection between the houses, he unfolded the matter-to an audience not merely wondering, but incredulous; for mrs Bennet, with more perseverance than politeness, protested he must be entirely mistaken; and Lydia, always unguarded and often uncivil, boisterously exclaimed:
"Good Lord!
Sir William, how can you tell such a story?
Do not you know that mr Collins wants to marry Lizzy?"
mrs Bennet was in fact too much overpowered to say a great deal while Sir William remained; but no sooner had he left them than her feelings found a rapid vent.
In the first place, she persisted in disbelieving the whole of the matter; secondly, she was very sure that mr Collins had been taken in; thirdly, she trusted that they would never be happy together; and fourthly, that the match might be broken off.
Two inferences, however, were plainly deduced from the whole: one, that Elizabeth was the real cause of the mischief; and the other that she herself had been barbarously misused by them all; and on these two points she principally dwelt during the rest of the day.
Nothing could console and nothing could appease her.
Nor did that day wear out her resentment.
A week elapsed before she could see Elizabeth without scolding her, a month passed away before she could speak to Sir William or Lady Lucas without being rude, and many months were gone before she could at all forgive their daughter.
mr Bennet's emotions were much more tranquil on the occasion, and such as he did experience he pronounced to be of a most agreeable sort; for it gratified him, he said, to discover that Charlotte Lucas, whom he had been used to think tolerably sensible, was as foolish as his wife, and more foolish than his daughter!
Jane confessed herself a little surprised at the match; but she said less of her astonishment than of her earnest desire for their happiness; nor could Elizabeth persuade her to consider it as improbable.
Kitty and Lydia were far from envying Miss Lucas, for mr Collins was only a clergyman; and it affected them in no other way than as a piece of news to spread at Meryton.
Between Elizabeth and Charlotte there was a restraint which kept them mutually silent on the subject; and Elizabeth felt persuaded that no real confidence could ever subsist between them again.
Her disappointment in Charlotte made her turn with fonder regard to her sister, of whose rectitude and delicacy she was sure her opinion could never be shaken, and for whose happiness she grew daily more anxious, as Bingley had now been gone a week and nothing more was heard of his return.
Jane had sent Caroline an early answer to her letter, and was counting the days till she might reasonably hope to hear again.
The promised letter of thanks from mr Collins arrived on Tuesday, addressed to their father, and written with all the solemnity of gratitude which a twelvemonth's abode in the family might have prompted.
mr Collins's return into Hertfordshire was no longer a matter of pleasure to mrs Bennet.
On the contrary, she was as much disposed to complain of it as her husband.
It was very strange that he should come to Longbourn instead of to Lucas Lodge; it was also very inconvenient and exceedingly troublesome.
She hated having visitors in the house while her health was so indifferent, and lovers were of all people the most disagreeable.
Such were the gentle murmurs of mrs Bennet, and they gave way only to the greater distress of mr Bingley's continued absence.
Neither Jane nor Elizabeth were comfortable on this subject.
Day after day passed away without bringing any other tidings of him than the report which shortly prevailed in Meryton of his coming no more to Netherfield the whole winter; a report which highly incensed mrs Bennet, and which she never failed to contradict as a most scandalous falsehood.
Even Elizabeth began to fear-not that Bingley was indifferent-but that his sisters would be successful in keeping him away.
Unwilling as she was to admit an idea so destructive of Jane's happiness, and so dishonorable to the stability of her lover, she could not prevent its frequently occurring.
The united efforts of his two unfeeling sisters and of his overpowering friend, assisted by the attractions of Miss Darcy and the amusements of London might be too much, she feared, for the strength of his attachment.
But as no such delicacy restrained her mother, an hour seldom passed in which she did not talk of Bingley, express her impatience for his arrival, or even require Jane to confess that if he did not come back she would think herself very ill used.
It needed all Jane's steady mildness to bear these attacks with tolerable tranquillity.
mr Collins returned most punctually on Monday fortnight, but his reception at Longbourn was not quite so gracious as it had been on his first introduction.
He was too happy, however, to need much attention; and luckily for the others, the business of love making relieved them from a great deal of his company.
The chief of every day was spent by him at Lucas Lodge, and he sometimes returned to Longbourn only in time to make an apology for his absence before the family went to bed.
mrs Bennet was really in a most pitiable state.
The very mention of anything concerning the match threw her into an agony of ill humour, and wherever she went she was sure of hearing it talked of.
The sight of Miss Lucas was odious to her.
Whenever Charlotte came to see them, she concluded her to be anticipating the hour of possession; and whenever she spoke in a low voice to mr Collins, was convinced that they were talking of the Longbourn estate, and resolving to turn herself and her daughters out of the house, as soon as mr Bennet were dead.
She complained bitterly of all this to her husband.
"My dear, do not give way to such gloomy thoughts.
Let us hope for better things.
Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor."
This was not very consoling to mrs Bennet, and therefore, instead of making any answer, she went on as before.
"I cannot bear to think that they should have all this estate.
If it was not for the entail, I should not mind it."
"What should not you mind?"
"I should not mind anything at all."
"Let us be thankful that you are preserved from a state of such insensibility."
"I never can be thankful, mr Bennet, for anything about the entail.
Chapter forty
Elizabeth's impatience to acquaint Jane with what had happened could no longer be overcome; and at length, resolving to suppress every particular in which her sister was concerned, and preparing her to be surprised, she related to her the next morning the chief of the scene between mr Darcy and herself.
Miss Bennet's astonishment was soon lessened by the strong sisterly partiality which made any admiration of Elizabeth appear perfectly natural; and all surprise was shortly lost in other feelings.
She was sorry that mr Darcy should have delivered his sentiments in a manner so little suited to recommend them; but still more was she grieved for the unhappiness which her sister's refusal must have given him.
"His being so sure of succeeding was wrong," said she, "and certainly ought not to have appeared; but consider how much it must increase his disappointment!"
"Indeed," replied Elizabeth, "I am heartily sorry for him; but he has other feelings, which will probably soon drive away his regard for me. You do not blame me, however, for refusing him?"
"Blame you!
Oh, no"
"But you blame me for having spoken so warmly of Wickham?"
She then spoke of the letter, repeating the whole of its contents as far as they concerned George Wickham.
Nor was Darcy's vindication, though grateful to her feelings, capable of consoling her for such discovery. Most earnestly did she labour to prove the probability of error, and seek to clear the one without involving the other.
"This will not do," said Elizabeth; "you never will be able to make both of them good for anything.
Take your choice, but you must be satisfied with only one.
There is but such a quantity of merit between them; just enough to make one good sort of man; and of late it has been shifting about pretty much.
For my part, I am inclined to believe it all Darcy's; but you shall do as you choose."
It was some time, however, before a smile could be extorted from Jane.
"I do not know when I have been more shocked," said she.
"Wickham so very bad!
It is almost past belief.
And poor mr Darcy!
Dear Lizzy, only consider what he must have suffered.
Such a disappointment! and with the knowledge of your ill opinion, too! and having to relate such a thing of his sister!
It is really too distressing.
"Oh! no, my regret and compassion are all done away by seeing you so full of both.
I know you will do him such ample justice, that I am growing every moment more unconcerned and indifferent.
Your profusion makes me saving; and if you lament over him much longer, my heart will be as light as a feather."
"Poor Wickham! there is such an expression of goodness in his countenance! such an openness and gentleness in his manner!"
"There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men.
"And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason.
It is such a spur to one's genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind.
"Lizzy, when you first read that letter, I am sure you could not treat the matter as you do now."
"Indeed, I could not.
I was uncomfortable enough, I may say unhappy.
And with no one to speak to about what I felt, no Jane to comfort me and say that I had not been so very weak and vain and nonsensical as I knew I had!
Oh! how I wanted you!"
"Certainly.
But the misfortune of speaking with bitterness is a most natural consequence of the prejudices I had been encouraging.
There is one point on which I want your advice.
I want to be told whether I ought, or ought not, to make our acquaintances in general understand Wickham's character."
Miss Bennet paused a little, and then replied, "Surely there can be no occasion for exposing him so dreadfully.
What is your opinion?"
"That it ought not to be attempted.
mr Darcy has not authorised me to make his communication public.
On the contrary, every particular relative to his sister was meant to be kept as much as possible to myself; and if I endeavour to undeceive people as to the rest of his conduct, who will believe me?
The general prejudice against mr Darcy is so violent, that it would be the death of half the good people in Meryton to attempt to place him in an amiable light.
I am not equal to it.
Wickham will soon be gone; and therefore it will not signify to anyone here what he really is.
Some time hence it will be all found out, and then we may laugh at their stupidity in not knowing it before.
At present I will say nothing about it."
"You are quite right.
To have his errors made public might ruin him for ever.
He is now, perhaps, sorry for what he has done, and anxious to re-establish a character.
We must not make him desperate."
The tumult of Elizabeth's mind was allayed by this conversation.
But there was still something lurking behind, of which prudence forbade the disclosure.
She dared not relate the other half of mr Darcy's letter, nor explain to her sister how sincerely she had been valued by her friend.
Here was knowledge in which no one could partake; and she was sensible that nothing less than a perfect understanding between the parties could justify her in throwing off this last encumbrance of mystery.
"And then," said she, "if that very improbable event should ever take place, I shall merely be able to tell what Bingley may tell in a much more agreeable manner himself.
The liberty of communication cannot be mine till it has lost all its value!"
She was now, on being settled at home, at leisure to observe the real state of her sister's spirits.
Jane was not happy.
She still cherished a very tender affection for Bingley.
For my part, I am determined never to speak of it again to anybody.
I told my sister Phillips so the other day.
But I cannot find out that Jane saw anything of him in London.
Well, he is a very undeserving young man-and I do not suppose there's the least chance in the world of her ever getting him now.
"I do not believe he will ever live at Netherfield any more."
"Oh well! it is just as he chooses.
Nobody wants him to come.
Though I shall always say he used my daughter extremely ill; and if I was her, I would not have put up with it.
Well, my comfort is, I am sure Jane will die of a broken heart; and then he will be sorry for what he has done."
But as Elizabeth could not receive comfort from any such expectation, she made no answer.
Well, well, I only hope it will last.
And what sort of table do they keep?
Charlotte is an excellent manager, I dare say.
If she is half as sharp as her mother, she is saving enough.
"No, nothing at all."
Well, much good may it do them!
And so, I suppose, they often talk of having Longbourn when your father is dead.
"It was a subject which they could not mention before me."
"No; it would have been strange if they had; but I make no doubt they often talk of it between themselves.
Well, if they can be easy with an estate that is not lawfully their own, so much the better.
Chapter twenty six
IN WHICH PHILEAS FOGG AND PARTY TRAVEL BY THE PACIFIC RAILROAD
"From ocean to ocean"--so say the Americans; and these four words compose the general designation of the "great trunk line" which crosses the entire width of the United States.
New York and San Francisco are thus united by an uninterrupted metal ribbon, which measures no less than three thousand seven hundred and eighty six miles.
Between Omaha and the Pacific the railway crosses a territory which is still infested by Indians and wild beasts, and a large tract which the Mormons, after they were driven from Illinois in eighteen forty five, began to colonise.
The journey from New York to San Francisco consumed, formerly, under the most favourable conditions, at least six months.
It is now accomplished in seven days.
It was in eighteen sixty two that, in spite of the Southern Members of Congress, who wished a more southerly route, it was decided to lay the road between the forty first and forty second parallels.
President Lincoln himself fixed the end of the line at Omaha, in Nebraska.
The work was at once commenced, and pursued with true American energy; nor did the rapidity with which it went on injuriously affect its good execution.
The Pacific Railroad is joined by several branches in Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, and Oregon.
Such was the road to be traversed in seven days, which would enable Phileas Fogg-at least, so he hoped-to take the Atlantic steamer at New York on the eleventh for Liverpool.
The car which he occupied was a sort of long omnibus on eight wheels, and with no compartments in the interior.
It was supplied with two rows of seats, perpendicular to the direction of the train on either side of an aisle which conducted to the front and rear platforms. These platforms were found throughout the train, and the passengers were able to pass from one end of the train to the other.
It was supplied with saloon cars, balcony cars, restaurants, and smoking cars; theatre cars alone were wanting, and they will have these some day.
Book and news dealers, sellers of edibles, drinkables, and cigars, who seemed to have plenty of customers, were continually circulating in the aisles.
The train left Oakland station at six o'clock.
It was already night, cold and cheerless, the heavens being overcast with clouds which seemed to threaten snow.
The train did not proceed rapidly; counting the stoppages, it did not run more than twenty miles an hour, which was a sufficient speed, however, to enable it to reach Omaha within its designated time.
There was but little conversation in the car, and soon many of the passengers were overcome with sleep.
Passepartout found himself beside the detective; but he did not talk to him.
After recent events, their relations with each other had grown somewhat cold; there could no longer be mutual sympathy or intimacy between them.
Fix's manner had not changed; but Passepartout was very reserved, and ready to strangle his former friend on the slightest provocation.
Snow began to fall an hour after they started, a fine snow, however, which happily could not obstruct the train; nothing could be seen from the windows but a vast, white sheet, against which the smoke of the locomotive had a greyish aspect.
At eight o'clock a steward entered the car and announced that the time for going to bed had arrived; and in a few minutes the car was transformed into a dormitory.
The backs of the seats were thrown back, bedsteads carefully packed were rolled out by an ingenious system, berths were suddenly improvised, and each traveller had soon at his disposition a comfortable bed, protected from curious eyes by thick curtains.
The sheets were clean and the pillows soft.
It only remained to go to bed and sleep which everybody did-while the train sped on across the State of California.
The country between San Francisco and Sacramento is not very hilly. The Central Pacific, taking Sacramento for its starting point, extends eastward to meet the road from Omaha.
The line from San Francisco to Sacramento runs in a north easterly direction, along the American River, which empties into San Pablo Bay.
The railway track wound in and out among the passes, now approaching the mountain sides, now suspended over precipices, avoiding abrupt angles by bold curves, plunging into narrow defiles, which seemed to have no outlet.
The train entered the State of Nevada through the Carson Valley about nine o'clock, going always northeasterly; and at midday reached Reno, where there was a delay of twenty minutes for breakfast.
From this point the road, running along Humboldt River, passed northward for several miles by its banks; then it turned eastward, and kept by the river until it reached the Humboldt Range, nearly at the extreme eastern limit of Nevada.
Sometimes a great herd of buffaloes, massing together in the distance, seemed like a moveable dam.
These innumerable multitudes of ruminating beasts often form an insurmountable obstacle to the passage of the trains; thousands of them have been seen passing over the track for hours together, in compact ranks.
This happened, indeed, to the train in which mr Fogg was travelling. About twelve o'clock a troop of ten or twelve thousand head of buffalo encumbered the track.
The locomotive, slackening its speed, tried to clear the way with its cow catcher; but the mass of animals was too great.
There was no use of interrupting them, for, having taken a particular direction, nothing can moderate and change their course; it is a torrent of living flesh which no dam could contain.
The travellers gazed on this curious spectacle from the platforms; but Phileas Fogg, who had the most reason of all to be in a hurry, remained in his seat, and waited philosophically until it should please the buffaloes to get out of the way.
Passepartout was furious at the delay they occasioned, and longed to discharge his arsenal of revolvers upon them.
"What a country!" cried he.
"Mere cattle stop the trains, and go by in a procession, just as if they were not impeding travel!
I should like to know if mr Fogg foresaw this mishap in his programme! And here's an engineer who doesn't dare to run the locomotive into this herd of beasts!"
The engineer did not try to overcome the obstacle, and he was wise.
He would have crushed the first buffaloes, no doubt, with the cow catcher; but the locomotive, however powerful, would soon have been checked, the train would inevitably have been thrown off the track, and would then have been helpless.
The best course was to wait patiently, and regain the lost time by greater speed when the obstacle was removed.
The procession of buffaloes lasted three full hours, and it was night before the track was clear.
The last ranks of the herd were now passing over the rails, while the first had already disappeared below the southern horizon.
Where, then, is justice, and where is injustice, and in what part of the State did they spring up?
Probably in the dealings of these citizens with one another.
I cannot imagine that they are more likely to be found any where else.
I dare say that you are right in your suggestion, I said; we had better think the matter out, and not shrink from the enquiry.
And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means; having an eye to poverty or war.
But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to their meal.
And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them.
Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?
I replied.
Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.
Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate.
In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described.
True, he said.
Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such as the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have to do with forms and colours; another will be the votaries of music-poets and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers, contractors; also makers of divers kinds of articles, including women's dresses.
They must not be forgotten: and there will be animals of many other kinds, if people eat them.
Certainly.
And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than before?
Much greater.
And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will be too small now, and not enough?
Quite true.
Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?
That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
Shall we not?
Most certainly, he replied.
Undoubtedly.
Why? he said; are they not capable of defending themselves?
Very true, he said.
But is not war an art?
Certainly.
And an art requiring as much attention as shoemaking?
Quite true.
Now nothing can be more important than that the work of a soldier should be well done.
But is war an art so easily acquired that a man may be a warrior who is also a husbandman, or shoemaker, or other artisan; although no one in the world would be a good dice or draught player who merely took up the game as a recreation, and had not from his earliest years devoted himself to this and nothing else?
No tools will make a man a skilled workman, or master of defence, nor be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them, and has never bestowed any attention upon them.
How then will he who takes up a shield or other implement of war become a good fighter all in a day, whether with heavy armed or any other kind of troops?
Yes, he said, the tools which would teach men their own use would be beyond price.
And the higher the duties of the guardian, I said, the more time, and skill, and art, and application will be needed by him?
No doubt, he replied.
Will he not also require natural aptitude for his calling?
Certainly.
Then it will be our duty to select, if we can, natures which are fitted for the task of guarding the city?
It will.
And the selection will be no easy matter, I said; but we must be brave and do our best.
We must.
Is not the noble youth very like a well bred dog in respect of guarding and watching?
What do you mean?
I mean that both of them ought to be quick to see, and swift to overtake the enemy when they see him; and strong too if, when they have caught him, they have to fight with him.
All these qualities, he replied, will certainly be required by them.
Well, and your guardian must be brave if he is to fight well?
And is he likely to be brave who has no spirit, whether horse or dog or any other animal?
I have.
True.
Yes.
A difficulty by no means easy to overcome, he replied.
Whereas, I said, they ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle to their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting for their enemies to destroy them.
True, he said.
What is to be done then?
I said; how shall we find a gentle nature which has also a great spirit, for the one is the contradiction of the other?
True.
I am afraid that what you say is true, he replied.
Here feeling perplexed I began to think over what had preceded.--My friend, I said, no wonder that we are in a perplexity; for we have lost sight of the image which we had before us.
he said.
Many animals, I replied, furnish examples of them; our friend the dog is a very good one: you know that well bred dogs are perfectly gentle to their familiars and acquaintances, and the reverse to strangers.
Yes, I know.
Certainly not.
Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the spirited nature, need to have the qualities of a philosopher?
I do not apprehend your meaning.
The trait of which I am speaking, I replied, may be also seen in the dog, and is remarkable in the animal.
What trait?
Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance, he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other any good.
Did this never strike you as curious?
The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of your remark.
And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming;--your dog is a true philosopher.
Why?
Why, because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only by the criterion of knowing and not knowing.
And must not an animal be a lover of learning who determines what he likes and dislikes by the test of knowledge and ignorance?
Most assuredly.
And is not the love of learning the love of wisdom, which is philosophy?
They are the same, he replied.
And may we not say confidently of man also, that he who is likely to be gentle to his friends and acquaintances, must by nature be a lover of wisdom and knowledge?
That we may safely affirm.
Undoubtedly.
Then we have found the desired natures; and now that we have found them, how are they to be reared and educated?
Adeimantus thought that the enquiry would be of great service to us.
Then, I said, my dear friend, the task must not be given up, even if somewhat long.
Certainly not.
And what shall be their education?
Can we find a better than the traditional sort?--and this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul.
True.
Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic afterwards?
By all means.
And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not?
I do.
And literature may be either true or false?
Yes.
I do not understand your meaning, he said.
Very true.
That was my meaning when I said that we must teach music before gymnastics.
Quite right, he said.
Quite true.
And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?
We cannot.
Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only.
he said.
You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of them.
Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the greater.
A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.
But when is this fault committed?
Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes,--as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original.
Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blameable; but what are the stories which you mean?
First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too,--I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him.
But the narrative of Hephaestus binding Here his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten, and all the battles of the gods in Homer-these tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not.
For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.
There you are right, he replied; but if any one asks where are such models to be found and of what tales are you speaking-how shall we answer him?
I said to him, You and I, Adeimantus, at this moment are not poets, but founders of a State: now the founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them, but to make the tales is not their business.
Very true, he said; but what are these forms of theology which you mean?
Something of this kind, I replied:--God is always to be represented as he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the representation is given.
Right.
And is he not truly good? and must he not be represented as such?
Certainly.
And no good thing is hurtful?
No, indeed.
And that which is not hurtful hurts not?
Certainly not.
And that which hurts not does no evil?
no
And can that which does no evil be a cause of evil?
Impossible.
Yes.
And therefore the cause of well-being?
Yes.
It follows therefore that the good is not the cause of all things, but of the good only?
Assuredly.
Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men.
For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.
That appears to me to be most true, he said.
'Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of evil lots,'
'Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;'
but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill,
'Him wild hunger drives o'er the beauteous earth.'
And again-
'Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us.'
'God plants guilt among men when he desires utterly to destroy a house.'
I agree with you, he replied, and am ready to give my assent to the law.
Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform,--that God is not the author of all things, but of good only.
That will do, he said.
And what do you think of a second principle?
I cannot answer you, he said, without more thought.
Well, I said; but if we suppose a change in anything, that change must be effected either by the thing itself, or by some other thing?
Most certainly.
And things which are at their best are also least liable to be altered or discomposed; for example, when healthiest and strongest, the human frame is least liable to be affected by meats and drinks, and the plant which is in the fullest vigour also suffers least from winds or the heat of the sun or any similar causes.
Of course.
And will not the bravest and wisest soul be least confused or deranged by any external influence?
True.
And the same principle, as I should suppose, applies to all composite things-furniture, houses, garments: when good and well made, they are least altered by time and circumstances.
Very true.
Then everything which is good, whether made by art or nature, or both, is least liable to suffer change from without?
True.
But surely God and the things of God are in every way perfect?
Of course they are.
He cannot.
But may he not change and transform himself?
Clearly, he said, that must be the case if he is changed at all.
And will he then change himself for the better and fairer, or for the worse and more unsightly?
Very true, Adeimantus; but then, would any one, whether God or man, desire to make himself worse?
Impossible.
Then it is impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being, as is supposed, the fairest and best that is conceivable, every God remains absolutely and for ever in his own form.
That necessarily follows, he said, in my judgment.
'The gods, taking the disguise of strangers from other lands, walk up and down cities in all sorts of forms;'
and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Here disguised in the likeness of a priestess asking an alms
--let us have no more lies of that sort.
Heaven forbid, he said.
Perhaps, he replied.
Well, but can you imagine that God will be willing to lie, whether in word or deed, or to put forth a phantom of himself?
I cannot say, he replied.
What do you mean?
he said.
I mean that no one is willingly deceived in that which is the truest and highest part of himself, or about the truest and highest matters; there, above all, he is most afraid of a lie having possession of him.
Still, he said, I do not comprehend you.
There is nothing more hateful to them.
Am I not right?
Perfectly right.
The true lie is hated not only by the gods, but also by men?
Yes.
Very true, he said.
But can any of these reasons apply to God?
Can we suppose that he is ignorant of antiquity, and therefore has recourse to invention?
That would be ridiculous, he said.
Then the lying poet has no place in our idea of God?
I should say not.
That is inconceivable.
But he may have friends who are senseless or mad?
But no mad or senseless person can be a friend of God.
Then no motive can be imagined why God should lie?
None whatever.
Then the superhuman and divine is absolutely incapable of falsehood?
Then is God perfectly simple and true both in word and deed; he changes not; he deceives not, either by sign or word, by dream or waking vision.
Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own.
You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type or form in which we should write and speak about divine things.
The gods are not magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in any way.
I grant that.
'Was celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were to be long, and to know no sickness.
And when he had spoken of my lot as in all things blessed of heaven he raised a note of triumph and cheered my soul.
And I thought that the word of Phoebus, being divine and full of prophecy, would not fail.
Such then, I said, are our principles of theology-some tales are to be told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one another.
Yes; and I think that our principles are right, he said.
But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these, and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death?
Certainly not, he said.
And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and terrible?
Impossible.
Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.
That will be our duty, he said.
Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning with the verses,
'I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to nought.'
We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared,
And again:--
'O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form but no mind at all!'
Again of Tiresias:--
'(To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,) that he alone should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades.'
Again:--
'The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamenting her fate, leaving manhood and youth.'
Again:--
'And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth.'
And,--
'As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of them has dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they moved.'
And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.
Undoubtedly.
I do not say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable and effeminate by them.
There is a real danger, he said.
Then we must have no more of them.
True.
Clearly.
And shall we proceed to get rid of the weepings and wailings of famous men?
They will go with the rest.
But shall we be right in getting rid of them?
Reflect: our principle is that the good man will not consider death terrible to any other good man who is his comrade.
Yes; that is our principle.
And therefore he will not sorrow for his departed friend as though he had suffered anything terrible?
He will not.
True, he said.
And for this reason the loss of a son or brother, or the deprivation of fortune, is to him of all men least terrible.
Assuredly.
And therefore he will be least likely to lament, and will bear with the greatest equanimity any misfortune of this sort which may befall him.
Then we shall be right in getting rid of the lamentations of famous men, and making them over to women (and not even to women who are good for anything), or to men of a baser sort, that those who are being educated by us to be the defenders of their country may scorn to do the like.
Nor should he describe Priam the kinsman of the gods as praying and beseeching,
'Rolling in the dirt, calling each man loudly by his name.'
'Alas! my misery!
Alas! that I bore the bravest to my sorrow.'
But if he must introduce the gods, at any rate let him not dare so completely to misrepresent the greatest of the gods, as to make him say-
'O heavens! with my eyes verily I behold a dear friend of mine chased round and round the city, and my heart is sorrowful.'
Or again:--
And instead of having any shame or self control, he will be always whining and lamenting on slight occasions.
Yes, he said, that is most true.
Yes, I replied; but that surely is what ought not to be, as the argument has just proved to us; and by that proof we must abide until it is disproved by a better.
It ought not to be.
Neither ought our guardians to be given to laughter.
For a fit of laughter which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a violent reaction.
So I believe.
Then persons of worth, even if only mortal men, must not be represented as overcome by laughter, and still less must such a representation of the gods be allowed.
Still less of the gods, as you say, he replied.
'Inextinguishable laughter arose among the blessed gods, when they saw Hephaestus bustling about the mansion.'
On your views, we must not admit them.
On my views, if you like to father them on me; that we must not admit them is certain.
Clearly not, he said.
Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good.
If, then, the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the State,
'Any of the craftsmen, whether he be priest or physician or carpenter,'
he will punish him for introducing a practice which is equally subversive and destructive of ship or State.
Most certainly, he said, if our idea of the State is ever carried out.
In the next place our youth must be temperate?
Certainly.
True.
Then we shall approve such language as that of Diomede in Homer,
'Friend, sit still and obey my word,'
and the verses which follow,
'The Greeks marched breathing prowess, ...in silent awe of their leaders,'
We shall.
What of this line,
They are ill spoken.
They may very possibly afford some amusement, but they do not conduce to temperance.
Yes.
And then, again, to make the wisest of men say that nothing in his opinion is more glorious than
'When the tables are full of bread and meat, and the cup bearer carries round wine which he draws from the bowl and pours into the cups,'
is it fit or conducive to temperance for a young man to hear such words? Or the verse
'The saddest of fates is to die and meet destiny from hunger?'
'Without the knowledge of their parents;'
or that other tale of how Hephaestus, because of similar goings on, cast a chain around Ares and Aphrodite?
Indeed, he said, I am strongly of opinion that they ought not to hear that sort of thing.
Certainly, he said.
In the next place, we must not let them be receivers of gifts or lovers of money.
Certainly not.
Neither must we sing to them of
'Gifts persuading gods, and persuading reverend kings.'
Neither is Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, to be approved or deemed to have given his pupil good counsel when he told him that he should take the gifts of the Greeks and assist them; but that without a gift he should not lay aside his anger.
Neither will we believe or acknowledge Achilles himself to have been such a lover of money that he took Agamemnon's gifts, or that when he had received payment he restored the dead body of Hector, but that without payment he was unwilling to do so.
Undoubtedly, he said, these are not sentiments which can be approved.
Loving Homer as I do, I hardly like to say that in attributing these feelings to Achilles, or in believing that they are truly attributed to him, he is guilty of downright impiety.
As little can I believe the narrative of his insolence to Apollo, where he says,
'Thou hast wronged me, O far darter, most abominable of deities.
You are quite right, he replied.
Assuredly not.
And further they are likely to have a bad effect on those who hear them; for everybody will begin to excuse his own vices when he is convinced that similar wickednesses are always being perpetrated by-
and who have
'the blood of deities yet flowing in their veins.'
And therefore let us put an end to such tales, lest they engender laxity of morals among the young.
Very true.
And what shall we say about men?
That is clearly the remaining portion of our subject.
But we are not in a condition to answer this question at present, my friend.
Why not?
To be sure we shall, he replied.
I grant the truth of your inference.
That such things are or are not to be said about men is a question which we cannot determine until we have discovered what justice is, and how naturally advantageous to the possessor, whether he seem to be just or not.
Most true, he said.
"Be done, boys!
Who's there?"
I says:
"Who's me?"
"George Jackson, sir."
"What do you want?"
"I don't want nothing, sir.
"I warn't prowling around, sir, I fell overboard off of the steamboat."
"Oh, you did, did you?
Strike a light there, somebody.
"George Jackson, sir.
I'm only a boy."
"Look here, if you're telling the truth you needn't be afraid  nobody'll hurt you.
But don't try to budge; stand right where you are.
Rouse out Bob and Tom, some of you, and fetch the guns.
George Jackson, is there anybody with you?"
"No, sir, nobody."
I heard the people stirring around in the house now, and see a light. The man sung out:
"Snatch that light away, Betsy, you old fool  ain't you got any sense? Put it on the floor behind the front door.
Bob, if you and Tom are ready, take your places."
"All ready."
"Now, George Jackson, do you know the Shepherdsons?"
"No, sir; I never heard of them."
Now, all ready.
Step forward, George Jackson.
If there's anybody with you, let him keep back  if he shows himself he'll be shot. Come along now.
I took one slow step at a time and there warn't a sound, only I thought I could hear my heart. The dogs were as still as the humans, but they followed a little behind me.
When I got to the three log doorsteps I heard them unlocking and unbarring and unbolting.
"There; I reckon it's all right.
Come in."
So he didn't pry into my pockets, but only felt outside with his hands, and said it was all right.
He told me to make myself easy and at home, and tell all about myself; but the old lady says:
"True for you, Rachel  I forgot."
"Betsy" (this was a nigger woman), "you fly around and get him something to eat as quick as you can, poor thing; and one of you girls go and wake up Buck and tell him  oh, here he is himself.
Buck, take this little stranger and get the wet clothes off from him and dress him up in some of yours that's dry."
Buck looked about as old as me  thirteen or fourteen or along there, though he was a little bigger than me.
He hadn't on anything but a shirt, and he was very frowzy headed.
"Ain't they no Shepherdsons around?"
They said, no, 'twas a false alarm.
"Well," he says, "if they'd a ben some, I reckon I'd a got one."
They all laughed, and Bob says:
"Why, Buck, they might have scalped us all, you've been so slow in coming."
"Well, nobody come after me, and it ain't right I'm always kept down; I don't get no show."
Go 'long with you now, and do as your mother told you."
When we got up stairs to his room he got me a coarse shirt and a roundabout and pants of his, and I put them on.
"Well, guess," he says.
"But you can guess, can't you?
It's just as easy."
"Why, any candle," he says.
"I don't know where he was," says I; "where was he?"
That's where he was!"
"Well, if you knowed where he was, what did you ask me for?"
"Why, blame it, it's a riddle, don't you see?
You got to stay always.
Do you own a dog?
Do you like to comb up Sundays, and all that kind of foolishness?
I reckon I'd better put 'em on, but I'd ruther not, it's so warm.
Are you all ready?
All right.
Cold corn pone, cold corn beef, butter and buttermilk  that is what they had for me down there, and there ain't nothing better that ever I've come across yet.
They all smoked and talked, and I eat and talked.
The young women had quilts around them, and their hair down their backs.
So I laid there about an hour trying to think, and when Buck waked up I says:
"Can you spell, Buck?"
"Yes," he says.
"I bet you can't spell my name," says i
"I bet you what you dare I can," says he.
"All right," says I, "go ahead."
"G e o r g e J a x o n  there now," he says.
"Well," says I, "you done it, but I didn't think you could.
It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too.
There was a big fireplace that was bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean and red by pouring water on them and scrubbing them with another brick; sometimes they wash them over with red water paint that they call Spanish brown, same as they do in town.
They had big brass dog irons that could hold up a saw log.
There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swinging behind it.
It was beautiful to hear that clock tick; and sometimes when one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her up and got her in good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and fifty before she got tuckered out.
Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy.
They squeaked through underneath.
There was a couple of big wild turkey wing fans spread out behind those things.
It come all the way from Philadelphia, they said.
There was some books, too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table.
One was a big family Bible full of pictures.
One was Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why.
The statements was interesting, but tough.
Another was Friendship's Offering, full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn't read the poetry.
Another was Henry Clay's Speeches, and another was dr Gunn's Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body was sick or dead.
There was a hymn book, and a lot of other books.
And there was nice split bottom chairs, and perfectly sound, too  not bagged down in the middle and busted, like an old basket.
But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard.
She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got the chance.
Other times it was hid with a little curtain.
This young girl kept a scrap book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head. It was very good poetry.
And did young Stephen sicken, And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken, And did the mourners cry?
No whooping cough did rack his frame, Nor measles drear with spots; Not these impaired the sacred name Of Stephen Dowling Bots.
Despised love struck not with woe That head of curly knots, Nor stomach troubles laid him low, Young Stephen Dowling Bots.
O no Then list with tearful eye, Whilst I his fate do tell.
They got him out and emptied him; Alas it was too late; His spirit was gone for to sport aloft In the realms of the good and great.
Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing.
She warn't particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold.
She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker  the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler.
She warn't ever the same after that; she never complained, but she kinder pined away and did not live long.
Poor thing, many's the time I made myself go up to the little room that used to be hers and get out her poor old scrap book and read in it when her pictures had been aggravating me and I had soured on her a little.
I liked all that family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let anything come between us.
Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make some about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn't seem to make it go somehow.
Well, as I was saying about the parlor, there was beautiful curtains on the windows: white, with pictures painted on them of castles with vines all down the walls, and cattle coming down to drink.
The walls of all the rooms was plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was whitewashed on the outside.
It was a double house, and the big open place betwixt them was roofed and floored, and sometimes the table was set there in the middle of the day, and it was a cool, comfortable place.
In brief, Mitya was informed that he was, from that moment, a prisoner, and that he would be driven at once to the town, and there shut up in a very unpleasant place.
Mitya listened attentively, and only shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, gentlemen, I don't blame you.
I understand that there's nothing else for you to do."
Nikolay Parfenovitch informed him gently that he would be escorted at once by the rural police officer, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, who happened to be on the spot....
"Gentlemen, we're all cruel, we're all monsters, we all make men weep, and mothers, and babes at the breast, but of all, let it be settled here, now, of all I am the lowest reptile!
I've sworn to amend, and every day I've done the same filthy things.
Never, never should I have risen of myself!
But the thunderbolt has fallen.
I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified.
Perhaps I shall be purified, gentlemen?
But listen, for the last time, I am not guilty of my father's blood.
I accept my punishment, not because I killed him, but because I meant to kill him, and perhaps I really might have killed him.
Still I mean to fight it out with you.
I warn you of that. I'll fight it out with you to the end, and then God will decide.
Oh, I was still such a fool then....
Saying good by to you, I say it to all men."
His voice quivered and he stretched out his hand, but Nikolay Parfenovitch, who happened to stand nearest to him, with a sudden, almost nervous movement, hid his hands behind his back.
Mitya instantly noticed this, and started.
He let his outstretched hand fall at once.
"The preliminary inquiry is not yet over," Nikolay Parfenovitch faltered, somewhat embarrassed.
"We will continue it in the town, and I, for my part, of course, am ready to wish you all success ... in your defense.... As a matter of fact, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, I've always been disposed to regard you as, so to speak, more unfortunate than guilty.
All of us here, if I may make bold to speak for all, we are all ready to recognize that you are, at bottom, a young man of honor, but, alas, one who has been carried away by certain passions to a somewhat excessive degree...."
Nikolay Parfenovitch's little figure was positively majestic by the time he had finished speaking.
"Certainly, but considering ... in fact, now it's impossible except in the presence of-"
"Oh, well, if it must be so, it must!"
Grushenka made a deep bow to Mitya.
"I have told you I am yours, and I will be yours.
I will follow you for ever, wherever they may send you.
Farewell; you are guiltless, though you've been your own undoing."
Her lips quivered, tears flowed from her eyes.
"Forgive me, Grusha, for my love, for ruining you, too, with my love."
Mitya would have said something more, but he broke off and went out.
He was at once surrounded by men who kept a constant watch on him.
Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, a sturdy, thick set man with a wrinkled face, was annoyed about something, some sudden irregularity.
He was shouting angrily.
He asked Mitya to get into the cart with somewhat excessive surliness.
At the gates there was a crowd of people, peasants, women and drivers.
All stared at Mitya.
"Forgive me at parting, good people!" Mitya shouted suddenly from the cart.
"Forgive us too!" he heard two or three voices.
"Good by to you, too, Trifon Borissovitch!"
But Trifon Borissovitch did not even turn round.
He was, perhaps, too busy.
He, too, was shouting and fussing about something.
It appeared that everything was not yet ready in the second cart, in which two constables were to accompany Mavriky Mavrikyevitch.
The peasant persisted and besought them to wait.
"You see what our peasants are, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch.
They've no shame!" exclaimed Trifon Borissovitch.
You've drunk it all and now you cry out.
I'm simply surprised at your good nature, with our low peasants, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, that's all I can say."
"But what do we want a second cart for?" Mitya put in.
"Let's start with the one, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch.
I won't be unruly, I won't run away from you, old fellow.
What do we want an escort for?"
"I'll trouble you, sir, to learn how to speak to me if you've never been taught.
I'm not 'old fellow' to you, and you can keep your advice for another time!" Mavriky Mavrikyevitch snapped out savagely, as though glad to vent his wrath.
Mitya was reduced to silence.
He flushed all over.
A moment later he felt suddenly very cold.
The rain had ceased, but the dull sky was still overcast with clouds, and a keen wind was blowing straight in his face.
"I've taken a chill," thought Mitya, twitching his shoulders.
At last Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, too, got into the cart, sat down heavily, and, as though without noticing it, squeezed Mitya into the corner.
It is true that he was out of humor and greatly disliked the task that had been laid upon him.
"Good by, Trifon Borissovitch!" Mitya shouted again, and felt himself, that he had not called out this time from good nature, but involuntarily, from resentment.
"Good by, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, good by!" he heard all at once the voice of Kalganov, who had suddenly darted out.
Running up to the cart he held out his hand to Mitya.
He had no cap on.
Mitya had time to seize and press his hand.
I shan't forget your generosity," he cried warmly.
But the cart moved and their hands parted.
The bell began ringing and Mitya was driven off.
Kalganov ran back, sat down in a corner, bent his head, hid his face in his hands, and burst out crying.
For a long while he sat like that, crying as though he were a little boy instead of a young man of twenty.
Oh, he believed almost without doubt in Mitya's guilt.
"What are these people?
What can men be after this?" he exclaimed incoherently, in bitter despondency, almost despair.
At that moment he had no desire to live.
"Is it worth it?
Is it worth it?" exclaimed the boy in his grief.
EPILOGUE
Chapter one Plans For Mitya's Escape
Very early, at nine o'clock in the morning, five days after the trial, Alyosha went to Katerina Ivanovna's to talk over a matter of great importance to both of them, and to give her a message.
She sat and talked to him in the very room in which she had once received Grushenka.
In the next room Ivan Fyodorovitch lay unconscious in a high fever.
Katerina Ivanovna had immediately after the scene at the trial ordered the sick and unconscious man to be carried to her house, disregarding the inevitable gossip and general disapproval of the public.
But if both had gone away, Katerina Ivanovna would have adhered to her resolution, and would have gone on nursing the sick man and sitting by him day and night.
Varvinsky and Herzenstube were attending him.
The famous doctor had gone back to Moscow, refusing to give an opinion as to the probable end of the illness.
Though the doctors encouraged Katerina Ivanovna and Alyosha, it was evident that they could not yet give them positive hopes of recovery.
Alyosha came to see his sick brother twice a day.
But this time he had specially urgent business, and he foresaw how difficult it would be to approach the subject, yet he was in great haste.
He had another engagement that could not be put off for that same morning, and there was need of haste.
They had been talking for a quarter of an hour.
Katerina Ivanovna was pale and terribly fatigued, yet at the same time in a state of hysterical excitement.
He must escape. That unhappy man, that hero of honor and principle-not he, not Dmitri Fyodorovitch, but the man lying the other side of that door, who has sacrificed himself for his brother," Katya added, with flashing eyes-"told me the whole plan of escape long ago.
I've told you something already....
Oh, it's a long way off yet.
To morrow perhaps I will show you in detail the whole plan which Ivan Fyodorovitch left me on the eve of the trial in case of need....
That was when-do you remember?--you found us quarreling.
He had just gone down stairs, but seeing you I made him come back; do you remember?
Do you know what we were quarreling about then?"
"Of course he did not tell you.
It was about that plan of escape.
He had told me the main idea three days before, and we began quarreling about it at once and quarreled for three days.
We quarreled because, when he told me that if Dmitri Fyodorovitch were convicted he would escape abroad with that creature, I felt furious at once-I can't tell you why, I don't know myself why....
"As soon as Ivan Fyodorovitch saw that I was furious about that woman, he instantly imagined I was jealous of Dmitri and that I still loved Dmitri.
That is how our first quarrel began.
I would not give an explanation, I could not ask forgiveness.
It was only resentment against that creature that made me angry with him.
Three days later, on the evening you came, he brought me a sealed envelope, which I was to open at once, if anything happened to him.
Oh, he foresaw his illness!
He told me that the envelope contained the details of the escape, and that if he died or was taken dangerously ill, I was to save Mitya alone.
Then he left me money, nearly ten thousand-those notes to which the prosecutor referred in his speech, having learnt from some one that he had sent them to be changed.
I was tremendously impressed to find that Ivan Fyodorovitch had not given up his idea of saving his brother, and was confiding this plan of escape to me, though he was still jealous of me and still convinced that I loved Mitya.
Oh, that was a sacrifice!
No, you cannot understand the greatness of such self sacrifice, Alexey Fyodorovitch.
I wanted to fall at his feet in reverence, but I thought at once that he would take it only for my joy at the thought of Mitya's being saved (and he certainly would have imagined that!), and I was so exasperated at the mere possibility of such an unjust thought on his part that I lost my temper again, and instead of kissing his feet, flew into a fury again!
Oh, I am unhappy!
It's my character, my awful, unhappy character!
Oh, you will see, I shall end by driving him, too, to abandon me for another with whom he can get on better, like Dmitri.
But ... no, I could not bear it, I should kill myself.
I said that malicious thing on purpose to wound him again.
He had never, never persuaded me that his brother was a murderer.
On the contrary, it was I who persuaded him!
Oh, my vile temper was the cause of everything!
I paved the way to that hideous scene at the trial.
He wanted to show me that he was an honorable man, and that, even if I loved his brother, he would not ruin him for revenge or jealousy.
So he came to the court ...
Oh, Alyosha knew another terrible reason of her present misery, though she had carefully concealed it from him during those days since the trial; but it would have been for some reason too painful to him if she had been brought so low as to speak to him now about that.
She was suffering for her "treachery" at the trial, and Alyosha felt that her conscience was impelling her to confess it to him, to him, Alyosha, with tears and cries and hysterical writhings on the floor.
But he dreaded that moment and longed to spare her.
It made the commission on which he had come even more difficult.
"It's all right, it's all right, don't be anxious about him!" she began again, sharply and stubbornly.
"All that is only momentary, I know him, I know his heart only too well.
You may be sure he will consent to escape. It's not as though it would be immediately; he will have time to make up his mind to it.
Ivan Fyodorovitch will be well by that time and will manage it all himself, so that I shall have nothing to do with it.
He has agreed already: do you suppose he would give up that creature?
And they won't let her go to him, so he is bound to escape.
It's you he's most afraid of, he is afraid you won't approve of his escape on moral grounds.
She paused and smiled.
"He talks about some hymn," she went on again, "some cross he has to bear, some duty; I remember Ivan Fyodorovitch told me a great deal about it, and if you knew how he talked!" Katya cried suddenly, with feeling she could not repress, "if you knew how he loved that wretched man at the moment he told me, and how he hated him, perhaps, at the same moment.
And I heard his story and his tears with sneering disdain.
Brute!
Yes, I am a brute.
I am responsible for his fever.
But that man in prison is incapable of suffering," Katya concluded irritably.
"Can such a man suffer?
Men like him never suffer!"
There was a note of hatred and contemptuous repulsion in her words.
And yet it was she who had betrayed him.
"Perhaps because she feels how she's wronged him she hates him at moments," Alyosha thought to himself.
"I sent for you this morning to make you promise to persuade him yourself. Or do you, too, consider that to escape would be dishonorable, cowardly, or something ... unchristian, perhaps?" Katya added, even more defiantly.
"Oh, no I'll tell him everything," muttered Alyosha.
She started, and drew back a little from him on the sofa.
"Me?
Can that be?" she faltered, turning pale.
"It can and ought to be!" Alyosha began emphatically, growing more animated.
"He needs you particularly just now.
I would not have opened the subject and worried you, if it were not necessary.
He is ill, he is beside himself, he keeps asking for you.
It is not to be reconciled with you that he wants you, but only that you would go and show yourself at his door.
So much has happened to him since that day.
He realizes that he has injured you beyond all reckoning.
He does not ask your forgiveness-'It's impossible to forgive me,' he says himself-but only that you would show yourself in his doorway."
"It's so sudden...." faltered Katya.
"I've had a presentiment all these days that you would come with that message.
I knew he would ask me to come.
Only think, he realizes for the first time how he has wounded you, the first time in his life; he had never grasped it before so fully.
Think-you must visit him; though he is ruined, he is innocent," broke like a challenge from Alyosha.
For the sake of his infinite sufferings in the future visit him now.
Go, greet him on his way into the darkness-stand at his door, that is all....
You ought to do it, you ought to!" Alyosha concluded, laying immense stress on the word "ought."
"I ought to ... but I cannot...." Katya moaned.
"He will look at me....
I can't."
"Your eyes ought to meet.
How will you live all your life, if you don't make up your mind to do it now?"
"Better suffer all my life."
"You ought to go, you ought to go," Alyosha repeated with merciless emphasis.
"But why to day, why at once?...
I can't leave our patient-"
"You can for a moment.
If you don't come, he will be in delirium by to night.
I would not tell you a lie; have pity on him!"
"Then you will come," said Alyosha firmly, seeing her tears.
"I'll go and tell him you will come directly."
"No, don't tell him so on any account," cried Katya in alarm.
"I will come, but don't tell him beforehand, for perhaps I may go, but not go in....
I don't know yet-"
She gasped for breath.
"That's just why you must go now, to avoid meeting any one.
We will expect you," he concluded emphatically, and went out of the room.
Give thy thoughts no tongue. SHAKESPEARE
I do not scruple to tell you, that I am unhappy, and that the watch of the last night has not assisted me to discover Ludovico; upon every occurrence of the night you must excuse my reserve.'
In the evening, the Count called, as he had promised, at the convent, and Emily was surprised to perceive a mixture of playful ridicule and of reserve in his mention of the north apartment.
Soon after, he took leave, and, when Emily joined some of the nuns, she was surprised to find them acquainted with a circumstance, which she had carefully avoided to mention, and expressing their admiration of his intrepidity in having dared to pass a night in the apartment, whence Ludovico had disappeared; for she had not considered with what rapidity a tale of wonder circulates.
'The guilty cannot claim that protection!' said sister Agnes, 'let the Count look to his conduct, that he do not forfeit his claim!
I mean you are yet innocent of any great crime!--But you have passions in your heart,--scorpions; they sleep now-beware how you awaken them!--they will sting you, even unto death!'
'We are taught to hope, that prayer and penitence will work our salvation.
There is hope for all who repent!'
I see them now-now!'
Was not that the vesper bell?'
'No,' replied Frances, 'the evening service is passed.
'You are right,' replied sister Agnes, 'I shall be better there.
Your services have already awakened her gratitude, and your sufferings her pity; and trust me, my friend, in a heart so sensible as hers, gratitude and pity lead to love.
By what means he did this, I never could learn; but he secreted her in this convent, where he afterwards prevailed with her to take the veil, while a report was circulated in the world, that she was dead, and the father, to save his daughter, assisted the rumour, and employed such means as induced her husband to believe she had become a victim to his jealousy.
At first, she was frantic and melancholy by quick alternatives; then, she sunk into a deep and settled melancholy, which still, however, has, at times, been interrupted by fits of wildness, and, of late, these have again been frequent.'
Emily did not appear to notice this question, but remained thoughtful, for a few moments, and then said, 'It was about that same period that the Marchioness de Villeroi expired.'
'That is an odd remark,' said Frances.
'I do not doubt it,' replied the Count, 'and I will not deny myself and Blanche the pleasure of visiting you, if your affairs should allow you to be at La Vallee, about the time when we can meet you there.'
CHAPTER sixteen
Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine, than the physician. MACBETH
Emily expressed her sincere concern.
'Her death presents to us a great and awful lesson,' continued the abbess; 'let us read it, and profit by it; let it teach us to prepare ourselves for the change, that awaits us all!
Hah! there again!
When she had finished, she returned the miniature to Emily. 'Keep it,' said she, 'I bequeath it to you, for I must believe it is your right.
What are riches-grandeur-health itself, to the luxury of a pure conscience, the health of the soul;--and what the sufferings of poverty, disappointment, despair-to the anguish of an afflicted one!
I tasted too what was called the sweet of revenge-but it was transient, it expired even with the object, that provoked it.
What!
Blood-blood too!--There was no blood-thou canst not say it!--Nay, do not smile,--do not smile so piteously!'
Du Pont to invite him to the chateau.
Du Pont he recited some particulars of his late sufferings, when it appeared, that he had been confined for several months in one of the prisons of Paris, with little hope of release, and without the comfort of seeing his wife, who had been absent in the country, endeavouring, though in vain, to procure assistance from his friends.
He succeeded; the heavy debt, that oppressed me, was discharged; and, when I would have expressed my sense of the obligation I had received, my benefactor was fled from my search.
Amiable and unfortunate Valancourt!'
Bonnac, if it had been possible for him to forget the benevolent Valancourt, would have wished that Emily might accept the just Du Pont.
The Lady Harriet, who remained at the hall, was a great invalid, and never went out in the carriage, and the Lady Anne preferred riding on horseback with her brother or cousins.
She was a perfect horsewoman, and as gay and gentle as she was beautiful.
I enjoyed these rides very much in the clear cold air, sometimes with Ginger, sometimes with Lizzie.
This Lizzie was a bright bay mare, almost thoroughbred, and a great favorite with the gentlemen, on account of her fine action and lively spirit; but Ginger, who knew more of her than I did, told me she was rather nervous.
"Are you tired of your good Black Auster?"
"Oh, no, not at all," she replied, "but I am amiable enough to let you ride him for once, and I will try your charming Lizzie.
"Do let me advise you not to mount her," he said; "she is a charming creature, but she is too nervous for a lady.
I assure you, she is not perfectly safe; let me beg you to have the saddles changed."
"My dear cousin," said Lady Anne, laughing, "pray do not trouble your good careful head about me.
There was no more to be said; he placed her carefully on the saddle, looked to the bit and curb, gave the reins gently into her hand, and then mounted me.
"Would they ask this question for her at dr Ashley's, and bring the answer?"
The village was about a mile off, and the doctor's house was the last in it.
We went along gayly enough till we came to his gate.
There was a short drive up to the house between tall evergreens.
He looked at her doubtfully.
"I will not be five minutes," he said.
"Oh, do not hurry yourself; Lizzie and I shall not run away from you."
Lizzie was standing quietly by the side of the road a few paces off, with her back to me.
My young mistress was sitting easily with a loose rein, humming a little song.
I listened to my rider's footsteps until they reached the house, and heard him knock at the door.
It was so sudden that Lady Anne was nearly unseated, but she soon recovered herself.
I gave a loud, shrill neigh for help; again and again I neighed, pawing the ground impatiently, and tossing my head to get the rein loose.
I had not long to wait.
Long before we came to the bend she was out of sight.
Which way had she turned?
A woman was standing at her garden gate, shading her eyes with her hand, and looking eagerly up the road.
Scarcely drawing the rein, Blantyre shouted, "Which way?" "To the right!" cried the woman, pointing with her hand, and away we went up the right-hand road; then for a moment we caught sight of her; another bend and she was hidden again.
We had hardly turned on the common, when we caught sight again of the green habit flying on before us.
My lady's hat was gone, and her long brown hair was streaming behind her.
About halfway across the heath there had been a wide dike recently cut, and the earth from the cutting was cast up roughly on the other side. Surely this would stop them!
I gathered myself well together and with one determined leap cleared both dike and bank.
Gently he turned her face upward: it was ghastly white and the eyes were closed.
"Annie, dear Annie, do speak!"
But there was no answer.
He unbuttoned her habit, loosened her collar, felt her hands and wrist, then started up and looked wildly round him for help.
At no great distance there were two men cutting turf, who, seeing Lizzie running wild without a rider, had left their work to catch her.
Blantyre's halloo soon brought them to the spot.
"Can you ride?"
He had no whip, which seemed to trouble him; but my pace soon cured that difficulty, and he found the best thing he could do was to stick to the saddle and hold me in, which he did manfully.
Woah!
Steady!" On the highroad we were all right; and at the doctor's and the hall he did his errand like a good man and true.
Ginger was saddled and sent off in great haste for Lord George, and I soon heard the carriage roll out of the yard.
It seemed a long time before Ginger came back, and before we were left alone; and then she told me all that she had seen.
"I can't tell much," she said.
"We went a gallop nearly all the way, and got there just as the doctor rode up.
The doctor poured something into her mouth, but all that I heard was, 'She is not dead.' Then I was led off by a man to a little distance.
After awhile she was taken to the carriage, and we came home together.
I heard my master say to a gentleman who stopped him to inquire, that he hoped no bones were broken, but that she had not spoken yet."
When Lord George took Ginger for hunting, York shook his head; he said it ought to be a steady hand to train a horse for the first season, and not a random rider like Lord George.
Ginger used to like it very much, but sometimes when she came back I could see that she had been very much strained, and now and then she gave a short cough.
Two days after the accident Blantyre paid me a visit; he patted me and praised me very much; he told Lord George that he was sure the horse knew of Annie's danger as well as he did.
thirty two A Horse Fair
No doubt a horse fair is a very amusing place to those who have nothing to lose; at any rate, there is plenty to see.
I was put with two or three other strong, useful looking horses, and a good many people came to look at us.
There was one man, I thought, if he would buy me, I should be happy. He was not a gentleman, nor yet one of the loud, flashy sort that call themselves so.
I knew in a moment by the way he handled me, that he was used to horses; he spoke gently, and his gray eye had a kindly, cheery look in it.
He offered twenty three pounds for me, but that was refused, and he walked away.
One or two more came who did not mean business.
Then the hard faced man came back again and offered twenty three pounds.
A very close bargain was being driven, for my salesman began to think he should not get all he asked, and must come down; but just then the gray eyed man came back again.
I could not help reaching out my head toward him.
He stroked my face kindly.
I'll give twenty four for him."
"Say twenty five and you shall have him."
"Twenty four ten," said my friend, in a very decided tone, "and not another sixpence-yes or no?"
"Done," said the salesman; "and you may depend upon it there's a monstrous deal of quality in that horse, and if you want him for cab work he's a bargain."
He gave me a good feed of oats and stood by while I ate it, talking to himself and talking to me.
Half an hour after we were on our way to London, through pleasant lanes and country roads, until we came into the great London thoroughfare, on which we traveled steadily, till in the twilight we reached the great city.
The gas lamps were already lighted; there were streets to the right, and streets to the left, and streets crossing each other, for mile upon mile.
I thought we should never come to the end of them.
"Halloo!" cried a voice.
"Have you got a good one?"
"I think so," replied my owner.
"I wish you luck with him."
"Thank you, governor," and he rode on.
We soon turned up one of the side streets, and about halfway up that we turned into a very narrow street, with rather poor looking houses on one side, and what seemed to be coach houses and stables on the other.
My owner pulled up at one of the houses and whistled.
"Now, then, Harry, my boy, open the gates, and mother will bring us the lantern."
"Is he gentle, father?"
"Yes, Dolly, as gentle as your own kitten; come and pat him."
How good it felt!
"Do, Polly, it's just what he wants; and I know you've got a beautiful mash ready for me."
There was a king who had twelve beautiful daughters.
They slept in twelve beds all in one room; and when they went to bed, the doors were shut and locked up; but every morning their shoes were found to be quite worn through as if they had been danced in all night; and yet nobody could find out how it happened, or where they had been.
Then the king made it known to all the land, that if any person could discover the secret, and find out where it was that the princesses danced in the night, he should have the one he liked best for his wife, and should be king after his death; but whoever tried and did not succeed, after three days and nights, should be put to death.
A king's son soon came.
There he was to sit and watch where they went to dance; and, in order that nothing might pass without his hearing it, the door of his chamber was left open.
But the king's son soon fell asleep; and when he awoke in the morning he found that the princesses had all been dancing, for the soles of their shoes were full of holes.
The same thing happened the second and third night: so the king ordered his head to be cut off.
Now it chanced that an old soldier, who had been wounded in battle and could fight no longer, passed through the country where this king reigned: and as he was travelling through a wood, he met an old woman, who asked him where he was going.
He was as well received as the others had been, and the king ordered fine royal robes to be given him; and when the evening came he was led to the outer chamber.
Just as he was going to lie down, the eldest of the princesses brought him a cup of wine; but the soldier threw it all away secretly, taking care not to drink a drop.
When the twelve princesses heard this they laughed heartily; and the eldest said, 'This fellow too might have done a wiser thing than lose his life in this way!' Then they rose up and opened their drawers and boxes, and took out all their fine clothes, and dressed themselves at the glass, and skipped about as if they were eager to begin dancing.
But the youngest said, 'I don't know how it is, while you are so happy I feel very uneasy; I am sure some mischance will befall us.' 'You simpleton,' said the eldest, 'you are always afraid; have you forgotten how many kings' sons have already watched in vain? And as for this soldier, even if I had not given him his sleeping draught, he would have slept soundly enough.'
That never happened before.' But the eldest said, 'It is only our princes, who are shouting for joy at our approach.'
Then they came to another grove of trees, where all the leaves were of gold; and afterwards to a third, where the leaves were all glittering diamonds.
One of the princesses went into each boat, and the soldier stepped into the same boat with the youngest.
There they all landed, and went into the castle, and each prince danced with his princess; and the soldier, who was all the time invisible, danced with them too; and when any of the princesses had a cup of wine set by her, he drank it all up, so that when she put the cup to her mouth it was empty.
They danced on till three o'clock in the morning, and then all their shoes were worn out, so that they were obliged to leave off. The princes rowed them back again over the lake (but this time the soldier placed himself in the boat with the eldest princess); and on the opposite shore they took leave of each other, the princesses promising to come again the next night.
When they came to the stairs, the soldier ran on before the princesses, and laid himself down; and as the twelve sisters slowly came up very much tired, they heard him snoring in his bed; so they said, 'Now all is quite safe'; then they undressed themselves, put away their fine clothes, pulled off their shoes, and went to bed.
However, on the third night the soldier carried away one of the golden cups as a token of where he had been.
As soon as the time came when he was to declare the secret, he was taken before the king with the three branches and the golden cup; and the twelve princesses stood listening behind the door to hear what he would say.
And when the king asked him.
'Where do my twelve daughters dance at night?' he answered, 'With twelve princes in a castle under ground.' And then he told the king all that had happened, and showed him the three branches and the golden cup which he had brought with him.
And the king asked the soldier which of them he would choose for his wife; and he answered, 'I am not very young, so I will have the eldest.'--And they were married that very day, and the soldier was chosen to be the king's heir.
seven.
Plainly she was the mere puppet of her moods, and more than that, any cunning nurse who knew her well enough could call or send away those moods almost as she pleased, like a showman pulling strings behind a show.
Agnes, on the contrary, seldom changed her mood, but kept that of calm assured self satisfaction.
Father nor mother had ever by wise punishment helped her to gain a victory over herself, and do what she did not like or choose; and their folly in reasoning with one unreasonable had fixed her in her conceit.
She would actually nod her head to herself in complacent pride that she had stood out against them.
Whether it be a good thing or a bad not to be afraid depends on what the fearlessness is founded upon.
Some have no fear, because they have no knowledge of the danger: there is nothing fine in that.
Some are too stupid to be afraid: there is nothing fine in that.
Some who are not easily frightened would yet turn their backs and run, the moment they were frightened: such never had more courage than fear.
But the man who will do his work in spite of his fear is a man of true courage.
The fearlessness of Agnes was only ignorance: she did not know what it was to be hurt; she had never read a single story of giant, or ogress or wolf; and her mother had never carried out one of her threats of punishment.
Nothing such, however, was in the wise woman's plan for the curing of her.
On and on she carried her without a word.
She knew that if she set her down she would never run after her like the princess, at least not before the evil thing was already upon her.
On and on she went, never halting, never letting the light look in, or Agnes look out.
She walked very fast, and got home to her cottage very soon after the princess had gone from it.
But she did not set Agnes down either in the cottage or in the great hall.
She had other places, none of them alike.
The place she had chosen for Agnes was a strange one-such a one as is to be found nowhere else in the wide world.
It was a great hollow sphere, made of a substance similar to that of the mirror which Rosamond had broken, but differently compounded.
It had neither door, nor window, nor any opening to break its perfect roundness.
The wise woman carried Agnes into a dark room, there undressed her, took from her hand her knitting needles, and put her, naked as she was born, into the hollow sphere.
What sort of a place it was she could not tell.
She could see nothing but a faint cold bluish light all about her.
She could not feel that any thing supported her, and yet she did not sink.
She stood for a while, perfectly calm, then sat down.
And, indeed, it was but this: she had cared only for Somebody, and now she was going to have only Somebody.
Her own choice was going to be carried a good deal farther for her than she would have knowingly carried it for herself.
After sitting a while, she wished she had something to do, but nothing came.
A little longer, and it grew wearisome.
She would see whether she could not walk out of the strange luminous dusk that surrounded her.
Walk she found she could, well enough, but walk out she could not.
On and on she went, keeping as much in a straight line as she might, but after walking until she was thoroughly tired, she found herself no nearer out of her prison than before.
She had not, indeed, advanced a single step; for, in whatever direction she tried to go, the sphere turned round and round, answering her feet accordingly.
Like a squirrel in his cage she but kept placing another spot of the cunningly suspended sphere under her feet, and she would have been still only at its lowest point after walking for ages.
At length she cried aloud; but there was no answer.
It grew dreary and drearier-in her, that is: outside there was no change.
Nothing was overhead, nothing under foot, nothing on either hand, but the same pale, faint, bluish glimmer.
She wept at last, then grew very angry, and then sullen; but nobody heeded whether she cried or laughed.
It was all the same to the cold unmoving twilight that rounded her.
On and on went the dreary hours-or did they go at all?--"no change, no pause, no hope;"--on and on till she FELT she was forgotten, and then she grew strangely still and fell asleep.
The moment she was asleep, the wise woman came, lifted her out, and laid her in her bosom; fed her with a wonderful milk, which she received without knowing it; nursed her all the night long, and, just ere she woke, laid her back in the blue sphere again.
When first she came to herself, she thought the horrors of the preceding day had been all a dream of the night.
But they soon asserted themselves as facts, for here they were!--nothing to see but a cold blue light, and nothing to do but see it.
Oh, how slowly the hours went by!
She lost all notion of time.
If she had been told that she had been there twenty years, she would have believed it-or twenty minutes-it would have been all the same: except for weariness, time was for her no more.
Another night came, and another still, during both of which the wise woman nursed and fed her.
But she knew nothing of that, and the same one dreary day seemed ever brooding over her.
All at once, on the third day, she was aware that a naked child was seated beside her.
But there was something about the child that made her shudder.
She was the color of pale earth, with a pinched nose, and a mere slit in her face for a mouth.
"How ugly she is!" thought Agnes.
"What business has she beside me!"
But it was so lonely that she would have been glad to play with a serpent, and put out her hand to touch her.
She touched nothing.
The child, also, put out her hand-but in the direction away from Agnes. And that was well, for if she had touched Agnes it would have killed her.
Then Agnes said, "Who are you?" And the little girl said, "Who are you?"
"I am Agnes," said Agnes; and the little girl said, "I am Agnes." Then Agnes thought she was mocking her, and said, "You are ugly;" and the little girl said, "You are ugly."
Then Agnes lost her temper, and put out her hands to seize the little girl; but lo! the little girl was gone, and she found herself tugging at her own hair.
Agnes was furious now, and flew at her to bite her.
But she found her teeth in her own arm, and the little girl was gone-only to return again; and each time she came back she was tenfold uglier than before.
And now Agnes hated her with her whole heart.
The moment she hated her, it flashed upon her with a sickening disgust that the child was not another, but her Self, her Somebody, and that she was now shut up with her for ever and ever-no more for one moment ever to be alone.
In her agony of despair, sleep descended, and she slept.
When she woke, there was the little girl, heedless, ugly, miserable, staring at her own toes.
All at once, the creature began to smile, but with such an odious, self satisfied expression, that Agnes felt ashamed of seeing her.
She turned sick at herself, and would gladly have been put out of existence, but for three days the odious companionship went on.
By the third day, Agnes was not merely sick but ashamed of the life she had hitherto led, was despicable in her own eyes, and astonished that she had never seen the truth concerning herself before.
The next morning she woke in the arms of the wise woman; the horror had vanished from her sight, and two heavenly eyes were gazing upon her. She wept and clung to her, and the more she clung, the more tenderly did the great strong arms close around her.
When she had lain thus for a while, the wise woman carried her into her cottage, and washed her in the little well; then dressed her in clean garments, and gave her bread and milk.
When she had eaten it, she called her to her, and said very solemnly,--
"Agnes, you must not imagine you are cured.
That you are ashamed of yourself now is no sign that the cause for such shame has ceased.
In new circumstances, especially after you have done well for a while, you will be in danger of thinking just as much of yourself as before.
So beware of yourself.
I am going from home, and leave you in charge of the house.
CHAPTER fifty three.
A FRIEND IN NEED.
Mary left the house, and saw no one on her way.
But it was better, she said to herself, that he should lie there untended, than be waited on by unloving hands.
The night was very dark.
There was no moon, and the stars were hidden by thick clouds.
She must walk all the way to Testbridge.
She felt weak, but the fresh air was reviving.
She had not gone far when the moon rose, and from behind the clouds diminished the darkness a little.
The first part of her journey lay along a narrow lane, with a small ditch, a rising bank, and a hedge on each side.
About the middle of the lane was a farmyard, and a little way farther a cottage.
Soon after passing the gate of the farmyard, she thought she heard steps behind her, seemingly soft and swift, and naturally felt a little apprehension; but her thoughts flew to the one hiding place for thoughts and hearts and lives, and she felt no terror. At the same time something moved her to quicken her pace.
As she drew near the common, she heard the steps more plainly, still soft and swift, and almost wished she had sought refuge in the cottage she had just passed-only it bore no very good character in the neighborhood. When she reached the spot where the paths united, feeling a little at home, she stopped to listen.
The same moment the clouds thinned about the moon, and a pale light came filtering through upon the common in front of her.
She cast one look over her shoulder, saw something turn a corner in the lane, and sped on again.
She would have run, but there was no place of refuge now nearer than the corner of the turnpike road, and she knew her breath would fail her long before that.
How lonely and shelterless the common looked!
Was that music she heard?
She dared not stop to listen.
But immediately, thereupon, was poured forth on the dim air such a stream of pearly sounds as if all the necklaces of some heavenly choir of woman angels were broken, and the beads came pelting down in a cataract of hurtless hail.
From no source could they come save the bow and violin of Joseph Jasper!
Where could he be?
She was so rejoiced to know that he must be somewhere near, that, for very delight of unsecured safety, she held her peace, and had almost stopped.
But she ran on again.
In the mean time the moon had been growing out of the clouds, clearer and clearer.
The hut came in sight.
Absorbed in his music, he did not see her.
She called out, "Joseph!
Joseph!"
He started, threw his bow from him, tucked his violin under his arm, and bounded to meet her.
The consequence was that she fell-but safe in the smith's arms.
He half stopped, and, turning from the path, took to the common.
Jasper handed his violin to Mary, and darted after him.
Joseph seized him by the wrist, saw something glitter in his other hand, and turned sick.
The fellow had stabbed him.
With indignation, as if it were a snake that had bit him, the blacksmith flung from him the hand he held.
The man gave a cry, staggered, recovered himself, and ran.
Joseph would have followed again, but fell, and for a minute or two lost consciousness.
When he came to himself, Mary was binding up his arm.
But my father was just the same, and he was a stronger man than I'm like to be, I fancy."
"It is no such wonder as you think," said Mary; "you have lost a good deal of blood."
Her voice faltered.
She had been greatly alarmed-and the more that she had not light enough to get the edges of the wound properly together.
"You've stopped it-ain't you, miss?"
"I think so."
"Then I'll be after the fellow."
"No, no; you must not attempt it.
You must lie still awhile.
But I don't understand it at all!
That cottage used to be a mere hovel, without door or window!
It can't be you live in it?"
It's mine-bought and paid for."
"But what made you think of coming here?"
"Let's go into the smithy-house I won't presume to call it," said Joseph, "though it has a lean to for the smith-and I'll tell you everything about it.
But really, miss, you oughtn't to be out like this after dark.
There's too many vagabonds about."
With but little need of the help Mary yet gave him, Joseph got up, and led her to what was now a respectable little smithy, with forge and bellows and anvil and bucket.
"Anyhow, miss," he said, "you'll never come from there alone in the dark again!"
"I understand you, Joseph," answered Mary, "for I know you would not have me leave doing what I can for the poor man up there, because of a little danger in the way."
That would be as much as to say you would do the will of God when the devil would let you.
"I must not take you from your work, you know, Joseph."
Any time you want to go anywhere, don't forget as you've got enemies about, and just send for me.
You won't have long to wait till I come.
Part of this conversation, and a good deal more, passed on their way to Testbridge, whither, as soon as Joseph seemed all right, Mary, who had forgotten her hunger and faintness, insisted on setting out at once.
In her turn she questioned Joseph, and learned that, as soon as he knew she was going to settle at Testbridge, he started off to find if possible a place in the neighborhood humble enough to be within his reach, and near enough for the hope of seeing her sometimes, and having what help she might please to give him.
The explanation afforded Mary more pleasure than she cared to show.
When they came to the suburbs, she sent him home, and went straight to mr Brett with mr Redmain's message.
He undertook to be at Durnmelling at the time appointed, and to let nothing prevent him from seeing his new client.
CHAPTER fifty five.
DISAPPEARANCE.
"No," said mr Redmain; "she must stay where she is.
I fancy something happened last night which she has got to tell us about."
"Ah!
What was that?" asked mr Brett, facing round on her.
Mary began her story with the incident of her having been pursued by some one, and rescued by the blacksmith, whom she told her listeners she had known in London.
Then she narrated all that had happened the night before, from first to last, not forgetting the flame that lighted the closet as they approached the window.
"Just let me see those memoranda," said mr Brett to mr Redmain, rising, and looking for the paper where he had left it the day before.
"It was of that paper I was this moment thinking," answered mr Redmain.
"It is not here!" said mr Brett.
"I thought as much!
The fool!
There was a thousand pounds there for her!
I didn't want to drive her to despair: a dying man must mind what he is about.
Mewks came, in evident anxiety.
mr Brett took it for granted he had deliberately and intentionally shut out Mary, and Mewks did not attempt to deny it, protesting he believed she was boring his master.
The grin on that master's face at hearing this was not very pleasant to behold. When examined as to the missing paper, he swore by all that was holy he knew nothing about it.
mr Brett next requested the presence of Miss Yolland.
She was nowhere to be found.
The place was searched throughout, but there was no trace of her.
Lady Malice was grievously hurt at the examination she found had been going on.
Hesper sought Mary, and kissed her with some appearance of gratitude. She saw what a horrible suspicion, perhaps even accusation, she had saved her from.
The behavior and disappearance of Sepia seemed to give her little trouble.
Almost every evening, until he left Durnmelling, Mary went to see mr Redmain.
And something did seem to be getting into, or waking up in, him.
When suffering, he would occasionally break into fierce and evil language, then be suddenly silent.
For some time it remained doubtful whether this attack was not, after all, going to be the last: the doctor himself was doubtful, and, having no reason to think his death would be a great grief in the house, did not hesitate much to express his doubt.
And, indeed, it caused no gloom.
For there was little love in the attentions the Mortimers paid him; and in what other hope could Hesper have married, than that one day she would be free, with a freedom informed with power, the power of money!
But to the mother's suggestions as to possible changes in the future, the daughter never responded: she had no thought of plans in common with her.
Strange rumors came abroad.
There was a conspiracy in that house to ruin the character of the loveliest woman in creation!
But when a week after week passed, and he heard nothing of or from her, he became anxious, and at last lowered his pride so far as to call on Mary, under the pretense of buying something in the shop.
His troubled look filled her with sympathy, but she could not help being glad afresh that he had escaped the snares laid for him.
He looked at her searchingly, and at last murmured a request that she would allow him to have a little conversation with her.
She led the way to her parlor, closed the door, and asked him to take a seat.
But Godfrey was too proud or too agitated to sit.
"You will be surprised to see me on such an errand, Miss Marston!" he said.
"I do not yet know your errand," replied Mary; "but I may not be so much surprised as you think."
"Do not imagine," said Godfrey, stiffly, "that I believe a word of the contemptible reports in circulation.
I come only to ask you to tell me the real nature of the accusations brought against Miss Yolland: your name is, of course, coupled with them."
As it is, allow me to refer you to mr Brett, the lawyer, whom I dare say you know."
Some time after, it came out that the same night on which the presence of Joseph rescued Mary from her pursuer, a man speaking with a foreign accent went to one of the surgeons in Testbridge to have his shoulder set, which he said had been dislocated by a fall.
When Joseph heard it, he smiled, and thought he knew what it meant.
Hesper was no sooner in London, than she wrote to Mary, inviting her to go and visit her.
But Mary answered she could no more leave home, and must content herself with the hope of seeing mrs Redmain when she came to Durnmelling.
But they never had any more talk about the things Mary loved most.
That he continued to think of those things, she had one ground of hoping, namely, the kindness with which he invariably received her, and the altogether gentler manner he wore as often and as long as she saw him.
Whether the change was caused by something better than physical decay, who knows save him who can use even decay for redemption?
He lived two years more, and died rather suddenly.
He grew a rich man, and died happy-so his friends said, and said as they saw.
Letty was diligent in business, but it never got into her heart.
She continued to be much liked, and in the shop was delightful.
After a year or so, mrs Wardour began to take a little notice of her again; but she never asked her to Thornwick until she found herself dying.
Perhaps she then remembered a certain petition in the Lord's prayer.
But will it not be rather a dreadful thing for some people if they are forgiven as they forgive?
Old mr Duppa died, and a young man came to minister to his congregation who thought the baptism of the spirit of more importance than the most correct of opinions concerning even the baptizing spirit. From him Mary found she could learn, and would be much to blame if she did not learn.
From him Letty also heard what increased her desire to be worth something before she went to rejoin Tom.
Joseph Jasper became once more Mary's pupil.
She was now no more content with her little cottage piano, but had an instrument of quite another capacity on which to accompany the violin of the blacksmith.
To him trade came in steadily, and before long he had to build a larger shoeing shed.
He soon found it necessary to make arrangement with a carpenter and wheelwright to work on his premises.
Before two years were over, he was what people call a flourishing man, and laying by a little money.
"But," he said to Mary, "I can't go on like this, you know, miss.
I don't want money.
"On the way to Yokohama?"
At this thought Passepartout tore his hair.
He had come down to the office very early, and for a few minutes was by himself.
It will make up three columns and a half.
"Yes-no
He took the type written matter just as it came from the telegraph editor and ran over it carefully.
"But-"
"I don't think, Clark, that it ought to be printed, and that's the end of it," said Norman, looking up from his desk.
"Do you mean that the paper is to go to press without a word of the prize fight in it?"
All the other papers will print it.
Norman looked at Clark thoughtfully.
Clark came in and the two men faced each other alone.
I have decided not to do a thing in connection with the paper for a whole year that I honestly believe Jesus would not do."
"I think it will simply ruin the paper," replied Clark promptly.
You can't make it pay. Just as sure as you live, if you shut out this prize fight report you will lose hundreds of subscribers.
The very best people in town are eager to read it.
Surely, you can't afford to disregard the wishes of the public to such an extent.
It will be a great mistake if you do, in my opinion."
Then he spoke gently but firmly.
"Clark, what in your honest opinion is the right standard for determining conduct?
It can't be done.
Norman did not reply at once.
Clark rose.
"The report does not go in?"
"It does not.
Clark walked out of the room to his own desk feeling as if the bottom had dropped out of everything.
NEWS, sir?"
There's no prize fight here!
Look!"
But he couldn't tell why, and ran over to the NEWS office to find out.
"What's the matter here, George?" he asked the clerk as he noted the unusual confusion.
Boys, count them out, and I'll buy them tonight."
"Fair!
He walked out of the office and went home.
Two or three of these letters may be of interest.
Editor of the News:
Dear Sir-I have been thinking for some time of changing my paper.
I want a journal that is up to the times, progressive and enterprising, supplying the public demand at all points.
The recent freak of your paper in refusing to print the account of the famous contest at the Resort has decided me finally to change my paper.
Edward Norman,
It's dangerous to experiment much along that line.
The public wants prize fights and such.
Yours,-------
Here followed the name of one of Norman's old friends, the editor of a daily in an adjoining town.
My Dear mr Norman:
It is a splendid beginning and no one feels the value of it more than I do.
I know something of what it will cost you, but not all.
Your pastor,
HENRY MAXWELL.
One other letter which he opened immediately after reading this from Maxwell revealed to him something of the loss to his business that possibly awaited him.
I enclose check for payment in full and shall consider my account with your paper closed after date.
Very truly yours,-------
He had been in the habit of inserting a column of conspicuous advertising and paying for it a very large price.
Norman laid this letter down thoughtfully, and then after a moment he took up a copy of his paper and looked through the advertising columns.
But the letter directed Norman's attention to the advertising phase of his paper.
He had not considered this before.
As he glanced over the columns he could not escape the conviction that his Master could not permit some of them in his paper.
What would He do with that other long advertisement of choice liquors and cigars?
No one thought anything about it.
Why not?
He was simply doing what every other business man in Raymond did.
Could it live?
"What would Jesus do?"
This was Thursday.
"Clark," said Norman, speaking slowly and carefully, "I have been looking at our advertising columns and have decided to dispense with some of the matter as soon as the contracts run out.
"This will mean a great loss to the NEWS.
But what has that to do with us?
"Why not?" asked Norman quietly.
"Why not?
"We shall certainly bankrupt the paper with this sort of business policy."
"You may direct Marks to do as I have said.
Clark went back to his desk feeling as if he had been in the presence of a very peculiar person.
He could not grasp the meaning of it all.
It would upset every custom and introduce endless confusion.
It was downright idiocy.
Was he going to bankrupt the whole business?
But Edward Norman had not yet faced his most serious problem.
No matter whether it paid.
Besides, the regular subscribers had paid for a seven day paper.
He was honestly perplexed by the question.
He was sole proprietor of the paper; it was his to shape as he chose.
He had no board of directors to consult as to policy.
It was a very unusual proceeding, but they all agreed that the paper was being run on new principles anyhow, and they all watched mr Norman carefully as he spoke.
I understand very well that some things I have already done are regarded by the men as very strange.
I wish to state my motive in doing what I have done."
In order to make up to the subscribers the amount of reading matter they may suppose themselves entitled to, we can issue a double number on Saturday, as is done by many evening papers that make no attempt at a Sunday edition.
The change itself is one that will take place.
So far as I can see, the loss will fall on myself.
He looked around the room and no one spoke.
He was struck for the first time in his life with the fact that in all the years of his newspaper life he had never had the force of the paper together in this way.
Would Jesus do that?
He caught himself drawing almost away from the facts of typographical unions and office rules and reporters' enterprise and all the cold, businesslike methods that make a great daily successful.
Clark came in and had a long, serious talk with his chief.
Clark was a very valuable man.
It would be difficult to fill his place.
But he was not able to give any reasons for continuing the Sunday paper that answered the question, "What would Jesus do?" by letting Jesus print that edition.
"It comes to this, then," said Clark frankly, "you will bankrupt the paper in thirty days.
"I don't think we shall.
Will you stay by the NEWS until it is bankrupt?" asked Norman with a strange smile.
"I don't know myself either, Clark.
"That's harder to decide.
But I've about made up my mind.
HERLAND
A Not Unnatural Enterprise
This is written from memory, unfortunately.
We had some bird's eyes of the cities and parks; a lot of lovely views of streets, of buildings, outside and in, and some of those gorgeous gardens, and, most important of all, of the women themselves.
But it's got to be done somehow; the rest of the world needs to know about that country.
They will not be wanted, I can tell them that, and will fare worse than we did if they do find it.
It began this way.
There were three of us, classmates and friends-Terry o Nicholson (we used to call him the Old Nick, with good reason), Jeff Margrave, and I, Vandyck Jennings.
All of us were interested in science.
He used to make all kinds of a row because there was nothing left to explore now, only patchwork and filling in, he said.
He filled in well enough-he had a lot of talents-great on mechanics and electricity.
Jeff Margrave was born to be a poet, a botanist-or both-but his folks persuaded him to be a doctor instead.
He was a good one, for his age, but his real interest was in what he loved to call "the wonders of science."
Terry was strong on facts-geography and meteorology and those; Jeff could beat him any time on biology, and I didn't care what it was they talked about, so long as it connected with human life, somehow.
There are few things that don't.
They needed a doctor, and that gave Jeff an excuse for dropping his just opening practice; they needed Terry's experience, his machine, and his money; and as for me, I got in through Terry's influence.
But this story is not about that expedition.
That was only the merest starter for ours.
My interest was first roused by talk among our guides.
I'm quick at languages, know a good many, and pick them up readily.
And as we got farther and farther upstream, in a dark tangle of rivers, lakes, morasses, and dense forests, with here and there an unexpected long spur running out from the big mountains beyond, I noticed that more and more of these savages had a story about a strange and terrible Woman Land in the high distance.
"Up yonder," "Over there,"
"Way up"--was all the direction they could offer, but their legends all agreed on the main point-that there was this strange country where no men lived-only women and girl children.
It was dangerous, deadly, they said, for any man to go there.
But there were tales of long ago, when some brave investigator had seen it-a Big Country, Big Houses, Plenty People-All Women.
Yes-a good many-but they never came back.
I told the boys about these stories, and they laughed at them.
Naturally I did myself.
I knew the stuff that savage dreams are made of.
But when we had reached our farthest point, just the day before we all had to turn around and start for home again, as the best of expeditions must in time, we three made a discovery.
The main encampment was on a spit of land running out into the main stream, or what we thought was the main stream.
I happened to speak of that river to our last guide, a rather superior fellow with quick, bright eyes.
He told me that there was another river-"over there, short river, sweet water, red and blue."
Yes, he pointed to the river, and then to the southwestward. "River-good water-red and blue."
I told him.
The man indicated a short journey; I judged about two hours, maybe three.
"May be indigo," Jeff suggested, with his lazy smile.
It was early yet; we had just breakfasted; and leaving word that we'd be back before night, we got away quietly, not wishing to be thought too gullible if we failed, and secretly hoping to have some nice little discovery all to ourselves.
It was a long two hours, nearer three.
But there was one, and I could see Terry, with compass and notebook, marking directions and trying to place landmarks.
We came after a while to a sort of marshy lake, very big, so that the circling forest looked quite low and dim across it.
Our guide told us that boats could go from there to our camp-but "long way-all day."
They crop out like that."
We heard running water before we reached it, and the guide pointed proudly to his river.
It was short.
We could see where it poured down a narrow vertical cataract from an opening in the face of the cliff.
It was sweet water. The guide drank eagerly and so did we.
"Must come from way back in the hills."
But as to being red and blue-it was greenish in tint.
The guide seemed not at all surprised.
He hunted about a little and showed us a quiet marginal pool where there were smears of red along the border; yes, and of blue.
Terry got out his magnifying glass and squatted down to investigate.
"Chemicals of some sort-I can't tell on the spot.
Look to me like dyestuffs.
Let's get nearer," he urged, "up there by the fall."
We scrambled along the steep banks and got close to the pool that foamed and boiled beneath the falling water.
Here we searched the border and found traces of color beyond dispute.
More-Jeff suddenly held up an unlooked for trophy.
It was only a rag, a long, raveled fragment of cloth.
But it was a well woven fabric, with a pattern, and of a clear scarlet that the water had not faded.
"Come down," he said, pointing to the cataract.
"Woman Country-up there."
Then we were interested.
He could tell us only what the others had-a land of women-no men-babies, but all girls.
No place for men-dangerous.
No place for men?
Dangerous?
He looked as if he might shin up the waterfall on the spot.
But the guide would not hear of going up, even if there had been any possible method of scaling that sheer cliff, and we had to get back to our party before night.
But Terry stopped in his tracks.
"Look here, fellows," he said.
"This is our find.
We looked at him, much impressed.
"There is no such cloth made by any of these local tribes," I announced, examining those rags with great care.
What's that old republic up in the Pyrenees somewhere-Andorra?
Then there's Montenegro-splendid little state-you could lose a dozen Montenegroes up and down these great ranges."
We discussed it hotly all the way back to camp.
We discussed it after that, still only among ourselves, while Terry was making his arrangements.
We had provisions and preventives and all manner of supplies.
His previous experience stood him in good stead there.
It was a very complete little outfit.
"Those natives can't get into it, or hurt it, or move it," Terry explained proudly.
"We'll start our flier from the lake and leave the boat as a base to come back to."
"If we come back," I suggested cheerfully.
"'Fraid the ladies will eat you?" he scoffed.
"We're not so sure about those ladies, you know," drawled Jeff.
"There may be a contingent of gentlemen with poisoned arrows or something."
"You don't need to go if you don't want to," Terry remarked drily.
"Go?
You'll have to get an injunction to stop me!" Both Jeff and I were sure about that.
Our absolute lack of facts only made the field of discussion wider.
"We'll leave papers with our consul where the yacht stays," Terry planned.
"If we don't come back in-say a month-they can send a relief party after us."
"If the ladies do eat us we must make reprisals."
"Yes, but how will they get up?" asked Jeff.
"Same way we do, of course.
If three valuable American citizens are lost up there, they will follow somehow-to say nothing of the glittering attractions of that fair land-let's call it 'Feminisia,'" he broke off.
"You're right, Terry.
Once the story gets out, the river will crawl with expeditions and the airships rise like a swarm of mosquitoes." I laughed as I thought of it.
Save us!
What headlines!"
"Not much!" said Terry grimly.
"This is our party.
We're going to find that place alone."
I think he thought that country-if there was one-was just blossoming with roses and babies and canaries and tidies, and all that sort of thing.
But I thought-then-that I could form a far clearer idea of what was before us than either of them.
"You're all off, boys," I insisted.
This is a condition known to have existed-here's just a survival.
They've got some peculiarly isolated valley or tableland up there, and their primeval customs have survived. That's all there is to it."
"Danger enough, Terry, and we'll have to be mighty careful.
Women of that stage of culture are quite able to defend themselves and have no welcome for unseasonable visitors."
We talked and talked.
"Women always do. We mustn't look to find any sort of order and organization."
"It will be like a nunnery under an abbess-a peaceful, harmonious sisterhood."
These are just women, and mothers, and where there's motherhood you don't find sisterhood-not much."
"No, sir-they'll scrap," agreed Terry.
"Oh, cloth!
But there they stop-you'll see."
We joked Terry about his modest impression that he would be warmly received, but he held his ground.
I'll get myself elected king in no time-whew! Solomon will have to take a back seat!"
"Couldn't risk it," he asserted solemnly.
And he was a good boy; he lived up to his ideals.
I always liked Terry.
He was a man's man, very much so, generous and brave and clever; but I don't think any of us in college days was quite pleased to have him with our sisters.
But Terry was "the limit." Later on-why, of course a man's life is his own, we held, and asked no questions.
But I got out of patience with Jeff, too.
It was not hard to find the river, just poking along that side till we came to it, and it was navigable as far as the lake.
There was some talk, even then, of skirting the rock wall and seeking a possible footway up, but the marshy jungle made that method look not only difficult but dangerous.
Terry dismissed the plan sharply.
We've decided that.
It might take months-we haven't got the provisions.
No, sir-we've got to take our chances.
If we get back safe-all right.
If we don't, why, we're not the first explorers to get lost in the shuffle.
So we got the big biplane together and loaded it with our scientifically compressed baggage: the camera, of course; the glasses; a supply of concentrated food.
Our pockets were magazines of small necessities, and we had our guns, of course-there was no knowing what might happen.
Up and up and up we sailed, way up at first, to get "the lay of the land" and make note of it.
It ran back on either side, apparently, to the far off white crowned peaks in the distance, themselves probably inaccessible.
"Let's make the first trip geographical," I suggested.
With your tremendous speed we can reach that range and back all right.
Then we can leave a sort of map on board-for that relief expedition."
So we made a long skirting voyage, turned the point of the cape which was close by, ran up one side of the triangle at our best speed, crossed over the base where it left the higher mountains, and so back to our lake by moonlight.
"That's not a bad little kingdom," we agreed when it was roughly drawn and measured.
We could tell the size fairly by our speed.
And from what we could see of the sides-and that icy ridge at the back end-"It's a pretty enterprising savage who would manage to get into it," Jeff said.
It appeared to be well forested about the edges, but in the interior there were wide plains, and everywhere parklike meadows and open places.
It looked-well, it looked like any other country-a civilized one, I mean.
We had to sleep after that long sweep through the air, but we turned out early enough next day, and again we rose softly up the height till we could top the crowning trees and see the broad fair land at our pleasure.
"Semitropical.
Looks like a first rate climate.
It's wonderful what a little height will do for temperature." Terry was studying the forest growth.
Is that what you call little?" I asked.
"Mighty lucky piece of land, I call it," Terry pursued.
"Now for the folks-I've had enough scenery."
So we sailed low, crossing back and forth, quartering the country as we went, and studying it.
We saw-I can't remember now how much of this we noted then and how much was supplemented by our later knowledge, but we could not help seeing this much, even on that excited day-a land in a state of perfect cultivation, where even the forests looked as if they were cared for; a land that looked like an enormous park, only it was even more evidently an enormous garden.
"I don't see any cattle," I suggested, but Terry was silent.
We were approaching a village.
We had our glasses out; even Terry, setting his machine for a spiral glide, clapped the binoculars to his eyes.
They heard our whirring screw.
We stared and stared until it was almost too late to catch the levers, sweep off and rise again; and then we held our peace for a long run upward.
"Gosh!" said Terry, after a while.
"Only women there-and children," Jeff urged excitedly.
"There's a fine landing place right there where we came over," he insisted, and it was an excellent one-a wide, flat topped rock, overlooking the lake, and quite out of sight from the interior.
"They won't find this in a hurry," he asserted, as we scrambled with the utmost difficulty down to safer footing.
"Come on, boys-there were some good lookers in that bunch."
But we were three young men.
CHAPTER two.
Rash Advances
Not more than ten or fifteen miles we judged it from our landing rock to that last village.
For all our eagerness we thought it wise to keep to the woods and go carefully.
Even Terry's ardor was held in check by his firm conviction that there were men to be met, and we saw to it that each of us had a good stock of cartridges.
But there are men somewhere-didn't you see the babies?"
We had all seen babies, children big and little, everywhere that we had come near enough to distinguish the people.
And though by dress we could not be sure of all the grown persons, still there had not been one man that we were certain of.
Terry studied it as we progressed.
"Talk of civilization," he cried softly in restrained enthusiasm.
They left me for a landmark and made a limited excursion on either side.
"Food bearing, practically all of them," they announced returning.
"The rest, splendid hardwood.
Call this a forest?
It's a truck farm!"
"Good thing to have a botanist on hand," I agreed.
"Sure there are no medicinal ones?
Or any for pure ornament?"
As a matter of fact they were quite right.
These towering trees were under as careful cultivation as so many cabbages.
"They don't kill birds, and apparently they do kill cats," Terry declared.
"MUST be men here.
Hark!"
We had heard something: something not in the least like a birdsong, and very much like a suppressed whisper of laughter-a little happy sound, instantly smothered.
We stood like so many pointers, and then used our glasses, swiftly, carefully.
"It couldn't have been far off," said Terry excitedly.
It was trimmed underneath some twenty feet up, and stood there like a huge umbrella, with circling seats beneath.
"There are short stumps of branches left to climb on.
There's someone up that tree, I believe."
We stole near, cautiously.
"In my heart, more likely," he answered.
"Gee!
Look, boys!"
By the time we had reached about as far as three men together dared push, they had left the main trunk and moved outward, each one balanced on a long branch that dipped and swayed beneath the weight.
We paused uncertain.
If we pursued further, the boughs would break under the double burden.
We might shake them off, perhaps, but none of us was so inclined.
They were girls, of course, no boys could ever have shown that sparkling beauty, and yet none of us was certain at first.
We saw short hair, hatless, loose, and shining; a suit of some light firm stuff, the closest of tunics and kneebreeches, met by trim gaiters. As bright and smooth as parrots and as unaware of danger, they swung there before us, wholly at ease, staring as we stared, till first one, and then all of them burst into peals of delighted laughter.
Then there was a torrent of soft talk tossed back and forth; no savage sing song, but clear musical fluent speech.
We met their laughter cordially, and doffed our hats to them, at which they laughed again, delightedly.
Then Terry, wholly in his element, made a polite speech, with explanatory gestures, and proceeded to introduce us, with pointing finger.
"mr Vandyck Jennings"--I also tried to make an effective salute and nearly lost my balance.
Again they laughed delightedly, and the one nearest me followed his tactics.
"Celis," she said distinctly, pointing to the one in blue; "Alima"--the one in rose; then, with a vivid imitation of Terry's impressive manner, she laid a firm delicate hand on her gold green jerkin-"Ellador." This was pleasant, but we got no nearer.
He suggested, by signs, that we all go down together; but again they shook their heads, still merrily.
"Have to use bait," grinned Terry.
He held it up, swung it, glittering in the sun, offered it first to one, then to another, holding it out as far as he could reach toward the girl nearest him.
He stood braced in the fork, held firmly by one hand-the other, swinging his bright temptation, reached far out along the bough, but not quite to his full stretch.
Then, softly and slowly, she drew nearer.
This was Alima, a tall long limbed lass, well knit and evidently both strong and agile. Her eyes were splendid, wide, fearless, as free from suspicion as a child's who has never been rebuked.
The others moved a bit farther out, holding firmly, watching.
I could already see it happen-the dropped necklace, the sudden clutching hand, the girl's sharp cry as he seized her and drew her in.
But it didn't happen.
She made a timid reach with her right hand for the gay swinging thing-he held it a little nearer-then, swift as light, she seized it from him with her left, and dropped on the instant to the bough below.
They dropped from the ends of the big boughs to those below, fairly pouring themselves off the tree, while we climbed downward as swiftly as we could.
"No use," gasped Terry.
My word!
The men of this country must be good sprinters!"
"Inhabitants evidently arboreal," I grimly suggested.
"Civilized and still arboreal-peculiar people."
But it was no use grumbling, and Terry refused to admit any mistake. "Nonsense," he said.
"They expected it.
Women like to be run after.
There it was, about four miles off, the same town, we concluded, unless, as Jeff ventured, they all had pink houses.
The broad green fields and closely cultivated gardens sloped away at our feet, a long easy slant, with good roads winding pleasantly here and there, and narrower paths besides.
"Look at that!" cried Jeff suddenly.
"There they go!"
It can't be the same ones," I urged.
But through the glasses we could identify our pretty tree climbers quite plainly, at least by costume.
Terry watched them, we all did for that matter, till they disappeared among the houses.
Then he put down his glass and turned to us, drawing a long breath.
"Mother of Mike, boys-what Gorgeous Girls!
To climb like that! to run like that! and afraid of nothing.
This country suits me all right.
Let's get ahead."
We set forth in the open, walking briskly.
"What a perfect road!
What a heavenly country!
See the flowers, will you?"
This was Jeff, always an enthusiast; but we could agree with him fully.
Here was evidently a people highly skilled, efficient, caring for their country as a florist cares for his costliest orchids.
Under the soft brilliant blue of that clear sky, in the pleasant shade of those endless rows of trees, we walked unharmed, the placid silence broken only by the birds.
Presently there lay before us at the foot of a long hill the town or village we were aiming for.
Jeff drew a long breath.
"They've got architects and landscape gardeners in plenty, that's sure," agreed Terry.
I was astonished myself.
You see, I come from California, and there's no country lovelier, but when it comes to towns-!
But this place!
It was built mostly of a sort of dull rose colored stone, with here and there some clear white houses; and it lay abroad among the green groves and gardens like a broken rosary of pink coral.
"Those big white ones are public buildings evidently," Terry declared. "This is no savage country, my friend.
But no men?
Boys, it behooves us to go forward most politely."
The place had an odd look, more impressive as we approached.
"It's like an exposition."
"It's too pretty to be true." "Plenty of palaces, but where are the homes?" "Oh there are little ones enough-but-." It certainly was different from any towns we had ever seen.
"There's no smoke," he added after a little.
"There's no noise," I offered; but Terry snubbed me-"That's because they are laying low for us; we'd better be careful how we go in there."
Nothing could induce him to stay out, however, so we walked on.
Everything was beauty, order, perfect cleanness, and the pleasantest sense of home over it all.
As we neared the center of the town the houses stood thicker, ran together as it were, grew into rambling palaces grouped among parks and open squares, something as college buildings stand in their quiet greens.
And then, turning a corner, we came into a broad paved space and saw before us a band of women standing close together in even order, evidently waiting for us.
We stopped a moment and looked back.
The street behind was closed by another band, marching steadily, shoulder to shoulder.
We went on-there seemed no other way to go-and presently found ourselves quite surrounded by this close massed multitude, women, all of them, but-
They were not young.
They were not old.
They were not, in the girl sense, beautiful.
It was that sense of being hopelessly in the wrong that I had so often felt in early youth when my short legs' utmost effort failed to overcome the fact that I was late to school.
But Terry showed no such consciousness.
Yet they were not old women.
They had no weapons, and we had, but we had no wish to shoot.
"What do they want with us anyhow?
They seem to mean business." But in spite of that businesslike aspect, he determined to try his favorite tactics.
Terry had come armed with a theory.
He stepped forward, with his brilliant ingratiating smile, and made low obeisance to the women before him.
Then he produced another tribute, a broad soft scarf of filmy texture, rich in color and pattern, a lovely thing, even to my eye, and offered it with a deep bow to the tall unsmiling woman who seemed to head the ranks before him.
She took it with a gracious nod of acknowledgment, and passed it on to those behind her.
He tried again, this time bringing out a circlet of rhinestones, a glittering crown that should have pleased any woman on earth.
Again his gift was accepted and, as before, passed out of sight.
"Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming.
But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.
We looked for nervousness-there was none.
For terror, perhaps-there was none.
Six of them stepped forward now, one on either side of each of us, and indicated that we were to go with them.
A large building opened before us, a very heavy thick walled impressive place, big, and old looking; of gray stone, not like the rest of the town.
"This won't do!" said Terry to us, quickly.
All together, now-"
We stopped in our tracks.
We began to explain, to make signs pointing away toward the big forest-indicating that we would go back to it-at once.
We seemed to think that if there were men we could fight them, and if there were only women-why, they would be no obstacles at all.
Terry, with his clear decided practical theories that there were two kinds of women-those he wanted and those he didn't; Desirable and Undesirable was his demarcation.
And now here they were, in great numbers, evidently indifferent to what he might think, evidently determined on some purpose of their own regarding him, and apparently well able to enforce their purpose.
We all thought hard just then.
It had not seemed wise to object to going with them, even if we could have; our one chance was friendliness-a civilized attitude on both sides.
But once inside that building, there was no knowing what these determined ladies might do to us.
Even a peaceful detention was not to our minds, and when we named it imprisonment it looked even worse.
So we made a stand, trying to make clear that we preferred the open country.
One of them came forward with a sketch of our flier, asking by signs if we were the aerial visitors they had seen.
This we admitted.
They pointed to it again, and to the outlying country, in different directions-but we pretended we did not know where it was, and in truth we were not quite sure and gave a rather wild indication of its whereabouts.
All around us and behind they were massed solidly-there was simply nothing to do but go forward-or fight.
We held a consultation.
"We can't fight them, of course," Jeff urged.
"They're all women, in spite of their nondescript clothes; nice women, too; good strong sensible faces.
I guess we'll have to go in."
Look at those faces!"
They had stood at ease, waiting while we conferred together, but never relaxing their close attention.
Their attitude was not the rigid discipline of soldiers; there was no sense of compulsion about them.
They had just the aspect of sturdy burghers, gathered hastily to meet some common need or peril, all moved by precisely the same feelings, to the same end.
We observed pretty closely just then, for all of us felt that it was a crucial moment.
The leader gave some word of command and beckoned us on, and the surrounding mass moved a step nearer.
"We've got to decide quick," said Terry.
"I vote to go in," Jeff urged.
But we were two to one against him and he loyally stood by us.
We made one more effort to be let go, urgent, but not imploring.
"Now for a rush, boys!" Terry said.
Terry soon found that it was useless, tore himself loose for a moment, pulled his revolver, and fired upward.
As they caught at it, he fired again-we heard a cry-.
Instantly each of us was seized by five women, each holding arm or leg or head; we were lifted like children, straddling helpless children, and borne onward, wriggling indeed, but most ineffectually.
So carried and so held, we came into a high inner hall, gray and bare, and were brought before a majestic gray haired woman who seemed to hold a judicial position.
mr
It simply leaves the inquiry: What was the understanding those fathers had of the question mentioned?
What is the frame of Government under which we live?
Their names, being familiar to nearly all, and accessible to quite all, need not now be repeated.
This affirmation and denial form an issue, and this issue-this question is precisely what the text declares our fathers understood "better than we."
The other of the four-james McHenry voted against the prohibition, showing that, for some cause, he thought it improper to vote for it.
Fitzsimmons, William Few, Abraham Baldwin, Rufus King, William Paterson, George Claimer, Richard Bassett, George Read, Pierce Butler, Daniel Carroll, james Madison.
Under these circumstances, Congress, on taking charge of these countries, did not absolutely prohibit slavery within them.
They all, probably, voted for it.
In eighteen o three, the Federal Government purchased the Louisiana country.
In eighteen o four, Congress gave a territorial organization to that part of it which now constitutes the State of Lousiana.
New Orleans, lying within that part, was an old and comparatively large city.
First.
Second.
Many votes were taken, by yeas and nays, in both branches of Congress, upon the various phases of the general question.
The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott case, plant themselves upon the fifth amendment, which provides that no person shall be deprived of "life, liberty, or property without due process of law"; while Senator Douglas and his peculiar adherents plant themselves upon the tenth amendment, providing that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution" "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
But he should, at the same time, brave the responsibility of declaring that, in his opinion, he understands their principles better than they did themselves; and especially should he not shirk that responsibility by asserting that they "understood the question just as well, and even better than we do now."
This is all Republicans ask-all Republicans desire-in relation to slavery.
Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws.
We deny it.
That makes an issue; and the burden of proof is upon you.
If our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such.
Do you accept the challenge?
We respect that warning of Washington, and we commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right application of it.
But you say you are conservative-eminently conservative-while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something, of the sort.
What is conservatism?
We deny it.
We admit that it is more prominent, but we deny that we made it so.
We deny it; and what is your proof'?
We do not believe it.
The elections came, and your expectations were not quite fulfilled.
The indispensable concert of action cannot be attained.
The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be supplied the indispensable connecting trains.
This is the rule; and the slave revolution in Hayti was not an exception to it, but a case occurring under peculiar circumstances.
In that case, only about twenty were admitted to the secret; and yet one of them, in his anxiety to save a friend, betrayed the plot to that friend, and, by consequence, averted the calamity.
He spoke of Virginia; and, as to the power of emancipation, I speak of the slave holding States only.
He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.
But we are proposing no such thing.
To show all this, is easy and certain.
In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us!
That is cool.
To be sure, what the robber demanded of me my money was my own, and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.
Let us Republicans do our part to have it so.
Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper.
We know they will not.
In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned.
We know it will not.
Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone.
This, we know by experience, is no easy task.
In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them.
These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them?
And this must be done thoroughly-done in acts as well as in words.
They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.
Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation.
If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away.
If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension-its enlargement.
All they ask we could readily grant if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong.
Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy.
Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them?
The potentate was on deck.
Bêche de mer was purely fortuitous, but it was fortuitous in the deterministic way.
Everything is related.
I wanted two or three pairs of the large clam shells (measuring three feet across), but I did not want the meat inside.
My instruction to the natives finally ripened into the following "You fella bring me fella big fella clam—kai kai he no stop, he walk about.
You fella bring me fella small fella clam—kai kai he stop."
Walk about is a quaint phrase.
Too much, by the way, does not indicate anything excessive.
The white men were all seamen, and so capsize and sing out were introduced into the lingo.
One would not tell a Melanesian cook to empty the dish water, but he would tell him to capsize it.
To sing out is to cry loudly, to call out, or merely to speak.
Sing sing is a song.
Savvee or catchee are practically the only words which have been introduced straight from pigeon English.
Of course, pickaninny has happened along, but some of its uses are delicious.
My word, as an exclamation with a thousand significances, could have arrived from nowhere else than Old England.
Harry, the schooner captain, started to write the letter, but was stopped by peter at the end of the second sentence.
He hereby wants twelve pounds." (At this point peter began dictation).
I like him six tin biscuit, four bag rice, twenty four tin bullamacow.
"peter."
On his head was a top hat.
He possessed a trade box full of calico, beads, porpoise teeth, and tobacco.
Another confiscated the strings of beads from around his neck.
Finally, one of them took his trade box, which represented three years' toil, and dropped it into a canoe alongside.
"That fella belong you?" the captain asked the recruit, referring to the thief.
"Then why in Jericho do you let him take the box?" the captain demanded indignantly. Quoth the recruit, "Me speak along him, say bokkis he stop, that fella he cross along me"—which was the recruit's way of saying that the other man would murder him.
God's wrath, when He sent the Flood, was merely a case of being cross along mankind.
It all depends on how it is uttered.
It may mean: What is your business?
What do you mean by this outrageous conduct?
What is the thing you are after?
"Before long time altogether no place he stop.
God big fella marster belong white man, him fella He make 'm altogether.
He name belong him.
Him fella Adam all the same sick; he no savvee kai kai; he walk about all the time.
God big fella marster belong white man, He scratch 'm head belong Him.
God say: 'What name?
Me no savvee what name this fella Adam he want.'
He call him this fella Mary, Eve.
One fella tree he tambo (taboo) along you altogether.
This fella tree belong apple.'
What name?
When they finish eat 'm, my word, they fright like hell, and they go hide along scrub.
"And God He come walk about along garden, and He sing out, 'Adam!' Adam he no speak.
He too much fright.
My word!
And God He sing out, 'Adam!' And Adam he speak, 'You call 'm me?' God He speak, 'Me call 'm you too much.' Adam he speak, 'Me sleep strong fella too much.' And God He speak, 'You been eat 'm this fella apple.' Adam he speak, 'No, me no been eat 'm.' God He speak.
"So Adam Eve these two fella go along scrub.
She was ketch rigged, carrying flying jib, jib, fore staysail, main sail, mizzen, and spinnaker.
There were six feet of head room below, and she was crown decked and flush decked.
A five horse power engine ran the pumps when it was in order, and on two occasions proved capable of furnishing juice for the search light.
Caught under full sail in tropic squalls, she buried her rail and deck many times, but stubbornly refused to turn turtle.
She steered easily, and she could run day and night, without steering, close by, full and by, and with the wind abeam.
Then came anarchy.
Six months overdue in the building, I sailed the shell of her to Hawaii to be finished, the engine lashed to the bottom, building materials lashed on deck.
As it was, partly built, she cost four times what she ought to have cost.
To save themselves, the newspapers could not tell the truth about her.
When I discharged an incompetent captain, they said I had beaten him to a pulp.
When one young man returned home to continue at college, it was reported that I was a regular Wolf Larsen, and that my whole crew had deserted because I had beaten it to a pulp.
Down in the uttermost South Sea isle this myth obtained, and I paid accordingly.
No case like it had ever been reported.
It extended from my hands to my feet so that at times I was as helpless as a child.
The Australian specialists agreed that the malady was non parasitic, and that, therefore, it must be nervous.
It did not mend, and it was impossible for me to continue the voyage.
Still further, I reasoned that in my own climate of California I had always maintained a stable nervous equilibrium.
So back I came.
Then I knew.
Later, I met Colonel Woodruff, and learned that he had been similarly afflicted.
Himself an Army surgeon, seventeen Army surgeons sat on his case in the Philippines, and, like the Australian specialists, confessed themselves beaten.
In passing, I may mention that among the other afflictions that jointly compelled the abandonment of the voyage, was one that is variously called the healthy man's disease, European Leprosy, and Biblical Leprosy. Unlike True Leprosy, nothing is known of this mysterious malady.
No doctor has ever claimed a cure for a case of it, though spontaneous cures are recorded.
It comes, they know not how.
It is, they know not what. It goes, they know not why.
The only hope the doctors had held out to me was a spontaneous cure, and such a cure was mine.
A last word: the test of the voyage.
But there is a better witness, the one woman who made it from beginning to end.
FOOTNOTES
Ulava, thursday march twelfth nineteen o eight.
Ulava, friday march thirteenth nineteen o eight.
Mate and skipper down with fever.
Ulava, saturday march fourteenth nineteen o eight.
Mate down with fever.
At daybreak found that the boy Bagua had died during the night, on dysentery.
He was about fourteen days sick.
At sea, monday march sixteenth nineteen o eight.
Set course for Sikiana at four p m
Wind broke off.
Heavy squalls during the night.
At sea, tuesday march seventeenth nineteen o eight.
Mate fever.
At sea, wednesday march eighteenth nineteen o eight.
Big sea.
Mate fever.
At sea, thursday march nineteenth nineteen o eight.
Too thick to see anything.
Blowing a gale all the time.
At sea, friday march twentieth nineteen o eight.
At sea, saturday march twenty first nineteen o eight.
Turned back from Sikiana.
CHAPTER three
Then, entering the Lucchese territory, they besieged Camaiore, the inhabitants of which, although faithful to their rulers, being influenced more by immediate danger than by attachment to their distant friends, surrendered.
You are well acquainted with the ancient enmity of the Florentines against you, which is not occasioned by any injuries you have done them, or by fear on their part, but by our weakness and their own ambition; for the one gives them hope of being able to oppress us, and the other incites them to attempt it.
But who is so simple as to be surprised at it? for were it in our power, we should do just the same to them, or even worse.
You know, that without the aid of some powerful ally we are incapable of self defense, and that none can render us this service more powerfully or faithfully than the duke.
He restored our liberty; it is reasonable to expect he will defend it.
We have often been deprived of every hope, except in God and the casualties which time might produce, and both have proved our friends.
The duke, influenced by his inveterate hostility against the Florentines, his new obligation to the Lucchese, and, above all, by his desire to prevent so great an acquisition from falling into the hands of his ancient enemies, determined either to send a strong force into Tuscany, or vigorously to assail the Venetians, so as to compel the Florentines to give up their enterprise and go to their relief.
It was soon known in Florence that the duke was preparing to send forces into Tuscany.
There still remained another difficulty, which, depending on circumstances beyond the reach of their influence, created more doubts and uneasiness than the former; the count would not consent to pass the Po, and the Venetians refused to accept him on any other condition.
To the Venetians, on the other hand, they averred that this private letter was sufficiently binding, and therefore they ought to be content; for if they could save the count from breaking with his father in law, it was well to do so, and that it could be of no advantage either to themselves or the Venetians to publish it without some manifest necessity.
The prospect of this connection had great influence with the count, for, as the duke had no sons, it gave him hope of becoming sovereign of Milan.
To induce the Venetians to retain the count in the command, Cosmo de' Medici went to Venice, hoping his influence would prevail with them, and discussed the subject at great length before the senate, pointing out the condition of the Italian states, the disposition of their armies, and the great preponderance possessed by the duke.
He concluded by saying, that if the count and the duke were to unite their forces, they (the Venetians) might return to the sea, and the Florentines would have to fight for their liberty.
Cosmo returned without having effected any part of his object.
The Florentines used the weightiest arguments they could adopt to prevent the count from quitting the service of the League, a course he was himself reluctant to follow, but his desire to conclude the marriage so embarrassed him, that any trivial accident would have been sufficient to determine his course, as indeed shortly happened.
As before observed, Niccolo Fortebraccio was dead.
He had married a daughter of the Count di Poppi, who, at the decease of his son in law, held the Borgo San Sepolcro, and other fortresses of that district, and while Niccolo lived, governed them in his name.
Claiming them as his daughter's portion, he refused to give them up to the pope, who demanded them as property held of the church, and who, upon his refusal, sent the patriarch with forces to take possession of them.
The count, finding himself unable to sustain the attack, offered them to the Florentines, who declined them; but the pope having returned to Florence, they interceded with him in the count's behalf.
Difficulties arising, the patriarch attacked the Casentino, took Prato Vecchio, and Romena, and offered them also to the Florentines, who refused them likewise, unless the pope would consent they should restore them to the count, to which, after much hesitation, he acceded, on condition that the Florentines should prevail with the Count di Poppi to restore the Borgo to him.
The pope was thus satisfied, and the Florentines having so far completed the building of their cathedral church of Santa Reparata, which had been commenced long ago, as to enable them to perform divine service in it, requested his holiness to consecrate it.
CHAPTER eleven.
THE HUES OF LOVE.
CAPTAIN BRAMBLE did not long remain contented on board his ship.
He felt that he had been overreached by Captain Ratlin, and also that he had good grounds of suspecting his successful rival of being either directly or indirectly engaged in the illegal trade of the coast, and, determined, if possible, to discover his secret, he again became a frequent visitor of Don Leonardo's house, where he was sure to meet him constantly.
We refer to Captain Bramble and Maud the Quadroon.
Both now hated Captain Ratlin, and would gladly have been revenged in any way for the gratification of their feelings upon her whom he so fondly loved. With this similarity of sentiment it was not singular that they should ere long discover themselves and feelings to each other.
Indeed Maud, who had been a secret witness of the deed, already realized that Captain Bramble was the enemy of him whom she had once loved, and whom she now so bitterly despised.
"Have I anything to gain by a lie?" responded Maud, with a curling lip.
"No, I presume not," he answered.
"I merely ask from ordinary precaution.
But what do you propose to reveal to me?
Something touching this Captain Ratlin?"
"It is of him I would speak.
You are an English officer, agent of your government, and sent here to suppress this vile traffic?"
"True."
"And have you suspected nothing since your vessel has been here?"
"I suspect that this Captain Ratlin is in some way connected with the trade."
"He is, and but now awaits the gathering of a cargo in my father's barracoons, to sail with them to the West Indies.
It is not his first voyage, either."
"But where is his vessel?
he cannot go to sea without one," said the Englishman.
"That is what I would reveal to you.
I will discover to you his ship if you swear to arrest him, seize the vessel, and if possible hang him!"
"I have reason to be," answered Maud, calming her feelings by an effort.
"Yes, he loves the white woman whom he brought to my father's house."
"Thus far, at all events, my good girl, we have mutual cause for hate, and we will work heartily together.
"I do."
"Is it far from here?"
"Less than a league."
"Indeed!
These fellows are cunning," mused the officer.
"When will you guide me and a party of my people thither?"
"To night."
I will be prepared.
Where shall we meet?"
"At the end of the cape, where you and he met a few days since."
"How knew you of that?"
"I saw it."
"The duel?"
"Yes."
"It is strange.
"He has moved in no direction since this woman has been here that I have not followed.
There I hoped to see him fall; but he was strangely preserved."
"Take this and wear it for my sake," he added, unloosing a fine gold chain from his watch and tossing it around her neck, "and be punctual at that spot to night after the last ray of twilight."
"I will," answered the Quadroon, as she regarded the fine workmanship of the chain for a moment with idle and childlike pleasure, then turning from the spot, they both returned, though by different paths, from the jungle towards the dwelling of her father.
Captain Bramble dined with Don Leonardo that day, and his good spirits and pleasant converse were afterwards the subject of comment, exhibiting him in a fair more favorable light than he had appeared in since his arrival at the factory.
Captain Ratlin, on his part, was ever the same; he found that he must wait some weeks even yet before he could prosecute the purpose of his voyage, and indeed he seemed to have lost all interest in it.
In the presence of that fair and pure minded girl he was as a child, impressible, and ready to follow her simplest instructions.
I have done with this trade, never more to engage in it."
"That is honorable, noble in you, Captain Ratlin, so promptly to relinquish all connection with a calling, which though it affords fortune and command, can never permit you self respect."
"The ship will probably be despatched within these two weeks, and then I will take any birth in legitimate commerce, where I may win an honorable name and reputation."
The young commander took the hand respectfully that waits extended to him, but when he raised his eyes to her face and detected that tear, a thought for a moment ran through his brain, a faint shadow of hope that perhaps she loved him, or might at some future time do so, and bending over the fair hand he held he pressed it gently to his lips.
He was not repulsed, nor chided, but she delicately rose and turned to her mother's apartment.
How small a things will affect the whole tenor of a life time; trifles lighter than straws are levers in the building up of destiny.
Captain Ratlin turned from that brief interview with a feeling he had never before experienced.
The idea that Miss Huntington really cared for him beyond the ordinary interest, that the circumstances of their acquaintances had caused, had not thus far been entertained by him; had this been otherwise he would doubtless have differently interpreted many agreeable tokens which she had granted him, and to which his mind now went back eagerly to recall and consider under the new phase of feeling which actuated him.
How else could he interpret that tear but as springing from a heart that was full of kindly feeling towards him.
This was the bright tide of the picture which his imagination, aided by that gaudy painter and fancy colorer, Hope, had conjured up before his mind's eye, but the reverse side of the picture was at hand, and now he paused to ask himself seriously: "Can this be?
Who am I? a poor unknown sailor, fortuneless, friendless, nameless.
Who is she? a lady of refined cultivation, high family, wealth, and beauty.
Is it likely that two such persons as I have considered should be joined by intimate friendship? can such barriers as these be broken down by love?
Alas, I am not so blind, so foolish, so unreasonable, as to believe it for a moment." So once more the heart of the young commander was heavy within his breast.
In the mean time Captain Bramble had found an opportunity that afternoon to see Maud, and to learn from her that Captain Ratlin almost always slept on board his ship, departing soon after dark for the spot through the jungle.
But all seemed now propitious, and he awaited the darkness with impatience, when he might disembark a couple of boat loads of sailors and marines, and with the Quadroon for guide follow the path through the jungle to where the "Sea Witch" lay.
"Fortunate, my dear?
I don't exactly know about that.
Here we have been confined at this slave factory, little better than the slaves themselves, these four weeks."
"Well, mother, Captain Bramble says he shall sail soon, and then we can go round to Sierra Leone, and from thence take passage direct for England."
"He says that business and duty, which he cannot explain, detain him here, but that he will soon leave, of which he will give us due notice."
This conversation will explain to the reader in part, the reason why mrs Huntington and her daughter, English subjects and in distress upon the coast, had not at once gone on board the vessel of their sovereign which lay in the harbor, and been carried upon their destination.
"Do I, mother?" she answered, vacantly.
CHAPTER twelve.
THE CONFLICT.
He was not wanting in personal courage, and therefore, with a well selected body of sailors and marines, and one or two officers, he quietly pulled away from the ship's side, under cover of the night, and landed at the proposed spot.
On the whole body pressed in silence, through a tangled and narrow path, being more than once startled by the growl of some wild animal, whose haunts they disturbed.
It was weary struggling by this path through the wood, but it was the only way to approach the desired point by land. Maud hesitated not, but stole or glided through the tangled undergrowth, as though she had passed her whole life time in the deep, tangled ways of the jungle.
Hark! those voices are not from the tongues of natives; that is English which they speak.
"Hist! hist!" whispered the Quadroon, "we are almost upon them!"
"In which direction?" asked the English officer.
"Yes."
"That is the river's bed, and they lie on board their craft, moored close to us."
"How many do they number?"
"I know not."
"It is not important," continued the Englishman, turning to his followers, and in a low voice bidding them look to their weapons, for the game was near at hand.
A few more steps brought the party to the skirts of the thicket, where it bordered on a small clearing, opening upon the river, and looking across which-while they were themselves screened by the jungle-they discovered the dark hull of the "Sea Witch," with her lower masts and their standing rigging.
The vessel was moored close to the shore, with which a portable gangway connected it.
Voices were heard issuing from the fore hatch, and two or three petty officers were seated about the entrance to the cabin, smoking cigars and pipes, all unconscious of any danger.
"There is your prey!
Spring upon it, and be quick, for they will fight like mad, and he will lay a dozen of you by the heels before you take the 'Sea Witch!'" said Maud.
This division of his forces was the best manouvre he could possibly make, and succeeded admirably, since his own people outnumbered the slavers, and by dividing them he strengthened his own power and weakened theirs.
Once more upon their deck, the hand to hand battle was short, bloody and decisive, until towards its close, Captain Bramble found himself driven into the forecastle with a number of his followers, and at the same moment saw the mate of the "Sea Witch," with those of his people that were left alive hastening to embark in a quarterboat, and pull away from the vessel's side with great speed.
Scarcely had they gained the shade of the thick undergrowth, when a report like that of a score of cannons rang upon the night air, and high in the air soared a body of flame and wreck in terrific confusion.
She realized the result of her treachery, but looked in vain for the object on whom she had hoped to reck the strength of her indignation and her hate. Where was he?
"Stand back, I say!
I carry the lives of six of you in this weapon, and I am not one to miss my aim, as your valiant leader yonder well knows.--Now, Captain Bramble, I will surrender to you, provided you accede to my terms, otherwise you cannot take me alive!"
"Well, sir, what have you to offer?" said the English officer, positively quailing before the stern and manly front of the young commander.
"That you accept my word of honor to obey your directions as a prisoner, but that you shall not bind my arms or confine me otherwise."
"Have your own way," replied the Englishman, doggedly; "but give up your weapons."
"Do you promise me this, Captain Bramble?"
"I do."
As soon as Maud saw him, she sprang to her feet, and with all the bitterness of expression which her countenance was capable of, she scowled upon his upright figure and handsome features.
"Maud," he said, in a low, but reproachful tone, "is it you who have betrayed us?"
"Maud, Maud! have I ever wronged you or your father?" asked Captain Ratlin, reproachfully.
"Do you not love that white faced girl you brought hither?"
"And if I did, Maud, what wrong is that to thee?
Did I promise thee love?"
"Nay; I asked it not of you," said the angry girl.
"But you have done me a great wrong, Maud; one that you do not yourself understand.
I forgive you though, poor girl; you are hardly to blame."
As they came upon the open spot where stand the barracoons and Don Leonardo's dwelling, they found the entire family aroused and on the watch, the heavy explosion of the "Sea Witch's" magazine having seemed to them like an earthquake.
Don Leonardo, who shrewdly suspected the truth, seemed satisfied at a single glance as to the state of affairs, and walking up to the young commander, and watching for a favorable opportunity, when not overheard, he asked, significantly: "Treachery?"
"Yes."
"Whom?"
"It matters not," was the magnanimous reply; for Captain Ratlin was too generous to betray the Quadroon to her father, though she had proved thus treacherous to him.
They felt that his advice was good, as truly disinterested, and both agreed to abide strictly by it; but doubted not that as Captain Ratlin had not been engaged in any slave commerce, and indeed had not been in the late action at all, that he would be very soon liberated, and free to choose his own calling.
And yet he did so; true, he did not actually importune Miss Huntington, but his attentions and services were all rendered under that guise and aspect which rendered them to her most repulsive.
Maud kept by herself.
The English officer looked upon her with mingled feelings of admiration for her strange beauty, with contempt for her treachery, and with a thought that she might be made perhaps the subject of his pleasure by a little management by and by.
It was natural for a heart so vile as his to couple every circumstance and connection in some such selfish spirit with himself; it was like him.
"Well," she answered, lifting her handsome face from her hands, where she often hid it.
"You have lost one lover?"
The girl only answered by a flashing glance of contempt.
"How would you like another?"
"Who?" she said, sternly.
"Me!" answered Captain Bramble.
Taking her lonely place in the cabin, after the conversation just referred to, she again hid her face in her hands, and remained with her head bowed in her lap for a long, long while, half dreaming, half waking.
Chapter seven
mr Bennet's property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed, in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother's fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply the deficiency of his.
Her father had been an attorney in Meryton, and had left her four thousand pounds.
She had a sister married to a mr Phillips, who had been a clerk to their father and succeeded him in the business, and a brother settled in London in a respectable line of trade.
Their visits to mrs Phillips were now productive of the most interesting intelligence.
"From all that I can collect by your manner of talking, you must be two of the silliest girls in the country.
I have suspected it some time, but I am now convinced."
"If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it."
What is it about?
What does he say?
Well, Jane, make haste and tell us; make haste, my love."
"It is from Miss Bingley," said Jane, and then read it aloud.
"CAROLINE BINGLEY"
"With the officers!" cried Lydia.
"Dining out," said mrs Bennet, "that is very unlucky."
"Can I have the carriage?" said Jane.
"No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to rain; and then you must stay all night."
"That would be a good scheme," said Elizabeth, "if you were sure that they would not offer to send her home."
"But if you have got them to day," said Elizabeth, "my mother's purpose will be answered."
Her hopes were answered; Jane had not been gone long before it rained hard.
"This was a lucky idea of mine, indeed!" said mrs Bennet more than once, as if the credit of making it rain were all her own.
"MY DEAREST LIZZY,--
"I find myself very unwell this morning, which, I suppose, is to be imputed to my getting wet through yesterday.
"Well, my dear," said mr Bennet, when Elizabeth had read the note aloud, "if your daughter should have a dangerous fit of illness-if she should die, it would be a comfort to know that it was all in pursuit of mr Bingley, and under your orders."
"Oh!
"I shall be very fit to see Jane-which is all I want."
"Is this a hint to me, Lizzy," said her father, "to send for the horses?"
"No, indeed, I do not wish to avoid the walk.
I shall be back by dinner."
"We will go as far as Meryton with you," said Catherine and Lydia. Elizabeth accepted their company, and the three young ladies set off together.
She was received, however, very politely by them; and in their brother's manners there was something better than politeness; there was good humour and kindness.
mr Darcy said very little, and mr Hurst nothing at all.
The latter was thinking only of his breakfast.
Miss Bennet had slept ill, and though up, was very feverish, and not well enough to leave her room.
She was not equal, however, to much conversation, and when Miss Bingley left them together, could attempt little besides expressions of gratitude for the extraordinary kindness she was treated with.
Elizabeth silently attended her.
The advice was followed readily, for the feverish symptoms increased, and her head ached acutely.
Elizabeth did not quit her room for a moment; nor were the other ladies often absent; the gentlemen being out, they had, in fact, nothing to do elsewhere.
"I wish it may."
"I think she will.
"Yes, all of them, I think.
Chapter nineteen
The next day opened a new scene at Longbourn.
Having resolved to do it without loss of time, as his leave of absence extended only to the following Saturday, and having no feelings of diffidence to make it distressing to himself even at the moment, he set about it in a very orderly manner, with all the observances, which he supposed a regular part of the business.
On finding mrs Bennet, Elizabeth, and one of the younger girls together, soon after breakfast, he addressed the mother in these words:
"May I hope, madam, for your interest with your fair daughter Elizabeth, when I solicit for the honour of a private audience with her in the course of this morning?"
Before Elizabeth had time for anything but a blush of surprise, mrs Bennet answered instantly, "Oh dear!--yes-certainly.
I am sure Lizzy will be very happy-I am sure she can have no objection.
Come, Kitty, I want you up stairs." And, gathering her work together, she was hastening away, when Elizabeth called out:
"Dear madam, do not go.
I beg you will not go.
mr Collins must excuse me.
He can have nothing to say to me that anybody need not hear.
I am going away myself."
Elizabeth would not oppose such an injunction-and a moment's consideration making her also sensible that it would be wisest to get it over as soon and as quietly as possible, she sat down again and tried to conceal, by incessant employment the feelings which were divided between distress and diversion.
mrs Bennet and Kitty walked off, and as soon as they were gone, mr Collins began.
"Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty, so far from doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections.
You can hardly doubt the purport of my discourse, however your natural delicacy may lead you to dissemble; my attentions have been too marked to be mistaken.
Collins, you must marry.
This is my advice.
You will find her manners beyond anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite.
Thus much for my general intention in favour of matrimony; it remains to be told why my views were directed towards Longbourn instead of my own neighbourhood, where I can assure you there are many amiable young women.
And now nothing remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affection.
On that head, therefore, I shall be uniformly silent; and you may assure yourself that no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married."
"You are too hasty, sir," she cried.
"You forget that I have made no answer.
Let me do it without further loss of time.
I am very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than to decline them."
"I am not now to learn," replied mr Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, "that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second, or even a third time.
I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long."
"Upon my word, sir," cried Elizabeth, "your hope is a rather extraordinary one after my declaration.
I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time.
I am perfectly serious in my refusal.
Nay, were your friend Lady Catherine to know me, I am persuaded she would find me in every respect ill qualified for the situation."
And you may be certain when I have the honour of seeing her again, I shall speak in the very highest terms of your modesty, economy, and other amiable qualification."
"Indeed, mr Collins, all praise of me will be unnecessary.
You must give me leave to judge for myself, and pay me the compliment of believing what I say.
I wish you very happy and very rich, and by refusing your hand, do all in my power to prevent your being otherwise. In making me the offer, you must have satisfied the delicacy of your feelings with regard to my family, and may take possession of Longbourn estate whenever it falls, without any self reproach.
This matter may be considered, therefore, as finally settled." And rising as she thus spoke, she would have quitted the room, had mr Collins not thus addressed her:
"Really, mr Collins," cried Elizabeth with some warmth, "you puzzle me exceedingly.
"You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your refusal of my addresses is merely words of course.
My reasons for believing it are briefly these: It does not appear to me that my hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would be any other than highly desirable.
Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications.
As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females."
I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere.
I thank you again and again for the honour you have done me in your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impossible.
My feelings in every respect forbid it.
Can I speak plainer?
Do not consider me now as an elegant female, intending to plague you, but as a rational creature, speaking the truth from her heart."
"You are uniformly charming!" cried he, with an air of awkward gallantry; "and I am persuaded that when sanctioned by the express authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will not fail of being acceptable."
For the reason just stated, the little girls were sent home in the autumn of eighteen twenty five, when Charlotte was little more than nine years old.
She remained there, as a member of the household, for thirty years; and from the length of her faithful service, and the attachment and respect which she inspired, is deserving of mention.
She abounded in strong practical sense and shrewdness.
Her words were far from flattery; but she would spare no deeds in the cause of those whom she kindly regarded.
What is more, she had known the "bottom," or valley, in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the "beck" on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them.
Miss Branwell instructed the children at regular hours in all she could teach, making her bed chamber into their schoolroom.
Their father was in the habit of relating to them any public news in which he felt an interest; and from the opinions of his strong and independent mind they would gather much food for thought; but I do not know whether he gave them any direct instruction.
Patrick Branwell, their only brother, was a boy of remarkable promise, and, in some ways, of extraordinary precocity of talent.
I have had a curious packet confided to me, containing an immense amount of manuscript, in an inconceivably small space; tales, dramas, poems, romances, written principally by Charlotte, in a hand which it is almost impossible to decipher without the aid of a magnifying glass.
No description will give so good an idea of the extreme minuteness of the writing as the annexed facsimile of a page.
CATALOGUE OF MY BOOKS, WITH THE PERIOD OF THEIR COMPLETION, UP TO august third eighteen thirty.
Two romantic tales in one volume; viz., The Twelve Adventurers and the Adventures in Ireland, april second eighteen twenty nine.
The Search after Happiness, a Tale, august first eighteen twenty nine.
The Adventures of Edward de Crack, a Tale, february second eighteen thirty.
An interesting Incident in the Lives of some of the most eminent Persons of the Age, a Tale, june tenth eighteen thirty.
Tales of the Islanders, in four volumes.
The strange Incident in the Duke of Wellington's Life; three.
The Marquis of Douro and Lord Charles Wellesley's Tale to his little King and Queen; completed december second eighteen twenty nine.
The Duke of Wellington's Adventure in the Cavern; two.
The Duke of Wellington and the little King's and Queen's visit to the Horse Guards; completed may eighth eighteen thirty.
The three old Washer women of Strathfieldsaye; two.
Characters of Great Men of the Present Age, december seventeenth eighteen twenty nine.
A True Story; two.
A True Story continued; six.
The Spirit of Cawdor; seven.
Interior of a Pothouse, a Poem; eight.
The Silver Cup, a Tale; ten.
Scene in my Tun, a Tale; fifteen.
An American Tale; sixteen.
The Lay of the Glass Town; eighteen.
Chief Genii in Council; twenty two.
Harvest in Spain; twenty three.
The Swiss Artists continued; twenty four.
The Beauty of Nature; two.
A Short Poem; three.
Meditations while Journeying in a Canadian Forest; four.
On Seeing the Ruins of the Tower of Babel; six.
Lines written on the Bank of a River one fine Summer Evening; eight.
Miscellaneous Poems, finished may thirtieth eighteen thirty.
The Churchyard; two.
Description of the Duke of Wellington's Palace on the Pleasant Banks of the Lusiva; this article is a small prose tale or incident; three.
Lines written on the Summit of a high Mountain of the North of England; five.
Winter; six.
Two Fragments, namely, first, The Vision; second, A Short untitled Poem; the Evening Walk, a Poem, june twenty third eighteen thirty.
Making in the whole twenty two volumes.
As each volume contains from sixty to a hundred pages, and the size of the page lithographed is rather less than the average, the amount of the whole seems very great, if we remember that it was all written in about fifteen months.
So much for the quantity; the quality strikes me as of singular merit for a girl of thirteen or fourteen.
One night, about the time when the cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are succeeded by the snow storms, and high piercing night winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting round the warm blazing kitchen fire, having just concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came off victorious, no candle having been produced.
A long pause succeeded, which was at last broken by Branwell saying, in a lazy manner, 'I don't know what to do.' This was echoed by Emily and Anne.
'I'd rather do anything than that.'
Oh! suppose we had each an island of our own.'
'If we had I would choose the Island of Man.'
'And mine shall be Guernsey.'
I chose the Duke of Wellington and two sons, Christopher North and Co., and mr Abernethy.
Here our conversation was interrupted by the, to us, dismal sound of the clock striking seven, and we were summoned off to bed.
The next day we added many others to our list of men, till we got almost all the chief men of the kingdom.
After this, for a long time, nothing worth noticing occurred.
In June, eighteen twenty eight, we erected a school on a fictitious island, which was to contain one thousand children.
The manner of the building was as follows.
Tabby moves about in her quaint country dress, frugal, peremptory, prone to find fault pretty sharply, yet allowing no one else to blame her children, we may feel sure.
Moreover, they do not confine themselves to local heroes; their range of choice has been widened by hearing much of what is not usually considered to interest children.
Little Anne, aged scarcely eight, picks out the politicians of the day for her chief men.
There is another scrap of paper, in this all but illegible handwriting, written about this time, and which gives some idea of the sources of their opinions.
THE HISTORY OF THE YEAR eighteen twenty nine.
"Once Papa lent my sister Maria a book.
It was an old geography book; she wrote on its blank leaf, 'Papa lent me this book.' This book is a hundred and twenty years old; it is at this moment lying before me.
Papa and Branwell are gone to Keighley.
We take two and see three newspapers a week.
We take the 'Leeds Intelligencer,' Tory, and the 'Leeds Mercury,' Whig, edited by mr Baines, and his brother, son in law, and his two sons, Edward and Talbot.
We see the 'john Bull;' it is a high Tory, very violent.
The Editor is mr Christopher North, an old man seventy four years of age; the first of April is his birth day; his company are Timothy Tickler, Morgan O'Doherty, Macrabin Mordecai, Mullion, Warnell, and james Hogg, a man of most extraordinary genius, a Scottish shepherd.
Best plays mean secret plays; they are very nice ones.
All our plays are very strange ones.
Their nature I need not write on paper, for I think I shall always remember them.
I will sketch out the origin of our plays more explicitly if I can.
Emily and I jumped out of bed, and I snatched up one and exclaimed, 'This is the Duke of Wellington!
This shall be the Duke!' When I had said this, Emily likewise took up one and said it should be hers; when Anne came down, she said one should be hers.
Mine was the prettiest of the whole, and the tallest, and the most perfect in every part.
"Guido Reni, Julio Romano, Titian, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Annibal Caracci, Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Carlo Cignani, Vandyke, Rubens, Bartolomeo Ramerghi."
Oh, those six months, from the time of the King's speech to the end!
Nobody could write, think, or speak on any subject but the Catholic question, and the Duke of Wellington, and mr Peel.
I remember the day when the Intelligence Extraordinary came with mr Peel's speech in it, containing the terms on which the Catholics were to be let in!
It will be interesting to some of my readers to know what was the character of her purely imaginative writing at this period.
While her description of any real occurrence is, as we have seen, homely, graphic, and forcible, when she gives way to her powers of creation, her fancy and her language alike run riot, sometimes to the very borders of apparent delirium.
Of this wild weird writing, a single example will suffice.
It is a letter to the editor of one of the "Little Magazines."
Politics were evidently their grand interest; the Duke of Wellington their demi god. All that related to him belonged to the heroic age.
Did Charlotte want a knight errant, or a devoted lover, the Marquis of Douro, or Lord Charles Wellesley, came ready to her hand.
As one evidence how Wellesley haunted her imagination, I copy out a few of the titles to her papers in the various magazines.
"Liffey Castle," a Tale by Lord c Wellesley.
"An Extraordinary Dream," by Lord c Wellesley.
"The Green Dwarf, a Tale of the Perfect Tense," by the Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley.
"Strange Events," by Lord c a f Wellesley.
Life in an isolated village, or a lonely country house, presents many little occurrences which sink into the mind of childhood, there to be brooded over.
This peculiarity I perceive very strongly in Charlotte's writings at this time.
Indeed, under the circumstances, it is no peculiarity.
To counterbalance this tendency in Charlotte, was the strong common sense natural to her, and daily called into exercise by the requirements of her practical life.
Thus we see that, while her imagination received vivid impressions, her excellent understanding had full power to rectify them before her fancies became realities.
On a scrap of paper, she has written down the following relation:--
"june twenty second eighteen thirty, six o'clock p.m. "Haworth, near Bradford.
"The following strange occurrence happened on the twenty second of June, eighteen thirty:--At the time Papa was very ill, confined to his bed, and so weak that he could not rise without assistance.
Tabby and I were alone in the kitchen, about half past nine ante meridian.
Suddenly we heard a knock at the door; Tabby rose and opened it.
An old man appeared, standing without, who accosted her thus:--
He desires me to say that the Bridegroom is coming, and that we must prepare to meet him; that the cords are about to be loosed, and the golden bowl broken; the pitcher broken at the fountain.'
As Tabby closed the door, I asked her if she knew him.
Her reply was, that she had never seen him before, nor any one like him.
Though I am fully persuaded that he was some fanatical enthusiast, well meaning perhaps, but utterly ignorant of true piety; yet I could not forbear weeping at his words, spoken so unexpectedly at that particular period."
Though the date of the following poem is a little uncertain, it may be most convenient to introduce it here.
It must have been written before eighteen thirty three, but how much earlier there are no means of determining.
I give it as a specimen of the remarkable poetical talent shown in the various diminutive writings of this time; at least, in all of them which I have been able to read.
THE WOUNDED STAG.
Passing amid the deepest shade Of the wood's sombre heart, Last night I saw a wounded deer Laid lonely and apart.
Such light as pierced the crowded boughs (Light scattered, scant and dim,) Passed through the fern that formed his couch And centred full on him.
This is perhaps a fitting time to give some personal description of Miss Bronte.
They were large and well shaped; their colour a reddish brown; but if the iris was closely examined, it appeared to be composed of a great variety of tints.
The usual expression was of quiet, listening intelligence; but now and then, on some just occasion for vivid interest or wholesome indignation, a light would shine out, as if some spiritual lamp had been kindled, which glowed behind those expressive orbs.
I never saw the like in any other human creature.
Her hands and feet were the smallest I ever saw; when one of the former was placed in mine, it was like the soft touch of a bird in the middle of my palm.
The delicate long fingers had a peculiar fineness of sensation, which was one reason why all her handiwork, of whatever kind-writing, sewing, knitting-was so clear in its minuteness.
She was remarkably neat in her whole personal attire; but she was dainty as to the fit of her shoes and gloves.
I can well imagine that the grave serious composure, which, when I knew her, gave her face the dignity of an old Venetian portrait, was no acquisition of later years, but dated from that early age when she found herself in the position of an elder sister to motherless children.
It is just such a neighbourhood as the monks loved, and traces of the old Plantagenet times are to be met with everywhere, side by side with the manufacturing interests of the West Riding of to day.
Within six miles of Miss W---'s house-on the left of the road, coming from Leeds-lie the remains of Howley Hall, now the property of Lord Cardigan, but formerly belonging to a branch of the Saviles.
These are to be seen in every direction, picturesque, many gabled, with heavy stone carvings of coats of arms for heraldic ornament; belonging to decayed families, from whose ancestral lands field after field has been shorn away, by the urgency of rich manufacturers pressing hard upon necessity.
Take Oakwell Hall, for instance.
It stands in a pasture field, about a quarter of a mile from the high road.
From the "Bloody Lane," overshadowed by trees, you come into the field in which Oakwell Hall is situated.
It is known in the neighbourhood to be the place described as "Field Head," Shirley's residence.
They show a bloody footprint in a bed chamber of Oakwell Hall, and tell a story connected with it, and with the lane by which the house is approached.
But the Oakwell property passed out of the hands of the Batts at the beginning of the last century; collateral descendants succeeded, and left this picturesque trace of their having been.
Lanes branch off for three or four miles to heaths and commons on the higher ground, which formed pleasant walks on holidays, and then comes the white gate into the field path leading to Roe Head itself.
The kind motherly nature of Miss W---, and the small number of the girls, made the establishment more like a private family than a school. Moreover, she was a native of the district immediately surrounding Roe Head, as were the majority of her pupils.
The time referred to is her first appearance at Roe Head, on january nineteenth eighteen thirty one.
"I first saw her coming out of a covered cart, in very old-fashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miserable.
She was coming to school at Miss W---'s.
When she appeared in the schoolroom, her dress was changed, but just as old.
She looked a little old woman, so short sighted that she always appeared to be seeking something, and moving her head from side to side to catch a sight of it.
She was very shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong Irish accent.
"E." was younger than she, and her tender heart was touched by the apparently desolate condition in which she found the oddly dressed, odd looking little girl that winter morning, as "sick for home she stood in tears," in a new strange place, among new strange people.
To quote again from "Mary's" letter:--
"We thought her very ignorant, for she had never learnt grammar at all, and very little geography."
This account of her partial ignorance is confirmed by her other school fellows.
But Miss W--- was a lady of remarkable intelligence and of delicate tender sympathy.
She gave a proof of this in her first treatment of Charlotte.
The little girl was well read, but not well grounded.
"She would confound us by knowing things that were out of our range altogether.
She had a habit of writing in italics (printing characters), and said she had learnt it by writing in their magazine.
No one wrote in it, and no one read it, but herself, her brother, and two sisters.
She promised to show me some of these magazines, but retracted it afterwards, and would never be persuaded to do so.
In our play hours she sate, or stood still, with a book, if possible.
She said she had never played, and could not play.
We made her try, but soon found that she could not see the ball, so we put her out. She took all our proceedings with pliable indifference, and always seemed to need a previous resolution to say 'No' to anything.
We understood but little of it.
She said that at Cowan Bridge she used to stand in the burn, on a stone, to watch the water flow by.
She always showed physical feebleness in everything.
She ate no animal food at school.
It was about this time I told her she was very ugly.
Whenever an opportunity offered of examining a picture or cut of any kind, she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper, looking so long that we used to ask her 'what she saw in it.' She could always see plenty, and explained it very well.
She made poetry and drawing at least exceedingly interesting to me; and then I got the habit, which I have yet, of referring mentally to her opinion on all matters of that kind, along with many more, resolving to describe such and such things to her, until I start at the recollection that I never shall."
"We used to be furious politicians, as one could hardly help being in eighteen thirty two.
She worshipped the Duke of Wellington, but said that Sir Robert Peel was not to be trusted; he did not act from principle like the rest, but from expediency.
"She used to speak of her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died at Cowan Bridge.
I used to believe them to have been wonders of talent and kindness.
I was eager for her to go on, and when she said there was no more, I said, 'but go on!
"This habit of 'making out' interests for themselves that most children get who have none in actual life, was very strong in her.
I told her sometimes they were like growing potatoes in a cellar.
She said, sadly, 'Yes!
I know we are!'
"This is the epitome of her life.
We had a rage for practicality, and laughed all poetry to scorn.
Charlotte, at school, had no plan of life beyond what circumstances made for her.
She knew that she must provide for herself, and chose her trade; at least chose to begin it once.
Her idea of self improvement ruled her even at school.
It was to cultivate her tastes.
What I have heard of her school days from other sources, confirms the accuracy of the details in this remarkable letter.
She was an indefatigable student: constantly reading and learning; with a strong conviction of the necessity and value of education, very unusual in a girl of fifteen.
She never lost a moment of time, and seemed almost to grudge the necessary leisure for relaxation and play hours, which might be partly accounted for by the awkwardness in all games occasioned by her shortness of sight.
Yet, in spite of these unsociable habits, she was a great favourite with her school fellows.
Incredible Treason
A careful survey of the territory showed that it was only the northern sections and slopes that had been "beamed" by the first Han ship.
The forest screen above it, however, had been annihilated, and it was determined to abandon it, after removing all usable machinery and evidences of the processes that might be of interest to the Han scientists, should they return to the valley in the future.
The ammunition plant, and the rocket ship plant, which had just been about to start operation at the time of the raid, were intact, as were the other important plants.
Hart brought the Camboss up from the Susquanna Works, and laid out new camp locations, scattering them farther to the south, and avoiding ground which had been seared by the Han beams and the immediate locations of the Han wrecks.
On our return, we had a camp of our own, of course.
And as might be expected, we had a great deal of banter over which one of us was Camp Boss.
The Wyomings had a high morale, and had prospered under the rule of Big Boss Hart for many years.
But many of the gangs, I found, were badly organized, lacked strong hands in authority, and were rife with intrigue.
On the whole, I thought I would be wise to stay with a group which had already proved its friendliness, and in which I seemed to have prospects of advancement.
Under these modern social and economic conditions, the kind of individual freedom to which I had been accustomed in the twentieth Century was impossible.
I would have been as much of a nonentity in every phase of human relationship by attempting to avoid alliances, as any man of the twentieth Century would have been politically, who aligned himself with no political party.
This entire modern life, it appeared to me, judging from my ancient viewpoint, was organized along what I called "political" lines.
He was just as much of an autocrat, and just as much dependent upon the general popularity of his actions for the ability to maintain his autocracy.
The sub boss who could not command the loyalty of his followers was as quickly deposed, either by them or by his superiors, as the ancient ward leader of the twentieth Century who lost control of his votes.
I tremble to think what would have happened, had the attempt been made to handle the a e f this way during the First World War, instead of by that rigid military discipline and complete assumption of the individual as a mere standardized cog in the machine.
But owing to the centuries of desperate suffering the people had endured at the hands of the Hans, there developed a spirit of self sacrifice and consideration for the common good that made the scheme applicable and efficient in all forms of human co-operation.
I have a little heresy about all this, however.
My associates regard the thought with as much horror as many worthy people of the twentieth Century felt in regard to any heretical suggestion that the original outline of government as laid down in the First Constitution did not apply as well to twentieth Century conditions as to those of the early nineteenth.
I have seen signs of the reawakening of greed, of selfishness.
The eternal cycle seems to be at work.
All this, however, is wandering afar from my story, which concerns our early battles against the Hans, and not our more modern problems of self control.
Our victory over the seven Han ships had set the country ablaze.
There was feverish activity in the ammunition plants, and the hunting of stray Han ships became an enthusiastic sport.
The results were disastrous to our hereditary enemies.
A dozen Sacramentos had caught the hazy outlines of its rep rays approaching them, head on, in the twilight, like ghostly pillars reaching into the sky.
They got one rep ray. The other was not strong enough to hold it up.
It floated to earth, nose down, and since it was unarmed and unarmored, they had no difficulty in shooting it to pieces and massacring its crew and passengers.
But then I did not have centuries of bitter persecution in my blood.
The Sand snipers, practically invisible in their sand colored clothing, and half buried along the beaches, lay in wait for days, risking the play of dis beams along the route, and finally registering four hits within a week.
The Hans discontinued their service along this route, and as evidence that they were badly shaken by our success, sent no raiders down the Beaches.
"Tony," he said, "There are two things I want to talk to you about.
One of them will become public property in a few days, I think.
We aren't going to get any more Han ships by shooting up their repellor rays unless we use much larger rockets.
They are wise to us now.
They're putting armor of great thickness in the hulls of their ships below the rep ray machines.
Near Bah flo this morning a party of Eries shot one without success.
The explosions staggered her, but did not penetrate.
Our reports indicate that the Eries' rockets bounced off harmlessly.
Most of the party was wiped out as the dis rays went into action on them.
The first move is to develop sectional organization by Zones.
"We're in for it now.
The Hans are sure to launch reprisal expeditions. If we're to save the race we must keep them away from our camps and plants.
I'm thinking of developing a permanent field force, along the lines of the regular armies of the twentieth Century you told me about.
I'm going to need your help in this.
You know, a hundred and fifteen or twenty years ago there were certain of these people's ancestors who actually degraded themselves by mating with the Hans, sometimes even serving them as slaves, in the days before they brought all their service machinery to perfection.
But I hardly suspect the Pineys. There is little intelligence among them.
"Just what evidence is there that anybody has been clearing information to the Hans?" I asked.
"Well," he replied, "first of all there was that raid upon us.
That first Han ship knew the location of our plants exactly.
Then, the Hans quite obviously have learned that we are picking up their electrophone waves, for they've gone back to their old, but extremely accurate, system of directional control.
But we've been getting them for the past week by installing automatic re broadcast units along the scar paths.
This is what the Americans called those strips of country directly under the regular ship routes of the Hans, who as a matter of precaution frequently blasted them with their dis beams to prevent the growth of foliage which might give shelter to the Americans.
But they've been beaming those paths so hard, it looks as though they even had information of this strategy.
And in addition, they've been using code.
Finally, we've picked up three of their messages in which they discuss, with some nervousness, the existence of our 'mysterious' ultrophone."
"But they still have no knowledge of the nature and control of ultronic activity?" I asked.
"Then it's quite clear," I ventured, "that whoever is 'clearing' us to them is doing it piecemeal.
It sounds like a bit of occasional barter, rather than an out and out alliance.
They're holding back as much information as possible for future bartering, perhaps."
CHAPTER eight
Hypnotic Torture
Some twenty minutes later the ship arrived.
It settled down slowly into the ravine on its repeller rays until it was but a few feet above the tree tops.
There it was stopped, and floated steadily, while a little cage was let down on a wire.
Into this I was hustled and locked, whereupon the cage rose swiftly again to a hole in the bottom of the hull, into which it fitted snugly, and I stepped into the interior of a craft not unlike the one with which I had had my fateful encounter, the cage being unlocked.
The ship rose to a great height, and headed westward at such speed that the hum of the air past its smooth plates rose to a shrill, almost inaudible moan.
Nor was there any sheen of shimmering disintegrator rays surrounding it, to interfere with the sparkling sight.
And this, I was the more ready to believe after my own recent experience.
I spent two months as a prisoner in Lo Tan.
Most elaborately staged attempts at seduction were made upon me with drugs, with women. Hypnotism was resorted to.
Viewplates were faked to picture to me the complete rout of American forces all over the continent.
Surrender of what?
Perhaps had my love for her been less great, I would have succumbed.
But all the while I knew subconsciously that this was not Wilma.
Product of the utmost of nobility in this modern virile, rugged American race, she would have died under even worse torture than these vicious Han scientists knew how to inflict, before she would have pleaded with me this way to betray my race and her honor.
But these were things that not even the most skilled of the Han hypnotists and psychoanalysts could drag from me.
Had they done so, it might have made a difference.
But even in the Twentieth Century we had learned that hypnotism cannot make a person violate his fundamental concepts of morality against his will, and steadfastly I steeled my will against them.
I have since thought that I was greatly aided by my newness to this age. I have never, as a matter of fact, become entirely attuned to it.
Now that my Wilma has been at rest these many years, I wish that I might go back to the year nineteen twenty seven, and take up my old life where I left it off, in the abandoned mine near Scranton.
And at the period of which I speak, I was less attuned than now to the modern world.
Real as my life was, and my love for my wife, there was much about it all that was like a dream, and in the midst of my tortures by the Hans, this complex-this habit of many months-helped me to tell myself that this, too, was all a dream, that I must not succumb, for I would wake up in a moment.
And so they failed.
Among these was San Lan himself, the ruler.
Instead of having me executed, he continued to shower luxuries and attentions on me, and frequently commanded my attendance upon him.
This creature, his most prized possession, San Lan with the utmost moral callousness ordered to seduce me, urging her to apply without stint and to its fullest extent, her knowledge of evil arts.
Had San Lan only known it, he might have had a better chance of breaking down my resistance through another bit of femininity in his household, the little nine year old Princess Lu Yan, his daughter.
But he did not realize this, and could not; for even the most natural and fundamental affection of the human race, that of parents for their offspring, had been so degraded and suppressed in this vicious Han civilization as to be unrecognizable.
Naturally San Lan could not understand the nature of my pity for this poor child, nor the fact that it might have proved a weak spot in my armor.
But had he done so, I truly believe he would have been ready to inflict degradation, torture and even death upon her, to make me surrender the information he wanted.
There were times when he seemed to sense vaguely, gropingly, wonderingly, that he might have a soul.
Its conception embraced nothing but electrons, protons and molecules, and still was struggling desperately for some shred of evidence that thoughts, will power and consciousness of self were nothing but chemical reactions.
They had succeeded in producing, by synthesis, what appeared to be living tissues, and even animals of moderately complex structure and rudimentary brains, but they could not give these creatures the full complement of life's characteristics, nor raise the brains to more than mechanical control of muscular tissues.
It was my own opinion that they never could succeed in doing so.
This opinion impressed San Lan greatly.
I had expected him to snort his disgust, as the extreme school of evolutionists would have done in the Twentieth Century.
But the idea was as new to him and the scientists of his court as Darwinism was to the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.
So it was received with much respect.
Painfully and with enforced mental readjustments, they began a philosophical search for excuses and justifications for the idea.
But the prestige I had gained among them, and the novelty of my expressed opinion carried much weight with them.
Yet, did not even brilliant scientists frequently exhibit the same lack of logic back in the Twentieth Century?
Did not the historians, the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome show themselves to be the same shrewd observers as those of succeeding centuries, the same masters of the logical and slaves of the illogical?
After all, I reflected, man makes little progress within himself. Through succeeding generations he piles up those resources which he possesses outside of himself, the tools of his hands, and the warehouses of knowledge for his brain, whether they be parchment manuscripts, printed book, or electronorecordographs.
For the rest he is born today, as in ancient Greece, with a blank brain, and struggles through to his grave, with a more or less beclouded understanding, and with distinct limitations to what we used to call his "think tank."
This particular reflection of mine proved unpopular with them, for it stabbed their vanity, and neither my prestige nor the novelty of the idea was sufficient salve.
Yet through these same centuries they had been busily engaged in the extermination of "weaklings," whom, by their very persecutions, they had turned into "super men," now rising in mighty wrath to destroy them; and in reducing themselves to the depths of softening vice and flabby moral fiber.
I am an old man.
I live here in this ancient house, surrounded by huge, unkempt gardens.
The peasantry, who inhabit the wilderness beyond, say that I am mad. That is because I will have nothing to do with them.
I live here alone with my old sister, who is also my housekeeper.
We keep no servants-I hate them.
I have one friend, a dog; yes, I would sooner have old Pepper than the rest of Creation together.
He, at least, understands me-and has sense enough to leave me alone when I am in my dark moods.
I have decided to start a kind of diary; it may enable me to record some of the thoughts and feelings that I cannot express to anyone; but, beyond this, I am anxious to make some record of the strange things that I have heard and seen, during many years of loneliness, in this weird old building.
For a couple of centuries, this house has had a reputation, a bad one, and, until I bought it, for more than eighty years no one had lived here; consequently, I got the old place at a ridiculously low figure.
I am not superstitious; but I have ceased to deny that things happen in this old house-things that I cannot explain; and, therefore, I must needs ease my mind, by writing down an account of them, to the best of my ability; though, should this, my diary, ever be read when I am gone, the readers will but shake their heads, and be the more convinced that I was mad.
Little curved towers and pinnacles, with outlines suggestive of leaping flames, predominate; while the body of the building is in the form of a circle.
I have heard that there is an old story, told amongst the country people, to the effect that the devil built the place.
However, that is as may be.
True or not, I neither know nor care, save as it may have helped to cheapen it, ere I came.
I must have been here some ten years before I saw sufficient to warrant any belief in the stories, current in the neighborhood, about this house.
It is true that I had, on at least a dozen occasions, seen, vaguely, things that puzzled me, and, perhaps, had felt more than I had seen.
Then, as the years passed, bringing age upon me, I became often aware of something unseen, yet unmistakably present, in the empty rooms and corridors.
Still, it was as I have said many years before I saw any real manifestations of the so-called supernatural.
It was not Halloween.
If I were telling a story for amusement's sake, I should probably place it on that night of nights; but this is a true record of my own experiences, and I would not put pen to paper to amuse anyone.
no
It was after midnight on the morning of the twenty first day of January.
I was sitting reading, as is often my custom, in my study. Pepper lay, sleeping, near my chair.
Without warning, the flames of the two candles went low, and then shone with a ghastly green effulgence.
Down on the floor, I heard a faint, frightened whimper, and something pressed itself in between my two feet.
Pepper, usually as brave as a lion!
I had been considerably startled when the lights burnt first green and then red; but had been momentarily under the impression that the change was due to some influx of noxious gas into the room.
Now, however, I saw that it was not so; for the candles burned with a steady flame, and showed no signs of going out, as would have been the case had the change been due to fumes in the atmosphere.
I did not move.
I felt distinctly frightened; but could think of nothing better to do than wait.
For perhaps a minute, I kept my glance about the room, nervously.
Still, I sat watching; while a sort of dreamy indifference seemed to steal over me; banishing altogether the fear that had begun to grip me.
Steadily it grew, filling the room with gleams of quivering green light; then they sank quickly, and changed-even as the candle flames had done-into a deep, somber crimson that strengthened, and lit up the room with a flood of awful glory.
The light came from the end wall, and grew ever brighter until its intolerable glare caused my eyes acute pain, and involuntarily I closed them.
It may have been a few seconds before I was able to open them.
The first thing I noticed was that the light had decreased, greatly; so that it no longer tried my eyes.
Gradually, as I became more accustomed to the idea, I realized that I was looking out on to a vast plain, lit with the same gloomy twilight that pervaded the room.
The immensity of this plain scarcely can be conceived.
In no part could I perceive its confines.
It seemed to broaden and spread out, so that the eye failed to perceive any limitations.
Suddenly, I became conscious that I was no longer in the chair. Instead, I seemed to be hovering above it, and looking down at a dim something, huddled and silent.
In a little while, a cold blast struck me, and I was outside in the night, floating, like a bubble, up through the darkness.
As I moved, an icy coldness seemed to enfold me, so that I shivered.
After a time, I looked to right and left, and saw the intolerable blackness of the night, pierced by remote gleams of fire.
Onward, outward, I drove.
Once, I glanced behind, and saw the earth, a small crescent of blue light, receding away to my left.
Further off, the sun, a splash of white flame, burned vividly against the dark.
An indefinite period passed.
Then, for the last time, I saw the earth-an enduring globule of radiant blue, swimming in an eternity of ether.
And there I, a fragile flake of soul dust, flickered silently across the void, from the distant blue, into the expanse of the unknown.
A great while seemed to pass over me, and now I could nowhere see anything.
I had passed beyond the fixed stars and plunged into the huge blackness that waits beyond.
All this time I had experienced little, save a sense of lightness and cold discomfort.
Now however the atrocious darkness seemed to creep into my soul, and I became filled with fear and despair.
What was going to become of me?
Where was I going?
Even as the thoughts were formed, there grew against the impalpable blackness that wrapped me a faint tinge of blood.
Slowly, the distant redness became plainer and larger; until, as I drew nearer, it spread out into a great, somber glare-dull and tremendous. Still, I fled onward, and, presently, I had come so close, that it seemed to stretch beneath me, like a great ocean of somber red.
I could see little, save that it appeared to spread out interminably in all directions.
In a further space, I found that I was descending upon it; and, soon, I sank into a great sea of sullen, red hued clouds.
Slowly, I emerged from these, and there, below me, I saw the stupendous plain that I had seen from my room in this house that stands upon the borders of the Silences.
Presently, I landed, and stood, surrounded by a great waste of loneliness.
The place was lit with a gloomy twilight that gave an impression of indescribable desolation.
Afar to my right, within the sky, there burnt a gigantic ring of dull red fire, from the outer edge of which were projected huge, writhing flames, darted and jagged.
The interior of this ring was black, black as the gloom of the outer night.
I comprehended, at once, that it was from this extraordinary sun that the place derived its doleful light.
From that strange source of light, I glanced down again to my surroundings.
Everywhere I looked, I saw nothing but the same flat weariness of interminable plain.
Nowhere could I descry any signs of life; not even the ruins of some ancient habitation.
Gradually, I found that I was being borne forward, floating across the flat waste.
For what seemed an eternity, I moved onward.
I was unaware of any great sense of impatience; though some curiosity and a vast wonder were with me continually.
Presently, in a half conscious manner, I noticed that there was a faint mistiness, ruddy in hue, lying over its surface.
Still, when I looked more intently, I was unable to say that it was really mist; for it appeared to blend with the plain, giving it a peculiar unrealness, and conveying to the senses the idea of unsubstantiality.
Gradually, I began to weary with the sameness of the thing.
Yet, it was a great time before I perceived any signs of the place, toward which I was being conveyed.
"At first, I saw it, far ahead, like a long hillock on the surface of the Plain.
Further reading of the log produced no new evidence.
He never lived to change his mind.
"Kerk must see this book," Jason said.
It took Jason a moment to realize that it was a mechanical signal, not a human voice.
"What is it?" he asked.
Kerk burst through the door and headed for the street entrance.
Meta looked confused, leaning towards the door, then looking back at Jason.
"What does it mean?
Can't you tell me?" He shook her arm.
I'll be all right."
He used it for general commands.
"All perimeter stations send twenty five per cent of your complement to Area Twelve."
The small images reappeared and the babble increased, red lights flickering from face to face.
"... Abandon the first floor, acid bombs can't reach."
Orders?"
He lay there, his chest heaving.
Other than that he couldn't determine the nature of the battle.
He couldn't have been more wrong.
When he smiled it was a grimace of pain, empty of humor.
I can still shoot.
Two half men-maybe we equal one whole." Jason was laboring too hard to even notice the insult.
"They found the napalm.
"Back quick.
They don't like heat," he said.
This was putting it very mildly.
The napalm caught, tongues of flame and roiling, greasy smoke climbed up to the sky.
It was immense, at least two meters thick and with no indication of its length. The flames didn't stop it at all, just annoyed it.
Not that it seemed to have any effect.
But what area?
It was too late.
Safety lay ahead.
Only in front of it rose an arch of dirt encrusted gray.
There are seconds of time that seem to last an eternity.
A moment of subjective time that is grabbed and stretched to an infinite distance. This was one of those moments.
Jason stood, frozen.
Shaped like a plant, yet with the motions of an animal. And cracking, splitting.
Seams and openings appeared.
He should have died.
Jason knew nothing.
It was too late.
Jason crawled.
He offered no protest and could not have even if Kerk had killed him.
He did not lose consciousness as the truck bounced away, yet he could not move.
twenty three.
Something caught in his throat and he coughed to clear it, spitting out blood.
He ended up shouting and shaking his fist at nothing in particular, but it helped.
The anger washed away the fear and brought him back to reality.
Sitting on the ground felt good now.
Well battered, but still alive.
When nightfall came it was still raining.
The way he felt.
Pneumonia.
He had all the symptoms.
Well, he had the remedy for this one, too.
A choking growl echoed behind him.
Did they hunt in packs, too?
As soon as the thought hit him he looked up-not a moment too soon.
Yet the fact didn't bother him greatly.
Nothing really mattered.
One of them exposed himself and Jason pulled the trigger.
There was only a slight click.
The gun was empty, as was the spare clip pouch at his belt.
This, then, was the end.
Though they shouldn't talk.
It would kill them all in the end, too. Pyrrans never died in bed.
Old Pyrrans never died, they just got et.
It leaped.
Grubbers.
Ahead, on the far side of a burnt corridor, stood the perimeter.
Generations of attackers had bruised, broken, and undermined it. Repairs had been quickly made, patches thrust roughly into place and fixed there.
This overlapped a length of pitted metal, large plates riveted together.
There were only thirty men in the party.
What they had to do could only be done with a fast, light force.
That isn't the danger.
"He's right," Naxa snorted.
Death, death up by that wall.
Do like 'e says."
"Biggest thing I 'ver heard.
Jason was aware of part of it.
It would work, he knew, if they could only keep the attack confined to a small area.
"They hit!" Naxa said suddenly.
The men were on their feet now, staring in the direction of the city. Jason had felt the twist as the attack had been driven home, and knew that this was it.
The other three were bitten or scratched and treatment came too late.
"Dam' beasts hurt m'head," Naxa muttered.
"We wait for the signal."
It was turned on, but only a hiss of atmospheric static came from the speaker.
The sound from the speaker changed.
"Wait," Jason said, taking him by the arm.
"We have four minutes to the next one-we hit the long period!"
If he was wrong, they were all dead.
The first men had slapped their wads of sticky congealed sap against the wall.
Others grabbed on and bent the jagged pieces aside.
The hole was filled with smoke and nothing was visible through it.
He was inside the city.
But they were Pyrrans, too.
The ship stood ahead.
A hail of bolts from the bows crashed into it with no effect.
"Keep going!" Jason shouted.
This time three men didn't make it.
Their time was running out.
It broke off in his hand but the hatch remained closed.
The big guns had stopped now and they could hear again.
"It would blow this thing open."
He returned quickly, darting into the open to throw the gun to them. Before he could dive back to safety the shells caught him.
Jason grabbed up the gun as it skidded almost to his feet.
They were all through the air lock before the first truck appeared.
The single city Pyrran looked like a pin cushion.
He found the communications screen and snapped it on.
"Yes, it's me," Jason answered.
"Listen to me, Kerk-and don't doubt anything I say.
Do you hear that sound?"
"That's the main fuel pump.
If I let it run-which I won't right now-it could quickly fill the drive chamber with raw fuel.
Pour in so much that it would run out of the stern tubes.
There was only silence in the cabin now, the men who had won the ship turned to face him.
"What do you want, Jason-what are you trying to do?
Why did you lead those animals in here ..." His voice cracked and broke as anger choked him and spilled over.
"Watch your tongue, Kerk," Jason said with soft menace.
If you want them to share it with you, you had better learn to talk nicely. Now come over here at once-and bring Brucco and Meta." Jason looked at the older man's florid and swollen face and felt a measure of sympathy. "Don't look so unhappy, it's not the end of the world.
In fact, it might be the beginning of one.
And another thing, leave this channel open when you go.
Make sure it's taped too, for replay."
Kerk started to say something, but changed his mind before he did.
And say!
Girlie!
We'll just take out the leaves.
"Thank you," she said, wearily, "but that wouldn't do me any good."
"Why not?" asked the man sharply.
"Your boss would never know it got out through you."
"It wouldn't be your fault.
You couldn't have helped it!"
"Oh, yes, I could, and I ought.
Well, anyhow, buck up, and let's have some tea.
See?
Hennie!
Bring in them things from the cupboard and let's get to work."
The man frowned when she declined to come to supper, but a moment later stumbled awkwardly across the room with a slopping cup of coffee and set it down beside her.
"Buck up, girlie!" he growled.
"Drink that and you'll feel better."
But she tried to look a bit brighter.
"Shut up!
"Beat it!" he cried in a hoarse whisper.
I bet they heard her singin'!
The man swore at her, grasped her arm till he hurt her and she cried out.
"You shut up or I'll shoot you!" he said with an oath.
It was then she heard Graham's voice calling:
"Shirley!
I'm coming!"
Joe stood between two policemen with a rope bound about his body spirally, and the boy Hennie, also bound, beside his fallen bicycle, turned his ferret eyes from side to side as if he hoped even yet to escape.
"Oh, my dear Miss Hollister!
"Yes, mr Barnard, they got my note book, but not the notes!
Won't you please get them out, for I'm afraid I can't hold them on any longer, my feet ache so!"
No one of that group but Shirley could fully appreciate the ludicrous picture he made.
You will see, we shall not forget it!" he puffed as he rose with beads of perspiration on his brow.
"She's rounded up the whole gang for us, and that's more than anybody else has been able to do yet!
"I say, pard!
I guess you're the winner!
You certainly had your nerve!"
"You were-as fine as you could be to me under the circumstances, I suppose!
The man met her gaze for an instant, a flippant reply upon his lips, but checked it and dropping his eyes, was silent.
Then, quietly, Graham led her away to his car with Barnard and the detectives following.
Douglas Dale could not attend that inquest.
He was stricken down with fever; the fate of the woman he had so loved, so unjustly suspected, nearly cost him his life, and when he recovered sufficiently, he left England, not to return for three years.
Before his departure he saw Lady Eversleigh and her mother, and established with them a bond of friendship as close as that of their kin.
Victor Carrington's mother retired into a convent, and was probably as happy as she had ever been.
She had loved him but little, whose only virtue was that he had loved her much.
He was almost jealous of Rosamond Jernam, when he found how great a hold she had obtained on the heart of her charge; but his jealousy was mingled with gratitude, and he joined Lady Eversleigh in testifying his friendship for the tender hearted woman who had protected and cherished the heiress of Raynham in the hour of her desolation.
"That woman's wealth must be boundless," exclaimed aristocratic dowagers, for whom the grip of poverty's bony fingers had been tight and cruel.
"Her husband left her magnificent estates, and an enormous amount of funded property; and now a mother drops down from the skies for her benefit-a mother who is reported to be almost as rich as herself."
Amongst those who envied Lady Eversleigh's good fortune, there was none whose envy was so bitter as that of her husband's disappointed nephew, Sir Reginald.
Instead of this, he heard of her exaltation, and he hated her with an intense hatred which was almost childish in its purposeless fury.
But now he found himself quite alone; and there was no voice to promise future triumph.
He knew that the game of life had been played to the last card, and that it was lost.
Here he could afford to buy brandy, for at that date brandy was much cheaper in France than it is now.
Form and features, complexion and expression, were alike degraded.
Had he any consciousness of his degradation?
Yes; that was the undying vulture which preyed upon his entrails-the consuming fire that was never quenched.
During the brief interval of each day in which he was sober, Sir Reginald Eversleigh was wont to reflect upon the past.
He knew himself to be the wretch and outcast he was; and, looking back at his start in life, he could but remember how different his career might have been had he so chosen.
In those hours the slow tears made furrows in his haggard cheeks-the tears of remorse, vain repentance, that came too late for earth; but not, perhaps, utterly too late for heaven, since, even for this last and worst of sinners, there might be mercy.
Thus his life passed-a changeless routine, unbroken by one bright interval, one friendly visit, one sign or token to show that there was any link between this lonely wretch and the rest of humanity.
"I have not seen him to day nor yesterday, nor for many days.
He must be ill.
A trap door in the roof, which he had been accustomed to open for the ventilation of his garret, had been closed by the wind, and the baronet had passed unconsciously from sleep to death.
Yes, Anna was at peace; surrounded by friends; delighted day by day to watch the budding loveliness, the sportive grace of Gertrude Eversleigh, the idolized heiress of Raynham.
As Lady Eversleigh paced the terraces of an Italian garden, her mother by her side, with Gertrude clinging to her side; as she looked out over the vast domain which owned her as mistress-it might seem that fortune had lavished her fairest gifts into the lap of her who had been once a friendless stranger, singing in the taverns of Wapping.
The difference in their social position made no difference to her; and no more frequent or more welcome guests were seen at Raynham than Captain Duncombe, his daughter and son in law, and honest Joyce Harker.
Lady Eversleigh had a particular regard for the man who had so true and faithful a heart, and she would often talk to him; but she never mentioned the subject of that miserable night on which he had seen her down at Wapping.
That subject was tacitly avoided by both.
There was a pain too intense, a memory too dark, associated with the events of that period.
And so the story ends.
Is it not the fate of the innocent to suffer in this life for the sins of the wicked?
Lady Eversleigh's widowhood, Douglas Dale's lonely life, are the work of Victor Carrington-a work not to be undone upon this earth.
If he has failed in all else, he has succeeded at least in this: he has ruined the happiness of two lives.
But in the heart of Douglas Dale there is an empty place which can never be filled upon earth.
Had not Paulina been "weary, and heavy laden," bowed down by the burden of a false accusation, friendless, hopeless, from her very cradle?
He thought of the illimitable Mercy, and he dared to hope for the day in which he should meet her he loved "Beyond the Veil."
He had not gone far when he met friend Fox, on his rounds that way.
'I am going to the King for what he owes me.'
'Oh! take me with thee!'
'Happy thought!' says friend Fox.
'I am going to the King for what he owes me.'
'Oh! take me with thee!'
Drakestail said to himself: 'One can't have too many friends.' ... 'I will,' says he, 'but with your wooden legs you will soon be tired.
'I am going to the King, you know, for what he owes me.'
Drakestail said to himself: 'We can't be too many friends.'... 'I will,' says he, 'but you who sleep while you walk will soon be tired.
Make yourself quite small, get into my throat-go into my gizzard and I will carry you.'
She takes bag and baggage, and glou, glou, glou, she takes her place between friend Fox and my friend Ladder.
'I am going to the King for what he owes me.'
'Oh! take me with thee!'
Drakestail said to himself, 'One can't have too many friends.'... 'I will,' says he, 'but with your battalion to drag along, you will soon be tired.
Make yourself quite small, go into my throat-get into my gizzard and I will carry you.'
And left file! he takes the same road to join the others with all his party.
There was not much more room, but by closing up a bit they managed....
He strikes with the knocker: 'Toc! toc!'
'Who is there?' asks the porter, putting his head out of the wicket.
''tis I, Drakestail.
I wish to speak to the King.'
'Speak to the King!...
The King is dining, and will not be disturbed.'
'Tell him that it is I, and I have come he well knows why.'
Make him come in, and put him with the turkeys and chickens.'
The porter descends.
'Have the goodness to enter.'
'Good!' says Drakestail to himself, 'I shall now see how they eat at court.'
'This way, this way,' says the porter.
'One step further....
There, there you are.'
'How? what?
in the poultry yard?'
Fancy how vexed Drakestail was!
'Wait!
'What is it?
what does he want?'
'I am lost!' said Drakestail to himself, when by good luck he remembers his comrade friend Fox, and he cries:
'Reynard, Reynard, come out of your earth, Or Drakestail's life is of little worth.'
Then friend Fox, who was only waiting for these words, hastens out, throws himself on the wicked fowls, and quick!
quack! he tears them to pieces; so much so that at the end of five minutes there was not one left alive.
And it was done as he commanded.
'Ladder, Ladder, come out of thy hold, Or Drakestail's days will soon be told.'
The furnace was soon hot, but this time Drakestail was not so afraid; he counted on his sweetheart, my friend River.
'River, River, outward flow, Or to death Drakestail must go.'
'Bring him here, and I'll cut his throat! bring him here quick!' cried he.
He thought this time it was all up with him.
'The brave Wasp's nest rushes out with all his wasps.
Behold Drakestail much astonished, all alone in the big saloon and master of the field.
He could not get over it.
Nevertheless, he remembered shortly what he had come for to the palace, and improving the occasion, he set to work to hunt for his dear money. But in vain he rummaged in all the drawers; he found nothing; all had been spent.
'The King is dead, long live the King! Heaven has sent us down this thing.'
Drakestail, who was no longer surprised at anything, received the acclamations of the people as if he had never done anything else all his life.
Thus he became King.
'And now,' said he after the ceremony, 'ladies and gentlemen, let's go to supper.
The more they killed the more came.
The Town Counsellor, who was considered clever, reassured them.
'Leave it to the Town Counsellor,' said the citizens one to another.
When the people of Hamel heard of the bargain, they too exclaimed: 'A gros a head! but this will cost us a deal of money!'
'Leave it to the Town Counsellor,' said the town council with a malicious air.
And the good people of Hamel repeated with their counsellors, 'Leave it to the Town Counsellor.'
Arrived there he turned round; the rats were following.
hop! without hesitating, the rats took the leap, swam straight to the funnel, plunged in head foremost and disappeared.
'Are they all there, friend Blanchet?' asked the bagpiper.
'Well reckoned?'
'Well reckoned.'
'All your rats took a jump into the river yesterday,' said he to the counsellors, 'and I guarantee that not one of them comes back.
Reckon!'
The ratcatcher did not expect this treacherous stroke.
'The heads!' cried he, 'if you care about them, go and find them in the river.'
'Keep your recompense for yourself,' replied the ratcatcher proudly.
'If you do not pay me I will be paid by your heirs.'
'Our children! where are our poor children?' was the cry that was soon heard in all the streets.
Then through the east door of the town came three little boys, who cried and wept, and this is what they told:
There they found the ratcatcher playing his bagpipes at the same spot as the evening before.
At their approach the mountain had opened a little, and the bagpiper had gone in with them, after which it had closed again. Only the three little ones who told the adventure had remained outside, as if by a miracle.
These people also declared that they came from Germany, but they did not know how they chanced to be in this strange country.
THE SECRET
And dropping her fingers quickly and turning away from the glass, she exclaimed, "How dare you, Hortense, come in without knocking?"
"Not exactly money, ma'am," said the man, "for I don't suppose you have much here.
Should she dare to scream?
"There he goes!" cried Dick, "in her room.
Well, I must catch him." So without the preamble of knocking, the boy dashed into the dressing room.
"Go back!" cried mrs Chatterton hoarsely, "you'll be killed."
There was no chance for her to escape, she knew, but she could save Dick.
"Go back!" she screamed again.
There was only a moment to think, but Dick dashed in, and with a mighty spirit, but small fists, he flung himself against the stalwart arms and shoulders.
Help-help!"
"Where are you, Dick?" cried Polly's voice outside, and rapping at the door.
"mrs Chatterton, have you seen him?"
Polly threw wide the door.
"I'll take care of him till you get help.
Hurry!"
"Oh, Dick!" cried Polly in a breath, with a fearful glance at the boy lying there.
"I think he's all right, Polly." She dared say no more, for Dick had not stirred.
"A burglar-a burglar!" and he dashed into mrs Chatterton's room.
"I'm a splendid markswoman."
"I won't stir."
"Well, here are the men."
Jasper had seized a table spread, and as Michael and the undergardeners advanced, he went back of the robber, and cleverly threw it over his head.
It was easy to secure and bind him then.
Polly rushed over to Dick.
"Turn the creature over and let us see how he looks," said mr King, hurrying in as the last knot of the rope was made fast.
"He's no beauty, and that's a fact."
"I've seen that fellow round here for many a day," said Michael, giving the recumbent legs a small kick.
"I want to tie one rope," cried a voice.
Dick opened his eyes, rubbed them, and felt of his head.
"I'm all right, Polly.
I saw stars, but I've got over it, I guess.
Let me give him the last knot." He staggered blindly to his feet.
"Tell his mother so, do, somebody," said old mr King.
Call Hortense, will you?"
"I'll peep.
She put me up to it; we was goin' shares on the old lady's stuff."
With that mrs Chatterton's spirit returned.
"Oh, Dick! do tell over again how it all happened."
"No, not a bit," declared Dick, shaking his brown poll.
"Do let me bathe it," she begged.
"No, I won't," said Dick.
"It smells awfully, and I've had so much of it for my leg.
I'm all right, Phronsie.
See his wings now-he's stretching."
"May I?"
Dick made a wry face.
"Worse and worse."
"Boys like to get hurt, you know.
'Tisn't manly to be fixed up."
Phronsie gave a sigh, which so went to Dick's heart, that he said, "All right, bring on some water if you want to.
"Oh!" Polly gasped.
"How can we ever leave the boys!
Oh!
As they danced lightly down the long hall, dr Fisher leaned against a pillar, and watched them.
"Have to," said Jasper, guiding his partner deftly in the intricacies of the chairs and statuary.
"I'm almost tempted to dance myself," said dr Fisher.
"If I wasn't such an old fellow, I'd try; that is, if anybody asked me."
"I will," said Polly, laughing.
"Come, Papa Fisher," holding out her hand, "do give me the honor."
"All right," said dr Fisher bravely.
So Jasper took the deserted post by the pillar, and whistled a Strauss waltz.
Thereupon a most extraordinary hopping up and down the hall was commenced, the two figures bobbing like a pair of corks on a quivering water surface.
"I couldn't help it," said the little doctor, coming up red and animated, and wiping his forehead.
"It looked so nice to see Jasper and Polly, I thought I'd try it.
"Humph!" laughed mr King, "it looks like it.
Just see Polly."
"Oh, Papa Fisher!" cried Polly with a merry peal in which Jasper, unpuckering his lips from the Strauss effort, had joined, "we must have looked"--Here she went off again.
"Yes," said Jasper, "you did.
That's just it, Polly, you did.
Lucky you two caperers didn't break anything."
"Well, if you've got through laughing," observed dr Fisher, "I'll remark that the secret is out."
"Do you like it, Polly?" asked mr King, holding out his hand.
"Say, my girl?" And then before she could answer, he went on, "You see, we can't do anything without a doctor on our travels.
Now Providence has given us one, though rather an obstinate specimen," he pointed to Father Fisher.
"When?" demanded Polly breathlessly.
When thoroughly mixed, add three pints of cold water.
When lukewarm, stir in half a pint of family yeast, (if brewers' yeast is used, a less quantity will answer,) a table spoonful of salt, knead in flour till stiff enough to mould up, and free from lumps.
The more the bread is kneaded, the better it will be.
Cover it over with a thick cloth, and if the weather is cold, set it near a fire.
To ascertain when it has risen, cut it through the middle with a knife-if full of small holes like a sponge, it is sufficiently light for baking.
It should be baked as soon as light.
The bread should stand ten or twelve minutes in the pans before baking it.
If you like your bread baked a good deal, let it stand in the oven an hour and a half.
When the wheat is grown, it makes better bread to wet the flour entirely with boiling water.
It should remain till cool before working in the yeast.
Some cooks have an idea that it kills the life of the flour to scald it, but it is a mistaken idea-it is sweeter for it, and will keep good much longer.
Bread made in this way is nearly as good as that which is wet with milk.
Care must be taken not to put the yeast in when the dough is hot, as it will scald it, and prevents its rising.
Most ovens require heating an hour and a half for bread.
A brisk fire should be kept up, and the doors of the room should be kept shut, if the weather is cold.
Pine and ash, mixed together, or birch wood, is the best for heating an oven.
To ascertain if your oven is of the right temperature, when cleaned, throw in a little flour; if it browns in the course of a minute, it is sufficiently hot; if it turns black directly, wait several minutes, before putting in the things that are to be baked.
If the oven does not bake well, set in a furnace of live coals.
Let it remain till lukewarm, then add a tea cup full of family, or half a tea cup of distillery yeast.
Set it in a warm place to rise.
When light, knead in flour till stiff enough to mould up, then let it stand till risen again, before moulding it up.
Wet up rye flour with lukewarm milk, (water will do to wet it with, but it will not make the bread so good.) Put in the same proportion of yeast as for wheat bread.
For four or five loaves of bread, put in a couple of tea spoonsful of salt.
It should not be kneaded as stiff as wheat bread, or it will be hard when baked.
When light, take it out into pans, without moulding it up-let it remain in them about twenty minutes, before baking.
Brown bread is made by scalding Indian meal, and stirring into it, when lukewarm, about the same quantity of rye flour as Indian meal-add yeast and salt in the same proportion as for other kinds of bread.
Bake it between two and three hours.
When light, take it out into buttered pans, let it remain a few minutes, then bake it two hours and a half.
Boil the potatoes very soft, then peel and mash them fine.
Put in salt, and very little butter-then rub them with the flour-wet the flour with lukewarm water-then work in the yeast, and flour till stiff to mould up.
It will rise quicker than common wheat bread, and should be baked as soon as risen, as it turns sour very soon.
The potatoes that the bread is made of should be mealy, and mixed with the flour in the proportion of one third of potatoes to two thirds of flour.
Boil a pint of rice till soft-then mix it with a couple of quarts of rice or wheat flour.
When cool, add half a tea cup of yeast, a little salt, and milk to render it of the consistency of rye bread.
When light, bake it in small buttered pans.
Turn a quart of lukewarm milk on to a quart of flour.
Melt a couple of ounces of butter, and put to the milk and flour, together with a couple of eggs, and a tea spoonful of salt.
When cool, stir in half a tea cup of yeast, and flour to make it stiff enough to mould up.
Put it in a warm place.
When light, do it up into small rolls-lay the rolls on flat buttered tins-let them remain twenty minutes before baking.
Boil a small handful of hops in a couple of quarts of water.
When lukewarm, stir in a tea cup of yeast-keep it in a warm place till risen.
When of a frothy appearance, it is sufficiently light.
Some people keep yeast in bottles, but they are apt to burst-some use jugs, but they cannot be cleaned so easily as jars.
Whenever your yeast gets sour, the jar should be thoroughly cleaned before fresh is put in-if not cleaned, it will spoil the fresh yeast.
Yeast made in this manner will keep good a fortnight in warm weather; in cold weather longer.
If your yeast appears to be a little changed, add a little saleratus to it before you mix it with your bread.
If it does not foam well, when put in, it is too stale to use.
Milk yeast makes sweeter bread than any other kind of yeast, but it will not keep good long.
It is very nice to make biscuit of.
Take half the quantity of milk you need for your biscuit-set it in a warm place, with a little flour, and a tea spoonful of salt.
When light, mix it with the rest of the milk, and use it directly for the biscuit.
It takes a pint of this yeast for five or six loaves of bread.
Another method of making yeast, which is very good, is to take about half a pound of your bread dough, when risen, and roll it out thin, and dry it. When you wish to make bread, put a quart of lukewarm milk to it, set it near the fire to rise-when light, scald the flour, and let it be till lukewarm-then add the yeast and salt.
This will raise the bread in the course of an hour.
The dough will need a little fresh hop liquor put to it, in the course of three or four times baking.
Stir into a pint of good lively yeast a table spoonful of salt, and rye or wheat flour to make a thick batter.
When risen, stir in Indian meal till of the right consistency to roll out.
When risen again, roll them out very thin, cut them into cakes with a tumbler, and dry them in the shade in clear windy weather.
Care must be taken to keep them from the sun, or they will ferment.
When perfectly dry, tie them up in a bag, and keep them in a cool dry place.
Yeast cakes will keep good five or six months.
They are very convenient to use in summer, as common yeast is so apt to ferment.
Melt a tea cup of butter-mix it with two thirds of a pint of milk, (if you have not any milk, water may be substituted, but the biscuit will not be as nice.) Put in a tea spoonful of salt, half a tea cup of yeast, (milk yeast is the best, see directions for making it)--stir in flour till it is stiff enough to mould up.
A couple of eggs improve the biscuit, but are not essential.
Set the dough in a warm place when risen, mould the dough with the hand into small cakes, lay them on flat tins that have been buttered.
Let them remain half an hour before they are baked.
Dissolve a couple of tea spoonsful of saleratus in a tea cup of sour milk-mix it with a pint of butter milk, and a couple of tea spoonsful of salt.
Stir in flour until stiff enough to mould up.
Mould it up into small cakes, and bake them immediately.
Weigh out four pounds of flour, and rub three pounds and a half of it with four ounces of butter, four beaten eggs, and a couple of tea spoonsful of salt.
Bake them in a quick oven.
Put a couple of tea spoonsful of saleratus in a pint of sour milk.
Mould them up into small biscuit, and bake them immediately.
Boil mealy potatoes very soft, peel and mash them.
To four good sized potatoes, put a piece of butter, of the size of a hen's egg, a tea spoonful of salt.
When the butter has melted, put in half a pint of cold milk.
If the milk cools the potatoes, put in a quarter of a pint of yeast, and flour to make them of the right consistency to mould up.
Set them in a warm place-when risen, mould them up with the hand-let them remain ten or fifteen minutes before baking them.
When light, drop this mixture by the large spoonful on to flat, buttered tins, several inches apart.
Let them remain a few minutes before baking.
Bake them in a quick oven till they are a light brown.
Rub six ounces of butter with two pounds of flour-dissolve a couple of tea spoonsful of saleratus in a wine glass of milk, and strain it on to the flour-add a tea spoonful of salt, and milk enough to enable you to roll it out.
Beat it with a rolling pin for half an hour, pounding it out thin-cut it into cakes with a tumbler-bake them about fifteen minutes, then take them from the oven.
Your majesty, replied the minister calmly, cannot bring yourself off.
We'll pay them in money-said the king.
Sire, there are not sixty thousand crowns in the treasury, answered the minister.--I'll pawn the best jewel in my crown, quoth Francis the First.
Your honour stands pawn'd already in this matter, answered Monsieur le Premier.
--But can the thing be undone, Yorick? said my father-for in my opinion, continued he, it cannot.
All that is requisite, continued Yorick, is to apprize Didius, and let him manage a conversation after dinner so as to introduce the subject.--Then my brother Toby, cried my father, clapping his two hands together, shall go with us.
--Let my old tye wig, quoth my uncle Toby, and my laced regimentals, be hung to the fire all night, Trim.
For my own part, I am but just set up in the business, so know little about it-but, in my opinion, to write a book is for all the world like humming a song-be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.
--This is the reason, may it please your reverences, that some of the lowest and flattest compositions pass off very well-(as Yorick told my uncle Toby one night) by siege.--My uncle Toby looked brisk at the sound of the word siege, but could make neither head or tail of it.
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.
THE "Red Death" had long devastated the country.
Blood was its Avatar and its seal-the redness and the horror of blood.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.
This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste.
A strong and lofty wall girdled it in.
The abbey was amply provisioned.
With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion.
The external world could take care of itself.
In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.
The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.
There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.
All these and security were within.
Without was the "Red Death."
It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade.
There were seven-an imperial suite.
Here the case was very different; as might have been expected from the duke's love of the bizarre.
There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect.
To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite.
The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple.
The third was green throughout, and so were the casements.
The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange-the fifth with white-the sixth with violet.
But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations.
The panes here were scarlet-a deep blood color.
But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room.
And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances.
It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony.
He had a fine eye for colors and effects.
He disregarded the decora of mere fashion.
There are some who would have thought him mad.
Be sure they were grotesque.
There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams.
And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock.
The dreams are stiff frozen as they stand.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life.
And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock.
And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise-then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.
There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.
The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave.
But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death.
His vesture was dabbled in blood-and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.
"Who dares?" he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him-"who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery?
At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker.
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death.
And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.
And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay.
And the flames of the tripods expired.
A new style comes into vogue and remains in favor for a season, and, at least so long as it is a novelty, people very generally find the new style attractive.
The prevailing fashion is felt to be beautiful.
This is due partly to the relief it affords in being different from what went before it, partly to its being reputable.
When seen in the perspective of half a dozen years or more, the best of our fashions strike us as grotesque, if not unsightly.
This is the priestly class.
Even more strikingly than the everyday habit of the priest, the vestments, properly so called, are ornate, grotesque, inconvenient, and, at least ostensibly, comfortless to the point of distress.
The shaven face of the priest is a further item to the same effect.
It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the salutation, as if it were at a distance:
"You are still hard at work, I see?"
After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the voice replied, "Yes-I am working." This time, a pair of haggard eyes had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.
Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse.
It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago.
So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain.
So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground.
So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.
Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes had looked up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty.
The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of listening, at the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor on the other side of him; then, upward at the speaker.
"What did you say?"
"I must bear it, if you let it in." (Laying the palest shadow of a stress upon the second word.)
The opened half door was opened a little further, and secured at that angle for the time.
A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labour.
He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes.
He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones of it seemed transparent.
So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing in his work.
He never looked at the figure before him, without first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak.
"Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to day?" asked Defarge, motioning to mr Lorry to come forward.
"What did you say?"
"Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to day?"
"I can't say that I mean to.
I suppose so.
mr Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door.
When he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker looked up.
He showed no surprise at seeing another figure, but the unsteady fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked at it (his lips and his nails were of the same pale lead colour), and then the hand dropped to his work, and he once more bent over the shoe.
"What did you say?"
The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a hand from his work.
Take it, monsieur."
mr Lorry took it in his hand.
There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied:
"I forget what it was you asked me.
What did you say?"
"I said, couldn't you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur's information?"
It is in the present mode.
"And the maker's name?" said Defarge.
The task of recalling him from the vagrancy into which he always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast dying man.
"Did you ask me for my name?"
"Is that all?"
"One Hundred and Five, North Tower."
His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the question to him: but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back on the questioner when they had sought the ground.
"I am not a shoemaker by trade?
I I learnt it here.
I asked leave to-"
He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his hands the whole time.
"I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after a long while, and I have made shoes ever since."
"Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?"
The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at the questioner.
"Monsieur Manette"; mr Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge's arm; "do you remember nothing of this man?
Look at him.
Look at me.
As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at mr Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an actively intent intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced themselves through the black mist that had fallen on him.
They were overclouded again, they were fainter, they were gone; but they had been there.
Finally, with a deep long sigh, he took the shoe up, and resumed his work.
"Have you recognised him, monsieur?" asked Defarge in a whisper.
At first I thought it quite hopeless, but I have unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I once knew so well.
Hush!
She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the bench on which he sat
There was something awful in his unconsciousness of the figure that could have put out its hand and touched him as he stooped over his labour.
She stood, like a spirit, beside him, and he bent over his work.
It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the instrument in his hand, for his shoemaker's knife.
He had taken it up, and was stooping to work again, when his eyes caught the skirt of her dress.
He raised them, and saw her face.
The two spectators started forward, but she stayed them with a motion of her hand.
She had no fear of his striking at her with the knife, though they had.
By degrees, in the pauses of his quick and laboured breathing, he was heard to say:
"What is this?"
With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands to her lips, and kissed them to him; then clasped them on her breast, as if she laid his ruined head there.
"You are not the gaoler's daughter?"
"Who are you?"
Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the bench beside him.
He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his arm.
Advancing his hand by little and little, he took it up and looked at it.
In the midst of the action he went astray, and, with another deep sigh, fell to work at his shoemaking.
But not for long.
After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his hand to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of folded rag attached to it.
He opened this, carefully, on his knee, and it contained a very little quantity of hair: not more than one or two long golden hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off upon his finger.
When was it!
As the concentrated expression returned to his forehead, he seemed to become conscious that it was in hers too.
He turned her full to the light, and looked at her.
"She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I was summoned out-she had a fear of my going, though I had none-and when I was brought to the North Tower they found these upon my sleeve.
He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could utter it. But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to him coherently, though slowly.
Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her with a frightful suddenness.
But she sat perfectly still in his grasp, and only said, in a low voice, "I entreat you, good gentlemen, do not come near us, do not speak, do not move!"
"Hark!" he exclaimed.
"Whose voice was that?"
His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to his white hair, which they tore in a frenzy.
It died out, as everything but his shoemaking did die out of him, and he refolded his little packet and tried to secure it in his breast; but he still looked at her, and gloomily shook his head.
It can't be.
See what the prisoner is.
No, no
She was-and He was-before the slow years of the North Tower-ages ago.
Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon her knees before him, with her appealing hands upon his breast.
"O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my mother was, and who my father, and how I never knew their hard, hard history.
But I cannot tell you at this time, and I cannot tell you here.
Kiss me, kiss me!
His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which warmed and lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him.
She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her breast like a child.
"If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and that I have come here to take you from it, and that we go to England to be at peace and at rest, I cause you to think of your useful life laid waste, and of our native France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it!
Good gentlemen, thank God!
O, see!
Thank God for us, thank God!"
He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay there in a lethargy, worn out.
"But, consider.
Is he fit for the journey?" asked mr Lorry.
"More than that; Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, best out of France. Say, shall I hire a carriage and post horses?"
"That's business," said mr Lorry, resuming on the shortest notice his methodical manners; "and if business is to be done, I had better do it."
"Then be so kind," urged Miss Manette, "as to leave us here.
You see how composed he has become, and you cannot be afraid to leave him with me now.
If you will lock the door to secure us from interruption, I do not doubt that you will find him, when you come back, as quiet as you leave him.
But, as there were not only carriage and horses to be seen to, but travelling papers; and as time pressed, for the day was drawing to an end, it came at last to their hastily dividing the business that was necessary to be done, and hurrying away to do it.
The darkness deepened and deepened, and they both lay quiet, until a light gleamed through the chinks in the wall.
Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the lamp he carried, on the shoemaker's bench (there was nothing else in the garret but a pallet bed), and he and mr Lorry roused the captive, and assisted him to his feet.
They tried speaking to him; but, he was so confused, and so very slow to answer, that they took fright at his bewilderment, and agreed for the time to tamper with him no more.
In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion, he ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak and other wrappings, that they gave him to wear.
They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, mr Lorry closing the little procession.
You remember coming up here?"
"What did you say?"
But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if she had repeated it.
"Remember?
It was so very long ago."
That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his prison to that house, was apparent to them.
On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his tread, as being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was no drawbridge, and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he dropped his daughter's hand and clasped his head again.
Only one soul was to be seen, and that was Madame Defarge-who leaned against the door post, knitting, and saw nothing.
She quickly brought them down and handed them in;--and immediately afterwards leaned against the door post, knitting, and saw nothing.
Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard house there.
"Your papers, travellers!" "See here then, Monsieur the Officer," said Defarge, getting down, and taking him gravely apart, "these are the papers of monsieur inside, with the white head.
"Adieu!" from Defarge.
And so, under a short grove of feebler and feebler over swinging lamps, out under the great grove of stars.
"I hope you care to be recalled to life?"
THE ENCHANTED CANARY
He ate four meals a day, slept twelve hours out of the twenty four, and the only thing he ever did was to shoot at small birds with his bow and arrow.
Still, with all his practice he shot very badly, he was so fat and heavy, and as he grew daily fatter, he was at last obliged to give up walking, and be dragged about in a wheel chair, and the people made fun of him, and gave him the name of my Lord Tubby.
Now, the only trouble that Lord Tubby had was about his son, whom he loved very much, although they were not in the least alike, for the young Prince was as thin as a cuckoo.
Instead of chatting with them in the dusk, he wandered about the woods, whispering to the moon.
'What is the matter with you?' his father often said to him.
'You have everything you can possibly wish for: a good bed, good food, and tuns full of beer.
The only thing you want, in order to become as fat as a pig, is a wife that can bring you broad, rich lands.
So marry, and you will be perfectly happy.'
All the girls here are pink and white, and I am tired to death of their eternal lilie and roses.
'My faith!' cried Tubby; 'do you want to marry a negress, and give me grandchildren as ugly as monkeys and as stupid as owls?'
'No, father, nothing of the sort.
But there must be women somewhere in the world who are neither pink nor white, and I tell you, once for all, that I will never marry until I have found one exactly to my taste.'
That evening Tubby and his son ate the golden apples at supper, and thought them delicious.
Then he went, all dressed for a journey, to the bedside of Tubby, and found him smoking his first pipe.
'Father,' he said gravely, 'I have come to bid you farewell.
Last night I dreamed that I was walking in a wood, where the trees were covered with golden apples.
I gathered one of them, and when I opened it there came out a lovely princess with a golden skin.
That is the wife I want, and I am going to look for her.'
He jumped lightly on his horse, and was a mile from home before Tubby had ceased laughing.
'A yellow wife!
He must be mad! fit for a strait waistcoat!' cried the good man, when he was able to speak.
'Here! quick! bring him back to me.'
The servants mounted their horses and rode after the Prince; but as they did not know which road he had taken, they went all ways except the right one, and instead of bringing him back they returned themselves when it grew dark, with their horses worn out and covered with dust.
He travelled in this way for many weeks, passing by villages, towns, mountains, valleys, and plains, but always pushing south, where every day the sun seemed hotter and more brilliant.
At last one day at sunset Desire felt the sun so warm, that he thought he must now be near the place of his dream.
He was at that moment close to the corner of a wood where stood a little hut, before the door of which his horse stopped of his own accord.
An old man with a white beard was sitting on the doorstep enjoying the fresh air.
The Prince got down from his horse and asked leave to rest.
'Come in, my young friend,' said the old man; 'my house is not large, but it is big enough to hold a stranger.'
The traveller entered, and his host put before him a simple meal.
When his hunger was satisfied the old man said to him:
'If I do not mistake, you come from far.
May I ask where you are going?'
I dreamed that in the land of the sun there was a wood full of orange trees, and that in one of the oranges I should find a beautiful princess who is to be my wife.
It is she I am seeking.'
'Why should I laugh?' asked the old man.
'Madness in youth is true wisdom.
Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.'
The next day the Prince arose early and took leave of his host.
'The wood that you saw in your dream is not far from here,' said the old man.
'It is in the depth of the forest, and this road will lead you there.
You will come to a vast park surrounded by high walls.
In the middle of the park is a castle, where dwells a horrible witch who allows no living being to enter the doors.
Behind the castle is the orange grove.
Follow the wall till you come to a heavy iron gate.
Don't try to press it open, but oil the hinges with this,' and the old man gave him a small bottle.
'The gate will open of itself,' he continued, 'and a huge dog which guards the castle will come to you with his mouth wide open, but just throw him this oat cake.
Next, you will see a baking woman leaning over her heated oven.
Give her this brush.
Lastly, you will find a well on your left; do not forget to take the cord of the bucket and spread it in the sun
When you have done this, do not enter the castle, but go round it and enter the orange grove.
Then gather three oranges, and get back to the gate as fast as you can.
Once out of the gate, leave the forest by the opposite side.
'Now, attend to this: whatever happens, do not open your oranges till you reach the bank of a river, or a fountain.
Out of each orange will come a princess, and you can choose which you like for your wife.
Your choice once made, be very careful never to leave your bride for an instant, and remember that the danger which is most to be feared is never the danger we are most afraid of.'
In less than an hour he arrived at the wall, which was very high indeed.
He sprang to the ground, fastened his horse to a tree, and soon found the iron gate.
Then he took out his bottle and oiled the hinges, when the gate opened of itself, and he saw an old castle standing inside.
The Prince entered boldly into the courtyard.
Suddenly he heard fierce howls, and a dog as tall as a donkey, with eyes like billiard balls, came towards him, showing his teeth, which were like the prongs of a fork.
A few yards further he saw a huge oven, with a wide, red hot gaping mouth.
Then he went on to the well, drew up the cord, which was half rotten, and stretched it out in the sun
Lastly he went round the castle, and plunged into the orange grove. There he gathered the three most beautiful oranges he could find, and turned to go back to the gate.
'Baker, baker, take him by his feet, and throw him into the oven!'
'No,' replied the baker; 'a long time has passed since I first began to scour this oven with my own flesh.
YOU never cared to give me a brush; but he has given me one, and he shall go in peace.'
'Rope, O rope!' cried the voice again, 'twine yourself round his neck and strangle him.'
'No,' replied the rope; 'you have left me for many years past to fall to pieces with the damp.
He has stretched me out in the sun
Let him go in peace.'
'Dog, my good dog,' cried the voice, more and more angry, 'jump at his throat and eat him up.'
'No,' replied the dog; 'though I have served you long, you never gave me any bread.
He has given me as much as I want.
Let him go in peace.'
'Iron gate, iron gate,' cried the voice, growling like thunder, 'fall on him and grind him to powder.'
'No,' replied the gate; 'it is a hundred years since you left me to rust, and he has oiled me.
Let him go in peace.'
Once outside, the young adventurer put his oranges into a bag that hung from his saddle, mounted his horse, and rode quickly out of the forest.
Now, as he was longing to see the princesses, he was very anxious to come to a river or a fountain, but, though he rode for hours, a river or fountain was nowhere to be seen.
Still his heart was light, for he felt that he had got through the most difficult part of his task, and the rest was easy.
About mid day he reached a sandy plain, scorching in the sun
Here he was seized with dreadful thirst; he took his gourd and raised it to his lips.
But the gourd was empty; in the excitement of his joy he had forgotten to fill it.
He rode on, struggling with his sufferings, but at last he could bear it no longer.
He let himself slide to the earth, and lay down beside his horse, his throat burning, his chest heaving, and his head going round.
Already he felt that death was near him, when his eyes fell on the bag where the oranges peeped out.
'Ah!' he said to himself.
'If only these oranges were real fruit-fruit as refreshing as what I ate in Flanders!
And, after all, who knows?'
This idea put some life into him.
He had the strength to lift himself up and put his hand into his bag.
He drew out an orange and opened it with his knife.
Out of it flew the prettiest little female canary that ever was seen.
'Give me something to drink, I am dying of thirst,' said the golden bird.
Out of it flew another canary, and she too began to cry:
'I am dying of thirst; give me something to drink.'
Then Tubby's son saw his folly, and while the two canaries flew away he sank on the ground, where, exhausted by his last effort, he lay unconscious.
seven
When he came to himself, he had a pleasant feeling of freshness all about him.
It was night, the sky was sparkling with stars, and the earth was covered with a heavy dew.
The traveller having recovered, mounted his horse, and at the first streak of dawn he saw a stream dancing in front of him, and stooped down and drank his fill.
He hardly had courage to open his last orange.
Then he remembered that the night before he had disobeyed the orders of the old man.
Perhaps his terrible thirst was a trick of the cunning witch, and suppose, even though he opened the orange on the banks of the stream, that he did not find in it the princess that he sought?
He took his knife and cut it open.
Alas! out of it flew a little canary, just like the others, who cried:
'I am thirsty; give me something to drink.'
However, he was determined not to let this bird fly away; so he took up some water in the palm of his hand and held it to its beak.
Scarcely had the canary drunk when she became a beautiful girl, tall and straight as a poplar tree, with black eyes and a golden skin.
On her side she seemed quite bewildered, but she looked about her with happy eyes, and was not at all afraid of her deliverer.
He asked her name.
She answered that she was called the Princess Zizi; she was about sixteen years old, and for ten years of that time the witch had kept her shut up in an orange, in the shape of a canary.
'Well, then, my charming Zizi,' said the young Prince, who was longing to marry her, 'let us ride away quickly so as to escape from the wicked witch.'
'To my father's castle,' he said.
He mounted his horse and took her in front of him, and, holding her carefully in his arms, they began their journey.
eight
It is so delightful to teach those one loves!
Once she inquired what the girls in his country were like.
'They are pink and white,' he replied, 'and their eyes are blue.'
'And no doubt,' went on the Princess, 'one of them is your intended bride?'
Still he was silent, and Zizi drew herself up proudly.
'No,' he said at last.
'None of the girls of my own country are beautiful in my eyes, and that is why I came to look for a wife in the land of the sun
Was I wrong, my lovely Zizi?'
This time it was Zizi's turn to be silent.
When they were about four stone throws from the gates they dismounted in the forest, by the edge of a fountain.
'My dear Zizi,' said Tubby's son, 'we cannot present ourselves before my father like two common people who have come back from a walk.
We must enter the castle with more ceremony.
Wait for me here, and in an hour I will return with carriages and horses fit for a princess.'
'Don't be long,' replied Zizi, and she watched him go with wistful eyes.
When she was left by herself the poor girl began to feel afraid.
She was alone for the first time in her life, and in the middle of a thick forest.
Suddenly she heard a noise among the trees.
Fearing lest it should be a wolf, she hid herself in the hollow trunk of a willow tree which hung over the fountain.
It was big enough to hold her altogether, but she peeped out, and her pretty head was reflected in the clear water.
Then there appeared, not a wolf, but a creature quite as wicked and quite as ugly.
Let us see who this creature was.
Now, fifteen years before this time, the father in walking through the forest found a little girl, who had been deserted by the gypsies.
He carried her home to his wife, and the good woman was sorry for her, and brought her up with her own sons.
As she grew older, the little gypsy became much more remarkable for strength and cunning than for sense or beauty. She had a low forehead, a flat nose, thick lips, coarse hair, and a skin not golden like that of Zizi, but the colour of clay.
As she was always being teased about her complexion, she got as noisy and cross as a titmouse.
So they used to call her Titty.
Titty was often sent by the bricklayer to fetch water from the fountain, and as she was very proud and lazy the gypsy disliked this very much.
It was she who had frightened Zizi by appearing with her pitcher on her shoulder.
Just as she was stooping to fill it, she saw reflected in the water the lovely image of the Princess.
'What a pretty face!' she exclaimed, 'Why, it must be mine!
How in the world can they call me ugly?
I am certainly much too pretty to be their water carrier!'
So saying, she broke her pitcher and went home.
'Where is your pitcher?' asked the bricklayer.
'Well, what do you expect?
The pitcher may go many times to the well....'
'But at last it is broken.
Well, here is a bucket that will not break.'
The gypsy returned to the fountain, and addressing once more the image of Zizi, she said:
'No; I don't mean to be a beast of burden any longer.' And she flung the bucket so high in the air that it stuck in the branches of an oak.
'I met a wolf,' she told the bricklayer, 'and I broke the bucket across his nose.'
The bricklayer asked her no more questions, but took down a broom and gave her such a beating that her pride was humbled a little.
It was not at all easy to fill the milk can, which was large and round.
It would not go down into the well, and the gypsy had to try again and again.
At last her arms grew so tired that when she did manage to get the can properly under the water she had no strength to pull it up, and it rolled to the bottom.
On seeing the can disappear, she made such a miserable face that Zizi, who had been watching her all this time, burst into fits of laughter.
Titty turned round and perceived the mistake she had made; and she felt so angry that she made up her mind to be revenged at once.
'What are you doing there, you lovely creature?' she said to Zizi.
'I am waiting for my lover,' Zizi replied; and then, with a simplicity quite natural in a girl who so lately had been a canary, she told all her story.
The gypsy had often seen the young Prince pass by, with his gun on his shoulder, when he was going after crows.
She was too ugly and ragged for him ever to have noticed her, but Titty on her side had admired him, though she thought he might well have been a little fatter.
'Dear, dear!' she said to herself.
'So he likes yellow women!
Why, I am yellow too, and if I could only think of a way----'
It was not long before she did think of it.
Get down at once, my poor child, and let me dress your hair for you!'
The innocent Zizi came down at once, and stood by Titty.
The gypsy began to comb her long brown locks, when suddenly she drew a pin from her stays, and, just as the titmouse digs its beak into the heads of linnets and larks, Titty dug the pin into the head of Zizi.
No sooner did Zizi feel the prick of the pin than she became a bird again, and, spreading her wings, she flew away.
'That was neatly done,' said the gypsy.
twelve
Meanwhile the Prince was coming as fast as his horse could carry him. He was so impatient that he was always full fifty yards in front of the lords and ladies sent by Tubby to bring back Zizi.
At the sight of the hideous gypsy he was struck dumb with surprise and horror.
'Ah me!' said Titty, 'so you don't know your poor Zizi?
While you were away the wicked witch came, and turned me into this.
But if you only have the courage to marry me I shall get back my beauty.' And she began to cry bitterly.
'Poor girl,' he thought to himself.
'It is not her fault, after all, that she has grown so ugly, it is mine.
Oh! why did I not follow the old man's advice?
Why did I leave her alone?
And besides, it depends on me to break the spell, and I love her too much to let her remain like this.'
So he presented the gypsy to the lords and ladies of the Court, explaining to them the terrible misfortune which had befallen his beautiful bride.
They all pretended to believe it, and the ladies at once put on the false princess the rich dresses they had brought for Zizi.
She was then perched on the top of a magnificent ambling palfrey, and they set forth to the castle.
Bells were pealing, chimes ringing, and the people filling the streets and standing at their doors to watch the procession go by, and they could hardly believe their eyes as they saw what a strange bride their Prince had chosen.
In order to do her more honour, Tubby came to meet her at the foot of the great marble staircase.
At the sight of the hideous creature he almost fell backwards.
'What!' he cried.
'Is this the wonderful beauty?'
'But she has been bewitched by a wicked sorceress, and will not regain her beauty until she is my wife.'
'Does she say so?
Well, if you believe that, you may drink cold water and think it bacon,' the unhappy Tubby answered crossly.
But all the same, as he adored his son, he gave the gypsy his hand and led her to the great hall, where the bridal feast was spread.
thirteen
However, to make up, the other guests ate greedily, and, as for Tubby, nothing ever took away his appetite.
When the moment arrived to serve the roast goose, there was a pause, and Tubby took the opportunity to lay down his knife and fork for a little. But as the goose gave no sign of appearing, he sent his head carver to find out what was the matter in the kitchen.
Now this was what had happened.
'Good morning, lovely golden bird,' replied the chief of the scullions, who had been well brought up.
'I pray that Heaven may send you to sleep,' said the golden bird, 'and that the goose may burn, so that there may be none left for Titty.'
And instantly the chief of the scullions fell fast asleep, and the goose was burnt to a cinder.
While it was browning at the fire, Tubby inquired for his goose a second time.
The Master Cook himself mounted to the hall to make his excuses, and to beg his lord to have a little patience.
Tubby showed his patience by abusing his son.
'As if it wasn't enough,' he grumbled between his teeth, 'that the boy should pick up a hag without a penny, but the goose must go and burn now.
While the Master Cook was upstairs, the golden bird came again to perch on the window sill, and called in his clear voice to the head scullion, who was watching the spit:
'Good morning, my fine Scullion!'
'Good morning, lovely Golden Bird,' replied the Scullion, whom the Master Cook had forgotten in his excitement to warn.
'I pray Heaven,' went on the Canary, 'that it will send you to sleep, and that the goose may burn, so that there may be none left for Titty.'
And the Scullion fell fast asleep, and when the Master Cook came back he found the goose as black as the chimney.
In a fury he woke the Scullion, who in order to save himself from blame told the whole story.
'That accursed bird,' said the Cook; 'it will end by getting me sent away.
Come, some of you, and hide yourselves, and if it comes again, catch it and wring its neck.'
He spitted a third goose, lit a huge fire, and seated himself by it.
The bird appeared a third time, and said: 'Good morning, my fine Cook.'
'Good morning, lovely Golden Bird,' replied the Cook, as if nothing had happened, and at the moment that the Canary was beginning, 'I pray Heaven that it may send,' a scullion who was hidden outside rushed out and shut the shutters.
The bird flew into the kitchen.
Then all the cooks and scullions sprang after it, knocking at it with their aprons. At length one of them caught it just at the very moment that Tubby entered the kitchen, waving his sceptre.
He had come to see for himself why the goose had never made its appearance.
The Scullion stopped at once, just as he was about to wring the Canary's neck.
fifteen
'Your Excellency, it is the bird,' replied the Scullion, and he placed it in his hand.
'Nonsense!
What a lovely bird!' said Tubby, and in stroking its head he touched a pin that was sticking between its feathers.
He pulled it out, and lo! the Canary at once became a beautiful girl with a golden skin who jumped lightly to the ground.
'Gracious! what a pretty girl!' said Tubby.
And he took her in his arms, crying: 'My darling Zizi, how happy I am to see you once more!'
'Well, and the other one?' asked Tubby.
The other one was stealing quietly to the door.
'Stop her! called Tubby.
'We will judge her cause at once.'
And he seated himself solemnly on the oven, and condemned Titty to be burned alive.
sixteen
The marriage took place a few days later.
All the boys in the country side were there, armed with wooden swords, and decorated with epaulets made of gilt paper.
Zizi obtained Titty's pardon, and she was sent back to the brick fields, followed and hooted at by all the boys.
And this is why to day the country boys always throw stones at a titmouse.
On the evening of the wedding day all the larders, cellars, cupboards and tables of the people, whether rich or poor, were loaded as if by enchantment with bread, wine, beer, cakes and tarts, roast larks, and even geese, so that Tubby could not complain any more that his son had married Famine.
Since that time there has always been plenty to eat in that country, and since that time, too, you see in the midst of the fair haired blue eyed women of Flanders a few beautiful girls, whose eyes are black and whose skins are the colour of gold.
By Booth Tarkington
'Keep out of the night air.'"
My grandmother----"
"Oh, I guess your GRANDmother thought so, mr Adams!
"Sleep?" he said.
"Likely!"
"It's miraculous what the human frame WILL survive," he admitted on the last evening of that month.
"Sleep?
Oh, CERTAINLY, thank you!"
They "pressed on his nerves," as he put it; and so did almost everything else, for that matter.
Listen to the darn brute!
"Sleep?
"Oh, you're better again!
"No doubt in the world!" she exclaimed.
"Oh, I will?"
"Of course you will," she repeated, absently. "You'll be as strong as you ever were; maybe stronger." She paused for a moment, not looking at him, then added, cheerfully, "So that you can fly around and find something really good to get into."
"So that's it," he said.
"That's what you're hinting at."
"'Hinting?'" mrs Adams looked surprised and indulgent.
"Why, I'm not doing any hinting, Virgil."
"What did you say about my finding 'something good to get into?'" he asked, sharply.
"'Old hole?' That's what you call it, is it?"
"Don't tell me what I know, please!"
"Virgil, you WON'T go back to that hole?"
"That's a nice word to use to me!" he said.
He looked up at her fiercely.
"Fine!" he repeated, with husky indignation.
"Fine way to cure a sick man!
"And give us our daily bread!" he added, meaning that his wife's little performance was no novelty.
See here, bub, does your mother know you're out?"
"Welcome, Friend of the Ace."
But Georgie was disposed to be informal.
"Well-" said Charlie Johnson uneasily.
"Listen!
"Oh, you are, are you?" said George skeptically.
"All right," said Georgie.
Now we'll hold another election."
Georgie addressed the members.
"I'd like to know who got up this thing in the first place," he said.
Who got this room rent free?
Who got the janitor to let us have most of this furniture?
Well, if that's what you want, you can have it.
"I guess all I better do is-resign!"
"I let them get in with me, Charlie," he said in a tone of gentle explanation.
"It's vulgar to do any other way.
Did I tell you the nickname they gave me-'King'?
Indeed I should!...
Of course.. ..
"How do you do, George," he said.
"Or try the side door-or the kitchen!"
"Why, Georgie!"
"Did you have plenty to eat?"
"Yes."
"Another one?" Isabel said, surprised.
"He didn't say."
"You have been investing!" and as she came across the room for a closer view, "Is it-is it Lucy?" she asked half timidly, half archly.
Now, so far as had been digged of old, they went onward along it without disturbance; but where they met with solid earth, they dug a mine under ground, and this in hopes that they should be able to proceed so far as to rise from under ground in a safe place, and by that means escape.
But when they came to make the experiment, they were disappointed of their hope; for the miners could make but small progress, and that with difficulty also; insomuch that their provisions, though they distributed them by measure, began to fail them.
And now Simon, thinking he might be able to astonish and elude the romans, put on a white frock, and buttoned upon him a purple cloak, and appeared out of the ground in the place where the temple had formerly been.
In the little world of Fort Caroline, a miniature France, cliques and parties, conspiracy and sedition, were fast stirring into life. Hopes had been dashed, and wild expectations had come to naught.
The adventurers had found, not conquest and gold, but a dull exile in a petty fort by a hot and sickly river, with hard labor, bad fare, prospective famine, and nothing to break the weary sameness but some passing canoe or floating alligator.
Gathered in knots, they nursed each other's wrath, and inveighed against the commandant.
The young nobles, of whom there were many, were volunteers, who had paid their own expenses in expectation of a golden harvest, and they chafed in impatience and disgust.
But for Laudonniere, he said, their fortunes would all be made.
He found an ally in a gentleman named Genre, one of Laudonniere's confidants, who, while still professing fast adherence to his interests, is charged by him with plotting against his life.
On this, Genre made advances to the apothecary, urging him to put arsenic into his medicine; but the apothecary shrugged his shoulders.
They next devised a scheme to blow him up by hiding a keg of gunpowder under his bed; but here, too, they failed.
The malcontents took the opportunity to send home charges against Laudonniere of peculation, favoritism, and tyranny.
When he returned, about the tenth of November, Laudonniere persuaded him to carry home seven or eight of the malcontent soldiers.
The exchange proved most disastrous. These pirates joined with others whom they had won over, stole Laudonniere's two pinnaces, and set forth on a plundering excursion to the West Indies.
They took a small Spanish vessel off the coast of Cuba, but were soon compelled by famine to put into Havana and give themselves up.
Here, to make their peace with the authorities, they told all they knew of the position and purposes of their countrymen at Fort Caroline, and thus was forged the thunderbolt soon to be hurled against the wretched little colony.
Laudonniere refused, but assured them that, as soon as the defences of the fort should be completed, a search should be begun in earnest for the Appalachian gold mine, and that meanwhile two small vessels then building on the river should be sent along the coast to barter for provisions with the Indians.
A severe illness again seized Laudonniere, and confined him to his bed. Improving their advantage, the malcontents gained over nearly all the best soldiers in the fort.
The ringleader was one Fourneaux, a man of good birth, but whom Le Moyne calls an avaricious hypocrite.
It was late in the night.
Forcing an entrance, they wounded a gentleman who opposed them, and crowded around the sick man's bed.
Fourneaux, armed with steel cap and cuirass, held his arquebuse to Laudonniere's throat, and demanded leave to go on a cruise among the Spanish islands.
The sick commandant, imprisoned in the ship with one attendant, at first refused; but receiving a message from the mutineers, that, if he did not comply, they would come on board and cut his throat, he at length yielded.
The buccaneers now bestirred themselves to finish the two small vessels on which the carpenters had been for some time at work.
Trenchant, an excellent pilot, was forced to join the party.
Their favorite object was the plunder of a certain church on one of the Spanish islands, which they proposed to assail during the midnight mass of Christmas, whereby a triple end would be achieved: first, a rich booty; secondly, the punishment of idolatry; thirdly, vengeance on the arch enemies of their party and their faith.
They set sail on the eighth of December, taunting those who remained, calling them greenhorns, and threatening condign punishment if, on their triumphant return, they should be refused free entrance to the fort.
They were no sooner gone than the unfortunate Laudonniere was gladdened in his solitude by the approach of his fast friends Ottigny and Arlac, who conveyed him to the fort and reinstated him.
The entire command was reorganized, and new officers appointed.
The colony was wofully depleted; but the bad blood had been drawn off, and thenceforth all internal danger was at an end.
Laudonniere sent to reconnoitre. The stranger lay anchored at the mouth of the river.
Discomfited, woebegone, and drunk, they were landed under a guard.
Embarking in her, they next fell in with a caravel, which also they captured.
She made a desperate fight, but was taken at last, and with her a rich booty.
Hence it happened that at daybreak three armed vessels fell upon them, retook the prize, and captured or killed all the pirates but twenty six, who, cutting the moorings of their brigantine, fled out to sea.
Among these was the ringleader Fourneaux, and also the pilot Trenchant, who, eager to return to Fort Caroline, whence he had been forcibly taken, succeeded during the night in bringing the vessel to the coast of Florida.
They chose the latter course, and bore away for the saint John's.
As the wine mounted to their heads, in the mirth of drink and desperation, they enacted their own trial.
"Say what you like," said one of them, after hearing the counsel for the defence; "but if Laudonniere does not hang us all, I will never call him an honest man."
A court martial was called near Fort Caroline, and all were found guilty.
"Comrades," said one of the condemned, appealing to the soldiers, "will you stand by and see us butchered?"
"These," retorted Laudonniere, "are no comrades of mutineers and rebels."
At the request of his followers, however, he commuted the sentence to shooting.
A file of men, a rattling volley, and the debt of justice was paid.
CHAPTER ten
"I s'pose the time when you learned all these knowing things, mr Creedle, was when you was in the militia?"
"Well, yes.
I seed the world at that time somewhat, certainly, and many ways of strange dashing life.
Not but that Giles has worked hard in helping me to bring things to such perfection to day. 'Giles,' says I, though he's maister.
Not that I should call'n maister by rights, for his father growed up side by side with me, as if one mother had twinned us and been our nourishing."
"I s'pose your memory can reach a long way back into history, mr Creedle?"
Ancient days, when there was battles and famines and hang fairs and other pomps, seem to me as yesterday.
There, he's calling for more plates.
He could not get over the initial failures in his scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that he was eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually snuffing the two candles next him till he had reduced them to mere glimmers drowned in their own grease.
A splash followed.
Grace gave a quick, involuntary nod and blink, and put her handkerchief to her face.
"Good heavens! what did you do that for, Creedle?" said Giles, sternly, and jumping up.
"'tis how I do it when they baint here, maister," mildly expostulated Creedle, in an aside audible to all the company.
"Well, yes-but-" replied Giles.
"Oh no," she said.
"Only a sprinkle on my face.
It was nothing."
"Kiss it and make it well," gallantly observed mr Bawtree.
Miss Melbury blushed.
The timber merchant said, quickly, "Oh, it is nothing!
She must bear these little mishaps." But there could be discerned in his face something which said "I ought to have foreseen this."
Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not quite liked to see Grace present.
He had done it, in dearth of other friends, that the room might not appear empty.
Every now and then the comparatively few remarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on by the measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow turner from the back of the room:
The timber merchant showed his feelings by talking with a satisfied sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party in a patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he and his were not enjoying themselves.
"Oh yes, yes; pretty much.
What handsome glasses those are!
I didn't know you had such glasses in the house.
I can't get such coats.
You dress better than i"
After supper there was a dance, the bandsmen from Great Hintock having arrived some time before.
Grace had been away from home so long that she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not join in the movement.
Then Giles felt that all was over.
As for her, she was thinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very different measure that she had been accustomed to tread with a bevy of sylph like creatures in muslin, in the music room of a large house, most of whom were now moving in scenes widely removed from this, both as regarded place and character.
A woman she did not know came and offered to tell her fortune with the abandoned cards.
Grace assented to the proposal, and the woman told her tale unskilfully, for want of practice, as she declared.
mr Melbury was standing by, and exclaimed, contemptuously, "Tell her fortune, indeed!
Her fortune has been told by men of science-what do you call 'em?
You can't teach her anything new.
She's been too far among the wise ones to be astonished at anything she can hear among us folks in Hintock."
At last the time came for breaking up, Melbury and his family being the earliest to leave, the two card players still pursuing their game doggedly in the corner, where they had completely covered Giles's mahogany table with chalk scratches.
The three walked home, the distance being short and the night clear.
"Well, Giles is a very good fellow," said mr Melbury, as they struck down the lane under boughs which formed a black filigree in which the stars seemed set.
When they were opposite an opening through which, by day, the doctor's house could be seen, they observed a light in one of his rooms, although it was now about two o'clock.
"The doctor is not abed yet," said mrs Melbury.
"Hard study, no doubt," said her husband.
"One would think that, as he seems to have nothing to do about here by day, he could at least afford to go to bed early at night.
'tis astonishing how little we see of him."
"It is natural enough," he replied.
"What can a man of that sort find to interest him in Hintock?
I don't expect he'll stay here long."
At this moment the two exclusive, chalk mark men, having at last really finished their play, could be heard coming along in the rear, vociferously singing a song to march time, and keeping vigorous step to the same in far reaching strides-
"She may go, oh! She may go, oh! She may go to the d---- for me!"
The timber merchant turned indignantly to mrs Melbury.
"For us old folk it didn't matter; but for Grace-Giles should have known better!"
Meanwhile, in the empty house from which the guests had just cleared out, the subject of their discourse was walking from room to room surveying the general displacement of furniture with no ecstatic feeling; rather the reverse, indeed.
At last he entered the bakehouse, and found there Robert Creedle sitting over the embers, also lost in contemplation.
"Well, Robert, you must be tired.
But 'tis well to think the day IS done, when 'tis done."
Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkled forehead was ploughing abroad the wood embers on the broad hearth, till it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red hot bowlders lying about everywhere.
"Do you think it went off well, Creedle?" he asked.
"The victuals did; that I know.
And the drink did; that I steadfastly believe, from the holler sound of the barrels.
Still, I don't deny I'm afeared some things didn't go well with He and his." Creedle nodded in a direction which signified where the Melburys lived.
"I'm afraid, too, that it was a failure there!"
Not but what that snail might as well have come upon anybody else's plate as hers."
"What snail?"
"But, Robert, of all places, that was where he shouldn't have been!"
"Well, 'twas his native home, come to that; and where else could we expect him to be?
I don't care who the man is, snails and caterpillars always will lurk in close to the stump of cabbages in that tantalizing way."
"He wasn't alive, I suppose?" said Giles, with a shudder on Grace's account.
"Oh no
"Oh yes-'tis all over!" murmured Giles to himself, shaking his head over the glooming plain of embers, and lining his forehead more than ever.
"Do you know, Robert," he said, "that she's been accustomed to servants and everything superfine these many years?
How, then, could she stand our ways?"
This prisoner was no other than Rabbi Aser Abarbanel, a Jew of Arragon, who-accused of usury and pitiless scorn for the poor-had been daily subjected to torture for more than a year.
Yet "his blindness was as dense as his hide," and he had refused to abjure his faith.
Proud of a filiation dating back thousands of years, proud of his ancestors-for all Jews worthy of the name are vain of their blood-he descended Talmudically from Othoniel and consequently from Ipsiboa, the wife of the last judge of Israel, a circumstance which had sustained his courage amid incessant torture.
With tears in his eyes at the thought of this resolute soul rejecting salvation, the venerable Pedro Arbuez d'Espila, approaching the shuddering rabbi, addressed him as follows:
"My son, rejoice: your trials here below are about to end.
If in the presence of such obstinacy I was forced to permit, with deep regret, the use of great severity, my task of fraternal correction has its limits.
You are the fig tree which, having failed so many times to bear fruit, at last withered, but God alone can judge your soul.
Perhaps Infinite Mercy will shine upon you at the last moment!
We must hope so. There are examples.
So sleep in peace to night.
Placed in the last row, you will have time to invoke God and offer to Him this baptism of fire, which is of the Holy Spirit.
Hope in the Light, and rest."
With these words, having signed to his companions to unchain the prisoner, the prior tenderly embraced him.
This ceremony over, the captive was left, solitary and bewildered, in the darkness.
Closed?
Then, very gently and cautiously, slipping one finger into the crevice, he drew the door toward him.
Marvelous!
By an extraordinary accident the familiar who closed it had turned the huge key an instant before it struck the stone casing, so that the rusty bolt not having entered the hole, the door again rolled on its hinges.
The rabbi ventured to glance outside.
By the aid of a sort of luminous dusk he distinguished at first a semicircle of walls indented by winding stairs; and opposite to him, at the top of five or six stone steps, a sort of black portal, opening into an immense corridor, whose first arches only were visible from below.
Stretching himself flat he crept to the threshold.
Yes, it was really a corridor, but endless in length.
What a terrible silence!
Yet, yonder, at the far end of that passage there might be a doorway of escape!
Without hesitating, he ventured on the flags, keeping close under the loopholes, trying to make himself part of the blackness of the long walls.
He advanced slowly, dragging himself along on his breast, forcing back the cry of pain when some raw wound sent a keen pang through his whole body.
Well, it was over, no doubt.
He pressed himself into a niche and, half lifeless with terror, waited.
He passed swiftly by, holding in his clenched hand an instrument of torture-a frightful figure-and vanished.
The suspense which the rabbi had endured seemed to have suspended the functions of life, and he lay nearly an hour unable to move.
Fearing an increase of tortures if he were captured, he thought of returning to his dungeon.
A miracle had happened.
He could doubt no longer.
He began to crawl toward the chance of escape.
Exhausted by suffering and hunger, trembling with pain, he pressed onward.
He again heard footsteps, but this time they were slower, more heavy.
The white and black forms of two inquisitors appeared, emerging from the obscurity beyond.
They were conversing in low tones, and seemed to be discussing some important subject, for they were gesticulating vehemently.
Just opposite to him the two inquisitors paused under the light of the lamp-doubtless owing to some accident due to the course of their argument.
One, while listening to his companion, gazed at the rabbi! And, beneath the look-whose absence of expression the hapless man did not at first notice-he fancied he again felt the burning pincers scorch his flesh, he was to be once more a living wound.
Fainting, breathless, with fluttering eyelids, he shivered at the touch of the monk's floating robe.
Amid the horrible confusion of the rabbi's thoughts, the idea darted through his brain: "Can I be already dead that they did not see me?" A hideous impression roused him from his lethargy: in looking at the wall against which his face was pressed, he imagined he beheld two fierce eyes watching him!
Yet, no! no
Forward!
He must hasten toward that goal which he fancied (absurdly, no doubt) to be deliverance, toward the darkness from which he was now barely thirty paces distant.
He pressed forward faster on his knees, his hands, at full length, dragging himself painfully along, and soon entered the dark portion of this terrible corridor.
Suddenly the poor wretch felt a gust of cold air on the hands resting upon the flags; it came from under the little door to which the two walls led.
Every nerve in the miserable fugitive's body thrilled with hope.
He examined it from top to bottom, though scarcely able to distinguish its outlines in the surrounding darkness.
He passed his hand over it: no bolt, no lock!
A latch!
He started up, the latch yielded to the pressure of his thumb: the door silently swung open before him.
"HALLELUIA!" murmured the rabbi in a transport of gratitude as, standing on the threshold, he beheld the scene before him.
The door had opened into the gardens, above which arched a starlit sky, into spring, liberty, life!
It revealed the neighboring fields, stretching toward the sierras, whose sinuous blue lines were relieved against the horizon.
Yonder lay freedom!
Oh, to escape!
He would journey all night through the lemon groves, whose fragrance reached him.
Once in the mountains and he was safe!
He inhaled the delicious air; the breeze revived him, his lungs expanded!
And to thank once more the God who had bestowed this mercy upon him, he extended his arms, raising his eyes toward Heaven.
It was an ecstasy of joy!
Then he fancied he saw the shadow of his arms approach him-fancied that he felt these shadowy arms inclose, embrace him-and that he was pressed tenderly to some one's breast.
He lowered his eyes-and remained motionless, gasping for breath, dazed, with fixed eyes, fairly driveling with terror.
Horror!
He was in the clasp of the Grand Inquisitor himself, the venerable Pedro Arbuez d'Espila, who gazed at him with tearful eyes, like a good shepherd who had found his stray lamb.
The dark robed priest pressed the hapless Jew to his heart with so fervent an outburst of love, that the edges of the monochal haircloth rubbed the Dominican's breast.
Citizen Deputy.
After that last glimmer of life beside the deathbed of his son, the old Duc had practically ceased to be.
The Archbishop was consulted.
He would make no promises.
He was busy consoling a monarch for the loss of his throne, and preparing himself and his royal patron for the scaffold.
Juliette was one of those who escaped condemnation.
How or why, she herself could not have told.
When he died, she looked upon her spiritual guide's death as a direct warning from God, that nothing could relieve her of her oath.
Two years later, she had heard the cries of an entire people exulting over a regicide.
Then the murder of Marat, by a young girl like herself, the pale faced, large eyed Charlotte, who had commited a crime for the sake of a conviction.
"Greater than Brutus!"
Juliette followed the trial of Charlotte Corday with all the passionate ardour of her exalted temperament.
I killed Marat!"
"I killed Marat!"
But there was no further comment.
His hospital would cover quite a good many defalcations.
Juliette heard it all.
The knitters round her were talking loudly.
Charlotte Corday was condemned.
Juliette left the court in a state of mad exultation.
What scenes!
Great God!
And now to wait for an opportunity!
Juliette felt impelled by duty, and duty at best is not so prompt a counsellor as love or hate.
Her adventure outside Deroulede's house had not been premeditated. Impulse and coincidence had worked their will with her.
Once or twice she saw him coming or going from home. Once she caught sight of the inner hall, and of a young girl in a dark kirtle and snow white kerchief bidding him good bye at his door.
Another time she caught sight of him at the corner of the street, helping that same young girl over the muddy pavement.
Chivalrous-eh?--and innately so, evidently, for the girl was slightly deformed: hardly a hunchback, but weak and unattractive looking, with melancholy eyes, and a pale, pinched face.
CHAPTER six
The Scarlet Pimpernel.
It was some few hours later.
A tall, somewhat lazy looking figure, he was sitting at a table face to face with the Citizen Deputy.
On a chair beside him lay a heavy caped coat, covered with the dust and the splashings of a long journey, but he himself was attired in clothes that suggested the most fastidious taste, and the most perfect of tailors; he wore with apparent ease the eccentric fashion of the time, the short waisted coat of many lapels, the double waistcoat and billows of delicate lace.
"La!
I took care of that!" responded Blakeney with his short, pleasant laugh.
"I sent Tinville my autograph this morning."
"Not altogether, my friend.
My faith!
"Fun, you call it?" queried the other bitterly.
"Then why did you come?"
"To-What shall I say, my friend?" rejoined Sir Percy Blakeney, with that inimitable drawl of his.
"Three things," he continued quietly; "an imprisoned Queen, about to be tried for her life, the temperament of a Frenchman-some of them-and the idiocy of mankind generally.
"I know it.
I guessed it, that is why I came: that is also why I sent a pleasant little note to the Committee of Public Safety, signed with the device they know so well: The Scarlet Pimpernel."
"Well?"
"Well! the result is obvious.
"But in the meanwhile they'll discover you, and they'll not let you escape a second time."
There is someone over the water now who weeps when I don't return-No! no! never fear-they'll not get The Scarlet Pimpernel this journey ..."
"By every means in my power," replied Blakeney, "save the insane.
But I will help to get you all out of the demmed hole, when you have failed."
"Will you tell me your plans?"
"Yes?"
I must get them out of France, however, in case-in case ..."
"Of course," rejoined the other simply.
You see the trial of the Queen has not yet been decided on, but I know that it is in the air.
Usually they drink and play cards all night long.
It should be easy, for I have a strong fist, and after that ..."
"Well?
No figure wrapped in a mantle will from this day forth leave Paris unchallenged."
Alas for her!
Can you take hold of Marie Antoinette by the shoulders, shove her into the bottom of a cart and pile sacks of potatoes on the top of her?
She'd rebuke you publicly, and betray herself and you in a flash, sooner than submit to a loss of dignity."
"Ah! there's the trouble, friend.
We are still twenty strong, and heart and soul in sympathy with your mad schemes.
The poor, poor Queen!
But you are bound to fail, and then who will help you all, if we too are put out of the way?"
He unlocked it and drew forth a bundle of papers.
"Will you look through these?" he asked, handing them to Sir Percy Blakeney.
"What are they?"
"Burn them, my friend," said Blakeney laconically.
"I can't burn these.
"Better that than papers in these times, my friend: these papers, if found, would send you, untried, to the guillotine."
"I am careful, and, at present, quite beyond suspicion.
He suddenly paused.
He turned, and there in the doorway, holding back the heavy portiere, stood Juliette, graceful, smiling, a little pale, this no doubt owing to the flickering light of the unsnuffed candles.
"In a moment, mademoiselle," he replied lightly, "my friend and I have just finished our talk.
CHAPTER seventeen
Atonement.
"It is only the soldiers come back for me," said Juliette quietly.
"For you?"
"Yes; they are coming to take me away.
In his hand he held a leather case, all torn, and split at one end, and a few tiny scraps of half charred paper.
"These are yours?" he said roughly.
"Yes."
She nodded quietly in reply.
"What were these papers which you burnt?"
"Love letters."
"You lie!"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"As you please," she said curtly.
"What were these papers?" he repeated, with a loud obscene oath which, however, had not the power to disturb the young girl's serenity.
"I have told you," she said: "love letters, which I wished to burn."
"Who was your lover?" he asked.
"no"
He thrust his face quite close to hers, and she closed her eyes, sick with the horror of this contact with the degraded wretch.
She shuddered at the loathsome touch, but her quietude never forsook her for a moment.
Was that it?"
"Yes," she replied firmly.
"Yes."
"I knew it."
"Nothing," she replied.
Resistance would only aggravate your case."
March!
Juliette was too proud to insist any further.
But that one word was not to be spoken.
The crippled girl was face to face with a psychological problem, which in itself was far beyond her comprehension, but vaguely she felt that it was a problem.
Juliette seemed to wake as if from a dream.
Tell him."
Tell him," whispered Juliette.
"Now then," shouted Merlin, "out of the way, hunchback, unless you want to come along too."
Then the men pushed her roughly aside.
But at the door Juliette turned to her once more, and said:
And with a firm step she followed the soldiers out of the room.
CHAPTER eighteen
Madame Guillotine was, above all, catholic in her tastes, her gaunt arms, painted blood red, were open alike to the murderer and the thief, the aristocrats of ancient lineage, and the proletariat from the gutter.
But lately the executions had been almost exclusively of a political character.
There were twelve prisons in Paris then, and forty thousand in France, and they were all full.
There was no room for separate cells, no room for privacy, no cause or desire for the most elementary sense of delicacy.
Women, men, children-all were herded together, for one day, perhaps two, and a night or so, and then death would obliterate the petty annoyances, the womanly blushes caused by this sordid propinquity.
Death levelled all, erased everything.
When Marie Antoinette mounted the guillotine she had forgotten that for six weeks she practically lived day and night in the immediate companionship of a set of degraded soldiery.
Juliette, as she marched through the streets between two men of the National Guard, and followed by Merlin, was hooted and jeered at, insulted, pelted with mud.
One woman tried to push past the soldiers, and to strike her in the face-a woman! not thirty!--and who was dragging a pale, squalid little boy by the hand.
"Spit on the aristocrat!" And the child tortured its own small, parched mouth so that, in obedience to its mother, it might defile and bespatter a beautiful, innocent girl.
But Juliette had seen nothing of it all.
She was walking as in a dream.
The mob did not exist for her; she heard neither insult nor vituperation.
She was happy-supremely, completely happy.
She had saved him from the consequences of her own iniquitous crime, and she was about to give her life for him, so that his safety might be more completely assured.
Her love for him he would never know; now he knew only her crime, but presently, when she would be convicted and condemned, confronted with a few scraps of burned paper and a torn letter case, then he would know that she had stood her trial, self accused, and meant to die for him.
It was ethereal, and perhaps not altogether human, but it was hers.
She had been his divinity, his madonna; he had loved in her that, which was her truer, her better self.
That awful oath, sworn so solemnly, had been her relentless tyrant; and her religion-a religion of superstition and of false ideals-had blinded her, and dragged her into crime.
She had arrogated to herself that which was God's alone-"Vengeance!" which is not for man.
That through it all she should have known love, and learned its tender secrets, was more than she deserved.
She was handed over to the governor of the prison, a short, thick set man in black trousers and black shag woollen shirt, and wearing a dirty red cap, with tricolour rosette on the side of his unkempt head.
"Yes," replied Merlin laconically.
"You understand," added the governor; "we are so crowded.
"Certainly," said Merlin, "you will be personally responsible for this prisoner to the Committee of Public Safety."
"Certainly not, without the special permission of the Public Prosecutor."
Well, perhaps that would be best.
She would have been afraid to meet Deroulede again, afraid to read in his eyes that story of his dead love, which alone might have destroyed her present happiness.
It consisted of a few words, a kiss-the last one-on her hand, and that passionate murmur which had escaped from his lips when he knelt at her feet:
"Juliette!"
CHAPTER fifteen.
CAP'S COUNTRY CAPERS.
"A willful elf-an uncle's child, That half a pet and half a pest, Was still reproved, endured, caressed, Yet never tamed, though never spoiled."
Capitola at first was delighted and half incredulous at the great change in her fortunes.
Sometimes of a morning, after a very vivid dream of the alleys, cellars and gutters, ragpickers, newsboys, and beggars of New York, she would open her eyes upon her own comfortable chamber, with its glowing fire and crimson curtains, and bright mirror crowning the walnut bureau between them, she would jump up and gaze wildly around, not remembering where she was or how she came thither.
Sometimes, suddenly startled by an intense realization of the contrast between her past and her present life, she would mentally inquire:
"Can this be really I, myself, and not another?
I, the little houseless wanderer through the streets and alleys of New York?
I, the little newsgirl in boy's clothes?
I, the wretched little vagrant that was brought up before the recorder and was about to be sent to the House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents?
Can this be I, Capitola, the little outcast of the city, now changed into Miss Black, the young lady, perhaps the heiress of a fine old country seat; calling a fine old military officer uncle; having a handsome income of pocket money settled upon me; having carriages and horses and servants to attend me?
No; it can't be!
It's just impossible!
No; I see how it is.
I'm crazy!
that's what I am, crazy!
For, now I think of it, the last thing I remember of my former life was being brought before the recorder for wearing boy's clothes.
This fine old military officer whom I call uncle is the head doctor.
The servants who come at my call are the keepers.
"There is no figure out of my past life in my present one except Herbert Greyson.
But, p shaw! he is not 'the nephew of his uncle;' he is only my old comrade, Herbert Greyson, the sailor lad, who comes here to the madhouse to see me, and, out of compassion, humors all my fancies.
"I wonder how long they'll keep me here?
Forever, I hope.
I hope they won't cure me; I vow I won't be cured.
It's a great deal too pleasant to be mad, and I'll stay so.
Catch me coming to my senses, when it's so delightful to be mad.
I'm too sharp for that.
I didn't grow up in Rag Alley, New York, for nothing."
So, half in jest and half in earnest, Capitola soliloquized upon her change of fortune.
Her education was commenced, but progressed rather irregularly.
Old Hurricane bought her books and maps, slates and copy books, set her lessons in grammar, geography and history, and made her write copies, do sums and read and recite lessons to him.
mrs Condiment taught her the mysteries of cutting and basting, back stitching and felling, hemming and seaming.
A pupil as sharp as Capitola soon mastered her tasks, and found herself each day with many hours of leisure with which she did not know what to do.
These hours were at first occupied with exploring the old house, with all its attics, cuddies, cock lofts and cellars; then in wandering through the old ornamental grounds, that were, even in winter and in total neglect, beautiful with their wild growth of evergreens; thence she extended her researches into the wild and picturesque country around.
She was never weary of admiring the great forest that climbed the heights of the mountains behind their house; the great bleak precipices of gray rock seen through the leafless branches of the trees; the rugged falling ground that lay before the house and between it and the river; and the river itself, with its rushing stream and raging rapids.
Capitola had become a skilful as she had first been a fearless rider. But her rides were confined to the domain between the mountain range and the river; she was forbidden to ford the one or climb the other.
Perhaps if such a prohibition had never been made Capitola would never have thought of doing the one or the other; but we all know the diabolical fascination there is in forbidden pleasures for young human nature.
And no sooner had Cap been commanded, if she valued her safety, not to cross the water or climb the precipice than, as a natural consequence, she began to wonder what was in the valley behind the mountain and what might be in the woods across the river.
And she longed, above all things, to explore and find out for herself.
If she could only get rid of Wool, she resolved to go upon a limited exploring expedition.
One day a golden opportunity occurred.
It was a day of unusual beauty, when autumn seemed to be smiling upon the earth with her brightest smiles before passing away.
In a word, it was Indian summer.
The beauty of the weather had tempted Old Hurricane to ride to the county seat on particular business connected with his ward herself.
Capitola, left alone, amused herself with her tasks until the afternoon; then, calling a boy, she ordered him to saddle her horse and bring him around.
"My dear, what do you want with your horse?
There is no one to attend you; Wool has gone with his master," said mrs Condiment, as she met Capitola in the hall, habited for her ride.
"I know that; but I cannot be mewed up here in the old house and deprived of my afternoon ride," exclaimed Capitola decidedly.
"But, my dear, you must never think of riding out alone," exclaimed the dismayed mrs Condiment.
"Indeed I shall, though-and glad of the opportunity," added Cap, mentally.
"But, my dear love, it is improper, imprudent, dangerous."
"Why so?" asked Cap.
"Good gracious, upon every account!
Suppose you were to meet with ruffians; suppose-oh, heaven!--suppose you were to meet with-Black Donald!"
"mrs Condiment, once for all do tell me who this terrible Black Donald is?
Is he the Evil One himself, or the Man in the Iron Mask, or the individual that struck Billy Patterson, or-who is he?"
"Who is Black Donald?
Good gracious, child, you ask me who is Black Donald!"
where is he?
what is he?
"Black Donald!
Oh, my child, may you never know more of Black Donald than I can tell you.
Black Donald is the chief of a band of ruthless desperadoes that infest these mountain roads, robbing mail coaches, stealing negroes, breaking into houses and committing every sort of depredation.
Their hands are red with murder and their souls black with darker crimes."
"Darker crimes than murder!" ejaculated Capitola.
"Yes, child, yes; there are darker crimes.
Only last winter he and three of his gang broke into a solitary house where there was a lone woman and her daughter, and-it is not a story for you to hear; but if the people had caught Black Donald then they would have burned him at the stake! His life is forfeit by a hundred crimes.
He is an outlaw, and a heavy price is set upon his head."
"No, my dear; at least, no one has been able to do so yet.
His very haunts are unknown, but are supposed to be in concealed mountain caverns."
"How I would like the glory of capturing Black Donald!" said Capitola.
"You, child!
You capture Black Donald!
You are crazy!"
"Oh, by stratagem, I mean, not by force.
Oh, how I should like to capture Black Donald!--There's my horse; good by!" and before mrs Condiment could raise another objection Capitola ran out, sprang into her saddle and was seen careering down the hill toward the river as fast as her horse could fly.
"My Lord, but the major will be hopping if he finds it out!" was good mrs Condiment's dismayed exclamation.
Then, gathering up her riding skirt and throwing it over the neck of her horse she plunged boldly into the stream, and, with the water splashing and foaming all around her, urged him onward till they crossed the river and climbed up the opposite bank. A bridle path lay before her, leading from the fording place through a deep wood.
That path attracted her; she followed it, charmed alike by the solitude of the wood, the novelty of the scene and her own sense of freedom.
But one thought was given to the story of Black Donald, and that was a reassuring one:
"If Black Donald is a mail robber, then this little bridle path is far enough off his beat."
And, so saying, she gayly galloped along, singing as she went, following the narrow path up hill and down dale through the wintry woods.
On her left hand the sun was sinking like a ball of fire below the horizon; all around her everywhere were the wintry woods; far away, in the direction whence she had come, she saw the tops of the mountains behind Hurricane Hall, looking like blue clouds against the southern horizon; the Hall itself and the river below were out of sight.
"I wonder how far I am from home?" said Capitola, uneasily; "somewhere between six and seven miles, I reckon.
Dear me, I didn't mean to ride so far.
I've got over a great deal of ground in these two hours.
I shall not get back so soon; my horse is tired to death; it will take me three hours to reach Hurricane Hall.
Good gracious! it will be pitch dark before I get there.
No, thank heaven, there will be a moon.
But won't there be a row though?
Well, I must turn about and lose no time. Come, Gyp, get up, Gyp, good horse; we're going home."
She had gone on for about a mile, and it was growing dark, and her horse was again slackening his pace, when she thought she heard the sound of another horse's hoofs behind her.
She drew rein and listened, and was sure of it.
Now, without being the least of a coward, Capitola thought of the loneliness of the woods, the lateness of the hour, her own helplessness, and-Black Donald!
And thinking "discretion the better part of valor," she urged her horse once more into a gallop for a few hundred yards; but the jaded beast soon broke into a trot and subsided into a walk that threatened soon to come to a standstill.
The invisible pursuer gained on her.
The thundering footfalls of the pursuing horse were close in the rear.
"Oh, Gyp, is it possible that, instead of my capturing Black Donald, you are going to let Black Donald or somebody else catch me?" exclaimed Capitola, in mock despair, as she urged her wearied steed.
In vain!
"Whither away so fast, pretty one?"
DOLLY'S LESSON.
"What is presence of mind, any way?" demanded little Dolly Ware, as she sat, surrounded by her family, watching the sunset.
The sunset hour is best of all the twenty four in Nantucket.
At no other time is the sea so blue and silvery, or the streaks of purple and pale green which mark the place of the sand spits and shallows that underlie the island waters so defined, or of such charming colors.
The wind blows across softly from the south shore, and brings with it scents of heath and thyme, caught from the high upland moors above the town.
The sun dips down, and sends a flash of glory to the zenith; and small pink clouds curl up about the rising moon, fondle her, as it were, and seem to love her.
It is a delightful moment, and all Nantucket dwellers learn to watch for it.
It was the hour when jokes were cracked and questions asked, and when Mamma, who was apt to be pretty busy during the daytime, had leisure to answer them.
Dolly was youngest of the family,--a thin, wiry child, tall for her years, with a brown bang lying like a thatch over a pair of bright inquisitive eyes, and a thick pig tail braided down her back.
Phyllis, the next in age, was short and fat; then came Harry, then Erma, just sixteen (named after a German great grandmother), and, last of all, Jack, tallest and jolliest of the group, who had just "passed his preliminaries," and would enter college next year.
mrs Ware might be excused for the little air of motherly pride with which she gazed at her five.
They were fine children, all of them,--frank, affectionate, generous, with bright minds and healthy bodies.
"Presence of mind sometimes means absence of body," remarked Jack, in answer to Dolly's question.
"I was speaking to Mamma," said Dolly, with dignity.
"I wasn't asking you."
"I am aware of the fact, but I overlooked the formality, for once.
What makes you want to know, midget?"
"There was a story in the paper about a girl who hid the kerosene can when the new cook came, and it said she showed true presence of mind," replied Dolly.
"Oh, that was only fun!
It didn't mean anything."
"Isn't there any such thing, then?"
"Why, of course there is.
Picking up a shell just before it bursts in a hospital tent, and throwing it out of the door, is presence of mind."
"Yes, and tying a string round the right place on your leg when you've cut an artery," added Harry, eagerly.
"Swallowing a quart of whiskey when a rattlesnake bites you," suggested Jack.
"Saving the silver, instead of the waste paper basket, when the house is on fire," put in Erma.
Dolly looked from one to the other.
"What funny things!" she cried.
"I don't believe you know anything about it.
Mamma, tell me what it really means."
"I think," said mrs Ware, in those gentle tones to which her children always listened, "that presence of mind means keeping cool, and having your wits about you, at critical moments.
Our minds-our reasoning faculties, that is-are apt to be stunned or shocked when we are suddenly frightened or excited; they leave us, and go away, as it were, and it is only afterward that we pick ourselves up, and realize what we ought to have done.
"Should you be proud of me if I showed presence of mind?" asked Dolly, leaning her arms on her mother's lap.
"Very proud," replied mrs Ware, smiling as she stroked the brown head,--"very proud, indeed."
"I mean to do it," said Dolly, in a firm tone.
There was a general laugh.
"How will you go to work?" asked Jack.
"Shall I step down to Hussey's, and get a shell for you to practise on?"
"She'll be setting the house on fire some night, to show what she can do," added Harry, teasingly.
"I shall do no such thing," protested Dolly, indignantly.
"How foolish you are!
You don't understand a bit!
I don't want to make things happen; but, if they do happen, I shall try to keep cool and have my wits about me, and perhaps I shall."
"It would be lovely to be brave and do heroic things," remarked Phyllis.
"You could at least be brave enough to use your common sense," said her mother.
"Yours is a very good resolution, Dolly dear, and I hope you'll keep to it."
"I will," said Dolly, and marched undauntedly off to bed.
Later, she found herself repeating, as if it were a lesson to be learned, "Presence of mind means keeping cool, and having your wits about you;" and she said it over and over every morning and evening after that, as she braided her hair.
It is not given to all of us to test ourselves, and discover by actual experiment just how much a mental resolution has done for us.
Dolly, however, was to have the chance.
The bathing beach at Nantucket is a particularly safe one, and the water through the summer months most warm and delicious.
All the children who lived on the sandy bluff known as "The Cliff" were in the habit of bathing; and the daily dip taken in company was the chief event of the day, in their opinion.
The little Wares all swam like ducks; and no one thought of being nervous or apprehensive if Harry struck out boldly for the jetty, or if Erma and Phyllis were seen side by side at a point far beyond the depth of either of them, or little Dolly took a "header" into deep water off an old boat.
It happened, about two months after the talk on the piazza, that Dolly was bathing with Kitty Allen, a small neighbor of her own age.
Kitty had just been learning to swim, and was very proud of her new accomplishment; but she was by no means so sure of herself or so much at home in the water as Dolly, who had learned three years before, and practised continually.
The two children had swam out for quite a distance; then, as they turned to go back, Kitty suddenly realized her distance from the shore, and was seized with immediate and paralyzing terror.
"How far out we are!
We shall never get back in the world!
We shall be drowned!
Dolly Ware, we shall certainly be drowned!"
She made a vain clutch at Dolly, and, with a wild scream, went down, and disappeared.
Dolly dived after her, only to be met by Kitty coming up to the surface again, and frantically reaching out, as drowning persons do, for something to hold by.
The first thing she touched was Dolly's large pig tail, and, grasping that tight, she sank again, dragging Dolly down with her, backward.
It was really a hazardous moment.
Many a good swimmer has lost his life under similar circumstances.
Nothing is more dangerous than to be caught and held by a person who cannot swim, or who is too much disabled by fear to use his powers.
And now it was that Dolly's carefully conned lesson about presence of mind came to her aid.
"Keep cool; have your wits about you," rang through her ears, as, held in Kitty's desperate grasp, she was dragged down, down into the sea.
A clear sense of what she ought to do flashed across her mind.
She must escape from Kitty and hold her up, but not give Kitty any chance to drag her down again.
As they rose, she pulled her hair away with a sudden motion, and seized Kitty by the collar of her bathing dress, behind.
"Float, and I'll hold you up," she gasped.
Kitty was too far gone to make any very serious struggle.
Then Dolly, striking out strongly, and pushing Kitty before her, sent one wild cry for help toward the beach.
The cry was heard.
It seemed to Dolly a terribly long time before any answer came, but it was in reality less than five minutes before a boat was pushed into the water.
Dolly saw it rowing toward her, and held on bravely.
"Be cool; have your wits about you," she said to herself.
And she kept firm grasp of her mind, and would not let the fright, of whose existence she was conscious, get possession of her.
Oh, how welcome was the dash of the oars close at hand, how gladly she relinquished Kitty to the strong arms that lifted her into the boat! But when the men would have helped her in too, she refused.
"No, thank you; I'll swim!" she said.
It seemed nothing to get herself to shore, now that the responsibility of Kitty and Kitty's weight were taken from her.
She swam pluckily along, the boat keeping near, lest her strength should give out, and reached the beach just as Jack, that moment aware of the situation, was dashing into the water after her.
She was very pale, but declared herself not tired at all, and she dressed and marched sturdily up the cliff, refusing all assistance.
There was quite a little stir among the summer colony over the adventure, and mrs Ware had many compliments paid her for her child's behavior.
mr Allen came over, and had much to say about the extraordinary presence of mind which Dolly had shown.
"It was really remarkable," he said.
"If she had fought with Kitty, or if she had tried to swim ashore and had not called for assistance, they might easily have both been drowned.
It is extraordinary that a child of that age should keep her head, and show such coolness and decision."
"It wasn't remarkable at all," Dolly declared, as soon as he was gone. "It was just because you said that on the piazza that night."
"Said what?"
"Why, Mamma, surely you haven't forgotten.
It was that about presence of mind, you know.
I taught it to myself, and have said it over and over ever since,--'Keep cool; have your wits about you.' I said it in the water when Kitty was pulling me under."
"Did you, really?"
"Indeed, I did.
And then I seemed to know what to do."
"Well, it was a good lesson," said mrs Ware, with glistening eyes.
"I am glad and thankful that you learned it when you did, Dolly."
"Are you proud of me?" demanded Dolly.
"Yes, I am proud of you."
This capped the climax of Dolly's contentment.
Mamma was proud of her; she was quite satisfied.
CHAPTER twenty
And now I come to perhaps the strangest adventure that happened to us in all this strange business, and one which shows how wonderfully things are brought about.
I was walking along quietly, some way in front of the other two, down the banks of the stream which runs from the oasis till it is swallowed up in the hungry desert sands, when suddenly I stopped and rubbed my eyes, as well I might.
There, not twenty yards in front of me, placed in a charming situation, under the shade of a species of fig tree, and facing to the stream, was a cosy hut, built more or less on the Kafir principle with grass and withes, but having a full length door instead of a bee hole.
I thought that I must have got a touch of the sun
It was impossible.
No hunter ever came to such a place as this.
I stared and stared, and so did the other man, and just at that juncture Sir Henry and Good walked up.
"Look here, you fellows," I said, "is that a white man, or am I mad?"
Sir Henry looked, and Good looked, and then all of a sudden the lame white man with a black beard uttered a great cry, and began hobbling towards us.
When he was close he fell down in a sort of faint.
With a spring Sir Henry was by his side.
At the sound of this disturbance, another figure, also clad in skins, emerged from the hut, a gun in his hand, and ran towards us.
"Macumazahn," he halloed, "don't you know me, Baas?
I'm Jim the hunter. I lost the note you gave me to give to the Baas, and we have been here nearly two years." And the fellow fell at my feet, and rolled over and over, weeping for joy.
But whatever they had quarrelled about in the past-I suspect it was a lady, though I never asked-it was evidently forgotten now.
"My dear old fellow," burst out Sir Henry at last, "I thought you were dead.
Then I came up.
It is all so very strange, and, when a man has ceased to hope, so very happy!"
That evening, over the camp fire, George Curtis told us his story, which, in its way, was almost as eventful as our own, and, put shortly, amounted to this.
As for the note I had sent him by Jim, that worthy lost it, and he had never heard of it till to day.
But, acting upon information he had received from the natives, he headed not for Sheba's Breasts, but for the ladder like descent of the mountains down which we had just come, which is clearly a better route than that marked out in old Dom Silvestra's plan.
In the desert he and Jim had suffered great hardships, but finally they reached this oasis, where a terrible accident befell George Curtis.
On the day of their arrival he was sitting by the stream, and Jim was extracting the honey from the nest of a stingless bee which is to be found in the desert, on the top of a bank immediately above him.
In so doing he loosened a great boulder of rock, which fell upon George Curtis's right leg, crushing it frightfully.
As for food, however, they got on pretty well, for they had a good supply of ammunition, and the oasis was frequented, especially at night, by large quantities of game, which came thither for water.
These they shot, or trapped in pitfalls, using the flesh for food, and, after their clothes wore out, the hides for clothing.
"And so," George Curtis ended, "we have lived for nearly two years, like a second Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday, hoping against hope that some natives might come here to help us away, but none have come. Only last night we settled that Jim should leave me, and try to reach Sitanda's Kraal to get assistance.
He was to go to morrow, but I had little hope of ever seeing him back again.
It is the most wonderful thing that I have ever heard of, and the most merciful too."
Then Sir Henry set to work, and told him the main facts of our adventures, sitting till late into the night to do it.
"By Jove!" said George Curtis, when I showed him some of the diamonds: "well, at least you have got something for your pains, besides my worthless self."
Sir Henry laughed.
"They belong to Quatermain and Good.
This remark set me thinking, and having spoken to Good, I told Sir Henry that it was our joint wish that he should take a third portion of the diamonds, or, if he would not, that his share should be handed to his brother, who had suffered even more than ourselves on the chance of getting them.
Finally, we prevailed upon him to consent to this arrangement, but George Curtis did not know of it until some time afterwards.
But we did accomplish it somehow, and to give its details would only be to reproduce much of what happened to us on the former occasion.
p s--Just as I had written the last word, a Kafir came up my avenue of orange trees, carrying a letter in a cleft stick, which he had brought from the post.
It turned out to be from Sir Henry, and as it speaks for itself I give it in full.
We got off the boat at Southampton, and went up to town.
He is furious, especially as some ill natured person has printed it in a Society paper.
To come to business, Good and I took the diamonds to Streeter's to be valued, as we arranged, and really I am afraid to tell you what they put them at, it seems so enormous.
They offer, however, a hundred and eighty thousand for a very small portion of them.
His time is too much occupied in shaving, and other matters connected with the vain adorning of the body.
He told me that since he had been home he hadn't seen a woman to touch her, either as regards her figure or the sweetness of her expression.
I want you to come home, my dear old comrade, and to buy a house near here.
You have done your day's work, and have lots of money now, and there is a place for sale quite close which would suit you admirably.
Do come; the sooner the better; you can finish writing the story of our adventures on board ship.
We have refused to tell the tale till it is written by you, for fear lest we shall not be believed.
If you start on receipt of this you will reach here by Christmas, and I book you to stay with me for that.
Good is coming, and George; and so, by the way, is your boy Harry (there's a bribe for you).
I have had him down for a week's shooting, and like him.
He is a cool young hand; he shot me in the leg, cut out the pellets, and then remarked upon the advantages of having a medical student with every shooting party!
Good bye, old boy; I can't say any more, but I know that you will come, if it is only to oblige
p s--The tusks of the great bull that killed poor Khiva have now been put up in the hall here, over the pair of buffalo horns you gave me, and look magnificent; and the axe with which I chopped off Twala's head is fixed above my writing table.
I wish that we could have managed to bring away the coats of chain armour.
Don't lose poor Foulata's basket in which you brought away the diamonds.
h c
To day is Tuesday.
ALLAN QUATERMAIN.
This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
ALLAN QUATERMAIN
By h Rider Haggard
december twenty third
'I have just buried my boy, my poor handsome boy of whom I was so proud, and my heart is broken.
Who am I that I should complain?
The great wheel of Fate rolls on like a Juggernaut, and crushes us all in turn, some soon, some late-it does not matter when, in the end, it crushes us all.
We do not prostrate ourselves before it like the poor Indians; we fly hither and thither-we cry for mercy; but it is of no use, the black Fate thunders on and in its season reduces us to powder.
He was doing so well at the hospital, he had passed his last examination with honours, and I was proud of them, much prouder than he was, I think.
And then he must needs go to that smallpox hospital.
He wrote to me that he was not afraid of smallpox and wanted to gain the experience; and now the disease has killed him, and I, old and grey and withered, am left to mourn over him, without a chick or child to comfort me.
I might have saved him, too-I have money enough for both of us, and much more than enough-King Solomon's Mines provided me with that; but I said, "No, let the boy earn his living, let him labour that he may enjoy rest." But the rest has come to him before the labour.
'I am like the man in the Bible who laid up much goods and builded barns-goods for my boy and barns for him to store them in; and now his soul has been required of him, and I am left desolate.
'We buried him this afternoon under the shadow of the grey and ancient tower of the church of this village where my house is.
The coffin was put down by the grave, and a few big flakes lit upon it.
They looked very white upon the black cloth!
There was a little hitch about getting the coffin down into the grave-the necessary ropes had been forgotten: so we drew back from it, and waited in silence watching the big flakes fall gently one by one like heavenly benedictions, and melt in tears on Harry's pall.
But that was not all. A robin redbreast came as bold as could be and lit upon the coffin and began to sing.
The above, signed 'Allan Quatermain', is an extract from my diary written two years and more ago.
I copy it down here because it seems to me that it is the fittest beginning to the history that I am about to write, if it please God to spare me to finish it.
That extract was penned seven thousand miles or so from the spot where I now lie painfully and slowly writing this, with a pretty girl standing by my side fanning the flies from my august countenance. Harry is there and I am here, and yet somehow I cannot help feeling that I am not far off Harry.
On all the four walls of this vestibule were placed pairs of horns-about a hundred pairs altogether, all of which I had shot myself.
They are beautiful specimens, as I never keep any horns which are not in every way perfect, unless it may be now and again on account of the associations connected with them.
In the centre of the room, however, over the wide fireplace, there was a clear space left on which I had fixed up all my rifles.
Some of them I have had for forty years, old muzzle loaders that nobody would look at nowadays.
And many an elephant have I shot with that old gun.
Yes, as I walked, I began to long to see the moonlight gleaming silvery white over the wide veldt and mysterious sea of bush, and watch the lines of game travelling down the ridges to the water.
The ruling passion is strong in death, they say, and my heart was dead that night.
But, independently of my trouble, no man who has for forty years lived the life I have, can with impunity go coop himself in this prim English country, with its trim hedgerows and cultivated fields, its stiff formal manners, and its well dressed crowds.
Ah! this civilization, what does it all come to?
A great gulf fixed?
No, only a very little one, that a plain man's thought may spring across.
It is a depressing conclusion, but in all essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical.
I dare say that the highly civilized lady reading this will smile at an old fool of a hunter's simplicity when she thinks of her black bead bedecked sister; and so will the superfine cultured idler scientifically eating a dinner at his club, the cost of which would keep a starving family for a week.
There, I might go on for ever, but what is the good?
A vainglory is it, and like a northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark.
Do not let me, however, be understood as decrying our modern institutions, representing as they do the gathered experience of humanity applied for the good of all.
Of course they have great advantages-hospitals for instance; but then, remember, we breed the sickly people who fill them.
In a savage land they do not exist. Besides, the question will arise: How many of these blessings are due to Christianity as distinct from civilization?
I make no apology for this digression, especially as this is an introduction which all young people and those who never like to think (and it is a bad habit) will naturally skip.
It seems to me very desirable that we should sometimes try to understand the limitations of our nature, so that we may not be carried away by the pride of knowledge.
Man's cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring.
It is the one fixed unchangeable thing-fixed as the stars, more enduring than the mountains, as unalterable as the way of the Eternal.
But the composing elements remain the same, nor will there be one more bit of coloured glass nor one less for ever and ever.
It is on the nineteen rough serviceable savage portions that we fall back on emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial twentieth.
Civilization should wipe away our tears, and yet we weep and cannot be comforted.
So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the dust, civilization fails us utterly.
And so in my trouble, as I walked up and down the oak panelled vestibule of my house there in Yorkshire, I longed once more to throw myself into the arms of Nature.
I would go again where the wild game was, back to the land whereof none know the history, back to the savages, whom I love, although some of them are almost as merciless as Political Economy.
one.--Oriental Canapes.
Take some lobster or crab meat and pound in a mortar.
Mix with one tablespoonful of butter; season with salt and pepper, a pinch each of mustard, cayenne, nutmeg and curry powder and moisten with lemon juice.
Cut small rounds of toasted bread; scoop out some of the centre; fill with the mixture and cover with a curry sauce.
Sprinkle with fine bread crumbs and let bake in the oven a few minutes. Serve hot.
two.--Haggis (SCOTCH).
Chop a sheep's tongue, liver and heart and one pound of bacon.
Then clean the pouch of the sheep and fill with the mixture. Lay in boiling water and let boil three hours.
Serve with apple sauce.
three.--Austrian Braised Tongue.
Boil a large fresh beef tongue in salted water until tender.
Remove the tongue and lard it with thin strips of bacon; sprinkle with paprica; lay in a baking pan; add one onion sliced thin and one cup of the water in which the tongue was cooked and pour over one pint of cream. Let bake in a moderate oven.
Baste often with the sauce.
Serve hot, and pour over the sauce; garnish with parsley.
four.--Russian Omelet.
Chop two shallots with a little parsley and cook in hot water.
Add two tablespoonfuls of caviare and a teaspoonful of lemon juice; season to taste.
Beat four eggs with one tablespoonful of cream, salt and pepper, and fry in an omelet pan with hot butter until done.
Put the mixture in the centre; turn in the ends and serve at once.
five.--Madras Potato Curry.
Cut boiled potatoes into thin slices; then fry one chopped onion in two tablespoonfuls of butter.
Add three ounces of grated cocoanut, one teaspoonful of curry powder and one cup of milk, salt and cayenne pepper to taste.
Let boil up.
Add the sliced potatoes and a sprig of parsley chopped.
Let simmer a few minutes and serve hot.
six.--Swiss Baked Eggs.
Melt one ounce of butter in a baking pan; then cover the bottom of the pan with thin slices of Swiss cheese.
Break in six eggs; sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Pour over four tablespoonfuls of cream; sprinkle with grated Swiss cheese, and let bake in the oven to a delicate brown. Serve hot.
seven.--Jewish Stewed Shad.
Clean and cut a shad into large slices; sprinkle with salt, pepper and ginger.
Let boil until done and pour over the fish.
Garnish with sliced lemon and sprigs of parsley and serve cold.
eight.--Bombay Spinach.
Boil the spinach in salted water until tender; drain and chop fine. Fry one chopped onion in two tablespoonfuls of butter; add the chopped spinach, a pinch of pepper and curry powder.
Cover and let simmer five minutes.
Serve on a platter with stewed prawns and garnish with croutons.
nine.--Spanish Fricasseed Shrimps.
Heat two tablespoonfuls of butter; add one onion chopped and two cups of tomatoes.
Stir in the yolk of an egg.
Put some boiled rice on a platter; add the shrimps and pour over the sauce.
Serve very hot.
ten.--Irish Baked Potatoes.
Peel and boil potatoes in salted water until tender; drain and mash with a lump of butter.
Put in the oven to brown.
Serve with boiled fish.
eleven.--Russian Stewed Chicken.
Cut a fat chicken into pieces at the joints and let stew, well seasoned with salt and pepper.
Then add some small whole onions, some cauliflower, mushrooms and one cup of French peas.
Let all cook until tender; then serve hot on a large platter.
twelve.--Dutch Baked Mackerel.
Place the mackerel in a baking dish; sprinkle with pepper and chopped parsley.
Cover with fried bread crumbs and bits of butter, and moisten with cream.
Then bake until brown on top and serve hot with stewed potatoes.
thirteen.--Polish Roast Mutton.
Season a leg of mutton with salt, pepper and a pinch of cloves.
Lay in a baking pan with one sliced onion, two celery roots, three cloves of garlic and two carrots cut fine, one bay leaf, a sprig of thyme and a few peppercorns.
Pour over one cup of vinegar and one cup of hot water.
Dredge with flour and let bake in a hot oven.
Baste often with the sauce in the pan until nearly done; then add one pint of sour cream and let bake until done.
Thicken with flour; boil up and pour over the roast.
fourteen.--Italian Sugar Cakes.
fifteen.--Oriental Stewed Prawns.
Clean and pick three dozen prawns.
Add one pint of stock and let simmer half an hour until tender.
Serve on a border of boiled rice; garnish with fried parsley.
sixteen.--Swiss Steak.
Season a round steak with salt, black pepper and paprica; dredge with flour and let fry in hot lard on both sides until brown.
Cover and let simmer half an hour.
seventeen.--Berlin Herring Salad.
Soak the herring over night; remove the milch and mash fine.
Cut off the head, skin and bone; chop the herring; add chopped apples, pickles, potatoes, olives and capers.
eighteen.--German Lentil Soup.
To one gallon of soup stock, add one quart of lentils.
Let boil until lentils are soft, with one sliced onion.
Then add some small sausages. Let boil five minutes.
Season to taste and serve the soup with the sausages and croutons fried in butter.
nineteen.--French Spiced Venison.
Rub the venison with salt, pepper, vinegar, cloves and allspice; then put in a baking pan.
Pour over a cup of melted butter; add one onion sliced, some thyme, parsley, the juice of a lemon, and a cup of hot water.
Let bake, covered, in a hot oven.
Baste often with the sauce when nearly done.
Sprinkle with flour; add a glass of sherry and let brown.
Serve with celery and currant jelly.
twenty.--Spanish Mushrooms.
Drain one can of mushrooms and heat two tablespoonfuls of butter.
Add six shallots and one clove of garlic chopped fine, some parsley and thyme and the mushrooms.
Let all fry a few minutes; then add the mushroom liquor and two tablespoonfuls of white wine, salt and pepper to taste. Let simmer five minutes and serve hot on slices of toast.
Boil some fine noodles in salted water for ten minutes; let drain. Beat the yolks of five eggs with one cup of pulverized sugar and mix with the noodles.
Put in a well buttered pudding dish and bake until brown.
twenty two.--Dutch Sweet Potato Puff.
Peel and boil three sweet potatoes in salted water until tender; then mash well with three beaten yolks of eggs, one cup of milk, three tablespoonfuls of butter, two tablespoonfuls of sugar, a pinch of nutmeg and lemon juice. Beat the whites with a pinch of salt to a stiff froth; add to the potatoes and put in a well buttered baking dish and bake.
Serve hot.
twenty three.--Spaghetti (ITALIAN).
Drain.
Then add one cup of milk; let boil and pour over the spaghetti.
Sprinkle with salt, pepper and grated cheese and let bake in the oven until done. Serve hot.
twenty four.--Russian Beet Soup.
Boil five medium sized beets until tender; then chop and add to a highly seasoned chicken broth.
Add the juice of one lemon, some cinnamon and nutmeg; let boil fifteen minutes.
Then add one glass of red wine, mixed with a teaspoonful of brown sugar.
Let boil a few minutes longer and serve with fried croutons.
twenty five.--Boulettes.
Add one tablespoonful of lemon juice, two tablespoonfuls of melted butter.
Season highly with salt, black pepper and a pinch of cayenne.
Mix with one egg and form into balls; roll in flour and fry in deep hot lard until brown.
Serve hot with tomato sauce.
twenty six.--Baden Stewed Lentils.
Boil one quart of lentils until tender; then heat two tablespoonfuls of butter.
Add one chopped onion and stir in one tablespoonful of flour until brown; add some cold water mixed with vinegar.
Season with salt and pepper, and serve with small boiled sausages.
Sprinkle the top with bread crumbs fried in butter until brown.
twenty seven.--Duck aux Champignons.
Heat two tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan; add the ducks, one large onion chopped fine, two cloves of garlic and one herb bouquet chopped.
Cover and brown a few minutes; add one cup of water and stew until tender.
one.--Italian Tongue.
Boil a beef tongue until tender; skin and slice thin.
Heat two tablespoonfuls of butter.
Add one chopped onion and two cloves of garlic minced fine.
Let boil.
Simmer ten minutes.
Serve with baked macaroni.
two.--German Prune Pudding.
Cook one pound of prunes in a large saucepan with sliced lemon, a piece of stick cinnamon and brown sugar.
Add flour sifted with a teaspoonful of baking powder. Make into a large roll; place in the centre of the prunes; cover with brown sugar and a tablespoonful of molasses and put in the oven to bake until done.
Serve hot or cold.
three.--Swiss Pot Roast.
Season a breast of veal with salt, pepper and ginger.
Heat a cupful of dripping; lay the meat in the stew pan with the dripping, one onion, some celery seed, carroway seed, a few peppercorns and parsley.
Cover and let stew slowly until nearly done; then add one cup of tomato sauce and cook slowly until tender.
Serve with baked potatoes.
four.--Mushrooms a la Bordelaise.
Drain one can of mushrooms; chop six shallots very fine and saute in one tablespoonful of butter.
Add the chopped mushrooms; sprinkle with salt, pepper, some chopped parsley and one minced bay leaf.
Serve hot on slices of French toast.
five.--Turkish Soup.
Season and fry some lamb chops; add two green peppers sliced thin, one onion chopped and an herb bouquet.
Pour all together and let cook until meat is very tender.
Serve hot.
six.--Scotch Omelet.
Boil young tender leeks in salted water; let drain.
Chop to a fine mince and fry in hot butter.
Add six well beaten eggs, sprinkle with salt and pepper and fold into an omelet and serve on a hot dish.
seven.--Jewish Egg Bread.
Add a pinch of sugar and let them fry in hot rendered butter until a golden brown.
Sprinkle with pulverized sugar and cinnamon and serve hot with coffee.
eight.--Bombay Broiled Kidney.
Clean sheep's kidneys and cut into thin slices.
Sprinkle with salt, cayenne pepper and grated lemon peel.
Then dip in beaten egg and fine bread crumbs and broil on a hot greased gridiron.
Serve on buttered toast, spread with curry paste.
nine.--German Prune Kuchen.
Boil some prunes until tender.
Remove the kernels and mash the prunes well.
Mix with sugar, cinnamon and lemon juice to taste.
Make a rich biscuit dough, roll out and place on a well buttered baking pan.
Fill with the prunes and let bake until done.
Serve cold.
ten.--French Roast with Carrots.
Lard a round of beef with slices of bacon and put in a large saucepan. Cover and let brown a few minutes.
Add sliced onion and boiling water to cover.
Let cook slowly until tender; then scrape six carrots and cut thin; add two sliced onions, two cloves of garlic and let cook until tender.
Thicken with butter and flour.
Season highly with salt, pepper and parsley; add to the meat, and let all cook together a half hour and serve hot.
eleven.--Spanish Fried Chicken.
Cut a fat hen into pieces at the joints and boil until tender; season and fry with one onion and two green peppers chopped fine.
Add one cup of tomato sauce, salt and pepper to taste.
Serve the chicken on a platter with boiled rice.
twelve.--Hungarian Bread Pudding.
Sprinkle with cinnamon, nutmeg and grated lemon peel; then mix with the yolks of four eggs and the whites beaten stiff.
Put in a well buttered pudding dish, and let bake until done.
Serve hot with wine sauce.
thirteen.--Swedish Baked Turnips.
Peel small tender turnips; heat one tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan.
Place the turnips in whole, sprinkle with salt and pepper; add a tablespoonful of sugar.
Pour over a cup of water; cover and let cook for one hour until tender but not broken.
Thicken the sauce with flour and milk.
Add a little water and set in the oven a half hour, covered with paper; then serve.
fourteen.--Belgian Baked Bananas.
Skin fine bananas and lay them whole in a baking dish.
Sprinkle with sugar and grated lemon peel.
Let bake in a quick oven.
Put the bananas in a glass dish and pour over the sauce.
Let get cold and serve.
fifteen.--Japanese Rice.
Boil one cup of rice; add three chopped shallots, one teaspoonful of soy and salt to taste.
Place on a platter, cover with chopped hard boiled eggs, sprinkle with salt, paprica and chopped parsley.
Garnish with some thin slices of smoked salmon.
sixteen.--Scotch Loaf Cake.
Make a loaf a half inch thick and bake in a moderate oven until done.
seventeen.--English Meat Loaf.
Sprinkle with pepper, mace and chopped parsley.
Moisten with beef stock and let bake in the oven.
Serve cold, sliced very thin, garnished with watercress.
eighteen.--Jewish Purim Cakes.
Put on a well floured baking board.
Roll out a half inch thick.
Cut into triangles and drop in a kettle of hot rendered butter; fry until a golden brown.
Then mix some powdered sugar with a little milk and flavor with vanilla.
Spread on the top.
nineteen.--Swiss Pie.
Make a rich pie dough.
Line a buttered pie dish with the dough; then slice three onions very thin and let cook in hot butter until tender; add a pinch of salt.
Fill the pie with the onions, cover the top with cream and let bake in a moderate oven until done.
Serve hot or cold.
twenty.--French Apple Fritters.
Peel and slice large apples; sprinkle with sugar and lemon juice and make a rich egg batter.
Lay the sliced apples in the batter and fry in deep hot lard to a golden brown.
twenty one.--Jewish Purim Torte.
Line a well buttered baking dish with a rich pie paste.
Add the whites beaten stiff; then fill with the mixture and let bake until done.
twenty two.--English Boiled Pudding.
Add the whites, beaten to a stiff froth; put in a buttered pudding mold, and let boil until done.
Serve with brandy sauce.
twenty three.--German Stewed Brains.
Clean the brains.
Heat one tablespoonful of drippings in a pan; add the brains, one sliced onion, some parsley, salt and pepper.
Let stew fifteen minutes.
twenty four.--Scotch Cream Muffins.
Sift one pint of flour with one teaspoonful of baking powder; beat three yolks of eggs with a pinch of salt; add one pint of cream and one tablespoonful of melted butter.
Stir in the flour; add the whites beaten to a stiff froth.
Beat all well together.
twenty five.--French Tart.
Make a rich pie dough.
Add the beaten whites; fill the pie and bake in a moderate oven.
Mix one ounce of granulated sugar with one tablespoonful of cold water and let come to a boil.
Put on the pie when cool and serve.
twenty six.--Polish Stewed Beans.
Break string beans into pieces and let boil in salted water until tender; then heat one tablespoonful of butter; stir in one tablespoonful of flour until brown.
Let sauce boil.
Add the beans and simmer ten minutes. Serve hot with a beef pot roast.
twenty seven.--Vienna Milk Rolls.
Beat all up well with one pint of milk; let raise over night.
Roll out an inch thick; cut with a biscuit cutter; rub with melted butter; lay in a buttered baking pan; let raise one hour; then bake in a hot oven twenty minutes.
twenty eight.--Scotch Potato Stew.
Cut the potatoes into small dice pieces and fry in hot lard.
Then fry one onion cut fine in hot butter, but do not brown; stir in some flour; then add milk, salt, pepper and parsley.
Let boil up once and add the potatoes to the sauce.
Let all get very hot and serve.
twenty nine.--Jewish Dumplings.
Soak six crackers in water; then press dry.
Fry one chopped onion in butter and pour over the crackers.
Add three eggs and chopped parsley; sprinkle with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
Mix all with some cracker meal until you can form into balls and boil in salted water until done. Serve hot with melted butter poured over them, and garnish with parsley.
thirty.--Italian Soup.
one.--Portugal Iced Pudding.
Then place in the freezer to harden and serve.
two.--English Chicken Salad.
Mix one cup of cold chicken cut fine with one cup of chopped celery, one cup of cooked chestnuts chopped and two green peppers cut fine.
Season with salt and pepper.
Put on crisp lettuce leaves in the salad bowl; cover with a mayonnaise dressing.
Serve cold.
three.--Turkish Stewed Lamb.
Lay in a large stew pan and cover with hot water.
Add one sliced onion, two sliced green peppers and two tomatoes, one red pepper and two sprigs of parsley.
Let stew slowly until tender.
Then fry thin slices of egg plant and add to the stew.
Serve hot.
four.--Irish Apple Pudding.
Pare and slice apples and lay them in a buttered pie dish.
Then cover with a rich pie paste and let bake until done.
five.--Indian Rice.
Boil one cup of rice in chicken broth; add a pinch of curry powder and season to taste with salt and pepper.
Serve very hot.
six.--Hungarian Chicken Soup.
Boil a large chicken in three quarts of water; season with salt, sage and pepper; add one onion chopped and cook until tender.
Remove the chicken and chop it fine; then add to the soup with the yolks of three well beaten eggs; let all get very hot.
Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve at once.
seven.--Yorkshire Pudding.
Beat three eggs with a pinch of salt; add one pint of milk and two thirds of a cup of flour.
Stir until smooth.
Then pour into a well greased pan and bake until done.
Serve with English roast beef, and pour over the gravy.
eight.--Portugal Salad.
Slice two cucumbers, two tomatoes, one onion and two green peppers.
Then sprinkle with one chopped clove of garlic, salt and pepper and cover with some thin slices of bread.
nine.--English Chocolate Pudding.
Soak six ounces of bread crumbs in milk and press dry; add two ounces of butter mixed with three ounces of sugar and three ounces of chocolate; add the yolks of six eggs well beaten, and flavor with a teaspoonful of vanilla; add the whites beaten to a stiff froth.
Bake in a quick oven and serve at once.
ten.--Spanish Canapes.
Prepare circular pieces of buttered toast.
Then mix one cup of chopped fish with three sweet pickles minced fine, and two tablespoonfuls of Madras chutney; moisten with two tablespoonfuls of Hollandaise sauce.
Spread this mixture over eight pieces of toast; sprinkle with three tablespoonfuls of grated Parmesan cheese.
Let bake for five minutes and serve.
eleven.--French Strawberry Pudding.
Dip enough macaroons in wine to line the pudding dish; cover with sweetened strawberries.
Beat the yolks of four eggs with sugar and flavor with vanilla; pour over the strawberries; put in the oven to bake. Beat the whites to a stiff froth with some pulverized sugar; put on top of the pudding and let brown.
Serve cold.
Chop cold veal.
Mix with some sweetbread and mushrooms chopped.
Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice.
Add a sprig of parsley and a little onion chopped fine.
Mix with a beaten egg and bread crumbs; sprinkle with nutmeg.
Form into croquettes.
Dip in beaten egg and fine bread crumbs and fry in deep hot lard.
Serve hot with a cream sauce.
thirteen.--German Cheese Pie.
Line a pie plate with a rich pie dough.
Mix well.
Fill the pie.
Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake until light brown.
Serve hot or cold.
fourteen.--Italian Veal Pates.
Chop cooked veal with some onion, parsley, thyme and one clove of garlic; season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
Add some chopped ham, lemon juice and two eggs.
Mix with bread crumbs and melted butter.
Fill into small pate shells; rub with butter and beaten egg.
Place a paper over the top and let bake in a moderate oven.
Serve with tomato sauce.
fifteen.--Hungarian Noodle Pudding.
Add the beaten whites.
Line the pudding dish with a rich pie paste.
Fill with the noodles and pour over some melted butter. Bake until brown.
Serve hot with lemon sauce.
sixteen.--Polish Stewed Chicken.
Let cook until tender and serve on a platter with cooked rice.
seventeen.--Madras Curried Apples.
Peel and core four sour apples and cut into rings; then sprinkle with curry powder and let fry until tender.
Add a few thinly cut shallots. Cover and let simmer until done.
Serve on a platter with boiled rice and pour over a curry sauce.
eighteen.--Irish Batter Cakes.
Beat the yolks of four eggs; add a pinch of salt, one tablespoonful of melted butter, one small cup of milk and sifted flour enough to make a smooth batter.
Beat well.
Add the whites of eggs, beaten stiff and let fry a golden color; then spread with jam and serve hot.
nineteen.--Spanish Baked Eggs.
Poach eggs as soft as possible.
Butter a baking dish; add a layer of bread crumbs and grated cheese.
Place the eggs on the crumbs; sprinkle with salt, pepper, grated cheese and chopped parsley.
Cover with bread crumbs and pour over some cream sauce.
Let bake in a hot oven until brown on top.
Serve with toast.
twenty.--Scotch Stewed Onions.
Heat two tablespoonfuls of butter.
Add the onions; let boil up and serve.
twenty one.--German Baked Cabbage.
Chop all the cabbage from the inside and fry in hot grease with one sliced onion.
Remove from the fire.
Let bake until brown.
Serve hot.
twenty two.--Dutch Veal Stew.
Season three pounds of veal with salt, pepper and lemon juice.
Put a few slices of bacon in a stew pan; when hot, add the veal.
Cover and let brown a few minutes; then add two carrots and one onion sliced thin, some thyme and mace; pour over one cup of hot water.
Cover and let cook slowly until tender.
twenty three.--French Baked Apple Dumplings.
Peel and core apples; sprinkle well with sugar.
Then mix some cold boiled rice with one egg, a pinch of salt, sugar and cinnamon, flour enough to make a dough.
Cover the apples with the dough; put in a well buttered baking dish with two tablespoonfuls of butter and bake to a delicate brown.
Serve with whipped cream.
twenty four.--Bavarian Fried Brains.
Clean and boil the brains in salted water; add one onion sliced; let cook ten minutes.
Remove the brains and mash up well with one tablespoonful of butter, some bread crumbs and parsley chopped, salt and pepper to taste; add two eggs.
Mix together and fry in deep hot lard by the tablespoonful until brown.
Serve with tomato sauce.
twenty five.--Polish Bread Pudding.
Mix well and bake until brown; then beat the whites to a stiff froth with three tablespoonfuls of pulverized sugar.
Spread the pudding with jelly and cover with the beaten whites; set in the oven to brown.
twenty six.--Vienna Cherry Cake.
Stone black cherries.
Sprinkle the dough with flour and cover with the cherries.
Sprinkle with sugar and let bake until done. Then cover with a sweetened egg custard and bake until brown. Serve cold.
twenty seven.--Belgian Poached Eggs.
Cut thin round slices of bread and toast them.
Spread with chopped anchovies and chopped ham.
Cover the top with whipped whites of eggs and place a raw yoke on each slice of bread.
Set in the oven to bake long enough to heat the egg, and serve at once.
twenty eight.--Bavarian Apple Pie.
Let bake and fill with chopped apples, raisins and chopped nuts, sugar and a pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg.
Then cover with cake crumbs and let bake until done.
Beat three whites of eggs with pulverized sugar; flavor with lemon and spread over the pudding.
Set in the oven a few minutes to brown on top.
twenty nine.--Russian Fried Sweetbreads.
Clean and season the sweetbreads with salt and pepper and sprinkle with lemon juice and chopped parsley.
Roll in fine bread crumbs and fry in hot lard.
I was put into the dog cart, and john went with his master.
The man at the gate said the river was rising fast, and he feared it would be a bad night.
"I wish we were well out of this wood," said my master.
"Yes, sir," said john, "it would be rather awkward if one of these branches came down upon us."
I dare not go forward, and I made a dead stop.
stop!" he cried.
I have been so anxious, fancying all sorts of things.
"'twas no use going twice when once would do, and he chose to get business forward."
"Get on, you lazy fellow," he said, "or I'll make you."
"Pray, stop; I think I can help you if you will let me."
You won't put that rein on again, will you?" for he was just going to hitch it up on the old plan.
"Can your horse do it, or can't he?" said the blustering man.
"I have no meadows to nurse sick horses in-he might get well or he might not; that sort of thing don't suit my business; my plan is to work 'em as long as they'll go, and then sell 'em for what they'll fetch, at the knacker's or elsewhere."
APPENDIX C
ACOUSTICS
one.
These particles lie so close together that no movement at all can be detected, and it is only when the disturbance finally reaches the air particles that are in contact with the ear drum that any effect is evident.
This phenomenon of sound transmission may perhaps be made more clear by the old illustration of a series of eight billiard balls in a row on a table: if the first ball is tapped lightly, striking gently against ball number two, the latter (as well as numbers three, four, five, six, and seven) will not apparently move at all, but ball number eight at the other end will roll away.
This medium may be air, water, a bar of iron or steel, the earth, etc
five.
If there is such a surface in an auditorium (as often occurs) there will be a certain point where everything can be heard very easily, but in the rest of the room it may be very difficult to understand what is being said or sung.
The duration of the reverberation depends upon the size and height of the room, material of floor and walls, furniture, size of audience, etc
six.
seven.
one.
Pitch.
three.
Quality (timbre).
It depends upon rate of vibration.
If a body vibrates only eight or ten times per second no tone is heard at all: but if it vibrates regularly at the rate of sixteen or eighteen per seconds a tone of very low pitch is heard.
The highest tone that can ordinarily be heard is the E[flat] four octaves higher than the highest E[flat] of the piano.
nine.
The intensity of tones varies with the medium conveying them, being usually louder at night because the air is then more elastic.
If two strings of the same length are stretched side by side and one set in vibration so as to produce tone the other will soon begin to vibrate also and the combined tone will be louder than if only one string produced it.
A series of simple vibrations will cause a simple (or colorless) tone, while complex vibrations (giving rise to overtones of various kinds and in a variety of proportions) cause more individualistic peculiarities of quality.
nine above.)
eleven.
Practically every musical tone really consists of a combination of several tones sounding simultaneously, the combined effect upon the ear giving the impression of a single tone.
The first of these overtones is the octave above the fundamental; the second is the fifth above this octave; the third, two octaves above the fundamental, and so on through the series as shown in the figure below.
A similar series might be worked out from any other fundamental.
The characteristic tone of the oboe on the other hand has many overtones and is therefore highly individualistic: this enables us to recognize the tone of the instrument even though we cannot see the player.
twelve.
There would be many other disadvantages in such a system, notably the inability to modulate freely to other keys, and since modulation is one of the predominant and most striking characteristics of modern music, this would constitute a serious barrier to advances in composition.
He called the collection "The Well tempered Clavichord."
thirteen.
In eighteen ninety one a convention of piano manufacturers at Philadelphia adopted this same pitch for the United States, and it has been in practically universal use ever since.
If a man has been affected pleasurably or painfully by anyone, of a class or nation different from his own, and if the pleasure or pain has been accompanied by the idea of the said stranger as cause, under the general category of the class or nation: the man will feel love or hatred, not only to the individual stranger, but also to the whole class or nation whereto he belongs.
Joy arising from the fact, that anything we hate is destroyed, or suffers other injury, is never unaccompanied by a certain pain in us.
For in so far as we conceive a thing similar to ourselves to be affected with pain, we ourselves feel pain.
For, as we have said, when the image of the thing in question, is aroused, inasmuch as it involves the thing's existence, it determines the man to regard the thing with the same pain as he was wont to do, when it actually did exist.
However, since he has joined to the image of the thing other images, which exclude its existence, this determination to pain is forthwith checked, and the man rejoices afresh as often as the repetition takes place.
This is the cause of men's pleasure in recalling past evils, and delight in narrating dangers from which they have escaped.
For when men conceive a danger, they conceive it as still future, and are determined to fear it; this determination is checked afresh by the idea of freedom, which became associated with the idea of the danger when they escaped therefrom: this renders them secure afresh: therefore they rejoice afresh.
Love or hatred towards, for instance, peter is destroyed, if the pleasure involved in the former, or the pain involved in the latter emotion, be associated with the idea of another cause: and will be diminished in proportion as we conceive peter not to have been the sole cause of either emotion.
note).
For pleasure is called love towards peter, and pain is called hatred towards peter, simply in so far as peter is regarded as the cause of one emotion or the other.
When this condition of causality is either wholly or partly removed, the emotion towards peter also wholly or in part vanishes.
Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other conditions being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.
note) love it or hate it, and shall do so with the utmost love or hatred that can arise from the given emotion.
Part one) conceive it not as the sole cause, but as one of the causes of the emotion, and therefore our love or hatred towards it will be less.
Note.--Things which are accidentally the causes of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
However, I do not think it worth while to point out here the vacillations springing from hope and fear; it follows from the definition of these emotions, that there can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope, as I will duly explain in the proper place.
Chapter three.
The Brothers Make Friends
Waiters were continually darting to and fro in it.
The only customer in the room was an old retired military man drinking tea in a corner.
But there was the usual bustle going on in the other rooms of the tavern; there were shouts for the waiters, the sound of popping corks, the click of billiard balls, the drone of the organ.
So he must have come here, he reflected, simply to meet Dmitri by arrangement.
Yet Dmitri was not there.
"Let me have soup, and tea afterwards, I am hungry," said Alyosha gayly.
"And cherry jam?
They have it here.
You remember how you used to love cherry jam when you were little?"
"You remember that?
Let me have jam too, I like it still."
"I remember everything, Alyosha, I remember you till you were eleven, I was nearly fifteen.
There's such a difference between fifteen and eleven that brothers are never companions at those ages.
I don't know whether I was fond of you even.
When I went away to Moscow for the first few years I never thought of you at all.
Then, when you came to Moscow yourself, we only met once somewhere, I believe.
And now I've been here more than three months, and so far we have scarcely said a word to each other.
To morrow I am going away, and I was just thinking as I sat here how I could see you to say good by and just then you passed."
"Were you very anxious to see me, then?"
"Very.
I want to get to know you once for all, and I want you to know me. And then to say good by.
I believe it's always best to get to know people just before leaving them.
I've noticed how you've been looking at me these three months.
There has been a continual look of expectation in your eyes, and I can't endure that.
That's how it is I've kept away from you.
The little man stands firm, I thought.
Though I am laughing, I am serious.
You do stand firm, don't you? I like people who are firm like that whatever it is they stand by, even if they are such little fellows as you.
Your expectant eyes ceased to annoy me, I grew fond of them in the end, those expectant eyes.
You seem to love me for some reason, Alyosha?"
You are a riddle to me even now.
But I understand something in you, and I did not understand it till this morning."
"You won't be angry?" Alyosha laughed too.
"Well?"
"That you are just as young as other young men of three and twenty, that you are just a young and fresh and nice boy, green in fact!
Now, have I insulted you dreadfully?"
"On the contrary, I am struck by a coincidence," cried Ivan, warmly and good humoredly.
"Would you believe it that ever since that scene with her, I have thought of nothing else but my youthful greenness, and just as though you guessed that, you begin about it.
At thirty, though, I shall be sure to leave the cup, even if I've not emptied it, and turn away-where I don't know.
But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over everything-every disillusionment, every disgust with life.
I've asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it of myself, I fancy.
Some driveling consumptive moralists-and poets especially-often call that thirst for life base.
It's a feature of the Karamazovs, it's true, that thirst for life regardless of everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base?
The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha.
I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic.
Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring.
I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why.
I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one's heart prizes them.
Here they have brought the soup for you, eat it, it will do you good.
It's first rate soup, they know how to make it here.
I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it's a most precious graveyard, that's what it is!
Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I'm convinced in my heart that it's long been nothing but a graveyard.
It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving with one's inside, with one's stomach.
One loves the first strength of one's youth.
Do you understand anything of my tirade, Alyosha?" Ivan laughed suddenly.
"Love life more than the meaning of it?"
"Certainly, love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it's only then one will understand the meaning of it.
"You are trying to save me, but perhaps I am not lost!
And what does your second half mean?"
"Why, one has to raise up your dead, who perhaps have not died after all. Come, let me have tea.
"I see you are feeling inspired.
You are a steadfast person, Alexey.
Is it true that you mean to leave the monastery?"
We shall meet before I am thirty, when I shall begin to turn aside from the cup.
Father doesn't want to turn aside from his cup till he is seventy, he dreams of hanging on to eighty in fact, so he says.
But to hang on to seventy is nasty, better only to thirty; one might retain 'a shadow of nobility' by deceiving oneself.
"But he begged me not to tell Dmitri that he had told me about him," added Alyosha.
"Are you frowning on Smerdyakov's account?" asked Alyosha.
"Yes, on his account.
Damn him, I certainly did want to see Dmitri, but now there's no need," said Ivan reluctantly.
"But are you really going so soon, brother?"
"What of Dmitri and father?
how will it end?" asked Alyosha anxiously.
"You are always harping upon it!
What have I to do with it?
"Cain's answer about his murdered brother, wasn't it? Perhaps that's what you're thinking at this moment?
Well, damn it all, I can't stay here to be their keeper, can I? I've finished what I had to do, and I am going.
I finished it.
I am going.
I finished it just now, you were witness."
"Yes, and I've released myself once for all.
And after all, what have I to do with Dmitri?
Dmitri doesn't come in.
I had my own business to settle with Katerina Ivanovna.
You know, on the contrary, that Dmitri behaved as though there was an understanding between us.
It's all too funny.
Ah, Alyosha, if you only knew how light my heart is now!
Would you believe, it, I sat here eating my dinner and was nearly ordering champagne to celebrate my first hour of freedom.
It's been going on nearly six months, and all at once I've thrown it off.
I could never have guessed even yesterday, how easy it would be to put an end to it if I wanted."
"Of my love, if you like.
I fell in love with the young lady, I worried myself over her and she worried me.
I sat watching over her ... and all at once it's collapsed!
Would you believe it?
Yes, it's the literal truth."
"You seem very merry about it now," observed Alyosha, looking into his face, which had suddenly grown brighter.
"But how could I tell that I didn't care for her a bit!
Ha ha!
It appears after all I didn't.
And yet how she attracted me!
How attractive she was just now when I made my speech!
And do you know she attracts me awfully even now, yet how easy it is to leave her.
Do you think I am boasting?"
"No, only perhaps it wasn't love."
How you rushed into the discussion this morning!
But how she tormented me!
It certainly was sitting by a 'laceration.' Ah, she knew how I loved her!
She loved me and not Dmitri," Ivan insisted gayly.
"Her feeling for Dmitri was simply a self laceration.
Well, it's better so; I can simply go away for good.
What happened after I departed?"
Alyosha told him she had been hysterical, and that she was now, he heard, unconscious and delirious.
"Isn't Madame Hohlakov laying it on?"
"I think not."
"I must find out.
Nobody dies of hysterics, though.
They don't matter.
God gave woman hysterics as a relief.
I won't go to her at all.
Why push myself forward again?"
"But you told her that she had never cared for you."
"I did that on purpose.
Alyosha, shall I call for some champagne?
Let us drink to my freedom.
"No, brother, we had better not drink," said Alyosha suddenly.
"Besides I feel somehow depressed."
"Yes, you've been depressed a long time, I've noticed it."
"Morning?
I didn't say I should go in the morning....
But perhaps it may be the morning.
Would you believe it, I dined here to day only to avoid dining with the old man, I loathe him so.
I should have left long ago, so far as he is concerned.
But why are you so worried about my going away? We've plenty of time before I go, an eternity!"
"If you are going away to morrow, what do you mean by an eternity?"
"We've time enough for our talk, for what brought us here.
Why do you look so surprised?
Answer: why have we met here?
To talk of my love for Katerina Ivanovna, of the old man and Dmitri? of foreign travel? of the fatal position of Russia?
Of the Emperor Napoleon?
Is that it?"
"no"
"Then you know what for.
It's different for other people; but we in our green youth have to settle the eternal questions first of all.
That's what we care about.
Just when the old folks are all taken up with practical questions.
Why have you been looking at me in expectation for the last three months?
To ask me, 'What do you believe, or don't you believe at all?' That's what your eyes have been meaning for these three months, haven't they?"
"Perhaps so," smiled Alyosha.
"Me laughing!
I don't want to wound my little brother who has been watching me with such expectation for three months.
Alyosha, look straight at me!
Of course I am just such a little boy as you are, only not a novice.
And what have Russian boys been doing up till now, some of them, I mean?
In this stinking tavern, for instance, here, they meet and sit down in a corner.
They've never met in their lives before and, when they go out of the tavern, they won't meet again for forty years.
And what do they talk about in that momentary halt in the tavern?
Of the eternal questions, of the existence of God and immortality.
And those who do not believe in God talk of socialism or anarchism, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, so that it all comes to the same, they're the same questions turned inside out.
And masses, masses of the most original Russian boys do nothing but talk of the eternal questions!
Isn't it so?"
"Yes, for real Russians the questions of God's existence and of immortality, or, as you say, the same questions turned inside out, come first and foremost, of course, and so they should," said Alyosha, still watching his brother with the same gentle and inquiring smile.
"Well, Alyosha, it's sometimes very unwise to be a Russian at all, but anything stupider than the way Russian boys spend their time one can hardly imagine.
But there's one Russian boy called Alyosha I am awfully fond of."
"How nicely you put that in!" Alyosha laughed suddenly.
"Well, tell me where to begin, give your orders.
The existence of God, eh?"
"Begin where you like.
You declared yesterday at father's that there was no God." Alyosha looked searchingly at his brother.
"I said that yesterday at dinner on purpose to tease you and I saw your eyes glow.
But now I've no objection to discussing with you, and I say so very seriously.
I want to be friends with you, Alyosha, for I have no friends and want to try it.
"Yes, of course, if you are not joking now."
"Joking?
I was told at the elder's yesterday that I was joking.
You know, dear boy, there was an old sinner in the eighteenth century who declared that, if there were no God, he would have to be invented.
And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.
So holy it is, so touching, so wise and so great a credit it does to man.
As for me, I've long resolved not to think whether man created God or God man.
And I won't go through all the axioms laid down by Russian boys on that subject, all derived from European hypotheses; for what's a hypothesis there, is an axiom with the Russian boy, and not only with the boys but with their teachers too, for our Russian professors are often just the same boys themselves.
And so I omit all the hypotheses.
For what are we aiming at now?
I am trying to explain as quickly as possible my essential nature, that is what manner of man I am, what I believe in, and for what I hope, that's it, isn't it?
And therefore I tell you that I accept God simply. But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space.
Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity.
I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God.
I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not.
All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions.
I believe in the Word to Which the universe is striving, and Which Itself was 'with God,' and Which Itself is God and so on, and so on, to infinity.
There are all sorts of phrases for it.
I seem to be on the right path, don't I? Yet would you believe it, in the final result I don't accept this world of God's, and, although I know it exists, I don't accept it at all.
It's not that I don't accept God, you must understand, it's the world created by Him I don't and cannot accept.
Let me make it plain.
I won't accept it.
Even if parallel lines do meet and I see it myself, I shall see it and say that they've met, but still I won't accept it.
That's what's at the root of me, Alyosha; that's my creed.
I am in earnest in what I say.
I began our talk as stupidly as I could on purpose, but I've led up to my confession, for that's all you want.
You didn't want to hear about God, but only to know what the brother you love lives by.
And so I've told you."
"And why did you begin 'as stupidly as you could'?" asked Alyosha, looking dreamily at him.
"To begin with, for the sake of being Russian.
Russian conversations on such subjects are always carried on inconceivably stupidly.
And secondly, the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality.
The stupider one is, the clearer one is.
Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself.
Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.
I've led the conversation to my despair, and the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me."
"You will explain why you don't accept the world?" said Alyosha.
"To be sure I will, it's not a secret, that's what I've been leading up to.
Chapter three.
The Speech At The Stone
He really was late.
They had waited for him and had already decided to bear the pretty flower decked little coffin to the church without him.
It was the coffin of poor little Ilusha.
He had died two days after Mitya was sentenced.
At the gate of the house Alyosha was met by the shouts of the boys, Ilusha's schoolfellows.
They had all been impatiently expecting him and were glad that he had come at last.
There were about twelve of them, they all had their school bags or satchels on their shoulders.
"Father will cry, be with father," Ilusha had told them as he lay dying, and the boys remembered it.
Kolya Krassotkin was the foremost of them.
"How glad I am you've come, Karamazov!" he cried, holding out his hand to Alyosha.
"It's awful here.
I am always manly, but this is awful. Karamazov, if I am not keeping you, one question before you go in?"
"What is it, Kolya?" said Alyosha.
"Is your brother innocent or guilty?
Was it he killed your father or was it the valet?
As you say, so it will be.
I haven't slept for the last four nights for thinking of it."
"The valet killed him, my brother is innocent," answered Alyosha.
"So he will perish an innocent victim!" exclaimed Kolya; "though he is ruined he is happy!
I could envy him!"
"What do you mean?
How can you?
"Oh, if I, too, could sacrifice myself some day for truth!" said Kolya with enthusiasm.
"But not in such a cause, not with such disgrace and such horror!" said Alyosha.
"Of course ...
I should like to die for all humanity, and as for disgrace, I don't care about that-our names may perish.
I respect your brother!"
"And so do I!" the boy, who had once declared that he knew who had founded Troy, cried suddenly and unexpectedly, and he blushed up to his ears like a peony as he had done on that occasion.
Alyosha went into the room.
Ilusha lay with his hands folded and his eyes closed in a blue coffin with a white frill round it.
His thin face was hardly changed at all, and strange to say there was no smell of decay from the corpse.
The expression of his face was serious and, as it were, thoughtful.
His hands, crossed over his breast, looked particularly beautiful, as though chiseled in marble.
But there were flowers too from Katerina Ivanovna, and when Alyosha opened the door, the captain had a bunch in his trembling hands and was strewing them again over his dear boy.
He scarcely glanced at Alyosha when he came in, and he would not look at any one, even at his crazy weeping wife, "mamma," who kept trying to stand on her crippled legs to get a nearer look at her dead boy.
Nina had been pushed in her chair by the boys close up to the coffin.
There was something crazy about his gestures and the words that broke from him.
It was his habit to call Ilusha "old man," as a term of affection when he was alive.
"Father, give me a flower, too; take that white one out of his hand and give it me," the crazy mother begged, whimpering.
Either because the little white rose in Ilusha's hand had caught her fancy or that she wanted one from his hand to keep in memory of him, she moved restlessly, stretching out her hands for the flower.
"I won't give it to any one, I won't give you anything," Snegiryov cried callously.
"They are his flowers, not yours!
Everything is his, nothing is yours!"
"Father, give mother a flower!" said Nina, lifting her face wet with tears.
"I won't give away anything and to her less than any one!
She took away his little cannon and he gave it to her," the captain broke into loud sobs at the thought of how Ilusha had given up his cannon to his mother.
The poor, crazy creature was bathed in noiseless tears, hiding her face in her hands.
The boys, seeing that the father would not leave the coffin and that it was time to carry it out, stood round it in a close circle and began to lift it up.
"I don't want him to be buried in the churchyard," Snegiryov wailed suddenly; "I'll bury him by the stone, by our stone!
Ilusha told me to.
I won't let him be carried out!"
He had been saying for the last three days that he would bury him by the stone, but Alyosha, Krassotkin, the landlady, her sister and all the boys interfered.
"What an idea, bury him by an unholy stone, as though he had hanged himself!" the old landlady said sternly.
"There in the churchyard the ground has been crossed.
He'll be prayed for there.
One can hear the singing in church and the deacon reads so plainly and verbally that it will reach him every time just as though it were read over his grave."
But on seeing that precious little face, which for the last three days she had only looked at from a distance, she trembled all over and her gray head began twitching spasmodically over the coffin.
"Mother, make the sign of the cross over him, give him your blessing, kiss him," Nina cried to her.
But her head still twitched like an automaton and with a face contorted with bitter grief she began, without a word, beating her breast with her fist.
They carried the coffin past her.
Nina pressed her lips to her brother's for the last time as they bore the coffin by her.
As Alyosha went out of the house he begged the landlady to look after those who were left behind, but she interrupted him before he had finished.
"To be sure, I'll stay with them, we are Christians, too." The old woman wept as she said it.
They had not far to carry the coffin to the church, not more than three hundred paces.
It was a still, clear day, with a slight frost.
He seemed in a state of bewildered anxiety.
At one minute he stretched out his hand to support the head of the coffin and only hindered the bearers, at another he ran alongside and tried to find a place for himself there.
A flower fell on the snow and he rushed to pick it up as though everything in the world depended on the loss of that flower.
"And the crust of bread, we've forgotten the crust!" he cried suddenly in dismay.
But the boys reminded him at once that he had taken the crust of bread already and that it was in his pocket.
He instantly pulled it out and was reassured.
"Ilusha told me to, Ilusha," he explained at once to Alyosha.
"I was sitting by him one night and he suddenly told me: 'Father, when my grave is filled up crumble a piece of bread on it so that the sparrows may fly down, I shall hear and it will cheer me up not to be lying alone.' "
"That's a good thing," said Alyosha, "we must often take some."
"Every day, every day!" said the captain quickly, seeming cheered at the thought.
They reached the church at last and set the coffin in the middle of it. The boys surrounded it and remained reverently standing so, all through the service.
It was an old and rather poor church; many of the ikons were without settings; but such churches are the best for praying in.
During the mass Snegiryov became somewhat calmer, though at times he had outbursts of the same unconscious and, as it were, incoherent anxiety.
During the prayer, "Like the Cherubim," he joined in the singing but did not go on to the end.
At last came the funeral service itself and candles were distributed.
The distracted father began fussing about again, but the touching and impressive funeral prayers moved and roused his soul.
He seemed suddenly to shrink together and broke into rapid, short sobs, which he tried at first to smother, but at last he sobbed aloud.
When they began taking leave of the dead and closing the coffin, he flung his arms about, as though he would not allow them to cover Ilusha, and began greedily and persistently kissing his dead boy on the lips.
At last they succeeded in persuading him to come away from the step, but suddenly he impulsively stretched out his hand and snatched a few flowers from the coffin.
He looked at them and a new idea seemed to dawn upon him, so that he apparently forgot his grief for a minute.
Gradually he seemed to sink into brooding and did not resist when the coffin was lifted up and carried to the grave.
It was an expensive one in the churchyard close to the church, Katerina Ivanovna had paid for it.
He did not seem to understand fully what was happening.
When they began filling up the grave, he suddenly pointed anxiously at the falling earth and began trying to say something, but no one could make out what he meant, and he stopped suddenly.
Then he was reminded that he must crumble the bread and he was awfully excited, snatched up the bread and began pulling it to pieces and flinging the morsels on the grave.
"Come, fly down, birds, fly down, sparrows!" he muttered anxiously.
One of the boys observed that it was awkward for him to crumble the bread with the flowers in his hands and suggested he should give them to some one to hold for a time.
But he would not do this and seemed indeed suddenly alarmed for his flowers, as though they wanted to take them from him altogether.
And after looking at the grave, and as it were, satisfying himself that everything had been done and the bread had been crumbled, he suddenly, to the surprise of every one, turned, quite composedly even, and made his way homewards.
But his steps became more and more hurried, he almost ran.
The boys and Alyosha kept up with him.
"The flowers are for mamma, the flowers are for mamma!
I was unkind to mamma," he began exclaiming suddenly.
Some one called to him to put on his hat as it was cold.
But he flung the hat in the snow as though he were angry and kept repeating, "I won't have the hat, I won't have the hat." Smurov picked it up and carried it after him.
He missed them, of course, and went on crying as he ran.
But the boys instantly overtook him and caught hold of him on all sides.
Then he fell helpless on the snow as though he had been knocked down, and struggling, sobbing, and wailing, he began crying out, "Ilusha, old man, dear old man!" Alyosha and Kolya tried to make him get up, soothing and persuading him.
"Captain, give over, a brave man must show fortitude," muttered Kolya.
"You'll spoil the flowers," said Alyosha, "and mamma is expecting them, she is sitting crying because you would not give her any before.
Ilusha's little bed is still there-"
"Yes, yes, mamma!" Snegiryov suddenly recollected, "they'll take away the bed, they'll take it away," he added as though alarmed that they really would.
He jumped up and ran homewards again.
But it was not far off and they all arrived together.
Snegiryov opened the door hurriedly and called to his wife with whom he had so cruelly quarreled just before:
"Mamma, poor crippled darling, Ilusha has sent you these flowers," he cried, holding out to her a little bunch of flowers that had been frozen and broken while he was struggling in the snow.
But at that instant he saw in the corner, by the little bed, Ilusha's little boots, which the landlady had put tidily side by side.
Seeing the old, patched, rusty looking, stiff boots he flung up his hands and rushed to them, fell on his knees, snatched up one boot and, pressing his lips to it, began kissing it greedily, crying, "Ilusha, old man, dear old man, where are your little feet?"
"Where have you taken him away?
Where have you taken him?" the lunatic cried in a heartrending voice.
Nina, too, broke into sobs.
"Let them weep," he said to Kolya, "it's no use trying to comfort them just now.
Let us wait a minute and then go back."
"No, it's no use, it's awful," Kolya assented.
"Do you know, Karamazov," he dropped his voice so that no one could hear them, "I feel dreadfully sad, and if it were only possible to bring him back, I'd give anything in the world to do it."
"Ah, so would I," said Alyosha.
"What do you think, Karamazov?
Had we better come back here to night? He'll be drunk, you know."
"Perhaps he will.
Let us come together, you and I, that will be enough, to spend an hour with them, with the mother and Nina.
If we all come together we shall remind them of everything again," Alyosha suggested.
"The landlady is laying the table for them now-there'll be a funeral dinner or something, the priest is coming; shall we go back to it, Karamazov?"
"Of course," said Alyosha.
"They are going to have salmon, too," the boy who had discovered about Troy observed in a loud voice.
"I beg you most earnestly, Kartashov, not to interrupt again with your idiotic remarks, especially when one is not talking to you and doesn't care to know whether you exist or not!" Kolya snapped out irritably.
The boy flushed crimson but did not dare to reply.
"There's Ilusha's stone, under which they wanted to bury him."
They all stood still by the big stone.
Alyosha looked and the whole picture of what Snegiryov had described to him that day, how Ilusha, weeping and hugging his father, had cried, "Father, father, how he insulted you," rose at once before his imagination.
A sudden impulse seemed to come into his soul.
With a serious and earnest expression he looked from one to another of the bright, pleasant faces of Ilusha's schoolfellows, and suddenly said to them:
"Boys, I should like to say one word to you, here at this place."
The boys stood round him and at once bent attentive and expectant eyes upon him.
"Boys, we shall soon part.
I shall be for some time with my two brothers, of whom one is going to Siberia and the other is lying at death's door. But soon I shall leave this town, perhaps for a long time, so we shall part.
And whatever happens to us later in life, if we don't meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones, do you remember, by the bridge?
and afterwards we all grew so fond of him.
He was a fine boy, a kind hearted, brave boy, he felt for his father's honor and resented the cruel insult to him and stood up for him.
And so in the first place, we will remember him, boys, all our lives.
And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain to honor or fall into great misfortune-still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are.
My little doves-let me call you so, for you are very like them, those pretty blue birds, at this minute as I look at your good dear faces.
People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.
If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.
Perhaps we may even grow wicked later on, may be unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men's tears and at those people who say as Kolya did just now, 'I want to suffer for all men,' and may even jeer spitefully at such people.
What's more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, 'Yes, I was good and brave and honest then!' Let him laugh to himself, that's no matter, a man often laughs at what's good and kind.
That's only from thoughtlessness.
But I assure you, boys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, 'No, I do wrong to laugh, for that's not a thing to laugh at.' "
"That will be so, I understand you, Karamazov!" cried Kolya, with flashing eyes.
The boys were excited and they, too, wanted to say something, but they restrained themselves, looking with intentness and emotion at the speaker.
"I say this in case we become bad," Alyosha went on, "but there's no reason why we should become bad, is there, boys?
Let us be, first and above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other!
I say that again.
I give you my word for my part that I'll never forget one of you.
Every face looking at me now I shall remember even for thirty years.
Just now Kolya said to Kartashov that we did not care to know whether he exists or not.
But I cannot forget that Kartashov exists and that he is not blushing now as he did when he discovered the founders of Troy, but is looking at me with his jolly, kind, dear little eyes.
But why am I talking about those two?
You are all dear to me, boys, from this day forth, I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me!
Well, and who has united us in this kind, good feeling which we shall remember and intend to remember all our lives?
Let us never forget him.
May his memory live for ever in our hearts from this time forth!"
"Yes, yes, for ever, for ever!" the boys cried in their ringing voices, with softened faces.
"Let us remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, his coffin and his unhappy, sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him alone against the whole school."
"He was brave, he was good!"
"Ah, how I loved him!" exclaimed Kolya.
How good life is when one does something good and just!"
"Yes, yes," the boys repeated enthusiastically.
"Karamazov, we love you!" a voice, probably Kartashov's, cried impulsively.
"We love you, we love you!" they all caught it up.
There were tears in the eyes of many of them.
"Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya shouted ecstatically.
"And may the dead boy's memory live for ever!" Alyosha added again with feeling.
"For ever!" the boys chimed in again.
"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it be true what's taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilusha too?"
"Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!" Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.
"Well, now we will finish talking and go to his funeral dinner.
Don't be put out at our eating pancakes-it's a very old custom and there's something nice in that!" laughed Alyosha.
"Well, let us go!
And now we go hand in hand."
Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya cried once more rapturously, and once more the boys took up his exclamation: "Hurrah for Karamazov!"
mr Watson gave a start of astonishment.
"Very well, Jane," he said, briefly.
"Yes?" he said, enquiringly, and drew from his pocket a pencil and paper.
"Yes, Jane," jotting down the memorandum.
"And to Elizabeth a like sum."
The lawyer seemed disappointed.
"Also to my brother, john Merrick, the sum of five thousand dollars," she resumed.
"To your brother?"
"Jane!"
"Did you hear me?"
"Yes."
"Then do as I bid you, Silas Watson."
He leaned back in his chair and looked at her thoughtfully.
I liked the child from the first.
She's frank and open and brave, and will do credit to my judgment."
The lawyer sighed.
You seem to have forgotten him," he said.
"Drat the boy!
"And the boy?" he asked, persistently.
"Make it ten, Jane."
"Now leave me, and prepare the paper at once.
Here Patricia was also brought in her wheel chair by Beth, who then left the two invalids together.
Then she loosened her tongue, and in her voluable Irish way berated her aunt until poor Phibbs stood aghast at such temerity, and even mr Watson, who arrived to enquire after his client and friend, was filled with amazement.
"Patricia is quite right, Silas," she declared, "and I deserve all that she has said.
After that it became the daily program for Patsy to spend her mornings in Aunt Jane's little garden, and although they sometimes clashed, and, as Phibbs told Beth, "had dreadful fights," they both enjoyed these hours very much.
The four had many excursions and picnics into the country together; but Kenneth and Patsy were recognized as especial chums, and the other girls did not interfere in their friendship except to tease them, occasionally, in a good natured way.
His fits of gloomy abstraction and violent bursts of temper had alike vanished, or only prevailed at brief intervals.
Although he had no teacher, as yet, he had begun to understand color a little, and succeeded in finishing one or two water color sketches which Patsy, who knew nothing at all of such things, pronounced "wonderfully fine." Of course the boy blushed with pleasure and was encouraged to still greater effort.
One day she said calmly to Aunt Jane:
"I've invited Kenneth to dinner this evening."
The woman flew angry in an instant.
"Who gave you such authority?" she demanded.
I just took it," said Patsy, saucily.
"He shall not come," declared Aunt Jane, sternly.
Phibbs, call Louise!"
Presently Louise appeared.
"Also, Louise," said Patsy, "tell them not to lay a plate for me, and ask Oscar to be ready with the wagon at five o'clock.
Louise hesitated, and looked from Miss Jane to Patsy, and back again. They were glaring upon each other like two gorgons.
Then she burst into laughter; she could not help it, the sight was too ridiculous.
"How?" asked Patsy.
Patsy was radiant with delight, and the next day Aunt Jane remarked casually that she did not object to the boy's presence at dinner, at all, and he could come whenever he liked.
This arrangement gave great pleasure to both Uncle john and mr Watson, the latter of whom was often present at the "state dinner," and both men congratulated Patsy upon the distinct victory she had won.
The appurtenances of the writing tables, about which Alexey Alexandrovitch was himself very fastidious, were exceptionally good.
He could not help observing this. One of the clerks, without getting up, turned wrathfully to Alexey Alexandrovitch, half closing his eyes.
"What are you wanting?"
"Can't he spare time to see me?" said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
"He has no time free; he is always busy.
Kindly wait your turn."
The clerk took the card and, obviously not approving of what he read on it, went to the door.
His whole life had been spent in administrative work, and consequently, when he did not approve of anything, his disapproval was softened by the recognition of the inevitability of mistakes and the possibility of reform in every department.
But till then he had had nothing to do with the law courts, and so had disapproved of their publicity simply in theory; now his disapprobation was strengthened by the unpleasant impression made on him in the lawyer's waiting room.
"Coming immediately," said the clerk; and two minutes later there did actually appear in the doorway the large figure of an old solicitor who had been consulting with the lawyer himself.
The lawyer was a little, squat, bald man, with a dark, reddish beard, light colored long eyebrows, and an overhanging brow.
He was attired as though for a wedding, from his cravat to his double watch chain and varnished boots.
His face was clever and manly, but his dress was dandified and in bad taste.
"Pray walk in," said the lawyer, addressing Alexey Alexandrovitch; and, gloomily ushering Karenin in before him, he closed the door.
He sat down himself, and, rubbing his little hands with short fingers covered with white hairs, he bent his head on one side.
The lawyer, with a swiftness that could never have been expected of him, opened his hands, caught the moth, and resumed his former attitude.
"I know you and the good"--again he caught a moth-"work you are doing, like every Russian," said the lawyer, bowing.
Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed, plucking up his courage.
But having once made up his mind he went on in his shrill voice, without timidity-or hesitation, accentuating here and there a word.
"I have the misfortune," Alexey Alexandrovitch began, "to have been deceived in my married life, and I desire to break off all relations with my wife by legal means-that is, to be divorced, but to do this so that my son may not remain with his mother."
The lawyer's gray eyes tried not to laugh, but they were dancing with irrepressible glee, and Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that it was not simply the delight of a man who has just got a profitable job: there was triumph and joy, there was a gleam like the malignant gleam he saw in his wife's eyes.
"You desire my assistance in securing a divorce?"
"Yes, precisely so; but I ought to warn you that I may be wasting your time and attention.
I want a divorce, but the form in which it is possible is of great consequence to me.
It is very possible that if that form does not correspond with my requirements I may give up a legal divorce."
"Oh, that's always the case," said the lawyer, "and that's always for you to decide."
He let his eyes rest on Alexey Alexandrovitch's feet, feeling that he might offend his client by the sight of his irrepressible amusement.
He looked at a moth that flew before his nose, and moved his hands, but did not catch it from regard for Alexey Alexandrovitch's position.
"You would be glad," the lawyer, without lifting his eyes, responded, adopting, with a certain satisfaction, the tone of his client's remarks, "for me to lay before you all the methods by which you could secure what you desire?"
"Divorce by our laws," he said, with a slight shade of disapprobation of our laws, "is possible, as you are aware, in the following cases.... Wait a little!" he called to a clerk who put his head in at the door, but he got up all the same, said a few words to him, and sat down again. "...
And therefore, guided by precedents, I must inform you that in practice cases of divorce may all be reduced to the following-there's no physical defect, I may assume, nor desertion?..."
"--May be reduced to the following: adultery of one of the married parties, and the detection in the fact of the guilty party by mutual agreement, and failing such agreement, accidental detection.
It must be admitted that the latter case is rarely met with in practice," said the lawyer, and stealing a glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch he paused, as a man selling pistols, after enlarging on the advantages of each weapon, might await his customer's choice.
I should not permit myself to express it so, speaking with a man of no education," he said, "but I imagine that to you this is comprehensible."
"People cannot go on living together-here you have a fact.
And if both are agreed about it, the details and formalities become a matter of no importance.
But he had religious scruples, which hindered the execution of such a plan.
"That is out of the question in the present case," he said.
If one wants the result, one must admit the means."
On his way back he caught unobserved another moth.
"Nice state my rep curtains will be in by the summer!" he thought, frowning.
"I will communicate my decision to you by letter," said Alexey Alexandrovitch, getting up, and he clutched at the table.
"When can I reckon on receiving information from you?" he asked, moving towards the door, his eyes and his varnished boots shining.
"In a week's time.
Your answer as to whether you will undertake to conduct the case, and on what terms, you will be so good as to communicate to me."
"Very good."
THE IMPOSTOR
The shrubberies loomed big in the violet twilight and afar out the sea lay placid, steel blue and mysterious.
Amongst other thoughts which crowded into the brain of mr Povey were the warm feelings he had experienced towards Charlotte when, as he thought, he lay dying in Enrico's death chamber, and he told himself that they were very right thoughts to have.
The thought that the time had now come when his part in her affairs was done was a very bitter one, but as day followed day the feeling that he was an impostor grew stronger.
He had long thought that he must get away from it all.
Every kind word, every smile was a stab to him.
To explain matters now would do no good, spoiling as it would Galva's happiness.
From there he had seen the procession leave the palace, had noted the enthusiasm of the holiday crowd, and, best of all, had seen Galva turn in her carriage and wave her bouquet of orchids at his balcony.
He had seen the yachts in the bay gay with little flags.
He had heard, too, the bells pealing joyously from the tall belfry of the Cathedral, the firing of the guns on the fort, and the distant murmur of the people cheering their Queen.
He had said a little prayer for everybody and had fallen asleep there on the flower decked balcony.
"A right down, regular, Royal Queen," she quoted gaily as she dropped an elegant curtsey.
"Oh, guardy dear, it's been splendid-just splendid-nothing but sun and cheers and flowers-and joy."
She turned to her husband who was standing a little behind her, for the ceremonies in the Cathedral had been twofold that day, and the Archbishop who had placed the crown on the little head, had, in the little private chapel, placed a circlet of gold also on the Queen's finger.
there would have been no joy, then, only----"
It was time for him to leave the stage, to take off the motley, for he had no part in the next act of the drama.
The attendant, who in the gorgeous Estrato livery was slowly propelling the chair, pulled up rather suddenly, as, turning into one of the alley ways which led back to the palace he came in sight of the figure of a woman.
Her manner, too, as she came towards him, was, he thought, a little strained.
A moment's final hesitation, then Edward took the plunge.
"But you will come back, mr Sydney?"
"Oh yes-that is, I----Oh, I'm sure to come back-yes-sure-to-come-back."
As she felt the paper under her fingers she smiled.
Why, I walked twice round the palace this morning; besides, I'm not going to morrow." Now that his departure had been decided on, and he had burnt his boats, he felt disposed to allow himself the luxury of delay.
"It may be a month before I really go," he added.
She selected a tiny key from the bunch at her waist and, opening the case, took out a box, a little cardboard box, which had once contained chocolates.
The lid was broken here and there, and had been carefully pasted together with scraps of plaster paper.
BOOK three.
From Vespasian's Coming To Subdue The Jews To The Taking Of Gamala.
CHAPTER one.
Vespasian Is Sent Into Syria By Nero In Order To Make War With The Jews.
Yet did the disturbance that was in his soul plainly appear by the solicitude he was in [how to recover his affairs again].
So Nero esteemed these circumstances as favorable omens, and saw that Vespasian's age gave him sure experience, and great skill, and that he had his sons as hostages for his fidelity to himself, and that the flourishing age they were in would make them fit instruments under their father's prudence.
Perhaps also there was some interposition of Providence, which was paving the way for Vespasian's being himself emperor afterwards.
CHAPTER two.
A Great Slaughter About Ascalon.
Accordingly, they presently got together a great multitude of all their most hardy soldiers, and marched away for Ascalon.
At this city also the inhabitants of Sepphoris of Galilee met him, who were for peace with the romans.
And indeed the danger of losing Sepphoris would be no small one, in this war that was now beginning, seeing it was the largest city of Galilee, and built in a place by nature very strong, and might be a security of the whole nation's [fidelity to the romans].
CHAPTER three.
A Description Of Galilee, Samaria, And Judea.
Moreover, the cities lie here very thick, and the very many villages there are here are every where so full of people, by the richness of their soil, that the very least of them contain above fifteen thousand inhabitants.
It is also sufficiently watered with torrents, which issue out of the mountains, and with springs that never fail to run, even when the torrents fail them, as they do in the dog days.
They have abundance of trees, and are full of autumnal fruit, both that which grows wild, and that which is the effect of cultivation.
This is the northern boundary of Judea.
The southern parts of Judea, if they be measured lengthways, are bounded by a Village adjoining to the confines of Arabia; the Jews that dwell there call it Jordan.
CHAPTER four.
The foot were put into the city to be a guard to it, but the horse lodged abroad in the camp.
Now these ten cohorts had severally a thousand footmen, but the other thirteen cohorts had no more than six hundred footmen apiece, with a hundred and twenty horsemen.
The camp, and all that is in it, is encompassed with a wall round about, and that sooner than one would imagine, and this by the multitude and the skill of the laborers; and, if occasion require, a trench is drawn round the whole, whose depth is four cubits, and its breadth equal.
The footmen are armed with breastplates and head pieces, and have swords on each side; but the sword which is upon their left side is much longer than the other, for that on the right side is not longer than a span.
The horsemen have a long sword on their right sides, axed a long pole in their hand; a shield also lies by them obliquely on one side of their horses, with three or more darts that are borne in their quiver, having broad points, and not smaller than spears.
They have also head pieces and breastplates, in like manner as have all the footmen.
In a case, therefore, where counsel still goes before action, and where, after taking the best advice, that advice is followed by so active an army, what wonder is it that Euphrates on the east, the ocean on the west, the most fertile regions of Libya on the south, and the Danube and the Rhine on the north, are the limits of this empire?
One might well say that the Roman possessions are not inferior to the romans themselves.
This account I have given the reader, not so much with the intention of commending the romans, as of comforting those that have been conquered by them, and for the deterring others from attempting innovations under their government.
This discourse of the Roman military conduct may also perhaps be of use to such of the curious as are ignorant of it, and yet have a mind to know it.
I return now from this digression.
CHAPTER six.
Placidus Attempts To Take Jotapata And Is Beaten Off. Vespasian Marches Into Galilee.
However, three men of the Jews' side were slain, and a few wounded; so Placidus, finding himself unable to assault the city, ran away.
He ordered those auxiliaries which were lightly armed, and the archers, to march first, that they might prevent any sudden insults from the enemy, and might search out the woods that looked suspiciously, and were capable of ambuscades.
Next to these followed that part of the romans which was completely armed, both footmen and horsemen.
Behind these he set such carriages of the army as belonged both to himself and to the other commanders, with a considerable number of their horsemen for their security.
After these came the peculiar cavalry of his own legion, for there were a hundred and twenty horsemen that peculiarly belonged to every legion.
Next to these came the mules that carried the engines for sieges, and the other warlike machines of that nature.
After these came the commanders of the cohorts and tribunes, having about them soldiers chosen out of the rest.
Then came the main army in their squadrons and battalions, with six men in depth, which were followed at last by a centurion, who, according to custom, observed the rest.
But behind all the legions came the whole multitude of the mercenaries; and those that brought up the rear came last of all for the security of the whole army, being both footmen, and those in their armor also, with a great number of horsemen.
CHAPTER seven.
Vespasian, When He Had Taken The City Gadaea Marches To Jotapata.
So Vespasian marched to the city Gadara, and took it upon the first onset, because he found it destitute of any considerable number of men grown up and fit for war.
Accordingly, he wrote these things, and sent messengers immediately to carry his letter to Jerusalem.
Now Vespasian was very desirous of demolishing Jotapata, for he had gotten intelligence that the greatest part of the enemy had retired thither, and that it was, on other accounts, a place of great security to them.
Accordingly, he sent both foot men and horsemen to level the road, which was mountainous and rocky, not without difficulty to be traveled over by footmen, but absolutely impracticable for horsemen.
Now these workmen accomplished what they were about in four days' time, and opened a broad way for the army.
And a certain deserter told this good news to Vespasian, that Josephus had removed himself thither, which made him make haste to the city, as supposing that with taking that he should take all Judea, in case he could but withal get Josephus under his power.
So he took this news to be of the vastest advantage to him, and believed it to be brought about by the providence of God, that he who appeared to be the most prudent man of all their enemies, had, of his own accord, shut himself up in a place of sure custody.
Accordingly, he sent Placidus with a thousand horsemen, and Ebutius a decurion, a person that was of eminency both in council and in action, to encompass the city round, that Josephus might not escape away privately.
But when Vespasian had set against them the archers and slingers, and the whole multitude that could throw to a great distance, he permitted them to go to work, while he himself, with the footmen, got upon an acclivity, whence the city might easily be taken.
Josephus was then in fear for the city, and leaped out, and all the Jewish multitude with him; these fell together upon the romans in great numbers, and drove them away from the wall, and performed a great many glorious and bold actions.
Yet did they suffer as much as they made the enemy suffer; for as despair of deliverance encouraged the Jews, so did a sense of shame equally encourage the romans.
These last had skill as well as strength; the other had only courage, which armed them, and made them fight furiously.
And when the fight had lasted all day, it was put an end to by the coming on of the night.
They had wounded a great many of the romans, and killed of them thirteen men; of the Jews' side seventeen were slain, and six hundred wounded.
On the next day the Jews made another attack upon the romans, and went out of the walls and fought a much more desperate battle with them than before.
It is only to be come at on the north side, where the utmost part of the city is built on the mountain, as it ends obliquely at a plain.
This mountain Josephus had encompassed with a wall when he fortified the city, that its top might not be capable of being seized upon by the enemies.
The city is covered all round with other mountains, and can no way be seen till a man comes just upon it. And this was the strong situation of Jotapata.
To that end he called the commanders that were under him to a council of war, and consulted with them which way the assault might be managed to the best advantage.
And when the resolution was there taken to raise a bank against that part of the wall which was practicable, he sent his whole army abroad to get the materials together.
These hurdles they spread over their banks, under cover whereof they formed their bank, and so were little or nothing hurt by the darts that were thrown upon them from the wall, while others pulled the neighboring hillocks to pieces, and perpetually brought earth to them; so that while they were busy three sorts of ways, nobody was idle.
However, the Jews cast great stones from the walls upon the hurdles which protected the men, with all sorts of darts also; and the noise of what could not reach them was yet so terrible, that it was some impediment to the workmen.
Vespasian then set the engines for throwing stones and darts round about the city.
He also built a good number of towers upon the wall, and fitted it to strong battlements.
This greatly discouraged the romans, who in their own opinions were already gotten within the walls, while they were now at once astonished at Josephus's contrivance, and at the fortitude of the citizens that were in the city.
Nor were the romans unacquainted with the state they were in, for when they stood over against them, beyond the wall, they could see them running together, and taking their water by measure, which made them throw their javelins thither the place being within their reach, and kill a great many of them.
At this sight the romans were discouraged, and under consternation, when they saw them able to throw away in sport so much water, when they supposed them not to have enough to drink themselves.
However, Josephus contrived another stratagem besides the foregoing, to get plenty of what they wanted.
Yet did not this plea move the people, but inflamed them the more to hang about him.
Now Josephus thought, that if he resolved to stay, it would be ascribed to their entreaties; and if he resolved to go away by force, he should be put into custody.
His commiseration also of the people under their lamentations had much broken that his eagerness to leave them; so he resolved to stay, and arming himself with the common despair of the citizens, he said to them, "Now is the time to begin to fight in earnest, when there is no hope of deliverance left.
So he repelled the Jews in great measure by the Arabian archers, and the Syrian slingers, and by those that threw stones at them, nor was there any intermission of the great number of their offensive engines.
Now the Jews suffered greatly by these engines, without being able to escape from them; and when these engines threw their stones or javelins a great way, and the Jews were within their reach, they pressed hard upon the romans, and fought desperately, without sparing either soul or body, one part succoring another by turns, when it was tired down.
This was the experiment which the Roman general betook himself to, when he was eagerly bent upon taking the city; but found lying in the field so long to be to his disadvantage, because the Jews would never let him be quiet.
This brought matters to such a pass that none of the Jews durst mount the walls, and then it was that the other romans brought the battering ram that was cased with hurdles all over, and in the tipper part was secured by skins that covered it, and this both for the security of themselves and of the engine.
Now, at the very first stroke of this engine, the wall was shaken, and a terrible clamor was raised by the people within the city, as if they were already taken.
And now, when Josephus saw this ram still battering the same place, and that the wall would quickly be thrown down by it, he resolved to elude for a while the force of the engine.
With this design he gave orders to fill sacks with chaff, and to hang them down before that place where they saw the ram always battering, that the stroke might be turned aside, or that the place might feel less of the strokes by the yielding nature of the chaff.
three.
six.
These romans being in great fear, lest the place should be taken by force, made an agreement with them to depart upon certain conditions; and when they had obtained the security they desired, they delivered up the citadel, into which the people of Machaerus put a garrison for their own security, and held it in their own power.
CHAPTER thirty five
In the Shark's body Pinocchio finds whom?
As he walked his feet splashed in a pool of greasy and slippery water, which had such a heavy smell of fish fried in oil that Pinocchio thought it was Lent.
The farther on he went, the brighter and clearer grew the tiny light.
On and on he walked till finally he found-I give you a thousand guesses, my dear children!
They wriggled so that, now and again, one of them slipped out of the old man's mouth and escaped into the darkness under the table.
At this sight, the poor Marionette was filled with such great and sudden happiness that he almost dropped in a faint.
He wanted to laugh, he wanted to cry, he wanted to say a thousand and one things, but all he could do was to stand still, stuttering and stammering brokenly.
"Are you really my own dear Pinocchio?"
"Yes, yes, yes!
It is I! Look at me!
And you have forgiven me, haven't you?
Oh, my dear Father, how good you are!
And to think that I-Oh, but if you only knew how many misfortunes have fallen on my head and how many troubles I have had!
Just think that on the day you sold your old coat to buy me my A B C book so that I could go to school, I ran away to the Marionette Theater and the proprietor caught me and wanted to burn me to cook his roast lamb!
He was the one who gave me the five gold pieces for you, but I met the Fox and the Cat, who took me to the Inn of the Red Lobster.
There they ate like wolves and I left the Inn alone and I met the Assassins in the wood.
It grew and it grew, till I couldn't get it through the door of the room.
The trap caught me and the Farmer put a collar on me and made me a watchdog.
He found out I was innocent when I caught the Weasels and he let me go.
The sea was rough and the whitecaps overturned the boat.
"And how long have you been shut away in here?"
And the matches with which to light it-where did you get them?"
The sailors were all saved, but the ship went right to the bottom of the sea, and the same Terrible Shark that swallowed me, swallowed most of it."
"What!
Swallowed a ship?" asked Pinocchio in astonishment.
"At one gulp.
To my own good luck, that ship was loaded with meat, preserved foods, crackers, bread, bottles of wine, raisins, cheese, coffee, sugar, wax candles, and boxes of matches.
"And then?"
"Then, my dear Father," said Pinocchio, "there is no time to lose.
We must try to escape."
"Escape!
How?"
"We can run out of the Shark's mouth and dive into the sea."
"You speak well, but I cannot swim, my dear Pinocchio."
"Why should that matter?
You can climb on my shoulders and I, who am a fine swimmer, will carry you safely to the shore."
And in any case, if it is written that we must die, we shall at least die together."
"Follow me and have no fear."
They walked a long distance through the stomach and the whole body of the Shark.
When they reached the throat of the monster, they stopped for a while to wait for the right moment in which to make their escape.
I want you to know that the Shark, being very old and suffering from asthma and heart trouble, was obliged to sleep with his mouth open. Because of this, Pinocchio was able to catch a glimpse of the sky filled with stars, as he looked up through the open jaws of his new home.
"The time has come for us to escape," he whispered, turning to his father.
"The Shark is fast asleep.
The sea is calm and the night is as bright as day.
Follow me closely, dear Father, and we shall soon be saved."
They climbed up the throat of the monster till they came to that immense open mouth.
There they had to walk on tiptoes, for if they tickled the Shark's long tongue he might awaken-and where would they be then?
The tongue was so wide and so long that it looked like a country road.
To make matters worse, the candle went out and father and son were left in the dark.
"And now?" asked Pinocchio with a serious face.
"Now we are lost."
"Why lost?
Give me your hand, dear Father, and be careful not to slip!"
"Where will you take me?"
"We must try again.
Come with me and don't be afraid."
With these words Pinocchio took his father by the hand and, always walking on tiptoes, they climbed up the monster's throat for a second time.
But before they took the last great leap, the Marionette said to his father:
"Climb on my back and hold on tightly to my neck.
I'll take care of everything else."
As soon as Geppetto was comfortably seated on his shoulders, Pinocchio, very sure of what he was doing, dived into the water and started to swim.
CHAPTER thirty six
Without another word, he swam swiftly away in an effort to reach land as soon as possible.
All at once he noticed that Geppetto was shivering and shaking as if with a high fever.
Was he shivering from fear or from cold?
Who knows?
Perhaps a little of both.
But Pinocchio, thinking his father was frightened, tried to comfort him by saying:
"Courage, Father!
In a few moments we shall be safe on land."
"Here I am searching on all sides and I see nothing but sea and sky."
"Remember, Father, that I am like a cat.
Poor Pinocchio pretended to be peaceful and contented, but he was far from that.
He was beginning to feel discouraged, his strength was leaving him, and his breathing was becoming more and more labored.
He felt he could not go on much longer, and the shore was still far away.
He swam a few more strokes.
Then he turned to Geppetto and cried out weakly:
"Help me, Father!
Father and son were really about to drown when they heard a voice like a guitar out of tune call from the sea:
"What is the trouble?"
"It is I and my poor father."
You are Pinocchio."
And you?"
"I am the Tunny, your companion in the Shark's stomach."
"And how did you escape?"
"I imitated your example.
"Tunny, you arrived at the right moment!
I implore you, for the love you bear your children, the little Tunnies, to help us, or we are lost!"
"With great pleasure indeed.
Hang onto my tail, both of you, and let me lead you.
In a twinkling you will be safe on land."
Geppetto and Pinocchio, as you can easily imagine, did not refuse the invitation; indeed, instead of hanging onto the tail, they thought it better to climb on the Tunny's back.
"Are we too heavy?" asked Pinocchio.
"Heavy?
You are as light as sea shells," answered the Tunny, who was as large as a two year old horse.
As soon as they reached the shore, Pinocchio was the first to jump to the ground to help his old father.
"Dear friend, you have saved my father, and I have not enough words with which to thank you!
Allow me to embrace you as a sign of my eternal gratitude."
The Tunny stuck his nose out of the water and Pinocchio knelt on the sand and kissed him most affectionately on his cheek.
At this warm greeting, the poor Tunny, who was not used to such tenderness, wept like a child.
He felt so embarrassed and ashamed that he turned quickly, plunged into the sea, and disappeared.
In the meantime day had dawned.
Pinocchio offered his arm to Geppetto, who was so weak he could hardly stand, and said to him:
"Lean on my arm, dear Father, and let us go.
We will walk very, very slowly, and if we feel tired we can rest by the wayside."
"To look for a house or a hut, where they will be kind enough to give us a bite of bread and a bit of straw to sleep on."
It was the Fox and the Cat, but one could hardly recognize them, they looked so miserable.
That sly thief had fallen into deepest poverty, and one day he had been forced to sell his beautiful tail for a bite to eat.
We are old, tired, and sick."
"Sick!" repeated the Cat.
"Addio, false friends!" answered the Marionette.
"You cheated me once, but you will never catch me again."
"Believe us!
Today we are truly poor and starving."
"Starving!" repeated the Cat.
"If you are poor; you deserve it!
"Have mercy on us!"
"On us."
"Addio, false friends.
"Abandon us," repeated the Cat.
"Addio, false friends.
Remember the old proverb: 'Whoever steals his neighbor's shirt, usually dies without his own.'"
"Let us see for ourselves."
"Turn the key and the door will open," said the same little voice.
Pinocchio turned the key and the door opened.
As soon as they went in, they looked here and there and everywhere but saw no one.
"Oh-ho, where is the owner of the hut?" cried Pinocchio, very much surprised.
"Oh, my dear Cricket," said Pinocchio, bowing politely.
"You are right, dear Cricket.
I deserve it! But spare my poor old father."
"I am going to spare both the father and the son.
"You are right, little Cricket, you are more than right, and I shall remember the lesson you have taught me.
"This cottage was given to me yesterday by a little Goat with blue hair."
"And where did the Goat go?" asked Pinocchio.
"I don't know."
"She will never come back.
Then it was she-it was-my dear little Fairy," cried out Pinocchio, sobbing bitterly.
After he had cried a long time, he wiped his eyes and then he made a bed of straw for old Geppetto.
"Tell me, little Cricket, where shall I find a glass of milk for my poor Father?"
"Three fields away from here lives Farmer john.
Go there and he will give you what you want."
Pinocchio ran all the way to Farmer John's house.
The Farmer said to him:
"I want a full glass."
"A full glass costs a penny.
First give me the penny."
"I have no penny," answered Pinocchio, sad and ashamed.
"Very bad, my Marionette," answered the Farmer, "very bad.
If you have no penny, I have no milk."
"Too bad," said Pinocchio and started to go.
"Wait a moment," said Farmer john.
Do you know how to draw water from a well?"
"I can try."
"Very well."
"After you have finished, I shall give you a glass of warm sweet milk."
"I am satisfied."
Farmer john took the Marionette to the well and showed him how to draw the water.
Pinocchio set to work as well as he knew how, but long before he had pulled up the one hundred buckets, he was tired out and dripping with perspiration.
He had never worked so hard in his life.
"Will you take me to see him?" said Pinocchio.
After looking at him a long time, he said to himself: "I know that Donkey!
I have seen him before."
"Oh, my poor Lamp Wick," said Pinocchio in a faint voice, as he wiped his eyes with some straw he had picked up from the ground.
"What should I do-I, who have paid my good money for him?"
"But, you see, he was my friend."
"Your friend?"
"A classmate of mine."
"What," shouted Farmer john, bursting out laughing.
"What!
You had donkeys in your school?
How you must have studied!"
The Marionette, ashamed and hurt by those words, did not answer, but taking his glass of milk returned to his father.
From that day on, for more than five months, Pinocchio got up every morning just as dawn was breaking and went to the farm to draw water. And every day he was given a glass of warm milk for his poor old father, who grew stronger and better day by day.
But he was not satisfied with this.
He learned to make baskets of reeds and sold them.
With the money he received, he and his father were able to keep from starving.
Among other things, he built a rolling chair, strong and comfortable, to take his old father out for an airing on bright, sunny days.
In the evening the Marionette studied by lamplight.
With some of the money he had earned, he bought himself a secondhand volume that had a few pages missing, and with that he learned to read in a very short time.
As far as writing was concerned, he used a long stick at one end of which he had whittled a long, fine point.
Ink he had none, so he used the juice of blackberries or cherries.
He succeeded, not only in his studies, but also in his work, and a day came when he put enough money together to keep his old father comfortable and happy.
Besides this, he was able to save the great amount of fifty pennies.
With it he wanted to buy himself a new suit.
"I am going to the market place to buy myself a coat, a cap, and a pair of shoes.
When I come back I'll be so dressed up, you will think I am a rich man."
"Don't you recognize me?" said the Snail.
"Yes and no"
Do you not remember how she opened the door for you one night and gave you something to eat?"
"I remember everything," cried Pinocchio.
"Answer me quickly, pretty Snail, where have you left my Fairy?
What is she doing?
Does she still love me?
At all these questions, tumbling out one after another, the Snail answered, calm as ever:
"My dear Pinocchio, the Fairy is lying ill in a hospital."
"In a hospital?"
She has been stricken with trouble and illness, and she hasn't a penny left with which to buy a bite of bread."
"Really?
My poor, dear little Fairy!
But I have only fifty pennies.
Here they are.
I was just going to buy some clothes.
Here, take them, little Snail, and give them to my good Fairy."
"What about the new clothes?"
"What does that matter?
Go, and hurry.
Come back here within a couple of days and I hope to have more money for you!
Until today I have worked for my father.
Now I shall have to work for my mother also.
Good by, and I hope to see you soon."
The Snail, much against her usual habit, began to run like a lizard under a summer sun
When Pinocchio returned home, his father asked him:
"And where is the new suit?"
"I couldn't find one to fit me.
I shall have to look again some other day."
That night, Pinocchio, instead of going to bed at ten o'clock waited until midnight, and instead of making eight baskets, he made sixteen.
After that he went to bed and fell asleep.
As he slept, he dreamed of his Fairy, beautiful, smiling, and happy, who kissed him and said to him, "Bravo, Pinocchio!
Boys who love and take good care of their parents when they are old and sick, deserve praise even though they may not be held up as models of obedience and good behavior.
At that very moment, Pinocchio awoke and opened wide his eyes.
There, he found a new suit, a new hat, and a pair of shoes.
As soon as he was dressed, he put his hands in his pockets and pulled out a little leather purse on which were written the following words:
The Marionette opened the purse to find the money, and behold-there were fifty gold coins!
Pinocchio ran to the mirror.
He hardly recognized himself.
The bright face of a tall boy looked at him with wide awake blue eyes, dark brown hair and happy, smiling lips.
Surrounded by so much splendor, the Marionette hardly knew what he was doing.
He rubbed his eyes two or three times, wondering if he were still asleep or awake and decided he must be awake.
"And where is Father?" he cried suddenly.
He ran into the next room, and there stood Geppetto, grown years younger overnight, spick and span in his new clothes and gay as a lark in the morning.
He was once more Mastro Geppetto, the wood carver, hard at work on a lovely picture frame, decorating it with flowers and leaves, and heads of animals.
"Father, Father, what has happened?
Tell me if you can," cried Pinocchio, as he ran and jumped on his Father's neck.
"What have I to do with it?"
"Just this.
"I wonder where the old Pinocchio of wood has hidden himself?"
And he pointed to a large Marionette leaning against a chair, head turned to one side, arms hanging limp, and legs twisted under him.
"How ridiculous I was as a Marionette!
Her little chin has grown quite pointed and her eyes are actually frightening," was an early observation.
But girls who are going into galloping consumption cough and look hectic and are weaker day by day and she had no cough, nor was she hectic and, though it was known that dr Redcliff saw her frequently, she insisted that she was not ill and begged the Duchess to let her go on with her work.
It cries out aloud.
She asked herself questions and with great care sat on foot a gradual and delicate cross examination of Robin herself.
But she discovered no reason common or uncommon for the thing she recognised each time she looked at her.
She could not avoid seeing that he was preoccupied.
"I almost feel as if your interest in her had lapsed," she said at last.
"no
Something came to life in each pair of eyes and it was something disturbed and reluctant. The Duchess spoke first.
"She has had no companions," she said painfully.
"The War put an end to what I thought I might do for her.
"The old leisurely habit of observing details no longer exists.
As Redcliff said in speaking of her-and girls generally-all the gates are thrown wide open."
"Two weeks ago she gave me something to reflect on.
Her feeling for her daughter is that of a pretty cat like woman for something enragingly younger than herself.
She said to me one afternoon, 'I hope the Duchess is still pleased with her companion.
After a few seconds-
I asked him if he had seen her since the dance and he owned that he had-and then was cross at himself for making the slip.
I have been thinking constantly ever since." There was a brief silence between them; then he proceeded.
It is one of the tragedies.
Perhaps you and I together-"
The Duchess was seeing again the two who had come forth shining from the conservatory.
She continued to see them as Lord Coombe went on speaking, telling her what dr Redcliff had told him.
On her part Robin scarcely understood anything which was happening because nothing seemed to matter.
Perhaps after people died they walked about as she did and did not understand that others could not see them and they were not alive.
But if she were dead she would surely see Donal.
Before she went to dr Redcliff the Duchess took her hand and held it closely in both her own.
"My poor child," she said.
"Whatsoever he tells you don't be frightened. Don't think you are without friends.
What she thought of chiefly was the Head of the House of Coombe.
He would not be indignant, or annoyed or embarrassed.
Sometimes she had felt that this had even verged on a tenderness of which he was himself remotely, if at all, conscious.
He had believed fine things of him and had watched him silently.
He had wished he had been his own flesh and blood.
"What he will do will be different.
It might seem cold; it might be merely judicial-but it might be surprising."
"I wish to God I had known him better!
But she had on her small hat and coat and what the Duchess seemed chiefly to see was the wide darkness of her eyes set in a face suddenly pinched, small and snow white.
She looked like a starved baby.
"To-Mersham Wood," the Duchess felt aghast-and then suddenly a flood of thought rushed upon her.
"I must go, please!
I must!
Just-to Mersham Wood!"
"Child," she said.
Robin went to her-oh, poor little soul!--in utter obedience.
"Stay here, my poor child and talk to me," the Duchess said.
"The time has come when you must talk to some one."
"When I come back-I will try.
"It is not far.
mrs Bennett is there.
She loves me."
Hapless young creatures in her plight must always be touching, but her touchingness was indescribable-almost unendurable to the ripe aged woman of the world who watched and heard her.
And it was so awfully plain that there was some tragic connection with the Wood and that her whole soul cried out to it.
Such things had been known.
Why not?
All the world was mad was the older woman's thought, and she herself after all the years, had for this moment no sense of balance and felt as if all old reasons for things had been swept away.
"If you will come back," she said.
"I will let you go."
But then again she said to herself, "Oh why, after all, should she be asked questions?
CHAPTER thirty six
It was of an order requiring a more serious atmosphere.
"Since the Dowager took her up she's far too grand for the likes of us," she said.
So to speak, Feather blew about from one place to another.
She had never found life so exciting and excitement had become more vitally necessary to her existence as the years had passed.
She still looked extraordinarily youthful and if her face was at times rather marvelous in its white and red, and her lips daring in their pomegranate scarlet, the fine grain of her skin aided her effects and she was dazzlingly in the fashion.
She had never worn such enchanting clothes and never had seemed to possess so many.
"That's my gift. Helene says I have genius.
I have a little slave woman who does that by the day.
She admires me and will do anything that I tell her.
Things are so delightfully scant and short now that you can cut two or three frocks out of one of your old petticoats-and mine were never very old."
There was probably a modicum of truth in this-the fact remained that the garments which were more scant and shorter than those of any other feathery person were also more numerous and exquisite.
Her patriotic entertainment of soldiers who required her special order of support and recreation was fast and furious.
She was such a success that important personages smiled on her and asked her to appear under undreamed of auspices.
Secretly triumphant though she was, she never so far lost her head as to do anything which would bore her or cause her to appear at less than an alluring advantage.
She found herself strung to her highest pitch of excitement by the air raids, which in the midst of their terrors had the singular effect of exciting many people and filling them with an insane recklessness.
Those so excited somehow seemed to feel themselves immune. Feather chattered about "Zepps" as if bombs could only wreak their vengeance upon coast towns and the lower orders.
When Lord Coombe definitely refused to allow her to fit up the roof of the slice of a house as a sort of luxurious Royal Box from which she and her friends might watch the spectacle, she found among her circle acquaintances who shared her thrills and had prepared places for themselves.
Sometimes she was even rather indecently exhilarated by her sense of high adventure.
The fact was that the excitement of the seething world about her had overstrung her trivial being and turned her light head until it whirled too fast.
And interesting heroic men coming and going in swarms and being so grateful for kindness and entertainment. One is really doing good all the time-and being adored for it.
I own I like being adored myself-and of course one likes doing good.
I never was so happy in my life."
"I used to be rather a coward, I suppose," she chattered gaily on another occasion.
I believe the War and living among soldiers has had an effect on me and made me braver. The Zepps don't frighten me at all-at least they excite me so that they make me forget to be frightened.
I don't know what they do to me exactly.
She saw Lord Coombe but infrequently at this time, the truth being that her exhilaration and her War Work fatigued him, apart from which his hours were filled.
He also objected to a certain raffishness which in an extremely mixed crowd of patriots rather too obviously "swept away silly old fads" and left the truly advanced to do as they liked.
Feather herself had no need of him. An athletic and particularly well favoured young actor who shared her thrills of elation seemed to permeate the atmosphere about her.
He and Feather together at times achieved the effect, between raids, of waiting impatiently for a performance and feeling themselves ill treated by the long delays between the acts.
"Are we growing callous, or are we losing our wits through living at such high temperature?" the Duchess asked.
"There's a delirium in the air.
Among those who are not shuddering in cellars there are some who seem possessed by a sort of light insanity, half defiance, half excited curiosity.
People say exultantly, 'I had a perfectly splendid view of the last Zepp!' A mother whose daughter was paying her a visit said to her, 'I wish you could have seen the Zepps while you were here.
It is such an experience.'"
"They have not been able to bring about the wholesale disaster Germany hoped for and when nothing serious happens there is a relieved feeling that the things are futile after all," said Coombe.
"When the results are tragic they must be hushed up as far as is possible to prevent panic."
Dowie faithfully sent him her private bulletin.
Her first fears of peril had died away, but her sense of mystification had increased and was more deeply touched with awe.
She opened certain windows every night and felt that she was living in the world of supernatural things.
Robin's eyes sometimes gave her a ghost of a shock when she came upon her sitting alone with her work in her idle hands.
But supported by the testimony of such realities as breakfasts, long untiring walks and unvarying blooming healthfulness, she thanked God hourly.
"Doctor Benton says plain that he has never had such a beautiful case and one that promised so well," she wrote.
"He says she's as strong as a young doe bounding about on the heather.
He is a clever gentleman with some wonderful comforting new ideas about things, my lord.
Robin herself wrote to Coombe-letters whose tender hearted comprehension of what he was doing always held the desire to surround him with the soothing quiet he had so felt when he was with her.
What he discovered was that she had been born of the elect,--the women who know what to say, what to let others say and what to beautifully leave unsaid.
Her unconscious genius was quite exquisite.
Now and then he made the night journey to Darreuch Castle and each time she met him with her frank childlike kiss he was more amazed and uplifted by her aspect.
Their quiet talks together were wonderful things to remember.
She had done much fine and dainty work which she showed him with unaffected sweetness.
She told him stories of Dowie and Mademoiselle and how they had taught her to sew and embroider.
Once she told him the story of her first meeting with Donal-but she passed over the tragedy of their first parting.
"It was too sad," she said.
He noticed that she never spoke of sad and dark hours.
He was convinced that she purposely avoided them and he was profoundly glad.
"I know," she said once, "that you do not want me to talk to you about the War."
"Thank you for knowing it," he answered.
"I come here on a pilgrimage to a shrine where peace is.
Darreuch is my shrine."
"Yes, I think it is," his look at her was deep.
Suddenly but gently he laid his hand on her shoulder.
Blot the accursed thing out of the Universe while-you are here.
For you there must be no war."
"How kind his face looked," was Robin's thought as he hesitated a second and then went on:
It was she who now put her hand on his arm.
MISS GRANDISON had resolved upon taking a house in London for the season, and had obtained a promise from her uncle and aunt to be her guests.
As for Ferdinand, the spring had gradually restored him to health, but not to his former frame of mind.
He remained moody and indolent, incapable of exertion, and a prey to the darkest humours; circumstances, however, occurred which rendered some energy on his part absolutely necessary. His creditors grew importunate, and the arrangement of his affairs or departure from his native land was an alternative now inevitable.
The month of April, which witnessed the arrival of the Temples and Lord Montfort in England, welcomed also to London Miss Grandison and her guests.
A sudden residence in a vast metropolis, after a life of rural seclusion, has without doubt a very peculiar effect upon the mind.
It was in this mood, exhausted by a visit to his lawyer, that he stepped into a military club and took up a newspaper.
Caring little for politics, his eye wandered over, uninterested, its pugnacious leading articles and tedious parliamentary reports; and he was about to throw it down when a paragraph caught his notice which instantly engrossed all his attention.
It was in the 'Morning Post' that he thus read:
His lordship is considered one of the most accomplished noblemen of the day, and was celebrated at Rome for his patronage of the arts. Lord Montfort will shortly be united to the beautiful Miss Temple, the only daughter of the Right Honourable Pelham Temple.
Miss Temple is esteemed one of the richest heiresses in England, as she will doubtless inherit the whole of the immense fortune to which her father so unexpectedly acceded.
mr Temple is a widower, and has no son.
mr Temple was formerly our minister at several of the German Courts, where he was distinguished by his abilities and his hospitality to his travelling countrymen.
The personal property is also very considerable.
Lord Montfort accompanied mr Temple and his amiable daughter to this country.'
What a wild and fiery chaos was the mind of Ferdinand Armine when he read this paragraph.
The wonders it revealed succeeded each other with such rapidity that for some time he was deprived of the power of reflection.
Henrietta Temple in England!
Henrietta Temple one of the greatest heiresses in the country!
Henrietta Temple about to be immediately married to another!
His Henrietta Temple, the Henrietta Temple whom he adored, and by whom he had been worshipped!
The Henrietta Temple whose beautiful lock of hair was at this very moment on his heart!
The Henrietta Temple for whom he had forfeited fortune, family, power, almost life!
O Woman, Woman!
Put not thy trust in woman!
And yet, could he reproach her?
Did she not believe herself trifled with by him, outraged, deceived, deluded, deserted?
And did she, could she love another?
Was there another to whom she had poured forth her heart as to him, and all that beautiful flow of fascinating and unrivalled emotion?
Was there another to whom she had pledged her pure and passionate soul?
Ah, no! he would not, he could not believe it.
Light and false Henrietta could never be.
But she was not yet married.
They were, according to these lines, to be soon united.
Could he not explain all?
Could he not prove that his heart had ever been true and fond?
And when she found that Ferdinand, her own Ferdinand, had indeed never deceived her, was worthy of her choice affection, and suffering even at this moment for her sweet sake, what were all the cold blooded ties in which she had since involved herself?
She was his by an older and more ardent bond.
Should he not claim his right?
Could she deny it?
Claim what?
Whatever she might think, his conduct had been faultless to her. It was not for Henrietta to complain.
She was not the victim, if one indeed there might chance to be.
Poor Ferdinand Armine! it was the first time he had experienced the maddening pangs of jealousy.
Yet how he had loved this woman!
And now they might have been so happy!
There is nothing that depresses a man so much as the conviction of bad fortune.
It so happened that he had promised this day to dine at his cousin's; for Glastonbury, who was usually his companion, had accepted an invitation this day to dine with the noble widow of his old patron. Ferdinand, however, found himself quite incapable of entering into any society, and he hurried to his hotel to send a note of excuse to Brook street.
As he arrived, Glastonbury was just about to step into a hackney coach, so that Ferdinand had no opportunity of communicating his sorrows to his friend, even had he been inclined.
He had been drowned.
He was floating in a sea of light, and now and then shining little fishes swam inquisitively up to him and stared.
They hurtled through the murky light like shooting stars.
And once two of them dashed together and burst like a rocket.
The sparks came falling down through a billion miles of space, and as they fell they built up planets and systems of their own.
Until a dark coil that had the shape of a dragon slithered across the milky way and began to devour them one by one.
The sparks disappeared into its dark maw.
Jack Odin groaned in pain and awoke.
But strong hands were holding him down.
He became conscious of a buzzing, murmuring sound.
It was neither sad nor glad.
Something was falling across the back of his neck and spreading out across his shoulders.
Perhaps it was a bit coarser.
But not much.
But then, just as the strange soothing feeling was putting him back to sleep, the hairs changed their soft caress and a dozen of them plunged into his spinal cord and upward into that small old brain where all the bogies of the stone age still cowered.
Odin yelled in pain and fought.
But the hands held him tight.
The voice was Gunnar's.
And once when he almost struggled clear, a strong knee was thrust into his back and forced him down.
At intervals, he could hear Gunnar's voice-and his own-crying, pleading, threatening.
Then at last it was over.
The hands turned Odin upon his back and he lay there, gasping and hurting, like one who has just come up from deep water.
The lights were so bright that at first he could see nothing.
Beside Odin on another bed was Gunnar, lying flat on his back and stripped to the waist.
Gunnar was howling curses and kicking like a frog.
A doctor and a nurse were there.
He was not completely conscious-and for a second she looked like a high priestess of the Amazon, holding two mummified heads before her-
The pain left him.
Ato and n e a smiled at them.
"God, that was a close one," Ato said, and wiped his forehead.
And it was touch and go all the time."
"What happened?" Odin asked.
He remembered something about a glittering tomb and Maya awakening from her long sleep and Grim Hagen.
But these were mere scenes that flashed before his mind.
She smiled proudly.
You see, I have two of them now.
You were electrocuted."
You might say that we are master electronicians, rebuilding circuits, repairing transistors and condensers-"
"You were plenty rough," Gunnar grumbled.
"We had to be.
Here." She held her two precious Kalis in one arm while she tapped the base of her skull.
It is a simple, worrying brain.
It was convinced that you were dead.
We had to arouse it."
Odin fancied that he could hear the two Kalis purring contentedly like cats.
Let them purr.
Gunnar sat up and began grumbling anew: "Well, thanks.
Now, get me some clothes.
And tell me where we are?"
"I threw The Nebula into the Fourth Drive some time ago.
That may have helped to save your lives too.
"Will you please tell me where we are?" Gunnar demanded.
"Give me time, little man," Ato retorted.
"We are back in Trans Einsteinian space, and Aldebaran and its worlds are far behind us.
Also, a dozen Brons. Maybe more, but not many.
The people were bled white.
Graft, corruption, and patronage had taken its toll.
They won, of course.
They gathered at the Old Ship and took off.
We decided to have one last try for Maya. But we found you two and a dead Bron and the head of a native.
All this time I have had a fix on Hagen."
"We had time on our side before. Now, if he gets away from us he can live out his days on some obscure planet.
The years will pass like a whirlwind-while we go dashing this way and that, and in a surprisingly short time our willing and unwilling fugitives will have lived out their lives.
"Then, what have you done?" Odin asked.
I have a fix upon him.
We sapped all the energy from Aldebaran that we could.
We have power enough, but there are no stars nearby.
As I said before, he is heading for a dust cloud.
After all, we are behind him.
"If not destroyed, it has a chance to improve its percentage when the pursuer has made its pass."
"True enough," Ato admitted.
"That is why I propose to stay close behind it.
It must be far, far away."
"What is far?
What is near?
Ato flushed in anger.
The Wounded Lion
Cuentos Populars Catalans.
There was once a girl so poor that she had nothing to live on, and wandered about the world asking for charity.
One day she arrived at a thatched cottage, and inquired if they could give her any work.
The farmer said he wanted a cowherd, as his own had left him, and if the girl liked the place she might take it.
So she became a cowherd.
One morning she was driving her cows through the meadows when she heard near by a loud groan that almost sounded human.
She hastened to the spot from which the noise came, and found it proceeded from a lion who lay stretched upon the ground.
You can guess how frightened she was!
She pulled out the thorn and bound up the place, and the lion was grateful, and licked her hand by way of thanks with his big rough tongue.
Then he said, 'Now you will have to look after the asses.'
So every day she had to take the asses to the woods to feed, until one morning, exactly a year after she had found the lion, she heard a groan which sounded quite human.
She went straight to the place from which the noise came, and, to her great surprise, beheld the same lion stretched on the ground with a deep wound across his face.
This time she was not afraid at all, and ran towards him, washing the wound and laying soothing herbs upon it; and when she had bound it up the lion thanked her in the same manner as before.
After that she returned to her flock, but they were nowhere to be seen.
She searched here and she searched there, but they had vanished completely!
Then she had to go home and confess to her master, who first scolded her and afterwards beat her.
'Now go,' he ended, 'and look after the pigs!'
So the next day she took out the pigs, and found them such good feeding grounds that they grew fatter every day.
Another year passed by, and one morning when the maiden was out with her pigs she heard a groan which sounded quite human.
She ran to see what it was, and found her old friend the lion, wounded through and through, fast dying under a tree.
She fell on her knees before him and washed his wounds one by one, and laid healing herbs upon them.
And the lion licked her hands and thanked her, and asked if she would not stay and sit by him.
But the girl said she had her pigs to watch, and she must go and see after them.
So she ran to the place where she had left them, but they had vanished as if the earth had swallowed them up.
She whistled and called, but only the birds answered her.
Then she sank down on the ground and wept bitterly, not daring to return home until some hours had passed away.
But it was no use; there was not a sign of the pigs.
At last she thought that perhaps if she climbed a tree she might see further.
But no sooner was she seated on the highest branch than something happened which put the pigs quite out of her head.
This was a handsome young man who was coming down the path; and when he had almost reached the tree he pulled aside a rock and disappeared behind it.
The maiden rubbed her eyes and wondered if she had been dreaming.
Next she thought, 'I will not stir from here till I see him come out, and discover who he is.' Accordingly she waited, and at dawn the next morning the rock moved to one side and a lion came out.
When he had gone quite out of sight the girl climbed down from the tree and went to the rock, which she pushed aside, and entered the opening before her.
The path led to a beautiful house.
She went in, swept and dusted the furniture, and put everything tidy.
Then she ate a very good dinner, which was on a shelf in the corner, and once more clambered up to the top of her tree.
As the sun set she saw the same young man walking gaily down the path, and, as before, he pushed aside the rock and disappeared behind it.
Next morning out came the lion.
He looked sharply about him on all sides, but saw no one, and then vanished into the forest.
The maiden then came down from the tree and did exactly as she had done the day before.
Thus three days went by, and every day she went and tidied up the palace.
At length, when the girl found she was no nearer to discovering the secret, she resolved to ask him, and in the evening when she caught sight of him coming through the wood she came down from the tree and begged him to tell her his name.
The young man looked very pleased to see her, and said he thought it must be she who had secretly kept his house for so many days.
And he added that he was a prince enchanted by a powerful giant, but was only allowed to take his own shape at night, for all day he was forced to appear as the lion whom she had so often helped; and, more than this, it was the giant who had stolen the oxen and the asses and the pigs in revenge for her kindness.
And the girl asked him, 'What can I do to disenchant you?'
But he said he was afraid it was very difficult, because the only way was to get a lock of hair from the head of a king's daughter, to spin it, and to make from it a cloak for the giant, who lived up on the top of a high mountain.
'Very well,' answered the girl, 'I will go to the city, and knock at the door of the king's palace, and ask the princess to take me as a servant.'
So they parted, and when she arrived at the city she walked about the streets crying, 'Who will hire me for a servant?
Who will hire me for a servant?' But, though many people liked her looks, for she was clean and neat, the maiden would listen to none, and still continued crying, 'Who will hire me for a servant?
Who will hire me for a servant?'
At last there came the waiting maid of the princess.
'What can you do?' she said; and the girl was forced to confess that she could do very little.
'Then you will have to do scullion's work, and wash up dishes,' said she; and they went straight back to the palace.
Then the maiden dressed her hair afresh, and made herself look very neat and smart, and everyone admired and praised her, till by and bye it came to the ears of the princess.
Now the hair of the princess was very thick and long, and shone like the sun
The princess, who was very proud of her hair, did not like the idea of parting with any of it, so she said no
But the girl could not give up hope, and each day she entreated to be allowed to cut off just one tress.
At length the princess lost patience, and exclaimed, 'You may have it, then, on condition that you shall find the handsomest prince in the world to be my bridegroom!'
And the girl answered that she would, and cut off the lock, and wove it into a coat that glittered like silk, and brought it to the young man, who told her to carry it straight to the giant.
But that she must be careful to cry out a long way off what she had with her, or else he would spring upon her and run her through with his sword.
So the maiden departed and climbed up the mountain, but before she reached the top the giant heard her footsteps, and rushed out breathing fire and flame, having a sword in one hand and a club in the other.
But she cried loudly that she had brought him the coat, and then he grew quiet, and invited her to come into his house.
He tried on the coat, but it was too short, and he threw it off, and declared it was no use.
And the girl picked it up sadly, and returned quite in despair to the king's palace.
The next morning, when she was combing the princess's hair, she begged leave to cut off another lock.
The maiden told her that she had already found him, and spun the lock into shining stuff, and fastened it on to the end of the coat.
This time it fitted him, and he was quite pleased, and asked her what he could give her in return.
And she said that the only reward he could give her was to take the spell off the lion and bring him back to his own shape.
For a long time the giant would not hear of it, but in the end he gave in, and told her exactly how it must all be done.
She was to kill the lion herself and cut him up very small; then she must burn him, and cast his ashes into the water, and out of the water the prince would come free from enchantment for ever.
But the maiden went away weeping, lest the giant should have deceived her, and that after she had killed the lion she would find she had also slain the prince.
And the maiden believed what the prince told her; and in the morning when he put on his lion's form she took a knife and slew him, and cut him up very small, and burnt him, and cast his ashes into the water, and out of the water came the prince, beautiful as the day, and as glad to look upon as the sun himself.
Then the young man thanked the maiden for all she had done for him, and said she should be his wife and none other.
But the prince replied, 'If it is the princess, we must go quickly.
Come with me.'
So they went together to the king's palace.
And when the king and queen and princess saw the young man a great joy filled their hearts, for they knew him for the eldest son, who had long ago been enchanted by a giant and lost to them.
Once upon a time there lived a man with one daughter and he made her work hard all the day.
The girl went out, and soon collected a large bundle, and then she plucked at a sprig of sweet smelling rosemary for herself.
But the harder she pulled the firmer seemed the plant, and at last, determined not to be beaten, she gave one great tug, and the rosemary remained in her hands.
Then she heard a voice close to her saying, 'Well?' and turning she saw before her a handsome young man, who asked why she had come to steal his firewood.
The girl, who felt much confused, only managed to stammer out as an excuse that her father had sent her.
'Very well,' replied the young man; 'then come with me.'
So he took her through the opening made by the torn up root, and they travelled till they reached a beautiful palace, splendidly furnished, but only lighted from the top.
And when they had entered he told her that he was a great lord, and that never had he seen a maiden so beautiful as she, and that if she would give him her heart they would be married and live happy for ever after.
And the maiden said 'yes, she would,' and so they were married.
The next day the old dame who looked after the house handed her all the keys, but pointed her out one that she would do well never to use, for if she did the whole palace would fall to the ground, and the grass would grow over it, and the damsel herself would be remembered no more.
The bride promised to be careful, but in a little while, when there was nothing left for her to do, she began to wonder what could be in the chest, which was opened by the key.
But the lock was stiff and resisted all her efforts, and in the end she had to break it.
And what was inside after all?
She burst into a flood of bitter tears, partly at her own folly, but more for the loss of her husband, whom she dearly loved.
Then, breaking a sprig of rosemary off a bush hard by, she resolved, cost what it might, to seek him through the world till she found him.
So she walked and she walked and she walked, till she arrived at a house built of straw.
And she knocked at the door, and asked if they wanted a servant.
The mistress said she did, and if the girl was willing she might stay.
But day by day the poor maiden grew more and more sad, till at last her mistress begged her to say what was the matter.
Then she told her story-how she was going through the world seeking after her husband.
On hearing these words the damsel set forth once more, and walked till she reached the Golden Castle, where lived the sun
And she knocked boldly at the door, saying, 'All hail, O Sun!
I have come to ask if, of your charity, you will help me in my need.
'Indeed!' spoke the sun
'Do you, rich as you are, need help?
But though you live in a palace without windows, the Sun enters everywhere, and he knows you.'
Then the bride told him the whole story. and did not hide her own ill doing.
And the Sun listened, and was sorry for her; and though he could not tell her where to go, he gave her a nut, and bid her open it in a time of great distress.
The damsel thanked him with all her heart, and departed, and walked and walked and walked, till she came to another castle, and knocked at the door which was opened by an old woman.
'All hail!' said the girl.
'I have come, of your charity, to ask your help!'
'It is my mistress, the Moon, you seek.
I will tell her of your prayer.'
So the Moon came out, and when she saw the maiden she knew her again, for she had watched her sleeping both in the cottage and in the palace. And she spake to her and said:
'Do you, rich as you are, need help?'
So the damsel thanked her, and departed, and walked and walked and walked till she came to another castle.
And she knocked at the door, and said:
I have come to ask if, of your charity, you will help me in my need.'
'It is my lord, the Wind, that you want,' answered the old woman who opened it.
And the Wind looked on her and knew her again, for he had seen her in the cottage and in the palace, and he spake to her and said:
And the Wind listened, and was sorry for her, and he gave her a walnut that she was to eat in time of need. But the girl did not go as the Wind expected.
She was tired and sad, and knew not where to turn, so she began to weep bitterly.
The Wind wept too for company, and said:
'Don't be frightened; I will go and see if I can find out something.'
And the Wind departed with a great noise and fuss, and in the twinkling of an eye he was back again, beaming with delight.
'From what one person and another have let fall,' he exclaimed, 'I have contrived to learn that he is in the palace of the king, who keeps him hidden lest anyone should see him; and that to morrow he is to marry the princess, who, ugly creature that she is, has not been able to find any man to wed her.'
Who can tell the despair which seized the poor maiden when she heard this news!
As soon as she could speak she implored the Wind to do all he could to get the wedding put off for two or three days, for it would take her all that time to reach the palace of the king.
The Wind gladly promised to do what he could, and as he travelled much faster than the maiden he soon arrived at the palace, where he found five tailors working night and day at the wedding clothes of the princess.
After them ran the tailors, catching, jumping, climbing, but all to no purpose!
The lace was torn, the satin stained, the pearls knocked off!
It was plainly quite impossible that the wedding clothes could be ready next day.
However, the king was much too anxious to see his daughter married to listen to any excuses, and he declared that a dress must be put together somehow for the bride to wear.
But when he went to look at the princess, she was such a figure that he agreed that it would be unfitting for her position to be seen in such a gown, and he ordered the ceremony and the banquet to be postponed for a few hours, so that the tailors might take the dress to pieces and make it fit.
But by this time the maiden had arrived footsore and weary at the castle, and as soon as she reached the door she cracked her nut and drew out of it the most beautiful mantle in the world.
Then she rang the bell, and asked:
'Is not the princess to be married to day?'
'Yes, she is.'
'Ask her if she would like to buy this mantle.'
And when the princess saw the mantle she was delighted, for her wedding mantle had been spoilt with all the other things, and it was too late to make another.
The maiden fixed a large sum, many pieces of gold, but the princess had set her heart on the mantle, and gave it readily.
Now the maiden hid her gold in the pocket of her dress, and turned away from the castle.
The moment she was out of sight she broke her almond, and drew from it the most magnificent petticoats that ever were seen. Then she went back to the castle, and asked if the princess wished to buy any petticoats.
And the maiden named many pieces of gold, which the princess paid her gladly, so pleased was she with her new possessions.
Then the girl went down the steps where none could watch her and cracked her walnut, and out came the most splendid court dress that any dressmaker had ever invented; and, carrying it carefully in her arms, she knocked at the door, and asked if the princess wished to buy a court dress.
When the message was delivered the princess sprang to her feet with delight, for she had been thinking that after all it was not much use to have a lovely mantle and elegant petticoats if she had no dress, and she knew the tailors would never be ready in time.
So she sent at once to say she would buy the dress, and what sum did the maiden want for it.
This time the maiden answered that the price of the dress was the permission to see the bridegroom.
The princess was not at all pleased when she heard the maiden's reply, but, as she could not do without the dress, she was forced to give in, and contented herself with thinking that after all it did not matter much.
CHAPTER seven THE SECRET ORCHARD
Once outside the noisy coffee room, alone in the dimly lighted passage, Marguerite Blakeney seemed to breathe more freely.
She heaved a deep sigh, like one who had long been oppressed with the heavy weight of constant self control, and she allowed a few tears to fall unheeded down her cheeks.
Outside the rain had ceased, and through the swiftly passing clouds, the pale rays of an after storm sun shone upon the beautiful white coast of Kent and the quaint, irregular houses that clustered round the Admiralty Pier.
"Armand!" said Marguerite Blakeney, as soon as she saw him approaching from the distance, and a happy smile shone on her sweet face, even through the tears.
"Half an hour," she said, looking wistfully out to sea, "half an hour more and you'll be far from me, Armand!
Oh!
I can't believe that you are going, dear!
"Nay, 'tis not the distance, Armand-but that awful Paris . . . just now . . ."
They had reached the edge of the cliff.
She tried to pierce the distance far away, beyond which lay the shores of France: that relentless and stern France which was exacting her pound of flesh, the blood tax from the noblest of her sons.
"Our own beautiful country, Marguerite," said Armand, who seemed to have divined her thoughts.
"They are going too far, Armand," she said vehemently.
"Hush!--" said Armand, instinctively, as he threw a quick, apprehensive glance around him.
Her voice was choked in sobs, her eyes, tender, blue and loving, gazed appealingly at the young man, who in his turn looked steadfastly into hers.
"You would in any case be my own brave sister," he said gently, "who would remember that, when France is in peril, it is not for her sons to turn their backs on her."
"Oh! Armand!" she said quaintly, "I sometimes wish you had not so many lofty virtues. . . .
I assure you little sins are far less dangerous and uncomfortable.
But you WILL be prudent?" she added earnestly.
"As far as possible . . .
I promise you."
"Nay, sweet one, you have other interests now.
Percy cares for you . . ."
A look of strange wistfulness crept into her eyes as she murmured,--
"He did . . . once . . ."
"But surely . . ."
"There, there, dear, don't distress yourself on my account.
Percy is very good . . ."
"Nay!" he interrupted energetically, "I will distress myself on your account, my Margot.
Listen, dear, I have not spoken of these things to you before; something always seemed to stop me when I wished to question you.
But, somehow, I feel as if I could not go away and leave you now without asking you one question. . . .
"What is it?" she asked simply.
I mean, does he know the part you played in the arrest of the Marquis de st Cyr?"
She laughed-a mirthless, bitter, contemptuous laugh, which was like a jarring chord in the music of her voice.
Yes, he does know. . . . .
I told him after I married him. . . ."
"You told him all the circumstances-which so completely exonerated you from any blame?"
I could no longer plead extenuating circumstances: I could not demean myself by trying to explain-"
"And?"
"And now I have the satisfaction, Armand, of knowing that the biggest fool in England has the most complete contempt for his wife."
"But Sir Percy loved you, Margot," he repeated gently.
"Loved me?--Well, Armand, I thought at one time that he did, or I should not have married him.
I daresay," she added, speaking very rapidly, as if she were about to lay down a heavy burden, which had oppressed her for months, "I daresay that even you thought-as everybody else did-that I married Sir Percy because of his wealth-but I assure you, dear, that it was not so.
I had never loved any one before, as you know, and I was four and twenty then-so I naturally thought that it was not in my nature to love.
But it has always seemed to me that it MUST be HEAVENLY to be loved blindly, passionately, wholly . . . worshipped, in fact-and the very fact that Percy was slow and stupid was an attraction for me, as I thought he would love me all the more.
I thought that a fool would worship, and think of nothing else.
And I was ready to respond, Armand; I would have allowed myself to be worshipped, and given infinite tenderness in return. . . ."
She had been young, misguided, ill advised perhaps.
Yet even now, his own sister puzzled him.
Could it be that with the waning of her husband's love, Marguerite's heart had awakened with love for him?
Marguerite was gazing out towards the sunset.
Armand could not see her face, but presently it seemed to him that something which glittered for a moment in the golden evening light, fell from her eyes onto her dainty fichu of lace.
But he could not broach that subject with her.
He knew her strange, passionate nature so well, and knew that reserve which lurked behind her frank, open ways.
This was his first visit to England since her marriage, and the few months of separation had already seemed to have built up a slight, thin partition between brother and sister; the same deep, intense love was still there, on both sides, but each now seemed to have a secret orchard, into which the other dared not penetrate.
And Marguerite could not speak to her brother about the secrets of her heart; she hardly understood them herself, she only knew that, in the midst of luxury, she felt lonely and unhappy.
She would not spoil these last few sadly sweet moments by speaking about herself.
CHAPTER nineteen THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL
At what particular moment the strange doubt first crept into Marguerite's mind, she could not herself have said.
Stupidly, senselessly, now, sitting beneath the shade of an overhanging sycamore, she was looking at the plain gold shield, with the star shaped little flower engraved upon it.
Had not everybody about town recently made a point of affecting the device of that mysterious and heroic Scarlet Pimpernel?
Did she herself wear it embroidered on her gowns?
set in gems and enamel in her hair?
What was there strange in the fact that Sir Percy should have chosen to use the device as a seal ring?
He might easily have done that . . . yes . . . quite easily . . . and . . . besides . . . what connection could there be between her exquisite dandy of a husband, with his fine clothes and refined, lazy ways, and the daring plotter who rescued French victims from beneath the very eyes of the leaders of a bloodthirsty revolution?
Her thoughts were in a whirl-her mind a blank . . .
You did not expect me quite so soon, did you, my darling little Margot CHERIE?"
"Indeed, sweet one," she said with a smile, "it is delightful to have you all to myself, and for a nice whole long day. . . .
You won't be bored?"
"Oh! bored!
Margot, how CAN you say such a wicked thing.
"And to talk secrets."
The two young girls had linked their arms in one another's and began wandering round the garden.
"Oh! how lovely your home is, Margot, darling," said little Suzanne, enthusiastically, "and how happy you must be!"
I ought to be happy-oughtn't I, sweet one?" said Marguerite, with a wistful little sigh.
"How sadly you say it, CHERIE. . . .
Do you remember?--some we did not even confide to Sister Theresa of the Holy Angels-though she was such a dear."
"Faith, there's naught to be ashamed of!
"Indeed, CHERIE, I am not ashamed," rejoined Suzanne, softly; "and it makes me very, very proud to hear you speak so well of him.
I think maman will consent," she added thoughtfully, "and I shall be-oh! so happy-but, of course, nothing is to be thought of until papa is safe. . . ."
Marguerite started.
Suzanne's father!
the Comte de Tournay!--one of those whose life would be jeopardised if Chauvelin succeeded in establishing the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel.
Armand's peril, Chauvelin's threat, his cruel "Either-or-" which she had accepted.
And then her own work in the matter, which should have culminated at one o'clock in Lord Grenville's dining room, when the relentless agent of the French Government would finally learn who was this mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel, who so openly defied an army of spies and placed himself so boldly, and for mere sport, on the side of the enemies of France.
Since then she had heard nothing from Chauvelin.
She had concluded that he had failed, and yet, she had not felt anxious about Armand, because her husband had promised her that Armand would be safe.
But now, suddenly, as Suzanne prattled merrily along, an awful horror came upon her for what she had done.
Chauvelin had told her nothing, it was true; but she remembered how sarcastic and evil he looked when she took final leave of him after the ball.
Had he discovered something then?
Had he already laid his plans for catching the daring plotter, red handed, in France, and sending him to the guillotine without compunction or delay?
Marguerite turned sick with horror, and her hand convulsively clutched the ring in her dress.
"You are not listening, CHERIE," said Suzanne, reproachfully, as she paused in her long, highly interesting narrative.
"Yes, yes, darling-indeed I am," said Marguerite with an effort, forcing herself to smile.
"I love to hear you talking . . . and your happiness makes me so very glad. . . .
Sir Andrew Ffoulkes is a noble English gentleman; he has money and position, the Comtesse will not refuse her consent. . . . But . . . now, little one . . . tell me . . . what is the latest news about your father?"
"Oh!" said Suzanne with mad glee, "the best we could possibly hear.
My Lord Hastings came to see maman early this morning.
He said that all is now well with dear papa, and we may safely expect him here in England in less than four days."
"Yes," said Marguerite, whose glowing eyes were fastened on Suzanne's lips, as she continued merrily:
"Oh, we have no fear now!
You don't know, CHERIE, that that great and noble Scarlet Pimpernel himself has gone to save papa.
He has gone, CHERIE . . . actually gone . . ." added Suzanne excitedly, "he was in London this morning; he will be in Calais, perhaps, to morrow . . . where he will meet papa . . . and then . . . and then . . ."
The blow had fallen.
He had gone to Calais, had been in London this morning . . . he . . . the Scarlet Pimpernel . . .
Percy Blakeney . . . her husband . . . whom she had betrayed last night to Chauvelin.
Percy . . .
Percy . . . her husband . . . the Scarlet Pimpernel . . .
Oh! how could she have been so blind?
And all for the sheer sport and devilry of course!--saving men, women and children from death, as other men destroy and kill animals for the excitement, the love of the thing.
No wonder that Chauvelin's spies had failed to detect, in the apparently brainless nincompoop, the man whose reckless daring and resourceful ingenuity had baffled the keenest French spies, both in France and in England.
Had his astute mind guessed the secret, then?
Here lay the whole awful, horrible, amazing puzzle.
In betraying a nameless stranger to his fate in order to save her brother, had Marguerite Blakeney sent her husband to his death?
"But what is it, CHERIE?" said little Suzanne, now genuinely alarmed, for Marguerite's colour had become dull and ashen.
"Are you ill, Marguerite?
What is it?"
"Nothing, nothing, child," she murmured, as in a dream.
You said . . . the Scarlet Pimpernel had gone today . . . ?"
You frighten me. . . ."
I must be alone a minute-and-dear one . . .
I may have to go away-you'll understand?"
"I understand that something has happened, CHERIE, and that you want to be alone.
Don't think of me.
My maid, Lucile, has not yet gone . . . we will go back together . . . don't think of me."
Child as she was, she felt the poignancy of her friend's grief, and with the infinite tact of her girlish tenderness, she did not try to pry into it, but was ready to efface herself.
Marguerite did not move, she remained there, thinking . . . wondering what was to be done.
Just as little Suzanne was about to mount the terrace steps, a groom came running round the house towards his mistress.
He carried a sealed letter in his hand.
Suzanne instinctively turned back; her heart told her that here perhaps was further ill news for her friend, and she felt that poor Margot was not in a fit state to bear any more.
The groom stood respectfully beside his mistress, then he handed her the sealed letter.
"What is that?" asked Marguerite.
"Just come by runner, my lady."
Marguerite took the letter mechanically, and turned it over in her trembling fingers.
"Who sent it?" she said.
"The runner said, my lady," replied the groom, "that his orders were to deliver this, and that your ladyship would understand from whom it came."
Marguerite tore open the envelope.
Already her instinct told her what it contained, and her eyes only glanced at it mechanically.
Marguerite's senses reeled, her very soul seemed to be leaving her body; she tottered, and would have fallen but for Suzanne's arm round her waist.
With superhuman effort she regained control over herself-there was yet much to be done.
"Bring that runner here to me," she said to the servant, with much calm. "He has not gone?"
"No, my lady."
The groom went, and Marguerite turned to Suzanne.
"And you, child, run within.
Tell Lucile to get ready.
I fear that I must send you home, child.
Suzanne made no reply.
She kissed Marguerite tenderly and obeyed without a word; the child was overawed by the terrible, nameless misery in her friend's face.
A minute later the groom returned, followed by the runner who had brought the letter.
"Who gave you this packet?" asked Marguerite.
"A gentleman, my lady," replied the man, "at 'The Rose and Thistle' inn opposite Charing Cross.
He said you would understand."
"At 'The Rose and Thistle'?
"He was waiting for the coach, your ladyship, which he had ordered."
"The coach?"
"Yes, my lady.
A special coach he had ordered.
I understood from his man that he was posting straight to Dover."
"That's enough.
You may go." Then she turned to the groom: "My coach and the four swiftest horses in the stables, to be ready at once."
Marguerite remained standing for a moment on the lawn quite alone.
Her graceful figure was as rigid as a statue, her eyes were fixed, her hands were tightly clasped across her breast; her lips moved as they murmured with pathetic heart breaking persistence,--
"What's to be done?
What's to be done?
Where to find him?--Oh, God! grant me light."
But this was not the moment for remorse and despair.
She had done-unwittingly-an awful and terrible thing-the very worst crime, in her eyes, that woman ever committed-she saw it in all its horror.
She ought to have known! she ought to have known!
How could she imagine that a man who could love with so much intensity as Percy Blakeney had loved her from the first-how could such a man be the brainless idiot he chose to appear?
She, at least, ought to have known that he was wearing a mask, and having found that out, she should have torn it from his face, whenever they were alone together.
But there was no time now to go over the past.
By her own blindness she had sinned; now she must repay, not by empty remorse, but by prompt and useful action.
Percy had started for Calais, utterly unconscious of the fact that his most relentless enemy was on his heels.
He had set sail early that morning from London Bridge.
Provided he had a favourable wind, he would no doubt be in France within twenty four hours; no doubt he had reckoned on the wind and chosen this route.
Chauvelin, on the other hand, would post to Dover, charter a vessel there, and undoubtedly reach Calais much about the same time.
Once in Calais, Percy would meet all those who were eagerly waiting for the noble and brave Scarlet Pimpernel, who had come to rescue them from horrible and unmerited death.
With Chauvelin's eyes now fixed upon his every movement, Percy would thus not only be endangering his own life, but that of Suzanne's father, the old Comte de Tournay, and of those other fugitives who were waiting for him and trusting in him.
Unfortunately, she could not do all this quite alone.
Once in Calais she would not know where to find her husband, whilst Chauvelin, in stealing the papers at Dover, had obtained the whole itinerary.
Above every thing, she wished to warn Percy.
She knew enough about him by now to understand that he would never abandon those who trusted in him, that he would not turn his back from danger, and leave the Comte de Tournay to fall into the bloodthirsty hands that knew of no mercy.
But if he were warned, he might form new plans, be more wary, more prudent.
Unconsciously, he might fall into a cunning trap, but-once warned-he might yet succeed.
Her whole body stiffened as with a great and firm resolution.
This she meant to do, if God gave her wits and strength.
Her eyes lost their fixed look; they glowed with inward fire at the thought of meeting him again so soon, in the very midst of most deadly perils; they sparkled with the joy of sharing these dangers with him-of helping him perhaps-of being with him at the last-if she failed.
The childlike sweet face had become hard and set, the curved mouth was closed tightly over her clenched teeth.
She meant to do or die, with him and for his sake.
A frown, which spoke of an iron will and unbending resolution, appeared between the two straight brows; already her plans were formed.
She would go and find Sir Andrew Ffoulkes first; he was Percy's best friend, and Marguerite remembered, with a thrill, with what blind enthusiasm the young man always spoke of his mysterious leader.
He would help her where she needed help; her coach was ready.
A change of raiment, and a farewell to little Suzanne, and she could be on her way.
mr Williams pointed at the sunflower, but I was forced to be very reserved to him; for the poor gentleman has no guard, no caution at all.
We have just supped together, all three: and I cannot yet think that all must be right.--Only I am resolved not to marry, if I can help it; and I will give no encouragement, I am resolved, at least, till I am with you.
Your ever dutiful DAUGHTER.
MY DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,
She pressed me, when she came to bed, very much, to give encouragement to mr Williams, and said many things in his behalf; and blamed my shyness to him.
I told her, I was resolved to give no encouragement, till I had talked to my father and mother.
She said, he fancied I thought of somebody else, or I could never be so insensible.
I assured her, as I could do very safely, that there was not a man on earth I wished to have: and as to mr Williams, he might do better by far: and I had proposed so much happiness in living with my poor father and mother, that I could not think of any scheme of life with pleasure, till I had tried that.
I asked her for my money; and she said, it was above in her strong box, but that I should have it to morrow.
All these things look well, as I said.
But pray don't encourage him, as I said; for he is much too heady and precipitate as to this matter, in my way of thinking; though, to be sure, he is a very good man, and I am much obliged to him.
Monday morning.
Alas a day! we have bad news from poor mr Williams.
He has had a sad mischance; fallen among rogues in his way home last night: but by good chance has saved my papers.
This is the account he gives of it to mrs Jewkes:
'GOOD mrs
JEWKES,
'I have had a sore misfortune in going from you.
They rummaged my pockets, and took from me my snuff box, my seal ring, and half a guinea, and some silver, and halfpence; also my handkerchief, and two or three letters I had in my pockets.
By good fortune, the letter mrs Pamela gave me was in my bosom, and so that escaped but they bruised my head and face, and cursing me for having no more money, tipped me into the dam, crying, be there, parson, till to morrow!
My shins and knees were bruised much in the fall against one of the stumps; and I had like to have been suffocated in water and mud.
To be sure, I shan't be able to stir out this day or two: for I am a frightful spectacle!
My cassock is sadly torn, as is my band. To be sure, I was much frightened, for a robbery in these parts has not been known many years.
Diligent search is making after the rogues.
This did not hinder me in writing a letter, though with great pain, as I do this, (To be sure this good man can keep no secret!) and sending it away by a man and horse, this morning.
I am, good mrs Jewkes,
'Your most obliged humble servant.'
'God be praised it is no worse!
And I find I have got no cold, though miserably wet from top to toe.
My fright, I believe, prevented me from catching cold: for I was not rightly myself for some hours, and know not how I got home.
I will write a letter of thanks this night, if I am able, to my kind patron, for his inestimable goodness to me.
The wicked brute fell a laughing, when she had read this letter, till her fat sides shook.
Said she, I can but think how the poor parson looked, after parting with his pretty mistress in such high spirits, when he found himself at the bottom of the dam!
And what a figure he must cut in his tattered band and cassock, and without a hat and wig, when he got home.
I heeded not her reflections; but as I have been used to causes for mistrusts, I cannot help saying, that I don't like this thing: And their taking his letters most alarms me.--How happy it was they missed my packet!
I knew not what to think of it!--But why should I let every accident break my peace?
Yet it will do so, while I stay here.
mrs Jewkes is mightily at me, to go with her in the chariot, to visit mr Williams.
And she is gone without me.
I have strange temptations to get away in her absence, for all these fine appearances.
But, alas for me!
I have no money, if I should, to buy any body's civilities, or to pay for necessaries or lodgings.
But I'll go into the garden, and resolve afterwards----
I could not see I was watched; so this looks well.
But if any thing should go bad afterwards, I should never forgive myself, for not taking this opportunity.
So I got in again, for fear he should come at me.
Nobody saw me, however.--Do you think there are such things as witches and spirits?
If there be, I believe, in my heart, mrs Jewkes has got this bull of her side.
I will go down again, I think!
But yet my heart misgives me, because of the difficulties before me, in escaping; and being so poor and so friendless!--O good God! the preserver of the innocent! direct me what to do!
Well, I have just now a sort of strange persuasion upon me, that I ought to try to get way, and leave the issue to Providence.
I have not the courage to go, neither can I think to stay.
But I must resolve.
The gardener was in sight last time; so made me come up again.
Once more I'll venture.
God direct my footsteps, and make smooth my path and my way to safety!
Well, here I am, come back again!
frightened, like a fool, out of all my purposes!
O how terrible every thing appears to me!
And now I am gone, to be sure!
God forgive me, (but I had a sad lie at my tongue's end,) said I; Though mrs Jewkes is sometimes a little hard upon me, yet I know not where I am without her: I go up, and I come down to walk about in the garden; and, not having her, know scarcely what to do with myself.
So here I am again, and here likely to be; for I have no courage to help myself any where else.
Monday afternoon.
So, mrs Jewkes is returned from her visit: Well, said she, I would have you set your heart at rest; for mr Williams will do very well again.
He is not half so bad as he fancied.
He has only a few scratches on his face; which, said she, I suppose he got by grappling among the gravel at the bottom of the dam, to try to find a hole in the ground, to hide himself from the robbers.
He says in his letter, he was a frightful spectacle: He might be so, indeed, when he first came in a doors; but he looks well enough now: and, only for a few groans now and then, when he thinks of his danger, I see nothing is the matter with him.
So, mrs Pamela, said she, I would have you be very easy about it.
I am glad of it, said I, for all your jokes, to mrs Jewkes.
Well, said she, he talks of nothing but you: and when I told him I would fain have persuaded you to come with me, the man was out of his wits with his gratitude to me: and so has laid open all his heart to me, and told me all that has passed, and was contriving between you two.
mrs Jewkes, mrs Jewkes, this might have done with me, had he had any thing that he could have told you of.
But you know well enough, that had we been disposed, we had no opportunity for it, from your watchful care and circumspection.
No, said she, that's very true, mrs Pamela; not so much as for that declaration that he owned before me, he had found opportunity, for all my watchfulness, to make you.
Come, come, said she, no more of these shams with me!
You have an excellent head piece for your years; but may be I am as cunning as you.--However, said she, all is well now; because my watchments are now over, by my master's direction.
How have you employed yourself in my absence?
She was so earnest, that I mistrusted she did this to pump me; and I knew how, now, to account for her kindness to mr Williams in her visit to him; which was only to get out of him what she could.
But I am sure he must have said more than he should.--And I am the more apprehensive all is not right, because she has now been actually, these two hours, shut up a writing; though she pretended she had given me up all her stores of papers, etc and that I should write for her.
I begin to wish I had ventured every thing and gone off, when I might.
Indeed, said I, I have no thanks to give, till I am with my father and mother: and besides, I sent a letter, as you know; but have had no answer to it.
She said, she thought that his letter to mr Williams was sufficient; and the least I could do was to thank him, if but in two lines.
No need of it, said I; for I don't intend to have mr Williams: What then is that letter to me?
I don't like all this.
O my foolish fears of bulls and robbers!--For now all my uneasiness begins to double upon me.
O what has this incautious man said!
That, no doubt, is the subject of her long letter.
I will close this day's writing, with just saying, that she is mighty silent and reserved, to what she was: and says nothing but No, or Yes, to what I ask.
This cut me to the heart; and, at the same time, stopped my mouth.
Tuesday, Wednesday.
He asked, If I would take a turn in the garden with mrs Jewkes and him.
No, said she, I can't go. Said he, May not mrs Pamela take a walk?--No, said she; I desire she won't.
Why, mrs Jewkes? said he: I am afraid I have somehow disobliged you.
Not at all, replied she; but I suppose you will soon be at liberty to walk together as much as you please: and I have sent a messenger for my last instructions, about this and more weighty matters; and when they come I shall leave you to do as you both will; but, till then, it is no matter how little you are together.
This alarmed us both; and he seemed quite struck of a heap, and put on, as I thought, a self accusing countenance.
I left them both together, and retired to my closet to write a letter for the tiles; but having no time for a copy, I will give you the substance only.
I put this in the usual place in the evening; and now wait with impatience for an answer.
Thursday.
I have the following answer:
'DEAREST MADAM,
'I am utterly confounded, and must plead guilty to all your just reproaches.
I would expose him all the world over if he did.
But it is not, cannot be in him.
This gives me a little pain; but I hope all will end well, and we shall soon hear, if it be necessary to pursue our former intentions.
If it be, I will lose no time to provide a horse for you, and another for myself; for I can never do either God or myself better service, though I were to forego all my expectations for it here, I am 'Your most faithful humble servant.'
'I was too free indeed with mrs Jewkes, led to it by her dissimulation, and by her pretended concern to make me happy with you.
I hinted, that I would not have scrupled to have procured your deliverance by any means; and that I had proposed to you, as the only honourable one, marriage with me.
But I assured her, though she would hardly believe me, that you discouraged my application: which is too true!
But not a word of the back door key, etc'
mrs Jewkes continues still sullen and ill natured, and I am almost afraid to speak to her.
She watches me as close as ever, and pretends to wonder why I shun her company as I do.
I have just put under the tiles these lines inspired by my fears, which are indeed very strong; and, I doubt, not without reason.
'SIR,
'Every thing gives me additional disturbance.
The missed letter of john Arnold's makes me suspect a plot.
Are you sure, however, the London journey is not to be a Lincolnshire one?
May not john, who has been once a traitor, be so again?--Why need I be thus in doubt?--If I could have this horse, I would turn the reins on his neck, and trust to Providence to guide him for my safeguard!
For I would not endanger you, now just upon the edge of your preferment.
'Were my life in question, instead of my honesty, I would not wish to involve you, or any body, in the least difficulty, for so worthless a poor creature.
But, O sir! my soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess; though my quality is inferior to that of the meanest slave.
Friday.
'MADAM,
'I think you are too apprehensive by much; I am sorry for your uneasiness.
You may depend upon me, and all I can do.
But I make no doubt of the London journey, nor of John's contrition and fidelity. I have just received, from my Gainsborough friend, this letter, as I suppose, from your good father, in a cover, directed for me, as I had desired.
I hope it contains nothing to add to your uneasiness.
Things, I hope, must be better than you expect.
'Your most faithful humble servant.'
'My DEAREST DAUGHTER,
'Our prayers are at length heard, and we are overwhelmed with joy.
Blessed be the Divine goodness, which has enabled thee to withstand so many temptations!
We have not yet had leisure to read through your long accounts of all your hardships.
I say long, because I wonder how you could find time and opportunity for them: but otherwise they are the delight of our spare hours; and we shall read them over and over, as long as we live, with thankfulness to God, who has given us so virtuous and so discreet a daughter.
How happy is our lot in the midst of our poverty!
O let none ever think children a burden to them; when the poorest circumstances can produce so much riches in a Pamela!
Persist, my dear daughter, in the same excellent course; and we shall not envy the highest estate, but defy them to produce such a daughter as ours.
'I said, we had not read through all yours in course.
But seeing your virtue, his heart is touched; and he has, no doubt, been awakened by your good example.
God bless him!--happy.
But, as you say, you had rather not marry at present, far be it from us to offer violence to your inclination!
But, alas! my child, what can we do for you?--To partake our hard lot, and involve yourself into as hard a life, would not help us, but add to your afflictions.
But it will be time enough to talk of these things, when we have the pleasure you now put us in hope of, of seeing you with us; which God grant.
Amen, amen, say 'Your most indulgent parents.
Amen!'
Again we say, God bless him for ever!
'O what a deal we have to say to you!
God give us a happy meeting! We understand the 'squire is setting out for London.
He is a fine gentleman, and has wit at will.
But I hope he will now reform.'
But I will proceed with my hopeless story.
I saw mr Williams was a little nettled at my impatience; and so I wrote to assure him I would be as easy as I could, and wholly directed by him; especially as my father, whose respects I mentioned, had assured me my master was setting out for London, which he must have somehow from his own family or he would not have written me word of it.
Saturday, Sunday.
mr Williams has been here both these days, as usual; but is very indifferently received still by mrs Jewkes; and, to avoid suspicion, I left them together, and went up to my closet, most of the time he was here.
He and she, I found by her, had a quarrel: and she seems quite out of humour with him: but I thought it best not to say any thing: and he said, he would very little trouble the house till he had an answer to his letter from mr B----.
And she returned, The less, the better. Poor man! he has got but little by his openness, making mrs Jewkes his confidant, as she bragged, and would have had me to do likewise.
I am more and more satisfied there is mischief brewing; and shall begin to hide my papers, and be circumspect.
"Howdye, little girl!" And the cat had got her tongue.
What should she do?
"Go home, I tell ye-Uncle Judd's shot.
"No, no, NO!
"Dad!" she said.
"No-no!"
There was more.
"Sure!
"Well, see you again.
"No, but one's comin'--Dave."
"Where you goin'?"
"I'm not worried."
"Well, you better be," said Budd sharply.
"Look here, Jack, you're seein' things wrong.
"Don't you worry, Jack."
"All right, Sam."
"I've heard."
"But I ain't."
That was what Budd said.
Well, had he given her a chance?
Hale choked.
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THE FEDERALIST PAPERS
General Introduction
For the Independent Journal.
saturday october twenty seventh seventeen eighty seven
HAMILTON
To the People of the State of New York:
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.
If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event.
Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good.
But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.
The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.
Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable-the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears.
So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society.
And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists.
Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question.
Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties.
And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion.
It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust.
In the course of the preceding observations, I have had an eye, my fellow citizens, to putting you upon your guard against all attempts, from whatever quarter, to influence your decision in a matter of the utmost moment to your welfare, by any impressions other than those which may result from the evidence of truth.
You will, no doubt, at the same time, have collected from the general scope of them, that they proceed from a source not unfriendly to the new Constitution.
Yes, my countrymen, I own to you that, after having given it an attentive consideration, I am clearly of opinion it is your interest to adopt it. I am convinced that this is the safest course for your liberty, your dignity, and your happiness.
I frankly acknowledge to you my convictions, and I will freely lay before you the reasons on which they are founded.
I shall not, however, multiply professions on this head.
They shall at least be offered in a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth.
I propose, in a series of papers, to discuss the following interesting particulars:
In the progress of this discussion I shall endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance, that may seem to have any claim to your attention.
It may perhaps be thought superfluous to offer arguments to prove the utility of the UNION, a point, no doubt, deeply engraved on the hearts of the great body of the people in every State, and one, which it may be imagined, has no adversaries.
For nothing can be more evident, to those who are able to take an enlarged view of the subject, than the alternative of an adoption of the new Constitution or a dismemberment of the Union.
This shall accordingly constitute the subject of my next address.
For the Independent Journal.
wednesday october thirty first seventeen eighty seven
To the People of the State of New York:
WHEN the people of America reflect that they are now called upon to decide a question, which, in its consequences, must prove one of the most important that ever engaged their attention, the propriety of their taking a very comprehensive, as well as a very serious, view of it, will be evident.
It has until lately been a received and uncontradicted opinion that the prosperity of the people of America depended on their continuing firmly united, and the wishes, prayers, and efforts of our best and wisest citizens have been constantly directed to that object.
But politicians now appear, who insist that this opinion is erroneous, and that instead of looking for safety and happiness in union, we ought to seek it in a division of the States into distinct confederacies or sovereignties. However extraordinary this new doctrine may appear, it nevertheless has its advocates; and certain characters who were much opposed to it formerly, are at present of the number.
Whatever may be the arguments or inducements which have wrought this change in the sentiments and declarations of these gentlemen, it certainly would not be wise in the people at large to adopt these new political tenets without being fully convinced that they are founded in truth and sound policy.
Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants.
As a nation we have made peace and war; as a nation we have vanquished our common enemies; as a nation we have formed alliances, and made treaties, and entered into various compacts and conventions with foreign states.
A strong sense of the value and blessings of union induced the people, at a very early period, to institute a federal government to preserve and perpetuate it.
They formed it almost as soon as they had a political existence; nay, at a time when their habitations were in flames, when many of their citizens were bleeding, and when the progress of hostility and desolation left little room for those calm and mature inquiries and reflections which must ever precede the formation of a wise and well balanced government for a free people.
It is not to be wondered at, that a government instituted in times so inauspicious, should on experiment be found greatly deficient and inadequate to the purpose it was intended to answer.
This intelligent people perceived and regretted these defects.
Still continuing no less attached to union than enamored of liberty, they observed the danger which immediately threatened the former and more remotely the latter; and being persuaded that ample security for both could only be found in a national government more wisely framed, they as with one voice, convened the late convention at Philadelphia, to take that important subject under consideration.
This convention composed of men who possessed the confidence of the people, and many of whom had become highly distinguished by their patriotism, virtue and wisdom, in times which tried the minds and hearts of men, undertook the arduous task.
In the mild season of peace, with minds unoccupied by other subjects, they passed many months in cool, uninterrupted, and daily consultation; and finally, without having been awed by power, or influenced by any passions except love for their country, they presented and recommended to the people the plan produced by their joint and very unanimous councils.
Admit, for so is the fact, that this plan is only RECOMMENDED, not imposed, yet let it be remembered that it is neither recommended to BLIND approbation, nor to BLIND reprobation; but to that sedate and candid consideration which the magnitude and importance of the subject demand, and which it certainly ought to receive.
But this (as was remarked in the foregoing number of this paper) is more to be wished than expected, that it may be so considered and examined.
Experience on a former occasion teaches us not to be too sanguine in such hopes.
It is not yet forgotten that well grounded apprehensions of imminent danger induced the people of America to form the memorable Congress of seventeen seventy four. That body recommended certain measures to their constituents, and the event proved their wisdom; yet it is fresh in our memories how soon the press began to teem with pamphlets and weekly papers against those very measures.
Many, indeed, were deceived and deluded, but the great majority of the people reasoned and decided judiciously; and happy they are in reflecting that they did so.
They considered that the Congress was composed of many wise and experienced men.
That, being convened from different parts of the country, they brought with them and communicated to each other a variety of useful information.
That they were individually interested in the public liberty and prosperity, and therefore that it was not less their inclination than their duty to recommend only such measures as, after the most mature deliberation, they really thought prudent and advisable.
Or why is it suggested that three or four confederacies would be better than one?
That certainly would be the case, and I sincerely wish that it may be as clearly foreseen by every good citizen, that whenever the dissolution of the Union arrives, America will have reason to exclaim, in the words of the poet: "FAREWELL!
The Same Subject Continued (Concerning Dangers From Foreign Force and Influence)
For the Independent Journal.
wednesday november seventh seventeen eighty seven
JAY
To the People of the State of New York:
But the safety of the people of America against dangers from FOREIGN force depends not only on their forbearing to give JUST causes of war to other nations, but also on their placing and continuing themselves in such a situation as not to INVITE hostility or insult; for it need not be observed that there are PRETENDED as well as just causes of war.
With them and with most other European nations we are rivals in navigation and the carrying trade; and we shall deceive ourselves if we suppose that any of them will rejoice to see it flourish; for, as our carrying trade cannot increase without in some degree diminishing theirs, it is more their interest, and will be more their policy, to restrain than to promote it.
In the trade to China and India, we interfere with more than one nation, inasmuch as it enables us to partake in advantages which they had in a manner monopolized, and as we thereby supply ourselves with commodities which we used to purchase from them.
Spain thinks it convenient to shut the Mississippi against us on the one side, and Britain excludes us from the Saint Lawrence on the other; nor will either of them permit the other waters which are between them and us to become the means of mutual intercourse and traffic.
That situation consists in the best possible state of defense, and necessarily depends on the government, the arms, and the resources of the country.
One government can collect and avail itself of the talents and experience of the ablest men, in whatever part of the Union they may be found.
It can harmonize, assimilate, and protect the several parts and members, and extend the benefit of its foresight and precautions to each.
In the formation of treaties, it will regard the interest of the whole, and the particular interests of the parts as connected with that of the whole.
It can apply the resources and power of the whole to the defense of any particular part, and that more easily and expeditiously than State governments or separate confederacies can possibly do, for want of concert and unity of system.
It can place the militia under one plan of discipline, and, by putting their officers in a proper line of subordination to the Chief Magistrate, will, as it were, consolidate them into one corps, and thereby render them more efficient than if divided into thirteen or into three or four distinct independent companies.
What would the militia of Britain be if the English militia obeyed the government of England, if the Scotch militia obeyed the government of Scotland, and if the Welsh militia obeyed the government of Wales? Suppose an invasion; would those three governments (if they agreed at all) be able, with all their respective forces, to operate against the enemy so effectually as the single government of Great Britain would?
We have heard much of the fleets of Britain, and the time may come, if we are wise, when the fleets of America may engage attention.
But if one national government, had not so regulated the navigation of Britain as to make it a nursery for seamen-if one national government had not called forth all the national means and materials for forming fleets, their prowess and their thunder would never have been celebrated.
Apply these facts to our own case.
Leave America divided into thirteen or, if you please, into three or four independent governments-what armies could they raise and pay-what fleets could they ever hope to have?
But admit that they might be willing to help the invaded State or confederacy.
How, and when, and in what proportion shall aids of men and money be afforded?
Who shall settle the terms of peace, and in case of disputes what umpire shall decide between them and compel acquiescence?
Various difficulties and inconveniences would be inseparable from such a situation; whereas one government, watching over the general and common interests, and combining and directing the powers and resources of the whole, would be free from all these embarrassments, and conduce far more to the safety of the people.
But whatever may be our situation, whether firmly united under one national government, or split into a number of confederacies, certain it is, that foreign nations will know and view it exactly as it is; and they will act toward us accordingly.
If they see that our national government is efficient and well administered, our trade prudently regulated, our militia properly organized and disciplined, our resources and finances discreetly managed, our credit re-established, our people free, contented, and united, they will be much more disposed to cultivate our friendship than provoke our resentment.
And when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his other sons, they hated him, and could not speak to him.
And Jehovah was with Joseph and showed kindness to him, and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison, so that the keeper of the prison gave to Joseph's charge all the prisoners who were in the prison, and for whatever they did he was responsible.
And Pharaoh said to Joseph, See, I have appointed you over all the land of Egypt.
Then they cried before him, Bow the knee!
He that respects himself is safe from others; He wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
The late Samuel l Clemens (Mark Twain) advised a young man who desired to enter business to select the firm with which he wished to be associated, then ask that they give him work, without mentioning the subject of compensation.
It concretely illustrates the fact that the first essential of success is the willingness to serve.
Do you accept George Eliot's definition of genius as "the capacity for unlimited work"? To what extent does a man's faith in God and in his fellow men determine his ability to win success?
THE LIMITATIONS AND TEMPTATIONS OF JOSEPH'S EARLY LIFE.
In what ways did his father show his favoritism towards Joseph? The Hebrew word rendered in the older translations, "coat of many colors," means literally, "long sleeved tunic."
This garment, like those worn by wealthy Chinese when in native costume, distinguished the rich or the nobility, who were not under the necessity of engaging in manual labor.
Egypt, with its marvelous natural resources, its peculiar climate, its irrigation, which usually guarantees good crops, and its versatile people, has always been pre eminently the land of opportunity.
A certain Dudu (David) was one of the most trusted officials of this king.
This was perhaps the Joseph of the Biblical account.
Is there any evidence that Joseph complained because of the injustice of his brothers?
What influences led him to resist this temptation?
Analyze his probable motives in detail.
In modern life as in the ancient story, the place usually seeks the man who is fitted to fill it.
If not, why not?
And Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them heads over the people, rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.
Love is the fulfilling of the law.--saint Paul.
If chosen men could never be alone, In deep mid silence, open doored with God No greatness ever had been dreamed or done.
THE NEEDS THAT GIVE RISE TO LAW.
According to the researches of the best anthropologists, savages live in very loosely organized groups, with no permanent ruler, no regular family law.
Each separate group has its totem, its general rules with reference to the marriage relation, to hunting and fishing, to shelter and protection.
They are largely negative.
Soon through his activities these almost instinctive habits, guided by rules, assume the nature of customs that have a sanction, often of religion, practically always of enforcement through the patriarch.
Later, as the tribe enters the pastoral state, private property is established and laws for its care are made.
Among them the less disciplined, the less intelligently directed groups perish.
But as this sense of fear or right or justice or love, associated with a Being felt to be divine, is not universal, inasmuch as many members of society are found ready to act selfishly, taking the law into their own hands, force is needed in all stages of society to put the rules and laws into effect.
With every law, as Austin says, must go a penalty.
Arise, O Jehovah, And let thine enemies be scattered, And let those who hate thee flee before thee.
And when it rested, he would say,
THE WILDERNESS ENVIRONMENT.
They must be interpreted in the light of the peculiar background of the wilderness and of the nomadic life which flourishes there to day as it did in the past. The hebrews on escaping from Egypt entered the South Country, which extends seventy miles from the rocky hills of Judah southward until it merges into the barren desert.
Parallel to these are deep, hot and for the most part waterless valleys.
The home of the hebrews at this time, like that of the modern Arabs, was the tent.
Some scholars hold that this coarse food was the manna of the Biblical accounts.
Upon the complete devotion of each man to the interest of the tribe hung his fate, as well as that of the community as a whole.
Hence, throughout their troubled career the hebrews have been conscious of the presence of God and have found in him their defender and personal friend as has no other people in human history.
As later generations meditated on the perils of the wilderness through which their ancestors passed, they naturally felt that only under the immediate guidance of a divine power could they have escaped.
They were familiar with the way in which the caravans travel through the desert: in front of the leader is borne aloft a brazier filled with coals.
At night these glowing coals seem like a pillar of fire, telling of the presence of their leader and protector.
Is it for you, who keep an inn, to treat passengers at this rate?
More and more surprising things still----
For I must be 'Yours, and only yours.'
'Monday morn, near three o'clock.'
I am 'Yours, etc'
Should I go back, or should I not?--I doubt he has got too great hold in my heart, for me to be easy presently, if I should refuse: And yet this gipsy information makes me fearful.
'tis well for her she can sleep so purely.
I did not think I could have lived under such fatigue.
He asked, What?
And she said, I was come.
And he said, Why, these tender fair ones, I think, bear fatigue better than us men.
Will she come?
My heart is too full of it to express myself as I ought.
I said I had, and hoped it would be brought.
He said it was doubly kind.
She said she would, to be sure.
'Your much grieved sister.'
But I shall see what light this new honour will procure me!--So I'll get ready.
But I won't, I think, change my garb.
Blessed be God for it!
What would you say?--Sir, said I, (a little ashamed,) I think it is too great an honour to go into the chariot with you.
BOOK fourteen.
He also proposed to make him presents on that account. At length he prevailed with Aretas in his suit.
Hale opened his eyes next morning on the little old woman in black, moving ghost like through the dim interior to the kitchen.
"Shore!
She's growed some-an' if she ain't purty, well I'd tell a man!
Keep yo' mouth plum' shut about this here war.
Uncle Billy was bewildered.
Uncle Billy turned back from the gate to the porch.
He's too old fer her."
"She ain't?"
"No, indeed, she ain't."
"It's for you.
"I reckon I will," she said with a happy smile.
Hale watched her while she munched a striped stick of peppermint.
Her teeth were even and white, and most of them flashed when her red lips smiled.
"I hate her," she said fiercely.
"Go away!" she said, digging her fist into her eyes until her face was calm again.
They had reached the spot on the river where he had seen her first, and beyond, the smoke of the cabin was rising above the undergrowth.
Straightway her face was a ray of sunlight.
"Would-I like-to-go-over-"
I'm a gittin' too big."
"I reckon you can," laughed Hale.
Sarved you right fer blabbin' things that hain't yo' business." He shook with laughter.
"Tell June to come down here.
With this thought in his brain, he rode down from the luminous upper world of the moon and stars toward the nether world of drifting mists and black ravines.
The little fellow patronized the feeble and disappointed old man.
But proper pride and this poor lady had never had much acquaintance together.
The very thought of them is odious and low.
O you poor women!
The kindness was too much for the poor epileptic creature.
Little George visited her captivity sometimes and consoled it with feeble gleams of encouragement.
Russell Square was the boundary of her prison: she might walk thither occasionally, but was always back to sleep in her cell at night; to perform cheerless duties; to watch by thankless sick beds; to suffer the harassment and tyranny of querulous disappointed old age.
The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind is pleased so to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise, and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked.
Be gentle with those who are less lucky, if not more deserving.
Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor's accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.
They buried Amelia's mother in the churchyard at Brompton, upon just such a rainy, dark day as Amelia recollected when first she had been there to marry George.
She remembered the old pew woman and clerk.
Her thoughts were away in other times as the parson read.
So she determined with all her might and strength to try and make her old father happy.
What sad, unsatisfactory thoughts those of the widow were!
The children running up and down the slopes and broad paths in the gardens reminded her of George, who was taken from her; the first George was taken from her; her selfish, guilty love, in both instances, had been rebuked and bitterly chastised.
She strove to think it was right that she should be so punished.
She was quite alone in the world.
Old Sedley grew very fond of his daughter after his wife's death, and Amelia had her consolation in doing her duty by the old man.
The idea that he should never see her again depressed him in his lucid hours.
He desired to be buried with a little brown hair chain which he wore round his neck and which, if the truth must be known, he had got from Amelia's maid at Brussels, when the young widow's hair was cut off, during the fever which prostrated her after the death of George Osborne on the plateau at Mount saint John.
But whether it was the sea air, or the hope which sprung up in him afresh, from the day that the ship spread her canvas and stood out of the roads towards home, our friend began to amend, and he was quite well (though as gaunt as a greyhound) before they reached the Cape.
For indeed it was no other than our stout friend who was also a passenger on board the Ramchunder.
After leaving saint Helena he became very generous, disposing of a great quantity of ship stores, claret, preserved meats, and great casks packed with soda water, brought out for his private delectation.
Jos, a little testy about his father's misfortunes and unceremonious applications to him, was soothed down by the Major, who pointed out the elder's ill fortunes and old age.
CHAPTER fifty nine
The Old Piano
The Major's visit left old john Sedley in a great state of agitation and excitement.
Emmy smiled.
"You don't know anything about business, my dear," answered the sire, shaking his head with an important air.
All these twopenny documents arranged on a side table, old Sedley covered them carefully over with a clean bandanna handkerchief (one out of Major Dobbin's lot) and enjoined the maid and landlady of the house, in the most solemn way, not to disturb those papers, which were arranged for the arrival of mr Joseph Sedley the next morning, "mr
Amelia found him up very early the next morning, more eager, more hectic, and more shaky than ever.
"I didn't sleep much, Emmy, my dear," he said.
I wish she was alive, to ride in Jos's carriage once again.
She kept her own and became it very well." And his eyes filled with tears, which trickled down his furrowed old face.
Amelia, as she read out the letter to her father, paused over the latter word; her brother, it was clear, did not know what had happened in the family.
Having partaken of a copious breakfast, with fish, and rice, and hard eggs, at Southampton, he had so far rallied at Winchester as to think a glass of sherry necessary.
At Farnham he stopped to view the Bishop's Castle and to partake of a light dinner of stewed eels, veal cutlets, and French beans, with a bottle of claret.
He was cold over Bagshot Heath, where the native chattered more and more, and Jos Sahib took some brandy and water; in fact, when he drove into town he was as full of wine, beer, meat, pickles, cherry brandy, and tobacco as the steward's cabin of a steam packet.
Jos descended from the post chaise and down the creaking swaying steps in awful state, supported by the new valet from Southampton and the shuddering native, whose brown face was now livid with cold and of the colour of a turkey's gizzard.
The old man was very much affected; so, of course, was his daughter; nor was Jos without feeling.
Distance sanctifies both. Long brooding over those lost pleasures exaggerates their charm and sweetness.
Jos was unaffectedly glad to see and shake the hand of his father, between whom and himself there had been a coolness-glad to see his little sister, whom he remembered so pretty and smiling, and pained at the alteration which time, grief, and misfortune had made in the shattered old man.
Emmy had come out to the door in her black clothes and whispered to him of her mother's death, and not to speak of it to their father.
Not that she would encourage him in the least-the poor uncouth monster-of course not.
Not Miss Binny, she was too old and ill tempered; Miss Osborne? too old too.
Jos's carriage (the temporary one, not the chariot under construction) arrived one day and carried off old Sedley and his daughter-to return no more.
As for Miss Mary, her sorrow at Amelia's departure was such as I shall not attempt to depict.
From childhood upwards she had been with her daily and had attached herself so passionately to that dear good lady that when the grand barouche came to carry her off into splendour, she fainted in the arms of her friend, who was indeed scarcely less affected than the good-natured girl.
Amelia loved her like a daughter. During eleven years the girl had been her constant friend and associate.
Let us hope she was wrong in her judgement.
She had to bear all the blame of his misdoings, and indeed was so utterly gentle and humble as to be made by nature for a victim.
Major Dobbin was exceedingly pleased when, as he was superintending the arrangements of Jos's new house-which the Major insisted should be very handsome and comfortable-the cart arrived from Brompton, bringing the trunks and bandboxes of the emigrants from that village, and with them the old piano.
"I was afraid you didn't care about it."
"Do you, Amelia?" cried the Major.
It was not George's gift; the only one which she had received from her lover, as she thought-the thing she had cherished beyond all others-her dearest relic and prize.
It was not George's relic.
Then, according to her custom, she rebuked herself for her pettishness and ingratitude and determined to make a reparation to honest William for the slight she had not expressed to him, but had felt for his piano.
A few days afterwards, as they were seated in the drawing room, where Jos had fallen asleep with great comfort after dinner, Amelia said with rather a faltering voice to Major Dobbin-
"About what?" said he.
Thank you, William." She held out her hand, but the poor little woman's heart was bleeding; and as for her eyes, of course they were at their work.
But William could hold no more.
"No, only indifferent," Dobbin continued desperately.
I forgot, or I should never have spoken of it so.
How could I love any other but him?
Our dearest, truest, kindest friend and protector?
Had you come a few months sooner perhaps you might have spared me that-that dreadful parting.
"Yes, often," Amelia said.
CHAPTER twelve-ON CLERICAL SNOBS AND SNOBBISHNESS
'Dear mr Snob,' an amiable young correspondent writes, who signs himself Snobling, 'ought the clergyman who, at the request of a noble Duke, lately interrupted a marriage ceremony between two persons perfectly authorised to marry, to be ranked or not among the Clerical Snobs?'
One of the illustrated weekly papers has already seized hold of the clergyman, and blackened him most unmercifully, by representing him in his cassock performing the marriage service.
Let that be sufficient punishment; and, if you please, do not press the query.
It is very likely that if Miss Smith had come with a licence to marry Jones, the parson in question, not seeing old Smith present, would have sent off the beadle in a cab to let the old gentleman know what was going on; and would have delayed the service until the arrival of Smith senior.
In either of which cases, you see, dear Snobling, that though the parson would not have been authorised, yet he might have been excused for interfering.
He has no more right to stop my marriage than to stop my dinner, to both of which, as a free born Briton, I am entitled by law, if I can pay for them.
But if the clergyman did in the Duke's case what he would NOT do in Smith's; if he has no more acquaintance with the Coeurdelion family than I have with the Royal and Serene House of Saxe Coburg Gotha,--THEN, I confess, my dear Snobling, your question might elicit a disagreeable reply, and one which I respectfully decline to give.
I wonder what Sir George Tufto would say, if a sentry left his post because a noble lord (not the least connected with the service) begged the sentinel not to do his duty!
What, gentlemen, can't we even in the Church acknowledge a republic?
There, at least, the Heralds' College itself might allow that we all of us have the same pedigree, and are direct descendants of Eve and Adam, whose inheritance is divided amongst us.
A story is current of a celebrated NOUVEAU RICHE, who having had occasion to oblige that excellent prelate the Bishop of Bullocksmithy, asked his Lordship, in return, to confirm his children privately in his Lordship's own chapel; which ceremony the grateful prelate accordingly performed.
Can satire go farther than this?
It is as if a man wouldn't go to heaven unless he went in a special train, or as if he thought (as some people think about vaccination) Confirmation more effectual when administered at first hand.
This is only a little more openly and undisguisedly snobbish than the cases before alluded to.
A well bred Snob is just as secretly proud of his riches and honours as a PARVENU Snob who makes the most ludicrous exhibition of them; and a high born Marchioness or Duchess just as vain of herself and her diamonds, as Queen Quashyboo, who sews a pair of epaulets on to her skirt, and turns out in state in a cocked hat and feathers.
When, for instance, Tom Sniffle first went into the country as Curate for mr Fuddleston (Sir Huddleston Fuddleston's brother), who resided on some other living, there could not be a more kind, hardworking, and excellent creature than Tom.
His conduct to his poor was admirable.
He wrote annually reams of the best intentioned and vapid sermons.
When Lord Brandyball's family came down into the country, and invited him to dine at Brandyball Park, Sniffle was so agitated that he almost forgot how to say grace, and upset a bowl of currant jelly sauce in Lady Fanny Toffy's lap.
He quarrelled with his aunt for dining out every night.
He DOUBLE BARRELLED his name, (as many poor Snobs do,) and instead of t Sniffle, as formerly, came out, in a porcelain card, as Rev.
As for poor Tom, he was over head and ears in debt as well as in love: his creditors came down upon him.
mr Hemp, of Portugal Street, proclaimed his name lately as a reverend outlaw; and he has been seen at various foreign watering places; sometimes doing duty; sometimes 'coaching' a stray gentleman's son at Carlsruhe or Kissingen; sometimes-must we say it?--lurking about the roulette tables with a tuft to his chin.
If temptation had not come upon this unhappy fellow in the shape of a Lord Brandyball, he might still have been following his profession, humbly and worthily.
He might have married his cousin with four thousand pounds, the wine merchant's daughter (the old gentleman quarrelled with his nephew for not soliciting wine orders from Lord b for him): he might have had seven children, and taken private pupils, and eked out his income, and lived and died a country parson.
Could he have done better?
CHAPTER four.
Is it not unaccountable that, in the midst of all my increased veneration for my patron, the first tumult of my emotion was scarcely subsided, before the old question that had excited my conjectures recurred to my mind, Was he the murderer?
It was a kind of fatal impulse, that seemed destined to hurry me to my destruction.
That was as completely accounted for from the consideration of his excessive sensibility in matters of honour, as it would have been upon the supposition of the most atrocious guilt.
Knowing, as he did, that such a charge had once been connected with his name, he would of course be perpetually uneasy, and suspect some latent insinuation at every possible opportunity.
He would doubt and fear, lest every man with whom he conversed harboured the foulest suspicion against him.
In my case he found that I was in possession of some information, more than he was aware of, without its being possible for him to decide to what it amounted, whether I had heard a just or unjust, a candid or calumniatory tale.
The fluctuating state of my mind produced a contention of opposite principles, that by turns usurped dominion over my conduct.
mr Falkland, who was most painfully alive to every thing that related to his honour, saw these variations, and betrayed his consciousness of them now in one manner, and now in another, frequently before I was myself aware, sometimes almost before they existed.
The situation of both was distressing; we were each of us a plague to the other; and I often wondered, that the forbearance and benignity of my master was not at length exhausted, and that he did not determine to thrust from him for ever so incessant an observer.
I had some consolation in the midst of my restlessness.
Curiosity is a principle that carries its pleasures, as well as its pains, along with it.
But to mr Falkland there was no consolation.
What he endured in the intercourse between us appeared to be gratuitous evil.
He had only to wish that there was no such person as myself in the world, and to curse the hour when his humanity led him to rescue me from my obscurity, and place me in his service.
The constant state of vigilance and suspicion in which my mind was retained, worked a very rapid change in my character.
It seemed to have all the effect that might have been expected from years of observation and experience.
The strictness with which I endeavoured to remark what passed in the mind of one man, and the variety of conjectures into which I was led, appeared, as it were, to render me a competent adept in the different modes in which the human intellect displays its secret workings.
As to his guilt, I could scarcely bring myself to doubt that in some way or other, sooner or later, I should arrive at the knowledge of that, if it really existed.
I shall come soon enough to the story of my own misery.
I have already said, that one of the motives which induced me to the penning of this narrative, was to console myself in my insupportable distress.
While I recollect or describe past scenes, which occurred in a more favourable period of my life, my attention is called off for a short interval, from the hopeless misfortune in which I am at present involved.
The man must indeed possess an uncommon portion of hardness of heart, who can envy me so slight a relief.--To proceed.
For some time after the explanation which had thus taken place between me and mr Falkland, his melancholy, instead of being in the slightest degree diminished by the lenient hand of time, went on perpetually to increase.
It was no longer practicable wholly to conceal them from the family, and even from the neighbourhood.
He would sometimes, without any previous notice, absent himself from his house for two or three days, unaccompanied by servant or attendant.
But it was impossible that a man of mr Falkland's distinction and fortune should long continue in such a practice, without its being discovered what was become of him; though a considerable part of our county was among the wildest and most desolate districts that are to be found in South Britain.
mr Falkland was sometimes seen climbing among the rocks, reclining motionless for hours together upon the edge of a precipice, or lulled into a kind of nameless lethargy of despair by the dashing of the torrents.
He would remain for whole nights together under the naked cope of heaven, inattentive to the consideration either of place or time; insensible to the variations of the weather, or rather seeming to be delighted with that uproar of the elements, which partially called off his attention from the discord and dejection that occupied his own mind.
At first, when we received intelligence at any time of the place to which mr Falkland had withdrawn himself, some person of his household, mr Collins or myself, but most generally myself, as I was always at home, and always, in the received sense of the word, at leisure, went to him to persuade him to return.
But, after a few experiments, we thought it advisable to desist, and leave him to prolong his absence, or to terminate it, as might happen to suit his own inclination.
At one time he would suddenly yield to his humble, venerable friend, murmuring grievously at the constraint that was put upon him, but without spirit enough even to complain of it with energy.
At another time, even though complying, he would suddenly burst out in a paroxysm of resentment.
Upon these occasions there was something inconceivably, savagely terrible in his anger, that gave to the person against whom it was directed the most humiliating and insupportable sensations.
Me he always treated, at these times, with fierceness, and drove me from him with a vehemence lofty, emphatical, and sustained, beyond any thing of which I should have thought human nature to be capable.
These sallies seemed always to constitute a sort of crisis in his indisposition; and, whenever he was induced to such a premature return, he would fall immediately after into a state of the most melancholy inactivity, in which he usually continued for two or three days.
To produce a good balance staff requires more skill than to produce any other turned portion of a watch, and your success will depend not alone on your knowledge of its proper shape and measurements, nor the tools at your command, but rather upon your skill with the graver and your success in hardening and tempering.
There are many points worthy of consideration in the making of a balance staff that are too often neglected.
I have seen staffs that were models as regards execution and finish, that were nearly worthless from a practical standpoint, simply because the maker had devoted all his time and energy to the execution of a beautiful piece of lathe work, and had given no thought or study to the form and size of the pivots.
To have good tools and the right ideas is one thing, and to use these tools properly and make a practical demonstration of your theory is another.
To the reader who takes this view of the situation I simply want to say, kindly follow me to the end of this paragraph, and if you are still of the same opinion, then you are wasting your time in following me farther.
This state of affairs leads to makeshifts, and they in turn lead to botch work.
The watchmaker who does not possess the experience or necessary qualifications to make a new balance staff and make it in a neat and workmanlike manner, is never certain of having exactly what is needed, and cannot hope to long retain the confidence of his customers.
In fact, he is not a watchmaker at all, but simply an apprentice or student, even though he be working for a salary or be his own master.
There are undoubtedly many worthy members of the trade, who are not familiar with the making of a balance staff, who will take exceptions to this statement; but it is nevertheless true.
They may be good workmen as far as they go; they may be painstaking; but they cannot be classed as watchmakers.
Good tools, in good condition, are the most essential requisites in making a new staff.
The balance staff should be made of the best steel, tempered to such a degree as to give the longest service and yet not so hard as to endanger the breakage of the pivots.
Be careful in selecting your chuck that you pick one that fits the wire fairly close.
The chuck holds the work truest that comes the nearest to fitting it.
If you try to use a chuck that is too large or too small for the work, you will only ruin the chuck for truth.
The hardening and tempering may be effected in various ways, and I am scarcely prepared to say which method is the best, as there are several which give about the same general results.
One method of hardening is to smear the blank with common yellow soap, heat it to a cherry red, and drop endwise into linseed oil.
Petroleum is preferred by some to linseed oil, but, to tell the truth, I can see no difference in the action of linseed, petroleum or olive oil.
The main object in using the soap in hardening is that it may form a scale upon the blank, and if the heating is effected gradually the soap will melt and form a practically air tight case around the blank.
This scale, if the hardening is carefully and properly done, will generally chip and fall off when the blank is plunged in the oil, particularly if the oil is cool, and if it does not fall off of its own accord, it can easily be removed by rolling the blank upon the bench.
If it does not come out clean, or if soap is not used, it may be brightened by again inserting in the lathe and bringing it in contact with a piece of fine emery paper or cloth.
This piece of metal, when nicely fitted into a file handle, will answer all the purposes of the bluing pan and presents quite a neat appearance.
Having placed the blank in the angle, lay on it a piece of yellow wax about the size of a bean, and heat it over your lamp until the wax takes fire and burns.
Blow out the flame and allow the staff to cool, and it will be found to be of about the right hardness.
We have now arrived at an important station in staff making, a junction, we may term it, where many lines branch off from the main road.
At this particular spot is where authorities differ.
I have no hesitation in saying that at this particular point the split chuck should be removed from the lathe head and carefully placed in the chuck box and the cement chuck put in its place.
I believe that all of the remaining work upon a staff should be executed while it is held in a cement chuck.
All I have got to say is that they had more confidence in the truth of their chucks than I have in mine.
I have even read of watchmakers who made the entire staff in a split chuck, but I must confess I am somewhat curious to examine a staff made in that way, and must have the privilege of examining it before I will admit that a true staff can be so made.
We will suppose that the workman has a moderately true chuck, and that he prefers to turn and finish all the lower portions in this way.
Of course the directions for using a cement chuck on the upper part of a staff are equally applicable to the lower.
peter AND PAUL.
"As I was saying," the other Professor resumed, "if you'll just think over any Poem, that contains the words-such as,
'peter is poor,' said noble Paul, 'And I have always been his friend: And, though my means to give are small, At least I can afford to lend. How few, in this cold age of greed, Do good, except on selfish grounds! But I can feel for Peter's need, And I WILL LEND HIM FIFTY POUNDS!'
peter said. 'The First of April, as I think. Five little weeks will soon be fled: One scarcely will have time to wink! Give me a year to speculate- To buy and sell-to drive a trade-' Said Paul 'I cannot change the date. On May the Fourth it must be paid.'
'Well, well!' said peter, with a sigh. 'Hand me the cash, and I will go. I'll form a Joint Stock Company, And turn an honest pound or so.' 'I'm grieved,' said Paul, 'to seem unkind: The money shalt of course be lent: But, for a week or two, I find It will not be convenient.'
So, week by week, poor peter came And turned in heaviness away; For still the answer was the same, 'I cannot manage it to day.' And now the April showers were dry- The five short weeks were nearly spent- Yet still he got the old reply, 'It is not quite convenient!'
The Fourth arrived, and punctual Paul Came, with his legal friend, at noon. 'I thought it best,' said he, 'to call: One cannot settle things too soon.' Poor peter shuddered in despair: His flowing locks he wildly tore: And very soon his yellow hair Was lying all about the floor.
Said Paul 'How bitterly I rue That fatal morning when I called! Consider, peter, what you do! You won't be richer when you're bald! Think you, by rending curls away, To make your difficulties less? Forbear this violence, I pray: You do but add to my distress!'
Yet why so strict? Is this to act a friendly part? However legal it may be To pay what never has been lent, This style of business seems to me Extremely inconvenient!
'But pay your debts!' cried honest Paul. 'My gentle peter, pay your debts! What matter if it swallows all That you describe as your "assets"? Already you're an hour behind: Yet Generosity is best. It pinches me-but never mind! I WILL NOT CHARGE YOU INTEREST!'
How great!' poor peter cried. 'Yet I must sell my Sunday wig- The scarf pin that has been my pride- My grand piano-and my pig!' Full soon his property took wings: And daily, as each treasure went, He sighed to find the state of things Grow less and less convenient.
Weeks grew to months, and months to years: peter was worn to skin and bone: And once he even said, with tears, 'Remember, Paul, that promised Loan!' Said Paul' I'll lend you, when I can, All the spare money I have got- Ah, peter, you're a happy man! Yours is an enviable lot!
Said peter 'I am well aware Mine is a state of happiness: And yet how gladly could I spare Some of the comforts I possess! What you call healthy appetite I feel as Hunger's savage tooth: And, when no dinner is in sight, The dinner bell's a sound of ruth!
'No scare crow would accept this coat: Such boots as these you seldom see. Ah, Paul, a single five pound note Would make another man of me!' Said Paul 'It fills me with surprise To hear you talk in such a tone: I fear you scarcely realise The blessings that are all your own!
Said peter 'Though I cannot sound The depths of such a man as you, Yet in your character I've found An inconsistency or two. You seem to have long years to spare When there's a promise to fulfil: And yet how punctual you were In calling with that little bill!'
'One can't be too deliberate,' Said Paul, 'in parting with one's pelf. With bills, as you correctly state, I'm punctuality itself: A man may surely claim his dues: But, when there's money to be lent, A man must be allowed to choose Such times as are convenient!'
It chanced one day, as peter sat Gnawing a crust-his usual meal- Paul bustled in to have a chat, And grasped his hand with friendly zeal. 'I knew,' said he, 'your frugal ways: So, that I might not wound your pride By bringing strangers in to gaze, I've left my legal friend outside!
'You well remember, I am sure, When first your wealth began to go, And people sneered at one so poor, I never used my peter so! And when you'd lost your little all, And found yourself a thing despised, I need not ask you to recall How tenderly I sympathised!
'Then the advice I've poured on you, So full of wisdom and of wit: All given gratis, though 'tis true I might have fairly charged for it! But I refrain from mentioning Full many a deed I might relate For boasting is a kind of thing That I particularly hate.
You little guessed How deep it drained my slender store: But there's a heart within this breast, And I WILL LEND YOU FIFTY MORE!'
'Not so,' was Peter's mild reply, His cheeks all wet with grateful tears; No man recalls, so well as I, Your services in bygone years: And this new offer, I admit, Is very very kindly meant- Still, to avail myself of it Would not be quite convenient!'
You'll see in a moment what the difference is between 'convenient' and 'inconvenient.' You quite understand it now, don't you?" he added, looking kindly at Bruno, who was sitting, at Sylvie's side, on the floor.
"Yes," said Bruno, very quietly.
Such a short speech was very unusual, for him: but just then he seemed, I fancied, a little exhausted.
In fact, he climbed up into Sylvie's lap as he spoke, and rested his head against her shoulder.
CHAPTER twenty three.
AN OUTLANDISH WATCH.
As I entered the little town, I came upon two of the fishermen's wives interchanging that last word "which never was the last": and it occurred to me, as an experiment with the Magic Watch, to wait till the little scene was over, and then to 'encore' it.
A casual observer might have thought "and there ends the dialogue!" That casual observer would have been mistaken.
"Ah, she'll like 'em, I war'n' ye!
They'll not treat her bad, yer may depend.
Good night!"
Good night!"
"Good night!
And ye'll send us word if she writes?"
And at last they parted.
I waited till they were some twenty yards apart, and then put the Watch a minute back.
The instantaneous change was startling: the two figures seemed to flash back into their former places.
"But the real usefulness of this magic power," I thought, "would be to undo some harm, some painful event, some accident-"
I had not long to wait for an opportunity of testing this property also of the Magic Watch, for, even as the thought passed through my mind, the accident I was imagining occurred.
A light cart was standing at the door of the 'Great Millinery Depot' of Elveston, laden with card board packing cases, which the driver was carrying into the shop, one by one. One of the cases had fallen into the street, but it scarcely seemed worth while to step forward and pick it up, as the man would be back again in a moment.
I helped them in emptying the cart, and placing in it some pillows for the wounded man to rest on; and it was only when the driver had mounted to his place, and was starting for the Surgery, that I bethought me of the strange power I possessed of undoing all this harm.
Instantly I stepped out into the street, picked up the box, and replaced it in the cart: in the next moment the bicycle had spun round the corner, passed the cart without let or hindrance, and soon vanished in the distance, in a cloud of dust.
"Delightful power of magic!" I thought.
"How much of human suffering I have-not only relieved, but actually annihilated!" And, in a glow of conscious virtue, I stood watching the unloading of the cart, still holding the Magic Watch open in my hand, as I was curious to see what would happen when we again reached the exact time at which I had put back the hand.
"Oh mocking Magic Watch!" I said to myself, as I passed out of the little town, and took the seaward road that led to my lodgings.
"Here is my chance," I thought, "for testing the reverse action of the Magic Watch!" I pressed the 'reversal peg' and walked in.
They would first wonder who I was, then see me, then look down, and think no more about me.
And as to being expelled with violence, that event would necessarily come first in this case.
"So, if I can once get in," I said to myself, "all risk of expulsion will be over!"
"He that takes my life," he seemed to be saying, wheezily, to himself, "takes trash: But he that takes the Daily Telegraph-!" But this awful contingency I did not face.
When the needle work had been unfolded, and they were all ready to begin, their mother said "Come, that's done, at last!
You may fold up your work, girls." But the children took no notice whatever of the remark; on the contrary, they set to work at once sewing-if that is the proper word to describe an operation such as I had never before witnessed.
Each of them threaded her needle with a short end of thread attached to the work, which was instantly pulled by an invisible force through the stuff, dragging the needle after it: the nimble fingers of the little sempstress caught it at the other side, but only to lose it again the next moment.
Now and then one of the children would pause, as the recovered thread became inconveniently long, wind it on a bobbin, and start again with another short end.
At last all the work was picked to pieces and put away, and the lady led the way into the next room, walking backwards, and making the insane remark "Not yet, dear: we must get the sewing done first."
After which, I was not surprised to see the children skipping backwards after her, exclaiming "Oh, mother, it is such a lovely day for a walk!"
The longer I thought over this strange adventure, the more hopelessly tangled the mystery became: and it was a real relief to meet Arthur in the road, and get him to go with me up to the Hall, to learn what news the telegraph had brought.
I told him, as we went, what had happened at the Station, but as to my further adventures I thought it best, for the present, to say nothing.
"Muriel is gone to bed-the excitement of that terrible scene was too much for her-and Eric has gone to the hotel to pack his things, to start for London by the early train."
"Did you not hear?
Oh, I had forgotten: it came in after you left the Station.
Yes, it's all right: Eric has got his commission; and, now that he has arranged matters with Muriel, he has business in town that must be seen to at once."
"Do you mean that they are engaged?"
I could never be happy with my child married to a man without an object to live for-without even an object to die for!"
"I hope they will be happy," a strange voice said.
"Who spoke?" he exclaimed.
"Thank you," the old man said, simply and heartily.
A silence followed: then I rose, feeling sure that Arthur would wish to be alone, and bade our gentle host 'Good night': Arthur took his hand, but said nothing: nor did he speak again, as we went home till we were in the house and had lit our bed room candles.
I never understood those words till now."
The next few days passed wearily enough.
I felt no inclination to call by myself at the Hall; still less to propose that Arthur should go with me: it seemed better to wait till Time-that gentle healer of our bitterest sorrows should have helped him to recover from the first shock of the disappointment that had blighted his life.
"But I hope to run down again in a month," I added.
"I would stay now, if I could.
"But don't think about me.
I have made up my mind to accept a post in India, that has been offered me.
'This life of mine I guard, as God's high gift, from scathe and wrong, Not greatly care to lose!'"
"But you will return, will you not?"
"Do," said Arthur: "and you shall write and tell me of our friends.
Anna Pavlovna's presentiment was in fact fulfilled.
Next day during the service at the palace church in honor of the Emperor's birthday, Prince Volkonski was called out of the church and received a dispatch from Prince Kutuzov.
It was Kutuzov's report, written from Tatarinova on the day of the battle.
It followed that there must have been a victory.
And at once, without leaving the church, thanks were rendered to the Creator for His help and for the victory.
Anna Pavlovna's presentiment was justified, and all that morning a joyously festive mood reigned in the city.
Everyone believed the victory to have been complete, and some even spoke of Napoleon's having been captured, of his deposition, and of the choice of a new ruler for France.
It is very difficult for events to be reflected in their real strength and completeness amid the conditions of court life and far from the scene of action.
General events involuntarily group themselves around some particular incident.
It was like a successfully arranged surprise.
In the Petersburg world this sad side of the affair again involuntarily centered round a single incident: Kutaysov's death.
Everybody knew him, the Emperor liked him, and he was young and interesting.
That day everyone met with the words:
"What a wonderful coincidence!
Just during the service.
How sorry I am!"
"What did I tell about Kutuzov?" Prince Vasili now said with a prophet's pride.
"I always said he was the only man capable of defeating Napoleon."
The courtiers suffered because of the suffering the suspense occasioned the Emperor.
"Fancy the Emperor's position!" said they, and instead of extolling Kutuzov as they had done the day before, they condemned him as the cause of the Emperor's anxiety.
That day Prince Vasili no longer boasted of his protege Kutuzov, but remained silent when the commander in chief was mentioned.
Moreover, toward evening, as if everything conspired to make Petersburg society anxious and uneasy, a terrible piece of news was added.
Countess Helene Bezukhova had suddenly died of that terrible malady it had been so agreeable to mention.
It was said that Prince Vasili and the old count had turned upon the Italian, but the latter had produced such letters from the unfortunate deceased that they had immediately let the matter drop.
On the third day after Kutuzov's report a country gentleman arrived from Moscow, and news of the surrender of Moscow to the French spread through the whole town.
This was terrible!
What a position for the Emperor to be in!
"I only wonder that the fate of Russia could have been entrusted to such a man."
Sire!
Kutuzov's action decides the fate of the capital and of your empire!
I have had everything removed, and it only remains for me to weep over the fate of my fatherland.
On receiving this dispatch the Emperor sent Prince Volkonski to Kutuzov with the following rescript:
Prince Michael Ilarionovich!
You can yourself imagine the effect this news has had on me, and your silence increases my astonishment.
Nine days after the abandonment of Moscow, a messenger from Kutuzov reached Petersburg with the official announcement of that event.
"Have you brought me sad news, Colonel?"
"Very sad, sire," replied Michaud, lowering his eyes with a sigh.
"The abandonment of Moscow."
The Emperor listened in silence, not looking at Michaud.
"Has the enemy entered the city?" he asked.
"Yes, sire, and Moscow is now in ashes.
I left it all in flames," replied Michaud in a decided tone, but glancing at the Emperor he was frightened by what he had done.
The Emperor began to breathe heavily and rapidly, his lower lip trembled, and tears instantly appeared in his fine blue eyes.
He suddenly frowned, as if blaming himself for his weakness, and raising his head addressed Michaud in a firm voice:
"I see, Colonel, from all that is happening, that Providence requires great sacrifices of us...
Did you not notice discouragement?..."
"Colonel, I always require it," replied the Emperor.
"Conceal nothing from me, I wish to know absolutely how things are."
"How is that?" the Emperor interrupted him, frowning sternly.
"Would misfortune make my Russians lose heart?...
Never!"
Michaud had only waited for this to bring out the phrase he had prepared.
"Sire," he said, with respectful playfulness, "they are only afraid lest Your Majesty, in the goodness of your heart, should allow yourself to be persuaded to make peace.
"You set me at ease, Colonel."
He bent his head and was silent for some time.
"Well, then, go back to the army," he said, drawing himself up to his full height and addressing Michaud with a gracious and majestic gesture, "and tell our brave men and all my good subjects wherever you go that when I have not a soldier left I shall put myself at the head of my beloved nobility and my good peasants and so use the last resources of my empire.
The Emperor's mild and handsome face was flushed and his eyes gleamed with resolution and anger.
"We can no longer both reign together.
I have learned to know him, and he will not deceive me any more...."
And the Emperor paused, with a frown.
"Sire!" said he, "Your Majesty is at this moment signing the glory of the nation and the salvation of Europe!"
With an inclination of the head the Emperor dismissed him.
The tales and descriptions of that time without exception speak only of the self sacrifice, patriotic devotion, despair, grief, and the heroism of the Russians.
But it was not really so.
It appears so to us because we see only the general historic interest of that time and do not see all the personal human interests that people had.
Yet in reality those personal interests of the moment so much transcend the general interests that they always prevent the public interest from being felt or even noticed.
Even those, fond of intellectual talk and of expressing their feelings, who discussed Russia's position at the time involuntarily introduced into their conversation either a shade of pretense and falsehood or useless condemnation and anger directed against people accused of actions no one could possibly be guilty of.
In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable.
Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance.
If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.
The more closely a man was engaged in the events then taking place in Russia the less did he realize their significance.
As the war had caught him in the service, Nicholas Rostov took a close and prolonged part in the defense of his country, but did so casually, without any aim at self sacrifice, and he therefore looked at what was going on in Russia without despair and without dismally racking his brains over it.
When-free from soldiers, wagons, and the filthy traces of a camp-he saw villages with peasants and peasant women, gentlemen's country houses, fields where cattle were grazing, posthouses with stationmasters asleep in them, he rejoiced as though seeing all this for the first time.
What for a long while specially surprised and delighted him were the women, young and healthy, without a dozen officers making up to each of them; women, too, who were pleased and flattered that a passing officer should joke with them.
He received Nicholas brusquely (imagining this to be characteristically military) and questioned him with an important air, as if considering the general progress of affairs and approving and disapproving with full right to do so.
Nicholas was in such good spirits that this merely amused him.
From the commander of the militia he drove to the governor.
The governor was a brisk little man, very simple and affable.
He indicated the stud farms at which Nicholas might procure horses, recommended to him a horse dealer in the town and a landowner fourteen miles out of town who had the best horses, and promised to assist him in every way.
"You are Count Ilya Rostov's son?
My wife was a great friend of your mother's.
Immediately on leaving the governor's, Nicholas hired post horses and, taking his squadron quartermaster with him, drove at a gallop to the landowner, fourteen miles away, who had the stud.
The landowner to whom Nicholas went was a bachelor, an old cavalryman, a horse fancier, a sportsman, the possessor of some century old brandy and some old Hungarian wine, who had a snuggery where he smoked, and who owned some splendid horses.
In very few words Nicholas bought seventeen picked stallions for six thousand rubles-to serve, as he said, as samples of his remounts.
After dining and taking rather too much of the Hungarian wine, Nicholas- having exchanged kisses with the landowner, with whom he was already on the friendliest terms-galloped back over abominable roads, in the brightest frame of mind, continually urging on the driver so as to be in time for the governor's party.
When he had changed, poured water over his head, and scented himself, Nicholas arrived at the governor's rather late, but with the phrase "better late than never" on his lips.
Among the men was an Italian prisoner, an officer of the French army; and Nicholas felt that the presence of that prisoner enhanced his own importance as a Russian hero.
The Italian was, as it were, a war trophy.
Nicholas felt this, it seemed to him that everyone regarded the Italian in the same light, and he treated him cordially though with dignity and restraint.
At posting stations, at inns, and in the landowner's snuggery, maidservants had been flattered by his notice, and here too at the governor's party there were (as it seemed to Nicholas) an inexhaustible number of pretty young women, married and unmarried, impatiently awaiting his notice.
Among these was the governor's wife herself, who welcomed Rostov as a near relative and called him "Nicholas."
Catherine Petrovna did actually play valses and the ecossaise, and dancing began in which Nicholas still further captivated the provincial society by his agility.
His particularly free manner of dancing even surprised them all.
Nicholas was himself rather surprised at the way he danced that evening.
He had never danced like that in Moscow and would even have considered such a very free and easy manner improper and in bad form, but here he felt it incumbent on him to astonish them all by something unusual, something they would have to accept as the regular thing in the capital though new to them in the provinces.
All the evening Nicholas paid attention to a blue eyed, plump and pleasing little blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials.
Her position in Carentan ought to be made clear, if the reader is to appreciate the expression of keen curiosity and cunning fanaticism on the countenances of these Norman citizens, and, what is of most importance, the part that the lady played among them.
Many a one during the days of the Revolution has doubtless passed through a crisis as difficult as hers at that moment, and the sympathies of more than one reader will fill in all the coloring of the picture.
Her calculations, based on a thorough knowledge of the district, proved correct.
The Revolution made little disturbance in Lower Normandy.
She was about thirty eight years of age, and still preserved, not the fresh, high colored beauty of the Basse Normandes, but a fragile loveliness of what may be called an aristocratic type.
Her figure was lissome and slender, her features delicate and clearly cut; the pale face seemed to light up and live when she spoke; but there was a quiet and devout look in the great dark eyes, for all their graciousness of expression-a look that seemed to say that the springs of her life lay without her own existence.
In her early girlhood she had been married to an elderly and jealous soldier.
She had been compelled to set constant restraint upon her frank impulses and emotions at an age when a woman feels rather than thinks, and the depths of passion in her heart had never been stirred.
In this lay the secret of her greatest charm, a youthfulness of the inmost soul, betrayed at times by her face, and a certain tinge of innocent wistfulness in her ideas.
She was reserved in her demeanor, but in her bearing and in the tones of her voice there was still something that told of girlish longings directed toward a vague future.
Her great soul, strengthened by the cruel ordeals through which she had passed, seemed to set her too far above the ordinary level, and these men weighed themselves, and instinctively felt that they were found wanting.
Such a nature demanded an exalted passion.
All the happiness and joy that she had not known as a wife, she had found later in her boundless love for him.
She was miserable when they were apart, and nervous about him while he was away; she could never see enough of him, and lived through and for him alone.
The late Comte de Dey was the last of his race, and she, his wife, was the sole heiress and descendant of her house.
So worldly ambitions and family considerations, as well as the noblest cravings of the soul, combined to heighten in the Countess a sentiment that is strong in every woman's heart.
The child was all the dearer, because only with infinite care had she succeeded in rearing him to man's estate; medical science had predicted his death a score of times, but she had held fast to her presentiments and her hopes, and had known the inexpressible joy of watching him pass safely through the perils of infancy, of seeing his constitution strengthen in spite of the decrees of the Faculty.
Thanks to her constant care, the boy had grown up and developed so favorably, that at twenty years of age he was regarded as one of the most accomplished gentlemen at the Court of Versailles.
One final happiness that does not always crown a mother's efforts was hers-her son worshiped her; and between these two there was the deep sympathy of kindred souls.
If they had not been bound to each other already by a natural and sacred tie, they would instinctively have felt for each other a friendship that is rarely met with between two men.
She was rich, noble, and the mother of an Emigrant.
With the one desire to look after her son's great fortune, she had denied herself the happiness of being with him; and when she read the rigorous laws in virtue of which the Republic was daily confiscating the property of Emigrants at Carentan, she congratulated herself on the courageous course that she had taken. Was she not keeping watch over the wealth of her son at the risk of her life?
Later, when news came of the horrible executions ordered by the Convention, she slept, happy in the knowledge that her own treasure was in safety, out of reach of peril, far from the scaffolds of the Revolution.
She had foreseen the difficulties that would beset her at Carentan.
Did she not tempt the scaffold by the very fact of going thither to take a prominent place?
Yet, sustained by a mother's courage, she succeeded in winning the affection of the poor, ministering without distinction to everyone in trouble; and made herself necessary to the well to do, by providing amusements for them.
He was the most formidable of all her suitors.
He alone knew the amount of the large fortune of his sometime client, and his fervor was inevitably increased by the cupidity of greed, and by the consciousness that he wielded an enormous power, the power of life and death in the district.
But, in despite of the danger of matching herself against Norman cunning, she used all the craft and inventiveness that Nature has bestowed on women to play off the rival suitors one against another.
She hoped, by gaining time, to emerge safe and sound from her difficulties at last; for at that time Royalists in the provinces flattered themselves with a hope, daily renewed, that the morrow would see the end of the Revolution-a conviction that proved fatal to many of them.
In spite of difficulties, the Countess had maintained her independence with considerable skill until the day when, by an inexplicable want of prudence, she took occasion to close her salon.
To all these questions, Brigitte, the housekeeper, answered with the same formula: her mistress was keeping her room, and would see no one, not even her own servants.
"If she were ill, she would have sent for the doctor," said gossip number one; "now the doctor has been playing chess in my house all day. He said to me, laughing, that in these days there is only one disease, and that, unluckily, it is incurable."
The joke was hazarded discreetly.
Women and men, elderly folk and young girls, forthwith betook themselves to the vast fields of conjecture. Everyone imagined that there was some secret in it, and every head was busy with the secret.
Next day the suspicions became malignant. Everyone lives in public in a small town, and the women kind were the first to find out that Brigitte had laid in an extra stock of provisions.
The thing could not be disputed.
Brigitte had been seen in the market place betimes that morning, and, wonderful to relate, she had bought the one hare to be had.
Elderly gentlemen, taking their constitutional, noticed a sort of suppressed bustle in the Countess's house; the symptoms were the more apparent because the servants were at evident pains to conceal them. The man servant was beating a carpet in the garden.
Only yesterday no one would have remarked the fact, but to day everybody began to build romances upon that harmless piece of household stuff.
Everyone had a version.
He was a retired merchant, a married man, a strictly honorable soul; everyone respected him, and the Countess held him in high regard.
There all the rich widows' suitors were fain to invent more or less probable fictions, each one thinking the while how to turn to his own advantage the secret that compelled her to compromise herself in such a manner.
The mayor had a belief in a priest who had refused the oath, a refugee from La Vendee; but this left him not a little embarrassed how to account for the purchase of a hare on a Friday.
Others voted for a noble escaped from the prisons of Paris.
The public prosecutor, moreover, said, in a low voice, that they must hush the matter up, and try to save the unfortunate lady from the abyss toward which she was hastening.
"If you spread reports about," he added, "I shall be obliged to take cognizance of the matter, and to search the house, and then!..."
He said no more, but everyone understood what was left unsaid.
The old merchant took a bolder step.
He called that morning upon the lady.
"She has given refuge to her lover, no doubt," thought the old man, struck with pity for the charming woman before him.
The Countess's face wore a strange look, that confirmed his suspicions. Deeply moved by the devotion so natural to women, but that always touches us, because all men are flattered by the sacrifices that any woman makes for any one of them, the merchant told the Countess of the gossip that was circulating in the town, and showed her the danger that she was running.
He wound up at last with saying that "if there are some of our public functionaries who are sufficiently ready to pardon a piece of heroism on your part so long as it is a priest that you wish to save, no one will show you any mercy if it is discovered that you are sacrificing yourself to the dictates of your heart."
"Come in," she said, taking him by the hand to bring him to her room, and as soon as she had assured herself that they were alone, she drew a soiled, torn letter from her bodice.--"Read it!" she cried, with a violent effort to pronounce the words.
She dropped as if exhausted into her armchair.
While the old merchant looked for his spectacles and wiped them, she raised her eyes, and for the first time looked at him with curiosity; then, in an uncertain voice, "I trust in you," she said softly.
"Why did I come but to share in your crime?" the old merchant said simply.
She trembled.
For the first time since she had come to the little town her soul found sympathy in another soul.
A sudden light dawned meantime on the old merchant; he understood the Countess's joy and her prostration.
Her son had taken part in the Granville expedition; he wrote to his mother from his prison, and the letter brought her a sad, sweet hope. Feeling no doubts as to his means of escape, he wrote that within three days he was sure to reach her, disguised.
The paper shook in the old man's hands.
She sprang to her feet, took back the letter, and walked up and down.
"You have set to work imprudently," the merchant remarked, addressing her.
"Why did you buy provisions?"
"Why, he may come in dying of hunger, worn out with fatigue, and-" She broke off.
"I am sure of my brother," the old merchant went on; "I will engage him in your interests."
Matching his shrewdness against Norman wits in the cross examination he underwent in every family as to the Countess's complaint, he succeeded in putting almost everyone who took an interest in the mysterious affair upon the wrong scent.
The Countess, he said, had lain in danger of her life for the past two days; but after carefully following out Tronchin's singular prescription, she was now sufficiently recovered to receive visitors that evening.
This tale had an immense success in Carentan.
They found the Countess seated in a corner of the great chimney piece in her room, which was almost as modestly furnished as similar apartments in Carentan; for she had given up the enjoyment of luxuries to which she had formerly been accustomed, for fear of offending the narrow prejudices of her guests, and she had made no changes in her house.
The floor was not even polished.
She even went so far as to affect avarice to recommend herself to these sordid natures; and had the ingenuity to make it appear that certain concessions to luxury had been made at the instance of others, to whom she had graciously yielded.
The old merchant's sympathetic glances sustained the mistress of the house through this ordeal; with wonderful strength of mind, she underwent the curious scrutiny of her guests, and bore with their trivial prosings.
Every time there was a knock at the door, at every sound of footsteps in the street, she hid her agitation by raising questions of absorbing interest to the countryside.
She led the conversation on to the burning topic of the quality of various ciders, and was so well seconded by her friend who shared her secret, that her guests almost forgot to watch her, and her face wore its wonted look; her self possession was unshaken.
The public prosecutor and one of the judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal kept silence, however; noting the slightest change that flickered over her features, listening through the noisy talk to every sound in the house.
Several times they put awkward questions, which the Countess answered with wonderful presence of mind. So brave is a mother's heart!
She elicited a suggestion of loto, and saying that no one else knew where to find the game, she left the room.
"My good Brigitte, I cannot breathe down there!" she cried, brushing away the tears that sprang to her eyes that glittered with fever, sorrow, and impatience.--She had gone up to her son's room, and was looking round it.
"He does not come," she said.
"Here I can breathe and live.
A few minutes more, and he will be here, for he is alive, I am sure that he is alive! my heart tells me so.
Do you hear nothing, Brigitte?
Oh!
I would give the rest of my life to know whether he is still in prison or tramping across the country.
I would rather not think."
Once more she looked to see that everything was in order.
A bright fire blazed on the hearth, the shutters were carefully closed, the furniture shone with cleanliness, the bed had been made after a fashion that showed that Brigitte and the Countess had given their minds to every trifling detail.
A dainty meal, the best of wine, clean linen, slippers-no necessary, no comfort, was lacking for the weary traveler, and all the delights of home heaped upon him should reveal his mother's love.
"Oh, Brigitte!..." cried the Countess, with a heart rending inflection in her voice.
He is not far off....
I haven't a doubt that he is living and on his way," Brigitte answered.
"I put a key in the Bible and held it on my fingers while Cottin read the Gospel of saint John, and the key did not turn, madame."
"Is that a certain sign?" the Countess asked.
"Why, yes, madame! everybody knows that.
He is still alive; I would stake my salvation on it; God cannot be mistaken."
"If only I could see him here in the house, in spite of the danger."
"Poor Monsieur Auguste!" cried Brigitte; "I expect he is tramping along the lanes!"
"And that is eight o'clock striking now!" cried the Countess in terror.
She was afraid that she had been too long in the room where she felt sure that her son was alive; all those preparations made for him meant that he was alive.
She went down, but she lingered a moment in the peristyle for any sound that might waken the sleeping echoes of the town.
She smiled at Brigitte's husband, who was standing there on guard; the man's eyes looked stupid with the strain of listening to the faint sounds of the night.
She stared into the darkness, seeing her son in every shadow everywhere; but it was only for a moment.
But from time to time she complained of feeling unwell, and went to sit in her great chair by the fireside.
The exigencies of the moment scarcely admitted of soldiers being equipped at once, and it was no uncommon thing to see the roads thronged with conscripts in their ordinary clothes.
The young fellows went ahead of their company to the next halting place, or lagged behind it; it depended upon their fitness to bear the fatigues of a long march.
This particular wayfarer was some considerable way in advance of a company of conscripts on the way to Cherbourg, whom the mayor was expecting to arrive every hour, for it was his duty to distribute their billets.
The young man's footsteps were still firm as he trudged along, and his bearing seemed to indicate that he was no stranger to the rough life of a soldier.
The moon shone on the pasture land about Carentan, but he had noticed great masses of white cloud that were about to scatter showers of snow over the country, and doubtless the fear of being overtaken by a storm had quickened his pace in spite of his weariness.
The wallet on his back was almost empty, and he carried a stick in his hand, cut from one of the high, thick box hedges that surround most of the farms in Lower Normandy.
He met no one in the silent streets that rang with the echoes of his own footsteps, and was obliged to ask the way to the mayor's house of a weaver who was working late. The magistrate was not far to seek, and in a few minutes the conscript was sitting on a stone bench in the mayor's porch waiting for his billet.
He was sent for, however, and confronted with that functionary, who scrutinized him closely.
The foot soldier was a good looking young man, who appeared to be of gentle birth.
"What is your name?" asked the mayor, eying him shrewdly.
"From-?" queried the official, and an incredulous smile stole over his features.
"From Paris."
"Your comrades must be a good way behind?" remarked the Norman in sarcastic tones.
"I am three leagues ahead of the battalion."
"All right, all right!" he added, with a wave of the hand, seeing that the young man was about to speak.
"We know where to send you.
The conscript read the direction curiously.
"He is uncommonly bold!
God guide him!...
He has an answer ready for everything.
Yes, but if somebody else had asked to see his papers it would have been all up with him!"
The clocks in Carentan struck half past nine as he spoke.
The card players settled their accounts, and everybody went out together, after the fashion of all little country towns.
And, as a matter of fact, that redoubtable functionary was alone with the Countess, who waited trembling till he should go.
There was something appalling in their long silence.
"Have you nothing to tell me?"
"Nothing!" she answered, in amazement.
I have watched your character, your soul, your manner, too closely to share the error into which you have managed to lead your visitors to night.
You are expecting your son, I could not doubt it."
The Countess made an involuntary sign of denial, but her face had grown white and drawn with the struggle to maintain the composure that she did not feel, and no tremor was lost on the merciless prosecutor.
"Very well," the Revolutionary official went on, "receive him; but do not let him stay under your roof after seven o'clock to morrow morning; for to morrow, as soon as it is light, I shall come with a denunciation that I will have made out, and-"
She looked at him, and the dull misery in her eyes would have softened a tiger.
"I will make it clear that the denunciation was false by making a thorough search," he went on in a gentle voice; "my report shall be such that you will be safe from any subsequent suspicion.
A knock at the door rang through the house.
"Oh!..." cried the terrified mother, falling upon her knees; "save him! save him!"
"Lost!" she wailed.
The prosecutor raised her politely.
"Madame, he is-" cried Brigitte, thinking that her mistress was alone. At the sight of the public prosecutor, the old servant's joy flushed countenance became haggard and impassive.
"Who is it, Brigitte?" the prosecutor asked kindly, as if he too were in the secret of the household.
"A conscript that the mayor has sent here for a night's lodging," the woman replied, holding out the billet.
"So it is," said the prosecutor, when he had read the slip of paper.
"A battalion is coming here to night."
And he went.
The Countess's need to believe in the faith of her sometime attorney was so great, that she dared not entertain any suspicion of him.
She fled upstairs; she felt scarcely strength enough to stand; she opened the door, and sprang, half dead with fear, into her son's arms.
"Oh! my child! my child!" she sobbed, covering him with almost frenzied kisses.
"Madame!..." said a stranger's voice.
"Oh! it is not he!" she cried, shrinking away in terror, and she stood face to face with the conscript, gazing at him with haggard eyes.
"Ah! monsieur," she said, leaning on the arm of Brigitte's husband, feeling for the first time the full extent of a sorrow that had all but killed her at its first threatening; "ah! monsieur, I cannot stay to see you any longer ... permit my servants to supply my place, and to see that you have all that you want."
She went down to her own room, Brigitte and the old serving man half carrying her between them.
The housekeeper set her mistress in a chair, and broke out:
Why, if they were to guillotine me for it, I-"
Brigitte said no more.
"Hold your tongue, chatterbox," said her husband, in a low voice; "do you want to kill madame?"
A sound came from the conscript's room as he drew his chair to the table.
She still wavered between the fear that she had lost her son and the hope of seeing him once more.
That night was hideously silent.
Once, for the Countess, there was an awful interval, when the battalion of conscripts entered the town, and the men went by, one by one, to their lodgings.
Every footfall, every sound in the street, raised hopes to be disappointed; but it was not for long, the dreadful quiet succeeded again.
Toward morning the Countess was forced to return to her room. Brigitte, ever keeping watch over her mistress's movements, did not see her come out again; and when she went, she found the Countess lying there dead.
That must have killed her."
The Work of the Field Zoologist and Field Geographer in South America
The only two other continents where such work, of like volume and value, remains to be done are Africa and Asia; and neither Africa nor Asia offers a more inviting field for the best kind of field worker in geographical exploration and in zoological, geological, and paleontological investigation.
The explorer is merely the most adventurous kind of field geographer; and there are two or three points worth keeping in mind in dealing with the South American work of the field geographer and field zoologist.
Roughly, the travellers who now visit (like those who for the past century have visited) South America come in three categories- although, of course, these categories are not divided by hard and fast lines.
First, there are the travellers who skirt the continent in comfortable steamers, going from one great seaport to another, and occasionally taking a short railway journey to some big interior city not too far from the coast.
This is a trip well worth taking by all intelligent men and women who can afford it; and it is being taken by such men and women with increasing frequency.
Such travelling is difficult in the sense that travelling in parts of Spain or southern Italy or the Balkan states is difficult.
In economic, social, and political matters the studies and observations of these travellers are essential in order to supplement, and sometimes to correct, those of travellers of the first category; for it is not safe to generalize overmuch about any country merely from a visit to its capital or its chief seaport.
These travellers of the second category can give us most interesting and valuable information about quaint little belated cities; about backward country folk, kindly or the reverse, who show a mixture of the ideas of savagery with the ideas of an ancient peasantry; and about rough old highways of travel which in comfort do not differ much from those of mediaeval Europe.
They can add little to our geographical knowledge; but if they are competent zoologists or archaeologists, especially if they live or sojourn long in a locality, their work may be invaluable from the scientific standpoint.
Of course travellers of this kind need to remember that their experiences in themselves do not qualify them to speak as wilderness explorers.
To cross the Andes on mule back along the regular routes is a feat comparable to the feats of the energetic tourists who by thousands traverse the mule trails in out of the way nooks of Switzerland.
A hundred years ago, even seventy or eighty years ago, before the age of steamboats and railroads, it was more difficult than at present to define the limits between this class and the next; and, moreover, in defining these limits I emphatically disclaim any intention of thereby attempting to establish a single standard of value for books of travel.
Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle" is to me the best book of the kind ever written; it is one of those classics which decline to go into artificial categories, and which stand by themselves; and yet Darwin, with his usual modesty, spoke of it as in effect a yachting voyage.
Humboldt's work had a profound effect on the thought of the civilized world; his trip was one of adventure and danger; and yet it can hardly be called exploration proper.
He visited places which had been settled and inhabited for centuries and traversed places which had been travelled by civilized men for years before he followed in their footsteps.
But these places were in Spanish colonies, and access to them had been forbidden by the mischievous and intolerant tyranny- ecclesiastical, political, and economic-which then rendered Spain the most backward of European nations; and Humboldt was the first scientific man of intellectual independence who had permission to visit them.
He never went off the native routes of ordinary travel. But he was a devoted and able naturalist.
Travel of the third category includes the work of the true wilderness explorers who add to our sum of geographical knowledge and of the scientific men who, following their several bents, also work in the untrodden wilds.
It can be accomplished with reasonable thoroughness only by the efforts of very many different workers, each in his own special field.
But as a rule the work must be specialized; and in its final shape it must be specialized everywhere.
This is true even of exploration done along the courses of unknown rivers; it is more true of the exploration, which must in South America become increasingly necessary, done across country, away from the rivers.
The scientific work proper of these early explorers must be of a somewhat preliminary nature; in other words the most difficult and therefore ordinarily the most important pieces of first-hand exploration are precisely those where the scientific work of the accompanying cartographer, geologist, botanist, and zoologist must be furthest removed from finality.
The zoologist who works to most advantage in the wilderness must take his time, and therefore he must normally follow in the footsteps of, and not accompany, the first explorers. The man who wishes to do the best scientific work in the wilderness must not try to combine incompatible types of work nor to cover too much ground in too short a time.
There is no better example of the kind of zoologist who does first class field work in the wilderness than john d Haseman, who spent from nineteen o seven to nineteen ten in painstaking and thorough scientific investigation over a large extent of South American territory hitherto only partially known or quite unexplored.
Haseman's primary object was to study the characteristics and distribution of South American fishes, but as a matter of fact he studied at first hand many other more or less kindred subjects, as may be seen in his remarks on the Indians and in his excellent pamphlet on "Some Factors of Geographical Distribution in South America."
Haseman made his long journey with a very slender equipment, his extraordinarily successful field work being due to his bodily health and vigor and his resourcefulness, self reliance, and resolution.
There is, however, one serious criticism to be made on Haseman: the extreme obscurity of his style-an obscurity mixed with occasional bits of scientific pedantry, which makes it difficult to tell whether or not on some points his thought is obscure also.
Modern scientists, like modern historians and, above all, scientific and historical educators, should ever keep in mind that clearness of speech and writing is essential to clearness of thought and that a simple, clear, and, if possible, vivid style is vital to the production of the best work in either science or history.
The thought is essential, but ability to give it clear expression is only less essential.
Ability to write well, if the writer has nothing to write about, entitles him to mere derision.
Surely, if he will take as much pains with his writing as he has with the far more difficult business of exploring and collecting, he will become able to express his thought clearly and forcefully.
He can take pains to see that his whole thought is expressed, instead of leaving vacancies which must be filled by the puzzled and groping reader.
His own views and his quotations from the views of others about the static and dynamic theories of distribution are examples of an important principle so imperfectly expressed as to make us doubtful whether it is perfectly apprehended by the writer.
mr Haseman drags it in continually when its use is either pointless and redundant or else serves purely to darken wisdom. He speaks of the "Antillean complex" when he means the Antilles, of the "organic complex" instead of the characteristic or bodily characteristics of an animal or species, and of the "environmental complex" when he means nothing whatever but the environment.
He holds that life has been intermittently distributed southward along these continental masses when there were no breaks in their southward connection, and intermittently exchanged between them when they were connected in the north; and he also upholds the view that from a common ancestral form the same species has been often developed in entirely disconnected localities when in these localities the conditions of environment were the same.
The opposite view is that there have been frequent connections between the great land masses, alike in the tropics, in the south temperate zone, and in the Antarctic region.
Unquestionably, the distribution of many forms of life, past and present, offers problems which with our present paleontological knowledge we are wholly unable to solve.
If we consider only the biological facts concerning some one group of animals it is not only easy but inevitable to conclude that its distribution must be accounted for by the existence of some former direct land bridge extending, for instance, between Patagonia and Australia, or between Brazil and South Africa, or between the West Indies and the Mediterranean, or between a part of the Andean region and northeastern Asia.
The trouble is that as more groups of animals are studied from the standpoint of this hypothesis the number of such land bridges demanded to account for the existing facts of animal distribution is constantly and indefinitely extended.
A recent book by one of the most learned advocates of this hypothesis calls for at least ten such land bridges between South America and all the other continents, present and past, of the world since a period geologically not very remote.
These land bridges, moreover, must, many of them, have been literally bridges; long, narrow tongues of land thrust in every direction across the broad oceans.
By parity of reasoning, the land bridges could be made a hundred instead of merely ten in number.
But he generalized with complete recklessness from the slenderest data; and even these data he often completely misunderstood or misinterpreted.
In addition to valuable investigations of fossil bearing beds in the Argentine, he made some excellent general suggestions, such as that the pithecoid apes, like the baboons, do not stand in the line of man's ancestral stem but represent a divergence from it away from humanity and toward a retrogressive bestialization.
But of his main theses he proves none, and what evidence we have tells against them. At the Museum of La Plata I found that the authorities were practically a unit in regarding his remains of tertiary men and proto men as being either the remains of tertiary American monkeys or of American Indians from strata that were long post tertiary.
The evidence we have, so far as it goes, tends to show that the South American fauna always has been more archaic in type than the arctogeal fauna of the same chronological level.
ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION.
On one of my first jaunts into the suburbs of Tallahassee I noticed not far from the road a bit of swamp,--shallow pools with muddy borders and flats.
It was a likely spot for "waders," and would be worth a visit.
Ordinarily I call myself a simple bird gazer, an amateur, a field naturalist, if you will; but on occasions like the present I assume-with myself, that is-all the rights and titles of an ornithologist proper, a man of science strictly so called.
In the interest of science, then, I climbed the fence and picked my way across the field.
True enough, about the edges of the water were two or three solitary sandpipers, and at least half a dozen of the smaller yellowlegs,--two additions to my Florida list,--not to speak of a little blue heron and a green heron, the latter in most uncommonly green plumage.
"The letter killeth" is a pretty good text in emergencies of this kind.
The herons, meanwhile, had taken French leave, but the smaller birds were less suspicious; I watched them at my leisure, and left them still feeding.
He pulled up his horse and bade me good afternoon.
As it was, he protected the birds on his plantation, and the place was full of them.
"We have orioles here," he added; and so far, at any rate, he was right; I had seen perhaps twenty that day (orchard orioles, that is), and one sat in a tree before us at the moment.
His whole manner was most kindly and hospitable,--as was that of every Tallahassean with whom I had occasion to speak,--and I told him with sincere gratitude that I should certainly avail myself of his courtesy and stroll through his woods.
I approached them, two mornings afterward, from the opposite side, where, finding no other place of entrance, I climbed a six barred, tightly locked gate-feeling all the while like "a thief and a robber"--in front of a deserted cabin.
Then I had only to cross a grassy field, in which meadow larks were singing, and I was in the woods.
I wandered through them without finding anything more unusual or interesting than summer tanagers and yellow throated warblers, which were in song there, as they were in every such place, and after a while came out into a pleasant glade, from which different parts of the plantation could be seen, and through which ran a plantation road.
Here was a wooden fence,--a most unusual thing,--and I lost no time in mounting it, to rest and look about me.
It is one of the marks of a true Yankee, I suspect, to like such a perch.
My own weakness in that direction is a frequent subject of mirth with chance fellow travelers. The attitude is comfortable and conducive to meditation; and now that I was seated and at my ease, I felt that this was one of the New England luxuries which, almost without knowing it, I had missed ever since I left home.
In the latter case, indeed, and perhaps in the former as well, it would seem more reasonable to draw an exactly opposite inference.
But, quibbles apart, one thing I do remember: I sat for some time on the fence, in the shade of a tree, with an eye upon the cane swamp and an ear open for bird voices.
Yes, and it comes to me at this moment that here I heard the first and only bull frog that I heard anywhere in Florida.
It was like a voice from home, and belonged with the fence.
One chorus brought me out of bed in Daytona-in the evening-after a succession of February dog day showers.
No doubt the creatures were frogs, but of some kind new to me, with voices more lugubrious and homesick than I should have supposed could possibly belong to any batrachian.
A week or two later, in the New Smyrna flat woods, I heard in the distance a sound which I took for the grunting of pigs.
A man was approaching, and when we met I asked him what was making that noise yonder.
"Frogs," he said.
At another time, in the flat woods of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing my reader's credulity too far, or making myself out a man of too imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating of sheep.
But this frog in the sugar cane swamp was the same fellow that on summer evenings, ever and ever so many years ago, in sonorous bass that could be heard a quarter of a mile away, used to call from Reuben Loud's pond, "Pull him in!
Jug o' rum!"
I dismounted from my perch at last, and was sauntering idly along the path (idleness like this is often the best of ornithological industry), when suddenly I had a vision!
Before me, in the leafy top of an oak sapling, sat a blue grosbeak.
I knew him on the instant.
Here was a new bird, a bird about which I had felt fifteen years of curiosity; and, more than that, a bird which here and now was quite unexpected, since it was not included in either of the two Florida lists that I had brought with me from home.
For perhaps five seconds I had my opera glass on the blue head and the thick set, dark bill, with its lighter colored under mandible.
Then I heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs, and lifted my eyes.
My friend the owner of the plantation was coming down the road at a gallop, straight upon me.
If I was to see the grosbeak and make sure of him, it must be done at once.
I moved to bring him fully into view, and he flew into the thick of a pine tree out of sight.
A bright thought came to me.
Alas! he had too much courtesy to pass his own guest without speaking.
"Still after the birds?" he said, as he checked his horse.
I responded, as I hope, without any symptom of annoyance.
Then, of course, he wished to know what I was looking at, and I told him that a blue grosbeak had just flown into that pine tree, and that I was most distressingly anxious to see more of him.
He looked at the pine tree.
"I can't see him," he said. No more could i "It wasn't a blue jay, was it?" he asked.
By this time the grosbeak had disappeared utterly.
Possibly he had gone to a bit of wood on the opposite side of the cane swamp.
I scaled a barbed wire fence and made in that direction, but to no purpose.
The grosbeak was gone for good.
Could the planter have read my thoughts just then he would perhaps have been angry with himself, and pretty certainly he would have been angry with me.
That a Yankee should accept his hospitality, and then load him with curses and call him all manner of names!
How should he know that I was so insane a hobbyist as to care more for the sight of a new bird than for all the laws and customs of ordinary politeness?
As my feelings cooled, I saw that I was stepping over hills or rows of some strange looking plants just out of the ground.
I was preparing to surmount the barbed wire fence again, when the planter returned and halted for another chat.
There were a great many kinds of sparrows in that country, he said, and also of woodpeckers.
As he rode off he called my attention to a great blue heron just then flying over the swamp.
"They are very shy," he said.
Then, from further away, he shouted once more to ask if I heard the mocking bird singing yonder, pointing with his whip in the direction of the singer.
For some time longer I hung about the glade, vainly hoping that the grosbeak would again favor my eyes.
Then I crossed more planted fields,--climbing more barbed wire fences, and stopping on the way to enjoy the sweetly quaint music of a little chorus of white crowned sparrows,--and skirted once more the muddy shore of the cane swamp, where the yellowlegs and sandpipers were still feeding.
At that point, as I now remember, the air was full of vultures (carrion crows), a hundred or more, soaring over the fields in some fit of gregariousness.
Once back at the hotel, I opened my Coues's Key to refresh my memory as to the exact appearance of that bird.
"Feathers around base of bill black," said the book.
I had not noticed that.
A black line between the almost black beak and the dark blue head would be inconspicuous at the best, and quite naturally would escape a glimpse so hasty as mine had been.
And yet, while I reasoned in this way, I foresaw plainly enough that, as time passed, doubt would get the better of assurance, as it always does, and I should never be certain that I had not been the victim of some illusion.
But that was not on a cotton plantation, and is part of another story.
A FLORIDA SHRINE.
It is one of the most conveniently accessible of those "points of interest" with which guide books so anxiously, and with so much propriety, concern themselves.
What a tourist prays for is something to see.
If I had ever been a tourist in Boston, no doubt I should before now have surveyed the world from the top of the Bunker Hill monument.
In Tallahassee, at all events, I went to the Murat estate.
In fact, I went more than once; but I remember especially my first visit, which had a livelier sentimental interest than the others because I was then under the agreeable delusion that the Prince himself had lived there.
The guide book told me so, vouchsafing also the information that after building the house he "interested himself actively in local affairs, became a naturalized citizen, and served successively as postmaster, alderman, and mayor"--a model immigrant, surely, though it is rather the way of immigrants, perhaps, not to refuse political responsibilities.
Here lived once the son of the King of Naples; himself a Prince, and-worthy son of a worthy sire-alderman and then mayor of the city of Tallahassee.
Thus did an uncompromising democrat pay court to the shades of Royalty, while a mocking bird sang from a fringe bush by the gate, and an oriole flew madly from tree to tree in pursuit of a fair creature of the reluctant sex.
The inconsistency, if such it was, was quickly punished.
For, alas!
I appealed to the guide book.
For once, the guide book compiler must have been misinformed.
The question, happily, was one of no great consequence.
Prince Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to travel that road to day, instead of sitting before a Massachusetts fire, with the ground deep under snow, and the air full of thirty or forty degrees of frost.
In the front yard of one of the cabins opposite the car wheel foundry, and near the station, as I now remember, a middle aged negress was cutting up an oak log.
She swung the axe with vigor and precision, and the chips flew; but I could not help saying, "You ought to make the man do that."
She answered on the instant.
"I'm sure you would," I thought.
Her tongue was as sharp as her axe.
His wife had died a year before, he said, and so far, though he had not let the grass grow under his feet, he had found no one to take her place.
He still meant to do so, if he could.
He was only seventy four years old, and it was not good for a man to be alone.
He seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheld all mention of the stalwart and manless wood cutter.
I hope he went farther, and fared better.
So youthful as he was, surely there was no occasion for haste.
When I had skirted a cotton field-the crop just out of the ground-and a bit of wood on the right, and a swamp with a splendid display of white water lilies on the left, and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, I met a man of considerably more than seventy four years.
"Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?" I inquired.
He grinned broadly, and thought he could.
He was one of the old Murat servants, as his father had been before him.
"I was borned on to him," he said, speaking of the Prince.
He "never was for barbarizing a poor colored person at all." Whipping?
Oh, yes.
"He didn't miss your fault.
The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emancipation had not made everything heavenly.
They had "sold their birthright," though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather.
"They ain't got no sense," he declared, "and what sense they has got don't do 'em no good."
I told him finally that I was from the North.
"Oh, I knows it," he exclaimed, "I knows it;" and he beamed with delight.
Anybody would know it that had any jedgment at all.
So it will be with us, if we live so long.
May we find once in a while a patient listener.
This patriarch's unfavorable opinion as to the prospects of the colored people was shared by my hopeful young widower before mentioned, who expressed himself quite as emphatically.
But he was less perspicacious than the older man.
He was one of the very few persons whom I met at the South who did not recognize me at sight as a Yankee.
But perhaps, after all, he only meant to flatter me.
If I am long on the way, it is because, as I love always to have it, the going and coming were the better part of the pilgrimage.
The estate itself is beautifully situated, with far away horizons; but it has fallen into great neglect, while the house, almost in ruins, and occupied by colored people, is to Northern eyes hardly more than a larger cabin.
"Have you seen any of those fine old country mansions," he asked, "about which we read so often in descriptions of Southern, life?" He had been on the lookout for them, he averred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; and from his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a "fine old mansion" must be different from his.
The Murat house, certainly, was never a palace, except as love may have made it so.
But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it; those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, were now in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor-for one visitor, at least-to fall into pensive meditation.
I recall in particular some white crowned sparrows, the first ones I had seen in Florida.
At a bend in the road opposite the water lily swamp, while I was cooling myself in the shade of a friendly pine tree,--enjoying at the same time a fence overrun with Cherokee roses,--a man and his little boy came along in a wagon.
The man seemed really disappointed when I told him that I was going into town, instead of coming from it.
It was pretty warm weather for walking, and he had meant to offer me a lift.
He was a Scandinavian, who had been for some years in Florida.
He talked of his crops, his children, the climate, and so on, all in a cheerful strain, pleasant to hear.
If the pessimists are right,--which may I be kept from believing,--the optimists are certainly more comfortable to live with, though it be only for ten minutes under a roadside shade tree.
When I reached the street car track at the foot of the hill, the one car which plies back and forth through the city was in its place, with the driver beside it, but no mules.
"Are you going to start directly?" I asked.
Do about!"
Half a minute afterwards two very neatly dressed little colored boys stepped upon the rear platform.
"Uptown?"
"Well, come inside.
"Sit down there," he said, "right there." They obeyed, and as he turned away he added, what I found more and more to be true, as I saw more of him, "I ain't de boss, but I's got right smart to say."
The fretful children were crying in their cradles; the horse destined for the knacker dozed forlorn in the field of his imprisonment; the cats waited stealthily in corners for the coming night.
"mr Bashwood!" she exclaimed, in loud, clear tones indicative of the utmost astonishment, "what a surprise to find you here!
Directly!
No?
Hush!
"Why am I stopping here?"
The spy fell into the snare laid for him.
"I wonder whether I'm strong enough to throw you after your hat?" she said.
"I'll take a turn and consider it."
She sauntered on a few steps toward the figure advancing along the road. The spy followed her close.
He was a dark man, his black hair was powdered with dust, and his black eyes were looking steadfastly forward along the road before him.
"Miss Gwilt!" he exclaimed, and mechanically held out his hand.
He has been following me, and annoying me all the way from the town."
"I have been forced to give up my situation, and I am followed and watched by a paid spy.
Let the wretch go.
May I-may I ask for the support of your arm?
"I am treating you like an old friend.
They went on toward the town.
"It is clean and quiet; I am too poor to want or expect more.
The magnetic influence of her touch was thrilling through him while she spoke.
We are both victims.
"Why, Allan himself told me-"
His eyes dropped before hers, and his dark color deepened.
Anyhow, the conspiracy has succeeded.
"Pray excuse my anxiety, Miss Gwilt: Allan's good name is as dear to me as my own!"
Let us go back to what we were talking about.
What could I do?
My pride (Heaven help me, I was brought up like a gentlewoman, and I have sensibilities that are not blunted even yet!)--my pride got the better of me, and I left my place.
But he has even used me more cruelly still; he persists in suspecting me; it is he who is having me watched.
"If the man told you that, the man lied.
I beg your pardon, Miss Gwilt; I beg your pardon from the bottom of my heart.
Let me go and clear it up at once.
She drew back from it, after a moment's absorption in her own thoughts, with a start of terror.
The front of the house was dark, and closed for the night.
He had all thirty two of his teeth.
She seemed to him to be eight years old.
He was a connoisseur of painting.
"What a charming grand seigneur," he said, "and what a fine air he had with his blue ribbon!"
"Thirty francs."
"What is your name?" "Olympie." "You shall have fifty francs, and you shall be called Nicolette."
He had all sorts of prejudices and took all sorts of liberties.
You are finely taken aback, and really, you are excessively ignorant.
This manner of procedure was good tempered.
He added: "I insist upon it that the mother shall treat them well. I shall go to see them from time to time." And this he did.
He took an immense amount of snuff, and had a particularly graceful manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the back of one hand.
He dined at five o'clock, and after that his door was open.
They had come into the world ten years apart.
No paradise becomes terrestrial in our day.
The younger wedded the man of her dreams, but she died.
Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of blackness. She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day, a man had beheld her garter.
Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty.
In spite of this favored Lancer, the label: Prude, under which we have classed her, suited her to absolute perfection.
Mademoiselle Vaubois, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a single spot of intelligence.
This is the case with passive natures.
There breathed from her whole person the stupor of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.
This was his grandson.
Chapter six.
For Awhile A Very Obscure One
He would again be as solitary as ever, and though he had great hopes, and great-too great-expectations from life, he could not have given any definite account of his hopes, his expectations, or even his desires.
No, it's not that either.
Is it the parting with Alyosha and the conversation I had with him?
No doubt that came in, that vexation, it must have done indeed; but yet that was not it, that was not it either.
"I feel sick with depression and yet I can't tell what I want.
Better not think, perhaps."
What made his depression so vexatious and irritating was that it had a kind of casual, external character-he felt that.
It all dawned upon him suddenly and became clear.
Afterwards, as he talked, Smerdyakov had been forgotten for the time; but still he had been in his mind, and as soon as Ivan parted with Alyosha and was walking home, the forgotten sensation began to obtrude itself again.
"Is it possible that a miserable, contemptible creature like that can worry me so much?" he wondered, with insufferable irritation.
He had even begun to notice in himself a growing feeling that was almost of hatred for the creature. Perhaps this hatred was accentuated by the fact that when Ivan first came to the neighborhood he had felt quite differently.
Then he had taken a marked interest in Smerdyakov, and had even thought him very original.
It had first given rise to his aversion.
Grushenka had come on the scene, and there had been the scandals with his brother Dmitri-they discussed that, too.
But though Smerdyakov always talked of that with great excitement, it was impossible to discover what he desired to come of it.
But what finally irritated Ivan most and confirmed his dislike for him was the peculiar, revolting familiarity which Smerdyakov began to show more and more markedly.
He always spoke in a tone that suggested that those two had some kind of compact, some secret between them, that had at some time been expressed on both sides, only known to them and beyond the comprehension of those around them.
With a feeling of disgust and irritation he tried to pass in at the gate without speaking or looking at Smerdyakov.
With anger and repulsion he looked at Smerdyakov's emasculate, sickly face, with the little curls combed forward on his forehead.
His left eye winked and he grinned as if to say, "Where are you going?
You won't pass by; you see that we two clever people have something to say to each other."
"Get away, miserable idiot.
What have I to do with you?" was on the tip of his tongue, but to his profound astonishment he heard himself say, "Is my father still asleep, or has he waked?"
He asked the question softly and meekly, to his own surprise, and at once, again to his own surprise, sat down on the bench.
For an instant he felt almost frightened; he remembered it afterwards.
Smerdyakov stood facing him, his hands behind his back, looking at him with assurance and almost severity.
"His honor is still asleep," he articulated deliberately ("You were the first to speak, not I," he seemed to say).
"I am surprised at you, sir," he added, after a pause, dropping his eyes affectedly, setting his right foot forward, and playing with the tip of his polished boot.
"Why I smile you must understand of yourself, if you are a clever man," his screwed up left eye seemed to say.
"Why should I go to Tchermashnya?" Ivan asked in surprise.
Smerdyakov was silent again.
"I put you off with a secondary reason," he seemed to suggest, "simply to say something."
"Damn you!
Smerdyakov drew his right foot up to his left, pulled himself up, but still looked at him with the same serenity and the same little smile.
"Substantially nothing-but just by way of conversation."
They did not speak for nearly a minute.
At last he moved to get up.
Smerdyakov seemed to seize the moment.
I don't know how to help myself," he said resolutely and distinctly, and at his last word he sighed.
"I am speaking of your parent and your brother Dmitri Fyodorovitch.
Here Fyodor Pavlovitch will get up directly and begin worrying me every minute, 'Has she come?
Why hasn't she come?' and so on up till midnight and even after midnight.
When will she come?'--as though I were to blame for it.
On the other side it's no better. As soon as it gets dark, or even before, your brother will appear with his gun in his hands: 'Look out, you rogue, you soup maker.
If you miss her and don't let me know she's been-I'll kill you before any one.' When the night's over, in the morning, he, too, like Fyodor Pavlovitch, begins worrying me to death.
'Why hasn't she come?
Will she come soon?' And he, too, thinks me to blame because his lady hasn't come.
"And why have you meddled?
Why did you begin to spy for Dmitri Fyodorovitch?" said Ivan irritably.
"How could I help meddling?
Though, indeed, I haven't meddled at all, if you want to know the truth of the matter.
I kept quiet from the very beginning, not daring to answer; but he pitched on me to be his servant. He has had only one thing to say since: 'I'll kill you, you scoundrel, if you miss her,' I feel certain, sir, that I shall have a long fit to morrow."
I fell from the garret that time.
The struggling ceased and then began again, and for three days I couldn't come back to my senses.
I might have died."
What makes you say you will have one to morrow?" Ivan inquired, with a peculiar, irritable curiosity.
"That's just so.
You can't tell beforehand."
"I climb up to the garret every day.
I might fall from the garret again to morrow.
And, if not, I might fall down the cellar steps.
I have to go into the cellar every day, too."
Ivan took a long look at him.
"You are talking nonsense, I see, and I don't quite understand you," he said softly, but with a sort of menace.
"Do you mean to pretend to be ill to morrow for three days, eh?"
Smerdyakov, who was looking at the ground again, and playing with the toe of his right foot, set the foot down, moved the left one forward, and, grinning, articulated:
"If I were able to play such a trick, that is, pretend to have a fit-and it would not be difficult for a man accustomed to them-I should have a perfect right to use such a means to save myself from death.
He'd be ashamed to."
All my brother Dmitri's threats are only hasty words and mean nothing.
"He'd kill me first of all, like a fly.
But even more than that, I am afraid I shall be taken for an accomplice of his when he does something crazy to his father."
"Why should you be taken for an accomplice?"
"What signals?
Whom did you tell?
Confound you, speak more plainly."
"I'm bound to admit the fact," Smerdyakov drawled with pedantic composure, "that I have a secret with Fyodor Pavlovitch in this business.
As you know yourself (if only you do know it) he has for several days past locked himself in as soon as night or even evening comes on.
Of late you've been going upstairs to your room early every evening, and yesterday you did not come down at all, and so perhaps you don't know how carefully he has begun to lock himself in at night, and even if Grigory Vassilyevitch comes to the door he won't open to him till he hears his voice.
That's the arrangement he made himself ever since this to do with Agrafena Alexandrovna began.
You look out for her,' says he, 'till midnight and later; and if she does come, you run up and knock at my door or at the window from the garden.
At first, two knocks, and then, after an interval, another much louder.
Then he will understand that something has happened suddenly and that I must see him, and he will open to me so that I can go and speak to him.
That's all in case Agrafena Alexandrovna can't come herself, but sends a message.
Besides, Dmitri Fyodorovitch might come, too, so I must let him know he is near.
His honor is awfully afraid of Dmitri Fyodorovitch, so that even if Agrafena Alexandrovna had come and were locked in with him, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch were to turn up anywhere near at the time, I should be bound to let him know at once, knocking three times.
So that the first signal of five knocks means Agrafena Alexandrovna has come, while the second signal of three knocks means 'something important to tell you.' His honor has shown me them several times and explained them.
Well, those signals are known to Dmitri Fyodorovitch too, now."
"How are they known?
Did you tell him?
How dared you tell him?"
How could I dare to keep it back from him?
I'll break both your legs for you.' So I told him those secret signals that he might see my slavish devotion, and might be satisfied that I was not deceiving him, but was telling him all I could."
"Hang it!
How can you be so sure you are going to have a fit, confound you?
Are you laughing at me?"
I am in no laughing humor with this fear on me.
I feel I am going to have a fit.
I have a presentiment.
Fright alone will bring it on."
"Confound it!
If you are laid up, Grigory will be on the watch.
Let Grigory know beforehand; he will be sure not to let him in."
And as for Grigory Vassilyevitch hearing him and not admitting him, he has been ill ever since yesterday, and Marfa Ignatyevna intends to give him medicine to morrow.
It's a very strange remedy of hers.
Marfa Ignatyevna knows of a preparation and always keeps it.
And when Grigory Vassilyevitch wakes up he is perfectly well after it, but Marfa Ignatyevna always has a headache from it.
So, if Marfa Ignatyevna carries out her intention to morrow, they won't hear anything and hinder Dmitri Fyodorovitch. They'll be asleep."
"What a rigmarole!
And it all seems to happen at once, as though it were planned.
"How could I?...
If he means to do anything, he'll do it; but if not, I shan't be thrusting him upon his father."
"You say that yourself, and all the while I've been here, I've felt sure it was all the old man's fancy, and the creature won't come to him.
Why should Dmitri break in on him if she doesn't come? Speak, I want to know what you are thinking!"
"You know yourself why he'll come.
His honor will come simply because he is in a rage or suspicious on account of my illness perhaps, and he'll dash in, as he did yesterday through impatience to search the rooms, to see whether she hasn't escaped him on the sly.
He is perfectly well aware, too, that Fyodor Pavlovitch has a big envelope with three thousand roubles in it, tied up with ribbon and sealed with three seals.
"Dmitri won't come to steal money and kill my father to do it.
He might have killed him yesterday on account of Grushenka, like the frantic, savage fool he is, but he won't steal."
You don't know in what need he is," Smerdyakov explained, with perfect composure and remarkable distinctness.
"He looks on that three thousand as his own, too.
He said so to me himself.
'My father still owes me just three thousand,' he said.
It's as good as certain, so to say, that Agrafena Alexandrovna will force him, if only she cares to, to marry her-the master himself, I mean, Fyodor Pavlovitch-if only she cares to, and of course she may care to.
All I've said is that she won't come, but maybe she's looking for more than that-I mean to be mistress here.
And she's got plenty of sense.
But if your father were to die now, there'd be some forty thousand for sure, even for Dmitri Fyodorovitch whom he hates so, for he's made no will....
Dmitri Fyodorovitch knows all that very well."
A sort of shudder passed over Ivan's face.
He suddenly flushed.
What did you mean by that?
"Precisely so," said Smerdyakov, softly and reasonably, watching Ivan intently, however.
"What do you mean by 'precisely so'?" Ivan questioned him, with a menacing light in his eyes, restraining himself with difficulty.
"I spoke because I felt sorry for you.
If I were in your place I should simply throw it all up ... rather than stay on in such a position," answered Smerdyakov, with the most candid air looking at Ivan's flashing eyes.
They were both silent.
He was about to pass straight through the gate, but he stopped short and turned to Smerdyakov.
Something strange followed.
"I am going away to Moscow to morrow, if you care to know-early to morrow morning.
That's all!" he suddenly said aloud angrily, and wondered himself afterwards what need there was to say this then to Smerdyakov.
"That's the best thing you can do," he responded, as though he had expected to hear it; "except that you can always be telegraphed for from Moscow, if anything should happen here."
Ivan stopped again, and again turned quickly to Smerdyakov.
But a change had passed over him, too.
All his familiarity and carelessness had completely disappeared.
His face expressed attention and expectation, intent but timid and cringing.
"From Tchermashnya, too ... you could be sent for," Smerdyakov muttered, almost in a whisper, looking disconcerted, but gazing intently into Ivan's eyes.
"Only Moscow is farther and Tchermashnya is nearer.
Is it to save my spending money on the fare, or to save my going so far out of my way, that you insist on Tchermashnya?"
Chapter seven.
"It's Always Worth While Speaking To A Clever Man"
Meeting Fyodor Pavlovitch in the drawing room directly he went in, he shouted to him, waving his hands, "I am going upstairs to my room, not in to you.
Good by!" and passed by, trying not even to look at his father.
Very possibly the old man was too hateful to him at that moment; but such an unceremonious display of hostility was a surprise even to Fyodor Pavlovitch.
And the old man evidently wanted to tell him something at once and had come to meet him in the drawing room on purpose.
Receiving this amiable greeting, he stood still in silence and with an ironical air watched his son going upstairs, till he passed out of sight.
Who can tell?" the valet muttered evasively.
"Confound him!
Let him be angry then.
Bring in the samovar, and get along with you.
Look sharp!
Half an hour later the house was locked, and the crazy old man was wandering along through the rooms in excited expectation of hearing every minute the five knocks agreed upon.
Now and then he peered out into the darkness, seeing nothing.
He sat up late that night, till two o'clock.
But we will not give an account of his thoughts, and this is not the place to look into that soul-its turn will come.
And even if one tried, it would be very hard to give an account of them, for there were no thoughts in his brain, but something very vague, and, above all, intense excitement.
He felt himself that he had lost his bearings.
He was fretted, too, by all sorts of strange and almost surprising desires; for instance, after midnight he suddenly had an intense irresistible inclination to go down, open the door, go to the lodge and beat Smerdyakov.
But if he had been asked why, he could not have given any exact reason, except perhaps that he loathed the valet as one who had insulted him more gravely than any one in the world.
On the other hand, he was more than once that night overcome by a sort of inexplicable humiliating terror, which he felt positively paralyzed his physical powers.
His head ached and he was giddy.
A feeling of hatred was rankling in his heart, as though he meant to avenge himself on some one.
At moments he hated himself intensely.
Of Katerina Ivanovna he almost forgot to think, and wondered greatly at this afterwards, especially as he remembered perfectly that when he had protested so valiantly to Katerina Ivanovna that he would go away next day to Moscow, something had whispered in his heart, "That's nonsense, you are not going, and it won't be so easy to tear yourself away as you are boasting now."
Remembering that night long afterwards, Ivan recalled with peculiar repulsion how he had suddenly got up from the sofa and had stealthily, as though he were afraid of being watched, opened the door, gone out on the staircase and listened to Fyodor Pavlovitch stirring down below, had listened a long while-some five minutes-with a sort of strange curiosity, holding his breath while his heart throbbed.
And why he had done all this, why he was listening, he could not have said.
For Fyodor Pavlovitch himself he felt no hatred at that moment, but was simply intensely curious to know how he was walking down there below and what he must be doing now. He wondered and imagined how he must be peeping out of the dark windows and stopping in the middle of the room, listening, listening-for some one to knock.
And he did fall asleep at once, and slept soundly without dreams, but waked early, at seven o'clock, when it was broad daylight.
Opening his eyes, he was surprised to feel himself extraordinarily vigorous.
He jumped up at once and dressed quickly; then dragged out his trunk and began packing immediately.
And his departure certainly was sudden.
At last his trunk and bag were ready.
It was about nine o'clock when Marfa Ignatyevna came in with her usual inquiry, "Where will your honor take your tea, in your own room or downstairs?"
He looked almost cheerful, but there was about him, about his words and gestures, something hurried and scattered.
Greeting his father affably, and even inquiring specially after his health, though he did not wait to hear his answer to the end, he announced that he was starting off in an hour to return to Moscow for good, and begged him to send for the horses.
His father heard this announcement with no sign of surprise, and forgot in an unmannerly way to show regret at losing him.
Instead of doing so, he flew into a great flutter at the recollection of some important business of his own.
"What a fellow you are!
Not to tell me yesterday!
Do me a great service, my dear boy.
Go to Tchermashnya on the way.
It's only to turn to the left from the station at Volovya, only another twelve versts and you come to Tchermashnya."
"I'm sorry, I can't.
It's eighty versts to the railway and the train starts for Moscow at seven o'clock to night.
I can only just catch it."
"You'll catch it to morrow or the day after, but to day turn off to Tchermashnya.
It won't put you out much to humor your father!
If I hadn't had something to keep me here, I would have run over myself long ago, for I've some business there in a hurry.
But here I ... it's not the time for me to go now....
You see, I've two pieces of copse land there.
The Maslovs, an old merchant and his son, will give eight thousand for the timber.
But last year I just missed a purchaser who would have given twelve.
There's no getting any one about here to buy it.
The Maslovs have it all their own way.
One has to take what they'll give, for no one here dare bid against them.
The priest at Ilyinskoe wrote to me last Thursday that a merchant called Gorstkin, a man I know, had turned up.
What makes him valuable is that he is not from these parts, so he is not afraid of the Maslovs.
He says he will give me eleven thousand for the copse.
But he'll only be here, the priest writes, for a week altogether, so you must go at once and make a bargain with him."
"Well, you write to the priest; he'll make the bargain."
"He can't do it.
He is a perfect treasure, I'd give him twenty thousand to take care of for me without a receipt; but he has no eye for business, he is a perfect child, a crow could deceive him. And yet he is a learned man, would you believe it?
That's the common complaint.
He is a liar.
He told me the year before last that his wife was dead and that he had married another, and would you believe it, there was not a word of truth in it?
So what you have to find out is whether he is lying or speaking the truth, when he says he wants to buy it and would give eleven thousand."
"Stay, wait a bit!
I've done business with him a long time.
You see, you must watch his beard; he has a nasty, thin, red beard. If his beard shakes when he talks and he gets cross, it's all right, he is saying what he means, he wants to do business.
But if he strokes his beard with his left hand and grins-he is trying to cheat you.
Don't watch his eyes, you won't find out anything from his eyes, he is a deep one, a rogue-but watch his beard!
If you come to an understanding with him, and see it's all right, write here at once.
You need only write: 'He's not lying.' Stand out for eleven thousand; one thousand you can knock off, but not more.
Just think!
Only let me know it's serious, and I'll run over and fix it up.
I'll snatch the time somehow.
But what's the good of my galloping over, if it's all a notion of the priest's?
Come, will you go?"
"Oh, I can't spare the time.
You must excuse me."
I shan't forget it.
You've no heart, any of you-that's what it is?
Where are you going now-to Venice?
Your Venice will keep another two days.
I send you just because you are a clever fellow.
You know nothing about timber, but you've got an eye.
I tell you, watch his beard-if his beard shakes you know he is in earnest."
Fyodor Pavlovitch did not catch, or would not catch, the malignancy, but he caught the smile.
"Then you'll go, you'll go?
I'll scribble the note for you at once."
I don't know.
I'll decide on the way."
"Nonsense!
Decide at once.
My dear fellow, decide!
If you settle the matter, write me a line; give it to the priest and he'll send it on to me at once.
And I won't delay you more than that.
The priest will give you horses back to Volovya station."
The old man was quite delighted.
He wrote the note, and sent for the horses.
A light lunch was brought in, with brandy.
He was quite unmoved by the parting, and seemed, in fact, at a loss for something to say.
"He must be bored with me," he thought.
Only when accompanying his son out on to the steps, the old man began to fuss about.
His father saw it at once, and instantly pulled himself up.
"Well, good luck to you, good luck to you!" he repeated from the steps. "You'll come again some time or other?
Well, Christ be with you!"
Ivan got into the carriage.
Don't be too hard on me!" the father called for the last time.
"You see ...
Again, as the day before, the words seemed to drop of themselves, and he laughed, too, a peculiar, nervous laugh.
He remembered it long after.
The carriage rolled away.
And all of a sudden he felt very happy.
He tried to talk to the driver, and he felt intensely interested in an answer the peasant made him; but a minute later he realized that he was not catching anything, and that he had not really even taken in the peasant's answer.
He was silent, and it was pleasant even so.
But he softly smiled, blew softly on the friendly phantoms, and they flew away.
"There's plenty of time for them," he thought.
They reached the station quickly, changed horses, and galloped to Volovya.
"Why is it worth while speaking to a clever man?
What did he mean by that?"
The thought seemed suddenly to clutch at his breathing.
"And why did I tell him I was going to Tchermashnya?" They reached Volovya station.
He told them to harness the horses.
He went into the station house, looked round, glanced at the overseer's wife, and suddenly went back to the entrance.
Am I too late to reach the railway by seven, brothers?"
"We shall just do it.
Shall we get the carriage out?"
"At once.
"To be sure.
Mitri here will."
I've known Fyodor Pavlovitch a long time."
"Thank you, sir.
I've done with the old world for ever, and may I have no news, no echo, from it.
To a new life, new places and no looking back!" But instead of delight his soul was filled with such gloom, and his heart ached with such anguish, as he had never known in his life before.
He was thinking all the night.
The train flew on, and only at daybreak, when he was approaching Moscow, he suddenly roused himself from his meditation.
"I am a scoundrel," he whispered to himself.
Fyodor Pavlovitch remained well satisfied at having seen his son off.
For two hours afterwards he felt almost happy, and sat drinking brandy.
But suddenly something happened which was very annoying and unpleasant for every one in the house, and completely upset Fyodor Pavlovitch's equanimity at once.
Smerdyakov went to the cellar for something and fell down from the top of the steps.
Fortunately, Marfa Ignatyevna was in the yard and heard him in time.
She did not see the fall, but heard his scream-the strange, peculiar scream, long familiar to her-the scream of the epileptic falling in a fit.
They could not tell whether the fit had come on him at the moment he was descending the steps, so that he must have fallen unconscious, or whether it was the fall and the shock that had caused the fit in Smerdyakov, who was known to be liable to them.
They found him at the bottom of the cellar steps, writhing in convulsions and foaming at the mouth.
It was thought at first that he must have broken something-an arm or a leg-and hurt himself, but "God had preserved him," as Marfa Ignatyevna expressed it-nothing of the kind had happened.
But it was difficult to get him out of the cellar.
They asked the neighbors to help and managed it somehow.
Fyodor Pavlovitch himself was present at the whole ceremony.
He helped, evidently alarmed and upset.
The sick man did not regain consciousness; the convulsions ceased for a time, but then began again, and every one concluded that the same thing would happen, as had happened a year before, when he accidentally fell from the garret. They remembered that ice had been put on his head then.
There was still ice in the cellar, and Marfa Ignatyevna had some brought up.
He was a most estimable old man, and the most careful and conscientious doctor in the province.
After careful examination, he concluded that the fit was a very violent one and might have serious consequences; that meanwhile he, Herzenstube, did not fully understand it, but that by to morrow morning, if the present remedies were unavailing, he would venture to try something else.
The invalid was taken to the lodge, to a room next to Grigory's and Marfa Ignatyevna's.
Then Fyodor Pavlovitch had one misfortune after another to put up with that day.
Marfa Ignatyevna cooked the dinner, and the soup, compared with Smerdyakov's, was "no better than dish water," and the fowl was so dried up that it was impossible to masticate it.
To her master's bitter, though deserved, reproaches, Marfa Ignatyevna replied that the fowl was a very old one to begin with, and that she had never been trained as a cook.
In the evening there was another trouble in store for Fyodor Pavlovitch; he was informed that Grigory, who had not been well for the last three days, was completely laid up by his lumbago.
Fyodor Pavlovitch finished his tea as early as possible and locked himself up alone in the house.
He was in terrible excitement and suspense.
He had received from Smerdyakov that morning an assurance "that she had promised to come without fail." The incorrigible old man's heart throbbed with excitement; he paced up and down his empty rooms listening.
He had to be on the alert.
Dmitri might be on the watch for her somewhere, and when she knocked on the window (Smerdyakov had informed him two days before that he had told her where and how to knock) the door must be opened at once.
She must not be a second in the passage, for fear-which God forbid!--that she should be frightened and run away.
Fyodor Pavlovitch had much to think of, but never had his heart been steeped in such voluptuous hopes.
SEVENTY TWO.
He could not now go to Lord Cantrip, as the hours were too precious to him, and, as he felt, too short.
There should be nothing written; he had tried that before in old days, and had broken down with the effort.
After a late breakfast he walked out far away, into the Regent's Park, and there, wandering among the uninteresting paths, he devised triumphs of oratory for himself.
Dim ideas of a definition of political honesty crossed his brain, bringing with him, however, a conviction that his thought must be much more clearly worked out than it could be on that day before he might venture to give it birth in the House of Commons.
But he knew also that it would behove him to abstain from speaking of himself unless he could do so in close reference to some point specially in dispute between the two parties.
He entered the House with the Speaker at four o'clock, and took his seat without uttering a word to any man.
He did not doubt but that Bonteen had shown the correspondence to his friends, and that the Ratlers and Erles had conceded that he, Phineas, was put out of court by it.
He sat doggedly still, at the end of a bench behind mr Gresham, and close to the gangway.
When mr Gresham entered the House he was received with much cheering; but Phineas did not join in the cheer.
Alas! of what avail was that?
But the prospect of an explanation,--or otherwise of a fight,--between two leading politicians will fill the House; and any allusion to our Eastern Empire will certainly empty it.
An aptitude for such encounters is almost a necessary qualification for a popular leader in Parliament, as is a capacity for speaking for three hours to the reporters, and to the reporters only,--a necessary qualification for an under-secretary of State for India.
Let a man doubt ever so much his own capacity for some public exhibition which he has undertaken; yet he will always prefer to fail,--if fail he must,--before a large audience.
But on this occasion there was no failure.
That such a measure should be carried by the gentlemen opposite, in their own teeth, at the bidding of the right honourable gentleman who led them, he thought to be impossible.
But a speaker who can certainly be made amenable to authority for vilipending in debate the heart of any specified opponent, may with safety attribute all manner of ill to the agglomerated hearts of a party.
To have told any individual Conservative,--Sir Orlando Drought for instance,--that he was abandoning all the convictions of his life, because he was a creature at the command of mr Daubeny, would have been an insult that would have moved even the Speaker from his serenity; but you can hardly be personal to a whole bench of Conservatives,--to bench above bench of Conservatives.
It might probably have been mr Daubeny's for choice, had any real cutting of a throat been possible.
But unfortunately the whole country was convinced that the Conservative party as a body was supporting this measure, unwillingly, and at the bidding of one man;--and, for himself, he was bound to say that he agreed with the country.
And he did not doubt that he would hereafter be found to have been equally practical in the view that he had expressed on the hustings at Tankerville, for he was convinced that before long the anomaly of which he had spoken would cease to exist under the influence of a Government that would really believe in the work it was doing.
But in reading the general barometer of the party as regarded himself, he did not find that the mercury went up.
His fate,--and what a fate it was!--would then be absolutely in the hands of mr Gresham.
He had given up everything in the world with the view of getting into office; and now that the opportunity had come,--an opportunity which if allowed to slip could hardly return again in time to be of service to him,--the prize was to elude his grasp!
He told his friend that a correspondence had taken place between himself and mr Bonteen, in which he thought that he had been ill used, and as to which he was quite anxious to ask His Lordship's advice.
"I heard that you and he had been tilting at each other," said Lord Cantrip, smiling.
"You can't quarrel with Bonteen for showing them to Fawn, if you intend to show them to me."
"He may publish them at Charing Cross if he likes."
"Exactly.
They two, Lord Cantrip and Phineas, had at one period been on most intimate terms together;--had worked in the same office, and had thoroughly trusted each other.
The elder of the two,--for Lord Cantrip was about ten years senior to Phineas,--had frequently expressed the most lively interest in the prospects of the other; and Phineas had felt that in any emergency he could tell his friend all his hopes and fears.
But now he did not say a word of his position, nor did Lord Cantrip allude to it.
This was much higher than any man had expected.
CHAPTER forty three.
THE SECOND THUNDERBOLT.
The political phase, though it was perhaps the best understood, was not the most engrossing.
There was the personal phase,--which had reference to the direct altercation that had taken place between the two gentlemen, and to the correspondence between them which had followed, as to which phase it may be said that though there were many rumours abroad, very little was known.
And there was a third, --which may perhaps be called the general social phase, and which unfortunately dealt with the name of Lady Laura Kennedy.
mr Gresham, the Prime Minister, was supposed to be very much concerned in this matter.
This murder had been nearly accomplished in the centre of the metropolis,--by daylight, as if that made it worse,--on a Sunday, which added infinitely to the delightful horror of the catastrophe; and yet no public notice had been taken of it!
No doubt general opinion was adverse to poor Phineas Finn, but he was not without his party in the matter.
I don't quite believe it all,--it would be too delicious; but a great many do." Madame Goesler, however, was strong in her opinion that the report in reference to Lady Laura was scandalous.
Contradiction he would take for simple argument.
And with it all he had an assurance in his own position,--a knowledge of the strength derived from his intellect, his industry, his rank, and his wealth,--which made him altogether fearless of others.
When the little dog snarls, the big dog does not connect the snarl with himself, simply fancying that the little dog must be uncomfortable.
mr Bonteen snarled a good deal, and the new Lord Privy Seal thought that the new President of the Board of Trade was not comfortable within himself.
But at last the little dog took the big dog by the ear, and then the big dog put out his paw and knocked the little dog over.
He had not chosen to throw mr Gresham over at once, or to make difficulties at the moment;--but he would not continue to hold his present position or to support the Government without a seat in the Cabinet.
Palliser had become quite useless,--so mr Bonteen said,--since his accession to the dukedom, and was quite unfit to deal with decimal coinage.
The People's Banner was the organ, and mr Quintus Slide was, of course, the organist.
We are far from imputing evil motives, or even indiscretion, to that functionary; but we are of opinion that the moral feeling of the country would have been served by the publication, and we are sure that undue steps were taken by the member for Tankerville to procure that injunction.
We think that we need hardly answer that question.
One piece of advice which we ventured to give mr Gresham in our former article he has been wise enough to follow. We took upon ourselves to tell him that if, after what has occurred, he ventured to place the member for Tankerville again in office, the country would not stand it;--and he has abstained.
That scandal is, we think, over,--and for ever.
But we cannot say that we are as yet satisfied in this matter, or that we believe that the public has got to the bottom of it,--as it has a right to do in reference to all matters affecting the public service.
We have never yet learned why it is that mr Bonteen, after having been nominated Chancellor of the Exchequer,--for the appointment to that office was declared in the House of Commons by the head of his party,--was afterwards excluded from the Cabinet, and placed in an office made peculiarly subordinate by the fact of that exclusion.
We should not be at all surprised if, as the result of this disgraceful manoeuvring, mr Bonteen found himself at the head of the Liberal party before the Session be over. If so, evil would have worked to good.
"no
CHAPTER five-HIS FRONTIERS
The gamin loves the city, he also loves solitude, since he has something of the sage in him.
Urbis amator, like Fuscus; ruris amator, like Flaccus.
To roam thoughtfully about, that is to say, to lounge, is a fine employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher; particularly in that rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly but odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities, notably Paris.
To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal. End of the trees, beginning of the roofs; end of the grass, beginning of the pavements; end of the furrows, beginning of the shops, end of the wheel ruts, beginning of the passions; end of the divine murmur, beginning of the human uproar; hence an extraordinary interest.
He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers of Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs.
The campagna of Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another; to behold nothing but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of country offers us, is to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God.
The spot where a plain effects its junction with a city is always stamped with a certain piercing melancholy.
Nature and humanity both appeal to you at the same time there.
Local originalities there make their appearance.
The outer boulevard is their breathing space; the suburbs belong to them.
There they are eternally playing truant.
There they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs.
These encounters with strange children are one of the charming and at the same time poignant graces of the environs of Paris.
Sometimes there are little girls among the throng of boys,--are they their sisters?--who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish, with sunburnt hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies and ears of rye, gay, haggard, barefooted.
They can be seen devouring cherries among the wheat.
In the evening they can be heard laughing.
Paris, centre, banlieue, circumference; this constitutes all the earth to those children.
They never venture beyond this.
They can no more escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from the water.
CHAPTER six-A BIT OF HISTORY
The statistics give an average of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that period, by the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in process of construction, and under the arches of the bridges.
One of these nests, which has become famous, produced "the swallows of the bridge of Arcola." This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social symptoms.
Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless.
In a relative measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the exception is just.
While in any other great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on the interior.
It is a magnificent thing to put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean.
What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken family.
In the civilization of the present day, incomplete as it still is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has become of their children, and allowing their own entrails to fall on the public highway.
Hence these obscure destinies.
Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children was not discouraged by the ancient monarchy.
A little of Egypt and Bohemia in the lower regions suited the upper spheres, and compassed the aims of the powerful.
The hatred of instruction for the children of the people was a dogma.
Such was the countersign. Now, the erring child is the corollary of the ignorant child.
Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children, and in that case it skimmed the streets.
Under Louis the fourteenth., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired to create a fleet.
The idea was a good one.
But let us consider the means.
A man kept his hat on in the presence of a procession-it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys.
A child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the galleys.
Under Louis the fifteenth. children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them off, for what mysterious purpose no one knew.
People whispered with terror monstrous conjectures as to the king's baths of purple.
It sometimes happened that the exempts of the guard, when they ran short of children, took those who had fathers.
The fathers, in despair, attacked the exempts.
In that case, the parliament intervened and had some one hung.
Who?
The day passed away in utter silence-night came without recurrence of the noise.
Day came, the jailer entered.
"A Frenchman."
"A sailor."
"I am innocent."
"What!
"A corridor."
"But then you would be close to the sea?"
"All?"
Wait."
"How long?"
"Then you will love me.
Chapter Ten
Under Water
When night fell all the interior of the Great Dome, streets and houses, became lighted with brilliant incandescent lamps, which rendered it bright as day.
Dorothy thought the island must look beautiful by night from the outer shore of the lake.
There was revelry and feasting in the Queen's palace, and the music of the royal band could be plainly heard in Lady Aurex's house, where Ozma and Dorothy remained with their hostess and keeper.
They were prisoners, but treated with much consideration.
Lady Aurex gave them a nice supper and when they wished to retire showed them to a pretty room with comfortable beds and wished them a good night and pleasant dreams.
"What do you think of all this, Ozma?" Dorothy anxiously inquired when they were alone.
"I am glad we came," was the reply, "for although there may be mischief done to morrow, it was necessary I should know about these people, whose leaders are wild and lawless and oppress their subjects with injustice and cruelties.
I have no doubt I can accomplish this in time."
"Just now, though, we're in a bad fix," asserted Dorothy.
"If Queen Coo ee oh conquers to morrow, she won't be nice to us, and if the Su dic conquers, he'll be worse."
"Do not worry, dear," said Ozma, "I do not think we are in danger, whatever happens, and the result of our adventure is sure to be good."
Dorothy was not worrying, especially.
She had confidence in her friend, the fairy Princess of Oz, and she enjoyed the excitement of the events in which she was taking part.
A sort of grating, grinding sound awakened her.
Dorothy sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes to get the sleep out of them, and then found it was daybreak.
"What is it?" asked Dorothy, jumping out of bed.
"I'm not sure," answered Ozma "but it feels as if the island is sinking."
As soon as possible they finished dressing, while the creaking and swaying continued.
Then they rushed into the living room of the house and found Lady Aurex, fully dressed, awaiting them.
"Do not be alarmed," said their hostess.
"Coo ee oh has decided to submerge the island, that is all.
But it proves the Flatheads are coming to attack us."
"What do you mean by sub sub merging the island?" asked Dorothy.
"Come here and see," was the reply.
Lady Aurex led them to a window which faced the side of the great dome which covered all the village, and they could see that the island was indeed sinking, for the water of the lake was already half way up the side of the dome.
Through the glass could be seen swimming fishes, and tall stalks of swaying seaweeds, for the water was clear as crystal and through it they could distinguish even the farther shore of the lake.
"The Flatheads are not here yet," said Lady Aurex.
"They will come soon, but not until all of this dome is under the surface of the water."
"Won't the dome leak?" Dorothy inquired anxiously.
"No, indeed."
"Was the island ever sub sub sunk before?"
"Oh, yes; on several occasions.
But Coo ee oh doesn't care to do that often, for it requires a lot of hard work to operate the machinery.
The dome was built so that the island could disappear.
I think," she continued, "that our Queen fears the Flatheads will attack the island and try to break the glass of the dome."
"Well, if we're under water, they can't fight us, and we can't fight them," asserted Dorothy.
"They could kill the fishes, however," said Ozma gravely.
By this time the top of the dome was quite under water and suddenly the island stopped sinking and became stationary.
"See!" cried Lady Aurex, pointing to the shore.
"The Flatheads have come."
On the bank, which was now far above their heads, a crowd of dark figures could be seen.
"Now let us see what Coo ee oh will do to oppose them," continued Lady Aurex, in a voice that betrayed her excitement.
The Flatheads, pushing their way through the line of palm trees, had reached the shore of the lake just as the top of the island's dome disappeared beneath the surface.
The water now flowed from shore to shore, but through the clear water the dome was still visible and the houses of the Skeezers could be dimly seen through the panes of glass.
"Good!" exclaimed the Su dic, who had armed all his followers and had brought with him two copper vessels, which he carefully set down upon the ground beside him.
"Kill them, then, while we have time, and then we can go home again," advised one of the chief officers.
"Not yet," objected the Su dic.
"Look out!" suddenly exclaimed the officers, pointing into the lake; "something's going to happen."
From the submerged dome a door opened and something black shot swiftly out into the water.
"What is that?" Dorothy asked the Lady Aurex.
"It is all enclosed, and can move under water.
Coo ee oh has several of these boats which are kept in little rooms in the basement under our village. When the island is submerged, the Queen uses these boats to reach the shore, and I believe she now intends to fight the Flatheads with them."
The Su dic and his people knew nothing of Coo ee oh's submarines, so they watched with surprise as the under water boat approached them. When it was quite near the shore it rose to the surface and the top parted and fell back, disclosing a boat full of armed Skeezers.
The boat halted and Coo ee oh drew back her arm to throw the silver rope toward the Su dic, who was now but a few feet from her.
His queen set out in quest of him, but was taken ill on her journey, and died, leaving an infant son, whom, from the melancholy circumstances of his birth, she called Tristram.
Gouvernail, the queen's squire, who had accompanied her, took charge of the child, and restored him to his father, who had at length burst the enchantments of the fairy, and returned home.
In particular, he devoted himself to the chase and to all woodland sports, so that he became distinguished above all other chevaliers of the court for his knowledge of all that relates to hunting.
No wonder that Belinda, the king's daughter, fell in love with him; but as he did not return her passion, she, in a sudden impulse of anger, excited her father against him, and he was banished the kingdom.
The princess soon repented of her act, and in despair destroyed herself, having first written a most tender letter to Tristram, sending him at the same time a beautiful and sagacious dog, of which she was very fond, desiring him to keep it as a memorial of her.
The knights of Cornwall are in ill repute in romance for their cowardice, and they exhibited it on this occasion.
King Mark could find no champion who dared to encounter the Irish knight, till his nephew Tristram, who had not yet received the honors of knighthood, craved to be admitted to the order, offering at the same time to fight the battle of Cornwall against the Irish champion.
King Mark assented with reluctance; Tristram received the accolade, which conferred knighthood upon him, and the place and time were assigned for the encounter.
The kingdom of Cornwall was thus delivered from its tribute. Tristram, weakened by loss of blood, fell senseless.
They dressed his wounds, which in general healed readily; but the lance of Moraunt was poisoned, and one wound which it made yielded to no remedies, but grew worse day by day.
Tristram asked permission of his uncle to depart, and seek for aid in the kingdom of Loegria (England).
The strange harper was sent for, and conveyed to the palace, where, finding that he was in Ireland, whose champion he had lately slain, he concealed his name, and called himself Tramtris.
The queen undertook his cure, and by a medicated bath gradually restored him to health.
At this time a tournament was held, at which many knights of the Round Table, and others, were present.
On the first day a Saracen prince, named Palamedes, obtained the advantage over all.
Palamedes could not behold them without emotion, and made no effort to conceal his love.
Tristram perceived it, and the pain he felt from jealousy taught him how dear the fair Isoude had already become to him.
Next day the tournament was renewed.
Tristram, still feeble from his wound, rose during the night, took his arms, and concealed them in a forest near the place of the contest, and, after it had begun, mingled with the combatants.
But his exertions caused his wound to reopen; he bled fast, and in this sad state, yet in triumph, they bore him to the palace.
It happened one day that a damsel of the court, entering the closet where Tristram's arms were deposited, perceived that a part of the sword had been broken off.
It occurred to her that the missing portion was like that which was left in the skull of Moraunt, the Irish champion.
She imparted her thought to the queen, who compared the fragment taken from her brother's wound with the sword of Tristram, and was satisfied that it was part of the same, and that the weapon of Tristram was that which reft her brother's life.
She laid her griefs and resentment before the king, who satisfied himself with his own eyes of the truth of her suspicions.
Tristram was cited before the whole court, and reproached with having dared to present himself before them after having slain their kinsman.
He acknowledged that he had fought with Moraunt to settle the claim for tribute, and said that it was by force of winds and waves alone that he was thrown on their coast.
The queen demanded vengeance for the death of her brother; the fair Isoude trembled and grew pale, but a murmur rose from all the assembly that the life of one so handsome and so brave should not be taken for such a cause, and generosity finally triumphed over resentment in the mind of the king.
King Mark made his nephew give him a minute recital of his adventures.
King Mark was fascinated with the description, and, choosing a favorable time, demanded a boon[Footnote: "Good faith was the very corner stone of chivalry.
Whenever a knight's word was pledged (it mattered not how rashly) it was to be redeemed at any price.
The history of the times presents authentic transactions equally embarrassing and absurd"--SCOTT, note to Sir Tristram.] of his nephew, who readily granted it.
Tristram believed it was certain death for him to return to Ireland; and how could he act as ambassador for his uncle in such a cause?
Yet, bound by his oath, he hesitated not for an instant. He only took the precaution to change his armor.
He embarked for Ireland; but a tempest drove him to the coast of England, near Camelot, where King Arthur was holding his court, attended by the knights of the Round Table, and many others, the most illustrious in the world.
He took part in many justs; he fought many combats, in which he covered himself with glory.
This prince, accused of treason against his liege sovereign, Arthur, came to Camelot to free himself from the charge.
Argius heard of the great renown of the unknown knight; he also was witness of his exploits.
He sought him, and conjured him to adopt his defence, and on his oath declared that he was innocent of the crime of which he was accused.
Tristram readily consented, and made himself known to the king, who on his part promised to reward his exertions, if successful, with whatever gift he might ask.
Tristram fought with Blaanor, and overthrew him, and held his life in his power.
"God forbid," said Tristram, "that I should take the life of so brave a knight!" He raised him up and restored him to his friends.
The judges of the field decided that the king of Ireland was acquitted of the charge against him, and they led Tristram in triumph to his tent.
They departed together, and arrived in Ireland; and the queen, forgetting her resentment for her brother's death, exhibited to the preserver of her husband's life nothing but gratitude and good will.
Brengwain, her favorite maid of honor, was to accompany her.
A favorable wind filled the sails, and promised them a fortunate voyage.
Love seemed to light up all his fires on their lips, as in their hearts.
The day was warm; they suffered from thirst.
He took it, gave some of it to the charming Isoude, and drank the remainder himself.
He loaded him with honors, and made him chamberlain of his palace, thus giving him access to the queen at all times.
In the midst of the festivities of the court which followed the royal marriage, an unknown minstrel one day presented himself, bearing a harp of peculiar construction.
He excited the curiosity of King Mark by refusing to play upon it till he should grant him a boon.
King Mark could not by the laws of knighthood withhold the boon.
The lady was mounted on her horse, and led away by her triumphant lover. Tristram, it is needless to say, was absent at the time, and did not return until their departure.
"Ah, lady," said he, "I will obey you; but I beseech you that you will not for ever steel your heart against me." "Palamedes," she replied, "may I never taste of joy again if I ever quit my first love." Palamedes then went his way.
The king showed much gratitude to Tristram, but in the bottom of his heart he cherished bitter jealousy of him.
A base and cowardly knight of the court, named Andret, spied them through a keyhole.
They sat at a table of chess, but were not attending to the game.
Andret brought the king, having first raised his suspicions, and placed him so as to watch their motions.
The king saw enough to confirm his suspicions, and he burst into the apartment with his sword drawn, and had nearly slain Tristram before he was put on his guard.
But Tristram avoided the blow, drew his sword, and drove before him the cowardly monarch, chasing him through all the apartments of the palace, giving him frequent blows with the flat of his sword, while he cried in vain to his knights to save him.
A proof of the great popularity of the tale of Sir Tristram is the fact that the Italian poets, Boiardo and Ariosto, have founded upon it the idea of the two enchanted fountains, which produced the opposite effects of love and hatred.
Boiardo thus describes the fountain of hatred:
"It hasn't been a question for me.
If you've had your woman I've had," she said, "my man."
"And you mean that makes you all right?"
"I don't know why it shouldn't make me-humanly, which is what we're speaking of-as right as it makes you."
"I see," Marcher returned.
"'Humanly,' no doubt, as showing that you're living for something.
Not, that is, just for me and my secret."
May Bartram smiled.
"I don't pretend it exactly shows that I'm not living for you.
It's my intimacy with you that's in question."
He laughed as he saw what she meant.
"Yes, but since, as you say, I'm only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're-aren't you?
You help me to pass for a man like another.
Is that it?"
She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough.
"That's it. It's all that concerns me-to help you to pass for a man like another."
He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely.
"How kind, how beautiful, you are to me!
How shall I ever repay you?"
She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of ways.
But she chose.
"By going on as you are."
It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a further sounding of their depths.
These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss.
A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn't dare to express-a charge uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended.
It had come up for him then that she "knew" something and that what she knew was bad-too bad to tell him.
When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's special sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch.
He circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and widened and that still wasn't much affected by the consciousness in him that there was nothing she could "know," after all, any better than he did.
She had no source of knowledge he hadn't equally-except of course that she might have finer nerves.
That was what women had where they were interested; they made out things, where people were concerned, that the people often couldn't have made out for themselves.
Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular that she had given herself so to his case.
He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe-some catastrophe that yet wouldn't at all be the catastrophe: partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertainty in her health, co incident and equally new.
When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the shadow of a change and the chill of a shock.
He immediately began to imagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of her peril as the direct menace for himself of personal privation.
This indeed gave him one of those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to him-it showed him that what was still first in his mind was the loss she herself might suffer.
It would have been brutal, in the early stages of her trouble, to put that question to her; but it had immediately sounded for him to his own concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry for her.
If she did "know," moreover, in the sense of her having had some-what should he think?--mystical irresistible light, this would make the matter not better, but worse, inasmuch as her original adoption of his own curiosity had quite become the basis of her life.
These reflexions, as I say, quickened his generosity; yet, make them as he might, he saw himself, with the lapse of the period, more and more disconcerted.
It lapsed for him with a strange steady sweep, and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, independently of the threat of much inconvenience, almost the only positive surprise his career, if career it could be called, had yet offered him.
If she was old, or almost, john Marcher assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth home to him.
He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax.
It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures.
He had been far from holding it a failure-long as he had waited for the appearance that was to make it a success.
He had waited for quite another thing, not for such a thing as that.
The breath of his good faith came short, however, as he recognised how long he had waited, or how long at least his companion had.
It grew more grave as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of mind it produced in him, which he himself ended by watching as if it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer person, may pass for another of his surprises.
This conjoined itself still with another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question that he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared.
Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside.
It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure.
It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its unlooked for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped.
She was a sphinx, yet with her white petals and green fronds she might have been a lily too-only an artificial lily, wonderfully imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain, though not exempt from a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, under some clear glass bell.
The perfection of household care, of high polish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now looked most as if everything had been wound up, tucked in, put away, so that she might sit with folded hands and with nothing more to do.
She was "out of it," to Marcher's vision; her work was over; she communicated with him as across some gulf or from some island of rest that she had already reached, and it made him feel strangely abandoned.
Was it-or rather wasn't it-that if for so long she had been watching with him the answer to their question must have swum into her ken and taken on its name, so that her occupation was verily gone?
It was a point he had never since ventured to press, vaguely fearing as he did that it might become a difference, perhaps a disagreement, between them.
There was something, it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something that would so at least ease off his tension.
But he wanted not to speak the wrong word; that would make everything ugly.
He wanted the knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if drop it could, by its own august weight.
It had ever been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions in it required but a little dismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for the hour as new. She could thus at present meet his enquiry quite freshly and patiently. "Oh yes, I've repeatedly thought, only it always seemed to me of old that I couldn't quite make up my mind.
I thought of dreadful things, between which it was difficult to choose; and so must you have done."
"Rather!
I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else.
I appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing but dreadful things. A great many of them I've at different times named to you, but there were others I couldn't name."
"They were too, too dreadful?"
"Too, too dreadful-some of them."
It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such a picture, talk of "horrors," but she was to do in a few minutes something stranger yet-though even of this he was to take the full measure but afterwards-and the note of it already trembled.
It was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her eyes were having again the high flicker of their prime.
He had to admit, however, what she said.
Well, he wished it were; and the consummation depended for him clearly more and more on his friend.
"Oh far-!"
She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look at him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread.
"Do you consider that we went far?"
"Including each other?" She still smiled.
"But you're quite right. We've had together great imaginations, often great fears; but some of them have been unspoken."
I feel," he explained, "as if I had lost my power to conceive such things." And he wondered if he looked as blank as he sounded.
"It's spent."
"Because you've given me signs to the contrary.
It isn't a question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing.
It isn't a question now of choosing." At last he came out with it.
"You know something I don't. You've shown me that before."
These last words had affected her, he made out in a moment, exceedingly, and she spoke with firmness.
He shook his head.
"You can't hide it."
"Oh, oh!" May Bartram sounded over what she couldn't hide.
It was almost a smothered groan.
"You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as of something you were afraid I should find out.
Your answer was that I couldn't, that I wouldn't, and I don't pretend I have.
But you had something therefore in mind, and I see now how it must have been, how it still is, the possibility that, of all possibilities, has settled itself for you as the worst.
This," he went on, "is why I appeal to you.
I'm only afraid of ignorance to day-I'm not afraid of knowledge." And then as for a while she said nothing: "What makes me sure is that I see in your face and feel here, in this air and amid these appearances, that you're out of it. You've done.
You've had your experience.
You leave me to my fate."
"I mean the thing I've never said."
It hushed him a moment.
Isn't that what you sufficiently express," she asked, "in calling it the worst?"
Marcher thought.
"Assuredly-if you mean, as I do, something that includes all the loss and all the shame that are thinkable."
"What we're speaking of, remember, is only my idea."
"It's your belief," Marcher returned.
"That's enough for me.
I feel your beliefs are right.
Therefore if, having this one, you give me no more light on it, you abandon me."
"I'm with you-don't you see?--still." And as to make it more vivid to him she rose from her chair-a movement she seldom risked in these days-and showed herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness.
"I haven't forsaken you."
It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous assurance, and had the success of the impulse not, happily, been great, it would have touched him to pain more than to pleasure.
But the cold charm in her eyes had spread, as she hovered before him, to all the rest of her person, so that it was for the minute almost a recovery of youth.
He couldn't pity her for that; he could only take her as she showed-as capable even yet of helping him.
It was as if, at the same time, her light might at any instant go out; wherefore he must make the most of it. There passed before him with intensity the three or four things he wanted most to know; but the question that came of itself to his lips really covered the others.
"Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer."
"Never!"
It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on him an extraordinary effect.
"Well, what's better than that?
She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief.
After which, as their eyes, over his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened, and something to his purpose came prodigiously out of her very face.
His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, and he gasped with the force of a perception to which, on the instant, everything fitted.
The sound of his gasp filled the air; then he became articulate.
"I see-if I don't suffer!"
In her own look, however, was doubt.
"You see what?"
"Why what you mean-what you've always meant."
She again shook her head.
"What I mean isn't what I've always meant. It's different."
"It's something new?"
She hung back from it a little.
"Something new.
It's not what you think.
His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong.
"A mistake?" she pityingly echoed.
"Oh no," she declared; "it's nothing of that sort.
You've been right."
Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed, speaking but to save him.
It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude.
The door isn't shut. The door's open," said May Bartram.
"Then something's to come?"
"It's never too late." She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken.
Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis of what she was at once hesitating and deciding to say.
He had been standing by the chimney piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a small perfect old French clock and two morsels of rosy Dresden constituting all its furniture; and her hand grasped the shelf while she kept him waiting, grasped it a little as for support and encouragement. She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited.
It had become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had something more to give him; her wasted face delicately shone with it-it glittered almost as with the white lustre of silver in her expression.
This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant.
The end, none the less, was that what he had expected failed to come to him.
Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes.
She gave way at the same instant to a slow fine shudder, and though he remained staring-though he stared in fact but the harder-turned off and regained her chair.
It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.
"Well, you don't say-?"
She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk back strangely pale.
"Too ill to tell me?" it sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips, the fear she might die without giving him light.
"'Now'--?"
She had spoken as if some difference had been made within the moment.
"Are you in pain?" he asked as the woman went to her.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystification.
"What then has happened?"
She was once more, with her companion's help, on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and had reached the door.
Yet he waited for her answer.
Chapter eight.
What followed was almost an orgy, a feast to which all were welcome. Grushenka was the first to call for wine.
"I want to drink.
I want to be quite drunk, as we were before.
Do you remember, Mitya, do you remember how we made friends here last time!"
Mitya himself was almost delirious, feeling that his happiness was at hand.
But Grushenka was continually sending him away from her.
Tell them to dance, to make merry, 'let the stove and cottage dance'; as we had it last time," she kept exclaiming.
She was tremendously excited.
And Mitya hastened to obey her.
The chorus were in the next room.
The room in which they had been sitting till that moment was too small, and was divided in two by cotton curtains, behind which was a huge bed with a puffy feather mattress and a pyramid of cotton pillows. In the four rooms for visitors there were beds.
Grushenka settled herself just at the door.
Mitya set an easy chair for her.
She had sat in the same place to watch the dancing and singing "the time before," when they had made merry there.
All the girls who had come had been there then; the Jewish band with fiddles and zithers had come, too, and at last the long expected cart had arrived with the wines and provisions.
Mitya bustled about.
All sorts of people began coming into the room to look on, peasants and their women, who had been roused from sleep and attracted by the hopes of another marvelous entertainment such as they had enjoyed a month before.
He uncorked bottles and poured out wine for every one who presented himself.
Only the girls were very eager for the champagne.
The men preferred rum, brandy, and, above all, hot punch.
Mitya had chocolate made for all the girls, and ordered that three samovars should be kept boiling all night to provide tea and punch for everyone to help himself.
An absurd chaotic confusion followed, but Mitya was in his natural element, and the more foolish it became, the more his spirits rose.
If the peasants had asked him for money at that moment, he would have pulled out his notes and given them away right and left.
This was probably why the landlord, Trifon Borissovitch, kept hovering about Mitya to protect him. He seemed to have given up all idea of going to bed that night; but he drank little, only one glass of punch, and kept a sharp look out on Mitya's interests after his own fashion.
He intervened in the nick of time, civilly and obsequiously persuading Mitya not to give away "cigars and Rhine wine," and, above all, money to the peasants as he had done before.
He was very indignant, too, at the peasant girls drinking liqueur, and eating sweets.
"I'd give them a kick, every one of them, and they'd take it as an honor-that's all they're worth!"
Mitya remembered Andrey again, and ordered punch to be sent out to him.
Maximov, blissfully drunk, never left his side.
Grushenka, too, was beginning to get drunk.
Pointing to Kalganov, she said to Mitya:
"What a dear, charming boy he is!"
And Mitya, delighted, ran to kiss Kalganov and Maximov.
She had said nothing yet, and seemed, indeed, purposely to refrain from speaking.
At last she suddenly gripped his hand and drew him vigorously to her.
Have you walked in!...
I was frightened.
So you wanted to give me up to him, did you?
Did you really want to?"
"I didn't want to spoil your happiness!" Mitya faltered blissfully.
"Well, go and enjoy yourself ..." she sent him away once more.
"Don't cry, I'll call you back again."
"Come, sit beside me, tell me, how did you hear about me, and my coming here yesterday?
From whom did you first hear it?"
And Mitya began telling her all about it, disconnectedly, incoherently, feverishly.
He spoke strangely, often frowning, and stopping abruptly.
"What are you frowning at?" she asked.
"Nothing....
I left a man ill there.
I'd give ten years of my life for him to get well, to know he was all right!"
So you meant to shoot yourself to morrow!
What for?
I like such reckless fellows as you," she lisped, with a rather halting tongue.
"So you would go any length for me, eh?
Did you really mean to shoot yourself to morrow, you stupid?
No, wait a little.
To morrow I may have something to say to you....
I won't say it to day, but to morrow.
You'd like it to be to day? No, I don't want to to day.
Once, however, she called him, as it were, puzzled and uneasy.
I see you're sad....
Yes, I see it," she added, looking intently into his eyes.
"Though you keep kissing the peasants and shouting, I see something.
No, be merry.
I'm merry; you be merry, too.... I love somebody here.
He was, in fact, drunk, and had dropped asleep for a moment, sitting on the sofa.
And the dances were as bad.
Two girls dressed up as bears, and a lively girl, called Stepanida, with a stick in her hand, acted the part of keeper, and began to "show them."
"Look alive, Marya, or you'll get the stick!"
The bears rolled on the ground at last in the most unseemly fashion, amid roars of laughter from the closely packed crowd of men and women.
"Well, let them!
Let them!" said Grushenka sententiously, with an ecstatic expression on her face.
"When they do get a day to enjoy themselves, why shouldn't folks be happy?"
"It's swinish, all this peasant foolery," he murmured, moving away; "it's the game they play when it's light all night in summer."
He particularly disliked one "new" song to a jaunty dance tune.
It described how a gentleman came and tried his luck with the girls, to see whether they would love him:
The master came to try the girls: Would they love him, would they not?
But the girls could not love the master:
He would beat me cruelly And such love won't do for me.
Then a gypsy comes along and he, too, tries:
The gypsy came to try the girls: Would they love him, would they not?
But they couldn't love the gypsy either:
He would be a thief, I fear, And would cause me many a tear.
The soldier came to try the girls: Would they love him, would they not?
But the soldier is rejected with contempt, in two indecent lines, sung with absolute frankness and producing a furore in the audience.
The merchant came to try the girls: Would they love him, would they not?
And it appears that he wins their love because:
The merchant will make gold for me And his queen I'll gladly be.
"That's just a song of yesterday," he said aloud.
"Who writes such things for them?
And, almost as though it were a personal affront, he declared, on the spot, that he was bored, sat down on the sofa and immediately fell asleep. His pretty little face looked rather pale, as it fell back on the sofa cushion.
"Look how pretty he is," said Grushenka, taking Mitya up to him.
"I was combing his hair just now; his hair's like flax, and so thick...."
And, bending over him tenderly, she kissed his forehead.
"Stay with me a minute. Mitya, run and find his Maximov."
Maximov, it appeared, could not tear himself away from the girls, only running away from time to time to pour himself out a glass of liqueur.
He had drunk two cups of chocolate.
His face was red, and his nose was crimson; his eyes were moist and mawkishly sweet.
"They taught me all those well bred, aristocratic dances when I was little...."
"Go, go with him, Mitya, and I'll watch from here how he dances," said Grushenka.
"No, no, I'm coming to look on, too," exclaimed Kalganov, brushing aside in the most naive way Grushenka's offer to sit with him.
They all went to look on.
Maximov danced his dance.
Kalganov did not like it at all, but Mitya kissed the dancer.
"Thanks.
You're tired perhaps?
What are you looking for here?
Would you like some sweets?
A cigar, perhaps?"
"A cigarette."
"I'll just have a liqueur....
Have you any chocolates?"
"Yes, there's a heap of them on the table there.
"I like one with vanilla ... for old people.
"No, brother, we've none of that special sort."
"I say," the old man bent down to whisper in Mitya's ear.
How would it be if you were to help me make friends with her?"
"So that's what you're after!
No, brother, that won't do!"
"Oh, all right, all right.
They only come here to dance and sing, you know, brother.
Don't you want money?"
"All right, all right...."
Mitya's head was burning.
He went outside to the wooden balcony which ran round the whole building on the inner side, overlooking the courtyard.
The fresh air revived him.
He stood alone in a dark corner, and suddenly clutched his head in both hands.
His scattered thoughts came together; his sensations blended into a whole and threw a sudden light into his mind.
A fearful and terrible light!
"If I'm to shoot myself, why not now?" passed through his mind.
"Why not go for the pistols, bring them here, and here, in this dark dirty corner, make an end?" Almost a minute he stood, undecided.
But yet it was easier for him then.
But now?
Was it the same as then?
Now one phantom, one terror at least was at an end: that first, rightful lover, that fateful figure had vanished, leaving no trace.
It would never return.
She was ashamed, and from her eyes he could see now whom she loved.
Now he had everything to make life happy ... but he could not go on living, he could not; oh, damnation!
"O God! restore to life the man I knocked down at the fence!
Let this fearful cup pass from me!
Lord, thou hast wrought miracles for such sinners as me!
But what, what if the old man's alive?
Yet there was a ray of light and hope in his darkness.
He jumped up and ran back to the room-to her, to her, his queen for ever!
Was not one moment of her love worth all the rest of life, even in the agonies of disgrace?
This wild question clutched at his heart.
He thought he looked gloomy and worried, and fancied he had come to find him.
"What is it, Trifon Borissovitch? are you looking for me?"
"No, sir." The landlord seemed disconcerted.
"Why should I be looking for you?
Where have you been?"
"Why do you look so glum?
You're not angry, are you?
Wait a bit, you shall soon get to bed....
What's the time?"
"It'll be three o'clock.
Past three, it must be."
"We'll leave off soon.
We'll leave off."
"Don't mention it; it doesn't matter.
Keep it up as long as you like...."
"What's the matter with him?" Mitya wondered for an instant, and he ran back to the room where the girls were dancing.
She was not in the blue room either; there was no one but Kalganov asleep on the sofa.
Mitya peeped behind the curtain-she was there.
She was sitting in the corner, on a trunk.
Bent forward, with her head and arms on the bed close by, she was crying bitterly, doing her utmost to stifle her sobs that she might not be heard.
Seeing Mitya, she beckoned him to her, and when he ran to her, she grasped his hand tightly.
"Mitya, Mitya, I loved him, you know.
How I have loved him these five years, all that time!
No, him, him! It's a lie that it was my anger I loved and not him.
And now, O Lord, it's not the same man.
Even his face is not the same; he's different altogether.
I drove here with Timofey, and all the way I was thinking how I should meet him, what I should say to him, how we should look at one another.
My soul was faint, and all of a sudden it was just as though he had emptied a pail of dirty water over me.
He talked to me like a schoolmaster, all so grave and learned; he met me so solemnly that I was struck dumb.
I couldn't get a word in.
At first I thought he was ashamed to talk before his great big Pole.
It must have been his wife that ruined him; you know he threw me up to get married.
She must have changed him like that.
Mitya, how shameful it is!
Oh, Mitya, I'm ashamed, I'm ashamed for all my life.
Curse it, curse it, curse those five years!"
And again she burst into tears, but clung tight to Mitya's hand and did not let it go.
"Mitya, darling, stay, don't go away.
"Listen, tell me who it is I love?
I love one man here.
Who is that man?
That's what you must tell me."
A smile lighted up her face that was swollen with weeping, and her eyes shone in the half darkness.
'Fool! that's the man you love!' That was what my heart whispered to me at once.
You came in and all grew bright.
For you were frightened; you couldn't speak.
It's not them he's afraid of-could you be frightened of any one?
It's me he's afraid of, I thought, only me.
Do you forgive me, Mitya?
Do you forgive me or not?
Do you love me?" She jumped up and held him with both hands on his shoulders.
"You will forgive me for having tormented you?
It was through spite I tormented you all.
It was for spite I drove the old man out of his mind....
He kissed me once, and now he draws back and looks and listens.
Why listen to me?
Kiss me, kiss me hard, that's right.
I'll be your slave now, your slave for the rest of my life.
It's sweet to be a slave. Kiss me!
Beat me, ill treat me, do what you will with me....
And I do deserve to suffer.
Stay, wait, afterwards, I won't have that...." she suddenly thrust him away.
Mitya followed like a drunken man.
"Yes, come what may-whatever may happen now, for one minute I'd give the whole world," he thought.
Grushenka did, in fact, toss off a whole glass of champagne at one gulp, and became at once very tipsy.
She sat down in the same chair as before, with a blissful smile on her face.
Even Kalganov felt a stir at the heart and went up to her.
"Did you feel how I kissed you when you were asleep just now?" she said thickly.
"I'm drunk now, that's what it is....
And aren't you drunk?
And why isn't Mitya drinking?
Why don't you drink, Mitya?
I'm drunk, and you don't drink...."
"I am drunk!
He drank off another glass, and-he thought it strange himself-that glass made him completely drunk.
He was suddenly drunk, although till that moment he had been quite sober, he remembered that.
From that moment everything whirled about him, as though he were delirious.
He walked, laughed, talked to everybody, without knowing what he was doing.
Only one persistent burning sensation made itself felt continually, "like a red hot coal in his heart," he said afterwards.
He went up to her, sat beside her, gazed at her, listened to her....
When the girl came up, she either kissed her, or made the sign of the cross over her.
She was greatly amused by the "little old man," as she called Maximov.
He ran up every minute to kiss her hands, "each little finger," and finally he danced another dance to an old song, which he sang himself.
He danced with special vigor to the refrain:
"Give him something, Mitya," said Grushenka.
"Give him a present, he's poor, you know.
Ah, the poor, the insulted!...
Do you know, Mitya, I shall go into a nunnery.
But to day let us dance.
To morrow to the nunnery, but to day we'll dance.
I want to play to day, good people, and what of it?
God will forgive us.
I gave a little onion.
Wicked as I've been, I want to pray.
Mitya, let them dance, don't stop them.
Every one in the world is good.
Every one-even the worst of them.
The world's a nice place.
You know I am good.
I'm very good....
Come, why am I so good?"
So Grushenka babbled on, getting more and more drunk.
She got up from her chair, staggering.
"Mitya, don't give me any more wine-if I ask you, don't give it to me.
Wine doesn't give peace.
I want to dance.
Let every one see how I dance ... let them see how beautifully I dance...."
She really meant it.
She pulled a white cambric handkerchief out of her pocket, and took it by one corner in her right hand, to wave it in the dance.
Mitya ran to and fro, the girls were quiet, and got ready to break into a dancing song at the first signal.
Maximov, hearing that Grushenka wanted to dance, squealed with delight, and ran skipping about in front of her, humming:
Mitya, why don't they come?
Let every one come ... to look on.
Call them in, too, that were locked in....
Why did you lock them in?
Tell them I'm going to dance.
Let them look on, too...."
Mitya walked with a drunken swagger to the locked door, and began knocking to the Poles with his fist.
Come, she's going to dance.
She calls you."
You're a little scoundrel, that's what you are."
He too was drunk.
"Be quiet, boy!
If I call him a scoundrel, it doesn't mean that I called all Poland so.
Be quiet, my pretty boy, eat a sweetmeat."
As though they were not men.
Why won't they make friends?" said Grushenka, and went forward to dance.
The chorus broke into "Ah, my porch, my new porch!" Grushenka flung back her head, half opened her lips, smiled, waved her handkerchief, and suddenly, with a violent lurch, stood still in the middle of the room, looking bewildered.
"I'm weak...." she said in an exhausted voice.
"Forgive me....
I'm weak, I can't....
I'm sorry."
She bowed to the chorus, and then began bowing in all directions.
"I'm sorry....
Forgive me...."
"The lady's been drinking.
The pretty lady has been drinking," voices were heard saying.
"The lady's drunk too much," Maximov explained to the girls, giggling.
"Mitya, lead me away ... take me," said Grushenka helplessly.
Mitya pounced on her, snatched her up in his arms, and carried the precious burden through the curtains.
"Well, now I'll go," thought Kalganov, and walking out of the blue room, he closed the two halves of the door after him.
Mitya laid Grushenka on the bed and kissed her on the lips.
"Don't touch me...." she faltered, in an imploring voice.
"Don't touch me, till I'm yours....
I've told you I'm yours, but don't touch me ... spare me....
With them here, with them close, you mustn't.
He's here.
It's nasty here...."
"I'll obey you!
I won't think of it ...
I worship you!" muttered Mitya. "Yes, it's nasty here, it's abominable."
"I know, though you're a brute, you're generous," Grushenka articulated with difficulty.
"It must be honorable ... it shall be honorable for the future ... and let us be honest, let us be good, not brutes, but good ... take me away, take me far away, do you hear?
I don't want it to be here, but far, far away...."
"Oh, yes, yes, it must be!" said Mitya, pressing her in his arms.
"I'll take you and we'll fly away....
Oh, I'd give my whole life for one year only to know about that blood!"
"What blood?" asked Grushenka, bewildered.
"Nothing," muttered Mitya, through his teeth.
"Grusha, you wanted to be honest, but I'm a thief.
But I've stolen money from Katya....
"From Katya, from that young lady?
No, you didn't steal it.
Why make a fuss?
Now everything of mine is yours.
What does money matter?
We shall waste it anyway....
Folks like us are bound to waste money.
But we'd better go and work the land.
I want to dig the earth with my own hands.
We must work, do you hear?
I won't be your mistress, I'll be faithful to you, I'll be your slave, I'll work for you.
We'll go to the young lady and bow down to her together, so that she may forgive us, and then we'll go away.
And if she won't forgive us, we'll go, anyway.
Don't love her any more.
If you love her, I shall strangle her....
I'll put out both her eyes with a needle...."
"I love you.
I love only you.
"Why Siberia?
I don't care ... we'll work ... there's snow in Siberia....
I love driving in the snow ... and must have bells....
Do you hear, there's a bell ringing?
Where is that bell ringing?
There are people coming....
Now it's stopped."
Mitya let his head sink on her breast.
Grushenka opened her eyes.
"What's the matter?
Yes ... a bell ...
I've been asleep and dreamt I was driving over the snow with bells, and I dozed.
And far, far away.
"Close to you," murmured Mitya, kissing her dress, her bosom, her hands. And suddenly he had a strange fancy: it seemed to him that she was looking straight before her, not at him, not into his face, but over his head, with an intent, almost uncanny fixity.
An expression of wonder, almost of alarm, came suddenly into her face.
Mitya turned, and saw that some one had, in fact, parted the curtains and seemed to be watching them.
And not one person alone, it seemed.
He jumped up and walked quickly to the intruder.
"Here, come to us, come here," said a voice, speaking not loudly, but firmly and peremptorily.
Mitya passed to the other side of the curtain and stood stock still.
The room was filled with people, but not those who had been there before.
He recognized all those people instantly.
And that "consumptive looking" trim dandy, "who always has such polished boots"--that was the deputy prosecutor.
"He has a chronometer worth four hundred roubles; he showed it to me." And that small young man in spectacles....
And this man-the inspector of police, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, a man he knew well.
And those fellows with the brass plates on, why are they here?
And those other two ... peasants.... And there at the door Kalganov with Trifon Borissovitch....
"Gentlemen!
What's this for, gentlemen?" began Mitya, but suddenly, as though beside himself, not knowing what he was doing, he cried aloud, at the top of his voice:
The young man in spectacles moved forward suddenly, and stepping up to Mitya, began with dignity, though hurriedly:
"We have to make ... in brief, I beg you to come this way, this way to the sofa....
"The old man!" cried Mitya frantically.
And he sank, almost fell, on a chair close by, as though he had been mown down by a scythe.
"You understand?
Monster and parricide!
Your father's blood cries out against you!" the old captain of police roared suddenly, stepping up to Mitya.
He was beside himself, crimson in the face and quivering all over.
"This is impossible!" cried the small young man.
"Mihail Makarovitch, Mihail Makarovitch, this won't do!...
I beg you'll allow me to speak.
"This is delirium, gentlemen, raving delirium," cried the captain of police; "look at him: drunk, at this time of night, in the company of a disreputable woman, with the blood of his father on his hands....
"I beg you most earnestly, dear Mihail Makarovitch, to restrain your feelings," the prosecutor said in a rapid whisper to the old police captain, "or I shall be forced to resort to-"
But the little lawyer did not allow him to finish.
He turned to Mitya, and delivered himself in a loud, firm, dignified voice:
He said something more, and the prosecutor, too, put in something, but though Mitya heard them he did not understand them.
The Babe
The examination of the witnesses began.
But we will not continue our story in such detail as before.
And so we will not dwell on how Nikolay Parfenovitch impressed on every witness called that he must give his evidence in accordance with truth and conscience, and that he would afterwards have to repeat his evidence on oath, how every witness was called upon to sign the protocol of his evidence, and so on.
We will only note that the point principally insisted upon in the examination was the question of the three thousand roubles, that is, was the sum spent here, at Mokroe, by Mitya on the first occasion, a month before, three thousand or fifteen hundred?
And again had he spent three thousand or fifteen hundred yesterday?
Alas, all the evidence given by every one turned out to be against Mitya.
There was not one in his favor, and some witnesses introduced new, almost crushing facts, in contradiction of his, Mitya's, story.
He was not in the least abashed as he stood before the lawyers.
He had, on the contrary, an air of stern and severe indignation with the accused, which gave him an appearance of truthfulness and personal dignity.
He spoke little, and with reserve, waited to be questioned, answered precisely and deliberately. Firmly and unhesitatingly he bore witness that the sum spent a month before could not have been less than three thousand, that all the peasants about here would testify that they had heard the sum of three thousand mentioned by Dmitri Fyodorovitch himself.
He wasted a thousand, I daresay, on them alone."
"It's a pity I didn't count the money at the time, but I was drunk...."
Mitya was sitting sideways with his back to the curtains.
He listened gloomily, with a melancholy and exhausted air, as though he would say:
"Oh, say what you like.
It makes no difference now."
"More than a thousand went on them, Dmitri Fyodorovitch," retorted Trifon Borissovitch firmly.
"You flung it about at random and they picked it up. They were a rascally, thievish lot, horse stealers, they've been driven away from here, or maybe they'd bear witness themselves how much they got from you.
I saw the sum in your hands, myself-count it I didn't, you didn't let me, that's true enough-but by the look of it I should say it was far more than fifteen hundred ... fifteen hundred, indeed!
We can judge of amounts...."
As for the sum spent yesterday he asserted that Dmitri Fyodorovitch had told him, as soon as he arrived, that he had brought three thousand with him.
"Come now, is that so, Trifon Borissovitch?" replied Mitya.
"Surely I didn't declare so positively that I'd brought three thousand?"
"You did say so, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.
You said it before Andrey.
Andrey himself is still here.
Send for him.
And in the hall, when you were treating the chorus, you shouted straight out that you would leave your sixth thousand here-that is with what you spent before, we must understand.
Stepan and Semyon heard it, and Pyotr Fomitch Kalganov, too, was standing beside you at the time.
Maybe he'd remember it...."
They were delighted with this new mode of reckoning; three and three made six, three thousand then and three now made six, that was clear.
They questioned all the peasants suggested by Trifon Borissovitch, Stepan and Semyon, the driver Andrey, and Kalganov.
The peasants and the driver unhesitatingly confirmed Trifon Borissovitch's evidence.
The psychological Ippolit Kirillovitch heard this with a subtle smile, and ended by recommending that these remarks as to where Dmitri Fyodorovitch would go should be "included in the case."
He began by saying that "he knew nothing about it and didn't want to." But it appeared that he had heard of the "sixth" thousand, and he admitted that he had been standing close by at the moment.
As far as he could see he "didn't know" how much money Mitya had in his hands.
He affirmed that the Poles had cheated at cards.
In reply to reiterated questions he stated that, after the Poles had been turned out, Mitya's position with Agrafena Alexandrovna had certainly improved, and that she had said that she loved him.
In spite of the young man's obvious repugnance at giving evidence, Ippolit Kirillovitch examined him at great length, and only from him learnt all the details of what made up Mitya's "romance," so to say, on that night. Mitya did not once pull Kalganov up.
At last they let the young man go, and he left the room with unconcealed indignation.
The Poles, too, were examined.
Though they had gone to bed in their room, they had not slept all night, and on the arrival of the police officers they hastily dressed and got ready, realizing that they would certainly be sent for.
The little Pole turned out to be a retired official of the twelfth class, who had served in Siberia as a veterinary surgeon.
His name was Mussyalovitch.
Pan Vrublevsky turned out to be an uncertificated dentist.
Although Nikolay Parfenovitch asked them questions on entering the room they both addressed their answers to Mihail Makarovitch, who was standing on one side, taking him in their ignorance for the most important person and in command, and addressed him at every word as "Pan Colonel." Only after several reproofs from Mihail Makarovitch himself, they grasped that they had to address their answers to Nikolay Parfenovitch only.
It turned out that they could speak Russian quite correctly except for their accent in some words.
Of his relations with Grushenka, past and present, Pan Mussyalovitch spoke proudly and warmly, so that Mitya was roused at once and declared that he would not allow the "scoundrel" to speak like that in his presence!
Pan Mussyalovitch at once called attention to the word "scoundrel" and begged that it should be put down in the protocol. Mitya fumed with rage.
"He's a scoundrel!
You can put that down.
And put down, too, that, in spite of the protocol I still declare that he's a scoundrel!" he cried.
After sternly reprimanding Mitya, he cut short all further inquiry into the romantic aspect of the case, and hastened to pass to what was essential.
The prosecutor positively pounced on this piece of evidence.
This would explain the circumstance, so baffling for the prosecution, that only eight hundred roubles were to be found in Mitya's hands.
"And you imagine he would have accepted such a deed as a substitute for two thousand three hundred roubles in cash?"
"He certainly would have accepted it," Mitya declared warmly.
"Why, look here, he might have grabbed not two thousand, but four or six, for it.
He would have put his lawyers, Poles and Jews, on to the job, and might have got, not three thousand, but the whole property out of the old man."
Then they let the Poles go.
Nikolay Parfenovitch was too well pleased with them, as it was, and did not want to worry them with trifles, moreover, it was nothing but a foolish, drunken quarrel over cards.
There had been drinking and disorder enough, that night....
Then old Maximov was summoned.
He came in timidly, approached with little steps, looking very disheveled and depressed.
So that she herself began trying to pacify and comfort him.
"Have you ever seen so much as twenty thousand before, then?" inquired Nikolay Parfenovitch, with a smile.
"To be sure I have, not twenty, but seven, when my wife mortgaged my little property.
It was a very thick bundle, all rainbow colored notes.
He was not kept long.
At last it was Grushenka's turn.
Nikolay Parfenovitch was obviously apprehensive of the effect her appearance might have on Mitya, and he muttered a few words of admonition to him, but Mitya bowed his head in silence, giving him to understand "that he would not make a scene." Mihail Makarovitch himself led Grushenka in.
She entered with a stern and gloomy face, that looked almost composed and sat down quietly on the chair offered her by Nikolay Parfenovitch.
She was very pale, she seemed to be cold, and wrapped herself closely in her magnificent black shawl.
She was suffering from a slight feverish chill-the first symptom of the long illness which followed that night.
Her grave air, her direct earnest look and quiet manner made a very favorable impression on every one.
But this was received with positive indignation by the ladies, who immediately called him a "naughty man," to his great satisfaction.
As she entered the room, Grushenka only glanced for an instant at Mitya, who looked at her uneasily.
But her face reassured him at once.
"He was an acquaintance.
She had never meant to go to Fyodor Pavlovitch, she had simply been laughing at him.
"I had no thoughts for either of them all this last month.
I was expecting another man who had wronged me.
But I think," she said in conclusion, "that there's no need for you to inquire about that, nor for me to answer you, for that's my own affair."
Nikolay Parfenovitch immediately acted upon this hint.
To which Grushenka replied that she had heard him say so before other people, and had heard him say so when they were alone.
Ippolit Kirillovitch was very well satisfied with this piece of evidence. Further examination elicited that Grushenka knew, too, where that money had come from, and that Dmitri Fyodorovitch had got it from Katerina Ivanovna.
"And did you never, once, hear that the money spent a month ago was not three thousand, but less, and that Dmitri Fyodorovitch had saved half that sum for his own use?"
"No, I never heard that," answered Grushenka.
It was explained further that Mitya had, on the contrary, often told her that he hadn't a farthing.
"He was always expecting to get some from his father," said Grushenka in conclusion.
"Once or several times?"
"He mentioned it several times, always in anger."
"And did you believe he would do it?"
"No, I never believed it," she answered firmly.
"I had faith in his noble heart."
"You can speak," Nikolay Parfenovitch assented.
"Agrafena Alexandrovna!" Mitya got up from his chair, "have faith in God and in me.
I am not guilty of my father's murder!"
Grushenka stood up and crossed herself devoutly before the ikon.
"As he has spoken now, believe it!
I know him.
He'll say anything as a joke or from obstinacy, but he'll never deceive you against his conscience.
He's telling the whole truth, you may believe it."
"Thanks, Agrafena Alexandrovna, you've given me fresh courage," Mitya responded in a quivering voice.
And to the question where he got the money, she said that he had told her that he had "stolen" it from Katerina Ivanovna, and that she had replied to that that he hadn't stolen it, and that he must pay the money back next day.
She went out.
Mitya was calm, and even looked more cheerful, but only for a moment.
He felt more and more oppressed by a strange physical weakness. His eyes were closing with fatigue.
He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the place and the time.
He was cold, it was early in November, and the snow was falling in big wet flakes, melting as soon as it touched the earth.
And the peasant drove him smartly, he had a fair, long beard.
He was not an old man, somewhere about fifty, and he had on a gray peasant's smock.
And in her arms was a little baby crying.
And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in them.
Why are they crying?" Mitya asked, as they dashed gayly by.
"But why is it weeping?" Mitya persisted stupidly, "why are its little arms bare?
Why don't they wrap it up?"
"The babe's cold, its little clothes are frozen and don't warm it."
"But why is it?
Why?" foolish Mitya still persisted.
"Why, they're poor people, burnt out.
They've no bread.
They're begging because they've been burnt out."
"Tell me why it is those poor mothers stand there?
Why are people poor?
Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren?
Why don't they hug each other and kiss?
Why don't they sing songs of joy?
Why are they so dark from black misery?
Why don't they feed the babe?"
And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless, yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way.
"And I'm coming with you.
I won't leave you now for the rest of my life, I'm coming with you," he heard close beside him Grushenka's tender voice, thrilling with emotion.
And his heart glowed, and he struggled forward towards the light, and he longed to live, to live, to go on and on, towards the new, beckoning light, and to hasten, hasten, now, at once!
"What!
Where?" he exclaimed opening his eyes, and sitting up on the chest, as though he had revived from a swoon, smiling brightly.
Nikolay Parfenovitch was standing over him, suggesting that he should hear the protocol read aloud and sign it.
He was suddenly struck by the fact that there was a pillow under his head, which hadn't been there when he had leant back, exhausted, on the chest.
"Who put that pillow under my head?
Who was so kind?" he cried, with a sort of ecstatic gratitude, and tears in his voice, as though some great kindness had been shown him.
He never found out who this kind man was; perhaps one of the peasant witnesses, or Nikolay Parfenovitch's little secretary, had compassionately thought to put a pillow under his head; but his whole soul was quivering with tears.
He went to the table and said that he would sign whatever they liked.
"I've had a good dream, gentlemen," he said in a strange voice, with a new light, as of joy, in his face.
seventeen.
SWEETWATER IN A NEW ROLE
A few days later three men were closeted in the district attorney's office.
Two of them were officials-the district attorney himself, and our old friend, the inspector.
The third was the detective, Sweetwater, chosen by them to keep watch on mr Grey.
Sweetwater had just come to town,--this was evident from the gripsack he had set down in a corner on entering, also from a certain tousled appearance which bespoke hasty rising and but few facilities for proper attention to his person.
These details counted little, however, in the astonishment created by his manner.
For a hardy chap he looked strangely nervous and indisposed, so much so that, after the first short greeting, the inspector asked him what was up, and if he had had another Fairbrother house experience.
He replied with a decided no; that it was not his adventure which had upset him, but the news he had to bring.
Here he glanced at every door and window; and then, leaning forward over the table at which the two officials sat, he brought his head as nearly to them as possible and whispered five words.
They produced a most unhappy sensation.
Both the men, hardened as they were by duties which soon sap the sensibilities, started and turned as pale as the speaker himself.
Then the district attorney, with one glance at the inspector, rose and locked the door.
It was a prelude to this tale which I give, not as it came from his mouth, but as it was afterward related to me.
The detective had just been with mr Grey to the coast of Maine. Why there, will presently appear.
His task had been to follow this gentleman, and follow him he did.
mr Grey was a very stately man, difficult of approach, and was absorbed, besides, by some overwhelming care.
This was a great stroke of luck, he thought, but he little knew how big a stroke or into what a series of adventures it was going to lead him.
Once on the platform of the small station at which mr Grey had bidden him to stop, he noticed two things: the utter helplessness of the man in all practical matters, and his extreme anxiety to see all that was going on about him without being himself seen.
Women did not interest him in the least. They could pass and repass without arousing his attention, but the moment a man stepped his way, he shrank from him only to betray the greatest curiosity concerning him the moment he felt it safe to turn and observe him.
All of which convinced Sweetwater that the Englishman's errand was in connection with a man whom he equally dreaded and desired to meet.
Of this he was made absolutely certain a little later.
"I want you to get me a room at a very quiet hotel.
Do this and you will earn a week's salary in one day."
Not till he had found what he wished, and installed the Englishman in his room, did he venture to open the precious memorandum and read the name he had been speculating over for an hour.
It was not the one he had anticipated, but it came near to it. It was that of james Wellgood.
The train on which he had just come had been a mail train, and he calculated that he would find half the town there.
His calculation was a correct one.
The man behind the boxes was used to the name and reached out a hand toward a box unusually well stacked, but stopped half-way there and gave Sweetwater a sharp look.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"A stranger," that young man put in volubly, "looking for james Wellgood.
I thought, perhaps, you could tell me where to find him.
I see that his letters pass through this office."
"You're taking up another man's time," complained the postmaster.
"Ask Dick over there; he knows him."
The detective was glad enough to escape and ask Dick.
But he was better pleased yet when Dick-a fellow with a squint whose hand was always in the sugar-told him that mr Wellgood would probably be in for his mail in a few moments.
"That is his buggy standing before the drug store on the opposite side of the way."
So! he had netted Jones' quondam waiter at the first cast!
"Lucky!" was what he said to himself, "still lucky!"
Sauntering to the door, he watched for the owner of that buggy.
He had learned, as such fellows do, that there was a secret hue and cry after this very man by the New York police; that he was supposed by some to be Sears himself.
In this way he would soon be looking upon the very man whose steps he had followed through the Fairbrother house a few nights before, and through whose resolute action he had very nearly run the risk of a lingering death from starvation.
"A dangerous customer," thought he.
"I wonder if my instinct will go so far as to make me recognize his presence.
It was enough.
The man was commonplace,--commonplace in feature, dress and manner, but his eye gave him away.
He had taken in Sweetwater as he passed, but Sweetwater was of a commonplace type, too, and woke no corresponding dread in the other's mind; for he went whistling into the store, from which he presently reissued with a bundle of mail in his hand.
But how, with the conditions laid on him by mr Grey, was this to be done?
He knew nothing of the man's circumstances or of his position in the town.
How, then, go to work to secure his cooperation in a scheme possibly as mysterious to him as it was to himself?
He could stop this stranger in mid street, with some plausible excuse, but it did not follow that he would succeed in luring him to the hotel where mr Grey could see him.
Wellgood, or, as he believed, Sears, knew too much of life to be beguiled by any open clap trap, and Sweetwater was obliged to see him drive off without having made the least advance in the purpose engrossing him.
But that was nothing.
He had all the evening before him, and reentering the store, he took up his stand near the sugar barrel.
He had perceived that in the pauses of weighing and tasting, Dick talked; if he were guided with suitable discretion, why should he not talk of Wellgood?
He was guided, and he did talk and to some effect.
That is, he gave information of the man which surprised Sweetwater.
He had not been long in town and was somewhat of a stranger yet, but he wouldn't be so long.
He was going to make things hum, he was.
Money for this, money for that, a horse where another man would walk, and mail-well, that alone would make this post office worth while.
Then the drugs ordered by wholesale.
Those boxes over there were his, ready to be carted out to his manufactory.
Count them, some one, and think of the bottles and bottles of stuff they stand for.
If it sells as he says it will-then he will soon be rich: and so on, till Sweetwater brought the garrulous Dick to a standstill by asking whether Wellgood had been away for any purpose since he first came to town.
Sweetwater felt all his convictions confirmed, and ended the colloquy with the final question:
"And where is his manufactory?
Might be worth visiting, perhaps."
The other made a gesture, said something about northwest and rushed to help a customer.
Sweetwater took the opportunity to slide away.
Sweetwater made only one stop on his way to mr Grey's hotel rooms, and that was at the stables.
Here he learned whatever else there was to know, and, armed with definite information, he appeared before mr Grey, who, to his astonishment, was dining in his own room.
He looked up eagerly, however, when Sweetwater entered, and asked what news.
The detective, with some semblance of respect, answered that he had seen Wellgood, but that he had been unable to detain him or bring him within his employer's observation.
"He is a patent medicine man," he then explained, "and manufactures his own concoctions in a house he has rented here on a lonely road some half mile out of town."
"Wellgood does?
the man named Wellgood?" mr Grey exclaimed with all the astonishment the other secretly expected.
"Yes; Wellgood, james Wellgood.
"Ah!"
mr Grey rose precipitately.
His manner had changed.
"I must see him.
What you tell me makes it all the more necessary for me to see him.
How can you bring it about?"
Couldn't you rap him up at his own door, and hold him in talk a minute, while I looked on from the carriage or whatever vehicle we can get to carry us there?
The least glimpse of his face would satisfy me.
That is, to night."
"I'll try," said Sweetwater, not very sanguine as to the probable result of this effort.
Returning to the stables, he ordered the team.
CHAPTER seventy five.
In these fine early autumn days spent at Matching, the great Trumpeton Wood question was at last settled.
During the summer considerable acerbity had been added to the matter by certain articles which had appeared in certain sporting papers, in which the new Duke of Omnium was accused of neglecting his duty to the county in which a portion of his property lay.
The question was argued at considerable length.
Is a landed proprietor bound, or is he not, to keep foxes for the amusement of his neighbours?
To ordinary thinkers, to unprejudiced outsiders,--to Americans, let us say, or Frenchmen,--there does not seem to be room even for an argument.
By what law of God or man can a man be bound to maintain a parcel of injurious vermin on his property, in the pursuit of which he finds no sport himself, and which are highly detrimental to another sport in which he takes, perhaps, the keenest interest?
Trumpeton Wood was the Duke's own,--to do just as he pleased with it.
Why should foxes be demanded from him then any more than a bear to be baited, or a badger to be drawn, in, let us say, his London dining room?
But a good deal had been said which, though not perhaps capable of convincing the unprejudiced American or Frenchman, had been regarded as cogent arguments to country bred Englishmen.
The Brake Hunt had been established for a great many years, and was the central attraction of a district well known for its hunting propensities.
The preservation of foxes might be an open question in such counties as Norfolk and Suffolk, but could not be so in the Brake country.
The Duke might have his foxes destroyed if he pleased, but he could hardly do so and remain a popular magnate in England.
As it happened, Trumpeton Wood was, and always had been, the great nursery of foxes for that side of the Brake country.
Gorse coverts make, no doubt, the charm of hunting, but gorse coverts will not hold foxes unless the woodlands be preserved.
The fox is a travelling animal.
Knowing well that "home staying youths have ever homely wits," he goes out and sees the world.
If all foxes so wandering be doomed to death, if poison, and wires, and traps, and hostile keepers await them there instead of the tender welcome of the loving fox preserver, the gorse coverts will soon be empty, and the whole country will be afflicted with a wild dismay.
But our dear old friend, only the other day a duke, Planty Pall as he was lately called, devoted to work and to Parliament, an unselfish, friendly, wise man, who by no means wanted other men to cut their coats according to his pattern, was the last man in England to put himself forward as the enemy of an established delight.
He did not hunt himself,--but neither did he shoot, or fish, or play cards.
He recreated himself with Blue Books, and speculations on Adam Smith had been his distraction;--but he knew that he was himself peculiar, and he respected the habits of others.
It had fallen out in this wise.
The animal becomes sacred, and his preservation is a religion.
He had mistaken it for a hare, and had done the deed in the presence of keepers, owner, and friends.
His feelings were so acute and his remorse so great that, in their pity, they had resolved to spare him; and then, on the spot, entered into a solemn compact that no one should be told.
Encouraged by the forbearing tenderness, the unfortunate one ventured to return to the house of his friend, the owner of the wood, hoping that, in spite of the sacrilege committed, he might be able to face a world that would be ignorant of his crime.
As the vulpicide, on the afternoon of the day of the deed, went along the corridor to his room, one maid servant whispered to another, and the poor victim of an imperfect sight heard the words-"That's he as shot the fox!"
The gentleman did not appear at dinner, nor was he ever again seen in those parts.
mr Fothergill had become angry.
And even the Duke was angry.
The Duke was angry because Lord Chiltern had been violent;--and Lord Chiltern had been violent because mr Fothergill's conduct had been, to his thinking, not only sacrilegious, but one continued course of wilful sacrilege.
To kill a certain number of foxes in the year, after the legitimate fashion, had become to him the one great study of life;--and he did it with an energy equal to that which the Duke devoted to decimal coinage.
His huntsman was always well mounted, with two horses; but Lord Chiltern would give up his own to the man and take charge of a weary animal as a common groom when he found that he might thus further the object of the day's sport.
He devoted his life to the Brake Hounds.
And it was too much for him that such a one as mr Fothergill should be allowed to wire foxes in Trumpeton Wood!
The Duke's property, indeed!
Surely all that was understood in England by this time.
Now he had consented to come to Matching, bringing his wife with him, in order that the matter might be settled.
There had been a threat that he would give up the country, in which case it was declared that it would be impossible to carry on the Brake Hunt in a manner satisfactory to masters, subscribers, owners of coverts, or farmers, unless a different order of things should be made to prevail in regard to Trumpeton Wood.
The Duke, however, had declined to interfere personally.
He had told his wife that he should be delighted to welcome Lord and Lady Chiltern,--as he would any other friends of hers.
The guests, indeed, at the Duke's house were never his guests, but always hers.
But he could not allow himself to be brought into an argument with Lord Chiltern as to the management of his own property.
The Duchess was made to understand that she must prevent any such awkwardness.
And she did prevent it.
Lady Chiltern and Madame Goesler were present, and also Phineas Finn.
"Well;--how about them?" said the lord, showing by the fiery eagerness of his eye, and the increased redness of his face, that though the matter had been introduced somewhat jocosely, there could not really be any joke about it.
"Why couldn't you keep it all out of the newspapers?"
"I don't write the newspapers, Duchess.
"We may have traps if we like it, Lord Chiltern."
"Certainly;--only say so, and we shall know where we are." He looked very angry, and poor Lady Chiltern was covered with dismay.
"But we don't like traps, Lord Chiltern;--nor yet poison, nor anything that is wicked.
I'd go and nurse the foxes myself if I knew how, wouldn't I, Marie?"
"They have robbed the Duchess of her sleep for the last six months," said Madame Goesler.
"And if they go on being not properly brought up and educated, they'll make an old woman of me.
As for the Duke, he can't be comfortable in his arithmetic for thinking of them.
But what can one do?"
"Change your keepers," said Lord Chiltern energetically.
How am I to set about it? To whom can I apply to appoint others?
Don't you know what vested interests mean, Lord Chiltern?"
"Then nobody can manage his own property as he pleases?"
"Nobody can,--unless he does the work himself.
If I were to go and live in Trumpeton Wood I could do it; but you see I have to live here.
I vote that we have an officer of State, to go in and out with the Government,--with a seat in the Cabinet or not according as things go, and that we call him Foxmaster General.
It would be just the thing for mr Finn."
"Then I suppose that nothing can be done," said Lord Chiltern.
"My dear Lord Chiltern, everything has been done.
Vested interests have been attended to.
Keepers shall prefer foxes to pheasants, wires shall be unheard of, and Trumpeton Wood shall once again be the glory of the Brake Hunt.
It won't cost the Duke above a thousand or two a year."
"I should be very sorry indeed to put the Duke to any unnecessary expense," said Lord Chiltern solemnly,--still fearing that the Duchess was only playing with him.
"Do not think of it.
We have pensioned poor mr Fothergill, and he retires from the administration."
"Then it'll be all right," said Lord Chiltern.
"I am so glad," said his wife.
"And so the great mr Fothergill falls from power, and goes down into obscurity," said Madame Goesler.
"He was an impudent old man, and that's the truth," said the Duchess;--"and he has always been my thorough detestation.
But if you only knew what I have gone through to get rid of him,--and all on account of Trumpeton Wood,--you'd send me every brush taken in the Brake country during the next season."
"Your Grace shall at any rate have one of them," said Lord Chiltern.
On the next day Lord and Lady Chiltern went back to Harrington Hall. When the end of August comes, a Master of Hounds,--who is really a master,--is wanted at home.
Nothing short of an embassy on behalf of the great coverts of his country would have kept this master away at present; and now, his diplomacy having succeeded, he hurried back to make the most of its results.
Lady Chiltern, before she went, made a little speech to Phineas Finn.
"You'll come to us in the winter, mr Finn?"
"I should like."
"You must.
No one was truer to you than we were, you know.
"Oh, Lady Chiltern!"
"Of course you'll come.
You owe it to us to come.
And may I say this? If there be anybody to come with you, that will make it only so much the better.
ADRIFT ON AN ICE PAN
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
"MOST NOBLE VICE CHANCELLOR, AND YOU, EMINENT PROCTORS:
"A citizen of Britain is before you, once a student in this University, now better known to the people of the New World than to our own.
This is the man who fifteen years ago went to the coast of Labrador, to succor with medical aid the solitary fishermen of the northern sea; in executing which service he despised the perils of the ocean, which are there most terrible, in order to bring comfort and light to the wretched and sorrowing.
Thus, up to the measure of human ability, he seems to follow, if it is right to say it of any one, in the footsteps of Christ Himself, as a truly Christian man.
Rightly then we praise him by whose praise not he alone, but our University also is honored.
With these fitting words was presented a man whose simple faith has been the motive power of his works, to whom pain and weariness of flesh have called no stay since there was discouragement never, to whom personal danger has counted as nothing since fear is incomprehensible.
"As the Lord wills, whether for wreck or service, I am about His business." On november ninth of the preceding year, the King of England gave one of his "Birthday Honors" to the same man, making him a Companion of saint Michael and saint George (c m g).
Algernon Sydney Grenfell and Jane Georgiana Hutchinson, was born on the twenty eighth day of February, eighteen hundred and sixty five, at Mostyn House School, Parkgate, by Chester, England, of an ancestry which laid a firm foundation for his career and in surroundings which fitted him for it.
On both sides of his inheritance have been exhibited the courage, patience, persistence, and fighting and teaching qualities which are exemplified in his own abilities to command, to administer, and to uplift.
On his father's side were the Grenvilles, who made good account of themselves in such cause as they approved, among them Basil Grenville, commander of the Royalist Cornish Army, killed at Lansdown in sixteen forty three in defence of King Charles.
"Four wheels to Charles's wain: Grenville, Trevanion, Slanning, Godolphin slain."
There was also Sir Richard Grenville, immortalized by Tennyson in "The Revenge," and john Pascoe Grenville, the right-hand man of Admiral Cochrane, who boarded the Spanish admiral's ship, the Esmeralda, on the port side, while Cochrane came up on the starboard, when together they made short work of the capture.
Nor has the strain died out, as is demonstrated in the present generation by many of dr Grenfell's cousins, among them General Francis Wallace Grenfell, Lord Kilvey, and by dr Grenfell himself on the Labrador in the fight against disease and disaster and distress along a stormy and uncharted coast.
On his mother's side, four of her brothers were generals or colonels in the trying times of service in India.
The eldest fought with distinction throughout the Indian Mutiny and in the defence of Lucknow, and another commanded the crack cavalry regiment, the "Guides," at Peshawar, and fell fighting in one of the turbulent North of India wars.
Of teachers, there was dr Grenfell's paternal grandfather, the reverend Algernon Grenfell, the second of three brothers, house master at Rugby under Arnold, and a fine classical scholar, whose elder and younger brothers each felt the ancestral call of the sea and became admirals, with brave records of daring and success.
dr Grenfell's father, after a brilliant career at Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford, became assistant master at Repton, and later, when he married, head master of Mostyn House School, a position which he resigned in eighteen eighty two to become Chaplain of the London Hospital.
"He was a man of much learning, with a keen interest in science, a remarkable eloquence, and a fervent evangelistic faith."
Mostyn House School still stands, enlarged and modernized, in the charge of dr Grenfell's elder brother, and in it his mother is still the real head and controlling genius.
Parkgate, at one time a seaport of renown, when Liverpool was still unimportant, and later a seaside health resort to which came the fashion and beauty of England, had fallen, through the silting of the estuary and the broadening of the "Sands of Dee," to the level of a hamlet in the time of dr Grenfell's boyhood.
The broad stretch of seaward trending sand, with its interlacing rivulets of fresh and brackish water, made a tempting though treacherous playground, alluring alike in the varied forms of life it harbored and in the adventure which whetted exploration.
Thither came Charles Kingsley, Canon of Chester, who married a Grenfell, and who coupled his verse with scientific study and made geological excursions to the river's mouth with the then Master of Mostyn House School.
In these excursions the youthful Wilfred was a participant, and therein he learned some of his first lessons in that accuracy of observation essential to his later life work.
From the school days at Parkgate came the step to Marlborough College, where three years were marked by earnest study, both in books and in play, for the one gained a scholarship and the other an enduring interest in Rugby football.
Matriculating later at the University of London, Grenfell entered the London Hospital, and there laid not only the foundation of his medical education, but that of his friendship with Sir Frederick Treves, renowned surgeon and daring sailor and master mariner as well.
With plenty of work to the fore, as a hospital interne, the ruling spirit still asserted itself, and the young doctor became an inspiration among the waifs of the teeming city; he was one of the founders of the great Lads' Brigades which have done much good, and fostered more, in the example that they have set for allied activities.
Nor were the needs of his own bodily machine neglected; football, rowing, and the tennis court kept him in condition, and his athletics served to strengthen his appeals to the London boys whom he enrolled in the brigades.
He founded the inter hospital rowing club at Putney and rowed in the first inter hospital race; he played on the Varsity football team, and won the "throwing the hammer" at the sports.
A couple of terms at Queen's College, Oxford, followed the London experience, but here the conditions were too easy and luxurious for one who, by both inheritance and training, had within him the incentive to the strenuous life.
Need called, misery appealed, the message of life, of hope, and of salvation awaited, and the young doctor turned from Oxford to the medical mission work in which his record stands among the foremost for its effectiveness and for the spirituality of its purpose.
Seeking some way in which he could satisfy his medical aspirations, as well as his desire for adventure and for definite Christian work, he appealed to Sir Frederick Treves, a member of the Council of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, who suggested his joining the staff of the mission and establishing a medical mission to the fishermen of the North Sea.
The conditions of the life were onerous, the existing traffic in spirituous liquors and in all other demoralizing influences had to be fought step by step, prejudice and evil habit had to be overcome and to be replaced by better knowledge and better desire, there was room for both fighting and teaching, and the medical mission won its way.
"When you set out to commend your gospel to men who don't want it, there's only one way to go about it,--to do something for them that they'll be sure to understand.
To accomplish this, to make of the scattered settlements a united and independent people, to safeguard their future by such measures as the establishment of a Seamen's Institute at saint John's, Newfoundland, and the insurance of communication with the outside world, and to raise, by personal solicitation, the money needed for these enterprises, requires an unusual personality.
Our old tracks are drifted up, deep in places, and toothed sastrugi have formed over them.
This has brought us to our Southern Depot, and we pick up four days' food.
Night Camp r three.
At first with full sail we went along at a great rate; then we got on to an extraordinary surface, the drifting snow lying in heaps; it clung to the ski, which could only be pushed forward with an effort.
The pulling was really awful, but we went steadily on and camped a short way beyond our cairn of the fourteenth.
It is everything now to keep up a good marching pace; I trust we shall be able to do so and catch the ship.
Total march, eighteen and a half miles.
ten thousand ten.
now.
We are just about on the eighty ninth parallel.
To night Bowers got a rating sight.
I thought we were climbing to day, but the barometer gives no change.
Little wind and heavy marching at start.
The old tracks show so remarkably well that we can follow them without much difficulty-a great piece of luck.
Bowers hung on to the sledge, Evans and Oates had to lengthen out.
Got the tent up with some difficulty, and now pretty cosy after good hoosh.
Oates gets cold feet.
The weather seems to be breaking up.
Pray God we have something of a track to follow to the Three Degree Depot-once we pick that up we ought to be right.
Things beginning to look a little serious.
Bowers guided the sledge alone for the first hour, then both Oates and he remained alongside it; they had a fearful time trying to make the pace between the soft patches.
I don't like the look of it.
Is the weather breaking up?
If so, God help us, with the tremendous summit journey and scant food.
Needless to say I shall sleep much better with our provision bag full again.
The tracks seem as good as ever so far, sometimes for thirty or forty yards we lose them under drifts, but then they reappear quite clearly raised above the surface.
If the light is good there is not the least difficulty in following.
There was a good stiff breeze and plenty of drift, but the tracks held.
But beyond the camp we found the tracks completely wiped out.
I hope to goodness we can follow it to morrow.
Barometer low?
The forenoon march was over the belt of storm tossed sastrugi; it looked like a rough sea.
Wilson and I pulled in front on ski, the remainder on foot.
It was very tricky work following the track, which pretty constantly disappeared, and in fact only showed itself by faint signs anywhere-a foot or two of raised sledge track, a dozen yards of the trail of the sledge meter wheel, or a spatter of hard snow flicks where feet had trodden.
However, by hook or crook, we managed to stick on the old track.
Came on the cairn quite suddenly, marched past it, and camped for lunch at seven miles.
If we get to the next depot in a few marches (it is now less than sixty miles and we have a full week's food) we ought to be able to open out a little, but we can't look for a real feed till we get to the pony food depot.
It is very difficult to say if we are going up or down hill; the barometer is quite different from outward readings.
We are camped opposite our lunch cairn of the fourth, only half a day's march from the point at which the last supporting party left us.
We picked up the boots and mits on the track, and to night we found the pipe lying placidly in sight on the snow.
We are pretty thin, especially Evans, but none of us are feeling worked out.
Excellent march of nineteen and a half miles, ten point five before lunch.
Wind helping greatly, considerable drift; tracks for the most part very plain.
Some time before lunch we picked up the return track of the supporting party, so that there are now three distinct sledge impressions.
Given a fine day to morrow we ought to get it without difficulty.
We have passed the last cairn before the depot, the track is clear ahead, the weather fair, the wind helpful, the gradient down-with any luck we should pick up our depot in the middle of the morning march.
This is the bright side; the reverse of the medal is serious.
Of course, he is full of pluck over it, but I don't like the idea of such an accident here.
In the afternoon the surface became fearfully bad, the wind dropped to light southerly air.
Ill luck that this should happen just when we have only four men to pull.
Wilson rested his leg as much as possible by walking quietly beside the sledge; the result has been good, and to night there is much less inflammation.
Wind light.
Started well in the afternoon and came down a steep slope in quick time; then the surface turned real bad-sandy drifts-very heavy pulling.
We have opened out on the one seventh increase and it makes a lot of difference.
Wilson's leg much better.
R. sixteen.
Soon got to a steep grade, when the sledge overran and upset us one after another.
Started in the afternoon on foot, going very strong.
We noticed a curious circumstance towards the end of the forenoon.
In the afternoon we soon came to a steep slope-the same on which we exchanged sledges on december twenty eighth.
All went well till, in trying to keep the track at the same time as my feet, on a very slippery surface, I came an awful 'purler' on my shoulder.
We shall be lucky if we get through without serious injury.
We lost the track.
Later, on soft snow, we picked up e Evans' return track, which we are now following.
The extra food is certainly helping us, but we are getting pretty hungry.
It is time we were off the summit-Pray God another four days will see us pretty well clear of it.
Height nine thousand forty feet.
To night we are near camp of december twenty sixth, but cannot see cairn.
The extra food is doing us all good, but we ought to have more sleep.
eight thousand six hundred twenty feet.
Just before lunch unexpectedly fell into crevasses, Evans and I together-a second fall for Evans, and I camped.
After lunch saw disturbance ahead, and what I took for disturbance (land) to the right.
We went on ski over hard shiny descending surface.
Did very well, especially towards end of march, covering in all eighteen point one.
We have come down some hundreds of feet.
Half way in the march the land showed up splendidly, and I decided to make straight for mount Darwin, which we are rounding.
Every sign points to getting away off this plateau.
Bowers is splendid, full of energy and bustle all the time.
A good forenoon, few crevasses; we covered ten point two miles.
In the afternoon we soon got into difficulties.
An hour after starting we came on huge pressures and great street crevasses partly open.
We had to steer more and more to the west, so that our course was very erratic.
Late in the march we turned more to the north and again encountered open crevasses across our track.
On turning out found sky overcast; a beastly position amidst crevasses.
Luckily it cleared just before we started.
We went straight for mount Darwin, but in half an hour found ourselves amongst huge open chasms, unbridged, but not very deep, I think.
We turned to the north between two, but to our chagrin they converged into chaotic disturbance.
Towards the end of the march we realised the certainty of maintaining a more or less straight course to the depot, and estimate distance ten to fifteen miles.
Food is low and weather uncertain, so that many hours of the day were anxious; but this evening, though we are not as far advanced as I expected, the outlook is much more promising.
Evans is the chief anxiety now; his cuts and wounds suppurate, his nose looks very bad, and altogether he shows considerable signs of being played out.
Things may mend for him on the glacier, and his wounds get some respite under warmer conditions.
It took us twenty seven days to reach the Pole and twenty one days back-in all forty eight days-nearly seven weeks in low temperature with almost incessant wind.
Height seven thousand one hundred.
A wretched day with satisfactory ending.
First panic, certainty that biscuit box was short.
Bowers is dreadfully disturbed about it.
The shortage is a full day's allowance.
The temperature is higher, but there is a cold wind to night.
Height six thousand two hundred sixty.
Start Temp.
nine point two miles.
Wind very strong and cold.
Steered in for mount Darwin to visit rock.
He obtained several specimens, all of much the same type, a close grained granite rock which weathers red.
Hence the pink limestone.
After he rejoined we skidded downhill pretty fast, leaders on ski, Oates and Wilson on foot alongside sledge-Evans detached.
However, better things were to follow.
We decided to steer for the moraine under mount Buckley and, pulling with crampons, we crossed some very irregular steep slopes with big crevasses and slid down towards the rocks.
It has been extremely interesting.
We found ourselves under perpendicular cliffs of Beacon sandstone, weathering rapidly and carrying veritable coal seams.
In one place we saw the cast of small waves on the sand.
To night Bill has got a specimen of limestone with archeo cyathus-the trouble is one cannot imagine where the stone comes from; it is evidently rare, as few specimens occur in the moraine.
There is a good deal of pure white quartz.
Altogether we have had a most interesting afternoon, and the relief of being out of the wind and in a warmer temperature is inexpressible.
It is like going ashore after a sea voyage.
Height five thousand two hundred ten feet.
About thirteen miles.
Kept along the edge of moraine to the end of mount Buckley.
Stopped and geologised.
Too tired to write geological notes.
We all felt very slack this morning, partly rise of temperature, partly reaction, no doubt.
The crevasses were much firmer than expected and we got down with some difficulty, found our night camp of december twentieth, and lunched an hour after.
Did pretty well in the afternoon, marching three and three quarters hours; the sledge meter is unshipped, so cannot tell distance traversed.
It is remarkable to be able to stand outside the tent and sun oneself.
Lunch Temp.
Got off a good morning march in spite of keeping too far east and getting in rough, cracked ice.
After lunch the land began to be obscured.
We held a course for two and a half hours with difficulty, then the sun disappeared, and snow drove in our faces with northerly wind-very warm and impossible to steer, so camped.
The fallen snow crystals are quite feathery like thistledown.
We have two full days' food left, and though our position is uncertain, we are certainly within two outward marches from the middle glacier depot.
However, if the weather doesn't clear by to morrow, we must either march blindly on or reduce food.
It is very trying.
Another night to make up arrears of sleep.
The ice crystals that first fell this afternoon were very large.
The worst day we have had during the trip and greatly owing to our own fault.
We went on for six hours, hoping to do a good distance, which in fact I suppose we did, but for the last hour or two we pressed on into a regular trap.
It got worse, harder, more icy and crevassed.
We could not manage our ski and pulled on foot, falling into crevasses every minute-most luckily no bad accident.
At length we saw a smoother slope towards the land, pushed for it, but knew it was a woefully long way from us.
The turmoil changed in character, irregular crevassed surface giving way to huge chasms, closely packed and most difficult to cross.
We won through at ten p m and I write after twelve hours on the march.
We had three pemmican meals left and decided to make them into four.
To morrow's lunch must serve for two if we do not make big progress.
We have come through well.
A good wind has come down the glacier which is clearing the sky and surface.
Short sleep to night and off first thing, I hope.
In a very critical situation.
In the afternoon, refreshed by tea, we went forward, confident of covering the remaining distance, but by a fatal chance we kept too far to the left, and then we struck uphill and, tired and despondent, arrived in a horrid maze of crevasses and fissures.
Divided councils caused our course to be erratic after this, and finally, at nine p m we landed in the worst place of all.
After discussion we decided to camp, and here we are, after a very short supper and one meal only remaining in the food bag; the depot doubtful in locality.
We must get there to morrow.
Meanwhile we are cheerful with an effort.
It's a tight place, but luckily we've been well fed up to the present.
Pray God we have fine weather to morrow.
[At this point the bearings of the mid glacier depot are given, but need not be quoted.]
Last night we all slept well in spite of our grave anxieties.
For my part these were increased by my visits outside the tent, when I saw the sky gradually closing over and snow beginning to fall.
At nine we got up, deciding to have tea, and with one biscuit, no pemmican, so as to leave our scanty remaining meal for eventualities.
Here the surface was much smoother and improved rapidly.
Then the whole place got smoother and we turned outward a little.
It was an immense relief, and we were soon in possession of our three and a half days' food.
The relief to all is inexpressible; needless to say, we camped and had a meal.
Marching in the afternoon, I kept more to the left, and closed the mountain till we fell on the stone moraines.
Here Wilson detached himself and made a collection, whilst we pulled the sledge on.
We camped late, abreast the lower end of the mountain, and had nearly our usual satisfying supper.
Yesterday was the worst experience of the trip and gave a horrid feeling of insecurity.
Now we are right up, we must march.
In future food must be worked so that we do not run so short if the weather fails us.
We mustn't get into a hole like this again.
Evans seems to have got mixed up with pressures like ourselves.
It promises to be a very fine day to morrow.
The valley is gradually clearing.
Bowers has had a very bad attack of snow blindness, and Wilson another almost as bad.
Evans has no power to assist with camping work.
We started a little late and pulled on down the moraine.
At first I thought of going right, but soon, luckily, changed my mind and decided to follow the curving lines of the moraines.
This course has brought us well out on the glacier.
At lunch these were scraped and sand papered.
After lunch we got on snow, with ice only occasionally showing through.
A poor start, but the gradient and wind improving, we did six and a half miles before night camp.
There is no getting away from the fact that we are not going strong.
Probably none of us: Wilson's leg still troubles him and he doesn't like to trust himself on ski; but the worst case is Evans, who is giving us serious anxiety.
It delayed us on the march, when he had to have his crampon readjusted.
Sometimes I fear he is going from bad to worse, but I trust he will pick up again when we come to steady work on ski like this afternoon.
He is hungry and so is Wilson.
We can't risk opening out our food again, and as cook at present I am serving something under full allowance.
We are inclined to get slack and slow with our camping arrangements, and small delays increase.
Lunch Temp.
Again we are running short of provision.
We don't know our distance from the depot, but imagine about twenty miles.
We are pulling for food and not very strong evidently.
In the afternoon it was overcast; land blotted out for a considerable interval.
We have reduced food, also sleep; feeling rather done.
A rather trying position.
Evans has nearly broken down in brain, we think.
We are on short rations with not very short food; spin out till to morrow night.
We cannot be more than ten or twelve miles from the depot, but the weather is all against us.
After lunch we were enveloped in a snow sheet, land just looming.
Memory should hold the events of a very troublesome march with more troubles ahead.
The surface was awful, the soft recently fallen snow clogging the ski and runners at every step, the sledge groaning, the sky overcast, and the land hazy.
Half an hour later he dropped out again on the same plea.
He asked Bowers to lend him a piece of string.
We had to push on, and the remainder of us were forced to pull very hard, sweating heavily.
Abreast the Monument Rock we stopped, and seeing Evans a long way astern, I camped for lunch.
By this time we were alarmed, and all four started back on ski.
Asked what was the matter, he replied with a slow speech that he didn't know, but thought he must have fainted.
We got him on his feet, but after two or three steps he sank down again.
He showed every sign of complete collapse.
Wilson, Bowers, and I went back for the sledge, whilst Oates remained with him.
When we returned he was practically unconscious, and when we got him into the tent quite comatose.
He died quietly at twelve thirty a m
On discussing the symptoms we think he began to get weaker just before we reached the Pole, and that his downward path was accelerated first by the shock of his frostbitten fingers, and later by falls during rough travelling on the glacier, further by his loss of all confidence in himself.
It is a terrible thing to lose a companion in this way, but calm reflection shows that there could not have been a better ending to the terrible anxieties of the past week.
On the last day of the journey as the railway train Philip was on was leaving a large city, a lady timidly entered the drawing room car, and hesitatingly took a chair that was at the moment unoccupied.
"Now you can't sit there.
That seat's taken.
Go into the other car."
"There aint any.
Car's full.
You'll have to leave."
"But, sir," said the lady, appealingly, "I thought-"
"Can't help what you thought-you must go into the other car."
"The train is going very fast, let me stand here till we stop."
"The lady can have my seat," cried Philip, springing up.
The conductor turned towards Philip, and coolly and deliberately surveyed him from head to foot, with contempt in every line of his face, turned his back upon him without a word, and said to the lady,
"Come, I've got no time to talk.
You must go now."
The lady, entirely disconcerted by such rudeness, and frightened, moved towards the door, opened it and stepped out.
The train was swinging along at a rapid rate, jarring from side to side; the step was a long one between the cars and there was no protecting grating.
The lady attempted it, but lost her balance, in the wind and the motion of the car, and fell!
She would inevitably have gone down under the wheels, if Philip, who had swiftly followed her, had not caught her arm and drawn her up.
He then assisted her across, found her a seat, received her bewildered thanks, and returned to his car.
The conductor was still there, taking his tickets, and growling something about imposition.
Philip marched up to him, and burst out with,
"You are a brute, an infernal brute, to treat a woman that way."
"Perhaps you'd like to make a fuss about it," sneered the conductor.
Philip's reply was a blow, given so suddenly and planted so squarely in the conductor's face, that it sent him reeling over a fat passenger, who was looking up in mild wonder that any one should dare to dispute with a conductor, and against the side of the car.
He recovered himself, reached the bell rope, "Damn you, I'll learn you," stepped to the door and called a couple of brakemen, and then, as the speed slackened; roared out,
"Get off this train."
"I shall not get off.
"We'll see," said the conductor, advancing with the brakemen.
The passengers protested, and some of them said to each other, "That's too bad," as they always do in such cases, but none of them offered to take a hand with Philip.
The men seized him, wrenched him from his seat, dragged him along the aisle, tearing his clothes, thrust him from the car, and, then flung his carpet bag, overcoat and umbrella after him. And the train went on.
The conductor, red in the face and puffing from his exertion, swaggered through the car, muttering "Puppy, I'll learn him." The passengers, when he had gone, were loud in their indignation, and talked about signing a protest, but they did nothing more than talk.
The next morning the Hooverville Patriot and Clarion had this "item":--
"We learn that as the down noon express was leaving H---- yesterday a lady! (God save the mark) attempted to force herself into the already full palatial car.
Conductor Slum, who is too old a bird to be caught with chaff, courteously informed her that the car was full, and when she insisted on remaining, he persuaded her to go into the car where she belonged.
Thereupon a young sprig, from the East, blustered like a Shanghai rooster, and began to sass the conductor with his chin music. That gentleman delivered the young aspirant for a muss one of his elegant little left handers, which so astonished him that he began to feel for his shooter.
Whereupon mr Slum gently raised the youth, carried him forth, and set him down just outside the car to cool off. Whether the young blood has yet made his way out of Bascom's swamp, we have not learned.
Conductor Slum is one of the most gentlemanly and efficient officers on the road; but he ain't trifled with, not much.
We learn that the company have put a new engine on the seven o'clock train, and newly upholstered the drawing room car throughout.
It spares no effort for the comfort of the traveling public."
He was somewhat bruised, but he was too angry to mind that.
In the scuffle, his railway check had disappeared, and he grimly wondered, as he noticed the loss, if the company would permit him to walk over their track if they should know he hadn't a ticket.
Philip had to walk some five miles before he reached a little station, where he could wait for a train, and he had ample time for reflection. At first he was full of vengeance on the company.
He would sue it.
He would make it pay roundly.
But then it occurred to him that he did not know the name of a witness he could summon, and that a personal fight against a railway corporation was about the most hopeless in the world. He then thought he would seek out that conductor, lie in wait for him at some station, and thrash him, or get thrashed himself.
But as he got cooler, that did not seem to him a project worthy of a gentleman exactly.
And when he came to this point, he began to ask himself, if he had not acted very much like a fool.
He didn't regret striking the fellow-he hoped he had left a mark on him.
But, after all, was that the best way?
Here was he, Philip Sterling, calling himself a gentleman, in a brawl with a vulgar conductor, about a woman he had never seen before.
Why should he have put himself in such a ridiculous position?
Wasn't it enough to have offered the lady his seat, to have rescued her from an accident, perhaps from death?
Suppose he had simply said to the conductor, "Sir, your conduct is brutal, I shall report you." The passengers, who saw the affair, might have joined in a report against the conductor, and he might really have accomplished something.
And, now!
Philip looked at his torn clothes, and thought with disgust of his haste in getting into a fight with such an autocrat.
He was a kindly sort of man, and seemed very much interested.
"Dum 'em," said he, when he had heard the story.
"Do you think any thing can be done, sir?"
When next morning, he read the humorous account in the Patriot and Clarion, he saw still more clearly what chance he would have had before the public in a fight with the railroad company.
Still Philip's conscience told him that it was his plain duty to carry the matter into the courts, even with the certainty of defeat.
He confessed that neither he nor any citizen had a right to consult his own feelings or conscience in a case where a law of the land had been violated before his own eyes.
The result of this little adventure was that Philip did not reach Ilium till daylight the next morning, when he descended sleepy and sore, from a way train, and looked about him.
It consisted of the plank platform on which he stood, a wooden house, half painted, with a dirty piazza (unroofed) in front, and a sign board hung on a slanting pole-bearing the legend, "Hotel.
P. Dusenheimer," a sawmill further down the stream, a blacksmith shop, and a store, and three or four unpainted dwellings of the slab variety.
As Philip approached the hotel he saw what appeared to be a wild beast crouching on the piazza.
It did not stir, however, and he soon found that it was only a stuffed skin.
Philip examined his ugly visage and strong crooked fore arm, as he was waiting admittance, having pounded upon the door.
"Morgen!
Philip was shown into a dirty bar room.
It was a small room, with a stove in the middle, set in a long shallow box of sand, for the benefit of the "spitters," a bar across one end-a mere counter with a sliding glass case behind it containing a few bottles having ambitious labels, and a wash sink in one corner.
Philip managed to complete his toilet by the use of his pocket handkerchief, and declining the hospitality of the landlord, implied in the remark, "You won'd dake notin'?" he went into the open air to wait for breakfast.
The country he saw was wild but not picturesque.
The mountain before him might be eight hundred feet high, and was only a portion of a long unbroken range, savagely wooded, which followed the stream.
Behind the hotel, and across the brawling brook, was another level topped, wooded range exactly like it.
Philip was recalled from the contemplation of Ilium by the rolling and growling of the gong within the hotel, the din and clamor increasing till the house was apparently unable to contain it; when it burst out of the front door and informed the world that breakfast was on the table.
The dining room was long, low and narrow, and a narrow table extended its whole length.
He begged for a glass of milk, after trying that green hued compound called coffee, and made his breakfast out of that and some hard crackers which seemed to have been imported into Ilium before the introduction of the iron horse, and to have withstood a ten years siege of regular boarders, Greeks and others.
The land that Philip had come to look at was at least five miles distant from Ilium station.
A corner of it touched the railroad, but the rest was pretty much an unbroken wilderness, eight or ten thousand acres of rough country, most of it such a mountain range as he saw at Ilium.
His first step was to hire three woodsmen to accompany him.
By their help he built a log hut, and established a camp on the land, and then began his explorations, mapping down his survey as he went along, noting the timber, and the lay of the land, and making superficial observations as to the prospect of coal.
He spent a month in traveling over the land and making calculations; and made up his mind that a fine vein of coal ran through the mountain about a mile from the railroad, and that the place to run in a tunnel was half way towards its summit.
Acting with his usual promptness, Philip, with the consent of mr Bolton, broke ground there at once, and, before snow came, had some rude buildings up, and was ready for active operations in the spring.
LET me think where we were.
Oh, yes... that conversation took place on the fourth of August, nineteen thirteen.
I remember saying to her that, on that day, exactly nine years before, I had made their acquaintance, so that it had seemed quite appropriate and like a birthday speech to utter my little testimonial to my friend Edward.
I could quite confidently say that, though we four had been about together in all sorts of places, for all that length of time, I had not, for my part, one single complaint to make of either of them.
And I added, that that was an unusual record for people who had been so much together.
You are not to imagine that it was only at Nauheim that we met.
That would not have suited Florence.
He made another short visit to us in December of that year-the first year of our acquaintance.
It must have been during this visit that he knocked Mr Jimmy's teeth down his throat.
I daresay Florence had asked him to come over for that purpose. In nineteen o five he was in Paris three times-once with Leonora, who wanted some frocks.
In nineteen o six we spent the best part of six weeks together at Mentone, and Edward stayed with us in Paris on his way back to London.
That was how it went.
The fact was that in Florence the poor wretch had got hold of a Tartar, compared with whom Leonora was a sucking kid.
He must have had a hell of a time.
Leonora wanted to keep him for-what shall I say-for the good of her church, as it were, to show that Catholic women do not lose their men.
Let it go at that, for the moment.
I will write more about her motives later, perhaps.
But Florence was sticking on to the proprietor of the home of her ancestors.
No doubt he was also a very passionate lover.
But I am convinced that he was sick of Florence within three years of even interrupted companionship and the life that she led him....
I daresay he would have faced it out; I daresay he would have thrown over Florence and taken the risk of exposure.
But there he had Leonora to deal with. And Leonora assured him that, if the minutest fragment of the real situation ever got through to my senses, she would wreak upon him the most terrible vengeance that she could think of.
Florence called for more and more attentions from him as the time went on.
Oh, yes, it was a difficult job for him.
For Florence, if you please, gaining in time a more composed view of nature, and overcome by her habits of garrulity, arrived at a frame of mind in which she found it almost necessary to tell me all about it-nothing less than that.
She proposed to tell me all, secure a divorce from me, and go with Edward and settle in California....
Besides she had got it into her head that Leonora, who was as sound as a roach, was consumptive.
She was always begging Leonora, before me, to go and see a doctor.
But, none the less, poor Edward seems to have believed in her determination to carry him off.
He would not have gone; he cared for his wife too much.
And she could have made it pretty hot for him in ten or a dozen different ways.
She was determined to spare my feelings.
Let me come to the fourth of August, nineteen thirteen, the last day of my absolute ignorance-and, I assure you, of my perfect happiness.
For the coming of that dear girl only added to it all.
Florence, I remember, had said at first that she would remain with Leonora, and me, and Edward and the girl had gone off alone.
And then Leonora had said to Florence with perfect calmness:
"I wish you would go with those two.
I think the girl ought to have the appearance of being chaperoned with Edward in these places.
I think the time has come." So Florence, with her light step, had slipped out after them.
Americans are particular in those matters.
The man called Bagshawe had been reading The Times on the other side of the room, but then he moved over to me with some trifling question as a prelude to suggesting an acquaintance.
I fancy he asked me something About the poll tax on Kur guests, and whether it could not be sneaked out of.
He was that sort of person.
Well, he was an unmistakable man, with a military figure, rather exaggerated, with bulbous eyes that avoided your own, and a pallid complexion that suggested vices practised in secret along with an uneasy desire for making acquaintance at whatever cost....
The filthy toad... .
He began by telling me that he came from Ludlow Manor, near Ledbury. The name had a slightly familiar sound, though I could not fix it in my mind.
Then he began to talk about a duty on hops, about Californian hops, about Los Angeles, where he had been.
He fencing for a topic with which he might gain my affection.
And then, quite suddenly, in the bright light of the street, I saw Florence running.
It was like that-I saw Florence running with a face whiter than paper and her hand on the black stuff over her heart.
I tell you, my own heart stood still; I tell you I could not move.
She rushed in at the swing doors.
She looked round that place of rush chairs, cane tables and newspapers.
She saw me and opened her lips.
She saw the man who was talking to me.
She stuck her hands over her face as if she wished to push her eyes out.
I could not move; I could not stir a finger.
"By Jove: Florry Hurlbird." He turned upon me with an oily and uneasy sound meant for a laugh.
He was really going to ingratiate himself with me.
"Do you know who that is?" he asked.
"The last time I saw that girl she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man called Jimmy at five o'clock in the morning.
You saw her recognize me." He was standing on his feet, looking down at me.
I don't know what I looked like.
At any rate, he gave a sort of gurgle and then stuttered:
"Oh, I say...." Those were the last words I ever heard of Mr Bagshawe's. A long time afterwards I pulled myself out of the lounge and went up to Florence's room.
She had not locked the door-for the first time of our married life.
She was lying, quite respectably arranged, unlike Mrs Maidan, on her bed.
She had a little phial that rightly should have contained nitrate of amyl, in her right hand.
"I suppose I ought to enjoy the joke of what's going on here," I wrote, "but somehow it doesn't amuse me.
I delight in his nonsense myself; why is it therefore that I grudge these happy folk their artless satisfaction?
Mystery of the human heart-abyss of the critical spirit! mrs Wimbush thinks she can answer that question, and as my want of gaiety has at last worn out her patience she has given me a glimpse of her shrewd guess.
To be intimate with him is a feather in my cap; it gives me an importance that I couldn't naturally pretend to, and I seek to deprive him of social refreshment because I fear that meeting more disinterested people may enlighten him as to my real motive.
All the disinterested people here are his particular admirers and have been carefully selected as such. There's supposed to be a copy of his last book in the house, and in the hall I come upon ladies, in attitudes, bending gracefully over the first volume.
There's a sociable circle or a confidential couple, and the relinquished volume lies open on its face and as dropped under extreme coercion.
Somebody else presently finds it and transfers it, with its air of momentary desolation, to another piece of furniture.
I'm sure it's rather smudgy about the twentieth page.
I've a strong impression, too, that the second volume is lost-has been packed in the bag of some departing guest; and yet everybody has the impression that somebody else has read to the end.
You see therefore that the beautiful book plays a great part in our existence.
Why should I take the occasion of such distinguished honours to say that I begin to see deeper into Gustave Flaubert's doleful refrain about the hatred of literature?
I refer you again to the perverse constitution of man.
She can't have a personal taste any more than, when her husband succeeds, she can have a personal crown, and her opinion on any matter is rusty and heavy and plain-made, in the night of ages, to last and be transmitted.
I feel as if I ought to 'tip' some custode for my glimpse of it.
She has been told everything in the world and has never perceived anything, and the echoes of her education respond awfully to the rash footfall-I mean the casual remark-in the cold Valhalla of her memory.
He's perpetually detailed for this job, and he tells me it has a peculiarly exhausting effect.
Every one's beginning-at the end of two days-to sidle obsequiously away from her, and mrs Wimbush pushes him again and again into the breach.
None of the uses I have yet seen him put to infuriate me quite so much.
Last night I had some talk with him about going to day, cutting his visit short; so sure am I that he'll be better as soon as he's shut up in his lighthouse.
He told me that this is what he would like to do; reminding me, however, that the first lesson of his greatness has been precisely that he can't do what he likes.
When I hint that a violent rupture with our hostess would be the best thing in the world for him he gives me to understand that if his reason assents to the proposition his courage hangs woefully back.
He makes no secret of being mortally afraid of her, and when I ask what harm she can do him that she hasn't already done he simply repeats: 'I'm afraid, I'm afraid!
Don't enquire too closely,' he said last night; 'only believe that I feel a sort of terror.
At any rate, I'd as soon overturn that piece of priceless Sevres as tell her I must go before my date.' It sounds dreadfully weak, but he has some reason, and he pays for his imagination, which puts him (I should hate it) in the place of others and makes him feel, even against himself, their feelings, their appetites, their motives.
He's too beastly intelligent.
I never willingly talk to these people about him, but see what a comfort I find it to scribble to you!
I appreciate it-it keeps me warm; there are no fires in the house.
mrs Wimbush goes by the calendar, the temperature goes by the weather, the weather goes by God knows what, and the Princess is easily heated.
When I asked her what she was looking for she said she had mislaid something that mr Paraday had lent her.
When I expressed my surprise that he should have bandied about anything so precious (I happen to know it's his only copy-in the most beautiful hand in all the world) Lady Augusta confessed to me that she hadn't had it from himself, but from mrs Wimbush, who had wished to give her a glimpse of it as a salve for her not being able to stay and hear it read.
Meanwhile mrs Wimbush has found out about him, and is actively wiring to him.
The clear thing is that mrs Wimbush doesn't guard such a treasure so jealously as she might.'
"'Poor dear, she has the Princess to guard!
mr Paraday lent her the manuscript to look over.'
"'She spoke, you mean, as if it were the morning paper?'
"Lady Augusta stared-my irony was lost on her.
'She didn't have time, so she gave me a chance first; because unfortunately I go to morrow to Bigwood.'
"'And your chance has only proved a chance to lose it?'
"'I haven't lost it.
I told my maid to give it to Lord Dorimont-or at least to his man.'
"'And Lord Dorimont went away directly after luncheon.'
"'Of course he gave it back to my maid-or else his man did,' said Lady Augusta. 'I dare say it's all right.'
They haven't time to look over a priceless composition; they've only time to kick it about the house.
Their questions are too delightful!
I declared to Lady Augusta briefly that nothing in the world can ever do so well as the thing that does best; and at this she looked a little disconcerted.
Oh the Princess will get up!' said Lady Augusta.
"'I thought she was mr Paraday's greatest admirer.'
"'I dare say she is-she's so awfully clever.
But what's the use of being a Princess-'
"'If you can't dissemble your love?' I asked as Lady Augusta was vague. She said at any rate she'd question her maid; and I'm hoping that when I go down to dinner I shall find the manuscript has been recovered."
TELLS OF AN EXTRAORDINARY INCIDENT IN CULLEN MAYLE'S BEDROOM
I was very tired, but in spite of my fatigue it was some while before I fell asleep.
Parmiter had thrown a new light upon the business tonight, and by the help of that light I arrayed afresh my scanty knowledge.
The strangeness of my position, besides, kept me in some excitement.
Finally, there was the adventure of that night.
I heard again that unearthly screeching which had so frightened Dick and perplexed me, It perplexed me still.
I could not for a moment entertain Dick's supposition of a spirit.
Ghosts and bogies might do very well for the island of Tresco, but mr Berkeley was not to be terrified with any such old wives' stories, and so mr Berkeley fell asleep.
The room was so dark that I could not have read my watch, even if I had looked at it, which I did not think to do.
But at some time during that night I woke up quite suddenly with a clear sense that I had been waked up.
The fog was still thick about the house, so that hardly a glimmer of light came from the window.
It was taller than any human being that I had seen.
And then it made a sound, and all the blood in my veins stood still.
I thought that my heart would stop or my brain burst.
For the sound was neither a screech like that which rose from the hollow, nor a groan, nor any ghostly noise.
It was purely human, it was a kecking sound in the throat, such as one makes who gasps for breath.
The white thing was a live thing of flesh and blood.
I sprang up on the bed and jumped to the foot of it.
Her eyes were open and they stared into mine.
I could see the whites of them; our heads were so near they almost touched.
I wondered what it was on which she stood.
I noticed a streak of white which ran straight up towards the ceiling from behind her head, and I wondered what that was.
She was standing on nothing whatever!
Again the queer gasping coughing noise broke from her lips, and at last I understood it.
With the other arm I felt about her neck.
A thick soft scarf-silk it seemed to the touch-was knotted tightly round it, and the end of the scarf ran up to the cross beam above the bed posts.
The scarf was the streak of white.
I fumbled at the knot with my fingers.
It was a slip knot, and now that no weight kept it taut, it loosened easily.
I slipped the noose back over her head and left it dangling.
I flung up the window and the cold fog poured into the room.
I groped for the chair and set it to face the open night.
Then I carried the woman to the window and placed her in the chair, and supported her so that she might not fall.
Such light as there was, glimmered upon the woman's face.
I saw that she was young, little more than a girl indeed, with hair and eyes of an extreme blackness.
She was of a slight figure as I knew from the ease with which I carried her, but tall.
I could not doubt who it was, for one thing the white dress she wore was of some fine soft fabric, and even in that light it was easy to see that she was beautiful.
I held her thus with the cold salt air blowing upon her face, and in a little, she began to recover.
She moved her hands upon her lap, and finally lifted one and held her throat with it.
"Very likely there will be some water in the room," said i "If you are safe, if you will not fall, I will look for it."
"Thank you," she murmured.
I took my arm from her waist and groped about the room for the water jug.
I found it at last and a glass beside it.
These I carried back to the window.
The girl was still seated on the chair, but she had changed her attitude.
She had leaned her arms upon the sill and her head upon her arms.
I poured out the water from the jug into the tumbler.
I spoke to her.
She did not answer me.
A horrible fear turned me cold.
I knelt down by her side, and setting down the water gently lifted her head.
Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing.
I could feel her breath upon my cheek and it came steadily and regular.
I cannot describe my astonishment; she was in a deep sleep.
I pondered for a moment what I should do!
Should I wake the household? Should I explain what had happened and my presence in the house?
I propped her securely in the chair, then crossed the room, opened the door and listened.
The house was very still; so far no one had been disturbed.
A long narrow passage stretched in front of me, with doors upon either side.
Remembering what Dick Parmiter had told me, I mean that every sound reverberated through the house, I crept down the landing on tiptoe.
I had only my stockings upon my feet and I crept forward so carefully that I could not hear my own footfalls.
I had taken some twenty paces when the passage opened out to my right. I put out my hand and touched a balustrade.
I crept forward, and at last at the far end of the house and on the left hand of the passage I came to that for which I searched, and which I barely hoped to find-an open door.
I held my breath and listened in the doorway, but there was no sound of any one breathing, so I stepped into the room.
I looked round the room.
It was a large bedroom, and the bed had not been slept in.
It had two big windows looking out towards the sea, and as I stood in the dim grey light, I wondered whether it was from one of those windows that Adam Mayle had looked years before, and seen the brigantine breaking up upon the Golden Ball Reef.
But the light was broadening with the passage of every minute.
Helen Mayle was still asleep, and she had not moved from her posture.
I raised her in my arms, and still she did not wake.
I carried her down the passage, through the open door and laid her on the bed.
She nestled down beneath it and her lips smiled very prettily, and she uttered a little purring murmur of content; but this she did in her sleep.
She slept with the untroubled sleep of a child.
Her face was pale, but that I took to be its natural complexion.
Her long black eyelashes rested upon her cheeks.
There was no hint of any trouble in her expression, no trace of any passionate despair.
Yet there was no doubt possible.
CHAPTER eleven
At the side farthest from the town, close under a bluff, there was an extensive marah, or sheepcot, ages old.
In some long forgotten foray, the building had been unroofed and almost demolished. The enclosure attached to it remained intact, however, and that was of more importance to the shepherds who drove their charges thither than the house itself.
On the inner side of the wall, and as an additional security against the constant danger, a hedge of the rhamnus had been planted, an invention so successful that now a sparrow could hardly penetrate the overtopping branches, armed as they were with great clusters of thorns hard as spikes.
The day of the occurrences which occupy the preceding chapters, a number of shepherds, seeking fresh walks for their flocks, led them up to this plain; and from early morning the groves had been made ring with calls, and the blows of axes, the bleating of sheep and goats, the tinkling of bells, the lowing of cattle, and the barking of dogs.
Such were the shepherds of Judea!
In appearance, rough and savage as the gaunt dogs sitting with them around the blaze; in fact, simple minded, tender hearted; effects due, in part, to the primitive life they led, but chiefly to their constant care of things lovable and helpless.
They rested and talked, and their talk was all about their flocks, a dull theme to the world, yet a theme which was all the world to them.
On Sabbaths they were accustomed to purify themselves, and go up into the synagogues, and sit on the benches farthest from the ark.
While they talked, and before the first watch was over, one by one the shepherds went to sleep, each lying where he had sat
By the gate, hugging his mantle close, the watchman walked; at times he stopped, attracted by a stir among the sleeping herds, or by a jackal's cry off on the mountain side.
The midnight was slow coming to him; but at last it came.
His task was done; now for the dreamless sleep with which labor blesses its wearied children!
He moved towards the fire, but paused; a light was breaking around him, soft and white, like the moon's.
He waited breathlessly. The light deepened; things before invisible came to view; he saw the whole field, and all it sheltered.
A chill sharper than that of the frosty air-a chill of fear-smote him.
He looked up; the stars were gone; the light was dropping as from a window in the sky; as he looked, it became a splendor; then, in terror, he cried,
"Awake, awake!"
The men clambered to their feet, weapons in hand.
"What is it?" they asked, in one voice.
"See!" cried the watchman, "the sky is on fire!"
"Fear not!"
"Fear not: for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people."
Directly the angel continued:
"For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord!"
"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men!"
Not once the praise, but many times.
Long after he was gone, down from the sky fell the refrain in measure mellowed by distance, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men."
When the shepherds came fully to their senses, they stared at each other stupidly, until one of them said, "It was Gabriel, the Lord's messenger unto men."
"Christ the Lord is born; said he not so?"
Then another recovered his voice, and replied, "That is what he said."
And that we should find him a babe in swaddling clothes?"
Brethren, let us go see this thing which has come to pass.
The priests and doctors have been a long time looking for the Christ.
Let us go up and worship him."
"But the flocks!"
"The Lord will take care of them.
Let us make haste."
Then they all arose and left the marah.
"What would you have?" he asked.
"We have seen and heard great things to night," they replied.
What did you hear?"
"Let us go down to the cave in the enclosure, that we may be sure; then we will tell you all.
Come with us, and see for yourself."
"It is a fool's errand."
"No, the Christ is born."
"The Christ!
How do you know?"
"Let us go and see first."
The man laughed scornfully.
"The Christ indeed!
How are you to know him?"
"The cave?"
"Yes.
Come with us."
They went through the court yard without notice, although there were some up even then talking about the wonderful light.
The door of the cavern was open.
"I give you peace," the watchman said to Joseph and the Beth Dagonite.
Then the bystanders collected about the two.
"It is the Christ!" said a shepherd, at last.
"The Christ!" they all repeated, falling upon their knees in worship. One of them repeated several times over,
In the khan, to all the people aroused and pressing about them, they told their story; and through the town, and all the way back to the marah, they chanted the refrain of the angels, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men!"
Few mothers, perhaps, have had less trouble with their children during their minority than myself.
In general, my children were friendly to each other, and it was very seldom that I knew them to have the least difference or quarrel: so far, indeed, were they from rendering themselves or me uncomfortable, that I considered myself happy-more so than commonly falls to the lot of parents, especially to women.
After Thomas and john arrived to manhood, in addition to the former charge, john got two wives, with whom he lived till the time of his death.
Although polygamy was tolerated in our tribe, Thomas considered it a violation of good and wholesome rules in society, and tending directly to destroy that friendly social intercourse and love, that ought to be the happy result of matrimony and chastity.
Consequently, he frequently reprimanded john, by telling him that his conduct was beneath the dignity, and inconsistent with the principles of good Indians; indecent and unbecoming a gentleman; and, as he never could reconcile himself to it, he was frequently, almost constantly, when they were together, talking to him on the same subject.
john always resented such reprimand, and reproof, with a great degree of passion, though they never quarrelled, unless Thomas was intoxicated.
In his fits of drunkenness, Thomas seemed to lose all his natural reason, and to conduct like a wild or crazy man, without regard to relatives, decency or propriety.
At such times he often threatened to take my life for having raised a witch, (as he called john,) and has gone so far as to raise his tomahawk to split my head.
He, however, never struck me; but on John's account he struck Hiokatoo, and thereby excited in john a high degree of indignation, which was extinguished only by blood.
For a number of years their difficulties, and consequent unhappiness, continued and rather increased, continually exciting in my breast the most fearful apprehensions, and greatest anxiety for their safety.
With tears in my eyes, I advised them to become reconciled to each other, and to be friendly; told them the consequences of their continuing to cherish so much malignity and malice, that it would end in their destruction, the disgrace of their families, and bring me down to the grave.
No one can conceive of the constant trouble that I daily endured on their account-on the account of my two oldest sons, whom I loved equally, and with all the feelings and affection of a tender mother, stimulated by an anxious concern for their fate.
Parents, mothers especially, will love their children, though ever so unkind and disobedient.
Their eyes of compassion, of real sentimental affection, will be involuntarily extended after them, in their greatest excesses of iniquity; and those fine filaments of consanguinity, which gently entwine themselves around the heart where filial love and parental care is equal, will be lengthened, and enlarged to cords seemingly of sufficient strength to reach and reclaim the wanderer.
My advice and expostulations with my sons were abortive; and year after year their disaffection for each other increased.
He caught Thomas by the hair of his head, dragged him out at the door and there killed him, by a blow which he gave him on the head with his tomahawk!
I returned soon after, and found my son lifeless at the door, on the spot where he was killed!
No one can judge of my feelings on seeing this mournful spectacle; and what greatly added to my distress, was the fact that he had fallen by the murderous hand of his brother!
I felt my situation unsupportable.
Having passed through various scenes of trouble of the most cruel and trying kind, I had hoped to spend my few remaining days in quietude, and to die in peace, surrounded by my family.
This fatal event, however, seemed to be a stream of woe poured into my cup of afflictions, filling it even to overflowing, and blasting all my prospects.
Shanks set out on his errand immediately,--and john, fearing that he should be apprehended and punished for the crime he had committed, at the same time went off towards Caneadea.
He was manly in his deportment, courageous and, active; and commanded respect.
Though he appeared well pleased with peace, he was cunning in Indian warfare, and succeeded to admiration in the execution of his plans.
At the age of fourteen or fifteen years, he went into the war with manly fortitude, armed with a tomahawk and scalping knife; and when he returned, brought one white man a prisoner, whom he had taken with his own hands, on the west branch of the Susquehannah river.
It so happened, that as he was looking out for his enemies, he discovered two men boiling sap in the woods.
He watched them unperceived, till dark when he advanced with a noiseless step to where they were standing, caught one of them before they were apprized of danger, and conducted him to the camp.
He was well treated while a prisoner, and redeemed at the close of the war.
He was a great Counsellor and a Chief when quite young; and in the last capacity, went two or three times to Philadelphia to assist in making treaties with the people of the states.
Thomas had four wives, by whom he had eight children.
Jacob Jemison, his second son by his last wife, who is at this time twenty seven or twenty eight years of age, went to Dartmouth college, in the spring of eighteen sixteen, for the purpose of receiving a good education, where it was said that he was an industrious scholar, and made great proficiency in the study of the different branches to which he attended.
Having spent two years at that Institution, he returned in the winter of eighteen eighteen, and is now at Buffalo; where I have understood that he contemplates commencing the study of medicine, as a profession.
Thomas, at the time he was killed, was a few moons over fifty two years old, and john was forty eight.
He fell a victim to the use of ardent spirits-a poison that will soon exterminate the Indian tribes in this part of the country, and leave their names without a root or branch.
Chapter forty one.
The State Prison.
The regent's re entrance into the citadel of Stirling, being on the evening preceding the day he had promised should see the English lords depart for their country, De Warenne, as a mark of respect to a man whom he could not but regard with admiration, went to the barbican gate to bid him welcome.
After having transferred his captives to the charge of Lord Mar, Wallace went alone to the chamber of Montgomery, to see whether the state of his wounds would allow him to march on the morrow.
While he was yet there, an invitation arrived from the Countess of Mar, requesting his presence at an entertainment which, by her husband's consent, she meant to give that night at Snawdoun, to the Southron lords before their departure for England.
"I fear you dare not expend your strength on this party?" inquired Wallace, turning to Montgomery.
"Certainly not," returned he; "but I shall see you amidst your noble friends, at some future period.
When the peace your arms must win, is established between the two nations, I shall then revisit Scotland; and openly declare my friendship for Sir William Wallace."
"Sanguinary have been the instruments of my sovereign's rule in Scotland," replied Montgomery; "but such cruelty is foreign to his gallant heart; and without offending that high souled patriotism, which would make me revere its possessor, were he the lowliest man in your legions, allow me, noblest of Scots, to plead one word in vindication of him to whom my allegiance is pledged.
Had he come hither, conducted by war alone, what would Edward have been worse than any other conqueror?
But on the reverse, was not his right to the supremacy of Scotland acknowledged by the princes who contended for the crown?
And besides, did not all the great lords swear fealty to England, on the day he nominated their king?"
All the princes whom you speak of, excepting Bruce of Annandale, did assent to the newly offered claim of Edward on Scotland; but who, amongst them, had any probable chance for the throne, but Bruce or Baliol?
Such ready acquiescence was meant to create them one.
Bruce, conscious of his inherent rights, rejected the iniquitous demand of Edward; Baliol accorded with it, and was made king.
Terrible as such ambition was, it is innocence to what Edward has done.
Was this honor?
Was this the right of conquest?
The cheek of Alexander would have blushed deep as his Tyrian robe; and the face of Charlemagne turned pale as the lilies, at the bare suspicion of being capable of such a deed.
"No, Lord Montgomery, it is not our conqueror we are opposing; it is a traitor, who, under the mask of friendship, has attempted to usurp our rights, destroy our liberties, and make a desert of our once happy country.
"I will think of this discourse," returned Montgomery, "when I am far distant; and rely on it, noble Wallace that I will assert the privilege of my birth, and counsel my king as becomes an honest man."
"Highly would he estimate such counsel," cried Wallace, "had he virtue to feel that he who will be just to his sovereign's enemies must be of an honor that will bind him with double fidelity to his king.
Such proof give your sovereign; and, if he have one spark of that greatness of mind which you say he possesses, though he may not adopt your advice, he must respect the adviser."
As Wallace pressed the hand of his new friend, to leave him to repose, a messenger entered from Lord Mar, to request the regent's presence in his closet.
He found him with Lord de Warenne.
The latter presented him with another dispatch from the Prince of Wales.
It was to say, that news had reached him of Wallace's design to attack the castles garrisoned by England, on the eastern coast.
Both the castles and the fleets are taken; and what punishment must we now expect from this terrible threatener?"
"Little from him, or his headlong counselors," replied De Warenne; "but Thomas Earl of Lancaster, the king's nephew, is come from abroad with a numerous army.
He is to conduct the Scottish prisoners to the borders, and then to fall upon Scotland with all his strength, unless you previously surrender, not only Berwick, but Stirling, and the whole of the district between the Forth and the Tweed, into his hands."
"My Lord de Warenne," replied Wallace, "you can expect but one return to these absurd demands.
I shall accompany you myself to the Scottish borders, and there made my reply."
Is not the greater part of the Lowlands free?
Let Edward yield to that, and though he has pierced us with many wounds, we will yet forgive him."
De Warenne shook his head; "I know my king too well to expect pacific measures.
He may die with the sword in his hand; but he will never grant an hour's repose to this country till it submits to his scepter."
If the blood of Abel called for vengeance on his murderer, what must be the vials of wrath which are reserved for thee?"
All warfare that is not defensive is criminal; and he who draws his sword to oppress, or merely to aggrandize, is a murderer and a robber.
I revere your principle, Sir William Wallace; but it is too sublime to be mine.
Nay, nor would it be politic for one who holds his possessions in England by the right of conquest to question the virtue of the deed.
By the sword my ancestors gained their estates; and with the sword I have no objection to extend my territories."
CHAPTER six.
Repeated experiments have proved that no brood can be raised in a hive, unless the bees are supplied with it.
It contains none of the elements of wax, but is rich in what chemists call nitrogenous substances, which are not contained in honey, and which furnish ample nourishment for the development of the growing bee.
dr Hunter dissected some immature bees, and found their stomachs to contain farina, but not a particle of honey.
We are indebted to Huber for the discovery of the use made by the bees of pollen.
That it did not serve as food for the mature bees, was evident from the fact that large supplies are often found in hives whose inmates have starved to death.
It was this fact which led the old observers to conclude that it was gathered for the purpose of building comb.
After Huber had demonstrated that wax is secreted from an entirely different substance, he was soon led to conjecture that the bee bread must be used for the nourishment of the embryo bees.
By rigid experiments he proved the truth of this supposition.
Bees were confined to their hive without any pollen, after being supplied with honey, eggs and larvae.
In a short time the young all perished.
A fresh supply of brood was given to them, with an ample allowance of pollen, and the development of the larvae then proceeded in the natural way.
In the backward spring of eighteen fifty two, I had an excellent opportunity of testing the value of this substance.
In one of my hives, was an artificial swarm of the previous year.
The hive was well protected, being double, and the situation was warm.
I opened it on the fifth of February, and although the weather, until within a week of that time, had been unusually cold, I found many of the cells filled with brood.
My experiments do not corroborate this theory, but tend to confirm the views of Huber, and to show the absolute necessity of pollen to the development of brood.
The same able contributor to Apiarian science, thinks that pollen is used by the bees when they are engaged in comb building; and that unless they are well supplied with it, they cannot rapidly secrete wax, without very severely taxing their strength.
But as all the elements of wax are found in honey, and none of them in pollen, this opinion does not seem to me, to be entitled to much weight.
That bees cannot live upon pollen without any honey, is proved by the fact, that large stores of it are often found, in hives whose occupants have died of starvation; that they can live without it, is equally well known; but that the full grown bees make some use of it in connection with honey, for their own nourishment, I believe to be highly probable.
The body of the bee appears, to the naked eye, to be covered with fine hairs; to these, when the bee alights on a flower, the farina adheres.
It has been observed that a bee, in gathering pollen, always confines herself to the same kind of flower on which she begins, even when that is not so abundant as some others.
Thus if you examine a ball of this substance taken from her thigh, it is found to be of one uniform color throughout: the load of one will be yellow, another red, and a third brown; the color varying according to that of the plant from which it was obtained.
It is probable that the pollen of different kinds of flowers would not pack so well together.
It is certain that if they flew from one species to another, there would be a much greater mixture of different varieties than there now is, for they carry on their bodies the pollen or fertilizing principle, and thus aid most powerfully in the impregnation of plants.
He must be blind indeed, who will not see, at every step in the natural history of this insect, the plainest proofs of the wisdom of its Creator.
At first the importance of its products, when honey was the only natural sweet, served most powerfully to attract his attention to its curious habits; and now since the cultivation of the sugar cane has diminished the relative value of its luscious sweets, the superior knowledge which has been obtained of its instincts, is awakening an increasing enthusiasm in its cultivation.
Virgil in the fourth book of his Georgics, which is entirely devoted to bees, speaks of them as having received a direct emanation from the Divine Intelligence.
And many modern Apiarians are almost disposed to rank the bee for sagacity, as next in the scale of creation to man.
The feeding is continued till the bees cease to carry away the meal; that is, until the natural supplies furnish them with a preferable article.
The average consumption of each colony is about two pounds of meal!
At the last annual Apiarian Convention in Germany, a cultivator recommended wheat flour as an excellent substitute for pollen.
He says that in February, eighteen fifty two, he used it with the best results.
The construction of my hives, permits the flour to be placed, at once, where the bees can take it, without being compelled to waste their time in going out for it, or to suffer for the want of it, when the weather confines them at home.
The unwillingness of a swarm of bees, which has been deprived of its queen, to receive another, until after some time has elapsed, must always be borne in mind, by those who have anything to do with making artificial swarms.
To prevent such losses, I adopt the German plan of confining the queen, in what they call, "a queen cage." A small hole, about as large as a thimble, may be gouged out of a block, and covered over with wire gauze, or any other kind of perforated cover, so that when the queen is put in, the bees cannot enter to destroy her.
Before long, they will cultivate an acquaintance, by thrusting their antennae through to her; so that, when she is liberated the next day, they will gladly adopt her in place of the one they have lost.
If a hole large enough for her to creep out, is closed with wax, they will gnaw the wax away, and liberate her themselves, from her confinement.
Queens that seem bent on departing to the woods, may be confined in the same way, until the colony has given up all thoughts of forsaking its hive.
A small paste board box with suitable holes, or a wooden match box thoroughly scalded, I have found to answer a very good purpose.
A solid block about an inch and a quarter thick, is substituted for one of my frames; holes, about one and a half inches in diameter, are bored through it, and covered on both sides, with gauze wire slides; the wire ought to be such as will allow a common bee to pass through, but should be too small to permit a queen to do the same.
Any kind of perforated cover may be made to answer the same purpose as the gauze wire.
If a number of sealed queens are on hand, and there is danger that some may hatch, and destroy the others, before the Apiarian can make use of them in forming artificial swarms, he may very carefully cut out the combs containing them, and place them each in a separate cradle!
The bees having access to them, will give them proper attention, and as soon as they are hatched, will supply them with food, and thus they will always be on hand for use when they are needed.
Nine things out of ten may work to a charm, and yet the tenth may be so connected with the other nine, that its failure renders their success of no account.
When I first used this Nursery, I did not give the bees access to it, and I found that the queens were not properly developed, and died in their cells.
Last Spring, I made one queen supply several hives with eggs, so as to keep them strong in numbers while they were constantly engaged in rearing a large number of spare queens.
Two queens may in this way, be made in six hives to furnish all the supernumerary queens which will be wanted in quite a large Apiary.
I am now prepared to answer an objection which doubtless has been present in the minds of many, all the time that they have been reading the various processes on which I rely for the multiplication of colonies.
A very large number of persons who keep bees, or who wish to keep them, are so much afraid of them that they object entirely even to natural swarming, because they are in danger of being stung in the process of hiving the bees.
How are such persons to manage bees on my plan, which seems like bearding a lion in its very den!
By managing bees according to the directions furnished in this treatise, almost any one can learn, by using a bee dress, to superintend them, with very little risk; while those who are favorites with them, may dispense entirely with any protection.
There never will be a "royal road" to profitable bee keeping.
"The use of these frames will, I am persuaded, give a new impulse to the easy and profitable management of bees; and will render the making of artificial swarms an easy operation."
sixteen, I found that when water was admitted to it, only one fourth of the air was imbibed.
Probably the whole of it would have been rendered immiscible in water, if the electrical operation had been continued a sufficient time. This air continued several days in water, and was even agitated in water without any farther diminution.
It was not, however, common air, for it was not diminished by nitrous air.
By means of iron filings and brimstone I have, since my former experiments, procured a considerable quantity of this kind of air in a method something different from that which I used before.
For having placed a pot of this mixture under a receiver, and exhausted it with a pump of mr Smeaton's construction, I filled it with fixed air, and then left it plunged under water; so that no common air could have access to it.
In this manner, and in about a week, there was, as near as I can recollect, one sixth, or at least one eighth of the whole converted into a permanent air, not imbibed by water.
Perhaps more time may be requisite for this purpose, for this process was not continued more than a day and a night.
Iron filings and brimstone, I have observed, ferment with great heat in nitrous air, and I have since observed that this process is attended with greater heat in fixed air than in common air.
Though fixed air incorporated with water dissolves iron, fixed air without water has no such power, as I observed before.
I imagined that, if it could have dissolved iron, the phlogiston would have united with the air, and have made it immiscible with water, as in the former instances; but after being confined in a phial full of nails from the fifteenth of December to the fourth of October following, neither the iron nor the air appeared to have been affected by their mutual contact.
In this manner I procured a very considerable quantity of fixed air, so that I judged it was all discharged from the tartar.
MISCELLANEOUS EXPERIMENTS.
one.
I put about the quantity of half a nut shell full of ether, inclosed in a glass tube, through a body of quicksilver, into an ounce measure of common air, confined by quicksilver; upon which it presently began to expand, till it occupied the space of two ounce measures.
Withdrawing the quicksilver, and admitting water to this air, without any agitation, it began to be absorbed; but only about half an ounce measure had disappeared after it had stood an hour in the water.
But by once passing it through water the air was reduced to its original dimensions.
Being tried by a mixture of nitrous air, it appeared not to be so good as fresh air, though the injury it had received was not considerable.
All the phenomena of dilatation and contraction were nearly the same, when, instead of common air, I used nitrous air, fixed air, inflammable air, or any species of phlogisticated common air.
The quantity of each of these kinds of air was nearly doubled while they were kept in quicksilver, but fixed air was not so much increased as the rest, and phlogisticated air less; but after passing through the water, they appeared not to have been sensibly changed by the process.
To what this appearance was owing I cannot tell, and indeed I did not examine into it.
three.
As some of the circumstances attending the ignition of this paper in some of the kinds of air were a little remarkable, I shall just recite them.
I repeated this experiment with the same event.
Paper dipped in a solution of mercury, zinc, or iron, in nitrous acid, has, in a small degree, the same property with paper dipped in a solution of copper in the same acid.
Gunpowder is also fired in all kinds of air, and, in the quantity in which I tried it, did not make any sensible change in them, except that the common air in which it was fired would not afterwards admit a candle to burn in it.
In order to try this experiment I half exhausted a receiver, and then with a burning glass fired the gunpowder which had been previously put into it.
By this means I could fire a greater quantity of gunpowder in a small quantity of air, and avoid the hazard of blowing up, and breaking my receiver.
In the experiment with inflammable air a considerable mixture of common air would have been exceedingly hazardous: for, by that assistance, the inflammable air might have exploded in such a manner, as to have been dangerous to the operator. Indeed, I believe I should not have ventured to have made the experiment at all with any other pump besides mr Smeaton's.
Sometimes, I filled a glass vessel with quicksilver, and introduced the air to it, when it was inverted in a bason of quicksilver.
By this means I intirely avoided any mixture of common air; but then it was not easy to convey the gunpowder into it, in the exact quantity that was requisite for my purpose.
This, however, was the only method by which I could contrive to fire gunpowder in acid or alkaline air, in which it exploded just as it did in nitrous or fixed air.
"My lord," he said at last, "I do know the road for which you ask, but your kindness and the friendship I have conceived for you make me loth to point it out."
"But why not?" inquired the prince.
"What danger can there be?"
"The very greatest danger," answered the dervish.
"Other men, as brave as you, have ridden down this road, and have put me that question.
I did my best to turn them also from their purpose, but it was of no use. Not one of them would listen to my words, and not one of them came back.
But what dangers can there be in the adventure which courage and a good sword cannot meet?"
"And suppose," answered the dervish, "that your enemies are invisible, how then?"
On each side you will see vast heaps of big black stones, and will hear a multitude of insulting voices, but pay no heed to them, and, above all, beware of ever turning your head. If you do, you will instantly become a black stone like the rest.
For those stones are in reality men like yourself, who have been on the same quest, and have failed, as I fear that you may fail also.
Then it came to a sudden halt, and the prince at once got down and flung the bridle on his horse's neck.
"Who is this imbecile?" cried some, "stop him at once." "Kill him," shrieked others, "Help! robbers!
Still, we must hope for better luck."
"That, holy dervish," replied Prince Perviz, "was my elder brother, who is now dead, though how he died I cannot say."
But may I ask the purpose of your question?"
"Good dervish," answered the princess, "I have heard such glowing descriptions of these three things, that I cannot rest till I possess them."
"Madam," said the dervish, "they are far more beautiful than any description, but you seem ignorant of all the difficulties that stand in your way, or you would hardly have undertaken such an adventure. Give it up, I pray you, and return home, and do not ask me to help you to a cruel death."
"Holy father," answered the princess, "I come from far, and I should be in despair if I turned back without having attained my object.
It is possible that you may succeed, but all the same, the risk is great."
The first thing the princess did on arriving at the mountain was to stop her ears with cotton, and then, making up her mind which was the best way to go, she began her ascent.
At the sight of the bird, the princess hastened her steps, and without vexing herself at the noise which by this time had grown deafening, she walked straight up to the cage, and seizing it, she said: "Now, my bird, I have got you, and I shall take good care that you do not escape." As she spoke she took the cotton from her ears, for it was needed no longer.
Although confined in a cage, I was content with my lot, but if I must become a slave, I could not wish for a nobler mistress than one who has shown so much constancy, and from this moment I swear to serve you faithfully. Some day you will put me to the proof, for I know who you are better than you do yourself.
She then returned to the cage, and said: "Bird, there is still something else, where shall I find the Singing Tree?"
When the Princess Parizade held in her hands the three wonders promised her by the old woman, she said to the bird: "All that is not enough. It was owing to you that my brothers became black stones.
"No, I have not forgotten," replied the bird, "but what you ask is very difficult.
Take it, and, as you go down the mountain, scatter a little of the water it contains over every black stone and you will soon find your two brothers."
Princess Parizade took the pitcher, and, carrying with her besides the cage the twig and the flask, returned down the mountain side.
At every black stone she stopped and sprinkled it with water, and as the water touched it the stone instantly became a man.
"Why, what are you doing here?" she cried.
"We have been asleep," they said.
Look round and see if there is one left.
Then they rode away, followed by the knights and gentlemen, who begged to be permitted to escort them.
The bird stopped singing at once, and all the other birds stopped too.
This was done.
WHY peter RABBIT CANNOT FOLD HIS HANDS
Happy Jack Squirrel sat with his hands folded across his white waistcoat.
He is very fond of sitting with his hands folded that way. A little way from him sat peter Rabbit.
peter was sitting up very straight, but his hands dropped right down in front.
Happy Jack noticed it.
"You mean you can't!" jeered Happy Jack.
"I really believe he can't fold his hands," said Happy Jack to himself, but speaking aloud.
"He can't, and none of his family can," said a gruff voice.
"Why not?" asked Happy Jack.
"Ask Grandfather Frog; he knows," replied Old mr Toad, and started on about his business.
And this is how it happens that Grandfather Frog told this story to the little meadow and forest people gathered around him on the bank of the Smiling Pool.
It was all because he was so dreadfully curious about other people's business, just as peter Rabbit is now.
It seemed that he was just born to be curious and so, of course, to get into trouble.
Old King Bear put on his blackest coat.
Then everybody began to fix up their homes and make them as neat and nice as they knew how-everybody but mr Rabbit.
"Now mr Rabbit was lazy.
The very sight of work scared old mr Rabbit.
You see, he was so busy minding other people's business that he didn't have time to attend to his own. So his brown and gray coat always was rumpled and tumbled and dirty. His house was a tumble down affair in which no one but mr Rabbit would ever have thought of living, and his garden-oh, dear me, such a garden you never did see!
It was all weeds and brambles.
"Now when old mr Rabbit heard that Old Mother Nature was coming, his heart sank way, way down, for he knew just how angry she would be when she saw his house, his garden and his shabby suit.
"'Oh, dear!
Oh, dear!
"Now mr Woodchuck was a worker and very, very neat.
He meant to have his home looking just as fine as he could make it.
He brought up some clean yellow sand from deep down in the ground and sprinkled it smoothly over his doorstep.
"That gave mr Rabbit an idea.
He would ask all his neighbors to help him, and perhaps then he could get his house and garden in order by the time Old Mother Nature arrived.
So mr Rabbit called on mr Skunk and mr Coon and mr Mink and mr Squirrel and mr Chipmunk, and all the rest of his neighbors, telling them of his trouble and asking them to help.
"Instead of hurrying home and getting to work himself, mr Rabbit stopped a while after each call and sat with his arms folded, watching the one he was calling on work.
It was very comfortable.
"'If you want the rest of us to help you, you'd better get things started yourself,' said old mr Skunk, carefully combing out his big, plumy tail.
"'That's right, mr Skunk!
"Finally mr Rabbit had made the round of all his friends and neighbors, and he once more reached his tumble down house.
It will be a lot easier to work when all my friends are here to help,' So he sighed once more and folded his arms, instead of beginning work as he should have done.
"Now Old Mother Nature likes to take people by surprise, and it happened that she chose this very day to make her promised visit.
She was greatly pleased with all she saw as she went along, until she came to the home of mr Rabbit.
"'Mercy me!' exclaimed Old Mother Nature, throwing up her hands as she saw the tumble down house almost hidden by the brambles and weeds. 'Can it be possible that any one really lives here?'
Then, peering through the tangle of brambles, she spied old mr Rabbit sitting on his broken down doorstep with his arms folded and fast asleep.
But as she watched him sitting there, dreaming in the warm sunshine, her anger began to melt away.
The fact is, Old Mother Nature was like all the rest of mr Rabbit's neighbors-she just couldn't help loving happy go lucky mr Rabbit in spite of all his faults.
"Probably he is taking a nap in that big house of his," said Johnny Chuck, "and if he is we'll have to sit here until he wakes up, or else go back home and visit him some other time."
"That's so," replied peter.
"I don't see what he has his house in the water for, anyway.
Funny place to build a house, isn't it?"
Johnny Chuck scratched his head thoughtfully.
"It does seem a funny place," he admitted.
"It certainly does seem a funny place.
But then, Jerry Muskrat is a funny fellow.
That seems funny to me.
peter Rabbit suddenly brightened up.
"I do believe you are right, Johnny Chuck, and if you are, there must be a story about it, and if there is a story, Grandfather Frog will be sure to know it.
Let's go ask him why Jerry Muskrat builds his house in the water."
Grandfather Frog saw them coming, and he guessed right away that they were coming for a story.
He grinned to himself and pretended to go to sleep.
"Good morning, Grandfather Frog," said Johnny Chuck.
Grandfather Frog didn't answer.
Johnny tried again, and still no reply.
"He's asleep," said Johnny, looking dreadfully disappointed, "and I guess we'd better not disturb him, for he might wake up cross, and of course we wouldn't get a story if he did."
peter looked at Grandfather Frog sharply.
He wasn't so sure that that was a real nap.
It seemed to him that there was just the least little hint of a smile in the corners of Grandfather Frog's big mouth.
"You sit here a minute," he whispered in Johnny Chuck's ear.
So Johnny Chuck sat down where he was, which was right where Grandfather Frog could see him by lifting one eyelid just the teeniest bit, and peter hopped along the bank until he was right behind Grandfather Frog.
Now just at that place on the bank was growing a toadstool.
peter looked over at Johnny Chuck and winked.
Then he turned around, and with one of his long hind feet, he kicked the toadstool with all his might.
Now toadstools, as you all know, are not very well fastened at the roots, and this one was no different from the rest.
When peter kicked it it flew out into the air and landed with a great splash in the Smiling Pool, close beside the big green lily pad on which Grandfather Frog was sitting.
Of course he didn't see it coming, and of course it gave him a great start.
"Chug a rum!" exclaimed Grandfather Frog and dived head first into the water.
At first Grandfather Frog was angry, very angry indeed.
So presently he climbed back on to his big green lily pad, blinking his great, goggly eyes and looking just a wee bit foolish.
What do you mean by frightening an old fellow like me this way?"
"Just trying to get even with you for trying to fool us into thinking that you were asleep when you were wide awake," replied peter.
"Oh, Grandfather Frog, do tell us why it is that Jerry Muskrat builds his house in the water.
Please do!"
"I have a mind not to, just to get even with you," said Grandfather Frog, settling himself comfortably, "but I believe I will, to show you that there are some folks who can take a joke without losing their temper."
"Goody!" cried peter and Johnny Chuck together, sitting down side by side on the very edge of the bank.
Grandfather Frog folded his hands across his white and yellow waistcoat and half closed his eyes, as if looking way, way back into the past.
"Chug a rum!" he began.
"A long, long time ago, when the world was young, there was very little dry land, and most of the animals lived in the water.
Yes, Sir, most of the animals lived in the water, as sensible animals do to day."
peter nudged Johnny Chuck.
"He means himself and his family," he whispered with a chuckle.
"After a time," continued Grandfather Frog, "there began to be more land and still more.
Then some of the animals began to spend most of their time on the land.
Now Old Mother Nature had been keeping a sharp watch, as she always does, and when she found that they were foolish enough to like the land best, she did all that she could to make things comfortable for them.
At first they only laughed, but after a while they found that quite often there were times when it would be very nice to be at home in the water as they once had been.
Some could swim as long as they could keep their heads above water, but as soon as they put their heads under water they were likely to drown.
peter nodded.
"'What's the matter, mr Muskrat?' she asked.
"mr Muskrat hesitated.
None of his friends on land had such a big, fine house, and mr Muskrat was very proud of it.
But with all his pride he never forgot that it was a reward for trying to be content with his surroundings and making the best of them.
"So from that day to this, the Muskrats have built their houses in the water, and have been among the most industrious, contented, and happy of all the animals.
fifteen
WHY SPOTTY THE TURTLE CARRIES HIS HOUSE WITH HIM
He had sat that way for the longest time without once moving.
peter Rabbit had seen him when he went by on his way to the Laughing Brook and the Green Forest to look for some one to pass the time of day with.
Spotty was still there when peter returned a long time after, and he didn't look as if he had moved.
A sudden thought struck peter.
"Hi, Spotty!" he shouted.
Spotty slowly turned his head and looked up at peter.
There was a twinkle in his eyes, though peter didn't see it.
Where else should I live?" he replied.
"I mean, where is your house?" returned peter.
"Of course I know you live in the Smiling Pool, but where is your house?
Is it in the bank or down under water?"
"It is just wherever I happen to be.
Just now it is right here," said Spotty.
"I always take it with me wherever I go; I find it much the handiest way."
With that Spotty disappeared.
That is to say, his head and legs and tail disappeared.
peter stared very hard.
Then he began to laugh, for it came to him that what Spotty had said was true.
His house was with him, and now he had simply retired inside.
He didn't need any other house than just that hard, spotted shell, inside of which he was now so cosily tucked away.
"That's a great idea!
That's a great idea!" shouted peter.
"Of course it is," replied Spotty, putting nothing but his head out, "You will always find me at home whenever you call, peter, and that is more than you can say of most other people."
All the way to his own home in the dear Old Briar patch, peter thought about Spotty and how queer it was that he should carry his house around with him.
"I wonder how it happens that he does it," thought he.
"No wonder he is so slow.
Still, when he is in a hurry to get away from an enemy, it must be very awkward to have to carry his house on his back.
He doesn't have to run away at all!
All he has got to do is to go inside his house and stay there until the danger is past!
I never thought of that before. Why, that is the handiest thing I ever heard of."
Now peter knew that there must be a good story about Spotty and his house, and you know peter dearly loves a good story.
So at the very first opportunity the next day, he hurried over to the Smiling Pool to ask Grandfather Frog about it.
As usual, Grandfather Frog was sitting on his big green lily pad.
No sooner did peter pop his head above the edge of the bank of the Smiling Pool than Grandfather Frog exclaimed:
You've kept me waiting a long time, peter Rabbit.
I don't like to be kept waiting.
If you wanted to know about Spotty the Turtle, why didn't you come earlier?" All the time there was a twinkle in the big, goggly eyes of Grandfather Frog.
peter was so surprised that he couldn't find his tongue.
He hadn't said a word to any one about Spotty, so how could Grandfather Frog know what he had come for?
For a long time he had had a great deal of respect for Grandfather Frog, who, as you know, is very old and very wise, but now peter felt almost afraid of him.
You see, it seemed to peter as if Grandfather Frog had read his very thoughts.
"I-I didn't know you were waiting.
Truly I didn't," stammered peter. "If I had, I would have been here long ago.
If you please, how did you know that I was coming and what I was coming for?"
"Never mind how I knew.
I know a great deal that I don't tell, which is more than some folks can say," replied Grandfather Frog.
peter wondered if he meant him, for you know peter is a great gossip. But he didn't say anything, because he didn't know just what to say, and in a minute Grandfather Frog began the story peter so much wanted.
And of course you know that that reason is because of something that happened a long time ago, way back in the days when the world was young.
Almost everything to day is the result of things that happened in those long ago days.
The great great ever so great grandfather of Spotty the Turtle lived then, and unlike Spotty, whom you know, he had no house.
He was very quiet and bashful, was mr Turtle, and he never meddled with any one's business, because he believed that the best way of keeping out of trouble was to attend strictly to his own affairs.
If he had had, he would have been saved a great deal of trouble and worry. For a long time everybody lived at peace with everybody else.
Then came the trying time, of which you already know, when those who lived on the Green Meadows and in the Green Forest had the very hardest kind of work to find enough to eat, and were hungry most of the time.
Now mr Turtle, living in the Smiling Pool, had plenty to eat.
He had nothing to worry about on that score.
Everybody who lives in the Smiling Pool knows that it is the best place in the world, anyway."
Grandfather Frog winked at Jerry Muskrat, who was listening, and Jerry nodded his head.
"But presently mr Turtle discovered that the big people were eating the little people whenever they could catch them, and that he wasn't safe a minute when on shore, and not always safe in the water," continued Grandfather Frog.
"He had two or three very narrow escapes, and these set him to thinking.
He was too slow and awkward to run or to fight.
The only thing he could do was to keep out of sight as much as possible.
So he learned to swim with only his head out of water, and sometimes with only the end of his nose out of water.
At first he was annoyed and started to shake it off.
It was mr Fisher, and he was very hungry and fierce.
He looked at the piece of bark under which mr Turtle was hiding, but all he saw was the bark, because, you know, mr Turtle had drawn himself wholly under.
"'I believe,' said mr Fisher, talking out loud to himself, 'that I'll have a look around the Smiling Pool and see if I can catch that slow moving Turtle who lives there.
I believe he'll make me a good dinner.'
"Of course mr Turtle heard just what he said, and he blessed the piece of bark which had hidden him from mr Fisher's sight.
For a long time he lay very still.
When he did go on, he took the greatest care not to shake off that piece of bark, for he didn't know but that any minute he might want to hide under it again.
At last he reached the Smiling Pool and slipped into the water, leaving the piece of bark on the bank.
Thereafter, when he wanted to go on land, he would first make sure that no one was watching.
Then he would crawl under the piece of bark and get it on his back.
Wherever he went he carried the piece of bark so as to have it handy to hide under.
"Now all this time Old Mother Nature had been watching mr Turtle, and it pleased her to see that he was smart enough to think of such a clever way of fooling his enemies.
So she began to study how she could help mr Turtle.
One day she came up behind him just as he sat down to rest.
The piece of bark was uncomfortable and scratched his back, 'I wish,' said he, talking to himself, for he didn't know that any one else was near, 'I wish that I had a house of my own that I could carry on my back all the time and be perfectly safe when I was inside of it.'
"'You shall have,' said Old Mother Nature, and reaching out, she touched his back and turned the skin into hard shell.
Then she touched the skin of his stomach and turned that into hard shell.
'Now draw in your head and your legs and your tail,' said she.
"mr Turtle did as he was told to do, and there he was in the very best and safest kind of a house, perfectly hidden from all his enemies!
"'Oh, Mother Nature, how can I ever thank you?' he cried.
"'By doing as you always have done, attending wholly to your own affairs,' replied Old Mother Nature.
I had lost myself completely in work, when I heard footsteps outside.
There was a steep footpath between the upper and the lower road, which I climbed to shorten the way, as the children had taught me, but I believed that mrs Todd would find it inaccessible, unless she had occasion to seek me in great haste.
Then I looked, and saw Captain Littlepage passing the nearest window; the next moment he tapped politely at the door.
I stepped down from the desk and offered him a chair by the window, where he seated himself at once, being sadly spent by his climb.
I returned to my fixed seat behind the teacher's desk, which gave him the lower place of a scholar.
"You ought to have the place of honor, Captain Littlepage," I said.
Then he glanced at me, and looked all about him as pleased as a child.
"Shakespeare was a great poet; he copied life, but you have to put up with a great deal of low talk."
He looked, with his careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing care on the part of elderly unmarried sisters, but I knew Mari' Harris to be a very common place, inelegant person, who would have no such standards; it was plain that the captain was his own attentive valet.
The captain was very grave indeed, and I bade my inward spirit keep close to discretion.
"Poor mrs Begg has gone," I ventured to say.
I thought of the Countess of Carberry, and felt that history repeated itself.
"She was very much looked up to in this town, and will be missed."
I wondered, as I looked at him, if he had sprung from a line of ministers; he had the refinement of look and air of command which are the heritage of the old ecclesiastical families of New England.
I began to be very eager to know upon what errand he had come.
"We may know it all, the next step; where mrs Begg is now, for instance. Certainty, not conjecture, is what we all desire."
"I suppose we shall know it all some day," said i
"We have not looked for truth in the right direction.
"You must have left the sea a good many years ago, then, Captain Littlepage?" I said.
Now we were approaching dangerous ground, but a sudden sense of his sufferings at the hands of the ignorant came to my help, and I asked to hear more with all the deference I really felt.
A swallow flew into the schoolhouse at this moment as if a kingbird were after it, and beat itself against the walls for a minute, and escaped again to the open air; but Captain Littlepage took no notice whatever of the flurry.
I began to find this unexpected narrative a little dull.
"It was a hard life at sea in those days, I am sure," said I, with redoubled interest.
"It accounts for the change in a great many things,--the sad disappearance of sea captains,--doesn't it?"
No: when folks left home in the old days they left it to some purpose, and when they got home they stayed there and had some pride in it.
It sounded like the strange warning wave that gives notice of the turn of the tide.
"It's a lie!
So they were at last going to fight.
She had then covered her face with the quilt.
A certain light haired girl had made vivacious fun at his martial spirit, but there was another and darker girl whom he had gazed at steadfastly, and he thought she grew demure and sad at sight of his blue and brass.
As he perceived her, she had immediately begun to stare up through the high tree branches at the sky.
He had seen a good deal of flurry and haste in her movement as she changed her attitude.
He often thought of it.
On the way to Washington his spirit had soared.
The regiment was fed and caressed at station after station until the youth had believed that he must be a hero.
There was a lavish expenditure of bread and cold meats, coffee, and pickles and cheese.
As he basked in the smiles of the girls and was patted and complimented by the old men, he had felt growing within him the strength to do mighty deeds of arms.
He was brought then gradually back to his old ideas.
Greeklike struggles would be no more.
Men were better, or more timid.
Secular and religious education had effaced the throat grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.
He had grown to regard himself merely as a part of a vast blue demonstration.
His province was to look out, as far as he could, for his personal comfort.
For recreation he could twiddle his thumbs and speculate on the thoughts which must agitate the minds of the generals. Also, he was drilled and drilled and reviewed, and drilled and drilled and reviewed.
The only foes he had seen were some pickets along the river bank.
They were a sun tanned, philosophical lot, who sometimes shot reflectively at the blue pickets.
When reproached for this afterward, they usually expressed sorrow, and swore by their gods that the guns had exploded without their permission.
The youth, on guard duty one night, conversed across the stream with one of them.
He was a slightly ragged man, who spat skillfully between his shoes and possessed a great fund of bland and infantile assurance.
The youth liked him personally.
"Yank," the other had informed him, "yer a right dum good feller." This sentiment, floating to him upon the still air, had made him temporarily regret war.
Various veterans had told him tales.
Some talked of gray, bewhiskered hordes who were advancing with relentless curses and chewing tobacco with unspeakable valor; tremendous bodies of fierce soldiery who were sweeping along like the Huns.
Others spoke of tattered and eternally hungry men who fired despondent powders.
Still, he could not put a whole faith in veteran's tales, for recruits were their prey.
They talked much of smoke, fire, and blood, but he could not tell how much might be lies.
However, he perceived now that it did not greatly matter what kind of soldiers he was going to fight, so long as they fought, which fact no one disputed.
He lay in his bunk pondering upon it.
He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.
Previously he had never felt obliged to wrestle too seriously with this question.
A little panic fear grew in his mind.
As his imagination went forward to a fight, he saw hideous possibilities.
He contemplated the lurking menaces of the future, and failed in an effort to see himself standing stoutly in the midst of them.
Whatever he had learned of himself was here of no avail.
He was an unknown quantity.
He saw that he would again be obliged to experiment as he had in early youth.
He must accumulate information of himself, and meanwhile he resolved to remain close upon his guard lest those qualities of which he knew nothing should everlastingly disgrace him. "Good Lord!" he repeated in dismay.
The loud private followed.
They were wrangling.
He waved his hand expressively.
"You can believe me or not, jest as you like.
His comrade grunted stubbornly.
For a moment he seemed to be searching for a formidable reply.
Finally he said: "Well, you don't know everything in the world, do you?"
He began to stow various articles snugly into his knapsack.
The youth, pausing in his nervous walk, looked down at the busy figure. "Going to be a battle, sure, is there, Jim?" he asked.
"Of course there is," replied the tall soldier.
You jest wait."
"Huh!" said the loud one from a corner.
"Not much it won't," replied the tall soldier, exasperated.
"Not much it won't.
Didn't the cavalry all start this morning?" He glared about him.
No one denied his statement.
The regiment's got orders, too. A feller what seen 'em go to headquarters told me a little while ago. And they're raising blazes all over camp-anybody can see that."
"Shucks!" said the loud one.
The youth remained silent for a time.
At last he spoke to the tall soldier.
"Jim!"
"What?"
He made a fine use of the third person.
"Oh, there may be a few of 'em run, but there's them kind in every regiment, 'specially when they first goes under fire," said the other in a tolerant way.
But you can't bet on nothing.
"Oh, you think you know-" began the loud soldier with scorn.
The other turned savagely upon him.
They had a rapid altercation, in which they fastened upon each other various strange epithets.
The youth at last interrupted them.
"Did you ever think you might run yourself, Jim?" he asked.
On concluding the sentence he laughed as if he had meant to aim a joke.
PART one
(This part is related by peter Hagstrom, p h d)
"The ability to communicate ideas from one individual to another," said a professor of sociology to his class, "is the principal distinction between human beings and their brute forbears.
The increase and refinement of this ability to communicate is an index of the degree of civilization of a people.
As usual, the observation burst harmlessly over the heads of most of the students in the class, who were preoccupied with more immediate things-with the evening's movies and the week end's dance.
But upon two young men in the class, it made a powerful impression.
It crystallized within them certain vague conceptions and brought them to a conscious focus, enabling the young men to turn formless dreams into concrete acts.
That is why I take the position that the above enthusiastic words of this sociology professor, whose very name I have forgotten, were the prime moving influence which many years later succeeded in saving Occidental civilization from a catastrophe which would have been worse than death and destruction.
One of these young men was myself, and the other was my lifelong friend and chum, Carl Benda, who saved his country by solving a tremendously difficult scientific puzzle in a simple way, by sheer reasoning power, and without apparatus.
The sociology professor struck a responsive chord in us: for since our earliest years we had wigwagged to each other as Boy Scouts, learned the finger alphabet of the deaf and dumb so that we might maintain communication during school hours, strung a telegraph wire between our two homes, admired Poe's "Gold Bug" together and devised boyish cipher codes in which to send each other postcards when chance separated us.
But we had always felt a little foolish about what we considered our childish hobbies, until the professor's words suddenly roused us to the realization that we were a highly civilized pair of youngsters.
Not only did we then and there cease feeling guilty about our secret ciphers and our dots and dashes, but the determination was born within us to make of communication our life's work.
It turned out that both of us actually did devote our lives to the cause of communication; but the passing years saw us engaged in widely and curiously divergent phases of the work.
Thirty years later, I was Professor of the Psychology of Language at Columbia University, and Benda was Maintenance Engineer of the Bell Telephone Company of New York City; and on his knowledge and skill depended the continuity and stability of that stupendously complex traffic, the telephone communication of Greater New York.
But we still kept up our intimate friendship and our intense interest in our beloved subject.
We were just as close chums at the age of fifty as we had been at ten, and just as thrilled at new advances in communication: at television, at the international language, at the supposed signals from Mars.
That was the state of affairs between us up to a year ago.
At about that time Benda resigned his position with the New York Bell Telephone Company to accept a place as the Director of Communication in the Science Community.
This, for many reasons, was a most amazing piece of news to myself and to anyone who knew Benda.
Of course, it was commonly known that Benda was being sought by Universities and corporations: I know personally of several tempting offers he had received.
But the New York Bell is a wealthy corporation and had thus far managed to hold Benda, both by the munificence of its salary and by the attractiveness of the work it offered him.
That the Science Community would want Benda was easy to understand; but, that it could outbid the New York Bell, was, to say the least, a surprise.
Furthermore, that a man like Benda would want to have anything at all to do with the Science Community seemed strange enough in itself.
He had the most practical common sense-well balanced habits of thinking and living, supported by an intellect so clear and so keen that I knew of none to excel it.
What the Science Community was, no one knew exactly; but that there was something abnormal, fanatical, about it, no one doubted.
The Science Community, situated in Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, had first been heard of many years ago, when it was already a going concern.
At the time of which I now speak, the novelty had worn off, and no one paid any more attention to it than they do to Zion City or the Dunkards.
It was modern to the highest degree in construction and operation; there was very little manual labor there; no poverty; every person had all the benefits of modern developments in power, transportation, and communication, and of all other resources provided by scientific progress.
So much, visitors and reporters were able to say.
The rumors that it was a vast socialistic organization, without private property, with equal sharing of all privileges, were never confirmed.
It was obvious that as an organization, the Science Community must also be wealthy.
If any of its individual citizens were wealthy, no one knew it.
I knew Benda as well as I knew myself, and if I was sure of anything in my life, it was that he was not the type of man to leave a fifty thousand dollar job and join a communist city on an equal footing with the clerks in the stores.
As it happens, I was also intimately acquainted with john Edgewater Smith, recently Power Commissioner of New York City and the most capable power engineer in North America, who, following Benda by two or three months, resigned his position, and accepted what his letter termed the place of Director of Power in the Science Community.
I was personally in a position to state that neither of these men could be lightly persuaded into such a step, and that neither of them would work for a small salary.
Benda's first letter to me stated that he was at the Science Community on a visit.
He had heard of the place, and while at Washington on business had taken advantage of the opportunity to drive out and see it. Fascinated by the equipment he saw there, he had decided to stay a few days and study it.
The next letter announced his acceptance of the position.
I would give a month's salary to get a look at those letters now; but I neglected to preserve them.
I should like to see them because I am curious as to whether they exhibit the characteristics of the subsequent letters, some of which I now have.
As I have stated, Benda and I had been on the most intimate terms for forty years.
His letters had always been crisp and direct, and thoroughly familiar and confidential.
I do not know just how many letters I received from him from the Science Community before I noted the difference, but I have one from the third month of his stay there (he wrote every two or three weeks), characterized by a verbosity that sounded strange for him.
He seemed to be writing merely to cover the sheet, trifles such as he had never previously considered worth writing letters about.
Four pages of letter conveyed not a single idea.
Yet Benda was, if anything, a man of ideas.
There followed several months of letters like that: a lot of words, evasion of coming to the point about anything; just conventional letters.
Something had changed Benda.
I pondered on it a good deal, and could think of no hypothesis to account for it.
In the meanwhile, New York City lost a third technical man to the Science Community.
Donald Francisco, Commissioner of the Water Supply, a sanitary engineer of international standing, accepted a position in the Science Community as Water Director.
I did not know whether to laugh and compare it to the National Baseball League's trafficking in "big names," or to hunt for some sinister danger sign in it.
The average man would have done that, but my long years of training in psychological interpretation told me that a character and a friendship built during forty years does not change in six months, and that there must be some other explanation for this.
I wrote him that I was coming.
It involved a drive of about fifty miles northwest, through a picturesque section of the country.
The city of my destination was back in the hills, and very much isolated.
During the last ten miles we met no traffic at all, and I was the only passenger left in the bus. Suddenly the vehicle stopped.
"Far as we go!" the driver shouted.
I looked about in consternation.
All around were low, wild looking hills.
The road went on ahead through a narrow pass.
He was right.
A small, neat looking bus drove through the pass and stopped for me.
"What do I owe you?"
"Nothing," he said curtly.
"Fill that out." He handed me a card.
An impertinent thing, that card was.
Besides asking for my name, address, nationality, vocation, and position, it requested that I state whom I was visiting in the Science Community, the purpose of my visit, the nature of my business, how long I intended to stay, did I have a place to stay arranged for, and if so, where and through whom.
It looked for all the world as though they had something to conceal; Czarist Russia couldn't beat that for keeping track of people and prying into their business.
Sign here, the card said.
Chapter Seventeen
Under the Great Dome
So I think our best plan will be to go to the Skeezer Country, raise the sunken island and save our friends and the imprisoned Skeezers.
Afterward we can visit the mountain and punish the cruel magician of the Flatheads."
"That is sensible," approved the Shaggy Man.
"I quite agree with you."
The others, too, seemed to think the Wizard's plan the best, and Glinda herself commended it, so on they marched toward the line of palm trees that hid the Skeezers' lake from view.
Pretty soon they came to the palms.
These were set closely together, the branches, which came quite to the ground, being so tightly interlaced that even the Glass Cat could scarcely find a place to squeeze through.
The path which the Flatheads used was some distance away.
"Here's a job for the Tin Woodman," said the Scarecrow.
Of course every eye was at first fixed upon this dome, where Ozma and Dorothy and the Skeezers were still fast prisoners.
But soon their attention was caught by a more brilliant sight, for here was the Diamond Swan swimming just before them, its long neck arched proudly, the amethyst eyes gleaming and all the diamond sprinkled feathers glistening splendidly under the rays of the sun
"She's wonderfully beautiful now," remarked the Frogman.
"It doesn't seem like much of a punishment," said Trot.
"I am sure Coo ee oh is punished," said Glinda, "for she has lost all her magic power and her grand palace and can no longer misrule the poor Skeezers."
Before anyone could speak Coo ee oh called to them in a rasping voice-for the voice of a swan is always harsh and unpleasant-and said with much pride:
"Admire me, Strangers!
Admire me!"
"Handsome is as handsome does," replied the Scarecrow.
What deeds can a swan do but swim around and give pleasure to all beholders?" said the sparkling bird.
"Have you forgotten your former life?
Have you forgotten your magic and witchcraft?" inquired the Wizard.
I wouldn't go back to it if I could.
Don't you admire my beauty, Strangers?"
"Tell us, Coo ee oh," said Glinda earnestly, "if you can recall enough of your witchcraft to enable us to raise the sunken island to the surface of the lake.
Tell us that and I'll give you a string of pearls to wear around your neck and add to your beauty."
"Nothing can add to my beauty, for I'm the most beautiful creature anywhere in the whole world."
"But how can we raise the island?"
If ever I knew I've forgotten, and I'm glad of it," was the response.
"Just watch me circle around and see me glitter!
"It's no use," said Button Bright; "the old Swan is too much in love with herself to think of anything else."
"But how?" asked Uncle Henry in a grave voice, for he could not bear to think of his dear niece Dorothy being out there under water; "how shall we do it?"
"If it were just an ordinary sunken island," said the powerful sorceress, "there would be several ways by which I might bring it to the surface again.
I do not despair in the least, but it will require some deep study to solve this difficult problem.
"It seems to me," said the Wizard after a brief silence had followed Glinda's speech, "that there are three fishes in this lake that used to be Adepts at Magic and from whom Coo ee oh stole much of her knowledge. If we could find those fishes and return them to their former shapes, they could doubtless tell us what to do to bring the sunken island to the surface."
You will understand, of course, that had Glinda been at home in her castle, where the Great Book of Records was, she would have known that Ervic the Skeezer already had taken the gold and silver and bronze fishes from the lake.
"I think I see a boat yonder on the shore," said Ojo the Munchkin boy, pointing to a place around the edge of the lake.
"If we could get that boat and row all over the lake, calling to the magic fishes, we might be able to find them."
"Let us go to the boat," said the Wizard.
They walked around the lake to where the boat was stranded upon the beach, but found it empty.
It was a mere shell of blackened steel, with a collapsible roof that, when in position, made the submarine watertight, but at present the roof rested in slots on either side of the magic craft.
There were no oars or sails, no machinery to make the boat go, and although Glinda promptly realized it was meant to be operated by witchcraft, she was not acquainted with that sort of magic.
"However," said she, "the boat is merely a boat, and I believe I can make it obey a command of sorcery, as well as it did the command of witchcraft.
After I have given a little thought to the matter, the boat will take us wherever we desire to go."
"Not all of us," returned the Wizard, "for it won't hold so many.
But, most noble Sorceress, provided you can make the boat go, of what use will it be to us?"
"Can't we use it to catch the three fishes?" asked Button Bright.
"It will not be necessary to use the boat for that purpose," replied Glinda.
"Wherever in the lake the enchanted fishes may be, they will answer to my call.
What I am trying to discover is how the boat came to be on this shore, while the island on which it belongs is under water yonder.
Did Coo ee oh come here in the boat to meet the Flatheads before the island was sunk, or afterward?"
No one could answer that question, of course; but while they pondered the matter three young men advanced from the line of trees, and rather timidly bowed to the strangers.
"Who are you, and where did you come from?" inquired the Wizard.
"We are Skeezers," answered one of them, "and our home is on the Magic Isle of the Lake.
We ran away when we saw you coming, and hid behind the trees, but as you are Strangers and seem to be friendly we decided to meet you, for we are in great trouble and need assistance."
"If you belong on the island, why are you here?" demanded Glinda.
The young men told how, in the night when they were asleep, their comrade Ervic had mysteriously disappeared, while the boat in some strange manner had floated to the shore and stranded upon the beach.
That was all they knew.
They had searched in vain for three days for Ervic.
As their island was under water and they could not get back to it, the three Skeezers had no place to go, and so had waited patiently beside their boat for something to happen.
Being questioned by Glinda and the Wizard, they told all they knew about Ozma and Dorothy and declared the two girls were still in the village under the Great Dome.
They were quite safe and would be well cared for by Lady Aurex, now that the Queen who opposed them was out of the way.
When they had gleaned all the information they could from these Skeezers, the Wizard said to Glinda:
"If you find you can make this boat obey your sorcery, you could have it return to the island, submerge itself, and enter the door in the basement from which it came.
But I cannot see that our going to the sunken island would enable our friends to escape.
We would only Join them as prisoners."
"Not so, friend Wizard," replied Glinda.
"If the boat would obey my commands to enter the basement door, it would also obey my commands to come out again, and I could bring Ozma and Dorothy back with me."
"And leave all of our people still imprisoned?" asked one of the Skeezers reproachfully.
"By making several trips in the boat, Glinda could fetch all your people to the shore," replied the Wizard.
"But what could they do then?" inquired another Skeezer.
"They would have no homes and no place to go, and would be at the mercy of their enemies, the Flatheads."
"That is true," said Glinda the Good.
I believe the best plan will be to summon the three fishes and learn from them how to raise the island."
The little Wizard seemed to think that this was rather a forlorn hope.
"That is something we must consider carefully," responded stately Glinda, with a serene smile.
"I think I can find a way."
All of Ozma's counsellors applauded this sentiment, for they knew well the powers of the Sorceress.
"Very well," agreed the Wizard.
MARY'S HALL-THANKSGIVING DAY IN CALIFORNIA-ANOTHER BROTHER IN LAW.
"mrs Brunner has become too childish to have the responsibility of young girls," had been frequently remarked before Elitha's visit; and after her departure, the same friends expressed regret that she had not taken us away with her.
These whispered comments, which did not improve our situation, suddenly ceased, for the smallpox made its appearance in Sonoma, and helpers were needed to care for the afflicted.
In fact, she had such confidence in her method of treating it, that she would not have Georgia and me vaccinated while the epidemic prevailed, insisting that if we should take the disease she could nurse us through it without disfigurement, and we would thenceforth be immune.
She did not expose us during what she termed the "catching stage," but after that had passed, she called us to share her work and become familiar with its details, and taught us how to brew the teas, make the ointments, and apply them.
I do not remember a death among her patients, and only two who were badly disfigured.
Grandma was called hurriedly in the night, because the afflicted girl, in delirium, had loosened the straps which held her upon her bed, and while her attendant was out of the room had rushed from the house into the rain, and was not found until after she had become thoroughly drenched.
The other was our arch enemy, Castle, who seemed so near death that one night as grandma was peering into the darkness for signal lights from the homes of the sick, she exclaimed impulsively, "Hark, children! there goes the Catholic bell.
Count its strokes.
She was right.
Later he came to us to recuperate, and was the most exacting and profane man we ever waited on.
He conceived a special grudge against Georgia, whom he had caught slyly laughing when she first observed the change in his appearance.
Yet months previous, he had laid the foundation for her mirth.
He was then a handsome, rugged fellow, and particularly proud of the shape of his nose.
Now, look at mine, large and finely shaped.
Georgia fled, and cried in anger over this indignity, declaring that she hated Castle and would not be sorry if something should happen to spoil his fine nose.
So when he came to us from the sick room, soured and crestfallen because disease had deeply pitted and seamed that feature which had formerly been his pride, she laughingly whispered, "Well, I don't care, my nose could never look like his, even if I had the smallpox, for there is not so much of it to spoil."
I raised my sleeve, showed the welt on my arm, and replied, "I am going to see if I can't find a home where they will treat me kindly."
Poor grandma was conscience stricken, drew me into her own room, and did not let me leave it until after she had soothed my hurts and we had become friends again.
Georgia went to mrs Bergwald's, and remained quite a while.
When she came back speaking English, and insisting that she was an American, grandma became very angry, and threatened to send her away among strangers; then hesitated, as if realizing how fully Georgia belonged to me and I to her, and that we would cling together whatever might happen.
In her perplexity, she besought mrs Bergwald's advice.
Now, mrs Bergwald was a native of Stockholm, a lady of rare culture, and used the French language in conversing with grandma.
Thereafter grandma changed her methods.
Sometimes she would let us bring her, from under the sofa, her gorgeous prints, illustrating "Wilhelm Tell," and would repeat the text relating to the scenes as we examined each picture with eager interest.
We were also allowed to go to Sunday school oftener, and later, she sent me part of the term to the select school for girls recently established by dr Ver Mehr, an Episcopalian clergyman.
In fact, my tuition was expected to offset the school's milk bill, yet that did not lessen my enthusiasm.
I was eager for knowledge.
I also expected to meet familiar faces in that great building, which had been the home of mr Jacob Leese.
The bell rang, I followed to the recitation hall, and was assigned a seat below the rest, because I was the only small Sonoma girl yet enrolled.
Nor was there a class for me.
My delighted sister was soon in touch with a crowd of other little girls, and brought home many of their bright sayings for my edification.
Grandma was pleased that I was invited, and declared that she would send a liberal donation of milk and cheese as a mark of appreciation.
I caught much of Georgia's spirit of delight, for I had a vivid recollection of the grand dinner given in commemoration of our very first legally appointed Thanksgiving Day in California; I had only to close my eyes, and in thought would reappear the longest and most bountifully spread table I had ever seen.
Turkey, chicken, and wild duck, at the ends; a whole roasted pig in the centre, and more than enough delicious accompaniments to cover the spaces between.
There, I wore a dark calico dress and sun bonnet, both made by poor mrs McCutchen of the Donner Party, who had to take in sewing for a livelihood; but to the Seminary, I should wear grandpa's gift, a costly alpaca, changeable in the sunlight to soft mingling bluish and greenish colors of the peacock.
Its wide skirt reached to my shoetops, and the gathers to its full waist were gauged to a sharp peak in front.
A wide open V from the shoulder down to the peak displayed an embroidered white Swiss chemisette.
The sleeves, small at the wrist, were trimmed with folds of the material and a quilling of white lace at the hand.
Did I look old fashioned?
Yes, for grandma said, "Thou art like a picture I saw somewhere long ago." Then she continued brightly, "Here are thy mits, and thy little embroidered handkerchief folded in a square.
Carry it carefully so it won't get mussed before the company see it, and come not back late for milking."
The Seminary playground was so noisy with chatter and screams of joy, that it was impossible to remember all the games we played; and later the dining room and its offerings were so surprising and so beautifully decorated that the sight nearly deprived me of my appetite.
"Mumps.
True enough, the least taste of anything sour produced the tell tale shock.
But the most aggravating feature of the illness was that it developed the week that sister Elitha and mr Benjamin w Wilder were married in Sacramento; and when they reached Sonoma on their wedding tour, we could not visit with them, because neither had had the disease.
They came to our house, and we had a hurried little talk with a closed window between us, and were favorably impressed by our tall "Brother Ben," who had very blue eyes and soft brown hair.
He was the second of the three Wilder brothers, who had been among the early gold seekers, and tried roughing it in the mines.
Though a native of Rhode Island, and of Puritan ancestry, he was quite Western in appearance.
He was also interested in a stage line running between Sacramento and the gold regions.
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.
Let us try to understand him.
It has to be sought for because of its depth at once and its simplicity.
But it is so complete, so imaginatively comprehensive, so immediately operative on the conscience through its poetic suggestiveness, that when it is once understood, there is nothing more to be said, but everything to be done.
"Why not lay up for ourselves treasures upon earth?"
"Because there the moth and rust and the thief come."
"Yes; by the moth and the rust and the thief."
"Of course the heart will be where the treasure is; but what has that to do with the argument?"
This: that what is with the treasure must fare as the treasure; that the heart which haunts the treasure house where the moth and rust corrupt, will be exposed to the same ravages as the treasure, will itself be rusted and moth eaten.
Many a man, many a woman, fair and flourishing to see, is going about with a rusty moth eaten heart within that form of strength or beauty.
"But this is only a figure."
True.
But is the reality intended, less or more than the figure?
Therein lies the hurt.
Was it the cry of relief at the touch of death?
Was it the cry of victory?
It may have been all in one.
And the mighty story ends with a cry.
Every highest human act is just a giving back to God of that which he first gave to us.
I am thine, and therefore I am mine.'" The vast operations of the spiritual as of the physical world, are simply a turning again to the source.
Am I going to do a good deed?
Am I going to die?
Thou knowest, if only from the cry of thy Son, how terrible that is; and if it comes not to me in so terrible a shape as that in which it came to him, think how poor to bear I am beside him.
I do not know what the struggle means; for, of the thousands who pass through it every day, not one enlightens his neighbour left behind; but shall I not long with agony for one breath of thy air, and not receive it?
Thou wilt know every shade of my suffering; thou wilt care for me with thy perfect fatherhood; for that makes my sonship, and inwraps and infolds it.
I care not for the pain, so long as my spirit is strong, and into thy hands I commend that spirit.
Think, brothers, think, sisters, we walk in the air of an eternal fatherhood.
Whither else dare we send them?
How the earthly father would love a child who would creep into his room with angry, troubled face, and sit down at his feet, saying when asked what he wanted: "I feel so naughty, papa, and I want to get good"!
Would he say to his child: "How dare you!
Go away, and be good, and then come to me?" And shall we dare to think God would send us away if we came thus, and would not be pleased that we came, even if we were angry as jonah?
Bread, at least, will be given, and not a stone; water, at least, will be sure, and not vinegar mingled with gall.
We may commend any brother, any sister, to the common fatherhood.
For he cannot be our father save as he is their father; and if we do not see him and feel him as their father, we cannot know him as ours.
The question is called forth by what the Lord had just said concerning his kingdom, closing with the statement that it was not of this world.
He might have had them.
He did not care for government.
Government, I repeat, was to him flat, stale, unprofitable.
His subjects must be of his own kind, in their very nature and essence kings.
To understand his answer to Pilate, see wherein consists his kingship; what it is that makes him a king; what manifestation of his essential being gives him a claim to be king.
The Lord's is a kingdom in which no man seeks to be above another: ambition is of the dirt of this world's kingdoms.
Neither Pilate nor they ask the one true question, 'How am I to be a true man?
They will kill him, but it matters not: the truth is as he says!
Jesus is a king because his business is to bear witness to the truth. What truth?
My judgment is the faultless rule of things.
My right is-what I desire. The more I am all in all to myself, the greater I am.
My will is all for his will, for his will is right.
He is righteousness itself.
He is the truth, and I am the truth.
I fear nothing you can do to me.
You do not like to hear it because you are not like him.
I am low in your eyes which measure things by their show; therefore you say I blaspheme.
I came into the world to show him.
If I mistake, he will forgive me.
Of the men who before Christ bare witness to the truth, some were sawn asunder, some subdued kingdoms; it mattered nothing which: they witnessed.
The truth is God; the witness to the truth is Jesus.
The thought of God is the truth of everything.
The man who responds to this with his whole being, is of the truth.
When his witness is treated as a lie, then most he witnesses, for he gives it still.
Is every Christian expected to bear witness?
Are we careful to be true?
When contempt is cast on the truth, do we smile?
We are not bound to say all we think, but we are bound not even to look what we do not think.
CHAPTER twelve
This did not hinder Caesar from seizing in the space of a few days Severeto, Scarlino, the isle of Elba, and La Pianosa; but he was obliged to stop short at the castle, which opposed a serious resistance.
As Louis the twelfth's army was continuing its way towards Rome, and he received a fresh order to join it, he took his departure the next day, leaving behind him, Vitellozzo and Gian Paolo Bagliani to prosecute the siege in his absence.
Louis the twelfth was this time advancing upon Naples, not with the incautious ardour of Charles the eighth, but, on the contrary, with that prudence and circumspection which characterised him.
This partition was all the more likely to be made, in fact, because Frederic, supposing all the time that Ferdinand was his good and faithful friend, would open the gates of his towns, only to receive into his fortresses conquerors and masters instead of allies.
All this perhaps was not very loyal conduct on the part of a king who had so long desired and had just now received the surname of Catholic, but it mattered little to Louis, who profited by treasonable acts he did not have to share.
But the feeling of safety inspired by Frederic's faithless ally was not destined to endure long: on their arrival at Rome, the French and Spanish ambassadors presented to the pope the treaty signed at Grenada on the eleventh of November, fifteen hundred, between Louis the twelfth and Ferdinand the Catholic, a treaty which up, to that time had been secret.
It was demonstrated that the arrangement had only been undertaken to provide the Christian princes with another weapon for attacking the Ottoman Empire, and before this consideration, one may readily suppose, all the pope's scruples vanished; on the twenty fifth of June, therefore, it was decided to call a consistory which was to declare Frederic deposed from the throne of Naples.
These dispositions were scarcely made when d'Aubigny, having passed the Volturno, approached to lay siege to Capua, and invested the town on both sides of the river.
Such negotiations, made with cunning supported by bribery, proved as usual more prompt and efficacious than any others.
At the very moment when Fabrizio Colonna in a fortified outpost was discussing the conditions of capitulation with the French captains, suddenly great cries of distress were heard.
The French, when they saw that the town was half taken, rushed on the gates with such impetuosity that the besieged did not even attempt to defend themselves any longer, and forced their way into Capua by three separate sides: nothing more could be done then to stop the issue.
Butchery and pillage had begun, and the work of destruction must needs be completed: in vain did Fabrizio Colonna, Ranuzio di Marciano, and Don Ugo di Cardona attempt to make head against the French and Spaniards with such men as they could get together.
The Duke of Valentinois broke in the doors, chased out for himself forty of the most beautiful, and handed over the rest to his army.
The pillage continued for three days.
Capua once taken, Frederic saw that it was useless any longer to attempt defence.
So he shut himself up in Castel Nuovo and gave permission to Gaeta and to Naples to treat with the conqueror.
The terms of this capitulation were faithfully adhered to on both sides: d'Aubigny entered Naples, and Frederic retired to Ischia.
His eldest son, Dan Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, retired to Spain, where he was permitted to marry twice, but each time with a woman who was known to be barren; and there he died in fifteen fifty.
The capture of Naples gave the Duke of Valentinois his liberty again; so he left the French army, after he had received fresh assurances on his own account of the king's friendliness, and returned to the siege of Piombino, which he had been forced to interrupt.
His Holiness was now having a run of good fortune, and he learned on the same day that Piombino was taken and that Duke Hercules had given the King of France his assent to the marriage.
We humbly ask forgiveness of our readers, and especially of our lady readers; but though we have found words to describe the first part of the spectacle, we have sought them in vain for the second; suffice it to say that just as there had been prizes for feats of adroitness, others were given now to the dancers who were most daring and brazen.
Lucrezia showed the utmost delight in accepting these gifts; then she retired into the next room, leaning on the pope's arm, and followed by the ladies of her suite, leaving the Duke of Valentinois to do the honours of the Vatican to the men.
That evening the guests met again, and spent half the night in dancing, while a magnificent display of fireworks lighted up the Piazza of San Paolo.
This man was Ramiro d'Orco.
The apparent object of this journey was that the new subjects might take their oath to Caesar, and the real object was to form an arsenal in Jacopo d'Appiano's capital within reach of Tuscany, a plan which neither the pope nor his son had ever seriously abandoned.
The pontifical court made a stay there of several days, partly with a view of making the duke known to the inhabitants, and also in order to be present at certain ecclesiastical functions, of which the most important was a service held on the third Sunday in Lent, in which the Cardinal of Cosenza sang a mass and the pope officiated in state with the duke and the cardinals.
After these solemn functions the customary pleasures followed, and the pope summoned the prettiest girls of the country and ordered them to dance their national dances before him.
Following on these dances came feasts of unheard of magnificence, during which the pope in the sight of all men completely ignored Lent and did not fast.
The object of all these fetes was to scatter abroad a great deal of money, and so to make the Duke of Valentinois popular, while poor Jacopo d'Appiano was forgotten.
At last they arrived in sight of Corneto, and there the duke, who was not on the same vessel as the pope, seeing that his ship could not get in, had a boat put out, and so was taken ashore.
Almost at the same time d'Albret arrived in quest of his cardinal's hat.
"What do you wonder?"
"That's easy," replied Johnny.
What is it this time?"
"I don't know," he confessed finally.
They grew harder and harder.
Now I can't run fast, because my legs are too short.
The only thing I can do is to dig.'
When it was finished, he was tired, so he curled up at the bottom for a nap.
Mole,' replied mr Badger.
"'Yes,' replied mr Fox.
'It's of no use,' thought mr Mole. 'If I go outside, they will soon find me, and if I stay here, they will dig me out.
Oh, dear, oh, dear!
It was a splendid idea!
And then he made a discovery-such a splendid discovery!
Just then up came peter Rabbit, all out of breath.
"Yes," replied Striped Chipmunk, winking at Grandfather Frog, "and now we are going back home perfectly happy and satisfied."
This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK
PREFACE
The Bellman, who was almost morbidly sensitive about appearances, used to have the bowsprit unshipped once or twice a week to be revarnished, and it more than once happened, when the time came for replacing it, that no one on board could remember which end of the ship it belonged to.
The helmsman used to stand by with tears in his eyes; he knew it was all wrong, but alas!
Rule forty two of the Code, "No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm," had been completed by the Bellman himself with the words "and the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one." So remonstrance was impossible, and no steering could be done till the next varnishing day.
Such is Human Perversity.
Humpty Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all.
Now open your mouth and speak.
"Under which king, Bezonian?
Speak or die!"
Fit the First
THE LANDING
"Just the place for a Snark!
I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark!
I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
The crew was complete: it included a Boots- A maker of Bonnets and Hoods- A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes- And a Broker, to value their goods.
A Billiard marker, whose skill was immense, Might perhaps have won more than his share- But a Banker, engaged at enormous expense, Had the whole of their cash in his care.
There was also a Beaver, that paced on the deck, Or would sit making lace in the bow: And had often (the Bellman said) saved them from wreck, Though none of the sailors knew how.
There was one who was famed for the number of things He forgot when he entered the ship: His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings, And the clothes he had bought for the trip.
He had forty two boxes, all carefully packed, With his name painted clearly on each: But, since he omitted to mention the fact, They were all left behind on the beach.
He would answer to "Hi!" or to any loud cry, Such as "Fry me!" or "Fritter my wig!" To "What you may call um!" or "What was his name!" But especially "Thing um a jig!"
While, for those who preferred a more forcible word, He had different names from these: His intimate friends called him "Candle ends," And his enemies "Toasted cheese."
"His form is ungainly-his intellect small-" (So the Bellman would often remark) "But his courage is perfect!
And that, after all, Is the thing that one needs with a Snark."
He came as a Baker: but owned, when too late- And it drove the poor Bellman half mad- He could only bake Bridecake-for which, I may state, No materials were to be had.
The last of the crew needs especial remark, Though he looked an incredible dunce: He had just one idea-but, that one being "Snark," The good Bellman engaged him at once.
He came as a Butcher: but gravely declared, When the ship had been sailing a week, He could only kill Beavers.
The Bellman looked scared, And was almost too frightened to speak:
But at length he explained, in a tremulous tone, There was only one Beaver on board; And that was a tame one he had of his own, Whose death would be deeply deplored.
The Beaver, who happened to hear the remark, Protested, with tears in its eyes, That not even the rapture of hunting the Snark Could atone for that dismal surprise!
It strongly advised that the Butcher should be Conveyed in a separate ship: But the Bellman declared that would never agree With the plans he had made for the trip:
Navigation was always a difficult art, Though with only one ship and one bell: And he feared he must really decline, for his part, Undertaking another as well.
The Beaver's best course was, no doubt, to procure A second-hand dagger proof coat- So the Baker advised it-and next, to insure Its life in some Office of note:
This the Banker suggested, and offered for hire (On moderate terms), or for sale, Two excellent Policies, one Against Fire, And one Against Damage From Hail.
Yet still, ever after that sorrowful day, Whenever the Butcher was by, The Beaver kept looking the opposite way, And appeared unaccountably shy.
Fit the Second
The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies- Such a carriage, such ease and such grace! Such solemnity, too!
One could see he was wise, The moment one looked in his face!
He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand.
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs!
"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank:" (So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best- A perfect and absolute blank!"
This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out That the Captain they trusted so well Had only one notion for crossing the ocean, And that was to tingle his bell.
He was thoughtful and grave-but the orders he gave Were enough to bewilder a crew. When he cried "Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!" What on earth was the helmsman to do?
Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes: A thing, as the Bellman remarked, That frequently happens in tropical climes, When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked."
But the principal failing occurred in the sailing, And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed, Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East, That the ship would not travel due West!
The Bellman perceived that their spirits were low, And repeated in musical tone Some jokes he had kept for a season of woe- But the crew would do nothing but groan.
He served out some grog with a liberal hand, And bade them sit down on the beach: And they could not but own that their Captain looked grand, As he stood and delivered his speech.
"We have sailed many months, we have sailed many weeks, (Four weeks to the month you may mark), But never as yet ('tis your Captain who speaks) Have we caught the least glimpse of a Snark!
"We have sailed many weeks, we have sailed many days, (Seven days to the week I allow), But a Snark, on the which we might lovingly gaze, We have never beheld till now!
"Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again The five unmistakable marks By which you may know, wheresoever you go, The warranted genuine Snarks.
"Let us take them in order.
The first is the taste, Which is meagre and hollow, but crisp: Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist, With a flavour of Will o'-the wisp.
"Its habit of getting up late you'll agree That it carries too far, when I say That it frequently breakfasts at five o'clock tea, And dines on the following day.
"The third is its slowness in taking a jest. Should you happen to venture on one, It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed: And it always looks grave at a pun.
"For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm, Yet, I feel it my duty to say, Some are Boojums-"
Fit the Third
THE BAKER'S TALE
They roused him with muffins-they roused him with ice- They roused him with mustard and cress- They roused him with jam and judicious advice- They set him conundrums to guess.
When at length he sat up and was able to speak, His sad story he offered to tell; And the Bellman cried "Silence!
Not even a shriek!" And excitedly tingled his bell.
There was silence supreme!
Not a shriek, not a scream, Scarcely even a howl or a groan, As the man they called "Ho!" told his story of woe In an antediluvian tone.
"My father and mother were honest, though poor-" "Skip all that!" cried the Bellman in haste. "If it once becomes dark, there's no chance of a Snark- We have hardly a minute to waste!"
"I skip forty years," said the Baker, in tears, "And proceed without further remark To the day when you took me aboard of your ship To help you in hunting the Snark.
"A dear uncle of mine (after whom I was named) Remarked, when I bade him farewell-" "Oh, skip your dear uncle!" the Bellman exclaimed, As he angrily tingled his bell.
"He remarked to me then," said that mildest of men, "'If your Snark be a Snark, that is right: Fetch it home by all means-you may serve it with greens, And it's handy for striking a light.
"'You may seek it with thimbles-and seek it with care; You may hunt it with forks and hope; You may threaten its life with a railway share; You may charm it with smiles and soap-'"
("That's exactly the method," the Bellman bold In a hasty parenthesis cried, "That's exactly the way I have always been told That the capture of Snarks should be tried!")
"'But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day, If your Snark be a Boojum!
"It is this, it is this that oppresses my soul, When I think of my uncle's last words: And my heart is like nothing so much as a bowl Brimming over with quivering curds!
"It is this, it is this-"
"We have had that before!" The Bellman indignantly said. And the Baker replied "Let me say it once more. It is this, it is this that I dread!
"But if ever I meet with a Boojum, that day, In a moment (of this I am sure), I shall softly and suddenly vanish away- And the notion I cannot endure!"
Fit the fourth
The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow. "If only you'd spoken before! It's excessively awkward to mention it now, With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!
"It's excessively awkward to mention it now- As I think I've already remarked." And the man they called "Hi!" replied, with a sigh, "I informed you the day we embarked.
"You may charge me with murder-or want of sense- (We are all of us weak at times): But the slightest approach to a false pretence Was never among my crimes!
"I said it in Hebrew-I said it in Dutch- I said it in German and Greek: But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak!"
"'tis a pitiful tale," said the Bellman, whose face Had grown longer at every word: "But, now that you've stated the whole of your case, More debate would be simply absurd.
"To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care; To pursue it with forks and hope; To threaten its life with a railway share; To charm it with smiles and soap!
"For the Snark's a peculiar creature, that won't Be caught in a commonplace way. Do all that you know, and try all that you don't: Not a chance must be wasted to day!
"For England expects-I forbear to proceed: 'tis a maxim tremendous, but trite: And you'd best be unpacking the things that you need To rig yourselves out for the fight."
Then the Banker endorsed a blank cheque (which he crossed), And changed his loose silver for notes. The Baker with care combed his whiskers and hair, And shook the dust out of his coats.
The Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade- Each working the grindstone in turn: But the Beaver went on making lace, and displayed No interest in the concern:
The maker of Bonnets ferociously planned A novel arrangement of bows: While the Billiard marker with quivering hand Was chalking the tip of his nose.
But the Butcher turned nervous, and dressed himself fine, With yellow kid gloves and a ruff- Said he felt it exactly like going to dine, Which the Bellman declared was all "stuff."
Fit the Fifth
THE BEAVER'S LESSON
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway share; They charmed it with smiles and soap.
Then the Butcher contrived an ingenious plan For making a separate sally; And had fixed on a spot unfrequented by man, A dismal and desolate valley.
But the very same plan to the Beaver occurred: It had chosen the very same place: Yet neither betrayed, by a sign or a word, The disgust that appeared in his face.
Each thought he was thinking of nothing but "Snark" And the glorious work of the day; And each tried to pretend that he did not remark That the other was going that way.
But the valley grew narrow and narrower still, And the evening got darker and colder, Till (merely from nervousness, not from goodwill) They marched along shoulder to shoulder.
Then a scream, shrill and high, rent the shuddering sky, And they knew that some danger was near: The Beaver turned pale to the tip of its tail, And even the Butcher felt queer.
He thought of his childhood, left far far behind- That blissful and innocent state- The sound so exactly recalled to his mind A pencil that squeaks on a slate!
"'tis the voice of the Jubjub!" he suddenly cried. (This man, that they used to call "Dunce.") "As the Bellman would tell you," he added with pride, "I have uttered that sentiment once.
"'tis the note of the Jubjub!
The proof is complete, If only I've stated it thrice."
The Beaver had counted with scrupulous care, Attending to every word: But it fairly lost heart, and outgrabe in despair, When the third repetition occurred.
It felt that, in spite of all possible pains, It had somehow contrived to lose count, And the only thing now was to rack its poor brains By reckoning up the amount.
The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens, And ink in unfailing supplies: While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens, And watched them with wondering eyes.
"The method employed I would gladly explain, While I have it so clear in my head, If I had but the time and you had but the brain- But much yet remains to be said.
"In one moment I've seen what has hitherto been Enveloped in absolute mystery, And without extra charge I will give you at large A Lesson in Natural History."
In his genial way he proceeded to say (Forgetting all laws of propriety, And that giving instruction, without introduction, Would have caused quite a thrill in Society),
"As to temper the Jubjub's a desperate bird, Since it lives in perpetual passion: Its taste in costume is entirely absurd- It is ages ahead of the fashion:
"But it knows any friend it has met once before: It never will look at a bribe: And in charity meetings it stands at the door, And collects-though it does not subscribe.
"You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue: You condense it with locusts and tape: Still keeping one principal object in view- To preserve its symmetrical shape."
The Butcher would gladly have talked till next day, But he felt that the lesson must end, And he wept with delight in attempting to say He considered the Beaver his friend.
While the Beaver confessed, with affectionate looks More eloquent even than tears, It had learned in ten minutes far more than all books Would have taught it in seventy years.
Such friends, as the Beaver and Butcher became, Have seldom if ever been known; In winter or summer, 'twas always the same- You could never meet either alone.
And when quarrels arose-as one frequently finds Quarrels will, spite of every endeavour- The song of the Jubjub recurred to their minds, And cemented their friendship for ever!
Fit the Sixth
THE BARRISTER'S DREAM
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway share; They charmed it with smiles and soap.
But the Barrister, weary of proving in vain That the Beaver's lace making was wrong, Fell asleep, and in dreams saw the creature quite plain That his fancy had dwelt on so long.
He dreamed that he stood in a shadowy Court, Where the Snark, with a glass in its eye, Dressed in gown, bands, and wig, was defending a pig On the charge of deserting its sty.
The Witnesses proved, without error or flaw, That the sty was deserted when found: And the Judge kept explaining the state of the law In a soft under current of sound.
The indictment had never been clearly expressed, And it seemed that the Snark had begun, And had spoken three hours, before any one guessed What the pig was supposed to have done.
The Jury had each formed a different view (Long before the indictment was read), And they all spoke at once, so that none of them knew One word that the others had said.
"You must know-" said the Judge: but the Snark exclaimed "Fudge!" That statute is obsolete quite! Let me tell you, my friends, the whole question depends On an ancient manorial right.
"The fact of Desertion I will not dispute; But its guilt, as I trust, is removed (So far as related to the costs of this suit) By the Alibi which has been proved.
But the Judge said he never had summed up before; So the Snark undertook it instead, And summed it so well that it came to far more Than the Witnesses ever had said!
When the verdict was called for, the Jury declined, As the word was so puzzling to spell; But they ventured to hope that the Snark wouldn't mind Undertaking that duty as well.
So the Snark found the verdict, although, as it owned, It was spent with the toils of the day: When it said the word "GUILTY!" the Jury all groaned, And some of them fainted away.
Then the Snark pronounced sentence, the Judge being quite Too nervous to utter a word: When it rose to its feet, there was silence like night, And the fall of a pin might be heard.
The Judge left the Court, looking deeply disgusted: But the Snark, though a little aghast, As the lawyer to whom the defense was entrusted, Went bellowing on to the last.
CHAPTER three: THE GOTHS
'Was his call of the spirit or of the flesh?' How should he test that problem?
True; but, he wished to convert the world.... was not that spiritual?
The barbarians shouted with delight.
'Asgard?
Where was the Caucasus?
In Paradise-in Indian Aethiopia-in Aethiopian India.
Where were they?
'As good as Thor's when he caught Snake Midgard with the bullock's head,' said Wulf.
'Fresh beef cheap there, Prince Wulf, eh?' quoth Smid; 'I must look over the arrow heads.'
'Curse the monk!' growled Wulf.
'Why should he not know as well as the prefect?
'Don't look so cross at me, Prince Wulf; I'm sure it's not my fault; I could only say what the monk told me,' whispered poor Pelagia.
'Who looks cross at you, my queen?' roared the Amal. 'Let me have him out here, and by Thor's hammer, I'll-'
I shall do as I threatened, and run away with Prince Wulf, if you are not good.
'See you here, Wulf the son of Ovida, and warriors all!
Don't look angry, Wulf.
Let's go back; send over for any of the tribes; send to Spain for those Vandals-they have had enough of Adolf by now, curse him!--I'll warrant them; get together an army, and take Constantinople.
I'll be Augustus, and Pelagia, Augusta; you and Smid here, the two Caesars; and we'll make the monk the chief of the eunuchs, eh?--anything you like for a quiet life; but up this accursed kennel of hot water I go no farther.
Women are all prophetesses, every one of them.'
'When they are not harlots,' growled Wulf to himself.
And did we not keep our oath?
If the bison bull lie down and wallow, what will the herd do for a leader? If the king wolf lose the scent, how will the pack hold it?
'Can you answer that, Wulf?' shouted a dozen voices.
Did not Alaric the king love it well?
'Not for worlds!
That's right, my Smid, don't use the knife!
He spoke the heart of the crew; the sleeping wolf in them had been awakened by the struggle, and blood they would have; and not frantically, like Celts or Egyptians, but with the cool humorous cruelty of the Teuton, they rose altogether, and turning Philammon over on his back, deliberated by what death he should die.
I cannot bear it!'
'The warriors are free men, my darling, and know what is proper.
And what can the life of such a brute be to you?'
The Goths drew back.
'Go back, pretty woman!
Smid, give him to me.
'Give him us, Prince Wulf!
And he lifted up the prostrate monk.
'He shakes his head!
He does not like it!
He is craven!
Let us have him!'
However, we may as well make him useful at once; so give him an oar.'
CHAPTER two.
AN INVITATION.
It is a curious fact, and makes life very interesting, that, generally speaking, none of us have any expectation that things are going to happen till the very moment when they do happen.
No instinct bids us to delay or to hasten the opening of the letter or telegram, or the lifting of the latch of the door at which stands the messenger of good or ill.
And because it may be, and often is, happy tidings that come, and joyful things which happen, each fresh day as it dawns upon us is like an unread story, full of possible interest and adventure, to be made ours as soon as we have cut the pages and begun to read.
Nothing whispered to Katy Carr, as she sat at the window mending a long rent in Johnnie's school coat, and saw mrs Ashe come in at the side gate and ring the office bell, that the visit had any special significance for her.
mrs Ashe often did come to the office to consult dr Carr.
Amy might not be quite well, Katy thought, or there might be a letter with something about Walter in it, or perhaps matters had gone wrong at the house, where paperers and painters were still at work.
For mrs Ashe was asking papa to let her do the very thing of all others that she most longed to do; she was asking him to let Katy go with her to Europe!
"I got tired and run down while Walter was ill, and I don't seem to throw it off as I hoped I should.
Don't you think so yourself?"
"Yes, I do," dr Carr admitted.
But if you will let me have Katy, dr Carr, it will settle all my difficulties.
I do hope you will consent."
"How long do you mean to be away?" asked dr Carr, divided between pleasure at these compliments to Katy and dismay at the idea of losing her.
"About a year, I think.
My plans are rather vague as yet; but my idea was to spend a few weeks in Scotland and England first,--I have some cousins in London who will be good to us; and an old friend of mine married a gentleman who lives on the Isle of Wight; perhaps we might go there.
Then we could cross over to France and visit Paris and a few other places; and before it gets cold go down to Nice, and from there to Italy.
Katy would like to see Italy.
Don't you think so?"
"I dare say she would," said dr Carr, with a smile.
"She would be a queer girl if she didn't."
Then toward spring I should like to go to Florence and Venice, and visit the Italian lakes and Switzerland in the early summer. But all this depends on your letting Katy go.
If you decide against it, I shall give the whole thing up.
You understand, Doctor, she is to be my guest all through.
I am sure you won't deny me, when I have so set my heart upon having her."
mrs Ashe was very pretty and persuasive, but still dr Carr hesitated. To send Katy for a year's pleasuring in Europe was a thing that had never occurred to his mind as possible.
He finally consented to take time for consideration before making his decision.
"I will talk it over with Katy," he said.
"The child ought to have a say in the matter; and whatever we decide, you must let me thank you in her name as well as my own for your great kindness in proposing it."
"Doctor, I'm not kind at all, and I don't want to be thanked.
My desire to take Katy with me to Europe is purely selfish.
I am a lonely person," she went on; "I have no mother or sister, and no cousins of my own age. My brother's profession keeps him at sea; I scarcely ever see him.
I have no one but a couple of old aunts, too feeble in health to travel with me or to be counted on in case of any emergency.
You see, I am a real case for pity."
mrs Ashe spoke gayly, but her brown eyes were dim with tears as she ended her little appeal.
dr Carr, who was soft hearted where women were concerned, was touched.
Perhaps his face showed it, for mrs Ashe added in a more hopeful tone,--
"But I won't tease any more.
I know you will not refuse me unless you think it right and necessary; and," she continued mischievously, "I have great faith in Katy as an ally.
I am pretty sure that she will say that she wants to go."
And indeed Katy's cry of delight when the plan was proposed to her said that sufficiently, without need of further explanation.
To go to Europe for a year with mrs Ashe and Amy seemed simply too delightful to be true.
dr Carr's objections, his reluctance to part with her, melted before the radiance of her satisfaction.
He had no idea that Katy would care so much about it.
After all, it was a great chance,--perhaps the only one of the sort that she would ever have. mrs Ashe could well afford to give Katy this treat, he knew; and it was quite true what she said, that it was a favor to her as well as to Katy.
This train of reasoning led to its natural results.
dr Carr began to waver in his mind.
But, the first excitement over, Katy's second thoughts were more sober ones.
How could papa manage without her for a whole year, she asked herself.
He would miss her, she well knew, and might not the charge of the house be too much for Clover?
A host of housewifely cares began to troop through Katy's mind, and a little pucker came into her forehead, and a worried look across the face which had been so bright a few minutes before.
"She is only twenty one," he reflected; "hardly out of childhood.
I don't want her to settle into an anxious, drudging state and lose her youth with caring for us all.
She shall go; though how we are to manage without her I don't see.
"Little Clover" came gallantly "to the fore" when the first shock of surprise was over, and she had relieved her mind with one long private cry over having to do without Katy for a year.
Anything and everything seemed possible to secure it for her; and she made light of all Katy's many anxieties and apprehensions.
"My dear child, I know a flannel undershirt when I see one, just as well as you do," she declared.
"Tucks in Johnnie's dress, forsooth!
why, of course.
Ripping out a tuck doesn't require any superhuman ingenuity! Give me your scissors, and I'll show you at once.
Quince marmalade? Debby can make that.
I'll make the spiced peaches!
I'll order the kindling!
Don't worry about us.
Wouldn't that be fine?" and Clover laughed merrily.
"So, Katy darling, cast that shadow from your brow, and look as a girl ought to look who's going to Europe.
"Not a very convenient position for packing," said Katy, smiling.
"Yes, it is, if you just turn your trunk upside down!
When I think of all the delightful things you are going to do, I can hardly sit still.
"So do I," said Katy, soberly.
"It was the kindest thing!
I can't think why she did it."
"Well, I can," replied Clover, always ready to defend Katy even against herself.
"She did it because she wanted you, and she wanted you because you are the dearest old thing in the world, and the nicest to have about.
You needn't say you're not, for you are!
Now, Katy, don't waste another thought on such miserable things as pickles and undershirts.
We shall get along perfectly well, I do assure you.
Just fix your mind instead on the dome of saint Peter's, or try to fancy how you'll feel the first time you step into a gondola or see the Mediterranean.
There will be a moment!
I feel a forty horse power of housekeeping developing within me; and what fun it will be to get your letters!
We shall stick out all over with knowledge before you come back; and this makes it a plain duty to go, if it were only for our sakes." With these zealous promises, Katy was forced to be content.
Indeed, contentment was not difficult with such a prospect of delight before her.
When once her little anxieties had been laid aside, the idea of the coming journey grew in pleasantness every moment.
But they didn't know that, and it made no real difference.
Katy learned a great deal while thus talking over what she was to see and do.
She read every scrap she could lay her hand on which related to Rome or Florence or Venice or London.
The driest details had a charm for her now that she was likely to see the real places.
She went about with scraps of paper in her pocket, on which were written such things as these: "Forum.
When built?
By whom built?
More than one?"
"Cecilia Metella.
People always wish this when they are starting for Europe; and they wish it more and more after they get there, and realize of what value exact ideas and information and a fuller knowledge of the foreign languages are to all travellers; how they add to the charm of everything seen, and enhance the ease of everything done.
All Burnet took an interest in Katy's plans, and almost everybody had some sort of advice or help, or some little gift to offer.
Debby's sister in law brought a bundle of dried chamomile for the same purpose.
mrs Hall's gift was a warm and very pretty woollen wrapper of dark blue flannel, with a pair of soft knitted slippers to match.
Old mr Worrett sent a note of advice, recommending Katy to take a quinine pill every day that she was away, never to stay out late, because the dews "over there" were said to be unwholesome, and on no account to drink a drop of water which had not been boiled.
Miss Inches sent a "History of Europe" in five fat volumes, which was so heavy that it had to be left at home.
In fact, a good many of Katy's presents had to be left at home, including a bronze paper weight in the shape of a griffin, a large pair of brass screw candlesticks, and an ormolu inkstand with a pen rest attached, which weighed at least a pound and a half.
These Katy laid aside to enjoy after her return.
mrs Ashe and Cousin Helen had both warned her of the inconvenient consequences of weight in baggage; and by their advice she had limited herself to a single trunk of moderate size, besides a little flat valise for use in her stateroom.
Clover's gift was a set of blank books for notes, journals, etc
In one of these, Katy made out a list of "Things I must see," "Things I must do," "Things I would like to see," "Things I would like to do." Another she devoted to various good shopping addresses which had been given her; for though she did not expect to do any shopping herself, she thought mrs Ashe might find them useful.
He also gave her five English sovereigns.
"Those are for immediate use," he said.
"Put the notes away carefully, and don't lose them.
mrs Ashe will explain how.
"But, papa," protested Katy, opening wide her candid eyes, "I didn't expect you to give me any money, and I'm afraid you are giving me too much.
Really and truly, I don't want to buy things.
I shall see everything, you know, and that's enough."
Her father only laughed.
"You'll be wiser and greedier before the year is out, my dear," he replied.
"Three hundred dollars won't go far, as you'll find.
"Papa!
I should think not!" cried Katy, with unsophisticated horror.
One very interesting thing was to happen before they sailed, the thought of which helped both Katy and Clover through the last hard days, when the preparations were nearly complete, and the family had leisure to feel dull and out of spirits.
Katy was to make Rose Red a visit.
Rose had by no means been idle during the three years and a half which had elapsed since they all parted at Hillsover, and during which the girls had not seen her.
mrs Ashe had taken passage in the "Spartacus," sailing from Boston; and it was arranged that Katy should spend the last two days before sailing, with Rose, while mrs Ashe and Amy visited an old aunt in Hingham.
To see Rose in her own home, and Rose's husband, and Rose's baby, was only next in interest to seeing Europe.
"My dearest child,--Your note made me dance with delight.
It is too enchanting, the whole of it.
I put it at the head of all the nice things that ever happened, except my baby.
Write the moment you get this by what train you expect to reach Boston, and when you roll into the station you will behold two forms, one tall and stalwart, the other short and fatsome, waiting for you.
They will be those of Deniston and myself.
The baby is both good and beautiful, and you will adore her.
I am neither; but you know all about me, and I always did adore you and always shall.
My funny little house, which is quite a dear little house too, assumes a new interest in my eyes from the fact that you so soon are to see it.
"I saw Silvery Mary the other day and told her you were coming.
"Your loving
"ROSE RED."
"She never signs herself Browne, I observe," said Clover, as she finished the letter.
"Oh, Rose Red Browne would sound too funny.
What fun it will be to see her and little Rose!"
"And Deniston Browne," put in Clover.
The last day came, as last days will.
He now proceeded to prepare and paste on two square cards, labelled respectively, "Hold" and "State room." mrs Hall had told them that this was the correct thing to do.
The first bell rang.
Katy kissed everybody quietly and went on board with her father.
Her parting from him, hardest of all, took place in the midst of a crowd of people; then he had to leave her, and as the wheels began to revolve she went out on the side deck to have a last glimpse of the home faces.
Why had she said she would go?
What was all Europe in comparison with what she was leaving?
Life was so short, how could she take a whole year out of it to spend away from the people she loved best?
But it was not left for her to choose.
But there were mrs Ashe and Amy, inclined to be homesick also, and in need of cheering; and Katy, as she tried to brighten them, gradually grew bright herself, and recovered her hopeful spirits.
Burnet pulled less strongly as it got farther away, and Europe beckoned more brilliantly now that they were fairly embarked on their journey.
CHAPTER eight-GREAT CITY SNOBS
Notes of admiration (!), of interrogation (?), of remonstrance, approval, or abuse, come pouring into mr
PUNCH'S box.
No; far from it.
If his lordship's boots are dirty, it is because he is Lord b, and walks.
There is nothing snobbish in having only one pair of boots, or a favourite pair; and certainly nothing snobbish in desiring to have them cleaned.
Great City Snobs are the next in the hierarchy, and ought to be considered.
But here is a difficulty.
The great City Snob is commonly most difficult of access.
Unless you are a capitalist, you cannot visit him in the recesses of his bank parlour in Lombard Street.
Unless you are a sprig of nobility there is little hope of seeing him at home.
In a great City Snob firm there is generally one partner whose name is down for charities, and who frequents Exeter Hall; you may catch a glimpse of another (a scientific City Snob) at my Lord N----'s SOIREES, or the lectures of the London Institution; of a third (a City Snob of taste) at picture auctions, at private views of exhibitions, or at the Opera or the Philharmonic.
But intimacy is impossible, in most cases, with this grave, pompous, and awful being.
In other countries of Europe, the Banking Snob is more expansive and communicative than with us, and receives all the world into his circle.
They entertain all the world, even the poor, at their FETES.
Prince Polonia, at Rome, and his brother, the Duke of Strachino, are also remarkable for their hospitalities.
I like the spirit of the first named nobleman.
It is a comfort to be able to gratify such grandees with a farthing or two; it makes the poorest man feel that he can do good.
'The Polonias have intermarried with the greatest and most ancient families of Rome, and you see their heraldic cognizance (a mushroom or on an azure field) quartered in a hundred places in the city with the arms of the Colonnas and Dorias.
I like to see such.
I am of a savage and envious nature,--I like to see these two humbugs which, dividing, as they do, the social empire of this kingdom between them, hate each other naturally, making truce and uniting, for the sordid interests of either.
I like to see an old aristocrat, swelling with pride of race, the descendant of illustrious Norman robbers, whose blood has been pure for centuries, and who looks down upon common Englishmen as a free American does on a nigger,--I like to see old Stiffneck obliged to bow down his head and swallow his infernal pride, and drink the cup of humiliation poured out by Pump and Aldgate's butler.
'Pump and Aldgate, says he, 'your grandfather was a bricklayer, and his hod is still kept in the bank.
Your pedigree begins in a workhouse; mine can be dated from all the royal palaces of Europe.
I came over with the Conqueror; I am own cousin to Charles Martel, Orlando Furioso, Philip Augustus, peter the Cruel, and Frederick Barbarossa. I quarter the Royal Arms of Brentford in my coat.
I despise you, but I want money; and I will sell you my beloved daughter, Blanche Stiffneck, for a hundred thousand pounds, to pay off my mortgages.
Old Pump and Aldgate clutches at the bargain.
And a comfortable thing it is to think that birth can be bought for money.
So you learn to value it.
Why should we, who don't possess it, set a higher store on it than those who do?
Old Pump and Aldgate buys the article and pays the money.
The sale of the girl's person is blessed by a Bishop at saint George's, Hanover Square, and next year you read, 'At Roehampton, on Saturday, the Lady Blanche Pump, of a son and heir.
After this interesting event, some old acquaintance, who saw young Pump in the parlour at the bank in the City, said to him, familiarly, 'How's your wife, Pump, my boy?'
mr Pump looked exceedingly puzzled and disgusted, and, after a pause, said, 'LADY BLANCHE PUMP' is pretty well, I thank you.'
'OH, I THOUGHT SHE WAS YOUR WIFE!' said the familiar brute, Snooks, wishing him good bye; and ten minutes after, the story was all over the Stock Exchange, where it is told, when young Pump appears, to this very day.
We can imagine the weary life this poor Pump, this martyr to Mammon, is compelled to undergo.
Pump the Second becomes chief of the house, spins more and more money, marries his son to an Earl's daughter.
A NIGHT'S WORK
For a few seconds Darrell tried vainly to recall what had awakened him. Low, confused sounds occasionally reached his ears, but they seemed part of his own troubled dreams.
The heat was intolerable; he raised himself to the open window that he might get a breath of cooler air; his head whirled, but the half sitting posture seemed to clear his brain, and he recalled his surroundings.
Suddenly he heard a muttered oath in one of the sections, followed by an order, low, but peremptory,--
"No noise!
Hand over, and be quick about it!"
Instantly Darrell comprehended the situation.
Peering cautiously between the curtains, he saw, at the forward end of the sleeper, a masked man with a revolver in each hand, while the mirror behind him revealed another figure at the rear, masked and armed in like manner.
He thought at once of young Whitcomb, but no sound came from the opposite section, and he sank quietly back upon his pillow.
"Hand out your valuables!"
A man of medium height, wearing a mask and full beard, stood over him. Darrell quietly handed over his watch and purse, noting as he did so the man's hands, white, well formed, well kept.
He half expected a further demand, as the purse contained only a few small bills and some change, the bulk of his money being secreted about the mattress, as was his habit; but the man turned with peculiar abruptness to the opposite section, as one who had a definite object in view and was in haste to accomplish it.
The man had been a spy sent out by the band now holding the train, and Whitcomb's money was without doubt the particular object of the hold up.
"Hand over that money, young man, and no fuss about it, either!"
Whitcomb, instantly awake, gazed at the masked face without a word or movement.
Darrell, powerless to aid his friend, watched intently, dreading some rash act on his part to which his impetuous nature might prompt him.
"No fooling!
Hand that money over, lively!"
A quick, desperate, silent struggle followed.
"Fool!" he heard the man mutter, with an oath.
"For God's sake, see if there is a surgeon aboard!
Here is a man stabbed, dying; don't stop to talk of money when a life is at stake!"
When it became known throughout the train what had occurred, the greatest excitement followed.
His lips moved; Darrell bent his head still lower to listen.
"How did it happen?" the latter inquired, recognizing Darrell for the first time in the dim light.
"Too bad!" said Parkinson.
"He ought never to have made a bluff of that sort; there were too many odds against him."
Yes, that was bad business for him, poor fellow!
I wonder, by the way, if it was all taken."
"mr Walcott, there is no use dallying or beating about the bush; I want this partnership terminated at once.
You will not kill him?" she breathed rather than whispered.
As Walcott listened, the sneer on his face deepened.
"Supposing we come at once to the point of dissolving our partnership; it cannot be done any too quickly for me. May I inquire on what terms you propose to settle?"
"Not a step farther, or you are a dead man!"
"I am all right," she cried, brightly; "look after papa, first; then we will attend to this creature."
With the revolver still levelled at Walcott, Kate slowly advanced towards him.
"Give me that weapon!" she demanded.
At sight of her, Walcott's face grew livid.
"No, no, Senor, a little turn of the wrist, so slight you would not see, would cause death.
I will take it from him; the viper dare not sting me!"
"Here is one, papa, to whom we owe much.
"Yes, Senor; I have the papers to prove it."
"How about the past year?
He raised his hand and the revolver gleamed in the light.
"Don't be rash or foolish; let the law take its course."
No, by God!
As Kate and her strange companion parted, the former inquired, "Why did you ask me not to shoot him?
You surely cannot love him!"
"Who is it?" inquired Montague.
Tell Alice to take my word for him."
His face was round like a full moon, and out of it looked two little eyes like those of a pig.
"Good evening.
There was a moment's pause.
"mr Gamble comes from Pittsburg," interposed Oliver.
"Are you in business there?"
"Made my pile, so to speak, and got out.
I want to see the world a bit before I get too old."
But it proved not very difficult to talk with the gentleman from Pittsburg.
He spoke for himself, however,--he had important work to do, and must be excused.
"Glad to see you again."
"Yes, do," said mr Gamble, cordially.
"Poor chap-it really was hard luck, you know.
It wasn't his fault.
"No," said Montague, but he knew to what the other referred.
"He is an old friend of mine," said Gamble; "he told me all about it.
And the public went wild, and they made him resign-just imagine it!"
"They're a lively crowd, the Steel fellows," laughed the other. "They want to make Davidson resign, too, but he'll fight them.
You should hear his story!"
"It's too bad," said the other, earnestly.
"I have talked to them sometimes, but it don't do any good.
If you're buying pictures, there's an end to it-you get your walls covered sooner or later.
"Too bad, too bad," he repeated.
I've been fighting the Trust, and last year they bought me out, and now I'm seeing the world."
mr Gamble relapsed into thought again.
"No, no, they live in Pittsburg," was the answer.
"I've got four daughters-all in college.
They're stunning girls, I tell you-I'd like you to meet them, mr Montague."
"That man," exclaimed the other.
"Why, I thought you would like to meet him," said Oliver; "he is an interesting chap."
"Why, you are talking nonsense!" exclaimed Oliver; "he knows the best people-"
"Where did you meet him?" asked Montague.
He has been living in Brooklyn this winter.
He knows all the navy people."
Montague stared at him.
"Oliver, you don't mean it," he said.
"That fellow in Society!"
Why not?"
"But his wife and his daughters!" exclaimed the other.
"Oh, that's not it-the family stays in Pittsburg.
"Leave that to him."
"Oh, stuff!" said Oliver.
He won't hurt Alice.
He gave her a good time this evening, and I wager she'll like him before he gets through. He's really a good-natured chap; the chief trouble with him is that he gets confidential."
"Is there nothing we can do about it?"
"I hope so," said Montague.
"They say he's making barrels of money," said Oliver; then he added, longingly, "My God, I wish I had a trust company to play with!"
"Why a trust company particularly?" asked the other.
"It's the easiest graft that's going," said Oliver.
"He might just as well own it," was the reply.
"By the way," Oliver remarked after a moment, "the Prentices have asked Alice up to Newport.
Alice seems to be quite taken with that young chap, Curtiss."
"He seems a very decent fellow."
"No doubt," said the other.
fourteen
HE DEFENDS CAMPAIGN METHODS
"This is a fine Sunday morning in spite of the gloom into which the approaching death of the campaign should plunge us all."
"You think that, do you?" observed the Bibliomaniac.
"Well, I don't agree with you.
I for one am sick and tired of politics, and it will be a great relief to me when it is all over."
"Do you mean to say that a Presidential campaign does not keep your nerve centres in a constant state of pleasurable titillation?
Why, to me it is what a bag full of nuts must be to a squirrel.
I fairly gloat over these quadrennial political campaigns of ours.
They are to me among the most exhilarating institutions of modern life.
They satisfy all one's zest for warfare without the distressing shedding of blood which attends real war, and regarded from the standpoint of humor, I know of nothing that, to the eye of an ordinarily keen observer, is more provocative of good, honest, wholesome mirth."
"I don't see it," said mr Bib.
"To my mind, the average political campaign is just a vulgar scrap in which men who ought to know better descend to all sorts of despicable trickery merely to gain the emoluments of office.
This quest for the flesh pots of politics, so far from being diverting, is, to my notion, one of the most deplorable exhibitions of human weakness that modern civilization, so called, has produced.
A couple of men are put up for the most dignified office known to the world-both are gentlemen by birth and education, men of honor, men who, you would think, would scorn baseness as they hate poison-and then what happens?
For three weary months the followers of each attack the character and intelligence of the other until, if you really believed what was said of either, neither in your estimation would have a shred of reputation left.
Is that either diverting or elevating or educational or, indeed, anything but deplorable?"
"It's perfectly fine," said the Idiot, "to think that we have men in the country whose characters are such that they can stand four months of such a test.
That's what I find elevating in it.
Even old Diogenes, who spent his life looking for an honest man, would have to admit every four years that he could spot him instantly by merely coming to this country and taking his choice from among the several candidates."
"You must admit, however," said the Bibliomaniac, "that a man with an honorable name must find it unpleasant to have such outrageous stories told of him."
"Not a bit of it," laughed the Idiot.
You know well enough that he either never did what is charged against him, or at least that the story is greatly exaggerated-he may have stuck a pin into the cook, and played some boyish trick upon some of his relatives-but the story on the face of it is untrue and therefore harmless.
Similarly with the Democratic candidate.
It hurts no one, therefore, and provokes a great deal of innocent mirth.
You don't yourself believe that last yarn about the Prohibition candidate, do you?"
"I haven't heard any yarn about him," said the Bibliomaniac.
"That he is the owner of a brewery up in Rochester, and backs fifteen saloons and a pool room in New York?" said the Idiot.
"Of course I don't," said the Bibliomaniac.
"Who does?"
"Nobody," said the Idiot; "and therefore the story doesn't hurt the man's reputation a bit, or interfere with his chances of election in the least.
Take that other story published in a New York newspaper that on the tenth of last August Thompson Bondifeller's yacht was seen anchored for six hours off Tom Watson's farm, two hundred miles from the sea, and that the Populist candidate, disguised as a bank president, went off with the trust magnate on a cruise from atlanta georgia, to Oklahoma-you don't believe that, do you?"
"It's preposterous on the face of it," said mr Bib.
"Well, that's the way the thing works," said the Idiot.
"And that's why I think there's a lot of bully good fun to be had out of a political campaign.
I love anything that arouses the imagination of a people too much given over to the pursuit of the cold, hard dollar.
No people can progress that lacks imagination.
Politics is an emery wheel that keeps our wits polished."
"Well, granting all that you say is true," said the Bibliomaniac, "the intrusion upon a man's private life that politics makes possible-surely you cannot condone that."
The Idiot laughed.
"That's the strangest argument of all," he said.
"The very idea of a man who deliberately chooses public life as the sphere of his activities seeking to hide behind his private life is preposterous.
The fellow who does that, mr Bib, wants to lead a double life, and that is reprehensible.
The man who offers himself to the people hasn't any business to tie a string to any part of him.
If he beats his mother in law, and eats asparagus with the sugar tongs, and doesn't pay his grocer, the public have a right to know it.
If he has children, the voters are perfectly justified in asking what kind of children they are, since the voters own the White House furniture, and if the Jim Jones children wipe their feet on plush chairs, and shoot holes in the paintings with their bean snappers and putty blowers, Uncle Sam, as a landlord and owner of the premises, ought to be warned beforehand.
You wouldn't yourself rent a furnished residence to a man whose children were known to have built bonfires in the parlor of their last known home, would you?"
"I think not," smiled the Bibliomaniac.
"Then you cannot complain if Uncle Sam is equally solicitous about the personal paraphernalia of the man who asks to occupy his little cottage on the Potomac," said the Idiot.
"So it happens that when a man runs for the Presidency the persons who intrude upon his private life, as you put it, are conferring a real service upon their fellow citizens.
You may say that the lady is not running for a public office, and that, therefore, she should be protected from public scrutiny, but that is a fallacy.
A man's wife is his better half and his children are a good part of the remainder, and what they do or don't do becomes a matter of legitimate public concern.
"Then you approve of these stories of candidates' cousins, the prattling anecdotes of their grandchildren, these paragraphs narrating the doings of their uncles in law, and all that?" sneered the Bibliomaniac.
"Certainly, I do," said the Idiot.
"Say, mr Idiot," put in the Poet, at this point, "who are you going to vote for, anyhow?"
"Don't ask me," laughed the Idiot.
"I don't know yet.
I admire all the candidates personally very much."
"But what are your politics-Republican or Democratic?" asked the Lawyer.
"Oh, that's different," said the Idiot.
"I'm a Sammycrat."
"A what?" cried the Idiot's fellow boarders in unison.
"A Sammycrat," said the Idiot.
"I'm for Uncle Sam every time.
"'Yes.
"Yes!
"But WHAT DID you see?
"I will not have it; I will not do it!
I will tell everything!
"But I will go first!" said the shadow.
CHAPTER three.
THE MEETING.
But Denis Oglethorpe did not appear again for several days.
Perhaps business detained him; perhaps he went oftener to see Priscilla.
At any rate, he did not call again until the end of the week.
Lady Throckmorton was in her private room when he came, and as he made his entrance with as little ceremony as usual, he ran in upon Theodora. Now, to tell the truth, he had, until this moment, forgotten all about that young person's very existence.
He saw so many pretty girls in a day's round, and he was so often too busy to notice half of them-though he was an admirer of pretty girls-that it was nothing new to see one and forget her, until chance threw them together again.
Of course, he had noticed Theodora North that first night.
How could a man help noticing her?
And the something beautifully over awed and bashfully curious in her lovely, uncommon eyes, had half amused him.
And yet, until this moment, he had forgotten her, with the assistance of proofs, and printers, and Priscilla.
"To be sure; I had forgotten Theodora."
But Theodora had not forgotten him.
The moment she saw him she stood up blushing, and with a light in her eyes.
It was odd how un English she looked, and yet how thoroughly English she was in that delicious, uncomfortable trick of blushing vividly upon all occasions.
She did not feel stately at all; she only felt somewhat confused, and rather glad that mr Denis Oglethorpe had surprised her by coming again.
How mr Denis Oglethorpe would have smiled if he had known what an innocent commotion his simple presence created!
"I will go and tell her you are here." There were no bells in the house at Downport, and no servants to answer if any one had rang one, and, very naturally, Theo forgot she was not at Downport.
"Excuse me.
No," said mr Denis Oglethorpe.
"I would not disturb her on any account; and, besides, I know she will be down directly.
She never reads late in the evening.
This is a very handsome dog, Miss North."
"Very handsome, indeed," was Theo's reply.
"Come here, Sabre."
Sabre stalked majestically to her side, and laid his head upon her knee. Theo stroked him softly, raising her eyes quite seriously to mr Oglethorpe's face.
"He reminds me of Sir Dugald himself," she said.
mr Denis Oglethorpe smiled faintly.
"Does he?" he returned, as quietly as possible, and then his glance meeting Theo's, she broke into a little burst of horror stricken self reproach.
"Oh, dear!" she exclaimed.
"I oughtn't to have said that, ought I? I forgot how rude it would sound; but, indeed, I only meant that Sabre was so slow and heavy, and-and so indifferent to people, somehow.
I don't think he cares about being liked at all."
She was so abashed at her blunder, that she looked absolutely imploring, and mr Denis Oglethorpe smiled again.
"There is a little girl staying at Lady Throckmorton's," he had said to Priscilla.
"A relative of hers.
A pretty creature, too, Priscilla, for a bread and butter Miss."
But just at this moment, he thought better of the matter.
What tender, speechful eyes she had!
He was aroused to a recognition of their beauty all at once.
What contour there was in the turn of arm and shoulder under the close fitting purple cloth!
Her unconscious stateliness of girlish form, and the conscious shyness of her manner, were the loveliest inconsistency in the world.
I don't know anything in London so like Sir Dugald as Sir Dugald's dog."
Theodora stroked Sabre, apologetically, but could scarcely find courage to speak.
She had stood somewhat in awe of mr Denis Oglethorpe, even at first, and her discomfort was rapidly increasing.
He must think her dreadfully stupid, though he was good humored enough to make light of her silly speech.
Certainly Priscilla never made such a silly speech in her life; but then, how could one teach French and Latin, and be anything but ponderously discreet?
mr Denis Oglethorpe was not thinking of Priscilla's wisdom, however; he was thinking of Theodora North; he was thinking that he must have been very blind not to have seen before that his friend's niece was a beauty of the first water, young as she was.
But he had been tired and fagged out, he remembered, on the first occasion of their meeting-too tired to think of anything but his appointment at Broome street, and Priscilla's Greek grammar.
And now in recognizing what he had before passed by, he was quite glad to find the girl so young and inexperienced-so modest, in a sweet way.
It was easy, as well as proper enough, to talk to her unceremoniously without the trouble of being diffuse and complimentary. So he made himself agreeable, and Theodora listened until she quite forgot Sir Dugald, and only remembered Sabre, because his big heavy head was on her knee, and she was stroking it.
"No, sir," Theo answered.
I was never even out of Downport before."
"Then we must take you to see the lions," he said, "if Lady Throckmorton will let us, Miss Theodora.
How should you like that?"
"Better than anything in the world," glowing with delighted surprise. "If it wouldn't be too much trouble," she added, quite apologetically.
mr Denis Oglethorpe smiled.
"It would be simply delightful," he said.
"I should like it better than anything in the world, too.
We will appeal to Lady Throckmorton."
"When Priscilla was in London-"
Theodora was beginning a minute later, when the handsome face changed suddenly as her companion turned upon her in evident surprise.
"Priscilla?" he repeated, after her.
"I meant to say Pamela. My eldest sister's name is Pamela, and-and-"
"And you said Priscilla by mistake," interposed Oglethorpe, with a sudden accession of gravity.
"Priscilla is a little like Pamela."
It needed nothing more than this simple slip of Theodora North's tongue to assure him that Lady Throckmorton had been telling her the story of his engagement to Miss Gower, and, as might be anticipated, he was not as devoutly grateful to her ladyship as he might have been.
He was careless to a fault in some things, and punctilious to a fault in others; and he was very punctilious about Priscilla Gower.
He was not an ardent lover, but he was a conscientiously honorable one, and, apart from his respect for his betrothed, he was very impatient of interference with his affairs; and my lady was not chary of interfering when the fancy seized her.
It roused his pride to think how liberally he must have been discussed, and, consequently, when Lady Throckmorton joined them, he was not in the most amiable of moods.
But he managed to end his conversation with Theo unconstrainedly enough.
He even gained her ladyship's consent to their plan.
She had been so used to Pamela, that she would have felt half afraid of being treated with any greater ceremony; but still she could clearly understand that mr Oglethorpe did not speak to her as he would have spoken to Miss Gower.
But free from any touch of light gallantry as his manner toward the girl was, Denis Oglethorpe did not forget her this night.
But he thought of her carelessly and honestly enough, as a beautiful young creature years behind him in experience, and utterly beyond him in all possibility of any sentimental fancy.
The friendship existing between Lady Throckmorton and this young man was a queer, inconsistent sentiment enough, and yet was a friendship, and a mature one.
The two had encountered each other some years ago, when Denis had been by no means in his palmiest days.
In fact, my lady had picked him up when he stood in sore need of friends, and Oglethorpe never forgot a favor.
He never forgot to be grateful to Lady Throckmorton; and so, despite the wide difference between their respective ages and positions, their mutual liking had ripened into a familiarity of relationship which made them more like elder sister and younger brother than anything else.
Oglethorpe, junior, was pretty much what Oglethorpe, senior, had been, and notwithstanding her practical views, Lady Throckmorton liked him none the worse for it.
In fact, she was a woman of caprices even at sixty five, and Denis Oglethorpe was one of her caprices.
And, in like manner, Theodora North became another of them.
Finding her tractable, she became quite fond of her, in her own way, and was at least generous to lavishness in her treatment of her.
"You are very handsome, indeed, Theodora," she said to her a few days after her arrival.
Your figure is perfect, and you have eyes like a Syrian, instead of a commonplace English woman.
Rose pink is just your shade, and some day, when we go out together, I will lend you some of my diamonds."
Theodora was an actual beauty, of an uncommon type, in the face of her ignorance of manners and customs. Pamela had never, at her best, been more than a delicately pretty girl.
In the meantime, Denis Oglethorpe made friendly calls as usual, and always meeting Theodora, found her very pleasant to talk to and look at. He found out her enthusiastic admiration for the poetic effusions of his youth, and in consideration thereof, good humoredly presented her with a copy of the volume, with some very witty verses written on the fly leaf in a flourishing hand.
It was worth while to amuse Theodora, she was so pretty and unassuming in her delight at his carelessly amiable efforts for her entertainment.
She was only a mere child after all at sixteen, with Downport in the background; so he felt quite honestly at ease in being attentive to her girlish requirements.
Better that he should amuse her than that she should be left to the mercy of men who would perhaps have the execrable taste to spoil her pretty childish ways with flattery.
"Don't let all these fine people and fine speeches turn your head, Theodora," he would say, in a tone that might either have been jest or earnest.
"They spoiled me in my infancy, and my unfortunate experience causes me to warn you."
But whether he jested or not, Theo was always inclined to listen to him with some degree of serious belief.
She took his advice when it was proffered, and regarded his wisdom as the wisdom of an oracle.
Who should know better than he what was right?
His indifference to the rule of opinion could only be the result of conscious perfection, and his careless satires were to her the most brilliant of witticisms.
He paid her his first compliment the night the rose colored satin dress came home.
He was conscious of a faint shock of delight on first beholding her.
He had just left Priscilla, pale and heavy eyed, in dun colored merino, poring over a Greek dictionary, and the sudden entering the bright room, and finding himself facing Theodora North in rose colored satin, was a little like electricity.
"Oh! it's Theodora, is it?" he said, slowly, when he recovered himself. "Thank you, Theodora."
"What for?" asked Theo, blushing.
"For the rose colored satin," he returned, complacently.
"It is so very becoming.
You look like a sultana, my dear Theodora."
Theo looked up at him for a second, and then looked down.
Much as she admired mr Denis Oglethorpe, she never quite comprehended him.
He had such an eccentric fashion of being almost curt sometimes.
"I have been making a fine speech to Theodora," he said to Lady Throckmorton, when she came in.
"And she does not comprehend it in the least."
It was somewhat singular, Theo thought, that he should be so silent after this, for he was silent.
He did not talk to her as much as usual, and she was quite sure he paid very little attention to Faust.
But during the final act she found that he was not looking at the stage at all; but was sitting in the shadow of the box curtain watching herself.
She had been deeply interested in Marguerite a minute before, and, in her heart touched pleasure, had leant upon the edge of the box, her whole face thrilled with excitement.
"What is it, Theodora?" he asked, in a low, clear voice.
"Is it Marguerite?"
She looked at him in a little fright at herself.
She did not know why she had exclaimed-she scarcely knew how; but when she met his unembarrassed eyes, she began to think that possibly it might be Marguerite.
Indeed, a second later, she was quite sure it had been Marguerite.
"Yes-I think so," she faltered.
"Poor Marguerite!
If she could only have saved him?"
"How?" he asked.
"I don't-at least I scarcely know; but I think the author ought to have made her save him, someway.
If-if she could have suffered something, or sacrificed something-"
"Would she have done it if she could?" commented Denis, languidly.
He had quite recovered himself by this time.
"I would have done it if I had been Marguerite," Theo half whispered.
In his surprise he forgot his self possession.
He turned upon her suddenly, and meeting her sweet, world ignorant eyes, felt the faint, pained shock once more, and strangely enough his first thought was a disconnected one of Priscilla Gower.
"You?" he said, the next moment.
"Yes, I believe you would, Theodora."
He was sure she would, after that swift glance of his, and-Well, what a happy man he would be for whom this tender young Marguerite would suffer or be sacrificed.
He sat by her side until the curtain fell; but his silent mood seemed to have come upon him again.
Bright as the future was, it left a sense of discomfort, he could not explain why.
He dismissed the carriage, and walked down the street, feeling fairly depressed in spirits.
He had, perhaps, never given the girl a thought before, unless when chance had thrown them together, and even then his thoughts had been common admiring ones.
She had pleased him, and he had tried to amuse her in a careless, well meant fashion, though he had never made fine speeches to her, as nine men out of ten would have done.
He had been so used to Priscilla, that it never occurred to him that a girl so young as this one could be a woman.
And, after all, his blindness had not been the result of any frivolous lack of thought.
A sharp experience had made him as thoroughly a man of the world as a man may be; but it had not made him callous or indifferent to the beauties of life.
No one would ever have called him emotional, or prone to enthusiasms of a weak kind, and yet he was by no means hard of heart.
He had quiet fancies of his own about people and things, and many of these reticent, rarely expressed ideas were reverent, chivalrous ones of women.
The opposing force of a whole world could never have shaken his faith in Priscilla Gower, or touched his respect for her; but though, perhaps, he had never understood it so, he had never felt very enthusiastically concerning her.
Truly, Priscilla Gower and enthusiasm were not in accordance with each other.
Propinquity is the strongest of agents in a love affair, and in Denis Oglethorpe's love affair, propinquity had accomplished what nothing else would have been likely to have done.
The desperate young scribbler of twenty years had been the lodger of the elder Miss Gower, and Priscilla, aged seventeen, had brought in his frugal dinners to him, and receipted his modest bills on their weekly payment.
Priscilla at seventeen, silent, practical, grave and handsome, had, perhaps, softened unconsciously at the sight of his often pale face-he worked so hard and so far into the night; when at length they became friends, Priscilla gravely, and without any hesitation, volunteered to help him.
She could copy well and clearly, and he could come into her aunt's room-it would save fires.
It is easy to guess how the matter terminated.
If ever he won success he determined to give it to Priscilla-and so he told her.
He had worked steadily for her sake, and shielded her from every care that it lay within his power to lighten.
He was not old Miss Elizabeth Gower's lodger now-he was her niece's husband in perspective. He was to marry Priscilla Gower in eight months.
This was why Theodora North, in glistening rose pink satin, sent him home confronting a suddenly raised spirit of pain.
Twice, in one night, he had found himself feeling toward Theodora North as he had never felt toward Priscilla Gower in his life.
Twice, in one night, he had turned his eyes upon this girl of sixteen, and suffered a sudden shock of enthusiasm, or something like it.
She had no right to win such admiration from him-he had no right to give it.
But as his walk in the night air cooled him, it cooled his ardor of self examination somewhat.
His discontent was modified by the time he reached his own door, and took his latch key out of his pocket.
The face that had looked down upon him beneath the light at the head of the stair case, had faded into less striking color-it was only a girl's face again.
He was on better terms with himself, and his weakness seemed less formidable.
"I will keep my promise to morrow," he said, "and Priscilla shall go with us.
Poor Priscilla!--poor girl!
The promise he had made was nothing more than a ratification of the old one.
They were to see the lions together, and Priscilla was to guide them.
And when the morrow came, he found it, after all, safe enough, and an easy enough matter, to tuck Theodora's small, gloved hand under his arm, when they set out on their tour of investigation and discovery.
The girl was pretty enough, too, in her soft, black merino-her "best" dress in Downport-but she was not dazzling.
The little round, black plumed hat was becoming also; but in his now more prosaic mood, he could stand that, too, pretty as it was in an innocent, unconsciously coquettish way.
Theo was never coquettish herself in the slightest degree.
She was not world wise enough for that yet.
She glanced up into his face, brightly.
She remembered what he had told her about his lady friend.
"Do you?" was his reply.
"Then say it to me-let me hear it."
"Miss Gower," she answered, softly, in a pretty reverence for him.
"Miss Priscilla Gower."
He nodded, slightly, with a curious mixture of expressions in his face.
"Yes," he said.
"Miss Gower, or rather Miss Priscilla Gower, as you say. Number twenty three, Broome street; and Broome street is not a fashionable locality, my dear Theodora."
"Isn't it?" queried Theo.
"Why not?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Ask Lady Throckmorton," he said.
"But do you know who Miss Priscilla Gower is, Theodora?"
Her bright eyes crept up to his, half timidly; but she said nothing, so he continued.
"Miss Priscilla Gower is the young lady to whom I am to be married next July.
Did you know that?"
"Yes," answered Theo, looking actually pleased, and blushing beautifully as he looked down at her.
"But I am very much obliged to you for telling me, mr Oglethorpe."
"Why?" he asked.
It was very preposterous, that even though his mood was so prosaic and paternal a one, he was absurdly, vacantly sensible of feeling some uneasiness at the brightness of her upturned face.
For pity's sake, why was it that he was impelled to such a puerile weakness-such a vanity, as he sternly called it.
I hope-oh!
I do hope Miss Priscilla Gower will like me."
He had been looking straight before him while she spoke, but this brought his eyes to hers again, and to her face-bright, appealing, upturned-and he found himself absolutely obliged to steady himself with a jesting speech.
"My dearest Theodora," he said.
"Miss Priscilla Gower could not possibly help it."
She was a trifle afraid of Miss Priscilla.
Miss Priscilla was sitting at the table reading when they entered, and as she rose to greet them, holding her book in one hand, the thought entered Theo's mind that she could comprehend dimly why Lady Throckmorton disliked her, and thought her unsuited to Denis Oglethorpe.
There was an absence of anything girl like in her fine, ivory pale face, somehow, though it was a young face and a handsome face, at whose fine lines and clear contour even a connoisseur could not have caviled.
Its long almond shaped, agate gray eyes, black fringed and lustrous as they were, still were silent eyes-they did not speak even to Denis Oglethorpe.
"I am glad you have come," she said, simply, extending her hand in acknowledgment of Denis's introduction.
The quietness of this greeting speech was a fair sample of all her manner.
She was constitutionally unenthusiastic, if such a thing may be.
The fact that Denis had spoken of her admiringly was sufficient to arouse in her mind an interest in this young creature, who was at once, and so inconsistently, beautiful, timid, and regal, without consciousness.
"Three years more will make her something wonderful, as far as beauty is concerned," he had said; and, accordingly, she had felt some slight pleasure in the anticipation of seeing her.
Yet Theo had some faint misgivings during the day as to whether Miss Priscilla Gower would like her or not.
As Lady Throckmorton had said, it was not a matter of age.
"I hope," said Theodora, when, after their sight seeing was over, she stood on the pavement before the door in Broome street, her nice little hand on Denis Oglethorpe's arm, "I hope you will let me come to see you again, Miss Gower."
Priscilla, standing upon the door step, smiled down on her blooming girl's face, a smile that was a little like moonlight.
All Priscilla's smiles were like moonlight.
"Yes," she said, in her practical manner.
"It will please me very much to see you, Miss Theodora.
Come as often as you can spare the time."
CHAPTER four.
OF THE LIMITS TO THE AUTHORITY OF SOCIETY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL.
What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself?
How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?
Each will receive its proper share, if each has that which more particularly concerns it.
To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly interests society.
These conditions society is justified in enforcing, at all costs to those who endeavour to withhold fulfilment.
But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person's conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself, or needs not affect them unless they like (all the persons concerned being of full age, and the ordinary amount of understanding).
In all such cases there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.
But disinterested benevolence can find other instruments to persuade people to their good, than whips and scourges, either of the literal or the metaphorical sort.
I am the last person to undervalue the self regarding virtues; they are only second in importance, if even second, to the social.
It is equally the business of education to cultivate both.
But even education works by conviction and persuasion as well as by compulsion, and it is by the former only that, when the period of education is past, the self regarding virtues should be inculcated.
Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and avoid the latter.
They should be for ever stimulating each other to increased exercise of their higher faculties, and increased direction of their feelings and aims towards wise instead of foolish, elevating instead of degrading, objects and contemplations.
But neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.
In this department, therefore, of human affairs, Individuality has its proper field of action.
Considerations to aid his judgment, exhortations to strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even obtruded on him, by others; but he himself is the final judge.
All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.
This is neither possible nor desirable.
If he is eminent in any of the qualities which conduce to his own good, he is, so far, a proper object of admiration.
He is so much the nearer to the ideal perfection of human nature.
It would be well, indeed, if this good office were much more freely rendered than the common notions of politeness at present permit, and if one person could honestly point out to another that he thinks him in fault, without being considered unmannerly or presuming.
We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours.
We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates.
We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement.
In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.
They may be proofs of any amount of folly, or want of personal dignity and self respect; but they are only a subject of moral reprobation when they involve a breach of duty to others, for whose sake the individual is bound to have care for himself.
What are called duties to ourselves are not socially obligatory, unless circumstances render them at the same time duties to others.
The term duty to oneself, when it means anything more than prudence, means self respect or self development; and for none of these is any one accountable to his fellow creatures, because for none of them is it for the good of mankind that he be held accountable to them.
If he displeases us, we may express our distaste, and we may stand aloof from a person as well as from a thing that displeases us; but we shall not therefore feel called on to make his life uncomfortable.
He may be to us an object of pity, perhaps of dislike, but not of anger or resentment; we shall not treat him like an enemy of society: the worst we shall think ourselves justified in doing is leaving him to himself, if we do not interfere benevolently by showing interest or concern for him.
It is far otherwise if he has infringed the rules necessary for the protection of his fellow creatures, individually or collectively.
The evil consequences of his acts do not then fall on himself, but on others; and society, as the protector of all its members, must retaliate on him; must inflict pain on him for the express purpose of punishment, and must take care that it be sufficiently severe.
The distinction here pointed out between the part of a person's life which concerns only himself, and that which concerns others, many persons will refuse to admit.
If he injures his property, he does harm to those who directly or indirectly derived support from it, and usually diminishes, by a greater or less amount, the general resources of the community.
And even (it will be added) if the consequences of misconduct could be confined to the vicious or thoughtless individual, ought society to abandon to their own guidance those who are manifestly unfit for it?
And as a supplement to the unavoidable imperfections of law, ought not opinion at least to organise a powerful police against these vices, and visit rigidly with social penalties those who are known to practise them?
There is no question here (it may be said) about restricting individuality, or impeding the trial of new and original experiments in living.
There must be some length of time and amount of experience, after which a moral or prudential truth may be regarded as established: and it is merely desired to prevent generation after generation from falling over the same precipice which has been fatal to their predecessors.
George Barnwell murdered his uncle to get money for his mistress, but if he had done it to set himself up in business, he would equally have been hanged.
No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty.
But with regard to the merely contingent, or, as it may be called, constructive injury which a person causes to society, by conduct which neither violates any specific duty to the public, nor occasions perceptible hurt to any assignable individual except himself; the inconvenience is one which society can afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom.
If grown persons are to be punished for not taking proper care of themselves, I would rather it were for their own sake, than under pretence of preventing them from impairing their capacity of rendering to society benefits which society does not pretend it has a right to exact.
But I cannot consent to argue the point as if society had no means of bringing its weaker members up to its ordinary standard of rational conduct, except waiting till they do something irrational, and then punishing them, legally or morally, for it.
Society has had absolute power over them during all the early portion of their existence: it has had the whole period of childhood and nonage in which to try whether it could make them capable of rational conduct in life.
If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame for the consequences.
Nor is there anything which tends more to discredit and frustrate the better means of influencing conduct, than a resort to the worse.
But the strongest of all the arguments against the interference of the public with purely personal conduct, is that when it does interfere, the odds are that it interferes wrongly, and in the wrong place.
But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it.
And a person's taste is as much his own peculiar concern as his opinion or his purse.
But where has there been seen a public which set any such limit to its censorship? or when does the public trouble itself about universal experience?
These teach that things are right because they are right; because we feel them to be so.
That is too weighty a subject to be discussed parenthetically, and by way of illustration.
And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.
As a first instance, consider the antipathies which men cherish on no better grounds than that persons whose religious opinions are different from theirs, do not practise their religious observances, especially their religious abstinences.
There are few acts which Christians and Europeans regard with more unaffected disgust, than Mussulmans regard this particular mode of satisfying hunger.
Their aversion to the flesh of the "unclean beast" is, on the contrary, of that peculiar character, resembling an instinctive antipathy, which the idea of uncleanness, when once it thoroughly sinks into the feelings, seems always to excite even in those whose personal habits are anything but scrupulously cleanly, and of which the sentiment of religious impurity, so intense in the Hindoos, is a remarkable example.
The practice is really revolting to such a public.
They also sincerely think that it is forbidden and abhorred by the Deity.
Neither could the prohibition be censured as religious persecution.
The only tenable ground of condemnation would be, that with the personal tastes and self regarding concerns of individuals the public has no business to interfere.
The people of all Southern Europe look upon a married clergy as not only irreligious, but unchaste, indecent, gross, disgusting.
What do Protestants think of these perfectly sincere feelings, and of the attempt to enforce them against non Catholics?
Yet, if mankind are justified in interfering with each other's liberty in things which do not concern the interests of others, on what principle is it possible consistently to exclude these cases?
or who can blame people for desiring to suppress what they regard as a scandal in the sight of God and man?
The preceding instances may be objected to, although unreasonably, as drawn from contingencies impossible among us: opinion, in this country, not being likely to enforce abstinence from meats, or to interfere with people for worshipping, and for either marrying or not marrying, according to their creed or inclination.
The next example, however, shall be taken from an interference with liberty which we have by no means passed all danger of.
Wherever the Puritans have been sufficiently powerful, as in New England, and in Great Britain at the time of the Commonwealth, they have endeavoured, with considerable success, to put down all public, and nearly all private, amusements: especially music, dancing, public games, or other assemblages for purposes of diversion, and the theatre.
This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.
To imagine another contingency, perhaps more likely to be realised than the one last mentioned.
There is confessedly a strong tendency in the modern world towards a democratic constitution of society, accompanied or not by popular political institutions.
We have only further to suppose a considerable diffusion of Socialist opinions, and it may become infamous in the eyes of the majority to possess more property than some very small amount, or any income not earned by manual labour.
And they employ a moral police, which occasionally becomes a physical one, to deter skilful workmen from receiving, and employers from giving, a larger remuneration for a more useful service.
If the public have any jurisdiction over private concerns, I cannot see that these people are in fault, or that any individual's particular public can be blamed for asserting the same authority over his individual conduct, which the general public asserts over people in general.
The organ of the Alliance, who would "deeply deplore the recognition of any principle which could be wrested to justify bigotry and persecution," undertakes to point out the "broad and impassable barrier" which divides such principles from those of the association.
Selling fermented liquors, however, is trading, and trading is a social act.
It destroys my primary right of security, by constantly creating and stimulating social disorder.
It invades my right of equality, by deriving a profit from the creation of a misery, I am taxed to support.
The doctrine ascribes to all mankind a vested interest in each other's moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection, to be defined by each claimant according to his own standard.
But this justification, grounded on the direct interest which others have in each individual's observance of the practice, does not apply to the self chosen occupations in which a person may think fit to employ his leisure; nor does it hold good, in the smallest degree, for legal restrictions on amusements.
It is true that the amusement of some is the day's work of others; but the pleasure, not to say the useful recreation, of many, is worth the labour of a few, provided the occupation is freely chosen, and can be freely resigned.
The operatives are perfectly right in thinking that if all worked on Sunday, seven days' work would have to be given for six days' wages: but so long as the great mass of employments are suspended, the small number who for the enjoyment of others must still work, obtain a proportional increase of earnings; and they are not obliged to follow those occupations, if they prefer leisure to emolument.
If a further remedy is sought, it might be found in the establishment by custom of a holiday on some other day of the week for those particular classes of persons.
It remains to be proved that society or any of its officers holds a commission from on high to avenge any supposed offence to Omnipotence, which is not also a wrong to our fellow creatures.
It is a determination not to tolerate others in doing what is permitted by their religion, because it is not permitted by the persecutor's religion.
It is a belief that God not only abominates the act of the misbeliever, but will not hold us guiltless if we leave him unmolested.
I cannot refrain from adding to these examples of the little account commonly made of human liberty, the language of downright persecution which breaks out from the press of this country, whenever it feels called on to notice the remarkable phenomenon of Mormonism.
Other countries are not asked to recognise such unions, or release any portion of their inhabitants from their own laws on the score of Mormonite opinions.
Let them send missionaries, if they please, to preach against it; and let them, by any fair means (of which silencing the teachers is not one), oppose the progress of similar doctrines among their own people.
If civilisation has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilisation.
A civilisation that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy, must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it.
If this be so, the sooner such a civilisation receives notice to quit, the better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until destroyed and regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians.
What was at first obedience to authority became a second nature, and the Parsees to this day abstain both from beef and pork.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
The route lay through Indianapolis, Dayton, Cleveland, Columbus, Buffalo, albany new york, Trenton, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, to Washington.
The police accused the stablemen of being parties to the theft, in which I think they were right.
Money could not buy that dog.
Next came a fight with a wolf; following this, came a narrow escape from a rattlesnake in the road.
I thought he was a "goner" that time for sure, but he soon straightened up.
Six years later it chanced that I lost Jim.
"Oh, Gee," said Ogden wearily.
"I'm feeling a lot worse."
"You haven't drunk your nice soup."
"Feed it to the cat."
"Could you eat a nice bowl of bread and milk, precious?"
"Have a heart," replied the sufferer.
She had always mistrusted the man.
How right events had proved this instinctive feeling.
Through the open window floated sounds of warmth and Summer.
Lord Wisbeach hated little dogs.
"Can I have a word with you, mrs Pett?"
"Certainly, Lord Wisbeach."
"In private, you know."
He then looked meaningly at mrs Pett.
"All right," he said.
"Poor Oggie is not at all well to day," said mrs Pett, when he was gone.
"He is very subject to these attacks.
What do you want to tell me, Lord Wisbeach?"
"mrs Pett, you remember what I told you yesterday?"
"Of course."
mrs Pett started.
It is one of the effects of a successful hunch that it breeds other hunches.
She had been right about Jerry Mitchell; was she to be proved right about the self styled Jimmy Crocker?
"Never.
But-"
"That man," said Lord Wisbeach impassively, "is not your nephew."
"But you-"
Just so.
For a purpose.
I wanted to make him think that I suspected nothing."
"Then you think-?"
"Remember what I said to you yesterday."
"But Skinner-the butler-recognised him?"
"Exactly.
They are working together.
The thing is self evident. Look at it from your point of view.
How simple it is.
"You must come here at once, Lord Wisbeach.
Let us leave it at this then.
I will come here to night and will make it my business to watch these two men.
"It is wonderful of you, Lord Wisbeach."
"Not at all," replied his lordship.
"It will be a pleasure."
When he had gone, mrs Pett remained for some minutes, thinking. She was aflame with excitement.
She felt that she must have further assistance.
He needed to be helped in spite of himself.
A happy solution struck mrs Pett.
She unhooked the receiver, and gave a number.
"I want to speak to mr Sturgis," she said.
"Oh, mr Sturgis," said mrs Pett.
Yes, the mother of Ogden Ford.
I want to consult-You will come up at once?
Thank you so much.
CHAPTER twenty one
CHICAGO ED.
mr Crocker seemed to feel this himself.
"How?
mr Crocker surveyed his repellent features doubtfully.
"Suppose he has a fit!"
mr Crocker eyed this sadly.
"I wish you hadn't thrown that stuff away, Jim.
I could have done with it.
I'm feeling nervous."
"Nonsense, dad!
You're all right!
"Don't do that!" he said huskily.
"It might go off!"
"I should worry!" replied Ogden coldly.
"I'm at the right end of it.
"I got this with cigarette coupons, to shoot rabbits when we went to the country.
"Do you want to murder me?"
"Why not?"
mr Crocker's make-up was trickling down his face in sticky streams.
"Say, did you come to kidnap me?"
Nix on the rough stuff!"
"Keep those hands up!" advised Ogden.
"Sure!
"I'm wit Buck."
"Why didn't Buck come himself?"
To mr Crocker's profound relief Ogden lowered the pistol.
"I'm strong for Buck," he said conversationally.
"We're old pals. Did you see the piece in the paper about him kidnapping me last time?
"Sure," said mr Crocker.
"Say, listen.
If you take me now, Buck's got to come across.
See?"
"I get you, kid."
"Well, if that's understood, all right.
Give me a minute to get some clothes on, and I'll be with you."
"Don't make a noise," said mr Crocker.
"Who's making any noise?
"Who's working this with you?
"Naw.
A new guy."
"Oh?
Say, I don't remember you, if it comes to that."
"You don't?" said mr Crocker a little discomposed.
Which of them are you?"
"Chicago Ed's my monaker."
"Well, you will after dis!" said mr Crocker, happily inspired.
"Take that mask off and let's have a look at you."
"How am I to know you're on the level?"
mr Crocker played a daring card.
"All right," he said, making a move towards the door.
"It's up to youse.
"I'm not saying anything against you.
There's no need to fly off the handle like that."
"I'll tell Buck I couldn't get you," said mr Crocker, moving another step.
"Here, stop!
What's the matter with you?"
"Sure, if you get the conditions.
"All right, then.
Wait till I've got this shoe on, and let's start.
Now I'm ready."
"Beat it quietly."
Sing?"
"Step dis way!" said mr Crocker jocosely.
They left the room cautiously.
One was large, the other small.
They crossed the room together.
Whispered words reached him.
"I thought you said you came in this way."
"Sure."
"Then why's the shutter closed?"
"I fixed it after I was in."
There was a faint scraping sound, followed by a click.
The figures passed through.
A block from the palace we bunched together and, by sheer mass and ferocity, actually stopped the machinelike advance for a few moments. Miscellaneous weapons had been brought from the houses-sledges, stone benches, anything that might break the Quabos' helmets-and handed to us in silence by the noncombatants.
Somebody tugged at my sleeve.
Looking down I saw a little girl.
Disregarding the clutching tentacles entirely, I swung the bar against the helmet.
It cracked.
I swung again and it fell in fragments, spilling the gallons of water it had contained.
"Why art thou here!
Go back to the palace at once!"
"I came to fight beside thee," she answered composedly, though her delicate lips quivered.
Fighting vainly, the population of Zyobor was swept into the palace grounds, then into the building itself.
An ironic picture came to me of the crowding masses of Quabos stuffed into the protection of the outer cave, waiting the outcome of the fight being waged by their warriors.
Though there was little doubt in the minds of any of us as to what the outcome would be.
The Quabos, able only to enter one at a time, halted a moment and there was a badly needed breathing spell.
"We've got to find some drastic means of defence," said the Professor, "or we won't last another three hours."
"If you asked me, I'd say we couldn't last another three hours anyway," replied Stanley with a shrug.
"These fish have out thought us!"
"Nonsense!
"A brace of machine guns...." I murmured hopefully.
"You might as well wish for a dozen light cannon!" snapped the Professor.
"Please try to concentrate, and see if any effective weapon suggests itself to you-something more available at the moment than machine guns."
Frankly I could think of nothing.
What weapon could be called forth to be effective against the thick glass helmets?
"Glass.
What destroys it?
He turned excitedly to the Queen.
"I think we have it!
At least it's worth trying.
"Hast thou, in the palace, any lengths of pipe like to that which the Quabos drag behind them?"
Then she interrupted herself.
"Ah, yes!
The length of hose-made of some linen like fabric of tough, shredded sea weed and covered with a flexible metal sheath-was cut into three pieces each about fifty yards long.
These were connected to three of the largest gas vents of the palace.
Stanley, the Professor and I each took an end.
And we prepared to fight, with fire, the creatures of water.
"It ought to work," Stanley, repeated several times as though trying to reassure himself as well as us.
"Unless," retorted the Professor, "their glass has some special heat and cold resisting quality."
Stanley shrugged.
How such creatures can make glass at all is beyond me!"
Dragging our hose to the big front entrance of the palace, and warning the crowded people to keep their feet clear of it, we prepared to test out the efficiency of this, our last resource against the enemy.
For an instant we paused just inside the doorway, looking out at the ugly, glassed in Things that were massing to attack us again.
The ranks of Quabos had closed in now, till they extended down the street for several hundred yards in close formation-a forest of great pulpy heads with huge eyes that glared unblinkingly at the glittering, pink building that was their objective.
"Light up!" ordered Stanley, setting an example by touching his hose nozzle to the nearest wall jet.
A spurt of fire belched from his hose, streaming out for four or five feet in a solid red cone.
The Professor and I touched off our torches; and we moved slowly out the door toward the ranks of Quabos.
The Quabos in front, supplied with slack in their hoses by those behind, leaped at us with incredible agility.
We fell back a step so that none should get at our backs.
The last stand was begun.
It was not a battle so much as a series of fierce duels.
We parried and thrust with the flaming hoses in an equally desperate effort to prevent it.
There was a sickening smell-and the tentacle was jerked spasmodically away.
I caught the hose in my left hand and turned the fiery jet against the water filled helmet.
A shout of savage exultation broke from my lips.
The tentacle around my arm tightened, then relaxed.
I went toward the next one, swinging the flaring hose in a slow arc as I advanced.
The creature lunged at me and threshed at the burning jet with all four of its feelers.
Nevertheless with a swift move it slapped a tentacle squarely down over the hose nozzle.
The flame was extinguished as the flame of a candle is pinched out between thumb and forefinger.
I retreated.
"Catch!" came a voice behind me.
The Professor swung his four foot jet my way.
And still there appeared to be hundreds of the Quabos left.
By order of the Queen three stout Zyobites stepped up to us and relieved us of our exhausting labor.
And here the Professor took command again.
They move so slowly that you can easily cut off their retreat."
"There's plenty of it.
The Quabos brought it with them." The Professor turned to me again.
"Take metal saws with you.
Run!"
Four of our number were caught, but the rest got through unscathed.
Down a side street we raced, and along a parallel avenue toward the tunnel.
As we went I prayed that all the Quabos had centered their attention on the palace and left their vulnerable water hoses unguarded.
They had!
When we stole up the last block toward the break we found the nearest Quabo was a hundred yards down the street-and working further away with every move.
At once we set to work on the scores of hoses that quivered over the floor with each move of the distant monsters.
The metal was soft enough to be sheered through by the stroke.
The cut ends were smashed so that they could not be crammed down over the tapering jets; but we could use our metal saws for cleaner severances at the other ends.
The giant with the ax stepped from hose to hose.
The end was certain and not long in coming.
We sprayed the monsters with fire as workmen spray fruit trees with insect poison.
Stanley, the Professor and a Zyobite came up in the rear with their three hoses.
Caught between the two forces, the beaten fish milled in hopeless confusion and indecision.
In half an hour they were all reduced to huddles of slimy wet flesh that dotted the pavement from the break back to the palace grounds.
"Now," said the Professor triumphantly, "we have only to knock out the bottom half of the tunnel wall, empty the tunnel and make sure there are no more Quabos lurking there.
After that we can fill it in with solid cement.
The Queen can order her fish servants to guard the outer cave and see that no food gets in to the starving monsters there.
The Quabos are as good as exterminated at this moment. And I can get back to my zoological work...."
We knew each others thoughts well enough.
With the menace of the Quabos banished forever, the city of Zyobor resumed its normal way.
The daily tasks and pleasures were picked up where they had been dropped.
He is second to me in power.
The Professor is the official wise man of the city.
We are more than content with our lot here.
Now we have thought of a way in which, with luck, we may communicate with the upper world.
Aboard her were a Professor George Berry and the owner, Stanley Browne.
CHAPTER nineteen
Stranger, more thrilling even than had been the flight of the Earth after being forced out of its orbit, was the flight of those dozen aircars of the Moon, bearing the rebels of Dalis' Gens back to Earth.
For the light which glowed from the bodies of the rebels, which had been given them by their passage through the white flames, was transmitted to the cars themselves, so that they glowed as with an inner radiance of their own-like comets flashing across the night.
Strange alchemy, which Sarka wondered about and, wondering, looked ahead to the time when he should be able, within his laboratory, to analyze the force it embodied, and thus gain new scientific knowledge of untold value to people of the Earth.
That there was an alliance between Mars and the Moon seemed almost unbelievable.
How had they managed the first contact, the first negotiations leading to the compact between two such alien peoples?
Had there been any flights exchanged by the two worlds, surely the scientists of Earth would have known about it.
But there had not, though there had been times and times when Sarka had peered closely enough at the surface of both the Moon and of Mars to see the activities, or the results of the activities, of the peoples of the two worlds.
Somehow, however, communication, if Sarka the Second had guessed correctly, had been managed between Mars and the Moon; and now that the Earth was a free flying orb the two were in alliance against it, perhaps for the same reason that the Earth had gone a voyaging.
Side by side sat Sarka and Jaska, their eager eyes peering through the forward end of the flashing aircar toward the Earth, growing minute by minute larger.
They were able, after some hours, to make out the outlines of what had once been continents, to see the shadows in valleys which had once held the oceans of Earth....
And always, as they stared and literally willed the cubes which piloted and were the motive power of the aircars to speed and more speed, that marvelous display of interplanetary fireworks which had aroused the concern of Sarka the Second.
What were those lights?
Whence did they emanate?
Sarka the Second had said that they came from Mars, yet Mars was invisible to those in the speeding aircars, which argued that it was hidden behind the Earth. There was no way of knowing how close it was to the home of these rebels of Dalis' Gens.
And ever, as they flashed forward, Sarka was recalling that vague hint on the lips of Jaska, to the effect that Luar, for all her sovereignty of the Moon, might be, nonetheless, a native of the Earth.
But....
How?
Why?
When?
There were no answers to any of the questions yet.
If she were a native of Earth, how had she reached the Moon?
Who was she?
Her name, Luar, was a strange one, and Sarka studied it for many minutes, rolling the odd syllables of it over his tongue, wondering where, on the Earth, he had heard names, or words, similar to it.
This produced no result, until he tried substituting various letters; then, again, adding various letters.
His mind went back to the clucking sounds which, among the Gnomes of the Moon, passed for speech.
He pondered anew.
"Yes, Jaska," he said suddenly, "somewhere on Earth, when we reach it, we may discover the secret of Luar-and know far more about Dalis than we have ever known before!"
By intuition, she already knew.
Let Sarka arrive at her conclusion by scientific methods if he desired, and she would simply smile anew.
Sarka thought of the manner in which Jaska and he had been transported to the Moon; of how much Dalis seemed to know of the secrets of the laboratory of the Sarkas.
Might he not have known, two centuries ago, of the Secret Exit Dome, and somehow managed to make use of it in some ghastly experiment?
And still the one question remained unanswered: Who was Luar?
The Earth was now so close that details were plainly seen.
The Himalayas were out of sight, over the Earth, and by a mental command Sarka managed to change slightly the course of the dozen aircars.
In their flight, which had been, to them a flight through the glories of a super heavenly Universe, they had lost all count of time.
Neither Sarka nor Jaska, nor yet the people in those other aircars, could have told how long they had been flying, when, coming over the curve of the Earth, at an elevation of something like three miles, they were able at last to see into the area which had once housed the Gens of Dalis.
The Gens of Dalis had occupied all the territory northward to the Pole, from a line drawn east and west through the southernmost of what had once been the Hawaiian Islands.
Upon this area had struck the strange blue light from the deep Cone of the Moon.
Here, however, the light was invisible, and Sarka flew on in fear that somehow his aircars would blunder into it, and be destroyed-for that the blue light was an agent of ghastly destruction became instantly apparent.
The dwellings of the Gens of Dalis were broken and smashed into chaotic ruins.
For, in order for the Gens of Dalis to be in position to launch their attack against the Moon, he had managed, by manipulating the speed of the Beryls, to bring that area into position directly opposite the Moon.
Had it been otherwise, the blue column might have struck anywhere, and wiped out millions of lives!
"God, Jaska," murmured Sarka.
"Look!"
Think of a shoreline, once lined with mighty buildings, after the passage of a tidal wave greater than ever before known to man.
The devastation would be indescribable.
Multiply that shoreline by the vast area which had housed the Gens of Dalis, and the mental picture is almost too big to grasp.
Chaos, catastrophe, approaching an infinity of destruction.
Yet, Sarka knew, remembering the murmuring of the blue column as it came out of the cone, all this devastation had been caused in almost absolute silence.
People could have watched and seen these deserted buildings slowly fuse together, run together as molten metal runs together, like the lava from a volcano of long ago under the ponderous moving to and fro of some invisible, juggernautlike agency.
Sarka shuddered, trying to picture in his mind the massing of the minions of Mars, who thus saw a new country given into their hands-if they could take it.
Had the Earth been taken by surprise?
Had Sarka the Second been able to prepare for the approaching catastrophe?
"Father," he sent his thoughts racing on ahead of him, "are those lights which are striking the Earth causing any damage?"
"Only," came back the instant answer, "in that they destroy the courage of the people of the Earth!
The people, however, now know that Sarka is returning, and their courage rises again!
The flames are merely a hint of what faces us; but the people will rise and follow you wherever you lead!"
So, as they raced across the area of devastation, the face of Sarka became calm again.
On a chance, he sent a single sentence of strange meaning to his father.
"The ruler of the Moon is a woman called Luar, which seems a contraction of Lunar!"
For many minutes Sarka the Second made no answer.
CHAPTER twenty one
Compared to the oncoming flames from Mars, the preceding display of lights had been as nothing. The whole Heavens between the Earth and Mars seemed alight with an unearthly glare, as though the very heart of the sun had burst and hurled part of its flaming mass outward into space.
On it came with unbelievable speed.
But there was no telling, yet, the form of the things which were coming.
"What are they?" whispered Jaska, standing fearlessly at Sarka's side. "Interplanetary cars?
Rockets?
Balls of fire?
Or beings of Mars?"
"I think," said Sarka, after studying the display for a few minutes, "that they are either rockets or fireballs, perhaps both together!
But the Martians cannot consolidate any position on the Earth without coming to handgrips.
Since they must know this, we can expect to see the people of Mars themselves when, or soon after, those balls of fire strike the Earth!"
Sarka raced back to the room of the Master Beryl as a strident humming came through to him.
The Spokesmen of the Gens whose borders touched those of the devasted Dalis area, were reporting again, and their voices were high pitched with fear that threatened to break the bounds of sanity.
"The ferment in the devasted area," was the gist of their report, "is assuming myriads of shapes!
"What forms?" snapped Sarka.
"Quickly!"
The columnar formations are topped by globes which emit an ethereal radiance!"
"Listen!" Sarka's voice was vibrant with excitement.
"Spokesmen of the Gens, make sure that every individual member of your Gens is fully equipped with flying clothing including belts and ovoids-prepared for an indefinite stay outside on the roof of the world!
Get your people out swiftly, keeping them in formation!
The contacts were broken.
Sarka stared into the Beryl, glancing swiftly in all directions, to see whether his orders were obeyed.
The advance fires from Mars seemed to have no effect on them, which Sarka had expected, since the fires seemed to consume nothing they had touched previously.
People dressed in the clothing of this Gens or that, wearing each the insignia of the house of his Spokesman.
A brave show.
Strange, too, that the fireballs made no noise.
Noiseless flame which rebounded from the surface of the Earth broke in silence, deluging the heavens with shooting stars of great brilliance.
Through its display flew the people of the Gens, mustering in flight above flight, each to his own level, under command of the Spokesmen of the Gens.
"How long, father," queried Sarka, "should it take to empty the Gens areas?"
"I wonder," mused Sarka, "if that is soon enough!"
Perhaps yes, perhaps no
It would be a race, in any case.
Even as the last flights of the Gens of Earth were slipping into the icy air from the roof of the world, the Moon cubes began their terrifying, appalling attack, every detail of which could be seen by Sarka from the Master Beryl.
The top of each of them was a gleaming globe whose eery light played over the country immediately surrounding each column, their weird light reflected in the squares, rectangles and globes that other cubes had formed.
Sarka sought swiftly among the columns for the one which might conceivably be in supreme command; but even as he sought the Moon cubes moved to the attack.
The globes on the tops of the columns dimmed their lights, and the squares, rectangles and globes got instantly into terrible motion.
Southward from the position in which they had formed they began to move, the squares and rectangles apparently sliding along the surface of the scarred and broken soil, the globes rolling.
Within a minute, Sarka was conscious of a trembling of all the laboratory, and the eyes of Jaska were wide with fear.
The cube army struck the dwellings, disappeared into them as though they had been composed of tissue paper, and continued on!
"God!" cried Sarka, his voice so tense that both his father and Jaska heard it above the roaring which shook and rocked the world.
"Do you see?
The Moon cubes are destroying the dwelling of our people, and the Martians are to destroy the people who have fled!"
"There must be a way," said Sarka the Second quietly, "to circumvent the cubes!
But what?
Your will still rules the cubes which piloted you from the Moon?"
"Yes," replied Sarka tersely, "but there are only a dozen of the cubes. What can they do against countless millions of them?
Cubes which are Moon cubes, brought to the Earth in the heart of that blue column, here reformed to create an army which is invincible, because it cannot be slain!
When they have laid waste the Earth, the Martians have but to finish the fight!"
"Then what of the Spokesmen of the Gens, who will be out of contact with me?"
"They must stand on their own feet, must fight their own battle!
Call to you the people who have passed through the white flames, and fight with the distant will of Luar and of Dalis for control of the cube army!"
Again that exaltation, which convinced him he could move mountains with his two hands, coursed through the being of Sarka.
Quietly be answered Jaska.
"I believe you are right," he said softly.
"Those of us who have passed through the flames which bore these Moon cubes will control the cubes, even bend them to our will.
The Spokesmen must vanquish the Martians or perish!"
Then he sent his mental commands to the Spokesmen:
"Meet the Martians when they arrive and destroy or drive them back!
You live only if you win!
We speak no more until victory is ours!
Jaska had thought spoken them, before he could prevent.
He turned upon her, lips shaping a command that she remain behind.
But she forestalled him.
"I, too, have been through the white flames!
Men are very strange people.
They are like those sums in algebra that you think about and worry about and cry about and try to get help from other women about, and then, all of a sudden, X works itself out into perfectly good sense.
I was tempted to say, "Why not my heart?" I was glad she didn't know how good that heart did feel under my blouse when the boy brought that basket of fish from Judge Wade's fishing expedition Saturday.
I have firmly determined not to blush any more at the thought of that gorgeous man-at least outwardly.
"Delightful indeed!
Not me!
Miss Clinton!
And I bought things!
First I went to see Madam Courtier for corsets.
But that didn't matter!
He only said politely, "And I am delighted that the trousseau is perfectly satisfactory to you, madame."
That was an awful shock, and I hope I didn't show it as I murmured "Perfectly, thank you."
I felt queer all the afternoon as I packed those trunks for the five o'clock train.
The judge is like that.
I couldn't stand that.
Don't you want to tell me what a little girl like you did in a big city, and-and read me part of that Paris letter I saw the postman give Jane this afternoon?"
But this torture book found that out about me, and stopped it the very first thing on page three.
The command is to sleep as little as possible to keep the nerves in a good condition-"eight hours at the most, and seven would be better." What earthly good would a seven hour nap do me?
I want ten hours to sleep and twelve if I get a good tired start.
To see me stagger out of my perfectly nice bed at six o'clock every morning now would wring the sternest heart with compassion and admiration at my faithfulness-to whom?
Anyhow, it made me take a resolve.
After breakfast, I went into the kitchen to speak to Jane.
"Jane," I said, looking past her head, "my health is not very good, and you can bring my breakfast to me in bed after this." Poor mr Carter always wanted breakfast on the stroke of seven.
Jane has buried husbands.
Jane understands everything I say to her.
But that was before my martyrdom to this book had begun.
I get up now!
I was thinking about things.
The subject of the conduct of widows is a serious one.
It was the dearest old-fashioned tune ever written, and Billy sang the words as distinctly as if he had been a boy chorister doing a difficult recitative.
My heart beat so it shook the lace on my breast, like a breeze from heaven, as he took the high note and then let it go on the last few words.
Lift me up, and I can put him in the waterglass on your table." He held up one muddy hand to me, and promptly I lifted him up into my arms.
"That was a lovely song you sang about 'Molly darling,' Billy," I said. "Where did you hear it?"
"Who taught it to you, sugar sweet?" I persisted as I poured water in on the frog under his direction.
"Nobody taught it to me.
He don't know no good songs like 'Black eyed Susan' or 'Little Boy Blue.' I go to sleep quick 'cause he makes me feel tired with his slow tune what's only good for frogs and things.
There is one exercise here on page twenty that I hate worst of all.
Hereafter I'll get up at the time directed on page three, or maybe earlier.
I won't let myself even think "perfect flower" and "scarlet runner." If I do, I get warm and happy all over.
I've put it away on the top shelf of a cupboard, for it is a torment to look at it.
He never stopped coming to see me occasionally, and mr Carter liked him.
I'm not sore, why should you be?
Aren't you happy with me?"
I was just planning a gorgeous dinner party I want to have for her when you came so suddenly.
Do you think we could arrange it for Tuesday evening?"
"Good gracious, Molly, don't knock the town down like that!
"Help!
Let my kinship protect me!" exclaimed Tom in alarm, and he pretended to move an inch away from me.
Then we both laughed and began to plan what Tom called a conflagration.
Miss Clinton was delightfully gracious about the dinner-I almost called it the debut dinner-and the expression on the judge's face when he accepted!
I was glad she was sitting beside him and couldn't see. Some women like to make other women unhappy, but I think it is best for you to keep them blissfully unconscious until you get what you want. Anyhow, I like that girl all over, and I can't see that her neck is so absolutely impossibly flowery.
That, mrs Johnson just couldn't stand, and she came across the street immediately and called me back to the gate.
"He's just a week younger, mrs Johnson, and I wouldn't tie him for worlds, even if I married him," I said meekly.
Well, I must go home now to see that Sally cooks up a few of mr Johnson's crotchets for supper." And she began to hurry away.
She doesn't know it yet; but I do.
I'll never forget my first real party.
I can hardly stand thinking about how he looked even now.
Candle light, pretty women's frocks, black coat sleeves, cut glass and flowers are good ingredients for a joy drink, and why not?
I sat down at the long table by the window and slowly prepared to enjoy myself.
I had just lifted it high in the air when out of the lilac scented dark of the garden came a laugh.
The spoon crashed on the table, and I turned and crashed into words.
"You are cruel, cruel, john Moore, and I hate you worse than I ever did before, if that is possible.
I'm hungry, hungry to death, and now you've spoiled it all!
I was glad myself.
Again I had that sensation of being against something warm and great and good, and I don't know how I controlled it enough not to-to-
"Thank you, I will, all of it, and the bread and butter, too," he answered, in that detestable friendly tone of voice, as he drew himself up and sat in the window.
"Supper," I sniffed, as I spread the jam on those lovely, lovely slices of bread and thick butter that I had fixed for my own self.
"I am so tired of that apple toast combination now that I forget it if I can." As I handed him the first slice of drippy lusciousness, I turned my head away.
Forget-" He didn't finish his sentence, and I'm glad.
"HADN'T we better take a policeman along?" said one of the girls with a nervous laugh.
"It really isn't safe down there, you know."
"There's no danger," said Virginia briefly.
"Is it true that your brother Rollin has been converted?" asked the first speaker, looking at Virginia curiously.
It impressed her during the drive to the Rectangle that all three of her friends were regarding her with close attention as if she were peculiar.
"Yes, he certainly is."
Doesn't that seem funny?" said the girl with the red silk parasol.
The sights and smells and sounds which had become familiar to Virginia struck the senses of these refined, delicate society girls as something horrible.
"Slumming" had never been a fad with Raymond society, and this was perhaps the first time that the two had come together in this way.
The girls felt that instead of seeing the Rectangle they were being made the objects of curiosity.
They were frightened and disgusted.
"Let's go back.
I've seen enough," said the girl who was sitting with Virginia.
They were at that moment just opposite a notorious saloon and gambling house.
She was singing in a broken, drunken sob that seemed to indicate that she partly realized her awful condition, "Just as I am, without one plea"--and as the carriage rolled past she leered at it, raising her face so that Virginia saw it very close to her own.
It was the face of the girl who had kneeled sobbing, that night with Virginia kneeling beside her and praying for her.
"Stop!" cried Virginia, motioning to the driver who was looking around.
The carriage stopped, and in a moment she was out and had gone up to the girl and taken her by the arm.
The girls in the carriage were smitten into helpless astonishment.
The saloon keeper had come to the door of the saloon and was standing there looking on with his hands on his hips.
And the Rectangle from its windows, its saloon steps, its filthy sidewalk, gutter and roadway, paused, and with undisguised wonder stared at the two girls.
Over the scene the warm sun of spring poured its mellow light.
A faint breath of music from the band stand in the park floated into the Rectangle.
The concert had begun, and the fashion and wealth of Raymond were displaying themselves up town on the boulevard.
When Virginia left the carriage and went up to Loreen she had no definite idea as to what she would do or what the result of her action would be.
She looked around now as she stood close by Loreen, and the whole scene was cruelly vivid to her.
The girl with the red parasol seemed to gasp at the word "friend," when Virginia spoke it.
She did not say anything.
The other girls seemed speechless.
"Go on.
The driver started the horses slowly.
One of the girls leaned a little out of the carriage.
"Can't we-that is-do you want our help?
Couldn't you-"
"No, no!" exclaimed Virginia.
"You cannot be of any help to me."
The carriage moved on and Virginia was alone with her charge.
She looked up and around.
Many faces in the crowd were sympathetic.
The Holy Spirit had softened a good deal of the Rectangle.
"Where does she live?" asked Virginia.
No one answered.
"You shall not touch me!
Leave me!
Let me go to hell!
That's where I belong!
The devil is waiting for me.
See him!" she exclaimed hoarsely.
She turned and pointed with a shaking finger at the saloon keeper.
The crowd laughed.
Virginia stepped up to her and put her arm about her.
"Loreen," she said firmly, "come with me.
You do not belong to hell. You belong to Jesus and He will save you.
Come."
The girl suddenly burst into tears.
She was only partly sobered by the shock of meeting Virginia.
Virginia looked around again.
"Where does mr Gray live?" she asked. She knew that the evangelist boarded somewhere near the tent.
A number of voices gave the direction.
So the two moved on through the Rectangle toward the evangelist's lodging place.
The sight seemed to impress the Rectangle seriously. It never took itself seriously when it was drunk, but this was different.
The event of Loreen's stumbling through the gutter dead drunk always made the Rectangle laugh and jest.
The Rectangle viewed it with soberness and more or less wondering admiration.
When they finally reached mr Gray's lodging place the woman who answered Virginia's knock said that both mr and mrs Gray were out somewhere and would not be back until six o'clock.
Virginia had not planned anything farther than a possible appeal to the Grays, either to take charge of Loreen for a while or find some safe place for her until she was sober.
She stood now at the door after the woman had spoken, and she was really at a loss to know what to do.
Virginia eyed the miserable figure of the girl with a feeling that she was afraid would grow into disgust.
Finally a thought possessed her that she could not escape.
What was to hinder her from taking Loreen home with her?
But that was not the question with Virginia just now.
"What would Jesus do with Loreen?"
That was what Virginia faced, and she finally answered it by touching the girl again.
"Loreen, come.
We will take the car here at the corner."
She had expected resistance or a stubborn refusal to move. When they reached the corner and took the car it was nearly full of people going uptown.
Virginia was painfully conscious of the stare that greeted her and her companion as they entered.
But her thought was directed more and more to the approaching scene with her grandmother.
What would Madam Page say?
But she was lapsing into a state of stupor.
Virginia was obliged to hold fast to her arm.
Several times the girl lurched heavily against her, and as the two went up the avenue a curious crowd of so-called civilized people turned and gazed at them.
Madam Page was in the library.
Hearing Virginia come in, she came into the hall.
Virginia stood there supporting Loreen, who stared stupidly at the rich magnificence of the furnishings around her.
"Grandmother," Virginia spoke without hesitation and very clearly, "I have brought one of my friends from the Rectangle.
Madam Page glanced from her granddaughter to Loreen in astonishment.
"Yes, I said so." Virginia's face flushed, but she seemed to recall a verse that mr Gray had used for one of his recent sermons, "A friend of publicans and sinners." Surely, Jesus would do this that she was doing.
"Do you know what this girl is?" asked Madam Page, in an angry whisper, stepping near Virginia.
"I know very well.
She is an outcast.
I know it even better than you do.
She is drunk at this minute.
But she is also a child of God.
Grandmother, we call ourselves Christians.
Here is a poor, lost human creature without a home, slipping back into a life of misery and possibly eternal loss, and we have more than enough.
Madam Page glared at Virginia and clenched her hands.
All this was contrary to her social code of conduct.
To Madam Page society represented more than the church or any other institution. It was a power to be feared and obeyed.
The loss of its good will was a loss more to be dreaded than anything except the loss of wealth itself.
She stood erect and stern and confronted Virginia, fully roused and determined.
Virginia placed her arm about Loreen and calmly looked her grandmother in the face.
"You shall not do this, Virginia!
You can send her to the asylum for helpless women.
We can pay all the expenses.
We cannot afford for the sake of our reputations to shelter such a person."
"Grandmother, I do not wish to do anything that is displeasing to you, but I must keep Loreen here tonight, and longer if it seems best."
"Then you can answer for the consequences!
Virginia stopped her before she could speak the next word.
"Grandmother, this house is mine.
But in this matter I must act as I fully believe Jesus would in my place.
I am willing to bear all that society may say or do.
Society is not my God.
"I shall not stay here, then!" said Madam Page.
She turned suddenly and walked to the end of the hall.
She then came back, and going up to Virginia said, with an emphasis that revealed her intensive excitement of passion: "You can always remember that you have driven your grandmother out of your house in favor of a drunken woman;" then, without waiting for Virginia to reply, she turned again and went upstairs.
Virginia called a servant and soon had Loreen cared for.
"Master, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest."
THE Saturday afternoon matinee at the Auditorium in Chicago was just over and the usual crowd was struggling to get to its carriage before any one else.
r s" in gilt letters on the panel of the door.
Two girls stepped out of the crowd towards the carriage.
"Come, Felicia!
I shall freeze to death!" called the voice from the carriage.
He took them, with a look of astonishment and a "Thank ye, lady!" and instantly buried a very grimy face in the bunch of perfume.
"Am I? What have I done that is queer now, Rose?" asked the other, looking up suddenly and turning her head towards her sister.
"Oh, giving those violets to that boy!
He looked as if he needed a good hot supper more than a bunch of violets.
I shouldn't have been surprised if you had.
"'Queer' isn't just the word, of course," replied Rose indifferently.
"It would be what Madam Blanc calls 'outre.' Decidedly.
Therefore you will please not invite him or others like him to hot suppers because I suggested it.
I'm awfully tired."
"The concert was stupid and the violinist was simply a bore.
I don't see how you could sit so still through it all," Rose exclaimed a little impatiently.
"I liked the music," answered Felicia quietly.
"You like anything.
I never saw a girl with so little critical taste."
Felicia colored slightly, but would not answer.
Rose yawned again, and then hummed a fragment of a popular song.
Then she exclaimed abruptly: "I'm sick of 'most everything.
I hope the 'Shadows of London' will be exciting tonight."
"The 'Shadows of Chicago,'" murmured Felicia.
You know we have a box with the Delanos tonight."
Felicia turned her face towards her sister.
Her great brown eyes were very expressive and not altogether free from a sparkle of luminous heat.
"And yet we never weep over the real thing on the actual stage of life.
What are the 'Shadows of London' on the stage to the shadows of London or Chicago as they really exist?
"Because the actual people are dirty and disagreeable and it's too much bother, I suppose," replied Rose carelessly.
"Felicia, you can never reform the world.
What's the use?
We're not to blame for the poverty and misery.
We ought to be thankful we're rich."
"Suppose Christ had gone on that principle," replied Felicia, with unusual persistence.
I tell you, Felicia, there will always be poor and rich in spite of all we can do.
Ever since Rachel Winslow has written about those queer doings in Raymond you have upset the whole family.
People can't live at that concert pitch all the time.
You see if Rachel doesn't give it up soon.
It's a great pity she doesn't come to Chicago and sing in the Auditorium concerts.
She has received an offer.
I'm going to write and urge her to come.
I'm just dying to hear her sing."
It was an elegant mansion of gray stone furnished like a palace, every corner of it warm with the luxury of paintings, sculpture, art and modern refinement.
The owner of it all, mr Charles r Sterling, stood before an open grate fire smoking a cigar.
She had been an invalid for several years.
The two girls, Rose and Felicia, were the only children.
Rose was twenty one years old, fair, vivacious, educated in a fashionable college, just entering society and already somewhat cynical and indifferent.
A very hard young lady to please, her father said, sometimes playfully, sometimes sternly.
There was that in Felicia that would easily endure any condition in life if only the liberty to act fully on her conscientious convictions were granted her.
"Here's a letter for you, Felicia," said mr Sterling, handing it to her.
Felicia sat down and instantly opened the letter, saying as she did so: "It's from Rachel."
"Well, what's the latest news from Raymond?" asked mr Sterling, taking his cigar out of his mouth and looking at Felicia with half shut eyes, as if he were studying her.
"Rachel says dr Bruce has been staying in Raymond for two Sundays and has seemed very much interested in mr Maxwell's pledge in the First Church."
"What does Rachel say about herself?" asked Rose, who was lying on a couch almost buried under elegant cushions.
"She is still singing at the Rectangle.
She ought not to throw away her voice in that railroad town upon all those people who don't appreciate her."
She might set Chicago wild with her voice if she sang in the Auditorium.
And there she goes on throwing it away on people who don't know what they are hearing."
"Rachel won't come here unless she can do it and keep her pledge at the same time," said Felicia, after a pause.
"What pledge?" mr Sterling asked the question and then added hastily: "Oh, I know, yes!
Alexander Powers used to be a friend of mine.
We learned telegraphy in the same office.
And he's back at his telegraph again.
There have been queer doings in Raymond during the past year.
I must have a talk with him about it."
"He is at home and will preach tomorrow," said Felicia.
"Perhaps he will tell us something about it."
There was silence for a minute.
Then Felicia said abruptly, as if she had gone on with a spoken thought to some invisible hearer: "And what if he should propose the same pledge to the Nazareth Avenue Church?"
"Who?
What are you talking about?" asked her father a little sharply.
"About dr Bruce.
"It's a very impracticable movement, to my mind," said mr Sterling shortly.
"I understand from Rachel's letter that the Raymond church is going to make an attempt to extend the idea of the pledge to other churches.
If it succeeds it will certainly make great changes in the churches and in people's lives," said Felicia.
"Oh, well, let's have some tea first!" said Rose, walking into the dining room.
mrs Sterling had her meals served in her room.
mr Sterling was preoccupied.
He ate very little and excused himself early, and although it was Saturday night, he remarked as he went out that he should be down town on some special business.
"Oh, I don't know!
I hadn't noticed anything unusual," replied Rose. After a silence she said: "Are you going to the play tonight, Felicia?
mrs Delano will be here at half past seven.
I think you ought to go.
She will feel hurt if you refuse."
I don't care about it.
"That's a doleful remark for a girl nineteen years old to make," replied Rose.
POLLY IS COMFORTED
Yes, it must be confessed.
Polly was homesick.
All her imaginations of her mother's hard work, increased by her absence, loomed up before her, till she was almost ready to fly home without a minute's warning.
It got to be noticed finally; and one and all redoubled their exertions to make everything twice as pleasant as ever!
The only place, except in front of the grand piano, where Polly approached a state of comparative happiness, was in the greenhouse.
Here she would stay, comforted and soothed among the lovely plants and rich exotics, rejoicing the heart of Old Turner the gardener, who since Polly's first rapturous entrance, had taken her into his good graces for all time.
Every chance she could steal after practice hours were over, and after the clamorous demands of the boys upon her time were fully satisfied, was seized to fly on the wings of the wind, to the flowers.
"Polly don't like us," at last said Van one day in despair.
"Well," said Van, and he showed signs of relenting a little at that; "but Percy is perfectly awful, mamma, you don't know; and he feels so smart too," he said vindictively.
"Well," said mrs Whitney, softly, "let's think what we can do for Polly; it makes me feel very badly to see her sad little face."
"I'm afraid those wouldn't quite answer the purpose," said his mamma, smiling-"especially the last; yet we must think of something."
So, with a great many chucklings and shruggings when no one was by, he had departed after breakfast one day, simply saying he shouldn't be back to lunch.
If she could only see Phronsie for just one moment!
"I shall have to give up!" she moaned.
"I can't bear it!" and over went her head on the music rack.
"Oh, she's always at the piano," said Van.
"She must be there now, somewhere," and then somebody laughed.
Polly sat up very straight, and whisked off the tears quickly.
Up came mr King with an enormous bundle in his arms; and he marched up to the piano, puffing with his exertions.
"Here, Polly, hold your arms," he had only strength to gasp.
At this, the bundle opened suddenly, and-out popped Phronsie!
I'm here, Polly!"
But Polly couldn't speak; and if Jasper hadn't caught her just in time, she would have tumbled over backward from the stool, Phronsie and all!
"Aren't you glad I've come, Polly?" asked Phronsie, with her little face close to Polly's own.
That brought Polly to.
"Oh, Phronsie!" she cried, and strained her to her heart; while the boys crowded around, and plied her with sudden questions.
"Now you'll stay," cried Van; "say, Polly, won't you."
"Weren't you awfully surprised?" cried Percy; "say, Polly, awfully?"
"Is her name Phronsie," put in Dick, unwilling to be left out, and not thinking of anything else to ask.
"Boys," whispered their mother, warningly, "she can't answer you; just look at her face."
And to be sure, our Polly's face was a study to behold.
"Isn't he splendid!" cried Jasper in intense pride, swelling up.
"Father knew how to do it."
"There, there," he said soothingly, patting her brown, fuzzy head. Something was going down the old gentleman's neck, that wet his collar, and made him whisper very tenderly in her ear, "don't give way now, Polly; Phronsie'll see you."
"I know," gasped Polly, controlling her sobs; "I won't-only-I can't thank you!"
"Phronsie," said Jasper quickly, "what do you suppose Prince said the other day?"
"What?" asked Phronsie in intense interest slipping down out of Polly's arms, and crowding up close to Jasper's side.
"What did he, Jasper?"
"Be still," said Jappy warningly, while Phronsie stood surveying them all with grave eyes.
Bark!'"
"Yes, all alone by himself," asserted Jasper, vehemently, and winking furiously to the others to stop their laughing; "he did now, truly, Phronsie."
yes, pretty soon now?"
"Don't mind it, Polly," whispered Jasper; "twasn't her fault."
"Phronsie," said mrs Whitney, smilingly, stooping over the child, "would you like to see a little pussy I have for you?"
But the chubby face didn't look up brightly, as usual: and the next moment, without a bit of warning, Phronsie sprang past them all, even Polly, and flung herself into mr King's arms, in a perfect torrent of sobs.
All Jasper's frantic efforts at comfort, utterly failed.
To think that Phronsie had left her for any one!--even good mr King!
The fat, little arms unclasped their hold, and transferred themselves willingly to Polly's neck; and Phronsie hugged up comfortingly to Polly's heart, who poured into her ear all the loving words she had so longed to say.
"She's the cunningest little thing I ever saw," said mrs Whitney, enthusiastically, afterward, aside to mr King.
"I didn't have any fears, if I worked it rightly," said the old gentleman complacently.
"I wasn't coming without her, Marian, if it could possibly be managed.
"So you see, I was just in time; in the very nick of time, in fact!"
"So her mother was willing?" asked his daughter, curiously.
At last he came out of them, and wiped his face vigorously.
"Well, she's a nice child," he said, "a very nice child; and," straightening himself up to his fullest height, and looking so very handsome, that his daughter could not conceal her admiration, "I shall always take care of Phronsie Pepper, Marian!"
"So I hope," said mrs Whitney; "and father, I do believe they'll repay you; for I do think there's good blood there; these children have a look about them that shows them worthy to be trusted."
"So they have: so they have," assented mr King, and then the conversation dropped.
To night Ponting has photographed the hand.
As I expected, some amendment of Atkinson's tale as written last night is necessary, partly due to some lack of coherency in the tale as first told and partly a reconsideration of the circumstances by Atkinson himself.
He seems in this predicament to have clung to the old idea of walking up wind, and it must be considered wholly providential that on this course he next struck Tent Island.
The distance of Tent Island, four to five miles, partly accounts for the time he took in returning.
For some time past some of the ponies have had great irritation of the skin.
A dilute solution of carbolic is expected to rid the poor beasts of their pests, but meanwhile one or two of them have rubbed off patches of hair which they can ill afford to spare in this climate.
Frostbiting weather!
A new pair of sealskin overshoes for ski made by Evans seem to be a complete success.
I am very pleased with this arrangement.
I find it exceedingly difficult to settle down to solid work just at present and keep putting off the tasks which I have set myself.
I was the victim of a very curious illusion to day.
On our small heating stove stands a cylindrical ice melter which keeps up the supply of water necessary for the dark room and other scientific instruments.
Apropos.
It was my turn for duty on Saturday night, and on the occasions when I had to step out of doors I was struck with the impossibility of enduring such conditions for any length of time.
Twice whilst engaged in this task I had literally to lean against the wind with head bent and face averted and so stagger crab like on my course.
In those two days of really terrible weather our thoughts often turned to absentees at Cape Crozier with the devout hope that they may be safely housed.
They are certain to have been caught by this gale, but I trust before it reached them they had managed to get up some sort of shelter.
To day with the temperature at zero one can walk about outside without inconvenience in spite of a fifty-mile wind.
This is the fourth day of gale; if one reflects on the quantity of transported air (nearly four thousand miles) one gets a conception of the transference which such a gale effects and must conclude that potentially warm upper currents are pouring into our polar area from more temperate sources.
It was so warm that I could have slept very comfortably.
I have been amused and pleased lately in observing the manners and customs of the persons in charge of our stores; quite a number of secret caches exist in which articles of value are hidden from public knowledge so that they may escape use until a real necessity arises.
The policy of every storekeeper is to have something up his sleeve for a rainy day.
For instance, Evans (p o), after thoroughly examining the purpose of some individual who is pleading for a piece of canvas, will admit that he may have a small piece somewhere which could be used for it, when, as a matter of fact, he possesses quite a number of rolls of that material.
Tools, metal material, leather, straps and dozens of items are administered with the same spirit of jealous guardianship by Day, Lashly, Oates and Meares, while our main storekeeper Bowers even affects to bemoan imaginary shortages.
It would be hardly possible for a tearing, raging wind to make itself more visible.
The snow is so hard blown that only the fiercest gusts raise the drifting particles-it is interesting to note the balance of nature whereby one evil is eliminated by the excess of another.
Out for exercise at this time I was obliged to lean against the wind, my light overall clothes flapping wildly and almost dragged from me; later when the wind rose again it was quite an effort to stagger back to the hut against it.
The work goes on very steadily-the men are making crampons and ski boots of the new style.
Evans is constructing plans of the Dry Valley and Koettlitz Glacier with the help of the Western Party.
Science cannot be served by 'dilettante' methods, but demands a mind spurred by ambition or the satisfaction of ideals.
Our most popular game for evening recreation is chess; so many players have developed that our two sets of chessmen are inadequate.
At noon yesterday one of the best ponies, 'Bones,' suddenly went off his feed-soon after it was evident that he was distressed and there could be no doubt that he was suffering from colic.
Oates called my attention to it, but we were neither much alarmed, remembering the speedy recovery of 'Jimmy Pigg' under similar circumstances.
Later the pony was sent out for exercise with Crean.
I passed him twice and seemed to gather that things were well, but Crean afterwards told me that he had had considerable trouble.
Every few minutes the poor beast had been seized with a spasm of pain, had first dashed forward as though to escape it and then endeavoured to lie down.
But as hour after hour passed without improvement, it was impossible not to realise that the poor beast was dangerously ill.
Within three minutes it had drunk a bucket of water and had started to feed.
It can scarcely be coincidence that the two ponies which have suffered so far are those which are nearest the stove end of the stable.
'Bones' seems to be getting on well, though not yet quite so buckish as he was before his trouble.
It is not easy to get over the alarm of Thursday night-the situation is altogether too critical.
Usual Sunday routine.
If we can get these people to run about at football all will be well.
Anyway the return of the light should cure all ailments physical and mental.
This fleeting hour of light is very pleasant, but of course dependent on a clear sky, very rare.
The course of events is not very clear, but it looks as though the gale pressed up the crack, raising broken pieces of the thin ice formed after recent opening movements.
It is surprising to find such a big disturbance from what appears to be a simple cause.
Yesterday the planet Venus appeared under similar circumstances as a ship's side light or Japanese lantern.
In both cases there was a flickering in the light and a change of colour from deep orange yellow to blood red, but the latter was dominant.
higher.
We passed a quiet Sunday with the usual Service to break the week day routine.
I went to see the crack at which soundings were taken a week ago-then it was several feet open with thin ice between-now it is pressed up into a sharp ridge three to four feet high: the edge pressed up shows an eighteen inch thickness-this is of course an effect of the warm weather.
The light comes on apace.
The light, merry humour of our company has never been eclipsed, the good-natured, kindly chaff has never ceased since those early days of enthusiasm which inspired them-they have survived the winter days of stress and already renew themselves with the coming of spring.
CHAPTER four.
ON THE "SPARTACUS."
The ulster and the felt hat soon came off again, for a head wind lay waiting in the offing, and the "Spartacus" began to pitch and toss in a manner which made all her unseasoned passengers glad to betake themselves to their berths.
mrs Ashe and Amy were among the earliest victims of sea sickness; and Katy, after helping them to settle in their staterooms, found herself too dizzy and ill to sit up a moment longer, and thankfully resorted to her own.
The "Spartacus" had the reputation of being a dreadful "roller," and seemed bound to justify it on this particular voyage.
Down, down, down the great hull would slide till Katy would hold her breath with fear lest it might never right itself again; then slowly, slowly the turn would be made, and up, up, up it would go, till the cant on the other side was equally alarming.
On the whole, Katy preferred to have her own side of the ship, the downward one; for it was less difficult to keep herself in the berth, from which she was in continual danger of being thrown.
The night seemed endless, for she was too frightened to sleep except in broken snatches; and when day dawned, and she looked through the little round pane of glass in the port hole, only gray sky and gray weltering waves and flying spray and rain met her view.
"Oh, dear, why do people ever go to sea, unless they must?" she thought feebly to herself.
She wanted to get up and see how mrs Ashe had lived through the night, but the attempt to move made her so miserably ill that she was glad to sink again on her pillows.
The stewardess looked in with offers of tea and toast, the very idea of which was simply dreadful, and pronounced the other lady "'orridly ill, worse than you are, Miss," and the little girl "takin' on dreadful in the h'upper berth." Of this fact Katy soon had audible proof; for as her dizzy senses rallied a little, she could hear Amy in the opposite stateroom crying and sobbing pitifully.
She seemed to be angry as well as sick, for she was scolding her poor mother in the most vehement fashion.
"I hate being at sea," Katy heard her say.
"I won't stay in this nasty old ship.
Mamma!
Mamma! do you hear me?
I won't stay in this ship!
It wasn't a bit kind of you to bring me to such a horrid place.
I want to go back, mamma.
Tell the captain to take me back to the land.
Mamma, why don't you speak to me?
Don't you wish you were dead?
I do!"
And then came another storm of sobs, but never a sound from mrs Ashe, who, Katy suspected, was too ill to speak.
She felt very sorry for poor little Amy, raging there in her high berth like some imprisoned creature, but she was powerless to help her.
She could only resign herself to her own discomforts, and try to believe that somehow, sometime, this state of things must mend,--either they should all get to land or all go to the bottom and be drowned, and at that moment she didn't care very much which it turned out to be.
The gale increased as the day wore on, and the vessel pitched dreadfully.
Twice Katy was thrown out of her berth on the floor; then the stewardess came and fixed a sort of movable side to the berth, which held her in, but made her feel like a child fastened into a railed crib. At intervals she could still hear Amy crying and scolding her mother, and conjectured that they were having a dreadful time of it in the other stateroom.
It was all like a bad dream.
"And they call this travelling for pleasure!" thought poor Katy.
One droll thing happened in the course of the second night,--at least it seemed droll afterward; at the time Katy was too uncomfortable to enjoy it.
Amid the rush of the wind, the creaking of the ship's timbers, and the shrill buzz of the screw, she heard a sound of queer little footsteps in the entry outside of her open door, hopping and leaping together in an odd irregular way, like a regiment of mice or toy soldiers.
Nearer and nearer they came; and Katy opening her eyes saw a procession of boots and shoes of all sizes and shapes, which had evidently been left on the floors or at the doors of various staterooms, and which in obedience to the lurchings of the vessel had collected in the cabin.
They now seemed to be acting in concert with one another, and really looked alive as they bumped and trotted side by side, and two by two, in at the door and up close to her bedside.
There they remained for several moments executing what looked like a dance; then the leading shoe turned on its heel as if giving a signal to the others, and they all hopped slowly again into the passage way and disappeared.
It was exactly like one of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, Katy wrote to Clover afterward.
She heard them going down the cabin; but how it ended, or whether the owners of the boots and shoes ever got their own particular pairs again, she never knew.
Toward morning the gale abated, the sea became smoother, and she dropped asleep.
When she woke the sun was struggling through the clouds, and she felt better.
"And 'ere's a letter, ma'am, which has come for you by post this morning," said the nice old stewardess, producing an envelope from her pocket, and eying her patient with great satisfaction.
"By post!" cried Katy, in amazement; "why, how can that be?" Then catching sight of Rose's handwriting on the envelope, she understood, and smiled at her own simplicity.
The letter was not long, but it was very like its writer.
"But this horrible ship keeps on, And is never a moment still, And I yearn for the touch of the nice dry land, Where I needn't feel so ill!
"Break! break!
break! There is no good left in me; For the dinner I ate on the shore so late Has vanished into the sea!"
Amy had fallen asleep at last and must not be waked up, so their interview was conducted in whispers.
mrs Ashe had by no means got to the tea and toast stage yet, and was feeling miserable enough.
"All day yesterday, when she wasn't sick she was raging at me from the upper berth, and I too ill to say a word in reply.
And it seemed very neglectful not to come to see after you, poor dear child! but really I couldn't raise my head."
"Neither could I, and I felt just as guilty not to be taking care of you," said Katy.
"Well, the worst is over with all of us, I hope.
The vessel doesn't pitch half so much now, and the stewardess says we shall feel a great deal better as soon as we get on deck.
"Oh no, h'indeed, mum,--no, you won't," put in mrs Barrett, who at that moment appeared, gruel cup in hand.
I h'always gets them on deck as soon as possible to get the h'air.
Stewardesses are all powerful on board ship, and mrs Barrett was so persuasive as well as positive that it was not possible to resist her. She got Katy into her dress and wraps, and seated her on deck in a chair with a great rug wrapped about her feet, with very little effort on Katy's part.
Amy gave a scream of joy at the sight of Katy, and cuddled down in her lap under the warm rug with a sigh of relief and satisfaction.
"I thought I was never going to see you again," she said, with a little squeeze.
"Oh, Miss Katy, it has been so horrid!
I never thought that going to Europe meant such dreadful things as this!"
"This is only the beginning; we shall get across the sea in a few days, and then we shall find out what going to Europe really means.
But what made you behave so, Amy, and cry and scold poor mamma when she was sick? I could hear you all the way across the entry."
"Could you?
Then why didn't you come to me?"
"I wanted to; but I was sick too, so sick that I couldn't move.
"I didn't mean to be naughty, but I couldn't help crying.
You would have cried too, and so would Johnnie, if you had been cooped up in a dreadful old berth at the top of the wall that you couldn't get out of, and hadn't had anything to eat, and nobody to bring you any water when you wanted some.
And mamma wouldn't answer when I called to her."
"She couldn't answer; she was too ill," explained Katy.
"Mabel looks quite pale; she was sick, too," said Amy, regarding the doll in her arms with an anxious air.
"I hope the fresh h'air will do her good."
"Is she going to have any fresh hair?" asked Katy, wilfully misunderstanding.
"That was what that woman called it,--the fat one who made me come up here.
But I'm glad she did, for I feel heaps better already; only I keep thinking of poor little Maria Matilda shut up in the trunk in that dark place, and wondering if she's sick.
"They say that you don't feel the motion half so much in the bottom of the ship," said Katy.
"Perhaps she hasn't noticed it at all.
I wish they would bring us something to eat."
A good many passengers had come up by this time; and Robert, the deck steward, was going about, tray in hand, taking orders for lunch.
Amy and Katy both felt suddenly ravenous; and when mrs Ashe awhile later was helped up the stairs, she was amazed to find them eating cold beef and roasted potatoes, with the finest appetites in the world.
"They had served out their apprenticeships," the kindly old captain told them, "and were made free of the nautical guild from that time on." So it proved; for after these two bad days none of the party were sick again during the voyage.
It might with equal propriety have been called "The Adventures of two little Girls who didn't have any Adventures," for nothing in particular happened to either Violet or Emma during the whole course of their long drawn out history.
Amy, however, found them perfectly enchanting, and was never weary of hearing how they went to school and came home again, how they got into scrapes and got out of them, how they made good resolutions and broke them, about their Christmas presents and birthday treats, and what they said and how they felt.
Captain Bryce was exactly the kind of sea captain that is found in story books, but not always in real life.
He was stout and grizzled and brown and kind.
He had a bluff weather beaten face, lit up with a pair of shrewd blue eyes which twinkled when he was pleased; and his manner, though it was full of the habit of command, was quiet and pleasant.
He was a Martinet on board his ship.
Not a sailor under him would have dared dispute his orders for a moment; but he was very popular with them, notwithstanding; they liked him as much as they feared him, for they knew him to be their best friend if it came to sickness or trouble with any of them.
Katy and he grew quite intimate during their long morning talk.
The Captain liked girls.
He had one of his own, about Katy's age, and was fond of talking about her.
Lucy was his mainstay at home, he told Katy. Her mother had been "weakly" now this long time back, and Bess and Nanny were but children yet, so Lucy had to take command and keep things ship shape when he was away.
"She'll be on the lookout when the steamer comes in," said the Captain. "There's a signal we've arranged which means 'All's well,' and when we get up the river a little way I always look to see if it's flying.
It's a bit of a towel hung from a particular window; and when I see it I say to myself, 'Thank God! another voyage safely done and no harm come of it.' It's a sad kind of work for a man to go off for a twenty four days' cruise leaving a sick wife on shore behind him.
She seemed such a very nice girl, and Katy thought she should like to know her.
The deck had dried fast in the fresh sea wind, and the Captain had just arranged Katy in her chair, and was wrapping the rug about her feet in a fatherly way, when mrs Barrett, all smiles, appeared from below.
I couldn't think what 'ad come to you so early; and you're looking ever so well again, I'm pleased to see; and 'ere's a bundle just arrived, Miss, by the Parcels Delivery."
"What!" cried simple Katy.
Then she laughed at her own foolishness, and took the "bundle," which was directed in Rose's unmistakable hand.
It contained a pretty little green bound copy of Emerson's Poems, with Katy's name and "To be read at sea," written on the flyleaf.
With a half happy, half tearful pleasure Katy recognized the fact that distance counts for little if people love one another, and that hearts have a telegraph of their own whose messages are as sure and swift as any of those sent over the material lines which link continent to continent and shore with shore.
Later in the morning, Katy, going down to her stateroom for something, came across a pallid, exhausted looking lady, who lay stretched on one of the long sofas in the cabin, with a baby in her arms and a little girl sitting at her feet, quite still, with a pair of small hands folded in her lap.
The little girl did not seem to be more than four years old. She had two pig tails of thick flaxen hair hanging over her shoulders, and at Katy's approach raised a pair of solemn blue eyes, which had so much appeal in them, though she said nothing, that Katy stopped at once.
"Can I do anything for you?" she asked.
"I am afraid you have been very ill."
At the sound of her voice the lady on the sofa opened her eyes.
She tried to speak, but to Katy's dismay began to cry instead; and when the words came they were strangled with sobs.
"If you would give my little girl something to eat!
How did it happen?"
"Everybody has been sick on our side the ship," explained the poor lady, "and I suppose the stewardess thought, as I had a maid with me, that I needed her less than the others.
But my maid has been sick, too; and oh, so selfish!
She wouldn't even take the baby into the berth with her; and I have had all I could do to manage with him, when I couldn't lift up my head.
Little Gretchen has had to go without anything; and she has been so good and patient!"
Katy lost no time, but ran for mrs Barrett, whose indignation knew no bounds when she heard how the helpless party had been neglected.
I'm h'ashamed that such a thing should 'appen on the 'Spartacus,' ma'am,--I h'am, h'indeed.
All the time that she talked mrs Barrett was busy in making mrs Ware-for that, it seemed, was the sick lady's name-more comfortable; and Katy was feeding Gretchen out of a big bowl full of bread and milk which one of the stewards had brought.
The little uncomplaining thing was evidently half starved, but with the mouthfuls the pink began to steal back into her cheeks and lips, and the dark circles lessened under the blue eyes.
They kept her on deck with them a great deal, and she was perfectly content with them and very good, though always solemn and quiet.
Pleasant people turned up among the passengers, as always happens on an ocean steamship, and others not so pleasant, perhaps, who were rather curious and interesting to watch.
Katy grew to feel as if she knew a great deal about her fellow travellers as time went on.
There was the young girl going out to join her parents under the care of a severe governess, whom everybody on board rather pitied.
There was the other girl on her way to study art, who was travelling quite alone, and seemed to have nobody to meet her or to go to except a fellow student of her own age, already in Paris, but who seemed quite unconscious of her lonely position and competent to grapple with anything or anybody.
A great sea going steamer is a little world in itself, and gives one a glimpse of all sorts and conditions of people and characters.
On the whole, there was no one on the "Spartacus" whom Katy liked so well as sedate little Gretchen except the dear old Captain, with whom she was a prime favorite.
He gave mrs Ashe and herself the seats next to him at table, looked after their comfort in every possible way, and each night at dinner sent Katy one of the apple dumplings made specially for him by the cook, who had gone many voyages with the Captain and knew his fancies.
Katy did not care particularly for the dumpling, but she valued it as a mark of regard, and always ate it when she could.
Meanwhile, every morning brought a fresh surprise from that dear, painstaking Rose, who had evidently worked hard and thought harder in contriving pleasures for Katy's first voyage at sea.
mrs Barrett was enlisted in the plot, there could be no doubt of that, and enjoyed the joke as much as any one, as she presented herself each day with the invariable formula, "A letter for you, ma'am," or "A bundle, Miss, come by the Parcels Delivery." On the fourth morning it was a photograph of Baby Rose, in a little flat morocco case.
The fifth brought a wonderful epistle, full of startling pieces of news, none of them true.
On the sixth appeared a long narrow box containing a fountain pen.
Then came mr Howells's "A Foregone Conclusion," which Katy had never seen; then a box of quinine pills; then a sachet for her trunk; then another burlesque poem; last of all, a cake of delicious violet soap, "to wash the sea smell from her hands," the label said.
It grew to be one of the little excitements of ship life to watch for the arrival of these daily gifts; and "What did the mail bring for you this time, Miss Carr?" was a question frequently asked.
Katy never forgot the thrill that went through her when, after so many days of sea, her eyes first caught sight of the dim line of the Irish coast.
It was late afternoon when they entered the Mersey, and dusk had fallen before the Captain got out his glass to look for the white fluttering speck in his own window which meant so much to him.
Long he studied before he made quite sure that it was there.
At last he shut the glass with a satisfied air.
"It's all right," he said to Katy, who stood near, almost as much interested as he.
"Lucy never forgets, bless her!
It's a load taken from my mind."
The moon had risen and was shining softly on the river as the crowded tender landed the passengers from the "Spartacus" at the Liverpool docks.
"We shall meet again in London or in Paris," said one to another, and cards and addresses were exchanged.
"Four wheeler or hansom, ma'am?" said a porter to mrs Ashe.
"Which, Katy?"
"Oh, let us have a hansom!
I never saw one, and they look so nice in 'Punch.'"
So a hansom cab was called, the two ladies got in, Amy cuddled down between them, the folding doors were shut over their knees like a lap robe, and away they drove up the solidly paved streets to the hotel where they were to pass the night.
"How lovely it will be to sleep in a bed that doesn't tip or roll from side to side!" said mrs Ashe.
"Yes, and that is wide enough and long enough and soft enough to be comfortable!" replied Katy.
"I feel as if I could sleep for a fortnight to make up for the bad nights at sea."
CHAPTER six
THE LONG ARM OF COINCIDENCE
"Go," said Ella, as she hastened from the room, "and open the door, while I go upstairs and take my hat off."
There were two persons at the door-Jack Martyn and another.
"This," said Jack, referring to his companion, "is a friend of mine."
It was dark in the passage, and Madge was a little flurried.
She perceived that Jack had a companion, and that was all.
Ella has gone to take her hat off."
Presently, returning with the lighted lamp in her hand, placing it on the table, she glanced at Jack's companion-and stared.
In her astonishment, she all but knocked the lamp over.
Jack laughed.
"I believe," he said, "you two have met before."
Madge continued speechless.
She passed her hand before her eyes, as if to make sure she was not dreaming.
Jack laughed again.
"I repeat that I believe you two have met before."
Madge drew herself up to her straightest and her stiffest.
Her tone was icy.
"Yes, I rather believe we have."
She rather believed they had?--If she could credit the evidence of her own eyes the man in front of her was the stranger who had so unwarrantably intruded on pretence of seeking music lessons-who had behaved in so extraordinary a fashion!
"This," went on Jack airily, "is a friend of mine, Bruce Graham,--Graham, this is Miss Brodie."
Madge acknowledged the introduction with an inclination of the head which was so faint as to be almost imperceptible.
mr Graham, on the contrary, bent almost double-he seemed scarcely more at his ease than she was.
"I'm afraid, Miss Brodie, that I've behaved very badly.
I trust you will allow me to express my contrition."
There came a voice from behind her.
"You needn't-Ella is aware of it already."
As Ella came into the room, she moved to leave it.
Jack caught her by the arm.
Do you know that we're standing in the presence of a romance in real life-on the verge of a blood curdling mystery? Fact!--aren't we, Graham?"
mr Graham's language was slightly less emphatic.
Jack waved his arm excitedly.
"I say it's the most extraordinary thing.
Now, honestly, Graham, isn't it a most extraordinary thing?"
"It certainly is rather a striking illustration of the long arm of coincidence."
"Listen to him.
Isn't he cold blooded?
If you'd heard him an hour or two ago, he was hot enough to melt all the ice cream in town.
But you wait a bit.
This is my show, and I'll let you know it.
Sit down, Ella-sit down, Madge-Graham, take a chair.
To you a tale I will unfold."
Taking up his position on the hearthrug in front of the fireplace, he commenced to orate.
"You see this man.
His name's Graham.
He digs in the same house I do. To be perfectly frank, his rooms are on the opposite side of the landing.
You may have heard me speak of him."
Often!"
This was Ella.
"Have you?
You must know, Graham, that there are frequently occasions on which I have nothing whatever to talk about, so I fill up the blanks with what I may call padding.
I say this, because I don't want you to misunderstand the situation.
This morning he lunched at the same crib I did.
'I'm always insulting a lady.'--I may explain that when I made that remark, Ella, you were the lady I had in my mind's eye.
At this point I would pause to inquire why, Miss Brodie, you did not take me into your confidence yesterday afternoon?"
"I did."
"You did not."
"I did."
"You told me about the lunatic lady, because, I suppose, you could not help it-since you were caught in the act-but you said nothing about a lunatic gentleman." He wagged his finger portentously.
"Don't think you deceive me, Madge Brodie-I smell a rat, and one of considerable size."
This was Ella.
If you bustle me, I'll keep going on for ever.
Don't I tell you this is my show?
Do you want to queer it?
Well, as I was about to observe-when I was interrupted-Graham started spinning a yarn about how he had forced his way into a house, in which there was a young woman all alone, by herself, and, so far as I could make out, gone on awful.
'May I ask,' I said, beginning to think that his yarn smelt somewhat fishy, 'what house this was?' 'The place,' he replied, as cool as a cucumber, 'is called Clover Cottage.' 'What's that!' I cried-I almost jumped out of my chair.
'I say that the place is called Clover Cottage.' I had to hold on to the hair of my head with both my hands.
'And whereabouts may Clover Cottage be?' 'On Wandsworth Common.' When he said that, as calmly as if he were asking me to pass the salt, I collapsed.
I daresay he thought that I'd gone mad."
"I began to wonder."
This was Graham.
"Did you?
Let me tell you, sir, that as far as you were concerned, I had long since passed the stage of wonder, and had reached the haven of assurance.
'Are you aware?' I cried, 'that Clover Cottage, Wandsworth Common, is the residence of the lady whom I hope to make my wife?' 'Good Lord!' he said.
'It seems to me,' I said, 'that if the lady you insulted was not the lady whom I hope to make my wife, it was that lady's friend, which is the same thing----'"
"Is it?" interposed Ella.
"I hear."
"'Which is the same thing,'" continued Jack.
"'And therefore, sir, I must ask you to explain.' He explained, I am bound to admit that he explained there and then.
He gave me an explanation which I have no hesitation in asserting"--Jack, holding his left hand out in front of him, brought his right list solemnly down upon his open palm-"was the most astonishing I ever heard.
It shows the hand of Providence; it shows that the age of miracles is not yet past; it shows----"
Ella cut the orator short.
"Never mind what it shows; what's the explanation?"
Jack shook his head sadly.
"I was about to point out several other things which that explanation shows, with a view, as I might phrase it, of improving the occasion, but, having been interrupted for the third time, I refrain.
The explanation itself you will hear from Graham's own lips-after tea.
He is here for the purpose of giving you that explanation-after tea.
I believe, Graham, I am correct in saying so?"
"Perfectly.
Only, so far as I am concerned, I am ready to give my explanation now.
I cannot but feel that I shall occupy an invidious position in, at any rate, Miss Brodie's eyes until I have explained."
"Then feel!
I'll be hanged if you shall explain now.
Dash it, man, I want my tea; I want a high tea, a good tea-at once!"
Ella sprang up from her chair.
It was a curious meal-if only because of the curious terms on which two members of the party stood toward each other.
The two girls sat at each end of the table, the men on either side.
Madge, unlike her usual self, was reserved and frosty; what little she did say was addressed to Ella or to Jack.
mr Graham she ignored, treating his timorous attempts in a conversational direction with complete inattention.
His position could hardly have been more uncomfortable.
Ella, influenced by Madge's attitude, seemed as if she could not make up her mind how to treat him on her own account; her bearing towards him, to say the least, was chilly.
On the other hand.
Jack's somewhat cumbrous attempts at humour and sociability did not mend matters; and more than once before the meal was over mr Graham must have heartily wished that he had never sat down to it.
Still, even Madge might have admitted, and perhaps in her heart she did admit, that, under the circumstances, he bore himself surprisingly well; that he looked as if he was deserving of better treatment.
Half unconsciously to herself-and probably quite unconsciously to him-she kept a corner of her eye upon him all the time.
He scarcely looked the sort of man to do anything unworthy.
The strong rough face suggested honesty, the bright clear eyes were frank and open; the broad brow spelt intellect, the lines of the mouth and jaw were bold and firm. The man's whole person was suggestive of strength, both physical and mental.
And when he came to tell the story which Jack Martyn had foreshadowed, it was difficult, as one listened, not to believe that he was one who had been raised by nature above the common sort.
VOLTAIRE.
Her Grace had issued cards for a concert; and after mature deliberation it was decided that her rival should strike out something new, and announce a christening for the same night.
In the utmost delight the fond mother drove away to consult her confidants upon the name and decorations of the child, whom she had not even looked at for many days.
Everything succeeded to admiration.
Lady Juliana glanced over the first line of the letter, then looked at the signature, resolved to read the rest as soon as she should have time to answer it; and in the meantime tossed it into a drawer, amongst old visiting cards and unpaid bills.
After vainly waiting for an answer, much beyond the accustomed time when children are baptized, mrs Douglas could no longer refuse to accede to the desires of the venerable inmates of Glenfern; and about a month before her favoured sister received her more elegant appellations, the neglected twin was baptized by the name of Mary.
mrs Douglas's letter had been enclosed in the following one from Miss Grizzy, and as it had not the good fortune to be perused by the person to whom it was addressed, we deem it but justice to the writer to insert it here:--
"My DEAREST NIECE, LADY JULIANA-I am Certain, as indeed we all are, that it will Afford your Ladyship and our dear Nephew the greatest Pleasure to see this letter Franked by our Worthy and Respectable Friend Sir Sampson Maclaughlan, Bart., especially as it is the First he has ever franked; out of compliment to you, as I assure you he admires you excessively, as indeed we all do.
At the same Time, you will of course, I am sure, Sympathise with us all in the distress Occasioned by the melancholy Death of our late Most Obliging Member, Duncan M'Dunsmuir, Esquire, of Dhunacrag and Auchnagoil, who you never have had the Pleasure of seeing.
This ought to be a warning to all Young people to take care of Wet feet, and Especially eating Raw oysters, which are certainly Highly dangerous, particularly where there is any Tendency to Gout.
I hope, my dear Niece, you have got a pair of Stout walking shoes, and that both Henry and you remember to Change your feet after Walking. I am told Raw Oysters are much the fashion in London at present; but when this Fatal Event comes to be Known, it will of course Alarm people very much, and put them upon their guard both as to Damp Feet and Raw oysters.
Lady Maclaughlan is in High spirits at Sir Sampson's Success, though, at the Same Time, I assure you, she Felt much for the Distress of poor mr M'Dunsmuir, and had sent him a Large Box of Pills, and a Bottle of Gout Tincture, only two days before he died.
I hope Harry wont take it amiss if Sir Sampson does not pay him so much Attention as he might expect; but he says that he will not be master of a moment of his own Time in London.
He will be so much taken up with the King and the Duke of York, that he is afraid he will Disoblige a great Number of the Nobility by it, besides injuring his own health by such Constant application to business.
He is to make a very fine Speech in Parliament, but it is not yet Fixed what his First Motion is to be upon.
This Place is in great Beauty at present, and the new Byre is completely finished.
Our dear Little Grand niece is in great health, and much improved.
We reckon her Extremely like our Family, Particularly Becky; though she has a great Look of Bella, at the Same Time, Then she Laughs.
Excuse the Shortness of this Letter, my dear Niece, as I shall Write a much Longer one by Lady Maclaughlan.
aunt,
Such jewels! such dresses! such a house! such a husband! so easy and good-natured, and rich and generous!
She might give what parties she pleased, go where she liked, spend as much money as she chose, and he would never, trouble his head about the matter.
When, shutting the drawing room doors, he said, with earnestness, "I think, Julia, you were talking of Lady Lindore this morning: oblige me by repeating what you said, as I was reading the papers, and really did not attend much to what passed."
Her Ladyship, in extreme surprise, wondered how Harry could be so tiresome and absurd as to stop her airing for any such purpose.
She really did not know what she said.
How could she?
It was more than an hour ago.
"Well, then, say what you think of her now," cried Douglas impatiently.
"Think of her!
why, what all the world must think-that she is the happiest woman in it.
After that, I quite lost sight of her."
"As everyone else has done.
She has not been seen since.
Even Lady Juliana was shocked at this intelligence, though the folly, more than the wickedness, of the thing, seemed to strike her mind; but Henry was no nice observer, and was therefore completely satisfied with the disapprobation she expressed for her sister in law's conduct.
"I am so sorry for poor dear Lindore," said Lady Juliana after having exhausted herself in invectives against his wife.
If he had been an ill natured stingy wretch it would have been nothing; but Frederick is such a noble hearted fellow-I dare say he would give me a thousand pounds if I were to ask him, for he don't care about money."
"Lord Lindore takes the matter very coolly, understand," replied her husband; "but-don't be alarmed, dear Julia-your father has suffered a little from the violence of his feelings.
He has had a sort of apoplectic fit, but is not considered in immediate danger."
Lady Juliana burst into tears, desired the carriage might be put up, as she should not go out, and even declared her intention of abstaining from mrs D-----'s assembly that evening.
Chapter twenty two
It was six o'clock already, and so, in order to be there quickly, and at the same time not to drive with his own horses, known to everyone, Vronsky got into Yashvin's hired fly, and told the driver to drive as quickly as possible.
It was a roomy, old-fashioned fly, with seats for four.
He sat in one corner, stretched his legs out on the front seat, and sank into meditation.
A vague sense of the order into which his affairs had been brought, a vague recollection of the friendliness and flattery of Serpuhovskoy, who had considered him a man that was needed, and most of all, the anticipation of the interview before him-all blended into a general, joyous sense of life.
This feeling was so strong that he could not help smiling.
He dropped his legs, crossed one leg over the other knee, and taking it in his hand, felt the springy muscle of the calf, where it had been grazed the day before by his fall, and leaning back he drew several deep breaths.
"I'm happy, very happy!" he said to himself.
He had often before had this sense of physical joy in his own body, but he had never felt so fond of himself, of his own body, as at that moment.
He enjoyed the slight ache in his strong leg, he enjoyed the muscular sensation of movement in his chest as he breathed.
The bright, cold August day, which had made Anna feel so hopeless, seemed to him keenly stimulating, and refreshed his face and neck that still tingled from the cold water.
The scent of brilliantine on his whiskers struck him as particularly pleasant in the fresh air.
"Get on, get on!" he said to the driver, putting his head out of the window, and pulling a three rouble note out of his pocket he handed it to the man as he looked round.
The driver's hand fumbled with something at the lamp, the whip cracked, and the carriage rolled rapidly along the smooth highroad.
"I want nothing, nothing but this happiness," he thought, staring at the bone button of the bell in the space between the windows, and picturing to himself Anna just as he had seen her last time.
"And as I go on, I love her more and more.
Where?
How?
Why did she fix on this place to meet me, and why does she write in Betsy's letter?" he thought, wondering now for the first time at it.
But there was now no time for wonder.
He called to the driver to stop before reaching the avenue, and opening the door, jumped out of the carriage as it was moving, and went into the avenue that led up to the house.
There was no one in the avenue; but looking round to the right he caught sight of her.
Her face was hidden by a veil, but he drank in with glad eyes the special movement in walking, peculiar to her alone, the slope of the shoulders, and the setting of the head, and at once a sort of electric shock ran all over him.
"You're not angry that I sent for you?
I absolutely had to see you," she said; and the serious and set line of her lips, which he saw under the veil, transformed his mood at once.
"I angry!
But how have you come, where from?"
"Never mind," she said, laying her hand on his, "come along, I must talk to you."
He saw that something had happened, and that the interview would not be a joyous one.
In her presence he had no will of his own: without knowing the grounds of her distress, he already felt the same distress unconsciously passing over him.
"What is it?
what?" he asked her, squeezing her hand with his elbow, and trying to read her thoughts in her face.
She walked on a few steps in silence, gathering up her courage; then suddenly she stopped.
He heard her, unconsciously bending his whole figure down to her as though hoping in this way to soften the hardness of her position for her.
But directly she had said this he suddenly drew himself up, and a proud and hard expression came over his face.
"Yes, yes, that's better, a thousand times better!
I know how painful it was," he said.
But she was not listening to his words, she was reading his thoughts from the expression of his face.
She could not guess that that expression arose from the first idea that presented itself to Vronsky-that a duel was now inevitable.
The idea of a duel had never crossed her mind, and so she put a different interpretation on this passing expression of hardness.
When she got her husband's letter, she knew then at the bottom of her heart that everything would go on in the old way, that she would not have the strength of will to forego her position, to abandon her son, and to join her lover.
But this interview was still of the utmost gravity for her.
She hoped that this interview would transform her position, and save her.
But this news had not produced what she had expected in him; he simply seemed as though he were resenting some affront.
"It was not in the least painful to me.
It happened of itself," she said irritably; "and see..." she pulled her husband's letter out of her glove.
"I understand, I understand," he interrupted her, taking the letter, but not reading it, and trying to soothe her.
"The one thing I longed for, the one thing I prayed for, was to cut short this position, so as to devote my life to your happiness."
"Why do you tell me that?" she said.
If I doubted..."
"Who's that coming?" said Vronsky suddenly, pointing to two ladies walking towards them.
"Perhaps they know us!" and he hurriedly turned off, drawing her after him into a side path.
"Oh, I don't care!" she said.
Her lips were quivering.
And he fancied that her eyes looked with strange fury at him from under the veil.
"I tell you that's not the point-I can't doubt that; but see what he writes to me.
Read it." She stood still again.
Again, just as at the first moment of hearing of her rupture with her husband, Vronsky, on reading the letter, was unconsciously carried away by the natural sensation aroused in him by his own relation to the betrayed husband.
And at that instant there flashed across his mind the thought of what Serpuhovskoy had just said to him, and what he had himself been thinking in the morning-that it was better not to bind himself-and he knew that this thought he could not tell her.
Having read the letter, he raised his eyes to her, and there was no determination in them.
She saw at once that he had been thinking about it before by himself.
She knew that whatever he might say to her, he would not say all he thought.
And she knew that her last hope had failed her.
"You see the sort of man he is," she said, with a shaking voice; "he..."
"For God's sake, let me finish!" he added, his eyes imploring her to give him time to explain his words.
"I rejoice, because things cannot, cannot possibly remain as he supposes."
"Why can't they?" Anna said, restraining her tears, and obviously attaching no sort of consequence to what he said.
She felt that her fate was sealed.
Vronsky meant that after the duel-inevitable, he thought-things could not go on as before, but he said something different.
"It can't go on.
I hope that now you will leave him.
I hope"--he was confused, and reddened-"that you will let me arrange and plan our life. Tomorrow..." he was beginning.
She did not let him go on.
"But my child!" she shrieked.
"You see what he writes!
I should have to leave him, and I can't and won't do that."
"But, for God's sake, which is better?--leave your child, or keep up this degrading position?"
"To whom is it degrading?"
"To all, and most of all to you."
"You say degrading ... don't say that.
Those words have no meaning for me," she said in a shaking voice.
She did not want him now to say what was untrue.
She had nothing left her but his love, and she wanted to love him.
"Don't you understand that from the day I loved you everything has changed for me?
For me there is one thing, and one thing only-your love.
If that's mine, I feel so exalted, so strong, that nothing can be humiliating to me.
I am proud of my position, because ... proud of being ... proud...." She could not say what she was proud of.
Tears of shame and despair choked her utterance.
He felt, too, something swelling in his throat and twitching in his nose, and for the first time in his life he felt on the point of weeping.
He could not have said exactly what it was touched him so.
He felt sorry for her, and he felt he could not help her, and with that he knew that he was to blame for her wretchedness, and that he had done something wrong.
"Is not a divorce possible?" he said feebly.
She shook her head, not answering.
"Couldn't you take your son, and still leave him?"
"Yes; but it all depends on him.
Now I must go to him," she said shortly.
Her presentiment that all would again go on in the old way had not deceived her.
"On Tuesday I shall be in Petersburg, and everything can be settled."
"Yes," she said.
"But don't let us talk any more of it."
CHAPTER twelve.
A MUSICAL GARDENER.
"The smaller animal ought to go to bed at once," he said with an air of authority.
"Why at once?" said the Professor.
"Because he can't go at twice," said the Other Professor.
The Professor gently clapped his hands.
"Nobody else could have thought of the reason, so quick.
It would hurt him to be divided."
This remark woke up Bruno, suddenly and completely.
"I don't want to be divided," he said decisively.
"It does very well on a diagram," said the Other Professor.
"I could show it you in a minute, only the chalk's a little blunt."
"Take care!" Sylvie anxiously exclaimed, as he began, rather clumsily, to point it.
"You'll cut your finger off, if you hold the knife so!"
Bruno thoughtfully added.
"It's like this," said the Other Professor, hastily drawing a long line upon the black board, and marking the letters 'A,' 'B,' at the two ends, and 'C' in the middle: "let me explain it to you.
"It would be drownded," Bruno pronounced confidently.
The Other Professor gasped.
"What would be drownded?"
"Why the bumble bee, of course!" said Bruno.
"And the two bits would sink down in the sea!"
Here the Professor interfered, as the Other Professor was evidently too much puzzled to go on with his diagram.
"When I said it would hurt him, I was merely referring to the action of the nerves-"
The Other Professor brightened up in a moment.
"The action of the nerves," he began eagerly, "is curiously slow in some people.
"And if you only pinched him?" queried Sylvie.
"Then it would take ever so much longer, of course.
In fact, I doubt if the man himself would ever feel it, at all.
His grandchildren might."
"I wouldn't like to be the grandchild of a pinched grandfather, would you, Mister Sir?" Bruno whispered.
"It might come just when you wanted to be happy!"
That would be awkward, I admitted, taking it quite as a matter of course that he had so suddenly caught sight of me.
"But don't you always want to be happy, Bruno?"
"Not always," Bruno said thoughtfully.
"Sometimes, when I's too happy, I wants to be a little miserable.
Then it's all right."
"I'm sorry you don't like lessons," I said.
"Well, so am I!" said Bruno.
"You're as busy as the day is short!"
"Well, what's the difference?" Bruno asked.
"Mister Sir, isn't the day as short as it's long?
I mean, isn't it the same length?"
Never having considered the question in this light, I suggested that they had better ask the Professor; and they ran off in a moment to appeal to their old friend.
The Professor left off polishing his spectacles to consider.
"My dears," he said after a minute, "the day is the same length as anything that is the same length as it." And he resumed his never ending task of polishing.
The children returned, slowly and thoughtfully, to report his answer. "Isn't he wise?"
Sylvie asked in an awestruck whisper.
"You appear to be talking to somebody-that isn't here," the Professor said, turning round to the children.
"Who is it?"
Bruno looked puzzled.
"I never talks to nobody when he isn't here!" he replied.
The Professor looked anxiously in my direction, and seemed to look through and through me without seeing me.
"Then who are you talking to?" he said.
"Children!
Help to look for him!
Quick!
He's got lost again!"
The children were on their feet in a moment.
"Where shall we look?" said Sylvie.
"Anywhere!" shouted the excited Professor.
"Only be quick about it!" And he began trotting round and round the room, lifting up the chairs, and shaking them.
Bruno took a very small book out of the bookcase, opened it, and shook it in imitation of the Professor.
"He isn't here," he said.
"I should have shooked him out, if he'd been in there!"
"Has he ever been lost before?" Sylvie enquired, turning up a corner of the hearth rug, and peeping under it.
"Once before," said the Professor: "he once lost himself in a wood-"
"And couldn't he find his self again?" said Bruno.
"Why didn't he shout? He'd be sure to hear his self, 'cause he couldn't be far off, oo know."
"Lets try shouting," said the Professor.
"What shall we shout?" said Sylvie.
"On second thoughts, don't shout," the Professor replied.
"The Vice Warden might hear you.
He's getting awfully strict!"
This reminded the poor children of all the troubles, about which they had come to their old friend.
Bruno sat down on the floor and began crying.
"He is so cruel!" he sobbed.
"And he lets Uggug take away all my toys!
"A little piece of a dead crow," was Bruno's mournful reply.
"He means rook pie," Sylvie explained.
"And there were a apple pudding-and Uggug ate it all-and I got nuffin but a crust!
"It's all true, Professor dear!
"But what can I do?"
"We know the way to Fairyland-where Father's gone-quite well," said Sylvie: "if only the Gardener would let us out."
"Won't he open the door for you?" said the Professor.
"Not for us," said Sylvie: "but I'm sure he would for you.
Do come and ask him, Professor dear!"
"I'll come this minute!" said the Professor.
Bruno sat up and dried his eyes.
"Isn't he kind, Mister Sir?"
"He is indeed," said i But the Professor took no notice of my remark. He had put on a beautiful cap with a long tassel, and was selecting one of the Other Professor's walking sticks, from a stand in the corner of the room.
"A thick stick in one's hand makes people respectful," he was saying to himself.
"Come along, dear children!" And we all went out into the garden together.
"I shall address him, first of all," the Professor explained as we went along, "with a few playful remarks on the weather.
I shall then question him about the Other Professor.
This will have a double advantage.
On our way, we passed the target, at which Uggug had been made to shoot during the Ambassador's visit.
"See!" said the Professor, pointing out a hole in the middle of the bull's eye.
"His Imperial Fatness had only one shot at it; and he went in just here!"
Bruno carefully examined the hole.
"He thought he saw an Albatross That fluttered round the lamp: He looked again, and found it was A Penny Postage Stamp. 'You'd best be getting home,' he said: 'The nights are very damp!'"
"Would it be afraid of catching cold?" said Bruno.
"If it got very damp," Sylvie suggested, "it might stick to something, you know."
"Suppose it was a cow!
Wouldn't it be dreadful for the other things!"
"That's what makes the song so interesting."
"He must have had a very curious life," said Sylvie.
"You may say that!" the Professor heartily rejoined.
"Of course she may!" cried Bruno.
By this time we had come up to the Gardener, who was standing on one leg, as usual, and busily employed in watering a bed of flowers with an empty watering can.
"It hasn't got no water in it!" Bruno explained to him, pulling his sleeve to attract his attention.
"It's lighter to hold," said the Gardener.
"A lot of water in it makes one's arms ache." And he went on with his work, singing softly to himself,
"The nights are very damp!"
"In digging things out of the ground which you probably do now and then," the Professor began in a loud voice; "in making things into heaps-which no doubt you often do; and in kicking things about with one heel-which you seem never to leave off doing; have you ever happened to notice another Professor something like me, but different?"
"There ain't such a thing!"
"We will try a less exciting topic," the Professor mildly remarked to the children.
"You were asking-"
"We asked him to let us through the garden door," said Sylvie: "but he wouldn't: but perhaps he would for you!"
The Professor put the request, very humbly and courteously.
"I wouldn't mind letting you out," said the Gardener.
Not for one and sixpence!"
The Professor cautiously produced a couple of shillings.
"That'll do it!" the Gardener shouted, as he hurled the watering can across the flower bed, and produced a handful of keys-one large one, and a number of small ones.
"But look here, Professor dear!" whispered Sylvie.
"He needn't open the door for us, at all.
We can go out with you."
"True, dear child!" the Professor thankfully replied, as he replaced the coins in his pocket.
"That saves two shillings!" And he took the children's hands, that they might all go out together when the door was opened.
"Why not try the large one?
The Professor shook his head.
And now it's open, we are going out by Rule-the Rule of Three."
The Gardener looked puzzled, and let us go out; but, as he locked the door behind us, we heard him singing thoughtfully to himself,
"He thought he saw a Garden Door That opened with a key: He looked again, and found it was A Double Rule of Three: 'And all its mystery,' he said, 'Is clear as day to me!'"
"I shall now return," said the Professor, when we had walked a few yards: "you see, it's impossible to read here, for all my books are in the house."
But the children still kept fast hold of his hands.
"Do come with us!" Sylvie entreated with tears in her eyes.
"Perhaps I'll come after you, some day soon.
But I must go back now.
You see I left off at a comma, and it's so awkward not knowing how the sentence finishes! Besides, you've got to go through Dogland first, and I'm always a little nervous about dogs.
But it'll be quite easy to come, as soon as I've completed my new invention-for carrying one's self, you know.
"Well, no, my child.
You see, whatever fatigue one incurs by carrying, one saves by being carried!
Good bye, Sir!" he added to my intense surprise, giving my hand an affectionate squeeze.
seventeen
Owen was still in the same state of moody abstraction as when Darrow had left him at the piano; and even Anna's face, to her friend's vigilant eye, revealed not, perhaps, a personal preoccupation, but a vague sense of impending disturbance.
She smiled, she bore a part in the talk, her eyes dwelt on Darrow's with their usual deep reliance; but beneath the surface of her serenity his tense perceptions detected a hidden stir.
He was sufficiently self possessed to tell himself that it was doubtless due to causes with which he was not directly concerned.
But this, again, was negatived by the fact that, during the afternoon's shooting, young Leath had been in a mood of almost extravagant expansiveness, and that, from the moment of his late return to the house till just before dinner, there had been, to Darrow's certain knowledge, no possibility of a private talk between himself and his step mother.
This obscured, if it narrowed, the field of conjecture; and Darrow's gropings threw him back on the conclusion that he was probably reading too much significance into the moods of a lad he hardly knew, and who had been described to him as subject to sudden changes of humour.
On the score of that one, at least, his mind, if not easy, was relieved.
It had been his first business to convince the girl that their secret was safe with him; but it was far from easy to square this with the equally urgent obligation of safe guarding Anna's responsibility toward her child. Darrow was not much afraid of accidental disclosures.
Both he and Sophy Viner had too much at stake not to be on their guard.
The fear that beset him was of another kind, and had a profounder source.
This discrepancy, which at the time had seemed to simplify the incident, now turned out to be its most galling complication.
The bare truth, indeed, was that he had hardly thought of her at all, either at the time or since, and that he was ashamed to base his judgement of her on his meagre memory of their adventure.
The essential cheapness of the whole affair-as far as his share in it was concerned-came home to him with humiliating distinctness.
He would have liked to be able to feel that, at the time at least, he had staked something more on it, and had somehow, in the sequel, had a more palpable loss to show.
But the plain fact was that he hadn't spent a penny on it; which was no doubt the reason of the prodigious score it had since been rolling up.
The night brought no aid to the solving of this problem; but it gave him, at any rate, the clear conviction that no time was to be lost.
His first step must be to obtain from Miss Viner the chance of another and calmer talk; and he resolved to seek it at the earliest hour.
He had gathered that Effie's lessons were preceded by an early scamper in the park, and conjecturing that her governess might be with her he betook himself the next morning to the terrace, whence he wandered on to the gardens and the walks beyond.
The atmosphere was still and pale.
The stillness was presently broken by joyful barks, and Darrow, tracking the sound, overtook Effie flying down one of the long alleys at the head of her pack.
The girl, coming forward at his approach, returned his greeting almost gaily.
For the first time he saw in her again the sidelong grace that had charmed his eyes in Paris; but he saw it now as in a painted picture.
"Shall we sit down a minute?" he asked, as Effie trotted off.
The girl looked away from him.
"I'm afraid there's not much time; we must be back at lessons at half past nine."
"But it's barely ten minutes past.
Let's at least walk a little way toward the river."
"If you like," she said in a low voice, with one of her quick fluctuations of colour; but instead of taking the way he proposed she turned toward a narrow path which branched off obliquely through the trees.
Darrow was struck, and vaguely troubled, by the change in her look and tone.
There was in them an undefinable appeal, whether for help or forbearance he could not tell.
Then it occurred to him that there might have been something misleading in his so pointedly seeking her, and he felt a momentary constraint.
To ease it he made an abrupt dash at the truth.
I want to hear more about you-about your plans and prospects.
Her face instantly sharpened to distrust.
"I had to live," she said in an off hand tone.
"I understand perfectly that you should like it here-for a time." His glance strayed down the gold roofed windings ahead of them.
"It's delightful: you couldn't be better placed.
She waited for a moment before answering: "I suppose I'm less restless than I used to be."
"It's certainly natural that you should be less restless here than at mrs Murrett's; yet somehow I don't seem to see you permanently given up to forming the young."
"What-exactly-DO you seem to see me permanently given up to?
You know you warned me rather emphatically against the theatre." She threw off the statement without impatience, as though they were discussing together the fate of a third person in whom both were benevolently interested.
Darrow considered his reply.
"If I did, it was because you so emphatically refused to let me help you to a start."
She stopped short and faced him "And you think I may let you now?"
Darrow felt the blood in his cheek.
But he had a fixed purpose ahead and could only push on to it.
"I hope, at any rate, you'll listen to my reasons.
There's been time, on both sides, to think them over since----"
She walked on beside him, her eyes on the ground.
"Then I'm to understand-definitely-that you DO renew your offer?" she asked
"With all my heart!
If you'll only let me----"
"It's extremely friendly of you-I DO believe you mean it as a friend-but I don't quite understand why, finding me, as you say, so well placed here, you should show more anxiety about my future than at a time when I was actually, and rather desperately, adrift."
"Oh, no, not more!"
Darrow stood still in the path.
Effie sprang past them, and Darrow took up the girl's challenge.
It's true enough that I want to help you; but the wish isn't due to...to any past kindness on your part, but simply to my own interest in you.
She took a few hesitating steps and then paused again.
"A long time-yes."
"She told me you were friends-great friends"
"Yes," he admitted, "we're great friends."
"Then you might naturally feel yourself justified in telling her that you don't think I'm the right person for Effie." He uttered a sound of protest, but she disregarded it.
"I don't say you'd LIKE to do it.
You wouldn't: you'd hate it.
But supposing that failed, and you saw I was determined to stay?
THEN you might think it your duty to tell mrs Leath."
She laid the case before him with a cold lucidity.
"I shouldn't feel justified in telling her, behind your back, if I thought you unsuited for the place; but I should certainly feel justified," he rejoined after a pause, "in telling YOU if I thought the place unsuited to you."
"And that's what you're trying to tell me now?"
You're too various, too gifted, too personal, to tie yourself down, at your age, to the dismal drudgery of teaching."
"And is THAT what you've told mrs Leath?"
She rushed the question out at him as if she expected to trip him up over it.
"I've told her exactly nothing," he replied.
"And what-exactly-do you mean by 'nothing'?
Darrow felt his blood rise at the thrust.
"I've told her, simply, that I'd seen you once or twice at mrs Murrett's."
"And not that you've ever seen me since?"
He uttered a protesting exclamation, and his flush reflected itself in the girl's cheek.
"Oh, I beg your pardon!
I didn't mean to ask you that." She halted, and again cast a rapid glance behind and ahead of her.
Then she held out her hand.
And you'll give me a chance to talk things over with you?"
She shook her head with a faint smile.
"I'm not thinking of the stage. I've had another offer: that's all."
The relief was hardly less great.
"You'll tell me about that, then-won't you?"
Her smile flickered up.
"Oh, you'll hear about it soon...I must catch Effie now and drag her back to the blackboard."
She walked on for a few yards, and then paused again and confronted him. "I've been odious to you-and not quite honest," she broke out suddenly.
"Not quite honest?" he repeated, caught in a fresh wave of wonder.
"I mean, in seeming not to trust you.
It's come over me again as we talked that, at heart, I've always KNOWN I could..."
Her colour rose in a bright wave, and her eyes clung to his for a swift instant of reminder and appeal.
For the same space of time the past surged up in him confusedly; then a veil dropped between them.
Perhaps no one less familiar with her face than Darrow would have discerned the tension of the smile she transferred from himself to Owen Leath, or have remarked that her eyes had hardened from misty grey to a shining darkness.
The change, for Darrow, was less definable; but, perhaps for that reason, it struck him as more sharply significant.
Only-just what did it signify?
Owen, like Sophy Viner, had the kind of face which seems less the stage on which emotions move than the very stuff they work in.
Darrow, through the rapid flight of the shadows, could not seize on any specific indication of feeling: he merely perceived that the young man was unaccountably surprised at finding him with Miss Viner, and that the extent of his surprise might cover all manner of implications.
Darrow's first idea was that Owen, if he suspected that the conversation was not the result of an accidental encounter, might wonder at his step mother's suitor being engaged, at such an hour, in private talk with her little girl's governess.
Presently he was struck by the fact that Owen Leath and the girl were silent also; and this gave a new turn to his thoughts.
A PORTRAIT FROM LIFE
This young man with a livid face-a blonde of the type with black eyes, whose immovable glance has an indescribable fascination, sober in speech as in conduct, dressed in black, lean as a consumptive, but nevertheless vigorously framed-visited the family of his former master and the house of his cashier less from affection than from self interest.
The young fellow looked at Modeste precisely as he would have looked at a cheap lithograph.
His little eyes, of a calm blue, were like bits of steel.
His physical strength, well-known to every one, put him above all danger of attack.
Her face expressed the pleasure she took in the smooth petals of the flower she was working.
It was eight o'clock.
Modeste,--blossom enclosed, like that of Catullus,--was she worth all these precautions?
It seemed, like a pearl, to have its orient.
Admission to the class is gained by exercise of the pecuniary aptitudes-aptitudes for acquisition rather than for serviceability. There is, therefore, a continued selective sifting of the human material that makes up the leisure class, and this selection proceeds on the ground of fitness for pecuniary pursuits.
The most immediate and unequivocal expression of that archaic human nature which characterizes man in the predatory stage is the fighting propensity proper.
In cases where the predatory activity is a collective one, this propensity is frequently called the martial spirit, or, latterly, patriotism.
Indeed, the leisure class claims the distinction as a matter of pride, and no doubt with some grounds.
In the male child the predaceous interval is ordinarily fairly well marked and lasts for some time, but it is commonly terminated (if at all) with the attainment of maturity.
This last statement may need very material qualification.
The same is true of the encouragement given to the growth of "college spirit," college athletics, and the like, in the higher institutions of learning.
Harold remained for four months longer with his cousin.
The Indians had made several attacks upon settlements at other points of the frontier, but they had not repeated their incursion in the neighborhood of the lake.
The farming operations had gone on regularly, but the men always worked with their rifles ready to their hand.
mr Welch's farm was the only one along the lake that had escaped, and the loss the Indians had sustained in attacking it had been so heavy that they were not likely to make an expedition in that quarter, where the chances of booty were so small and the certainty of a desperate resistance so great.
Other matters occurred which rendered the renewal of the attack improbable.
The news was brought by a wandering hunter that a quarrel had arisen between the Shawnees and the Iroquois, and that the latter had recalled their braves from the frontier to defend their own villages in case of hostilities breaking out between them and the rival tribe.
There was no occasion for Harold to wait for news from home, for his father had, before starting, definitely fixed the day for his return, and when that time approached Harold started on his eastward journey, in order to be at home about the date of their arrival.
Upon the day after Harold's return two gentlemen called upon Captain Wilson and asked him to sign the agreement which a number of colonists had entered into to resist the mother country to the last. This Captain Wilson positively refused to do.
"I am an Englishman," he said, "and my sympathies are wholly with my country.
I do not say that the whole of the demands of England are justifiable.
But I consider that it has done nothing whatever to justify the attitude of the colonists.
The soldiers of England have fought for you against French and Indians and are still stationed here to protect you.
The colonists pay nothing for their land; they pay nothing toward the expenses of the government of the mother country; and it appears to me to be perfectly just that people here, free as they are from all the burdens that bear so heavily on those at home, should at least bear the expense of the army stationed here.
I grant that it would have been far better had the colonists taxed themselves to pay the extra amount, instead of the mother country taxing them; but this they would not do.
Some of the colonists paid their quota, others refused to do so, and this being the case, it appears to me that England is perfectly justified in laying on a tax.
The stamp tax would in no way have affected the poorer classes in the colonies.
There are, of course, among them a large number of men-among them, gentlemen, I place you-who conscientiously believe that they are justified in doing nothing whatever for the land which gave them or their ancestors birth; who would enjoy all the great natural wealth of this vast country without contributing toward the expense of the troops to whom it is due that they enjoy peace and tranquility.
Such, gentlemen, are not my sentiments.
France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands all monopolize the trade of their colonies; all, far more than does England, regard their colonies as sources of revenue.
"The time will come, sir," one of the gentlemen said, "when you will have reason to regret the line which you have now taken."
"No, sir," Captain Wilson said haughtily.
When the deputation had departed Harold, who had been a wondering listener to the conversation, asked his father to explain to him the exact position in which matters stood.
The success of England, in her struggle with France for the supremacy of North America had cost her a great deal of money.
At home the burdens of the people were extremely heavy.
The expense of the army and navy was great, and the ministry, in striving to lighten the burdens of the people, turned their eyes to the colonies.
They saw in America a population of over two million people, subjects of the king, like themselves, living free from rent and taxes on their own land and paying nothing whatever to the expenses of the country.
They were, it is true, forced to trade with England, but this obligation was set wholly at naught.
Their first step was to strengthen the naval force on the American coast and by additional vigilance to put some sort of check on the wholesale smuggling which prevailed.
This step caused extreme discontent among the trading classes of America, and these set to work vigorously to stir up a strong feeling of disaffection against England.
The revenue officers were prevented, sometimes by force, from carrying out their duties.
The colonists were furious at the imposition of this tax.
Meetings were everywhere held, at which the strongest and most treasonable language was uttered, and such violent threats were used against the persons employed as stamp collectors that these, in fear of their lives, resigned their posts.
The stamp tax remained uncollected and was treated by the colonists as if it were not in existence.
The whole of the States now began to prepare for war.
In England neither the spirit nor the strength of the colonists was understood.
Men could not bring themselves to believe that these would fight rather than submit, still less that if they did fight it would be successfully.
It is true that even had England at this point abandoned altogether her determination to raise taxes in America the result would probably have been the same.
As it was, Parliament agreed to let the stamp tax drop, and in its place established some import duties on goods entering the American ports.
The colonists, however, were determined that they would submit to no taxation whatever.
The English government, in its desire for peace, abandoned all the duties with the exception of that on tea; but even this concession was not sufficient to satisfy the colonists.
There were throughout the country a large number of gentlemen, like Captain Wilson, wholly opposed to the general feeling.
New York refused to send members to the Congress, and in many other provinces the adhesion given to the disaffected movement was but lukewarm.
So far but few acts of violence had taken place.
The Congress drilled, armed, and organized; the English brought over fresh troops and prepared for the struggle.
It was December when Harold returned home to his parents, and for the next three months the lull before the storm continued.
The disaffected of Massachusetts had collected a large quantity of military stores at Concord.
Captain Wilson and his household were startled from sleep by the sudden ringing of the alarm bells, and a negro servant, Pompey, who had been for many years in their service, was sent down into the town, which lay a quarter of a mile from the house, to find out what was the news.
He returned in half an hour.
Down wid de redcoats!
"Nothing, my boy.
"May I go with you, father?"
"Yes, if you like, my boy.
Pompey, saddle two horses at once.
You are not afraid of being left alone, Mary?" he said, turning to his wife. "There is no chance of any disturbance here.
Our house lies beyond the town, and whatever takes place will be in Concord.
The horses were soon brought round, and Captain Wilson and his son mounted and rode off at full speed.
The alarm had evidently been given all along the line.
At every village the bells were ringing, the people were assembling in the streets, all carrying arms, while numbers were flocking in from the farmhouses around.
Once or twice Captain Wilson was stopped and asked where he was going.
If he has orders to come at all hazards, my words will not stop him; if it is left to his discretion, possibly he may pause before he brings on so dire a calamity."
Just as Captain Wilson rode in a messenger ran up with the news that the head of the British column was close at hand.
john Parker, who commanded them, ordered the drums to beat and the alarm guns to be fired, and his men drew up in two ranks across the road.
"Let us get out of the line of fire."
The British, hearing the drums and the alarm guns, loaded, and the advance company came on at the double.
Major Pitcairne was at their head and shouted to the militia to lay down their arms.
The Americans assert that it was the English; the English say that as they advanced several shots were fired at them from behind a stone wall and from some of the adjoining houses, which wounded one man and hit Major Pitcairne's horse in two places.
As they approached the town the militia retreated from it.
In destroying the stores by fire the court house took flames.
At the sight of this fire the militia and armed countrymen advanced down the hill toward the bridge.
The English tried to pull up the planks, but the Americans ran forward rapidly.
Half an hour later Colonel Smith, having performed the duty that he was sent to do, resumed the homeward march with the whole of his troops.
Such was the beginning of the war of independence.
Many American writers have declared that previous to that battle there was no desire for independence on the part of the colonists, but this is emphatically contradicted by the language used at the meetings and in the newspapers which have come down to us.
It was but the spark in the powder.
From an eminence at some distance from the line of retreat Captain Wilson and his son watched sorrowfully the attack upon the British troops.
"The die is cast," he said to his wife as she met him at the door. "The war has begun, and I fear it can have but one termination.
I have pointed out to him that as he was born here he can without dishonor remain neutral in the struggle.
To this I have agreed.
She would, too, be living among her friends and would meet with many of the same convictions and opinions as her husband's, whereas in Concord the whole population would be hostile.
CHAPTER ten
mr Wicker though interested and attentive, gave Chris the impression that what he had been told was not new to him.
So there was nothing left to do but to work as fast and as well as he could.
For Chris was now as accepted a member of the household as mr Wicker himself, and had it not been for the robust guffaws of Ned Cilley, and the ministrations of the now devoted Becky, Chris's days would have been tedious indeed.
He went straight to the bowl and addressed the fish.
"Sir," he said to the goldfish, "I am here.
What shall I do first?"
"How you have improved, my boy!" he exclaimed.
"It is now time for you to try, and this is as good a change as any."
All at once, at the imminent prospect of really changing himself into some other form, Chris became frightened and his hands grew cold.
"Oh, sir!
Do you really think I know how?" he cried, gazing up into the face of his master.
"Suppose I change and can't change back?"
mr Wicker shook his head with a smile.
"Never fear, Christopher.
You know enough to start, and I feel reasonably sure that you will be quite able to change back again.
If you get stuck I can help you.
Come now," he said, putting out his hand to touch Chris's shoulder in a reassuring way, "here you go.
Remember Incantation Seventy three, Book One."
Chris stared at the fishbowl, empty now.
Then as nothing happened, with a voice like a whip mr Wicker said: "Start at once!"
As he went on, concentrating on becoming a goldfish in the bowl on the table, he became aware of a humming sensation in his head.
This grew until it seemed that all his body was filled with the strange new vibration, tingling from his feet to the crown of his head.
His head swam and he felt faint and a little sick, but he persisted through the final words.
"Better come back now.
Seventy four, Book One: The Return."
"This will seem to smoke.
Sniff the smoke and drink the liquid that remains," he said.
A peculiar feeling, but as you come to do it more often and more quickly, the change will come more rapidly and in time you will be scarcely aware of the sensations at all." He looked at his pupil with pride.
From that time, Chris became increasingly proficient, and as his ability grew he began to find magic a wonderful game, which he and mr Wicker played together.
They played this new and unique form of hide and seek, each one taking a new shape, turn by turn, as a challenge to the other's powers of imagination and detection.
Soon Chris could turn himself into a limited number of things, for even mr Wicker's magic had a limit: a singing bird in a cage, a part of the pattern in the brocaded curtains, or a section of the design in the Indian rug.
This afternoon, a rainy one, he had tired of changing himself into and out of objects.
Without interest at first, Chris stared at the little Negro boy, so gaily dressed in full red trousers, gilded jacket and white turban. The figure's shoes, carved in some Eastern style, had curved up pointing toes.
Then all at once the idea came to Chris.
If he was to be a magician, could he make this boy come to life?
The prospect excited him wildly, for he had no companion with whom to laugh and share jokes.
He heard the magician going up the spiral staircase to his room above, and after changing himself to a mouse to slip under the door and see that the room was really empty, Chris resumed his proper shape and opened the doors of the cupboard at the far end of the room.
On its top shelf was Book Three, a book a foot thick and bound in heavy brass studded with semi precious stones in the form of signs and symbols.
With difficulty, standing on tiptoe, Chris lifted it down, and placing it on the floor, turned over page after page.
The afternoon, rainy before, increased in storm.
Dusk came two hours before its time; thunder snarled in the sky.
There were the words, and there the charm. Certain elements were to be mixed and poured at the proper time.
He hurried, memorizing as he closed the book, and hoisted it once more to its high shelf.
Chris, his cheeks hot from excitement and the fire, tiptoed out just as mr Wicker's step creaked on the topmost tread of the spiral stair.
With infinite caution Chris closed the door silently behind him, and running lightly forward, reached the figure of the Negro boy.
The words came out, interrupted by peals and cracks of thunder.
The shop was black except for the paler crescent of the bow window giving onto the street.
For in the blackness lit only by the lightning and its own eerie glow, the wood was changing as he watched.
It was as if the stiffness melted.
Under his eyes the wooden folds of cloth became rich silk, embroidery gleamed in its reality upon the coat, and oh! the face!
The wooden grin loosened, the large eyes turned, the hand holding the hard bouquet of carved flowers moved, and let the bouquet fall.
The feet of the boy twitched and shifted in their pointed shoes.
Outside, the rain poured down as if over some skyward dam.
And as they turned, the light and the dark hands holding firm, the firelight was streaming from the distant door and mr Wicker waited.
CHAPTER eleven
That is change enough from a carved wooden figure.
"Go and feel of it, Christopher," mr Wicker urged.
"Gee!
"This is the best yet-except for amos.
If the weather is hot, it will keep but a short time.
It should be kept in a cool, airy place, away from the flies, and if there is any danger of its spoiling, a little salt should be rubbed over it.
Boiling is the cheapest way of cooking meat, provided you make a soup of the liquor; if not, it is the dearest, as most of the gelatine is extracted by the process of boiling, which is the most nourishing part, and if not used for soup, is completely lost.
When it is put down to roast, there should be a little water in the dripping pan.
The bars of the gridiron should be concave, and terminate in a trough, to catch the juices, or they will drop in the fire and smoke the meat.
The dish should be very hot on which broiled meat is put, and it should not be seasoned till taken up.
If you wish to fry meat, cut a small piece of pork into slices, and fry them a light brown, then take them up and put in your meat, which should be perfectly dry.
When the meat is sufficiently fried, take it up, remove the frying pan from the fire to cool; when so, turn in a little cold water for the gravy, put it on the fire-when it boils, stir in a little mixed flour and water, let it boil, then turn it over the meat.
The tender loin and first and second cuts off the rack are the best roasting pieces-the third and fourth cuts are good.
When the bones get well heated through, turn the meat, and keep a brisk fire-baste it frequently while roasting.
If it is a thick piece, allow fifteen minutes to each pound to roast it in-if thin, less time will be required.
three.
The tender loin is the best piece for broiling-a steak from the round or shoulder clod is good and comes cheaper.
If the beef is not very tender, it should be laid on a board and pounded, before broiling or frying it.
If broiled slow, it will not be good.
It takes from fifteen to twenty minutes to broil a steak.
For seven or eight pounds of beef, cut up about a quarter of a pound of butter.
Heat the platter very hot that the steak is to be put on, lay the butter on it, take up the steak, salt and pepper it on both sides.
Beef steak to be good, should be eaten as soon as cooked.
There should always be a trough to catch the juices of the meat when broiled.
The same pieces that are good broiled are good for frying.
Fry a few slices of salt pork, brown, then take them up and put in the beef.
four.
When it has stewed a couple of hours, turn the reserved dressing on top of the meat, heat the bake pan lid hot enough to brown the dressing, stew it an hour and a half longer.
five.
Liver is very good fried, but the best way to cook it, is to broil it ten minutes, with four or five slices of salt pork.
Then take it, cut it into small strips together with the pork, put it in a stew pan, with a little water, butter, and pepper.
six.
To every gallon of cold water, put a quart of rock salt, an ounce of salt petre, quarter of a pound of brown sugar-(some people use molasses, but it is not as good)--no boiling is necessary.
Put the beef in the brine.
When a piece of beef is put in the brine, rub a little salt over it.
If the weather is hot, cut a gash to the bone of the meat, and fill it with salt.
In very hot weather, it is difficult to corn beef in cold brine before it spoils.
On this account it is good to corn it in the pot when boiled.
seven.
The saddle is the best part to roast-the shoulder and leg are good roasted; but the best mode to cook the latter, is to boil it with a piece of salt pork.
A little rice boiled with it, improves the looks of it.
Mutton for roasting, should have a little butter rubbed on it, and a little salt and pepper sprinkled on it-some people like cloves and allspice.
The bony side should be turned towards the fire first, and roasted.
For boiling or roasting mutton, allow a quarter of an hour to each pound of meat.
The leg is good cut in gashes, and filled with a dressing, and baked.
The dressing is made of soaked bread, a little butter, salt, and pepper, and a couple of eggs.
The leg is also good, cut into slices and broiled.
It is good corned a few days, and then boiled.
The rack is good for broiling-it should be divided, each bone by itself, broiled quick, and buttered, salted and peppered.
The breast of mutton is nice baked.
The joints of the brisket should be separated, the sharp ends of the ribs sawed off, the outside rubbed over with a little piece of butter-salt it, and put it in a bake pan, with a pint of water.
When done, take it up, and thicken the gravy with a little flour and water, and put in a small piece of butter.
The neck of mutton makes a good soup.
Parsely or celery heads are a pretty garnish for mutton.
eight.
The breast and rack are good roasted.
The breast also is good made into a pot pie, and the rack cut into small pieces and broiled.
The fillet is good baked, the bone should be cut out, and the place filled with a dressing, made of bread soaked soft in cold water, a little salt, pepper, a couple of eggs, and a table spoonful of melted butter put in-then sew it up, put it in your bake pan, with about a pint of water, cover the top of the meat with some of the dressing.
nine.
When the veal is fried brown, dip it into the batter, then put it back into the fat, and fry it until brown again.
Thicken the gravy and turn it over the whole.
It takes about an hour to cook this dish.
If the meat is tough, it will be better to stew it half an hour before frying it.
ten.
Boil the head two hours, together with the lights and feet.
Before the head is done, tie the brains in a bag, and boil them with it; when the brains are done, take them up, season them with salt, pepper, butter, and sweet herbs, or spices if you like-use this as a dressing for the head.
Some people prefer part of the liver and feet for dressing-they are prepared like the brains.
The liquor that the calf's head is boiled in, makes a good soup, seasoned in a plain way like any other veal soup, or seasoned turtle fashion.
The liquor should stand until the next day after the head is boiled, in order to have the fat rise, and skimmed off.
If you wish to have your calf's head look brown, take it up when tender, rub a little butter over it, sprinkle on salt, pepper, and allspice-sprinkle flour over it, and put before the fire, with a Dutch oven over it, or in a brick oven where it will brown quick.
Warm up the brains with a little water, butter, salt, and pepper.
Add wine and spices if you like.
Serve it up as a dressing for the head.
Calf's head is also good, baked.
Bake it in a quick oven, and garnish it with slices of lemon, or force meat balls.
eleven.
Do them up into balls about the size of half an egg, and fry them brown.
twelve.
Boil them with the head, until tender, then split and lay them round the head, or dredge them with flour after they have been boiled tender, and fry them brown.
If you wish for gravy for them, when you have taken them up, stir a little flour into the fat they were fried in; season it with salt, pepper, and mace.
thirteen.
Are good, broiled or fried.
Some people like the liver stuffed and baked.
fourteen.
Cut part of a leg of veal into pieces, three or four inches broad-sprinkle flour on them, fry them in butter until brown, then turn in water enough to cover the veal.
When it boils, take off the scum, put in two or three onions, a blade of mace, a little salt and pepper.
When stewed tender, take up the meat, thicken the gravy with flour and water, mixed smoothly together, squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, then turn it over the collops.
Garnish them with a lemon cut in thin slices.
fifteen.
Boil a piece of lean veal till tender.
Take it up, cut it into strips three or four inches long, put it back into the pot, with the liquor it was boiled in, with a tea cup of rice to three pounds of veal.
Put in a piece of butter, of the size of a hen's egg; season it with salt, pepper, and sweet herbs if you like; stew it gently till the rice is tender, and the water nearly stewed away.
A little curry powder in this, converts it into a curry dish.
sixteen.
Cut off the shank of a leg of veal, and cut gashes in the remainder. Make a dressing of bread, soaked soft in cold water, and mashed; season it with salt, pepper, and sweet herbs; chop a little raw pork fine, put it in the dressing, and if you have not pork, use a little butter instead.
A leg of veal is nice prepared in this manner, and roasted.
seventeen.
Sprinkle salt and pepper on the lamb, turn the bony side towards the fire first; if not fat, rub a little butter on it, and put a little in the dripping pan; baste it frequently.
These pieces are good stuffed like a fillet of veal, and roasted.
The leg is also good, cooked in the same manner; but it is better boiled with a pound of salt pork.
Allow fifteen minutes boiling to each pound of meat.
The fore quarter, with the ribs divided, is good broiled.
A little salt, pepper, and butter, should be put on it when you take it up.
Lamb is very apt to spoil in warm weather.
If you wish to keep a leg several days, put it in brine.
It should not be put with pork, as fresh meat is apt to injure it.
CHAPTER eleven.
THE "BALLOT TEST."--THE OLD GENTLEMAN AND HIS "DISEASED" RELATIVES.--A "HUNGRY SPIRIT."--"PALMING" A BALLOT.--REVELATIONS ON STRIPS OF PAPER.
His mode of operating was "the ballot test," and was as follows:
Supposing the names written were Mary, Joseph, and Samuel, being, respectively, the investigator's mother, father, and brother.
"But I say Mister, what has them papers to do with a sperit communication?"
"You will see, directly," replied the medium.
Your loving wife, BETSEY."
The reply was, an emphatic affirmative.
Dropping that and taking another:
"That paper," says he to the investigator, "probably contains the name of the spirit who rapped; please hold it in your hand."
His terms are only five dollars an hour.
For instance:
"BROTHER SAMUEL:--Will you communicate with me through this medium? WILLIAM FRANKLIN."
There were also, as a class apart, the bruisers, which did not lacerate the flesh, but only crushed the bone.
The wound brought on lockjaw, of which he died.
"What's that?" said Suke, starting up in bed.
Hark!"
Tim was puzzled.
Thus far it was according to Tim's conjecture.
The man trap was thrown; and between its jaws was part of a woman's clothing-a patterned silk skirt-gripped with such violence that the iron teeth had passed through it, skewering its tissue in a score of places.
Right and left of the narrow pass between the oaks were dense bushes; and now from behind these a female figure glided, whose appearance even in the gloom was, though graceful in outline, noticeably strange.
They went on together.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The ship struck on an uncharted rock.
I saw a great big cat sharpening his claws on a great big tree, just the way pussy does!" she said as soon as she could catch her breath.
A FRONTIER FARM.
"Concord, march first seventeen seventy four.
"MY DEAR COUSIN: I am leaving next week with my husband for England, where we intend to pass some time visiting his friends.
john and I have determined to accept the invitation you gave us last summer for Harold to come and spend a few months with you.
His father thinks that a great future will, ere many years, open in the West, and that it is therefore well the boy should learn something of frontier life. For myself, I would rather that he stayed quietly at home, for he is at present over fond of adventure; but as my husband is meditating selling his estate here and moving West, it is perhaps better for him.
"Massachusetts is in a ferment, as indeed are all the Eastern States, and the people talk openly of armed resistance against the Government.
As an American woman, it seems to me that the colonists have been dealt with somewhat hardly by the English Parliament, and that the measures of the latter have been high handed and arbitrary.
Upon the other hand, I naturally incline toward my husband's views.
He maintains that, as the king's army has driven out the French, and gives protection to the colony, it is only fair that the colonists should contribute to its expenses. The English ask for no contributions toward the expense of their own country, but demand that, at least, the expenses of the protection of the colony shall not be charged upon the heavily taxed people at home.
Then our life was a peaceful and quiet one; now there is nothing but wrangling and strife.
The dissenting clergy are, as my husband says was the case in England before the great civil war, the fomenters of this discontent.
One has heard so many dreadful stories of Indian fights and massacres that I tremble a little at the prospect; but I do not mention this to john, for as other women are, like yourself, brave enough to support these dangers, I would not appear a coward in his eyes.
john joins me in kind love to yourself and your husband, and believe me to remain,
"Your Affectionate Cousin,
"MARY WILSON."
Behind them was a large clearing of about a hundred acres in extent; a comfortable house, with buildings for cattle, stood at a distance of some three hundred yards from the lake; broad fields of yellow corn waved brightly in the sun; and from the edge of the clearing came the sound of a woodsman's ax, showing that the proprietor was still enlarging the limits of his farm.
William Welch had settled ten years before on this spot, which was then far removed from the nearest habitation.
I hoped that nothing would come of it, but I might have known better.
I stopped at Burns' and Hooper's. Burns said he should clear out at once, but Hooper talked about seeing it through.
If they succeed there and get lots of booty and plenty of scalps, they may march back without touching you; they will be in a hurry to get to their villages and have their feasts and dancing.
If they are beaten off at the settlements I reckon they will pay you a visit for sure; they won't go back without scalps.
Of course you will take your rifles with you and keep a sharp lookout; but they will have heard the bell, if they are in the neighborhood, and will guess that we are on the alert, so they are not likely to attempt a surprise.
"What is it?" they exclaimed.
"He went out to scout round the house, leaving me at the gate," Harold said.
mr Welch," he shouted, "it is all safe here, so far as we know; we are all on the lookout to cover you as you come up."
"I thought it was something of the sort.
CHAPTER thirty eight
THE SCOTTISH TERRIER
The Scottish Terrier as a show dog dates from about eighteen seventy seven to eighteen seventy nine.
He seems almost at once to have attained popularity, and he has progressed gradually since then, ever in an upward direction, until he is to day one of the most popular and extensively owned varieties of the dog.
At the end of his report on the kennel the writer adds these words: "It was certainly one of the happiest days of my life to have the pleasure of looking over so many grand little dogs, but to find them in England quite staggered me.
I know but few that take such a delight in the brave little 'die hards' as mr Pigott, and he may well feel proud of the lot he has got together at great trouble and expense."
Granite was unquestionably a typical Scottish Terrier, even as we know them at the present day.
He was certainly longer in the back than we care for nowadays, and his head also was shorter, and his jaw more snipy than is now seen, but his portrait clearly shows he was a genuine Scottish Terrier, and there is no doubt that he, with his kennel mates, Tartan, Crofter, Syringa, Cavack, and Posey, conferred benefit upon the breed.
To dive deeper into the antiquity of the Scottish Terrier is a thing which means that he who tries it must be prepared to meet all sorts of abuse, ridicule, and criticism.
It is a most extraordinary fact that Scotland should have unto herself so many different varieties of the terrier.
There is strong presumption that they one and all came originally from one variety, and it is quite possible, nay probable, that different crosses into other varieties have produced the assortment of to day.
Scottish Terriers frequently go by the name of Aberdeen Terriers-an appellation, it is true, usually heard only from the lips of people who do not know much about them.
Sir Paynton Pigott's kennel of the breed assumed quite large proportions, and was most successful, several times winning all the prizes offered in the variety at different shows.
He may well be called the Father of the breed in England, for when he gave up exhibiting, a great deal of his best blood got into the kennels of mr h j Ludlow, who, as everyone knows, has done such a tremendous amount of good in popularising the breed and has also himself produced such a galaxy of specimens of the very best class.
mr Ludlow's first terrier was a bitch called Splinter two.
The name of Kildee is, in the breed, almost world famous, and it is interesting to note that in every line does he go back to the said Splinter two.
Rambler-called by the great authorities the first pillar of the stud book-was a son of a dog called Bon Accord, and it is to this latter dog and Roger Rough, and also the aforesaid Tartan and Splinter two. that nearly all of the best present day pedigrees go back.
Alister especially was quite an extraordinary stud dog.
He was apparently too much inbred to, and though he produced or was responsible for several beautiful terriers, it is much to be doubted whether in a breed which is suffering from the ill effects of too much inbreeding, he was not one of the greatest sinners.
The Scottish Terrier Club was formed in the year eighteen eighty two.
In the same year a joint committee drew up a standard of perfection for the breed, Messrs.
j b Morison and Thomson Gray, two gentlemen who were looked upon as great authorities, having a good deal to do with it.
It should not be quite flat, as there should be a sort of stop or drop between the eyes.
MUZZLE-Very powerful, and gradually tapering towards the nose, which should always be black and of a good size.
The jaws should be perfectly level, and the teeth square, though the nose projects somewhat over the mouth which gives the impression of the upper jaw being longer than the under one.
EYES-A dark brown or hazel colour; small, piercing, very bright and rather sunken. EARS-Very small, prick or half prick (the former is preferable), but never drop.
They should also be sharp pointed, and the hair on them should not be long, but velvety, and they should not be cut.
The ears should be free from any fringe at the top.
NECK-Short, thick and muscular; strongly set on sloping shoulders.
CHEST-Broad in comparison to the size of the dog, and proportionately deep.
BODY-Of moderate length, but not so long as a Skye's, and rather flat sided; well ribbed up, and exceedingly strong in hind quarters.
LEGS AND FEET-Both fore and hind legs should be short and very heavy in bone, the former being straight and well set on under the body, as the Scottish Terrier should not be out at elbows.
The hocks should be bent, and the thighs very muscular, and the feet strong, small and thickly covered with short hair, the fore feet being larger than the hind ones.
TAIL-Should be about seven inches long, never docked, carried with a slight bend and often gaily.
COAT-Should be rather short (about two inches), intensely hard and wiry in texture, and very dense all over the body.
COLOUR-Steel or iron grey, black brindle, brown brindle, grey brindle, black, sandy and wheaten.
White markings are objectionable, and can only be allowed on the chest and to a small extent.
GENERAL APPEARANCE-The face should wear a very sharp, bright and active expression, and the head should be carried up.
In fact, a Scottish Terrier, though essentially a terrier, cannot be too powerfully put together, and should be from about nine inches to twelve inches in height.
SPECIAL FAULTS: MUZZLE-Either under or over hung.
EYES-Large or light coloured.
EARS-Large, round at the points or drop.
It is also a fault if they are too heavily covered with hair.
LEGS-Bent, or slightly bent, and out at elbows.
Callum Dhu, mr McCandlish's Ems Cosmetic, mr Chapman's Heather Bob and Heather Charm, mr Kinnear's Seafield Rascal, mr Wood's Hyndman Chief, Messrs.
Carter Laddie.
It is highly probable that of all the terrier tribe, the "Scottie," taken as a whole, is the best companion.
He makes a most excellent house dog, is not too big, does not leave white hairs about all over the place, loves only his master and his master's household, and is, withal, a capable and reliable guard.
CHAPTER twenty eight
Chris and amos lay belly down in a low clump of pine scrub at the top of a precipitous rocky pinnacle.
Below them in the blistering noon lay the palace walls of the Lord of the Seven Seas, Descendant of the Sun and the Moon, Overlord of the Mountains and the Plains, Prince of all the Isles, Father of Plenty, and Brilliance Before Which All Cast Down Their Eyes, the Emperor of China.
The two boys were uninterested in titles.
Somewhere within that city within a city, inside the enormous spread of the palace walls that were surrounded in their turn by the city of Peking, lay the goal they had come so far to seek, the Jewel Tree of the Princess of China. Now, like a general planning his campaign, Chris lay looking down at the high angular walls, thinking of how he would gain entry.
He had given much thought to what he considered would be the last dangerous section of the journey, and after listening to what his master said through the shell, was permitted to take amos on this stage of the voyage.
It was reasoned if something happened to Chris, amos might be able to carry out their mission by himself.
The boys had come to Peking on camel back, a camel made from the magic rope.
As amos had never seen a real camel, he thought the rope animal quite natural, and as remarkable a creature as a real one.
Chris took care to make it or disentangle it out of Amos's sight, and so many were the strange and wonderful things to be seen, that amos had no time to concern himself over the reality of a camel.
The arid countryside was blanched by the excessive heat.
Flies droned over the dates and figs that the boys pulled from their pockets to eat.
amos wriggled with excitement as he pointed out details to Chris.
"Chris!
Look at that procession going in the big gate!
All those pigtailed gentlemen dressed in embroidered coats.
No, I'd sooner have the black satin one with the dragon in red and yellow!" He looked again more closely.
"Or the one with the peacock in green and purple.
Which would you sooner have?"
Chris paid little attention to Amos's exclamations.
Leaning on his elbows and looking at the scene below, his mind worked busily on these last vital problems.
But amos was not waiting for an answer.
His mind was on the present moment and the present scene, forgetful of what lay ahead of them, a few hours away.
He chattered on.
"I like their funny black hats and droopy mustaches.
Why don't they look like us, Chris?" he asked.
And then, "Who all's in the curtained stretcher they're carrying?"
"It's a palanquin, amos.
They carry dignitaries in them."
"Hate to be a dignitary in all this heat," amos said, unenviously. "What are they doing now?" he enquired, and both boys parted the prickly pine needles to look out and down.
The leader of the procession rapped three times on the great gate with a gold staff.
Sentinels and guards came forward, walking on the broad gate top, and after talking with the members of the procession, turned to give an order.
Gaily dressed trumpeters with dragon masks on the visors of their helmets raised long brass trumpets.
Sixteen men came into sight, eight on either side, pushing wide the gates.
"Gee!
Imagine the weight of those doors!" Chris murmured, and taking out his spyglass looked through it.
"Golly Moses!" he exclaimed.
"Take a look, amos.
Those gates are made of bronze, nearly three feet thick!
And now they have the gates open, look at the depth of the walls.
The waiting procession, the richly dressed courtiers and curtained palanquin, moved inside and the gates were slowly pulled close by lines of men dragging at ropes and chains to shut them.
From within the main gate drifted out the sound, becoming fainter and fainter, of other trumpets sounding the order for the opening of other gates.
"Ten walls and ten gates-at the very least!
'Course we don't know-" He rolled his worried eyes toward Chris, "We don't know whether those folks got to the Emperor or not.
Likely he's in behind a couple more walls, just to be on the safe side." He searched his friend's face. "How are we going past all that many guards and trumpets, Chris?
amos need not have been so concerned, for Chris had a good plan.
But just at that moment the heat overcame Chris.
Putting his head down on his arms, he slept.
amos slept too, and it must have been several hours later that the rising sound of a crowd talking and laughing with excitement penetrated their sleep and brought them to consciousness.
For a moment they both lay rubbing their eyes and peering out.
Then they realized, by the growing crowd on either side of the palace gate and along the narrow street leading away from it, that someone of importance was about to come from the palace and parade through the streets of Peking.
Boys climbed upon one another's shoulders, teakwood stools were brought for the richer people to stand on, and along the street that led away to the right around the palace walls, Chris and amos could see embroidered silks hung from all the windows, and Chinese people in their best holiday clothes laughing excitedly.
All were looking toward the gates, and at last, from far within, even more distantly than before, came the first sound of trumpets.
These had a sweeter, clearer sound than those the boys had heard at noon.
"Never heard a sweeter note," amos said.
The trumpeters atop the great outer gates were now differently dressed, and there were not two but a dozen lined along the deep palace walls.
As they were blown, the final gates were pushed aside.
A long procession emerged of such fantasy and variety of color that the two boys were spellbound.
Elephants and camels, llamas and horses, all richly caparisoned in Eastern silks, passed along with their riders.
Guards with curved swords and many thonged whips formed a double hedge between those in the procession and the bystanders.
Still others led leopards and black panthers on chains as an added protection to those they guarded.
Palanquin after palanquin passed by, but still the crowd seemed to be waiting for something.
Then, as the silver trumpets continued their sweet lingering notes, a murmur arose from the crowd.
Four lines of youths preceded a palanquin more finely decked than the rest, and the murmur rose.
After it came four lines of Chinese girls, fanning the air with peacock fans on long staves, fans of white egret feathers, and ostrich plumes dyed a yellow gold.
"amos!" Chris breathed, "That color!
Yellow is the royal color of China!"
Made of silver and rock crystal, studded with diamonds and pearls, and hung about with sheer curtains of embroidered yellow silk, the palanquin belonged without doubt to a young girl of the royal house.
As it appeared under the high arch of the outer gate, a roar of joy and greeting arose from the waiting crowd and with one accord every man bowed low, covering his eyes with the wide sleeve of his left arm.
The thin silk was transparent enough under the strong focus of the glass, and behind it Chris could perceive, leaning delicately against silk cushions, a Chinese girl as beautiful as a dream.
Her slightly uptilted eyes were large and dark, her skin put a magnolia flower to shame, her mouth was lifted in a charming smile, and her long exquisite fingers held a spray of jeweled flowers.
CHAPTER twenty nine
Chris put down his spyglass and the two boys, hidden on the piny knoll, watched the procession out of sight.
"I'm supposed to take something from her," Chris said with his eyes sparkling, "but I know now what I'm going to give her back in return. I feel sort of sorry for that girl," he added thoughtfully.
"What all comes next, and have we some more of those dates?"
Chris passed him some.
"We have to wait until dusk anyway," he said, his voice abstracted, "and by the look of the light that won't be long."
Too precipitous on which to build houses, it rose far above the surrounding roofs of Peking.
The green and scarlet of curved tiles spread under the boys' sight like a curling sea.
Listening and watching, the boys gathered by the silver trumpet notes that the Princess and her retinue had re-entered the palace walls by another gate.
Thinking about it Chris mused: I wonder if that first palanquin held someone she's to marry?
It could be.
I can't imagine a woman leaving a thing like that behind.
He paused, remembering.
She held a spray of jeweled flowers in her hand, maybe off the Tree, and I never saw anything like it.
Well, can't do a thing until dusk comes down.
The evening was not long in coming, and Chris, who had been sitting cross legged under the little crooked pines, looked across with great concern to where amos lay on his back, dozing.
I can't take him along, Chris thought, and I can't leave him alone, if I should get caught.
What in the world do I do?
Then, remembering the bag of magic "odds and ends," Chris put his hand inside it and drew out a small folded piece of silk and netting.
On it a piece of paper, like a label, showed mr Wicker's fine script.
Chris looked closer and read: "Strike three."
"Strike three."
Chris held the folded object in his hand, and then glanced at amos. amos slept.
Going softly out of the pine grove to a narrow ledge of rock where he was out of sight, Chris put the object down and said: "Strike three."
Nothing happened.
The object remained an object.
Then, suddenly understanding, Chris struck the stone ledge three times.
At once the folded object began to unfold itself and to puff itself up like a little mushroom.
In a matter of seconds, Chris could see what it was becoming, and before he could wink ten times, a balloon with a basket hanging from it, quite big enough for two boys, hung swaying in the air.
Chris examined it with pleasure and then struck the ground three times again.
The balloon gently collapsed and refolded itself, basket and all, into its original neat shape.
"Now, if that isn't handy!" Chris exclaimed.
"amos!" he said, shaking his friend's shoulder, "it's time for me to go.
Are you awake?"
amos blinked a few times and said he thought so.
"Then listen to me," Chris told him earnestly, "and listen hard!" amos sat up more alertly.
"Well, I don't know how you could, myself.
But don't you cross any bridges until you come to them.
Look." He held out the folded balloon.
"If I'm not back by two sunups from now-I may have to hide all during tomorrow-if I'm not back by then, put this package out beyond the trees in the clearing.
That's very important.
You've got that?"
"I haven't got anything but a few old dried up fruits," amos pouted. "That's all."
"I mean, do you understand that much?"
amos brightened at once and broke into a broad grin.
"Oh yes, of course.
Why didn't you say so in the first place?
You said, put the package out in the clear.
Where's that, on this tippy top of a hill?" amos asked, looking about.
"The ledge near where we climbed up.
That's big enough," Chris reminded him.
"Oh yes," amos said, looking wise.
"Well," Chris took up again, "you put the package on the ledge and strike the ground three times-"
"Like this?" And before Chris could stop him, amos had struck the earth beside him twice before Chris seized his hand in mid-air.
If someone comes after you, or if I don't come back.
amos raised his right hand looking very solemn.
"I promise," he said. "Only," he added, looking bewildered and already somewhat forlorn, "what happens when I do hit three times?"
"A what?" amos stuck his head forward, trying hard to understand.
Oh."
Chris stopped and stared at amos.
Perhaps balloons had not yet been invented.
How very confusing!
"It's something that will hold you up in the air.
There's a basket for you to sit in-"
Not me."
Chris was becoming exasperated.
He had important things to do.
"Look, amos.
If you have to use it, you'll be in such a bad fix that being up in the air will seem like the very best thing that could happen.
Stop running.
I'll be back-I hope."
He turned away toward the ledge and clearing.
"And now, wish me luck, and stay here and wait for me.
Don't follow me now, or watch, or I might fail."
amos jumped up from the pine covered ground.
"Oh, Chris!" he cried, his voice sharp with distress, "can't I go?
You might get hurt. There's no telling what could happen if you're all alone!"
"No," he said after a long moment.
"Better not.
But I'd sure like to, amos.
Now don't lose that package.
It's your escape.
Wish me luck."
amos clasped his hand, and then, rushing off, dashed back again.
"Here, Chris.
Our fruits.
Better not to eat strange food in this foreigny place.
Good luck," he added.
Chris stuffed the dried fruit in his pocket.
amos turned back into the darkening pine knoll, and Chris pushed his way out to the narrow steep ledge, hanging high above the roofs of Peking.
Chris uncoiled the magic rope from around his waist, and standing as far out on the rock ledge as he dared, in order to have the greatest possible freedom of movement, he attempted for the first time to draw an eagle in the air with the rope.
It was a complicated, fast maneuver.
Its wings were not wide enough, its back very insecure to look at.
In short, Chris knew, it was a total failure.
He tried again, racing against the oncoming darkness, and this time he succeeded, although, when he pulled it close and straddled the body of the magic bird, his heart was in his throat that it might unfurl itself, become just a rope, and hurl him to his death far below.
But this second eagle seemed secure enough.
Chris pressed his hands on the wings spread out on either side, with a jolt they flapped, and the boy's strange conveyance moved somewhat unsteadily through the air.
Chris, frightened but resolute, found that by touching the head of the bird in the direction he wanted to go, the magic eagle would turn, and after a few moments to test out his new method of travel, Chris coasted over the gaily tiled roofs as he hunted for something.
Peking at that time had many palaces.
Wealthy Chinese and people of title and family owned beautiful houses set in terraced gardens surrounded by parks and ancient trees.
Somewhere, Chris had heard of this and remembered it, and now in the dusk that was nearly night, the eagle carried him silently over the city as he looked for what he wanted to find.
Pools of water reflected the first stars among their lilypads.
The shaded walks and lawns were deserted at that hour.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
They resolved to build one, opened the subscription at once, and appointed a committee to carry the work forward.
As we journeyed on down the Platte, we passed thrifty ranches and thriving little towns.
All along the way was a spirit of good cheer and hearty welcome.
Here the Laramie River and the Platte meet.
One of the old barracks, three hundred feet long, was in good preservation in nineteen o six, being utilized by the owner, Joseph Wilde, for a store, post office, hotel, and residence.
Tradition says: "A trapper named Scott, while returning to the States, was robbed and stripped by the Indians.
He crawled to these Bluffs and there famished.
This occurred prior to eighteen thirty.
The tire bore this simple inscription: "Rebecca Winters, aged fifty years." The hoofs of stock tramped the sunken grave and trod it into dust, but the arch of the tire remained to defy the strength of thoughtless hands that would have removed it.
About twenty miles from Scott's Bluff stands old Chimney Rock.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
A BIT OF BAD LUCK
I finally stopped, put him on the off side, gave him the long end of the yoke, and tied his head back with the halter strap to the chain; but to no purpose, for he pulled by the head very heavily.
I finally unyoked, gave him a quart of lard, a gill of vinegar, and a handful of sugar, but all to no purpose, for he soon fell down and in two hours was dead."
And yet, am I sure that at some points I did not abuse him?
But one cow would not go at all!
"What is this cow worth to you?"
"Thirty dollars."
The fact gradually became apparent that the loss of that fine ox was almost irreparable.
Yes, the ox has passed, for in all Nebraska I was unable to find even one yoke.
Dave and Dandy made good team mates.
At that time Nostromo had been already long enough in the country to raise to the highest pitch Captain Mitchell's opinion of the extraordinary value of his discovery.
Clearly he was one of those invaluable subordinates whom to possess is a legitimate cause of boasting.
Not that dr Monygham was a prodigal either of laughter or of words.
He was bitterly taciturn when at his best.
At his worst people feared the open scornfulness of his tongue.
Only mrs Gould could keep his unbelief in men's motives within due bounds; but even to her (on an occasion not connected with Nostromo, and in a tone which for him was gentle), even to her, he had said once, "Really, it is most unreasonable to demand that a man should think of other people so much better than he is able to think of himself."
And mrs Gould had hastened to drop the subject.
There were strange rumours of the English doctor.
Years ago, in the time of Guzman Bento, he had been mixed up, it was whispered, in a conspiracy which was betrayed and, as people expressed it, drowned in blood.
His hair had turned grey, his hairless, seamed face was of a brick dust colour; the large check pattern of his flannel shirt and his old stained Panama hat were an established defiance to the conventionalities of Sulaco.
Had it not been for the immaculate cleanliness of his apparel he might have been taken for one of those shiftless Europeans that are a moral eyesore to the respectability of a foreign colony in almost every exotic part of the world.
The young ladies of Sulaco, adorning with clusters of pretty faces the balconies along the Street of the Constitution, when they saw him pass, with his limping gait and bowed head, a short linen jacket drawn on carelessly over the flannel check shirt, would remark to each other, "Here is the Senor doctor going to call on Dona Emilia.
He was old, ugly, learned-and a little "loco"--mad, if not a bit of a sorcerer, as the common people suspected him of being.
The little white jacket was in reality a concession to mrs Gould's humanizing influence.
The doctor, with his habit of sceptical, bitter speech, had no other means of showing his profound respect for the character of the woman who was known in the country as the English Senora.
He presented this tribute very seriously indeed; it was no trifle for a man of his habits.
mrs Gould felt that, too, perfectly.
She would never have thought of imposing upon him this marked show of deference.
She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in Sulaco) open for the dispensation of the small graces of existence.
She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.
She would have protested that she had done nothing for them, with a low laugh and a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had anybody told her how convincingly she was remembered on the edge of the snow line above Sulaco.
But directly, with a little capable air of setting her wits to work, she would have found an explanation.
"Of course, it was such a surprise for these boys to find any sort of welcome here.
I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick."
She was always sorry for homesick people.
Born in the country, as his father before him, spare and tall, with a flaming moustache, a neat chin, clear blue eyes, auburn hair, and a thin, fresh, red face, Charles Gould looked like a new arrival from over the sea.
His grandfather had fought in the cause of independence under Bolivar, in that famous English legion which on the battlefield of Carabobo had been saluted by the great Liberator as Saviours of his country.
Thus, at least, the priests explained its disappearance to the barefooted multitude that streamed in, awestruck, to gaze at the hole in the side of the ugly box of bricks before the great altar.
His accent had never been English; but there was something so indelible in all these ancestral Goulds-liberators, explorers, coffee planters, merchants, revolutionists-of Costaguana, that he, the only representative of the third generation in a continent possessing its own style of horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly English even on horseback.
The other Carlos, turning off to the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed pavement-Don Carlos Gould, in his English clothes, looked as incongruous, but much more at home than the kingly cavalier reining in his steed on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos, with his marble arm raised towards the marble rim of a plumed hat.
The weather stained effigy of the mounted king, with its vague suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to present an inscrutable breast to the political changes which had robbed it of its very name; but neither did the other horseman, well known to the people, keen and alive on his well shaped, slate coloured beast with a white eye, wear his heart on the sleeve of his English coat.
His mind preserved its steady poise as if sheltered in the passionless stability of private and public decencies at home in Europe.
In the early days of her Costaguana life, the little lady used to clench her hands with exasperation at not being able to take the public affairs of the country as seriously as the incidental atrocity of methods deserved.
She saw in them a comedy of naive pretences, but hardly anything genuine except her own appalled indignation.
Charles, very quiet and twisting his long moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all.
Once, however, he observed to her gently-
"My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here." These few words made her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation.
Perhaps the mere fact of being born in the country did make a difference.
She had a great confidence in her husband; it had always been very great.
He had struck her imagination from the first by his unsentimentalism, by that very quietude of mind which she had erected in her thought for a sign of perfect competency in the business of living.
Don Jose Avellanos, their neighbour across the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of culture, who had represented his country at several European Courts (and had suffered untold indignities as a state prisoner in the time of the tyrant Guzman Bento), used to declare in Dona Emilia's drawing room that Carlos had all the English qualities of character with a truly patriotic heart.
mrs Gould, raising her eyes to her husband's thin, red and tan face, could not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what he must have heard said of his patriotism.
Perhaps he had just dismounted on his return from the mine; he was English enough to disregard the hottest hours of the day.
Basilio, in a livery of white linen and a red sash, had squatted for a moment behind his heels to unstrap the heavy, blunt spurs in the patio; and then the Senor Administrator would go up the staircase into the gallery.
Rows of plants in pots, ranged on the balustrade between the pilasters of the arches, screened the corredor with their leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved space is the true hearthstone of a South American house, where the quiet hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light and shadow on the flagstones.
Don Jose chose to come over at tea time because the English rite at Dona Emilia's house reminded him of the time he lived in London as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of saint James.
He did not like tea; and, usually, rocking his American chair, his neat little shiny boots crossed on the foot rest, he would talk on and on with a sort of complacent virtuosity wonderful in a man of his age, while he held the cup in his hands for a long time.
His close cropped head was perfectly white; his eyes coalblack.
On seeing Charles Gould step into the sala he would nod provisionally and go on to the end of the oratorial period.
Only then he would say-
Always the true English activity.
No?
What?"
Then giving up the empty cup into his young friend's hand, extended with a smile, he continued to expatiate upon the patriotic nature of the San Tome mine for the simple pleasure of talking fluently, it seemed, while his reclining body jerked backwards and forwards in a rocking chair of the sort exported from the United States.
The ceiling of the largest drawing room of the Casa Gould extended its white level far above his head.
The loftiness dwarfed the mixture of heavy, straight backed Spanish chairs of brown wood with leathern seats, and European furniture, low, and cushioned all over, like squat little monsters gorged to bursting with steel springs and horsehair.
There were knick knacks on little tables, mirrors let into the wall above marble consoles, square spaces of carpet under the two groups of armchairs, each presided over by a deep sofa; smaller rugs scattered all over the floor of red tiles; three windows from the ceiling down to the ground, opening on a balcony, and flanked by the perpendicular folds of the dark hangings.
The stateliness of ancient days lingered between the four high, smooth walls, tinted a delicate primrose colour; and mrs Gould, with her little head and shining coils of hair, sitting in a cloud of muslin and lace before a slender mahogany table, resembled a fairy posed lightly before dainty philtres dispensed out of vessels of silver and porcelain.
Worked in the early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones.
Whole tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since with this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw.
Then it became forgotten.
It was rediscovered after the War of Independence.
An English company obtained the right to work it, and found so rich a vein that neither the exactions of successive governments, nor the periodical raids of recruiting officers upon the population of paid miners they had created, could discourage their perseverance.
The mine, which by every law, international, human, and divine, reverts now to the Government as national property, shall remain closed till the sword drawn for the sacred defence of liberal principles has accomplished its mission of securing the happiness of our beloved country."
What advantage that Government had expected from the spoliation, it is impossible to tell now.
But afterwards another Government bethought itself of that valuable asset.
It was an ordinary Costaguana Government-the fourth in six years-but it judged of its opportunities sanely.
The father of Charles Gould, for a long time one of the most wealthy merchants of Costaguana, had already lost a considerable part of his fortune in forced loans to the successive Governments.
He was a man of calm judgment, who never dreamed of pressing his claims; and when, suddenly, the perpetual concession of the San Tome mine was offered to him in full settlement, his alarm became extreme.
He was versed in the ways of Governments.
Indeed, the intention of this affair, though no doubt deeply meditated in the closet, lay open on the surface of the document presented urgently for his signature.
mr Gould, senior, defended himself from this fatal favour with many arguments and entreaties, but without success.
It was no longer an abandoned mine; it was a wild, inaccessible, and rocky gorge of the Sierra, where vestiges of charred timber, some heaps of smashed bricks, and a few shapeless pieces of rusty iron could have been found under the matted mass of thorny creepers covering the ground.
mr Gould, senior, did not desire the perpetual possession of that desolate locality; in fact, the mere vision of it arising before his mind in the still watches of the night had the power to exasperate him into hours of hot and agitated insomnia.
Now, after reaching his exalted position, that politician had proclaimed his intention to repay evil with good to Senor Gould-the poor man.
Marta, in a soft and implacable voice, and with such malicious glances that mr Gould's best friends advised him earnestly to attempt no bribery to get the matter dropped.
It would have been useless.
She was good-natured, and her despondency was genuine.
The friend of mr Gould, charged with the delicate mission, used to say afterwards that she was the only honest person closely or remotely connected with the Government he had ever met.
"No go," she had said with a cavalier, husky intonation which was natural to her, and using turns of expression more suitable to a child of parents unknown than to the orphaned daughter of a general officer.
"No; it's no go.
Ah! zut!
For a moment, biting her carmine lip, she deplored inwardly the tyranny of the rigid principles governing the sale of her influence in high places.
After such a warning there was nothing for it but to sign and pay. mr Gould had swallowed the pill, and it was as though it had been compounded of some subtle poison that acted directly on his brain.
He became at once mine ridden, and as he was well read in light literature it took to his mind the form of the Old Man of the Sea fastened upon his shoulders.
His position in Costaguana was no worse than before.
But man is a desperately conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty of this outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities.
Everybody around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands that played their game of governments and revolutions after the death of Guzman Bento.
His experience had taught him that, however short the plunder might fall of their legitimate expectations, no gang in possession of the Presidential Palace would be so incompetent as to suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext.
mr Gould knew that very well, and, armed with resignation, had waited for better times.
But to be robbed under the forms of legality and business was intolerable to his imagination.
mr Gould, the father, had one fault in his sagacious and honourable character: he attached too much importance to form.
It is a failing common to mankind, whose views are tinged by prejudices.
There was for him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by means of a moral shock, attacked his vigorous physique.
"It will end by killing me," he used to affirm many times a day.
And, in fact, since that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver pains, and mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything else.
The Finance Minister could have formed no conception of the profound subtlety of his revenge.
Even mr Gould's letters to his fourteen year old boy Charles, then away in England for his education, came at last to talk of practically nothing but the mine.
He groaned over the injustice, the persecution, the outrage of that mine; he occupied whole pages in the exposition of the fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that mine from every point of view, with every dismal inference, with words of horror at the apparently eternal character of that curse.
He implored his son never to return to Costaguana, never to claim any part of his inheritance there, because it was tainted by the infamous Concession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to forget that America existed, and pursue a mercantile career in Europe.
They encamped in the fields at night, because the habit they indulged in of stealing everything for which they had a fancy, caused them to fear being disturbed in the towns.
It was not long, however, before many of them were arrested and put to death for theft, when the rest speedily decamped.
However, whether because a considerable number remained on the road, or because they had been reinforced by others of the same tribe during the year, a troop of fifty men, accompanied by a number of hideous women and filthy children, made their appearance in the neighbourhood of Augsburg.
These vagabonds gave out that they were exiles from Lower Egypt, and pretended to know the art of predicting coming events.
Few men, however, left the house of the so-called Duke of Egypt without having their purses stolen, and but few women escaped without having the skirts of their dresses cut.
The Egyptian women walked about the town in groups of six or seven, and whilst some were talking to the townspeople, telling them their fortunes, or bartering in shops, one of their number would lay her hands on anything which was within reach.
So many robberies were committed in this way, that the magistrates of the town and the ecclesiastical authorities forbad the inhabitants from visiting the Egyptians' camp, or from having any intercourse with them, under penalty of excommunication and of a fine of fifty livres.
They also modified their original tale, and stated that they were descendants of the Egyptians who refused hospitality to the Holy Virgin and to saint Joseph during their flight into Egypt: they also declared that, in consequence of this crime, God had doomed their race to perpetual misery and exile.
Five years later we find them in the neighbourhood of Paris.
What was worse, either by magic, by Satanic agency, or by sleight of hand, they managed to empty people's purses whilst talking to them....
So, at least, every one said.
At last accounts respecting them reached the ears of the Bishop of Paris.
He went to them with a Franciscan friar, called Le Petit Jacobin, who, by the bishop's order, delivered an earnest address to them, and excommunicated all those who had anything to do with them, or who had their fortunes told.
He further advised the gipsies to go away, and, on the festival of Notre Dame, they departed for Pontoise."
Suffice it to say that their quarrels with the authorities, or the inhabitants of the countries which had the misfortune to be periodically visited by them, have left numerous traces in history.
On the seventh of November, fourteen fifty three, from sixty to eighty gipsies, coming from Courtisolles, arrived at the entrance of the town of Cheppe, near Chalons sur Marne.
During their unwilling retreat, they were pursued by many of the inhabitants of the town, one of whom killed a gipsy named Martin de la Barre: the murderer, however, obtained the King's pardon.
In fifteen thirty two, at Pleinpalais, a suburb of Geneva, some rascals from among a band of gipsies, consisting of upwards of three hundred in number, fell upon several of the officers who were stationed to prevent their entering the town.
The gipsies retired to the monastery of the Augustin friars, in which they fortified themselves: the bourgeois besieged them, and would have committed summary justice on them, but the authorities interfered, and some twenty of the vagrants were arrested, but they sued for mercy, and were discharged.
The whole of them were killed, with the exception of their chief, who was taken prisoner and brought before the Parliament of Bordeaux, and ordered to be hung.
On the twenty first of July, sixteen twenty two, the same magistrates ordered the gipsies to leave the parish of Eysines within twenty four hours, under penalty of the lash.
It was not often that the gipsies used violence or openly resisted authority; they more frequently had recourse to artifice and cunning in order to attain their end.
In this difficulty, they pretended that one of them had committed a crime, and had been condemned to be hung a quarter of a league from the village, where they betook themselves with all their goods.
The man, at the foot of the gibbet, asked for a confessor, and they went to fetch the cure.
He, at first, refused to go, but his parishioners compelled him.
I expected he would appeal." Immediately they packed up, secured the prisoner, and were far enough away from the scene before the cure re-entered his house.
Tallemant relates another good trick.
The butcher then went away; whereupon the gipsy pulled the sheep from a sack into which he had put it, and substituted for it a child belonging to his tribe.
He then ran after the butcher, and said, "Give me five livres, and you shall have the sack into the bargain." The butcher paid him the money, and went away.
When he got home he opened the sack, and was much astonished when he saw a little boy jump out of it, who, in an instant, caught up the sack and ran off.
"Never was a poor man so thoroughly hoaxed as this butcher," says Tallemant des Reaux.
Those who are well armed and mounted he sends off with a good almanac, on which are marked all the fairs, and they continually change their dress and their horses.
When they take up their quarters in any village they steal very little in its immediate vicinity, but in the neighbouring parishes they rob and plunder in the most daring manner.
If they find a sum of money they give notice to the captain, and make a rapid flight from the place.
They coin counterfeit money, and put it into circulation.
When they buy food they pay for it in good money the first time, as they are held in such distrust; but, when they are about to leave a neighbourhood, they again buy something, for which they tender false coin, receiving the change in good money.
In harvest time all doors are shut against them; nevertheless they contrive, by means of picklocks and other instruments, to effect an entrance into houses, when they steal linen, cloaks, silver, and any other movable article which they can lay their hands on.
They give a strict account of everything to their captain, who takes his share of all they get, except of what they earn by fortune telling.
After having forbidden them, with a threat of six years at the galleys, to sojourn in Spain, Charles the fifth ordered them to leave Flanders under penalty of death.
In fifteen forty five, a gipsy who had infringed the sentence of banishment was condemned by the Court of Utrecht to be flogged till the blood appeared, to have his nostrils slit, his hair removed, his beard shaved off, and to be banished for life.
The answer seems to us to be clear.
Receiving into their ranks all those whom crime, the fear of punishment, an uneasy conscience, or the charm of a roaming life, continually threw in their path, they made use of them either to find their way into countries of which they were ignorant, or to commit robberies which would otherwise have been impracticable.
Themselves adepts in all sorts of bad practices, they were not slow to form an alliance with profligate characters who sometimes worked in concert with them, and sometimes alone, and who always framed the model for their own organization from that of the gipsies."
In this place I found a mud house, half buried, very shaky from old age and rottenness, and only eight metres square; but in which, nevertheless, some fifty families are living, who have the charge of a large number of children, many of whom are stolen or illegitimate....
Some came and paid him the tribute which was required of them by the statutes of the craft; others rendered him an account of what they had done, and what they had earned during the year.
When they had executed their work badly, he ordered them to be punished, either corporally or pecuniarily, according to the gravity of their offences.
When he had not himself properly governed his people, he was dethroned, and a successor was appointed by acclamation.
We will therefore only mention those which were more especially Italian.
They asserted that these treasures could not be discovered without danger, except by means of fastings and offerings, which they and their brethren could alone make, in consideration of which they entered into a bargain, and received a certain sum of money from the owners.
In giving a description, therefore, of the mendicity practised in these two countries during the Middle Ages, we are sure to be representing what it was in other parts of Europe.
On this account they were looked upon with the utmost horror by the infidels, who dreaded more their savage ferocity than the valour of the Crusaders.
He was killed before Sandwich, in twelve seventeen.
We know that this charming poet, who was at the same time a most expert thief, narrowly escaped hanging on two occasions.
The meaning of this doggrel, which is somewhat broad, may be rendered-"He dines well who escapes without paying a penny, and who bids farewell to the innkeeper by wiping his nose on the tablecloth."
Brantome relates that King Charles the ninth. had the curiosity to wish to "know how the cut purses performed their arts with so much skill and dexterity," and begged Captain La Chambre to introduce to him, on the occasion of a banquet and a ball, the cleverest cut purses, giving them full liberty to exhibit their skill.
THREE months had gone by since the Sunday morning when dr Bruce came into his pulpit with the message of the new discipleship.
They were three months of great excitement in Nazareth Avenue Church. Never before had reverend Calvin Bruce realized how deep the feeling of his members flowed.
He humbly confessed that the appeal he had made met with an unexpected response from men and women who, like Felicia, were hungry for something in their lives that the conventional type of church membership and fellowship had failed to give them.
But dr Bruce was not yet satisfied for himself.
"You know what I have come in this evening for?" the Bishop was saying after the friends had been talking some time about the results of the pledge with the Nazareth Avenue people.
dr Bruce looked over at the Bishop and shook his head.
"Edward," dr Bruce spoke abruptly, "I have not yet been able to satisfy myself, either, in obeying my promise.
But I have at last decided on my course.
In order to follow it I shall be obliged to resign from Nazareth Avenue Church."
dr Bruce turned and walked up to his friend.
They were both laboring under a repressed excitement.
I have had a beautiful house to live in, the most expensive food, clothing and physical pleasures.
I have been able to go abroad at least a dozen times, and have enjoyed for years the beautiful companionship of art and letters and music and all the rest, of the very best.
And I have been unable to silence the question of late: 'What have I suffered for the sake of Christ?' Paul was told what great things he must suffer for the sake of his Lord.
Where has my suffering come in?
I cannot endure this any longer.
I have not been walking in His steps.
The Bishop had risen now and walked over to the window.
"Calvin, this is a terrible city in which we live!
Its misery, its sin, its selfishness, appall my heart.
Rather, I have followed the conventional soft habits of my position and have lived in the society of the rich, refined, aristocratic members of my congregations.
Where has the suffering come in?
Do you know, Calvin," he turned abruptly toward his friend, "I have been tempted of late to lash myself with a scourge. If I had lived in Martin Luther's time I should have bared my back to a self inflicted torture."
dr Bruce was very pale.
dr Bruce spoke at last: "Edward, I do not need to say that you have expressed my feelings also.
I have been in a similar position for years.
My life has been one of comparative luxury.
But I cannot say that I have suffered any for Jesus.
That verse in peter constantly haunts me: 'Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that ye should follow His steps.' I have lived in luxury.
The sin and misery of this great city have beaten like waves against the stone walls of my church and of this house in which I live, and I have hardly heeded them, the walls have been so thick.
I have reached a point where I cannot endure this any longer. I am not condemning the Church.
I love her.
I am not forsaking the Church.
I believe in her mission and have no desire to destroy. Least of all, in the step I am about to take do I desire to be charged with abandoning the Christian fellowship.
In this action I judge no other minister and pass no criticism on others' discipleship.
But I feel as you do.
And I know that to do that I must sever my immediate connection with Nazareth Avenue Church.
I do not see any other way for myself to suffer for His sake as I feel that I ought to suffer."
Again that sudden silence fell over those two men.
It was no ordinary action they were deciding.
"What is your plan?"
The Bishop's face grew in glory now every day.
My wife is fully in accord with me.
He was exultant.
So was dr Bruce from the same cause.
And in this particular case it was the nearest approach to anything that would satisfy the hunger of these two men to suffer for Christ.
There had sprung up in them at the same time a longing that amounted to a passion, to get nearer the great physical poverty and spiritual destitution of the mighty city that throbbed around them.
That was what they had promised.
Those who went with him in making the promise breathed into the church the very breath of divine life, and are continuing that life giving work at this present time.
The Bishop one afternoon came out of the Settlement and walked around the block, intending to go on a visit to one of his new friends in the district.
There were two windows in the front, very clean, and that was remarkable to begin with.
"Felicia!" exclaimed the Bishop.
"Why, don't you know?
These are the only clean windows in the block."
Although, to speak truth for him, he had no desire to go back to it.
"Well, dear Bishop," said Felicia, who had always called him so, "I knew how overwhelmed you were with your work.
I am an expert and I have a plan I want you to admire and develop.
You see, I thought I would get settled first and work out something, and then come with some real thing to offer.
I'm able to earn my own living now."
"You are?" the Bishop said a little incredulously.
"How?
Making those things?"
"Those things!" said Felicia with a show of indignation.
"You poor Bishop!
This is the Bishop.
But you must come to the Settlement.
I begin to see what your plan is. You can be of infinite help to us.
"That is my gospel.
Shall I not follow it?"
"Aye, Aye!
You're right.
It was good.
It belonged to God.
It was a small but well equipped carpenter's shop.
He looked up as the two entered, and took off his cap.
"Miss Sterling, mr Stephen Clyde," said the Bishop.
"We have met before," said Felicia looking at Clyde frankly.
"Yes." Felicia hesitated.
"I am very glad to see you."
"Are you?"
The flush of pleasure mounted to the young carpenter's forehead.
"You have had a great deal of trouble since-since-then," he said, and then he was afraid he had wounded her, or called up painful memories.
"Yes, and you also.
How is it that you're working here?"
"It is a long story, Miss Sterling.
My father lost his money and I was obliged to go to work.
A very good thing for me.
The Bishop says I ought to be very grateful.
I am.
I am very happy now.
I learned the trade, hoping some time to be of use, I am night clerk at one of the hotels.
That Sunday morning when you took the pledge at Nazareth Avenue Church, I took it with the others."
"Did you?" said Felicia slowly.
"I am glad."
"Yes, 'back in the world,' dear Bishop.
"We were very good friends," added Felicia.
"But nothing more?" the Bishop ventured to ask.
Felicia's face glowed for an instant.
Then she looked her companion in the eyes frankly and answered: "Truly and truly, nothing more."
It was almost like the old pang over Camilla.
Love is older than I am, and wiser."
"Hold up your hands, and be quick about it!" said the man with the pistol.
CHAPTER twenty three
When Chris awoke he saw that amos had already stolen out of the cabin, for his hammock was rolled up and put away.
By the strength of the sun and the heat that seeped even through the boards of the ship, Chris judged that the morning was well advanced.
Dressing was rapid, for Chris, like the rest of the sailors in the tropic heat, wore only his breeches.
Running up to the bridge he was startled at first, at coming on deck, at the sudden green shade everywhere.
That side of the ship that could be seen from the sea through the narrow channel entrance had been completely covered with green.
The work was not yet finished, but most of the crew were sleeping during the hot hours, while a handful had volunteered to complete the job.
The deep water, with a white base of coral sand, flashed in emerald, turquoise, or sapphire blue.
He put these thoughts from his mind until the time came, and decided to tackle what was most pressing.
He paused, and Chris, looking up, saw that the Captain's gaze was fixed on Zachary Heigh.
It would be only a few minutes more before up he would jump once more to pace the deck or lean at the ship's rail.
Before the words could leave his mouth, he was interrupted by the appearance of red faced Ned Cilley.
Cheerful as a sand flea at the prospect of going ashore, Ned had come from his rest with a small company of the sailors to ask permission of the Captain if they might leave the ship.
Chris and amos were shoved along with their friends, Chris hiking up his breeches to cover the coil of the magic rope around his waist; the leathern bag hanging in plain sight about his neck.
Zachary Heigh, the Captain, and mr Finney were not to be found.
How could he change himself to a fish or other shape, unobserved?
Chris knew the voice of the sailor was right, and was on the point of jumping into one of the dinghies, where they lay pulled up on the beach.
He wondered too if he could row over in time, or if he would be blown up with the ship.
The boy had his hands on the scorching wood of a dinghy, his muscles tensed to thrust it into the waters of the cove, when out over the still harbor, jangling in the heat, came a prolonged and piercing scream.
Hot as he was, Chris felt himself go cold at the sound.
He knew instantly, although he had never heard it before, that this was the death cry of a man.
The scream came a second time, terrified and despairing, and out over the water following it came a low, scattered rumble.
A babble of voices broke out, and one by one the boats were hastily launched, heading back to the ship, leaving Chris shaking and unnerved on the sand.
Over the water as brawny backs bent to the oars the words came floating back:
"Someone's dead for sartin sure-"
It was a little later that Chris remembered amos having taken his arm and led him into the shade, and of how sick he was-the heat and the scream, the fear, and a sense of having failed in warning the Captain, combining to churn his insides into a queasy place that violently rejected his pleasant breakfast of so short a time before.
Chris must have dozed, for when he came to himself the light had changed, and men were carrying a shapeless bundle wrapped in canvas to a grave dug in the sand.
Chris started up and joined the men gathered solemnly about the grave, and as he searched among them, knew a great sense of relief and joy when he saw, standing at the grave head, the Captain and mr Finney.
As Chris came up to them, Captain Blizzard was speaking, a Bible in his hand.
We harbored a viper, men, who meant to destroy our ship and cargo and leave us to who knows what fate?
He paused again, but there was not a stir from his audience.
From under their dirty headkerchiefs or straggly unkempt hair, the men who knew no other life but the sea, no happiness or danger unconnected with it, never took their eyes from their captain.
Therefore, feeling as I do for my ship and my men, I cannot bring myself to read the holy words over this man who had no charity in his heart."
It is not proper that he should be left without even a token of respect." He gestured with his plump hand to the Bible.
"I am the Resurrection and the Life-"
But Chris, watching the disappearing backs of the Captain and first mate, was thinking what a curious and fortunate thing it was that the bales had fallen on Zachary just at the right time, and when there was not a ripple on the cove.
Chris watched the fat short man and the tall lean one go, resolution and anger still evident even in the set of their shoulders.
Stir a quart of milk gradually into a quart of flour-put in a tea spoonful of salt, and seven beaten eggs.
Drop them by the large spoonful into hot lard, and fry them till a very light brown color.
They are the lightest fried in a great deal of fat, but less greasy if fried in just fat enough to keep them from sticking to the frying pan.
Serve them up with liquid pudding sauce.
Make a batter of a quart of milk, a quart of flour, eight eggs-grate in the rind of two lemons, and the juice and apples.
Drop the batter by the spoonful into hot lard, taking care to have a slice of apple in each fritter.
Pare tart, mellow apples-take out the cores with a small knife, and fill the holes with sugar.
Make good pie crust-roll it out about two thirds of an inch thick, cut it into pieces just large enough to enclose one apple.
Lay the apples on them, and close the crust tight over them-tie them up in small pieces of thick cloth, that has been well floured-put the dumplings in a pot of boiling water, and boil them an hour without any intermission-if allowed to stop boiling, they will be heavy.
Serve them up with pudding sauce, or butter and sugar.
Pare thin the rind of fresh lemons, squeeze out the juice, and to a pint of it, when strained, put a pound and three quarters of sugar, and the rind of the lemons.
When cool, bottle, cork, and seal it tight, and keep it in a cool place.
Squeeze out the juice of fresh oranges, and strain it.
To a pint of the juice, put a pound and a half of sugar-set it on a moderate fire-when the sugar has dissolved, put in the peel of the oranges, and set the syrup where it will boil slowly for six or eight minutes-then strain it, till clear, through a flannel bag.
The bag should not be squeezed while the syrup is passing through it, or it will not be clear.
Bottle, cork, and seal it tight.
three hundred.
Procure nice, high vine blackberries, that are perfectly ripe-the low vine blackberries will not answer for syrup, as they do not possess the medicinal properties of the high vine blackberries.
Boil the whole together fifteen minutes-strain it, and when cool, add to each pint of syrup a wine glass of French brandy. Bottle, cork, and seal it-keep it in a cool place.
This, mixed with cold water, in the proportion of a wine glass of syrup to two thirds of a tumbler of water, is an excellent remedy for the dysentery, and similar complaints.
It is also a very pleasant summer beverage.
Wash and strain the berries, which should be perfectly ripe.
To a pint of juice, put a pint of molasses.
This is an excellent remedy for a tight cough.
Mix eight pounds of light sugar house or New Orleans molasses, eight pounds of water, one pound of powdered charcoal.
Boil the whole together twenty minutes, then strain it through a flannel bag.
When lukewarm, put in the beaten whites of a couple of eggs, and put it on the fire.
As soon as it boils, take it from the fire, and skim it till clear-then put it on the fire, and let it boil till it becomes a thick syrup-strain it for use.
Put your sugar into the preserving kettle, turn in the quantity of cold water that you think will be sufficient to cover the fruit that is to be preserved in it.
Beat the whites of eggs to a froth, allowing one white of an egg to three pounds of sugar-mix the whites of the eggs with the sugar and water, set it on a slow fire, and let the sugar dissolve, then stir the whole up well together, and set it where it will boil.
As soon as it boils up well, take it from the fire, let it remain for a minute, then take off the scum-set it back on the fire, and let it boil a minute, then take it off, and skim it again.
This operation repeat till the syrup is clear-put in the fruit when the syrup is cold.
CHAPTER twenty six
THE WINGED VICTORY
KATE turned and placing the baby on the front seat, she knelt and put her arms around the little thing, but her lips only repeated the words: "Praise the Lord for this precious baby!" Her heart was filled with high resolve.
She would rear the baby with such care.
She would be more careful with Adam.
She would make heroic effort to help him to clean, unashamed manhood.
She would be a better sister to all her family.
She would be friendlier, and have more patience with the neighbours.
She would join in whatever effort the church was making to hold and increase its membership among the young people, and to raise funds to keep up the organization.
Kate arose with the benediction, picked up the baby, and started down the aisle among the people she had known all her life.
On every side strong hands stretched out to greet and welcome her.
They all knew how she could work, and what she could give if she chose; while that she had stood at the altar and been baptized, meant that something not customary with the Bates family was taking place in her heart.
So they welcomed her, and praised the beauty and sweetness of the baby until Kate went out into the sunshine, her face glowing.
Slowly she walked home and as she reached the veranda, Adam took the baby.
"Been to the cemetery?" he asked.
Kate nodded and dropped into a chair.
"That's too far to walk and carry this great big woman," he said, snuggling his face in the baby's neck, while she patted his cheeks and pulled his hair.
"Why didn't you tell me you wanted to go, and let me get out the car?"
Kate looked at him speculatively.
I'm going to church as often as I can after this, and I'm going to help with the work of running it."
"Why didn't you let me go with you?"
Kate sat staring down the road.
She was shocked speechless.
Again she had followed an impulse, without thinking of any one besides herself. Usually she could talk, but in that instant she had nothing to say. Then a carriage drew into the line of her vision, stopped at York's gate, and mr York alighted and swung to the ground a slim girlish figure and then helped his wife.
"But you would want to wait a little and join with Milly, wouldn't you?" she asked.
"Uncle Robert always has been a church member.
I think it's a fine stand for a man to take."
"Maybe that would be better," he said.
"I didn't think of Milly.
I only thought I'd like to have been with you and Little Poll."
She was a very substantial woman, but for the remainder of that day she felt that she was moving with winged feet.
She sang, she laughed, she was unspeakably happy.
It never occurred to Kate that she had done an unprecedented thing.
She had done as her heart dictated. She did not know that she put the minister into a most uncomfortable position, when he followed her request to baptize her and the child. She had never thought of probations, and examinations, and catechisms. She had read the Bible, as was the custom, every morning before her school.
In that book, when a man wanted to follow Jesus, he followed; Jesus accepted him; and that was all there was to it, with Kate.
The middle of the week Nancy Ellen came flying up the walk on winged feet, herself.
She carried photographs of several small children, one of them a girl so like Little Poll that she might have been the original of the picture.
"They just came," said Nancy Ellen rather breathlessly.
"I was wild for that little darling at once.
I had Robert telegraph them to hold her until we could get there.
We're going to start on the evening train and if her blood seems good, and her ancestors respectable, and she looks like that picture, we're going to bring her back with us. Oh, Kate, I can scarcely wait to get my fingers on her.
I'm hungry for a baby all of my own."
Kate studied the picture.
"She's charming!" she said.
Nancy Ellen looked at Kate and smiled peculiarly.
I can't imagine a Bates joining church."
"If that is joining church, it's the easiest thing in the world," said Kate.
"We just loved doing it, didn't we, Little Poll?
Adam and Milly are going to come in soon, I'm almost sure.
At least he is willing.
I don't know what it is that I am to do, but I suppose they will give me my work soon."
"You bet they'll give you work soon, and enough," said Nancy Ellen, laughing.
You'll just put it through, as you do things out here.
Kate, you are making this place look fine.
I used to say I'd rather die than come back here to live, but lately it has been growing so attractive, I've been here about half my time, and wished I were the other half."
Kate slipped her arm around Nancy Ellen as they walked to the gate.
Usually it's sickness, and sorrow, and losing their friends that bring people to the consolations of the church.
You bore those things like a stoic.
Kate, you make me think of the 'Winged Victory,' this afternoon. If I get this darling little girl, will she make me big, and splendid, and fine, like you?"
Kate suddenly drew Nancy Ellen to her and kissed her a long, hard kiss on the lips.
Good bye and good luck to you, and remember me to Robert."
Nancy Ellen stood intently studying the picture she held in her hand. Then she looked at Kate, smiling with misty eyes: "I think, Kate, I'm very close, if I am not really where you are this minute," she said. Then she started her car; but she looked back, waving and smiling until the car swerved so that Kate called after her: "Do drive carefully, Nancy Ellen!"
Kate went slowly up the walk.
She stopped several times to examine the shrubs and bushes closely, to wish for rain for the flowers.
She sat on the porch a few minutes talking to Little Poll, then she went inside to answer the phone.
"Kate?" cried a sharp voice.
"Yes," said Kate, recognizing a neighbour, living a few miles down the road.
"Did Nancy Ellen just leave your house?" came a breathless query.
"Yes," said Kate again.
"I just saw a car that looked like hers slip in the fresh sand at the river levee, and it went down, and two or three times over."
"O God!" said Kate.
I'll phone Robert, and come as soon as I can get there."
Kate called dr Gray's office.
Rush him!"
Kate was at the little garage they had built, and had the door open.
She told him what she had heard, ran to get the baby, and met him at the gate.
You know where her things are, and how to feed her.
Don't you dare let them change any way I do.
Baby knows Milly; she will be good for her and for you.
You'll be careful?"
"Of course, Mother," said Adam.
He called her attention to the road.
"Look at those tracks," he said.
"Was she sick?
She might have been drunk, from them."
She WAS drunk, drunken with joy. She had a picture of the most beautiful little baby girl.
They were to start to Chicago after her to night.
Oh, my God, have mercy!"
They had come to deep grooves in loose gravel, then the cut in the embankment, then they could see the wrecked car standing on the engine and lying against a big tree, near the water, while two men and a woman were carrying a limp form across the meadow toward the house.
As their car stopped, Kate kissed the baby mechanically, handed her to Adam, and ran into the house where she dragged a couch to the middle of the first room she entered, found a pillow, and brought a bucket of water and a towel from the kitchen.
Kate gathered her sister's feet in her arms and hid her face beside them. The neighbours silently began taking away things that had been used, while mrs Howe chose her whitest sheet, and laid it on a chair near Robert.
Two days later they laid Nancy Ellen beside her mother.
Then they began trying to face the problem of life without her.
Robert said nothing.
He seemed too stunned to think.
Kate wanted to tell him of her final visit with Nancy Ellen, but she could not at that time. Robert's aged mother came to him, and said she could remain as long as he wanted her, so that was a comfort to Kate, who took time to pity him, even in her blackest hour.
She had some very black ones.
She could have wailed, and lamented, and relinquished all she had gained, but she did not.
She merely went on with life, as she always had lived it, to the best of her ability when she was so numbed with grief she scarcely knew what she was doing.
Every Sabbath, and often during the week, her feet carried her to the cemetery, where she sat in the deep grass and looked at those three long mounds and tried to understand life; deeper still, to fathom death.
She and her mother had agreed that there was "something." Now Kate tried as never before to understand what, and where, and why, that "something" was.
One day after she had arranged the fall roses she had grown, and some roadside asters she had gathered in passing, she sat in deep thought, when a car stopped on the road.
Kate looked up to see Robert coming across the churchyard with his arms full of greenhouse roses.
He carried a big bunch of deep red for her mother, white for Polly, and a large sheaf of warm pink for Nancy Ellen.
Kate knelt up and taking her flowers, she moved them lower, and silently helped Robert place those he had brought.
Then she sat where she had been, and looked at him.
Finally he asked: "Still hunting the 'why,' Kate?"
Polly had a clear case of uric poison, while I'd stake my life Nancy Ellen was gloating over the picture she carried when she ran into that loose sand.
In each of their cases I am satisfied as to 'why,' as well as about Father.
The thing that holds me, and fascinates me, and that I have such a time being sure of, is 'where.'"
Robert glanced upward and asked: "Isn't there room enough up there, Kate?"
"Too much!" said Kate.
"And what IS the soul, and HOW can it bridge the vortex lying between us and other worlds, that man never can, because of the lack of air to breathe, and support him?"
"I don't know," said Robert; "and in spite of the fact that I do know what a man CANNOT do, I still believe in the immortality of the soul."
"Oh, yes," said Kate.
"If there is any such thing in science as a self evident fact, that is one.
THAT is provable."
Robert looked at her eager face.
"How would you go about proving it, Kate?" he asked.
They all reproduce themselves, they all make something intended for music, they all express a feeling in their hearts by the exercise we call dance, they all believe in the after life of the soul.
This belief is as much a PART of any man, ever born in any location, as his hands and his feet. Whether he believes his soul enters a cat and works back to man again after long transmigration, or goes to a Happy Hunting Ground as our Indians, makes no difference with the fact that he enters this world with belief in after life of some kind.
We see material evidence in increase that man is not defeated in his desire to reproduce himself; we have advanced to something better than tom toms and pow wows for music and dance; these desires are fulfilled before us, now tell me why the very strongest of all, the most deeply rooted, the belief in after life, should come to nothing.
Why should the others be real, and that a dream?"
"I don't think it is," said Robert.
"It's my biggest self evident fact," said Kate, conclusively.
"I never heard any one else say these things, but I think them, and they are provable.
She stood in full evening light, I looked straight in her face, and Robert, you know I'm no creature of fancies and delusions, I tell you I SAW HER SOUL PASS.
I saw the life go from her and go on, and on.
I saw her body stand erect, long enough for me to reach her, and pick her up, after its passing.
That I know."
"I shouldn't think of questioning it, Kate," said Robert.
"Oh, I don't know," said Kate.
"Air to breathe and food to sustain are presupposed.
Man LEARNS to fight in self defense, and to acquire what he covets.
He learns to covet by seeing stronger men, in better locations, surpass his achievements, so if he is strong enough he goes and robs them by force.
He learns the desire for the chase in food hunting; I think four are plenty to start with."
"I must go now. Shall I take you home?"
Kate glanced at the sun and shook her head.
"I can stay half an hour longer.
I don't mind the walk.
I need exercise to keep me in condition.
Good bye!"
As he started his car he glanced back.
Kate sat looking straight before her until time to help with the evening work, and prepare supper, then she arose.
She stood looking down a long time; finally she picked up a fine specimen of each of the roses and slowly dropped them on her father's grave.
"There!
You may have that many," she said.
WHAT THE WAR OF eighteen twelve DEMONSTRATED
That incapacity in national politics should appear as a leading trait in American character was unexpected by Americans, but might naturally result from their conditions.
Every vestige of hostile fleets had been swept away, until, after the battle of Trafalgar, British frigates ceased practice with their guns.
Nothing showed that Nelson's line of battle ships, frigates, or sloops were, as a rule, better fought than the Macedonian and Java, the Avon and Reindeer.
According to the reports, the two infantry lines in the centre never came nearer than eighty yards. Major General Riall reported that then, owing to severe losses, his troops broke and could not be rallied.
Riall reported one hundred and forty eight killed; Scott reported sixty one.
The conclusion seemed incredible, but it was supported by the results of the naval battles.
The number of graduates before the year eighteen twelve was very small; but at the outbreak of the war the corps of engineers was already efficient.
The lieutenant colonel in eighteen twelve was Walker Keith Armistead, of Virginia,--the third graduate, who planned the defenses of Norfolk.
Major William McRee, of North Carolina, became chief engineer to General Brown and constructed the fortifications at Fort Erie, which cost the British General Gordon Drummond the loss of half his army, besides the mortification of defeat.
Captain Joseph Gilbert Totten, of New York, was chief engineer to General Izard at Plattsburg, where he directed the fortifications that stopped the advance of Prevost's great army.
The next day it came on a richer prize.
The Constitution, the best frigate in the United States service, sailed into the midst of Broke's five ships.
Hull put out his boats to tow the Constitution; Broke summoned the boats of the squadron to tow the Shannon.
All night the British and American crews toiled on, and when morning came the Belvidera, proving to be the best sailer, got in advance of her consorts, working two kedge anchors, until at two o'clock in the afternoon she tried in her turn to reach the Constitution with her bow guns, but in vain.
Hull expected capture, but the Belvidera could not approach nearer without bringing her boats under the Constitution's stern guns; and the wearied crews toiled on, towing and kedging, the ships barely out of gunshot, till another morning came.
Hull could not expect to keep command of the Constitution.
For about an hour the two ships wore and wore again, trying to get advantage of position; until at last, a few minutes before six o'clock, they came together side by side, within pistol shot, the wind almost astern, and running before it, they pounded each other with all their strength.
In every respect, and in proportion of ten to seven, the Constitution was the better ship; her crew was more numerous in proportion of ten to six.
He never fully understood the causes of his defeat, and never excused it by pleading, as he might have done, the great superiority of his enemy.
CHAPTER ten-THE KITE
On the following day, a little after four o'clock, Adam set out for Mercy.
He was home just as the clocks were striking six.
He was pale and upset, but otherwise looked strong and alert.
The old man summed up his appearance and manner thus: "Braced up for battle."
"Now!" said Sir Nathaniel, and settled down to listen, looking at Adam steadily and listening attentively that he might miss nothing-even the inflection of a word.
"I found Lilla and Mimi at home.
Watford had been detained by business on the farm.
Miss Watford received me as kindly as before; Mimi, too, seemed glad to see me.
He was followed closely by the negro, who was puffing hard as if he had been running-so it was probably he who watched.
However, we got on very well.
He talked pleasantly on all sorts of questions.
True, they seemed to be very deep and earnest, but there was no offence in them.
Had it not been for the drawing down of the brows and the stern set of the jaws, I should not at first have noticed anything.
But the stare, when presently it began, increased in intensity.
I could see that Lilla began to suffer from nervousness, as on the first occasion; but she carried herself bravely.
However, the more nervous she grew, the harder mr Caswall stared.
It was evident to me that he had come prepared for some sort of mesmeric or hypnotic battle.
It was evidently intended to give some sign to the negro, for he came, in his usual stealthy way, quietly in by the hall door, which was open.
Then mr Caswall's efforts at staring became intensified, and poor Lilla's nervousness grew greater.
This evidently made a difficulty for mr Caswall, for his efforts, without appearing to get feebler, seemed less effective.
Then there was a diversion.
I had seen her coming through the great window.
Without a word she crossed the room and stood beside mr Caswall.
It really was very like a fight of a peculiar kind; and the longer it was sustained the more earnest-the fiercer-it grew. That combination of forces-the over lord, the white woman, and the black man-would have cost some-probably all of them-their lives in the Southern States of America.
To us it was simply horrible.
But all that you can understand.
This time, to go on in sporting phrase, it was understood by all to be a 'fight to a finish,' and the mixed group did not slacken a moment or relax their efforts.
She grew pale-a patchy pallor, which meant that her nerves were out of order.
She trembled like an aspen, and though she struggled bravely, I noticed that her legs would hardly support her.
A dozen times she seemed about to collapse in a faint, but each time, on catching sight of Mimi's eyes, she made a fresh struggle and pulled through.
"By now mr Caswall's face had lost its appearance of passivity.
His eyes glowed with a fiery light.
His companions in the baleful work seemed to have taken on something of his feeling.
Lady Arabella looked like a soulless, pitiless being, not human, unless it revived old legends of transformed human beings who had lost their humanity in some transformation or in the sweep of natural savagery.
As for the negro-well, I can only say that it was solely due to the self restraint which you impressed on me that I did not wipe him out as he stood-without warning, without fair play-without a single one of the graces of life and death.
Lilla was silent in the helpless concentration of deadly fear; Mimi was all resolve and self forgetfulness, so intent on the soul struggle in which she was engaged that there was no possibility of any other thought.
As for myself, the bonds of will which held me inactive seemed like bands of steel which numbed all my faculties, except sight and hearing.
Something must happen, though the power of guessing was inactive.
Mechanically it touched that of Lilla, and in that instant she was transformed.
It was as if youth and strength entered afresh into something already dead to sensibility and intention. As if by inspiration, she grasped the other's band with a force which blenched the knuckles.
Her face suddenly flamed, as if some divine light shone through it.
Towards the door he retreated, she following.
There was a sound as of the cooing sob of doves, which seemed to multiply and intensify with each second.
The sound from the unseen source rose and rose as he retreated, till finally it swelled out in a triumphant peal, as she with a fierce sweep of her arm, seemed to hurl something at her foe, and he, moving his hands blindly before his face, appeared to be swept through the doorway and out into the open sunlight.
"All at once my own faculties were fully restored; I could see and hear everything, and be fully conscious of what was going on.
Even the figures of the baleful group were there, though dimly seen as through a veil-a shadowy veil.
By the next morning, daylight showed the actual danger which threatened. From every part of the eastern counties reports were received concerning the enormous immigration of birds.
Experts were sending-on their own account, on behalf of learned societies, and through local and imperial governing bodies-reports dealing with the matter, and suggesting remedies.
The reports closer to home were even more disturbing.
Each bird seemed to sound some note of fear or anger or seeking, and the whirring of wings never ceased nor lessened.
The air was full of a muttered throb.
So monotonous it was, so cheerless, so disheartening, so melancholy, that all longed, but in vain, for any variety, no matter how terrible it might be.
The second morning the reports from all the districts round were more alarming than ever.
And as yet it was only a warning of evil, not the evil accomplished; the ground began to look bare whenever some passing sound temporarily frightened the birds.
Edgar Caswall tortured his brain for a long time unavailingly, to think of some means of getting rid of what he, as well as his neighbours, had come to regard as a plague of birds.
The experience was of some years ago in China, far up country, towards the head waters of the Yang tze kiang, where the smaller tributaries spread out in a sort of natural irrigation scheme to supply the wilderness of paddy fields.
The kite was shaped like a great hawk; and the moment it rose into the air the birds began to cower and seek protection-and then to disappear.
Then he and his men, with a sufficiency of cord, began to fly it high overhead.
The experience of China was repeated.
The moment the kite rose, the birds hid or sought shelter.
All the birds were cowed; their sounds stopped. Neither song nor chirp was heard-silence seemed to have taken the place of the normal voices of bird life.
But that was not all.
The silence spread to all animals.
The fear and restraint which brooded amongst the denizens of the air began to affect all life.
Not only did the birds cease song or chirp, but the lowing of the cattle ceased in the fields and the varied sounds of life died away.
One and all, the faces of men and women seemed bereft of vitality, of interest, of thought, and, most of all, of hope.
Men seemed to have lost the power of expression of their thoughts.
Everything was affected; gloom was the predominant note.
Joy appeared to have passed away as a factor of life, and this creative impulse had nothing to take its place.
After a few days, men began to grow desperate; their very words as well as their senses seemed to be in chains.
Edgar Caswall again tortured his brain to find any antidote or palliative of this greater evil than before.
He would gladly have destroyed the kite, or caused its flying to cease; but the instant it was pulled down, the birds rose up in even greater numbers; all those who depended in any way on agriculture sent pitiful protests to Castra Regis.
It was strange indeed what influence that weird kite seemed to exercise. Even human beings were affected by it, as if both it and they were realities.
As for the people at Mercy Farm, it was like a taste of actual death.
Lilla felt it most.
Of course, some of those already drawn into the vortex noticed the effect on individuals.
Those who were interested took care to compare their information.
Strangely enough, as it seemed to the others, the person who took the ghastly silence least to heart was the negro.
By nature he was not sensitive to, or afflicted by, nerves.
This alone would not have produced the seeming indifference, so they set their minds to discover the real cause.
Thus the black had a never failing source of amusement.
Lady Arabella's cold nature rendered her immune to anything in the way of pain or trouble concerning others.
mr Watford, mr Salton, and Sir Nathaniel were all concerned in the issue, partly from kindness of heart-for none of them could see suffering, even of wild birds, unmoved-and partly on account of their property, which had to be protected, or ruin would stare them in the face before long.
Lilla suffered acutely.
As time went on, her face became pinched, and her eyes dull with watching and crying.
Mimi suffered too on account of her cousin's suffering.
But as she could do nothing, she resolutely made up her mind to self restraint and patience.
MISTLETOE.
And he was handsome too, and good humoured, though these qualities told less with her than the others.
And now she was to meet him in the house of her great relations,--in a position in which her rank and her fashion would seem to be equal to his own.
And she would meet him with the remembrance fresh in his mind as in her own of those passages of love at Rufford.
It would be impossible that he should even seem to forget them.
The most that she could expect would be four or five days of his company, and she knew that she must be upon her mettle.
She must do more now than she had ever attempted before.
She must scruple at nothing that might bind him.
She would be in the house of her uncle and that uncle a duke, and she thought that those facts might help to quell him.
She thought of it all, and made her plans carefully and even painfully.
She would be at any rate two days in the house before his arrival.
She had stretched her means and her credit to the utmost in regard to her wardrobe, and was aware that she had never been so well equipped since those early days of her career in which her father and mother had thought that her beauty, assisted by a generous expenditure, would serve to dispose of her without delay.
A generous expenditure may be incurred once even by poor people, but cannot possibly be maintained over a dozen years.
Now she had taken the matter into her own hands and had done that which would be ruinous if not successful. She was venturing her all upon the die,--with the prospect of drowning herself on the way out to Patagonia should the chances of the game go against her.
She forgot nothing.
She could hardly hope for more than one day's hunting and yet that had been provided for as though she were going to ride with the hounds through all the remainder of the season.
When she reached Mistletoe there were people going and coming every day, so that an arrival was no event.
Everybody knew that she was a Trefoil and her presence therefore raised no question.
The Duchess of Omnium was among the guests.
The Duchess knew all about her and vouchsafed to her the smallest possible recognition.
Lady Chiltern had met her before, and as Lady Chiltern was always generous, she was gracious to Arabella. She was sorry to see Lady Drummond, because she connected Lady Drummond with the Foreign Office and feared that the conversation might be led to Patagonia and its new minister.
The girl was his niece and the Duke had an idea that he should be kind to the family of which he was the head.
His brother's wife had become objectionable to him, but as to the girl, if she wanted a home for a week or two, he thought it to be his duty to give it to her.
There is nothing in England more ugly or perhaps more comfortable.
He was a grey haired comely man of sixty, with a large body and a wonderful appetite.
By many who understood the subject he was supposed to be the best amateur judge of wine in England.
During the first evening Arabella did contrive to make herself very agreeable.
After dinner, something having been said of the respectable old game called cat's cradle, she played it to perfection with Sir Jeffrey,--till her aunt thought that she must have been unaware that Sir Jeffrey had a wife and family.
She was all smiles and all pleasantness, and seemed to want no other happiness than what the present moment gave her.
Such a thing had never happened to her before.
She could not recollect that, on any of those annual visits which she had made to Mistletoe for more years than she now liked to think of, she had ever had five minutes' conversation alone with her aunt.
It had always seemed that she was to be allowed to come and go by reason of her relationship, but that she was to receive no special mark of confidence or affection.
The message was whispered into her ear by her aunt's own woman as she was listening with great attention to Lady Drummond's troubles in regard to her nursery arrangements.
She nodded her head, heard a few more words from Lady Drummond, and then, with a pretty apology and a statement made so that all should hear her, that her aunt wanted her, followed the maid up stairs.
"My dear," said her aunt, when the door was closed, "I want to ask you whether you would like me to ask mr Morton to come here while you are with us?" A thunderbolt at her feet could hardly have surprised or annoyed her more.
It would utterly subvert everything and rob her of every chance.
With a great effort she restrained all emotion and simply shook her head.
She did it very well, and betrayed nothing.
"I ask," said the Duchess, "because I have been very glad to hear that you are engaged to marry him.
Lord Drummond tells me that he is a most respectable young man."
"And I thought that if it were so, you would be glad that he should meet you here.
I could manage it very well, as the Drummonds are here, and Lord Drummond would be glad to meet him."
"You are engaged to him?"
"Well; I was going to tell you.
"But you were engaged to him?"
"Yes," said Arabella; "I was engaged to him."
"I suppose you will go with him?"
She could not say that she certainly was not going with him.
And yet she had to remember that her coming campaign with Lord Rufford must be carried on in part beneath her aunt's eyes. When she had come to Mistletoe she had fondly hoped that none of the family there would know anything about mr Morton.
And now she was called upon to answer these horrid questions without a moment's notice!
"I hope not.
You should think of it very seriously.
As for money, you know, you have none of your own, and I am told that he has a very nice property in Rufford.
There is a neighbour of his coming here to morrow, and perhaps he knows him."
"Lord Rufford.
He is coming to shoot.
I will ask him about the property."
"Know Lord Rufford very well!"
"As one does know men that one meets about."
"I thought it might settle everything if we had mr Morton here."
"I couldn't meet him, aunt; I couldn't indeed.
After what Arabella had told her mr Morton could not be asked there to meet her niece. But all the slight feeling of kindness to the girl which had been created by the tidings of so respectable an engagement were at once obliterated from the Duchess's bosom.
Arabella, with many expressions of thanks and a good humoured countenance, left the room, cursing the untowardness of her fate which would let nothing run smooth.
Lord Rufford was to come.
That at any rate was now almost certain. Up to the present she had doubted, knowing the way in which such men will change their engagements at the least caprice.
But the Duchess expected him on the morrow.
When she went up to dress for dinner on the day of his expected arrival Lord Rufford had not come.
When she came into the drawing room, a little late, he was not there.
"We won't wait, Duchess," said the Duke to his wife at three minutes past eight.
The Duke's punctuality at dinner time was well known, and everybody else was then assembled.
Within two minutes after the Duke's word dinner was announced, and a party numbering about thirty walked away into the dinner room.
Arabella, when they were all settled, found that there was a vacant seat next herself.
If the man were to come, fortune would have favoured her in that.
The fish and soup had already disappeared and the Duke was wakening himself to eloquence on the first entree when Lord Rufford entered the room.
"There never were trains so late as yours, Duchess," he said, "nor any part of the world in which hired horses travel so slowly.
I beg the Duke's pardon, but I suffer the less because I know his Grace never waits for anybody."
"Certainly not," said the Duke, "having some regard for my friends' dinners."
"And I find myself next to you," said Lord Rufford as he took his seat.
"Jack is here," said Lord Rufford, as soon as the fuss of his late arrival had worn itself away.
"I shall be proud to renew my acquaintance."
"Can you come to morrow?"
"Oh yes," said Arabella, rapturously.
"There are difficulties, and I ought to have written to you about them.
I am going with the Fitzwilliam." Now Mistletoe was in Lincolnshire, not very far from Peterborough, not very far from Stamford, not very far from Oakham.
And a postchaise could meet him here or there.
But when a lady is added, the difficulty is often increased fivefold.
"Is it very far?" asked Arabella.
"It is a little far.
I wonder who are going from here?"
"Heaven only knows.
I have passed my time in playing cat's cradle with Sir Jeffrey Bunker for the amusement of the company, and in confidential communications with my aunt and Lady Drummond.
The Duke said that he did not know of anything on wheels going to Holcombe Cross.
Then a hunting man who had heard the question said that he and another intended to travel by train to Oundle.
Upon this Lord Rufford turned round and looked at Arabella mournfully.
"Cannot I go by train to Oundle?" she asked.
"Nothing on earth so jolly if your pastors and masters and all that will let you."
"The Duchess!" suggested Lord Rufford.
"I thought all that kind of nonsense was over," said Arabella.
"I believe a great deal is over.
You can do many things that your mother and grandmother couldn't do; but absolute freedom,--what you may call universal suffrage,--hasn't come yet, I fear.
"But the railway!"
"I'm afraid that would be worse.
We couldn't ride back, you know, as we did at Rufford.
To tell you the truth I'm the least bit in the world afraid of the Duchess."
"I am not at all," said Arabella, angrily.
Then Lord Rufford ate his dinner and seemed to think that that matter was settled.
Arabella knew that he might have hunted elsewhere,--that the Cottesmore would be out in their own county within twelve miles of them, and that the difficulty of that ride would be very much less.
The Duke might have been persuaded to send a carriage that distance.
But Lord Rufford cared more about the chance of a good run than her company!
"And is that to be the end of Jack as far as I'm concerned?"
"I have been thinking about it ever since.
This is Thursday."
"Not a doubt about it."
"To morrow will be Friday and the Duke has his great shooting on Saturday.
I shall go with the Pytchley if I don't shoot, but I shall have to get up just when other people are going to bed.
That wouldn't suit you."
"I wouldn't mind if I didn't go to bed at all."
"At any rate it wouldn't suit the Duchess.
I hate being anywhere on Sunday except in a railway carriage. But if I thought the Duke would keep me till Tuesday morning we might manage Peltry on Monday.
I meant to have got back to Surbiton's on Sunday and have gone from there."
"Where is Peltry?"
"It's a Cottesmore meet,--about five miles this side of Melton."
"We could ride from here."
"It's rather far for that, but we could talk over the Duke to send a carriage.
Ladies always like to see a meet, and perhaps we could make a party.
If not we must put a good face on it and go in anything we can get.
I shouldn't fear the Duchess so much for twelve miles as I should for twenty."
"I don't mean to let the Duchess interfere with me," said Arabella in a whisper.
It was, however, understood that she was to have a place in the carriage.
Arabella had gained two things.
She would have her one day's hunting, and she had secured the presence of Lord Rufford at Mistletoe for Sunday.
With such a man as his lordship it was almost impossible to find a moment for confidential conversation.
He worked so hard at his amusements that he was as bad a lover as a barrister who has to be in Court all day,--almost as bad as a sailor who is always going round the world.
On this evening it was ten o'clock before the gentlemen came into the drawing room, and then Lord Rufford's time was spent in arranging the party for the meet on Monday.
When the ladies went up to bed Arabella had had no other opportunity than what Fortune had given her at dinner.
And even then she had been watched.
The Duchess, though she was at some distance down the table, had seen that her niece and Lord Rufford were intimate, and remembered immediately what had been said up stairs.
They could not have talked as they were then talking,--sometimes whispering as the Duchess could perceive very well,--unless there had been considerable former intimacy.
She began gradually to understand various things;--why Arabella Trefoil had been so anxious to come to Mistletoe just at this time, why she had behaved so unlike her usual self before Lord Rufford's arrival, and why she had been so unwilling to have mr Morton invited.
The Duchess was in her way a clever woman and could see many things.
She could see that though her niece might be very anxious to marry Lord Rufford, Lord Rufford might indulge himself in a close intimacy with the girl without any such intention on his part.
And, as far as the family was concerned, she would have been quite contented with the Morton alliance.
She would have asked Morton now only that it would be impossible that he should come in time to be of service.
The Duchess of Omnium had since declared that she also would go, and there were to be two carriages.
But still it never occurred to the Duchess that Arabella intended to hunt.
Nor did Arabella intend that she should know it till the morning came.
The Friday was very dull.
She did not see Lord Rufford before dinner, and at dinner sat between Sir Jeffrey and an old gentleman out of Stamford who dined at Mistletoe that evening.
"We've had no such luck to night," Lord Rufford said to her in the drawing room.
"The old dragon took care of that," replied Arabella.
"Because-; I can't very well tell you why, but I dare say you know."
"Of course there is a little danger, but who is going to be stopped by that?"
He could make no reply to this because the Duchess called him away to give some account to Lady Chiltern about Goarly and the u r u, Lady Chiltern's husband being a master of hounds and a great authority on all matters relating to hunting.
"Nasty old dragon!" Arabella said to herself when she was thus left alone.
The Saturday was the day of the great shooting and at two o'clock the ladies went out to lunch with the gentlemen by the side of the wood.
Lord Rufford had at last consented to be one of the party.
With logs of trees, a few hurdles, and other field appliances, a rustic banqueting hall was prepared and everything was very nice.
Tons of game had been killed, and tons more were to be killed after luncheon. The Duchess was not there and Arabella contrived so to place herself that she could be waited upon by Lord Rufford, or could wait upon him.
Nobody was present who could dare to interfere with her.
She had come to feel that the time was slipping between her fingers and that she must say something effective.
"Do we hunt or shoot to morrow?" she said.
"To morrow is Sunday."
"I am quite aware of that, but I didn't know whether you could live a day without sport."
"The country is so full of prejudice that I am driven to Sabbatical quiescence."
"Take a walk with me to morrow," said Arabella.
"But the Duchess?" exclaimed Lord Rufford in a stage whisper.
One of the beaters was so near that he could not but have heard;--but what does a beater signify?
CHAPTER one
While there is a great deal of literary reference in all the following argument, I realize, looking back over many attempts to paraphrase it for various audiences, that its appeal is to those who spend the best part of their student life in classifying, and judging, and producing works of sculpture, painting, and architecture.
I find the eyes of all others wandering when I make talks upon the plastic artist's point of view.
This book tries to find that fourth dimension of architecture, painting, and sculpture, which is the human soul in action, that arrow with wings which is the flash of fire from the film, or the heart of man, or Pygmalion's image, when it becomes a woman.
The nineteen fifteen edition was used by Victor o Freeburg as one of the text books in the Columbia University School of Journalism, in his classes in photoplay writing.
Now I realize that those who approach the theory from the general University standpoint, or from the history of the drama, had best begin with Freeburg's book, for he is not only learned in both matters, but presents the special analogies with skill.
From there it must work its way out.
Of course those bodies touch on a thousand others.
The work is being used as one basis of the campaign for the New Denver Art Museum, and I like to tell the story of how George w Eggers of Denver first began to apply the book when the Director of the Art Institute, Chicago, that it may not seem to the merely University type of mind a work of lost abstractions.
One of the most gratifying recognitions I ever received was the invitation to talk on the films in Fullerton Hall, Chicago Art Institute.
Then there came invitations to speak at Chicago University, and before the Fortnightly Club, Chicago, all around nineteen sixteen-seventeen.
I talked at these three and other places, but hardly knew how to go about crossing the commercial bridge.
It took a deal of will and breaking of precedent, on the part of all concerned, to show this film, The Wild Girl of the Sierras, and I retired from the field a long time. But now this same Eggers is starting, in Denver, an Art Museum from its very foundations, but on the same constructive scale.
So this enterprise, in my fond and fatuous fancy, is associated with the sweet Mae Marsh as The Wild Girl of the Sierras-one of the loveliest bits of poetry ever put into screen or fable.
For about one year, off and on, I had the honor to be the photoplay critic of The New Republic, this invitation also based on the first edition of this book.
But when I was through with all these dashes into the field, and went back to reciting verses again, no one had given me any light as to who should make the disinterested, non-commercial film for these immediate times, the film that would class, in our civilization, with The New Republic or The Atlantic Monthly or the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson.
The school was to be largely devoted to producing music for the photoplay, in defiance of chapter fourteen.
Neither music nor films have as yet shaken the world.
I felt that once it was started the films would take their proper place and dominate the project, disinterested non-commercial films to be classed with the dramas so well stimulated by the great drama department under Professor Baker of Harvard.
As I look back over this history I see that the printed page had counted too much, and the real forces of the visible arts in America had not been definitely enlisted.
They should take the lead.
No three people would more welcome opportunities to outline the idealistic possibilities of this future art.
And a well-known American painter was talking to me of a midnight scolding Charlie Chaplin gave to some Los Angeles producer, in a little restaurant, preaching the really beautiful film, and denouncing commerce like a member of Coxey's illustrious army.
He is praised for a kind of o Henry double meaning to his antics.
He is said to be like one of o Henry's misquotations of the classics.
He looks to me like that artist Edgar Poe, if Poe had been obliged to make millions laugh.
I do not like Chaplin's work, but I have to admit the good intentions and the enviable laurels.
As spring approached, the starving multitude on Isle saint Joseph grew reckless with hunger.
Along the main shore, in spots where the sun lay warm, the spring fisheries had already begun, and the melting snow was uncovering the acorns in the woods.
The ice was still thick, but the advancing season had softened it; and, as a body of them were crossing, it broke under their feet.
Some were drowned; while others dragged themselves out, drenched and pierced with cold, to die miserably on the frozen lake, before they could reach a shelter.
So, too, our starving Hurons were driven out of a town which had become an abode of horror.
And, in fact, only a few days passed before we heard of the disaster which we had foreseen.
These poor people fell into ambuscades of our Iroquois enemies.
Some were killed on the spot; some were dragged into captivity; women and children were burned.
Go where they would, they met with slaughter on all sides.
The Jesuits at saint Joseph knew not what course to take.
The doom of their flock seemed inevitable.
"Take courage, brother," continued one of the chiefs, addressing Ragueneau.
Turn your eyes towards Quebec, and transport thither what is left of this ruined country.
If you do as we wish, we will form a church under the protection of the fort at Quebec.
Our faith will not be extinguished.
Their resolution once taken, they pushed their preparations with all speed, lest the Iroquois might learn their purpose, and lie in wait to cut them off. Canoes were made ready, and on the tenth of June they began the voyage, with all their French followers and about three hundred Hurons.
Their scouts came in, and reported that they had found fresh footprints of men in the forest.
These proved, however, to be the tracks, not of enemies, but of friends.
Bressani's party outnumbered them six to one; but they resolved that it should not pass without a token of their presence. Late on a dark night, the French and Hurons lay encamped in the forest, sleeping about their fires.
They had set guards: but these, it seems, were drowsy or negligent; for the ten Iroquois, watching their time, approached with the stealth of lynxes, and glided like shadows into the midst of the camp, where, by the dull glow of the smouldering fires, they could distinguish the recumbent figures of their victims.
The Iroquois were surrounded, and a desperate fight ensued in the dark.
The united parties soon after reached Montreal; but the Hurons refused to remain in a spot so exposed to the Iroquois.
Their good will exceeded their power; for food was scarce at Quebec, and the Jesuits themselves had to bear the chief burden of keeping the sufferers alive.
A party of Christian Indians, chiefly from Sillery, planned a stroke of retaliation, and set out for the Mohawk country, marching cautiously and sending forward scouts to scour the forest.
He had come, he declared, with no other thought than that of joining them, and turning Iroquois, as they had done.
The Iroquois, in great delight, demanded to be shown where they were.
Not long after, he came to Canada, and, with a view, as it was thought, to some further treachery, rejoined the French. A sharp cross questioning put him to confusion, and he presently confessed his guilt.
In the course of the summer, the French at Three Rivers became aware that a band of Iroquois was prowling in the neighborhood, and sixty men went out to meet them.
In the forests far north of Three Rivers dwelt the tribe called the Atticamegues, or Nation of the White Fish.
From their remote position, and the difficult nature of the intervening country, they thought themselves safe; but a band of Iroquois, marching on snow shoes a distance of twenty days' journey northward from the saint Lawrence, fell upon one of their camps in the winter, and made a general butchery of the inmates.
With him were a large party of Atticamegues, and several Frenchmen.
Game was exceedingly scarce, and they were forced by hunger to separate, a Huron convert and a Frenchman named Fontarabie remaining with the missionary.
The snows had melted, and all the streams were swollen.
They toiled through the naked forest, among the wet, black trees, over tangled roots, green, spongy mosses, mouldering leaves, and rotten, prostrate trunks, while the cataract foamed amidst the rocks hard by.
The Indian led the way with the canoe on his head, while Buteux and the other Frenchman followed with the baggage.
Suddenly they were set upon by a troop of Iroquois, who had crouched behind thickets, rocks, and fallen trees, to waylay them.
The Iroquois rushed upon them, mangled their bodies with tomahawks and swords, stripped them, and then flung them into the torrent.
Iroquois bullets and tomahawks had killed the Hurons by hundreds, but famine and disease had killed incomparably more.
Game was very scarce; and, without agriculture, the country could support only a scanty and scattered population like that which maintained a struggling existence in the wilderness of the lower saint Lawrence.
The mortality among the exiles was prodigious.
This brought them in contact with the Illinois, an Algonquin people, at that time very numerous, but who, like many other tribes at this epoch, were doomed to a rapid diminution from wars with other savage nations.
Thus it appears that the Wyandots, whose name is so conspicuous in the history of our border wars, are descendants of the ancient Hurons, and chiefly of that portion of them called the Tobacco Nation.
They took possession of the stone fort which the French had abandoned, and where, with reasonable vigilance, they could maintain themselves against attack.
In the succeeding autumn a small Iroquois war party had the audacity to cross over to the island, and build a fort of felled trees in the woods.
A Huron war chief, named Etienne Annaotaha, whose life is described as a succession of conflicts and adventures, and who is said to have been always in luck, landed with a few companions, and fell into an ambuscade of the Iroquois.
Etienne suspected treachery, but concealed his distrust, and advanced towards the Iroquois with an air of the utmost confidence. They received him with open arms, and pressed him to accept their invitation; but he replied, that there were older and wiser men among the Hurons, whose counsels all the people followed, and that they ought to lay the proposal before them.
He set out accordingly with three of the principal Iroquois.
Etienne seized the opportunity to take aside four or five of the principal chiefs, and secretly tell them his suspicions that the Iroquois were plotting to compass their destruction under cover of overtures of peace; and he proposed that they should meet treachery with treachery.
The squaws began their preparations at once, and all was bustle and alacrity; for the Hurons themselves were no less deceived than were the Iroquois envoys.
Etienne's time had come.
Three of the Iroquois, immediately before the slaughter began, had received from Etienne a warning of their danger in time to make their escape.
The miseries of the Hurons were lighted up with a brief gleam of joy; but it behooved them to make a timely retreat from their island before the Iroquois came to exact a bloody retribution.
The fugitives directed their course to the Grand Manitoulin Island, where they remained for a short time, and then, to the number of about four hundred, descended the Ottawa, and rejoined their countrymen who had gone to Quebec the year before.
It was built of brick, like its original, of which it was an exact facsimile; and it stood in the centre of a quadrangle, the four sides of which were formed by the bark dwellings of the Hurons, ranged with perfect order in straight lines.
We are at the end of all our troubles, and at the beginning of happiness."
CHAPTER fourteen
A VISIT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
That same afternoon Baldos, blissfully ignorant of the stir he had created in certain circles, rode out for the first time as a member of the Castle Guard.
He and Haddan were detailed by Colonel Quinnox to act as private escort to Miss Calhoun until otherwise ordered.
If Haddan thought himself wiser than Baldos in knowing that their charge was not the princess, he was very much mistaken; if he enjoyed the trick that was being played on his fellow guardsman, his enjoyment was as nothing as compared to the pleasure Baldos was deriving from the situation.
The royal victoria was driven to the fortress, conveying the supposed princess and the Countess Dagmar to the home of Count Marlanx.
Baldos was mildly surprised and puzzled by the homage paid the young American girl.
It struck him as preposterous that the entire population of Edelweiss could be in the game to deceive him.
"The Countess Dagmar, cousin to her highness.
She even went so far as to whisper in Beverly's ear that he did not remember her face, and probably would not recognize Yetive as one of the eavesdroppers.
The princess had flatly refused to accompany them on the visit to the fortress because of Baldos.
Struck by a sudden impulse, Beverly called Baldos to the side of the vehicle.
"I am happy to have pleased your highness," he said steadily.
"Yes, your highness, it certainly is interesting," he said, as he fell back into position beside Haddan.
During the remainder of the ride he caught himself time after time gazing reflectively at the back of her proud little head, possessed of an almost uncontrollable desire to touch the soft brown hair.
Count Marlanx welcomed his visitors with a graciousness that awoke wonder in the minds of his staff.
His marked preference for the American girl did not escape attention.
The new guard could not help hearing the sarcastic remark.
"You didn't have him beaten?" cried Beverly, stopping short.
"No, but I imagine it would have been preferable.
The count provided a light luncheon in his quarters after the ladies had gone over the fortress.
Count Marlanx's home was in the southeast corner of the enclosure, near the gates.
Beverly thought him extremely silly and sentimental, much preferring him in the character of the harsh, implacable martinet.
He was patrolling the narrow piazza which fronted the house.
Toward the close of the rather trying luncheon she was almost unable to control the impulse to rush out and compel him to relax that imposing, machine like stride.
She hungered for a few minutes of the old time freedom with him.
Servants came in to clear the tables, but the count harshly ordered them to wait until the guests had departed.
The count's eyes followed the graceful curves of her white forearm with an eagerness that was annoying.
"It came from Rome; it has a history which I shall try to tell you some day, and which makes it almost invaluable.
A German nobleman offered me a small fortune if I would part with it."
"I was saving it for an occasion, your highness," he said, his steely eyes glittering.
"The glad hour has come when I can part with it for a recompense far greater than the baron's gold."
"Oh, isn't it lucky you kept it?" she cried.
"The recompense of a sweet smile, a tender blush and the unguarded thanks of a pretty woman.
The candlestick is yours, Miss Calhoun,--if you will repay me for my sacrifice by accepting it without reservation."
Slowly Beverly Calhoun set the candlestick down upon the table her eyes meeting his with steady disdain.
"What a rare old jester you are, Count Marlanx," she said without a smile.
She and I have promised to play tennis with the princess at three o'clock." The count's glare of disappointment lasted but a moment. The diplomacy of egotism came to his relief, and he held back the gift for another day, but not for another woman.
"It grieves me to have you hurry away.
My afternoon is to be a dull one, unless you permit me to watch the tennis game," he said.
His eyes for the moment held her spellbound.
He was drawing the hand to his lips when a shadow darkened the French window, and a saber rattled warningly.
Baldos stood at the window in an attitude of alert attention.
Beverly drew her arm away spasmodically and took a step toward the window.
"Report to me in half an hour.
"He cannot come in half an hour," she cried quickly.
"My ears are excellent," said Marlanx stiffly.
"I fancy Baldos's must be even better, for he heard me," said Beverly, herself once more.
The shadow of a smile crossed the face of the guard.
"He is impertinent, insolent, your highness.
Now, go!" commanded the count.
"Wait a minute, Baldos.
We are going out, too.
She was disturbed by his threat to reprimand Baldos.
For some time her mind had been struggling with what the count had said about "the lesson." It grew upon her that her friend had been bullied and humiliated, perhaps in the presence of spectators.
While the general was explaining one of the new gun carriages to the countess, Beverly walked deliberately over to where Baldos was standing.
"He meant to alarm your highness."
"Didn't he give you a talking to?"
"He coached me in ethics."
"You are evading the question, sir.
Tell me; I want to know."
"Well, he said things that a soldier must endure.
A civilian or an equal might have run him through for it, your highness." A flush rose to his cheeks and his lips quivered ever so slightly.
"That settles it," she said rigidly.
"You are not to report to him at nine tomorrow."
"But he will have me shot, your highness," said he gladly.
"He will do nothing of the kind.
"Count Marlanx," she said, with entrancing dimples, "will you report to me at nine to morrow morning?"
"I have an appointment," he said slowly, but with understanding.
"But you will break it, I am sure," she asserted confidently.
"I want to give you a lesson in-in lawn tennis."
Later on, when the victoria was well away from the fort, Dagmar took her companion to task for holding in public friendly discourse with a member of the guard, whoever he might be.
"It is altogether contrary to custom, and-" but Beverly put her hand over the critical lips and smiled like a guilty child.
"Now, don't scold," she pleaded, and the countess could go no further.
The following morning Count Marlanx reported at nine o'clock with much better grace than he had suspected himself capable of exercising.
What she taught him of tennis on the royal courts, in the presence of an amused audience, was as nothing to what he learned of strategy as it can be practiced by a whimsical girl.
Almost before he knew it she had won exemption for Baldos, that being the stake for the first set of singles.
To his credit, the count was game.
He took the wager, knowing that he, in his ignorance, could not win from the blithe young expert in petticoats.
Then he offered to wager the brass candlestick against her bracelet.
She considered for a moment and then, in a spirit of enthusiasm, accepted the proposition.
After all, she coveted the candlestick.
Half an hour later an orderly was riding to the fort with instructions to return at once with Miss Calhoun's candlestick.
It is on record that they were "love" sets, which goes to prove that Beverly took no chances.
Beverly, quite happy in her complete victory, enjoyed a nap of profound sweetness and then was ready for her walk with the princess.
They were strolling leisurely about the beautiful grounds, safe in the shade of the trees from the heat of the July sun, when Baron Dangloss approached.
"It has to do with Baldos, I'll take oath," said Beverly, with conviction.
"Yes, with your guard.
Yesterday he visited the fortress.
He went in an official capacity, it is true, but he was privileged to study the secrets of our defense with alarming freedom.
It would not surprise me to find that this stranger has learned everything there is to know about the fort." His listeners were silent.
"I am not saying that he would betray us-"
"No, no!" protested Beverly.
"--but he is in a position to give the most valuable information to an enemy.
An officer has just informed me that Baldos missed not a detail in regard to the armament, or the location of vital spots in the construction of the fortress."
Count Marlanx is not at all in sympathy with him, you are aware.
"Neither am I one of you," said Beverly stoutly.
"You have no quarrel with us, Miss Calhoun," said Dangloss.
"If anything happens, then, I am to be blamed for it," she cried in deep distress.
"I brought him to Edelweiss, and I believe in him."
"For his own sake, your highness, and Miss Calhoun, I suggest that no opportunity should be given him to communicate with the outside world.
"You mean inside the city walls?" asked Yetive.
"Yes, your highness, and as far as possible from the fortress."
"I think it is a wise precaution.
Don't be angry, Beverly," the princess said gently.
"It is for his own sake, you see.
I am acting on the presumption that he is wholly innocent of any desire to betray us."
"And it would be just like someone, too," agreed Beverly, her thoughts, with the others', going toward none but one man "high in power."
Later in the day she called Baldos to her side as they were riding in the castle avenue.
"I could overthrow it after half an hour's bombardment, your highness," he answered, without thinking.
"Is it possible?
Are there so many weak points?" she went on, catching her breath.
"There are three vital points of weakness, your highness.
"Good heavens!" gasped poor Beverly.
"Have you studied all this out?"
"It was impossible for me not to see the defects in your fort."
"You-you haven't told anyone of this, have you?" she cried, white faced and anxious.
"No one but your highness.
I mean about the weak spots."
"You may expect to be summoned then, so hold yourself in readiness.
And, Baldos-"
"Yes, your highness?"
CHAPTER twenty two
A PROPOSAL
She shrank back with a great dread in her heart.
Marlanx, of all men! Why was he in the park at this hour of the night?
There could be but one answer, and the very thought of it almost suffocated her.
He was drawing the net with his own hands, he was spying with his own eyes.
For a full minute it seemed to her that her heart would stop beating.
What had he seen or heard?
Involuntarily she peered over the rail for a glimpse of Baldos.
A throb of thankfulness assailed her heart.
She was not thinking of her position, but of his.
The tread of a man impelled her to glance below once more before fleeing to her room.
She fled swiftly, pausing at the window to lower the friendly but forgotten umbrella.
Once more she stopped to listen.
It was beyond the power of woman to keep from laughing.
Once she was inside, however, it did not seem so amusing.
Still, it gave her an immense amount of satisfaction to slam the windows loudly, as if in pure defiance.
Then she closed the blinds, shutting out the night completely.
Turning up the light at her dressing table, she sat down in a state of sudden collapse.
For a long time she stared at her face in the mirror.
She saw the red of shame and embarrassment mount to her cheeks and then she covered her eyes with her hands.
"Oh, what a fool you've been," she half sobbed, shrinking from the mirror as if it were an accuser.
She prepared for bed with frantic haste.
The next she was at the windows and the slats were closed with a rattle like a volley of firearms.
Then she jumped into bed.
She wondered if the windows were locked.
"Now, I reckon I'm safe," she murmured a moment later, again getting into bed.
"I love to go to sleep with the rain pattering outside like that.
Oh, dear, I'm so sorry he has to walk all night In this rain. Poor fellow!
Goodness, it's raining cats and dogs!"
But in spite of the rain she could not go to sleep.
Vague fears began to take possession of her.
Something dreadful told her that Count Marlanx was on the balcony and at her window, notwithstanding the rain pour.
The fear became oppressive, maddening.
He was there, she knew it.
Consumed by the fear that the window might open slowly at any moment, she reached forth and clutched the weapon.
Then she shrank back in the bed, her eyes fixed upon the black space across the room.
For hours she shivered and waited for the window to open, dozing away time and again only to come back to wakefulness with a start.
The next morning she confessed to herself that her fears had been silly.
Her first act after breakfasting alone in her room was to seek out Colonel Quinnox, commander of the castle guard.
In her mind she was greatly troubled over the fate of the bold visitor of the night before.
Vagabond though he was, he had conquered where princes had failed.
Her better judgment told her that she could be nothing to this debonair knight of the road, yet her heart stubbornly resisted all the arguments that her reason put forth.
Colonel Quinnox was pleasant, but he could give Beverly no promise of leniency in regard to Baldos.
Instructions had come to him from General Marlanx, and he could not set them aside at will.
Her plea that he might once more be assigned to old time duties found the colonel regretfully obdurate.
Baldos could not ride with her again until Marlanx withdrew the order which now obtained, Beverly swallowed her pride and resentment diplomatically, smiled her sweetest upon the distressed colonel, and marched defiantly back to the castle.
Down in her rebellious, insulted heart she was concocting all sorts of plans for revenge.
Chief among them was the terrible overthrow of the Iron Count.
Her wide scope of vengeance even contemplated the destruction of Graustark if her end could be obtained in no other way.
Full of these bitter sweet thoughts she came to the castle doors before she saw who was waiting for her upon the great verandah.
The early hour was responsible for the bright solitude which marked the place.
She stopped with a sharp exclamation of surprise.
Then scorn and indignation rushed in to fill the place of astonishment.
"Good morning," he said, extending his hand, which she did not see.
She was wondering how much he had seen and heard at midnight.
"I thought the troops were massing this morning," she said coldly.
"Don't you mass, too?"
"There is time enough for that, my dear.
I came to have a talk with you-in private," he said meaningly.
"It is sufficiently private here, Count Marlanx.
What have you to say to me?"
"An involuntary observer, believe me-and a jealous one.
What I saw last night shocked me beyond expression."
"Well, you shouldn't have looked," she retorted, tossing her chin; and the red feather in her hat bobbed angrily.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that I saw everything that occurred."
"Good bye, Count Marlanx."
"One moment, please.
I cannot let you off so easily.
What right had you to take that man into your room, a place sacred in the palace of Graustark?
Answer me, Miss Calhoun."
Beverly drew back in horror and bewilderment.
"Into my room?" she gasped.
I saw him come from your window, and I saw all that passed between you in the balcony.
Love's eyes are keen.
What occurred in your chamber I can only-"
"Stop!
How dare you say such a thing to me?" she fiercely cried.
"You miserable coward!
Take it back-take back every word of that lie!"
She was white with passion, cold with terror.
"Bah!
This is childish.
It's useless to deny it.
And to think that I have spared him from death to have it come to this!
You need not look so horrified.
Your secret is safe with me.
I come to make terms with you.
It's worth it to you.
One word from me, you are disgraced and Baldos dies.
Come, my fair lady, give me your promise, it's a good bargain for both."
Beverly was trembling like a leaf.
This phase of his villainy had not occurred to her.
She was like a bird trying to avoid the charmed eye of the serpent.
"Oh, you-you miserable wretch!" she cried, hoarse with anger and despair.
"What a cur you are!
I have never wronged you-"
She was almost in tears, impotent with shame and fear.
"It has been a pretty game of love for you and the excellent Baldos.
You have deceived those who love you best and trust you most.
What will the princess say when she hears of last night's merry escapade?
What will she say when she learns who was hostess to a common guardsman at the midnight hour?
It is no wonder that you look terrified.
It is for you to say whether she is to know or not.
You can bind me to silence.
You have lost Baldos.
Take me and all that I can give you in his stead, and the world never shall know the truth.
You love him, I know, and there is but one way to save him.
Say the word and he goes free to the hills; decline and his life is not worth a breath of air."
"And pretending to believe this of me, you still ask me to be your wife.
"My wife?" he said harshly.
"Oh, no
You are not the wife of Baldos," he added significantly.
"Good God!" gasped Beverly, crushed by the brutality of it all.
"I would sooner die.
Would to heaven my father were here, he would shoot you as he would a dog!
Don't you try to stop me!
I shall go to the princess myself.
She shall know what manner of beast you are."
She was racing up the steps, flaming with anger and shame.
"Remember, I can prove what I have said.
Beware what you do.
Think well over it.
Your honor and his life!
It rests with you," he cried eagerly, following her to the door.
"You disgusting old fool," she hissed, turning upon him as she pulled the big brass knocker on the door.
"I must have my answer to night, or you know what will happen," he snarled, but he felt in his heart that he had lost through his eagerness.
Between sobs and feminine maledictions she poured the whole story, in all its ugliness, into the ears of the princess.
"I cannot prevent General Marlanx from preferring serious charges against Baldos, dear.
"You may depend upon me to protect you from Marlanx.
He can make it very unpleasant for Baldos, but he shall pay dearly for this insult to you.
He has gone too far."
"I don't think he has any proof against Baldos," said Beverly, thinking only of the guardsman.
"He seems to think he can get wives as easily as he gets rid of them, I observe.
I was going back to Washington soon, Yetive, but I'll stay on now and see this thing to the end.
I'll telegraph for my brother Dan to come over here and punch his head to pieces."
"Now, now,--don't be so high and mighty, dear.
Whereupon the hot headed girl from Dixie suspended hostilities and became a very demure young woman.
Before long she was confessing timidly, then boldly, that she loved Baldos better than anything in all the world.
I know I oughtn't to, but what is there to do when one can't help it?
There would be an awful row at home if I married him.
Maybe he won't.
In fact, I'm sure he won't.
I shan't give him a chance.
But if he does ask me I'll just keep putting him off.
I've done it before, you know.
You see, for a long, long time, I fancied he might be a prince, but he isn't at all.
I've had his word for it.
He's just an ordinary person-like-like-well, like I am.
Only he doesn't look so ordinary.
Isn't he handsome, Yetive?
Wouldn't that have surprised old Marlanx?" Beverly gave a merry laugh.
The troubles of the morning seemed to fade away under the warmth of her humor.
Yetive sat back and marvelled at the manner in which this blithe young American cast out the "blue devils."
"You must not do anything foolish, Beverly," she cautioned, "Your parents would never forgive me if I allowed you to marry or even to fall in love with any Tom, Dick or Harry over here.
I wish now that I had not humored you in your plan to bring him to the castle.
I'm afraid I have done wrong.
Beverly kissed her rapturously.
"Don't worry about me, Yetive.
I know how to take care of myself.
"Now let's talk about the war.
Marlanx won't do anything until he hears from me.
What's the use worrying?"
Nightfall brought General Marlanx in from the camps outside the gates.
She promptly answered that she did not want to see him and would not.
Without a moment's hesitation he appealed for an audience with the princess, and it was granted.
He proceeded, with irate coolness, to ask how far she believed herself bound to protect the person of Baldos, the guard.
He understood that she was under certain obligations to Miss Calhoun and he wanted to be perfectly sure of his position before taking a step which now seemed imperative.
Baldos was a spy in the employ of Dawsbergen.
He had sufficient proof to warrant his arrest and execution; there were documents, and there was positive knowledge that he had conferred with strangers from time to time, even within the walls of the castle grounds.
Marlanx cited instances in which Baldos had been seen talking to a strange old man inside the grounds, and professed to have proof that he had gone so far as to steal away by night to meet men beyond the city walls.
He was now ready to seize the guard, but would not do so until he had conferred with his sovereign.
"Miss Calhoun tells me that you have made certain proposals to her, Count Marlanx," said Yetive coldly, her eyes upon his hawkish face.
"I have asked her to be my wife, your highness."
"You have threatened her, Count Marlanx."
"She has exposed herself to you?
I would not have told what I saw last night."
"Would it interest you to know that I saw everything that passed on the balcony last night?
You will allow me to say, general, that you have behaved in a most outrageous manner in approaching my guest with such foul proposals.
Stop, sir!
She has told me everything and I believe her.
I believe my own eyes.
There is no need to discuss the matter further.
You have lost the right to be called a man.
For the present I have only to say that you shall be relieved of the command of my army.
The man who makes war on women is not fit to serve one.
As for Baldos, you are at liberty to prefer the charges.
He shall have a fair trial, rest assured."
"Your highness, hear me," implored Marlanx, white to the roots of his hair.
"I can but stand condemned, then, your highness, without a hearing.
My vindication will come, however.
You may depose me, but you cannot ask me to neglect my duty to Graustark.
I have tried to save him for Miss Calhoun's sake-" But her hand was pointing to the door.
Ten minutes later Beverly was hearing everything from the lips of the princess, and Marlanx was cursing his way toward the barracks, vengeance in his heart.
But a swift messenger from the castle reached the guard room ahead of him.
Colonel Quinnox was reading an official note from the princess when Marlanx strode angrily into the room.
"Bring this fellow Baldos to me, Colonel Quinnox," he said, without greeting.
"I regret to say that I have but this instant received a message from her highness, commanding me to send him to the castle," said Quinnox, with a smile.
"The devil!
"Have a care, sir," said Quinnox stiffly.
"It is of the princess you speak."
"Bah!
It is more important than-"
"Nevertheless, sir, he goes to the castle first.
This note says that I am to disregard any command you may give until further notice."
Marlanx fell back amazed and stunned.
At this juncture Baldos entered the room.
Quinnox handed him an envelope, telling him that it was from the princess and that he was to repair at once to the castle, Baldos glanced at the handwriting, and his face lit up proudly.
For my part, I see no necessary connection between discomfort and devotion.
The singing seats, projecting from the central portion of the gallery, furnished me with another hebdomadal study, in large gilt letters of antique awkwardness, which so impressed themselves on my mind that I see them now.
This was the golden legend: "BUILT, seventeen seventy.
ENLARGED, seventeen ninety five." I remember hearing a wag propose to add as another remarkable fact, "SCOURED, eighteen eighteen."
Opposite to the singing seats towered the pulpit, from which the clergyman looked down upon us like a sparrow upon the house top.
But in winter the vast airy space had a peculiar and searching chill.
The minister stood upon a heated slab of soap stone.
The chorister, even, was frequently among the missing, but was charitably supposed to be subject to the ague. Efforts were made to prevail upon the elderly part of the parish to permit the introduction of stoves with long funnels.
Their fathers had worshipped in the cold, and their sons might.
The stoves were provided, and an uncommonly full attendance the next Sabbath showed the very general interest the matter had excited.
How would it seem?
Would any one faint?
No one could see across the church, and the minister loomed up, as if in a dense fog; all eyes were fountains of tears.
CHAPTER sixteen
ARTS AT HULL HOUSE
The exhibits afforded pathetic evidence that the older immigrants do not expect the solace of art in this country; an Italian expressed great surprise when he found that we, although Americans, still liked pictures, and said quite naively that he didn't know that Americans cared for anything but dollars-that looking at pictures was something people only did in Italy.
"Who was it made the coal? Our God as well as theirs."
seemed to relieve the tension of the moment.
"The roaring of the wheels has filled my ears, The clashing and the clamor shut me in, Myself, my soul, in chaos disappears, I cannot think or feel amid the din."
CHAPTER thirty.
WAITING ON DESTINY
Throughout the day Marian kept her room.
At times she lay in silent anguish; frequently her tears broke forth, and she sobbed until weariness overcame her.
At five her mother brought tea.
'To bed?
But I am going out in an hour or two.'
'Oh, you can't, dear!
It's so bitterly cold.
It wouldn't be good for you.'
'I have to go out, mother, so we won't speak of it.'
Mrs Yule sat down, and watched the girl raise the cup to her mouth with trembling hand.
'This won't make any difference to you-in the end, my darling,' the mother ventured to say at length, alluding for the first time to the effect of the catastrophe on Marian's immediate prospects.
'Of course not,' was the reply, in a tone of self persuasion.
'You feel much better now, don't you?'
'Much.
I am quite well again.'
At seven, Marian went out.
Finding herself weaker than she had thought, she stopped an empty cab that presently passed her, and so drove to the Milvains' lodgings.
Jasper was at home, and working.
'Your father has been behaving brutally,' he said, holding her hands and gazing anxiously at her.
'There is something far worse than that, Jasper.'
Jasper gave a whistle of consternation, and looked vacantly from the paper to Marian's countenance.
'How the deuce comes this about?' he exclaimed.
'Perhaps he was.
'You are the only one affected?'
'So father says.
Sit down, Marian.
When did the letter come?'
'And you have been fretting over it all day.
Even whilst he spoke his eyes wandered absently.
Marian's look was fixed upon him, and he became conscious of it.
He tried to smile.
It was as necessary to him as to her to have a respite before the graver discussion began.
'I only wanted to make myself indispensable to them, and at the end of this year I shall feel pretty sure of that.
'Oh, I shall transfer myself to a better paper presently.
'What shall we do, Jasper?'
'Work and wait, I suppose.'
'There's something I must tell you.
If I do that, I shall have a right to the money, I think.
It will at least be eight guineas.
And why shouldn't I go on writing for myself-for us?
You can help me to think of subjects.'
'First of all, what about my letter to your father?
We are forgetting all about it.'
Surely that is extreme behaviour.'
Jasper stood rather stiffly, and threw his head back.
'You know the reason, dear.
'Well, well; it isn't a matter of much moment.
But what I have in mind is this.
And I was thinking more of-'
'Of what?'
She spoke with shaken voice, her eyes fixed upon his face.
'no
I only meant-'
'No; I quite understand that.'
'Can you promise to keep a little love for me all that time?' he asked with a constrained smile.
'You know me too well to fear.'
'I thought you seemed a little doubtful.'
He had never satisfied her heart's desire of infinite love; she never spoke with him but she was oppressed with the suspicion that his love was not as great as hers, and, worse still, that he did not wholly comprehend the self surrender which she strove to make plain in every word.
'You don't say that seriously, Jasper?'
'Why no, of course not.'
'Oh, but how coldly you speak, Jasper!'
She could not breathe a word which might be interpreted as fear lest the change of her circumstances should make a change in his feeling. Yet that was in her mind.
The existence of such a fear meant, of course, that she did not entirely trust him, and viewed his character as something less than noble.
Her heart ached because, in her great misery, he had not fondled her, and intoxicated her senses with loving words.
'How can I make you feel how much I love you?' she murmured.
'I am content for you to think so,' she said.
'Well now, we are quite sure of each other.
The question made her wince.
I'm not the fellow to be beaten.
'Not a bit of it.
You understand?
'You are right.
She was on the point of confessing that she had swooned, but something restrained her.
'Your father can hardly be sorry,' said Jasper.
If the blackguards pay ten shillings in the pound you will get two thousand five hundred out of them, and that's something.
But how do you stand?
'But of course your interests will be properly looked after.
'No, indeed.'
'Oh, no doubt.'
'Not to night.
He again lost himself in anxious reverie.
'That isn't exactly the question.
Could you do anything that would sell? With very moderate success in fiction you might make three times as much as you ever will by magazine pot boilers.
A girl like you.
'A girl like me?'
For the first time Jasper saw her cheeks colour deeply, and it was with anything but pleasure.
'I know you didn't, Jasper.
But you make me think that-'
Come here and forgive me.'
She did not approach, but only because the painful thought he had excited kept her to that spot.
'Come, Marian!
Then I must come to you.'
The experiment is worth a try I'm certain.
That thought which at times gives trouble to all women of strong emotions was working in her: had she been too demonstrative, and made her love too cheap?
Now that Jasper's love might be endangered, it behoved her to use any arts which nature prompted.
And so, for once, he was not wholly satisfied with her, and at their parting he wondered what subtle change had affected her manner to him.
'Why didn't Marian come to speak a word?' said Dora, when her brother entered the girls' sitting room about ten o'clock.
The girls were appalled.
'Well, I shouldn't be surprised if that were found necessary,' replied her brother caustically.
'And shall we have to go back to our old lodgings again?' inquired Maud.
Jasper gave no answer, but kicked a footstool savagely out of his way and paced the room.
Maud glanced at her sister, but Dora was preoccupied.
He bit the ends of his moustache, and his eyes glared at the impalpable thwarting force that to imagination seemed to fill the air about him.
'A lesson against being over hasty,' he muttered, again kicking the footstool.
'Did you make that considerate remark to Marian?' asked Maud.
'I suppose she's wretched?' said Dora.
'What else can you expect?'
He walked about and ejaculated splenetic phrases on the subject of his ill luck.
'We are here, and here we must stay,' was the final expression of his mood.
Suppose we had married, and after that lost the money!'
'You would have been no worse off than plenty of literary men,' said Dora.
'Perhaps not.
I have to rely upon my own efforts. What's the time?
And nodding a good night he left them.
We have talked about it.'
'What does he wish you to do, dear?'
'Father has been telling me something, Marian,' said Mrs Yule after a long silence.
He'll get worse and worse, until there has been an operation; and perhaps he'll never be able to use his eyes properly again.'
The girl listened in an attitude of despair.
'He has seen an oculist?--a really good doctor?'
'And how did he speak to you?'
He talked of going to the workhouse, and things like that.
Wouldn't somebody help him?'
'There's not much help to be expected in this world,' answered the girl.
A fog veiled sky added its weight to crush her spirit; at the hour when she usually rose it was still all but as dark as midnight.
It could be smelt and tasted.
'Your father has asked to see you when you come down,' Mrs Yule whispered.
Marian entered the study.
He did not immediately move.
When he raised his head Marian saw that he looked older, and she noticed-or fancied she did-that there was some unfamiliar peculiarity about his eyes.
'I am obliged to you for coming,' he began with distant formality. 'Since I saw you last I have learnt something which makes a change in my position and prospects, and it is necessary to speak on the subject.
'I understand.
If the disease prove irremediable, I must prepare myself for the worst.
What I wish to say is, that it will be better if from to day you consider yourself as working for your own subsistence.
But it is right that you should understand what my prospects are.
'I am prepared to do that, father.'
If you marry, I wish you a happy life.
'Is there no remedy for cataract in its early stages?' asked Marian.
'None.
I prefer not to speak of it.'
'Will you let me be what help to you I can?'
Marian withdrew.
With the dissipation of the fog rain had set in; its splashing upon the muddy pavement was audible.
Marian took a place beside her.
CHAPTER forty five
The dogs were, and are to this day, jealously guarded under the supervision of the Chief Eunuch of the Court, and few have ever found their way into the outer world.
Lord john and another naval officer, a cousin of the late Duchess of Richmond's, each secured two dogs; the fifth was taken by General Dunne, who presented it to Queen Victoria.
The Duchess of Richmond occasionally gave away a dog to intimate friends, such as the Dowager Lady Wharncliffe, Lady Dorothy Nevill, and others, but in those days the Pekinese was practically an unknown quantity, and it can therefore be more readily understood what interest was aroused about eleven years ago by the appearance of a small dog, similar in size, colour, and general type to those so carefully cherished at Goodwood.
Gia Gia, Manchu Tao Tai, Goodwood Ming, Marland Myth, and others.
Is it therefore to be wondered at that confusion exists as to what is the true type?
The following is the scale of points as issued by the Pekinese Club:--
NOSE-Black, broad, very short and flat.
STOP-Deep. EARS-Heart shaped; not set too high; leather never long enough to come below the muzzle; not carried erect, but rather drooping, long feather.
MUZZLE-Very short and broad; not underhung nor pointed; wrinkled.
Black masks, and spectacles round the eyes, with lines to the ears, are desirable.
LEGS-Short; fore legs heavy, bowed out at elbows; hind legs lighter, but firm and well shaped.
FEET-Flat, not round; should stand well up on toes, not on ankles.
TAIL-Curled and carried well up on loins; long, profuse straight feather.
SIZE-Being a toy dog the smaller the better, provided type and points are not sacrificed.
In every case a black muzzle is indispensable, also black points to the ears, with trousers, tail and feathering a somewhat lighter shade than the body.
It would not be fitting to close an article on Pekinese without bearing testimony to their extraordinarily attractive characteristics. They are intensely affectionate and faithful, and have something almost cat like in their domesticity.
They display far more character than the so-called "toy dog" usually does, and for this reason it is all important that pains should be taken to preserve the true type, in a recognition of the fact that quality is more essential than quantity.
As their breed name implies, these tiny black and white, long haired lap dogs are reputed to be natives of the land of the chrysanthemum. The Japanese, who have treasured them for centuries, have the belief that they are not less ancient than the dogs of Malta.
It is fairly certain that they are indigenous to the Far East, whence we have derived so many of our small snub nosed, large eyed, and long haired pets.
The Oriental peoples have always bred their lap dogs to small size, convenient for carrying in the sleeve.
The "sleeve dog" and the "chin dog" are common and appropriate appellations in the East.
The Japanese Spaniel was certainly known in England half a century ago, and probably much earlier.
Their colours were not invariably white and black.
The colouring other than white was usually about the long fringed ears and the crown of the head, with a line of white running from the point of the snub black nose between the eyes as far as the occiput.
This blaze up the face was commonly said to resemble the body of a butterfly, whose closed wings were represented by the dog's expansive ears.
The white and black colouring is now the most frequent.
The legs are by preference slender and much feathered, the feet large and well separated.
An important point is the coat.
The Japanese Spaniel is constitutionally delicate, requiring considerable care in feeding.
A frequent-almost a daily-change of diet is to be recommended, and manufactured foods are to be avoided.
Rice usually agrees well; fresh fish, sheep's head, tongue, chicken livers, milk or batter puddings are also suitable; and occasionally give oatmeal porridge, alternated with a little scraped raw meat as an especial favour.
For puppies newly weaned it is well to limit the supply of milk foods and to avoid red meat.
Finely minced rabbit, or fish are better.
Daddy Jap.
The following is the official standard issued by the Club:--
NOSE-Very short in the muzzle part.
EARS-Small and V shaped, nicely feathered, set wide apart and high on the head and carried slightly forward.
LEGS-The bones of the legs should be small, giving them a slender appearance, and they should be well feathered.
TAIL-Carried in a tight curl over the back. It should be profusely feathered so as to give the appearance of a beautiful "plume" on the animal's back.
COAT-Profuse, long, straight, rather silky.
It should be absolutely free from wave or curl, and not lie too flat, but have a tendency to stand out, especially at the neck, so as to give a thick mane or ruff, which with profuse feathering on thighs and tail gives a very showy appearance.
The term red includes all shades, sable, brindle, lemon or orange, but the brighter and clearer the red the better.
The white should be clear white, and the colour, whether black or red, should be evenly distributed in patches over the body, cheeks, and ears.
HEIGHT AT SHOULDER-About ten inches.
He appears almost to prefer equine to human companionship, and he is as fond of being among horses as the Collie is of being in the midst of sheep.
Yet he is of friendly disposition, and it must be insisted that he is by no means so destitute of intelligence as he is often represented to be.
On the contrary, he is capable of being trained into remarkable cleverness, as circus proprietors have discovered.
Of late years, however, these dogs have so far degenerated as to be looked upon simply as companions, or as exhibition dogs, for only very occasionally can it be found that any pains have been taken to train them systematically for gun work.
At that period they were looked upon as a novelty, and, though the generosity and influence of a few admirers ensured separate classes being provided for the breed at the leading shows, it did not necessitate the production of such perfect specimens as those which a few years afterwards won prizes.
Berolina.
In appearance the Dalmatian should be very similar to a Pointer except in head and marking.
Those which are flesh coloured in this particular should be discarded, however good they may be in other respects.
The density and pureness of colour, in both blacks and browns, is of great importance, but should not be permitted to outweigh the evenness of the distribution of spots on the body; no black patches, or even mingling of the spots, should meet with favour, any more than a ring tail or a clumsy looking, heavy shouldered dog should command attention.
The clearer and whiter they are the better they are likely to be.
There should not be the shadow of a mark or spot on them.
When about a fortnight old, however, they generally develop a dark ridge on the belly, and the spots will then begin to show themselves; first about the neck and ears, and afterwards along the back, until at about the sixteenth day the markings are distinct over the body, excepting only the tail, which frequently remains white for a few weeks longer.
The standard of points as laid down by the leading club is sufficiently explicit to be easily understood, and is as follows:--
GENERAL APPEARANCE-The Dalmatian should represent a strong, muscular, and active dog, symmetrical in outline, and free from coarseness and lumber, capable of great endurance combined with a fair amount of speed.
MUZZLE-The muzzle should be long and powerful; the lips clean, fitting the jaws moderately close.
THE RIM ROUND THE EYES in the black spotted variety should be black, in the liver spotted variety brown-never flesh colour in either.
EARS-The ears should be set on rather high, of moderate size, rather wide at the base, and gradually tapering to a round point.
They should be carried close to the head, be thin and fine in texture, and always spotted-the more profusely the better. NOSE-The nose in the black spotted variety should always be black, in the liver spotted variety always brown.
LEGS AND FEET-The legs and feet are of great importance.
The fore legs should be perfectly straight, strong, and heavy in bone; elbows close to the body; fore feet round, compact with well arched toes (cat footed), and round, tough, elastic pads.
TAIL-The tail should not be too long, strong at the insertion, and gradually tapering towards the end, free from coarseness.
It should not be inserted too low down, but carried with a slight curve upwards, and never curled.
It should be spotted, the more profusely the better.
COLOUR AND MARKINGS-These are most important points.
The ground colour in both varieties should be pure white, very decided, and not intermixed.
The spots should not intermingle, but be as round and well defined as possible, the more distinct the better; in size they should be from that of a sixpence to a florin.
WEIGHT-Dogs, fifty five pounds.; bitches, fifty pounds.
Why the breed was first called the Southern Hound, or when his use became practical in Great Britain, must be subjects of conjecture; but that there was a hound good enough to hold a line for many hours is accredited in history that goes very far back into past centuries.
The hound required three centuries ago even was all the better esteemed for being slow and unswerving on a line of scent, and in many parts of the Kingdom, up to within half that period, the so-called Southern Hound had been especially employed.
His holt can very well be passed, his delicious scent may be overrun; but the pure bred Otterhound is equal to all occasions.
To be equal to such prey, the hound must have a Bulldog's courage, a Newfoundland's strength in water, a Pointer's nose, a Retriever's sagacity, the stamina of the Foxhound, the patience of a Beagle, the intelligence of a Collie.
With a narrow forehead, ascending to a moderate peak.
They show a considerable amount of the haw. NOSE-The nose is large and well developed, the nostrils expanding. MUZZLE-The muzzle well protected from wiry hair.
NECK-The neck is strong and muscular, but rather long.
The dewlap is loose and folded.
CHEST-The chest, deep and capacious, but not too wide.
BACK-The back is strong, wide and arched.
SHOULDERS-The shoulders ought to be sloping, the arms and thighs substantial and muscular.
FEET-The feet, fairly large and spreading, with firm pads and strong nails to resist sharp rocks. STERN-The stern when the hound is at work is carried gaily, like that of a rough Welsh Harrier.
It is thick and well covered, to serve as a rudder.
COLOUR-Grey, or buff, or yellowish, or black, or rufus red, mixed with black or grey.
"Poor thing!" said the old poet, as he went to open the door.
"Poor child!" said the old poet, as he took the boy by the hand.
Thou shalt have wine and roasted apples, for thou art verily a charming child!" And the boy was so really.
His eyes were like two bright stars; and although the water trickled down his hair, it waved in beautiful curls.
He looked exactly like a little angel, but he was so pale, and his whole body trembled with cold.
"You are a merry fellow," said the old man.
"What's your name?"
"My name is Cupid," answered the boy.
"Don't you know me?
Look, the weather is now clearing up, and the moon is shining clear again through the window."
The poor poet lay on the earth and wept, for the arrow had really flown into his heart.
I will tell all children about him, that they may take care and not play with him, for he will only cause them sorrow and many a heartache."
And all good children to whom he related this story, took great heed of this naughty Cupid; but he made fools of them still, for he is astonishingly cunning.
Yes, he is forever following people.
Ask them only and you will hear what they'll tell you.
He is forever running after everybody.
Only think, he shot an arrow once at your old grandmother!
But that is a long time ago, and it is all past now; however, a thing of that sort she never forgets.
Now Karen was old enough to be confirmed; she had new clothes and was to have new shoes also.
All this looked charming, but the old lady could not see well, and so had no pleasure in them.
In the midst of the shoes stood a pair of red ones, just like those the princess had worn.
The next Sunday there was the sacrament, and Karen looked at the black shoes, looked at the red ones-looked at them again, and put on the red shoes.
The sun shone gloriously; Karen and the old lady walked along the path through the corn; it was rather dusty there.
"Sit firm when you dance"; and he put his hand out towards the soles.
And Karen could not help dancing a step or two, and when she began her feet continued to dance; it was just as though the shoes had power over them.
The shoes were placed in a closet at home, but Karen could not avoid looking at them.
She danced, and was forced to dance straight out into the gloomy wood.
"Dance shalt thou!" said he.
Dance shalt thou-!"
"Mercy!" cried Karen.
Here, she knew, dwelt the executioner; and she tapped with her fingers at the window, and said, "Come out!
Come out!
I cannot come in, for I am forced to dance!"
"Don't strike my head off!" said Karen.
"Then I can't repent of my sins! But strike off my feet in the red shoes!"
And the clergyman's wife was sorry for her and took her into service; and she was industrious and thoughtful.
And he touched the ceiling with the spray, and the ceiling rose so high, and where he had touched it there gleamed a golden star.
For the church itself had come to the poor girl in her narrow chamber, or else she had come into the church.
twenty two.
L'Apprenti Sorcier
In Praise of Solid People
Yet not unfaithful nor unkind, with work day virtues surely staid, Theirs is the sane and humble mind, And dull affections undismayed.
O happy people!
I look around the empty room, The clock still ticking in its place, And all else silent as the tomb, Till suddenly, I think, a face
And dusky galleys past me sail, Full freighted on a faerie sea; I hear the silken merchants hail Across the ringing waves to me
CHAPTER ten
--The Fight of Heriot's Ford. 'THIS is a cheerful life,' said Dick, some days later.
'Torp's away; Bessie hates me; I can't get at the notion of the Melancolia; Maisie's letters are scrappy; and I believe I have indigestion.
What give a man pains across the head and spots before his eyes, Binkie?
Shall us take some liver pills?'
She explained her enduring hatred for Dick, and made it clear to him that she only sat for the sake of his money.
'And mr Torpenhow's ten times a better man than you,' she concluded.
That's why he went away.
'To me!
I'd like to catch you!
Dick smiled wearily.
It is not pleasant to live in the company of a notion that will not work out, a fox terrier that cannot talk, and a woman who talks too much.
He would have answered, but at that moment there unrolled itself from one corner of the studio a veil, as it were, of the flimsiest gauze.
He rubbed his eyes, but the gray haze would not go.
Binkie, we will go to a medicine man. We can't have our eyes interfered with, for by these we get our bread; also mutton chop bones for little dogs.'
The doctor was an affable local practitioner with white hair, and he said nothing till Dick began to describe the gray film in the studio.
'We all want a little patching and repairing from time to time,' he chirped.
'Like a ship, my dear sir,--exactly like a ship.
A little patching and repairing from time to time is all we want.
An oculist, by all means.'
Dick sought an oculist,--the best in London.
'I've neglected the warnings of my lord the stomach too long.
Hence these spots before the eyes, Binkie.
I can see as well as I ever could.'
As he entered the dark hall that led to the consulting room a man cannoned against him.
Dick saw the face as it hurried out into the street.
'That's the writer type.
He has the same modelling of the forehead as Torp.
He looks very sick.
Probably heard something he didn't like.'
Even as he thought, a great fear came upon Dick, a fear that made him hold his breath as he walked into the oculist's waiting room, with the heavy carved furniture, the dark green paper, and the sober hued prints on the wall.
He recognised a reproduction of one of his own sketches.
Many people were waiting their turn before him.
His eye was caught by a flaming red and gold Christmas carol book.
Little children came to that eye doctor, and they needed large type amusement.
'That's idolatrous bad Art,' he said, drawing the book towards himself.
The next good joy that Mary had, It was the joy of three, To see her good Son Jesus Christ Making the blind to see; Making the blind to see, good Lord, And happy we may be.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost To all eternity! Dick read and re read the verse till his turn came, and the doctor was bending above him seated in an arm chair.
The doctor's hand touched the scar of the sword cut on Dick's head, and Dick explained briefly how he had come by it.
When the flame was removed, Dick saw the doctor's face, and the fear came upon him again.
The doctor wrapped himself in a mist of words.
'Verdict?' he said faintly.
What do you make of it?'
Again the whirl of words, but this time they conveyed a meaning.
'Can you give me anything to drink?'
Many sentences were pronounced in that darkened room, and the prisoners often needed cheering.
Dick found a glass of liqueur brandy in his hand.
'As far as I can gather,' he said, coughing above the spirit, 'you call it decay of the optic nerve, or something, and therefore hopeless.
What is my time limit, avoiding all strain and worry?'
'Perhaps one year.'
And if I don't take care of myself?'
'I really could not say.
One cannot ascertain the exact amount of injury inflicted by the sword cut.
The scar is an old one, and-exposure to the strong light of the desert, did you say?--with excessive application to fine work?
I really could not say?'
'I beg your pardon, but it has come without any warning.
If you will let me, I'll sit here for a minute, and then I'll go.
'We've got it very badly, little dog!
Just as badly as we can get it. We'll go to the Park to think it out.'
They headed for a certain tree that Dick knew well, and they sat down to thin, because his legs were trembling under him and there was cold fear at the pit of his stomach.
'How could it have come without any warning?
It's the living death, Binkie.
'Binkie, we must think.
Let's see how it feels to be blind.' Dick shut his eyes, and flaming commas and Catherine wheels floated inside the lids.
Yet when he looked across the Park the scope of his vision was not contracted.
He could see perfectly, until a procession of slow wheeling fireworks defiled across his eyeballs.
'Little dorglums, we aren't at all well.
Let's go home.
If only Torp were back, now!'
His letters were brief and full of mystery.
He argued, in the loneliness of his studio, henceforward to be decorated with a film of gray gauze in one corner, that, if his fate were blindness, all the Torpenhows in the world could not save him.
'I can't call him off his trip to sit down and sympathise with me.
I must pull through this business alone,' he said.
He was lying on the sofa, eating his moustache and wondering what the darkness of the night would be like.
Looking down, he saw that his life blood was going from him.
The stupid bewilderment on his face was so intensely comic that both Dick and Torpenhow, still panting and unstrung from a fight for life, had roared with laughter, in which the man seemed as if he would join, but, as his lips parted in a sheepish grin, the agony of death came upon him, and he pitched grunting at their feet.
Dick laughed again, remembering the horror.
It seemed so exactly like his own case.
'But I have a little more time allowed me,' he said.
He paced up and down the room, quietly at first, but afterwards with the hurried feet of fear.
It was as though a black shadow stood at his elbow and urged him to go forward; and there were only weaving circles and floating pin dots before his eyes.
'We need to be calm, Binkie; we must be calm.' He talked aloud for the sake of distraction.
We must do something.
Our time is short.
I shouldn't have believed that this morning; but now things are different.
Binkie smiled from ear to ear, as a well bred terrier should, but made no suggestion.
'What can I do?
What can I do?
'You won't do, and you won't do,' he said, at each inspection.
Sudden death comes home too nearly, and this is battle and murder for me.'
'Allah Almighty!' he cried despairingly, 'help me through the time of waiting, and I won't whine when my punishment comes.
What can I do now, before the light goes?'
There was no answer.
Dick waited till he could regain some sort of control over himself.
His hands were shaking, and he prided himself on their steadiness; he could feel that his lips were quivering, and the sweat was running down his face.
He was lashed by fear, driven forward by the desire to get to work at once and accomplish something, and maddened by the refusal of his brain to do more than repeat the news that he was about to go blind.
'It's a humiliating exhibition,' he thought, 'and I'm glad Torp isn't here to see.
The doctor said I was to avoid mental worry.
Come here and let me pet you, Binkie.'
Not quite so gentle as we could wish, but we'll discuss that later.
I think I see my way to it now.
All those studies of Bessie's head were nonsense, and they nearly brought your master into a scrape.
That's for myself.
'Understand the speech and feel a stir Of fellowship in all disastrous fight. "In all disastrous fight"?
That's better than painting the thing merely to pique Maisie.
I can do it now because I have it inside me.
Come here.'
Binkie swung head downward for a moment without speaking.
'Rather like holding a guinea pig; but you're a brave little dog, and you don't yelp when you're hung up.
Binkie went to his own chair, and as often as he looked saw Dick walking up and down, rubbing his hands and chuckling.
That night Dick wrote a letter to Maisie full of the tenderest regard for her health, but saying very little about his own, and dreamed of the Melancolia to be born.
Not till morning did he remember that something might happen to him in the future.
He fell to work, whistling softly, and was swallowed up in the clean, clear joy of creation, which does not come to man too often, lest he should consider himself the equal of his God, and so refuse to die at the appointed time.
He forgot Maisie, Torpenhow, and Binkie at his feet, but remembered to stir Bessie, who needed very little stirring, into a tremendous rage, that he might watch the smouldering lights in her eyes.
He threw himself without reservation into his work, and did not think of the doom that was to overtake him, for he was possessed with his notion, and the things of this world had no power upon him.
'You're pleased to day,' said Bessie.
Dick waved his mahl stick in mystic circles and went to the sideboard for a drink.
There was a delightful sense of irresponsibility upon him, such as they feel who walking among their fellow men know that the death sentence of disease is upon them, and, seeing that fear is but waste of the little time left, are riotously happy.
The days passed without event.
The Melancolia began to flame on the canvas, in the likeness of a woman who had known all the sorrow in the world and was laughing at it.
It was true that the corners of the studio draped themselves in gray film and retired into the darkness, that the spots in his eyes and the pains across his head were very troublesome, and that Maisie's letters were hard to read and harder still to answer.
He could not tell her of his trouble, and he could not laugh at her accounts of her own Melancolia which was always going to be finished.
But the furious days of toil and the nights of wild dreams made amends for all, and the sideboard was his best friend on earth.
She used to shriek with rage when Dick stared at her between half closed eyes.
Torpenhow had been absent for six weeks.
An incoherent note heralded his return.
'News! great news!' he wrote.
'The Nilghai knows, and so does the Keneu.
We're all back on Thursday.
Get lunch and clean your accoutrements.'
Dick showed Bessie the letter, and she abused him for that he had ever sent Torpenhow away and ruined her life.
'Well,' said Dick, brutally, 'you're better as you are, instead of making love to some drunken beast in the street.' He felt that he had rescued Torpenhow from great temptation.
'I don't know if that's any worse than sitting to a drunken beast in a studio.
You haven't been sober for three weeks.
'What d'you mean?' said Dick.
'Mean!
You'll see when mr Torpenhow comes back.'
It was not long to wait.
Torpenhow met Bessie on the staircase without a sign of feeling.
'Drinking like a fish,' Bessie whispered.
'He's been at it for nearly a month.' She followed the men stealthily to hear judgment done.
They came into the studio, rejoicing, to be welcomed over effusively by a drawn, lined, shrunken, haggard wreck,--unshaven, blue white about the nostrils, stooping in the shoulders, and peering under his eyebrows nervously.
The drink had been at work as steadily as Dick.
'Is this you?' said Torpenhow.
'All that's left of me.
Sit down.
Binkie's quite well, and I've been doing some good work.' He reeled where he stood.
Torpenhow turned to his companions appealingly, and they left the room to find lunch elsewhere.
After a time the culprit began to feel the need of a little self respect.
He was quite sure that he had not in any way departed from virtue, and there were reasons, too, of which Torpenhow knew nothing.
He would explain.
He rose, tried to straighten his shoulders, and spoke to the face he could hardly see.
'But I am right, too.
After you went away I had some trouble with my eyes.
So I went to an oculist, and he turned a gasogene-I mean a gas engine-into my eye.
He said, "Scar on the head,--sword cut and optic nerve." Make a note of that.
So I am going blind.
I have some work to do before I go blind, and I suppose that I must do it.
I cannot see much now, but I can see best when I am drunk.
I did not know I was drunk till I was told, but I must go on with my work.
Torpenhow said nothing, and Dick began to whimper feebly, for joy at seeing Torpenhow again, for grief at misdeeds-if indeed they were misdeeds-that made Torpenhow remote and unsympathetic, and for childish vanity hurt, since Torpenhow had not given a word of praise to his wonderful picture.
Bessie looked through the keyhole after a long pause, and saw the two walking up and down as usual, Torpenhow's hand on Dick's shoulder.
BOOK three.
Containing The Interval Of Two Years.
From The exodus Out Of Egypt, To The Rejection Of That Generation.
CHAPTER one.
How Moses When He Had Brought The People Out Of Egypt Led Them To Mount Sinai; But Not Till They Had Suffered Much In Their Journey.
He therefore betook himself to prayer to God, that he would change the water from its present badness, and make it fit for drinking.
And when God had granted him that favor, he took the top of a stick that lay down at his feet, and divided it in the middle, and made the section lengthways.
He then let it down into the well, and persuaded the hebrews that God had hearkened to his prayers, and had promised to render the water such as they desired it to be, in case they would be subservient to him in what he should enjoin them to do, and this not after a remiss or negligent manner.
So they labored at it till the water was so agitated and purged as to be fit to drink.
And when they dug into the sand, they met with no water; and if they took a few drops of it into their hands, they found it to be useless, on account of its mud.
And by fixing their attention upon nothing but their present misfortunes, they were hindered from remembering what deliverances they had received from God, and those by the virtue and wisdom of Moses also; so they were very angry at their conductor, and were zealous in their attempt to stone him, as the direct occasion of their present miseries.
But as for Moses himself, while the multitude were irritated and bitterly set against him, he cheerfully relied upon God, and upon his consciousness of the care he had taken of these his own people; and he came into the midst of them, even while they clamored against him, and had stones in their hands in order to despatch him.
Seeing it is probable that God tries their virtue, and exercises their patience by these adversities, that it may appear what fortitude they have, and what memory they retain of his former wonderful works in their favor, and whether they will not think of them upon occasion of the miseries they now feel.
That as for himself, he shall not be so much concerned for his own preservation; for if he die unjustly, he shall not reckon it any affliction, but that he is concerned for them, lest, by casting stones at him, they should be thought to condemn God himself.
Accordingly God promised he would take care of them, and afford them the succor they were desirous of.
So he placed himself in the midst of them, and told them he came to bring them from God a deliverance from their present distresses.
Upon which Moses returned thanks to God for affording them his assistance so suddenly, and sooner than he had promised them.
So he tasted it, and gave them some of it, that they might be satisfied about what he told them.
They also imitated their conductor, and were pleased with the food, for it was like honey in sweetness and pleasant taste, but like in its body to bdellium, one of the sweet spices, and in bigness equal to coriander seed.
It also supplied the want of other sorts of food to those that fed on it.
Now the hebrews call this food manna: for the particle man, in our language, is the asking of a question. What is this?
So the hebrews were very joyful at what was sent them from heaven.
When Moses had received this command from God, he came to the people, who waited for him, and looked upon him, for they saw already that he was coming apace from his eminence.
As soon as he was come, he told them that God would deliver them from their present distress, and had granted them an unexpected favor; and informed them, that a river should run for their sakes out of the rock.
But they were astonished at this wonderful effect; and, as it were, quenched their thirst by the very sight of it.
So they drank this pleasant, this sweet water; and such it seemed to be, as might well be expected where God was the donor.
They were also in admiration how Moses was honored by God; and they made grateful returns of sacrifices to God for his providence towards them.
Purblind and short sighted friends!
If we were blind, we should be abundantly pitied, but as we are only half blind, such comments as these are all the consolation we get.
Yes, it is very fashionable now a days for young ladies to carry eye glasses, and call themselves near sighted!" Or, "Pooh!
It's all affectation.
She can see as well as any body, if she chooses.
I did not see you." "O no!
In vain I protest that I could not see her,--that three yards is a great distance to my eyes.
She leaves me with an incredulous smile, and that most provoking phrase, "O yes!
Alas! we see just enough to seal our own condemnation.
Who is free from this malady?
As I look around in society, I see staring glassy ellipses on every side "in the place where eyes ought to grow,"--and perhaps most of the unfortunate owls get along very comfortably with their artificial eyes.
But imagine a bashful youth, awkward and near sighted, whose friends dissuade him from wearing glasses.
See that little boy, who, having put on his father's spectacles, is enjoying for the first time a clear and distinct view of the evening sky.
"Oh! is that pretty little yellow dot a star?" exclaims the delighted child.
Poor innocent! a star had always been to him a dim, cloudy spot, a little nebula, which the magic glass has now resolved; and he can hardly believe that this brilliant point is not an optical illusion.
But when his mother assures him that the stars always appear so to her, and he turns to look in her face, he says, "Why, mother! how beautiful you look!
They were accompanied, I was told, by a Boston lady, a stranger to us.
Have you quite forgotten me?
Ah!
I was petrified.
I could not smile, I could not speak.
My only feeling was mortification at my most awkward mistake.
"Why, Julia! what is the matter?
As he was passing her, he thought he perceived that her fur boa or tippet had escaped from her neck, and, carefully lifting the end of it with one hand, he made a low bow, raising his hat with the other, and said in his blandest tone, "Madam, you are losing your tippet!" And what thanks did the worthy Doctor receive, do you think, for this truly kind and polite deed?
The Rev.
Numerous are the traditionary accounts of his peculiarities,--of his odd manners and customs,--which I have heard; but it is only of one little incident that I am now going to speak.
A favorite employment of this good man was the care of his garden, and he might be seen any pleasant afternoon in summer, rigged out in a hideous yellow calico robe, or blouse, with a dusty old black straw hat stuck on the back of his head, hoeing and digging in that beloved patch of ground.
One day as he was thus occupied, his wife emerged from the house, dressed in a dark brown gingham, and bearing in her hand some "muslins," which she began to spread upon the gooseberry bushes to whiten.
She was very busily engaged, so that she was not aware that her husband was approaching her with a large stick, until she felt a smart blow across her shoulders, and heard his peculiar, sharp voice shouting in her ears, "Go 'long! old cow!
Go 'long! old cow!"
There was no such fuss when I was young; in those good old times these airy notions had not come into fashion.
No, indeed!
When we crowded joyfully round a crackling, sparkling wood fire, even while our faces glowed with the intense heat, cold shivers were creeping down our backs, and sudden draughts from an opening door set our teeth chattering.
I often wished myself on a spit, to revolve slowly before the fire until thoroughly roasted.
Fresh air is my bane.
I banish all books on the subject from my table.
I call in a physician; lo!
Even the poor babies are not safe from this popular insanity.
The old-fashioned blanket, in which the baby was done up head and all, like a bundle, is thrown aside.
The child is not quite so often carried upside down.
I suppose, under the new system, but what difference does it make whether the poor thing is smothered or frozen to death?
I always took to flight.
She always walked fast, and the more the wind blew, the warmer she felt, I might be assured.
As soon as she had gone, I established myself in comfort by the side of a glowing grate, happy but for dreading her return.
I devoutly hoped she would leave it behind in some of our numerous stopping places, and with an eye to that possibility, I must confess, I hung it in the most out of the way corners I could find; but it seemed to be on her mind continually.
She never forgot it, and always packed it very carefully, too.
A long time ago there lived a king and queen who had no children, although they both wished very much for a little son.
They tried not to let each other see how unhappy they were, and pretended to take pleasure in hunting and hawking and all sorts of other sports; but at length the king could bear it no longer, and declared that he must go and visit the furthest corners of his kingdom, and that it would be many months before he should return to his capital.
By that time he hoped he would have so many things to think about that he would have forgotten to trouble about the little son who never came.
The country the king reigned over was very large, and full of high, stony mountains and sandy deserts, so that it was not at all easy to go from one place to another.
One day the king had wandered out alone, meaning to go only a little distance, but everything looked so alike he could not make out the path by which he had come.
On the surface floated a silver cup with a golden handle, but as it bobbed about whenever the king tried to seize it, he was too thirsty to wait any longer and knelt down and drank his fill.
When he had finished he began to rise from his knees, but somehow his beard seemed to have stuck fast in the water, and with all his efforts he could not pull it out.
After two or three jerks to his head, which only hurt him without doing any good, he called out angrily, 'Let go at once!
Who is holding me?'
'You have drunk from my spring, and I shall not let you go until you promise to give me the most precious thing your palace contains, which was not there when you left it.'
But as he felt much stronger and better he made up his mind that this strange adventure must really have happened, and he sprang on his horse and rode off with a light heart to look for his companions.
In a few weeks they began to set out on their return home, which they reached one hot day, eight months after they had all left.
On the steps of the palace stood the queen, with a splendid golden cushion in her arms, and on the cushion the most beautiful boy that ever was seen, wrapped about in a cloud of lace.
But try as he would and work as hard as he might he could never forget his promise, and every time he let the baby out of his sight he thought that he had seen it for the last time.
'How are you my unlooked for Prince?' he said.
'You kept them waiting a good long time!'
'And who are you?' asked the prince.
When you go home give my compliments to your father and tell him that I wish he would square accounts with me.
If he neglects to pay his debts he will bitterly repent it.'
So saying the old man disappeared, and the prince returned to the palace and told his father what had happened.
The king turned pale and explained to his son the terrible story.
'Do not grieve over it, father,' answered the prince.
'It is nothing so dreadful after all!
But if I do not come back in a year's time, you must give up all hopes of ever seeing me.'
Then the prince began to prepare for his journey.
His father gave him a complete suit of steel armour, a sword, and a horse, while his mother hung round his neck a cross of gold.
So, kissing him tenderly, with many tears they let him go.
He rode steadily on for three days, and at sunset on the fourth day he found himself on the seashore.
On the sand before him lay twelve white dresses, dazzling as the snow, yet as far as his eyes could reach there was no one in sight to whom they could belong.
Curious to see what would happen, he took up one of the garments, and leaving his horse loose, to wander about the adjoining fields, he hid himself among some willows and waited.
In a few minutes a flock of geese which had been paddling about in the sea approached the shore, and put on the dresses, struck the sand with their feet and were transformed in the twinkling of an eye into eleven beautiful young girls, who flew away as fast as they could.
'Oh Prince, give me back my dress, and I shall be for ever grateful to you.'
'I thank you, noble Prince, for having granted my request.
I am the youngest daughter of Kostiei the immortal, who has twelve daughters and rules over the kingdoms under the earth.
Long time my father has waited for you, and great is his anger.
But trouble not yourself and fear nothing, only do as I bid you.
That which will happen after, you will know in time.
Now let us go.'
At these words she struck the ground with her foot and a gulf opened, down which they went right into the heart of the earth.
And the prince, as he had been bidden, entered boldly into the hall.
His green eyes glittered like glass, his hands were as the claws of a crab.
When he caught sight of the prince he uttered piercing yells, which shook the walls of the palace.
When he had almost reached it, the king broke out into a laugh and said:
'It has been very lucky for you that you have been able to make me laugh.
Stay with us in our underground empire, only first you will have to do three things.
Go to sleep; to morrow I will tell you.'
He got up and dressed, and hastened to the presence chamber, where the little king was seated on his throne.
'Now, Prince, this is what you have to do.
By to night you must build me a marble palace, with windows of crystal and a roof of gold.
It is to stand in the middle of a great park, full of streams and lakes.
If you are able to build it you shall be my friend.
If not, off with your head.'
The prince listened in silence to this startling speech, and then returning to his room set himself to think about the certain death that awaited him.
He was quite absorbed in these thoughts, when suddenly a bee flew against the window and tapped, saying, 'Let me come in.' He rose and opened the window, and there stood before him the youngest princess.
'What are you dreaming about, Prince?'
'I was dreaming of your father, who has planned my death.'
'Fear nothing.
You may sleep in peace, and to morrow morning when you awake you will find the palace all ready.'
What she said, she did.
To morrow all my twelve daughters shall stand in a row before you, and if you cannot tell me which of them is the youngest, off goes your head.'
'What!
Not recognise the youngest princess!' said the Prince to himself, as he entered his room, 'a likely story!'
'Then what must I do?'
'This.
Be very careful.
Now good bye.'
Next morning King Kostiei again sent for the prince.
The young princesses were all drawn up in a row, dressed precisely in the same manner, and with their eyes all cast down.
As the prince looked at them, he was amazed at their likeness.
Twice he walked along the line, without being able to detect the sign agreed upon.
The third time his heart beat fast at the sight of a tiny speck upon the eyelid of one of the girls.
'This one is the youngest,' he said.
'How in the world did you guess?' cried Kostiei in a fury.
But you are not going to escape me so easily. In three hours you shall come here and give me another proof of your cleverness.
If not, off goes your head.'
So the prince returned sadly into his room, but the bee was there before him.
'Why do you look so melancholy, my handsome Prince?'
Does he take me for a shoemaker?'
'What do you think of doing?'
'Not of making boots, at any rate!
I am not afraid of death.
One can only die once after all.'
'No, Prince, you shall not die.
I will try to save you.
And we will fly together or die together.'
As she spoke she spat upon the ground, and then drawing the prince after her out of the room, she locked the door behind her and threw away the key.
Holding each other tight by the hand, they made their way up into the sunlight, and found themselves by the side of the same sea, while the prince's horse was still quietly feeding in the neighbouring meadow. The moment he saw his master, the horse whinnied and galloped towards him.
Without losing an instant the prince sprang into the saddle, swung the princess behind him, and away they went like an arrow from a bow.
When the hour arrived which Kostiei had fixed for the prince's last trial, and there were no signs of him, the king sent to his room to ask why he delayed so long.
The servants, finding the door locked, knocked loudly and received for answer, 'In one moment.' It was the spittle, which was imitating the voice of the prince.
He waited; still no prince.
He sent the servants back again, and the same voice replied, 'Immediately.'
'He is making fun of me!' shrieked Kostiei in a rage.
'Break in the door, and bring him to me!'
The servants hurried to do his bidding.
The door was broken open.
Nobody inside; but just the spittle in fits of laughter!
By this time the prince and princess had got a good start, and were feeling quite happy, when suddenly they heard the sound of a gallop far behind them.
The prince sprang from the saddle, and laid his ear to the ground.
'Then there is no time to be lost,' answered the princess; and as she spoke she changed herself into a river, the prince into a bridge, the horse into a crow, and divided the wide road beyond the bridge into three little ones.
When the soldiers came up to the bridge, they paused uncertainly.
How were they to know which of the three roads the fugitives had taken?
'Idiots!' he exclaimed, in a passion.
Do you mean to say you never thought of that?
Go back at once!' and off they galloped like lightning.
'I hear a horse,' cried the princess.
The prince jumped down and laid his ear to the ground.
'Yes,' he said, 'they are not far off now.'
In an instant prince, princess, and horse had all disappeared, and instead was a dense forest, crossed and recrossed by countless paths. Kostiei's soldiers dashed hastily into the forest, believing they saw before them the flying horse with its double burden.
They seemed close upon them, when suddenly horse, wood, everything disappeared, and they found themselves at the place where they started.
'A horse! a horse!' cried the king.
'I will go after them myself.
This time they shall not escape.' And he galloped off, foaming with anger.
'I think I hear someone pursuing us,' said the princess
'Yes, so do i'
'And this time it is Kostiei himself.
But his power only reaches as far as the first church, and he can go no farther.
Give me your golden cross.' So the prince unfastened the cross which was his mother's gift, and the princess hastily changed herself into a church, the prince into a priest, and the horse into a belfry.
'Greeting, monk.
'Yes, the prince and Kostiei's daughter have just gone by.
They have entered the church, and told me to give you their greetings if I met you.'
Compare ALLOW.
Any of them may be planted in company, for all their colours harmonise.
The plantation is long in shape, straggling over a space of about half an acre, the largest and strongest coloured group being in an open clearing about midway in the length.
Though both enjoy a moist peat soil, and have a near botanical relationship, they are incongruous in appearance, and impossible to group together for colour.
This must be understood to apply to the two classes of plants of the hardy kinds, as commonly grown in gardens.
There are tender kinds of the East Indian families that are quite harmonious, but those now in question are the ordinary varieties of so-called Ghent Azaleas, and the hardy hybrid Rhododendrons.
In the case of small gardens, where there is only room for one bed or clump of peat plants, it would be better to have a group of either one or the other of these plants, rather than spoil the effect by the inharmonious mixture of both.
I always think it desirable to group together flowers that bloom at the same time.
It is impossible, and even undesirable, to have a garden in blossom all over, and groups of flower beauty are all the more enjoyable for being more or less isolated by stretches of intervening greenery.
The old Guelder Rose or Snowball tree is beautiful anywhere, but I think it best of all on the cold side of a wall.
Moreover, as there is necessarily less wood in a flat wall tree than in a round bush, and as the front shoots must be pruned close back, it follows that much more strength is thrown into the remaining wood, and the blooms are much larger.
The two flower at the same time, their growths mingling in friendly fashion, while their unlikeness of habit makes the companionship all the more interesting.
The Guelder Rose is a stiff wooded thing, the character of its main stems being a kind of stark uprightness, though the great white balls hang out with a certain freedom from the newly grown shoots.
The Clematis meets it with an exactly opposite way of growth, swinging down its great swags of many flowered garland masses into the head of its companion, with here and there a single flowering streamer making a tiny wreath on its own account.
Buttresses flank the doorway on this side, dying away into the general thickness of the wall above the arch by a kind of roofing of broad flat stones that lay back at an easy pitch.
Above all is the same white Clematis, some of its abundant growth having been trained over the south side, so that this one plant plays a somewhat important part in two garden scenes.
Thus the Paeonies are protected all round, for they like a sheltered place, and the Moutans do best with even a little passing shade at some time of the day.
For an immense hardy flower of beautiful colouring what can equal the salmon rose Moutan Reine Elizabeth?
The Tree Paeonies are also beautiful in leaf; the individual leaves are large and important, and so carried that they are well displayed.
This is probably the reason why they are so difficult to establish, and so slow to grow, especially on light soils, even when their beds have been made deep and liberally enriched with what one judges to be the most gratifying comfort.
Every now and then, just before blooming time, a plant goes off all at once, smitten with sudden death.
At the time of making my collection I was unable to visit the French nurseries where these plants are so admirably grown, and whence most of the best kinds have come.
Many of the plants therefore had to be shifted into better groups for colour after their first blooming, a matter the more to be regretted as Paeonies dislike being moved.
Though among these, as is the case with all the kinds, there is a preponderance of pink or rose crimson colouring of a decidedly rank quality, yet the number of varieties is so great, that among the minority of really good colouring there are plenty to choose from, including a good number of beautiful whites and whites tinged with yellow.
Of those I have, the kinds I like best are-
Many of the lovely flowers in this class have a rather strong, sweet smell, something like a mixture of the scents of Rose and Tulip.
They are in three distinct colourings-full rich crimson, crimson rose, and pale pink changing to dull white.
These are the earliest to flower, and with them it is convenient, from the garden point of view, to class some of the desirable species.
Some years ago my friend mr Barr kindly gave me a set of the Paeony species as grown by him.
I wished to have them, not for the sake of making a collection, but in order to see which were the ones I should like best to grow as garden flowers.
In due time they grew into strong plants and flowered.
All Paeonies are strong feeders.
Friends often ask me vaguely about Paeonies, and when I say, "What kind of Paeonies?" they have not the least idea.
Broadly, and for garden purposes, one may put them into three classes-
one.
three.
They are in a wide border on the north side of the high wall and partly shaded by it.
CHAPTER seven
JUNE
What is one to say about June-the time of perfect young summer, the fulfilment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade?
It is the offering of the Hymn of Praise!
The lizards run in and out of the heathy tufts in the hot sunshine, and as the long day darkens the night jar trolls out his strange song, so welcome because it is the prelude to the perfect summer night; here and there a glowworm shows its little lamp.
June is here-June is here; thank God for lovely June!
And June is the time of Roses.
I do not know the origin of this charming Rose, but by its appearance it should be related to the Damask.
The white is a creamy white, the outsides of the outer petals are stained with red, first showing clearly in the bud.
The scent is delicate and delightful, with a faint suspicion of Magnolia.
A few years ago this pretty old Rose found its way to one of the meetings of the Royal Horticultural Society, where it gained much praise.
It was there that I recognised my old friend, and learned its name.
How seldom one sees these Roses except in cottage gardens; but what good taste it shows on the cottager's part, for what Rose is so perfectly at home upon the modest little wayside porch?
I have also learnt from cottage gardens how pretty are some of the old Roses grown as standards.
The picture of my neighbour, mrs Edgeler, picking me a bunch from her bush, shows how freely they flower, and what fine standards they make.
What a fine thing, among the cluster Roses, is the old Dundee Rambler!
I trained one to go up a rather upright green Holly about twenty five feet high, and now it has rushed up and tumbles out at the top and sides in masses of its pretty bloom.
It is just as good grown as a "fountain," giving it a free space where it can spread at will with no training or support whatever.
These two ways I think are much the best for growing the free, rambling Roses.
The Garland Rose, another old sort, is just as suitable for this kind of growth as Dundee Rambler, and the individual flowers, of a tender blush colour, changing to white, are even more delicate and pretty.
The newer Crimson Rambler is a noble plant for the same use, in sunlight gorgeous of bloom, and always brilliant with its glossy bright green foliage.
Of the many good plants from Japan, this is the best that has reached us of late years.
One of the bushes in this garden covers a space thirty four feet across-more than a hundred feet round.
Directly the flower is over it throws up rods of young growth eighteen to twenty feet long; as they mature they arch over, and next year their many short lateral shoots will be smothered with bloom.
I have them on an east fence, where they yield a large quantity of bloom for cutting; indeed, they have been so useful in this way that I have planted several more, but this time for training down to an oak trellis, like the one that supports the row of Bouquet d'Or, in order to bring the flowers within easier reach.
The wild plant is widely distributed in England, though somewhat local. It grows on moors in Scotland, and on Beachy Head in Sussex, and near Tenby in South Wales, favouring wild places within smell of the sea.
The rather dusky foliage sets off the lemon white of the wild, and the clear white, pink, rose, and pale yellow of the double garden kinds.
The hips are large and handsome, black and glossy, and the whole plant in late autumn assumes a fine bronzy colouring between ashy black and dusky red. Other small old garden Roses are coming into bloom.
The leaves turn a brilliant yellow in autumn, and after they have fallen the bushes are still bright with the coloured stems and the large clusters of bright red hips.
It is the saint Mark's Rose of Venice, where it is usually in flower on saint Mark's Day, april twenty fifth.
After many years of fruitless effort I have to allow that I am beaten in the attempt to grow the Grand Roses in the Hybrid Perpetual class.
They plainly show their dislike to our dry hill, even when their beds are as well enriched as I can contrive or afford to make them.
But the Tea Roses are more accommodating, and do fairly well, though, of course, not so well as in a stiffer soil.
If I were planting again I should grow a still larger proportion of the kinds I have now found to do best.
Far beyond all others is Madame Lambard, good alike early and late, and beautiful at all times.
In this garden it yields quite three times as much bloom as any other; nothing else can approach it either for beauty or bounty.
It is well to remember that the tying or pegging down of Roses always makes them bloom better: every joint from end to end wants to make a good Rose; if the shoots are more upright, the blooming strength goes more to the top.
The pruning of Tea Roses is quite different from the pruning required for the Hybrid Perpetuals.
In these the last year's growth is cut back in March to within two to five eyes from where it leaves the main branch, according to the strength of the kind.
This must not be done with the Teas.
With these the oldest wood is cut right out from the base, and the blooming shoots left full length.
But it is well, towards the end of July or beginning of August, to cut back the ends of soft summer shoots in order to give them a chance of ripening what is left. When an old Tea looks worn out, if cut right down in March or April it will often throw out vigorous young growth, and quite renew its life.
Within the first days of June we can generally pick some Sweet Peas from the rows sown in the second week of September.
They are very much stronger than those sown in spring.
By November they are four inches high, and seem to gain strength and sturdiness during the winter; for as soon as spring comes they shoot up with great vigour, and we know that the spray used to support them must be two feet higher than for those that are spring sown.
The flower stalks are a foot long, and many have four flowers on a stalk.
A few doses of liquid manure are a great help when they are getting towards blooming strength.
I am very fond of the Elder tree.
It is a sociable sort of thing; it seems to like to grow near human habitations.
In my own mind it is certainly the tree most closely associated with the pretty old cottage and farm architecture of my part of the country; no bush or tree, not even the apple, seems to group so well or so closely with farm buildings.
They look just right, and are, moreover, every year loaded with their useful fruit.
This is ripe quite early in September, and is made into Elder wine, to be drunk hot in winter, a comfort by no means to be despised.
Now is the time to look out for the seeds.
A few ripen on the plant, but most of them fall while green, and then ripen in a few days while lying on the ground.
I shake the seeds carefully out, and leave them lying round the parent plant; a week later, when they will be ripe, they are lightly scratched into the ground.
Some young plants of last year's growth I mark with a bit of stick, in case of wanting some later to plant elsewhere, or to send away; the plant dies away completely, leaving no trace above ground, so that if not marked it would be difficult to find what is wanted.
Two year old plants come up with thick clumps of matted root that is now useless.
I cut off the whole mass of old root about an inch below the crown, when it can easily be divided into nice little bits for replanting.
Many other spring flowering plants may with advantage be divided now, such as Aubrietia, Arabis, Auricula, Tiarella, and Saxifrage.
The young Primrose plants, sown in March, have been planted out in their special garden, and are looking well after some genial rain.
Both are seen at their best either quite early in the morning, or in the evening, or in half shade, as, like all their kind, they do not expand their bloom in bright sunshine.
Both are excellent plants on poor soils.
It does well in any waste spaces of poor soil, where, by having plants of all ages, there will be some to flower every year.
The Mullein moth is sure to find them out, and it behoves the careful gardener to look for and destroy the caterpillars, or he may some day find, instead of his stately Mulleins, tall stems only clothed with unsightly grey rags.
The caterpillars are easily caught when quite small or when rather large; but midway in their growth, when three quarters of an inch long, they are wary, and at the approach of the avenging gardener they will give a sudden wriggling jump, and roll down into the lower depths of the large foliage, where they are difficult to find.
But by going round the plants twice a day for about a week they can all be discovered.
Towards the end of June the bracken that covers the greater part of the ground of the copse is in full beauty.
No other manner of undergrowth gives to woodland in so great a degree the true forest like character. This most ancient plant speaks of the old, untouched land of which large stretches still remain in the south of England-land too poor to have been worth cultivating, and that has therefore for centuries endured human contempt.
In the early part of the present century, William Cobbett, in his delightful book, "Rural Rides," speaking of the heathy headlands and vast hollow of Hindhead, in Surrey, calls it "certainly the most villainous spot God ever made."
This gives expression to his view, as farmer and political economist, of such places as were incapable of cultivation, and of the general feeling of the time about lonely roads in waste places, as the fields for the lawless labours of smuggler and highwayman.
Now such tracts of natural wild beauty, clothed with stretches of Heath and Fern and Whortleberry, with beds of Sphagnum Moss, and little natural wild gardens of curious and beautiful sub aquatic plants in the marshy hollows and undrained wastes, are treasured as such places deserve to be, especially when they still remain within fifty miles of a vast city.
The height to which the bracken grows is a sure guide to the depth of soil.
On the poorest, thinnest ground it only reaches a foot or two; but in hollow places where leaf mould accumulates and surface soil has washed in and made a better depth, it grows from six feet to eight feet high, and when straggling up through bushes to get to the light a frond will sometimes measure as much as twelve feet.
three
All that day and all the next day Wemyss was Lucy's tower of strength and rock of refuge.
He did everything that had to be done of the business part of death-that extra wantonness of misery thrown in so grimly to finish off the crushing of a mourner who is alone.
It is true the doctor was kind and ready to help, but he was a complete stranger; she had never seen him till he was fetched that dreadful morning; and he had other things to see to besides her affairs,--his own patients, scattered widely over a lonely countryside.
Wemyss had nothing to see to.
He could concentrate entirely on Lucy.
And he was her friend, linked to her so strangely and so strongly by death.
She felt she had known him for ever.
She felt that since the beginning of time she and he had been advancing hand in hand towards just this place, towards just this house and garden, towards just this year, this August, this moment of existence.
Wemyss dropped quite naturally into the place a near male relative would have been in if there had been a near male relative within reach; and his relief at having something to do, something practical and immediate, was so immense that never were funeral arrangements made with greater zeal and energy,--really one might almost say with greater gusto.
There were no anxieties, there were no worries, and there was a grateful little girl.
After each fruitful visit to the undertaker, and he paid several in his zeal, he came back to Lucy and she was grateful; and she was not only grateful, but very obviously glad to get him back.
He saw she didn't like it when he went away, off along the top of the cliff on his various business visits, purpose in each step, a different being from the indignantly miserable person who had dragged about that very cliff killing time such a little while before; he could see she didn't like it.
She knew he had to go, she was grateful and immensely expressive of her gratitude-Wemyss thought he had never met any one so expressively grateful-that he should so diligently go, but she didn't like it.
He saw she didn't like it; he saw that she clung to him; and it pleased him.
'Don't be long,' she murmured each time, looking at him with eyes of entreaty; and when he got back, and stood before her again mopping his forehead, having triumphantly advanced the funeral arrangements another stage, a faint colour came into her face and she had the relieved eyes of a child who has been left alone in the dark and sees its mother coming in with a candle.
Vera usedn't to look like that.
Vera had accepted everything he did for her as a matter of course.
What she would have done without him Wemyss couldn't think.
He felt he was being delicate and tactful in this about the drawing room sofa.
'What would I have done without you?'
Why this calm should have been interrupted, and so cruelly, he couldn't imagine.
It wasn't as if he had deserved it.
'Oh, but you have done good,' said Lucy, her voice, too, dropped into more than ordinary gentleness by the night, the silence, and the occasion; besides which it vibrated with feeling, it was lovely with seriousness, with simple conviction.
'Always, always I know that you've been doing good,' she said, 'being kind.
I can't imagine you anything else but a help to people and a comfort.'
And Wemyss said, Well, he had done his best and tried, and no man could say more, but judging from what-well, what people had said to him, it hadn't been much of a success sometimes, and often and often he had been hurt, deeply hurt, by being misunderstood.
And Lucy said, How was it possible to misunderstand him, to misunderstand any one so transparently good, so evidently kind?
It wasn't much to ask.
Vera----
'Who is Vera?' asked Lucy.
'My wife.'
'Ah, don't,' said Lucy earnestly, taking his hand very gently in hers. 'Don't talk of that to night please don't let yourself think of it.
If I could only, only find the words that would comfort you----'
'Aren't we like two children,' he said, his voice, like hers, deepened by feeling, 'two scared, unhappy children, clinging to each other alone in the dark.'
So they talked on in subdued voices as people do who are in some holy place, sitting close together, looking out at the starlit sea, darkness and coolness gathering round them, and the grass smelling sweetly after the hot day, and the little waves, such a long way down, lapping lazily along the shingle, till Wemyss said it must be long past bedtime, and she, poor girl, must badly need rest.
'How old are you?' he asked suddenly, turning to her and scrutinising the delicate faint outline of her face against the night.
'Twenty two,' said Lucy.
'You might just as easily be twelve,' he said, 'except for the sorts of things you say.'
'It's my hair,' said Lucy.
'My father liked-he liked----'
'Don't cry again. Don't cry any more to night.
It's time you were in bed.'
And he helped her up, and when they got into the light of the hall he saw that she had, this time, successfully strangled her tears.
'Good night,' she said, when he had lit her candle for her, 'good night, and-God bless you.'
'He has,' said Lucy. 'Indeed He has already, in sending me you.' And she smiled up at him.
For the first time since he had known her-and he too had the feeling that he had known her ever since he could remember-he saw her smile, and the difference it made to her marred, stained face surprised him.
'Do what?' asked Lucy.
Then she laughed; but the sound of it in the silent, brooding house was shocking.
'Remember you're to go to sleep and not think of anything,' Wemyss ordered as she went slowly upstairs.
fifteen
Early in their engagement Wemyss had expounded his theory to Lucy that there should be the most perfect frankness between lovers, while as for husband and wife there oughtn't to be a corner anywhere about either of them, mind, body, or soul, which couldn't be revealed to the other one.
'You can talk about everything to your Everard,' he assured her.
'Tell him your innermost thoughts, whatever they may be.
You need no more be ashamed of telling him than of thinking them by yourself.
That, little Love, is real marriage.
What do you think of it?'
Lucy thought so highly of it that she had no words with which to express her admiration, and fell to kissing him instead.
Her mind was a chalice filled only with love, and so clear and bright was the love that even at the bottom, when she stirred it up to look, there wasn't a trace of sediment.
But marriage-or was it sleeplessness?--completely changed this, and there were perfect crowds of thoughts in her mind that she was thoroughly ashamed of.
Wemyss pricked up his ears, thinking it was something interesting to do with sex, and waited with an amused, inquisitive smile.
But Lucy in such matters was content to follow him, aware of her want of experience and of the abundance of his, and the thought that was worrying her only had to do with a waiter.
A waiter, if you please.
Wemyss's smile died away.
He had had occasion to reprimand this waiter at lunch for gross negligence, and here was Lucy alleging he had done so without any reason that she could see, and anyhow roughly.
Would he remove the feeling of discomfort she had at being forced to think her own heart's beloved, the kindest and gentlest of men, hadn't been kind and gentle but unjust, by explaining?
Well, that was at the very beginning.
She soon learned that a doubt in her mind was better kept there.
If she brought it out to air it and dispel it by talking it over with him, all that happened was that he was hurt, and when he was hurt she instantly became perfectly miserable. Seeing, then, that this happened about small things, how impossible it was to talk with him of big things; of, especially, her immense doubt in regard to The Willows.
For a long while she was sure he was bearing her feeling in mind, since it couldn't have changed since Christmas, and that when she arrived there she would find that he had had everything altered and all traces of Vera's life there removed.
Then, when he began to talk about The Willows, she found that such an idea as alterations hadn't entered his head.
She was to sleep in the very room that had been his and Vera's, in the very bed.
And positively, so far was it from true that she could tell him every thought and talk everything over with him, when she discovered this she wasn't able to say more than that hesitating remark on the chateau terrace at Amboise about supposing he was going to change his bedroom.
What a comfort if, even if he had thought her too silly and morbid to be laughed at, he had indulged her and consented to alter those rooms.
There seemed to be no moment when it was in a condition of becoming, and she might have slipped in a suggestion or laid a wish before him; his plans were sprung upon her full fledged, and they were unalterable.
Sometimes he said, 'Would you like----?' and if she didn't like, and answered truthfully, as she answered at first before she learned not to, there was trouble.
Silent trouble.
Of course as far as the minor wishes and preferences of every day went it was all quite easy, once she had grasped the right answer to the question, 'Would you like?' She instantly did like.
How difficult it was sometimes.
When he said to her, 'You'll like the view from your sitting room at The Willows,' she naturally wanted to cry out that she wouldn't, and ask him how he could suppose she would like what was to her a view for ever associated with death?
Why shouldn't she be able to cry out naturally if she wanted to, to talk to him frankly, to get his help to cure herself of what was so ridiculous by laughing at it with him?
She couldn't laugh all alone, though she was always trying to; with him she could have, and so have become quite sensible.
For he was so much bigger than she was, so wonderful in the way he had triumphed over diseased thinking, and his wholesomeness would spread over her too, a purging, disinfecting influence, if only he would let her talk, if only he would help her to laugh.
'Is it possible,' she thought, 'that I am abject?'
Yes, she was extremely abject, she reflected, lying awake at night considering her behaviour during the day.
Love had made her so.
Love did make one abject, for it was full of fear of hurting the beloved.
The assertion of the Scriptures that perfect love casteth out fear only showed, seeing that her love for Everard was certainly perfect, how little the Scriptures really knew what they were talking about.
Well, if she couldn't tell him the things she was feeling, why couldn't she get rid of the sorts of feelings she couldn't tell him, and just be wholesome?
Sometimes Lucy would be sure that deep in his character there was a wonderful store of simple courage.
He didn't speak of Vera's death, naturally he didn't wish to speak of that awful afternoon, but how often he must think of it, hiding his thoughts even from her, bearing them altogether alone.
Sometimes she was sure of this, and sometimes she was equally sure of the very opposite.
But this was too incredible.
She couldn't believe it.
What had perhaps happened, she thought, was that in self defence, for the preservation of his peace, he had made up his mind never to think of Vera.
Only by banishing her altogether from his mind would he be safe.
Yet that couldn't be true either, for several times on the honeymoon he had begun talking of her, of things she had said, of things she had liked, and it was she, Lucy, who stopped him.
She shrank from hearing anything about Vera.
She especially shrank from hearing her mentioned casually.
She might be too morbid, but wasn't it possible to be too wholesome?
That, at least, ought to be kept free from her.
Later on at The Willows....
Lucy fought and fought against it, but always at the back of her mind was the thought, not looked at, slunk away from, but nevertheless fixed, that there at The Willows, waiting for her, was Vera.
Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry the beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his brain, Martin was called to the telephone.
"It's a lady's voice, a fine lady's," mr Higginbotham, who had called him, jeered.
In his battle with the sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the sound of her voice his love for her smote him like a sudden blow.
And such a voice!--delicate and sweet, like a strain of music heard far off and faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a perfect tone, crystal pure. No mere woman had a voice like that.
There was something celestial about it, and it came from other worlds.
He could scarcely hear what it said, so ravished was he, though he controlled his face, for he knew that mr Higginbotham's ferret eyes were fixed upon him.
Would he!
He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice.
And he had never dared to ask her to go anywhere with him.
Quite irrelevantly, still at the telephone and talking with her, he felt an overpowering desire to die for her, and visions of heroic sacrifice shaped and dissolved in his whirling brain.
He loved her so much, so terribly, so hopelessly.
It was the only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty emotion he felt for her.
It was the sublime abnegation of true love that comes to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the telephone, in a whirlwind of fire and glory; and to die for her, he felt, was to have lived and loved well.
And he was only twenty one, and he had never been in love before.
His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he was weak from the organ which had stirred him.
His eyes were shining like an angel's, and his face was transfigured, purged of all earthly dross, and pure and holy.
"Makin' dates outside, eh?" his brother in law sneered.
"You know what that means.
You'll be in the police court yet."
But Martin could not come down from the height.
Not even the bestiality of the allusion could bring him back to earth.
Anger and hurt were beneath him.
He had seen a great vision and was as a god, and he could feel only profound and awful pity for this maggot of a man.
He did not look at him, and though his eyes passed over him, he did not see him; and as in a dream he passed out of the room to dress.
It was not until he had reached his own room and was tying his necktie that he became aware of a sound that lingered unpleasantly in his ears.
On investigating this sound he identified it as the final snort of Bernard Higginbotham, which somehow had not penetrated to his brain before.
It was not unalloyed bliss, taking her to the lecture.
He did not know what he ought to do.
He had seen, on the streets, with persons of her class, that the women took the men's arms.
But then, again, he had seen them when they didn't; and he wondered if it was only in the evening that arms were taken, or only between husbands and wives and relatives.
Just before he reached the sidewalk, he remembered Minnie.
Minnie had always been a stickler.
And Minnie had made a practice of kicking his heels, whenever they crossed from one side of the street to the other, to remind him to get over on the outside.
It wouldn't do any harm to try it, he decided, by the time they had reached the sidewalk; and he swung behind ruth and took up his station on the outside.
Then the other problem presented itself.
He had never offered anybody his arm in his life.
The girls he had known never took the fellows' arms.
But this was different.
She wasn't that kind of a girl. He must do something.
And then the wonderful thing happened.
He felt her hand upon his arm.
Delicious thrills ran through him at the contact, and for a few sweet moments it seemed that he had left the solid earth and was flying with her through the air.
But he was soon back again, perturbed by a new complication.
They were crossing the street. This would put him on the inside.
He should be on the outside.
Should he therefore drop her arm and change over?
And if he did so, would he have to repeat the manoeuvre the next time?
And the next?
There was something wrong about it, and he resolved not to caper about and play the fool.
Yet he was not satisfied with his conclusion, and when he found himself on the inside, he talked quickly and earnestly, making a show of being carried away by what he was saying, so that, in case he was wrong in not changing sides, his enthusiasm would seem the cause for his carelessness.
As they crossed Broadway, he came face to face with a new problem.
In the blaze of the electric lights, he saw Lizzie Connolly and her giggly friend.
Only for an instant he hesitated, then his hand went up and his hat came off.
He could not be disloyal to his kind, and it was to more than Lizzie Connolly that his hat was lifted.
She nodded and looked at him boldly, not with soft and gentle eyes like Ruth's, but with eyes that were handsome and hard, and that swept on past him to ruth and itemized her face and dress and station.
And he was aware that ruth looked, too, with quick eyes that were timid and mild as a dove's, but which saw, in a look that was a flutter on and past, the working class girl in her cheap finery and under the strange hat that all working class girls were wearing just then.
"What a pretty girl!" ruth said a moment later.
Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-
"I don't know.
I guess it's all a matter of personal taste, but she doesn't strike me as being particularly pretty."
"Why, there isn't one woman in ten thousand with features as regular as hers.
They are splendid.
Her face is as clear cut as a cameo.
And her eyes are beautiful."
"Do you think so?" Martin queried absently, for to him there was only one beautiful woman in the world, and she was beside him, her hand upon his arm.
"Do I think so?
If that girl had proper opportunity to dress, mr Eden, and if she were taught how to carry herself, you would be fairly dazzled by her, and so would all men."
"She would have to be taught how to speak," he commented, "or else most of the men wouldn't understand her.
I'm sure you couldn't understand a quarter of what she said if she just spoke naturally."
"Nonsense!
"You forget how I talked when you first met me.
I have learned a new language since then.
Before that time I talked as that girl talks.
Now I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in your language to explain that you do not know that other girl's language.
And do you know why she carries herself the way she does?
I think about such things now, though I never used to think about them, and I am beginning to understand-much."
"But why does she?"
"She has worked long hours for years at machines.
When one's body is young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like putty according to the nature of the work.
I can tell at a glance the trades of many workingmen I meet on the street.
Look at me.
Why am I rolling all about the shop?
Because of the years I put in on the sea.
And so with that girl. You noticed that her eyes were what I might call hard.
She has never been sheltered.
She has had to take care of herself, and a young girl can't take care of herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like-like yours, for example."
"I think you are right," ruth said in a low voice.
"And it is too bad. She is such a pretty girl."
He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity.
And then he remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his fortune that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm to a lecture.
Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking glass, that night when he got back to his room.
Who are you?
What are you?
Where do you belong?
You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.
You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful.
You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches.
There are the stale vegetables now.
Those potatoes are rotting.
Smell them, damn you, smell them.
Who are you? and what are you?
damn you!
And are you going to make good?
He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge of the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes.
Then he got out note book and algebra and lost himself in quadratic equations, while the hours slipped by, and the stars dimmed, and the gray of dawn flooded against his window.
Let us return to eighteen thirty.
Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained graceful; not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the masses; he pleased.
He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera. Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers in, by ballet dancers; this made a part of his bourgeois popularity.
He had no heart.
This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.
Louis Philippe is eighteen thirty made man.
He had lived by his own labor.
His case is, as yet, only in the lower court.
Often, in the midst of his gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there, exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do?
He obstinately maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he disputed the ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown attorneys, those chatterers of the law, as he called them.
Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue of a revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real aim of the Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orleans, exercised no personal initiative.
He had been born a Prince, and he believed himself to have been elected King.
He had not served this mandate on himself; he had not taken it; it had been offered to him, and he had accepted it; convinced, wrongly, to be sure, but convinced nevertheless, that the offer was in accordance with right and that the acceptance of it was in accordance with duty.
Hence his possession was in good faith.
Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these formidable collisions.
Whatever the nature of these tempests may be, human irresponsibility is mingled with them.
Let us complete this exposition.
Born yesterday, it was obliged to fight to day.
Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on the preceding evening.
From month to month the hostility increased, and from being concealed it became patent.
The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside of France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France, as we have said.
God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious tongue.
Men immediately make translations of it; translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps, and of nonsense. Very few minds comprehend the divine language.
The most sagacious, the calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly, and when they arrive with their text, the task has long been completed; there are already twenty translations on the public place.
Power itself is often a faction.
There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current; they are the old parties.
For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God, think that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt, one has the right to revolt against them.
Error.
For in these revolutions, the one who revolts is not the people; it is the king.
Every revolution, being a normal outcome, contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionists sometimes dishonor, but which remains even when soiled, which survives even when stained with blood.
Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity.
A revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real.
It is because it must be that it is.
Errors make excellent projectiles.
They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; they attacked this revolution in its royalty.
They shouted to it: "Revolution, why this king?" Factions are blind men who aim correctly.
This cry was uttered equally by the republicans.
But coming from them, this cry was logical.
What was blindness in the legitimists was clearness of vision in the democrats.
eighteen thirty had bankrupted the people. The enraged democracy reproached it with this.
Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the establishment of July struggled.
To keep the peace, was an increase of complication.
A harmony established contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war.
From this secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization which in the harness of the European cabinets is suspicious in itself.
The Royalty of July reared up, in spite of the fact that it caught it in the harness of European cabinets.
Metternich would gladly have put it in kicking straps.
Pushed on in France by progress, it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers in Europe.
After having been towed, it undertook to tow.
Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary, education, penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman, wealth, misery, production, consumption, division, exchange, coin, credit, the rights of capital, the rights of labor,--all these questions were multiplied above society, a terrible slope.
Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement became manifest.
Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people, traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with indescribably vague epileptic shocks.
This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this agitated epoch.
These men left to political parties the question of rights, they occupied themselves with the question of happiness.
The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract from society.
They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry, of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion.
These men who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all be designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavored to pierce that rock and to cause it to spout forth the living waters of human felicity.
From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works embraced everything.
The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do not here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point of view, the questions raised by socialism.
We confine ourselves to indicating them.
First problem: To produce wealth.
Second problem: To share it.
The first problem contains the question of work.
The second contains the question of salary.
In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.
In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.
From the proper employment of forces results public power.
From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.
By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must be understood.
From these two things combined, the public power without, individual happiness within, results social prosperity.
Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.
England solves the first of these two problems.
She creates wealth admirably, she divides it badly.
This solution which is complete on one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence, monstrous wretchedness.
All enjoyments for some, all privations for the rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly, feudalism, born from toil itself.
A false and dangerous situation, which sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State in the sufferings of the individual.
A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral element enters.
Their division kills production.
Equal partition abolishes emulation; and consequently labor.
It is a partition made by the butcher, which kills that which it divides.
It is therefore impossible to pause over these pretended solutions.
The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved.
The two problems must be combined and made but one.
Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice, you will be England.
You will have, like Venice, an artificial power, or, like England, a material power; you will be the wicked rich man.
And the world will allow to die and fall all that is merely selfishness, all that does not represent for the human race either a virtue or an idea.
The nations always have our respect and our sympathy.
Venice, as a people, will live again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England, the nation, is immortal.
That said, we continue.
Efforts worthy of admiration!
Sacred attempts!
He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not, nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.
Piles of shadows covered the horizon.
A strange shade, gradually drawing nearer, extended little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shade which came from wraths and systems.
Everything which had been hastily stifled was moving and fermenting.
Spirits trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of a storm. The electric tension was such that at certain instants, the first comer, a stranger, brought light.
Then the twilight obscurity closed in again. At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be formed as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.
Brujon, after having passed a month in the punishment cell, had had time, in the first place, to weave a rope, in the second, to mature a plan.
Brujon, of whom it is high time that the reader should have a complete idea, was, with an appearance of delicate health and a profoundly premeditated languor, a polished, intelligent sprig, and a thief, who had a caressing glance, and an atrocious smile.
His first studies in his art had been directed to roofs.
Up above there were scaffoldings and ladders; in other words, bridges and stairs in the direction of liberty.
The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing to be seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison.
This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed through Berquin.
There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half jailers, half thieves, who assist in escapes, who sell to the police an unfaithful service, and who turn a penny whenever they can.
An abyss six feet broad and eighty feet deep separated them from the surrounding wall.
At two o'clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was relieved, and replaced by a conscript.
How had he got there?
The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for.
A steep escarpment three stories high separated him from the pavement of the street.
The rope which he had was too short.
"Let's cut.
What are we up to here?"
"There's no hurry yet, let's wait a bit.
As for the fourth, he held his peace, but his huge shoulders betrayed him.
Brujon replied almost impetuously but still in a low tone:--
"What are you jabbering about?
You have to be a pretty knowing cove to tear up your shirt, cut up your sheet to make a rope, punch holes in doors, get up false papers, make false keys, file your irons, hang out your cord, hide yourself, and disguise yourself! The old fellow hasn't managed to play it, he doesn't understand how to work the business."
He's recaptured, there!
"Yes."
"I can't budge."
"My hands are benumbed."
"I can't."
It was very narrow.
"A brat must be got," resumed Brujon.
"Climb up that flue."
"And fasten it," continued Brujon.
"Is that all!"
And he took off his shoes.
"Now, whom are we to eat?"
"Let's get well into a corner," said Brujon.
"Well! why not?" demanded Thenardier.
"Yes, yes," said Brujon, "it must be looked up."
In the meanwhile, none of the men seemed to see Gavroche, who, during this colloquy, had seated himself on one of the fence posts; he waited a few moments, thinking that perhaps his father would turn towards him, then he put on his shoes again, and said:--
"Is that all?
CHAPTER five
Renewed efforts were made in every direction.
If you will come here-with papa's permission-after tea, my views on the subject of Falkland will be at your disposal.
"I know I can't do it," he said.
"A mistake, mr Vanstone," chimed in Miss Garth.
"Made with the best intentions-but a mistake for all that."
The Marrables are respectable people, and keep the best company in Clifton.
Knowing by experience that interference would be hopeless, under these circumstances, Miss Garth turned sharply and left the room.
The female mind does occasionally-though not often-project itself into the future.
Miss Garth was prophetically pitying Magdalen's unfortunate husband.
"I have conceived the part of Lucy," she observed, with the demurest gravity.
"The next difficulty is to make Frank conceive the part of Falkland.
No, papa-no wine to day, thank you.
I must keep my intelligence clear.
The clock on the mantel piece pointed to half past eleven before Lucy the resolute permitted Falkland the helpless to shut up his task book for the night.
"I'm to come to morrow, and hear more of her views-if you have no objection.
Goodnight."
"Yes, mr Starr."
"No, Harry.
"And your mother?"
"mr
"What!
In the Dochart pit?"
And are you happy there?"
And now the question was between the moon and the cottage.
The princess thought she knew the worst of the moon, and she knew nothing at all about the cottage, therefore she would stay with the moon.
Strange, was it not, that she should have been so long with the wise woman, and yet know NOTHING about that cottage?
First of all, the soft wind blowing gently through the dry stalks of the heather and its thousands of little bells raised a sweet rustling, which the princess took for the hissing of serpents, for you know she had been naughty for so long that she could not in a great many things tell the good from the bad.
Then nobody could deny that there, all round about the heath, like a ring of darkness, lay the gloomy fir wood, and the princess knew what it was full of, and every now and then she thought she heard the howling of its wolves and hyenas.
And who could tell but some of them might break from their covert and sweep like a shadow across the heath?
Indeed, it was not once nor twice that for a moment she was fully persuaded she saw a great beast coming leaping and bounding through the moonlight to have her all to himself.
She did not know that not a single evil creature dared set foot on that heath, or that, if one should do so, it would that instant wither up and cease.
The wise woman, too, she felt sure, although her cottage looked asleep, was watching her at some little window.
In this, however, she would have been quite right, if she had only imagined enough-namely, that the wise woman was watching OVER her from the little window.
Hardly had the possibility arisen in her mind, before she was on her feet: if the woman was any thing short of an ogress, her cottage must be better than that horrible loneliness, with nothing in all the world but a stare; and even an ogress had at least the shape and look of a human being.
But, to her surprise, she came only to another back, for no door was to be seen. She tried the farther end, but still no door.
She must have passed it as she ran-but no-neither in gable nor in side was any to be found.
A cottage without a door!--she rushed at it in a rage and kicked at the wall with her feet.
Suddenly, however, she remembered how her screaming had brought the horde of wolves and hyenas about her in the forest, and, ceasing at once, lay still, gazing yet again at the moon.
But the old woman-as the princess called her, not knowing that her real name was the Wise Woman-had told her that she must knock at the door: how was she to do that when there was no door?
But again she bethought herself-that, if she could not do all she was told, she could, at least, do a part of it: if she could not knock at the door, she could at least knock-say on the wall, for there was nothing else to knock upon-and perhaps the old woman would hear her, and lift her in by some window.
Thereupon, she rose at once to her feet, and picking up a stone, began to knock on the wall with it.
For a moment she feared the old woman would be offended, but the next, there came a voice, saying,
"Who is there?"
The princess answered,
"Please, old woman, I did not mean to knock so loud."
To this there came no reply.
Then the princess knocked again, this time with her knuckles, and the voice came again, saying,
"Who is there?"
And the princess answered,
"Rosamond."
But the princess soon ventured to knock a third time.
"What do you want?" said the voice.
"Oh, please, let me in!" said the princess.
Then the door opened, and the princess entered.
She looked all around, but saw nothing of the wise woman.
It was a single bare little room, with a white deal table, and a few old wooden chairs, a fire of fir wood on the hearth, the smoke of which smelt sweet, and a patch of thick growing heath in one corner.
And what with the sufferings and terrors she had left outside, the new kind of tears she had shed, the love she had begun to feel for her parents, and the trust she had begun to place in the wise woman, it seemed to her as if her soul had grown larger of a sudden, and she had left the days of her childishness and naughtiness far behind her.
People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed!
Those who are good tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in the one case, the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy.
Then in her terror the princess grew angry, and saying to herself, "She must be somewhere in the place, else who was there to open the door to me?" began to shout and yell, and call the wise woman all the bad names she had been in the habit of throwing at her nurses.
On the contrary, she thought she had a perfect right to be angry, for was she not most desperately ill used-and a princess too?
But the wind howled on, and the rain kept pouring down the chimney, and every now and then the lightning burst out, and the thunder rushed after it, as if the great lumbering sound could ever think to catch up with the swift light!
But being in a bad temper always makes people stupid, and presently she struck her forehead such a blow against something-she thought herself it felt like the old woman's cloak-that she fell back-not on the floor, though, but on the patch of heather, which felt as soft and pleasant as any bed in the palace.
It was no use stopping to look about her, for what had she to do but forever look about her as she went on and on and on-never seeing any thing, and never expecting to see any thing!
The only shadow of a hope she had was, that she might by slow degrees grow thinner and thinner, until at last she wore away to nothing at all; only alas! she could not detect the least sign that she had yet begun to grow thinner.
The hopelessness grew at length so unendurable that she woke with a start.
Seeing the face of the wise woman bending over her, she threw her arms around her neck and held up her mouth to be kissed.
And the kiss of the wise woman was like the rose gardens of Damascus.
On a fair Saturday afternoon in November Penrod's little old dog Duke returned to the ways of his youth and had trouble with a strange cat on the back porch.
This indiscretion, so uncharacteristic, was due to the agitation of a surprised moment, for Duke's experience had inclined him to a peaceful pessimism, and he had no ambition for hazardous undertakings of any sort.
He was given to musing but not to avoidable action, and he seemed habitually to hope for something which he was pretty sure would not happen.
Even in his sleep, this gave him an air of wistfulness.
Thus, being asleep in a nook behind the metal refuse can, when the strange cat ventured to ascend the steps of the porch, his appearance was so unwarlike that the cat felt encouraged to extend its field of reconnaissance-for the cook had been careless, and the backbone of a three pound whitefish lay at the foot of the refuse can.
This cat was, for a cat, needlessly tall, powerful, independent, and masculine.
Once, long ago, he had been a roly poly pepper and salt kitten; he had a home in those days, and a name, "Gipsy," which he abundantly justified.
He was precocious in dissipation.
Long before his adolescence, his lack of domesticity was ominous, and he had formed bad companionships.
Meanwhile, he grew so rangy, and developed such length and power of leg and such traits of character, that the father of the little girl who owned him was almost convincing when he declared that the young cat was half broncho and half Malay pirate-though, in the light of Gipsy's later career, this seems bitterly unfair to even the lowest orders of bronchos and Malay pirates.
No; Gipsy was not the pet for a little girl.
The rosy hearthstone and sheltered rug were too circumspect for him.
Surrounded by the comforts of middle class respectability, and profoundly oppressed, even in his youth, by the Puritan ideals of the household, he sometimes experienced a sense of suffocation.
He went forth in a May twilight, carrying the evening beefsteak with him, and joined the underworld.
His extraordinary size, his daring, and his utter lack of sympathy soon made him the leader-and, at the same time, the terror-of all the loose lived cats in a wide neighbourhood.
He contracted no friendships and had no confidants.
In appearance he did not lack distinction of an ominous sort; the slow, rhythmic, perfectly controlled mechanism of his tail, as he impressively walked abroad, was incomparably sinister.
This stately and dangerous walk of his, his long, vibrant whiskers, his scars, his yellow eye, so ice cold, so fire hot, haughty as the eye of Satan, gave him the deadly air of a mousquetaire duellist.
Such, in brief, was the terrifying creature which now elongated its neck, and, over the top step of the porch, bent a calculating scrutiny upon the wistful and slumberous Duke.
The scrutiny was searching but not prolonged.
It was a desirable fishbone, large, with a considerable portion of the fish's tail still attached to it.
It was about a foot from Duke's nose, and the little dog's dreams began to be troubled by his olfactory nerve.
This faithful sentinel, on guard even while Duke slept, signalled that alarums and excursions by parties unknown were taking place, and suggested that attention might well be paid.
Duke opened one drowsy eye.
What that eye beheld was monstrous.
Here was a strange experience-the horrific vision in the midst of things so accustomed.
Sunshine fell sweetly upon porch and backyard; yonder was the familiar stable, and from its interior came the busy hum of a carpenter shop, established that morning by Duke's young master, in association with Samuel Williams and Herman.
Gipsy had seized the fishbone by the middle.
Out from one side of his head, and mingling with his whiskers, projected the long, spiked spine of the big fish: down from the other side of that ferocious head dangled the fish's tail, and from above the remarkable effect thus produced shot the intolerable glare of two yellow eyes.
To the gaze of Duke, still blurred by slumber, this monstrosity was all of one piece-the bone seemed a living part of it.
Indeed, Duke was not in a position to think the matter over quietly.
If he had been able to do that, he would have said to himself: "We have here an animal of most peculiar and unattractive appearance, though, upon examination, it seems to be only a cat stealing a fishbone. Nevertheless, as the thief is large beyond all my recollection of cats and has an unpleasant stare, I will leave this spot at once."
On the contrary, Duke was so electrified by his horrid awakening that he completely lost his presence of mind.
In the very instant of his first eye's opening, the other eye and his mouth behaved similarly, the latter loosing upon the quiet air one shriek of mental agony before the little dog scrambled to his feet and gave further employment to his voice in a frenzy of profanity.
It was Gipsy's war cry, and, at the sound of it, Duke became a frothing maniac.
He made a convulsive frontal attack upon the hobgoblin-and the massacre began.
Such was not his purpose, however, for, having attained his greatest possible altitude, he partially sat down and elevated his right arm after the manner of a semaphore.
This semaphore arm remained rigid for a second, threatening; then it vibrated with inconceivable rapidity, feinting.
But it was the treacherous left that did the work.
Seemingly this left gave Duke three lightning little pats upon the right ear, but the change in his voice indicated that these were no love taps.
Never had such a shattering uproar, all vocal, broken out upon a peaceful afternoon.
Gipsy possessed a vocabulary for cat swearing certainly second to none out of Italy, and probably equal to the best there, while Duke remembered and uttered things he had not thought of for years.
The hum of the carpenter shop ceased, and Sam Williams appeared in the stable doorway.
He stared insanely.
"My gorry!" he shouted.
"Duke's havin' a fight with the biggest cat you ever saw in your life!
C'mon!"
His feet were already in motion toward the battlefield, with Penrod and Herman hurrying in his wake.
Onward they sped, and Duke was encouraged by the sight and sound of these reinforcements to increase his own outrageous clamours and to press home his attack.
But he was ill advised.
This time it was the right arm of the semaphore that dipped-and Duke's honest nose was but too conscious of what happened in consequence.
They rushed upon him from two directions, cutting off the steps of the porch.
Undaunted, the formidable cat raked Duke's nose again, somewhat more lingeringly, and prepared to depart with his fishbone.
He had little fear for himself, because he was inclined to think that, unhampered, he could whip anything on earth; still, things seemed to be growing rather warm and he saw nothing to prevent his leaving.
Therefore, on small accounts he decided to leave the field to his enemies and to carry the fishbone elsewhere.
He took two giant leaps. The first landed him upon the edge of the porch.
There, without an instant's pause, he gathered his fur sheathed muscles, concentrated himself into one big steel spring, and launched himself superbly into space.
He made a stirring picture, however brief, as he left the solid porch behind him and sailed upward on an ascending curve into the sunlit air.
His head was proudly up; he was the incarnation of menacing power and of self confidence.
It is possible that the white fish's spinal column and flopping tail had interfered with his vision, and in launching himself he may have mistaken the dark, round opening of the cistern for its dark, round cover.
In that case, it was a leap calculated and executed with precision, for as the boys clamoured their pleased astonishment, Gipsy descended accurately into the orifice and passed majestically from public view, with the fishbone still in his mouth and his haughty head still high.
CHAPTER eleven.
THE STORY GIRL DOES PENANCE
I had read the story before, and it had been my opinion that it was "rot." No king, I felt certain, would ever marry a beggar maid when he had princesses galore from whom to choose.
But now I understood it all.
And she had.
"Sara is real sick," she said, with regret, and something that was not regret mingled in her voice.
"She has a cold and sore throat, and she is feverish.
mrs Ray says if she isn't better by the morning she's going to send for the doctor.
"Oh, do you suppose she caught them at the magic lantern show?" she said miserably.
"Where else could she have caught them?" said Felicity mercilessly.
The Story Girl was not to be comforted.
I don't think she did.
But, for all that, there was a certain exhilaration about her.
"I'm going to do penance all day for coaxing Sara to disobey her mother," she announced with chastened triumph.
"Penance?" we murmured in bewilderment.
"Yes.
I'm going to deny myself everything I like, and do everything I can think of that I don't like, just to punish myself for being so wicked.
And if any of you think of anything I don't, just mention it to me.
I thought it out last night.
"He can see it anyhow, without your doing anything," said Cecily.
"Well, my conscience will feel better."
But the rest of us rather looked with favour on the Story Girl's idea. We felt sure that she would do penance as picturesquely and thoroughly as she did everything else.
I never thought of that.
I'll get some after breakfast. I'm not going to eat a single thing all day, except bread and water-and not much of that!"
To sit down to one of Aunt Janet's meals, in ordinary health and appetite, and eat nothing but bread and water-that would be penance with a vengeance!
We felt WE could never do it.
But the Story Girl did it.
"no
So I'm going to do penance all day.
You don't mind, do you?"
"Not if you don't go too far with your nonsense," she said tolerantly.
"Thank you.
"There isn't any; I used the last in the soup yesterday."
"Then I suppose I'll have to do without.
"You'll do nothing of the sort," said Aunt Janet.
"Sara must not do penance in that way.
She would wear holes in her stockings, and might seriously bruise her feet."
"I wouldn't SAY anything," retorted Aunt Janet.
You'd find that penance enough."
The Story Girl was crimson with indignation.
But the Story Girl would not come.
And I'm going to work buttonholes all over this cotton.
"It isn't any good.
So it doesn't matter what you do, whether it's useful or not, so long as it's nasty.
"I've thought of a great penance," said Cecily eagerly.
"Don't go to the missionary meeting to night."
The Story Girl looked piteous.
"I thought of that myself-but I CAN'T stay home, Cecily.
I MUST hear that missionary speak.
No, I must go, but I'll tell you what I'll do.
I'll wear my school dress and hat.
THAT will be penance.
I hate it so.
It's such dreadful tasting stuff-but it's a good blood purifier, so Aunt Janet can't object to it."
All day she sat in the kitchen and worked buttonholes, subsisting on bread and water and Mexican Tea.
The smell of raisin pies is something to tempt an anchorite; and the Story Girl was exceedingly fond of them.
Felicity ate two in her very presence, and then brought the rest out to us in the orchard.
But she worked on at her buttonholes.
Pat came over, but his most seductive purrs won no notice from his mistress, who refused herself the pleasure of even patting him.
The Story Girl slipped over home, and when she came back we gasped.
I want to mortify the flesh-"
Go right home and dress yourself decently-or eat your supper in the kitchen."
And she had tied her hair with a snuff brown ribbon which was very unbecoming to her.
The first person we saw in the church porch was mrs Ray.
"Oh, I don't know.
I feel better since I punished myself.
But I'm going to make up for it to morrow," said the Story Girl energetically.
"In fact, I'll begin to night.
Wasn't the missionary splendid?
That cannibal story was simply grand.
"I'd like to be a missionary and have adventures like that," said Felix.
Two cents more a week out of Cecily's egg money, meant something of a sacrifice.
It inspired the rest of us.
I won't be able to give much.
But I'll do the best I can.
Are there any Methodist heathen?
I s'pose I ought to give my box to them, rather than to Presbyterian heathen."
"No, it's only after they're converted that they're anything in particular," said Felicity.
"Before that, they're just plain heathen. But if you want your money to go to a Methodist missionary you can give it to the Methodist minister at Markdale.
I guess the Presbyterians can get along without it, and look after their own heathen."
"Her roses are all out and that bed of Sweet William is a sight by daylight."
"It wouldn't do," said Felicity decidedly.
"You could see through it."
Aunt Janet had forgotten to warn Uncle Roger to keep an eye on our bedtime snacks, and we ate what seemed good unto us.
The mince pie was to blame for THAT wish.
"Hush!
"Shut up," he said.
"Felicity, put on the kettle.
"Yes," answered Tom.
"Why not break 'through the ends of all the cars-so we can get back and forth without having to climb over the roofs!"
"All right-but hurry.
Uncouple just as soon as you can."
Tom climbed over the logs in the tender; then, balancing carefully, he stood up and clutched the top of the swaying freight car.
In an instant he had swung himself over and was running down the roofs of the cars, silhouetted against the cloudy sky.
When he reached the end of the train he lay on his stomach and looked down.
The hole was large enough so that he could climb down the ladder, swing around the corner, and enter.
They passed the remaining ties and the rails forward.
"I'll pull the pin," said Tom.
"No-here, shove a tie off.
Well see if we can wreck her."
It struck one wheel of the detached car, bounded, struck again and then bounded out of the way. The men silently watched the car rolling along behind them.
Tom shook his head in disgust.
"Let's knock the ends of these cars out," he said.
Once again they took the rail up and battered their way through.
Tom climbed up over the end of the tender and reported to Andrews.
"We tried to wreck it," he said, "but the tie bounced out of the way."
Andrews nodded and leaned from the cab.
"We're within a mile of Reseca bridge," he said slowly.
"I don't dare to stop and build a fire.
They're too close upon us."
Now, for the first time, Tom realized that the raid might fail in its purpose.
The excitement of the race, of reaching this point where the road to Chattanooga lay clear before them, had been upon him; it had never entered his head that their long struggle against so many obstacles could end in anything but glorious success.
Surely they could do something to block the way of the pursuing engine.
"Can't we stop and fight?" he asked.
We're all armed."
"No," answered Andrews; "they'll be better armed." He still believed that the engine in their rear had come from Atlanta-probably with a detachment of soldiers aboard, prepared for a battle.
"There are bridges ahead-the Chickamauga bridges.
We'll drop another car on the Reseca bridge.
Go back and tell them.
Try to wreck it in the shed."
Tom hurried back again over the wood pile.
The Reseca bridge which ran over the Oostenaula River was covered by a long shed.
And, as it was built upon a curve in the road, a box car-either wrecked or merely left standing-could not be seen until the pursuing engine was almost upon it.
The train's speed decreased.
"Get ready," yelled Ross; then, as they entered the shed, "Go!"
Tom drew the pin.
Ties streamed out upon the track.
The wheels of the abandoned car knocked several out of the way; then, as the train swung about the curve, leaving the car hidden in the shed, Tom saw one tie resting at an angle across the track.
The wheels struck it, and the car lurched heavily....
They could see no more.
Andrews slapped him on the back.
"We'll have to break the wires above here," he said as the little station in Reseca flashed past them.
"Stop about a mile up here, Knight.
On a curve."
"Wood!" yelled Brown.
He stopped once, and pointed to the wood pile.
Fuel was running low.
"At Green's Station," said Andrews.
"Water there, too?" asked Brown.
"At Tilton-just a few miles farther on." Andrews waved to Knight to shut off the power.
"Put an obstruction here!
That bent rail!"
It was the one they had ripped from the ties north of Calhoun.
"Keep dropping ties, men," ordered Andrews.
Tom put the last of the fuel in the fire, and leaned wearily against the cab.
Instinctively they turned toward Andrews. He was in the fireman's seat, hands clenched and face set, staring ahead. He did not move until they were within sight of Green's Station.
The keeper of the yard came running toward them.
Andrews waved him aside.
"Throw that wood aboard, men," he said.
But they had already attacked the pile.
The men paused and looked at Andrews.
Hurry!" he yelled.
"What's this train!"
Andrews seemed not to hear him.
Four Confederate soldiers who were standing several hundred yards away yelled and pointed in the direction of the whistling.
"'Board," called Andrews.
As he climbed into the cab of the General, Tom saw that his face had become suddenly drawn.
There was no talking now.
The race had reached the final test of strength.
While Tom, in the tender, yanked logs loose from the pile, Andrews stood ready to pass them to Knight, who shoved them into the fire box.
"The wood's wet," said Knight.
The others heard him and made no reply.
He worked with the drafts, coaxing the fire.
Occasionally, Brown glanced at the steam gauge; then the two engineers would exchange glances.
Slowly the needle of the gauge crept up.
In the box car the men silently dropped ties upon the tracks.
Sometimes there was a mumble of satisfaction as a tie fell squarely across the rails; or a grunt of disgust when one tumbled end for end and landed out of position.
There were moments when the smoke paused and mounted straight into the sky; then a few seconds later it flattened out and rose in a long black stream.
How had they done it? How had they passed the broken rail, the ties along the track, the box cars and the snag?
Those questions were pounding in the brains of Andrews' men.
If ever a man combined determination with luck it was Fuller.
He had started on foot from Big Shanty in complete ignorance of what was happening to his stolen train.
Undoubtedly, if he had known that a party of Northern raiders had taken it, he would have waited until a locomotive came from Atlanta.
The idea of running after a locomotive would have seemed too ridiculous.
And still they pressed on.
Fuller and Murphy, still sitting on the edge of the tender, saw the abandoned box car as they swerved around the bend.
Fuller waved his arms up and down slowly to the engineer as a signal to come to a gradual stop.
They coasted down upon the box car, picked it up and carried it on with them. Fuller and Murphy climbed to the top of it; Murphy, staying at the rear end to repeat the signals of Fuller, who was perched on the front.
At the sight of ties lying across the track, Fuller's arms shot up.
Then, when the decreasing speed of the train gave his legs the advantage, Fuller was ahead, heaving ties from the road.
Then they swept around the curve and the bridge lay before them, indistinct in the drizzle of rain.
It appeared intact, but Fuller knew that long curving shed too well through his years of travel over the road not to be suspicious of what lurked inside.
"Wait here," he yelled, sliding down the ladder.
The left forward wheel of the box car had mounted upon one of the ties thrown before it.
The tie was wedged diagonally across the track, and the flange had cut a deep groove in it.
The right wheel was nearly a foot off the track.
Apparently the car had struck the tie just at the moment of losing momentum.
Murphy was coming forward to meet him.
"They've dropped the second box car in there," explained Fuller.
"The front wheels are off the track.
We can drag it back, I think.
We'll have to find a coupling pin."
"Will this be all right?" he asked, holding up a short crow bar.
"Yes," answered Fuller.
"Careful now," yelled Fuller, as the two box cars came closer together. "Easy-easy!" The cars met gently.
"Now run back slowly-an inch at a time," ordered Fuller.
The left wheel followed back along the groove its flange had cut in the tie.
Fuller watched it breathlessly.
They swept out of the shed, pushing the two cars.
As it was, the cars cleared it.
The snag caught on the low cow catcher of the engine and gave the train a mighty jerk.
They were past it before they knew what had happened.
He motioned Murphy ahead.
"What was that?" he asked.
Something on the track.
Thought the engine was going off for a second."
"They'll probably stop at Green's for wood," said Fuller.
Fuller's arms went up again, and he was on the ground removing ties.
"We'll have to stop for fuel," yelled Murphy.
CAPTURED
"Halt there!"
They whipped about and found themselves facing a raised rifle.
He waved the rifle from one to the other.
"Where're you going?" he demanded.
"Chattanooga," answered Tom.
He said it coolly but it required an effort.
"That so?" asked Wilson.
"I can think of better company if you're going to keep that rifle waving around in the air.
What's the matter with you?"
"Well, this way we won't take the wrong road again," said Tom.
"I'd rather walk at the end of a rifle than drown in this mud.
The folks at home'll laugh when they hear that we were held up just as soon as we got in the South."
"Hey?
What's that?" demanded the man.
"If you're after our money you won't get much," Tom replied.
"I'm after you."
"Huh?"
"I'm asking what sort of a Yank trick this is?
"Then what do you want?"
That's what I want."
"Burning what?"
"Burning bridges!" shouted the man.
"You seem to be running the talking match," said Tom.
"What do you want us to do?
"And you might have the decency," answered Wilson, "to ask us who we are before you go any further."
What was it we burned, Tom?"
"Bridges," replied Tom, laughing.
"Then let's go," said Tom.
"I'll walk you back to Judson, an' you can tell yer story there.
I ain't believing you and I ain't disbelieving you.
I'll let a bullet go smack into the first man that makes a move he shouldn't."
Here was a man they couldn't talk down.
He was probably a good shot, and ready to keep his threat.
If only they could get him at a disadvantage, and pull their revolvers before he could fire.
But such hopes were shattered a few minutes later when two horsemen pulled up before them.
They yelled when they saw the three prisoners.
"Good work, Alf!" said one of the men.
Hello there, Yanks."
"You're a Yank yourself," answered Tom hotly.
"What's that?"
"Don't believe 'em," said Alf.
"Why not wait until we get back to Judson?
Easier to do it there."
"All right," replied Alf.
I'm done up totin' this gun."
The procession started again.
It was nearly six o'clock when they reached the little town of Judson.
As they went down the main street, men and boys tagged along beside them, plying the guards with questions.
The guards waved them aside, and answered, "Don't know if it's them or not.
Picked 'em up a piece down the road."
They stopped at a two story frame building labeled "Hotel." One of the guards went in, then motioned to the others to bring the prisoners. Presently they found themselves in a big room, lighted by two lamps which hung from the ceiling.
The air was cloudy with smoke.
Instantly there was commotion.
Everyone commenced talking.
"You better keep your mouth shut," yelled Alf.
"No use talkin' like that, Alf," said the man addressed as Judge.
"Where did you find them?"
"Down the Ringgold road about five miles."
A murmur arose from the men.
"I can tell a Yank one mile off," boasted Alf.
"I can tell a fool just as far away as I can see you," interrupted Wilson.
"You...."
"Now, Alf, keep quiet," said the Judge.
"We were trying to get to Chattanooga," Tom replied, "We got started on the wrong road this morning."
Wilson broke in: "We tried to tell this wild man with his rifle that we were going to enlist in the army.
We've sneaked through the Union lines from Kentucky, and came across the Tennessee yesterday.
This fellow held us up and arrested us in the name of the law for something or other.
"That's what I arrested you for."
"All right," answered Wilson.
"We're arrested for burning bridges.
Whose bridges?
What bridges?"
"He's crazier than any Yank I've ever seen in my life," remarked Shadrack, nodding toward Alf.
"Search 'em," demanded Alf.
"Now, Alf," said the Judge, "you go on out to the kitchen and get something to eat.
Go on, now." He pushed Alf gently toward the door.
Alf, still protesting, disappeared reluctantly into the kitchen.
The Judge shook his head, laughing.
"That man acts a little crazy," said Tom.
"Oh, he's hot headed," said the Judge.
"He gets one idea and he can't think of anything else.
Lock the door, Joe, so we won't be disturbed.
Now let's search these men, and see what we can find."
Tom, Shadrack, and Wilson held their arms up, while the men dumped the contents of their pockets on a table.
Three revolvers, handkerchiefs, Confederate money....
They found nothing of importance.
"Now let's sit down here and talk this thing over," said the Judge.
"Where do you men say you come from!"
"From Fleming county kentucky," replied Wilson.
It was easy.
"Where did you come across the river?" demanded the Judge.
One of the men beside the Judge interrupted: "There aren't any ferries running up there."
"I know there aren't," answered Tom.
"A raft!" exclaimed the Judge.
"Yes, out of logs.
Look at my hands." He spread his hands out upon the table, palms up.
They had been torn and bruised by the logs he had yanked from the tender.
They were trying to pull me aboard, but every time they came to help me the raft tilted so that they had to crawl back."
"And finally," said Wilson, "I got down on my stomach and held to his wrists, while Shadrack sat on the other side and balanced us."
It was a good yarn, and they enlarged upon it.
"And so you're going to enlist, eh?" asked the Judge finally.
"We thought that Chattanooga would be a good place for us.
It's near Beauregard and we'll probably get into action pretty soon."
"It's not so near to Beauregard as you think," the Judge answered.
"The Yanks have taken a bite out of the railroad between there and Corinth."
"They have?" asked Tom.
"Is that what this man Alf was so excited about!"
"No-not exactly," replied the Judge.
"Some Yanks stole a train on the Georgia State Railroad yesterday and burned a bridge."
"Stole a train!"
"That's what they did!" He gave them a wild and inaccurate account of what Andrews' raiders had done.
"Judge, we're famished," said Wilson.
"Do you think we could get some supper here?"
"Joe, run out to the kitchen and see if mrs james can give these boys some dinner.
And tell Alf that I don't want to be disturbed."
Dinner came and they ate ravenously.
The Judge sat across the table from them, talking with some of his friends.
Obviously, the atmosphere had changed, now that Alf was no longer there to incite trouble, but they noticed that the Judge took good care to keep the revolvers out of their reach.
What did he think?
Did he believe their story?
Were they to be set free again, or would they be taken to Chattanooga?
"Now, boys," said the Judge as they pushed back from the table, "I want you to stay here in this hotel for the night.
Tomorrow you can go to Chattanooga and enlist."
It was a request which amounted to a command.
We need it."
"Joe, you show them their rooms.
I'll keep these for the present, if you don't mind." He motioned towards the revolvers.
"You can take the other things."
They nodded and said good night.
Joe handed them candles and they followed him upstairs.
"Two of you can sleep there."
"You and Shadrack take it," said Tom to Wilson.
"Good night."
They shook hands.
"Here's the other," said Joe, leading the way down the corridor.
He opened the window and looked down.
In the dim light which came from the room in which they had been sitting downstairs he could see a wagon drawn up beside the house; there was a stack of farm tools against the wagon, and the ground was strewn with objects he could not make out. Just a mixture of things which had been thrown there for want of a better place, he thought.
He leaned over and peered in, but he could see nothing.
Then he put his ear against the thin wall and listened.
Then he put his ear down and listened.
Alf had just returned to the room.
"Why not take 'em to Chattanooga now?" he was demanding.
"Now, Alf," said the Judge, "I'm taking care of this.
The men are upstairs going to bed, and Joe is in the hall on guard.
I'm going over to Chattanooga with them in the morning and turn them over to the authorities.
They can do whatever they think best."
"I'd take 'em over tonight," answered Alf.
The conversation, carried along upon those lines, lasted for half an hour, with the Judge dominating.
Tom left the hole, and continued his investigations.
But perhaps Joe might leave for a moment.
But first he barred the door with a chair.
The man who had entered announced: "They've captured two of the engine stealers over at Julian's Gap!
"What!" yelled the Judge.
"There you are!" Alf shouted triumphantly.
Tom jumped to his feet.
He could hear the boots pounding up the stairs.
To jump on that mess of farm tools below him would probably mean a broken leg.
Leaning far out, he reached around and pushed up the window of the next room, climbed in and closed his own window.
"Here we are, Marjorie." He went forward to meet her.
"Thanks a thousand times for all you've done.
I'm going on-so that they won't catch me here."
"I won't let you. Here!--Joe and Sam-put those things down and stay here.
Oh, Tom, they'll surely catch you if you try it." She clutched his arm as though to hold him from running into the woods.
"Please go back. Don't you see what it'll mean if I'm found near here?
You'll have to stay here, Tom.
I'll hide you in the house-Matty'll hide you over the kitchen.
Let me do that for you-let me take the risk.
Please!"
"No!
If they get me, they'll get me in the open.
No, Marjorie.
Go on back."
"Then take a horse from the stable.
Take my horse."
"Yours?"
"Yes.
Uncle gave him to me, and I give him to you.
You must...."
"But they'll know...."
"No, they won't...."
"But tomorrow when they find...."
"Matty's husband is the stableman.
He knows about you.
You must....
Joe!
Sam!
Run!"
They disappeared into the darkness.
Tom's protest was smothered under Marjorie's hand.
"Can you ride?
Are you strong enough?" she asked anxiously.
"Yes-if I once get my legs wrapped around him I can stick there.
"You're worth a dozen soldiers!" he exclaimed.
There was a moment of silence.
"Poor Tom!" she said softly.
"It's all so terrible, isn't it?
And so wonderful!
You men have left the whole South gasping at your bravery.
"But you-you're from the North."
"Yes," she answered.
"We don't talk about the war.
He just takes it for granted that I believe everything he believes.
I've been here two years now.
When mother and father were alive I lived in Albany.
I'm going back just as soon as I can.
There were more horses on the road.
"They're coming to join Kirby," she said.
"I heard him say that more men were coming.
When Uncle went down to let them in, I went to the head of the stairs to hear what they were saying.
Uncle took them into the dining room to give them something to eat and drink; then I dressed and stole down."
"But how did they know that I was in this part of the country?"
"There was something about a boat.
It was found ashore a few miles down the river, and there was a report from Chattanooga that the boat had been taken.
I didn't wait to hear it all.
Men are going out in all directions, and Kirby is taking the road to Wartrace.
If you're ahead of him they'll never catch you.
Star can run like the wind."
"Star?"
"My horse," she explained.
"He's a beautiful horse....
Oh, I wish they'd hurry." There was anguish in her voice.
"Why don't you go back to the house now!"
"Why not?
Please go back now."
Then, too...." She faltered and stopped.
"What?"
"You can't leave by the main road.
I'm going to show you the way through the woods.
Then there's a fence to jump.
I'm going to take Star over it."
It was useless to protest, for she became calm again and determined.
"I want to do it," she said.
"You've come to me for help, and it's my right to help you all I can.
And remember, I'll always be proud of it.
Oh, so proud!" She slipped her hand into his and they sat there quietly, straining to catch the first sounds of the negroes returning.
"There they are-General Marjorie," he said presently.
She jumped up and ran to the horse.
Tom could see her pressing her cheek to the horse's nose, stroking its head and neck.
"Go back now," she said to the negroes.
"Take everything with you.
If Matty is up, tell her that I'll be home in a few minutes."
"No, don't argue!
Hurry!
Laboriously, he did as he was told to do.
With Marjorie leading Star, they made their way through the woods.
Once she stopped and listened.
"They haven't started yet," she said.
A few minutes later she stopped again.
"There's the fence," she said.
"Let me mount now.
You hold Star while I fix the stirrups." He slid to the ground and stood there, while she measured the straps with her arms and fixed the buckles.
He could see her plainly now in the soft moonlight which was flooding the world.
Ahead of them was the black wall of the rail fence.
"Now," she said, "if you'll help me mount." He held his hands braced against his knees so that they formed a step for her.
She was up, adjusting herself to the saddle, stroking Star's neck, talking to him softly.
Once again he did as he was told to do.
"Put it on the top rail as a marker," she said, as she turned back for the run.
Tom spread the handkerchief on the fence-a tiny spot of white to guide Star over.
Then he watched her, as she retreated into the black background of the woods, his heart thumping so that it hurt.
Star's hoofs pounded upon the soft turf, then his body emerged from the shadows.
Tom could see Marjorie crouching, riding to his gait, holding him down for the jump.
He had cleared it by a foot.
Marjorie wheeled about, dismounted, and readjusted the stirrups.
"There!" she said.
"Now-now, go."
"I can never thank you," he began.
"Don't-please don't even try," she interrupted.
"Good luck once again. Good by, Star dear." She pressed her cheek against the horse's head. "Good by, Tom.
He mounted and for a moment they delayed the parting.
He reached down and took her hand.
"Always, little soldier, always," he said.
"Good by."
The sounds of shouting came from the Beecham's.
"They're starting.
Go straight ahead until you come to the road, then to your left."
He gave Star the reins, and above the beat of hoofs heard her call: "Good luck, Tom!" He glanced back and saw her standing there, her arms raised above her head.
Then, when they turned northward, Tom could feel all the strength of the fine, valiant animal he was riding.
It was a strength which seemed to flow into the road, which carried him forward in long, swinging leaps.
"Go it, Star!" he said.
"Go it, boy!"
He leaned forward, riding easily, peering ahead at the road.
Star was willing, but no horse could stand such a pace forever, so he reined in to a trot.
"They'll stop there, old fellow," he confided.
"You've shown them what a pair of hind hoofs look like."
Through each settlement he walked Star quietly, but always ready to throw himself forward, dig his heels into the horse's flanks and race away.
An hour passed ... two hours ... three hours.
The first light of dawn found him a mile south of Manchester.
"Guess we'd better begin to step lively, Star," he said, reaching forward and stroking the horse's neck.
Star snorted and shook his head.
They trotted around a bend in the road.
Ahead of them Tom distinguished a man who had dismounted and was standing beside his horse.
"Get ready, boy," he whispered, reining in slightly.
"Hey!
You!" called the man.
"None of your business!" he replied.
Then with his hat he slapped the man's horse on the head.
He whooped, and dug his heels into Star's flanks.
As they shot forward, he saw the other horse rear up, pawing the air.
Tom, flat against Star's neck, with the black mane whipping his face, sped down the road-past the spot where they had met Andrews that first day of the raid, past the Widow Fry's and down the one street of Manchester at a full gallop.
"Keep it up, Star!" he urged.
"Go it, Star!
We're almost there, old boy.
His neck was outstretched and his head was thrust forward as though he were devouring the road.
Tom did not look back, but he cast out short, broken sentences to console his pursuer.
"Huh!
Race me-on that hunk o'--dog meat.
We'll race-anything that-wears four legs.
Won't we-Star?
Huh!"
Presently he eased Star's gait, for the horse was beginning to breath too heavily.
"Wonder how much ground we covered then.
Must be pretty close...."
It was a cry that brought a yell of exultation to Tom's lips.
There was no mistaking it.
No civilian could say halt in that tone.
Tom pulled on the reins and Star planted his feet; they went sliding past the Sentry with his rifle glinting in the moonlight.
"Halt there!" came the second warning as Star came to a stop.
"Put your hands up!"
Tom dropped the reins and raised his hands.
Star, almost winded, seemed propped upon his legs, rather than standing upon them.
His head drooped and each breath came as a great heave.
"Friend," answered Tom.
"Password?"
"Haven't got it.
I'm...."
BOOK thirty four.
SANDS AT SEVENTY
Mannahatta
Paumanok
To those who've fail'd, in aspiration vast, To unnam'd soldiers fallen in front on the lead, To calm, devoted engineers-to over ardent travelers-to pilots on their ships, To many a lofty song and picture without recognition-I'd rear laurel cover'd monument, High, high above the rest-To all cut off before their time, Possess'd by some strange spirit of fire, Quench'd by an early death.
A Carol Closing Sixty Nine
The Bravest Soldiers
A Font of Type
As I Sit Writing Here
My Canary Bird
Approaching, nearing, curious, Thou dim, uncertain spectre-bringest thou life or death? Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier? Or placid skies and sun?
The First Dandelion
Simple and fresh and fair from winter's close emerging, As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been, Forth from its sunny nook of shelter'd grass-innocent, golden, calm as the dawn, The spring's first dandelion shows its trustful face.
America
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, Chair'd in the adamant of Time.
Memories
How sweet the silent backward tracings! The wanderings as in dreams-the meditation of old times resumed --their loves, joys, persons, voyages.
After the dazzle of day is gone, Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars; After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band, Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.
Abraham Lincoln, Born february twelfth eighteen o nine
To day, from each and all, a breath of prayer-a pulse of thought, To memory of Him-to birth of Him.
Out of May's Shows Selected
Apple orchards, the trees all cover'd with blossoms; Wheat fields carpeted far and near in vital emerald green; The eternal, exhaustless freshness of each early morning; The yellow, golden, transparent haze of the warm afternoon sun; The aspiring lilac bushes with profuse purple or white flowers.
Halcyon Days
[three] You Tides with Ceaseless Swell
you power that does this work! You unseen force, centripetal, centrifugal, through space's spread, Rapport of sun, moon, earth, and all the constellations, What are the messages by you from distant stars to us?
what Sirius'? what Capella's? What central heart-and you the pulse-vivifies all?
what boundless aggregate of all? What subtle indirection and significance in you?
what clue to all in you?
How they sweep down and out!
how they mutter! Poets unnamed-artists greatest of any, with cherish'd lost designs, Love's unresponse-a chorus of age's complaints-hope's last words, Some suicide's despairing cry, Away to the boundless waste, and never again return.
On to oblivion then! On, on, and do your part, ye burying, ebbing tide! On for your time, ye furious debouche!
Proudly the flood comes in, shouting, foaming, advancing, Long it holds at the high, with bosom broad outswelling, All throbs, dilates-the farms, woods, streets of cities-workmen at work, Mainsails, topsails, jibs, appear in the offing-steamers' pennants of smoke-and under the forenoon sun, Freighted with human lives, gaily the outward bound, gaily the inward bound, Flaunting from many a spar the flag I love.
[seven] By That Long Scan of Waves
[eight] Then Last Of All
Then last of all, caught from these shores, this hill, Of you O tides, the mystic human meaning: Only by law of you, your swell and ebb, enclosing me the same, The brain that shapes, the voice that chants this song.
Election Day, November, eighteen eighty four
it serves to purify-while the heart pants, life glows: These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships, Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.
With Husky Haughty Lips, O Sea!
Death of General Grant
Red Jacket (From Aloft)
Washington's Monument February, eighteen eighty five
Of That Blithe Throat of Thine
Broadway
To Get the Final Lilt of Songs
To get the final lilt of songs, To penetrate the inmost lore of poets-to know the mighty ones, Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakespere, Tennyson, Emerson; To diagnose the shifting delicate tints of love and pride and doubt- to truly understand, To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance price, Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences.
Old Salt Kossabone
Yonnondio
Life
Small the theme of my Chant, yet the greatest-namely, One's Self- a simple, separate person.
That, for the use of the New World, I sing. Man's physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing.
The Female equally with the Male, I sing. Nor cease at the theme of One's Self.
True Conquerors
The United States to Old World Critics
Here first the duties of to day, the lessons of the concrete, Wealth, order, travel, shelter, products, plenty; As of the building of some varied, vast, perpetual edifice, Whence to arise inevitable in time, the towering roofs, the lamps, The solid planted spires tall shooting to the stars.
Thanks in Old Age
Thine eyes, ears-all thy best attributes-all that takes cognizance of natural beauty, Shall wake and fill.
While not the past forgetting, To day, at least, contention sunk entire-peace, brotherhood uprisen; For sign reciprocal our Northern, Southern hands, Lay on the graves of all dead soldiers, North or South, (Nor for the past alone-for meanings to the future,) Wreaths of roses and branches of palm.
Stronger Lessons
Have you learn'd lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learn'd great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?
A Prairie Sunset
Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn, The earth's whole amplitude and Nature's multiform power consign'd for once to colors; The light, the general air possess'd by them-colors till now unknown, No limit, confine-not the Western sky alone-the high meridian- North, South, all, Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.
What of the future?)
Twilight
Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone
The Dead Emperor
As the Greek's Signal Flame
The Dismantled Ship
Now Precedent Songs, Farewell
Beat!
Drums! or To the Leaven'd Soil they Trod, Or Captain!
My Captain!
After a week of physical anguish, Unrest and pain, and feverish heat, Toward the ending day a calm and lull comes on, Three hours of peace and soothing rest of brain.
Old Age's Lambent Peaks
After the Supper and Talk
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.
COMING TO AN UNDERSTANDING.
He went straight to his room, at his mother's old house, and did not breakfast with the Rowlands.
He knocked at their door when breakfast was finished, and sent to request Mrs Rowland's presence in the drawing room.
There was all due politeness in Enderby's way of inducing his sister to sit down, and of asking after the health of herself and her children.
"We are all wonderfully improved, thank you, brother.
Mr Walcot's care will be new life to us."
"Whose care?"
"Mr Walcot's.
We brought him with us last night; and he is to go at once into my mother's house.
He is a surgeon of the first degree of eminence.
I think myself extremely fortunate in having secured him. The chief reason, however, of my inviting him here was, that my poor mother might be properly taken care of.
Now that she will be in good hands, I shall feel that I have done my duty."
"And, pray, does Rowland know of your having brought this stranger here?"
"Of course.
Mr Walcot is our guest till his own house can be prepared for him.
As I tell you, he arrived with me, last night."
"And now let me tell you, sister, that either Mr Walcot is not a man of honour, or you have misinformed him of the true state of affairs here: I suspect the latter to be the case.
It is of a piece with the whole of your conduct, towards Mr Hope-conduct unpardonable for its untruthfulness, and hateful for its malice."
Mr Hope must have justice, and you have no one to blame but yourself that justice must be done at your expense.
I give you fair notice that I shall discharge my duty fully, in the painful circumstances in which you have contrived to place all your family."
"Do what you will, Philip.
My first duty is to take care of the health of my parent and my children; and if, by the same means, Deerbrook is provided with a medical man worthy of its confidence, all Deerbrook will thank me."
"Ignorant and stupid as Deerbrook is about many things, Priscilla, it is not so wicked as to thank any one for waging a cowardly war against the good, for disparaging the able and accomplished, and fabricating and circulating injurious stories against people too magnanimous for the slanderer to understand."
"I do not know what you mean, Philip."
You do not know that he and his wife are not happy.
You know that Hope is an able and most humane man in his profession, and that he does not steal dead bodies.
You know the falsehood of the whole set of vulgar stories that you have put into circulation against him.
You know, also, that my mother has entire confidence in him, and that it will go near to break her heart to have him dismissed for any one else.
This is the meaning of what I say.
As for what I mean to do-it is this.
I shall speak to Mr Walcot at once, before his intention to settle here is known."
"You are too late, my dear sir.
"So much the worse for you, Priscilla.
I shall explain the whole of Hope's case to Mr Walcot, avoiding, if possible, all exposure of you-."
"Oh, pray do not disturb yourself about that.
Mr Walcot knows me very well.
I am not afraid."
If this gentleman be honourable, he will decline attending my mother, and go away more willingly than he came.
"You take the tone of defiance, I see, Philip.
I have not the slightest objection.
I give you peremptory warning, leaving you opportunity to retrieve yourself, to repair the mischief you have done, and to alleviate the misery which I see is coming upon you."
"You are very good: but I know what I am about, and I shall proceed in my own way.
I mean to get rid of these Hopes; and, perhaps, you may be surprised to see how soon I succeed."
"The Hopes shall remain as long as they wish to stay, if truth can prevail against falsehood.
I am sorry for you, if you cannot endure the presence of neighbours whose whole minds and conduct are noble and humane, and known by you to be so.
I would have you look to it."
"Is your sermon ended?
"What I have to say is not finished.
"I said so, because it is true."
The cool assurance with which she said this was too much for Enderby's gravity.
He burst out a laughing.
"If not precisely true when I said it, it was sure to be so soon; which is just the same thing.
I mean that it shall be true.
I have set my heart upon your marrying, and upon your marrying Mary Bruce.
I know she would like it, and-"
"Stop there!
I will not have you take liberties with her name to me; and this is not the first time I have told you so.
It is not true that she would like it-no more true than many other things that you have said: and if you were to repeat it till night, it would make no sort of impression upon me.
Miss Bruce knows little, and cares less, about me; and beware how you say to the contrary!--And now for the plain fact.
I am engaged elsewhere."
"Yes; I am."
"You will marry no one but Mary Bruce at last, you will see, whatever you may think now."
"I dare say you are?
Margaret Ibbotson!
"I hope you will all make yourselves happy with your greatness and your beauty: for these friends of yours seem likely to have little else left to comfort themselves with."
"They will be happy with their greatness and loveliness, sister; for it is Heaven's decree that they should.
Why will you not throw off the restraint of bad feelings, and do magnanimous justice to this family, and, having thus opened and freed your mind, glory in their goodness- the next best thing to being as good as they?
You have power of mind to do this: the very force with which you persist in persecuting them shows that you have power for better things.
Believe me, they are full of the spirit of forgiveness.
Do but try-"
"Thank you.
If they forgive me for anything, it shall be for my power."
"That is not for you to determine, happily.
To what extent they forgive is between God and themselves.
You lie under their forgiveness, whether you will or not.
I own, Priscilla, I would fain bestow on Margaret a sister whom she might respect rather than forgive."
"Very few; for your sake, scarcely any.
You must now get out of the scrape in your own way."
"I am glad you have told so few people of your entanglement.
I shall deny the engagement everywhere."
"That will hardly avail against my testimony."
"It will, when you are gone.
Indeed, I think I have the majority with me now, as the events of last night pretty plainly show."
Oh, Priscilla, I am unwilling to give you up!
Let me hope, that the pride, the insane pride of this morning, is but the reaction of your internal suffering from witnessing the results of your influence in the outrages of last night.
Confide this to me now, and give yourself such ease as you yet can."
"Thank you: but you are quite mistaken.
I was extremely glad to arrive when I did.
It satisfied me as to the necessity of getting rid of these people; and it proved to Mr Walcot, as I observed to him at the time, how much he was wanted here.
Now, if you have nothing more to say to me, I must go.
Philip fixed his eyes upon her with an earnestness from which, for one moment, she shrank; but she instantly rallied, and returned him a stare which lasted till she reached the door.
"There is something almost sublime in audacity like this," thought he. "But it cannot last.
It comes from internal torture-a thing as necessarily temporary as faith (the source of the other kind of strength) is durable.
Not the slightest compunction has she for having caused the misery she knows of: and not a whit would she relent, if she could become aware (which she never shall) of what she made Margaret suffer.
No; not the only comfort.
She does not suffer from these things as she did.
Now for Mr Walcot!
I must catch him as he comes out of church, and see what I can make of him.
If he is an honourable man, all may turn out well.
He had arrived within sight, and fortunately within rifle range of the spot, at that critical moment when the jaguar was preparing to spring.
Fortunate for Zeb, that the mustanger's knife had been left upon land. As it was, he came near being throttled; and only after throwing aside his rifle, and employing all his strength, was he able to protect himself against the unlooked for assault.
A struggle ensued, which ended in Zeb flinging his colossal arms around the young Irishman, and bearing him bodily to the bank.
It was not all over.
The hunter suspected his intent.
Standing over six feet, he saw the bloody knife blade lying along the cloak.
It was for that the mustanger was making!
"Speel up thur, Pheelum!" shouted he.
Still the struggle was not over.
The Galwegian, believing it so, began uttering a series of lugubrious cries-the "keen" of Connemara.
He's no more dead than you air-only fented.
No," he continued, after stooping down and giving a short examination, "I kin see no wound worth makin' a muss about.
What kin they be?
They air more like the claws o' a tom cat.
The hunter had all the talking to himself.
Zeb took no notice of these grotesque demonstrations; but, once more bending over the prostrate form, proceeded to complete the examination already begun.
Becoming satisfied that there was no serious wound, he rose to his feet, and commenced taking stock of the odd articles around him.
He had already noticed the Panama hat, that still adhered to the head of the mustanger; and a strange thought at seeing it there, had passed through his mind.
It was possible he might have seen fit to change the fashion.
It was not from any suspicion of its being honestly in possession of him now wearing it that the hunter stooped down, and took it off with the design to examine it.
"HENRY POINDEXTER."
The cloak now came under his notice.
"Hats, heads, an everythin'.
By the 'tarnal thur's somethin' goed astray!
The hunter seemed to cogitate on how he was to effect this purpose.
How air it to be done?
Two saplings of at least ten feet in length were cut from the chapparal, and trimmed clear of twigs.
In the mode of using it, it more resembled the latter than the former: since he who was to be borne upon it, again deliriously raging, had to be strapped to the trestles!
Unlike the ordinary stretcher, it was not carried between two men; but a man and a mare-the mare at the head, the man bearing behind.
It was he of Connemara who completed the ill matched team.
He was taking it, or rather getting it-Zeb having appointed himself to the easier post of conductor.
The idea was not altogether original.
In strong but tender arms the wounded man was transferred from the stretcher to the skin couch, on which he had been accustomed to repose.
He was unconscious of where he was, and knew not the friendly faces bending over him.
He was experiencing an interval of calm.
But there were wild words upon his lips that forbade it-suggesting only serious thoughts.
It was not from any unfaithfulness on the part of the foster brother, that he seemed thus to disregard his duty; but simply because Zeb had requested him to lie down-telling him there was no occasion for both to remain awake.
And alone he sate listening to them-throughout the live long night.
He heard speeches that surprised him, and names that did not.
But there was another name also often pronounced-with speeches less pleasant to his ear.
It was the name of Louise's brother.
The speeches were disjointed-incongruous, and almost unintelligible.
CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO.
After getting clear of the enclosures of Casa del Corvo, the hunter headed his animal up stream-in the direction of the Port and town.
It was the former he intended to reach-which he did in a ride of less than a quarter of an hour.
Commonly it took him three to accomplish this distance; but on this occasion he was in an unusual state of excitement, and he made speed to correspond.
The old mare could go fast enough when required-that is when Zeb required her and he had a mode of quickening her speed-known only to himself, and only employed upon extraordinary occasions.
It simply consisted in drawing the bowie knife from his belt, and inserting about in inch of its blade into the mare's hip, close to the termination of the spine.
On the present occasion there was no necessity for such excessive speed; and the Fort was reached after fifteen minutes' sharp trotting.
The old hunter had no difficulty in obtaining an interview with the military chief of Fort Inge.
Looked upon by the officers as a sort of privileged character, he had the entree at all times, and could go in without countersign, or any of the other formalities usually demanded from a stranger.
From his first words, the latter appeared to have been expecting him.
Glad to see you so soon.
Have you made any discovery in this queer affair?
From your quick return, I can almost say you have.
What have you learnt?"
"In welcome.
What is it you have to say?"
"I have.
You speak quite truly about that, Mr Stump.
And as to the power, I have that, too, in a certain sense.
I can go so far as to hinder any open violation of the law; but I cannot go against the law itself."
"Who?"
You may speak your mind freely."
"That's my own belief.
You know it already.
Have you nothing more to communicate?"
"So far as I am concerned, I'm quite contented to wait for your return; the more willingly that I know you are acting on the side of justice. But what would you have me do?"
The rest will be all right."
"How long?
You know that it must come on according to the usual process in the Criminal Court.
But there is a party, who are crying out for vengeance; and he may be ruled by them."
Kin ye promise me three days?"
"Three days!
For what?"
"Afore the trial kims on."
Even if the judge of the Supreme Court should require him to be delivered up inside that time, I can make objections that will delay his being taken from the guard house.
I shall undertake to do that."
Don't ask me who.
Innocent or guilty, for that time he shall be protected."
Mr Stump, you may rely upon my pledged word."
With this complimentary leave taking the hunter strode out of head quarters, and made his way back to the place where he had left his old mare.
Once more mounting her, he rode rapidly away.
On reaching the outskirts of Poindexter's plantation, he left the low lands of the Leona bottom, and spurred his old mare 'gainst the steep slope ascending to the upper plain.
He reached it, at a point where the chapparal impinged upon the prairie, and there reined up under the shade of a mezquit tree.
He did not alight, nor show any sign of an intention to do so; but sate in the saddle, stooped forward, his eyes turned upon the ground, in that vacant gaze which denotes reflection.
But it want.
He looked round, as if in search of some one to answer the interrogatory.
Having advanced about a mile in the direction of the Nueces river, he abruptly changed his course; but with a coolness that told of a predetermined purpose.
It was now nearly due west, and at right angles to the different trails going towards the Rio Grande.
There was a simultaneous change in his bearing-in the expression of his features-and his attitude in the saddle.
No longer looking listlessly around, he sate stooping forward, his eye carefully scanning the sward, over a wide space on both sides of the path he was pursuing.
Nothing loth, the "critter" came to a stand; Zeb, at the same time, flinging himself out of the saddle.
Leaving the old mare to ruminate upon this eccentric proceeding, he advanced a pace or two, and dropped down upon his knees.
Then drawing the piece of curved iron out of his capacious pocket, he applied it to a hoof print conspicuously outlined in the turf.
It fitted.
"Fits!" he exclaimed, with a triumphant gesticulation, "Dog goned if it don't!"
thirteen
THE REBEL
They proceeded to a near by park, where a game of aerial punt ball was already in progress.
Billie took great interest in the darting play of the little flylike machines, the action of the mechanical catapults, and the ease with which the twelve inch ball was usually caught in the baskets on the machines' prows.
But Fort was content for a while to merely watch Mona, who was driving.
Finally the conversation made an opening for him to say, "I asked your mother, Mona, what she thought of me as a prospective son in law."
Didn't she?"
Then his boldness returned.
And now that I've done it-do you love me well enough to marry me, Mona?"
"I think-I rather think I like you too well to marry you.
You're too well satisfied with yourself.
Fort looked as though he would, with an ounce more provocation, take her in his arms and say something to get quick results.
But he didn't.
"I see," pretty soberly, for him.
Like Powart?" suddenly.
"It's only fair to say that I've given him an ultimatum, too." She hinted at what she had told the chairman.
"I said nothing about-you."
Mona gave him a glance or two, and Billie could see a startling change come over him.
"This makes everything very different!" he declared; and even his voice was altered.
There was a determined, purposeful ring about it which was altogether unlike his usual reckless tones.
"Clearly, I should tell him myself.
After that it is up to me!"
Next instant he had thrown off his seriousness, and for the remainder of the flight was his former jovial self.
He seemed a trifle ashamed, however, of his old lightheartedness; so much so that Mona warned him not to tamper too much with his disposition.
"I like it too well, boy."
"I have the honor to inform you," said Fort, coming straight to the point, "that Miss Mona has seen fit to encourage my suit.
I thought it only right that you should know."
"You are considerate," he stated with the faintest trace of sarcasm. "Let me call your attention to the fact that, because of the position which recent events have forced upon me, it is quite within my power to dispose of your opposition"--significantly.
"Quite so!
"On second thoughts, however, you can't afford to be other than considerate.
If anything happens to me now, Miss Mona will naturally think of you; for she knows I have come here!"
However, he spoke with his usual coolness and certainty.
I take it"--evenly-"that you hope to accomplish something-big?"
Fort bowed.
For the first time Powart laughed.
"mr
Fort dropped his seriousness for an instant.
Thanks for the exemption.
In return, I assure you that whatever I do will be as truly in the interests of the people as what you have done."
A few minutes later Billie, through Mona, knew that Fort was reporting progress.
He did it by telephone.
"Thought you'd like to know," he finished.
"Hope I didn't rouse you out of bed."
It was night in Mona's part of the world, and Billie had come upon the girl just as she was preparing for bed.
"I was just about to retire.
Good luck"--another yawn-"and good-"
"mr
Fort!" sharply.
"Powart's declaration of war on Alma is a frame up!
Never mind how I happen to know; it is true; they are not planning to invade us at all!
He trumped up this affair in order to make himself dictator!"
"What!"
The athlete was astounded.
"Are you sure of this, Mona?"
The girl's manner had changed again.
"I beg your pardon?" she inquired, vastly confused.
She was still bewildered.
"I do not!" Then gathering her poise again, "What did I say?"
"You said-"
"Mona, you told me something which could have come only through a supernatural agency.
I am sure of it, from your manner.
You were temporarily possessed." He paused again.
"It is not impossible.
I have heard of such things before.
I was sleepy, and-the point is, what did I say?" she demanded.
What I learned gives me a great advantage over Powart; that's all I can say.
"Come again any time you like."
Which Fort did, the very next day.
"Then you can tell me.
Are the men entirely content with their treatment?"
It was the man eater, cautiously stalking us.
To my dismay, however, it was not there.
The terror of the sudden charge had proved too much for Mahina, and both he and the carbine were by this time well on their way up a tree.
CHAPTER ten
As the piers and abutments progressed in height, the question of how to lift the large stones into their positions had to be solved.
These were bolted together at the top, while the other ends were fixed at a distance of about ten feet apart in a large block of wood. This contrivance acted capitally, and by manipulation of ropes and pulleys the heavy stones were swung into position quickly and without difficulty, so that in a very short time the masonry of the bridge was completed.
It was next "jacked" up from the trucks, which were hauled away empty, the temporary bridge was dismantled, and the girder finally lowered gently into position.
When the last girder was thus successfully placed, no time was lost in linking up the permanent way, and very soon I had the satisfaction of seeing the first train cross the finished work.
Curiously enough, only a day or so after the bridge had been completed and the intermediate cribs cleared away, a tremendous rain storm broke over the country.
On it came, and with it an additional bank of stormy looking water.
I confess that I witnessed the whole occurrence with a thrill of pride.
These animals did a great deal of damage to the herds of sheep and goats which were kept to supply the commissariat, and there was always great rejoicing when a capture was made in one of the many traps that were laid for them.
I happened at the time to have a flock of about thirty sheep and goats which I kept for food and for milk, and which were secured at sundown in a grass hut at one corner of my boma.
One particularly dark night we were startled by a tremendous commotion in this shed, but as this was before the man eaters were killed, no one dared stir out to investigate the cause of the disturbance.
He had not eaten one of the flock, but had killed them all out of pure love of destruction.
As we approached the shed, the leopard made a frantic spring in our direction as far as the chain would allow him, and this so frightened the chaukidar that he fled in terror, leaving me in utter darkness.
The night was as black as had been the previous one, and I could see absolutely nothing; but I knew the general direction in which to fire and accordingly emptied my magazine at the beast.
As far as I could make out, he kept dodging in and out through the broken wall of the goat house; but in a short time my shots evidently told, as his struggles ceased and all was still.
I called out that he was dead, and at once everyone in the boma turned out, bringing all the lanterns in the place.
Whereupon he levelled his revolver at the dead leopard, and shutting his eyes tightly, fired four shots in rapid succession.
I of course assented to this proposal, and in a very few minutes the skin had been neatly taken off, and the famishing natives began a ravenous meal on the raw flesh.
Wild dogs are also very destructive, and often caused great losses among our sheep and goats.
He was a fine looking beast, bigger than a collie, with jet black hair and a white tipped bushy tail.
Pierre was shown into the large, brightly lit dining room; a few minutes later he heard footsteps and Princess Mary entered with Natasha.
Natasha was calm, though a severe and grave expression had again settled on her face.
They all three of them now experienced that feeling of awkwardness which usually follows after a serious and heartfelt talk.
It is impossible to go back to the same conversation, to talk of trifles is awkward, and yet the desire to speak is there and silence seems like affectation.
The footmen drew back the chairs and pushed them up again.
"They even tell me wonders I myself never dreamed of!
Stepan Stepanych also instructed me how I ought to tell of my experiences.
In general I have noticed that it is very easy to be an interesting man (I am an interesting man now); people invite me out and tell me all about myself."
Natasha smiled and was on the point of speaking.
"We have been told," Princess Mary interrupted her, "that you lost two millions in Moscow.
Is that true?"
"But I am three times as rich as before," returned Pierre.
"What I have certainly gained is freedom," he began seriously, but did not continue, noticing that this theme was too egotistic.
"No," answered Pierre, evidently not considering awkward the meaning Princess Mary had given to his words.
We were not an exemplary couple," he added quickly, glancing at Natasha and noticing on her face curiosity as to how he would speak of his wife, "but her death shocked me terribly.
I am very, very sorry for her," he concluded, and was pleased to notice a look of glad approval on Natasha's face.
"Yes, and so you are once more an eligible bachelor," said Princess Mary.
Pierre suddenly flushed crimson and for a long time tried not to look at Natasha.
When he ventured to glance her way again her face was cold, stern, and he fancied even contemptuous.
Pierre laughed.
"No, not once!
Supper was over, and Pierre who at first declined to speak about his captivity was gradually led on to do so.
At first he spoke with the amused and mild irony now customary with him toward everybody and especially toward himself, but when he came to describe the horrors and sufferings he had witnessed he was unconsciously carried away and began speaking with the suppressed emotion of a man re experiencing in recollection strong impressions he has lived through.
Princess Mary with a gentle smile looked now at Pierre and now at Natasha.
In the whole narrative she saw only Pierre and his goodness.
Natasha, leaning on her elbow, the expression of her face constantly changing with the narrative, watched Pierre with an attention that never wandered-evidently herself experiencing all that he described.
Not only her look, but her exclamations and the brief questions she put, showed Pierre that she understood just what he wished to convey.
It was clear that she understood not only what he said but also what he wished to, but could not, express in words.
One was snatched out before my eyes... and there were women who had their things snatched off and their earrings torn out..." he flushed and grew confused.
Pierre continued.
When he spoke of the execution he wanted to pass over the horrible details, but Natasha insisted that he should not omit anything.
Pierre began to tell about Karataev, but paused.
Then he added:
"No, you can't understand what I learned from that illiterate man-that simple fellow."
"Where is he?"
"They killed him almost before my eyes."
And Pierre, his voice trembling continually, went on to tell of the last days of their retreat, of Karataev's illness and his death.
He told of his adventures as he had never yet recalled them.
She caught the unfinished word in its flight and took it straight into her open heart, divining the secret meaning of all Pierre's mental travail.
She saw the possibility of love and happiness between Natasha and Pierre, and the first thought of this filled her heart with gladness.
It was three o'clock in the morning.
Natasha continued to look at him intently with bright, attentive, and animated eyes, as if trying to understand something more which he had perhaps left untold.
Pierre in shamefaced and happy confusion glanced occasionally at her, and tried to think what to say next to introduce a fresh subject.
Princess Mary was silent.
It occurred to none of them that it was three o'clock and time to go to bed.
While there is life there is happiness.
There is much, much before us.
I say this to you," he added, turning to Natasha.
Pierre looked intently at her.
"Yes, and nothing more," said Natasha.
"It's not true, not true!" cried Pierre.
"I am not to blame for being alive and wishing to live-nor you either."
Suddenly Natasha bent her head, covered her face with her hands, and began to cry.
"What is it, Natasha?" said Princess Mary.
"Nothing, nothing." She smiled at Pierre through her tears.
"Good night!
Pierre rose and took his leave.
They talked of what Pierre had told them.
Princess Mary did not express her opinion of Pierre nor did Natasha speak of him.
"Well, good night, Mary!" said Natasha.
Princess Mary sighed deeply and thereby acknowledged the justice of Natasha's remark, but she did not express agreement in words.
"It did me so much good to tell all about it today.
"I am sure he really loved him.
That is why I told him...
Was it all right?" she added, suddenly blushing.
"To tell Pierre?
Oh, yes.
What a splendid man he is!" said Princess Mary.
"Do you know, Mary..." Natasha suddenly said with a mischievous smile such as Princess Mary had not seen on her face for a long time, "he has somehow grown so clean, smooth, and fresh-as if he had just come out of a Russian bath; do you understand?
Out of a moral bath.
Isn't it true?"
"Yes," replied Princess Mary.
"With a short coat and his hair cropped; just as if, well, just as if he had come straight from the bath... Papa used to..."
"Yes, and yet he is quite different.
They say men are friends when they are quite different.
That must be true.
"Yes, but he's wonderful."
"Well, good night," said Natasha.
CHAPTER eighteen
It was a long time before Pierre could fall asleep that night.
He was thinking of Prince Andrew, of Natasha, and of their love, at one moment jealous of her past, then reproaching himself for that feeling.
It was already six in the morning and he still paced up and down the room.
"Well, what's to be done if it cannot be avoided?
What's to be done?
Evidently it has to be so," said he to himself, and hastily undressing he got into bed, happy and agitated but free from hesitation or indecision.
"Strange and impossible as such happiness seems, I must do everything that she and I may be man and wife," he told himself.
A few days previously Pierre had decided to go to Petersburg on the Friday.
When he awoke on the Thursday, Savelich came to ask him about packing for the journey.
"What, to Petersburg?
What is Petersburg?
Who is there in Petersburg?" he asked involuntarily, though only to himself.
"Why?
But perhaps I shall go.
What a good fellow he is and how attentive, and how he remembers everything," he thought, looking at Savelich's old face, "and what a pleasant smile he has!"
"Well, Savelich, do you still not wish to accept your freedom?" Pierre asked him.
"What's the good of freedom to me, your excellency?
We lived under the late count-the kingdom of heaven be his!--and we have lived under you too, without ever being wronged."
"And your children?"
With such masters one can live."
"But what about my heirs?" said Pierre.
"Supposing I suddenly marry... it might happen," he added with an involuntary smile.
Too soon or too late... it is terrible!"
"No, I'll put it off for a bit.
Shall I have a talk with him and see what he thinks?" Pierre reflected.
"No, another time."
At breakfast Pierre told the princess, his cousin, that he had been to see Princess Mary the day before and had there met-"Whom do you think?
Natasha Rostova!"
"Do you know her?" asked Pierre.
"I have seen the princess," she replied.
It would be a very good thing for the Rostovs, they are said to be utterly ruined."
"I heard about that affair of hers at the time.
It was a great pity."
"No, she either doesn't understand or is pretending," thought Pierre.
"Better not say anything to her either."
The princess too had prepared provisions for Pierre's journey.
"How kind they all are," thought Pierre.
And all for me!"
On the same day the Chief of Police came to Pierre, inviting him to send a representative to the Faceted Palace to recover things that were to be returned to their owners that day.
"And this man too," thought Pierre, looking into the face of the Chief of Police.
"What a fine, good looking officer and how kind.
Fancy bothering about such trifles now!
And they actually say he is not honest and takes bribes.
What nonsense!
Besides, why shouldn't he take bribes?
That's the way he was brought up, and everybody does it.
But what a kind, pleasant face and how he smiles as he looks at me."
Pierre went to Princess Mary's to dinner.
As he drove through the streets past the houses that had been burned down, he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins.
The picturesqueness of the chimney stacks and tumble down walls of the burned out quarters of the town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of the Rhine and the Colosseum.
Let's see what will come of it!"
She was in the same black dress with soft folds and her hair was done the same way as the day before, yet she was quite different.
Had she been like this when he entered the day before he could not for a moment have failed to recognize her.
A bright questioning light shone in her eyes, and on her face was a friendly and strangely roguish expression.
Pierre dined with them and would have spent the whole evening there, but Princess Mary was going to vespers and Pierre left the house with her.
Next day he came early, dined, and stayed the whole evening.
Though Princess Mary and Natasha were evidently glad to see their visitor and though all Pierre's interest was now centered in that house, by the evening they had talked over everything and the conversation passed from one trivial topic to another and repeatedly broke off.
He stayed so long that Princess Mary and Natasha exchanged glances, evidently wondering when he would go.
Pierre noticed this but could not go.
He felt uneasy and embarrassed, but sat on because he simply could not get up and take his leave.
Princess Mary, foreseeing no end to this, rose first, and complaining of a headache began to say good night.
"So you are going to Petersburg tomorrow?" she asked.
"Yes... no.. to Petersburg?
Tomorrow-but I won't say good by yet.
I will call round in case you have any commissions for me," said he, standing before Princess Mary and turning red, but not taking his departure.
Natasha gave him her hand and went out.
Princess Mary on the other hand instead of going away sank into an armchair, and looked sternly and intently at him with her deep, radiant eyes.
The weariness she had plainly shown before had now quite passed off.
When Natasha left the room Pierre's confusion and awkwardness immediately vanished and were replaced by eager excitement.
He quickly moved an armchair toward Princess Mary.
"Princess, help me!
Can I hope?
Princess, my dear friend, listen!
But I want to be a brother to her.
No, not that, I don't, I can't..."
He paused and rubbed his face and eyes with his hands.
"I don't know when I began to love her, but I have loved her and her alone all my life, and I love her so that I cannot imagine life without her.
I cannot propose to her at present, but the thought that perhaps she might someday be my wife and that I may be missing that possibility... that possibility... is terrible.
Tell me, can I hope?
Tell me what I am to do, dear princess!" he added after a pause, and touched her hand as she did not reply.
"This is what I will say.
Princess Mary stopped.
She was going to say that to speak of love was impossible, but she stopped because she had seen by the sudden change in Natasha two days before that she would not only not be hurt if Pierre spoke of his love, but that it was the very thing she wished for.
"But what am I to do?"
"Leave it to me," said Princess Mary.
"I know..."
Pierre was looking into Princess Mary's eyes.
"Well?...
Well?..." he said.
"I know that she loves... will love you," Princess Mary corrected herself.
Before her words were out, Pierre had sprung up and with a frightened expression seized Princess Mary's hand.
"What makes you think so?
You think I may hope?
You think...?"
"Write to her parents, and leave it to me.
I wish it to happen and my heart tells me it will."
"No, it cannot be!
How happy I am!
But it can't be....
How happy I am!
No, it can't be!" Pierre kept saying as he kissed Princess Mary's hands.
"Go to Petersburg, that will be best.
And I will write to you," she said.
"To Petersburg?
Go there?
But I may come again tomorrow?"
Next day Pierre came to say good by.
Natasha was less animated than she had been the day before; but that day as he looked at her Pierre sometimes felt as if he was vanishing and that neither he nor she existed any longer, that nothing existed but happiness.
"Is it possible?
When on saying good by he took her thin, slender hand, he could not help holding it a little longer in his own.
"Good bye, Count," she said aloud.
"I shall look forward very much to your return," she added in a whisper.
And these simple words, her look, and the expression on her face which accompanied them, formed for two months the subject of inexhaustible memories, interpretations, and happy meditations for Pierre.
"'I shall look forward very much to your return....' Yes, yes, how did she say it?
What is happening to me?
She gave it up just because it was so powerfully seductive.
She acted in contradiction to all those rules.
She felt that her unity with her husband was not maintained by the poetic feelings that had attracted him to her, but by something else-indefinite but firm as the bond between her own body and soul.
To adorn herself for others might perhaps have been agreeable-she did not know-but she had no time at all for it.
The subject which wholly engrossed Natasha's attention was her family: that is, her husband whom she had to keep so that he should belong entirely to her and to the home, and the children whom she had to bear, bring into the world, nurse, and bring up.
And the deeper she penetrated, not with her mind only but with her whole soul, her whole being, into the subject that absorbed her, the larger did that subject grow and the weaker and more inadequate did her powers appear, so that she concentrated them wholly on that one thing and yet was unable to accomplish all that she considered necessary.
These questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is, only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which lies in the family.
Discussions and questions of that kind, which are like the question of how to get the greatest gratification from one's dinner, did not then and do not now exist for those for whom the purpose of a dinner is the nourishment it affords; and the purpose of marriage is the family.
If the purpose of marriage is the family, the person who wishes to have many wives or husbands may perhaps obtain much pleasure, but in that case will not have a family.
If the purpose of food is nourishment and the purpose of marriage is the family, the whole question resolves itself into not eating more than one can digest, and not having more wives or husbands than are needed for the family-that is, one wife or one husband.
From the very first days of their married life Natasha had announced her demands.
Pierre was greatly surprised by his wife's view, to him a perfectly novel one, that every moment of his life belonged to her and to the family.
At home Natasha placed herself in the position of a slave to her husband, and the whole household went on tiptoe when he was occupied-that is, was reading or writing in his study.
Pierre had but to show a partiality for anything to get just what he liked done always.
He had only to express a wish and Natasha would jump up and run to fulfill it.
The entire household was governed according to Pierre's supposed orders, that is, by his wishes which Natasha tried to guess.
And she deduced the essentials of his wishes quite correctly, and having once arrived at them clung to them tenaciously.
Thus in a time of trouble ever memorable to him after the birth of their first child who was delicate, when they had to change the wet nurse three times and Natasha fell ill from despair, Pierre one day told her of Rousseau's view, with which he quite agreed, that to have a wet nurse is unnatural and harmful.
It very often happened that in a moment of irritation husband and wife would have a dispute, but long afterwards Pierre to his surprise and delight would find in his wife's ideas and actions the very thought against which she had argued, but divested of everything superfluous that in the excitement of the dispute he had added when expressing his opinion.
After seven years of marriage Pierre had the joyous and firm consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt this because he saw himself reflected in his wife.
He felt the good and bad within himself inextricably mingled and overlapping.
But only what was really good in him was reflected in his wife, all that was not quite good was rejected.
And this was not the result of logical reasoning but was a direct and mysterious reflection.
A moment later Bates entered with a fresh supply of wood.
I watched him narrowly for some sign of perturbation, but he was not to be caught off guard.
"Is there anything further, sir?"
"I believe not, Bates.
Oh! here's a hammer I picked up out in the grounds a bit ago.
I wish you'd see if it belongs to the house."
"It doesn't belong here, I think, sir.
But we sometimes find tools left by the carpenters that worked on the house.
"Never mind.
I need such a thing now and then and I'll keep it handy."
"Very good, mr Glenarm.
It's a bit sharper to night, but we're likely to have sudden changes at this season."
"I dare say."
We were not getting anywhere; the fellow was certainly an incomparable actor.
"You must find it pretty lonely here, Bates.
Don't hesitate to go to the village when you like."
I keep a few books by me for the evenings.
Annandale is not what you would exactly call a diverting village."
"I fancy not.
But the caretaker over at the summer resort has even a lonelier time, I suppose.
That's what I'd call a pretty cheerless job,—watching summer cottages in the winter."
"That's Morgan, sir.
I meet him occasionally when I go to the village; a very worthy person, I should call him, on slight acquaintance."
"No doubt of it, Bates.
Any time through the winter you want to have him in for a social glass, it's all right with me."
He met my gaze without flinching, and lighted me to the stair with our established ceremony.
I had no intention of being killed, and now that I had due warning of danger, I resolved to protect myself from foes without and within.
Both Bates and Morgan, the caretaker, were liars of high attainment.
Morgan was, moreover, a cheerful scoundrel, and experience taught me long ago that a knave with humor is doubly dangerous.
Before going to bed I wrote a long letter to Larry Donovan, giving him a full account of my arrival at Glenarm House.
The thought of Larry always cheered me, and as the pages slipped from my pen I could feel his sympathy and hear him chuckling over the lively beginning of my year at Glenarm.
The idea of being fired upon by an unseen foe would, I knew, give Larry a real lift of the spirit.
The next morning I walked into the village, mailed my letter, visited the railway station with true rustic instinct and watched the cutting out of a freight car for Annandale with a pleasure I had not before taken in that proceeding.
The villagers stared at me blankly as on my first visit.
A group of idle laborers stopped talking to watch me; and when I was a few yards past them they laughed at a remark by one of the number which I could not overhear.
But I am not a particularly sensitive person; I did not care what my Hoosier neighbors said of me; all I asked was that they should refrain from shooting at the back of my head through the windows of my own house.
On this day I really began to work.
I mapped out a course of reading, set up a draftsman's table I found put away in a closet, and convinced myself that I was beginning a year of devotion to architecture.
Such was, I felt, the only honest course.
I should work every day from eight until one, and my leisure I should give to recreation and a search for the motives that lay behind the crafts and assaults of my enemies.
When I plunged into the wood in the middle of the afternoon it was with the definite purpose of returning to the upper end of the lake for an interview with Morgan, who had, so Bates informed me, a small house back of the cottages.
I took the canoe I had chosen for my own use from the boat house and paddled up the lake.
The air was still warm, but the wind that blew out of the south tasted of rain.
I scanned the water and the borders of the lake for signs of life,—more particularly, I may as well admit, for a certain maroon colored canoe and a girl in a red tam o'-shanter, but lake and summer cottages were mine alone.
There were many paths through the woods back of the cottages, and I followed several futilely before I at last found a small house snugly bid away in a thicket of young maples.
The man I was looking for came to the door quickly in response to my knock.
"Good afternoon, Morgan."
"Good afternoon, mr Glenarm," he said, taking the pipe from his mouth the better to grin at me.
He showed no sign of surprise, and I was nettled by his cool reception.
There was, perhaps, a certain element of recklessness in my visit to the house of a man who had shown so singular an interest in my affairs, and his cool greeting vexed me.
"Morgan—"
I began.
"Won't you come in and rest yourself, mr Glenarm?" he interrupted.
"I reckon you're tired from your trip over—"
"Thank you, no," I snapped.
"Morgan, you are an infernal blackguard.
You have tried twice to kill me—"
He lifted the gray fedora hat from his head, and poked his finger through a hole in the top.
"You're a pretty fair shot, mr Glenarm.
The fact about me is,"—and he winked,—"the honest truth is, I'm all out of practice.
Why, sir, when I saw you paddling out on the lake this afternoon I sighted you from the casino half a dozen times with my gun, but I was afraid to risk it."
He seemed to be shaken with inner mirth.
I know of nothing in the way of social adventure that is quite equal to it.
Morgan was a fellow of intelligence and, whatever lay back of his designs against me, he was clearly a foe to reckon with.
He stood in the doorway calmly awaiting my next move.
I struck a match on my box and lighted a cigarette.
I hadn't seen him for several years before he died.
I was never at Glenarm before in my life, so it's a little rough for you to visit your displeasure on me."
He smiled tolerantly as I spoke.
I knew—and he knew that I did—that no ill feeling against my grandfather lay back of his interest in my affairs.
"You're not quite the man your grandfather was, mr Glenarm.
You'll excuse my bluntness, but I take it that you're a frank man.
He was a very keen person, and, I'm afraid,"—he chuckled with evident satisfaction to himself,—"I'm really afraid, mr Glenarm, that you're not!"
"There you have it, Morgan!
I fully agree with you! I'm as dull as an oyster; that's the reason I've called on you for enlightenment.
Consider that I'm here under a flag of truce, and let's see if we can't come to an agreement."
There was a time when we might have done some business; but that's past now.
You seem like a pretty decent fellow, too, and I'm sorry I didn't see you sooner; but better luck next time."
He stroked his yellow beard reflectively and shook his head a little sadly.
He was not a bad looking fellow; and he expressed himself well enough with a broad western accent.
"Well,"
I said, seeing that I should only make myself ridiculous by trying to learn anything from him, "I hope our little spats through windows and on walls won't interfere with our pleasant social relations.
And I don't hesitate to tell you,"—I was exerting myself to keep down my anger,—"that if I catch you on my grounds again I'll fill you with lead and sink you in the lake."
"And now, if you'll promise not to fire into my back I'll wish you good day.
He snatched off his hat and bowed profoundly.
"It'll suit me much better to continue handling the case on your grounds," he said, as though he referred to a business matter.
"Killing a man on your own property requires some explaining—you may have noticed it?"
"Yes; I commit most of my murders away from home,"
I said.
"I formed the habit early in life.
Good day, Morgan."
As I turned away he closed his door with a slam,—a delicate way of assuring me that he was acting in good faith, and not preparing to puncture my back with a rifle ball.
I regained the lake shore, feeling no great discouragement over the lean results of my interview, but rather a fresh zest for the game, whatever the game might be.
Morgan was not an enemy to trifle with; he was, on the other hand, a clever and daring foe; and the promptness with which he began war on me the night of my arrival at Glenarm House, indicated that there was method in his hostility.
It was assuredly a spot for a pipe and a mood, and as the shadows crept through the wood before me and the water, stirred by the rising wind, began to beat below, I invoked the one and yielded to the other.
Something in the withered grass at my feet caught my eye. I bent and picked up a string of gold beads, dropped there, no doubt, by some girl from the school or a careless member of the summer colony.
I counted the separate beads—they were round and there were fifty of them.
The proper length for one turn about a girl's throat, perhaps; not more than that!
I lifted my eyes and looked off toward saint Agatha's.
With this foolishness I rose, thrust the beads into my pocket, and paddled home in the waning glory of the sunset.
That night, as I was going quite late to bed, bearing a candle to light me through the dark hall to my room, I heard a curious sound, as of some one walking stealthily through the house.
At first I thought Bates was still abroad, but I waited, listening for several minutes, without being able to mark the exact direction of the sound or to identify it with him.
I went on to the door of my room, and still a muffled step seemed to follow me,—first it had come from below, then it was much like some one going up stairs,—but where?
In my own room I still heard steps, light, slow, but distinct.
Again there was a stumble and a hurried recovery,—ghosts, I reflected, do not fall down stairs!
The next morning Bates placed a letter postmarked Cincinnati at my plate.
Very truly yours, Arthur Pickering, Executor of the Estate of john Marshall Glenarm.
"Very truly the devil's," growled Larry, snapping his cigarette case viciously.
"How did he find out?"
I asked lamely, but my heart sank like lead.
Had Marian Devereux told him!
How else could he know?
"Probably from the stars,—the whole universe undoubtedly saw you skipping off to meet your lady love. Bah, these women!"
Take that for your impertinence.
But perhaps it was Bates?"
I did not wait for an answer.
I was not in a mood for reflection or nice distinctions.
The man came in just then with a fresh plate of toast.
"Bates, mr Pickering has learned that I was away from the house on the night of the attack, and I'm ordered off for having broken my agreement to stay here. How do you suppose he heard of it so promptly?"
"From Morgan, quite possibly.
He placed before me a note bearing the same date as my own.
It was a sharp rebuke of Bates for his failure to report my absence, and he was ordered to prepare to leave on the first of February.
"Close your accounts at the shopkeepers' and I will audit your bills on my arrival."
The tone was peremptory and contemptuous.
Bates had failed to satisfy Pickering and was flung off like a smoked out cigar.
He met my gaze imperturbably.
He was carrying away the coffee tray and his eyes wandered to the windows.
You see—"
"But I don't see!"
He left hurriedly, as though to escape from the consequences of his words, and when I came to myself Larry was gloomily invoking his strange Irish gods.
"Larry Donovan, I've been tempted to kill that fellow a dozen times!
This thing is too damned complicated for me.
I wish my lamented grandfather had left me something easy.
To think of it—that fellow, after my treatment of him—my cursing and abusing him since I came here!
Great Scott, man, I've been enjoying his bounty, I've been living on his money!
"As I have said before, you're rather lacking at times in perspicacity.
Your intelligence is marred by large opaque spots.
And now we've got to go to work."
Bah, these women!
My own heart caught the words. I was enraged and bitter.
No wonder she had been anxious for me to avoid Pickering after daring me to follow her!
We called a council of war for that night that we might view matters in the light of Pickering's letter. His assuredness in ordering me to leave made prompt and decisive action necessary on my part.
I summoned Stoddard to our conference, feeling confident of his friendliness.
"Of course," said the broad shouldered chaplain, "if you could show that your absence was on business of very grave importance, the courts might construe in that you had not really violated the will."
Larry looked at the ceiling and blew rings of smoke languidly.
I had not disclosed to either of them the cause of my absence.
On such a matter I knew I should get precious little sympathy from Larry, and I had, moreover, a feeling that I could not discuss Marian Devereux with any one; I even shrank from mentioning her name, though it rang like the call of bugles in my blood.
She was always before me,—the charmed spirit of youth, linked to every foot of the earth, every gleam of the sun upon the ice bound lake, every glory of the winter sunset.
All the good impulses I had ever stifled were quickened to life by the thought of her.
Amid the day's perplexities I started sometimes, thinking I heard her voice, her girlish laughter, or saw her again coming toward me down the stairs, or holding against the light her fan with its golden butterflies.
I wished to be alone, to yield to the sweet mood that the thought of her brought me.
The doubt that crept through my mind as to any possibility of connivance between her and Pickering was as vague and fleeting as the shadow of a swallow's wing on a sunny meadow.
"You don't intend fighting the fact of your absence, do you?" demanded Larry, after a long silence.
"Of course not!" I replied quietly.
And it would not be square to my grandfather, —who never harmed a flea, may his soul rest in blessed peace!—to lie about it.
They might nail me for perjury besides."
"So much the worse for the sheriff and the rest of them!" I declared.
"Spoken like a man of spirit.
And now we'd better stock up at once, in case we should be shut off from our source of supplies.
Better let Bates raid the village shops to morrow.
I've tried being hungry, and I don't care to repeat the experience."
And Larry reached for the tobacco jar.
"I can't imagine, I really can't believe," began the chaplain, "that Miss Devereux will want to be brought into this estate matter in any way.
I suppose there's no way of preventing a man from leaving his property to a young woman, who has no claim on him,—who doesn't want anything from him."
"Bah, these women!
Of course she'll take it."
Then his eyes widened and met mine in a gaze that reflected the mystification and wonder that struck both of us.
Stoddard turned from the fire suddenly:
"What's that?
There's some one up stairs!"
"Where's Bates?" demanded the chaplain.
"I'll thank you for the answer,"
I replied.
Larry stood at the top of the staircase, holding a candle at arm's length in front of him, staring about.
The noise ceased suddenly, leaving us with no hint of its whereabouts.
I went directly to the rear of the house and found Bates putting the dishes away in the pantry.
"Where have you been?"
I demanded.
"Nothing."
I joined the others in the library.
"Why didn't you tell me this feudal imitation was haunted?" asked Larry, in a grieved tone.
"All it needed was a cheerful ghost, and now I believe it lacks absolutely nothing.
I'm increasingly glad I came.
How often does it walk?"
"It's not on a schedule.
Just now it's the wind in the tower probably; the wind plays queer pranks up there sometimes."
"You'll have to do better than that, Glenarm," said Stoddard.
"It's as still outside as a country graveyard."
Certain things were planned that night.
We determined to exercise every precaution to prevent a surprise from without, and we resolved upon a new and systematic sounding of walls and floors, taking our clue from the efforts made by Morgan and his ally to find hiding places by this process.
Pickering would undoubtedly arrive shortly, and we wished to anticipate his movements as far as possible.
We resolved, too, upon a day patrol of the grounds and a night guard.
The suggestion came, I believe, from Stoddard, whose interest in my affairs was only equaled by the fertility of his suggestions.
One of us should remain abroad at night, ready to sound the alarm in case of attack.
Bates should take his turn with the rest—Stoddard insisted on it.
Within two days we were, as Larry expressed it, on a war footing.
We added a couple of shot guns and several revolvers to my own arsenal, and piled the library table with cartridge boxes.
It was a cheerful company of conspirators that now gathered around the big hearth.
Larry, always restless, preferred to stand at one side, an elbow on the mantel shelf, pipe in mouth; and Stoddard sought the biggest chair,—and filled it.
He and Larry understood each other at once, and Larry's stories, ranging in subject from undergraduate experiences at Dublin to adventures in Africa and always including endless conflicts with the Irish constabulary, delighted the big boyish clergyman.
Bates had been into Annandale to mail some letters, and I was staring out upon the park from the library windows when he entered.
Stoddard, having kept watch the night before, was at home asleep, and Larry was off somewhere in the house, treasure hunting.
I was feeling decidedly discouraged over our failure to make any progress with our investigations, and Bates' news did not interest me.
"Well, what of it?" I demanded, without turning round.
"Nothing, sir; but Miss Devereux has come back!"
"The devil!"
"I said Miss Devereux," he repeated in dignified rebuke. "She came up this morning, and the Sister left at once for Chicago.
Sister Theresa depends particularly upon Miss Devereux,—so I've heard, sir.
"You seem full of information,"
I remarked, taking another step toward my hat and coat.
"Well?"
"They all came together, sir."
"Who came; if you please, Bates?"
That's what I learned in the village.
And mr Pickering is going to stay—"
"Pickering stay!"
The reason is that he's worn out with his work, and wishes quiet. The other people went back to New York in the car."
"He's opened a summer cottage in mid winter, has he?"
I had been blue enough without this news.
Marian Devereux had come back to Annandale with Arthur Pickering; my faith in her snapped like a reed at this astounding news.
She was now entitled to my grandfather's property and she had lost no time in returning as soon as she and Pickering had discussed together at the Armstrongs' my flight from Annandale.
Her return could have no other meaning than that there was a strong tie between them, and he was now to stay on the ground until I should be dispossessed and her rights established.
She had led me to follow her, and my forfeiture had been sealed by that stolen interview at the Armstrongs'.
It was a black record, and the thought of it angered me against myself and the world.
"Tell mr Donovan that I've gone to saint Agatha's," I said, and I was soon striding toward the school.
I heard the sound of a piano, somewhere in the building, and I consigned the inventor of pianos to hideous torment as scales were pursued endlessly up and down the keys.
Two girls passing through the hall made a pretext of looking for a book and came in and exclaimed over their inability to find it with much suppressed giggling.
The piano pounding continued and I waited for what seemed an interminable time.
I took a book from the table.
It was The Life of Benvenuto Cellini and "Marian Devereux" was written on the fly leaf, by unmistakably the same hand that penned the apology for Olivia's performances.
I saw in the clear flowing lines of the signature, in their lack of superfluity, her own ease, grace and charm; and, in the deeper stroke with which the x was crossed, I felt a challenge, a readiness to abide by consequences once her word was given. Then my own inclination to think well of her angered me.
It was only a pretty bit of chirography, and I dropped the book impatiently when I heard her step on the threshold.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting, mr Glenarm. But this is my busy hour."
"I shall not detain you long.
I came,"—I hesitated, not knowing why I had come.
She took a chair near the open door and bent forward with an air of attention that was disquieting.
She wore black—perhaps to fit her the better into the house of a somber Sisterhood.
The silence grew intolerable; she was waiting for me to speak, and I blurted:
"I suppose you have come to take charge of the property."
"Do you?" she asked.
"And you came back with the executor to facilitate matters.
I'm glad to see that you lose no time."
"Oh!" she said lingeringly, as though she were finding with difficulty the note in which I wished to pitch the conversation.
Her calmness was maddening.
"I suppose you thought it unwise to wait for the bluebird when you had beguiled me into breaking a promise, when I was trapped, defeated,—"
"I remember now the first time!"
I exclaimed, more angry than I had ever been before in my life.
"That is quite remarkable," she said, and nodded her head ironically.
"It was at Sherry's; you were with Pickering—you dropped your fan and he picked it up, and you turned toward me for a moment.
You were in black that night; it was the unhappiness in your face, in your eyes, that made me remember."
I was intent upon the recollection, eager to fix and establish it.
"You are quite right.
It was at Sherry's.
I was wearing black then; many things made me unhappy that night."
Her forehead contracted slightly and she pressed her lips together.
"I suppose that even then the conspiracy was thoroughly arranged,"
I said tauntingly, laughing a little perhaps, and wishing to wound her, to take vengeance upon her.
She rose and stood by her chair, one hand resting upon it.
I faced her; her eyes were like violet seas. She spoke very quietly.
"You probably thought I was a fool," I retorted.
"No;"—she smiled slightly—"I thought—I believe I have said this to you before!—you were a gentleman. I really did, mr Glenarm.
I must say it to justify myself.
I relied upon your chivalry; I even thought, when I played being Olivia, that you had a sense of honor.
But you are not the one and you haven't the other.
I even went so far, after you knew perfectly well who I was, as to try to help you—to give you another chance to prove yourself the man your grandfather wished you to be.
And now you come to me in a shocking bad humor,—I really think you would like to be insulting, mr Glenarm, if you could."
"But Pickering,—you came back with him; he is here and he's going to stay!
And now that the property belongs to you, there is not the slightest reason why we should make any pretense of anything but enmity. When you and Arthur Pickering stand together I take the other side of the barricade!
I suppose chivalry would require me to vacate, so that you may enjoy at once the spoils of war."
"I fancy it would not be very difficult to eliminate you as a factor in the situation," she remarked icily.
"And I suppose, after the unsuccessful efforts of mr Pickering's allies to assassinate me, as a mild form of elimination, one would naturally expect me to sit calmly down and wait to be shot in the back.
I hope it will not embarrass you to deliver the message."
"I quite sympathize with your reluctance to deliver it yourself," she said.
"Is this all you came to say?"
I had accepted your own renouncement of the legacy in good part, but now, please believe me, it shall be yours to morrow. I'll yield possession to you whenever you ask it,—but never to Arthur Pickering!
As against him and his treasure hunters and assassins I will hold out for a dozen years!"
"Nobly spoken, mr Glenarm!
Yours is really an admirable, though somewhat complex character."
"My character is my own, whatever it is," I blurted.
Your blustering here this afternoon can hardly conceal the fact of your failure,—your inability to keep a promise.
But, of course, that is all a matter of past history now."
Her tone, changing from cold indifference to the most severe disdain, stung me into self pity for my stupidity in having sought her.
My anger was not against her, but against Pickering, who had, I persuaded myself, always blocked my path.
She went on.
mr Pickering is decidedly more than a match for you, mr Glenarm, —even in humor."
She left me so quickly, so softly, that I stood staring like a fool at the spot where she had been, and then I went gloomily back to Glenarm House, angry, ashamed and crestfallen.
While we were waiting for dinner I made a clean breast of my acquaintance with her to Larry, omitting nothing,—rejoicing even to paint my own conduct as black as possible.
"You may remember her," I concluded, "she was the girl we saw at Sherry's that night we dined there.
She was with Pickering, and you noticed her,—spoke of her, as she went out."
Bless me!
Why her eyes haunted me for days.
"Of course I mean it!"
I thundered at him.
He took the pipe from his mouth, pressed the tobacco viciously into the bowl, and swore steadily in Gaelic until I was ready to choke him.
"Stop!"
I bawled.
The trilling of his r's was like the whirring rise of a flock of quails.
He scowled, but when we reached the trap in the room floor grid, we found him standing aside to admit us.
I flung a swift glance around.
It was a metallic cubby, not much over fifteen feet square, with an eight foot arched ceiling.
There were instrument panels.
The range finder for the giant projector was here; its telescope with the trajectory apparatus and the firing switch were unmistakable.
And the signaling apparatus was here!
I saw too, what seemed to be weapons: a row of small fragile glass globes, hanging on clips along the wall-bombs, each the size of a man's fist.
And a broad belt with bombs in its padded compartments.
This upper trap was open.
Four feet above the room's roof was the arch of the dome, with the entrance to the exit lock directly above us.
I must gain his confidence at once. Anita had laid her helmet aside.
She spoke first.
You heard of it?
We know where the treasure is."
A tremendous, beetle browed, scowling fellow. He stood with hands on his hips, his leather garbed legs spread wide; and as I confronted him, I felt like a child.
"You speak English?" I asked.
"We are not skilled with Martian."
I hoped not: it would not be easy to trick him and find an opportunity to flash a signal.
But that task was some hours away as yet; I would worry about it when the time came.
If we could persuade this duty man to turn the projector on them!
And this is the sister of George Prince-what do you want up here?"
"I am a navigator.
"This is not the control room."
He did not speak: he was still scowling.
He sent up a signal-you saw it, didn't you?--just before Miss Prince and I came aboard.
He was trying to pretend he was your Earth party, Miko and Coniston."
"Why?"
The fellow turned his scowl on me, but Anita brought his gaze back to her.
She put in quickly:
You have its firing mechanism here."
I gestured.
"I see it here.
It's obvious: I'm skilled at trajectory firing.
"Is it connected?" Anita demanded boldly.
"Yes," he said.
Then go."
But that was what we did not want to do.
She said sweetly, "Are you in charge of this room?
Show me how the projector is operated.
I had my back to them for a moment.
And my heart suddenly leaped into my throat.
It seemed that down there in the Earthlit shadows, where the spreading base of the giant crater joined the plains, a light was bobbing.
I gazed, stricken.
Miko's lights?
I tried to gauge the distance; it was not over two miles from here.
With the naked eye, I could not be sure. Perhaps there was a telescope finder here in the cubby....
He saw me coming.
He held her with one arm! his other flung at me, caught me, knocked me backward.
"Get out of here!
Go up to the dome-"
I grasped its barrel, reached upward and struck with its heavy metal butt.
We went down together, falling partly upon Anita.
I lay panting.
Blood from the giant's head was welling out, hot and sticky against my face as I lay sprawled on him.
I cast him off.
He was dead, his fragile Martian skull split open by my blow.
There had been no alarm.
Anita and I crouched by the floor.
"Dead."
"Oh Gregg-"
It forced our hand.
And they were being answered from the ship!
And they are answering him!
Get your helmet: I'll try firing the projector."
There would be no time to do both: we must escape out of here.
I rushed to it.
One of them called up to me, but I ignored him.
Then Potan looked up and saw me.
He shouted in Martian at the duty man, whom he doubtless thought was behind me: "Be ready!
We may fire on them.
I'll give you the word."
The signals were proceeding.
It had only been a moment.
I was aiming the projector.
I pushed her back.
"Put on your helmet!"
At the deck window the giant projector spat its deadly electronic stream.
I heard Potan's voice, his shout of protest and anger.
But down in the Earth glow at the crater base, Miko's lights had not vanished!
I had missed!
An error in the range?
Abruptly I knew it was not that.
Miko's lights were still there.
His signals still coming. And I noticed now a faint distortion about them, the glow of his little group of hand lights faintly distorted and vaguely shot with a greenish cast.
Benson curve lights!
He had gone back to his camp, equipped all his lights with the Benson curve. He was somewhere at the crater base now.
Anita was plucking at me.
"Gregg, come."
"I can't hit him," I gasped.
Should I try the flash signal to Earth?
Did we dare linger here?
I stood another few seconds at the window.
By the Almighty-his giant stature-Brotow, look!
"Disconnect that projector!
It's Miko down there!
This Haljan is a trickster!
Where is he? Braile-Braile, you accursed fool!
Are Haljan and the girl up there with you?"
But the duty man lay in his blood at our feet.
I had dropped back from the window.
The ship rang with the alarm.
eight.
As soon as she was left alone, Agnes set to work tidying and dusting the cottage, made up the fire, watered the bed, and cleaned the inside of the windows: the wise woman herself always kept the outside of them clean.
When she had done, she found her dinner-of the same sort she was used to at home, but better-in the hole of the wall.
When she had eaten it, she went to look at the pictures.
By this time her old disposition had begun to rouse again.
She had been doing her duty, and had in consequence begun again to think herself Somebody.
However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make any one conceited who only does it sometimes.
What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets?
A thief who was trying to reform would.
To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it.
Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible?
Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.
So Agnes began to stroke herself once more, forgetting her late self stroking companion, and never reflecting that she was now doing what she had then abhorred.
And in this mood she went into the picture gallery.
The first picture she saw represented a square in a great city, one side of which was occupied by a splendid marble palace, with great flights of broad steps leading up to the door.
Between it and the square was a marble paved court, with gates of brass, at which stood sentries in gorgeous uniforms, and to which was affixed the following proclamation in letters of gold, large enough for Agnes to read:--
"By the will of the King, from this time until further notice, every stray child found in the realm shall be brought without a moment's delay to the palace.
"Can there be such a city in the world?" she said to herself.
"If I only knew where it was, I should set out for it at once.
THERE would be the place for a clever girl like me!"
Her eyes fell on the picture which had so enticed Rosamond.
It was the very country where her father fed his flocks.
Just round the shoulder of the hill was the cottage where her parents lived, where she was born and whence she had been carried by the beggar woman.
"Ah!" she said, "they didn't know me there.
They little thought what I could be, if I had the chance.
If I were but in this good, kind, loving, generous king's palace, I should soon be such a great lady as they never saw!
As she said this, she turned her back with disdain upon the picture of her home, and setting herself before the picture of the palace, stared at it with wide ambitious eyes, and a heart whose every beat was a throb of arrogant self esteem.
The shepherd child was now worse than ever the poor princess had been. For the wise woman had given her a terrible lesson one of which the princess was not capable, and she had known what it meant; yet here she was as bad as ever, therefore worse than before.
Nestling in her very heart, where most of all she had her company, and least of all could see her.
After gazing a while at the palace picture, during which her ambitious pride rose and rose, she turned yet again in condescending mood, and honored the home picture with one stare more.
"What a poor, miserable spot it is compared with this lordly palace!" she said.
But presently she spied something in it she had not seen before, and drew nearer.
It was the form of a little girl, building a bridge of stones over one of the hill brooks.
"Ah, there I am myself!" she said.
"That is just how I used to do.--No," she resumed, "it is not me.
That snub nosed little fright could never be meant for me!
What a dull, dirty, insignificant spot it is!
And what a life to lead there!"
She turned once more to the city picture.
And now a strange thing took place.
In proportion as the other, to the eyes of her mind, receded into the background, this, to her present bodily eyes, appeared to come forward and assume reality.
"I do believe it is real!
That frame is only a trick of the woman to make me fancy it a picture lest I should go and make my fortune.
She is a witch, the ugly old creature!
It would serve her right to tell the king and have her punished for not taking me to the palace-one of his poor lost children he is so fond of!
I should like to see her ugly old head cut off.
Anyhow I will try my luck without asking her leave.
How she has ill used me!"
But at that moment, she heard the voice of the wise woman calling, "Agnes!" and, smoothing her face, she tried to look as good as she could, and walked back into the cottage.
There stood the wise woman, looking all round the place, and examining her work.
She fixed her eyes upon Agnes in a way that confused her, and made her cast hers down, for she felt as if she were reading her thoughts.
The wise woman, however, asked no questions, but began to talk about her work, approving of some of it, which filled her with arrogance, and showing how some of it might have been done better, which filled her with resentment.
But the wise woman seemed to take no care of what she might be thinking, and went straight on with her lesson.
Ere it had time to sink down again, the wise woman caught up the little mirror, and held it before her: Agnes saw her Somebody-the very embodiment of miserable conceit and ugly ill temper.
She gave such a scream of horror that the wise woman pitied her, and laying aside the mirror, took her upon her knees, and talked to her most kindly and solemnly; in particular about the necessity of destroying the ugly things that come out of the heart-so ugly that they make the very face over them ugly also.
Would you believe it?--instead of thinking how to kill the ugly things in her heart, she was with all her might resolving to be more careful of her face, that is, to keep down the things in her heart so that they should not show in her face, she was resolving to be a hypocrite as well as a self worshipper.
Her heart was wormy, and the worms were eating very fast at it now.
Then the wise woman laid her gently down upon the heather bed, and she fell fast asleep, and had an awful dream about her Somebody.
When she woke in the morning, instead of getting up to do the work of the house, she lay thinking-to evil purpose.
In place of taking her dream as a warning, and thinking over what the wise woman had said the night before, she communed with herself in this fashion:--
"If I stay here longer, I shall be miserable, It is nothing better than slavery.
If I don't run away, that frightful blue prison and the disgusting girl will come back, and I shall go out of my mind.
How I do wish I could find the way to the good king's palace!
I shall go and look at the picture again-if it be a picture-as soon as I've got my clothes on.
The work can wait.
It's not my work.
It's the old witch's; and she ought to do it herself."
She jumped out of bed, and hurried on her clothes.
There was no wise woman to be seen; and she hastened into the hall.
There was the picture, with the marble palace, and the proclamation shining in letters of gold upon its gates of brass.
She stood before it, and gazed and gazed; and all the time it kept growing upon her in some strange way, until at last she was fully persuaded that it was no picture, but a real city, square, and marble palace, seen through a framed opening in the wall.
FREE was she, with that creature inside her?
The same moment a terrible storm of thunder and lightning, wind and rain, came on.
The uproar was appalling.
Agnes threw herself upon the ground, hid her face in her hands, and there lay until it was over.
There was the city far away on the horizon.
Without once turning to take a farewell look of the place she was leaving, she set off, as fast as her feet would carry her, in the direction of the city.
CHAPTER five Advice from a Caterpillar
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
'Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.
Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I-I hardly know, sir, just at present-at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly.
'Explain yourself!'
'I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.
'I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, 'for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'
'It isn't,' said the Caterpillar.
'Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; 'but when you have to turn into a chrysalis-you will some day, you know-and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?'
'Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.
'You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously.
'Who are YOU?'
Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar's making such VERY short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, 'I think, you ought to tell me who YOU are, first.'
'Why?' said the Caterpillar.
Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a VERY unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.
'Come back!' the Caterpillar called after her.
'I've something important to say!'
This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.
'Keep your temper,' said the Caterpillar.
'No,' said the Caterpillar.
Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing.
For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, 'So you think you're changed, do you?'
'I'm afraid I am, sir,' said Alice; 'I can't remember things as I used-and I don't keep the same size for ten minutes together!'
'Can't remember WHAT things?' said the Caterpillar.
'Well, I've tried to say "HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE," but it all came different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.
Alice folded her hands, and began:--
'You are old, Father William,' the young man said, 'And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head- Do you think, at your age, it is right?'
'In my youth,' Father William replied to his son, 'I feared it might injure the brain; But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again.'
'You are old,' said the youth, 'as I mentioned before, And have grown most uncommonly fat; Yet you turned a back somersault in at the door- Pray, what is the reason of that?'
'In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, 'I kept all my limbs very supple By the use of this ointment-one shilling the box- Allow me to sell you a couple?'
'You are old,' said the youth, 'and your jaws are too weak For anything tougher than suet; Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak- Pray how did you manage to do it?'
'In my youth,' said his father, 'I took to the law, And argued each case with my wife; And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw, Has lasted the rest of my life.'
'You are old,' said the youth, 'one would hardly suppose That your eye was as steady as ever; Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose- What made you so awfully clever?'
'I have answered three questions, and that is enough,' Said his father; 'don't give yourself airs! Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!'
'That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar.
'Not QUITE right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly; 'some of the words have got altered.'
'It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.
The Caterpillar was the first to speak.
'What size do you want to be?' it asked.
'Oh, I'm not particular as to size,' Alice hastily replied; 'only one doesn't like changing so often, you know.'
'I DON'T know,' said the Caterpillar.
Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.
'Are you content now?' said the Caterpillar.
'Well, I should like to be a LITTLE larger, sir, if you wouldn't mind,' said Alice: 'three inches is such a wretched height to be.'
'But I'm not used to it!' pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone.
'You'll get used to it in time,' said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.
This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again.
In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself.
Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, 'One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.'
'One side of WHAT?
The other side of WHAT?' thought Alice to herself.
'Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.
Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question.
However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.
'And now which is which?' she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!
She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit.
Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the lefthand bit.
'Come, my head's free at last!' said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her.
'What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. 'And where HAVE my shoulders got to?
And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?' She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves.
As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent.
She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.
'Serpent!' screamed the Pigeon.
'I'm NOT a serpent!' said Alice indignantly.
'Let me alone!'
'Serpent, I say again!' repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, 'I've tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!'
'I haven't the least idea what you're talking about,' said Alice.
'I've tried the roots of trees, and I've tried banks, and I've tried hedges,' the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; 'but those serpents!
There's no pleasing them!'
Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished.
'As if it wasn't trouble enough hatching the eggs,' said the Pigeon; 'but I must be on the look out for serpents night and day!
Why, I haven't had a wink of sleep these three weeks!'
'I'm very sorry you've been annoyed,' said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning.
'And just as I'd taken the highest tree in the wood,' continued the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, 'and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky!
Ugh, Serpent!'
'But I'm NOT a serpent, I tell you!' said Alice. 'I'm a-I'm a-'
'Well!
WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon.
'I can see you're trying to invent something!'
'I-I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.
'A likely story indeed!' said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt.
No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it.
'I HAVE tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful child; 'but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.'
'I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; 'but if they do, why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.'
This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, 'You're looking for eggs, I know THAT well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you're a little girl or a serpent?'
'Well, be off, then!' said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again into its nest.
Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she had to stop and untwist it.
After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.
It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual.
'Come, there's half my plan done now!
How puzzling all these changes are!
I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another!
However, I've got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden-how IS that to be done, I wonder?' As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high.
thirteen
THE appearance of the island when I came on deck next morning was altogether changed.
Although the breeze had now utterly ceased, we had made a great deal of way during the night and were now lying becalmed about half a mile to the south-east of the low eastern coast. Grey coloured woods covered a large part of the surface.
The HISPANIOLA was rolling scuppers under in the ocean swell.
The booms were tearing at the blocks, the rudder was banging to and fro, and the whole ship creaking, groaning, and jumping like a manufactory.
I volunteered for one of the boats, where I had, of course, no business.
The heat was sweltering, and the men grumbled fiercely over their work.
Anderson was in command of my boat, and instead of keeping the crew in order, he grumbled as loud as the worst.
"Well," he said with an oath, "it's not forever."
I thought this was a very bad sign, for up to that day the men had gone briskly and willingly about their business; but the very sight of the island had relaxed the cords of discipline.
We brought up just where the anchor was in the chart, about a third of a mile from each shore, the mainland on one side and Skeleton Island on the other.
The bottom was clean sand.
The plunge of our anchor sent up clouds of birds wheeling and crying over the woods, but in less than a minute they were down again and all was once more silent.
The place was entirely land locked, buried in woods, the trees coming right down to high water mark, the shores mostly flat, and the hilltops standing round at a distance in a sort of amphitheatre, one here, one there.
From the ship we could see nothing of the house or stockade, for they were quite buried among trees; and if it had not been for the chart on the companion, we might have been the first that had ever anchored there since the island arose out of the seas.
There was not a breath of air moving, nor a sound but that of the surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and against the rocks outside.
A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage-a smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree trunks.
"I don't know about treasure," he said, "but I'll stake my wig there's fever here."
If the conduct of the men had been alarming in the boat, it became truly threatening when they had come aboard.
They lay about the deck growling together in talk.
The slightest order was received with a black look and grudgingly and carelessly obeyed.
Mutiny, it was plain, hung over us like a thunder cloud.
And it was not only we of the cabin party who perceived the danger.
Long john was hard at work going from group to group, spending himself in good advice, and as for example no man could have shown a better.
He fairly outstripped himself in willingness and civility; he was all smiles to everyone.
Of all the gloomy features of that gloomy afternoon, this obvious anxiety on the part of Long john appeared the worst.
We held a council in the cabin.
You see, sir, here it is.
I get a rough answer, do I not?
Well, if I speak back, pikes will be going in two shakes; if I don't, Silver will see there's something under that, and the game's up.
Now, we've only one man to rely on."
"And who is that?" asked the squire.
"Silver, sir," returned the captain; "he's as anxious as you and I to smother things up.
This is a tiff; he'd soon talk 'em out of it if he had the chance, and what I propose to do is to give him the chance. Let's allow the men an afternoon ashore.
If they all go, why we'll fight the ship.
If they none of them go, well then, we hold the cabin, and God defend the right.
It was so decided; loaded pistols were served out to all the sure men; Hunter, Joyce, and Redruth were taken into our confidence and received the news with less surprise and a better spirit than we had looked for, and then the captain went on deck and addressed the crew.
"My lads," said he, "we've had a hot day and are all tired and out of sorts.
A turn ashore'll hurt nobody-the boats are still in the water; you can take the gigs, and as many as please may go ashore for the afternoon.
I'll fire a gun half an hour before sundown."
I believe the silly fellows must have thought they would break their shins over treasure as soon as they were landed, for they all came out of their sulks in a moment and gave a cheer that started the echo in a faraway hill and sent the birds once more flying and squalling round the anchorage.
The captain was too bright to be in the way.
He whipped out of sight in a moment, leaving Silver to arrange the party, and I fancy it was as well he did so.
Had he been on deck, he could no longer so much as have pretended not to understand the situation.
It was as plain as day. Silver was the captain, and a mighty rebellious crew he had of it.
The honest hands-and I was soon to see it proved that there were such on board-must have been very stupid fellows.
Or rather, I suppose the truth was this, that all hands were disaffected by the example of the ringleaders-only some more, some less; and a few, being good fellows in the main, could neither be led nor driven any further.
It is one thing to be idle and skulk and quite another to take a ship and murder a number of innocent men.
At last, however, the party was made up.
Six fellows were to stay on board, and the remaining thirteen, including Silver, began to embark.
Then it was that there came into my head the first of the mad notions that contributed so much to save our lives.
If six men were left by Silver, it was plain our party could not take and fight the ship; and since only six were left, it was equally plain that the cabin party had no present need of my assistance.
It occurred to me at once to go ashore.
In a jiffy I had slipped over the side and curled up in the fore sheets of the nearest boat, and almost at the same moment she shoved off.
No one took notice of me, only the bow oar saying, "Is that you, Jim? Keep your head down." But Silver, from the other boat, looked sharply over and called out to know if that were me; and from that moment I began to regret what I had done.
The crews raced for the beach, but the boat I was in, having some start and being at once the lighter and the better manned, shot far ahead of her consort, and the bow had struck among the shore side trees and I had caught a branch and swung myself out and plunged into the nearest thicket while Silver and the rest were still a hundred yards behind.
But you may suppose I paid no heed; jumping, ducking, and breaking through, I ran straight before my nose till I could run no longer.
fourteen
The First Blow
I WAS so pleased at having given the slip to Long john that I began to enjoy myself and look around me with some interest on the strange land that I was in.
I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd, outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with a few pines and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.
On the far side of the open stood one of the hills, with two quaint, craggy peaks shining vividly in the sun
I now felt for the first time the joy of exploration.
The isle was uninhabited; my shipmates I had left behind, and nothing lived in front of me but dumb brutes and fowls.
I turned hither and thither among the trees.
Here and there were flowering plants, unknown to me; here and there I saw snakes, and one raised his head from a ledge of rock and hissed at me with a noise not unlike the spinning of a top.
Little did I suppose that he was a deadly enemy and that the noise was the famous rattle.
Then I came to a long thicket of these oaklike trees-live, or evergreen, oaks, I heard afterwards they should be called-which grew low along the sand like brambles, the boughs curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch.
The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage.
The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy glass trembled through the haze.
All at once there began to go a sort of bustle among the bulrushes; a wild duck flew up with a quack, another followed, and soon over the whole surface of the marsh a great cloud of birds hung screaming and circling in the air.
I judged at once that some of my shipmates must be drawing near along the borders of the fen.
Nor was I deceived, for soon I heard the very distant and low tones of a human voice, which, as I continued to give ear, grew steadily louder and nearer.
This put me in a great fear, and I crawled under cover of the nearest live oak and squatted there, hearkening, as silent as a mouse.
Another voice answered, and then the first voice, which I now recognized to be Silver's, once more took up the story and ran on for a long while in a stream, only now and again interrupted by the other.
By the sound they must have been talking earnestly, and almost fiercely; but no distinct word came to my hearing.
At last the speakers seemed to have paused and perhaps to have sat down, for not only did they cease to draw any nearer, but the birds themselves began to grow more quiet and to settle again to their places in the swamp.
And now I began to feel that I was neglecting my business, that since I had been so foolhardy as to come ashore with these desperadoes, the least I could do was to overhear them at their councils, and that my plain and obvious duty was to draw as close as I could manage, under the favourable ambush of the crouching trees.
I could tell the direction of the speakers pretty exactly, not only by the sound of their voices but by the behaviour of the few birds that still hung in alarm above the heads of the intruders.
Crawling on all fours, I made steadily but slowly towards them, till at last, raising my head to an aperture among the leaves, I could see clear down into a little green dell beside the marsh, and closely set about with trees, where Long john Silver and another of the crew stood face to face in conversation.
The sun beat full upon them.
Silver had thrown his hat beside him on the ground, and his great, smooth, blond face, all shining with heat, was lifted to the other man's in a kind of appeal.
"Mate," he was saying, "it's because I thinks gold dust of you-gold dust, and you may lay to that!
If I hadn't took to you like pitch, do you think I'd have been here a warning of you?
"Silver," said the other man-and I observed he was not only red in the face, but spoke as hoarse as a crow, and his voice shook too, like a taut rope-"Silver," says he, "you're old, and you're honest, or has the name for it; and you've money too, which lots of poor sailors hasn't; and you're brave, or I'm mistook.
And will you tell me you'll let yourself be led away with that kind of a mess of swabs?
Not you!
As sure as God sees me, I'd sooner lose my hand.
If I turn agin my dooty-"
And then all of a sudden he was interrupted by a noise.
I had found one of the honest hands-well, here, at that same moment, came news of another.
Far away out in the marsh there arose, all of a sudden, a sound like the cry of anger, then another on the back of it; and then one horrid, long drawn scream.
The rocks of the Spy glass re echoed it a score of times; the whole troop of marsh birds rose again, darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was still ringing in my brain, silence had re-established its empire, and only the rustle of the redescending birds and the boom of the distant surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon.
Tom had leaped at the sound, like a horse at the spur, but Silver had not winked an eye.
He stood where he was, resting lightly on his crutch, watching his companion like a snake about to spring.
"john!" said the sailor, stretching out his hand.
"Hands off!" cried Silver, leaping back a yard, as it seemed to me, with the speed and security of a trained gymnast.
"Hands off, if you like, john Silver," said the other.
"It's a black conscience that can make you feared of me.
But in heaven's name, tell me, what was that?"
"That?" returned Silver, smiling away, but warier than ever, his eye a mere pin point in his big face, but gleaming like a crumb of glass. "That?
And at this point Tom flashed out like a hero.
"Alan!" he cried.
"Then rest his soul for a true seaman!
And as for you, john Silver, long you've been a mate of mine, but you're mate of mine no more.
If I die like a dog, I'll die in my dooty.
You've killed Alan, have you?
Kill me too, if you can.
But I defies you."
And with that, this brave fellow turned his back directly on the cook and set off walking for the beach.
But he was not destined to go far. With a cry john seized the branch of a tree, whipped the crutch out of his armpit, and sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air. It struck poor Tom, point foremost, and with stunning violence, right between the shoulders in the middle of his back.
His hands flew up, he gave a sort of gasp, and fell.
Whether he were injured much or little, none could ever tell.
Like enough, to judge from the sound, his back was broken on the spot.
But he had no time given him to recover.
Silver, agile as a monkey even without leg or crutch, was on the top of him next moment and had twice buried his knife up to the hilt in that defenceless body.
From my place of ambush, I could hear him pant aloud as he struck the blows.
I do not know what it rightly is to faint, but I do know that for the next little while the whole world swam away from before me in a whirling mist; Silver and the birds, and the tall Spy glass hilltop, going round and round and topsy turvy before my eyes, and all manner of bells ringing and distant voices shouting in my ear.
When I came again to myself the monster had pulled himself together, his crutch under his arm, his hat upon his head.
But now john put his hand into his pocket, brought out a whistle, and blew upon it several modulated blasts that rang far across the heated air.
I could not tell, of course, the meaning of the signal, but it instantly awoke my fears.
More men would be coming.
I might be discovered.
They had already slain two of the honest people; after Tom and Alan, might not I come next?
Instantly I began to extricate myself and crawl back again, with what speed and silence I could manage, to the more open portion of the wood.
As I did so, I could hear hails coming and going between the old buccaneer and his comrades, and this sound of danger lent me wings.
As soon as I was clear of the thicket, I ran as I never ran before, scarce minding the direction of my flight, so long as it led me from the murderers; and as I ran, fear grew and grew upon me until it turned into a kind of frenzy.
Indeed, could anyone be more entirely lost than I?
When the gun fired, how should I dare to go down to the boats among those fiends, still smoking from their crime?
Would not the first of them who saw me wring my neck like a snipe's?
Would not my absence itself be an evidence to them of my alarm, and therefore of my fatal knowledge?
It was all over, I thought.
Good bye to the HISPANIOLA; good bye to the squire, the doctor, and the captain!
There was nothing left for me but death by starvation or death by the hands of the mutineers.
All this while, as I say, I was still running, and without taking any notice, I had drawn near to the foot of the little hill with the two peaks and had got into a part of the island where the live oaks grew more widely apart and seemed more like forest trees in their bearing and dimensions.
Mingled with these were a few scattered pines, some fifty, some nearer seventy, feet high.
The air too smelt more freshly than down beside the marsh.
And here a fresh alarm brought me to a standstill with a thumping heart.
Fortunately this anecdote is well authenticated, and moreover is intrinsically probable; I say fortunately, because it is always painful to have to give up these child learnt anecdotes, like Alfred and the cakes and so on.
This anecdote of the apple we need not resign.
The tree was blown down in eighteen twenty and part of its wood is preserved.
I have mentioned Voltaire in connection with Newton's philosophy.
He now began to turn his attention to optics, and, as was usual with him, his whole mind became absorbed in this subject as if nothing else had ever occupied him.
Accordingly he calculated out their proper curves, just as Descartes had also done, and then proceeded to grind them as near as he could to those figures. But the images did not please him; they were always blurred and rather indistinct.
At length, it struck him that perhaps it was not the lenses but the light which was at fault.
Perhaps the law of refraction was not quite accurate, but only an approximation.
So he bought a prism to try the law.
The patch on the screen was not a round disk, as it would have been without the prism, but was an elongated oval and was coloured at its extremities.
Evidently refraction was not a simple geometrical deflection of a ray, there was a spreading out as well.
Why did the image thus spread out?
If it were due to irregularities in the glass a second prism should rather increase them, but a second prism when held in appropriate position was able to neutralise the dispersion and to reproduce the simple round white spot without deviation. Evidently the spreading out of the beam was connected in some definite way with its refraction.
Pierce the screen to let one of the constituents through and interpose a second prism in its path.
If the spreading out depended on the prism only it should spread out just as much as before, but if it depended on the complex character of white light, this isolated simple constituent should be able to spread out no more.
It differed from sunlight in being simple.
White light was not simple but compound. It could be sorted out by a prism into an infinite number of constituent parts which were differently refracted, and the most striking of which Newton named violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.
At once the true nature of colour became manifest.
Red glass for instance adds nothing to sunlight.
The light does not get dyed red by passing through the glass; all that the red glass does is to stop and absorb a large part of the sunlight; it is opaque to the larger portion, but it is transparent to that particular portion which affects our eyes with the sensation of red.
Coloured media act like filters, stopping certain kinds but allowing the rest to go through.
Leonardo's and all the ancient doctrines of colour had been singularly wrong; colour is not in the object but in the light.
Refraction analysed out the various constituents of white light and displayed them in the form of a series of overlapping images of the aperture, each of a different colour; this series of images we call a spectrum, and the operation we now call spectrum analysis.
If light be simple it acts well, but if ordinary white light fall upon a lens, its different constituents have different foci; every bright object is fringed with colour, and nothing like a clear image can be obtained.
Beyond the crossing point or focus the order of cones is reversed, as the above figure shows.
If a screen be held anywhere nearer the lens than the place marked one there will be a whitish centre to the patch of light and a red and orange fringe or border.
Held anywhere beyond the region two, the border of the patch will be blue and violet.
Each point of an object will be represented in the image not by a point but by a coloured patch: a fact which amply explains the observed blurring and indistinctness.
So he gave up his "glass works"; and proceeded to think of reflexion from metal specula.
A concave mirror forms an image just as a lens does, but since it does so without refraction or transmission through any substance, there is no accompanying dispersion or chromatic aberration.
It acted as well as a three or four feet refractor of that day, and showed Jupiter's moons.
Fifty years elapsed before it was much improved on, and then, first by Hadley and afterwards by Herschel and others, large and good reflectors were constructed.
The largest telescope ever made, that of Lord Rosse, is a Newtonian reflector, fifty feet long, six feet diameter, with a mirror weighing four tons.
The sextant, as used by navigators, was also invented by Newton.
The year after the plague, in sixteen sixty seven, Newton returned to Trinity College, and there continued his experiments on optics.
However, he was known as an accomplished young mathematician, and was made a fellow of his college.
It happened, about sixteen sixty nine, that a mathematical discovery of some interest was being much discussed, and dr Barrow happened to mention it to Newton, who said yes, he had worked out that and a few other similar things some time ago.
Still, however, his method of fluxions was unknown, and still he did not publish it.
He lectured first on optics, giving an account of his experiments.
His lectures were afterwards published both in Latin and English, and are highly valued to this day.
Boyle was a great experimenter, a worthy follower of dr Gilbert.
Hooke began as his assistant, but being of a most extraordinary ingenuity he rapidly rose so as to exceed his master in importance.
With great ingenuity, remarkable scientific insight, and consummate experimental skill, he stands in many respects almost on a level with Galileo.
Of Christopher Wren I need not say much.
He is well known as an architect, but he was a most accomplished all round man, and had a considerable taste and faculty for science.
He communicated to them an account of his reflecting telescope, and presented them with the instrument.
Comparisons in different departments are but little help perhaps, nevertheless it seems to me that in his own department, and considered simply as a man of science, Newton towers head and shoulders over, not only his contemporaries-that is a small matter-but over every other scientific man who has ever lived, in a way that we can find no parallel for in other departments.
Armed with this new datum, his old speculation concerning gravity occurred to him.
What if it should turn out to be true after all!
If gravity were the force keeping the moon in its orbit, it would fall toward the earth sixteen feet every minute.
How far did it fall?
He throws down the pen; and the secret of the universe is, to one man, known.
But of course it had to be worked out.
During those years he lived but to calculate and think, and the most ludicrous stories are told concerning his entire absorption and inattention to ordinary affairs of life.
Thus, for instance, when getting up in a morning he would sit on the side of the bed half dressed, and remain like that till dinner time.
After waiting a long time, dr Stukely removed the cover and ate the chicken underneath it, replacing and covering up the bones again.
The first part of the work having been done, any ordinary mortal would have proceeded to publish it; but the fact is that after he had sent to the Royal Society his papers on optics, there had arisen controversies and objections; most of them rather paltry, to which he felt compelled to find answers.
This shows how much he cared for contemporary fame.
The theory of gravitation seemed to be in the air, and Wren, Hooke, and Halley had many a talk about it.
It does not obey Kepler's laws; still it was a striking experiment.
They had guessed at a law of inverse squares, and their difficulty was to prove what curve a body subject to it would describe.
They knew it ought to be an ellipse if it was to serve to explain the planetary motion, and Hooke said he could prove that an ellipse it was; but he was nothing of a mathematician, and the others scarcely believed him.
He surmised also that gravity was the force concerned, and asserted that the path of an ordinary projectile was an ellipse, like the path of a planet-which is quite right.
We should never have had them stated in the same form, nor proved with the same marvellous lucidity and simplicity, but the facts themselves we should by this time have arrived at.
Their developments and completions, due to such men as Clairaut, Euler, D'Alembert, Lagrange, Laplace, Airy, Leverrier, Adams, we should of course not have had to the same extent; because the lives and energies of these great men would have been partially consumed in obtaining the main facts themselves.
He had been at Cambridge, doubtless had heard Newton lecture, and had acquired a great veneration for him.
So at last, in August, Halley went over to Cambridge to speak to Newton about the difficult problem and secure his aid.
He said, "What path will a body describe if it be attracted by a centre with a force varying as the inverse square of the distance." To which Newton at once replied, "An ellipse." "How on earth do you know?" said Halley in amazement.
"Why, I have calculated it," and began hunting about for the paper.
He actually couldn't find it just then, but sent it him shortly by post, and with it much more-in fact, what appeared to be a complete treatise on motion in general.
The Society at his representation wrote to mr Newton asking leave that it might be printed.
To this he consented; but the Royal Society wisely appointed mr Halley to see after him and jog his memory, in case he forgot about it.
However, he set to work to polish it up and finish it, and added to it a great number of later developments and embellishments, especially the part concerning the lunar theory, which gave him a deal of trouble-and no wonder; for in the way he has put it there never was a man yet living who could have done the same thing.
Mathematicians regard the achievement now as men might stare at the work of some demigod of a bygone age, wondering what manner of man this was, able to wield such ponderous implements with such apparent ease.
For though he ultimately suffered no pecuniary loss, rather the contrary, yet there was considerable risk in bringing out a book which not a dozen men living could at the time comprehend.
It is no small part of the merit of Halley that he recognized the transcendent value of the yet unfinished work, that he brought it to light, and assisted in its becoming understood to the best of his ability.
In less than twenty years the edition was sold out, and copies fetched large sums.
The only useful way really to read a book like that is to pore over every sentence: it is no book to be skimmed.
Oxford had given way, and the Dean of Christ Church was a creature of James's choosing.
By this time Newton was only forty five years old, but his main work was done.
By some fatality, principally no doubt because of the interest they excited, every discovery he published was the signal for an outburst of criticism and sometimes of attack.
By indiscreet friends these two great men were set somewhat at loggerheads, and worse might have happened had they not managed to come to close quarters, and correspond privately in a quite friendly manner, instead of acting through the mischievous medium of third parties.
In the next edition Newton liberally recognizes the claims of both Hooke and Wren.
However, fortunately, Halley was able to prevail upon him to publish the third book also.
Some years later, when his method of fluxions was published, another and a worse controversy arose-this time with Leibnitz, who had also independently invented the differential calculus.
He went, I believe, as a Whig, but it is not recorded that he spoke.
It is, in fact, recorded that he was once expected to speak when on a Royal Commission about some question of chronometers, but that he would not.
However, I dare say he made a good average member.
Then a little later it was realized that Newton was poor, that he still had to teach for his livelihood, and that though the Crown had continued his fellowship to him as Lucasian Professor without the necessity of taking orders, yet it was rather disgraceful that he should not be better off.
But what a pitiful business it all is!
It is not to be supposed that he had lost his power, for he frequently solved problems very quickly which had been given out by great Continental mathematicians as a challenge to the world.
Certainly Newton did not know it.
He several times talks of giving up philosophy altogether; and though he never really does it, and perhaps the feeling is one only born of some temporary overwork, yet he does not sacrifice everything else to it as he surely must had he been conscious of his own greatness. No; self consciousness was the last thing that affected him.
It is for a great man's contemporaries to discover him, to make much of him, and to put him in surroundings where he may flourish luxuriantly in his own heaven intended way.
However, it is difficult for us to judge of these things.
Perhaps if he had been maintained at the national expense to do that for which he was preternaturally fitted, he might have worn himself out prematurely; whereas by giving him routine work the scientific world got the benefit of his matured wisdom and experience.
The events of his later life I shall pass over lightly.
His silver white hair when he removed his peruke was a venerable spectacle.
He died quietly, after a painful illness, at the ripe age of eighty five.
His body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey, six peers bearing the pall.
He lived frugally with his niece and her husband, mr Conduit, who succeeded him as Master of the Mint.
Much ought to be sacrificed to obtain those conditions.
mrs Parker's Sorrows
CHAPTER one
AFTER SHILOH.
Although defeated they had not been conquered.
They had set forth from Corinth in the highest hopes, fully expecting to drive Grant's army into the Tennessee River.
This hope was almost realized, when it suddenly perished: twenty thousand fresh troops had arrived upon the field, and the Confederates were forced to retreat.
But they had fallen back unmolested, for the Federal army had been too severely punished to think of pursuing.
They had fought as only brave men can fight; they left one third of their number on the field, killed and wounded.
No charge could pierce that line of heroes.
With faces to the foe, they slowly fell back, contesting every inch of ground.
"It looks to me," said Breckinridge, with a sigh, "that if we are forced to give up Corinth, our cause in the West will be lost.
I am in favor of holding Corinth to the last man."
"What is your opinion, Morgan?" asked one of the officers, turning to the captain of whom we have spoken.
"What! would you give up Corinth without a struggle?" asked the officer, in surprise.
Corinth is nothing; the army is everything."
"Then you believe, Captain, that Corinth could be lost, and our cause not greatly suffer?"
"Certainly.
"No joke about it.
A murmur of surprise arose, and then Trabue asked: "Will Beauregard let you make the hazardous attempt?"
"Well, good bye, john, if you try it," said one of the officers, laughing.
"Why good bye, Colonel?"
"Perhaps!" answered Morgan, dryly, as he arose to go.
"A perfect dare devil.
"He said he must see you," continued the orderly, "and if necessary he would wait all night."
Morgan gave him a swift glance, and then exclaimed: "Bless my heart!
Let's see! You were on the staff of the late lamented Governor Johnson, were you not?"
"Yes," replied Calhoun; and his voice trembled, and tears came into his eyes in spite of himself, as he thought of the death of his beloved chief.
"Now that he has gone, what do you propose doing?"
"That is what I have come to see you about.
Of course you are going to accept?"
Calhoun's brow clouded.
"Yes," he answered; "but why do you say the late Colonel Shackelford?
Uncle Dick is not dead."
"Is that so?
I am rejoiced to hear it.
"He was desperately wounded," answered Calhoun, "but he did not die, and he is now a prisoner in the hands of the Yankees.
But that is not all.
"Captured?" echoed Morgan, in surprise.
"Then you escaped?" queried Morgan.
I was dressed in citizen's clothes.
But as I failed to get him, I believe you would make a splendid substitute.
"A thousand times, yes.
Morgan's eyes sparkled.
Let's see!
How would you like to go back to Kentucky?"
"Yes, to recruit for my command.
Do you think you could dodge the Yankees?"
"I believe I could.
I could at least try," answered Calhoun, his face aglow with the idea.
My present force is small-not much over four hundred.
I do not look for much help from the Confederate Government.
When can you start?"
Good night, now, for it is getting late."
Thus dismissed Calhoun went away with a light heart.
"True, General," replied Calhoun, "but if Morgan can keep thousands of the enemy in the rear guarding their communications, the great armies of the North will be depleted by that number."
I have recommended him for a colonelcy.
May God bless you, and crown your efforts with victory!"
"I believe I have heard of Captain Conway," said Calhoun, with a smile.
"I have heard a cousin of mine speak of him."
Conway fairly turned purple with rage.
With these words he turned on his heel and stalked away.
"He can never forget that trick your cousin played on him."
I noticed that he greeted me rather coldly."
To my mind, Pennington is no better than that sneak of a cousin of his, and Morgan will find it out some day."
"Better keep a still tongue in your head, Conway," dryly replied the officer, a Captain Matthews, to whom Conway was complaining.
Just as Calhoun was ready to start, Morgan gave him his secret instructions.
Much depends on your success.
If possible (and I think it is), I shall try to reach Kentucky.
If I could be joined by a thousand when I reach Kentucky, I believe I could sweep clear to the Ohio River.
I expect to be in Glasgow by the tenth of May at the latest."
"All right," replied Calhoun, "I will try to meet you there at that time, with at least one or two good companies."
At the time Calhoun started for Kentucky, General Halleck was concentrating his immense army at Pittsburg Landing, preparatory to an attack on Corinth.
Here he found little trouble in finding means to cross the Tennessee River.
They were mostly country boys, rough, uncouth, and with little or no education.
"The whelps and robbers!" he exclaimed; "how I should like to get at them! But their time will come.
"She will, she must," cried Calhoun.
"Already thousands of her sons are flocking to the Southern standard.
"He can if any one can.
'Under no consideration,' says Morgan, 'should Beauregard allow himself to be cooped up in Corinth.' "
"I reckon he is right," sighed the Doctor; "but may the time never come when he will have to give it up."
Near Mount Pleasant he met a Confederate officer with a party of recruits which he was taking south.
I have no fears but that you can capture it, even with your small force."
He was discovered by a squad of Federal cavalry, which immediately gave chase. But he was mounted on a splendid horse, one that he had brought with him from Kentucky.
"Only one," muttered Calhoun, looking back, as a pistol ball whistled by his head; "I can settle him," and he reached for a revolver in his holster.
"Surrender, you Rebel!" cried the officer, but quick as a flash, Calhoun snatched a small revolver which he carried in his belt, and fired.
A scattering volley was fired by the foremost of the pursuers, but it did no harm, and Calhoun was soon across the field.
Did you get him?" asked the Lieutenant.
He got across that field as if Old Nick was after him.
I took a crack at him, but missed."
"My leg is sprained," he groaned; "but the worst of it is, Jupiter is dead.
I would make him pay dearly for that horse."
I caught him!" exclaimed one of the men, leading up Calhoun's horse, which he had captured.
Wonder who that feller can be.
I thought you had him sure, Lieutenant."
Sergeant Latham took the roll, which was securely strapped behind Calhoun's saddle, and began to unroll it as carefully as if he suspected it might be loaded.
"A fine rubber and a good woollen blanket," remarked the Sergeant.
Bet your life, they are a part of the plunder from Shiloh.
"Give them to me," said the Lieutenant.
We will see." He tore open one of the letters.
He had read but a few lines when he exclaimed, with a strong expletive, "Boys, I would give a month's pay if we had captured that fellow!"
"Who was he?
He was a Lieutenant Calhoun Pennington, and he was from the Rebel army at Corinth.
Morgan-Morgan, I have heard of that fellow before.
He played the deuce with us in Kentucky last winter: burned the railroad bridge over Bacon Creek, captured trains, tore up the railroad, and played smash generally.
But he may have carried important dispatches on his person.
We let a rare prize slip through our fingers."
"Can't be helped now," dryly remarked Sergeant Latham.
"If you had captured him it might have put one bar, if not two, on your shoulder strap."
The Lieutenant scowled, but did not reply.
All the letters were read and passed around.
"Golly!
"Or took fire from their warmth," put in a boyish looking soldier.
I tell you it was hot stuff.
'My dearest Polly!' it commenced, 'I----' "
"A fight! a fight!" shouted the men, and crowded around to see the fun.
"Stop that!" roared the Lieutenant, "or I will have you both bucked and gagged when we get to camp.
Sergeant Latham, see that both of those men are put on extra duty to night."
It was thought he sheltered these wandering bands of Confederates who make it dangerous to step outside the camp.
"Shut up, or I will have you reduced to the ranks," growled the Lieutenant.
The subject was rather a painful one to the Lieutenant, for during his visit to the Osbornes the week before, when he tried to make himself agreeable to the daughter, the lady told him in very plain words what she thought of Yankees.
It was a beautiful place. The country had not yet been devastated by the cruel hand of war, and the landscape, rich with the growing crops, lay glowing under the bright April sky.
From underneath a rock near the house gushed forth a spring, whose waters, clear as crystal, ran away in a rippling stream.
It was near this spring that Lieutenant Haines, for that was the officer's name, halted his troops.
After you get the guard posted, we will search the house."
I trust that the telegraph wire has not been cut, or the railroad torn up again."
The invitation nearly took away the Lieutenant's breath, but he accepted it gladly.
Are you afraid of an attack?
I know of no body of Confederates in the vicinity."
"The truth is," replied Haines, "we ran into a lone Confederate about a mile from here.
We captured his horse, but he succeeded in escaping to the woods, after killing my horse.
"Do as you please," replied mr Osborne, coldly; "I have seen no such Confederate; but if I had, I should have concealed him if I could.
But do not let this circumstance spoil our good nature, or our dinner."
Just then they met Sergeant Latham returning from posting the guard. "Sergeant, you may withdraw the guard," said the Lieutenant; "mr
The Sergeant turned back to carry out the order, muttering, "Confederate! Confederate!
No wonder Lieutenant Haines felt his heart beat faster when he looked upon her.
When he met her the week before, she treated him with the utmost disdain; now she greeted him with a smile, and said, "I trust you have not come to carry papa away in captivity.
If not, you are welcome."
"Thank you," she answered, with a smile.
"Now, you must stay and take dinner with us while your men rest."
"Better let the Lieutenant tell the story, for I know nothing of it," answered mr Osborne; "but he spoke of searching the house for a supposed concealed Confederate."
As mr Osborne said this, Miss Osborne gave a little gasp and turned pale, but quickly recovering herself, she turned a pair of inquiring eyes on the Lieutenant-eyes that emitted flames of angry light and seemed to look him through and through.
Lieutenant Haines turned very red.
"Your father has assured me he has neither seen nor concealed any Confederate officer, and his word is good with me. Make yourself easy.
"Only my poor horse; he was killed," answered Haines.
"You must admit yourself vanquished!"
"Yes, but to all appearances a most gallant one."
The place for true knights, at this time, is at Corinth."
"From letters captured with his horse, I take it he was from Corinth," said Haines.
"From those letters we learned that his name was Calhoun Pennington, that he was a lieutenant in the command of Captain john h Morgan, a gentleman who has given us considerable trouble, and may give us more, and that he was on his way back to Kentucky to recruit for Morgan's command."
"Yes, a whole package of them.
They were from members of Morgan's command to their friends back in Kentucky.
"Some of them were rich," laughed Haines; "they were written by loving swains to their girls.
"Lieutenant, there was nothing in those letters of value to you from a military standpoint, was there?" suddenly asked Miss Osborne.
"Nothing."
Will you not give them to me?"
"Why, Miss Osborne, what can you do with them?" asked Haines, in surprise.
"I can at least keep them sacred.
Oh! give them to me, Lieutenant Haines, and you will sleep the sweeter to night."
"Thank you!
I see nothing more we can accomplish here," answered the Lieutenant.
The Sergeant saluted and turned to go, when the officer stopped him with, "Say, Sergeant, you can gather up all those letters we captured and send them up here with my horse."
The family had accompanied Lieutenant Haines to the porch.
I will catch up with you in a few moments.
"Yes, sir," answered the soldier, saluting, and handing the package to his commander.
"Very well, you may go now."
"Oh, how could you betray us!" and stood with clasped hands, and with face as pale as death.
Lower that weapon!"
mr Osborne flushed deeply, but before he could reply, his daughter sprang in front of him, and faced Lieutenant Haines with flashing eye.
I alone am to blame, and I told you nothing.
I strove to entertain you and keep you from searching the house, and I accomplished my purpose."
"Yes."
Lieutenant Haines groaned.
"I did not intend that Lieutenant Pennington should show himself.
mr Osborne now spoke.
As my guest, you are entitled to my protection, and I shall make what reparation is in my power." Then turning to the colored boy who had stood by with mouth and eyes wide open, he said, "Tom, go and saddle and bridle Starlight, and bring him around for this gentleman."
So you see, after all, I am out nothing."
I suspected something was wrong all the time."
"Thank you, Sergeant, for your watchfulness.
I shall remember it."
"Yes; the girl worked it fine."
The Lieutenant sighed.
"Gods!
Not above ten miles, I dare say."
there is not much difference.
"My dear," said he to his lady, "it is very provoking that we should be so few.
"My love you contradict every body," said his wife with her usual laugh.
He declares he won't.
"Well-I am so glad you do.
"Don't pretend to deny it, because you know it is what every body talks of.
"But I do assure you it was so, for all that, and I will tell you how it happened.
It is so delightful that you should live at the cottage!
"I think, Elinor," she presently added, "we must employ Edward to take care of us in our return to Barton.
The years passed slowly, and I continued to serve them, and at the same time grew into strong, healthy womanhood.
The salary was small, and we still had to practise the closest economy.
I drew myself up proudly, firmly, and said: "No, mr Bingham, I shall not take down my dress before you.
My words seemed to exasperate him.
He seized a rope, caught me roughly, and tried to tie me.
Then he picked up a rawhide, and began to ply it freely over my shoulders.
It cut the skin, raised great welts, and the warm blood trickled down my back.
Oh God!
"Go away," he gruffly answered, "do not bother me."
I would not be put off thus.
No, I could not sleep, for I was suffering mental as well as bodily torture.
We struggled, and he struck me many savage blows.
My distress even touched her cold, jealous heart.
These revolting scenes created a great sensation at the time, were the talk of the town and neighborhood, and I flatter myself that the actions of those who had conspired against me were not viewed in a light to reflect much credit upon them.
The child of which he was the father was the only child that I ever brought into the world.
In this connection I desire to state that Rev.
"HILLSBORO', april tenth eighteen thirty eight.
I really believe you and all the family have forgotten me, if not I certainly should have heard from some of you since you left Boyton, if it was only a line; nevertheless I love you all very dearly, and shall, although I may never see you again, nor do I ever expect to.
I have often wished that I lived where I knew I never could see you, for then I would not have my hopes raised, and to be disappointed in this manner; however, it is said that a bad beginning makes a good ending, but I hardly expect to see that happy day at this place.
Give my love to all the family, both white and black. I was very much obliged to you for the presents you sent me last summer, though it is quite late in the day to be thanking for them.
Tell Aunt Bella that I was very much obliged to her for her present; I have been so particular with it that I have only worn it once.
CHAPTER ten
Most of the women of the middle and upper classes in America seem secure in their knowledge of contraceptives as a means of birth control.
Nevertheless, so strong is their purpose that they do obtain it and use it, correctly or incorrectly.
Being given their choice by society-to continue to be overburdened mothers or to submit to a humiliating, repulsive, painful and too often gravely dangerous operation, those women in whom the feminine urge to freedom is strongest choose the abortionist.
"Our examinations," says dr Max Hirsch, an authority on the subject, "have informed us that the largest number of abortions (in the United States) are performed on married women.
This fact brings us to the conclusion that contraceptive measures among the upper classes and the practice of abortion among the lower class, are the real means employed to regulate the number of offspring."
Thus a high percentage of women in comfortable circumstances escape overbreeding by the use of contraceptives.
When accidental conception takes place, some women of both classes resort to abortion if they can obtain the services of an abortionist.
When society holds up its hands in horror at the "crime" of abortion, it forgets at whose door the first and principal responsibility for this practice rests.
The abortionist could not continue his practice for twenty four hours if it were not for the fact that women come desperately begging for such operations.
The question that society must answer is this: Shall family limitation be achieved through birth control or abortion?
Shall normal, safe, effective contraceptives be employed, or shall we continue to force women to the abnormal, often dangerous surgical operation?
Knowledge of these processes will also enable us to comprehend more thoroughly the dangers to which woman is exposed by our antiquated laws, and how much better it would be for her to employ such preventive measures as would keep her out of the hands of the abortionist, into which the laws now drive her.
They are in every female at birth, and as the girl develops into womanhood, these ovules develop also.
If fertilization takes place, the fertilized ovule or ovum will cling to the lining of the womb and there gather its nourishment. If fertilization does not take place, the ovum passes out of the body and the uterus throws off its surplus blood supply.
This is called the menstrual period.
It occurs about once a month or every twenty eight days.
In the semen is the life giving principle called the sperm.
When intercourse takes place, if no preventive is employed, the semen is deposited in the woman's vagina.
This process is called fertilization, conception or impregnation.
When scientific means are employed to prevent this meeting, one is said to practice birth control.
The means used is known as a contraceptive.
An abortion is as important a matter as a confinement and requires as much attention as the birth of a child at its full term.
It is these, too, who are most often forced to resort to such operations.
If death does not result, the woman who has undergone an abortion is not altogether safe from harm.
Even such drugs as are prescribed by physicians have harmful effects, and nostrums recommended by druggists are often worse still.
Even more drastic may be the effect upon the unborn child, for many women fill their systems with poisonous drugs during the first weeks of their pregnancy, only to decide at last, when drugs have failed, as they usually do, to bring the child to birth.
There are no statistics, of course, by which we may compute the amount of suffering to mother and child from the use of such drugs, but we know that the total of physical weakness and disease must be astounding.
We know that the woman's own system feels the strain of these drugs and that the embryo is usually poisoned by them.
The suffering and the death of these women is squarely upon the heads of the lawmakers and the puritanical, masculine minded person who insist upon retaining the abominable legal restrictions.
Try as they will they cannot escape the truth, nor hide it under the cloak of stupid hypocrisy.
"He who would combat abortion," says dr Hirsch, "and at the same time combat contraceptive measures may be likened to the person who would fight contagious diseases and forbid disinfection.
It follows, therefore, that America stands at the head of all nations in the huge number of abortions."
There is the case in a nutshell.
Family limitation will always be practiced as it is now being practiced-either by birth control or by abortion.
We know that.
The one means health and happiness-a stronger, better race.
These conditions give her the choice between the surgeon's instruments and the sacrificing of what is highest and holiest in her-her aspiration to freedom, her desire to protect the children already hers.
These conditions-not the woman-outface society with this question:
CHAPTER fifteen
LEGISLATING WOMAN'S MORALS
This will be no easy undertaking; it is usually much easier to enact statutes than to revise them.
Laws are seldom exactly what they seem, rarely what their advocates claim for them.
Woman, bent upon her freedom and seeking to make a better world, will not permit the indecent and unclean forces of reaction to mask themselves forever behind the plea that it is necessary to keep her in ignorance to preserve her purity.
In the birth control movement, she has already begun to fight for her right to have, without legal interference, all knowledge pertaining to her sex nature.
It is most important because it is to purify the very fountain of the race and make the race completely free.
The first and most dramatic of the three great struggles for liberty reached its apex, as we know, in the American Revolution.
It had for its object the right to hold such political beliefs as one might choose, and to act in accordance with those beliefs.
If the obscenity laws are not radically revised or repealed, few reactionaries will dare to face the public derision that will greet their attempts to use them to stay woman's progress.
The French have a saying concerning "mort main"--the dead hand.
This hand of the past reaches up into the present to smother the rising flame of modern ideals, to reforge our chains when we have broken them, to arrest progress.
It is the hand of such as have lived on earth but have not loved humanity.
At the call of those who fear progress and freedom, it rises from the gloom of forgotten things to oppress the living.
It is the dead hand that holds imprisoned within the obscenity laws all direct information concerning birth control.
It is the dead hand that thus compels millions of American women to remain in the bondage of maternity.
In that year, however, the General Assembly of New York passed an act which specifically included the subject of contraceptives.
The act made it exactly as great an offense to give such information as to exhibit the sort of pictures and writings at which the legislation was ostensibly aimed.
This act made it a crime to use the mails to convey contraceptives or information concerning contraceptives.
Meanwhile, the provisions regarding contraceptives had been dropped from the amended New York State law of eighteen seventy two.
In eighteen seventy three, however, a new section, said to have been drafted by Comstock himself, was substituted for the one enacted in eighteen seventy two, and that section is essentially the substance of the present law.
None of these acts made it an offense to prevent conception-all of them provided punishment for anyone disseminating information concerning the prevention of conception.
Comstock has passed out of public notice.
His body has been entombed but the evil that he did lives after him.
Each year this hand reaches out to compel the birth of hundreds of thousands of infants who must die before they are twelve months old.
Like many laws upon our statute books, these are being persistently and intelligently violated.
They limit their families to one, two or three well cared for children.
Usually the prosecutor who presents the case against a birth control advocate, trapped by a detective hired by the Comstock Society, has no children at all or a small family.
The family of the judge who passes upon the case is likely to be smaller still.
The words "It is the law" sums it all up for these officials when they pass sentence in court.
Millions of them know nothing of reliable contraceptives. When women of the impoverished strata of society do not break these laws against contraceptives, they violate those laws of their inner beings which tell them not to bring children into the world to live in want, disease and general misery.
They break the first law of nature, which is that of self preservation.
The darkness that surrounded the whole field of sex was made as complete as possible.
The rapidity with which women are going into industry, the increasing hardship and poverty of the lower strata of society, the arousing of public conscience, have all operated to give force and volume to the demand for woman's right to control her own body that she may work out her own salvation.
Those who believe in strictly legal measures, as well as those who believe both in legal measures and in open defiance of these brutal and unjust laws, are demanding amendments to the obscenity statutes, which shall remove information concerning contraceptives from its present classification among things filthy and obscene.
This proposed amendment should without doubt include midwives as well as nurses.
It does exist, however, and was specifically declared by the New York State Court of Appeals, as we shall see when we consider that court's opinion in the Sanger case, farther on in the book.
Shall we go on indefinitely driving the now healthy mother of two children into the hands of the abortionist, where she goes in preference to constant ill health, overwork and the witnessing of dying and starving babies?
They will do it at once unless, like men, they use the ballot for those political honors which many years of experience have taught men to be hollow.
It is only a question of how long it will take women to make up their minds to this result.
Man has not protected woman in matters most vital to her-but she is awaking and will sooner or later realize this and assert herself.
It might have been an unfortunate affair for his poor dad, and the whole story threw a queer light upon the social and political life of Costaguana.
Mines had acquired for him a dramatic interest.
He studied their peculiarities from a personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied characters of men.
Their desolation appealed to him like the sight of human misery, whose causes are varied and profound.
He simply went on acting and thinking in her sight.
For this natural reason these discussions were precious to mrs Gould in her engaged state.
Charles feared that mr Gould, senior, was wasting his strength and making himself ill by his efforts to get rid of the Concession.
You were born there, too."
He knew his answer.
"That's different.
"It has killed him!" he said.
"It has killed him!" he repeated.
"He ought to have had many years yet. We are a long lived family."
It was only when, turning suddenly to her, he blurted out twice, "I've come to you-I've come straight to you-," without being able to finish his phrase, that the great pitifulness of that lonely and tormented death in Costaguana came to her with the full force of its misery.
"Yes.
And then they stopped.
Everywhere there were long shadows lying on the hills, on the roads, on the enclosed fields of olive trees; the shadows of poplars, of wide chestnuts, of farm buildings, of stone walls; and in mid-air the sound of a bell, thin and alert, was like the throbbing pulse of the sunset glow.
That slight girl, with her little feet, little hands, little face attractively overweighted by great coils of hair; with a rather large mouth, whose mere parting seemed to breathe upon you the fragrance of frankness and generosity, had the fastidious soul of an experienced woman.
They corrupted him thoroughly, the poor old boy.
But now I shall know how to grapple with this."
After pronouncing these words with immense assurance, he glanced down at her, and at once fell a prey to distress, incertitude, and fear.
She did.
She would.
When her feet touched the ground again, the bell was still ringing in the valley; she put her hands up to her hair, breathing quickly, and glanced up and down the stony lane.
They turned back, and after she had slipped her hand on his arm, the first words he pronounced were-
You've heard its name.
I am so glad poor father did get that house.
You shall be the new mistress of the Casa Gould."
Uncle Harry was no adventurer.
He made use of the political cry of his time.
It was Federation.
But he was no politician.
He went to work in his own way because it seemed right, just as I feel I must lay hold of that mine."
He explained those things.
It was late when they parted.
Action is consolatory.
Such were the-properly speaking-emotions of Charles Gould.
Not one of them could be aware beforehand what enormous changes the death of any given individual may produce in the very aspect of the world.
The words it pronounces have the value of acts of integrity, tolerance, and compassion.
She jested most agreeably, they thought; and Charles Gould, besides knowing thoroughly what he was about, had shown himself a real hustler.
These facts caused them to be well disposed towards his wife.
Captain Mitchell had snatched at the occasion of leave taking to remark to mrs Gould, in a low, confidential mutter, "This marks an epoch."
mrs Gould loved the patio of her Spanish house.
one: NATURE IS GOVERNED BY ONE UNIVERSAL LAW
Nature is that condition, that reality, which in appearance consists in life and death, or, in other words, in the composition and decomposition of all things.
But when you look at Nature itself, you see that it has no intelligence, no will.
For instance, the nature of fire is to burn; it burns without will or intelligence.
The nature of water is fluidity; it flows without will or intelligence.
The nature of the sun is radiance; it shines without will or intelligence.
The nature of vapor is to ascend; it ascends without will or intelligence.
Thus it is clear that the natural movements of all things are compelled; there are no voluntary movements except those of animals and, above all, those of man.
For example, he invented the telegraph, which is the means of communication between the East and the West.
Now, when you behold in existence such organizations, arrangements and laws, can you say that all these are the effect of Nature, though Nature has neither intelligence nor perception?
If not, it becomes evident that this Nature, which has neither perception nor intelligence, is in the grasp of Almighty God, Who is the Ruler of the world of Nature; whatever He wishes, He causes Nature to manifest.
One of the things which has appeared in the world of existence, and which is one of the requirements of Nature, is human life.
Considered from this point of view man is the branch; nature is the root.
two: PROOFS AND EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
One of the proofs and demonstrations of the existence of God is the fact that man did not create himself: nay, his creator and designer is another than himself.
It is certain and indisputable that the creator of man is not like man because a powerless creature cannot create another being.
The maker, the creator, has to possess all perfections in order that he may create.
Can the creation be perfect and the creator imperfect?
Can a picture be a masterpiece and the painter imperfect in his art?
For it is his art and his creation.
Moreover, the picture cannot be like the painter; otherwise, the painting would have created itself.
However perfect the picture may be, in comparison with the painter it is in the utmost degree of imperfection.
The imperfections of the contingent world are in themselves a proof of the perfections of God.
For example, when you look at man, you see that he is weak.
In the contingent world there is ignorance; necessarily knowledge exists, because ignorance is found; for if there were no knowledge, neither would there be ignorance.
Because a characteristic of contingent beings is dependency, and this dependency is an essential necessity, therefore, there must be an independent being whose independence is essential.
Throughout the world of existence it is the same; the smallest created thing proves that there is a creator.
For instance, this piece of bread proves that it has a maker.
Praise be to God! the least change produced in the form of the smallest thing proves the existence of a creator: then can this great universe, which is endless, be self created and come into existence from the action of matter and the elements?
These obvious arguments are adduced for weak souls; but if the inner perception be open, a hundred thousand clear proofs become visible.
three: THE NEED OF AN EDUCATOR
When we consider existence, we see that the mineral, vegetable, animal and human worlds are all in need of an educator.
If the earth is not cultivated, it becomes a jungle where useless weeds grow; but if a cultivator comes and tills the ground, it produces crops which nourish living creatures.
It is evident, therefore, that the soil needs the cultivation of the farmer.
These are rational proofs; in this age the peoples of the world need the arguments of reason.
If a man be left alone in a wilderness where he sees none of his own kind, he will undoubtedly become a mere brute; it is then clear that an educator is needed.
But education is of three kinds: material, human and spiritual.
Now we need an educator who will be at the same time a material, human and spiritual educator, and whose authority will be effective in all conditions.
He must also impart spiritual education, so that intelligence and comprehension may penetrate the metaphysical world, and may receive benefit from the sanctifying breeze of the Holy Spirit, and may enter into relationship with the Supreme Concourse.
How can one solitary person without help and without support lay the foundations of such a noble construction?
Certainly nothing short of a divine power could accomplish so great a work.
We ought to consider this with justice, for this is the office of justice.
A Cause which all the governments and peoples of the world, with all their powers and armies, cannot promulgate and spread, one Holy Soul can promote without help or support!
Can this be done by human power?
No, in the name of God!
If He does not show forth such a holy power, He will not be able to educate, for if He be imperfect, how can He give a perfect education?
If He be ignorant, how can He make others wise?
If He be unjust, how can He make others just?
If He be earthly, how can He make others heavenly?
Therefore, it must be our task to prove to the thoughtful by reasonable arguments the prophethood of Moses, of Christ and of the other Divine Manifestations.
four: ABRAHAM
He opposed His own nation and people, and even His own family, by rejecting all their gods.
Alone and without help He resisted a powerful tribe, a task which is neither simple nor easy.
These people believed not in one God but in many gods, to whom they ascribed miracles; therefore, they all arose against Him, and no one supported Him except Lot, His brother's son, and one or two other people of no importance.
In reality they banished Him in order that He might be crushed and destroyed, and that no trace of Him might be left.
As a result the teachings of Abraham were spread abroad, a Jacob appeared among His posterity, and a Joseph who became ruler in Egypt.
In consequence of His exile a Moses and a being like Christ were manifested from His posterity, and Hagar was found from whom Ishmael was born, one of whose descendants was Muhammad.
And so it will continue for ever and ever.
See what a power it is that enabled a Man Who was a fugitive from His country to found such a family, to establish such a faith, and to promulgate such teachings.
We must be just: was this Man an Educator or not?
five: MOSES
Moses was for a long time a shepherd in the wilderness.
It was such a Man as this that freed a great nation from the chains of captivity, made them contented, brought them out from Egypt, and led them to the Holy Land.
This people from the depths of degradation were lifted up to the height of glory.
They were captive; they became free.
They were the most ignorant of peoples; they became the most wise.
Later the people of Greece rose in opposition to him, accused him of impiety, arraigned him before the Areopagus, and condemned him to death by poison.
Now, how could a Man Who was a stammerer, Who had been brought up in the house of Pharaoh, Who was known among men as a murderer, Who through fear had for a long time remained in concealment, and Who had become a shepherd, establish so great a Cause, when the wisest philosophers on earth have not displayed one thousandth part of this influence?
This is indeed a prodigy.
A Man Who had a stammering tongue, Who could not even converse correctly, succeeded in sustaining this great Cause!
How is it that a shepherd could acquire all of this knowledge?
It is beyond doubt that He must have been assisted by an omnipotent power.
Consider also what trials and difficulties arise for people.
To prevent an act of cruelty, Moses struck down an Egyptian and afterward became known among men as a murderer, more notably because the man He had killed was of the ruling nation.
Then He fled, and it was after that that He was raised to the rank of a Prophet!
six: CHRIST
Afterward Christ came, saying, "I am born of the Holy Spirit." Though it is now easy for the Christians to believe this assertion, at that time it was very difficult.
Briefly, this Man, Who, apparently, and in the eyes of all, was lowly, arose with such great power that He abolished a religion that had lasted fifteen hundred years, at a time when the slightest deviation from it exposed the offender to danger or to death.
Moreover, in the days of Christ the morals of the whole world and the condition of the Israelites had become completely confused and corrupted, and Israel had fallen into a state of the utmost degradation, misery and bondage.
This young Man, Christ, by the help of a supernatural power, abrogated the ancient Mosaic Law, reformed the general morals, and once again laid the foundation of eternal glory for the Israelites.
Moreover, He brought to humanity the glad tidings of universal peace, and spread abroad teachings which were not for Israel alone but were for the general happiness of the whole human race.
To all outward appearances they overcame Him and brought Him into direst distress.
At last they crowned Him with the crown of thorns and crucified Him.
Nay, all their standards have been overthrown, while the banner of that Oppressed One has been raised to the zenith.
But this is opposed to all the rules of human reason.
mrs Bittacy had never liked their present home.
She preferred a flat, more open country that left approaches clear.
She liked to see things coming.
This cottage on the very edge of the old hunting grounds of William the Conqueror had never satisfied her ideal of a safe and pleasant place to settle down in.
In those weeks of solitude the feeling had matured.
In this particular case, yielding to his strong desire, she thought the battle won, but the terror of the trees came back before the first month had passed.
They laughed in her face.
Far from morbid naturally, she did her best to deny the thought, and so simple and unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would wholly lose it.
It was not only in her mind; it existed apart from any mere mood; a separate fear that walked alone; it came and went, yet when it went-went only to watch her from another point of view.
It was in abeyance-hidden round the corner.
The Forest never let her go completely.
It was ever ready to encroach. All the branches, she sometimes fancied, stretched one way-towards their tiny cottage and garden, as though it sought to draw them in and merge them in itself.
It would absorb and smother them if it could.
They had angered its great soul.
At its heart was this deep, incessant roaring.
But instinctively she felt it; and more besides.
Chiefly, moreover, for her husband.
Merely for herself, the nightmare might have left her cold.
It was David's peculiar interest in the trees that gave the special invitation.
It had decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires, hopes.
All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and guardianship of trees.
He could not live for long away from them without a strange, acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his strength of body.
Trees influenced the sources of his life, lowered or raised the very heart beat in him.
Cut off from them he languished as a lover of the sea can droop inland, or a mountaineer may pine in the flat monotony of the plains.
This she could understand, in a fashion at least, and make allowances for.
It has the genuine air and mystery, the depth and splendor, the loneliness, and there and there the strong, untamable quality of old time forests as Bittacy of the Department knew them.
He consented to a cottage on the edge, instead of in the heart of it.
Only with the last two years or so-with his own increasing age, and physical decline perhaps-had come this marked growth of passionate interest in the welfare of the Forest.
The six weeks they annually spent away from their English home, each regarded very differently, of course.
The discipline would certainly be severe-she did not dream at the moment how severe!--but this fine, consistent little Christian saw it plain; she accepted it, too, without any sighing of the martyr, though the courage she showed was of the martyr order.
Her husband should never know the cost.
In all but this one passion his unselfishness was ever as great as her own.
She loved to suffer for them both.
Besides, the way her husband had put it to her was singular.
It did not take the form of a mere selfish predilection.
Something higher than two wills in conflict seeking compromise was in it from the beginning.
"My duty and my happiness lie here with the Forest and with you. My life is deeply rooted in this place.
Something I can't define connects my inner being with these trees, and separation would make me ill-might even kill me.
My hold on life would weaken; here is my source of supply.
I cannot explain it better than that." He looked up steadily into her face across the table so that she saw the gravity of his expression and the shining of his steady eyes.
"David, you feel it as strongly as that!" she said, forgetting the tea things altogether.
"Yes," he replied, "I do.
And it's not of the body only, I feel it in my soul."
The reality of what he hinted at crept into that shadow covered room like an actual Presence and stood beside them.
She felt suddenly cold, confused a little, frightened.
She almost felt the rush of foliage in the wind.
It stood between them.
"There are things-some things," she faltered, "we are not intended to know, I think." The words expressed her general attitude to life, not alone to this particular incident.
And after a pause of several minutes, disregarding the criticism as though he had not heard it-"I cannot explain it better than that, you see," his grave voice answered.
"There is this deep, tremendous link,--some secret power they emanate that keeps me well and happy and-alive.
If you cannot understand, I feel at least you may be able to-forgive." His tone grew tender, gentle, soft.
"My selfishness, I know, must seem quite unforgivable.
I cannot help it somehow; these trees, this ancient Forest, both seem knitted into all that makes me live, and if I go-"
He stopped abruptly, and sank back in his chair.
"My dear," she murmured, "God will direct.
"My selfishness afflicts me-" he began, but she would not let him finish.
"David, He will direct.
Nothing shall harm you.
You've never once been selfish, and I cannot bear to hear you say such things.
And then he had suggested that she should go alone perhaps for a shorter time, and stay in her brother's villa with the children, Alice and Stephen.
I cannot leave this Forest that I love so well.
My life and happiness lie here together."
He loved the Forest better than herself, for he placed it first.
Behind the words, moreover, hid the unuttered thought that made her so uneasy.
The terror Sanderson had brought revived and shook its wings before her very eyes. For the whole conversation, of which this was a fragment, conveyed the unutterable implication that while he could not spare the trees, they equally could not spare him.
The vividness with which he managed to conceal and yet betray the fact brought a profound distress that crossed the border between presentiment and warning into positive alarm.
I think you need me really,--don't you?" Eagerly, with a touch of heart felt passion, the words poured out.
"Now more than ever, dear.
God bless you for you sweet unselfishness. And your sacrifice," he added, "is all the greater because you cannot understand the thing that makes it necessary for me to stay."
"Perhaps in the spring instead-" she said, with a tremor in the voice.
"In the spring-perhaps," he answered gently, almost beneath his breath. "For they will not need me then.
All the world can love them in the spring.
I wish to stay with them particularly then.
I even feel I ought to-and I must."
And in this way, without further speech, the decision was made.
mrs Bittacy, at least, asked no more questions.
TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION
"Is the poor privilege to turn the key Upon the captive, freedom?
He's as far From the enjoyment of the earth and air Who watches o'er the chains, as they who wear."
The inhabitants of New Orleans look with as much certainty for the appearance of the yellow fever, small pox, or cholera, in the hot season, as the Londoner does for fog in the month of November.
In the summer of eighteen thirty one, the people of New Orleans were visited with one of these epidemics.
It appeared in a form unusually repulsive and deadly.
It seized persons who were in health, without any premonition.
Sometimes death was the immediate consequence.
The disorder began in the brain, by an oppressive pain accompanied or followed by fever.
The patient was devoured with burning thirst. The stomach, distracted by pains, in vain sought relief in efforts to disburden itself.
Fiery veins streaked the eye; the face was inflamed, and dyed of a dark dull red colour; the ears from time to time rang painfully.
Now mucous secretions surcharged the tongue, and took away the power of speech; now the sick one spoke, but in speaking had a foresight of death.
The progress of the heat within was marked by yellowish spots, which spread over the surface of the body.
If, then, a happy crisis came not, all hope was gone.
Soon the breath infected the air with a fetid odour, the lips were glazed, despair painted itself in the eyes, and sobs, with long intervals of silence, formed the only language.
From each side of the mouth spread foam, tinged with black and burnt blood.
This was the Yellow Fever.
On an average, more than four hundred died daily.
In the midst of disorder and confusion, death heaped victims on victims.
Friend followed friend in quick succession.
The sick were avoided from the fear of contagion, and for the same reason the dead were left unburied.
Nearly two thousand dead bodies lay uncovered in the burial ground, with only here and there a little lime thrown over them, to prevent the air becoming infected.
Like too many, Morton had been dealing extensively in lands and stocks; and though apparently in good circumstances was, in reality, deeply involved in debt. Althesa, although as white as most white women in a southern clime, was, as we already know, born a slave.
Yet such was the fact.
The girls themselves had never heard that their mother had been a slave, and therefore knew nothing of the danger hanging over their heads.
An inventory of the property was made out by james Morton, and placed in the hands of the creditors; and the young ladies, with their uncle, were about leaving the city to reside for a few days on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, where they could enjoy a fresh air that the city could not afford.
But just as they were about taking the train, an officer arrested the whole party; the young ladies as slaves, and the uncle upon the charge of attempting to conceal the property of his deceased brother.
Morton was overwhelmed with horror at the idea of his nieces being claimed as slaves, and asked for time, that he might save them from such a fate.
He even offered to mortgage his little farm in Vermont for the amount which young slave women of their ages would fetch.
But the creditors pleaded that they were "an extra article," and would sell for more than common slaves; and must, therefore, be sold at auction.
They were given up, but neither ate nor slept, nor separated from each other, till they were taken into the New Orleans slave market, where they were offered to the highest bidder.
We need not add that had those young girls been sold for mere house servants or field hands, they would not have brought one half the sums they did.
Ellen, the eldest, was sold to an old gentleman, who purchased her, as he said, for a housekeeper.
She had taken poison.
Jane was purchased by a dashing young man, who had just come into the possession of a large fortune.
This was a most singular spot, remote, in a dense forest spreading over the summit of a cliff that rose abruptly to a great height above the sea; but so grand in its situation, in the desolate sublimity which reigned around, in the reverential murmur of the waves that washed its base, that, though picturesque, it was a forest prison.
The poverty of the young man, and the youthful age of the girl, had caused their feelings to be kept from the young lady's parents.
At the death of his master, Volney had returned to his widowed mother at Mobile, and knew nothing of the misfortune that had befallen his mistress, until he received a letter from her.
There she remained more than a fortnight, and with the exception of a daily visit from her master, she saw no one but the old Negress who waited upon her.
One bright moonlight evening as she was seated at the window, she perceived the figure of a man beneath her window.
He had no sooner received her letter, than he set out for New Orleans; and finding on his arrival there, that his mistress had been taken away, resolved to follow her.
She dared not trust the old Negress with her secret, for fear that it might reach her master.
Jane wrote a hasty note and threw it out of the window, which was eagerly picked up by the young man, and he soon disappeared in the woods. Night passed away in dreariness to her, and the next morning she viewed the spot beneath her window with the hope of seeing the footsteps of him who had stood there the previous night.
Soon the young maiden was seen descending, and the enthusiastic lover, with his arms extended, waiting to receive his mistress.
At this moment the sharp sound of a rifle was heard, and the young man fell weltering in his blood, at the feet of his mistress.
Jane fell senseless by his side.
The slow recovery of her reason settled into the most intense melancholy, which gained at length the compassion even of her cruel master.
The beautiful bright eyes, always pleading in expression, were now so heart piercing in their sadness, that he could not endure their gaze.
In a few days the poor girl died of a broken heart, and was buried at night at the back of the garden by the Negroes; and no one wept at the grave of her who had been so carefully cherished, and so tenderly beloved.
This, reader, is an unvarnished narrative of one doomed by the laws of the Southern States to be a slave.
The impressive phenomena which characterize it, the prodigious noise, the awful flash, the portentous gloom, the blast, the rain, have left a profound impression on the myths of every land.
Fire from water, warmth and moisture from the destructive breath of the tempest, this was the riddle of riddles to the untutored mind.
"Out of the eater came forth meat, out of the strong came forth sweetness." It was the visible synthesis of all the divine manifestations, the winds, the waters, and the flames.
"There is no end to the fancies entertained by the Sioux concerning thunder," observes mrs Eastman.
They typified the paradoxical nature of the storm under the character of the giant Haokah. To him cold was heat, and heat cold; when sad he laughed, when merry groaned; the sides of his face and his eyes were of different colors and expressions; he wore horns or a forked headdress to represent the lightning, and with his hands he hurled the meteors.
As nations rose in civilization these fancies put on a more complex form and a more poetic fulness.
For this crime they destroyed him, but their sister proved pregnant, and died in her labor, giving birth to two eggs.
The former was the more powerful.
For this reason they adored him as their maker.
He it was, they thought, who produced the thunder and the lightning by hurling stones with his sling; and the thunderbolts that fall, said they, are his children.
Few villages were willing to be without one or more of these.
They were in appearance small, round, smooth stones, but had the admirable properties of securing fertility to the fields, protecting from lightning, and, by a transition easy to understand, were also adored as gods of the Fire, as well material as of the passions, and were capable of kindling the dangerous flames of desire in the most frigid bosom.
Therefore they were in great esteem as love charms.
Apocatequil's statue was erected on the mountains, with that of his mother on one hand, and his brother on the other.
"He was Prince of Evil and the most respected god of the Peruvians.
From Quito to Cuzco not an Indian but would give all he possessed to conciliate him.
Five priests, two stewards, and a crowd of slaves served his image.
Garcilasso de la Vega, a descendant of the Incas, has preserved an ancient indigenous poem of his nation, presenting the storm myth in a different form, which as undoubtedly authentic and not devoid of poetic beauty I translate, preserving as much as possible the trochaic tetrasyllabic verse of the original Quichua:--
In this pretty waif that has floated down to us from the wreck of a literature now forever lost, there is more than one point to attract the notice of the antiquary.
Again, twice in this poem is the triple nature of the storm adverted to. This is observable in many of the religions of America.
It constitutes a sort of Trinity, not in any point resembling that of Christianity, nor yet the Trimurti of India, but the only one in the New World the least degree authenticated, and which, as half seen by ignorant monks, has caused its due amount of sterile astonishment.
Therefore he was the patron of husbandry.
He was invoked at seed time and harvest; and as purveyor of nourishment he was addressed as grandfather, and his worshippers styled themselves his grandchildren.
He rode through the heavens on the clouds, and the thunderbolts which split the forest trees were the stones he hurled at his enemies.
Moreover, as has already been pointed out, the thunder god was usually ruler of the winds, and thus another reason for his quadruplicate nature was suggested.
Hurakan, Haokah, Tlaloc, and probably Heno, are plural as well as singular nouns, and are used as nominatives to verbs in both numbers.
Tlaloc was appealed to as inhabiting each of the cardinal points and every mountain top.
His statue rested on a square stone pedestal, facing the east, and had in one hand a serpent of gold.
Ribbons of silver, crossing to form squares, covered the robe, and the shield was composed of feathers of four colors, yellow, green, red, and blue.
Tohil, the god who gave the Quiches fire by shaking his sandals, was represented by a flint stone. He is distinctly said to be the same as Quetzalcoatl, one of whose commonest symbols was a flint (tecpatl).
He was debating what tie would go with which waistcoat.
There were symptoms of a stampede.
Never . . .
REGINALD'S CHOIR TREAT
The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.
A good life is infinitely preferable to good looks."
After all, he said, it is the spirit of the thing that counts.
Following the etiquette of dramatic authors on first nights, he remained discreetly in the background while the procession, with extreme diffidence and the goat, wound its way lugubriously towards the village.
There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady.
Still, that's better than a domestic scandal; a woman who leaves her cook never wholly recovers her position in Society.
I suppose the same thing holds good with the hosts; they seldom have more than a superficial acquaintance with their guests, and so often just when they do get to know you a bit better, they leave off knowing you altogether.
And they tried to rag me in the smoking room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and thinking they were teasing it.
I breakfasted upstairs myself.
I gathered afterwards that the meal was tinged with a very unchristian spirit.
I suppose it's unlucky to bring peacock's feathers into a house; anyway, there was a blue pencilly look in my hostess's eye when I took my departure.
She eventually finds her way to India and gets married, and comes home to admire the Royal Academy, and to imagine that an indifferent prawn curry is for ever an effective substitute for all that we have been taught to believe is luncheon.
I told her whole crowds, as long as she kept the door shut, and the idea didn't seem to have struck her before; at least, she brooded over it for the rest of dinner.
England must wake up, as the Duke of Devonshire said the other day; wasn't it?
"A most variable climate," said the Duchess; "and how unfortunate that we should have had that very cold weather at a time when coal was so dear! So distressing for the poor."
"Someone has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big dividends," remarked Reginald.
Reginald had left the selection of a feeding ground to her womanly intuition, but he chose the wine himself, knowing that womanly intuition stops short at claret.
A woman will cheerfully choose husbands for her less attractive friends, or take sides in a political controversy without the least knowledge of the issues involved-but no woman ever cheerfully chose a claret.
"Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me," said Reginald: "they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like-and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.
You see that type of Briton very much in hotels abroad.
And nowadays there are always the Johannesbourgeois, who bring a Cape to Cairo atmosphere with them-what may be called the Rand Manner, I suppose."
Such a sweet woman"--
"And so silly.
In these days of the over education of women she's quite refreshing.
They say some people went through the siege of Paris without knowing that France and Germany were at war; but the Beauwhistle aunt is credited with having passed the whole winter in Paris under the impression that the Humberts were a kind of bicycle . . .
How frightfully embarrassing to meet a whole shoal of whitebait you had last known at Prince's!
I know if I were served up at a cannibal feast I should be dreadfully annoyed if anyone found fault with me for not being tender enough, or having been kept too long."
"My idea about the lecture," resumed the Duchess hurriedly, "is to inquire whether promiscuous Continental travel doesn't tend to weaken the moral fibre of the social conscience.
"The people with what I call Tauchnitz morals," observed Reginald.
"On the whole, I think they get the best of two very desirable worlds.
"A scandal, my dear Reginald, is as much to be avoided at Monaco or any of those places as at Exeter, let us say."
"Scandal, my dear Irene-I may call you Irene, mayn't I?"
"I don't know that you have known me long enough for that."
Tell me, who is the woman with the old lace at the table on our left?
"mrs Spelvexit?
Quite a charming woman; separated from her husband"--
"Oh, nothing of that sort.
By miles of frozen ocean, I was going to say. He explores ice floes and studies the movements of herrings, and has written a most interesting book on the home life of the Esquimaux; but naturally he has very little home life of his own."
She collects postage stamps. Such a resource.
Those people with her are the Whimples, very old acquaintances of mine; they're always having trouble, poor things."
"Trouble is not one of those fancies you can take up and drop at any moment; it's like a grouse moor or the opium habit-once you start it you've got to keep it up."
"Their eldest son was such a disappointment to them; they wanted him to be a linguist, and spent no end of money on having him taught to speak-oh, dozens of languages!--and then he became a Trappist monk.
And the youngest, who was intended for the American marriage market, has developed political tendencies, and writes pamphlets about the housing of the poor.
"There are different ways of taking disappointment.
That's what I call being vindictive."
"Life is full of its disappointments," observed the Duchess, "and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.
But that, my dear Reginald, becomes more difficult as one grows older."
"I think it's more generally practised than you imagine.
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
"After all," said the Duchess, "the disillusions of life may depend on our way of assessing it.
In the minds of those who come after us we may be remembered for qualities and successes which we quite left out of the reckoning."
There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the mediaeval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.
"Private talk.
Let's go where it's quiet."
"Deepest well in all Wrychester under that," he remarked.
"You'd never think it-it's a hundred feet deep-and more!
"Had that put in," he continued, "and turned the top of the building into a little snuggery.
Come up!"
"Good stuff, those."
"Aye, doctor," he said.
"The fact is-I came here to tell you so!--I know a good deal about everything."
"You've got some limitation to it, I should think.
Ever since Braden was found at the foot of those stairs in Paradise, and I was fetched to him, I've interested myself.
"Oh!" he said after a pause.
"Dear me!
"Lots!" answered Bryce.
"I came to tell you-on seeing that Glassdale had been with you.
Because-I was with Glassdale this morning."
But Bryce saw that his cool, almost indifferent manner was changing-he was beginning, under the surface, to get anxious.
"When I left Glassdale-at noon," continued Bryce, "I'd no idea-and I don't think he had-that he was coming to see you.
But all that Glassdale knows is nothing-to what I know."
He threw it away, took a fresh one from the box, and slowly struck a match and lighted it.
"What might you know, now?" he asked after another pause.
I went back-to the time when Braden was married.
He got to know-got into close touch with a Barthorpe man who, about the time of Brake's marriage, left Barthorpe end settled in London.
I know what happened-he used to let them have money for short financial transactions-to be refunded within a very brief space.
He had to stand the racket.
He stood it-to the tune of ten years' penal servitude.
"The name of the particular one was Wraye-Falkiner Wraye," replied Bryce promptly.
"Of the other-the man of lesser importance-Flood."
"I will!--it's deeply interesting.
mr Falkiner Wraye, after cheating and deceiving Brake, and leaving him to pay the penalty of his over trustfulness, cleared out of England and carried his money making talents to foreign parts.
What is it?"
"We've not come to that," retorted Bryce.
"You're a bit mistaken.
Look here!
Come, now!--whose?"
"That's a fact?"
"Then who had?" demanded Bryce.
He was evidently thinking deeply, and Bryce made no attempt to disturb him.
Some minutes went by before Folliot took the cigar from his lips and leaning against the chimneypiece looked fixedly at his visitor.
"Collishaw?"
"Supposing that all you say is true about-about past matters?
"As if there must be!" interrupted Bryce.
"That's about it," assented Folliot laconically.
Bryce laughed cynically.
"Here!
"What!" he exclaimed.
"Never!
What-"
A sharp exclamation from him took Bryce to his side.
"Hell and-What's this mean?"
Bryce looked in the direction pointed out.
CHAPTER six
john Lexman-A.
A day to him was the beginning and the end of an eternity.
The future meant Sunday chapel; the present whatever task they found him.
They were desperate men, peculiarly interesting to him, and he had watched their faces furtively in the early period of his imprisonment.
It was usual to have twelve months at the Scrubbs before testing the life of a convict establishment.
He believed there was some talk of sending him to Parkhurst, and here he traced the influence which t x would exercise, for Parkhurst was a prisoner's paradise.
He heard his warder's voice behind him.
"Right turn, forty three, quick march."
The house was as yet without a tenant.
"What have you got!"
"Hardly," said Lexman, drily.
john Lexman looked at him enviously.
The drive in the brake to the station, the ride to London in creased, but comfortable clothing, free as the air, at liberty to go to bed and rise when he liked, to choose his own dinner, to answer no call save the call of his conscience, to see-he checked himself.
"Conspiracy and fraud," said the other cheerfully.
Damn rough luck, wasn't it?"
"He's coming out next month, too, and we are all fixed up proper.
We are going to get the pile and then we're off to South America, and you won't see us for dust."
The warder's step on the stones outside reduced them to silence. Suddenly his voice came up the stairs.
"Forty three," he called sharply, "I want you down here."
john took his paint pot and brush and went clattering down the uncarpeted stairs.
"Where's the other man?" asked the warder, in a low voice.
"He's upstairs in the back room."
Coming up from Princetown was a big, grey car.
"Put down your paint pot," he said.
"I am going upstairs.
When that car comes abreast of the gate, ask no questions and jump into it.
Get down into the bottom and pull a sack over you, and do not get up until the car stops."
Like an automaton john put down his brushes, and walked slowly to the gate.
Now it was going fast, now faster, now it rocked and swayed as it gathered speed.
"Get out," said a voice.
Where could he go?
At the foot there was a smooth stretch of green sward.
"But, I do not understand.
They discovered your escape," he said. "Get in."
He clicked over a lever and with a roar the big three bladed tractor screw spun.
Up, up, they climbed in one long sweeping ascent, passing through drifting clouds till the machine soared like a bird above the blue sea.
john Lexman looked down.
Talking was impossible.
Kara was evidently a skilful pilot.
From time to time he consulted the compass on the board before him, and changed his course ever so slightly.
john Lexman read:
"If you cannot swim there is a life belt under your seat."
A white steam yacht, long and narrow of beam, was steaming slowly westward.
He could see the feathery wake in her rear, and as the aeroplane fell he had time to observe that a boat had been put off.
Then with a jerk the monoplane flattened out and came like a skimming bird to the surface of the water; her engines stopped.
"We ought to be able to keep afloat for ten minutes," said Kara, "and by that time they will pick us up."
In less than five minutes the boat had come alongside, manned, as Lexman gathered from a glimpse of the crew, by Greeks.
Kara was by his side.
three
THE ADVENTURE OF mrs
GASTER'S MAID
Two days after my bargain with mr Harold Van Gilt, in which he acquired possession of the Scrappe jades and mrs Van Raffles and I shared the proceeds of the ten thousand dollars check, I was installed at Bolivar Lodge as head butler and steward, my salary to consist of what I could make out of it on the side, plus ten per cent. of the winnings of my mistress.
This went very much against the grain at first, for, although I am scarcely more than a thief after all, I am an artistic one, and still retain the prejudice against inferior associations which an English gentleman whatever the vicissitudes of his career can never quite rid himself of.
I had to join their club-an exclusive organization of butlers and "gentlemen's gentlemen"--otherwise valets-and in order to quiet all suspicion of my real status in the Van Raffles household I was compelled to act the part in a fashion which revolted me.
Otherwise the position was pleasant, and, as I have intimated, more than lucrative.
It did not take me many days to discover that Henriette was a worthy successor to her late husband.
Few opportunities for personal profit escaped her eye, and I was able to observe as time went on and I noted the accumulation of spoons, forks, nutcrackers, and gimcracks generally that she brought home with her after her calls upon or dinners with ladies of fashion that she had that quality of true genius which never overlooks the smallest details.
Henriette had been to a bridge afternoon at mrs Gaster's and upon her return manifested an extraordinary degree of excitement.
Her color was high, and when she spoke her voice was tremulous.
I must do something to warn her against this momentary weakness.
"Yes," she replied.
How did you guess?"
This won't do, Henriette.
"As if I cared about my losses at bridge!
You don't suppose that I am going to risk my popularity with these Newport ladies by winning, do you?
For the good of our cause it is my task to lose steadily and with good grace.
This establishes my credit, proves my amiability, and confirms my popularity."
"But you are very much excited by something, Henriette," said i "You cannot deny that."
"I don't-but it is the prospect of future gain, not the reality of present losses, that has taken me off my poise," she said.
We must get her, Bunny."
"All this powwow over another woman's maid!"
"You don't understand," said Henriette.
You can't guess who she was."
"How should I?" I demanded.
"She was Fiametta de Belleville, one of the most expert hands in our business.
Poor old Raffles used to say that she diminished his income a good ten thousand pounds a year by getting in her fine work ahead of his," explained Henriette.
"He pointed her out to me in Piccadilly once and I have never forgotten her face."
"No, indeed-she never saw me before, so how could she?
But I knew her the minute she took my cloak," said Henriette.
When I got the cloak back both were gone.
"What for-to rob you?"
"No," returned Henrietta, "rather that we-but there, there, Bunny, I'll manage this little thing myself.
It's a trifle too subtle for a man's intellect-especially when that man is you."
"What do you suppose she is doing here?" I asked.
"That cuts us out, doesn't it?"
"Does it?" asked Henriette, enigmatically.
Henriette and I, of course, knew that Fiametta de Belleville had accomplished her mission, but apparently no one else knew it.
"She'll skip now," said i
"To disappear now would be a confession of guilt.
"Where then?" I asked.
"The fact is," she added, "I have already engaged her.
"All right, Bunny, I'll remember," smiled mrs Van Raffles, and there the matter was dropped for the moment.
The woman's presence in our household could not be but a source of danger to our peace of mind as well as to our profits, and for the life of me I could not see why Henriette should want her there.
A week after Fiametta's arrival mrs Raffles rang hurriedly for me.
"Yes, madam," I said, responding immediately to her call.
I have just sent Fiametta on an errand to Providence.
"Yes!" said i "What of it?"
"I want you during her absence to go with me to her room-"
"Yes!" I cried, breathlessly.
"And search her trunks?"
"No, Bunny, no-the eaves," whispered Henriette.
I am inclined to think-well, the moment she leaves the city let me know.
Oh, that woman!
If I had not adored her before I-but enough.
This is no place for sentiment.
I followed out Henriette's instructions to the letter, and an hour later returned with the information that Fiametta was, indeed, safely on her way.
"And now, Bunny, for the Gaster jewels."
There were religious pictures upon the bureau, prayer books, and some volumes of essays of a spiritual nature were scattered about-nothing was there to indicate that the occupant was anything but a simple, sweet child of innocence except-
Well, Henriette was right-except the Gaster jewels.
Are you ready for a coup requiring a lot of it?"
"Well," I replied, pluming myself a bit, "I don't wish to boast, Henriette, but I think it is pretty good.
I managed to raise twenty seven hundred dollars on my own account by the use of it last night."
"Indeed?" said Henriette, with a slight frown.
"How, Bunny?
You know you are likely to complicate matters for all of us if you work on the side. What, pray, did you do last night?"
"I was spending the evening at the Gentlemen's Gentlemen's Club," I explained, "when word came over the telephone to Digby, mr de Pelt's valet, that mr de Pelt was at the Rockerbilts' and in no condition to go home alone.
It happened that it was I who took the message, and observing that Digby was engaged in a game of billiards, and likely to remain so for some time to come, I decided to go after the gentleman myself without saying anything to Digby about it.
Muffling myself up so that no one could recognize me, I hired a cab and drove out to the Rockerbilt mansion, sent in word that mr de Pelt's man was waiting for him, and in ten minutes had the young gentleman in my possession.
I took him to his apartment, dismissed the cab, and, letting ourselves into his room with his own latch key, put him to bed.
His clothes I took, as a well ordered valet should, from his bed chamber into an adjoining room, where, after removing the contents of his pockets, I hung them neatly over a chair and departed, taking with me, of course, everything of value the young gentleman had about him, even down to the two brilliant rubies he wore in his garter buckles.
This consisted of two handfuls of crumpled twenty dollar bills from his trousers, three rolls of one hundred dollar bills from his waistcoat, and sundry other lots of currency, both paper and specie, that I found stowed away in his overcoat and dinner coat pockets.
"Mercy, Bunny, that was a terribly risky thing.
Suppose he had recognized you?" cried Henriette.
"Oh, he did-or at least he thought he did," I replied, smiling broadly at the recollection.
He was very genial."
"Well, Bunny," said Henriette, "you are very clever at times, but do be careful.
I am delighted to have you show your nerve now and then, but please don't take any serious chances.
Again I laughed.
"I, Bunny?
Why, I haven't seen you since dinner," she demurred.
You know mrs Gushington Andrews?"
"Yes," said i "She is the lady who asked me for the olives at your last dinner."
"You possibly observed also that wherever she goes she wears about sixty nine yards of pearl rope upon her person."
"Rope?" I laughed.
"I shouldn't call that rope.
Cable, yes-frankly, when she came into the dining room the other night I thought it was a feather boa she had on."
"All pearls, Bunny, of the finest water," said Henriette, enthusiastically.
"There isn't one of the thousands that isn't worth anywhere from five hundred to twenty five hundred."
"Sarcasm does not suit your complexion, Bunny," retorted Henriette. "Your best method is to follow implicitly the directions of wiser brains.
You are a first-class tool, but as a principal-well-well, never mind.
You do what I tell you and some of those pearls will be ours.
Where most people nod she describes a complete circle with her head.
When a cold, formal handshake is necessary she perpetrates an embrace, and that is where we come in.
At my next Tuesday tea she will be present.
She will wear her pearls-she'll be strung with them from head to foot.
A rope walk won't be in it with her, and every single little jewel will be worth a small fortune.
You, Bunny, will be in the room to announce her when she arrives.
"No, Bunny-you will behave like a gentleman, that is all," she responded, haughtily; "or rather like a butler with the instincts of a gentleman.
At my cry of dismay over the accident-"
"Better call it the incident," I put in.
"Hush!
Now, do you see?"
"Nothing of the sort, Bunny; just do as I tell you-only bring your gloves to me just before the guests arrive, that is all," said Henriette.
"Instinct will carry you through the rest of it."
And then the conspiracy stopped for the moment.
The following Tuesday at five the second of mrs Van Raffles's Tuesday afternoons began.
Fortune favored us in that it was a beautiful day and the number of guests was large.
Henriette was charming in her new gown specially imported from Paris-a gown of Oriental design with row upon row of brilliantly shining, crescent shaped ornaments firmly affixed to the front of it and every one of them as sharp as a steel knife.
I could see at a glance that even if so little as one of these fastened its talons upon the pearl rope of mrs Gushington Andrews nothing under heaven could save it from laceration.
What a marvellous mind there lay behind those exquisite, childlike eyes of the wonderful Henriette!
"Remember, Bunny-calm deliberation-your gloves now," were her last words to me.
"Hush!
Just watch me," she replied.
"There!" she said-and at last I understood.
An hour later our victim arrived and scarce an inch of her but shone like a snow clad hill with the pearls she wore.
"You dear, sweet thing!" cried mrs Gushington Andrews.
There was a cry of dismay both from Henriette and her guest, and the rug beneath their feet was simply white with riches. In a moment I was upon my knees scooping them up by the handful.
"Here, dear," she added, holding out a pair of teacups.
"Tell me quickly-what was the result?"
"These, madam," said I, handing her a small plush bag into which I had poured the "salvage" taken from my sticky palms.
And, egad, it was: seventeen pearls of a value of twelve hundred dollars each, fifteen worth scarcely less than nine hundred dollars apiece, and some twenty seven or eight smaller ones that we held to be worth in the neighborhood of five hundred dollars each.
"Splendid!" cried Henrietta "Roughly speaking, Bunny, we've pulled in between forty and fifty thousand dollars to day."
"About that," said I, with an inward chuckle, for I, of course, did not tell Henriette of eight beauties I had kept out of the returns for myself.
"I shall provide for that," said this wonderful woman.
Even then we'll be thirty five thousand dollars to the good.
"I am dreadfully afraid it WILL be mouse!" said Duchess to herself-"I really couldn't, COULDN'T eat mouse pie.
"Oh what a good idea!
"The top oven bakes too quickly," said Ribby to herself.
When Ribby had laid the table she went out down the field to the farm, to fetch milk and butter.
They only bowed to one another; they did not speak, because they were going to have a party.
She sat down before the fire to wait for the little dog.
"Oh, what lovely flowers!
"Just a shade longer; I will pour out the tea, while we wait. Do you take sugar, my dear Duchess?"
"Do you not think that I had better go home before it gets dark?"
Well I never did! . . .
ten O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
fifteen To the tally of my soul, Loud and strong kept up the gray brown bird, With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim, Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp perfume, And I with my comrades there in the night.
O Captain!
This Dust Was Once the Man
CHAPTER nineteen
"A tumbler of the old Marcobrunner, David, and a slice of the game pie-before I say one word about what we owe to that angel upstairs.
Off with the wine, my dear boy; you look as pale as death!"
With those words mr Engelman lit his pipe, and waited in silence until the good eating and drinking had done their good work.
"Now carry your mind back to last night," he began.
"You remember my going out to get a breath of fresh air.
Can you guess what that meant?"
I guessed of course that it meant a visit to Madame Fontaine.
"Quite right, David.
I told her that one of the doctors was evidently puzzled, and that the other had acknowledged that the malady was so far incomprehensible to him.
She clasped her hands in despair-she said, 'Oh, if my poor husband had been alive!' I naturally asked what she meant.
I wish I could give her explanation, David, in her own delightful words.
Some person in her husband's employment at the University of Wurzburg had been attacked by a malady presenting exactly the same symptoms from which mr Keller was suffering.
Alone among them Doctor Fontaine understood the case.
He made up the medicine that he administered with his own hand.
Madame Fontaine, under her husband's instructions, assisted in nursing the sick man, and in giving the nourishment prescribed when he was able to eat.
His extraordinary recovery is remembered in the University to this day."
I interrupted mr Engelman at that point.
"Of course you asked her for the prescription?" I said.
"I begin to understand it now."
"No, David; you don't understand it yet.
I certainly asked her for the prescription.
No such thing was known to be in existence-she reminded me that her husband had made up the medicine himself.
But she remembered that the results had exceeded his anticipations, and that only a part of the remedy had been used.
The bottle might still perhaps be found at Wurzburg.
Or it might be in a small portmanteau belonging to her husband, which she had found in his bedroom, and had brought away with her, to be examined at some future time.
'I have not had the heart to open it yet,' she said; 'but for mr Keller's sake, I will look it over before you go away.' There is a Christian woman, David, if ever there was one yet! After the manner in which poor Keller had treated her, she was as eager to help him as if he had been her dearest friend.
Minna offered to take her place.
'Why should you distress yourself, mamma?' she said.
'Tell me what the bottle is like, and let me try if I can find it.' No!
It was quite enough for Madame Fontaine that there was an act of mercy to be done.
At any sacrifice of her own feelings, she was prepared to do it."
I interrupted him again, eager to hear the end.
"I can show it to you, if you like.
She has herself requested me to keep it under lock and key, so long as it is wanted in this house."
He opened an old cabinet, and took out a long narrow bottle of dark blue glass.
The glass stopper was carefully secured by a piece of leather, for the better preservation, I suppose, of the liquid inside. Down one side of the bottle ran a narrow strip of paper, notched at regular intervals to indicate the dose that was to be given.
No label appeared on it; but, examining the surface of the glass carefully, I found certain faintly marked stains, which suggested that the label might have been removed, and that some traces of the paste or gum by which it had been secured had not been completely washed away.
I held the bottle up to the light, and found that it was still nearly half full.
mr Engelman forbade me to remove the stopper.
It was very important, he said, that no air should be admitted to the bottle, except when there was an actual necessity for administering the remedy.
"I took it away with me the same night," he went on.
Madame Fontaine, always just in her views, said, 'You had better wait and consult the doctors.' She made but one condition (the generous creature!) relating to herself.
'If the remedy is tried,' she said, 'I must ask you to give it a fair chance by permitting me to act as nurse; the treatment of the patient when he begins to feel the benefit of the medicine is of serious importance.
I know this from my husband's instructions, and it is due to his memory (to say nothing of what is due to mr Keller) that I should be at the bedside.' It is needless to say that I joyfully accepted the offered help.
So the night passed.
The next morning, soon after you fell asleep, the doctors came.
You may imagine what they thought of poor Keller, when I tell you that they recommended me to write instantly to Fritz in London summoning him to his father's bedside.
I was just in time to catch the special mail which left this morning.
Don't blame me, David.
I could not feel absolutely sure of the new medicine; and, with time of such terrible importance, and London so far off, I was really afraid to miss a post."
I was far from blaming him-and I said so.
In his place I should have done what he did.
We arranged that I should write to Fritz by that night's mail, on the chance that my announcement of the better news might reach him before he left London.
"My letter despatched," mr Engelman continued, "I begged both the doctors to speak with me before they went away, in my private room.
There I told them, in the plainest words I could find, exactly what I have told you.
Doctor Dormann behaved like a gentleman.
He said, 'Let me see the lady, and speak to her myself, before the new remedy is tried.' As for the other, what do you think he did?
Walked out of the house (the old brute!) and declined any further attendance on the patient.
After what I had seen myself of the housekeeper's temper on the previous evening, this last piece of news failed to surprise me.
"Well," mr Engelman resumed, "Doctor Dormann asked his questions, and smelt and tasted the medicine, and with Madame Fontaine's full approval took away a little of it to be analyzed.
That came to nothing!
The medicine kept its own secret.
Half an hour since we tried the second.
But for you we might never have known Madame Fontaine."
The door opened as he spoke, and I found myself confronted by a second surprise.
Minna came in, wearing a cook's apron, and asked if her mother had rung for her yet.
Under the widow's instructions, she was preparing the peculiar vegetable diet which had been prescribed by Doctor Fontaine as part of the cure.
The good girl was eager to make herself useful to us in any domestic capacity.
What a charming substitute for the crabbed old housekeeper who had just left us!
What would Fritz think, when he knew of it?
What would mr Keller say when he recognized his nurse, and when he heard that she had saved his life?
"All's well that ends well" is a good proverb.
But we had not got as far as that yet.
The apartments were supplied with every book which it could have been supposed might amuse her; there were guitars of the city and of Florence, and even an English piano; a library of the choicest music; and all the materials of art.
Her lively and refined taste, and her highly cultured mind, could not refrain from responding to these glorious spectacles.
Short visits, but numerous ones, was his system.
Sometimes they entered merely to see a statue or a picture they were reading or conversing about the preceding eve; and then they repaired to some modern studio, where their entrance always made the sculptor's eyes sparkle.
The colour returned to Henrietta's cheek and the lustre to her languid eye: her form regained its airy spring of health; the sunshine of her smile burst forth once more.
Perhaps he prided himself upon his skill as a physician, but he certainly watched the apparent convalescence of his friend's daughter with zealous interest.
'I should like it very much,' said mr Temple.
All the best families in Rome were present, and not a single English person.
That constraint which at first she had attributed to reserve, but which of late she had ascribed to modesty, now entirely quitted him.
Frank, yet always dignified, smiling, apt, and ever felicitous, it seemed that he had a pleasing word for every ear, and a particular smile for every face.
It was they whom he wished to catch.
I would not ask this favour of you unless I thought you would be pleased.'
Lord Montfort approached Miss Temple. 'There is one room in the palace you have never yet visited,' he said, 'my tribune; 'tis open to night for the first time.'
Henrietta accepted his proffered arm.
At the end of the principal gallery, Henrietta perceived an open door which admitted them into a small octagon chamber, of Ionic architecture. The walls were not hung with pictures, and one work of art alone solicited their attention.
Elevated on a pedestal of porphyry, surrounded by a rail of bronze arrows of the lightest workmanship, was that statue of Diana which they had so much admired at Pisa.
The cheek, by an ancient process, the secret of which has been recently regained at Rome, was tinted with a delicate glow.
CHAPTER five
'If he knew all that had occurred he would shrink from blending his life with mine.'
'Indeed!' said Miss Temple.
'He loves you, Henrietta,' said her father.
No, Lord Montfort cannot love me.
But it is too late.'
Lean upon your father, listen to him, be guided by his advice.
For his sake, for my sake, for all our sakes, dearest Henrietta, grant his wish.
Henrietta seemed plunged in thought. Suddenly she said, 'I cannot rest until this is settled.
He seated himself at her side, but he was unusually constrained.
'The only aim of my life is to make you happy,' said Lord Montfort.
Why------'
You make me wretched.
It is my wish.'
Alas!
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THE GAMBLER
By
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
At length I returned from two weeks leave of absence to find that my patrons had arrived three days ago in Roulettenberg.
I received from them a welcome quite different to that which I had expected.
The General eyed me coldly, greeted me in rather haughty fashion, and dismissed me to pay my respects to his sister.
It was clear that from SOMEWHERE money had been acquired.
I thought I could even detect a certain shamefacedness in the General's glance.
Polina Alexandrovna, on seeing me, inquired why I had been so long away.
Then, without waiting for an answer, she departed.
Evidently this was not mere accident, and I felt that I must throw some light upon matters.
It was high time that I did so.
I was assigned a small room on the fourth floor of the hotel (for you must know that I belonged to the General's suite).
So far as I could see, the party had already gained some notoriety in the place, which had come to look upon the General as a Russian nobleman of great wealth.
Later, I was about to take Mischa and Nadia for a walk when a summons reached me from the staircase that I must attend the General. He began by deigning to inquire of me where I was going to take the children; and as he did so, I could see that he failed to look me in the eyes.
He WANTED to do so, but each time was met by me with such a fixed, disrespectful stare that he desisted in confusion.
In pompous language, however, which jumbled one sentence into another, and at length grew disconnected, he gave me to understand that I was to lead the children altogether away from the Casino, and out into the park. Finally his anger exploded, and he added sharply:
"I suppose you would like to take them to the Casino to play roulette? Well, excuse my speaking so plainly, but I know how addicted you are to gambling.
"I have no money for gambling," I quietly replied.
"Let us calculate," he went on.
"We must translate these roubles into thalers.
The rest will be safe in my hands."
In silence I took the money.
"You are too touchy about these things.
When returning home with the children before luncheon, I met a cavalcade of our party riding to view some ruins.
The passers by stopped to stare at them, for the effect was splendid-the General could not have improved upon it.
To think, therefore, that I should suddenly encounter him again here, in Roulettenberg!
Never in my life had I known a more retiring man, for he was shy to the pitch of imbecility, yet well aware of the fact (for he was no fool).
How he had come to make the General's acquaintance I do not know, but, apparently, he was much struck with Polina.
Also, he was delighted that I should sit next him at table, for he appeared to look upon me as his bosom friend.
Interminably he discoursed on finance and Russian politics, and though, at times, the General made feints to contradict him, he did so humbly, and as though wishing not wholly to lose sight of his own dignity.
This I said in French.
"To spit into it?" the General inquired with grave disapproval in his tone, and a stare, of astonishment, while the Frenchman looked at me unbelievingly.
"Just so," I replied.
After listening politely, but with great reserve, to my account of myself, this sacristan asked me to wait a little.
I ventured to remind the good man of my own business also; whereupon, with an expression of, if anything, increased dryness, he again asked me to wait.
This made me very angry.
Upon this the sacristan shrunk back in astonishment.
"What?
While he is engaged with a Cardinal?" screeched the sacristan, again shrinking back in horror.
He looked at me with an air of infinite resentment.
Here it is now, if you care to see it,"--and I pulled out the document, and exhibited the Roman visa.
"What really saved you was the fact that you proclaimed yourself a heretic and a barbarian," remarked the Frenchman with a smile.
Why, when they settle here they dare not utter even a word-they are ready even to deny the fact that they are Russians!
That man was then a boy of ten and his family are still residing in Moscow."
"Nevertheless the incident was as I say," I replied.
"A very respected ex captain told me the story, and I myself could see the scar left on his cheek."
Of course, we began by talking on business matters.
Polina seemed furious when I handed her only seven hundred gulden, for she had thought to receive from Paris, as the proceeds of the pledging of her diamonds, at least two thousand gulden, or even more.
"Come what may, I MUST have money," she said.
In the first place, my grandmother is very ill, and unlikely to last another couple of days.
We had this from Timothy Petrovitch himself, and he is a reliable person.
Every moment we are expecting to receive news of the end."
"Looking for it?"
"Yes, looking for it.
"Yes, I believe that you WILL come in for a good deal," I said with some assurance.
I answered this question with another one.
"That Marquis of yours," I said, "--is HE also familiar with your family secrets?"
"And why are you yourself so interested in them?" was her retort as she eyed me with dry grimness.
"Never mind.
"It may be so."
I thought you ought to know that."
"Then he has only just begun his courting?
"You KNOW he has not," retorted Polina angrily.
"He is very shy," I said, "and susceptible.
Also, he is in love with you.--"
"Yes, he is in love with me," she replied.
In fact, what does the Frenchman possess?
To me it seems at least doubtful that he possesses anything at all."
"Oh, no, there is no doubt about it.
He does possess some chateau or other.
Last night the General told me that for certain.
NOW are you satisfied?"
"Nevertheless, in your place I should marry the Englishman."
"Yes?
But then the Frenchman is a marquis, and the cleverer of the two," remarked Polina imperturbably.
"Is that so?" I repeated.
"Yes; absolutely."
Polina was not at all pleased at my questions; I could see that she was doing her best to irritate me with the brusquerie of her answers.
But I took no notice of this.
"It amuses me to see you grow angry," she continued.
Polina giggled.
Some day I may remind you of that saying, in order to see if you will be as good as your word.
I hate you because I have allowed you to go to such lengths, and I also hate you and still more-because you are so necessary to me.
For the time being I want you, so I must keep you."
Then she made a movement to rise.
Her tone had sounded very angry. Indeed, of late her talks with me had invariably ended on a note of temper and irritation-yes, of real temper.
Blanche.
Nothing further has transpired.
Blanche, with her mother and her cousin, the Marquis, know very well that, as things now stand, we are ruined."
"That has nothing to do with it.
Listen to me.
Take these seven hundred florins, and go and play roulette with them.
So saying, she called Nadia back to her side, and entered the Casino, where she joined the rest of our party.
Something had seemed to strike my brain when she told me to go and play roulette.
Indeed, on one occasion (this happened in Switzerland, when I was asleep in the train) I had spoken aloud to her, and set all my fellow travellers laughing.
Again, therefore, I put to myself the question: "Do I, or do I not love her?" and again I could return myself no answer or, rather, for the hundredth time I told myself that I detested her.
Yes, this I knew well.
Hitherto (I concluded) she had looked upon me in the same light that the old Empress did upon her servant-the Empress who hesitated not to unrobe herself before her slave, since she did not account a slave a man.
Yes, often Polina must have taken me for something less than a man!"
Still, she had charged me with a commission-to win what I could at roulette.
Yet all the time I could not help wondering WHY it was so necessary for her to win something, and what new schemes could have sprung to birth in her ever fertile brain.
Well, it behoved me to divine them, and to probe them, and that as soon as possible.
In fact, it almost upset my balance, and I entered the gaming rooms with an angry feeling at my heart.
At first glance the scene irritated me.
Those journalists are not paid for doing so: they write thus merely out of a spirit of disinterested complaisance.
For one thing, the crowd oppressed me.
However ridiculous it may seem to you that I was expecting to win at roulette, I look upon the generally accepted opinion concerning the folly and the grossness of hoping to win at gambling as a thing even more absurd.
How, for instance, is it worse than trade?
True, out of a hundred persons, only one can win; yet what business is that of yours or of mine?
As to the question whether stakes and winnings are, in themselves, immoral is another question altogether, and I wish to express no opinion upon it.
Herein, as said, I draw sharp distinctions.
In the same way, I saw our General once approach the table in a stolid, important manner.
Slowly he took out his money bags, and slowly extracted three hundred francs in gold, which he staked on the black, and won.
Of course, the SUPREMELY aristocratic thing is to be entirely oblivious of the mire of rabble, with its setting; but sometimes a reverse course may be aristocratic to remark, to scan, and even to gape at, the mob (for preference, through a lorgnette), even as though one were taking the crowd and its squalor for a sort of raree show which had been organised specially for a gentleman's diversion.
At the same time, to stare fixedly about one is unbecoming; for that, again, is ungentlemanly, seeing that no spectacle is worth an open stare-are no spectacles in the world which merit from a gentleman too pronounced an inspection.
However, to me personally the scene DID seem to be worth undisguised contemplation-more especially in view of the fact that I had come there not only to look at, but also to number myself sincerely and wholeheartedly with, the mob.
As for my secret moral views, I had no room for them amongst my actual, practical opinions.
Another standard altogether has directed my life....
As for the crowd itself-well, it consisted mostly of Frenchmen.
At first the proceedings were pure Greek to me.
I could only divine and distinguish that stakes were hazarded on numbers, on "odd" or "even," and on colours.
It was an unpleasant sensation, and I tried hard to banish it.
I had a feeling that, once I had begun to play for Polina, I should wreck my own fortunes.
Also, I wonder if any one has EVER approached a gaming table without falling an immediate prey to superstition?
I began by pulling out fifty gulden, and staking them on "even." The wheel spun and stopped at thirteen.
I had lost!
Again I staked the whole sum, and again the red turned up.
Clutching my four hundred gulden, I placed two hundred of them on twelve figures, to see what would come of it.
In his opinion, such conduct would greatly compromise him-especially if I were to lose much.
"Of course I have no RIGHT to order your actions, but you yourself will agree that..." As usual, he did not finish his sentence.
"Why not?" she asked excitedly.
I said very seriously, "Yes," and then added: "Possibly my certainty about winning may seem to you ridiculous; yet, pray leave me in peace."
"Well, absurd though it be, I place great hopes on your playing of roulette," she remarked musingly; "wherefore, you ought to play as my partner and on equal shares; wherefore, of course, you will do as I wish."
Money cannot buy happiness, but most of us are willing to make the experiment.
Money is the root of much friendship.
MACARONI.
MAP.
That part of the human face which is visible above the collar.
MARVEL.
The fellow who butts in and says you're not entitled to a medal.
A man who has all the money he wants but wants more.
No matter how many good things our friends say about us, we are never surprised.
Nothing is so astonishing to us as another man's success.
Nothing ventured nothing wonderful.
NABOB.
A man who can put on a new suit of clothes every fifteen minutes.
NATION.
A large principality ready to go to war at a moment's notice. For example: Carrie Nation.
NATURE.
NECESSITY.
The mother of many an empty stomach.
NECK.
NEXT.
The battle cry in a barber shop before blood is shed.
NIT.
An abbreviation of Nix.
NIX.
NOPE.
NOISE.
NODDLE.
The place where some people think they think.
NOVEL.
A book that sells better than it reads.
Oh, yes, the man with a jag can hold on to the fence, but he can't hold on to his reputation.
OATS.
OBEY.
OIL. See john d Rockerfeller-if you can.
OLD HEN.
OLIVE.
A green grape dropped in a cocktail so the customer can pull it out with his fingers.
ONION.
OPERA.
OPPORTUNITY.
ORIGINALITY.
OSLER.
A modern abbreviation of chloroform.
To pour chloroform over an old man's breakfast food and telephone for the undertaker.
An attack of hysteria which broke out at a banquet and became epidemic in the newspapers.
Perhaps you have met the man who is so wrapped up in himself that he thinks he is a warm baby.
Pleasure travels with a brass band, but Trouble sneaks in on rubber shoes.
Philosophers do not believe half the things they tell themselves.
PAINT.
A polite name for balloon juice.
See the bartender.
PALPITATION OF THE TONGUE.
A disease that affects many women.
PATHOS.
A poor man laughing at his rich wife's poor joke.
PEACH.
A bit of domestic fruit, consisting of blonde tresses, a dimple, and three bows of pink ribbon.
PEEKABOO.
It is constructed by making one stitch and forgetting seven. The Peekaboo is the only friend the mosquito has on earth.
A man who can size himself up and forget the result.
PLAN.
Something which any fool can lay, but it takes patience like a hen to hatch it.
PLEASURE.
Fun you have to day so you can worry over it to morrow.
POLITICS.
The place where a man gets it-sometimes in the neck, sometimes in the bank.
POLITICIAN.
POPULARITY.
The cold storage house where the world sends her favorites before she forgets them.
POSTERITY.
A lot of people who will forget all about you before they are born.
PRACTICAL JOKE.
When Nature makes a pink lobster look like a man.
PREDICTION.
He says what he thinks it will be and then the weather is what it pleases.
PROMISE.
Quitters cannot be trained to quit quitting.
Quotation marks cover a multitude of plagiarists.
RAG.
RAKE.
The way you get roast beef when you order it well done.
REFORM.
A bird which is always flying towards us but which never gets here.
A man who marries for money and finds it is all in Confederate bills.
RICHES.
Something which is said to have wings, but I can't prove it, because they never flew my way.
RIDDLE.
A question mark gone mad.
How old will Ann's mother be when the book gets back?
james wrote two letters, one to his wife and one to his lady typewriter.
Ten minutes after mailing them he discovered that the right letter was in the wrong envelope.
Ann took a dollar bill and went to a department store.
She saved twenty cents for car fare and spent eighty cents for lunch.
What were the clerks swearing at after Ann went out?
One of them paints sawdust in a delicatessen factory at twelve dollars per.
What time does the dinner bell ring and who squares it with the grocer?
Some people's talk is too cheap at any price.
SALOON.
Something which can be opened on credit, but it takes cash to start a church.
A thirty dollar Panama hat on a thirty cent man.
SATAN.
SCEPTIC.
A violent disease which breaks out all over people when the weather gets warm.
The cure costs anywhere from two dollars to fifteen dollars per day, according to the mood the landlord is in.
What our friends think about us when our backs are turned.
Paying a nickle for a seat in a street car and then waiting till you get it.
SUCKERS.
The bait used by those who go fishing for compliments.
Failure kicked to pieces by hard work.
Little Jack Horner Sat in a corner Riding down town on the "L." He jumped to his feet Gave a lady his seat- I'm a liar, but don't it sound well.
--Oliver Goldsmith, page thirty four.
Brave and strong men climb into a street car and they are full of health and life and vigor, but a few blocks up the road they fall out backwards and inquire feebly for a sanitarium.
To get in some of the street cars about six o'clock is a problem, and to get out again is an assassination.
One evening I rode from Forty second Street to Fifty ninth without once touching the floor with my feet.
Some of our street cars lead a double life, because they are used all winter to act the part of a refrigerator.
Often while riding in the street cars I have felt a germ rubbing against my ankle like a kitten, but being a gentleman, I did not reach down and kick it away because the law says we must not be disrespectful to the dumb brutes of the field.
Many of our street cars are made out of the same idea as a can of condensed milk.
The only difference is that the street cars have a sour taste like a lemon squeezer.
We are a very nervous and careless people in America.
FOOD FOR THE SICK.
Remarks on Preparing Food for the Sick.
Few young persons understand cooking for the sick.
It is very important to know how to prepare their food in an inviting manner; every thing should be perfectly clean and nice.
It is well to have a stand or small table by the bed side, that you can set any thing on.
Boiled Custard.
Panada.
Put some crackers, crusts of dry bread or dried rusk, in a sauce pan with cold water, and a few raisins; after it has boiled half an hour, put in sugar, nutmeg, and half a glass of wine, if the patient has no fever.
If you have dried rusk, it is a quicker way to put the rusk in a bowl with some sugar, and pour boiling water on it out of the tea kettle. If the patient can take nothing but liquids, this makes a good drink when strained.
Egg Panada.
Boil a handful of good raisins in a quart of water; toast a slice of bread and cut it up; beat two eggs with a spoonful of sugar, and mix it with the bread; when the raisins are done, pour them on the toast and eggs, stirring all the time; season to your taste with wine, nutmeg and butter.
Oat meal Gruel.
Corn Gruel.
Arrow root.
In cooking arrow root for children, it is a very good way to make it very thick, and thin it afterwards with milk.
Sago.
Tapioca Jelly.
Milk Porridge.
To Poach Eggs.
This is a very delicate way of cooking eggs.
Barley Panada.
Calf's Foot Blancmange.
This is very nice for a sick person, and is easily made.
Cream Toast.
This is very good for sick persons, and can be eaten without much exertion. In making water toast, the butter should be melted in boiling water, and put on while hot.
To Stew Dried Beef.
Chip some beef very thin, pour hot water on it, and let it stand a minute or two, then drain it off, and stew it in a skillet with a little cream and butter.
If it is preferred dry, it may be fried in butter alone.
Cut a slice of ham into small pieces, and pour boiling water on it; let it soak a few minutes to extract the salt, and stew it in a little water; just before it is done, put in some cream and parsley.
To Stew Chickens or Birds.
Chicken Water.
If you have a small chicken, it will take half of it to make a pint of chicken water.
This is valuable in cases of dysentery and cholera morbus, particularly when made of old fowls.
Mutton and Veal Broth.
Veal broth may be made in the same way, and is more delicate for sick persons.
Wine Whey.
Rennet Whey.
Beat together an egg, a glass of wine, and a spoonful of sugar; pour on it half a pint of hot water; stir all the time to keep it from curdling, and when you pour it in a tumbler, grate a little nutmeg over it.
Toast Water.
Toast water will allay thirst better than almost any thing else.
If it is wanted to drink through the night, it should always be made early in the evening.
Tamarinds, currant or grape jelly, cranberries, or dried fruit of any kind, make a good drink.
Coffee.
Sick persons should have their coffee made separate from the family, as standing in the tin pot spoils the flavor.
Chocolate.
To make a cup of chocolate, grate a large tea spoonful in a mug, and pour a tea cup of boiling water on it; let it stand covered by the fire a few minutes, when you can put in sugar and cream.
Black Tea.
Black tea is much more suitable than green for sick persons, as it does not affect the nerves.
Pat a tea spoonful in a pot that will hold about two cups, and pour boiling water on it.
Let it set by the fire to draw five or ten minutes.
Rye Mush.
Four large spoonsful of rye flour mixed smooth in a little water, and stirred in a pint of boiling water; let it boil twenty minutes, stirring frequently.
'The nuts are quite ripe now,' said Chanticleer to his wife Partlet, 'suppose we go together to the mountains, and eat as many as we can, before the squirrel takes them all away.' 'With all my heart,' said Partlet, 'let us go and make a holiday of it together.'
So they went to the mountains; and as it was a lovely day, they stayed there till the evening.
However, the duck, who slept in the open air in the yard, heard them coming, and jumping into the brook which ran close by the inn, soon swam out of their reach.
Then the princess came in, and as she passed by them she had something spiteful to say to every one.
The first was too fat: 'He's as round as a tub,' said she.
The next was too tall: 'What a maypole!' said she.
The next was too short: 'What a dumpling!' said she.
The fourth was too pale, and she called him 'Wallface.' The fifth was too red, so she called him 'Coxcomb.' The sixth was not straight enough; so she said he was like a green stick, that had been laid to dry over a baker's oven.
'Look at him,' said she; 'his beard is like an old mop; he shall be called Grisly beard.' So the king got the nickname of Grisly beard.
But the old king was very angry when he saw how his daughter behaved, and how she ill treated all his guests; and he vowed that, willing or unwilling, she should marry the first man, be he prince or beggar, that came to the door.
When this was over the king said, 'Now get ready to go-you must not stay here-you must travel on with your husband.'
'Whose are these beautiful green meadows?' said she.
Then they came to a great city.
Am not I good enough for you?'
At last they came to a small cottage.
When they had eaten a very scanty meal they went to bed; but the fiddler called her up very early in the morning to clean the house.
You must learn to weave baskets.' Then he went out and cut willows, and brought them home, and she began to weave; but it made her fingers very sore.
But her husband did not care for that, and said she must work, if she did not wish to die of hunger.
At first the trade went well; for many people, seeing such a beautiful woman, went to buy her wares, and paid their money without thinking of taking away the goods.
'Ah! what will become of me?' said she; 'what will my husband say?' So she ran home and told him all.
Thus the princess became a kitchen maid, and helped the cook to do all the dirtiest work; but she was allowed to carry home some of the meat that was left, and on this they lived.
Everything was ready, and all the pomp and brightness of the court was there.
Then she bitterly grieved for the pride and folly which had brought her so low.
Then everybody laughed and jeered at her; and she was so abashed, that she wished herself a thousand feet deep in the earth.
I brought you there because I really loved you.
I am also the soldier that overset your stall.
I have done all this only to cure you of your silly pride, and to show you the folly of your ill treatment of me.
Now all is over: you have learnt wisdom, and it is time to hold our marriage feast.'
Then the chamberlains came and brought her the most beautiful robes; and her father and his whole court were there already, and welcomed her home on her marriage.
Joy was in every face and every heart.
Narrative Continued by the Doctor: The Jolly boat's Last Trip
THIS fifth trip was quite different from any of the others.
In the first place, the little gallipot of a boat that we were in was gravely overloaded.
Five grown men, and three of them-Trelawney, Redruth, and the captain-over six feet high, was already more than she was meant to carry.
Add to that the powder, pork, and bread bags.
The gunwale was lipping astern.
Several times we shipped a little water, and my breeches and the tails of my coat were all soaking wet before we had gone a hundred yards.
All the same, we were afraid to breathe.
Even the ripples were a danger to our overloaded craft, but the worst of it was that we were swept out of our true course and away from our proper landing place behind the point.
"I cannot keep her head for the stockade, sir," said I to the captain. I was steering, while he and Redruth, two fresh men, were at the oars. "The tide keeps washing her down.
Could you pull a little stronger?"
"You must bear up, sir, if you please-bear up until you see you're gaining."
I tried and found by experiment that the tide kept sweeping us westward until I had laid her head due east, or just about right angles to the way we ought to go.
"We'll never get ashore at this rate," said i
"If it's the only course that we can lie, sir, we must even lie it," returned the captain.
"We must keep upstream.
"Thank you, my man," said I, quite as if nothing had happened, for we had all quietly made up our minds to treat him like one of ourselves.
Suddenly the captain spoke up again, and I thought his voice was a little changed.
"The gun!" said he.
"They could never get the gun ashore, and if they did, they could never haul it through the woods."
"Look astern, doctor," replied the captain.
We had entirely forgotten the long nine; and there, to our horror, were the five rogues busy about her, getting off her jacket, as they called the stout tarpaulin cover under which she sailed.
"Israel was Flint's gunner," said Gray hoarsely.
At any risk, we put the boat's head direct for the landing place.
By this time we had got so far out of the run of the current that we kept steerage way even at our necessarily gentle rate of rowing, and I could keep her steady for the goal.
I could hear as well as see that brandy faced rascal Israel Hands plumping down a round shot on the deck.
"Who's the best shot?" asked the captain.
"mr Trelawney, will you please pick me off one of these men, sir? Hands, if possible," said the captain.
He looked to the priming of his gun.
"Now," cried the captain, "easy with that gun, sir, or you'll swamp the boat.
All hands stand by to trim her when he aims."
They had the gun, by this time, slewed round upon the swivel, and Hands, who was at the muzzle with the rammer, was in consequence the most exposed.
However, we had no luck, for just as Trelawney fired, down he stooped, the ball whistled over him, and it was one of the other four who fell.
The cry he gave was echoed not only by his companions on board but by a great number of voices from the shore, and looking in that direction I saw the other pirates trooping out from among the trees and tumbling into their places in the boats.
"Give way, then," cried the captain.
"We mustn't mind if we swamp her now.
If we can't get ashore, all's up."
"They'll have a hot run, sir," returned the captain.
"Jack ashore, you know.
It's not them I mind; it's the round shot.
Carpet bowls!
My lady's maid couldn't miss.
Tell us, squire, when you see the match, and we'll hold water."
In the meanwhile we had been making headway at a good pace for a boat so overloaded, and we had shipped but little water in the process.
We were now close in; thirty or forty strokes and we should beach her, for the ebb had already disclosed a narrow belt of sand below the clustering trees.
The gig was no longer to be feared; the little point had already concealed it from our eyes.
The ebb tide, which had so cruelly delayed us, was now making reparation and delaying our assailants.
The one source of danger was the gun.
"If I durst," said the captain, "I'd stop and pick off another man."
But it was plain that they meant nothing should delay their shot.
They had never so much as looked at their fallen comrade, though he was not dead, and I could see him trying to crawl away.
"Ready!" cried the squire.
"Hold!" cried the captain, quick as an echo.
And he and Redruth backed with a great heave that sent her stern bodily under water.
This was the first that Jim heard, the sound of the squire's shot not having reached him.
Where the ball passed, not one of us precisely knew, but I fancy it must have been over our heads and that the wind of it may have contributed to our disaster.
So far there was no great harm.
Mine I had snatched from my knees and held over my head, by a sort of instinct.
The other three had gone down with the boat.
With all this in our minds, we waded ashore as fast as we could, leaving behind us the poor jolly boat and a good half of all our powder and provisions.
ON THE MOOR
After tea my father went to his study, for it was late in the week, and he was a most conscientious writer of sermons.
I read for an hour, and then, tired alike of my book and my own company, I strolled up and down the drive.
This restlessness was one of my greatest troubles.
When the fit came I could neither work nor read nor think connectedly.
It was a phase of incipient dissatisfaction with life, morbid, but inevitable.
At the end of the drive nearest the road, I met Alice, my youngest sister, walking briskly with a book under her arm, and a quiet smile upon her homely face.
I watched her coming towards me, and I almost envied her.
What a comfort to be blessed with a placid disposition and an optimistic frame of mind!
"So I have-after a fashion," she answered, good humoredly.
"Are you wise to be without a hat, Kate?
To look at your airy attire one would imagine that it was summer instead of autumn.
Come back into the house with me."
I laughed at her in contempt.
There was a difference indeed between my muslin gown and the plain black skirt and jacket, powdered with dust, which was Alice's usual costume.
"Have you ever known me to catch cold through wearing thin clothes or going without a hat?" I asked.
"I am tired of being indoors.
There have been people here all the afternoon.
Alice was always so painfully literal.
I was in an evil mood, and I determined to shock her.
"So I do sometimes," I answered; "but to day my callers have been all women, winding up with an hour and a half of Lady Naselton.
One gets so tired of one's own sex!
Not a single man all the afternoon.
Alice pursed up her lips, and turned her head away with a look of displeasure.
"I am surprised to hear you talk like that, Kate," she said, quietly.
"Do you think that it is quite good taste?"
"Be off, you little goose!" I called after her as she passed on towards the house with quickened step and rigid head.
The little sober figure turned the bend and disappeared without looking around.
She was the right person in the right place.
She had the supreme good fortune to be in accord with her environment.
I looked after her and sighed.
I had no desire to go in; on the other hand, there was nothing to stay out for.
I leaned over the gate with my face turned towards the great indistinct front of Deville Court.
There was nothing to look at.
The trees had taken to themselves fantastic shapes, little wreaths of white mist were rising from the hollows of the park.
The landscape was grey, colorless, monotonous.
My whole life was like that, I thought, with a sudden despondent chill.
In our little family Alice absorbed the domesticity.
There was not one shred of it in my disposition.
I realized with a start that I was becoming morbid, and turned from the gate towards the house.
Suddenly I heard an unexpected sound-the sound of voices close at hand.
A deep voice rang out upon the still, damp air-
Get over, Marvel!"
There must have been quite twenty of them, all of the same breed-beagles-and amongst them two people were walking, a man and a woman.
The man was nearest to me, and I could see him more distinctly.
He was tall and very broad, with a ragged beard and long hair.
He wore no collar, and there was a great rent in his shabby shooting coat.
Of his features I could see nothing.
He wore knickerbockers, and stockings, and thick shoes.
He was by no means an ordinary looking person, but he was certainly not prepossessing.
The most favorable thing about him was his carriage, which was upright and easy, but even that was in a measure spoiled by a distinct suggestion of surliness.
The woman by his side I could only see very indistinctly.
As they came nearer to me, I slipped from the drive on to the verge of the shrubbery, standing for a moment in the shadow of a tall laurel bush.
I was not seen, but I could hear their voices.
The woman was speaking.
I fancy I heard that one was expected."
The parson was bound to come, I suppose, but what the mischief does he want with a daughter?"
A little laugh from the woman-a pleasant, musical laugh.
"Daughters, I believe-I heard some one say that there were two.
There was a contemptuous snort, and a moment's silence.
The man's huge form stood out with almost startling distinctness against the grey sky.
He was lashing the thistles by the side of the road with his long whip.
I smothered a laugh.
I was the pale faced, black haired chit, but it was scarcely a polite way of alluding to me, mr Bruce Deville.
The sound of their voices came to me indistinctly; but I could hear the deep bass of the man as he slung some scornful exclamation out upon the moist air.
His great figure, looming unnaturally large through the misty twilight, was the last to vanish.
It was my first glimpse of mr Bruce Deville of Deville Court.
I turned round with a terrified start.
Almost at my side some heavy body had fallen to the ground with a faint groan.
A single step, and I was bending over the prostrate form of a man.
I caught his hand and gazed into his face with horrified eyes.
It was my father.
He must have been within a yard of me when he fell.
His eyes were half closed, and his hands were cold.
I met Alice in the hall.
"Get some brandy!" I cried, breathlessly.
Quick!"
She brought it in a moment.
He had not moved.
His cheeks were ghastly pale, and his eyes were still closed.
I felt his pulse and his heart, and unfastened his collar.
"There is nothing serious the matter-at least I think not," I whispered to Alice.
"It is only a fainting fit."
Presently he opened his eyes, and raised his head a little, looking half fearfully around.
"It was her voice," he whispered, hoarsely.
Where is she?
What have you done with her?
There was a rustling of the leaves-and then I heard her speak!"
"You must have been fancying things.
Are you better?"
"Better!"
"Ah!
I must have fainted!" he exclaimed.
"I remember the study was close, and I came to get cool.
Yet, I thought-I thought----"
He was still white and shaken, but evidently his memory was returning.
"I remember it was close in the study," he said-"very close; I was tired too.
I don't like it though.
I must see a doctor; I must certainly see a doctor!"
Alice bent over him full of sympathy, and he took her arm.
I walked behind him in silence.
A curious thought had taken possession of me.
I could not get rid of the impression of my father's first words, and his white, terrified face.
Was it indeed a wild fancy of his, or had he really heard this voice which had stirred him so deeply?
I tried to laugh at the idea.
I could not.
His cry was so natural, his terror so apparent!
He had heard a voice.
He had been stricken with a sudden terror.
Whose was the voice-whence his fear of it?
I watched him leaning slightly upon Alice's arm, and walking on slowly in front of me towards the house.
Already he was better.
His features had reassumed their customary air of delicate and reserved strength.
I looked at him with new and curious eyes.
mrs McLane had called on mrs Talbot.
That was known to all San Francisco, for her carriage had stood in front of the Occidental Hotel for an hour.
No one wasted time on a second effort to gossip with their leader; it was known that just so often mrs McLane drew down the blinds, informed her household that she was not to be disturbed, disposed herself on the sofa with her back to the room and indulged in the luxury of blues for three days.
She took no nourishment but milk and broth and spoke to no one.
Today this would be a rest cure and was equally beneficial.
When the attack was over mrs McLane would arise with a clear complexion, serene nerves, and renewed strength for social duties.
Her friends knew that her retirement on this occasion was timed to finish on the morning of her reception and had not the least misgiving that her doors would still be closed.
A magnificent crystal chandelier depended from the high and lightly frescoed ceiling and there were side brackets beside the doors and the low mantel piece.
The rooms filled early.
mrs McLane stood before the north windows receiving her friends with her usual brilliant smile, her manner of high dignity and sweet cordiality.
She wore her prematurely white hair in a tall pompadour, and this with the rich velvets she affected, ample and long, made her look like a French marquise of the eighteenth century, stepped down from the canvas.
The effect was by no means accidental.
mrs McLane's grandmother had been French and she resembled her.
Unlike as a reception of that day was in background and costumes from the refinements of modern art and taste, it possessed one contrast that was wholly to its advantage.
Its men were gentlemen and the sons and grandsons of gentlemen.
If they took up less room than the women they certainly were more decorative.
dr Talbot and his wife had not arrived.
To all eager questions mrs McLane merely replied that "they" would "be here." She had the dramatic instinct of the true leader and had commanded the doctor not to bring his bride before four o'clock.
The reception began at three.
They should have an entrance.
But mrs Abbott, a lady of three chins and an eagle eye, who had clung for twenty five years to black satin and bugles, was too persistent to be denied.
She extracted the information that the Bostonian had sent her own furniture by a previous steamer and that her drawing room was graceful, French, and exquisite.
At ten minutes after the hour the buzz and chatter stopped abruptly and every face was turned, every neck craned toward the door.
The colored butler had announced with a grand flourish:
"dr and mrs Talbot."
The doctor looked as rubicund, as jovial, as cynical as ever.
But few cast him more than a passing glance.
Then they gave an audible gasp, induced by an ingenuous compound of amazement, disappointment, and admiration.
They had been prepared to forgive, to endure, to make every allowance.
The poor thing could no more help being plain and dowdy than born in Boston, and as their leader had satisfied herself that she "would do," they would never let her know how deeply they deplored her disabilities.
mrs Talbot was unquestionably a product of the best society.
The South could have done no better.
She was tall and supple and self possessed.
She was exquisitely dressed in dark blue velvet with a high collar of point lace tapering almost to her bust, and revealing a long white throat clasped at the base by a string of pearls.
On her head, as proudly poised as mrs McLane's, was a blue velvet hat, higher in the crown than the prevailing fashion, rolled up on one side and trimmed only with a drooping gray feather.
And her figure, her face, her profile!
Her skin was as white as the San Francisco fogs, her lips were scarlet, her cheeks pink, her hair and eyes a bright golden brown.
Her features were delicate and regular, the mouth not too small, curved and sensitive; her refinement was almost excessive.
As she moved forward and stood in front of mrs McLane, or acknowledged introductions to those that stood near, the women gave another gasp, this time of consternation.
Or was this lovely creature of surpassing elegance, a law unto herself?
Her skirt was full but straight and did not disguise the lines of her graceful figure; above her small waist it fitted as closely as a riding habit.
mrs Abbott, who was given to primitive sounds, snorted.
mrs Ballinger, who had been the belle of Richmond and was still adjudged the handsomest woman in San Francisco, lifted the eyebrows to which sonnets had been written with an air of haughty resignation; but made up her mind to abate her scorn of the North and order her gowns from New York hereafter.
They all met her in the course of the afternoon.
She was sweet and gracious, but although there was not a hint of embarrassment she made no attempt to shine, and they liked her the better for that.
The young men soon discovered they could make no impression on this lovely importation, for her eyes strayed constantly to her husband; until he disappeared in search of cronies, whiskey, and a cigar: then she looked depressed for a moment, but gave a still closer attention to the women about her.
In love with her husband but a woman of the world.
Manners as fine as mrs McLane's, but too aloof and sensitive to care for leadership.
She had made the grand tour in Europe, they discovered, and enjoyed a season in Washington.
She should continue to live at the Occidental Hotel as her husband would be out so much at night and she was rather timid.
And she was bright, unaffected, responsive.
The girls drew little unconscious sighs of relief.
mrs Abbott succumbed.
In short they all took her to their hearts.
And, indeed, his government did present these two phases, so different and inharmonious.
Let us follow these two portions of Louis the twelfth's reign, each separately, without mixing up one with the other by reason of identity of dates.
We shall thus get at a better understanding and better appreciation of their character and their results.
Outside of France, Milaness [the Milanese district] was Louis the twelfth's first thought, at his accession, and the first object of his desire.
He looked upon it as his patrimony.
The Duke of Milan, Ludovic, the Moor, had by his sagacity and fertile mind, by his taste for arts and sciences and the intelligent patronage he bestowed upon them, by his ability in speaking, and by his facile character, obtained in Italy a position far beyond his real power.
Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most eminent amongst the noble geniuses of the age, lived on intimate terms with him; but Ludovic was, nevertheless, a turbulent rascal and a greedy tyrant, of whom those who did not profit by his vices or the enjoyments of his court were desirous of being relieved.
As early as the twentieth of April, fourteen ninety eight, a fortnight after his accession, Louis the twelfth. addressed to the Venetians a letter "most gracious," says the contemporary chronicler Marino Sanuto, "and testifying great good will;" and the special courier who brought it declared that the king had written to nobody in Italy except the pope, the Venetians, and the Florentines.
There is certainly a royal castle, in the which lives the queen, the wife of the deceased king; nevertheless his Majesty was pleased to give audience in this hostelry, all covered expressly with cloth of Alexandrine velvet, with lilies of gold at the spot where the king was placed.
As soon as the speech was ended, his Majesty rose up and gave quite a brotherly welcome to the brilliant ambassadors.
It provided for an alliance between the King of France and the Venetian government, for the purpose of making war in common upon the Duke of Milan, Ludovic Sforza, on and against every one, save the lord pope of Rome, and for the purpose of insuring to the Most Christian king restoration to the possession of the said duchy of Milan as his rightful and olden patrimony.
And on account of the charges and expenses which would be incurred by the Venetian government whilst rendering assistance to the Most Christian king in the aforesaid war, the Most Christian king bound himself to approve and consent that the city of Cremona and certain forts or territories adjacent, specially indicated, should belong in freehold and perpetuity to the Venetian government.
The treaty, at the same time, regulated the number of troops and the military details of the war on behalf of the two contracting powers, and it provided for divers political incidents which might be entailed, and to which the alliance thus concluded should or should not be applicable according to the special stipulations which were drawn up with a view to those very incidents.
Duke Ludovic Sforza opposed to it a force pretty nearly equal in number, but far less full of confidence and of far less valor.
In less than three weeks the duchy was conquered; in only two cases was any assault necessary; all the other places were given up by traitors or surrendered without a show of resistance.
Milan and Cremona alone remained to be occupied.
Ludovic Sforza "appeared before his troops and his people like the very spirit of lethargy," says a contemporary unpublished chronicle, "with his head bent down to the earth, and for a long while he remained thus pensive and without a single word to say.
The Venetians did not deserve his censure.
By allying themselves, in fourteen ninety nine, with Louis the twelfth. against the Duke of Milan, they did not fall into Louis's hands, for, between fourteen ninety nine and fifteen fifteen, and many times over, they sided alternately with and against him, always preserving their independence and displaying it as suited them at the moment.
And these vicissitudes in their policy did not bring about their ruin, for at the death of Louis the twelfth. their power and importance in Southern Europe had not declined.
It was Louis the twelfth. who deserved Machiavelli's strictures for having engaged, by means of diplomatic alliances of the most contradictory kind, at one time with the Venetians' support, and at another against them, in a policy of distant and incoherent conquests, without any connection with the national interests of France, and, in the long run, without any success.
Unfortunately Trivulzio was himself a Milanese and of the faction of the Guelphs.
A plot was formed in favor of the fallen tyrant, who was in Germany expecting it, and was recruiting, during expectancy, amongst the Germans and Swiss in order to take advantage of it.
On the twenty fifth of January, fifteen hundred, the insurrection broke out; and two months later Ludovic Sforza had once more become master of Milaness, where the French possessed nothing but the castle of Milan.
In one of the fights brought about by this sudden revolution the young Chevalier Bayard, carried away by the impetuosity of his age and courage, pursued right into Milan the foes he was driving before him, without noticing that his French comrades had left him; and he was taken prisoner in front of the very palace in which were the quarters of Ludovic Sforza.
Whilst matters were thus going on in the north of Italy, Louis the twelfth. was preparing for his second great Italian venture, the conquest of the kingdom of Naples, in which his predecessor Charles the eighth. had failed.
He forgot, moreover, that Ferdinand had at the head of his armies a tried chieftain, Gonzalvo of Cordova, already known throughout Europe as the great captain, who had won that name in campaigns against the Moors, the Turks, and the Portuguese, and who had the character of being as free from scruple as from fear.
The King of France, whatever sacrifices he might already have made and might still make in order to insure their co-operation, could no more count upon it than upon the loyalty of the King of Spain in the conquest they were entering upon together.
The outset of the campaign was attended with easy success.
The French army, under the command of Stuart d'Aubigny, a valiant Scot, arrived on the twenty fifth of June, fifteen o one, before Rome, and there received a communication in the form of a bull of the pope which removed the crown of Naples from the head of Frederick the third., and partitioned that fief of the Holy See between the Kings of France and Spain.
Fortified with this authority, the army continued its march, and arrived before Capua on the sixth of July.
Gonzalvo of Cordova was already upon Neapolitan territory with a Spanish army, which Ferdinand the Catholic had hastily sent thither at the request of Frederick the third. himself, who had counted upon the assistance of his cousin the King of Arragon against the French invasion. Great was his consternation when he heard that the ambassadors of France and Spain had proclaimed at Rome the alliance between their masters.
A French fleet, commanded by Philip de Ravenstein, arrived off Naples when D'Aubigny was already master of it.
The unhappy King Frederick took refuge in the island of Ischia; and, unable to bear the idea of seeking an asylum in Spain with his cousin who had betrayed him so shamefully, he begged the French admiral himself to advise him in his adversity.
It does not appear that Frederick ever had an idea of doing so, for his name is completely lost to history up to the day of his death, which took place at Tours on the ninth of November, fifteen o four, after three years' oblivion and exile.
In giving the senate an account of his mission, one of the ambassadors, Dominic of Treviso, drew the following portrait of Louis the twelfth.: "The king is in stature tall and thin, and temperate in eating, taking scarcely anything but boiled beef; he is by nature miserly and retentive; his great pleasure is hawking; from September to April he hawks.
The French and the Spaniards, D'Aubigny and Gonzalvo of Cordova, at first gave their attention to nothing but establishing themselves firmly, each in the interests of the king his master, in those portions of the kingdom which were to belong to them.
D'Aubigny fell ill; and Louis the twelfth. sent to Naples, with the title of viceroy, Louis d'Armagnac, Duke of Nemours, a brave warrior, but a negotiator inclined to take umbrage and to give offence.
The disputes soon took the form of hostilities.
The French essayed to drive the Spaniards from the points they had occupied in the disputed territories; and at first they had the advantage.
The very day after his success Gonzalvo heard that a Spanish corps, lately disembarked in Calabria, had also beaten, on the twenty first of April, at Seminara, a French corps commanded by D'Aubigny.
The great captain was as eager to profit by victory as he had been patient in waiting for a chance of it.
He marched rapidly on Naples, and entered it on the fourteenth of May, almost without resistance; and the two forts defending the city, the Castel Nuovo and the Castel dell' Uovo surrendered, one on the eleventh of June and the other on the first of July.
He found Gonzalvo of Cordova posted with his army on the left bank of the Garigliano, either to invest the place or to repulse re enforcements that might arrive for it.
Gonzalvo, who was kept well informed of his enemies' condition, threw, on the twenty seventh of December, a bridge over the Garigliano, attacked the French suddenly, and forced them to fall back upon Gaeta, which they did not succeed in entering until they had lost artillery, baggage, and a number of prisoners.
The French captains, seeing that fortune was not kind to them, and that they had provisions for a week only, were all for taking this offer.
All the prisoners, captains, men at arms, and common soldiers were accordingly given up, put to sea, and sailed for Genoa, where they were well received and kindly treated by the Genoese, which did them great good, for they were much in need of it.
But the candidature of Cardinal d'Amboise failed; a four weeks' pope, Pius the third., succeeded Alexander the sixth.; and, when the Holy See suddenly became once more vacant, Cardinal d'Amboise failed again; and the new choice was Cardinal Julian della Rovera, Pope Julius the second., who soon became the most determined and most dangerous foe of Louis the twelfth., already assailed by so many enemies.
The Venetian, Dominic of Treviso, was quite right; Louis the twelfth. was "of unstable mind, saying yes and no" On such characters discouragement tells rapidly.
With those political miscalculations was connected a more personal and more disinterested feeling.
Two other small towns, Marano and Osopo, followed her example; and for several months this was all that the Venetians preserved of their continental possessions.
But at the commencement of July, fifteen o nine, they heard that the important town of Padua, which had fallen to the share of Emperor Maximilian, was uttering passionate murmurs against its new master, and wished for nothing better than to come back beneath the old sway; and, in spite of the opposition shown by the doge, Loredano, the Venetians resolved to attempt the venture.
During the night between the sixteenth and seventeenth of July, a small detachment, well armed and well led, arrived beneath the walls of Padua, which was rather carelessly guarded.
It blazed forth again immediately, but at first between the Venetians and the Emperor Maximilian almost alone by himself.
The doge, Leonardo Loredano, the same who had but lately opposed the surprisal of Padua, rose up and delivered in the senate a long speech, of which only the essential and characteristic points can be quoted here:--
"Everybody knows, excellent gentlemen of the senate," said he, "that on the preservation of Padua depends all hope, not only of recovering our empire, but of maintaining our own liberty.
To save it who would refuse to risk his own life and that of his children?
If the defence of Padua is the pledge for the salvation of Venice, who would hesitate to go and defend it?
On returning to his quarters he sent for a French secretary of his, whom he bade write to the lord of La Palisse a letter, whereof this was the substance: 'Dear cousin, I have this morning been to look at the breach, which I find more than practicable for whoever would do his duty.
I pray you, so soon as my big drum sounds, which will be about midday, that you do incontinently hold ready all the French gentlemen who are under your orders at my service, by command of my brother the King of France, to go to the said assault along with my foot; and I hope that, with God's help we shall carry it.'
"The lord of La Palisse," continues the chronicler, "thought this a somewhat strange manner of proceeding; howbeit he hid his thought, and said to the secretary, 'I am astounded that the emperor did not send for my comrades and me for to deliberate more fully of this matter; howbeit you will tell him that I will send to fetch them, and when they are come I will show them the letter.
I do not think there will be many who will not be obedient to that which the emperor shall be pleased to command.'
They all looked at one another, laughing, for to see who would speak first.
Maximilian was personally brave and free from depravity or premeditated perfidy, but he was coarse, volatile, inconsistent, and not very able.
When he became pope, he had three objects: to recover and extend the temporal possessions of the papacy, to exercise to the full his spiritual power, and to drive the foreigner from Italy.
"Oh, it's so far up in the air," answered old mr King.
"Not a bit," said Tom.
What work did my father do to support us?"
His mother replied: "Your father was a hunter.
He set traps, and we ate what he caught in them."
I, too, will set traps, and see if we can't get enough to eat."
The third day he twisted cocoanut fiber into ropes.
The fourth day he set up as many traps as time would permit.
The fifth day he set up the remainder of the traps.
Take me out of this trap and let me go.
He started to the village to give the alarm, but the snake shouted: "Come back, son of Adam; don't call the people from the village to come and kill me.
I am Neeo'ka, the snake.
Let me out of this trap, I pray you.
Save me from the rain to day, that I may be able to save you from the sun to morrow, if you should be in need of help."
He was so wretched and tired that he felt he must lie down and die, when suddenly he heard some one calling him, and looking up he saw Neeanee, the ape, who said, "Son of Adam, where are you going?"
"Well, well," said the ape; "don't worry.
Is there anything else you want?
And the youth answered, as dolefully as before, "I don't know; I'm lost."
"Come, cheer up," said the very old lion, "and rest yourself here a little.
I want to repay with kindness to day the kindness you showed me on a former day."
Simba Kongway went away, but soon returned with some game he had caught, and then he brought some fire, and the young man cooked the game and ate it.
Won't you make it?" But he answered: "My good woman, I am not a doctor, I am a hunter, and never used medicine in my life.
I can not help you."
When he came to the road leading to the principal city he saw a well, with a bucket standing near it, and he said to himself: "That's just what I want.
I'll take a drink of nice well water.
Let me see if the water can be reached."
As he peeped over the edge of the well, to see if the water was high enough, what should he behold but a great big snake, which, directly it saw him, said, "Son of Adam, wait a moment." Then it came out of the well and said: "How?
Don't you know me?"
"Well, well!" said the snake; "I could never forget you.
I am Neeoka, whom you released from the trap.
Then they parted very cordially.
But although he pretends to be a man, I know that he is a snake who has power to look like a man."
There is the great snake that lives in the well, and he stays by you.
Tell him to go away."
But Neeoka would not stir.
Then the sultan asked him, "Why should this man invite you to his home and then speak ill of you?"
And the sultan said: "Although men are often ungrateful, they are not always so; only the bad ones.
As for this fellow, he deserves to be put in a sack and drowned in the sea.
CHAPTER sixteen.
Nothing, however, was allowed to divert them from their ostensible object of making a survey of the coast of the Mediterranean, and accordingly they persevered in following that singular boundary which had revealed itself to their extreme astonishment.
Having rounded the great promontory that had barred her farther progress to the north, the schooner skirted its upper edge.
Yes, of France.
Who shall paint the look of consternation with which he gazed upon the stony rampart-rising perpendicularly for a thousand feet-that had replaced the shores of the smiling south?
Who shall reveal the burning anxiety with which he throbbed to see beyond that cruel wall?
But there seemed no hope.
It might have been supposed that Servadac's previous experiences would have prepared him for the discovery that the catastrophe which had overwhelmed other sites had brought destruction to his own country as well.
But he had failed to realize how it might extend to France; and when now he was obliged with his own eyes to witness the waves of ocean rolling over what once had been the lovely shores of Provence, he was well nigh frantic with desperation.
There is-there must be-something more behind that frowning rock.
By Heaven, I adjure you, let us disembark, and mount the summit and explore!
With her steam at high pressure, the yacht made rapid progress towards the east.
Of the planets, some, it was observed, seemed to be fading away in remote distance.
The inference was irresistible that Gallia was receding from the sun, and traveling far away across the planetary regions.
Count Timascheff and the lieutenant were scarcely less impatient than the captain, and little needed his urgent and repeated solicitations: "Come on!
Quick!
The bit of strand was only a few square yards in area, quite a narrow strip.
Upon it might have been recognized some fragments of that agglutination of yellow limestone which is characteristic of the coast of Provence.
The narrow ravine was not only perfectly dry, but manifestly had never been the bed of any mountain torrent.
"So cold, do you think," asked Servadac, "that animal life must be extinct?"
"I do not say that, captain," answered the lieutenant; "for, however far our little world may be removed from the sun, I do not see why its temperature should fall below what prevails in those outlying regions beyond our system where sky and air are not." "And what temperature may that be?" inquired the captain with a shudder.
"Fourier estimates that even in those vast unfathomable tracts, the temperature never descends lower than sixty degrees," said Procope.
"Sixty!
Sixty degrees below zero!" cried the count.
"Why, there's not a Russian could endure it!"
When Captain Parry was on Melville Island, he knew the thermometer to fall to fifty six degrees," said Procope.
As the explorers advanced, they seemed glad to pause from time to time, that they might recover their breath; for the air, becoming more and more rarefied, made respiration somewhat difficult and the ascent fatiguing.
Eagerly and anxiously did they look around.
Servadac could not suppress a cry of dismay.
Where was his beloved France?
Had he gained this arduous height only to behold the rocks carpeted with ice and snow, and reaching interminably to the far off horizon?
His heart sank within him.
The whole region appeared to consist of nothing but the same strange, uniform mineral conglomerate, crystallized into regular hexagonal prisms.
Of the vegetable kingdom, there was not a single representative; the most meager of Arctic plants, the most insignificant of lichens, could obtain no hold upon that stony waste.
The mineral kingdom reigned supreme.
Silent and tearful, he stood upon an ice bound rock, straining his eyes across the boundless vista of the mysterious territory.
"It cannot be!" he exclaimed.
By all that's pitiful, I entreat you, come and explore the farthest verge of the ice bound track!"
It proved to be a fragment of dis colored marble, on which several letters were inscribed, of which the only part at all decipherable was the syllable "Vil."
"Vil-Villa!" he cried out, in his excitement dropping the marble, which was broken into atoms by the fall.
What else could this fragment be but the sole surviving remnant of some sumptuous mansion that once had stood on this unrivaled site?
And did it not give in its sad and too convincing testimony that Antibes itself had been involved in the great destruction?
Servadac gazed upon the shattered marble, pensive and disheartened.
He shook his head mournfully.
Servadac smiled faintly, and replied that he felt rather compelled to take up the despairing cry of Dante, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy gear of compliments and clothed on with rhetorical tar and feathers.
He was a cork that could not be kept under the water many moments at a time.
There's two hundred thousand dollars coming, and that will set things booming again: Harry seems to be having some difficulty, but that's to be expected-you can't move these big operations to the tune of Fisher's Hornpipe, you know.
"The grave?"
"Well, no-not that exactly; but you can't understand these things, Polly dear-women haven't much head for business, you know.
Why bless you, let the appropriation lag, if it wants to-that's no great matter-there's a bigger thing than that."
"Bigger, child?--why, what's two hundred thousand dollars?
Pocket money!
Mere pocket money! Look at the railroad!
Did you forget the railroad?
Where'll it be by the middle of summer?
Just stop and fancy a moment-just think a little-don't anything suggest itself? Bless your heart, you dear women live right in the present all the time-but a man, why a man lives----
"In the future, Beriah?
I know you're doing all you can, and I don't want to seem repining and ungrateful-for I'm not, Beriah-you know I'm not, don't you?"
And I'll bring things all right yet, honey-cheer up and don't you fear.
The railroad----"
"Oh, I had forgotten the railroad, dear, but when a body gets blue, a body forgets everything.
Things ain't so dark, are they?
Now just think for a moment-just figure up a little on the future dead moral certainties.
For instance, call this waiter saint Louis.
"And we'll lay this fork (representing the railroad) from saint Louis to this potato, which is Slouchburg:
"Then with this carving knife we'll continue the railroad from Slouchburg to Doodleville, shown by the black pepper:
"Thence by the pipe to Belshazzar, which is the salt cellar:
"Thence to, to-that quill-Catfish-hand me the pincushion, Marie Antoinette:
"Then by the spoon to Bloody Run-thank you, the ink:
"Thence to Hail Columbia-snuffers, Polly, please move that cup and saucer close up, that's Hail Columbia:
"And there we strike Columbus River-pass me two or three skeins of thread to stand for the river; the sugar bowl will do for Hawkeye, and the rat trap for Stone's Landing-Napoleon, I mean-and you can see how much better Napoleon is located than Hawkeye.
"Now then-there you are!
It's a beautiful road, beautiful.
But ain't it a ripping road, though?
I tell you, it'll make a stir when it gets along.
Just see what a country it goes through.
And now we come to the Brimstone region-cattle raised there till you can't rest-and corn, and all that sort of thing.
Then from Catfish to Babylon it's a little swampy, but there's dead loads of peat down under there somewhere.
Next is the Bloody Run and Hail Columbia country-tobacco enough can be raised there to support two such railroads.
Next is the sassparilla region.
I reckon there's enough of that truck along in there on the line of the pocket knife, from Hail Columbia to Hark from the Tomb to fat up all the consumptives in all the hospitals from Halifax to the Holy Land.
And I'll fix that, you know.
"But Beriah, dear-"
"Don't interrupt me; Polly-I don't want you to lose the run of the map-well, take your toy horse, james Fitz james, if you must have it-and run along with you.
Look at that, now.
Perfectly straight line straight as the way to the grave.
And see where it leaves Hawkeye clear out in the cold, my dear, clear out in the cold.
Polly, mark my words-in three years from this, Hawkeye'll be a howling wilderness. You'll see.
And just look at that river-noblest stream that meanders over the thirsty earth!--calmest, gentlest artery that refreshes her weary bosom!
It's enough, I should judge. Now here we are at Napoleon.
That's all right-that will come.
And it's no bad country now for calmness and solitude, I can tell you-though there's no money in that, of course.
And patriotic?--why they named it after Congress itself.
That railroad's fetching it.
That's all right.
Open the letter-open it quick, and let's know all about it before we stir out of our places.
This reason or cause must either be contained in the nature of the thing in question, or be external to it.
For instance, the reason for the non-existence of a square circle is indicated in its nature, namely, because it would involve a contradiction.
On the other hand, the existence of substance follows also solely from its nature, inasmuch as its nature involves existence.
From the latter it must follow, either that a triangle necessarily exists, or that it is impossible that it should exist.
So much is self-evident.
If, then, no cause or reason can be given, which prevents the existence of God, or which destroys his existence, we must certainly conclude that he necessarily does exist.
If such a reason or cause should be given, it must either be drawn from the very nature of God, or be external to him-that is, drawn from another substance of another nature.
For if it were of the same nature, God, by that very fact, would be admitted to exist.
To make such an affirmation about a being absolutely infinite and supremely perfect is absurd; therefore, neither in the nature of God, nor externally to his nature, can a cause or reason be assigned which would annul his existence.
Another proof.--The potentiality of non-existence is a negation of power, and contrariwise the potentiality of existence is a power, as is obvious.
If, then, that which necessarily exists is nothing but finite beings, such finite beings are more powerful than a being absolutely infinite, which is obviously absurd; therefore, either nothing exists, or else a being absolutely infinite necessarily exists also.
Note.--In this last proof, I have purposely shown God's existence a posteriori, so that the proof might be more easily followed, not because, from the same premises, God's existence does not follow a priori.
For, as the potentiality of existence is a power, it follows that, in proportion as reality increases in the nature of a thing, so also will it increase its strength for existence.
Perhaps there will be many who will be unable to see the force of this proof, inasmuch as they are accustomed only to consider those things which flow from external causes.
Of such things, they see that those which quickly come to pass-that is, quickly come into existence-quickly also disappear; whereas they regard as more difficult of accomplishment-that is, not so easily brought into existence-those things which they conceive as more complicated.
Things which are produced by external causes, whether they consist of many parts or few, owe whatsoever perfection or reality they possess solely to the efficacy of their external cause; and therefore their existence arises solely from the perfection of their external cause, not from their own.
Contrariwise, whatsoever perfection is possessed by substance is due to no external cause; wherefore the existence of substance must arise solely from its own nature, which is nothing else but its essence.
Thus, the perfection of a thing does not annul its existence, but, on the contrary, asserts it. Imperfection, on the other hand, does annul it; therefore we cannot be more certain of the existence of anything, than of the existence of a being absolutely infinite or perfect-that is, of God.
Substance absolutely infinite is indivisible.
Proof.--If it could be divided, the parts into which it was divided would either retain the nature of absolutely infinite substance, or they would not.
Corollary.--It follows, that no substance, and consequently no extended substance, in so far as it is substance, is divisible.
If it could be conceived, it would necessarily have to be conceived as existent; but this (by the first part of this proof) is absurd.
Corollary two.--It follows: two.
Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.
Note.--Some assert that God, like a man, consists of body and mind, and is susceptible of passions.
But these I pass over.
Of this they find excellent proof in the fact that we understand by body a definite quantity, so long, so broad, so deep, bounded by a certain shape, and it is the height of absurdity to predicate such a thing of God, a being absolutely infinite.
But meanwhile by other reasons with which they try to prove their point, they show that they think corporeal or extended substance wholly apart from the divine nature, and say it was created by God.
Hence we drew the conclusion that extended substance is one of the infinite attributes of God.
However, in order to explain more fully, I will refute the arguments of my adversaries, which all start from the following points:----
Extended substance, in so far as it is substance, consists, as they think, in parts, wherefore they deny that it can be infinite, or consequently, that it can appertain to God.
If extended substance, they say, is infinite, let it be conceived to be divided into two parts; each part will then be either finite or infinite.
If the former, then infinite substance is composed of two finite parts, which is absurd.
If the latter, then one infinite will be twice as large as another infinite, which is also absurd.
Further, if an infinite line be measured out in foot lengths, it will consist of an infinite number of such parts; it would equally consist of an infinite number of parts, if each part measured only an inch: therefore, one infinity would be twelve times as great as the other.
Lastly, if from a single point there be conceived to be drawn two diverging lines which at first are at a definite distance apart, but are produced to infinity, it is certain that the distance between the two lines will be continually increased, until at length it changes from definite to indefinable.
As these absurdities follow, it is said, from considering quantity as infinite, the conclusion is drawn, that extended substance must necessarily be finite, and, consequently, cannot appertain to the nature of God.
It follows, therefore, that extended substance does not appertain to the essence of God.
If, from this absurdity of theirs, they persist in drawing the conclusion that extended substance must be finite, they will in good sooth be acting like a man who asserts that circles have the properties of squares, and, finding himself thereby landed in absurdities, proceeds to deny that circles have any center, from which all lines drawn to the circumference are equal.
For if extended substance could be so divided that its parts were really separate, why should not one part admit of being destroyed, the others remaining joined together as before?
Surely in the case of things, which are really distinct one from the other, one can exist without the other, and can remain in its original condition.
As, then, there does not exist a vacuum in nature (of which anon), but all parts are bound to come together to prevent it, it follows from this that the parts cannot really be distinguished, and that extended substance in so far as it is substance cannot be divided.
If anyone asks me the further question, Why are we naturally so prone to divide quantity?
I answer, that quantity is conceived by us in two ways; in the abstract and superficially, as we imagine it; or as substance, as we conceive it solely by the intellect.
This will be plain enough to all who make a distinction between the intellect and the imagination, especially if it be remembered, that matter is everywhere the same, that its parts are not distinguishable, except in so far as we conceive matter as diversely modified, whence its parts are distinguished, not really, but modally.
For instance, water, in so far as it is water, we conceive to be divided, and its parts to be separated one from the other; but not in so far as it is extended substance; from this point of view it is neither separated nor divisible.
I think I have now answered the second argument; it is, in fact, founded on the same assumption as the first-namely, that matter, in so far as it is substance, is divisible, and composed of parts.
All things, I repeat, are in God, and all things which come to pass, come to pass solely through the laws of the infinite nature of God, and follow (as I will shortly show) from the necessity of his essence.
Wherefore it can in nowise be said, that God is passive in respect to anything other than himself, or that extended substance is unworthy of the Divine nature, even if it be supposed divisible, so long as it is granted to be infinite and eternal.
Corollary two.--It also follows that God is a cause in himself, and not through an accident of his nature.
Corollary three.--It follows, thirdly, that God is the absolutely first cause.
Corollary two.--It follows: two.
That God is the sole free cause.
Note.--Others think that God is a free cause, because he can, as they think, bring it about, that those things which we have said follow from his nature-that is, which are in his power, should not come to pass, or should not be produced by him.
But this is the same as if they said, that God could bring it about, that it should follow from the nature of a triangle that its three interior angles should not be equal to two right angles; or that from a given cause no effect should follow, which is absurd.
Moreover, I will show below, without the aid of this proposition, that neither intellect nor will appertain to God's nature.
I know that there are many who think that they can show, that supreme intellect and free will do appertain to God's nature; for they say they know of nothing more perfect, which they can attribute to God, than that which is the highest perfection in ourselves.
Further, although they conceive God as actually supremely intelligent, they yet do not believe that he can bring into existence everything which he actually understands, for they think that they would thus destroy God's power.
This manner of treating the question attributes to God an omnipotence, in my opinion, far more perfect.
For, otherwise, we are compelled to confess that God understands an infinite number of creatable things, which he will never be able to create, for, if he created all that he understands, he would, according to this showing, exhaust his omnipotence, and render himself imperfect.
Wherefore, in order to establish that God is perfect, we should be reduced to establishing at the same time, that he cannot bring to pass everything over which his power extends; this seems to be a hypothesis most absurd, and most repugnant to God's omnipotence.
Further (to say a word here concerning the intellect and the will which we attribute to God), if intellect and will appertain to the eternal essence of God, we must take these words in some significance quite different from those they usually bear.
For intellect and will, which should constitute the essence of God, would perforce be as far apart as the poles from the human intellect and will, in fact, would have nothing in common with them but the name; there would be about as much correspondence between the two as there is between the Dog, the heavenly constellation, and a dog, an animal that barks.
This I will prove as follows.
This seems to have been recognized by those who have asserted, that God's intellect, God's will, and God's power, are one and the same.
As, therefore, God's intellect is the sole cause of things, namely, both of their essence and existence, it must necessarily differ from them in respect to its essence, and in respect to its existence.
For a cause differs from a thing it causes, precisely in the quality which the latter gains from the former.
Wherefore, a thing which is the cause both of the essence and of the existence of a given effect, must differ from such effect both in respect to its essence, and also in respect to its existence.
This is our second point.
God, therefore, is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
God, and all the attributes of God, are eternal.
of my "Principles of the Cartesian Philosophy"), I have proved the eternity of God, in another manner, which I need not here repeat.
The existence of God and his essence are one and the same.
Therefore the same attributes of God which explain his eternal essence, explain at the same time his eternal existence-in other words, that which constitutes God's essence constitutes at the same time his existence.
For if they could be changed in respect to existence, they must also be able to be changed in respect to essence-that is, obviously, be changed from true to false, which is absurd.
FORGING THE FETTERS
During the weeks immediately following Darrell's departure the daily routine of life at The Pines continued in the accustomed channels, but there was not a member of the family, including mr Underwood himself, to whom it did not seem strangely empty, as though some essential element were missing.
But she was learning the lesson that all must learn; that the world sweeps relentlessly onward with no pause for individual woe, and each must keep step in its ceaseless march, no matter how weary the brain or how heavy the heart.
Walcott's visits continued with the same frequency, but he was less annoying in his attentions than formerly.
He was not displeased at the discovery; on the contrary, he looked forward with all the keener anticipation to the pleasure of what he mentally termed the "taming" process, once she was fairly within his power.
An hour or more passed pleasantly, and Walcott inquired, casually,--
I have not seen him for three weeks or more, and his attentions to me were so marked I naturally miss them."
"Duke is at the mining camp," Kate answered, with a faint smile.
Walcott raised his eyebrows incredulously.
Kate made no reply, but the lines about her mouth deepened.
For a moment he watched her silently; then he continued slowly, in low, nonchalant tones:
"mr Walcott," said Kate, facing him with sudden hauteur of tone and manner, "you are correct.
If ever I consent to marry you I can tell you now as well as then my reason for doing so: it will be simply and solely for my dear father's sake, for the love I bear him, out of consideration for his wishes, and with no more thought of you than if you did not exist."
"After what I have just told you, mr Walcott, do you still ask me to be your wife?" Kate demanded, indignantly.
She rose, drawing herself proudly to her full height.
"Take me to my father," she said, imperiously.
"Some time ago, mr Underwood," he began, smoothly and easily, "I asked you for your daughter's hand in marriage, and you honored me with your consent.
Feeling now that I have given her abundance of time I have this evening asked her to become my wife, and insisted that I was entitled to a decision.
"How is this, Kate?" her father asked, not unkindly; "I supposed you and I had settled this matter long ago."
Her voice was clear, her tones unfaltering, as she replied: "Before giving my answer I wanted to ask you, papa, for the last time, whether, knowing the circumstances as you do and how I regard mr Walcott, it is still your wish that I marry him?"
"It is; and I expect my child to be governed by my wishes in this matter rather than by her own feelings."
"No, my child, no!"
"Then I shall not attempt it at this late day.
Kate smiled sadly.
"No home can ever seem to me like The Pines, papa, but I appreciate your kindness, and I want you to know that I am taking this step solely for your happiness."
She then turned, facing Walcott, who advanced slightly, while mr Underwood made a movement as though to place her hand in his.
"Not yet, papa," she said, gently; then, addressing Walcott, she continued:
"There can be no love between us, either in our engagement or our marriage, for, as I have told you, I can never love you, and you yourself are incapable of love in its best sense; you have not even the slightest knowledge of what it is.
For this reason any token of love between us would be only a mockery, a farce, and true wedded love is something too holy, too sacred, to be travestied in any such manner.
"Kate," interposed her father, sternly, "this is preposterous!
I cannot allow such absurdity;" but Walcott silenced him with a deprecatory wave of his hand, and, taking Kate's hand in his, replied, with smiling indifference,--
I suppose," he added, addressing Kate, at the same time producing a superb diamond ring, "you will not object to wearing this?"
"Conventionality, I believe, would require that it be placed on your hand with a kiss and some appropriate bit of sentiment, but since that sort of thing is tabooed between us, we will have to dispense with that part of the ceremony."
Then turning to mr Underwood, who stood looking on frowningly, somewhat troubled by the turn matters had taken, Walcott added, playfully,--
"It was the only way for me, papa," Kate answered, gravely and decidedly.
That sort of thing, you know," he added, his lip curling just perceptibly, "is apt to get a little monotonous after a while."
"Well," said mr Underwood, resignedly, "fix it up between you any way to suit yourselves; but for heaven's sake, don't do anything to cause comment or remarks!"
"Papa, you can depend on me not to make myself conspicuous in any way," Kate replied, with dignity.
As Walcott bade Kate good night at a late hour he inquired, "What do you think of the little comedy I suggested to night for our future line of action?
Does it meet with your approval?"
She was quick to catch the significance of the question, and, looking him straight in the eyes, she replied, calmly,--
Something of this kind must have happened to me now.
Preoccupied as I was, by the condition of the patient, the professional habit of rapid and close observation caused me to direct a searching glance at the man before me.
It was this:
As mr Weiss stood, with his head slightly turned, I was able to look through one glass of his spectacles at the wall beyond.
On the wall was a framed print; and the edge of the frame, seen through the spectacle glass, appeared quite unaltered and free from distortion, magnification or reduction, as if seen through plain window glass; and yet the reflections of the candle flame in the spectacles showed the flame upside down, proving conclusively that the glasses were concave on one surface at least.
The strange phenomenon was visible only for a moment or two, and as it passed out of my sight it passed also out of my mind.
"No," I said, replying to the last question; "I can think of no way in which he could have effectually hidden a store of morphine.
Judging by the symptoms, he has taken a large dose, and, if he has been in the habit of consuming large quantities, his stock would be pretty bulky.
"I suppose you consider him quite out of danger now?"
I think we can pull him round if we persevere, but he must not be allowed to sink back into a state of coma.
We must keep him on the move until the effects of the drug have really passed off.
If you will put him into his dressing gown we will walk him up and down the room for a while."
"But is that safe?" mr Weiss asked anxiously.
"Quite safe," I answered.
"I will watch his pulse carefully.
"If you will excuse me, doctor," said he, "I will go now and attend to some rather important business that I have had to leave unfinished.
In case I should not see you again I will say 'good night.' I hope you won't think me very unceremonious."
The melancholy progress up and down the room re commenced, and with it the mumbled protests from the patient.
As we walked, and especially as we turned, I caught frequent glimpses of the housekeeper's face.
But it was nearly always in profile.
It struck me, even at the time, as an odd affair, but I was too much concerned about my charge to give it much consideration.
"S'quite s'fficient, thang you.
Much 'bliged frall your kindness"--here I turned him round-"no, really; m'feeling rather tired.
He looked at me with a curious, dull surprise, and reflected awhile as if in some perplexity.
Then he looked at me again and said:
"Thing, sir, you are mistake-mistaken me-mist-"
"The doctor thinks it's good for you to walk about.
You've been sleeping too much.
He doesn't want you to sleep any more just now."
"Don't wanter sleep; wanter lie down," said the patient.
"But you mustn't lie down for a little while.
You must walk about for a few minutes more.
And you'd better not talk.
"There's no harm in his talking," said I; "in fact it's good for him.
It will help to keep him awake."
Apparently he took in the very broad hint contained in the concluding sentence, for he trudged wearily and unsteadily up and down the room for some time without speaking, though he continued to look at me from time to time as if something in my appearance puzzled him exceedingly.
At length his intolerable longing for repose overcame his politeness and he returned to the attack.
Feeling very tired.
Am really.
"Don't you think he might lie down for a little while?" mrs Schallibaum asked.
I felt his pulse, and decided that he was really becoming fatigued, and that it would be wiser not to overdo the exercise while he was so weak. Accordingly, I consented to his returning to bed, and turned him round in that direction; whereupon he tottered gleefully towards his resting place like a tired horse heading for its stable.
As soon as he was tucked in, I gave him a full cup of coffee, which he drank with some avidity as if thirsty.
"Does your head ache, mr Graves?" I asked.
"The doctor says 'does your head ache?'" mrs Schallibaum squalled, so loudly that the patient started perceptibly.
"Not deaf you know.
Yes.
Head aches a good deal.
"He says you are to keep awake.
You mustn't go to sleep again, and you are not to close your eyes."
Keep'm open," and he proceeded forthwith to shut them with an air of infinite peacefulness.
I grasped his hand and shook it gently, on which he opened his eyes and looked at me sleepily.
It is getting very late and you have a long way to go."
I looked doubtfully at the patient.
I was loath to leave him, distrusting these people as I did.
"I think I heard the carriage some time ago," mrs Schallibaum added.
I rose hesitatingly and looked at my watch.
It had turned half past eleven.
You clearly understand that?"
"Yes, quite clearly.
"Very well," I said.
"On that understanding I will go now; and I shall hope to find our friend quite recovered at my next visit."
"Good bye, mr Graves!" I said.
"I am sorry to have to disturb your repose so much; but you must keep awake, you know.
But I think you're mistak'n-"
"Now it's of no use for you to ask a lot of questions," mrs Schallibaum said playfully; "we'll talk to you to morrow.
Good night, doctor.
Taking this definite dismissal, I retired, followed by a dreamily surprised glance from the sick man.
The housekeeper held the candle over the balusters until I reached the bottom of the stairs, when I perceived through the open door along the passage a glimmer of light from the carriage lamps.
I lit my little pocket lamp and hung it on the back cushion.
But it seemed rather unnecessary to take a fresh set of notes, and, to tell the truth, I rather shirked the labour, tired as I was after my late exertions; besides, I wanted to think over the events of the evening, while they were fresh in my memory.
Accordingly I put away the notebook, filled and lighted my pipe, and settled myself to review the incidents attending my second visit to this rather uncanny house.
Considered in leisurely retrospect, that visit offered quite a number of problems that called for elucidation.
mr Graves was certainly under the influence of morphine, and the only doubtful question was how he had become so.
That he had taken the poison himself was incredible.
No morphinomaniac would take such a knock down dose.
It was practically certain that the poison had been administered by someone else, and, on mr Weiss's own showing, there was no one but himself and the housekeeper who could have administered it.
And to this conclusion all the other very queer circumstances pointed.
What were these circumstances?
That departure coincided in time with the sick man's recovery of the power of speech.
It looked rather like it.
And yet he had gone away and left me with the patient and the housekeeper.
But when I came to think about it I remembered that mrs Schallibaum had shown some anxiety to prevent the patient from talking.
She had interrupted him more than once, and had on two occasions broken in when he seemed to be about to ask me some question.
I was "mistaken" about something.
What was that something that he wanted to tell me?
Germans are not usually tea drinkers and they do take coffee.
But perhaps there was nothing in this.
There were other points, too.
I recalled the word that sounded like "Pol'n," which mr Graves had used in speaking to the housekeeper. Apparently it was a Christian name of some kind; but why did mr Graves call the woman by her Christian name when mr Weiss addressed her formally as mrs Schallibaum?
And, as to the woman herself: what was the meaning of that curious disappearing squint?
Physically it presented no mystery.
Was it only feminine vanity-mere sensitiveness respecting a slight personal disfigurement?
It was impossible to say.
And here I met with a real poser.
Now they obviously could not be both flat and concave; but yet they had the properties peculiar to both flatness and concavity.
And there was a further difficulty.
If I could see objects unaltered through them, so could mr Weiss.
If they leave the appearances unchanged they are useless.
After puzzling over it for quite a long time, I had to give it up; which I did the less unwillingly inasmuch as the construction of mr Weiss's spectacles had no apparent bearing on the case.
Having made up a mixture for mr Graves and handed it to the coachman, I raked the ashes of the surgery fire together and sat down to smoke a final pipe while I reflected once more on the singular and suspicious case in which I had become involved.
THE ISLE OF BLASTED HOPES.
It is the Isle of Blasted Hopes. Its enchanting landscape has allured many a landsman to his ruin, and its beacon, seen through the haze of a south-east gale, has guided many a watchful mariner to shipwreck and death.
After the discovery of Gippsland, Pearson and Black first occupied the island under a grazing license, and they put eleven thousand sheep on it, with some horses, bullocks, and pigs.
The sheep began to die, so they sold them to Captain Cole at ten shillings a head, giving in the other stock.
They were of the opinion that they had made an excellent bargain, but when the muster was made nine thousand six hundred of the sheep were missing.
The pigs ran wild, but multiplied.
When the last sheep had perished, Cole sold his license to a man named Thomas, who put on more sheep, and afterwards exchanged as many as he could find with john King for cattle and horses.
Morrison next occupied the island until he was starved out. Then another man named Thomas took the fatal grazing license, but he did not live on the land.
He placed his brother in charge of it, to be out of the way of temptation, as he was too fond of liquor.
The brother was not allowed the use of a boat; he, with his wife and family, was virtually a prisoner, condemned to sobriety.
But by this time a lighthouse had been erected, and Watts the keeper of it had a boat, and was, moreover, fond of liquor.
The two men soon became firm friends, and often found it necessary to make voyages to Port Albert for flour, or tea, or sugar.
The last time they sailed together the barometer was low, and a gale was brewing.
When they left the wharf they had taken on board all the stores they required, and more; they were happy and glorious.
Next day the masthead of their boat was seen sticking out of the water near Sunday Island. The pilot schooner went down and hauled the boat to the surface, but nothing was found in her except the sand ballast and a bottle of rum. Her sheet was made fast, and when the squall struck her she had gone down like a stone.
The Isle of Blasted Hopes was useless even as an asylum for inebriates.
The 'Ecliptic' was carrying coals from Newcastle.
The time was midnight, the sky was misty, and the gale was from the south-east, when the watch reported a light ahead.
The cabin boy was standing on deck near the captain, when he held a consultation with his mate, who was also his son.
Father and son agreed; they said the light ahead was the one on Kent's Group, and then the vessel grounded amongst the breakers.
The seamen stripped off their heavy clothing, and went overboard; the captain and his son plunged in together and swam out of sight.
There were nine men in the water, while the cabin boy stood shivering on deck.
He could not make up his mind to jump overboard.
He heard the men in the water shouting to one another, "Make for the light." That course led them away from the nearest land, which they could not see.
At length a great sea swept the boy among the breakers, but his good angel pushed a piece of timber within reach, and he held on to it until he could feel the ground with his feet; he then let the timber go, and scrambled out of reach of the angry surge; but when he came to the dry sand he fainted and fell down.
When he recovered his senses he began to look for shelter; there was a signal station not far off, but he could not see it.
He went away from the pitiless sea through an opening between low conical hills, covered with dark scrub, over a pathway composed of drift sand and broken shells.
He found an old hut without a door.
There was no one in it; he went inside, and lay down shivering.
At daybreak a boy, the son of Ratcliff, the signal man, started out to look for his goats, and as they sometimes passed the night in the old fowlhouse, he looked in for them.
But instead of the goats, he saw the naked cabin boy.
"Who are you?" he said, "and what are you doing here, and where did you come from?"
"I have been shipwrecked," replied the cabin boy; and then he sat up and began to cry.
Young Ratcliff ran off to tell his father what he had found; and the boy was brought to the cottage, put to bed, and supplied with food and drink.
The signal for a wreck was hoisted at the flagstaff, but when the signallman went to look for a wreck he could not find one. He searched along the shore and found the dead body of the captain, and a piece of splintered spar seven or eight feet long, on which the cabin boy had come ashore.
The 'Ecliptic', with her cargo and crew, had completely disappeared, while the signalman, near at hand, slept peacefully, undisturbed by her crashing timbers, or the shouts of the drowning seamen.
Ratcliff was not a seer, and had no mystical lore. He was a runaway sailor, who had, in the forties, travelled daily over the Egerton run, unconscious of the tons of gold beneath his feet.
There was a fair wind and a smooth sea when the 'Clonmel' went ashore at three o'clock in the morning of the second day of January, eighteen forty one. Eighteen hours before she had taken a fresh departure from Ram's Head to Wilson's Promontory.
The anchors were let go, she swung to wind, and at the fall of the tide she bedded herself securely in the sand, her hull, machinery, and cargo uninjured.
The seventy five passengers and crew were safely landed; sails, lumber, and provisions were taken ashore in the whaleboats and quarter boats; tents were erected; the food supplies were stowed away under a capsized boat, and a guard set over them by Captain Tollervey.
Next morning seven volunteers launched one of the whaleboats, boarded the steamer, took in provisions, made a lug out of a piece of canvas, hoisted the Union Jack to the mainmast upside down, and pulled safely away from the 'Clonmel' against a head wind.
They hoisted the lug and ran for one of the Seal Islands, where they found a snug little cove, ate a hearty meal, and rested for three hours.
They then pulled for the mainland, and reached Sealer's Cove about midnight, where they landed, cooked supper, and passed the rest of the night in the boat for fear of the blacks.
Next morning three men went ashore for water and filled the breaker, when they saw three blacks coming down towards them; so they hurried on board, and the anchor was hauled up.
At eight o'clock in the evening they brought up in a small bay at the eastern extremity of Western Port, glad to get ashore and stretch their weary limbs.
After a night's refreshing repose on the sandy beach, they started at break of day, sailing along very fast with a strong and steady breeze from the east, although they were in danger of being swamped, as the sea broke over the boat repeatedly.
At two o'clock p.m. they were abreast of Port Philip Heads; but they found a strong ebb tide, with such a ripple and broken water that they did not consider it prudent to run over it.
Captain Lewis, the harbour master, went to rescue the crew and passengers and brought them all to Melbourne, together with the mails, which had been landed on the island since known by the name of the 'Clonmel'.
For fifty two years the black boilers of the 'Clonmel' have lain half buried in the sandspit, and they may still be seen among the breakers from the deck of every vessel sailing up the channel to Port Albert.
The 'Clonmel', with her valuable cargo, was sold in Sydney, and the purchaser, mr Grose, set about the business of making his fortune out of her.
He sent a party of wreckers who pitched their camps on Snake Island, where they had plenty of grass, scrub, and timber.
The work of taking out the cargo was continued under various captains for six years, and then mr Grose lost a schooner and was himself landed in the Court of Insolvency.
One morning the wreckers had gone to the wreck; a man named Kennedy was left in charge of the camp; Sambo, the black cook, was attending to his duties at the fire; and mrs Kennedy, the only lady of the party, was at the water hole washing clothes.
Her husband had left the camp with his gun in the hope of shooting some wattle birds, which were then fat with feeding on the sweet blossoms of the honeysuckle.
She stood with her hands on her hips, pensively contemplating the garments.
She had her troubles, and was turning them over in her mind, while her husband was thinking of something else quite different.
It is, I believe, a thing that often happens.
"I am thinking, Flora," he said, "that this would be a grand island to live on-far better than Skye, because it has no rocks on it.
Their hopes and troubles had come to a sudden end.
The tents occupied by the wreckers had been enclosed in a thick hedge of scrub to protect them from the drifting sand.
There was only one opening in the hedge, through which the blacks could see Sambo cooking the wreckers' dinner before a fire.
The hearing of the Australian aboriginal is acute, and his talent for mimicry astonishing; he can imitate the notes of every bird and the call of every animal with perfect accuracy.
It was first heard with tremendous applause in New Orleans, it was received with enthusiasm by every audience in the Great Republic, and it had been the delight of every theatre in the British Empire.
they forgot their murderous errand.
At last there was an echo of the closing words which seemed to come from a large gum tree beyond the tents, against which a ladder had been reared to the forks, used for the purpose of a look out by Captain Leebrace.
The echo was repeated, and then he wheeled about in real earnest, transfixed with horror, unable to move a limb.
The blacks were close to him now, but even their colour could not restore his courage.
But first they examined their game critically, poking their fingers about him, pinching him in various parts of the body, stroking his broad nose and ample lips with evident admiration, and trying to pull out the curls on his woolly head.
Sambo was usually proud of his personal appearance, but just now fear prevented him from enjoying the applause of the strangers.
At length he recovered his presence of mind sufficiently to make an effort to avert his impending doom.
If the blacks could be induced to eat the dinner he was cooking their attention to himself might be diverted, and their appetites appeased, so he pointed towards the pots, saying, "Plenty beef, pork, plum duff."
The blacks seemed to understand his meaning, and they began to inspect the dinner; so instead of taking the food like sensible men, they upset all the pots with their waddies, and scattered the beef, pork, plum duff and potatoes, so that they were covered with sand and completely spoiled.
But there was a sound of voices from the waterhole, and they quickly gathered together their stolen goods and disappeared.
In a few minutes Captain Leebrace and the wreckers arrived at the camp, bringing with them Kennedy and his wife, who had recovered their senses, and were able to tell what had happened.
Captain Leebrace soon resolved on a course of reprisals.
He went up the ladder to the forks of the gum tree with his telescope, and soon obtained a view of the retreating thieves, appearing occasionally and disappearing among the long grass and timber; and after observing the course they were taking he came down the ladder.
He selected two of his most trustworthy men, and armed them and himself with double barrelled guns, one barrel being smooth bore and the other rifled, weapons suitable for game both large and small.
During the pursuit the captain every now and then, from behind a tree, searched for the enemy with his telescope, until at last he could see that they had halted, and had joined a number of their tribe.
Three of the blacks were wearing the stolen shirts, a fourth had put on the lilac dress, and they were strutting around to display their brave apparel just like white folks.
He whispered to his men, "I don't like to shoot at a gown; there may be a lubra in it, but I'll take the middle fellow in the shirt, and you take the other two, one to the right, the other to the left; when I say one, two, three, fire."
The men who had guns-Campbell, Shay, and Davy-fetched them out of their huts and stood ready to receive the enemy; even McClure, although very weak, left his bed and came outside to assist in the fight.
They were not in hundreds, as the boys imagined, their number apparently not exceeding forty; but it was evident that they were threatening death and destruction to the invaders of their territory.
None, however, but the very bravest ventured far into the cleared space, and they showed no disposition to make a rush or anything like a concerted attack.
He went into his store to get the charge ready.
He tied some powder tightly in a piece of calico and rammed it home.
On this he put a nine pound shot; but, reflecting that the aim at the dancing savages would be uncertain, he put in a double charge, consisting of some broken glass and a handful of nails.
He then thrust a wooden skewer down the touch hole into the powder bag below, primed and directed the piece towards the scrub, giving it, as he judged, sufficient elevation to send the charge among the thickest of the foe.
He then selected a long piece of bark, which he lighted at the fire, and, standing behind an angle of the building, he applied the light to the touch hole.
Every man was watching the scrub to see the effect of the discharge.
There was a fearful explosion, succeeded by shrieks of horror and fear from the blacks, as the ball and nails and broken glass went whistling over their heads through the trees.
Then there was a moment of complete silence.
Campbell, like a skilful general, ordered his men to pursue at once the flying foe, in order to reap to the full the fruits of victory, and they ran across the open ground to deliver a volley; but on arriving at the scrub no foe was to be seen, either dead or alive.
The elevation of the artillery had been too great, and the missiles had passed overhead; but the result was all that could be hoped for, for two months afterwards not a single native was visible.
Two victories had been gained by the pioneers, and it was felt that they deserved some commemoration.
The twelve canoes, the spoils of victory, were of little value; they were placed on the camp fire one after another, and reduced to ashes.
They dipped pannikins of tea out of the iron pot.
When Burke and Wills were starving at Cooper's Creek on a diet of nardoo, the latter recorded in his diary that what the food wanted was sugar; he believed that nardoo and sugar would keep him alive. The pioneers at the Old Port were convinced that their great want was fat; with that their supper would have been perfect.
McClure was dying of consumption as everybody knew but himself; he could not believe that he had come so far from home only to die, and he joined the revellers at the camp fire.
He said to kindly enquirers that he felt quite well, and would soon regain his strength.
Before that terrible journey over the mountains he had been the life and soul of the Port.
He could play on the violin, on the bagpipes-both Scotch and Irish-and he was always so pleasant and cheerful, looking as innocent as a child, that no one could be long dispirited in his company, and the most impatient growler became ashamed of himself.
But by degrees the musician grew weary, and began to play odds and ends of old tunes, sacred and profane.
He went into his tent.
It was high tide, and there was a gentle swish of long low waves lapping the sandy beach.
The night wind sighed a soothing lullaby through the spines of the she oak, and his spirit passed peacefully away with the ebb.
He was the first man who died at the Old Port, and he was buried on the bank of the river where Friday first saw its waters flowing towards the mountain.
Awake My fairest, my espous'd, my latest found, Heav'ns last best gift, my ever new delight, Awake, the morning shines, and the fresh field Calls us, we lose the prime, to mark how spring Our tended Plants, how blows the Citron Grove, What drops the Myrrhe, and what the balmie Reed, How Nature paints her colours, how the Bee Sits on the Bloom extracting liquid sweet.
On whom the Angel HAILE Bestowd, the holy salutation us'd Long after to blest MARIE, second EVE.
three
july sixteenth.
My school days are over!
I have come off with flying colors, and mother is pleased at my success.
I said to her today that I should now have time to draw and practice to my heart's content.
"You will not find your heart content with either," she said.
"Why, mother!" I cried, "I thought you liked to see me happy!"
"And so I do," she said, quietly.
"I am sure I hope so," I returned.
"On the whole, I haven't got much so far."
Amelia is now on such terms with Jenny Underhill that I can hardly see one without seeing the other After the way in which I have loved her, this seems rather hard.
Sometimes I am angry about it, and sometimes grieved.
However, I find Jenny quite nice.
She buys all the new books and lends them to me.
I wish I liked more solid reading; but I don't.
And I wish I were not so fond of novels; but I am.
If it were not for mother I should read nothing else.
And I am sure I often feel quite stirred up by a really good novel, and admire and want to imitate every high minded, noble character it describes.
Jenny has a miniature of her brother "Charley" in a locket, which she always wears, and often shows me.
According to her, he is exactly like the heroes I most admire in books.
She says she knows he would like me if we should meet.
But that is not probable.
Very few like me.
Amelia says it is because I say just what I think.
"Dear me!" I said, "so then I have some virtues after all!"
And I really think I must have, for Jenny's brother, who has come here for the sake of being near her, seems to like me very much. Nobody ever liked me so much before, not even Amelia.
But how foolish to write that down!
Thursday.-Jenny's brother has been here all evening.
He has the most perfect manners I ever saw.
I am sure that mother, who thinks so much of such things, would be charmed with him but she happened to be out, mrs Jones having sent for her to see about her baby.
He gave me an account of his mother's death, and how he and Jenny nursed her day and night.
He has a great deal of feeling.
I was going to tell him about my father's death, sorrow seems to bring people together so, but I could not.
sunday august fifth.-Jenny's brother has been at our church all day.
He walked home with me this afternoon.
Mother, after being up all night with mrs Jones and her baby, was not able to go out.
Dr Cabot preaches as if we had all got to die pretty soon, or else have something almost as bad happen to us.
How can old people always try to make young people feel uncomfortable, and as if things couldn't last?
I suppose mother would say my head was turned by my good fortune, but it is not.
I am getting quite sober and serious.
It is a great thing to be-to be-well-liked.
I could not like a man who did not possess such sentiments as his.
Perhaps mother would think I ought not to put such things into my journal.
She and her brother are so much alike!
The plan is for us three girls, Jenny, Amelia and myself, to form ourselves into a little class to read and to study together.
She says "Charley" will direct our readings and help us with our studies.
It is perfectly delightful.
september first.-Somehow I forgot to tell mother that mr Underhill was to be our teacher.
So when it came my turn to have the class meet here, she was not quite pleased.
I told her she could stay and watch us, and then she would see for herself that we all behaved ourselves.
september nineteenth.-The class met at Amelia's to night.
Mother insisted on sending for me, though mr Underhill had proposed to see me home himself.
So he stayed after I left.
september twenty eighth-We met at Jenny's this evening.
Jenny idled over her lessons, and at last took a book and began to read.
I studied awhile with mr Underhill.
At last he said, scribbling something on a bit of paper:
"Here is a sentence I hope you can translate."
I took it, and read these words:
"You are the brightest, prettiest, most warm hearted little thing in the world.
And I love you more than tongue can tell.
You must love me in the same way."
But I pretended to laugh, and said I could not translate Greek.
I shall have to tell mother, and what will she say?
"Kate, I do not like these lessons of yours.
At your age, with your judgment quite unformed, it is not proper that you should spend so much time with a young man.
"Jenny is always there, and Amelia," I replied.
"That makes no difference.
I wish the whole thing stopped.
mrs Gordon says-"
"mrs Gordon!
"If what you say of Amelia is true, it is most ungenerous in you to tell of it.
But I do not believe it.
I began to cry.
"He likes me," I got out, "he likes me ever so much.
Nobody ever said such nice things to me.
And I don't want such horrid things said about him."
I kept on crying.
"Is it possible," she went on, "that with your good sense, and the education you have had, you are captivated by this mere boy?"
"He is not a boy," I said.
"The child actually keeps his birthdays!" cried mother.
This time my mouth shut itself up, and no mortal force could open it. I stopped crying, and sat with folded arms.
Mother said what she had to say, and then I came to you, my dear old Journal.
Yes, he likes me and I like him.
Come now, let's out with it once for all.
He loves me and I love him.
You are just a little bit too late, mother.
october first.-I never can write down all the things that have happened.
The very day after I wrote that mother had forbidden my going to the class, Charley came to see her, and they had a regular fight together.
Then, as he could not prevail, his uncle wrote, told her it would be the making of Charley to be settled down on one young lady instead of hovering from flower to flower, as he was doing now.
Then Jenny came with her pretty ways, and cried, and told mother what a darling brother Charley was.
She made a good deal, too, out of his having lost both father and mother, and needing my affection so much.
Mother shut herself up, and I have no doubt prayed over it.
Then she sent for me and talked beautifully, and I behaved abominably.
At last she said she would put us on one year's probation.
Charley might spend one evening here every two weeks, when she should always be present.
We were never to be seen together in public, nor would she allow us to correspond.
If, at the end of the year, we were both as eager for it as we are now, she would consent to our engagement. Of course we shall be, so I consider myself as good as engaged now. Dear me!
how funny it seems.
october second.-Charley is not at all pleased with mother's terms, but no one would guess it from his manner to her.
His coming is always the signal for her trotting down stairs; he goes to meet her and offers her a chair, as if he was delighted to see her.
We go on with the lessons, as this gives us a chance to sit pretty close together, and when I am writing my exercises and he corrects them, I rather think a few little things get on to the paper that sound nicely to us, but would not strike mother very agreeably.
For instance, last night Charley wrote:
A nice little headache or two would be so convenient to us!"
And I wrote back.
"You dear old horrid thing How can you be so selfish?"
january fifteenth eighteen thirty three.-I have been trying to think whether I am any happier today than I was at this time a year ago.
If I am not, I suppose it is the tantalizing way in which I am placed in regard to Charley.
He says he entered into no contract not to write, and keeps slipping little notes into my hand; but I don't think that quite right.
"I would not argue with him, if I were you.
He never will yield."
"Oh, you may as well finish it!" I cried.
"I know you think him a fool."
Then mother burst out,
"Oh, my child," she said, "before it is too late, do be persuaded by me to give up this whole thing.
I shrink from paining or offending you, but it is my duty, as your mother, to warn you against a marriage that will make shipwreck of your happiness."'
"Marriage!" I fairly shrieked out.
I felt a chill creep over me.
"Yes, marriage!" mother repeated.
How can you fail to see, what I see, oh! so plainly, that Charley Underhill can never, never meet the requirements of your soul.
You are captivated by what girls of your age call beauty, regular features, a fair complexion and soft eyes.
His flatteries delude, and his professions of affection gratify you.
You do not see that he is shallow, and conceited, and selfish and "
"Oh mother!
How can you be so unjust?
His whole study seems to be to please others."
"Seems to be-that is true," she replied.
"His ruling passion is love of admiration; the little pleasing acts that attract you are so many traps set to catch the attention and the favorable opinion of those about him.
He has not one honest desire to please because it is right to be pleasing.
I felt very angry.
"I thought the Bible forbade back biting," I said.
And then I came up here and wrote some poetry, which was very good (for me), though I don't suppose she would think so.
But being engaged is not half so nice as I expected it would be.
I suppose it is owing to my being obliged to defy mother's judgment in order to gratify my own.
People say she has great insight into character, and sees, at a glance, what others only learn after much study.
october tenth.-I have taken a dreadful cold.
It is too bad.
I dare say I shall be coughing all winter, and instead of going out with Charley, be shut up at home.
Chapter five
april sixth.
I have taken it at last.
My class is perfectly delightful.
There are twelve dear little things in it, of all ages between eight and nine.
When I get them all about me, and their sweet innocent faces look up into mine, I am so happy that I can hardly help stopping every now and then to kiss them.
They ask the very strangest questions I mean to spend a great deal of time in preparing the lesson, and in hunting up stories to illustrate it.
april thirteenth.-Sunday has come again, and with it my darling little class! dr Cabot has preached delightfully all day, and I feel that I begin to understand his preaching better, and that it must do me good.
april twentieth.-Now that I have these twelve little ones to instruct, I am more than ever in earnest about setting them a good example through the week.
It is true they do not, most of them, know how I spend my time, nor how I act.
But I know, and whenever I am conscious of not practicing what I preach, I am bitterly ashamed and grieved.
How much work, badly done, I am now having to undo.
If I had begun in earnest to serve God when I was as young as these children are, how many wrong habits I should have avoided; habits that entangle me now, as in so many nets.
Poor Johnny Ross is not so docile as they are, and tries my patience to the last degree.
april twenty seventh.-This morning I had my little flock about me, and talked to them out of the very bottom of my heart about Jesus.
They left their seats and got close to me in a circle, leaning on my lap and drinking in every word.
All of a sudden I was aware, as by a magnetic influence, that a great lumbering man in the next seat was looking at me out of two of the blackest eyes I ever saw, and evidently listening to what I was saying.
I was disconcerted at first, then angry.
What impertinence.
What rudeness!
I am sure he must have seen my displeasure in my face, for he got up what I suppose he meant for a blush, that is he turned several shades darker than he was before, giving one the idea that he is full of black rather than red blood.
I should not have remembered it, however by it I mean his impertinence-if he had not shortly after made a really excellent address to the children.
Perhaps it was a little above their comprehension, but it showed a good deal of thought and earnestness. I meant to ask who he was, but forgot it.
This has been a delightful Sunday.
But I am satisfied that there is something in religion I do not yet comprehend.
I do wish I positively knew that God had forgiven and accepted me.
may sixth.-Last evening Clara Ray had a little party and I was there.
I sang several songs, and so did Clara, but they all said my voice was finer and in better training than hers.
It is delightful to be with cultivated, agreeable people.
I could have stayed all night, but mother sent for me before any one else had thought of going.
may seventh.-I have been on a charming excursion to day with Clara Ray and all her set.
I was rather tired, but had an invitation to a concert this evening which I could not resist.
My prayers are dull and short, and full of wandering thoughts.
I am brimful of vivacity and good humor in company, and as soon as I get home am stupid and peevish.
july twenty fourth.-Clara Ray says the girls think me reckless and imprudent in speech.
I've a good mind not to go with her set any more.
I am afraid I have been a good deal dazzled by the attentions I have received of late; and now comes this blow at my vanity.
On the whole, I feel greatly out of sorts this evening.
On Sundays I am pretty good, and always seem to start afresh; but on week days I am drawn along with those about me.
But these things distract me; they absorb me; they make religious duties irksome.
I almost wish I could shut myself up in a cell, and so get out of the reach of temptation.
The truth is, the journey heavenward is all up hill I have to force myself to keep on.
The wonder is that anybody gets there with so much to oppose--- so little to help one!
july twenty ninth.-It is high time to stop and think.
I feel restless and ill at ease.
I want Him but I want to have my own way, too.
I want to walk humbly and softly before Him, and I want to go where I shall be admired and applauded.
To God?
Or to myself?
july thirtieth.-I met dr Cabot to day, and could not, help asking the question:
"Is it right for me to sing and play in company when all I do it for is to be admired?"
"Are you sure it is all you do it for?" he returned.
"Oh," I said, "I suppose there may be a sprinkling of desire to entertain and please, mixed with the love of display."
"Do you suppose that your love of display, allowing you have it, would be forever slain by your merely refusing to sing in company?"
"No child, go on singing; God has given you this power of entertaining and, gratifying your friends.
But ,pray without ceasing, that you may sing from pure benevolence and not from pure self love."
"Why, do people pray about such things as that?" I cried.
"Of course they do.
Why, I would pray about my little finger, if my little finger went astray."
I looked at his little finger, but saw no signs of its becoming schismatic.
august third.-This morning I took great delight in praying for my little scholars, and went to Sunday school as on wings.
But on reaching my seat, what was my horror to find Maria Perry there!
Oh, your seat is changed," said she.
"I am to have half your class, and I like this seat better than those higher up.
I suppose you don't care?"
I shall speak to mr Williams about it directly."
"It is just as pleasant to me to have pretty children to teach as it is to you.
mr Williams said he had no doubt you would be glad to divide your class with me, as it is so large; and I doubt if you gain anything by speaking to him.
I went to my new seat with great disgust, and found it very inconvenient.
The children could not cluster around me as they did before, and I got on with the lesson very badly.
I am sure Maria Perry has no gift at teaching little children, and I feel quite vexed and disappointed.
august ninth.-mr
Williams called this evening to say that I am to have my old seat and all the children again.
I should have been greatly elated by these compliments, but for the display I made of myself to Maria Perry on Sunday.
Oh, that I could learn to bridle my unlucky tongue!
That sounds very old, yet I feel pretty much as I did before.
As a general rule, I do not think poor people are very interesting, and they are always ungrateful.
We went first to see old Jacob Stone.
He seemed in great distress of mind, and begged mother to pray with him.
I do not see how she could.
How tenderly she prayed for him!
She had made a carpet for her room by sewing together little bits of pieces given her, I suppose, by persons for whom she works, for she goes about fitting and making carpets.
It looked bright and cheerful.
"Mercy on us!" she cried out, "it ain't to sleep in!
Mother looked a little amused, and then she sat and listened, patiently, to a long account of how the poor old thing had invested her money; how mr Jones did not pay the interest regularly, and how mr Stevens haggled about the percentage.
After we came away, I asked mother how she could listen to such a rigmarole in patience, and what good she supposed she had done by her visit.
"Why the poor creature likes to show off her bright carpet and nice bed, her chairs, her vases and her knick knacks, and she likes to talk about her beloved money, and her bank stock.
I may not have done her any good; but I have given her a pleasure, and so have you."
"Why, I hardly spoke a word."
"Yes, but your mere presence gratified her.
And if she ever gets into trouble, she will feel kindly towards us for the sake of our sympathy with her pleasures, and will let us sympathize with her sorrows."
I confess this did not seem a privilege to be coveted.
She is not nice at all, and takes snuff.
We went next to see Bridget Shannon.
Mother had lost sight of her for some years, and had just heard that she was sick and in great want. We found her in bed; there was no furniture in the room, and three little half naked children sat with their bare feet in some ashes where there had been a little fire.
Three such disconsolate faces I never saw.
I am going to cut up one or two old dresses to make the poor things something to cover them.
Those few visits used up the very time I usually spend in drawing.
But on the whole I am glad I went with mother, because it has gratified her.
Besides, one must either stop reading the Bible altogether, or else leave off spending one's whole time in just doing easy pleasant things one likes to do.
"Look at the dear little thing, mother!" I cried; "doesn't she look like a line of poetry?"
"You foolish, romantic child!" quoth mother.
"She looks, to me, like a very ordinary line of prose.
A slice of bread and butter and a piece of gingerbread mean more to her than these elaborate ringlets possibly can.
They get in her eyes, and make her neck cold; see, they are dripping with water, and the child is all in a shiver."
So saying, mother folded a towel round its neck, to catch the falling drops, and went for bread and butter, of which the child consumed a quantity that, was absolutely appalling.
twenty four.
march twentieth.
I had a busy day before me; the usual Saturday baking and Sunday dinner to oversee, the children's lessons for to morrow to superintend and hear them repeat, their clean clothes to lay out, and a basket of stockings to mend.
My mind was somewhat distracted with these cares, and I found it a little difficult to keep on with my morning devotions in spite of them.
But I have learned, at least, to face and fight such distractions, instead of running away from them as I used to do.
My faith in prayer, my resort to it, becomes more and more the foundation of my life, and I believe, with one wiser and better than myself, that nothing but prayer stands between my soul and the best gifts of God; in other words, that I can and shall get what I ask for.
I went down into the kitchen, put on my large baking apron, and began my labors; of course the door bell rang, and a poor woman was announced.
It is very sweet to follow Fenelon's counsel and give oneself to Christ in all these interruptions; but this time I said, "oh, dear!" before I thought.
Then I wished I hadn't, and went up, with a cheerful face at any rate, to my unwelcome visitor, who proved to be one of my aggravating poor folks a great giant of a woman, in perfect health, and with a husband to support her if he will.
I told her that I could do no more for her; she answered me rudely, and kept urging her claims.
At last she went off, abusing me in a way that chilled my heart.
Off came my apron, and up two pairs of stairs I ran; after a long search it came to light.
Work resumed; door bell again.
Aunty wanted the children to come to an early dinner.
Bridget had let the milk I was going to use boil over, and finally burn up.
I was annoyed and irritated, and already tired,. and did not see how I was to get more, as Mary was cleaning the silver (to be sure, there is not much of it), and had other extra Saturday work to do.
It isn't good for him, and how much precious time is wasted over just this one thing?" However, I reflected, that arbitrarily refusing to indulge him in this respect is not exactly my mission as his wife; he is perfectly well, and likes his little luxuries as well as other people do.
So I humbled my pride and asked Bridget to go for the milk, which she did, in a lofty way of her own.
While she was gone the marketing came home, and I had everything to dispose of.
Ernest had sent home some apples, which plainly said, "I want some apple pie, Katy." I looked nervously at the clock, and undertook to gratify him.
At last I got through with the kitchen, the Sunday dinner being well under way, and ran upstairs to put away the host of little garments the children had left when they took their flight, and to make myself presentable at lunch.
Then I began to be uneasy lest Ernest should not be punctual, and Mary be delayed; but he came just as the clock struck one.
I ran joyfully to meet him, very glad now that I had something good to give him.
She had a fashionable young lady with her, a stranger to me, as well as a Miss Somebody else, from Albany, whose name I did not catch.
"Now be bright and animated, and like yourself," she whispered, "for I have brought these girls here on purpose to hear you talk, and they are prepared to fall in love with you on the spot"
This speech sufficed to shut my mouth.
Mary had to get ready for these unexpected guests, whose appetites proved equal to a raid on a good many things besides bread and butter.
mrs Fry said, after she had devoured nearly half a loaf of cake, that she would really try to eat a morsel more, which Ernest remarked, dryly, was a great triumph of mind over matter.
As they talked and 'laughed and ate leisurely on, Mary stood looking the picture of despair.
Winthrop, from Brooklyn, one of Ernest's patients a few years ago, when she lived here.
She professed herself greatly indebted to him, and said she had come at this hour because she should make sure of seeing him.
Ernest did not receive his "favorite" with any special warmth; but invited her out to lunch and gallanted her to the table we had just left.
Just like a man!
Poor Mary! she had to fly round and get up what she could; mrs Winthrop devoted herself to Ernest with a persistent ignoring of me that I thought rude and unwomanly.
"But she contrives to read the reports of all the murders, of which the newspapers are full."
Helen came home, and Mary went.
I gave Helen an account of my morning; she laughed heartily, and it did me good to hear that musical sound once more.
It isn't living to live so.
Who is the better for my being in the world since six o'clock this morning?"
"I am for one," she said, kissing my hot cheeks; "and you have given a great deal of pleasure to several persons.
Your and Ernest's hospitality is always graceful.
At the dinner table Ernest complimented me on my good housekeeping.
"And yet you said that outrageous thing about my reading about nothing but murders!" I said.
"Oh, well, you understood it," he said, laughingly.
"But that dreadful mrs Winthrop took it literally."
"What do we care for mrs Winthrop?" he returned.
"If you could have seen the contrast between you two in my eyes!"
After all, one must take life as it comes, its homely details are so mixed up with its sweet charities, and loves, and friendships that one is forced to believe that God has joined them together and does not will that they should be put asunder.
It is something that my husband has been satisfied with his wife and his home to day; that does me good.
It must, be delightful to feel well and strong while one's children are young, there is so much to do for them.
I do it; but no one can tell the effort, it costs me. What a contrast there is between their vitality and the languor under which I suffer!
As I sat with this precious little group about me, Ernest opened the door, looked in, gravely and without a word, and instantly disappeared.
Was I indulging the children too much, or what was it?
Oh, I am glad I have got this written down!
april first.-This has been a sad day to our church.
Our dear dr Cabot has gone to his eternal home, and left us as sheep without a shepherd.
His death was sudden at the last and found us all unprepared for it. But my tears of sorrow are mingled with tears of joy.
Poor mrs Cabot!
She is left very desolate, for all their children are married and settled at a distance.
But she bears this sorrow like one who has long felt herself a pilgrim and a stranger on earth.
How strange that we ever forget that we are all such!
april sixteenth.-The desolate pilgrimage was not long.
I find it hard not to wish and pray that I may as speedily follow my precious husband, should God call him away first.
But it is not for me to choose.
Almost all the disappointments and sorrows of my life have had their Christian sympathy, particularly the daily, wasting solicitude concerning my darling Una, for they to watched for years over as delicate a flower, and saw it fade and die.
Only those who have suffered thus can appreciate the heart soreness through which, no matter how outwardly cheerful I may be, I am always passing.
But what then!
Have I not ten thousand times made this my prayer, that in the words of Leighton, my will might become, identical with God's will."
Something seemed to say, this captive sings in his cage because it has never known liberty, and cannot regret a lost freedom.
Yes, and does sing them! What should we do without her gentle, loving presence, whose frailty calls forth our tenderest affections and whose sweet face makes sunshine in the shadiest places!
I am sure that the boys are truly blessed by having a sister always at home to welcome them, and that their best manliness is appealed to by her helplessness.
What this child is to me I cannot tell And yet, if the skillful and kind Gardener should house this delicate plant before frosts come, should I dare to complain?
He answered,
"Your daughter did you call her?
Chapter one
IN WHICH PHILEAS FOGG AND PASSEPARTOUT ACCEPT EACH OTHER, THE ONE AS MASTER, THE OTHER AS MAN
Had he travelled?
I've been an itinerant singer, a circus rider, when I used to vault like Leotard, and dance on a rope like Blondin.
"You are four minutes too slow.
The circumstances under which this telegraphic dispatch about Phileas Fogg was sent were as follows:
The steamer Mongolia, belonging to the Peninsular and Oriental Company, built of iron, of two thousand eight hundred tons burden, and five hundred horse power, was due at eleven o'clock a.m. on Wednesday, the ninth of October, at Suez.
"So you say, consul," asked he for the twentieth time, "that this steamer is never behind time?"
"Directly from Brindisi; she takes on the Indian mails there, and she left there Saturday at five p.m. Have patience, mr Fix; she will not be late.
Fix," said the consul, "I like your way of talking, and hope you'll succeed; but I fear you will find it far from easy.
Fix took up a position, and carefully examined each face and figure which made its appearance.
"No, it's my master's."
"Oh, is that necessary?"
"Quite indispensable."
Chapter nine
The best of fare was spread upon the cabin tables at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the eight o'clock supper, and the ladies scrupulously changed their toilets twice a day; and the hours were whirled away, when the sea was tranquil, with music, dancing, and games.
"Ah!
I quite recognise you.
"Fix."
"Like you, to Bombay."
"That's capital!
"Then you know India?"
"Quite well, and I too.
"Never; he hasn't the least curiosity."
The Mongolia was due at Bombay on the twenty second; she arrived on the twentieth. This was a gain to Phileas Fogg of two days since his departure from London, and he calmly entered the fact in the itinerary, in the column of gains.
Fix did not look at the state of things in the same light.
The storm greatly pleased him.
Had the hour of adversity come? Passepartout was as much excited as if the twenty thousand pounds were to come from his own pocket.
The storm exasperated him, the gale made him furious, and he longed to lash the obstinate sea into obedience. Poor fellow!
Passepartout shook it, but with no perceptible effect; for neither shaking nor maledictions could prevail upon it to change its mind.
"The Carnatic."
"Yes, sir; but they had to repair one of her boilers, and so her departure was postponed till to morrow."
Aouda at first said nothing.
Then, in her sweet, soft voice, she said: "What ought I to do, mr Fogg?"
"But I cannot intrude-"
"Monsieur."
"Go to the Carnatic, and engage three cabins."
CHAPTER nine.
Washington dreamed his way along the street, his fancy flitting from grain to hogs, from hogs to banks, from banks to eye water, from eye water to Tennessee Land, and lingering but a feverish moment upon each of these fascinations.
Arrived at the finest dwelling in the town, they entered it and were at home.
Washington was introduced to mrs Boswell, and his imagination was on the point of flitting into the vapory realms of speculation again, when a lovely girl of sixteen or seventeen came in.
This vision swept Washington's mind clear of its chaos of glittering rubbish in an instant.
Beauty had fascinated him before; many times he had been in love even for weeks at a time with the same object but his heart had never suffered so sudden and so fierce an assault as this, within his recollection.
Louise Boswell occupied his mind and drifted among his multiplication tables all the afternoon.
He was constantly catching himself in a reverie-reveries made up of recalling how she looked when she first burst upon him; how her voice thrilled him when she first spoke; how charmed the very air seemed by her presence.
Blissful as the afternoon was, delivered up to such a revel as this, it seemed an eternity, so impatient was he to see the girl again.
Other afternoons like it followed.
Washington plunged into this love affair as he plunged into everything else-upon impulse and without reflection.
As the days went by it seemed plain that he was growing in favor with Louise,--not sweepingly so, but yet perceptibly, he fancied.
His attentions to her troubled her father and mother a little, and they warned Louise, without stating particulars or making allusions to any special person, that a girl was sure to make a mistake who allowed herself to marry anybody but a man who could support her well.
He longed for riches now as he had never longed for them before.
Sellers, and had been discouraged to note that the Colonel's bill of fare was falling off both in quantity and quality-a sign, he feared, that the lacking ingredient in the eye water still remained undiscovered-though Sellers always explained that these changes in the family diet had been ordered by the doctor, or suggested by some new scientific work the Colonel had stumbled upon.
But it always turned out that the lacking ingredient was still lacking-though it always appeared, at the same time, that the Colonel was right on its heels.
Every time the Colonel came into the real estate office Washington's heart bounded and his eyes lighted with hope, but it always turned out that the Colonel was merely on the scent of some vast, undefined landed speculation-although he was customarily able to say that he was nearer to the all necessary ingredient than ever, and could almost name the hour when success would dawn.
And then Washington's heart would sink again and a sigh would tell when it touched bottom.
It was thought best that Washington should come home.
All the way home he nursed his woe and exalted it.
He pictured himself as she must be picturing him: a noble, struggling young spirit persecuted by misfortune, but bravely and patiently waiting in the shadow of a dread calamity and preparing to meet the blow as became one who was all too used to hard fortune and the pitiless buffetings of fate.
These thoughts made him weep, and weep more broken heartedly than ever; and he wished that she could see his sufferings now.
There was nothing significant in the fact that Louise, dreamy and distraught, stood at her bedroom bureau that night, scribbling "Washington" here and there over a sheet of paper.
But there was something significant in the fact that she scratched the word out every time she wrote it; examined the erasure critically to see if anybody could guess at what the word had been; then buried it under a maze of obliterating lines; and finally, as if still unsatisfied, burned the paper.
The darkened room, the labored breathing and occasional moanings of the patient, the tip toeing of the attendants and their whispered consultations, were full of sad meaning.
For three or four nights mrs Hawkins and Laura had been watching by the bedside; Clay had arrived, preceding Washington by one day, and he was now added to the corps of watchers.
mr Hawkins would have none but these three, though neighborly assistance was offered by old friends.
From this time forth three hour watches were instituted, and day and night the watchers kept their vigils.
By degrees Laura and her mother began to show wear, but neither of them would yield a minute of their tasks to Clay.
And, he had noticed, also, that when midnight struck, the patient turned his eyes toward the door, with an expectancy in them which presently grew into a longing but brightened into contentment as soon as the door opened and Laura appeared.
And he did not need Laura's rebuke when he heard his father say:
"Clay is good, and you are tired, poor child; but I wanted you so."
"Clay is not good, father-he did not call me.
I would not have treated him so.
How could you do it, Clay?"
It was a wintry one. The darkness gathered, the snow was falling, the wind wailed plaintively about the house or shook it with fitful gusts.
Hawkins roused out of a doze, looked about him and was evidently trying to speak.
Instantly Laura lifted his head and in a failing voice he said, while something of the old light shone in his eyes:
"Wife-children-come nearer-nearer.
The darkness grows.
Let me see you all, once more."
"I am leaving you in cruel poverty.
I have been-so foolish-so short sighted.
But courage!
A better day is-is coming.
Be wary.
There is wealth stored up for you there-wealth that is boundless!
The children shall hold up their heads with the best in the land, yet.
Where are the papers?--Have you got the papers safe?
Show them-show them to me!"
Under his strong excitement his voice had gathered power and his last sentences were spoken with scarcely a perceptible halt or hindrance. With an effort he had raised himself almost without assistance to a sitting posture.
But now the fire faded out of his eyes and he fell back exhausted.
The papers were brought and held before him, and the answering smile that flitted across his face showed that he was satisfied.
He closed his eyes, and the signs of approaching dissolution multiplied rapidly.
He lay almost motionless for a little while, then suddenly partly raised his head and looked about him as one who peers into a dim uncertain light.
He muttered:
"Gone?
No-I see you-still.
But you are-safe.
Safe. The Ten-----"
The emaciated fingers began to pick at the coverlet, a fatal sign.
After a time there were no sounds but the cries of the mourners within and the gusty turmoil of the wind without.
Then she closed the dead eyes, and crossed the hands upon the breast; after a season, she kissed the forehead reverently, drew the sheet up over the face, and then walked apart and sat down with the look of one who is done with life and has no further interest in its joys and sorrows, its hopes or its ambitions.
Major Lackland had once been a man of note in the State-a man of extraordinary natural ability and as extraordinary learning.
He had been universally trusted and honored in his day, but had finally, fallen into misfortune; while serving his third term in Congress, and while upon the point of being elevated to the Senate-which was considered the summit of earthly aggrandizement in those days-he had yielded to temptation, when in distress for money wherewith to save his estate; and sold his vote.
His crime was discovered, and his fall followed instantly.
Nothing could reinstate him in the confidence of the people, his ruin was irretrievable-his disgrace complete.
All doors were closed against him, all men avoided him.
After years of skulking retirement and dissipation, death had relieved him of his troubles at last, and his funeral followed close upon that of mr Hawkins.
He died as he had latterly lived-wholly alone and friendless.
The coroner's jury found certain memoranda upon his body and about the premises which revealed a fact not suspected by the villagers before viz., that Laura was not the child of mr and mrs Hawkins.
The gossips were soon at work.
They were but little hampered by the fact that the memoranda referred to betrayed nothing but the bare circumstance that Laura's real parents were unknown, and stopped there. So far from being hampered by this, the gossips seemed to gain all the more freedom from it.
They supplied all the missing information themselves, they filled up all the blanks.
Her pride was stung.
She was astonished, and at first incredulous.
She was about to ask her mother if there was any truth in these reports, but upon second thought held her peace.
She soon gathered that Major Lackland's memoranda seemed to refer to letters which had passed between himself and Judge Hawkins.
She shaped her course without difficulty the day that that hint reached her.
That night she sat in her room till all was still, and then she stole into the garret and began a search.
One bundle was marked "private," and in that she found what she wanted.
She selected six or eight letters from the package and began to devour their contents, heedless of the cold.
They were all from Major Lackland to mr Hawkins.
The substance of them was, that some one in the east had been inquiring of Major Lackland about a lost child and its parents, and that it was conjectured that the child might be Laura.
In one letter the Major said he agreed with mr Hawkins that the inquirer seemed not altogether on the wrong track; but he also agreed that it would be best to keep quiet until more convincing developments were forthcoming.
Another letter said that "the poor soul broke completely down when he saw Laura's picture, and declared it must be she."
It is this: his lost memory returns to him when he is delirious, and goes away again when he is himself just as old Canada Joe used to talk the French patois of his boyhood in the delirium of typhus fever, though he could not do it when his mind was clear.
It was not for me to assist him, of course.
But now in his delirium it all comes out: the names of the boats, every incident of the explosion, and likewise the details of his astonishing escape-that is, up to where, just as a yawl boat was approaching him (he was clinging to the starboard wheel of the burning wreck at the time), a falling timber struck him on the head.
But I will write out his wonderful escape in full to morrow or next day.
Of course the physicians will not let me tell him now that our Laura is indeed his child-that must come later, when his health is thoroughly restored.
His case is not considered dangerous at all; he will recover presently, the doctors say.
But they insist that he must travel a little when he gets well-they recommend a short sea voyage, and they say he can be persuaded to try it if we continue to keep him in ignorance and promise to let him see l as soon as he returns." The letter that bore the latest date of all, contained this clause:
Random remarks here and there, being pieced together gave Laura a vague impression of a man of fine presence, about forty three or forty five years of age, with dark hair and eyes, and a slight limp in his walk-it was not stated which leg was defective.
And this indistinct shadow represented her father.
They had probably been burned; and she doubted not that the ones she had ferreted out would have shared the same fate if mr Hawkins had not been a dreamer, void of method, whose mind was perhaps in a state of conflagration over some bright new speculation when he received them.
She sat long, with the letters in her lap, thinking-and unconsciously freezing.
If she could only have found these letters a month sooner!
That was her thought.
But now the dead had carried their secrets with them.
A dreary, melancholy settled down upon her.
An undefined sense of injury crept into her heart.
She grew very miserable.
She had just reached the romantic age-the age when there is a sad sweetness, a dismal comfort to a girl to find out that there is a mystery connected with her birth, which no other piece of good luck can afford.
One never ceases to make a hero of one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of his heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead that seem greater.
The recent wearing days and nights of watching, and the wasting grief that had possessed her, combined with the profound depression that naturally came with the reaction of idleness, made Laura peculiarly susceptible at this time to romantic impressions.
Now a former thought struck her-she would speak to mrs Hawkins.
And naturally enough mrs Hawkins appeared on the stage at that moment.
Finally mrs Hawkins said:
"Speak to me, child-do not forsake me.
Forget all this miserable talk. Say I am your mother!--I have loved you so long, and there is no other. I am your mother, in the sight of God, and nothing shall ever take you from me!"
All barriers fell, before this appeal.
Laura put her arms about her mother's neck and said:
"You are my mother, and always shall be.
There was no longer any sense of separation or estrangement between them.
Indeed their love seemed more perfect now than it had ever been before.
But it transpired that mrs Hawkins had never known of this correspondence between her husband and Major Lackland.
With his usual consideration for his wife, mr Hawkins had shielded her from the worry the matter would have caused her.
Laura went to bed at last with a mind that had gained largely in tranquility and had lost correspondingly in morbid romantic exaltation. She was pensive, the next day, and subdued; but that was not matter for remark, for she did not differ from the mournful friends about her in that respect.
The great secret was new to some of the younger children, but their love suffered no change under the wonderful revelation.
It is barely possible that things might have presently settled down into their old rut and the mystery have lost the bulk of its romantic sublimity in Laura's eyes, if the village gossips could have quieted down.
But they could not quiet down and they did not.
Day after day they called at the house, ostensibly upon visits of condolence, and they pumped away at the mother and the children without seeming to know that their questionings were in bad taste.
They meant no harm they only wanted to know.
Villagers always want to know.
The family fought shy of the questionings, and of course that was high testimony "if the Duchess was respectably born, why didn't they come out and prove it?--why did they, stick to that poor thin story about picking her up out of a steamboat explosion?"
Under this ceaseless persecution, Laura's morbid self communing was renewed.
At night the day's contribution of detraction, innuendo and malicious conjecture would be canvassed in her mind, and then she would drift into a course of thinking.
As her thoughts ran on, the indignant tears would spring to her eyes, and she would spit out fierce little ejaculations at intervals.
But finally she would grow calmer and say some comforting disdainful thing-something like this:
"But who are they?--Animals!
Let them talk-I will not stoop to be affected by it.
I could hate----. Nonsense-nobody I care for or in any way respect is changed toward me, I fancy."
She may have supposed she was thinking of many individuals, but it was not so-she was thinking of only one.
And her heart warmed somewhat, too, the while.
One day a friend overheard a conversation like this:--and naturally came and told her all about it:
"Ned, they say you don't go there any more.
How is that?"
I think she is a fine girl every way, and so would you if you knew her as well as I do; but you know how it is when a girl once gets talked about-it's all up with her-the world won't ever let her alone, after that."
He is well favored in person, and well liked, too, I believe, and comes of one of the first families of the village.
I attended their funerals.
Well, other people have hoped and been disappointed; I am not alone in that.
But Maria could not stay.
She had come to mingle romantic tears with Laura's over the lover's defection and had found herself dealing with a heart that could not rise to an appreciation of affliction because its interest was all centred in sausages.
But as soon as Maria was gone, Laura stamped her expressive foot and said:
"The coward!
Are all books lies?
I thought he would fly to the front, and be brave and noble, and stand up for me against all the world, and defy my enemies, and wither these gossips with his scorn!
I do begin to despise this world!"
She lapsed into thought.
Presently she said:
She could not find a word that was strong enough, perhaps.
"Well, I am glad of it-I'm glad of it.
I never cared anything for him anyway!"
CHAPTER eleven.
No particular reason except one which he preferred to keep to himself-viz. that he could not bear to be away from Louise.
It occurred to him, now, that the Colonel had not invited him lately-could he be offended?
It was a good idea; especially as Louise had absented herself from breakfast that morning, and torn his heart; he would tear hers, now, and let her see how it felt.
For an instant the Colonel looked nonplussed, and just a bit uncomfortable; and mrs Sellers looked actually distressed; but the next moment the head of the house was himself again, and exclaimed:
"All right, my boy, all right-always glad to see you-always glad to hear your voice and take you by the hand.
You can't please us any better than that, Washington; the little woman will tell you so herself.
We don't pretend to style.
Plain folks, you know-plain folks.
Just a plain family dinner, but such as it is, our friends are always welcome, I reckon you know that yourself, Washington.
To visit such a family, was to find one's self confronted by a congress made up of representatives of the imperial myths and the majestic dead of all the ages.
There was something thrilling about it, to a stranger, not to say awe inspiring.]--stand off the cat's tail, child, can't you see what you're doing?--Come, come, come, Roderick Dhu, it isn't nice for little boys to hang onto young gentlemen's coat tails-but never mind him, Washington, he's full of spirits and don't mean any harm.
Children will be children, you know.
Washington contemplated the banquet, and wondered if he were in his right mind.
Was this the plain family dinner?
And was it all present? It was soon apparent that this was indeed the dinner: it was all on the table: it consisted of abundance of clear, fresh water, and a basin of raw turnips-nothing more.
The poor woman's face was crimson, and the tears stood in her eyes.
Washington did not know what to do.
No?
Well, you're right, you're right. Some people like mustard with turnips, but-now there was Baron Poniatowski-Lord, but that man did know how to live!--true Russian you know, Russian to the back bone; I say to my wife, give me a Russian every time, for a table comrade.
The Baron used to say, 'Take mustard, Sellers, try the mustard,--a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without, mustard,' but I always said, 'No, Baron, I'm a plain man and I want my food plain-none of your embellishments for Beriah Sellers-no made dishes for me!
How does that fruit strike you?"
Washington said he did not know that he had ever tasted better.
He did not add that he detested turnips even when they were cooked-loathed them in their natural state.
No, he kept this to himself, and praised the turnips to the peril of his soul.
"I thought you'd like them.
Examine them-examine them-they'll bear it.
See how perfectly firm and juicy they are-they can't start any like them in this part of the country, I can tell you.
These are the Early Malcolm-it's a turnip that can't be produced except in just one orchard, and the supply never is up to the demand.
Take some more water, Washington-you can't drink too much water with fruit-all the doctors say that.
The plague can't come where this article is, my boy!"
"Plague?
What plague?"
"What plague, indeed?
And whoever it touches can make his will and contract for the funeral. Well you can't cure it, you know, but you can prevent it.
How?
Turnips! that's it!
Turnips and water!
Nothing like it in the world, old McDowells says, just fill yourself up two or three times a day, and you can snap your fingers at the plague.
Sh!--keep mum, but just you confine yourself to that diet and you're all right.
I wouldn't have old McDowells know that I told about it for anything-he never would speak to me again.
Take some more water, Washington-the more water you drink, the better.
There, now.
Absorb those.
They're, mighty sustaining-brim full of nutriment-all the medical books say so.
You'll feel like a fighting cock next day."
One was, that he discovered, to his confusion and shame, that in allowing himself to be helped a second time to the turnips, he had robbed those hungry children.
He had not needed the dreadful "fruit," and had not wanted it; and when he saw the pathetic sorrow in their faces when they asked for more and there was no more to give them, he hated himself for his stupidity and pitied the famishing young things with all his heart.
The other matter that disturbed him was the dire inflation that had begun in his stomach.
It grew and grew, it became more and more insupportable.
Evidently the turnips were "fermenting." He forced himself to sit still as long as he could, but his anguish conquered him at last.
He rose in the midst of the Colonel's talk and excused himself on the plea of a previous engagement.
He immediately bent his steps toward home.
In bed he passed an hour that threatened to turn his hair gray, and then a blessed calm settled down upon him that filled his heart with gratitude.
CHAPTER five
The next morning, when Lord Elmwood and Sandford met at breakfast, the latter was pale with fear for the success of Lady Elmwood's letter-the Earl was pale too, but there was besides upon his face, something which evidently marked he was displeased.
Sandford observed it, and was all humbleness, both in his words and looks, in order to soften him.
As soon as the breakfast was removed, Lord Elmwood drew the letter from his pocket, and holding it towards Sandford, said,
Sandford called up a look of surprise, as if he did not know the letter again.
Sandford took it, and putting it up, asked fearfully, "What those two reasons were?"
"Be not hasty in your gratitude; you may have cause to recall it."
"I know what you have said;" replied Sandford, "you have said you grant Lady Elmwood's request-you cannot recall these words, nor I my gratitude."
"Not exactly, my Lord-I told you before, I did not; but it is no doubt something in favour of her child."
"I think not," he replied: "such as it is, however, I grant it: but in the strictest sense of the word-no farther-and one neglect of my commands, releases me from this promise totally."
"We will take care, Sir, not to disobey them."
"Then listen to what they are, for to you I give the charge of delivering them again.
In the literal sense, to suffer that she may reside at one of my seats; dispensing at the same time with my ever seeing her."
"And you will comply?"
"I will, till she encroaches on this concession, and dares to hope for a greater.
I will, while she avoids my sight, or the giving me any remembrance of her.
But if, whether by design or by accident, I ever see or hear from her, that moment, my compliance to her mother's supplication ceases, and I abandon her once more."
Sandford sighed.
Lord Elmwood continued:
"I am glad her request stopped where it did.
I would rather comply with her desires than not; and I rejoice they are such as I can grant with ease and honour to myself.
I am seldom now at Elmwood castle; let her daughter go there; the few weeks or months I am down in the summer, she may easily in that extensive house avoid me-while she does, she lives in security-when she does not-you know my resolution."
Sandford bowed-the Earl resumed:
Sandford interrupted the menace prepared for utterance, saying, "and you still mean, I suppose, to make mr Rushbrook your heir?"
"Have you not heard me say so?
And do you imagine I have changed my determination?
I am not given to alter my resolutions, mr Sandford; and I thought you knew I was not; besides, will not my title be extinct, whoever I make my heir?
Could any thing but a son have preserved my title?"
"By marrying again, you mean?
No-no-I have had enough of marriage-and Henry Rushbrook I shall leave my heir.
Therefore, Sir----"
"My Lord, I do not presume-"
"Do not, Sandford, and we may still be good friends.
But I am not to be controlled as formerly; my temper is changed of late; changed to what it was originally; till your religious precepts reformed it.
Sandford again repeated, "He should not presume-"
To which Lord Elmwood again made answer, "Do not, Sandford;" and added, "for I have a sincere regard for you, and should be loath, at these years, to quarrel with you seriously."
Sandford turned away his head to conceal his feelings.
"Nay, if we do quarrel," resumed Lord Elmwood, "You know it must be your own fault; and as this is a theme the most likely of any, nay, the only one on which we can have a difference (such as we cannot forgive) take care never from this day to resume it; indeed that of itself, would be an offence I could not pardon.
I have been clear and explicit in all I have said; there can be no fear of mistaking my meaning; therefore, all future explanation is unnecessary-nor will I permit a word, or a hint on the subject from any one, without shewing my resentment even to the hour of my death." He was going out of the room.
"But before we bid adieu to the subject for ever, my Lord-there was another person whom I named to you-"
"Do you mean Miss Woodley?
Oh, by all means let her live at Elmwood House too.
"She is a good woman, my Lord," cried Sandford, pleased.
"You need not tell me that, mr Sandford; I know her worth." And he left the room.
But before he left London, Giffard, the steward, took an opportunity to wait upon him, and let him know, that his Lord had acquainted him with the consent he had given for his daughter to be admitted at Elmwood Castle, and upon what restrictions: that he had farther uttered the severest threats, should these restrictions ever be infringed.
Sandford thanked Giffard for his friendly information.
It served him as a second warning of the circumspection that was necessary; and having taken leave of his friend and patron, under the pretence that "He could not live in the smoke of London," he set out for the North.
It is unnecessary to say with what delight Sandford was received by Miss Woodley, and the hapless daughter of Lady Elmwood, even before he told his errand.
They both loved him sincerely; more especially Lady Matilda, whose forlorn state, and innocent sufferings, had ever excited his compassion and caused him to treat her with affection, tenderness, and respect.
She knew, too, how much he had been her mother's friend; for that, she also loved him; and for being honoured with the friendship of her father, she looked up to him with reverence.
For Matilda (with an excellent understanding, a sedateness above her years, and early accustomed to the most private converse between Lady Elmwood and Miss Woodley) was perfectly acquainted with the whole fatal history of her mother; and was, by her, taught the respect and admiration of her father's virtues which they justly merited.
Notwithstanding the joy of mr Sandford's presence, once more to cheer their solitary dwelling; no sooner were the first kind greetings over, than the dread of what he might have to inform them of, possessed poor Matilda and Miss Woodley so powerfully, that all their gladness was changed into affright.
Their apprehensions were far more forcible than their curiosity; they dared not ask a question, and even began to wish he would continue silent upon the subject on which they feared to listen.
For near two hours he was so.----At length, after a short interval from speaking, (during which they waited with anxiety for what he might next say) he turned to Lady Matilda, and said,
"You don't ask for your father, my dear."
"I did not know it was proper:" she replied, timidly.
"Do not think I reproved you," said Sandford; "I only told you what was right."
"Nay," said Miss Woodley, "she does not weep for that-she fears her father has not complied with her mother's request.
Perhaps-not even read her letter?"
"Oh Heavens!" exclaimed Matilda, clasping her hands together, and the tears falling still faster.
"Do not be so much alarmed, my dear," said Miss Woodley; "you know we are prepared for the worst; and you know you promised your mother, whatever your fate should be, to submit with patience."
"Yes," replied Matilda, "and I am prepared for every thing, but my father's refusal to my dear mother."
"Your father has not refused your mother's request," replied Sandford.
She was leaping from her seat in ecstasy.
"Not entirely," replied Matilda, "and since it is granted, I am careless.
But she told me her letter concerned none but me."
She listened sometimes with tears, sometimes with hope, but always with awe, and with terror, to every sentence in which her father was concerned.
Once she called him cruel-then exclaimed "He was kind;" but at the end of Sandford's intelligence, concluded "that she was happy and grateful for the boon bestowed." Even her mother had not a more exalted idea of Lord Elmwood's worth than his daughter had formed; and this little bounty just obtained, would not have been greater in her mother's estimation, than it was now in hers.
CHAPTER twenty four.
PEGGY HAS REVENGE.
Joe Wegg made a rapid recovery, his strength returning under the influence of pleasant surroundings and frequent visits from Ethel and Uncle John's three nieces.
Joe was planning to exploit a new patent as soon as he could earn enough to get it introduced, and Ethel exhibited a sublime confidence in the boy's ability that rendered all question of money insignificant.
Joe's sudden appearance in the land of his birth and his generally smashed up condition were a nine days' wonder in Millville.
The gossips wanted to know all the whys and wherefores, but the boy kept his room in the hotel, or only walked out when accompanied by Ethel or one of the three nieces.
McNutt, always busy over somebody else's affairs, was very curious to know what had caused the accident Joe had suffered.
But that did not deter him from indulging in various vivid speculations about Joe Wegg, which the simple villagers listened to with attention.
For one thing, he confided to "the boys" at the store that, in his opinion, the man who had murdered Cap'n Wegg had tried to murder his son also, and it wasn't likely Joe could manage to escape him a second time.
He waylaid the nieces once or twice, and tried to secure from them a verification of his somber suspicions, which they mischievously fostered.
The girls found him a source of much amusement, and relieved their own disappointment at finding the "Wegg Mystery" a pricked bubble by getting McNutt excited over many sly suggestions of hidden crimes.
These he had fostered with great care since the plants had first sprouted through the soil, and in these late August days two or three hundreds of fine, big melons were just getting ripe.
He showed the patch with much pride one day to the nieces, saying:
Dan Brayley he thinks he kin raise mellings, but the ol' fool ain't got a circumstance to this.
"It seems to me," observed Patsy, gravely, "that Brayley's are just as good.
We passed his place this morning and wondered how he could raise such enormous melons."
"'Normous!
Brayley's!"
"I'm sure they are finer than these," said Beth.
"Well, I'll be jiggered!" Peggy's eyes stared as they had never stared before.
"What do you charge for melons, mr McNutt?" inquired Louise.
"Charge?
Why-er-fifty cents a piece is my price to nabobs; an' dirt cheap at that!"
"That is too much," declared Patsy.
"Him!
Fifteen cents!" gasped Peggy, greatly disappointed.
"But they ain't.
"How impolite."
"But that's Dan Brayley.
"Tell me," said Patsy, with a smile, "did you ever rob a melon patch, mr McNutt?"
"Me?
"But the ones you grow are worth fifty cents each, are they not?"
"Sure; mine is."
"Then every time you eat one of your own melons you eat fifty cents.
If you were eating one of mr Brayley's melons you would only eat fifteen cents."
"And it would be Brayley's fifteen cents, too," added Beth, quickly.
Peggy turned his protruding eyes from one to the other, and a smile slowly spread over his features.
"By jinks, let's rob Brayley's melling patch!" he cried.
"All right; we'll help you," answered Patsy, readily.
"It will be such fun," replied her cousin, with eyes dancing merrily. "Boys always rob melon patches, so I don't see why girls shouldn't.
When shall we do it, mr McNutt?"
"It's a bargain," declared Patsy.
"We will come for you in the surrey at ten o'clock, and all drive together to the back of Brayley's yard and take all the melons we want."
"Don't betray us, sir," pleaded Beth.
Patsy was overjoyed at the success of her plot, which she had conceived on the spur of the moment, as most clever plots are conceived.
On the way home she confided to her cousins a method of securing revenge upon the agent for selling them the three copies of the "Lives of the Saints."
"McNutt wants to get even with Brayley, he says, and we want to get even with McNutt.
I think our chances are best, don't you?" she asked.
And they decided to join the conspiracy.
McNutt was waiting for them when they quietly drew up before his house. The village was dark and silent, for its inhabitants retired early to bed.
They put McNutt on the back seat with Louise, cautioned him to be quiet, and then drove away.
The back seat was hemmed in by side curtains and the canopy, so it would be no wonder if he lost all sense of direction, even had not the remarks of the girl at his side completely absorbed him.
But now the most difficult part of the enterprise lay before them.
The girls turned down the lane back of the main street and bumped over the ruts until they thought they had arrived at a spot opposite McNutt's own melon patch.
McNutt thrust his head out and peered into the blackness.
"Drive along a little," he whispered.
The girl obeyed.
"I think that's them contwisted fifteen cent mellings-over there!"
They all got out and Beth tied the horse to the fence.
Peggy climbed over and at once whispered:
It's them, all right."
Through the drifting clouds there was just enough light to enable them to perceive the dark forms of the melons lying side by side upon their vines.
The agent took out his big clasp knife and recklessly slashed one of them open.
"Green's grass!" he grumbled, and slashed another.
Patsy giggled, and the others felt a sudden irresistible impulse to join her.
"Keep still!" cautioned McNutt.
Say-here's a ripe one.
They all felt for the slices he offered and ate the fruit without being able to see it.
But it really tasted delicious.
As the girls feasted they heard a crunching sound and inquired in low voices what it was.
McNutt was stumping over the patch and plumping his wooden foot into every melon he could find, smashing them wantonly against the ground. The discovery filled them with horror.
They had thought inducing the agent to rob his own patch of a few melons, while under the delusion that they belonged to his enemy Brayley, a bit of harmless fun; but here was the vindictive fellow actually destroying his own property by the wholesale.
Please don't, mr McNutt!" pleaded Patsy, in frightened accents.
"Yes, I will," declared the agent, stubbornly.
"But it's wrong-it's wicked!" protested Beth.
"It's the law of retribution. Poor Peggy will be sorry for this tomorrow."
The man had not the faintest suspicion where he was.
He knew his own melon patch well enough, having worked in it at times all the summer; but he had never climbed over the fence and approached it from the rear before, so it took on a new aspect to him from this point of view, and moreover the night was dark enough to deceive anybody.
If he came across an especially big melon McNutt would lug it to the carriage and dump it in.
And so angry and energetic was the little man that in a brief space the melon patch was a scene of awful devastation, and the surrey contained all the fruit that survived the massacre.
Beth unhitched the horse and they all took their places in the carriage again, having some difficulty to find places for their feet on account of the cargo of melons.
McNutt was stowed away inside, with Louise, and they drove away up the lane.
"Oh, it were Brayley's, all right," McNutt retorted.
"Are you sure?" asked Louise.
"Feelin's jest the same," declared the little man, confidently.
He took rather more than his share of the spoils, but the girls had no voice to object.
They were by this time so convulsed with suppressed merriment that they had hard work not to shriek aloud their laughter. For, in spite of the tragic revelations the morrow would bring forth, the situation was so undeniably ridiculous that they could not resist its humor.
"Good night, gals.
Good night."
CHAPTER eleven.
THE PEBBLE AND THE WINDOW.
MISS MEADOWCROFT and I were the only representatives of the family at the farm who attended the trial.
I have purposely abstained from encumbering my narrative with legal details.
I now propose to state the nature of the defense in the briefest outline only.
We insisted on making both the prisoners plead not guilty.
This done, we took an objection to the legality of the proceedings at starting.
We appealed to the old English law, that there should be no conviction for murder until the body of the murdered person was found, or proof of its destruction obtained beyond a doubt.
We denied that sufficient proof had been obtained in the case now before the court.
The judges consulted, and decided that the trial should go on.
We took our next objection when the confessions were produced in evidence.
We declared that they had been extorted by terror, or by undue influence; and we pointed out certain minor particulars in which the two confessions failed to corroborate each other.
For the rest, our defense on this occasion was, as to essentials, what our defense had been at the inquiry before the magistrate.
Once more the judges consulted, and once more they overruled our objection.
The confessions were admitted in evidence.
On their side, the prosecution produced one new witness in support of their case.
It is needless to waste time in recapitulating his evidence.
He contradicted himself gravely on cross examination.
We showed plainly, and after investigation proved, that he was not to be believed on his oath.
The chief justice summed up.
He charged, in relation to the confessions, that no weight should be attached to a confession incited by hope or fear; and he left it to the jury to determine whether the confessions in this case had been so influenced.
As for Silas, he was proved to have been beside himself with terror when he made his abominable charge against his brother.
We had vainly trusted to the evidence on these two points to induce the court to reject the confessions: and we were destined to be once more disappointed in anticipating that the same evidence would influence the verdict of the jury on the side of mercy.
After an absence of an hour, they returned into court with a verdict of "Guilty" against both the prisoners.
This statement was not noticed by the bench.
The prisoners were both sentenced to death.
Miss Meadowcroft informed her of the result of the trial.
Half an hour later, one of the women servants handed to me an envelope bearing my name on it in Naomi's handwriting.
The envelope inclosed a letter, and with it a slip of paper on which Naomi had hurriedly written these words: "For God's sake, read the letter I send to you, and do something about it immediately!"
I looked at the letter.
It assumed to be written by a gentleman in New York.
Only the day before, he had, by the merest accident, seen the advertisement for john Jago cut out of a newspaper and pasted into a book of "curiosities" kept by a friend.
To his surprise, he was informed that the clerk had not appeared at his desk that day.
His employer had sent to his lodgings, and had been informed that he had suddenly packed up his hand bag after reading the newspaper at breakfast; had paid his rent honestly, and had gone away, nobody knew where!
It was late in the evening when I read these lines.
I had time for reflection before it would be necessary for me to act.
The newspaper at his breakfast had no doubt given him his first information of the "finding" of the grand jury, and of the trial to follow.
It was in my experience of human nature that he should venture back to Narrabee under these circumstances, and under the influence of his infatuation for Naomi.
More than this, it was again in my experience, I am sorry to say, that he should attempt to make the critical position of Ambrose a means of extorting Naomi's consent to listen favorably to his suit.
Cruel indifference to the injury and the suffering which his sudden absence might inflict on others was plainly implied in his secret withdrawal from the farm.
The same cruel indifference, pushed to a further extreme, might well lead him to press his proposals privately on Naomi, and to fix her acceptance of them as the price to be paid for saving her cousin's life.
To these conclusions I arrived after much thinking.
I had determined, on Naomi's account, to clear the matter up; but it is only candid to add that my doubts of john Jago's existence remained unshaken by the letter.
I believed it to be nothing more nor less than a heartless and stupid "hoax."
I counted the strokes-midnight!
I rose to go up to my room.
Everybody else in the farm had retired to bed, as usual, more than an hour since.
The stillness in the house was breathless.
I walked softly, by instinct, as I crossed the room to look out at the night.
A lovely moonlight met my view; it was like the moonlight on the fatal evening when Naomi had met john Jago on the garden walk.
My bedroom candle was on the side table; I had just lighted it.
I was just leaving the room, when the door suddenly opened, and Naomi herself stood before me!
Recovering the first shook of her sudden appearance, I saw instantly in her eager eyes, in her deadly pale cheeks, that something serious had happened.
A large cloak was thrown over her; a white handkerchief was tied over her head.
Her hair was in disorder; she had evidently just risen in fear and in haste from her bed.
"What is it?" I asked, advancing to meet her.
"john Jago!" she whispered.
You will think my obstinacy invincible.
I could hardly believe it, even then!
"Where?" I asked.
"In the back yard," she replied, "under my bedroom window!"
The emergency was far too serious to allow of any consideration for the small proprieties of every day life.
"Let me see him!" I said.
"I am here to fetch you," she answered, in her frank and fearless way. "Come upstairs with me."
Her room was on the first floor of the house, and was the only bedroom which looked out on the back yard.
On our way up the stairs she told me what had happened.
"I was in bed," she said, "but not asleep, when I heard a pebble strike against the window pane.
I waited, wondering what it meant.
Another pebble was thrown against the glass.
So far, I was surprised, but not frightened.
I got up, and ran to the window to look out.
There was john Jago looking up at me in the moonlight!"
"Did he see you?"
"Yes.
He said, 'Come down and speak to me!
"Did you answer him?"
What shall I do?"
We entered her room.
Keeping cautiously behind the window curtain, I looked out.
There he was!
His beard and mustache were shaved off; his hair was close cut.
"What shall I do?" Naomi repeated.
"Very good.
Show yourself at the window, and say to him, 'I am coming directly.'"
The brave girl obeyed me without a moment's hesitation.
There had been no doubt about his eyes and his gait; there was no doubt now about his voice, as he answered softly from below-"All right!"
We left the house together, and separated silently.
Naomi followed my instructions with a woman's quick intelligence where stratagems are concerned.
I had hardly been a minute in the tool house before I heard him speaking to Naomi on the other side of the door.
The first words which I caught distinctly related to his motive for secretly leaving the farm.
Mortified pride-doubly mortified by Naomi's contemptuous refusal and by the personal indignity offered to him by Ambrose-was at the bottom of his conduct in absenting himself from Morwick.
He owned that he had seen the advertisement, and that it had actually encouraged him to keep in hiding!
It rests with you, Miss Naomi, to keep me here, and to persuade me to save Ambrose by showing myself and owning to my name."
He lowered his voice; but I could still hear him.
"Promise you will marry me," he said, "and I will go before the magistrate to morrow, and show him that I am a living man."
"Suppose I refuse?"
"In that case you will lose me again, and none of you will find me till Ambrose is hanged."
"If you attempt to give the alarm," he answered, "as true as God's above us, you will feel my hand on your throat!
It's my turn now, miss; and I am not to be trifled with.
Will you have me for your husband-yes or no?"
"No!" she answered, loudly and firmly.
I burst open the door, and seized him as he lifted his hand on her.
She struck up his pistol as he pulled it out of his pocket with his free hand and presented it at my head.
The bullet was fired into the air.
I tripped up his heels at the same moment.
The report of the pistol had alarmed the house.
Concerning Daniel And What Befell Him At Babylon.
Now among these there were four of the family of Zedekiah, of most excellent dispositions, one of whom was called Daniel, another was called Ananias, another Misael, and the fourth Azarias; and the king of Babylon changed their names, and commanded that they should make use of other names.
Daniel he called Baltasar; Ananias, Shadrach; Misael, Meshach; and Azarias, Abednego. These the king had in esteem, and continued to love, because of the very excellent temper they were of, and because of their application to learning, and the profess they had made in wisdom.
Now Daniel and his kinsmen had resolved to use a severe diet, and to abstain from those kinds of food which came from the king's table, and entirely to forbear to eat of all living creatures.
Accordingly, God, out of pity to those that were in danger, and out of regard to the wisdom of Daniel, made known to him the dream and its interpretation, that so the king might understand by him its signification also.
So when he had with them returned thanks to God, who had commiserated their youth, when it was day he came to Arioch, and desired him to bring him to the king, because he would discover to him that dream which he had seen the night before.
When therefore all the rest, upon the hearing of the sound of the trumpet, worshipped the image, they relate that Daniel's kinsmen did not do it, because they would not transgress the laws of their country.
This it was which recommended them to the king as righteous men, and men beloved of God, on which account they continued in great esteem with him.
seven
How the Speckled Hen Got
Once upon a time, ages and ages ago, there was a little white hen.
One day she was busily engaged in scratching the soil to find worms and insects for her breakfast.
"This must be a letter. One time when the king, the great ruler of our country, held his court in the meadow close by, many people brought him letters and laid them at his feet.
Now I, too, even I, the little white hen, have a letter. I am going to carry my letter to the king."
The little white hen had never been so far from home in all her life.
Once upon a time she had helped the fox to escape from a trap and the fox had never forgotten her kindness to him.
"Indeed, little white hen," said the fox, "I should like to go with you.
The fox climbed into the little brown basket.
After the little white hen had gone on for some distance farther she met a river.
Once upon a time the little white hen had done the river a kindness.
He had, with great difficulty, thrown some ugly worms upon the bank and he was afraid they would crawl back in again.
The little white hen had eaten them for him.
Always after that the river had been her friend.
The little white hen told the river that he might go with her and asked him to ride in the little brown basket.
So the river climbed into the little brown basket.
The grass had given the fire new life and always after that he had been the friend of the little white hen.
The little white hen journeyed on and on, and finally she arrived at the royal palace.
There were marks of dirt upon it where the friendly fox's feet had rested.
It had tiny holes in it where the fire had sat after he had turned himself into hot ashes.
I always knew that hens were stupid little creatures but you are quite the stupidest little hen I ever saw in all my life."
I think we will have her for dinner to morrow."
One pulled off the cover of the little brown basket.
Out sprang the fox from the little brown basket and in the twinkling of an eye he fell upon the fowls of the royal poultry yard.
They couldn't get across without canoes.
The chickens of the little white hen (who was now a little speckled hen) were all speckled too.
Not a word was said in the cab as Lord Silverbridge took his sister to Carlton Terrace, and he was leaving her without any reference to the scene which had taken place, when an idea struck him that this would be cruel.
"It was not my doing."
"I suppose it was nobody's doing.
I think that you should have controlled yourself."
"I think so."
"No;--if you mean by controlling myself, holding my tongue.
He is the man I love,--whom I have promised to marry."
"But, Mary,--do ladies generally embrace their lovers in public?"
"No;--nor should i I never did such a thing in my life before.
Do you think I should have done it if you all had not been there?" Then again she burst into tears.
He did not quite know what to make of it.
"I was thinking of the governor," he said.
"He shall be told everything."
"That you met Tregear?"
"Certainly; and that I-kissed him.
I will do nothing that I am ashamed to tell everybody."
"He will be very angry."
mr Tregear is a gentleman.
Why did he let him come?
The thing is settled.
On that night Mary told the whole of her story to Lady Cantrip.
There was nothing that she tried to conceal.
"No;--no!
Nothing had been planned.
Now I want you to tell papa all about it."
As this objectionable lover had either contrived a meeting, or had met her without contriving, it was necessary that the Duke should be informed.
It cannot in any circumstance be easy to write to a father as to his daughter's love for an objectionable lover; but the Duke's character added much to the severity of the task.
She knew that the Duke would be struck with horror as he read of such a tale, and she found herself almost struck with horror as she attempted to write it.
"I fear there was a good deal of warmth shown on both sides," she said, feeling that she was calumniating the man, as to whose warmth she had heard nothing.
"It is quite clear," she added, "that this is not a passing fancy on her part."
He understood also that the meeting had taken place in the presence of Silverbridge and of Lady Mabel.
"No doubt it was all an accident," Lady Cantrip wrote.
How could it be an accident?
"You had Mary up in town on Friday," he said to his son on the following Sunday morning.
"Yes, sir."
"And that friend of yours came in?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you not know what my wishes are?"
"Certainly I do;--but I could not help his coming.
You do not suppose that anybody had planned it?"
"I hope not."
"It was simply an accident.
Such an accident as must occur over and over again,--unless Mary is to be locked up."
"I only meant that of course they will stumble across each other in London."
"I think I will go abroad," said the Duke.
He was silent for awhile, and then repeated his words.
"I think I will go abroad."
"Not for long, I hope, sir."
"Yes;--to live there.
Why should I stay here?
What good can I do here?
"So much as that!
"Not exactly, sir."
As for your sister, I think she will break my heart." Silverbridge found it to be quite impossible to say anything in answer to this.
"Are you going to church?" asked the Duke.
"I was not thinking of doing so particularly."
"I had thought of going, but my mind is too much harassed.
And there were various matters also which harassed him.
And he had made these bets under the influence of Major Tifto.
It was the remembrance of this, after the promise made to his father, that annoyed him the most. He was imbued with a feeling that it behoved him as a man to "pull himself together," as he would have said himself, and to live in accordance with certain rules.
He could make the rules easily enough, but he had never yet succeeded in keeping any one of them.
He had determined to sever himself from Tifto, and, in doing that, had intended to sever himself from affairs of the turf generally.
He had so committed himself that the offer must now be made.
He did not specially regret that, though he wished that he had been more reticent.
"What a fool a man is to blurt out everything!" he said to himself.
A wife would be a good thing for him; and where could he possibly find a better wife than Mabel Grex?
No doubt there were objections to marriage.
But then, if he were married, he might be sure that Tifto would be laid aside.
It meant complete independence in money matters.
Then his mind ran away to a review of his father's affairs.
Of all the griefs which weighed upon the Duke's mind, that in reference to his sister was the heaviest.
The money which Gerald owed at Cambridge would be nothing if that other sorrow could be conquered.
Nor had Tifto and his own extravagance caused the Duke any incurable wounds. If Tregear could be got out of the way, his father, he thought, might be reconciled to other things.
He had wandered into saint James's Park, and had lighted by this time half a dozen cigarettes one after another, as he sat on one of the benches.
He now sat with his legs stretched out, with his cane in his hands, looking down upon the water.
But the bench was hard and, upon the whole, he was not satisfied with his position.
"What on earth makes you sit there?
Do you often come?"
I strolled in because I had things to think of."
"Questions to be asked in Parliament?
"Go on, old fellow."
"Or perhaps Major Tifto has made important revelations."
"D---- Major Tifto."
"With all my heart," said Tregear.
"That was kind."
"And I was determined to go to you.
All this about my sister must be given up."
"Must be given up?"
"It can never lead to any good.
I mean that there never can be a marriage." Then he paused, but Tregear was determined to hear him out.
"I dare say I should.
When I see people unhappy I always pity them. What I would ask you to think of is this.
"And so will your father."
"He has a right to have his own opinion on such a matter."
I have no right to ask your father for a penny, and I will never do so.
We did meet, as you saw, the other day, by the merest chance.
After that, do you think that your sister wishes me to give her up?"
"As for supposing that girls are to have what they wish, that is nonsense."
"For young men I suppose equally so.
Life ought to be a life of self denial, no doubt.
Perhaps it might be my duty to retire from this affair, if by doing so I should sacrifice only myself.
"In that way you support each other.
Silverbridge as he said this looked forward steadfastly on to the water, regretting much that cause for quarrel should have arisen, but thinking that Tregear would find himself obliged to quarrel. But Tregear, after a few moments' silence, having thought it out, determined that he would not quarrel.
"Well then!"
"I have to examine myself, and find out whether I am guilty of the meanness which I might perhaps be too ready to impute to another. I have done so, and I am quite sure that I am not drawn to your sister by any desire for her money.
I did not seek her because she was a rich man's daughter, nor,--because she is a rich man's daughter,--will I give her up.
Everything had gone wrong with Polly that day.
It began with her boots.
Of all things in the world that tried Polly's patience most were the troublesome little black buttons that originally adorned those useful parts of her clothing, and that were fondly supposed to be there when needed.
But they never were.
For one thing mrs Pepper was very strict about-and that was, Polly should do nothing else till the buttons were all on again, and the boots buttoned up firm and snug.
"Oh dear!" said Polly, sitting down on the floor, and pulling on her stockings.
"What's the matter with it?" said mrs Pepper straightening the things on the bureau.
"You haven't worn it out already, Polly?"
I don't care! I wish they'd all go; they might as well!" she cried, tossing that boot on the floor in intense scorn, while she investigated the state of the other one.
"Every one, Polly?"
"No," said Polly, "but I wish they were, mean old things; when I was going down to play a duet with Jasper!
"No," said mrs Pepper firmly, "there isn't any time but now.
And piano playing isn't very nice when you've got to stick your toes under it to keep your shoes on."
Oh-here it is on the window seat." A rattle of spools, scissors and necessary utensils showed plainly that Polly had found it, followed by a jumble of words and despairing ejaculations as she groped hurriedly under chairs and tables to collect the scattered contents.
When she got back with a very red face, she found Phronsie, who had crawled out of bed, sitting down on the floor in her little nightgown and examining the boot with profound interest.
"Tisn't very cold," said Phronsie, tucking up her toes under the night gown, but Polly hurried her into bed, where she curled herself up under the clothes, watching her make a big knot.
And then the thread kinked horribly, and got all twisted up in disagreeable little snarls that took all Polly's patience to unravel.
"There now, let mother see what's the matter."
I wish there wasn't such a thing as shoes in the world!" And she gave a flounce and sat up straight in front of her mother.
There now, here they are.
"Oh, mamsie!" cried Polly, ignoring for a moment the delights of the finished shoe to fling her arms around her mother's neck and give her a good hug.
Which done, she flew at the rest of her preparations and tried to make up for lost time.
But 'twas all of no use.
The day seemed to be always just racing ahead of her, and turning a corner, before she could catch up to it, and Ben and the other boys only caught dissolving views of her as she flitted through halls or over stairs.
"Where's Polly?" said Percy at last, coming with great dissatisfaction in his voice to the library door.
"I didn't tease," said Percy indignantly, coming up to the sofa, boat in hand, to enforce his words.
Now, says I, for the sails." And she began to flap out a long white piece of cotton cloth on the table to trim into just the desired shape.
"That isn't the way," said Percy, crowding up, the brightness that had flashed over his face at Polly's appearance beginning to fade.
"I haven't finished," said Polly, snipping away vigorously, and longing to get back to mamsie.
"Wait till they're done; then they'll be good-as good as can be!"
"And it's bad enough to have to make them," put in Jasper, flinging aside his book and rolling over to watch them, "without having to be found fault with every second, Percy."
"They're too big," said Percy, surveying them critically, and then looking at his boat.
"Oh, that corner's coming off," cried Polly cheerfully, giving it a sharp cut that sent it flying on the floor.
There," as she held one up for inspection, "that's just the way I used to make Ben's and mine, when we sailed boats."
"Is it?" asked Percy, looking with more respect at the piece of cloth Polly was waving alluringly before him.
"Just exactly like it, Polly?"
"And were theirs just like this?" asked Percy, laying his hand on the sail she had finished cutting out.
"Pre cisely," said Polly, with a pin in her mouth.
"Just as like as two peas, Percy Whitney."
"Oh now, that's too bad!" he cried, seeing Polly fold up the remaining bits of cloth, and pick up the scraps on the floor.
"I forgot-" began Percy, "and she cut 'em so quick-and-"
"And I've been waiting," said Van, in a loud wrathful key, "and waiting-and waiting!"
"They're done and done beautifully, aren't they?" he said, holding up one.
But this only proved fresh fuel for the fire of Van's indignation.
"I cut-all the keel-and the bow-and-"
"Oh dear!" said Polly, in extreme dismay, looking at Jasper.
"Come, I'll tell you what I'll do, boys."
"What?" said Van, cooling off a little, and allowing Percy to edge into a corner with the beloved boat and one sail.
"What will you, Polly?"
"You did say so, Polly!
You know you did!"
"Of course I did, Vanny," said Polly, smiling down into his eager face, "and we'll have a splendid pair in just-one-minute!" she sang.
And so the sails were cut out, and the hems turned down and basted, and tucked away into Polly's little work basket ready for the sewing on the morrow.
CHAPTER eleven
HOW THE GOSPELS CAME TO BE WRITTEN
But how did the story of the Saviour's life on earth come to be written?
We have seen that many years passed before any one thought of writing it down at all.
But as the years passed, the number of those who had seen Christ grew less, and the need of a written Gospel became ever greater.
Precious words would be forgotten, precious facts passed over, unless they were collected together and put down in black and white.
Some of those, therefore, who had seen and heard Christ began to write down all they remembered of His life.
They loved it and searched its pages eagerly, as they realized that all its words spoke of Christ!
But about the time that saint Paul was imprisoned at Rome we think that the Gospel according to saint Mark was written.
eleven.)
Now a Christian writer, named Papias, who lived about sixty years after this time, tells us that Mark wrote his Gospel story from what peter had told him about Christ; so we think this Gospel writing is really the Apostle Peter's account of our Lord's life on earth.
Very likely, as Mark journeyed with the Apostle from place to place, and heard him tell and retell the wonderful story of His Master's life on earth, the thought came into the young man's mind, 'Why not write down what peter says, so that his words shall not be forgotten?'
And so fresh and vivid are the words of Mark's Gospel, so full of little natural touches, that most people agree that old Papias must have been right.
The very things saint Peter would have noticed are mentioned by Mark.
matthew, the writer of the Gospel which comes the first in our New Testament, was a Levite; that is, he belonged to the tribe of Levi, and this tribe was specially chosen in the time of Moses to learn the Law and serve God in His Temple.
matthew, therefore, was very learned in the books of the Law, and in the writings of the old prophets.
As you all know, the Lord Jesus chose matthew to be one of His special companions; and as matthew followed his Master day by day, he saw more and more clearly how all the old prophecies which he knew so well pointed to the coming of Christ.
This is why we find in the Gospel according to matthew more quotations from the Old Testament than in the writings of any of the other evangelists.
'See, My Book has always spoken of the coming of My Son.' This is the wonderful message which God gave to the world through Matthew's knowledge of the Old Testament Scriptures.
Years passed, and those who had seen Christ in His earthly life had nearly all died, while Gentile Christians everywhere were asking eagerly for the written story of His life.
Twenty years after Matthew's Gospel was written, God called a Greek scholar, named luke, to write what was to be a most important part of our Bible.
This is because the whole work is written from the Gentile point of view-it is the world's history of Christ.
fourteen), and besides being highly educated and gifted, he took infinite pains with his work.
He collected all the information he could both from books and eye witnesses-either from the Saviour's Mother herself, or from some of her relations-and to him we owe many of the most beautiful and touching facts of our Lord's life on earth.
Written last of all, we have the good news-that is, Gospel, told by saint John.
When the Saviour ascended into Heaven, john was still a young man, but he lived to be older than all the other Apostles.
By the time that saint John wrote his Gospel, Jerusalem had been destroyed and her inhabitants slain or scattered.
He was able, therefore, to mention details, and give the actual names of people and places, which, if told earlier, might have endangered the lives of those of whom he wrote.
Many instances of this will be found by those who read carefully.
So filled with love was the Apostle john that before he died his spirit became altogether one with Christ's spirit, and the sayings of Jesus, which he had only half understood whilst his Master had walked this earth, grew quite clear to him, so that he remembered them distinctly.
Therefore, that others might understand also, God's Spirit called john, when he was an old man, to write out those precious words of Jesus Christ's which were always echoing in his heart, and which the other writers had not known, or had forgotten.
CHAPTER twelve
SOME OTHER WRITERS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
Let us now look at the rest of the books which make up the New Testament.
In the days when Paul preached at Athens, the old capital of Greece, much of the ancient splendour and power of the Greek people had passed away, for the romans had conquered their country, and they were no longer a free nation.
Yet, although the Greeks had been forced to yield to Rome, their conquerors knew that the Grecian scholars and artists were far better educated and more highly gifted than themselves, and Greek statues and writings had therefore become the fashion throughout the Roman Empire. Indeed, many of the Greek sculptors and authors are remembered and admired to this day.
Homer, the greatest Greek poet, who lived about a thousand years b c, is still world famous.
The picture it gives of the old heathen religion is terrible, for Homer described the 'gods' and 'goddesses' in whom he believed as being far more cruel and unjust than the worst men and women of his time. According to his ideas, Jupiter, Diana, Apollo, Mars, and the rest came down to earth and took part in the battle.
In vain did the great hero, Hector, fight his bravest; in vain did he sacrifice himself, and strive to make up for the wrong doing of his brother; he failed utterly, for Homer tells us that he was hated by some of the 'gods' for no fault of his own, and so they doomed him to destruction, and guided the hand of the man who slew him.
How little those clever Greeks had been able to discover of the mercy and justice of God!
But although the men of this great nation knew nothing of our wise and loving Heavenly Father, He knew and loved them every one, and as we have seen, He called a Greek Christian author to help Him in the wonderful work of writing the Bible.
The Apostle Paul's life would be almost a blank.
Stephen's victorious death would be all unknown to us.
Above all, the story of our Saviour's ascension into Heaven, and the marvellous fulfilment of His promises in the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, would have been left untold.
The Book of the Acts stands alone.
There are four Gospels-written from four different points of view, but of the four writers, luke, the Greek, was the only one who wrote a sequel and showed the results which our Saviour's Life, and Death, and Resurrection produced at once in the world.
The marvellous accuracy of saint Luke and his keen observation become every year more striking as fresh discoveries in the lands of which he wrote show how true he is in the tiniest detail; while his modesty is equally remarkable, for only by carefully noticing when he says 'we' and when 'they' can we discover when he shared saint Paul's dangers and trials.
eleven) wrote the Apostle from his Roman prison.
The beloved physician was faithful to his great leader to the last.
He wrote on papyrus-that is, on reed paper, using an ink like black paint, and a reed pen.
luke.
Homer's book belongs to the forgotten past, for the heathen religion of Greece is to day as though it had never been.
But the writings of saint Luke are as full of blessing and power as ever, and the war he wrote about grows more wonderful every day.
The Apostle peter, in contrast to saint Luke, was only a fisherman when the Lord bade him leave his boat and his nets to preach and teach the Gospel.
His ideas were very limited when Jesus Christ first came into his life, and he knew little or nothing of the various branches of knowledge which had become a second nature to the Greek scholar; but the fisherman was to receive his education in a very different fashion from luke, for his teacher was the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
How impossible it would have seemed to peter, in the days when he washed his nets by the Lake of Galilee, that his writings should ever form a part of the Scriptures-God's Book, which he had learned from his childhood to love and reverence!
Yet with God all things are possible.
Thus it is that Peter's contribution to our Bible has become one of the strongest witnesses to the truth of the words written down in the Gospels.
There is no possibility of a mistake; the man who wrote this Epistle could have been none other than the Apostle peter who had been with the Lord from the beginning of His public work.
eight.) 'Charity' should have been translated 'love.'
This Epistle of saint Peter was written, we believe, to comfort God's people under the heavy trial of Paul's second imprisonment.
This vow is often mentioned in the Old Testament.
james had not believed that Jesus Christ was the Saviour of the world until after His Resurrection, when the Lord appeared to him.
seven.)
three we learn that he was one of the Lord's brethren, and, like his brother, james, did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Messiah until after the Resurrection. This jude must not be confused with the Apostle jude.
These writers of the New Testament as they took their reed pens in their hands, and spread out their rolls of whitey brown papyrus paper, were not like Moses.
True, they knew that the Holy Spirit was bidding them write, but that their written words should ever be used by God to form a part of the Bible would have seemed impossible to them all.
The last and by far the latest writer of God's Book was saint John, the beloved disciple.
Three of the shortest and yet most beautiful Books of the Bible are the three epistles which bear John's name.
It may well be then that these calm and loving letters were the last of all the Bible words to be written.
Now the 'revelation,' though placed at the end of our Bible, was not the last Book to be written.
It was probably composed whilst Nero, the wicked Emperor, was torturing and burning the followers of Christ.
Among the fragments of the oldest Bibles in the world recently discovered, the Book of revelation takes a prominent place.
CHAPTER thirteen
THE FIRST BIBLE PICTURES
Those boys and girls who love their Bibles are fond of Bible pictures. Even tiny children delight to see a picture of Jesus Christ holding the little ones in His arms; and how sad children feel when they are shown a painting or engraving of the Saviour led away to die!
We have learnt much now of the Bible, and of how the Old and New Testaments were written, but who first thought of making pictures from the Bible?
A few miles from the city of Rome, deep, deep underground, are those wonderful networks of galleries and chambers called 'The Catacombs.'
'Catacomb' means 'scooped out.' Miles and miles of passages are there, some low and narrow, others wide and lofty; they cross and re cross each other, like the streets of a town, and all are scooped out of the solid earth.
For all this great underground city is in reality one huge cemetery: the quiet resting place where the first Christians of heathen Rome buried their dead, where the martyred bodies so cruelly tortured by Nero were laid at last.
How wonderful to read the names of those who loved Christ and suffered for His sake so long, long ago!
Their very names speak to us of the courage and joy which, in spite of torture, Christ had brought into their lives.
'Rest,' 'Constancy,' 'God's will.' Many names have meanings like these.
Our beloved mother, our little child, our dear brother is with Christ; the parting is only for a time. Yonder, in our beautiful Heavenly Home, we shall meet once more.
How different from the words carved over heathen tombs!
We know what these were like, for not very far away is a heathen catacomb.
So the Christian woman was laid to rest.
'Spare your tears, dear husband and daughter, and believe that it is forbidden to weep for one who lives in God.' How beautiful to know that we shall one day meet the woman in Heaven of whom these words are written!
Now, about the time of Nero's cruel persecution, the Christians of Rome began to use the Catacombs for meetings and services.
Their heathen tormentors had a horror of death, and therefore among the quiet dead the Christians were safe for a while.
So they met deep underground in the dim galleries, their little oil lamps twinkling like stars, and there they listened to the Word of God, and prayed and sang together.
Many touching stories are told of these days; and of the meetings held underground in these Catacombs, where the living were surrounded by the bodies of the martyred dead.
Now, these first Christians loved the Bible with all their hearts, and just as you like to see hanging in your room the picture of the Good Shepherd with the little lamb, so they began to long for pictures from their Bible.
Every heathen Roman had his house decorated with pictures and carvings from his pagan religion, but it was in the dim underground galleries that the first Bible pictures appeared.
Some of the subjects were taken from the Old Testament, some from the New.
Only Bible pictures interested the first Christians.
So will God keep safe all those who trust in Him.'
There are many pictures of jonah and the whale, and one of the three children in the burning fiery furnace, for this had special messages for the martyrs as we can well understand.
The artist who carved this had once been a heathen; perhaps in former days he had made and sold idols, but now all his life and talents were consecrated to God.
And here carved in stone, is the Good Shepherd, Christ bearing the lost lamb on His shoulder, just as He does in the picture you love so well at home; Christ, the Good Shepherd of your life, just as surely as He was the Saviour and Friend of these men and women who fell asleep so long ago!
Now, there is one very wonderful thing about all these pictures: although so many martyrs lie buried here, nearly all the pictures and inscriptions are cheerful!
The heathen Roman writers tell a great deal about the dreadful sufferings of the Christians, but there is very little said about it on the tombs of the martyrs themselves.
How thoroughly these first Christians knew their Bible!
Had all the writings of the New Testament been lost, we should have known the most important events of our Lord's life on earth from these faded paintings and worn carvings alone.
This is the message which these first Bible pictures bring to us all.
CHAPTER one
ACQUIRING CONFIDENCE BEFORE AN AUDIENCE
There is a strange sensation often experienced in the presence of an audience.
It may proceed from the gaze of the many eyes that turn upon the speaker, especially if he permits himself to steadily return that gaze.
Most speakers have been conscious of this in a nameless thrill, a real something, pervading the atmosphere, tangible, evanescent, indescribable.
All writers have borne testimony to the power of a speaker's eye in impressing an audience.
Apply horse sense to ridding yourself of self consciousness and fear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying.
You can never attain freedom from stage fright by reading a treatise.
You must learn to speak by speaking.
The Apostle Paul tells us that every man must work out his own salvation.
All we can do here is to offer you suggestions as to how best to prepare for your plunge.
The real plunge no one can take for you.
Do not be disheartened if at first you suffer from stage fright.
Dan Patch was more susceptible to suffering than a superannuated dray horse would be.
It never hurts a fool to appear before an audience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.
A blow that would kill a civilized man soon heals on a savage.
The higher we go in the scale of life, the greater is the capacity for suffering.
Apply the blacksmith's homely principle when you are speaking.
Self consciousness is undue consciousness of self, and, for the purpose of delivery, self is secondary to your subject, not only in the opinion of the audience, but, if you are wise, in your own.
To hold any other view is to regard yourself as an exhibit instead of as a messenger with a message worth delivering.
Do you remember Elbert Hubbard's tremendous little tract, "A Message to Garcia"?
The youth subordinated himself to the message he bore.
Say this to yourself sternly, and shame your self consciousness into quiescence.
If the theater caught fire you could rush to the stage and shout directions to the audience without any self consciousness, for the importance of what you were saying would drive all fear thoughts out of your mind.
Far worse than self consciousness through fear of doing poorly is self consciousness through assumption of doing well.
The first sign of greatness is when a man does not attempt to look and act great.
Before you can call yourself a man at all, Kipling assures us, you must "not look too good nor talk too wise."
Nothing advertises itself so thoroughly as conceit.
Voltaire said, "We must conceal self love." But that can not be done.
You know this to be true, for you have recognized overweening self love in others.
There are things in this world bigger than self, and in working for them self will be forgotten, or-what is better-remembered only so as to help us win toward higher things.
The trouble with many speakers is that they go before an audience with their minds a blank.
It is no wonder that nature, abhorring a vacuum, fills them with the nearest thing handy, which generally happens to be, "I wonder if I am doing this right!
How does my hair look?
I know I shall fail." Their prophetic souls are sure to be right.
It is not enough to be absorbed by your subject-to acquire self confidence you must have something in which to be confident.
If you go before an audience without any preparation, or previous knowledge of your subject, you ought to be self conscious-you ought to be ashamed to steal the time of your audience.
Prepare yourself.
Know what you are going to talk about, and, in general, how you are going to say it.
Have the first few sentences worked out completely so that you may not be troubled in the beginning to find words.
Know your subject better than your hearers know it, and you have nothing to fear.
Let your bearing be modestly confident, but most of all be modestly confident within.
Over confidence is bad, but to tolerate premonitions of failure is worse, for a bold man may win attention by his very bearing, while a rabbit hearted coward invites disaster.
Humility is not the personal discount that we must offer in the presence of others-against this old interpretation there has been a most healthy modern reaction.
Washington Irving once introduced Charles Dickens at a dinner given in the latter's honor.
In the middle of his speech Irving hesitated, became embarrassed, and sat down awkwardly.
Turning to a friend beside him he remarked, "There, I told you I would fail, and I did."
If you believe you will fail, there is no hope for you.
You will.
Rid yourself of this I am a poor worm in the dust idea.
You are a god, with infinite capabilities.
"All things are ready if the mind be so." The eagle looks the cloudless sun in the face.
Either you or your audience are going to possess the positive factor.
If you assume the negative you are sure to be negative.
Summon all your power of self direction, and remember that though your audience is infinitely more important than you, the truth is more important than both of you, because it is eternal.
If your mind falters in its leadership the sword will drop from your hands.
Your assumption of being able to instruct or lead or inspire a multitude or even a small group of people may appall you as being colossal impudence-as indeed it may be; but having once essayed to speak, be courageous.
Reflect that your audience will not hurt you.
In facing your audience, pause a moment and look them over-a hundred chances to one they want you to succeed, for what man is so foolish as to spend his time, perhaps his money, in the hope that you will waste his investment by talking dully?
Do not make haste to begin-haste shows lack of control.
Do not apologize.
It ought not to be necessary; and if it is, it will not help.
Go straight ahead.
You will not find it half so bad as you imagined; really, it is like taking a cold plunge: after you are in, the water is fine.
In fact, having spoken a few times you will even anticipate the plunge with exhilaration.
Instead of fearing it, you ought to be as anxious as the fox hounds straining at their leashes, or the race horses tugging at their reins.
So cast out fear, for fear is cowardly-when it is not mastered.
The bravest know fear, but they do not yield to it.
In your audience lies some victory for you and the cause you represent.
Go win it.
But remember that men erect no monuments and weave no laurels for those who fear to do what they can.
Is all this unsympathetic, do you say?
Man, what you need is not sympathy, but a push.
No one doubts that temperament and nerves and illness and even praiseworthy modesty may, singly or combined, cause the speaker's cheek to blanch before an audience, but neither can any one doubt that coddling will magnify this weakness.
In this foundation chapter we have tried to strike the tone of much that is to follow.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES.
one.
What is the cause of self consciousness?
Why are animals free from it?
three.
What is your observation regarding self consciousness in children?
Why are you free from it under the stress of unusual excitement?
five.
six.
Which is the more important?
seven.
What effect does confidence on the part of the speaker have on the audience?
eight.
Write out a two minute speech on "Confidence and Cowardice."
nine.
In this connection read the chapter on "Right Thinking and Personality."
ten.
Write out very briefly any experience you may have had involving the teachings of this chapter.
eleven.
'Morning, sir!
Morning!
Morning!'
'Oh!
No!
'He hasn't,' repeated the other to his knotted stick, as he gave it a hug; 'he hasn't got-ha!--ha!--to keep it warm!
'Do you like it?'
Think it over.
Nick, or Noddy.'
'Noddy.
That's my name.
Noddy-or Nick-Boffin.
What's your name?'
'Right, Wegg, right!
Why, its delightful!'
I'm coming to it!
Then consider this.
'That ain't no word for it.
'Now, look here.
'Man alive, don't I tell you?
A diseased governor?
'Yes.
'Would it come dearer?' Mr Boffin asked.
I shall have no peace or patience till you come.
This is a charming spot, is the Bower, but you must get to apprechiate it by degrees.
'Sorry to deprive you of a pipe, Wegg,' he said, filling his own, 'but you can't do both together.
Oh! and another thing I forgot to name!
CHAPTER forty two
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE OF OLIVER'S, EXHIBITING DECIDED MARKS OF GENIUS, BECOMES A PUBLIC CHARACTER IN THE METROPOLIS
Upon the night when Nancy, having lulled mr Sikes to sleep, hurried on her self imposed mission to Rose Maylie, there advanced towards London, by the Great North Road, two persons, upon whom it is expedient that this history should bestow some attention.
The woman was young, but of a robust and hardy make, as she need have been to bear the weight of the heavy bundle which was strapped to her back. Her companion was not encumbered with much luggage, as there merely dangled from a stick which he carried over his shoulder, a small parcel wrapped in a common handkerchief, and apparently light enough.
What a lazybones yer are, Charlotte.'
'It's a heavy load, I can tell you,' said the female, coming up, almost breathless with fatigue.
'Heavy!
What are yer talking about?
What are yer made for?' rejoined the male traveller, changing his own little bundle as he spoke, to the other shoulder.
Well, if yer ain't enough to tire anybody's patience out, I don't know what is!'
'Much farther!
'Look there!
Those are the lights of London.'
'Where do you mean to stop for the night, Noah?' she asked, after they had walked a few hundred yards.
'How should I know?' replied Noah, whose temper had been considerably impaired by walking.
'Near, I hope,' said Charlotte.
'No, not near,' replied mr Claypole. 'There!
'Why not?'
'A pretty thing it would be, wouldn't it to go and stop at the very first public house outside the town, so that Sowerberry, if he come up after us, might poke in his old nose, and have us taken back in a cart with handcuffs on,' said mr Claypole in a jeering tone.
And serve yer right for being a fool.'
'I know I ain't as cunning as you are,' replied Charlotte; 'but don't put all the blame on me, and say I should have been locked up.
You would have been if I had been, any way.'
'No; you trusted in me, and let me carry it like a dear, and so you are,' said the lady, chucking him under the chin, and drawing her arm through his.
Of course, he entered at this juncture, into no explanation of his motives, and they walked on very lovingly together.
In pursuance of this cautious plan, mr Claypole went on, without halting, until he arrived at the Angel at Islington, where he wisely judged, from the crowd of passengers and numbers of vehicles, that London began in earnest.
Just pausing to observe which appeared the most crowded streets, and consequently the most to be avoided, he crossed into Saint John's Road, and was soon deep in the obscurity of the intricate and dirty ways, which, lying between Gray's Inn Lane and Smithfield, render that part of the town one of the lowest and worst that improvement has left in the midst of London.
Through these streets, Noah Claypole walked, dragging Charlotte after him; now stepping into the kennel to embrace at a glance the whole external character of some small public house; now jogging on again, as some fancied appearance induced him to believe it too public for his purpose.
'Cripples,' said Charlotte.
Now, then! Keep close at my heels, and come along.' With these injunctions, he pushed the rattling door with his shoulder, and entered the house, followed by his companion.
There was nobody in the bar but a young Jew, who, with his two elbows on the counter, was reading a dirty newspaper.
He stared very hard at Noah, and Noah stared very hard at him.
If Noah had been attired in his charity boy's dress, there might have been some reason for the Jew opening his eyes so wide; but as he had discarded the coat and badge, and wore a short smock frock over his leathers, there seemed no particular reason for his appearance exciting so much attention in a public house.
Barney complied by ushering them into a small back room, and setting the required viands before them; having done which, he informed the travellers that they could be lodged that night, and left the amiable couple to their refreshment.
'Strangers!' repeated the old man in a whisper.
Fagin appeared to receive this communication with great interest.
'Aha!' he whispered, looking round to Barney, 'I like that fellow's looks.
He again applied his eye to the glass, and turning his ear to the partition, listened attentively: with a subtle and eager look upon his face, that might have appertained to some old goblin.
'No more jolly old coffins, Charlotte, but a gentleman's life for me: and, if yer like, yer shall be a lady.'
'Tills be blowed!' said mr Claypole; 'there's more things besides tills to be emptied.'
'What do you mean?' asked his companion.
'Pockets, women's ridicules, houses, mail coaches, banks!' said mr Claypole, rising with the porter.
'But you can't do all that, dear,' said Charlotte.
'I shall look out to get into company with them as can,' replied Noah. 'They'll be able to make us useful some way or another.
'There, that'll do: don't yer be too affectionate, in case I'm cross with yer,' said Noah, disengaging himself with great gravity.
He was meditating another, when the sudden opening of the door, and the appearance of a stranger, interrupted him.
The stranger was mr Fagin.
'From the country, I see, sir?'
'We have not so much dust as that in London,' replied Fagin, pointing from Noah's shoes to those of his companion, and from them to the two bundles.
'Ha! ha! only hear that, Charlotte!'
Fagin followed up this remark by striking the side of his nose with his right forefinger,--a gesture which Noah attempted to imitate, though not with complete success, in consequence of his own nose not being large enough for the purpose.
However, mr Fagin seemed to interpret the endeavour as expressing a perfect coincidence with his opinion, and put about the liquor which Barney reappeared with, in a very friendly manner.
mr Claypole no sooner heard this extract from his own remarks than he fell back in his chair, and looked from the Jew to Charlotte with a countenance of ashy paleness and excessive terror.
'Don't mind me, my dear,' said Fagin, drawing his chair closer.
It was very lucky it was only me.'
'No matter who's got it, or who did it, my dear,' replied Fagin, glancing, nevertheless, with a hawk's eye at the girl and the two bundles.
'I'm in that way myself, and I like you for it.'
'In that way of business,' rejoined Fagin; 'and so are the people of the house.
You've hit the right nail upon the head, and are as safe here as you could be.
There is not a safer place in all this town than is the Cripples; that is, when I like to make it so.
'I'll tell you more,' said Fagin, after he had reassured the girl, by dint of friendly nods and muttered encouragements.
'I have got a friend that I think can gratify your darling wish, and put you in the right way, where you can take whatever department of the business you think will suit you best at first, and be taught all the others.'
'What advantage would it be to me to be anything else?' inquired Fagin, shrugging his shoulders.
'Here!
Let me have a word with you outside.'
'There's no occasion to trouble ourselves to move,' said Noah, getting his legs by gradual degrees abroad again.
'She'll take the luggage upstairs the while.
Charlotte, see to them bundles.'
'She's kept tolerably well under, ain't she?' he asked as he resumed his seat: in the tone of a keeper who had tamed some wild animal.
'Quite perfect,' rejoined Fagin, clapping him on the shoulder.
'You're a genius, my dear.'
'Regular town maders?' asked mr Claypole.
'It couldn't possibly be done without,' replied Fagin, in a most decided manner.
Payment stopped at the Bank?
Ah!
It's not worth much to him.
It'll have to go abroad, and he couldn't sell it for a great deal in the market.'
'When could I see him?' asked Noah doubtfully.
'To morrow morning.'
'Here.'
'But, yer see,' observed Noah, 'as she will be able to do a good deal, I should like to take something very light.'
'A little fancy work?' suggested Fagin.
'Ah! something of that sort,' replied Noah. 'What do you think would suit me now?
Something not too trying for the strength, and not very dangerous, you know.
That's the sort of thing!'
'That's true!' observed the Jew, ruminating or pretending to ruminate. 'No, it might not.'
'I don't think that would answer my purpose.
Ain't there any other line open?'
'The kinchin lay.'
'The kinchins, my dear,' said Fagin, 'is the young children that's sent on errands by their mothers, with sixpences and shillings; and the lay is just to take their money away-they've always got it ready in their hands,--then knock 'em into the kennel, and walk off very slow, as if there were nothing else the matter but a child fallen down and hurt itself.
Ha! ha!
CHAPTER thirty four
It was the wedding day of four happy people.
The day was bright, the sky blue, and Sherwood had taken upon itself early summer raiment.
The old church of Nottingham was already crowded to excess.
Richard meant to employ these fellows shrewdly and test their loyalty.
The hour was reached, and at once a small company was seen issuing forth from Nottingham Castle.
Arthur a Bland, with a gold chain about his neck, given him by the knight Sir Richard, walked with Middle the Tinker on his left and Much the Miller on his right.
They came to the lych gate, and the crowd jostled itself in its admiration.
As they walked, rather consciously, up the narrow path between the smiling ranks of their fellows the crowd cheered them radiantly.
For Robin Hood and Will Scarlett the Bishop had enmity and contempt, but towards the Earls of Huntingdon and Nottingham this time serving man could only profess an abundance of respect.
The brides were to be escorted from Gamewell by no other person than the King himself.
He was to give them both in marriage, and had promised them jewels and to spare when they were come to Court.
The people were wild with joy at having their King amongst them like this.
As the King jumped down from his horse before the lych gate, and held out his strong hand to help the brides from off their milk white mares, the whole place became alive with excitement and rapture.
Little maids, with baskets of violets and primroses, flung their offerings prettily under the feet of the two beauteous blushing brides, who leaned so timidly upon the King's proud arms.
The Bishop had spoken the Latin service impressively and with unction.
In the first row stood Monceux, in all the pomp of his shrievalty, with his councilmen and aldermen.
Master Simeon, with face leaner than ever and inturning eyes, glared impotently at the chief actors in this historic scene.
But now that the double marriage was nearly made she suddenly appeared, thrusting her way rudely through the gathered crowd at the church door.
She was wild eyed, dishevelled, her dress fastened all awry.
Folks looked once at her, and then exchanged glances between themselves.
"Stay this mockery of marriage, my lord," she cried, fiercely facing the Bishop.
Is no crime too great for you?"
Seize this woman, some of you, and take her without. I will deal with her later." He imperiously signed to his guards, and at once the demoiselle was gripped harshly by both arms.
At the door of the church she turned once as though to renew her preposterous charges, but contented herself merely with a single glance towards them of malignant hate.
Then she was gone; and people stirred themselves uneasily, as folks do when having been within touch of the plague.
When he saw that she was gone, that the dreadful episode was done, he gasped hurriedly and sat down.
Then all signed their names in the church books, and the trumpeters and heralds made music for them.
They returned through the streets of Nottingham, gay now with flags and merry with a joyful populace.
All the treasure that they had accumulated in their caves at Barnesdale the King's bowmen freely distributed this day.
All were happy-the nightmare of unjust dealings, of Norman oppression, of laws for the poor and none for the rich, was ended.
The King had said it, and the King had already made good the promise in his words.
Sir Richard of the Lee and his son became members of the Star Chamber, with grants of land in perpetuity.
Turning to Marian, the King wished her every joy that she could wish herself, and gave to her the lands of Broadweald in Lancashire to hold in her own right for ever.
"Thus you shall have wealth to share with your Robin; and I counsel you both to make good use of your days.
My subjects who are loyal to me shall have no cause to regret it.
Help her to administer her riches, Geoffrey, wisely and well; and be you all ready when I shall call upon you.
CHAPTER fifteen.
CHOICE OF PUNISHMENTS.
Then the Bishop came in with the Lady Superior, and the Abbess who had charge of the kitchen when I left.
The Bishop read to me three punishments of which he said, I could take my choice.
First.--To fast five days in the fasting room.
Third.--To fast four days, in the cell.
At first, I thought I did not care, and I said I had no choice about it; but when I came to see the rooms, I was thankful that I was not allowed to abide by that decision.
I was blindfolded, and taken to the lime room first.
At length we entered a room where the atmosphere seemed laden with hot vapor.
Around the sides of the room, a great number of hooks and chains were fastened to the wall, and a large hook hung in the center overhead.
The priest directed me to stand upon the bench, and turning to the men, he bade them raise the door.
Surprised and terrified, I stood wondering what was to come next.
At my feet yawned a deep pit, from which, arose a suffocating vapor, so hot, it almost scorched my face and nearly stopped my breath.
The priest pointed to the heaving, tumbling billows of smoke that were rolling below, and; asked, "How would you like to be thrown into the lime?" "Not at all," I gasped, in a voice scarcely audible, "it would burn me to death." I suppose he thought I was sufficiently frightened, for he bade his men close the door.
But the sight that met my eyes when my blinder was removed, I cannot describe, nor the sensations with which I gazed upon it.
I can only give the reader some faint idea of the place, which, they said, was called the fasting room, and here incorrigible offenders fasted until they starved to death.
Nor was this all.
Their dead bodies were not even allowed a decent burial, but were suffered to remain in the place where they died, until the work of death was complete and dust returned to dust.
Thus the atmosphere became a deadly poison to the next poor victim who was left to breathe the noxious effluvia of corruption and decay.
In this room were placed several large iron kettles, so deep that a person could sit in them, and many of them contained the remains of human beings.
In one the corpse looked as though it had been dead but a short time.
Was I to meet a fate like this?
I might, perchance, escape it for that time, but what assurance had I that I was not ultimately destined to such an end?
These thoughts filled my mind, as I followed the priest from the room; and for a long time I continued to speculate upon what I had seen.
They called it the fasting room; but if fasting were the only object, why were they placed in those kettles, instead of being allowed to sit on chairs or benches, or even on the floor?
Why were they not made of wood?
It would have answered the purpose quite as well, if fasting or starvation were the only objects in view.
Then came the fearful suggestion, were these kettles ever heated?
The thought was too shocking to be cherished for a moment; but I could not drive it from my mind.
One end of a long chain was fastened around my waist, and the other firmly secured to an iron ring in the floor; but the chain, though large and heavy, was long enough to allow me to go all over the room.
I could not see how it was lighted, but it must have been in some artificial manner, for it was quite as light at night, as in the day.
I wished to know whether it would really bite me or not, but it looked so frightful I did not dare to hazard the experiment.
I believed them all to be instruments of torture, and I thought they gave me a long chain in the hope and expectation that my curiosity would lead me into some of the numerous traps the room contained.
He would blow white froth from his mouth, but he never spoke to me, and when he went out, he locked the door after him and took away the key.
And what will he do with it?
Or, are the priests on such friendly terms with his satanic majesty that they lend him their keys?
CHAPTER three.
Fighting the Flames With Dynamite.
Shaken by earthquake, swept by flames, the water supply cut off by the breaking of the mains, the authorities of the doomed city for a time stood appalled.
What could be done to stay the fierce march of the flames which were sweeping resistlessly over palace and hovel alike, over stately hall and miserable hut?
Water was not to be had; what was to take its place?
Nothing remained but to meet ruin with ruin, to make a desert in the path of the fire and thus seek to stop its march.
They had dynamite, gunpowder and other explosives, and in the frightful exigency there was nothing else to be used.
While the soldiers under General Funston took military charge of the city, squads of cavalry and troops of infantry patrolling the streets and guarding the sections that had not yet been touched by the flames, Mayor Schmitz and Chief of Police Dinan sprang into the breach and prepared to make a desperate charge against the platoons of the fire. This was not all that was needed to be done.
From the "Barbary Coast," as the resort of the vicious and criminal classes was called, hordes of wretches poured out as soon as night fell, seeking to slip through the guards and loot stores and rob the dead in the burning section.
Orders were given to the soldiers to kill all who were engaged in such work, and these orders were carried out.
An associated Press reporter saw three of these thieves shot and fatally wounded, and doubtless others of them were similarly dealt with elsewhere.
A band of fire fighters was quickly organized by the Mayor and Chief of Police, and the devoted firemen put themselves in the face of the flames, determined to do their utmost to stay them in their course.
Cut off from the use of their accustomed engines and water streams, which might have been effective if brought into play at the beginning of the struggle, there was nothing to work with but the dynamite cartridge and the gunpowder mine, and they set bravely to work to do what they could with these.
On every side the roar of explosions could be heard, and the crash of falling walls came to the ear, while people were forced to leave buildings which still stood, but which it was decided must be felled.
Frequently a crash of stone and brick, followed by a cloud of dust, gave warning to pedestrians that destruction was going on in the forefront of the flames, and that travel in such localities was unsafe.
FIGHTING THE FLAMES.
One instance of the peril they ran may be given.
While he was in the building the explosion took place, and he received injuries that seemed likely to prove fatal, his skull being fractured and several bones broken, while he was injured internally.
In the early morning, when the fire reached the municipal building on Portsmouth Square, the nurses, with the aid of soldiers, got out fifty bodies which were in the temporary morgue and a number of patients from the receiving hospital. Just after they reached the street with their gruesome charge a building was blown up, and the flying bricks and splinters came falling upon them.
The nurses fortunately escaped harm, but several of the soldiers were hurt, and had to be taken with the other patients to the out of doors Presidio hospital.
The Southern Pacific Hospital, at Fourteenth and Missouri Streets, was among the buildings destroyed by dynamite, the patients having been removed to places of safety, and the Linda Vista and the Pleasanton, two large family hotels on Jones Street, in the better part of the city, were also among those blown up to stay the progress of the conflagration.
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE FIRE.
As day broke the flames seized upon this beautiful structure, and the Council was forced to retreat to new quarters.
They finally met in the North End Police Station, on Sacramento Street, and there entered actively upon their duties of seeking to check the progress of the flames, maintain order in the city and control and direct the host of fugitives, many of whom, still in a state of semi panic, were moving helplessly to and fro and sadly needed wise counsels and a helping hand.
The fire fighters meanwhile kept up their indefatigable work under the direction of the Mayor and the chief of their department.
The cloud of despair grew darker still as the report spread that the city's supply of dynamite had given out.
"No more dynamite!
"No more dynamite!
O God! no more dynamite!
A NEW SUPPLY OF EXPLOSIVES.
Had all been like these the entire city would have been doomed, but there were those at the head of affairs who never for a moment gave up their resolution.
Hitherto much of the work had been ignorantly and carelessly done, and by the hasty and premature use of explosives more harm than good had been occasioned.
As the fire continued to spread in spite of the heroic work of the fighting corps, the Committee of Safety called a meeting at noon on Friday and decided to blow up all the residences on the east side of Van Ness Avenue, between Golden Gate and Pacific Avenues, a distance of one mile.
They declared that should the fire cross Van Ness Avenue and the wind continue its earlier direction toward the west, the destruction of San Francisco would be virtually complete.
The district west of Van Ness Avenue and north of McAllister constitutes the finest part of the metropolis.
Here are located all of the finer homes of the well to do and wealthier classes, and the resolution to destroy them was the last resort of desperation.
Hundreds of police, regiments of soldiers and scores of volunteers were sent into the doomed district to warn the people to flee.
They heroically responded to the demand of law and went bravely on their way, leaving their loved homes and trudging painfully over the pavements with the little they could carry away of their treasured possessions.
The reply of a grizzled fire engineer standing at O'Farrell Street and Van Ness Avenue, beside a blackened engine, may not have been as terse as that of Hugo's guardsman at Waterloo, but the pathos of it must have been as great.
"We are waiting for it to come.
When it gets here we will make one more stand.
If it crosses Van Ness Avenue the city is gone."
THE SAVERS OF THE CITY.
Yet the work now to be done was much too important to be left to the hands of untrained volunteers.
Skilled engineers were needed, men used to the scientific handling of explosives, and it was men of this kind who finally saved what is left to day of the city.
Three men saved San Francisco, so far as any San Francisco existed after the fire had worked its will, these three constituting the dynamite squad who faced and defied the demon at Van Ness Avenue.
When the burning city seemed doomed and the flames lit the sky farther and farther to the west, Admiral McCalla sent a trio of his most trusted men from Mare Island with orders to check the conflagration at any cost of property.
With them they brought a ton and a half of guncotton.
The terrific power of the explosive was equal to the maniac determination of the fire.
Captain MacBride was in charge of the squad, Chief Gunner Adamson placed the charges and the third gunner set them off.
A million dollars' worth of property, noble residences and worthless shacks alike, were blown to drifting dust, but that destruction broke the fire and sent the raging flames back over their own charred path.
The whole east side of Van Ness Avenue, from the Golden Gate to Greenwich, a distance of twenty two blocks, or a mile and a half, was dynamited a block deep, though most of the structures as yet had stood untouched by spark or cinder.
Not one charge failed.
Not one building stood upon its foundation.
Every pound of guncotton did its work, and though the ruins burned, it was but feebly.
From Golden Gate Avenue north the fire crossed the wide street in but one place.
That was at the Claus Spreckels place, on the corner of California Street.
Yet they made their way to the foundations, carrying their explosives, despite the furnace like heat.
The charge had to be placed so swiftly and the fuse lit in such a hurry that the explosion was not quite successful from the trained viewpoint of the gunners.
But though the walls still stood, it was only an empty victory for the fire, as bare brick and smoking ruins are poor food for flames.
Captain MacBride's dynamiting squad had realized that a stand was hopeless except on Van Ness Avenue, their decision thus coinciding with that of the authorities.
They could have forced their explosives farther in the burning section, but not a pound of guncotton could be or was wasted.
The ruined blocks of the wide thoroughfare formed a trench through the clustered structures that the conflagration, wild as it was, could not leap.
The desolate waste straight through the heart of the city remained a mute witness to the most heroic and effective work of the whole calamity.
Three men did this, and when their work was over and what stood of the city rested quietly for the first time, they departed as modestly as they had come.
They were ordered to save San Francisco, and they obeyed orders, and Captain MacBride and his two gunners made history on that dreadful night.
They stayed the march of the conflagration at that critical point, leaving it no channel to spread except along the wharf region, in which its final force was spent.
One side of Van Ness Avenue was gone; the other remained, the fire leaping the broad open space only feebly in a few places, where it was easily extinguished.
In this connection it is well to put on record an interesting circumstance.
This is that there is one place within pistol shot of San Francisco that the earthquake did not touch, that did not lose a chimney or feel a tremor.
That spot is Alcatraz Island.
CHAPTER nine.
Disaster Spreads Over the Golden State
The first news that the world received of the earthquake came direct from San Francisco and was confined largely to descriptions of the disaster which had overwhelmed that city.
It was so sudden, so appalling, so tragic in its nature, that for the time being it quite overshadowed the havoc and misery wrought in a number of other California towns of lesser note.
THE DESTRUCTION OF SANTA ROSA.
In Santa Rosa, sixty miles to the north of San Francisco, and one of the most beautiful towns of California, practically every building was destroyed or badly damaged.
The brick and stone business blocks, together with the public buildings, were thrown down.
The Court House, Hall of Records, the Occidental and Santa Rosa Hotels, the Athenaeum Theatre, the new Masonic Temple, Odd Fellows' Block, all the banks, everything went, and in all the city not one brick or stone building was left standing, except the California Northwestern Depot.
From the ruins of the fallen houses fifty eight bodies were taken out and interred during the first few days, and the total of dead and injured was close to a hundred.
The money loss at this small city is estimated at three million dollars.
The destruction of Santa Rosa gave rise to general sorrow among the residents of the interior of the State.
It was one of the show towns of California, and not only one of the most prosperous cities in the fine county of Sonoma, but one of the most picturesque in the State. Surrounding it there were miles of orchards, vineyards and corn fields. The beautiful drives of the city were adorned with bowers of roses, which everywhere were seen growing about the homes of the people.
In its vicinity are the famous gardens of Luther Burbank, the "California wizard," but these fortunately escaped injury.
At San Jose, another very beautiful city of over twenty thousand population, not a single brick or stone building of two stories or over was left standing.
Among those wrecked were the Hall of justice, just completed at a cost of three hundred thousand dollars; the new High School, the Presbyterian Church and saint Patrick's Cathedral.
Numbers of people were caught in the ruins and maimed or killed.
The death list appears to have been small, but the property damage was not less than five million dollars.
The Agnew State Insane Asylum, in the vicinity of San Jose, was entirely destroyed, more than half the inmates being killed or injured.
THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY.
The Leland Stanford junior, University, at Palo Alto (about thirty miles south of San Francisco), felt the full force of the earthquake and was badly wrecked.
Only two lives were lost as a result of the earthquake, one of a student, the other of a fireman, but eight students were injured more or less seriously.
The damage to the buildings is estimated by President Jordan to amount to about four million dollars.
The memorial church, with its twelve marble figures of the apostles, each weighing two tons, was badly injured by the fall of its Gothic spire, which crashed through the roof and demolished much of the interior; the great entrance archway was split in twain and wrecked; so, too, were the library, the gymnasium and the power house.
A number of other buildings in the outer quadrangle and some of the small workshops were seriously damaged.
Encina Hall and the inner quadrangle were practically uninjured, and the bulk of the books, collections and apparatus escaped damage.
THE EARTHQUAKE AT OTHER CITIES.
At Alameda, on the bay opposite San Francisco, a score of chimneys were shaken down and other injuries done.
Railroad tracks were twisted, and over six hundred feet of track of the Oakland Transit Company's railway sank four feet.
The total damage done amounted to probably two hundred thousand dollars, but no lives were lost.
At Los Panos several buildings were wrecked, causing damage to the extent of seventy five thousand dollars, but no lives were lost.
At Loma Prieta the earthquake caused a mine house to slip down the side of a mountain, ten men being buried in the ruins.
Fort Bragg, one of the principal lumbering towns in Mendocino County, was practically wiped out by fire following the earthquake, but out of a population of five thousand only one was killed, though scores were injured.
The town of Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, suffered considerable damage from twisted structures, fallen walls and broken chimneys, the greatest injury being in the collapse of the town hall and the ruin of the deaf and dumb asylum.
The University of California, situated here, was fortunate in escaping injury, it being reported that not a building was harmed in the slightest degree.
Another public edifice of importance and interest, in a different section of the State, the famous Lick Astronomical Observatory, was equally fortunate, no damage being done to the buildings or the instruments.
AT THE STATE UNIVERSITY.
Salinas, a town down the coast near Monterey, suffered severely, the place being to a large extent destroyed, with an estimated loss of over one million dollars.
The Spreckels' sugar factory and a score of other buildings were reported ruined and a number of lives lost.
During the succeeding week several other shocks of some strength were reported from this town.
Thus the ruinous work of the earthquake stretched over a broad track of prosperous, peaceful and happy country, embracing one of the best sections of California, laying waste not only the towns in its path, but doing much damage to ranch houses and country residences.
Strange manifestations of nature were reported from the interior, where the ground was opened in many places like a ploughed field.
Great rents in the earth were reported, and for many miles north from Los Angeles miniature geysers are said to have spouted volcano like streams of hot mud.
Railroad tracks in some localities were badly injured, sinking or lifting, and being put out of service until repaired.
In fact, the ruinous effects of the earthquake immensely exceeded those of any similar catastrophe ever before known in the United States, and when the destruction done by the succeeding conflagration in San Francisco is taken into account the California earthquake of nineteen o six takes rank with the most destructive of those recorded in history.
Chapter ten
A MARRIAGE CONTRACT
He invests his property.
He goes, in a condescending amateurish way, into the City, attends meetings of Directors, and has to do with traffic in Shares.
Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares.
Where does he come from?
Shares.
Where is he going to?
What are his tastes?
Shares. Has he any principles?
What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares.
Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything?
Wards of his, perhaps?
Yet that can scarcely be, for they are older than himself. Veneering has been in their confidence throughout, and has done much to lure them to the altar.
He has mentioned to Twemlow how he said to Mrs Veneering, 'Anastatia, this must be a match.' He has mentioned to Twemlow how he regards Sophronia Akershem (the mature young lady) in the light of a sister, and Alfred Lammle (the mature young gentleman) in the light of a brother.
He has answered, 'Not exactly.' Whether Sophronia was adopted by his mother?
He has answered, 'Not precisely so.' Twemlow's hand has gone to his forehead with a lost air.
'My dear Twemlow,' says Veneering, 'your ready response to Anastatia's unceremonious invitation is truly kind, and like an old, old friend.
Not, however, that he has the least notion of its being his own case.
'Our friends, Alfred and Sophronia,' pursues Veneering the veiled prophet: 'our friends Alfred and Sophronia, you will be glad to hear, my dear fellows, are going to be married.
As my wife and I make it a family affair the entire direction of which we take upon ourselves, of course our first step is to communicate the fact to our family friends.'
('Oh!' thinks Twemlow, with his eyes on Podsnap, 'then there are only two of us, and he's the other.')
'I did hope,' Veneering goes on, 'to have had Lady Tippins to meet you; but she is always in request, and is unfortunately engaged.'
'Mortimer Lightwood,' resumes Veneering, 'whom you both know, is out of town; but he writes, in his whimsical manner, that as we ask him to be bridegroom's best man when the ceremony takes place, he will not refuse, though he doesn't see what he has to do with it.'
('Oh!' thinks Twemlow, with his eyes rolling, 'then there are four of us, and HE'S the other.')
('Then,' thinks Twemlow, with his eyes shut, 'there are si-' But here collapses and does not completely recover until dinner is over and the Analytical has been requested to withdraw.)
'We now come,' says Veneering, 'to the point, the real point, of our little family consultation.
Sophronia, having lost both father and mother, has no one to give her away.'
'My dear Podsnap, no
Firstly, because I couldn't take so much upon myself when I have respected family friends to remember.
Secondly, because I am not so vain as to think that I look the part.
Thirdly, because Anastatia is a little superstitious on the subject and feels averse to my giving away anybody until baby is old enough to be married.'
'My dear Mr Podsnap, it's very foolish I know, but I have an instinctive presentiment that if Hamilton gave away anybody else first, he would never give away baby.' Thus Mrs Veneering; with her open hands pressed together, and each of her eight aquiline fingers looking so very like her one aquiline nose that the bran new jewels on them seem necessary for distinction's sake.
'But, my dear Podsnap,' quoth Veneering, 'there IS a tried friend of our family who, I think and hope you will agree with me, Podsnap, is the friend on whom this agreeable duty almost naturally devolves.
That friend,' saying the words as if the company were about a hundred and fifty in number, 'is now among us.
That friend is Twemlow.'
'Certainly!' From Podsnap.
'That friend,' Veneering repeats with greater firmness, 'is our dear good Twemlow.
Also how the fair bride was married from the house of Hamilton Veneering, Esquire, of Stucconia, and was given away by Melvin Twemlow, Esquire, of Duke Street, saint James's, second cousin to Lord Snigsworth, of Snigsworthy Park.
While perusing which composition, Twemlow makes some opaque approach to perceiving that if the Reverend Blank Blank and the Reverend Dash Dash fail, after this introduction, to become enrolled in the list of Veneering's dearest and oldest friends, they will have none but themselves to thank for it.
And after her, appears Alfred (whom Twemlow has seen once in his lifetime), to do the same and to make a pasty sort of glitter, as if he were constructed for candle light only, and had been let out into daylight by some grand mistake.
A waste, a waste, a waste, my Twemlow!' And so drops asleep, and has galvanic starts all over him.
Who, who, who? Why, why, why?') begins to be dyed and varnished for the interesting occasion.
Whereabout in the bonnet and drapery announced by her name, any fragment of the real woman may be concealed, is perhaps known to her maid; but you could easily buy all you see of her, in Bond Street; or you might scalp her, and peel her, and scrape her, and make two Lady Tippinses out of her, and yet not penetrate to the genuine article.
She has a large gold eye glass, has Lady Tippins, to survey the proceedings with.
'Mortimer, you wretch,' says Lady Tippins, turning the eyeglass about and about, 'where is your charge, the bridegroom?'
'Miserable!
Is that the way you do your duty?'
Eugene is also in attendance, with a pervading air upon him of having presupposed the ceremony to be a funeral, and of being disappointed.
But, hark!
A carriage at the gate, and Mortimer's man arrives, looking rather like a spurious Mephistopheles and an unacknowledged member of that gentleman's family.
Whom Lady Tippins, surveying through her eye glass, considers a fine man, and quite a catch; and of whom Mortimer remarks, in the lowest spirits, as he approaches, 'I believe this is my fellow, confound him!' More carriages at the gate, and lo the rest of the characters.
Whom Lady Tippins, standing on a cushion, surveying through the eye glass, thus checks off.
'Bride; five and forty if a day, thirty shillings a yard, veil fifteen pound, pocket handkerchief a present.
Bridesmaids; kept down for fear of outshining bride, consequently not girls, twelve and sixpence a yard, Veneering's flowers, snub nosed one rather pretty but too conscious of her stockings, bonnets three pound ten.
Mrs Veneering; never saw such velvet, say two thousand pounds as she stands, absolute jeweller's window, father must have been a pawnbroker, or how could these people do it?
Attendant unknowns; pokey.'
Ceremony performed, register signed, Lady Tippins escorted out of sacred edifice by Veneering, carriages rolling back to Stucconia, servants with favours and flowers, Veneering's house reached, drawing rooms most magnificent.
Here, the Podsnaps await the happy party; Mr Podsnap, with his hair brushes made the most of; that imperial rocking horse, Mrs Podsnap, majestically skittish.
Veneering launching himself upon this trustee as his oldest friend (which makes seven, Twemlow thought), and confidentially retiring with him into the conservatory, it is understood that Veneering is his co trustee, and that they are arranging about the fortune.
Pokey unknowns, amazed to find how intimately they know Veneering, pluck up spirit, fold their arms, and begin to contradict him before breakfast.
What time Mrs Veneering, carrying baby dressed as a bridesmaid, flits about among the company, emitting flashes of many coloured lightning from diamonds, emeralds, and rubies.
The Analytical, in course of time achieving what he feels to be due to himself in bringing to a dignified conclusion several quarrels he has on hand with the pastrycook's men, announces breakfast.
Splendid cake, covered with Cupids, silver, and true lovers' knots.
Splendid bracelet, produced by Veneering before going down, and clasped upon the arm of bride.
Another dismal circumstance is, that Veneering, having the captivating Tippins on one side of him and the bride's aunt on the other, finds it immensely difficult to keep the peace.
And this snort being regular in its reproduction, at length comes to be expected by the company, who make embarrassing pauses when it is falling due, and by waiting for it, render it more emphatic when it comes.
Aware of her enemy, Lady Tippins tries a youthful sally or two, and tries the eye glass; but, from the impenetrable cap and snorting armour of the stoney aunt all weapons rebound powerless.
Another objectionable circumstance is, that the pokey unknowns support each other in being unimpressible.
They persist in not being frightened by the gold and silver camels, and they are banded together to defy the elaborately chased ice pails.
They even seem to unite in some vague utterance of the sentiment that the landlord and landlady will make a pretty good profit out of this, and they almost carry themselves like customers.
In which state of affairs, the usual ceremonies rather droop and flag, and the splendid cake when cut by the fair hand of the bride has but an indigestible appearance.
All over, that is to say, for the time being.
But, there is another time to come, and it comes in about a fortnight, and it comes to Mr and Mrs Lammle on the sands at Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight.
As if he were of the Mephistopheles family indeed, and had walked with a drooping tail.
Thus he begins after a long silence, when Sophronia flashes fiercely, and turns upon him.
Mr Lammle falls silent again, and they walk as before.
Mrs Lammle opens her nostrils and bites her under lip; Mr Lammle takes his gingerous whiskers in his left hand, and, bringing them together, frowns furtively at his beloved, out of a thick gingerous bush.
'The what?'
He is at her side again in a pace or two, and he retorts, 'That is not what you said.
You said disingenuousness.'
'What if I did?'
'There is no "if" in the case.
You did.'
And what of it?'
'What of it?' says Mr Lammle. 'Have you the face to utter the word to me?'
'The face, too!' replied Mrs Lammle, staring at him with cold scorn. 'Pray, how dare you, sir, utter the word to me?'
'I never did.'
After a little more walking and a little more silence, Mr Lammle breaks the latter.
You claim a right to ask me do I mean to tell you.
Do I mean to tell you what?'
'That you are a man of property?'
'no'
'Then you married me on false pretences?'
'no'
'If you were so dull a fortune hunter that you deceived yourself, or if you were so greedy and grasping that you were over willing to be deceived by appearances, is it my fault, you adventurer?' the lady demands, with great asperity.
'I asked Veneering, and he told me you were rich.'
'Veneering!' with great contempt.' And what does Veneering know about me!'
'Was he not your trustee?'
I have no trustee, but the one you saw on the day when you fraudulently married me.
Mr Lammle bestows a by no means loving look upon the partner of his joys and sorrows, and he mutters something; but checks himself.
'Question for question.
'You made me suppose you so.
'But you asked somebody, too.
'I asked Veneering.'
'Neither will I,' returns the bridegroom.
With that, they walk again; she, making those angry spirts in the sand; he, dragging that dejected tail.
A taunting roar comes from the sea, and the far out rollers mount upon one another, to look at the entrapped impostors, and to join in impish and exultant gambols.
'Do you pretend to believe,' Mrs Lammle resumes, sternly, 'when you talk of my marrying you for worldly advantages, that it was within the bounds of reasonable probability that I would have married you for yourself?'
What do you pretend to believe?'
I have originated nothing.
'Was mine!' the bride repeats, and her parasol breaks in her angry hand.
'Throw it away,' he coolly recommends as to the parasol; 'you have made it useless; you look ridiculous with it.'
Whereupon she calls him in her rage, 'A deliberate villain,' and so casts the broken thing from her as that it strikes him in falling.
Then she says that if she had the courage to kill herself, she would do it.
Then she calls him vile impostor.
Then she asks him, why, in the disappointment of his base speculation, he does not take her life with his own hand, under the present favourable circumstances.
Then she cries again.
Also his livid lips are parted at last, as if he were breathless with running. Yet he is not.
She sits upon her stone, and takes no heed of him.
'Get up, I tell you.'
Raising her head, she looks contemptuously in his face, and repeats, 'You tell me!
Tell me, forsooth!'
Do you hear?
Get up.'
In a nut shell, there's the state of the case.'
'You sought me out-'
I am disappointed and cut a poor figure.'
'Am I no one?'
You, too, are disappointed and cut a poor figure.'
'An injured figure!'
'You are now cool enough, Sophronia, to see that you can't be injured without my being equally injured; and that therefore the mere word is not to the purpose.
When I look back, I wonder how I can have been such a fool as to take you to so great an extent upon trust.'
'And when I look back-' the bride cries, interrupting.
'And when you look back, you wonder how you can have been-you'll excuse the word?'
I cannot get rid of you; you cannot get rid of me.
A mutual understanding follows, and I think it may carry us through.
Here I split my discourse (give me your arm, Sophronia), into three heads, to make it shorter and plainer.
Firstly, it's enough to have been done, without the mortification of being known to have been done.
So we agree to keep the fact to ourselves.
'Possible!
We have pretended well enough to one another.
Agreed.
Secondly, we owe the Veneerings a grudge, and we owe all other people the grudge of wishing them to be taken in, as we ourselves have been taken in.
Agreed.'
'We come smoothly to thirdly.
So are you, my dear.
So are many people.
We agree to keep our own secret, and to work together in furtherance of our own schemes.'
'What schemes?'
She answers, after a little hesitation, 'I suppose so.
Agreed.'
Now, Sophronia, only half a dozen words more. We know one another perfectly.
To wind up all:--You have shown temper today, Sophronia.
So, the happy pair, with this hopeful marriage contract thus signed, sealed, and delivered, repair homeward.
If, when those infernal finger marks were on the white and breathless countenance of Alfred Lammle, Esquire, they denoted that he conceived the purpose of subduing his dear wife Mrs Alfred Lammle, by at once divesting her of any lingering reality or pretence of self respect, the purpose would seem to have been presently executed.
The mature young lady has mighty little need of powder, now, for her downcast face, as he escorts her in the light of the setting sun to their abode of bliss.
It reached down a tiny pink paw and touched a leaf of the brave red rose which every day lies before the skull.
It plucked the leaf, which made a buckler for its small throbbing breast.
It spoke:
The rose and the skull love one another. They understand.
We do not understand.
"It is peace upon the land.
He smiles, but he is sad.
He crosses the wide sea, but cares not.
He goes by saddle, and the mountains hem him in, but now he smiles the more.
See, the trail is gone!
Do you see the red rose on his breast?
Always the rose is there.
Do you see him look up at the mountains, about him at the trees?
Do you see him lay his head upon the earth?
Do you still see his smile, the smile which is weary and yet not afraid?
"Look!
It is the time of war.
There is music.
The blood stings. The heart leaps.
The soul exults.
Flickering of light on steel, the flash of servant forces used to slay, the reverberant growl of engines made for death, the passing of men in cloth and men in blankets, the tramp of hurrying hoofs, the falling of men who die-can you see this-can you catch the horror, the exultation, the joy of this, I say?
They come, they go; they run their race, and it is all.
"Here are those who ride against those who slay.
It is he who said in the mountains that riddle of the end and the beginning-who knew that to the heart of nature we must come, for either the end or the beginning of this, our life.
I think he rides to battle with the rose, knowing what fate will come.
"You know of this biting whistle in the air-this small thing that smites unseen?
Do you know the mowing of the death scythes? Hark!
See! he of the rose is bitten.
He has fallen.
He was so brave and strong!
It is red.
The rose upon his breast is red.
His face is white, but still the smile is there; and now it is calmer and more sweet, though still he whispers, 'I know not if it be the end or the beginning!'
"He is alone with Nature again.
The heavens weep for him.
The earth pillows him.
He sleeps.
It is all.
It is done.
It is the way of life.
It is the end and the beginning.
"He loved the valley, the mountain, the grass, the rose.
Now, since he cherished the rose so well, see, the rose will not leave him.
Out of the dust it rises, it grows, it blooms. Against his lips it presses.
It is the beginning!
He loved, he thought, he knew.
He is not dead He is with Nature.
It is but the beginning!
"Let the rose press against his lips in an eternal, pure caress. There is no end.
They understand.
We do not yet understand."
The pageant of the hills, the panorama of the battle, faded and were gone.
The table and the books came back.
THE BEAST TERRIBLE
And so each shadow found its partner in a ray of firelight, and there they danced.
They danced about the tangled front of the big bison's head which hung upon the wall.
They crossed the grinning skull of the gray wolf.
They brought forth to view in alternate eclipse and definition the great, grim bear's head which hung above the mantel.
Every trophy gathered in years of the chase, once perhaps prized, now perhaps forgotten, was brought into evidence, nor could one escape noting each one, and giving to each, for this one night more, the story which belonged to it.
I sat and looked upon them all, and so there passed a panorama of the years.
"There," thought I, "is the stag which once fell far in the pine woods of the North.
This antelope takes me back to the hard, white Plains.
These huge antlers could grow only amid the forests of the Rockies.
That wolf-how many of the hounds he mangled, I remember; and the giant bear, it was a good fight he made, perhaps dangerous, had the old rifle there been less sure. Yes, yes, of course, I could recall each incident.
Of course, they all were thrilling, exciting, delightful, glorious, all those things.
Of course, the heart must have leaped in those days.
The blood must have surged, in those moments.
The pulse must have grown hard, the mouth must have been dry with the ardor of the chase, at those times.
But now?
But why?
Does the heart leap to night, do the veins fill with the rush of the blood, tumultuous in the joy of stimulus or danger?
Why does not the old eagerness come back?
Which of these trophies is the one to bring this back again?
"I know," said the Singing Mouse, which unknown to me had come and placed itself upon the table.
"I know." And it climbed upon my arm which lay across the table.
"Maker of dreams, tell me what you know to night."
I looked at it so closely that a dream came upon my eyes, so that the voice of the Singing Mouse sounded far away and faint, though it was still clear and resonant in its own peculiar way and very fine and sweet.
"I will tell you which trophy you most prize," it said.
And so I gazed where the Singing Mouse pointed, quite beyond the dusty walls, and there I saw as it had said.
I heard not the thunder of the hoofs of buffalo, nor the faint crack of the twig beneath the panther's foot.
I saw not the lurching gallop of the long jawed wolf, nor the high, elastic bounding of the deer.
The level swinging speed of the antelope, the slinking of the lynx, the crashing flight of the wapiti-no, it was none of these that came to mind; nor did the mountains nor the plains, nor the wilderness of the pines.
But when the Singing Mouse whispered, "Do you see?" I murmured in reply, "I see it all again!"
I saw the small, low hills, well covered with short oaks and hazel bushes, which rolled on away from the village, far out, almost to the Delectable Mountains, which are well known to be upon the edge of the world.
Through these low hills a winding road led on, a road whose end no man had ever reached, but which went to places where, no doubt, many wonders were-perhaps even to the Delectable Mountains; for so a wise man once had said, his words harkened to with awe.
This was a pleasant road, lined with brave sumacs, with bushes of the wild blackberry, and with small hazel trees which soon would offer fruit for the regular harvest of the fall, this same to be spread for drying on the woodshed roof.
It was perhaps wise curiosity as to the crop of nuts which had brought thus far from home these two figures-an enormous distance, perhaps at least a mile beyond what heretofore had been the utmost limit of their wanderings.
It was not, perhaps, safe to venture so far.
There were known to be strange creatures in these woods, one knew not what.
It was therefore well that the younger boy should clasp tightly the hand of the older, him who bore with such confidence the bow and arrows, potent weapons of those days gone by!
They scarce dared fare farther on, but yet would not turn back.
The sudden clanging note of the jay near by caused them to stop, heart in mouth for the moment.
Strange rustlings in the leaves made them cross the road, and step more quickly.
Yet the cawing of a crow across the woods seemed friendly, and a small brown bird which hopped ahead along the road was intimate and kind, and thus touched the founts of bravery in the two venturous hearts.
Certainly they would go on. It was no matter about the sun
This was the valley of Ajalon, perhaps, of which one had heard in the class at Sabbath school. And surely this was a good, droning, yellow bodied bee-where did the bees go to when they rose up straight into the air?
And this little mouse, what became of it in winter?
And-ah!
What was that-that awful burst of sound?
Clutch closer, little brother, though both be pale!
How should either of you yet know the thunderous flight of the wild grouse, this great bird which whirled away through the brown leaves of the oaks?
Father must be asked about this tremendous, startling bird.
Meantime, the heart having begun to beat again, let the two adventurers press yet a little farther on.
And so, with fears and tremblings, with doubts and joys, through briers and flowers, through hindrances and recompenses, along this crooked, winding, unknown road which led on out into the Unknown, they wandered, as in life we all are wandering to day.
But hush!
Listen!
What is it, this sound, approaching, coming directly toward the road?
Surely, it must be the footfall of some large animal, this cadenced rustling on the leaves!
It comes-it will cross near-there, it has turned, it is near the road!
Look!
There it is, a great animal, half the length of one's arm, with bushy, long red tail arched high for easier running, its grayish coat showing in the bars of sunlight, its eyes bright and black and keen.
Each heart now thumped hard with the surging blood it bore; but it was now the blood of hunters and not of boys.
Forward!
Victory!
But ho! the creature rallies-recovers!
It gathers its forces, it flies!
Pursuit then, but pursuit apparently useless, for the animal has found refuge deep in this hollow stump, beyond the reach of longest mortal arm!
Roar, grouse, and clamor on, all ye jangling jays.
The heart of the hunter has now been born for each. Fear and defeat are known no longer in the compass of their thoughts.
Follow, follow, follow!
So spake the good old savagery of the natural man.
Better for this creature had it never disturbed these two with its footfalls approaching among the leaves.
The sun forgot its part, and sank red, though reluctant, beyond the Delectable Mountains.
Be kindly, for by moonlight one still may labor, and here is labor to be done.
Every blade in the Barlow knives is broken.
The hole in the stump yields not to slashings, nor to attempts to pry it open.
The prey is still unreached.
What is to be done?
The elder hunter bethinks him of a solution for this problem. The broken blade will do to gnaw off this bough, and it will serve to make a split in the end of it.
And if one be fortunate, and if this split bestride the tail of the concealed animal, and if the stick be twisted-
Cruel barbarians, thoughtless, relentless!
The moon was over Ajalon when these two hunters, after all the perils of the long, black road, marched up into the dooryard, bearing on a pole between them their quarry, well suspended by the gambrels.
"My boys, I feared that you were lost!" exclaims the tearful mother who stands waiting in the door. But the silent father, standing back of her in the glow of the lamplight, sees what the pole is bearing, and in his eye there is a smile.
After that, motherly reproach, fatherly inquiry, plenteous bread and milk, many eager explanations and much descriptive narrative simultaneously uttered by two mouths eager both to eat and to talk.
"It all comes back again.
No chase was ever or will ever be so great as this one-back there, near the Delectable Mountains, in those days gone by, those incomparable days of youth!
I thank you, Singing Mouse; but I beg you do not go for yet a time.
The heads upon the wall grin much, and the dust lies thick upon them all."
For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.
Mad indeed would I be to expect it in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence.
But tomorrow I die, and today I would unburthen my soul.
My immediate purpose is to place before the world plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events.
In their consequences these events have terrified-have tortured-have destroyed me.
Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the commonplace-some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.
I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets.
With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them.
This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and in my manhood I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure.
Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind.
In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.
Pluto-this was the cat's name-was my favourite pet and playmate.
It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets.
Our friendship lasted in this manner for several years, during which my general temperament and character-through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance-had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse.
I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others.
At length, I even offered her personal violence.
My pets of course were made to feel the change in my disposition.
I not only neglected but ill used them.
For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when by accident, or through affection, they came in my way.
One night, returning home much intoxicated from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence.
I seized him, when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth.
The fury of a demon instantly possessed me.
My original soul seemed at once to take its flight from my body, and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame.
I took from my waistcoat pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!
I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.
When reason returned with the morning-when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch-I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty, but it was at best a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched.
The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain.
He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach.
I had so much of my old heart left as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me.
But this feeling soon gave place to irritation.
And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS.
Of this spirit philosophy takes no account.
This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow.
The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing.
It was with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape from the conflagration.
The destruction was complete.
My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself forward to despair.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect between the disaster and the atrocity.
But I am detailing a chain of facts, and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect.
This exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed.
The plastering had here in great measure resisted the action of the fire, a fact which I attributed to its having recently spread.
The words "Strange!" "Singular!" and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity.
There was a rope about the animal's neck.
When I first beheld this apparition-for I could scarcely regard it as less-my wonder and my terror were extreme.
But at length reflection came to my aid.
The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house.
Upon the alarm of fire this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd, by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown through an open window into my chamber.
This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep.
Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy.
One night, as I sat half stupefied in a den of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of gin or of rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment.
I had been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object thereupon.
I approached it, and touched it with my hand.
It was a black cat-a very large one-fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one.
Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast.
Upon my touching him he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice.
This, then, was the very creature of which I was in search.
I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to it-knew nothing of it-had never seen it before.
I permitted it to do so, occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded.
When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once, and became immediately a great favourite with my wife.
For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me.
By slow degrees these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred.
I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it.
I did not, for some weeks, strike or otherwise violently ill use it, but gradually-very gradually-I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence as from the breath of a pestilence.
What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes.
This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed in a high degree that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the source of my simplest and purest pleasures.
With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase.
It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend.
Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses.
This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil-and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to define it.
I am almost ashamed to own-yes, even in this felon's cell, I am almost ashamed to own-that the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me had been heightened by one of the merest chimeras it would be possible to conceive.
My wife had called my attention more than once to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed.
Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed.
Evil thoughts became my sole intimates-the darkest and most evil of thoughts.
One day she accompanied me upon some household errand into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit.
The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness.
Uplifting an ax, and forgetting in my wrath the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal, which of course would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished.
She fell dead upon the spot without a groan.
This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith and with entire deliberation to the task of concealing the body.
I knew that I could not remove it from the house, either by day or by night, without the risk of being observed by the neighbours.
Many projects entered my mind.
I determined to wall it up in the cellar-as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims.
Its walls were loosely constructed and had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening.
Moreover, in one of the walls was a projection caused by a false chimney or fireplace, that had been filled up and made to resemble the rest of the cellar.
I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so that no eye could detect anything suspicious.
And in this calculation I was not deceived.
By means of a crowbar I easily dislodged the bricks, and having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while with little trouble I relaid the whole structure as it originally stood.
Having procured mortar, sand, and hair with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brick work.
When I had finished I felt satisfied that all was all right.
The wall did not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed.
The rubbish on the floor was picked up with the minutest care.
I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself-"Here at last, then, my labour has not been in vain."
My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so much wretchedness, for I had at length firmly resolved to put it to death.
Had I been able to meet with it at the moment there could have been no doubt of its fate, but it appeared that the crafty animal had been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger, and forbore to present itself in my present mood.
It is impossible to describe or to imagine the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom.
The monster, in terror, had fled the premises forever!
I should behold it no more!
Even a search had been instituted-but of course nothing was to be discovered.
I looked upon my future felicity as secured.
Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever.
The officers bade me accompany them in their search.
They left no nook or corner unexplored.
At length, for the third or fourth time they descended into the cellar.
I quivered not in a muscle.
My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence.
I walked the cellar from end to end.
The police were thoroughly satisfied, and prepared to depart.
The glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained.
I burned to say if but one word by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness.
I wish you all health, and a little more courtesy.
These walls-are you going, gentlemen?--these walls are solidly put together;" and here, through the mere frenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily with a cane which I held in my hand upon that very portion of the brick work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.
But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the arch fiend!
Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak.
Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall.
For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe.
In the next a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall.
It fell bodily.
The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators.
Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman.
THE BIRD OF PREY BROUGHT DOWN
'Gaffer's boat, Gaffer in luck again, and yet no Gaffer!' So spake Riderhood, staring disconsolate.
Perhaps fire, like the higher animal and vegetable life it helps to sustain, has its greatest tendency towards death, when the night is dying and the day is not yet born.
Astonished by his friend's unusual heat, Lightwood stared too, and then said: 'What can have become of this man?'
'Can't imagine.
'She's fast enough till the tide runs back.
While they were doing so, Riderhood still sat staring disconsolate.
'All right.
Steady!' cried Eugene (he had recovered immediately on embarking), as they bumped heavily against a pile; and then in a lower voice reversed his late apostrophe by remarking ('I wish the boat of my honourable and gallant friend may be endowed with philanthropy enough not to turn bottom upward and extinguish us!) Steady, steady!
Sit close, Mortimer.
Here's the hail again.
Indeed he had the full benefit of it, and it so mauled him, though he bent his head low and tried to present nothing but the mangy cap to it, that he dropped under the lee of a tier of shipping, and they lay there until it was over.
The squall had come up, like a spiteful messenger before the morning; there followed in its wake a ragged tear of light which ripped the dark clouds until they showed a great grey hole of day.
They were all shivering, and everything about them seemed to be shivering; the river itself; craft, rigging, sails, such early smoke as there yet was on the shore.
Black with wet, and altered to the eye by white patches of hail and sleet, the huddled buildings looked lower than usual, as if they were cowering, and had shrunk with the cold.
And everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water-discoloured copper, rotten wood, honey combed stone, green dank deposit-that the after consequences of being crushed, sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the main event.
('With a morbid expectation,' murmured Eugene to Lightwood, 'that somebody is always going to tell him the truth.')
'This is Hexam's boat,' said Mr Inspector. 'I know her well.'
'Look at the broken scull.
Mr Inspector stepped into the boat.
His luck's got fouled under the keels of the barges.
'I must have it up,' said Mr Inspector. 'I am going to take this boat ashore, and his luck along with it.
He tried easy now; but the luck resisted; wouldn't come.
'I mean to have it, and the boat too,' said Mr Inspector, playing the line.
But still the luck resisted; wouldn't come.
'Take care,' said Riderhood.
'You'll disfigure.
'I am not going to do either, not even to your Grandmother,' said Mr Inspector; 'but I mean to have it.
You MUST come up. I mean to have you.'
'I told you so,' quoth Mr Inspector, pulling off his outer coat, and leaning well over the stern with a will.
'Come!'
Go ahead you, and keep out in pretty open water, that I mayn't get fouled again.'
His directions were obeyed, and they pulled ashore directly; two in one boat, two in the other.
'By the Lord, he's done me!'
He pointed behind him at the boat, and gasped to that degree that he dropped upon the stones to get his breath.
It's Gaffer!'
They ran to the rope, leaving him gasping there.
Father, was that you calling me?
Father!
I thought I heard you call me twice before!
The wind sweeps jeeringly over Father, whips him with the frayed ends of his dress and his jagged hair, tries to turn him where he lies stark on his back, and force his face towards the rising sun, that he may be shamed the more.
Father, was that you calling me?
Was it you, the voiceless and the dead?
Why not speak, Father?
Speak, Father.
They had helped to release the rope, and of course not.
'And you will have observed before, and you will observe now, that this knot, which was drawn chock tight round his neck by the strain of his own arms, is a slip knot': holding it up for demonstration.
'Likewise you will have observed how he had run the other end of this rope to his boat.'
It's a wild tempestuous evening when this man that was,' stooping to wipe some hailstones out of his hair with an end of his own drowned jacket, '--there!
Now he's more like himself; though he's badly bruised,--when this man that was, rows out upon the river on his usual lay.
He carries with him this coil of rope.
Last evening he does this. Worse for him!
He dodges about in his boat, does this man, till he gets chilled.
He sees some object that's in his way of business, floating.
He makes ready to secure that object.
He makes it too secure, as it happens.
His object drifts up, before he is quite ready for it.
Now see!
You'll ask me how I make out about the pockets?
How do I make that out? Simple and satisfactory.
Because he's got it here.' The lecturer held up the tightly clenched right hand.
'What is to be done with the remains?' asked Lightwood.
'If you wouldn't object to standing by him half a minute, sir,' was the reply, 'I'll find the nearest of our men to come and take charge of him;--I still call it HIM, you see,' said Mr Inspector, looking back as he went, with a philosophical smile upon the force of habit.
He raised his voice and called 'Eugene!
It was broad daylight now, and he looked about.
Mr Inspector could not exactly say that he had seen him go, but had noticed that he was restless.
'Singular and entertaining combination, sir, your friend.'
We could, and we did.
In a public house kitchen with a large fire.
Mr Inspector having to Mr Riderhood announced his official intention of 'keeping his eye upon him', stood him in a corner of the fireplace, like a wet umbrella, and took no further outward and visible notice of that honest man, except ordering a separate service of brandy and water for him: apparently out of the public funds.
'Here just before us, you see,' said Mr Inspector.
'And had hot brandy and water too, you see,' said Mr Inspector, 'and then cut off at a great rate.'
But he offered such ample apologies, and was so very penitent, that when Lightwood got out of the cab, he gave the driver a particular charge to be careful of him.
In short, the night's work had so exhausted and worn out this actor in it, that he had become a mere somnambulist.
He had just come home.
'Why what bloodshot, draggled, dishevelled spectacle is this!' cried Mortimer.
But consider.
Such a night for plumage!'
I also felt that I had committed every crime in the Newgate Calendar.
Mr Boffin's face denoted Care and Complication.
It is curious to consider, in such a case as Mr Boffin's, what a cheap article ink is, and how far it may be made to go.
Mr Boffin drew a long breath, laid down his pen, looked at his notes as doubting whether he had the pleasure of their acquaintance, and appeared, on a second perusal of their countenances, to be confirmed in his impression that he had not, when there was announced by the hammer headed young man:
'Mr Rokesmith.'
'Oh!' said Mr Boffin. 'Oh indeed!
Yes.
Ask him to come in.'
Mr Rokesmith appeared.
'Mrs Boffin you're already acquainted with.
Well, sir, I am rather unprepared to see you, for, to tell you the truth, I've been so busy with one thing and another, that I've not had time to turn your offer over.'
'That's apology for both of us: for Mr Boffin, and for me as well,' said the smiling Mrs Boffin. 'But Lor! we can talk it over now; can't us?'
'It was Secretary that you named; wasn't it?'
'I said Secretary,' assented Mr Rokesmith.
'It rather puzzled me at the time,' said Mr Boffin, 'and it rather puzzled me and Mrs Boffin when we spoke of it afterwards, because (not to make a mystery of our belief) we have always believed a Secretary to be a piece of furniture, mostly of mahogany, lined with green baize or leather, with a lot of little drawers in it.
Certainly not, said Mr Rokesmith.
But he had used the word in the sense of Steward.
'Why, as to Steward, you see,' returned Mr Boffin, with his hand still to his chin, 'the odds are that Mrs Boffin and me may never go upon the water.
Being both bad sailors, we should want a Steward if we did; but there's generally one provided.'
Mr Rokesmith again explained; defining the duties he sought to undertake, as those of general superintendent, or manager, or overlooker, or man of business.
'Now, for instance-come!' said Mr Boffin, in his pouncing way.
'I would keep exact accounts of all the expenditure you sanctioned, Mr Boffin.
I would write your letters, under your direction.
I would transact your business with people in your pay or employment.
Now let us hear what they're all about; will you be so good?'
john Rokesmith read his abstracts aloud.
They were all about the new house.
Decorator's estimate, so much.
Furniture estimate, so much. Estimate for furniture of offices, so much.
Coach maker's estimate, so much.
Horse dealer's estimate, so much.
Harness maker's estimate, so much.
Then came correspondence.
Acceptance of Mr Boffin's offer of such a date, and to such an effect.
Rejection of Mr Boffin's proposal of such a date and to such an effect.
Concerning Mr Boffin's scheme of such another date to such another effect.
All compact and methodical.
'Apple pie order!' said Mr Boffin, after checking off each inscription with his hand, like a man beating time.
Now, as to a letter.
Yourself.'
Mr Rokesmith quickly wrote, and then read aloud:
'"Mr Boffin presents his compliments to Mr john Rokesmith, and begs to say that he has decided on giving Mr john Rokesmith a trial in the capacity he desires to fill.
Mr Boffin takes Mr john Rokesmith at his word, in postponing to some indefinite period, the consideration of salary.
It is quite understood that Mr Boffin is in no way committed on that point.
Mr john Rokesmith will please enter on his duties immediately."'
'Well!
Now, Noddy!' cried Mrs Boffin, clapping her hands, 'That IS a good one!'
Mr Boffin was no less delighted; indeed, in his own bosom, he regarded both the composition itself and the device that had given birth to it, as a very remarkable monument of human ingenuity.
'And I tell you, my deary,' said Mrs Boffin, 'that if you don't close with Mr Rokesmith now at once, and if you ever go a muddling yourself again with things never meant nor made for you, you'll have an apoplexy-besides iron moulding your linen-and you'll break my heart.'
So did Mrs Boffin.
Well!
Mrs Boffin has carried the day, and we're going in neck and crop for Fashion.'
'I rather inferred that, sir,' replied john Rokesmith, 'from the scale on which your new establishment is to be maintained.'
'Yes,' said Mr Boffin, 'it's to be a Spanker.
The fact is, my literary man named to me that a house with which he is, as I may say, connected-in which he has an interest-'
'As property?' inquired john Rokesmith.
'Association?' the Secretary suggested.
My literary man was so friendly as to drop into a charming piece of poetry on that occasion, in which he complimented Mrs Boffin on coming into possession of-how did it go, my dear?'
Mrs Boffin replied:
'"The gay, the gay and festive scene, The halls, the halls of dazzling light."'
'That's it!
Mrs Boffin has a wonderful memory.
Will you repeat it, my dear?'
'Correct to the letter!' said Mr Boffin. 'And I consider that the poetry brings us both in, in a beautiful manner.'
I shall therefore cast about for comfortable ways and means of not calling up Wegg's jealousy, but of keeping you in your department, and keeping him in his.'
'Lor!' cried Mrs Boffin. 'What I say is, the world's wide enough for all of us!'
'So it is, my dear,' said Mr Boffin, 'when not literary.
And I am bound to bear in mind that I took Wegg on, at a time when I had no thought of being fashionable or of leaving the Bower.
'In this house?'
'No, no I have got other plans for this house.
'That will be as you please, Mr Boffin.
I hold myself quite at your disposal.
You'll begin to take charge at once, of all that's going on in the new house, will you?'
I will begin this very day.
Mr Boffin repeated it, and the Secretary wrote it down in his pocket book.
Mrs Boffin took the opportunity of his being so engaged, to get a better observation of his face than she had yet taken.
It impressed her in his favour, for she nodded aside to Mr Boffin, 'I like him.'
Being here, would you care at all to look round the Bower?'
'I should greatly like it.
Bare of paint, bare of paper on the walls, bare of furniture, bare of experience of human life.
Whatever is built by man for man's occupation, must, like natural creations, fulfil the intention of its existence, or soon perish.
This old house had wasted-more from desuetude than it would have wasted from use, twenty years for one.
The scanty moveables partook of it; save for the cleanliness of the place, the dust-into which they were all resolving would have lain thick on the floors; and those, both in colour and in grain, were worn like old faces that had kept much alone.
There was the old grisly four post bedstead, without hangings, and with a jail like upper rim of iron and spikes; and there was the old patch work counterpane.
There was the tight clenched old bureau, receding atop like a bad and secret forehead; there was the cumbersome old table with twisted legs, at the bed side; and there was the box upon it, in which the will had lain.
A few old chairs with patch work covers, under which the more precious stuff to be preserved had slowly lost its quality of colour without imparting pleasure to any eye, stood against the wall.
'The room was kept like this, Rokesmith,' said Mr Boffin, 'against the son's return.
In short, everything in the house was kept exactly as it came to us, for him to see and approve.
When the son came home for the last time in his life, and for the last time in his life saw his father, it was most likely in this room that they met.'
As the Secretary looked all round it, his eyes rested on a side door in a corner.
We'll go down this way, as you may like to see the yard, and it's all in the road.
He was very timid of his father.
I've seen him sit on these stairs, in his shy way, poor child, many a time.
Mr and Mrs Boffin have comforted him, sitting with his little book on these stairs, often.'
'Ah!
And his poor sister too,' said Mrs Boffin. 'And here's the sunny place on the white wall where they one day measured one another.
'We must take care of the names, old lady,' said Mr Boffin. 'We must take care of the names.
They shan't be rubbed out in our time, nor yet, if we can help it, in the time after us.
They had opened the door at the bottom of the staircase giving on the yard, and they stood in the sunlight, looking at the scrawl of the two unsteady childish hands two or three steps up the staircase.
'It would have been enough for us,' said Mr Boffin, 'in case it had pleased God to spare the last of those two young lives and sorrowful deaths.
We didn't want the rest.'
'Not any, Rokesmith.
no'
'Might I ask, without seeming impertinent, whether you have any intention of selling it?'
'Certainly not.
In remembrance of our old master, our old master's children, and our old service, me and Mrs Boffin mean to keep it up as it stands.'
The Secretary's eyes glanced with so much meaning in them at the Mounds, that Mr Boffin said, as if in answer to a remark:
There's no hurry about it; that's all I say at present.
I ain't a scholar in much, Rokesmith, but I'm a pretty fair scholar in dust.
I can price the Mounds to a fraction, and I know how they can be best disposed of; and likewise that they take no harm by standing where they do.
You'll look in to morrow, will you be so kind?'
'Every day.
And the sooner I can get you into your new house, complete, the better you will be pleased, sir?'
'Well, it ain't that I'm in a mortal hurry,' said Mr Boffin; 'only when you DO pay people for looking alive, it's as well to know that they ARE looking alive.
Ain't that your opinion?'
The man of low cunning had, of course, acquired a mastery over the man of high simplicity.
How long such conquests last, is another matter; that they are achieved, is every day experience, not even to be flourished away by Podsnappery itself.
It seemed to him (so skilful was Wegg) that he was plotting darkly, when he was contriving to do the very thing that Wegg was plotting to get him to do.
For these reasons Mr Boffin passed but anxious hours until evening came, and with it Mr Wegg, stumping leisurely to the Roman Empire.
At about this period Mr Boffin had become profoundly interested in the fortunes of a great military leader known to him as Bully Sawyers, but perhaps better known to fame and easier of identification by the classical student, under the less Britannic name of Belisarius.
'Let me get on my considering cap, sir,' replied that gentleman, turning the open book face downward.
Now let me think.' (as if there were the least necessity) 'Yes, to be sure I do, Mr Boffin.
It was at my corner. To be sure it was!
You had first asked me whether I liked your name, and Candour had compelled a reply in the negative case.
I little thought then, sir, how familiar that name would come to be!'
Much obliged to you, I'm sure.
Is it your pleasure, sir, that we decline and we fall?' with a feint of taking up the book.
In fact, I have got another offer to make you.'
Mr Wegg (who had had nothing else in his mind for several nights) took off his spectacles with an air of bland surprise.
'And I hope you'll like it, Wegg.'
'Thank you, sir,' returned that reticent individual.
'I hope it may prove so.
On all accounts, I am sure.' (This, as a philanthropic aspiration.)
'What do you think,' said Mr Boffin, 'of not keeping a stall, Wegg?'
'I think, sir,' replied Wegg, 'that I should like to be shown the gentleman prepared to make it worth my while!'
Mr Wegg was going to say, My Benefactor, and had said My Bene, when a grandiloquent change came over him.
'No, Mr Boffin, not you sir.
Anybody but you.
Do not fear, Mr Boffin, that I shall contaminate the premises which your gold has bought, with MY lowly pursuits.
I have already thought of that, and taken my measures.
No need to be bought out, sir. Would Stepney Fields be considered intrusive?
If not remote enough, I can go remoter.
In the words of the poet's song, which I do not quite remember:
--And equally,' said Mr Wegg, repairing the want of direct application in the last line, 'behold myself on a similar footing!'
'Now, Wegg, Wegg, Wegg,' remonstrated the excellent Boffin.
'I know I am, sir,' returned Wegg, with obstinate magnanimity.
'I am acquainted with my faults.
I always was, from a child, too sensitive.'
'But listen,' pursued the Golden Dustman; 'hear me out, Wegg.
You have taken it into your head that I mean to pension you off.'
'I am acquainted with my faults.
Far be it from me to deny them.
I HAVE taken it into my head.'
'Don't you, indeed, sir?'
'No,' pursued Mr Boffin; 'because that would express, as I understand it, that you were not going to do anything to deserve your money.
But you are; you are.'
Now, my independence as a man is again elevated.
Now, I no longer
Weep for the hour, When to Boffinses bower, The Lord of the valley with offers came; Neither does the moon hide her light From the heavens to night, And weep behind her clouds o'er any individual in the present Company's shame.
Would that man, sir-we will say that man, for the purposes of argueyment;' Mr Wegg made a smiling demonstration of great perspicuity here; 'would that man, sir, be expected to throw any other capacity in, or would any other capacity be considered extra?
Now let us (for the purposes of argueyment) suppose that man to be engaged as a reader: say (for the purposes of argueyment) in the evening.
'Well,' said Mr Boffin, 'I suppose it would be added.'
'I suppose it would, sir.
Exactly my own views, Mr Boffin.' Here Wegg rose, and balancing himself on his wooden leg, fluttered over his prey with extended hand.
'Mr Boffin, consider it done.
My stall and I are for ever parted.
The collection of ballads will in future be reserved for private study, with the object of making poetry tributary'--Wegg was so proud of having found this word, that he said it again, with a capital letter-'Tributary, to friendship.
Mr Boffin, don't allow yourself to be made uncomfortable by the pang it gives me to part from my stock and stall.
His Christian name was Thomas.
His words at the time (I was then an infant, but so deep was their impression on me, that I committed them to memory) were:
--My father got over it, Mr Boffin, and so shall i'
He now darted it at his patron, who took it, and felt his mind relieved of a great weight: observing that as they had arranged their joint affairs so satisfactorily, he would now be glad to look into those of Bully Sawyers.
Mr Wegg resumed his spectacles therefore.
Mr Boffin hurried out, and found her on the dark staircase, panting, with a lighted candle in her hand.
'What is it, my dear?
'What is, my dear?'
'I know it must sound foolish, and yet it is so.'
'I don't know that I think I saw them anywhere.
I felt them.'
'Touched them?'
'What face?' asked her husband, looking about him.
'For a moment it was the old man's, and then it got younger.
For a moment it was both the children's, and then it got older.
'And then it was gone?'
'Yes; and then it was gone.'
'Where were you then, old lady?'
'Here, at the chest.
Well; I got the better of it, and went on sorting, and went on singing to myself.
"Lor!" I says, "I'll think of something else-something comfortable-and put it out of my head." So I thought of the new house and Miss Bella Wilfer, and was thinking at a great rate with that sheet there in my hand, when all of a sudden, the faces seemed to be hidden in among the folds of it and I let it drop.'
I thought I'd try another room, and shake it off.
'With the faces?'
'Yes, and I even felt that they were in the dark behind the side door, and on the little staircase, floating away into the yard.
Mr Boffin, lost in amazement, looked at Mrs Boffin.
Mrs Boffin, lost in her own fluttered inability to make this out, looked at Mr Boffin.
Whereas we know better.
'I never had the feeling in the house before,' said Mrs Boffin; 'and I have been about it alone at all hours of the night.
'And won't again, my dear,' said Mr Boffin. 'Depend upon it, it comes of thinking and dwelling on that dark spot.'
'Yes; but why didn't it come before?' asked Mrs Boffin.
This draft on Mr Boffin's philosophy could only be met by that gentleman with the remark that everything that is at all, must begin at some time. Then, tucking his wife's arm under his own, that she might not be left by herself to be troubled again, he descended to release Wegg.
Who, being something drowsy after his plentiful repast, and constitutionally of a shirking temperament, was well enough pleased to stump away, without doing what he had come to do, and was paid for doing.
Mr Boffin then put on his hat, and Mrs Boffin her shawl; and the pair, further provided with a bunch of keys and a lighted lantern, went all over the dismal house-dismal everywhere, but in their own two rooms-from cellar to cock loft.
'That was the treatment, you see.
'Yes, deary,' said Mrs Boffin, laying aside her shawl.
'I'm not nervous any more.
But-'
The old man's face, and it gets younger.
The two children's faces, and they get older.
A face that I don't know.
Miriam's Lover
I had been reading a ghost story to mrs Sefton, and I laid it down at the end with a little shrug of contempt.
"What utter nonsense!" I said.
mrs Sefton nodded abstractedly above her fancywork.
"That is.
It is a very commonplace story indeed.
If they ever appear, it must be for a better reason than that."
"We have no proof that they do not, my dear."
"Surely, Mary," I exclaimed, "you don't mean to say that you believe people ever do or can see spirits-ghosts, as the word goes?"
"I didn't say I believed it.
I never saw anything of the sort.
But you know queer things do happen at times-things you can't account for.
At least, people who you know wouldn't lie say so.
Of course, they may be mistaken.
And I don't think that everybody can see spirits either, provided they are to be seen.
It requires people of a certain organization-with a spiritual eye, as it were.
I dare say you think I'm talking nonsense."
"Well, yes, I think you are.
Something must have come under your observation to develop such theories in your practical head.
"To what purpose?
You would remain as sceptical as ever."
"Possibly not.
Try me; I may be convinced."
"No," returned mrs Sefton calmly.
When a person has once seen a spirit-or thinks he has-he thenceforth believes it.
And when somebody else is intimately associated with that person and knows all the circumstances-well, he admits the possibility, at least.
But by the time it gets to the third person-the outsider-it loses power.
Besides, in this particular instance the story isn't very exciting.
"You have excited my curiosity.
You must tell me the story."
"Well, first tell me what you think of this.
Suppose two people, both sensitively organized individuals, loved each other with a love stronger than life.
"You're getting into too deep waters for me, Mary," I said, shaking my head.
"I'm not an authority on telepathy, or whatever you call it.
But I've no belief in such theories.
I'm sure you must think so too in your rational moments."
"I dare say it is all nonsense," said mrs Sefton slowly, "but if you had lived a whole year in the same house with Miriam Gordon, you would have been tainted too.
Not that she had 'theories'--at least, she never aired them if she had.
But there was simply something about the girl herself that gave a person strange impressions.
When I first met her I had the most uncanny feeling that she was all spirit-soul-what you will! no flesh, anyhow.
That feeling wore off after a while, but she never seemed like other people to me.
"She was mr Sefton's niece.
Her father had died when she was a child. When Miriam was twenty her mother had married a second time and went to Europe with her husband.
Miriam came to live with us while they were away.
Upon their return she was herself to be married.
Her arrival was unexpected, and I was absent from home when she came.
Talk about spirits!
For five seconds I thought I had seen one.
"Miriam was a beauty.
I had known that before, though I think I hardly expected to see such wonderful loveliness.
She was tall and extremely graceful, dark-at least her hair was dark, but her skin was wonderfully fair and clear.
Her hair was gathered away from her face, and she had a high, pure, white forehead, and the straightest, finest, blackest brows.
Her face was oval, with very large and dark eyes.
"I soon realized that Miriam was in some mysterious fashion different from other people.
I think everyone who met her felt the same way.
Yet it was a feeling hard to define.
On the contrary, it was the very reverse.
Everybody liked her.
As for what Dick called her 'little queernesses'--well, we got used to them in time.
I knew she loved him very deeply.
When she showed me his photograph, I liked his appearance and said so.
Then I made some teasing remark about her love letters-just for a joke, you know. Miriam looked at me with an odd little smile and said quickly:
"'Sidney and I never write to each other.'
'Do you mean to tell me you never hear from him at all?'
"'No, I did not say that.
I hear from him every day-every hour.
There are better means of communication between two souls that are in perfect accord with each other.'
"But Miriam only gave another queer smile and made no answer at all. Whatever her beliefs or theories were, she would never discuss them.
No matter where she was, this, whatever it was, would come over her.
She would sit there, perhaps in the centre of a gay crowd, and gaze right out into space, not hearing or seeing a single thing that went on around her.
I looked up and saw that Miriam's work had dropped on her knee and she was leaning forward, her lips apart, her eyes gazing upward with an unearthly expression.
"'Don't look like that, Miriam!' I said, with a little shiver.
"'How do you know but that I was?'
"She bent her head for a minute or two.
Then she lifted it again and looked at me with a sudden contraction of her level brows that betokened vexation.
"'I wish you hadn't spoken to me just then,' she said.
I shall not get it at all now.'
It makes people think there is something queer about you.
"'Sidney,' said Miriam simply.
"I recall another event was when some caller dropped in and we had drifted into a discussion about ghosts and the like-and I've no doubt we all talked some delicious nonsense.
Miriam said nothing at the time, but when we were alone I asked her what she thought of it.
"'I thought you were all merely talking against time,' she retorted evasively.
"'But, Miriam, do you really think it is possible for ghosts-'
"'Well, spirits then-to return after death, or to appear to anyone apart from the flesh?'
"'I will tell you what I know.
After Dick went out, I asked her if anything were wrong.
"'Something has happened to Sidney,' she replied, 'some painful accident-I don't know what.'
"'How do you know?' I cried.
Then, as she looked at me strangely, I added hastily, 'You haven't been receiving any more unearthly messages, have you?
"'I know,' she answered quickly.
'Belief or disbelief has nothing to do with it.
Yes, I have had a message.
I know that some accident has happened to Sidney-painful and inconvenient but not particularly dangerous.
Sidney will write me that.
He writes when it is absolutely necessary.'
"'Aerial communication isn't perfected yet then?' I said mischievously.
You may be mistaken.'
"Well, two days afterwards she got a note from her lover-the first I had ever known her to receive-in which he said he had been thrown from his horse and had broken his left arm.
"Miriam had been with us about eight months when one day she came into my room hurriedly.
She was very pale.
"'Sidney is ill-dangerously ill.
What shall I do?'
"I knew she must have had another of those abominable messages-or thought she had-and really, remembering the incident of the broken arm, I couldn't feel as sceptical as I pretended to.
I tried to cheer her, but did not succeed.
Two hours later she had a telegram from her lover's college chum, saying that mr Claxton was dangerously ill with typhoid fever.
"I was quite alarmed about Miriam in the days that followed.
She grieved and fretted continually.
Anyhow, she had to content herself with the means of communication used by ordinary mortals.
"Sidney's mother, who had gone to nurse him, wrote every day, and at last good news came.
The crisis was over and the doctor in attendance thought Sidney would recover.
Miriam seemed like a new creature then, and rapidly recovered her spirits.
"For a week reports continued favourable.
One night we went to the opera to hear a celebrated prima donna.
"Suddenly she sat straight up with a sort of convulsive shudder, and at the same time-you may laugh if you like-the most horrible feeling came over me.
"Miriam was gazing straight before her.
She rose to her feet and held out her hands.
"'Sidney!' she said.
"Then she fell to the floor in a dead faint.
"I screamed for Dick, rang the bell and rushed to her.
"In a few minutes the whole household was aroused, and Dick was off posthaste for the doctor, for we could not revive Miriam from her death like swoon.
She seemed as one dead.
She would come out of her faint for a moment, give us an unknowing stare and go shudderingly off again.
"The doctor talked of some fearful shock, but I kept my own counsel. At dawn Miriam came back to life at last.
When she and I were left alone, she turned to me.
"'Sidney is dead,' she said quietly.
I looked up, and he was standing between me and you.
Almost while we were talking a telegram came.
He was dead-he had died at the very hour at which Miriam had seen him."
"What do you think of it?" she queried as we rose.
AT THE PLACE OF THE OAKS
"Do you know what the oak says?" it repeated.
"Do you hear it?
Do you hear the talking of the leaves?...
"When the wind is soft, the oak says: 'Peace!
Peace!' When the breeze is sharp it sighs and says: 'Pity!
"Do you see the oaks?" asked the Singing Mouse.
"Do you see the little lake?
Do you know this place of the oaks?
Behold it now!" It waved a tiny hand.
I gazed at the naked, cheerless wall, seamed and rent with cracks along its sallow width.
And as I gazed more intently the map took on color, and narrowed its semblance to that of a certain region.
And as I gazed yet more eagerly the map faded quite away, and there lay in its stead the smiling face of an enchanted land.
And there were the oaks. At the water's edge, near the lesser spring, the wild apple trees twisted, but upon the hills and over the great glades stood the reserved, mysterious oaks, tall and strong.
One oak, a mighty one, now resolved itself more prominently forth.
Did I not know it well?
Could one forget the tortured but noble soul of this oak?
One must suffer before one may comfort.
The oak had suffered somewhere.
Those who built this fire here, so many times, so many years, each time first craved pardon of the green grass of that happy glade, for they would not harm the grass.
And each year the oak dropped down food enough for the little fire.
The oak took pay in the vast shadows the fire made for it.
That was the way the oak saw the spirits of the Past, and when it saw them it sighed; but still it welcomed the shadows of the Past.
So the fire, and the grass, and the oak, and the shadows of the Past were friends, and each year they met here.
It had been thus for many years.
Each year, for many years, the same hand had laid the little fire, in the same place, and so given back to the oak its Past.
Now, the Past is a very sad but tender thing.
Near by the little fire I saw a small table formed of straight laid boughs, and at either side of this were seats made cunningly in the workshop of the woods.
There were two forms at this small table.
I saw them both.
One was gray and bowed somewhat, stooped as the oaks are, silvered as the oaks are in the winter days.
The other was younger and more erect.
Once the younger looked to the older for counsel, but now it seemed to me the bowed figure turned to the one that had become more strong.
Even, it seemed to me, I could note a faint, clear odor of innocent potency.
I saw the table laid, not with gleam of snow and silver, but with plain vessels which, nevertheless, seemed now to have a radiance of their own. I knew all this.
Now as I looked, the gray figure bowed its head, there, under the arm of the oak, and asked on the humble board the blessing of the God who made the oak, and gave the fire and spread the pleasant waters on the land.
Every mealtime, every year, for many years, it had been thus.
Ever, the oak knew, the gray figure would first bow and ask the blessing of God.
And each time at the close the oak with rustling leaves pronounced distinct Amen!
Let those jest who will.
I think perhaps the oak knows or it would not thus for years have whispered reverently its distinct Amen!
I will not scoff.
It is perhaps we who are ignorant.
We do not know all things.
I ask not what nor who were these two who had come each year to this place of the oaks, but surely they were friends.
In shadow, I could hear them talk.
In shadow, I could see them smile.
These friends sat by the little fire a time before they went to rest in the tiny house of white.
After they had gone, the fire did strange things.
All men know that, though you see the fire burned down, when you go into the tent you will some time in the night see the walls lit up by a sudden flash or so, now and then, from the fire which was thought to be dead.
That is the business of the fire, and of the oaks and of the shadows.
I know that the shadows dance strangely, and hover and come near at hand, in those late hours of the night; but what then occurs I do not know.
They knew it was the secret of the night, and gave the oak its own request, in pay for its protection and consent.
They gave the oak its union with the sacred Past.
In the night I have heard the oak sob.
Yet in the morning, when the sun was silvering the wake of all the leaping fishes, the oak was always gentle, and it said, "Wake, wake!
God is wise. Waken, waken!
God is good!"
As pure shining beads upon a thread of gold I saw this small, dear picture, reiterant and unchanged, year after year, always with the same calm and pure surroundings.
Only as year added itself to year, slipping forward on the golden string, I saw the gray figure grow more gray, more bowed, more feeble.
Yet the years came, to the oaks and to the grasses and to the friends.
The grass dies every year, but it is born again.
The oak dies in centuries, but it is born again.
Man dies in three score years and ten; but he, too, is born again.
Grayer, grayer, more bent, more feeble-is it not so, Singing Mouse?
And now, this time, what was this gentle warning that the oak tried to whisper softly down?
Perhaps the grayer friend heard it, as he sat musing by the fire.
He rose and looked about him, as one who had dreamed and was content.
He looked up at the solemn stars unafraid, and so murmured to himself.
Here again is the little table, and here is the evening meal.
The table is still spread for two.
Yet why?
At this table there is but one form now.
The younger man is there, although now he has grown gray and stooped.
Hush!
The squirrels have grown still, and even the oak is silent.
What is that opposite, across the table, at the seat long years held only by the elder of these two?
It is the shadow of a shadow, the apparition of a soul!
The one at the table pauses, as was the wont before the beginning of a meal.
He looks across the table to the shadow, as if the shadow were his friend.
Doubt not those words are heard this day.
The glorious day sets on once more.
Doubt not, fear not, sorrow not, ye two.
"I cannot exist without a cat!" she wept.
Chapter Ten
Shaggy Man to the Rescue
They had not gone very far before Bungle, who had run on ahead, came bounding back to say that the road of yellow bricks was just before them.
At once they hurried forward to see what this famous road looked like.
It was a broad road, but not straight, for it wandered over hill and dale and picked out the easiest places to go.
All its length and breadth was paved with smooth bricks of a bright yellow color, so it was smooth and level except in a few places where the bricks had crumbled or been removed, leaving holes that might cause the unwary to stumble.
"I wonder," said Ojo, looking up and down the road, "which way to go."
"The Emerald City," he replied.
"Have you ever been to the Emerald City?" asked Scraps.
"Are you afraid of men?" inquired the Patchwork Girl.
"Me?
With my heart rending growl-my horrible, shudderful growl?
I am not afraid of anything," declared the Woozy.
"I wish I could say the same," sighed Ojo.
"If anything should fade the colors of my lovely patches it would break my heart," said the Patchwork Girl.
"I'm not sure you have a heart," Ojo reminded her.
"Then it would break my cotton," persisted Scraps.
"Do you think they are all fast colors, Ojo?" she asked anxiously.
They were certainly pretty to look upon and the travelers hurried forward to observe them more closely.
But the most curious thing about the swaying leaves was their color.
Suddenly a leaf bent lower than usual and touched the Patchwork Girl. Swiftly it enveloped her in its embrace, covering her completely in its thick folds, and then it swayed back upon its stem.
But, before he could think what he ought to do to save her, another leaf bent down and captured the Glass Cat, rolling around the little creature until she was completely hidden, and then straightening up again upon its stem.
"Look out," cried the Woozy.
But the last leaf of the row of plants seized the beast even as he ran and instantly he disappeared from sight.
Half a dozen of the great leaves were bending toward him from different directions and as he stood hesitating one of them clutched him in its embrace.
In a flash he was in the dark. Then he felt himself gently lifted until he was swaying in the air, with the folds of the leaf hugging him on all sides.
Then Ojo quieted himself and tried to think.
Despair fell upon him when he remembered that all his little party had been captured, even as he was, and there was none to save them.
"I might have expected it," he sobbed, miserably.
"I'm Ojo the Unlucky, and something dreadful was sure to happen to me."
He pushed against the leaf that held him and found it to be soft, but thick and firm.
It was like a great bandage all around him and he found it difficult to move his body or limbs in order to change their position.
The minutes passed and became hours.
Ojo wondered how long one could live in such a condition and if the leaf would gradually sap his strength and even his life, in order to feed itself.
His greatest fear at this time was that he would always remain imprisoned in the beautiful leaf and never see the light of day again.
The sounds were low and sweet and, although they reached Ojo's ears very faintly, they were clear and harmonious.
Could the leaf whistle, Ojo wondered?
Suddenly the whole leaf toppled and fell, carrying the boy with it, and while he sprawled at full length the folds slowly relaxed and set him free.
He scrambled quickly to his feet and found that a strange man was standing before him-a man so curious in appearance that the boy stared with round eyes.
He was a big man, with shaggy whiskers, shaggy eyebrows, shaggy hair-but kindly blue eyes that were gentle as those of a cow.
Rich but shaggy laces were at his throat; a coat with shaggy edges was decorated with diamond buttons; the velvet breeches had jeweled buckles at the knees and shags all around the bottoms.
On his breast hung a medallion bearing a picture of Princess Dorothy of Oz, and in his hand, as he stood looking at Ojo, was a sharp knife shaped like a dagger.
"Yes; I can see that," said the boy, nodding.
"None other, you may be sure.
But take care, or I shall have to rescue you again."
"Singing or whistling-it doesn't matter which-makes 'em behave, and nothing else will.
I always whistle as I go by 'em and so they always let me alone.
To day as I went by, whistling, I saw a leaf curled and knew there must be something inside it.
I cut down the leaf with my knife and-out you popped.
Lucky I passed by, wasn't it?"
"You were very kind," said Ojo, "and I thank you.
Will you please rescue my companions, also?"
"What companions?" asked the Shaggy Man.
"The leaves grabbed them all," said the boy.
"There's a Patchwork Girl and-"
She's alive and her name is Scraps.
And there's a Glass Cat-"
"Glass?" asked the Shaggy Man.
"All glass."
"What's a Woozy?" inquired the Shaggy Man.
"Why, I-I-can't describe it," answered the boy, greatly perplexed. "But it's a queer animal with three hairs on the tip of its tail that won't come out and-"
"What won't come out?" asked the Shaggy Man; "the tail?"
"The hairs won't come out.
"Of course," said the Shaggy Man, nodding his shaggy head.
And then he walked back among the plants, still whistling, and found the three leaves which were curled around Ojo's traveling companions.
The first leaf he cut down released Scraps, and on seeing her the Shaggy Man threw back his shaggy head, opened wide his mouth and laughed so shaggily and yet so merrily that Scraps liked him at once.
"My dear, you're a wonder.
I must introduce you to my friend the Scarecrow."
When he cut down the second leaf he rescued the Glass Cat, and Bungle was so frightened that she scampered away like a streak and soon had joined Ojo, when she sat beside him panting and trembling.
The last plant of all the row had captured the Woozy, and a big bunch in the center of the curled leaf showed plainly where he was.
Soon the entire party was gathered on the road of yellow bricks, quite beyond the reach of the beautiful but treacherous plants.
The Shaggy Man, staring first at one and then at the other, seemed greatly pleased and interested.
Let us sit down a while, and have a talk and get acquainted."
"Haven't you always lived in the Land of Oz?" asked the Munchkin boy.
But I came here once with Dorothy, and Ozma let me stay."
"It's the finest country in all the world, even if it is a fairyland, and I'm happy every minute I live in it," said the Shaggy Man.
"But tell me something about yourselves."
Then he told how he had set out to find the five different things which the Magician needed to make a charm that would restore the marble figures to life, one requirement being three hairs from a Woozy's tail.
"We found the Woozy," explained the boy, "and he agreed to give us the three hairs; but we couldn't pull them out.
"I see," returned the Shaggy Man, who had listened with interest to the story.
"But perhaps I, who am big and strong, can pull those three hairs from the Woozy's tail."
"Try it, if you like," said the Woozy.
So the Shaggy Man tried it, but pull as hard as he could he failed to get the hairs out of the Woozy's tail.
So he sat down again and wiped his shaggy face with a shaggy silk handkerchief and said:
"It doesn't matter.
What are the other things you are to find?"
"One," said Ojo, "is a six leaved clover."
"There is a Law against picking six leaved clovers, but I think I can get Ozma to let you have one."
"Thank you," replied Ojo.
"The next thing is the left wing of a yellow butterfly."
"For that you must go to the Winkie Country," the Shaggy Man declared. "I've never noticed any butterflies there, but that is the yellow country of Oz and it's ruled by a good friend of mine, the Tin Woodman."
"Oh, I've heard of him!" exclaimed Ojo.
"He must be a wonderful man."
"The next thing I must find," said the Munchkin boy, "is a gill of water from a dark well."
"Indeed!
Well, that is more difficult," said the Shaggy Man, scratching his left ear in a puzzled way.
"I've never heard of a dark well; have you?"
"Do you know where one may be found?" inquired the Shaggy Man.
"I can't imagine," said Ojo.
"The Scarecrow!
But surely, sir, a scarecrow can't know anything."
"Most scarecrows don't, I admit," answered the Shaggy Man.
"But this Scarecrow of whom I speak is very intelligent.
"If anyone knows where a dark well is, it's my friend the Scarecrow."
"Where does he live?" inquired Ojo.
"He has a splendid castle in the Winkie Country, near to the palace of his friend the Tin Woodman, and he is often to be found in the Emerald City, where he visits Dorothy at the royal palace."
"Then we will ask him about the dark well," said Ojo.
"But what else does this Crooked Magician want?" asked the Shaggy Man.
"A drop of oil from a live man's body."
"Oh; but there isn't such a thing."
"That is what I thought," replied Ojo; "but the Crooked Magician said it wouldn't be called for by the recipe if it couldn't be found, and therefore I must search until I find it."
"I wish you good luck," said the Shaggy Man, shaking his head doubtfully; "but I imagine you'll have a hard job getting a drop of oil from a live man's body.
There's blood in a body, but no oil."
"There's cotton in mine," said Scraps, dancing a little jig.
"You're a regular comforter and as sweet as patchwork can be.
All you lack is dignity."
"Half the fools and all the wise folks are dignified, and I'm neither the one nor the other."
"She's just crazy," explained the Glass Cat.
The Shaggy Man laughed.
"She's delightful, in her way," he said.
"I'm sure Dorothy will be pleased with her, and the Scarecrow will dote on her.
Did you say you were traveling toward the Emerald City?"
"Yes," replied Ojo.
"I'll go with you," said the Shaggy Man, "and show you the way."
"Thank you," exclaimed Ojo.
"I hope it won't put you out any."
"No," said the other, "I wasn't going anywhere in particular.
I've been a rover all my life, and although Ozma has given me a suite of beautiful rooms in her palace I still get the wandering fever once in a while and start out to roam the country over.
"That will be very nice," said the boy, gratefully.
"Some are, and some are not," he answered; "but I never criticise my friends.
If they are really true friends, they may be anything they like, for all of me."
"There's some sense in that," said Scraps, nodding her queer head in approval.
"It is quite a distance from here to the Emerald City," remarked the Shaggy Man, "so we shall not get there to day, nor to morrow.
I'm an old traveler and have found that I never gain anything by being in a hurry.
'Take it easy' is my motto.
If you can't take it easy, take it as easy as you can."
After walking some distance over the road of yellow bricks Ojo said he was hungry and would stop to eat some bread and cheese.
He offered a portion of the food to the Shaggy Man, who thanked him but refused it.
Think I'll indulge in one now, as long as we're stopping anyway."
Saying this, he took a bottle from his pocket and shook from it a tablet about the size of one of Ojo's finger nails.
"That," announced the Shaggy Man, "is a square meal, in condensed form. Invention of the great Professor Woggle Bug, of the Royal College of Athletics.
It contains soup, fish, roast meat, salad, apple dumplings, ice cream and chocolate drops, all boiled down to this small size, so it can be conveniently carried and swallowed when you are hungry and need a square meal."
"Give me one, please."
So the Shaggy Man gave the Woozy a tablet from his bottle and the beast ate it in a twinkling.
"You have now had a six course dinner," declared the Shaggy Man.
"One should only eat to sustain life," replied the Shaggy Man, "and that tablet is equal to a peck of other food."
"I don't care for it.
I want something I can chew and taste," grumbled the Woozy.
"Chewing isn't tiresome; it's fun," maintained the Woozy.
Give me some bread and cheese, Ojo."
I may not be hungry, having eaten all those things you gave me, but I consider this eating business a matter of taste, and I like to realize what's going into me."
"Are you so broken up that you can't play?" asked Scraps.
"That is too bad," remarked Ojo.
"We've no objection to you as a machine, you know; but as a music maker we hate you."
"Then why was I ever invented?" demanded the machine, in a tone of indignant protest.
They looked at one another inquiringly, but no one could answer such a puzzling question.
Finally the Shaggy Man said:
"I'd like to hear the phonograph play."
"I know.
But a little misery, at times, makes one appreciate happiness more.
"It's a popular song, sir.
In all civilized lands the common people have gone wild over it."
Then it's dangerous."
It made the author rich-for an author.
Then the phonograph began to play.
A strain of odd, jerky sounds was followed by these words, sung by a man through his nose with great vigor of expression:
"Here-shut that off!" cried the Shaggy Man, springing to his feet. "What do you mean by such impertinence?"
"A popular song?"
"Yes.
One that the feeble minded can remember the words of and those ignorant of music can whistle or sing.
That makes a popular song popular, and the time is coming when it will take the place of all other songs."
"That time won't come to us, just yet," said the Shaggy Man, sternly: "I'm something of a singer myself, and I don't intend to be throttled by any Lulus like your coal black one.
But before he could say more the phonograph turned and dashed up the road as fast as its four table legs could carry it, and soon it had entirely disappeared from their view.
The Shaggy Man sat down again and seemed well pleased.
When you are rested, friends, let us go on our way."
During the afternoon the travelers found themselves in a lonely and uninhabited part of the country.
Even the fields were no longer cultivated and the country began to resemble a wilderness.
Scrubby under brush grew on either side of the way, while huge rocks were scattered around in abundance.
But this did not deter Ojo and his friends from trudging on, and they beguiled the journey with jokes and cheerful conversation.
Toward evening they reached a crystal spring which gushed from a tall rock by the roadside and near this spring stood a deserted cabin.
Said the Shaggy Man, halting here:
"We may as well pass the night here, where there is shelter for our heads and good water to drink.
Road beyond here is pretty bad; worst we shall have to travel; so let's wait until morning before we tackle it."
They agreed to this and Ojo found some brushwood in the cabin and made a fire on the hearth.
The fire delighted Scraps, who danced before it until Ojo warned her she might set fire to herself and burn up.
For supper the Shaggy Man ate one of his tablets, but Ojo stuck to his bread and cheese as the most satisfying food.
He also gave a portion to the Woozy.
When darkness came on and they sat in a circle on the cabin floor, facing the firelight-there being no furniture of any sort in the place-Ojo said to the Shaggy Man:
"Won't you tell us a story?"
"I'm not good at stories," was the reply; "but I sing like a bird."
"Raven, or crow?" asked the Glass Cat.
I'll sing a song I composed myself. Don't tell anyone I'm a poet; they might want me to write a book.
Don't tell 'em I can sing, or they'd want me to make records for that awful phonograph.
Haven't time to be a public benefactor, so I'll just sing you this little song for your own amusement."
I'll not forget Nick Chopper, the Woodman made of Tin, Whose tender heart thinks killing time is quite a dreadful sin, Nor old Professor Woggle Bug, who's highly magnified And looks so big to everyone that he is filled with pride.
There's Tik Tok-he's a clockwork man and quite a funny sight- He talks and walks mechanically, when he's wound up tight; And we've a Hungry Tiger who would babies love to eat But never does because we feed him other kinds of meat.
Just search the whole world over-sail the seas from coast to coast- No other nation in creation queerer folk can boast; And now our rare museum will include a Cat of Glass, A Woozy, and-last but not least-a crazy Patchwork Lass."
Ojo was so pleased with this song that he applauded the singer by clapping his hands, and Scraps followed suit by clapping her padded fingers together, although they made no noise.
The cat pounded on the floor with her glass paws-gently, so as not to break them-and the Woozy, which had been asleep, woke up to ask what the row was about.
"I seldom sing in public, for fear they might want me to start an opera company," remarked the Shaggy Man, who was pleased to know his effort was appreciated.
"Voice, just now, is a little out of training; rusty, perhaps."
I even forgot one thing: Dorothy's Pink Kitten."
"For goodness sake!" exclaimed Bungle, sitting up and looking interested.
"A Pink Kitten?
Is it glass?"
"No; just ordinary kitten."
"Then it can't amount to much.
"Dorothy's kitten is all pink-brains and all-except blue eyes.
Name's Eureka.
Great favorite at the royal palace," said the Shaggy Man, yawning.
The Glass Cat seemed annoyed.
"Can't say.
Tastes differ, you know," replied the Shaggy Man, yawning again.
"I'm solid now; solid glass."
"You don't understand," rejoined the Shaggy Man, sleepily.
If the Pink Kitten despises you, look out for breakers."
"Would anyone at the royal palace break a Glass Cat?"
"Might.
You never can tell.
Advise you to purr soft and look humble-if you can.
Chapter Nine
They Meet the Woozy
"There seem to be very few houses around here, after all," remarked Ojo, after they had walked for a time in silence.
"Never mind," said Scraps; "we are not looking for houses, but rather the road of yellow bricks.
Won't it be funny to run across something yellow in this dismal blue country?"
"Oh; do you mean the pink pebbles you call your brains, and your red heart and green eyes?" asked the Patchwork Girl.
"You'd give your whiskers for a lovely variegated complexion like mine."
"I wouldn't!" retorted the cat.
"Please don't quarrel," begged Ojo.
"This is an important journey, and quarreling makes me discouraged.
To be brave, one must be cheerful, so I hope you will be as good tempered as possible."
They had traveled some distance when suddenly they faced a high fence which barred any further progress straight ahead.
It ran directly across the road and enclosed a small forest of tall trees, set close together.
When the group of adventurers peered through the bars of the fence they thought this forest looked more gloomy and forbidding than any they had ever seen before.
They soon discovered that the path they had been following now made a bend and passed around the enclosure, but what made Ojo stop and look thoughtful was a sign painted on the fence which read:
"BEWARE OF THE WOOZY!"
"That means," he said, "that there's a Woozy inside that fence, and the Woozy must be a dangerous animal or they wouldn't tell people to beware of it."
"That path is outside the fence, and mr Woozy may have all his little forest to himself, for all we care."
"But one of our errands is to find a Woozy," Ojo explained.
"The Magician wants me to get three hairs from the end of a Woozy's tail."
"Let's go on and find some other Woozy," suggested the cat.
"This one is ugly and dangerous, or they wouldn't cage him up.
Maybe we shall find another that is tame and gentle."
"Perhaps there isn't any other, at all," answered Ojo.
"The sign doesn't say: 'Beware a Woozy'; it says: 'Beware the Woozy,' which may mean there's only one in all the Land of Oz."
"Then," said Scraps, "suppose we go in and find him?
Very likely if we ask him politely to let us pull three hairs out of the tip of his tail he won't hurt us."
"It would hurt him, I'm sure, and that would make him cross," said the cat.
"You needn't worry, Bungle," remarked the Patchwork Girl; "for if there is danger you can climb a tree.
Ojo and I are not afraid; are we, Ojo?"
How shall we get over the fence?"
"Climb," answered Scraps, and at once she began climbing up the rows of bars.
Ojo followed and found it more easy than he had expected.
When they got to the top of the fence they began to get down on the other side and soon were in the forest.
The Glass Cat, being small, crept between the lower bars and joined them.
Here there was no path of any sort, so they entered the woods, the boy leading the way, and wandered through the trees until they were nearly in the center of the forest.
They now came upon a clear space in which stood a rocky cave.
So far they had met no living creature, but when Ojo saw the cave he knew it must be the den of the Woozy.
It is hard to face any savage beast without a sinking of the heart, but still more terrifying is it to face an unknown beast, which you have never seen even a picture of.
The opening was perfectly square, and about big enough to admit a goat.
"I guess the Woozy is asleep," said Scraps.
"Shall I throw in a stone, to waken him?"
"No; please don't," answered Ojo, his voice trembling a little.
But he had not long to wait, for the Woozy heard the sound of voices and came trotting out of his cave.
As this is the only Woozy that has ever lived, either in the Land of Oz or out of it, I must describe it to you.
Its head was an exact square, like one of the building blocks a child plays with; therefore it had no ears, but heard sounds through two openings in the upper corners.
Its nose, being in the center of a square surface, was flat, while the mouth was formed by the opening of the lower edge of the block.
The body of the Woozy was much larger than its head, but was likewise block shaped-being twice as long as it was wide and high.
The tail was square and stubby and perfectly straight, and the four legs were made in the same way, each being four sided.
The animal was covered with a thick, smooth skin and had no hair at all except at the extreme end of its tail, where there grew exactly three stiff, stubby hairs.
The beast was dark blue in color and his face was not fierce nor ferocious in expression, but rather good humored and droll.
Seeing the strangers, the Woozy folded his hind legs as if they had been hinged and sat down to look his visitors over.
"Well, well," he exclaimed; "what a queer lot you are!
It is plain to me that you are a remarkable group-as remarkable in your way as I am in mine-and so you are welcome to my domain.
Nice place, isn't it?
But lonesome-dreadfully lonesome."
"Why did they shut you up here?" asked Scraps, who was regarding the queer, square creature with much curiosity.
"Because I eat up all the honey bees which the Munchkin farmers who live around here keep to make them honey."
"Are you fond of eating honey bees?" inquired the boy.
"Very.
They are really delicious.
But the farmers did not like to lose their bees and so they tried to destroy me.
Of course they couldn't do that."
"Why not?"
"My skin is so thick and tough that nothing can get through it to hurt me.
So, finding they could not destroy me, they drove me into this forest and built a fence around me.
Unkind, wasn't it?"
"But what do you eat now?" asked Ojo.
"Nothing at all.
I've tried the leaves from the trees and the mosses and creeping vines, but they don't seem to suit my taste.
So, there being no honey bees here, I've eaten nothing for years.
"You must be awfully hungry," said the boy.
"I've got some bread and cheese in my basket.
Would you like that kind of food?"
So the boy opened his basket and broke a piece off the loaf of bread. He tossed it toward the Woozy, who cleverly caught it in his mouth and ate it in a twinkling.
"That's rather good," declared the animal.
"Any more?"
"Try some cheese," said Ojo, and threw down a piece.
The Woozy ate that, too, and smacked its long, thin lips.
"That's mighty good!" it exclaimed.
"Any more?"
"Plenty," replied Ojo.
So he sat down on a Stump and fed the Woozy bread and cheese for a long time; for, no matter how much the boy broke off, the loaf and the slice remained just as big.
"That'll do," said the Woozy, at last; "I'm quite full.
I hope the strange food won't give me indigestion."
"I hope not," said Ojo.
"It's what I eat."
"Well, I must say I'm much obliged, and I'm glad you came," announced the beast.
"Is there anything I can do in return for your kindness?"
"Yes," said Ojo earnestly, "you have it in your power to do me a great favor, if you will."
"Name the favor and I will grant it."
"I-I want three hairs from the tip of your tail," said Ojo, with some hesitation.
Why, that's all I have-on my tail or anywhere else," exclaimed the beast.
"I know; but I want them very much."
"They are my sole ornaments, my prettiest feature," said the Woozy, uneasily.
"If I give up those three hairs I-I'm just a blockhead."
The beast listened with attention and when Ojo had finished the recital it said, with a sigh:
"I always keep my word, for I pride myself on being square.
So you may have the three hairs, and welcome.
I think, under such circumstances, it would be selfish in me to refuse you."
"Thank you!
Thank you very much," cried the boy, joyfully.
"May I pull out the hairs now?"
"Any time you like," answered the Woozy.
So Ojo went up to the queer creature and taking hold of one of the hairs began to pull.
He pulled with all his might; but the hair remained fast.
"What's the trouble?" asked the Woozy, which Ojo had dragged here and there all around the clearing in his endeavor to pull out the hair.
"I was afraid of that," declared the beast.
"You'll have to pull harder."
"I'll help you," exclaimed Scraps, coming to the boy's side.
"You pull the hair, and I'll pull you, and together we ought to get it out easily."
"Wait a jiffy," called the Woozy, and then it went to a tree and hugged it with its front paws, so that its body couldn't be dragged around by the pull.
"All ready, now.
Go ahead!"
Ojo grasped the hair with both hands and pulled with all his strength, while Scraps seized the boy around his waist and added her strength to his.
But the hair wouldn't budge.
Instead, it slipped out of Ojo's hands and he and Scraps both rolled upon the ground in a heap and never stopped until they bumped against the rocky cave.
"Give it up," advised the Glass Cat, as the boy arose and assisted the Patchwork Girl to her feet.
"A dozen strong men couldn't pull out those hairs.
I believe they're clinched on the under side of the Woozy's thick skin."
"Then what shall I do?" asked the boy, despairingly.
"They're goners, I guess," said the Patchwork Girl.
But Ojo did not feel that way.
He was so disheartened that he sat down upon a stump and began to cry.
"Then, when at last you get to the Magician's house, he can surely find some way to pull out those three hairs."
Ojo was overjoyed at this suggestion.
"That's it!" he cried, wiping away the tears and springing to his feet with a smile.
"If I take the three hairs to the Magician, it won't matter if they are still in your body."
"It can't matter in the least," agreed the Woozy.
"Come on, then," said the boy, picking up his basket; "let us start at once.
I have several other things to find, you know."
But the Glass Cat gave a little laugh and inquired in her scornful way:
That puzzled them all for a time.
"Let us go to the fence, and then we may find a way," suggested Scraps. So they walked through the forest to the fence, reaching it at a point exactly opposite that where they had entered the enclosure.
"How did you get in?" asked the Woozy.
"We climbed over," answered Ojo.
"I can't do that," said the beast.
"I'm a very swift runner, for I can overtake a honey bee as it flies; and I can jump very high, which is the reason they made such a tall fence to keep me in.
But I can't climb at all, and I'm too big to squeeze between the bars of the fence."
Ojo tried to think what to do.
"Can you dig?" he asked.
"No," answered the Woozy, "for I have no claws.
My feet are quite flat on the bottom of them.
Nor can I gnaw away the boards, as I have no teeth."
"You're not such a terrible creature, after all," remarked Scraps.
"You haven't heard me growl, or you wouldn't say that," declared the Woozy.
"When I growl, the sound echoes like thunder all through the valleys and woodlands, and children tremble with fear, and women cover their heads with their aprons, and big men run and hide.
"Please don't growl, then," begged Ojo, earnestly.
"There is no danger of my growling, for I am not angry.
Only when angry do I utter my fearful, ear splitting, soul shuddering growl.
Also, when I am angry, my eyes flash fire, whether I growl or not."
"Real fire?" asked Ojo.
"Of course, real fire.
"In that case, I've solved the riddle," cried Scraps, dancing with glee.
"Those fence boards are made of wood, and if the Woozy stands close to the fence and lets his eyes flash fire, they might set fire to the fence and burn it up.
Then he could walk away with us easily, being free."
"Ah, I have never thought of that plan, or I would have been free long ago," said the Woozy.
"But I cannot flash fire from my eyes unless I am very angry."
"I'll try.
You just say 'Krizzle Kroo' to me."
"Will that make you angry?" inquired the boy.
"Terribly angry."
"What does it mean?" asked Scraps.
"I don't know; that's what makes me so angry," replied the Woozy.
He then stood close to the fence, with his head near one of the boards, and Scraps called out "Krizzle Kroo!"
Then Ojo said "Krizzle Kroo!" and the Glass Cat said "Krizzle Kroo!"
The Woozy began to tremble with anger and small sparks darted from his eyes.
Seeing this, they all cried "Krizzle Kroo!" together, and that made the beast's eyes flash fire so fiercely that the fence board caught the sparks and began to smoke.
Then it burst into flame, and the Woozy stepped back and said triumphantly:
"Aha!
That did the business, all right.
It was a happy thought for you to yell all together, for that made me as angry as I have ever been. Fine sparks, weren't they?"
"Reg'lar fireworks," replied Scraps, admiringly.
In a few moments the board had burned to a distance of several feet, leaving an opening big enough for them all to pass through.
Ojo broke some branches from a tree and with them whipped the fire until it was extinguished.
"We don't want to burn the whole fence down," said he, "for the flames would attract the attention of the Munchkin farmers, who would then come and capture the Woozy again.
I guess they'll be rather surprised when they find he's escaped."
"So they will," declared the Woozy, chuckling gleefully.
"When they find I'm gone the farmers will be badly scared, for they'll expect me to eat up their honey bees, as I did before."
You would get us all into trouble, and we can't afford to have any more trouble than is necessary.
I'll feed you all the bread and cheese you want, and that must satisfy you."
"All right; I'll promise," said the Woozy, cheerfully.
"And when I promise anything you can depend on it, 'cause I'm square."
"I don't see what difference that makes," observed the Patchwork Girl, as they found the path and continued their journey.
"The shape doesn't make a thing honest, does it?"
"Of course it does," returned the Woozy, very decidedly.
"No one could trust that Crooked Magician, for instance, just because he is crooked; but a square Woozy couldn't do anything crooked if he wanted to."
"I am neither square nor crooked," said Scraps, looking down at her plump body.
"No; you're round, so you're liable to do anything," asserted the Woozy.
"Do not blame me, Miss Gorgeous, if I regard you with suspicion. Many a satin ribbon has a cotton back."
Scraps didn't understand this, but she had an uneasy misgiving that she had a cotton back herself.
Notwithstanding all the glory of the shops, and the tempting array of the jewellery and trinkets of every description therein displayed, after a few days of sailing on the exquisite lake, and some walks and drives, Polly, down deep in her heart, was quite ready to move on from Geneva.
And, although she didn't say anything, old mr King guessed as much, and broke out suddenly, "Well, are you ready to start, Polly?"
"I have the presents for the girls.
"Why, Polly, you haven't anything for yourself," Mother Fisher exclaimed, as Polly ran into her room and told the news-how Grandpapa said they were to pack up and leave in the morning.
Mamsie, isn't this pin for Alexia just too lovely for anything?"
She curled up on the end of the bed, and drew it out of its little box. "I think she'll like it," with anxious eyes on Mother Fisher's face.
"Like it?" repeated her mother.
"I think so too," said Polly, happily, replacing it on the bed of cotton, and putting on the cover to look over another gift.
"Well, now, Polly," she said, decidedly, "I shall go down and get that chain we were looking at.
For you do need that, and your father and I are going to give it to you."
"Oh, Mamsie," protested Polly, "I don't need it; really, I don't."
"Well, we shall give it to you," said Mother Fisher.
When they neared Paris, Adela drew herself up in her corner of the compartment.
"I've been staring all the time since we started on our journey, Adela, as hard as I could," said Polly, laughing.
"Well, you'll stare worse than ever now," said Adela, in an important way.
"There isn't anything in all this world that isn't in Paris," she brought up, not very elegantly.
"I don't like Paris." Tom let the words out before he thought.
"That's just because you are a boy," sniffed Adela.
You never saw such bonnets, Polly Pepper, in all your life!" She lifted her hands, unable to find words enough.
"And the parks and gardens, I suppose, are perfectly lovely," cried Polly, feeling as if she must get away from the bonnets and clothes.
"Yes, and the Bois de Boulogne to drive in, that's elegant.
"Oh, those don't go into the Bois de Boulogne," cried Adela, in a tone of horror.
This nettled Tom.
"Of something besides clothes and bonnets," he broke out.
"Well, there's the Louvre," said Polly, after an uncomfortable little pause.
"Yes," said Adela, "that's best of all, and it doesn't cost anything; so Mademoiselle takes us there very often."
"I should think it would be," cried Polly, beaming at her, and answering the first part of Adela's sentence.
"Oh, Adela, I do so long to see it."
"And you can't go there too often, Polly," said Jasper.
"We'll go there the first day, Polly," said Jasper, "the Louvre, I mean.
Well, here we are in Paris!" And then it was all confusion, for the guards were throwing open the doors to the compartments, and streams of people were meeting on the platform, in what seemed to be inextricable confusion amid a babel of sounds.
And it wasn't until Polly was driving up in the big cab with her part of mr King's "family," as he called it, through the broad avenues and boulevards, interspersed with occasional squares and gardens, and the beautiful bridges here and there across the Seine, gleaming in the sunshine, that she could realise that they were actually in Paris.
And the next day they did go to the Louvre.
And Adela, who was to stay a day or two at the hotel with them before going back into her school, was very important, indeed.
"I do want to see the Venus de Milo," said Polly, quite gone with impatience.
"Well, that old statue will wait, too," cried Adela, pulling her off into another gallery.
"Now, Polly, Mademoiselle says, in point of art, the pictures in here are quite important."
"Are they?" said poor Polly, listlessly.
"Yes, they are," said Adela, twitching her sleeve, "and Mademoiselle brings us in this room every single time we come to the Louvre."
"It's the early French school, you know," she brought up glibly.
"Come, I'm for the Venus de Milo.
"Why, she's smiling at us," as the afternoon sunshine streamed across the lovely face, to lose itself in the folds of the crimson curtain in the background.
The parson folded his arms and drew in long breaths of delight.
"Well, it's much better to see the pictures," said Adela.
"And then we can come here again to morrow."
"Well, all right," she said, and turned off, to come directly into the path of Grandpapa, with Phronsie clinging to his hand, and the rest of his part of the "family" standing in silent admiration.
"We thought we'd come here first," said old mr King.
"I don't mean to see anything else to day.
The Venus de Milo is quite enough for me. To morrow, now, we'll drop in again, and look at some of the pictures."
Just look at that child's face, Edward."
"I don't care about the features," said the lady, "it's the expression; the child hasn't a thought of herself, and that's wonderful to begin with."
"Let us walk slowly down the corridor again," said Evelyn, "and then come up; otherwise we shall attract attention to be standing here and gazing at them."
"And I'd like to see that little beauty again," remarked Edward, "I'll confess, Evelyn."
And when they tired of driving, old mr King gave orders for the drivers to rest their horses.
And then they all got out of the carriages, and walked about among the beautiful trees, and on the winding, sheltered paths.
"It's perfectly lovely off there," said Polly, "and almost like the country," with a longing glance off into the green, cool shade beyond. So they strolled off there, separating into little groups; Polly and Jasper in front, and wishing for nothing so much as a race.
Just then a child screamed.
"Oh, no, Polly," Jasper tried to reassure her, as he ran after her. They were having their race, after all, but in a different way from what they had planned.
As that was impossible, she gave a hasty glance around the shrubbery, and seeing no one to notice her, she broke out into a lively run.
"Yes, Phronsie," Grandpapa was saying, as the young people had left them, and the others had wandered off to enjoy the quiet, shady paths, "this place was the old Foret de Rouvray.
It wasn't a very pretty place to come to in those days, what with the robbers and other bad people who infested it.
And now let us go and find a seat, child, and I'll show you one or two little pictures I picked up in the shop this morning; and you can send them in your next letter, to joel and David, if you like."
Polly flew to Phronsie, who was clinging to Grandpapa's hand, and wailing bitterly.
"What is it?
"My pocket book," said Grandpapa; "some fellow has seized it, and frightened this poor child almost to death." He seemed to care a great deal more about that than any loss of the money.
Tom saw the fellow slink with the manner of one who knew the ins and outs of the place well,--now gliding, and ducking low in the sparser growth, now making a bold run around some exposed curve, now dashing into a dense part of the wood.
"I'll have you yet!" said Tom, through set teeth; "I haven't trained at school for nothing!"
A thud of fast flying feet in his rear didn't divert him an instant from his game, although it might be a rescue party for the thief, in the shape of a partner,--who could tell?
And realising, if he caught the man at all, he must do one of his sprints, he covered the ground by a series of flying leaps,--dashed in where he saw his prey rush; one more leap with all his might, and-"I have you!" cried Tom.
The man under him, thrown to the ground by the suddenness of Tom's leap on him, was wriggling and squirming with all the desperation of a trapped creature, when the individual with the flying footsteps hove in sight.
And they had just persuaded the robber that it would be useless to struggle longer against his fate, when the parson, running as he hadn't run for years, appeared to their view.
And after him, at such a gait that would have been his fortune, in a professional way, was the little doctor.
His hat was gone, and his toes scarcely seemed to touch the ground.
When the thief saw him, he looked to see if any more were coming, and resigned himself at once and closed his eyes instinctively.
Unkempt and unwashed, his long, black hair hung around a face sallow in the extreme.
"Don't, Tom," said Jasper, "joke about it."
"Can't help it," said Tom.
"Turn him over?" repeated mr King.
"I should say so," he added drily, "and give him the best recommendation for a long term, too.
"Grandpapa," suddenly cried Phronsie, who hadn't taken her eyes from the man's face, "what are you going to do-where is he going?"
"And as soon as possible, too."
"No, no, Phronsie," said mr King, hastily.
"Say no more, child; you don't understand.
"Oh, my goodness!" exclaimed old mr King, starting backward and putting up his hands to his face to shut out the sight.
"Cover it up, man-bless me-no need to ask him a question.
Why, the fellow is starving."
"Hum-hum-very bad case; very bad case, indeed!" mr King was exploding at intervals, while the torrent was rushing on in execrable French as far as accent went.
CHAPTER eleven.
THE LETTER OF INTRODUCTION.
I LOOKED at the house.
It was an inn, of no great size, but of respectable appearance.
If I was to be of any use to her that night, the time had come to speak of other subjects than the subject of dreams.
What are your plans?
She thanked me warmly, and hesitated, looking up the street and down the street in evident embarrassment what to say next.
"Do you propose staying in Edinburgh?" I asked.
I want to go much further away.
I think I should do better in London; at some respectable milliner's, if I could be properly recommended.
I am quick at my needle, and I understand cutting out.
Or I could keep accounts, if-if anybody would trust me."
She stopped, and looked at me doubtingly, as if she felt far from sure, poor soul, of winning my confidence to begin with.
"I can give you exactly the recommendation you want," I said, "whenever you like.
Now, if you would prefer it."
Her charming features brightened with pleasure.
Her face clouded again-she saw my proposal in a new light.
"Have I any right," she asked, sadly, "to accept what you offer me?"
She shrunk back in alarm.
What would the landlady think if she saw her lodger enter the house at night in company with a stranger, and that stranger a gentleman?
She led the way into a sort of parlor behind the "bar," placed writing materials on the table, looked at my companion as only one woman can look at another under certain circumstances, and left us by ourselves.
She stood, leaning one hand on the table, confused and irresolute, her firm and supple figure falling into an attitude of unsought grace which it was literally a luxury to look at.
I said nothing; my eyes confessed my admiration; the writing materials lay untouched before me on the table.
She abruptly broke it.
"Why not?"
"You know nothing of me.
I am a miserable wretch who has tried to commit a great sin-I have tried to destroy myself.
You ought to know it.
Her head sunk on her bosom; her delicate lips trembled a little; she said no more.
The way to reassure and console her lay plainly enough before me, if I chose to take it.
Without stopping to think, I took it.
"In the mean time," I added, "I have the most perfect confidence in you; and I beg as a favor that you will let me put it to the proof.
I can introduce you to a dressmaker in London who is at the head of a large establishment, and I will do it before I leave you to night."
The dressmaker to whom I had alluded had been my mother's maid in f ormer years, and had been established in business with money lent by my late step father, mr Germaine.
I used both their names without scruple; and I wrote my recommendation in terms which the best of living women and the ablest of existing dressmakers could never have hoped to merit.
Will anybody find excuses for me?
Those rare persons who have been in love, and who have not completely forgotten it yet, may perhaps find excuses for me.
It matters little; I don't deserve them.
I handed her the open letter to read.
She blushed delightfully; she cast one tenderly grateful look at me, which I remembered but too well for many and many an after day.
The next moment, to my astonishment, this changeable creature changed again.
Some forgotten consideration seemed to have occurred to her.
"Would you mind adding a postscript, sir?"
I suppressed all appearance of surprise as well as I could, and took up the pen again.
"Would you please say," she went on, "that I am only to be taken on trial, at first?
I am not to be engaged for more"--her voice sunk lower and lower, so that I could barely hear the next words-"for more than three months, certain."
It was not in human nature-perhaps I ought to say it was not in the nature of a man who was in my situation-to refrain from showing some curiosity, on being asked to supplement a letter of recommendation by such a postscript as this.
"Have you some other employment in prospect?" I asked.
An unworthy doubt of her-the mean offspring of jealousy-found its way into my mind.
She lifted her noble head.
"For God's sake, ask me no more questions to night!"
We stood together by the table; we looked at each other in a momentary silence.
"How can I thank you?" she murmured, softly.
"Oh, sir, I will indeed be worthy of the confidence that you have shown in me!" Her eyes moistened; her variable color came and went; her dress heaved softly over the lovely outline of her bosom.
I don't believe the man lives who could have resisted her at that moment.
I lost all power of restraint; I caught her in my arms; I whispered, "I love you!" I kissed her passionately.
For a moment she lay helpless and trembling on my breast; for a moment her fragrant lips softly returned the kiss.
In an instant more it was over.
How dare you touch me!" she said. "Take your letter back, sir; I refuse to receive it; I will never speak to you again.
You don't know what you have done.
Oh!" she cried, throwing herself in despair on a sofa that stood near her, "shall I ever recover my self respect? shall I ever forgive myself for what I have done to night?"
I implored her pardon; I assured her of my repentance and regret in words which did really come from my heart.
The violence of her agitation more than distressed me-I was really alarmed by it.
She composed herself after a while.
She rose to her feet with modest dignity, and silently held out her hand in token that my repentance was accepted.
"You will give me time for atonement?" I pleaded.
"You will not lose all confidence in me?
"I will write to you," she said.
"To morrow?"
I took up the letter of recommendation from the floor.
"Make your goodness to me complete," I said.
"Don't mortify me by refusing to take my letter."
"I will take your letter," she answered, quietly.
"Thank you for writing it.
Leave me now, please.
Good night."
I left her, pale and sad, with my letter in her hand.
mrs VAN BRANDT AT HOME.
As I lifted my hand to ring the house bell, the door was opened from within, and no less a person than mr Van Brandt himself stood before me.
He had his hat on.
We had evidently met just as he was going out.
"My dear sir, how good this is of you!
You present the best of all replies to my letter in presenting yourself.
mrs Van Brandt is at home. mrs Van Brandt will be delighted.
Pray walk in."
He threw open the door of a room on the ground floor.
"Be seated, mr Germaine, I beg of you." He turned to the open door, and called up the stairs, in a loud and confident voice:
"Mary! come down directly."
"Mary"!
I knew her Christian name at last, and knew it through Van Brandt.
No words can tell how the name jarred on me, spoken by his lips. For the first time for years past my mind went back to Mary Dermody and Greenwater Broad.
The next moment I heard the rustling of mrs Van Brandt's dress on the stairs.
As the sound caught my ear, the old times and the old faces vanished again from my thoughts as completely as if they had never existed.
What similarity was perceivable in the sooty London lodging house to remind me of the bailiff's flower scented cottage by the shores of the lake?
"I have a business appointment," he said, "which it is impossible to put off.
Pray excuse me.
Good morning."
The house door opened and closed again.
She stood before me.
"mr Germaine!" she exclaimed, starting back, as if the bare sight of me repelled her.
"Is this honorable?
Is this worthy of you?
You allow me to be entrapped into receiving you, and you accept as your accomplice mr Van Brandt!
Oh, sir, I have accustomed myself to look up to you as a high minded man.
Her reproaches passed by me unheeded.
They only heightened her color; they only added a new rapture to the luxury of looking at her.
"If you loved me as faithfully as I love you," I said, "you would understand why I am here.
She suddenly approached me, and fixed her eyes in eager scrutiny on my face.
"There must be some mistake," she said.
"You cannot possibly have received my letter, or you have not read it?"
"I have received it, and I have read it."
"And Van Brandt's letter-you have read that too?"
"Yes."
She sat down by the table, and, leaning her arms on it, covered her face with her hands.
My answers seemed not only to have distressed, but to have perplexed her.
"Are men all alike?" I heard her say.
I closed the door and seated myself by her side.
She removed her hands from her face when she felt me near her.
She looked at me with a cold and steady surprise.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I am going to try if I can recover my place in your estimation," I said.
"I am going to ask your pity for a man whose whole heart is yours, whose whole life is bound up in you."
She started to her feet, and looked round her incredulously, as if doubting whether she had rightly heard and rightly interpreted my last words.
Before I could speak again, she suddenly faced me, and struck her open hand on the table with a passionate resolution which I now saw in her for the first time.
"Stop!" she cried.
"There must be an end to this.
And an end there shall be.
Do you know who that man is who has just left the house?
I am speaking in earnest."
There was no choice but to answer her.
She was indeed in earnest-vehemently in earnest.
"His letter tells me," I said, "that he is mr Van Brandt."
She sat down again, and turned her face away from me.
"Do you know what made him invite you to this house?"
I made no reply.
"You force me to tell you the truth," she went on.
"He asked me who you were, last night on our way home.
I told him I knew nothing of your position in the world.
He was too cunning to believe me; he went out to the public house and looked at a directory.
He came back and said, 'mr
He is not a man for a poor devil like me to offend; I mean to make a friend of him, and I expect you to make a friend of him too.' He sat down and wrote to you.
I am living under that man's protection, mr Germaine.
His wife is not dead, as you may suppose; she is living, and I know her to be living.
I wrote to you that I was beneath your notice, and you have obliged me to tell you why.
I drew closer to her.
She tried to get up and leave me.
I knew my power over her, and used it (as any man in my place would have used it) without scruple.
I took her hand.
"I don't believe you have voluntarily degraded yourself," I said.
"You have been forced into your present position: there are circumstances which excuse you, and which you are purposely keeping back from me. Nothing will convince me that you are a base woman.
Should I love you as I love you, if you were really unworthy of me?"
She struggled to free her hand; I still held it.
She tried to change the subject.
"There is one thing you haven't told me yet," she said, with a faint, forced smile.
"Never.
Can you tell why?"
But the subject dropped.
Instead of answering her question, I drew her nearer to me-I returned to the forbidden subject of my love.
"Look at me," I pleaded, "and tell me the truth.
Do you really care nothing for me?
Have you never once thought of me in all the time that has passed since we last met?"
I spoke as I felt-fervently, passionately.
She made a last effort to repel me, and yielded even as she made it.
Her hand closed on mine, a low sigh fluttered on her lips.
She answered with a sudden self abandonment; she recklessly cast herself loose from the restraints which had held her up to this time.
"I think of you perpetually," she said.
"I was thinking of you at the opera last night.
"You love me!" I whispered.
"Love you!" she repeated.
"My whole heart goes out to you in spite of myself.
Degraded as I am, unworthy as I am-knowing as I do that nothing can ever come of it-I love you!
I love you!"
She threw her arms round my neck, and held me to her with all her strength.
"Oh, don't tempt me!" she murmured.
I was beside myself.
I spoke as recklessly to her as she had spoken to me.
Leave him at once and forever. Leave him, and come with me to a future that is worthy of you-your future as my wife."
"Never!" she answered, crouching low at my feet.
"Why not?
What obstacle is there?"
"I can't tell you-I daren't tell you."
"Will you write it?"
Go, I implore you, before Van Brandt comes back.
Go, if you love me and pity me."
She had roused my jealousy.
I positively refused to leave her.
"Let him come back!
She looked at me wildly, with a cry of terror.
"Don't frighten me," she said.
"Let me think."
She reflected for a moment.
"Have you a mother living?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Do you think she would come and see me?"
"I am sure she would if I asked her."
She considered with herself once more.
"I will tell your mother what the obstacle is," she said, thoughtfully.
"When?"
"To morrow, at this time."
She raised herself on her knees; the tears suddenly filled her eyes.
She drew me to her gently.
"Kiss me," she whispered.
"You will never come here again.
Kiss me for the last time."
My lips had barely touched hers, when she started to her feet and snatched up my hat from the chair on which I had placed it.
"Take your hat," she said.
"He has come back."
My duller sense of hearing had discovered nothing.
I rose and took my hat to quiet her.
At the same moment the door of the room opened suddenly and softly.
mr Van Brandt came in.
I saw in his face that he had some vile motive of his own for trying to take us by surprise, and that the result of the experiment had disappointed him.
"You are not going yet?" he said, speaking to me with his eye on mrs Van Brandt.
Put down your hat, mr Germaine. No ceremony!"
"You are very good," I answered.
I must beg you and mrs Van Brandt to excuse me."
I took leave of her as I spoke.
She turned deadly pale when she shook hands with me at parting.
Had she any open brutality to dread from Van Brandt as soon as my back was turned?
The bare suspicion of it made my blood boil.
In her interests, the wise thing and the merciful thing to do was to conciliate the fellow before I left the house.
"I am sorry not to be able to accept your invitation," I said, as we walked together to the door.
"Perhaps you will give me another chance?"
His eyes twinkled cunningly.
"What do you say to a quiet little dinner here?" he asked.
"A slice of mutton, you know, and a bottle of good wine.
Only our three selves, and one old friend of mine to make up four.
Mary and you partners-eh?
Shall we say the day after to morrow?"
She had followed us to the door, keeping behind Van Brandt while he was speaking to me.
When he mentioned the "old friend" and the "rubber of whist," her face expressed the strongest emotions of shame and disgust. The next moment (when she had heard him fix the date of the dinner for "the day after to morrow") her features became composed again, as if a sudden sense of relief had come to her.
What did the change mean? "To morrow" was the day she had appointed for seeing my mother.
Did she really believe, when I had heard what passed at the interview, that I should never enter the house again, and never attempt to see her more? And was this the secret of her composure when she heard the date of the dinner appointed for "the day after to morrow"?
Asking myself these questions, I accepted my invitation, and left the house with a heavy heart.
That farewell kiss, that sudden composure when the day of the dinner was fixed, weighed on my spirits.
"You have gone out earlier than usual to day," she said.
"Did the fine weather tempt you, my dear?" She paused, and looked at me more closely. "George!" she exclaimed, "what has happened to you?
Where have you been?"
I told her the truth as honestly as I have told it here.
The color deepened in my mother's face.
She looked at me, and spoke to me with a severity which was rare indeed in my experience of her.
"Must I remind you, for the first time in your life, of what is due to your mother?" she asked.
"Is it possible that you expect me to visit a woman, who, by her own confession-"
"I expect you to visit a woman who has only to say the word and to be your daughter in law," I interposed.
"Surely I am not asking what is unworthy of you, if I ask that?"
My mother looked at me in blank dismay.
"Do you mean, George, that you have offered her marriage?"
"Yes."
"And she has said No?"
"She has said No, because there is some obstacle in her way.
I have tried vainly to make her explain herself.
The serious nature of the emergency had its effect.
"Write down the name and address," she said resignedly.
"Is it as serious as that, George?"
Lord Percy to the quarry went, To view the tender deere; Quoth he, "Erle Douglas promised This day to meet me heere;
[Yet bides Earl Douglas on the bent, As Chieftain stout and good, As valiant Captain, all unmov'd The shock he firmly stood.
And throwing strait their bows away, They grasp'd their swords so bright: And now sharp blows, a heavy shower, On shields and helmets light.]
So thus did both these nobles dye, Whose courage none could staine; An English archer then perceiv'd The noble erle was slaine.
This fight did last from breake of day Till setting of the sun; For when they rung the evening bell, The battel scarce was done.
And with Sir George and stout Sir james, Both knights of good account, Good Sir Ralph Rabby there was slaine, Whose prowesse did surmount.
And the Lord Maxwell in like case Did with Erle Douglas dye; Of twenty hundred Scottish speres, Scarce fifty five did flye.
This newes was brought to Eddenborrow, Where Scotlands king did raigne, That brave Erle Douglas suddenlye Was with an arrow slaine.
"O heavy newes," King james did say; "Scottland can witnesse bee, I have not any captaine more Of such account as hee."
"Now God be with him," said our king, "Sith it will noe better bee; I trust I have, within my realme, Five hundred as good as hee.
This vow full well the king perform'd After, at Humbledowne; In one day, fifty knights were slayne, With lordes of great renowne.
God save our king, and bless this land In plentye, joy, and peace; And grant henceforth, that foule debate 'Twixt noblemen may cease!
Chapter five
The main object of the missionaries was to ascertain the spiritual wants of the warlike Chilcat tribe, with a view to the establishment of a church and school in their principal village; the merchant and his party were bent on business and scenery; while my mind was on the mountains, glaciers, and forests.
Every face glowed with natural love of wild beauty.
But every eye was turned to the mountains. Forgotten now were the Chilcats and missions while the word of God was being read in these majestic hieroglyphics blazoned along the sky.
The earnest, childish wonderment with which this glorious page of Nature's Bible was contemplated was delightful to see.
All evinced eager desire to learn.
"Is that a glacier," they asked, "down in that canyon?
"Yes."
"How deep is it?"
"You say it flows.
"It flows like water, though invisibly slow."
"From snow that is heaped up every winter on the mountains."
"And how, then, is the snow changed into ice?"
"Yes."
"Are those bluish draggled masses hanging down from beneath the snow fields what you call the snouts of the glaciers?"
"Yes."
"The glaciers themselves, just as traveling animals make their own tracks."
"How long have they been there?"
"Numberless centuries," etc
About the middle of the afternoon we were directly opposite a noble group of glaciers some ten in number, flowing from a chain of crater like snow fountains, guarded around their summits and well down their sides by jagged peaks and cols and curving mural ridges. From each of the larger clusters of fountains, a wide, sheer walled canyon opens down to the sea.
It was to this glacier that the ships of the Alaska Ice Company resorted for the ice they carried to San Francisco and the Sandwich Islands, and, I believe, also to China and Japan.
To load, they had only to sail up the fiord within a short distance of the front and drop anchor in the terminal moraine.
The captain repeatedly called for more steam, which the engineer refused to furnish, cautiously keeping the pressure low because the salt water foamed in the boilers and some of it passed over into the cylinders, causing heavy thumping at the end of each piston stroke, and threatening to knock out the cylinder heads.
In the discussions that followed much indignation and economy were brought to light.
But at the present rate of speed it was found that the cost of the trip for each passenger would be five or ten dollars above the first estimate.
The tide was low, exposing a luxuriant growth of algae, which sent up a fine, fresh sea smell.
The shingle was composed of slate, quartz, and granite, named in the order of abundance.
The first land plant met was a tall grass, nine feet high, forming a meadow like margin in front of the forest. Pushing my way well back into the forest, I found it composed almost entirely of spruce and two hemlocks (Picea sitchensis, Tsuga heterophylla and t mertensiana) with a few specimens of yellow cypress.
On the opener spots beneath the trees the ground is covered to a depth of two or three feet with mosses of indescribable freshness and beauty, a few dwarf conifers often planted on their rich furred bosses, together with pyrola, coptis, and Solomon's seal.
As the twilight began to fall, I sat down on the mossy instep of a spruce.
One bird, a thrush, embroidered the silence with cheery notes, making the solitude familiar and sweet, while the solemn monotone of the stream sifting through the woods seemed like the very voice of God, humanized, terrestrialized, and entering one's heart as to a home prepared for it.
The stream was bridged at short intervals with picturesque, moss embossed logs, and the trees on its banks, leaning over from side to side, made high embowering arches.
Our next attempt, made nearer the middle of the valley, was successful, and we soon found ourselves on firm gravelly ground, and made haste to the huge ice wall, which seemed to recede as we advanced.
mr Young and I traced the glorious crystal wall, admiring its wonderful architecture, the play of light in the rifts and caverns, and the structure of the ice as displayed in the less fractured sections, finding fresh beauty everywhere and facts for study.
Along the sides of the glacier we saw the mighty flood grinding against the granite walls with tremendous pressure, rounding outswelling bosses, and deepening the retreating hollows into the forms they are destined to have when, in the fullness of appointed time, the huge ice tool shall be withdrawn by the sun
Every feature glowed with intention, reflecting the plans of God.
In the mean time another excursion was being invented, one of small size and price.
"We shall probably find stone axes and other curiosities.
For example, the first dwelling we visited was about forty feet square, with walls built of planks two feet wide and six inches thick.
The pillars that had supported the ridgepole were still standing in some of the ruins.
With the same tools not one in a thousand of our skilled mechanics could do as good work.
The carved totem pole monuments are the most striking of the objects displayed here.
The simplest of them consisted of a smooth, round post fifteen or twenty feet high and about eighteen inches in diameter, with the figure of some animal on top-a bear, porpoise, eagle, or raven, about life-size or larger.
The largest were thirty or forty feet high, carved from top to bottom into human and animal totem figures, one above another, with their limbs grotesquely doubled and folded.
But a telling display of family pride seemed to have been the prevailing motive. All the figures were more or less rude, and some were broadly grotesque, but there was never any feebleness or obscurity in the expression.
This sacrilege came near causing trouble and would have cost us dear had the totem not chanced to belong to the Kadachan family, the representative of which is a member of the newly organized Wrangell Presbyterian Church.
Exploration of the Stickeen Glaciers
Next day I planned an excursion to the so-called Dirt Glacier, the most interesting to Indians and steamer men of all the Stickeen glaciers from its mysterious floods.
The captain kindly loaned me his canoe and two of his Indian deck hands, who seemed much puzzled to know what the rare service required of them might mean, and on leaving bade a merry adieu to their companions.
Thirteen small glaciers were in sight and four waterfalls.
I had my supper before leaving the steamer, so I had only to make a campfire, spread my blanket, and lie down.
The Dirt Glacier is noted among the river men as being subject to violent flood outbursts once or twice a year, usually in the late summer.
Our camp was made on the south or lower side of the delta, below all the draining streams, so that I would not have to ford any of them on my way to the glacier.
I had but little to say to my companions as they could speak no English, nor I much Thlinkit or Chinook.
After wrapping myself in my blankets, I still gazed into the marvelous sky and made out to sleep only about two hours.
Then, without waking the noisy sleepers, I arose, ate a piece of bread, and set out in my shirt sleeves, determined to make the most of the time at my disposal.
The captain was to pick us up about noon at a woodpile about a mile from here; but if in the mean time the steamer should run aground and he should need his canoe, a three whistle signal would be given.
It was too swift and rough to ford, and no bridge tree could be found, for the great floods had cleared everything out of their way.
Seedling trees and bushes also were growing among the flowers.
Altogether, I saw about fifteen or sixteen miles of the main trunk. The grade is almost regular, and the walls on either hand are about from two to three thousand feet high, sculptured like those of Yosemite Valley.
The structure of the glacier was strikingly revealed on its melting surface.
It is made up of thin vertical or inclined sheets or slabs set on edge and welded together.
They represent, I think, the successive snowfalls from heavy storms on the tributaries.
One of the tributaries on the right side, about three miles above the front, has been entirely melted off from the trunk and has receded two or three miles, forming an independent glacier.
Across the mouth of this abandoned part of its channel the main glacier flows, forming a dam which gives rise to a lake.
In the angle formed by the main glacier and the lake that gives rise to the river floods, there is a massive granite dome sparsely feathered with trees, and just beyond this yosemitic rock is a mountain, perhaps ten thousand feet high, laden with ice and snow which seemed pure pearly white in the morning light.
Last evening as seen from camp it was adorned with a cloud streamer, and both the streamer and the peak were flushed in the alpenglow.
A mile or two above this mountain, on the opposite side of the glacier, there is a rock like the Yosemite Sentinel; and in general all the wall rocks as far as I saw them are more or less yosemitic in form and color and streaked with cascades.
The return trip to the camp past the shelving cliff and through the weary devil's club jungle was made in a few hours.
The captain had called for me, and, after waiting three hours, departed for Wrangell without leaving any food, to make sure, I suppose, of a quick return of his Indians and canoe.
This was no serious matter, however, for the swift current swept us down to Buck Station, some thirty five miles distant, by eight o'clock.
The weather that morning, august twenty seventh, was dark and rainy, and I tried to persuade myself that I ought to rest a day before setting out on new ice work.
So grand an invitation displayed in characters so telling was of course irresistible, and body care and weather care vanished.
"When shall I expect you back?" inquired Choquette, when I bade him good bye.
"I shall see as much as possible of the glacier, and I know not how long it will hold me."
"Well, but when will I come to look for you, if anything happens? Where are you going to try to go?
"Yes, I have," I said.
Do not look for me until I make my appearance on the river bank.
I am used to caring for myself." And so, shouldering my bundle, I trudged off through the moraine boulders and thickets.
On the older portions of this moraine I discovered several kettles in process of formation and was pleased to find that they conformed in the most striking way with the theory I had already been led to make from observations on the old kettles which form so curious a feature of the drift covering Wisconsin and Minnesota and some of the larger moraines of the residual glaciers in the California Sierra.
The moraine material of course was falling in as the ice melted, and the sides maintained an angle as steep as the material would lie.
All sorts of theories have been advanced for the formation of these kettles, so abundant in the drift over a great part of the United States, and I was glad to be able to set the question at rest, at least as far as I was concerned.
The outlet of the lake is a large stream, almost a river in size, one of the main draining streams of the glacier.
I attempted to ford it where it begins to break in rapids in passing over the moraine, but found it too deep and rough on the bottom.
Here I found a spruce tree which I felled for a bridge; it reached across, about ten feet of the top holding in the bank brush.
But the force of the torrent, acting on the submerged branches and the slender end of the trunk, bent it like a bow and made it very unsteady, and after testing it by going out about a third of the way over, it seemed likely to be carried away when bent deeper into the current by my weight.
Fortunately, I discovered another larger tree well situated a little farther down, which I felled, and though a few feet in the middle was submerged, it seemed perfectly safe.
As it was now getting late, I started back to the lakeside where I had left my bundle, and in trying to hold a direct course found the interlaced jungle still more difficult than it was along the bank of the torrent.
But everything was deliciously fresh, and I found new and old plant friends, and lessons on Nature's Alaska moraine landscape gardening that made everything bright and light.
It was now near dark, and I made haste to make up my flimsy little tent.
The ground was desperately rocky.
I made out, however, to level down a strip large enough to lie on, and by means of slim alder stems bent over it and tied together soon had a home.
While thus busily engaged I was startled by a thundering roar across the lake.
Running to the top of the moraine, I discovered that the tremendous noise was only the outcry of a newborn berg about fifty or sixty feet in diameter, rocking and wallowing in the waves it had raised as if enjoying its freedom after its long grinding work as part of the glacier.
After this fine last lesson I managed to make a small fire out of wet twigs, got a cup of tea, stripped off my dripping clothing, wrapped myself in a blanket and lay brooding on the gains of the day and plans for the morrow, glad, rich, and almost comfortable.
The smell of the washed ground and vegetation made every breath a pleasure, and I found Calypso borealis, the first I had seen on this side of the continent, one of my darlings, worth any amount of hardship; and I saw one of my Douglas squirrels on the margin of a grassy pool.
In the gardens and forests of this wonderful moraine one might spend a whole joyful life.
Fortunately this night it did not rain, but it was very cold.
I then crossed to the south side, noting the forms of the huge blocks into which the glacier was broken in passing over the brow of the cataract, and how they were welded.
The weather was now clear, opening views according to my own heart far into the high snowy fountains.
The greatest discovery was in methods of denudation displayed beneath the glacier.
Promptly at sight of the signal I made, the kind Frenchman came across for me in his canoe.
CHAPTER eight.
How Absalom Murdered Amnon, Who Had Forced His Own Sister; And How He Was Banished And Afterwards Recalled By David.
Now Amnon, David's eldest son, fell in love with her, and being not able to obtain his desires, on account of her virginity, and the custody she was under, was so much out of order, nay, his grief so eat up his body, that he grew lean, and his color was changed.
When, therefore, he saw that every morning Amnon was not in body as he ought to be, he came to him, and desired him to tell him what was the cause of it: however, he said that he guessed that it arose from the passion of love.
Amnon confessed his passion, that he was in love with a sister of his, who had the same father with himself.
So Jenadab suggested to him by what method and contrivance he might obtain his desires; for he persuaded him to pretend sickness, and bade him, when his father should come to him, to beg of him that his sister might come and minister to him; for if that were done, he should be better, and should quickly recover from his distemper.
When his father came, and inquired how he did, he begged of him to send his sister to him.
So she kneaded the flour in the sight of her brother, and made him cakes, and baked them in a pan, and brought them to him; but at that time he would not taste them, but gave order to his servants to send all that were there out of his chamber, because he had a mind to repose himself, free from tumult and disturbance.
As soon as what he had commanded was done, he desired his sister to bring his supper to him into the inner parlor; which, when the damsel had done, he took hold of her, and endeavored to persuade her to lie with him.
Whereupon the damsel cried out, and said, "Nay, brother, do not force me, nor be so wicked as to transgress the laws, and bring upon thyself the utmost confusion.
Curb this thy unrighteous and impure lust, from which our house will get nothing but reproach and disgrace." She also advised him to speak to his father about this affair; for he would permit him [to marry her].
This she said, as desirous to avoid her brother's violent passion at present.
But he would not yield to her; but, inflamed with love and blinded with the vehemency of his passion, he forced his sister: but as soon as Amnon had satisfied his lust, he hated her immediately, and giving her reproachful words, bade her rise up and be gone.
And when she said that this was a more injurious treatment than the former, if, now he had forced her, he would not let her stay with him till the evening, but bid her go away in the day-time, and while it was light, that she might meet with people that would be witnesses of her shame,--he commanded his servant to turn her out of his house.
Now Absalom, her brother, happened to meet her, and asked her what sad thing had befallen her, that she was in that plight; and when she had told him what injury had been offered her, he comforted her, and desired her to be quiet, and take all patiently, and not to esteem her being corrupted by her brother as an injury.
So she yielded to his advice, and left off her crying out, and discovering the force offered her to the multitude; and she continued as a widow with her brother Absalom a long time.
When David his father knew this, he was grieved at the actions of Amnon; but because he had an extraordinary affection for him, for he was his eldest son, he was compelled not to afflict him; but Absalom watched for a fit opportunity of revenging this crime upon him, for he thoroughly hated him.
Then Absalom charged his own servants, that when they should see Amnon disordered and drowsy with wine, and he should give them a signal, they should fear nobody, but kill him.
In the mean time, a great noise of horses, and a tumult of some people that were coming, turned their attention to them; they were the king's sons, who were fled away from the feast.
So their father met them as they were in their grief, and he himself grieved with them; but it was more than he expected to see those his sons again, whom he had a little before heard to have perished.
However, their were tears on both sides; they lamenting their brother who was killed, and the king lamenting his son, who was killed also; but Absalom fled to Geshur, to his grandfather by his mother's side, who was king of that country, and he remained with him three whole years.
However, the king sent a message to his son beforehand, as he was coming, and commanded him to retire to his own house, for he was not yet in such a disposition as to think fit at present to see him. Accordingly, upon the father's command, he avoided coming into his presence, and contented himself with the respects paid him by his own family only.
But Absalom sent to Joab, and desired him to pacify his father entirely towards him; and to beseech him to give him leave to come to him to see him, and speak with him.
CHAPTER twenty.
The visit of Senator Abner Dilworthy was an event in Hawkeye.
When a Senator, whose place is in Washington moving among the Great and guiding the destinies of the nation, condescends to mingle among the people and accept the hospitalities of such a place as Hawkeye, the honor is not considered a light one.
All parties are flattered by it and politics are forgotten in the presence of one so distinguished among his fellows.
Sellers, who had been a confederate and had not thriven by it, should give him the cold shoulder?
Sellers for the unreserved hospitalities of the town.
It was the large hearted Colonel who, in a manner, gave him the freedom of the city.
Boswell.
But you will mingle with our people, and you will see here developments that will surprise you."
He did, in fact, press him to dine upon the morning of the day the Senator was going away.
Senator Dilworthy was large and portly, though not tall-a pleasant spoken man, a popular man with the people.
He took a lively interest in the town and all the surrounding country, and made many inquiries as to the progress of agriculture, of education, and of religion, and especially as to the condition of the emancipated race.
"Providence," he said, "has placed them in our hands, and although you and I, General, might have chosen a different destiny for them, under the Constitution, yet Providence knows best."
"They are a speculating race, sir, disinclined to work for white folks without security, planning how to live by only working for themselves.
Idle, sir, there's my garden just a ruin of weeds.
If he won't stick to any industry except for himself now, what will he do then?"
"But, Colonel, the negro when educated will be more able to make his speculations fruitful."
"Never, sir, never.
He would only have a wider scope to injure himself. A niggro has no grasp, sir.
Now, a white man can conceive great operations, and carry them out; a niggro can't."
"Still," replied the Senator, "granting that he might injure himself in a worldly point of view, his elevation through education would multiply his chances for the hereafter-which is the important thing after all, Colonel.
"I'd elevate his soul," promptly responded the Colonel; "that's just it; you can't make his soul too immortal, but I wouldn't touch him, himself. Yes, sir! make his soul immortal, but don't disturb the niggro as he is."
Of course one of the entertainments offered the Senator was a public reception, held in the court house, at which he made a speech to his fellow citizens.
Boswell.
The occasion was one to call out his finest powers of personal appearance, and one he long dwelt on with pleasure.
This not being an edition of the Congressional Globe it is impossible to give Senator Dilworthy's speech in full.
He began somewhat as follows:
"Fellow citizens: It gives me great pleasure to thus meet and mingle with you, to lay aside for a moment the heavy duties of an official and burdensome station, and confer in familiar converse with my friends in your great state.
The good opinion of my fellow citizens of all sections is the sweetest solace in all my anxieties.
Cries of "put him out."]
"My friends, do not remove him.
I see that he is a victim of that evil which is swallowing up public virtue and sapping the foundation of society.
As I was saying, when I can lay down the cares of office and retire to the sweets of private life in some such sweet, peaceful, intelligent, wide awake and patriotic place as Hawkeye (applause).
I have traveled much, I have seen all parts of our glorious union, but I have never seen a lovelier village than yours, or one that has more signs of commercial and industrial and religious prosperity-(more applause)."
The Senator then launched into a sketch of our great country, and dwelt for an hour or more upon its prosperity and the dangers which threatened it.
He and mr Brierly took the Senator over to Napoleon and opened to him their plan.
It was a plan that the Senator could understand without a great deal of explanation, for he seemed to be familiar with the like improvements elsewhere.
When, however, they reached Stone's Landing the Senator looked about him and inquired,
"Is this Napoleon?"
"This is the nucleus, the nucleus," said the Colonel, unrolling his map. "Here is the deepo, the church, the City Hall and so on."
"Ah, I see.
How far from here is Columbus River?
Does that stream empty----"
"That, why, that's Goose Run.
"Yes, sir," the Colonel hastened to explain, "in the old records Columbus River is called Goose Run.
You see how it sweeps round the town-forty nine miles to the Missouri; sloop navigation all the way pretty much drains this whole country; when it's improved steamboats will run right up here.
It's got to be enlarged, deepened.
You see by the map.
Columbus River.
This country must have water communication!"
Sellers.
"I should say a million; is that your figure mr Brierly."
"According to our surveys," said Harry, "a million would do it; a million spent on the river would make Napoleon worth two millions at least."
You can begin to sell town lots on that appropriation you know."
The Senator, himself, to do him justice, was not very much interested in the country or the stream, but he favored the appropriation, and he gave the Colonel and mr Brierly to understand that he would endeavor to get it through.
Harry, who thought he was shrewd and understood Washington, suggested an interest.
But he saw that the Senator was wounded by the suggestion.
"You will offend me by repeating such an observation," he said. "Whatever I do will be for the public interest.
It will require a portion of the appropriation for necessary expenses, and I am sorry to say that there are members who will have to be seen.
But you can reckon upon my humble services."
This aspect of the subject was not again alluded to.
It was on this visit also that the Senator made the acquaintance of mr Washington Hawkins, and was greatly taken with his innocence, his guileless manner and perhaps with his ready adaptability to enter upon any plan proposed.
And he did not doubt that this was an opportunity of that kind.
The result of several conferences with Washington was that the Senator proposed that he should go to Washington with him and become his private secretary and the secretary of his committee; a proposal which was eagerly accepted.
The Senator spent Sunday in Hawkeye and attended church.
He cheered the heart of the worthy and zealous minister by an expression of his sympathy in his labors, and by many inquiries in regard to the religious state of the region.
It was not a very promising state, and the good man felt how much lighter his task would be, if he had the aid of such a man as Senator Dilworthy.
"I am glad to see, my dear sir," said the Senator, "that you give them the doctrines.
It is owing to a neglect of the doctrines, that there is such a fearful falling away in the country.
I wish that we might have you in Washington-as chaplain, now, in the senate."
The good man could not but be a little flattered, and if sometimes, thereafter, in his discouraging work, he allowed the thought that he might perhaps be called to Washington as chaplain of the Senate, to cheer him, who can wonder.
The Senator's commendation at least did one service for him, it elevated him in the opinion of Hawkeye.
Laura was at church alone that day, and mr Brierly walked home with her.
A part of their way lay with that of General Boswell and Senator Dilworthy, and introductions were made.
Laura had her own reasons for wishing to know the Senator, and the Senator was not a man who could be called indifferent to charms such as hers.
That meek young lady so commended herself to him in the short walk, that he announced his intentions of paying his respects to her the next day, an intention which Harry received glumly; and when the Senator was out of hearing he called him "an old fool."
He said you were a young man of great promise."
The Senator did call next day, and the result of his visit was that he was confirmed in his impression that there was something about him very attractive to ladies.
He saw Laura again and again during his stay, and felt more and more the subtle influence of her feminine beauty, which every man felt who came near her.
Perhaps Laura enjoyed his torment, but she soothed him with blandishments that increased his ardor, and she smiled to herself to think that he had, with all his protestations of love, never spoken of marriage.
Probably the vivacious fellow never had thought of it.
At any rate when he at length went away from Hawkeye he was no nearer it.
But there was no telling to what desperate lengths his passion might not carry him.
Laura bade him good bye with tender regret, which, however, did not disturb her peace or interfere with her plans.
CHAPTER three.
How The Kings Of Asia Honored The Nation Of The Jews And Made Them Citizens Of Those Cities Which They Built.
Now as to this determination of Agrippa, it is not so much to be admired, for at that time our nation had not made war against the romans.
But one may well be astonished at the generosity of Vespasian and titus, that after so great wars and contests which they had from us, they should use such moderation.
But I will now return to that part of my history whence I made the present digression.
But at length, when Antiochus had beaten Ptolemy, he seized upon Judea; and when Philopater was dead, his son sent out a great army under Scopas, the general of his forces, against the inhabitants of Celesyria, who took many of their cities, and in particular our nation; which when he fell upon them, went over to him.
Yet was it not long afterward when Antiochus overcame Scopas, in a battle fought at the fountains of Jordan, and destroyed a great part of his army.
But afterward, when Antiochus subdued those cities of Celesyria which Scopas had gotten into his possession, and Samaria with them, the Jews, of their own accord, went over to him, and received him into the city [Jerusalem], and gave plentiful provision to all his army, and to his elephants, and readily assisted him when he besieged the garrison which was in the citadel of Jerusalem.
Wherefore Antiochus thought it but just to requite the Jews' diligence and zeal in his service.
So he wrote to the generals of his armies, and to his friends, and gave testimony to the good behavior of the Jews towards him, and informed them what rewards he had resolved to bestow on them for that their behavior.
But we will return to the series of the history, when we have first produced the epistles of king Antiochus.
King Antiochus To Ptolemy, Sendeth Greeting.
And these payments I would have fully paid them, as I have sent orders to you.
I would also have the work about the temple finished, and the cloisters, and if there be any thing else that ought to be rebuilt.
And that the city may the sooner recover its inhabitants, I grant a discharge from taxes for three years to its present inhabitants, and to such as shall come to it, until the month Hyperheretus.
We also discharge them for the future from a third part of their taxes, that the losses they have sustained may be repaired.
And these were the contents of this epistle.
Nor let any flesh of horses, or of mules, or of asses, he brought into the city, whether they be wild or tame; nor that of leopards, or foxes, or hares; and, in general, that of any animal which is forbidden for the Jews to eat.
Nor let their skins be brought into it; nor let any such animal be bred up in the city.
Let them only be permitted to use the sacrifices derived from their forefathers, with which they have been obliged to make acceptable atonements to God.
The epistle was this:
King Antiochus To Zeuxis His Father, Sendeth Greeting.
CHAPTER eight.
What Other Acts Were Done By Agrippa Until His Death; And After What Manner He Died.
When Agrippa had finished what I have above related at Berytus, he removed to Tiberias, a city of Galilee.
Now he was in great esteem among other kings.
Accordingly there came to him Antiochus, king of Commalena, Sampsigeratnus, king of Emesa, and Cotys, who was king of the Lesser Armenia, and Polemo, who was king of Pontus, as also Herod his brother, who was king of Chalcis.
All these he treated with agreeable entertainments, and after an obliging manner, and so as to exhibit the greatness of his mind, and so as to appear worthy of those respects which the kings paid to him, by coming thus to see him.
However, while these kings staid with him, Marcus, the president of Syria, came thither.
So the king, in order to preserve the respect that was due to the romans, went out of the city to meet him, as far as seven furlongs. But this proved to be the beginning of a difference between him and Marcus; for he took with him in his chariot those other kings as his assessors.
But Marcus had a suspicion what the meaning could be of so great a friendship of these kings one with another, and did not think so close an agreement of so many potentates to be for the interest of the romans.
He therefore sent some of his domestics to every one of them, and enjoined them to go their ways home without further delay.
This was very ill taken by Agrippa, who after that became his enemy.
And now he took the high priesthood away from Matthias, and made Elioneus, the son of Cantheras, high priest in his stead.
At which festival a great multitude was gotten together of the principal persons, and such as were of dignity through his province.
A severe pain also arose in his belly, and began in a most violent manner.
He therefore looked upon his friends, and said, "I, whom you call a god, am commanded presently to depart this life; while Providence thus reproves the lying words you just now said to me; and I, who was by you called immortal, am immediately to be hurried away by death.
Accordingly he was carried into the palace, and the rumor went abroad every where, that he would certainly die in a little time.
But the multitude presently sat in sackcloth, with their wives and children, after the law of their country, and besought God for the king's recovery.
All places were also full of mourning and lamentation. Now the king rested in a high chamber, and as he saw them below lying prostrate on the ground, he could not himself forbear weeping.
The revenues that he received out of them were very great, no less than twelve millions of drachme.
But before the multitude were made acquainted with Agrippa's being expired, Herod the king of Chalcis, and Helcias the master of his horse, and the king's friend, sent Aristo, one of the king's most faithful servants, and slew Silas, who had been their enemy, as if it had been done by the king's own command.
CHAPTER nine.
What Things Were Done After The Death Of Agrippa; And How Claudius, On Account Of The Youth And Unskilfulness Of Agrippa, Junior, Sent Cuspius Fadus To Be Procurator Of Judea, And Of The Entire Kingdom.
Now Agrippa, the son of the deceased, was at Rome, and brought up with Claudius Caesar.
And when Caesar was informed that Agrippa was dead, and that the inhabitants of Sebaste and Cesarea had abused him, he was sorry for the first news, and was displeased with the ingratitude of those cities.
He was therefore disposed to send Agrippa, junior, away presently to succeed his father in the kingdom, and was willing to confirm him in it by his oath.
Chapter nine
The youth fell back in the procession until the tattered soldier was not in sight.
Then he started to walk on with the others.
The mob of men was bleeding.
Because of the tattered soldier's question he now felt that his shame could be viewed. He was continually casting sidelong glances to see if the men were contemplating the letters of guilt he felt burned into his brow.
At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way.
He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy.
He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.
The spectral soldier was at his side like a stalking reproach.
His gray, appalling face had attracted attention in the crowd, and men, slowing to his dreary pace, were walking with him.
They were discussing his plight, questioning him and giving him advice.
In a dogged way he repelled them, signing to them to go on and leave him alone.
The shadows of his face were deepening and his tight lips seemed holding in check the moan of great despair.
There could be seen a certain stiffness in the movements of his body, as if he were taking infinite care not to arouse the passion of his wounds.
Something in the gesture of the man as he waved the bloody and pitying soldiers away made the youth start as if bitten.
Jim Conklin!"
The tall soldier made a little commonplace smile.
"Hello, Henry," he said.
He stuttered and stammered.
The tall soldier held out his gory hand.
The youth still lamented.
"Oh, Jim-oh, Jim-oh, Jim-"
Yes, b'jiminey, I got shot." He reiterated this fact in a bewildered way, as if he did not know how it came about.
The youth put forth anxious arms to assist him, but the tall soldier went firmly as if propelled.
His face turned to a semblance of gray paste. He clutched the youth's arm and looked all about him, as if dreading to be overheard.
Then he began to speak in a shaking whisper:
"Sure-will yeh, Henry?" the tall soldier beseeched.
He could not speak accurately because of the gulpings in his throat.
But the tall soldier continued to beg in a lowly way.
He paused in piteous anxiety to await his friend's reply.
The youth had reached an anguish where the sobs scorched him.
He strove to express his loyalty, but he could only make fantastic gestures.
However, the tall soldier seemed suddenly to forget all those fears. He became again the grim, stalking specter of a soldier.
He went stonily forward.
His look was fixed again upon the unknown.
The youth had to follow.
Presently the latter heard a voice talking softly near his shoulder. Turning he saw that it belonged to the tattered soldier.
He was shaking his hands helplessly.
He ran forward presently and grasped the tall soldier by the arm. "Jim!
The tall soldier weakly tried to wrench himself free.
He stared at the youth for a moment.
At last he spoke as if dimly comprehending.
He started blindly through the grass.
He was startled from this view by a shrill outcry from the tattered man.
Turning his head swiftly, the youth saw his friend running in a staggering and stumbling way toward a little clump of bushes.
His heart seemed to wrench itself almost free from his body at this sight. He made a noise of pain.
When he overtook the tall soldier he began to plead with all the words he could find.
"Jim-Jim-what are you doing-what makes you do this way-you'll hurt yerself."
The same purpose was in the tall soldier's face.
What you thinking about?
Where you going?
Tell me, won't you, Jim?"
The tall soldier faced about as upon relentless pursuers.
In his eyes there was a great appeal.
The youth recoiled.
The tall soldier turned and, lurching dangerously, went on.
There was something rite like in these movements of the doomed soldier.
They hung back lest he have at command a dreadful weapon.
At last, they saw him stop and stand motionless.
He was waiting with patience for something that he had come to meet.
He was at the rendezvous.
They paused and stood, expectant.
Finally, the chest of the doomed soldier began to heave with a strained motion.
The tall soldier opened his lips and spoke.
He made a gesture.
Suddenly his form stiffened and straightened.
Then it was shaken by a prolonged ague.
He stared into space.
His tall figure stretched itself to its full height.
There was a slight rending sound.
Then it began to swing forward, slow and straight, in the manner of a falling tree.
A swift muscular contortion made the left shoulder strike the ground first.
"God!" said the tattered soldier.
The youth had watched, spellbound, this ceremony at the place of meeting.
He now sprang to his feet and, going closer, gazed upon the pastelike face.
As the flap of the blue jacket fell away from the body, he could see that the side looked as if it had been chewed by wolves.
He shook his fist.
He seemed about to deliver a philippic.
"Hell-"
Chapter eleven
He became aware that the furnace roar of the battle was growing louder. Great blown clouds had floated to the still heights of air before him. The noise, too, was approaching.
As he rounded a hillock, he perceived that the roadway was now a crying mass of wagons, teams, and men.
From the heaving tangle issued exhortations, commands, imprecations.
Fear was sweeping it all along. The cracking whips bit and horses plunged and tugged.
The white topped wagons strained and stumbled in their exertions like fat sheep.
The youth felt comforted in a measure by this sight.
They were all retreating.
Perhaps, then, he was not so bad after all.
He seated himself and watched the terror stricken wagons.
They fled like soft, ungainly animals.
There was an amount of pleasure to him in watching the wild march of this vindication.
It came swiftly on.
Avoiding the obstructions gave it the sinuous movement of a serpent.
The men at the head butted mules with their musket stocks.
They prodded teamsters indifferent to all howls.
The men forced their way through parts of the dense mass by strength.
The blunt head of the column pushed.
They were to confront the eager rush of the enemy.
They tumbled teams about with a fine feeling that it was no matter so long as their column got to the front in time.
This importance made their faces grave and stern.
And the backs of the officers were very rigid.
The separation was as great to him as if they had marched with weapons of flame and banners of sunlight.
He could never be like them.
He could have wept in his longings.
He searched about in his mind for an adequate malediction for the indefinite cause, the thing upon which men turn the words of final blame.
It-whatever it was-was responsible for him, he said.
There lay the fault.
The haste of the column to reach the battle seemed to the forlorn young man to be something much finer than stout fighting.
Heroes, he thought, could find excuses in that long seething lane.
They could retire with perfect self respect and make excuses to the stars.
He wondered what those men had eaten that they could be in such haste to force their way to grim chances of death.
As he watched his envy grew until he thought that he wished to change lives with one of them. He would have liked to have used a tremendous force, he said, throw off himself and become a better.
Swift pictures of himself, apart, yet in himself, came to him-a blue desperate figure leading lurid charges with one knee forward and a broken blade high-a blue, determined figure standing before a crimson and steel assault, getting calmly killed on a high place before the eyes of all.
He thought of the magnificent pathos of his dead body.
These thoughts uplifted him.
He felt the quiver of war desire.
In his ears, he heard the ring of victory.
He knew the frenzy of a rapid successful charge.
For a few moments he was sublime.
He thought that he was about to start for the front.
Indeed, he saw a picture of himself, dust stained, haggard, panting, flying to the front at the proper moment to seize and throttle the dark, leering witch of calamity.
He hesitated, balancing awkwardly on one foot.
He had no rifle; he could not fight with his hands, said he resentfully to his plan.
Well, rifles could be had for the picking.
He started forward slowly.
He stepped as if he expected to tread upon some explosive thing.
Doubts and he were struggling.
He would truly be a worm if any of his comrades should see him returning thus, the marks of his flight upon him.
There was a reply that the intent fighters did not care for what happened rearward saving that no hostile bayonets appeared there.
In the battle blur his face would, in a way, be hidden, like the face of a cowled man.
But then he said that his tireless fate would bring forth, when the strife lulled for a moment, a man to ask of him an explanation.
In imagination he felt the scrutiny of his companions as he painfully labored through some lies.
He was not cast down by this defeat of his plan, for, upon studying the affair carefully, he could not but admit that the objections were very formidable.
Furthermore, various ailments had begun to cry out.
He discovered that he had a scorching thirst.
His face was so dry and grimy that he thought he could feel his skin crackle.
Each bone of his body had an ache in it, and seemingly threatened to break with each movement.
His feet were like two sores.
It was more powerful than a direct hunger.
There was a dull, weight like feeling in his stomach, and, when he tried to walk, his head swayed and he tottered.
He could not see with distinctness. Small patches of green mist floated before his vision.
As he was at last compelled to pay attention to them, his capacity for self hate was multiplied.
Those pictures of glory were piteous things.
He groaned from his heart and went staggering off.
A certain mothlike quality within him kept him in the vicinity of the battle.
He had a great desire to see, and to get news.
He wished to know who was winning.
Thus, many men of courage, he considered, would be obliged to desert the colors and scurry like chickens.
They would be sullen brothers in distress, and he could then easily believe he had not run any farther or faster than they.
And if he himself could believe in his virtuous perfection, he conceived that there would be small trouble in convincing all others.
He said, as if in excuse for this hope, that previously the army had encountered great defeats and in a few months had shaken off all blood and tradition of them, emerging as bright and valiant as a new one; thrusting out of sight the memory of disaster, and appearing with the valor and confidence of unconquered legions.
He of course felt no compunctions for proposing a general as a sacrifice.
He could not tell who the chosen for the barbs might be, so he could center no direct sympathy upon him.
It was quite probable they would hit the wrong man who, after he had recovered from his amazement would perhaps spend the rest of his days in writing replies to the songs of his alleged failure.
It would be very unfortunate, no doubt, but in this case a general was of no consequence to the youth.
In a defeat there would be a roundabout vindication of himself.
A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree.
This would demonstrate that he was indeed a seer.
With his heart continually assuring him that he was despicable, he could not exist without making it, through his actions, apparent to all men.
If the din meant that now his army's flags were tilted forward he was a condemned wretch.
He would be compelled to doom himself to isolation.
If the men were advancing, their indifferent feet were trampling upon his chances for a successful life.
As these thoughts went rapidly through his mind, he turned upon them and tried to thrust them away.
He denounced himself as a villain.
He said that he was the most unutterably selfish man in existence.
His mind pictured the soldiers who would place their defiant bodies before the spear of the yelling battle fiend, and as he saw their dripping corpses on an imagined field, he said that he was their murderer.
He believed that he envied a corpse.
Thinking of the slain, he achieved a great contempt for some of them, as if they were guilty for thus becoming lifeless. They might have been killed by lucky chances, he said, before they had had opportunities to flee or before they had been really tested.
Yet they would receive laurels from tradition.
He cried out bitterly that their crowns were stolen and their robes of glorious memories were shams.
A defeat of the army had suggested itself to him as a means of escape from the consequences of his fall.
He presently discarded all his speculations in the other direction.
He returned to the creed of soldiers.
When he perceived again that it was not possible for the army to be defeated, he tried to bethink him of a fine tale which he could take back to his regiment, and with it turn the expected shafts of derision.
But, as he mortally feared these shafts, it became impossible for him to invent a tale he felt he could trust.
He experimented with many schemes, but threw them aside one by one as flimsy.
He was quick to see vulnerable places in them all.
He imagined the whole regiment saying: "Where's Henry Fleming?
Oh, my!" He recalled various persons who would be quite sure to leave him no peace about it.
They would doubtless question him with sneers, and laugh at his stammering hesitation.
In the next engagement they would try to keep watch of him to discover when he would run.
Wherever he went in camp, he would encounter insolent and lingeringly cruel stares.
As he imagined himself passing near a crowd of comrades, he could hear one say, "There he goes!"
He seemed to hear some one make a humorous remark in a low tone.
At it the others all crowed and cackled.
There were once two brothers Karmu and Dharmu.
When the time for transplanting the rice came, Dharmu used to plough and dig the ditches and mend the gaps along with the day labourers.
When the midday meal was brought the same thing happened, Dharmu and his wife got nothing; but they hoped that it would be made up to them when the wages were paid, and worked on fasting.
In the night Dharmu's wife said "They promised to pay us for merely looking after the work and instead, we worked hard and have still got nothing.
We will not work for them anymore; come, let us undo the work we did to day, you cut down the embankments you repaired, and I will uproot the seedlings which I planted." So they went out into the night to do this.
On the way they came to a fig tree full of figs and they went to eat the fruit; but when they got near they found that all the figs were full of grubs, and they sang:--
"Exhausted by hunger we came to a fig tree, And found it full of grubs, O Karam Gosain, how far off are you?"
Then they came to a mango tree and the same thing happened.
And they went on and saw a cow with a calf; and they thought that they would milk the cow and drink the milk, but when they went to catch it it ran away from them and would not let itself be caught; and they sang:--
"If you go to catch the buffalo, Dharmu, It will kill you. How shall we drink milk?
But they said.
Karam Gosain promised them that on their way back they should take possession of all; and they did so and mounted on the elephant and returned to their home with great wealth.
On their way they met the four women and told them how they could be saved from their troubles.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.
The sky was grey, but that made little difference in the Piazza del Duomo, which was covered with its holiday sky of blue drapery, and its constellations of yellow lilies and coats of arms.
The sheaves of banners were unfurled at the angles of the Baptistery, but there was no carpet yet on the steps of the Duomo, for the marble was being trodden by numerous feet that were not at all exceptional.
Some were in close and eager discussion; others were listening with keen interest to a single spokesman, and yet from time to time turned round with a scanning glance at any new passer by.
Standing in the grey light of the street, with bare brawny arms and soiled garments, they made all the more striking the transition from the brightness of the Piazza.
So I threw my cloth in at the first doorway, and took hold of my meat axe and ran after my fine cavaliers towards the Vigna Nuova.
And the lasses peppered a few stones down to frighten them.
However, Piero de' Medici wasn't come after all; and it was a pity; for we'd have left him neither legs nor wings to go away with again."
But we'll swallow no Medici any more, whatever else the French king wants to make us swallow."
"But I like not those French cannon they talk of," said Goro, none the less fat for two years' additional grievances.
"He pretends to look well satisfied-that deep Tornabuoni-but he's a Medicean in his heart: mind that."
He wore nothing but black, for he was in mourning; but the black was presently to be covered by a red mantle, for he too was to walk in procession as Latin Secretary to the Ten.
Tito Melema had become conspicuously serviceable in the intercourse with the French guests, from his familiarity with Southern Italy, and his readiness in the French tongue, which he had spoken in his early youth; and he had paid more than one visit to the French camp at Signa.
The lustre of good fortune was upon him; he was smiling, listening, and explaining, with his usual graceful unpretentious ease, and only a very keen eye bent on studying him could have marked a certain amount of change in him which was not to be accounted for by the lapse of eighteen months.
It was that change which comes from the final departure of moral youthfulness-from the distinct self conscious adoption of a part in life.
But Lorenzo Tornabuoni possessed that power of dissembling annoyance which is demanded in a man who courts popularity, and Tito, besides his natural disposition to overcome ill will by good humour, had the unimpassioned feeling of the alien towards names and details that move the deepest passions of the native.
Arrived where they could get a good oblique view of the Duomo, the party paused.
It seemed as if the piazza had been decorated for a real Florentine holiday.
His beard, which had grown long in neglect, and the hair which fell thick and straight round his baldness, were nearly white.
And yet there was something fitful in the eyes which contradicted the occasional flash of energy: after looking round with quick fierceness at windows and faces, they fell again with a lost and wandering look.
This sight had been witnessed by the Florentines with growing exasperation.
"French dogs!"
"Bullock feet!"
"Snatch their pikes from them!"
They'll run as fast as geese-don't you see they're web footed?" These were the cries which the soldiers vaguely understood to be jeers, and probably threats. But every one seemed disposed to give invitations of this spirited kind rather than to act upon them.
"Santiddio! here's a sight!" said the dyer, as soon as he had divined the meaning of the advancing tumult, "and the fools do nothing but hoot. Come along!" he added, snatching his axe from his belt, and running to join the crowd, followed by the butcher and all the rest of his companions, except Goro, who hastily retreated up a narrow passage.
And now, when the people began to hoot and jostle more vigorously, Lollo felt that his moment was come-he was close to the eldest prisoner: in an instant he had cut the cord.
The cause could not be precisely guessed, for the French dress was screened by the impeding crowd.
"The people are not content with having emptied the Bargello the other day.
The two men looked at each other, silent as death: Baldassarre, with dark fierceness and a tightening grip of the soiled worn hands on the velvet clad arm; Tito, with cheeks and lips all bloodless, fascinated by terror.
It seemed a long while to them-it was but a moment.
"Ha, ha!
"Who is he, I wonder?"
They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in one instant does the work of long premeditation.
The two men had not taken their eyes off each other, and it seemed to Tito, when he had spoken, that some magical poison had darted from Baldassarre's eyes, and that he felt it rushing through his veins.
But the next instant the grasp on his arm had relaxed, and Baldassarre had disappeared within the church.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.
OUTSIDE THE DUOMO.
The painter spoke to him in a low tone-
At last he said, "If you will."
"Well," he thought, "if he does any mischief, he'll soon get tied up again.
The poor devil shall have a chance, at least."
"No, I have nothing to tell."
He has been sent off."
Baldassarre nodded, and turned in silent acceptance of the offer, and he and Piero left the church together.
"I am a painter: I would give you money to get your portrait."
"It is well," said Piero, with a shrug, and they turned away from each other.
"A mysterious old tiger!" thought the artist, "well worth painting. Ugly-with deep lines-looking as if the plough and the harrow had gone over his heart.
The men of ideas, like young Niccolo Macchiavelli, went to observe and write reports to friends away in country villas; the men of appetites, like Dolfo Spini, bent on hunting down the Frate, as a public nuisance who made game scarce, went to feed their hatred and lie in wait for grounds of accusation.
The effect was inevitable. No man ever struggled to retain power over a mixed multitude without suffering vitiation; his standard must be their lower needs and not his own best insight.
It was the fashion of old, when an ox was led out for sacrifice to Jupiter, to chalk the dark spots, and give the offering a false show of unblemished whiteness.
THE GARMENT OF FEAR.
There was no sunshine to light up the splendour of banners, and spears, and plumes, and silken surcoats, but there was no thick cloud of dust to hide it, and as the picked troops advanced into close view, they could be seen all the more distinctly for the absence of dancing glitter.
But he had left himself no second path now: there could be no conflict any longer: the only thing he had to do was to take care of himself.
Tito gave a slight start and quickened his pace, for the sounds had suggested a welcome thought.
"What makes the giant at work so late?" thought Tito.
Preoccupied as he was, he could not help pausing a moment in admiration as he came in front of the workshop.
That was not until the smith had beaten the head of an axe to the due sharpness of edge and dismissed it from his anvil. But in the meantime Tito had satisfied himself by a glance round the shop that the object of which he was in search had not disappeared.
"Assuredly, Niccolo; else I should not have ventured to interrupt you when you are working out of hours, since I take that as a sign that your work is pressing."
Arms are good, and Florence is likely to want them.
The Frate tells us we shall get Pisa again, and I hold with the Frate; but I should be glad to know how the promise is to be fulfilled, if we don't get plenty of good weapons forged?
The Frate sees a long way before him; that I believe.
He sees sense, and not nonsense.
I want to buy it for a certain personage who needs a protection of that sort under his doublet."
"Let him come and buy it himself, then," said Niccolo, bluntly.
"I'm rather nice about what I sell, and whom I sell to.
I like to know who's my customer."
No, no; it's not my own work; but it's fine work of Maso of Brescia; I should be loth for it to cover the heart of a scoundrel.
"Well, then, to be plain with you, Niccolo mio, I want it myself," said Tito, knowing it was useless to try persuasion.
"The fact is, I am likely to have a journey to take-and you know what journeying is in these times.
"But have you the money to pay for the coat?
For you've passed my shop often enough to know my sign: you've seen the burning account books.
I trust nobody.
You're not likely to have so much money with you.
Let it be till to morrow."
"I happen to have the money," said Tito, who had been winning at play the day before, and had not emptied his purse.
Niccolo reached down the finely wrought coat, which fell together into little more than two handfuls.
"There, then," he said, when the florins had been told down on his palm. "Take the coat.
But, for my part, I would never put such a thing on.
In the autumn of eighteen eighty three, and for years afterward, occurred brilliant colored sunsets, such as had never been seen before within the memory of all observers.
Nevertheless they were as common as were green suns in eighteen eighty three.
Science had to account for these unconventionalities.
I suppose, in Alaska and in the South Sea Islands, all the medicine men were similarly upon trial.
Something had to be thought of.
Upon the twenty eighth of August, eighteen eighty three, the volcano of Krakatoa, of the Straits of Sunda, had blown up.
Terrific.
We're told that the sound was heard two thousand miles, and that thirty six thousand three hundred eighty persons were killed.
The volume of smoke that went up must have been visible to other planets-or, tormented with our crawlings and scurryings, the earth complained to Mars; swore a vast black oath at us.
In all text books that mention this occurrence-no exception so far so I have read-it is said that the extraordinary atmospheric effects of eighteen eighty three were first noticed in the last of August or the first of September.
That makes a difficulty for us.
It is said that these phenomena were caused by particles of volcanic dust that were cast high in the air by Krakatoa.
But for seven years the atmospheric phenomena continued-
Except that, in the seven, there was a lapse of several years-and where was the volcanic dust all that time?
Then you haven't studied hypnosis.
You have never tried to demonstrate to a hypnotic that a table is not a hippopotamus.
There's nothing to prove.
This is one of the profundities that we advertised in advance.
You can oppose an absurdity only with some other absurdity.
But Science is established preposterousness.
But Krakatoa: that's the explanation that the scientists gave.
I don't know what whopper the medicine men told.
This book is an assemblage of data of external relations of this earth. We take the position that our data have been damned, upon no consideration for individual merits or demerits, but in conformity with a general attempt to hold out for isolation of this earth.
This is attempted positiveness.
My own chief reason for indignation here:
That this preposterous explanation interferes with some of my own enormities.
It would cost me too much explaining, if I should have to admit that this earth's atmosphere has such sustaining power.
The orthodox explanation:
It was issued after an investigation that took five years.
You couldn't think of anything done more efficiently, artistically, authoritatively.
The mathematical parts are especially impressive: distribution of the dust of Krakatoa; velocity of translation and rates of subsidence; altitudes and persistences-
That the atmospheric effects that have been attributed to Krakatoa were seen in Trinidad before the eruption occurred:
That they were seen in Natal, South Africa, six months before the eruption.
Inertia and its inhospitality.
Or raw meat should not be fed to babies.
We shall have a few data initiatorily.
I fear me that the horse and the barn were a little extreme for our budding liberalities.
The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.
Hailstones, for instance.
One reads in the newspapers of hailstones the size of hens' eggs.
See Chambers' Encyclopedia for three pounders.
At Seringapatam, India, about the year eighteen hundred, fell a hailstone-
I fear me, I fear me: this is one of the profoundly damned.
I blurt out something that should, perhaps, be withheld for several hundred pages-but that damned thing was the size of an elephant.
We laugh.
Or snowflakes.
Size of saucers.
Said to have fallen at nashville tennessee, january twenty fourth eighteen ninety one.
One smiles.
In the topography of intellection, I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter.
Black rains-red rains-the fall of a thousand tons of butter.
Jet black snow-pink snow-blue hailstones-hailstones flavored like oranges.
Punk and silk and charcoal.
Therefore no stones can fall from the sky.
Or nothing more reasonable or scientific or logical than that could be said upon any subject.
The only trouble is the universal trouble: that the major premise is not real, or is intermediate somewhere between realness and unrealness.
In seventeen seventy two, a committee, of whom Lavoisier was a member, was appointed by the French Academy, to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from the sky at Luce, France.
Lavoisier analyzed the stone of Luce.
The exclusionists' explanation at that time was that stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may seem to fall, and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly had landed-only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it.
The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion.
So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned.
The stock means of exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike something-that had been upon the ground in the first place.
But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement.
It is not customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did-or data of them bombarded the walls raised against them-
The writer abandons the first, or absolute, exclusion, and modifies it with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in Tuscany, june sixteenth seventeen ninety four, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius-
It's more than one hundred and twenty years later.
I know of no aerolite that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestrial origin.
We believe no more.
We accept.
It's virginal.
Butter and paper and wool and silk and resin.
We see, to start with, that the virgins of science have fought and wept and screamed against external relations-upon two grounds:
There in the first place;
Or up from one part of this earth's surface and down to another.
That, upon the thirteenth of August, eighteen nineteen, something had fallen from the sky at Amherst, Mass.
Graves, formerly lecturer at Dartmouth College.
It was an object that had upon it a nap, similar to that of milled cloth.
Upon removing this nap, a buff colored, pulpy substance was found.
This thing was said to have fallen with a brilliant light.
Dewey's family.
A few minutes of exposure to the air changed the buff color to "a livid color resembling venous blood." It absorbed moisture quickly from the air and liquefied.
They were dead and dry.
Or they were not fish at all.
Edward Hitchcock went to live in Amherst.
Graves to examine it.
Exactly like the first one.
The chemic reactions were the same.
Hitchcock recognized it in a moment.
It was a gelatinous fungus.
He did not satisfy himself as to just the exact species it belonged to, but he predicted that similar fungi might spring up within twenty four hours-
But, before evening, two others sprang up.
Or we've arrived at one of the oldest of the exclusionists' conventions-or nostoc.
The rival convention is "spawn of frogs or of fishes." These two conventions have made a strong combination.
Now, I can't say that nostoc is always greenish, any more than I can say that blackbirds are always black, having seen a white one: we shall quote a scientist who knew of flesh colored nostoc, when so to know was convenient.
When we come to reported falls of gelatinous substances, I'd like it to be noticed how often they are described as whitish or grayish.
In looking up the subject, myself, I have read only of greenish nostoc.
It would seem acceptable that, if many reports of white birds should occur, the birds are not blackbirds, even though there have been white blackbirds. Or that, if often reported, grayish or whitish gelatinous substance is not nostoc, and is not spawn if occurring in times unseasonable for spawn.
"The Kentucky Phenomenon."
So it was called, in its day, and now we have an occurrence that attracted a great deal of attention in its own time.
Usually these things of the accursed have been hushed up or disregarded-suppressed like the seven black rains of Slains-but, upon march third eighteen seventy six, something occurred, in Bath county kentucky, that brought many newspaper correspondents to the scene.
The substance that looked like beef that fell from the sky.
Upon march third eighteen seventy six, at Olympian Springs, Bath county kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky-"from a clear sky." We'd like to emphasize that it was said that nothing but this falling substance was visible in the sky.
It fell in flakes of various sizes; some two inches square, one, three or four inches square.
The flake formation is interesting: later we shall think of it as signifying pressure-somewhere.
Then the exclusionists.
Something that looked like beef: one flake of it the size of a square envelope.
If we think of how hard the exclusionists have fought to reject the coming of ordinary looking dust from this earth's externality, we can sympathize with them in this sensational instance, perhaps.
Newspaper correspondents wrote broadcast and witnesses were quoted, and this time there is no mention of a hoax, and, except by one scientist, there is no denial that the fall did take place.
It seems to me that the exclusionists are still more emphatically conservators.
"It has been comparatively easy to identify the substance and to fix its status.
The Kentucky 'wonder' is no more or less than nostoc."
Or that it had not fallen; that it had been upon the ground in the first place, and had swollen in rain, and, attracting attention by greatly increased volume, had been supposed by unscientific observers to have fallen in rain-
What rain, I don't know.
Also it is spoken of as "dried" several times.
That's one of the most important of the details.
To give completeness to "the proper explanation," it is said that mr Brandeis had identified the substance as "flesh colored" nostoc.
Lawrence Smith, of Kentucky, one of the most resolute of the exclusionists:
But he had also called upon dr Hamilton, who had a specimen, and dr Hamilton had declared it to be lung tissue.
"As to whence it came, I have no theory." Nevertheless he endorses the local explanation-and a bizarre thing it is:
A flock of gorged, heavy weighted buzzards, but far up and invisible in the clear sky-
Or this is why, against the seemingly insuperable odds against all things new, there can be what is called progress-
That nothing is positive, in the aspects of homogeneity and unity:
If the whole world should seem to combine against you, it is only unreal combination, or intermediateness to unity and disunity.
The simplest strategy seems to be-never bother to fight a thing: set its own parts fighting one another.
I shall have to accept, myself, that gelatinous substance has often fallen from the sky-
Or that, far up, or far away, the whole sky is gelatinous?
That meteors tear through and detach fragments?
That fragments are brought down by storms?
That the twinkling of stars is penetration of light through something that quivers?
I think, myself, that it would be absurd to say that the whole sky is gelatinous: it seems more acceptable that only certain areas are.
We shall be opposed by the standard resistances:
There in the first place;
Up from one place, in a whirlwind, and down in another.
It will mean that something had been in a stationary position for several days over a small part of a small town in England: this is the revolutionary thing that we have alluded to before; whether the substance were nostoc, or spawn, or some kind of a larval nexus, doesn't matter so much.
That, in Wilna, Lithuania, april fourth eighteen forty six, in a rainstorm, fell nut sized masses of a substance that is described as both resinous and gelatinous.
It was odorless until burned: then it spread a very pronounced sweetish odor.
It is described as like gelatine, but much firmer: but, having been in water twenty four hours, it swelled out, and looked altogether gelatinous-
It was grayish.
We are told that, in eighteen forty one and eighteen forty six, a similar substance had fallen in Asia Minor.
That, june twenty fourth nineteen eleven, at Eton, Bucks, England, the ground was found covered with masses of jelly, the size of peas, after a heavy rainfall. We are not told of nostoc, this time: it is said that the object contained numerous eggs of "some species of Chironomus, from which larvae soon emerged."
I incline, then, to think that the objects that fell at Bath were neither jellyfish nor masses of frog spawn, but something of a larval kind-
This is what had occurred at Bath, England, twenty three years before.
L. Jenyns, of Bath.
He tries to account for their segregation.
The mystery of it is: What could have brought so many of them together?
A whirlwind seems anything but a segregative force.
That such marksmanship is not attributable to whirlwinds seems to me to be what we think we mean by common sense:
It may not look like common sense to say that these things had been stationary over the town of Bath, several days-
The seven black rains of Slains;
The four red rains of Siena.
An interesting sidelight on the mechanics of orthodoxy is that mr Jenyns dutifully records the second fall, but ignores it in his explanation.
He gives earlier dates, but I practice exclusions, myself.
Greg's comment in this instance is: "Curious if true." But he records without modification the fall of a meteorite at Gotha, Germany, september sixth eighteen thirty five, "leaving a jelly like mass on the ground." We are told that this substance fell only three feet away from an observer.
They returned next morning and found a gelatinous mass of grayish color.
Garland, of Nelson county virginia, had found a jelly like substance of about the circumference of a twenty five cent piece:
That, according to a communication from a c
It looked like boiled starch:
That, according to a newspaper, of newark new jersey, a mass of gelatinous substance, like soft soap, had been found.
Olmstead, who collected these lost souls, says:
"The fact that the supposed deposits were so uniformly described as gelatinous substance forms a presumption in favor of the supposition that they had the origin ascribed to them."
"Laura?
I thought you were-"
"You thought I was dead?
Reproach me.
"And you dare come with her, here, and tell me of it, here and mock me with it!
You think I am as powerless as that day I fell dead at your feet?"
think!
Laura thought this, believed it; because she desired to believe it.
CHAPTER one
PORTLAND BILL.
An obstinate north wind blew without ceasing over the mainland of Europe, and yet more roughly over England, during all the month of December, sixteen eighty nine, and all the month of January, sixteen ninety.
Hence the disastrous cold weather, which caused that winter to be noted as "memorable to the poor," on the margin of the old Bible in the Presbyterian chapel of the Nonjurors in London.
The Thames was frozen over-a thing which does not happen once in a century, as the ice forms on it with difficulty owing to the action of the sea.
An ox was roasted whole on the ice.
This thick ice lasted two months.
It was already night at the bottom of the cliff; it was still day at top.
Any one approaching the vessel's moorings would have recognized a Biscayan hooker.
There was beginning to be felt that deep and sombrous melancholy which might be called anxiety for the absent sun
With no wind from the sea, the water of the creek was calm.
This was, especially in winter, a lucky exception.
Almost all the Portland creeks have sand bars; and in heavy weather the sea becomes very rough, and, to pass in safety, much skill and practice are necessary.
These little ports (ports more in appearance than fact) are of small advantage.
They are hazardous to enter, fearful to leave.
It figured in the Armada.
But the merchant and contraband hookers were very feeble specimens.
Sea folk held them at their true value, and esteemed the model a very sorry one, The rigging of the hooker was made of hemp, sometimes with wire inside, which was probably intended as a means, however unscientific, of obtaining indications, in the case of magnetic tension.
Two wheels in two pulleys at the end of the rudder corrected this defect, and compensated, to some extent, for the loss of strength.
The compass was well housed in a case perfectly square, and well balanced by its two copper frames placed horizontally, one in the other, on little bolts, as in Cardan's lamps.
The hooker was primitive, just like the praam and the canoe; was kindred to the praam in stability, and to the canoe in swiftness; and, like all vessels born of the instinct of the pirate and fisherman, it had remarkable sea qualities: it was equally well suited to landlocked and to open waters.
It could sail round a lake, and sail round the world-a strange craft with two objects, good for a pond and good for a storm.
These Biscay hookers, even to the poorest, were gilt and painted. Tattooing is part of the genius of those charming people, savages to some degree.
Their coaches, which you can hear grinding the wheels two leagues off, are illuminated, carved, and hung with ribbons.
They do not mend their rags, but they embroider them.
Vivacity profound and superb!
Biscay is Pyrenean grace as Savoy is Alpine grace.
Two harvests a year; villages resonant and gay; a stately poverty; all Sunday the sound of guitars, dancing, castanets, love making; houses clean and bright; storks in the belfries.
Let us return to Portland-that rugged mountain in the sea.
The peninsula of Portland, looked at geometrically, presents the appearance of a bird's head, of which the bill is turned towards the ocean, the back of the head towards Weymouth; the isthmus is its neck.
Portland, greatly to the sacrifice of its wildness, exists now but for trade.
Since that period what is called Roman cement has been made of the Portland stone-a useful industry, enriching the district, and disfiguring the bay.
The pick bites meanly, the wave grandly; hence a diminution of beauty.
These measured strokes have worked away the creek where the Biscay hooker was moored.
The creek, walled in on all sides by precipices higher than its width, was minute by minute becoming more overshadowed by evening.
A plank thrown from on board on to a low and level projection of the cliff, the only point on which a landing could be made, placed the vessel in communication with the land.
Dark figures were crossing and recrossing each other on this tottering gangway, and in the shadow some people were embarking.
It was less cold in the creek than out at sea, thanks to the screen of rock rising over the north of the basin, which did not, however, prevent the people from shivering.
Certain indentations in their clothes were visible, and showed that they belonged to the class called in England the ragged.
The twisting of the pathway could be distinguished vaguely in the relief of the cliff.
The pathway of this creek, full of knots and angles, almost perpendicular, and better adapted for goats than men, terminated on the platform where the plank was placed.
The pathways of cliffs ordinarily imply a not very inviting declivity; they offer themselves less as a road than as a fall; they sink rather than incline.
Excepting the movement of embarkation which was being made in the creek, a movement visibly scared and uneasy, all around was solitude; no step, no noise, no breath was heard.
At the other side of the roads, at the entrance of Ringstead Bay, you could just perceive a flotilla of shark fishing boats, which were evidently out of their reckoning.
They had just taken refuge in the anchorage of Portland-a sign of bad weather expected and danger out at sea.
They formed a busy and confused group, in rapid movement on the shore.
To distinguish one from another was difficult; impossible to tell whether they were old or young.
The indistinctness of evening intermixed and blurred them; the mask of shadow was over their faces.
They were sketches in the night.
Chapter forty four
'The "Banner" comes next,' says Starlight, tearing it open.
'We shall have something short and sweet after the "Star".
How's this?
This mercurial brigand, it would appear, has paid Turon another visit, but, with the exception of what may be considered the legalised robbery of the betting ring, has not levied contributions.
Rather the other way, indeed.
A hasty note for mr Dawson, whom he had tricked into temporary association by adopting one of the disguises he can so wonderfully assume, requested that gentleman to receive the Handicap Stakes, won by his horse, Darkie, alias Rainbow, and to hand them over to the treasurer of the Turon Hospital, which was accordingly done.
We have always regarded the present system-facetiously called police protection-as a farce.
We, unlike a contemporary, have no morbid sympathy with crime-embroidered or otherwise; our wishes, as loyal subjects, are confined to a short shrift and a high gallows for all who dare to obstruct the Queen's highway.'
'That's easy to understand, barrin' a word here and there,' says father, taking his pipe out of his mouth and laying it down; 'that's the way they used to talk to us in the old days.
Dashed if I don't think it's the best way after all.
You know where you are.
The rest's flummery.
All on us as takes to the cross does it with our eyes open, and deserves all we gets.'
'Why?' says father, getting up and glaring with his eyes, 'because I was a blind, ignorant dog when I was young, as had never been taught nothing, and knowed nothing, not so much as him there' (pointing to Crib), 'for he knows what his business is, and I didn't.
Whose business was it to have learned me better?
Was that justice?
We none of us felt in the humour to say much after that.
Father had got into one of his tantrums, and when he did he was fit to be tied; only I'd not have took the contract for something.
Whatever it was that had happened to him in the old times when he was a Government man he didn't talk about.
The next dust we got into was all along of a mr Knightley, who lived a good way down to the south, and it was one of the worst things we ever were mixed up in.
After the Turon races and all that shine, somehow or other we found that things had been made hotter for us than ever since we first turned out.
Go where we would, we found the police always quick on our trail, and we had two or three very close shaves of it.
It looked as if our luck was dead out, and we began to think our chance of getting across the border to Queensland, and clear out of the colony that way, looked worse every day.
Sir Ferdinand was always on the move, but we knew he couldn't do it all himself unless he got the office from some one who knew the ropes better than he did.
Last of all we dropped on to it.
Well, this gentleman took it into his head to put on extra steam and try and run us down.
He'd lost some gold by us in the escort robbery, and not forgotten it; so it seems he'd been trying his best to fit us ever since.
We heard, too, that he should say he'd never rest till he had Starlight and the Marstons, and that if he could get picked police he'd bring us in within a month, dead or alive.
Moran and Daly knew about this, and they were dead on for sticking up the place and getting hold of the gold.
Besides that, we felt savage about his trying to run us in.
We didn't like working with them. Starlight and I were dead against it.
But we knew they'd tackle it by themselves if we backed out.
So we agreed to make one thing of it. We were to meet at a place about ten miles off and ride over there together.
Of course he was on his guard then, and before long the bullets began to fly pretty thick among us, and we had to take cover to return fire and keep as dark as we could.
We blazed away too, and as there was no stable at the back we surrounded the house and tried hard to find an opening.
Devil a chance there seemed to be; none of us dared show.
We all had a close shave more than once for being too fast.
The lot fell upon Patsey Daly.
'I'm dashed if I don't think Knightley will bag me.
I don't half like charging him, and that's God's truth.
Anyhow I'll try for that barrel there; and if I get behind it I can fire from short range and make him come out.'
He made a rush, half on his hands and knees, and managed to get behind this barrel, where he was safe from being hit as long as he kept well behind it.
On the left of the verandah there was a door stood partly open, and after a bit a man in a light overcoat and a white hat, like mr Knightley always wore, showed himself for a second.
Daly raps away at this, and the man staggers and falls.
Patsey shows himself for a moment from behind the cask, thinking to make a rush forward; that minute mr Knightley, who was watching him from a window (the other was only an image), lets drive at him, cool and steady, and poor Patsey drops like a cock, and never raised his head again.
He was shot through the body.
He lingered a bit; but in less than an hour he was a dead man.
We began to think at last that we had got in for a hot thing, and that we should have to drop it like Moran's mob at Kadombla.
He crept away to the back of the building, where he could see to fire at a top window close by where the doctor and mr Knightley had been potting at us.
It always beat me how they contrived to defend so many points at once.
We tried back and front, doors and windows.
Twenty times we tried a rush, but they were always ready-so it seemed-and their fire was too hot for us to stand up to, unless we wanted to lose every second man.
The shooting was very close.
Nearly every one of us had a scratch-Starlight rather the worst, as he was more in the front and showed himself more.
At last we began to see that the return fire was slacking off, while ours was as brisk as ever.
Here goes for a battering ram, Dick!'
He pointed to a long, heavy sapling which had been fetched in for a sleeper or something of that sort.
We picked it up, and, taking a run back, brought it with all its weight against the front door.
It seemed very queer and strange, everything was so silent and quiet.
We half expected another volley.
But nothing came.
We could only stand and wait.
'Get to a corner, Dick; they're always the safest places.
We must mind it isn't an ambush.
What the devil's the matter?
Are they going to suicide, like the people in the round tower of Jhansi?'
'There are no women here,' I said.
'I hate seeing women put out.
Besides, everybody bows down to mrs Knightley.
She's as good as she's handsome, I believe, and that's saying a great deal.'
Just then Moran and Wall managed to find their way into the other side of the house, and they came tearing into the hall like a pair of colts. They looked rather queer when they saw us three and no one else.
Poor Patsey won't want one, anyhow.'
Then he stepped back and waited.
I noticed he took off his hat and leaned against the wall.
It was an old-fashioned house for that part of the world, built a good many years ago by a rich settler, who was once the owner of all that side of the country.
The staircase was all stone, ornamented every way it could be.
Three or four people could walk abreast easy enough.
It was a strange sight.
There we were standing and leaning about the dark hall, staring and wondering, and these people walking down to meet us like ghosts, without speaking or anything else.
mr Knightley was a tall, handsome man, with a grand black beard that came down to his chest.
He walked like a lord, and had that kind of manner with him that comes to people that have always been used to be waited on and have everything found for them in this world.
As for his wife, she was given in to be the handsomest woman in the whole countryside-tall and graceful, with a beautiful smile, and soft fair hair.
Everybody liked and respected her, gentle and simple-everybody had a good word for her.
You couldn't have got any one to say different for a hundred pounds.
There are some people, here and there, like this among the gentlefolk, and, say what you like, it does more to make coves like us look a little closer at things and keep away from what's wrong and bad than all the parsons' talk twice over.
mrs Knightley was the only woman that ever put me in mind of Miss Falkland, and I can't say more than that.
We had both seen them at the ball at the Turon, and everybody agreed they were the handsomest couple there.
Now they were entering their own hall in a different way.
But you couldn't have told much of what they felt by their faces.
Now the tables were turned.
He and his beautiful wife were in our power, and, to make matters worse, one of our band lay dead, beside the inner wall, killed by his hand.
What was to be his doom?
And who could say how such a play might end?
I looked at our men.
As they stepped on to the floor of the hall and looked round mrs Knightley smiled.
She looked to me like an angel from heaven that had come by chance into the other place and hadn't found out her mistake.
I saw Starlight start as he looked at her.
Part of her hair had straggled down, and hung in a sort of ringlet by her face.
It was pale, but clear and bright looking, and there was a thin streak of blood across her forehead that showed as she came underneath the lamp light from the landing above.
I looked over at Moran.
He and Wall sat in a corner, looking as grim and savage as possible, while his deadly black eyes had a kind of gloomy fire in them that made him look like a wild beast in a cage.
mr Knightley was a man that always had the first word in everything, and generally the best of an argument-putting down anybody who differed from him in a quiet, superior sort of way.
He began now.
But we have fired our last cartridge-the doctor thought we had a thousand left-in which case, I may as well tell you, you'd never have had this pleasure.
Captain Starlight, I surrender my sword-or should do so if I had one.
We trust to receive honourable treatment at your hands.'
'I shall never forget the honour,' says Starlight, walking forward and bowing low.
'Permit me to offer you a chair, madam; you look faint.'
As he did so she sank down in it, and really looked as if she would faint away.
It wouldn't have been much wonder if she had after what she'd gone through that night.
Then mr Knightley began again.
He wanted to know how he stood.
He didn't like the look of Moran and Wall-they were a deal too quiet for him, and he could read men's faces like a book.
The other two prisoners were the German dr Schiller-a plucky old chap, who'd been a rebel and a conspirator and I don't know what all in his own country.
The old woman was a family servant, who had been with them for years and years.
Chapter eight
Towards the end of May, when everything had been more or less satisfactorily arranged, she received her husband's answer to her complaints of the disorganized state of things in the country.
He wrote begging her forgiveness for not having thought of everything before, and promised to come down at the first chance.
This chance did not present itself, and till the beginning of June Darya Alexandrovna stayed alone in the country.
Darya Alexandrovna in her intimate, philosophical talks with her sister, her mother, and her friends very often astonished them by the freedom of her views in regard to religion.
She had a strange religion of transmigration of souls all her own, in which she had firm faith, troubling herself little about the dogmas of the Church.
But in her family she was strict in carrying out all that was required by the Church-and not merely in order to set an example, but with all her heart in it.
The fact that the children had not been at the sacrament for nearly a year worried her extremely, and with the full approval and sympathy of Marya Philimonovna she decided that this should take place now in the summer.
One dress, Tanya's, which the English governess had undertaken, cost Darya Alexandrovna much loss of temper.
It was so narrow on Tanya's shoulders that it was quite painful to look at her.
But Marya Philimonovna had the happy thought of putting in gussets, and adding a little shoulder cape.
The dress was set right, but there was nearly a quarrel with the English governess.
On the morning, however, all was happily arranged, and towards ten o'clock-the time at which they had asked the priest to wait for them for the mass-the children in their new dresses, with beaming faces, stood on the step before the carriage waiting for their mother.
Darya Alexandrovna had done her hair, and dressed with care and excitement.
In the old days she had dressed for her own sake to look pretty and be admired.
She saw that she was losing her good looks.
But now she began to feel pleasure and interest in dress again.
Now she did not dress for her own sake, not for the sake of her own beauty, but simply that as the mother of those exquisite creatures she might not spoil the general effect.
And looking at herself for the last time in the looking glass she was satisfied with herself.
She looked nice.
In the church there was no one but the peasants, the servants and their women folk.
But Darya Alexandrovna saw, or fancied she saw, the sensation produced by her children and her.
The children were not only beautiful to look at in their smart little dresses, but they were charming in the way they behaved.
Aliosha, it is true, did not stand quite correctly; he kept turning round, trying to look at his little jacket from behind; but all the same he was wonderfully sweet.
Tanya behaved like a grownup person, and looked after the little ones.
And the smallest, Lily, was bewitching in her naive astonishment at everything, and it was difficult not to smile when, after taking the sacrament, she said in English, "Please, some more."
On the way home the children felt that something solemn had happened, and were very sedate.
Everything went happily at home too; but at lunch Grisha began whistling, and, what was worse, was disobedient to the English governess, and was forbidden to have any tart.
Darya Alexandrovna would not have let things go so far on such a day had she been present; but she had to support the English governess's authority, and she upheld her decision that Grisha should have no tart.
This rather spoiled the general good humor.
But on the way, as she passed the drawing room, she beheld a scene, filling her heart with such pleasure that the tears came into her eyes, and she forgave the delinquent herself.
The culprit was sitting at the window in the corner of the drawing room; beside him was standing Tanya with a plate.
On the pretext of wanting to give some dinner to her dolls, she had asked the governess's permission to take her share of tart to the nursery, and had taken it instead to her brother.
Tanya had at first been under the influence of her pity for Grisha, then of a sense of her noble action, and tears were standing in her eyes too; but she did not refuse, and ate her share.
On catching sight of their mother they were dismayed, but, looking into her face, they saw they were not doing wrong.
Tanya!
Grisha!" said their mother, trying to save the frock, but with tears in her eyes, smiling a blissful, rapturous smile.
The new frocks were taken off, and orders were given for the little girls to have their blouses put on, and the boys their old jackets, and the wagonette to be harnessed; with Brownie, to the bailiff's annoyance, again in the shafts, to drive out for mushroom picking and bathing.
They gathered a whole basketful of mushrooms; even Lily found a birch mushroom.
It had always happened before that Miss Hoole found them and pointed them out to her; but this time she found a big one quite of herself, and there was a general scream of delight, "Lily has found a mushroom!"
Then they reached the river, put the horses under the birch trees, and went to the bathing place.
The coachman, Terenty, fastened the horses, who kept whisking away the flies, to a tree, and, treading down the grass, lay down in the shade of a birch and smoked his shag, while the never ceasing shrieks of delight of the children floated across to him from the bathing place.
To go over all those fat little legs, pulling on their stockings, to take in her arms and dip those little naked bodies, and to hear their screams of delight and alarm, to see the breathless faces with wide open, scared, and happy eyes of all her splashing cherubs, was a great pleasure to her.
"Yes, she has been ill."
"And so they've been bathing you too," said another to the baby.
"No; he's only three months old," answered Darya Alexandrovna with pride.
"You don't say so!"
"I've had four; I've two living-a boy and a girl.
I weaned her last carnival."
"Why, two years old."
And the conversation became most interesting to Darya Alexandrovna.
What sort of time did she have?
Where was her husband?
Did it often happen?
Darya Alexandrovna felt disinclined to leave the peasant women, so interesting to her was their conversation, so completely identical were all their interests.
What pleased her most of all was that she saw clearly what all the women admired more than anything was her having so many children, and such fine ones.
The peasant women even made Darya Alexandrovna laugh, and offended the English governess, because she was the cause of the laughter she did not understand.
CHAPTER two.
Toby could scarcely restrain himself at the prospect of this golden future that had so suddenly opened before him.
He tried to express his gratitude, but could only do so by evincing his willingness to commence work at once.
"No, no, that won't do," said mr Lord, cautiously.
"If your uncle Daniel should see you working here, he might mistrust something, and then you couldn't get away."
"I don't believe he'd try to stop me," said Toby, confidently; "for he's told me lots of times that it was a sorry day for him when he found me."
"We won't take any chances, my son," was the reply, in a very benevolent tone, as he patted Toby on the head, and at the same time handed him a piece of pasteboard.
"There's a ticket for the circus, and you come around to see me about ten o'clock to night.
If Toby had followed his inclinations, the chances are that he would have fallen on his knees, and kissed mr Lord's hands in the excess of his gratitude.
But not knowing exactly how such a show of thankfulness might be received, he contented himself by repeatedly promising that he would be punctual to the time and place appointed.
As Toby walked around the circus grounds, whereon was so much to attract his attention, he could not prevent himself from assuming an air of proprietorship.
He was really to travel with a circus, to become a part, as it were, of the whole, and to be able to see its many wonderful and beautiful attractions every day.
Even the very tent ropes had acquired a new interest for him, and the faces of the men at work seemed suddenly to have become those of friends.
How hard it was for him to walk around unconcernedly: and how especially hard to prevent his feet from straying toward that tempting display of dainties which he was to sell to those who came to see and enjoy, and who would look at him with wonder and curiosity!
It was very hard not to be allowed to tell his playmates of his wonderfully good fortune; but silence meant success, and he locked his secret in his bosom, not even daring to talk with any one he knew, lest he should betray himself by some incautious word.
He did not go home to dinner that day, and once or twice he felt impelled to walk past the candy stand, giving a mysterious shake of the head at the proprietor as he did so.
The afternoon performance passed off as usual to all of the spectators save Toby.
He imagined that each one of the performers knew that he was about to join them; and even as he passed the cage containing the monkeys he fancied that one particularly old one knew all about his intention of running away.
Of course it was necessary for him to go home at the close of the afternoon's performance, in order to get one or two valuable articles of his own-such as a boat, a kite, and a pair of skates-and in order that his actions might not seem suspicious.
Before he left the grounds, however, he stole slyly around to the candy stand, and informed mr Job Lord, in a very hoarse whisper, that he would be on hand at the time appointed.
mr Lord patted him on the head, gave him two large sticks of candy, and, what was more kind and surprising, considering the fact that he wore glasses, and was cross eyed, he winked at Toby.
A wink from mr Lord must have been intended to convey a great deal, because, owing to the defect in his eyes, it required no little exertion, and even then could not be considered as a really first-class wink.
That wink, distorted as it was, gladdened Toby's heart immensely, and took away nearly all the sting of the scolding with which Uncle Daniel greeted him when he reached home.
Just then one or two kind words would have prevented him from running away, bright as the prospect of circus life appeared.
It was almost impossible for him to eat anything, and this very surprising state of affairs attracted the attention of Uncle Daniel.
"Bless my heart! what ails the boy?" asked the old man, as he peered over his glasses at Toby's well filled plate, which was usually emptied so quickly.
Toby thought of the six pea nuts which he had bought with the penny Uncle Daniel had given him; and, amid all his homesickness, he could not help wondering if Uncle Daniel ever made himself sick with only six pea nuts when he was a boy.
As no one paid any further attention to Toby, he pushed back his plate, arose from the table, and went with a heavy heart to attend to his regular evening chores.
The cow, the hens, and even the pigs, came in for a share of his unusually kind attention; and as he fed them all the big tears rolled down his cheeks, as he thought that perhaps never again would he see any of them.
These dumb animals had all been Toby's confidants; he had poured out his griefs in their ears, and fancied, when the world or Uncle Daniel had used him unusually hard, that they sympathized with him.
Now he was leaving them forever, and as he locked the stable door he could hear the sounds of music coming from the direction of the circus grounds, and he was angry at it, because it represented that which was taking him away from his home, even though it was not as pleasant as it might have been.
mr Lord saw him as soon as he arrived on the grounds, and as he passed another ticket to Toby he took his bundle from him, saying, as he did so, "I'll pack up your bundle with my things, and then you'll be sure not to lose it.
Don't you want some candy?"
Toby shook his head; he had just discovered that there was possibly some connection between his heart and his stomach, for his grief at leaving home had taken from him all desire for good things.
It is also more than possible that mr Lord had had experience enough with boys to know that they might be homesick on the eve of starting to travel with a circus; and in order to make sure that Toby would keep to his engagement he was unusually kind.
That evening was the longest Toby ever knew.
The performance failed to interest him, and the animals did not attract until he had visited the monkey cage for the third or fourth time.
Then he fancied that the same venerable monkey who had looked so knowing in the afternoon was gazing at him with a sadness which could only have come from a thorough knowledge of all the grief and doubt that was in his heart.
There was no one around the cages, and Toby got just as near to the iron bars as possible.
No sooner had he flattened his little pug nose against the iron than the aged monkey came down from the ring in which he had been swinging, and, seating himself directly in front of Toby's face, looked at him most compassionately.
It would not have surprised the boy just then if the animal had spoken; but as he did not, Toby did the next best thing, and spoke to him.
At this moment Toby saw mr Lord enter the tent, and he knew that the summons to start was about to be given.
GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter.
Through late November and all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might drop to twenty below, or thirty.
Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
Storm sheds were erected at every door. In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy mr Dawson, all save asthmatic ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing them to second story jambs.
While Kennicott put up his windows Carol danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws, which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false teeth.
The children's parents either laughed at him or hated him.
He was the one democrat in town.
He called both Lyman Cass the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their first names. He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered slightly insane.
Bjornstam could do anything with his hands-solder a pan, weld an automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a clock, carve a Gloucester schooner which magically went into a bottle.
Now, for a week, he was commissioner general of Gopher Prairie.
He was the only person besides the repairman at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing.
He rushed from house to house till after bedtime-ten o'clock.
Icicles from burst water pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog skin overcoat; his plush cap, which he never took off in the house, was a pulp of ice and coal dust; his red hands were cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of a cigar.
But he was courtly to Carol.
He stooped to examine the furnace flues; he straightened, glanced down at her, and hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace, no matter what else I do."
Along the railroad the sections of snow fence, which had been stacked all summer in romantic wooden tents occupied by roving small boys, were set up to prevent drifts from covering the track.
Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the topic at parties. It was good form to ask, "Put on your heavies yet?" There were as many distinctions in wraps as in motor cars.
The lesser sort appeared in yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long raccoon ulster and a new seal cap.
Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria.
It was so rich looking to sit and drive-and so easy. Skiing and sliding were "stupid" and "old-fashioned." In fact, the village longed for the elegance of city recreations almost as much as the cities longed for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as much pride in neglecting coasting as saint Paul--or New York-in going coasting.
Harry Haydock did figure eights, and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect life.
She had to nag them.
They scooted down a long hill on a bob sled, they upset and got snow down their necks they shrieked that they would do it again immediately-and they did not do it again at all.
She badgered another group into going skiing.
Carol was discouraged.
He belonged there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high laced boots.
That night she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric sparks by touching his ear with her finger tip; she slept twelve hours; and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land.
Snug in her furs she trotted up town.
The frames of their buck saws were cherry red, the blades blued steel, and the fresh cut ends of the sticks-poplar, maple, iron wood, birch-were marked with engraved rings of growth.
The boys wore shoe packs, blue flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson, lemon yellow, and foxy brown.
Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland and Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner.
So brilliant was the snow glare that when she entered the house she saw the door knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness.
When her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of life.
In the mid afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the country.
Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do.
The cuts of beef were not cuts.
They were hacks.
Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins.
She could not find a glass headed picture nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of veiling she wanted-she took what she could get; and only at Howland and Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus.
Only by such fussing as the Widow Bogart's could she make it fill her time.
She could not have outside employment.
To the village doctor's wife it was taboo.
She was a woman with a working brain and no work.
There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study club and bridge parties.
Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready.
She had been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was inadvisable to have children till he had made more money.
She was sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some day."
Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had become indistinct.
But she would set them going now.
Become an authentic part of the town?
She began to think with unpleasant lucidity.
She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked her.
The men smiled-but did they like her?
She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed.
Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed.
Was that merely his usual manner?
"It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think.
But here I'm spied on.
They're watching me.
three
A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning.
In tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going out to play hockey.
She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run.
She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student "Yippee!"
Across the street, at another window, the curtain had secretively moved.
She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the girl Carol into mrs dr Kennicott.
Then the town exploded.
Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat.
They were already playing. Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge.
She twittered, "You're perfectly right.
I'm a lazy thing.
Some one giggled.
The olives need not be stuffed.
She tried to get back into the current.
She talked.
Isn't the country lovely!
"Oh, do you THINK so?" protested mrs Jackson Elder.
Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people. I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful.
They were off, riding hard.
mrs Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest?
Do you call it honest to hold us up for every cent of pay they can get?
"How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured.
mrs b j Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner, "Any place from three fifty to five fifty a week!
I know positively that mrs Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them in their outrageous demands, went and paid five fifty-think of it! practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of the wash.
HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, mrs KENNICOTT?"
"Yes!
How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen.
They gasped.
Carol was angry.
"I don't care!
A maid has one of the hardest jobs on earth.
Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets out of it is the pay----"
Their eyes were hostile.
What angry passions-and what an idiotic discussion!
Stop it!
Carol Kennicott, you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times.
Juanita, quit looking so belligerent.
What is this, a card party or a hen fight? Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls, or I'll spank you.
Boooooo!
If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the hen roost myself!"
They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries."
We have two thousand more books than Wakamin."
I've had some experience, in saint Paul."
"So I have been informed.
"You feel so?
She walked home.
Only----I can't!
CHAPTER thirty six
Once, when Kennicott announced at noon dinner, "What do you know about this!
They didn't give him a chance!" His laugh was stagey.
Is it a new kind of logic?"
They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble.
Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure."
"What editorial did he get that from?" she wondered, as she protested, "See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories declare war honestly?
You don't oppose this organizer because you think he's seditious but because you're afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops. Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any one of us doesn't like is 'pro German,' whether it's business competition or bad music.
If we were fighting England, you'd call the radicals 'pro English.' When this war is over, I suppose you'll be calling them 'red anarchists.' What an eternal art it is-such a glittery delightful art-finding hard names for our opponents!
The churches have always done it, and the political orators-and I suppose I do it when I call mrs Bogart a 'Puritan' and mr Stowbody a 'capitalist.' But you business men are going to beat all the rest of us at it, with your simple hearted, energetic, pompous----"
You can camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals, as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here and now, and you and all these long haired men and short haired women can beef all you want to, but we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic.
And-Lord knows I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife-but if you go defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you!
Next thing, I suppose you'll be yapping about free speech.
"Will!"
She was not timorous now.
"Am I pro German if I fail to throb to Honest Jim Blausser, too?
He was grumbling, "The whole thing's right in line with the criticism you've always been making.
All I've done has been in line.
I don't belong to Gopher Prairie.
All right!
I don't care!
I don't belong here, and I'm going.
He grunted.
"I don't know.
"No, I think we can save you that trouble.
I've got to find out what my work is----"
"Work?
Work?
Sure!
That's the whole trouble with you!
You haven't got enough work to do.
That's what most men-and women-like you WOULD say.
As it happens, I've done that sort of thing.
I was not.
I was just bedraggled and unhappy.
It's work-but not my work.
I could run an office or a library, or nurse and teach children.
We're going to chuck it.
Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women! Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you?
"Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!"
"Yes, all the difference.
That's why I'm going to take him with me."
"You won't!"
"Oh, conversation!
No, it's much more than that.
I think it's a greatness of life-a refusal to be content with even the healthiest mud."
"Perhaps.
I'm going away to be quiet and think.
I'm-I'm going!
I have a right to my own life."
"So have I to mine!"
"Well?"
"I have a right to my life-and you're it, you're my life!
You've made yourself so.
I'm damned if I'll agree to all your freak notions, but I will say I've got to depend on you.
Never thought of that complication, did you, in this 'off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life' stuff!"
"You have a right to me if you can keep me.
Can you?"
For a month they discussed it.
At most he agreed to a public theory that she was "going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in wartime."
three
She had her freedom, and it was empty.
The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.
Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy!"
"I'm tired of playing train.
Let's play something else.
Let's go see Auntie Bogart."
Do you really like mrs Bogart?"
"Yes.
She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord.
Auntie Bogart says I'm going to be a preacher.
Can I be a preacher?
Can I preach about the Dear Lord?"
"What's a generation?"
"That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and rather humorless.
She kissed his frown, and marveled:
But the story doesn't go right.
"What?" flatly.
"And cookies?"
"Cookies?
We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all."
"That's foolish."
"It is, O male Kennicott!"
"Huh!" said Kennicott two, and went to sleep on her shoulder.
"Ah-I have dropped my scorecard."
A man in front of her turned.
Will you accept it?"
Her small, modishly gloved hand closed eagerly on it before she lifted her eyes to his face.
Both started convulsively.
"You?" she faltered.
His lips parted in the coldly grave smile she remembered and hated.
"You are not glad to see me," he said calmly, "but that, I suppose, was not to be expected.
I did not come here to annoy you.
I had no suspicion that for the last half hour I had been standing next to my-"
She interrupted him by an imperious gesture.
Again he smiled, this time with a tinge of scorn, and shifted his eyes to the track.
None of the people around them had noticed the little by play.
All eyes were on the track, which was being cleared for the first heat of another race.
The backers of "Mascot", the rival favourite, looked gloomy.
The woman noticed nothing of all this.
She studied the man's profile furtively.
He looked older than when she had seen him last-there were some silver threads gleaming in his close clipped dark hair and short, pointed beard.
Otherwise there was little change in the quiet features and somewhat stern grey eyes.
They had not met for five years.
She shut her eyes and looked in on her past.
It all came back very vividly.
She had been eighteen when they were married-a gay, high spirited girl and the season's beauty. He was much older and a quiet, serious student.
The marriage had been an unhappy one.
She was fond of society and gaiety, he wanted quiet and seclusion.
She Was impulsive and impatient, he deliberate and grave.
The strong wills clashed.
After two years of an unbearable sort of life they had separated-quietly, and without scandal of any sort.
She had wanted a divorce, but he would not agree to that, so she had taken her own independent fortune and gone back to her own way of life.
In the following five years she had succeeded in burying all remembrance well out of sight.
No one knew if she were satisfied or not; her world was charitable to her and she lived a gay and quite irreproachable life.
She wished that she had not come to the races.
It was such an irritating encounter.
She opened her eyes wearily; the dusty track, the flying horses, the gay dresses of the women on the grandstand, the cloudless blue sky, the brilliant September sunshine, the purple distances all commingled in a glare that made her head ache.
Before it all she saw the tall figure by her side, his face turned from her, watching the track intently.
She wondered with a vague curiosity what induced him to come to the races.
Such things were not greatly in his line.
Evidently their chance meeting had not disturbed him.
It was a sign that he did not care.
She sighed a little wearily and closed her eyes.
When the heat was over he turned to her.
You are looking extremely well.
Has Vanity Fair palled in any degree?"
She was angry at herself and him.
She felt weak and hysterical. What if she should burst into tears before the whole crowd-before those coldly critical grey eyes?
She almost hated him.
"No-why should it?
I have found it very pleasant-and I have been well-very well.
And you?"
He jotted down the score carefully before he replied.
"I?
Oh, a book worm and recluse always leads a placid life.
I never cared for excitement, you know.
I came down here to attend a sale of some rare editions, and a well meaning friend dragged me out to see the races.
I find it rather interesting, I must confess, much more so than I should have fancied.
Sorry I can't stay until the end.
I must go as soon as the free for all is over, if not before.
I have backed 'Mascot'; you?"
"She belongs to a friend of mine, so I am naturally interested."
One more for either will decide it.
This is a good day for the races.
Excuse me."
He leaned over and brushed a scrap of paper from her grey cloak.
She shivered slightly.
"You are cold!
This stand is draughty."
"I am not at all cold, thank you.
What race is this?--oh! the three minute one."
She bent forward with assumed interest to watch the scoring.
She was breathing heavily.
There were tears in her eyes-she bit her lips savagely and glared at the track until they were gone.
Presently he spoke again, in the low, even tone demanded by circumstances.
"This is a curious meeting, is it not?--quite a flavor of romance! By the way, do you read as many novels as ever?"
She fancied there was mockery in his tone.
Besides, she resented the personal tinge.
What right had he?
"Almost as many," she answered carelessly.
"I was very intolerant, wasn't I?" he said after a pause.
"You thought so-you were right.
You have been happier since you-left me?"
"Yes," she said defiantly, looking straight into his eyes.
"And you do not regret it?"
He bent down a little.
His sleeve brushed against her shoulder. Something in his face arrested the answer she meant to make.
"I-I-did not say that," she murmured faintly.
There was a burst of cheering.
The free for all horses were being brought out for the sixth heat.
She turned away to watch them.
The scoring began, and seemed likely to have no end.
She was tired of it all.
Had Vanity Fair after all been a satisfying exchange for love?
She had never before said, even in her own heart: "I am sorry," but-suddenly, she felt his hand on her shoulder, and looked up.
Their eyes met.
He stooped and said almost in a whisper:
"Will you come back to me?"
"I don't know," she whispered breathlessly, as one half fascinated.
"We were both to blame-but I the most.
I was too hard on you-I ought to have made more allowance.
We are wiser now both of us.
Come back to me-my wife."
His tone was cold and his face expressionless.
It was on her lips to cry out "No," passionately.
But the slender, scholarly hand on her shoulder was trembling with the intensity of his repressed emotion.
A wild caprice flashed into her brain.
She sprang up.
"See," she cried, "they're off now.
This heat will probably decide the race.
If 'Lu Lu' wins I will not go back to you, if 'Mascot' does I will.
That is my decision."
He turned paler, but bowed in assent.
He knew by bitter experience how unchangeable her whims were, how obstinately she clung to even the most absurd.
She leaned forward breathlessly.
The crowd hung silently on the track. "Lu Lu" and "Mascot" were neck and neck, getting in splendid work. half-way round the course "Lu Lu" forged half a neck ahead, and her backers went mad.
But one woman dropped her head in her hands and dared look no more.
One man with white face and set lips watched the track unswervingly.
Again "Mascot" crawled up, inch by inch.
They were on the home stretch, they were equal, the cheering broke out, then silence, then another terrific burst, shouts, yells and clappings-"Mascot" had won the free for all.
In the front row a woman stood up, swayed and shaken as a leaf in the wind.
She straightened her scarlet hat and readjusted her veil unsteadily.
No one noticed her.
A man beside her drew her hand through his arm in a quiet proprietary fashion.
He opened it, and within he found a lock of hair like spun gold, and from which came a faint, exquisite odour.
The father bowed his head three times to the ground, and replied:
At first, the condition attaching to his wedding with the lovely Dorani troubled the prince very little, for he thought that he would at least see his bride all day.
Each evening she was carried in a palanquin to her father's house, and each morning she was brought back soon after daybreak; and yet never a sound passed her lips, nor did she show by any sign that she saw, or heard, or heeded her husband.
The old man stood thinking for a moment, and then he hobbled off to his own cottage.
In a short while they arrived at the house of the fairy who, as I told you before, was the favourite friend of Dorani.
What is the reason of that, I wonder?
The fairy still looked doubtful, but made no answer, and took her seat beside Dorani, the prince again holding tightly one leg.
All through the night the women sang and danced before the rajah Indra, whilst a magic lute played of itself the most bewitching music; till the prince, who sat watching it all, was quite entranced.
'I was there,' answered the prince.
However, in the evening, just as she was stepping into her palanquin, she said to the prince:
That evening the magic stool flew so unsteadily that they could hardly keep their seats, and at last the fairy exclaimed:
You have been talking to your husband!'
And Dorani replied: 'Yes, I have spoken; oh, yes, I have spoken!' But no more would she say.
Dorani bowed her head silently as she took the lute, and passed with the fairy out of the great gate, where the stool awaited them.
That day Dorani sat very quietly, but she answered the prince when he spoke to her; and when evening fell, and with it the time for her departure, she still sat on.
CHAPTER sixteen.
INTO TRAINING FOR MARY ELLEN
Bertram told a friend afterwards that he never knew the meaning of the word "chaos" until he had seen the Strata during the weeks immediately following the laying away of his old servant.
"Every stratum was aquiver with apprehension," he declared; "and there was never any telling when the next grand upheaval would rock the whole structure to its foundations."
Nor was Bertram so far from being right.
It was, indeed, a chaos, as none knew better than did Bertram's wife.
Poor Billy!
Sorry indeed were these days for Billy; and, as if to make her cup of woe full to overflowing, there were Sister Kate's epistolary "I told you so," and Aunt Hannah's ever recurring lament: "If only, Billy, you were a practical housekeeper yourself, they wouldn't impose on you so!"
Aunt Hannah, to be sure, offered Rosa, and Kate, by letter, offered advice-plenty of it.
But Billy, stung beyond all endurance, and fairly radiating hurt pride and dogged determination, disdained all assistance, and, with head held high, declared she was getting along very well, very well indeed!
And this was the way she "got along."
First came Nora.
Nora was a blue eyed, black haired Irish girl, the sixth that the despairing Billy had interviewed on that fateful morning when Bertram had summoned her to his aid.
Nora stayed two days.
During her reign the entire Strata echoed to banged doors, dropped china, and slammed furniture.
Olga came next.
Olga was a Treasure.
She was low voiced, gentle eyed, and a good cook.
She stayed a week.
By that time the growing frequency of the disappearance of sundry small articles of value and convenience led to Billy's making a reluctant search of Olga's room-and to Olga's departure; for the room was, indeed, a treasure house, the Treasure having gathered unto itself other treasures.
Following Olga came a period of what Bertram called "one night stands," so frequently were the dramatis personae below stairs changed. Gretchen drank.
Christine knew only four words of English: salt, good by, no, and yes; and Billy found need occasionally of using other words.
Mary was impertinent and lazy.
Jennie could not even boil a potato properly, much less cook a dinner.
Sarah (colored) was willing and pleasant, but insufferably untidy.
Bridget was neatness itself, but she had no conception of the value of time.
Her meals were always from thirty to sixty minutes late, and half cooked at that.
Vera sang-when she wasn't whistling-and as she was generally off the key, and always off the tune, her almost frantic mistress dismissed her before twenty four hours had passed.
Then came Mary Ellen.
Mary Ellen began well.
She was neat, capable, and obliging; but it did not take her long to discover just how much-and how little-her mistress really knew of practical housekeeping.
Matters and things were very different then.
Mary Ellen became argumentative, impertinent, and domineering.
Billy, in weary despair, submitted to this bullying for almost a week; then, in a sudden accession of outraged dignity that left Mary Ellen gasping with surprise, she told the girl to go.
The maids came and the maids went, and, to Billy, each one seemed a little worse than the one before.
Nowhere was there comfort, rest, or peacefulness.
Noise, confusion, meals poorly cooked and worse served, dust, disorder, and uncertainty.
No wonder that Bertram telephoned more and more frequently that he had met a friend, and was dining in town.
No wonder that William pushed back his plate almost every meal with his food scarcely touched, and then wandered about the house with that hungry, homesick, homeless look that nearly broke her heart.
No wonder, indeed!
And so it had come.
It was true.
Aunt Hannah and Kate and the "Talk to Young Wives" were right.
She had not been fit to marry Bertram.
She had not been fit to marry anybody.
Her honeymoon was not only waning, but going into a total eclipse.
Had not Bertram already declared that if she would tend to her husband and her home a little more-
Billy clenched her small hands and set her round chin squarely.
Very well, she would show them.
She would tend to her husband and her home.
Billy was well aware now that housekeeping was a matter of more than muffins and date puffs.
But she did not falter; and very systematically she set about making her plans.
With a good stout woman to come in twice a week for the heavier work, she believed she could manage by herself very well until Eliza could come back.
Meanwhile, all the time, she could be learning, and in due course she would reach that shining goal of Housekeeping Efficiency, short of which-according to Aunt Hannah and the "Talk to Young Wives"--no woman need hope for a waneless honeymoon.
So chaotic and erratic had been the household service, and so quietly did Billy slip into her new role, that it was not until the second meal after the maid's departure that the master of the house discovered what had happened.
Then, as his wife rose to get some forgotten article, he questioned, with uplifted eyebrows:
"Too good to wait upon us, is my lady now, eh?"
"My lady is waiting on you," smiled Billy.
Great Scott, Billy, how long are you going to stand this?"
Billy tossed her head airily, though she shook in her shoes.
Billy had been dreading this moment.
"I'm not standing it.
She's gone," responded Billy, cheerfully, resuming her seat.
"Uncle William, sha'n't I give you some more pudding?"
"Gone, so soon?" groaned Bertram, as William passed his plate, with a smiling nod.
"Oh, well," went on Bertram, resignedly, "she stayed longer than the last one.
When is the next one coming?"
"She's already here."
Bertram frowned.
"Here?
But-you served the dessert, and-" At something in Billy's face, a quick suspicion came into his own.
"Yes," she nodded brightly, "that's just what I mean.
I'm the next one."
"Nonsense!" exploded Bertram, wrathfully.
"Oh, come, Billy, we've been all over this before.
You know I can't have it."
"Yes, you can.
You've got to have it," retorted Billy, still with that disarming, airy cheerfulness.
"Besides, 'twon't be half so bad as you think.
Wasn't that a good pudding to night?
Didn't you both come back for more?
Well, I made it."
"Puddings!" ejaculated Bertram, with an impatient gesture.
"Billy, as I've said before, it takes something besides puddings to run this house."
"Yes, I know it does," dimpled Billy, "and I've got mrs Durgin for that part.
She's coming twice a week, and more, if I need her.
Why, dearie, you don't know anything about how comfortable you're going to be!
But Uncle William had gone.
Silently he had slipped from his chair and disappeared.
Uncle William, it might be mentioned in passing, had never quite forgotten Aunt Hannah's fateful call with its dire revelations concerning a certain unwanted, superfluous, third-party husband's brother.
Remembering this, there were times when he thought absence was both safest and best.
This was one of the times.
"But, Billy, dear," still argued Bertram, irritably, "how can you?
You don't know how.
You've had no experience."
Billy threw back her shoulders.
An ominous light came to her eyes.
She was no longer airily playful.
"That's exactly it, Bertram.
I don't know how-but I'm going to learn.
I haven't had experience-but I'm going to get it.
"But if you'd get a maid-a good maid," persisted Bertram, feebly.
She was a good maid-until she found out how little her mistress knew; then-well, you know what it was then.
Do you think I'd let that thing happen to me again?
No, sir!
THE CENTRAL AMERICAN AND MEXICAN COLONIES.
Who brought the dialect of Homer to America? or who took to Greece that of the Mayas? Greek is the offspring of the Sanscrit.
They wrote on cotton cloth, on skins prepared like parchment, on a composition of silk and gum, and on a species of paper, soft and beautiful, made from the aloe.
Cotton napkins and ewers of water were placed before them as they took their seats at the board.
They claimed descent from "the twelve great gods," which must have meant the twelve gods of Atlantis, to wit, Poseidon and Cleito and their ten sons.
three.
The great similarity between the Egyptian civilization and that of the American nations.
six.
They were not likely to send ships to Atlantis.
We find another proof of the descent of the Egyptians from Atlantis in their belief as to the "under world." This land of the dead was situated in the West-hence the tombs were all placed, whenever possible, on the west bank of the Nile.
The constant cry of the mourners as the funeral procession moved forward was, "To the west; to the west." This under world was beyond the water, hence the funeral procession always crossed a body of water.
In connection with all this we must not forget that Plato described Atlantis as "that sacred island lying beneath the sun" Everywhere in the ancient world we find the minds of men looking to the west for the land of the dead.
Poole says, "How then can we account for this strong conviction?
There is no evidence that the civilization of Egypt was developed in Egypt itself; it must have been transported there from some other country.
To use the words of a recent writer in Blackwood,
"As we have not yet discovered any trace of the rude, savage Egypt, but have seen her in her very earliest manifestations already skilful, erudite, and strong, it is impossible to determine the order of her inventions.
Light may yet be thrown upon her rise and progress, but our deepest researches have hitherto shown her to us as only the mother of a most accomplished race.
The explanation is simple: the waters of the Atlantic now flow over the country where all this magnificence and power were developed by slow stages from the rude beginnings of barbarism.
And how mighty must have been the parent nation of which this Egypt was a colony!
Look at the magnificent mason work of this ancient people!
Look at the Temple of Karnac, covering a square each side of which is eighteen hundred feet.
"When we consider the high ideal of the Egyptians, as proved by their portrayals of a just life, the principles they laid down as the basis of ethics, the elevation of women among them, their humanity in war, we must admit that their moral place ranks very high among the nations of antiquity.
Then look at the proficiency in art of this ancient people.
They were the first mathematicians of the Old World.
Those Greeks whom we regard as the fathers of mathematics were simply pupils of Egypt. They were the first land surveyors.
They were the first astronomers, calculating eclipses, and watching the periods of planets and constellations.
They knew the rotundity of the earth, which it was supposed Columbus had discovered!
Professor Mitchell, to whom the fact was communicated, employed his assistants to ascertain the exact position of the heavenly bodies belonging to our solar system on the equinox of that year.
They were the first agriculturists of the Old World, raising all the cereals, cattle, horses, sheep, etc
They worked in gold, silver, copper, bronze, and iron; they tempered iron to the hardness of steel.
They were the first chemists.
The word "chemistry" comes from chemi, and chemi means Egypt.
Their dentists filled teeth with gold; their farmers hatched poultry by artificial heat.
This papyrus is a medical treatise; there are in it no incantations or charms; but it deals in reasonable remedies, draughts, unguents and injections.
The later medical papyri contain a great deal of magic and incantations.
"Among the ancient cultured nations of Egypt and Assyria handicrafts had already come to a stage which could only have been reached by thousands of years of progress.
In museums still may be examined the work of their joiners, stone cutters, goldsmiths, wonderful in skill and finish, and in putting to shame the modern artificer....
To see gold jewellery of the highest order, the student should examine that of the ancients, such as the Egyptian, Greek, and Etruscan."
Even the obelisks of Egypt have their counterpart in America.
In reality, the intercalation of the Mexicans being thirteen days on each cycle of fifty two years, comes to the same thing as that of the Julian calendar, which is one day in four years; and consequently supposes the duration of the year to be three hundred and sixty five days six hours.
In Egypt we have the oldest of the Old World children of Atlantis; in her magnificence we have a testimony to the development attained by the parent country; by that country whose kings were the gods of succeeding nations, and whose kingdom extended to the uttermost ends of the earth.
Sea shells from the Gulf, pearls from the Atlantic, and obsidian from Mexico, have also been found side by side in their mounds.
five.
eight.
Perhaps you do not know it, but the monkeys think that all the bananas belong to them.
It was very difficult for the old woman to gather the bananas herself, so she made a bargain with the largest monkey.
She told him that if he would gather the bunches of bananas for her she would give him half of them. The monkey gathered the bananas.
When he took his half he gave the little old woman the bananas which grow at the bottom of the bunch and are small and wrinkled.
The nice big fat ones he kept for himself and carried them home to let them ripen in the dark.
The little old woman was very angry.
Then she placed a large flat basket on the top of the image's head and in the basket she placed the best ripe bananas she could find.
He had often pushed over boy banana peddlers, upset their baskets and then had run away with the bananas.
"O, peddler boy, peddler boy," he said to him, "please give me a banana." The image of wax answered never a word.
Then the monkey called out in his loudest voice, "O, peddler boy, peddler boy, if you don't give me a banana I'll give you such a push that it will upset all of your bananas." The image of wax was silent.
The monkey ran toward the image of wax and struck it hard with his hand.
"O, peddler boy, peddler boy, let go my hand," the monkey called out. "Let go my hand and give me a banana or else I'll give you a hard, hard blow with my other hand." The image of wax did not let go.
The monkey gave the image a hard, hard blow with his other hand.
The other hand remained firmly embedded in the wax.
Then the monkey called out, "O, peddler boy, peddler boy, let go my two hands.
Let go my two hands and give me a banana or else I will give you a kick with my foot." The image of wax did not let go.
The monkey gave the image a kick with his foot and his foot remained stuck fast in the wax.
Let go my two hands and my foot and give me a banana or else I'll give you a kick with my other foot." The image of wax did not let go.
Then the monkey who was now very angry, gave the image of wax a kick with his foot and his foot remained stuck fast in the wax.
The monkey shouted, "O, peddler boy, peddler boy, let go my foot.
Let go my two feet and my two hands and give me a banana or else I'll give you a push with my body." The image of wax did not let go.
The monkey gave the image of wax a push with his body.
His body remained caught fast in the wax.
"O, peddler boy, peddler boy," the monkey shouted, "let go my body! Let go my body and my two feet and my two hands or I'll call all the other monkeys to help me!"
The image of wax did not let go.
Then the monkey made such an uproar with his cries and shouts that very soon monkeys came running from all directions.
A whole army of monkeys had come to the aid of the biggest monkey.
It was the very littlest monkey who thought of a plan to help the biggest monkey out of his plight.
The monkeys were to climb up into the biggest tree and pile themselves one on top of another until they made a pyramid of monkeys.
This is what all the big sized, little sized, middle sized monkeys did.
The monkey with the loudest voice on top of the pyramid made the sun hear.
The sun came at once.
After a while the wax began to melt.
The monkey was at last able to pull out one of his hands.
The sun poured down more of his hottest rays and soon the monkey was able to pull out his two hands.
Then he could pull out one foot, then another, and in a little while his body, too.
When the little old woman saw what had happened she was very much discouraged about raising bananas.
She decided to move to another part of the world where she raised cabbages instead of bananas.
How the Monkey Escaped
People had to eat meat.
Some of the beasts were good to eat and others were not good at all.
The ox was found to be very good, and so was the sheep, and the armadillo.
The monkey was playing his guitar.
Just as he was about to stretch out his hand and seize the monkey, the monkey gave a sudden leap to the tree and hurried away to the tree top.
After that every time the man heard the monkey play the guitar he would come near and try to catch him.
He did not think that the man would hear him, but the man had very sharp ears.
After a while the man became thirsty and went to get a drink.
When the little boy was rubbing his eyes to get the dirt out of them the monkey made a sudden dash out of the cave and escaped to the tree tops.
When the man returned the little boy did not dare to tell him that the monkey had escaped.
The man waited and waited and waited there by the hole in the ground.
At last he became tired of waiting and went away.
After that the man tried harder than ever to catch the monkey.
If he had not had the good luck to catch the monkey napping one day there is no knowing when he would have got his hands upon him.
One day, however, he caught the monkey napping.
He shut him up in a box and carried him home to the children for supper.
The monkey and his guitar were shut up in the box, and there, inside the box, the monkey played on his guitar.
"Just let me out and I'll show you how well I can dance."
Then he said, "O, children!
O, children!
You have nothing at all cooking in that pot over the fire.
Let us put something into the pot to cook."
The children begged him to dance some more.
"If you will open the door a little bit so that I can have more air to breathe I'll show you a new dance," said the monkey.
The children opened the door.
The monkey danced over to the door and out of the door away to the tree top.
That was the last they ever saw of him.
He moved to another part of the country after that experience.
When the man came home with fuel for the fire the children did not dare to tell him that the monkey had escaped.
They let him think that the sticks and the cocoanut shell in the pot was the monkey.
He fished a hard stick out of the pot and bit into it.
Then he fished the empty cocoanut shell out of the pot.
"That is not the monkey's head," he said as he tasted it, "That is just an empty cocoanut shell." He couldn't find a single trace of the monkey in that monkey stew.
Her name was Agnes.
Her father and mother were poor, and could not give her many things. Rosamond would have utterly despised the rude, simple playthings she had.
Impertinent and rude things done by THEIR child they thought SO clever! laughing at them as something quite marvellous; her commonplace speeches were said over again as if they had been the finest poetry; and the pretty ways which every moderately good child has were extolled as if the result of her excellent taste, and the choice of her judgment and will.
They would even say sometimes that she ought not to hear her own praises for fear it should make her vain, and then whisper them behind their hands, but so loud that she could not fail to hear every word.
The consequence was that she soon came to believe-so soon, that she could not recall the time when she did not believe, as the most absolute fact in the universe, that she was SOMEBODY; that is, she became most immoderately conceited.
Now as the least atom of conceit is a thing to be ashamed of, you may fancy what she was like with such a quantity of it inside her!
Had she been, the wise woman would have only pitied and loved her, instead of feeling sick when she looked at her.
As time went on, this disease of self conceit went on too, gradually devouring the good that was in her.
By degrees, from thinking herself so clever, she came to fancy that whatever seemed to her, must of course be the correct judgment, and whatever she wished, the right thing; and grew so obstinate, that at length her parents feared to thwart her in any thing, knowing well that she would never give in.
She never went into rages like the princess, and would have thought Rosamond-oh, so ugly and vile! if she had seen her in one of her passions.
True, there is more hope of helping the angry child out of her form of selfishness than the conceited child out of hers; but on the other hand, the conceited child was not so terrible or dangerous as the wrathful one. The conceited one, however, was sometimes very angry, and then her anger was more spiteful than the other's; and, again, the wrathful one was often very conceited too.
So that, on the whole, of two very unpleasant creatures, I would say that the king's daughter would have been the worse, had not the shepherd's been quite as bad.
The shepherd's wife looked at her, liked her, and brought her a cup of milk.
The wise woman took it, for she made it a rule to accept every kindness that was offered her.
Agnes was not by nature a greedy girl, as I have said; but self conceit will go far to generate every other vice under the sun
The wise woman saw it, for all her business was with Agnes though she little knew it, and, rising, went and offered the cup to the child, where she sat with her knitting in a corner.
Agnes looked at it, did not want it, was inclined to refuse it from a beggar, but thinking it would show her consequence to assert her rights, took it and drank it up.
For whoever is possessed by a devil, judges with the mind of that devil; and hence Agnes was guilty of such a meanness as many who are themselves capable of something just as bad will consider incredible.
The wise woman waited till she had finished it-then, looking into the empty cup, said:
The wise woman looked at the mother.
Some foolish people think they take another's part when they take the part he takes.
Then she turned again to Agnes, who had never looked round but sat with her back to both, and suddenly lapped her in the folds of her cloak.
But she never turned her head; and the mother went back into her cottage.
The wise woman walked close past the shepherd and his dogs, and through the midst of his flock of sheep.
The shepherd wondered where she could be going-right up the hill.
They were accustomed to such an absence now and then, and were not at first frightened; but when it grew dark and she did not appear, the husband set out with his dogs in one direction, and the wife in another, to seek their child.
Then the whole country side arose to search for the missing Agnes; but day after day and night after night passed, and nothing was discovered of or concerning her, until at length all gave up the search in despair except the mother, although she was nearly convinced now that the poor woman had carried her off.
Her hair hung in tangles from her head; her clothes were tattered, and through the rents her skin showed in many places; her cheeks were white, and worn thin with hunger; the hollows were dark under her eyes, and they stood out scared and wild.
Perhaps her words were not just like these, but her thoughts were.
We have had a miserable cold day, but good sport.
I approve of all you do in my absence; but it would be nonsense, and appear affected, to carry your scruples too far.
My cold is better, notwithstanding the weather.
MY DEAR EMMA,
I find, in my book of letters, twentieth of December, that I wrote, that day, a letter to mr Burgess, to deliver to Messieurs Biddulph and Co.--to Lord Abercorn-and to mr Durno, with the order inclosed.
thirteen.
I have killed five boars, and two great ones got off after falling; two bucks; six does; and a hare: fourteen in all.
This is a heavy air; nobody eats with appetite, and many are ill with colds.
Your's, ever, my dear wife,
fifteen.
Suppose you had put it on nine parts out of ten of the ladies in company, would any one have appeared angelic?
Yesterday, when we brought home all we killed, it filled the house, completely; and, to day, they are obliged to white wash the walls, to take away the blood.
MY DEAR EM.
By having grumbled a little, I got a better post to day; and have killed two boars and a sow, all enormous.
The news you sent me, of poor Lord Pembroke, gave me a little twist; but I have, for some time, perceived, that my friends, with whom I spent my younger days, have been dropping around me.
Admire the Creator, and all his works, to us incomprehensible: and do all the good you can upon earth; and take the chance of eternity, without dismay.
I dined, this morning, at nine o'clock; and, I think, it agreed better with me than tea.
Divert yourself-I shall soon be at you again.
seventeen.
Here we are, my Dear Emma, after a pleasant day's journey!
MY DEAR SIR,
With our love to Sam, I am, ever, dear Sir, your's, sincerely,
Above all, take care of your health; that is the first of blessings. May God ever protect you!
MY DEAR LORD,
Ever, my dear Lord, your truly attached friend,
Palermo, june twentieth seventeen ninety nine. Eight o'Clock at Night.
MY DEAR LORD,
Having wrote fully by the felucca to day, that went off at three o'clock-and have not yet General Acton's answer, with respect to what the Court would wish you to do when you hear how the French fleet is disposed of-I have nothing to write by the transport.
God bless you!
And I hope, somehow or other, we shall meet again soon.
MY DEAR LORD,
Emma
MY DEAR LORD,
twelve.
When I came, I found him unwilling to exert himself. I pressed him to write down his thoughts upon the subject.
He said, 'There's no occasion for my writing.
I'll talk to you.' He was, however, at last prevailed on to dictate to me, while I wrote as follows:--
'The charge is, that he has used immoderate and cruel correction. Correction, in itself, is not cruel; children, being not reasonable, can be governed only by fear.
Yet, as good things become evil by excess, correction, by being immoderate, may become cruel.
A stubborn scholar must be corrected till he is subdued.
Correction must be proportioned to occasions.
The degrees of scholastick, as of military punishment, no stated rules can ascertain. It must be enforced till it overpowers temptation; till stubbornness becomes flexible, and perverseness regular.
No scholar has gone from him either blind or lame, or with any of his limbs or powers injured or impaired. They were irregular, and he punished them: they were obstinate, and he enforced his punishment.
It has been said, that he used unprecedented and improper instruments of correction.
Of this accusation the meaning is not very easy to be found. No instrument of correction is more proper than another, but as it is better adapted to produce present pain without lasting mischief. Whatever were his instruments, no lasting mischief has ensued; and therefore, however unusual, in hands so cautious they were proper.
In a place like Campbelltown, it is easy for one of the principal inhabitants to make a party.
dr Johnson said, 'the cards used by such persons must be less polished than ours commonly are.'
We talked of sounds.
JOHNSON.
BOSWELL.
Some think Swift's the best; others prefer a fuller and grander way of writing.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, you must first define what you mean by style, before you can judge who has a good taste in style, and who has a bad.
I expressed a liking for mr Francis Osborne's works, and asked him what he thought of that writer.
He answered, 'A conceited fellow.
If the authours who apply to me have money, I bid them boldly print without a name; if they have written in order to get money, I tell them to go to the booksellers, and make the best bargain they can.' BOSWELL. 'But, Sir, if a bookseller should bring you a manuscript to look at?' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, I would desire the bookseller to take it away.'
JOHNSON.
'Sir, he is attached to some woman.' BOSWELL. 'I rather believe, Sir, it is the fine climate which keeps him there.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, how can you talk so?
What proportion does climate bear to the complex system of human life?
He said, 'Walpole was a minister given by the King to the people: Pitt was a minister given by the people to the King,--as an adjunct.'
The law is the measure of civil right; but if the measure be changeable, the extent of the thing measured never can be settled.
'To permit a law to be modified at discretion, is to leave the community without law.
To permit Intromission, and to punish fraud, is to make law no better than a pitfall.
It is necessary that the law should be adequate to its end; that, if it be observed, it shall prevent the evil against which it is directed.
Its end is the security of property; and property very often of great value.
He that intromits, is criminal; he that intromits not, is innocent.
If temptation were rare, a penal law might be deemed unnecessary.
If the duty enjoined by the law were of difficult performance, omission, though it could not be justified, might be pitied.
'I therefore return to my original position, that a law, to have its effect, must be permanent and stable.
'DEAR SIR,
'I am glad if you got credit by your cause, and am yet of opinion, that our cause was good, and that the determination ought to have been in your favour.
For such an institution makes a very important part of the history of mankind.
JOHNSON.
SELECTING A PROPER SCHOOL
This is, of course, mainly a parent's problem and is best solved by resorting to the following formula: Let A and B represent two young girls' finishing schools in the East.
Answer: A, because life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.
CORRECT EQUIPMENT FOR THE SCHOOLGIRL
Having selected an educational institution, the next requisite is a suitable equipment.
I would, therefore, recommend the following list, subject, of course, to variation in individual cases.
After the purchase of a complete outfit, it will be necessary to say goodbye to one's local friends.
Partings are always somewhat sad, but it will be found that much simple pleasure may be derived from the last nights with the various boys to whom one is engaged.
In this connection, however, it would be well to avoid making any rash statements regarding undying friendship and affection, because, when you next see Eddie or Walter, at Christmas time, you will have been three months in the East, while they have been at the State University, and really, after one starts dancing with Yale men-well, it's a funny world.
In case you do not happen to meet any friends on the train, the surest way to protect yourself from any unwelcome advances is to buy a copy of the Atlantic Monthly and carry it, in plain view.
Next to a hare lip, this is the safest protection for a travelling young girl that I know of; it has, however, the one objection that all the old ladies on the train are likely to tell you what they think of Katherine Fullerton Gerould, or their rheumatism.
If you are compelled to go to the dining car alone, you will probably sit beside an Elk with white socks, who will call the waiter "George." Along about the second course he will say to you, "It's warm for September, isn't it?" to which you should answer "no" That will dispose of the Elk.
Across the table from you will be a Grand Army man and his wife, going to visit their boy Elmer's wife's folks in Schenectady.
When the fish is served, the Grand Army man will choke on a bone.
Let him choke, but do not be too hopeful, as the chances are that he will dislodge the bone. All will go well until the dessert, when his wife will begin telling how raspberry sherbet always disagrees with her.
Offer her your raspberry sherbet.
After dinner you may wish to read for a while, but the porter will probably have made up all the berths for the night.
It will also be found that the light in your berth does not work, so you will be awake for a long time; finally, just as you are leaving Buffalo, you will at last get to sleep, and when you open your eyes again, you will be-in Buffalo.
The next morning, tired but unhappy, you will reach New York.
A JOURNEY AROUND NEW YORK
The Aquarium.
Take Fifth Avenue Bus to Times Square.
Transfer to forty second Street Crosstown.
Get off at forty fourth Street, and walk one block south to the Biltmore.
The most interesting fish will be found underneath the hanging clock, near the telephone booths.
Grant's Tomb.
Take Fifth Avenue bus, and a light lunch.
Then return the same way you came, followed by three fast sets of tennis, a light supper and early to bed. If you do not feel better in the morning, cut out milk, fresh fruit and uncooked foods for a while.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Take Subway to Brooklyn. (Flatbush.) Then ask the subway guard where to go; he will tell you.
The Bronx.
Take three oranges, a lemon, three of gin, to one of vermouth, with a dash of bitters.
Serve cold.
The Ritz.
Take taxicab and fifty dollars.
Brooklyn Bridge.
Terrible.
And their auction is worse.
When you have visited all these places, it will probably be time to take the train to your school.
THE FIRST DAYS IN THE NEW SCHOOL
The first week of school life is apt to be quite discouraging, and we can not too emphatically warn the young girl not to do anything rash under the influence of homesickness.
We advise: Go slow at first.
In your first day at school you will be shown your room; in your room you will find a sad eyed fat girl.
You will find that you have drawn a blank, that she comes from Topeka, Kan., that her paw made his money in oil, and that she is religious.
You will be nice to her for the first week, because you aren't taking any chances at the start; you will tolerate her for the rest of the year, because she will do your lessons for you every night.
Across the hall from you there will be two older girls who are back for their second year.
One of them will remind you of the angel painted on the ceiling of the Victory Theatre back home, until she starts telling about her summer at Narragansett; from the other you will learn how to inhale.
A VISITOR FROM PRINCETON
She sniffs at the "cousin" and tell's you that she must have a letter from Charley's father, one from Charley's minister, one from the governor of your state, and one from some disinterested party certifying that Charley has never been in the penitentiary, has never committed arson, and is a legitimate child.
Charley will come and will be ushered into the reception room.
While he is sitting there alone, the entire school will walk slowly, one by one, past the open door and look in at him.
This will cause Charley to perspire freely and to wish to God he had worn his dark suit.
It is not at all likely that you will be allowed to go to New Haven during your first year, which is quite a pity, as this city, founded in sixteen thirty eight, is rich in historical interest.
It was here, for example, in eighteen ninety three, that Yale defeated Harvard at football, and the historic Pigskin which was used that day is still preserved intact.
Many other quaint relics are to be seen in and around the city of elms, mementos of the past which bring to the younger generation a knowledge and respect for things gone.
In the month of June, for example, there is really nothing which quite conjures up for the college youth of today a sense of the mutability and impermanence of this mortal life so much as the sight of a member of the class of eighteen seventy five after three days' intensive drinking.
A lady who has left town may send a brief note or a "P.
p c" ("pour prendre conge," i e, "to take leave") card to a gentleman who remains at home, if the gentleman is her husband and if she has left town with his business partner.
FROM PETROLEUM v NASBY
My esteemed and life-long friend and co laborer, Rev.
So, receevin transportashen and suffishent money from the secret service fund for expenses, I departed for Cleveland, and after a tejus trip thro' an Ablishn country, I arrived there.
My thots were gloomy beyond expression.
Why harrow up the public bosom, or lasserate the public mind?
"Be quiet, yoo idiot!" remarked I, soothingly, to him.
Are you quite shoor-quite shoor?
"I stand by Andrew Johnson and his policy, and I don't want no office!"
General Ewing made another extemporaneous address, which he read from manuscript, and we adjourned for dinner.
As the isolated oak that spreads his umbrageous top in the meadow surpasses his spindling congener of the forest, so does the country gentleman, alone in the midst of his broad estate, outgrow the man of crowds and conventionalities in our cities.
The oak may have the advantage in the comparison, as his locality and consequent superiority are permanent.
The Squire, out of his own district, we ignore.
Whether intrinsically, or simply in default of comparison, at home he is invariably a great man.
Such, at least, was Squire Hardy.
"It will be time enough for them to hive," quoth the Squire, "when the old box is full."
Notwithstanding his contempt for fast men nowadays, he is rather pleased with any allusion to his own youthful reputation in that line, and not unfrequently tells a good story on himself.
At Culpepper Court house, or some court house thereabout, Dick Hardy, then a good humored, gay young bachelor, and the prime favorite of both sexes, was called upon to carve the pig at the court dinner.
The district judge was at the table, the lawyers, justices, and everybody else that felt disposed to dine.
He had probably been engaged on some court martial, imposing fifty cent fines on absentees from the last general muster. Howbeit Dick, in thrusting his fork into the back of the pig, bespattered the officer's regimentals with some of the superfluous gravy.
"Beg your pardon," said Dick, as he went on with his carving.
Now these were times when the war spirit was high, and chivalry at a premium.
"Beg your pardon" might serve as a napkin to wipe the stain from one's honor, but did not touch the question of the greased and spotted regimentals.
The colonel, swelling with wrath, seized a spoon, and deliberately dipping it into the gravy, dashed it over Dick's prominent shirt frill.
All saw the act, and with open eyes and mouth sat in astonished silence, waiting to see what would be done next.
The outraged citizen calmly laid down his knife and fork, and looked at his frill, the officer, and the pig, one after another.
The colonel, unmindful of the pallid countenance and significant glances of the burning eye, leaned back in his chair, with arms akimbo, regarding the young farmer with cool disdain.
A murmur of surprise and indignation arose from the congregated guests.
He deliberately took the pig by the hind legs, and with a sudden whirl brought it down upon the head of the unlucky officer.
Stunned by the squashing blow, astounded and blinded with streams of gravy and wads of stuffing, he attempted to rise, but blow after blow from the fat pig fell upon his bewildered head.
He seized a carving knife and attempted to defend himself with blind but ineffectual fury, and at length, with a desperate effort, rose and took to his heels.
Dick Hardy, whose wrath waxed hotter and hotter, followed, belaboring him unmercifully at every step, around the table, through the hall, and into the street, the crowd shouting and applauding.
There's no law in Christendom against basting a man with a roast pig!" Dick's weapon failed before his anger; and when at length the battered colonel escaped into the door of a friendly dwelling, the victor had nothing in his hands but the hind legs of the roaster.
The company reassembled, and finished their dinner as best they might. In reply to a toast, Hardy made a speech, wherein he apologized for sacrificing the principal dinner dish, and, as he expressed it, for putting public property to private uses.
In reply to this speech a treat was ordered.
After the squire got older, and a family grew up around him, he was not always victorious in his contests.
On their return from a visit to Richmond the ladies took it into their heads that the parlors looked bare and old-fashioned, and it was decided by them in secret conclave that a change was necessary.
"What!" said he, in a towering passion, "isn't it enough that you spend your time and money in vinegar to sour sweet peaches, and your sugar to sweeten crab apples, that you must turn the house you were born in topsy turvy?
God help us!
we've a house with windows to let the light in, and you want curtains to keep it out; we've plastered the walls to make them white, and now you want to paste blue paper over them; we've waxed floors to walk on, and we must pay two dollars a yard for a carpet to save the oak plank!
Begone with your nonsense, ye demented jades!"
The squire smote the oak floor with his heavy cane, and the rosy petitioners fled from his presence laughing.
In due time, however, the parlors were furnished with carpets, curtains, paper, and all the fixtures of modern luxury.
The ladies were, of course, greatly delighted; and while professing great aversion and contempt for the "tawdry lumber," it was plain to see that the worthy man enjoyed their pleasure as much as they did the new furniture.
The western horizon was blushing rosy red at the coming of the sun, whose descending chariot was hidden by the thick Indian summer haze that covered lowland and mountain as it were with a violet tinted veil.
Barring his modern costume, he might have suggested to the artist's mind a picture of one of the Patriarchs.
The black ram halted, and the long procession of ewes and well grown lambs moved up in a dense semicircle, and also halted, expressing their pleasure at the expected treat by gentle bleatings.
The squire stooped to spread the salt.
The black ram, either from most uncivil impatience, or mistaking the movement of the proprietor's coat tail for a challenge, pitched into him incontinently.
An attack from behind, so sudden and unexpected, threw the squire sprawling on his face into a stone pile.
Oh, never was the thunder's jar, The red tornado's wasting wing, Or all the elemental war,
like the fury of Squire Hardy on that occasion.
The timid flock looked all aghast, while the audacious offender, so far from having shown any disposition to skulk, stood shaking his head and threatening, as if he had a mind to follow up the dastardly attack.
The squire let fly one stone, which grazed the villain's head and killed a lamb.
With the other he crippled a favorite ewe.
"Quick, quick! young man-your gun; let me shoot the cursed brute on the spot."
"By your leave, Squire, and by your orders, I'll do the shooting myself. Which of them was it?"
Crayon leveled his piece and fired.
The offender made a bound and fell dead, the black blood spouting from his forehead in a stream as thick as your thumb.
"There, now," exclaimed the squire, with infinite satisfaction, "you've got it, you ungrateful brute!
You've found something harder than your own head at last, you cursed reptile!
Friend Crayon, that's a capital gun of yours, and you shot well."
The squire dropped the stones which he had in his hands, and looking back at the dead body of the belligerent sheep, observed, with a thoughtful air, "He was a fine animal, mr Crayon-a fine animal, and this will teach him a good lesson."
Not long after this occurrence, Squire Hardy went to hear an itinerant phrenologist who lectured in the village.
In the progress of his discourse, the lecturer, for purposes of illustration, introduced the skulls of several animals, mapped off in the most correct and scientific manner.
"Observe, ladies and gentlemen, the head of the wolf: combativeness enormously developed, alimentiveness large, while conscientiousness is entirely wanting.
Here combativeness is a nullity-absolutely wanting-while the fullness of the sentimental organs indicate at once the mild and peaceful disposition of the sheep."
The squire, who had listened with great attention up to this point, hastily rose to his feet.
"A sheep!" he exclaimed; "did you call a sheep a peaceful animal?
Sir, I had a ram once-"
"My dear sir," cried the astonished lecturer, "on the authority of our most distinguished writers, the sheep is an emblem of peace and innocence."
"An emblem of the devil," interrupted the squire, boiling over.
"You are an ignorant impostor, and your science a humbug.
INTRODUCTORY
There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year, asking him questions, some of them of the strangest.
A man is dying of cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast?
A man is unable to make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women?
A man has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him what to do about it?
A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little time for self improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to read?
Many such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of people, earnest, hungry for happiness, and groping as if in a fog.
The things they most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in the newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend.
Of these agencies, the first is not entirely competent, the second is not entirely honest, and the third is not entirely up to date.
For the present book the following claims may be made.
Third, it is an honest book; its writer will not pretend to know what he only guesses, and where it is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly.
Finally, it is a kind book; it is not written for its author's glory, nor for his enrichment, but to tell you things that may be useful to you in the brief span of your life.
A large order, as the boys phrase it!
There are several ways for such a book to begin.
It might begin with the child, because we all begin that way; it might begin with love, because that precedes the child; it might begin with the care of the body, explaining that sound physical health is the basis of all right living, and even of right thinking; it might begin as most philosophies do, by defining life, discussing its origin and fundamental nature.
The trouble with this last plan is that there are a lot of people who have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; they have creeds and catechisms which they know by heart, and if you suggest to them anything different, they give you a startled look and get out of your way.
And then there is another, and in our modern world a still larger class, who say, "Oh, shucks!
I don't go in for religion and that kind of thing." You offer them something that looks like a sermon, and they turn to the baseball page.
There will be, among others, the great American tired business man.
He wrestles with problems and cares all day, and when he sits down to read in the evening, he says: "Make it short and snappy." There is the wife of the tired business man, the American perfect lady.
Yet, I wonder; is there a single one among all these tired people, or even among the cynical people, who has not had some moment of awe when the thought came stabbing into his mind like a knife: "What a strange thing this life is!
What am I anyhow?
Where do I come from, and what is going to become of me?
It is not only in the class room and the schools that the minds of men are grappling with the fundamental problems; in fact, it was not from the schools that the new religions and the great moral impulses of humanity took their origin.
It was from lonely shepherds sitting on the hillsides, and from fishermen casting their nets, and from carpenters and tailors and shoemakers at their benches.
Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a difference what you believe about life, how it comes to be, where it is going, and what is your place in it.
Is there a heaven with a God, who watches you day and night, and knows every thought you think, and will some day take you to eternal bliss if you obey his laws?
If you really believe that, you will try to find out about his laws, and you will be comparatively little concerned about the success or failure of your business.
No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you may be, it will pay you to get such things straight: to know a little of what the wise men of the past have thought about them, and more especially what science with its new tools of knowledge may have discovered.
Then, being dissatisfied, he went to the unrecognized teachers, the enthusiasts and the "cranks" of a hundred schools.
Finally, he thought for himself; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself.
As a result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or final truth; but he has what he might describe as a rough working draft, a practical outline, good for everyday purposes.
He is going to have confidence enough in you, the reader, to give you the hardest part first; that is, to begin with the great fundamental questions.
What is life, and how does it come to be?
What does it mean, and what have we to do with it? Are we its masters or its slaves?
What does it owe us, and what do we owe to it?
Why is it so hard, and do we have to stand its hardness?
And can we really know about all these matters, or will we be only guessing? Can we trust ourselves to think about them, or shall we be safer if we believe what we are told?
Shall we be punished if we think wrong, and how shall we be punished?
Shall we be rewarded if we think right, and will the pay be worth the trouble?
Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the simplest language possible.
You do not refuse to engage in the automobile business because the carburetor and the differential are words of four syllables.
THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE
(Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and one of the means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.)
You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about the "divorce evil," and you will find that to the preacher or editor this "evil" consists of the fact that more and more people are refusing to stay unhappily married.
They know this because God has told them so, and in the name of God they seek to keep people tied in sex unions which have come to mean loathing instead of love.
Now, I will assert it as a mathematical certainty that a considerable percentage of marriages must fail.
Who does not know the man who masters life and becomes a vital force, while his wife remains dull and empty?
She ought in common sense to have broken the engagement; but she was in love, and she married, as many another fool woman does, with the idea of "reforming" the man.
She failed, and was utterly and unspeakably wretched.
I know another man, a conservative capitalist of narrow and aggressive temper, whose wife turned into an ardent Bolshevik.
I know another whose wife turned into an ultra pious Catholic, and turned over the care of his domestic life to a priest.
Also we are coming to take what we believe with more seriousness; the intellectual life means more and more to us, and it becomes harder and harder for us to find sexual and domestic happiness with a partner who does not share our convictions, but, on the contrary, may be contributing to the campaign funds of the opposition party.
But it is a fact that intellectual convictions are the raw material out of which characters and lives are made, and it is inevitable that some characters and lives that fit quite well at twenty should fit very badly at thirty or forty.
When we refuse divorce under such circumstances we are not fostering marriage, as we fondly imagine; we are really fostering adultery.
Therefore it follows that "strict" divorce laws, such as the clerical propaganda urges upon us, are in reality laws for the promotion of fornication and prostitution.
There is a short story by Edith Wharton, in which the "divorce evil" is exhibited to us in its naked horror; the story called "The Other Two," in the volume "The Descent of Man." A society woman has been divorced twice and married three times, and by an ingenious set of circumstances the woman and all three of the men are brought into the same drawing room at the same time.
Just imagine, if you can, such an excruciating situation: a woman, her husband, and two men who used to be her husbands, all compelled to meet together and think of something to say!
I cite this story because it is a perfect illustration of the extent to which the "divorce problem" is a problem of our lack of sense. mrs Wharton will, I fear, consider me a very vulgar person if I assert that there is absolutely no reason whatever why any of those four people in her story should have had a moment's discomfort of mind, except that they thought there was.
I would not say that they should choose to be intimate friends-though even that may be possible occasionally.
I know, because I have seen it happen.
I visited his home, and met his wife and two little children, and saw a man and woman living in domestic happiness.
The man had also two grown sons, and after a few days he remarked that he would like me to meet the mother of these young men.
This lady had been the writer's wife for ten years or so, and there had been a terrible uproar when they voluntarily parted.
THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE
(Discusses the circumstances under which society has the right to forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.)
We have quoted the old maxim, "Marry in haste and repent at leisure," and we suggested that parents and guardians should have the right to ask the young to wait before marriage, and make certain of the state of their hearts.
In the first place, there are or may be children, and society should try to preserve for every child a home with a father and a mother in it.
Second, there are property rights, of which every marriage is a tangle, and the settlement of which the law should always oversee.
Third, there is the question of venereal disease, which society has an unquestionable right to keep down, by every reasonable restriction upon sexual promiscuity.
And finally, there is the respect which all men and women owe to love.
It seems to me that society has the same right to protect love against extreme outrage, as it has to forbid indecent exposure of the person on the street.
There is in successful operation in Switzerland a wise and sane divorce law, based upon common sense and not upon superstition.
A couple wish to break their marriage, and they go before a judge, and in private session, as to a friendly adviser, they tell their troubles.
He gives them advice about their disagreement, and sends them away for three months to think it over.
In both cases, the parties directly interested have the right to decide their own fate, but the rest of the world requires them to think carefully about it, and to listen to counsel.
Except for grave offenses, such as adultery, insanity, crime or venereal disease, I do not think that anyone should receive a divorce in less than six months, nor do I think that any personal right is contravened by the imposing of such a delay.
In order to illustrate this problem, I will tell you about a certain man known to me.
He lays claim to extraordinary spiritual gifts, and uses the language of the highest idealism known.
To my knowledge he was three times married in six years, and each time he deserted the woman, and forced her to divorce him, and to take care of herself, and in one case of a child.
In addition, he had begotten one child out of marriage, and left the mother and child to starve.
For ten years or so I used to see him about once in six months, and invariably he had a new woman, a young girl of fine character, who had been ensnared by him, and was in the agonizing process of discovering his moral and mental derangement.
Yet there was absolutely nothing in the law to place restraint upon this man; he could wander from state to state, or to the other side of the world, preying upon lovely young girls wherever he went.
This particular man happens to call himself a "radical"; but I could tell you of similar men in the highest social circles, or in the political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world; they are in every rank of life, and are just as definitely and certainly menaces to human welfare and progress as pirates on the high seas or highwaymen on the road.
But I think we might begin by refusing to let any man or woman have more than two divorces in one lifetime, in any state or part of the world.
If any man or woman tries three times to find happiness in love, and fails each time, we have a right to assume that the fault must lie with that person, and not with the three partners.
At present the great mass of the public has sympathy for the law breaker; just as, in old days, the peasants could not help admiring the outlaw who resisted unjust land laws and robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist regime, we can not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore.
We clear out foul smelling weeds from our garden, because we wish to raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein.
There lives in California a student of plant life, who has shown us what we can do, not by magic or by superhuman efforts, but simply by loving plants, by watching them ceaselessly, understanding their ways, and guiding their sex life to our own purposes.
We can perform what to our ignorant ancestors would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own kind, and survive forever if we give them proper care.
In other words, Luther Burbank has shown us that we can "change plant nature."
We have shown elsewhere how genius multiplies to infinity the joy and power of life by means of the arts; and one of the greatest of the arts is the art of love.
NOTES FOR LECTURE eighteen
Two spheres revolving round each other can only remain spherical if rigid; if at all plastic they become prolate.
If either rotate on its axis, in the same or nearly the same plane as it revolves, that one is necessarily subject to tides.
Hence the rotation takes place against a pull, and is therefore more or less checked and retarded.
The effect of this tangential force acting on the tide compelling body is gradually to increase its distance from the other body.
Also that the moon's rotation relative to the earth has been destroyed by past tidal action in it (the only residue of ancient lunar rotation now being a scarcely perceptible libration), so that it turns always the same face towards us.
Halving the distance would make them eight times as high; quartering it would increase them sixty four fold.
A most powerful geological denuding agent.
Hence it is possible that this is the history of the moon.
If so, it is probably an exceptional history.
It appears to be about twenty miles in diameter, and weighs therefore, if composed of rock, forty billion tons.
LECTURE eighteen
The strata which were once horizontal are now so no longer-they have been tilted and upheaved, bent and distorted, in many places.
Some of them again have been metamorphosed by fire, so that their organic remains have been destroyed, and the traces of their aqueous origin almost obliterated.
But still, to the eye of the geologist, all are of aqueous or sedimentary origin: roughly speaking, one may say they were all deposited at the bottom of some ancient sea.
For the geological era is not over.
Of all denuding agents, there can be no doubt that, to the land exposed to them, the waves of the sea are by far the most powerful.
Think how they beat and tear, and drive and drag, until even the hardest rock, like basalt, becomes honeycombed into strange galleries and passages-Fingal's Cave, for instance-and the softer parts are crumbled away.
They can undermine such cliffs indeed, and then grind the fragments to powder, but their direct action is limited.
Not so limited, however, as they would be without the tides. Consider for a moment the denudation import of the tides: how does the existence of tidal rise and fall affect the geological problem?
The scouring action of the tidal currents themselves is not to be despised.
The waves are a great planing machine attacking the land, and the tides raise and lower this planing machine, so that its denuding tooth is applied, now twenty feet vertically above mean level, now twenty feet below.
That is to say, not greatly more than this period of time has elapsed since it was in a molten condition.
The Laurentian and Huronian rocks of Canada constitute a stratum ten miles thick; and everywhere the rocks at the base of our stratified system are of the most stupendous volume and thickness.
To this discovery I now proceed to lead up.
Modern astronomers have calculated back when it should have occurred, and the observed time agrees very closely with the actual, but not exactly.
Why not exactly?
It is of the nature of a perturbation, and is therefore a periodic not a progressive or continuous change, and in a sufficiently long time it will be reversed. Still, for the last few thousand years the moon's motion has been, on the whole, accelerated (though there seems to be a very slight retarding force in action too).
Laplace thought that this fact accounted for the whole of the discrepancy; but recently, in eighteen fifty three, Professor Adams re examined the matter, and made a correction in the details of the theory which diminishes its effect by about one half, leaving the other half to be accounted for in some other way.
This residual discrepancy, when every known cause has been allowed for, amounts to about one hour.
The eclipse occurred later than calculation warrants.
The loss per revolution is exceedingly small, but it accumulates, and at any era the total loss is the sum of all the losses preceding it.
It may be worth while just to explain this point further.
On the next day it would come up two instants late by reason of the previous loss; but it also loses another instant during the course of the second day, and so the total lateness by the end of that day amounts to three instants.
This minute quantity represents the retardation of the earth per day.
What can have caused the slowing down?
Contraction of the earth as it goes on cooling would act in the opposite direction, and probably more than counterbalance the dust effect.
These humps are pulled at by the moon, and the earth rotates on its axis against this pull.
The energy of the tides is, in fact, continually being dissipated by friction, and all the energy so dissipated is taken from the rotation of the earth.
The same cause must have been in operation, but with eighty fold greater intensity, on the moon.
It is believed to be almost certainly the cause.
The earth may have spun round then quite quickly.
But there is a limit.
If it spun too fast it would fly to pieces.
Attach shot by means of wax to the whirling earth model, Fig. one hundred ten, and at a certain speed the cohesion of the wax cannot hold them, so they fly off.
We find it about one revolution in three hours. This is a critical speed.
Remember this, as a natural result of a three hour day, which corresponds to an unstable state of things; remember also that in some past epoch a three hour day is a probability.
We have seen that the moon pulls the tidal hump nearest to it back; but action and reaction are always equal and opposite-it cannot do that without itself getting pulled forward.
And the way it increases will be for the radius vector to lengthen, so as to sweep out a bigger area.
This is because it obeys a different law from gravitation-the force is not inversely as the square, or any other single power, of the distance.
The time of revolution varies as the square of the cube root of the distance (Kepler's third law).
Hence, the tidal reaction on the moon, having as its primary effect, as we have seen, the pulling the moon a little forward, has also the secondary or indirect effect of making it move slower and go further off.
It may seem strange that an accelerating pull, directed in front of the centre, and therefore always pulling the moon the way it is going, should retard it; and that a retarding force like friction, if such a force acted, should hasten it, and make it complete its orbit sooner; but so it precisely is.
Gradually, but very slowly, the moon is receding from us, and the month is becoming longer.
The tides of the earth are pushing it away.
This is not a periodic disturbance, like the temporary acceleration of its motion discovered by Laplace, which in a few centuries, more or less, will be reversed; it is a disturbance which always acts one way, and which is therefore cumulative.
It is superposed upon all periodic changes, and, though it seems smaller than they, it is more inexorable. In a thousand years it makes scarcely an appreciable change, but in a million years its persistence tells very distinctly; and so, in the long run, the month is getting longer and the moon further off.
The pushing away action was then a good deal more violent, and so the process went on quicker.
Now just contemplate the effect of a six hundred-foot tide.
We are here only about one hundred fifty feet above the level of the sea; hence, the tide would sweep right over us and rush far away inland. At high tide we should have some two hundred feet of blue water over our heads. There would be nothing to stop such a tide as that in this neighbourhood till it reached the high lands of Derbyshire.
Manchester would be a seaport then with a vengeance!
Accordingly, in about five hours, all that mass of water would have swept back again, and great tracts of sand between here and Ireland would be left dry.
Another five hours, and the water would come tearing and driving over the country, applying its furious waves and currents to the work of denudation, which would proceed apace.
These high tides of enormously distant past ages constitute the denuding agent which the geologist required.
We found that it was just possible for the earth to rotate on its axis in three hours, and that when it did so, something was liable to separate from it.
Surely the two are connected.
Once, long ages back, at date unknown, but believed to be certainly as much as fifty million years ago, and quite possibly one hundred million, there was no moon, only the earth as a molten globe, rapidly spinning on its axis-spinning in about three hours.
Gradually, by reason of some disturbing causes, a protuberance, a sort of bud, forms at one side, and the great inchoate mass separates into two-one about eighty times as big as the other.
The bigger one we now call earth, the smaller we now call moon.
Round and round the two bodies went, pulling each other into tremendously elongated or prolate shapes, and so they might have gone on for a long time.
But they are unstable, and cannot go on thus: they must either separate or collapse.
Some disturbing cause acts again, and the smaller mass begins to revolve less rapidly.
Tides at once begin-gigantic tides of molten lava hundreds of miles high; tides not in free ocean, for there was none then, but in the pasty mass of the entire earth.
Immediately the series of changes I have described begins, the speed of rotation gets slackened, the moon's mass gets pushed further and further away, and its time of revolution grows rapidly longer.
The changes went on rapidly at first, because the tides were so gigantic; but gradually, and by slow degrees, the bodies get more distant, and the rate of change more moderate.
This is the era we call "to day."
It will take too long to go into full detail: but I will shortly summarize the results.
The date of this period is one hundred and fifty millions of years hence, but unless some unforeseen catastrophe intervenes, it must assuredly come.
Yet neither will even this be the final stage; for the system is disturbed by the tide generating force of the sun
It is a small effect, but it is cumulative; and gradually, by much slower degrees than anything we have yet contemplated, we are presented with a picture of the month getting gradually shorter than the day, the moon gradually approaching instead of receding, and so, incalculable myriads of ages hence, precipitating itself upon the surface of the earth whence it arose.
The planet rotates in twenty four hours as we do; but its tides are following its moon more quickly than it rotates after them; they are therefore tending to increase its rate of spin, and to retard the revolution of the moon.
Mars is therefore slowly but surely pulling its moon down on to itself, by a reverse action to that which separated our moon.
This moon of Mars is not a large body: it is only twenty or thirty miles in diameter, but it weighs some forty billion tons, and will ultimately crash along the surface with a velocity of eight thousand miles an hour.
Such a blow must produce the most astounding effects when it occurs, but I am unable to tell you its probable date.
So far we have dealt mainly with the earth and its moon; but is the existence of tides limited to these bodies?
The principal tide generating bodies will be Venus and Jupiter; the greater nearness of one rather more than compensating for the greater mass of the other.
They are as follows, calling that of the earth one thousand:--
Mercury one thousand one hundred twenty one Venus two thousand three hundred thirty nine Earth one thousand Mars three hundred four Jupiter two thousand one hundred thirty six Saturn one thousand thirty three Uranus twenty one Neptune nine
The solar tides are, however, much too small to appreciably push any planet away, hence we are not to suppose that the planets originated by budding from the sun, in contradiction of the nebular hypothesis.
Nor is it necessary to assume that the satellites, as a class, originated in the way ours did; though they may have done so.
They were more probably secondary rings.
Our moon differs from other satellites in being exceptionally large compared with the size of its primary; it is as big as some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
The earth is the only one of the small planets that has an appreciable moon, and hence there is nothing forced or unnatural in supposing that it may have had an exceptional history.
Evidently, however, tidal phenomena must be taken into consideration in any treatment of the solar system through enormous length of time, and it will probably play a large part in determining its future.
When Laplace and Lagrange investigated the question of the stability or instability of the solar system, they did so on the hypothesis that the bodies composing it were rigid.
They reached a grand conclusion-that all the mutual perturbations of the solar system were periodic-that whatever changes were going on would reach a maximum and then begin to diminish; then increase again, then diminish, and so on.
But this conclusion is not final.
The hypothesis that the bodies are rigid is not strictly true: and directly tidal deformation is taken into consideration it is perceived to be a potent factor, able in the long run to upset all their calculations.
Granted it is small, but it is terribly persistent; and it always acts in one direction.
Never does it cease: never does it begin to act oppositely and undo what it has done.
We have been speaking of millions of years somewhat familiarly; but what, after all, is a million years that we should not speak familiarly of it?
To the ephemeral insects whose lifetime is an hour, a year might seem an awful period, the mid day sun might seem an almost stationary body, the changes of the seasons would be unknown, everything but the most fleeting and rapid changes would appear permanent and at rest.
A continent would be sometimes dry, sometimes covered with ocean; the stars we now call fixed would be moving visibly before our eyes; the earth would be humming on its axis like a top, and the whole of human history might seem as fleeting as a cloud of breath on a mirror.
His escape from death had in it something of the marvellous.
He says:
It was a little before eight o'clock on the morning of may eighth that the end came.
A terror came upon me, but I could not explain my fear.
It was quite dark, the sun being obscured by ashes and fine volcanic dust.
The air was dead about me, so dead that the floating dust seemingly was not disturbed.
"It was like a terrible hurricane, and where a fraction of a second before there had been a perfect calm, I felt myself drawn into a vortex and I had to brace myself firmly.
The mysterious force levelled a row of strong trees, tearing them up by the roots and leaving bare a space of ground fifteen yards wide and more than one hundred yards long. Transfixed I stood, not knowing in what direction to flee.
It moved with a rapidity that made it impossible for anything to escape it.
It is impossible for me to tell how long I stood there inert.
Probably it was only a few seconds, but so vivid were my impressions that it now seems as though I stood as a spectator for many minutes.
When I recovered possession of my senses I ran to my house and collected the members of the family, all of whom were panic stricken.
I hurried them to the seashore, where we boarded a small steamship, in which we made the trip in safety to Fort de France.
WHAT HAPPENED ON THE "HORACE"
The British steamer Horace experienced the effect of the explosion when farther from land.
We quote engineer Anderson's story:
The air seemed heavy and oppressive.
The weather conditions were not at all unlike those which precede the great West Indian hurricanes, but, knowing it was not the season of the year for them, we all remarked in the engine room that there must be a heavy storm approaching.
GREAT FLASHES OF LIGHT
"There would suddenly come great flashes of light from the dark bank toward Martinique.
All night this continued, and it was not until day came that the flashes disappeared. The dark bank that covered the horizon toward Martinique, however, did not fade away with the breaking of day, and at eight in the morning of the ninth (Friday) the whole section of the sky in that direction seemed dark and troubled.
I noticed a sort of grit that got into my mouth from the end of the cigar I was smoking.
As we went forward we met one or two of the sailors from the forecastle, who wanted to know about the dust that was falling on the ship.
Then we found that the grayish looking ash was sifting all over the ship, both forward and aft.
A few moments later, the lookout called down that we were running into a fog bank dead ahead.
"Before we knew it, we went into the fog, which proved to be a big dense bank of this same sand, and it rained down on us from every side. Ventilators were quickly brought to their places, and later even the hatches were battened down.
What the stuff was we could not at first conjecture, or rather, we didn't have much time to speculate on it, for we had to get our ship in shape to withstand we hardly knew what.
THE ENGINE BECAME CHOKED
"Then there was another anxious moment shortly after nine o'clock.
We made some experiments, and found the stuff was superior to emery dust.
It cut deeper and quicker, and only about half as much was required to do the work.
MATE SCOTT'S GRAPHIC STORY
I wasn't looking at the mountain at all.
"Did you ever see the tide come into the Bay of Fundy.
He was facing the fire cloud with both hands gripped hard to the bridge rail, his legs apart and his knees braced back stiff.
"In another instant it was all over for him.
He reeled and fell on the bridge with his face toward me.
"That all happened a long way inside of half a minute; then something new happened.
When the wave of fire was going over us, a tidal wave of the sea came out from the shore and did the rest.
For an instant we could see nothing but the water and the flame.
"That tidal wave picked the ship up like a canoe and then smashed her. After one list to starboard the ship righted, but the masts, the bridge, the funnel and all the upper works had gone overboard.
Before I could get up three men tumbled in on top of me.
"Captain Muggah went overboard, still clinging to the fragments of his wrecked bridge.
Daniel Taylor, the ship's cooper, and a Kitts native jumped overboard to save him.
Taylor managed to push the captain on to a hatch that had floated off from us and then they swam back to the ship for more assistance, but nothing could be done for the captain.
Taylor wasn't sure he was alive.
The last we saw of him or his dead body it was drifting shoreward on that hatch.
There were just four of us left aboard who could do anything. The four were Thompson, Dan Taylor, Quashee, and myself.
It was still raining fire and hot rocks and you could hardly see a ship's length for dust and ashes, but we could stand that.
Not just burned, but burning, then, when we got to them.
More than half the ship's company had been killed in that first rush of flame.
The cook was burned to death in his galley.
The donkey engineman was killed on deck sitting in front of his boiler.
We found parts of some bodies-a hand, or an arm or a leg.
Below decks there were some twenty alive.
"The ship was on fire, of course, what was left of it.
The stumps of both masts were blazing.
Aft she was like a furnace, but forward the flames had not got below deck, so we four carried those who were still alive on deck into the fo'c's'l.
His hair and all his clothing had been burned off, but he was alive.
We rolled him in a blanket and put him in a sailor's bunk.
A few minutes later we looked at him and he was dead.
"My own son's gone, too.
But he wasn't.
Nobody could tell me where he was.
He was a likely boy.
Our boats had gone overboard with the masts and funnel.
PREPARED TO TRUST TO LUCK
"We made that raft for something over thirty that were alive.
We put provisions on for two days and rigged up a make shift mast and sail, for we intended to go to sea.
But we did not have to risk the raft, for about three o'clock in the afternoon, when we were almost ready to put the raft overboard, the Suchet came along and took us all off.
We thought for a minute just after we were wrecked that we were to get help from a ship that passed us.
We burned blue lights, but she kept on.
We learned afterward that she was the Roddam."
While deep crevices had been formed on the land, a still greater effect had seemingly been produced beneath the water.
The French Cable Company, which was at work trying to repair the cables broken by the eruption, found the bottom of the Caribbean Sea so changed as to render the old charts useless.
The changes in sea levels were not confined to the immediate centre of volcanic activity, but extended as far north as Porto Rico, and it was believed that the seismic wave would be found to have altered the ocean bed round Jamaica.
Soundings showed seven fathoms where before the eruption there were thirty six fathoms of water.
The following is the story told by Captain Eric Lillien skjold:
THE STRANGE EXPERIENCE OF THE "NORDBY"
Nothing worth while talking about occurred until two days afterward-wednesday may seventh.
About noon I took the bridge to make an observation.
I shed my coat and vest and got into what little shade there was.
As I worked it grew hotter and hotter.
I didn't know what to make of it.
Along about two o'clock in the afternoon it was so hot that all hands got to talking about it.
We reckoned that something queer was coming off, but none of us could explain what it was.
You could almost see the pitch softening in the seams.
"Then, as quick as you could toss a biscuit over its rail, the Nordby dropped-regularly dropped-three or four feet down into the sea.
We sort of ducked, expecting an awful crash of thunder, but it didn't come.
There wasn't a breath of wind.
"Something else we could see, too.
Sharks!
Some of them jumped clear out of it.
And sea birds!
A flock of them, squawking and crying, made for our rigging and perched there.
They seemed like they were scared to death.
Even the officers began to think that the world was coming to an end.
Mighty strange things happen on the sea, but this topped them all.
"I kept to the bridge all night.
We were all pretty much tired out by that time, but there was no such thing as trying to sleep.
At two o'clock in the morning all the queer goings on stopped just the way they began-all of a sudden.
We lay to until daylight; then we took our reckonings and started off again.
We were about seven hundred miles off Cape Henlopen.
FIERY STREAM CONTAINED POISONOUS GASES
It is believed that Mont Pelee threw off a great gasp of some exceedingly heavy and noxious gas, something akin to firedamp, which settled upon the city and rendered the inhabitants insensible.
Cattle lowed in the night.
Dogs howled and sought the company of their masters, and when driven forth they gave every evidence of fear.
Even the snakes, which at ordinary times are found in great numbers near the volcano, crawled away.
Morne Rouge, a beautiful summer resort, frequented by the people of the island during the hot season as a place of recreation, also escaped.
CHAPTER five
THE PERUVIAN COLONY.
Was not the Nubian "Island of Merou," with its pyramids built by "red men," a similar transplantation?
Their descendants are to this day an olive skinned people, much lighter in color than the Indian tribes subjugated by them.
They were a great race.
The Incas were simply an offshoot, who, descending from the mountains, subdued the rude races of the sea coast, and imposed their ancient civilization upon them.
"In this place, also," says De Leon, "there are stones so large and so overgrown that our wonder is excited, it being incomprehensible how the power of man could have placed them where we see them.
They are variously wrought, and some of them, having the form of men, must have been idols. Near the walls are many caves and excavations under the earth; but in another place, farther west, are other and greater monuments, such as large gate ways with hinges, platforms, and porches, each made of a single stone.
It surprised me to see these enormous gate ways, made of great masses of stone, some of which were thirty feet long, fifteen high, and six thick."
But its remains exist to day, the marvel of the Southern Continent, covering not less than twenty square miles.
Tombs, temples, and palaces arise on every hand, ruined but still traceable.
These vast structures have been ruined for centuries, but still the work of excavation is going on.
One of the centres of the ancient Quichua civilization was around Lake Titicaca.
The buildings here, as throughout Peru, were all constructed of hewn stone, and had doors and windows with posts, sills, and thresholds of stone.
At Cuelap, in Northern Peru, remarkable ruins were found.
In it were rooms and cells which were used as tombs.
Think of a stone aqueduct reaching from the city of New York to the State of North Carolina!
The public roads of the Peruvians were most remarkable; they were built on masonry.
These roads were from twenty to twenty five feet wide, were macadamized with pulverized stone mixed with lime and bituminous cement, and were walled in by strong walls "more than a fathom in thickness." In many places these roads were cut for leagues through the rock; great ravines were filled up with solid masonry; rivers were crossed by suspension bridges, used here ages before their introduction into Europe.
They were the work of the white, auburn haired, bearded men from Atlantis, thousands of years before the time of the Incas.
Their works in cotton and wool exceeded in fineness anything known in Europe at that time.
They had carried irrigation, agriculture, and the cutting of gems to a point equal to that of the Old World.
Their accumulations of the precious metals exceeded anything previously known in the history of the world.
Can any one read these details and declare Plato's description of Atlantis to be fabulous, simply because he tells us of the enormous quantities of gold and silver possessed by the people?
Atlantis was the older country, the parent country, the more civilized country; and, doubtless, like the Peruvians, its people regarded the precious metals as sacred to their gods; and they had been accumulating them from all parts of the world for countless ages.
I have already shown, in the chapter upon the similarities between the civilizations of the Old and New Worlds, some of the remarkable coincidences which existed between the Peruvians and the ancient European races; I will again briefly, refer to a few of them:
one.
They worshipped the sun, moon, and planets.
They believed in the resurrection of the body, and accordingly embalmed their dead.
The priest examined the entrails of the animals offered in sacrifice, and, like the Roman augurs, divined the future from their appearance.
five.
six.
They divided the year into twelve months.
seven.
eight.
They possessed castes; and the trade of the father descended to the son, as in India.
nine.
They had bards and minstrels, who sung at the great festivals.
ten.
Their weapons were the same as those of the Old World, and made after the same pattern.
eleven.
They drank toasts and invoked blessings.
twelve.
They built triumphal arches for their returning heroes, and strewed the road before them with leaves and flowers.
thirteen.
fourteen.
They regarded agriculture as the principal interest of the nation, and held great agricultural fairs and festivals for the interchange of the productions of the farmers.
fifteen.
The king opened the agricultural season by a great celebration, and, like the kings of Egypt, he put his hand to the plough, and ploughed the first furrow.
sixteen.
seventeen.
There was a striking resemblance between the architecture of the Peruvians and that of some of the nations of the Old World.
It is enough for me to quote mr Ferguson's words, that the coincidence between the buildings of the Incas and the Cyclopean remains attributed to the Pelasgians in Italy and Greece "is the most remarkable in the history of architecture."
Even the mode of decorating their palaces and temples finds a parallel in the Old World.
A recent writer says:
"that a study of ancient Peruvian pottery has constantly reminded me of forms with which we are familiar in Egyptian archaeology."
In Peru we find vases with very much the same style of face.
I might pursue those parallels much farther; but it seems to me that these extraordinary coincidences must have arisen either from identity of origin or long continued ancient intercourse.
"Senor Lopez's view, that the Peruvians were Aryans who left the parent stock long before the Teutonic or Hellenic races entered Europe, is supported by arguments drawn from language, from the traces of institutions, from religious beliefs, from legendary records, and artistic remains.
The evidence from language is treated scientifically, and not as a kind of ingenious guessing.
Senor Lopez first combats the idea that the living dialect of Peru is barbarous and fluctuating.
It is not one of the casual and shifting forms of speech produced by nomad races.
To which of the stages of language does this belong-the agglutinative, in which one root is fastened on to another, and a word is formed in which the constitutive elements are obviously distinct, or the inflexional, where the auxiliary roots get worn down and are only distinguishable by the philologist?
But many of these forms are due to a scanty alphabet, and really express familiar sounds; and many, again, result from the casual spelling of the Spaniards.
It is impossible to do more than refer to the supposed Aryan roots contained in the glossary, but it may be noticed that the future of the Quichuan verb is formed in s-I love, Munani; I shall love, Munasa-and that the affixes denoting cases in the noun are curiously like the Greek prepositions."
[Since the above was written I have received a letter from dr Falb, dated Leipsic, april fifth eighteen eighty one.
A work from such a source, upon so curious and important a subject, will be looked for with great interest.]
But it is impossible that the Quichuas and Aimaras could have passed across the wide Atlantic to Europe if there had been no stepping stone in the shape of Atlantis with its bridge like ridges connecting the two continents.
THE DEPUTATION
It was a beautiful church, ancient and spacious; moreover, it had recently been restored at great cost.
The Rev.
Hence his disappointment.
He preached extemporarily, with the aid of notes; and it cannot be said that his discourse was remarkable for interest, at any rate in its beginning.
"What is the matter?" asked Owen.
"Yes, viewed from a distance.
"Who can say?" he answered.
He was named Hokosa, a tall, thin man, with a spiritual face and terrible calm eyes.
Therefore we will put you to the proof.
Ho! there, lead forth that evil one.'
"'Kill him!' said Hokosa.
"'Now, followers of the new God,' said Hokosa, 'raise him from the dead as your Master did!'
Choose which horn of the bull you will, you hang to one of them, and it shall pierce you.
This is the sentence of the king, I speak it who am the king's mouth: That you, White Man, who have spoken to us and cheated us these two weary days, be put to death, and that you, his companion who have been silent, be driven from the land.'
"'Go back, White Man, to those who sent you, and tell them the words of the Sons of Fire: That they have listened to the message of peace, and though they are a people of warriors, yet they thank them for that message, for in itself it sounds good and beautiful in their ears, if it be true.
Tell them that they desire to hear more of this matter, and if one can be sent to them who has no false tongue; who in all things fulfills the promises of his lips, that they will hearken to him and treat him well, but that for such as you they keep a spear.'"
"And who went after you got back?" asked Owen, who was listening with the deepest interest.
"Then perhaps you would like to undertake the mission, mr Owen," said the Deputation briskly; for the reflection stung him, unintentional as it was.
Owen started.
A herald stood forward and cried:--
"Hearken, you Sons of Fire!
Hearken, you Children of Umsuka, Shaker of the Earth!
When all had done, the Prince Hafela came forward, lifted his spear, and cried:--
"A boon, King!"
"A while ago I named a certain woman, Noma, the ward of Hokosa the wizard, and she was sealed to me to fill the place of my first wife, the queen that is to be.
She passed into the House of the Royal Women, and, by your command, King, it was fixed that I should marry her according to our customs to morrow, after the feast of the first fruits is ended.
King, my heart is changed towards that woman; I no longer desire to take her to wife, and I pray that you will order that she shall now be handed back to Hokosa her guardian."
What have you to say to this demand, Hokosa?"
His dress, like that of his companions, was simple, but in its way striking.
"You do well, Hokosa," answered Umsuka, "to leave this to me.
Let the Lady Noma be summoned."
And yet the face was haughty, a face that upon occasion might even become cruel.
"What of it, O King?"
"This, girl: the prince who was pleased to honour you is now pleased to dishonour you.
Noma started, and her face grew hard.
"Is it so?" she said.
"Then it would seem that I have lost favour in the eyes of my lord the prince, or that some fairer woman has found it."
Her breast heaved and her white teeth bit upon her lip.
Hokosa fixed his calm eyes upon her with a strange intensity of gaze, and while he gazed his form quivered with a suppressed excitement, much as a snake quivers that is about to strike its prey. To the careless eye there was nothing remarkable about his look and attitude; to the observer it was evident that both were full of extraordinary purpose.
Here, at some whispered word or sign, she seemed to recover herself, and again resuming the character of a proud offended beauty, she curtseyed to Umsuka, and spoke:--
Although he had been unable to see him drop the poison into the cup, a glance at Hafela told Owen that it was there; for though he kept his face under control, he could not prevent his hands from twitching or the sweat from starting upon his brow and breast.
"In this cup, which I drink on behalf of the nation, I pledge you, my people."
When the last of them had died away, the king brought the cup to the level of his lips.
To act now would be madness, his time had not yet come.
Then pouring the rest of the liquor on the ground, Umsuka set aside the cup, and in the midst of a silence that seemed deep after the crash of the great salute, he began to address the multitude:--
"Hearken, Councillors and Captains, and you, my people, hearken.
At this point the king began to grow confused.
PEGGY PRESENTS HIS BILL.
Millville waited in agonized suspense for three days for tangible evidence that "the nabob was in their midst," as Nib Corkins poetically expressed it; but the city folks seemed glued to the farm and no one of them had yet appeared in the village.
As a matter of fact, Patsy and Uncle john were enthusiastically fishing in the Little Bill, far up in the pine woods, and having "the time of their lives" in spite of their scant success in capturing trout.
Old Hucks could go out before breakfast and bring in an ample supply of speckled beauties for Mary to fry; but Uncle John's splendid outfit seemed scorned by the finny folk, and after getting her dress torn in sundry places and a hook in the fleshy part of her arm Patsy learned to seek shelter behind a tree whenever her uncle cast his fly.
Here she practiced persistently, shooting at sixty yards with much skill.
But occasionally, when Louise tired of her novel and her cushions in the hammock, the two girls would play tennis or croquet together-Beth invariably winning.
Such delightful laziness could brook no interference for the first days of their arrival, and it was not until Peggy McNutt ventured over on Monday morning for a settlement with mr Merrick that any from the little world around them dared intrude upon the dwellers at the Wegg farm.
Although the agent had been late in starting from Millville and Nick Thorne's sorrel mare had walked every step of the way, Peggy was obliged to wait in the yard a good half hour for the "nabob" to finish his breakfast.
During that time he tried to decide which of the two statements of accounts that he had prepared he was most justified in presenting.
He had learned from the liveryman at the Junction that mr Merrick had paid five dollars for a trip that was usually made for two, and also that the extravagant man had paid seventy five cents more to Lucky Todd, the hotel keeper, than his bill came to.
Also he charged a round commission on the wages of Lon Taft and Ned Long, and doubled the liveryman's bill for hauling the goods over from the Junction.
When the bill was made out and figured up it left him a magnificent surplus for his private account; but at the last his heart failed him, and he made out another bill more modest in its extortions. He had brought them both along, though, one in each pocket, vacillating between them as he thought first of the Merrick millions and then of the righteous anger he might incur.
By the time Uncle john came out to him, smiling and cordial, he had not thoroughly made up his mind which account to present.
McNutt was reassured.
"I tried fer to do my best, sir," he said.
"I hope you kept your expenditures well within bounds?"
Even millionaires do not allow themselves to be swindled, if they can help it.
"Most things is high in Millville," he faltered, "an' wages has gone up jest terr'ble.
The boys don't seem to wanter do nuthin' without big pay."
"That is the case everywhere," responded mr Merrick, thoughtfully; "and between us, McNutt, I'm glad wages are better in these prosperous times. The man who works by the day should be well paid, for he has to pay well for his living.
Adequately paid labor is the foundation of all prosperity."
Peggy smiled cheerfully.
"I suppose they overcharged you because a city man wanted the animals. But of course you would not allow me to be robbed."
As it was now too late to add it to the bill he replied, grudgingly:
She carried a book, but did not open it.
"Ain't much to tell, sir, 'bout them folks," replied the agent.
"Nice boy?" asked Uncle john.
Uncle john seemed thoughtful, but asked no more questions, and McNutt appeared to be relieved that he refrained.
This was said so sternly that it sent McNutt into an ague of terror.
"It's-it's-a-'count of what I spent out," he stammered.
"What are Plymouth Rocks?" he demanded.
"Hens at a dollar apiece?"
"Thoroughbreds, sir.
Extry fine stock.
I raised 'em myself."
You've charged them twice."
"Here's an item: 'Twelve Plymouth Rocks, twelve dollars;' and farther down: 'Twelve Plymouth Rocks, eighteen dollars.'"
"Are they here?"
"Very good.
I'm glad to have them.
The cow seems reasonably priced, for a Jersey."
"It is.
I am very much pleased.
There seems to be a hundred and forty dollars my due, remaining from the five hundred I sent you."
"Here it is, sir," responded McNutt, taking the money from his pocket book.
Uncle john took the money.
"You are an honest fellow, McNutt," said he.
"I hadn't expected a dollar back, for folks usually take advantage of a stranger if he gives them half a chance.
So I thank you for your honesty as well as for your services.
The agent was thoroughly ashamed of himself.
A hundred and forty dollars; When would he have a chance to get such a windfall again?
"Didn't the man rob you, Uncle?" asked Louise, when the agent had disappeared.
"Yes, dear; but I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing I realized it."
"That was what I thought.
"Mystery!" cried Uncle john.
You've been readin' too many novels.
Romances don't grow in parts like these."
"But I think this is where they are most likely to grow, Uncle," persisted the girl, "just consider.
A retired sea captain hides inland, with no companions but a grinning sailor and his blind housekeeper --except his pale wife, of course; and she is described as sad and unhappy.
"I don't think," said Uncle john, smiling and patting the fair check of his niece.
"I'm sure it does.
It is the key to the whole mystery.
Even the fine house the Captain built failed to interest her.
"And that finished the romance, Louise."
The boy grew up in this dismal place and brooded on his mother's wrongs.
His stern, sulky old father died suddenly.
"Figglepiff, Louise!
You're getting theatric-and so early in the morning, too!
Want to saddle my new farm with a murder, do you?
Joe Wegg ran away from here to get busy in the world. Major Doyle helped him with my money, in exchange for this farm, which the boy was sensible to get rid of-although I'm glad it's now mine.
The Major liked Joe Wegg, and says he's a clean cut, fine young feller.
He's an inventor, too, even if an unlucky one, and I've no doubt he'll make his way in the world and become a good citizen."
With these words Uncle john arose and sauntered around to the barn, to look at the litter of new pigs that just then served to interest and amuse him.
How melts my beating heart as I behold Each lovely nymph, our island's boast and pride, Push on the generous steed, that sweeps along O'er rough, o'er smooth, nor heeds the steepy hill, Nor falters in the extended vale below! The Chase.
I approached my native north, for such I esteemed it, with that enthusiasm which romantic and wild scenery inspires in the lovers of nature.
No longer interrupted by the babble of my companion, I could now remark the difference which the country exhibited from that through which I had hitherto travelled.
The abode of my fathers, which I was now approaching, was situated in a glen, or narrow valley, which ran up among those hills.
This he employed (as I was given to understand by some inquiries which I made on the road) in maintaining the prodigal hospitality of a northern squire of the period, which he deemed essential to his family dignity.
I paused, therefore, on a rising ground, and, not unmoved by the sense of interest which that species of silvan sport is so much calculated to inspire (although my mind was not at the moment very accessible to impressions of this nature), I expected with some eagerness the appearance of the huntsmen.
The fox, hard run, and nearly spent, first made his appearance from the copse which clothed the right-hand side of the valley.
His drooping brush, his soiled appearance, and jaded trot, proclaimed his fate impending; and the carrion crow, which hovered over him, already considered poor Reynard as soon to be his prey.
The dogs pursued the trace of Reynard with unerring instinct; and the hunters followed with reckless haste, regardless of the broken and difficult nature of the ground.
A vision that passed me interrupted these reflections.
It was a young lady, the loveliness of whose very striking features was enhanced by the animation of the chase and the glow of the exercise, mounted on a beautiful horse, jet black, unless where he was flecked by spots of the snow white foam which embossed his bridle.
She wore, what was then somewhat unusual, a coat, vest, and hat, resembling those of a man, which fashion has since called a riding habit.
The mode had been introduced while I was in France, and was perfectly new to me.
Her long black hair streamed on the breeze, having in the hurry of the chase escaped from the ribbon which bound it.
Some very broken ground, through which she guided her horse with the most admirable address and presence of mind, retarded her course, and brought her closer to me than any of the other riders had passed.
I had, therefore, a full view of her uncommonly fine face and person, to which an inexpressible charm was added by the wild gaiety of the scene, and the romance of her singular dress and unexpected appearance.
As she passed me, her horse made, in his impetuosity, an irregular movement, just while, coming once more upon open ground, she was again putting him to his speed.
It served as an apology for me to ride close up to her, as if to her assistance.
There was, however, no cause for alarm; it was not a stumble, nor a false step; and, if it had, the fair Amazon had too much self possession to have been deranged by it.
She thanked my good intentions, however, by a smile, and I felt encouraged to put my horse to the same pace, and to keep in her immediate neighbourhood.
The clamour of "Whoop!
dead!
dead!"--and the corresponding flourish of the French horn, soon announced to us that there was no more occasion for haste, since the chase was at a close.
"I see," she replied,--"I see; but make no noise about it: if Phoebe," she said, patting the neck of the beautiful animal on which she rode, "had not got among the cliffs, you would have had little cause for boasting."
They met as she spoke, and I observed them both look at me, and converse a moment in an under tone, the young lady apparently pressing the sportsman to do something which he declined shyly, and with a sort of sheepish sullenness.
I was too happy to acknowledge myself to be the party inquired after, and to express my thanks for the obliging inquiries of the young lady.
There was a mixture of boldness, satire, and simplicity in the manner in which Miss Vernon pronounced these words.
My knowledge of life was sufficient to enable me to take up a corresponding tone as I expressed my gratitude to her for her condescension, and my extreme pleasure at having met with them.
To say the truth, the compliment was so expressed, that the lady might easily appropriate the greater share of it, for Thorncliff seemed an arrant country bumpkin, awkward, shy, and somewhat sulky withal.
He shook hands with me, however, and then intimated his intention of leaving me that he might help the huntsman and his brothers to couple up the hounds,--a purpose which he rather communicated by way of information to Miss Vernon than as apology to me.
"There he goes," said the young lady, following him with eyes in which disdain was admirably painted-"the prince of grooms and cock fighters, and blackguard horse coursers.
But there is not one of them to mend another.--Have you read Markham?" said Miss Vernon.
"Read whom, ma'am?--I do not even remember the author's name."
"I am, indeed, Miss Vernon."
"And do you not blush to own it?" said Miss Vernon.
"Why, we must forswear your alliance.
"I confess I trust all these matters to an ostler, or to my groom."
"Incredible carelessness!--And you cannot shoe a horse, or cut his mane and tail; or worm a dog, or crop his ears, or cut his dew claws; or reclaim a hawk, or give him his casting stones, or direct his diet when he is sealed; or"--
"Very little to the purpose, Miss Vernon; something, however, I can pretend to-When my groom has dressed my horse I can ride him, and when my hawk is in the field, I can fly him."
"Can you do this?" said the young lady, putting her horse to a canter.
I was bound in point of honour to follow, and was in a moment again at her side.
"There are hopes of you yet," she said.
"I was afraid you had been a very degenerate Osbaldistone.
But what on earth brings you to Cub Castle?--for so the neighbours have christened this hunting hall of ours.
You might have stayed away, I suppose, if you would?"
I felt I was by this time on a very intimate footing with my beautiful apparition, and therefore replied, in a confidential under tone-"Indeed, my dear Miss Vernon, I might have considered it as a sacrifice to be a temporary resident in Osbaldistone Hall, the inmates being such as you describe them; but I am convinced there is one exception that will make amends for all deficiencies."
"Indeed I do not; I was thinking-forgive me-of some person much nearer me."
"I suppose it would be proper not to understand your civility?--But that is not my way-I don't make a courtesy for it because I am sitting on horseback.
But, seriously, I deserve your exception, for I am the only conversable being about the Hall, except the old priest and Rashleigh."
"Rashleigh is one who would fain have every one like him for his own sake.
But nature has given him a mouthful of common sense, and the priest has added a bushelful of learning; he is what we call a very clever man in this country, where clever men are scarce.
Bred to the church, but in no hurry to take orders."
"The Catholic Church? what Church else?" said the young lady.
"But I forgot-they told me you are a heretic.
Is that true, mr Osbaldistone?"
"I must not deny the charge."
"And yet you have been abroad, and in Catholic countries?"
"For nearly four years."
"You have seen convents?"
"Often; but I have not seen much in them which recommended the Catholic religion."
Those who have adopted a life of seclusion from sudden and overstrained enthusiasm, or in hasty resentment of some disappointment or mortification, are very miserable. The quickness of sensation soon returns, and like the wilder animals in a menagerie, they are restless under confinement, while others muse or fatten in cells of no larger dimensions than theirs."
"And what," continued Miss Vernon, "becomes of those victims who are condemned to a convent by the will of others?
what do they resemble? especially, what do they resemble, if they are born to enjoy life, and feel its blessings?"
"They are like imprisoned singing birds," replied I, "condemned to wear out their lives in confinement, which they try to beguile by the exercise of accomplishments which would have adorned society had they been left at large."
But to return to Rashleigh," said she, in a more lively tone, "you will think him the pleasantest man you ever saw in your life, mr Osbaldistone,--that is, for a week at least.
If he could find out a blind mistress, never man would be so secure of conquest; but the eye breaks the spell that enchants the ear.--But here we are in the court of the old hall, which looks as wild and old-fashioned as any of its inmates.
If there was any coquetry in the action, it was well disguised by the careless indifference of her manner.
I could not help saying, "that, judging of the family from what I saw, I should suppose the toilette a very unnecessary care."
"That's very politely said-though, perhaps, I ought not to understand in what sense it was meant," replied Miss Vernon; "but you will see a better apology for a little negligence when you meet the Orsons you are to live amongst, whose forms no toilette could improve.
So do you hold my palfrey, like a duteous knight, until I send some more humble squire to relieve you of the charge."
I was left awkwardly enough stationed in the centre of the court of the old hall, mounted on one horse, and holding another in my hand.
The building afforded little to interest a stranger, had I been disposed to consider it attentively; the sides of the quadrangle were of various architecture, and with their stone shafted latticed windows, projecting turrets, and massive architraves, resembled the inside of a convent, or of one of the older and less splendid colleges of Oxford.
This service he performed with much such grace and good will, as a peasant who is compelled to act as guide to a hostile patrol; and in the same manner I was obliged to guard against his deserting me in the labyrinth of low vaulted passages which conducted to "Stun Hall," as he called it, where I was to be introduced to the gracious presence of my uncle.
We did, however, at length reach a long vaulted room, floored with stone, where a range of oaken tables, of a weight and size too massive ever to be moved aside, were already covered for dinner.
This venerable apartment, which had witnessed the feasts of several generations of the Osbaldistone family, bore also evidence of their success in field sports. Huge antlers of deer, which might have been trophies of the hunting of Chevy Chace, were ranged around the walls, interspersed with the stuffed skins of badgers, otters, martins, and other animals of the chase.
Amidst some remnants of old armour, which had, perhaps, served against the Scotch, hung the more valued weapons of silvan war, cross bows, guns of various device and construction, nets, fishing rods, otter spears, hunting poles, with many other singular devices, and engines for taking or killing game.
A few old pictures, dimmed with smoke, and stained with March beer, hung on the walls, representing knights and ladies, honoured, doubtless, and renowned in their day; those frowning fearfully from huge bushes of wig and of beard; and these looking delightfully with all their might at the roses which they brandished in their hands.
I had just time to give a glance at these matters, when about twelve blue coated servants burst into the hall with much tumult and talk, each rather employed in directing his comrades than in discharging his own duty.
All tramped, kicked, plunged, shouldered, and jostled, doing as little service with as much tumult as could well be imagined.
The hubbub among the servants rather increased than diminished as this crisis approached.
NOTES TO LECTURE thirteen
numbers which very fairly represent the distances of the then known planets from the sun in the order specified.
Ceres was discovered on the first of January, eighteen o one, by Piazzi; Pallas in March, eighteen o two, by Olbers; Juno in eighteen o four, by Harding; and Vesta in eighteen o seven, by Olbers.
No more asteroids were discovered till eighteen forty five, but there are now several hundreds known.
Their diameters range from five hundred to twenty miles.
It was first knowingly seen by Galle, of Berlin, on the twenty third of September, eighteen forty six.
LECTURE thirteen
THE DISCOVERY OF THE ASTEROIDS
Up to the time of Herschel, astronomical interest centred on the solar system.
Since that time it has been divided, and a great part of our attention has been given to the more distant celestial bodies.
Those who have read the third lecture in Part one will remember the speculation in which Kepler indulged respecting the arrangements of the planets, the order in which they succeeded one another in space, and the law of their respective distances from the sun; and his fanciful guess about the five regular solids inscribed and circumscribed about their orbits.
The rude coincidences were, however, accidental, and he failed to discover any true law.
No thoroughly satisfactory law is known at the present day.
And yet, if the nebular hypothesis or anything like it be true, there must be some law to be discovered hereafter, though it may be a very complicated one.
An empirical relation is, however, known: it was suggested by Tatius, and published by Bode, of Berlin, in seventeen seventy two.
Neptune's distance, however, turns out to be more nearly thirty times the earth's distance than thirty eight point eight.
The gap between Mars and Jupiter, which had often been noticed, and which Kepler filled with a hypothetical planet too small to see, comes into great prominence by this law of Bode.
So much so, that towards the end of last century an enthusiastic German, von Zach, after some search himself for the expected planet, arranged a committee of observing astronomers, or, as he termed it, a body of astronomical detective police, to begin a systematic search for this missing subject of the sun
In eighteen hundred the preliminaries were settled: the heavens near the zodiac were divided into twenty four regions, each of which was intrusted to one observer to be swept.
Meanwhile, however, quite independently of these arrangements in Germany, and entirely unknown to this committee, a quiet astronomer in Sicily, Piazzi, was engaged in making a catalogue of the stars.
His attention was directed to a certain region in Taurus by an error in a previous catalogue, which contained a star really non-existent.
In the course of his scrutiny, on the first of January, eighteen o one, he noticed a small star which next evening appeared to have shifted.
He watched it anxiously for successive evenings, and by the twenty fourth of January he was quite sure he had got hold of some moving body, not a star: probably, he thought, a comet.
It was very small, only of the eighth magnitude; and he wrote to two astronomers (one of them Bode himself) saying what he had observed.
He continued to observe till the eleventh of February, when he was attacked by illness and compelled to cease.
His letters did not reach their destination till the end of March. Directly Bode opened his letter he jumped to the conclusion that this must be the missing planet.
But unfortunately he was unable to verify the guess, for the object, whatever it was, had now got too near the sun to be seen.
It would not be likely to be out again before September, and by that time it would be hopelessly lost again, and have just as much to be rediscovered as if it had never been seen.
Mathematical astronomers tried to calculate a possible orbit for the body from the observations of Piazzi, but the observed places were so desperately few and close together.
It was like having to determine a curve from three points close together.
All the calculations gave different results, and none were of the slightest use.
The difficulty as it turned out was most fortunate.
It resulted in the discovery of one of the greatest mathematicians, perhaps the greatest, that Germany has ever produced-Gauss.
He was then a young man of twenty five, eking out a living by tuition.
He had invented but not published several powerful mathematical methods (one of them now known as "the method of least squares"), and he applied them to Piazzi's observations.
He was thus able to calculate an orbit, and to predict a place where, by the end of the year, the planet should be visible.
Piazzi called it Ceres, after the tutelary goddess of Sicily.
Its distance from the sun as determined by Gauss was two point seven six seven times the earth's distance.
It was undoubtedly the missing planet.
Very soon, a more surprising discovery followed.
Olbers, while searching for Ceres, had carefully mapped the part of the heavens where it was expected; and in March, eighteen o two, he saw in this place a star he had not previously noticed.
In two hours he detected its motion, and in a month he sent his observations to Gauss, who returned as answer the calculated orbit.
This was called Pallas.
Olbers at once surmised that these two planets were fragments of a larger one, and kept an eager look out for other fragments.
In two years another was seen, in the course of charting the region of the heavens traversed by Ceres and Pallas.
It was smaller than either, and was called Juno.
In eighteen o seven the persevering search of Olbers resulted in the discovery of another, with a very oblique orbit, which Gauss named Vesta.
Vesta is bigger than any of the others, being five hundred miles in diameter, and shines like a star of the sixth magnitude.
Gauss by this time had become so practised in the difficult computations that he worked out the complete orbit of Vesta within ten hours of receiving the observational data from Olbers.
For many weary years Olbers kept up a patient and unremitting search for more of these small bodies, or fragments of the large planet as he thought them; but his patience went unrewarded, and he died in eighteen forty without seeing or knowing of any more.
In eighteen forty five another was found, however, in Germany, and a few weeks later two others by mr Hind in England.
Since then there seems no end to them; numbers have been discovered in America, where Professors Peters and Watson have made a specialty of them, and have themselves found something like a hundred.
Vesta is the largest-its area being about the same as that of Central Europe, without Russia or Spain-and the smallest known is about twenty miles in diameter, or with a surface about the size of Kent.
The whole of them together do not nearly equal the earth in bulk.
The main interest of these bodies to us lies in the question, What is their history?
Can they have been once a single planet broken up? or are they rather an abortive attempt at a planet never yet formed into one?
Imagine a shell travelling in an elliptic orbit round the earth to suddenly explode: the centre of gravity of all its fragments would continue moving along precisely the same path as had been traversed by the centre of the shell before explosion, and would complete its orbit quite undisturbed.
If the zone of asteroids had a common point through which they all successively passed, they could be unhesitatingly asserted to be the remains of an exploded planet.
But they have nothing of the kind; their orbits are scattered within a certain broad zone-a zone everywhere as broad as the earth's distance from the sun, ninety two million miles--with no sort of law indicating an origin of this kind.
It must be admitted, however, that the fragments of our supposed shell might in the course of ages, if left to themselves, mutually perturb each other into a different arrangement of orbits from that with which they began.
It is probable that the asteroids were at one time not rigid, and hence it is difficult to say what may have happened to them; but there is not the least reason to believe that their present arrangement is derivable in any way from an explosion, and it is certain that an enormous time must have elapsed since such an event if it ever occurred.
It is far more probable that they never constituted one body at all, but are the remains of a cloudy ring thrown off by the solar system in shrinking past that point: a small ring after the immense effort which produced Jupiter and his satellites: a ring which has aggregated into a multitude of little lumps instead of a few big ones.
But it is easy to show from the theory of gravitation, that a solid ring could not possibly be stable, but would before long get precipitated excentrically upon the body of the planet.
Devices have been invented, such as artfully distributed irregularities calculated to act as satellites and maintain stability; but none of these things really work. Nor will it do to imagine the rings fluid; they too would destroy each other.
The mechanical behaviour of a system of rings, on different hypotheses as to their constitution, has been worked out with consummate skill by Clerk Maxwell; who finds that the only possible constitution for Saturn's assemblage of rings is a multitude of discrete particles each pursuing its independent orbit.
Saturn's ring is, in fact, a very concentrated zone of minor asteroids, and there is every reason to conclude that the origin of the solar asteroids cannot be very unlike the origin of the Saturnian ones.
The nebular hypothesis lends itself readily to both.
His paper constituted what is called "The Adams Prize Essay" for eighteen fifty six.
Sir George Airy, one of the adjudicators (recently Astronomer Royal), characterized it as "one of the most remarkable applications of mathematics to physics that I have ever seen."
There are several distinct constituent rings in the entire Saturnian zone, and each perturbs the other, with the result that they ripple and pulse in concord.
The waves thus formed absorb the effect of the mutual perturbations, and prevent an accumulation which would be dangerous to the persistence of the whole.
The only effect of gravitational perturbation and of collisions is gradually to broaden out the whole ring, enlarging its outer and diminishing its inner diameter.
LECTURE fifteen
THE DISCOVERY OF NEPTUNE
We approach to night perhaps the greatest, certainly the most conspicuous, triumphs of the theory of gravitation.
Prediction is no novelty in science; and in astronomy least of all is it a novelty.
Thousands of years ago, Thales, and others whose very names we have forgotten, could predict eclipses with some certainty, though with only rough accuracy.
And many other phenomena were capable of prediction by accumulated experience.
We have seen, for instance (coming to later times), how a gap between Mars and Jupiter caused a missing planet to be suspected and looked for, and to be found in a hundred pieces.
We have seen, also, how the abnormal proper motion of Sirius suggested to Bessel the existence of an unseen companion.
Mainly, the difference lies, first, in the grounds on which the prediction is based; second, on the difficulty of the investigation whereby it is accomplished; third, in the completeness and the accuracy with which it can be verified.
In seventeen eighty one, Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus.
If a wrong entry were discovered, it might of course have been due to some clerical error, though that is hardly probable considering the care taken over these things, or it might have been some tailless comet or other, or it might have been the newly found planet.
If only he had reduced and compared his observations, he would have anticipated Herschel by twelve years.
As it was, he missed it altogether.
It was seen once by Bradley also.
Altogether it had been seen twenty times.
These old observations of Flamsteed and those of Le Monnier, combined with those made after Herschel's discovery, were very useful in determining an exact orbit for the new planet, and its motion was considered thoroughly known.
For a time Uranus seemed to travel regularly and as expected, in the orbit which had been calculated for it; but early in the present century it began to be slightly refractory, and by eighteen twenty its actual place showed quite a distinct discrepancy from its position as calculated with the aid of the old observations.
It was at first thought that this discrepancy must be due to inaccuracies in the older observations, and they were accordingly rejected, and tables prepared for the planet based on the newer and more accurate observations only.
But by eighteen thirty it became apparent that it would not accurately obey even these.
This discrepancy is quite distinct, but still it is very small, and had two objects been in the heavens at once, the actual Uranus and the theoretical Uranus, no unaided eye could possibly have distinguished them or detected that they were other than a single star.
Some cause was evidently at work on this distant planet, causing it to disagree with its motion as calculated according to the law of gravitation.
Some thought that the exact law of gravitation did not apply to so distant a body.
Others surmised the presence of some foreign and unknown body, some comet, or some still more distant planet perhaps, whose gravitative attraction for Uranus was the cause of the whole difficulty-some perturbations, in fact, which had not been taken into account because of our ignorance of the existence of the body which caused them.
But though such an idea was mentioned among astronomers, it was not regarded with any special favour, and was considered merely as one among a number of hypotheses which could be suggested as fairly probable.
It is perfectly right not to attach much importance to unelaborated guesses.
A later stage still occurs when the theory has been actually and completely verified by agreement with observation.
ANCIENT OBSERVATIONS (casually made, as of a star).
MODERN OBSERVATIONS.
Something was evidently the matter with the planet.
Could it be an outer planet?
The ordinary problem of perturbation is difficult enough: Given a disturbing planet in such and such a position, to find the perturbations it produces.
But the inverse problem: Given the perturbations, to find the planet which causes them-such a problem had never yet been attacked, and by only a few had its possibility been conceived.
Bessel made preparations for trying what he could do at it in eighteen forty, but he was prevented by fatal illness.
In January, eighteen forty three, he graduated as Senior Wrangler, and shortly afterwards he set to work.
Was it likely that a young and unknown man should have successfully solved so extremely difficult a problem?
It was altogether unlikely. Still, he would test him: he would ask for further explanations concerning some of the perturbations which he himself had specially noticed, and see if mr Adams could explain these also by his hypothesis.
If he could, there might be something in his theory.
If he failed-well, there was an end of it.
The questions were not difficult. They concerned the error of the radius vector.
He did not answer Professor Airy's letter.
If observatories were conducted on these unsystematic and spasmodic principles, they would not be the calm, accurate, satisfactory places they are.
I do not suppose that mr Adams himself could feel all that confidence in his attempted prediction.
So there the matter dropped.
mr Adams's communication was pigeon holed, and remained in seclusion for eight or nine months.
Meanwhile, and quite independently, something of the same sort was going on in France.
A brilliant young mathematician, born in Normandy in eighteen eleven, had accepted the post of Astronomical Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, then recently founded by Napoleon.
His first published papers directed attention to his wonderful powers; and the official head of astronomy in France, the famous Arago, suggested to him the unexplained perturbations of Uranus as a worthy object for his fresh and well armed vigour.
At once he set to work in a thorough and systematic way.
He first considered whether the discrepancies could be due to errors in the tables or errors in the old observations.
This part of the work he published in November, eighteen forty five.
He introduced several fresh terms into these perturbations, but none of them of sufficient magnitude to do more than slightly lessen the unexplained perturbations.
He next examined the various hypotheses that had been suggested to account for them:--Was it a failure in the law of gravitation?
Was it due to the presence of a resisting medium?
Or was it due to a collision with some comet?
All these he examined and dismissed for various reasons one after the other.
It was due to some steady continuous cause-for instance, some unknown planet.
Could this planet be inside the orbit of Uranus?
No, for then it would perturb Saturn and Jupiter also, and they were not perturbed by it.
It must, therefore, be some planet outside the orbit of Uranus, and in all probability, according to Bode's empirical law, at nearly double the distance from the sun that Uranus is.
Lastly he proceeded to examine where this planet was, and what its orbit must be to produce the observed disturbances.
This was, after all, the real tug of war.
So many unknown quantities: its mass, its distance, its excentricity, the obliquity of its orbit, its position at any time-nothing known, in fact, about the planet except the microscopic disturbance it caused in Uranus, some thousand million miles away from it.
Without going into further detail, suffice it to say that in June, eighteen forty six, he published his last paper, and in it announced to the world his theoretical position for the planet.
So striking a coincidence seemed sufficient to justify a Herschelian "sweep" for a week or two.
But a sweep for so distant a planet would be no easy matter.
When seen in a large telescope it would still only look like a star, and it would require considerable labour and watching to sift it out from the other stars surrounding it.
We know that Uranus had been seen twenty times, and thought to be a star, before its true nature was by Herschel discovered; and Uranus is only about half as far away as Neptune is.
"The past year has given to us the new [minor] planet Astraea; it has done more-it has given us the probable prospect of another. We see it as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain.
Its movements have been felt trembling along the far reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to ocular demonstration."
It was about time to begin to look for it.
So the Astronomer Royal thought on reading Leverrier's paper.
He thus, without giving an excessive time to the business, accumulated a host of observations, which he intended afterwards to reduce and sift at his leisure.
The wretched man thus actually saw the planet twice-on august fourth and august twelfth eighteen forty six--without knowing it.
If only he had had a map of the heavens containing telescopic stars down to the tenth magnitude, and if he had compared his observations with this map as they were made, the process would have been easy, and the discovery quick.
But he had no such map.
Nevertheless one was in existence: it had just been completed in that country of enlightened method and industry-Germany.
dr Bremiker had not, indeed, completed his great work-a chart of the whole zodiac down to stars of the tenth magnitude-but portions of it were completed, and the special region where the new planet was expected happened to be among the portions already just done.
But in England this was not known.
Meanwhile, mr Adams wrote to the Astronomer Royal several additional communications, making improvements in his theory, and giving what he considered nearer and nearer approximations for the place of the planet. He also now answered quite satisfactorily, but too late, the question about the radius vector sent to him months before.
This great man was likewise engaged in improving his theory and in considering how best the optical search could be conducted.
He was five years older than Levin, and had long been married.
Sviazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to Levin, whose convictions, very logical though never original, go one way by themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and firm in its direction, goes its way quite apart and almost always in direct contradiction to their convictions.
He believed neither in God nor the devil, but was much concerned about the question of the improvement of the clergy and the maintenance of their revenues, and took special trouble to keep up the church in his village.
If it had not been a characteristic of Levin's to put the most favorable interpretation on people, Sviazhsky's character would have presented no doubt or difficulty to him: he would have said to himself, "a fool or a knave," and everything would have seemed clear.
But he could not say "a fool," because Sviazhsky was unmistakably clever, and moreover, a highly cultivated man, who was exceptionally modest over his culture.
The shooting turned out to be worse than Levin had expected.
The marsh was dry and there were no grouse at all.
He imagined, probably mistakenly, that this low necked bodice had been made on his account, and felt that he had no right to look at it, and tried not to look at it; but he felt that he was to blame for the very fact of the low necked bodice having been made.
It seemed to Levin that he had deceived someone, that he ought to explain something, but that to explain it was impossible, and for that reason he was continually blushing, was ill at ease and awkward.
He has so much to do, and he has the faculty of interesting himself in everything.
The little house covered with ivy, isn't it?"
His brilliant black eyes were looking straight at the excited country gentleman with gray whiskers, and apparently he derived amusement from his remarks.
Chapter eleven
He was sitting in the middle of the hut, clinging with both hands to the bench from which he was being pulled by a soldier, the brother of the peasant's wife, who was helping him off with his miry boots.
Veslovsky was laughing his infectious, good humored laugh.
"I've only just come.
Just fancy, they gave me drink, fed me!
Such bread, it was exquisite!
And they would not take a penny for anything. And they kept saying: 'Excuse our homely ways.'"
"What should they take anything for?
They were entertaining you, to be sure.
Do you suppose they keep vodka for sale?" said the soldier, succeeding at last in pulling the soaked boot off the blackened stocking.
In spite of the dirtiness of the hut, which was all muddied by their boots and the filthy dogs licking themselves clean, and the smell of marsh mud and powder that filled the room, and the absence of knives and forks, the party drank their tea and ate their supper with a relish only known to sportsmen.
Washed and clean, they went into a hay barn swept ready for them, where the coachman had been making up beds for the gentlemen.
Though it was dusk, not one of them wanted to go to sleep.
Malthus was a well-known capitalist, who had made his money by speculation in railway shares.
Stepan Arkadyevitch described what grouse moors this Malthus had bought in the Tver province, and how they were preserved, and of the carriages and dogcarts in which the shooting party had been driven, and the luncheon pavilion that had been rigged up at the marsh.
"I don't understand you," said Levin, sitting up in the hay; "how is it such people don't disgust you?
They don't care for their contempt, and then they use their dishonest gains to buy off the contempt they have deserved."
"Perfectly!
"Not a bit of it." Levin could hear that Oblonsky was smiling as he spoke.
"I simply don't consider him more dishonest than any other wealthy merchant or nobleman.
They've all made their money alike-by their work and their intelligence."
"Oh, by what work?
Do you call it work to get hold of concessions and speculate with them?"
"Of course it's work.
Work in this sense, that if it were not for him and others like him, there would have been no railways."
"But that's not work, like the work of a peasant or a learned profession."
"Granted, but it's work in the sense that his activity produces a result-the railways.
But of course you think the railways useless."
"No, that's another question; I am prepared to admit that they're useful.
But all profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended is dishonest."
"Making profit by dishonest means, by trickery," said Levin, conscious that he could not draw a distinct line between honesty and dishonesty. "Such as banking, for instance," he went on.
No sooner were the spirit monopolies abolished than the railways came up, and banking companies; that, too, is profit without work."
"Yes, that may all be very true and clever....
He was obviously convinced of the correctness of his position, and so talked serenely and without haste.
"But you have not drawn the line between honest and dishonest work.
That I receive a bigger salary than my chief clerk, though he knows more about the work than I do-that's dishonest, I suppose?"
"I can't say."
"Well, but I can tell you: your receiving some five thousand, let's say, for your work on the land, while our host, the peasant here, however hard he works, can never get more than fifty roubles, is just as dishonest as my earning more than my chief clerk, and Malthus getting more than a station master.
No, quite the contrary; I see that society takes up a sort of antagonistic attitude to these people, which is utterly baseless, and I fancy there's envy at the bottom of it...."
"No, that's unfair," said Veslovsky; "how could envy come in?
"You say," Levin went on, "that it's unjust for me to receive five thousand, while the peasant has fifty; that's true.
It is unfair, and I feel it, but..."
Why is it we spend our time riding, drinking, shooting, doing nothing, while they are forever at work?" said Vassenka Veslovsky, obviously for the first time in his life reflecting on the question, and consequently considering it with perfect sincerity.
There had arisen of late something like a secret antagonism between the two brothers in law; as though, since they had married sisters, a kind of rivalry had sprung up between them as to which was ordering his life best, and now this hostility showed itself in the conversation, as it began to take a personal note.
"Give it to this peasant, he would not refuse it."
"Yes, but how am I to give it up?
Am I to go to him and make a deed of conveyance?"
"I don't know; but if you are convinced that you have no right..."
"I'm not at all convinced.
"No, excuse me, but if you consider this inequality is unjust, why is it you don't act accordingly?..."
"Well, I do act negatively on that idea, so far as not trying to increase the difference of position existing between him and me."
"No, excuse me, that's a paradox."
"Yes, there's something of a sophistry about that," Veslovsky agreed. "Ah! our host; so you're not asleep yet?" he said to the peasant who came into the barn, opening the creaking door.
I thought our gentlemen would be asleep, but I heard them chattering.
I want to get a hook from here.
She won't bite?" he added, stepping cautiously with his bare feet.
"We are going out for the night with the beasts."
"Ah, what a night!" said Veslovsky, looking out at the edge of the hut and the unharnessed wagonette that could be seen in the faint light of the evening glow in the great frame of the open doors.
"But listen, there are women's voices singing, and, on my word, not badly too.
Who's that singing, my friend?"
"That's the maids from hard by here."
"Let's go, let's have a walk!
Oblonsky, come along!"
"It's capital lying here."
"Well, I shall go by myself," said Veslovsky, getting up eagerly, and putting on his shoes and stockings.
"Good bye, gentlemen.
You've treated me to some good sport, and I won't forget you."
"He really is a capital fellow, isn't he?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, when Veslovsky had gone out and the peasant had closed the door after him.
"Yes, capital," answered Levin, still thinking of the subject of their conversation just before.
This disconcerted him.
"It's just this, my dear boy.
The great thing for me is to feel that I'm not to blame."
"What do you say, why not go after all?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, evidently weary of the strain of thought.
"We shan't go to sleep, you know.
Come, let's go!"
Levin did not answer.
What they had said in the conversation, that he acted justly only in a negative sense, absorbed his thoughts.
"Can it be that it's only possible to be just negatively?" he was asking himself.
"How strong the smell of the fresh hay is, though," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up.
"There's not a chance of sleeping.
Vassenka has been getting up some fun there.
Hadn't we better go?
"No, I'm not coming," answered Levin.
"Surely that's not a matter of principle too," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling, as he felt about in the dark for his cap.
"It's not a matter of principle, but why should I go?"
"But do you know you are preparing trouble for yourself," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, finding his cap and getting up.
"How so?"
"Do you suppose I don't see the line you've taken up with your wife?
I heard how it's a question of the greatest consequence, whether or not you're to be away for a couple of days' shooting.
That's all very well as an idyllic episode, but for your whole life that won't answer.
A man has to be manly," said Oblonsky, opening the door.
"In what way?
To go running after servant girls?" said Levin.
"Why not, if it amuses him?
It won't do my wife any harm, and it'll amuse me.
The great thing is to respect the sanctity of the home.
There should be nothing in the home.
But don't tie your own hands."
"Perhaps so," said Levin dryly, and he turned on his side.
Levin pretended to be asleep, while Oblonsky, putting on his slippers, and lighting a cigar, walked out of the barn, and soon their voices were lost.
He heard the horses munching hay, then he heard the peasant and his elder boy getting ready for the night, and going off for the night watch with the beasts, then he heard the soldier arranging his bed on the other side of the barn, with his nephew, the younger son of their peasant host.
He could only hear the snort of the horses, and the guttural cry of a snipe.
"Is it really only negative?" he repeated to himself.
"Well, what of it? It's not my fault." And he began thinking about the next day.
"Tomorrow I'll go out early, and I'll make a point of keeping cool. There are lots of snipe; and there are grouse too.
When I come back there'll be the note from Kitty.
Yes, Stiva may be right, I'm not manly with her, I'm tied to her apron strings....
Well, it can't be helped! Negative again...."
Half asleep, he heard the laughter and mirthful talk of Veslovsky and Stepan Arkadyevitch.
For an instant he opened his eyes: the moon was up, and in the open doorway, brightly lighted up by the moonlight, they were standing talking.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying something of the freshness of one girl, comparing her to a freshly peeled nut, and Veslovsky with his infectious laugh was repeating some words, probably said to him by a peasant: "Ah, you do your best to get round her!" Levin, half asleep, said:
"Gentlemen, tomorrow before daylight!" and fell asleep.
IN WHICH CASSANDRA VISITS DAVID THRYNG'S ANCESTORS
Cassandra had placed her little son in the middle of a huge bed which nearly filled the small room she had been given in a hotel, recommended to her by Betty Towers as one where "nice ladies travelling alone" could stop.
The child was dressed in a fresh white coat, and Cassandra had much ado to keep him clean.
She had tried to put them one side that she might look out when she awoke, but she could see only chimney pots and grimy, irregularly tiled roofs.
A narrow opening at the top of the window let in a little air; still she felt smothered, and tried to raise the lower sash, but could not move it.
Here only a small triangle of blue sky could be seen-not a tree, not a bit of earth-and in the small room all those heavy furnishings closed around her, dark red, stuffy, and greasy with London smoke.
She could not touch them without blackening her hands, nor let her baby sit on the floor for the dirt he wiped up on his clothing as he rolled and kicked about.
The room seemed to sway and tip as the ship had done, and there was a continuous sound as of thunder, a strange undercurrent that seemed to her strained nerves like the moaning of the lost souls of all the ages, who had lived and toiled and smothered in this monstrous and terrible city.
She must hurry-hurry and find David.
He would be glad to see his little son.
He would take him in his arms.
He would hold them both to his heart.
She must get used to all this, and not expect to find all the world like her own sunny mountains.
She was to go nowhere alone, without taking a cab, and never start out on foot, carrying her baby in her arms, as she might do at home.
She had given her written instructions how to conduct herself under all ordinary circumstances, at her hotel or on the street-how to ring for a servant, order her meals, or call a cab.
She leaned over the bed, half dressed as she was, and murmured pretty cooing phrases, kissing and cuddling him to contented laughter.
Betty Towers had procured clothing for her-a modest supply-using her own good taste, and not disguising Cassandra's natural grace and dignity by a too close adherence to the prevailing mode.
Cassandra stood a long moment before the two gowns.
While waiting with her baby in her arms for the hotel boy to call her cab, she observed another lady, young and graceful, enter a cab, and a maid following her wearing a pretty cap, and carrying a child.
Eager, for David's sake, to draw no adverse comment upon herself, she took note of everything.
Ought she then to arrive attended by a maid, carrying her baby?
But David would know she did not need one; bringing him his little son in her own arms, what would he care for anything more?
So the address was given the cabman, and they were rattled away over the rough paving, a long, lonely ride through the wonderful city-so many miles of houses and splendid buildings, of gardens and monuments.
There were the nursemaids-the babies-the beggars-the ragged urchins and the venders of the street, with their raucous cries rending the air.
Her brain whirled, and a new feeling to which she had hitherto been blessedly a stranger crept over her, a feeling of fear.
As the great two story coaches and trams thundered by, she clasped her baby closer, until he looked up in her face with round eyed wonder and put up his lip in pitiful protest.
She soothed and comforted him until her panic passed, and when, at last, they stopped before a great house built in on either side by other houses, with wide steps of stone descending directly upon the street, she had regained a measure of composure.
"Oh, yes.
Wait," cried Cassandra.
What if David were not there!
And of course, he might be out.
Then they were swallowed up in the dark interior.
For a moment, bewildered, she could hardly understand what he was saying to her.
Although dazed and baffled, Cassandra betrayed no sign of the tumult within, and the little old man stood before her hesitating, his curiosity piqued into a determination to discover her business and identity.
Her gravity and silence gave her a poise and dignity that allayed suspicion, but he and his old wife liked diversion, and a spice of gossip lightened the monotony of their lives, so he waited, then coughed behind his hand.
"No, it was not the house-it was-" Again she waited, not knowing how to introduce her husband's name.
A mystery!
A visitor at this hour, and seemingly a lady, yet with a baby in her arms, and alone, and not to see the house.
Again he coughed behind his hand.
"Yes, I'm a stranger." She caught at the word.
Seized by an inward terror of the small eyes fixed curiously on her, she intuitively shrank from betraying her identity, and the old servant had told her what she needed to know.
Of course her husband was "his lordship," over here.
"I am from America, and I would like to see the gallery." She must do so to give a pretext for having come to visit an empty house.
She held her now sleeping baby close to her breast as she followed the old man about from picture to picture.
We'll let in a little more light.
A Vandyke-and worth it's weight in gold."
Cassandra watched him cross the floor, his short bow legs reflected grotesquely in its shining surface as he walked, then turned and gazed again at the life-size, half length portrait of a young man with sunny hair like David's and warm brown eyes.
She drew a deep breath and looked down the length of the long gallery.
Everything was being impressed upon her mind as upon sensitized paper.
She followed slowly in the old man's wake, never opening her lips until they had made the circuit and were again standing before the portrait of the fair haired youth.
The old servant was saying: "You 'aven't 'appened to meet a Samuel Cutter in America, 'ave you?
'E's our son.
"No, I never met any one by that name.
"About 'ow far do you think, ma'm?"
Cassandra had no idea of the distance, but she knew how long David and Hoyle were journeying there, so she answered as best she could.
"It takes three or four days to get there from my home."
The old man's eyes opened wide, and his jaw dropped.
"It's a big country-America is.
England may be a small place, but she 'as tremendous big possessions." He felt it all belonged to England, and spoke with swelling pride as his short legs carried him toward the door. There again he paused.
He had learned nothing of this young woman to tell his old wife, except that she came from America, and had never met Samuel Cutter.
The mystery was still unsolved.
"Yes, 'is young lordship do look amazing like that picture.
If you'd ever seen 'im, you'd think 'e'd dressed up in velvet and lace and stood for it.
'E's lived in America five years, but if you never were in Canada and never met our Sammy, it's more likely you never saw 'im either."
She had seated herself in the hall, for her heart throbbed chokingly, and the lump was heavy in her throat.
"'Is lordship is still in Hafrica, mam.
That's gossip, you know."
Cassandra rose and stood suddenly poised for flight.
She must get out of that house and hear no more.
She had a silver shilling in her hand, for Betty Towers had told her all servants expected a tip, and this was intended for the cabman.
Had she followed her impulse, she would have darted by with her fingers in her ears, but instead, she dropped the shilling in the old man's hand, and quietly turned toward the door.
"Thank you," his fingers closed over the shilling.
Her pallor struck him then, even as the red spot on her cheek deepened, and he held out his arms for the child.
"Let me carry 'im for you, ma'm.
Is it a boy?"
But her arms closed tighter about her baby.
"He is my little son." It was almost a cry, as she said it, but again she forced herself to calmness, and, walking slowly out, added, with a quiet smile: "I always keep him myself.
We do in America."
In a moment she was gone.
Darker, dingier, stuffier, seemed the box of a room, as she walked into it and laid her still sleeping babe on the bed.
She felt herself moving in an unreal world.
David-her David-she had not come to him after all; she had come to an empty place.
She neither wept nor prayed; and the red spot burned against the creamy whiteness of her skin.
She was not thinking, only looking, seeing into the past and down the long vista of her future.
In the radiance of the spring, she saw them, and in the glory of the autumn; she breathed the fragrance of the pines in winter and heard the soft patter of summer rains on widespreading leaves.
She saw David walking at her side, and heard his laugh, sun bright and glorious he seemed, her Phoebus Apollo-the father of her little son.
She saw the terrible sea which she had crossed to come to him-the white crested waves, with turquoise lights and indigo depths, shifting and sliding unceasingly where all the world seemed swallowed in space, and the huge steamship so small a thing in the vast and perilous deep; and now-now she was here.
What was she?
She had tried to find him, her David, and had been shown the dead, and the glory of the dead-all past and gone-her David's glory.
Shown that long, empty gallery resounding with those aged footsteps, and the pictures-pictures-pictures-of men and women who had once been babes like her little son and David's, now dead and gone-not one soul among them all to greet her.
And David-her David-was one of these!
What they had felt-what they had thought and striven for-was it all intensified and concentrated in him?
Oh, if her soul could only reach to him, wherever he was, and penetrate this impalpable veil that stretched between them!
He opened his large, clear eyes, and suddenly it seemed that her wish was granted,--that the veil was rent and she was looking into David's eyes and seeing his soul free, no longer chained by invisible links to those dead and gone beings, and their traditions.
This had been all a dream-a dream.
She gathered the child in her arms and held him with his sweet, warm lips pressed to her breast and his soft little hand thrust in her bosom. David's little son-David's little son!
Surely all was good and well with the world!
Did not the old man say it was only gossip?
Had not evil things been said of David even on her own mountain?
It was the trail of the serpent of ill report.
He had not confided his sacred secret to these people, and they had thought what they pleased.
She would go to his mother and wait for his return, and there she would bring her precious gift-David's little son.
Quickly she packed her few belongings and rang for a messenger, and as she stood an instant waiting for an answer to her ring, the white capped nurse she had noticed in the morning passed by with the baby in her arms.
Yes, surely women of David's state did not travel about alone.
And now she was in "Vanity Fair," and must be wise and not go to David's mother unattended.
Then, too, if only she had some one with her to whom she could speak now and then, it would be better.
Therefore, without further consideration, she walked swiftly down the corridor after the tidy nurse.
"Will you tell me, please, have you a sister?" she said.
The young woman stood still in astonishment.
"Or-any friend like yourself?
"And it is right hard to go about alone with my baby, so I thought I would ask you if you have a sister."
"Yes."
"I couldn't go with you myself, ma'm-but-"
"I saw you this morning, ma'm, as you went out.
I'll see what I can do. What number is your room? and what name?
I mustn't talk here.
mrs Darling is very particular."
"Oh, never mind, then." Cassandra turned away in sudden shame lest she had not done the right thing.
The nurse watched her return to her room as swiftly as she had left it, and took note of the number.
Cassandra felt more abashed under the round eyed gaze of the maid than if she had encountered the queen.
Her ring for a messenger had not been answered, and she did not know how to find her husband's country seat. She felt faint and weary, but did not think of hunger, nor that it was long past the dinner hour, and that she had eaten nothing since her early breakfast.
She only thought that she must be brave and try-try to think how to reach David's people.
Then Cassandra knew that she was hungry and sat herself in one of the windows apart, before a table.
Presently a young man came and bent down to her as if listening.
"I would like tea, please."
"I will take what they have."
"Yes, ma'm.
Cabs and carriages were rushing up and down the street below them.
She placed her little son on the seat beside her and held him with sheltering arm, while he watched the moving vehicles and looked from them to his mother's face.
"What a perfectly lovely child!" said a pleasant voice.
Cassandra looked up to see a rosy cheeked girl, a little too stout and florid, with a great mop of dark hair tied with a wide black ribbon.
A gray haired lady followed, and paused beside her.
"Yes," said Cassandra, faintly.
The girl reached over and patted his cheek.
"How perfectly dear.
Isn't he, though?"
"Babies are always dear," said the mother, with a smile.
"Come, Laura, we can't wait, you know," and they passed on.
As Cassandra looked up in the mother's face, something stirred vaguely in her heart.
Then her tea and crisp, hot muffins were brought.
The young girl's pleasant words had warmed her heart, and the refreshment gave her more courage.
She made her way to the office and inquired how she might find Lord Thryng's country home.
The clerk wrote the address promptly on a card, but the keen look of interest with which he handed it to her caused her to shrink inwardly.
Why, what was it to him what place she asked for?
She lifted her head proudly.
"I wish to go there.
Will you tell me how, please?"
He explained to her courteously-almost deferentially.
"Will you go to Daneshead Castle itself, ma'm, or stop in Queensderry?" As she had no idea what the question involved, she replied at hazard.
Wonderful or supernatural events are not so uncommon, rather they are irregular in their incidence.
Thus there may be not one marvel to speak of in a century, and then often enough comes a plentiful crop of them; monsters of all sorts swarm suddenly upon the earth, comets blaze in the sky, eclipses frighten nature, meteors fall in rain, while mermaids and sirens beguile, and sea serpents engulf every passing ship, and terrible cataclysms beset humanity.
But the strange event which I shall here relate came alone, unsupported, without companions into a hostile world, and for that very reason claimed little of the general attention of mankind.
For the sudden changing of mrs Tebrick into a vixen is an established fact which we may attempt to account for as we will.
Certainly it is in the explanation of the fact, and the reconciling of it with our general notions that we shall find most difficulty, and not in accepting for true a story which is so fully proved, and that not by one witness but by a dozen, all respectable, and with no possibility of collusion between them.
But here I will confine myself to an exact narrative of the event and all that followed on it.
Yet I would not dissuade any of my readers from attempting an explanation of this seeming miracle because up till now none has been found which is entirely satisfactory.
What adds to the difficulty to my mind is that the metamorphosis occurred when mrs Tebrick was a full grown woman, and that it happened suddenly in so short a space of time.
But here we have something very different.
A grown lady is changed straightway into a fox.
There is no explaining that away by any natural philosophy.
The only things which go any way towards an explanation of it are but guesswork, and I give them more because I would not conceal anything, than because I think they are of any worth.
They were an ancient family, and have had their seat at Tangley Hall time out of mind.
It seems she took great fright or disgust at it, and vomited after it was done.
She was married in the year eighteen seventy nine to mr Richard Tebrick, after a short courtship, and went to live after their honeymoon at Rylands, near Stokoe, Oxon.
One point indeed I have not been able to ascertain and that is how they first became acquainted.
Tangley Hall is over thirty miles from Stokoe, and is extremely remote.
Indeed to this day there is no proper road to it, which is all the more remarkable as it is the principal, and indeed the only, manor house for several miles round.
Whether it was from a chance meeting on the roads, or less romantic but more probable, by mr Tebrick becoming acquainted with her uncle, a minor canon at Oxford, and thence being invited by him to visit Tangley Hall, it is impossible to say.
But however they became acquainted the marriage was a very happy one.
The bride was in her twenty third year. She was small, with remarkably small hands and feet.
It is perhaps worth noting that there was nothing at all foxy or vixenish in her appearance. On the contrary, she was a more than ordinarily beautiful and agreeable woman.
Her eyes were of a clear hazel but exceptionally brilliant, her hair dark, with a shade of red in it, her skin brownish, with a few dark freckles and little moles.
In manner she was reserved almost to shyness, but perfectly self possessed, and perfectly well bred.
She had been strictly brought up by a woman of excellent principles and considerable attainments, who died a year or so before the marriage.
And owing to the circumstance that her mother had been dead many years, and her father bedridden, and not altogether rational for a little while before his death, they had few visitors but her uncle.
That she did not grow up a country hoyden is to be explained by the strictness of her governess and the influence of her uncle.
But perhaps living in so wild a place gave her some disposition to wildness, even in spite of her religious upbringing.
Her old nurse said: "Miss Silvia was always a little wild at heart," though if this was true it was never seen by anyone else except her husband.
On one of the first days of the year eighteen eighty, in the early afternoon, husband and wife went for a walk in the copse on the little hill above Rylands.
They were still at this time like lovers in their behaviour and were always together.
While they were walking they heard the hounds and later the huntsman's horn in the distance.
mr Tebrick had persuaded her to hunt on Boxing Day, but with great difficulty, and she had not enjoyed it (though of hacking she was fond enough).
Hearing the hunt, mr Tebrick quickened his pace so as to reach the edge of the copse, where they might get a good view of the hounds if they came that way.
His wife hung back, and he, holding her hand, began almost to drag her.
Before they gained the edge of the copse she suddenly snatched her hand away from his very violently and cried out, so that he instantly turned his head.
You may well think if he were aghast: and so maybe was his lady at finding herself in that shape, so they did nothing for nearly half an hour but stare at each other, he bewildered, she asking him with her eyes as if indeed she spoke to him: "What am I now become? Have pity on me, husband, have pity on me for I am your wife."
So that with his gazing on her and knowing her well, even in such a shape, yet asking himself at every moment: "Can it be she?
Am I not dreaming?" and her beseeching and lastly fawning on him and seeming to tell him that it was she indeed, they came at last together and he took her in his arms.
She lay very close to him, nestling under his coat and fell to licking his face, but never taking her eyes from his.
So they passed a good while, till at last the tears welled up in the poor fox's eyes and she began weeping (but quite in silence), and she trembled too as if she were in a fever.
At this he could not contain his own tears, but sat down on the ground and sobbed for a great while, but between his sobs kissing her quite as if she had been a woman, and not caring in his grief that he was kissing a fox on the muzzle.
They sat thus till it was getting near dusk, when he recollected himself, and the next thing was that he must somehow hide her, and then bring her home.
He waited till it was quite dark that he might the better bring her into her own house without being seen, and buttoned her inside his topcoat, nay, even in his passion tearing open his waistcoat and his shirt that she might lie the closer to his heart.
For when we are overcome with the greatest sorrow we act not like men or women but like children whose comfort in all their troubles is to press themselves against their mother's breast, or if she be not there to hold each other tight in one another's arms.
Having got her into the house, the next thing he thought of was to hide her from the servants.
He carried her to the bedroom in his arms and then went downstairs again.
mr Tebrick had three servants living in the house, the cook, the parlour maid, and an old woman who had been his wife's nurse.
Besides these women there was a groom or a gardener (whichever you choose to call him), who was a single man and so lived out, lodging with a labouring family about half a mile away.
mr Tebrick going downstairs pitched upon the parlour maid.
"Janet," says he, "mrs Tebrick and I have had some bad news, and mrs Tebrick was called away instantly to London and left this afternoon, and I am staying to night to put our affairs in order.
We are shutting up the house, and I must give you and mrs Brant a month's wages and ask you to leave to morrow morning at seven o'clock.
We shall probably go away to the Continent, and I do not know when we shall come back.
Please tell the others, and now get me my tea and bring it into my study on a tray." Janet said nothing for she was a shy girl, particularly before gentlemen, but when she entered the kitchen mr Tebrick heard a sudden burst of conversation with many exclamations from the cook.
When she came back with his tea, mr Tebrick said: "I shall not require you upstairs.
I am busy now, but I will see you again before you go."
When she had gone mr Tebrick took the tray upstairs.
For the first moment he thought the room was empty, and his vixen got away, for he could see no sign of her anywhere.
But after a moment he saw something stirring in a corner of the room, and then behold! she came forth dragging her dressing gown, into which she had somehow struggled.
This must surely have been a comical sight, but poor mr Tebrick was altogether too distressed then or at any time afterwards to divert himself at such ludicrous scenes.
He only called to her softly:
What do you do there?" And then in a moment saw for himself what she would be at, and began once more to blame himself heartily-because he had not guessed that his wife would not like to go naked, notwithstanding the shape she was in.
Nothing would satisfy him then till he had clothed her suitably, bringing her dresses from the wardrobe for her to choose.
But as might have been expected, they were too big for her now, but at last he picked out a little dressing jacket that she was fond of wearing sometimes in the mornings.
It was made of a flowered silk, trimmed with lace, and the sleeves short enough to sit very well on her now.
While he tied the ribands his poor lady thanked him with gentle looks and not without some modesty and confusion.
He propped her up in an armchair with some cushions, and they took tea together, she very delicately drinking from a saucer and taking bread and butter from his hands.
All this showed him, or so he thought, that his wife was still herself; there was so little wildness in her demeanour and so much delicacy and decency, especially in her not wishing to run naked, that he was very much comforted, and began to fancy they could be happy enough if they could escape the world and live always alone.
From this too sanguine dream he was aroused by hearing the gardener speaking to the dogs, trying to quiet them, for ever since he had come in with his vixen they had been whining, barking and growling, and all as he knew because there was a fox within doors and they would kill it.
He started up now, calling to the gardener that he would come down to the dogs himself to quiet them, and bade the man go indoors again and leave it to him.
All this he said in a dry, compelling kind of voice which made the fellow do as he was bid, though it was against his will, for he was curious.
mr Tebrick went downstairs, and taking his gun from the rack loaded it and went out into the yard.
Now there were two dogs, one a handsome Irish setter that was his wife's dog (she had brought it with her from Tangley Hall on her marriage); the other was an old fox terrier called Nelly that he had had ten years or more.
When he came out into the yard both dogs saluted him by barking and whining twice as much as they did before, the setter jumping up and down at the end of his chain in a frenzy, and Nelly shivering, wagging her tail, and looking first at her master and then at the house door, where she could smell the fox right enough.
There was a bright moon, so that mr Tebrick could see the dogs as clearly as could be.
First he shot his wife's setter dead, and then looked about him for Nelly to give her the other barrel, but he could see her nowhere.
The bitch was clean gone, till, looking to see how she had broken her chain, he found her lying hid in the back of her kennel. But that trick did not save her, for mr Tebrick, after trying to pull her out by her chain and finding it useless-she would not come,--thrust the muzzle of his gun into the kennel, pressed it into her body and so shot her.
Then, leaving the dogs as they were, chained up, mr Tebrick went indoors again and found the gardener, who had not yet gone home, gave him a month's wages in lieu of notice and told him he had a job for him yet-to bury the two dogs and that he should do it that same night.
But by all this going on with so much strangeness and authority on his part, as it seemed to them, the servants were much troubled.
Old Nanny, though she was not expecting to find her mistress there, having been told that she was gone that afternoon to London, knew her instantly, and cried out:
"Oh, my poor precious!
What dreadful change is this?"
Then, seeing her mistress start and look at her, she cried out: "But never fear, my darling, it will all come right, your old Nanny knows you, it will all come right in the end."
But though she said this she did not care to look again, and kept her eyes turned away so as not to meet the foxy slit ones of her mistress, for that was too much for her.
So she hurried out soon, fearing to be found there by mr Tebrick, and who knows, perhaps shot, like the dogs, for knowing the secret.
mr Tebrick had all this time gone about paying off his servants and shooting his dogs as if he were in a dream.
Now he fortified himself with two or three glasses of strong whisky and went to bed, taking his vixen into his arms, where he slept soundly.
Karl soon found himself before the house in which his friend Hoellenrachen resided.
Knowing his studious habits, he had hoped to see his light still burning, nor was he disappointed.
He contrived to bring him to his window, and a moment after, the door was cautiously opened.
"From the grave, Heinrich, or next door to it."
"Perhaps you were not far wrong.
But get me a horn of ale, for even a vampire is thirsty, you know."
"A vampire!" exclaimed Heinrich, retreating a pace, and involuntarily putting himself upon his guard.
Karl laughed.
"My hand was warm, was it not, old fellow?" he said.
"Vampires are cold, all but the blood."
"What a fool I am!" rejoined Heinrich.
Karl told him the whole story; and the mental process of regarding it for the sake of telling it, revealed to him pretty clearly some of the treatment of which he had been unconscious at the time.
Heinrich was quite sure that his suspicions were correct.
And now the question was, what was to be done next?
To this proposal Karl agreed with hearty thanks, and soon all was arranged.
The only conclusion they could yet arrive at was, that somehow or other the old demon painter must be tamed.
Meantime, how fared it with Lilith?
She too had no doubt that she had seen the body ghost of poor Karl, and that the vampire had, according to rule, paid her the first visit because he loved her best.
And then, though he had visited her, he had not, as far as she was aware, deprived her of a drop of blood.
She could not be certain that he had not bitten her, for she had been in such a strange condition of mind that she might not have felt it, but she believed that he had restrained the impulses of his vampire nature, and had left her, lest he should yet yield to them.
She fell fast asleep; and, when morning came, there was not, as far as she could judge, one of those triangular leech like perforations to be found upon her whole body.
Will it be believed that the moment she was satisfied of this, she was seized by a terrible jealousy, lest Karl should have gone and bitten some one else?
They were very different causes, and the effects must be very different.
There lay the awful white block, seeming to his eyes just the same as he had left it.
What was to be done with it?
He dared not open it.
Mould and model must go together.
If inquiry should be made after Wolkenlicht, and this were discovered anywhere on his premises, would it not be enough to bring him at once to the gallows?
Therefore it would be dangerous to bury it in the garden, or in the cellar.
"Besides," thought he, with a shudder, "that would be to fix the vampire as a guest for ever."--And the horrors of the past night rushed back upon his imagination with renewed intensity.
What would it be to have the dead Karl crawling about his house for ever, now inside, now out, now sitting on the stairs, now staring in at the windows?
He would have dragged it to the bottom of his garden, past which the Moldau flowed, and plunged it into the stream; but then, should the spectre continue to prove troublesome, it would be almost impossible to reach the body so as to destroy it by fire; besides which, he could not do it without assistance, and the probability of discovery.
If, however, the apparition should turn out to be no vampire, but only a respectable ghost, they might manage to endure its presence, till it should be weary of haunting them.
He resolved at last to convey the body for the meantime into a concealed cellar in the house, seeing something must be done before his daughter came down.
Proceeding to remove it, his consternation as greatly increased when he discovered how the body had grown in weight since he had thus disposed of it, leaving on his mind scarcely a hope that it could turn out not to be a vampire after all.
He could scarcely stir it, and there was but one whom he could call to his assistance-the old woman who acted as his housekeeper and servant.
He went to her room, roused her, and told her the whole story.
Devoted to her master for many years, and not quite so sensitive to fearful influences as when less experienced in horrors, she showed immediate readiness to render him assistance.
Utterly unable, however, to lift the mass between them, they could only drag and push it along; and such a slow toil was it that there was no time to remove the traces of its track, before Lilith came down and saw a broad white line leading from the door of the studio down the cellarstairs.
She knew in a moment what it meant; but not a word was uttered about the matter, and the name of Karl Wolkenlicht seemed to be entirely forgotten.
So it was not surprising that the painter abandoned his studio early, and that the three found themselves together in the gorgeous room formerly described, as soon as twilight began to fall.
Already Teufelsbuerst had begun to experience a kind of shrinking from the horrid faces in his own pictures, and to feel disgusted at the abortions of his own mind.
As much as possible, however, they avoided alarming Lilith, who, knowing all they knew, was as silent as they.
But her mind was in a strange state of excitement, partly from the presence of a new sense of love, the pleasure of which all the atmosphere of grief into which it grew could not totally quench.
It comforted her somehow, as a child may comfort when his father is away.
Bedtime came, and no one made a move to go.
Without a word spoken on the subject, the three remained together all night; the elders nodding and slumbering occasionally, and Lilith getting some share of repose on a couch.
All night the shape of death might be somewhere about the house; but it did not disturb them.
They heard no sound, saw no sight; and when the morning dawned, they separated, chilled and stupid, and for the time beyond fear, to seek repose in their private chambers.
There they remained equally undisturbed.
But when the painter approached his easel a few hours after, looking more pale and haggard still than he was wont, from the fears of the night, a new bewilderment took possession of him.
He had been busy with a fresh embodiment of his favourite subject, into which he had sketched the form of the student as the sufferer.
At an open door he had painted Lilith passing, with her face buried in a bunch of sweet peas.
But when he came to the picture, he found, to his astonishment and terror, that the face of one of the group was now turned towards that of the victim, regarding his revival with demoniac satisfaction, and taking pains to prevent the others from discovering it.
The face of this prince of torturers was that of Teufelsbuerst himself.
Lilith had altogether vanished, and in her place stood the dim vampire reiteration of the body that lay extended on the table, staring greedily at the assembled company.
With trembling hands the painter removed the picture from the easel, and turned its face to the wall.
Of course this was the work of Lottchen.
When he left the house, he took with him the key of a small private door, which was so seldom used that, while it remained closed, the key would not be missed, perhaps for many months.
Watching the windows, he had chosen a safe time to enter, and had been hard at work all night on these alterations.
Teufelsbuerst attributed them to the vampire, and left the picture as he found it, not daring to put brush to it again.
The next night was passed much after the same fashion.
But the fear had begun to die away a little in the hearts of the women, who did not know what had taken place in the studio on the previous night.
But this night likewise passed in peace; and before it was over, the old woman had taken to speculating in her own mind as to the best way of disposing of the body, seeing it was not at all likely to be troublesome.
But when the painter entered his studio in trepidation the next morning, he found that the form of the lovely Lilith was painted out of every picture in the room.
This could not be concealed; and Lilith and the servant became aware that the studio was the portion of the house in haunting which the vampire left the rest in peace.
Karl recounted all the tricks he had played to his friend Heinrich, who begged to be allowed to bear him company the following night.
So they took a couple of bottles of wine and some provisions with them, and before midnight found themselves snug in the studio.
They sat very quiet for some time, for they knew that if they were seen, two vampires would not be so terrible as one, and might occasion discovery.
But at length Heinrich could bear it no longer.
"I think I know.
Stop; let me peep out.
All right!
Come along."
With a lamp in his hand, he led the way to the cellars, and after searching about a little they discovered it.
So he took a bottle from his pocket, and after they had had a glass apiece, he dropped a third in blots all over the plaster.
Being red wine, it had the effect Hoellenrachen desired.
In a corner close by the plaster, they found the clothes Karl had worn.
So he carried them with him to the studio.
There he got hold of the lay figure.
"What are you about, Heinrich?"
He next seated the creature at an easel with its back to the door, so that it should be the first thing the painter should see when he entered.
Karl meant to remove this before he went, for it was too comical to fall in with the rest of his proceedings.
But the two sat down to their supper, and by the time they had finished the wine, they thought they should like to go to bed.
So they got up and went home, and Karl forgot the lay figure, leaving it in busy motionlessness all night before the easel.
When Teufelsbuerst saw it, he turned and fled with a cry that brought his daughter to his help.
He rushed past her, able only to articulate:
The vampire!
Far more courageous than he, because her conscience was more peaceful, Lilith passed on to the studio.
She too recoiled a step or two when she saw the figure; but with the sight of the back of Karl, as she supposed it to be, came the longing to see the face that was on the other side. So she crept round and round by the wall, as far off as she could.
It was a strange kind of shock that she experienced when she saw the face, disgusting from its inanity.
The absurdity next struck her; and with the absurdity flashed into her mind the conviction that this was not the doing of a vampire; for of all creatures under the moon, he could not be expected to be a humorist.
A wild hope sprang up in her mind that Karl was not dead.
Of this she soon resolved to make herself sure.
She closed the door of the studio; in the strength of her new hope undressed the figure, put it in its place, concealed the garments-all the work of a few minutes; and then, finding her father just recovering from the worst of his fear, told him there was nothing in the studio but what ought to be there, and persuaded him to go and see.
He not only saw no one, but found that no further liberties had been taken with his pictures.
Reassured, he soon persuaded himself that the spectre in this case had been the offspring of his own terror haunted brain.
But he had no spirit for painting now.
He wandered about the house, himself haunting it like a restless ghost.
When night came, Lilith retired to her own room.
The waters of fear had begun to subside in the house; but the painter and his old attendant did not yet follow her example.
As soon, however, as the house was quite still, Lilith glided noiselessly down the stairs, went into the studio, where as yet there assuredly was no vampire, and concealed herself in a corner.
As it would not do for an earnest student like Heinrich to be away from his work very often, he had not asked to accompany Lottchen this time. And indeed Karl himself, a little anxious about the result of the scarecrow, greatly preferred going alone.
While she was waiting for what might happen, the conviction grew upon Lilith, as she reviewed all the past of the story, that these phenomena were the work of the real Karl, and of no vampire.
In a few moments she was still more sure of this.
Behind the screen where she had taken refuge, hung one of the pictures out of which her portrait had been painted the night before last.
She had not looked at it long, before she wetted the tip of her forefinger, and began to rub away at the obliteration.
Her suspicions were instantly confirmed: the substance employed was only a gummy wash over the paint.
The delight she experienced at the discovery threw her into a mischievous humour.
"I will see," she said to herself, "whether I cannot match Karl Wolkenlicht at this game."
In a closet in the room hung a number of costumes, which Lilith had at different times worn for her father.
Among them was a large white drapery, which she easily disposed as a shroud.
With the help of some chalk, she soon made herself ghastly enough, and then placing her lamp on the floor behind the screen, and setting a chair over it, so that it should throw no light in any direction, she waited once more for the vampire.
Nor had she much longer to wait.
She soon heard a door move, the sound of which she hardly knew, and then the studio door opened.
Her heart beat dreadfully, not with fear lest it should be a vampire after all, but with hope that it was Karl.
To see him once more was too great joy.
Would she not make up to him for all her coldness!
But would he care for her now?
Perhaps he had been quite cured of his longing for a hard heart like hers.
She peeped.
It was he sure enough, looking as handsome as ever.
He was holding his light to look at her last work, and the expression of his face, even in regarding her handiwork, was enough to let her know that he loved her still.
If she had not seen this, she dared not have shown herself from her hiding place.
She then made a slight noise to attract Karl's attention.
He looked up, evidently rather startled, and saw the face of Lilith in the air: He gave a stifled cry threw himself on his knees with his arms stretched towards her, and moaned-
"I have killed her!
I have killed her!"
Lilith descended, and approached him noiselessly.
He did not move.
She came close to him and said-
"Are you Karl Wolkenlicht?"
His lips moved, but no sound came.
Karl sprang to his feet.
Lilith's laugh changed into a burst of sobbing and weeping, and in another moment the ghost was in the arms of the vampire.
Lilith had no idea how far her father had wronged Karl, and though, from thinking over the past, he had no doubt that the painter had drugged him, he did not wish to pain her by imparting this conviction.
But Lilith was afraid of a reaction of rage and hatred in her father after the terror was removed; and Karl saw that he might thus be deprived of all further intercourse with Lilith, and all chance of softening the old man's heart towards him; while Lilith would not hear of forsaking him who had banished all the human race but herself.
They managed at length to agree upon a plan of operation.
The first thing they did was to go to the cellar where the plaster mass lay, Karl carrying with him a great axe used for cleaving wood.
Lilith shuddered when she saw it, stained as it was with the wine Heinrich had spilt over it, and almost believed herself the midnight companion of a vampire after all, visiting with him the terrible corpse in which he lived all day.
But Karl soon reassured her; and a few good blows of the axe revealed a very different core to that which Teufelsbuerst supposed to be in it.
Karl broke it into pieces, and with Lilith's help, who insisted on carrying her share, the whole was soon at the bottom of the Moldau and every trace of its ever having existed removed.
Before morning, too, the form of Lilith had dawned anew in every picture.
When they had done, and Lilith, for all his entreaties, would remain with him no longer, Karl took his former clothes with him, and having spent the rest of the night in his old room, dressed in them in the morning.
The painter started, stared, rubbed his eyes, thought it was another spectral illusion, and was on the point of yielding to his terror, when Karl rose, and approached him with a smile.
The healthy, sunshiny countenance of Karl, let him be ghost or goblin, could not fail to produce somewhat of a tranquillising effect on Teufelsbuerst.
He took his offered hand mechanically, his countenance utterly vacant with idiotic bewilderment. Karl said-
"I was not well, and thought it better to pay a visit to a friend for a few days; but I shall soon make up for lost time, for I am all right now."
In a few moments he came up again.
Karl stole a glance at him.
There he stood in the same spot, no doubt more full of bewilderment than ever, but it was not possible that his face should express more.
At last he went to his easel, and sat down with a long drawn sigh as if of relief.
But though he sat at his easel, he painted none that day; and as often as Karl ventured a glance, he saw him still staring at him.
The discovery that his pictures were restored to their former condition aided, no doubt, in leading him to the same conclusion as the other facts, whatever that conclusion might be-probably that he had been the sport of some evil power, and had been for the greater part of a week utterly bewitched.
But when all was restored again to the old routine, it became evident that the peculiar direction of his art in which he had hitherto indulged had ceased to interest him.
The shock had acted chiefly upon that part of his mental being which had been so absorbed.
Karl paid him every attention; and the old man, for he now looked much older than before, submitted to receive his services as well as those of Lilith.
At length, one morning, he said in a slow thoughtful tone-
"Karl Wolkenlicht, I should like to paint you."
"Certainly, sir," answered Karl, jumping up, "where would you like me to sit?"
And as soon as he had finished Karl, he began once more to paint Lilith; and when he had painted her, he composed a picture for the very purpose of introducing them together; and in this picture there was neither ugliness nor torture, but human feeling and human hope instead.
Then Karl knew that he might speak to him of Lilith; and he spoke, and was heard with a smile.
CHAPTER six
THE SCREAM IN THE NIGHT
It was too late now to hesitate or turn back; we must press forward.
It was half past eleven.
I stood up with a gasp of thankfulness.
"I've got something to tell you."
"Well, what are they?"
"I don't know.
"I have it!" he said.
"Up the ladder.
If it doesn't ..."
Then Godfrey's voice spoke again.
"It's three minutes of twelve," he said.
"It must be long past midnight," I whispered.
"Well," I asked, at last, "what now?"
"I don't know what I fear; but there's something wrong over there. This is the first night for a week that that light hasn't appeared."
"Still," I pointed out, "that may have nothing to do with Swain."
"If he's back," I said, "he'll have taken the ladders down from the wall."
"The other ladder is still there," he said, and took off his cap and rubbed his head perplexedly.
"Then we'll start from there and take a quiet look for him.
"And here's an electric torch. Do you feel the button?"
"You'd better keep it in your hand," he added, "ready for action.
And now come ahead."
"Look here, Godfrey," I said, "do you realise that what we're about to do is pretty serious?
"You remind me of Tartarin," he said; "the adventurer Tartarin urging you on, the lawyer Tartarin holding you back.
But if he's too strong for you, why, stay here," and he started up the ladder.
I felt Godfrey press me back, and descended cautiously.
"Stand back!" he cried, hoarsely.
"Who is it?
What do you want?"
"It's Lester," I said, and Godfrey flashed his torch into my face, then back to Swain's.
"No; this is mr Godfrey."
Godfrey?"
"Whose house we're staying at," I explained.
Then we can talk.
"I want to wash," he said, thickly.
"You're right-that cut must be attended to," and he started toward the house.
"Wait!" Swain called after him, with unexpected vigour.
"We must take down the ladders.
"Why not?"
"If they're found, they'll suspect-they'll know ..."
"Very well," Godfrey agreed, at last.
The next instant, the figure poised itself on the coping of the wall and then plunged forward out of sight.
"Come on!" he said.
"We must save him if we can!" and he, too, disappeared.
CHAPTER fifteen
"mr Smith," began Betty.
"Who, exactly?" asked Smith.
"De whole bunch of dem."
Smith inspected Pugsy through his eyeglass.
"Can you give me any particulars?" he asked patiently.
"mr
Asher," said Betty, "and mr Philpotts, and all the rest of them." She struggled for a moment, but, unable to resist the temptation, added, "I told you so."
A faint smile appeared upon Smith's face.
'I'll go in and wait,' says he.
In about t'ree minutes along comes another gazebo.
I says, 'Well, gent,' I says, 'it's up to youse.
I can't be boddered!'"
"And what more could you have said?" agreed Smith approvingly.
"Tell me, did these gentlemen appear to be gay and light-hearted, or did they seem to be looking for someone with a hatchet?"
"Dreadfully," attested Betty.
"As I suspected," said Smith, "but we must not repine.
These trifling contretemps are the penalties we pay for our high journalistic aims.
Master Maloney's statement that "about 'steen" visitors had arrived proved to be a little exaggerated.
There were five men in the room.
Not a word was spoken as he paced, wrapped in thought, to the editorial chair.
This accomplished, he looked up and started.
"Ha!
I am observed!" he murmured.
The words broke the spell.
Instantly the five visitors burst simultaneously into speech.
"Are you the acting editor of this paper?"
"I wish to have a word with you, sir."
"mr Maloney, I presume?"
"Pardon me!"
"I should like a few moments' conversation."
"Are you mr Maloney, may I ask?" enquired the favored one.
The others paused for the reply.
Smith shook his head.
"My name is Smith."
Smith looked across at Betty, who had seated herself in her place by the typewriter.
Ah, well, never mind.
I am on the editorial staff of this paper."
"My wife," he went on, "has received this extraordinary communication from a man signing himself p Maloney.
We are both at a loss to make head or tail of it."
"It's an outrage.
And now, without the slightest warning, comes this peremptory dismissal from p Maloney. Who is p Maloney?
Where is mr Renshaw?"
The chorus burst forth.
It seemed that that was what they all wanted to know.
Who was p Maloney?
Where was mr Renshaw?
Smith nodded.
"I know, yours has always seemed to me work which the world will not willingly let die."
The Reverend Edwin's frosty face thawed into a bleak smile.
"And yet," continued Smith, "I gather that p Maloney, on the other hand, actually wishes to hurry on its decease.
Strange!"
"Where's this fellow Maloney?
See here-"
I write 'Moments of Mirth.'"
He stood up and shook mr Asher reverently by the hand.
"Gentlemen," he said, reseating himself, "this is a painful case.
The circumstances, as you will admit when you have heard all, are peculiar. You have asked me where mr Renshaw is.
I don't know."
"You don't know!" exclaimed mr Asher.
Shortly after I joined this journal, he started out on a vacation, by his doctor's orders, and left no address.
He was to enjoy complete rest.
Possibly racing down some rugged slope in the Rockies with two grizzlies and a wildcat in earnest pursuit.
Who can tell?"
Silent consternation prevailed among his audience.
Smith bowed.
A rapid fire impression of a glove fight, a spine shaking word picture of a railway smash, or something on those lines, would be welcomed.
But-"
"In this life," said Smith, shaking his head, "we must be prepared for every emergency.
You are unprepared.
The thing comes on you as a surprise.
The cry goes round New York, 'Comrades Asher, Waterman, Philpotts, and others have been taken unawares.
They cannot cope with the situation.'"
"But what is to be done?" cried mr Asher.
"Nothing, I fear, except to wait.
It may be that when mr Renshaw, having dodged the bears and eluded the wildcat, returns to his post, he will decide not to continue the paper on the lines at present mapped out.
He should be back in about ten weeks."
"Ten weeks!"
"Till then, the only thing to do is to wait.
You may rely on me to keep a watchful eye on your interests.
Smith is keeping a watchful eye on our interests.'"
"All the same, I should like to see this p Maloney," said mr Asher.
"I speak in your best interests.
He cannot brook interference.
He would be the first to regret any violent action, when once he had cooled off, but- Of course, if you wish it I could arrange a meeting. No?
And now, gentlemen, as I have a good deal of work to get through-
"All very disturbing to the man of culture and refinement," said Smith, as the door closed behind the last of the malcontents.
I see no further obstacle in our path.
I fear I have made Comrade Maloney perhaps a shade unpopular with our late contributors, but these things must be.
We must clench our teeth and face them manfully.
CHAPTER nine
It is claimed that in States, districts, and counties, in which the colored people are in the majority, the suppression of the colored vote is necessary to prevent "Negro Domination,"--to prevent the ascendency of the blacks over the whites in the administration of the State and local governments.
This claim is based upon the assumption that if the black vote were not suppressed in all such States, districts, and counties, black men would be supported and elected to office because they were black, and white men would be opposed and defeated because they were white.
Taking Mississippi for purposes of illustration, it will be seen that there has never been the slightest ground for such an apprehension.
No colored man in that State ever occupied a judicial position above that of Justice of the Peace and very few aspired to that position.
Of the two United States Senators and the seven members of the lower house of Congress not more than one colored man occupied a seat in each house at the same time.
Of the thirty five members of the State Senate, and of the one hundred and fifteen members of the House,--which composed the total membership of the State Legislature prior to eighteen seventy four,--there were never more than about seven colored men in the Senate and forty in the lower house.
The composition of the lower house of the State Legislature that was elected in eighteen seventy one was as follows:
Total membership, one hundred and fifteen.
Republicans, sixty six; Democrats, forty nine.
Colored members, thirty eight.
White members, seventy seven.
White majority, thirty nine.
Of the sixty six Republicans thirty eight were colored and twenty eight, white.
There was a slight increase in the colored membership as a result of the election of eighteen seventy three, but the colored men never at any time had control of the State Government nor of any branch or department thereof, nor even that of any county or municipality.
The State; district, county, and municipal governments were not only in control of white men, but white men who were to the manor born, or who were known as old citizens of the State-those who had lived in the State many years before the War of the Rebellion.
There was, therefore, never a time when that class of white men known as Carpet baggers had absolute control of the State Government, or that of any district, county or municipality, or any branch or department thereof.
There was never, therefore, any ground for the alleged apprehension of negro domination as a result of a free, fair, and honest election in any one of the Southern or Reconstructed States.
And this brings us to a consideration of the question, What is meant by "Negro Domination?"
The answer that the average reader would give to that question would be that it means the actual, physical domination of the blacks over the whites.
But, according to a high Democratic authority, that would be an incorrect answer.
The definition given by that authority I have every reason to believe is the correct one, the generally accepted one.
The authority referred to is the late Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Mississippi, h h
If this is the correct definition of that term,--and it is, no doubt, the generally accepted one,--then the friends and advocates of manhood suffrage will not deny that we have had in the past "Negro Domination," nationally as well as locally, and that we may have it in the future.
For instance, in the Presidential election of eighteen sixty eight, General Grant, the Republican candidate, lost the important and pivotal State of New York, a loss which would have resulted in his defeat if the Southern States that took part in that election had all voted against him.
That they did not do so was due to the votes of the colored men in those States.
Therefore Grant's first administration represented "Negro Domination."
Again, in eighteen seventy six, Hayes was declared elected President by a majority of one vote in the electoral college.
This was made possible by the result of the election in the States of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, about which there was much doubt and considerable dispute, and over which there was a bitter controversy.
But for the colored vote in those States there would have been no doubt, no dispute, no controversy.
Therefore, the Hayes administration represented "Negro Domination."
Again, in eighteen eighty, General Garfield, the Republican candidate for President, carried the State of New York by a plurality of about twenty thousand, without which he could not have been elected.
It will not be denied by those who are well informed that if the colored men that voted for him in that State at that time had voted against him, he would have lost the State and, with it, the Presidency.
Therefore, the Garfield Arthur administration represented "Negro Domination."
Again, in eighteen eighty four, mr Cleveland, the Democratic candidate, carried the doubtful but very important State of New York by the narrow margin of one thousand one hundred forty seven plurality, which resulted in his election.
It cannot and will not be denied that even at that early date the number of colored men that voted for mr Cleveland was far in excess of the plurality by which he carried the State.
mr Cleveland's first administration, therefore, represented "Negro Domination." mr Cleveland did not hesitate to admit and appreciate the fact that colored men contributed largely to his success, hence he did not fail to give that element of his party appropriate and satisfactory official recognition.
Again, in eighteen eighty eight, General Harrison, the Republican Presidential candidate, carried the State of New York by a plurality of about twenty thousand, which resulted in his election, which he would have lost but for the votes of the colored men in that State.
Therefore, Harrison's administration represented "Negro Domination."
The same is true of important elections in a number of States, districts and counties in which the colored vote proved to be potential and decisive.
Why was this? What was the excuse for it?
What was the motive, the incentive that caused it?
It was not in the interest of good, efficient, and capable government; for that we already had.
It was not on account of dishonesty, maladministration, misappropriation of public funds; for every dollar of the public funds had been faithfully accounted for.
It was not on account of high taxes; for it had been shown that, while the tax rate was quite high during the Alcorn administration, it had been reduced under the Ames administration to a point considerably less than it is now or than it has been for a number of years.
It was not to prevent "Negro Domination" and to make sure the ascendency of the whites in the administration of the State and local governments; for that was then the recognized and established order of things, from which there was no apprehension of departure.
Then, what was the cause of this sudden and unexpected uprising?
There must have been a strong, if not a justifiable, reason for it.
What was it?
CHAPTER eighteen.
THE DOG ON THE TRAP LINE.
Now, we will say first that there is as much or more difference in the man who handles the dog as there is in the different breeds of dogs.
We have heard men say that they wanted no dog on the trap line with them, and that they didn't believe that any one who did want a dog on the trap line knew but very little about trapping at the best.
Now those are the views and ideas of some trappers, while my experience has led me to see it otherwise.
One who is so constituted that they must give a dog the growl or perhaps a kick every time they come in reach, will undoubtedly find a dog of but little use on the trap line.
We have known some dogs to refuse to eat, and would lay out where they could watch in the direction in which their master had gone and piteously howl for hours, waiting the return of the master and friend.
I have seen other dogs that would take for the barn or any other place to get out of the way at the first sight or sound of their master.
I have seen men training dogs for bird hunting, who would treat the dog most cruelly and claim that a dog could not be trained to work a bird successfully under any other treatment.
Though I have seen others train the same breed of dogs to work a bird to perfection and that their most harsh treatment would be a tap or two with a little switch.
I will say that one who cannot understand the wag of a dog's tail, the wistful gaze of the eye, the quick lifting of the ears, the cautious raising of a foot, and above all, treat his dog as a friend, need expect his dog to be but little else than a nuisance on the trap line.
Several years ago I had a partner who had a dog, part stag hound and the other part just dog, I think.
One day he (my partner) asked if I would object to his bringing the dog to camp, saying that his wife was going on a visit and he had no place to leave the dog.
I told him that if he had a good dog I would be glad to have him in camp.
In a day or two pard went home and brought in the dog.
I asked if the animal was any good and he replied that he did not know how good he was.
I asked the name of the dog.
He said, "Oh, I call him Pont." I spoke to the dog, calling him by name.
He looked at me wistfully, wagging his tail.
The look that dog gave me said to me as plainly as words that this was the first kind word he had ever heard.
We went inside and the dog started to follow, when his master in a harsh voice said, "get out of here." I said, "where do you expect the dog to go?" I then took an old coat that was in the camp, placed it in the corner and called gently to Pont, patted the coat and told him to lay down on the coat, which he did.
I patted him saying that is a good place for Pont, and I can see that wistful gaze the dog gave me, now.
After we had our supper I asked my partner if he wasn't going to fix Pont some supper.
"Oh, after a while I will see if I can't find something for him." I took a biscuit from the table, spread some butter on it, called the dog to me, broke the biscuit in pieces, and gave it to the dog from my hand; then I found an old basin that chanced to be about the camp and fixed the dog a good supper.
After the dog had finished his supper I went to the coat in the corner, spoke gently to Pont, patted the coat, and told him to lay down on the coat.
That was the end of that, Pont knew his place and took it without any further trouble.
The next morning when we were about ready to start out on the trap line I asked Pard what he intended to do with Pont.
He said that he would tie him to a tree that stood against the shanty close to the door.
We were going to take different lines of traps.
I said, "What is the harm of Pont's going with me?" "All right, if you want him, I don't want any dog with me." I said, Am, (that was Pard's given name, for short) I don't believe the dog wants to go with you any more than you want him to.
Am's reply was that he guessed he would go all right if he wanted him.
I said.
Am, just for shucks, say nothing to the dog and see which one he will follow.
So we stepped outside the shack and the dog stood close to me.
I said, "Go on Am, and we will see who the dog will follow." He started off and the dog only looked at him.
Am stopped and told the dog to come on.
The dog got around behind me.
I started on my way, Pont following after I had gone a little ways.
I spoke to Pont, patting him on the head and told him what a good dog he was.
He jumped about and showed more ways than one how pleased he was, and from that day until we broke camp, Pont stayed with me.
He showed plainly the disgust he had for his master.
Pont showed what pride he took in the hunt, so much so that he did not like to have Am go near the pelt.
I saw from the very first day out that all that Pont needed was kind treatment and proper training to make a good help on the trap line.
I was careful to let him know what I was doing when setting a trap, and when he would go to smell at the bait after a trap had been set, I would speak to him in a firm voice and let him know that I did not approve of what he was doing.
When making blind sets, I took the same pains to show and give him to understand what I was doing.
I would sometimes, after giving him fair warning, let him put his foot into a trap.
Then all the time I was resetting the trap I would talk trap to him, and by action and word teach him the nature of the trap.
mr Trapper, please do not persuade yourself to believe that the intelligent dog cannot understand if you go about it right.
The third day Pont was with me he found a 'coon that had escaped with a trap nearly two weeks before.
My route called me up a little draw from the main stream.
I had not gone far up this when Pont took the trail of some animal and began working it up the side of the hill.
He soon raised his head and gave a long howl, as much as to say he is here and I want help.
After running a stick in the hole I soon discovered that the log was hollow.
Pont soon had the 'coon out, and when I saw it was the 'coon that had escaped with our trap, I gave Pont praise for what he had done, petting him and telling him of his good deed, and he seemed to understand it all.
Not long after this Am came into camp at night and reported that a fox had broken the chain on a certain trap and gone off with the trap, saying that he would take Pont in the morning and see if he could find the fox.
In the morning when we were ready to go Am tried to have Pont follow him, but it was no go, Pont would not go with him.
Then Am put a rope on to him and tried to lead him, but Pont would sulk and would not be led.
Then Am lost his temper and wanted to break Pont's neck again.
I said that I did not like to have Pont abused and that I would go along with him.
When we came to the place where the fox had escaped with the trap Am at once began to slap his hands and hiss Pont on.
Pont only crouched behind me for protection. I persuaded Am to go on down the run and look at the traps down that way while I and Pont would look after the escaped fox.
As soon as Am was gone I began to look about where the fox had been caught and search for his trail, and soon Pont began to wag his tail. I merely worked Pont's way and said, "Has he gone that way?" Pont gave me to understand that the fox had gone that way and that he knew what was wanted.
A little way up this we found where the fox had been fast in some bushes but had freed himself and left and gone up the hillside.
Pont soon began to get uneasy, and when I said hunt him out Pont, away he went and in a few minutes I heard Pont give a long howl and I knew that he had holed his game.
When I came up to Pont he was working in a hole in some shell rocks.
There was scarcely a week that Pont did not help us out on the trap line.
Not unfrequently did Pont show me a 'coon den.
I had some difficulty in teaching Pont to let the porcupines alone, but after a time he learned that they were not the kind of game that he wanted, and he paid no more attention to them.
I have had many different dogs on the trap line with me, and I can say to any one who can understand dog's language, has a liking for a dog and has a reasonable amount of patience and is willing to use it, will find a well trained dog of much benefit on the trap line, and often a more genial companion than some partners one may fall in with.
eighteen forty seven to eighteen eighty.
The story of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the "bonnie Prince Charlie" of song, is too well known to need recapitulation here.
That he died in seventeen eighty eight, without leaving any legitimate offspring, is a fact equally well known; as also that his brother Henry Stuart, Cardinal York, who died in eighteen o seven, was the last of his ill fated race.
Notwithstanding the incontrovertible nature of these circumstances, attempts have been made within the last thirty or forty years to prove that Prince Charles did leave a legitimate son, the child of his wife the Princess Louisa; and that two brothers, who until quite recently were residing in London under the pseudonyms of "Counts d'Albanie," were the children of this unknown royal prince, and therefore grandchildren of "Charles the Third."
On glancing into the conveyance he was still more startled by beholding the not to be forgotten countenance of his beloved "Prince Charlie," seated by a lady's side.
On the evening of the same day, whilst meditating on what he had seen, he was accosted by a man of military appearance, and asked whether he was dr Beaton, the Scotch physician.
On replying in the affirmative, he was informed that his immediate attendance was required in a case of urgency, and all his questions as to the nature of the patient's malady were disposed of in a very unceremonious manner.
His reluctance to be blindfolded before entering a carriage that was in waiting was overcome by the intimation that it was on behalf of him whom both recognised as their royal chief, that is to say, Prince Charles.
After the usual style of such mystic tales, dr Beaton was taken to a secluded palace, and after being led through the usual corridors and apartments of such abodes, had his mask removed, and was permitted to inspect the magnificent chamber into which he had been inducted.
He was taken into a gorgeous bedroom, where a lady who spoke English led him towards the bed, wherein he beheld the face of the lady he had seen in the carriage with Prince Charles, whilst by the bedside was a woman holding the newly born babe wrapped in a mantle.
The patient was in a somewhat critical condition, so dr Beaton hastily turned to a writing table near at hand to write a prescription for her, and in so doing beheld among the trinkets on the table a miniature of Prince Charles, attired in the very uniform the doctor had seen him in at Culloden.
The lady who had spoken English approached the table as if looking for something, and when Beaton looked again, the portrait had been turned on its face.
Having performed his duties, the doctor was persuaded to take an oath on a crucifix, "never to speak of what he had seen, heard, or thought on that night, unless it should be in the service of his king-King Charles;" he was, also, desired to leave Tuscany that night, and then conducted from the dwelling in the same needlessly mysterious manner as he had been taken to it.
The doctor obeyed his injunctions to the letter, and at once departed from the neighbourhood.
A few days later he arrived at a certain seaport, and one night, soon after his arrival, he was strolling along the beach when his attention was attracted by an English looking vessel anchored off the coast.
His curiosity aroused by this singular coincidence, he stopped to watch what happened, and beheld a lady, bearing a babe in her arms, descend from the mysterious vehicle. This lady and her infantile charge were then conveyed on board the frigate, and no sooner had they got on board than the vessel hoisted sail and slowly disappeared.
The babe, it is implied, was the legitimate son and heir of Prince Charles, thus mysteriously smuggled off in order to preserve it from the machinations of the English government.
Even had not direct testimony been forthcoming, the circumstantial evidence against the allegation that Prince Charles had left a legitimate child is so strong that no amount of "Romance of History" could upset it.
In his latter days, when separated from his wife, the Princess Louisa, Prince Charles sent for his illegitimate daughter by Miss Walkinshaw; created her Duchess of Albany, made her mistress of his household, and left her by will almost everything that he possessed, including such family jewels and plate as were still in his possession.
After the death of Prince Charles, who, from the time of his father's decease, had borne the title of King of England, his brother, clearly ignorant of the existence of a nearer claimant to the distinction, also assumed the royal title, and caused himself to be addressed as a sovereign, and styled "Henry the Ninth, King of Great Britain and Ireland."
But, perhaps, the height of Shakespeare's conception of life is such that, tho he does not satisfy the esthetic demands, he discloses to us a view of life so new and important for men that, in consideration of its importance, all his failures as an artist become imperceptible.
So, indeed, say Shakespeare's admirers.
Gervinus devotes the concluding chapter of his second volume, about fifty pages, to an explanation of this.
The ethical authority of this supreme teacher of life consists in the following: The starting point of Shakespeare's conception of life, says Gervinus, is that man is gifted with powers of activity, and therefore, first of all, according to Gervinus, Shakespeare regarded it as good and necessary for man that he should act (as if it were possible for a man not to act):
And happiness and success, according to Shakespeare, are attained by individuals possessing this active character, not at all owing to the superiority of their nature; on the contrary, notwithstanding their inferior gifts, the capacity of activity itself always gives them the advantage over inactivity, quite independent of any consideration whether the inactivity of some persons flows from excellent impulses and the activity of others from bad ones.
"Activity is good, inactivity is evil. Activity transforms evil into good," says Shakespeare, according to Gervinus.
In other words, he prefers death and murder due to ambition, to abstinence and wisdom.
He did not admit that the limits of duties should exceed the biddings of Nature.
That one may do too much good (exceed the reasonable limits of good) is convincingly proved by Shakespeare's words and examples.
"There are classes of men whose morality is best guarded by the positive precepts of religion and state law; to such persons Shakespeare's creations are inaccessible.
They are comprehensible and accessible only to the educated, from whom one can expect that they should acquire the healthy tact of life and self consciousness by means of which the innate guiding powers of conscience and reason, uniting with the will, lead us to the definite attainment of worthy aims in life.
But even for such educated people, Shakespeare's teaching is not always without danger. The condition on which his teaching is quite harmless is that it should be accepted in all its completeness, in all its parts, without any omission.
In order thus to accept all, one should understand that, according to his teaching, it is stupid and harmful for the individual to revolt against, or endeavor to overthrow, the limits of established religious and state forms.
Property, the family, the state, are sacred; but aspiration toward the recognition of the equality of men is insanity.
How could a man who so eloquently attracts people toward honors, permit that the very aspiration toward that which was great be crushed together with rank and distinction for services, and, with the destruction of all degrees, "the motives for all high undertakings be stifled"?
Even if the attraction of honors and false power treacherously obtained were to cease, could the poet admit of the most dreadful of all violence, that of the ignorant crowd?
Such is Shakespeare's view of life as demonstrated by his greatest exponent and admirer.
And indeed, Shakespeare always held that there are no unconditional prohibitions, nor unconditional duties.
And he who will attentively read Shakespeare's works can not fail to recognize that the description of this Shakespearian view of life by his admirers is quite correct.
The merit of every poetic work depends on three things:
Without this condition there can be no work of art, as the essence of art consists in the contemplation of the work of art being infected with the author's feeling.
If the author does not actually feel what he expresses, then the recipient can not become infected with the feeling of the author, does not experience any feeling, and the production can no longer be classified as a work of art.
The second condition also, with the exception of the rendering of the scenes in which the movement of feelings is expressed, is quite absent in Shakespeare.
He does not grasp the natural character of the positions of his personages, nor the language of the persons represented, nor the feeling of measure without which no work can be artistic.
The third and most important condition, sincerity, is completely absent in all Shakespeare's works.
It was on such a day, and such an occasion, that my timorous acquaintance and I were about to grace the board of the ruddy faced host of the Black Bear, in the town of Darlington, and bishopric of Durham, when our landlord informed us, with a sort of apologetic tone, that there was a Scotch gentleman to dine with us.
"A gentleman!--what sort of a gentleman?" said my companion somewhat hastily-his mind, I suppose, running on gentlemen of the pad, as they were then termed.
"I respect the Scotch, sir; I love and honour the nation for their sense of morality.
Men talk of their filth and their poverty: but commend me to sterling honesty, though clad in rags, as the poet saith.
But thou kens I'm an outspoken Yorkshire tyke.
So saying, he eagerly whetted his knife, assumed his seat of empire at the head of the board, and loaded the plates of his sundry guests with his good cheer.
This was the first time I had heard the Scottish accent, or, indeed, that I had familiarly met with an individual of the ancient nation by whom it was spoken.
Yet, from an early period, they had occupied and interested my imagination.
The quarrel betwixt him and his relatives was such, that he scarcely ever mentioned the race from which he sprung, and held as the most contemptible species of vanity, the weakness which is commonly termed family pride.
His ambition was only to be distinguished as William Osbaldistone, the first, at least one of the first, merchants on Change; and to have proved him the lineal representative of William the Conqueror would have far less flattered his vanity than the hum and bustle which his approach was wont to produce among the bulls, bears, and brokers of Stock alley.
But his designs, as will happen occasionally to the wisest, were, in some degree at least, counteracted by a being whom his pride would never have supposed of importance adequate to influence them in any way.
His nurse, an old Northumbrian woman, attached to him from his infancy, was the only person connected with his native province for whom he retained any regard; and when fortune dawned upon him, one of the first uses which he made of her favours, was to give Mabel Rickets a place of residence within his household.
Interdicted by her master from speaking to him on the subject of the heaths, glades, and dales of her beloved Northumberland, she poured herself forth to my infant ear in descriptions of the scenes of her youth, and long narratives of the events which tradition declared to have passed amongst them.
D.--
Oh, the oak, the ash, and the bonny ivy tree, They flourish best at home in the North Countrie!
Now, in the legends of Mabel, the Scottish nation was ever freshly remembered, with all the embittered declamation of which the narrator was capable.
The inhabitants of the opposite frontier served in her narratives to fill up the parts which ogres and giants with seven leagued boots occupy in the ordinary nursery tales.
And how could it be otherwise?
Was it not Wat the Devil, who drove all the year old hogs off the braes of Lanthorn side, in the very recent days of my grandfather's father?
And had we not many a trophy, but, according to old Mabel's version of history, far more honourably gained, to mark our revenge of these wrongs?
All our family renown was acquired-all our family misfortunes were occasioned-by the northern wars.
Warmed by such tales, I looked upon the Scottish people during my childhood, as a race hostile by nature to the more southern inhabitants of this realm; and this view of the matter was not much corrected by the language which my father sometimes held with respect to them.
He had engaged in some large speculations concerning oak woods, the property of Highland proprietors, and alleged, that he found them much more ready to make bargains, and extort earnest of the purchase money, than punctual in complying on their side with the terms of the engagements.
The Scottish mercantile men, whom he was under the necessity of employing as a sort of middle men on these occasions, were also suspected by my father of having secured, by one means or other, more than their own share of the profit which ought to have accrued.
In justification, or apology, for those who entertained such prejudices, I must remark, that the Scotch of that period were guilty of similar injustice to the English, whom they branded universally as a race of purse proud arrogant epicures.
Such seeds of national dislike remained between the two countries, the natural consequences of their existence as separate and rival states.
We have seen recently the breath of a demagogue blow these sparks into a temporary flame, which I sincerely hope is now extinguished in its own ashes.
There was much about him that coincided with my previous conceptions.
He had the hard features and athletic form said to be peculiar to his country, together with the national intonation and slow pedantic mode of expression, arising from a desire to avoid peculiarities of idiom or dialect.
But I was not prepared for the air of easy self possession and superiority with which he seemed to predominate over the company into which he was thrown, as it were by accident.
His dress was as coarse as it could be, being still decent; and, at a time when great expense was lavished upon the wardrobe, even of the lowest who pretended to the character of gentleman, this indicated mediocrity of circumstances, if not poverty.
His conversation intimated that he was engaged in the cattle trade, no very dignified professional pursuit.
And yet, under these disadvantages, he seemed, as a matter of course, to treat the rest of the company with the cool and condescending politeness which implies a real, or imagined, superiority over those towards whom it is used.
When he gave his opinion on any point, it was with that easy tone of confidence used by those superior to their society in rank or information, as if what he said could not be doubted, and was not to be questioned.
Mine host and his Sunday guests, after an effort or two to support their consequence by noise and bold averment, sunk gradually under the authority of mr Campbell, who thus fairly possessed himself of the lead in the conversation.
In the latter respect he offered no competition, and it was easy to see that his natural powers had never been cultivated by education.
On the subject of politics, Campbell observed a silence and moderation which might arise from caution.
The divisions of Whig and Tory then shook England to her very centre, and a powerful party, engaged in the Jacobite interest, menaced the dynasty of Hanover, which had been just established on the throne.
Every alehouse resounded with the brawls of contending politicians, and as mine host's politics were of that liberal description which quarrelled with no good customer, his hebdomadal visitants were often divided in their opinion as irreconcilably as if he had feasted the Common Council.
The curate and the apothecary, with a little man, who made no boast of his vocation, but who, from the flourish and snap of his fingers, I believe to have been the barber, strongly espoused the cause of high church and the Stuart line.
The excise man, as in duty bound, and the attorney, who looked to some petty office under the Crown, together with my fellow traveller, who seemed to enter keenly into the contest, staunchly supported the cause of King George and the Protestant succession.
Dire was the screaming-deep the oaths!
Each party appealed to mr Campbell, anxious, it seemed, to elicit his approbation.
"And did you, sir, really," said my fellow traveller, edging his chair (I should have said his portmanteau) nearer to mr Campbell, "really and actually beat two highwaymen yourself alone?"
"Upon my word, sir," replied my acquaintance, "I should be happy to have the pleasure of your company on my journey-I go northward, sir."
This piece of gratuitous information concerning the route he proposed to himself, the first I had heard my companion bestow upon any one, failed to excite the corresponding confidence of the Scotchman.
"We can scarce travel together," he replied, drily.
"You, sir, doubtless, are well mounted, and I for the present travel on foot, or on a Highland shelty, that does not help me much faster forward."
So saying, he called for a reckoning for the wine, and throwing down the price of the additional bottle which he had himself introduced, rose as if to take leave of us.
My companion made up to him, and taking him by the button, drew him aside into one of the windows.
I could not help overhearing him pressing something-I supposed his company upon the journey, which mr Campbell seemed to decline.
"I will pay your charges, sir," said the traveller, in a tone as if he thought the argument should bear down all opposition.
"It is quite impossible," said Campbell, somewhat contemptuously; "I have business at Rothbury."
"That gentleman," I replied, looking towards the traveller, "is no friend of mine, but an acquaintance whom I picked up on the road.
"The gentleman," replied I, "knows his own affairs best, and I should be sorry to constitute myself a judge of them in any respect."
mr Campbell made no farther observation, but merely wished me a good journey, and the party dispersed for the evening.
Next day I parted company with my timid companion, as I left the great northern road to turn more westerly in the direction of Osbaldistone Manor, my uncle's seat.
I cannot tell whether he felt relieved or embarrassed by my departure, considering the dubious light in which he seemed to regard me.
ROB ROY
By Sir Walter Scott
And hurry, hurry, off they rode, As fast as fast might be; Hurra, hurra, the dead can ride, Dost fear to ride with me? Burger.
But it is not enough that Shakespeare's characters are placed in tragic positions which are impossible, do not flow from the course of events, are inappropriate to time and space-these personages, besides this, act in a way which is out of keeping with their definite character, and is quite arbitrary.
It is generally asserted that in Shakespeare's dramas the characters are specially well expressed, that, notwithstanding their vividness, they are many sided, like those of living people; that, while exhibiting the characteristics of a given individual, they at the same time wear the features of man in general; it is usual to say that the delineation of character in Shakespeare is the height of perfection.
This is asserted with such confidence and repeated by all as indisputable truth; but however much I endeavored to find confirmation of this in Shakespeare's dramas, I always found the opposite.
This is absent from Shakespeare.
They speak all alike.
If there is a difference in the speech of Shakespeare's various characters, it lies merely in the different dialogs which are pronounced for these characters-again by Shakespeare and not by themselves.
In the same way, also, it is Shakespeare alone who speaks for his villains: Richard, Edmund, Iago, Macbeth, expressing for them those vicious feelings which villains never express.
So that in Shakespeare there is no language of living individuals-that language which in the drama is the chief means of setting forth character.
Moreover, if the characters speak at random and in a random way, and all in one and the same diction, as is the case in Shakespeare's work, then even the action of gesticulation is wasted.
Therefore, whatever the blind panegyrists of Shakespeare may say, in Shakespeare there is no expression of character.
But all these characters, as well as all the others, instead of belonging to Shakespeare, are taken by him from dramas, chronicles, and romances anterior to him.
All these characters not only are not rendered more powerful by him, but, in most cases, they are weakened and spoilt.
The characters of this drama, that of King Lear, and especially of Cordelia, not only were not created by Shakespeare, but have been strikingly weakened and deprived of force by him, as compared with their appearance in the older drama.
All these motives for Lear's conduct are absent in Shakespeare's play.
Then, when, according to the old drama, Leir asks his daughters about their love for him, Cordelia does not say, as Shakespeare has it, that she will not give her father all her love, but will love her husband, too, should she marry-which is quite unnatural-but simply says that she can not express her love in words, but hopes that her actions will prove it.
She tells him the cause of her grief.
Then the pilgrim, still disguised, offers her his hand and heart and Cordelia confesses she loves the pilgrim and consents to marry him, notwithstanding the poverty that awaits her.
As in Shakespeare's drama, so also in the older drama, the courtiers, Perillus-Kent-who had interceded for Cordelia and was therefore banished-comes to Leir and assures him of his love, but under no disguise, but simply as a faithful old servant who does not abandon his king in a moment of need.
Leir tells him what, according to Shakespeare, he tells Cordelia in the last scene, that, if the daughters whom he has benefited hate him, a retainer to whom he has done no good can not love him.
But Perillus-Kent-assures the King of his love toward him, and Leir, pacified, goes on to Regan.
Turned out by his elder daughters, Leir, according to the older drama, as a last resource, goes with Perillus to Cordelia.
She accepts the counsel and takes Leir into her house without disclosing herself to him, and nurses him.
"If from the first," says Leir, "I should relate the cause, I would make a heart of adamant to weep. And thou, poor soul, kind hearted as thou art, Dost weep already, ere I do begin."
Cordelia: "For God's love tell it, and when you have done I'll tell the reason why I weep so soon."
Is there anything approaching this exquisite scene in Shakespeare's drama?
Thus it is in the drama we are examining, which Shakespeare has borrowed from the drama "King Leir." So it is also with Othello, taken from an Italian romance, the same also with the famous Hamlet.
Shakespeare's Othello suffers from epilepsy, of which he has an attack on the stage; moreover, in Shakespeare's version, Desdemona's murder is preceded by the strange vow of the kneeling Othello.
In that romance the reasons for Othello's jealousy are represented more naturally than in Shakespeare. In the romance, Cassio, knowing whose the handkerchief is, goes to Desdemona to return it, but, approaching the back door of Desdemona's house, sees Othello and flies from him.
Othello perceives the escaping Cassio, and this, more than anything, confirms his suspicions. Shakespeare has not got this, and yet this casual incident explains Othello's jealousy more than anything else.
With Shakespeare, this jealousy is founded entirely on Iago's persistent, successful machinations and treacherous words, which Othello blindly believes. Othello's monolog over the sleeping Desdemona, about his desiring her when killed to look as she is alive, about his going to love her even dead, and now wishing to smell her "balmy breath," etc, is utterly impossible.
A man who is preparing for the murder of a beloved being, does not utter such phrases, still less after committing the murder would he speak about the necessity of an eclipse of sun and moon, and of the globe yawning; nor can he, negro tho he may be, address devils, inviting them to burn him in hot sulphur and so forth.
Lastly, however effective may be the suicide, absent in the romance, it completely destroys the conception of his clearly defined character.
So it is with the chief character, Othello, but notwithstanding its alteration and the disadvantageous features which it is made thereby to present in comparison with the character from which it was taken in the romance, this character still remains a character, but all the other personages are completely spoiled by Shakespeare.
Iago, according to Shakespeare, is an unmitigated villain, deceiver, and thief, a robber who robs Roderigo and always succeeds even in his most impossible designs, and therefore is a person quite apart from real life.
There are many motives, but they are all vague.
Emilia, who says anything it may occur to the author to put into her mouth, has not even the slightest semblance of a live character.
"But Falstaff, the wonderful Falstaff," Shakespeare's eulogists will say, "of him, at all events, one can not say that he is not a living character, or that, having been taken from the comedy of an unknown author, it has been weakened."
Falstaff, like all Shakespeare's characters, was taken from a drama or comedy by an unknown author, written on a really living person, Sir john Oldcastle, who had been the friend of some duke.
This Oldcastle had once been convicted of heresy, but had been saved by his friend the duke.
But afterward he was condemned and burned at the stake for his religious beliefs, which did not conform with Catholicism.
Falstaff is, indeed, quite a natural and typical character; but then it is perhaps the only natural and typical character depicted by Shakespeare.
And this character is natural and typical because, of all Shakespeare's characters, it alone speaks a language proper to itself. And it speaks thus because it speaks in that same Shakespearian language, full of mirthless jokes and unamusing puns which, being unnatural to all Shakespeare's other characters, is quite in harmony with the boastful, distorted, and depraved character of the drunken Falstaff.
For this reason alone does this figure truly represent a definite character.
Thus it is with Falstaff.
And putting into the mouth of his hero these thoughts: about life (the grave digger), about death (To be or not to be)--the same which are expressed in his sixty sixth sonnet-about the theater, about women.
He persists, then sees his mother in private, kills a courtier who was eavesdropping, and convicts his mother of her sin.
All this is comprehensible and flows from Hamlet's character and position.
During the whole of the drama, Hamlet is doing, not what he would really wish to do, but what is necessary for the author's plan.
One moment he is awe struck at his father's ghost, another moment he begins to chaff it, calling it "old mole"; one moment he loves Ophelia, another moment he teases her, and so forth.
There is no possibility of finding any explanation whatever of Hamlet's actions or words, and therefore no possibility of attributing any character to him.
And lo! profound critics declare that in this drama, in the person of Hamlet, is expressed singularly powerful, perfectly novel, and deep personality, existing in this person having no character; and that precisely in this absence of character consists the genius of creating a deeply conceived character.
So that neither do the characters of Lear nor Othello nor Falstaff nor yet Hamlet in any way confirm the existing opinion that Shakespeare's power consists in the delineation of character.
That a great talent for depicting character is attributed to Shakespeare arises from his actually possessing a peculiarity which, for superficial observers and in the play of good actors, may appear to be the capacity of depicting character.
This peculiarity consists in the capacity of representative scenes expressing the play of emotion.
Shakespeare, himself an actor, and an intelligent man, knew how to express by the means not only of speech, but of exclamation, gesture, and the repetition of words, states of mind and developments or changes of feeling taking place in the persons represented.
Such clever methods of expressing the development of feeling, giving good actors the possibility of demonstrating their powers, were, and are, often mistaken by many critics for the expression of character.
They were in a wretched state, worn out and worn down.
They were all terribly footsore.
There was nothing the matter with them except that they were dead tired.
In less than five months they had travelled twenty five hundred miles, during the last eighteen hundred of which they had had but five days' rest. When they arrived at Skaguay they were apparently on their last legs. They could barely keep the traces taut, and on the down grades just managed to keep out of the way of the sled.
"Mush on, poor sore feets," the driver encouraged them as they tottered down the main street of Skaguay.
But so many were the men who had rushed into the Klondike, and so many were the sweethearts, wives, and kin that had not rushed in, that the congested mail was taking on Alpine proportions; also, there were official orders. Fresh batches of Hudson Bay dogs were to take the places of those worthless for the trail.
The worthless ones were to be got rid of, and, since dogs count for little against dollars, they were to be sold.
This belt was the most salient thing about him.
"Mercedes" the men called her.
When they put a clothes sack on the front of the sled, she suggested it should go on the back; and when they had put it on the back, and covered it over with a couple of other bundles, she discovered overlooked articles which could abide nowhere else but in that very sack, and they unloaded again.
"It's springtime, and you won't get any more cold weather," the man replied.
"Think it'll ride?" one of the men asked.
"Why shouldn't it?" Charles demanded rather shortly.
"Oh, that's all right, that's all right," the man hastened meekly to say.
The dogs sprang against the breast bands, strained hard for a few moments, then relaxed.
They need a rest."
But she was a clannish creature, and rushed at once to the defence of her brother.
"Never mind that man," she said pointedly.
They threw themselves against the breast bands, dug their feet into the packed snow, got down low to it, and put forth all their strength.
After two efforts, they stood still, panting.
"You poor, poor dears," she cried sympathetically, "why don't you pull hard?--then you wouldn't be whipped." Buck did not like her, but he was feeling too miserable to resist her, taking it as part of the day's miserable work.
The runners are froze fast.
Throw your weight against the gee pole, right and left, and break it out."
The dogs never stopped.
The lightened sled bounded on its side behind them.
Buck was raging.
He tripped and was pulled off his feet.
Kind hearted citizens caught the dogs and gathered up the scattered belongings.
"Half as many is too much; get rid of them.
Throw away that tent, and all those dishes,--who's going to wash them, anyway?
Good Lord, do you think you're travelling on a Pullman?"
She clasped hands about knees, rocking back and forth broken heartedly.
This accomplished, the outfit, though cut in half, was still a formidable bulk.
These, added to the six of the original team, and Teek and Koona, the huskies obtained at the Rink Rapids on the record trip, brought the team up to fourteen.
Buck and his comrades looked upon them with disgust, and though he speedily taught them their places and what not to do, he could not teach them what to do.
The two men, however, were quite cheerful.
And they were proud, too.
In the nature of Arctic travel there was a reason why fourteen dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could not carry the food for fourteen dogs.
They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so many dogs, so many days, q e d
Late next morning Buck led the long team up the street.
They were starting dead weary.
Four times he had covered the distance between Salt Water and Dawson, and the knowledge that, jaded and tired, he was facing the same trail once more, made him bitter.
His heart was not in the work, nor was the heart of any dog.
They did not know how to do anything, and as the days went by it became apparent that they could not learn.
They were slack in all things, without order or discipline.
It took them half the night to pitch a slovenly camp, and half the morning to break that camp and get the sled loaded in fashion so slovenly that for the rest of the day they were occupied in stopping and rearranging the load.
Some days they did not make ten miles.
The Outside dogs, whose digestions had not been trained by chronic famine to make the most of little, had voracious appetites. And when, in addition to this, the worn out huskies pulled weakly, Hal decided that the orthodox ration was too small.
But it was not food that Buck and the huskies needed, but rest.
Then came the underfeeding.
So he cut down even the orthodox ration and tried to increase the day's travel.
His sister and brother in law seconded him; but they were frustrated by their heavy outfit and their own incompetence.
It was the cherished belief of each that he did more than his share of the work, and neither forbore to speak this belief at every opportunity. Sometimes Mercedes sided with her husband, sometimes with her brother. The result was a beautiful and unending family quarrel.
In the meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp half pitched, and the dogs unfed.
Mercedes nursed a special grievance-the grievance of sex.
Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex prerogative, she made their lives unendurable.
She let her legs go limp like a spoiled child, and sat down on the trail.
They went on their way, but she did not move.
In the excess of their own misery they were callous to the suffering of their animals.
In its frozen state it was more like strips of galvanized iron, and when a dog wrestled it into his stomach it thawed into thin and innutritious leathery strings and into a mass of short hair, irritating and indigestible.
And through it all Buck staggered along at the head of the team as in a nightmare.
It was heartbreaking, only Buck's heart was unbreakable.
They were perambulating skeletons.
There were seven all together, including him.
They were simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly.
There came a day when Billee, the good-natured, fell and could not rise. Hal had traded off his revolver, so he took the axe and knocked Billee on the head as he lay in the traces, then cut the carcass out of the harness and dragged it to one side.
It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware of it.
The sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds.
Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green.
Air holes formed, fissures sprang and spread apart, while thin sections of ice fell through bodily into the river.
When they halted, the dogs dropped down as though they had all been struck dead.
Charles sat down on a log to rest.
Hal did the talking.
john Thornton was whittling the last touches on an axe handle he had made from a stick of birch.
"And they told you true," john Thornton answered.
"The bottom's likely to drop out at any moment.
I tell you straight, I wouldn't risk my carcass on that ice for all the gold in Alaska."
Hi! Get up there!
It was idle, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would not alter the scheme of things.
But the team did not get up at the command.
john Thornton compressed his lips.
Teek followed. Joe came next, yelping with pain.
Pike made painful efforts.
Buck made no effort.
A moisture came into his eyes, and, as the whipping continued, he arose and walked irresolutely up and down.
What of the thin and rotten ice he had felt under his feet all day, it seemed that he sensed disaster close at hand, out there ahead on the ice where his master was trying to drive him.
He refused to stir.
It was nearly out.
As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten.
The last sensations of pain left him.
He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body.
I'm going to Dawson."
He rapped his knuckles again as he tried to pick it up. Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two strokes cut Buck's traces.
They were limping and staggering.
As Buck watched them, Thornton knelt beside him and with rough, kindly hands searched for broken bones.
Suddenly, they saw its back end drop down, as into a rut, and the gee pole, with Hal clinging to it, jerk into the air.
The bottom had dropped out of the trail.
john Thornton and Buck looked at each other.
"You poor devil," said john Thornton, and Buck licked his hand.
Chapter six.
A rest comes very good after one has travelled three thousand miles, and it must be confessed that Buck waxed lazy as his wounds healed, his muscles swelled out, and the flesh came back to cover his bones.
For that matter, they were all loafing,--Buck, john Thornton, and Skeet and Nig,--waiting for the raft to come that was to carry them down to Dawson.
Skeet was a little Irish setter who early made friends with Buck, who, in a dying condition, was unable to resent her first advances.
She had the doctor trait which some dogs possess; and as a mother cat washes her kittens, so she washed and cleansed Buck's wounds.
Regularly, each morning after he had finished his breakfast, she performed her self appointed task, till he came to look for her ministrations as much as he did for Thornton's.
Nig, equally friendly, though less demonstrative, was a huge black dog, half bloodhound and half deerhound, with eyes that laughed and a boundless good nature.
To Buck's surprise these dogs manifested no jealousy toward him.
As Buck grew stronger they enticed him into all sorts of ridiculous games, in which Thornton himself could not forbear to join; and in this fashion Buck romped through his convalescence and into a new existence.
Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time.
This man had saved his life, which was something; but, further, he was the ideal master.
Other men saw to the welfare of their dogs from a sense of duty and business expediency; he saw to the welfare of his as if they were his own children, because he could not help it.
And he saw further.
He had a way of taking Buck's head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck's, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names.
Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy.
And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without movement, john Thornton would reverently exclaim, "God! you can all but speak!"
Buck had a trick of love expression that was akin to hurt.
He would often seize Thornton's hand in his mouth and close so fiercely that the flesh bore the impress of his teeth for some time afterward.
For the most part, however, Buck's love was expressed in adoration. While he went wild with happiness when Thornton touched him or spoke to him, he did not seek these tokens.
And often, such was the communion in which they lived, the strength of Buck's gaze would draw john Thornton's head around, and he would return the gaze, without speech, his heart shining out of his eyes as Buck's heart shone out.
For a long time after his rescue, Buck did not like Thornton to get out of his sight.
From the moment he left the tent to when he entered it again, Buck would follow at his heels.
But in spite of this great love he bore john Thornton, which seemed to bespeak the soft civilizing influence, the strain of the primitive, which the Northland had aroused in him, remained alive and active. Faithfulness and devotion, things born of fire and roof, were his; yet he retained his wildness and wiliness.
Because of his very great love, he could not steal from this man, but from any other man, in any other camp, he did not hesitate an instant; while the cunning with which he stole enabled him to escape detection.
Skeet and Nig were too good-natured for quarrelling,--besides, they belonged to john Thornton; but the strange dog, no matter what the breed or valor, swiftly acknowledged Buck's supremacy or found himself struggling for life with a terrible antagonist.
And Buck was merciless.
It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death.
Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.
But as often as he gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for john Thornton drew him back to the fire again.
Nothing was too great for Buck to do, when Thornton commanded.
One day (they had grub staked themselves from the proceeds of the raft and left Dawson for the head waters of the Tanana) the men and dogs were sitting on the crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bed rock three hundred feet below.
john Thornton was sitting near the edge, Buck at his shoulder.
"It's uncanny," Pete said, after it was over and they had caught their speech.
"No, it is splendid, and it is terrible, too. Do you know, it sometimes makes me afraid."
"Not mineself either."
A "miners' meeting," called on the spot, decided that the dog had sufficient provocation, and Buck was discharged.
Buck, on the bank, worried and anxious, kept abreast of the boat, his eyes never off his master.
This it did, and was flying down stream in a current as swift as a mill race, when Hans checked it with the rope and checked too suddenly.
When he felt him grasp his tail, Buck headed for the bank, swimming with all his splendid strength.
But the progress shoreward was slow; the progress down stream amazingly rapid.
The suck of the water as it took the beginning of the last steep pitch was frightful, and Thornton knew that the shore was impossible.
He clutched its slippery top with both hands, releasing Buck, and above the roar of the churning water shouted: "Go, Buck!
Hans promptly snubbed with the rope, as though Buck were a boat.
He staggered to his feet and fell down.
The faint sound of Thornton's voice came to them, and though they could not make out the words of it, they knew that he was in his extremity.
Hans paid out the rope, permitting no slack, while Pete kept it clear of coils.
Thornton saw him coming, and, as Buck struck him like a battering ram, with the whole force of the current behind him, he reached up and closed with both arms around the shaggy neck.
His first glance was for Buck, over whose limp and apparently lifeless body Nig was setting up a howl, while Skeet was licking the wet face and closed eyes.
Thornton was himself bruised and battered, and he went carefully over Buck's body, when he had been brought around, finding three broken ribs.
This exploit was particularly gratifying to the three men; for they stood in need of the outfit which it furnished, and were enabled to make a long desired trip into the virgin East, where miners had not yet appeared.
At the end of half an hour one man stated that his dog could start a sled with five hundred pounds and walk off with it; a second bragged six hundred for his dog; and a third, seven hundred.
"Pooh! pooh!" said john Thornton; "Buck can start a thousand pounds."
"And break it out?
Nobody spoke.
Thornton's bluff, if bluff it was, had been called.
He could feel a flush of warm blood creeping up his face.
His tongue had tricked him.
The enormousness of it appalled him.
He had great faith in Buck's strength and had often thought him capable of starting such a load; but never, as now, had he faced the possibility of it, the eyes of a dozen men fixed upon him, silent and waiting.
"I've got a sled standing outside now, with twenty fiftypound sacks of flour on it," Matthewson went on with brutal directness; "so don't let that hinder you."
Thornton did not reply.
He did not know what to say.
"Though it's little faith I'm having, john, that the beast can do the trick."
A quibble arose concerning the phrase "break out." O'Brien contended it was Thornton's privilege to knock the runners loose, leaving Buck to "break it out" from a dead standstill.
A majority of the men who had witnessed the making of the bet decided in his favor, whereat the odds went up to three to one against Buck.
Not a man believed him capable of the feat. Thornton had been hurried into the wager, heavy with doubt; and now that he looked at the sled itself, the concrete fact, with the regular team of ten dogs curled up in the snow before it, the more impossible the task appeared.
Matthewson waxed jubilant.
The team of ten dogs was unhitched, and Buck, with his own harness, was put into the sled.
"I offer you eight hundred for him, sir, before the test, sir; eight hundred just as he stands."
"You must stand off from him," Matthewson protested.
"Free play and plenty of room."
Thornton knelt down by Buck's side.
He took his head in his two hands and rested cheek on cheek.
"As you love me, Buck.
Buck whined with suppressed eagerness.
The crowd was watching curiously.
The affair was growing mysterious.
It was the answer, in terms, not of speech, but of love.
Thornton stepped well back.
"Now, Buck," he said.
"Gee!" Thornton's voice rang out, sharp in the tense silence.
The load quivered, and from under the runners arose a crisp crackling.
Buck duplicated the manoeuvre, this time to the left.
The sled was broken out.
"Now, MUSH!"
Thornton's command cracked out like a pistol shot.
His great chest was low to the ground, his head forward and down, while his feet were flying like mad, the claws scarring the hard packed snow in parallel grooves.
The sled swayed and trembled, half started forward. One of his feet slipped, and one man groaned aloud.
Then the sled lurched ahead in what appeared a rapid succession of jerks, though it never really came to a dead stop again...half an inch...an inch... two inches...
But Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck.
Thornton rose to his feet.
His eyes were wet.
"Sir," he said to the Skookum Bench king, "no, sir.
The Treasure hunt-Flint's Pointer
In the same wasteful spirit, they had cooked, I suppose, three times more than we could eat; and one of them, with an empty laugh, threw what was left into the fire, which blazed and roared again over this unusual fuel.
"Aye, mates," said he, "it's lucky you have Barbecue to think for you with this here head.
Where they have it, I don't know yet; but once we hit the treasure, we'll have to jump about and find out.
And then, mates, us that has the boats, I reckon, has the upper hand."
I'll take him in a line when we go treasure hunting, for we'll keep him like so much gold, in case of accidents, you mark, and in the meantime.
Once we got the ship and treasure both and off to sea like jolly companions, why then we'll talk mr Hawkins over, we will, and we'll give him his share, to be sure, for all his kindness."
For my part, I was horribly cast down.
Should the scheme he had now sketched prove feasible, Silver, already doubly a traitor, would not hesitate to adopt it.
He had still a foot in either camp, and there was no doubt he would prefer wealth and freedom with the pirates to a bare escape from hanging, which was the best he had to hope on our side.
Nay, and even if things so fell out that he was forced to keep his faith with dr Livesey, even then what danger lay before us!
All the stores, I observed, came from our stock, and I could see the truth of Silver's words the night before.
Both were to be carried along with us for the sake of safety; and so, with our numbers divided between them, we set forth upon the bosom of the anchorage.
As we pulled over, there was some discussion on the chart.
Tall tree, Spy glass shoulder, bearing a point to the n of n n e Skeleton Island e s e and by e Ten feet.
A tall tree was thus the principal mark.
We pulled easily, by Silver's directions, not to weary the hands prematurely, and after quite a long passage, landed at the mouth of the second river-that which runs down a woody cleft of the Spy glass. Thence, bending to our left, we began to ascend the slope towards the plateau.
It was, indeed, a most pleasant portion of the island that we were now approaching.
About the centre, and a good way behind the rest, Silver and I followed-I tethered by my rope, he ploughing, with deep pants, among the sliding gravel.
But what sort of a way is that for bones to lie? 'Tain't in natur'."
Indeed, on a second glance, it seemed impossible to fancy that the body was in a natural position.
"I've taken a notion into my old numbskull," observed Silver.
The body pointed straight in the direction of the island, and the compass read duly e s e and by e
But, by thunder! If it don't make me cold inside to think of Flint.
"Speaking of knives," said another, "why don't we find his'n lying round?
"There ain't a thing left here," said Merry, still feeling round among the bones; "not a copper doit nor a baccy box.
Great guns!
Messmates, but if Flint was living, this would be a hot spot for you and me.
"Billy took me in.
There he laid, with penny pieces on his eyes."
Dear heart, but he died bad, did Flint!"
"Come, come," said Silver; "stow this talk.
He's dead, and he don't walk, that I know; leastways, he won't walk by day, and you may lay to that.
Care killed a cat.
thirty two
The Treasure hunt-The Voice Among the Trees
The plateau being somewhat tilted towards the west, this spot on which we had paused commanded a wide prospect on either hand.
There was no sound but that of the distant breakers, mounting from all round, and the chirp of countless insects in the brush.
Not a man, not a sail, upon the sea; the very largeness of the view increased the sense of solitude.
Silver, as he sat, took certain bearings with his compass.
"There are three 'tall trees'" said he, "about in the right line from Skeleton Island. 'Spy glass shoulder,' I take it, means that lower p'int there.
It's child's play to find the stuff now.
"Blue!
Well, I reckon he was blue.
The colour went from their six faces like enchantment; some leaped to their feet, some clawed hold of others; Morgan grovelled on the ground.
"It's Flint, by ----!" cried Merry.
The song had stopped as suddenly as it began-broken off, you would have said, in the middle of a note, as though someone had laid his hand upon the singer's mouth.
"Come," said Silver, struggling with his ashen lips to get the word out; "this won't do.
Stand by to go about.
His courage had come back as he spoke, and some of the colour to his face along with it.
Already the others had begun to lend an ear to this encouragement and were coming a little to themselves, when the same voice broke out again-not this time singing, but in a faint distant hail that echoed yet fainter among the clefts of the Spy glass.
"Darby M'Graw," it wailed-for that is the word that best describes the sound-"Darby M'Graw!
"That fixes it!" gasped one.
"Let's go."
Still Silver was unconquered.
I could hear his teeth rattle in his head, but he had not yet surrendered.
"Don't you cross a sperrit."
And the rest were all too terrified to reply.
They would have run away severally had they dared; but fear kept them together, and kept them close by john, as if his daring helped them.
He, on his part, had pretty well fought his weakness down.
"Sperrit?
"But there's one thing not clear to me. There was an echo.
That ain't in natur', surely?"
But you can never tell what will affect the superstitious, and to my wonder, George Merry was greatly relieved.
"Well, that's so," he said.
'bout ship, mates!
"Ben Gunn it were!"
"It don't make much odds, do it, now?" asked Dick.
"Ben Gunn's not here in the body any more'n Flint."
Soon they were chatting together, with intervals of listening; and not long after, hearing no further sound, they shouldered the tools and set forth again, Merry walking first with Silver's compass to keep them on the right line with Skeleton Island.
He had said the truth: dead or alive, nobody minded Ben Gunn.
Dick alone still held his Bible, and looked around him as he went, with fearful glances; but he found no sympathy, and Silver even joked him on his precautions.
Not that!" and he snapped his big fingers, halting a moment on his crutch.
But Dick was not to be comforted; indeed, it was soon plain to me that the lad was falling sick; hastened by heat, exhaustion, and the shock of his alarm, the fever, predicted by dr Livesey, was evidently growing swiftly higher.
The first of the tall trees was reached, and by the bearings proved the wrong one.
So with the second.
It was conspicuous far to sea both on the east and west and might have been entered as a sailing mark upon the chart.
Silver hobbled, grunting, on his crutch; his nostrils stood out and quivered; he cursed like a madman when the flies settled on his hot and shiny countenance; he plucked furiously at the line that held me to him and from time to time turned his eyes upon me with a deadly look. Certainly he took no pains to hide his thoughts, and certainly I read them like print.
"Huzza, mates, all together!" shouted Merry; and the foremost broke into a run.
And suddenly, not ten yards further, we beheld them stop.
A low cry arose.
Silver doubled his pace, digging away with the foot of his crutch like one possessed; and next moment he and I had come also to a dead halt.
Before us was a great excavation, not very recent, for the sides had fallen in and grass had sprouted on the bottom.
In this were the shaft of a pick broken in two and the boards of several packing cases strewn around.
On one of these boards I saw, branded with a hot iron, the name WALRUS-the name of Flint's ship.
All was clear to probation.
"Here we see God dealing in slaves; giving them to his own favourite child [Abraham], a man of superlative worth, and as a reward for his eminent goodness."--Rev.
Theodore Clapp, of New Orleans.
mr Peck was a kind of a patriarch in his own way.
To begin with, he was a man of some talent.
He too either had, or thought he had, poetical genius; and was often sending contributions to the Natchez Free Trader, and other periodicals.
In the way of raising contributions for foreign missions, he took the lead of all others in his neighbourhood. Everything he did, he did for the "glory of God," as he said: he quoted Scripture for almost everything he did.
He was a most loving father, and his daughter exercised considerable influence over him, and owing to her piety and judgment, that influence had a beneficial effect. Carlton, though a schoolfellow of the parson's, was nevertheless nearly ten years his junior; and though not an avowed infidel, was, however, a freethinker, and one who took no note of to morrow.
The young Christian felt that she would not be living up to that faith that she professed and believed in, if she did not exert herself to the utmost to save the thoughtless man from his downward career; and in this she succeeded to her most sanguine expectations.
She not only converted him, but in placing the Scriptures before him in their true light, she redeemed those sacred writings from the charge of supporting the system of slavery, which her father had cast upon them in the discussion some days before.
The Christian religion is opposed to slaveholding in its spirit and its principles; it classes menstealers among murderers; and it is the duty of all who wish to meet God in peace, to discharge that duty in spreading these principles.
Slaveholding is the highest possible violation of the eighth commandment.
For my own part, I shall do all I can.
What was the effect upon their minds?
Have we less precious promises in the Scriptures of truth?
Shall we not then do as the apostles did?
Shall not the manifold crimes and horrors of slavery excite more ardent outpourings at the throne of grace to grant repentance to our guilty country, and permit us to aid in preparing the way for the glorious second advent of the Messiah, by preaching deliverance to the captives, and the opening of the prison doors to those who are bound?"
Georgiana had succeeded in riveting the attention of Carlton during her conversation, and as she was finishing her last sentence, she observed the silent tear stealing down the cheek of the newly born child of God.
At this juncture her father entered, and Carlton left the room.
"Dear papa," said Georgiana, "will you grant me one favour; or, rather, make me a promise?"
"I can't tell, my dear, till I know what it is," replied mr Peck.
"I hope, my dear," answered she, "that papa would not think me capable of making an unreasonable request." "Well, well," returned he; "tell me what it is."
"I hope," said she, "that in your future conversation with mr Carlton, on the subject of slavery, you will not speak of the Bible as sustaining it." "Why, Georgiana, my dear, you are mad, ain't you?" exclaimed he, in an excited tone.
If the Bible sanctions slavery, then it misrepresents the character of God.
Nothing would be more dangerous to the soul of a young convert than to satisfy him that the Scriptures favoured such a system of sin." "Don't you suppose that I understand the Scriptures better than you?
I once heard you say, that you were opposed to the institution, when you first came to the South." "Yes," answered he, "I did not know so much about it then." "With great deference to you, papa," replied Georgiana, "I don't think that the Bible sanctions slavery.
I am afraid," continued the daughter, "that the acts of the professed friends of Christianity in the South do more to spread infidelity than the writings of all the atheists which have ever been published.
The infidel watches the religious world.
He surveys the church, and, lo! thousands and tens of thousands of her accredited members actually hold slaves.
Members 'in good and regular standing,' fellowshipped throughout Christendom except by a few anti slavery churches generally despised as ultra and radical, reduce their fellow men to the condition of chattels, and by force keep them in that state of degradation.
Moreover, those ministers and churches who do not themselves hold slaves, very generally defend the conduct of those who do, and accord to them a fair Christian character, and in the way of business frequently take mortgages and levy executions on the bodies of their fellow men, and in some cases of their fellow Christians.
And must not this conclusion be strengthened, when they hear ministers of talent and learning declare that the Bible does sanction slaveholding, and that it ought not to be made a disciplinable offence in churches?
When nothing can be further from the truth.
When he designed to do us good, he took upon himself the form of a servant.
Let us not forget what followed.
Then, should our labour fail to accomplish the end for which we pray, we shall stand acquitted at the bar of Jehovah, and although we may share in the national calamities which await unrepented sins, yet that blessed approval will be ours-'Well done, good and faithful servants, enter ye into the joy of your Lord.'"
"Believe me, dear papa," she replied, "I would not be understood as wishing to teach you, or to dictate to you in the least; but only grant my request, not to allude to the Bible as sanctioning slavery, when speaking with mr Carlton."
"Well," returned he, "I will comply with your wish."
The young Christian had indeed accomplished a noble work; and whether it was admitted by the father, or not, she was his superior and his teacher.
Georgiana had viewed the right to enjoy perfect liberty as one of those inherent and inalienable rights which pertain to the whole human race, and of which they can never be divested, except by an act of gross injustice.
Modest and self possessed, with a voice of great sweetness, and a most winning manner, she could, with the greatest ease to herself, engage their attention.
At length he came to a large house, at the door of which he knocked.
'What do you want?' asked the old man who opened it.
'That you shall have,' replied the man; 'but to morrow I shall give you some work to do, for you must know that I am the chief herdsman of the king.'
The herdsman's two daughters and their mother were sitting at supper, and invited him to join them.
Nothing more was said about work, and when the meal was over they all went to bed.
In the morning, when the young man was dressed, the herdsman called to him and said:
'Now listen, and I will tell you what you have to do.'
'What is it?' asked the youth, sulkily.
'Nothing less than to look after two hundred pigs,' was the reply.
'Oh, I am used to that,' answered the youth.
'They belong to the king's chief herdsman,' answered his son.
'He gave them to me to look after, but I knew I could not do it, so I drove them straight to you.
'What are you talking about?' cried the father, pale with horror.
'We should certainly both be put to death if I did any such thing.'
'No, no; do as I tell you, and I will get out of it somehow,' replied the young man.
The pigs were killed, and laid side by side in a row.
'Oh, don't speak of them!' answered the young man; 'I really can hardly tell you.
At last, however, I collected them all and was about to drive them back, when suddenly they rushed down the hill into the swamp, where they vanished completely, leaving only the points of their tails, which you can see for yourself.'
Now let us return home, for it is time for supper.
Next morning the herdsman said to the young man: 'I have got some other work for you to do.
To day you must take a hundred sheep to graze; but be careful that no harm befalls them.'
'I will do my best,' replied the youth.
And he opened the gate of the fold, where the sheep had been all night, and drove them out into the meadow.
But when the tale was ended the father shook his head.
'No, no,' answered the youth; 'I am not so stupid as that!
We will kill them and have them for dinner.'
'You will lose your life if you do,' replied the father.
As there was a soft breeze blowing, the bushes to which the head was tied moved gently, and the bells rang.
When all was done to his liking he hastened quickly back to his master.
'Oh! don't speak of them,' answered he.
'Tell me at once what has happened,' said the herdsman sternly.
The youth began to sob, and stammered out: 'I-I hardly know how to tell you!
They-they-they were so-so troublesome-that I could not manage them at all.
They-ran about in-in all directions, and I-I-ran after them and nearly died of fatigue.
But-but-it was the sheep, which, be-before my very eyes, were carried straight up-up into the air.
'That is nothing but a lie from beginning to end,' said the herdsman.
'Then give me a proof of it,' cried his master.
'Well, come with me,' said the youth.
The young man brought the herdsman to the foot of the great rock, but it was so dark you could hardly see.
'Do you hear?' asked the youth.
'Yes, I hear; you have spoken the truth, and I cannot blame you for what has happened.
I must bear the loss as best as I can.'
'I should not be surprised if the tasks I set you were too difficult, and that you were tired of them,' said the herdsman next morning; 'but to day I have something quite easy for you to do.
You must look after forty oxen, and be sure you are very careful, for one of them has gold tipped horns and hoofs, and the king reckons it among his greatest treasures.'
The young man drove out the oxen into the meadow, and no sooner had they got there than, like the sheep and the pigs, they began to scamper in all directions, the precious bull being the wildest of all.
As the youth stood watching them, not knowing what to do next, it came into his head that his father's cow was put out to grass at no great distance; and he forthwith made such a noise that he quite frightened the oxen, who were easily persuaded to take the path he wished.
'Whose cattle are these, and why are they here?' he asked; and his son told him the story.
For a long while the old man refused to have anything to do with such a wicked scheme; but his son talked him over in the end, and they killed the oxen as they had killed the sheep and the pigs.
The son had a rope ready to cast round its horns, and throw it to the ground, but the ox was stronger than the rope, and soon tore it in pieces.
Then it dashed away to the wood, the youth following; over hedges and ditches they both went, till they reached the rocky pass which bordered the herdsman's land.
Here the ox, thinking itself safe, stopped to rest, and thus gave the young man a chance to come up with it.
At last he answered:
'It is always the same story!
The oxen are-gone-gone!'
Come and see for yourself.'
'What do you call that?' asked the youth.
And the herdsman looked and saw the traces of a fire, which seemed to have sprung up from under the earth.
'Wonder upon wonder,' he exclaimed, 'so you really did speak the truth after all!
But come, let us go home!
Just make me ten scythes, one for every man, for I want the grass mown in one of my meadows to morrow.'
At these words the youth's heart sank, for he had never been trained either as a smith or a joiner.
Slowly and sadly he went to bed, but he could not sleep, for wondering how the scythes were to be made.
When they had heard everything, they hid him where no one could find him.
Time passed away, and the young man stayed at home doing all his parents bade him, and showing himself very different from what he had been before he went out to see the world; but one day he said to his father that he should like to marry, and have a house of his own.
'When I served the king's chief herdsman,' added he, 'I saw his daughter, and I am resolved to try if I cannot win her for my wife.'
'Well, I will do my best,' replied his son; 'but first give me the sword which hangs over your bed!'
'I want to speak to your master,' said he.
'So it is you?' cried the herdsman, when he had received the message. 'Well, you can sleep here to night if you wish.'
'I have come for something else besides a bed,' replied the young man, drawing his sword, 'and if you do not promise to give me your youngest daughter as my wife I will stab you through the heart.'
Then the young man went home to his parents, and bade them get ready to welcome his bride.
And when the wedding was over he told his father in law, the herdsman, what he had done with the sheep, and pigs, and cattle.
Janni and the Draken
He had a wife and one little girl, and after a long time his wife had another child.
In the course of time Janni's parents died, and he and his sister were left alone in the world; soon affairs went badly with them, so they determined to wander away to seek their fortune.
In packing up, the sister found a knife which the monk had left for his godson, and this she gave to her brother.
After wandering for three days they met a man with three dogs who proposed that they should exchange animals, he taking the sheep, and they the dogs.
The brother and sister were quite pleased at this arrangement, and after the exchange was made they separated, and went their different ways.
So Janni found the castle deserted, and abode there with his sister, and every day went out to hunt with the weapons the Draken had left in the castle.
One day, when he was away hunting, one of the Draken came up to get provisions, not knowing that there was anyone in the castle.
But he plucked the cherries, and took them back to his sister.
And the sister ate the cherries and declared herself well again.
But he took the quinces and brought them back to his sister, who, when she had eaten them, declared herself better.
The sister did as she was told, and next day Janni, taking his three dogs with him, went to get the pears.
So Janni plucked the pears and took them to his sister, who, when she had eaten them, declared she felt better.
The travellers let a rope down and drew him up to daylight.
When she learnt what had befallen him she called together all the sorceresses in the country in order that they should tell her where the eyes were.
Three years had passed since his marriage, and he lived very happily with his wife, but Heaven granted him no heir, which grieved the King greatly.
As the day was very hot and sultry he commanded his servants to pitch tents in the open field, and there await the cool of the evening.
Suddenly a frightful thirst seized the King, and as he saw no water near, he mounted his horse, and rode through the neighbourhood looking for a spring.
Before long he came to a well filled to the brim with water clear as crystal, and on the bosom of which a golden jug was floating.
King Kojata at once tried to seize the vessel, but though he endeavoured to grasp it with his right hand, and then with his left, the wretched thing always eluded his efforts and refused to let itself be caught.
But when he had satisfied his thirst, and wished to raise himself up, he couldn't lift his head, because someone held his beard fast in the water.
'Who's there?
'Yes, I promise that you shall have it.'
The voice replied, 'Very well; but it will go ill with you if you fail to keep your promise.' Then the claws relaxed their hold, and the face disappeared in the depths.
All the courtiers standing round were much amazed at the King's grief, but no one dared to ask him the cause of it.
He took the child in his arms and kissed it tenderly; then laying it in its cradle, he determined to control his emotion and began to reign again as before.
The secret of the King remained a secret, though his grave, careworn expression escaped no one's notice.
In the constant dread that his child would be taken from him, poor Kojata knew no rest night or day.
However, time went on and nothing happened.
Days and months and years passed, and the Prince grew up into a beautiful youth, and at last the King himself forgot all about the incident that had happened so long ago.
One day the Prince went out hunting, and going in pursuit of a wild boar he soon lost the other huntsmen, and found himself quite alone in the middle of a dark wood.
Farewell for the present; we shall meet again.'
The time has come when we must part,' and with a heavy heart he told the Prince what had happened at the time of his birth.
Only give me a horse for my journey, and I wager you'll soon see me back again.'
The King gave him a beautiful charger, with golden stirrups, and a sword.
The Queen hung a little cross round his neck, and after much weeping and lamentation the Prince bade them all farewell and set forth on his journey.
He rode straight on for two days, and on the third he came to a lake as smooth as glass and as clear as crystal.
Then they finished dressing and disappeared.
Only the thirtieth little duck couldn't come to the land; it swam about close to the shore, and, giving out a piercing cry, it stretched its neck up timidly, gazed wildly around, and then dived under again.
Prince Milan's heart was so moved with pity for the poor little creature that he came out from behind the bulrushes, to see if he could be of any help.
As soon as the duck perceived him, it cried in a human voice, 'Oh, dear Prince Milan, for the love of Heaven give me back my garment, and I will be so grateful to you.' The Prince lay the little garment on the bank beside her, and stepped back into the bushes.
In a few seconds a beautiful girl in a white robe stood before him, so fair and sweet and young that no pen could describe her.
'Many thanks, Prince Milan, for your courtesy.
I am the daughter of a wicked magician, and my name is Hyacinthia.
He has been expecting you for ages, but you need have no fear if you will only follow my advice.
As soon as you come into the presence of my father, throw yourself at once on the ground and approach him on your knees.
Don't mind if he stamps furiously with his feet and curses and swears.
With these words the beautiful Hyacinthia stamped on the ground with her little foot, and the earth opened and they both sank down into the lower world.
The Magician sat on a throne, a sparkling crown on his head; his eyes blazed like a green fire, and instead of hands he had claws.
As soon as Prince Milan entered he flung himself on his knees.
The Magician stamped loudly with his feet, glared frightfully out of his green eyes, and cursed so loudly that the whole underworld shook.
But the Prince, mindful of the counsel he had been given, wasn't the least afraid, and approached the throne still on his knees.
When it grew dark, a little bee flew by, and knocking at the window, it said, 'Open, and let me in.'
Milan opened the window quickly, and as soon as the bee had entered, it changed into the beautiful Hyacinthia.
'Now, don't be so foolish, my dear Prince; but keep up your spirits, for there is no need to despair.
Go to bed, and when you wake up to morrow morning the palace will be finished.
Then you must go all round it, giving a tap here and there on the walls to look as if you had just finished it.'
And so it all turned out just as she had said.
To morrow I will place the whole thirty in a row.
Why, that is the easiest thing in the world.'
'Not so easy as you think,' cried the little bee, who was flying past. 'If I weren't to help you, you'd never guess.
We are thirty sisters so exactly alike that our own father can hardly distinguish us apart.'
'Then what am I to do?' asked Prince Milan.
'You will recognise me by a tiny fly I shall have on my left cheek, but be careful for you might easily make a mistake.'
But they were all so precisely alike that they looked like one face reflected in thirty mirrors, and the fly was nowhere to be seen; the second time he passed them he still saw nothing; but the third time he perceived a little fly stealing down one cheek, causing it to blush a faint pink. Then the Prince seized the girl's hand and cried out, 'This is the Princess Hyacinthia!'
Before this candle, which I shall light, burns to the socket, you must have made me a pair of boots reaching to my knees.
If they aren't finished in that time, off comes your head.'
Your father has set me this time an impossible task.
Before a candle which he has lit burns to the socket, I am to make a pair of boots.
But what does a prince know of shoemaking? If I can't do it, I lose my head.'
'And what do you mean to do?' asked Hyacinthia.
'Well, what is there to be done?
'Not so, dearest.
Then it sped onwards like an arrow from a bow.
But when the Prince still did not appear, after a time he sent his servants a second time to bring him.
The frozen breath always gave the same answer, but the Prince never came.
Out of his mind with rage, the Magician ordered the Prince to be pursued.
Then a wild chase began.
Milan sprang from the saddle, put his ear to the ground and listened.
'Yes,' he answered, 'they are pursuing us, and are quite close.' 'Then no time must be lost,' said Hyacinthia, and she immediately turned herself into a river, Prince Milan into an iron bridge, and the charger into a blackbird.
The Magician's servants hurried after the fresh tracks, but when they came to the bridge, they stood, not knowing which road to take, as the footprints stopped suddenly, and there were three paths for them to choose from.
Go back and bring them to me at once, or it will be the worse for you.'
Then the pursuit began afresh.
The Prince dismounted and put his ear to the ground.
At last they found themselves back at the same spot they had started from, and in despair they returned once more with empty hands to the Magician.
'Bring a horse at once; they shan't escape me.'
But at the first church we come to his power ceases; he may chase us no further.
Prince Milan loosened from his neck the little gold cross his mother had given him, and as soon as Hyacinthia grasped it, she had changed herself into a church, Milan into a monk, and the horse into a belfry.
'Prince Milan and Princess Hyacinthia have just gone on this minute; they stopped for a few minutes in the church to say their prayers, and bade me light this wax candle for you, and give you their love.'
'The town is easy to get into, but more difficult to get out of,' sighed Hyacinthia. 'But let it be as you wish.
Go, and I will await you here, but I will first change myself into a white milestone; only I pray you be very careful.
The King and Queen of the town will come out to meet you, leading a little child with them.
I will wait for you here for three days.'
The Prince hurried to the town, but Hyacinthia remained behind disguised as a white milestone on the road.
The first day passed, and then the second, and at last the third also, but Prince Milan did not return, for he had not taken Hyacinthia's advice.
The child at once caressed the Prince, who, carried away by its beauty, bent down and kissed it on the cheek.
He pulled it up carefully by the roots and carried it home.
Here he planted it in a pot, and watered and tended the little plant carefully.
And now the most extraordinary thing happened, for from this moment everything in the old man's house was changed.
When he awoke in the morning he always found his room tidied and put into such beautiful order that not a speck of dust was to be found anywhere.
At first he was so surprised he didn't know what to think, but after a time he grew a little uncomfortable, and went to an old witch to ask for advice.
The witch said, 'Get up before the cock crows, and watch carefully till you see something move, and then throw this cloth quickly over it, and you'll see what will happen.'
When the first ray of light entered the room, he noticed that the little blue flower began to tremble, and at last it rose out of the pot and flew about the room, put everything in order, swept away the dust, and lit the fire.
In great haste the old man sprang from his bed, and covered the flower with the cloth the old witch had given him, and in a moment the beautiful Princess Hyacinthia stood before him.
'What have you done?' she cried.
'Why have you called me back to life? For I have no desire to live since my bridegroom, the beautiful Prince Milan, has deserted me.'
She went straight to the King's kitchen, where the white aproned cooks were running about in great confusion.
The Princess went up to the head cook, and said, 'Dear cook, please listen to my request, and let me make a wedding cake for Prince Milan.'
The busy cook was just going to refuse her demand and order her out of the kitchen, but the words died on his lips when he turned and beheld the beautiful Hyacinthia, and he answered politely, 'You have just come in the nick of time, fair maiden.
The invited guests were already thronging round the table, when the head cook entered the room, bearing a beautiful wedding cake on a silver dish, and laid it before Prince Milan.
The guests were all lost in admiration, for the cake was quite a work of art.
Then he jumped up suddenly from the table and ran to the door, where he found the beautiful Hyacinthia waiting for him.
Outside stood his faithful charger, pawing the ground.
Chapter three
And as I've told you before, I tell you again: it's not right for you not to go to the meetings, and altogether to keep out of the district business.
If decent people won't go into it, of course it's bound to go all wrong.
We pay the money, and it all goes in salaries, and there are no schools, nor district nurses, nor midwives, nor drugstores-nothing."
"I can't! and so there's no help for it."
"But why can't you?
I must own I can't make it out.
Indifference, incapacity-I won't admit; surely it's not simply laziness?"
He had hardly grasped what his brother was saying.
Looking towards the plough land across the river, he made out something black, but he could not distinguish whether it was a horse or the bailiff on horseback.
"Why is it you can do nothing?
You made an attempt and didn't succeed, as you think, and you give in.
How can you have so little self respect?"
"Self respect!" said Levin, stung to the quick by his brother's words; "I don't understand.
If they'd told me at college that other people understood the integral calculus, and I didn't, then pride would have come in.
But in this case one wants first to be convinced that one has certain qualifications for this sort of business, and especially that all this business is of great importance."
"I don't think it important; it does not take hold of me, I can't help it," answered Levin, making out that what he saw was the bailiff, and that the bailiff seemed to be letting the peasants go off the ploughed land.
They were turning the plough over.
"Can they have finished ploughing?" he wondered.
"Come, really though," said the elder brother, with a frown on his handsome, clever face, "there's a limit to everything.
How can you think it a matter of no importance whether the peasant, whom you love as you assert..."
"I never did assert it," thought Konstantin Levin.
"... dies without help?
The ignorant peasant women starve the children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and don't help them because to your mind it's of no importance."
And Sergey Ivanovitch put before him the alternative: either you are so undeveloped that you can't see all that you can do, or you won't sacrifice your ease, your vanity, or whatever it is, to do it.
Konstantin Levin felt that there was no course open to him but to submit, or to confess to a lack of zeal for the public good.
And this mortified him and hurt his feelings.
"It's both," he said resolutely: "I don't see that it was possible..."
"What! was it impossible, if the money were properly laid out, to provide medical aid?"
"Impossible, as it seems to me....
For the three thousand square miles of our district, what with our thaws, and the storms, and the work in the fields, I don't see how it is possible to provide medical aid all over.
And besides, I don't believe in medicine."
"Oh, well, that's unfair ...
I can quote to you thousands of instances....
But the schools, anyway."
"Why have schools?"
"What do you mean?
If it's a good thing for you, it's a good thing for everyone."
Konstantin Levin felt himself morally pinned against a wall, and so he got hot, and unconsciously blurted out the chief cause of his indifference to public business.
He was silent for a little, drew out a hook, threw it in again, and turned to his brother smiling.
"Come, now....
"Oh, well, but I fancy her wrist will never be straight again."
"That remains to be proved....
And mending the highroads is an impossibility; and as soon as they put up bridges they're stolen."
"Still, that's not the point," said Sergey Ivanovitch, frowning.
"Do you admit that education is a benefit for the people?"
"Yes, I admit it," said Levin without thinking, and he was conscious immediately that he had said what he did not think.
He felt that if he admitted that, it would be proved that he had been talking meaningless rubbish.
How it would be proved he could not tell, but he knew that this would inevitably be logically proved to him, and he awaited the proofs.
The argument turned out to be far simpler than he had expected.
"If you admit that it is a benefit," said Sergey Ivanovitch, "then, as an honest man, you cannot help caring about it and sympathizing with the movement, and so wishing to work for it."
"But I still do not admit this movement to be just," said Konstantin Levin, reddening a little.
"What!
But you said just now..."
"That's to say, I don't admit it's being either good or possible."
"That you can't tell without making the trial."
"How so?"
"I can't see where philosophy comes in," said Sergey Ivanovitch, in a tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother's right to talk about philosophy.
And that irritated Levin.
"I'll tell you, then," he said with heat, "I imagine the mainspring of all our actions is, after all, self interest.
Doctors and dispensaries are no use to me.
An arbitrator of disputes is no use to me.
I never appeal to him, and never shall appeal to him.
The schools are no good to me, but positively harmful, as I told you.
For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and self interest offers me no inducement."
"Excuse me," Sergey Ivanovitch interposed with a smile, "self interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did work for it."
"No!" Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; "the emancipation of the serfs was a different matter.
There self interest did come in.
One longed to throw off that yoke that crushed us, all decent people among us.
Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking the president and the half witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it was all to the point.
But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.
Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had burst open.
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.
"I'm not going to be tried.
"Excuse me, but you know one really can't argue in that way," he observed.
But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing, of which he was conscious, of lack of zeal for the public welfare, and he went on.
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.
"He too has a philosophy of his own at the service of his natural tendencies," he thought.
"Come, you'd better let philosophy alone," he said.
"The chief problem of the philosophy of all ages consists just in finding the indispensable connection which exists between individual and social interests.
The birches are not simply stuck in, but some are sown and some are planted, and one must deal carefully with them. It's only those peoples that have an intuitive sense of what's of importance and significance in their institutions, and know how to value them, that have a future before them-it's only those peoples that one can truly call historical."
"As for your dislike of it, excuse my saying so, that's simply our Russian sloth and old serf owner's ways, and I'm convinced that in you it's a temporary error and will pass."
Konstantin was silent.
He felt himself vanquished on all sides, but he felt at the same time that what he wanted to say was unintelligible to his brother.
Sergey Ivanovitch wound up the last line, untied the horse, and they drove off.
Chapter four
Once in a previous year he had gone to look at the mowing, and being made very angry by the bailiff he had recourse to his favorite means for regaining his temper,--he took a scythe from a peasant and began mowing.
"I must have physical exercise, or my temper'll certainly be ruined," he thought, and he determined he would go mowing, however awkward he might feel about it with his brother or the peasants.
Towards evening Konstantin Levin went to his counting house, gave directions as to the work to be done, and sent about the village to summon the mowers for the morrow, to cut the hay in Kalinov meadow, the largest and best of his grass lands.
I shall maybe do some mowing myself too," he said, trying not to be embarrassed.
The bailiff smiled and said: "Yes, sir."
At tea the same evening Levin said to his brother:
Tomorrow I shall start mowing."
"I'm so fond of that form of field labor," said Sergey Ivanovitch.
"I'm awfully fond of it.
Just like one of the peasants, all day long?"
"Yes, it's very pleasant," said Levin.
"It's splendid as exercise, only you'll hardly be able to stand it," said Sergey Ivanovitch, without a shade of irony.
"I've tried it.
It's hard work at first, but you get into it.
I dare say I shall manage to keep it up..."
"Really! what an idea!
But tell me, how do the peasants look at it?
I suppose they laugh in their sleeves at their master's being such a queer fish?"
"No, I don't think so; but it's so delightful, and at the same time such hard work, that one has no time to think about it."
"No, I'll simply come home at the time of their noonday rest."
From the uplands he could get a view of the shaded cut part of the meadow below, with its grayish ridges of cut grass, and the black heaps of coats, taken off by the mowers at the place from which they had started cutting.
He counted forty two of them.
Levin got off his mare, and fastening her up by the roadside went to meet Tit, who took a second scythe out of a bush and gave it to him.
"It's ready, sir; it's like a razor, cuts of itself," said Tit, taking off his cap with a smile and giving him the scythe.
Tit made room, and Levin started behind him.
The grass was short close to the road, and Levin, who had not done any mowing for a long while, and was disconcerted by the eyes fastened upon him, cut badly for the first moments, though he swung his scythe vigorously.
"It's not set right; handle's too high; see how he has to stoop to it," said one.
"Never mind, he'll get on all right," the old man resumed.
"He's made a start....
The master, sure, does his best for himself!
But see the grass missed out!
For such work us fellows would catch it!"
The grass became softer, and Levin, listening without answering, followed Tit, trying to do the best he could.
They moved a hundred paces.
Tit kept moving on, without stopping, not showing the slightest weariness, but Levin was already beginning to be afraid he would not be able to keep it up: he was so tired.
Levin straightened himself, and drawing a deep breath looked round.
Tit moved on with sweep after sweep of his scythe, not stopping nor showing signs of weariness.
His pleasure was only disturbed by his row not being well cut.
The first row, as Levin noticed, Tit had mowed specially quickly, probably wishing to put his master to the test, and the row happened to be a long one.
He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, but not to be left behind the peasants, and to do his work as well as possible.
Another row, and yet another row, followed-long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass.
A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction.
On finishing yet another row he would have gone back to the top of the meadow again to begin the next, but Tit stopped, and going up to the old man said something in a low voice to him.
They both looked at the sun "What are they talking about, and why doesn't he go back?" thought Levin, not guessing that the peasants had been mowing no less than four hours without stopping, and it was time for their lunch.
"Lunch, sir," said the old man.
"Is it really time?
That's right; lunch, then."
Levin gave his scythe to Tit, and together with the peasants, who were crossing the long stretch of mown grass, slightly sprinkled with rain, to get their bread from the heap of coats, he went towards his house. Only then he suddenly awoke to the fact that he had been wrong about the weather and the rain was drenching his hay.
"The hay will be spoiled," he said.
"Not a bit of it, sir; mow in the rain, and you'll rake in fine weather!" said the old man.
Levin untied his horse and rode home to his coffee.
Sergey Ivanovitch was only just getting up.
POLLY'S BIG BUNDLE
The room was very quiet; but presently Phronsie strayed in, and seeing Polly studying, climbed up in a chair by the window to watch the birds hop over the veranda and pick up worms in the grass beside the carriage drive.
And then came mrs Pepper with the big mending basket, and ensconced herself opposite by the table; and nothing was to be heard but the "tick, tick" of the clock, and an occasional dropping of a spool of thread, or scissors, from the busy hands flying in and out among the stockings.
And then he set up a loud and angry chirping, flying up and down, and opening his mouth as if he wanted to express his mind, but couldn't, and otherwise acting in a very strange and unaccountable manner.
"Dear me!" said mrs Pepper, "what's that?"
"It's Cherry," said Polly, lifting up her head from "Fasquelle," "and-oh, dear me!" and flinging down the pile of books in her lap on a chair, she rushed across the room and flew up to the cage and began to wildly gesticulate and explain and shower down on him every endearing name she could think of.
"What is the matter?" asked her mother, turning around in her chair in perfect astonishment.
"What upon earth, Polly!"
"How could I!" cried Polly, in accents of despair, not heeding her mother's question.
"Oh, mamsie, will he die, do you think?"
"I guess not," said mrs Pepper, laying down her work and coming up to the cage, while Phronsie scrambled off from her chair and hurried to the scene.
"Why, he does act queer, don't he?
P'raps he's been eating too much?"
"Eating!" said Polly, "oh mamsie, he hasn't had anything." And she pointed with shame and remorse to the seed cup with only a few dried husks in the very bottom.
"Oh, Polly," began mrs Pepper; but seeing the look on her face, she changed her tone for one more cheerful.
There, there," she said, nodding persuasively at the cage, "you pretty creature you!
so you sha'n't be starved."
At the word "starved," Polly winced as though a pin had been pointed at her.
"There isn't any, mamsie, in the house," she stammered; "he had the last yesterday."
"And you forgot him to day?" asked mrs Pepper, with a look in her black eyes Polly didn't like.
"Well, he must have something right away," said mrs Pepper, decidedly. "That's certain."
"I'll run right down to Fletcher's and get it," cried Polly.
"Twon't take me but a minute, mamsie; Jasper's gone, and Thomas, too, so I've got to go," she added, as she saw her mother hesitate.
"I'm most afraid it will rain, Polly."
"Oh, no, mamsie," cried Polly, feeling as if she could fly to the ends of the earth to atone, and longing beside for the brisk walk down town. Going up to the window she pointed triumphantly to the little bit of blue sky still visible.
"There, now, see, it can't rain yet awhile."
"Well," said mrs Pepper, while Phronsie, standing in a chair with her face pressed close to the cage, was telling Cherry through the bars "not to be hungry, please don't!" which he didn't seem to mind in the least, but went on screaming harder than ever!
"And besides, 'tisn't much use to wait for Ben.
But be sure, Polly, to hurry, for it's getting late, and I shall be worried about you.
"Oh, mamsie," said Polly, turning back just a minute, "I know the way to Fletcher's just as easy as anything.
I couldn't get lost."
"I know you do," said mrs Pepper, "but it'll be dark early on account of the shower.
Well," she said, pulling out her well worn purse from her pocket, "if it does sprinkle, you get into a car, Polly, remember."
"And there's ten cents for your bird seed in that pocket," said mrs Pepper, pointing to a coin racing away into a corner by itself.
"Yes'm," said Polly, wild to be off.
"And there's a five cent piece in that one for you to ride up with," said her mother, tying up the purse carefully.
"Remember, for you to ride up with.
Well, I guess you better ride up anyway, Polly, come to think, and then you'll get home all the quicker."
"Where you going?" asked Phronsie, who on seeing the purse knew there was some expedition on foot, and beginning to clamber down out of the chair.
"Oh, I want to go too, I do.
Take me, Polly!"
"Oh, no Pet, I can't," cried Polly, "I've got to hurry like everything!"
"I can hurry too," cried Phronsie, drawing her small figure to its utmost height, "oh, so fast, Polly!"
"And it's ever so far," cried Polly, in despair, as she saw the small under lip of the child begin to quiver.
"Run right along," said mrs Pepper, briskly.
At this Phronsie turned and wiped away two big tears, while she gazed up at the cage in extreme commiseration.
"I guess I'll give him a piece of bread," said mrs Pepper to herself. At this word "bread," Polly, who was half way down the hall, came running back.
"Oh, mamsie, don't," she said.
"It made him sick before, don't you know it did-so fat and stuffy."
"Well, hurry along then," said mrs Pepper, and Polly was off.
"Well, here I am," she said with a sigh of relief, as she at last reached mr Fletcher's big bird store.
Here she steadily resisted all temptations to stop and look at the new arrivals of birds, and to feed the carrier pigeons who seemed to be expecting her, and who turned their soft eyes up at her reproachfully when she failed to pay her respects to them.
Even the cunning blandishments of a very attractive monkey that always had entertained the children on their numerous visits, failed to interest her now. Mamsie would be worrying, she knew; and besides, the sight of so many birds eating their suppers out of generously full seed cups, only filled her heart with remorse as she thought of poor Cherry and his empty one.
So she put down her ten cents silently on the counter, and took up the little package of seed, and went out.
But what a change!
The cloud that had seemed but a cloud when she went in, was now fast descending in big ominous sprinkles that told of a heavy shower to follow.
"I don't care," said Polly to herself, holding fast her little package. "I'll run and get in the car-then I'll be all right."
So she went on with nimble footsteps, dodging the crowd, and soon came to the corner.
A car was just in sight-that was fine!
Her pocket was empty!
Well, I must hurry.
Nothing for it but to run now!"
"I beg your pardon; it was extremely careless in me."
"It's no matter," said Polly, hopping up with a little laugh, and straightening her hat.
"Only-" and she began to look for her parcel that had been sent spinning.
"Oh, dear!"
No need to ask for it now!
There lay the paper wet and torn, down at their feet.
The seed lay all over the pavement, scattered far and wide even out to the puddles in the street.
And not a cent of money to get any more with!
The rain that was falling around them as they stood there sent with the sound of every drop such a flood of misery into Polly's heart!
"What was it, child?" asked the gentleman, peering sharply to find out what the little shiny things were.
"Bird seed," gasped Polly.
"Is that all?" said the gentleman with a happy laugh.
"I'm very glad."
"All!" Polly's heart stood still as she thought of Cherry, stark and stiff in the bottom of his cage, if he didn't get it soon.
"Now," said the kind tones, briskly, "come, little girl, we'll make this all right speedily.
Let's see-here's a bird store.
"But, sir-" began Polly, holding back.
And then he added a cunning arrangement for birds to swing in, and two or three other things that didn't have anything to do with birds at all.
And then they came out on the wet, slippery street again.
"Now, then, little girl," said the gentleman, tucking the bundle under his arm, and opening the umbrella; then he took hold of Polly's hand, who by this time was glad of a protector.
"Where do you live?
For I'm going to take you safely home this time where umbrellas can't run into you."
"Oh!" said Polly, with a little skip.
"Thank you sir!
It's up to mr King's; and-"
"What!" said the gentleman, stopping short in the midst of an immense puddle, and staring at her, "mr
Jasper King's?"
"Jappy!" said the stranger, still standing as if petrified.
"Oh, yes," said Polly, raising her clear, brown eyes up at him.
"There's Percy, and Van, and little Dick-oh, he's so cunning!" she cried, impulsively.
The gentleman's face looked very queer just then; but he merely said:
"Why, you must be Polly?"
"Yes, sir, I am," said Polly, pleased to think he knew her.
And then she told him how she'd forgotten Cherry's seed, and all about it.
"And oh, sir," she said, and her voice began to tremble, "Mamsie'll be so frightened if I don't get there soon!"
"I'm going up there myself, so that it all happens very nicely," said the gentleman, commencing to start off briskly, and grasping her hand tighter.
"Now, then, Polly."
"Oh dear me, Phronsie!" cried Polly, huddling her up from the dark, wet ground.
"You'll catch your death!
The stranger, amazed at this new stage of the proceedings, was vainly trying to hold the umbrella over both, till the procession could move on again.
At that Polly gathered her up close and began to walk with rapid footsteps up the path.
"Do let me carry you, little girl," said Polly's kind friend persuasively, bending down to the little face on Polly's neck.
"Don't let him, Polly, don't!"
"There sha'n't anything hurt you," said Polly, kissing her reassuringly, and stepping briskly off with her burden, just as the door burst open, and joel flew out on the veranda steps, followed by the rest of the troop in the greatest state of excitement.
"Oh, whickety!
she's come!" he shouted, springing up to her over the puddles, and crowding under the umbrella.
"Where'd you get Phronsie?" he asked, standing quite still at sight of the little feet tucked up to get out of the rain.
"Phronsie!" said mrs Pepper, springing to her feet, "why, I thought she was up stairs with Jane."
She's caught her death cold, no doubt, no doubt!"
"Isn't anybody going to kiss me, I wonder!"
The two little Whitneys, who were eagerly clutching Polly's arms, turned around; and Percy rubbed his eyes in a puzzled way, as joel said, stopping a minute to look up at the tall figure:
"We don't ever kiss strangers-mamsie's told us not to."
"For shame, Joey!" cried Polly, feeling her face grow dreadfully red in the darkness, "the gentleman's been so kind to me!"
And then-well, then Percy gave a violent bound, and upsetting joel as he did so, wriggled his way down the steps-at the same time that Van, on Polly's other side, rushed up to the gentleman:
"Papa-oh, papa!"
"Why, Polly Pepper!" exclaimed joel, not minding his own upset.
"Hush!" cried Polly, catching his arm, "he's come-oh, joel--he's come!"
"Who?" cried joel, staring around blindly, "who, Polly?" Polly had just opened her lips to explain, when mr King's portly, handsome figure appeared in the doorway.
"Do come in, children-why-good gracious, Mason!"
"Here, mrs Pepper, be so good as to call mrs Whitney."
"Pepper!
Pepper!" repeated mr Whitney, perplexedly.
"Oh, let me tell her!" He struggled to get down from his father's arms as he said this.
"No, I shall-I heard her first!" cried Percy.
"Oh, dear me!
Grandpapa's going to!"
mr King advanced to the foot of the staircase as his daughter, all unconscious, ran down with a light step, and a smile on her face.
"Has Polly come?" she asked, seeing only her father.
"Yes," replied the old gentleman, shortly, "and she's brought a big bundle, Marian!"
"A big bundle?" she repeated wonderingly, and gazing at him.
So Polly and Phronsie crept in unnoticed after all.
"I wish Ben was here," said little Davie, capering around the Whitney group, "an' Jappy, I do!"
"Where are they!" asked Polly.
"See-aren't these prime!"
He held up a shining black shoe, fairly bristling with newness, for Polly to admire.
"Splendid," she cried heartily; "but where are the boys?"
"They went after you," said Davie, "after we came home with our shoes."
"No, they didn't," contradicted joel, flatly; and sitting down on the floor he began to tie and untie his new possessions.
"Oh, yes," said Davie, nodding his head, "so he did; that was when we all cried 'cause you weren't home, Polly."
"He drawed me a be yew tiful one," cried Phronsie, holding up her mangy bit; "see, Polly, see!"
"That's the little brown house," said Davie, looking over her shoulder as Phronsie put it carefully into Polly's hand.
"It's all washed out," said Polly, smoothing it out, "when you staid out in the rain."
Phronsie's face grew very grave at that.
"Bad, naughty old rain," she said, and then she began to cry as hard as she could.
"Why, I thought I told you," said Polly, at her wit's end over Phronsie. "It's Percy and Van's father, Joey!"
"Whockey!" cried joel, completely stunned, "really and truly, Polly Pepper?"
"Then I'm going to peek," cried joel, squeaking across the floor to carry his threat into execution.
"Come right back, or I'll tell mamsie!"
"And here are the little friends I've heard so much about!" cried mr Whitney coming in amongst them.
"Oh, you needn't introduce me to Polly-she brought me home!"
"They're all Pepperses," said Percy, waving his hand, and doing the business up at one stroke.
"Only the best of 'em isn't here," observed Van, rather ungallantly, "he draws perfectly elegant, papa!"
"Peppers!" again repeated mr Whitney in a puzzled way.
"And here is mrs Pepper," said old mr King, pompously drawing her forward, "the children's mother, and-"
"Well," said mr Whitney, sitting down and drawing his wife to his side, "it's a long story.
You see, when I was a little youngster, and-"
"You were john Whitney then," put in mrs Pepper, slyly.
But to go back-when I was a little shaver, about as big as Percy here-"
"Oh, papa!" began Percy, deprecatingly.
To be called "a little shaver" before all the others!
"He means, dearie," said his mamma, reassuringly, "when he was a boy like you.
Now hear what papa is going to say."
"Well, I was sent up into Vermont to stay at the old place.
There was a little girl there; a bright, black eyed little girl.
"Who's Mary Bartlett?" asked joel, interrupting.
"There she is, sir," said mr Whitney, pointing to mrs Pepper, who was laughing and crying together.
"Where?" said joel, utterly bewildered.
"I don't see any Mary Bartlett. What does he mean, Polly?"
"I don't know," said Polly.
"Wait, Joey," she whispered, "he's going to tell us all about it."
"Well, this little cousin and I went to the district school, and had many good times together.
And then my parents sent for me, and I went to Germany to school; and when I came back I lost sight of her.
All I could find out was that she had married an Englishman by the name of Pepper."
"Oh!" cried all the children together.
"I heard," said mrs Pepper, "that you'd grown awfully rich, and I couldn't."
"You always were a proud little thing," he said laughing.
"Well, but," broke in mr King, unable to keep silence any longer, "I'd like to inquire, Mason, why you didn't find all this out before, in Marian's letters, when she mentioned mrs Pepper?"
"She didn't ever mention her," said mr Whitney, turning around to face his questioner, "not as mrs Pepper-never once by name.
It was always either 'Polly's mother,' or 'Phronsie's mother.' Just like a woman," he added, with a mischievous glance at his wife, "not to be explicit."
"And just like a man," she retorted, with a happy little laugh, "not to ask for explanations."
The door was thrown suddenly open, and Jasper plunged in, his face flushed with excitement, and after him Ben, looking a little as he did when Phronsie was lost, while Prince squeezed panting in between the two boys.
"Has Polly got-" began Jasper.
"Oh, yes, I'm here," cried Polly, springing up to them; "oh, Ben!"
"She has," cried joel, disentangling himself from the group, "don't you see, Jappy?"
"She's all home," echoed Phronsie, flying up.
"Oh, Ben, do draw me another little house!"
"And see-see!" cried the little Whitneys, pointing with jubilant fingers to their papa, "see what she brought!"
Jasper turned around at that-and then rushed forward.
"Oh, brother Mason!"
"He's a standin' on tip toe," said joel critically, who was hovering near.
"Not a bit of it, Joe!" cried Jasper, with a merry laugh, and setting both feet with a convincing thud on the floor.
"Well, anyway, I'll be just as big," cried joel, "when I'm thirteen, so!"
Just then a loud and quick rap on the table made all the children skip, and stopped everybody's tongue.
It came from mr King.
"Now, then!"
"I will," said Phronsie, shaking her small head wisely, "every single thing."
"Well, then, now begin-"
"Well, then, now begin," said Phronsie, looking down on the faces with an air as much like mr King's as was possible, and finishing up with two or three little nods.
"Oh, no, dear, that isn't it," cried the old gentleman, "I'll tell you. Say, Phronsie, 'you are all cousins-every one.'"
"Does she mean it, grandpapa?
Does she mean it?" cried Percy, in the greatest excitement.
"As true as everything?" demanded joel, crowding in between them.
"So make the most of it."
And then Jasper and she took hold of hands and had a good spin!
"We're cousins!" he said.
"I know it," said Percy, "and so's Van!"
"Yes," said Van, flying up, "and I'm cousin to Polly, too-that's best!"
"You and I, my boy," he turned to his son, "are left out in the cold."
At this a scream, loud and terrible to hear, struck upon them all, as joel flung himself flat on the floor.
"Isn't Jappy-our-cousin?
I-want-Jappy!"
"Goodness!" exclaimed the old gentleman, in the greatest alarm, "what is the matter with the boy!
Do somebody stop him!"
"joel," said Jasper, leaning over him, and trying to help Polly lift him up.
"I'll tell you how we'll fix it!
joel bolted up at that, and began to smile through the tears running down the rosy face.
"Will you, really?" he said, "just like Ben-and everything?"
"I can't be as good as Ben," said Jappy, laughing, "but I'll be a real brother like him."
"Phoo-phoo!
"Oh, dear!" they both cried in great distress.
"Now, papa, Jappy's going to be Joey's brother-and he isn't anything but our old uncle!
Make him be ours more, papa, do!"
And then Polly sprang up.
"Cherry'll die-Cherry'll die!" she cried, "do somebody help me off with the string!"
"Don't hurry so, Polly," said Jasper, as she jumped up to fly up stairs. "He's had some a perfect age-he's all right."
"Is that all there is in that big bundle?" said joel in a disappointed tone, who had followed with extreme curiosity to see its contents. "Phoo!--that's no fun-old bird seed!"
"I know," said Polly with a gay little laugh, pointing with the handful of seed into the library, "but I shouldn't have met the other big bundle if it hadn't have been for this, Joe!"
The moment that the last of the Macedonian dynasty was gone, the elements of discord seemed unchained, and the double scourge of civil war and foreign invasion began to afflict the empire.
Domestic troubles were the first inevitable consequence of the extinction of the Macedonian dynasty.
The aged Theodora had named as her successor on the throne Michael Stratioticus, a contemporary of her own who had been an able soldier twenty five years back.
But Michael the sixth. was grown aged and incompetent, and the empire was full of ambitious generals, who would not tolerate a dotard on the throne.
Before a year had passed a band of great Asiatic nobles entered into a conspiracy to overturn Michael, and replace him by Isaac Comnenus, the chief of one of the ancient Cappadocian houses, and the most popular general of the East.
Isaac Comnenus and his friends took arms, and dispossessed the aged Michael of his throne with little difficulty.
The safety of the realm was entirely in the hands of its well paid and well disciplined national army, and anything that impaired the efficiency of the army was fraught with the deadliest peril.
The Seljouk Turks were now drawing near.
In ten fifty, they had penetrated to Bagdad, and their great chief, Togrul Beg, had declared himself "defender of the faith and protector of the Caliph." Armenia had next been overrun, and those portions of it which had not been annexed to the empire, and still obeyed independent princes, had been conquered by ten sixty four.
The reign of Constantine Ducas was troubled by countless Seljouk invasions of the Armeniac, Anatolic, and Cappadocian themes.
Sometimes the invaders were driven back, sometimes they eluded the imperial troops and escaped with their booty.
But whether successful or unsuccessful, they displayed a reckless cruelty, far surpassing anything that the Saracens had ever shown.
Wherever they passed they not merely plundered to right and left, but slew off the whole population.
Ducas died in ten sixty seven, leaving the throne to his son, Michael, a boy of fourteen years.
The usual result followed.
To secure her son's life and throne, the Empress dowager Eudocia took a new husband, and made him guardian of the young Michael.
The new Emperor regent was Romanus Diogenes, an Asiatic noble, whose brilliant courage displayed in the Seljouk wars had dazzled the world, and caused it to forget that caution and ability are far more regal virtues than headlong valour.
Romanus took in hand with the greatest vigour the task of repelling the Turks, which his predecessor had so grievously neglected.
Hence the Emperor was not unfrequently able to catch and slay off one of the minor divisions of the Turkish army.
But some of them always contrived to elude him; his heavy cavalry could not come up with the light Seljouk horse bowmen, who generally escaped and rode back home by a long detour, burning and murdering as they went.
Cappadocia was already desolated from end to end, and the Turkish raids had reached as far as Amorium, in Phrygia.
In ten seventy one came the final disaster.
Either from treachery or cowardice Andronicus Ducas, the officer who commanded the reserve, led his men off without fighting.
The Emperor's division was beset on all sides by the enemy, and broke up in the dusk.
Romanus himself was wounded, thrown from his horse, and made prisoner.
The greater part of his men were cut to pieces.
Alp Arslan showed himself more forbearing to his prisoner than might have been expected.
It is true that Romanus was led after his capture to the tent of the Sultan, and laid prostrate before him, that, after the Turkish custom, the conqueror might place his foot on the neck of his vanquished foe.
But after this humiliating ceremony the Emperor was treated with kindness, and allowed after some months to ransom himself and return home. He would have fared better, however, if he had remained the prisoner of the Turk.
During his captivity the conduct of affairs had fallen into the hands of john Ducas, uncle of the young emperor Michael.
The unscrupulous regent was determined that Romanus should not supersede him and mount the throne again.
When the released captive reappeared, john had him seized and blinded.
The cruel work was so roughly done that the unfortunate Romanus died a few days later.
After this fearful disaster Asia Minor was lost; there was no chief to take the place of Romanus, and the Seljouk hordes spread westward almost unopposed.
The next ten years were a time of chaos and disaster.
After the death of Romanus, every general in the empire seemed to think that the time had come for him to assume the purple buskins and proclaim himself emperor. History records the names of no less than six pretenders to the throne during the next nine years, besides several rebels who took up arms without assuming the imperial title.
At last a man of ability worked himself up to the surface. This was Alexius Comnenus, nephew of the emperor Isaac Comnenus, whose short reign we related in the opening paragraph of this chapter.
Alexius was a man of courage and ability, but he displayed one of the worst types of Byzantine character.
He was the most accomplished liar of his age, and, while winning and defending the imperial throne, committed enough acts of mean treachery, and swore enough false oaths to startle even the courtiers of Constantinople.
He could fight when necessary, but he preferred to win by treason and perjury.
Yet as a ruler he had many virtues, and it will always be remembered to his credit that he dragged the empire out of the deepest slough of degradation and ruin that it had ever sunk into.
Though false, he was not cruel, and seven ex emperors and usurpers, living unharmed in Constantinople under his sceptre, bore witness to the mildness of his rule.
CHAPTER thirteen
METAMORPHISM AND MINERAL VEINS
Under the action of internal agencies rocks of all kinds may be rendered harder, more firmly cemented, and more crystalline.
These processes are known as METAMORPHISM, and the rocks affected, whether originally sedimentary or igneous, are called METAMORPHIC ROCKS.
CONTACT METAMORPHISM.
The adjacent strata may be changed only in color, hardness, and texture.
Thus, next to a dike, bituminous coal may be baked to coke or anthracite, and chalk and limestone to crystalline marble.
Sandstone may be converted into quartzite, and shale into ARGILLITE, a compact, massive clay rock.
In sedimentary rocks there may be produced crystals of mica and of GARNET (a mineral as hard as quartz, commonly occurring in red, twelve sided crystals).
In contact metamorphism, thin sheets of molten rock produce less effect than thicker ones.
The strongest heat effects are naturally caused by bosses and regional intrusions, and the zone of change about them may be several miles in width.
Which will be more strongly altered, the rocks about a closed dike in which lava began to cool as soon as it filled the fissure, or the rocks about a dike which opened on the surface and through which the molten rock flowed for some time?
REGIONAL METAMORPHISM.
In these regions the rocks have yielded to immense pressure.
Other factors, however, have played important parts.
Rock crushing develops heat, and allows a freer circulation of heated waters and vapors.
Thus chemical reactions are greatly quickened; minerals are dissolved and redeposited in new positions, or their chemical constituents may recombine in new minerals, entirely changing the nature of the rock, as when, for example, feldspar recrystallizes as quartz and mica.
Early stages of metamorphism are seen in SLATE.
Pressure has hardened the marine muds, the arkose, or the volcanic ash from which slates are derived, and has caused them to cleave by the rearrangement of their particles.
Under somewhat greater pressure, slate becomes PHYLLITE, a clay slate whose cleavage surfaces are lustrous with flat lying mica flakes.
The same pressure which has caused the rock to cleave has set free some of its mineral constituents along the cleavage planes to crystallize there as mica.
FOLIATION.
Under still stronger pressure the whole structure of the rock is altered.
Of this structure, called FOLIATION, we may distinguish two types,--a coarser feldspathic type, and a fine type in which other minerals than feldspar predominate.
THE CRYSTALLINE SCHISTS, representing the finer types of foliation, consist of thin, parallel, crystalline leaves, which are often remarkably crumpled.
These folia can be distinguished from the laminae of sedimentary rocks by their lenticular form and lack of continuity, and especially by the fact that they consist of platy, crystalline grains, and not of particles rounded by wear.
MICA SCHIST, the most common of schists, and in fact of all metamorphic rocks, is composed of mica and quartz in alternating wavy folia.
TALC SCHIST consists of quartz and TALC, a light colored magnesian mineral of greasy feel, and so soft that it can be scratched with the thumb nail.
These few examples must suffice of the great class of metamorphic rocks.
The fact of change is seen in their hardness arid cementation, their more or less complete recrystallization, and their foliation; but the change is often so complete that no trace of their original structure and mineral composition remains to tell whether the rocks from which they were derived were sedimentary or igneous, or to what variety of either of these classes they belonged.
Schists may contain rolled out pebbles, showing their derivation from a conglomerate.
The most thoroughly metamorphosed rocks may sometimes be traced out into unaltered sedimentary or igneous rocks, or among them may be found patches of little change where their history maybe read.
Why do metamorphic rocks appear on the surface to day?
MINERAL VEINS
The most common vein stones are QUARTZ and CALCITE.
FLUORITE (calcium fluoride), a mineral harder than calcite and crystallizing in cubes of various colors, and BARITE (barium sulphate), a heavy white mineral, are abundant in many veins.
How the gold came in the placers we may leave the pupil to suggest.
ORIGIN OF MINERAL VEINS.
Now fissures, wherever they occur, form the trunk channels of the underground circulation. Water descends from the surface along these rifts; it moves laterally from either side to the fissure plane, just as ground water seeps through the surrounding rocks from every direction to a well; and it ascends through these natural water ways as in an artesian well, whenever they intersect an aquifer in which water is under hydrostatic pressure.
The waters which deposit vein stones and ores are commonly hot, and in many cases they have derived their heat from intrusions of igneous rock still uncooled within the crust.
The steaming water rises through fissures in volcanic rocks and is now depositing in the rifts a vein stone of quartz, with metallic ores of iron, mercury, lead, and other metals.
The minerals of veins are therefore constantly being dissolved along their upper portions and carried down the fissures by ground water to lower levels, where they are redeposited.
Many of the richest ore deposits are thus due to successive concentrations: the ores were leached originally from the rocks to a large extent by laterally seeping waters; they were concentrated in the ore deposits of the vein chiefly by ascending currents; they have been reconcentrated by descending waters in the way just mentioned.
Thus in soluble rocks, such as limestones, joints enlarged by percolating water are sometimes filled with metalliferous deposits, as, for example, the lead and zinc deposits of the upper Mississippi valley.
EASTERN NORTH AMERICA.
THE BRITISH ISLES.
The consequences were terrible.
Jealousy, discord, and fury, dwell in the convent.
The palace was beautifully built.
Music, to day, is only the art of executing difficult things, and that which is only difficult cannot please long.
They sat down to table, and after an excellent dinner they went into the library.
For the matter of that I say what I think, and I care very little whether others think as I do."
"There would not be much harm in that," said Martin.
"It is a great question," said Candide.
Candide did not quite agree to that, but he affirmed nothing.
Paquette continued her trade wherever she went, but made nothing of it.
"Ha!" said Pangloss to Paquette, "Providence has then brought you amongst us again, my poor child!
"Hold your tongue," answered the Dervish.
Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops.
"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."
The future has been filled with fear, stained and polluted by the heartless past.
Why should we fear that which will come to all that is?
We cannot tell.
We do not know which is the greatest blessing, life or death.
Every cradle asks us "Whence?" and every coffin "Whither?"
The largest and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest.
My Friends: I am going to do that which the dead often promised he would do for me.
He had not passed on life's highway the stone that marks the highest point, but being weary for a moment he lay down by the wayside, and, using his burden for a pillow, fell into that dreamless sleep that kisses down his eyelids still.
While yet in love with life and raptured with the world, he passed to silence and pathetic dust.
He loved the beautiful and was with color, form and music touched to tears.
Speech can not contain our love.
He allowed Marius to slide down upon the shore.
The miasmas, darkness, horror lay behind him.
The pure, healthful, living, joyous air that was easy to breathe inundated him.
Everywhere around him reigned silence, but that charming silence when the sun has set in an unclouded azure sky.
Twilight had descended; night was drawing on, the great deliverer, the friend of all those who need a mantle of darkness that they may escape from an anguish.
The sky presented itself in all directions like an enormous calm.
The river flowed to his feet with the sound of a kiss.
A few stars, daintily piercing the pale blue of the zenith, and visible to revery alone, formed imperceptible little splendors amid the immensity. Evening was unfolding over the head of Jean Valjean all the sweetness of the infinite.
It was that exquisite and undecided hour which says neither yes nor no Night was already sufficiently advanced to render it possible to lose oneself at a little distance and yet there was sufficient daylight to permit of recognition at close quarters.
For several seconds, Jean Valjean was irresistibly overcome by that august and caressing serenity; such moments of oblivion do come to men; suffering refrains from harassing the unhappy wretch; everything is eclipsed in the thoughts; peace broods over the dreamer like night; and, beneath the twilight which beams and in imitation of the sky which is illuminated, the soul becomes studded with stars.
Jean Valjean could not refrain from contemplating that vast, clear shadow which rested over him; thoughtfully he bathed in the sea of ecstasy and prayer in the majestic silence of the eternal heavens.
Then he bent down swiftly to Marius, as though the sentiment of duty had returned to him, and, dipping up water in the hollow of his hand, he gently sprinkled a few drops on the latter's face.
Jean Valjean was on the point of dipping his hand in the river once more, when, all at once, he experienced an indescribable embarrassment, such as a person feels when there is some one behind him whom he does not see.
We have already alluded to this impression, with which everyone is familiar.
He turned round.
Some one was, in fact, behind him, as there had been a short while before.
A man of lofty stature, enveloped in a long coat, with folded arms, and bearing in his right fist a bludgeon of which the leaden head was visible, stood a few paces in the rear of the spot where Jean Valjean was crouching over Marius.
With the aid of the darkness, it seemed a sort of apparition.
An ordinary man would have been alarmed because of the twilight, a thoughtful man on account of the bludgeon.
The reader knows the rest.
Thus it will be easily understood that that grating, so obligingly opened to Jean Valjean, was a bit of cleverness on Thenardier's part. Thenardier intuitively felt that Javert was still there; the man spied upon has a scent which never deceives him; it was necessary to fling a bone to that sleuth hound.
An assassin, what a godsend!
Such an opportunity must never be allowed to slip.
Thenardier, by putting Jean Valjean outside in his stead, provided a prey for the police, forced them to relinquish his scent, made them forget him in a bigger adventure, repaid Javert for his waiting, which always flatters a spy, earned thirty francs, and counted with certainty, so far as he himself was concerned, on escaping with the aid of this diversion.
Jean Valjean had fallen from one danger upon another.
These two encounters, this falling one after the other, from Thenardier upon Javert, was a rude shock.
Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean, who, as we have stated, no longer looked like himself.
He did not unfold his arms, he made sure of his bludgeon in his fist, by an imperceptible movement, and said in a curt, calm voice:
"I."
"Who is 'I'?"
Javert thrust his bludgeon between his teeth, bent his knees, inclined his body, laid his two powerful hands on the shoulders of Jean Valjean, which were clamped within them as in a couple of vices, scrutinized him, and recognized him.
Their faces almost touched.
Jean Valjean remained inert beneath Javert's grasp, like a lion submitting to the claws of a lynx.
Moreover, I have regarded myself as your prisoner ever since this morning.
I did not give you my address with any intention of escaping from you.
Take me. Only grant me one favor."
Javert did not appear to hear him.
He kept his eyes riveted on Jean Valjean.
His chin being contracted, thrust his lips upwards towards his nose, a sign of savage revery.
At length he released Jean Valjean, straightened himself stiffly up without bending, grasped his bludgeon again firmly, and, as though in a dream, he murmured rather than uttered this question:
He still abstained from addressing Jean Valjean as thou.
Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice appeared to rouse Javert:
"It is with regard to him that I desire to speak to you.
Dispose of me as you see fit; but first help me to carry him home.
Javert's face contracted as was always the case when any one seemed to think him capable of making a concession.
Nevertheless, he did not say "no"
Again he bent over, drew from his pocket a handkerchief which he moistened in the water and with which he then wiped Marius' blood stained brow.
"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean replied:
"no
"So you have brought him thither from the barricade?" remarked Javert.
His preoccupation must indeed have been very profound for him not to insist on this alarming rescue through the sewer, and for him not to even notice Jean Valjean's silence after his question.
Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have but one thought.
He resumed:
I do not recollect his name."
Besides this, Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night birds.
Then he exclaimed: "Coachman!"
The reader will remember that the hackney coach was waiting in case of need.
Javert kept Marius' pocket book.
A moment later, the carriage, which had descended by the inclined plane of the watering place, was on the shore.
Marius was laid upon the back seat, and Javert seated himself on the front seat beside Jean Valjean.
The door slammed, and the carriage drove rapidly away, ascending the quays in the direction of the Bastille.
They quitted the quays and entered the streets.
The coachman, a black form on his box, whipped up his thin horses.
A glacial silence reigned in the carriage.
At every jolt over the pavement, a drop of blood trickled from Marius' hair.
Javert was the first to alight; he made sure with one glance of the number on the carriage gate, and, raising the heavy knocker of beaten iron, embellished in the old style, with a male goat and a satyr confronting each other, he gave a violent peal.
The gate opened a little way and Javert gave it a push.
The porter half made his appearance yawning, vaguely awake, and with a candle in his hand.
Everyone in the house was asleep.
People go to bed betimes in the Marais, especially on days when there is a revolt.
This good, old quarter, terrified at the Revolution, takes refuge in slumber, as children, when they hear the Bugaboo coming, hide their heads hastily under their coverlet.
In the meantime Jean Valjean and the coachman had taken Marius out of the carriage, Jean Valjean supporting him under the armpits, and the coachman under the knees.
As they thus bore Marius, Jean Valjean slipped his hand under the latter's clothes, which were broadly rent, felt his breast, and assured himself that his heart was still beating.
It was even beating a little less feebly, as though the movement of the carriage had brought about a certain fresh access of life.
Javert addressed the porter in a tone befitting the government, and the presence of the porter of a factious person.
"Some person whose name is Gillenormand?"
"Here.
Jean Valjean, who, soiled and tattered, stood behind Javert, and whom the porter was surveying with some horror, made a sign to him with his head that this was not so.
Javert continued:
"To the barricade?" ejaculated the porter.
"He has got himself killed.
Go waken his father."
The porter did not stir.
And he added:
"There will be a funeral here to morrow."
Basque woke Nicolette; Nicolette roused great aunt Gillenormand.
As for the grandfather, they let him sleep on, thinking that he would hear about the matter early enough in any case.
He understood and descended the stairs, having behind him the step of Javert who was following him.
The porter watched them take their departure as he had watched their arrival, in terrified somnolence.
They entered the carriage once more, and the coachman mounted his box.
"Inspector Javert," said Jean, "grant me yet another favor."
"Let me go home for one instant.
Then you shall do whatever you like with me."
CHAPTER eleven-CONCUSSION IN THE ABSOLUTE
They did not open their lips again during the whole space of their ride.
What did Jean Valjean want?
To finish what he had begun; to warn Cosette, to tell her where Marius was, to give her, possibly, some other useful information, to take, if he could, certain final measures.
Suicide, that mysterious act of violence against the unknown which may contain, in a measure, the death of the soul, was impossible to Jean Valjean.
At the entrance to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, the carriage halted, the way being too narrow to admit of the entrance of vehicles.
Javert and Jean Valjean alighted.
The coachman humbly represented to "monsieur l'Inspecteur," that the Utrecht velvet of his carriage was all spotted with the blood of the assassinated man, and with mire from the assassin.
That is the way he understood it.
He added that an indemnity was due him.
At the same time, drawing his certificate book from his pocket, he begged the inspector to have the goodness to write him "a bit of an attestation."
Javert thrust aside the book which the coachman held out to him, and said:
Eighty francs, mr Inspector."
Javert drew four napoleons from his pocket and dismissed the carriage.
They entered the street.
It was deserted as usual.
Javert followed Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean knocked.
The door opened.
"It is well," said Javert.
"Go up stairs."
He added with a strange expression, and as though he were exerting an effort in speaking in this manner:
Jean Valjean looked at Javert.
However, he could not be greatly surprised that Javert should now have a sort of haughty confidence in him, the confidence of the cat which grants the mouse liberty to the length of its claws, seeing that Jean Valjean had made up his mind to surrender himself and to make an end of it.
He pushed open the door, entered the house, called to the porter who was in bed and who had pulled the cord from his couch: "It is I!" and ascended the stairs.
On arriving at the first floor, he paused.
All sorrowful roads have their stations.
The window on the landing place, which was a sash window, was open.
As in many ancient houses, the staircase got its light from without and had a view on the street.
The street lantern, situated directly opposite, cast some light on the stairs, and thus effected some economy in illumination.
Jean Valjean, either for the sake of getting the air, or mechanically, thrust his head out of this window.
He leaned out over the street.
It is short, and the lantern lighted it from end to end.
Javert had taken his departure.
At the physician's orders, a camp bed had been prepared beside the sofa.
She set herself to telling her beads in her own chamber.
The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet, deadened by the pocket book, had turned aside and made the tour of his ribs with a hideous laceration, which was of no great depth, and consequently, not dangerous.
The long, underground journey had completed the dislocation of the broken collar bone, and the disorder there was serious.
The arms had been slashed with sabre cuts.
Not a single scar disfigured his face; but his head was fairly covered with cuts; what would be the result of these wounds on the head?
Would they stop short at the hairy cuticle, or would they attack the brain?
As yet, this could not be decided.
A grave symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that people do not always recover from such swoons.
Moreover, the wounded man had been exhausted by hemorrhage.
From the waist down, the barricade had protected the lower part of the body from injury.
As lint was lacking, the doctor, for the time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding.
Beside the bed, three candles burned on a table where the case of surgical instruments lay spread out.
The doctor bathed Marius' face and hair with cold water.
A full pail was reddened in an instant.
The porter, candle in hand, lighted them.
The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly.
From time to time, he made a negative sign with his head, as though replying to some question which he had inwardly addressed to himself.
A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues of the doctor with himself.
At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius' face, and lightly touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened at the end of the drawing room, and a long, pallid figure made its appearance.
This was the grandfather.
He had not been able to sleep on the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long.
In the evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in the house should be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through sheer fatigue.
Surprised at the rift of light which he saw under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way thither.
He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the half open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering, his body wrapped in a white dressing gown, which was straight and as destitute of folds as a winding sheet; and he had the air of a phantom who is gazing into a tomb.
He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding, white with a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth, and pallid lips, stripped to the waist, slashed all over with crimson wounds, motionless and brilliantly lighted up.
"Sir," said Basque, "Monsieur has just been brought back.
Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this centenarian as erect as a young man.
"Sir," said he, "you are the doctor.
Begin by telling me one thing.
You blood drinker!
Misery of my life, he is dead!"
Killed!
A barricade!
Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe?
Oh!
I am going to tell you.
His mother is dead.
He could not manage to pronounce his d's.
He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to whom the physician had returned, and began once more to wring his hands.
The old man's pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and permitted the passage of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death agony:
Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to come from the other side of an abyss:
Just think of it!
At twenty!
Come, he's dead, completely dead.
About this time a firm of merchants having dealings with the East put on the market little paper flowers which opened on touching water.
As it was the custom also to use finger bowls at the end of dinner, the new discovery was found of excellent service.
In these sheltered lakes the little coloured flowers swam and slid; surmounted smooth slippery waves, and sometimes foundered and lay like pebbles on the glass floor.
Their fortunes were watched by eyes intent and lovely.
It is surely a great discovery that leads to the union of hearts and foundation of homes.
The paper flowers did no less.
It must not be thought, though, that they ousted the flowers of nature. Roses, lilies, carnations in particular, looked over the rims of vases and surveyed the bright lives and swift dooms of their artificial relations.
mr Stuart Ormond made this very observation; and charming it was thought; and Kitty Craster married him on the strength of it six months later.
But real flowers can never be dispensed with.
If they could, human life would be a different affair altogether.
For flowers fade; chrysanthemums are the worst; perfect over night; yellow and jaded next morning-not fit to be seen.
On the whole, though the price is sinful, carnations pay best;--it's a question, however, whether it's wise to have them wired.
Some shops advise it.
Certainly it's the only way to keep them at a dance; but whether it is necessary at dinner parties, unless the rooms are very hot, remains in dispute.
Old mrs Temple used to recommend an ivy leaf-just one-dropped into the bowl. She said it kept the water pure for days and days.
But there is some reason to think that old mrs Temple was mistaken.
The little cards, however, with names engraved on them, are a more serious problem than the flowers.
More horses' legs have been worn out, more coachmen's lives consumed, more hours of sound afternoon time vainly lavished than served to win us the battle of Waterloo, and pay for it into the bargain.
The little demons are the source of as many reprieves, calamities, and anxieties as the battle itself.
But, even if the cards should be superseded, which seems unlikely, there are unruly powers blowing life into storms, disordering sedulous mornings, and uprooting the stability of the afternoon-dressmakers, that is to say, and confectioners' shops.
It has not arrived.
The flamingo hours fluttered softly through the sky.
But regularly they dipped their wings in pitch black; Notting Hill, for instance, or the purlieus of Clerkenwell.
No wonder that Italian remained a hidden art, and the piano always played the same sonata.
Mackie's dye works, suffering in winter with his chest, letters must be written, columns filled up in the same round, simple hand that wrote in mr Letts's diary how the weather was fine, the children demons, and Jacob Flanders unworldly.
Clara Durrant procured the stockings, played the sonata, filled the vases, fetched the pudding, left the cards, and when the great invention of paper flowers to swim in finger bowls was discovered, was one of those who most marvelled at their brief lives.
Nor were there wanting poets to celebrate the theme.
Edwin Mallett, for example, wrote his verses ending:
And read their doom in Chloe's eyes,
which caused Clara to blush at the first reading, and to laugh at the second, saying that it was just like him to call her Chloe when her name was Clara.
Ridiculous young man!
But when, between ten and eleven on a rainy morning, Edwin Mallett laid his life at her feet she ran out of the room and hid herself in her bedroom, and Timothy below could not get on with his work all that morning on account of her sobs.
"Which is the result of enjoying yourself," said mrs Durrant severely, surveying the dance programme all scored with the same initials, or rather they were different ones this time-r b instead of e m; Richard Bonamy it was now, the young man with the Wellington nose.
"Nonsense," said mrs Durrant.
"But I am too severe," she thought to herself.
For Clara, losing all vivacity, tore up her dance programme and threw it in the fender.
Such were the very serious consequences of the invention of paper flowers to swim in bowls.
"Please," said Julia Eliot, taking up her position by the curtain almost opposite the door, "don't introduce me.
I like to look on.
The amusing thing," she went on, addressing mr Salvin, who, owing to his lameness, was accommodated with a chair, "the amusing thing about a party is to watch the people-coming and going, coming and going."
"Last time we met," said mr Salvin, "was at the Farquhars.
Poor lady! She has much to put up with."
"Doesn't she look charming?" exclaimed Miss Eliot, as Clara Durrant passed them.
"And which of them ...?" asked mr Salvin, dropping his voice and speaking in quizzical tones.
"There are so many ..." Miss Eliot replied.
Three young men stood at the doorway looking about for their hostess.
"You don't remember Elizabeth as I do," said mr Salvin, "dancing Highland reels at Banchorie.
Clara is a little pale."
"What different people one sees here!" said Miss Eliot.
"I never read them," said Miss Eliot.
"I know nothing about politics," she added.
"The piano is in tune," said Clara, passing them, "but we may have to ask some one to move it for us."
"Are they going to dance?" asked mr Salvin.
"Nobody shall disturb you," said mrs Durrant peremptorily as she passed.
"Julia Eliot.
It IS Julia Eliot!" said old Lady Hibbert, holding out both her hands.
"And mr Salvin.
What is going to happen to us, mr Salvin?
With all my experience of English politics-My dear, I was thinking of your father last night-one of my oldest friends, mr Salvin.
Never tell me that girls often are incapable of love!
I had all Shakespeare by heart before I was in my teens, mr Salvin!"
"You don't say so," said mr Salvin.
"But I do," said Lady Hibbert.
"I will remove myself if you'll kindly lend me a hand," said mr Salvin.
"You shall sit by my mother," said Clara.
"Everybody seems to come in here. ...
mr Calthorp, let me introduce you to Miss Edwards."
"Are you going away for Christmas?" said mr Calthorp.
"If my brother gets his leave," said Miss Edwards.
"What regiment is he in?" said mr Calthorp.
"Perhaps he knows my brother?" said mr Calthorp.
"I am afraid I did not catch your name," said Miss Edwards.
"Calthorp," said mr Calthorp.
"But what proof was there that the marriage service was actually performed?" said mr Crosby.
"There is no reason to doubt that Charles james Fox ..." mr Burley began; but here mrs Stretton told him that she knew his sister well; had stayed with her not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming, but bleak in winter.
"Going about as girls do nowadays-" said mrs Forster.
mr Bowley looked round him, and catching sight of Rose Shaw moved towards her, threw out his hands, and exclaimed: "Well!"
"Nothing!" she replied.
"Nothing at all-though I left them alone the entire afternoon on purpose."
"Dear me, dear me," said mr Bowley.
"I will ask Jimmy to breakfast."
"But who could resist her?" cried Rose Shaw.
"Dearest Clara-I know we mustn't try to stop you..."
"You and mr Bowley are talking dreadful gossip, I know," said Clara.
"Life is wicked-life is detestable!" cried Rose Shaw.
"There's not much to be said for this sort of thing, is there?" said Timothy Durrant to Jacob.
"Women like it."
"Like what?" said Charlotte Wilding, coming up to them.
"Where have you come from?" said Timothy.
"I don't see why not," said Charlotte.
"People must go downstairs," said Clara, passing.
"Take Charlotte, Timothy.
How d'you do, mr Flanders."
"How d'you do, mr Flanders," said Julia Eliot, holding out her hand. "What's been happening to you?"
Every one stood where they were, or sat down if a chair was empty.
"Ah," sighed Clara, who stood beside Jacob, half-way through.
"Then to Silvia let us sing, That Silvia is excelling; She excels each mortal thing Upon the dull earth dwelling. To her let us garlands bring,"
sang Elsbeth Siddons.
"Ah!" Clara exclaimed out loud, and clapped her gloved hands; and Jacob clapped his bare ones; and then she moved forward and directed people to come in from the doorway.
"Yes," said Jacob.
"In rooms?"
'Yes."
"There is mr Clutterbuck.
You always see mr Clutterbuck here.
He is not very happy at home, I am afraid.
They say that mrs Clutterbuck ..." she dropped her voice.
Were you there when they acted mr Wortley's play?
No, mr Carter is playing by himself-This is BACH," she whispered, as mr Carter played the first bars.
"Are you fond of music?" said mr Durrant.
"Yes.
I like hearing it," said Jacob.
"I know nothing about it."
"Very few people do that," said mrs Durrant.
"I daresay you were never taught.
Why is that, Sir Jasper?--Sir Jasper Bigham-mr
Flanders.
Why is nobody taught anything that they ought to know, Sir Jasper?"
She left them standing against the wall.
Neither of the gentlemen said anything for three minutes, though Jacob shifted perhaps five inches to the left, and then as many to the right. Then Jacob grunted, and suddenly crossed the room.
"Will you come and have something to eat?" he said to Clara Durrant.
"Yes, an ice.
Quickly.
Now," she said.
Downstairs they went.
But half-way down they met mr and mrs Gresham, Herbert Turner, Sylvia Rashleigh, and a friend, whom they had dared to bring, from America, "knowing that mrs Durrant-wishing to show mr Pilcher.--mr
Pilcher from New York-This is Miss Durrant."
"Whom I have heard so much of," said mr Pilcher, bowing low.
So Clara left him.
LETTER three.
The population of Sweden has been estimated from two millions and a half to three millions; a small number for such an immense tract of country, of which only so much is cultivated-and that in the simplest manner-as is absolutely requisite to supply the necessaries of life; and near the seashore, whence herrings are easily procured, there scarcely appears a vestige of cultivation.
Hard enough, you may imagine, as it is baked only once a year.
The servants also, in most families, eat this kind of bread, and have a different kind of food from their masters, which, in spite of all the arguments I have heard to vindicate the custom, appears to me a remnant of barbarism.
In fact, the situation of the servants in every respect, particularly that of the women, shows how far the Swedes are from having a just conception of rational equality.
They are not termed slaves; yet a man may strike a man with impunity because he pays him wages, though these wages are so low that necessity must teach them to pilfer, whilst servility renders them false and boorish.
Still the men stand up for the dignity of man by oppressing the women.
The most menial, and even laborious offices, are therefore left to these poor drudges.
Much of this I have seen.
In the winter, I am told, they take the linen down to the river to wash it in the cold water, and though their hands, cut by the ice, are cracked and bleeding, the men, their fellow servants, will not disgrace their manhood by carrying a tub to lighten their burden.
You will not be surprised to hear that they do not wear shoes or stockings, when I inform you that their wages are seldom more than twenty or thirty shillings per annum.
It is the custom, I know, to give them a new year's gift and a present at some other period, but can it all amount to a just indemnity for their labour?
The treatment of servants in most countries, I grant, is very unjust, and in England, that boasted land of freedom, it is often extremely tyrannical.
I have frequently, with indignation, heard gentlemen declare that they would never allow a servant to answer them; and ladies of the most exquisite sensibility, who were continually exclaiming against the cruelty of the vulgar to the brute creation, have in my presence forgot that their attendants had human feelings as well as forms.
I do not know a more agreeable sight than to see servants part of a family.
We must love our servants, or we shall never be sufficiently attentive to their happiness; and how can those masters be attentive to their happiness who, living above their fortunes, are more anxious to outshine their neighbours than to allow their household the innocent enjoyments they earn?
It is, in fact, much more difficult for servants, who are tantalised by seeing and preparing the dainties of which they are not to partake, to remain honest, than the poor, whose thoughts are not led from their homely fare; so that, though the servants here are commonly thieves, you seldom hear of housebreaking, or robbery on the highway.
The country is, perhaps, too thinly inhabited to produce many of that description of thieves termed footpads, or highwaymen.
They are usually the spawn of great cities-the effect of the spurious desires generated by wealth, rather than the desperate struggles of poverty to escape from misery.
Since then the burden has continually been growing heavier, and the price of provisions has proportionately increased-nay, the advantage accruing from the exportation of corn to France and rye to Germany will probably produce a scarcity in both Sweden and Norway, should not a peace put a stop to it this autumn, for speculations of various kinds have already almost doubled the price.
Such are the effects of war, that it saps the vitals even of the neutral countries, who, obtaining a sudden influx of wealth, appear to be rendered flourishing by the destruction which ravages the hapless nations who are sacrificed to the ambition of their governors.
The prohibition of drinking coffee under a penalty, and the encouragement given to public distilleries, tend to impoverish the poor, who are not affected by the sumptuary laws; for the regent has lately laid very severe restraints on the articles of dress, which the middling class of people found grievous, because it obliged them to throw aside finery that might have lasted them for their lives.
These may be termed vexatious; still the death of the king, by saving them from the consequences his ambition would naturally have entailed on them, may be reckoned a blessing.
And, perhaps, the efforts which the aristocrats are making here, as well as in every other part of Europe, to secure their sway, will be the most effectual mode of undermining it, taking into the calculation that the King of Sweden, like most of the potentates of Europe, has continually been augmenting his power by encroaching on the privileges of the nobles.
The well bred Swedes of the capital are formed on the ancient French model, and they in general speak that language; for they have a knack at acquiring languages with tolerable fluency.
This may be reckoned an advantage in some respects; but it prevents the cultivation of their own, and any considerable advance in literary pursuits.
A sensible writer has lately observed (I have not his work by me, therefore cannot quote his exact words), "That the Americans very wisely let the Europeans make their books and fashions for them." But I cannot coincide with him in this opinion.
The reflection necessary to produce a certain number even of tolerable productions augments more than he is aware of the mass of knowledge in the community.
But we must have an object to refer our reflections to, or they will seldom go below the surface.
I am, my friend, more and more convinced that a metropolis, or an abode absolutely solitary, is the best calculated for the improvement of the heart, as well as the understanding; whether we desire to become acquainted with man, nature, or ourselves.
Mixing with mankind, we are obliged to examine our prejudices, and often imperceptibly lose, as we analyse them.
And in the country, growing intimate with nature, a thousand little circumstances, unseen by vulgar eyes, give birth to sentiments dear to the imagination, and inquiries which expand the soul, particularly when cultivation has not smoothed into insipidity all its originality of character.
I love the country, yet whenever I see a picturesque situation chosen on which to erect a dwelling I am always afraid of the improvements.
It requires uncommon taste to form a whole, and to introduce accommodations and ornaments analogous with the surrounding scene.
It visited, near Gothenburg, a house with improved land about it, with which I was particularly delighted.
It was close to a lake embosomed in pine clad rocks.
In one part of the meadows your eye was directed to the broad expanse, in another you were led into a shade, to see a part of it, in the form of a river, rush amongst the fragments of rocks and roots of trees; nothing seemed forced.
Here the hand of taste was conspicuous though not obtrusive, and formed a contrast with another abode in the same neighbourhood, on which much money had been lavished; where Italian colonnades were placed to excite the wonder of the rude crags, and a stone staircase, to threaten with destruction a wooden house.
Venuses and Apollos condemned to lie hid in snow three parts of the year seemed equally displaced, and called the attention off from the surrounding sublimity, without inspiring any voluptuous sensations.
Numberless workmen have been employed, and the superintending artist has improved the labourers, whose unskilfulness tormented him, by obliging them to submit to the discipline of rules.
CHAPTER fifteen
The next summer the truce for a year ended, after lasting until the Pythian games.
During the armistice the Athenians expelled the Delians from Delos, concluding that they must have been polluted by some old offence at the time of their consecration, and that this had been the omission in the previous purification of the island, which, as I have related, had been thought to have been duly accomplished by the removal of the graves of the dead.
These last were scattered in various directions; but the upper classes came to an agreement with the Syracusans, abandoned and laid waste their city, and went and lived at Syracuse, where they were made citizens.
During his voyage along the coast to and from Sicily, he treated with some cities in Italy on the subject of friendship with Athens, and also fell in with some Locrian settlers exiled from Messina, who had been sent thither when the Locrians were called in by one of the factions that divided Messina after the pacification of Sicily, and Messina came for a time into the hands of the Locrians.
He never dreamed of any one coming out to fight him, but said that he was rather going up to view the place; and if he waited for his reinforcements, it was not in order to make victory secure in case he should be compelled to engage, but to be enabled to surround and storm the city.
He thought to retire at pleasure without fighting, as there was no one to be seen upon the wall or coming out of the gates, all of which were shut.
Indeed, it seemed a mistake not to have brought down engines with him; he could then have taken the town, there being no one to defend it.
He did not venture to go out in regular order against the Athenians: he mistrusted his strength, and thought it inadequate to the attempt; not in numbers-these were not so unequal-but in quality, the flower of the Athenian army being in the field, with the best of the Lemnians and Imbrians.
He accordingly picked out a hundred and fifty heavy infantry and, putting the rest under Clearidas, determined to attack suddenly before the Athenians retired; thinking that he should not have again such a chance of catching them alone, if their reinforcements were once allowed to come up; and so calling all his soldiers together in order to encourage them and explain his intention, spoke as follows:
"Peloponnesians, the character of the country from which we have come, one which has always owed its freedom to valour, and the fact that you are Dorians and the enemy you are about to fight Ionians, whom you are accustomed to beat, are things that do not need further comment.
But the plan of attack that I propose to pursue, this it is as well to explain, in order that the fact of our adventuring with a part instead of with the whole of our forces may not damp your courage by the apparent disadvantage at which it places you.
I imagine it is the poor opinion that he has of us, and the fact that he has no idea of any one coming out to engage him, that has made the enemy march up to the place and carelessly look about him as he is doing, without noticing us.
No cowardice then on your part, seeing the greatness of the issues at stake, and I will show that what I preach to others I can practise myself."
Upon hearing this he went up to look, and having done so, being unwilling to venture upon the decisive step of a battle before his reinforcements came up, and fancying that he would have time to retire, bid the retreat be sounded and sent orders to the men to effect it by moving on the left wing in the direction of Eion, which was indeed the only way practicable.
The result was that the Athenians, suddenly and unexpectedly attacked on both sides, fell into confusion; and their left towards Eion, which had already got on some distance, at once broke and fled.
The men who had taken up and rescued Brasidas, brought him into the town with the breath still in him: he lived to hear of the victory of his troops, and not long after expired.
The rest of the army returning with Clearidas from the pursuit stripped the dead and set up a trophy.
They also gave the Athenians back their dead.
While they delayed there, this battle took place and so the summer ended.
With the beginning of the winter following, Ramphias and his companions penetrated as far as Pierium in Thessaly; but as the Thessalians opposed their further advance, and Brasidas whom they came to reinforce was dead, they turned back home, thinking that the moment had gone by, the Athenians being defeated and gone, and themselves not equal to the execution of Brasidas's designs.
The main cause however of their return was because they knew that when they set out Lacedaemonian opinion was really in favour of peace.
Indeed it so happened that directly after the battle of Amphipolis and the retreat of Ramphias from Thessaly, both sides ceased to prosecute the war and turned their attention to peace.
She also suspected some of the cities in Peloponnese of intending to go over to the enemy and that was indeed the case.
The smart of this accusation, and the reflection that in peace no disaster could occur, and that when Lacedaemon had recovered her men there would be nothing for his enemies to take hold of (whereas, while war lasted, the highest station must always bear the scandal of everything that went wrong), made him ardently desire a settlement.
one.
The temple and shrine of Apollo at Delphi and the Delphians shall be governed by their own laws, taxed by their own state, and judged by their own judges, the land and the people, according to the custom of their country.
three.
But should any difference arise between them they are to have recourse to law and oaths, according as may be agreed between the parties.
five.
six.
eight.
nine.
Every man shall swear by the most binding oath of his country, seventeen from each city.
Accordingly, after conference with the Athenian ambassadors, an alliance was agreed upon and oaths were exchanged, upon the terms following:
But if the invader be gone after plundering the country, that city shall be the enemy of Lacedaemon and Athens, and shall be chastised by both, and one shall not make peace without the other.
This to be honestly, loyally, and without fraud.
three.
This to be honestly, loyally, and without fraud.
five.
This completes the history of the first war, which occupied the whole of the ten years previously.
CHAPTER seventeen
Cleomedes, son of Lycomedes, and Tisias, son of Tisimachus, the generals, encamping in their territory with the above armament, before doing any harm to their land, sent envoys to negotiate.
These the Melians did not bring before the people, but bade them state the object of their mission to the magistrates and the few; upon which the Athenian envoys spoke as follows:
Make no set speech yourselves, but take us up at whatever you do not like, and settle that before going any farther.
And first tell us if this proposition of ours suits you.
The Melian commissioners answered:
If you have met to reason about presentiments of the future, or for anything else than to consult for the safety of your state upon the facts that you see before you, we will give over; otherwise we will go on.
However, the question in this conference is, as you say, the safety of our country; and the discussion, if you please, can proceed in the way which you propose.
As we think, at any rate, it is expedient-we speak as we are obliged, since you enjoin us to let right alone and talk only of interest-that you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right, and even to profit by arguments not strictly valid if they can be got to pass current.
This, however, is a risk that we are content to take.
And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule?
No; for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friendship will be an argument to our subjects of our weakness, and your enmity of our power.
But do you consider that there is no security in the policy which we indicate?
For here again if you debar us from talking about justice and invite us to obey your interest, we also must explain ours, and try to persuade you, if the two happen to coincide.
Our confidence, therefore, after all is not so utterly irrational.
Athenians.
But they would have others to send.
This, if you are well advised, you will guard against; and you will not think it dishonourable to submit to the greatest city in Hellas, when it makes you the moderate offer of becoming its tributary ally, without ceasing to enjoy the country that belongs to you; nor when you have the choice given you between war and security, will you be so blinded as to choose the worse.
Think over the matter, therefore, after our withdrawal, and reflect once and again that it is for your country that you are consulting, that you have not more than one, and that upon this one deliberation depends its prosperity or ruin.
The Athenians now withdrew from the conference; and the Melians, left to themselves, came to a decision corresponding with what they had maintained in the discussion, and answered: "Our resolution, Athenians, is the same as it was at first.
Subsequently the Athenians returned with most of their army, leaving behind them a certain number of their own citizens and of the allies to keep guard by land and sea. The force thus left stayed on and besieged the place.
The Corinthians also commenced hostilities with the Athenians for private quarrels of their own; but the rest of the Peloponnesians stayed quiet.
Meanwhile the Melians attacked by night and took the part of the Athenian lines over against the market, and killed some of the men, and brought in corn and all else that they could find useful to them, and so returned and kept quiet, while the Athenians took measures to keep better guard in future.
Ask for a good fat Megatherium and have done with it.'
Good bye.'
'I'll tell you what,' said the Psammead suddenly, shooting out its long snail's eyes - 'I'm getting tired of you — all of you.
'He does grow,' said Anthea.
'Grow up some day!' said Cyril bitterly, plumping the Lamb down on the grass.
I wish to goodness he would -'
'OH, take care!' cried Anthea in an agony of apprehension.
But it was too late — like music to a song her words and Cyril's came out together — Anthea - 'Oh, take care!' Cyril - 'Grow up now!'
You boys might wish as well!' They all wished hard, for the sight was enough to dismay the most heartless.
Their own Lamb!
I can see it.
What's the giddy hour?
You'll be late for your grub!'
'What about your grub, though?' asked Jane.
You might let Bobs and me come with you — even if you don't want the girls.'
'Look here.'
'Oh, Lamb! how can you?' cried Jane - 'when you know perfectly well you're our own little baby brother that we're so fond of.
You see, he's sort of under a spell — enchanted — you know what I mean!'
'You shall say whatever you like in the morning — if you can,' she added in a whisper. It was a gloomy party that went home through the soft evening.
'Come to his own Martha, then — a precious poppet!'
Not on the same night, as he had intended, but the next morning, the Count of Monte Cristo went out by the Barrier d'Enfer, taking the road to Orleans.
Leaving the village of Linas, without stopping at the telegraph, which flourished its great bony arms as he passed, the count reached the tower of Montlhery, situated, as every one knows, upon the highest point of the plain of that name.
Monte Cristo looked for the entrance to the enclosure, and was not long in finding a little wooden gate, working on willow hinges, and fastened with a nail and string.
The garden was crossed by a path of red gravel, edged by a border of thick box, of many years' growth, and of a tone and color that would have delighted the heart of Delacroix, our modern Rubens.
This path was formed in the shape of the figure of eight, thus, in its windings, making a walk of sixty feet in a garden of only twenty.
Never had Flora, the fresh and smiling goddess of gardeners, been honored with a purer or more scrupulous worship than that which was paid to her in this little enclosure.
He had twelve leaves and about as many strawberries, which, on rising suddenly, he let fall from his hand.
"You are gathering your crop, sir?" said Monte Cristo, smiling.
"Excuse me, sir," replied the man, raising his hand to his cap; "I am not up there, I know, but I have only just come down."
This is the reason that, instead of the sixteen I had last year, I have this year, you see, eleven, already plucked-twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
"Of course," said the gardener, "but that does not make it the less unpleasant.
But, sir, once more I beg pardon; perhaps you are an officer that I am detaining here." And he glanced timidly at the count's blue coat.
"Calm yourself, my friend," said the count, with the smile which he made at will either terrible or benevolent, and which now expressed only the kindliest feeling; "I am not an inspector, but a traveller, brought here by a curiosity he half repents of, since he causes you to lose your time."
"Indeed, I should think not," replied Monte Cristo; "dormice are bad neighbors for us who do not eat them preserved, as the romans did."
"What?
Did the romans eat them?" said the gardener-"ate dormice?"
They can't be nice, though they do say 'as fat as a dormouse.' It is not a wonder they are fat, sleeping all day, and only waking to eat all night.
Listen.
Last year I had four apricots-they stole one, I had one nectarine, only one-well, sir, they ate half of it on the wall; a splendid nectarine-I never ate a better."
"You ate it?"
"That is to say, the half that was left-you understand; it was exquisite, sir.
But this year," continued the horticulturist, "I'll take care it shall not happen, even if I should be forced to sit by the whole night to watch when the strawberries are ripe." Monte Cristo had seen enough.
"Did you come here, sir, to see the telegraph?" he said.
"Yes, if it isn't contrary to the rules."
"Oh, no," said the gardener; "not in the least, since there is no danger that anyone can possibly understand what we are saying."
"I have been told," said the count, "that you do not always yourselves understand the signals you repeat."
"That is true, sir, and that is what I like best," said the man, smiling.
"Why do you like that best?"
"Is it possible," said Monte Cristo to himself, "that I can have met with a man that has no ambition?
That would spoil my plans."
"Sir," said the gardener, glancing at the sun dial, "the ten minutes are almost up; I must return to my post.
Will you go up with me?"
"I follow you." Monte Cristo entered the tower, which was divided into three stories.
The tower contained implements, such as spades, rakes, watering pots, hung against the wall; this was all the furniture.
"Does it require much study to learn the art of telegraphing?" asked Monte Cristo.
"The study does not take long; it was acting as a supernumerary that was so tedious."
"And what is the pay?"
"A thousand francs, sir."
"It is nothing."
"No; but then we are lodged, as you perceive."
Monte Cristo looked at the room.
They passed to the third story; it was the telegraph room.
Monte Cristo looked in turn at the two iron handles by which the machine was worked.
"It is very interesting," he said, "but it must be very tedious for a lifetime."
"Yes.
At first my neck was cramped with looking at it, but at the end of a year I became used to it; and then we have our hours of recreation, and our holidays."
"Holidays?"
"Yes."
"When we have a fog."
"Those are indeed holidays to me; I go into the garden, I plant, I prune, I trim, I kill the insects all day long."
"How long have you been here?"
"Ten years, and five as a supernumerary make fifteen."
"You are-"
"Fifty five years old."
"Oh, sir, twenty five years."
"And how much is the pension?"
"A hundred crowns."
"What did you say, sir?" asked the man.
"What was?"
"All you were showing me.
"None at all."
"Never.
Why should I?"
"Certainly."
"And do you understand them?"
"They are always the same."
"Nothing new; You have an hour; or To morrow."
"This is simple enough," said the count; "but look, is not your correspondent putting itself in motion?"
"And what is it saying-anything you understand?"
"Yes; it asks if I am ready."
"And you reply?"
"What is it, sir?"
"And you would be pleased to have, instead of this terrace of twenty feet, an enclosure of two acres?"
"Sir, I should make a terrestrial paradise of it."
"You live badly on your thousand francs?"
"Badly enough; but yet I do live."
"Yes; but you have a wretchedly small garden."
"True, the garden is not large."
"Ah, they are my scourges."
"I should not see him."
"Then what would happen?"
"I could not repeat the signals."
"And then?"
"Not having repeated them, through negligence, I should be fined."
"How much?"
"A hundred francs."
"The tenth of your income-that would be fine work."
"Has it ever happened to you?" said Monte Cristo.
"Once, sir, when I was grafting a rose tree."
"Well, suppose you were to alter a signal, and substitute another?"
"Ah, that is another case; I should be turned off, and lose my pension."
"Three hundred francs?"
"Yes."
"Sir, you alarm me."
"Just so; fifteen thousand francs, do you understand?"
"On the contrary, do not look at him, but at this."
"What is it?"
"What?
"Bank notes!"
"Exactly; there are fifteen of them."
"And whose are they?"
"Yours, if you like."
"Mine?" exclaimed the man, half suffocated.
"Yes; yours-your own property."
"Let him signal."
"Sir, you have distracted me; I shall be fined."
"That will cost you a hundred francs; you see it is your interest to take my bank notes."
"Sir, my right-hand correspondent redoubles his signals; he is impatient."
"Never mind-take these;" and the count placed the packet in the man's hands.
"Now this is not all," he said; "you cannot live upon your fifteen thousand francs."
"I shall still have my place."
"No, you will lose it, for you are going to alter your correspondent's message."
"Oh, sir, what are you proposing?"
"I think I can effectually force you;" and Monte Cristo drew another packet from his pocket.
"Here are ten thousand more francs," he said, "with the fifteen thousand already in your pocket, they will make twenty five thousand.
"A garden with two acres of land!"
"And a thousand francs a year."
"What am I to do?"
"Nothing very difficult."
"But what is it?"
"To repeat these signs." Monte Cristo took a paper from his pocket, upon which were drawn three signs, with numbers to indicate the order in which they were to be worked.
"There, you see it will not take long."
"Yes; but"--
"Now you are rich," said Monte Cristo.
"Listen, friend," said Monte Cristo.
"I think so, indeed!
He has six millions' worth."
"Why?"
"Because Don Carlos has fled from Bourges, and has returned to Spain."
"How do you know?" Debray shrugged his shoulders.
The baroness did not wait for a repetition; she ran to her husband, who immediately hastened to his agent, and ordered him to sell at any price.
All that evening nothing was spoken of but the foresight of Danglars, who had sold his shares, and of the luck of the stock jobber, who only lost five hundred thousand francs by such a blow.
Those who had kept their shares, or bought those of Danglars, looked upon themselves as ruined, and passed a very bad night.
This, reckoning his loss, and what he had missed gaining, made the difference of a million to Danglars.
Chapter sixty two.
Ghosts.
The splendor was within.
Indeed, almost before the door opened, the scene changed.
The library was divided into two parts on either side of the wall, and contained upwards of two thousand volumes; one division was entirely devoted to novels, and even the volume which had been published but the day before was to be seen in its place in all the dignity of its red and gold binding.
On the other side of the house, to match with the library, was the conservatory, ornamented with rare flowers, that bloomed in china jars; and in the midst of the greenhouse, marvellous alike to sight and smell, was a billiard table which looked as if it had been abandoned during the past hour by players who had left the balls on the cloth.
Before this room, to which you could ascend by the grand, and go out by the back staircase, the servants passed with curiosity, and Bertuccio with terror.
Monte Cristo descended into the courtyard, walked all over the house, without giving any sign of approbation or pleasure, until he entered his bedroom, situated on the opposite side to the closed room; then he approached a little piece of furniture, made of rosewood, which he had noticed at a previous visit.
"That can only be to hold gloves," he said.
At precisely six o'clock the clatter of horses' hoofs was heard at the entrance door; it was our captain of Spahis, who had arrived on Medeah.
Julie and Emmanuel have a thousand things to tell you.
Ah, really this is magnificent!
But tell me, count, will your people take care of my horse?"
"I mean, because he wants petting.
"I?
Certainly not," replied the count.
"Then they follow you?" asked Monte Cristo.
"See, they are here." And at the same minute a carriage with smoking horses, accompanied by two mounted gentlemen, arrived at the gate, which opened before them.
The carriage drove round, and stopped at the steps, followed by the horsemen.
The instant Debray had touched the ground, he was at the carriage door.
He offered his hand to the baroness, who, descending, took it with a peculiarity of manner imperceptible to every one but Monte Cristo.
After his wife the banker descended, as pale as though he had issued from his tomb instead of his carriage.
The count understood him.
"How so?"
"He laid a wager he would tame Medeah in the space of six months.
You understand now that if he were to get rid of the animal before the time named, he would not only lose his bet, but people would say he was afraid; and a brave captain of Spahis cannot risk this, even to gratify a pretty woman, which is, in my opinion, one of the most sacred obligations in the world."
"You see my position, madame," said Morrel, bestowing a grateful smile on Monte Cristo.
The baroness was astonished. "Why," said she, "you could plant one of the chestnut trees in the Tuileries inside!
It is the work of another age, constructed by the genii of earth and water."
"How so?--at what period can that have been?"
"I do not know; I have only heard that an emperor of China had an oven built expressly, and that in this oven twelve jars like this were successively baked.
Two broke, from the heat of the fire; the other ten were sunk three hundred fathoms deep into the sea.
Divers descended in machines, made expressly on the discovery, into the bay where they were thrown; but of ten three only remained, the rest having been broken by the waves.
When he had finished with the orange tree, he began at the cactus; but this, not being so easily plucked as the orange tree, pricked him dreadfully.
"Stay," said Debray; "I recognize this Hobbema."
"Yes; it was proposed for the Museum."
"Which, I believe, does not contain one?" said Monte Cristo.
"No; and yet they refused to buy it."
"I think not," replied Chateau Renaud.
A black satin stock, fresh from the maker's hands, gray moustaches, a bold eye, a major's uniform, ornamented with three medals and five crosses-in fact, the thorough bearing of an old soldier-such was the appearance of Major Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, that tender father with whom we are already acquainted.
The three young people were talking together.
"Cavalcanti!" said Debray.
"Yes," said Chateau Renaud, "these Italians are well named and badly dressed."
"You are fastidious, Chateau Renaud," replied Debray; "those clothes are well cut and quite new."
That gentleman appears to be well dressed for the first time in his life."
"Who are those gentlemen?" asked Danglars of Monte Cristo.
"You heard-Cavalcanti."
"That tells me their name, and nothing else."
"Have they any fortune?"
"An enormous one."
"What do they do?"
"Try to spend it all.
They have some business with you, I think, from what they told me the day before yesterday.
I will introduce you to them."
"But they appear to speak French with a very pure accent," said Danglars.
You will find him quite enthusiastic."
"Upon what subject?" asked Madame Danglars.
"A fine idea that of his," said Danglars, shrugging his shoulders. Madame Danglars looked at her husband with an expression which, at any other time, would have indicated a storm, but for the second time she controlled herself.
"The baron appears thoughtful to day," said Monte Cristo to her; "are they going to put him in the ministry?"
"Not yet, I think.
More likely he has been speculating on the Bourse, and has lost money."
After a short time, the count saw Bertuccio, who, until then, had been occupied on the other side of the house, glide into an adjoining room.
He went to him.
"Your excellency has not stated the number of guests."
"Ah, true."
"How many covers?"
"Count for yourself."
"Yes."
Bertuccio glanced through the door, which was ajar.
The count watched him.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed.
"What is the matter?" said the count.
"That woman-that woman!"
"Which?"
"The woman of the garden!--she that was enciente-she who was walking while she waited for"--Bertuccio stood at the open door, with his eyes starting and his hair on end.
Who?"
"No; you see plainly he is not dead.
"Eight!" repeated Bertuccio.
"Stop!
You are in a shocking hurry to be off-you forget one of my guests.
Lean a little to the left.
Five minutes afterwards the doors of the drawing room were thrown open, and Bertuccio appearing said, with a violent effort, "The dinner waits."
The Count of Monte Cristo offered his arm to Madame de Villefort.
In the morning when he woke up they had the place to themselves, for on his instructions the servants had all left first thing: Janet and the cook to Oxford, where they would try and find new places, and Nanny going back to the cottage near Tangley, where her son lived, who was the pigman there.
She was still fond of the same food that she had been used to before her transformation, a lightly boiled egg or slice of ham, a piece of buttered toast or two, with a little quince and apple jam.
His vixen relished them exceedingly and seemed never to tire of them, so that he increased his order first from one pound to three pounds and afterwards to five.
Though you are a fox I would rather live with you than any woman.
I swear I would, and that too if you were changed to anything." But then, catching her grave look, he would say: "Do you think I jest on these things, my dear?
I do not.
I swear to you, my darling, that all my life I will be true to you, will be faithful, will respect and reverence you who are my wife.
Often he would swear to her that the devil might have power to work some miracles, but that he would find it beyond him to change his love for her.
She would come to him, put her paw in his hand and look at him with sparkling eyes shining with joy and gratitude, would pant with eagerness, jump at him and lick his face.
"Good God!
"Day but just breaking...." etc
Nor did he ever repeat the experiment of reading to her.
Moreover she won all three of them. After this they often played a quiet game of piquet together, and cribbage too.
For his mind was filled not only with the fear that she might escape from him and run away, which he knew was groundless, but with more rational visions, such as wandering curs, traps, gins, spring guns, besides a dread of being seen with her by the neighbourhood.
After this he resolved to take her, though with full precautions.
First she ran this way, then that, though keeping always close to him, looking very sharply with ears cocked forward first at one thing, then another and then up to catch his eye.
But her appearance threw the ducks into the utmost degree of consternation.
So in this case, too, for realising that the silly ducks thought his wife a fox indeed and were alarmed on that account he found painful that spectacle which to others might have been amusing.
So she drove them before her back into the pond, the ducks running in terror from her with their wings spread, and she not pressing them, for he saw that had she been so minded she could have caught two or three of the nearest.
But when they got within doors he picked her up in his arms, kissed her and spoke to her.
"Silvia, what a light-hearted childish creature you are.
Then it seemed she would have him play to her on the pianoforte: she led him to it, nay, what is more, she would herself pick out the music he was to play.
Farewell, poor bird!
Farewell!
Indeed at one time nothing but holding her by the scruff prevented her from getting away from him, but at last he achieved his object and she was washed, brushed, scented and dressed, although to be sure this left him better pleased than her, for she regarded her silk jacket with disfavour.
Then his difficulties with her began for she would go out, but as he had his housework to do, he could not allow it.
At first he tried coaxing her and wheedling, gave her cards to play patience and so on, but finding nothing would distract her from going out, his temper began to rise, and he told her plainly that she must wait his pleasure and that he had as much natural obstinacy as she had. But to all that he said she paid no heed whatever but only scratched the harder.
In the afternoon he took her out for her airing in the garden.
She made no pretence now of enjoying the first snowdrops or the view from the terrace.
No-there was only one thing for her now-the ducks, and she was off to them before he could stop her.
Luckily they were all swimming when she got there (for a stream running into the pond on the far side it was not frozen there).
Presently she turned on herself and began tearing off her clothes, and at last by biting got off her little jacket and taking it in her mouth stuffed it into a hole in the ice where he could not get it.
Then she ran hither and thither a stark naked vixen, and without giving a glance to her poor husband who stood silently now upon the bank, with despair and terror settled in his mind.
She let him stay there most of the afternoon till he was chilled through and through and worn out with watching her.
At last he reflected how she had just stripped herself and how in the morning she struggled against being dressed, and he thought perhaps he was too strict with her and if he let her have her own way they could manage to be happy somehow together even if she did eat off the floor.
So he called out to her then:
"Silvia, come now, be good, you shan't wear any more clothes if you don't want to, and you needn't sit at table neither, I promise.
You shall do as you like in that, but you must give up one thing, and that is you must stay with me and not go out alone, for that is dangerous.
If any dog came on you he would kill you."
Directly he had finished speaking she came to him joyously, began fawning on him and prancing round him so that in spite of his vexation with her, and being cold, he could not help stroking her.
"Oh, Silvia, are you not wilful and cunning?
I see you glory in being so, but I shall not reproach you but shall stick to my side of the bargain, and you must stick to yours."
He built a big fire when he came back to the house and took a glass or two of spirits also, to warm himself up, for he was chilled to the very bone.
He got up to catch her then and finding himself unsteady on his legs, he went down on to all fours.
The long and the short of it is that by drinking he drowned all his sorrow; and then would be a beast too like his wife, though she was one through no fault of her own, and could not help it.
To what lengths he went then in that drunken humour I shall not offend my readers by relating, but shall only say that he was so drunk and sottish that he had a very imperfect recollection of what had passed when he woke the next morning.
There is no exception to the rule that if a man drink heavily at night the next morning will show the other side to his nature.
Thus with mr Tebrick, for as he had been beastly, merry and a very dare devil the night before, so on his awakening was he ashamed, melancholic and a true penitent before his Creator.
Then he got up and dressed but continued very melancholy for the whole of the morning.
Being in this mood you may imagine it hurt him to see his wife running about naked, but he reflected it would be a bad reformation that began with breaking faith.
He had made a bargain and he would stick to it, and so he let her be, though sorely against his will.
For the same reason, that is because he would stick to his side of the bargain, he did not require her to sit up at table, but gave her her breakfast on a dish in the corner, where to tell the truth she on her side ate it all up with great daintiness and propriety.
After lunch he took her out, and she never so much as offered to go near the ducks, but running before him led him on to take her a longer walk.
This he consented to do very much to her joy and delight.
He took her through the fields by the most unfrequented ways, being much alarmed lest they should be seen by anyone.
But by good luck they walked above four miles across country and saw nobody.
All the way his wife kept running on ahead of him, and then back to him to lick his hand and so on, and appeared delighted at taking exercise.
Just when they got home and were going into the porch they came face to face with an old woman.
mr Tebrick stopped short in consternation and looked about for his vixen, but she had run forward without any shyness to greet her.
Then he recognised the intruder, it was his wife's old nurse.
"What are you doing here, mrs Cork?" he asked her.
mrs Cork answered him in these words:
"Poor thing.
It is a shame to let her run about like a dog.
It is a shame, and your own wife too.
But whatever she looks like, you should trust her the same as ever.
I saw her, sir, before I left, and I've had no peace of mind.
I couldn't sleep thinking of her.
So I've come back to look after her, as I have done all her life, sir," and she stooped down and took mrs Tebrick by the paw.
mr Tebrick unlocked the door and they went in.
When mrs Cork saw the house she exclaimed again and again: "The place was a pigstye.
They couldn't live like that, a gentleman must have somebody to look after him.
She would do it.
He could trust her with the secret."
Had the old woman come the day before it is likely enough that mr Tebrick would have sent her packing.
Being in this mood the truth is he welcomed her.
But we may conclude that mrs Tebrick was as sorry to see her old Nanny as her husband was glad.
If we consider that she had been brought up strictly by her when she was a child, and was now again in her power, and that her old nurse could never be satisfied with her now whatever she did, but would always think her wicked to be a fox at all, there seems good reason for her dislike.
And it is possible, too, that there may have been another cause as well, and that is jealousy.
We know her husband was always trying to bring her back to be a woman, or at any rate to get her to act like one, may she not have been hoping to get him to be like a beast himself or to act like one?
May she not have thought it easier to change him thus than ever to change herself back into being a woman?
If we think that she had had a success of this kind only the night before, when he got drunk, can we not conclude that this was indeed the case, and then we have another good reason why the poor lady should hate to see her old nurse?
It is certain that whatever hopes mr Tebrick had of mrs Cork affecting his wife for the better were disappointed.
She grew steadily wilder and after a few days so intractable with her that mr Tebrick again took her under his complete control.
The first morning mrs Cork made her a new jacket, cutting down the sleeves of a blue silk one of mrs Tebrick's and trimming it with swan's down, and directly she had altered it, put it on her mistress, and fetching a mirror would have her admire the fit of it.
But though at first she submitted passively, mrs Tebrick only waited for her Nanny's back to be turned to tear up her pretty piece of handiwork into shreds, and then ran gaily about waving her brush with only a few ribands still hanging from her neck.
So it was time after time (for the old woman was used to having her own way) until mrs Cork would, I think, have tried punishing her if she had not been afraid of mrs Tebrick's rows of white teeth, which she often showed her, then laughing afterwards, as if to say it was only play.
Not content with tearing off the dresses that were fitted on her, one day Silvia slipped upstairs to her wardrobe and tore down all her old dresses and made havoc with them, not sparing her wedding dress either, but tearing and ripping them all up so that there was hardly a shred or rag left big enough to dress a doll in.
On this, mr Tebrick, who had let the old woman have most of her management to see what she could make of her, took her back under his own control.
For he saw that vanity had kept her mouth shut if she had won over her mistress to better ways, and her love for her would have grown by getting her own way with her.
But now that she had failed she bore her mistress a grudge for not being won over, or at the best was become indifferent to the business, so that she might very readily blab.
For the moment all mr Tebrick could do was to keep her from going into Stokoe to the village, where she would meet all her old cronies and where there were certain to be any number of inquiries about what was going on at Rylands and so on.
Since he had sent away his servants and the gardener, giving out a story of having received bad news and his wife going away to London where he would join her, their probably going out of England and so on, he knew well enough that there would be a great deal of talk in the neighbourhood.
And as he had now stayed on, contrary to what he had said, there would be further rumour.
He had long grown a nuisance to his friends as an exorbitant sponge upon them, and the world was well rid of him.
Hearing this story of myself diverted me at the time, but I fully believe it has served me in good stead since.
For it set me on my guard as perhaps nothing else would have done, against accepting for true all floating rumour and village gossip, so that now I am by second nature a true sceptic and scarcely believe anything unless the evidence for it is conclusive.
Indeed I could never have got to the bottom of this history if I had believed one tenth part of what I was told, there was so much of it that was either manifestly false and absurd, or else contradictory to the ascertained facts.
It is therefore only the bare bones of the story which you will find written here, for I have rejected all the flowery embroideries which would be entertaining reading enough, I daresay, for some, but if there be any doubt of the truth of a thing it is poor sort of entertainment to read about in my opinion.
It was thirty miles away from Stokoe, which in the country means as far as Timbuctoo does to us in London.
Nor did it mean imparting his secret to others, for there was only mrs Cork's son, a widower, who being out at work all day would be easily outwitted, the more so as he was stone deaf and of a slow and saturnine disposition.
To be sure there was little Polly, mrs Cork's granddaughter, but either mr Tebrick forgot her altogether, or else reckoned her as a mere baby and not to be thought of as a danger.
He talked the thing over with mrs Cork, and they decided upon it out of hand.
The next morning they locked up the house and they departed, having first secured mrs Tebrick in a large wicker hamper where she would be tolerably comfortable.
mr Tebrick drove with the hamper beside him on the front seat, and spoke to her gently very often.
He knew that any living creature in a hamper, even if it be only an old fowl, always draws attention; there would be several loafers most likely who would notice that he had a fox with him, and even if he left the hamper in the cart the dogs at the inn would be sure to sniff out her scent.
So not to take any chances he drew up at the side of the road and rested there, though it was freezing hard and a north-east wind howling.
He took down his precious hamper, unharnessed his two horses, covered them with rugs and gave them their corn.
Then he opened the basket and let his wife out.
She was quite beside herself with joy, running hither and thither, bouncing up on him, looking about her and even rolling over on the ground.
mr Tebrick took this to mean that she was glad at making this journey and rejoiced equally with her.
As for mrs Cork, she sat motionless on the back seat of the dogcart well wrapped up, eating her sandwiches, but would not speak a word.
They drove on again and then the snow began to come down and that in earnest, so that he began to be afraid they would never cover the ground.
But just after nightfall they got in, and he was content to leave unharnessing the horses and baiting them to Simon, mrs Cork's son.
His vixen was tired by then, as well as he, and they slept together, he in the bed and she under it, very contentedly.
One day he tried taking with him the stereoscope and a pack of cards.
But though his Silvia was affectionate and amiable enough to let him put the stereoscope over her muzzle, yet she would not look through it, but kept turning her head to lick his hand, and it was plain to him that now she had quite forgotten the use of the instrument.
It was the same too with the cards.
For with them she was pleased enough, but only delighting to bite at them, and flip them about with her paws, and never considering for a moment whether they were diamonds or clubs, or hearts, or spades or whether the card was an ace or not.
So it was evident that she had forgotten the nature of cards too.
Thereafter he only brought them things which she could better enjoy, that is sugar, grapes, raisins, and butcher's meat.
Sorel was a clumsy little beast of a cheery and indeed puppyish disposition; Kasper was fierce, the largest of the five, even in his play he would always bite, and gave his godfather many a sharp nip as time went on.
esther was of a dark complexion, a true brunette and very sturdy; Angelica the brightest red and the most exactly like her mother; while Selwyn was the smallest cub, of a very prying, inquisitive and cunning temper, but delicate and undersized.
Thus mr Tebrick had a whole family now to occupy him, and, indeed, came to love them with very much of a father's love and partiality.
After her in his affections came Selwyn, whom he soon saw was the most intelligent of the whole litter.
He was not, however, above playing tricks on the others, and one day when mr Tebrick was by, he made believe that there was a mouse in a hole some little way off.
On the next visit it was the same thing.
But clever as he was, little Selwyn could never understand it, and if his mother remembered anything about watches it was a subject which she never attempted to explain to her children.
One day mr Tebrick left the earth as usual and ran down the slope to the road, when he was surprised to find a carriage waiting before his house and a coachman walking about near his gate.
mr Tebrick went in and found that his visitor was waiting for him.
After some conversation on indifferent topics Canon Fox said to him:
"I have called really to ask about my niece."
mr Tebrick was silent for some time and then said:
I have heard she is not living with you any longer."
"no
I see her every day now."
"Indeed.
Where does she live?"
I ought to tell you that she has changed her shape.
She is a fox."
The Rev.
"No-I never see anyone if I can avoid it.
You are the first person I have spoken to for months."
"Quite right, too, my dear fellow.
I quite understand-in the circumstances." Then the cleric shook him by the hand, got into his carriage and drove away.
"At any rate," he said to himself, "there will be no scandal." He was relieved also because mr Tebrick had said nothing about going abroad to disseminate the Gospel.
Canon Fox had been alarmed by the letter, had not answered it, and thought that it was always better to let things be, and never to refer to anything unpleasant.
His eccentricities would never be noticed at Stokoe.
Besides that, mr Tebrick had said he was happy.
"Not an affectionate disposition," then to his coachman: "No, that's all right.
"True happiness," he said to himself, "is to be found in bestowing love; there is no such happiness as that of the mother for her babe, unless I have attained it in mine for my vixen and her children."
At last he must have dropped asleep, for he woke suddenly with all his senses alert, and opening his eyes found a full grown fox within six feet of him sitting on its haunches like a dog and watching his face with curiosity.
mr Tebrick saw instantly that it was not Silvia.
It was the same dark beast with a large white tag to his brush.
Now the secret was out and mr Tebrick could see his rival before him.
Here was the real father of his godchildren, who could be certain of their taking after him, and leading over again his wild and rakish life.
"By Gad! we two have been strangely brought together!"
"We would both of us give our lives for theirs," he said to himself as he reasoned upon it, "we both of us are happy chiefly in their company. What pride this fellow must feel to have such a wife, and such children taking after him.
And has he not reason for his pride?
For half the year he is hunted, everywhere dogs pursue him, men lay traps for him or menace him. He owes nothing to another."
He could see that Silvia had been hunting with her cubs, and also that she had forgotten that he would come that morning, for she started when she saw him, and though she carelessly licked his hand, he could see that her thoughts were not with him.
Very soon she led her cubs into the earth, the dog fox had vanished and mr Tebrick was again alone.
He did not wait longer but went home.
A hundred times this poor gentleman bit his lip, drew down his torvous brows, and stamped his foot, and cursed himself bitterly, or called his lady bitch.
All that night he was in this mood, and in agony, as if he had broken in the crown of a tooth and bitten on the nerve.
The Main Building had originally been a handsome old dwelling house, whose spacious rooms were now used as parlors, library, offices and teachers' rooms.
There were wide, beautiful porches in front and back, and massive stone steps, ending in great stone urns overflowing with bright flowers at the foot of each flight.
These steps led down into wide shady gardens, where the girls walked up and down with arms intertwined, or sat and studied and talked on rustic seats under the trees on the shady lawns.
The other buildings, Briarley Hall, Elmtree Hall and Hillview, were devoted to class rooms and dormitories, each hall being presided over by a teacher.
In these pleasant courts of learning Alison Fair arrived on a golden September afternoon, and was warmly welcomed by Miss Harland, the Principal.
"We are so glad to have you back, dear," Miss Harland said, kissing the girl affectionately.
"I was rather afraid from what you wrote some time ago, that you might not return to us this year."
I was dreadfully afraid of it.
I was so disappointed, I hardly realize yet that it is all right, and I am really here.
We have a very large school this year, and the dormitories are overflowing.
I really had no other place for her.
You may be able to change later, if you don't find her congenial.
You won't mind?"
Alison did mind; but after the first pang of disappointment, she spoke cheerfully.
"It's all right, Miss Harland.
I'm so thankful to be here at all, I shan't grumble at anything.
"Oh, yes, I expect her this evening.
Her father is driving her through the country.
Run up, then, and get acquainted with your new roommate. Marcia West, is her name.
She looked homesick."
Homesick at Briarwood!
She was so happy to find herself here again; but then she was not a new girl, and she knew there were many freshmen lying on their beds at this moment and crying their eyes out for homesickness.
She reached her door and tapped lightly.
She was about Alison's own age, rather tall and slight, with dark, sombre eyes and dark heavy hair worn low on her forehead.
The heavy hair and the unsmiling eyes gave her face a lowering look that was not attractive at first sight.
She merely stood there without speaking, until Alison said pleasantly,
"Good evening.
Miss Harland told me you were here.
"Pretty, though it's not very large for two," said the girl nonchalantly.
"I came in this morning.
I've been unpacking."
It was evident, as Alison entered and looked about her.
Marcia had unpacked her trunk, which stood open in the hall beside their door, and had strewed her belongings about as freely as though she had expected to occupy the room alone.
It was a fairly good sized room, containing two single beds, and a dresser, chair and small table for each girl.
A glance showed Alison that Marcia had placed her dresser and table close to the window and strewn them with photographs and toilet articles in lavish profusion.
Also, that she had taken the best chair.
"I changed things a little.
You don't mind, do you?" she asked, watching Alison.
"Oh, no, it's your room as well as mine," Alison answered good humoredly, and proceeded to open her own trunk, which had been brought up and placed in the hall, according to custom, and to arrange her part of the room.
Marcia had encroached on her side of the closet, she noticed, but she said nothing, only hanging up a few dresses and leaving the rest in her trunk.
She placed a few favorite books between a pair of bronze bookends, her father's parting gift; laid her Bible beside them, and her pretty new portfolio her mother had given her; and finally set her cherished lamp on the dresser.
She had scarcely finished, and stood surveying the effect, when there was a rush of little feet in the corridor, the door was flung open, and a small, rosy faced curly haired girl rushed in to fling herself into Alison's arms.
"Oh, Alison, you darling thing!
CHAPTER three
SOME OF THE GIRLS
"Lovely to be back," said Alison, warmly kissing the pretty childish face," but you are too late for us to be roommates, Jo.
I have another roommate, a new girl, Marcia West.
Marcia, this is Joan Wentworth, who roomed with me last year."
Joan shook back her light fluffy hair, looking rather taken aback for an instant, as Marcia emerged from the closet, where she had been invisible, arranging a rack of shoes.
"How do you do?" Marcia said briefly.
I'll look her up."
She was gone, leaving Alison and Marcia to shake down together as best they could.
Alison tried to talk about her school work.
She had come to school because she was made to, and she looked forward to nothing but getting through.
Finally she said she was tired and lay down on her bed; and seeing presently that she had fallen asleep, Alison slipped out of the room across the hall to the room opposite, which was Katherine Bertram's. Katherine was better off financially than most of the girls.
It was prettily furnished, and her pictures and rugs were better and more luxurious than most schoolgirls' rooms could boast.
Nevertheless, she was known as "a good fellow," and was popular with the girls.
Alison's tap at the door was answered by a cordial "Come in," and she entered, to find Katherine and Joan curled up on the bed, talking vigorously, but both sprang up to greet her joyously.
"I'm just too disappointed and cross for anything," she lamented.
"Here I came flying back to our old quarters like-like a homing pigeon, only to find my place taken by that cross looking thing.
I don't believe you are going to like her a bit, Alison.
She doesn't look as if she would fit in."
"I didn't know there was a chance of your losing your place, or I would have spoken to Miss Harland and tried to get one of the old girls to change with her."
"And in the mean time, Joan is welcome with me as long as she likes. I'll ask for a cot for her.
There's plenty of room," said Katherine hospitably.
"We shall be close by and can get together whenever we like. So cheer up, Jo, it won't be so bad."
They fell into an animated discussion of school matters, which was presently interrupted by a tumultuous rush outside, the door was opened without ceremony, and in flocked the rest of the "Kindred Spirit,"--Evelyn and Polly, boon companions, unlike as they were; studious Rachel; Rosalind, the school beauty, whose golden head and apple blossom face scarcely suggested books or scholarship.
These with Alison, Katherine and Joan, made up the seven "Kindred Spirits," an informal little club of loyal friends.
Their favorite gathering place last year had been the room occupied by Alison and Joan, and consternation reigned when the news spread that the newcomer had usurped Joan's place.
"It won't be the same thing at all," complained Polly, flinging herself back on the bed in a paroxysm of disappointment.
Katherine poured oil on the troubled waters.
"You can meet here just as well.
And maybe, as Alison says, we shall like her when we know her. Don't let us judge her too hardly beforehand."
"So charitable, Kathy always is," murmured Evelyn.
Rachel changed the subject.
"Well-did you know we have a new English teacher?"
"Miss Burnett-Cecil Burnett.
She's lovely.
And she's to be at our table."
"Are Helen Yorke and Brenda Thornton back?"
"Yes.
I saw them this morning.
As musical as ever.
Oh, is that the supper bell?
It can't be six o'clock already."
"It seems it can-for it is," said Alison, consulting her wrist watch and finding it correspond with the bell.
Please be nice to her, girls.
We embarked on board a good ship, and, after recommending ourselves to God, set sail.
We traded from island to island, and exchanged commodities with great profit.
One day we landed on an island covered with several sorts of fruit trees, but we could see neither man nor animal.
We walked in the meadows, along the streams that watered them.
I made a good meal, and afterward fell asleep.
I cannot tell how long I slept, but when I awoke the ship was gone.
In this sad condition, I was ready to die with grief.
I cried out in agony, beat my head and breast, and threw myself upon the ground, where I lay some time in despair.
But all this was in vain, and my repentance came too late.
At last I resigned myself to the will of God.
Not knowing what to do, I climbed up to the top of a lofty tree, from whence I looked about on all sides, to see if I could discover anything that could give me hopes.
As I approached, I thought it to be a white dome, of a prodigious height and extent; and when I came up to it, I touched it, and found it to be very smooth.
I went round to see if it was open on any side, but saw it was not, and that there was no climbing up to the top, as it was so smooth.
It was at least fifty paces round.
By this time the sun was about to set, and all of a sudden the sky became as dark as if it had been covered with a thick cloud.
I was much astonished at this sudden darkness, but much more when I found it occasioned by a bird of a monstrous size, that came flying toward me.
In short, the bird alighted, and sat over the egg.
As I perceived her coming, I crept close to the egg, so that I had before me one of the legs of the bird, which was as big as the trunk of a tree.
I tied myself strongly to it with my turban, in hopes that the roc next morning would carry me with her out of this desert island. After having passed the night in this condition, the bird flew away as soon as it was daylight, and carried me so high, that I could not discern the earth; she afterward descended with so much rapidity that I lost my senses.
This was a new perplexity; so that when I compared this place with the desert island from which the roc had brought me, I found that I had gained nothing by the change.
As I walked through this valley, I perceived it was strewed with diamonds, some of which were of surprising bigness.
I took pleasure in looking upon them; but shortly saw at a distance such objects as greatly diminished my satisfaction, and which I could not view without terror, namely, a great number of serpents, so monstrous that the least of them was capable of swallowing an elephant.
I secured the entrance, which was low and narrow, with a great stone, to preserve me from the serpents; but not so far as to exclude the light.
At last I sat down, and notwithstanding my apprehensions, not having closed my eyes during the night, fell asleep, after having eaten a little more of my provisions.
This was a large piece of raw meat; and at the same time I saw several others fall down from the rocks in different places.
I had always regarded as fabulous what I had heard sailors and others relate of the valley of diamonds, and of the stratagems employed by merchants to obtain jewels from thence; but now I found that they had stated nothing but the truth.
I perceived in this device the means of my deliverance.
He was much alarmed when he saw me; but recovering himself, instead of inquiring how I came thither, began to quarrel with me, and asked why I stole his goods?
"You will treat me," replied I, "with more civility, when you know me better.
They conducted me to their encampment; and there having opened my bag, they were surprised at the largeness of my diamonds, and confessed that they had never seen any of such size and perfection.
I prayed the merchant who owned the nest to which I had been carried (for every merchant had his own) to take as many for his share as he pleased.
The merchants had thrown their pieces of meat into the valley for several days; and each of them being satisfied with the diamonds that had fallen to his lot, we left the place the next morning, and travelled near high mountains, where there were serpents of a prodigious length, which we had the good fortune to escape.
We took shipping at the first port we reached, and touched at the isle of Roha, where the trees grow that yield camphire.
This tree is so large, and its branches so thick, that one hundred men may easily sit under its shade.
After the juice is thus drawn out, the tree withers and dies.
In this island is also found the rhinoceros, an animal less than the elephant, but larger than the buffalo.
It has a horn upon its nose, about a cubit in length; this horn is solid, and cleft through the middle.
I pass over many other things peculiar to this island, lest I should weary you.
Here I exchanged some of my diamonds for merchandise.
There I immediately gave large presents to the poor, and lived honourably upon the vast riches I had brought, and gained with so much fatigue.
"From the Depths of his Love"
At seven o'clock, precisely, Anthony Dexter's old housekeeper rang the rising bell.
In fact, the breakfast bell had rung before he was fully awake.
He dressed leisurely, and was haunted by a vague feeling that something unpleasant had happened.
At length he remembered that just before dusk, in the garden of Evelina Grey's old house, he had seen a ghost-a ghost who confronted him mutely with a thing he had long since forgotten.
"It was subjective, purely," mused Anthony Dexter.
He was strong and straight of body, finely muscular, and did not look over forty, though it was more than eight years ago that he had reached the fortieth milestone.
His hair was thinning a little at the temples and the rest of it was touched generously with grey.
His features were regular and his skin clear.
A full beard, closely cropped, hid the weakness of his chin, but did not entirely conceal those fine lines about the mouth which mean cruelty.
Someway, in looking at him, one got the impression of a machine, well nigh perfect of its kind.
His dark eyes were sharp and penetrating.
Once they had been sympathetic, but he had outgrown that. His hands were large, white, and well kept, his fingers knotted, and blunt at the tips.
He had, pre eminently, the hand of the surgeon, capable of swiftness and strength, and yet of delicacy.
It was not a hand that would tremble easily; it was powerful and, in a way, brutal.
He was thoroughly self satisfied, as well he might be, for the entire countryside admitted his skill, and even in the operating rooms of the hospitals in the city not far distant.
Doctor Dexter's name was well known.
He had thought seriously, at times, of seeking a wider field, but he liked the country and the open air, and his practice would give Ralph the opportunity he needed.
At the thought of Ralph, the man's face softened a trifle and his keen eyes became a little less keen.
Ralph was twenty three now and would finish in a few weeks at a famous medical school-Doctor Dexter's own alma mater.
He had not been at home since he entered the school, having undertaken to do in three years the work which usually required four.
He wrote frequently, however, and Doctor Dexter invariably went to the post office himself on the days Ralph's letters were expected.
The last one was in his pocket now.
"To think, Father," Ralph had written, "in three weeks more or less, I shall be at home with my sheepskin and a fine new shingle with 'dr Ralph Dexter' painted on it, all ready to hang up on the front of the house beside yours.
I'll be glad to get out of the grind for a while, I can tell you that.
I've worked as His Satanic Majesty undoubtedly does when he receives word that a fresh batch of Mormons has hit the trail for the good intentions pavement.
"At first, I suppose, there won't be much for me to do.
Finally, they'll let me vaccinate the kids and the rest will be pitifully easy.
Remembering the boyishness of it, Anthony Dexter smiled a little and took another satisfying look at the pictured face before him.
Ralph's eyes were as his father's had been-frank and friendly and clear, with no hint of suspicion.
His chin was firm and his mouth determined, but the corners of it turned up decidedly, and the upper lip was short. The unprejudiced observer would have seen merely an honest, intelligent, manly young fellow, who looked as if he might be good company.
Anthony Dexter saw all this-and a great deal more.
It was his pride that he was unemotional.
By rigid self discipline, he had wholly mastered himself.
His detachment from his kind was at first spasmodic, then exceptionally complete.
Excepting Ralph, his relation to the world was that of an unimpassioned critic.
He was so sure of his own ground that he thought he considered Ralph impersonally, also.
Over a nature which, at the beginning, was warmly human, Doctor Dexter had laid this glacial mask.
He did what he had to do with neatness and dispatch.
If an operation was necessary, he said so at once, not troubling himself to approach the subject gradually.
If there was doubt as to the outcome, he would cheerfully advise the patient to make a will first, but there was seldom doubt, for those white, blunt fingers were very sure.
He believed in the clean cut, sudden stroke, and conducted his life upon that basis.
Without so much as the quiver of an eyelash, Anthony Dexter could tell a man that within an hour his wife would be dead.
He could predict the death of a child, almost to the minute, without a change in his mask like expression, and feel a faint throb of professional pride when his prediction was precisely fulfilled.
The people feared him, respected him, and admired his skill, but no one loved him except his son.
Among all his acquaintances, there was none who called him friend except Austin Thorpe, the old minister who had but lately come to town. This, in itself, was no distinction, for Thorpe was the friend of every man, woman, child, and animal in the village.
No two men could have been more unlike, but friendship, like love, is often a matter of chemical affinity, wherein opposites rush together in obedience to a hidden law.
The broadly human creed of the minister included every living thing, and the man himself interested Doctor Dexter in much the same way that a new slide for his microscope might interest him.
They exchanged visits frequently when the duties of both permitted, and the Doctor reflected that, when Ralph came, Thorpe would be lonely.
The Dexter house was an old one but it had been kept in good repair. From time to time, wings had been added to the original structure, until now it sprawled lazily in every direction.
One wing, at the right of the house, contained the Doctor's medical library, office, reception room, and laboratory.
The laboratory, at the back of the wing, was well fitted with modern appliances for original research, and had, too, its own outside door.
When Ralph came home, the other wing, at the left of the house, was to be arranged in like manner for him if he so desired.
Doctor Dexter had some rough drawings under consideration, but wanted Ralph to order the plans in accordance with his own ideas.
The breakfast bell rang again, and Doctor Dexter went downstairs.
The servant met him in the hall.
"Breakfast is waiting, sir," she said.
"All right," returned the Doctor, absently.
He opened the door for a breath of fresh air, and immediately perceived the small, purple velvet box at his feet.
He picked it up, wonderingly, and opened it.
Being unemotional, he experienced nothing at first, save natural surprise.
He stood there, staring into vacancy, idly fingering the pearls.
By some evil magic of the moment, the hour seemed set back a full quarter of a century.
As though it were yesterday, he saw Evelina before him.
She had been a girl of extraordinary beauty and charm.
He had travelled far and seen many, but there had been none like Evelina.
How he had loved her, in those dead yesterdays, and how she had loved him! The poignant sweetness of it came back, changed by some fatal alchemy into bitterness.
Anthony Dexter had seen enough of the world to recognise cowardice when he saw it, even in himself.
Hard work and new love and daily wearying of the body to the point of exhaustion had banished those phantoms of earlier years, save in his dreams.
At night, the soul claims its own-its right to suffer for its secret sins, its shirking, its betrayals.
It is not pleasant for a man to be branded, in his own consciousness, a coward.
Refusal to admit it by day does not change the hour of the night when life is at its lowest ebb, and, sleepless, man faces himself as he is.
The necklace slipped snakily over his hand-one of those white, firm hands which could guide the knife so well-and Anthony Dexter shuddered.
He flung the box far from him into the shrubbery, went back into the house, and slammed the door.
He sat down at the table, but could not eat.
The Past had come from its grave, veiled, like the ghost in the garden that he had seen yesterday.
It was not an hallucination, then.
Only one person in the world could have laid those discoloured pearls at his door in the dead of night. The black figure in the garden, with the chiffon fluttering about its head, was Evelina Grey-or what was left of her.
"Why?" he questioned uneasily of himself.
"Why?" He had repeatedly told himself that any other man, in his position, would do as he had done, yet it was as though some one had slipped a stiletto under his armour and found a vulnerable spot.
Before his mental vision hovered two women.
One was a girl of twenty, laughing, exquisitely lovely.
The other was a bent and broken woman in black, whose veil concealed the dreadful hideousness of her face.
He determined to vanquish the spectre that had reared itself before him, not perceiving that Remorse incarnate, in the shape of Evelina, had come back to haunt him until his dying day.
The Sabbath, pale with September sunshine, and monotonous with chiming bells, had passed languidly away.
Dr Simon had come and gone, optimistic and urbane, yet with a faint inward dissatisfaction over a patient behind whose taciturnity a hint of mockery and subterfuge seemed to lurk.
Even Mrs Lawford had appeared to share her husband's reticence. But Dr Simon had happened on other cases in his experience where tact was required rather than skill, and time than medicine.
The voices and footsteps, even the frou frou of worshippers going to church, the voices and footsteps of worshippers returning from church, had floated up to the patient's open window.
Sunlight had drawn across his room in one pale beam, and vanished.
A few callers had called. Hothouse flowers, waxen and pale, had been left with messages of sympathy.
Even Dr Critchett had respectfully and discreetly made inquiries on his way home from chapel.
Lawford had spent most of his time in pacing to and fro in his soft slippers.
The very monotony had eased his mind.
Now and again he had lain motionless, with his face to the ceiling.
He had dozed and had awakened, cold and torpid with dream.
He had hardly been aware of the process, but every hour had done something, it seemed, towards clarifying his point of view.
A consciousness had begun to stir in him that was neither that of the old, easy Lawford, whom he had never been fully aware of before, nor of this strange ghostly intelligence that haunted the hawklike, restless face, and plucked so insistently at his distracted nerves.
He had begun in a vague fashion to be aware of them both, could in a fashion discriminate between them, almost as if there really were two spirits in stubborn conflict within him.
It would, of course, wear him down in time.
There could be only one end to such a struggle-THE end.
All day he had longed for freedom, on and on, with craving for the open sky, for solitude, for green silence, beyond these maddening walls.
And above all, betwixt dread and an almost physical greed, he hungered for night.
He sat down with elbows on knees and head on his hands, thinking of night, its secrecy, its immeasurable solitude.
His eyelids twitched; the fire before him had for an instant gone black out.
He seemed to see slow gesturing branches, grass stooping beneath a grey and wind swept sky.
He started up; and the remembrance of the morning returned to him-the glassy light, the changing rays, the beaming gilt upon the useless books.
Now, at last, at the windows; afternoon had begun to wane.
And when Sheila brought up his tea, as if Chance had heard his cry, she entered in hat and stole.
She put down the tray, and paused at the glass, looking across it out of the window.
'Alice says you are to eat every one of those delicious sandwiches, and especially the tiny omelette.
You have scarcely touched anything to day, Arthur.
I am a poor one to preach, I am afraid; but you know what that will mean-a worse breakdown still.
You really must try to think of-of us all.'
'Are you going to church?' he asked in a low voice.
But Dr Simon advised me most particularly to go out at least once a day.
We must remember, this is not the beginning of your illness.
Anyhow, he said that I looked worried and run down.
Let us both try for each other's sakes, or even if only for Alice's, to-to do all we can.
I must not harass you; but is there any-do you see the slightest change of any kind?'
'You always look pretty, Sheila; to night you look prettier: THAT is the only change, I think.'
Mrs Lawford's attitude intensified in its stillness.
'Now, speaking quite frankly, what is it in you suggests these remarks at such a time? That's what baffles me.
It seems so childish, so needlessly blind.'
'I am very sorry, Sheila, to be so childish.
But I'm not, say what you like, blind.
You ARE pretty: I'd repeat it if I was burning at the stake.'
Sheila lowered her eyes softly on to the rich toned picture in the glass.
'Supposing,' she said, watching her lips move, 'supposing-of course, I know you are getting better and all that-but supposing you don't change back as Mr Bethany thinks, what will you do?
Honestly, Arthur, when I think over it calmly, the whole tragedy comes back on me with such a force it sweeps me off my feet; I am for the moment scarcely my own mistress.
What would you do?'
'I think, Sheila,' replied a low, infinitely weary voice, 'I think I should marry again.' It was the same wavering, faintly ironical voice that had slightly discomposed Dr Simon that same morning.
'YOU, dear!'
Sheila turned softly round, conscious in a most humiliating manner that she had ever so little flushed.
Her husband was pouring out his tea, unaware, apparently, of her change of position.
She watched him curiously.
In spite of all her reason, of her absolute certainty, she wondered even again for a moment if this really could be Arthur.
And for the first time she realised the power and mastery of that eager and far too hungry face.
Her mind seemed to pause, fluttering in air, like a bird in the wind.
'Will you want anything more, do you think, for an hour?' she asked.
Her husband looked up over his little table.
'Is Alice going with you?'
'Oh yes; poor child, she looks so pale and miserable.
We are going to Mrs Sherwin's, and then on to Church.
You will lock your door?'
'Yes, I will lock my door.'
'And I do hope Arthur-nothing rash!'
A change, that seemed almost the effect of actual shadow, came over his face.
'I wish you could stay with me,' he said slowly.
'I don't think you have any idea what-what I go through.'
It was as if a child had asked on the verge of terror for a candle in the dark.
But an hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity. Sheila sighed.
'I think,' she said, 'I too might say that.
But there; giving way will do nothing for either of us.
'But why Mrs Sherwin?
She'd worm a secret out of one's grave.'
'It's useless to discuss that, Arthur; you have always consistently disliked my friends.
'Oh, well-' he began.
But the door was already closed.
'Sheila!' he called in a burst of anger.
'Well, Arthur?'
'You have taken my latchkey.'
Sheila came hastily in again.
'Your latchkey?'
'I am going out.'
'"Going out!"--you will not be so mad, so criminal; and after your promise!'
He stood up.
'It is useless to argue.
If I do not go out, I shall certainly go mad.
As for criminal-why, that's a woman's word.
Who on earth is to know me?'
Lawford eyed her coldly and stubbornly-thinking of the empty room he would leave awaiting his return, its lamp burning, its fire flames shining.
It was almost a physical discomfort, this longing unspeakable for the twilight, the green secrecy and the silence of the graves.
'Keep them out of the way,' he said in a low voice; 'it will be dark when I come in.' His hardened face lit up.
'It's useless to attempt to dissuade me.'
why do you seem to delight in trying to estrange me?' Husband and wife faced each other across the clear lit room.
He did not answer.
'For the last time,' she said in a quiet, hard voice, 'I ask you not to go.'
He shrugged his shoulders.
'Ask me not to come back,' he said; 'that's nearer your hope.' He turned his face to the fire.
Without moving he heard her go out, return, pause, and go out again.
The last light of sunset lay in the west; and a sullen wrack of cloud was mounting into the windless sky when Lawford entered the country graveyard again by its dark weather worn lych gate.
The old stone church with its square tower stood amid trees, its eastern window faintly aglow with crimson and purple.
He could hear a steady, rather nasal voice through its open lattices.
But the stooping stones and the cypresses were out of sight of its porch.
He would not be seen down there.
He paused a moment, however; his hat was drawn down over his eyes; he was shivering.
Far over the harvest fields showed a growing pallor in the solitary seat beneath the cypresses.
He stood hesitating, gazing steadily and yet half vacantly at the motionless figure, and in a while a face was lifted in his direction, and undisconcerted eyes calmly surveyed him.
'I am afraid,' called Lawford rather nervously-'I hope I am not intruding?'
'I have no privileges here; at least as yet.'
Lawford again hesitated, then slowly advanced.
'It's astonishingly quiet and beautiful,' he said.
The stranger turned his head to glance over the fields.
'Yes, it is, very,' he replied.
There was the faintest accent, a little drawl of unfriendliness in the remark.
'You often sit here?' Lawford persisted.
The stranger raised his eyebrows.
'Oh yes, often.' He smiled.
'It is my own modest fashion of attending divine service.
The congregation is rapt.'
'My visits,' said Lawford, 'have been very few-in fact, so far as I know, I have only once been here before.'
'I envy you the novelty.' There was again the same faint unmistakable antagonism in voice and attitude; and yet so deep was the relief in talking to a fellow creature who hadn't the least suspicion of anything unusual in his appearance that Lawford was extremely disinclined to turn back.
He made another effort-for conversation with strangers had always been a difficulty to him-and advanced towards the seat.
'You mustn't please let me intrude upon you,' he said, 'but really I am very interested in this queer old place.
Perhaps you would tell me something of its history?' He sat down.
His companion moved slowly to the other side of the broken gravestone.
'To tell you the truth,' he replied, picking his way as it were from word to word, 'it's "history," as people call it, does not interest me in the least.
After all, it's not when a thing is, but what it is, that much matters.
What this is'--he glanced, with head bent, across the shadowy stones, 'is pretty evident.
Of course, age has its charms.'
'And is this very old?'
'Oh yes, it's old right enough, as things go; but even age, perhaps, is mainly an affair of the imagination.
There's a tombstone near that little old hawthorn, and there are two others side by side under the wall, still even legibly late seventeenth century.
'Of course, the church itself is centuries older, drenched with age.
But she's still sleep walking while these old tombstones dream.
Glow worms and crickets are not such bad bedfellows.'
Lawford found himself staring with unusual concentration into the rather long and pale face.
'Not, I suppose,' he resumed faintly-'not, I suppose, beyond what's there.'
His companion leant his hand on the old stooping tombstone.
Even if you don't.'
'A suicide,' said Lawford, under his breath.
'Yes, a suicide; that's why our Christian countrymen have buried him outside of the fold.
Dead or alive, they try to keep the wolf out.'
'Is this, then, unconsecrated ground?' said Lawford.
'Haven't you noticed,' drawled the other, 'how green the grass grows down here, and how very sharp are poor old Sabathier's thorns?
'But, surely,' said Lawford, 'was it so entirely a matter of choice-the laws of the Church?
If he did kill himself, he did.'
The stranger turned with a little shrug.
'I don't suppose it's a matter of much consequence to HIM.
I fancied I was his only friend.
May I venture to ask why you are interested in the poor old thing?'
Lawford's mind was as calm and shallow as a millpond.
'You say you often come?'
'Often,' said the stranger rather curtly.
'Has anything-ever-occurred?'
'"Occurred?"' He raised his eyebrows.
I come here simply, as I have said, because it's quiet; because I prefer the company of those who never answer me back, and who do not so much as condescend to pay me the least attention.' He smiled and turned his face towards the quiet fields.
Lawford, after a long pause, lifted his eyes.
'Do you think,' he said softly, 'it is possible one ever could?'
'"One ever could?"'
'Answer back?'
There was a low rotting wall of stone encompassing Sabathier's grave; on this the stranger sat down.
He glanced up rather curiously at his companion.
'Of course, of course,' said Lawford eagerly.
'But it is an absolutely new one to me.
I don't mean that I have never had such an idea, just in one's own superficial way; but'--he paused and glanced swiftly into the fast thickening twilight-'I wonder: are they, do you think, really, all quite dead?'
'Call and see!' taunted the stranger softly.
'But I believe in the resurrection of the body; that is what we say; and supposing, when a man dies-supposing it was most frightfully against one's will; that one hated the awful inaction that death brings, shutting a poor devil up like a child kicking against the door in a dark cupboard; one might surely one might-just quietly, you know, try to get out?
wouldn't you?' he added.
And a sheer enormous abyss of silence seemed to follow the unanswerable question.
'He was a stranger; it says so.
Good God!' said Lawford, 'how he must have wanted to get home!
He killed himself, poor wretch, think of the fret and fever he must have been in-just before.
'But it might, you know,' suggested the other with a smile-'might have been sheer indifference.'
It was almost too dark now to distinguish the stranger's features but there seemed a faint suggestion of irony in his voice.
'And how do you suppose your angry naughty child would set about it?
It's narrow quarters; how would he begin?'
Lawford sat quite still.
'You say-I hope I am not detaining you-you say you have come here, sat here often, on this very seat; have you ever had-have you ever fallen asleep here?'
He was cold and shivering.
He felt instinctively it was madness to sit on here in the thin gliding mist that had gathered in swathes above the grass, milk pale in the rising moon.
The stranger turned away from him.
'"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come must give us pause,"' he said slowly, with a little satirical catch on the last word.
'What did you dream?'
Lawford glanced helplessly about him.
The moon cast lean grey beams of light between the cypresses.
But to his wide and wandering eyes it seemed that a radiance other than hers haunted these mounds and leaning stones.
'Have you ever noticed it?' he said, putting out his hand towards his unknown companion; 'this stone is cracked from head to foot?...
But there'--he rose stiff and chilled-'I am afraid I have bored you with my company.
You came here for solitude, and I have been trying to convince you that we are surrounded with witnesses.
You will forgive my intrusion?' There was a kind of old-fashioned courtesy in his manner that he himself was dimly aware of.
He held out his hand.
It's the old story of Bluebeard.
And I confess I too should very much like a peep into his cupboard.
But there, it's merely a matter of time, I suppose.' He paused, and together they slowly ascended the path already glimmering with a heavy dew.
At the porch they paused once more.
'Perhaps,' he said, 'you will give me the pleasure of some day continuing our talk.
I live only at the foot of the hill, not half a mile distant.
Perhaps you could spare the time now?'
Lawford took out his watch, 'You are really very kind,' he said.
'But, perhaps-well, whatever that history may be, I think you would agree that mine is even-but, there, I've talked too much about myself already.
Perhaps to morrow?'
'Why, to morrow, then,' said his companion.
'It's a flat wooden house, on the left hand side.
Come at any time of the evening'; he paused again and smiled-'the third house after the Rectory, which is marked up on the gate.
My name is Herbert-Herbert Herbert to be precise.'
Lawford took out his pocket book and a card.
'Mine,' he said, handing it gravely to his companion.
'is Lawford-at least...' It was really the first time that either had seen the other's face at close quarters and clear lit; and on Lawford's a moon almost at the full shone dazzlingly.
He saw an expression-dismay, incredulity, overwhelming astonishment-start suddenly into the dark, rather indifferent eyes.
'What is it?' he cried, hastily stooping close.
'Why,' said the other, laughing and turning away, 'I think the moon must have bewitched me too.'
He heard voices in the dining room.
A light shone faintly between the blinds of his bedroom.
He very gently let himself in, and unheard, unseen, mounted the stairs.
He sat down in front of the fire, tired out and bitterly cold in spite of his long walk home.
But his mind was wearier even than his body.
He tried in vain to catch up the thread of his thoughts.
He only knew for certain that so far as his first hope and motives had gone his errand had proved entirely futile.
'How could I possibly fall asleep with that fellow talking there?' he had said to himself angrily; yet knew in his heart that their talk had driven every other idea out of his mind.
He had not yet even glanced into the glass.
His every thought was vainly wandering round and round the one curious hint that had drifted in, but which he had not yet been able to put into words.
Supposing, though, that he had really fallen into a deep sleep, with none to watch or spy-what then?
However ridiculous that idea, it was not more ridiculous, more incredible than the actual fact.
If he had remained there, he might, it was just possible that he would by now, have actually awakened just his own familiar every day self again.
And the thought of that-though he hardly realised its full import-actually did send him on tip toe for a glance that more or less effectually set the question at rest.
And there looked out at him, it seemed, the same dark sallow face that had so much appalled him only two nights ago-expressionless, cadaverous, with shadowy hollows beneath the glittering eyes.
And even as he watched it, its lips, of their own volition, drew together and questioned him-'Whose?'
He was not to be given much leisure, however, for fantastic reveries like this.
As he leaned his head on his hands, gladly conscious that he could not possibly bear this incessant strain for long, Sheila opened the door.
He started up.
I refuse to be watched and guarded and peeped on like this.' He knew that his hands were trembling, that he could not keep his eyes fixed, that his voice was nearly inarticulate.
Sheila drew in her lips.
'I have merely come to tell you, Arthur, that Mr Bethany has brought Mr Danton in to supper.
He agrees with me it really would be advisable to take such a very old and prudent and practical friend into our confidence.
You do nothing I ask of you.
I simply cannot bear the burden of this incessant anxiety.
Look, now, what your night walk has done for you!
You look positively at death's door.'
'What-what an instinct you have for the right word,' said Lawford softly.
'And Danton, of all people in the world!
It was surely rather a curious, a thoughtless choice.
Has he had supper?'
'Why do you ask?'
'He won't believe: too-bloated.'
Besides, Arthur, as for believing-without in the least desiring to hurt your feelings-I must candidly warn you, some people won't.'
'Come along,' said Lawford, with a faint gust of laughter; 'let's see.'
They went quickly downstairs, Sheila with less dignity, perhaps, than she had been surprised into since she had left a slimmer girlhood behind.
Mr Danton composed his chin in his collar, and deliberately turned himself towards his companion.
His small eyes wandered, and instantaneously met and rested on those of Mrs Lawford.
'Arthur thought he would prefer to come down and see you himself.'
'You take such formidable risks, Lawford,' said Mr Bethany in a dry, difficult voice.
'Am I really to believe,' Danton began huskily.
'I am sure, Bethany, you will-My dear Mrs Lawford!' said he, stirring vaguely, glancing restlessly.
'It was not my wish, Vicar, to come at all,' said a voice from the doorway.
'To tell you the truth, I am too tired to care a jot either way.
And'--he lifted a long arm-'I must positively refuse to produce the least, the remotest proof that I am not, so far as I am personally aware, even the Man in the Moon.
Danton at heart was always an incorrigible sceptic.
Aren't you, t d?
You pride your dear old brawn on it in secret?'
'Oh, but you know you are,' drawled on the slightly hesitating long drawn syllables; 'it's your parochial metier.
You were born fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately thrust on you-in layers!
Lampreys!
You'll perish of surfeit some day, of sheer Dantonism.
And fat, postmortem, Danton.
Oh, what a basting's there!'
Mr Bethany, with a convulsive effort, woke.
He turned swiftly on Mrs Lawford. 'Why, why, could you not have seen?' he cried.
'It's no good, Vicar.
Blow hot, blow cold. North, south, east, west-to have a weathercock for a wife is to marry the wind.
There's nothing to be got from poor Sheila but....
'Lawford!' the little man's voice was as sharp as the crack of a whip; 'I forbid it.
Do you hear me?
I forbid it.
Lawford peered as if out of a gathering dusk, that thickened and flickered with shadows before his eyes.
'What's he mean, then,' he muttered huskily, 'coming here with his black, still carcase-peeping, peeping-what's he mean, I say?' There was a moment's silence.
Then with lifted brows and wide eyes that to every one of his three witnesses left an indelible memory of clear and wolfish light within their glassy pupils, he turned heavily, and climbed back to his solitude.
'I suppose,' began Danton, with an obvious effort to disentangle himself from the humiliation of the moment, 'I suppose he was-wandering?'
'Bless me, yes,' said Mr Bethany cordially-'fever.
We all know what that MEANS.'
'Yes,' said Danton, taking refuge in Mrs Lawford's white and intent gaze.
Danton inserted a plump, white finger between collar and chin.
'Oh yes. But-eh?--needlessly abusive?
I never SAID I disbelieved him.'
He poised himself, as if it were, on the monolithic stability of his legs.
Mr Bethany sat down at the table.
'I rather feared some such temporary breakdown as this, Danton.
I think I foresaw it.
And now, just while we are all three alone here together in friendly conclave, wouldn't it be as well, don't you think, to confront ourselves with the difficulties? I know-we all know, that that poor half demented creature IS Arthur Lawford.
This morning he was as sane, as lucid as I hope I am now.
An awful calamity has suddenly fallen upon him-this change.
I own frankly at the first sheer shock it staggered me as I think for the moment it has staggered you.
But when I had seen the poor fellow face to face, heard him talk, and watched him there upstairs in the silence stir and awake and come up again to his trouble out of his sleep.
I had no more doubt in my own mind and heart that he was he than I have in my mind that I-am i We do in some mysterious way, you'll own at once, grow so accustomed, so inured, if you like, to each other's faces (masks though they be) that we hardly realise we see them when we are speaking together.
And yet the slightest, the most infinitesimal change is instantly apparent.'
'Oh yes, Vicar; but you see-'
Mr Bethany raised a small lean hand: 'One moment, please.
I have heard Lawford's own account.
What more likely, more inevitable than that such a thing should leave its scar, its cloud, its masking shadow?--call it what you will.
A smile can turn a face we dread into a face we'd die for.
Some experience, which would be nothing but a hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about-one, perhaps, which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of-has put him temporarily at the world's mercy.
And that, my dear Danton, is just where we come in. We know the man himself; and it is to be our privilege to act as a buffer state, to be intermediaries between him and the rest of this deadly, craving, sheepish world-for the time being; oh yes, just for the time being.
Other and keener and more knowledgeable minds than mine or yours will some day bring him back to us again.
We don't attempt to explain; we can't.
We simply believe.'
But Danton merely continued to stare, as if into the quiet of an aquarium.
'My dear good Danton,' persisted Mr Bethany with cherubic patience, 'how old are you?'
'I don't see quite...' smiled Danton with recovered ease, and rapidly mobilising forces.
'Excuse the confidence, Mrs Lawford, I'm forty three.'
'Good,' said Mr Bethany; 'and I'm seventy one, and this child here'--he pointed an accusing finger at Sheila-is youth perpetual.
So,' he briskly brightened, 'say, between us we're six score all told.
Are we-can we, deliberately, with this mere pinch of years at our command out of the wheeling millions that have gone-can we say, "This is impossible," to any single phenomenon?
CAN we?'
'Not finally.
That's all very well, but'--he paused, and nodded, nodding his round head upward as if towards the inaudible overhead, 'I suppose he can't HEAR?'
Mr Bethany rose cheerfully.
'All right, Danton; I am afraid you are exactly what the poor fellow in his delirium solemnly asseverated. And, jesting apart, it is in delirium that we tell our sheer, plain, unadulterated truth: you're a nicely covered sceptic.
Personally, I refuse to discuss the matter.
Mere dull, stubborn prejudice; bigotry, if you like.
I will only remark just this-that Mrs Lawford and I, in our inmost hearts, know.
You, my dear Danton, forgive the freedom, merely incredulously grope.
Faith versus Reason-that prehistoric Armageddon. Some day, and a day not far distant either, Lawford will come back to us.
This-this shutter will be taken down as abruptly as by some inconceivably drowsy heedlessness of common Nature it has been put up.
He'll win through; and of his own sheer will and courage.
But now, because I ask it, and this poor child here entreats it, you will say nothing to a living soul about the matter, say, till Friday?
What step by step creatures we are, to be sure!
I say Friday because it will be exactly a week then.
And what's a week?--to Nature scarcely the unfolding of a rose.
But still, Friday be it.
Then, if nothing has occurred, we will, we shall HAVE to call a friendly gathering, we shall be compelled to have a friendly consultation.'
But then, I am a sceptic; I own it.
And 'pon my word, Mrs Lawford, there's plenty of room for sceptics in a world like this.'
'Very well,' said Mr Bethany crisply, 'that's settled, then.
With your permission, my dear,' he added, turning untarnishably clear childlike eyes on Sheila, 'I will take all risks-even to the foot of the gibbet: accessory, Danton, AFTER the fact.' And so direct and cloudless was his gaze that Sheila tried in vain to evade it and to catch a glimpse of Danton's small agate like eyes, now completely under mastery, and awaiting confidently the meeting with her own.
"Oh, I'm going out into the world to try and get a place," said the lad.
"Will you come and serve me?" said the man.
"Oh, yes; just as soon you as any one else," said the lad.
"Well, you'll have a good place with me," said the man; "for you'll only have to keep me company, and do nothing at all else beside."
So the lad stopped with him, and lived on the fat of the land, both in meat and drink, and had little or nothing to do; but he never saw a living soul in that man's house.
So one day the man said:
"Now, I'm going off for eight days, and that time you'll have to spend here all alone; but you must not go into any one of these four rooms here.
If you do, I'll take your life when I come back."
But when the man had been gone three or four days, the lad couldn't bear it any longer, but went into the first room, and when he got inside he looked round, but he saw nothing but a shelf over the door where a bramble bush rod lay.
Well, indeed! thought the lad; a pretty thing to forbid my seeing this.
So when the eight days were out, the man came home, and the first thing he said was:
And when it was over, they were as good friends as ever.
Some time after the man set off again, and said he should be away fourteen days; but before he went he forbade the lad to go into any of the rooms he had not been in before; as for that he had been in, he might go into that, and welcome.
In this room, too, he saw nothing but a shelf over the door, and a big stone, and a pitcher of water on it.
Well, after all, there's not much to be afraid of my seeing here, thought the lad.
But when the man came back, he asked if he had been into any of the rooms.
No, the lad hadn't done anything of the kind.
But the lad begged and prayed for himself again, and so this time too he got off with stripes; though he got as many as his skin would carry.
But when he got sound and well again, he led just as easy a life as ever, and he and the man were just as good friends.
So a while after the man was to take another journey, and now he said he should be away three weeks, and he forbade the lad anew to go into the third room, for if he went in there he might just make up his mind at once to lose his life.
Then after fourteen days the lad couldn't bear it, but crept into the room, but he saw nothing at all in there but a trap door on the floor; and when he lifted it up and looked down, there stood a great copper cauldron which bubbled up and boiled away down there; but he saw no fire under it.
"Well, I should just like to know if it's hot," thought the lad, and struck his finger down into the broth, and when he pulled it out again, lo! it was gilded all over.
So the lad scraped and scrubbed it, but the gilding wouldn't go off, so he bound a piece of rag round it; and when the man came back, and asked what was the matter with his finger, the lad said he'd given it such a bad cut.
But the man tore off the rag, and then he soon saw what was the matter with the finger. First he wanted to kill the lad outright, but when he wept, and begged, he only gave him such a thrashing that he had to keep his bed three days.
After that the man took down a pot from the wall, and rubbed him over with some stuff out of it, and so the lad was as sound and fresh as ever.
Well, the lad stood out for two or three weeks, but then he couldn't hold out any longer; he must and would go into that room, and so in he stole.
There stood a great black horse tied up in a stall by himself, with a manger of red hot coals at his head and a truss of hay at his tail.
Then the lad thought this all wrong, so he changed them about, and put the hay at his head.
"Since you are so good at heart as to let me have some food, I'll set you free, that I will.
So the lad did all that; but it was a heavy load for him to carry them all down at once.
"If I do," thought the lad, "I shall look an awful fright;" but for all that, he did as he was told.
So when he had taken his bath, he became so handsome and sleek, and as red and white as milk and blood, and much stronger than he had been before.
"Yes," said the lad.
Oh yes! he could do that, and as for the sword, he brandished it like a feather.
"Yes; there are ever so many coming after us, at least a score," said the lad.
So the lad did that, and all at once a close, thick bramblewood grew up behind them.
"Yes, ever so many," said the lad, "as many as would fill a large church."
So the lad did that; but in spite of all the pains he took, he still spilt one drop on the horse's flank.
So it became a great deep lake; and because of that one drop, the horse found himself far out in it, but still he swam safe to land.
Then make yourself a wig of fir moss, and go up to the king's palace, which lies close here, and ask for a place. Whenever you need me, only come here and shake the bridle, and I'll come to you."
Then he went up to the king's palace and begged first for leave to be in the kitchen, and bring in wood and water for the cook, but then the kitchen maid asked him:
"Why do you wear that ugly wig?
Off with it.
I won't have such a fright in here."
"No, I can't do that," said the lad; "for I'm not quite right in my head."
"Do you think then I'll have you in here about the food," cried the cook.
"Away with you to the coachman; you're best fit to go and clean the stable."
"You'd best go down to the gardener," said he; "you're best fit to go about and dig in the garden."
So he got leave to be with the gardener, but none of the other servants would sleep with him, and so he had to sleep by himself under the steps of the summer house.
It stood upon beams, and had a high staircase.
Under that he got some turf for his bed, and there he lay as well as he could.
So, when he had been some time at the palace, it happened one morning, just as the sun rose, that the lad had taken off his wig, and stood and washed himself, and then he was so handsome, it was a joy to look at him.
Then she asked the gardener why he lay out there under the steps.
"Oh," said the gardener, "none of his fellow servants will sleep with him; that's why."
So the gardener told that to the lad.
"Do you think I'll do any such thing?" said the lad.
"Yes," said the gardener, "you've good reason to fear any such thing, you who are so handsome."
"Well, well," said the lad, "since it's her will, I suppose I must go."
"Go gently, and just pull his wig off;" and she went up to him.
But just as she was going to whisk it off, he caught hold of it with both hands, and said she should never have it.
After that he lay down again, and began to snore.
He didn't do that, however, but he threw him into the prison tower; and as for his daughter, he shut her up in her own room, whence she never got leave to stir day or night. All that she begged, and all that she prayed, for the lad and herself, was no good.
So he got that, and an old broken down hack besides, which went upon three legs, and dragged the fourth after it.
Then they went out to meet the foe; but they hadn't got far from the palace before the lad got stuck fast in a bog with his hack.
There he sat and dug his spurs in, and cried, "Gee up! gee up!" to his hack. And all the rest had their fun out of this, and laughed, and made game of the lad as they rode past him.
When they went back, there sat the lad still in the bog, and dug his spurs into his three legged hack, and they all laughed again.
"No! only just look," they said; "there the fool sits still."
The next day when they went out to battle, they saw the lad sitting there still, so they laughed again, and made game of him; but as soon as ever they had ridden by, the lad ran again to the lime tree, and all happened as on the first day.
So when they went home at night, and saw the lad still sitting there on his hack, they burst out laughing at him again, and one of them shot an arrow at him and hit him in the leg.
"Gee up! gee up!" he said to his hack.
And then they rode on, and laughed at him till they were fit to fall from their horses.
When they were gone, he ran again to the lime, and came up to the battle just in the very nick of time.
This day he slew the enemy's king, and then the war was over at once.
"Here comes my own true love," she said.
Then he took the pot of ointment and rubbed himself on the leg, and after that he rubbed all the wounded, and so they all got well again in a moment.
So just take the sword, and cut my head off."
LETTER the fourteenth LAURA in continuation
The morning after our arrival at the Cottage, Sophia complained of a violent pain in her delicate limbs, accompanied with a disagreable Head ake She attributed it to a cold caught by her continued faintings in the open air as the Dew was falling the Evening before.
I was most seriously alarmed by her illness which trifling as it may appear to you, a certain instinctive sensibility whispered me, would in the End be fatal to her.
Alas! my fears were but too fully justified; she grew gradually worse-and I daily became more alarmed for her.
Her disorder turned to a galloping Consumption and in a few days carried her off.
I had wept over her every Day-had bathed her sweet face with my tears and had pressed her fair Hands continually in mine-.
Beware of fainting fits...
My fate will teach you this..
One fatal swoon has cost me my Life..
Beware of swoons Dear Laura....
A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequences-Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint-"
After having attended my lamented freind to her Early Grave, I immediately (tho' late at night) left the detested Village in which she died, and near which had expired my Husband and Augustus.
It was so dark when I entered the Coach that I could not distinguish the Number of my Fellow travellers; I could only perceive that they were many.
He must I am certain be capable of every bad action!
There is no crime too black for such a Character!" Thus reasoned I within myself, and doubtless such were the reflections of my fellow travellers.
At length, returning Day enabled me to behold the unprincipled Scoundrel who had so violently disturbed my feelings.
It was Sir Edward the father of my Deceased Husband.
By his side sate Augusta, and on the same seat with me were your Mother and Lady Dorothea.
Great as was my astonishment, it was yet increased, when on looking out of Windows, I beheld the Husband of Philippa, with Philippa by his side, on the Coachbox and when on looking behind I beheld, Philander and Gustavus in the Basket.
"Oh!
Heavens, (exclaimed I) is it possible that I should so unexpectedly be surrounded by my nearest Relations and Connections?" These words roused the rest of the Party, and every eye was directed to the corner in which I sat
"Oh! my Isabel (continued I throwing myself across Lady Dorothea into her arms) receive once more to your Bosom the unfortunate Laura.
Tell us I intreat you what is become of him?" "Yes, cold and insensible Nymph, (replied I) that luckless swain your Brother, is no more, and you may now glory in being the Heiress of Sir Edward's fortune."
LETTER the fifteenth LAURA in continuation.
This is however of little consequence for as our Mothers were certainly never married to either of them it reflects no Dishonour on our Blood, which is of a most ancient and unpolluted kind.
Having thus arranged our Expences for two months (for we expected to make the nine Hundred Pounds last as long) we hastened to London and had the good luck to spend it in seven weeks and a Day which was six Days sooner than we had intended.
The Manager always played BANQUO himself, his Wife my LADY MACBETH.
I did the THREE WITCHES and Philander acted ALL THE REST.
You know how well it succeeded-.
I graciously promised that I would, but could not help observing that the unsimpathetic Baronet offered it more on account of my being the Widow of Edward than in being the refined and amiable Laura.
I took up my Residence in a Romantic Village in the Highlands of Scotland where I have ever since continued, and where I can uninterrupted by unmeaning Visits, indulge in a melancholy solitude, my unceasing lamentations for the Death of my Father, my Mother, my Husband and my Freind.
Philippa has long paid the Debt of Nature, Her Husband however still continues to drive the Stage Coach from Edinburgh to Sterling:--Adeiu my Dearest Marianne.
Laura.
Finis
Herr Lazarus and the Draken
Once upon a time there was a cobbler called Lazarus, who was very fond of honey.
One day, as he ate some while he sat at work, the flies collected in such numbers that with one blow he killed forty.
Then he went and ordered a sword to be made for him, on which he had written these words: 'With one blow I have slain forty.' When the sword was ready he took it and went out into the world, and when he was two days' journey from home he came to a spring, by which he laid himself down and slept.
Now in that country there dwelt Draken, one of whom came to the spring to draw water; there he found Lazarus sleeping, and read what was written on his sword.
Then he went back to his people and told them what he had seen, and they all advised him to make fellowship with this powerful stranger.
Lazarus answered that he was willing, and after a priest had blessed the fellowship, they returned together to the other Draken, and Lazarus dwelt among them.
After some days they told him that it was their custom to take it in turns to bring wood and water, and as he was now of their company, he must take his turn.
They went first for water and wood, but at last it came to be Lazarus's turn to go for water.
This Lazarus could only, with great difficulty, drag empty to the spring, and because he could not carry it back full, he did not fill it at all, but, instead, he dug up the ground all round the spring.
As Lazarus remained so long away, the Draken sent one of their number to see what had become of him, and when this one came to the spring, Lazarus said to him: 'We will no more plague ourselves by carrying water every day.
I will bring the entire spring home at once, and so we shall be freed from this burden.'
Next it comes to be Lazarus's turn to bring the wood.
Now the Draken, when they fetched the wood, always took an entire tree on their shoulder, and so carried it home.
Because Lazarus could not imitate them in this, he went to the forest, tied all the trees together with a thick rope, and remained in the forest till evening.
When they had lived together some time, the Draken became weary of Lazarus, and agreed among themselves to kill him; each Draken, in the night while Lazarus slept, should strike him a blow with a hatchet.
But Lazarus heard of this scheme, and when the evening came, he took a log of wood, covered it with his cloak, laid it in the place where he usually slept, and then hid himself.
In the night the Draken came, and each one hit the log a blow with his hatchet, till it flew in pieces.
Then they believed their object was gained, and they lay down again.
Thereupon Lazarus took the log, threw it away, and laid himself down in its stead.
He agreed willingly to this, but asked further that one of the Draken should go with him to carry the bag of gold.
They consented, and one was sent with him.
When they had come to within a short; distance of Lazarus's house, he said to the Draken: 'Stop here, in the meantime, for I must go on in front and tie up my children, lest they eat you.'
So he went and tied his children with strong ropes, and said to them: 'As soon as the Draken comes in sight, call out as loud as you can, "Drakenflesh!
Drakenflesh!"'
So, when the Draken appeared, the children cried out: 'Drakenflesh! Drakenflesh!' and this so terrified the Draken that he let the bag fall and fled.
But the fox laughed, and said: 'What! you were afraid of the children of Herr Lazarus?
The Draken then tied himself on to the fox's tail, and went back thus with it to Lazarus's house, in order to see what it would arrange.
"One single thing.
"What?"
Poor Cornelius, thus left alone with his bitter grief, muttered to himself,--
And certainly the unfortunate prisoner would have fallen ill but for the counterpoise which Providence had granted to his grief, and which was called Rosa.
In the evening she came back.
"And how do you know that?" the prisoner asked, with a doleful look.
"'You have done that,' he cried, 'you have crushed the bulb?'
"'Indeed I have.'
"'Are you mad, too?' he asked his friend."
I only know-as unfortunately it is our lot to live with prisoners-that for them any pastime is of value.
This poor Mynheer van Baerle amused himself with this bulb.
"'How so?'
"Did you say that I have three?"
"The word certainly struck me just as much as it does you.
"Halloa, halloa!" said Cornelius.
"What?"
"So he did."
"Certainly."
"That not one of your movements escaped him?"
"Not one, indeed."
"Well?"
"Who else, then?"
"But with whom else?"
"Oh, it would be very easy!"
"Tell me."
"Well, and what then?"
"Oh!" said Rosa, with a sigh, "you are very fond of your bulbs."
"Which proposition?"
"Accept two or three, and, along with them, you may grow the third sucker."
"Well, that is true; but only think! you are depriving yourself, as I can easily see, of a very great pleasure."
If I thus give up the only and last resource which we possess to the uncertain chances of the bad passions of anger and envy, I should never deserve to be forgiven.
"Be easy, Mynheer Cornelius," said Rosa, with a sweet mixture of melancholy and gravity, "be easy; your wishes are commands to me."
Rosa felt her heart sink within her, and her eyes were filling with tears.
"Alas!" she said.
"What is it?" asked Cornelius.
"I see one thing."
"What do you see?"
Saying this, she fled.
Night came, and with it Rosa, joyous and cheerful as a bird.
"Well?" asked Cornelius.
"Without a speck of any other colour."
"Without one speck."
"Well?"
"Well, and I will tell you now what I have decided on.
"By Jove!"
"Oh!"
"And if on your return you find it open?"
"Well?"
"Rosa, Rosa, I don't know to what wonder under the sun I shall compare you."
"Say, 'My very dear friend.'"
"Your cheek,--your fresh cheek, your soft, rosy cheek.
Oh, Rosa, give it me of your own free will, and not by chance.
Rosa made her escape.
Touch it gently, Rosa.
Cornelius uttered a cry, and was nearly fainting.
"Rosa," said Cornelius, almost gasping, "Rosa, there is not one moment to lose in writing the letter."
"Is it, indeed?"
As soon as it is open, I shall send a messenger to you, with the request that you will come and fetch it in person from the fortress at Loewestein.
I cannot, therefore, bring to you this wonderful flower.
The messenger! the messenger!"
"What's the name of the President?"
'We will set to work on that,' said Hansel, 'and have a good meal.
Then she went to Gretel, shook her till she awoke, and cried: 'Get up, lazy thing, fetch some water, and cook something good for your brother, he is in the stable outside, and is to be made fat.
'Now, then, Gretel,' she cried to the girl, 'stir yourself, and bring some water. Let Hansel be fat or lean, tomorrow I will kill him, and cook him.' Ah, how the poor little sister did lament when she had to fetch the water, and how her tears did flow down her cheeks!
Whoop!
I'm quite a baby.
Whoop! How are you!
Merry Christmas!"
"mr Scrooge?"
"Not a farthing less.
"Yes, sir."
I'll show you up stairs, if you please."
"Fred!" said Scrooge.
"Why bless my soul!" cried Fred, "who's that?"
"It's i Your uncle Scrooge.
I have come to dinner. Will you let me in, Fred?"
A quarter past.
He was full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time.
His hat was off, before he opened the door; his comforter too.
I think you are. Step this way, sir, if you please."
"Now, I'll tell you what, my friend," said Scrooge, "I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer.
And therefore," he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the Tank again; "and therefore I am about to raise your salary!"
Make up the fires, and buy another coal scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!"
The house, with kitchens and cellars below, had above the ground floor, two stories and attics.
Penelon, Penelon!" An old man, who was digging busily at one of the beds, stuck his spade in the earth, and approached, cap in hand, striving to conceal a quid of tobacco he had just thrust into his cheek.
"Look there," said Maximilian, laughing; "there is her husband changing his jacket for a coat.
a doctor?"
It was three o'clock; at a quarter past, a merchant presented himself to insure two ships; it was a clear profit of fifteen thousand. francs.
"No, no," returned Monte Cristo, pale as death, pressing one hand on his heart to still its throbbings, while with the other he pointed to a crystal cover, beneath which a silken purse lay on a black velvet cushion.
"Oh, it is useless to inquire," returned the count; "perhaps, after all, he was not the man you seek for.
"Not a word."
"Nothing."
Recollect what our excellent father so often told us, 'It was no Englishman that thus saved us.'" Monte Cristo started.
FRUIT IS SEED.
Even you are getting tired, with all your patience, my Tito; confess it.
The attitude had been a frequent one, and Tito was accustomed, when he felt her hand there, to raise his head, throw himself a little backward, and look up at her. But he felt now as unable to raise his head as if her hand had been a leaden cowl.
He spoke instead, in a light tone, as his pen still ran along.
"The French are as ready to go from Florence as the wasps to leave a ripe pear when they have just fastened on it."
Romola, keenly sensitive to the absence of the usual response, took away her hand and said, "I am going, Tito."
"Farewell, my sweet one.
Take Maso with you."
Still Tito did not look up, and Romola went out without saying any more. Very slight things make Epochs in married life, and this morning for the first time she admitted to herself not only that Tito had changed, but that he had changed towards her.
Did the reason lie in herself? She might perhaps have thought so, if there had not been the facts of the armour and the picture to suggest some external event which was an entire mystery to her.
He was about to take a step which he knew would arouse her deep indignation; he would have to encounter much that was unpleasant before he could win her forgiveness.
And Tito could never find it easy to face displeasure and anger; his nature was one of those most remote from defiance or impudence, and all his inclinations leaned towards preserving Romola's tenderness.
He was not tormented by sentimental scruples which, as he had demonstrated to himself by a very rapid course of argument, had no relation to solid utility; but his freedom from scruples did not release him from the dread of what was disagreeable.
Unscrupulousness gets rid of much, but not of toothache, or wounded vanity, or the sense of loneliness, against which, as the world at present stands, there is no security but a thoroughly healthy jaw, and a just, loving soul.
And Tito was feeling intensely at this moment that no devices could save him from pain in the impending collision with Romola; no persuasive blandness could cushion him against the shock towards which he was being driven like a timid animal urged to a desperate leap by the terror of the tooth and the claw that are close behind it.
It was not possible for him to make himself independent even of those Florentines who only greeted him with regard; still less was it possible for him to make himself independent of Romola.
This was the leaden weight which had been too strong for his will, and kept him from raising his head to meet her eyes.
Their pure light brought too near him the prospect of a coming struggle.
He would have been equal to any sacrifice that was not unpleasant.
The rustling magnates came and went, the bargains had been concluded, and Romola returned home; but nothing grave was said that night.
Tito was only gay and chatty, pouring forth to her, as he had not done before, stories and descriptions of what he had witnessed during the French visit.
The next day Tito remained away from home until late at night.
It was a marked day to Romola, for Piero di Cosimo, stimulated to greater industry on her behalf by the fear that he might have been the cause of pain to her in the past week, had sent home her father's portrait.
She had propped it against the back of his old chair, and had been looking at it for some time, when the door opened behind her, and Bernardo del Nero came in.
"It is you, godfather!
How I wish you had come sooner! it is getting a little dusk," said Romola, going towards him.
"The French king moves off to morrow: not before it is high time.
Tito seemed to think yesterday that there was little prospect of the king's going soon."
The Cristianissimo was frightened at that thunder, and has given the order to move.
"Don't you want your spectacles, godfather?" said Romola, in anxiety that he should see just what she saw.
"No, child, no," said Bernardo, uncovering his grey head, as he seated himself with firm erectness.
Old men's eyes are like old men's memories; they are strongest for things a long way off."
"I don't know," said Bernardo.
"I almost think I see Bardo as he was when he was young, better than that picture shows him to me as he was when he was old.
Your father had a great deal of fire in his eyes when he was young.
It was what I could never understand, that he, with his fiery spirit, which seemed much more impatient than mine, could hang over the books and live with shadows all his life.
However, he had put his heart into that."
"And he was disappointed to the last," she said, involuntarily.
Then, turning to her, and patting her cheek, said, "And you need not be afraid of my dying; my ghost will claim nothing.
I've taken care of that in my will."
I see him everywhere but here," said Bernardo, willing to change the subject.
She felt the flush spread over her neck and face as she said, "He has been very much wanted; you know he speaks so well.
I am glad to know that his value is understood."
"Assuredly."
Poor Romola!
There was one thing that would have made the pang of disappointment in her husband harder to bear; it was, that any one should know he gave her cause for disappointment.
This might be a woman's weakness, but it is closely allied to a woman's nobleness.
WHY TITO WAS SAFE.
On the other hand, the Piagnoni of the popular party, who had the directness that belongs to energetic conviction, were the more inclined to credit Tito with sincerity in his political adhesion to them, because he affected no religious sympathies.
By virtue of these conditions, the last three months had been a time of flattering success to Tito.
At present, the scale dipped in favour of Milan; and if within the year he could render certain services to Duke Ludovico Sforza, he had the prospect of a place at the Milanese court which outweighed the advantages of Rome.
But his quick mind had soon traced out the course that would secure his own safety with the fewest unpleasant concomitants.
It is agreeable to keep a whole skin; but the skin still remains an organ sensitive to the atmosphere.
His reckoning had not deceived him.
Francesco Valori, as we have seen, was the head of the Piagnoni, a man with certain fine qualities that were not incompatible with violent partisanship, with an arrogant temper that alienated his friends, nor with bitter personal animosities-one of the bitterest being directed against Bernardo del Nero.
These propositions did not sound in the ear of Francesco Valori precisely as they sound to us.
There were sure to be immense efforts to save them; and it was to be wished (on public grounds) that the evidence against them should be of the strongest, so as to alarm all well affected men at the dangers of clemency.
The character of legal proceedings at that time implied that evidence was one of those desirable things which could only be come at by foul means.
Documentary evidence on this subject would do more than anything else to make the right course clear.
He had that degree of self contemplation which necessarily accompanies the habit of acting on well considered reasons, of whatever quality; and if he could have chosen, he would have declined to see himself disapproved by men of the world.
He had never meant to be disapproved; he had meant always to conduct himself so ably that if he acted in opposition to the standard of other men they should not be aware of it; and the barrier between himself and Romola had been raised by the impossibility of such concealment with her.
He shrank from condemnatory judgments as from a climate to which he could not adapt himself But things were not so plastic in the hands of cleverness as could be wished, and events had turned out inconveniently.
His proffer of a little additional proof against them would probably have no influence on their fate; in fact, he felt convinced they would escape any extreme consequences; but if he had not given it, his own fortunes, which made a promising fabric, would have been utterly ruined.
And what motive could any man really have, except his own interest?
Did not Pontanus, poet and philosopher of unrivalled Latinity, make the finest possible oration at Naples to welcome the French king, who had come to dethrone the learned orator's royal friend and patron? and still Pontanus held up his head and prospered.
Men did not really care about these things, except when their personal spleen was touched.
It was weakness only that was despised; power of any sort carried its immunity; and no man, unless by very rare good fortune, could mount high in the world without incurring a few unpleasant necessities which laid him open to enmity, and perhaps to a little hissing, when enmity wanted a pretext.
It was a faint prognostic of that hissing, gathered by Tito from certain indications when he was before the council, which gave his present conduct the character of an epoch to him, and made him dwell on it with argumentative vindication.
His brilliant success at Florence had had some ugly flaws in it: he had fallen in love with the wrong woman, and Baldassarre had come back under incalculable circumstances. But as Tito galloped with a loose rein towards Siena, he saw a future before him in which he would no longer be haunted by those mistakes.
THE BENEDICTION.
About ten o'clock on the morning of the twenty seventh of February the currents of passengers along the Florentine streets set decidedly towards San Marco.
It was the last morning of the Carnival, and every one knew there was a second Bonfire of Vanities being prepared in front of the Old Palace; but at this hour it was evident that the centre of popular interest lay elsewhere.
The Piazza di San Marco was filled by a multitude who showed no other movement than that which proceeded from the pressure of new comers trying to force their way forward from all the openings: but the front ranks were already close serried and resisted the pressure.
But the temporary wooden pulpit erected over the church door was still empty.
This man had said, "A wicked, unbelieving Pope who has gained the pontifical chair by bribery is not Christ's Vicar.
His curses are broken swords: he grasps a hilt without a blade.
That expectation rather than any spell from the accustomed wail of psalmody was what made silence and expectation seem to spread like a paling solemn light over the multitude of upturned faces, all now directed towards the empty pulpit.
The next instant the pulpit was no longer empty.
A figure covered from head to foot in black cowl and mantle had entered it, and was kneeling with bent head and with face turned away.
It seemed a weary time to the eager people while the black figure knelt and the monks chanted.
At last there was a vibration among the multitude, each seeming to give his neighbour a momentary aspen like touch, as when men who have been watching for something in the heavens see the expected presence silently disclosing itself.
Those great jets of emotion were a necessary part of his life; he himself had said to the people long ago, "Without preaching I cannot live." But it was a life that shattered him.
He had taken into his hands a crystal vessel, containing the consecrated Host, and was about to address the people.
"You remember, my children, three days ago I besought you, when I should hold this Sacrament in my hand in the face of you all, to pray fervently to the Most High that if this work of mine does not come from Him, He will send a fire and consume me, that I may vanish into the eternal darkness away from His light which I have hidden with my falsity.
It was a breathless moment: perhaps no man really prayed, if some in a spirit of devout obedience made the effort to pray.
Every consciousness was chiefly possessed by the sense that Savonarola was praying, in a voice not loud, but distinctly audible in the wide stillness.
Every one else was motionless and silent too, while the sunlight, which for the last quarter of an hour had here and there been piercing the greyness, made fitful streaks across the convent wall, causing some awe stricken spectators to start timidly.
An instantaneous shout rang through the Piazza, "Behold the answer!"
The warm radiance thrilled through Savonarola's frame, and so did the shout.
It was but a moment that expanded itself in that prevision.
"Nevertheless it was a striking moment, eh, Messer Pietro?
Never was a richly furnished room more thoroughly comfortless than this-the eye ached at looking round it.
There was no repose anywhere.
All surrounding objects seemed startlingly near to the eye; much nearer than they really were.
He wore a white cravat, and an absurdly high shirt collar.
His lips were thin and colourless, the lines about them being numerous and strongly marked.
But he was Margaret's father; and I was determined to be pleased with him.
This done, he coughed, and begged to know what he could do for me.
"Indeed!"
"My daughter!
"Pray hear me out, mr Sherwin: you will not condemn my conduct, I think, if you hear all I have to say."
She would do nothing without my authority, of course?"
"No doubt that was one reason why she received me as she did; but she had another, which she communicated to me in the plainest terms-the difference in our rank of life."
"Ah! she said that, did she?
"Very proper-a very proper way of putting it.
"Quite so-most natural; most becoming, indeed, on the part of your respected father.
My dear Sir, I emphatically repeat it, your father's convictions do him honour; I respect them as much as I respect him; I do, indeed."
"He disapproves of it, of course-strongly, perhaps.
"He has expressed no disapproval, mr Sherwin."
"I have not given him an opportunity.
Good gracious, I don't at all see my way-"
"Yes, secret-a profound secret among ourselves, until I can divulge my marriage to my father, with the best chance of-"
"But I tell you, Sir, I can't see my way through it at all.
Chance! what chance would there be, after what you have told me?"
"There might be many chances.
There's something in that, certainly."
I speak in all our interests, when I say that a private marriage gives us a chance for the future, as opportunities arise of gradually disclosing it.
"Certainly! most decidedly so!
"I am sure, mr Sherwin-"
No duchess has had a better education than my Margaret!--"
"Permit me to assure you, mr Sherwin-"
"May I ask who mr Mannion is?"
"Without fail, depend upon it.
"Certainly."
"And between that time and this, you will engage not to hold any communication with my daughter?"
"I promise not, mr Sherwin-because I believe that your answer will be favourable."
When I entered the house, this reluctance increased to something almost like dread.
It was a relief to me to hear that my father was not at home.
I instantly drew back, and half closed my own door again.
Clara had got the book she wanted, and was taking it up to her own sitting room.
As I thought on what I had done, I felt a sense of humiliation which was almost punishment enough for the meanness of which I had been guilty.
I simply felt resolved to pass my two days' ordeal of suspense away from home-far enough away to keep me faithful to my promise not to see Margaret.
The animal took the direction which he had been oftenest used to take during my residence in London-the northern road.
To follow the favourite road which I had so often followed with Clara; to stop perhaps at some place where I had often stopped with her, was more than I had the courage or the insensibility to do at that moment.
During the night, many thoughts that I had banished for the last week had returned-those thoughts of evil omen under which the mind seems to ache, just as the body aches under a dull, heavy pain, to which we can assign no particular place or cause. Absent from Margaret, I had no resource against the oppression that now overcame me.
I could only endeavour to alleviate it by keeping incessantly in action; by walking or riding, hour after hour, in the vain attempt to quiet the mind by wearying out the body.
Besides, what I had observed of Margaret's father, especially during the latter part of my interview with him, showed me plainly enough that he was trying to conceal, under exaggerated surprise and assumed hesitation, his secret desire to profit at once by my offer; which, whatever conditions might clog it, was infinitely more advantageous in a social point of view, than any he could have hoped for.
It was not his delay in accepting my proposals, but the burden of deceit, the fetters of concealment forced on me by the proposals themselves, which now hung heavy on my heart.
That evening I left Ewell, and rode towards home again, as far as Richmond, where I remained for the night and the forepart of the next day.
I reached London in the afternoon; and got to North Villa-without going home first-about five o'clock.
The oppression was still on my spirits.
On the table was the sherry which had been so perseveringly pressed on me at the last interview, and by it a new pound cake.
mrs Sherwin was cutting the cake as I came in, while her husband watched the process with critical eyes.
The poor woman's weak white fingers trembled as they moved the knife under conjugal inspection.
His wife rose in a hurry, and curtseyed, leaving the knife sticking in the cake; upon which mr Sherwin, with a stern look at her, ostentatiously pulled it out, and set it down rather violently on the dish.
A happy woman imperceptibly diffuses her happiness around her; she has an influence that is something akin to the influence of a sunshiny day. So, again, the melancholy of a melancholy woman is invariably, though silently, infectious; and mrs Sherwin was one of this latter order.
"Very beautiful weather to be sure," continued the poor woman, as timidly as if she had become a little child again, and had been ordered to say her first lesson in a stranger's presence.
"Delightful weather, mrs Sherwin.
There was a pause.
"Oh dear me!
His wife (to whom he offered nothing) looked at him all the time with the most reverential attention.
mrs Sherwin coughed-a very weak, small cough, half stifled in its birth.
"Well, Sir, the evening after you left me, I had what you may call an explanation with my dear girl.
Her husband's quick glance turned on her, however, immediately, with anything but an expression of sympathy.
"Good God, mrs s! what's the use of going on in that way?" he said, indignantly.
"What is there to cry about?
I sincerely felt for her; but could say nothing.
In the impulse of the moment, I rose to open the door for her; and immediately repented having done so.
The action added so much to her embarrassment that she kicked her foot against a chair, and uttered a suppressed exclamation of pain as she went out.
By this time (in spite of all my efforts to preserve some respect for him, as Margaret's father) he had sunk to his proper place in my estimation.
I think that's fair enough-Eh?"
"Quite fair, mr Sherwin."
"Just so.
Now, in the first place, my daughter is too young to be married yet.
However, that's not the point.
Well: the upshot of this is, that I could not give my consent to Margaret's marrying, until another year is out-say a year from this time.
A year to wait!
At first, this seemed a long trial to endure, a trial that ought not to be imposed on me.
But the next moment, the delay appeared in a different light.
Would it not be the dearest of privileges to be able to see Margaret, perhaps every day, perhaps for hours at a time?
"It will be some trial," I said, "to my patience, though none to my constancy, none to the strength of my affection-I will wait the year."
"Pray explain yourself, mr Sherwin.
Now, you must promise me not to be huffed-offended, I should say-at what I am going to propose."
"Certainly not."
"I must confess I do not."
He coughed rather uneasily; turned to the table, and poured out another glass of sherry-his hand trembling a little as he did so.
That's the point-that's the point precisely."
"But the case could not happen-I am astonished you can imagine it possible.
Now, pray compose yourself!" (I was looking at him in speechless astonishment.) "Take it easy; pray take it easy!
There! what do you say to that-eh?"
Well, what do you say?
He stopped, out of breath from the extraordinary volubility of his long harangue.
When mr Sherwin had ceased speaking, I replied at once:
He was hardly prepared for so complete and so sudden an acquiescence in his proposal, and looked absolutely startled by it, at first.
But soon resuming his self possession-his wily, "business like" self possession-he started up, and shook me vehemently by the hand.
"Delighted-most delighted, my dear Sir, to find how soon we understand each other, and that we pull together so well.
This apartment was furnished with less luxury, but with more bad taste (if possible) than the room we had just left.
Once more, all my doubts, all my self upbraidings vanished, and gave place to the exquisite sense of happiness, the glow of joy and hope and love which seemed to rush over my heart, the moment I looked at her.
After staying in the room about five minutes, mr Sherwin whispered to his wife, and left us.
mrs Sherwin still kept her place; but she said nothing, and hardly turned to look round at us more than once or twice. Perhaps she was occupied by her own thoughts; perhaps, from a motive of delicacy, she abstained even from an appearance of watching her daughter or watching me.
Whatever feelings influenced her, I cared not to speculate on them.
She spoke but little; yet even that little it was a new delight to hear.
I saw that I had stayed long enough, and that we were not to be left together again, that night.
No doubt the butchers of the next half century will have learned much better, and the Guestwick beast, could it be embalmed and then produced, would excite only ridicule at the agricultural ignorance of the present age; but Lord De Guest took the praise that was offered to him, and found himself in a seventh heaven of delight.
He was never so happy as when surrounded by butchers, graziers, and salesmen who were able to appreciate the work of his life, and who regarded him as a model nobleman.
"Look at that fellow," he said to Eames, pointing to the prize bullock.
Eames had joined his patron at the show after his office hours, looking on upon the living beef by gaslight.
He was got by Lambkin, you know."
"Lambkin," said Johnny, who had not as yet been able to learn much about the Guestwick stock.
"Yes, Lambkin.
The bull that we had the trouble with.
Don't you see?"
"I daresay," said Johnny, who looked very hard, but could not see.
"It's very odd," exclaimed the earl, "but do you know, that bull has been as quiet since that day,--as quiet as-as anything.
I think it must have been my pocket handkerchief."
"I daresay it was," said Johnny;--"or perhaps the flies."
"Flies!" said the earl, angrily.
Come away.
At home, in his own life, his daily companions were Cradell and Amelia Roper, mrs Lupex and mrs Roper.
The difference was very great, and yet he found it quite as easy to talk to the earl as to mrs Lupex.
"Oh, yes, I know them."
"But, perhaps, you never met the colonel."
"I don't think I ever did."
"He's a queer sort of fellow;--very well in his way, but he never does anything.
As for me, I'm a year older than he is, but I wouldn't mind going up and down from Guestwick every day."
"It's looking after the bull that does it," said Eames.
"By George! you're right, Master Johnny.
My sister and Crofts may tell me what they like, but when a man's out in the open air for eight or nine hours every day, it doesn't much matter where he goes to sleep after that.
Colonel Dale was much like his brother in face, but was taller, even thinner, and apparently older.
When Eames went into the sitting room, the colonel was there alone, and had to take upon himself the trouble of introducing himself.
"mr Eames, I believe?
I knew your father at Guestwick, a great many years ago;" then he turned his face back towards the fire and sighed.
"It's got very cold this afternoon," said Johnny, trying to make conversation.
"It's always cold in London," said the colonel.
After that nothing more was said till the earl came down.
Pawkins then took his lordship's orders about the wine and retired.
"It isn't like what it was thirty years ago, but then everything of that sort has got worse and worse."
"I remember when old Pawkins had as good a glass of port as I've got at home,--or nearly.
They can't get it now, you know."
"I never drink port," said the colonel.
"I seldom take anything after dinner, except a little negus."
His brother in law said nothing, but made a most eloquent grimace as he turned his face towards his soup plate.
Eames saw it, and could hardly refrain from laughing.
When, at half past nine o'clock, the colonel retired from the room, the earl, as the door was closed, threw up his hands, and uttered the one word "negus!"
Then Eames took heart of grace and had his laughter out.
Once or twice he tried a word with the colonel, for the colonel sat with his eyes open looking at the fire.
But he was answered with monosyllables, and it was evident to him that the colonel did not wish to talk.
To sit still, with his hands closed over each other on his lap, was work enough for Colonel Dale during his after dinner hours.
But the earl knew what was going on.
During that terrible conflict between him and his slumber, in which the drowsy god fairly vanquished him for some twenty minutes, his conscience was always accusing him of treating his guests badly.
But his brother in law would not help him in his efforts; and even Eames was not bright in rendering him assistance.
Then for twenty minutes he slept soundly, and at the end of that he woke himself with one of his own snorts. "By George!" he said, jumping up and standing on the rug, "we'll have some coffee;" and after that he did not sleep any more.
"Come, Johnny, fill your glass." He had already got into the way of calling his young friend Johnny, having found that mrs Eames generally spoke of her son by that name.
"I have been filling my glass all the time," said Eames, taking the decanter again in his hand as he spoke.
"I'm glad you've found something to amuse you, for it has seemed to me that you and Dale haven't had much to say to each other.
I've been listening all the time."
"You've been asleep," said the colonel.
"Then there's been some excuse for my holding my tongue," said the earl.
"By the by, Dale, what do you think of that fellow Crosbie?"
"Think of him?" said the colonel.
"He ought to have every bone in his skin broken," said the earl.
"So he ought," said Eames, getting up from his chair in his eagerness, and speaking in a tone somewhat louder than was perhaps becoming in the presence of his seniors.
"So he ought, my lord.
He is the most abominable rascal that ever I met in my life.
I wish I was Lily Dale's brother." Then he sat down again, remembering that he was speaking in the presence of Lily's uncle, and of the father of Bernard Dale, who might be supposed to occupy the place of Lily's brother.
The colonel turned his head round, and looked at the young man with surprise.
"Nevertheless it is, perhaps, as well not to make too free with a young lady's name.
"I should think not," said the earl.
And then the earl winked back at Eames.
"De Guest," said the colonel, "I think I'll go upstairs; I always have a little arrowroot in my own room."
"I'll ring the bell for a candle," said the host.
"I don't suppose there's any harm in it."
"Oh dear, no; I wonder what Pawkins says about him.
"The waiter didn't seem to think much of it when he brought it."
By the by, you touched him up about that poor girl."
I didn't mean it."
"You see he's Bernard Dale's father, and the question is, whether Bernard shouldn't punish the fellow for what he has done.
Somebody ought to do it.
"No, I suppose not," said Eames, sadly.
And if we are to be Christians, I suppose we ought to be Christians."
"What sort of a Christian has he been?"
"That's true enough; and if I was Bernard, I should be very apt to forget my Bible lessons about meekness."
"Do you know, my lord, I should think it the most Christian thing in the world to pitch into him; I should, indeed.
There are some things for which a man ought to be beaten black and blue."
"So that he shouldn't do them again?"
"Exactly.
You might say it isn't Christian to hang a man."
It wasn't right to hang men for stealing sheep."
"Well, I believe so.
If any fellow wanted now to curry favour with the young lady, what an opportunity he'd have."
Johnny remained silent for a moment or two before he answered.
"I'm not so sure of that," he said, mournfully, as though grieving at the thought that there was no chance of currying favour with Lily by thrashing her late lover.
"I don't pretend to know much about girls," said Lord De Guest; "but I should think it would be so.
"If I thought so," said Eames, "I'd find him out to morrow."
what difference does it make to you?"
Then there was another pause, during which Johnny looked very sheepish.
"You don't mean to say that you're in love with Miss Lily Dale?"
"I don't know much about being in love with her," said Johnny, turning very red as he spoke.
And then he made up his mind, in a wild sort of way, to tell all the truth to his friend.
Pawkins's port wine may, perhaps, have had something to do with the resolution.
"But I'd go through fire and water for her, my lord.
I knew her years before he had ever seen her, and have loved her a great deal better than he will ever love any one.
When I heard that she had accepted him, I had half a mind to cut my own throat,--or else his."
"Highty tighty," said the earl.
"It's very ridiculous, I know," said Johnny, "and of course she would never have accepted me."
"Girls don't care much for that."
"And then a clerk in the Income tax Office!
It's such a poor thing."
"The other fellow was only a clerk in another office."
"By George, I don't see it," said the earl.
"I don't wonder a bit at her accepting a fellow like that.
I hated him the first moment I saw him; but that's no reason she should hate him.
He was a swell, and girls like that kind of thing.
I never felt angry with her, but I could have eaten him." As he spoke he looked as though he would have made some such attempt had Crosbie been present.
"Did you ever ask her to have you?" said the earl.
"And you never told her-that you were in love with her, I mean, and all that kind of thing."
"She knows it now," said Johnny; "I went to say good by to her the other day,--when I thought she was going to be married.
I could not help telling her then."
"But it seems to me, my dear fellow, that you ought to be very much obliged to Crosbie;--that is to say, if you've a mind to-"
"I know what you mean, my lord.
I am not a bit obliged to him.
It's my belief that all this will about kill her.
As to myself, if I thought she'd ever have me-"
You come down and spend your Christmas with me at Guestwick."
"Never mind my lording me, but do as I tell you.
Lady Julia sent you a message, though I forgot all about it till now.
She wants to thank you herself for what you did in the field."
"That's all nonsense, my lord."
You may take my word for this, too,--my sister hates Crosbie quite as much as you do.
I think she'd 'pitch into him,' as you call it, herself, if she knew how.
You come down to Guestwick for the Christmas, and then go over to Allington and tell them all plainly what you mean."
"I couldn't say a word to her now."
"Say it to the squire, then.
Go to him, and tell him what you mean,--holding your head up like a man.
Don't talk to me about swells.
The man who means honestly is the best swell I know.
Tell him that if he'll put a little stick under the pot to make it boil, I'll put a bigger one.
Lord bless you, I knew your father as well as I ever knew any man; and to tell the truth, I believe I helped to ruin him. He held land of me, you know, and there can't be any doubt that he did ruin himself.
He knew no more about a beast when he'd done, than-than-than that waiter.
If he'd gone on to this day he wouldn't have been any wiser."
"You come down with me," continued the earl, "and you'll find we'll make it all straight.
But tell everything to the uncle, and then to the mother.
And, above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself.
My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.
If you are made of dirt, like that fellow Crosbie, you'll be found out at last, no doubt.
But then I don't think you are made of dirt."
"I hope not."
"And so do i You can come down, I suppose, with me the day after to morrow?"
"I'm afraid not.
"Shall I write to old Buffle, and ask it as a favour?"
But I'll see to morrow, and then I'll let you know.
"That won't be comfortable.
See and come with me if you can.
I think I may boast that I never yet went back from my word."
As he went through the little scene, john Eames felt that he was every inch an earl.
"Say nothing,--not a word more to me.
Good night, my dear boy, good night.
I dine out to morrow, but you can call and let me know at about six."
Eames then left the room without another word, and walked out into the cold air of Jermyn Street.
The moon was clear and bright, and the pavement in the shining light seemed to be as clean as a lady's hand.
Could it be true that he, even now, was in a position to go boldly to the Squire of Allington, and tell him what were his views with reference to Lily?
And how far would he be justified in taking the earl at his word?
"Oh, john, how late you are!" said Amelia, slipping out from the back parlour as he let himself in with his latch key.
CHAPTER thirty three.
"THE TIME WILL COME."
"At Guestwick Manor!" said mrs Dale.
"Dear me!
Do you hear that, Bell?
There's promotion for Master Johnny!"
"Don't you remember, mamma," said Bell, "that he helped his lordship in his trouble with the bull?"
She valued him more highly after that scene than she did before.
But now, she would feel herself injured and hurt if he ever made his way into her presence under circumstances as they existed.
"I should not have thought that Lord De Guest was the man to show so much gratitude for so slight a favour," said the squire.
"However, I'm going to dine there to morrow."
"Yes,--especially to meet young Eames.
"And is Bernard going?"
"Indeed I'm not," said Bernard.
Lily bore her cross bravely and well; but not the less did it weigh heavily upon her at every turn because she had the strength to walk as though she did not bear it.
Nothing happened to her, or in her presence, that did not in some way connect itself with her misery.
Of course the men there would talk about her, and all such talking was an injury to her.
The afternoon of that day did not pass away brightly.
As long as the servants were in the room the dinner went on much as other dinners. At such times a certain amount of hypocrisy must always be practised in closely domestic circles.
People so mixed do not talk together their inward home thoughts.
But when close friends are together, a little conscious reticence is practised till the door is tiled.
When the door was tiled, and when the servants were gone, how could they be merry together?
By what mirth should the beards be made to wag on that Christmas Day?
"He was with Lord De Guest at Pawkins's."
I shall go down to Torquay in February.
I must be up in London, you know, in a fortnight, for good." Then they were all silent again for a few minutes.
If Bernard could have owned the truth, he would have acknowledged that he had not gone up to London, because he did not yet know how to treat Crosbie when he should meet him.
"I want him to give up his profession altogether," said the squire, speaking firmly and slowly.
"It would be better, I think, for both of us that he should do so."
"I think it would be wise.
"That would be your own fault.
But if you did as I would have you, your life would not be idle." In this he was alluding to Bernard's proposed marriage, but as to that nothing further could be said in Bell's presence.
Bell understood it all, and sat quite silent, with demure countenance;--perhaps even with something of sternness in her face.
"Why not?" said the squire.
"I have even offered to settle the property on him if he will leave the service."
"If you mean that I cannot constrain him, I know that well enough. As regards money, I have offered to do for him quite as much as any father would feel called upon to do for an only son."
"I hope you don't think me ungrateful," said Bernard.
"No, I do not; but I think you unmindful.
I have nothing more to say about it, however;--not about that.
If you should marry-" And then he stopped himself, feeling that he could not go on in Bell's presence.
"Wouldn't she have this house?" said the squire, angrily.
"Isn't it big enough?
"That's nonsense," said mrs Dale.
"You'll be squire of Allington for the next twenty years," said mrs Dale.
I don't approve of monarchs abdicating in favour of young people."
"I don't think uncle Christopher would look at all well like Charles the Fifth," said Lily.
"I would always keep a cell for you, my darling, if I did," said the squire, regarding her with that painful, special tenderness.
Lily, who was sitting next to mrs Dale, put her hand out secretly and got hold of her mother's, thereby indicating that she did not intend to occupy the cell offered to her by her uncle; or to look to him as the companion of her monastic seclusion.
"mrs Hearn is dining at the vicarage, I suppose?" asked the squire.
"Yes; she went in after church," said Bell.
"I saw her go with mrs Boyce."
"The last time she was there, the boy let the lamp blow out as she was going home, and she lost her way.
The truth was, she was angry because mr Boyce didn't go with her."
"She hardly speaks to me now. When she paid her rent the other day to Jolliffe, she said she hoped it would do me much good; as though she thought me a brute for taking it."
I should be very wrong to do so.
"And she wouldn't take it," said mrs Dale.
"I don't think she would.
But if she did, I'm sure she would grumble because it wasn't double the amount.
And if mr Boyce had gone home with her, she would have grumbled because he walked too fast."
"But, nevertheless, she ought to know better than to speak disparagingly of me to my servants.
It was very long and very dull that Christmas evening, making Bernard feel strongly that he would be very foolish to give up his profession, and tie himself down to a life at Allington.
"Of course you know much better than I do," he would say.
"I don't pretend to know anything about it.
But-" So the evening wore itself away; and when the squire was left alone at half past nine, he did not feel that the day had passed badly with him.
That was his style of life, and he expected no more from it than he got.
He did not look to find things very pleasant, and, if not happy, he was, at any rate, contented.
"Only think of Johnny Eames being at Guestwick Manor!" said Bell, as they were going home.
"There must be some reason for it." Then Lily felt the soreness come upon her again, and spoke no further upon the subject.
He must be at his office by twelve on Wednesday, and could manage to do that by an early train from Guestwick.
"Then I'll tell you what; I've been thinking of it.
I'll ask Dale to come over to dinner on Tuesday; and if he'll come, I'll explain the whole matter to him myself.
He's a man of business, and he'll understand. If he won't come, why then you must go over to Allington, and find him, if you can, on the Tuesday morning; or I'll go to him myself, which will be better.
You mustn't keep me now, as I am ever so much too late."
Eames did not attempt to keep him, but went away feeling that the whole matter was being arranged for him in a very wonderful way.
Then he declared to himself that there was no longer any possibility of retractation for him.
Of course he did not wish to retract.
But he felt afraid of the squire,--that the squire would despise him and snub him, and that the earl would perceive that he had made a mistake when he saw how his client was scorned and snubbed.
He got on very well with Lady Julia, who gave herself no airs, and made herself very civil.
Her brother had told her the whole story, and she felt as anxious as he did to provide Lily with another husband in place of that horrible man Crosbie.
In answer to this Lady Julia merely shook her head.
But Johnny had already begun to feel at the Manor that, after all, people are not so very different in their ways of life as they are supposed to be.
Lady Julia's manners were certainly not quite those of mrs Roper; but she made the tea very much in the way in which it was made at Burton Crescent, and Eames found that he could eat his egg, at any rate on the second morning, without any tremor in his hand, in spite of the coronet on the silver egg cup.
He did feel himself to be rather out of his place in the Manor pew on the Sunday, conceiving that all the congregation was looking at him; but he got over this on Christmas Day, and sat quite comfortably in his soft corner during the sermon, almost going to sleep.
And when he walked with the earl after church to the gate over which the noble peer had climbed in his agony, and inspected the hedge through which he had thrown himself, he was quite at home with his little jokes, bantering his august companion as to the mode of his somersault.
But it was not in Johnny's nature to do so, and therefore it was that the earl liked him.
At last came the hour of dinner on Tuesday, or at least the hour at which the squire had been asked to show himself at the Manor House. Eames, as by agreement with his patron, did not come down so as to show himself till after the interview.
Lady Julia, who had been present at their discussions, had agreed to receive the squire; and then a servant was to ask him to step into the earl's own room.
It was pretty to see the way in which the three conspired together, planning and plotting with an eagerness that was beautifully green and fresh.
"I'll give him some port wine that ought to soften his heart," said the earl, "and then we'll see how he is in the evening."
The earl, as he entered, was standing in the middle of the room, and his round rosy face was a picture of good humour.
"I've something I want to say to you."
I've taken a great fancy to him myself."
He sat down, and in some general terms expressed his good will towards all the Eames family.
"As you know, Dale, I'm a very bad hand at talking, and therefore I won't beat about the bush in what I've got to say at present.
But the less we say about that the better.
"But, my dear Dale, I must mention it at the present moment.
Dear young child, I would do anything to comfort her!
And I hope that something may be done to comfort her.
Do you know that that young man was in love with her long before Crosbie ever saw her?"
"What;--john Eames!"
He was my nephew's friend, and I am not going to say that my nephew was in fault.
But I wish,--I only say that I wish,--she had first known what are this young man's feelings towards her."
"He is an uncommonly good looking young fellow; straight made, broad in the chest, with a good, honest eye, and a young man's proper courage.
"But it's too late now, De Guest."
It mustn't be too late!
That child is not to lose her whole life because a villain has played her false. Of course she'll suffer.
But, Dale, the time will come; the time will come;--the time always does come."
The story of their lives had been so far the same; each had loved, and each had been disappointed, and then each had remained single through life.
But for her,--you and her mother will look forward to see her married some day."
"I have not thought about it."
"But I want you to think about it.
I want to interest you in this fellow's favour; and in doing so, I mean to be very open with you. I suppose you'll give her something?"
"Well, then, whether you do or not, I'll give him something," said the earl.
"I shouldn't have ventured to meddle in the matter had I not intended to put myself in such a position with reference to him as would justify me in asking the question." And the peer as he spoke drew himself up to his full height.
"If such a match can be made, it shall not be a bad marriage for your niece in a pecuniary point of view.
I shall have pleasure in giving to him; but I shall have more pleasure if she can share what I give."
"She ought to be very much obliged to you," said the squire.
I hope that you and I may see them happy together, and that you too may thank me for having assisted in making them so.
"Half a moment," said the squire.
"There are matters as to which I never find myself able to speak quickly, and this certainly seems to be one of them.
"Certainly, certainly."
Lord De Guest still felt that he had not succeeded.
He had said of himself that he was never able to speak quickly in matters of moment; but he would more correctly have described his own character had he declared that he could not think of them quickly.
As it was, the earl was disappointed; but had he been able to read the squire's mind, his disappointment would have been less strong.
mr Dale knew well enough that he was being treated well, and that the effort being made was intended with kindness to those belonging to him; but it was not in his nature to be demonstrative and quick at expressions of gratitude.
"How do you do, sir?" said Johnny, walking up to him in a wild sort of manner,--going through a premeditated lesson, but doing it without any presence of mind.
"Dale, I know you drink port," said the earl when Lady Julia left them.
"Ah! that's the 'twenty," said the squire, tasting it.
"I should rather think it is," said the earl.
"I was lucky enough to get it early, and it hasn't been moved for thirty years.
I like to give it to a man who knows it, as you do, at the first glance.
So is champagne, or ginger beer, or lollipops,--for those who like them.
"It'll come to him soon enough," said the squire.
"Not ten minutes.
That's exactly nine minutes to each; and as for lunch, we only have a biscuit dipped in ink."
"Dipped in ink!" said the squire.
"It comes to that, for you have to be writing while you munch it."
"I don't suppose he ever heard my name as yet," said Johnny.
"Haven't seen him these thirty years; but I did know him."
"Huffle Scuffle!
He always was Huffle Scuffle; a noisy, pretentious, empty headed fellow.
Come, we'll go into the drawing room."
"And what did he say?" asked Lady Julia, as soon as the squire was gone.
There was no attempt at concealment, and the question was asked in Johnny's presence.
"Well, he did not say much.
And coming from him, that ought to be taken as a good sign.
He is to think of it, and let me see him again. You hold your head up, Johnny, and remember that you shan't want a friend on your side.
Faint heart never won fair lady."
And the snow fell and spread a beautiful white covering over the grave; but by the time the spring came, and the sun had melted it away again, her father had married another wife.
This new wife had two daughters of her own, that she brought home with her; they were fair in face but foul at heart, and it was now a sorry time for the poor little girl.
'What does the good for nothing want in the parlour?' said they; 'they who would eat bread should first earn it; away with the kitchen maid!' Then they took away her fine clothes, and gave her an old grey frock to put on, and laughed at her, and turned her into the kitchen.
There she was forced to do hard work; to rise early before daylight, to bring the water, to make the fire, to cook and to wash.
Besides that, the sisters plagued her in all sorts of ways, and laughed at her.
It happened once that the father was going to the fair, and asked his wife's daughters what he should bring them.
'Fine clothes,' said the first; 'Pearls and diamonds,' cried the second.
'Now, child,' said he to his own daughter, 'what will you have?' 'The first twig, dear father, that brushes against your hat when you turn your face to come homewards,' said she.
Then she took it, and went to her mother's grave and planted it there; and cried so much that it was watered with her tears; and there it grew and became a fine tree.
Three times every day she went to it and cried; and soon a little bird came and built its nest upon the tree, and talked with her, and watched over her, and brought her whatever she wished for.
'You, Ashputtel!' said she; 'you who have nothing to wear, no clothes at all, and who cannot even dance-you want to go to the ball?
Then she threw the peas down among the ashes, but the little maiden ran out at the back door into the garden, and cried out:
'Hither, hither, through the sky, Turtle doves and linnets, fly! Blackbird, thrush, and chaffinch gay, Hither, hither, haste away! One and all come help me, quick! Haste ye, haste ye!--pick, pick, pick!'
Long before the end of the hour the work was quite done, and all flew out again at the windows.
Then Ashputtel brought the dish to her mother, overjoyed at the thought that now she should go to the ball.
So she shook two dishes of peas into the ashes.
'Hither, hither, through the sky, Turtle doves and linnets, fly! Blackbird, thrush, and chaffinch gay, Hither, hither, haste away! One and all come help me, quick! Haste ye, haste ye!--pick, pick, pick!'
Then first came two white doves in at the kitchen window; next came two turtle doves; and after them came all the little birds under heaven, chirping and hopping about.
And they flew down into the ashes; and the little doves put their heads down and set to work, pick, pick, pick; and then the others began pick, pick, pick; and they put all the good grain into the dishes, and left all the ashes.
Before half an hour's time all was done, and out they flew again.
And then Ashputtel took the dishes to her mother, rejoicing to think that she should now go to the ball. But her mother said, 'It is all of no use, you cannot go; you have no clothes, and cannot dance, and you would only put us to shame': and off she went with her two daughters to the ball.
Now when all were gone, and nobody left at home, Ashputtel went sorrowfully and sat down under the hazel tree, and cried out:
'Shake, shake, hazel tree, Gold and silver over me!'
Then her friend the bird flew out of the tree, and brought a gold and silver dress for her, and slippers of spangled silk; and she put them on, and followed her sisters to the feast.
The king's son soon came up to her, and took her by the hand and danced with her, and no one else: and he never left her hand; but when anyone else came to ask her to dance, he said, 'This lady is dancing with me.'
Thus they danced till a late hour of the night; and then she wanted to go home: and the king's son said, 'I shall go and take care of you to your home'; for he wanted to see where the beautiful maiden lived.
But she slipped away from him, unawares, and ran off towards home; and as the prince followed her, she jumped up into the pigeon house and shut the door.
But when they had broken open the door they found no one within; and as they came back into the house, Ashputtel was lying, as she always did, in her dirty frock by the ashes, and her dim little lamp was burning in the chimney.
The next day when the feast was again held, and her father, mother, and sisters were gone, Ashputtel went to the hazel tree, and said:
And when she came in it to the ball, everyone wondered at her beauty: but the king's son, who was waiting for her, took her by the hand, and danced with her; and when anyone asked her to dance, he said as before, 'This lady is dancing with me.'
'Shake, shake, hazel tree, Gold and silver over me!'
When night came she wanted to go home; and the king's son would go with her, and said to himself, 'I will not lose her this time'; but, however, she again slipped away from him, though in such a hurry that she dropped her left golden slipper upon the stairs.
The prince took the shoe, and went the next day to the king his father, and said, 'I will take for my wife the lady that this golden slipper fits.' Then both the sisters were overjoyed to hear it; for they had beautiful feet, and had no doubt that they could wear the golden slipper.
Then the mother gave her a knife, and said, 'Never mind, cut it off; when you are queen you will not care about toes; you will not want to walk.' So the silly girl cut off her great toe, and thus squeezed on the shoe, and went to the king's son.
Then he took her for his bride, and set her beside him on his horse, and rode away with her homewards.
But on their way home they had to pass by the hazel tree that Ashputtel had planted; and on the branch sat a little dove singing:
'Back again! back again!
Then the prince got down and looked at her foot; and he saw, by the blood that streamed from it, what a trick she had played him.
So he turned his horse round, and brought the false bride back to her home, and said, 'This is not the right bride; let the other sister try and put on the slipper.' Then she went into the room and got her foot into the shoe, all but the heel, which was too large.
'Back again! back again!
look to the shoe! The shoe is too small, and not made for you! Prince! prince! look again for thy bride, For she's not the true one that sits by thy side.'
'This is not the true bride,' said he to the father; 'have you no other daughters?' 'No,' said he; 'there is only a little dirty Ashputtel here, the child of my first wife; I am sure she cannot be the bride.' The prince told him to send her.
But the mother said, 'No, no, she is much too dirty; she will not dare to show herself.' However, the prince would have her come; and she first washed her face and hands, and then went in and curtsied to him, and he reached her the golden slipper.
Then she took her clumsy shoe off her left foot, and put on the golden slipper; and it fitted her as if it had been made for her.
And when he drew near and looked at her face he knew her, and said, 'This is the right bride.' But the mother and both the sisters were frightened, and turned pale with anger as he took Ashputtel on his horse, and rode away with her.
And when they came to the hazel tree, the white dove sang:
look at the shoe! Princess! the shoe was made for you! Prince! prince! take home thy bride, For she is the true one that sits by thy side!'
THE WHITE SNAKE
A long time ago there lived a king who was famed for his wisdom through all the land.
Nothing was hidden from him, and it seemed as if news of the most secret things was brought to him through the air.
But he had a strange custom; every day after dinner, when the table was cleared, and no one else was present, a trusty servant had to bring him one more dish.
It was covered, however, and even the servant did not know what was in it, neither did anyone know, for the king never took off the cover to eat of it until he was quite alone.
This had gone on for a long time, when one day the servant, who took away the dish, was overcome with such curiosity that he could not help carrying the dish into his room.
When he had carefully locked the door, he lifted up the cover, and saw a white snake lying on the dish.
Now it so happened that on this very day the queen lost her most beautiful ring, and suspicion of having stolen it fell upon this trusty servant, who was allowed to go everywhere.
The king ordered the man to be brought before him, and threatened with angry words that unless he could before the morrow point out the thief, he himself should be looked upon as guilty and executed.
In vain he declared his innocence; he was dismissed with no better answer.
In his trouble and fear he went down into the courtyard and took thought how to help himself out of his trouble.
The servant could now easily prove his innocence; and the king, to make amends for the wrong, allowed him to ask a favour, and promised him the best place in the court that he could wish for.
When his request was granted he set out on his way, and one day came to a pond, where he saw three fishes caught in the reeds and gasping for water.
Now, though it is said that fishes are dumb, he heard them lamenting that they must perish so miserably, and, as he had a kind heart, he got off his horse and put the three prisoners back into the water.
He rode on, and after a while it seemed to him that he heard a voice in the sand at his feet.
He listened, and heard an ant king complain: 'Why cannot folks, with their clumsy beasts, keep off our bodies?
That stupid horse, with his heavy hoofs, has been treading down my people without mercy!' So he turned on to a side path and the ant king cried out to him: 'We will remember you-one good turn deserves another!'
'Out with you, you idle, good for nothing creatures!' cried they; 'we cannot find food for you any longer; you are big enough, and can provide for yourselves.' But the poor young ravens lay upon the ground, flapping their wings, and crying: 'Oh, what helpless chicks we are!
We must shift for ourselves, and yet we cannot fly!
What can we do, but lie here and starve?' So the good young fellow alighted and killed his horse with his sword, and gave it to them for food.
Then they came hopping up to it, satisfied their hunger, and cried: 'We will remember you-one good turn deserves another!'
And now he had to use his own legs, and when he had walked a long way, he came to a large city.
But when the proud princess perceived that he was not her equal in birth, she scorned him, and required him first to perform another task.
The ant king had come in the night with thousands and thousands of ants, and the grateful creatures had by great industry picked up all the millet seed and gathered them into the sacks.
But he heard a rustling in the branches, and a golden apple fell into his hand.
The mother of Hans said: 'Whither away, Hans?' Hans answered: 'To Gretel.' 'Behave well, Hans.' 'Oh, I'll behave well.
Goodbye, mother.' 'Goodbye, Hans.' Hans comes to Gretel. 'Good day, Gretel.' 'Good day, Hans.
What do you bring that is good?' 'I bring nothing, I want to have something given me.' Gretel presents Hans with a needle, Hans says: 'Goodbye, Gretel.' 'Goodbye, Hans.'
Hans takes the needle, sticks it into a hay cart, and follows the cart home.
Where have you been?' 'With Gretel.' 'What did you take her?' 'Took nothing; had something given me.' 'What did Gretel give you?' 'Gave me a needle.' 'Where is the needle, Hans?' 'Stuck in the hay cart.' 'That was ill done, Hans.
You should have stuck the needle in your sleeve.' 'Never mind, I'll do better next time.'
'Whither away, Hans?' 'To Gretel, mother.' 'Behave well, Hans.' 'Oh, I'll behave well.
Goodbye, mother.' 'Goodbye, Hans.' Hans comes to Gretel. 'Good day, Gretel.' 'Good day, Hans.
What do you bring that is good?' 'I bring nothing.
I want to have something given to me.' Gretel presents Hans with a knife.
'Goodbye, Gretel.' 'Goodbye, Hans.' Hans takes the knife, sticks it in his sleeve, and goes home.
'Good evening, mother.' 'Good evening, Hans.
Where have you been?' 'With Gretel.' What did you take her?' 'Took her nothing, she gave me something.' 'What did Gretel give you?' 'Gave me a knife.' 'Where is the knife, Hans?' 'Stuck in my sleeve.' 'That's ill done, Hans, you should have put the knife in your pocket.' 'Never mind, will do better next time.'
Goodbye, mother.' 'Goodbye, Hans.' Hans comes to Gretel. 'Good day, Gretel.' 'Good day, Hans.
What good thing do you bring?' 'I bring nothing, I want something given me.' Gretel presents Hans with a young goat.
'Goodbye, Gretel.' 'Goodbye, Hans.' Hans takes the goat, ties its legs, and puts it in his pocket.
When he gets home it is suffocated.
Where have you been?' 'With Gretel.' 'What did you take her?' 'Took nothing, she gave me something.' 'What did Gretel give you?' 'She gave me a goat.' 'Where is the goat, Hans?' 'Put it in my pocket.' 'That was ill done, Hans, you should have put a rope round the goat's neck.' 'Never mind, will do better next time.'
Goodbye, mother.' 'Goodbye, Hans.' Hans comes to Gretel. 'Good day, Gretel.' 'Good day, Hans.
What good thing do you bring?' 'I bring nothing, I want something given me.' Gretel presents Hans with a piece of bacon.
'Goodbye, Gretel.' 'Goodbye, Hans.'
Hans takes the bacon, ties it to a rope, and drags it away behind him. The dogs come and devour the bacon.
When he gets home, he has the rope in his hand, and there is no longer anything hanging on to it.
Where have you been?' 'With Gretel.' 'What did you take her?' 'I took her nothing, she gave me something.' 'What did Gretel give you?' 'Gave me a bit of bacon.' 'Where is the bacon, Hans?' 'I tied it to a rope, brought it home, dogs took it.' 'That was ill done, Hans, you should have carried the bacon on your head.' 'Never mind, will do better next time.'
Goodbye, mother.' 'Goodbye, Hans.' Hans comes to Gretel. 'Good day, Gretel.' 'Good day, Hans, What good thing do you bring?' 'I bring nothing, but would have something given.' Gretel presents Hans with a calf.
'Goodbye, Gretel.' 'Goodbye, Hans.'
Hans takes the calf, puts it on his head, and the calf kicks his face. 'Good evening, mother.' 'Good evening, Hans.
Where have you been?' 'With Gretel.' 'What did you take her?' 'I took nothing, but had something given me.' 'What did Gretel give you?' 'A calf.' 'Where have you the calf, Hans?' 'I set it on my head and it kicked my face.' 'That was ill done, Hans, you should have led the calf, and put it in the stall.' 'Never mind, will do better next time.'
'Whither away, Hans?' 'To Gretel, mother.' 'Behave well, Hans.' 'I'll behave well.
Hans comes to Gretel. 'Good day, Gretel.' 'Good day, Hans.
What good thing do you bring?' 'I bring nothing, but would have something given.' Gretel says to Hans: 'I will go with you.'
Then Hans goes to his mother.
Where have you been?' 'With Gretel.' 'What did you take her?' 'I took her nothing.' 'What did Gretel give you?' 'She gave me nothing, she came with me.' 'Where have you left Gretel?' 'I led her by the rope, tied her to the rack, and scattered some grass for her.' 'That was ill done, Hans, you should have cast friendly eyes on her.' 'Never mind, will do better.'
Hans went into the stable, cut out all the calves' and sheep's eyes, and threw them in Gretel's face.
What that interview was like we decline to say.
There are things which one must not attempt to depict; the sun is one of them.
Cosette was intoxicated, delighted, frightened, in heaven.
She stammered all pale, yet flushed, she wanted to fling herself into Marius' arms, and dared not.
Ashamed of loving in the presence of all these people.
Lovers have no need of any people whatever.
He was very well dressed, as the porter had said, entirely in black, in perfectly new garments, and with a white cravat.
He had under his arm, a package which bore considerable resemblance to an octavo volume enveloped in paper.
The enveloping paper was of a greenish hue, and appeared to be mouldy.
What then?
Is that his fault?
Monsieur Boulard, one of my acquaintances, never walked out without a book under his arm either, and he always had some old volume hugged to his heart like that."
"That's settled," said the grandfather.
And, turning to Marius and Cosette, with both arms extended in blessing, he cried:
"Permission to adore each other!"
They did not require him to repeat it twice.
So much the worse!
They talked low.
Oh! how wicked it was of you to go to that battle!
I have not taken the time to dress myself, I must frighten people with my looks! What will your relatives say to see me in a crumpled collar?
Do speak! You let me do all the talking.
They told me that you could put your fist in it.
And then, it seems that they cut your flesh with the scissors.
That is frightful.
I have cried till I have no eyes left. It is queer that a person can suffer like that.
So our unhappiness is over! I am quite foolish.
I made lint all the time; stay, sir, look, it is your fault, I have a callous on my fingers."
"Talk loud, the rest of you.
"Look at the happiness of others."
Then he turned to Cosette.
She's a Greuze.
It's perfectly simple.
It is your right.
The church is better.
It was built by the Jesuits.
It is more coquettish.
The Bible says: Multiply.
In order to save the people, Jeanne d'Arc is needed; but in order to make people, what is needed is Mother Goose.
So, marry, my beauties.
"By the way!"
"What is it, father?"
"Have not you an intimate friend?"
"Yes, Courfeyrac."
"What has become of him?"
"That is good."
"She is exquisite, this darling.
Be foolish about it.
Adore each other.
It has just occurred to me!
"I am she," replied Cosette.
Jean Valjean himself opened the package; it was a bundle of bank notes. They were turned over and counted.
CHAPTER five-DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY
Chapter thirty two
But the cold, severe glance with which he had looked at her when he came to tell her he was going had wounded her, and before he had started her peace of mind was destroyed.
In solitude afterwards, thinking over that glance which had expressed his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same point-the sense of her own humiliation.
Not simply to go away, but to leave me.
He has every right, and I have none.
What has he done, though?...
He looked at me with a cold, severe expression.
Of course that is something indefinable, impalpable, but it has never been so before, and that glance means a great deal," she thought.
"That glance shows the beginning of indifference."
And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him.
Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him.
That means was divorce and marriage.
And she began to long for that, and made up her mind to agree to it the first time he or Stiva approached her on the subject.
Absorbed in such thoughts, she passed five days without him, the five days that he was to be at the elections.
However hard she tried, she could not love this little child, and to feign love was beyond her powers.
Towards the evening of that day, still alone, Anna was in such a panic about him that she decided to start for the town, but on second thoughts wrote him the contradictory letter that Vronsky received, and without reading it through, sent it off by a special messenger.
She dreaded a repetition of the severe look he had flung at her at parting, especially when he knew that the baby was not dangerously ill. But still she was glad she had written to him.
Let him weary of her, but he would be here with her, so that she would see him, would know of every action he took.
She was sitting in the drawing room near a lamp, with a new volume of Taine, and as she read, listening to the sound of the wind outside, and every minute expecting the carriage to arrive.
At last she heard not the sound of wheels, but the coachman's shout and the dull rumble in the covered entry.
Even Princess Varvara, playing patience, confirmed this, and Anna, flushing hotly, got up; but instead of going down, as she had done twice before, she stood still.
She suddenly felt ashamed of her duplicity, but even more she dreaded how he might meet her.
All feeling of wounded pride had passed now; she was only afraid of the expression of his displeasure.
Then she thought of him, that he was here, all of him, with his hands, his eyes.
She heard his voice.
And forgetting everything, she ran joyfully to meet him.
"Well, how is Annie?" he said timidly from below, looking up to Anna as she ran down to him.
He was sitting on a chair, and a footman was pulling off his warm over boot.
"Oh, she is better."
She took his hand in both of hers, and drew it to her waist, never taking her eyes off him.
"Well, I'm glad," he said, coldly scanning her, her hair, her dress, which he knew she had put on for him.
"Well, I'm glad.
And are you well?" he said, wiping his damp beard with his handkerchief and kissing her hand.
"Never mind," she thought, "only let him be here, and so long as he's here he cannot, he dare not, cease to love me."
"What am I to do?
I couldn't sleep....
When he's here I never take it-hardly ever."
He told her about the election, and Anna knew how by adroit questions to bring him to what gave him most pleasure-his own success.
She told him of everything that interested him at home; and all that she told him was of the most cheerful description.
She said:
"Tell me frankly, you were vexed at getting my letter, and you didn't believe me?"
As soon as she had said it, she felt that however warm his feelings were to her, he had not forgiven her for that.
"Yes," he said, "the letter was so strange.
"It was all the truth."
"Yes, you do doubt it.
"The duty of going to a concert..."
"Why not talk about it?" she said.
Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable?
"Anna, that's cruel.
Either we must separate or else live together."
But for that..."
I will write to him.
But I will come with you to Moscow."
It was a moment's impression, but she never forgot it.
CHAPTER eleven
FLUENCY THROUGH PREPARATION
At first blush it would seem that fluency consists in a ready, easy use of words.
Not so-the flowing quality of speech is much more, for it is a composite effect, with each of its prior conditions deserving of careful notice.
He was banished by the Spartans.
But preparation goes beyond the getting of the facts in the case you are to present: it includes also the ability to think and arrange your thoughts, a full and precise vocabulary, an easy manner of speech and breathing, absence of self consciousness, and the several other characteristics of efficient delivery that have deserved special attention in other parts of this book rather than in this chapter.
Preparation may be either general or specific; usually it should be both.
But that method must not be applied on the platform!
After all this enrichment of life by storage, must come the special preparation for the particular speech.
This is of so definite a sort that it warrants separate chapter treatment later.
Do not feel surprised or discouraged if practise on the principles of delivery herein laid down seems to retard your fluency.
This warning, however, is strictly for the closet, for your practise at home.
Do not carry any thoughts of inflection with you to the platform.
There is an absolute telepathy between the audience and the speaker.
If your thought goes to your gesture, their thought will too.
You have doubtless been adjured to "forget everything but your subject." This advice says either too much or too little.
A nice balance between these two kinds of attention is important.
Return to the opening chapter, on self confidence, and again lay its precepts to heart.
Learn by rules to speak without thinking of rules.
As an inexperienced speaker you will find a great deal of difficulty at first in putting principles into practise, for you will be scared, like the young swimmer, and make some crude strokes, but if you persevere you will "win out."
But this means work.
What good habit does not?
If it were, it would be thrown away, because it would kill our greatest joy-the delight of acquisition.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
one.
What influences, within and without the man himself, work against fluency?
three.
five.
Machinery has created a new economic world.
The Socialist Party is a strenuous worker for peace.
six.
Honestly criticise your own effort.
seven.
There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.
His best companions, innocence and health, And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.
Beware of desperate steps!
I learn to be content.
eight.
CHAPTER twelve
THE VOICE
Leaving the message aside, the same may justly be said of public speaking.
A rich, correctly used voice is the greatest physical factor of persuasiveness and power, often over topping the effects of reason.
Try this for yourself.
In practising voice exercises, and in speaking, never force your tones. Ease must be your watchword.
Don't work.
Let the yoke of speech be easy and its burden light.
Nervousness and mental strain are common sources of mouth and throat constriction, so make the battle for poise and self confidence for which we pleaded in the opening chapter.
you ask.
Hold your arm out straight from your shoulder.
Now-withdraw all power and let it fall.
Practise relaxation of the muscles of the throat by letting your neck and head fall forward.
Roll the upper part of your body around, with the waist line acting as a pivot.
Let your head fall and roll around as you shift the torso to different positions.
Again, let your head fall forward on your breast; raise your head, letting your jaw hang.
Relax until your jaw feels heavy, as though it were a weight hung to your face.
Remember, you must relax the jaw to obtain command of it.
It must be free and flexible for the moulding of tone, and to let the tone pass out unobstructed.
The lips also must be made flexible, to aid in the moulding of clear and beautiful tones.
Mo-E-O-E-OO-Ah.
All the activity of breathing must be centered, not in the throat, but in the middle of the body-you must breathe from the diaphragm.
Note the way you breathe when lying flat on the back, undressed in bed.
This is the natural and correct method of breathing.
Open your mouth wide, relax all the organs of speech, and let the tone flow out easily.
If so, a skilled physician should be consulted.
The nose is an important tone passage and should be kept open and free for perfect tones.
This is quite important, aside from voice, for the general health will be much lowered if the lungs are continually starved for air.
The sensation is so slight that you will probably not be able to detect it at once, but persevere in your practise, always thinking the tone forward, and you will be rewarded by feeling your voice strike the roof of your mouth.
A correct forward placing of the tone will do away with the dark, throaty tones that are so unpleasant, inefficient, and harmful to the throat.
Think the tone forward.
Do you feel it strike the lips?
Can you feel the forward tones strike against your hand?
Practise until you can.
It is not necessary to speak loudly in order to be heard at a distance. It is necessary only to speak correctly.
If you will only use your voice correctly, you will not have much difficulty in being heard.
Do not gaze at the floor as you talk.
This habit not only gives the speaker an amateurish appearance but if the head is hung forward the voice will be directed towards the ground instead of floating out over the audience.
Voice is a series of air vibrations.
To strengthen it two things are necessary: more air or breath, and more vibration.
Breath is the very basis of voice.
As a bullet with little powder behind it will not have force and carrying power, so the voice that has little breath behind it will be weak.
Practise this until it becomes second nature.
Do not try to speak too long without renewing your breath.
A certain very successful speaker developed voice carrying power by running across country, practising his speeches as he went.
The vigorous exercise forced him to take deep breaths, and developed lung power.
When these methods are not convenient, we recommend the following:
Take a deep breath.
As the breath is taken your hands will be forced out.
Many methods for deep breathing have been given by various authorities. Get the air into your lungs-that is the important thing.
You can increase its vibrations by practise.
Do you feel the lips vibrate? After a little practise they will vibrate, giving a tickling sensation.
Can you feel the nose vibrate?
Can you feel the vibration there?
The mere act of thinking about any portion of your body will tend to make it vibrate.
This quality is sometimes destroyed by wasting the breath.
Utilize all that you give out.
Failure to do this results in a breathy tone.
Take in breath like a prodigal; in speaking, give it out like a miser.
Do not drink cold water when speaking.
The sudden shock to the heated organs of speech will injure the voice.
Avoid pitching your voice too high-it will make it raspy.
This is a common fault.
Do not wait until you get to the platform to try this.
Repeat the alphabet, beginning A on the lowest scale possible and going up a note on each succeeding letter, for the development of range.
A wide range will give you facility in making numerous changes of pitch.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
one.
three.
Give some exercises for development of these conditions.
five.
Tell how range of voice may be cultivated.
six.
seven.
How can resonance and carrying power be developed?
eight.
What are your voice faults?
nine.
CONCENTRATION IN DELIVERY
Attention is the microscope of the mental eye.
Its power may be high or low; its field of view narrow or broad.
When high power is used attention is confined within very circumscribed limits, but its action is exceedingly intense and absorbing.
Try to rub the top of your head forward and backward at the same time that you are patting your chest.
Unless your powers of cooerdination are well developed you will find it confusing, if not impossible.
The brain needs special training before it can do two or more things efficiently at the same instant.
Whatever is the psychological truth of this contention it is undeniable that the mind measurably loses grip on one idea the moment the attention is projected decidedly ahead to a second or a third idea.
In a well prepared written speech the emphatic word usually comes at one end of the sentence.
But an emphatic word needs emphatic expression, and this is precisely what it does not get when concentration flags by leaping too soon to that which is next to be uttered.
Concentrate all your mental energies on the present sentence.
Remember that the mind of your audience follows yours very closely, and if you withdraw your attention from what you are saying to what you are going to say, your audience will also withdraw theirs.
They may not do so consciously and deliberately, but they will surely cease to give importance to the things that you yourself slight.
It is fatal to either the actor or the speaker to cross his bridges too soon.
Let it come from its proper source-within yourself.
You cannot deliver a broadside without concentrated force-that is what produces the explosion.
Divide your attention and you divide your power.
"What do you read, my lord?" Hamlet replied, "Words.
Words.
Words." That is a world old trouble.
Did you ever notice how hollow a memorized speech usually sounds?
You have listened to the ranting, mechanical cadence of inefficient actors, lawyers and preachers.
Their trouble is a mental one-they are not concentratedly thinking thoughts that cause words to issue with sincerity and conviction, but are merely enunciating word sounds mechanically.
Painful experience alike to audience and to speaker!
A parrot is equally eloquent.
He laments thus pointedly:
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
The truth is, that as a speaker your words must be born again every time they are spoken, then they will not suffer in their utterance, even though perforce committed to memory and repeated, like dr Russell Conwell's lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," five thousand times.
Such speeches lose nothing by repetition for the perfectly patent reason that they arise from concentrated thought and feeling and not a mere necessity for saying something-which usually means anything, and that, in turn, is tantamount to nothing.
Words are only a result.
Do not try to get the result without stimulating the cause.
Think of how a lens gathers and concenters the rays of light within a given circle.
It centers them by a process of withdrawal.
It may seem like a harsh saying, but the man who cannot concentrate is either weak of will, a nervous wreck, or has never learned what will power is good for.
You must concentrate by resolutely withdrawing your attention from everything else.
If you concentrate your thought on a pain which may be afflicting you, that pain will grow more intense.
"Count your blessings" and they will multiply.
Center your thought on your strokes and your tennis play will gradually improve.
To concentrate is simply to attend to one thing, and attend to nothing else.
If you find that you cannot do that, there is something wrong-attend to that first.
Remove the cause and the symptom will disappear.
Read the chapter on "Will Power." Cultivate your will by willing and then doing, at all costs. Concentrate-and you will win.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
one.
Select from any source several sentences suitable for speaking aloud; deliver them first in the manner condemned in this chapter, and second with due regard for emphasis toward the close of each sentence.
Put into about one hundred words your impression of the effect produced.
three.
Tell of any peculiar methods you may have observed or heard of by which speakers have sought to aid their powers of concentration, such as looking fixedly at a blank spot in the ceiling, or twisting a watch charm.
What effect do such habits have on the audience?
five.
What relation does pause bear to concentration?
six.
Tell why concentration naturally helps a speaker to change pitch, tempo, and emphasis.
seven.
Read the following selection through to get its meaning and spirit clearly in your mind.
Then read it aloud, concentrating solely on the thought that you are expressing-do not trouble about the sentence or thought that is coming.
The cave man's club made law and procured food.
Might decreed right.
Warriors were saviours.
In Nazareth a carpenter laid down the saw and preached the brotherhood of man.
Twelve centuries afterwards his followers marched to the Holy Land to destroy all who differed with them in the worship of the God of Love.
Triumphantly they wrote "In Solomon's Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses."
History is an appalling tale of war.
In the seventeenth century Germany, France, Sweden, and Spain warred for thirty years.
At Magdeburg thirty thousand out of thirty six thousand were killed regardless of sex or age.
In Germany schools were closed for a third of a century, homes burned, women outraged, towns demolished, and the untilled land became a wilderness.
Two thirds of Germany's property was destroyed and eighteen million of her citizens were killed, because men quarrelled about the way to glorify "The Prince of Peace." Marching through rain and snow, sleeping on the ground, eating stale food or starving, contracting diseases and facing guns that fire six hundred times a minute, for fifty cents a day-this is the soldier's life.
At the window sits the widowed mother crying.
Little children with tearful faces pressed against the pane watch and wait. Their means of livelihood, their home, their happiness is gone. Fatherless children, broken hearted women, sick, disabled and dead men-this is the wage of war.
We spend more money preparing men to kill each other than we do in teaching them to live.
We spend more money building one battleship than in the annual maintenance of all our state universities.
The financial loss resulting from destroying one another's homes in the civil war would have built fifteen million houses, each costing two thousand dollars.
We pray for love but prepare for hate.
War only defers a question.
Like rival "gun gangs" in a back alley, the nations of the world, through the bloody ages, have fought over their differences.
Denver cannot fight Chicago and Iowa cannot fight Ohio.
Why should Germany be permitted to fight France, or Bulgaria fight Turkey?
When mankind rises above creeds, colors and countries, when we are citizens, not of a nation, but of the world, the armies and navies of the earth will constitute an international police force to preserve the peace and the dove will take the eagle's place.
Our differences will be settled by an international court with the power to enforce its mandates.
In times of peace prepare for peace.
The wages of war are the wages of sin, and the "wages of sin is death."
But such was not the case with Popopo, the knook we are speaking of.
He had lived thousands of years, and had enjoyed all the wonders he could think of.
Finally, by chance, Popopo thought of the earth people who dwell in cities, and so he resolved to visit them and see how they lived. This would surely be fine amusement, and serve to pass away many wearisome hours.
Therefore one morning, after a breakfast so dainty that you could scarcely imagine it, Popopo set out for the earth and at once was in the midst of a big city.
His nerves were so shocked that before he had looked around three minutes he decided to give up the adventure, and instantly returned home.
He would visit them at night.
So at the proper time Popopo transported himself in a jiffy to a great city, where he began wandering about the streets.
Everyone was in bed.
Even the policemen slumbered slyly and there happened to be no prowling thieves abroad.
His nerves being soothed by the stillness, Popopo began to enjoy himself.
Locks and bolts made no difference to a knook, and he saw as well in darkness as in daylight.
During his wanderings he entered a millinery shop, and was surprised to see within a large glass case a great number of women's hats, each bearing in one position or another a stuffed bird.
Indeed, some of the most elaborate hats had two or three birds upon them.
To see so many of his little friends shut up in a glass case annoyed and grieved Popopo, who had no idea they had purposely been placed upon the hats by the milliner.
So he slid back one of the doors of the case, gave the little chirruping whistle of the knooks that all birds know well, and called:
"Come, friends; the door is open-fly out!"
Popopo did not know the birds were stuffed; but, stuffed or not, every bird is bound to obey a knook's whistle and a knook's call.
So they left the hats, flew out of the case and began fluttering about the room.
"Poor dears!" said the kind hearted knook, "you long to be in the fields and forests again."
Then he opened the outer door for them and cried: "Off with you!
The astonished birds at once obeyed, and when they had soared away into the night air the knook closed the door and continued his wandering through the streets.
By dawn he saw many interesting sights, but day broke before he had finished the city, and he resolved to come the next evening a few hours earlier.
As soon as it was dark the following day he came again to the city and on passing the millinery shop noticed a light within.
Entering he found two women, one of whom leaned her head upon the table and sobbed bitterly, while the other strove to comfort her.
Of course Popopo was invisible to mortal eyes, so he stood by and listened to their conversation.
"Cheer up, sister," said one.
"Even though your pretty birds have all been stolen the hats themselves remain."
"Alas!" cried the other, who was the milliner, "no one will buy my hats partly trimmed, for the fashion is to wear birds upon them.
This thought brought him back to the millinery shop later in the night, when the two women had gone home.
He wanted, in some way, to replace the birds upon the hats, that the poor woman might be happy again.
"Here are just the creatures," thought Popopo, "to place upon the woman's hats.
Moreover, they now pass their lives in stealing, and were they obliged to remain always upon women's hats their morals would be much improved."
So he exercised a charm that drew all the mice from the cellar and placed them upon the hats in the glass case, where they occupied the places the birds had vacated and looked very becoming-at least, in the eyes of the unworldly knook.
To prevent their running about and leaving the hats Popopo rendered them motionless, and then he was so pleased with his work that he decided to remain in the shop and witness the delight of the milliner when she saw how daintily her hats were now trimmed.
She came in the early morning, accompanied by her sister, and her face wore a sad and resigned expression.
But when she saw a tiny gray mouse nestling among the ribbons and laces she gave a loud shriek, and, dropping the hat, sprang with one bound to the top of the table.
"What is it?
Oh! what is it?"
"A mouse!" gasped the milliner, trembling with terror.
Popopo, seeing this commotion, now realized that mice are especially disagreeable to human beings, and that he had made a grave mistake in placing them upon the hats; so he gave a low whistle of command that was heard only by the mice.
Instantly they all jumped from the hats, dashed out the open door of the glass case and scampered away to their cellar.
Popopo was a kind hearted knook, but on witnessing all this misery, caused by his own ignorance of the ways of humans, he straightway wished himself at home, and so left the poor women to recover as best they could.
He loved the birds, and disliked to condemn them to slavery again; but that seemed the only way to end the trouble.
So he set off to find the birds.
When they saw the knook the birds cried:
"Thank you, Popopo.
Thank you for setting us free."
"Do not thank me," returned the knook, "for I have come to send you back to the millinery shop."
"Why?" demanded a blue jay, angrily, while the others stopped their songs.
"Because I find the woman considers you her property, and your loss has caused her much unhappiness," answered Popopo.
"But remember how unhappy we were in her glass case," said a robin redbreast, gravely.
"And as for being her property, you are a knook, and the natural guardian of all birds; so you know that Nature created us free.
To be sure, wicked men shot and stuffed us, and sold us to the milliner; but the idea of our being her property is nonsense!"
Popopo was puzzled.
"Pooh!" exclaimed the blue jay, "we cannot be shot now, for we are stuffed.
Indeed, two men fired several shots at us this morning, but the bullets only ruffled our feathers and buried themselves in our stuffing.
We do not fear men now."
"Listen!" said Popopo, sternly, for he felt the birds were getting the best of the argument; "the poor milliner's business will be ruined if I do not return you to her shop.
So the poor milliner's wares, although beautified by lace and ribbons, are worthless unless you are perched upon them."
What law is there, among birds or knooks, that requires us to be the slaves of fashion?"
"What have we to do with fashions, anyway?" screamed a linnet.
"If it were the fashion to wear knooks perched upon women's hats would you be contented to stay there?
Answer me, Popopo!"
But Popopo was in despair.
He could not wrong the birds by sending them back to the milliner, nor did he wish the milliner to suffer by their loss.
So he went home to think what could be done.
After much meditation he decided to consult the king of the knooks, and going at once to his majesty he told him the whole story.
The king frowned.
"But since you have caused all this trouble, it is your duty to remedy it.
Our birds cannot be enslaved, that is certain; therefore you must have the fashions changed, so it will no longer be stylish for women to wear birds upon their hats."
"How shall I do that?" asked Popopo.
"Easily enough.
Fashions often change among the earth people, who tire quickly of any one thing.
When they read in their newspapers and magazines that the style is so and so, they never question the matter, but at once obey the mandate of fashion.
So you must visit the newspapers and magazines and enchant the types."
"Enchant the types!" echoed Popopo, in wonder.
"Just so.
That will afford relief to your poor milliner and at the same time set free thousands of our darling birds who have been so cruelly used."
Popopo thanked the wise king and followed his advice.
The following morning when the poor milliner looked over her newspaper she was overjoyed to read that "no woman could now wear a bird upon her hat and be in style, for the newest fashion required only ribbons and laces."
Popopo after this found much enjoyment in visiting every millinery shop he could find and giving new life to the stuffed birds which were carelessly tossed aside as useless.
And they flew to the fields and forests with songs of thanks to the good knook who had rescued them.
Sometimes a hunter fires his gun at a bird and then wonders why he did not hit it.
SELECTING THE FACULTY
BY BAYNARD RUST HALL
For his chair there was one with a hickory bottom; and doubtless he would have filled it, and even lapped over its edges, with equal dignity in the recitation room of Big College.
But of all our unsuccessful candidates, we shall introduce by name only two-mr
james Jimmy, a s s, and mr Solomon Rapid, a to z
mr Jimmy, who aspired to the mathematical chair, was master of a small school of all sexes, near Woodville.
At the first, he was kindly, yet honestly told, his knowledge was too limited and inaccurate; yet, notwithstanding this, and some almost rude repulses afterward, he persisted in his application and his hopes.
To give evidence of competency, he once told me he was arranging a new spelling book, the publication of which would make him known as a literary man, and be an unspeakable advantage to "the rising generation." And this naturally brought on the following colloquy about the work:
"Ah! indeed!
mr Jimmy?"
"On what new principle do you go, sir?"
I allow school books for schools are all too powerful obstruse and hard like to be understood without exemplifying illustrations."
"Yes, but mr Jimmy, how is a child's spelling book to be made any plainer?"
"Why, sir, by clear explifications of the words in one column, by exemplifying illustrations in the other."
"I do not understand you, mr Jimmy, give me a specimen-"
"Sir?"
"An example-"
"Well, mr Carlton, this algebra is a most powerful thing-ain't it?"
"Indeed it is, mr Jimmy-have you been looking into it?"
"Looking into it!
"Indeed!"
"Yes, sir! but it is such a pretty thing!
Only to think of cyphering by letters!
Why, sir, the sums come out, and bring the answers exactly like figures.
Why, sir, I done a whole slate full of letters and signs; and afterward, when I tried by figures, they every one of them came out right and brung the answer!
I mean to cypher by letters altogether."
"mr Jimmy, my company is nearly out of sight-if you can get along this way through simple and quadratic equations by our meeting, your chance will not be so bad-good morning, sir."
But our man of "letters" quit cyphering the new way, and returned to plain figures long before reaching equations; and so he could not become our professor.
The most extraordinary candidate, however, was mr Solomon Rapid.
He was now somewhat advanced into the shaving age, and was ready to assume offices the most opposite in character; although justice compels us to say mr Rapid was as fit for one thing as another.
Deeming it waste of time to prepare for any station till he was certain of obtaining it, he wisely demanded the place first, and then set to work to become qualified for its duties, being, I suspect, the very man, or some relation of his, who is recorded as not knowing whether he could read Greek, as he had never tried.
"I heerd, sir, you wanted somebody to teach the State school, and I'm come to let you know I'm willing to take the place."
"Yes, sir, we are going to elect a professor of languages who is to be the principal and a professor-"
"Are you a linguist?"
"Sir?"
"You, of course, understand the dead languages?"
"Oh! my dear sir, it is not possible-we-can't-"
"mr Rapid, I do not mean to question your abilities; but if you are now wholly unacquainted with the dead languages, it is impossible for you or any other talented man to learn them under four or five years."
Try me, sir,--let's have the furst one furst-how many are there?"
"mr Rapid, it is utterly impossible; but if you insist, I will loan you a Latin book-"
"That's your sort, let's have it, that's all I want, fair play."
In a few weeks, to my no small surprise, mr Solomon Rapid again presented himself; and drawing forth the book began with a triumphant expression of countenance:
"Well, sir, I have done the Latin."
"Done the Latin!"
"Yes, as fast as English-and I didn't find it hard at all."
"May I try you on a page?"
"Try away, try away; that's what I've come for."
"That will do, mr Rapid-"
I told you so."
"Yes, yes-but translate."
"Translate!" (eyebrows elevating.)
"Yes, translate, render it."
"Render it!! how's that?" (forehead more wrinkled.)
"Why, yes, render it into English-give me the meaning of it."
CHAPTER three.
THE VALENTINE PARTY.
"Now we can tell Ginger about the bear," was Keith's first remark, when he awoke early next morning.
"Then let's go down before breakfast," exclaimed Keith, springing out of bed and beginning to dress himself.
A little while later, the old coloured coachman saw them run past the window, where he was warming himself by the kitchen stove.
Daphne, who had just been coaxed into filling a basket with a generous supply of cold victuals, pretended not to hear until he repeated his question.
Lak enough dee's settin' a rabbit trap.
Daphne had seen them setting rabbit traps there, but she knew well enough that was not what they had gone for now, and that the food they carried was not for the game of Robinson Crusoe, which they had played in the deserted cabin the summer before.
It's nicer than any pets we ever had, except the ponies.
"Haven't we had a lot of things, when you come to think of it?" exclaimed Malcolm.
"Yes, and the gold fish, and the little baby alligator that froze to death in its tank," added Keith.
"But a bear like this would be nicer than any of them.
As soon as papa comes home I am going to ask him to buy us one."
"Jonesy's nearly done for," said the tramp, pointing to the boy who lay curled up in the hay, coughing at nearly every breath.
"Oh, goody!" cried Keith.
Give us one more day to rest up and get in a little better trim.
The poor beast's foot is still too lame for him to do his best, and you're too kind hearted, I am sure, to want anything to suffer in order to give you pleasure."
"Of course," answered both the boys, agreeing so quickly to all the man's smooth speeches that, before they left the cabin, they had renewed their promise to keep silent one more day.
The man was a shrewd one, and knew well how to make these unsuspecting little souls serve his purpose, like puppets tied to a string.
Miss Allison was so busy with preparations for the party that she had no time all that day to notice what the boys were doing.
When they came back from reciting their lessons to the minister, she sent them on several errands, but the rest of the time they divided between the cabin and the post office.
Every mail brought a few valentines to each of them, but it was not until the five o'clock train came that they found the long looked for letters from their father and mother.
"I knew they'd each send us a valentine," cried Keith, tearing both of his open.
"I'll bet that papa's is a comic one.
Isn't it a stunner?
a base ball player.
They couldn't find anything down on the coast that they thought we would like."
"I don't know what to get with mine," said Keith, folding his two bills together.
"Seems to me I have everything I want except a camera, and I couldn't buy the kind I want for two dollars."
They were half-way home when a happy thought came to Malcolm.
"Let's do it!" exclaimed Keith, turning a handspring in the snow to show his delight.
"Come on, we'll ask the man now."
But the man shook his head, when they dashed into the cabin and told their errand.
"No, sonny, that ain't a tenth of what it's worth to me," he said.
I've taught it, and fed it, and looked to it for company when I hadn't nobody in the world to care for me.
He turned away, too disappointed to trust himself to answer any other way.
The tears sprang to Keith's eyes.
He had set his heart on having that bear.
"Papa will get us one when he comes home and finds how much we want one."
You've been so kind to me that I ought to be willing to make any sacrifice for you.
You can leave the bear here till we go."
"No!
It wouldn't seem like he is really ours if we couldn't take him with us."
After some grumbling the man consented, and pocketed the four dollars, first asking very particularly the exact spot in the barn where they expected to hide their huge pet.
There was no answer, and, after peering intently through the dusk for a moment, the old darkey concluded that he must have been mistaken, and passed on.
As soon as he was gone, the boys came out from behind the cedars, and crept up the snowy hillside.
They were leading the bear between them.
"We'll put him away back in the hay mow where he'll be warm and comfortable to night," whispered Malcolm.
"Then in the morning we can tell everybody."
While they were busily scooping out a big hollow in the hay, they were startled by a rustling behind them.
They looked into each other's frightened faces, and then glanced around the dark barn in alarm.
An old cap pushed up through the hay.
He started to the store for some tobacco as soon as you left.
He never saw the bear till two months ago, and he sold it to you cheap because he's a goin' to steal it back again to night, and make off up the road with it.
I'll never forget the little kid's givin' me the coat off his own back, if I live to be a hundred.
There was a hurried consultation in the hay mow.
They scarcely dared breathe until it was safe in their own room.
All the time that they were dressing for the party, they were trying to decide where to put it for the night, so that neither the tramp nor the family could discover it.
They were amazed that any one could be so mean, and longed to tell their Aunt Allison all about it; still, one of the conditions on which they had bought the bear was that they were to "keep mum," and they stuck strictly to that promise.
By the time they were dressed, they had decided to put it in the blue room, a guest chamber in the north wing, seldom used in winter, because it was so hard to heat.
"We'll tell her that we have a valentine six feet long, and keep her guessing."
There was no time for teasing, however, as the first guest arrived while they were still in the blue room.
"I guess he'll not mind, though.
"See what an enormous valentine pie Aunt Allison has made!"
Looking over the banisters, the boys saw that a table had been drawn into the middle of the wide reception hall, and on it sat the largest pie that they had ever seen.
It was in a bright new tin pan, and its daintily browned crust would have made them hungry even if their appetites had not been sharpened by the cold and exercise of the afternoon.
"What a queer place to serve pie," said Malcolm, in a disapproving undertone to his brother.
"Why don't they have it in the dining room?
It looks mighty good, but somehow it doesn't seem proper to have it stuck out here in the hall.
Mamma would never do such a thing."
She fooled us, sure, Malcolm," called back Keith, who had run on ahead to look.
But isn't it a splendid imitation?"
Virginia, pleased to have caught them so cleverly, showed them the ends of twenty four pieces of narrow ribbon, peeping from under the delicately brown top crust.
The guests came promptly.
They had been invited for half past six, and dinner was to be served soon after that time.
The last to arrive was the Little Colonel.
She came in charge of an old coloured woman, Mom Beck, who had been her mother's nurse as well as her own.
The child was so hidden in her wraps when Mom Beck led her up stairs, that no one could tell how she looked.
A few minutes later, when she appeared in the parlours, there was a buzz of admiration.
Maybe it was not so much for the soft light hair, the star like beauty of her big dark eyes, or the delicate colour in her cheeks that made them as pink as a wild rose, as it was for the valentine costume she wore.
"The Queen of Hearts," announced Aunt Allison, leading her forward.
The big music box in the hall began playing one of its liveliest waltzes, the children gathered around the great pie, and twenty four little hands reached out to grasp the floating ends of ribbon.
"Pull!" cried the little Queen of Hearts.
The paper crust flew off, and twenty four yards of ribbon, each with a valentine attached, fluttered brightly through the air for an instant.
"Now match your verses," cried her Majesty again, opening her own to read what was in it.
In the midst of it Virginia beckoned to the Little Colonel.
"Come up stairs with me for a minute, Lloyd," she whispered, "and help me look for something.
Aunt Allison has forgotten where she put the box of arrows that we are to use in the archery contest after dinner.
There is the prettiest prize for the one who hits the red heart in the centre of the target."
"I used to practise so much with my Indian bow and arrow out at the fort, that I could hit centre nearly every time.
I am not going to shoot to night.
Aunt Allison thinks it wouldn't be fair."
When they reached the top of the stairs, Virginia went into her room to light a wax taper in one of the tall silver candlesticks on her dressing table.
"I think that Aunt Allison must have left those arrows in the blue room," she said, leading the way down the cross hall which went to the north wing.
Nobody comes over in this part of the house much in winter, unless there happens to be a great deal of company."
It was a pretty picture that the little "Queen of Hearts" made, as she stood in the doorway, with the tall silver candlestick held high in both hands.
Her hair shone like gold in the candlelight, and her glittering crown flashed as if a circle of fairy fireflies had been caught in its soft meshes.
Her dark eyes peered anxiously around the big shadowy room, lighted only by her flickering taper.
Down stairs, Malcolm and Keith were almost quarrelling about her.
It began by Malcolm taking his brother aside and offering to trade valentines with him.
"'cause yours matches the Little Colonel's, and I want to take her out to dinner," admitted Malcolm.
"She is the prettiest girl here."
"I want to take her myself."
"I'll give you the pick of any six stamps in my album if you will."
"Don't want your old stamps," declared Keith, stoutly.
"I'd rather have the Little Colonel for my partner."
I'll give you that Chinese puzzle you've been wanting so long if you will." Keith shook his head.
Just then a terrific scream sounded in the upper hall, followed by another that made every one down stairs turn pale with fright.
Two voices were uttering piercing shrieks, one after another, so loud and frantic that even the servants in the back part of the house came running.
Miss Allison, thinking of the candle she had told Virginia to light, and remembering the thin, white dress the child wore, instantly thought she must have set herself afire.
Before she could reach the staircase, Virginia came flying down the steps, white as a little ghost, and her eyes wide with terror.
Throwing herself into her aunt's outstretched arms, she began to sob out her story between great, trembling gasps.
It rose up and came after us out of the corner, and if I hadn't slammed the door just in time, it would have eaten us up.
It was so awful!" she wailed.
Malcolm and Keith, with guilty faces, went dashing up the stairs, and the whole party followed them at a respectful distance.
When they opened the door the room looked very big and shadowy, and the bear, roused from its nap, was standing on its hind legs beside the high posted bed.
The huge figure was certainly enough to frighten any one coming upon it unexpectedly in the dark, and when Miss Allison saw it she drew Virginia's trembling hand into hers with a sympathetic clasp.
Before she could ask any questions, the boys began an excited explanation.
It was some time before they could make their story understood.
Their grandmother was horrified, and insisted on sending the animal away at once.
Let me bring him into the light, and show you what a kind old pet he is."
Keith whistled and kept time with his feet in a funny little shuffling jig he had learned from Jonesy, and the bear obligingly went through all his tricks.
He was used to being pulled out to perform whenever a crowd could be collected.
Virginia forgot her fear of him when he stood up and presented arms like a real soldier, and even went up and patted him when the show was over, joining with the boys in begging that he might be allowed to stay in the house until morning.
She had a horror of tramps.
But the boys begged her to wait until daylight for Jonesy's sake.
"The man will beat him if he finds out that Jonesy warned us," pleaded Keith.
There seemed no other way to settle it just then, so Bruin was allowed to go back to his rug in the blue room, and the door was securely locked.
Keith took Lloyd down to dinner, and his grandmother heard him apologising all the way down for having frightened her.
The little Queen of Hearts listened smilingly, but her colour did not come back all evening, until after the archery contest.
"Will you keep it to remember me by?" he asked, bashfully.
"But there's one comfort," she added, gathering all her gay valentines together, "there needn't be any end to the remembering of it.
One by one the lights went out in every home in the valley, and only the stars were left shining, in the cold wintry sky.
No, there was one lamp that still burned.
CHAPTER four.
A FIRE AND A PLAN.
Some people said that old Johann Heinrich never slept, for no matter what hour of the night one passed his lonely little house, a lamp was always burning.
He had been a professor in a large university until he grew too old to keep his position.
Why he should have chosen Lloydsborough Valley as the place to settle for the remainder of his life, no one could tell.
They did not know that he had written two big books about the birds and insects he loved so well, or that he could tell them facts more wonderful than fairy tales about these little wild creatures of the woodland.
To night he had read later than usual, and his fire was nearly out.
He was too poor to keep a servant, so when he found that the coal hod was empty he had to go out to the kitchen to fill it himself.
That is why he saw something that happened soon after midnight, while everybody else in the valley was sound asleep.
Over in the cabin by the spring house where the boys had left the tramp and Jonesy, a puff of smoke went curling around the roof.
Then a tongue of flame shot up through the cedars, and another and another until the sky was red with an angry glare.
It lighted up the eastern window panes of the servants' cottage, but the inmates, tired from the unusual serving of the evening before, slept on.
It shone full across the window of Virginia's room, but she was dreaming of being chased by bears, and only turned uneasily in her sleep.
The old professor, on his way to the kitchen, noticed that it seemed strangely light outside.
He shuffled to the door and looked out.
"Somebody vill shust in his bed be burnt, if old Johann does not haste make!"
Not waiting to close the door behind him, or even to catch up something to protect his old bald head from the intense cold of the winter night, he ran out across the garden.
His shuffling feet, in their flapping old carpet slippers, forgot their rheumatism, and his shoulders dropped the weight of their seventy years.
He ran like a boy across the meadow, through the gap in the fence, and down the hill to the cabin by the spring.
The fire was curling around the front door and bursting through the windows with fierce cracklings.
Dashing frantically around to the back door, he threw himself against it, shouting to know if any one was within.
A blinding rush of smoke was his only answer as he backed away from the overpowering heat, but something fell across the door sill in a limp little heap.
It was Jonesy.
Dragging the child to a safe distance from the burning building, he ran back, fearing that some one else might be in danger, but this time the flames met him at the door, and it was impossible to go in.
While the professor was bending over Jonesy, trying to bring him back to consciousness, Miss Allison came running down the path.
She had an eiderdown quilt wrapped around her over her dressing gown.
"Is the child badly burned?
Is any one else hurt?
Is the tramp in the cabin?"
The old professor shook his head, but did not look up.
He was bending over Jonesy, trying to restore him to consciousness.
It was not much, only a horrible recollection of being awakened by a feeling that he was choking in the thick smoke that filled the room; of hearing the boss swear at him to be quick and follow him or he would be burned to death.
Then there had been an awful moment of groping through the blinding, choking smoke, trying to find a way out.
The man sprang to a window and made his escape, but as the outside air rushed in through the opening he left, it seemed to fan the smoke instantly into flame.
Jonesy had struck out at the wall of fire with his helpless little hands, and then, half crazed by the scorching pain, dropped to the floor and crawled in the opposite direction, just as the professor burst open the door.
The sight of the poor little blistered face brought the tears to Miss Allison's eyes, and she called two of the coloured men, directing them to carry Jonesy to the house, and then go at once for a doctor.
He said that he knew how to prepare the cooling bandages that were needed, and that he would sit up all night to apply them.
He could not sleep anyhow, he said, after such great excitement.
"But I feel responsible for him," urged Miss Allison.
"Since it happened on our place, and my little nephews brought him here, it seems to me that we ought to have the care of him."
There was no opposing the old man's masterful way.
He found some tracks presently, and followed them over the meadow in the starlight, across the road, and down the railroad track several rods.
There they suddenly disappeared.
The tramp had evidently walked on the rail some distance.
"We nearly froze to death that night," he said, when questioned about it afterward, "and the boss piled on an awful big lot of wood just before he went to bed."
"Then what made him take to his heels so fast if he didn't?" some one asked.
"I don't know," answered Jonesy.
"He said that luck was always against him, and maybe he thought nobody would believe him if he did say that he didn't do it."
He was a noted criminal who had escaped from a Northern penitentiary some two months before, and had been arrested by the Louisville police.
There was no mistaking him.
That big, ugly scar branded him on cheek and forehead like another Cain.
"And to think that that terrible man was harboured on my place!" exclaimed mrs MacIntyre when she heard of it.
Sat beside him and talked with him!
It is probably the only thing that can save him from growing up to be a criminal like the man who brought him here.
I shall see what can be done about it, as soon as possible."
"A child of the slums!" Malcolm and Keith repeated the expression afterward, with only a vague idea of its meaning.
It seemed to set poor Jonesy apart from themselves as something unclean,--something that their happy, well filled lives must not be allowed to touch.
Maybe if Jonesy had been an attractive child, with a sensitive mouth, and big, appealing eyes, he might have found his way more easily into people's hearts.
But he was a lean, snub nosed little fellow, with a freckled face and neglected hair.
No one would ever find his cheek a tempting one to kiss, and no one would be moved, by any feeling save pity, to stoop and put affectionate arms around Jonesy.
He was only a common little street gamin, as unlovely as he was unloved.
"What a blessing that there are such places as orphan asylums for children of that class," said mrs Maclntyre, after one of her visits to him.
"I must make arrangements for him to be put into one as soon as he is able to be moved."
"I think he will be very loath to leave the old professor," answered Miss Allison.
"He has been so good to the child, amusing him by the hour with his microscopes and collections of insects, telling him those delightful old German folk lore tales, and putting him to sleep every night to the music of his violin.
What a child lover he is, and what a delightful old man in every way!
I am glad we have discovered him."
"Yes," said mrs Maclntyre; "and when this little tramp is sent away, I want the children to go there often.
I asked him if he could not teach them this spring, at least make a beginning with them in natural history, and he appeared much pleased.
He is as poor as a church mouse, and would be very glad of the money."
mrs MacIntyre hesitated.
"I do not believe their mother would like it," she answered.
I questioned him very closely this morning.
He comes from the worst of the Chicago slums.
He slept in the cellar of one of its poorest tenement houses, and lived in the gutters.
He has a brother only a little older, who is a bootblack.
On days when shines were plentiful they had something to eat, otherwise they starved or begged."
"Poor little lamb," murmured Miss Allison.
They walked all the way from Chicago to Lloydsborough, Jones told me, excepting three days' journey they made in a wagon.
They have been two months on the road, and showed the bear in the country places they passed through. They avoided the large towns."
I doubt if he ever heard the word.
His speech is something shocking; nothing but the slang of the streets, and so ungrammatical that I could scarcely understand him at times.
"But he is so little, mother, and so sick and pitiful looking," pleaded Miss Allison.
"Surely he cannot know so very much badness or hurt the boys if they go down to cheer him up for a little while."
Notwithstanding mrs Maclntyre's fears, she consented to the boys visiting Jonesy that afternoon.
They took the bear with them, which Jonesy welcomed like a lost friend. They spent an interesting hour among the professor's collections, listening to his explanations in his funny broken English.
Then they explored his cottage, much amused by his queer housekeeping, cracked nuts on the hearth, and roasted apples on a string in front of the fire.
Presently the old man left the room and Keith sat down on the side of the bed.
"What makes you so still, Jonesy?" he asked.
"You haven't said a word for the last half hour."
"I was thinking about Barney," he answered, keeping his face turned away.
"Barney is my brother, you know."
"Yes, so grandmother said," answered Keith.
"How big is he?"
I could ride back on the cars and take a whole trunk full of nice things to Barney,--clothes, and candy, and a swell watch and chain, and a bustin' beauty of a bike.
Now the bear's sold and the boss has run away, and I don't know how I can get back to Barney.
The little fellow's lip quivered, and he put up one bandaged hand to wipe away the hot tears that would keep coming, in spite of his efforts not to make a baby of himself.
There was something so pitiful in the gesture that Keith looked across at Malcolm and then patted the bedclothes with an affectionate little hand.
He was crying violently now.
"Who is going to put you in an asylum?" asked Malcolm, lifting an end of the pillow under which Jonesy's head had burrowed, to hide the grief that his eight year old manhood made him too proud to show.
But I've got somebody!" he cried.
"I've got Barney!
"I don't want nothing but him."
"Well, we'll see what we can do," said Malcolm, as he heard the professor coming back.
"If we could only keep you here until spring, I am sure that papa would send you back all right.
He's always helping people that get into trouble."
Jonesy took his little snub nose out of the pillow as the professor came in, and looked around defiantly as if ready to fight the first one who dared to hint that he had been crying.
The boys took their leave soon after, leading the bear back to his new quarters in the carriage house, where they had made him a comfortable den.
Then they walked slowly up to the house, their arms thrown across each other's shoulders.
"S'pose that you and I were left of all the family, and didn't have any friends in the world, and I was to get separated from you and couldn't get back?"
"Don't you s'pose Jonesy feels as badly about it as we would?" asked Keith.
"Shouldn't be surprised," said Malcolm, beginning to whistle.
Keith joined in, and keeping step to the tune, like two soldiers, they marched on into the house.
Virginia found them in the library, a little while later, sitting on the hearth rug, tailor fashion.
They were still talking about Jonesy.
They could think of nothing else but the loneliness of the little waif, and his pitiful appeal: "Oh, don't let them shut me up where I can't never get back to Barney."
"Why don't you write to your father?" asked Virginia, when they had told her the story of their visit.
But if he could see Jonesy,--how pitiful looking he is, and hear him crying to go back to his brother, I know he'd feel the way we do about it."
"I called the professor out in the hall, and told him so," said Keith, "and asked him if he couldn't adopt Jonesy, or something, until papa comes home.
But he said that he is too poor.
He has only a few dollars a month to live on.
"Then he would keep him till Uncle Sydney comes, if somebody would pay his board?" asked Virginia.
"Yes," said Malcolm, "but that doesn't help matters much, for we children are the only ones who want him to stay, and our monthly allowances, all put together, wouldn't be enough."
"How?" demanded Malcolm.
You can't pick fruit in the dead of winter, can you? or pull weeds, or rake leaves? What other way is there?"
"Now you've made me think of it," cried Virginia, excitedly.
"I've thought of a good way.
We'll give Jonesy a benefit, like great singers have.
I love to arrange tableaux.
We were always having them out at the fort."
"I bid to show off the bear," cried Malcolm, entering into Virginia's plan at once.
"May be I'll learn something to recite, too."
"I'll help print the tickets," said Keith, "and go around selling them, and be in anything you want me to be.
How many tableaux are you going to have, Ginger?"
"I can't tell yet," she answered, but a moment after she cried out, her eyes shining with pleasure, "Oh, I've thought of a lovely one.
We can have the Little Colonel and the bear for 'Beauty and the Beast.'"
Malcolm promptly turned a somersault on the rug, to express his approval, but came up with a grave face, saying, "I'll bet that grandmother will say we can't have it."
"Let's get Aunt Allison on our side," suggested Virginia.
This was the first time that she had touched her brushes since the children's coming, and she had hoped that this one afternoon would be free from interruption, when she heard them planning their afternoon's occupations at the lunch table.
They had come back before the little water colour sketch she was making was quite finished.
There was no disappointment, however, in the bright face she turned toward them, and Virginia lost no time in beginning her story.
She had been elected to tell it, but before it was done all three had had a part in the telling, and all three were waiting with wistful eyes for her answer.
"Well, what is it you want me to do?" she asked, finally.
Aunt Allison answered Malcolm's last remark a little sternly.
"There is nobody in the valley so generous and kind to the poor as your grandmother." "Yes'm," said Virginia, meekly, "but you'll ask her, won't you please, auntie?"
Miss Allison smiled at her persistence.
"Wait until I finish this," she said.
"Then I'll go down stairs and put the matter before her, and report to you at dinner time.
Now are you satisfied?"
"Yes," they cried in chorus, "you're on our side.
It's all right now!" With a series of hearty hugs that left her almost breathless, they hurried away.
When Miss Allison kept her promise she did not go to her mother with the children's story of Jonesy, to move her to pity.
"'Not what we give, but what we share, For the gift without the giver is bare.'
"This would be a real sharing of themselves, all their time and best energies, for they will have to work hard to get up such an entertainment as this.
It isn't for Jonesy's sake I ask it, but for the children's own good."
I do want to keep them unspotted from a knowledge of the world's evils, but I do not want to make them selfish. If this little beggar at the gate can teach them where to find the Holy Grail, through unselfish service to him, I do not want to stand in the way.
CHAPTER two
THE SIN OF MONOTONY
One day Ennui was born from Uniformity.
Our English has changed with the years so that many words now connote more than they did originally.
The monotonous speaker not only drones along in the same volume and pitch of tone but uses always the same emphasis, the same speed, the same thoughts-or dispenses with thought altogether.
Monotony, the cardinal and most common sin of the public speaker, is not a transgression-it is rather a sin of omission, for it consists in living up to the confession of the Prayer Book: "We have left undone those things we ought to have done."
To tell you that your speech is monotonous may mean very little to you, so let us look at the nature-and the curse-of monotony in other spheres of life, then we shall appreciate more fully how it will blight an otherwise good speech.
If the Victrola in the adjoining apartment grinds out just three selections over and over again, it is pretty safe to assume that your neighbor has no other records.
If a speaker uses only a few of his powers, it points very plainly to the fact that the rest of his powers are not developed.
Monotony reveals our limitations.
In its effect on its victim, monotony is actually deadly-it will drive the bloom from the cheek and the lustre from the eye as quickly as sin, and often leads to viciousness.
The worst punishment that human ingenuity has ever been able to invent is extreme monotony-solitary confinement.
Lay a marble on the table and do nothing eighteen hours of the day but change that marble from one point to another and back again, and you will go insane if you continue long enough.
So this thing that shortens life, and is used as the most cruel of punishments in our prisons, is the thing that will destroy all the life and force of a speech.
Avoid it as you would shun a deadly dull bore. The "idle rich" can have half a dozen homes, command all the varieties of foods gathered from the four corners of the earth, and sail for Africa or Alaska at their pleasure; but the poverty stricken man must walk or take a street car-he does not have the choice of yacht, auto, or special train.
He must spend the most of his life in labor and be content with the staples of the food market.
Monotony is poverty, whether in speech or in life.
Strive to increase the variety of your speech as the business man labors to augment his wealth.
Nature in her wealth gives us endless variety; man with his limitations is often monotonous.
Get back to nature in your methods of speech making.
The power of variety lies in its pleasure giving quality.
If you wish to teach or influence men, you must please them, first or last.
Strike the same note on the piano over and over again.
This will give you some idea of the displeasing, jarring effect monotony has on the ear.
The dictionary defines "monotonous" as being synonymous with "wearisome." That is putting it mildly.
It is maddening.
We obviate monotony in dress by replenishing our wardrobes.
We avoid monotony in speech by multiplying our powers of speech.
We multiply our powers of speech by increasing our tools.
The carpenter has special implements with which to construct the several parts of a building.
The organist has certain keys and stops which he manipulates to produce his harmonies and effects.
In like manner the speaker has certain instruments and tools at his command by which he builds his argument, plays on the feelings, and guides the beliefs of his audience.
To give you a conception of these instruments, and practical help in learning to use them, are the purposes of the immediately following chapters.
Why did not the Children of Israel whirl through the desert in limousines, and why did not Noah have moving picture entertainments and talking machines on the Ark?
The laws that enable us to operate an automobile, produce moving pictures, or music on the Victrola, would have worked just as well then as they do today.
It was ignorance of law that for ages deprived humanity of our modern conveniences.
Many speakers still use ox cart methods in their speech instead of employing automobile or overland express methods.
They are ignorant of laws that make for efficiency in speaking.
We cannot impress too thoroughly upon you the necessity for a real working mastery of these principles.
They are the very foundations of successful speaking.
"Get your principles right," said Napoleon, "and the rest is a matter of detail."
It is useless to shoe a dead horse, and all the sound principles in Christendom will never make a live speech out of a dead one.
So let it be understood that public speaking is not a matter of mastering a few dead rules; the most important law of public speech is the necessity for truth, force, feeling, and life.
Forget all else, but not this.
When you have mastered the mechanics of speech outlined in the next few chapters you will no longer be troubled with monotony.
The complete knowledge of these principles and the ability to apply them will give you great variety in your powers of expression.
The technical principles that we lay down in the following chapters are not arbitrary creations of our own.
They are all founded on the practices that good speakers and actors adopt-either naturally and unconsciously or under instruction-in getting their effects.
It is useless to warn the student that he must be natural.
To be natural may be to be monotonous.
The little strawberry up in the arctics with a few tiny seeds and an acid tang is a natural berry, but it is not to be compared with the improved variety that we enjoy here.
The dwarfed oak on the rocky hillside is natural, but a poor thing compared with the beautiful tree found in the rich, moist bottom lands.
Be natural-but improve your natural gifts until you have approached the ideal, for we must strive after idealized nature, in fruit, tree, and speech.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES.
one.
What are the causes of monotony?
Cite some instances in nature.
three.
Cite instances in man's daily life.
Describe some of the effects of monotony in both cases.
five.
Read aloud some speech without paying particular attention to its meaning or force.
six.
Now repeat it after you have thoroughly assimilated its matter and spirit.
What difference do you notice in its rendition?
seven.
Why is monotony one of the worst as well as one of the most common faults of speakers?
CHAPTER three
--c s
The gun that scatters too much does not bag the birds.
The same principle applies to speech.
The speaker that fires his force and emphasis at random into a sentence will not get results.
Not every word is of special importance-therefore only certain words demand emphasis.
To some extent you do, in ordinary speech; but do you in public discourse?
It is there that monotony caused by lack of emphasis is so painfully apparent.
"Destiny is not a matter of chance.
Speak it aloud and see.
Obviously, the author has contrasted these ideas purposely, so that they might be more emphatic, and here we see that contrast is one of the very first devices to gain emphasis.
As a public speaker you can assist this emphasis of contrast with your voice.
White, naturally, for that is the opposite of black.
It is the one word that positively defines the quality of the subject being discussed, and the author of those lines desired to bring it out emphatically, as he has shown by contrasting it with another idea.
These lines, then, would read like this:
When you pick up the evening paper you can tell at a glance which are the important news articles.
Size of type is his device to show emphasis in bold relief. He brings out sometimes even in red headlines the striking news of the day.
It would be a boon to speech making if speakers would conserve the attention of their audiences in the same way and emphasize only the words representing the important ideas.
The average speaker will deliver the foregoing line on destiny with about the same amount of emphasis on each word.
"But," said mr Dana, "if you see a man bite a dog, hurry back to the office and write the story." Of course that is news; that is unusual.
The ideal speaker makes his big words stand out like mountain peaks; his unimportant words are submerged like stream beds.
His big thoughts stand like huge oaks; his ideas of no especial value are merely like the grass around the tree.
Note the following, printed in the same type as given here.
He looked at her in angry astonishment.
"Did you expect me to give you a chance to destroy me and poison Jacqueline's mind?
Otherwise, it is justified."
A Fifth Avenue bus would attract attention up at Minisink Ford, New York, while one of the ox teams that frequently pass there would attract attention on Fifth Avenue.
To make a word emphatic, deliver it differently from the manner in which the words surrounding it are delivered.
If you have been going fast, go very slow on the emphatic word.
If you have been talking on a low pitch, jump to a high one on the emphatic word.
If you have been talking on a high pitch, take a low one on your emphatic ideas. Read the chapters on "Inflection," "Feeling," "Pause," "Change of Pitch," "Change of Tempo." Each of these will explain in detail how to get emphasis through the use of a certain principle.
In this chapter, however, we are considering only one form of emphasis: that of applying force to the important word and subordinating the unimportant words.
Do not forget: this is one of the main methods that you must continually employ in getting your effects.
Let us not confound loudness with emphasis.
To yell is not a sign of earnestness, intelligence, or feeling.
The kind of force that we want applied to the emphatic word is not entirely physical.
It must come from within, outward.
Last night a speaker said: "The curse of this country is not a lack of education.
The other words were hurried over and thus given no comparative importance at all.
His emphasis was both correct and powerful.
What would you think of a guide who agreed to show New York to a stranger and then took up his time by visiting Chinese laundries and boot blacking "parlors" on the side streets?
If he wearies their attention with trifles they will have neither vivacity nor desire left when he reaches words of Wall Street and skyscraper importance.
You do not dwell on these small words in your everyday conversation, because you are not a conversational bore.
Apply the correct method of everyday speech to the platform.
As we have noted elsewhere, public speaking is very much like conversation enlarged.
I ab so lute ly refuse to grant your demand.
Now and then this principle should be applied to an emphatic sentence by stressing each word.
It is a good device for exciting special attention, and it furnishes a pleasing variety.
Patrick Henry's notable climax could be delivered in that manner very effectively: "Give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death." The italicized part of the following might also be delivered with this every word emphasis.
Of course, there are many ways of delivering it; this is only one of several good interpretations that might be chosen.
Knowing the price we must pay, the sacrifice we must make, the burdens we must carry, the assaults we must endure-knowing full well the cost-yet we enlist, and we enlist for the war.
Strongly emphasizing a single word has a tendency to suggest its antithesis.
Notice how the meaning changes by merely putting the emphasis on different words in the following sentence.
The parenthetical expressions would really not be needed to supplement the emphatic words.
When a great battle is reported in the papers, they do not keep emphasizing the same facts over and over again.
They try to get new information, or a "new slant." The news that takes an important place in the morning edition will be relegated to a small space in the late afternoon edition.
We are interested in new ideas and new facts.
This principle has a very important bearing in determining your emphasis.
Do not emphasize the same idea over and over again unless you desire to lay extra stress on it; Senator Thurston desired to put the maximum amount of emphasis on "force" in his speech on page fifty.
Note how force is emphasized repeatedly.
In the following selection, "larger" is emphatic, for it is the new idea.
"New stars and suns" are hardly as emphatic as the word "larger." Why?
Because we expect an astronomer to discover heavenly bodies rather than cooking recipes.
The words, "Republic needs" in the next sentence, are emphatic; they introduce a new and important idea.
"New" is emphatic because it introduces a new idea.
In like manner, "soil," "grain," "tools," are also emphatic.
Are there any others you would emphasize?
Why?
One speaker will put one interpretation on a speech, another speaker will use different emphasis to bring out a different interpretation.
No one can say that one interpretation is right and the other wrong.
This principle must be borne in mind in all our marked exercises.
Here your own intelligence must guide-and greatly to your profit.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES.
one.
What is emphasis?
Describe one method of destroying monotony of thought presentation.
three.
What relation does this have to the use of the voice?
Which words should be emphasized, which subordinated, in a sentence?
five.
Read the selections on pages fifty, fifty one, fifty two, fifty three and fifty four, devoting special attention to emphasizing the important words or phrases and subordinating the unimportant ones.
Read again, changing emphasis slightly.
What is the effect?
six.
Read some sentence repeatedly, emphasizing a different word each time, and show how the meaning is changed, as is done on page twenty two.
seven.
What is the effect of a lack of emphasis?
eight.
Read the selections on pages thirty and forty eight, emphasizing every word.
What is the effect on the emphasis?
nine.
When is it permissible to emphasize every single word in a sentence?
ten.
Note the emphasis and subordination in some conversation or speech you have heard.
Were they well made?
Why?
Can you suggest any improvement?
eleven.
Mark the passage for emphasis and bring it with you to class.
twelve.
In the following passage, would you make any changes in the author's markings for emphasis?
Where?
Why?
CHAPTER two
To be lost at five years of age in a great city, to be snatched from wealth, happiness, and a loving mother's arms, only to be thrust instantly into poverty, misery, and loneliness; and then to be, after four long years, suddenly returned-no wonder Houghtonsville held its breath and questioned if it all indeed were true.
Bit by bit the little girl's history was related in every house in town; and many a woman-and some men-wept over the tale of how the little fingers had sewed on buttons in the attic sweat shop, and pasted bags in the ill smelling cellar.
"But, there!
ain't that what she's always doin' for folks-somethin' ter make 'em happy?
But there!
what's past is past, and there ain't no use frettin' over it.
Nor was this all.
She was not ungrateful, certainly, but she was overwhelmed.
Not only the cakes and the tidies, however, gave mrs Kendall food for thought during those first few days after Margaret's return.
From the very nature of the case it was, of necessity, a period of adjustment; and to mrs Kendall's consternation there was every indication of friction, if not disaster.
For four years now her young daughter had been away from her tender care and influence; and for only one of those four years-the last-had she come under the influence of any sort of refinement or culture, and then under only such as a city missionary and an overworked schoolteacher could afford, supplemented by the two trips to Mont Lawn.
It was not easy for "Mag of the Alley" to become at once Margaret Kendall, the dainty little daughter of a well bred, fastidious mother.
Kendall went for advice.
"What shall I do?" she asked anxiously.
"The child is so good and loving," she went on a little hurriedly, "that it makes it all the harder-but I must do something.
Doctor, what shall I do?"
"I know, I know," nodded the man.
"I have seen it myself.
It's in her-the gentleness and the refinement.
But she'll come out straight.
Her heart is all right."
mrs Kendall laughed softly.
"Her heart, doctor!" she exclaimed.
"Just there lies the greatest problem of all.
Why, Harry,"--mrs
So far her horror is tempered by the fact that she is sure I didn't know before that there were any people who did not have all these things.
Now that she has told me of them, she confidently looks to me to do my obvious duty at once."
The doctor laughed.
"As if you weren't always doing things for people," he said fondly.
Then he grew suddenly grave.
You'll see.
At heart she's so gentle and-why, what"--he broke off with an unspoken question, his eyes widely opened at the change that had come to her face.
"Oh, nothing," returned mrs Kendall, almost despairingly, "only if you'd seen Joe Bagley yesterday morning I'm afraid you'd have changed your opinion of her gentleness.
"Why, he's almost twice her size."
"Yes, I know, but that didn't seem to occur to Margaret," returned mrs Kendall.
When I arrived on the scene they were the center of an admiring crowd of children,"--mrs
Kendall shivered visibly-"and Margaret was just delivering herself of a final blow that sent the great bully off blubbering."
"Good for her!"--it was an involuntary tribute, straight from the heart.
"Harry!" gasped mrs Kendall.
"'Good'--a delicate girl!"
The household at Hilcrest did not break up as early as usual that year. A few days were consumed in horrified remonstrances and tearful pleadings on the part of mrs Merideth and Ned when Margaret's plans became known.
"It is not so dreadful at all," Margaret had assured them.
"I have taken a large house not far from the mills, and I am having it papered and painted and put into very comfortable shape.
Patty and her family will live with me, and we are going to open classes in simple little things that will help toward better living."
"But that is regular settlement work," sighed mrs Merideth.
"Well, perhaps it is. Anyway, I hope that just the presence of one clean, beautiful home among them will do some good.
I mean to try it, at all events."
"But are you going to do nothing but that all the time-just teach those dreadful creatures, and-and live there?"
"Certainly not," declared Margaret, with a bright smile.
"I've planned a trip to New York."
"To New York?" mrs Merideth sat up suddenly, her face alight.
"Oh, that will be fine-lovely!
Why didn't you tell us?
Poor dear, you'll need a rest all right, I'm thinking, and we'll keep you just as long as we can, too." With lightning rapidity mrs Merideth had changed their plans-in her mind.
They would go to New York, not Egypt.
Egypt had seemed desirable, but if Margaret was going to New York, that altered the case.
"Oh, but I thought you weren't going to New York," laughed Margaret. "Besides-I'm going with Patty."
"With Patty!"
"What absurd names!" mrs Merideth spoke sharply.
"Patty doesn't think them absurd," laughed Margaret.
You should hear Patty say it really to appreciate it.
"Ugh!" shuddered mrs Merideth.
"Margaret, how can you-laugh!"
"Why, it's funny, I think," laughed Margaret again, as she turned away.
Even the most urgent entreaties on the part of Margaret failed to start the Spencers on their trip, and not until she finally threatened to make the first move herself and go down to the town, did they consent to go.
"I would rather wait until you go, as you seem so worried about the 'break,' as you insist upon calling it; but if you won't, why I must, that is all.
Margaret smiled, but she made no comment-it was enough to fight present battles without trying to win future ones.
She told herself, however, that all this was well and good; and she ate the supper and laid herself down upon the hard bed with an exaltation that rendered her oblivious to taste and feeling.
In due time the Mill House, as Margaret called her new home, was ready for occupancy, and the family moved in.
Naming the place had given Margaret no little food for thought.
It is just one of the mill houses."
I will," cried Margaret.
And the "Mill House" it was from that day.
Margaret's task was not an easy one.
Both she and her house were looked upon with suspicion, and she had some trouble in finding the two or three teachers of just the right sort to help her.
"Never mind," said Margaret, "we shall grow.
You'll see!"
The mill people, however, were not the only ones that learned something during the next few months.
Margaret herself learned much.
"But thar ain't a boss but what said if I'd got kids I might send them along.
"That would spoil everything.
They must go to school-get an education."
"They got ter eat-first," he said.
"Yes, yes, I know," interposed Margaret, eagerly.
"I understand all that, and I'll help about that part.
A sudden flash came into the man's eyes.
His shoulders straightened.
We be n't charity folks." And he turned away.
A week later Margaret learned that Rosy and Katy were out of school. When she looked them up she found them at work in the mills.
This matter of the school question was a great puzzle to Margaret.
Very early in her efforts she had sought out the public school teachers, and asked their help and advice.
She was appalled at the number of children who appeared scarcely to understand that there was such a thing as school.
This state of affairs she could not seem to remedy, however, in spite of her earnest efforts.
The parents, in many cases, were indifferent, and the children more so.
Some of the children in the mills, indeed, were there solely-according to the parents' version-because they could not "get on" in school.
Conscious that there must be a school law, Margaret went vigorously to work to find and enforce it.
Then, and not until then, did she realize the seriousness of even this one phase of the problem she had undertaken to solve.
There were other phases, too.
Sometimes it was ambition.
To this end and aim were sacrificed all the life and strength of whatever was theirs.
To Margaret, however, the whole thing seemed hopelessly small: there was so much to do, so little done!
She was still the little girl with the teaspoon and the bowl of sand; and the chasm yawned as wide as ever.
To tell the truth, Margaret was tired, discouraged, and homesick.
For months her strength, time, nerves, and sympathies had been taxed to the utmost; and now that there had come a breathing space, when the intricate machinery of her scheme could run for a moment without her hand at the throttle, she was left weak and nerveless.
She was, in fact, perilously near a breakdown.
Added to all this, she was lonely.
Here she was the head, the strong tower of defense, the one to whom everybody came with troubles, perplexities, and griefs.
There was no human being to whom she could turn for comfort.
They all looked to her.
Even Bobby McGinnis, when she saw him at all-which was seldom-treated her with a frigid deference that was inexpressibly annoying to her.
From the Spencers she heard irregularly.
Then had come the good news that Frank was out of danger, though still far too weak to undertake the long journey home.
Their letters showed unmistakably their impatience at the delay, and questioned her as to her health and welfare, but could set no date for their return.
Frank, in particular, was disturbed, they said.
As for Frank himself-he had not written her since his illness.
Margaret raised an imperious hand.
I will see him now." And Patty, wondering vaguely what had come to her gentle eyed, gentle voiced mistress-as she insisted upon calling Margaret-fled precipitately.
Two minutes later Bobby McGinnis himself stood tall and straight just inside the door.
"You sent for me?" he asked.
Margaret sprang to her feet.
All the pent loneliness of the past weeks and months burst forth in a stinging whip of retort.
"Yes, I sent for you." She paused, but the man did not speak, and in a moment she went on hurriedly, feverishly.
"I always send for you-if I see you at all, and yet you know how hard I'm trying to help these people, and that you are the only one here that can help me."
She paused again, and again the man was silent.
"Don't you know what I'm trying to do?" she asked.
"Yes." The lips closed firmly over the single word.
"Didn't I ask you to help me?
Didn't I appoint us a committee of two to do the work?" Her voice shook, and her chin trembled like that of a grieved child.
"Yes." Again that strained, almost harsh monosyllable.
Margaret made an impatient gesture.
"Bobby McGinnis, why don't you help me?" she demanded, tearfully.
Why don't you come to me frankly and freely, and tell me the best way to deal with these people?"
There was no answer.
The man had half turned his face so that only his profile showed clean cut and square chinned against the close shut door.
"Don't you know that I am alone here-that I have no friends but you and Patty?" she went on tremulously.
Sometimes it seems almost as if you were afraid----"
"I am afraid," cut in a voice shaken with emotion.
"Bobby!" breathed Margaret in surprised dismay, falling back before the fire in the eyes that suddenly turned and flashed straight into hers. "Why, Bobby!"
If the man heard, he did not heed.
He had stepped forward as she fell back, and his eyes still blazed into hers.
"I don't dare to trust myself within sight of your dear eyes, or within touch of your dear hands-though all the while I'm hungry for both.
Perhaps I do let you send for me, instead of coming of my own free will; but I'm never without the thought of you, and the hope of catching somewhere a glimpse of even your dress.
Over by the table Margaret stood silent, motionless, her eyes on the bowed figure of the man before her.
Gradually her confused senses were coming into something like order.
Slowly her dazed thoughts were taking shape.
It was her own fault.
She had brought this thing upon herself.
She should have seen-have understood.
But, after all, why should he not love her?
And why should she not-love him?
He was good and true and noble, and for years he had loved her-she remembered now their childish compact, and she bitterly reproached herself for not thinking of it before-it might have saved her this....
Still, did she want to save herself this?
Was it not, after all, the very best thing that could have happened?
Where, and how could she do more good in the world than right here with this strong, loving heart to help her?...
Of course she loved him!
Very softly Margaret crossed the room and touched the man's shoulder.
"Bobby, I did not understand-I did not know," she said gently.
"Won't have to-stay-away!"
"no
We-we will do it together-this work."
"But you don't mean-you can't mean----" McGinnis paused, his breath suspended.
"Margaret!" choked the man, as he fell on his knees and caught the girl's two hands to his lips.
Frank Spencer had already left the Mill House and gone to Hilcrest when McGinnis was well enough to go back to his place in the mills.
For some time after McGinnis went away, Margaret remained at the Mill House; but she was restless and unhappy in the position in which she found herself.
McGinnis taught an evening class at the Mill House, and she knew that it could not be easy for him to see her so frequently now that the engagement was broken.
Those long hours of misery when the mills burned had opened Margaret's eyes; and now that her eyes were opened, she was frightened and ashamed.
As for Hilcrest-she certainly would not stay at Hilcrest anyway-now.
Later, when she had come to her senses, perhaps-but not now.
It did not take much persuasion on the part of Margaret to convince mrs Merideth that a winter abroad would be delightful-just they two together.
The news of Margaret's broken engagement had been received at Hilcrest with a joyous relief that was nevertheless carefully subdued in the presence of Margaret herself; but mrs Merideth could not conceal her joy that she was to take Margaret away from the "whole unfortunate affair," as she expressed it to her brothers.
Frank Spencer, however, was not so pleased at the proposed absence.
He could see no reason for Margaret's going, and one evening when they were alone together in the library he spoke of it.
"But, Margaret, I don't see why you must go," he protested.
For a moment the girl was silent; then she turned swiftly and faced him.
"Frank, Bobby McGinnis was my good friend.
From the time when I was a tiny little girl he has been that.
He is good and true and noble, but I have brought him nothing but sorrow.
He will be happier now if I am quite out of his sight at present.
I am going away."
Frank Spencer stirred uneasily.
"But you will be away-from him-if you are here," he suggested.
Spencer grew sober instantly.
"You poor child, of course you do, and no wonder!
She raised a protesting hand.
"No, no, you do not understand.
I-I have made a failure of it."
"A failure of it!"
"Yes.
It's no failure at all.
You've done wonders down there at the Mill House."
Margaret shook her head slowly.
"It's so little-so very little compared to what ought to be done," she sighed.
"The Mill House is good and does good, I acknowledge; but it's so puny after all.
It's like a tiny little oasis in a huge desert of poverty and distress."
"But what-what more could you do?" ventured the man.
Margaret rose, and moved restlessly around the room.
"That's what I mean to find out." She stopped suddenly, facing him.
"Don't you see?
I touch only the surface. The great cause behind things I never reach.
Sometimes it seems as if it were like that old picture-where was it?
in Pilgrim's Progress?--of the fire.
On one side is the man trying to put it out; on the other, is the evil one pouring on oil.
My two hands are the two men.
With one I feed a hungry child, or nurse a sick woman; with the other I make more children hungry and more women sick."
"Margaret, are you mad?
What can you mean?"
"Merely this.
It is very simple, after all.
With one hand I relieve the children's suffering; with the other I take dividends from the very mills that make the children suffer.
The man frowned.
He, too, got to his feet and walked nervously up and down the room.
When he came back the girl had sat down again.
Her elbows were on the table, and her linked fingers were shielding her eyes. Involuntarily the man reached his hand toward the bowed head.
"I do see, Margaret," he began gently, "and you are right.
She gave a nervous little laugh and picked up a bit of paper from the floor.
"Of course it is useless," she retorted in what she hoped was a merry voice.
"And he doesn't even love me now, besides."
"Of course not!
He never did, for that matter.
'twas only the fancy of a moment.
Why, Frank, Ned never cared for me-that way!"
The tone and the one word were enough.
For one moment Margaret gazed into the man's face with startled eyes; then she turned and covered her own telltale face with her hands-and because it was a telltale face, Spencer took a long stride toward her.
"Margaret!
And did you think it was Ned I was pleading for, when all the while it was I who was hungering for you with a love that sent me across the seas to rid myself of it?
Did you, Margaret?"
There was no answer.
Still no answer.
"Margaret, it did not go-that love.
It stayed with me day after day, and month after month, and it only grew stronger and deeper until there was nothing left me in all this world but you-just you.
And now-Margaret, my Margaret," he said softly and very tenderly.
When it was the Five Hundred and Sixty sixth Night,
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that Sindbad the Seaman thus continued:--When I smote the serpent on the head with my golden staff she cast the man forth of her mouth.
Then I gave the wand of gold to him whom I had delivered from the serpent and bade him farewell, and my friend took me on his back and flew with me as before, till he brought me to the city and set me down in my own house.
Then we embarked, I and my wife, with all our moveables, leaving our houses and domains and so forth, and set sail, and ceased not sailing from island to island and from sea to sea, with a fair wind and a favouring, till we arrived at Bassorah safe and sound.
I made no stay there, but freighted another vessel and, transferring my goods to her, set out forthright for Baghdad city, where I arrived in safety, and entering my quarter and repairing to my house, foregathered with my family and friends and familiars who laid up my goods in my warehouses.
Then I forswore travel and vowed to Allah the Most High I would venture no more by land or sea, for that this seventh and last voyage had surfeited me of travel and adventure; and I thanked the Lord (be He praised and glorified!), and blessed Him for having restored me to my kith and kin and country and home.
A Translation of The Seventh Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman
according to the version of the Calcutta Edition
which differs in essential form from the preceding tale
Know, O my brothers and friends and companions all, that when I left voyaging and commercing, I said in myself, "Sufficeth me that hath befallen me;" and I spent my time in solace and pleasure.
I trembled at these words and rejoined, "By Allah the Omnipotent, O my lord, I have taken a loathing to wayfare, and when I hear the words 'Voyage' or 'Travel,' my limbs tremble for what hath befallen me of hardships and horrors.
Then I dropped down from Baghdad to the Gulf, and with other merchants embarked, and our ship sailed before a fair wind many days and nights till, by Allah's aid, we reached the island of Sarandib.
As soon as we had made fast we landed and I took the present and the letter; and, going in with them to the King, kissed ground before him.
By Allah Omnipotent we were longing to see thee, and glory be to God who hath again shown us thy face!" Then taking me by the hand he made me sit by his side, rejoicing, and he welcomed me with familiar kindness again and entreated me as a friend.
But after.
Some days after I craved his leave to depart, but could not obtain it except by great pressing, whereupon I farewelled him and fared forth from his city, with merchants and other companions, homewards bound without any desire for travel or companions, homewards bound without any desire for travel or trade.
We continued voyaging and coasting along many islands; but, when we were half-way, we were surrounded by a number of canoes, wherein were men like devils armed with bows and arrows, swords and daggers; habited in mail coats and other armoury.
They fell upon us and wounded and slew all who opposed them; then, having captured the ship and her contents, carried us to an island, where they sold us at the meanest price.
Now I was bought by a wealthy man who, taking me to his house, gave me meat and drink and clothing and treated me in the friendliest manner; so I was heartened and I rested a little.
In the evening I reported my success to my master who was delighted in me and entreated me with high honour; and next morning he removed the slain elephant.
I fell down fainting amongst the beasts when the monster elephant wound his trunk about me and, setting me on his back, went off with me, the others accompanying us.
He carried me still unconscious till he reached the place for which he was making, when he rolled me off his back and presently went his ways followed by the others.
After this, he entreated me with increased favour and said, "O my son, thou hast shown us the way to great gain, wherefore Allah requite thee!
I likewise bought for myself a beast and we fared forth and crossed the deserts from country to country till I reached Baghdad.
Here I went in to the Caliph and, after saluting him and kissing hands, informed him of all that had befallen me; whereupon he rejoiced in my safety and thanked Almighty Allah; and he bade my story be written in letters of gold.
Now when Shahrazad had ended her story of the two Sindbads, Dinarzad exclaimed, "O my sister, how pleasant is thy tale and how tasteful!
How sweet and how grateful!"
THE SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON
It refers as well to every other type of moving picture that gets into the slum.
But now, to speak in an Irish way, the crowd takes the platform, and looking down, sees itself swaying.
Below the cliff caves were bar rooms in endless lines.
There are almost as many bar rooms to day, yet this new thing breaks the lines as nothing else ever did.
For no pious reason, surely.
Now they have fire pouring into their eyes instead of into their bellies.
Blood is drawn from the guts to the brain.
After a day's work a street sweeper enters the place, heavy as King Log.
The photoplays have done something to reunite the lower class families. No longer is the fire escape the only summer resort for big and little folks.
Here is more fancy and whim than ever before blessed a hot night. Here, under the wind of an electric fan, they witness everything, from a burial in Westminster to the birthday parade of the ruler of the land of Swat.
As Padraic Colum says in his poem on the herdsman:--
"With thoughts on white ships And the King of Spain's Daughter."
I beg to be allowed to relate a personal matter.
The talk with this man was worth it all to me.
Through their office they are committed to prohibition.
When a county goes dry, it is generally in spite of the county seat.
The larger the county seat, the larger the non church going population and the more stubborn the fight.
But they are outstanding groups.
Their leadership seldom dries up a factory town or a mining region, with all the help the Anti Saloon League can give.
The men who do this, drink freely at their own clubs or parties.
The women's vote, a little more puritanical than the men's vote, will make the result sure.
And a whole evening costs but a dime apiece.
Since I have announced myself a farmer and a puritan, let me here list the saloon evils not yet recorded in this chapter.
The shame of the American drinking place is the bar tender who dominates its thinking.
But it is not too late for the dry forces to repent.
And wet territory voted dry will bring about a greatly accelerated patronage of the photoplay houses. There is every strategic reason why these two forces should patch up a truce.
CHAPTER nineteen
ON COMING FORTH BY DAY
Humanity takes on its sacred aspect.
We retire to the shaded porch.
It takes two more steps toward quietness of light to read the human face and figure.
In the imaginative pictures the principle begins to be applied more largely, till throughout the fairy story the figures float in and out from the unknown, as fancies should.
Now we have a darkness on which we can paint, an unspoiled twilight.
We need not call it the Arabian's cave.
The Nile flows through his heart.
We built the mysteriousness of the Universe into the Pyramids, carved it into every line of the Sphinx.
He is carried past a dreadful place on the back of the cow Hathor.
They sit in majestic rows.
At last he is declared justified.
She makes sacrifice with him there.
It was the force behind every mummification.
The Greeks, the wisest people in our limited system of classics, bowed down before the Egyptian hierarchy.
In many cases where the sexes are separate, both are permanently attached to some support, and the one cannot search or struggle for the other.
Moreover it is almost certain that these animals have too imperfect senses and much too low mental powers to appreciate each other's beauty or other attractions, or to feel rivalry.
It should be borne in mind that in no case have we sufficient evidence that colours have been thus acquired, except where one sex is much more brilliantly or conspicuously coloured than the other, and where there is no difference in habits between the sexes sufficient to account for their different colours.
Conspicuous colours are likewise beneficial to many animals as a warning to their would be devourers that they are distasteful, or that they possess some special means of defence; but this subject will be discussed more conveniently hereafter.
Bearing in mind how many substances closely analogous to natural organic compounds have been recently formed by chemists, and which exhibit the most splendid colours, it would have been a strange fact if substances similarly coloured had not often originated, independently of any useful end thus gained, in the complex laboratory of living organisms.
THE SUB KINGDOM OF THE MOLLUSCA.
Throughout this great division of the animal kingdom, as far as I can discover, secondary sexual characters, such as we are here considering, never occur.
In the Lamellibranchiata, or bivalve shells, hermaphroditism is not rare.
In the next higher class of the Gasteropoda, or univalve shells, the sexes are either united or separate.
But in the latter case the males never possess special organs for finding, securing, or charming the females, or for fighting with other males.
As I am informed by mr Gwyn Jeffreys, the sole external difference between the sexes consists in the shell sometimes differing a little in form; for instance, the shell of the male periwinkle (Littorina littorea) is narrower and has a more elongated spire than that of the female.
But differences of this nature, it may be presumed, are directly connected with the act of reproduction, or with the development of the ova.
The Gasteropoda, though capable of locomotion and furnished with imperfect eyes, do not appear to be endowed with sufficient mental powers for the members of the same sex to struggle together in rivalry, and thus to acquire secondary sexual characters.
Nevertheless with the pulmoniferous gasteropods, or land snails, the pairing is preceded by courtship; for these animals, though hermaphrodites, are compelled by their structure to pair together.
After a short time the strong and healthy individual disappeared, and was traced by its track of slime over a wall into an adjoining well stocked garden.
mr Lonsdale concluded that it had deserted its sickly mate; but after an absence of twenty four hours it returned, and apparently communicated the result of its successful exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared over the wall.
Even in the highest class of the Mollusca, the Cephalopoda or cuttle fishes, in which the sexes are separate, secondary sexual characters of the present kind do not, as far as I can discover, occur.
The colours do not appear in most cases to be of any use as a protection; they are probably the direct result, as in the lowest classes, of the nature of the tissues; the patterns and the sculpture of the shell depending on its manner of growth.
But many brightly coloured, white, or otherwise conspicuous species, do not seek concealment; whilst again some equally conspicuous species, as well as other dull coloured kinds live under stones and in dark recesses.
So that with these nudibranch molluscs, colour apparently does not stand in any close relation to the nature of the places which they inhabit.
These naked sea slugs are hermaphrodites, yet they pair together, as do land snails, many of which have extremely pretty shells.
It is conceivable that two hermaphrodites, attracted by each other's greater beauty, might unite and leave offspring which would inherit their parents' greater beauty.
We have not here the case of a number of males becoming mature before the females, with the more beautiful males selected by the more vigorous females.
These animals are often beautifully coloured, but as the sexes do not differ in this respect, we are but little concerned with them.
In this great class we first meet with undoubted secondary sexual characters, often developed in a remarkable manner.
Unfortunately the habits of crustaceans are very imperfectly known, and we cannot explain the uses of many structures peculiar to one sex.
But these extraordinary differences between the two sexes are no doubt related to their widely different habits of life, and consequently do not concern us.
In various crustaceans, belonging to distinct families, the anterior antennae are furnished with peculiar thread like bodies, which are believed to act as smelling organs, and these are much more numerous in the males than in the females.
mr Bate put a large male Carcinus maenas into a pan of water, inhabited by a female which was paired with a smaller male; but the latter was soon dispossessed.
After a time the male was put again into the same vessel; and he then, after swimming about for a time, dashed into the crowd, and without any fighting at once took away his wife.
This fact shews that in the Amphipoda, an order low in the scale, the males and females recognise each other, and are mutually attached.
The mental powers of the Crustacea are probably higher than at first sight appears probable.
Any one who tries to catch one of the shore crabs, so common on tropical coasts, will perceive how wary and alert they are. There is a large crab (Birgus latro), found on coral islands, which makes a thick bed of the picked fibres of the cocoa nut, at the bottom of a deep burrow.
It feeds on the fallen fruit of this tree by tearing off the husk, fibre by fibre; and it always begins at that end where the three eye like depressions are situated.
It then breaks through one of these eyes by hammering with its heavy front pincers, and turning round, extracts the albuminous core with its narrow posterior pincers.
But these actions are probably instinctive, so that they would be performed as well by a young animal as by an old one.
In about five minutes the crab brought out the shell which had fallen in, and carried it away to a distance of a foot; it then saw the three other shells lying near, and evidently thinking that they might likewise roll in, carried them to the spot where it had laid the first.
In some species of the genus, probably in all, the sexes pair and inhabit the same burrow.
They are also, as we have seen, highly intelligent animals.
From these various considerations it seems probable that the male in this species has become gaily ornamented in order to attract or excite the female.
It has just been stated that the male Gelasimus does not acquire his conspicuous colours until mature and nearly ready to breed.
This seems a general rule in the whole class in respect to the many remarkable structural differences between the sexes.
We shall hereafter find the same law prevailing throughout the great sub kingdom of the Vertebrata; and in all cases it is eminently distinctive of characters which have been acquired through sexual selection.
I am informed by mr Blackwall that the sexes whilst young usually resemble each other; and both often undergo great changes in colour during their successive moults, before arriving at maturity.
In other cases the male alone appears to change colour.
Spiders are possessed of acute senses, and exhibit much intelligence; as is well known, the females often shew the strongest affection for their eggs, which they carry about enveloped in a silken web.
The males search eagerly for the females, and have been seen by Canestrini and others to fight for possession of them. This same author says that the union of the two sexes has been observed in about twenty species; and he asserts positively that the female rejects some of the males who court her, threatens them with open mandibles, and at last after long hesitation accepts the chosen one.
From these several considerations, we may admit with some confidence that the well marked differences in colour between the sexes of certain species are the results of sexual selection; though we have not here the best kind of evidence,-- the display by the male of his ornaments.
In this species, as I may add, the male is testaceous and the female black with legs banded with red.
I have not alluded to the well-known noise made by the Death's Head Sphinx, for it is generally heard soon after the moth has emerged from its cocoon.
Or have successive variations been accumulated and determined as a protection, or for some unknown purpose, or that one sex may be attractive to the other? And, again, what is the meaning of the colours being widely different in the males and females of certain species, and alike in the two sexes of other species of the same genus?
Before attempting to answer these questions a body of facts must be given.
With our beautiful English butterflies, the admiral, peacock, and painted lady (Vanessae), as well as many others, the sexes are alike.
This is also the case with the magnificent Heliconidae, and most of the Danaidae in the tropics.
But in certain other tropical groups, and in some of our English butterflies, as the purple emperor, orange tip, etc (Apatura Iris and Anthocharis cardamines), the sexes differ either greatly or slightly in colour.
No language suffices to describe the splendour of the males of some tropical species.
Even within the same genus we often find species presenting extraordinary differences between the sexes, whilst others have their sexes closely alike.
Hence we may infer that these nine species, and probably all the others of the genus, are descended from an ancestral form which was coloured in nearly the same manner.
In the tenth species the female still retains the same general colouring, but the male resembles her, so that he is coloured in a much less gaudy and contrasted manner than the males of the previous species.
Hence in these two latter species the bright colours of the males seem to have been transferred to the females; whilst in the tenth species the male has either retained or recovered the plain colours of the female, as well as of the parent form of the genus.
Another striking case was pointed out to me in the British Museum by mr a Butler, namely, one of the tropical American Theclae, in which both sexes are nearly alike and wonderfully splendid; in another species the male is coloured in a similarly gorgeous manner, whilst the whole upper surface of the female is of a dull uniform brown.
I have given the foregoing details in order to shew, in the first place, that when the sexes of butterflies differ, the male as a general rule is the more beautiful, and departs more from the usual type of colouring of the group to which the species belongs.
Hence in most groups the females of the several species resemble each other much more closely than do the males.
In some cases, however, to which I shall hereafter allude, the females are coloured more splendidly than the males.
In the third place, we have seen that when the sexes nearly resemble each other, this appears due either to the male having transferred his colours to the female, or to the male having retained, or perhaps recovered, the primordial colours of the group.
It also deserves notice that in those groups in which the sexes differ, the females usually somewhat resemble the males, so that when the males are beautiful to an extraordinary degree, the females almost invariably exhibit some degree of beauty.
With animals of all kinds, whenever colour has been modified for some special purpose, this has been, as far as we can judge, either for direct or indirect protection, or as an attraction between the sexes.
With many species of butterflies the upper surfaces of the wings are obscure; and this in all probability leads to their escaping observation and danger. But butterflies would be particularly liable to be attacked by their enemies when at rest; and most kinds whilst resting raise their wings vertically over their backs, so that the lower surface alone is exposed to view.
Hence it is this side which is often coloured so as to imitate the objects on which these insects commonly rest.
Many analogous and striking facts could be given.
In some other cases the lower surfaces of the wings are brilliantly coloured, and yet are protective; thus in Thecla rubi the wings when closed are of an emerald green, and resemble the young leaves of the bramble, on which in spring this butterfly may often be seen seated.
Both the males and females in these cases are conspicuous, and it is not credible that their difference in colour should stand in any relation to ordinary protection.
Nevertheless, it is probable that conspicuous colours are indirectly beneficial to many species, as a warning that they are unpalatable.
Most Moths rest motionless during the whole or greater part of the day with their wings depressed; and the whole upper surface is often shaded and coloured in an admirable manner, as mr Wallace has remarked, for escaping detection.
The common Yellow Under wings (Triphaena) often fly about during the day or early evening, and are then conspicuous from the colour of their hind wings.
It would naturally be thought that this would be a source of danger; but mr j Jenner Weir believes that it actually serves them as a means of escape, for birds strike at these brightly coloured and fragile surfaces, instead of at the body.
DISPLAY.
The bright colours of many butterflies and of some moths are specially arranged for display, so that they may be readily seen.
During the night colours are not visible, and there can be no doubt that the nocturnal moths, taken as a body, are much less gaily decorated than butterflies, all of which are diurnal in their habits.
Nevertheless, as a general rule, the upper surface, which is probably more fully exposed, is coloured more brightly and diversely than the lower.
Hence the lower surface generally affords to entomologists the more useful character for detecting the affinities of the various species.
Other such cases could be added.
For instance, in the Australian Gastrophora the upper surface of the fore wing is pale greyish ochreous, while the lower surface is magnificently ornamented by an ocellus of cobalt blue, placed in the midst of a black mark, surrounded by orange yellow, and this by bluish white. But the habits of these three moths are unknown; so that no explanation can be given of their unusual style of colouring.
Hence the lower surface of the wings being brighter than the upper surface in certain moths is not so anomalous as it at first appears.
The Saturniidae include some of the most beautiful of all moths, their wings being decorated, as in our British Emperor moth, with fine ocelli; and mr t w
It is a singular fact that no British moths which are brilliantly coloured, and, as far as I can discover, hardly any foreign species, differ much in colour according to sex; though this is the case with many brilliant butterflies.
In this latter species the difference in colour between the two sexes is strongly marked; and mr Wallace informs me that we here have, as he believes, an instance of protective mimicry confined to one sex, as will hereafter be more fully explained.
From the several foregoing facts it is impossible to admit that the brilliant colours of butterflies, and of some few moths, have commonly been acquired for the sake of protection.
Hence I am led to believe that the females prefer or are most excited by the more brilliant males; for on any other supposition the males would, as far as we can see, be ornamented to no purpose.
We know that ants and certain Lamellicorn beetles are capable of feeling an attachment for each other, and that ants recognise their fellows after an interval of several months. Hence there is no abstract improbability in the Lepidoptera, which probably stand nearly or quite as high in the scale as these insects, having sufficient mental capacity to admire bright colours.
They certainly discover flowers by colour.
As I hear from mr Doubleday, the common white butterfly often flies down to a bit of paper on the ground, no doubt mistaking it for one of its own species.
The courtship of butterflies is, as before remarked, a prolonged affair. The males sometimes fight together in rivalry; and many may be seen pursuing or crowding round the same female.
The process of sexual selection will have been much facilitated, if the conclusion can be trusted, arrived at from various kinds of evidence in the supplement to the ninth chapter; namely, that the males of many Lepidoptera, at least in the imago state, greatly exceed the females in number.
Some facts, however, are opposed to the belief that female butterflies prefer the more beautiful males; thus, as I have been assured by several collectors, fresh females may frequently be seen paired with battered, faded, or dingy males; but this is a circumstance which could hardly fail often to follow from the males emerging from their cocoons earlier than the females.
The females, as several entomologists have remarked to me, lie in an almost torpid state, and appear not to evince the least choice in regard to their partners.
dr Wallace, who has had great experience in breeding Bombyx cynthia, is convinced that the females evince no choice or preference.
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Translated by Constance Garnett
PART ONE
Chapter one
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days.
Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky-Stiva, as he was called in the fashionable world-woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o'clock in the morning, not in his wife's bedroom, but on the leather covered sofa in his study.
"Yes, yes, how was it now?" he thought, going over his dream.
To be sure!
Alabin was giving a dinner at Darmstadt; no, not Darmstadt, but something American.
Yes, but then, Darmstadt was in America.
Stepan Arkadyevitch's eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile. "Yes, it was nice, very nice.
And, as he had done every day for the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place where his dressing gown always hung in his bedroom.
And thereupon he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife's room, but in his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his brows.
And again every detail of his quarrel with his wife was present to his imagination, all the hopelessness of his position, and worst of all, his own fault.
"Yes, she won't forgive me, and she can't forgive me.
And the most awful thing about it is that it's all my fault-all my fault, though I'm not to blame.
"What's this?
this?" she asked, pointing to the letter.
And at this recollection, Stepan Arkadyevitch, as is so often the case, was not so much annoyed at the fact itself as at the way in which he had met his wife's words.
There happened to him at that instant what does happen to people when they are unexpectedly caught in something very disgraceful.
This idiotic smile he could not forgive himself.
Catching sight of that smile, Dolly shuddered as though at physical pain, broke out with her characteristic heat into a flood of cruel words, and rushed out of the room.
Since then she had refused to see her husband.
"It's that idiotic smile that's to blame for it all," thought Stepan Arkadyevitch.
"But what's to be done?
What's to be done?" he said to himself in despair, and found no answer.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself.
He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct.
He could not at this date repent of the fact that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty four, was not in love with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and only a year younger than himself.
Possibly he might have managed to conceal his sins better from his wife if he had anticipated that the knowledge of them would have had such an effect on her.
He had never clearly thought out the subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his wife must long ago have suspected him of being unfaithful to her, and shut her eyes to the fact.
It had turned out quite the other way.
awful!" Stepan Arkadyevitch kept repeating to himself, and he could think of nothing to be done.
That's bad!
Roland and her smile.) "But after all, while she was in the house, I kept myself in hand.
There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble.
He pulled up the blind and rang the bell loudly.
Matvey was followed by the barber with all the necessaries for shaving.
"Are there any papers from the office?" asked Stepan Arkadyevitch, taking the telegram and seating himself at the looking glass.
"On the table," replied Matvey, glancing with inquiring sympathy at his master; and, after a short pause, he added with a sly smile, "They've sent from the carriage jobbers."
Stepan Arkadyevitch made no reply, he merely glanced at Matvey in the looking glass.
In the glance, in which their eyes met in the looking glass, it was clear that they understood one another.
Stepan Arkadyevitch's eyes asked: "Why do you tell me that?
Matvey put his hands in his jacket pockets, thrust out one leg, and gazed silently, good humoredly, with a faint smile, at his master.
He had obviously prepared the sentence beforehand.
Stepan Arkadyevitch saw Matvey wanted to make a joke and attract attention to himself.
Tearing open the telegram, he read it through, guessing at the words, misspelt as they always are in telegrams, and his face brightened.
"Alone, or with her husband?" inquired Matvey.
Stepan Arkadyevitch could not answer, as the barber was at work on his upper lip, and he raised one finger.
Matvey nodded at the looking glass.
"Alone.
Is the room to be got ready upstairs?"
"Inform Darya Alexandrovna: where she orders."
"Darya Alexandrovna?" Matvey repeated, as though in doubt.
"Yes, inform her.
Here, take the telegram; give it to her, and then do what she tells you."
"You want to try it on," Matvey understood, but he only said, "Yes sir."
The barber had gone.
"It's all right, sir; she will come round," said Matvey.
"Come round?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you think so?
Although Stepan Arkadyevitch was completely in the wrong as regards his wife, and was conscious of this himself, almost every one in the house (even the nurse, Darya Alexandrovna's chief ally) was on his side.
"Well, what now?" he asked disconsolately.
Maybe God will aid you.
You must have pity, sir, on the children.
Beg her forgiveness, sir.
One must take the consequences..."
"But she won't see me."
"You do your part.
God is merciful; pray to God, sir, pray to God."
"Come, that'll do, you can go," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, blushing suddenly.
Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse's collar, and, blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious pleasure over the well groomed body of his master.
He read the letters.
One was very unpleasant, from a merchant who was buying a forest on his wife's property.
To sell this forest was absolutely essential; but at present, until he was reconciled with his wife, the subject could not be discussed.
And the idea that he might be led on by his interests, that he might seek a reconciliation with his wife on account of the sale of the forest-that idea hurt him.
When he had finished his letters, Stepan Arkadyevitch moved the office papers close to him, rapidly looked through two pieces of business, made a few notes with a big pencil, and pushing away the papers, turned to his coffee.
As he sipped his coffee, he opened a still damp morning paper, and began reading it.
Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority.
And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them-or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.
Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn.
The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of money.
The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature.
And with all this, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family-the monkey.
He read another article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry.
With his characteristic quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him, as it always did, a certain satisfaction.
But today that satisfaction was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna's advice and the unsatisfactory state of the household.
He read, too, that Count Beist was rumored to have left for Wiesbaden, and that one need have no more gray hair, and of the sale of a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a situation; but these items of information did not give him, as usual, a quiet, ironical gratification.
Having finished the paper, a second cup of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs of the roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his mind-the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.
But this joyous smile at once recalled everything to him, and he grew thoughtful.
Two childish voices (Stepan Arkadyevitch recognized the voices of Grisha, his youngest boy, and Tanya, his eldest girl) were heard outside the door.
They were carrying something, and dropped it.
"I told you not to sit passengers on the roof," said the little girl in English; "there, pick them up!"
"Everything's in confusion," thought Stepan Arkadyevitch; "there are the children running about by themselves." And going to the door, he called them.
They threw down the box, that represented a train, and came in to their father.
The little girl, her father's favorite, ran up boldly, embraced him, and hung laughingly on his neck, enjoying as she always did the smell of scent that came from his whiskers.
At last the little girl kissed his face, which was flushed from his stooping posture and beaming with tenderness, loosed her hands, and was about to run away again; but her father held her back.
"Good morning," he said, smiling to the boy, who had come up to greet him.
He was conscious that he loved the boy less, and always tried to be fair; but the boy felt it, and did not respond with a smile to his father's chilly smile.
"Mamma?
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed.
"Well, is she cheerful?"
The little girl knew that there was a quarrel between her father and mother, and that her mother could not be cheerful, and that her father must be aware of this, and that he was pretending when he asked about it so lightly.
And she blushed for her father.
"I don't know," she said.
"She did not say we must do our lessons, but she said we were to go for a walk with Miss Hoole to grandmamma's."
"Well, go, Tanya, my darling.
He took off the mantelpiece, where he had put it yesterday, a little box of sweets, and gave her two, picking out her favorites, a chocolate and a fondant.
"For Grisha?" said the little girl, pointing to the chocolate.
"Yes, yes." And still stroking her little shoulder, he kissed her on the roots of her hair and neck, and let her go.
"Been here long?" asked Stepan Arkadyevitch.
"Half an hour."
"How many times have I told you to tell me at once?"
"One must let you drink your coffee in peace, at least," said Matvey, in the affectionately gruff tone with which it was impossible to be angry.
"Well, show the person up at once," said Oblonsky, frowning with vexation.
Having got rid of the staff captain's widow, Stepan Arkadyevitch took his hat and stopped to recollect whether he had forgotten anything.
It appeared that he had forgotten nothing except what he wanted to forget-his wife.
Except deceit and lying nothing could come of it now; and deceit and lying were opposed to his nature.
"It must be some time, though: it can't go on like this," he said, trying to give himself courage.
He squared his chest, took out a cigarette, took two whiffs at it, flung it into a mother of pearl ashtray, and with rapid steps walked through the drawing room, and opened the other door into his wife's bedroom.
Darya Alexandrovna, in a dressing jacket, and with her now scanty, once luxuriant and beautiful hair fastened up with hairpins on the nape of her neck, with a sunken, thin face and large, startled eyes, which looked prominent from the thinness of her face, was standing among a litter of all sorts of things scattered all over the room, before an open bureau, from which she was taking something.
Hearing her husband's steps, she stopped, looking towards the door, and trying assiduously to give her features a severe and contemptuous expression.
She still continued to tell herself that she should leave him, but she was conscious that this was impossible; it was impossible because she could not get out of the habit of regarding him as her husband and loving him.
Besides this, she realized that if even here in her own house she could hardly manage to look after her five children properly, they would be still worse off where she was going with them all.
Seeing her husband, she dropped her hands into the drawer of the bureau as though looking for something, and only looked round at him when he had come quite up to her.
He bent his head towards his shoulder and tried to look pitiful and humble, but for all that he was radiant with freshness and health.
In a rapid glance she scanned his figure that beamed with health and freshness.
"Yes, he is happy and content!" she thought; "while i...
And that disgusting good nature, which every one likes him for and praises-I hate that good nature of his," she thought.
Her mouth stiffened, the muscles of the cheek contracted on the right side of her pale, nervous face.
"What do you want?" she said in a rapid, deep, unnatural voice.
"Dolly!" he repeated, with a quiver in his voice.
"Anna is coming today."
"Well, what is that to me?
I can't see her!" she cried.
"But you must, really, Dolly..."
"My God! what have I done?
Dolly!
You know...." He could not go on; there was a sob in his throat.
She shut the bureau with a slam, and glanced at him.
"Dolly, what can I say?....
One thing: forgive...
Remember, cannot nine years of my life atone for an instant...."
She dropped her eyes and listened, expecting what he would say, as it were beseeching him in some way or other to make her believe differently.
"--instant of passion?" he said, and would have gone on, but at that word, as at a pang of physical pain, her lips stiffened again, and again the muscles of her right cheek worked.
"Go away, go out of the room!" she shrieked still more shrilly, "and don't talk to me of your passion and your loathsomeness."
She tried to go out, but tottered, and clung to the back of a chair to support herself.
His face relaxed, his lips swelled, his eyes were swimming with tears.
"Dolly!" he said, sobbing now; "for mercy's sake, think of the children; they are not to blame!
I am to blame, and punish me, make me expiate my fault.
Anything I can do, I am ready to do anything!
I am to blame, no words can express how much I am to blame!
But, Dolly, forgive me!"
She sat down.
He listened to her hard, heavy breathing, and he was unutterably sorry for her.
She tried several times to begin to speak, but could not.
She had called him "Stiva," and he glanced at her with gratitude, and moved to take her hand, but she drew back from him with aversion.
"I think of the children, and for that reason I would do anything in the world to save them, but I don't myself know how to save them.
By taking them away from their father, or by leaving them with a vicious father-yes, a vicious father....
Tell me, after what ... has happened, can we live together?
Is that possible?
"But what could I do?
"You are loathsome to me, repulsive!" she shrieked, getting more and more heated.
"Your tears mean nothing!
You have never loved me; you have neither heart nor honorable feeling!
He looked at her, and the fury expressed in her face alarmed and amazed him.
He did not understand how his pity for her exasperated her.
"No, she hates me.
"It is awful!
awful!" he said.
At that moment in the next room a child began to cry; probably it had fallen down.
Darya Alexandrovna listened, and her face suddenly softened.
She seemed to be pulling herself together for a few seconds, as though she did not know where she was, and what she was doing, and getting up rapidly, she moved towards the door.
"Well, she loves my child," he thought, noticing the change of her face at the child's cry, "my child: how can she hate me?"
"Dolly, one word more," he said, following her.
"If you come near me, I will call in the servants, the children!
They may all know you are a scoundrel!
I am going away at once, and you may live here with your mistress!"
Stepan Arkadyevitch sighed, wiped his face, and with a subdued tread walked out of the room.
"Matvey says she will come round; but how?
I don't see the least chance of it.
And how vulgarly she shouted," he said to himself, remembering her shriek and the words-"scoundrel" and "mistress." "And very likely the maids were listening!
Horribly vulgar!
horrible!" Stepan Arkadyevitch stood a few seconds alone, wiped his face, squared his chest, and walked out of the room.
It was Friday, and in the dining room the German watchmaker was winding up the clock.
Stepan Arkadyevitch remembered his joke about this punctual, bald watchmaker, "that the German was wound up for a whole lifetime himself, to wind up watches," and he smiled.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was fond of a joke: "And maybe she will come round!
"I must repeat that."
"Matvey!" he shouted.
"Yes, sir."
Stepan Arkadyevitch put on his fur coat and went out onto the steps.
"You won't dine at home?" said Matvey, seeing him off.
"That's as it happens.
But here's for the housekeeping," he said, taking ten roubles from his pocketbook.
"That'll be enough."
"Enough or not enough, we must make it do," said Matvey, slamming the carriage door and stepping back onto the steps.
Darya Alexandrovna meanwhile having pacified the child, and knowing from the sound of the carriage that he had gone off, went back again to her bedroom.
Even now, in the short time she had been in the nursery, the English governess and Matrona Philimonovna had succeeded in putting several questions to her, which did not admit of delay, and which only she could answer: "What were the children to put on for their walk?
Should they have any milk?
"He has gone!
But has he broken it off with her?" she thought.
"Can it be he sees her?
Why didn't I ask him!
Even if we remain in the same house, we are strangers-strangers forever!" She repeated again with special significance the word so dreadful to her.
"And how I loved him! my God, how I loved him!....
And now don't I love him?
"Let us send for my brother," she said; "he can get a dinner anyway, or we shall have the children getting nothing to eat till six again, like yesterday."
"Very well, I will come directly and see about it.
And Darya Alexandrovna plunged into the duties of the day, and drowned her grief in them for a time.
CHAPTER forty four.
VALENTINE'S DAY AT ALLINGTON.
Lily was to be told the day on which Crosbie was to be married. It had come to the knowledge of them all that the marriage was to take place in February.
But this was not sufficient for Lily.
She must know the day.
And as the time drew nearer,--Lily becoming stronger the while, and less subject to medical authority,--the marriage of Crosbie and Alexandrina was spoken of much more frequently at the Small House. It was not a subject which mrs Dale or Bell would have chosen for conversation; but Lily would refer to it.
She would begin by doing so almost in a drolling strain, alluding to herself as a forlorn damsel in a play book; and then she would go on to speak of his interests as a matter which was still of great moment to her.
But in the course of such talking she would too often break down, showing by some sad word or melancholy tone how great was the burden on her heart.
mrs Dale and Bell would willingly have avoided the subject, but Lily would not have it avoided.
For them it was a very difficult matter on which to speak in her hearing.
The day was named soon enough, and the tidings came down to Allington.
On the fourteenth of February, Crosbie was to be made a happy man.
This was not known to the Dales till the twelfth, and they would willingly have spared the knowledge then, had it been possible to spare it.
But it was not so, and on that evening Lily was told.
During these days, Bell used to see her uncle daily.
Her visits were made with the pretence of taking to him information as to Lily's health; but there was perhaps at the bottom of them a feeling that, as the family intended to leave the Small House at the end of March, it would be well to let the squire know that there was no enmity in their hearts against him.
Nothing more had been said about their moving,--nothing, that is, from them to him.
But the matter was going on, and he knew it.
dr Crofts was already in treaty on their behalf for a small furnished house at Guestwick.
The squire was very sad about it,--very sad indeed.
When Hopkins spoke to him on the subject, he sharply desired that faithful gardener to hold his tongue, giving it to be understood that such things were not to be made matter of talk by the Allington dependants till they had been officially announced.
With Bell during these visits he never alluded to the matter.
She was the chief sinner, in that she had refused to marry her cousin, and had declined even to listen to rational counsel upon the matter.
But the squire felt that he could not discuss the subject with her, seeing that he had been specially informed by mrs Dale that his interference would not be permitted; and then he was perhaps aware that if he did discuss the subject with Bell, he would not gain much by such discussion.
Their conversation, therefore, generally fell upon Crosbie, and the tone in which he was mentioned in the Great House was very different from that assumed in Lily's presence.
"I don't want him to be wretched," said Bell.
"But I can hardly think that he can act as he has done without being punished."
"He will be a wretched man.
He gets no fortune with her, and she will expect everything that fortune can give.
I believe, too, that she is older than he is.
I cannot understand it.
Give my love to Lily.
I'll see her to morrow or the next day.
She's well rid of him; I'm sure of that;--though I suppose it would not do to tell her so."
The morning of the fourteenth came upon them at the Small House, as comes the morning of those special days which have been long considered, and which are to be long remembered.
It brought with it a hard, bitter frost,--a black, biting frost,--such a frost as breaks the water pipes, and binds the ground to the hardness of granite. Lily, queen as she was, had not yet been allowed to go back to her own chamber, but occupied the larger bed in her mother's room, her mother sleeping on a smaller one.
"Mamma," she said, "how cold they'll be!" Her mother had announced to her the fact of the black frost, and these were the first words she spoke.
"I fear their hearts will be cold also," said mrs Dale.
She ought not to have said so.
She was transgressing the acknowledged rule of the house in saying any word that could be construed as being inimical to Crosbie or his bride.
But her feeling on the matter was too strong, and she could not restrain herself.
"Why should their hearts be cold?
Oh, mamma, that is a terrible thing to say.
Why should their hearts be cold?"
"Of course you do; of course we all hope it.
He was not cold hearted, at any rate.
A man is not cold hearted, because he does not know himself.
Mamma, I want you to wish for their happiness."
mrs Dale was silent for a minute or two before she answered this, but then she did answer it.
"I think I do," said she.
"I think I do wish for it."
"You must be very careful in wrapping yourself as you go downstairs," said Bell, who stood by the tray on which she had brought up the toast and tea.
"The cold is what you would call awful."
"I should call it jolly," said Lily, "if I could get up and go out. Do you remember lecturing me about talking slang the day that he first came?"
"Did I, my pet?"
Bell for a moment turned her face away, and beat with her foot against the ground.
Her anger was more difficult of restraint than was even her mother's,--and now, not restraining it, but wishing to hide it, she gave it vent in this way.
"I understand, Bell.
I know what your foot means when it goes in that way; and you shan't do it.
Come here, Bell, and let me teach you Christianity.
I'm a fine sort of teacher, am I not?
And I did not quite mean that."
"I wish I could learn it from some one," said Bell.
"There are circumstances in which what we call Christianity seems to me to be hardly possible."
"When your foot goes in that way it is a very unchristian foot, and you ought to keep it still.
It means anger against him, because he discovered before it was too late that he would not be happy,--that is, that he and I would not be happy together if we were married."
"Don't scrutinize my foot too closely, Lily."
"But your foot must bear scrutiny, and your eyes, and your voice.
He was very foolish to fall in love with me.
And so was I very foolish to let him love me, at a moment's notice,--without a thought as it were.
I was so proud of having him, that I gave myself up to him all at once, without giving him a chance of thinking of it.
In a week or two it was done.
Who could expect that such an engagement should be lasting?"
"And why not?
But we will not talk about it."
It was as I have said, and if so, you shouldn't hate him because he did the only thing which he honestly could do when he found out his mistake."
"What; become engaged again within a week!"
"There had been a very old friendship, Bell; you must remember that. But I was speaking of his conduct to me, and not of his conduct to-" And then she remembered that that other lady might at this very moment possess the name which she had once been so proud to think that she would bear herself.
"Bell," she said, stopping her other speech suddenly, "at what o'clock do people get married in London?"
"Oh, at all manner of hours,--any time before twelve.
They will be fashionable, and will be married late."
"You don't think she's mrs Crosbie yet, then?"
"Lady Alexandrina Crosbie," said Bell, shuddering.
"Yes, of course; I forgot.
I should so like to see her.
I feel such an interest about her.
I wonder what coloured hair she has.
I suppose she is a sort of Juno of a woman,--very tall and handsome.
I'm sure she has not got a pug nose like me.
Do you know what I should really like, only of course it's not possible;--to be godmother to his first child."
"I should.
Don't you hear me say that I know it's not possible?
I'm not going up to London to ask her.
She'll have all manner of grandees for her godfathers and godmothers.
I wonder what those grand people are really like."
"I don't think there's any difference.
Look at Lady Julia."
"Oh, she's not a grand person.
It isn't merely having a title.
Don't you remember that he told us that mr Palliser is about the grandest grandee of them all.
I suppose people do learn to like them.
He always used to say that he had been so long among people of that sort, that it would be very difficult for him to divide himself off from them.
I should never have done for that kind of thing; should I?"
"Do you?
I don't.
After all, think how much work they do.
He used to tell me of that.
They have all the governing in their hands, and get very little money for doing it."
"Worse luck for the country."
"The country seems to do pretty well.
But you're a radical, Bell.
My belief is, you wouldn't be a lady if you could help it."
"I'd sooner be an honest woman."
"And so you are,--my own dear, dearest, honest Bell,--and the fairest lady that I know.
If I were a man, Bell, you are just the girl that I should worship."
"But you mustn't let your foot go astray in that way; you mustn't, indeed.
Somebody said, that whatever is, is right, and I declare I believe it."
"I'm sometimes inclined to think, that whatever is, is wrong."
I think I'll get up now, Bell; only it's so frightfully cold that I'm afraid."
"There's a beautiful fire," said Bell.
"Yes; I see.
It's only half past ten yet."
"I shouldn't be at all surprised if it's over."
"Over!
What a word that is!
A thing like that is over, and then all the world cannot put it back again.
"He must take his chance," said Bell, thinking within her own mind that that chance would be a very bad one.
"Of course he must take his chance.
Well,--I'll get up now." And then she took her first step out into the cold world beyond her bed.
"We must all take our chance.
When half past eleven came, she was seated in a large easy chair over the drawing room fire, with a little table by her side, on which a novel was lying.
She had not opened her book that morning, and had been sitting for some time perfectly silent, with her eyes closed, and her watch in her hand.
"Mamma," she said at last, "it is over now, I'm sure."
"What is over, my dear?"
I hope God will bless them, and I pray that they may be happy." As she spoke these words, there was an unwonted solemnity in her tone which startled mrs Dale and Bell.
"I also will hope so," said mrs Dale.
"And now, Lily, will it not be well that you should turn your mind away from the subject, and endeavour to think of other things?"
"But I can't, mamma.
It is so easy to say that; but people can't choose their own thoughts."
"They can usually direct them as they will, if they make the effort."
"But I can't make the effort.
It seems natural to me to think about him, and I don't suppose it can be very wrong.
When you have had so deep an interest in a person, you can't drop him all of a sudden." Then there was again silence, and after a while Lily took up her novel.
She made that effort of which her mother had spoken, but she made it altogether in vain.
"I declare, Bell," she said, "it's the greatest rubbish I ever attempted to read."
This was specially ungrateful, because Bell had recommended the book.
"All the books have got to be so stupid!
I think I'll read Pilgrim's Progress again."
"But I believe I'll have Pilgrim's Progress.
I never can understand it, but I rather think that makes it nicer."
"I hate books I can't understand," said Bell.
"I like a book to be clear as running water, so that the whole meaning may be seen at once."
"But then so many readers are fools," said Lily.
"And yet they get something out of their reading.
mrs Crump is always poring over the Revelations, and nearly knows them by heart.
I don't think she could interpret a single image, but she has a hazy, misty idea of the truth.
That's why she likes it,--because it's too beautiful to be understood; and that's why I like Pilgrim's Progress." After which Bell offered to get the book in question.
"No, not now," said Lily.
"I'll go on with this, as you say it's so grand.
The personages are always in their tantrums, and go on as though they were mad.
Mamma, do you know where they're going for the honeymoon?"
"No, my dear."
"He used to talk to me about going to the lakes." And then there was another pause, during which Bell observed that her mother's face became clouded with anxiety.
"But I won't think of it any more," continued Lily; "I will fix my mind to something." And then she got up from her chair.
"I don't think it would have been so difficult if I had not been ill."
"Of course it would not, my darling."
"And I'm going to be well again now, immediately.
Let me see: I was told to read Carlyle's History of the French Revolution, and I think I'll begin now."
It was Crosbie who had told her to read the book, as both Bell and mrs Dale were well aware.
"But I must put it off till I can get it down from the other house."
"Jane shall fetch it, if you really want it," said mrs Dale.
"Bell shall get it, when she goes up in the afternoon; will you, Bell?
And I'll try to get on with this stuff in the meantime." Then again she sat with her eyes fixed upon the pages of the book.
"I'll tell you what, mamma,--you may have some comfort in this: that when to day's gone by, I shan't make a fuss about any other day."
"Yes, but I am.
Isn't it odd, Bell, that it should take place on Valentine's day?
I wonder whether it was so settled on purpose, because of the day.
Well; he's got another-valen-tine-now." So much she said with articulate voice, and then she broke down, bursting out into convulsive sobs, and crying in her mother's arms as though she would break her heart.
And yet her heart was not broken, and she was still strong in that resolve which she had made, that her grief should not overpower her.
"Lily, my darling; my poor, ill used darling."
"No, mamma, I won't be that." And she struggled grievously to get the better of the hysterical attack which had overpowered her.
"I won't be regarded as ill used; not as specially ill used.
But I am your darling, your own darling.
Only I wish you'd beat me and thump me when I'm such a fool, instead of pitying me.
It's a great mistake being soft to people when they make fools of themselves.
There, Bell; there's your stupid book, and I won't have any more of it.
I believe it was that that did it." And she pushed the book away from her.
After this little scene she said no further word about Crosbie and his bride on that day, but turned the conversation towards the prospect of their new house at Guestwick.
"It will be a great comfort to be nearer dr Crofts; won't it, Bell?"
"I don't know," said Bell.
"Because if we are ill, he won't have such a terrible distance to come."
In the evening the first volume of the French Revolution had been procured, and Lily stuck to her reading with laudable perseverance; till at eight her mother insisted on her going to bed, queen as she was.
"I don't believe a bit, you know, that the king was such a bad man as that," she said.
"I do," said Bell.
"Ah, that's because you're a radical.
I never will believe that kings are so much worse than other people.
As for Charles the First, he was about the best man in history."
mrs DALE IS THANKFUL FOR A GOOD THING.
On that day they dined early at the Small House, as they had been in the habit of doing since the packing had commenced.
And after dinner mrs Dale went through the gardens, up to the other house, with a written note in her hand.
In that note she had told Lady Julia, with many protestations of gratitude, that Lily was unable to go out so soon after her illness, and that she herself was obliged to stay with Lily.
She explained also, that the business of moving was in hand, and that, therefore, she could not herself accept the invitation.
But her other daughter, she said, would be very happy to accompany her uncle to Guestwick Manor.
Then, without closing her letter, she took it up to the squire in order that it might be decided whether it would or would not suit his views.
"Leave it with me," he said; "that is, if you do not object."
"Oh dear, no!"
"I'll tell you the plain truth at once, Mary.
I shall go over myself with it, and see the earl.
Then I will decline it or not, according to what passes between me and him.
I wish Lily would have gone."
"I wish she could.
I wish she could.
I wish she could." As he repeated the words over and over again, there was an eagerness in his voice that filled mrs Dale's heart with tenderness towards him.
"The truth is," said mrs Dale, "she could not go there to meet john Eames."
"Oh, I know," said the squire: "I understand it.
But that is just what we want her to do.
Why should she not spend a week in the same house with an honest young man whom we all like."
"There are reasons why she would not wish it."
Perhaps I had better tell you all.
Lord De Guest has taken him by the hand, and wishes him to marry.
He has promised to settle on him an income which will make him comfortable for life."
"That is very generous; and I am delighted to hear it,--for John's sake."
"And they have promoted him at his office."
"Ah! then he will do well."
He is private secretary now to their head man. And, Mary, so that she, Lily, should not be empty handed if this marriage can be arranged, I have undertaken to settle a hundred a year on her,--on her and her children, if she will accept him.
Now you know it all.
I did not mean to tell you; but it is as well that you should have the means of judging.
That other man was a villain. This man is honest.
Would it not be well that she should learn to like him?
She always did like him, I thought, before that other fellow came down here among us."
"She has always liked him-as a friend."
"She will never get a better lover."
mrs Dale sat silent, thinking over it all.
Every word that the squire said was true.
It would be a healing of wounds most desirable and salutary; an arrangement advantageous to them all; a destiny for Lily most devoutly to be desired,--if only it were possible.
mrs Dale firmly believed that if her daughter could be made to accept john Eames as her second lover in a year or two all would be well. Crosbie would then be forgotten or thought of without regret, and Lily would become the mistress of a happy home.
But there are positions which cannot be reached, though there be no physical or material objection in the way.
It is the view which the mind takes of a thing which creates the sorrow that arises from it.
If the heart were always malleable and the feelings could be controlled, who would permit himself to be tormented by any of the reverses which affection meets?
Death would create no sorrow; ingratitude would lose its sting; and the betrayal of love would do no injury beyond that which it might entail upon worldly circumstances.
But the heart is not malleable; nor will the feelings admit of such control.
"It is not possible for her," said mrs Dale.
"I fear it is not possible.
It is too soon."
"Six months," pleaded the squire.
"It will take years,--not months," said mrs Dale.
"And she will lose all her youth."
But it is done, and we cannot now go back.
She loves him yet as dearly as she ever loved him."
Then the squire muttered certain words below his breath,--ejaculations against Crosbie, which were hardly voluntary; but even as involuntary ejaculations were very improper.
mrs Dale heard them, and was not offended either by their impropriety or their warmth.
"But you can understand," she said, "that she cannot bring herself to go there." The squire struck the table with his fist, and repeated his ejaculations.
If, also, he could have perceived and understood the light in which an alliance with the De Courcy family was now regarded by Crosbie, I think that he would have received some consolation from that consideration.
Those who offend us are generally punished for the offence they give; but we so frequently miss the satisfaction of knowing that we are avenged!
It is arranged, apparently, that the injurer shall be punished, but that the person injured shall not gratify his desire for vengeance.
"And will you go to Guestwick yourself?" asked mrs Dale.
"I will take the note," said the squire, "and will let you know to morrow.
The earl has behaved so kindly that every possible consideration is due to him.
I had better tell him the whole truth, and go or stay, as he may wish.
I don't see the good of going.
What am I to do at Guestwick Manor?
I did think that if we had all been there it might have cured some difficulties."
mrs Dale got up to leave him, but she could not go without saying some word of gratitude for all that he had attempted to do for them.
She well knew what he meant by the curing of difficulties. He had intended to signify that had they lived together for a week at Guestwick the idea of flitting from Allington might possibly have been abandoned.
She felt half ashamed of what she was doing, almost acknowledging to herself that she should have borne with his sternness in return for the benefits he had done to her daughters. Had she not feared their reproaches she would, even now, have given way.
"I do not know what I ought to say to you for your kindness."
In truth the squire, as he spoke, was half ashamed of the warmth of what he said.
"At any rate I will not think evil," mrs Dale answered, giving him her hand.
After that she left him, and returned home.
In these days of the cold early spring, the way from the lawn into the house, through the drawing room window, was not as yet open, and it was necessary to go round by the kitchen garden on to the road, and thence in by the front door; or else to pass through the back door, and into the house by the kitchen.
This latter mode of entrance mrs Dale now adopted; and as she made her way into the hall Lily came upon her, with very silent steps, out from the parlour, and arrested her progress.
There was a smile upon Lily's face as she lifted up her finger as if in caution, and no one looking at her would have supposed that she was herself in trouble.
"Mamma," she said, pointing to the drawing room door, and speaking almost in a whisper, "you must not go in there; come into the parlour."
"Who's there?
Where's Bell?" and mrs Dale went into the parlour as she was bidden.
"But who is there?" she repeated.
"He's there!"
"Who is he?"
"Oh, mamma, don't be a goose!
dr Crofts is there, of course.
He's been nearly an hour.
I wonder how he is managing, for there is nothing on earth to sit upon but the old lump of a carpet.
The room is strewed about with crockery, and Bell is such a figure!
She has got on your old checked apron, and when he came in she was rolling up the fire irons in brown paper.
I don't suppose she was ever in such a mess before.
There's one thing certain,--he can't kiss her hand."
"It's you are the goose, Lily."
"But he's in there certainly, unless he has gone out through the window, or up the chimney."
"What made you leave them?"
"He met me here, in the passage, and spoke to me ever so seriously. 'Come in,' I said, 'and see Bell packing the pokers and tongs.' 'I will go in,' he said, 'but don't come with me.' He was ever so serious, and I'm sure he had been thinking of it all the way along."
"And why should he not be serious?"
"Oh, no, of course he ought to be serious; but are you not glad, mamma?
I am so glad.
We shall live alone together, you and I; but she will be so close to us!
I have been so tired of waiting and looking out for you.
Perhaps he's helping her to pack the things. Don't you think we might go in; or would it be ill natured?"
"Lily, don't be in too great a hurry to say anything.
You may be mistaken, you know; and there's many a slip between the cup and the lip."
"Yes, mamma, there is," said Lily, putting her hand inside her mother's arm, "that's true enough."
"Oh, my darling, forgive me," said the mother, suddenly remembering that the use of the old proverb at the present moment had been almost cruel.
But, with God's help, there shall be no slip here, and she shall be happy.
But they'll remain there for ever if we don't go in.
Then mrs Dale did open the door, giving some little premonitory notice with the handle, so that the couple inside might be warned of approaching footsteps.
Bell still wore the checked apron as described by her sister.
What might have been the state of her hands I will not pretend to say; but I do not believe that her lover had found anything amiss with them.
"How do you do, doctor?" said mrs Dale, striving to use her accustomed voice, and to look as though there were nothing of special importance in his visit.
"I have just come down from the Great House."
"Mamma," said Bell, jumping up, "you must not call him doctor any more."
"Must I not?
Has any one undoctored him?"
"Oh, mamma, you understand," said Bell.
"I understand," said Lily, going up to the doctor, and giving him her cheek to kiss, "he is to be my brother, and I mean to claim him as such from this moment.
I expect him to do everything for us, and not to call a moment of his time his own."
"mrs Dale," said the doctor, "Bell has consented that it shall be so, if you will consent."
"There is but little doubt of that," said mrs Dale.
"We shall not be rich-" began the doctor.
"I hate to be rich," said Bell.
"I hate even to talk about it.
I don't think it quite manly even to think about it; and I'm sure it isn't womanly."
"Bell was always a fanatic in praise of poverty," said mrs Dale.
I'm very fond of money earned.
"Let her go out and visit the lady patients," said Lily.
"They do in America."
The proceeding, considering the nature of it,--that a young lady, acknowledged to be of great beauty and known to be of good birth, had on the occasion been asked and given in marriage,--was carried on after a somewhat humdrum fashion, and in a manner that must be called commonplace.
Lily for the time had been raised to a pinnacle,--a pinnacle which might be dangerous, but which was, at any rate, lofty.
With what a pretty speech had Crosbie been greeted!
How it had been felt by all concerned that the fortunes of the Small House were in the ascendant,--felt, indeed, with some trepidation, but still with much inward triumph.
How great had been the occasion, forcing Lily almost to lose herself in wonderment at what had occurred!
There was no great occasion now, and no wonderment.
No one, unless it was Crofts, felt very triumphant.
But they were all very happy, and were sure that there was safety in their happiness.
It was but the other day that one of them had been thrown rudely to the ground through the treachery of a lover, but yet none of them feared treachery from this lover.
Bell was as sure of her lot in life as though she were already being taken home to her modest house in Guestwick.
But Bell was not seated next to her lover.
She had been in no wise ashamed of her love, and had shown it constantly by some little caressing motion of her hand, leaning on his arm, looking into his face, as though she were continually desirous of some palpable assurance of his presence.
It was not so at all with Bell.
I do not think it would have made her unhappy if some sudden need had required that Crofts should go to India and back before they were married.
As her mother was about to go into a new residence, it might be as well that that residence should be fitted to the wants of two persons instead of three.
So they talked about chairs and tables, carpets and kitchens, in a most unromantic, homely, useful manner! A considerable portion of the furniture in the house they were now about to leave belonged to the squire,--or to the house rather, as they were in the habit of saying.
The older and more solid things,--articles of household stuff that stand the wear of half a century,--had been in the Small House when they came to it.
In the first month or two they were to live in lodgings, and their goods were to be stored in some friendly warehouse.
Under such circumstances would it not be well that Bell's marriage should be so arranged that the lodging question might not be in any degree complicated by her necessities?
This was the last suggestion made by dr Crofts, induced no doubt by the great encouragement he had received.
"That would be hardly possible," said mrs Dale.
"It only wants three weeks;--and with the house in such a condition!"
"james is joking," said Bell.
"I was not joking at all," said the doctor.
"It's just the sort of thing for primitive people to do, like you and Bell.
All the same, Bell, I do wish you could have been married from this house."
"I don't think it will make much difference," said Bell.
It sounds so ugly, being married from lodgings; doesn't it, mamma?"
"I shall always call you Dame Commonplace when you're married," said Lily.
Then they had tea, and after tea dr Crofts got on his horse and rode back to Guestwick.
"Now may I talk about him?" said Lily, as soon as the door was closed behind his back.
"No; you may not."
"As if I hadn't known it all along!
And wasn't it hard to bear that you should have scolded me with such pertinacious austerity, and that I wasn't to say a word in answer!"
"I don't remember the austerity," said mrs Dale.
"Nor yet Lily's silence," said Bell.
"But it's all settled now," said Lily, "and I'm downright happy.
I never felt more satisfaction,--never, Bell!"
Good.
As a matter of form, Lord Nikkolon, will you take a vote? His Imperial Majesty would be most gratified if it were unanimous."
Somebody insisted that the question would have to be debated, which meant that everybody would have to make a speech, all two thousand of them.
He informed them that there was nothing to debate; they were confronted with an accomplished fact which they must accept.
So Nikkolon made a speech, telling them at what a great moment in Adityan history they stood, and concluded by saying:
"I take it that it is the unanimous will of this Convocation that the sovereignty of the Galactic Emperor be acknowledged, and that we, the 'Mastership of Aditya' do here proclaim our loyal allegiance to his Imperial Majesty, Rodrik the Third.
Any dissent?
Then it is ordered so recorded."
Then he had to make another speech, to inform the representatives of his new sovereign of the fact.
Erskyll's charge d'affaires, Sharll Ernanday, produced the scroll of the Imperial Constitution, and Erskyll began to read.
Section One: The universality of the Empire.
The absolute powers of the Emperor.
The Emperor also to be Planetary King of Odin.
Section Two: Every planetary government to be sovereign in its own internal affairs....
Only one sovereign government upon any planet, or within normal space travel distance....
All hyperspace ships, and all nuclear weapons....
Every sapient being shall be equally protected....
Then he came to Article Six.
He cleared his throat, raised his voice, and read:
The Convocation Chamber was silent, like a bomb with a defective fuse, for all of thirty seconds.
Then it blew up with a roar.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the doors slide apart and an airjeep, bristling with machine guns, float in and rise to the ceiling.
The first inarticulate roar was followed by a babel of voices, like a tropical cloudburst on a prefab hut.
Olvir Nikkolon's mouth was working as he shouted unheard.
Out of the screen speaker a voice, as loud, by actual sound meter test, as an anti vehicle gun, thundered:
What is this, a planetary parliament or a spaceport saloon?"
"You tricked us!" Nikkolon accused.
"You didn't tell us about that article when we voted.
Why, our whole society is based on slavery!"
Other voices joined in:
"That's all right for you people, you have robots...."
"Look, you can't free slaves!
That's ridiculous.
It meant, the basic, fundamental, question.
Rovard Javasan, he suspected, had just asked the sixtifor.
Of course, Obray, Count Erskyll, Planetary Proconsul of Aditya, didn't realize that.
He didn't even know what Javasan meant.
Just free them. Commodore Vann Shatrak couldn't see much of a problem, either.
He would have answered, Just free them, and then shoot down the first two or three thousand who took it seriously.
Jurgen, Prince Trevannion, had no intention whatever of attempting to answer the sixtifor.
"My dear Lord Javasan, that is the problem of the Adityan Mastership. They are your slaves; we have neither the intention nor the right to free them.
But let me remind you that slavery is specifically prohibited by the Imperial Constitution; if you do not abolish it immediately, the Empire will be forced to intervene.
I believe, toward the last of those audio visuals, you saw some examples of Imperial intervention."
They had.
"Well, the first thing will have to be an Act of Convocation, outlawing the ownership of one being by another.
Then, I would suggest that you set up some agency to handle all the details. And, as soon as you have enacted the abolition of slavery, which should be this afternoon, appoint a committee, say a dozen of you, to confer with Count Erskyll and myself.
And let me point out, I hope for the last time, that we discuss matters directly, without intermediaries.
We don't want any more slaves, pardon, freedmen, coming aboard to talk for you, as happened yesterday."
Obray, Count Erskyll, was unhappy about it.
He did not think that the Lords Master were to be trusted to abolish slavery; he said so, on the launch, returning to the ship.
Jurgen, Prince Trevannion was inclined to agree.
Line Commodore Vann Shatrak was also worried.
He was wondering how long it would take for Pyairr Ravney to make useful troops out of the newly surrendered slave soldiers, and where he was going to find contragravity to shift them expeditiously from trouble spot to trouble spot.
Erskyll thought he was anticipating resistance on the part of the Masters, and for once he approved the use of force.
Ordinarily, force was a Bad Thing, but this was a Good Cause, which justified any means.
They entertained the committee from the Convocation for dinner, that evening.
They came aboard stiffly hostile-most understandably so, under the circumstances-and Prince Trevannion exerted all his copious charm to thaw them out, beginning with the pre dinner cocktails and continuing through the meal.
By the time they retired for coffee and brandy to the parlor where the conference was to be held, the Lords ex Masters were almost friendly.
"We've enacted the Emancipation Act," Olvir Nikkolon, who was ex officio chairman of the committee, reported.
"And when will that be?"
Aditya, he knew, had a three hundred and fifty eight day year; even if the Midyear Feasts were just past, they were giving themselves very little time.
In about a hundred and fifty days, Nikkolon said.
"Good heavens!" Erskyll began, indignantly.
"I should say so, myself," he put in, cutting off anything else the new Proconsul might have said.
A hundred and fifty days will pass quite rapidly, and you have twenty million slaves to deal with.
If you start at this moment and work continuously, you'll have a little under a second apiece for each slave."
The Lords Master looked dismayed.
So, he was happy to observe, did Count Erskyll.
That was safe.
They had a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies tend to have registrations of practically everything.
"Oh, yes, of course," Rovard Javasan assured him.
"That's your Management, isn't it, Sesar; Servile Affairs?"
"Yes, we have complete data on every slave on the planet," Sesar Martwynn, the Chief of Servile Management, said.
"Have you gentlemen informed your chief slaves that they are free, yet?"
Nikkolon and Javasan looked at each other.
"They know," Javasan said.
"I must say they are much disturbed."
"You mean, we can keep our chief slaves?" somebody cried.
"Yes, of course-chief freedmen, you'll have to call them, now.
"You mean, give them money?" Ranal Valdry, the Lord Provost Marshal demanded, incredulously.
"Pay our own slaves?"
"You idiot," somebody told him, "they aren't our slaves any more.
That's the whole point of this discussion."
"But ... but how can we pay slaves?" one of the committeemen at large asked.
"Freedmen, I mean?"
"With money.
You do have money, haven't you?"
"Of course we have.
"What kind of money?"
Why, money; what did he think?
The unit was the star piece, the stelly. When he asked to see some of it, they were indignant.
Nobody carried money; wasn't Masterly.
A Master never even touched the stuff; that was what slaves were for.
He wanted to know how it was secured, and they didn't know what he meant, and when he tried to explain their incomprehension deepened.
It seemed that the Mastership issued money to finance itself, and individual Masters issued money on their personal credit, and it was handled through the Mastership Banks.
"I can't explain it, myself."
CHAPTER fifteen.
AFTER THE STORM
The young husband's apologies were profuse and abject.
At first Billy did not speak, or even vouchsafe a glance in his direction.
But that her ears were only seemingly, and not really deaf, was shown very clearly a little later, when, at a particularly abject wail on the part of the babbling shadow at her heels, Billy choked into a little gasp, half laughter, half sob.
It was all over then.
Bertram had her in his arms in a twinkling, while to the floor clattered and rolled a knife and a half peeled baked potato.
Naturally, after that, there could be no more dignified silences on the part of the injured wife.
Torn between his craving for food and his desire not to interfere with any possible peace making, William was obviously hesitating what to do, when Billy glanced up and saw him.
She saw, too, at the same time, the empty, blazing gas stove burner, and the pile of half prepared potatoes, to warm which the burner had long since been lighted.
With a little cry she broke away from her husband's arms.
They all got dinner then, together, with many a sigh and quick coming tear as everywhere they met some sad reminder of the gentle old hands that would never again minister to their comfort.
It was a silent meal, and little, after all, was eaten, though brave attempts at cheerfulness and naturalness were made by all three. Bertram, especially, talked, and tried to make sure that the shadow on Billy's face was at least not the one his own conduct had brought there.
"For you do-you surely do forgive me, don't you?" he begged, as he followed her into the kitchen after the sorry meal was over.
"Why, yes, dear, yes," sighed Billy, trying to smile.
"And you'll forget?"
There was no answer.
"Billy!
And you'll forget?" Bertram's voice was insistent, reproachful.
Billy changed color and bit her lip.
She looked plainly distressed.
"Billy!" cried the man, still more reproachfully.
"But, Bertram, I can't forget-quite yet," faltered Billy.
Bertram frowned.
So, there!" he finished, with a smilingly determined "now everything is just as it was before" air.
Billy made no response.
She turned hurriedly and began to busy herself with the dishes at the sink.
In her heart she was wondering: could she ever forget what Bertram had said?
It seemed now that always, for evermore, they would ring in her ears; always, for evermore, they would burn deeper and deeper into her soul.
And not once, in all Bertram's apologies, had he referred to them-those words he had uttered.
He had not said he did not mean them.
He had not said he was sorry he spoke them.
He had ignored them; and he expected that now she, too, would ignore them.
Later, however, after Bertram was asleep, Billy crept out of bed and got the book.
Under the carefully shaded lamp in the adjoining room she turned the pages softly till she came to the sentence: "Perhaps it would be hard to find a more utterly unreasonable, irritable, irresponsible creature than a hungry man." With a long sigh she began to read; and not until some minutes later did she close the book, turn off the light, and steal back to bed.
During the next three days, until after the funeral at the shabby little South Boston house, Eliza spent only about half of each day at the Strata.
This, much to her distress, left many of the household tasks for her young mistress to perform.
Billy, however, attacked each new duty with a feverish eagerness that seemed to make the performance of it very like some glad penance done for past misdeeds.
And when-on the day after they had laid the old servant in his last resting place-a despairing message came from Eliza to the effect that now her mother was very ill, and would need her care, Billy promptly told Eliza to stay as long as was necessary; that they could get along all right without her.
"We must have somebody!"
As if you could!" scoffed Bertram.
"Couldn't I, indeed," she retorted.
How about those muffins you had this morning for breakfast, and that cake last night?
And didn't you yourself say that you never ate a better pudding than that date puff yesterday noon?"
Bertram laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
There's the Carletons coming to dinner Monday, and my studio Tea to morrow, to say nothing of the Symphony and the opera, and the concerts you'd lose because you were too dead tired to go to them.
"I didn't-want-to go," choked Billy, under her breath.
You haven't done a thing with that for days, yet only last week you told me the publishers were hurrying you for that last song to complete the group."
"Of course you haven't," triumphed Bertram.
"You've been too dead tired. And that's just what I say.
"But I want to.
I want to-to tend to things," faltered Billy, with a half fearful glance into her husband's face.
Indeed, he seemed never to have heard it-much less to have spoken it.
"'Tend to things,'" he laughed lightly.
Anyhow, we're going to have one.
I'll just step into one of those-what do you call 'em?--intelligence offices on my way down and send one up," he finished, as he gave his wife a good by kiss.
An hour later Billy, struggling with the broom and the drawing room carpet, was called to the telephone.
"Billy, for heaven's sake, take pity on me.
"Why, Bertram, what's the matter?"
"Matter?
Holy smoke!
Well, I've been to three of those intelligence offices-though why they call them that I can't imagine.
If ever there was a place utterly devoid of intelligence but never mind!
Billy, will you come?
I'm sure you can!"
"Why, of course I'll come," chirped Billy.
"Where shall I meet you?"
Bertram gave the street and number.
"Good!
I'll be there," promised Billy, as she hung up the receiver.
Quite forgetting the broom in the middle of the drawing room floor, Billy tripped up stairs to change her dress.
On her lips was a gay little song.
In her heart was joy.
Just as Billy was about to leave the house the telephone bell jangled again.
It was Alice Greggory.
"Billy, dear," she called, "can't you come out?
We want you. Will you come?"
"I can't, dear.
Bertram wants me.
Johnny Dooit Does It
"It's getting awful rough walking," said Dorothy, as they trudged along.
Indeed, all were hungry, and thirsty, too; for they had eaten nothing but the apples since breakfast; so their steps lagged and they grew silent and weary.
At last they slowly passed over the crest of a barren hill and saw before them a line of green trees with a strip of grass at their feet.
An agreeable fragrance was wafted toward them.
Our travelers, hot and tired, ran forward on beholding this refreshing sight and were not long in coming to the trees.
Here they found a spring of pure bubbling water, around which the grass was full of wild strawberry plants, their pretty red berries ripe and ready to eat. Some of the trees bore yellow oranges and some russet pears, so the hungry adventurers suddenly found themselves provided with plenty to eat and to drink.
They lost no time in picking the biggest strawberries and ripest oranges and soon had feasted to their hearts' content.
Walking beyond the line of trees they saw before them a fearful, dismal desert, everywhere gray sand.
At the edge of this awful waste was a large, white sign with black letters neatly painted upon it and the letters made these words:
ALL PERSONS ARE WARNED NOT TO VENTURE UPON THIS DESERT
For the Deadly Sands will Turn Any Living Flesh to Dust in an instant.
LAND OF OZ
But no one can Reach that Beautiful Country because of these Destroying Sands
"Don't know," said Button Bright.
"I'm sure I don't know, either," added Dorothy, despondently.
"I wish father would come for me," sighed the pretty Rainbow's Daughter, "I would take you all to live upon the rainbow, where you could dance along its rays from morning till night, without a care or worry of any sort.
"Don't want to dance," said Button Bright, sitting down wearily upon the soft grass.
"It's very good of you, Polly," said Dorothy; "but there are other things that would suit me better than dancing on rainbows.
This didn't help to solve the problem, and they all fell silent and looked at one another questioningly.
"Really, I don't know what to do," muttered the shaggy man, gazing hard at Toto; and the little dog wagged his tail and said "Bow wow!" just as if he could not tell, either, what to do.
Button Bright got a stick and began to dig in the earth, and the others watched him for a while in deep thought.
"It's nearly evening, now; so we may as well sleep in this pretty place and get rested; perhaps by morning we can decide what is best to be done."
In the bright morning sunshine, as they ate of the strawberries and sweet juicy pears, Dorothy said:
"Polly, can you do any magic?"
"No dear," answered Polychrome, shaking her dainty head.
"You ought to know SOME magic, being the Rainbow's Daughter," continued Dorothy, earnestly.
"What I'd like," said Dorothy, "is to find some way to cross the desert to the Land of Oz and its Emerald City.
I've crossed it already, you know, more than once.
Then Ozma took me over on her Magic Carpet, and the Nome King's Magic Belt took me home that time.
You see it was magic that did it every time 'cept the first, and we can't 'spect a cyclone to happen along and take us to the Emerald City now."
"No indeed," returned Polly, with a shudder, "I hate cyclones, anyway."
"That's why I wanted to find out if you could do any magic," said the little Kansas girl.
"I'm sure I can't; and I'm sure Button Bright can't; and the only magic the shaggy man has is the Love Magnet, which won't help us much."
"Don't be too sure of that, my dear," spoke the shaggy man, a smile on his donkey face.
"I may not be able to do magic myself, but I can call to us a powerful friend who loves me because I own the Love Magnet, and this friend surely will be able to help us."
"Who is your friend?" asked Dorothy.
"What can Johnny do?"
"Anything," answered the shaggy man, with confidence.
"Ask him to come," she exclaimed, eagerly.
The shaggy man took the Love Magnet from his pocket and unwrapped the paper that surrounded it.
"Dear Johnny Dooit, come to me. I need you bad as bad can be."
"Well, here I am," said a cheery little voice; "but you shouldn't say you need me bad, 'cause I'm always, ALWAYS, good."
At this they quickly whirled around to find a funny little man sitting on a big copper chest, puffing smoke from a long pipe.
His hair was grey, his whiskers were grey; and these whiskers were so long that he had wound the ends of them around his waist and tied them in a hard knot underneath the leather apron that reached from his chin nearly to his feet, and which was soiled and scratched as if it had been used a long time.
His nose was broad, and stuck up a little; but his eyes were twinkling and merry.
The little man's hands and arms were as hard and tough as the leather in his apron, and Dorothy thought Johnny Dooit looked as if he had done a lot of hard work in his lifetime.
"Good morning, Johnny," said the shaggy man.
"I never waste time," said the newcomer, promptly.
"But what's happened to you?
Where did you get that donkey head?
Really, I wouldn't have known you at all, Shaggy Man, if I hadn't looked at your feet."
The shaggy man introduced Johnny Dooit to Dorothy and Toto and Button Bright and the Rainbow's Daughter, and told him the story of their adventures, adding that they were anxious now to reach the Emerald City in the Land of Oz, where Dorothy had friends who would take care of them and send them safe home again.
"But," said he, "we find that we can't cross this desert, which turns all living flesh that touches it into dust; so I have asked you to come and help us."
Johnny Dooit puffed his pipe and looked carefully at the dreadful desert in front of them-stretching so far away they could not see its end.
"You must ride," he said, briskly.
"What in?" asked the shaggy man.
"In a sand boat, which has runners like a sled and sails like a ship. The wind will blow you swiftly across the desert and the sand cannot touch your flesh to turn it into dust."
"Good!" cried Dorothy, clapping her hands delightedly.
"That was the way the Magic Carpet took us across.
We didn't have to touch the horrid sand at all."
"But where is the sand boat?" asked the shaggy man, looking all around him.
"I'll make you one," said Johnny Dooit.
As he spoke, he knocked the ashes from his pipe and put it in his pocket.
Johnny Dooit moved quickly now-so quickly that they were astonished at the work he was able to accomplish.
He had in his chest a tool for everything he wanted to do, and these must have been magic tools because they did their work so fast and so well.
She thought the words were something like these:
Whatever Johnny Dooit was singing he was certainly doing things, and they all stood by and watched him in amazement.
He seized an axe and in a couple of chops felled a tree.
Next he took a saw and in a few minutes sawed the tree trunk into broad, long boards.
He then nailed the boards together into the shape of a boat, about twelve feet long and four feet wide.
He cut from another tree a long, slender pole which, when trimmed of its branches and fastened upright in the center of the boat, served as a mast.
Dorothy fairly gasped with wonder to see the thing grow so speedily before her eyes, and both Button Bright and Polly looked on with the same absorbed interest.
"It ought to be painted," said Johnny Dooit, tossing his tools back into the chest, "for that would make it look prettier.
But 'though I can paint it for you in three seconds it would take an hour to dry, and that's a waste of time."
"We don't care how it looks," said the shaggy man, "if only it will take us across the desert."
"It will do that," declared Johnny Dooit.
Did you ever sail a ship?"
"Good.
With this he slammed down the lid of the chest, and the noise made them all wink.
While they were winking the workman disappeared, tools and all.
"That they are pig headed?
three
Well, he was here at last, dishevelled, hatless and exhausted, looking up at the dark windows.
She babbled out a question at him.
"Oh! thank God!
You are a priest, father?"
Yes; this was genuine enough.
When will you bring me Holy Communion?"
He hesitated.
"Tell me, are you very ill?"
"I don't know, father.
Father, ought I to tell him?"
"Father, I must not keep you; but tell me this-Who is this man?"
"Felsenburgh?"
"Yes."
Her face seemed to fall away in a kind of emotion, half cunning, half fear.
I am a Catholic-?"
What do you know of Felsenburgh? You have been dreaming."
"You have been dreaming.
"The door is shut, father?
Well, at least, this is what I dreamt.
Father---"
"Very well, listen, father....
Nearer, father."
"Hush!" he said.
"Who is that?"
"Why, her light is burning.
Come in, Oliver, but softly."
seven
THE LAY OF THE TWO LOVERS
Once upon a time there lived in Normandy two lovers, who were passing fond, and were brought by Love to Death.
The story of their love was bruited so abroad, that the Bretons made a song in their own tongue, and named this song the Lay of the Two Lovers.
The town yet endures, with its towers and houses, to bear witness to the truth; moreover the country thereabouts is known to us all as the Valley of Pistres.
This King had one fair daughter, a damsel sweet of face and gracious of manner, very near to her father's heart, since he had lost his Queen.
So then, that none should carry off his child, he caused it to be proclaimed, both far and near, by script and trumpet, that he alone should wed the maid, who would bear her in his arms, to the pinnacle of the great and perilous mountain, and that without rest or stay.
When this news was noised about the country, many came upon the quest.
But strive as they would they might not enforce themselves more than they were able.
However mighty they were of body, at the last they failed upon the mountain, and fell with their burthen to the ground.
Thus, for a while, was none so bold as to seek the high Princess.
Now in this country lived a squire, son to a certain count of that realm, seemly of semblance and courteous, and right desirous to win that prize, which was so coveted of all.
He was a welcome guest at the Court, and the King talked with him very willingly.
This squire had set his heart upon the daughter of the King, and many a time spoke in her ear, praying her to give him again the love he had bestowed upon her.
So seeing him brave and courteous, she esteemed him for the gifts which gained him the favour of the King, and they loved together in their youth.
This thing was very grievous to them, but the damoiseau thought within himself that it were good to bear the pains he knew, rather than to seek out others that might prove sharper still.
Yet in the end, altogether distraught by love, this prudent varlet sought his friend, and showed her his case, saying that he urgently required of her that she would flee with him, for no longer could he endure the weariness of his days.
Hearken well.
I have kindred in Salerno, of rich estate.
For more than thirty years my aunt has studied there the art of medicine, and knows the secret gift of every root and herb. If you hasten to her, bearing letters from me, and show her your adventure, certainly she will find counsel and cure.
Doubt not that she will discover some cunning simple, that will strengthen your body, as well as comfort your heart.
Then return to this realm with your potion, and ask me at my father's hand.
He will deem you but a stripling, and set forth the terms of his bargain, that to him alone shall I be given who knows how to climb the perilous mountain, without pause or rest, bearing his lady between his arms."
So with a little company of men, mounted on swift palfreys, and most privy to his mind, he arrived at Salerno.
Now the squire made no long stay at his lodging, but as soon as he might, went to the damsel's kindred to open out his mind.
When the dame had read these letters with him, line by line, she charged him to lodge with her awhile, till she might do according to his wish.
So by her sorceries, and for the love of her maid, she brewed such a potion that no man, however wearied and outworn, but by drinking this philtre, would not be refreshed in heart and blood and bones.
Such virtue had this medicine, directly it were drunken.
He repaired straightway to the Court, and, seeking out the King, required of him his fair daughter in marriage, promising, for his part, that were she given him, he would bear her in his arms to the summit of the mount.
The King was no wise wrath at his presumption.
He smiled rather at his folly, for how should one so young and slender succeed in a business wherein so many mighty men had failed.
Therefore he appointed a certain day for this judgment.
Moreover he caused letters to be written to his vassals and his friends-passing none by-bidding them to see the end of this adventure.
And from every region round about men came to learn the issue of this thing.
But for her part the fair maiden did all that she was able to bring her love to a good end.
Ever was it fast day and fleshless day with her, so that by any means she might lighten the burthen that her friend must carry in his arms.
Now on the appointed day this young dansellon came very early to the appointed place, bringing the flacket with him.
When the great company were fully met together, the King led forth his daughter before them; and all might see that she was arrayed in nothing but her smock.
The varlet took the maiden in his arms, but first he gave her the flask with the precious brewage to carry, since for pride he might not endure to drink therefrom, save at utmost peril.
The squire set forth at a great pace, and climbed briskly till he was halfway up the mount. Because of the joy he had in clasping his burthen, he gave no thought to the potion.
But when two thirds of the course was won, the grasshopper would have tripped him off his feet.
But he would neither hear, nor give credence to her words.
A mighty anguish filled his bosom.
He climbed upon the summit of the mountain, and pained himself grievously to bring his journey to an end.
This he might not do.
He reeled and fell, nor could he rise again, for the heart had burst within his breast.
When the maiden saw her lover's piteous plight, she deemed that he had swooned by reason of his pain.
She kneeled hastily at his side, and put the enchanted brewage to his lips, but he could neither drink nor speak, for he was dead, as I have told you.
She bewailed his evil lot, with many shrill cries, and flung the useless flacket far away.
For many saving herbs have been found there since that day by the simple folk of that country, which from the magic philtre derived all their virtue.
She kissed his eyes and mouth, and falling upon his body, took him in her arms, and pressed him closely to her breast.
After his speech had returned to him, he was passing heavy, and lamented their doleful case, and thus did all his people with him.
Three days they kept the bodies of these two fair children from earth, with uncovered face.
On the third day they sealed them fast in a goodly coffin of marble, and by the counsel of all men, laid them softly to rest on that mountain where they died.
Then they departed from them, and left them together, alone.
Since this adventure of the Two Children this hill is known as the Mountain of the Two Lovers, and their story being bruited abroad, the Breton folk have made a Lay thereof, even as I have rehearsed before you.
"What a comfort! the day light is lengthening.
Has it not, my little daughter? Who brought her these violets?"
"To morrow."
"So we have said for a great many to morrows, but it is always put off. What do you think, mother-is the little maid strong enough?"
mrs Halifax hesitated; said something about "east winds."
The child shrank back with an involuntary "Oh, no"
"That is because she is a little girl, necessarily less strong than the lads are.
Is it not so, Uncle Phineas?" continued her father, hastily, for I was watching them.
"Muriel will be quite strong when the warm weather comes.
We have had such a severe winter.
Every one of the children has suffered," said the mother, in a cheerful tone, as she poured out a cup of cream for her daughter, to whom was now given, by common consent, all the richest and rarest of the house.
"I think every one has," said john, looking round on his apple cheeked boys; it must have been a sharp eye that detected any decrease of health, or increase of suffering, there.
"But my plan will set all to rights.
I spoke to mrs Tod yesterday.
She will be ready to take us all in.
Boys, shall you like going to Enderley?
You shall go as soon as ever the larch wood is green."
For, at Longfield, already we began to make a natural almanack and chronological table.
"When the may was out"--"When Guy found the first robin's nest"--"When the field was all cowslips"--and so on.
"Is it absolutely necessary we should go?" said the mother, who had a strong home clinging, and already began to hold tiny Longfield as the apple of her eye.
"I think so, unless you will consent to let me go alone to Enderley."
She shook her head.
"What, with those troubles at the mills?
How can you speak so lightly?"
The troubles must be borne; why not bear them with as good heart as possible?
They cannot last-let Lord Luxmore do what he will.
If my landlord will not do it, I will; and add a steam engine, too."
At first, mrs Halifax had looked grave-most women would, especially wives and mothers, in those days when every innovation was regarded with horror, and improvement and ruin were held synonymous.
She might have thought so too, had she not believed in her husband.
But now, at mention of the steam engine, she looked up and smiled.
"Lady Oldtower asked me about it to day.
She said, 'she hoped you would not ruin yourself, like mr Miller of Glasgow!' I said I was not afraid."
"It is easier to make the world trust one, when one is trusted by one's own household."
"Ah! never fear; you will make your fortune yet, in spite of Lord Luxmore."
For, all winter, john had found out how many cares come with an attained wish.
Chiefly, because, as the earl had said, his lordship possessed an "excellent memory." The Kingswell election had worked its results in a hundred small ways, wherein the heavy hand of the landlord could be laid upon the tenant.
He bore up bravely against it; but hard was the struggle between might and right, oppression and staunch resistance.
It would have gone harder, but for one whom john now began to call his "friend;" at least, one who invariably called mr Halifax so-our neighbour, Sir Ralph Oldtower.
"How often has Lady Oldtower been here, Ursula?"
"She called first, you remember, after our trouble with the children; she has been twice since, I think.
I shall not go-I told her so."
"But gently, I hope?--you are so very outspoken, love.
I think-though john rarely betrayed it-he had strongly this presentiment of future power, which may often be noticed in men who have carved out their own fortunes.
They have in them the instinct to rise; and as surely as water regains its own level, so do they, from however low a source, ascend to theirs.
Not many weeks after, we removed in a body to Enderley.
He used to turn away, almost in pain, from her smile, as she would listen to all he said, then steal off to the harpsichord, and begin that soft, dreamy music, which the children called "talking to angels."
Little we thought he should ever own it, or that john would be pointing it out to his own boys, lecturing them on "undershot," and "overshot," as he used to lecture me.
It was sweet, though half melancholy, to see Enderley again; to climb the steep meadows and narrow mule paths, up which he used to help me so kindly.
He could not now; he had his little daughter in his arms.
We paused half-way up on a low wall, where I had many a time rested, watching the sunset over Nunneley Hill-watching for john to come home.
Every night-at least after Miss March went away-he usually found me sitting there.
He turned to me and smiled.
"Dost remember, lad?" at which appellation Guy widely stared.
"Enderley is just the same, Phineas. Twelve years have made no change-except in us." And he looked fondly at his wife, who stood a little way off, holding firmly on the wall, in a hazardous group, her three boys.
Better as it was; better a thousand times.
I went to mrs Halifax, and helped her to describe the prospect to the inquisitive boys; finally coaxing the refractory Guy up the winding road, where, just as if it had been yesterday, stood my old friends, my four Lombardy poplars, three together and one apart.
In her delight, she so absolutely forgot herself as to address the mother as Miss March; at which long unspoken name Ursula started, her colour went and came, and her eyes turned restlessly towards the church hard by.
"It is all right-Miss-Ma'am, I mean.
"Yes, I know."
And when she had put all her little ones to bed-we, wondering where the mother was, went out towards the little churchyard, and found her quietly sitting there.
We were very happy at Enderley.
Muriel brightened up before she had been there many days.
It was the season she enjoyed most-the time of the singing of birds, and the springing of delicate scented flowers. I myself never loved the beech wood better than did our Muriel.
She used continually to tell us this was the happiest spring she had ever had in her life.
john was much occupied now.
Very often Muriel and I followed him, and spent whole mornings in the mill meadows.
"What is the matter with the stream?
Do you notice, Phineas?"
"I have seen it gradually lowering-these two hours.
"Nothing of the kind-I must look after it.
Good bye, my little daughter.
Don't cling so fast; father will be back soon-and isn't this a sweet sunny place for a little maid to be lazy in?"
He walked rapidly down the meadows, and went into his mill.
Then he came towards us, narrowly watching the stream.
It had sunk more and more-the muddy bottom was showing plainly.
"Yes-that's it-it can be nothing else!
"Do what, john?
Who?"
"Lord Luxmore." He spoke in the smothered tones of violent passion. "Lord Luxmore has turned out of its course the stream that works my mill."
I tried to urge that such an act was improbable; in fact, against the law.
"Not against the law of the great against the little.
But I see what it is-I have seen it coming a whole year.
He is determined to ruin me!"
john said this in much excitement.
He hardly felt Muriel's tiny creeping hands.
"What does 'ruin' mean?
Is anybody making father angry?"
"No, my sweet-not angry-only very, very miserable!"
He snatched her up, and buried his head in her soft, childish bosom. She kissed him and patted his hair.
"Never mind, dear father.
You say nothing signifies, if we are only good.
And father is always good."
"I wish I were."
"No, Lord Luxmore shall not ruin me!
I have thought of a scheme.
But first I must speak to my people-I shall have to shorten wages for a time."
If it must be done-better done at once, before winter sets in.
He almost ground his teeth as he saw the sun shining on the far white wing of Luxmore Hall.
If it is an unlawful act, why not go to law?"
"Phineas, you forget my principle-only mine, however; I do not force it upon any one else-my firm principle, that I will never go to law. Never!
I would not like to have it said, in contradistinction to the old saying, 'See how these Christians FIGHT!'"
"Now, Uncle Phineas, go you home with Muriel.
Tell my wife what has occurred-say, I will come to tea as soon as I can.
But I may have some little trouble with my people here.
She must not alarm herself."
No, the mother never did.
What was to be borne-she bore: what was to be done-she did; but she rarely made any "fuss" about either her doings or her sufferings.
"Then you think john is right?"
"Of course I do."
I had not meant it as a question, or even a doubt.
But it was pleasant to hear her thus answer.
For, as I have said, Ursula was not a woman to be led blindfold, even by her husband.
Sometimes they differed on minor points, and talked their differences lovingly out; but on any great question she had always this safe trust in him-that if one were right and the other wrong, the erring one was much more likely to be herself than john.
She said no more; but put the children to bed; then came downstairs with her bonnet on.
Or are you too tired?
I am going down to the mill."
He was rather odd looking, being invariably muffled up in a large cloak and a foreign sort of hat.
"Who is that, watching our mills?" said mrs Halifax, hastily.
I told her all I had seen of the person.
They used to find shelter at Luxmore."
In his empty mill, standing beside one of its silenced looms, we found the master.
He was very much dejected-Ursula touched his arm before he even saw her.
"Well, love-you know what has happened?"
"Yes, john.
But never mind."
"I would not-except for my poor people."
"What do you intend doing?
"Our wishes come as a cross to us sometimes," he said, rather bitterly. "It is the only thing I can do.
The water power being so greatly lessened, I must either stop the mills, or work them by steam."
"Do that, then.
Set up your steam engine."
"And have all the country down upon me for destroying hand labour?
Have a new set of Luddites coming to burn my mill, and break my machinery? That is what Lord Luxmore wants.
If you had heard those poor people whom I sent away tonight!
He spoke-as we rarely heard john speak: as worldly cares and worldly injustice cause even the best of men to speak sometimes.
"Poor people!" he added, "how can I blame them?
Here I heard-or fancied I heard-out of the black shadow behind the loom, a heavy sigh.
john and Ursula were too anxious to notice it.
Will it cost much?"
"More than I like to think of.
But it must be;--nothing venture-nothing have.
But oh, my poor people at Enderley!"
Again Ursula asked if nothing could be done.
"Yes-I did think of one plan-but-"
At last john said:
"How can you talk so!
We could do it easily, by living in a plainer way; by giving up one or two trifles.
Only outside things, you know. Why need we care for outside things?"
"Why, indeed?" he said, in a low, fond tone.
Three months of little renunciations-three months of the old narrow way of living, as at Norton Bury-and the poor people at Enderley might have full wages, whether or no there was full work.
Then in our quiet valley there would be no want, no murmurings, and, above all, no blaming of the master.
"Husband, don't let us speak of Lord Luxmore."
Again that sigh-quite ghostly in the darkness.
"Who's there?"
"Only I, mr Halifax-don't be angry with me."
It was the softest, mildest voice-the voice of one long used to oppression; and the young man whom Ursula had supposed to be a Catholic appeared from behind the loom.
"I do not know you, sir.
How came you to enter my mill?"
"I followed mrs Halifax.
I have often watched her and your children. But you don't remember me."
"I am surprised to see you here, Lord Ravenel."
I would have renounced it long ago.
"He-do you mean your father?"
The boy-no, he was a young man now, but scarcely looked more than a boy-assented silently, as if afraid to utter the name.
"Would not your coming here displease him?" said john, always tenacious of trenching a hair's breadth upon any lawful authority.
"It matters not-he is away.
He has left me these six months alone at Luxmore."
"Have you offended him?" asked Ursula, who had cast kindly looks on the thin face, which perhaps reminded her of another-now for ever banished from our sight, and his also.
The youth crossed himself, then started and looked round, in terror of observers.
"You will not betray me?
You are a good man, mr Halifax, and you spoke warmly for us.
Tell me-I will keep your secret-are you a Catholic too?"
"No, indeed."
I hoped you were.
But you are sure you will not betray me?"
mr Halifax smiled at such a possibility.
Yet, in truth, there was some reason for the young man's fears; since, even in those days, Catholics were hunted down both by law and by public opinion, as virulently as Protestant nonconformists.
All who kept out of the pale of the national church were denounced as schismatics, deists, atheists-it was all one.
"I am sick of it.
There never was but one in it I cared for, or who cared for me-and now-Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis."
His lips moved in a paroxysm of prayer-helpless, parrot learnt, Latin prayer; yet, being in earnest, it seemed to do him good.
He looked exceedingly surprised.
"I-you cannot mean it?
After Lord Luxmore has done you all this evil?"
"Is that any reason why I should not do good to his son-that is, if I could?
The lad lifted up those soft grey eyes, and then I remembered what his sister had said of Lord Ravenel's enthusiastic admiration of mr Halifax.
"Oh, you could-you could."
"But I and mine are heretics, you know!"
"I will pray for you.
Only let me come and see you-you and your children."
"Come, and welcome."
"Heartily welcome, Lord-"
"No-not that name, mrs Halifax.
So henceforward "Brother Anselmo" was almost domesticated at Rose Cottage.
He said, "She made him good"--our child of peace.
And the little maid in her quiet way was very fond of him; delighting in his company when her father was not by.
But no one ever was to her like her father.
The chief bond between her and Lord Ravenel-or "Anselmo," as he would have us call him-was music.
He taught her to play on the organ, in the empty church close by.
Just at this time, her father saw somewhat less of her than usual.
He was oppressed with business cares; daily, hourly vexations.
It ceased to be a pleasure to walk in the green hollow, between the two grassy hills, which heretofore Muriel and I had liked even better than the Flat.
He was setting up that wonderful novelty-a steam engine.
So the ignorant, simple mill people, when they came for their easy Saturday's wages, only stood and gaped at the mass of iron, and the curiously shaped brickwork, and wondered what on earth "the master" was about?
....The merest outline of the subject is terrifying!
three
This is very cheap.
When the rich Sudatta wished to invite the Buddha to a repast, he made use of incense.
We shall suppose the game to be arranged for a party of six,-- though there is no rule limiting the number of players.
But with the "guest incense" no experiment is made.
But the faces of the tablets bear numbers or marks; and each set comprises three tablets numbered "one," three numbered "two," three numbered "three," and one marked with the character signifying "guest." After these tablet sets have been distributed, a box called the "tablet box" is placed before the first player; and all is ready for the real game.
He takes the six tablets out of the box, and wraps them up in the paper which contained the incense guessed about.
But it is quite a feat to make ten correct judgments in succession.
The olfactory nerves are apt to become somewhat numbed long before the game is concluded; and, therefore it is customary during the Ko kwai to rinse the mouth at intervals with pure vinegar, by which operation the sensitivity is partially restored.
RECORD OF A KO KWAI.
It is the custom In some families to enter all such records in a book especially made for the purpose, and furnished with an index which enables the Ko kwai player to refer immediately to any interesting fact belonging to the history of any past game.
To twenty one pastilles
Recipe for Baikwa.
Finally I may observe that, while judging the incense, a player is expected to take not less than three inhalations, or more than five.
In this economical era, the Ko kwai takes of necessity a much humbler form than it assumed in the time of the great daimyo, of the princely abbots, and of the military aristocracy.
A full set of the utensils required for the game can now be had for about fifty dollars; but the materials are of the poorest kind.
When the Emperor had lost his beautiful favorite, the Lady Li, he sorrowed so much that fears were entertained for his reason.
Although the power of making visible the forms of the dead has been claimed for one sort of incense only, the burning of any kind of incense is supposed to summon viewless spirits in multitude.
"Is it possible," he exclaimed, "that you never saw a silkworm moth?
The silkworm moth has very beautiful eyebrows."
"Well, call them what you like," returned Niimi;--"the poets call them eyebrows....
He left the guest room, and presently returned with a white paper fan, on which a silkworm moth was sleepily reposing.
It cannot fly, of course: none of them can fly....
Now look at the eyebrows."
Then Niimi took me to see his worms.
As they approach maturity, the creatures need almost constant attention.
They have mouths, but do not eat.
They only pair, lay eggs, and die.
Those silkworms have all that they wish for,--even considerably more.
Let pain and its effort be suspended, and life must shrink back, first into protoplasmic shapelessness, thereafter into dust.
In a silkworm paradise such as our mundane instincts lead us to desire, the seraph freed from the necessity of toil, and able to satisfy his every want at will, would lose his wings at last, and sink back to the condition of a grub....
three
"BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER."
He was not detained by business, nor did he get left behind nor snowed up, as frequently happens in stories, and in real life too, I am afraid.
The snow storm came also; and the turkey nearly died a natural and premature death from over eating.
Donald came, too; Donald, with a line of down upon his upper lip, and Greek and Latin on his tongue, and stores of knowledge in his handsome head, and stories-bless me, you couldn't turn over a chip without reminding Donald of something that happened "at College."
Carol's hand (all too thin and white these latter days) lay close clasped in Uncle Jack's, and they talked together quietly of many, many things.
Mama says she supposes that ever so many other children have been born on that day.
I often wonder where they are, Uncle Jack, and whether it is a dear thought to them, too, or whether I am so much in bed, and so often alone, that it means more to me.
Oh, I do hope that none of them are poor, or cold, or hungry; and I wish, I wish they were all as happy as I, because they are my little brothers and sisters.
"That large and interesting brood of children in the little house at the end of the back garden?"
"Yes; isn't it nice to see so many together?
We ought to call them the Ruggles children, of course; but Donald began talking of them as the 'Ruggleses in the rear,' and Papa and Mama took it up, and now we cannot seem to help it.
The house was built for mr Carter's coachman, but mr Carter lives in Europe, and the gentleman who rents his place doesn't care what happens to it, and so this poor Irish family came to live there.
"Yes, we all thought it very funny, and I smiled at them from the window when I was well enough to be up again.
Then, one day, 'Cary,' my pet canary, flew out of her cage, and peter Ruggles caught her and brought her back, and I had him up here in my room to thank him."
"Is peter the oldest?"
"No; Sarah Maud is the oldest-she helps do the washing; and peter is the next.
He is a dressmaker's boy."
"And which is the pretty little red haired girl?"
"That's Kitty."
"And the fat youngster?"
"Baby Larry."
"And that freckled one?"
"Now, don't laugh-that's Peoria!"
"Carol, you are joking."
"No, really, Uncle dear.
She was born in Peoria; that's all."
"And is the next boy Oshkosh?"
"No," laughed Carol, "the others are Susan, and Clement, and Eily, and Cornelius."
"How did you ever learn all their names?"
"Well, I have what I call a 'window school.' It is too cold now; but in warm weather I am wheeled out on my little balcony, and the Ruggleses climb up and walk along our garden fence, and sit down on the roof of our carriage house.
That brings them quite near, and I read to them and tell them stories; On Thanksgiving Day they came up for a few minutes, it was quite warm at eleven o'clock, and we told each other what we had to be thankful for; but they gave such queer answers that Papa had to run away for fear of laughing; and I couldn't understand them very well.
Susan was thankful for 'TRUNKS,' of all things in the world; Cornelius, for 'horse cars;' Kitty, for 'pork steak;' while Clem, who is very quiet, brightened up when I came to him, and said he was thankful for 'HIS LAME PUPPY.' Wasn't that pretty?"
"It might teach some of us a lesson, mightn't it, little girl?"
"That's what Mama said.
Now I'm going to give this whole Christmas to the Ruggleses; and, Uncle Jack, I earned part of the money myself."
"Well, you see, it could not be my own, own Christmas if Papa gave me all the money, and I thought to really keep Christ's birthday I ought to do something of my very own; and so I talked with Mama.
Of course she thought of something lovely; she always does; Mama's head is just brimming over with lovely thoughts, and all I have to do is ask, and out pops the very one I want.
This thought was, to let her write down, just as I told her, a description of how a little girl lived in her own room three years, and what she did to amuse herself; and we sent it to a magazine and got twenty five dollars for it.
Just think!"
"Well, well," cried Uncle Jack, "my little girl a real author!
And what are you going to do with this wonderful 'own' money of yours?"
"I shall give the nine Ruggleses a grand Christmas dinner here in this very room-that will be Papa's contribution, and afterwards a beautiful Christmas tree, fairly blooming with presents-that will be my part; for I have another way of adding to my twenty five dollars, so that I can buy everything I like.
I have written a letter to the organist, and asked him if I might have the two songs I like best.
Will you see if it is all right?"
DEAR mr
WILKIE,--
I am the little sick girl who lives next door to the church, and, as I seldom go out, the music on practice days and Sundays is one of my greatest pleasures.
I want to know if you can let the boys sing 'Carol, brothers, carol,' on Christmas night, and if the one who sings 'My ain countree' so beautifully may please sing that too.
I think it is the loveliest song in the world, but it always makes me cry; doesn't it you?
If it isn't too much trouble, I hope they can sing them both quite early, as after ten o'clock I may be asleep.
--Yours respectfully,
CAROL BIRD.
p s--The reason I like 'Carol, brothers, carol,' is because the choir boys sang it eleven years ago, the morning I was born, and put it into Mama's head to call me Carol.
She didn't remember then that my other name would be Bird, because she was half asleep, and couldn't think of but one thing at a time.
--Yours truly,
CAROL BIRD."
Uncle Jack thought the letter quite right, and did not even smile at her telling the organist so many family items.
The days flew by, as they always fly in holiday time, and it was Christmas eve before anybody knew it.
Carol and Elfrida, her pretty German nurse, had ransacked books, and introduced so many plans, and plays, and customs and merry makings from Germany, and Holland, and England and a dozen other places, that you would scarcely have known how or where you were keeping Christmas.
The dog and the cat had enjoyed their celebration under Carol's direction. Each had a tiny table with a lighted candle in the center, and a bit of Bologna sausage placed very near it, and everybody laughed till the tears stood in their eyes to see Villikins and Dinah struggle to nibble the sausages, and at the same time evade the candle flame.
Villikins barked, and sniffed, and howled in impatience, and after many vain attempts succeeded in dragging off the prize, though he singed his nose in doing it.
Dinah, meanwhile, watched him placidly, her delicate nostrils quivering with expectation, and, after all excitement had subsided, walked with dignity to the table, her beautiful gray satin tail sweeping behind her, and, calmly putting up one velvet paw, drew the sausage gently down, and walked out of the room without "turning a hair," so to speak.
Elfrida had scattered handfuls of seeds over the snow in the garden, that the wild birds might have a comfortable breakfast next morning, and had stuffed bundles of dried grasses in the fireplaces, so that the reindeer of Santa Claus could refresh themselves after their long gallops across country.
This was really only done for fun, but it pleased Carol.
That was to keep the dear ones from quarreling all through the year.
There were Papa's stout top boots; Mama's pretty buttoned shoes next; then Uncle Jack's, Donald's, Paul's and Hugh's; and at the end of the line her own little white worsted slippers.
Last, and sweetest of all, like the little children in Austria, she put a lighted candle in her window to guide the dear Christ child, lest he should stumble in the dark night as he passed up the deserted street.
SOME OTHER BIRDS ARE TAUGHT TO FLY.
Before the earliest Ruggles could wake and toot his five cent tin horn, mrs Ruggles was up and stirring about the house, for it was a gala day in the family.
Gala day!
I should think so!
RUGGLES,--
I want them every one, please, from Sarah Maud to Baby Larry.
Mama says dinner will be at half past five, and the Christmas tree at seven; so you may expect them home at nine o'clock.
Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, I am, yours truly,
CAROL BIRD."
Breakfast was on the table promptly at seven o'clock, and there was very little of it, too; for it was an excellent day for short rations, though mrs Ruggles heaved a sigh as she reflected that even the boys, with their India rubber stomachs, would be just as hungry the day after the dinner party as if they had never had any at all.
You other boys clear out from under foot!
Clem, you and Con hop into bed with Larry while I wash yer underflannins; 'twont take long to dry 'em.
Won't yer, Peory?"
"That's a lady;" cried her mother.
I say, "complete;" but I do not know whether they would be called so in the best society.
The law of compensation had been well applied; he that had necktie had no cuffs; she that had sash had no handkerchief, and vice versa; but they all had boots and a certain amount of clothing, such as it was, the outside layer being in every case quite above criticism.
"Now, Sarah Maud," said mrs Ruggles, her face shining with excitement, "everything is red up an' we can begin.
A row of seats was formed directly through the middle of the kitchen.
There were not quite chairs enough for ten, since the family had rarely all wanted to sit down at once, somebody always being out, or in bed, but the wood box and the coal hod finished out the line nicely.
The children took their places according to age, Sarah Maud at the head and Larry on the coal hod, and mrs Ruggles seated herself in front, surveying them proudly as she wiped the sweat of honest toil from her brow.
mrs Ruggles looked severe.
The matter began to assume a graver aspect; the little Ruggleses stopped giggling and backed into the bed room, issuing presently with lock step, Indian file, a scared and hunted expression in every countenance.
The third time brought deserved success, and the pupils took their seats in the row.
Now, look me in the eye.
Now, can you remember?"
All the little Ruggleses shouted, "Yes, marm," in chorus.
The little Ruggleses hung their diminished heads.
Speak up, Sarah Maud."
"Quick!"
This was too much for the boys.
"Dunno!" said Cornelius, turning pale.
Ask Mis' Bird how she's feelin' this evenin', or if mr Bird's havin' a busy season, or somethin' like that.
"Clement Ruggles, do you mean to tell me that you'd say that to a dinner party?
mr Clement, will you take some of the cramb'ry?"
"Very good, indeed!
mr peter, do you speak for white or dark meat?"
"First rate!
nobody could speak more genteel than that.
"You just stop your gruntin', peter Ruggles; that was all right.
Now, is there anything more ye'd like to practice?"
"ABOUT ONCE IN SO OFTEN!" Could any words in the language be fraught with more terrible and wearing uncertainty?
"Oh, don't fret," said her mother, good naturedly, "I guess you'll git along.
"WHEN THE PIE WAS OPENED, THE BIRDS BEGAN TO SING!"
peter rang the door bell, and presently a servant admitted them, and, whispering something in Sarah's ear, drew her downstairs into the kitchen.
The other Ruggleses stood in horror stricken groups as the door closed behind their commanding officer; but there was no time for reflection, for a voice from above was heard, saying, "Come right up stairs, please!"
"Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do or die."
Accordingly, they walked upstairs, and Elfrida, the nurse, ushered them into a room more splendid than anything they had ever seen.
However, mrs Bird said, pleasantly, "Of course you wouldn't wear hats such a short distance-I forgot when I asked.
Now, will you come right in to Miss Carol's room, she is so anxious to see you?"
Just then Sarah Maud came up the back stairs, so radiant with joy from her secret interview with the cook, that peter could have pinched her with a clear conscience, and Carol gave them a joyful welcome.
"But where is Baby Larry?" she cried, looking over the group with searching eye.
"Didn't he come?"
"Larry!
Larry!" Good Gracious, where was Larry?
They were all sure that he had come in with them, for Susan remembered scolding him for tripping over the door mat.
Uncle Jack went into convulsions of laughter.
"Are you sure there were nine of you?" he asked, merrily.
"I think so, sir," said Peoria, timidly; "but, anyhow, there was Larry;" and she showed signs of weeping.
"Oh, well, cheer up!" cried Uncle Jack.
"I guess he's not lost-only mislaid.
I'll go and find him before you can say Jack Robinson!"
The other Ruggleses stood rooted to the floor.
Sarah Maud went out through the hall, calling, "Larry!
He was afraid to yell!
Uncle Jack dried his tears, carried him upstairs, and soon had him in breathless fits of laughter, while Carol so made the other Ruggleses forget themselves that they were soon talking like accomplished diners out.
Carol's bed had been moved into the farthest corner of the room, and she was lying on the outside, dressed in a wonderful soft white wrapper.
Her golden hair fell in soft fluffy curls over her white forehead and neck, her cheeks flushed delicately, her eyes beamed with joy, and the children told their mother, afterwards, that she looked as beautiful as the pictures of the Blessed Virgin.
There was great bustle behind a huge screen in another part of the room, and at half past five this was taken away, and the Christmas dinner table stood revealed.
What a wonderful sight it was to the poor little Ruggles children, who ate their sometimes scanty meals on the kitchen table!
It blazed with tall colored candles, it gleamed with glass and silver, it blushed with flowers, it groaned with good things to eat; so it was not strange that the Ruggleses, forgetting that their mother was a McGrill, shrieked in admiration of the fairy spectacle.
There was turkey and chicken, with delicious gravy and stuffing, and there were half a dozen vegetables, with cranberry jelly, and celery, and pickles; and as for the way these delicacies were served, the Ruggleses never forgot it as long as they lived.
"I declare to goodness," murmured Susan, on the other side, "there's so much to look at I can't scarcely eat nothin!"
Then, when Carol and Uncle Jack perceived that more turkey was a physical impossibility, the meats were taken off and the dessert was brought in-a dessert that would have frightened a strong man after such a dinner as had preceded it.
Kitty chose ice cream, explaining that she knew it "by sight," but hadn't never tasted none; but all the rest took the entire variety, without any regard to consequences.
"My dear child," whispered Uncle Jack, as he took Carol an orange, "there is no doubt about the necessity of this feast, but I do advise you after this to have them twice a year, or quarterly, perhaps, for the way they eat is positively dangerous; I assure you I tremble for that terrible Peoria.
I'm going to run races with her after dinner."
The feast being over, the Ruggleses lay back in their chairs languidly, and the table was cleared in a trice; then a door was opened into the next room, and there, in a corner facing Carol's bed, which had been wheeled as close as possible, stood the brilliantly lighted Christmas tree, glittering with gilded walnuts and tiny silver balloons, and wreathed with snowy chains of pop corn.
Each girl had a blue knitted hood, and each boy a red crocheted comforter, all made by Mama, Carol and Elfrida ("because if you buy everything, it doesn't show so much love," said Carol).
Then every girl had a pretty plaid dress of a different color, and every boy a warm coat of the right size.
Here the useful presents stopped, and they were quite enough; but Carol had pleaded to give them something "for fun."
"I know they need the clothes," she had said, when they were talking over the matter just after Thanksgiving, "but they don't care much for them, after all.
"You can have both," said mr Bird, promptly; "is there any need of my little girl's going without her Christmas, I should like to know? Spend all the money you like."
"But that isn't the thing," objected Carol, nestling close to her father; "it wouldn't be mine.
What is the use?
Haven't I almost everything already, and am I not the happiest girl in the world this year, with Uncle Jack and Donald at home?
You never look half as happy when you are getting your presents as when you are giving us ours.
Now, Papa, submit, or I shall have to be very firm and disagreeable with you!"
"Very well, your Highness, I surrender."
"That's a dear Papa!
Now, what were you going to give me?
Confess!"
"A bronze figure of Santa Claus; and in the little round belly, that shakes, when he laughs, like a bowl full of jelly, is a wonderful clock.
Oh, you would never give it up if you could see it."
"Nonsense," laughed Carol; "as I never have to get up to breakfast, nor go to bed, nor catch trains, I think my old clock will do very well! Now, Mama, what were you going to give me?"
"Oh, I hadn't decided.
A few more books, and a gold thimble, and a smelling bottle, and a music box."
"Poor Carol," laughed the child, merrily, "she can afford to give up these lovely things, for there will still be left Uncle Jack, and Donald, and Paul, and Hugh, and Uncle Rob, and Aunt Elsie, and a dozen other people."
The candles flickered and went out, the tree was left alone with its gilded ornaments, and mrs Bird sent the children down stairs at half past eight, thinking that Carol looked tired.
"Now, my darling, you have done quite enough for one day," said mrs Bird, getting Carol into her little night dress; "I am afraid you will feel worse to morrow, and that would be a sad ending to such a good time."
"Oh, wasn't it a lovely, lovely time," sighed Carol.
"From first to last, everything was just right.
"But we mustn't talk any longer about it to night," said mrs Bird, anxiously; "you are too tired, dear."
"I am not so very tired, Mama.
I have felt well all day; not a bit of pain anywhere.
Perhaps this has done me good."
"Perhaps; I hope so.
There was no noise or confusion; it was just a merry time.
Now, may I close the door and leave you alone?
I will steal in softly the first thing in the morning, and see if you are all right; but I think you need to be quiet."
"Oh, I'm willing to stay alone; but I am not sleepy yet, and I am going to hear the music by and by, you know."
"Yes, I have opened the window a little, and put the screen in front of it, so that you will not feel the air."
"Can I have the shutters open; and won't you turn my bed a little, please?
I never saw it before, and I thought of the Star in the East, that guided the wise men to the place where Jesus was.
Good night, Mama.
Such a happy, happy day!"
"Good night, my precious little Christmas Carol-mother's blessed Christmas child."
"Bend your head a minute, mother dear," whispered Carol, calling her mother back.
"Mama, dear, I do think that we have kept Christ's birthday this time just as He would like it.
Don't you?"
"I am sure of it," said mrs Bird, softly.
The Josephs' Christmas
The month before Christmas was always the most exciting and mysterious time in the Joseph household.
No questions were asked no matter what queer things were done.
The air was simply charged with secrets.
Sister Mollie was the grand repository of these; all the little Josephs came to her for advice and assistance.
It was Mollie who for troubled small brothers and sisters did such sums in division as this: How can I get a ten cent present for Emmy and a fifteen cent one for Jimmy out of eighteen cents?
Or, how can seven sticks of candy be divided among eight people so that each shall have one?
It was Mollie who put the finishing touches to most of the little gifts.
In short, all through December Mollie was weighed down under an avalanche of responsibility.
It speaks volumes for her sagacity and skill that she never got things mixed up or made any such terrible mistake as letting one little Joseph find out what another was going to give him.
"Dead" secrecy was the keystone of all plans and confidences.
During this particular December the planning and contriving had been more difficult and the results less satisfactory than usual.
The Josephs were poor at any time, but this winter they were poorer than ever.
"I'm glad I'm not driving over the prairie tonight," said mr Joseph. "It's quite a storm.
I hope it will be fine tomorrow, for the children's sake.
mrs Joseph sighed over Jimmy's worn jacket which she was mending. Then she smiled.
"Never mind, john.
Things will be better next Christmas, we'll hope. The children will not mind, bless their hearts.
Look at all the little knick knacks they've made for each other.
I did feel that I'd ask nothing better than to go in and buy all the lovely things I wanted, just for once, and give them to the children tomorrow morning.
They've never had anything really nice for Christmas.
But there!
mr Joseph nodded.
"That's so.
It's all the 'Christmassy' I could give them.
Two snowed up figures were standing on the porch.
"Late hour for callers, isn't it?" said mr Ralston.
"The fact is, our horse has about given out, and the storm is so bad that we can't proceed.
Can you take us in for the night, mr Joseph?"
"Certainly, and welcome!" exclaimed mr Joseph heartily, "if you don't mind a shakedown by the kitchen fire for the night.
My, mrs Ralston," as his wife helped her off with her things, "but you are snowed up! I'll see to putting your horse away, mr Ralston.
This way, if you please."
mr Ralston put the big basket he was carrying down on a bench in the corner.
"Thought I'd better bring our Christmas flummery in," he said.
mrs Ralston packed this basket, and goodness knows what she put in it, but she half cleaned out my store. The eyes of the Lindsay youngsters will dance tomorrow-that is, if we ever get there."
How meagre and small they did look, to be sure, beside that bulgy basket with its cover suggestively tied down.
"Our Santa Claus is somewhat out of pocket this year," said mr Joseph frankly.
They've been a month at it, and I'm always kind of relieved when Christmas is over and there are no more mysterious doings.
We're in such cramped quarters here that you can't move without stepping on somebody's secret."
A shakedown was spread in the kitchen for the unexpected guests, and presently the Ralstons found themselves alone.
mrs Ralston went over to the Christmas table and looked at the little gifts half tenderly and half pityingly.
"Just what I was thinking," returned her husband, "and I was thinking of something else, too.
"Let's just leave them here, Edward.
mrs Ralston untied the cover of the big basket.
Then the two of them, moving as stealthily as if engaged in a burglary, transferred the contents to the table.
It fell out as mrs Ralston had planned.
The dawn broke fine and clear over a vast white world.
"I expect the trail will be heavy," he said, "but I guess we'd get to Lindsay in time for dinner, anyway.
Much obliged for your kindness, mr Joseph.
When you and mrs Joseph come to town we shall hope to have a chance to return it.
Good bye and a merry Christmas to you all."
When mrs Joseph went back to the kitchen her eyes fell on the heaped up table in the corner.
One look she gave, and then this funny little mother began to cry; but they were happy tears.
mr Joseph came too, and looked and whistled.
There really seemed to be everything on that table that the hearts of children could desire-three pairs of skates, a fur cap and collar, a dainty workbasket, half a dozen gleaming new books, a writing desk, a roll of stuff that looked like a new dress, a pair of fur topped kid gloves just Mollie's size, and a china cup and saucer.
"The children will go wild with delight," said his wife happily.
Such a Christmas had never been known in the Joseph household before.
And as for the big box of good things, why, everybody appreciated that.
That Christmas was one to date from in that family.
I'm glad to be able to say, too, that even in the heyday of their delight and surprise over their wonderful presents, the little Josephs did not forget to appreciate the gifts they had prepared for each other.
mrs Joseph's taffy was eaten too.
Not a scrap of it was left.
Jimmy Scarecrow led a sad life in the winter.
Jimmy's greatest grief was his lack of occupation.
He liked to be useful, and in winter he was absolutely of no use at all.
He wondered how many such miserable winters he would have to endure.
He was a young Scarecrow, and this was his first one.
Every morning, when the wintry sun peered like a hard yellow eye across the dry corn stubble, Jimmy felt sad, but at Christmas time his heart nearly broke.
On Christmas Eve Santa Claus came in his sledge heaped high with presents, urging his team of reindeer across the field.
He was on his way to the farmhouse where Betsey lived with her Aunt Hannah.
Santa Claus had a large wax doll baby for her on his arm, tucked up against the fur collar of his coat.
He was afraid to trust it in the pack, lest it get broken.
Here I am!" he cried out, but Santa Claus did not hear him.
"Santa Claus, please give me a little present.
Then Jimmy Scarecrow stood in the corn stubble and shook with sobs until his joints creaked.
But he was mistaken.
"Aunt Hannah?" said she.
Aunt Hannah was making a crazy patchwork quilt, and she frowned hard at a triangular piece of red silk and circular piece of pink, wondering how to fit them together.
"Well?" said she.
"No, of course he didn't."
"Because he's a Scarecrow.
Don't ask silly questions."
Sometimes he almost vanished in the thick white storm.
Then she got up and spread it out over the sofa with an air of pride.
I've got one for every bed in the house, and I've given four away.
She carried her new doll baby smuggled up under her shawl.
"Wish you Merry Christmas!" she said to Jimmy Scarecrow.
"Wish you the same," said Jimmy, but his voice was choked with sobs, and was also muffled, for his old hat had slipped down to his chin.
Betsey looked pitifully at the old hat fringed with icicles, like frozen tears, and the old snow laden coat.
"Thank you," said Jimmy Scarecrow faintly.
"You're welcome," said she.
"Keep her under your overcoat, so the snow won't wet her, and she won't catch cold, she's delicate."
"Yes, I will," said Jimmy Scarecrow, and he tried hard to bring one of his stiff, outstretched arms around to clasp the doll baby.
"Don't you feel cold in that old summer coat?" asked Betsey.
"You wait a minute," said Betsey, and was off across the field.
Jimmy Scarecrow stood in the corn stubble, with the doll baby under his coat and waited, and soon Betsey was back again with Aunt Hannah's crazy quilt trailing in the snow behind her.
"Here," said she, "here is something to keep you warm," and she folded the crazy quilt around the Scarecrow and pinned it.
"Aunt Hannah wants to give it away if anybody wants it," she explained. "She's got so many crazy quilts in the house now she doesn't know what to do with them.
The bright flash of colours under Jimmy's hat brim dazzled his eyes, and he felt a little alarmed.
"I hope this quilt is harmless if it IS crazy," he said.
But the quilt was warm, and he dismissed his fears. Soon the doll baby whimpered, but he creaked his joints a little, and that amused it, and he heard it cooing inside his coat.
But after that the snow began to turn to rain, and the crazy quilt was soaked through and through: and not only that, but his coat and the poor doll baby.
It was after midnight, Christmas was over, and Santa was hastening home to the North Pole.
"Santa Claus! dear Santa Claus!" cried Jimmy Scarecrow with a great sob, and that time Santa Claus heard him and drew rein.
"Who's me?" shouted Santa Claus.
"Jimmy Scarecrow!"
"Have you been standing here ever since corn was ripe?" he asked pityingly, and Jimmy replied that he had.
"What's that over your shoulders?" Santa Claus continued, holding up his lantern.
"Nonsense!" cried Santa Claus.
"Let me see it!" And with that he pulled the doll baby out from under the Scarecrow's coat, and patted its back, and shook it a little, and it began to cry, and then to crow.
"It's all right," said Santa Claus.
"This is the doll baby I gave Betsey, and it is not at all delicate.
It went through the measles, and the chicken pox, and the mumps, and the whooping cough, before it left the North Pole.
"Get in, Jimmy Scarecrow, and come with me to the North Pole!" he cried.
"Please, how long shall I stay?" asked Jimmy Scarecrow.
"Why, you are going to live with me," replied Santa Claus.
"I've been looking for a person like you for a long time."
"Are there any crows to scare away at the North Pole?
"No," answered Santa Claus, "but I don't want you to scare away crows. I want you to scare away Arctic Explorers.
I can keep you in work for a thousand years, and scaring away Arctic Explorers from the North Pole is much more important than scaring away crows from corn.
Why, if they found the Pole, there wouldn't be a piece an inch long left in a week's time, and the earth would cave in like an apple without a core!
They would whittle it all to pieces, and carry it away in their pockets for souvenirs.
Come along; I am in a hurry."
"I will go on two conditions," said Jimmy.
"First, I want to make a present to Aunt Hannah and Betsey, next Christmas."
"You shall make them any present you choose.
What else?"
"Just wait a minute."
Santa took his stylographic pen out of his pocket, went with his lantern close to one of the fence posts, and wrote these words upon it:
NOTICE TO CROWS
Whichever crow shall hereafter hop, fly, or flop into this field during the absence of Jimmy Scarecrow, and therefrom purloin, steal, or abstract corn, shall be instantly, in a twinkling and a trice, turned snow white, and be ever after a disgrace, a byword and a reproach to his whole race.
Per order of Santa Claus.
"The corn will be safe now," said Santa Claus, "get in." Jimmy got into the sledge and they flew away over the fields, out of sight, with merry halloos and a great clamour of bells.
Betsey had told Aunt Hannah she had given away the crazy quilt and the doll baby, but had been scolded very little.
That was all Aunt Hannah had said.
john, the servant man, searched everywhere, but not a trace of them could he find.
But the next summer there was no need of a scarecrow, for not a crow came past the fence post on which Santa Claus had written his notice to crows.
Then she and Betsey had each a strange present.
"Why, it's my old crazy quilt, but it isn't crazy now!" cried Aunt Hannah, and her very spectacles seemed to glisten with amazement.
"It's my doll baby!" she cried, and snatched her up and kissed her.
ANNE HOLLINGSWORTH WHARTON
"On Christmas day in Seventy six, Our gallant troops with bayonets fixed, To Trenton marched away."
Children, have any of you ever thought of what little people like you were doing in this country more than a hundred years ago, when the cruel tide of war swept over its bosom?
From many homes the fathers were absent, fighting bravely for the liberty which we now enjoy, while the mothers no less valiantly struggled against hardships and discomforts in order to keep a home for their children, whom you only know as your great grandfathers and great grandmothers, dignified gentlemen and beautiful ladies, whose painted portraits hang upon the walls in some of your homes.
Merry, romping children they were in those far off times, yet their bright faces must have looked grave sometimes, when they heard the grown people talk of the great things that were happening around them.
Some of these little people never forgot the wonderful events of which they heard, and afterward related them to their children and grandchildren, which accounts for some of the interesting stories which you may still hear, if you are good children.
Thus you see that the British, in force, were between Washington's army and Bordentown, besides which there were some British and Hessian troops in the very town.
Kitty, who loved to play quite as much as any frolicsome Kitty of to day, had spent all her spare time in knitting a pair of thick woollen stockings, which seems a wonderful feat for a little girl only eight years old to perform!
Can you not see her sitting by the great chimney place, filled with its roaring, crackling logs, in her quaint, short waisted dress, knitting away steadily, and puckering up her rosy, dimpled face over the strange twists and turns of that old stocking?
"Oh, he'll come!
Papa never stays away on Christmas," says Kitty, looking up into her mother's face for an echo to her words.
Instead she sees something very like tears in her mother's eyes.
"Oh, mamma, don't you think he'll come?"
"We'll let him come just the same, and if he brings anything for papa we can put it away for him."
The days of that cold winter of seventeen seventy six wore on; so cold it was that the sufferings of the soldiers were great, their bleeding feet often leaving marks on the pure white snow over which they marched.
mrs Tracy looked anxiously each day for news of the husband and father only a few miles away, yet so separated by the river and the enemy's troops that they seemed like a hundred.
Christmas Eve came, but brought with it few rejoicings.
"Yes," said her mother, "Santa Claus won't forget you, I am sure, although he has been kept pretty busy looking after the soldiers this winter."
"Which side is he on?" asked Harry.
"The right side, of course," said mrs Tracy, which was the most sensible answer she could possibly have given.
"The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that saint Nicholas soon would be there."
Two little rosy faces lay fast asleep upon the pillow when the good old soul came dashing over the roof about one o'clock, and after filling each stocking with red apples, and leaving a cornucopia of sugar plums for each child, he turned for a moment to look at the sleeping faces, for saint Nicholas has a tender spot in his great big heart for a soldier's children.
Then, remembering many other small folks waiting for him all over the land, he sprang up the chimney and was away in a trice.
Santa Claus, in the form of mrs Tracy's farmer brother, brought her a splendid turkey; but because the Hessians were uncommonly fond of turkey, it came hidden under a load of wood.
The day passed and night came, cold with a steady fall of rain and sleet.
Kitty prayed that her "dear papa might not be out in the storm, and that he might come home and wear his beautiful blue stockings"; "And eat his turkey," said Harry's sleepy voice; after which they were soon in the land of dreams.
Toward morning the good people in Bordentown were suddenly aroused by firing in the distance, which became more and more distinct as the day wore on.
There was great excitement in the town; men and women gathered together in little groups in the streets to wonder what it was all about, and neighbours came dropping into mrs Tracy's parlour, all day long, one after the other, to say what they thought of the firing.
In the evening there came a body of Hessians flying into the town, to say that General Washington had surprised the British at Trenton, early that morning, and completely routed them, which so frightened the Hessians in Bordentown that they left without the slightest ceremony.
It was a joyful hour to the good town people when the red jackets turned their backs on them, thinking every moment that the patriot army would be after them.
Indeed, it seemed as if wonders would never cease that day, for while rejoicings were still loud, over the departure of the enemy, there came a knock at mrs Tracy's door, and while she was wondering whether she dared open it, it was pushed ajar, and a tall soldier entered.
Cold and tired Captain Tracy was, after a night's march in the streets and a day's fighting; but he was not too weary to smile at the dear faces around him, or to pat Kitty's head when she brought his warm stockings and would put them on the tired feet, herself.
Suddenly there was a sharp, quick bark outside the door.
"What's that?" cried Harry.
"Oh, I forgot.
Open the door.
Here, Fido, Fido!"
Into the room there sprang a beautiful little King Charles spaniel, white, with tan spots, and ears of the longest, softest, and silkiest.
"From the battle of Trenton," said her father.
"His poor master was shot.
The gentleman-for he was a real gentleman-gasped out, 'Take care of my poor Fido; good night,' and was gone.
"Pretty little Fido," said Kitty, taking the soft, curly creature in her arms; "I think it's the best present in the world, and to morrow is to be real Christmas, because you are home, papa."
What a good time we'll have!
"What would become of our country if we should all do that, my little man?
It was a good day's work that we did this Christmas, getting the army all across the river so quickly and quietly that we surprised the enemy, and gained a victory, with the loss of few men."
CHAPTER five.
This last news affected him deeply; not out of any affection for Pheroras, but because he was dead without having murdered his father, which he had promised him to do.
Now some of his friends advised him that he should tarry a while some where, in expectation of further information.
But others advised him to sail home without delay; for that if he were once come thither, he would soon put an end to all accusations, and that nothing afforded any weight to his accusers at present but his absence.
And now was Antipater evidently in a miserable condition, while nobody came to him nor saluted him, as they did at his going away, with good wishes of joyful acclamations; nor was there now any thing to hinder them from entertaining him, on the contrary, with bitter curses, while they supposed he was come to receive his punishment for the murder of his brethren.
The porters indeed received him in, but excluded his friends.
So Herod ordered him to be brought into the midst, and then lamented himself about his children, from whom he had suffered such great misfortunes; and because Antipater fell upon him in his old age.
He also offered himself to the torture.
But Antipater fell down on his face, and appealed to God and to all men for testimonials of his innocency, desiring that God would declare, by some evident signals, that he had not laid any plot against his father.
Then Varus got up, and departed out of the court, and went away the day following to Antioch, where his usual residence was, because that was the palace of the Syrians; upon which Herod laid his son in bonds.
But what were Varus's discourses to Herod was not known to the generality, and upon what words it was that he went away; though it was also generally supposed that whatsoever Herod did afterward about his son was done with his approbation.
But while the king was in doubt about it, one of Herod's friends seeing a seam upon the inner coat of the slave, and a doubling of the cloth, [for he had two coats on,] he guessed that the letter might be within that doubling; which accordingly proved to be true.
The letter was this: 'Acme to king Herod.
Hereupon Herod was in such great grief, that he was ready to send his son to Rome to Caesar, there to give an account of these his wicked contrivances.
CHAPTER six.
Concerning The Disease That Herod Fell Into And The Sedition Which The Jews Raised Thereupon; With The Punishment Of The Seditious.
Now Herod's ambassadors made haste to Rome; but sent, as instructed beforehand, what answers they were to make to the questions put to them. They also carried the epistles with them.
But Herod now fell into a distemper, and made his will, and bequeathed his kingdom to [Antipas], his youngest son; and this out of that hatred to Archclaus and Philip, which the calumnies of Antipater had raised against them.
He also distributed among his sons and their sons his money, his revenues, and his lands.
Accordingly we will undergo death, and all sorts of punishments which thou canst inflict upon us, with pleasure, since we are conscious to ourselves that we shall die, not for any unrighteous actions, but for our love to religion." And thus they all said, and their courage was still equal to their profession, and equal to that with which they readily set about this undertaking.
He then cried out, that these men had not abstained from affronting him, even in his lifetime, but that in the very day time, and in the sight of the multitude, they had abused him to that degree, as to fall upon what he had dedicated, and in that way of abuse had pulled it down to the ground.
They pretended, indeed, that they did it to affront him; but if any one consider the thing truly, they will find that they were guilty of sacrilege against God therein.
But as for Herod, he dealt more mildly with others [of the assembly] but he deprived Matthias of the high priesthood, as in part an occasion of this action, and made Joazar, who was Matthias's wife's brother, high priest in his stead.
Now it happened, that during the time of the high priesthood of this Matthias, there was another person made high priest for a single day, that very day which the Jews observed as a fast.
And that very night there was an eclipse of the moon.
Nay, further, his privy member was putrefied, and produced worms; and when he sat upright, he had a difficulty of breathing, which was very loathsome, on account of the stench of his breath, and the quickness of its returns; he had also convulsions in all parts of his body, which increased his strength to an insufferable degree.
He also sent for physicians, and did not refuse to follow what they prescribed for his assistance, and went beyond the river Jordan, and bathed himself in the warm baths that were at Callirrhoe, which, besides their other general virtues, were also fit to drink; which water runs into the lake called Asphaltiris.
Accordingly, they were a great number that came, because the whole nation was called, and all men heard of this call, and death was the penalty of such as should despise the epistles that were sent to call them.
CHAPTER seven.
When he had got the knife, he looked about, and had a mind to stab himself with it; and he had done it, had not his first cousin, Achiabus, prevented him, and held his hand, and cried out loudly.
CHAPTER eight.
Concerning Herod's Death, And Testament, And Burial.
And now Herod altered his testament upon the alteration of his mind; for he appointed Antipas, to whom he had before left the kingdom, to be tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, and granted the kingdom to Archclaus.
But then, as to the affairs of his family and children, in which indeed, according to his own opinion, he was also very fortunate, because he was able to conquer his enemies, yet, in my opinion, he was herein very unfortunate.
But then Salome and Alexas, before the king's death was made known, dismissed those that were shut up in the hippodrome, and told them that the king ordered them to go away to their own lands, and take care of their own affairs, which was esteemed by the nation a great benefit.
The body was carried upon a golden bier, embroidered with very precious stones of great variety, and it was covered over with purple, as well as the body itself; he had a diadem upon his head, and above it a crown of gold: he also had a scepter in his right hand.
And when he had given a treat to the multitude, and left off his motoring, he went up into the temple; he had also acclamations and praises given him, which way soever he went, every one striving with the rest who should appear to use the loudest acclamations.
When it was the Two Hundred and Fifty fifth Night,
Now is thy time!" And behold, a scorpion stung the Badawi in the palm and he cried out, saying, "Help, O Arabs!
Now one was an old man of comely face and the other a youth; and he heard the younger say to the elder, "O my uncle,, I conjure thee by Allah, give me back my cousin!"
The old man replied, "Did I not forbid thee, many a time, when the oath of divorce was always in thy mouth, as it were Holy Writ?"
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that Ala al Din continued, "So he packed me fifty loads of goods and gave me ten thousand dinars, wherewith I set out for Baghdad; but when I reached the Lion's Copse, the wild Arabs came out against me and took all my goods and monies.
Now he loveth her, but she loatheth him; and when he chanced to take an oath of triple divorcement and broke it, forthright she left him.
And when he heard her chant these lines he ended his recitation of the chapter, and began also to sing and repeated the following couplet,
Thereupon she came forward, swinging her haunches and gracefully swaying a shape the handiwork of Him whose boons are hidden; and each of them stole one glance of the eyes that cost them a thousand sighs.
And when she drew near him, and there remained but two paces between them, he recited these two couplets,
When it was the Two Hundred and Fifty seventh Night,
sixteen
The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.
The letter was on the bookshelf.
She examined every detail of the outside before opening it.
Edna experienced a pang of jealousy because he had written to his mother rather than to her.
Every one seemed to take for granted that she missed him.
Where had they met?
On Carondelet Street, in the morning.
What had they talked about? Chiefly about his prospects in Mexico, which mr Pontellier thought were promising.
How did he look?
She went down and led them out of the sun, scolding the quadroon for not being more attentive.
They had never taken the form of struggles.
"I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.
I can't make it more clear; it's only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me."
I'm sure I couldn't do more than that."
"Oh, yes you could!" laughed Edna.
"Oh, good morning, Mademoiselle; is it you?
"She must feel very lonely without her son," said Edna, desiring to change the subject.
"Her favorite son, too.
It must have been quite hard to let him go."
"Her favorite son!
Oh, dear!
Favorite son, indeed!
I miss the poor fellow myself, my dear.
That Victor! hanging would be too good for him.
It's about time he was getting another."
"Was her name Mariequita?" asked Edna.
She had not intended to go into the water; but she donned her bathing suit, and left Mademoiselle alone, seated under the shade of the children's tent.
The water was growing cooler as the season advanced.
But Mademoiselle waited.
She talked about music.
She hoped that Edna would go to see her in the city, and wrote her address with the stub of a pencil on a piece of card which she found in her pocket.
"When do you leave?" asked Edna.
"Next Monday; and you?"
seventeen
It was a large, double cottage, with a broad front veranda, whose round, fluted columns supported the sloping roof.
The house was painted a dazzling white; the outside shutters, or jalousies, were green.
In the yard, which was kept scrupulously neat, were flowers and plants of every description which flourishes in South Louisiana.
Within doors the appointments were perfect after the conventional type.
The softest carpets and rugs covered the floors; rich and tasteful draperies hung at doors and windows.
There were paintings, selected with judgment and discrimination, upon the walls.
A maid, in white fluted cap, offered the callers liqueur, coffee, or chocolate, as they might desire.
"Tired out, Edna?
Whom did you have?
Many callers?" he asked.
"I found their cards when I got home; I was out."
"Why, what could have taken you out on Tuesday?
What did you have to do?"
"Nothing.
I simply felt like going out, and I went out."
"No, I left no excuse.
I told Joe to say I was out, that was all."
Was mrs Belthrop here?"
I don't remember who was here."
He handed it to mrs Pontellier.
Joe offered the tray to mr Pontellier, and removed the soup.
'mrs Belthrop.' I tell you what it is, Edna; you can't afford to snub mrs Belthrop.
His business is worth a good, round sum to me.
'mrs
"Why are you taking the thing so seriously and making such a fuss over it?"
"I'm not making any fuss over it.
But it's just such seeming trifles that we've got to take seriously; such things count."
The fish was scorched.
"I'm going to get my dinner at the club.
Good night." He went into the hall, took his hat and stick from the stand, and left the house.
They had often made her very unhappy.
Her face was flushed and her eyes flamed with some inward fire that lighted them.
She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her.
Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet.
When she saw it lying there, she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it.
But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the little glittering circlet.
She wanted to destroy something.
The crash and clatter were what she wanted to hear.
eighteen
She was unusually pale and very quiet.
The boys were dragging along the banquette a small "express wagon," which they had filled with blocks and sticks.
She felt no interest in anything about her.
She went back into the house.
In the large and pleasant salon which extended across the width of the house, the Ratignolles entertained their friends once a fortnight with a soiree musicale, sometimes diversified by card playing.
There was a friend who played upon the 'cello.
I feel as if I wanted to be doing something.
What do you think of them?
Do you think it worth while to take it up again and study some more?
I might study for a while with Laidpore."
She knew that Madame Ratignolle's opinion in such a matter would be next to valueless, that she herself had not alone decided, but determined; but she sought the words of praise and encouragement that would help her to put heart into her venture.
"Your talent is immense, dear!"
"Nonsense!" protested Edna, well pleased.
One might almost be tempted to reach out a hand and take one."
His cheerfulness was unbounded, and it was matched by his goodness of heart, his broad charity, and common sense.
His wife was keenly interested in everything he said, laying down her fork the better to listen, chiming in, taking the words out of his mouth.
It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui.
She completely abandoned her Tuesdays at home, and did not return the visits of those who had called upon her.
It shocked him.
Then her absolute disregard for her duties as a wife angered him.
She had resolved never to take another step backward.
And she's more of a musician than you are a painter."
"On account of what, then?"
I don't know.
He could see plainly that she was not herself.
That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.
The quadroon sat for hours before Edna's palette, patient as a savage, while the house maid took charge of the children, and the drawing room went undusted.
While Edna worked she sometimes sang low the little air, "Ah! si tu savais!"
It moved her with recollections.
She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day.
She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in.
A gate or door opening upon the street was locked.
It was Victor who opened the gate for her.
A black woman, wiping her hands upon her apron, was close at his heels.
Before she saw them Edna could hear them in altercation, the woman-plainly an anomaly-claiming the right to be allowed to perform her duties, one of which was to answer the bell.
Victor was surprised and delighted to see mrs Pontellier, and he made no attempt to conceal either his astonishment or his delight.
Whatever it was, the rebuke was convincing, for the woman dropped her hoe and went mumbling into the house.
It was very pleasant there on the side porch, where there were chairs, a wicker lounge, and a small table.
She seated herself, for she was tired from her long tramp; and she began to rock gently and smooth out the folds of her silk parasol.
Victor drew up his chair beside her.
He wouldn't want his mother to know, and he began to talk in a whisper.
He was scintillant with recollections.
Of course, he couldn't think of telling mrs Pontellier all about it, she being a woman and not comprehending such things.
Oh! but she was a beauty!
Certainly he smiled back, and went up and talked to her.
mrs Pontellier did not know him if she supposed he was one to let an opportunity like that escape him.
She must have betrayed in her look some degree of interest or entertainment.
Her eyes beamed an effusive welcome.
A CAPE HORN GALE.
We stood on to the southward and westward during the remainder of that day, the wind continuing still to freshen, and the sea getting up with most fearful rapidity.
Bob stood by my side watching the wild scene I have so feebly described, and as the sun disappeared, he turned to me and remarked:
"My eyes, Harry! what d'ye think of that, lad?
This floating anchor I will describe for the benefit of those who may not have seen such a thing, for it is a most useful affair, and no small craft should undertake a long cruise without one.
As soon as the bars were spread open, and the swifter passed and set up, a square sheet of the stoutest canvas, painted, was spread over them, the edges laced to the swifter with a stout lacing, and the crowfoot toggled through the intermediate holes in the bars and corresponding holes in the canvas.
I may as well state here, that for the economisation of space the buoy for floating out anchor was an india rubber ball, made of the same materials as an ordinary air cushion, and distended in the same way. This was enclosed in a strong net of three strand sinnet, which net was attached to the buoy rope.
Now, what lubber comes here with his eyes sealed up instead of looking before him?
Jump up, Harry; quick, boy! we are in a mess here, and no mistake.
She was not a large vessel; about two hundred tons or thereabouts, apparently; painted all black down to her copper, excepting a narrow red ribbon which marked the line of her sheer.
She was hove to on the port tack under a storm staysail, and her topgallant masts were down on deck.
"Honest going merchant ships ain't so plaguy careful of their spars as that chap-leastways, not such small fry as he is.
"Never fear," returned Bob confidently.
"Our bit of a windlass and the mast breaks the force of it before it reaches the skylight.
But he was quite of my opinion.
"Well," said I, "I trust we shall not fall in with him again.
It looked half inclined to break away two or three times during the morning; but as mid day approached it became as bad as ever, and I had the vexation of seeing noon pass by without so much as a momentary glimpse of the sun
There was nothing in sight, and with this I was obliged to rest satisfied.
We had found the day dreadfully tedious, cooped up as we were in our low cabin, and a meal was a most welcome break in the monotony.
We sat long over this one, therefore, prolonging it to its utmost extent; and when it was over, we both turned to and cleared up the wreck.
"Look here, Harry; what d'ye think of this?"
She was fearfully close, but appeared to be at the moment sheering away from us.
She rolled completely bottom upwards, and then disappeared.
About four p.m.
THE GENIAL IDIOT DISCUSSES THE MUSIC CURE
BY john KENDRICK BANGS
There's nothing but one quinine pill and a soda mint drop in it, and if there's anything in the music cure I don't think I'll have it filled again.
"You ought to submit your tongue to some scientific student of dynamics.
"I will consider your suggestion," replied the Idiot.
"And as for the music cure I don't know anything about it.
What do you mean by the music cure?"
"You'll have to go to somebody else for the information," said the Doctor.
"I have seen a reference to it somewhere," put in mr Whitechoker, coming to the Idiot's rescue.
"For example?" said the Doctor.
Suddenly somebody presented me with a couple of tickets for a performance of Parsifal and I went.
I rubbed my eyes and looked about me.
It was true, the great auditorium was empty, and was gradually darkening.
I put on my hat and walked out refreshed, having slept from five twenty until twelve, or six hours and forty minutes, straight.
That was one instance.
I didn't wake up this time until nine o'clock the next day, the rest of the party having gone off without awakening me, as a sort of joke.
"The Wagner habit is a terrible thing to acquire, mr Idiot."
"That may be," said the Idiot.
He had spent the day down at Asbury Park and had eaten not wisely but too copiously.
A counter pain set in immediately.
Scientific experiment will demonstrate before long what composition will cure specific ills.
If a baby has whooping cough, an anxious mother, instead of ringing up the Doctor, will go to the piano and give the child a dose of Hiawatha.
People suffering from sleeplessness can dose themselves back to normal conditions again with Wagner the way I did.
Nothing in it?
"No," said the Idiot.
This alone will serve to popularize sickness and instead of being driven out of business their trade will pick up."
"And the Doctor?
And the Doctor's gig and all the appurtenances of his profession-what becomes of them?" demanded the Doctor.
"And why, pray?" asked the Doctor.
"Because there are no more drugs must the physician walk?"
"Not at all," said the Idiot.
Section three
In the evening after dinner dr Martineau sought, rather unsuccessfully, to go on with the analysis of Sir Richmond.
But Sir Richmond was evidently a creature of moods.
Either he regretted the extent of his confidences or the slight irrational irritation that he felt at waiting for his car affected his attitude towards his companion, or dr Martineau's tentatives were ill chosen.
He was inclined to think that she and Sir Richmond were unduly obsessed by the idea that they had to stick together because of the child, because of the look of the thing and so forth, and that really each might be struggling against a very strong impulse indeed to break off the affair. It seemed evident to the doctor that they jarred upon and annoyed each other extremely.
Accordingly he framed his enquiries so as to make the revelation of a latent antipathy as easy as possible.
He made several not very well devised beginnings.
At the fifth Sir Richmond was suddenly conclusive.
"It's no use," he said, "I can't fiddle about any more with my motives to day."
An awkward silence followed.
On reflection Sir Richmond seemed to realize that this sentence needed some apology.
"I admit," he said, "that this expedition has already been a wonderfully good thing for me. These confessions have made me look into all sorts of things-squarely. But-I'm not used to talking about myself or even thinking directly about myself.
What I say, I afterwards find disconcerting to recall. I want to alter it.
I can feel myself wallowing into a mess of modifications and qualifications."
"Yes, but-"
"I want a rest anyhow...."
There was nothing for dr Martineau to say to that.
The two gentlemen smoked for some time in a slightly uncomfortable silence.
dr Martineau cleared his throat twice and lit a second cigar. They then agreed to admire the bridge and think well of Maidenhead.
Sir Richmond communicated hopeful news about his car, which was to arrive the next morning before ten-he'd just ring the fellow up presently to make sure-and dr Martineau retired early and went rather thoughtfully to bed.
The spate of Sir Richmond's confidences, it was evident, was over.
Section four
They lunched in Marlborough and went on in the afternoon to Silbury Hill, that British pyramid, the largest artificial mound in Europe.
They left the car by the roadside and clambered to the top and were very learned and inconclusive about the exact purpose of this vast heap of chalk and earth, this heap that men had made before the temples at Karnak were built or Babylon had a name.
There are drawings of Avebury before these things arose there, when it was a lonely wonder on the plain, but for the most part the destruction was already done before the MAYFLOWER sailed.
Around this lonely place rise the Downs, now bare sheep pastures, in broad undulations, with a wart like barrow here and there, and from it radiate, creeping up to gain and hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways of that forgotten world.
These trackways, these green roads of England, these roads already disused when the romans made their highway past Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced for scores of miles through the land, running to Salisbury and the English Channel, eastward to the crossing at the Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the Severn, and southwestward into Devon and Cornwall.
The doctor and Sir Richmond walked round the walls, surveyed the shadow cast by Silbury upon the river flats, strolled up the down to the northward to get a general view of the village, had tea and smoked round the walls again in the warm April sunset.
Both were inclined to find fault with the archaeological work that had been done on the place.
"Clumsy treasure hunting," Sir Richmond said.
These walls of earth ought to tell what these people ate, what clothes they wore, what woods they used.
Was this a sheep land then as it is now, or a cattle land?
Were these hills covered by forests?
I don't know.
These archaeologists don't know.
Or if they do they haven't told me, which is just as bad.
I don't believe they know.
But suppose one day someone were to find a potsherd here from early Knossos, or a fragment of glass from Pepi's Egypt."
The place had stirred up his imagination.
The doctor had not realized before the boldness and liveliness of his companion's mind.
These people must have done an enormous lot with wood.
This use of stones here was a freak.
It was the very strangeness of stones here that had made them into sacred things.
One thought too much of the stones of the Stone Age.
Who would carve these lumps of quartzite when one could carve good oak?
Or beech-a most carvable wood. Especially when one's sharpest chisel was a flint.
"It's wood we ought to look for," said Sir Richmond.
"A peat bog here, even a few feet of clay, might have pickled some precious memoranda....
No such luck.... Now in Glastonbury marshes one found the life of the early iron age-half way to our own times-quite beautifully pickled."
Though they wrestled mightily with the problem, neither Sir Richmond nor the doctor could throw a gleam of light upon the riddle why the ditch was inside and not outside the great wall.
"And what was our Mind like in those days?" said Sir Richmond.
"That, I suppose, is what interests you.
The doctor pursed his lips.
"None," he delivered judicially.
"If one were able to recall one's childhood-at the age of about twelve or thirteen-when the artistic impulse so often goes into abeyance and one begins to think in a troubled, monstrous way about God and Hell, one might get something like the mind of this place."
"Thirteen.
You put them at that already?...
These people, you think, were religious?"
"Intensely.
In that personal way that gives death a nightmare terror. And as for the fading of the artistic impulse, they've left not a trace of the paintings and drawings and scratchings of the Old Stone people who came before them."
"Adults with the minds of thirteen year old children.
Thirteen year old children with the strength of adults-and no one to slap them or tell them not to....
After all, they probably only thought of death now and then.
And they never thought of fuel.
They supposed there was no end to that.
So they used up their woods and kept goats to nibble and kill the new undergrowth.
DID these people have goats?"
"I don't know," said the doctor.
"So little is known."
"Very like children they must have been.
The same unending days.
When I was a child I believed that my father's garden had been there for ever....
"This is very like trying to remember some game one played when one was a child.
"The life we lived here," said the doctor, "has left its traces in traditions, in mental predispositions, in still unanalyzed fundamental ideas."
"Archaeology is very like remembering," said Sir Richmond.
We sowed our corn in blood here.
We had strange fancies about the stars.
Those we brought with us out of the south where the stars are brighter.
And what like were those wooden gods of ours?
I don't remember....
But I could easily persuade myself that I had been here before."
And then I suppose that this ditch won't be the riddle it is now."
"Life didn't seem so complicated then," Sir Richmond mused.
"Our muddles were unconscious.
We drifted from mood to mood and forgot.
There was more sunshine then, more laughter perhaps, and blacker despair.
Despair like the despair of children that can weep itself to sleep....
It's over....
Was it battle and massacre that ended that long afternoon here? Or did the woods catch fire some exceptionally dry summer, leaving black hills and famine?
Or did strange men bring a sickness-measles, perhaps, or the black death?
Or was it cattle pest?
I can't remember...."
Sir Richmond turned about.
"I would like to dig up the bottom of this ditch here foot by foot-and dry the stuff and sift it-very carefully....
"Let it rest then," said the doctor generously.
"The healing touch of history."
"And for the first time my damned Committee has mattered scarcely a rap."
Sir Richmond stretched himself in his chair and blinked cheerfully at his cigar smoke.
That I needn't bother about further....
So far as that goes, I think we have done all that there is to be done."
"I shouldn't say that-quite-yet," said the doctor.
I'm not an overlaid sort of person.
What you get is a quite open and recognized discord of two sets of motives."
The doctor considered.
Generally you are doing what you want to do-overdoing, in fact, what you want to do and getting simply tired."
"Yes," said the doctor.
Practically open.
Your problems are problems of conscious conduct."
"As I said."
Sir Richmond did not answer that....
"This pilgrimage of ours," he said, presently, "has made for magnanimity.
This day particularly has been a good day.
I stood with my feet upon the Stone Age and saw myself four thousand years away, and all my distresses as very little incidents in that perspective.
There is no past any longer, there is no future, there is only the rankling dispute.
At last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding, desperately fighting, pin point of SELF....
One goes back to one's home unable to recover. Fighting it over again.
All night sometimes....
I get up and walk about the room and curse....
Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame of mind to Westminster?"
"But the dust chokes me," said Sir Richmond.
But he did not open it.
"I do not think that I shall stir up my motives any more for a time.
"I can prescribe nothing better," said dr Martineau.
"I don't want to think of them," said Sir Richmond.
"Let me get right away from everything.
Until my skin has grown again."
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE
Section one
Sir Richmond was frankly disappointed.
"It looks," Sir Richmond said, "as though some old giantess had left a discarded set of teeth on the hillside." Far more impressive than Stonehenge itself were the barrows that capped the neighbouring crests.
At the side of the road stood a travel stained middle class automobile, with a miscellany of dusty luggage, rugs and luncheon things therein-a family automobile with father no doubt at the wheel.
Sir Richmond left his own trim coupe at its tail.
"She keeps on looking at it," said the small boy.
"You won't SEE Stonehenge every day, young man," said the custodian, a little piqued.
"It's only an old beach," said the small boy, with extreme conviction. "It's rocks like the seaside.
The two gentlemen lingered at the turnstile for a moment or so to watch his proceedings.
"Modern child," said Sir Richmond.
"Old stones are just old stones to him.
But motor cars are gods."
"You can hardly expect him to understand-at his age," said the custodian, jealous for the honor of Stonehenge....
"Reminds me of Martin's little girl," said Sir Richmond, as he and dr Martineau went on towards the circle.
She was a black haired, sun burnt individual and she stood with her arms akimbo, quite frankly amused at the disappearance of Master Anthony, and offering no sort of help for his recovery.
"If you are looking for a small, resolute boy of six," said Sir Richmond, addressing himself to the lady on the rock rather than to the angry parent below, "he's perfectly safe and happy.
'Stonehenge,' he says, 'is no good.' So he's gone back to clean the lamps of your car."
So THAT'S it!" said Papa.
"Winnie, go and tell Price he's gone back to the car....
The excitement about Master Anthony collapsed.
"We were discussing the age of this old place," she said, smiling in the frankest and friendliest way.
"How old do YOU think it is?"
The father of Anthony intervened, also with a shadow of controversy in his manner.
Before chronology existed....
But she insists on dates."
Sir Richmond sought a recognizable datum.
"Ah!" said the young lady, as who should say, 'This man at least talks sense.'
"I don't SEE the place," said the young lady on the stone.
"I can't imagine how they did it up-not one bit."
"It's just the bones of a place.
They hung things round it.
They draped it."
"But what things?" asked Sir Richmond.
"Oh! they had things all right.
Skins perhaps.
Mats of rushes.
Bast cloth.
Fibre of all sorts.
Wadded stuff."
It's really a delightful idea;" said the father of the family, enjoying it.
"It's quite a possible one," said Sir Richmond.
"Or they may have used wicker," the young lady went on, undismayed.
She seemed to concede a point.
"Wicker IS likelier."
"In which case it wouldn't have stood out.
It doesn't stand out so very much even now."
"You came to it through a grove," said the young lady, eagerly picking up the idea.
"Probably beech," said Sir Richmond.
"Which may have pointed to the midsummer sunrise," said dr Martineau, unheeded.
"Well," said the young lady, "I guess there was some sort of show here anyhow.
I guess this was covered in all right.
A dark hunched old place in a wood.
Beech stems, smooth, like pillars.
The torches were put out and the priests did their mysteries.
Until dawn broke.
That is how they worked it."
"But even you can't tell what the show was, v v" said the lady in grey, who was standing now at dr Martineau's elbow.
"Something horrid," said Anthony's younger sister to her elder in a stage whisper.
"SQUEALS!...."
Sir Richmond was evidently prepared to confirm it.
With a queer little twinge of infringed proprietorship, the doctor saw Sir Richmond step up on the prostrate megalith and stand beside her, the better to appreciate her point of view.
He smiled down at her.
"Now why do you think they came in THERE?" he asked.
ON THE TOW PATH
Half an hour later, when Mother De Smet went back to get some potatoes for the soup, she found Jan proudly steering the boat by himself.
"Oh, my soul!" she cried in astonishment.
"What a clever boy you must be to learn so quickly to handle the tiller.
"Here!" boomed a loud voice behind her, and Father De Smet's head appeared above a barrel on the other side of the deck.
If the Germans see these potatoes, they'll never let us get them to Antwerp," he shouted.
You mustn't talk so loud," whispered Mother De Smet.
"You roar like a foghorn on a dark night.
Netteke, the mule, came to a sudden stop, and Mother De Smet sat down equally suddenly on a coil of rope.
Her potatoes spilled over the deck, while a wail from the front of the boat announced that one of the babies had bumped, too.
His father threw him a pole which was kept for such emergencies, and they both pushed.
"Never mind, son," said Mother De Smet kindly, when she came back for her potatoes and saw his downcast face.
The boat gave a little lurch toward the middle of the stream.
"Look alive there, Mate!" sang out Father De Smet.
"Hard aport with the tiller!
Head her out into the stream!"
For the most part, however, the countryside seemed so quiet and peaceful that it was hard to believe that such dreadful things were going on all about them.
He hailed his father.
"Would you like to drive the mule awhile?" he asked.
"Have you ever driven a mule before?" Father De Smet asked again.
"Not a mule, exactly," Jail replied, "but I drove old Pier up from the field with a load of wheat all by myself.
"May I go, too?" asked Marie timidly of Father De Smet as he was about to draw in the plank.
"The babies are both asleep and I have nothing to do."
It was level, open country all about them, dotted here and there with farmhouses, and in the distance the spire of a village church rose above the clustering houses and pointed to the sky.
Go ahead," said Father De Smet.
"Only don't get too near Netteke's hind legs.
I've been measuring by that farmhouse across the river for a long time, and she hasn't crawled up to it yet!
"She'll wake up fast enough when it's time to eat, and so will you," said Marie, with profound wisdom.
Marie seized Jan's arm.
"You'll do nothing of the kind!" she cried.
"Father De Smet told me especially to keep away from Netteke's hind legs."
In vain!
Netteke would not move.
But Netteke was really offended.
She made no effort to get it.
"What is the matter?" he shouted.
"Netteke has stopped.
I think she's run down!" Marie called back.
Hold it in front of her nose."
"I have," answered Marie, "but she won't even look at it."
"Then it's no use," said Father De Smet mournfully.
"She's balked and that is all there is to it.
When she has made up her mind she is as difficult to persuade as a setting hen."
"Oh, dear!" said she; "I hoped we should get to the other side of the line before dark, but if Netteke's set, she's set, and we must just make the best of it.
It's lucky it's dinner time.
We'll eat, and maybe by the time we are through she'll be willing to start." Father De Smet tossed a bucket on to the grass.
She kept her ears back and would not touch the water.
"All right, then, Crosspatch," said Jan. Leaving the pail in front of her, he went back to the boat.
The gangplank was put out, and he and Marie went on board.
"Now, why couldn't you have done that long ago, you addlepated old fool," he said mildly to Netteke.
"You have made no end of trouble for us, and gained nothing for yourself!
We may even have to spend the night in dangerous territory, and all because you're just as mulish as, as a mule," he finished helplessly.
"There isn't a thing," answered his father.
"Well," answered Joseph, "there are a whole lot of other things beside balky mules in this world that I wish had never been made.
There are spiders, and rats, and Germans.
They are all pests.
Father De Smet became serious at once.
"Son," he said sternly, "don't ever let me hear you say such a thing again.
There are spiders, and rats, and balky mules, and Germans, and it doesn't do a bit of good to waste words fussing because they are here.
The thing to do is to deal with them!"
Father De Smet was so much in earnest that he boomed these words out in quite a loud voice.
Joseph seized his hand.
Father De Smet looked up.
There, standing right in front of them in the tow path, was a German soldier!
But Netteke was now just as much bent upon going as she had been before upon standing still.
But Netteke had had no military training, and she simply kept on.
In one more step she would have come down upon the soldier's toes, if he had not moved aside just in time.
He was very angry.
"Why didn't you stop your miserable old mule when I told you to?" he said to Father De Smet.
"It's a balky mule," replied Father De Smet mildly, "and very obstinate."
"Indeed!" sneered the soldier; "then, I suppose you have named him Albert after your pig headed King!"
"No," answered Father De Smet, "I think too much of my King to name my mule after him."
"No," Father De Smet called back, "I didn't name her after the Kaiser. I think too much of my mule!"
"I'll make you pay well for your impudence!" he shouted.
"Very likely," muttered Father De Smet under his breath.
He was now more than ever anxious to get beyond the German lines before dark, but as the afternoon passed it became certain that they would not be able to do it.
"I think we shall have to stop soon and feed the mule or she will be too tired to get us across the line at all.
I believe we should save time by stopping for supper.
Besides, I want to send over there," she pointed to a farmhouse not a great distance from the river, "and get some milk and eggs."
"Very well," said her husband; "we'll stop under that bunch of willows."
When Father De Smet returned, supper was nearly ready.
Father De Smet was so startled that he dropped the eggs.
"Ha!
I told you we should meet again!" shouted the soldier to Father De Smet.
"And it was certainly thoughtful of you to provide for our entertainment.
Comrades, fall to!"
The instant she heard the gruff voice she had dropped her spoon, and, seizing a baby under each arm, had fled up the gangplank on to the boat.
"What do you want here?" he said.
"Some supper first," said the soldier gayly, helping himself to some onions and passing the pan to his friends.
"Then, perhaps, a few supplies for our brave army.
There is no hurry.
After supper will do; but first we'll drink a health to the Kaiser, and since you are host here, you shall propose it!"
He pointed to the pail of milk which Father De Smet still held.
Father De Smet looked them in the face and said not a word.
The river had now quite a current, which helped them, and while the soldiers were still having their joke with Father De Smet the boat moved quietly out of sight.
She was beside herself with anxiety.
Meanwhile his captors were busy with Father De Smet.
"Come!
Drink to the Kaiser!" shouted the first soldier, "or we'll feed you to the fishes!
We want our supper, and you delay us." Still Father De Smet said nothing.
But he did not finish the sentence.
From an unexpected quarter a shot rang out.
One of his companions gave a howl and fell to the ground.
Still no one appeared at whom the Germans could direct their fire.
Father De Smet fled, too.
"Boys!" shouted Father De Smet.
"Get aboard!
On went the boat at Netteke's best speed, which seemed no better than a snail's pace to the fleeing family.
It was after ten o'clock at night when the "Old Woman" at last approached the twinkling lights of Antwerp, and they knew that, for the time being at least, they were safe.
Here, in a suburb of the city, Father De Smet decided to dock for the night.
A distant clock struck eleven as the hungry but thankful family gathered upon the deck of the "Old Woman" to eat a meager supper of bread and cheese with only the moon to light their repast.
"They overreached themselves," he said.
"You were brave boys!
If you had not started the boat when you did, it is quite likely they might have got me, after all, and the potatoes too.
I am proud of you."
"Neither did I," answered his father; "and neither did the Germans for that matter.
"Oh," cried Mother De Smet, "it was as if the good God himself intervened to save you!"
But the smell of the onions was too much for him!
If he hadn't been greedy, he might have carried out his plan, but he wanted our potatoes and our supper too; and so he got neither!" he chuckled.
"And neither did the Kaiser get a toast from me!
Instead, he got a salute from the Belgians." He crossed himself reverently. "Thank God for our soldiers," he said, and Mother De Smet, weeping softly, murmured a devout "Amen."
CHAPTER fourteen.
HOW DEW IS FORMED.
Reader, did you ever live in the country?
If not, you have missed a picture that otherwise would have been hung on the walls of your memory, that no one could rob you of.
Everyone has noticed that at certain times in the year the grass becomes wet in the evening and grows more so till the sun rises the next day and dispels the moisture, and this when no cloud is seen.
It was as familiar to the ancients as it is to us, and yet it is only about three quarters of a century since the cause of it has been understood.
In former times some scientists supposed that it was a fine rain that fell from the higher regions of the atmosphere. Others supposed it to be an emanation from the earth, while still others supposed it was an exudation from the stars.
twenty).
It always forms when the conditions are right, summer and winter.
In cold weather we call it frost.
It has been stated in a former chapter on evaporation that the capacity of the air for holding moisture in a transparent form depends upon its temperature.
If it is sixty degrees Fahrenheit the air will retain six grains of transparent moisture to the square foot of air, while at eighty degrees it will contain nearly eleven grains.
When the air is charged with this vapor to the point of saturation (which point varies with the temperature) a slight depression of the temperature is sufficient to condense this vapor into cloud or drops of water.
Between eighteen twelve and eighteen fourteen dr Wells made a series of experiments with flocks of cotton wool.
He weighed out pieces of equal weight and attached a number of them to the upper side of a board and as many more to the lower side, and exposed it to the night air under varying conditions.
One experiment was made with a board four feet from the earth, so that half of the bunches of cotton faced the ground and the other half the sky.
He found upon weighing these after a night's exposure under a clear sky that the cotton wool on top of the board had gained fourteen grains in weight from the moisture, or dew, that had formed upon it, while the same amount of cotton on the under side of the board had only increased four grains.
He tried further experiments by making little paper houses, or boxes, to cover a certain portion of grass or vegetation.
It has been determined that substances like grass and green leaves of all kinds, hay and straw, while they are poor conductors of heat, are excellent radiators.
In another chapter we have referred to this quality of straw, that is taken advantage of by the inhabitants of hot countries in the manufacture of ice and in our own land for storing it.
The covering acts as a screen, which prevents the heat from radiating to the dew point.
From what has gone before it will be seen that if the atmosphere is not charged with moisture up to the point of saturation it will require a greater amount of depression of temperature to cause condensation, and this is why we usually have heavier dews in June when the air is more highly charged with moisture than we do in August when it is dry.
If, however, it is cloudy or the wind is blowing there is rarely any formation of dew.
It is a curious fact that often there will be a heavier dew under the blaze of a full moon on a clear night than at any other time.
The moon has no screens about it of any kind to obstruct the free radiation of heat.
For half the month, say, the sun is shining continuously upon all or a part of it.
The moon does not revolve upon its own axis like the earth, therefore the same side or a portion of it is exposed to the sun for fourteen days.
There are but few days in summer when there is not a haze in the atmosphere, although we call the sky clear, which intensifies the light and gives everything a warmer tone. The heat coming from a full moon on a clear night is absorbed in causing the aqueous vapors that are partly condensed in the higher regions of the atmosphere, to be reabsorbed into transparent vapor.
This clears away the heat screen in the atmosphere and allows radiation to go on more rapidly at the earth's surface, and thus cools it to a greater extent when the moon is shining brightly than when it is dark and in the shadow of the earth.
Sometimes the difference is very marked, amounting to as much as twenty or thirty degrees.
If under these conditions a cloud floats overhead, forming a heat screen, its presence will be readily noticed by a rise in the thermometer.
Radiation into the upper regions of the atmosphere is checked, which causes a sudden rise in the temperature near the surface of the earth.
Frost-which of course is but frozen dew-at this season of the year will form on a still autumn night, although the atmosphere at some distance above the ground is some degrees above the freezing point.
It will thus be seen that dew performs an important part in supporting vegetation.
When it is condensed at the surface of the earth we have the phenomenon of frost, but when condensed in the upper regions of the atmosphere we have that of snow.
In some cases the blooming flowers were in actual contact with the snow.
CHAPTER one
Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.
This belief was not without its grounds.
The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation.
Indeed this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world-I had almost said of mankind.
The richest soils were always most subject to this change of masters; such as the district now called Thessaly, Boeotia, most of the Peloponnese, Arcadia excepted, and the most fertile parts of the rest of Hellas.
The goodness of the land favoured the aggrandizement of particular individuals, and thus created faction which proved a fertile source of ruin.
Accordingly Attica, from the poverty of its soil enjoying from a very remote period freedom from faction, never changed its inhabitants.
And here is no inconsiderable exemplification of my assertion that the migrations were the cause of there being no correspondent growth in other parts.
The most powerful victims of war or faction from the rest of Hellas took refuge with the Athenians as a safe retreat; and at an early period, becoming naturalized, swelled the already large population of the city to such a height that Attica became at last too small to hold them, and they had to send out colonies to Ionia.
There is also another circumstance that contributes not a little to my conviction of the weakness of ancient times.
The best proof of this is furnished by Homer.
Indeed, they could not unite for this expedition till they had gained increased familiarity with the sea.
He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent the first colonies, expelling the Carians and appointing his own sons governors; and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use.
They would fall upon a town unprotected by walls, and consisting of a mere collection of villages, and would plunder it; indeed, this came to be the main source of their livelihood, no disgrace being yet attached to such an achievement, but even some glory.
An illustration of this is furnished by the honour with which some of the inhabitants of the continent still regard a successful marauder, and by the question we find the old poets everywhere representing the people as asking of voyagers-"Are they pirates?"--as if those who are asked the question would have no idea of disclaiming the imputation, or their interrogators of reproaching them for it.
And the fact that the people in these parts of Hellas are still living in the old way points to a time when the same mode of life was once equally common to all.
Formerly, even in the Olympic contests, the athletes who contended wore belts across their middles; and it is but a few years since that the practice ceased.
To this day among some of the barbarians, especially in Asia, when prizes for boxing and wrestling are offered, belts are worn by the combatants.
And there are many other points in which a likeness might be shown between the life of the Hellenic world of old and the barbarian of to day.
With respect to their towns, later on, at an era of increased facilities of navigation and a greater supply of capital, we find the shores becoming the site of walled towns, and the isthmuses being occupied for the purposes of commerce and defence against a neighbour.
But the old towns, on account of the great prevalence of piracy, were built away from the sea, whether on the islands or the continent, and still remain in their old sites.
For the pirates used to plunder one another, and indeed all coast populations, whether seafaring or not.
The islanders, too, were great pirates.
These islanders were Carians and Phoenicians, by whom most of the islands were colonized, as was proved by the following fact.
The coast population now began to apply themselves more closely to the acquisition of wealth, and their life became more settled; some even began to build themselves walls on the strength of their newly acquired riches.
For the love of gain would reconcile the weaker to the dominion of the stronger, and the possession of capital enabled the more powerful to reduce the smaller towns to subjection.
And it was at a somewhat later stage of this development that they went on the expedition against Troy.
What enabled Agamemnon to raise the armament was more, in my opinion, his superiority in strength, than the oaths of Tyndareus, which bound the suitors to follow him.
And so the power of the descendants of Pelops came to be greater than that of the descendants of Perseus.
To all this Agamemnon succeeded.
Besides, in his account of the transmission of the sceptre, he calls him
Of many an isle, and of all Argos king.
Now Agamemnon's was a continental power; and he could not have been master of any except the adjacent islands (and these would not be many), but through the possession of a fleet.
And from this expedition we may infer the character of earlier enterprises.
By this, I conceive, he meant to convey the maximum and the minimum complement: at any rate, he does not specify the amount of any others in his catalogue of the ships.
That they were all rowers as well as warriors we see from his account of the ships of Philoctetes, in which all the men at the oar are bowmen.
Difficulty of subsistence made the invaders reduce the numbers of the army to a point at which it might live on the country during the prosecution of the war.
Even after the victory they obtained on their arrival-and a victory there must have been, or the fortifications of the naval camp could never have been built-there is no indication of their whole force having been employed; on the contrary, they seem to have turned to cultivation of the Chersonese and to piracy from want of supplies.
This was what really enabled the Trojans to keep the field for ten years against them; the dispersion of the enemy making them always a match for the detachment left behind.
If they had brought plenty of supplies with them, and had persevered in the war without scattering for piracy and agriculture, they would have easily defeated the Trojans in the field, since they could hold their own against them with the division on service.
In short, if they had stuck to the siege, the capture of Troy would have cost them less time and less trouble.
The late return of the Hellenes from Ilium caused many revolutions, and factions ensued almost everywhere; and it was the citizens thus driven into exile who founded the cities.
Sixty years after the capture of Ilium, the modern Boeotians were driven out of Arne by the Thessalians, and settled in the present Boeotia, the former Cadmeis; though there was a division of them there before, some of whom joined the expedition to Ilium.
All these places were founded subsequently to the war with Troy.
But as the power of Hellas grew, and the acquisition of wealth became more an object, the revenues of the states increasing, tyrannies were by their means established almost everywhere-the old form of government being hereditary monarchy with definite prerogatives-and Hellas began to fit out fleets and apply herself more closely to the sea.
About this time also the Phocaeans, while they were founding Marseilles, defeated the Carthaginians in a sea fight.
These were the most powerful navies.
For after these there were no navies of any account in Hellas till the expedition of Xerxes; Aegina, Athens, and others may have possessed a few vessels, but they were principally fifty oars.
The navies, then, of the Hellenes during the period we have traversed were what I have described.
All their insignificance did not prevent their being an element of the greatest power to those who cultivated them, alike in revenue and in dominion.
Various, too, were the obstacles which the national growth encountered in various localities.
All this is only true of the mother country, for in Sicily they attained to very great power.
In the face of this great danger, the command of the confederate Hellenes was assumed by the Lacedaemonians in virtue of their superior power; and the Athenians, having made up their minds to abandon their city, broke up their homes, threw themselves into their ships, and became a naval people.
This coalition, after repulsing the barbarian, soon afterwards split into two sections, which included the Hellenes who had revolted from the King, as well as those who had aided him in the war.
For a short time the league held together, till the Lacedaemonians and Athenians quarrelled and made war upon each other with their allies, a duel into which all the Hellenes sooner or later were drawn, though some might at first remain neutral.
So that the whole period from the Median war to this, with some peaceful intervals, was spent by each power in war, either with its rival, or with its own revolted allies, and consequently afforded them constant practice in military matters, and that experience which is learnt in the school of danger.
The policy of Lacedaemon was not to exact tribute from her allies, but merely to secure their subservience to her interests by establishing oligarchies among them; Athens, on the contrary, had by degrees deprived hers of their ships, and imposed instead contributions in money on all except Chios and Lesbos.
Both found their resources for this war separately to exceed the sum of their strength when the alliance flourished intact.
Having now given the result of my inquiries into early times, I grant that there will be a difficulty in believing every particular detail. The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever.
There are many other unfounded ideas current among the rest of the Hellenes, even on matters of contemporary history, which have not been obscured by time.
So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.
Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth's expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend.
And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible.
My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other.
The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.
In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.
Old stories of occurrences handed down by tradition, but scantily confirmed by experience, suddenly ceased to be incredible; there were earthquakes of unparalleled extent and violence; eclipses of the sun occurred with a frequency unrecorded in previous history; there were great droughts in sundry places and consequent famines, and that most calamitous and awfully fatal visitation, the plague.
The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight.
But the siege of Potidaea put an end to her inaction; she had men inside it: besides, she feared for the place.
We are at last assembled.
The Mede, we ourselves know, had time to come from the ends of the earth to Peloponnese, without any force of yours worthy of the name advancing to meet him.
But this was a distant enemy.
The Athenians are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when forced to act you never go far enough.
The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions.
We need not refer to remote antiquity: there we could appeal to the voice of tradition, but not to the experience of our audience.
We assert, therefore, that we conferred on you quite as much as we received.
This at least is certain.
This you ought to spare as long as possible, and not make them desperate, and so increase the difficulty of dealing with them.
For if while still unprepared, hurried away by the complaints of our allies, we are induced to lay it waste, have a care that we do not bring deep disgrace and deep perplexity upon Peloponnese.
"And the slowness and procrastination, the parts of our character that are most assailed by their criticism, need not make you blush.
And yet if they behaved well against the Mede then, but ill towards us now, they deserve double punishment for having ceased to be good and for having become bad.
This decision of the assembly, judging that the treaty had been broken, was made in the fourteenth year of the thirty years' truce, which was entered into after the affair of Euboea.
The Strong Prince
All day long he drank till he was too stupid to attend to his business, and everything in the kingdom went to rack and ruin.
But one day an accident happened to him, and he was struck on the head by a falling bough, so that he fell from his horse and lay dead upon the ground.
His wife and son mourned his loss bitterly, for, in spite of his faults, he had always been kind to them.
When they had finished the queen said: 'My son, I am thirsty; fetch me some water.'
The prince got up at once and went to a brook which he heard gurgling near at hand.
The young man drew back with a start; but in a moment he climbed the tree, cutting the rope which held the sword, and carried the weapon to his mother.
This discovery put new life into the queen and her son, and they continued their walk through the forest.
But night was drawing on, and the darkness grew so thick that it seemed as if it could be cut with a knife.
At last with a great heave he moved it out of the road, and as it fell he knew it was a huge rock.
Hastily putting out the fire which burned brightly at the back, and bidding his mother come in and keep very still, the prince began to pace up and down, listening for the return of the robbers.
'This must be the place,' said a voice, which the prince took to be that of the captain.
'Yes, I feel the ditch before the entrance.
Someone forgot to pile up the fire before we left and it has burnt itself out!
But it is all right.
Let every man jump across, and as he does so cry out "Hop!
I am here." I will go last.
The man who stood nearest jumped across, but he had no time to give the call which the captain had ordered, for with one swift, silent stroke of the prince's sword, his head rolled into a corner.
Then the young man cried instead, 'Hop!
I am here.'
Being very cunning, however, he made no resistance, and rolled over as if he were as dead as the other men.
Still, the prince was no fool, and wondered if indeed he was as dead as he seemed to be; but the captain lay so stiff and stark, that at last he was taken in.
The prince went round all these and carefully locked them up, bidding his mother take care of the keys while he was hunting.
So the moment that her son had turned his back, she opened the doors of all the rooms, and peeped in, till she came to the one where the robbers lay.
But if the sight of the blood on the ground turned her faint, the sight of the robber captain walking up and down was a greater shock still.
She quickly turned the key in the lock, and ran back to the chamber she had slept in.
Soon after her son came in, bringing with him a large bear, which he had killed for supper.
As there was enough food to last them for many days, the prince did not hunt the next morning, but, instead, began to explore the castle.
He found that a secret way led from it into the forest; and following the path, he reached another castle larger and more splendid than the one belonging to the robbers.
He knocked at the door with his fist, and said that he wanted to enter; but the giant, to whom the castle belonged, only answered: 'I know who you are.
'I am no robber,' answered the prince.
'I am the son of a king, and I have killed all the band.
He waited a little, but the door remained shut as tightly as before. Then he just put his shoulder to it, and immediately the wood began to crack.
When the giant found that it was no use keeping it shut, he opened it, saying: 'I see you are a brave youth.
Let there be peace between us.'
Now the queen led a dull life all alone in the castle, and to amuse herself she paid visits to the robber captain, who flattered her till at last she agreed to marry him.
The robber, indeed, granted him his life, but took out both his eyes, which he thrust into the prince's hand, saying brutally:
'Here, you had better keep them!
Weeping, the blind youth felt his way to the giant's house, and told him all the story.
The prince drew them out of his pocket, and silently handed them to the giant, who washed them well, and then put them back in the prince's head.
'Tell the fox and the squirrel that they are to go with you, and fetch me back the prince's sword,' ordered he.
Directly they came to the window of the robber captain's room, the monkey sprang from the backs of the fox and the squirrel, and climbed in.
The room was empty, and the sword hanging from a nail.
He took it down, and buckling it round his waist, as he had seen the prince do, swung himself down again, and mounting on the backs of his two companions, hastened to his master.
The giant bade him give the sword to the prince, who girded himself with it, and returned with all speed to the castle.
'Come out, you rascal! come out, you villain!' cried he, 'and answer to me for the wrong you have done.
The noise he made brought the robber into the room.
In his turn he fell on his knees to beg for mercy, but it was too late.
As he had done to the prince, so the prince did to him, and, blinded, he was thrust forth, and fell down a deep hole, where he is to this day.
His mother the prince sent back to her father, and never would see her again.
After this he returned to the giant, and said to him:
'My friend, add one more kindness to those you have already heaped on me.
Give me your daughter as my wife.'
So they were married, and the wedding feast was so splendid that there was not a kingdom in the world that did not hear of it.
Shepherd Paul
Once upon a time a shepherd was taking his flock out to pasture, when he found a little baby lying in a meadow, left there by some wicked person, who thought it was too much trouble to look after it.
The shepherd was fond of children, so he took the baby home with him and gave it plenty of milk, and by the time the boy was fourteen he could tear up oaks as if they were weeds.
Then Paul, as the shepherd had called him, grew tired of living at home, and went out into the world to try his luck.
'Good morning, friend,' said Paul; 'upon my word, you must be a strong man!'
The man stopped his work and laughed.
'I am Tree Comber,' he answered proudly; 'and the greatest wish of my life is to wrestle with Shepherd Paul.'
However, in a moment he was up again, and catching hold of Paul, threw him so that he sank up to his waist; but then it was Paul's turn again, and this time the man was buried up to his neck.
'Very good,' answered Paul, and they continued their journey together.
By and by they reached a man who was grinding stones to powder in his hands, as if they had been nuts.
'Good morning,' said Paul politely; 'upon my word, you must be a strong fellow!'
'I am Stone Crusher,' answered the man, and the greatest wish of my life is to wrestle with Shepherd Paul.'
After a short time the man declared himself beaten, and begged leave to go with them; so they all three travelled together.
'I am Iron Kneader, and should like to fight Shepherd Paul,' answered he.
'We three will go and look for game,' he said, 'and you, Tree Comber, will stay behind and prepare a good supper for us.' So Tree Comber set to work to boil and roast, and when dinner was nearly ready, a little dwarf with a pointed beard strolled up to the place.
The dwarf took no notice, but waited patiently till the dinner was cooked, then suddenly throwing Tree Comber on the ground, he ate up the contents of the saucepan and vanished.
The fourth day Paul said to them: 'My friends, there must be some reason why your cooking has always been so bad, now you shall go and hunt and I will stay behind.' So they went off, amusing themselves by thinking what was in store for Paul.
He set to work at once, and had just got all his vegetables simmering in the pot when the dwarf appeared as before, and asked to have some of the stew.
The hunters came back early, longing to see how Paul had got on, and, to their surprise, dinner was quite ready for them.
When we have finished supper I will show you what I have done with him!' But when they reached the place where Paul had left the dwarf, neither he nor the tree was to be seen, for the little fellow had pulled it up by the roots and run away, dragging it after him.
See! there is a basket that will do for me to sit in, and a cord to lower me with.
But when I pull the cord again, lose no time in drawing the basket up.'
And he stepped into the basket, which was lowered by his friends.
At last it touched the ground and he jumped out and looked about him.
As the door was open he walked in, but a lovely maiden met him and implored him to go back, for the owner of the castle was a dragon with six heads, who had stolen her from her home and brought her down to this underground spot.
But Paul refused to listen to all her entreaties, and declared that he was not afraid of the dragon, and did not care how many heads he had; and he sat down calmly to wait for him.
'I am Shepherd Paul,' said the young man, 'and I have come to fight you, and as I am in a hurry we had better begin at once.'
'I am sure of my supper, but let us have a mouthful of something first, just to give us an appetite.'
Whereupon he began to eat some huge boulders as if they had been cakes, and when he had quite finished, he offered Paul one.
Paul was not fond of boulders, but he took a wooden knife and cut one in two, then he snatched up both halves in his hands and threw them with all his strength at the dragon, so that two out of the six heads were smashed in.
Then, seizing the monster by the neck, he dashed the remaining heads against the rock.
He did so, and it instantly changed into a golden apple, which he put in his pocket.
After that, they started on their search.
She was overjoyed at the sight of her sister and of Paul, and brought him a shirt belonging to the dragon, which made every one who wore it twice as strong as they were before.
Then Paul changed the castle into an apple, which he put into his pocket, and set out with the two girls in search of the third castle.
Her husband had eighteen heads, but when he quitted the lower regions for the surface of the earth, he left them all at home except one, which he changed for the head of a little dwarf, with a pointed beard.
But the thought of the eighteen heads warned him to be careful, and the third sister brought him a silk shirt which would make him ten times stronger than he was before.
He had scarcely put it on, when the whole castle began to shake violently, and the dragon flew up the steps into the hall.
'Well, my friend, so we meet once more!
Have you forgotten me?
I am Shepherd Paul, and I have come to wrestle with you, and to free your wife from your clutches.'
At this the dragon grew rather frightened, but in a moment had recollected his eighteen heads, and was bold again.
'Come on,' he cried, rearing himself up and preparing to dart all his heads at once at Paul.
But Paul jumped underneath, and gave an upward cut so that six of the heads went rolling down.
Then Paul changed the castle into an apple, and put it in his pocket.
At length, one day, he happened to pass the nest of a huge griffin, who had left her young ones all alone.
'By carrying me up to the earth,' answered Paul; and the griffin agreed, but first went to get some food to eat on the way, as it was a long journey.
'Now get on my back,' he said to Paul, 'and when I turn my head to the right, cut a slice off the bullock that hangs on that side, and put it in my mouth, and when I turn my head to the left, draw a cupful of wine from the cask that hangs on that side, and pour it down my throat.'
For three days and three nights Paul and the griffin flew upwards, and on the fourth morning it touched the ground just outside the city where Paul's friends had gone to live.
'You know what to expect,' Paul said to them quietly.
Off with you!' He next took the three apples out of his pocket and placed them all in the prettiest places he could find; after which he tapped them with his golden rod, and they became castles again. He gave two of the castles to the eldest sisters, and kept the other for himself and the youngest, whom he married, and there they are living still.
CHAPTER eleven
Summer was now over.
The winter following, the plague a second time attacked the Athenians; for although it had never entirely left them, still there had been a notable abatement in its ravages.
At the same time took place the numerous earthquakes in Athens, Euboea, and Boeotia, particularly at Orchomenus in the last named country.
The same winter the Athenians in Sicily and the Rhegians, with thirty ships, made an expedition against the islands of Aeolus; it being impossible to invade them in summer, owing to the want of water.
A similar inundation also occurred at Atalanta, the island off the Opuntian Locrian coast, carrying away part of the Athenian fort and wrecking one of two ships which were drawn up on the beach.
Without an earthquake I do not see how such an accident could happen.
This town afterwards also submitted upon the approach of the Athenians and their allies, and gave hostages and all other securities required.
The settlement effected, they fortified anew the city, now called Heraclea, distant about four miles and a half from Thermopylae and two miles and a quarter from the sea, and commenced building docks, closing the side towards Thermopylae just by the pass itself, in order that they might be easily defended.
The plan which they recommended was to attack first the Apodotians, next the Ophionians, and after these the Eurytanians, who are the largest tribe in Aetolia, and speak, as is said, a language exceedingly difficult to understand, and eat their flesh raw.
These once subdued, the rest would easily come in.
These were by far the best men in the city of Athens that fell during this war.
The same summer the Aetolians, who before the Athenian expedition had sent an embassy to Corinth and Lacedaemon, composed of Tolophus, an Ophionian, Boriades, an Eurytanian, and Tisander, an Apodotian, obtained that an army should be sent them against Naupactus, which had invited the Athenian invasion.
His preparations completed, Eurylochus lodged the hostages in Kytinium, in Doris, and advanced upon Naupactus through the country of the Locrians, taking upon his way Oeneon and Eupalium, two of their towns that refused to join him.
The winter ensuing, the Athenians in Sicily with their Hellenic allies, and such of the Sicel subjects or allies of Syracuse as had revolted from her and joined their army, marched against the Sicel town Inessa, the acropolis of which was held by the Syracusans, and after attacking it without being able to take it, retired.
The same winter the Athenians purified Delos, in compliance, it appears, with a certain oracle.
It had been purified before by Pisistratus the tyrant; not indeed the whole island, but as much of it as could be seen from the temple.
Nothing can be clearer on this point than the following verses of Homer, taken from a hymn to Apollo:
That there was also a poetical contest in which the Ionians went to contend, again is shown by the following, taken from the same hymn. After celebrating the Delian dance of the women, he ends his song of praise with these verses, in which he also alludes to himself:
On their part, the Ambraciots at Olpae sent a messenger to their own city, to beg them to come with their whole levy to their assistance, fearing that the army of Eurylochus might not be able to pass through the Acarnanians, and that they might themselves be obliged to fight single handed, or be unable to retreat, if they wished it, without danger.
Uniting here at daybreak, they sat down at the place called Metropolis, and encamped.
While the fleet off Olpae blockaded the hill from the sea, the Acarnanians and a few of the Amphilochians, most of whom were kept back by force by the Ambraciots, had already arrived at Argos, and were preparing to give battle to the enemy, having chosen Demosthenes to command the whole of the allied army in concert with their own generals.
Demosthenes led them near to Olpae and encamped, a great ravine separating the two armies. During five days they remained inactive; on the sixth both sides formed in order of battle.
CHAPTER thirteen
These last, however, gave them the slip by coming in the dark; and being informed by signals of the fact the Corinthians left half their number at Cenchreae, in case the Athenians should go against Crommyon, and marched in all haste to the rescue.
Battus, one of the two generals present at the action, went with a company to defend the village of Solygia, which was unfortified; Lycophron remaining to give battle with the rest.
The battle was an obstinate one, and fought throughout hand to hand.
After holding on for a long while without either giving way, the Athenians aided by their horse, of which the enemy had none, at length routed the Corinthians, who retired to the hill and, halting, remained quiet there, without coming down again.
After walling off this spot, the fleet sailed off home.
But if both should happen to have chosen the wrong moment for acting in this way, advice to make peace would not be unserviceable; and this, if we did but see it, is just what we stand most in need of at the present juncture.
"So far as regards the Athenians, such are the great advantages proved inherent in a wise policy.
And so it turned out.
Come in, Bates.
"no
Can't be.
But it isn't.
My father's pride had nothing of this about it.
It was that quiet, negative, courteous, inbred pride, which only the closest observation could detect; which no ordinary observers ever detected at all.
Who that observed him in communication with any of the farmers on any of his estates-who that saw the manner in which he lifted his hat, when he accidentally met any of those farmers' wives-who that noticed his hearty welcome to the man of the people, when that man happened to be a man of genius-would have thought him proud?
On such occasions as these, if he had any pride, it was impossible to detect it.
Here lay his fretful point.
Among a host of instances of this peculiar pride of his which I could cite, I remember one, characteristic enough to be taken as a sample of all the rest.
A merchant of enormous wealth, who had recently been raised to the peerage, was staying at one of our country houses.
His daughter, my uncle, and an Italian Abbe were the only guests besides.
The merchant was a portly, purple faced man, who bore his new honours with a curious mixture of assumed pomposity and natural good humour.
He was a political refugee, dependent for the bread he ate, on the money he received for teaching languages.
On the first day, the party assembled for dinner comprised the merchant's daughter, my mother, an old lady who had once been her governess, and had always lived with her since her marriage, the new Lord, the Abbe, my father, and my uncle.
My father's pale face flushed crimson in a moment. He touched the magnificent merchant lord on the arm, and pointed significantly, with a low bow, towards the decrepit old lady who had once been my mother's governess.
It was by such accidental circumstances as these that you discovered how far he was proud.
He never boasted of his ancestors; he never even spoke of them, except when he was questioned on the subject; but he never forgot them.
They were the very breath of his life; the deities of his social worship: the family treasures to be held precious beyond all lands and all wealth, all ambitions and all glories, by his children and his children's children to the end of their race.
Every fair liberty was given to us; every fair indulgence was granted to us.
We were formed, under his superintendence, in principles of religion, honour, and industry; and the rest was left to our own moral sense, to our own comprehension of the duties and privileges of our station.
It may seem incomprehensible, even ridiculous, to some persons, but it is nevertheless true, that we were none of us ever on intimate terms with him.
I mean by this, that he was a father to us, but never a companion.
There was something in his manner, his quiet and unchanging manner, which kept us almost unconsciously restrained.
I never confided to him my schemes for amusement as a boy, or mentioned more than generally my ambitious hopes, as a young man.
Thus, all holiday councils were held with old servants; thus, my first pages of manuscript, when I first tried authorship, were read by my sister, and never penetrated into my father's study.
Again, his mode of testifying displeasure towards my brother or myself, had something terrible in its calmness, something that we never forgot, and always dreaded as the worst calamity that could befall us.
Whenever, as boys, we committed some boyish fault, he never displayed outwardly any irritation-he simply altered his manner towards us altogether.
On these occasions, we were not addressed by our Christian names; if we accidentally met him out of doors, he was sure to turn aside and avoid us; if we asked a question, it was answered in the briefest possible manner, as if we had been strangers.
His whole course of conduct said, as though in so many words-You have rendered yourselves unfit to associate with your father; and he is now making you feel that unfitness as deeply as he does.
We were left in this domestic purgatory for days, sometimes for weeks together.
To our boyish feelings (to mine especially) there was no ignominy like it, while it lasted.
I know not on what terms my father lived with my mother.
Towards my sister, his demeanour always exhibited something of the old-fashioned, affectionate gallantry of a former age.
He paid her the same attention that he would have paid to the highest lady in the land.
He led her into the dining room, when we were alone, exactly as he would have led a duchess into a banqueting hall.
He would allow us, as boys, to quit the breakfast table before he had risen himself; but never before she had left it.
His daughter was in his eyes the representative of her mother: the mistress of his house, as well as his child.
It was curious to see the mixture of high bred courtesy and fatherly love in his manner, as he just gently touched her forehead with his lips, when he first saw her in the morning.
It required, indeed, all the masculine energy of look about the upper part of his face, to redeem the lower part from an appearance of effeminacy, so delicately was it moulded in its fine Norman outline.
If he ever laughed, as a young man, his laugh must have been very clear and musical; but since I can recollect him, I never heard it.
In his happiest moments, in the gayest society, I have only seen him smile.
There were other characteristics of my father's disposition and manner, which I might mention; but they will appear to greater advantage, perhaps, hereafter, connected with circumstances which especially called them forth.
DEDICATION
Now, among those very stupid old-fashioned boys' books was one which taught me that; and therefore I am more grateful to it than if it had been as full of wonderful pictures as all the natural history books you ever saw.
"Well, Robert, where have you been walking this afternoon?" said mr Andrews to one of his pupils at the close of a holiday.
But it was very dull.
He hardly saw a single person.
But he did not mind it, because he fell in with an old man cutting turf, who told him all about turf cutting, and gave him a dead adder.
Whereon mr Andrews, who seems to have been a very sensible old gentleman, tells him all about his curiosities: and then it comes out-if you will believe it-that Master William has been over the very same ground as Master Robert, who saw nothing at all.
"So it is.
On the other hand, Franklin could not cross the Channel without making observations useful to mankind.
And you, Robert, learn that eyes were given to you to use."
I say "good boys;" not merely clever boys, or prudent boys: because using your eyes, or not using them, is a question of doing Right or doing Wrong.
God has given you eyes; it is your duty to God to use them.
If your parents tried to teach you your lessons in the most agreeable way, by beautiful picture books, would it not be ungracious, ungrateful, and altogether naughty and wrong, to shut your eyes to those pictures, and refuse to learn?
It is your duty to learn His lessons: and it is your interest.
God's Book, which is the Universe, and the reading of God's Book, which is Science, can do you nothing but good, and teach you nothing but truth and wisdom.
God did not put this wondrous world about your young souls to tempt or to mislead them.
If you ask Him for a fish, he will not give you a serpent.
But you must begin at the beginning in order to end at the end, and sow the seed if you wish to gather the fruit.
God has ordained that you, and every child which comes into the world, should begin by learning something of the world about him by his senses and his brain; and the better you learn what they can teach you, the more fit you will be to learn what they cannot teach you.
And so you will be delivered (if you will) out of the tyranny of darkness, and distrust, and fear, into God's free kingdom of light, and faith, and love; and will be safe from the venom of that tree which is more deadly than the fabled upas of the East.
Who planted that tree I know not, it was planted so long ago: but surely it is none of God's planting, neither of the Son of God: yet it grows in all lands and in all climes, and sends its hidden suckers far and wide, even (unless we be watchful) into your hearts and mine.
And its name is the Tree of Unreason, whose roots are conceit and ignorance, and its juices folly and death.
It drops its venom into the finest brains; and makes them call sense, nonsense; and nonsense, sense; fact, fiction; and fiction, fact. It drops its venom into the tenderest hearts, alas! and makes them call wrong, right; and right, wrong; love, cruelty; and cruelty, love.
Some say that the axe is laid to the root of it just now, and that it is already tottering to its fall: while others say that it is growing stronger than ever, and ready to spread its upas shade over the whole earth.
For my part, I know not, save that all shall be as God wills.
The tree has been cut down already again and again; and yet has always thrown out fresh shoots and dropped fresh poison from its boughs.
But this at least I know: that any little child, who will use the faculties God has given him, may find an antidote to all its poison in the meanest herb beneath his feet.
I will not be positive about "the Spanish Main," but it was hurrah for something o I considered them very jolly fellows, and so indeed they were.
But what completely won my good will was a picture of enviable loveliness painted on his left arm.
I determined to know that man.
While I stood admiring this work of art, a fat wheezy steamtug, with the word AJAX in staring black letters on the paddlebox, came puffing up alongside the Typhoon.
It was ridiculously small and conceited, compared with our stately ship.
What do I remember next?
Just at the most exciting point of the game, the ship would careen, and down would go the white checkers pell mell among the black.
That's what the pilot said.
He said the colors were pricked into the skin with needles, and that the operation was somewhat painful.
We must next consider the work of adornment, first as to each day by itself, secondly as to all seven days in general.
In the first place, then, we consider the work of the fourth day, secondly, that of the fifth day, thirdly, that of the sixth day, and fourthly, such matters as belong to the seventh day.
Under the first head there are three points of inquiry:
(one) As to the production of the lights;
Whether the Lights Ought to Have Been Produced on the Fourth Day?
Objection one: It would seem that the lights ought not to have been produced on the fourth day.
For the heavenly luminaries are by nature incorruptible bodies: wherefore their matter cannot exist without their form.
But as their matter was produced in the work of creation, before there was any day, so therefore were their forms.
It follows, then, that the lights were not produced on the fourth day.
For, the Scripture says: "He set them in the firmament." But plants are described as produced when the earth, to which they are attached, received its form.
Now, cause precedes effect in the order of nature. The lights, therefore, ought not to have been produced on the fourth day, but on the third day.
Therefore the sun and the moon alone are not correctly described as the "two great lights."
For the perfection of the heaven and the earth regards, seemingly, those things that belong to them intrinsically, but the adornment, those that are extrinsic, just as the perfection of a man lies in his proper parts and forms, and his adornment, in clothing or such like.
Now just as distinction of certain things is made most evident by their local movement, as separating one from another; so the work of adornment is set forth by the production of things having movement in the heavens, and upon the earth.
Wherefore Scripture does not say: "Let the firmament produce lights," though it says: "Let the earth bring forth the green herb."
For those, however, who hold the heavenly bodies to be of another nature from the elements, and naturally incorruptible, the answer must be that the lights were substantially created at the beginning, but that their substance, at first formless, is formed on this day, by receiving not its substantial form, but a determination of power.
Thus we observe that the rays of the sun have one effect, those of the moon another, and so forth.
But the lights are the cause of what takes place upon the earth.
Therefore they are not signs.
But the lights are nobler than the earth.
Therefore they were not made "to enlighten it."
The moon, therefore, was not made "to rule the night."
First, the lights are of service to man, in regard to sight, which directs him in his works, and is most useful for perceiving objects.
And in this respect he says: "Let them be for signs."
Hence nothing prevents a sensible cause from being a sign.
But he says "signs," rather than "causes," to guard against idolatry.
Nor is it untrue to say that a higher creature may be made for the sake of a lower, considered not in itself, but as ordained to the good of the universe.
For although the perfect is developed from the imperfect by natural processes, yet the perfect must exist simply before the imperfect.
Whether the Lights of Heaven Are Living Beings?
Objection one: It would seem that the lights of heaven are living beings.
Therefore the lights of heaven, as pertaining to its adornment, should be living beings also.
Now the noblest of all forms is the soul, as being the first principle of life.
Much more, therefore, have the heavenly bodies a living soul.
thirty four, because, what is such of itself precedes that which is by another.
Therefore the heavenly bodies are living beings.
Nor was there less diversity of opinion among the Doctors of the Church.
In examining the truth of this question, where such diversity of opinion exists, we shall do well to bear in mind that the union of soul and body exists for the sake of the soul and not of the body; for the form does not exist for the matter, but the matter for the form.
Now the nature and power of the soul are apprehended through its operation, which is to a certain extent its end.
Yet for some of these operations, as sensation and nutrition, our body is a necessary instrument.
Hence it is clear that the sensitive and nutritive souls must be united to a body in order to exercise their functions.
There are, however, operations of the soul, which are not exercised through the medium of the body, though the body ministers, as it were, to their production.
It is not, however, possible that the functions of nutrition, growth, and generation, through which the nutritive soul operates, can be exercised by the heavenly bodies, for such operations are incompatible with a body naturally incorruptible.
It follows, then, that of the operations of the soul the only ones left to be attributed to the heavenly bodies are those of understanding and moving; for appetite follows both sensitive and intellectual perception, and is in proportion thereto.
Accordingly, the union of a soul to a heavenly body cannot be for the purpose of the operations of the intellect.
The Platonists explain the union of soul and body in the same way, as a contact of a moving power with the object moved, and since Plato holds the heavenly bodies to be living beings, this means nothing else but that substances of spiritual nature are united to them, and act as their moving power.
A proof that the heavenly bodies are moved by the direct influence and contact of some spiritual substance, and not, like bodies of specific gravity, by nature, lies in the fact that whereas nature moves to one fixed end which having attained, it rests; this does not appear in the movement of heavenly bodies.
Hence it follows that they are moved by some intellectual substances.
From what has been said, then, it is clear that the heavenly bodies are not living beings in the same sense as plants and animals, and that if they are called so, it can only be equivocally.
It will also be seen that the difference of opinion between those who affirm, and those who deny, that these bodies have life, is not a difference of things but of words.
While, then, it is not conceded that the souls of heavenly bodies are nobler than the souls of animals absolutely it must be conceded that they are superior to them with regard to their respective forms, since their form perfects their matter entirely, which is not in potentiality to other forms; whereas a soul does not do this.
Also as regards movement the power that moves the heavenly bodies is of a nobler kind.
Presently up spoke the silver haired Father Martin.
'Comrades,' said he, 'you have had wonderful adventures; but I will tell you something still more astonishing that happened to myself.
When I was a young lad I had no home and no one to care for me, and I wandered from village to village all over the country with my knapsack on my back; but as soon as I was old enough I took service with a shepherd in the mountains, and helped him for three years.
One autumn evening as we drove the flock homeward ten sheep were missing, and the master bade me go and seek them in the forest.
I took my dog with me, but he could find no trace of them, though we searched among the bushes till night fell; and then, as I did not know the country and could not find my way home in the dark, I decided to sleep under a tree.
I shook like an aspen leaf at the sight, and my spirit quaked for fear.
If you will come with me you shall dig up much gold."
'Though I was still deadly cold with terror I plucked up my courage and said: "Get away from me, evil spirit; I do not desire your treasures."
'At this the spectre grinned in my face and cried mockingly:
'"Simpleton!
Do you scorn your good fortune?
Well, then, remain a ragamuffin all your days."
I will fill your knapsack-I will fill your pouch."
A vast treasure of gold and precious stones lies in safety deep under the earth.
At twilight and at high noon it is hidden, but at midnight it may be dug up.
So I thought to give it into your hand, having a kindness for you because you feed your flock upon my mountain."
'Thereupon the spectre told me exactly where the treasure lay, and how to find it.
It might be only yesterday so well do I remember every word he spoke.
Do not cross the bridge, but keep to your right along the bank till a high rock stands before you.
When you find this hollow dig it out; but it will be hard work, for the earth has been pressed down into it with care.
Into this opening you must crawl, holding a lamp in your mouth.
Do not go through the door to the right lest you disturb the bones of the lords of the treasure.
Neither must you go through the door to the left, it leads to the snake's chamber, where adders and serpents lodge; but open the fast closed door by means of the well-known spring root, which you must on no account forget to take with you, or all your trouble will be for naught, for no crowbar or mortal tools will help you.
If you want to procure the root ask a wood seller; it is a common thing for hunters to need, and it is not hard to find.
If the door bursts open suddenly with great crackings and groanings do not be afraid, the noise is caused by the power of the magic root, and you will not be hurt.
Now trim your lamp that it may not fail you, for you will be nearly blinded by the flash and glitter of the gold and precious stones on the walls and pillars of the vault; but beware how you stretch out a hand towards the jewels!
In the midst of the cavern stands a copper chest, in that you will find gold and silver, enough and to spare, and you may help yourself to your heart's content.
If you take as much as you can carry you will have sufficient to last your lifetime, and you may return three times; but woe betide you if you venture to come a fourth time.
You would have your trouble for your pains, and would be punished for your greediness by falling down the stone steps and breaking your leg.
Do not neglect each time to heap back the loose earth which concealed the entrance of the king's treasure chamber."
'As the apparition left off speaking my dog pricked up his ears and began to bark.
I heard the crack of a carter's whip and the noise of wheels in the distance, and when I looked again the spectre had disappeared.'
'Tell us now, Father Martin, did you go to the mountain and find what the spirit promised you; or is it a fable?'
'Nay, nay,' answered the graybeard.
'I cannot tell if the spectre lied, for never a step did I go towards finding the hollow, for two reasons:--one was that my neck was too precious for me to risk it in such a snare as that; the other, that no one could ever tell me where the spring root was to be found.'
Then Blaize, another aged shepherd, lifted up his voice.
Even though you will never climb the mountain now, I will tell you, for a joke, how it is to be found.
The easiest way to get it is by the help of a black woodpecker.
When she perceives that she cannot get into her nest she will fly round the tree uttering cries of distress, and then dart off towards the sun setting.
When you see her do this, take a scarlet cloak, or if that be lacking to you, buy a few yards of scarlet cloth, and hurry back to the tree before the woodpecker returns with the spring root in her beak.
Then spread the red cloth quickly under the tree, so that the woodpecker may think it is a fire, and in her terror drop the root.
He could make fish jelly, and quince fritters, and even wafer cakes; and he gilded the ears of all his boars' heads.
peter had looked about him for a wife early in life, but unluckily his choice fell upon a woman whose evil tongue was well known in the town.
Therefore, when Master peter came along, and let himself be taken in by her boasted skill as a housewife, she jumped at his offer, and they were married the next day.
Though Master peter had no great wealth to leave behind him, still it was sad to him to be childless; and he would bemoan himself to his friends, when he laid one baby after another in the grave, saying: 'The lightning has been among the cherry blossoms again, so there will be no fruit to grow ripe.'
But, by and by, he had a little daughter so strong and healthy that neither her mother's temper nor her father's spoiling could keep her from growing up tall and beautiful.
Meanwhile the fortunes of the family had changed.
From his youth up, Master peter had hated trouble; when he had money he spent it freely, and fed all the hungry folk who asked him for bread.
This grieved the tender heart of his pretty daughter, who loved him dearly, and was the comfort of his life.
Soon he heard his wife's harsh voice singing its morning song as she went about her household affairs, scolding her daughter the while.
She burst open his door while he was still dressing: 'Well, Toper!' was her greeting, 'have you been drinking all night, wasting money that you steal from my housekeeping?
For shame, drunkard!'
'Do not be annoyed, dear wife.
I have a good piece of business in hand which may turn out well for us.'
'You with a good business?' cried she, 'you are good for nothing but talk!'
'I am making my will,' said he, 'that when my hour comes my house may be in order.'
These unexpected words cut his daughter to the heart; she remembered that all night long she had dreamed of a newly dug grave, and at this thought she broke out into loud lamentations.
But her mother only cried: 'Wretch! have you not wasted goods and possessions, and now do you talk of making a will?'
And she seized him like a fury, and tried to scratch out his eyes.
But by and by the quarrel was patched up, and everything went on as before. From that day peter saved up every penny that his daughter Lucia gave him on the sly, and bribed the boys of his acquaintance to spy out a black woodpecker's nest for him.
He sent them into the woods and fields, but instead of looking for a nest they only played pranks on him.
They led him miles over hill and vale, stock and stone, to find a raven's brood, or a nest of squirrels in a hollow tree, and when he was angry with them they laughed in his face and ran away.
This went on for some time, but at last one of the boys spied out a woodpecker in the meadow lands among the wood pigeons, and when he had found her nest in a half dead alder tree, came running to peter with the news of his discovery.
peter could hardly believe his good fortune, and went quickly to see for himself if it was really true; and when he reached the tree there certainly was a bird flying in and out as if she had a nest in it.
peter was overjoyed at this fortunate discovery, and instantly set himself to obtain a red cloak.
Now in the whole town there was only one red cloak, and that belonged to a man of whom nobody ever willingly asked a favour-Master Hammerling the hangman.
peter now had all that was necessary to secure the magic root; he stopped up the entrance to the nest, and everything fell out exactly as Blaize had foretold.
All Peter's plans had succeeded, and he actually held in his hand the magic root-that master key which would unlock all doors, and bring its possessor unheard of luck.
His thoughts now turned to the mountain, and he secretly made preparations for his journey.
He took with him only a staff, a strong sack, and a little box which his daughter Lucia had given him.
He stood still in sheer amazement, not knowing which to rejoice over most-this unexpected find, or the proof of the magic root's real power; but at last he remembered that it was quite time to be starting on his journey.
When Dame Ilse and her daughter returned they wondered to find the house door shut, and Master peter nowhere to be seen.
'Who knows?' cried Dame Ilse at last, 'the wretch may have been idling in some tavern since early morning.'
Then a sudden thought startled her, and she felt for her keys.
Mid day came, then evening, then midnight, and still no Master peter appeared, and the matter became really serious.
Dame Ilse knew right well what a torment she had been to her husband, and remorse caused her the gloomiest forebodings.
After that the neighbours went out with long poles to fish in every ditch and pond, but they found nothing, and then Dame Ilse gave up the idea of ever seeing her husband again and very soon consoled herself, only wondering how the sacks of corn were to be carried to the mill in future.
She decided to buy a strong ass to do the work, and having chosen one, and after some bargaining with the owner as to its price, she went to the cupboard in the wall to fetch the money.
But what were her feelings when she perceived that every shelf lay empty and bare before her!
He looked at her fondly, and took her hand, which she tried to draw away, crying:
I thought you were a hundred miles away.
'No, dearest girl,' answered he; 'I am come to complete your happiness and my own.
Since we last met my fortune has utterly changed; I am no longer the poor vagabond that I was then.
My rich uncle has died, leaving me money and goods in plenty, so that I dare to present myself to your mother as a suitor for your hand.
That I love you I know well; if you can love me I am indeed a happy man.'
Now a great hurry burly began in the house, and preparations for the wedding went on apace.
The day for the wedding was chosen, and all their friends and neighbours were bidden to the feast.
If only he could come back again!
'I should not be sorry myself to see him come back-there is always something lacking in a house when the good man is away.'
But the fact was that she was growing quite tired of having no one to scold.
On the very eve of the wedding a man pushing a wheelbarrow arrived at the city gate, and paid toll upon a barrel of nails which it contained, and then made the best of his way to the bride's dwelling and knocked at the door.
When Dame Ilse had set something to eat before her husband, she was curious to hear his adventures, and questioned him eagerly as to why he had gone away.
'God bless my native place,' said he.
This barrel of nails is my whole fortune, which I wish to give as my contribution towards the bride's house furnishing.'
Father peter also stayed quietly with them, living, as everybody believed, upon the generosity of his rich son in law.
No one suspected that his barrel of nails was the real 'Horn of Plenty,' from which all this prosperity overflowed.
peter had made the journey to the treasure mountain successfully, without being found out by anybody.
He had enjoyed himself by the way, and taken his own time, until he actually reached the little brook in the valley which it had cost him some trouble to find.
Then he pressed on eagerly, and soon came to the little hollow in the wood; down he went, burrowing like a mole into the earth; the magic root did its work, and at last the treasure lay before his eyes.
However, all went well-he neither saw nor heard anything alarming; the only thing that happened was that the great iron barred door shut with a crash as soon as he was fairly outside it, and then he remembered that he had left the magic root behind him, so he could not go back for another load of treasure.
But even that did not trouble peter much; he was quite satisfied with what he had already.
After he had faithfully done everything according to Father Martin's instructions, and pressed the earth well back into the hollow, he sat down to consider how he could bring his treasure back to his native place, and enjoy it there, without being forced to share it with his scolding wife, who would give him no peace if she once found out about it.
At last, after much thinking, he hit upon a plan.
He carried his sack to the nearest village, and there bought a wheelbarrow, a strong barrel, and a quantity of nails.
At one place upon the road he met a handsome young man who seemed by his downcast air to be in some great trouble.
Father peter, who wished everybody to be as happy as he was himself, greeted him cheerfully, and asked where he was going, to which he answered sadly:
'Into the wide world, good father, or out of it, where ever my feet may chance to carry me.'
'What has the world been doing to you?'
'Nevertheless there is not anything left in it for me.'
But when good food was set before him he seemed to forget to eat.
So peter perceived that what ailed his guest was sorrow of heart, and asked him kindly to tell him his story.
'Where is the good, father?' said he.
'You can give me neither help nor comfort.'
'Who knows?' answered Master peter.
'I might be able to do something for you.
Often enough in life help comes to us from the most unexpected quarter.'
I soon reached the little town where the maiden dwelt; but there fresh difficulties awaited me.
But at last I dressed myself as an old woman, and knocked boldly at her door.
She was startled at first; but I persuaded her to listen to me, and I soon saw that I was not displeasing to her, though she scolded me gently for my disobedience to my master, and my deceit in disguising myself.
But when I begged her to marry me, she told me sadly that her mother would scorn a penniless wooer, and implored me to go away at once, lest trouble should fall upon her.
Master peter, who had been listening attentively, pricked up his ears at the sound of his daughter's name, and very soon found out that it was indeed with her that this young man was so deeply in love.
'Your story is strange indeed,' said he.
'But where is the father of this maiden-why do you not ask him for her hand?
'Alas!' said the young man, 'her father is a wandering good for naught, who has forsaken wife and child, and gone off-who knows where?
The wife complains of him bitterly enough, and scolds my dear maiden when she takes her father's part.'
Father peter was somewhat amused by this speech; but he liked the young man well, and saw that he was the very person he needed to enable him to enjoy his wealth in peace, without being separated from his dear daughter.
'If you will take my advice,' said he, 'I promise you that you shall marry this maiden whom you love so much, and that before you are many days older.'
'Stay, hothead!' he cried; 'it is no jest, and I am prepared to make good my words.'
Master peter long enjoyed the profits of his journey to the mountain, and no rumour of it ever got abroad.
In his old age his prosperity was so great that he himself did not know how rich he was; but it was always supposed that the money was Friedlin's.
LONGSTREET
They are still common throughout the Southern States, though they are not as common as they were twenty five or thirty years ago. Chance led me to one about a year ago.
"How goes it, stranger?" said he, with a tone of independence and self confidence that awakened my curiosity to know a little of his character.
"Going driving?" inquired i
It seems to me I ought to know you."
"Pretty digging!" said he.
"I find you're not the fool I took you to be; so here's to a better acquaintance with you."
"With all my heart," returned I; "but you must be as clever as I've been, and give me your name."
"To be sure I will, my old coon; take it, take it, and welcome.
Anything else about me you'd like to have?"
"Oh, yes there is, stranger!
"Well," said I, "if the shooting match is not too far out of my way, I'll go to it with pleasure."
"Unless your way lies through the woods from here," said Billy, "it'll not be much out of your way; for it's only a mile ahead of us, and there is no other road for you to take till you get there; and as that thing you're riding in ain't well suited to fast traveling among brushy knobs, I reckon you won't lose much by going by.
I reckon you hardly ever was at a shooting match, stranger, from the cut of your coat?"
"Oh, yes," returned I, "many a time.
He was born a shooting, and killed squirrels before he was weaned."
"Why, stop, stranger, let me look at you good!
I was too young to recollect you myself; but I've heard daddy talk about you many a time.
Come along, Lyman, and I'll go my death upon you at the shooting match, with the old Soap stick at your shoulder."
"Now I know you're the very chap, for I heard daddy tell that very thing about the half bullet.
We soon reached the place appointed for the shooting match.
Archibald had been a justice of the peace in his day (and where is the man of his age in Georgia who has not?); consequently, he was called 'Squire Sims.
It is the custom in this state, when a man has once acquired a title, civil or military, to force it upon him as long as he lives; hence the countless number of titled personages who are introduced in these sketches.
We stopped at the 'squire's door.
Don't say nothing about it."
"Well, mr Swinge cat," said the 'squire, "here's to a better acquaintance with you," offering me his hand.
"How goes it, Uncle Archy?" said I, taking his hand warmly (for I am always free and easy with those who are so with me; and in this course I rarely fail to please).
"Well, that's not my fault."
The beef was not present, nor is it ever upon such occasions; but several of the company had seen it, who all concurred in the opinion that it was a good beef, and well worth the price that was set upon it-eleven dollars.
A general inquiry ran around, in order to form some opinion as to the number of shots that would be taken; for, of course, the price of a shot is cheapened in proportion to the increase of that number.
It was soon ascertained that not more than twenty persons would take chances; but these twenty agreed to take the number of shots, at twenty five cents each.
"How many shots left?" inquired Billy.
"Five," was the reply.
Put down four shots to me, and one to Lyman Hall, paid for by William Curlew."
I was thunder struck, not at his proposition to pay for my shot, because I knew that Billy meant it as a token of friendship, and he would have been hurt if I had refused to let him do me this favor; but at the unexpected announcement of my name as a competitor for beef, at least one hundred miles from the place of my residence.
I therefore protested against his putting in for me, and urged every reason to dissuade him from it that I could, without wounding his feelings.
"Put it down!" said Billy, with the authority of an emperor, and with a look that spoke volumes intelligible to every by stander.
"Reckon I don't know what I'm about?" Then wheeling off, and muttering in an under, self confident tone, "Dang old Roper," continued he, "if he don't knock that cross to the north corner of creation and back again before a cat can lick her foot."
These were, that they should be fired off hand, while the shot guns were allowed a rest, the distance being equal; or that the distance should be one hundred yards for a rifle, to sixty for the shot gun, the mode of firing being equal.
Mealy stepped out, rifle in hand, and toed the mark.
"Kiss my foot!" said Mealy.
"The way I'll creep into that bull's eye's a fact."
"A pretty good shot, Mealy!" said one.
I was rejoiced when one of the company inquired, "Where is it?" for I could hardly believe they were founding these remarks upon the evidence of their senses.
I looked with all the power of my eyes, but was unable to discover the least change in the surface of the paper.
Their report, however, was true; so much keener is the vision of a practiced than an unpracticed eye.
Here goes!"
"I've eat paper," said he, at the crack of the gun, without looking, or seeming to look, toward the target.
"Buck killer made a clear racket. Where am I, gentlemen?"
"I said I'd eat paper, and I've done it; haven't I, gentlemen?"
Simon Stow was now called on.
"Oh, Lord!" exclaimed two or three: "now we have it.
"Where are you going, Bob?"
The next was Moses Firmby.
Moses kept us not long in suspense.
"No great harm done yet," said Spivey, manifestly relieved from anxiety by an event which seemed to me better calculated to produce despair. Firmby's ball had cut out the lower angle of the diamond, directly on a right line with the cross.
Three or four followed him without bettering his shot; all of whom, however, with one exception, "eat the paper."
It now came to Spivey's turn.
There was nothing remarkable in his person or manner.
He took his place, lowered his rifle slowly from a perpendicular until it came on a line with the mark, held it there like a vice for a moment and fired.
Had I judged Billy's chance of success from the looks of his gun, I should have said it was hopeless.
An auger hole in the breech served for a grease box; a cotton string assisted a single screw in holding on the lock; and the thimbles were made, one of brass, one of iron, and one of tin.
"Where's Lark Spivey's bullet?" called out Billy to the judges, as he finished rolling up his sleeves.
"About three quarters of an inch from the cross," was the reply.
"Well, clear the way! the Soap stick's coming, and she'll be along in there among 'em presently."
"Where am I?" said Billy, as the smoke rose from before his eye.
Take her, and show the boys how you used to do when you was a baby."
This round was a manifest improvement upon the first.
The third and fourth rounds were shot.
Billy discharged his last shot, which left the rights of parties thus: Billy Curlew first and fourth choice, Spivey second, Firmby third and Whitecotton fifth.
The distinction is perfectly natural and equitable.
Billy wiped out his rifle carefully, loaded her to the top of his skill, and handed her to me.
"Now," said he, "Lyman, draw a fine bead, but not too fine; for Soap stick bears up her ball well.
Take care and don't touch the trigger until you've got your bead; for she's spring trigger'd and goes mighty easy: but you hold her to the place you want her, and if she don't go there, dang old Roper."
I took hold of Soap stick, and lapsed immediately into the most hopeless despair.
"Why, Billy," said I, "you little mortal, you! what do you use such a gun as this for?"
"Go 'long, you old coon!" said Billy; "I see what you're at;" intimating that all this was merely to make the coming shot the more remarkable. "Daddy's little boy don't shoot anything but the old Soap stick here to day, I know."
"It may be fun," said the other, "but it looks mightily like yearnest to a man up a tree."
I had just strength enough to master Soap stick's obstinate proclivity, and, consequently, my nerves began to exhibit palpable signs of distress with her first imperceptible movement upward.
"I swear poin' blank," said one, "that man can't shoot."
"He used to shoot well," said another; "but can't now, nor never could."
"The stranger's got the peedoddles," said a fourth, with humorous gravity.
As soon as I found that Soap stick was high enough (for I made no farther use of the sights than to ascertain this fact), I pulled trigger, and off she went.
Bet 'em two to one that I've knocked out the cross."
Another sort for getting bets upon, to the drop sight, with a single wabble!
And the Soap stick's the very yarn for it."
"Well," returned I, "you've seen it now, and I'm the boy that can do it."
Consequently, they were all transfixed with astonishment when the judges presented the target to them, and gravely observed, "It's only second best, after all the fuss."
"Second best!" reiterated I, with an air of despondency, as the company turned from the target to me.
"Second best, only?
Here, Billy, my son, take the old Soap stick; she's a good piece, but I'm getting too old and dim sighted to shoot a rifle, especially with the drop sight and double wabbles."
"What's that!
Several received this palaver with a contemptuous but very appropriate curl of the nose; and Mealy Whitecotton offered to bet a half pint "that I couldn't do the like again with no sort o' wabbles, he didn't care what." But I had already fortified myself on this quarter of my morality.
But I could not accept his hospitality without retracing five or six miles of the road which I had already passed, and therefore I declined it.
"Tell her," said I, "that I send her a quarter of beef which I won, as I did the handkerchief, by nothing in the world but mere good luck."
"Yes," said Billy, "dang old Roper if we don't go our death for you, no matter who offers.
THE MURDERED MAN
Was this the man mr Gilverthwaite meant me to meet?
Then I wondered if I had disturbed the murderers-it was fixed in me from the beginning that there must have been more than one in at this dreadful game-and if they were still lurking about and watching me from the brushwood; and I made an effort, and bent down and touched one of the nerveless hands.
"Not a sound!" I answered.
"Nothing and nobody!" I said.
You'll have to get help," he went on, turning to the constable.
And I'm wondering if whoever killed this fellow, whoever he may be, wouldn't have killed mr Gilverthwaite, too, if he'd come?
"Well, well, I never knew its like!" he remarked, staring from me to the body, and from it to me.
"You saw nobody about close by-nor in the neighbourhood-no strangers on the road?"
Ever since finding the body, I had been wondering what I should say when authority, either in the shape of a coroner or a policeman, asked me about my own adventures that night.
"Anyway, he's not known to me, and I've been in these parts twenty years.
"What?" I asked.
"Papers!" said he.
"That's just where I'm coming with you," he answered.
"I've my bicycle close by, and we'll ride into the town together at once.
Was he the man I ought to have met?
Or had that man been there, witnessed the murder, and gone away, frightened to stop where the murder had been done?
Or-yet again-was this some man who had come upon mr Gilverthwaite's correspondent, and, for some reason, been murdered by him?
"But you must get back with me quickly.
Yon lodger of yours is dead, and your mother in a fine way, wondering where you are!"
CHAPTER seven
THE COUNTESS DE SANTIAGO
The repetition irritated the girl, whose nerves were strained to snapping point.
She could not parry the man's questions.
She could not bear his grieved or offended reproaches.
If he persisted, through these moments of suspense, she would scream or burst out crying.
Trembling, with tears in her voice, she heard herself answer.
And yet it did not seem to be herself, but something within, stronger than she, that suddenly took control of her.
"Why should I not wish to tell you?" the Something was saying.
"The name is the same as your own-Smith.
Nelson Smith." And before the words had left her lips a taxi drew up at the door.
There was one instant of agony during which the previous suspense seemed nothing-an instant when the girl forgot what she had said, her soul pressing to the windows of her eyes.
Was it he who had come, or----
It was he.
Before she had time to finish the thought, he walked in, confident and smiling as when she had left him a few minutes-or a few years-ago; and in the wave of relief which overwhelmed her, Annesley forgot Ruthven Smith's question and her answer.
She remembered again, only with the shock of hearing him address the newcomer by the name she had given.
"I-he asked me ...
I told him," Annesley stammered, her eyes appealing, seeking to explain, and begging pardon.
"But if----"
"Quite right.
Not only did he shake hands, but actually came out to the taxi with them, asking Annesley if he should tell his cousins of her engagement, or if she preferred to give the news herself?
She dared not make such a suggestion without consulting the other person most concerned, so she answered that she would write mrs Smith or see her.
"Well, you can trust me with mrs Ellsworth.
I'll remind her of it if you like-tell her you asked me.
"Thank you, but my wife won't need to remind mrs Ellsworth of her debt," the answer came before Annesley could speak.
Good night!
Glad to have met you, even if it was an unpromising introduction."
Then they were off, they two alone together; and Annesley guessed that the chauffeur must have had his instructions where to drive, as she heard none given.
It occurred to the girl that precautions might still have to be taken.
But in another moment she was undeceived.
"The Savoy!" exclaimed Annesley.
"Oh, but we mustn't go there, of all places!
Those men----"
But there's something about you makes me feel as if I'd like to tell you the truth whenever I can: and the truth is, that for reasons you may understand some day-though I hope to Heaven you'll never have to!--my association with those men is one of the things I long to turn the key upon.
To me, it doesn't seem bad at all.
Will you believe this-and trust me for the rest?"
"I've told you I would!" the girl reminded him.
"I know.
I didn't suppose that Fate would give you to me so soon.
I----"
I wanted to arrange my-business matters so as to be fair to you.
But you'll make the best of things."
"You are being noble to me," said the girl, "and I've been very foolish. I've complicated everything.
"You weren't foolish!" he contradicted.
Destiny!
You were an angel to sacrifice yourself to save me, and your doing it the way you did has made me a happy man at one stroke.
As for the name-what's in a name?
We might as well be in reality what we played at being to night-'mr and mrs Nelson Smith.' There are even reasons why I'm pleased that you've made me a present of the name.
I thank you for it-and for all the rest."
"By Jove!" he exclaimed.
"I hadn't thought of that.
It's a difficulty. But we'll obviate it-somehow.
Don't worry!
Only I'm afraid we can't ask your friend the Archdeacon to marry us, as I meant to suggest, because I was sure you'd like it."
"I should.
"Besides, I feel that to morrow I shall find I've dreamed-all this."
"Then I've dreamed you, at the same time, and I'm not going to let you slip out of my dream, now I've got you in it.
Afterward there came a time when Annesley called back those words and wondered if they had held a deeper meaning than she guessed.
"About the Savoy," he went on.
She knows all about me-or enough-and if she'd been in the restaurant at dinner this evening she could have done for me what you did.
But she was missing.
Are you sorry?"
"If she'd been there, you would have gone to her table and sat down, and we-should never have met!" Annesley thought aloud.
"How strange!
But you haven't answered my question."
"I'll answer it now!" cried the girl.
"saint George!" he echoed, a ring of bitterness under his laugh.
"That's the first time I've been called a saint, and I'm afraid it will be the last.
I'd give anything to show you how I-but no I was good before, when I was tempted to kiss you.
Meantime, I'll try to grow a bit more like what your lover ought to be; and later I shall kiss you enough to make up for lost time."
Yet so it was.
She was sorry that he was so scrupulous. She longed to have him hold her against his heart.
Her silence, after the warmth of his words, seemed cold.
Perhaps he felt it so, for he went on after an instant's pause, as if he had waited for something in vain, and his tone was changed.
Annesley thought it, by contrast, almost businesslike.
Indeed, I'm partly English, born in Canada, though I've spent most of my life in the United States.
Nobody at the Savoy but the Countess de Santiago knows who I am, and she'll understand that it may be convenient for me to change my name.
Nelson Smith is a respectable one, and she'll respect it!
"Now, my plan is to ask for her (she'll be in by this time), have a few words of explanation on the quiet, not to embarrass you; and the Countess will do the rest.
She'll engage a room for you next to her own suite, or as near as possible; then you'll be provided with a chaperon."
"I'm not anxious about myself, but about you," Annesley said.
I suppose you did know?
Or-did you chance it?"
"I was as sure as I needed to be," Nelson Smith answered.
"A moment after I switched on the electricity in the room up there I heard a taxi drive away.
I turned off the light so I could look out.
By flattening my nose against the glass I could see that the place where those chaps had waited was empty; but in case the taxi was only turning, and meant to pass the house again, I lit the room once more, for realism.
It seemed beastly hard luck to leave you fast in that old woman's clutches!"
He took it, raising it to his lips, and both were startled when the taxi stopped.
Nobody paid the slightest attention to the newcomers, and Annesley settled down unobtrusively in a corner, while her companion went to scribble a line to the Countess de Santiago.
She had not the air of one who would be complimented by such a request.
Even the thumb was abnormally long, which fact prevented the hand from being as beautiful as it was, somehow, unforgettable.
She spoke English perfectly, with a slight foreign accent and a roll of the letter "r."
I think this is the best thing that can happen.
He, too, will be lucky.
I see that!" with another smile.
"Now you must engage her room," Nelson Smith said, abruptly.
"It's late. You can make friends afterward."
"And you-will you come to the desk? Yet, no-it is better not.
Miss Grayle and I will go together-two women alone and independent.
Lucky it's not the season, or we might find nothing free at short notice.
I hope he always will!"
BOY AND PONIES STRANGELY MISSING
After all, the supper proved a very jolly meal, now that they were sure Tad was all right.
Then, again, the beans and bacon were pronounced excellent by each of them, and Stacy had made fully as good time with his crude chopsticks as had the others with the tablespoons.
Supper finished, all hands turned in to help wash the dishes, and in a few moments the camp was again in perfect order.
"Are you warm enough down there?" called Ned.
"Sure thing.
I have most of the blankets."
"That means we freeze, I guess," interjected Stacy.
"You can go cut yourself a few chopsticks and sleep under them," retorted Ned Rector.
"Haven't any matches."
"Never mind, Tad, the moon soon will be up and you can get warm by that," shouted the fat boy.
"Chunky has suddenly developed into a wit, Tad.
I don't know what's happened to the boy.
"What's that you say?" demanded Ned, turning on him.
"I-I was just thinking to myself," explained Chunky, edging away.
Ned was glaring at him ferociously, at the same time struggling to keep back the laughter that rose to his lips because of Stacy's sharp retort.
"I'll make a suggestion, young gentlemen," said the Professor.
"Yes, sir, what is it?" asked the boys in chorus.
Pile it right up on the edge of the cliff and light it.
"That will be fine," cried Walter.
Quickly carrying the dried wood to the place indicated, they piled it so that it would make a long fire, then lighted it from three sides at the same time.
The result was a bright blaze that flared high, lighting the rocks far down into the canyon, but not sufficiently far to reach Tad.
"Trying to burn up the mountain?" shouted Tad.
"No; we're trying to burn it down, so we can pick you up," called Ned Rector.
"Wait till Tad comes up.
"You mustn't mind our talk, Professor," explained Walter.
"We say things to each other, but it's all in fun.
"Of course not.
Chunky is the only one who-"
"Never mind Chunky.
"Isn't it about time that lazy Indian were back, Professor?" asked Walter.
"Yes, that's so.
"Suppose he had to stop to smoke a pipe of peace with his friend," suggested Ned.
"Then there would be a certain amount of grunting to do before Eagle eye could state his business, and after that much talk, talk.
Were you ever an Indian?" asked Stacy innocently.
"Even if I were, I couldn't be called a savage," retorted Ned.
"Hello, up there!" he shouted, pulling himself to a sitting position.
"Hello!" answered Walter.
"I'm going to bed.
"No such luck," answered Ned, who had come up beside Walter and replied to Tad's question.
"And he won't be back till morning," sang the boy down there in the shadows.
"Right you are," laughed Ned.
"If he gets back then we are in great luck.
"No; wait till morning.
I wouldn't care to try to climb up in the dark.
I'd be likely to get hurt if I did.
You had better all turn in now.
There will be no need for you to sit up."
"All right," answered Ned and Walter at once.
"I think perhaps Master Tad is right.
I would suggest, however, that one of you roll up in his blankets outside here, so that he can hear if Master Tad calls," suggested Professor Zepplin.
"That's a good idea.
I'll do that, with your permission, Professor," offered Ned Rector promptly.
"Yes.
Then Walter and Stacy had better go to their tents.
If anything occurs during the night, remember you are to let me know at once.
"Very well, sir," answered Ned.
After replenishing the fire, determined to remain awake until daylight, the lad rolled up in his blankets.
Ned awoke with a start.
He sat up, rubbing his eyes and blinking in the strong morning light.
I'm stiff in every joint," he mumbled.
Ned pulled himself to his feet, yawning broadly.
"Wake up," he commanded, pinching one of the fat boy's big toes.
"Get out," mumbled Stacy sleepily, at the same time kicking viciously with the disturbed foot.
Thus encouraged, Ned pulled the other big toe.
But he was left in peace only a moment.
Ned recovered himself and returned to the charge.
Over went the cot, with Stacy beneath it. From the confusion of blankets emerged the red face of the fat boy.
Ned Rector thought it time to leave.
He did so, with Stacy a close second and the rubber pillow brushing Ned's cheek in transit.
Ned and Stacy's foot race continued until both were out of breath and thoroughly awake.
Then they sat down, laughing, the color flaming in their cheeks and eyes sparkling with pleasurable excitement.
"I'll wake up Tad, I guess," announced Ned after recovering his breath.
But there was no answer to his summons.
Then both boys added their voices to the effort, joined a few minutes later by the Professor and Walter Perkins.
They were unable to get any reply at all; nor was there the slightest movement or sign of life where Tad had last been seen.
"It means," said Ned, "that Tad isn't there.
Beyond that, I would not venture an opinion."
"Maybe he's fallen into the stream during the night and drowned," suggested Chunky.
"If the Indian ever gets here with a rope, I'll go down there and see if I can find out anything," said Ned.
"Not until all other means have been exhausted," declared the Professor.
"I wouldn't worry," comforted Walter Perkins.
"That's right," agreed Ned.
"What is there to eat?" asked the Professor.
The other two boys began preparing for the camp fire.
Boys!" he cried.
"What is it?
"The ponies!
The ponies!"
"What about them?" asked Walter, pausing as he was about to strike a match to the wood.
Has anything happened to them?" asked the Professor, striding toward the excited Ned Rector.
"Happened?
"Well, what is it?
Don't keep us waiting in suspense all-"
"They're gone!"
"It can't be possible."
They have broken away, I think.
"Chunky's and Tad's."
"Is it possible?" sputtered the Professor, striding to the place where their stock had been tethered.
"Look around, boys.
They cannot be far away.
"They went this way," shouted Ned.
All hands hurried to him.
"Yes, there's their tracks," agreed the Professor.
Instead, a few moments afterward, they lost the trail.
No amount of searching brought it to view again, and after more than an hour of persistent effort, the Professor called the hunt off, and the crestfallen party returned to camp.
"What are we going to do?" asked Stacy dolefully.
"What?"
CHAPTER fourteen
FUN IN THE FOOTHILLS
The Professor found difficulty even in driving the lads to their beds that night.
When they did finally tumble in and pull the blankets over them they were unable to sleep, between the howling of the coyotes and their laughter over Stacy Brown's new found talent.
"They'll go away when the moon comes up," called the guide when the boys protested that the beasts kept them awake.
"We don't want to chase them off the range.
"Go to sleep!" commanded the Professor.
They grew bolder.
They approached the camp until a circle of them surrounded it.
Out of Stacy Brown's tent crept a figure in its night clothes.
It was none other than Stacy himself.
In one hand he held a can of condensed milk that he had smuggled from the commissary department that afternoon.
He could see them plainly now and Stacy's eyes looked like two balls.
The animals would elevate their noses in the air, and, as if at a prearranged signal, all would strike the first note of their mournful wail at identically the same instant.
Suddenly the figure of the Pony Rider Boy rose up before them, right in the middle of one of the unearthly wails.
"Boo!" said Stacy explosively, at the same time hurling the can of condensed milk full in the face of the coyote nearest to him.
His aim was true.
The can landed right between the eyes of the animal. The coyote uttered a grunt of surprise, hesitated an instant, then, with tail between his legs, bounded away with a howl of fear.
"Yeow! Scat!" shrieked the fat boy.
The whole pack turned tail and ran with Stacy after them in full flight, headed for the desert.
Tom Parry, aroused by this new note in the midnight medley, tumbled out just in time to see Stacy disappearing over the ridge.
The guide was followed quickly by the other three boys of the party and Professor Zepplin.
"Hey, come back here!" shouted Parry.
The fat boy paid no attention to him.
"Get after him, boys!
If he falls they're liable to pile on him and chew him up before we can get to him!" commanded the guide.
The coyotes, frightened beyond their power of reasoning, if such a faculty was possessed by them, were now no more than so many black streaks lengthening out across the desert.
The lads set up a whoop as they started on the chase after their companion.
"Rope him, somebody!" shouted Parry.
"Haven't any rope," answered Tad, with a muttered "Ouch!" as his big toe came in contact with the can of condensed milk.
Laughing and shouting, they soon came up with Stacy, however, because he could not run as fast as the other boys.
Tad caught up with him first, and the two lads went down together.
In another minute the rest of the party had piled on the heap.
"Get up!" shouted Tad.
"Somebody's standing on my neck."
Reaching his tent, they threw the fat boy into his bed.
The tall, gaunt figure of the Professor appeared suddenly at the tent entrance.
Some of the boys darted by him, the others crawling out under the sides of the tent, all making a lively sprint for their own quarters.
"Young men, the very next one who raises a disturbance in this camp to night is going to get a real old-fashioned trouncing.
Not having any slipper, I'll use my shoe.
Do you hear?"
Yet they were destined not to pass the night without a further disturbance, though the Professor did not use his shoe to chastise the noisy ones.
It lacked only a few hours to daylight when the second interruption occurred.
And when it arrived it was even more startling than had been the fat boy's chase of the cowardly coyotes.
There was a sudden sound of hoof beats.
A volley of shots was fired as an accompaniment to the startling yells. A moment later and a body of horsemen dashed into camp, which they had easily located by the smouldering camp fire.
The Pony Rider Boys were out of their tents in a twinkling.
"Wow!" piped Stacy.
Bang!
Two bullets flicked the dirt up into his face.
Better look out where you're shooting to!" warned Stacy.
"The Professor'll take you over his knee and chastise you with his shoe, if you don't watch sharp," said Stacy.
"Come out of that.
Where's the kiddie?
I want to see my kiddie!" laughed Bud Stevens.
By this time, with his companions, he had dismounted, turning the ponies loose to roam where they would.
The whole camp, aroused by the shouting and shooting, had turned out after pulling on their trousers and shoes.
Tom Parry, piling fresh fuel on the embers of the camp fire, soon had the scene brightly lighted.
There was no more sleep in camp that night.
Professor Zepplin accepted the new disturbance with good grace.
"We're going to eat breakfast with you," Bud Stevens informed them.
"That's right.
What we have is free," answered the Professor hospitably.
"That's what I was telling the bunch," nodded Bud.
"Our chuck wagon'll be along when it gets here.
"A schooner, did you say?" questioned Stacy, edging closer to the cowboy.
"Yep; schooner."
"Where's the water?"
"Say, moon face, didn't you ever hear tell of a prairie schooner!"
"Well, you've got something coming to you, then," replied Bud, turning to the others again.
I presume that's the purpose of your visit here?" asked the Professor.
"Yep.
Soon as the wagon gets here with the trappings.
After breakfast we'll look around a bit.
"Yes, how did you know that!" questioned Tad.
"We saw one of them and the tracks of the rest----"
"I don't know whether you'd call it an angel or not.
It struck me that it was quite the opposite," laughed Tad.
"The white stallion, fellows," nodded Bud.
"I told you so.
Come along, kiddie, and show me that trail.
I'll tell you in a minute if he's the one."
Tad took the horse hunter to the trail that he had followed up the mountain side.
Finally he paused over one particular spot, and with a frown peered down upon it.
"That's him.
That's the Angel," he emphasized.
"Why do you call him that?"
Then, if you'll look at his hoof mark, you'll see the frog is shaped like a heart.
More angel.
Then again-that's three times, ain't it?--he's got a temper like angels ain't supposed to have."
We'll get the old gentleman this time or break every cinch strap in the outfit."
He's proud as a peacock with a new spread of tail feathers."
So-but Tom Parry told you, of course."
"Tom Parry didn't," objected the guide.
"Master Tad read the trail himself."
"Shake," glowed Bud, extending his hand to Tad.
"You're the right sort for this outfit.
We'll let you help point the bunch into the corral when we get them going.
"It won't be the first time, mr Stevens.
Just after breakfast, to which the camp had sat down at break of day, the horse hunters began their preliminary work.
Bud directed two of his men to work south, two more to ride north, while he would take the center of the range.
"What I want," he explained to the boys, "is to find where the wild horses are waterin' these days.
"No; they were out for a play.
That shows they had had plenty to eat and drink.
Professor Zepplin glanced at the guide inquiringly.
"Yes, you may go, Tad.
But be careful.
Don't let him get into any difficulties, mr Stevens.
"Come along; take a hunch on your cinch straps, a chunk of grub in your pocket; then we're ready to find where the Angel washes his face every morning and night."
Tad lost no time in getting ready for the trip to trail the wild horses to their lair, and in a few moments the horse hunters rode from the camp, followed by the envious glances of the Pony Rider Boys.
CHAPTER ten
The boys realized that they had taken a rather active part in what might prove for them a serious affair.
If, by any chance, the bandits learned who had interfered with them, it might be necessary for Professor Zepplin and his charges to make lively tracks for the border and seek other fields of adventure.
The same thought was in the minds of all except Chunky, who held his head erect, his chest swelled out.
He was full of their great achievements and was telling what he would do if any of the bandits came to visit their camp.
"On guard?"
"Yes."
Let him take the watch," approved Rector.
"You forget that I'm a wounded man.
Huh!
Some of you children take the trick.
I've got to take care of my health."
"I guess if we expect to get any sleep we had better let some one else do it," agreed Tad.
They were agreed upon this, and by common consent Butler was given the watch for the night.
The boys slept with their rifles beside them that night.
The night passed without incident, Tad Butler keeping a vigilant watch all during the dark hours of the night.
He had plenty of time to think matters over.
He realized that Dunk Tucker, the prisoner, had overheard all that had been said during their talk with Withem out on the plain.
Tad knew that if Dunk ever got into communication with his fellows it would go hard with the Pony Rider Boys.
Soon after daybreak, Tad awakened his fellows.
He already had a brisk fire going, but before lighting it, the lad had walked down to the edge of the canyon for a survey of the plain.
He saw a solitary horseman far out over the rolling plain.
About noon they made camp for dinner and a rest, not taking up their journey until about four o'clock in the afternoon.
Darkness overtook them, finding them still without sight or sound of the Spring where Withem said they would find the Rangers' camp.
Hands up!
Every man of you is covered!"
"They've got us again."
"Who are you?" returned Tad boldly.
"I reckon my question gits the first answer, seeing as I've got the drop on you."
Tad all at once realized that the sound of falling water was in the air.
With it came the thought that these must be the Rangers.
"Wait a minute.
"I---I wish we did have a little daylight," stammered Chunky, which elicited a short laugh from his companions.
"Yeow!" bowled the fat boy as a figure appeared beside him and a pair of iron arms grasped his hands pulling him down, nearly unseating him.
Let go!"
At the lieutenant's reassuring words the Rangers---for the boys had stumbled upon the camp of the men of Captain McKay's command---crowded forward, talking and laughing, three of them taking the horses as the party dismounted, then leading the way into the bushes and in among the rocks where the lads came upon a campfire, around which were seated five or six other Rangers.
"Just in time to have chuck with us.
You see we have our chuck wagon here.
Of course we don't carry it wherever we go.
We usually have some central point where we make headquarters.
All hands sat down to the evening meal after the men had washed up, in most instances without removing their hats.
This attracted the attention of the fat boy.
"Say, do you fellows sleep in your hats as well as wash and eat in them?" he demanded.
"Do you sleep in your skin?" retorted Dippy.
"Chop it!" commanded a Ranger.
"Can't I say what I've got to say?" demanded the fat boy indignantly.
"Are you going to brag about yourself?" demanded Polly.
"I'm telling you, and---"
"Well, don't tell us.
"Don't you like it?" asked Ned, flushing.
"Like it?
Why, it's the hottest thing that ever crossed the Staked Plains since the Apaches came down in---"
"Why don't you look the other way then?" interjected Stacy.
What you got to say about it, young man?" demanded Dippy, glancing at Tad Butler, who was smiling.
"I haven't said anything yet."
"But you're going to?"
"Can we stand for any more remarks, boys?" asked Dippy.
"That's the idea!"
"Will you go peaceably or must we drag you?"
"I reckon you'd better drag me.
If you're going to have fun with me you'll have to earn it.
I don't propose to help you out."
"Do you hear?" demanded Dippy in a deep, hoarse voice.
"We hear."
They expected the boy to resist, which would have given them still further excuse to handle him roughly.
The Rangers fell in behind the two who were carrying Butler, in solemn procession.
To look at their faces one would have thought they were performing a solemn duty.
Tad was taken out where the gentle murmur of the Spring falling over the rocks could be heard when the Pony Rider Boys were not making too much noise.
"Do you withdraw the flippant words you used to a member of this august body?" demanded a deep voice.
I'll die first!"
"Then take your punishment!"
With that they gave the boy a swing, one holding to the feet the other the shoulders of the lad.
When they let go, Tad sailed several feet through the air.
Quick as a cat in his movements Tad turned over before he landed, going down on all fours.
He thought he was going to strike on the hard ground.
Instead he landed at the bottom of a deep pool of water cold as ice it seemed to him.
He went in all over.
Not expecting anything of this sort the boy was not holding his breath. The result was that he got a mouthful of water.
He came up choking, then pretended to go down again.
Instead he crawled up to the bank, under which he hid.
Dippy stepped to the edge of the pool and leaning over peered down somewhat anxiously.
Quick as a flash a pair of arms encircled his neck.
Dippy plunged in head first.
He did not even have time to cry out.
Within sixty seconds from that time half of the crowd were threshing about in the cold waters of the pool, while Tad, who had crawled out, sat on the bank dripping, watching their struggles.
All at once he was picked up in a pair of strong arms and tossed in bodily. Stacy howled lustily.
Clambering out he squared off for fight, but the only fight he got was another ducking in the pool.
Don't you know I've been shot?"
"Shot?"
"Yes, shot."
"Any of the rest of you kiddies been wounded in the fracas?" demanded Folly.
"No, but you've overlooked two of us," announced Ned stepping out.
"We haven't had our baths yet and I reckon we need them."
They had a rough and tumble scrimmage in the cold water, coming out choking, dripping and laughing.
All this made a favorable impression on the Rangers.
Boys who could take rough handling such as this, without losing their tempers or even offering any objection, surely must be worth while.
"I reckon you kin go back and dry off now," drawled Dippy.
"Yes, you might fetch me a piece of soap," answered Butler laughingly.
But their troubles for the night were not wholly over yet.
Their initiation was not yet complete.
GUN FITTINGS AND AMMUNITION.
Powder flask.--The flask that is carried in the pocket may be small, if roomy; a large one, in reserve, being kept in a bag, at the front of the saddle.
To reduce bulges in a metal powder flask, fill it up with Indian corn, or dry peas, of any other sort of hard grain; then pour water into it, and screw down the lid tightly.
The grain will swell, at first slowly and then very rapidly, and the flask will resume its former dimensions, or burst if it is not watched.
Peas do not begin to swell for a couple of hours or more.
Powder horn, to make.--Saw off the required length from an ox's horn, flatten it somewhat by heat (see "Horn"), fit a wooden bottom into it, caulk it well, and sew raw hide round the edge to keep all tight.
The mouth must be secured by a plug, which may be hollowed to make a charger. Pieces of cane of large diameter, and old gunpowder canisters, sewn up in hide, make useful powder flasks.
Percussion Caps.--Caps may be carried very conveniently by means of a ring, with two dozen nipple shaped beads, made of some metal, strung upon it; each bead being intended to be covered by a percussion cap.
It is very Difficult, without this contrivance, to keep caps free from sand, crumbs, and dirt, yet always at hand when required.
Spring cap holders are, I am sure, too delicate for rough travel.
To protect Caps from the Rain.--Before stalking, or watching at night in rainy weather, wax or grease the edge of the cap as it rests on the nipple: it will thus become proof against water and damp air.
Some persons carry a piece of grease with them, when shooting in wet weather, and with it they smear the top of the nipple after each loading, before putting on the fresh cap.
A broad leaf wrapped loosely round the lock of a gun, will protect it during a heavy shower.
Substitute for Caps.--When the revolution in Spain in eighteen fifty four began, "there was a great want of percussion caps; this the insurgents supplied by cutting off the heads of lucifer matches and sticking them into the nipples.
The plan was found to answer perfectly." (Times, july thirty first.)
Gun pricker.--I am indebted for the following plan, both for clearing the touchhole, and also for the rather awkward operation of pricking down fresh gunpowder into it, to an old sportsman in the Orkney Island of Sanday.
Next, he cuts a wooden plug to fit the quill; into the plug, the pricker is fixed.
The whole affair goes safely in the pocket; the quill acting as a sheath to the sharp pricker.
Now, when powder has to be pricked down the nipple, the "broad ring" is slipped off the quill and put on the nipple, which it fits; powder is poured into it, and the required operation is easily completed.
This little contrivance, which is so simple and Light, lasts for months, and is perfectly effective.
I have tried metal holders, but I much prefer the simple quill, on account of its elasticity and lightness. A little binding with waxed thread, may be put on, as shown in the sketch, to prevent the quill from splitting.
Wadding.--The bush affords few materials from which wadding can be made; some birds' nests are excellent for the purpose.
Gun flints are made with a hammer, and a chisel of steel that is not hardened.
The stone is chipped by the hammer alone into pieces of the required thickness, which are fashioned by being laid upon the fixed chisel, and hammered against it.
It takes nearly a minute for a practised workman to make one gun flint.
Gunpowder.--To carry Gunpowder.--Wrap it up in flannel or leather, not in paper, cotton, or linen; because these will catch fire, or smoulder like tinder, whilst the former will do neither the one nor the other. Gunpowder carried in a goat skin bag, travels very safely.
To make Gunpowder.--It is difficult to make good gunpowder, but there is no skill required in making powder that will shoot and kill.
Many of the negroes of Africa, make it for themselves-burning the charcoal, gathering saltpetre from salt pans, and buying the sulphur from trading caravans: they grind the materials on a stone.
These proportions should be followed as accurately as possible.
Each of the three materials must be pounded into powder separately, and then all mixed together most thoroughly.
Next, the cake is squeezed and worked against a sieve made of parchment, in which the holes have been burnt with a red hot wire, and through which the cake is squeezed in grains.
These grains are now put into a box, which is well shaken about, and in this way the grains run each other smooth.
The fine dust that is then found mixed with the grains, must be winnowed away; lastly the grains are dried.
Pound the ingredients separately.
Mix them.
three. Add a little water, and knead the mass.
Press it.
five.
Rub the mass through a sieve.
six.
Shake up the grains in a box. seven.
Get rid of the dust. eight.
Dry the grains.
The ingredients should be used as pure as they can be obtained.
For making a few charges of coarse powder, the sieve may be dispensed with: in this case, roll the dough into long pieces of the thickness of a pin; lay several of these side by side, and mince the whole into small grains; dust with powder, to prevent their sticking together: and then proceed as already described.
It should be made with the greatest care, and used as soon as possible afterwards: it is the most important ingredient in gunpowder.
When this has taken place, the bottom part must be broken off and put aside as unfit for making gunpowder, and the top part alone used.
Flower of sulphur is quite pure.
Saltpetre.--Dissolve the saltpetre that you wish to purify, in an equal measure of boiling water; a cupful of one to a cupful of the other. Strain this solution, and, letting it cool gradually, somewhat less than three fourths of the nitre will separate in regular crystals.
Saltpetre exists in the ashes of many plants, of which tobacco is one; it is also found copiously on the ground in many places, in saltpans, or simply as an effloresence.
Rubbish, such as old mud huts, and mortar, generally abounds with it.
(It is made by the action of the air on the potash contained in the earths.) The taste, which is that of gunpowder, is the best test of its presence.
To extract it, pour hot water on the mass, then evaporate and purify, as mentioned above.
Rocket Composition consists of gunpowder sixteen parts, by Weight; charcoal, three parts.
Or, in other words, of nitre, sixteen parts; charcoal seven parts; sulphur, four parts.
It must not be forgotten that when rockets are charged with the composition, a hollow tube must be left down their middle.
A mixture of very little tin, or pewter (which is lead and tin), with lead, hardens it: we read of sportsmen melting up their spoons and dishes for this purpose.
A little quicksilver has the same effect.
He says, "This is superior to all [other] mixtures for that purpose, as it combines hardness with extra weight; the lead must be melted in a pot by itself to a red heat, and the proportion of quicksilver must be added a ladleful at a time, and stirred quickly with a piece of iron just in sufficient quantity to make three or four bullets.
If the quicksilver is subjected to red heat in the large leadpot, it will evaporate." Proper alloy, or spelter, had best be ordered at a gun maker's shop, and taken from England instead of lead: different alloys of spelter vary considerably in their degree of hardness, and therefore more than one specimen should be tried.
Shape of Bullets.--Round iron bullets are worthless, except at very close quarters, on account of the lightness of the metal: for the resistance of the air checks their force extremely.
Whether elongated iron bullets would succeed, remains to be Tried.
Some savages-as, for instance, those of Timor-when in want of bullets, use stones two or three inches long.
Some good sportsmen insist on the advantage, for shooting at very close quarters, of cleaving a conical bullet nearly down to its base, into four parts; these partly separate, and make a fearful wound.
Bullets, to carry.--Bullets should be carried sewn up in their patches, for the convenience of loading, and they should not fit too tight: a few may be carried bare, for the sake of rapid loading.
Recovering Bullets.--When ammunition is scarce, make a practice of recovering the bullets that may have been shot into a beast; if they are of spelter, they will be found to have been very little knocked out of shape, and may often be used again without recasting.
If birds are to be killed for stuffing, dust shot will also be wanted; otherwise, it is undoubtedly better to take only one size of shot.
If the shot turns out to be lens shaped, there has been too much arsenic; if hollow, flattened, or tailed, there has been too little. Pewter or tin is bad, as it makes tailed shot.
Slugs are wanted both for night shooting and also in case of a hostile attack.
HINTS ON SHOOTING.
It is easy to load in this way with cartridges.
On Horseback.--Loading.--Empty the charge of powder from the flask into the left hand, and pour it down the gun; then take a bullet, wet out of your mouth, and drop it into the barrel, using no ramrod; the wet will cake the bullet pretty firmly in its right place.
On Water.--Boat shooting.--A landing net should be taken in the boat, as Colonel Hawker well advises, to pick up the dead birds as they float on the water, while the boat passes quickly by them.
Shooting over Water.--When shooting from a river bank without boat or dog, take a long light string with a stick tied to one end of it, the other being held in the hand: by throwing The stick beyond the floating bird, it can gradually be drawn in.
The stick should be one and a half or two feet long, two inches in diameter, and notched at either end, and attached to the hand line by a couple of strings, each six feet long, tied round either notch.
Night shooting.--Tie a band of white paper round the muzzle of the gun, behind the sight.
mr Andersson, who has had very great experience, ties the paper, not round the smooth barrel, but over the sight and all; and, if the sight does not happen to be a large one, he ties a piece of thick string round the barrel, or uses other similar contrivance, to tilt up the fore end of the paper.
By this means, the paper is not entirely lost sight of at the moment when the aim is being taken.
mr Andersson also pinches the paper into a ridge along the middle of the gun, to ensure a more defined foresight.
Nocturnal Animals.--There are a large number of night feeding animals, upon whose flesh a traveller might easily support himself, but of whose existence he would have few indications by daylight observation only.
The following remarks of Professor Owen, in respect to Australia are very suggestive:--"All the marsupial animals-and it is one of their curious peculiarities-are nocturnal.
With regard to most of the other Australian forms of marsupial animals, they are most strictly nocturnal; so that, if a traveller were not aware of that peculiarity, he might fancy himself traversing a country destitute of the mammalian grade of animal life.
If, however, after a weary day's journey, he could be awakened, and were to look out about the moonlight glade or scrub, or if he were to set traps by night, he would probably be surprised to find how great a number of interesting forms of mammalian animals were to Be met with, in places where there was not the slightest appearance of them in the daytime."
Scarecrows.--A string with feathers tied to it at intervals, like the tail of a boy's kite, will scare most animals of the deer tribe, by their fluttering; and, in want of a sufficient force of men, passes may be closed by this contrivance.
mr Lloyd tells us of a peasant who, when walking without a gun, saw a glutton up in a tree.
Stalking horses.--Artificial.--A stalking horse, or cow, is made by cutting out a piece of strong canvas into the shape of the animal, and painting it properly.
Loops are sewn in different places, through which sticks are passed, to stretch the curves into shape: a stake, planted in the ground serves as a buttress to support the apparatus: at a proper height, there is a loophole to fire through.
It packs up into a roll of canvas and a bundle of five or six sticks.
Colonel Hawker made a contrivance upon wheels which he pushed before him.
The Esquimaux shoot seals by pushing a white screen before them over the ice, on a sledge.
Pan hunting (used at salt licks).--"Pan hunting is a method of hunting deer at night.
An iron pan attached to a long stick, serving as a handle, is carried in the left hand over the left shoulder; near where the hand grasps the handle, in a small projecting stick, forming a fork on which to rest the rifle, when firing.
The pan is filled with burning pine knots, which, being saturated with turpentine, shed a brilliant and constant light all around; shining into the eyes of any deer that may come in that direction, and making them look like two balls of fire.
The effect is most curious to those unaccumstomed to it.
The rush of an enraged Animal is far more easily avoided than is usually supposed.
The way the Spanish bull fighters play with the bull, is well known: any man can avoid a mere headlong charge.
Few animals turn, if the rush be unsuccessful.
The buffalo is an exception; he regularly hunts a man, and is therefore peculiarly dangerous. Unthinking persons talk of the fearful rapidity of a lion or tiger's spring.
It is not rapid at all: it is a slow movement, as must be evident from The following consideration.
No wild animal can leap ten yards, and they all make a high trajectory in their leaps.
The catcher can play with it as he likes; he has even time to turn after it, if thrown wide.
But the speed of a springing animal is undeniably the same as that of a ball, thrown so as to make a flight of equal length and height in the air.
The corollary to all this is, that, if charged, you must keep cool and watchful, and your chance of escape is far greater than non sportsmen would imagine.
The blow of the free paw is far swifter than the bound.
Dogs kept at bay.--A correspondent assures me that "a dog flying at a man may be successfully repelled by means of a stout stick held horizontally, a hand at each end, and used to thrust the dog backwards over, by meeting him across the throat or breast.
If followed by a blow on the nose, as the brute is falling, the result will be sooner attained."
The dog then contents himself with barking and keeping guard until his master arrives.
Hiding Game.--In hiding game from birds of prey, brush it over, and they will seldom find it out; birds cannot smell well, but they have keen eyes.
Leaving a handkerchief or a short to flutter from a tree, will scare animals of prey for a short time.
Tying up your Horse.--You may tie your horse, on a bare plain, to the horns of an animal that you have shot, while you are skinning him, but it is better to hobble the horse with a stirrup leather. (See "Shooting horse.")
Division of Game.--Some rules are necessary in these matters, to avoid disputes, especially between whites and natives; and therefore the custom of the country must be attended to.
Duck shooting.--Wooden ducks, ballasted with lead, and painted, may be used at night as decoy ducks; or the skins of birds already shot, may be stuffed and employed for the same purpose.
They should be anchored in the water, or made fast to a frame attached to the shooting punt, and dressed with sedge.
It is convenient to sink a large barrel into the flat marsh or mud, as a dry place to stand or sit in, when waiting for the birds to come.
A lady suggests to me, that if the sportsman took a bottle of hot water to put under his feet, it would be a great comfort to him, and in this I quite agree; I would take a keg of hot water, when about it.
If real ducks be used as decoy birds, the males should be tied in one place and the females in another, to induce them to quack.
An artificial island may be made to attract ducks, when there is no real one.
Crocodile shooting.--mr
Gilby says, speaking of Egypt, "I killed several crocodiles by digging pits on the sand islands and sleeping a part of the night in them; a dry shred of palm branch, the colour of the sand, round the hole, formed a screen to put the gun through.
Their flesh was most excellent eating-half-way between meat and fish: I had it several times.
The difficulty of shooting them was, that the falcons and spurwing plovers would hover round the pit, when the crocodiles invariably took to the water.
Their sight and hearing were good, but their scent indifferent.
I generally got a shot or two at daybreak after sleeping in the pit."
Tracks.--When the neighbourhood of a drinking place is trodden down with tracks, "describe a circle a little distance From it, to ascertain if it be much frequented.
This is the manner in which spoor should at all times be sought for." (Cumming's 'Life in South Africa.') To know if a burrow be tenanted, go to work on the same principle; but, if the ground be hard, sprinkle sand over it, in order to show the tracks more clearly.
Carrying Game.--To carry small Game, as Fallow Deer.--Make a long slit with your knife between the back sinew and the bone of both of the hind legs.
Cut a thick pole of wood and a stout wooden skewer eight inches long.
Now thrust the right fore leg through the slit in the left hind one, and then the left fore leg through the slit in the right hind one, and holding these firmly in their places, push the skewer right through the left fore leg, so as to peg it from drawing back.
Lastly run the pole between the animal's legs and its body, and let two men carry it on their shoulders, one at each end of the pole; or, if a beast of burden be at hand, the carcase is in a very convenient shape for being packed.
In animals whose back sinew is not very prominent, it is best to cross the legs as above, and to lash them together.
Always take the bowels out of game, before carrying it; it is so much weight saved.
To float carcases of Game across a river.--Sir s Baker recommends stripping off the skin of the animal, as though it were intended to make a water skin of it: putting a stone up the neck end of the skin; thus forming a water tight sack, open at one end only.
All the flesh is now to be cut off the bones, and packed into the sack; which is then to be inflated, and secured by tying up the open end.
The skin of a large antelope thus inflated, will not only float the whole of the flesh, but will also support several swimmers.
"To carry Ivory on pack animals, the North African traders use nets, slinging two large teeth on each side of an ass.
Small teeth are wrapped up in skins and secured with rope." (Mungo Park.)
Setting a gun as a spring gun.--General Remarks.--The string that goes across the pathway should be dark coloured, and so fine that, if the beast struggles against it, it should break rather than cause injury to the gun.
The stock is firmly lashed to a tree, and the muzzle to a stake planted in the ground.
A "lever stick," eight inches long, is bound across the grip of the gun so as to stand upright; but it is not bound so tightly as to prevent a slight degree of movement.
The bottom of the "lever stick" is tied to the trigger, and the top of it to a long, fine, dark coloured string, which is passed through the empty ramrod tubes, and is fixed to a tree on the other side of the pathway.
It is evident that when a beast breasts this string, the trigger of the gun will be pulled.
The fault of the previous plan, is the trouble of tying the string to the trigger; since the curvature is usually such as to make it a matter of some painstaking to fix it securely.
A, B, C, is the "lever stick." Notch it deeply at A, where it is to receive the trigger; notch it also at B, half an inch from A; and at C, five inches or so from b In lashing B to the grip of the stock at D, the firmer you make the lashing, the better.
If D admit of any yielding movement, on C being pulled, the gun will not go off, either readily or surely; as will easily be seen, on making experiment.
third Method.--I am indebted to Captain j Meaden for the following account of the plan used in Ceylon for setting a spring gun for leopards:--
"Remove the sear, or tie up the trigger.
Load the gun, and secure it at the proper height from the ground.
Opposite the muzzle of the gun, or at such distance to the right, or left, as may be required, fasted the end of a black string, or line made of horsehair or fibre, and pass it across the path to the gun.
Fasten the other end to a stake, long enough to stand higher than the hammer.
Stick the end of the stake slightly in the ground, and let it rest upright against the lock projection, the black line being fastened nearly at that height.
Pass round the small of the stock a loop of single or double string.
Take a piece of stick six or eight inches long, pass through the loop, and twist tourniquet fashion until the loop is reduced to the required length.
Raise the hammer carefully, and pass the short end of the lever stick, from the inner to the outer side, over the comb, and let the long end of the lever rest against the stake: the pressure of the hammer will keep the lever steady against the stake.
To prevent the lower end of the stake flying out, from the pressure of the lever on the upper part, place a log or stone against the foot.
"An animal pushing against the black string, draws the upper end of the stake towards the muzzle, until the lever is disengaged and releases the hammer.
The stakes to be connected above and below the gun, by cross sticks.
"The carcase or live bait must be hedged round, and means adopted to guide the leopard across the string, by running out a short hedge on one side.
The breast than catches the string, and the push releases the hammer when the muzzle is in line with the chest.
Bow and Arrow set for Beasts.--The Chinese have some equivalent contrivance with bows and arrows.
These machines are planted in caves of sepulture, to guard them from pillage.
They use spring guns, and used to have spring bows in Sweden, and in many other countries.
Knives.--Hunting knife.--A great hunting knife is a useless encumbrance: no old sportsman or traveller cares to encumber himself with one; but a butcher's knife, carried in a sheath, is excellent, both from its efficient shape, the soft quality of The steel, its lightness, and the strong way in which the blade is set in the haft.
Pocket knife.--If a traveller wants a pocket knife full of all kinds of tools, he had best order a very light one of two and three quarters inches long, in a tortoise shell handle, without the usual turnscrew at the end.
It should have a light "picker" to shut over its back; this will act as a strike light, and a file also, if its under surface be properly roughened.
Underneath the picker, there should be a small triangular borer, for making holes in leather, and a gimlet.
The front of the knife should contain a long, narrow pen blade of soft steel; a cobbler's awl, slightly bent; and a packing needle with a large eye, to push thongs and twine through holes in leather.
Between the tortoise shell part of the handle and the metal frame of the knife, should be a space to contain three flat thin pieces of steel, turning on the same pivot.
The ends of these are to be ground to form turnscrews of brass instruments: when this excellent contrivance is used, it must be opened out like the letter T, the foot of which represents the turnscrew in use and the horizontal part represents the other two turnscrews, which serve as the handle.
It may be thought advisable to add a button hook, a corkscrew, and a large blade; but that is not my recommendation, because it increases the size of the knife and makes it heavy; now a heavy knife is apt to be laid by, and not to be at hand when wanted, while a light knife is a constant pocket companion.
Sheath Knives, to carry.--They are easily carried by half naked, pocketless savages, by attaching the sheaths to a leather loop, through which the left forearm and elbow are to be passed.
A swimmer can easily carry a knife in this way; otherwise he holds it between his teeth.
Substitutes for Knives.--Steel is no doubt vastly better than iron, but it is not essential for the ordinary purposes of life; indeed, most ancient civilized nations had nothing better than iron.
A fragment of flint or obsidian may be made fast to a handle, to be used as a carpenter cuts paper With a chisel; namely, by holding it dagger fashion, and drawing it over the skin or flesh which he wishes to cut.
Night glass.--Opera glasses are invaluable as night glasses, for, by their aid, the sight of man is raised nearly to a par with that of night roving animals; therefore, a sportsman would find them of great service when watching for game at night.
CHAPTER TEN.
CHASED BY PIRATES.
The weather now rapidly became finer, and the ocean, no longer lashed into fury by the breath of the tempest, subsided once more into long regular undulations.
The wind hauled gradually more round from the northward too, and blew warm and balmy; a most welcome change after the raw and chilly weather we had lately experienced.
Nothing of importance occurred for more than a week.
We were fairly in the Pacific, the region of fine weather; and our little barkie had behaved so well in the gale that our confidence in her seaworthiness was thoroughly established; so that all fear of future danger from bad weather was completely taken off our minds.
One morning, the wind having fallen considerably lighter during the preceding night, as soon as breakfast was over I roused up our square headed topsail, with the intention of setting it in the room of the small one.
But when I proceeded to take the latter in, I found that the halliards were somehow jammed aloft, and I shinned up to clear them.
"Broad on our lee bow," I answered, still clinging to the thin wire topmast shrouds.
"What d'ye make her out to be, Harry, my lad?" was the next question.
"Either a barque or a brig," answered I; "the latter I am inclined to believe, though he is still too far away for his mizzen mast to show, if he has one."
"Why d'ye think it's a brig, Harry?" queried Bob.
I was inclined to take the same view of the matter that Bob did.
Had she been bound to the eastward, the weather was not so bad at that time as to have prevented her scudding before it, which she undoubtedly would have done under such circumstances, making a fair wind of it.
At the same time there was of course a possibility of our being mistaken as to the craft in sight being the pirate brig, it being by no means an unusual thing for vessels as small as she was, or even smaller, to venture round the Cape.
What, under such circumstances, is your advice?"
"Which of us has the weather gauge, d'ye think?" queried Bob.
If we are both going at about the same speed, I should say we shall pass extremely close to her."
"How is she heading, Harry?" was the next question.
"To the northward, rather edging down towards us, if anything, I thought."
Having reached the cross trees, he stood upon them, with one hand grasping the peak halliards to steady himself, whilst with the other he shaded his eyes.
Having satisfied himself, he descended deliberately to the deck, evidently ruminating deeply.
The wind, however, was dropping fast; and by the time that the sun was on the meridian we were not going more than five knots.
Bob, on the other hand, was delighted beyond measure, stoutly avowing that the falling breeze was little, if anything, short of a divine manifestation in our favour.
We were very busy with the viands, keeping one eye always on the brig however, when we noticed something fluttering over her taffrail; and the next moment a flag of some sort floated up to her peak.
I was at the tiller; so Bob took the glass, and levelling it at the brig, gave her a more thorough scrutiny than we had bestowed upon her at all hitherto.
"The stars and stripes, and a pennant!" exclaimed he, with his eye still at the tube.
"Lord bless us for the two pretty innocents he takes us for, Harry; but there, of course he don't know as we've got his character and all about him at our fingers' ends.
Well, anyhow, we won't be behindhand with him in the matter of politeness;" and therewith Master Bob dived below, returning in a moment with our ensign and club burgee in his hand, which he bent to their respective halliards and ran them up-the one to our gaff end, and the other to our mast head.
As we had by this time finished our meal, Bob cleared the things away, muttering something about having "plenty to do afore long besides eating and drinking."
Bob at once assumed the duties of signal officer, by once more taking a peep through the glass.
"Commercial code pennant," said he; and then he read out the flags beneath it.
"Run down and fetch up the signal book," said i
"Thank 'ee!" ejaculated Bob, "not if we can help it, Mister Johnson.
I reckon 'twould be about the most onprofitable conwersation as ever the crew of this here cutter took a part in.
"You are right, Bob," I replied, glancing at the compass; "he is more than a point farther aft than he was a quarter of an hour ago; but is it not possible that we are giving ourselves needless uneasiness?
It was but too evident that Bob was right.
It was by this time perfectly manifest that whatever he might be able to do in a breeze, he had no chance with us in a light air like the present; and I entertained strong hopes of being able to slip past him unscathed, when I felt sanguine of our ability to get fairly away from him in a chase dead to windward.
He had aimed apparently so as to throw the shot across our fore foot; but it fell short by about fifty feet.
"Do that again, you lubber!" exclaimed Bob, contemptuously apostrophising the brig.
"Three more such fool's tricks as that, and we'll say good bye t'ye without ever having been within range.
"Here it comes straight for us this time, and no mistake," exclaimed Bob, as the water jets again marked the course of the shot.
"Scaldings! out of the road all of us that's got thin skulls," continued he, as the shot came skipping across the water in such long bounds as showed we were within range.
"Well missed!" added he, as the shot struck the water close to us, and bounded fairly over the boat, passing close beneath the main boom and the foot of the mainsail, without injuring so much as a ropeyarn.
"That's his long gun, Bob," said I; "his broadside guns would never reach so far as this, and though we're just now in rather warm quarters, we shall be out of range again very soon; and then, I think, we need give ourselves no further trouble concerning him.
Any way, you've got something very like the fulfilment of the wish you expressed the other day."
The shot shaved us pretty close to windward nevertheless, striking the water for the last time just short of our taffrail, and scurrying along and ploughing up the surface close enough to give us a pretty copious shower bath of spray ere it finally sank just ahead of us.
After this he fired no more.
"We can now take things quietly; and as it's your watch below, I'd recommend you to turn in and get a bit of a snooze.
It's your eight hours out to night, my lad, and if the breeze should happen to freshen about sundown, and that chap comes after us-and, by the piper, he means that same, for I'm blest if he isn't in stays-you'll need to keep both eyes open all your watch."
I had not been below above two minutes when I heard his voice shouting to me to come on deck again.
Wondering what was now in the wind, I sprang up the short companion ladder, and my eye at once falling upon the brig (which was now dead astern of us, heading in the same direction as ourselves, though not lying so close to the wind), I saw in a moment that our troubles were not yet by any means over.
The wind had by this time fallen so light that we were not making above three knots' way through the water, whilst the pirate appeared barely to have steerage way-in fact, his canvas was flapping to the mast with every sluggish roll which the vessel took over the long, scarcely perceptible swell.
Friend Johnson was evidently greatly nettled at our having slipped so handsomely through his fingers as we had, and seemed determined to have a word or two with us yet, whether we would or no; for he had lowered one of his boats, and she was just leaving the vessel in chase.
I took the glass, and counted six men at the oars, besides one or two (I could not be sure which) in the stern sheets.
This was serious indeed; for a light boat, propelled by six good oarsmen, would go about two feet to our one at our then rate of sailing, and must necessarily soon overhaul us.
Our case appeared pretty nearly desperate; but a seaman never gives up "whilst there is a shot in the locker," or a fresh expedient to be tried.
So I directed Bob to keep the cutter away about three points, and then lash the tiller, and lend me a hand to get our balloon canvas set.
This additional spread of canvas, coupled with the fact that we were running far enough off the wind to permit of its drawing well, made a perceptible difference in our speed-quite a knot, I considered, and Bob agreed with me.
By the time that we have it ready, they will be within range; and I think we may persuade them to turn back yet."
"So be it," replied Bob gleefully.
This gun was, as I think I have mentioned before, a four pound rifled piece, which was specially made to my order by an eminent firm.
It was a most beautiful little weapon, exquisitely finished; was a breech loader, and threw a solid shot about a mile, and a shell nearly half as far again.
It was mounted on a swivel or pivot, which we had the means of firmly fixing to the deck.
We got it out and upon deck, and soon had it mounted and ready for service.
Bob took the tiller, desiring me to work the gun, as I was not only a more practised artillerist than he, but knew also how to handle a breech loader, and I had the knack somehow of shooting straight.
I had it loaded, and was in the act of levelling it, when Bob said, "Suppose we was to let them chaps get a bit nearer, Hal, afore we opens fire.
At length, however, they were within half a mile of us, and I thought we might now fairly commence operations.
I carefully levelled the piece accordingly, and desiring Bob to sit well out of the line of fire and steer as steadily as possible, I watched the heave of the cutter, and pulled the trigger line.
The shot sped straight for the boat, but, striking the water just before it reached her, bounded clear over her and into the sea beyond.
I was too busy with the gun to reply just then, and in another moment I fired once more.
This looked like a fixed determination to come alongside at any price, so I this time inserted a shell instead of a solid shot, which I had before been firing.
We saw four fall from the thwarts, at all events, and all hands ceased pulling, whilst three of the oars slipped unnoticed overboard.
"Now," shouted I, "luff you may, Bob, and let's heave the craft to, and finish the job for them."
As I said this, Bob put his helm down, whilst I hauled the jib sheet to windward, and then I sprang aft again to the gun.
By this time they had taken to their oars again, but there were only two of them pulling: a sure indication of the extent to which our last shot had told.
They were turning the boat round to pull back to the ship, and seeing this I felt some compunction about firing on them again, and said so.
"Don't be such a soft hearted donkey, Harry, lad," retorted Bob. "Settle the whole lot if you can, boy; it'll only be so many skulking cut throats the less in the world.
I accordingly loaded again, and fired; but, probably from excitement, fired too high, and the missile flew harmlessly over the boat.
The next time I was more careful, aiming with the utmost deliberation. At length I pulled the trigger line, and immediately leapt to my feet to watch for the result.
The shell struck the boat's stern fairly amidships, and close to the water line; there was an explosion, but both the oarsmen appeared to be unhurt.
Almost immediately, however, one of them sprang aft and crouched down, doing something that we could not make out.
I took the glass, and then saw that a large gap had been made by the explosion of the shell, through which the water was doubtless pouring rapidly.
"It is time we were off once more, Bob," I remarked, as soon as I saw this; "so another shot at our friends here, and then we'll fill away."
The boat was very much disabled, and appeared to be sinking gradually, notwithstanding their efforts to keep her afloat, for they were now baling rapidly;--but I thought it best to make sure of her, so once more loaded and fired.
The shell passed through her stern this time also, and exploded; there was a shrill scream from more than one agonised throat, and the baling and pulling ceased altogether; every man in her was wounded, if not killed outright.
Satisfied with our work of destruction, and not particularly caring to expose ourselves to the fire of the gun in the other boat, which was no doubt much heavier than our own toy of a weapon, we filled away; and I once more swayed up the spinnaker forward, desiring Bob to keep just sufficiently away to permit of our balloon canvas fully drawing, but no more.
As soon as I had got the spinnaker set, I took the glass and had a good look at the boat we had beaten off.
She was nearly full of water, her gunwale being but an inch or two above the surface.
I saw three or four figures rouse themselves on board her, and recommence baling feebly; but their efforts were useless; she sank lower and lower, and at length rolled heavily bottom upwards, throwing her wounded crew into the water.
Almost immediately there was a furious splashing, and by the aid of the glass I distinctly saw the dorsal fins of several sharks darting here and there among them, whilst over the glassy surface of the water a shriek or two came faintly towards us.
In less than a minute all was over with the miserable wretches; the voracious sharks made short work of it with them, tearing living and dead alike to pieces in their eagerness to obtain a share of the prey.
They paused for a moment on their oars as though paralysed with horror; and then with a vengeful shout gave way more energetically than before.
The pirates tugged at their oars with might and main, passing within oar's length of the wreck of the first boat, when they again raised a furious yell, straining away at their stout ash blades until they made them bend like willow wands.
Judging that more powder would have to be burned after all, I once more loaded our little piece, charging with shell as before; and whilst I was doing this our pursuers opened fire upon us.
They miscalculated their distance, however, or the powers of their gun; for the shot fell considerably short of us, much to Bob's delight, to which he gave expression by the utterance of a few remarks of such biting sarcasm and raillery that they would infallibly have still further incensed the individuals to whom they were addressed could they but have heard them.
I accordingly levelled the breech loader, and then waited for a favourable opportunity to fire.
At length it came.
The shell entered the starboard bow of the pursuing boat, about midway between her gunwale and her water line; and immediately, to our great surprise, there was a violent explosion on board her.
Victoria Station, still named after the great nineteenth century Queen, was neither more nor less busy than usual as he came into it half an hour later.
The vast platform, sunk now nearly two hundred feet below the ground level, showed the double crowd of passengers entering and leaving town.
Those on the extreme left, towards whom Percy began to descend in the open glazed lift, were by far the most numerous, and the stream at the lift entrance made it necessary for him to move slowly.
He arrived at last, walking in the soft light on the noiseless ribbed rubber, and stood by the door of the long car that ran straight through to the Junction.
It was the last of a series of a dozen or more, each of which slid off minute by minute.
He felt quiet now that he had actually started.
He had made his confession, just in order to make certain of his own soul, though scarcely expecting any definite danger, and sat now, his grey suit and straw hat in no way distinguishing him as a priest (for a general leave was given by the authorities to dress so for any adequate reason).
He had only the violet thread in his pocket, such as was customary for sick calls.
He was sliding along peaceably enough, fixing his eyes on the empty seat opposite, and trying to preserve complete collectedness when the car abruptly stopped.
He looked out, astonished, and saw by the white enamelled walks twenty feet from the window that they were already in the tunnel.
The stoppage might arise from many causes, and he was not greatly excited, nor did it seem that others in the carriage took it very seriously; he could hear, after a moment's silence, the talking recommence beyond the partition.
Then there came, echoed by the walls, the sound of shouting from far away, mingled with hoots and chords; it grew louder.
The talking in the carriage stopped.
He heard a window thrown up, and the next instant a car tore past, going back to the station although on the down line.
This must be looked into, thought Percy: something certainly was happening; so he got up and went across the empty compartment to the further window.
Again came the crying of voices, again the signals, and once more a car whirled past, followed almost immediately by another.
There was a jerk-a smooth movement.
Percy staggered and fell into a seat, as the carriage in which he was seated itself began to move backwards.
There was a clamour now in the next compartment, and Percy made his way there through the door, only to find half a dozen men with their heads thrust from the windows, who paid absolutely no attention to his inquiries.
So he stood there, aware that they knew no more than himself, waiting for an explanation from some one.
It was disgraceful, he told himself, that any misadventure should so disorganise the line.
Twice the car stopped; each time it moved on again after a hoot or two, and at last drew up at the platform whence it had started, although a hundred yards further out.
Ah! there was no doubt that something had happened!
The instant he opened the door a great roar met his ears, and as he sprang on to the platform and looked up at the end of the station, he began to understand.
From right to left of the huge interior, across the platforms, swelling every instant, surged an enormous swaying, roaring crowd.
The flight of steps, twenty yards broad, used only in cases of emergency, resembled a gigantic black cataract nearly two hundred feet in height.
Each car as it drew up discharged more and more men and women, who ran like ants towards the assembly of their fellows.
The noise was indescribable, the shouting of men, the screaming of women, the clang and hoot of the huge machines, and three or four times the brazen cry of a trumpet, as an emergency door was flung open overhead, and a small swirl of crowd poured through it towards the streets beyond.
But after one look Percy looked no more at the people; for there, high up beneath the clock, on the Government signal board, flared out monstrous letters of fire, telling in Esperanto and English, the message for which England had grown sick.
He read it a dozen times before he moved, staring, as at a supernatural sight which might denote the triumph of either heaven or hell.
"EASTERN CONVENTION DISPERSED.
PEACE, NOT WAR.
It was not until mid day breakfast on the following morning that husband and wife met again.
Oliver had slept in town and telephoned about eleven o'clock that he would be home immediately, bringing a guest with him: and shortly before noon she heard their voices in the hall.
mr Francis, who was presently introduced to her, seemed a harmless kind of man, she thought, not interesting, though he seemed in earnest about this Bill.
It was not until breakfast was nearly over that she understood who he was.
"Don't go, Mabel," said her husband, as she made a movement to rise. "You will like to hear about this, I expect.
My wife knows all that I know," he added.
mr Francis smiled and bowed.
"Why, certainly."
Then she heard that he had been a Catholic priest a few months before, and that mr Snowford was in consultation with him as to the ceremonies in the Abbey.
She was conscious of a sudden interest as she heard this.
"I want to hear everything."
It seemed that mr Francis had seen the new Minister of Public Worship that morning, and had received a definite commission from him to take charge of the ceremonies on the first of October.
Of course things would be somewhat sloppy at first, said mr Francis; but by the New Year it was hoped that all would be in order, at least in the cathedrals and principal towns.
"It is important," he said, "that this should be done as soon as possible.
It is very necessary to make a good impression.
There are thousands who have the instinct of worship, without knowing how to satisfy it."
"That is perfectly true," said Oliver.
"I have felt that for a long time.
I suppose it is the deepest instinct in man."
"As to the ceremonies---" went on the other, with a slightly important air.
His eyes roved round a moment; then he dived into his breast pocket, and drew out a thin red covered book.
"Here is the Order of Worship for the Feast of Paternity," he said.
"I have had it interleaved, and have made a few notes."
He began to turn the pages, and Mabel, with considerable excitement, drew her chair a little closer to listen.
"That is right, sir," said the other.
"Now give us a little lecture."
mr Francis closed the book on his finger, pushed his plate aside, and began to discourse.
"First," he said, "we must remember that this ritual is based almost entirely upon that of the Masons.
Three quarters at least of the entire function will be occupied by that.
The proper officials will conduct the rest....
The difficulties begin with the last quarter."
He paused, and with a glance of apology began arranging forks and glasses before him on the cloth.
In the place of the reredos and Communion table there will be erected the large altar of which the ritual speaks, with the steps leading up to it from the floor.
Behind the altar-extending almost to the old shrine of the Confessor-will stand the pedestal with the emblematic figure upon it; and-so far as I understand from the absence of directions-each such figure will remain in place until the eve of the next quarterly feast."
"What kind of figure?" put in the girl.
Francis glanced at her husband.
"I understand that mr Markenheim has been consulted," he said.
"He will design and execute them.
Each is to represent its own feast.
This for Paternity---"
He paused again.
"Yes, mr Francis?"
"This one, I understand, is to be the naked figure of a man."
Yes-that seemed all right, thought Mabel.
mr Francis's voice moved on hastily.
"A new procession enters at this point, after the discourse," he said. "It is this that will need special marshalling.
I suppose no rehearsal will be possible?"
"Scarcely," said Oliver, smiling.
The Master of Ceremonies sighed.
"I feared not.
That is what seems to me the best."
He indicated the chapel.
mr Francis permitted a slight grimace to appear on his face; he flushed a little.
"The President of Europe---"
He broke off.
"Ah! that is the point.
Will the President take part?
That is not made clear in the ritual."
"We think so," said Oliver.
"He is to be approached."
"Well, if not, I suppose the Minister of Public Worship will officiate. He with his supporters pass straight up to the foot of the altar. Remember that the figure is still veiled, and that the candles have been lighted during the approach of the procession.
There follow the Aspirations printed in the ritual with the responds.
These are sung by the choir, and will be most impressive, I think.
Then the officiant ascends the altar alone, and, standing, declaims the Address, as it is called.
At the close of it-at the point, that is to say, marked here with a star, the thurifers will leave the chapel, four in number.
One ascends the altar, leaving the others swinging their thurifers at its foot-hands his to the officiant and retires.
Upon the sounding of a bell the curtains are drawn back, the officiant tenses the image in silence with four double swings, and, as he ceases the choir sings the appointed antiphon."
"The rest is easy," he said.
"We need not discuss that."
To Mabel's mind even the previous ceremonies seemed easy enough.
But she was undeceived.
The stupidity of people is prodigious.
I foresee a great deal of hard work for us all....
Who is to deliver the discourse, mr Brand?"
Oliver shook his head.
"I suppose mr Snowford will select."
mr Francis looked at him doubtfully.
"What is your opinion of the whole affair, sir?" he said.
Oliver paused a moment.
"I think it is necessary," he began.
"There would not be such a cry for worship if it was not a real need.
I think too-yes, I think that on the whole the ritual is impressive.
I do not see how it could be bettered...."
"Yes, Oliver?" put in his wife, questioningly.
"No-there is nothing-except ... except I hope the people will understand it."
mr Francis broke in.
"My dear sir, worship involves a touch of mystery.
You must remember that.
It was the lack of that that made Empire Day fail in the last century.
For myself, I think it is admirable.
Of course much must depend on the manner in which it is presented.
I see many details at present undecided-the colour of the curtains, and so forth.
But the main plan is magnificent.
It is simple, impressive, and, above all, it is unmistakable in its main lesson---"
"I take it that it is homage offered to Life," said the other slowly. "Life under four aspects-Maternity corresponds to Christmas and the Christian fable; it is the feast of home, love, faithfulness.
Life itself is approached in spring, teeming, young, passionate.
Sustenance in midsummer, abundance, comfort, plenty, and the rest, corresponding somewhat to the Catholic Corpus Christi; and Paternity, the protective, generative, masterful idea, as winter draws on....
I understand it was a German thought."
Oliver nodded.
"Yes," he said.
"And I suppose it will be the business of the speaker to explain all this."
"I take it so.
It appears to me far more suggestive than the alternative plan-Citizenship, Labour, and so forth.
These, after all, are subordinate to Life."
mr Francis spoke with an extraordinary suppressed enthusiasm, and the priestly look was more evident than ever.
It was plain that his heart at least demanded worship.
Mabel clasped her hands suddenly.
"I think it is beautiful," she said softly, "and-and it is so real."
mr Francis turned on her with a glow in his brown eyes.
"Ah! yes, madam.
There is no Faith, as we used to call it: it is the vision of Facts that no one can doubt; and the incense declares the sole divinity of Life as well as its mystery."
"What of the figures?" put in Oliver.
"A stone image is impossible, of course.
It must be clay for the present.
If the figures are approved they can then be executed in marble."
Again Mabel spoke with a soft gravity.
"It seems to me," she said, "that this is the last thing that we needed. It is so hard to keep our principles clear-we must have a body for them-some kind of expression---"
She paused.
"Yes, Mabel?"
"I do not mean," she went on, "that some cannot live without it, but many cannot.
The unimaginative need concrete images.
There must be some channel for their aspirations to flow through--- Ah!
I cannot express myself!"
Oliver nodded slowly.
He, too, seemed to be in a meditative mood.
"Yes," he said.
mr Francis turned on him abruptly.
"What do you think of the Pope's new Religious Order, sir?"
"I think it is the worst step he ever took-for himself, I mean.
Why do you ask?"
"I should be sorry for the brawler."
A bell rang sharply from the row of telephone labels.
Oliver rose and went to it.
Mabel watched him as he touched a button-mentioned his name, and put his ear to the opening.
"It is Snowford's secretary," he said abruptly to the two expectant faces.
"Snowford wants to-ah!"
They heard a sentence or two from him that seemed significant.
"Ah! that is certain, is it?
Yes....
Oh! but that is better than nothing....
Yes; he is here....
Indeed.
He looked on the tube, touched the button again, and came back to them.
"I am sorry," he said.
mr Snowford wants to see us both at once, mr Francis.
Markenheim is with him."
But though Mabel was herself disappointed, she thought he looked graver than the disappointment warranted.
CHAPTER six.
SHIPS.
The object aimed at by the owners of cargo boats will be to secure the greatest possible economy of working, combined with a moderately good rate of speed, such as may ensure shippers against having to stand out of their capital locked up in the cargo for too long a period.
Hence cheap power will become increasingly a desideratum, and the possible applications of natural sources of energy will be keenly scrutinised with a view to turning any feasible plan to advantage.
The sailing ship, and the economic and constructive lines upon which it is built and worked, will be carefully overhauled with a view to finding how its deficiencies may be supplemented and its good points turned to account.
One result of this renewed attention will be to confirm, for some little time, the movement which showed itself during the past decade of the nineteenth century for an increase of sailing tonnage. Sooner or later, however, it will be recognised that sail power must be largely supplemented, even on the "sailer," if it is to hold its own against steam.
For mails and passengers, on the other hand, steam must more and more decidedly assert its supremacy.
Yet the mail packet of the twentieth century will be very different from packets which have "made the running" towards the close of the nineteenth.
She will carry little or no cargo excepting specie, and goods of exceptionally high value in proportion to their weight and bulk.
Nearly all her below deck capacity, indeed, will be filled with machinery and fuel.
She will be in other respects more like a floating hotel than the old ideal of a ship, her cellars, so to speak, being crammed with coal and her upper stories fitted luxuriously for sitting and bed rooms and brilliant with the electric light.
Indeed the probability is that, on the average, the twentieth century mail packets will be smaller, being built for speed rather than for magnificence or carrying capacity.
The turbine engine will be the main factor in working the approaching revolution in mail steamer construction.
The special reason for this will consist in the fact that only by its adoption can the conditions mentioned above be fulfilled.
With the ordinary reciprocating type of marine steam machinery it would be impossible to place, in a steamer of moderate tonnage, engines of a size suitable to enable it to attain a very high rate of speed, because the strain and vibration of the gigantic steel arms, pulling and pushing the huge cranks to turn the shafting, would knock the hull to pieces in a very short time.
For this very reason, in fact, the marine architect and engineer have hitherto urged, with considerable force of argument, that high speed and large tonnage must go concomitantly.
Practically, only a big steamer, with the old type of marine engine, could be a very fast one, and, for ocean traffic at any rate, a smaller vessel must be regarded as out of the running.
Very large tonnage being thus made a prime necessity, it followed that the space provided must be utilised, and this need has tended to perpetuate the combination of mail and passenger traffic with cargo carrying.
The first step towards the revolution was taken many years ago when the screw propeller was substituted for the paddle wheel.
The latter means of propulsion caused shock and vibration not only owing to the thrusts of the piston rod from the steam engine itself, but also from the impact of the paddles upon the water one after the other.
A great increase in the smoothness of running was attained when the screw was invented-a propeller which was entirely sunk in the water and therefore exercised its force, not in shocks, but in gentle constant pressure upon the fluid around it.
Such as the windmill is for wind and the turbine water wheel for water was the screw propeller, although adapted, not as a generator, but as an application of power. Having made the work and stress continuous, the next thing to be accomplished was to effect a similar reform in the engines supplying the power.
This is accomplished in the turbine steam engine by causing the steam to play in strong jets continuously and steadily upon vanes which form virtually a number of small windmills.
Thus, while the screw outside of the hull is applying the force continuously, the steam in the inside is driving the shafting with equal evenness and regularity.
The steam turbine does not appear to have by any means reached finality in its form, such questions as the angle of impact which the jet should make with the surface of the vane, and the size of the orifice through which the steam should be ejected, being still debatable points.
Hitherto the steam supply pipe emitting the jet has been placed outside of the circle of the wheel; but the future form seems likely to be one in which the axis of the wheel is itself the pipe which contains the steam, but which permits it to escape outwards to the circumference of the wheel.
The latter is, in this form of turbine, made in the shape of a paddle wheel of very small circumference but considerable length, the paddles being set at such an inclination as to obtain the greatest possible rotative impulse from the outward rushing steam.
The pipe must be turned true at intervals to enable it to carry a number of diminutive wheels upon which these long vanes are mounted, and a very strong connection must be made between these wheels and the shaft of the screw.
The twin screw, with which the best and safest of modern steam ships are all fitted, will soon develop into what may be called "the twin stern".
Each screw requires a separate set of engines and the main object of the duplication is to lessen the risk of the vessel being left helpless in case of accident to one or other.
The advisability of placing each engine and shafting in a separate water tight compartment has therefore been seen.
At this point there presents itself for consideration the advisability of separating the two screws by as wide a distance as may be convenient and placing the rudder between the two.
Practically, therefore, it will be found best to build out a steel framework from each side of the stern for holding the bearings of each screw in connection with the twin water tight compartments holding the shafting; and thus will be evolved what will practically represent a twin, or double, stern.
In the case of the turbine steamer several of the forms of screw which were first proposed when that type of propeller was invented will again come up for examination, notably the Archimedean screw, wound round a fairly long piece of shafting.
Hence will arise a demand for accommodation for each screw in a tube forming part of the lower hull itself and open at the side for the taking in of water, while the stern part is equally free.
In this way there is evolved a kind of compromise between the two principles of marine propulsion, by a screw and by a jet of water thrown to sternward.
The water jet is already very successfully employed for the propulsion of steam lifeboats in which, owing to the danger of fouling the life saving and other tackle, an open screw is objectionable.
The final extermination of the sailing ship is popularly expected as one of the first developments of the twentieth century in maritime traffic.
Steam, which for oversea trade made its entrance cautiously in the shape of a mere auxiliary to sail power, had taken up a much more self assertive position long before the close of the nineteenth century, and has driven its former ally almost out of the field in large departments of the shipping industry.
Yet a curious and interesting counter movement is now taking place on the Pacific Coast of America, as well as among the South Sea Islands and in several other places where coal is exceptionally dear.
Trading schooners and barques used in these localities are often fitted with petroleum oil engines, which enable them to continue their voyages during calm or adverse weather.
For the owners of the smaller grade of craft it was a material point in recommendation of this movement that, having no boiler or other parts liable to explode and wreck the vessel, an oil engine may be worked without the attendance of a certificated engineer.
As soon as this legal question was settled a considerable impetus was given to the extension of the auxiliary principle for sailing ships.
The shorter duration of the average voyage made by the sail and oil power vessels had the effect of enabling shippers to realise upon the goods carried more speedily than would have been possible under the old system of sail power alone.
For ocean greyhounds carrying mails and passengers the prime necessity of high speed has to a large extent obliterated any such separating line between waste and economy.
It is, however, a mistake to imagine that the cargo steamer of the future will be in any sense a replica of the mail boat of to day.
The opposition presented by the water to the passage of a vessel increases by leaps and bounds as soon as the rate now adopted by the cargo steamer is passed, and thus presents a natural barrier beyond which it will not be economically feasible to advance much further.
If then we recognise clearly that steam cargo transport across the ocean can only be done remuneratively at about one half the speed now attained by the very fastest mail boats, we shall soon perceive also that the chances of the auxiliary principle, if wisely introduced, placing the "sailer" on a level with the cargo ship worked by steam alone, are by no means hopeless.
A type of vessel which can be trusted to make some ten or twelve knots regularly, and which can also take advantage of the power of the wind whenever it is in its favour, must inevitably possess a material advantage over the steam cargo slave in economy of working, while making almost the same average passages as its rival.
Then, also, the sailless cargo slave, in the keen competition that must arise, will be fitted with such appliances as human ingenuity can in future devise, or has already tentatively suggested, for invoking the aid of natural powers in order to supplement the steam engine and effect a saving in fuel.
One of these will no doubt be the adoption of the heavy pendulum with universal joint movement in a special hold of the vessel so connected with an air compression plant that its movements may continually work to fill a reservoir of air at a high pressure.
The marine engines of the ordinary type will then be adapted to work with compressed air, and the true steam engine itself will be used for operating an air compressor on the system adopted in mines.
The pendulum apparatus, of course, is really a device for enabling a vessel to derive, from the power of the waves which raise her and roll her, an impetus in the desired direction of her course.
These undoubtedly are dangers which have to be provided against, and probably the occasional lack of care has been the cause of many an unreported loss, as well as of recorded mishaps from broken tail shafts and screws, or from explosions far out at sea.
The swinging framework would then be steadied by the friction brake gripping it gradually.
Auxiliary machinery of this class can only be made use of, as already indicated, to a certain strictly limited extent, owing to the tendency of any swinging weight in a vessel to aggravate the rolling during heavy weather.
No kind of floating appendage, moving independently of the vessel, could exercise any actual force by the uprising of a wave in lifting it without being to some extent sunk in the water; and, accordingly, when the waves were running high there would be imminent risk that heavy volumes of water would get upon the apparatus and prevent the ship from righting itself.
Many of the schemes that have been put forward, by patent and otherwise, for the automatic propulsion of ships have entirely failed to commend themselves by reason of their taking little or no account of the behaviour of a ship, fitted with the proposed inventions, during very rough and trying weather.
The swinging pendulum, with connected apparatus for compressing air or, perhaps, for generating the electric current, seems to be the most controllable and therefore the safest of the various types of apparatus which are applicable to the utilisation of wave power for propulsion.
In the construction of connecting machinery by which the movements of a pendulum hanging up from a universal joint may be transmitted to wheels or pistons operating compressors or dynamos, it is necessary to transform all motions passing in any direction through the spherical or bowl shaped figure traced out by the end of the pendulum in the course of its swinging.
This may be effected, for instance, in the case of a pendulum working air compressors, by mounting the latter on bearings like those of the gun carriage in a field piece, and having two of them operating one at right angles to the other.
Air tight joints in the pipes which lead to the compressed air reservoir are placed in the bearings of this mounting.
We thus have the same kind of provision for taking advantage of a universal movement in space as is made in solid geometry by three co ordinates at right angles to one another for measuring such movements.
As the pendulum moves it throws one or more of these piston rod ends into contact with the inner surface of the ring, driving it into the compressing pump.
At the top of the pendulum there is a double or universal pipe joint through which the air under pressure is driven to the reservoir, and by which the apparatus is also hung.
This is the simplest, and in some respects the best, form.
A very simple type of the wave power motor as applied to marine propulsion is based upon an idea taken from the mode of progression adopted by certain crustaceans, namely the possession of the means for drawing in and rapidly ejecting the water.
A very much simplified form of the pendulous or rocking weight is applicable in this case.
A considerable amount of cargo is stowed away in an inner hull, taking the shape of what is practically a gigantic cradle rocking upon semicircular lines of railway iron laid down in the form of ribs of the ship.
To the sides of these large rocking receptacles are connected the rods carrying, at their other ends, the pistons of large force pumps which draw the water in at one stroke and force it out to sternwards, below the water line, at the other.
In this arrangement it is obvious that only the "roll" and not the "pitch" of the vessel can be utilised as the medium through which to obtain propulsive force.
But it is probable that fully eighty per cent. of the movements of a vessel during a long voyage-as indicated, say, by the direction and sweep of its mast heads-consists of the roll.
Each ton of goods moved through a vertical distance of one foot in relation to the hull of the vessel, has in it the potentiality of developing, when fourteen or fifteen movements occur per minute, about one horse power.
A cradle containing two hundred tons, as may therefore be imagined, can be made to afford very material assistance in helping forward a sailing ship during a calm.
For sailing ships especially, the rocking form of wave motor as an aid to propulsion will be recommended on account of the fact that when the weather is "on the beam" both of its sources of power can be kept in full use.
The advantage of the wave power, however, would be seen mainly during the calm and desultory weather which has virtually been the means of forcing sail power to resign its supremacy to steam.
For checking the rocker in time of heavy weather special appliances are necessary, which, of course, must be easily operated from the deck.
Wedge shaped pieces with rails attached may be driven down by screws upon the sides of the vessel, thus having the effect of gradually narrowing the amplitude of the rocking motion until a condition of stability with reference to the hull has been attained.
In the building of steel ships, as well as in the construction of bridges and other erections demanding much metal work, great economies will be introduced by the reduction of the extent to which riveting will be required when the full advantages of hydraulic pressure are realised.
The plates used in the building of a ship will be "knocked up" at one side and split at the other, with the object of making joints without the need for using rivets to anything like the extent at present required.
In putting the plates thus treated together to form the hull of a vessel the swollen side of one plate is inserted between the split portions of another and the latter parts are then clamped down by heavy hydraulic pressure.
Through this reform, and the further use of steel ribs for imparting strength and thus admitting of the employment of thinner steel plates for the actual shell, the cost of shipbuilding will be very greatly reduced.
The grain elevator system is only the beginning of a revolution in this department which will not end until the loading and unloading of ships have become almost entirely the work of machinery.
The principle of the miner's tool known as the "sand auger" may prove itself very useful in this connection.
From a heap of tailings the miner can select a sample, by boring into it with a thin tube, inside of which revolves a shaft carrying at its end a flat steel rotary scoop.
The auger, after working its way to the bottom of the heap, is raised, and, of course, it contains a fair sample of the sand at all depths from the top downwards.
On a somewhat similar principle the unloading of ships laden with grain, ore, coal, and all other articles which can be handled in bulk and divided, will be carried out by machines which, by rotary action, will work their way down to the bottom of the hull and will then be elevated by powerful lifting cranes.
For other classes of goods permanent packages and tramways will be provided in each ship, and trucks will be supplied at the wharf.
For coastal passages across shallow but rough water like the English Channel, the services of moving bridges will be called into requisition.
One of these has been at work at saint Malo on the French coast opposite Jersey, and another was more recently constructed on the English coast near Brighton.
For the longer and much more important service across the Channel submarine rails may be laid down as in the cases mentioned, but in addition it will be necessary to provide for static stability by fixing a flounder shaped pontoon just below the greatest depth of wave disturbance, and just sufficient in buoyancy to take the great bulk of the weight of the structure off the rails.
In this way passengers may be conveyed across straits like the Channel without the discomforts of sea sickness.
The stoking difficulties on large ocean going steamers have become so acute that they now suggest the conclusion that, notwithstanding repeated failures, a really effective mechanical stoker will be so imperatively called for as to enforce the adoption of any reasonably good device.
As soon as the mechanical fuel shifter has been adopted, and the boilers have been properly insulated in order to prevent the overheating of the stoke hole, the stoker will be raised to the rank of a secondary engineer, and his work will cease to be looked upon as in any sense degrading.
Already some owners and masters have begun to mitigate, to a certain extent, the embargo which the choice of a sea faring life has in times past been understood to place upon married men.
Positions are found for women as stewardesses and in other capacities, and it is coming to be increasingly recognised that there is a large amount of women's work to be done on board a ship.
There will be the "Ship's Shop" and the "Ship's School," the "Ship's Church" and various other institutions and societies.
Thus in the twentieth century the sea will no longer be regarded, to the same extent as in the past, as the refuge for the ne'er do well of the land living populace; and this, more than perhaps anything else, will help to render travelling by the great ocean highways safe and comfortable.
one.
one.
I am like an infant which has not yet smiled.
twenty one.
one.
The partial becomes complete; the crooked, straight; the empty, full; the worn out, new.
To Heaven and Earth.
three.
He who stands on his tiptoes does not stand firm; he who stretches his legs does not walk (easily). (So), he who displays himself does not shine; he who asserts his own views is not distinguished; he who vaunts himself does not find his merit acknowledged; he who is self conceited has no superiority allowed to him.
one.
Great, it passes on (in constant flow).
Passing on, it becomes remote.
Therefore the Tao is great; Heaven is great; Earth is great; and the (sage) king is also great.
Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao.
one.
one.
one.
one.
If any one should wish to get the kingdom for himself, and to effect this by what he does, I see that he will not succeed.
The kingdom is a spirit like thing, and cannot be got by active doing.
one.
three.
The second in command of the army has his place on the left; the general commanding in chief has his on the right;--his place, that is, is assigned to him as in the rites of mourning.
one.
three.
five.
one.
All pervading is the Great Tao!
three.
one.
one.
one.
He who knows (the Tao) does not (care to) speak (about it); he who is (ever ready to) speak about it does not know it.
one.
Therefore a sage has said, 'I will do nothing (of purpose), and the people will be transformed of themselves; I will be fond of keeping still, and the people will of themselves become correct.
one.
Misery!--happiness is to be found by its side!
Happiness!--misery lurks beneath it!
one.
one.
If you will go along with me I will make your fortune also."
"Not I," said Babo; "I will carry no stone with me.
The stone?
"Give me a piece of your bread, master," said he.
The next morning off they started again bright and early, and before long they came to just such another field of stones as they left behind them the day before.
We may need something more to eat before the day is over."
At last they came to a great wide plain, where neither stock nor stone was to be seen, but only a gallows tree, upon which one poor wight hung dancing upon nothing at all, and there night caught them again.
But listen to what happened.
Then the smith let him go, and off he marched in a huff.
"Help!" bawled Babo.
"Help!
Murder!"
"Stop, friend," said he to the smith, "let the simpleton go; this is not past mending yet."
"Bless you!
Bless you!" said the rich man.
You must have been dreaming!
See, here are two hundred silver pennies, and that is enough and more than enough for six drops of medicine."
Down the stairs stumped the doctor with Babo at his heels.
There stood the cook waiting for them.
"Very well," said the cook, and he counted out the two hundred pennies, and Babo slipped them into his pocket.
And then, besides, how about the fortune you promised me?"
"I got it for a piece of advice," said Babo.
For a piece of advice!
"I got it for a piece of advice," said he.
When Babo came the next morning the king gave him ten chests full of money, and that made the simpleton richer than anybody in all that land.
One of his neighbours, a lady of quality, had two daughters who were perfect beauties.
There was nothing then to be seen but parties of pleasure, hunting, fishing, dancing, mirth and feasting. Nobody went to bed, but all passed the night in playing tricks upon each other.
"What," said he, "is not the key of my closet among the rest?"
"Fail not," said Blue Beard, "to bring it me presently."
"How comes this blood upon the key?"
"You must die, Madam," said he, "and that presently."
"Sister Anne" (for that was her name), "go up I beg you, upon the top of the tower, and look if my brothers are not coming; they promised me that they would come to day, and if you see them, give them a sign to make haste."
"Come down quickly," cried Blue Beard, "or I will come up to you."
"I see," replied sister Anne, "a great dust that comes this way."
"Are they my brothers?"
"Alas! no, my dear sister, I see a flock of sheep."
"Will you not come down?" cried Blue Beard.
"I see," said she, "two horsemen coming, but they are yet a great way off."
"God be praised," she cried presently, "they are my brothers; I am beckoning to them, as well as I can, for them to make haste."
THE COMING OF THE SEA
Once there was no sea, and the gods went walking over the green plains of earth.
But to the gods as They sat upon Their hilltops a new cry came crying over the green spaces that lay below the hills, and the gods said:
"This is neither the cry of life nor yet the whisper of death.
What is this new cry that the gods have never commanded, yet which comes to the ears of the gods?"
And the gods together shouting made the cry of the south, calling the south wind to them.
Then for a space Slid and the four winds struggled with one another till the strength of the winds was gone, and they limped back to the gods, their masters, and said:
"We have met this new thing that has come upon the earth and have striven against its armies, but could not drive them forth; and the new thing is beautiful but very angry, and is creeping towards the gods."
Then from Their hills the gods sent down a great array of cliffs against hard, red rocks, and bade them march against Slid.
Then Slid sent some of his smaller waves to search out what stood against him, and the cliffs shattered them.
And again Slid called up out of his deep a mighty array of waves and sent them roaring against the guardians of the gods, and the red rocks frowned and smote them.
Then into every cleft that stood in the rocks Slid sent his hugest wave and others followed behind it, and Slid himself seized hold of huge rocks with his claws and tore them down and stamped them under his feet.
And when the tumult was over the sea had won, and over the broken remnants of those red cliffs the armies of Slid marched on and up the long green valley.
And passing across the world they came at last to where the white cliffs stood, and, coming behind them, split them here and there and went through their broken ranks to Slid at last.
And the gods were angry with Their traitorous streams.
And now, Tintaggon, thine ancient lords, the gods, are facing a new thing which overthrows the old.
Go therefore, thou, Tintaggon, and stand up against Slid, that the gods be still the gods and the earth still green."
And I will deck thee with all the robes of the sea, and all the plunder that I have taken in rare cities shall be piled before thy feet.
Tintaggon, I have conquered all the stars, my song swells through all the space besides, I come victorious from Mahn and Khanagat on the furthest edge of the worlds, and thou and I are to be equal lords when the old gods are gone and the green earth knoweth Slid.
And all the while that Slid sang his songs and played with the nautilus that sailed up and down he gathered his oceans together.
Very calm the sea lies now about Tintaggon's feet, where he stands all black amid crumbled cliffs of white, with red rocks piled about his feet.
And often the sea retreats far out along the shore, and often wave by wave comes marching in with the sound of the tramping of armies, that all may still remember the great fight that surged about Tintaggon once, when he guarded the gods and the green earth against Slid.
A LEGEND OF THE DAWN
Then running down the stairway of the gods with tripping feet, chalcedony, onyx, chalcedony, onyx, step by step, she cast her golden ball across the sky.
All in the dark among the crags in a mighty cavern, guarded by two twin peaks, at last they found the golden ball for which the Dawnchild wept.
And again the gods were sorry, and the South Wind came to tell her tales of most enchanted islands, to whom she listened not, nor yet to the tales of temples in lone lands that the East Wind told her, who had stood beside her when she flung her golden ball.
But from far away the West Wind came with news of three grey travellers wrapt round with battered cloaks that carried away between them a golden ball.
And in the darkness underneath the world he met the three grey travellers and rushed upon them and drove them far before him, smiting them with his sword till their grey cloaks streamed with blood.
And the child cried and threw it upon the stairway and chipped and broke its edges and asked for the golden ball.
A heron had seen it lying in a pond, but a wild duck in some reeds had seen it last as she came home across the hills, and then it was rolling very far away.
At last the cock cried out that he had seen it lying beneath the world. There Limpang Tung sought it and the cock called to him through the darkness as he went, until at last he found the golden ball.
We found the golden ball."
When Inzana saw the Eclipse bearing her plaything away she cried aloud to the thunder, who burst from Pegana and fell howling upon the throat of the Eclipse, who dropped the golden ball and let it fall towards earth.
And then she cried because there was none to find it, for the thunder was far away chasing the Eclipse, and all the gods lamented when They saw her sorrow.
And into the world he went till he came to the nether cliffs that stand by the inner mountains in the soul and heart of the earth where the Earthquake dwelleth alone, asleep but astir as he sleeps, breathing and moving his legs, and grunting aloud in the dark.
And as the golden ball went through the sky to gleam on lands and cities, there came the Fog towards it, stooping as he walked with his dark brown cloak about him, and behind him slunk the Night.
At the entreaty of Their Dawnchild all the gods made Themselves stars for torches, and far away through all the sky followed the tracks of Night as far as he prowled abroad.
And the child played all day long with the golden ball down in the little fields where the humans lived, and went to bed at evening and put it beneath his pillow, and went to sleep, and no one worked in all the world because the child was playing.
And the light of the golden ball streamed up from under the pillow and out through the half shut door and shone in the western sky, and Yoharneth Lahai in the night time tip toed into the room, and took the ball gently (for he was a god) away from under the pillow and brought it back to the Dawnchild to gleam on an onyx step.
And the hound, the thunder, shall chase the Eclipse and all the gods go seeking with Their stars, but never find the ball.
These things be hidden even from the gods.
A Plea
When the newly married pair came home, the first person who appeared, to offer his congratulations, was Sydney Carton.
"mr Darnay," said Carton, "I wish we might be friends."
"We are already friends, I hope."
"You are good enough to say so, as a fashion of speech; but, I don't mean any fashion of speech.
Indeed, when I say I wish we might be friends, I scarcely mean quite that, either."
"I remember a certain famous occasion when you forced me to confess that you had been drinking."
I hope it may be taken into account one day, when all days are at an end for me!
Don't be alarmed; I am not going to preach."
"I am not at all alarmed.
I wish you would forget it."
"I forgot it long ago."
"Fashion of speech again!
But, mr Darnay, oblivion is not so easy to me, as you represent it to be to you.
I declare to you, on the faith of a gentleman, that I have long dismissed it from my mind.
Good Heaven, what was there to dismiss!
"Genuine truth, mr Darnay, trust me!
I have gone aside from my purpose; I was speaking about our being friends.
If you doubt it, ask Stryver, and he'll tell you so."
"I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his."
"Well!
At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never done any good, and never will."
"But I do, and you must take my word for it.
Well!
"Will you try?"
"That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I have indicated.
I thank you, Darnay.
I may use that freedom with your name?"
"I think so, Carton, by this time."
They shook hands upon it, and Sydney turned away.
"Yes, dearest Charles," with her hands on his breast, and the inquiring and attentive expression fixed upon him; "we are rather thoughtful to night, for we have something on our mind to night."
"Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you not to ask it?"
"Will I promise?
"I think, Charles, poor mr Carton deserves more consideration and respect than you expressed for him to night."
"Indeed, my own?
Why so?"
"That is what you are not to ask me.
I would ask you to believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep wounds in it.
My dear, I have seen it bleeding."
"It is a painful reflection to me," said Charles Darnay, quite astounded, "that I should have done him any wrong.
I never thought this of him."
"My husband, it is so.
I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable now.
"And, O my dearest Love!" she urged, clinging nearer to him, laying her head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his, "remember how strong we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!"
The supplication touched him home.
If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the dark streets, could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could have seen the drops of pity kissed away by her husband from the soft blue eyes so loving of that husband, he might have cried to the night-and the words would not have parted from his lips for the first time-
Her countenance, too, carried a peculiar something that the artist's eye was quick to detect, and that the artist's fingers tingled to put on canvas.
"Jove!
Billy wished, sometimes, that she did not so often seem to Bertram-a picture.
She turned to Cyril with outstretched hand.
He's expected always to remove her quietly but effectually, whenever he sees that she is likely to interrupt a tete a tete.
She dropped into a chair and raised both her hands, palms outward.
I've had all I can stand, already."
"All you can stand?"
"What do you mean?"
This last was from Bertram, spoken softly, and with a hurried glance toward the hall.
Billy dropped her hands and lifted her head.
By heroic effort she pulled her face into sobriety-all but her eyes-and announced:
Three masculine forms sat suddenly erect.
Billy began to laugh again, yet she was plainly trying to control herself.
"I'll tell you.
I must tell you.
"But it was so funny, when I expected a girl, you know, to see him with his brown beard, and he was so tall and big!
Oh, it was so funny!"
"Did the creature sign himself 'Mary Jane'?" exploded Bertram.
"Didn't he write again?" asked William.
"Yes."
He thought it was too good a joke."
"Joke!" scoffed Cyril.
"But, see here, Billy, he isn't going to live here-now?" Bertram's voice was almost savage.
"Oh, no, he isn't going to live here-now," interposed smooth tones from the doorway.
"mr--Arkwright!" breathed Billy, confusedly.
Three crimson faced men sprang to their feet.
The situation, for a moment, threatened embarrassed misery for all concerned; but Arkwright, with a cheery smile, advanced straight toward Bertram, and held out a friendly hand.
Naturally, after this, there could be nothing stiff or embarrassing. Billy laughed in relief, and motioned mr Arkwright to a seat near her. William said "Of course, of course!" and shook hands again.
Bertram and Cyril laughed shamefacedly and sat down.
Somebody said: "But what does the 'M.
After dinner somebody suggested music.
Cyril frowned, and got up abruptly.
Bertram twinkled and glanced at Billy.
"You see," explained Bertram, jauntily, to Arkwright, whose eyes were slightly puzzled, "Cyril never plays unless the piano and the pedals and the weather and your ears and my watch and his fingers are just right!"
"Nonsense!" scorned Cyril, dropping his book and walking back to his chair.
"I don't feel like playing to night; that's all."
"You see," nodded Bertram again.
"I see," bowed Arkwright with quiet amusement.
"I believe-mr
Everybody laughed.
"Can you-without your notes?
I have lots of songs if you want them."
For a moment-but only a moment-Arkwright hesitated; then he rose and went to the piano.
Cyril's chin had lifted at the first tone.
He was listening now with very obvious pleasure.
Bertram, too, was showing by his attitude the keenest appreciation.
She seemed scarcely to move or to breathe till the song's completion; then there came a low "Oh, how beautiful!" through her parted lips.
Bertram, looking at her, was conscious of a vague irritation.
"I wish I could sing like that!"
There, here it is.
Just let me play it for you." And she slipped into the place the singer had just left.
It was the beginning of the end.
Then came Nevin again, Billy still playing the accompaniment.
Next followed a duet.
Billy did not consider herself much of a singer, but her voice was sweet and true, and not without training. It blended very prettily with the clear, pure tenor.
Bertram, still sitting stiffly erect in his chair, was not conscious of a vague irritation now.
He wondered how long it took to teach a man to sing, anyhow; and he wondered if a man could sing-who never had sung.
At this point the duet came to an end, and Billy and her guest left the piano.
Almost at once, after this, Arkwright made his very graceful adieus, and went off with his suit case to the hotel where, as he had informed Aunt Hannah, his room was already engaged.
William went home then, and Aunt Hannah went up stairs.
"Billy, how long does it take-to learn to sing?"
Bertram wished then he had not asked the question; but all he said was:
"'mr
What an absurd name!"
"But doesn't he sing beautifully?"
Oh, yes, he sings all right," said Bertram's tongue.
CHAPTER thirteen
THE DANCE
"Are you all set?
Then dance!
On went the dance; and through the atmosphere-thick with tobacco smoke-the native women were guided, their bronzed faces speaking excitement.
Squaws, who had not yet learned the dance, sat on boxes.
The three friends crowded into the room and stood with their backs against the wall.
"A la main left." All stood to attention.
"First gent swing the left hand lady, with the left hand round."
The ladies turned to the right.
This movement brought them opposite, and so they were in a circle, at which they balanced, the men facing outwards, the women inwards.
"On to the next!"
"On the next!"--again brought the men facing outwards, the ladies inwards-and so on.
"Promenade all Around the hall, And seat your ladies at the ball."
The music was weird and discordant.
"Say! why don't you fellows get in and dance?"
I saw a squaw looking at you and saying 'heap dam dood,' so if you want to keep your station in society you've got to dance." Haskins was again worrying them.
"All right.
Who will I ask to dance?" George was ready.
She it was who had said "Heap dam dood."
George went and invited her to be his partner.
The squaw in the corner was keeping her eye on George with evident dislike.
As john noticed this he recommended their departure; so George and he went back to bed.
Well-you'll get the worst of it.
"Too much police-too much law and order; you can never have a real live mining camp in Canada."
Frank chuckled; and then, as the prospect of an international argument did not seem good, went on another tack.
No-the question was too serious.
He felt called upon to answer,
"Yes, I do."
"Well, partner, I don't.
Now, say!
He had, it is true, discussed doctrine at college with his class mates.
He did not know what to say; he said nothing.
Frank Corte was working at his bread again, his face twitching with a smile.
Frank Corte returned to the kneading, while john Berwick thoughtfully watched the sun flooded landscape.
"The Bible tells a story of the origin of man, which we may or may not believe.
The Bible says there is a God; and God sees best not to explain His schemes and why He makes man and animals suffer.
john paused, and would have added something; but Frank, his face half flushed in confusion, his voice less rasping than usual, broke in,
"Say! stranger, when I first saw you I sized you up along with the Siwashes as a 'heap dam dood,' though I didn't like to say it serious like; but that's a pretty good talk of yours, and, sure, sounds natural.
Marston's manner was changed towards her; he seemed shy, cowed, and uneasy in her presence, and thenceforth she saw less than ever of him.
Meanwhile the time approached which was to witness the long expected, and, by Rhoda, the intensely prayed for arrival of her brother.
We must now follow mr Marston in his solitary expedition to Chester. When he took his place in the stagecoach he had the whole interior of the vehicle to himself, and thus continued to be its solitary occupant for several miles.
The coach, however, was eventually hailed, brought to, and the door being opened, dr Danvers got in, and took his place opposite to the passenger already established there.
Embarrassing as each felt the situation to be, there was, however, no avoiding it, and, after a recognition and a few forced attempts at conversation, they became, by mutual consent, silent and uncommunicative.
The journey, though in point of space a mere trifle, was, in those slowcoach days, a matter of fully five hours' duration; and before it was completed the sun had set, and darkness began to close.
Whether it was that the descending twilight dispelled the painful constraint under which Marston had seemed to labor, or that some more purely spiritual and genial influence had gradually dissipated the repulsion and distrust with which, at first, he had shrunk from a renewal of intercourse with dr Danvers, he suddenly accosted him thus.
"dr Danvers, I have been fifty times on the point of speaking to you-confidentially of course-while sitting here opposite to you, what I believe I could scarcely bring myself to hint to any other man living; yet I must tell it, and soon, too, or I fear it will have told itself."
"Pray, Doctor Danvers, have you heard any stories of an odd kind; any surmises-I don't mean of a moral sort, for those I hold very cheap-to my prejudice?
He put the question with obvious difficulty, and at last seemed to overcome his own reluctance with a sort of angry and excited self contempt and impatience.
I did not define it, nor do I think you suspect its nature.
It is a fear of nothing mortal, but of the immortal tenant of this body.
My mind; sir, is beginning to play me tricks; my guide mocks and terrifies me."
There was a perceptible tinge of horror in the look of astonishment with which dr Danvers listened.
"You are a gentleman, sir, and a Christian clergyman; what I have said and shall say is confided to your honor; to be held sacred as the confession of misery, and hidden from the coarse gaze of the world.
It comes at intervals.
I do not think any mortal suspects it, except, maybe, my daughter Rhoda.
It comes and disappears, and comes again.
I kept my pleasant secret for a long time, but at last I let it slip, and committed myself fortunately, to but one person, and that my daughter; and, even so, I hardly think she understood me.
I recollected myself before I had disclosed the grotesque and infernal chimera that haunts me."
Marston paused.
He was stooped forward, and looking upon the floor of the vehicle, so that his companion could not see his countenance.
A silence ensued, which was interrupted by Marston, who once more resumed.
It is, I suppose, the restless nature of the devil that is in me; but, be it what it may, I will speak to you, but to you only, for the present, at least, to you alone."
"The human mind, I take it, must have either comfort in the past or hope in the future," he continued, "otherwise it is in danger.
"No, sir, there is no comfort from that quarter either," said Marston, bitterly; "you but cast your seeds, as the parable terms your teaching, upon the barren sea, in wasting them on me.
Sir, this is a monstrous and hideous extravagance, a delusion, but, after all, no more than a trick of the imagination; the reason, the judgment, is untouched.
I cannot choose but see all the damned phantasmagoria, but I do not believe it real, and this is the difference between my case and-and-madness!"
They were now entering the suburbs of Chester, and Doctor Danvers, pained and shocked beyond measure by this unlooked for disclosure, and not knowing what remark or comfort to offer, relieved his temporary embarrassment by looking from the window, as though attracted by the flash of the lamps, among which the vehicle was now moving.
Marston, however, laid his hand upon his arm, and thus recalled him, for a moment, to a forced attention.
"It must seem strange to you, Doctor, that I should trust this cursed secret to your keeping," he said; "and, truth to say, it seems so to myself.
The sense of solitude under this aggressive and tremendous delusion was agony, hourly death to my soul.
That is the secret of my talkativeness; my sole excuse for plaguing you with the dreams of a wretched hypochondriac."
A few minutes more, and the coach having reached its destination, they bid one another farewell, and parted.
At that time there resided in a decent mansion about a mile from the town of Chester, a dapper little gentleman, whom we shall call Doctor Parkes. This gentleman was the proprietor and sole professional manager of a private asylum for the insane and enjoyed a high reputation, and a proportionate amount of business, in his melancholy calling.
It was about the second day after the conversation we have just sketched, that this little gentleman, having visited, according to his custom, all his domestic patients, was about to take his accustomed walk in his somewhat restricted pleasure grounds, when his servant announced a visitor.
"A gentleman," he repeated; "you have seen him before-eh?"
"No, sir," replied the man; "he is in the study, sir."
"Ha! a professional call.
Well, we shall see."
"My name, sir, is Marston; I have come to give you a patient."
The doctor bowed with a still deeper inclination, and paused for a continuance of the communication thus auspiciously commenced.
"Your most obedient, humble servant, sir," replied he, with the polite formality of the day, and another grave bow.
"Doctor," demanded Marston, fixing his eye upon him sternly, and significantly tapping his own forehead, "can you stay execution?"
The physician looked puzzled, hesitated, and at last requested his visitor to be more explicit.
"Can you," said Marston, with the same slow and stern articulation, and after a considerable pause-"can you prevent the malady you profess to cure?--can you meet and defeat the enemy halfway?--can you scare away the spirit of madness before it takes actual possession, and while it is still only hovering about its threatened victim?"
The First View: The Bridal Veil
General Features Of The Valley
The Upper Canyons
In the south branch, a mile or two from the main Valley, is the Illilouette Fall, six hundred feet high, one of the most beautiful of all the Yosemite choir, but to most people inaccessible as yet on account of its rough, steep, boulder choked canyon.
For all these the beautiful meadows near the Soda Springs form a delightful center.
Natural Features Near The Valley
In the basin of the Illilouette there are sixteen, in the Tenaya basin and its branches thirteen, in the Yosemite Creek basin fourteen, and in the Pohono or Bridal Veil one, making a grand total of one hundred and eleven lakes whose waters come to sing at Yosemite.
Down The Yosemite Creek
The total descent made by the stream from its highest sources to its confluence with the Merced in the Valley is about six thousand feet, while the distance is only about ten miles, an average fall of six hundred feet per mile.
Their only pet was a dog named Shiro, and on him they lavished all the affection of their old age.
Indeed, they loved him so much that whenever they had anything nice to eat they denied themselves to give it to Shiro.
Now Shiro means "white," and he was so called because of his color.
Sure enough, Shiro was waiting for his master and the evening tit bit.
He ran back to the house, fetched his spade and began to dig the ground at that spot.
He then took his spade and hastened to his own field, forcing the unwilling Shiro to follow him.
You must find them for me!
Where are they? Where?
Where?"
He seized his spade, and with all his strength struck Shiro and killed him on the spot.
Then he returned to the house, telling no one, not even his wife, what he had done.
Out of the trunk he made a mortar.
They tasted the cakes and found them nicer than any other food.
Now please give me the ashes of the mortar, as I wish to keep them in remembrance of my dog."
This Knight told him that he was a retainer of a great Daimio (Earl); that one of the favorite cherry trees in this nobleman's garden had withered, and that though every one in his service had tried all manner of means to revive it, none took effect. The Knight was sore perplexed when he saw what great displeasure the loss of his favorite cherry tree caused the Daimio.
"And," added the Knight, "I shall be very much obliged if you will come at once."
I shall look on."
The Daimio ordered that henceforth the old man should call himself by the name of Hana Saka Jijii, or "The Old Man who makes the Trees to Blossom," and that henceforth all were to recognize him by this name, and he sent him home with great honor.
"Yes, my Lord!"
"That is strange!" said the Daimio.
"I am the true Hana Saka Jijii.
But not only did the tree not burst into flower, but not even a bud came forth.
But all to no effect.
From this imprisonment the wicked old man was never freed. Thus did he meet with punishment at last for all his evil doings.
It was done as the king said, and by and by Aben Hassen the Fool lay in the prison, smarting and sore with the whipping he had had.
In the meantime bear thy punishment; perhaps it will cure thee of thy folly.
Only do not call upon Zadok, the King of the Demons, in this thy trouble."
The young man smote his hand upon his head.
"What a fool I am," said he, "not to have thought to call upon Zadok before this!" Then he called aloud, "Zadok, Zadok!
The floor swayed and rocked beneath the young man's feet.
"I have come," said Zadok, "and first let me cure thy smarts, O master."
He removed the cloths from the young man's back, and rubbed the places that smarted with a cooling unguent.
Instantly the pain and smarting ceased, and the merchant's son had perfect ease.
"Now," said Zadok, "what is thy bidding?"
"I bring the treasure," said Zadok, "from the treasure house of the ancient kings of Egypt.
"And where is this treasure house, O Zadok?" said the young man.
It was I that brought him thence to this place with one vessel of gold money and one vessel of silver money."
Then, tell me, can you take me from here to the city of the queen of the Black Isles, whence you brought him?"
"Yes," said Zadok, "with ease."
"Then," said the young man, "I command you to take me thither instantly, and to show me the treasure."
"I obey," said Zadok.
He stamped his foot upon the ground.
In an instant the walls of the prison split asunder, and the sky was above them.
The Demon leaped from the earth, carrying the young man by the girdle, and flew through the air so swiftly that the stars appeared to slide away behind them.
In a moment he set the young man again upon the ground, and Aben Hassen the Fool found himself at the end of what appeared to be a vast and splendid garden.
"We are now," said Zadok, "above the treasure house of which I spoke.
It was here that I saw thy father seal it so that no one but the master of Zadok may enter.
"Thou shalt enter," said Zadok.
Instantly the earth opened, and there appeared a flight of marble steps leading downward into the earth.
Zadok led the way down the steps and the young man followed.
At the bottom of the steps there was a door of adamant.
"Oh, fool!
Fool!
Within here shalt thou find death!"
There was a key of brass in the door.
The young man entered after him.
The young man could not believe what he saw with his own eyes.
Zadok laughed.
"This," said he, "is nothing; come with me."
He led him from this room to another-like it vaulted, and like it lit by a carbuncle set in the dome of the roof above.
When the young man saw this vast and amazing wealth he stood speechless and breathless with wonder.
The Demon Zadok laughed.
"This," said he, "is great, but it is little.
He took the young man by the hand and led him into a third room-vaulted as the other two had been, lit as they had been by a carbuncle in the roof above.
He had to lean against the wall behind him, for the sight made him dizzy.
Around the wall, and facing the basin from all sides, stood six golden statues.
The door was tightly shut, and there was neither lock nor key to it.
Beyond this door is that alone which shall satisfy all thy desires."
"Tell me, Zadok," said the young man, after he had filled his soul with all the other wonders that surrounded him-"tell me what is there that lies beyond that door?"
"Then open the door for me," said the young man; "for I cannot open it for myself, as there is neither lock nor key to it."
"That also I am forbidden to do," said Zadok.
"I wish that I knew what was there," said the young man.
The Demon laughed.
He led the way and the young man followed; they passed through the vaulted rooms and out through the door of adamant, and Zadok locked it behind them and gave the key to the young man.
I have shown thee how to enter, and thou mayst go in whenever it pleases thee to do so."
They ascended the steps, and so reached the garden above.
Thereupon he vanished like a flash, leaving the young man standing like one in a dream.
He saw before him a garden of such splendor and magnificence as he had never dreamed of even in his wildest fancy.
There were seven fountains as clear as crystal that shot high into the air and fell back into basins of alabaster.
Each held a flaming torch of sandal wood.
Behind the slaves stood a double row of armed men, and behind them a great crowd of other slaves and attendants, dressed each as magnificently as a prince, blazing and flaming with innumerable jewels and ornaments of gold.
But of all these things the young man thought nothing and saw nothing; for at the end of the marble avenue there arose a palace, the like of which was not in the four quarters of the earth-a palace of marble and gold and carmine and ultramarine-rising into the purple starry sky, and shining in the moonlight like a vision of Paradise.
The palace was illuminated from top to bottom and from end to end; the windows shone like crystal, and from it came sounds of music and rejoicing.
When the crowd that stood waiting saw the young man appear, they shouted: "Welcome!
Welcome!
To the master who has come again!
He was dizzy with joy.
"All-all this," he exulted, "belongs to me.
And to think that if I had listened to the Talisman of Solomon I would have had none of it."
That was the way he came back to the treasure of the ancient kings of Egypt, and to the palace of enchantment that his father had quitted.
Nor had he any fear of an end coming to it, for he knew that his treasure was inexhaustible.
He made friends with the princes and nobles of the land.
When men would praise any one they would say, "He is as rich," or as "magnificent," or as "generous, as Aben Hassen the Fool."
So for seven months he lived a life of joy and delight; then one morning he awakened and found everything changed to grief and mourning.
Where the day before had been laughter, to day was crying.
All the city was shrouded in gloom, and everywhere was weeping and crying.
"What means all this sorrow?" said he to one of the slaves.
Instantly all the slaves began howling and beating their heads, and he to whom the young man had spoken fell down with his face in the dust, and lay there twisting and writhing like a worm.
"He has asked the question!" howled the slaves-"he has asked the question!"
"Are you mad?" cried the young man.
"What is the matter with you?"
"Tell me," said the young man, "what means all this sorrow and lamentation?"
Instantly the beautiful slave dropped the golden basin upon the stone floor, and began shrieking and tearing her clothes.
"He has asked the question!" she screamed-"he has asked the question!"
The young man began to grow frightened; he arose from his couch, and with uneven steps went out into the anteroom.
Instantly they who stood waiting began crying and tearing their clothes and beating their hands.
"What," he cried, "art thou not contented with all thou hast and with all that we do for thee without asking the forbidden question?"
Thereupon he tore his cap from his head and flung it upon the ground, and began beating himself violently upon the head with great outcrying.
"I think everybody in this place has gone mad," said he.
"Nevertheless, if I do not find out what it all means, I shall go mad myself."
Then he bethought himself, for the first time since he came to that land, of the Talisman of Solomon.
"Tell me, O Talisman," said he, "why all these people weep and wail so continuously?"
Be thou also further advised: do not question the Demon Zadok."
Then he called aloud, Zadok!
Zadok! Zadok!"
"Tell me," said the young man; "I command thee to tell me, O Zadok!
Why are the people all gone mad this morning, and why do they weep and wail, and why do they go crazy when I do but ask them why they are so afflicted?"
"I will tell thee," said Zadok.
No one since that time has been permitted to enter the palace-it is forbidden for any one even to ask a question concerning it; but every year, on the day on which the queen was turned to stone, the whole land mourns with weeping and wailing.
And now thou knowest all!"
"What you tell me," said the young man, "passes wonder.
"Nothing is easier," said Zadok.
"I hear and obey," said the Demon.
He seized the young man by the girdle, and in an instant flew away with him to a hanging garden that lay before the queen's palace.
"Thou art the first man," said Zadok, "who has seen what thou art about to see for seven and thirty years.
He led the way, and the young man followed, filled with wonder and astonishment.
Not a sound was to be heard, not a thing moved, but silence hung like a veil between the earth and the sky.
Following the Demon, the young man ascended a flight of steps, and so entered the vestibule of the palace.
There stood guards in armor of brass and silver and gold.
But they were without life-they were all of stone as white as alabaster.
But each sat silent and motionless-each was a stone as white as alabaster.
Upon the couch in the centre of the apartment reclined a queen with a crown of gold upon her head.
She was cold and dead-of stone as white as marble.
The young man approached and looked into her face, and when he looked his breath became faint and his heart grew soft within him like wax in a flame of fire.
He sighed; he melted; the tears burst from his eyes and ran down his cheeks.
"Zadok!" he cried-"Zadok!
Zadok!
O Zadok!
That she were flesh and blood, instead of cold stone!
"She was really alive as thou art alive, and he did truly transform her to this stone," said Zadok.
"And tell me," said the young man, "can she never become alive again?"
"Listen, O master.
Thy father possessed a wand, half of silver and half of gold.
"Tell me, Zadok," cried the young man; "I command you to tell me, where is that wand of silver and gold?"
"Then give it to me; I command you to give it to me."
He drew from his girdle a wand, half of gold and half of silver, as he spoke, and gave it to the young man.
"Thou mayst go now, Zadok," said the young man, trembling with eagerness.
Zadok laughed and vanished.
The young man stood for a while looking down at the beautiful figure of alabaster.
In an instant there came a marvellous change. He saw the stone melt, and begin to grow flexible and soft.
He saw it become warm, and the cheeks and lips grow red with life.
It grew louder and louder-it became a shout.
"Who are you?" it said.
Aben Hassen the Fool fell upon his knees.
"My father turned you to cold stone, and I-I have brought you back to warm life again."
The queen smiled-her teeth sparkled like pearls.
He grew suddenly dizzy; the world swam before his eyes.
The young man lived in a golden cloud of delight.
"And to think," said he, "if I had listened to that accursed Talisman of Solomon, called The Wise,' all this happiness, this ecstasy that is now mine, would have been lost to me."
"And do you really love me as you say?"
"Then, as you love me, I beg one boon on you.
The young man was drunk with happiness.
"Thou shalt see it all," said he.
Then, for the first time, the Talisman spoke without being questioned. "Fool!" it cried; "wilt thou not be advised?"
"Be silent," said the young man.
"Six times, vile thing, you would have betrayed me.
Six times you would have deprived me of joys that should have been mine, and each was greater than that which went before.
Now," said he to the queen, "I will show you our treasure." He called aloud, "Zadok, Zadok, Zadok!"
"I command you," said the young man, "to carry the queen and myself to the garden where my treasure lies hidden."
Zadok laughed aloud.
"Thou art where thou commandest to be," said the Demon.
He struck his heel upon the circle.
The young man descended the steps with the queen behind him, and behind them both came the Demon Zadok.
The young man opened the door of adamant and entered the first of the vaulted rooms.
When the queen saw the huge basin full of silver treasure, her cheeks and her forehead flushed as red as fire.
They went into the next room, and when the queen saw the basin of gold her face turned as white as ashes.
"Are you content?" asked the young man.
The queen looked about her.
"No!" cried she.
"I do not know," said the young man.
"Then open the door, and let me see what lies within."
"I cannot open the door," said he.
"How can I open the door, seeing that there is no lock nor key to it?"
They had both forgotten that the Demon Zadok was there.
Then the young man bethought himself of the Talisman of Solomon.
"Tell me, O Talisman," said he, "how shall I open yonder door?"
"Oh, wretched one!" cried the Talisman, "oh, wretched one!
Do not push the door open, for it is not locked!"
The young man struck his head with his clinched fist.
"What a fool am I!" he cried.
Here have I been coming to this place seven months, and have never yet thought to try whether yonder door was locked or not!"
"Open the door!" cried the queen.
They went forward together.
The young man pushed the door with his hand. It opened swiftly and silently, and they entered.
A flaming lamp hung from the ceiling above.
The young man stood as though turned to stone, for there stood a gigantic Black Demon with a napkin wrapped around his loins and a scimitar in his right hand, the blade of which gleamed like lightning in the flame of the lamp.
Strike, O slave!"
The young man heard the Demon Zadok give a yell of laughter.
Is there not some one here to tell us a fair story about a saint?"
"Well, let us have it.
Wilt thou not let me pay for having it filled?"
"That," said the Lad who fiddled when the Jew was in the bramble bush, "may be as you please, Sir Knight; and, to tell the truth, I will be mightily glad for a drop to moisten my throat withal."
"But," said Fortunatus, "you have not told us what the story is to be about."
Ill Luck and the Fiddler
The Forest Trees in General
The different species are arranged in zones and sections, which brings the forest as a whole within the comprehension of every observer.
After advancing fifteen or twenty miles towards Yosemite and making an ascent of from two to three thousand feet you reach the lower margin of the main pine belt, composed of great sugar pine, yellow pine, incense cedar and sequoia.
The cedar of Lebanon, said Sir Joseph Hooker, occurs upon one of the moraines of an ancient glacier.
All the forests of the Sierra are growing upon moraines, but moraines vanish like the glaciers that make them.
It appears, therefore, that the Sierra forests indicate the extent and positions of ancient moraines as well as they do belts of climate.
One will have no difficulty in knowing the Nut Pine (Pinus Sabiniana), for it is the first conifer met in ascending the Range from the west, springing up here and there among Douglas oaks and thickets of ceanothus and manzanita; its extreme upper limit being about four thousand feet above the sea, its lower about from five hundred to eight hundred feet.
It is remarkable for its loose, airy, wide branching habit and thin gray foliage.
Full grown specimens are from forty to fifty feet in height and from two to three feet in diameter.
The trunk usually divides into three or four main branches about fifteen or twenty feet from the ground that, after bearing away from one another, shoot straight up and form separate summits.
Their slender, grayish needles are from eight to twelve inches long, and inclined to droop, contrasting with the rigid, dark colored trunk and branches.
The cones are from five to eight inches long and about as large in thickness; rich chocolate brown in color and protected by strong, down curving nooks which terminate the scales.
Nevertheless the little Douglas Squirrel can open them.
The curious little Pinus attenuata is found at an elevation of from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet, growing in close groves and belts.
It is exceedingly slender and graceful, although trees that chance to stand alone send out very long, curved branches, making a striking contrast to the ordinary grove form.
The foliage is of the same peculiar gray green color as that of the nut pine, and is worn about as loosely, so that the body of the tree is scarcely obscured by it.
Branches also soon become fruitful.
The average size of the tree is about thirty or forty feet in height and twelve to fourteen inches in diameter.
The cones are about four inches long and covered with a sort of varnish and gum, rendering them impervious to moisture.
No observer can fail to notice the admirable adaptation of this curious pine to the fire swept regions where alone it is found.
The Sugar Pine, King Of Pine Trees
Of all the world's eighty or ninety species of pine trees, the Sugar Pine (Pinus Lambertiana) is king, surpassing all others, not merely in size but in lordly beauty and majesty.
Toward the head of this magnificent column long branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming a palm like crown, but far more impressive than any palm crown I ever beheld.
The cones are about fifteen to eighteen inches long, and three in diameter; green, shaded with dark purple on their sunward sides.
The wood is deliciously fragrant, fine in grain and texture and creamy yellow, as if formed of condensed sunbeams.
The sugar from which the common name is derived is, I think, the best of sweets.
It exudes from the heart wood where wounds have been made by forest fires or the ax, and forms irregular, crisp, candy like kernels of considerable size, something like clusters of resin beads. When fresh it is white, but because most of the wounds on which it is found have been made by fire the sap is stained and the hardened sugar becomes brown.
Indians are fond of it, but on account of its laxative properties only small quantities may be eaten.
They are the priests of pines and seem ever to be addressing the surrounding forest.
MEMORY RHYMES.
The Months.
Birthdays.
Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday best of all, Thursday for crosses, Friday for losses, Saturday no luck at all.
The lines refer to the days of the week as birthdays.
They are, in idea, the same as the more familiar lines:
Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace; Wednesday's child is merry and glad, Thursday's child is sorry and sad; Friday's child is loving and giving; Saturday's child must work for its living; While the child that is born on the Sabbath day Is blithe and bonny and good and gay.
Short Grammar.
To Tell the Age of Horses.
To tell the age of any horse, Inspect the lower jaw, of course; The six front teeth the tale will tell, And every doubt and fear dispel.
Two middle "nippers" you behold Before the colt is two weeks old, Before eight weeks will two more come; Eight months the "corners" cut the gum. The outside grooves will disappear From middle two in just one year. In two years, from the second pair; In three, the corners, too, are bare.
A swarm of bees in May Is worth a load of hay; A swarm of bees in June Is worth a silver spoon; A swarm of bees in July Is not worth a fly.
The Cuckoo.
May-sings all the day; June-changes his tune; July-prepares to fly; August-go he must.
Rules for Riding.
Keep up your head and your heart, Your hands and your heels keep down, Press your knees close to your horse's side, And your elbows close to your own.
HAPPINESS DEFINED.
A "will o'-the wisp" which eludes us even when we grasp it.
The ever retreating summit on the hill of our ambition.
The prize at the top of a greasy pole which is continually slipping from one's grasp.
The only thing a man continues to search for after he has found it.
The bull's eye on the target at which all the human race are shooting.
The goal erected for the human race, which few reach, being too heavily handicapped.
A wayside flower growing only by the path of duty.
A bright and beautiful butterfly, which many chase but few can take.
The interest we receive from capital invested in good works.
The birthright of contentment.
A treasure which we search for far and wide, though oft times it is lying at our feet.
APPALLING DEPTHS OF SPACE. Distances that Stun the Mind and Baffle Comprehension.
"The stars," though appearing small to us because of their immense distance, are in reality great and shining suns.
If we were to escape from the earth into space, the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and eventually the sun would become invisible.
Mizar, the middle star in the tail of the Great Bear, is forty times as heavy as the sun
To the naked eye there are five or six thousand of these heavenly bodies visible.
Cygni is the nearest star to us in this part of the sky.
At the speed of an electric current, one hundred eighty thousand miles per second, a message to be sent from a point on the earth's surface would go seven times around the earth in one second.
Let it be supposed that messages were sent off to the different heavenly bodies.
To reach the moon at this rate it would take about one second.
In eight minutes a message would get to the sun, and allowing for a couple of minutes' delay, one could send a message to the sun and get an answer all within twenty minutes.
If, when Wellington won the battle of Waterloo, in eighteen fifteen, the news had been telegraphed off immediately, there are some stars so remote that it would not yet have reached them.
To go a step further, if in ten sixty six the result of the Norman Conquest had been wired to some of these stars, the message would still be on its way.
SENATOR VEST'S EULOGY ON THE DOG.
"Gentlemen of the Jury: The best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy.
Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith.
The money that a man has he may lose.
It flies away from him when he may need it most.
The people who are prone to fall on their knees and do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our head.
The one absolutely unselfish friend a man may have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is the dog.
"Gentlemen of the jury, A man's dog stands by him in prosperity and poverty, in health and in sickness.
He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince.
CHAPTER two-A DOUBLE QUARTETTE
These young men were insignificant; every one has seen such faces; four specimens of humanity taken at random; neither good nor bad, neither wise nor ignorant, neither geniuses nor fools; handsome, with that charming April which is called twenty years.
They were four Oscars; for, at that epoch, Arthurs did not yet exist.
Burn for him the perfumes of Araby! exclaimed romance.
Oscar advances.
Oscar, I shall behold him! People had just emerged from Ossian; elegance was Scandinavian and Caledonian; the pure English style was only to prevail later, and the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, had but just won the battle of Waterloo.
Favourite, Dahlia, Zephine, and Fantine were four ravishing young women, perfumed and radiant, still a little like working women, and not yet entirely divorced from their needles; somewhat disturbed by intrigues, but still retaining on their faces something of the serenity of toil, and in their souls that flower of honesty which survives the first fall in woman.
Not to conceal anything, the three first were more experienced, more heedless, and more emancipated into the tumult of life than Fantine the Blonde, who was still in her first illusions.
Poverty and coquetry are two fatal counsellors; one scolds and the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the people have both of them whispering in their ear, each on its own side.
These badly guarded souls listen.
Hence the falls which they accomplish, and the stones which are thrown at them.
They are overwhelmed with splendor of all that is immaculate and inaccessible.
Her father was an old unmarried professor of mathematics, a brutal man and a braggart, who went out to give lessons in spite of his age.
This professor, when he was a young man, had one day seen a chambermaid's gown catch on a fender; he had fallen in love in consequence of this accident.
The result had been Favourite.
She met her father from time to time, and he bowed to her.
One morning an old woman with the air of a devotee, had entered her apartments, and had said to her, "You do not know me, Mamemoiselle?" "no"
"I am your mother." Then the old woman opened the sideboard, and ate and drank, had a mattress which she owned brought in, and installed herself.
This cross and pious old mother never spoke to Favourite, remained hours without uttering a word, breakfasted, dined, and supped for four, and went down to the porter's quarters for company, where she spoke ill of her daughter.
How could she make such nails work?
She who wishes to remain virtuous must not have pity on her hands. As for Zephine, she had conquered Fameuil by her roguish and caressing little way of saying "Yes, sir."
The young men were comrades; the young girls were friends.
Such loves are always accompanied by such friendships.
Goodness and philosophy are two distinct things; the proof of this is that, after making all due allowances for these little irregular households, Favourite, Zephine, and Dahlia were philosophical young women, while Fantine was a good girl.
Solomon would reply that love forms a part of wisdom.
We will confine ourselves to saying that the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love.
She alone, of all the four, was not called "thou" by a single one of them.
Though she had emerged from the most unfathomable depths of social shadow, she bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the unknown.
Who can say?
She had never known father or mother.
Why Fantine?
She had never borne any other name.
At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed.
She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed.
She was called little Fantine.
No one knew more than that.
This human creature had entered life in just this way.
At the age of ten, Fantine quitted the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood.
At fifteen she came to Paris "to seek her fortune." Fantine was beautiful, and remained pure as long as she could.
She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.
She worked for her living; then, still for the sake of her living,--for the heart, also, has its hunger,--she loved.
An amour for him; passion for her.
The streets of the Latin quarter, filled with throngs of students and grisettes, saw the beginning of their dream.
In short, the eclogue took place.
It was he who possessed the wit.
Tholomyes was the antique old student; he was rich; he had an income of four thousand francs; four thousand francs! a splendid scandal on Mount Sainte Genevieve.
Tholomyes was a fast man of thirty, and badly preserved.
His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked by a watering in one eye.
But in proportion as his youth disappeared, gayety was kindled; he replaced his teeth with buffooneries, his hair with mirth, his health with irony, his weeping eye laughed incessantly. He was dilapidated but still in flower.
His youth, which was packing up for departure long before its time, beat a retreat in good order, bursting with laughter, and no one saw anything but fire.
He had had a piece rejected at the Vaudeville.
Being thus ironical and bald, he was the leader.
Iron is an English word.
Is it possible that irony is derived from it?
We have promised them solemnly that we would.
Thereupon, Tholomyes lowered his voice and articulated something so mirthful, that a vast and enthusiastic grin broke out upon the four mouths simultaneously, and Blachevelle exclaimed, "That is an idea."
A smoky tap room presented itself; they entered, and the remainder of their confidential colloquy was lost in shadow.
The result of these shades was a dazzling pleasure party which took place on the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four young girls.
CHAPTER twenty four.
MYSTERY DEVELOPED.
The afternoon on which Montraville had visited her she had found herself languid and fatigued, and after making a very slight dinner had lain down to endeavour to recruit her exhausted spirits, and, contrary to her expectations, had fallen asleep.
She had not long been lain down, when Belcour arrived, for he took every opportunity of visiting her, and striving to awaken her resentment against Montraville.
She then left him with precipitation, and retiring to her own apartment, threw herself on the bed, and gave vent to an agony of grief which it is impossible to describe.
He then left a polite, tender note for Charlotte, and returned to New York.
His first business was to seek Montraville, and endeavour to convince him that what had happened would ultimately tend to his happiness: he found him in his apartment, solitary, pensive, and wrapped in disagreeable reflexions.
"Why how now, whining, pining lover?" said he, clapping him on the shoulder.
Montraville started; a momentary flush of resentment crossed his cheek, but instantly gave place to a death like paleness, occasioned by painful remembrance remembrance awakened by that monitor, whom, though we may in vain endeavour, we can never entirely silence.
"Belcour," said he, "you have injured me in a tender point." "Prithee, Jack," replied Belcour, "do not make a serious matter of it: how could I refuse the girl's advances? and thank heaven she is not your wife."
"True," said Montraville; "but she was innocent when I first knew her. It was I seduced her, Belcour.
Had it not been for me, she had still been virtuous and happy in the affection and protection of her family."
"I wish I had never seen her," cried he passionately, and starting from his seat.
He paused.
"With Julia Franklin," said Belcour.
The name, like a sudden spark of electric fire, seemed for a moment to suspend his faculties-for a moment he was transfixed; but recovering, he caught Belcour's hand, and cried-"Stop! stop!
I am a seducer, a mean, ungenerous seducer of unsuspecting innocence.
I dare not hope that purity like her's would stoop to unite itself with black, premeditated guilt: yet by heavens I swear, Belcour, I thought I loved the lost, abandoned Charlotte till I saw Julia-I thought I never could forsake her; but the heart is deceitful, and I now can plainly discriminate between the impulse of a youthful passion, and the pure flame of disinterested affection."
At that instant Julia Franklin passed the window, leaning on her uncle's arm.
She curtseyed as she passed, and, with the bewitching smile of modest cheerfulness, cried-"Do you bury yourselves in the house this fine evening, gents?" There was something in the voice! the manner!
the look! that was altogether irresistible.
Belcour drew mr Franklin on one side and entered into a political discourse: they walked faster than the young people, and Belcour by some means contrived entirely to lose sight of them.
Julia was leaning on his arm: he took her hand in his, and pressing it tenderly, sighed deeply, but continued silent.
Julia was embarrassed; she wished to break a silence so unaccountable, but was unable; she loved Montraville, she saw he was unhappy, and wished to know the cause of his uneasiness, but that innate modesty, which nature has implanted in the female breast, prevented her enquiring.
"I am sorry," she replied, "that you have any cause of inquietude.
I am sure if you were as happy as you deserve, and as all your friends wish you-" She hesitated.
"Certainly," said she, "the service you have rendered me, the knowledge of your worth, all combine to make me esteem you."
"Esteem, my lovely Julia," said he passionately, "is but a poor cold word.
I would if I dared, if I thought I merited your attention-but no, I must not-honour forbids.
I am beneath your notice, Julia, I am miserable and cannot hope to be otherwise." "Alas!" said Julia, "I pity you."
Indeed if you knew all, you would pity; but at the same time I fear you would despise me."
Just then they were again joined by mr Franklin and Belcour.
It had interrupted an interesting discourse.
They found it impossible to converse on indifferent subjects, and proceeded home in silence.
CHAPTER twenty seven.
Often had she wrote to her perfidious seducer, and with the most persuasive eloquence endeavoured to convince him of her innocence; but these letters were never suffered to reach the hands of Montraville, or they must, though on the very eve of marriage, have prevented his deserting the wretched girl.
Real anguish of heart had in a great measure faded her charms, her cheeks were pale from want of rest, and her eyes, by frequent, indeed almost continued weeping, were sunk and heavy.
"If she were here," she would cry, "she would certainly comfort me, and sooth the distraction of my soul."
She was sitting one afternoon, wrapped in these melancholy reflexions, when she was interrupted by the entrance of Belcour.
"And how does my lovely Charlotte?" said he, taking her hand: "I fear you are not so well as I could wish."
"I am not well, mr Belcour," said she, "very far from it; but the pains and infirmities of the body I could easily bear, nay, submit to them with patience, were they not aggravated by the most insupportable anguish of my mind."
"You are not happy, Charlotte," said he, with a look of well dissembled sorrow.
You are lonely here, my dear girl; give me leave to conduct you to New York, where the agreeable society of some ladies, to whom I will introduce you, will dispel these sad thoughts, and I shall again see returning cheerfulness animate those lovely features."
"Oh never!
never!" cried Charlotte, emphatically: "the virtuous part of my sex will scorn me, and I will never associate with infamy.
Something like humanity was awakened in Belcour's breast by this pathetic speech: he arose and walked towards the window; but the selfish passion which had taken possession of his heart, soon stifled these finer emotions; and he thought if Charlotte was once convinced she had no longer any dependance on Montraville, she would more readily throw herself on his protection.
Determined, therefore, to inform her of all that had happened, he again resumed his seat; and finding she began to be more composed, enquired if she had ever heard from Montraville since the unfortunate recontre in her bed chamber.
"Ah no," said she.
"I am greatly of your opinion," said Belcour, "for he has been for some time past greatly attached-"
At the word "attached" a death like paleness overspread the countenance of Charlotte, but she applied to some hartshorn which stood beside her, and Belcour proceeded.
"He has been for some time past greatly attached to one Miss Franklin, a pleasing lively girl, with a large fortune."
"She may be richer, may be handsomer," cried Charlotte, "but cannot love him so well.
Oh may she beware of his art, and not trust him too far as I have done."
"He addresses her publicly," said he, "and it was rumoured they were to be married before he sailed for Eustatia, whither his company is ordered."
"I fear," said Belcour, "he can be that villain."
"Perhaps," cried she, eagerly interrupting him, "perhaps he is married already: come, let me know the worst," continued she with an affected look of composure: "you need not be afraid, I shall not send the fortunate lady a bowl of poison."
"Well then, my dear girl," said he, deceived by her appearance, "they were married on Thursday, and yesterday morning they sailed for Eustatia."
"Married-gone-say you?" cried she in a distracted accent, "what without a last farewell, without one thought on my unhappy situation! Oh Montraville, may God forgive your perfidy." She shrieked, and Belcour sprang forward just in time to prevent her falling to the floor.
Alarming faintings now succeeded each other, and she was conveyed to her bed, from whence she earnestly prayed she might never more arise. Belcour staid with her that night, and in the morning found her in a high fever.
CHAPTER eleven
NOT PATS BUT SCRATCHES
mrs Colebrook went home the next day.
She wore the air of an injured martyr at breakfast.
She told her brother that, of course, if he preferred to have an ignorant servant girl take care of his poor afflicted son, she had nothing to say; but that certainly he could not expect HER to stay, too, especially after being insulted as she had been.
Susan, in the kitchen, went doggedly about her work, singing, meanwhile, what Keith called her "mad" song.
Hurrah!
Upstairs, Keith, wearily indifferent as to everything that was taking place about him, lay motionless as usual, his face turned toward the wall.
And at ten o'clock mrs Colebrook went.
Five minutes later Daniel Burton entered the kitchen-a proceeding so extraordinary that Susan broke off her song in the middle of a "Hurrah" and grew actually pale.
"What is it?--KEITH?
Is anything the matter with Keith?" she faltered.
Ignoring her question the man strode into the room.
"Well, Susan, this time you've done it," he ejaculated tersely.
"Done it-to Keith-ME?
Why, mr Burton, what do you mean?
Is Keith-worse?" chattered Susan, with dry lips.
"No, no, I don't mean the hash," interrupted the man irritably.
"Keith is all right-that is, he is just as he has been.
It's my sister, mrs Colebrook.
She's gone."
"Gone-for good?"
"Yes, she's gone home."
"Glory be!"
The color came back to Susan's face in a flood, and frank delight chased the terror from her eyes.
"Now we can do somethin' worthwhile."
"I reckon you'll find you have to do something, Susan.
"I don't want one."
"But there's all the other work, too."
"Work!
Susan's face fell.
"I'm glad your courage is still good, Susan; but I'm afraid the dear public is going to appreciate your poems about the way it does-my pictures," shrugged the man bitterly, as he turned and left the room.
Not waiting to finish setting her kitchen in order, Susan ran up the back stairs to Keith's room.
"How about gettin' up?
Such a lazy boy!
But it was not to be so easy this time.
Keith was not to be cajoled into getting up and dressing himself even to beat Susan's record. Steadfastly he resisted all efforts to stir him into interest or action; and a dismayed, disappointed Susan had to go downstairs in acknowledged defeat.
"But, land's sake, what could you expect?" she muttered to herself, after a sorrowful meditation before the kitchen fire.
"You can't put a backbone into a jellyfish by jest showin' him the bone-an' that's what his aunt has made him-a flappy, transparallel jellyfish.
Drat her!
Susan did not attempt again that day to get Keith up and dressed; and she gave him his favorite "pop overs" for supper with a running fire of merry talk and jingles that contained never a reference to the unpleasant habit of putting on clothes, But the next morning, after she had given Keith his breakfast (not of toast and oatmeal) she suggested blithely that he get up and be dressed.
When he refused she tried coaxing, mildly, then more strenuously.
When this failed she tried to sting his pride by telling him she did not believe he could get up now, anyhow, and dress himself.
"All right, Susan, let it go that I can't.
I don't want to, anyhow," sighed the boy with impatient weariness.
"Say, can't you let a fellow alone?"
Susan drew a long breath and held it suspended for a moment.
She had the air of one about to make a dreaded plunge.
"No, I can't let you alone, Keith," she replied, voice and manner now coldly firm.
"Why not?
"Why, SUSAN!" There was incredulous, hurt amazement in the boy's voice; but Susan was visibly steeling herself against it.
"If you'll get my clothes, Susan, I'll get up," said Keith very quietly from the bed.
"I'm downstairs, Susan." The boy's voice challenged hers for coldness now.
"I'll take my meals down here, after this."
"Why, Keith, however in the world did you-" Then Susan pulled herself up.
"Good boy, Keith!
That WILL make it lots easier," she said cheerfully, impersonally, turning away and making a great clatter of pans in the sink.
But later, at least once every half hour through that long forenoon, Susan crept softly through the side hall to the half open living room door, where she could watch Keith.
She watched him pause and move hesitating fingers down the backs of the chairs that he encountered.
But when she saw him stop and finger the books on the little table by the window, she crept back to her kitchen-and rattled still more loudly the pots and pans in the sink.
Just before the noon meal Keith appeared once more at the kitchen door.
"Susan, would it bother you very much if I ate out here-with you?" he asked.
"With me?
Nonsense!
It's dad.
He'd like it, I'm sure," insisted the boy feverishly.
"You know sometimes I-I don't get any food on my fork, when I eat, an' I have to-to feel for things, an' it-it must be disagreeable to see me.
"Now, Keith Burton, you stop right where you are," interrupted Susan harshly.
Keith had not disappeared down the hall, however, before Susan was halfway up the back stairs.
A moment later she was in the studio.
"Company?"
"Yes.
Your son." "KEITH?"
The man drew back perceptibly.
"But, Susan, it breaks my heart," moaned the man, turning quite away.
"What if it does?
Ain't his broke, too?
Can't you think of him a little?
The man wheeled sharply.
"Did Keith-do that?"
"All right, Susan.
I-I don't think you'll have to say-any more."
And Susan, after a sharp glance into the man's half averted face, said no more.
A moment later she had left the room.
AN INJUDICIOUS PAYMENT
When Judge Straight's visitors had departed, he took up the papers which had been laid loosely on the table as they were taken out of Tryon's breast pocket, and commenced their perusal.
There was a note for five hundred dollars, many years overdue, but not yet outlawed by lapse of time; a contract covering the transaction out of which the note had grown; and several letters and copies of letters modifying the terms of the contract.
MY DEAREST GEORGE,--I am going away for about a week, to visit the bedside of an old friend, who is very ill, and may not live.
Do not be alarmed about me, for I shall very likely be back by the time you are.
The judge was unable to connect this letter with the transaction which formed the subject of his examination.
Age had dimmed his perceptions somewhat, and it was not until he had finished the letter, and read it over again, and noted the signature at the bottom a second time, that he perceived that the writing was in a woman's hand, that the ink was comparatively fresh, and that the letter was dated only a couple of days before.
While he still held the sheet in his hand, it dawned upon him slowly that he held also one of the links in a chain of possible tragedy which he himself, he became uncomfortably aware, had had a hand in forging.
She has come to visit her sick mother.
My young client, Green's relation, is her lover-is engaged to marry her-is in town, and is likely to meet her!"
Such people were, for the most part, merely on the ragged edge of the white world, seldom rising above the level of overseers, or slave catchers, or sheriff's officers, who could usually be relied upon to resent the drop of black blood that tainted them, and with the zeal of the proselyte to visit their hatred of it upon the unfortunate blacks that fell into their hands.
One curse of negro slavery was, and one part of its baleful heritage is, that it poisoned the fountains of human sympathy.
Under a system where men might sell their own children without social reprobation or loss of prestige, it was not surprising that some of them should hate their distant cousins.
Ten years later, the ghost of my good deed returns to haunt me, and makes me doubt whether I have wrought more evil than good.
I wonder," he mused, "if he will find her out?"
"If he found her out, would he by any possibility marry her?"
"It is not likely," he answered himself.
"If he made the discovery here, the facts would probably leak out in the town.
It is something that a man might do in secret, but only a hero or a fool would do openly."
The judge sighed as he contemplated another possibility.
Conditions were changed, but human nature was the same.
Yes, conditions were changed, so far as the girl was concerned; there was a possible future for her under the new order of things; but white people had not changed their opinion of the negroes, except for the worse.
The general belief was that they were just as inferior as before, and had, moreover, been spoiled by a disgusting assumption of equality, driven into their thick skulls by Yankee malignity bent upon humiliating a proud though vanquished foe.
But the old man's attitude toward society was chiefly that of an observer, and the narrow stream of sentiment left in his heart chose to flow toward the weaker party in this unequal conflict,--a young woman fighting for love and opportunity against the ranked forces of society, against immemorial tradition, against pride of family and of race.
"It may be the unwisest thing I ever did," he said to himself, turning to his desk and taking up a quill pen, "and may result in more harm than good; but I was always from childhood in sympathy with the under dog.
There is certainly as much reason in my helping the girl as the boy, for being a woman, she is less able to help herself."
He dipped his pen into the ink and wrote the following lines:--
MADAM,--If you value your daughter's happiness, keep her at home for the next day or two.
This note he dried by sprinkling it with sand from a box near at hand, signed with his own name, and, with a fine courtesy, addressed to "mrs Molly Walden." Having first carefully sealed it in an envelope, he stepped to the open door, and spied, playing marbles on the street near by, a group of negro boys, one of whom the judge called by name.
Do you know where she lives-down on Front Street, in the house behind the cedars?"
When you come back and tell me what she says, I'll give you ten cents.
On second thoughts, I shall be gone to lunch, so here's your money," he added, handing the lad the bit of soiled paper by which the United States government acknowledged its indebtedness to the bearer in the sum of ten cents.
Very few mortals can spare the spring of hope, the motive force of expectation.
The boy kept the note in his hand, winked at his companions, who had gathered as near as their awe of the judge would permit, and started down the street.
As soon as the judge had disappeared, Billy beckoned to his friends, who speedily overtook him.
When the party turned the corner of Front Street and were safely out of sight of Judge Straight's office, the capitalist entered the grocery store and invested his unearned increment in gingerbread.
He had nearly reached his objective point when he met upon the street a young white lady, whom he did not know, and for whom, the path being narrow at that point, he stepped out into the gutter.
He reached the house behind the cedars, went round to the back door, and handed the envelope to Mis' Molly, who was seated on the rear piazza, propped up by pillows in a comfortable rocking chair.
"Who's it fur?" she asked.
I'll have Aunt Zilphy fetch you a piece of 'tater pone, if you'll hol' on a minute."
She called to Aunt Zilphy, who soon came hobbling out of the kitchen with a large square of the delicacy,--a flat cake made of mashed sweet potatoes, mixed with beaten eggs, sweetened and flavored to suit the taste, and baked in a Dutch oven upon the open hearth.
The boy took the gratuity, thanked her, and turned to go.
Mis' Molly was still scanning the superscription of the letter.
"I wonder," she murmured, "what old Judge Straight can be writin' to me about.
Oh, boy!"
Never mind."
She laid the letter carefully on the chimney piece of the kitchen.
On the one hand, Jeff Wain's infatuation had rapidly increased, in view of her speedy departure.
From mrs Tryon's remark about Wain's wife Amanda, and from things Rena had since learned, she had every reason to believe that this wife was living, and that Wain must be aware of the fact.
In the light of this knowledge, Wain's former conduct took on a blacker significance than, upon reflection, she had charitably clothed it with after the first flush of indignation.
In a week her school would be over, and then she would get Elder Johnson, or some one else than Wain, to take her back to Patesville.
True, she might abandon her school and go at once; but her work would be incomplete, she would have violated her contract, she would lose her salary for the month, explanations would be necessary, and would not be forthcoming.
She might feign sickness,--indeed, it would scarcely be feigning, for she felt far from well; she had never, since her illness, quite recovered her former vigor-but the inconvenience to others would be the same, and her self sacrifice would have had, at its very first trial, a lame and impotent conclusion.
She had as yet no fear of personal violence from Wain; but, under the circumstances, his attentions were an insult.
He was evidently bent upon conquest, and vain enough to think he might achieve it by virtue of his personal attractions.
If he could have understood how she loathed the sight of his narrow eyes, with their puffy lids, his thick, tobacco stained lips, his doubtful teeth, and his unwieldy person, Wain, a monument of conceit that he was, might have shrunk, even in his own estimation, to something like his real proportions.
Rena believed that, to defend herself from persecution at his hands, it was only necessary that she never let him find her alone. This, however, required constant watchfulness.
Relying upon his own powers, and upon a woman's weakness and aversion to scandal, from which not even the purest may always escape unscathed, and convinced by her former silence that he had nothing serious to fear, Wain made it a point to be present at every public place where she might be.
He assumed, in conversation with her which she could not avoid, and stated to others, that she had left his house because of a previous promise to divide the time of her stay between Elder Johnson's house and his own. He volunteered to teach a class in the Sunday school which Rena conducted at the colored Methodist church, and when she remained to service, occupied a seat conspicuously near her own.
The knowledge of Tryon's presence in the vicinity had been almost as much as Rena could bear.
To it must be added the consciousness that he, too, was pursuing her, to what end she could not tell.
If he had loved her truly, he would never have forgotten her in three short months,--three long months they had heretofore seemed to her, for in them she had lived a lifetime of experience.
She must not meet him-at any cost she must avoid him.
"You may go with me to morrow, Plato," answered the teacher.
I wanted you to go to town to morrow to take an important message for me.
Plato scratched his head disconsolately, but suddenly a bright thought struck him.
The honor might be postponed or, if necessary, foregone; the opportunity to earn a dollar was the chance of a lifetime and must not be allowed to slip.
Rena's letter had re inflamed his smouldering passion; only opposition was needed to fan it to a white heat.
Wherein lay the great superiority of his position, if he was denied the right to speak to the one person in the world whom he most cared to address?
He felt some dim realization of the tyranny of caste, when he found it not merely pressing upon an inferior people who had no right to expect anything better, but barring his own way to something that he desired.
He meant her no harm-but he must see her.
He was conscious of a certain relief at the thought that he had not asked Blanche Leary to be his wife.
He could not marry the other girl, of course, but they must meet again.
The rest he would leave to Fate, which seemed reluctant to disentangle threads which it had woven so closely.
Your teacher, I imagine, merely wants some one to see her safely home. Don't you think, if you should go part of the way, that I might take your place for the rest, while you did my errand?"
Fortunate teacher!
Happy Plato!
"Very well, Plato.
I think we can arrange it so that you can kill the two rabbits at one shot.
Plato led the way by the road through the woods to a point where, amid somewhat thick underbrush, another path intersected the road they were following.
"Now, Plato," said Tryon, pausing here, "this would be a good spot for you to leave the teacher and for me to take your place.
This path leads to the main road, and will take you to town very quickly.
I shouldn't say anything to the teacher about it at all; but when you and she get here, drop behind and run along this path until you meet me,--I'll be waiting a few yards down the road,--and then run to town as fast as your legs will carry you.
As soon as you are gone, I'll come out and tell the teacher that I've sent you away on an errand, and will myself take your place.
You shall have a dollar, and I'll ask her to let you go home with her the next day.
But you mustn't say a word about it, Plato, or you won't get the dollar, and I'll not ask the teacher to let you go home with her again."
mrs Phillips stepped to the front door to meet the half dozen young people who were cheerily coming up the walk.
Cope, looking at the fallen cushions with an unseeing eye, remained within the drawing room door to compose a further paragraph for the behoof of his correspondent in Wisconsin:
They came on as thick as spatter. One played a few things on the violin.
Another set up her easel and painted a picture for us.
A third wrote a poem and read it to us.
And a few sophomores hung about in the background.
The others-either engaged elsewhere or consciously unworthy-went away after a moment or two on the front steps.
Perhaps they did not feel "encouraged." And in fact mrs Phillips looked back toward Cope with the effect of communicating the idea that she had enough men for to day.
She even conveyed to him the notion that he had made the others superfluous.
But-
He met Hortense and Carolyn-with due stress laid on their respective patronymics-and he made an early acquaintance with Amy's violin.
And further on mrs Phillips said:
"Now, Amy, before you really stop, do play that last little thing.
The dear child," she said to Cope in a lower tone, "composed it herself and dedicated it to me."
The last little thing was a kind of "meditation," written very simply and performed quite seriously and unaffectedly.
And it gave, of course, a good chance for the arms.
And it inspired Carolyn too.
She wrote a poem after hearing it."
"A copy of verses," corrected Carolyn, with a modest catch in her breath.
She was a quiet, sedate girl, with brown eyes and hair.
Her eyes were shy, and her hair was plainly dressed.
"Oh, you're so sweet, so old-fashioned!" protested mrs Phillips, slightly rolling her eyes.
"It's a poem,--of course it's a poem.
I leave it to mr Cope, if it isn't!"
"Well, listen, anyway," said Medora.
Its title was read, formally, by the writer; and, quite as formally, the dedication which intervened between title and first stanza,--a dedication to "Medora Townsend Phillips."
"Of course," said Cope to himself.
He knew what he expected to find.
The poem was over, the patroness duly celebrated.
Cope spatted a little too, but kept his eye on one of the walls.
"You're looking at my portrait!" declared mrs Phillips, as the poetess sank deeper into the big chair.
"Hortense did it."
"Of course she did," said Cope under his breath.
He transferred an obligatory glance from the canvas to the expectant artist.
But-
"It's getting almost too dark to see it," said his hostess, and suddenly pressed a button.
This brought into play a row of electric bulbs near the top edge of the frame and into full prominence the dark plumpness of the subject.
He looked back again from the painter (who also had black hair and eyes) to her work.
"Isn't he the dear, comical chap!" exclaimed mrs Phillips, with unction, glancing upward and backward at the girls.
Yet one of them-Hortense-formed her black brows into a frown, and might have spoken resentfully, save for a look from their general patroness.
"Meanwhile, how about a drop of tea?" asked mrs Phillips suddenly. "Roddy"--to the sophomore-"if you will help clear that table...."
The youth hastened to get into action.
Cope went on with his letter to "Arthur":
"It was an afternoon in Lesbos-with Sappho and her band of appreciative maidens.
Phaon, a poor lad of nineteen, swept some pamphlets and paper cutters off the center table, and we all plunged into the ocean of Oolong-the best thing we do on this island...."
He was lingering in a smiling abstractedness on his fancy, when-
"Bertram Cope!" a voice suddenly said, "do you do nothing-nothing?"
He suddenly came to.
Perhaps he had really deserved his hostess' rebuke.
"I mean," proceeded mrs Phillips, "can you do nothing whatever to entertain?"
Cope gained another stage on the way to self consciousness and self control. Entertainment was doubtless the basic curse of this household.
"I sing," he said, with naif suddenness and simplicity.
"Then, sing-do.
There's the open piano.
Can you play your own accompaniments?"
"Some of the simpler ones."
"Some of the simpler ones!
He is quite prepared to wipe us all out.
Shall we let him?"
"That's unfair," Cope protested.
"Will you sing before your tea, or after it?"
"I'm ready to sing this instant,--during it, or before it."
"Very well."
The room was now in dusk, save for the bulbs which made the portrait shine forth like a wayside shrine.
Roddy, the possible sophomore, helped a maid find places for the cups and saucers; and the three girls, still formed in a careful group about the sofa, silently waited.
"Meaning....?"
"Meaning, then, that I am not to raise the roof nor jar the china.
I'll try not to."
Possibly Cope gave too great heed to his hostess' caution; but it seemed as if a voice essentially promising had slipped through some teacher's none too competent hands, or-what was quite as serious-as if some temperamental brake were operating to prevent the complete expression of the singer's nature.
Lassen, Grieg, Rubinstein-all these were carried through rather cautiously, perhaps a little mechanically; and there was a silence.
Hortense broke it.
"Parnassus, yes.
And finally comes Apollo." She reached over and murmured to mrs Phillips: "None too skillful on the lyre, and none too strong in the lungs...."
Medora spoke up loudly and promptly.
"Do you know, I think I've heard you sing before."
"Possibly," Cope said, turning his back on the keyboard.
'Come, Holy Spirit,' and all that?"
"Of course," she said.
But I never saw you before without your mortar board.
That changes the forehead.
Yes, you're yourself," she went on, adding to her previous pleasure the further pleasure of recognition.
"You've earned your tea," she added. "Hortense," she said over her shoulder to the dark girl behind the sofa, "will you-?
No; I'll pour, myself."
She slid into her place at table and got things to going.
There was an interval which Cope might have employed in praising the artistic aptitudes of this variously gifted household, but he found no appropriate word to say,--or at least uttered none.
And none of the three girls made any further comment on his own performance.
mrs Phillips accompanied him, on his way out, as far as the hall.
She looked up at him questioningly.
"You don't like my poor girls," she said.
"You don't find them clever; you don't find them interesting."
"On the contrary," he rejoined, "I have spent a delightful hour." Must he go on and confess that he had developed no particular dexterity in dealing with the younger members of the opposite sex?
"No, you don't care for them one bit," she insisted.
She tried to look rebuking, reproachful; yet some shade of expression conveyed to him a hint that her protest was by no means sincere: if he really didn't, it was no loss-it was even a possible gain.
"It's you who don't care for me," he returned.
"Nonsense," she rejoined.
"If you have a slight past, that only makes you the more atmospheric.
Be sure you come again soon, and put in a little more work on the foreground."
Cope, on his way eastward, in the early evening, passed near the trolley tracks, the Greek lunch counter, without a thought; he was continuing his letter to "Dear Arthur":
"I think," he wrote, with his mind's finger, "that you might as well come down.
I miss you-even more than I thought I should.
The term is young, and you can enter for Spanish, or Psychology, or something. There's nothing for you up there.
The bishop can spare you.
We can easily arrange some suitable quarters..."
And we await a reply from "Dear Arthur"--the fifth and last of our little group.
Chapter twelve
How Best to Spend One's Yosemite Time
One Day Excursions
From Glacier Point you look down three thousand feet over the edge of its sheer face to the meadows and groves and innumerable yellow pine spires, with the meandering river sparkling and spangling through the midst of them.
Thence returning to the trail, follow it to the head of the Nevada Fall.
One Day Excursions
Another grand one day excursion is to the Upper Yosemite Fall, the top of the highest of the Three Brothers, called Eagle Peak on the Geological Survey maps; the brow of El Capitan; the head of the Ribbon Fall; across the beautiful Ribbon Creek Basin; and back to the Valley by the Big Oak Flat wagon road.
From the foot of the Fall the trail zigzags up a narrow canyon between the fall and a plain mural cliff that is burnished here and there by glacial action.
You should stop a while on a flat iron fenced rock a little below the head of the fall beside the enthusiastic throng of starry comet like waters to learn something of their strength, their marvelous variety of forms, and above all, their glorious music, gathered and composed from the snow storms, hail, rain and wind storms that have fallen on their glacier sculptured, domey, ridgy basin.
Refreshed and exhilarated, you follow your trail way through silver fir and pine woods to Eagle Peak, where the most comprehensive of all the views to be had on the north wall heights are displayed.
Dragging yourself away, go to the head of the Ribbon Fall, thence across the beautiful Ribbon Creek Basin to the Big Oak Flat stage road, and down its fine grades to the Valley, enjoying glorious Yosemite scenery all the way to the foot of El Capitan and your camp.
Two Day Excursions
For a two day trip I would go straight to Mount Hoffman, spend the night on the summit, next morning go down by May Lake to Tenaya Lake and return to the Valley by Cloud's Rest and the Nevada and Vernal Falls.
As on the foregoing excursion, you leave the Valley by the Yosemite Falls trail and follow it to the Tioga wagon road, a short distance east of Porcupine Flat.
From that point push straight up to the summit.
Mount Hoffman is a mass of gray granite that rises almost in the center of the Yosemite Park, about eight or ten miles in a straight line from the Valley.
Its southern slopes are low and easily climbed, and adorned here and there with castle like crumbling piles and long jagged crests that look like artificial masonry; but on the north side it is abruptly precipitous and banked with lasting snow.
Most of the broad summit is comparatively level and thick sown with crystals, quartz, mica, hornblende, feldspar, granite, zircon, tourmaline, etc, weathered out and strewn closely and loosely as if they had been sown broadcast.
At first sight only these radiant crystals are likely to be noticed, but looking closely you discover a multitude of very small gilias, phloxes, mimulus, etc, many of them with more petals than leaves.
Northward lies Yosemite's wide basin with its domes and small lakes, shining like larger crystals; eastward the rocky, meadowy Tuolumne region, bounded by its snowy peaks in glorious array; southward Yosemite and westward the vast forest.
You will find it a magnificent sky camp.
The most telling of all the wide Hoffman views is the basin of the Tuolumne with its meadows, forests and hundreds of smooth rock waves that appear to be coming rolling on towards you like high heaving waves ready to break, and beyond these the great mountains.
With your heart aglow, spangling Lake Tenaya and Lake May will beckon you away for walks on their ice burnished shores.
Two Day Excursions
Early next morning visit the small glacier on the north side of Merced Peak, the first of the sixty five that I discovered in the Sierra.
The path of the vanished glacier shone in many places as if washed with silver, and pushing up the canyon on this bright road I passed lake after lake in solid basins of granite and many a meadow along the canyon stream that links them together.
The main lateral moraines that bound the view below the canyon are from a hundred to nearly two hundred feet high and wonderfully regular, like artificial embankments covered with a magnificent growth of silver fir and pine. But this garden and forest luxuriance is speedily left behind, and patches of bryanthus, cassiope and arctic willows begin to appear.
Yet, strange to say, amid all this arctic repression the mountain pine on ledges and buttresses of Red Mountain seems to find the climate best suited to it.
Early next morning I set out to trace the ancient glacier to its head.
Climbing to the top of it, I discovered a very small but well characterized glacier swooping down from the shadowy cliffs of the mountain to its terminal moraine.
A Three Day Excursion
The best three day excursion, as far as I can see, is the same as the first of the two day trips until you reach Lake Tenaya.
There instead of returning to the Valley, follow the Tioga road around the northwest side of the lake, over to the Tuolumne Meadows and up to the west base of Mount Dana.
The walking is good and almost level and from the west end of Clouds' Rest take the Clouds' Rest Trail which will lead direct to the Valley by the Nevada and Vernal Falls.
We come now to the grandest of all the Yosemite excursions, one that requires at least two or three weeks.
The best time to make it is from about the middle of July.
Next morning climb Mount Hoffman; thence push on past Tenaya Lake into the Tuolumne Meadows and establish a central camp near the Soda Springs, from which glorious excursions can be made at your leisure.
It is in the heart of the High Sierra east of Yosemite, eight thousand five hundred to nine thousand feet above the level of the sea.
The gray, picturesque Cathedral Range bounds it on the south; a similar range or spur, the highest peak of which is Mount Conness, on the north; the noble Mounts Dana, Gibbs, Mammoth, Lyell, McClure and others on the axis of the Range on the east; a heaving, billowing crowd of glacier polished rocks and Mount Hoffman on the west.
Tracing the river, we find that it forks a mile above the Soda Springs, the main fork turning southward to Mount Lyell, the other eastward to Mount Dana and Mount Gibbs.
Along both forks strips of meadow extend almost to their heads.
The most beautiful portions of the meadows are spread over lake basins, which have been filled up by deposits from the river.
The principal grass of these meadows is a delicate calamagrostis with very slender filiform leaves, and when it is in flower the ground seems to be covered with a faint purple mist, the stems of the panicles being so fine that they are almost invisible, and offer no appreciable resistance in walking through them.
Along the edges of the meadows beneath the pines and throughout the greater part of the Valley tall ribbon leaved grasses grow in abundance, chiefly bromus, triticum and agrostis.
In October the nights are frosty, and then the meadows at sunrise, when every leaf is laden with crystals, are a fine sight.
The excursion to the top of Mount Dana is a very easy one; for though the mountain is thirteen thousand feet high, the ascent from the west side is so gentle and smooth that one may ride a mule to the very summit.
To the eastward you gaze far out over the desert plains and mountains of the "Great Basin," range beyond range extending with soft outlines, blue and purple in the distance.
To the southward there is a well defined range of pale gray extinct volcanoes, and though the highest of them rises nearly two thousand feet above the lake, you can look down from here into their circular, cup like craters, from which a comparatively short time ago ashes and cinders were showered over the surrounding sage plains and glacier laden mountains.
To the westward the landscape is made up of exceedingly strong, gray, glaciated domes and ridge waves, most of them comparatively low, but the largest high enough to be called mountains; separated by canyons and darkened with lines and fields of forest, Cathedral Peak and Mount Hoffman in the distance; small lakes and innumerable meadows in the foreground.
Northward and southward the great snowy mountains, marshaled along the axis of the Range, are seen in all their glory, crowded together in some places like trees in groves, making landscapes of wild, extravagant, bewildering magnificence, yet calm and silent as the sky.
Some eight glaciers are in sight.
It is about eight miles long and from two thousand to three thousand feet deep.
At one place near the summit careful climbing is necessary, but it is not so dangerous or difficult as to deter any one of ordinary skill, while the views are glorious.
These spurs like distinct ranges meet at your feet; therefore you look at them mostly in the direction of their extension, and their peaks seem to be massed and crowded against one another, while immense amphitheaters, canyons and subordinate ridges with their wealth of lakes, glaciers, and snow fields, maze and cluster between them.
A more interesting problem than a walk over a glacier thus sculptured and adorned is seldom presented to the mountaineer.
And it is all the more interesting since it is the highest and most enduring remnant of the great Tuolumne Glacier, whose traces are still distinct fifty miles away, and whose influence on the landscape was so profound.
The McClure Glacier, once a tributary of the Lyell, is smaller.
The canyon begins near the lower end of the meadows and extends to the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a distance of about eighteen miles, though it will seem much longer to any one who scrambles through it.
It is from twelve hundred to about five thousand feet deep, and is comparatively narrow, but there are several roomy, park like openings in it, and throughout its whole extent Yosemite natures are displayed on a grand scale-domes, El Capitan rocks, gables, Sentinels, Royal Arches, Glacier Points, Cathedral Spires, etc
Its falls and cascades are innumerable.
The sheer falls, except when the snow is melting in early spring, are quite small in volume as compared with those of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy; though in any other country many of them would be regarded as wonders.
The most showy and interesting of them are mostly in the upper part of the canyon, above the point of entrance of Cathedral Creek and Hoffman Creek.
For miles the river is one wild, exulting, on rushing mass of snowy purple bloom, spreading over glacial waves of granite without any definite channel, gliding in magnificent silver plumes, dashing and foaming through huge boulder dams, leaping high into the air in wheel like whirls, displaying glorious enthusiasm, tossing from side to side, doubling, glinting, singing in exuberance of mountain energy.
There is not a dull step all the way.
My own Sierra trip was ten years long.
Other Trips From The Valley
Another fine trip was up, bright and early, by Avalanche Canyon to Glacier Point, along the rugged south wall, tracing all its far outs and ins to the head of the Bridal Veil Fall, thence back home, bright and late, by a brushy, bouldery slope between Cathedral rocks and Cathedral spires and along the level Valley floor.
The Tuolumne grove was passed on the Big Oak Flat road, the Merced grove by the Coulterville road and the Mariposa grove by the Raymond and Wawona road.
All the High Sierra excursions that I have sketched cost from a dollar a week to anything you like.
None of mine when I was exploring the Sierra cost over a dollar a week, most of them less.
The final battle of the Soudanese campaign, Khartoum, put the finishing touches to the rebellion, and gave to Kitchener the title "K. of k"--Kitchener of Khartoum.
This battle was noteworthy in employing the cavalry in an open charge across the plains against the dervish infantry.
It was just such a charge as a skilled horseman such as Haig would keenly enjoy, despite the danger.
Winston Churchill, the British Minister, thus describes it:
It was hardly possible to miss such a target at such a range.
The only course was plain and welcome to all.
The Colonel, nearer than his regiment, already saw what lay behind the skirmishers.
He ordered 'Right wheel into line' to be sounded.
On the instant the troops swung round and locked up into a long, galloping line.
"Two hundred and fifty yards away, the dark blue men were firing madly in a thin film of light blue smoke.
The pace was fast and the distance short.
The Lancers acknowledged the apparition only by an increase of pace."
In such a melee as then followed, that trooper was lucky indeed who escaped without a scratch.
He returned to England wearing the Khedive's medal and the honorary title of Major.
It is probable, however, that little more would have been heard of him, had not the South African War broken out, soon after.
It is the lot of military men to vegetate in days of peace.
They live upon action. Haig was no exception to this rule.
He welcomed new fields.
He went to South Africa as aide and right-hand man to Sir john French-the general whom he was to succeed in later years on the battlefields of France.
In this war, Haig is not credited with many personal exploits.
His was essentially a thinking part.
As usual Haig pinned his faith upon the cavalry.
He was a warm admirer of the American officer, j e b Stuart, the Confederate General whose dashing tactics turned the scale in so many encounters.
Now he tried the same strategy in the operations around Colesburg-and paved the way for later victory.
Haig somewhat resembled another Southern leader, Stonewall Jackson, in his piety.
It was not ostentatious, but simply part and parcel of the man, due to his Presbyterian training.
Haig did not swear or gamble or dance all night.
He was more apt to be found in his tent, when off duty, either reading or writing.
"Yes," replied Haig solemnly, "my Bible!"
Not once did his countenance relax its gravity, as he met the grinning faces across the table.
Almost daily he risked his life in these cavalry operations-until the "Haig luck" became a watchword.
This was in nineteen o one.
About this time he paid a visit to Germany, then at peace and professing a warm affection for England.
One result of this visit was a letter which showed him possessed with wonderful powers of analysis and foresight.
He practically predicted the war that was to come.
It gave the German plan with a mastery of detail, shrewd prophecy, and earnest warning.
The future commander in chief of the British armies in France was convinced of the certainty of the conflict and besought the authorities to make better preparation-but his warnings fell upon deaf ears.
It required thirteen years to demonstrate the truth of Haig's predictions, and then the blow fell.
During the intervening years since the South African campaign he had risen by fairly rapid stages to Inspector General of the Cavalry in India-a situation which he handled with great skill for three years-then Major General, and Lieutenant General.
At the outbreak of the World War, he was hurriedly sent to France, under the command of Sir john French, his old leader in Africa.
French was generosity itself in his praise of Haig in these early days of disaster.
In the first battle of Ypres, the chief honors of victory were again awarded to him:
"Throughout this trying period, Sir Douglas Haig, aided by his divisional commanders and his brigade commanders, held the line with marvelous tenacity and undaunted courage."
Again and again, the generous French pays tribute to his friend, which while deserved reflects no less honor upon the speaker.
He was big enough to share honor.
It is not strange, therefore, when French was superseded, for strategic reasons, that Haig should have been given the chief command.
The appointment, however, left most of the world frankly amazed.
Haig had come forward so quietly that few save those in official circles knew anything about him.
It was nevertheless but a matter of weeks, possibly days, before a quiet confidence born of the man himself was manifest everywhere.
One war correspondent who visited headquarters in the midst of the War's turmoil, thus describes his visit:
"The environment of the Commander in chief is strongly suggestive of his conduct of the war.
Before war became a thing of precise science, the headquarters of an army head seethed with all the picturesque details so common to pictures of martial life.
Couriers mounted on foam flecked horses dashed to and fro.
h q'--as headquarters are familiarly known-are totally different.
Although army units have risen from thousands to millions of men, and fields of operations stretch from sea to sea, and more ammunition is expended in a single engagement than was employed in entire wars of other days, absolute serenity prevails.
It is only when your imagination conjures up the picture of flame and fury that lies beyond the horizon line that you get a thrill.
Neither time nor words are wasted when myriad lives hang in the balance and an empire is at stake.
Inside and out there is an atmosphere of quiet confidence, born of unobtrusive efficiency."
The same writer on meeting Haig says: "I found myself in a presence that, even without the slightest clue to its profession, would have unconsciously impressed itself as military.
Dignity, distinction, and a gracious reserve mingle in his bearing.
I have rarely seen a masculine face so handsome and yet so strong.
His hair and mustache are fair, and his clear, almost steely blue eyes search you, but not unkindly.
His chest is broad and deep, yet scarcely broad enough for the rows of service and order ribbons that plant a mass of color against the background of khaki. . . .
"Into every detail of daily life at General Headquarters the Commander's character is impressed.
After lunch, for example, he spends an hour alone, and in this period of meditation the whole fateful panorama of the war passes before him.
When it is over the wires splutter and the fierce life of the coming night-the Army does not begin to fight until most people go to sleep-is ordained.
"This finished, the brief period of respite begins.
Rain or shine, his favorite horse is brought up to the door, and he goes for a ride, usually accompanied by one or two young staff officers.
He rides like those latter day centaurs-the Australian ranger and the American cowboy.
He seems part of his horse."
And that is one reason why the Little Contemptibles grew and grew until they became a mighty barrier stretching across the pathway of the invader from sea to sea, and saying with their Allies:
"You shall not pass!"
IMPORTANT DATES IN HAIG'S LIFE
eighteen sixty one.
june nineteenth.
Douglas Haig born. eighteen eighty.
Entered Brasenose College, Oxford. eighteen eighty five.
Joined seventh Hussars, British army. eighteen ninety eight.
Served in South Africa.
d a a g for cavalry; then staff officer to General French. nineteen o one.
Lieutenant colonel commanding seventeenth Lancers. nineteen o three.
Inspector general, cavalry, India. nineteen o four.
Major general. nineteen ten.
Lieutenant general. nineteen fourteen.
General, commanding First Army in France. nineteen fifteen.
Commander in chief of British forces. nineteen seventeen.
Created an earl. nineteen twenty eight.
january thirtieth.
Among the beautiful varieties of the domestic cat brought into notice by the cat shows, none deserve more attention than "The Royal Cat of Siam." In form, colour, texture, and length, or rather shortness of its coat, it is widely different from other short haired varieties; yet there is but little difference in its mode of life or habit.
I have not had the pleasure of owning one of this breed, though when on a visit to Lady Dorothy Nevill, at Dangstein, near Petersfield, I had several opportunities for observation.
Lady Dorothy Nevill thought them exceedingly docile and domestic, but delicate in their constitution; although her ladyship kept one for two years, another over a year, but eventually all died of the same complaint, that of worms, which permeated every part of their body.
mr Young, of Harrogate, possesses a chocolate variety of this Royal Siamese cat; it was sent from Singapore to mr Brennand, from whom he purchased it, and is described as "most loving and affectionate," which I believe is usually the case.
Although this peculiar colour is very beautiful and scarce, I am of opinion that the light gray or fawn colour with black and well marked muzzle, ears, and legs is the typical variety, the markings being the same as the Himalayan rabbits.
I therefore take that to be the correct form and colour, and the darker colour to be an accidental deviation.
But I give mr Young's own views:
"The dun Siamese we have has won whenever shown; the body is of a dun colour, nose, part of the face, ears, feet, and tail of a very dark chocolate brown, nearly black, eyes of a beautiful blue by day, and of a red colour at night!
My other prize cat is of a very rich chocolate or seal, with darker face, ears, and tail; the legs are a shade darker, which intensifies towards the feet.
The dun, unless under special judges, invariably beats the chocolate at the shows.
The tail is shorter and finer than our English cats.
"I may add that we lately have had four kittens from the chocolate cat by a pure dun Siamese he cat.
All the young are dun coloured, and when born were very light, nearly white, but are gradually getting the dark points of the parents; in fact, I expect that one will turn chocolate. The cats are very affectionate, and make charming ladies' pets, but are rather more delicate than our cats, but after they have once wintered in England they seem to get acclimatised.
"mr Brennand, who brought the chocolate one and another, a male, from Singapore last year, informs me that there are two varieties, a large and small.
Ours are the small; he also tells me the chocolate is the most rare.
"I have heard a little more regarding the Siamese cats from Miss Walker, the daughter of General Walker, who brought over one male and three females.
"Their food is fish and rice boiled together until quite soft, and Miss Walker finds the kittens bred have thriven on it.
"It is my intention to try and breed from a white English female with blue eyes, and a Siamese male.
"The Siamese cats are very prolific breeders, having generally five at each litter, and three litters a year.
Hitherto we have never had any half bred Siamese; but there used to be a male Siamese at Hurworth on Tees, and there were many young bred from English cats.
Poodle) had three kittens by an English cat; but none showed any trace of the Siamese, being all tabby.
"The original pair were sent from Bangkok, and it is believed that they came from the King's Palace, where alone the breed are said to be kept pure.
We were in China when they reached us, and the following year, eighteen eighty six, we brought the father, mother, and a pair of kittens to England.
"Their habits are in general the same as the common cat, though it has been observed by strangers, 'there is a pleasant wild animal odour,' which is not apparent to us.
This tallies with the description given by mr Darwin of the Malayan and also the Siamese cats.
See my notes on the Manx cat.
mr Young had also noted this peculiarity in "the Royal cat of Siam."
mrs Vyvyan further remarks:
"They are very affectionate and personally attached to their human friends, not liking to be left alone, and following us from room to room more after the manner of dogs than cats.
"They are devoted parents, the old father taking the greatest interest in the young ones.
"They are friendly with the dogs of the house, occupying the same baskets; but the males are very strong, and fight with great persistency with strange dogs, and conquer all other tom cats in their neighbourhood.
They also like chicken and game.
We have proved the fish diet is not essential, as two of our cats (in Cornwall) never get it.
"Rather a free life seems necessary to their perfect acclimatisation, where they can go out and provide themselves with raw animal food, 'feather and fur.'
"We find these cats require a great deal of care, unless they live in the country, and become hardy through being constantly out of doors.
The kittens are difficult to rear unless they are born late in the spring, thus having the warm weather before them.
Most deaths occur before they are six months old.
We also give cod liver oil, if the appetite fails and weight diminishes.
After maturity they are apt to darken considerably, though not in all specimens.
"They are most interesting and delightful pets.
'Loquat' also provided this for a young family for whom she had no milk.
We have at present two males, four adult females, and five kittens." One of our kittens sent to Scotland last August, has done well.
mrs Lee, of Penshurst, also has some fine specimens of the breed, and of the same colours as described.
I take it, therefore, that the true breed, by consensus of opinion, is that of the dun, fawn, or ash coloured ground, with black points.
Other colours should be shown in the variety classes.
The head should be long from the ears to the eyes, and not over broad, and then rather sharply taper off towards the muzzle, the forehead flat, and receding, the eyes somewhat aslant downwards towards the nose, and the eyes of a pearly, yet bright blue colour, the ears usual size and black, with little or no hair on the inside, with black muzzle, and round the eyes black.
The form should be slight, graceful, and delicately made, body long, tail rather short and thin, and the legs somewhat short, slender, and the feet oval, not so round as the ordinary English cat.
The body should be one bright, uniform, even colour, not clouded, either rich fawn, dun, or ash.
DISEASES OF CATS.
Through the kindness of friends I am enabled to give recipes for medicines considered as useful, or, at any rate, tending to abate the severity of the attack in the one, and utterly eradicate the other.
Care should always be taken on the first symptoms of illness to remove the animal at once from contact with others.
CATARRHAL FEVERS.
From a d fourteen fourteen up to eighteen thirty two no fewer than nineteen widespread outbreaks of this kind have been recorded.
The most notable of these was in seventeen ninety six, when the cats in England and Holland were generally attacked by the disease, and in the following year when it had spread over Europe and extended to America; in eighteen o three, it again appeared in this country and over a large part of the European continent.
"The symptoms are intense fever, prostration, vomiting, diarrhoea, sneezing, cough, and profuse discharge from the nose and eyes.
Sometimes the parotid glands are swollen, as in human mumps.
"The treatment consists in careful nursing and cleanliness, keeping the animal moderately warm and comfortable.
The disease rapidly produces intense debility, and therefore the strength should be maintained from the very commencement by frequent small doses of strong beef tea, into which one grain of quinine has been introduced twice a day, a small quantity of port wine (from half to one teaspoonful) according to the size of the cat, and the state of debility.
If there is no diarrhoea, but constipation, a small dose of castor oil or syrup of buckthorn should be given.
Solid food should not be allowed until convalescence has set in.
Isolation, with regard to other cats, and disinfection, should be attended to.
"Simple Catarrh demands similar treatment.
Warmth, cleanliness, broth, and beef tea, are the chief items of treatment, with a dose of castor oil if constipation is present.
Probably inoculation with cultivated or modified virus would be found a good and safe preventative."
I was anxious to know about this, as inoculation used to be the practice with packs of hounds.
It will be observed that dr Fleming treats the distemper as a kind of influenza, and considers one of the most important things is to keep up the strength of the suffering animal.
Other members of the r c v s, whom I have consulted, have all given the same kind of advice, not only prescribing for the sick animal wine, but brandy, as a last resource, to arouse sinking vitality.
mr George Cheverton, of High Street, Tunbridge Wells, who is very successful with animals and their diseases, thinks it best to treat them homoeopathically.
The following is what he prescribes as efficacious for some of the most dire complaints with which cats are apt to be afflicted.
WORMS.
For a full grown cat give three grains of santonine every night for a week or ten days; it might be administered in milk, or given in a small piece of beef or meat of any kind.
After the course give an aperient powder.
MANGE.
A most useful lotion is acid sulphurous, one ounce. to five ounces. of water, adding about a teaspoonful of glycerine, and sponging the affected parts twice or thrice daily.
COLDS.
The symptoms are twofold, usually there is constant sneezing and discharge from the nose.
COUGHS.
DISTEMPER.
Early symptoms should be noted and receive prompt attention; this will often cut short the duration of the malady.
The first indications usually are a disinclination to rest in the usual place, seeking a dark corner beneath a sofa, etc
The eyes flow freely, the nose after becoming hard and dry becomes stopped with fluid, the tongue parched, and total aversion to food follows.
When the nose becomes dry, and the eye restless and glaring, give belladonna.
CANKER OF EAR.
When internal, drop into the affected ear, night and morning, three or five drops of the following mixture:
APERIENT.
Get a chemist to rub down a medium size croton bean with about forty grains of sugar of milk, and divide into four powders.
Large cats often require two powders. The dose might be repeated if necessary.
REMEDIES AND STRENGTHENING MEDICINES.
Santonine.
mr Frank Upjohn, of Castelnau, Barnes, has also kindly forwarded me his treatment of some few of the cat ailments.
Mindful of the old proverb that "In a multitude of counsellors there is wisdom," I place all before my friends, and those of the cat, that they may select which remedy they deem best:
DISTEMPER.
Mix for ointment.
Then give sulphide of mercury, three grains, two or three times on alternate nights.
PURGATIVE.
Nothing like castor oil for purgation; half the quantity of syrup of buckthorn, if necessary, may be added.
WORMS.
Two or three grains of santonine in a teaspoonful of castor oil, for two or three days.
CATARRH.
Mix. Give one teaspoonful every two or three hours.
FLEAS, AND IRRITATION OF SKIN.
EYE OINTMENT.
Red oxide of mercury, twelve grains; spermaceti ointment, one ounce.
Mix.
The above prescription was given to me many years ago by the late dr Walsh (Stonehenge), and I have found it of great service, both for my own eyes, also those of animals and birds.
Wash the eyes carefully with warm water, dry off with a soft silk handkerchief, and apply a little of the ointment.
dr Walsh informed me that he deemed it excellent for canker in the ear, but of that I have had no experience.
FOR MANGE.
Another remedy: give a teaspoonful of castor oil; next day give raw meat, dusted over with flowers of sulphur.
Of all the ailments, both of dogs and cats, distemper is the worst to combat, and is so virulent and contagious that I have thought it well to offer remedies that are at least worthy of a trial, though when the complaint has firm hold, and the attack very severe, the case is generally almost hopeless, especially with high bred animals.
POISON.
It is not generally known that the much admired laburnum contains a strong poison, and is therefore an exceedingly dangerous plant.
A small dose of juice infused under the skin is quite sufficient to kill a cat or a dog.
Children have died from eating the seeds, of which ten or twelve were sufficient to cause death.
How many cases have happened before the danger was discovered is of course only a matter of conjecture, as few would suspect the cause to come from the lovely plant that so delights the eye.
An undulating landscape, with a homely farmstead here and there, and plenty of old English timber scattered grandly over it, extended mistily to my right; on the left the road is overtopped by masses of noble forest.
The old park of Brandon lies there, more than four miles from end to end.
These masses of solemn and discoloured verdure, the faint but splendid lights, and long filmy shadows, the slopes and hollows-my eyes wandered over them all with that strange sense of unreality, and that mingling of sweet and bitter fancy, with which we revisit a scene familiar in very remote and early childhood, and which has haunted a long interval of maturity and absence, like a romantic reverie.
As I looked through the chaise windows, every moment presented some group, or outline, or homely object, for years forgotten; and now, with a strange surprise how vividly remembered and how affectionately greeted! We drove by the small old house at the left, with its double gable and pretty grass garden, and trim yews and modern lilacs and laburnums, backed by the grand timber of the park.
This general liking for children and instinct of smiling on them is one source of the delightful illusions which make the remembrance of early days so like a dream of Paradise, and give us, at starting, such false notions of our value.
There was a little fair haired child playing on the ground before the steps as I whirled by.
The old rector had long passed away; the shorts, gaiters, and smile-a phantom; and nature, who had gathered in the past, was providing for the future.
The pretty mill road, running up through Redman's Dell, dank and dark with tall romantic trees, was left behind in another moment; and we were now traversing the homely and antique street of the little town, with its queer shops and solid steep roofed residences.
Up Church street I contrived a peep at the old gray tower where the chimes hung; and as we turned the corner a glance at the 'Brandon Arms.' How very small and low that palatial hostelry of my earlier recollections had grown!
There were new faces at the door.
It was only two and twenty years ago, and I was then but eleven years old.
A retrospect of a score of years or so, at three and thirty, is a much vaster affair than a much longer one at fifty.
The whole thing seemed like yesterday; and as I write, I open my eyes and start and cry, 'can it be twenty, five and twenty, aye, by Jove! five and thirty, years since then?' How my days have flown!
And I think when another such yesterday shall have arrived, where shall I be?
The first ten years of my life were longer than all the rest put together, and I think would continue to be so were my future extended to an ante Noachian span.
It is the first ten that emerge from nothing, and commencing in a point, it is during them that consciousness, memory-all the faculties grow, and the experience of sense is so novel, crowded, and astounding.
But, I beg your pardon.
My journey was from London.
I could not in the least tell why.
It had not a good countenance, somehow.
The original lines were not prepossessing.
I examined it carefully, and laid it down unopened.
I went through half a dozen others, and recurred to it, and puzzled over its exterior again, and again postponed what I fancied would prove a disagreeable discovery; and this happened every now and again, until I had quite exhausted my budget, and then I did open it, and looked straight to the signature.
Mark Wylder,' I exclaimed, a good deal relieved.
Mark Wylder!
There was nothing about him to excite the least uneasiness; on the contrary, I believe he liked me as well as he was capable of liking anybody, and it was now seven years since we had met.
There was a complicated cousinship among these Brandons, Wylders, and Lakes-inextricable intermarriages, which, five years ago, before I renounced the bar, I had at my fingers' ends, but which had now relapsed into haze.
There must have been some damnable taint in the blood of the common ancestor-a spice of the insane and the diabolical.
They were an ill conditioned race-that is to say, every now and then there emerged a miscreant, with a pretty evident vein of madness.
There was Sir Jonathan Brandon, for instance, who ran his own nephew through the lungs in a duel fought in a paroxysm of Cencian jealousy; and afterwards shot his coachman dead upon the box through his coach window, and finally died in Vienna, whither he had absconded, of a pike thrust received from a sentry in a brawl.
The Wylders had not much to boast of, even in contrast with that wicked line.
They had produced their madmen and villains, too; and there had been frequent intermarriages-not very often happy.
There had been many lawsuits, frequent disinheritings, and even worse doings.
So there were Wylders of Brandon, and Brandons of Brandon.
In one generation, a Wylder ill using his wife and hating his children, would cut them all off, and send the estate bounding back again to the Brandons.
The next generation or two would amuse themselves with a lawsuit, until the old Brandon type reappeared in some bachelor brother or uncle, with a Jezebel on his left hand, and an attorney on his right, and, presto!
the estates were back again with the Wylders.
A 'statement of title' is usually a dry affair.
Here is Mark Wylder's letter:--
'DEAR CHARLES-Of course you have heard of my good luck, and how kind poor Dickie-from whom I never expected anything-proved at last.
Do you know anything of him?
He seems a clever fellow-a bit too clever, perhaps-and was too much master here, I suspect, in poor Dickie's reign.
Tell me all you can make out about him. It is a long time since I saw you, Charles; I'm grown brown, and great whiskers.
I met poor Dominick-what an ass that chap is-but he did not know me till I introduced myself, so I must be a good deal changed.
Our ship was at Malta when I got the letter.
I was sick of the service, and no wonder: a lieutenant-and there likely to stick all my days.
I do not think he is a year older than I, but takes airs because he's a trustee.
But I only laugh at trifles that would have riled me once.
Well, you know he left Brandon with some charges to my Cousin Dorcas.
Our ship was at Naples when she was there two years ago; and I saw a good deal of her.
Of course it was not to be thought of then; but matters are quite different, you know, now, and the viscount, who is a very sensible fellow in the main, saw it at once.
You see, the old brute meant to leave her a life estate; but it does not amount to that, though it won't benefit me, for he settled that when I die it shall go to his right heirs-that will be to my son, if I ever have one.
So Miss Dorcas must pack, and turn out whenever I die, that is, if I slip my cable first.
She is a wide awake young lady, and nothing the worse for that: I'm a bit that way myself.
And so very little courtship has sufficed.
She is a splendid beauty, and when you see her you'll say any fellow might be proud of such a bride; and so I am.
And now, dear Charlie, you have it all.
It will take place somewhere about the twenty fourth of next month; and you must come down by the first, if you can.
Don't disappoint.
I want you for best man, maybe; and besides, I would like to talk to you about some things they want me to do in the settlements, and you were always a long headed fellow: so pray don't refuse.
'Dear Charlie, ever most sincerely,
'Your old Friend,
'MARK WYLDER.
'p s--I stay at the Brandon Arms in the town, until after the marriage; and then you can have a room at the Hall, and capital shooting when we return, which will be in a fortnight after.'
But he was certainly one of the oldest and most intimate acquaintances I had.
We had been for nearly three years at school together; and when his ship came to England, met frequently; and twice, when he was on leave, we had been for months together under the same roof; and had for some years kept up a regular correspondence, which first grew desultory, and finally, as manhood supervened, died out.
Then there was that beautiful apathetic Dorcas Brandon.
Where is the laggard so dull as to experience no pleasing flutter at his heart in anticipation of meeting a perfect beauty in a country house.
I was romantic, like every other youngish fellow who is not a premature curmudgeon; and there was something indefinitely pleasant in the consciousness that, although a betrothed bride, the young lady still was fancy free: not a bit in love.
It was but a marriage of convenience, with mitigations.
Lord Chelford raised his hat, smiling: 'I am so very glad I met you, I was beginning to feel so solitary!' he placed himself beside Miss Lake. 'I've had such a long walk across the park.
I think Lord Chelford perceived there was something amiss between the young people, for his eye rested on Rachel with a momentary look of enquiry, unconscious, no doubt, and quickly averted, and he went on chatting pleasantly; but he looked, once or twice, a little hard at Stanley Lake.
But though he never hinted at an unfavourable estimate of the captain, his intimacies with him were a little reserved; and I think I have seen him, even when he smiled, look the least little bit in the world uncomfortable, as if he did not quite enter into the captain's pleasantries.
They had not walked together very far, when Stanley recollected that he must take his leave, and walk back to Gylingden; and so the young lady and Lord Chelford were left to pursue their way towards Redman's Farm together.
The shock of her brief interview with her brother over, reflection assured her, knowing all she did, that Stanley's wooing would prosper, and so this cause of quarrel had really nothing in it; no, nothing but a display of his temper and morals-not very astonishing, after all-and, like an ugly picture or a dreadful dream, in no way to affect her after life, except as an odious remembrance.
It was rather a marked thing-as lean mrs Loyd, of Gylingden, who had two thin spinsters with pink noses under her wing, remarked-this long walk of Lord Chelford and Miss Lake in the park; and she enjoined upon her girls the propriety of being specially reserved in their intercourse with persons of Lord Chelford's rank; not that they were much troubled with dangers from any such quarter.
That perverse and utterly selfish brother, Stanley Lake, had chosen to take his leave.
Lord Chelford was a lively and agreeable companion; but there was something unusually gentle, almost resembling tenderness, in his manner. She was so different from her gay, fiery self in this walk-so gentle; so subdued-and he was more interested by her, perhaps, than he had ever been before.
The sun just touched the verge of the wooded uplands, as the young people began to descend the slope of Redman's Dell.
'How very short!' Lord Chelford paused, with a smile, at these words.
There was not much in this little speech, but it was spoken in a low, sweet voice; and Rachel looked down on the ferns before her feet, as they walked on side by side, not with a smile, but with a blush, and that beautiful look of gratification so becoming and indescribable.
But the fitful evening breeze came up through Redman's Dell, with a gentle sweep over the autumnal foliage.
Sudden as a sigh, and cold; in her ear it sounded like a whisper or a shudder, and she lifted up her eyes and saw the darkening dell before her; and with a pang, the dreadful sense of reality returned.
She stopped, with something almost wild in her look.
But with an effort she smiled, and said, with a little shiver, 'The air has grown quite chill, and the sun nearly set; we loitered, Stanley and I, a great deal too long in the park, but I am now at home, and I fear I have brought you much too far out of your way already; good bye.' And she extended her hand.
He had a few pleasant, lingering words to say.
She seemed to like those lingering sentences-and hung upon them-and even smiled but in her eyes there was a vague and melancholy pleading-a wandering and unfathomable look that pained him.
She turned into the little drawing room at the left, and, herself unseen, did take that last look, and saw him go up the road again towards Brandon.
The Dulhamptons have arrived: the old Marchioness never appears till three o'clock, and only out in the carriage twice since they came.
She has fine eyes-and I think no other good point-much too dark for my taste-but they say clever;' and not another word was there on this subject.
But no Nothing could be more perfectly distinct than 'Chelford,' traced in her fair correspondent's very legible hand.
'He treats the young lady very coolly,' thought Rachel, forgetting, perhaps, that his special relations to Dorcas Brandon had compelled his stay in that part of the world.
But then she had been very guarded; not stiff or prudish, indeed, but frank and cold enough with him, and that was comforting.
Rachel, Rachel, girl! what a fool you were near becoming!'
So they sat down together in her chamber.
So the old nurse mounted her spectacles, glad of the invitation, and began to read.
'Stop,' said Rachel suddenly, as she reached about the middle of the chapter.
The old woman looked up, with her watery eyes wide open, and there was a short pause.
The dead themselves declare their dreadful secrets, open mouthed, to the winds.
LARCOM, THE BUTLER, VISITS THE ATTORNEY.
It commenced thus:--
'DEAR LARKIN,--I hope you did the three commissions all right.
There was a great deal more, but these were the passages which perplexed Larkin.
He unlocked the iron safe, and took out the sheaf of Wylder's letters, and conned the last one over very carefully.
Is it Martin of the China Kilns, or Martin of the bank?
That, too, plainly refers to a former letter-not a word of the sort.
'There has plainly been a letter lost, manifestly.
I don't think the captain would venture anything so awfully hazardous.
'It is not a thing to be passed over,' murmured the attorney, who had come to a decision as to the first step to be taken, and he thought with a qualm of the effect of one of Wylder's confidential notes getting into Captain Lake's hands.
While he was buttoning his walking boots, with his foot on the chair before the fire, a tap at his study door surprised him.
'Oh, yes; and how do you do, mr Larcom?
'But do sit down, mr Larcom-pray do,' said the attorney, who was very gracious to Larcom. 'You'll get the scrip, you know, on executing, but the shares are allotted.
Larcom received it with grave gratitude, and sipped it, and spoke respectfully of it.
I-you know-I'm interested for all parties.'
The butler nodded gloomily.
Larkin continued to stare on him in silence, with his round eyes, for some seconds after.
incredible!
'Well, mr Larcom, I think you have been led into an erroneous conclusion.
Larcom did understand perfectly, and so this little visit ended.
No, it was a mistake; it could not be.
It was Mark Wylder's penmanship-he could swear to it.
No, no; with Mark Wylder it was quite out of the question-altogether visionary and impracticable.
Quite impossible!
He had called to mention the circumstance, lest mr Driver should be taken by surprise by official investigation. Was it possible that the letter had been sent by mistake to Brandon-to Captain Lake?
At all events, it would be well to make your clerks recollect themselves. (mr Larkin knew that Driver's 'clerks' were his daughters.) It is not easy to meet with a young fellow that is quite honest.
It is one of the marks of an advancing state of intelligence and culture, when an assemblage of gentlemen and ladies can pass delightful hours in the mere interchange of thought in conversation.
And while games and other amusements may serve for a temporary variety (always excepting games known as "kissing games," which should be promptly tabooed and denounced, and ever will be in truly refined society), yet animated and intelligent conversation must always hold the first place in the list of the pleasures of any refined society circle.
How shall a young girl fit herself to enjoy and to afford enjoyment in general society?
Certainly the first requisites are intelligence, a good knowledge of standard literature, a general knowledge of the more important events that are taking place in the world, and such a knowledge of the best current literature as may be obtained from the regular reading of one or two of the standard monthly magazines.
And here it may help you if I particularize a little in regard to a knowledge of important events of the day and also of general and current literature.
Of course the main source of knowledge of the more important events that are going on in the world is the daily or weekly newspaper; and yet there is scarcely any reading so utterly demoralizing to good mental habits as the ordinary daily paper.
More than three fourths of the matter printed in the "great city dailies" is not only of no use to anyone, but it is a positive damage to habits of mental application to read it.
It is a waste of time even to undertake to sift the important from the unimportant.
The most that any earnest person should attempt to do with a daily paper is to glance over the headlines which give the gist of the news, and then to read such editorial comments as enable the reader to understand the more important events and affairs that are transpiring in the world so that reference to them in conversation would be intelligent and intelligible.
But if one should never see a daily paper, yet should every week carefully read a digest of news prepared for a good weekly paper, one would be thoroughly furnished with all necessary knowledge of contemporaneous events, and the time thus saved from daily papers could be profitably employed in other reading.
The field of literature is now so vast that no one can hope to be well acquainted with more than a small portion of it.
Yet every well informed young person should know the general character of the principal writers since the time of Shakespere, even though one should never read their works.
She was telling a young gentleman where the book shelves were to be in the splendid new house being built by her father, and suggesting that the shelves would look nice if the books had nice bindings.
"'If you want to read him,' said Corey, with a laugh of sympathy for an imaginable joke.
"'We had a good deal about him in school.
I believe we had one of his books.
Mine's lost, but Pen will remember.'
"The young man looked at her, and then said seriously, 'You'll want Green, of course, and Motley, and Parkman.'
What kind of writers are they?'
"'They're historians, too.'
That's what Gibbon was.
'I used to get them mixed up with each other, and I couldn't tell them from the poets. Should you want to have poetry?'
"'We don't any of us like poetry.
Do you like it?'
"'I'm afraid I don't, very much,' Corey owned.
'But of course there was a time when Tennyson was a great deal more to me than he is now.'
I think we ought to have all the American poets.'
"'Well, not all.
"'And Shakespere,' she added.
We had ever so much about Shakespere.
Weren't you perfectly astonished when you found out how many other plays there were of his?
So you see how ridiculous this young girl, by the betrayal of such ignorance, made herself in conversation with a cultured young gentleman whose good opinion she was most anxious to win.
And yet, to talk too much about books is not well; it often marks the pedantic and egotistic character.
It is safe to say that unless one happens to meet a very congenial mind among conversers in general society, to introduce the subject of books is liable to be misconstrued.
It is not very long since another popular modern novelist held up to scorn and ridicule the young woman whose particular ambition seemed to be to let society know what an immense number of books she had been reading.
Nevertheless, one must have a good groundwork of knowledge of books in order to avoid mistakes such as poor Irene made in talking with young Corey.
Directions and suggestions for aiding young people to become agreeable and pleasant conversers must necessarily be mainly negative.
one.
Especially should she avoid seeking to make an impression by frequent mention of advantageous friends or circumstances.
The greatest observer and commentator upon manners that ever wrote was mr Emerson.
In one of his essays he says: "You shall not enumerate your brilliant acquaintances, nor tell me by their titles what books you have read.
I am to infer that you keep good company by your good manners and better information; and to infer your reading from the wealth, and accuracy of your conversation."
To laugh aloud is a dangerous thing, unless all noise and harshness have been cultivated out of the voice, as ought to be done in every good school.
The culture of the voice is one of the most important elements in making a pleasant converser.
American girls and women are accused by cultivated foreigners of having loud, harsh, strident voices; and there is too much truth in the accusation.
Nor is there any excuse for unpleasant, harsh, rough, nasal tones of voice in these days when in every good school instruction is given in the management of the voice for reading and conversation.
The cause of harshness and loudness is often mere carelessness on the part of young people.
But talking in too loud a tone is scarcely less unpleasant to the listeners than the use of too low a tone, which is generally an affectation.
three.
She must avoid frequent attempts at wit; avoid punning, which is the cheapest possible form of wit; and avoid sarcasm.
The talent for being sarcastic is a most dangerous one.
'No one ever knew a sarcastic woman who could keep friends.
The temptation to be bright and interesting and to attract attention by the use of sarcasm is very strong, for nearly all will be interested in it and enjoy it for a little.
But were I obliged to choose between sarcasm and dullness in a young girl, I should prefer dullness.
Happily, this is not a necessary alternative.
She must avoid a kind of joking and badinage that should never be heard among well bred young people in society-that about courtship and marriage.
Much harm, much blunting of fine sensibilities, much destruction of that delicate modesty which is the priceless dower of young girlhood, comes of such jesting and joking where it is permitted without restraint or reproof.
A young girl may not be called upon to reprove it, but she certainly can shun the company of those who are given to such vulgarity (for no other term will rightly describe it), and she can certainly refrain from joining in any conversation of this description.
Be especially careful to avoid interrupting one who is speaking.
One reason why the art of conversation has so degenerated in these days is that so few have a real interest in hearing the fine thoughts of good thinker and talkers.
So many people want to talk about themselves, or their affairs, that it is in many circles almost an impossibility to maintain a high and elevating conversation.
Until years and experience, as well as wide reading and information, have given you the right to express freely your opinions in society, it will be well to listen a great deal more than you speak, especially when in the company of your elders.
Avoid all sentimentality, or the discussion of subjects that would expose the private and sacred feelings of the heart.
Do not quote poetry; do not ask people's opinions on delicate and individual questions.
I have heard a young boarding school graduate embarrass a whole room full of excellent and educated people by asking a young gentleman if he did not think Longfellow very inferior to Lowell in his love poems.
In this way you will avoid that bane of social conversation-gossip.
In all social relations strive to throw your influence for that which is faithful, sincere, kind, generous, and just.
Have a special thought and regard for those who may labor under disadvantages?
be especially kind to the shrinking and timid, to the poor and unfortunate.
CHAPTER one
My birthplace was Dinwiddie Court House, in Virginia.
My recollections of childhood are distinct, perhaps for the reason that many stirring incidents are associated with that period.
The visions are so terribly distinct that I almost imagine them to be real.
Every day seems like a romance within itself, and the years grow into ponderous volumes.
As I cannot condense, I must omit many strange passages in my history.
From such a wilderness of events it is difficult to make a selection, but as I am not writing altogether the history of myself, I will confine my story to the most important incidents which I believe influenced the moulding of my character.
As I glance over the crowded sea of the past, these incidents stand forth prominently, the guide posts of memory.
I presume that I must have been four years old when I first began to remember; at least, I cannot now recall anything occurring previous to this period.
A. Burwell, was somewhat unsettled in his business affairs, and while I was yet an infant he made several removals.
While living at Hampton Sidney College, Prince Edward county virginia, mrs Burwell gave birth to a daughter, a sweet, black eyed baby, my earliest and fondest pet.
To take care of this baby was my first duty.
The baby was named Elizabeth, and it was pleasant to me to be assigned a duty in connection with it, for the discharge of that duty transferred me from the rude cabin to the household of my master. My simple attire was a short dress and a little white apron.
My old mistress encouraged me in rocking the cradle, by telling me that if I would watch over the baby well, keep the flies out of its face, and not let it cry, I should be its little maid.
This was a golden promise, and I required no better inducement for the faithful performance of my task. I began to rock the cradle most industriously, when lo! out pitched little pet on the floor.
This was the first time I was punished in this cruel way, but not the last.
The black eyed baby that I called my pet grew into a self willed girl, and in after years was the cause of much trouble to me.
When I was eight, mr Burwell's family consisted of six sons and four daughters, with a large family of servants.
I was my mother's only child, which made her love for me all the stronger.
At last mr Burwell determined to reward my mother, by making an arrangement with the owner of my father, by which the separation of my parents could be brought to an end.
But the golden days did not last long.
The shadow eclipsed the sunshine, and love brought despair.
The parting was eternal.
We who are crushed to earth with heavy chains, who travel a weary, rugged, thorny road, groping through midnight darkness on earth, earn our right to enjoy the sunshine in the great hereafter.
My old mistress said to her: "Stop your nonsense; there is no necessity for you putting on airs.
Your husband is not the only slave that has been sold from his family, and you are not the only one that has had to part.
She turned away in stoical silence, with a curl of that loathing scorn upon her lips which swelled in her heart.
They kept up a regular correspondence for years, and the most precious mementoes of my existence are the faded old letters that he wrote, full of love, and always hoping that the future would bring brighter days.
I note a few extracts from one of my father's letters to my mother, following copy literally:
six, eighteen thirty three.
"mrs
AGNES HOBBS
We were living at Prince Edward, in Virginia, and master had just purchased his hogs for the winter, for which he was unable to pay in full.
To escape from his embarrassment it was necessary to sell one of the slaves.
Little Joe, the son of the cook, was selected as the victim.
His mother was ordered to dress him up in his Sunday clothes, and send him to the house.
He came in with a bright face, was placed in the scales, and was sold, like the hogs, at so much per pound. His mother was kept in ignorance of the transaction, but her suspicions were aroused.
One day she was whipped for grieving for her lost boy.
Colonel Burwell at one time owned about seventy slaves, all of which were sold, and in a majority of instances wives were separated from husbands and children from their parents.
Time seemed to soften the hearts of master and mistress, and to insure kinder and more humane treatment to bondsmen and bondswomen.
When I was quite a child, an incident occurred which my mother afterward impressed more strongly on my mind.
One of my uncles, a slave of Colonel Burwell, lost a pair of ploughlines, and when the loss was made known the master gave him a new pair, and told him that if he did not take care of them he would punish him severely.
My mother went to the spring in the morning for a pail of water, and on looking up into the willow tree which shaded the bubbling crystal stream, she discovered the lifeless form of her brother suspended beneath one of the strong branches.
Rather than be punished the way Colonel Burwell punished his servants, he took his own life.
fifteen
In the midst of these appalling horrors, time, it seems, has hastened still more in its bewildered flight, and already we have reached the anniversary of that foul deed, the blackest that has ever defiled the history of the human race.
This crime was committed after long, hypocritical premeditation, and no pang of remorse, no vestige of shame, caused those myriads of accomplices to stay their hands.
There were certain dastardly deeds, certain acts of profanation, certain lies, at which those hordes that came to us from Asia hesitated; an instinctive reverence still restrained them; and, moreover, in those times they did not destroy with such impudent cynicism, invoking the God of Christians in a burlesque pathos of prayer!
King Albert of Belgium, dispossessed to day of his all and banished to a hamlet-what tribute of admiration and homage can we offer him worthy of his acceptance and sufficiently enduring?
Upon tablets of flawless marble let us carve his name in deep letters so that it may be well insured against the fugitiveness of our French memories, which, alas! have sometimes proved a little untrustworthy, at least in face of the age long infamies of Germany.
As for Queen Elizabeth, let each one of us dedicate to her a shrine in his soul.
One of the most dreaded duties that falls almost invariably to the lot of queens is having to reign over adopted countries while exiled from their own.
In the special case of this young martyred queen, this doom of exile which has befallen her, and many other queens, must be a far more exquisite torture, added to all the other evils endured, for a crushing fatality has come and separated her for ever from all who were once her own people, even from that noble woman, all devotion and charity, who was her mother.
And she is by the side of the poor who have lost their all by pillage or fire; by the side of the wounded who are suffering or dying; to them, too, she is a companion, comforting the lowliest with her adorable simplicity, shedding on all the increasing bounty of her exquisite compassion.
Oh, may she be blest, reverenced, and glorified!
ALL SOULS' DAY WITH THE ARMIES AT THE FRONT
Each grave is decked with at least four fine tricolours, their flagstaffs planted in the ground, two at the head, two at the foot, and an infinite number of flowers and wreaths tied with ribbons.
There are fifteen of these graves, each with its four flags, making sixty flags in all.
And in the bitter autumn wind they flutter almost gaily, unceasingly, all these strips of bunting, they wanton in the air, intermingle, and their bright colours shine out more conspicuously.
During these days of festival, the rest of the cemetery is also very full of flowers, but it looks dull and colourless compared with that corner sacred to our soldiers.
It was very gloomy in that cemetery, under an overcast sky, whence fell a semi darkness already wintry in aspect.
All the little churches-those at least that the barbarians have not destroyed-had been decorated that day with all that the villages could muster in the way of flags, banners, tapers and wreaths.
And they were too small, these churches, to hold the crowds that flocked to them.
There were officers, soldiers, civil population, women mostly in mourning, whose eyes under their veils were reddened with secret tears.
Indeed what could better prepare them for the supreme sacrifice and for a death nobly met than these prayers, this music and even these flowers?
They sang this morning, these improvised choristers, with a solemn transport.
And again, as on the day of the funerals, all the little graves were blessed.
Oh let them take comfort!
In spite of the simplicity of these little wooden crosses, almost all alike, nowhere are they cared for and honoured so well as at the front; in no other place could they receive such touching homage, such tribute of flowers, of prayers, of tears.
The condition of women in Rome, especially from one fifty b c to one fifty a d, was quite different from what it was in Athens, even during her palmiest days.
In the first place the Roman matron had much more freedom than was accorded the Greek wife during the age of Pericles.
Far from being kept in oriental seclusion, like her Athenian sister, she was at liberty to receive and dine with the friends of her husband, and to appear in public whenever she desired.
She went to the theater and the Forum; she took part in all reputable entertainment, whether public or private. Besides this, she had more and greater legal rights than Greek women had ever known, and was treated rather as the peer and companion of man than as his toy or his slave.
Besides this, foreign women were never so conspicuous in Rome as in Athens.
And, although many Greek women, some of them of rare beauty and culture, found their way to Rome, especially under the empire, they were always kept in the background and never succeeded in achieving anything approaching the ascendancy which distinguished them during the time of Aspasia.
She was never supposed to have reached the age of reason or experience." And her noblest epitaph, it was averred, was couched in the following words:
"Mere woman's work Expressing the comparative respect Which means the absolute scorn."
As early as four fifty b c, when the laws of the Twelve Tables were promulgated, the girls of Rome received instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic.
Then, most probably, her education in the scholastic sense came to an end.
With the extension of the empire and the consequent enormous increase in wealth and the rapid progress in social and intellectual freedom, there was a notable change in the character of the education given to women, at least to those of the wealthier and patrician families.
This was, in great measure, due to the wave of Hellenism which, shortly after the conquest of Greece, broke upon the Roman capital with such irresistible force.
To become thoroughly versed in Greek poetry and proficient in the teachings of Greek philosophy was the ambition of scores of Roman women, who soon became noted for the extent and variety of their attainments, as well as for their rare culture and charming personality.
Among the pioneers of the intellectual movement in Rome, and one of the most beautiful types of the learned women of her time, was the celebrated daughter of the elder Scipio Africanus-Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi.
Scarcely less distinguished and accomplished was another Cornelia, the wife of Pompey, the Great.
Then there was the cultured and devoted Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar.
Highly educated and of commanding personalities, both these women, like many others of their time, contributed much to the making of Roman history by the success they achieved in molding the characters of some of the greatest men of their own or of any age.
But there were others who chose a wider field for their activities, and who, by reason of their unerring judgment, well poised and highly cultivated minds, had so won the confidence of the nation's greatest leaders that they were frequently consulted on important affairs of state.
Thus, Cicero tells us of an interview which he had at Antium with Brutus and Cassius. Besides the men, there were present on this occasion three women, who took an active part in the discussion.
These were Servilia, the mother of Brutus, Porcia, the wife of Brutus and the daughter of Cato, and Tertulla, the wife of Cassius and sister of Brutus.
As we learn from Tacitus, their counsels and assistance were considered of peculiar value by the Commonwealth.
For, when some of the sterner old moralists wished to exclude women from all participation in public affairs, the Senate, after a heated debate, decided by a large majority that the cooperation of women in questions of administration, far from being a menace, as some contended, was so beneficial to the state that it should be continued.
Among other noteworthy makers of Roman history, besides those just mentioned, is Livia, the wife of Augustus and the mother of Tiberius.
So great was her influence and so persistent was her activity in government affairs, that it is sometimes asserted that she was the prime mover of most of the public acts of both these rulers.
Then there was the gracious, the virtuous, the self sacrificing Octavia, sister of the Emperor Augustus, who was so successful in composing grave differences between her brother and her husband, and who so exerted her influence for peace during the troublous times in which she lived that she lives in history as a peacemaker.
In many respects she was the most commanding personality of her age, and exhibited in an eminent degree those sterling qualities which we are wont to associate with the strong, dignified, courageous women of ancient Rome, who gave to the world so many and so great men in every sphere of human endeavor.
They not only went to, but presided over, public games and religious ceremonies.
Yet more.
That some of the women had literary ability of a high order is indicated by a letter of Pliny to one of his correspondents, in which occurs the following passage:
I believed that Plautus or Terence was being read in prose.
Scarcely less distinguished for her taste in literature, and for her talent as a letter writer, was Pliny's wife, Calphurnia, who, at his request, wrote to him in his absence every day and sometimes even twice a day.
According to Cicero, his daughter Tulia was "the best and most learned of women"; but her literary work, it is probable, did not extend much beyond her letters to her illustrious father.
Considering the number of educated women that lived in the latter days of the Republic and during the earlier part of the Empire, and their well known culture and love of letters, it is reasonable to suppose that they may have written much in both prose and verse of which we have no record.
And as for men of the old conservative type, a learned woman was as much an object of horror as is a militant suffragette in conservative England to day.
He gives his opinion of them in the following characteristic fashion:
Like Plato, he contended that women should have the same training as men and that the faculties of both should be equally developed.
The gist of his teaching is contained in the statement that:
So great was Jerome's confidence in their scholarship and so high was his appreciation of their ability and judgment that he did not hesitate to submit his translations to them for their criticism and approval.
After he had completed his version of the first Book of Kings, he turned it over to them, saying: "Read my Book of Kings-read also the Latin and Greek translations and compare them with my version." And they did read and compare and criticise.
And more than this, they frequently suggested modifications and corrections which the great man accepted with touching humility and incorporated in a revised copy.
It is not only a defence of his course, but also a splendid tribute to his two illustrious friends, and a tribute also to the great and good women of all time.
"There are people, O Paula and Eustochium," exclaims the Christian Cicero, vibrant with emotion and in a burst of eloquence that recalls one of the burning philippics of Marcus Tullius, "who take offence at seeing your names at the beginning of my works.
These people do not know that Olda prophesied when the men were mute; that while Barach was atremble, Deborah saved Israel; that Judith and esther delivered from supreme peril the children of God.
Did not Themista philosophize with the sages of Greece?
And the mother of the Gracchi, your Cornelia, and the daughter of Cato, wife of Brutus, before whom pale the austere virtue of the father and the courage of the husband-are they not the pride of the whole of Rome?
By some it is considered as synonymous with the Dark Ages, because of the decline of learning and civilization during this long interval of time.
During the "wandering of the nations" in the fourth and fifth centuries, and the long and fierce struggles between the barbarian hordes from the north with the decadent peoples of the once great Roman empire, there was, no doubt, a partial eclipse of the sun of civilization; but the consequent darkness was not so dense nor so general and long continued as is sometimes imagined.
The progress of intellectual culture was, indeed, greatly retarded, but there was no time when the light of learning was entirely extinguished.
For even during the most troublous times there were centers of culture in one part of Europe or another.
At one time the center was in Italy, at another in Gaul, and, at still another, it was in Britain or Ireland or Germany.
But whether it was in the south, or the west or the north of Europe that letters flourished, it was always the convent or the monastery that was the home of learning and culture.
Within these holy precincts the literary treasures of antiquity were preserved and multiplied.
Of the monastic institutions for men there is no occasion to speak, except in so far as they contributed to the intellectual advancement of woman.
Practically the only schools for girls during the Middle Ages were the convents.
Here were educated rich and poor, gentle and simple.
And in these homes of piety and learning the inmates enjoyed a peace and a security that it was impossible to find elsewhere.
They were free from the dangers and annoyances that so often menaced them in their own homes and were able to pursue their studies under the most favorable auspices.
Among the first convent schools to achieve distinction were those of Arles and Poitiers in Gaul, in the latter part of the sixth century.
Her convent and adjoining monastery for monks soon became the most noted center of learning and culture in Britain.
And so great was her reputation for knowledge and wisdom that not only priests and bishops, but also princes and kings sought her counsel in important matters of church and state.
As to the monks subject to her authority, she inspired them with so great a love of knowledge, and urged them to so thorough a study of the Scriptures, that her monastery became, as Venerable Bede informs us, a school not only for missionaries but for bishops as well.
Celebrated, however, as Hilda was for her great educational work at Whitby, she is probably better known to the world as the one who first recognized and fostered the rare gifts of the poet Caedmon.
As his poetical faculty became more developed, his profoundly original genius became more marked, and his inspiration more earnest and impassioned.
I cannot, however, refrain from referring to that group of learned English nuns who are chiefly known by their Latin correspondence with saint Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, and by the assistance which they gave him in his arduous labors.
From what has been said of the accomplishments and achievements of the Anglo Saxon nuns just mentioned, it is evident that they were, of a truth, women of exceptional worth and of sterling character.
A woman's education, at this time, was not complete unless she could write Latin and speak it fluently.
In certain convents Latin was almost the sole medium of communication,--to such an extent, indeed, that a special rule was made prohibiting "the use of the Latin tongue except under special circumstances."
But this is not all.
The strangest and saddest result, consequent on the suppression of the convents, was that men were made to profit by the loss which women had sustained.
When they were appropriated by Henry the eighth, it never occurred to him or his ministers to make any provision for the education of women in lieu of that which had so ruthlessly been wrested from them.
Similarly, the properties of other nunneries, large and small, were appropriated for the foundation of collegiate institutions at Oxford, all of which were for the benefit of men.
But no
They made provision only for the boys.
The truth is, when anything was achieved for the intellectual advancement of women it was due either to private instruction or to the result of a protracted struggle on the part of women themselves for what they deemed their indefeasible rights.
The Anglo Saxon convents developed few writers, whereas those of Germany produced several who not only shed luster on their sex but who also showed what woman is capable of accomplishing when accorded some measure of encouragement and full liberty of action.
As a writer of history and legends she ranks with the best authors of her time, while as a writer of dramas she stands absolutely alone.
Her dramas, which, of all her works, have attracted the most attention, are seven in number.
They are, likewise, distinguished by originality of treatment, complete mastery of the material used, as well as by genuine beauty of rhyme and rhythm.
In form, all the plays preserve the simple directness of their model, Terence, while, in conception, they embody the noblest ideals of Christian teaching.
In marked contrast to her model, who invariably exhibits the frailties and lapses of woman, Hroswitha's plays turn on the resistance of her sex to temptation, and on their steadfast adherence to duty and to vows voluntarily assumed.
Everything in her plays that is not formal but essential, everything that is original and individual, belongs wholly to the Christianized Germany of the tenth century. Everywhere we can trace the influence of the atmosphere in which she lived; every thought and every motive is colored by the spiritual conditions of her time.
So great was her reputation for sanctity and for the extent and variety of her attainments that she was called "the marvel of Germany." She is without doubt one of the most beautiful and imposing as well as one of the greatest figures of the Middle Ages-great beside such eminent contemporaries as Abelard, Martin of Tours and Bernard of Clairvaux.
People from all parts of the Christian world sought her counsel; and her convent at Bingen became a Mecca for all classes and conditions of men and women.
Among her correspondents were people of the humble walks of life as well as the highest representatives of Church and State.
There were simple monks and noble abbots; dukes, kings and queens; archbishops and cardinals and no fewer than four Popes.
And, if we accept the criterion that influence is measured by the number and nature of one's relations, it would be difficult to find in any age relations that were more select or more cosmopolitan.
But her astonishing collection of letters is the slightest product of her intellectual activity.
She is without doubt the most voluminous woman writer of the Middle Ages.
Her works on theology, Scripture and science make no less than six or eight large octavo volumes.
The Bollandists, than whom there is no more competent authority, express their amazement at the amount and quality of Hildegard's work.
Herrad, the gifted abbess of Hohenburg in Alsace, was a contemporary of Hildegard, and, like her, was noted for her culture and wide range of knowledge.
Nor is there any other work that gives us a better knowledge of the manners, customs and ideals of the twelfth century, or one that, in its particular sphere, is of more value to the student of art, philology and archaeology.
It exhibits Herrad's intense interest in the intellectual advancement of her nuns and pupils as well as her superior talent and acquirements.
Unfortunately the manuscript copy of this work was destroyed at the time of the bombardment of Strasburg by the Germans in eighteen seventy, and our knowledge of it is limited to portions of it which had previously been transcribed or to accounts left of it by those who had examined it before its destruction.
Of the abbess Gertrude we read that her enthusiasm for knowledge was so great that she not only inspired others with the same enthusiasm, but that she was an incessant collector of books, which she had her nuns transcribe.
Among her most distinguished subjects were two religious by the name of Matilda, one of whom was her sister, and a third, who, to distinguish her from the abbess, is known as "Gertrude the Great."
For this reason they still have a special claim on the attention of students of art and literature, as well as those of theology and mysticism.
A recent writer sums up in a few words the status and the accomplishments of the lady of the abbey in the following paragraph:
The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it, since the college for women has arisen at a time when colleges in general are under a cloud.
The lady abbess, on the other hand, was part of the two great social forces of her time, feudalism and the Church.
Great spiritual rewards and great worldly prizes were alike within her grasp.
She was treated as an equal by the men of her class, as is witnessed by letters we still have from popes and emperors to abbesses.
Nor is this all.
Never was woman more highly honored, never was her power and influence greater than during the period of conventual life extending from Hilda of Whitby to Gertrude and the Matildas of Helfta, and especially during that golden period of monasticism and chivalry when cloister and court were the radiant centers of learning and culture.
In England, they ranked with lords temporal and spiritual, and had the right to attend the king's council or to send proxies to represent them, while in Germany, where they held property directly from the king or emperor, they enjoyed the rights and privileges of barons and, as such, took part in the proceedings of the imperial diet either in person or through their accredited representatives.
In Saxony, the abbesses had the right to strike coins bearing their own portraits, notably the abbesses of Gandersheim and Quedlinburg.
In England they were invested with extraordinary powers, and in certain cases owed obedience to none save the Pope.
In Kent abbesses, as representatives of religion, came immediately after bishops.
Possessing such power and prestige, it is not surprising to learn that abbesses wielded great influence in temporal as well as spiritual matters; that it pervaded politics and extended to the courts of kings and emperors.
At a later period during the prolonged absence in Italy of Otto the third, the control of affairs was entrusted to the abbess alone; and so successful was her administration, and so vigorous were the measures which she adopted against the invading Wends, that she commanded the admiration of all.
"The educational influence of convents during centuries," continues the same writer, "cannot be rated too highly.
Both of these noted women were worthy prototypes of that long list of learned Italian women who, during the Renaissance, won such honor for themselves and such undying glory for their country.
JULIA PERFORMS A SACRED DUTY
"What have we ever done that we should be so neglected?" said David Nesbit, swinging himself from his motorcycle and landing squarely in front of Grace Harlowe and Anne Pierson while they were out walking one afternoon.
"Why, David Nesbit, how can you make such statements?" replied Grace, looking at the young man in mock disapproval.
"You know perfectly well that you've been shut up in your old laboratory all fall.
We have scarcely seen you since the walking party.
"That's what comes of having a sister who belongs to a sorority.
However, you folks are equally guilty, you've all gone mad over your sorority, and left Hippy and Reddy and me to wander about Oakdale like lost souls.
I hear you've adopted a girl, too.
Reddy is horribly jealous of her.
He says Jessica won't look at him any more."
"Reddy is laboring under a false impression," said Anne.
"He is head over heels in football practice and has forgotten he ever knew Jessica. As for Hippy, Nora says that he is studying night and day, and that he is actually wearing himself away by burning midnight oil."
"Yes, Hippy is studying some this year," replied David.
You know Hippy never bothered himself much about study, just managed to scrape through.
But now he'll have to hustle if he gets through with High School this year, and he's wide awake to that fact."
"You'll have to have better excuses than football and experiments."
"I'll tell you what we'll do to square ourselves," said David, smiling. "We'll take you girls to the football game next Thursday.
Reddy's on the team, but Hippy and I will do the honors."
"Fine," replied Grace.
"But are you willing to burden yourselves with some extra girls?
You see it's this way.
One of the things that our sorority has pledged itself to do this year is to look up the stray girls in High School, and see that they are not lonely and homesick during holiday seasons.
"mrs Gray had planned a party for us, but when we told her what we were about to do, she gave up her party and agreed to go to mine instead, on condition that Anne's family, plus Anne's two guests, should have dinner with her."
"Bless her dear heart," said David, "she is always thinking of the pleasure of others.
Now about the football game.
Bring your girls along and I'll do my best to give them a good time, although I'm generally anything but a success with new girls.
However, Hippy makes up for what I lack.
He can entertain a regiment of them, and not even exert himself. Now I must leave you, for I have a very important engagement at home."
"In the laboratory, I suppose," said Anne teasingly.
"Just so," replied David.
"Good bye, girls.
Let me know how many tickets you want for the game." He raised his cap, mounted his machine and was off down the street.
"We do seem to be getting awfully serious and settled of late," replied Anne.
We've had so many special meetings."
Last season seems like a dream to me now."
"I have forgiven, long ago, but I have not forgotten the way some of those girls performed last year.
It was remarkable that things ever straightened themselves.
Anne pressed Grace's hand by way of answer.
The sophomore year had been crowded with many trials, some of them positive school tragedies, in which Anne and Grace had been the principal actors.
"What are you two mooning over?" asked a gay voice, and the two girls turned with a start to find Julia Crosby grinning cheerfully at them.
"O Julia, how glad I am to see you at close range!" exclaimed Grace. "Admiring you from a distance isn't a bit satisfactory."
"That's the only thing that keeps me from your side.
The duties of the class president are many and irksome.
At the present moment I've a duty on hand that I don't in the least relish, and I want your august assistance.
"Why, of course," answered Grace and Anne in the same breath.
"What is it you want us to do?"
"Well, it seems that some of your juniors are still in need of discipline.
You remember the hatchet that we buried last year with such pomp and ceremony?"
"Yes, yes," was the answer.
"This morning I overheard certain girls planning to go out to the Omnibus House after school to morrow and dig up the poor hatchet and flaunt it in the seniors' faces the day of the opening basketball game, simply to rattle us.
Just as though it wouldn't upset your team as much as ours.
It's an idiotic trick, at any rate, and anything but funny.
Now I propose to take four of our class, and you must select four of yours. We'll hustle out there the minute school is over to morrow, and be ready to receive the marauders when they arrive.
Select your girls, but don't tell them what you want or they may tell some one about it beforehand."
"Who are the girls, Julia?
Are you sure they're juniors?"
"The two I heard talking are juniors.
"Tell us who they are, Julia," said Grace.
"We don't want to go into this blindfolded."
"Wait and see," replied Julia tantalizingly.
"Then you'll feel more indignant and can help my cause along all the better.
I give you my word that the girls I overheard talking are not particular friends of yours. You aren't going to back out, are you, and leave me without proper support?"
"Of course not," laughed Grace.
"Don't worry.
We'll support you, only you must agree to do all the talking."
"I shall endeavor to overcome their insane freshness with a few well chosen words," Julia promised.
"Be sure and be on hand early."
Grace chose Anne, Nora, Jessica and Marian Barber, the latter three being considerably mystified at her request, but nevertheless agreeing to be on hand when school closed.
They were met at the gate by Julia and four other seniors, and the whole party set out for the Omnibus House without delay.
Grace walked with Julia, and the two girls found plenty to say to each other during the walk.
Julia was studying hard, she told Grace.
She wanted to enter Smith next year.
"I don't know where I shall go after I finish High School," said Grace. "Ethel Post wants me to go to Wellesley.
She'll be a junior when I'm a freshman.
But I don't know whether I should like Wellesley.
I shall not try to decide where I want to go for a while yet."
"Wherever we are we'll write and always be friends," said Julia, and Grace warmly acquiesced.
As they neared the old Omnibus House they could see no one about.
"We're early!" exclaimed Julia.
"The enemy has not arrived.
Thank goodness, it's not cold to day or we might have a chilly vigil.
Now listen, all ye faithful, while I set forth the object of this walk." She thereupon related what Grace and Anne already knew.
"It isn't the hatchet we care for, it's the principle of the thing.
Give them what they deserve, Julia."
"Never fear," replied Julia.
"I'll effectually attend to their case.
Now we'd better dodge around the corner and keep out of sight until they get here.
Then we'll swoop down upon them unawares."
They had not waited long before they heard voices.
"They're coming," whispered Julia.
"There are eight of them.
Form in line and when they get nicely started, we'll circle about them and hem them in.
The girls waited in silence.
"They have trowels," Julia informed them from time to time.
"They have a spade.
They've begun to dig, and they are having their own troubles, for the ground is hard.
All ready! March!"
Softly the procession approached the spot where the marauders were energetically digging.
The girl using the spade was Eleanor.
"Now I'm in for it," groaned Grace.
"She's down on me now, and she'll be sure to think I organized the whole thing." For an instant Grace regretted making the promise to Julia, before learning the situation; then, holding her head a trifle more erect, she decided to make the best of her unfortunate predicament.
"It isn't Julia's fault," she thought.
"She probably knows nothing about our acquaintance with Eleanor; besides, Eleanor has no business to play such tricks.
Edna Wright must have told her all about last year."
Her reflections were cut short, for one of the girls glanced up from her digging with a sudden exclamation which drew all eyes toward Julia and her party.
"Well, little folks," said Julia in mock surprise, "what sort of a party is this?
At Julia's first words Eleanor dropped the small spade she held and straightened up, the picture of defiance.
The other diggers looked sheepishly at Julia, who stood eyeing them in a way that made them feel "too foolish for anything," as one of them afterwards expressed it.
"Why don't you answer me, little girls?" asked Julia.
This was too much for Eleanor.
"How dare you speak to us in that manner and treat us as though we were children?" she burst forth.
"What business is it of yours why we are here?
"Do you?"
"No," replied Eleanor a trifle less rudely, "but we have as much right here as you have."
"Granted," replied Julia calmly.
"However, there is this difference. You are here to make mischief and we are here to prevent it, and, furthermore, are going to do so."
"Just this," replied Julia.
"Last year the girls belonging to the present senior and junior classes met on this very spot and amicably disposed of a two year old class grudge.
Emblematic of this they buried a hatchet, once occupying a humble though honorable position in the Crosby family, but cheerfully sacrificed for the good of the cause.
"Yesterday," continued Julia, "I overheard two juniors plotting to get possession of this same hatchet for the purpose of flaunting it in the faces of the seniors at the opening basketball game.
Therefore I decided to take a hand in things, and here I am, backed by girls from both classes, who are of the self same mind."
"Really, Miss Crosby," said Edna Wright, "you are very amusing."
"My friends all think so," returned Julia sweetly, "but never mind now about my amusing qualities, Edna.
Let's talk about the present situation."
She looked at Edna with the old time aggravating smile that was always warranted to further incense her opponent.
It had its desired effect, for Edna fairly bristled with indignation and was about to make a furious reply when she was pushed aside by Eleanor, who said loftily, "Allow me to talk to this person, Edna."
"No," said Julia resolutely, every vestige of a smile leaving her face at Eleanor's words.
But you have with you seven girls who do know all about the enmity that was buried here last spring, and who ought to have enough good sense to know that this afternoon's performance is liable to bring it to life again.
"If you girls carry this hatchet to school and exhibit it to the seniors on the day of the game you are apt to start bad feeling all over again," she said, turning to the others.
"That's the reason I asked Grace to appoint a committee of juniors and come out here with me.
I feel sure that under the circumstances the absent members of both classes would agree with us if they were present. Digging up a rusty old hatchet is nothing, but digging up a rusty old grudge is quite another matter.
We didn't come here to quarrel, but I appeal to you, as members of the junior class, to think before you do something that is bound to cause us all annoyance and perhaps unhappiness."
There was complete silence after Julia finished speaking.
Eleanor alone looked belligerent.
"Perhaps we'd better let the old hatchet alone," Daisy Culver said sullenly.
"The fun is all spoiled now, and everyone will know about it before school begins to morrow."
"Daisy, how can you say so?" exclaimed Grace, who, fearing a scene with Eleanor, had hitherto remained silent.
"You know perfectly well that none of us will say anything about it.
This was Eleanor's opportunity.
Turning furiously on Grace, her eyes flashing, she exclaimed: "Yes, there is one girl who would tell anything, and that girl is you!
You pretend to be honorable and high principled, but you are nothing but a hypocrite and a sneak. I would not trust you as far as I could see you.
You seem determined to meddle with matters that do not concern you, and I warn you that if you do not change your tactics you may regret it.
"You seem to think yourself the idol of your class, but there are some of the girls who are too clever to be deceived.
They do not belong among the number who trail tamely after you, either.
And now I wish to say that I despise you and all your friends, and wish never to speak to any of you again.
Let them keep their trumpery hatchet."
With these words she turned and stalked across the field to the road, where her runabout stood.
After an instant's hesitation, she was followed by Edna, Daisy Culver and those who had come with her. Henceforth there would again be two distinct factions in the junior class.
"Good gracious," exclaimed Julia Crosby.
What on earth did you ever do to her, Grace?"
But Grace could not answer.
She was winking hard to keep back the tears. Twice she attempted to speak and failed.
"I can't help feeling badly," said Grace, with a sob.
"She said such dreadful things."
"No one who knows you would believe them," replied Julia.
"By the way, who is she?
"I'll tell you about her as we walk along," replied Grace, wiping her eyes and smiling a little.
"The battle is over.
No one has been killed and only one wounded.
CHAPTER fourteen
Now that Thanksgiving was past, basketball became the topic of the hour. The juniors had accepted the challenge of the senior class, and had agreed to play them on saturday december twelfth, at two o'clock, in the gymnasium.
Only two weeks remained in which to practise.
Their sorority enthusiasm had so completely run away with them that they had even neglected basketball until now.
Therefore Grace Harlowe lost no time in getting Miss Thompson's permission to use the gymnasium, and promptly notified her team and the subs. to meet there, in gymnasium suits, prepared to play, that afternoon.
The instant the last bell sounded on lessons, ten girls made for their lockers, and fifteen minutes later the first team and the subs. were moving toward the gymnasium deep in the discussion of the coming game and their chances for success over their opponents.
A brief meeting was held, and the girls were assigned to their positions.
Grace had fully intended that Miriam should play center, but when she proposed it, Miriam flatly refused to do so, and asked for her old position of right forward.
"You are our captain," she declared to Grace, "and the best center I ever saw on a girls' team.
Don't you agree with me, girls?"
Nora was detailed as left forward, while Marian Barber and Eva Allen played right and left guards.
The substitutes were also assigned their positions and practice began.
"I never saw you girls work better!" she exclaimed.
"It will be a sorry day for the seniors when we line up on the twelfth."
"There'll be a great gnashing of senior teeth after the game," remarked Nora confidently.
"Do you know, girls," said Grace, as they left the gymnasium that afternoon, "I am sorry that Eleanor won't be peaceable.
I suppose she will stay away from the game merely because we are on the team.
"Grace Harlowe, are you ever going to stop mourning over Eleanor?" cried Miriam impatiently.
"She doesn't deserve your regret and is too selfish to appreciate it.
I know what I am talking about because I used to be just as ridiculous as she is, and knowing what you suffered through me, I can't bear to see you unhappy again over some one who is too trivial to be taken seriously."
"You're a dear, Miriam!" exclaimed Nora impulsively.
It is their ambition to become loud and loyal fans."
Grace nodded to her, but her salutation met with a chilly stare.
"I suppose she thinks that hurts me.
Of course it isn't exactly pleasant, but I'm going to keep on speaking to her, just the same.
I am not angry, even if she is; although I have far greater cause to be."
But before the close of the week Grace was destined to cross swords with Eleanor in earnest, and the toleration she had felt was swallowed up in righteous indignation.
During the winter, theatrical companies sometimes visited Oakdale for a week at a time, presenting, at popular prices, old worn out plays and cheap melodramas.
All this Eleanor had heard, among other things, from Edna Wright, but had paid little attention to it when Edna had told her.
Directly after cutting Grace Harlowe, she had turned her runabout into Main Street, where a billboard had caught her eye, displaying in glaring red and blue lettering the fact that the "Peerless Dramatic Company" would open a week's engagement in Oakdale with daily matinees.
Eleanor's eyes sparkled.
She halted her machine, scanning curiously the list of plays on the billboard.
"The Nihilist's Daughter" was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, and Eleanor decided to go.
She wasn't afraid of Miss Thompson.
Then, possessed with a sudden idea, she laughed gleefully.
Finally, for the sake of those to whom nothing can be stated so well but that they misunderstand and distort it, we must add a word, in case they can understand even that.
There are very many persons who, when they hear of this liberty of faith, straightway turn it into an occasion of licence.
On the other hand, they are most pertinaciously resisted by those who strive after salvation solely by their observance of and reverence for ceremonies, as if they would be saved merely because they fast on stated days, or abstain from flesh, or make formal prayers; talking loudly of the precepts of the Church and of the Fathers, and not caring a straw about those things which belong to our genuine faith.
Both these parties are plainly culpable, in that, while they neglect matters which are of weight and necessary for salvation, they contend noisily about such as are without weight and not necessary.
three)!
You see here how the Apostle blames those who, not from religious feeling, but in mere contempt, neglect and rail at ceremonial observances, and teaches them not to despise, since this "knowledge puffeth up." Again, he teaches the pertinacious upholders of these things not to judge their opponents.
In this matter we must listen to Scripture, which teaches us to turn aside neither to the right hand nor to the left, but to follow those right precepts of the Lord which rejoice the heart.
For just as a man is not righteous merely because he serves and is devoted to works and ceremonial rites, so neither will he be accounted righteous merely because he neglects and despises them.
It is not from works that we are set free by the faith of Christ, but from the belief in works, that is from foolishly presuming to seek justification through works.
Faith redeems our consciences, makes them upright, and preserves them, since by it we recognise the truth that justification does not depend on our works, although good works neither can nor ought to be absent, just as we cannot exist without food and drink and all the functions of this mortal body.
Still it is not on them that our justification is based, but on faith; and yet they ought not on that account to be despised or neglected.
twenty).
The Christian must therefore walk in the middle path, and set these two classes of men before his eyes.
He may meet with hardened and obstinate ceremonialists, who, like deaf adders, refuse to listen to the truth of liberty, and cry up, enjoin, and urge on us their ceremonies, as if they could justify us without faith.
Such were the Jews of old, who would not understand, that they might act well.
In this way Paul also would not have titus circumcised, though these men urged it; and Christ defended the Apostles, who had plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath day; and many like instances.
Or else we may meet with simple minded and ignorant persons, weak in the faith, as the Apostle calls them, who are as yet unable to apprehend that liberty of faith, even if willing to do so.
These we must spare, lest they should be offended.
We must bear with their infirmity, till they shall be more fully instructed.
For since these men do not act thus from hardened malice, but only from weakness of faith, therefore, in order to avoid giving them offence, we must keep fasts and do other things which they consider necessary.
This is required of us by charity, which injures no one, but serves all men.
Thus, though we ought boldly to resist those teachers of tradition, and though the laws of the pontiffs, by which they make aggressions on the people of God, deserve sharp reproof, yet we must spare the timid crowd, who are held captive by the laws of those impious tyrants, till they are set free.
Fight vigorously against the wolves, but on behalf of the sheep, not against the sheep.
If you wish to use your liberty, do it secretly, as Paul says, "Hast thou faith?
twenty two).
But take care not to use it in the presence of the weak.
On the other hand, in the presence of tyrants and obstinate opposers, use your liberty in their despite, and with the utmost pertinacity, that they too may understand that they are tyrants, and their laws useless for justification, nay that they had no right to establish such laws.
This is a thing which easily happens, and defiles very many, unless faith be constantly inculcated along with works.
It is impossible to avoid this evil, when faith is passed over in silence, and only the ordinances of men are taught, as has been done hitherto by the pestilent, impious, and soul destroying traditions of our pontiffs and opinions of our theologians.
An infinite number of souls have been drawn down to hell by these snares, so that you may recognise the work of antichrist.
And yet it would be death to them to persevere in believing that they can be justified by these things.
They must rather be taught that they have been thus imprisoned, not with the purpose of their being justified or gaining merit in this way, but in order that they might avoid wrong doing, and be more easily instructed in that righteousness which is by faith, a thing which the headlong character of youth would not bear unless it were put under restraint.
Hence in the Christian life ceremonies are to be no otherwise looked upon than as builders and workmen look upon those preparations for building or working which are not made with any view of being permanent or anything in themselves, but only because without them there could be no building and no work.
When the structure is completed, they are laid aside.
Thus, too, we do not contemn works and ceremonies-nay, we set the highest value on them; but we contemn the belief in works, which no one should consider to constitute true righteousness, as do those hypocrites who employ and throw away their whole life in the pursuit of works, and yet never attain to that for the sake of which the works are done.
seven).
They appear to wish to build, they make preparations, and yet they never do build; and thus they continue in a show of godliness, but never attain to its power.
Meanwhile they please themselves with this zealous pursuit, and even dare to judge all others, whom they do not see adorned with such a glittering display of works; while, if they had been imbued with faith, they might have done great things for their own and others' salvation, at the same cost which they now waste in abuse of the gifts of God.
We have therefore need to pray that God will lead us and make us taught of God, that is, ready to learn from God; and will Himself, as He has promised, write His law in our hearts; otherwise there is no hope for us.
For unless He himself teach us inwardly this wisdom hidden in a mystery, nature cannot but condemn it and judge it to be heretical.
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Translated by f Bente and w h t Dau
I have accordingly compiled these articles and presented them to our side.
For what shall I say?
How shall I complain?
[Good God!] Alas! what first will happen when I am dead?
Indeed, I ought to reply to everything while I am still living.
But, again, how can I alone stop all the mouths of the devil?
I often think of the good Gerson who doubts whether anything good should be [written and] published.
For while they have lied so shamefully against us and by means of lies wished to retain the people, God has constantly advanced His work, and been making their following ever smaller and ours greater, and by their lies has caused and still causes them to be brought to shame.
I must tell a story.
God convert to repentance those who can be converted!
Regarding the rest it will be said, Woe, and, alas!
eternally.
Not that we need It, for our churches are now, through God's grace, so enlightened and equipped with the pure Word and right use of the Sacraments, with knowledge of the various callings and of right works, that we on our part ask for no Council, and on such points have nothing better to hope or expect from a Council.
But we see in the bishoprics everywhere so many parishes vacant and desolate that one's heart would break, and yet neither the bishops nor canons care how the poor people live or die, for whom nevertheless Christ has died, and who are not permitted to hear Him speak with them as the true Shepherd with His sheep.
This causes me to shudder and fear that at some time He may send a council of angels upon Germany utterly destroying us, like Sodom and Gomorrah, because we so wantonly mock Him with the Council.
If such chief matters of the spiritual and worldly estates as are contrary to God would be considered in the Council, they would have all hands so full that the child's play and absurdity of long gowns [official insignia], large tonsures, broad cinctures [or sashes], bishops' or cardinals' hats or maces, and like jugglery would in the mean time be forgotten.
If we first had performed God's command and order in the spiritual and secular estate we would find time enough to reform food, clothing, tonsures, and surplices.
But if we want to swallow such camels, and, instead, strain at gnats, let the beams stand and judge the motes, we also might indeed be satisfied with the Council.
Therefore I have presented few articles; for we have without this so many commands of God to observe in the Church, the state and the family that we can never fulfil them.
What, then, is the use, or what does it profit that many decrees and statutes thereon are made in the Council, especially when these chief matters commanded of God are neither regarded nor observed?
Just as though He were bound to honor our jugglery as a reward of our treading His solemn commandments under foot.
But our sins weigh upon us and cause God not to be gracious to us; for we do not repent, and, besides, wish to defend every abomination.
What!
"How is everything down on the earth?"
Well, he sat by his ice cool fire and thought about his journey to the earth, and finally he decided the only way he could get there was to slide down a moonbeam.
But he plucked up courage and said to the farmer,
"Can you tell me the way to Norwich, sir?"
A good looking woman answered his knock at the door, and he asked politely,
"Is this the town of Norwich, madam?"
So he thanked her and entered the house, and she asked,
"Matter!" screamed the Man; "why, your porridge is so hot it has burned me."
"Come, come, no nonsense!" said the magistrate, "you must have some name.
Who are you?"
"Very good," replied the judge; "now, then, where did you come from?"
"The moon."
"I slid down a moonbeam."
"Indeed!
Well, what were you running for?"
"A woman gave me some cold pease porridge, and it burned my mouth."
"This person is evidently crazy; so take him to the lunatic asylum and keep him there."
Therefore he begged the magistrate to wait a few minutes while he looked through his telescope to see if the Man in the Moon was there.
The nights are too hot."
We can inflate this balloon and send the Man out of the Moon home in it."
So the balloon was brought and inflated, and the Man got into the basket and gave the word to let go, and then the balloon mounted up into the sky in the direction of the moon.
This was in the winter of eighteen seventy three, when the snow laden peaks were swept by a powerful norther.
I was awakened early in the morning by a wild storm wind and of course I had to make haste to the middle of the Valley to enjoy it.
His mother's name was Thorun.
They had in the ship forty men.
seven.
They cruised along the land, leaving it on the starboard side.
It was cooked by the cook boys, and they ate thereof; though bad effects came upon all from it afterwards. Then began Thorhall, and said, "Has it not been that the Redbeard has proved a better friend than your Christ?
"No, mr Gotobed; we couldn't catch him.
"Oh;--that's part of the fun.
What's become of the rest of the men?"
"He should have put something in it to make it at any rate decent before we came in."
"That's just it."
"I will, mamma.
"And Bragton is here.
"My dear, my opinion is that we've made a mistake.
"You are determined then?"
"I think I am.
"Nonsense, mamma!
NEWS, TRUTH, AND A CONCLUSION
If we assume with mr Sinclair, and most of his opponents, that news and truth are two words for the same thing, we shall, I believe, arrive nowhere.
We shall prove that on this point the newspaper lied.
In this sector, and only in this sector, the tests of the news are sufficiently exact to make the charges of perversion or suppression more than a partisan judgment.
But when it comes to dealing, for example, with stories of what the Russian people want, no such test exists.
The absence of these exact tests accounts, I think, for the character of the profession, as no other explanation does.
The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the County Clerk's office that john Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear.
There are no canons to direct his own mind, and no canons that coerce the reader's judgment or the publisher's.
How can he demonstrate the truth as he sees it?
He may have all kinds of moral courage, and sometimes has, but he lacks that sustaining conviction of a certain technic which finally freed the physical sciences from theological control.
His proofs were so clear, his evidence so sharply superior to tradition, that he broke away finally from all control.
But the journalist has no such support in his own conscience or in fact.
The task of deflating these controversies, and reducing them to a point where they can be reported as news, is not a task which the reporter can perform.
The press, in other words, can fight for the extension of reportable truth.
The theory that the press can itself record those forces is false.
It can normally record only what has been recorded for it by the working of institutions.
Everything else is argument and opinion, and fluctuates with the vicissitudes, the self consciousness, and the courage of the human mind.
If the press is not so universally wicked, nor so deeply conspiring, as mr Sinclair would have us believe, it is very much more frail than the democratic theory has as yet admitted.
It is too frail to carry the whole burden of popular sovereignty, to supply spontaneously the truth which democrats hoped was inborn.
And when we expect it to supply such a body of truth we employ a misleading standard of judgment.
If the newspapers, then, are to be charged with the duty of translating the whole public life of mankind, so that every adult can arrive at an opinion on every moot topic, they fail, they are bound to fail, in any future one can conceive they will continue to fail.
Unconsciously the theory sets up the single reader as theoretically omnicompetent, and puts upon the press the burden of accomplishing whatever representative government, industrial organization, and diplomacy have failed to accomplish.
Acting upon everybody for thirty minutes in twenty four hours, the press is asked to create a mystical force called Public Opinion that will take up the slack in public institutions.
Institutions, having failed to furnish themselves with instruments of knowledge, have become a bundle of "problems," which the population as a whole, reading the press as a whole, is supposed to solve.
The Court of Public Opinion, open day and night, is to lay down the law for everything all the time.
It is not workable.
And when you consider the nature of news, it is not even thinkable.
For the news, as we have seen, is precise in proportion to the precision with which the event is recorded.
The press is no substitute for institutions.
They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions.
The trouble lies deeper than the press, and so does the remedy.
Then, too, the news is uncovered for the press by a system of intelligence that is also a check upon the press.
That is the radical way.
It is because they are compelled to act without a reliable picture of the world, that governments, schools, newspapers and churches make such small headway against the more obvious failings of democracy, against violent prejudice, apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three legged calves.
This is the primary defect of popular government, a defect inherent in its traditions, and all its other defects can, I believe, be traced to this one.
CHAPTER one
GRADUATION DAY
In the year nineteen twenty, the student and the statesman saw many indications that the social, financial and industrial troubles that had vexed the United States of America for so long a time were about to culminate in civil war.
Wealth had grown so strong, that the few were about to strangle the many, and among the great masses of the people, there was sullen and rebellious discontent.
The laborer in the cities, the producer on the farm, the merchant, the professional man and all save organized capital and its satellites, saw a gloomy and hopeless future.
With these conditions prevailing, the graduation exercises of the class of nineteen twenty of the National Military Academy at West Point, held for many a foreboding promise of momentous changes, but the twelfth of June found the usual gay scene at the great institution overlooking the Hudson.
The scene had all the usual charm of West Point graduations, and the usual intoxicating atmosphere of military display.
There was among the young graduating soldiers one who seemed depressed and out of touch with the triumphant blare of militarism, for he alone of his fellow classmen had there no kith nor kin to bid him God speed in his new career.
He saw the gleaming brook that wound its way through the tangle of orchard and garden, and parted the distant blue grass meadow.
He saw his aged mother sitting under the honeysuckle trellis, book in hand, but thinking, he knew, of him.
But this was not all the young man saw, for Philip Dru, in spite of his military training, was a close student of the affairs of his country, and he saw that which raised grave doubts in his mind as to the outcome of his career.
He saw many of the civil institutions of his country debased by the power of wealth under the thin guise of the constitutional protection of property.
He saw the Army which he had sworn to serve faithfully becoming prostituted by this same power, and used at times for purposes of intimidation and petty conquests where the interests of wealth were at stake.
He saw the great city where luxury, dominant and defiant, existed largely by grace of exploitation- exploitation of men, women and children.
The young man's eyes had become bright and hard, when his day dream was interrupted, and he was looking into the gray blue eyes of Gloria Strawn-the one whose lot he had been comparing to that of her sisters in the city, in the mills, the sweatshops, the big stores, and the streets.
He had met her for the first time a few hours before, when his friend and classmate, Jack Strawn, had presented him to his sister.
No comrade knew Dru better than Strawn, and no one admired him so much. Therefore, Gloria, ever seeking a closer contact with life, had come to West Point eager to meet the lithe young Kentuckian, and to measure him by the other men of her acquaintance.
She was disappointed in his appearance, for she had fancied him almost god like in both size and beauty, and she saw a man of medium height, slender but toughly knit, and with a strong, but homely face.
When he smiled and spoke she forgot her disappointment, and her interest revived, for her sharp city sense caught the trail of a new experience.
To Philip Dru, whose thought of and experience with women was almost nothing, so engrossed had he been in his studies, military and economic, Gloria seemed little more than a child.
And yet her frank glance of appraisal when he had been introduced to her, and her easy though somewhat languid conversation on the affairs of the commencement, perplexed and slightly annoyed him.
He even felt some embarrassment in her presence.
Child though he knew her to be, he hesitated whether he should call her by her given name, and was taken aback when she smilingly thanked him for doing so, with the assurance that she was often bored with the eternal conventionality of people in her social circle.
Suddenly turning from the commonplaces of the day, Gloria looked directly at Philip, and with easy self possession turned the conversation to himself.
"An American soldier has to fight so seldom that I have heard that the insurance companies regard them as the best of risks, so what attraction, mr Dru, can a military career have for you?"
"As far back as I can remember," he said, "I have wanted to be a soldier.
I have no desire to destroy and kill, and yet there is within me the lust for action and battle.
It is the primitive man in me, I suppose, but sobered and enlightened by civilization.
I would do everything in my power to avert war and the suffering it entails.
Fate, inclination, or what not has brought me here, and I hope my life may not be wasted, but that in God's own way, I may be a humble instrument for good.
Oftentimes our inclinations lead us in certain directions, and it is only afterwards that it seems as if fate may from the first have so determined it."
The mischievous twinkle left the girl's eyes, and the languid tone of her voice changed to one a little more like sincerity.
"But suppose there is no war," she demanded, "suppose you go on living at barracks here and there, and with no broader outlook than such a life entails, will you be satisfied?
Is that all you have in mind to do in the world?"
He looked at her more perplexed than ever.
Such an observation of life, his life, seemed beyond her years, for he knew but little of the women of his own generation.
He wondered, too, if she would understand if he told her all that was in his mind.
"Gloria, we are entering a new era.
The past is no longer to be a guide to the future.
A century and a half ago there arose in France a giant that had slumbered for untold centuries.
He knew he had suffered grievous wrongs, but he did not know how to right them.
He therefore struck out blindly and cruelly, and the innocent went down with the guilty.
He was almost wholly ignorant for in the scheme of society as then constructed, the ruling few felt that he must be kept ignorant, otherwise they could not continue to hold him in bondage.
For him the door of opportunity was closed, and he struggled from the cradle to the grave for the minimum of food and clothing necessary to keep breath within the body.
His labor and his very life itself was subject to the greed, the passion and the caprice of his over lord.
"So when he awoke he could only destroy.
"But out of that revelry of blood there dawned upon mankind the hope of a more splendid day.
The divinity of kings, the God given right to rule, was shattered for all time.
The giant at last knew his strength, and with head erect, and the light of freedom in his eyes, he dared to assert the liberty, equality and fraternity of man.
Not satisfied with reasonable gain, they sought to multiply it beyond all bounds of need.
They who had sprung from the people a short life span ago were now throttling individual effort and shackling the great movement for equal rights and equal opportunity."
Dru's voice became tense and vibrant, and he talked in quick sharp jerks.
"Nowhere in the world is wealth more defiant, and monopoly more insistent than in this mighty republic," he said, "and it is here that the next great battle for human emancipation will be fought and won.
And from the blood and travail of an enlightened people, there will be born a spirit of love and brotherhood which will transform the world; and the Star of Bethlehem, seen but darkly for two thousand years, will shine again with a steady and effulgent glow."
CHAPTER fourteen
THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT
Selwyn now devoted himself to the making of enough conservative senators to control comfortably that body.
The task was not difficult to a man of his sagacity with all the money he could spend.
Newspapers were subsidized in ways they scarcely recognized themselves. Honest officials who were in the way were removed by offering them places vastly more remunerative, and in this manner he built up a strong, intelligent and well constructed machine.
It was done so sanely and so quietly that no one suspected the master mind behind it all. Selwyn was responsible to no one, took no one into his confidence, and was therefore in no danger of betrayal.
It was a fascinating game to Selwyn.
It appealed to his intellectual side far more than it did to his avarice.
He arranged to have his name appear less frequently in the press and he never submitted to interviews, laughingly ridding himself of reporters by asserting that he knew nothing of importance.
He had a supreme contempt for the blatant self advertised politician, and he removed himself as far as possible from that type.
It was done so adroitly that Rockland would have been fooled himself, had not Selwyn informed him in advance of each move as it was made.
After the nomination, Selwyn had trusted men put in charge of the campaign, which he organized himself, though largely under cover.
He put out the cry of lack of funds, and indeed it seemed to be true, for he was too wise to make a display of his resources.
To ward heelers, to the daily press, and to professional stump speakers, he gave scant comfort.
It was not to such sources that he looked for success.
He began by eliminating all states he knew the opposition party would certainly carry, but he told the party leaders there to claim that a revolution was brewing, and that a landslide would follow at the election.
This would keep his antagonists busy and make them less effective elsewhere.
He also ignored the states where his side was sure to win.
He divided each of these states into units containing five thousand voters, and, at the national headquarters, he placed one man in charge of each unit.
Of the five thousand, he roughly calculated there would be two thousand voters that no kind of persuasion could turn from his party and two thousand that could not be changed from the opposition.
This would leave one thousand doubtful ones to win over.
It was easy then to know how to reach each individual by literature, by persuasion or perhaps by some more subtle argument.
No mistake was made by sending the wrong letter or the wrong man to any of the desired one thousand.
In the states so divided, there was, at the local headquarters, one man for each unit just as at the national headquarters.
So these two had only each other to consider, and their duty was to bring to Rockland a majority of the one thousand votes within their charge.
The local men gave the conditions, the national men gave the proper literature and advice, and the local man then applied it.
The money that it cost to maintain such an organization was more than saved from the waste that would have occurred under the old method.
The opposition management was sending out tons of printed matter, but they sent it to state headquarters that, in turn, distributed it to the county organizations, where it was dumped into a corner and given to visitors when asked for.
The opposition was spending large sums upon the daily press.
Selwyn used the weekly press so that he could reach the fireside of every farmer and the dweller in the small country towns.
These were the ones that would read every line in their local papers and ponder over it.
The opposition had its candidates going by special train to every part of the Union, making many speeches every day, and mostly to voters that could not be driven from him either by force or persuasion.
They wanted the candidate to remember the enthusiasm of these places, and to leave greatly pleased and under the belief that he was making untold converts.
As a matter of fact his voice would seldom reach any but a staunch partisan.
Selwyn kept Rockland at home, and arranged to have him meet by special appointment the important citizens of the twelve uncertain states.
He would know it was his influence that was wanted but, even so, there was a subtle flattery in that.
An appointment would be arranged.
Just before he came into Rockland's presence, his name and a short epitome of his career would be handed to Rockland to read.
When he reached Rockland's home he would at first be denied admittance.
His sponsor would say,--"this is mr Munting of Muntingville." "Oh, pardon me, mr Munting, Governor Rockland expects you."
And in this way he is ushered into the presence of the great.
His fame, up to a moment ago, was unknown to Rockland, but he now grasps his hand cordially and says,--"I am delighted to know you, mr Munting.
I recall the address you made a few years ago when you gave a library to Muntingville.
When Munting leaves he is stepping on air.
He sees visions of visits to Washington to consult the President upon matters of state, and perhaps he sees an ambassadorship in the misty future.
He becomes Rockland's ardent supporter, and his purse is open and his influence is used to the fullest extent.
And this was Selwyn's way.
It was all so simple.
The pay roll of the opposition was filled with incompetent political hacks, that had been fastened upon the management by men of influence.
Selwyn's force, from end to end, was composed of able men who did a full day's work under the eye of their watchful taskmaster.
There followed in orderly succession the inauguration, the selection of cabinet officers and the new administration was launched.
Drunk with power and the adulation of sycophants, once or twice Rockland asserted himself, and acted upon important matters without having first conferred with Selwyn.
But, after he had been bitterly assailed by Selwyn's papers and by his senators, he made no further attempts at independence.
He felt that he was utterly helpless in that strong man's hands, and so, indeed, he was.
One of the Supreme Court justices died, two retired because of age, and all were replaced by men suggested by Selwyn.
He now had the Senate, the Executive and a majority of the Court of last resort.
The government was in his hands.
He had reached the summit of his ambition, and the joy of it made all his work seem worth while.
He did not know, could not know, what force was working to his ruin and to the ruin of his system.
She had a more definite aim than they, with the prospect of college examinations not so very far away. Brenda had not yet made up her mind to give her approval to her cousin's studying Greek, and she did not take the trouble to contradict Belle and Frances Pounder when they said that it must be a very disagreeable thing to have a cousin who intended to be a teacher.
Other persons did not find Julia peculiar.
To older people she seemed an especially well mannered girl, with a delightful vein of thoughtfulness that was not too often met in young girls.
For Edith had an uncomfortable habit of forgetting just what was to be kept secret, and though Philip had no very dark secrets, there were still little things that he preferred not to have told.
For even after these many weeks of work there was hardly a single finished article.
"Ah," said Belle, tossing her head, "you won't find me working myself to death over a Bazaar.
"Oh, Belle!" cried Edith, looking shocked.
Why, Edith, as for that you yourself never go down to the North End to see them."
Edith looked so uncomfortable at this suggestion, that Nora, on whom usually fell the duty of taking up the cudgels, exclaimed,
So trimming her sails she said, "Why, how silly you are, Nora, you know that I was only in fun.
"You busy, Belle," cried Nora.
"Indeed I am not," was the answer.
For she had twisted the front to the back, had added a deep blue bow to the trimming, and she believed that altogether she had accomplished wonders.
I wish that I could trim hats."
While Nora was talking Belle had been folding up her work, and in a moment more she was putting on her hat and coat.
"Oh, don't go; you're not mad at Nora, are you?"
"Oh, no, but I think that I ought to be going.
As a matter of fact Belle was deeply offended, and she knew that if she had stayed much longer with her friends she would have been driven to express herself strongly.
"Better to her face than behind her back."
"Oh, Edith," responded Nora, "you are altogether too fair.
"No, it's her grandmother," interrupted Edith.
"No," added Brenda, "it is not."
You make Belle awfully mad sometimes by what you say.
"Don't let us bicker.
"Why, Nora, I never heard of such a thing.
Besides I thought that you always wanted to make every one comfortable in her feelings.
But I say that we have had enough of this exchange of compliments for to day.
On the very afternoon when Nora and Belle had their falling out, Julia, after finishing her practising, had gone for a walk.
It was a bright, clear day, and she wished that she had some other girl to walk with her. For when by herself she never ventured beyond the entrance to the park, although if her cousin or one of her school friends could go with her, her aunt had no objection to her walking in the park itself.
One of the disadvantages of her friendship with ruth Roberts lay in the fact that they could seldom be together in the afternoons.
Their homes were too far apart.
It was hard to tell which was the pleasanter thing to do.
At Roxbury, there were Ruth's ponies to drive, and in snowy weather a chance to coast down a quiet side street.
Out of town there are many more chances for fun for girls past sixteen than can possibly be found in town or the city.
She was not fond of music, and she did not pretend to be.
The only matinee that she cared for was the theatre, and as her parent were decidedly opposed to her going often to the play, she could not indulge herself half as much as she wished.
"To look up and not down, to look out and not in," had been one of the lessons which her father had been most careful to teach her.
It was therefore not very often that she let her thoughts dwell too long on her own affairs.
Without realizing it she had walked some distance into the park, and pausing to admire a bit of distant view that she was able to get from a slightly elevated point, she lingered a moment or two longer to decide whether it was an animal or a child that she heard crying behind a small clump of bushes near by.
When she found that there was no other way of satisfying herself, she walked up to the bushes, and there, standing forlornly on three legs, was a tiny Italian greyhound.
"Why, you poor little thing!" she cried, "what is the matter?" and as she spoke she took the little creature in her arms.
The greyhound showed great joy at the sound of a friendly voice, and looked up in Julia's face with an expression of confidence and gratitude.
"Come, I am going to put you down on the ground for a minute to see whether you are hurt, or only pretending." So, suiting the action to the word, she stood the little dog on its feet.
"Now let me see if your collar tells who your owner is," added Julia, and she bent down towards the dog.
There to her surprise, she read in clear letters, "Fidessa, Madame du Launy." Now immediately Julia decided that the owner of the dog must be the mistress of the large house near the school, about which her friends were so curious.
In an instant, too, she remembered that she had seen this little animal, or one very like it, taking its exercise in front of the great, mysterious house.
"O, if only it had no owner, what joy!" she thought, as she gazed into its dark eyes, "to keep it for myself!"
Nevertheless, she rang the bell bravely, and was welcomed almost with open arms by the serious faced servant who opened the door.
Her figure, though somewhat bent, gave the impression of stateliness.
"That is an old trick of Fidessa," said her mistress smiling, "when she is at all unhappy she limps about on three legs as if really lame.
She does not know her way about the city, and she is never supposed to go anywhere without her leash.
Fidessa probably jumped out of the carriage to take a walk herself.
For I don't believe that the little thing was actually hiding, and you all three have come back with the report that it was impossible to find her."
The footman placed in her hand a little box "with Madame du Launy's compliments," he said.
This when she opened proved to contain a delicately chased little envelope opener, shaped like a tiny scimitar.
How did it strike you, Julia?"
"Not that way, uncle, at all, not at all, though she seemed very sad."
"Perhaps she's repenting for the way she has neglected her grandchildren," interposed Brenda.
Brenda.
I forget what I have heard about it myself, but I could make enquiries."
PERSHING
THE LEADER OF AMERICA'S BIGGEST ARMY
It was a historic moment, on that June day, in the third year of the World War.
On the landing stage at the French harbor of Boulogne was drawn up a company of French soldiers, who looked eagerly at the approaching steamer.
They were not dress parade soldiers nor smart cadets-only battle scarred veterans home from the trenches, with the tired look of war in their eyes.
For three years they had been hoping and praying that the Americans would come-and here they were at last!
As the steamer slowly approached the dock, a small group of officers might be discerned, looking as eagerly landward as the men on shore had sought them out.
There was, however, little to distinguish his dress from that of his staff, except the marks of rank on his collar, and the service ribbons across his breast. To those who could read the insignia, they spelled many days of arduous duty in places far removed.
America was sending a seasoned soldier, one tried out as by fire.
But his dark eyes glowed with the untamable fire of youth.
He was full six feet in height, straight, broad shouldered, and muscular.
The well formed legs betrayed the old time calvalryman.
The alert poise of the man showed a nature constantly on guard against surprise-the typical soldier in action.
America was at last repaying to France her debt of gratitude, for aid received nearly a century and a half earlier.
"Lafayette, we come!"
The eyes of the whole world were upon him, when he reached France.
His was a task of tremendous difficulties, and a single slip on his part would have brought shame upon his country, no less than upon himself.
The original family name was Pfirsching, but was soon shortened to its present form.
As the clan multiplied the sons and grandsons began to scatter.
They had the pioneer spirit of their ancestors.
At length, john f Pershing, a grandson of Daniel, the first immigrant, went to the Middle West, to work on building railroads.
These were the days, just before the Civil War, when railroads were being thrown forward everywhere.
Young Pershing had early caught the fever, and had worked with construction gangs in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Now as the railroads pushed still further West, he went with them as section foreman-after first persuading an attractive Nashville girl, Ann Thompson, to go with him as his wife.
His mother had come of a race quite as good as that of his father.
After the line of railroad was completed upon which the father had worked, he came to Laclede and invested his savings in a small general store.
A neighbor pays him this tribute:
"john f Pershing was a man of commanding presence.
"The Pershing family were zealous church people.
john f Pershing was the Sunday School superintendent of the Methodist Church all the years he lived here.
He had one or two close calls from the "bushwhackers," as roving rangers were called, but his family escaped harm.
At times during the War, he was entrusted with funds by various other families, and acted as a sort of local bank.
After the War he was postmaster.
The close of the War found the younger john a stocky boy of five.
There was always plenty to do, whether of work or play.
One of his boyhood chums writes:
"john Pershing was a clean, straight, well behaved young fellow.
He attended strictly to his own business.
He was not a big talker.
He said a lot in a few words, and didn't try to cut any swell. He was a hard student.
He was not brilliant, but firm, solid, and would hang on to the very last.
About nine thirty or ten o'clock, I'd say:
"'john, how are you coming?'
"'Pretty stubborn.'
"'Better go to bed, hadn't we?'
"'No, Charley, I'm going to work this out.'"
Another schoolmate gives us a more human picture:
He knew, too, where the coolest and deepest swimming pools in the Locust, Muddy, or Turkey creeks were. Many a time we went swimming together in Pratt's Pond."
About this time Pershing's father added to his other ventures the purchase of a farm near Laclede, and the family moved out there.
The chores often began before sun up, and lasted till after dark; and the children were lucky to find time for schooling during the late Fall and Winter months.
john, however, kept doggedly at it, and managed to get a fair, common school education.
john was sober and studious, and besides was so well grown for his age that they banked on his ability to "lick" any negro boy that got obstreperous.
He succeeded sufficiently in this venture, to cause him to take up teaching regularly, in white schools, with a view to paying for his education.
He wanted to study law, and his parents encouraged the idea.
A former pupil of his writes:
"Though he never sought a quarrel, young Pershing was known as 'a game fighter,' who never acknowledged defeat.
One day, at Prairie Mound, at the noon hour a big farmer with red sideburns rode up to the schoolhouse with a revolver in his hand.
Pershing had whipped one of the farmer's children, and the enraged parent intended to give the young schoolmaster a flogging.
We peeked over the edge, though, and heard Pershing tell the farmer to put up his gun, get down off his horse, and fight like a man.
"The farmer got down and john stripped off his coat.
And I have hated red sideburns ever since."
One of his sisters went with him.
He remained there for two terms, doing his usual good steady work, but was still dissatisfied.
He wanted to get a better education.
The soldiering side did not appeal to him, but the school side did.
If there isn't, I'll study law, but I want an education, and now I see how I can get it."
If she could have looked ahead to his future career, and final part in the greatest war the world has ever known-one wonders what her emotions would have been!
He found the soldier life awakening in him, along with his desire for a good education.
Four happy years were spent there-and while he didn't shine, being number thirty in a class of seventy seven, his all around qualities made him many friends among both faculty and students.
"This brings up a period of West Point life whose vivid impressions will be the last to fade.
"No one can ever forget his first guard tour with all its preparation and perspiration.
I got along all right during the day, but at night on the color line my troubles began.
Of course, I was scared beyond the point of properly applying any of my orders.
A few minutes after taps, ghosts of all sorts began to appear from all directions.
When I promptly said: 'Halt, who sits there?' . . .
From the very day we entered, the class as a unit has always stood for the very best traditions of West Point."
While Pershing was still in West Point, the Indian chief Geronimo was making trouble in the Southwest.
For several years he led a band of outlaw braves, who terrorized the Southern border.
General Crook was sent in pursuit of him, and afterwards General Miles took up the chase. Finally in August, eighteen eighty six, the chief and his followers were rounded up.
Pershing graduated in the spring of this year, with the usual rank given to graduates, second lieutenant, and was immediately assigned to duty under Miles.
He had an inconspicuous part in the capture.
But the next year in the special maneuvers he was personally complimented by the General for "marching his troops with a pack train of one hundred forty mules in forty six hours and bringing in every animal in good condition." Doubtless his early experience with the Missouri brand of mule aided him.
Thereafter, for the next five years, Pershing's life was that of a plainsman.
He was successively at Fort Bayard, Fort Stanton, and Fort Wingate, all in New Mexico, in the center of troubled country.
In eighteen ninety he was shifted north to take the field against the Sioux Indians, in South Dakota, and in the Battle of Wounded Knee he had a considerable taste of burnt powder, where the tribe that had massacred General Custer and his band was practically wiped out.
The next year he was stationed at Fort Niobrara, in Nebraska, in command of the Sioux Indian Scouts.
But it was an exceedingly valuable period of training to the young officer.
He was finding himself, and learning something of the inner art of military science that he was later to put to such good use.
"In those days, when a youngster joined a regiment, he was not expected to express himself on military matters until he had some little experience.
But there was a certain something in Pershing's appearance and manner which made him an exception to the rule.
Within a very short time after he came to the post, a senior officer would turn to him, and say: 'Pershing, what do you think of this?' and his opinion was such that we always listened to it.
He was quiet, unobtrusive in his opinions, but when asked he always went to the meat of a question in a few words.
From the first he had responsible duties thrown on him.
We all learned to respect and like him.
He was genial and full of fun.
No matter what the work or what the play, he always took a willing and leading part.
He worked hard and he played hard; but whenever he had work to do, he never let play interfere with it."
Word was sent of their predicament to the nearest fort, and Lieutenant Pershing was sent with a small detachment to their rescue.
A single false move on his part would probably have ended him, but he did not waver.
The outlaws laughed noisily and swore by way of reply.
"You might as well come along," he went on, without raising his voice. "My men are posted all around this cabin."
They wouldn't budge otherwise.
And they did.
The next duty which fell to Lieutenant Pershing was quite different. From chasing Indians and outlaws on the plains, he was assigned to the task of putting some "half baked" cadets through their paces.
It was the general belief that the students in these Western colleges, many of them farmers' sons, could never be taught the West Point idea. "But the Lieutenant who had just arrived from Lincoln received an impression startlingly in contrast to the general one.
He looked over the big crowd of powerful young men, and, himself a storehouse and radiating center of energy and forcefulness, recognized the same qualities when he saw them.
"'By George!
I've got the finest material in the world,'" he told the Chancellor, his steel like eyes alight with enthusiasm.
'You could do anything with those boys.
They've got the stuff in them!
Watch me get it out!'
"And he proceeded to do so.
Moreover, the boys had made a nickname for their leader, and nicknames mean a great deal in student life.
He was universally called 'the Lieut.' (pronounced 'Loot,' of course, in the real American accent), as though there were but one lieutenant in the world.
This he was called behind his back, of course.
To his face they called him 'sir,' a title of respect which they had never thought to give to any man alive.
"By the end of that first academic year every man under him would have followed 'the Lieut.' straight into a prairie fire, and would have kept step while doing it."
As he gradually got his group of officers licked into shape, he found less to do personally.
So he promptly complained to the Chancellor, to this effect, and asked, like Oliver Twist, for more.
"After a moment's stupefaction (the Lieut. was then doing five times the work that any officer before him had ever done) the Chancellor burst into a great laugh and suggested that the Lieut. should take the law course in the law school of the University.
He added that if two men's work was not enough for him, he might do three men's, and teach some of the classes in the Department of Mathematics.
"During the next two years he ate up the law course with a fiery haste which raised the degree of class work to fever heat.
Of course he graduated, and was thus entitled to write another title after his name-that of Bachelor of Arts.
About this time, also, he was promoted to a first lieutenancy, the first official recognition for his many long months of work.
Next came a welcome command to take the position of Assistant Instructor of Tactics, at West Point.
It was almost like getting back home, to see these loved hills, the mighty river, and the familiar barracks again.
Eager to get into the action, he resigned his position at the Military Academy, and was transferred to his former regiment, the Tenth Cavalry.
This regiment was sent immediately to Santiago, and took part in the short but spirited fighting at El Caney and San Juan hill-where a certain Colonel of the Rough Riders was in evidence.
We would like to fancy these two intrepid soldiers as recognizing each other here in the din of battle.
"Captain Pershing," said the President, when the party was seated at the table, "did I ever meet you in the Santiago campaign?"
"Yes, mr President, just once."
"When was that?
What did I say?"
"Since there are ladies here, I can't repeat just what you said, mr President."
There was a general laugh in which Roosevelt joined.
"Tell me the circumstances, then."
"Why, I had gone back with a mule team to Siboney, to get supplies for the men.
The night was pitch black and it was raining torrents.
I suggested that the best thing to do, was to take my mules and pull your wagon out, and then get your mules out.
This was done, and we saluted and parted."
He had now been transferred at his own request to the Philippines.
Whether or not he won promotion through the slow moving machinery of the war office, his energetic spirit demanded action.
His first term of service in the Philippines was from eighteen ninety nine to nineteen o three.
In the interval between his first and second assignments, the latter being as Governor of the Moros, he returned to America to serve on the General Staff, and also to act as special military observer in the Russo Japanese War.
And Pershing was "making good." He had turned forty, before he was Captain.
Out in the Philippines he worked up to a Major.
Now advancement was to follow with a startling jump.
It all hinged upon that luncheon with Roosevelt, about which we have already told, and the fact that Roosevelt had a characteristic way of doing things.
The step he now took was not a piece of favoritism toward Pershing-it arose from a desire to have the most efficient men at the head of the army.
The President, by his action, had "jumped" the new General eight hundred and sixty two orders.
On his return to the Philippines, as Governor of the Moro Province, he performed an invaluable service in bringing peace to this troubled district.
The little brown men found in this big Americano a man with whom they could not trifle, and also one on whose word they could rely.
It was not until nineteen fourteen that he was recalled from the Philippines, and then very shortly was sent across the Mexican border in the pursuit of Villa.
The Fates had indeed been shaping Pershing from boyhood for a supreme task.
The punitive expedition into Mexico was a case in point.
It was a thankless job at best, and full of hardship and danger.
A day's march of thirty miles across an alkali desert, under a blazing sun, is hardly a pleasure jaunt.
And there were many such during those troubled months of nineteen sixteen.
Then, one day, came a quiet message from Washington, asking General Pershing to report to the President.
The results of that interview were momentous.
The Great War in Europe was demanding the intervention of America.
Our troops were to be sent across the seas to Europe for the first time in history.
The Government needed a man upon whom it could absolutely rely to be Commander in chief of the Expeditionary Forces.
The veteran of thirty years of constant campaigning stiffened to attention.
The eager look of battle-battle for the right-shone in his eye.
Every line of his upstanding figure denoted confidence-a confidence that was to inspire all America, and then the world itself, in this choice of leader.
He saluted.
"I will do my duty, sir," he said.
IMPORTANT DATES IN PERSHING'S LIFE
eighteen sixty.
september thirteenth.
Entered Highland Military Academy, New York. eighteen eighty two.
Entered u s Military Academy, West Point. eighteen eighty six.
Graduated from West Point, senior cadet captain. Sent to southwest as second lieutenant, sixth cavalry. eighteen ninety one.
Professor, military tactics, University of Nebraska. eighteen ninety eight.
Took part in Spanish American War. nineteen o one.
Captain, first Cavalry, Philippines. nineteen o five.
Married Frances Warren. nineteen o six.
Recalled from Philippines. nineteen fifteen.
Lost his wife and three children in a fire. nineteen fifteen.
Sent to France as commander in chief of American Expeditionary Force. nineteen nineteen.
Appointment of general made permanent. nineteen twenty four.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.
HOME AT LAST!
Fellows who knock about the world sailoring and so on, cannot help coming to the conclusion that its compass is narrower than stay at home folk might be inclined to believe, for you can hardly stir a step without knocking across some one whom you previously imagined to have been miles and miles away, separated, perhaps, by an ocean from yourself.
I was as pleased to see him, as may readily be believed, as the genial Irishman was to see me, I was sure, even without his telling me so.
"What! my sister Janet?"
"This is indeed a surprise!"
But, good looking as she was, he did not think her to be compared to my sister Janet, with whom he had evidently fallen in love at first sight and very deeply so, too!
On his subsequently declaring his passion, impetuous as usual, after a very short acquaintance, my mother insisted as a first step to entertaining his suit that he should leave the sea, as he had another profession by which he was quite capable of supporting a wife as well as himself, if he so pleased.
After I had answered a lot of Garry O'Neil's questions concerning myself and the time I had passed in South America, speaking, too, of poor Colonel Vereker, whose death he had learnt from my mother, I began again, asking in my turn all about my old shipmates, and, of course, his own also.
Do you ricollict ould Stokes?"
"Of course I do," I said.
"Is he still chief?"
"What's become of Mr Fosset?"
"Och, be jabbers!
he's a big man now.
I should think I did."
"That same, alannah.
"No, indeed," said I, amused at his query and the funny wink that accompanied it.
"What has become of that spiteful little beggar?"
I asked after some of the other men belonging to my old ship, including Accra Prout, whom the colonel wished to accompany us to Venezuela, the mulatto refusing on the plea that, though he should always love his "old massa," he could not go with him for one insurmountable reason.
With suchlike conversation my old mess mate and I beguiled our long railway journey to Liverpool, which we reached the same evening, but before we had quite exhausted our respective questions and answers respecting everybody we had ever met or known during the time he and I had been to sea together.
My meeting with my dear mother and sister after so long an absence abroad can be well imagined, and so too my first interview with Elsie, whom I should hardly have known again, for how can I describe her beauty and grace, and though I had been prepared in some measure from accounts my mother had sent me, still they exceeded my expectations.
So to make a long story short and to avoid all further explanation, it need only be added that one fine day last summer, when the trees were all green and leafy, and the flowers abloom, and happy birds filling the air with song, Elsie and I were married.
CHAPTER seventeen
A CHRISTMAS PRESENT
He still hoped that his little girl might be found.
A party of soldiers, headed by Captain Carleton, had started to search for her on Sullivan's Island, but this had not been determined upon until late in the evening, at about the time when Estralla and Sylvia were embarking upon their adventurous voyage to Fort Sumter.
No one had given a thought to the little darky girl.
She was supposed to be somewhere about the fort.
Grace, warmly wrapped in a thick shawl, sat beside mr Fulton as the Butterfly made its swift way across the dark harbor.
They could see the dark line of the guard boat, but they were not molested and came into the wharf safely.
Neither of them spoke until they reached the walk leading to the door of Grace's home, then Grace said:
"Estralla!
Why, I had entirely forgotten her," responded mr Fulton.
"She ran off as soon as Sylvia was missed," Grace continued earnestly, "and she will find her.
Estralla is a clever little darky, and if she started in search of Sylvia perhaps she has been able to find her.
I had not thought of it," and mr Fulton's voice had a new note of hope.
"Thank you, Grace.
I will start back to the fort as soon as I have talked with Sylvia's mother."
But on mr Fulton's return to the wharf he found a sentry on guard who refused him permission to go to the fort.
It was in vain that mr Fulton explained that his little daughter was lost, that he must be permitted to return to the fort.
The sentry wasted no words.
"Orders, sir.
Sorry," was the only response he could get, and at midnight mr Fulton was in his own house looking out over the harbor.
He realized that in that case it would not be possible for his family to remain in Charleston.
They landed at the wharf where the Butterfly was fastened, and before Captain Gerald had stepped on shore Sylvia called out: "Father!
And Mother, too!" and in another moment her mother's arms were about her, and she was telling as rapidly as possible the story of her adventures, and of Estralla coming to her rescue.
Grace came running to meet Sylvia as they came near their home.
"Oh, Sylvia, I wish I had been with you," she exclaimed.
"That is twice you have been to Fort Sumter without meaning to go, isn't it?"
"We will hope that her next visit will not be as dangerous as this one," said mr Fulton soberly.
For several days Sylvia could think and talk only of her wanderings among the sand hills, and of her first sight of the guard boat.
She began teaching Estralla on the very day of her return, and the little darky made rapid progress.
"Father, when may we go to Fort Moultrie again?" she asked one morning a few days later, for she wanted very much to see mrs Carleton, and was quite sure that her father would be ready to sail down the harbor on any pleasant day, and his reply made her look up in surprise.
"I do not know that we shall ever go to the forts again," her father had replied.
No one is allowed to go to the forts.
And unless Major Anderson takes possession of Fort Sumter the Confederates will."
"And we are to start for Boston next week, dear child," Sylvia's mother added.
But Sylvia was not glad.
What would become of Estralla?
But if they went to Boston and left Estralla behind Sylvia was sure that there would be nothing but trouble for the faithful little darky.
"Why, Sylvia!
"I can't go to Boston and leave Estralla!" she sobbed.
"She has done lots of brave things for me.
She wouldn't leave me to be a slave."
mr and mrs Fulton looked at each other with puzzled eyes.
"But Estralla would not want to leave her mammy," suggested mr Fulton.
"Oh, Father!
"Couldn't I buy Estralla and then make her free?
I've got that gold money Grandma gave me."
"Don't suggest such a thing to Aunt Connie, Sylvia."
"When shall we go to Boston?" Sylvia asked.
"Right away after Christmas, unless Fort Sumter is attacked before that time.
Washington ought to send troops and provisions for the forts at once!" replied mr Fulton.
After her father had left the house Sylvia and her mother went up to mrs Fulton's pleasant sitting room.
"We must begin to pack at once," declared Sylvia's mother, "and do not go outside the gate alone, Sylvia.
I wish we could leave Charleston immediately."
"Won't I see mrs Carleton again?" Sylvia asked anxiously.
"I do not know, dear child, but run away and give Estralla her lesson, as usual.
It will not be a very gay Christmas for any of us this year," responded mrs Fulton, and Sylvia went slowly to her own room where Estralla was waiting for her.
The little colored girl had put the room in order; there was a bright fire in the grate, the morning sunshine filled the room, and Miss Molly and Polly, smiling as usual, were in the tiny chairs behind the little round table.
Won't de Yankees come and set us free, Missy?"
"I don't know, Estralla!
Let's not talk about it," she replied.
"Oh!" she whispered, as she stood in the open door.
They were all talking so earnestly that they did not notice the surprised little girl standing in the doorway, and Sylvia heard mr Waite say:
And you had better leave Charleston immediately.
The city is no longer a safe place for northern people. The conflict may begin at any moment."
"'Conflict,'" Sylvia repeated the word to herself.
Probably it meant something dreadful, she thought, recalling the "question period" at Miss Rosalie's school.
Just then mr Waite glanced toward the door and saw Sylvia.
"Miss Sylvia, I am glad to see you again," and he stepped forward to meet her.
Sylvia, feeling quite grown up, made her pretty curtsey, and smiled with delight at mr Waite's greeting, as he led her toward her mother and, with another polite bow, gave her the seat on the sofa.
"I was hoping to see Miss Sylvia," he said.
"I had meant to make her a little Christmas gift, with your permission," and he bowed again to mrs Fulton.
"She was kind enough to interest herself in behalf of one of my people, the little darky, Estralla.
And so I thought this would please you," and he smiled at Sylvia, who began to be sure that mr Waite and Santa Claus must be exactly alike.
As he spoke he handed Sylvia a long envelope.
"Do not open it until to morrow, if you please," he added.
Sylvia promised and thanked him.
She wondered if the envelope might not contain a picture of this kind friend.
She knew that she must not ask a question; questions were never polite, she remembered, especially about a gift.
But whatever it was she was very happy to think mr Robert Waite had remembered her.
They all went to the door with their friendly visitor, and stood there until he had reached the gate.
"I think mr Robert Waite is just like the Knights in that book, 'The Age of Chivalry.' They always did exactly what was right, and so does he; and they were polite and so is he."
"Then, my dear, perhaps you will always remember that to do brave and gentle deeds with kindness is what 'chivalry' means," responded mrs Fulton.
Palmetto flags floated everywhere; the streets were filled with marching men.
Major Anderson in Fort Moultrie watched Fort Sumter with anxious eyes, hoping for a word from Washington which would give him authority to occupy it before the Charleston men could turn its guns against him.
CHAPTER two
In the springtime a Japanese house is a fairy like thing, with only top and bottom of straw and a few upholding posts to give it a look of substance.
Yuki Chan's house was typical.
The paper screens were carefully put away during the day, that the breezes might play unobstructed through the house.
At night the heavy wooden doors were fitted into grooves and served not only to keep out the night air, but also the evil spirits that come abroad when the great sun ceases watching.
Binding the whole was a narrow porch, showing a floor polished like a mirror from the slipping and sliding of generations of feet.
On the side of the porch toward the plum tree the child found her father and mother waiting.
The two old people sat on gay cushions with hands folded and feet crossed.
Their festal attire bore the marks of a once careless luxury, but now shabbiness tried to hide itself under the bravery of tinsel, where once had been pure gold.
Each year the struggle of obsolete methods of business and the intricacies of progress plowed the furrows a little deeper in the man's face, and when his eyes, that in youth had blazed with ambition, grew wistful and troubled, he dropped them that his wife might not see.
When she came to him as a shy bride on trial, she knew no such word as love. Duty was her entire vocabulary, and she asked nothing and gave all.
Many little souls had come to her, with hands all crimped and pink, like new blown cherry leaves, only to close their eyes and pass out to the good god Jizo, who is always waiting to help little children across the river of death.
In years gone by, night after night sleep had flown before the terror that another woman would be brought into the house that the family name might not die out.
Silently she would slip out to the little shrine and pour out passionate words of prayer that just one little soul might be permitted to live.
No matter how long the night, nor how bitter the struggle, morning always found her bright and cheerful, bending every effort to invent new diversions for her husband.
She labored to anticipate every wish, and even though she did without, she provided him the best of comfort. Working far into the night, secretly disposing of her small personal treasures, acquiescing in his most trivial statements, she planned that no slightest gap in the domestic arrangement should suggest itself to him.
The woman worked and prayed and waited.
Then she triumphed.
In the wake of a great snow storm came the longed for child, and they called her Yuki, after the snow that had brought them their wish.
From that time to this love had prevailed, and as Yuki Chan climbed on the porch, besmirching its shining surface with her muddy little feet, that had been guiltless of sandals all day, the faces of the two old people lighted up with sudden joy.
Yuki Chan looked ruefully at the muddy prints she had made and realized that she had been a most impolite little girl.
She drew close, and reaching down took her mother's hand, hard and cracked by labor, and laying her cheek against it said, with a voice sure of forgiveness and sweet desire for atonement:
"Go men nasai."
The mother, with a courtly but playful air, granted her pardon with a low salutation.
Then with a rush of affection that no convention could stem, she folded the child to her heart and lived another moment of supreme joy.
The father sat by, making no comment, his eyes bright and twinkling. Then he suggested that their Majesties, the dolls, had been waiting long on the shelf.
Was it not time they were receiving a visit?
The years of toil were telling on both father and mother, but they daily refreshed themselves at the overbrimming fountain of Yuki Chan's youth, and now, as they each took one of her hands to go in to see the dolls, they were so gay that the child suggested that instead of walking they should do the new one two three hop she had learned at the kindergarten.
There was nothing in the room to impede their progress.
Half skipping, half hopping, and wholly undone with laughter and exertion, the three at last reached the place where, for six years, offerings had been made for the gift of the child who stood to these two for love.
Arranged in the best room in the house, on five long red covered shelves, were dolls.
Big dolls and little dolls, thin ones and fat ones, each one to represent some royal man or woman of the long ago, and dressed in a fashion of a time almost forgotten.
His hair was done in a curious fashion and his dress was of a wonderful brocade, while his hands clasped two fierce looking swords.
There was Jingo, too, who had won fame and lasting honor by her wonderful fighting, and was so great she had to sit by the emperors and look down on the other empresses.
Such a lot of them!
Some worthy to be remembered every day in the year, others the more quickly forgotten the better.
She could not be rude to an emperor, even though he had been dead hundreds of years. She was really not very afraid of the greatness of the old doll men and women who sat on the shelf, still it was well to be careful about handling them.
She might be turned into a lizard or a snake, just as the old lodge keeper had said.
But her delight was in the miniature toilet articles of solid silver, costly gold lacquer, and porcelain, so tiny, so beautifully carved they must have meant the eyesight of some workman, only too glad to shut out the sunlight forever if he might produce just one perfect thing.
She pretended to feed the dolls with real food and wine, and actually played with the five court musicians, because they were partly servants and it did not matter.
Her father and mother hovered around her, repeating the history of all those wonderful people.
Yuki Chan listened very little, so concerned was she with her own comments, until she happened to see an anxious look creep into her mother's eyes.
It was something every little girl must know, and if Yuki Chan's honorable ears refused to open, how would she learn?
Then Yuki Chan nestled close, and gave little pats of love and tried to listen.
THE shadows of the bamboo grew long and slim as the sun kissed them good night.
The sails skimmed homeward on a silver sea as the west covered its rosy pink in a veil of deepest blue.
The young birds in the old plum tree did not stir at the loving touch of the mother who, with a soft bill, searched and sought for the lost one.
The plum blossoms lingered yet for a night as the air had grown chill.
Her mother took from a small inclosure beneath a shelf many soft comforts with which she arranged the child's bed.
It was all getting unmanageable and very hazy, when her mother gathered her into her arms, and quickly casting aside her two garments laid her gently in a bath of caressing warmth.
A moment more and the little maiden lay like a rose leaf in her bed.
The night lamp made shadowy ghosts of all it touched, and one gleam of light, escaping the paper shade, hung like an aureole above the head of Yuki Chan's mother as she knelt with clasped hands before the Buddha on the shelf.
Her moving lips had only one refrain: "The child, the child, the child."
Yuki Chan watched the play of the light in the half dark room.
What funny things those shadows made, and, strangely enough, one more wonderful than all the rest grew into the shape of the boy, and his lips were saying, "Be good."
by
"This is the fourth and last cautionary announcement.
Any who are not seated will seat themselves at once.
Prepare for take-off acceleration of one and one half gravities; that is, everyone will weigh one half again as much as his normal Earth weight for about fifteen minutes.
We lift in twenty seconds; I will count down the final five seconds....
Five ...
One ...
Lift!"
Then a girl stood up.
Her hair was an artificial yellow.
Her eyes were a deep, cool blue.
Her skin, what could be seen of it-she was wearing breeches and a long sleeved shirt-was lightly tanned.
She was only about five feet three, and her build was not spectacular.
However, every ounce of her one hundred fifteen pounds was exactly where it should have been.
Very few people, and almost no stewardesses, either actually bustle in or really enjoy one point five gees.
I must insist....
Oh, you're Miss Warner...."
She paused.
"That's right, Barbara Warner.
Cabin two eight one."
"But really, Miss Warner, it's regulations, and if you should fall...."
I won't fall.
I've been wondering, every time out, if I could do a thing, and now I'm going to find out."
Jackknifing double, she put both forearms flat on the carpet and lifted both legs into the vertical.
Then, silver slippers pointing motionlessly ceilingward, she got up onto her hands and walked twice around a vacant chair.
She then performed a series of flips that would have done credit to a professional acrobat; the finale of which left her sitting calmly in the previously empty seat.
"See?" she informed the flabbergasted stewardess.
"More!" "Keep it up, gal!" "Do it again!"
"Oh, I didn't do that to show off!" Barbara Warner flushed hotly as she met the eyes of the nearby spectators.
Just a little guy, as spacemen go. Although narrow waisted and, for his heft, broad shouldered, he was built for speed and maneuverability, not to haul freight.
Watching a hundred lights and half that many instruments, listening to two phone circuits, one with each ear, and hands moving from switches to rheostats to buttons and levers, he was completely informed as to the instant by instant status of everything in his department.
Although attentive, he was not tense, even during the countdown.
The only change was that at the word "Two" his right forefinger came to rest upon a red button and his eyes doubled their rate of scan.
And again, well out beyond the orbit of the moon, just before the starship's mighty Chaytor engines hurled her out of space as we know it into that unknowable something that is hyperspace, he poised a finger. But Immergence, too, was normal; all the green lights except one went out, needles dropped to zero, both phones went dead, all signals stopped.
He plugged a jack into a socket below the one remaining green light and spoke:
"Procyon One to Control Six.
Flight Eight Four Nine.
Subspace Radio Test One.
How do you read me, Control Six?"
"Control Six to Procyon One.
I read you ten and zero.
How do you read me, Procyon One?"
"Ten and zero.
Out." Deston flipped a toggle and the solitary green light went out.
Perfect signal and zero noise.
That was that.
From now until Emergence-unless something happened-he might as well be a passenger. Everything was automatic, unless and until some robot or computer yelled for help.
Deston leaned back in his bucket seat and lighted a cigarette. He didn't need to scan the board constantly now; any trouble signal would jump right out at him.
"All black, Babe?" the newcomer asked.
"As the pit, Eddie.
Take over." Eddie did so.
"You've picked out your girl friend for the trip, I suppose?"
"Not yet.
I got sidetracked watching Bobby Warner.
She was doing handstands and handwalks and forward and back flips in the lounge-under one point five gees yet.
"Talk about poetry in motion!
Just walking across a stage, she'd bring down the house and stop the show cold in its tracks."
"O.
K., o k, don't blow a fuse," Deston said, resignedly.
"I know. You'll love her undyingly; all this trip, maybe.
So bring her up, next watch, and I'll give her a gold badge.
As usual."
"You'd play footsie with the Archangel Michael's sister if she'd let you; and she probably would.
So who's Barbara Warner?"
Eddie Thompson gazed at his superior pityingly.
Did you ever hear of Warner Oil?"
"I think so." Deston thought for a moment.
"Found a big new field, didn't they?
In South America somewhere?"
"Just the biggest on Earth, is all.
He operates in all the systems for a hundred parsecs around, and he never sinks a dry hole.
Every well he drills is a gusher that blows the rig clear up into the stratosphere.
Everybody wonders how he does it.
My guess is that his wife's an oil witch, which is why he lugs his whole family along wherever he goes.
Why else would he?"
"Maybe he loves her.
It happens, you know."
"Huh?" Eddie snorted.
"After twenty years of her?
Comet gas!
"I don't make passes."
"That's right, you don't.
Only at books and tapes, even on ground leaves; more fool you.
"Certainly, if I loved...." Deston paused, thought a moment, then went on: "Maybe I wouldn't, either.
She'd make me dress for dinner.
So I guess I wouldn't, at that."
"You nor me neither, brother.
"You'll be raving about another one tomorrow," Deston said, unfeelingly, as he turned away.
And Deston, outside the door, grinned sardonically to himself.
Before his next watch, Eddie would bring up one of the prettiest girls aboard for a gold badge; the token that would let her-under approved escort, of course-go through the Top.
He himself never went down to the Middle, which was passenger territory. There was nothing there he wanted.
He was too busy, had too many worthwhile things to do, to waste time that way ... but the hunch was getting stronger and stronger all the time.
For the first time in all his three years of deep space service he felt an overpowering urge to go down into the very middle of the Middle; to the starship's main lounge.
He knew that his hunches were infallible.
At cards, dice, or wheels he had always had hunches and he had always won.
That was why he had stopped gambling, years before, before anybody found out.
He was that kind of a man.
He had been resisting it for hours, because he had never visited the lounge and did not want to visit it now.
He didn't even think of it; the point four one automatic at his hip was as much a part of his uniform as his pants.
Entering the lounge, he did not have to look around.
She was playing bridge, and as eyes met eyes and she rose to her feet a shock wave swept through him that made him feel as though his every hair was standing straight on end.
"Excuse me, please," she said to the other three at her table.
"I must go now." She tossed her cards down onto the table and walked straight toward him; eyes still holding eyes.
He backed hastily out into the corridor, and as the door closed behind her they went naturally and wordlessly into each other's arms.
Lips met lips in a kiss that lasted for a long, long time.
It was not a passionate embrace-passion would come later-it was as though each of them, after endless years of bootless, fruitless longing, had come finally home.
"Come with me, dear, where we can talk," she said, finally; eying with disfavor the half dozen highly interested spectators.
You came aboard at exactly zero seven forty three."
"Uh uh." She shook her yellow head.
"A few minutes before that.
That was when I read your name in the list of officers on the board.
First Officer, Carlyle Deston.
I got a tingle that went from the tips of my toes up and out through the very ends of my hair.
Nothing like when we actually saw each other, of course.
We both knew the truth, then.
It's wonderful that you're so strongly psychic, too."
"I don't know about that," he said, thoughtfully.
On the other, the signal doesn't carry much information.
More like hearing a siren when you're driving along a street.
You know you have to pull over and stop, but that's all you know.
"Not necessarily.
You've been fighting it.
"You're either psychic or the biggest wolf in the known universe, and I know you aren't a wolf.
If you hadn't been as psychic as I am, you'd've jumped clear out into subspace when a perfectly strange girl attacked you."
"How do you know so much about me?"
"I made it a point to.
"That was Eddie Thompson."
"Uh huh." She nodded brightly.
"Well, is that bad?"
"Anything else but.
That is, he thought it was terrible-outrageous-a betrayal of the whole officer caste-but to me it makes everything just absolutely perfect."
How soon can we get married?"
"I'd say right now, except...." She caught her lower lip between her teeth and thought.
"No, no 'except'.
Right now, or as soon as you can. You can't, without resigning, can you?
They'd fire you?"
"Don't worry about that," he grinned.
"My record is good enough, I think, to get a good ground job.
Even if they fire me for not waiting until we ground, there's lots of jobs.
I can support you, sweetheart."
"Oh, I know you can.
"What difference does that make?" he asked, in honest surprise.
"A man grows up.
I couldn't have you with me in space, and I'd like that a lot less.
No, I'm done with space, as of now.
"I thought at first I'd tell my parents first-they're both aboard-but I decided not to.
He looked at her questioningly; she shrugged and went on: "We aren't what you'd call a happy family.
She's been trying to make me marry an old goat of a prince and I finally told her to go roll her hoop-to get a divorce and marry the foul old beast herself.
And to consolidate two empires, he's been wanting me to marry a multi billionaire-who is also a louse and a crumb and a heel.
I told him if I got married a thousand times I'd pick every one of my husbands myself, without the least bit of help from either him or her.
The way she walked; poetry in motion ... the oil witch ... two empires ... more millions than he had dimes....
"Oh, you're Barbara Warner, then."
"Why, of course; but my friends call me 'Bobby'.
Didn't you-but of course you didn't-you never read passenger lists.
If you did, you'd've got a tingle, too."
"I got plenty of tingle without reading, believe me.
However, I never expected to----"
"I know how you feel.
So I'll tell you this." Her eyes looked steadily into his.
"If it bothers you the least bit, later on, I'll give every dollar I own to some foundation or other, I swear it."
"I can tell."
"I know you can, sweetheart." Then he had another thought, and with strong, deft fingers he explored the muscles of her arms and back.
"I majored in Physical Education and I love it.
And I'm a Newmartian, you know, so I teach a few courses----"
"Newmartian?
I've heard-but you aren't a colonial; you're as Terran as I am."
"By blood, yes; but I was born on Newmars.
Our actual and legal residence has always been there.
The tax situation, you know."
"I don't know, no Taxes don't bother me much.
But go ahead.
You teach a few courses.
In?"
"Oh, bars, trapeze, ground and lofty tumbling, acrobatics, aerialistics, high wire, muscle control, judo-all that kind of thing."
"Ouch!
So if you ever happen to accidentally get mad at me you'll tie me right up into a pretzel?"
"I doubt it; very seriously.
"Definitely I couldn't.
A good big man can always take a good little one, you know."
"But I'm not big; I'm just a little squirt.
You've probably heard what they call me?"
"Yes, and I'm going to call you 'Babe', too, and mean it the same way they do.
Besides, who wants a man a foot taller than she is and twice as big?
"That's spreading the good old oil, Bobby, but I'll never tangle with you if I can help it.
Buzz saws are small, too, and sticks of dynamite. Shall we go hunt up the parson-or should it be a priest?
Or a rabbi?"
"Of course not.
How could it?"
"Some details, of course, but nothing of any importance and we'll have plenty of time to learn them."
"And we'll love every second of it.
You'll live down here in the Middle with me, won't you, all the time you aren't actually on duty?"
"I can't imagine doing anything else," and the two set out, arms around each other, to find a minister.
And as they strolled along:
"Dowsing?
Oh, that witch stuff.
Of course not."
"Listen, darling.
All the time I've been touching you I've been learning about you.
And you've been learning about me."
"Yes, but----"
"No buts, buster.
All I can do at dowsing is find water, oil, coal, and gas.
I'm no good at all on metals-I couldn't feel gold if I were perched right on the roof of Fort Knox; I couldn't feel radium if it were frying me to a crisp.
The starship, now a mere spaceship, was on course at one gravity.
The lifecraft were in their slots, but the five and the four still lived in them rather than in the vast and oppressive emptiness that the ship itself now was.
And socially, outside of working hours, the two groups did not mix.
clean-up was going nicely, at the union rate of six hours on and eighteen hours off.
Deston could have set any hours he pleased, but he didn't.
There was plenty of time.
Eleven months in deep space is a fearfully, a tremendously long time.
"Morning," "afternoon," "evening," and "night" were, of course, purely conventional terms.
The twenty four hour "day" measured off by the brute force machine that was their masterclock carried no guarantee, expressed or implied, as to either accuracy or uniformity.
One evening, then, four hard faced men sat at two small tables in the main room of Lifecraft Three.
Two of them, Ferdy Blaine and Moose Mordan, were playing cards for small stakes.
Ferdy was of medium size; compact rather than slender; built of rawhide and spring steel.
Lithe and poised, he was the epitome of leashed and controlled action.
The two at the other table had been planning for days.
They had had many vitriolic arguments, but neither had made any motion toward his weapon.
"Play it my way and we've got it made, I tell you!" Newman pounded the table with his fist.
I'm as good an astrogator as Jones is, and a damn sight better engineer.
In electronics I maybe ain't got the theory Pretty Boy has, but at building and repairing the stuff I've forgot more than he ever will know.
"Oh, yeah?" Lopresto sneered.
"How come you aren't ticketed for subspace, then?"
"For hell's sake, act your age!" Newman snorted in disgust.
Or that them subspace Boy Scouts can be fixed?
Or I don't know where the heavy grease is at?
"I see." Lopresto forced his anger down.
I got to get back myself, don't I?
"You can have her.
Too big.
I like the little yellowhead a lot better."
Chew on that a while, and you'll know who's boss."
After just the right amount of holding back and objecting, Lopresto agreed.
"You win, Newman, the way the cards lay.
Have you ever planned this kind of an operation or do you want me to?"
"You do it, Vince," Newman said, grandly.
He had at least one of the qualities of a leader.
Ferdy will take Deston----"
"No he won't!
What are you using for a brain?
Can't you see the guy's chain lightning on ball bearings?"
"But we're going to surprise 'em, ain't we?"
"O.
K., we'll let Ferdy have him.
Me and you will match draws to see who----"
"I can draw twice to your once, but I suppose I'll have to prove it to you.
I'll take Jones; you will gun the professor; Moose will grab the dames, one under each arm, and keep 'em out of the way until the shooting's over.
The only thing is, when?
The sooner the better. Tomorrow?"
"Not quite, Vince.
Let 'em finish figuring course, time, distance, all that stuff.
They can do it a lot faster and some better than I can.
I'll tell you when."
"O.
K., and I'll give the signal.
Newman went to his cabin and the muscle called Moose spoke thoughtfully. That is, as nearly thoughtfully as his mental equipment would allow.
"I don't like that ape, boss.
Before you gun him, let me work him over just a little bit, huh?"
"It'll be quite a while yet, but that's a promise, Moose.
As soon as his job's done he'll wish he'd never been born.
Until then, we'll let him think he's Top Dog.
Let him rave.
But Ferdy, any time he's behind me or out of sight, watch him like a hawk.
Shoot him through the right elbow if he makes one sour move."
"I get you, boss."
A couple of evenings later, in Lifecraft Two, Barbara said: "You're worried, Babe, and everything's going so smoothly.
Why?"
"Too smoothly altogether.
That's why.
There's going to be shooting for sure."
Jones' dark face did not lighten.
"They could, and I'm very much afraid they intend to.
"Could be," Deston said, doubtfully.
"In with a mob of normal space pirate smugglers.
I'll buy that, but there wouldn't be enough plunder to----"
"Just a sec.
So he's a pretty good rule of thumb astrogator, too, and we're computing every element of the flight.
As for motive-salvage. With either of us alive, none.
With both of us dead, can you guess within ten million bucks of how much they'll collect?"
That nails it down solid."
"With the added attraction," Jones went on, coldly and steadily, "of having two extremely desirable female women for eleven months before killing them, too."
Both girls shrank visibly, and Deston said: "Check.
I thought that was the main feature, but it didn't add up.
This does.
Now, how will they figure the battle?
Both of us at once, of----"
"Why?" Barbara asked.
"Uh uh.
The survivor would lock the ship in null G and it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Ferdy will probably draw on me----"
"And he'll kill you," Jones said, flatly.
"So I think I'll blow his brains out tomorrow morning on sight."
"And get killed yourself?
No ... much better to use their own trap----"
He's a professional-probably one of the fastest guns in space."
"Yes, but ...
I've got a ...
I mean I think I can----"
Bernice, grinning openly now, stopped Deston's floundering.
"It's high time you fellows told each other the truth.
Bobby and I let our back hair down long ago-we were both tremendously surprised to know that both you boys are just as strongly psychic as we are.
Perhaps even more so."
"So you'll have plenty of warning?"
"All my life.
The old alarm clock has never failed me yet.
But the girls can't start packing pistols now."
"I wouldn't know how to shoot one if I did," Bernice laughed.
"I'll throw things I'm very good at that."
"Huh?" Jones asked.
He didn't know his new wife very well, either.
"Anything I can reach," she replied, confidently.
"Baseballs, medicine balls, cannon balls, rocks, bricks, darts, discus, hammer, javelin-what have you.
In a for real battle I'd prefer ... chairs, I think.
Flying chairs are really hard to cope with.
So who will I knock out with the first chair?"
"I'll answer that," Barbara said, quietly.
"If it's Blaine against Babe, it'll be Lopresto against Herc.
So you'll throw your chairs or whatever at that unspeakable oaf Newman."
"I always do." Barbara held out her hands.
"Since they don't want to shoot us two-yet-these are all the weapons I'll need."
Really?"
I'm that good.
Really," and both Joneses began to realize what Deston already knew-just how deadly those harmless seeming weapons could be.
Barbara went on: "We should have a signal, in case one of us gets warning first.
Something that wouldn't mean anything to them ... musical, say ...
Brahms.
That's it.
o k?"
It was o k, and the four-Adams was still hard at work in the lounge-went to bed.
And three days later, within an hour after the last flight datum had been "put in the tank," the four intended victims allowed themselves to be inveigled into the lounge.
Everything was peaceful; everyone was full of friendship and brotherly love.
But suddenly "BRAHMS!" rang out, with four voices in absolute unison; followed a moment later by Lopresto's stentorian "NOW!"
It was a very good thing that Deston had had ample warning, for he was indeed competing out of his class.
As it was, his bullet crashed through Blaine's head, while the gunman's went harmlessly into the carpet.
The other pistol duel wasn't even close!
Lopresto's hand barely touched his gun.
Bernice, even while shrieking the battle cry, leaped to her feet, hurled her chair, and reached for another; but one chair was enough.
That fiercely but accurately sped missile knocked the half drawn pistol from Newman's hand and sent his body crashing to the floor, where Deston's second bullet made it certain that he would not recover consciousness.
Barbara's hand to hand engagement took about one second longer.
Moose Mordan was big and strong; and, for such a big man, was fairly fast physically.
If he had had time to get his muscles ready, he might have had a chance.
That ended it.
The big man could very well have been dying on his feet. To make sure, however-or to keep the girl from knowing that she had killed a man?--Deston and Jones each put a bullet through the falling head before it struck the rug.
Both girls flung themselves, sobbing, into their husband's arms.
The whole battle had lasted only a few seconds.
"You didn't kill him, Barbara," Adams said.
"Huh?" She raised her head from Deston's shoulder; the contrast between her streaming eyes and the relief dawning over her whole face was almost funny.
"Why, I did the foulest things possible, and as hard as I possibly could.
"By no means, my dear.
Judo techniques, however skillfully and powerfully applied, do not and can not kill instantly.
Bullets through the brain do.
I will photograph the cadavers, of course, and perform the customary post mortem examinations for the record; but I know already what the findings will be.
These four men died instantly of gunshot wounds."
With the four gangsters gone, life aboardship settled down quickly into a routine.
That routine, however, was in no sense dull.
The officers had plenty to do; operating the whole ship and rebuilding the mechanisms that were operating on jury rigging or on straight "bread board" hookups.
For Bernice and Jones, like Barbara and Deston, had for each other an infinite number of endless vistas of personality; the exploration of which was sheerest delight.
The girls-each of whom became joyously pregnant as soon as she could-kept house and helped their husbands whenever need or opportunity arose.
Their biggest chore, however, was to see to it that Adams got sleep, food, and exercise.
For, if left to his own devices, he would never have exercised at all, would have grabbed a bite now and then, and would have slept only when he could no longer stay awake.
"For a man that's actually as smart as you are, I swear you've got the least sense of anybody I know!"
"But it's necessary, my dear child," Adams explained, unmoved.
"This material is new.
There are many extremely difficult problems involved, and I have less than a year to work on them.
"Considering the enormous amounts of supplies carried; the scope, quantity, and quality of the safety devices employed; it is improbable that we are the first survivors of a subspace catastrophe to set course for a planet."
After some argument, the officers agreed.
From the facts: One, that in the absence of that field the subspace radio will function normally; and Two, that no subspace radio messages have ever been received from survivors; the conclusion seems inescapable that the discharge of this unknown field is in fact of extreme violence."
"Good God!" Deston exclaimed.
"Precisely."
"I don't know.
CHAPTER ten THE ESCAPE
The faint grey of the dawn was the only light that penetrated the gloom of that pit.
"The Fates are kind, Kenneth," he whispered.
But Kenneth laid his hand upon Galliard's sleeve.
"Someone will die," muttered Crispin back.
"But pray God that it may not.
We must run the risk."
"Why, yes," returned Galliard sardonically, "we can linger here until we are taken.
But, oddslife, I'm not so minded.
And as he spoke he drew the lad along.
His foot was upon the topmost stair of the flight, when of a sudden the stillness of the house was broken by a loud knock upon the street door. Instantly-as though they had been awaiting it there was a stir of feet below and the bang of an overturned chair; then a shaft of yellow light fell athwart the darkness of the hall as the guardroom door was opened.
"Back!" growled Galliard.
"Back, man!"
A bolt was drawn and a chain rattled, then followed the creak of hinges, and on the stone flags rang the footsteps and the jingling of spurs of those that entered.
"Is all well?" came a voice, which Crispin recognized as Colonel Pride's, followed by an affirmative reply from one of the soldiers.
In the hall Crispin could now make out the figures of Colonel Pride and of three men who came with him.
"Come, sirs," he heard him say, "light me to their garret.
I would see them-leastways, one of them, before he dies.
But, there lead on, fellow."
"Oh, God!" gasped Kenneth, as the soldier set foot upon the stairs. Under his breath Crispin swore a terrific oath.
Partly his eyes and partly his instinct told him that not six paces behind him there must be a door, and if Heaven pleased it should be unlocked, behind it they must look for shelter. It even crossed his mind in that second of crowding, galloping thought, that perchance the room might be occupied.
He ran his hand along until he caught the latch.
Softly he tried it; it gave, and the door opened.
Kenneth was by then beside him.
He paused to look back.
An instant later and the light had vanished, eclipsed by those who followed in the fellow's wake.
"The drop is a long one, and we should but light in the streets, and be little better than we are here.
Wait."
He listened.
The footsteps had turned the corner leading to the floor above.
He opened the door, partly at first, then wide.
The guardroom door stood ajar, and he caught the murmurs of subdued conversation.
But he did not pause.
Had the door stood wide he would not have paused then.
Cautiously, and leaning well upon the stout baluster, he began the descent.
Kenneth followed him mechanically, with white face and a feeling of suffocation in his throat.
Not more than a dozen steps were there; but at the bottom stood the guardroom door, and through the chink of its opening a shaft of light fell upon the nethermost step.
Another step Galliard descended; then from the guardroom came a loud yawn, to send the boy cowering against the wall. It was followed by the sound of someone rising; a chair grated upon the floor, and there was a movement of feet within the chamber.
Then slowly-painfully slowly-to avoid their steps from ringing upon the stone floor, they crept across towards the door that meant safety to Sir Crispin.
Slowly, step by step, they moved, and with every stride Crispin looked behind him, prepared to rush the moment he had sign they were discovered.
But it was not needed.
Quietly he opened it, then with calm gallantry he motioned to his companion to go first, holding it for him as he passed in, and keeping watch with eye and ear the while.
Kenneth tugged at the skirts of his doublet.
"What now?" he inquired.
"Get in, Kenneth," Crispin commanded.
Hey! Have a care, boy.
CHAPTER twenty seven.
GLACIAL AND PREGLACIAL LAKES AND RIVERS.
Even the imagination, that wonderful architect, with all its tendencies to exaggeration, palls in its attempt to give expression in measured quantities to the mighty power exerted by the great glacier or combination of glaciers that existed in comparatively recent times.
Before the glacial period the Wisconsin River made a detour some miles west of its present channel through the high hills in the region of Baraboo.
The river at that point passed between two of these hills.
When the ice flowed down it surrounded these hills, yet did not sweep over their tops, but left great piles of glacial drift, both at the points where the river channel entered the hills and where it emerges from them.
Therefore a deep basin was left, which is kept filled by the watershed furnished by the surrounding hills.
There are hundreds and perhaps thousands of lakes that have been formed in one way or another through the power of glacial action.
These smaller inland lakes, so many of which are seen in northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, and Minnesota, are due almost entirely to the great deposits of glacial drift that have been transported with the ice.
Wherever these "kettle holes" are found large bodies of ice have become anchored, while the ice behind it has carried the drift until it is covered over and piled up at the sides.
When these ice mountains melted away depressions were left which in some cases have resulted in lakes, and in others simply dry kettle holes.
This process has been hinted at in a former chapter, but we give it here as one of the kinds of lakes formed during the glacial period.
They are found everywhere that glacial action has prevailed.
These lakes, however, are comparatively insignificant as compared with the great inland seas like Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, that undoubtedly owe their origin largely to the ice age.
Glacial lakes may be divided into three classes.
Those found in the "kettle holes" of the terminal or medial moraines, and those that are formed by the deposition of the glacial drift, as, for instance, Devil's Lake, and those that are caused by ice forming dams across the valley of a river that lasted only during the ice age.
In order, however, that we may understand more fully the formation of these greater lakes it will be necessary for us to go back and examine the conditions that seem to have existed before the glacial period.
It is a fact well known that continents have periods of elevation and depression.
The question naturally arises, Where did all the dirt come from to fill up these great river beds and change the whole topography of the northern half of the continent?
dr Wright estimates that there is not less than one million square miles of territory in North America covered with glacial debris to an average depth of fifty feet.
Of the carrying power of these great glaciers we will speak more fully in a future chapter.
In preglacial times the watershed of the Mississippi and of the great rivers east of the Alleghany Mountains, the Susquehanna and Hudson, extended probably farther north than it does to day.
All of the lake bottoms of this great chain, with the exception of Lake Erie, are now below sea-level.
There may have existed something of a lake in preglacial times, through which the river ran, but it undoubtedly owes its present width to the grinding action of the irresistible icebergs and the piling up of debris on the shores.
Another glacier plowed down through Lake Michigan, widening it out to its present dimensions, while the glacial drift was deposited at what is now the head of the lake, filling up the old outlet and thus making a great dam.
In a similar way Lake Erie was formed.
It is supposed, however, that this lake is entirely the product of glacial action, as there is no evidence of an old river bed in its bottom; besides, it is much shallower than the other lakes.
The same action that formed Lake Erie filled up the old river bed running through the province of Ontario, so that when the ice receded Lake Erie became the new channel for the old river.
The same process filled up the Valley of the Mohawk to more than one hundred feet in depth and also raised the Valley of the Hudson.
At the same time it built great dams across the outlets which raised the surface of the water to a much higher level and caused them to form new outlets, thus changing the whole face of the country over which the ice drifted.
Of course such a lake could not be permanent, because, when the ice melted away, it again opened the channel and allowed the water to flow off.
Terraces were formed running up the Ohio and its tributaries corresponding to the level that the water must have risen to if the valley were filled up with ice.
The fact that in some places successive terraces are found does not disprove the theory, because it is more than likely that when the ice receded it did so in successive stages, remaining at different positions for a considerable length of time.
There is abundant proof of this in the successive moraines and also in the formation of successive terraces. Some of these terraces could have been formed from other causes.
The ice did not stand with an even thickness over the surface of the glaciated area, but at some points it moved down in great lobes, which marked the lines of greatest pressure as well as the greatest accumulation.
All of the region about Winnipeg, in the Red River country, covering great areas of hundreds of miles in extent, is a level plain only lacking the coloring to give to one passing through it the effect of a great unruffled sea.
We can imagine that during this period the water that flowed off through the great Mississippi must have been of enormous volume as compared to the present time.
dr Wright-as we have before stated-has estimated that there are a million square miles of country that has been covered to an average depth of fifty feet with glacial drift.
When this great body of water was released it was to the northward.
CHAPTER twenty nine.
The valley of the Ohio River will probably average a mile in width at its upper level and, deep as it is to day, it was much deeper in preglacial times.
There is evidence that the whole bed of the river was from one hundred to one hundred fifty feet deeper than it is at present.
This has been determined by borings at different points to ascertain the depth of the drift that was lodged during the glacial period in the trough of the Ohio River.
These lands are exceedingly productive, owing to the great depth and richness of the soil.
For many years the writer lived upon one of the rivers tributary to the Ohio and often made trips by steamboat up and down the Ohio River. Traveling along this river a close observer will be struck by the exactness of the stratifications in the rock and in the coal beds to be seen on each side of the river.
They match as perfectly as the grain of a block of wood when sawn asunder-showing that these coal beds were formed at an age long before the water cut this sinuous groove.
What the water was doing while these coal beds were forming will be brought out in some future chapter.
All the rivers that are tributary to the Ohio, such as the Monongahela, the Alleghany, the Muskingum, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Kentucky, the Wabash, the Miami, the Licking, the Scioto, the Big Sandy, the Kanawha, the Hocking, and the Great Beaver, besides numerous smaller streams, have their own valleys that have been worn away by the same process, and to a greater depth than they now appear to be.
The great lakes, that were enlarged during the glacial period and in some cases wholly created-by the scooping out and damming up of the waterways and by piling glacial drift around their shores-have had some of their outlets raised to a higher level, and others have been created anew.
Great bodies of salt are found at that low level, constantly dissolved by the water percolating through the sand and gravel of the glacial drift.
There is abundant evidence that the earth sinks in some places and rises in others.
This fact need not occasion any uneasiness on the part of those who are living to day or for millions of years to come.
The problem of building a world and then tearing it to pieces is a very complicated one.
The world has never been exactly alike any two successive days from the time its foundations were laid to the present moment.
It seems to be a fundamental law of all life and growth, as well as of all decay, that there shall be a constant change.
There is no such thing as rest in nature.
In the animal and vegetable world there is a period of life and growth, and a period of decay and death; and this seems to be the destiny of planets themselves as well as the things that live and grow upon them.
Still, science teaches us that with all this turmoil and change nothing either of matter or energy is lost, but that it is simply undergoing one eternal round of change.
Does this law apply to mind and soul?
Do we die?
"What's that for?
He said:
CHAPTER twenty four
"Guardy Lud" was the first visitor, just for a night and a day.
He had come East for a flying business trip, and could not pass by his beloved wards without at least a glimpse.
He dropped down into their midst quite unexpectedly the night before college closed, and found them with a bevy of young people at the supper table, who opened their ranks right heartily, and took him in.
He sat on the terrace in the moonlight with them afterwards, joking, telling them stories, and eating chocolates with the rest.
After the young people were gone he lingered, wiping his eyes, and saying, "Bless my soul!" thoughtfully.
He told Julia Cloud over and over again how more than pleased he was with what she had done for his children, and insisted that her salary should be twice as large.
He would see that a sum was set aside in the bank for their use in any such plans as they might have for their Christian Endeavor work.
They talked far into the night, for he had to hear all the stories of all their doings, and every minute or two one or the other of the children would break in to tell something about the other or to praise their dear Cloudy Jewel for her part in everything.
The next day they took him everywhere and showed him everything about the college and the place, introduced him to their favorite professors, at least those who were not already gone on their vacations, and took him for a long drive past their favorite haunts. Then he had to meet Jane Bristol and Howard Letchworth.
"They are both poor and earning their own living," said Julia Cloud, feeling that in view of the future and what it might contain she wanted to be entirely honest, that the weight of responsibility should not rest too heavily upon her.
"All the better for that, no doubt," said Guardy Lud thoughtfully, watching Jane Bristol's sweet smile as she talked over some committee plans with Allison.
"I should say they were about as wholesome a couple of young people as could be found to match your two.
I'm entirely satisfied with the work you're doing, Miss Cloud.
I couldn't have found a better mother for 'em if I'd searched heaven, I'm sure."
And so Julia Cloud was well content to go on with her beloved work as home maker.
Allison arose and went down the terrace to do the honors, showing his uncle where to drive in and put his car in the little garage, helping his aunt and the little cousins to alight.
"I should think 'twould take all your time to keep clean.
What's the idea in making a sidewalk of your front porch?
Looks as if some crazy person had built it.
Couldn't you find anything better than this in the town?
I saw some real pretty frame houses with gardens as we came through."
"We like this very well," said Julia Cloud with her old patient smile and the hurt flush that always accompanied her answers to her sister's contempt.
She likes to keep them bright.
No paper on the wall!
That's queer, isn't it?
And the chimney right in the room!
Leslie took the children up stairs to wash their faces and freshen up, and Julia Cloud led her sister to the lovely guest room that was always in perfect order.
"Well, you certainly have things well fixed," said Ellen grudgingly. "What easy little stairs!
It's like child's play going up.
I suppose that's one consolation for having such a little playhouse affair to live in; you don't have to climb up far.
Well, we've come to stay two days if you want us.
Herbert said he could spare that much time off, and we're going to stop in Thayerville on the way back and see his folks a couple of days; and that'll be a week.
Now, if you don't want us, say so, and we'll go on to night.
It isn't as if we couldn't go when we like, you know."
But Julia Cloud was genuinely glad to see her sister, and said so heartily enough to satisfy even so jealous a nature as Ellen's; and so presently they were walking about the pretty rooms together, and Ellen was taking in all the beauties of the home.
"And this is your bedroom!" she paused in the middle of the rose and gray room, and looked about her, taking in every little detail with an eye that would put it away for remembrance long afterwards.
"Well, they certainly have feathered your nest well!" she declared as her eyes rested on the luxury everywhere.
"Though I don't like that painted furniture much myself," she said as she glanced at the French gray enamel of the bed; "but I suppose it's all right if that's the kind of thing you like.
Was it some of their old furniture from California?"
"Oh, no," said Julia Cloud quickly, the pretty flush coming in her cheeks.
"Everything was bought new except a few little bits of mahogany down stairs.
We had such fun choosing it, too.
Don't you like my furniture?
It's real French enamel, you know, and happens to be a craze of fashion at present.
I thought it was ridiculous to buy it, but Leslie insisted that it was the only thing for my room; and those crazy, extravagant children went and bought it when I had my head turned."
"You don't say!" said Ellen Robinson, putting a hard, investigating finger on the foot board.
"Well, it does seem sort of smooth.
But I never thought my cane seat chairs were much.
What's that out there, a porch?"
Julia Cloud led her out to the upper porch with its rush rugs, willow chairs, and table, and its stone wall crowned with blooming plants and trailing vines.
She showed her the bird's nest in the tree overhead.
"Well," said Ellen half sourly, "I suppose there's no chance of your getting sick of it all and coming back, and I must say I don't blame you.
It certainly is a contrast from the way you've lived up to now. But these children will grow up and get married, and then where will you be?
I suppose you have chances here of getting married, haven't you?"
"I'm not looking for such chances, Ellen," she said decidedly.
I'm happier as I am."
"Yes, but after these children are married what'll you do?
Who'll support you?"
"Don't let that worry you, Ellen, There are other children, and I love to mother them.
But as far as support is concerned I'm putting away money in the bank constantly, more than I ever expected to have all together in life; and I shall not trouble anybody for support. However, I hope to be able to work for a good many years yet, and what I'm doing now I love.
Shall we go down stairs?"
"I suppose they have by this time."
"They have a great many young friends, and we have beautiful times together.
But you won't see many of them now.
College closed last week."
"Cloudy, dear, what makes such a difference in people?
Why are some so much harder to make have a good time than others?
Why, I feel as if I'd lived years since day before yesterday, and I don't feel as if they'd half enjoyed anything.
I really wanted to make them happy, for I felt as if we'd taken so much from them when we took you; but I just seemed to fail, everything I did."
Julia Cloud smiled.
"I don't know what it is, dear, unless it is that some people have different ideals and standards from other people, and they can't find their pleasure the same way.
Your Aunt Ellen always wanted to have a lot of people around, and liked to go to tea parties and dress a great deal; and she never cared for reading or study or music.
But I think you're mistaken about their not having had a good time.
They appreciated your trying to do things for them, I know, for Aunt Ellen said to me that you were a very thoughtful girl.
And the children enjoyed the victrola, especially the funny records.
Herbert liked it that Allison let him drive his car when they went out.
"Did she truly say that, Cloudy?" twinkled Leslie.
"Isn't she funny?" They both broke down and laughed.
"But I'm glad they came, Cloudy.
It was nice to play with the children, and nice to have a home to show our relatives, and nicest of all to have them see you-how beautiful you are at the head of the house."
"Dear, flattering child!" said Julia Cloud lovingly.
"It is so good to know you feel that way!
But now here comes Allison, and we must finish up our plans for the trip and get ready to close the house for the summer."
"I don't see any place as nice as our town, do you, Cloudy?
And I don't feel quite right anywhere but home on Sunday, do you?
For, really, all the Christian Endeavor societies I've been to this summer acted as if their members were all away on vacations and they didn't care whether school kept or not."
And so they went home to begin another happy winter.
But the very first day there came a rift in their happiness in the shape of the new professor of chemistry, a man about Julia Cloud's age, whom Ellen Robinson had met on her visit to Thayerville, and told about her sister.
Ellen had suggested that maybe he could get her sister to take him to board!
To this day Julia Cloud has never decided whether Ellen really thought Julia would take a professor from the college to board, or whether she just sent him there as a joke.
There was a third solution, which Julia Cloud kept in the back of her mind and only took out occasionally with an angry, troubled look when she was very much annoyed.
It was that Ellen was still anxious to have her sister get married, and she had taken this way to get her acquainted with a man whom she thought a "good match".
No, indeed!
But Professor Armitage, like everybody else who came once to Cloudy Villa, liked it, and begged a thousand pardons for presuming, but came again and again, until even the children began to like him in a way, and did not in the least mind having him around.
twenty four
AN EVENING'S FUN
mrs Blair had said that all the preparations for the Bazaar must be completed on Tuesday, the day before it was to open.
She knew the ways of girls too well to think that it would be safe to have anything left for Wednesday morning.
The flower table, of course had to be arranged on that day, and some things for the refreshment table.
But so definite had she been in expressing her wishes, that the girls felt that it was due her for lending her house to pay all deference to what she said.
On the Monday therefore after Easter they went to work with a will to gather in the promised contributions.
Tuesday was rainy, and at dusk gave little promise of a bright sky for the following day.
Brenda was in a tremor of excitement.
I know that a lot of people will come even if it rains, and perhaps they'll be good and buy three times as much as they would in fine weather."
Just then Julia came in with the evening paper in her hand.
"See, or rather hear the news.
There was a large patch of blue in the west when the sun went down----"
"The sun!" exclaimed the others derisively.
"In the place where the sun should have gone down," she responded with a smile.
"Why, how well the rooms look!
there won't be a thing for the boys to do this evening."
"Boys are not so fond of spending money at fairs, I can tell you that," said Nora, rather decidedly, "and besides most of them are so much in debt that they haven't anything to spend."
"I know several who have more money than they know what to do with.
Some juniors that I know-New York fellows, are coming to morrow and they will spend a lot of money."
"Gracious!" exclaimed Brenda, "I hope that we have things that will suit them.
It seems to me that most of these things are for girls to use."
"Oh, they can buy things for their sisters and cousins; besides, boys like pincushions and picture frames and sofa pillows.
Oh, I am sure that we shall have no trouble getting them to buy all that they can afford," replied Belle positively.
As a matter of fact when the boys after dinner were ushered into the pretty little ballroom, where the tables laden with fancy goods stood, they expressed great interest in all that they saw, and began to make bids for the things which seemed to them best worth having.
"Look out," cried Nora, "or we may take you at your word, Will Hardon, and make you pay one hundred dollars for that crimson pillow that you admire so."
"Well, why not?" he enquired, "as long as it is to be in a good cause."
"Oh, no," interrupted the practical Edith, "that would not really be fair.
"Oh, how silly you are, Edith," broke in Brenda; "as if all the people who come to the Bazaar could be here at the same minute.
If any one wants to bid on anything to night I say that it is perfectly fair." After much discussion, it was at last decided that any one who had a great preference for any special thing might write his name on a piece of paper and have it pinned to the object with the limit of price that he was willing to pay.
"Then you must be willing," said Brenda, "to let us sell the things you have chosen, if some fussy old person comes along and wishes any of these reserved things, and refuses to be contented with anything else."
"Oh, there will be plenty of things that will suit you just as well, if you only make up your minds to it."
"Perhaps you'll want me to buy a blue sofa pillow or some other Yale thing," sighed Will Hardon.
All the girls laughed except Edith, who seldom saw the funny side of things as quickly as the others.
"Well, you can see yourselves, boys," she said, in a determined tone, "that you ought to be glad to buy whatever is left over,--for you probably won't get in until toward evening.
You can always find some one to give the things to that you buy."
"This doll?" asked Philip, holding it rather clumsily on his arm.
"Why, of course," said Edith, "we know several children who would be delighted with it at Christmas."
"No, thank you, sister Edith," responded Philip, "I'm not going to spend my hard earned allowance in presents for children; if you make me buy this doll, out it goes to a certain room in one of the college buildings to become a cherished decoration, and," waving the doll dramatically in the air, "I shall defy any proctor or college authority to tear it away from me."
But you know I'm in earnest about that pillow," he added, for he knew, and ruth knew that he knew that the down pillow with its rich crimson cover embroidered with a large "H." was the work of her skilful fingers.
"You wouldn't pay a hundred dollars for it?" queried ruth.
This was not entirely an idle boast, this readiness to spend a large sum of money for a small thing-on the part of Will, as Philip and some of his classmates might have testified.
Although very quiet in his way of living, and in his general conversation, he had a larger income than many in his set.
No one knew of his liberality except those whom he helped, for he had not the least wish to pose as a benefactor.
Now ruth, while pleased at his wish for the cushion had no idea that he would, if necessary, pay a hundred dollars for it.
"If you really wish to have it, I'll try to secure it for you," she said.
"I am sure there won't be any trouble, although I suppose that it can't be laid aside to night, as long as Edith feels as she does."
"Come," cried Brenda, rushing up to them, "you are not doing a thing, you two."
"Well, the rest of you seemed so busy that we thought we should only be in the way," said Will with the glibness that is almost second nature with youths of his age, "but we're ready to work now," and they went across the room to the surprise table where half a dozen of their friends were busy.
The "surprise table" had been an idea of Belle's, and was a rather agreeable change from the usual grab bag.
All kinds of little things-toys, novelties, like those used as German favors, small books and photographs, were neatly done up in bright tissue paper wrappings, and tied with silk ribbons.
They were heaped on a large table, and purchasers were permitted to buy each little package at their own price, provided at least, according to a sign placed above the table, that no bid should be for less than fifteen cents.
Nora was to have charge of this table, and she expected to have a great deal of fun out of the misfits between the purchasers and the parcels.
Altogether the preparations for the Bazaar had moved along much more smoothly than any one had expected.
It is true that the various mothers of the girls comprising "The Four" had said that they would be glad enough when it was all over, because for a fortnight it had been impossible to get the girls to think of anything else.
mrs Barlow was especially pleased with the good spirit that her niece Julia had shown, for it would have been so easy and natural for her at the last to display a little pettishness in the way of a refusal to have anything to do with the Bazaar in view of the fact that she had not been invited to join "The Four" at their weekly meetings for work.
But Julia was not one to show this kind of resentment, and since she had become interested in Manuel she was only too glad to help the Bazaar that was to benefit him.
At her aunt's suggestion she had made it her special duty to collect flowers and plants for the flower table, and armed with notes of introduction from mrs Barlow she had gone to many a supposedly close person to ask for some small contribution to the flower table.
Her success had been altogether remarkable, and in addition to the cut flowers that were to arrive on Wednesday, a great many beautiful potted plants and vines had been sent in from various conservatories for general decorations.
The work did not, of course, proceed very rapidly, for every one in the group of fifteen or more had to give an opinion on everything, and a unanimous opinion as to what looked best in any particular case was naturally impossible.
The large room was so handsome as to require comparatively little decoration.
The long mirrors with which every side was paneled formed a complete decoration in themselves, and added to the general effectiveness, as Brenda said by making the tables "look double."
Now if the boys did not find a great deal of work to do they were very outspoken in their admiration for all that had been accomplished by the girls.
"Well, if other people will only be as much impressed as you are, and will open their purses accordingly, we shall have nothing to complain of," said Nora, "and I hope that you will all come back and buy everything that is left over by to morrow evening."
"Can't we have first choice of anything?" queried Tom Hurst, a mischief loving friend of Philip's whom some of the girls distrusted a little.
"No," answered Nora, sternly, "you must not be so selfish.
There may be old ladies who will want----"
"Do you suppose that any old lady will want that tobacco pouch?" asked Tom, with a most innocent expression on his face.
"She might," answered Nora, with a very dignified manner.
"She might if she had a son who was fond of smoking, at any rate she ought to have first choice."
"Well, then," replied Tom, "I don't believe that I shall return, for I am not sure that I ought to patronize an institution that encourages old ladies to buy tobacco pouches."
"You shouldn't use tobacco at all," cried Edith in a plaintive tone, "at your age, Philip, you know how mamma feels about it."
Anyway it's time we started for Cambridge, we're not used to late hours." At this the rest of the boys laughed rather more loudly than the occasion seemed to warrant, but with a return of good manners they bade the girls good bye, and promised mrs Blair, who had returned to the room that they would certainly drop in some time on Wednesday.
"It certainly does look as if it might clear up," said Belle to Nora, as they walked along.
"Yes, indeed," answered Nora, "there are as many as twenty stars to be seen, and that is almost a sure sign.
CHAPTER twenty three
Knight Errantry
Indeed, I had great liberty with regard to her, and took her out for a trot and a gallop as often as I pleased.
I believe he was never quite without a hope that somehow or other he should find her again in the next world.
At all events I am certain that it was hard for him to believe that so much wise affection should have been created to be again uncreated.
It was a lovely night. A kind of grey peace filled earth and air and sky.
It was not dark, although rather cloudy; only a dim dusk, like a vapour of darkness, floated around everything.
I was fond of being out at night, but I had never before contemplated going so far alone.
I should not, however, feel alone with Missy under me, for she and I were on the best of terms, although sometimes she would take a fit of obstinacy, and refuse to go in any other than the direction she pleased.
Everything seemed thinking about me, but nothing would tell me what it thought.
Not feeling, however, that I was doing wrong, I was only awed not frightened by the stillness.
I made Missy slacken her speed, and rode on more gently, in better harmony with the night.
I did not like the noise she made, and got upon the grass, for here there was no fence.
She tore away over the field in quite another direction from that in which I had been taking her, and the gallop quickened until she was going at her utmost speed.
The rapidity of the motion and the darkness together-for it seemed darkness now-I confess made me frightened.
In a minute I had lost my reckoning, and could not tell where I was in the field, which was a pretty large one; but soon finding that we were galloping down a hill so steep that I had trouble in retaining my seat, I began, not at all to my comfort, to surmise in what direction the mare was carrying me.
She avoided it, and galloped past, but bore me to a far more frightful goal, suddenly dropping into a canter, and then standing stock still.
It was a cottage half in ruins, occupied by an old woman whom I dimly recollected having once gone with my father to see-a good many years ago, as it appeared to me now.
She was still alive, however, very old, and bedridden.
Now there is nothing particularly frightful about a pair of bellows, however large it may be, and yet the recollection of that huge structure of leather and wood, with the great iron nose projecting from the contracting cheeks of it, at the head of the old woman's bed, so capable yet so useless, did return upon me with terror in the dusk of that lonely night.
If there was any truth in the story, it is easily accounted for by the fact that the poor old woman had been a little out of her mind for many years,--and no wonder, for she was nearly a hundred, they said.
Neither is it any wonder that when Missy stopped almost suddenly, with her fore feet and her neck stretched forward, and her nose pointed straight for the door of the cottage at a few yards' distance, I should have felt very queer indeed.
There she had to stop, for I had shut it when I brought her out.
It was mortifying to find myself there instead of under john Adam's hayloft, the rescuer of Jamie Duff.
But I did not think of that for a while.
Shaken with terror, and afraid to dismount and be next the ground, I called upon Andrew as well as my fear would permit; but my voice was nearly unmanageable, and I could do little more than howl with it.
In a few minutes, to me a time of awful duration-for who could tell what might be following me up from the hollow?--Andrew appeared half dressed, and not in the best of tempers, remarking it was an odd thing to go out riding when honest people were in their beds, except, he added, I meant to take to the highway.
Thereupon, rendered more communicative by the trial I had gone through, I told him the whole story, what I had intended and how I had been frustrated.
It's all waste to be frightened before you know whether the thing is worth it."
I was still seated on Missy.
To go home having done nothing for Jamie, and therefore nothing for Elsie, after all my grand ideas of rescue and restoration, was too mortifying.
When he reappeared, I asked him:
"What do you think it could be, Andrew?"
"How should I tell?" returned Andrew.
"The old woman has a very queer cock, I know, that always roosts on the top of her bed, and crows like no cock I ever heard crow.
Thus armed, and mounted with my feet in the stirrups, and therefore a good pull on Missy's mouth, I found my courage once more equal to the task before me.
A Double Exposure
When she had set our porridge on the table, she stood up, and, with her fists in her sides, addressed my father:
I whispered to Allister-
Tell him to come directly."
The Kelpie looked suspicious as he left the room, but she had no pretext for interference.
"Let her go, father," I said.
"None of us like her."
"I like her," whimpered little Davie.
"Silence, sir!" said my father, very sternly.
"Are these things true?"
"Yes, father," I answered.
"You have confessed to the truth of what she alleges," said my father.
I was not too much abashed to take notice that the Kelpie bridled at this.
"I can't say I'm sorry for what I've done to her," I said.
"Really, Ranald, you are impertinent.
I would send you out of the room at once, but you must beg mrs Mitchell's pardon first, and after that there will be something more to say, I fear."
"But, father, you have not heard my story yet."
"Well-go on.
But nothing can justify such conduct."
I began with trembling voice.
Both were out of breath with running.
My father stopped me, and ordered Turkey away until I should have finished.
I ventured to look up at the Kelpie once or twice.
She had grown white, and grew whiter.
When Turkey left the room, she would have gone too.
Several times she broke out, accusing me of telling a pack of wicked lies, but my father told her she should have an opportunity of defending herself, and she must not interrupt me.
When I had done, he called Turkey, and made him tell the story.
I need hardly say that, although he questioned us closely, he found no discrepancy between our accounts.
He turned at last to mrs Mitchell, who, but for her rage, would have been in an abject condition.
"Now, mrs Mitchell!" he said.
She had nothing to reply beyond asserting that Turkey and I had always hated and persecuted her, and had now told a pack of lies which we had agreed upon, to ruin her, a poor lone woman, with no friends to take her part.
I will leave the house this very day."
"They all hate me," said the Kelpie.
"And why?" asked my father.
She made no answer.
"I must get at the truth of it," said my father.
She left the room without another word, and my father turned to Turkey.
"I have no doubt of it, but equally unjustifiable.
"I confess I yielded to temptation then, for I knew it could do no good.
I will try to show you the wrong you have done.--Had you told me without doing anything yourselves, then I might have succeeded in bringing mrs Mitchell to repentance.
I could have reasoned with her on the matter, and shown her that she was not merely a thief, but a thief of the worst kind, a Judas who robbed the poor, and so robbed God.
"Please, sir," interrupted Turkey, "I don't think after all she did it for herself.
I do believe," he went on, and my father listened, "that Wandering Willie is some relation of hers.
"You may be right, Turkey-I dare say you are right.
It is to her, not to me, you have done the wrong.
But it is a very dreadful thing to throw difficulties in the way of repentance and turning from evil works."
"What can I do to make up for it?" I sobbed.
Thereupon Turkey and I walked away, I to school, he to his cattle.
But the Kelpie frustrated whatever he may have resolved upon with regard to her: before he returned she had disappeared.
I think she must have hid it in some outhouse, and fetched it the next night.
It was more his own affection than her kindness that had attached him to her.
CHAPTER one
THE INVITATIONS ARE SENT.
Down the long avenue that led from the house to the great entrance gate came the Little Colonel on her pony.
It was a sweet, white way that morning, filled with the breath of the locusts; white overhead where the giant trees locked branches to make an arch of bloom nearly a quarter of a mile in length, and white underneath where the fallen blossoms lay like scattered snowflakes along the path.
Everybody, in Lloydsboro Valley knew Locust.
"It is one of the prettiest places in all Kentucky," they were fond of saying, and every visitor to the Valley was taken past the great entrance gate to admire the long rows of stately old trees, and the great stone house at the end, whose pillars gleamed white through the Virginia creeper that nearly covered it.
Some people called attention to him because he was an old Confederate soldier who had given his good right arm to the cause he loved, some because they thought he resembled Napoleon, and others because they had some amusing tale to tell of the eccentric things he had said or done.
He was proud of the fact that she had inherited his lordly manner, his hot temper, and imperious ways.
It pleased him that people had given her his title of Colonel on account of the resemblance to himself.
She had outgrown it somewhat since she had first been nicknamed the Little Colonel.
Then she was only a spoiled baby of five; but now his pride in her was even greater, since she had grown into a womanly little maid of eleven.
He was proud of her delicate, flower like beauty, of her dainty ways, and all her little schoolgirl accomplishments.
She's like Amanthis,--sweet souled and starry eyed; we were here when you brought her home, a bride.
She's like Amanthis!
Like Amanthis!"
Under the blossoms rode the Little Colonel, all in white herself this May morning, except the little Napoleon hat of black velvet, set jauntily over her short light hair.
"Tarbaby" she called him, partly because he was so black, and partly because that was the name of her favourite Uncle Remus story.
As she spoke, she passed through the gate at the end of the avenue and turned into the public road, a wide pike with a railroad track on one side of it and a bridle path on the other.
Judge Moore was Rob's grandfather, and she and Rob had played together every summer since she could remember.
The wide white gate was standing open now, and she drew rein, peering anxiously in.
She hoped for the sight of a familiar freckled face or the sound of a welcoming whoop.
It balanced itself on the limb, leaning over and cocking its bright bead like eyes at her, as if admiring the sight.
What it saw was a slender girl of eleven, taller than most children of that age, and more graceful.
There was a colour in her cheek like the delicate pink of a wild rose, and the big hazel eyes had a roguish twinkle in them, as they looked out fearlessly on the world from under the little Napoleon hat with its nodding cockade of locust blossoms.
She was turning slowly away when down the pike behind her came the quick beat of a horse's hoofs and a shrill whistle.
A twelve year old boy was riding toward her as fast as his big gray horse could carry him.
He snatched it off with a flourish as he came within speaking distance of the Little Colonel, his freckled face all ashine with pleasure.
"Hello!
Lloyd," he called, "I was just going to your house."
"And I was looking for you, Bobby," she answered, as informally as if it were only yesterday they had parted, instead of eight months before.
"Come and go down to the post office with me.
"You don't know how good it feels to get back to the country again, Lloyd.
As they jogged along, side by side, the Little Colonel chatting gaily of all that had happened since their last meeting, Rob kept casting curious glances at her.
Then her hand flew up to her head.
"Don't you see?
I've had my hair cut.
It had to be brushed and plaited a dozen times a day."
"I don't like it that way.
It isn't a bit becoming," said Rob, with the frankness of old comradeship.
"You look like a boy.
"I don't care," answered Lloyd, her eyes flashing dangerously.
"It's comfortable this way, and grandfathah likes it.
"When you were a little thing!" laughed Rob, teasingly.
"I was eleven last week.
We'll expect you at all the pahties and picnics and candy pullin's that we have.
I want you to help me give the girls a good time, Bobby."
Jolly for you!" before he answered more politely, "Thank you, Lloyd, you can count on me for my part.
I'll be on hand every time you turn around, if you want me. Who all's coming?"
"Well, who is she?" he asked, reading it aloud.
"Eugenia is a sort of cousin of mine," explained Lloyd.
She was dreadfully spoiled.
"Then what did you do?" asked Rob, with a grin.
He had experimented with Lloyd's temper himself in the past.
He is always so busy there's no one to pay any attention to her but her maid.
I imagine she's stuck up, too.
She used to be, and she's always had her own way about everything."
"Number one doesn't sound very inviting," said Rob, with a sour grimace. "Who is your number two?" Lloyd held out the second envelope.
Oh, it was just like a fairy tale, all the things that Joyce did when she was in Touraine."
"How old is she?" interrupted Rob.
"Just Eugenia's age, I believe, and she must be an interestin' sort of girl, for she draws beautifully.
"Number two is all right," said Rob, with an approving nod.
"Next!"
The Little Colonel held out the third envelope.
"One flew east and one flew west, so I s'pose this will fly into the cuckoo's nest," said Rob, as he read the address:
Mother is her godmothah.
That's why she is named Elizabeth Lloyd.
That's why she invited them."
"And you don't know anything about this one?" questioned Rob.
"Not a thing.
I shouldn't be su'prised if she's mighty countrified, for the farm is several miles from a railroad, and the people she lives with don't think of anything but work, yeah in and yeah out."
They had reached the post office by this time, and Rob held out his hand for the letters.
"I'll put them in for you," he said.
Then, dropping them into the box, one by one, he repeated the rhyme:
"One flew east and one flew west. And one flew into the cuckoo's nest."
Lloyd added, quickly:
"Joyce," said Rob, promptly.
"I think so, too," agreed the Little Colonel, stooping to fasten the locust blossoms more securely behind the pony's ears.
"Well, the invitations are off now.
Come on, Tarbaby, and see if you can't beat Bobby Moore's old gray hawse so bad it will be ashamed to evah race again."
The dust flew, dogs barked, and chickens ran squawking across the road out of the way.
Heads were thrust out of the windows as the two vanished up the dusty pike, and an old graybeard loafing in front of the corner grocery gave an amused chuckle.
"Beats all how them two do get over the ground," he said.
A little while later the three white envelopes were jogging sociably along, side by side in a mail bag, on their way to Louisville.
But their course did not lie together long.
CHAPTER two.
"ONE FLEW INTO THE CUCKOO'S NEST."
The letter for Jaynes's Post office reached the end of its journey first.
It wasn't much of a post office; only an old case of pigeon holes set up in one corner of a cross roads store.
A man riding over from the nearest town twice a week brought the mail bag on horseback.
So few letters found their way into this, particular bag that Squire Jaynes, who kept the store and post office, felt a personal interest in every envelope that passed through his hands.
"Miss Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis," he spelled aloud, examining the address through his square bowed spectacles with a critical squint.
There was no one in the store to answer the question but an overgrown boy who had stopped to get his father's weekly paper.
He sat on the counter dangling his big bare feet against a nail keg, and catching flies in his sunburned hands, while he waited for the mail to be opened.
"That's Betty.
The Appletons' Betty.
Don't you know?
Any how, they're all she's got, and her father made some arrangement with them before he died.
"That's the truth," said Jake; "she does.
Talk about bringin' up.
It's Betty that 'pears to be bringin' up the little Appletons."
Lloydsboro Valley it's postmarked.
Wish she'd happen down here.
I'd ask her who it's from."
Jake got up, dragged his bare feet across the floor, and leaned lazily on the counter as he reached for his paper.
I'll take it up to her, squire, if you say so.
"Reckon you might as well," answered the old man, giving a final close scrutiny before handing it to the boy.
"It might lie here all week in case none of them happened to come to the store, and it looks as if it might be important."
Jake mounted and rode off slowly, his bare feet dangling far below the stirrups.
It was two miles to the Appleton farm, down a hot, dusty road, and he took his time in going. Well for little Betty that she did not know what wonderful surprise was on its way to her, or she would have been in a fever of impatience for the letter to arrive.
It had been a tiresome day for the child.
But it was cool and pleasant down in the spring house with the water trickling out in a ceaseless drip drip on the cold stones.
Surely it must have learned a great many on its underground way among the roots of things, and all else that lies hidden in the earth.
But she could not loiter long.
There was the dinner table to set for the hungry farm hands, and after the dinner was over more dishes to wash. Then there were some towels to iron.
It was two o'clock before her work was all done, and she had time to go up to her little room in the west gable.
It was such a tiny mirror that she could see only a part of her face at a time.
When her big brown eyes, wistful and questioning as a fawn's, were reflected in it, there was no room for the sensitive little mouth.
Or if she stood on tiptoe so that she could see her plump round chin, dimpled cheeks, and white teeth, the eyes were left out, and she could see no more of her inquisitive little nose than lay below the big freckle in the middle of it.
She was free now to do as she pleased until supper time.
Once out of the house, she walked slowly along through the shady orchard, swinging her sunbonnet by the strings.
After the orchard came the long leafy lane, with its double rows of cherry trees, and then the gate at the end, leading into the public highway.
As she slipped her hand around the post to unfasten the chain that held the gate, little bare feet came pattering behind her, and a shrill voice called: "Wait, Betty, wait a minute!"
It was Davy Appleton.
Betty's little lamb, they called him, and Betty's shadow, and Betty's sticking plaster, because everywhere she went there was Davy just at her heels.
All the Appleton children were boys,--three younger and two older than Davy, whose last birthday cake should have had eight candles if there had been any celebration of the event.
But there never had been a birthday cake with candles on it on the Appleton table.
It would have been considered a foolish waste of time and money, and birthdays came and went sometimes, without the children knowing that they had passed.
Davy was a queer little fellow.
He tagged along after Betty, switching at the grass with a whip he carried, never saying a word after that first eager call for her to wait.
The two never tired of each other.
He was content to follow and ask no questions, for he had learned long ago to look twice before he spoke once.
As he caught up with her at the gate, he did not even ask where she was going, knowing that he would find out in due time if he only followed far enough.
He did not have to follow far to day.
Betty led the way across the road to a plain little wooden church, set back in a grove of cedar trees. Behind the church was a graveyard, where they often strolled on summer afternoons, through the tangle of grass and weeds and myrtle vines, to read the names on the tombstones and smell the pinks and lilies that struggled up year after year above the neglected mounds.
But that was not their errand to day.
A little red bookcase inside the church was the attraction.
It held all that was left of a scattered Sunday school library, that had been in use two generations before.
Queer little books they were, time yellowed and musty smelling, but to story loving little Betty, hungry for something new, they seemed a veritable gold mine.
She had found that no key barred her way into this little red treasure house of a bookcase, and a board propped against the wall under the window outside gave her an easy entrance into the church.
Here she came day after day, when her work was done, to pore over the musty old volumes of tales forgotten long ago.
In Betty's little room under the roof at home was a pile of handsomely bound books, lying on a chest beside her mother's Bible.
They were twelve in all, and had come in several different Christmas boxes, and each one had Betty's name on the fly leaf, with the date of the Christmas on which it happened to be sent.
Underneath was always written: "From your loving godmother, Elizabeth Lloyd Sherman."
Excepting a few school books and some out of date census reports, they were the only books in the Appleton house.
Betty guarded them like a little dragon.
They were the only things she owned that the children were not allowed to touch.
Even Davy, when he was permitted to look at the wonderful pictures in her "Arabian Nights," or "Pilgrim's Progress," or "Mother Goose," had to sit with his hands behind his back while she carefully turned the leaves.
Eugene Field's poems had come in the last box, with Riley's "Songs of Childhood" and Kipling's jungle tales. Twelve beautiful books, all of mrs Sherman's giving, and they were like twelve great windows to Betty, opening into a new strange world, far away from the experiences of her every day life.
The little dog eared books in the meeting house proved poor reading sometimes after such entertainment.
At the end there was always the word MORAL, in big capital letters, as if the readers were supposed to be too blind to find it for themselves, and it had to be put directly across the path for them to stumble over.
Betty laughed at them sometimes, but she touched the little books with reverent fingers, when she remembered how old they were, and how long ago their first childish readers laid them aside.
Many an afternoon she had spent, perched in the high window, with her feet drawn up under her on the sill, reading aloud to Davy, who lay outside on the grass, staring up at the sky.
Davy's short fat legs could not climb from the board to the window sill, and since this little Mahomet could not come to the mountain, Betty had to carry the mountain to him.
The reading was slow work sometimes.
Davy's mind, like his legs, could not climb as far as Betty's, and she usually had to stop at the bottom of every page to explain something.
Often he fell asleep in the middle of the most interesting part, and then Betty read on to herself, with nothing to break the stillness around her but the buzzing of the wasps, as they darted angrily in and out of the open window above her head.
Betty stopped reading to listen, and Davy sat up to look.
They might think it wasn't respectful."
"He's looking this way," said Davy, who had stood up for a better view, but squatted down again at Betty's command.
At that, Betty leaned so far out of the window that she nearly lost her balance and toppled over.
"Here you are," he said, riding alongside the window and dropping the letter into her eager hands.
If Jake expected her to tear it open instantly and share the news with him before she had examined every inch of the big square envelope, he was disappointed.
Then she spread the letter out on her knees, drawing a long breath of pleasure as the faintest odour of violets floated up from the paper with its dainty monogram at the top.
Davy waited in silence, watching a flush spread over Betty's face as she read.
Her breath came short and her heart beat fast.
"Oh, Davy," she exclaimed, in a low, wondering tone.
"What do you think? It is an invitation to a house party at Locust; Lloyd Sherman's house party.
I shall be there a whole month, and she knew my mamma and was her dearest friend.
Then he set aside his usual custom and asked a question.
"Why are you crying?" he demanded.
"Is there?" asked Betty, brushing it away with the back of her hand.
"I didn't know it.
Then she walked slowly down the narrow aisle of the little meeting house, between its double rows of narrow straight backed pews.
As she reached the bench like altar, extending in front of the pulpit, she slipped to her knees a moment.
"Thank you, God," came in a happy whisper from the depths of a glad little heart.
Then Betty stood up and put on her sunbonnet.
The next moment she had scrambled over the sill, pulled the window down after her, and walked down the slanting board to the ground.
Catching Davy by the hand, and swinging it back and forth as they ran, she went skipping across the road regardless of the dust.
Down the lane they went, between the rows of cherry trees; across the orchard and up the path.
Then the eunuchs went forth that they might perfume the Hammam for the brides; so they scented it with rosewater and willow flower water and pods of musk, and fumigated it with Kakili eaglewood and ambergris.
Their cheeks were rosy red, and their necks and shapes gracefully swayed, and their eyes wantoned like the gazelle's; and the slave girls came to meet them with instruments of music.
Then they attired Dunyazad in a dress of blue brocade, and she became as she were the full moon when it shineth forth.
Then they returned to Shahrazad and displayed her in the second dress, a suit of surpassing goodliness, and veiled her face with her hair like a chin veil.
Moreover, they let down her side locks, and she was even as saith of her one of her describers in these couplets:--
O hail to him whose locks his cheeks o'ershade, Who slew my life by cruel hard despight: Said I, "Hast veiled the Morn in Night?" He said, "Nay, I but veil the Moon in hue of Night."
Then they displayed Dunyazad in a second and a third and a fourth dress, and she paced forward like the rising sun, and swayed to and fro in the insolence of her beauty; and she was even as saith the poet of her in these couplets:--
Then they displayed Shahrazad in the third dress and the fourth and the fifth, and she became as she were a Ban branch snell of a thirsting gazelle, lovely of face and perfect in attributes of grace, even as saith of her one in these couplets:--
Thus also they did with her sister Dunyazad; and when they had made an end of the display, the King bestowed robes of honor on all who were present, and sent the brides to their own apartments.
The Minister kissed ground and prayed that they might be vouchsafed length of life: then he went in to his daughters, whilst the Eunuchs and Ushers walked before him, and saluted them and farewelled them.
So he entered the city, and they decorated the houses and it was a notable day.
So he bestowed on them robes of honor and entreated them with distinction, and they made him Sultan over them.
Then there reigned after them a wise ruler, who was just, keen witted, and accomplished, and loved tales and legends, especially those which chronicle the doings of Sovrans and Sultans, and he found in the treasury these marvelous stories and wondrous histories, contained in the thirty volumes aforesaid.
So he read in them a first book and a second and a third and so on to the last of them, and each book astounded and delighted him more than that which preceded it, till he came to the end of them.
Sometimes she used to feel as if it must be another life altogether, the life of some other child.
She was a little drudge and outcast; she was given her lessons at odd times and expected to learn without being taught; she was sent on errands by Miss Minchin, Miss Amelia and the cook.
Nobody took any notice of her except when they ordered her about.
She had never been intimate with the other pupils, and soon she became so shabby that, taking her queer clothes together with her queer little ways, they began to look upon her as a being of another world than their own.
The fact was that, as a rule, Miss Minchin's pupils were rather dull, matter of fact young people, accustomed to being rich and comfortable; and Sara, with her elfish cleverness, her desolate life, and her odd habit of fixing her eyes upon them and staring them out of countenance, was too much for them.
"I am," said Sara promptly, when she heard of it.
"That's what I look at them for.
I like to know about people.
I think them over afterward."
Sara thought Emily understood her feelings, though she was only wax and had a habit of staring herself.
Sara used to talk to her at night.
"You are the only friend I have in the world," she would say to her. "Why don't you say something?
Why don't you speak?
It ought to make you try, to know you are the only thing I have.
If I were you, I should try.
Why don't you try?"
It arose from her being so desolate.
She did not like to own to herself that her only friend, her only companion, could feel and hear nothing.
There were rat holes in the garret, and Sara detested rats, and was always glad Emily was with her when she heard their hateful squeak and rush and scratching.
One of her "pretends" was that Emily was a kind of good witch and could protect her.
Poor little Sara! everything was "pretend" with her.
She had a strong imagination; there was almost more imagination than there was Sara, and her whole forlorn, uncared for child life was made up of imaginings.
She imagined and pretended things until she almost believed them, and she would scarcely have been surprised at any remarkable thing that could have happened.
"As to answering," she used to say, "I don't answer very often.
I never answer when I can help it.
When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word-just to look at them and think.
Miss Minchin turns pale with rage when I do it.
Miss Amelia looks frightened, so do the girls.
They know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward.
There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in-that's stronger.
It's a good thing not to answer your enemies.
I scarcely ever do.
Perhaps Emily is more like me than I am like myself.
Perhaps she would rather not answer her friends, even.
She keeps it all in her heart."
But though she tried to satisfy herself with these arguments, Sara did not find it easy.
"I shall die presently!" she said at first.
Emily stared.
"I can't bear this!" said the poor child, trembling.
"I know I shall die.
I'm cold, I'm wet, I'm starving to death.
I've walked a thousand miles to day, and they have done nothing but scold me from morning until night.
Some men laughed at me because my old shoes made me slip down in the mud.
And they laughed!
Do you hear!"
She looked at the staring glass eyes and complacent wax face, and suddenly a sort of heartbroken rage seized her.
"Nothing but a doll doll doll!
You care for nothing.
You never had a heart.
Nothing could ever make you feel. You are a doll!"
Emily lay upon the floor, with her legs ignominiously doubled up over her head, and a new flat place on the end of her nose; but she was still calm, even dignified.
Sara hid her face on her arms and sobbed.
Some rats in the wall began to fight and bite each other, and squeak and scramble.
But, as I have already intimated, Sara was not in the habit of crying.
After a while she stopped, and when she stopped she looked at Emily, who seemed to be gazing at her around the side of one ankle, and actually with a kind of glassy eyed sympathy.
Sara bent and picked her up.
Remorse overtook her.
"You can't help being a doll," she said, with a resigned sigh, "any more than those girls downstairs can help not having any sense.
We are not all alike.
Perhaps you do your sawdust best."
None of Miss Minchin's young ladies were very remarkable for being brilliant; they were select, but some of them were very dull, and some of them were fond of applying themselves to their lessons.
If she had always had something to read, she would not have been so lonely.
She liked romances and history and poetry; she would read anything.
There was also a fat, dull pupil, whose name was Ermengarde saint John, who was one of her resources.
Sara had once actually found her crying over a big package of them.
"What is the matter with you?" she asked her, perhaps rather disdainfully.
"What is the matter with you?" she asked.
"My papa has sent me some more books," answered Ermengarde woefully, "and he expects me to read them."
"Don't you like reading?" said Sara.
"I hate it!" replied Miss Ermengarde saint John.
"And he will ask me questions when he sees me: he will want to know how much I remember; how would you like to have to read all those?"
"I'd like it better than anything else in the world," said Sara.
Ermengarde wiped her eyes to look at such a prodigy.
"Oh, gracious!" she exclaimed.
Sara returned the look with interest.
A sudden plan formed itself in her sharp mind.
"Look here!" she said.
"If you'll lend me those books, I'll read them and tell you everything that's in them afterward, and I'll tell it to you so that you will remember it.
I know I can.
The A B C children always remember what I tell them."
"Oh, goodness!" said Ermengarde.
"Do you think you could?"
"I like to read, and I always remember. I'll take care of the books, too; they will look just as new as they do now, when I give them back to you."
Ermengarde put her handkerchief in her pocket.
"If you'll do that," she said, "and if you'll make me remember, I'll give you-I'll give you some money."
"I don't want your money," said Sara.
"Take them, then," said Ermengarde; "I wish I wanted them, but I am not clever, and my father is, and he thinks I ought to be."
Sara picked up the books and marched off with them.
But when she was at the door, she stopped and turned around.
"What are you going to tell your father?" she asked.
Sara looked down at the books; her heart really began to beat fast.
"I won't do it," she said rather slowly, "if you are going to tell him lies about it-I don't like lies.
Why can't you tell him I read them and then told you about them?"
"But he wants me to read them," said Ermengarde.
"He would like it better if I read them myself," replied Ermengarde.
"He will like it, I dare say, if you learn anything in any way," said Sara.
"I should, if I were your father."
And though this was not a flattering way of stating the case, Ermengarde was obliged to admit it was true, and, after a little more argument, gave in.
And so she used afterward always to hand over her books to Sara, and Sara would carry them to her garret and devour them; and after she had read each volume, she would return it and tell Ermengarde about it in a way of her own.
She had a gift for making things interesting. Her imagination helped her to make everything rather like a story, and she managed this matter so well that Miss saint John gained more information from her books than she would have gained if she had read them three times over by her poor stupid little self.
"It sounds nicer than it seems in the book," she would say.
"I never cared about Mary, Queen of Scots, before, and I always hated the French Revolution, but you make it seem like a story."
"It is a story," Sara would answer.
"They are all stories.
Everything is a story-everything in this world.
You can make a story out of anything."
"I can't," said Ermengarde.
Sara stared at her a minute reflectively.
"I suppose you couldn't.
"Who is Emily?"
Sara recollected herself.
She knew she was sometimes rather impolite in the candor of her remarks, and she did not want to be impolite to a girl who was not unkind-only stupid.
In the hours she spent alone, she used to argue out a great many curious questions with herself.
One thing she had decided upon was, that a person who was clever ought to be clever enough not to be unjust or deliberately unkind to any one.
So she would be as polite as she could to people who in the least deserved politeness.
"Emily is-a person-I know," she replied.
"Do you like her?" asked Ermengarde.
"Yes, I do," said Sara.
Ermengarde examined her queer little face and figure again.
She did look odd.
And yet Ermengarde was beginning slowly to admire her.
One could not help staring at her and feeling interested, particularly one to whom the simplest lesson was a trouble and a woe.
"Do you like me?" said Ermengarde, finally, at the end of her scrutiny.
"I like you because you are not ill natured-I like you for letting me read your books-I like you because you don't make spiteful fun of me for what I can't help.
It's not your fault that-"
She pulled herself up quickly.
She had been going to say, "that you are stupid."
"That what?" asked Ermengarde.
"That you can't learn things quickly.
If you can't, you can't.
If I can, why, I can-that's all." She paused a minute, looking at the plump face before her, and then, rather slowly, one of her wise, old-fashioned thoughts came to her.
"Perhaps," she said, "to be able to learn things quickly isn't everything.
To be kind is worth a good deal to other people.
Lots of clever people have done harm and been wicked.
Look at Robespierre-"
She stopped again and examined her companion's countenance.
"Do you remember about him?" she demanded.
"I believe you've forgotten."
"Well, I don't remember all of it," admitted Ermengarde.
"Well," said Sara, with courage and determination, "I'll tell it to you over again."
And she plunged once more into the gory records of the French Revolution, and told such stories of it, and made such vivid pictures of its horrors, that Miss saint John was afraid to go to bed afterward, and hid her head under the blankets when she did go, and shivered until she fell asleep.
But afterward she preserved lively recollections of the character of Robespierre, and did not even forget Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe.
Yes, it was true; to this imaginative child everything was a story; and the more books she read, the more imaginative she became.
One of her chief entertainments was to sit in her garret, or walk about it, and "suppose" things.
On a cold night, when she had not had enough to eat, she would draw the red footstool up before the empty grate, and say in the most intense voice:
"Suppose there was a grate, wide steel grate here, and a great glowing fire-a glowing fire-with beds of red hot coal and lots of little dancing, flickering flames.
THE LION AND THE MOUSE
A Lion lay asleep in the forest, his great head resting on his paws.
A timid little Mouse came upon him unexpectedly, and in her fright and haste to get away, ran across the Lion's nose.
Roused from his nap, the Lion laid his huge paw angrily on the tiny creature to kill her.
"Please let me go and some day I will surely repay you."
The Lion was much amused to think that a Mouse could ever help him.
But he was generous and finally let the Mouse go.
Some days later, while stalking his prey in the forest, the Lion was caught in the toils of a hunter's net.
Unable to free himself, he filled the forest with his angry roaring.
Soon he found life in the pasture very dull.
All he could do to amuse himself was to talk to his dog or play on his shepherd's pipe.
One day as he sat watching the Sheep and the quiet forest, and thinking what he would do should he see a Wolf, he thought of a plan to amuse himself.
His Master had told him to call for help should a Wolf attack the flock, and the Villagers would drive it away.
So now, though he had not seen anything that even looked like a Wolf, he ran toward the village shouting at the top of his voice, "Wolf!
Wolf!"
As he expected, the Villagers who heard the cry dropped their work and ran in great excitement to the pasture.
But when they got there they found the Boy doubled up with laughter at the trick he had played on them.
A few days later the Shepherd Boy again shouted, "Wolf!
Wolf!" Again the Villagers ran to help him, only to be laughed at again.
Then one evening as the sun was setting behind the forest and the shadows were creeping out over the pasture, a Wolf really did spring from the underbrush and fall upon the Sheep.
In terror the Boy ran toward the village shouting "Wolf!
"He cannot fool us again," they said.
The Wolf killed a great many of the Boy's sheep and then slipped away into the forest.
But before he left he begged the Bull's pardon for having used his horn for a resting place.
"You must be very glad to have me go now," he said.
"It's all the same to me," replied the Bull.
"I did not even know you were there."
THE PLANE TREE
Two Travellers, walking in the noonday sun, sought the shade of a widespreading tree to rest.
As they lay looking up among the pleasant leaves, they saw that it was a Plane Tree.
"How useless is the Plane!" said one of them.
"It bears no fruit whatever, and only serves to litter the ground with leaves."
"Ungrateful creatures!" said a voice from the Plane Tree.
"You lie here in my cooling shade, and yet you say I am useless!
Thus ungratefully, O Jupiter, do men receive their blessings!"
THE WORSHIP OF FALSE GODS
And as far as I can see that it does this, I think the show right and helpful; and whenever it does not, I think it harmful and misleading.
The love of gardening has so greatly grown and spread within the last few years, that the need of really good and beautiful garden flowers is already far in advance of the demand for the so-called "florists" flowers, by which I mean those that find favour in the exclusive shows of Societies for the growing and exhibition of such flowers as Tulips, Carnations, Dahlias, and Chrysanthemums.
Looking at the catalogue of a leading Dahlia nursery, I find that the decorative kinds fill ten pages, while the show kinds, including Pompones, fill only three.
Already in the case of Carnations a better influence is being felt, and at the London shows there are now classes for border Carnations set up in long stalked bunches just as they grow.
It is only like this that their value as outdoor plants can be tested; for many of the show sorts have miserably weak stalks, and a very poor, lanky habit of growth.
Then the poor Pansies have single blooms laid flat on white papers, and are only approved if they will lie quite flat and show an outline of a perfect circle.
All that is most beautiful in a Pansy, the wing like curves, the waved or slightly fluted radiations, the scarcely perceptible undulation of surface that displays to perfection the admirable delicacy of velvety texture; all the little tender tricks and ways that make the Pansy one of the best loved of garden flowers; all this is overlooked, and not only passively overlooked, but overtly contemned.
The show pansy judge appears to have no eye, or brain, or heart, but to have in their place a pair of compasses with which to describe a circle!
All idea of garden delight seems to be excluded, as this kind of judging appeals to no recognition of beauty for beauty's sake, but to hard systems of measurement and rigid arrangement and computation that one would think more applicable to astronomy or geometry than to any matter relating to horticulture.
I do most strongly urge that beauty of the highest class should be the aim, and not anything of the nature of fashion or "fancy," and that every effort should be made towards the raising rather than the lowering of the standard of taste.
They spring up sheaf wise, straight upright for a time, and only bending a little outwards above, to give room for the branching heads of bloom.
The stems are rather stiff, because they are half woody at the base.
I have never seen anything so ugly in the way of potted plants as a certain kind of Chrysanthemum that has incurved flowers of a heavy sort of dull leaden looking red purple colour trained in this manner.
Such a sight gives me a feeling of shame, not unmixed with wrathful indignation.
I ask myself, What is it for? and I get no answer.
I look again at the unhappy plant, and see its poor leaves fat with an unwholesome obesity, and seeming to say, We were really a good bit mildewed, but have been doctored up for the show by being crammed and stuffed with artificial aliment!
But the show decrees that all this is wrong, and that the tiny, brittle branches must be trained stiffly round till the shape of the plant shows as a sort of cylinder.
Again I ask myself, What is this for?
What does it teach?
Can it be really to teach with deliberate intention that instead of displaying its natural and graceful tree form it should aim at a more desirable kind of beauty, such as that of the chimney pot or drain pipe, and that this is so important that it is right and laudable to devote to it much time and delicate workmanship?
I cannot but think, as well as hope, that the strong influences for good that are now being brought to bear on all departments of gardening may reach this class of show, for there are already more hopeful signs in the admission of classes for groups arranged for decoration.
It is, therefore, thrown out, not because they have any fault to find with it, but because it does not concern them; and the ordinary gardener, to whose practice it might be of the highest value, accepting the verdict of the show judge as an infallible guide, also treats it with contempt and neglect.
CHAPTER twenty one
NOVELTY AND VARIETY
When I look back over thirty years of gardening, I see what an extraordinary progress there has been, not only in the introduction of good plants new to general cultivation, but also in the home production of improved kinds of old favourites.
In annual plants alone there has been a remarkable advance.
And here again, though many really beautiful things are being brought forward, there seems always to be an undue value assigned to a fresh development, on the score of its novelty.
Now it seems to me, that among the thousands of beautiful things already at hand for garden use, there is no merit whatever in novelty or variety unless the thing new or different is distinctly more beautiful, or in some such way better than an older thing of the same class.
And there seems to be a general wish among seed growers just now to dwarf all annual plants.
Now, when a plant is naturally of a diffuse habit, the fixing of a dwarfer variety may be a distinct gain to horticulture-it may just make a good garden plant out of one that was formerly of indifferent quality; but there seems to me to be a kind of stupidity in inferring from this that all annuals are the better for dwarfing.
I take it that the bedding system has had a good deal to do with it.
It no doubt enables ignorant gardeners to use a larger variety of plants as senseless colour masses, but it is obvious that many, if not most, of the plants are individually made much uglier by the process.
Take, for example, one of the dwarfest Ageratums: what a silly little dumpy, formless, pincushion of a thing it is!
And then the dwarfest of the China Asters.
Here is a plant (whose chief weakness already lies in a certain over stiffness) made stiffer and more shapeless still by dwarfing and by cramming with too many petals.
The Comet Asters of later years are a much improved type of flower, with a looser shape and a certain degree of approach to grace and beauty.
When this kind came out it was a noteworthy novelty, not because it was a novelty, but because it was a better and more beautiful thing.
It is quite true that here and there the dwarf kind is a distinctly useful thing, as in the dwarf Nasturtiums.
In this grand plant one is glad to have dwarf ones as well as the old trailing kinds.
I also look at them as a little floral joke that is harmless and not displeasing, but they cannot for a moment compare in beauty with the free growing Snapdragon of the older type.
This I always think one of the best and most interesting and admirable of garden plants.
Its beauty is lost if it is crowded up among other things in a border; it should be grown in a dry wall or steep rocky bank, where its handsome bushy growth and finely poised spikes of bloom can be well seen.
I was fortunate enough to get some seed, and have never grown any other, nor have I ever seen elsewhere any that I think can compare with it.
The Zinnia is another fine annual that has been much spoilt by its would be improvers.
When a Zinnia has a hard, stiff, tall flower, with a great many rows of petals piled up one on top of another, and when its habit is dwarfed to a mean degree of squatness, it looks to me both ugly and absurd, whereas a reasonably double one, well branched, and two feet high, is a handsome plant.
I also think that Stocks and Wallflowers are much handsomer when rather tall and branching.
Dwarf Stocks, moreover, are invariably spattered with soil in heavy autumn rain.
The improver has sought to increase the width of the red ring.
Up to a certain point it makes a livelier and brighter looking flower; but he has gone too far, and extended the red till it has become a red flower with a narrow yellow edge.
The red also is of a rather dull and heavy nature, so that instead of a handsome yellow flower with a broad central ring, here is an ugly red one with a yellow border.
No annual plant has of late years been so much improved as the Sweet Pea, and one reason why its charming beauty and scent are so enjoyable is, that they grow tall, and can be seen on a level with the eye.
And all this parade of distortion and deformity comes about from the grower losing sight of beauty as the first consideration, or from his not having the knowledge that would enable him to determine what are the points of character in various plants most deserving of development, and in not knowing when or where to stop.
Abnormal size, whether greatly above or much below the average, appeals to the vulgar and uneducated eye, and will always command its attention and wonderment.
But then the production of the immense size that provokes astonishment, and the misapplied ingenuity that produces unusual dwarfing, are neither of them very high aims.
Chapter eighteen
He had professed to himself that his reason for not going there was the non performance of the commission which Lady Ongar had given him with reference to Count Pateroff.
He had not yet succeeded in catching the Count, though he had twice asked for him in Mount Street and twice at the club in Pall Mall. It appeared that the Count never went to Mount Street, and was very rarely seen at the club.
There was some other club which he frequented, and Harry did not know what club.
On both the occasions of Harry's calling in Mount Street, the servant had asked him to go up and see madame; but he had declined to do so, pleading that he was hurried.
He was, however, driven to resolve that he must go direct to Sophie, as otherwise he could find no means of doing as he had promised.
She probably might put him on the scent of her brother.
But there had been another reason why Harry had not gone to Bolton Street, though he had not acknowledged it to himself.
He feared that he would be led on to betray himself and to betray Florence-to throw himself at Julia's feet and sacrifice his honesty, in spite of all his resolutions to the contrary.
He felt when there as the accustomed but repentant dram drinker might feel, when, having resolved to abstain, he is called upon to sit with the full glass offered before his lips.
He was wretched at this time-ill satisfied with himself and others-and was no fitting companion for Cecilia Burton.
The world, he thought, had used him ill.
It was not for her money that he had regarded her.
Had he been now a free man-free from those chains with which he had fettered himself at Stratton-he would again have asked this woman for her love, in spite of her past treachery; but it would have been for her love, and not for her money, that he would have sought her.
Was it his fault that he had loved her, that she had been false to him, and that she had now come back and thrown herself before him?
The world had been very cruel to him, and he could not go to Onslow Crescent, and behave there prettily, hearing the praises of Florence with all the ardor of a discreet lover.
Let him but once communicate to Lady Ongar the fact of his engagement, and the danger would be over, though much, perhaps, of the misery might remain.
Let him write to her, and mention the fact, bringing it up as some little immaterial accident, and she would understand what he meant.
But this he abstained from doing.
Though he swore to himself that he would not touch the dram, he would not dash down the full glass that was held to his lips.
He went about the town very wretchedly, looking for the Count, and regarding himself as a man specially marked out for sorrow by the cruel hand of misfortune.
Lady Ongar, in the meantime, was expecting him, and was waxing angry and becoming bitter toward him because he came not.
Sir Hugh was a man who strained an income, that was handsome and sufficient for a country gentleman, to the very utmost, wanting to get out of it more than it could be made to give.
He was not a man to be in debt, or indulge himself with present pleasures to be paid for out of the funds of future years.
He was possessed of a worldly wisdom which kept him from that folly, and taught him to appreciate fully the value of independence.
He had a great eye to discount, and looked closely into his bills.
He searched for cheap shops; and some men began to say of him that he had found a cheap establishment for such wines as he did not drink himself!
In playing cards and in betting, he was very careful, never playing high, never risking much, but hoping to turn something by the end of the year, and angry with himself if he had not done so.
An unamiable man he was, but one whose heir would probably not quarrel with him-if only he would die soon enough.
He had always had a house in town-a moderate house in Berkeley Square, which belonged to him, and had belonged to his father before him.
Lady Clavering had usually lived there during the season; or, as had latterly been the case, during only a part of the season.
The arrangement would make the difference of considerably more than a thousand a year to him.
For himself, he would take lodgings.
But why keep up a house in Berkeley Square, as Lady Clavering did not use it?
He was partly driven to this by a desire to shake off the burden of his brother.
When Archie chose to go to Clavering, the house was open to him.
That was the necessity of Sir Hugh's position, and he could not avoid it unless he made it worth his while to quarrel with his brother. Archie was obedient, ringing the bell when he was told, looking after the horses, spying about, and perhaps saving as much money as he cost. But the matter was very different in Berkeley Square.
And yet, from his boyhood upward, Archie had made good his footing in Berkeley Square.
In the matter of the breakfast, Sir Hugh had indeed, of late, got the better of him.
But there was Archie's room, and Sir Hugh felt this to be a hardship.
The present was not the moment for actually driving forth the intruder, for Archie was now up in London, especially under his brother's auspices.
And if the business on which Captain Clavering was now intent could be brought to a successful issue, the standing in the world of that young man would be very much altered.
Then he would be a brother of whom Sir Hugh might be proud-a brother who would pay his way, and settle his points at whist if he lost them, even to a brother.
If Archie could induce Lady Ongar to marry him, he would not be called upon any longer to ring the bells and look after the stable.
He would have bells of his own, and stables, too, and perhaps some captain of his own to ring them and look after them.
The expulsion, therefore, was not to take place till Archie should have made his attempt upon Lady Ongar.
But Sir Hugh would admit of no delay, whereas Archie himself seemed to think that the iron was not yet quite hot enough for striking.
It would be better, he had suggested, to postpone the work till Julia could be coaxed down to Clavering in the Autumn.
He could do the work better, he thought; down at Clavering than in London.
But Sir Hugh was altogether of a different opinion.
Though he had already asked his sister in law to Clavering, when the idea had first come up, he was glad that she had declined the visit.
Her coming might be very well, if she accepted Archie; but he did not want to be troubled with any renewal of his responsibility respecting her, if, as was more probable, she should reject him.
The world still looked askance at Lady Ongar, and Hugh did not wish to take up the armor of a paladin in her favor.
If Archie married her, Archie would be the paladin; though, indeed, in that case, no paladin would be needed.
"She has only been a widow, you know, four months," said Archie, pleading for delay.
"It won't be delicate, will it?"
"Delicate!" said Sir Hugh.
"I don't know whether there is much of delicacy in it at all."
If you were to die, you'd think it very odd if any fellow came up to Hermy before the season was over.
"Archie, you are a fool," said Sir Hugh; and Archie could see, by his brother's brow, that Hugh was angry.
"You say things that, for folly and absurdity, are beyond belief.
"She is peculiar, of course-having so much money, and that place near Guilford, all her own for her life.
Of course it's peculiar.
"If it had been four days it need have made no difference.
A home, with some one to support her, is everything to her.
If you wait till lots of fellows are buzzing around her you won't have a chance.
You'll find that by this time next year she'll be the top of the fashion; and if not engaged to you, she will be to some one else.
You have this great advantage over every one, except him, that you can go to her at once without doing anything out of the way.
That girl that Harry has in tow may perhaps keep him away for some time."
"I tell you what, Hugh, you might as well call with me the first time."
"So that I may quarrel with her, which I certainly should do-or, rather, she with me.
No, Archie; if you're afraid to go alone, you'd better give it up."
I'm not afraid!"
"She can't eat you.
She knows what she is about, and will understand what she has to get as well as what she is expected to give.
It couldn't be done, I suppose, till after a year; and in that case she shall be married at Clavering."
Here was a prospect for Julia Brabazon-to be led to the same altar, at which she had married Lord Ongar, by Archie Clavering, twelve month's after her first husband's death, and little more than two years after her first wedding!
"Because I shouldn't like-"
Judge not, that you be not judged."
"Yes, that's true, to be sure," said Archie; and on that point he went forth satisfied.
CHAPTER nine
Two days afterwards, Elinor came to summon her to the drawing room.
Elinor, when she had formed a wish, never listened to an objection. 'What an old fashioned style you prose in!' she cried; 'who could believe you came so lately from France?
But example has no more force without sympathy, than precept had without opinion!
However, I'll get you a licence from Aunt Maple in a minute.'
She went down stairs, and, returning almost immediately, cried, 'Aunt Maple is quite contented.
I have ample business upon my hands, between my companions of the buskin, and this pragmatical old aunt; for Harleigh himself refused to act against her approbation, till I threatened to make over Lord Townly to Sir Lyell Sycamore, a smart beau at Brighthelmstone, that all the mammas and aunts are afraid of.
And then poor aunty was fain, herself, to request Harleigh to take the part.
I could manage matters no other way.'
Personal remonstrances were vain, and the stranger was forced down stairs to the theatrical group.
She requested to have the book of the play; but Elinor, engaged in arranging the entrances and exits, did not heed her.
Harleigh, however, comprehending the relief which any occupation for the eyes and hands might afford her, presented it to her himself.
It preserved her not, nevertheless, from a volley of questions, with which she was instantly assailed from various quarters.
'I find Ma'am, you are lately come from abroad,' said Mr Scope, a gentleman self dubbed a deep politician, and who, in the most sententious manner, uttered the most trivial observations: 'I have no very high notion, I own, of the morals of those foreigners at this period.
A man's wife and daughters belong to any man who has a taste to them, as I am informed.
Nothing is very strict.
'But I should like to know,' cried Gooch, the young farmer, 'whether it be true, of a reality, that they've got such numbers and numbers, and millions and millions of red coats there, all made into generals, in the twinkling, as one may say, of an eye?'
Pray who were your masters?'
While the Incognita hesitated, Miss Bydel, a collateral and uneducated successor to a large and unexpected fortune, said, 'Pray, first of all, young woman, what took you over to foreign parts?
I should like to know that.'
Elinor, now, being ready, cut short all further investigation by beginning the rehearsal.
During the first scenes, the voice of the Incognita was hardly audible. The constraint of her forced attendance, and the insurmountable awkwardness of her situation, made all exertion difficult, and her tones were so languid, and her pronunciation was so inarticulate, that Elinor began seriously to believe that she must still have recourse to Mr Creek.
Every one else, absorbed in his part and himself, in the hope of being best, or the shame of being worst; in the fear of being out, or the confusion of not understanding what next was to be done, was regardless of all else but his own fancied reputation of the hour.
Harleigh, however, as the play proceeded, and the inaccuracy of the performers demanded greater aid, found the patience of his judgment recompensed, and its appreciation of her talents just.
Her voice, from seeming feeble and monotonous, became clear and penetrating: it was varied, with the nicest discrimination, for the expression of every character, changing its modulation from tones of softest sensibility, to those of archest humour; and from reasoning severity, to those of uncultured rusticity.
The stranger stood still.
'In the first place, tell me, if you please, what's your name?'
The Incognita coloured at this abrupt demand, but remained silent.
'Nay,' said Miss Bydel, 'your name, at least, can be no such great secret, for you must be called something or other.'
Ireton, who had hitherto appeared decided not to take any notice of her, now exclaimed, with a laugh, 'I will tell you what her name is, Miss Bydel; 'tis l s'
The stranger dropt her eyes, but Miss Bydel, not comprehending that Ireton meant two initial letters, said.
Selina, tittering, would have cleared up the mistake; but Ireton, laughing yet more heartily, made her a sign to let it pass.
'Don't let that young person go,' cried Miss Arbe, who had now finished the labours of her theatrical presidency, 'till I have heard her play and sing.
If she is so clever, as you describe her, she shall perform between the acts.'
The stranger declared her utter inability to comply with such a request.
She opened it, and found ten bank notes, of ten pounds each.
She was surprised, soon afterwards, by the sight of Selina. 'I would not let Mr Ireton hinder me from coming to you this once,' she cried, 'do what he could; for we are all in such a fidget, that there's only you, I really believe, can help us.
The stranger answered that she should gladly be useful in any way that could be proposed.
The book, therefore, was brought to her, with writing implements, and she dedicated herself so diligently to copying, that the following morning, when Miss Arbe was expected, the part was prepared.
Miss Arbe, however, came not; a note arrived in her stead, stating that she had been so exceedingly fatigued the preceding day, in giving so many directions, that she begged they would let somebody read her part, and rehearse without her; and she hoped that she should find them more advanced when she joined them on Monday.
The stranger was now summoned not only as prompter, but to read the part of Lady Townly.
She could not refuse, but her compliance was without any sort of exertion, from a desire to avoid, not promote similar calls for exhibition.
Elinor remarked to Harleigh, how inadequate were her talents to such a character.
Elinor herself, now, would only call the stranger Miss Ellis, a name which, she said, she verily believed that Miss Bydel, with all her stupidity, had hit upon, and which therefore, henceforth, should be adopted.
"So I understand you wish me to go down at once?" said Louis Craven. "This is Friday-say Monday?"
Wharton nodded.
Their hostess and Edith Craven had escaped through the door in the back kitchen communicating with the Hurds' tenement, so that the two men might be left alone a while.
Wharton, whose tendency in matters of business was always to go rather further than he had meant to go, for the sake generally of making an impression on the man with whom he was dealing, had spoken of a two years' engagement, and had offered two hundred a year.
So far as that went, Craven was abundantly satisfied.
He fixed his penetrating greenish eyes on his companion.
Louis Craven was now a tall man with narrow shoulders, a fine oval head and face, delicate features, and a nervous look of short sight, producing in appearance and manner a general impression of thin grace and of a courtesy which was apt to pass unaccountably into sarcasm.
Wharton had never felt himself personally at ease with him, either now, or in the old days of Venturist debates.
"Certainly, we shall fight it through," Wharton replied, with emphasis-"I have gone through the secretary's statement, which I now hand over to you, and I never saw a clearer case.
The poor wretches have been skinned too long; it is high time the public backed them up.
There are two of the masters in the House.
Denny, I should say, belonged quite to the worst type of employer going."
He spoke with light venom, buttoning his coat as he spoke with the air of the busy public man who must not linger over an appointment.
"Oh! Denny!" said Craven, musing; "yes, Denny is a hard man, but a just one according to his lights.
There are plenty worse than he."
Wharton was disagreeably reminded of the Venturist habit of never accepting anything that was said quite as it stood-of not, even in small things, "swearing to the words" of anybody.
He was conscious of the quick passing feeling that his judgment, with regard to Denny, ought to have been enough for Craven.
"One thing more," said Craven suddenly, as Wharton looked for his stick-"you see there is talk of arbitration."
"Oh yes, I know!" said Wharton impatiently; "a mere blind.
The men have been done by it twice before.
They get some big wig from the neighbourhood-not in the trade, indeed, but next door to it-and, of course, the award goes against the men."
"Then the paper will not back arbitration?"
Craven took out a note book.
"No!--The quarrel itself is as plain as a pikestaff.
The men are asking for a mere pittance, and must get it if they are to live.
It's like all these home industries, abominably ground down.
We must go for them!
I mean to go for them hot and strong.
Poor devils!
did you read the evidence in that Bluebook last year?
Arbitration?
no, indeed! let them live first!"
Craven looked up absently.
"And I think," he said, "you gave me mr Thorpe's address?" mr Thorpe was the secretary.
Again Wharton gulped down his annoyance.
If he chose to be expansive, it was not for Craven to take no notice.
Craven, however, except in print, where he could be as vehement as anybody else, never spoke but in the driest way of those workman's grievances, which in reality burnt at the man's heart.
Wharton repeated the address, following it up by some rather curt directions as to the length and date of articles, to which Craven gave the minutest attention.
"May we come in?" said Marcella's voice.
"Business is up and I am off!"
He took up his hat as he spoke.
Tea is just coming, without which no guest departs," said Marcella, taking as she spoke a little tray from the red haired Daisy who followed her, and motioning to the child to bring the tea table.
Wharton looked at her irresolute.
But now that she was on the scene again, he did not find it so easy to go away.
How astonishingly beautiful she was, even in this disguise!
She wore her nurse's dress; for her second daily round began at half past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a chair beside her.
The dress was plain brown holland, with collar and armlets of white linen; but, to Wharton's eye, the dark Italian head, and the long slenderness of form had never shown more finely.
He hesitated and stayed.
He nodded and smiled, and she went back to the tea table with an eye all gaiety, pleased with herself and everybody else.
The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough.
Wharton sat among the little group, far too clever to patronise a cat, let alone a Venturist, but none the less master and conscious master of the occasion, because it suited him to take the airs of equality.
Craven said little, but as he lounged in Marcella's long cane chair with his arms behind his head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented; and Marcella talked and laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose plots for improving the universe have at least temporarily succeeded. Or did it betray, perhaps, a woman's secret consciousness of some presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others?
"Well then, Friday," said Wharton at last, when his time was more than spent.--"You must be there early, for there will be a crush.
Miss Craven comes too?
Excellent!
I will tell the doorkeeper to look out for you. Good bye!--good bye!"
And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Cravens, and one more keen glance, first at Marcella and then round the little workman's room in which they had been sitting, he went.
He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother, who must have passed him on the stairs, appeared.
"Well-any news?" he said, as Marcella found him a chair.
"All right!" said Louis, whose manner had entirely changed since Wharton had left the room.
"I am to go down on Monday to report the Damesley strike that is to be.
A month's trial, and then a salary-two hundred a year.
Oh! it'll do."
He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide his pleasure.
But in spite of him it transformed every line of the pinched and worn face.
"And you and Anna will walk to the Registry Office next week?" said Anthony, sourly, as he took his tea.
"It can't be next week," said Edith Craven's quiet voice, interposing. "Anna's got to work out her shirt making time.
And she was to have a month at each."
Marcella's lifted eyebrows asked for explanations.
Louis explained that Anna was exploring various sweated trades for the benefit of an East End newspaper.
She had earned fourteen shillings her last week at tailoring, but the feat had exhausted her so much that he had been obliged to insist on two or three days respite before moving on to shirts.
Shirts were now brisk, and the hours appallingly long in this heat.
"It was on shirts they made acquaintance," said Edith pensively.
"Louis was lodging on the second floor, she in the third floor back, and they used to pass on the stairs.
One day she heard him imploring the little slavey to put some buttons on his shirts.
When he'd gone out, Anna came downstairs, calmly demanded his shirts, and, having the slavey under her thumb, got them, walked off with them, and mended them all.
When Louis came home he discovered a neat heap reposing on his table.
Of course he wept-whatever he may say.
But next morning Miss Anna found her shoes outside her door, blacked as they had never been blacked before, with a note inside one of them.
Affecting! wasn't it?
Thenceforward, as long as they remained in those lodgings, Anna mended and Louis blacked. Naturally, Anthony and I drew our conclusions."
Marcella laughed.
"You must bring her to see me," she said to Louis.
"I will," said Louis, with some perplexity; "if I can get hold of her. But when she isn't stitching she's writing, or trying to set up Unions. She does the work of six.
Oh! we shall swim!"
Anthony surveyed his radiant aspect-so unlike the gentle or satirical detachment which made his ordinary manner-with a darkening eye, as though annoyed by his effusion.
"Two hundred a year?" he said slowly; "about what mr Harry Wharton spends on his clothes, I should think.
The Labour men tell me he is superb in that line.
"Never mind," said Louis recklessly.
"No; by Heaven, you shan't be!" said Anthony, with a fierce change of tone.
I don't know how I'm to put up with it.
You know very well what I think of him, and of your becoming dependent on him."
Marcella gave an angry start.
Louis protested.
"Nonsense!" said Anthony doggedly; "you'll have to bear it from me, I tell you-unless you muzzle me too with an Anna."
"I think you know that I owe mr Wharton a debt.
Please remember it!"
Anthony looked at her an instant in silence.
A question crossed his mind concerning her.
"I am dumb," he said.
"My manners, you perceive, are what they always were."
"What do you mean by such a remark," cried Marcella, fuming.
"How can a man who has reached the position he has in so short a time-in so many different worlds-be disposed of by calling him an ugly name?
It is more than unjust-it is absurd!
Besides, what can you know of him?"
"You forget," said Anthony, as he calmly helped himself to more bread and butter, "that it is some three years since Master Harry Wharton joined the Venturists and began to be heard of at all.
I watched his beginnings, and if I didn't know him well, my friends and Louis's did. And most of them-as he knows!--have pretty strong opinions by now about the man."
"Come, come, Anthony!" said Louis, "nobody expects a man of that type to be the pure eyed patriot.
Am I asked to take him to my bosom?
Not at all! He proposes a job to me, and offers to pay me.
I like the job, and mean to use him and his paper, both to earn some money that I want, and do a bit of decent work."
She saw nothing in his attack on Wharton, except personal prejudice and ill will.
"Suppose we leave mr Wharton alone?" she said with emphasis, and Anthony, making her a little proud gesture of submission, threw himself back in his chair, and was silent.
It had soon become evident to Marcella, upon the renewal of her friendship with the Cravens, that Anthony's temper towards all men, especially towards social reformers and politicians, had developed into a mere impotent bitterness.
While Louis had renounced his art, and devoted himself to journalism, unpaid public work and starvation, that he might so throw himself the more directly into the Socialist battle, Anthony had remained an artist, mainly employed as before in decorative design.
Only what with Louis was an intoxication of hope, was on the whole with Anthony a counsel of despair.
He loathed wealth more passionately than ever; but he believed less in the working man, less in his kind.
Rich men must cease to exist; but the world on any terms would probably remain a sorry spot.
Anthony Craven thought out the story for himself, finding it a fit food for a caustic temper.
Poor devil-the lover!
To fall a victim to enthusiasms so raw, so unprofitable from any point of view, was hard. And as to this move to London, he thought he foresaw the certain end of it.
At any rate he believed in her no more than before.
But her beauty was more marked than ever, and would, of course, be the dominant factor in her fate.
He was thankful, at any rate, that Louis in this two years' interval had finally transferred his heart elsewhere.
"I told you.
I am to investigate, report, and back up the Damesley strike, or rather the strike that begins at Damesley next week."
"No chance!" said Anthony shortly, "the masters are too strong.
He had lately joined the Venturists.
Anthony had taken a fancy to him.
Louis as yet knew little or nothing of him.
"Ah, well!" he said, in reply to his brother, "I don't know.
"Bunkum!" interrupted Anthony drily; "pure bunkum!
At this both Marcella and Louis laughed out.
Extravagance after a certain point becomes amusing.
They dropped their vexation, and Anthony for the next ten minutes had to submit to the part of the fractious person whom one humours but does not argue with.
He accepted the part, saying little, his eager, feverish eyes, full of hostility, glancing from one to the other.
However, at the end, Marcella bade him a perfectly friendly farewell.
It was always in her mind that Anthony Craven was lame and solitary, and her pity no less than her respect for him had long since yielded him the right to be rude.
There is a parish doctor who calls me 'my good woman,' and a sanitary inspector who tells me to go to him whenever I want advice. Those are my chief grievances, I think."
"And you are as much in love with the poor as ever?"
She stiffened at the note of sarcasm, and a retaliatory impulse made her say:--
"I see a great deal more happiness than I expected."
He laughed.
"How like a woman!
A few ill housed villagers made you a democrat.
A few well paid London artisans will carry you safely back to your class.
Your people were wise to let you take this work."
She stood resting both hands on a little table behind her, in an attitude touched with the wild freedom which best became her, a gleam of storm in her great eyes.
"Why are you still a Venturist?" he asked her abruptly.
"Because I have every right to be!
I joined a society, pledged to work 'for a better future.' According to my lights, I do what poor work I can in that spirit."
She hesitated, looking at him steadily.
"No!--so far as Socialism means a political system-the trampling out of private enterprise and competition, and all the rest of it-I find myself slipping away from it more and more.
No!--as I go about among these wage earners, the emphasis-do what I will-comes to lie less and less on possession-more and more on character.
I go to two tenements in the same building.
One is Hell-the other Heaven.
Why?
Both belong to well paid artisans with equal opportunities.
Both, so far as I can see, might have a decent and pleasant life of it.
But one is a man-the other, with all his belongings, will soon be a vagabond.
That is not all, I know-oh! don't trouble to tell me so!--but it is more than I thought.
No!--my sympathies in this district where I work are not so much with the Socialists that I know here-saving your presence! but-with the people, for instance, that slave at Charity Organisation! and get all the abuse from all sides."
Anthony laughed scornfully.
"It is always the way with a woman," he said; "she invariably prefers the tinkers to the reformers."
"And as to your Socialism," she went on, unheeding, the thought of many days finding defiant expression-"it seems to me like all other interesting and important things-destined to help something else! Christianity begins with the poor and division of goods-it becomes the great bulwark of property and the feudal state.
The Crusades-they set out to recover the tomb of the Lord!--what they did was to increase trade and knowledge.
And so with Socialism.
Anthony clapped her ironically.
"Excellent!
When the Liberty and Property Defence people have got hold of you-ask me to come and hear!"
Meanwhile, Louis stood behind, with his hands on his sides, a smile in his blinking eyes.
He really had a contempt for what a handsome half taught girl of twenty three might think.
Anthony only pretended or desired to have it.
Nevertheless, Louis said good bye to his hostess with real, and, for him, rare effusion.
Two years before, for the space of some months, he had been in love with her.
That she had never responded with anything warmer than liking and comradeship he knew; and his Anna now possessed him wholly.
And now, so kindly, so eagerly!--she had given him his Anna.
When they were all gone Marcella threw herself into her chair a moment to think.
But Louis's thanks had filled her with delicious pleasure.
Her cheek, her eye had a child's brightness.
The old passion for ruling and influencing was all alive and happy.
"I will look after them."
How changed he was, yet how much the same!
He had not sat beside her for ten minutes before each was once more vividly, specially conscious of the other.
She felt in him the old life and daring, the old imperious claim to confidence, to intimacy-on the other hand a new atmosphere, a new gravity, which suggested growing responsibilities, the difficulties of power, a great position-everything fitted to touch such an imagination as Marcella's, which, whatever its faults, was noble, both in quality and range.
Altogether, to have met him again was pleasure; to think of him was pleasure; to look forward to hearing him speak in Parliament was pleasure; so too was his new connection with her old friends.
And a pleasure which took nothing from self respect; which was open, honourable, eager.
Otherwise friends they would and should be; and the personal interest in his public career should lift her out of the cramping influences that flow from the perpetual commerce of poverty and suffering.
Why not?
Such equal friendships between men and women grow more possible every day.
While, as for Hallin's distrust, and Anthony Craven's jealous hostility, why should a third person be bound by either of them?
Could any one suppose that such a temperament as Wharton's would be congenial to Hallin or to Craven-or-to yet another person, of whom she did not want to think?
Besides, who wished to make a hero of him?
It was the very complexity and puzzle of the character that made its force.
So with a reddened cheek, she lost herself a few minutes in this pleasant sense of a new wealth in life; and was only roused from the dreamy running to and fro of thought by the appearance of Minta, who came to clear away the tea.
"Why, it is close on the half hour!" cried Marcella, springing up. "Where are my things?"
She looked down the notes of her cases, satisfied herself that her bag contained all she wanted, and then hastily tied on her bonnet and cloak.
Suddenly-the room was empty, for Minta had just gone away with the tea-by a kind of subtle reaction, the face in that photograph on Hallin's table flashed into her mind-its look-the grizzled hair.
With an uncontrollable pang of pain she dropped her hands from the fastenings of her cloak, and wrung them together in front of her-a dumb gesture of contrition and of grief.
Something belittling and withering swept over all her estimate of herself, all her pleasant self conceit.
THE ENCHANTED STAG
One day the boy took his sister's hand, and said to her, "Dear little sister, since our mother died we have not had one happy hour.
Our stepmother gives us dry hard crusts for dinner and supper; she often knocks us about, and threatens to kick us out of the house.
Even the little dogs under the table fare better than we do, for she often throws them nice pieces to eat.
Heaven pity us!
Come, let us go out into the wide world!"
So they went out, and wandered over fields and meadows the whole day till evening.
At last they found themselves in a large forest; it began to rain, and the little sister said, "See, brother, heaven and our hearts weep together." At last, tired out with hunger and sorrow, and the long journey, they crept into a hollow tree, laid themselves down, and slept till morning.
When they awoke the sun was high in the heavens, and shone brightly into the hollow tree, so they left their place of shelter and wandered away in search of water.
"Oh, I am so thirsty!" said the boy.
"If we could only find a brook or a stream." He stopped to listen, and said, "Stay, I think I hear a running stream." So he took his sister by the hand, and they ran together to find it.
She had seen the children go away, and, following them cautiously like a snake, had bewitched all the springs and streams in the forest.
The pleasant trickling of a brook over the pebbles was heard by the children as they reached it, and the boy was just stooping to drink, when the sister heard in the babbling of the brook:
"Whoever drinks of me, a tiger soon will be."
Then she cried quickly, "Stay, brother, stay! do not drink, or you will become a wild beast, and tear me to pieces."
Thirsty as he was, the brother conquered his desire to drink at her words, and said, "Dear sister, I will wait till we come to a spring." So they wandered farther, but as they approached, she heard in the bubbling spring the words-
"Who drinks of me, a wolf will be."
"Brother, I pray you, do not drink of this brook; you will be changed into a wolf, and devour me."
Again the brother denied himself and promised to wait; but he said, "At the next stream I must drink, say what you will, my thirst is so great."
Not far off ran a pretty streamlet, looking clear and bright; but here also in its murmuring waters, the sister heard the words-
"Who dares to drink of me, Turned to a stag will be."
"Dear brother, do not drink," she began; but she was too late, for her brother had already knelt by the stream to drink, and as the first drop of water touched his lips he became a fawn.
How the little sister wept over the enchanted brother, and the fawn wept also.
Every morning she went out to gather dried roots, nuts, and berries, for her own food, and sweet fresh grass for the fawn, which he ate out of her hand, and the poor little animal went out with her, and played about as happy as the day was long.
When evening came, and the poor sister felt tired, she would kneel down and say her prayers, and then lay her delicate head on the fawn's back, which was a soft warm pillow, on which she could sleep peacefully.
After they had been alone in the forest for some time, and the little sister had grown a lovely maiden, and the fawn a large stag, a numerous hunting party came to the forest, and amongst them the king of the country.
"Oh dear," he said, "do let me go and see the hunt; I cannot restrain myself." And he begged so hard that at last she reluctantly consented.
"But remember," she said, "I must lock the cottage door against those huntsmen, so when you come back in the evening, and knock, I shall not admit you, unless you say, 'Dear little sister let me in.'"
He had not run far when the king's chief hunter caught sight of the beautiful animal, and started off in chase of him; but it was no easy matter to overtake such rapid footsteps.
Once, when he thought he had him safe, the fawn sprang over the bushes and disappeared.
As it was now nearly dark, he ran up to the little cottage, knocked at the door, and cried, "Dear little sister, let me in." The door was instantly opened, and oh, how glad his sister was to see him safely resting on his soft pleasant bed!
She opened the door, and said, "I will let you go this time; but pray do not forget to say what I told you, when you return this evening."
They chased him with all their skill till the evening; but he was too light and nimble for them to catch, till a shot wounded him slightly in the foot, so that he was obliged to hide himself in the bushes, and, after the huntsmen were gone, limp slowly home.
One of them, however, determined to follow him at a distance, and discover where he went.
What was his surprise at seeing him go up to a door and knock, and to hear him say, "Dear little sister, let me in." The door was only opened a little way, and quickly shut; but the huntsman had seen enough to make him full of wonder, when he returned and described to the king what he had seen.
"We will have one more chase to morrow," said the king, "and discover this mystery."
In the meantime the loving sister was terribly alarmed at finding the stag's foot wounded and bleeding.
"Oh, dear sister, I must go once more; it will be easy for me to avoid the hunters now, and my foot feels quite well; they will not hunt me unless they see me running, and I don't mean to do that."
But his sister wept, and begged him not to go: "If they kill you, dear fawn, I shall be here alone in the forest, forsaken by the whole world."
So at length his sister, with a heavy heart, set him free, and he bounded away joyfully into the forest.
As soon as the king caught sight of him, he said to the huntsmen, "Follow that stag about, but don't hurt him." So they hunted him all day, but at the approach of sunset the king said to the hunter who had followed the fawn the day before, "Come and show me the little cottage."
So they went together, and when the king saw it he sent his companion home, and went on alone so quickly that he arrived there before the fawn; and, going up to the little door, knocked and said softly, "Dear little sister, let me in."
As the door opened, the king stepped in, and in great astonishment saw a maiden more beautiful than he had ever seen in his life standing before him.
But how frightened she felt to see instead of her dear little fawn a noble gentleman walk in with a gold crown on his head.
However, he appeared very friendly, and after a little talk he held out his hand to her, and said, "Wilt thou go with me to my castle and be my dear wife?"
"Ah yes," replied the maiden, "I would willingly; but I cannot leave my dear fawn: he must go with me wherever I am."
"He shall remain with you as long as you live," replied the king, "and I will never ask you to forsake him."
While they were talking, the fawn came bounding in, looking quite well and happy.
Then his sister fastened the string of rushes to his collar, took it in her hand, and led him away from the cottage in the wood to where the king's beautiful horse waited for him.
The king placed the maiden before him on his horse and rode away to his castle, the fawn following by their side.
Soon after, their marriage was celebrated with great splendour, and the fawn was taken the greatest care of, and played where he pleased, or roamed about the castle grounds in happiness and safety.
In the meantime the wicked stepmother, who had caused these two young people such misery, supposed that the sister had been devoured by wild beasts, and that the fawn had been hunted to death.
Therefore when she heard of their happiness, such envy and malice arose in her heart that she could find no rest till she had tried to destroy it.
She and her ugly daughter came to the castle when the queen had a little baby, and one of them pretended to be a nurse, and at last got the mother and child into their power.
They shut the queen up in the bath, and tried to suffocate her, and the old woman put her own ugly daughter in the queen's bed that the king might not know she was away.
She would not, however, let him speak to her, but pretended that she must be kept quite quiet.
The queen escaped from the bath room, where the wicked old woman had locked her up, but she did not go far, as she wanted to watch over her child and the little fawn.
For two nights the baby's nurse saw a figure of the queen come into the room and take up her baby and nurse it.
Then she told the king, and he determined to watch himself.
The old stepmother, who acted as nurse to her ugly daughter, whom she tried to make the king believe was his wife, had said that the queen was too weak to see him, and never left her room.
"There cannot be two queens," said the king to himself, "so to night I will watch in the nursery." As soon as the figure came in and took up her baby, he saw it was his real wife, and caught her in his arms, saying, "You are my own beloved wife, as beautiful as ever."
The wicked witch had thrown her into a trance, hoping she would die, and that the king would then marry her daughter; but on the king speaking to her, the spell was broken.
The queen told the king how cruelly she had been treated by her stepmother, and on hearing this he became very angry, and had the witch and her daughter brought to justice.
They were both sentenced to die-the daughter to be devoured by wild beasts, and the mother to be burnt alive.
After this, the brother and sister lived happily and peacefully for the rest of their lives.
The very pictures on the walls rested him, they reminded him so much of the rooms in his boyhood home.
He would have loved to take them to his heart and his home; but his wife was not so minded, and that ended it.
They had a rollicking time at breakfast, for Guardy Lud was delighted with the crisp brown sausages, fried potatoes, and buckwheats with real maple syrup; and he laughed, and ate, and told stories with the children, and kept the old dining room walls ringing with joy as they had not resounded within the memory of Julia Cloud.
Dismay filled Julia Cloud's heart for an instant, and brought a pallor to her cheek.
How had she forgotten Ellen?
However, it could not be helped now; and a glance at the kind, strong face of the white haired man gave her courage.
He felt that the arrangement was good, and with him to back her she felt she could stand out against any arguments her sister might bring forth.
"I'm just going up to look over some of my mother's things." And she turned to the back stairway, and went up, closing the door behind her.
mr Luddington gazed after her a second; and then, taking his glasses off and wiping them energetically, he remarked:
It must be getting late!
Those certainly were good buckwheats, Miss Cloud.
I shan't forget them very soon.
Could we just go into the other room there, and close the door for a few minutes, not to be interrupted?" and he cast an anxious glance toward the stair door again.
Julia Cloud smiled understandingly, and ushered them into the little parlor ablaze with fall sunshine, its windows wreathed about with crimsoning woodbine; and, as she caught the glow and glint from the window, she remembered the gray evening when she had looked out across into her future as she supposed it would be.
As she sat down to enter into the contract that was to bind her to a new and wonderful life with great responsibilities and large possibilities, her heart, accustomed to look upward, sent a whisper of thanksgiving heavenward.
Julia Cloud was quite overwhelmed.
"I would rather do it for love, you know."
"Love's all right!" said the old man, smiling; "but this thing has got to be on a business basis, or the terms of the will will not allow me to agree to it.
You see what you are going to undertake means work, and it means sticking to it; and you deserve pay for it, and we're not going to accept several of the best years out of your life for nothing.
Besides, you've got to feel free to give up the job if it proves too burdensome for you."
"And you to dismiss me if I do not prove capable for the position," suggested Julia Cloud, lifting meek and honest eyes to meet his gaze.
"But, however that is, this is the contract I've made out.
And I'm quite satisfied.
So are the children.
Are you willing to sign it?
Only give me a chance to look after these youngsters properly."
Julia Cloud took the pen eagerly, tremblingly, a sense of wonder in her pounding heart, and signed her name just as Ellen's heavy footsteps could be heard pounding down the back stairs.
Because, if he isn't, I don't think it's respectable for you to go and live near him!" declared Ellen in a penetrating voice to the intense distress of Julia Cloud, who was happily hurrying the dishes from the breakfast table.
But Leslie came to the rescue.
Altogether too much married for comfort.
But he doesn't intend to live anywhere near us. His home is off in California, and he's going back next week.
We'll take good care of her. But isn't he a dear?
He was my Grandfather Leslie's best friend."
The two young people had rushed down to the car, and were pulling their guardian joyously inside. They seemed to do everything joyously, like two young creatures let out of prison into the sunshine.
Julia Cloud smiled at the thought of them, but her soul was not watching them just then.
She was looking off to the hills that had been her strength all the years through so many trials, and gathering strength now to go in and meet her sister in final combat.
She knew that there would be a scene; that was inevitable.
Across the road behind her parlor curtains mrs Perkins was keeping lookout, and remarking to a neighbor who had run in:
Now, doesn't that beat all?
Seems to me I did hear there was somebody died or something before we came here to live, but she must have been awful young."
She acknowledged it with a bow and a smile which mrs Perkins pounced on and analyzed audibly.
"Well, there's no fool like an old fool, as the saying is!
Just watch her smirk!
There goes Julia in.
She watched him out o' sight!
Well, I wonder what her mother would think."
Julia Cloud went slowly back to the dining room, where Ellen was seated on the couch, waiting like a visitor.
"Well!" she said as Julia began to gather up more dishes from the breakfast table.
"I suppose you think you've done something smart now, don't you, getting that old snob here and fixing things all up without consulting any of your relatives?"
"But it did not seem likely that you would object, for you suggested yourself that I rent the house, and you said you did not want me to stay here alone.
This seemed quite providential."
You call that providential, do you?
I can't see you put the halter around your neck to hang yourself without doing everything I can to stop it.
My own sister!"
"Why, Ellen, dear!" said Julia Cloud eagerly, sitting down beside her sister.
"You don't understand.
I'm sorry I had to spring it on you so suddenly and give you such a wrong impression.
You know I couldn't think of coming to live on you and Herbert.
It was kind of you to suggest it, and I am grateful and all that; but I know how it would be to have some one else, even a sister, come into the home, and I couldn't think of it.
Ellen sat up bristling.
"O Ellen!" said Julia pleadingly.
I'm just going to be a sort of mother to them.
And you oughtn't to call them snobs.
They are your own brother's children."
"Own brother's children, nothing!" sneered Ellen.
Mother! fiddlesticks! You'll slave all right.
Affection between them even when Ellen was a child had been quite one sided; for Ellen had always been a selfish, spoiled little thing, and Julia had looked in vain for any signs of tenderness.
I'm not to be a worker, nor even a housekeeper.
But mr Luddington quite insisted there should be servants, and that no work of any sort should fall upon me.
"That's ridiculous!" put in Ellen.
I think it's all nonsense for 'em to go.
What do they do it for?
They've got money, and don't have to teach or anything.
What do they need of learning?
That girl thinks she's too smart to live.
I call her impudent, for my part!"
There was a quiet finality in her tone that impressed her sister.
She looked at her angrily.
"Well, if you will, you will, I suppose.
Nobody can stop you.
You'll fool away a little while there, and find out how mistaken you were; and then you'll come back to Herbert to be taken care of.
They won't want you then."
Julia arose and went to the window to get calmed.
The thought of Herbert's having to take care of her ever was intolerable.
Ellen was watching her silently.
Almost she thought she had made an impression.
Perhaps this was the time to repeat Herbert's threat.
"Herbert feels," she began, "that if you refuse his offer now he can't promise to keep it open.
He can't be responsible for you if you take this step.
He said he wanted you to understand thoroughly."
Julia Cloud turned and walked with swift step to the little parlor where lay the paper she and mr Luddington had just signed, and a copy of which he had taken with him.
She returned to her astonished sister with the paper in her hand.
"Perhaps it would be just as well for you to read this," she said with dignity, and put the paper into Ellen's hands, going back to her clearing of the table.
She had finished her part of the argument.
She was resolutely putting out of her mind the things her sister had just said, and refusing altogether to think of Herbert.
She knew in her heart just how Herbert had looked when he had said those things, even to the snarl at the corner of his nose. She knew, too, that Ellen had probably not reported the message even so disagreeably as the original, and she knew that it would be better to forget.
"Well," said Ellen, rising after a long perusal, laying the paper on the table, "that sounds all very well in writing.
The thing is to see how it comes out.
If he does, he's a fool; that's all I've got to say.
But I suppose nothing short of getting caught in a trap will make you see it; so I better save my breath.
"Well, Ellen," said Julia Cloud, looking at her speculatively, "I'm sure I never dreamed you cared about having me away from here.
But I'm sorry if you feel it that way, and I'm sure I'll write to you and try to do little things for the children often, now that I shall have something to do with." But her kindly feeling was cut short by Ellen interrupting her.
"Oh, you needn't trouble yourself!
We can look after the children ourselves.
CHAPTER eight
Still, there were cookies and wonderful apples from the big tree in the back yard for dessert.
"We ought to have left the kitchen till last," she added with a troubled look.
"You crazy children!
Didn't you know we had to eat?
I don't see how we can get along."
"See!
I woke up early, and thought it all out. Let's see," consulting her wee wrist watch, "it's nine o'clock.
That isn't bad.
Now we'll work till twelve; that's long enough for to day, because you got too tired yesterday; and, besides, we've got some other things to attend to.
Then we'll hustle into the car, and get to town, and do some shopping ready for our trip.
That will rest you. We'll get lunch at a tea room, and shop all the afternoon.
We'll go to a hotel for dinner, and stay all night.
Now isn't that perfectly spick and span for a plan?"
But, dear, that would cost a lot!
And, besides, it isn't in the least necessary."
"Cost has nothing to do with it.
Look!" and Leslie flourished a handful of bills.
"See what Guardy Lud gave me!
And Allison has another just like it.
Oh, we're going to run you to beat the band!" laughed Leslie, and jumped down from her perch to hug and squeeze the breath out of Julia Cloud.
"But child!
Dear!" said that good woman when she could get her breath to speak.
But they put their hands over her lips, and laughed away her protests until she had to give up for laughing with them.
"Visiting, nothing!" declared Allison; "we're having the time of our lives.
This is real work, and I like it.
Come now, don't let's waste any time.
What can I do first?
What are you going to do with the books?
"No, I won't take any of those books.
They'll need to be dusted and put in boxes.
Allison went whistling up stairs, and began taking down the pictures; but anybody could see by the set of his shoulders that he meant to get the books out of the way too before noon.
"No, dear.
That has your grandmother's things in it, and is in perfect order.
She had me fix up the things several months ago.
Everything is tied up and labelled.
I don't think we need to disturb it.
But we need to get the rest of the bed clothes out on the line for an airing before I pack them away in the chest up stairs.
You might do that."
She came with a cup in her hand to ask for some baking powder, and Julia Cloud gave her the whole box.
"I shall not need it. I've rented the house, and am going away for a while." mrs Perkins was so astonished that she actually went home without finding out where Julia Cloud was going, and had to come back to see whether there was anything she could do to help, in order to get a chance to ask.
The rooms had assumed that cleared up, ready look that rests the tired worker just to look around and see what has been accomplished.
"What is it, dear?
But I'm afraid to say it.
Maybe it will make you feel bad."
"Not a bit, deary; what is it?"
"Well, then, Cloudy, do you think Grandmother would care very much if you didn't wear black?
Are you very mad at me for saying it?"
"Why, no, dear!
I'm not mad, and I don't care for black myself.
But I put on these things to please Ellen.
I like bright, happy things.
"That makes the day just perfect."
"That's all right, Cloudy.
There were not many people eating, for it was past one o'clock.
There were little round tables with high backed chairs that seemed to shut them off in a corner by themselves.
"Creamed chicken on toast, fruit salad, toasted muffins, and ice cream with hot chocolate sauce," ordered Allison after studying the menu card for a moment.
A sandwich is all I need.
Just a tongue sandwich.
This goes under the head of expenses.
If you can't find enough you like among what I order, why, I'll get you a tongue sandwich, too; but you've been feeding us out of the cooky jar, and I guess I'll get the finest I can find to pay you back. I told you this was my time.
When we get settled, you can order things; but now I'm going to see that you get enough to eat while you're working so hard."
Leslie's eyes danced with her dimples as Julia Cloud appealed to her to stop this extravagance.
"That's all right, Cloudy.
"Now," said Leslie as the meal drew to a close, "we must get to work. It's half past two, and the stores close at half past five.
How about you, Cloudy?"
"I must buy a trunk," said Julia Cloud thoughtfully, "and a hand bag and some gloves.
Allison landed them at a big department store, and guided his aunt to the trunk department with instructions to stay there until he and Leslie came back.
Then they went off with great glee and many whisperings.
Allison and Leslie were back within the time they had set, looking very meek and satisfied.
Leslie carried a small package, which she laid in Julia Cloud's lap.
If you don't like it, we can give it to Aunt Ellen or some one."
It seemed fit for a queen, yet was plain and quiet enough on the outside for a dove to carry.
"O you dear children!
How you are going to spoil me!
Then Allison thoughtfully suggested a handsome leather wallet for Uncle Herbert, and Julia Cloud lingered by the handkerchief counter, and selected half a dozen new fine handkerchiefs.
It all seemed just like a play to her, it was so very long since she had been shopping herself.
I saw it as we came by.
Or don't you like movies?
I suppose you are maybe worn out.
"Why, how did it happen? Don't they have moving pictures in your town?"
But you know I've never been able to get away, even if they had been all about me. Besides, I suppose I should have been considered crazy if I had gone, me, an oldish woman!
Then after a good dinner they went up to their rooms, and there was Julia Cloud's shining new trunk that had to be looked over; and there on the floor beside it stood two packages, big boxes, both of them.
Allison picked up the top package, a big, square box.
Open it!"
"Open it, Cloudy.
I want to see what's in it."
The cover fell off at last, and the tissue paper blew up in a great fluff; and out of it rolled a beautiful long, soft, thick gray cloak of finest texture and silken lining, with a great puffy collar and cuffs of deep, soft silver gray fox.
"You don't mind, do you, Cloudy, dear?
"Like them!"
Like them!
It wasn't sensible for her to talk that way.
That was being too humble.
And, besides, weren't these things quite sensible and practical?
And so at last they said "Good night," and went to their beds; but long after the children were asleep Julia Cloud lay awake and thought it out.
mrs PRIME READS HER RECANTATION.
Above an hour had passed after the interruption mentioned at the end of the last chapter before mrs Ray and Rachel crossed back from the farm house to the cottage, and when they went they went alone.
The farmer had come in and had joked his joke, and mrs Sturt had clacked over them as though they were a brood of chickens of her own hatching; and mrs Ray had smiled and cried, and sobbed and laughed till she had become almost hysterical. Then she had jumped up from her seat, saying, "Oh, dear, what will Dorothea think has become of us?"
After that Rachel insisted upon going, and the mother and daughter returned across the green, leaving luke at the farm house, ready to take his departure as soon as mrs Ray and Rachel should have safely reached their home.
In answer to this luke protested that he had not thought of Rachel when he was making that speech, and tried to explain that all that was "soft sawder" as he called it, for the election.
But the words were too apposite to the event, and the sentiment too much in accordance with mrs Sturt's chivalric views to allow of her admitting the truth of any such assurance as this.
"I know," she said; "I know.
Rachel, as she followed her mother out from the farmyard gate, had not a word to say.
The whole affair had now been managed so suddenly, and the action had been so quick, that she had hardly found a moment for thought.
Could it be that things were so fixed that there was no room for further disappointment?
She had been scalded so cruelly that she still feared the hot water.
She longed for hours of absolute quiet, in which she might make herself sure that her malady had also passed away, and that the soreness which remained came only from the memory of former pain.
"Will you tell her or shall I?" said mrs Ray, pausing for a moment at the cottage gate.
"You had better tell her, mamma."
"I suppose she won't set herself against it; will she?"
"I hope not, mamma.
I shall think her very ill natured if she does. But it can't make any real difference now, you know."
"No; it can't make any difference.
Only it will be so uncomfortable."
Then with half frightened, muffled steps they entered their own house, and joined mrs Prime in the sitting room.
mrs Prime was still reading the serious book; but I am bound to say that her mind had not been wholly intent upon it during the long absence of her mother and sister.
If it were not wicked, why should not she have been allowed to share it?
She did not imagine it to be wicked according to the world's ordinary wickedness;--but she feared that it was wicked according to that tone of morals to which she was desirous of tying her mother down as a bond slave.
They were away talking about love and pleasure, and those heart throbbings in which her sister had so unfortunately been allowed to indulge.
She felt all but sure that some tidings of luke Rowan had been brought in mrs Sturt's budget of news, and she had never been able to think well of luke Rowan since the evening on which she had seen him standing with Rachel in the churchyard.
She knew nothing against him; but she had then made up her mind that he was pernicious, and she could not bring herself to own that she had been wrong in that opinion.
She had been loud and defiant in her denunciation when she had first suspected Rachel of having a lover. Since that she had undergone some troubles of her own by which the tone of her remonstrances had been necessarily moderated; but even now she could not forgive her sister such a lover as luke Rowan.
She would have been quite willing to see her sister married, but the lover should have been dingy, black coated, lugubrious, having about him some true essence of the tears of the valley of tribulation. Alas, her sister's taste was quite of another kind!
"No, mother, I didn't think that.
But I thought you were staying late with mrs Sturt."
"So we were,--and really I didn't think we had been so long.
But, Dorothea, there was some one else over there besides mrs Sturt, and he kept us."
"He!
What he?" said mrs Prime.
She had not even suspected that the lover had been over there in person.
"mr Rowan, my dear.
"What! the young man that was dismissed from mr Tappitt's?"
It was ill said of her,--very ill said, and so she was herself aware as soon as the words were out of her mouth.
But she could not help it.
She had taken a side against luke Rowan, and could not restrain herself from ill natured words.
Rachel was still standing in the middle of the room when she heard her lover thus described; but she would not condescend to plead in answer to such a charge.
The colour came to her cheeks, and she threw up her head with a gesture of angry pride, but at the moment she said nothing.
mrs Ray spoke.
"It seems to me, Dorothea," she said, "that you are mistaken there.
I think he has dismissed mr Tappitt."
"I don't know much about it," said mrs Prime; "I only know that they've quarrelled."
"But it would be well that you should learn, because I'm sure you will be glad to think as well of your brother in law as possible."
"Do you mean that he is engaged to marry Rachel?"
"Yes, Dorothea.
I think we may say that it is all settled now;--mayn't we, Rachel?
And a very excellent young man he is,--and as for being well off, a great deal better than what a child of mine could have expected.
And a fine comely fellow he is, as a woman's eye would wish to rest on."
"Beauty is but skin deep," said mrs Prime, with no little indignation in her tone, that a thing so vile as personal comeliness should have been mentioned by her mother on such an occasion.
"Mother, there can have been nothing of the kind.
"At any rate I liked him very much; didn't I, Rachel?--from the first moment I set eyes on him.
Only I don't think he'll ever do away with cider in Devonshire, because of the apple trees.
But if people are to drink beer it stands to reason that good beer will be better than bad."
All this time Rachel had not spoken a word, nor had her sister uttered anything expressive of congratulation or good wishes.
"If this matter is settled, Rachel-"
"It is settled,--I think," said Rachel.
"If it is settled I hope that it may be for your lasting happiness and eternal welfare."
"I hope it will," said Rachel.
"That's quite true, my dear," said mrs Ray.
"A most important step, and one that requires the most exact circumspection,--especially on the part of the young woman.
I hope you may have known mr Rowan long enough to justify your confidence in him."
It was still the voice of a raven!
But it was not possible.
Though she would permit no such foreshadowings as those at which her mother had hinted, she had committed herself to forebodings against this young man, to such extent that she could not wheel her thoughts round and suddenly think well of him.
She could not do so as yet, but she would make the struggle.
"You mustn't mind Dorothea," the widow said.
"I mean that you mustn't mind her seeming to be so hard.
She means well through it all, and is as affectionate as any other woman."
can't you understand?
When she first heard of mr Rowan-"
"Call him luke, mamma."
Who taught her?"
"Miss Pucker, and mr Prong, and that set."
"Yes; and they are the people who talk most of Christian charity!"
"But, my dear, they don't mean to be uncharitable.
They try to do good.
And you can't expect her to turn round all in a minute.
Think how she has been troubled herself about this affair of mr Prong's."
What makes me so angry is that she should think everybody is a fool except herself.
Why should anybody be more dangerous to me than to anybody else?"
I don't know how to be thankful enough when I think how things have turned out;--but when I first heard of him I thought he was dangerous too."
"But you don't think he is dangerous now, mamma?"
"No, my dear; of course I don't.
And I never did after he drank tea here that night; only mr Comfort told me it wouldn't be safe not to see how things went a little before you,--you understand, dearest?"
I ain't a bit obliged to mr Comfort, though I mean to forgive him because of mrs Cornbury.
She has behaved best through it all,--next to you, mamma."
But why need she sleep now that every thought was a new pleasure?
There was no moment that she had ever passed with him that had not to be recalled.
There was no word of his that had not to be re weighed.
She could almost believe that he had been specially made and destined for her behoof.
Now he was there on purpose to take her with him, and she went forth with him, leaning lovingly on his arm, while yet close under her sister's eyes.
I think there must have been a gleam of triumph in her face as she put her hand with such confidence well round her lover's arm.
Girls do triumph in their lovers,--in their acknowledged and permitted lovers, as young men triumph in their loves which are not acknowledged or perhaps permitted.
A man's triumph is for the most part over when he is once allowed to take his place at the family table, as a right, next to his betrothed.
But the girl feels herself to be exalted for those few weeks as a conqueror, and to be carried along in an ovation of which that bucolic victim, tied round with blue ribbons on to his horns, is the chief grace and ornament.
In Rachel's presence she could not have first made this recantation.
Though Rachel spoke no triumph, there was a triumph in her eye, which prevented almost the possibility of such yielding on the part of Dorothea.
But when the thing should have been once done, when she should once have owned that Rachel was not wrong, then gradually she could bring herself round to the utterance of some kindly expression.
"Pretty," she said; "yes, it is pretty.
I do not know that anybody ever doubted its prettiness."
"And isn't it nice too?
Dear girl!
"Yes, just so; of course we know that.
"No; I don't say that.
Everybody seems to speak well of him now."
"Well, mother, I have nothing to say against him,--not a word.
And if it will give Rachel any pleasure,--though I don't suppose it will, the least in the world; but if it would, she may know that I think she has done wisely to accept him."
"Indeed it will; the greatest pleasure."
"And I hope they will be happy together for very many years.
I love Rachel dearly, though I fear she does not think so, and anything I have said, I have said in love, not in anger."
"Amen!" said mrs Ray, solemnly.
It was thus that mrs Prime read her recantation, which was repeated on that evening to Rachel with some little softening touches.
"You won't be living together in the same house after a bit," said mrs Ray, thinking, with some sadness, that those little evening festivities of buttered toast and thick cream were over for her now,--"but I do hope you will be friends."
"Of course we will, mamma.
She has only to put out her hand the least little bit in the world, and I will go the rest of the way.
As for her living, I don't know what will be best about that, because luke says that of course you'll come and live with us."
But to this both Martha and Cherry objected.
"We have heard of your engagement," said Martha, "and we congratulate you.
Mamma has already looked at a villa near Torquay, which will suit us delightfully."
three.
THE HYMN BOOK.
ALMOST the first decided taste in my life was the love of hymns. Committing them to memory was as natural to me as breathing.
I followed my mother about with the hymn book ("Watts' and Select"), reading or repeating them to her, while she was busy with her baking or ironing, and she was always a willing listener.
Finding it so easy, I thought I would begin at the beginning, and learn the whole.
I did not, I think, change my resolution because there were so many, but because, little as I was, I discovered that there were hymns and hymns.
I had no idea of its meaning, but made up a little story out of it, with myself as the heroine.
It began with the words-
I did not know that this last line was bad grammar, but thought that the sin in question was something pretty, that looked "like a mountain rose." Mountains I had never seen; they were a glorious dream to me. And a rose that grew on a mountain must surely be prettier than any of our red wild roses on the hill, sweet as they were.
But it did read-
The last verse began with the lines,--
When I repeated,--
The New Testament, then, did really mean what it said!
Jesus said He would come back again, and would always be with those who loved Him.
"He is alive!
He loves me!
He wanted me to be good, and I could be, I would be, for his sake.
I tried long afterward, thinking that it was my duty, to build up a wall of difficult doctrines over my spring blossoms, as if they needed protection.
I earned the book when I was about four years old.
"Awake, our souls!
away, our fears!"
"Love divine, all love excelling; Joy of heaven, to earth come down."
"Joy to the world! the Lord is come!"
I thought that they really knew better.
There is something at the heart of a true song or hymn which keeps the heart young that listens.
CHAPTER nineteen
Vanikoro
THIS DREADFUL SIGHT was the first of a whole series of maritime catastrophes that the Nautilus would encounter on its run. When it plied more heavily traveled seas, we often saw wrecked hulls rotting in midwater, and farther down, cannons, shells, anchors, chains, and a thousand other iron objects rusting away.
Thanks to the work of polyps, a slow but steady upheaval will someday connect these islands to each other. Later on, this new island will be fused to its neighboring island groups, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia as far as the Marquesas Islands.
The day I expounded this theory to Captain Nemo, he answered me coldly:
"The earth doesn't need new continents, but new men!"
The tiny microscopic animals that secrete this polypary live by the billions in the depths of their cells. Their limestone deposits build up into rocks, reefs, islets, islands. In some places, they form atolls, a circular ring surrounding a lagoon or small inner lake that gaps place in contact with the sea.
These polyps grow exclusively in the agitated strata at the surface of the sea, and so it's in the upper reaches that they begin these substructures, which sink little by little together with the secreted rubble binding them.
I could observe these strange walls quite closely: our sounding lines indicated that they dropped perpendicularly for more than three hundred meters, and our electric beams made the bright limestone positively sparkle.
"Therefore," he said to me, "to build these walls, it took . . . ?"
What's more, the formation of coal- in other words, the petrification of forests swallowed by floods- and the cooling of basaltic rocks likewise call for a much longer period of time.
Its tree grew tall, catching steam off the water. A brook was born.
Little by little, vegetation spread. Tiny animals-worms, insects-rode ashore on tree trunks snatched from islands to windward.
In this way animal life developed, and drawn by the greenery and fertile soil, man appeared. And that's how these islands were formed, the immense achievement of microscopic animals.
After touching the Tropic of Capricorn at longitude one hundred thirty five degrees, it headed west northwest, going back up the whole intertropical zone.
Although the summer sun lavished its rays on us, we never suffered from the heat, because thirty or forty meters underwater, the temperature didn't go over ten degrees to twelve degrees centigrade.
The Nautilus had cleared eight thousand one hundred miles.
It was the Dutch navigator Tasman who discovered this group in sixteen forty three, the same year the Italian physicist Torricelli invented the barometer and King Louis the fourteenth ascended the French throne.
This bay, repeatedly dredged, furnished a huge supply of excellent oysters.
As the Roman playwright Seneca recommended, we opened them right at our table, then stuffed ourselves. These mollusks belonged to the species known by name as Ostrea lamellosa, whose members are quite common off Corsica.
That day it was yuletide, and it struck me that Ned Land badly missed celebrating "Christmas," that genuine family holiday where Protestants are such zealots.
I hadn't seen Captain Nemo for over a week, when, on the morning of the twenty seventh, he entered the main lounge, as usual acting as if he'd been gone for just five minutes.
The captain approached, placed a finger over a position on the chart, and pronounced just one word:
It was the name of those islets where vessels under the Count de La Pérouse had miscarried. I straightened suddenly.
"The Nautilus is bringing us to Vanikoro?" I asked.
"Yes, professor," the captain replied.
"If you like, professor."
"We already have, professor."
Followed by Captain Nemo, I climbed onto the platform, and from there my eyes eagerly scanned the horizon.
Its shores seemed covered with greenery from its beaches to its summits inland, crowned by mount Kapogo, which is four hundred seventy six fathoms high.
Just then Captain Nemo asked me what I knew about the shipwreck of the Count de La Pérouse.
"What everybody knows, captain," I answered him.
"And could you kindly tell me what everybody knows?" he asked me in a gently ironic tone.
"Very easily."
I related to him what the final deeds of Captain Dumont d'Urville had brought to light, deeds described here in this heavily condensed summary of the whole matter.
They boarded two sloops of war, the Compass and the Astrolabe, which were never seen again.
In seventeen ninety one, justly concerned about the fate of these two sloops of war, the French government fitted out two large cargo boats, the Search and the Hope, which left Brest on september twenty eighth under orders from Rear Admiral Bruni d'Entrecasteaux.
It was an old hand at the Pacific, the English adventurer Captain peter Dillon, who was the first to pick up the trail left by castaways from the wrecked vessels.
Dillon returned to Calcutta.
There Dillon collected many relics of the shipwreck: iron utensils, anchors, eyelets from pulleys, swivel guns, an eighteen pound shell, the remains of some astronomical instruments, a piece of sternrail, and a bronze bell bearing the inscription "Made by Bazin," the foundry mark at Brest Arsenal around seventeen eighty five. There could no longer be any doubt.
But just then the renowned French explorer Captain Dumont d'Urville, unaware of Dillon's activities, had already set sail to search elsewhere for the site of the shipwreck.
Pretty perplexed, Dumont d'Urville didn't know if he should give credence to these reports, which had been carried in some of the less reliable newspapers; nevertheless, he decided to start on Dillon's trail.
Where?
Nobody knew.
This is the substance of the account I gave Captain Nemo.
"So," he said to me, "the castaways built a third ship on Vanikoro Island, and to this day, nobody knows where it went and perished?"
"Nobody knows."
The Nautilus sank a few meters beneath the waves, and the panels opened.
And as I stared at this desolate wreckage, Captain Nemo told me in a solemn voice:
"And how do you know all this?" I exclaimed.
"Here's what I found at the very site of that final shipwreck!"
He opened it and I saw a bundle of papers, yellowed but still legible.
The "field hands" labouring near had collected around the "quarter;" and in groups, squatted upon the grass, or seated upon stray logs, were discussing their diet-by no means spare-of "hog and hominy" corn bread and "corn coffee," with a jocosity that proclaimed a keen relish of these, their ordinary comestibles.
Henry was the absent one.
Only the conjecture: that he would shortly make his appearance.
As several minutes passed without his coming in, the planter quietly observed that it was rather strange of Henry to be behind time, and wonder where he could be.
This habit is exacted by a sort of necessity, arising out of the nature of some of the viands peculiar to the country; many of which, as "Virginia biscuit," "buckwheat cakes," and "waffles," are only relished coming fresh from, the fire: so that the hour when breakfast is being eaten in the dining room, is that in which the cook is broiling her skin in the kitchen.
As the laggard, or late riser, may have to put up with cold biscuit, and no waffles or buckwheat cakes, there are few such on a Southern plantation.
"Where can the boy be?" asked his father, for the fourth time, in that tone of mild conjecture that scarce calls for reply.
Louise only gave expression to a similar conjecture.
It could scarce be caused by the absence of her brother from the breakfast table?
What was it?
No one put the inquiry.
Her father did not notice anything odd in her look.
Ever since entering the room he had maintained a studied silence; keeping his eyes averted, instead of, according to his usual custom, constantly straying towards his cousin.
He sate nervously in his chair; and once or twice might have been seen to start, as a servant entered the room.
Beyond doubt he was under the influence of some extraordinary agitation.
"Very strange Henry not being here to his breakfast!" remarked the planter, for about the tenth time.
No-no-he never lies so late.
Pluto!"
"Ho-ho!
"Go to Henry's sleeping room.
"He no dar, Mass' Woodley."
Go instantly, and see!"
"There's something strange in all this," pursued the planter, as Pluto shuffled out of the sala.
"Henry from home; and at night too.
Where can he have gone?
Not at the tavern, I hope?"
"Oh, no!
He wouldn't go there," interposed Calhoun, who appeared as much mystified by the absence of Henry as was Poindexter himself.
"If not, it may still remain a secret between brother and myself.
I think I can manage Henry.
But why is he still absent?
I've sate up all night waiting for him.
Who could blame him if he has?
There can be little harm in it: since he has gone astray in good company?"
It was interrupted by the reappearance of Pluto; whose important air, as he re-entered the room, proclaimed him the bearer of eventful tidings.
"Well!" cried his master, without waiting for him to speak, "is he there?"
"No, Mass' Woodley," replied the black, in a voice that betrayed a large measure of emotion, "he are not dar-Massa Henry am not.
"His horse at the gate?
And why, pray, do you grieve about that?"
What because?
Or is it his tail that is missing?"
"What!
Henry thrown from his horse?
Nonsense, Pluto!
My son is too good a rider for that.
A sight was there awaiting them, calculated to inspire all three with the most terrible apprehensions.
The animal wet with the dews of the night, and having been evidently uncared for in any stable, was snorting and stamping the ground, as if but lately escaped from some scene of excitement, in which he had been compelled to take part.
Whence came that horse?
From the prairies.
The negro had caught him, on the outside plain, as, with the bridle trailing among his feet, he was instinctively straying towards the hacienda.
The question was not asked.
All present knew him to be the horse of Henry Poindexter.
Nor did any one ask whose blood bedaubed the saddle flaps.
The dark red spots on which they were distractedly gazing had spurted from the veins of Henry Poindexter.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT.
THE AVENGERS.
Hastily-perhaps too truly-construing the sinister evidence, the half frantic father leaped into the bloody saddle, and galloped direct for the Fort.
Calhoun, upon his own horse, followed close after.
The Indians were out, and near at hand, reaping their harvest of scalps! That of young Poindexter was the firstfruits of their sanguinary gleaning!
Henry Poindexter-the noble generous youth who had not an enemy in all Texas!
Who but Indians could have spilled such innocent blood?
Only the Comanches could have been so cruel?
Among the horsemen, who came quickly together on the parade ground of Port Inge, no one doubted that the Comanches had done the deed.
It was simply a question of how, when, and where.
The blood drops pretty clearly, proclaimed the first.
He who had shed them must have been shot, or speared, while sitting in his saddle.
They were mostly on the off side; where they presented an appearance, as if something had been slaked over them.
Of course it was the body of the rider as it slipped lifeless to the earth.
According to them the blood was scarce "ten hours old:" in other words, must have been shed about ten hours before.
Where was the body to be found?
After that, where should the assassins be sought for?
These were the questions discussed by the mixed council of settlers and soldiers, hastily assembled at Port Inge, and presided over by the commandant of the Fort-the afflicted father standing speechless by his side.
The last was of special importance.
It was directly negatived by the major himself.
The party must be kept together, or run the risk of being attacked, and perhaps cut off, in detail!
The argument was deemed conclusive.
It was decided that the searchers should proceed in a body.
In what direction?
This still remained the subject of discussion.
Who last saw Henry Poindexter?
His father and cousin were first appealed to.
The answer of Calhoun was less direct, and, perhaps, less satisfactory. He had conversed with his cousin at a later hour, and had bidden him good night, under the impression that he was retiring to his room.
Whatever was the reason, the truth was shunned; and an answer given, the sincerity of which was suspected by more than one who listened to it.
While the inquiry was going on, light came in from a quartet hitherto unthought of.
The landlord of the Rough and Ready, who had come uncalled to the council, after forcing his way through the crowd, proclaimed himself willing to communicate some facts worth their hearing-in short, the very facts they were endeavouring to find out: when Henry Poindexter had been last seen, and what the direction he had taken.
Oberdoffer's testimony, delivered in a semi Teutonic tongue, was to the effect: that Maurice the mustanger-who had been staying at his hotel ever since his fight with Captain Calhoun-had that night ridden out at a late hour, as he had done for several nights before.
Where he had procured the money "Gott" only knew, or why he left the hotel in such a hurry.
On one of these the village Boniface supposed him to have gone.
What had all this to do with the question before the council?
This was all Mr Oberdoffer knew of the matter; and all he could be expected to tell.
It furnished a sort of clue to the direction they ought to take.
If the missing man had gone off with Maurice the mustanger, or after him, he should be looked for on the road the latter himself would be likely to have taken.
Did any one know where the horse hunter had his home?
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE.
THE POOL OF BLOOD.
There was reason.
Scouts were sent out in advance; and professed "trackers" employed to pick up, and interpret the "sign."
On the prairie, extending nearly ten miles to the westward of the Leona, no trail was discovered.
The turf, hard and dry, only showed the tracks of a horse when going in a gallop.
None such were seen along the route.
Through this jungle, directly opposite the Fort, there is an opening, through which passes a path-the shortest that leads to the head waters of the Nueces.
It may be artificial: some old "war trail" of the Comanches, erst trodden by their expeditionary parties on the maraud to Tamaulipas, Coahuila, or New Leon.
The trackers knew that it conducted to the Alamo; and, therefore, guided the expedition into it.
Shortly after entering among the trees, one of the latter, who had gone afoot in the advance, was seen standing by the edge of the thicket, as if waiting to announce some recently discovered fact.
"What is it?" demanded the major, spurring ahead of the others, and riding up to the tracker.
"Sign?"
Look there!
"The tracks of a horse."
"True.
There are two."
They have gone up this openin' a bit, and come back again."
"Well, Spangler, my good fellow; what do you make of it?"
"What proof have you of what you say?
Is there a dead body?"
"no
"What then?"
"Blood, a regular pool of it-enough to have cleared out the carcass of a hull buffalo.
But," continued the scout in a muttered undertone, "if you wish me to follow up the sign as it ought to be done, you'll order the others to stay back-'specially them as are now nearest you."
This observation appeared to be more particularly pointed at the planter and his nephew; as the tracker, on making it, glanced furtively towards both.
"By all means," replied the major.
"Yes, Spangler, you shall have every facility for your work.
He can only take me along with him."
It was obeyed, however, just as if they had been; and one and all kept their places, while the officer, following his scout, rode away from the ground.
About fifty yards further on, Spangler came to a stand.
"You see that, major?" said he, pointing to the ground.
"I should be blind if I didn't," replied the officer.
"Dead!" pronounced the tracker.
"Dead before that blood had turned purple-as it is now."
"Whose do you think it is, Spangler?"
That's why I didn't wish him to come forward."
That's what is puzzling me."
"How! by the Indians, of course?
"Not a bit of it," rejoined the scout, with an air of confidence.
As you see, both are shod; and they're the same that have come back again.
The other is the hoof of an American horse.
Goin' west the mustang was foremost; you can tell that by the overlap.
It can't be a great ways off."
"Let us proceed thither, then," said the major.
"I shall command the people to stay where they are."
Having issued the command, in a voice loud enough to be heard by his following, the major rode away from the bloodstained spot, preceded by the tracker.
At this point the trail ended-both horses, as was already known, having returned on their own tracks.
Before taking the back track, however, they had halted, and stayed some time in the same place-under the branches of a spreading cottonwood. The turf, much trampled around the trunk of the tree, was evidence of this.
The tracker got off his horse to examine it; and, stooping to the earth, carefully scrutinised the sign.
They must have quarrelled afterwards."
"If you are speaking the truth, Spangler, you must be a witch.
How on earth can you know all that?"
It's simple enough.
As for the time, they've taken long enough to smoke a cigar apiece-close to the teeth too.
The tracker, stooping as he spoke, picked up a brace of cigar stumps, and handed them to the major.
"By the same token," he continued, "I conclude that the two horsemen, whoever they were, while under this tree could not have had any very hostile feelins, the one to the tother.
That it did come there can be no doubt.
"'tis very mysterious," remarked the major.
"That's what purplexes me most of all.
"Most strange!" exclaimed the major, pronouncing the words with emphasis-"most mysterious!"
We may make something out of that.
We may as well go back, major.
"Mr Poindexter, you mean?"
"Yes.
"Oh, no; not so much as that comes to.
Only convinced that the horse the old gentleman is now riding is one of the two that's been over this ground last night-the States horse I feel sure.
"Spangler! have you any suspicion as to who the other may be?"
"Not a spark, major.
If't hadn't been for the tale of Old Duffer I'd never have thought of Maurice the mustanger.
Surely it can't be?
The young Irishman aint the man to stand nonsense from nobody; but as little air he the one to do a deed like this-that is, if it's been cold blooded killin'."
"I think as you about that."
"And you may think so, major.
That's how I shed reckon it up.
We must follow the trail, howsoever; and maybe it'll fetch us to some sensible concloosion.
"Perhaps better not.
He knows enough already.
It will at least fall lighter upon him if he find things out by piecemeal.
Say nothing of what we've seen.
Give me ten minutes upon it, and then come on to my signal."
A Pearl Worth Ten Million
NIGHT FELL.
I went to bed.
I slept pretty poorly.
The next day at four o'clock in the morning, I was awakened by the steward whom Captain Nemo had placed expressly at my service. I got up quickly, dressed, and went into the lounge.
Captain Nemo was waiting for me.
"Professor Aronnax," he said to me, "are you ready to start?"
"Kindly follow me."
"What about my companions, captain?"
"They've been alerted and are waiting for us."
"Aren't we going to put on our diving suits?" I asked.
"Not yet.
Captain Nemo took me to the central companionway whose steps led to the platform.
Oars in position, five of the Nautilus's sailors were waiting for us aboard the skiff, which was moored alongside.
Captain Nemo, Conseil, Ned Land, and I found seats in the stern of the skiff.
The skiff headed southward.
The oarsmen took their time. I watched their strokes vigorously catch the water, and they always waited ten seconds before rowing again, following the practice used in most navies.
We were silent.
What was Captain Nemo thinking?
Between us and the shore, the sea was deserted. Not a boat, not a diver.
Profound solitude reigned over this gathering place of pearl fishermen.
At six o'clock the day broke suddenly, with that speed unique to tropical regions, which experience no real dawn or dusk. The sun's rays pierced the cloud curtain gathered on the easterly horizon, and the radiant orb rose swiftly.
The skiff advanced toward Mannar Island, which curved to the south. Captain Nemo stood up from his thwart and studied the sea.
A month from now in this very place, the numerous fishing boats of the harvesters will gather, and these are the waters their divers will ransack so daringly. This bay is felicitously laid out for their type of fishing. It's sheltered from the strongest winds, and the sea is never very turbulent here, highly favorable conditions for diving work. Now let's put on our underwater suits, and we'll begin our stroll."
"Our lighting equipment would be useless to us," the captain answered me. "We won't be going very deep, and the sun's rays will be sufficient to light our way.
Besides, it's unwise to carry electric lanterns under these waves.
Their brightness might unexpectedly attract certain dangerous occupants of these waterways."
As Captain Nemo pronounced these words, I turned to Conseil and Ned Land.
But my two friends had already encased their craniums in their metal headgear, and they could neither hear nor reply.
"What about our weapons?" I asked him.
"Our rifles?"
"Rifles!
What for?
Here's a sturdy blade. Slip it under your belt and let's be off."
I stared at my companions.
Then, following the captain's example, I let myself be crowned with my heavy copper sphere, and our air tanks immediately went into action.
We followed him down a gentle slope and disappeared under the waves.
There the obsessive fears in my brain left me.
I became surprisingly calm again.
The ease with which I could move increased my confidence, and the many strange sights captivated my imagination.
The sun was already sending sufficient light under these waves. The tiniest objects remained visible.
After ten minutes of walking, we were in five meters of water, and the terrain had become almost flat.
Near seven o'clock we finally surveyed the bank of shellfish, where pearl oysters reproduce by the millions.
The others had rugged black surfaces, measured up to fifteen centimeters in width, and were ten or more years old.
But we couldn't stop.
Just then a huge cave opened up in our path, hollowed from a picturesque pile of rocks whose smooth heights were completely hung with underwater flora.
At first this cave looked pitch black to me.
We followed him.
I distinguished the unpredictably contoured springings of a vault, supported by natural pillars firmly based on a granite foundation, like the weighty columns of Tuscan architecture. Why had our incomprehensible guide taken us into the depths of this underwater crypt?
I would soon find out.
After going down a fairly steep slope, our feet trod the floor of a sort of circular pit.
I approached this phenomenal mollusk.
Its mass of filaments attached it to a table of granite, and there it grew by itself in the midst of the cave's calm waters.
I estimated the weight of this giant clam at three hundred kilograms.
I was mistaken.
Captain Nemo had an explicit personal interest in checking on the current condition of this giant clam.
The mollusk's two valves were partly open.
I then understood Captain Nemo's intent.
Perhaps, following the examples of oyster farmers in China and India, he had even predetermined the creation of this pearl by sticking under the mollusk's folds some piece of glass or metal that was gradually covered with mother of pearl. In any case, comparing this pearl to others I already knew about, and to those shimmering in the captain's collection, I estimated that it was worth at least ten million francs.
Our visit to this opulent giant clam came to an end. Captain Nemo left the cave, and we climbed back up the bank of shellfish in the midst of these clear waters not yet disturbed by divers at work.
We walked by ourselves, genuine loiterers stopping or straying as our fancies dictated.
For my part, I was no longer worried about those dangers my imagination had so ridiculously exaggerated. The shallows drew noticeably closer to the surface of the sea, and soon, walking in only a meter of water, my head passed well above the level of the ocean.
Conseil rejoined me, and gluing his huge copper capsule to mine, his eyes gave me a friendly greeting. But this lofty plateau measured only a few fathoms, and soon we reentered Our Element.
I think I've now earned the right to dub it that.
Ten minutes later, Captain Nemo stopped suddenly.
no
Five meters away a shadow appeared and dropped to the seafloor. The alarming idea of sharks crossed my mind.
It was a man, a living man, a black Indian fisherman, a poor devil who no doubt had come to gather what he could before harvest time. I saw the bottom of his dinghy, moored a few feet above his head. He would dive and go back up in quick succession.
This diver didn't see us.
A shadow cast by our crag hid us from his view.
So he went up and down several times.
He gathered only about ten shellfish per dive, because he had to tear them from the banks where each clung with its tough mass of filaments. And how many of these oysters for which he risked his life would have no pearl in them!
I observed him with great care.
I understood his fear.
A gigantic shadow appeared above the poor diver. It was a shark of huge size, moving in diagonally, eyes ablaze, jaws wide open!
I was speechless with horror, unable to make a single movement.
This scene lasted barely a few seconds.
I can see Captain Nemo's bearing to this day.
The shark bellowed, so to speak.
Blood was pouring into the waves from its wounds.
I wanted to run to the captain's rescue.
But I was transfixed with horror, unable to move.
I stared, wild eyed.
Then the shark's jaws opened astoundingly wide, like a pair of industrial shears, and that would have been the finish of Captain Nemo had not Ned Land, quick as thought, rushed forward with his harpoon and driven its dreadful point into the shark's underside.
The waves were saturated with masses of blood.
Ned Land hadn't missed his target. This was the monster's death rattle.
Pierced to the heart, it was struggling with dreadful spasms whose aftershocks knocked Conseil off his feet.
Meanwhile Ned Land pulled the captain clear.
The three of us followed him, and a few moments later, miraculously safe, we reached the fisherman's longboat.
Captain Nemo's first concern was to revive this unfortunate man. I wasn't sure he would succeed.
I hoped so, since the poor devil hadn't been under very long.
But that stroke from the shark's tail could have been his deathblow.
How startled he must have felt, how frightened even, at seeing four huge, copper craniums leaning over him!
His bewildered eyes indicated that he didn't know to what superhuman creatures he owed both his life and his fortune.
Back on board, the sailors helped divest us of our heavy copper carapaces.
Captain Nemo's first words were spoken to the Canadian.
"Thank you, mr Land," he told him.
"Tit for tat, captain," Ned Land replied.
"I owed it to you."
The ghost of a smile glided across the captain's lips, and that was all.
"To the Nautilus," he said.
The longboat flew over the waves.
A few minutes later we encountered the shark's corpse again, floating.
It was more than twenty five feet long; its enormous mouth occupied a third of its body. It was an adult, as could be seen from the six rows of teeth forming an isosceles triangle in its upper jaw.
There I fell to thinking about the incidents that marked our excursion over the Mannar oysterbank.
In spite of everything, this strange man hadn't yet succeeded in completely stifling his heart.
When I shared these impressions with him, he answered me in a tone touched with emotion:
twelve
THE LAY OF MILON
I purpose in this place to show you the story of Milon, and-since few words are best-I will set out the adventure as briefly as I may.
So great was his prowess that from the day he was dubbed knight there was no champion who could stand before him in the lists.
He was a passing fair knight, open and brave, courteous to his friends, and stern to his foes.
Since he was praised by the frank, he was therefore envied of the mean.
Nevertheless, by reason of his skill with the spear, he was counted a very worshipful knight, and was honourably entreated by many a prince in divers lands.
With this baron dwelt his daughter, a passing fair and gracious damsel.
He placed the ring in her hand, saying that he had done her will, as he was bidden to do.
"When the child is born," replied the lady, "you must carry him forthwith to my sister.
She is a rich dame, pitiful and good, and is wedded to a lord of Northumberland.
You will send messages with the babe-both in writing and by speech-that the little innocent is her sister's child.
Whether it be a boy or girl his mother will have suffered much because of him, and for her sister's sake you will pray her to cherish the babe.
If this be done, perchance the orphan will not be fatherless all his days."
The old nurse who tended her mistress was privy to the damsel's inmost mind.
The child was then placed in his cradle, swathed close in white linen.
The servitors set forth, bearing the infant with them.
They served their lord so faithfully, keeping such watch upon the way, that at the last they won to the lady to whom they were bidden.
These having bestowed the boy in accordance with their lord's commandment, returned to their own land.
Though this baron was a worthy knight, justly esteemed of all his fellows, the damsel was grieved beyond measure when she knew her father's will.
So on the appointed day the lady was wedded to the baron, and her husband took her to dwell with him in his fief.
He made him ready quickly, and went forth, bearing the swan with him.
He went by the nearest road, and passing through the streets of the city, came before the portal of the castle.
"Friend," said he, "hearken to me.
I am of Caerleon, and a fowler by craft.
"Friend," replied the porter, "fowlers are not always welcomed of ladies.
The porter entered in the hall, where he found none but two lords seated at a great table, playing chess for their delight.
They went therefore to the chamber of the lady.
When the swan was proffered to the lady it pleased her to receive the gift.
She summoned a varlet of her household and gave the bird to his charge, commanding him to keep it safely, and to see that it ate enough and to spare.
The swan is fit to serve at a royal table, for the bird is plump as he is fair."
The varlet put the swan in his lady's hands.
She took the bird kindly, and smoothing his head and neck, felt the letter that was hidden beneath its feathers.
When they had parted the lady called a maiden to her aid. She broke the seal, and unfastening the letter, came upon the name of Milon at the head.
She kissed the name a hundred times through her tears.
In you-he wrote-is all my pleasure, and in your white hands it lies to heal me or to slay.
Strive to find a plan by which we may speak as friend to friend, if you would have me live.
The knight prayed her in his letter to send him an answer by means of the swan.
She held him for a month within her chamber, but this was less from choice, than for the craft that was necessary to obtain the ink and parchment requisite for her writing.
At the end she wrote a letter according to her heart, and sealed it with her ring.
The lady caused the swan to fast for three full days; then having concealed the message about his neck, let him take his flight.
Milon rejoiced greatly when he marked his own.
He glanced from head to head of the letter, seeking the means that he hoped to find, and the salutation he so tenderly wished.
There was no speech between them, save that carried by the bird.
He to whom the letter came, saw to it that the messenger was fed to heart's desire.
He rejoiced greatly to hear of his father's prowess, and was proud beyond measure of his renown.
He considered within himself, saying to his own heart, that much should be required of his father's son, and that he would not be worthy of his blood if he did not endeavour to merit his name.
He rode to Southampton, that he might find a ship equipped for sea, and so came to Barfleur.
What he took from the rich he bestowed on such knights as were poor and luckless.
These loved him greatly, since he gained largely and spent freely, granting of his wealth to all.
Folk told how a certain knight from beyond the Humber, who had passed the sea in quest of wealth and honour, had so done, that by reason of his prowess, his liberality, and his modesty, men called him the Knight Peerless, since they did not know his name.
He marvelled greatly that the stout spears of the past had not put on their harness and broken a lance for their ancient honour.
One thing he determined, that he would cross the sea without delay, so that he might joust with the dansellon, and abate his pride.
Milon caused his friend to know of his wishes.
He opened out to her all his thought, and craved her permission to depart.
She approved his desire to quit the realm for the sake of his honour, and far from putting let and hindrance in his path, trusted that in the end he would bring again her son.
At that time a tournament was proclaimed to be held at Mont st Michel.
Now in this tournament a knight could joust with that lord who was set over against him, or he could seek to break a lance with his chosen foe.
But the Knight Peerless carried the cry from all his fellows, for none might stand before him, nor rival him in skill and address.
Milon observed him curiously.
The lad struck so heavily, he thrust home so shrewdly, that Milon's hatred changed to envy as he watched.
Very comely showed the varlet, and much to Milon's mind.
Milon struck his adversary so fiercely, that the lance splintered in his gauntlet; but the young knight kept his seat without even losing a stirrup.
"Sir," said he, "I pray you to get upon your horse.
Milon sprang upon his steed.
"Friend," said he, "hearken to me.
I have seen much, and gone to and fro about the world.
This day I am overthrown by a boy, and yet I cannot help but love thee."
In hope and wish I purpose to cross the sea, and return to my own realm.
He got him swiftly from his horse, and taking the lad by the fringe of his hauberk, he cried, "Praise be to God, for now am I healed.
Fair friend, by my faith thou art my very son, for whom I came forth from my own land, and have sought through all this realm."
The varlet climbed from the saddle, and stood upon his feet.
Father and son kissed each other tenderly, with many comfortable words.
Their love was fair to see, and those who looked upon their meeting, wept for joy and pity.
They rode to their hostel, and with the knights of their fellowship, passed the hours in mirth and revelry.
"In faith, fair father, let us return to our own land.
They embarked in a propitious hour, for a fair wind carried the ship right swiftly to its haven.
His task was done long before sundown in chancing on the knight.
He gave over the sealed writing with which he was charged, praying the knight to hasten to his friend without any tarrying, since her husband was in his grave.
Milon rejoiced greatly when he knew this thing.
Of their love and content the minstrel wrought this Lay.
Chapter Thirteen-The Snow Fort on Slatter's Hill
The memory of man, even that of the Oldest Inhabitant, runneth not back to the time when there did not exist a feud between the North End and the South End boys of Rivermouth.
Slatter's Hill, or No man's land, as it was generally called, was a rise of ground covering, perhaps, an acre and a quarter, situated on an imaginary line, marking the boundary between the two districts.
An immense stratum of granite, which here and there thrust out a wrinkled boulder, prevented the site from being used for building purposes.
The street ran on either side of the hill, from one part of which a quantity of rock had been removed to form the underpinning of the new jail. This excavation made the approach from that point all but impossible, especially when the ragged ledges were a glitter with ice.
The rear of the entrenchment, being protected by the quarry, was left open.
The walls were four feet high, and twenty two inches thick, strengthened at the angles by stakes driven firmly into the ground.
Fancy the rage of the South Enders the next day, when they spied our snowy citadel, with Jack Harris's red silk pocket handkerchief floating defiantly from the flag staff.
In less than an hour it was known all over town, in military circles at least, that the "Puddle dockers" and the "River rats" (these were the derisive sub titles bestowed on our South End foes) intended to attack the fort that Saturday afternoon.
At two o'clock all the fighting boys of the Temple Grammar School, and as many recruits as we could muster, lay behind the walls of Fort Slatter, with three hundred compact snowballs piled up in pyramids, awaiting the approach of the enemy.
The enemy was not slow in making his approach-fifty strong, headed by one Mat Ames.
Our forces were under the command of General j Harris.
As it was impossible for the North Enders to occupy the fort permanently, it was stipulated that the South Enders should assault it only on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons between the hours of two and six.
For them to take possession of the place at any other time was not to constitute a capture, but on the contrary was to be considered a dishonorable and cowardly act.
A snow ball soaked in water and left out to cool was a projectile which in previous years had been resorted to with disastrous results.
These preliminaries settled, the commanders retired to their respective corps.
The interview had taken place on the hillside between the opposing lines.
The repellers were called light infantry; but when they carried on operations beyond the fort they became cavalry.
It was also their duty, when not otherwise engaged, to manufacture snow balls.
General Mat Ames, a veteran commander, was no less wide awake in the disposition of his army.
Five companies, each numbering but six men, in order not to present too big a target to our sharpshooters, were to charge the fort from different points, their advance being covered by a heavy fire from the gunners posted in the rear.
Each scaler was provided with only two rounds of ammunition, which were not to be used until he had mounted the breastwork and could deliver his shots on our heads.
Nothing on earth could represent the state of things after the first volley.
The thrilling moment had now arrived.
If I had been going into a real engagement I could not have been more deeply impressed by the importance of the occasion.
The fort opened fire first-a single ball from the dexterous band of General Harris taking General Ames in the very pit of his stomach.
The shouts of the leaders, and the snowballs bursting like shells about our ears, made it very lively.
The rest retired confused and blinded by our well directed fire.
When General Harris (with his right eye bunged up) said, "Soldiers, I am proud of you!" my heart swelled in my bosom.
The victory, however, had not been without its price.
Six North Enders, having rushed out to harass the discomfited enemy, were gallantly cut off by General Ames and captured.
Whitcomb was one of the most notable shots on our side, though he was not much to boast of in a rough and tumble fight, owing to the weakness before mentioned.
General Ames put him among the gunners, and we were quickly made aware of the loss we had sustained, by receiving a frequent artful ball which seemed to light with unerring instinct on any nose that was the least bit exposed.
But we had no time for vain regrets.
The battle raged.
Already there were two bad cases of black eye, and one of nosebleed, in the hospital.
It was glorious excitement, those pell mell onslaughts and hand to hand struggles.
Twice we were within an ace of being driven from our stronghold, when General Harris and his staff leaped recklessly upon the ramparts and hurled the besiegers heels over head down hill.
At sunset, the garrison of Fort Slatter was still unconquered, and the South Enders, in a solid phalanx, marched off whistling "Yankee Doodle," while we cheered and jeered them until they were out of hearing.
General Ames remained behind to effect an exchange of prisoners.
We held thirteen of his men, and he eleven of ours.
I forget whether it was on that afternoon or the next that we lost Fort Slatter; but lose it we did, with much valuable ammunition and several men.
General Ames handled his men with great skill; his deadliest foe could not deny that.
Once he outgeneralled our commander in the following manner: He massed his gunners on our left and opened a brisk fire, under cover of which a single company (six men) advanced on that angle of the fort.
Meanwhile, four companies of the enemy's scalers made a detour round the foot of the hill, and dashed into Fort Slatter without opposition.
Of course we had to vacate the fort.
A cloud rested on General Harris's military reputation until his superior tactics enabled him to dispossess the enemy.
At length the provision against using heavy substances in the snow balls was disregarded.
A ball stuck full of sand bird shot came tearing into Fort Slatter.
snow balls containing marbles.
After this, both sides never failed to freeze their ammunition.
It was no longer child's play to march up to the walls of Fort Slatter, nor was the position of the besieged less perilous.
At every assault three or four boys on each side were disabled.
It was not an infrequent occurrence for the combatants to hold up a flag of truce while they removed some insensible comrade.
Matters grew worse and worse.
Seven North Enders had been seriously wounded, and a dozen South Enders were reported on the sick list. The selectmen of the town awoke to the fact of what was going on, and detailed a posse of police to prevent further disturbance.
The watch were determined fellows, and charged the boys valiantly, driving them all into the fort, where we made common cause, fighting side by side like the best of friends.
In vain the four guardians of the peace rushed up the hill, flourishing their clubs and calling upon us to surrender.
They could not get within ten yards of the fort, our fire was so destructive.
Perceiving that it was impossible with their small number to dislodge us, the watch sent for reinforcements.
Their call was responded to, not only by the whole constabulary force (eight men), but by a numerous body of citizens, who had become alarmed at the prospect of a riot.
This formidable array brought us to our senses: we began to think that maybe discretion was the better part of valor.
So, after one grand farewell volley, we fled, sliding, jumping, rolling, tumbling down the quarry at the rear of the fort, and escaped without losing a man.
But we lost Fort Slatter forever.
Those battle scarred ramparts were razed to the ground, and humiliating ashes sprinkled over the historic spot, near which a solitary lynx eyed policeman was seen prowling from time to time during the rest of the winter.
The event passed into a legend, and afterwards, when later instances of pluck and endurance were spoken of, the boys would say, "By golly!
You ought to have been at the fights on Slatter's Hill!"
Chapter Twenty One-In Which I Leave Rivermouth
A letter with a great black seal!
But which was it, father or mother?
I do not like to look back to the agony and suspense of that moment.
My father had died at New Orleans during one of his weekly visits to the city.
The letter bearing these tidings had reached Rivermouth the evening of my flight-had passed me on the road by the down train.
I must turn back for a moment to that eventful evening.
When I failed to make my appearance at supper, the Captain began to suspect that I had really started on my wild tour southward-a conjecture which Sailor Ben's absence helped to confirm.
I had evidently got off by the train and Sailor Ben had followed me.
There was no telegraphic communication between Boston and Rivermouth in those days; so my grandfather could do nothing but await the result. Even if there had been another mail to Boston, he could not have availed himself of it, not knowing how to address a message to the fugitives. The post office was naturally the last place either I or the Admiral would think of visiting.
My grandfather, however, was too full of trouble to allow this to add to his distress.
He knew that the faithful old sailor would not let me come to any harm, and even if I had managed for the time being to elude him, was sure to bring me back sooner or later.
Our return, therefore, by the first train on the following day did not surprise him.
"I can't read it, Tom," said the old gentleman, breaking down.
"I thought I could."
He handed it to me.
As the days went by my first grief subsided, and in its place grew up a want which I have experienced at every step in life from boyhood to manhood.
Often, even now, after all these years, when I see a lad of twelve or fourteen walking by his father's side, and glancing merrily up at his face, I turn and look after them, and am conscious that I have missed companionship most sweet and sacred.
I shall not dwell on this portion of my story.
There were many tranquil, pleasant hours in store for me at that period, and I prefer to turn to them.
My mother had arrived at New York, and would be with us the next day.
I was to go to Boston with the Captain to meet her and bring her home.
With my mother's hand in mine once more, all the long years we had been parted appeared like a dream.
Everything was changed with us now.
There were consultations with lawyers, and signing of papers, and correspondence; for my father's affairs had been left in great confusion.
Little Black Sam, by the by, had been taken by his master from my father's service ten months previously, and put on a sugar plantation near Baton Rouge.
How all these simple details interested me will be readily understood by any boy who has been long absent from home.
I was sorry when it became necessary to discuss questions more nearly affecting myself.
I had been removed from school temporarily, but it was decided, after much consideration, that I should not return, the decision being left, in a manner, in my own hands.
The Captain wished to carry out his son's intention and send me to college, for which I was nearly fitted; but our means did not admit of this.
In the midst of our discussions a letter came from my Uncle Snow, a merchant in New York, generously offering me a place in his counting house.
If I accepted my uncle's offer, I might hope to work my way to independence without loss of time.
It was hard to give up the long cherished dream of being a Harvard boy; but I gave it up.
The decision once made, it was Uncle Snow's wish that I should enter his counting house immediately.
The cause of my good uncle's haste was this-he was afraid that I would turn out to be a poet before he could make a merchant of me.
His fears were based upon the fact that I had published in the Rivermouth Barnacle some verses addressed in a familiar manner "To the Moon." Now, the idea of a boy, with his living to get, placing himself in communication with the Moon, struck the mercantile mind as monstrous.
It was not only a bad investment, it was lunacy.
'We adopted Uncle Snow's views so far as to accede to his proposition forthwith.
My mother, I neglected to say, was also to reside in New York.
In the excitement of preparing for the journey I didn't feel any very deep regret myself.
As the carriage swept round the corner, I leaned out of the window to take a last look at Sailor Ben's cottage, and there was the Admiral's flag flying at half mast.
With the close of my school days at Rivermouth this modest chronicle ends.
The new life upon which I entered, the new friends and foes I encountered on the road, and what I did and what I did not, are matters that do not come within the scope of these pages.
I am sure that the reader who has followed me thus far will be willing to hear what became of her, and Sailor Ben and Miss Abigail and the Captain.
First about Gypsy.
A month after my departure from Rivermouth the Captain informed me by letter that he had parted with the little mare, according to agreement.
She had been sold to the ring master of a travelling circus (I had stipulated on this disposal of her), and was about to set out on her travels.
She did not disappoint my glowing anticipations, but became quite a celebrity in her way-by dancing the polka to slow music on a pine board ball room constructed for the purpose.
I hope all the praises she received and all the spangled trappings she wore did not spoil her; but I am afraid they did, for she was always over much given to the vanities of this world!
The old house became very lonely when the family got reduced to Captain Nutter and Kitty; and when Kitty passed away, my grandfather divided his time between Rivermouth and New York.
He also expressed a wish to have his body stitched up in a shotted hammock and dropped into the harbor; but as he did not strenuously insist on this, and as it was not in accordance with my grandfather's preconceived notions of Christian burial, the Admiral was laid to rest beside Kitty, in the Old South Burying Ground, with an anchor that would have delighted him neatly carved on his headstone.
For several months after leaving Rivermouth I carried on a voluminous correspondence with Pepper Whitcomb; but it gradually dwindled down to a single letter a month, and then to none at all.
Great events no longer considered it worth their while to honor so quiet a place.
Young Conway went into the grocery business with his ancient chum, Rodgers-RODGERS and CONWAY!
I have reserved my pleasantest word for the last.
It is touching the Captain.
So ends the Story of a Bad Boy-but not such a very bad boy, as I told you to begin with.
Was the child determined to share her vigil?
Their rooms were over the parlour and thus as far removed as possible from the judge's den.
In her own, which was front, she felt at perfect ease, and it was without any fear of disturbing either him or Reuther that she finally raised her window and allowed the cool wind to soothe her heated cheeks.
How calm the aspect of the lawn and its clustering shrubs.
Perched, as she was, in a window overlooking the lane, she had but to lift her eyes from the double fence (that symbol of sad seclusion) to light on the trees rising above that unspeakable ravine, black with memories she felt strangely like forgetting to night.
But the moon loved it; caressed it; dallied with it, lighting up its toppling chimney and empty, staring gable.
There, hidden but always seen by those who remembered the traditions of the place, mouldered away the walls of that old closet where the timorous, God stricken suicide had breathed out his soul.
She had stood in it only the other day, penned from outsiders' view by the judge's outstretched arms.
Then, she had no mind for bygone horrors, her own tragedy weighed too heavily upon her; but to night, as she gazed, fascinated, anxious to forget herself, anxious to indulge in any thought which would relieve her from dwelling on the question she must settle before she slept, she allowed her wonder and her revulsion to have free course.
Instead of ignoring, she would recall the story of the place as it had been told her when she first came to settle in its neighbourhood.
Spencer's Folly!
Well, it had been that, and Spencer's den of dissipation too!
This was long before she herself had come to Shelby; but she had been told the story so often that it was quite as vivid to her as if she had been one of the innumerable men and women who had crowded the glistening, swimming streets to view this spectacle of destruction.
The family had been gone for months, and so no pity mingled with the excitement.
Not till the following day did the awful nature of the event break in its full horror upon the town.
Among the ruins, in a closet which the flames had spared, they found hunched up in one corner, the body of a man, in whose seared throat a wound appeared which had not been made by lightning or fire.
Spencer!
Spencer himself, returned they knew not how, to die of this self inflicted wound, in the dark corner of his grand but neglected dwelling.
And this was what made the horror of the place till the tragedy of the opposite hollow added crime to crime, and the spot became outlawed to all sensitive citizens.
Innocence was asleep at last.
Not a movement disturbed the closed lids on the wax like cheek.
Even the breath came so softly that it hardly lifted the youthful breast.
Repose the most perfect and in the form of all others the sweetest to a tender mother, lay before her and touched her already yearning heart to tears.
Yes, she was right.
Sorrow was slowly sapping the fountain of her darling's youth.
If Reuther was to be saved, hope must come soon.
With a sob and a prayer, the mother left the room, and locking herself into her own, sat down at last to face the new perplexity, the monstrous enigma which had come into her life.
"I am really sorry to trouble you, mrs Scoville; but if you have time this morning, will you clean up my study before I leave?
The carriage is ordered for half past nine."
You will be choked, Judge."
"No more than I have been for the last two days.
"He will lock it when he goes out," she commented to herself.
"I had better hasten."
Giving Reuther the rest of the work to do, she presently appeared before him with pail and broom and a pile of fresh linen.
Nothing more commonplace could be imagined, but to her, if not to him, there underlay this especial act of ordinary housewifery a possible enlightenment on a subject which had held the whole community in a state of curiosity for years.
She was going to enter the room which had been barred from public sight by poor Bela's dying body.
The doubt gave a tremulous eagerness to her step and caused her eye to wander immediately to that forbidden corner soon as she had stepped over the threshold.
But she could not, quite.
Two facts of which she immediately became cognisant, prevented this.
First, the great room before her presented a bare floor, whereas on her first visit it had been very decently, if not cheerfully, covered by a huge carpet rug.
Manifestly she was not to be allowed to pursue her duties unwatched.
Certainly she had to take more than one look at the every day implements she carried to retain that balance of judgment which should prevent her from becoming the dupe of her own expectations.
"I do not expect you to clean up here as thoroughly as you have your own rooms up stairs," he remarked, as she passed him.
"You haven't the time, or I the patience for too many strokes of the broom.
And mrs Scoville," he called out as she slipped through the doorway, "leave the door open and keep away as much as possible from the side of the room where I have nailed up the curtain.
I had rather not have that touched."
She felt that she had been set to work with a string tied round her feet.
Not touch the curtain!
Why, that was the one thing in the room she wanted to touch; for in it she not only saw the carpet which had been taken up from the floor of the study, but a possible screen behind which anything might lurk-even his redoubtable secret.
It would be like him to shut out light and air.
She would ask.
"No," was his short reply.
One thing was settled.
It was Bela's cot she saw before her-a cot without any sheets.
These had been left behind in the dead negro's room, and the judge had been sleeping just as she had feared, wrapped in a rug and with uncovered pillow.
This pillow was his own; it had not been brought down with the bed.
She hastily slipped a cover on it, and without calling any further attention to her act, began to make up the bed.
He coughed and shook his head, but did not budge an inch.
Before she had begun to put things in order, the clock struck the half hour.
"Oh!" she protested, with a pleading glance his way, "I'm not half done."
"There's another day to follow," he dryly remarked, rising and taking a key from his pocket.
The act expressed his wishes; and she was proceeding to carry out her things when a quick sliding noise from the wall she was passing, drew her attention and caused her to spring forward in an involuntary effort to catch a picture which had slipped its cord and was falling to the floor.
She had grasped and lifted the picture and seen-
But first, let me explain.
This picture was not like the others hanging about.
It was a veiled one.
From some motive of precaution or characteristic desire for concealment on the part of the judge, it had been closely wrapped about in heavy brown paper before being hung, and in the encounter which ensued between the falling picture and the spear of an image standing on a table underneath, this paper had received a slit through which Deborah had been given a glimpse of the canvas beneath.
The shock of what she saw would have unnerved a less courageous woman.
IT WAS A HIGHLY FINISHED PORTRAIT OF OLIVER IN HIS YOUTH, WITH A BROAD BAND OF BLACK PAINTED DIRECTLY ACROSS THE EYES.
An aristocratic society might accordingly be a perfect heaven if the variety and superposition of functions in it expressed a corresponding diversity in its members' faculties and ideals.
And, indeed, what aristocratic philosophers have always maintained is that men really differ so much in capacity that one is happier for being a slave, another for being a shopkeeper, and a third for being a king.
All professions, they say, even the lowest, are or may be vocations.
Some men, Aristotle tells us, are slaves by nature; only physical functions are spontaneous in them.
So long as they are humanely treated, it is, we may infer, a benefit for them to be commanded; and the contribution their labour makes toward rational life in their betters is the highest dignity they can attain, and should be prized by them as a sufficient privilege.
Such assertions, coming from lordly lips, have a suspicious optimism about them; yet the faithful slave, such as the nurse we find in the tragedies, may sometimes have corresponded to that description.
It would seldom benefit a musician to be appointed admiral or a housemaid to become a prima donna.
One tribe would run errands as persistently as the ants; another would sing like the lark; a third would show a devil's innate fondness for stoking a fiery furnace.
Aristocracy logically involves castes.
But such castes as exist in India, and the social classes we find in the western world, are not now based on any profound difference in race, capacity, or inclination.
They are based probably on the chances of some early war, reinforced by custom and perpetuated by inheritance.
A certain circulation, corresponding in part to proved ability or disability, takes place in the body politic, and, since the French Revolution, has taken place increasingly.
Some, by energy and perseverance, rise from the bottom; some, by ill fortune or vice, fall from the top.
But these readjustments are insignificant in comparison with the social inertia that perpetuates all the classes, and even such shifts as occur at once re-establish artificial conditions for the next generation.
As a rule, men's station determines their occupation without their gifts determining their station.
Thus stifled ability in the lower orders, and apathy or pampered incapacity in the higher, unite to deprive society of its natural leaders.
It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation.
Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of racial or professional soul.
Their only character is composed of the habits they have been led to acquire.
Variety in human dreams, like personality among savages, may indeed be inwardly very great, but it is not efficacious.
To be socially important and expressible in some common medium, initial differences in temper must be organised into custom and become cumulative by being imitated and enforced.
The only artists who can show great originality are those trained in distinct and established schools; for originality and genius must be largely fed and raised on the shoulders of some old tradition.
A rich organisation and heritage, while they predetermine the core of all possible variations, increase their number, since every advance opens up new vistas; and growth, in extending the periphery of the substance organised, multiplies the number of points at which new growths may begin.
So, too, in political society, statesmanship is made possible by traditional policies, generalship by military institutions, great financiers by established commerce.
Savages are born free and equal, but wherever a complex and highly specialised environment limits the loose freedom of those born into it, it also stimulates their capacity. Under forced culture remarkable growths will appear, bringing to light possibilities in men which might, perhaps, not even have been possibilities had they been left to themselves; for mulberry leaves do not of themselves develop into brocade.
A certain personal idiosyncrasy must be assumed at bottom, else cotton damask would be as good as silk and all men having like opportunities would be equally great.
This idiosyncrasy is brought out by social pressure, while in a state of nature it might have betrayed itself only in trivial and futile ways, as it does among barbarians.
Distinction is thus in one sense artificial, since it cannot become important or practical unless a certain environment gives play to individual talent and preserves its originality; but distinction nevertheless is perfectly real, and not merely imputed.
If Shakespeare had been born in Italy he might, if you will, have been a great poet, but Shakespeare he could never have been.
Nor can it be called an injustice to all of us who are not Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth's time that Shakespeare had that advantage and was thereby enabled to exist.
The sense of injustice at unequal opportunities arises only when the two environments compared are really somewhat analogous, so that the illusion of a change of roles without a change of characters may retain some colour.
It was a just insight, for instance, in the Christian fable to make the first rebel against God the chief among the angels, the spirit occupying the position nearest to that which he tried to usurp. Lucifer's fallacy consisted in thinking natural inequality artificial. His perversity lay in rebelling against himself and rejecting the happiness proper to his nature.
No one, except in wilful fancy, would envy the peculiar advantages of a whale or an ant, of an Inca or a Grand Lama.
An exchange of places with such remote beings would too evidently leave each creature the very same that it was before; for after a nominal exchange of places each office would remain filled and no trace of a change would be perceptible.
But the penny that one man finds and another misses would not, had fortune been reversed, have transmuted each man into the other.
Yet the incipient fallacy lurking even in such suppositions becomes obvious when we inquire whether so blind an accident, for instance, as sex is also adventitious and ideally transferable and whether Jack and Jill, remaining themselves, could have exchanged genders.
The first personal pronoun "I" is a concept so thoroughly universal that it can accompany any experience whatever, yet it is used to designate an individual who is really definable not by the formal selfhood which he shares with every other thinker, but by the special events that make up his life.
If a new birth could still be called by a man's own name, the reason would be that the concrete faculties now present in him are the basis for the ideal he throws out, and if these particular faculties came to fruition in a new being, he would call that being himself, inasmuch as it realised his ideal.
Even his most perversely metaphysical envy can begrudge to others only what he instinctively craves for himself.
It is not mere inequality, therefore, that can be a reproach to the aristocratic or theistic ideal.
Could each person fulfil his own nature the most striking differences in endowment and fortune would trouble nobody's dreams.
The true reproach to which aristocracy and theism are open is the thwarting of those unequal natures and the consequent suffering imposed on them all.
Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
A bruised child wailing in the street, his small world for the moment utterly black and cruel before him, does not fetch his unhappiness from sophisticated comparisons or irrational envy; nor can any compensations and celestial harmonies supervening later ever expunge or justify that moment's bitterness.
The pain may be whistled away and forgotten; the mind may be rendered by it only a little harder, a little coarser, a little more secretive and sullen and familiar with unrightable wrong.
CHAPTER seventeen
DANIEL BURTON TAKES THE PLUNGE
He then went on to explain.
Meanwhile, the boy was as comfortable where he was as he could be anywhere, and, moreover, there were certain treatments which should still be continued.
It was a bitter blow.
Then came Keith's letter.
She went at once to the studio.
His face had grown a little white.
But will he PAY anything for them things?"
And-Susan."
"I shall want breakfast at seven o'clock, Susan." He turned away plainly indicating that for him the matter was closed.
But for Susan the matter was not closed.
You may go."
And Susan went.
But not yet for Susan was the matter closed.
mrs McGuire, her eyes dreamily fixed out the window, nodded her head slowly.
It was always like that with my john.
I'll never forget.
One day he went to a fire.
He was twelve years old.
It was just the way he told it.
He could make others see-everything. But now-that's all over now.
I tell you it made me sick, mr Jenkins, sick!"
"Well, it did.
I couldn't help it.
You know that's all the rage now.
Like this," she finished, producing from somewhere about her person a half sheet of note paper.
But inwardly-
She brought them all, and read them to him.
"Susan, how-how IS he?" she finished unsteadily.
"I know.
WOULD he see me, do you think?"
"He ought to.
"I mean, about your being 'Miss Stewart'?"
"A little, but not much.
Some way, I-" She stopped short, with a quick indrawing of her breath.
In the doorway down the hall stood Keith.
"Susan, I thought I heard-WAS Miss Stewart here?" he demanded excitedly.
"Indeed I'm here," she cried gayly, giving a warm clasp to his eagerly outstretched hand "How do you do?
"When did you come?"
"Yesterday."
"Oh, but I didn't," she laughed a little embarrassedly.
"You're at home now, and you have all your old friends, and-"
"Good!
"No, no, it isn't that," protested the girl quickly.
"It's only-There are so many-"
There isn't any one here that UNDERSTANDS-like you.
"Miss Stewart, I don't say this sort of thing very often.
I never said it before-to anybody.
And it was the WAY you did it, with never a word or a hint that I was different.
And how I blessed you for not TELLING me those lines were there!
You will come?"
"You've helped more-than you'll ever know.
But, come-look!
"I mean just that."
But the words just wouldn't come.
He'd never forgive it-I know he wouldn't-to think I'd taken advantage of his not being able to see."
"He wouldn't.
He spoke-beautifully about that to day.
When thinkin' won't mend it, Then thinkin' won't end it.
So what's the use?
FOR THE SAKE OF john
The town, aware now of the stupendous change that had come to the fortunes of the Burton family, stared, gossiped, shook wise heads of prophecy, then passed on to the next sensation-which happened to be the return of four soldiers from across the seas; three crippled, one blinded.
What IS the matter?" demanded Susan concernedly.
Now, tell me, what is it?"
"Susan, I can't! I can't-stand it," he moaned.
But, what is it-now?"
"john McGuire.
Why, Susan, I could see it-SEE it, I tell you, and, oh, I did so want to be there to help.
I could hear it.
Even one man counted there-counted for, oh, so much!--for at the last there was just one man left----john McGuire.
And to hear him tell it-it was wonderful, wonderful!"
His mother told me.
He never talked like this, until to day.
Oh, he's told me a little, from time to time.
And there it was, wasted, WASTED, worse than wasted on-me!"
"Listen!
You want others to hear it-what you heard-don't you?"
"How?"
"Oh, Susan, if we only could!" A dawning hope had come into Keith Burton's face, but almost at once it faded into gray disappointment. "We couldn't do it, though, Susan.
He couldn't do it.
He's only begun to practice a little bit.
He couldn't do it.
I can see that now.
But, Keith, couldn't YOU do it?--take it down, I mean, as he talked, like a stylographer?"
Keith shook his head.
"I wish I could.
But I couldn't, I know I couldn't.
His step was slow, his head was bowed.
He looked like anything but the happy possessor of new wealth.
"Do what?"
Couldn't he do it?"
But Susan, john McGuire wouldn't TELL it to HIM.
Tell me that?"
No, no, don't look like that," she protested hurriedly, as Keith began to frown.
"Yes, you're quite right-john wouldn't know a thing about it," broke in Keith, with a passion so sudden and bitter that Susan fell back in dismay.
"I wonder if you think I'd do it!" he demanded.
"But, Keith, I'm sure that Dorothy liked-"
"It would-help some." Keith drew in his breath and held it a moment suspended.
He's nervous as a witch since he quit his job."
However, we'll see.
These things, if they were merely the grievances of the study, might very well rest there.
And not only that, but it might be the prevalent and everyday language of Scandinavia and Denmark and Holland, of all Africa, all North America, of the Pacific coasts of Asia and of India, the universal international language, and in a fair way to be the universal language of mankind.
But here it is clear that upon the probability of such a renascence depends the extension of the language, and not only that, but the preservation of that military and naval efficiency upon which, in this world of resolute aggression, the existence of the English speaking communities finally depends.
The French reading public is something different and very much larger than the existing French political system.
The number of books published in French is greater than that published in English; there is a critical reception for a work published in French that is one of the few things worth a writer's having, and the French translators are the most alert and efficient in the world.
The serried ranks of lemon coloured volumes in the former have the whole range of human thought and interest; there are no taboos and no limits, you have everything up and down the scale, from frank indecency to stark wisdom.
It is a shop for men.
While the French bookshop reeks of contemporary intellectual life!
These things count for French as against English now, and they will count for infinitely more in the coming years.
And over German also French has many advantages.
And German compared with French is an unattractive language; unmelodious, unwieldy, and cursed with a hideous and blinding lettering that the German is too patriotic to sacrifice.
In particular it has stood in the way of the international use of scientific terms.
The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian have a certain community of technical, scientific, and philosophical phraseology, and it is frequently easier for an Englishman with some special knowledge of his subject to read and appreciate a subtle and technical work in French, than it is for him to fully enter into the popular matter of the same tongue.
Moreover, the technicalities of these peoples, being not so immediately and constantly brought into contrast and contact with their Latin or Greek roots as they would be if they were derived (as are so many "patriotic" German technicalities) from native roots, are free to qualify and develop a final meaning distinct from their original intention.
In the growing and changing body of science this counts for much.
And the shade of meaning, the limited qualification, that a Frenchman or Englishman can attain with a mere twist of the sentence, the German must either abandon or laboriously overstate with some colossal wormcast of parenthesis....
Moreover, against the German tongue there are hostile frontiers, there are hostile people who fear German preponderance, and who have set their hearts against its use.
These two tongues must inevitably come into keen conflict; they will perhaps fight their battle for the linguistic conquest of Europe, and perhaps of the world, in a great urban region that will arise about the Rhine.
Politically this region lies now in six independent States, but economically it must become one in the next fifty years.
It will stretch from Lille to Kiel, it will drive extensions along the Rhine valley into Switzerland, and fling an arm along the Moldau to Prague, it will be the industrial capital of the old world.
Its westward port may be Bordeaux or Milford Haven, or even some port in the south-west of Ireland-unless, which is very unlikely, the velocity of secure sea travel can be increased beyond that of land locomotion.
I do not see how this great region is to unify itself without some linguistic compromise-the Germanization of the french-speaking peoples by force is too ridiculous a suggestion to entertain.
Almost inevitably with travel, with transport communications, with every condition of human convenience insisting upon it, formally or informally a bi lingual compromise will come into operation, and to my mind at least the chances seem even that French will emerge on the upper hand.
Unless, indeed, that great renascence of the English speaking peoples should, after all, so overwhelmingly occur as to force this European city to be tri lingual, and prepare the way by which the whole world may at last speak together in one tongue.
These are the aggregating tongues.
I do not think that any other tongues than these are quite likely to hold their own in the coming time. Italian may flourish in the city of the Po valley, but only with French beside it.
They are, I believe, already judged.
By a d two thousand all these languages will be tending more and more to be the second tongues of bi lingual communities, with French, or English, or less probably German winning the upper hand.
But when one turns to China there are the strangest possibilities.
Throughout Eastern Asia there is still, no doubt, a vast wilderness of languages, but over them all rides the Chinese writing.
And very strong-strong enough to be very gravely considered-is the possibility of that writing taking up an orthodox association of sounds, and becoming a world speech.
The Japanese written language, the language of Japanese literature, tends to assimilate itself to Chinese, and fresh Chinese words and expressions are continually taking root in Japan.
Suppose, after all, I am not the victim of atmospheric refraction, and they are, indeed, as gallant and bold and intelligent as my baseless conception of them would have them be!
They would almost certainly find co-operative elements among the educated Chinese....
But this is no doubt the lesser probability.
It has the start of all other languages-the mechanical advantage-the position.
Conall Yellowclaw
Conall Yellowclaw was a sturdy tenant in Erin: he had three sons. There was at that time a king over every fifth of Erin.
The children of Conall got the upper hand, and they killed the king's big son.
But I see that though I follow you revengefully, I shall not be much better for it, and I will now set a thing before you, and if you will do it, I will not follow you with revenge.
If you and your sons will get me the brown horse of the king of Lochlann, you shall get the souls of your sons."
Hard is the matter you require of me, but I will lose my own life, and the life of my sons, or else I will do the pleasure of the king."
After these words Conall left the king, and he went home: when he got home he was under much trouble and perplexity.
His wife took much sorrow that he was obliged to part from herself, while she knew not if she should see him more.
When he rose on the morrow, he set himself and his three sons in order, and they took their journey towards Lochlann, and they made no stop but tore through ocean till they reached it.
When they went to the house of the king's miller, the man asked them to stop there for the night.
Conall told the miller that his own children and the children of his king had fallen out, and that his children had killed the king's son, and there was nothing that would please the king but that he should get the brown horse of the king of Lochlann.
"If you will do me a kindness, and will put me in a way to get him, for certain I will pay ye for it."
"The thing is silly that you are come to seek," said the miller; "for the king has laid his mind on him so greatly that you will not get him in any way unless you steal him; but if you can make out a way, I will keep it secret."
"This is what I am thinking," said Conall, "since you are working every day for the king, you and your gillies could put myself and my sons into four sacks of bran."
"The plan that has come into your head is not bad," said the miller.
The king's gillies came to seek the bran, and they took the four sacks with them, and they emptied them before the horses.
The servants locked the door, and they went away.
When they rose to lay hand on the brown horse, said Conall, "You shall not do that.
"It must be my brown horse," said he to his gillies; "find out what is wrong with him."
The servants went out, and when Conall and his sons saw them coming they went into the hiding holes.
The servants looked amongst the horses, and they did not find anything wrong; and they returned and they told this to the king, and the king said to them that if nothing was wrong they should go to their places of rest.
When the gillies had time to be gone, Conall and his sons laid their hands again on the horse.
If the noise was great that he made before, the noise that he made now was seven times greater.
The king sent a message for his gillies again, and said for certain there was something troubling the brown horse.
The servants rummaged well, and did not find a thing.
When Conall and his sons perceived that the gillies were gone, they laid hands again on the horse, and one of them caught him; and if the noise that the horse made on the two former times was great, he made more this time.
"Be this from me," said the king; "it must be that some one is troubling my brown horse." He sounded the bell hastily, and when his waiting man came to him, he said to him to let the stable gillies know that something was wrong with the horse.
The gillies came, and the king went with them.
When Conall and his sons perceived the company coming they went to the hiding holes.
"Be wary," said the king, "there are men within the stable, let us get at them somehow."
The king followed the tracks of the men, and he found them.
I am under thy pardon, and under thine honour, and under thy grace." He told how it happened to him, and that he had to get the brown horse for the king of Erin, or that his sons were to be put to death.
"Yes, Conall, it is well enough, but come in," said the king.
And a double watch was set that night on the sons of Conall.
"Now, O Conall," said the king, "were you ever in a harder place than to be seeing your lot of sons hanged to morrow?
But you set it to my goodness and to my grace, and say that it was necessity brought it on you, so I must not hang you.
Tell me any case in which you were as hard as this, and if you tell that, you shall get the soul of your youngest son."
"I will tell a case as hard in which I was," said Conall.
"I was once a young lad, and my father had much land, and he had parks of year old cows, and one of them had just calved, and my father told me to bring her home.
I found the cow, and took her with us.
There fell a shower of snow.
Who should come in but one cat and ten, and one great one eyed fox coloured cat as head bard over them.
'Play up with you, why should you be silent?
Make a cronan to Conall Yellowclaw,' said the head bard.
'Pay them now their reward,' said the great fox coloured cat.
'I am tired myself of yourselves and your rewards,' said i 'I have no reward for you unless you take that cow down there.' They betook themselves to the cow, and indeed she did not last them long.
Go up and sing a cronan to Conall Yellowclaw,' said the head bard.
And surely, O king, I had no care for them or for their cronan, for I began to see that they were not good comrades.
'Pay now their reward,' said the head bard; and for sure, O king, I had no reward for them; and I said to them, 'I have no reward for you.' And surely, O king, there was a catterwauling between them.
The cats began to search for me through the wood, and they could not find me; and when they were tired, each one said to the other that they would turn back.
'Certainly,' said the priest, 'it is a man in extremity-let us move.' They set themselves in order for moving.
Then I gave the third shout.
And then I came home.
Conall," said the king, "you are full of words.
You have freed the soul of your son with your tale; and if you tell me a harder case than that you will get your second youngest son, and then you will have two sons."
"Well then," said Conall, "on condition that thou dost that, I will tell thee how I was once in a harder case than to be in thy power in prison to night."
"Let's hear," said the king.
I heard a great clattering, coming, and what was there but a great giant and two dozen of goats with him, and a buck at their head.
I am a good leech, and I will give you the sight of the other eye.' The giant went and he drew the great caldron on the site of the fire.
I myself was telling him how he should heat the water, so that I should give its sight to the other eye.
I got heather and I made a rubber of it, and I set him upright in the caldron.
I began at the eye that was well, pretending to him that I would give its sight to the other one, till I left them as bad as each other; and surely it was easier to spoil the one that was well than to give sight to the other.
"When he felt the birds calling in the morning, and knew that the day was, he said-'Art thou sleeping?
Awake and let out my lot of goats.' I killed the buck.
Then I went and I put my legs in place of his legs, and my hands in place of his forelegs, and my head in place of his head, and the horns on top of my head, so that the brute might think that it was the buck.
I went out.
"'Aha!' said he, 'hast thou done this to me?
I drew a dirk.
He shouted, 'Where art thou, ring?' And the ring said, 'I am here,' though it was on the bed of the ocean.
He gave a spring after the ring, and out he went in the sea.
"When the giant was drowned I went in, and I took with me all he had of gold and silver, and I went home, and surely great joy was on my people when I arrived.
"Yes, indeed, Conall, you are wordy and wise," said the king.
"I see the finger is off you.
I went to hunt.
I looked myself on the boat to see how I might get part of them.
I did not know now what I should do.
The place was without meat or clothing, without the appearance of a house on it.
She tried to put the knife to the throat of the babe, and the babe began to laugh in her face, and she began to cry, and she threw the knife behind her.
I thought to myself that I was near my foe and far from my friends, and I called to the woman, 'What are you doing here?' And she said to me 'What brought you here?' I told her myself word upon word how I came.
'Well, then,' said she, 'it was so I came also.' She showed me to the place where I should come in where she was.
I went in, and I said to her, 'What was the matter that you were putting the knife on the neck of the child?' 'It is that he must be cooked for the giant who is here, or else no more of my world will be before me.' Just then we could be hearing the footsteps of the giant, 'What shall I do?
what shall I do?' cried the woman.
I went to the caldron, and by luck it was not hot, so in it I got just as the brute came in.
As fortune favoured me, the brute slept beside the caldron.
There I was scalded by the bottom of the caldron.
When she perceived that he was asleep, she set her mouth quietly to the hole that was in the lid, and she said to me 'was I alive?' I said I was.
When I got out of the caldron I knew not what to do; and she said to me that there was no weapon that would kill him but his own weapon.
But with every ill that befell me I got the spear loosed from him.
And it was fearful to look on the brute, who had but one eye in the midst of his face; and it was not agreeable for the like of me to attack him.
And he fell cold dead where he was; and you may be sure, O king, that joy was on me.
The king of Lochlann's mother was putting on a fire at this time, and listening to Conall telling the tale about the child.
"Is it you," said she, "that were there?"
The king said, "O Conall, you came through great hardships.
They lay down that night, and if it was early that Conall rose, it was earlier than that that the queen was on foot making ready.
He got the brown horse and his sack full of gold and silver and stones of great price, and then Conall and his three sons went away, and they returned home to the Erin realm of gladness.
He left the gold and silver in his house, and he went with the horse to the king.
They were good friends evermore.
Chapter forty six.
The Donation.
Colbert reappeared beneath the curtains.
"Alas! yes, my lord."
"Can he be right?
Can all this money be badly acquired?"
People generally find they have been so,--when they die."
"In the first place, they commit the wrong of dying, Colbert."
"That is true, my lord.
Against the king?"
"That admits of no contradiction, my lord."
"Does it?
"That is beyond doubt."
"And I might fairly keep for my own family, which is so needy, a good fortune,--the whole, even, of which I have earned?"
"I see no impediment to that, monseigneur."
"I felt assured that in consulting you, Colbert, I should have good advice," replied Mazarin, greatly delighted.
"Oh! no; a snare?
What for?
Did I not hear him say-'Distinguish that which the king has given you from that which you have given yourself.' Recollect, my lord, if he did not say something a little like that to you?--that is quite a theatrical speech."
"That is possible."
"To make restitution!" cried Mazarin, with great warmth.
"What, of all!
You speak just as the confessor did."
"To make restitution of a part,--that is to say, his majesty's part; and that, monseigneur, may have its dangers.
Your eminence is too skillful a politician not to know that, at this moment, the king does not possess a hundred and fifty thousand livres clear in his coffers."
"The legacy of a part would dishonor you and offend the king.
Leaving a part to his majesty, is to avow that that part has inspired you with doubts as to the lawfulness of the means of acquisition."
"Monsieur Colbert!"
"I thought your eminence did me the honor to ask my advice?"
"Yes, but you are ignorant of the principal details of the question."
"Surely the king would reproach me with nothing, but he would laugh at me, while squandering my millions, and with good reason."
"Your eminence has misunderstood me.
"You said so, clearly, it seems to me, when you advised me to give it to him."
"Ah," replied Colbert, "that is because your eminence, absorbed as you are by your disease, entirely loses sight of the character of Louis the fourteenth."
"How so?"
"Go on-that is?"
"Pride!
Pardon me, my lord, haughtiness, nobleness; kings have no pride, that is a human passion."
"Pride,--yes, you are right.
Next?"
"Well, my lord, if I have divined rightly, your eminence has but to give all your money to the king, and that immediately."
"But for what?" said Mazarin, quite bewildered.
"Because the king will not accept of the whole."
"Just so."
"My lord!"
"To inherit, yes, Colbert, yes; he is anxious for my death, in order to inherit.
Triple fool that I am!
I would prevent him!"
"Exactly: if the donation were made in a certain form he would refuse it."
"Well; but how?"
"That is plain enough.
All that does not proceed from himself, I predict, he will disdain."
"And you will guarantee, that if I give my forty millions to the king-"
"Saying certain things to him at the same time, I guarantee he will refuse them."
"But those things-what are they?"
"I will write them, if my lord will have the goodness to dictate them."
"Well, but, after all, what advantage will that be to me?"
"But, if he should accept it; if he should even think of accepting it!"
"Then there would remain thirteen millions for your family, and that is a good round sum."
You appear to be much afraid that the king will accept; you have a deal more reason to fear that he will not accept."
But my pains are returning, I shall faint.
Colbert started.
The cardinal was indeed very ill; large drops of sweat flowed down upon his bed of agony, and the frightful pallor of a face streaming with water was a spectacle which the most hardened practitioner could not have beheld without much compassion.
Colbert was, without doubt, very much affected, for he quitted the chamber, calling Bernouin to attend to the dying man, and went into the corridor.
Whilst burning hot napkins, physic, revulsives, and Guenaud, who was recalled, were performing their functions with increased activity, Colbert, holding his great head in both his hands, to compress within it the fever of the projects engendered by the brain, was meditating the tenor of the donation he would make Mazarin write, at the first hour of respite his disease should afford him.
Colbert resumed his place at Mazarin's pillow at the first interval of pain, and persuaded him to dictate a donation thus conceived.
"About to appear before God, the Master of mankind, I beg the king, who was my master on earth, to resume the wealth which his bounty has bestowed upon me, and which my family would be happy to see pass into such illustrious hands.
The particulars of my property will be found-they are drawn up-at the first requisition of his majesty, or at the last sigh of his most devoted servant,
The cardinal sighed heavily as he signed this; Colbert sealed the packet, and carried it immediately to the Louvre, whither the king had returned.
Chapter forty seven.
But the minister had had, as we have said, an alarming attack of gout, and the tide of flattery was mounting towards the throne.
Courtiers have a marvelous instinct in scenting the turn of events; courtiers possess a supreme kind of science; they are diplomatists in throwing light upon the unraveling of complicated intrigues, captains in divining the issue of battles, and physicians in curing the sick.
Louis the fourteenth., to whom his mother had taught this axiom, together with many others, understood at once that the cardinal must be very ill.
The young king then was, as we have seen, a prey to a double excitement; and he said to himself as he looked in a glass, "O king!--king by name, and not in fact;--phantom, vain phantom art thou!--inert statue, which has no other power than that of provoking salutations from courtiers, when wilt thou be able to raise thy velvet arm, or clench thy silken hand?
when wilt thou be able to open, for any purpose but to sigh, or smile, lips condemned to the motionless stupidity of the marbles in thy gallery?"
Then, passing his hand over his brow, and feeling the want of air, he approached a window, and looking down, saw below some horsemen talking together, and groups of timid observers.
These horsemen were a fraction of the watch: the groups were busy portions of the people, to whom a king is always a curious thing, the same as a rhinoceros, a crocodile, or a serpent.
He struck his brow with his open hand, crying,--"King of France! what a title!
People of France! what a heap of creatures!
I have just returned to my Louvre; my horses, just unharnessed, are still smoking, and I have created interest enough to induce scarcely twenty persons to look at me as I passed.
Twenty! what do I say?
no; there were not twenty anxious to see the king of France.
Why, my good God! have not I, the king, the right to ask of you all that?"
"Because," said a voice, replying to his, and which sounded from the other side of the door of the cabinet, "because at the Palais Royal lies all the gold,--that is to say, all the power of him who desires to reign."
The voice which had pronounced these words was that of Anne of Austria.
The king started, and advanced towards her. "I hope," said he, "your majesty has paid no attention to the vain declamations which the solitude and disgust familiar to kings suggest to the happiest dispositions?"
"I only paid attention to one thing, my son, and that was, that you were complaining."
"Who!
I?
Not at all," said Louis the fourteenth.; "no, in truth, you err, madame."
"What were you doing, then?"
"I thought I was under the ferule of my professor, and developing a subject of amplification."
"My son," replied Anne of Austria, shaking her head, "you are wrong not to trust my word; you are wrong not to grant me your confidence.
A day will come, and perhaps quickly, wherein you will have occasion to remember that axiom:--'Gold is universal power; and they alone are kings who are all powerful.'"
"Your intention," continued the king, "was not, however, to cast blame upon the rich men of this age, was it?"
That is what I mean to say by the words for which you reproach me."
"Besides," continued Anne of Austria, "the Lord never gives the goods of this world but for a season; the Lord-as correctives to honor and riches-the Lord has placed sufferings, sickness, and death; and no one," added she, with a melancholy smile, which proved she made the application of the funeral precept to herself, "no man can take his wealth or greatness with him to the grave.
It results, therefore, that the young gather the abundant harvest prepared for them by the old."
Louis listened with increased attention to the words which Anne of Austria, no doubt, pronounced with a view to console him.
"Madame," said he, looking earnestly at his mother, "one would almost say in truth that you had something else to announce to me."
"I have absolutely nothing, my son; only you cannot have failed to remark that his eminence the cardinal is very ill."
Louis looked at his mother, expecting some emotion in her voice, some sorrow in her countenance.
The face of Anne of Austria appeared a little changed, but that was from sufferings of quite a personal character. Perhaps the alteration was caused by the cancer which had begun to consume her breast.
Is not that your opinion as well as mine, my son?" said the queen.
"Yes, madame; yes, certainly, it would be a great loss for the kingdom," said Louis, coloring; "but the peril does not seem to me to be so great; besides, the cardinal is still young." The king had scarcely ceased speaking when an usher lifted the tapestry, and stood with a paper in his hand, waiting for the king to speak to him.
"What have you there?" asked the king.
"Give it to me," said the king; and he took the paper.
But at the moment he was about to open it, there was a great noise in the gallery, the ante chamber, and the court.
"How could I say there was but one king in France!
I was mistaken, there are two."
As he spoke or thought thus, the door opened, and the superintendent of finances, Fouquet, appeared before his nominal master.
In addition to all this, a loud murmur was heard along his passage, which did not die away till some time after he had passed. It was this murmur which Louis the fourteenth. regretted so deeply not hearing as he passed, and dying away behind him.
"He is not precisely a king, as you fancy," said Anne of Austria to her son; "he is only a man who is much too rich-that is all."
He nodded, therefore, familiarly to Fouquet, whilst he continued to unfold the paper given to him by the usher.
Louis had opened the paper, and yet he did not read it.
I was at my country house of Vaux when the news reached me; and the affair seemed so pressing that I left at once."
"You left Vaux this evening, monsieur?"
"An hour and a half ago, yes, your majesty," said Fouquet, consulting a watch, richly ornamented with diamonds.
"An hour and a half!" said the king, still able to restrain his anger, but not to conceal his astonishment.
Your majesty doubts my word, and you have reason to do so; but I have really come in that time, though it is wonderful!
I received from England three pairs of very fast horses, as I had been assured.
They were placed at distances of four leagues apart, and I tried them this evening.
They really brought me from Vaux to the Louvre in an hour and a half, so your majesty sees I have not been cheated." The queen mother smiled with something like secret envy.
But Fouquet caught her thought.
"Thus, madame," he promptly said, "such horses are made for kings, not for subjects; for kings ought never to yield to any one in anything."
The king looked up.
"Truly not, madame; therefore the horses only await the orders of his majesty to enter the royal stables; and if I allowed myself to try them, it was only for fear of offering to the king anything that was not positively wonderful."
The king became quite red.
"You know, Monsieur Fouquet," said the queen, "that at the court of France it is not the custom for a subject to offer anything to his king."
Louis started.
It was not so much a present that I permitted myself to offer, as the tribute I paid."
"Thank you, Monsieur Fouquet," said the king politely, "and I am gratified by your intention, for I love good horses; but you know I am not very rich; you, who are my superintendent of finances, know it better than any one else.
I am not able, then, however willing I may be, to purchase such a valuable set of horses."
Fouquet darted a haughty glance at the queen mother, who appeared to triumph at the false position in which the minister had placed himself, and replied:--
Under the mild heat of this luxury of kings springs the luxury of individuals, a source of riches for the people.
But the king is silent, and consequently I am condemned."
During this speech, Louis was, unconsciously, folding and unfolding Mazarin's paper, upon which he had not cast his eyes.
At length he glanced upon it, and uttered a faint cry at reading the first line.
"What is the matter, my son?" asked the queen, anxiously, and going towards the king.
"From the cardinal," replied the king, continuing to read; "yes, yes, it is really from him."
"Is he worse, then?"
"Oh! a regularly drawn up deed of gift," said she.
"A gift?" repeated Fouquet.
"Yes," said the king, replying pointedly to the superintendent of finances, "yes, at the point of death, monsieur le cardinal makes me a donation of all his wealth."
"Forty millions," cried the queen.
this is very noble on the part of his eminence, and will silence all malicious rumors; forty millions scraped together slowly, coming back all in one heap to the treasury!
It is the act of a faithful subject and a good Christian." And having once more cast her eyes over the act, she restored it to Louis the fourteenth., whom the announcement of the sum greatly agitated.
The king looked at him, and held the paper out to him, in turn.
"You must reply to it, my son," said Anne of Austria; "you must reply to it, and immediately."
"But how, madame?"
"By a visit to the cardinal."
"Why, it is but an hour since I left his eminence," said the king.
"Write, then, sire."
"Write!" said the young king, with evident repugnance.
"That the present is worth the trouble?
"Accept, then, and thank him," insisted Anne of Austria.
"Does your majesty wish to know my opinion?"
"Yes."
"Thank him, sire-"
"Ah!" said the queen.
"But do not accept," continued Fouquet.
"And why not?" asked the queen.
The king remained silent between these two contrary opinions.
"But forty millions!" said Anne of Austria, in the same tone as that in which, at a later period, poor Marie Antoinette replied, "You will tell me as much!"
"It is precisely, madame, because these forty millions would be a fortune that I will say to the king, 'Sire, if it be not decent for a king to accept from a subject six horses, worth twenty thousand livres, it would be disgraceful for him to owe a fortune to another subject, more or less scrupulous in the choice of the materials which contributed to the building up of that fortune.'"
"It ill becomes you, monsieur, to give your king a lesson," said Anne of Austria; "better procure for him forty millions to replace those you make him lose."
"The king shall have them whenever he wishes," said the superintendent of finances, bowing.
"Yes, by oppressing the people," said the queen.
"And were they not oppressed, madame," replied Fouquet, "when they were made to sweat the forty millions given by this deed?
Furthermore, his majesty has asked my opinion, I have given it; if his majesty ask my concurrence, it will be the same."
"Nonsense! accept, my son, accept," said Anne of Austria.
"You are above reports and interpretations."
"Refuse, sire," said Fouquet.
"As long as a king lives, he has no other measure but his conscience,--no other judge than his own desires; but when dead, he has posterity, which applauds or accuses."
"Thank you, mother," replied Louis, bowing respectfully to the queen. "Thank you Monsieur, Fouquet," said he, dismissing the superintendent civilly.
"Do you accept?" asked Anne of Austria, once more.
"I shall consider of it," replied he, looking at Fouquet.
CHAPTER sixteen
A WORLD FAMOUS CITY-JERUSALEM
The history of the world is largely the story of the rise and fall of great cities.
Some of the great cities of today are famous for their size, such as New York and London; some for their beauty, like Paris and Rio Janeiro; some for their culture and learning, as Boston and Oxford; some for their manufacturing and commercial supremacy, as Detroit and Liverpool.
But there is one city on the globe not nearly as large as Des Moines, not at all beautiful, its people neither cultured nor learned, has no factories and one narrow gauge railway takes care of most of its commerce, and yet it is by far the most famous city of all time.
It is the city of Jerusalem.
The site of the city was once owned by a farmer whose name was Oman.
He had a threshing floor on the top of Mount Moriah.
The city as it is today is on top of two mountains, but the valley between has been filled up so that it is almost like one continuous mountain top.
To get an idea of the city as it was when the war broke out you must imagine a city of about sixty thousand people, without street cars, electric lights, telephones, waterworks, sewer system or any modern improvements whatever.
However, General Allenby's entrance into the city in December, nineteen seventeen, was the beginning of a new era.
In three months the English did more for the city than the Turk did in a thousand years.
There is an old Arab legend which says: "Not until the River Nile flows into Palestine will the Turk be driven from Palestine." Of course this was their way of saying that such a thing would never come to pass for the Turk actually believed that he had such a hold on that country that there was no power on earth that could make him give it up.
But when the English started from Egypt they not only built a railroad as they went toward Jerusalem, but not far from the Nile they prepared a great filtering process to cleanse the water, and then laid a twelve inch pipe and brought the pure water along with them for both man and beast.
Jerusalem is to this day a walled city.
The walls average some thirty feet high and are about fifteen feet thick at the top.
It is a little less than two and one half miles around the city wall, but the city itself has outgrown these limitations, quite a portion of it being on the outside of the wall.
The hotel at which the writer stopped while visiting the city some years ago, was located outside the wall, as are many of the best buildings.
The streets are narrow, the houses have flat tops and many of them are but one or two stories high.
There was a time, however, when this city boasted of having the finest building ever erected by the hands of man, viz: Solomon's Temple.
This was built on Mount Moriah which was a great flat mountain top of uneven rock.
Great arches were built around the sides and then the top leveled off until the large temple area was formed.
Below the sides of this area are still seen the massive rooms that are called Solomon's stables.
The writer rambled for hours through these great underground vaults and saw the holes in the stone pillars where the horses were tied.
Here multiplied thousands took refuge during some of the memorable sieges that the city went through.
Not far away are the great vaults known as Solomon's Quarries.
Here is where the massive stones were "made ready" and the master builder's plans were so perfect that, "there was neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron heard in the temple while it was in building." The marks of the mason's tools and the niches where their lamps were placed can be seen to this day.
It is a remarkable fact that in sinking shafts alongside the temple wall, great stones have been discovered but no stone chips are found by them.
Jerusalem has several large churches the most noted of which is the one built over the traditional tomb of Christ.
It is called the "Church of the Holy Sepulchre." For sixteen hundred years there was no question but what this tomb was the identical one in which the body of Christ was laid.
This church as it stands today is a magnificent building with two great entrances.
The sad thing about it is the fact that it is divided up into various chapels, each held by sects of so-called Christians, and a large armed guard has to be kept in the church to keep these fanatical people from killing each other.
Before soldiers were placed there, scenes of conflict and bloodshed were very common indeed-a sad spectacle for Jews and Moslems and other enemies of the Christ to gaze upon.
In the Church of Pater Noster I counted the Lord's Prayer in thirty two different languages inscribed on marble slabs so that almost any person from any country can read this prayer in his own language.
In this connection it is interesting to note that at the gate entrance to the Pool of Bethesda the scripture story of the healing of the impotent man is written, or rather inscribed, beneath the arch, in fifty one different languages.
One of the large churches in the city was dedicated by the ex kaiser when he visited the city in eighteen ninety eight.
It was later found out that this German church was built for military purposes.
This self appointed world ruler is represented on the ceiling of the chapel of a building on Mount Olivet in a companion panel with the Deity.
In this same building the ex kaiser is represented as a crusader by a figure and the Psalmist is painted with the moustache of a German general.
When the ex kaiser entered the city of Jerusalem, a breach was made in the wall near the Jaffa Gate, so instead of entering through the gate like an ordinary mortal, he went in through a hole in the wall. He would no doubt be glad now to go through another "hole in the wall" to have his liberty.
To the writer, however, perhaps the most interesting place in or about the entire city is the Garden Tomb and Mount Calvary.
This is almost north of the Damascus gate and on the great highway from Jerusalem from the north.
Mount Calvary is only a small hill.
It is said that no Jew cares to pass this place after night and if he passes it in daylight he will mutter a curse upon the memory of him who presumed to be the King of the Jews.
Near this Skull Place is an old tomb that just fits the Bible narrative, viz: "Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulchre wherein never man was yet laid."
This tomb was discovered many years ago by General Gordon and is often spoken of as Gordon's Tomb, also called the Garden Tomb.
When excavating about it a wall was found which proved to be a garden wall the end of which butts up against Mount Calvary.
One of the first things noted as the writer went into this tomb was the fact that it is a Jewish tomb.
They made their tombs different from those of any other people.
That it was a "rich man's tomb" is also very certain, as is the fact that it dates back to the Herodian period in which Jesus lived.
There is also some frescoed work upon it showing that it was held sacred by the early Christians.
Then the "rolling stone" and the groove in which it was placed is very interesting.
This was something like a gigantic grindstone which rolled in the groove and was large enough to cover the opening when the tomb was closed.
While in and about Jerusalem the writer visited the famous "Upper Room," the "Jew's Wailing Place," the "Mosque of Omar," which stands upon the very spot where Solomon's Temple used to stand, the "Way of Sorrows," the "Ecco Homo Arch," the "Castle of Antonio," "Tower of David," the "Pool of Siloam," and a great many other interesting places.
CHAPTER seventeen
A WORLD FAMOUS RIVER-THE JORDAN
It is the River Jordan, and a glimpse of it brings forth some of the most wonderful characteristics possessed by any river, as well as many historical events that make their memories dear to the hearts of men and women wherever civilization has found its way.
Unlike all other rivers which rise in some elevated place and flow toward the sea level, nearly every mile of this river is below the surface of the ocean.
That spring is but a few hundred feet above sea level.
The water from this spring is joined by that of several other springs and small rivulets caused by the melting snows on the mountain, flows to the south a distance of a few miles, and forms a small lake which is about three miles wide and four miles long.
This lake is just on a level with the Mediterranean Sea which is only about thirty miles to the west.
This is spoken of in the Bible as "the waters of Merom." From the southern end of this lake the Jordan begins.
The first ten and one half miles the water falls six hundred and eighty feet to where it enters the Sea of Galilee.
This pear shaped body of water is a little more than a dozen miles long and half that wide and is surrounded by mountains.
The river enters through a small canyon at the northwest and passes out through another canyon at the south end. Sometimes the wind will rush down the canyon at the northwest and in a few moments the waters of the lake are like a great whirlpool.
These sudden storms often imperil any small boats which may be out on the sea as was the case in Bible times when the Master was sleeping and his disciples awakened him, saying: "Lord, save us; we perish."
From this body of water to the point where the Jordan empties into the Dead Sea is only sixty five miles by airline, but the way the river winds like a gigantic serpent, one would travel twice that distance were he to go in a boat.
This Jordan valley is from four to fourteen miles wide and the mountains on each side rise to the height of from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet.
Within this Jordan valley is what might be called an inner valley which is from a quarter of a mile to a mile wide, and from fifty to something like seventy five feet deep.
This might be called the river bottom and the river winds like a snake in this smaller valley.
During this sixty five miles (airline) to the Dead Sea, it falls more than six hundred feet more, so that the Dead Sea itself is about thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean Sea which is only forty miles west.
While the Jordan as well as other smaller streams flow continually into the Dead Sea, it is said that it never raises an inch.
This, with the fact that this body of water has no outlet whatever, makes a problem to which geologists and scientific men have failed to give a satisfactory solution.
Of course, the water evaporates very rapidly, but in the spring when the Jordan overflows and pours a much greater volume of water into it, how does it come that it evaporates so much faster than at any other time in the year?
I have never learned to swim; in deep water simply cannot keep my feet up, but in the Dead Sea they could not be kept down, and of course I could swim like a duck.
Nothing grows near this body of water.
Everything about it is dead.
Like some people, it is always receiving but never giving.
At the mouth of the Jordan one can see dead fish floating on the water.
When carried by the swift current into this salty water they soon die.
The River Jordan runs very swiftly.
It is about the size of the Des Moines river in northern Iowa, not nearly so large as this river in the southern part of the state.
At the fords of the Jordan I waded out into the stream but the current was so swift that I did not attempt to go entirely across.
Here at this ford occurred some of the greatest events of Bible history. On the plain just east of the river the Children of Israel were encamped when Moses went up on Mount Nebo, looked over the Promised Land, folded his arms and peacefully passed into the great beyond.
It must have been an exciting day for the entire camp when they last saw their great leader become a mere speck on the mountain side and finally disappear altogether.
They not only never saw him again but they never were able to find a trace of his body.
There must have been much speculation among these people as to what became of Moses until in some miraculous way joshua was informed that the great leader was dead and that he must now take charge and lead the people across the Jordan into the Promised Land.
After thirty days mourning for Moses, the great company marched down to the river; it was opened for them and they crossed on dry ground.
The record also states that this crossing was at the time when the river was out of its banks and this whole bottom, nearly a mile wide, was a rushing torrent. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that the enemies who had taken possession of the Promised Land were totally unprepared for their coming, feeling secure while the river was so high and dangerous.
Failing to find the body, together with the fact that they had witnessed the parting of the waters when the two men went over and the same when Elisha came back alone, was sufficient evidence to them that the young prophet had told the truth.
Evidently this event created a great impression all over the country and young men came to the school for the prophets which was located near, that the buildings had to be enlarged.
Every student borrowed an ax and went to work felling trees along the river bank.
In one case the ax flew off the handle and went into the water.
The young man was greatly troubled about this for it was a borrowed one.
But perhaps the greatest of all events that occurred at this place was the baptism of Christ.
john the Baptist must have been the Billy Sunday of his day for the crowds that came to hear him were immense.
One day among others who came was a fine looking young man who asked for baptism.
But the preacher knew him and refused, saying that he was unworthy to do this, but the young man, who was no other than the Master himself, explained the situation and the preacher hesitated no longer.
In connection with the River Jordan and the bodies of water at each end, it is interesting to note that the first man to take the level and give to the world the remarkable facts about the physical characteristics of this wonderful and world famous river, was an American.
His name was Lynch and he was a lieutenant in the American Navy.
At the close of the Mexican War, our Government permitted Lieutenant Lynch to take ten seamen and two small boats and make this exploration.
THE UNITED STATES AND THE EUROPEAN WAR
On june twenty eighth, the heir to the Austro Hungarian throne was assassinated at Serajevo, the capital of Bosnia, an Austrian province occupied mainly by Serbs.
Germany at once proposed that the issue should be regarded as "an affair which should be settled solely between Austria Hungary and Serbia"; meaning that the small nation should be left to the tender mercies of a great power.
Russia refused to take this view.
Great Britain proposed a settlement by mediation.
Germany backed up Austria to the limit.
To use the language of the German authorities: "We were perfectly aware that a possible warlike attitude of Austria Hungary against Serbia might bring Russia upon the field and that it might therefore involve us in a war, in accordance with our duties as allies.
We could not, however, in these vital interests of Austria Hungary which were at stake, advise our ally to take a yielding attitude not compatible with his dignity nor deny him our assistance." That made the war inevitable.
Every day of the fateful August, nineteen fourteen, was crowded with momentous events.
On the same day, Great Britain, anxiously besought by the French government, promised the aid of the British navy if German warships made hostile demonstrations in the Channel.
The following day, Great Britain demanded of Germany respect for Belgian neutrality and, failing to receive the guarantee, broke off diplomatic relations.
On the fifth, the British prime minister announced that war had opened between England and Germany.
The storm now broke in all its pitiless fury.
Moreover, they regarded the German imperial government as an autocratic power wielded in the interest of an ambitious military party.
On the other hand, many Americans of German descent, in memory of their ties with the Fatherland, openly sympathized with the Central Powers; and many Americans of Irish descent, recalling their long and bitter struggle for home rule in Ireland, would have regarded British defeat as a merited redress of ancient grievances.
Extremely sensitive to American opinion, but ill informed about it, the German government soon began systematic efforts to present its cause to the people of the United States in the most favorable light possible. dr Bernhard Dernburg, the former colonial secretary of the German empire, was sent to America as a special agent.
For months he filled the newspapers, magazines, and periodicals with interviews, articles, and notes on the justice of the Teutonic cause.
From a press bureau in New York flowed a stream of pamphlets, leaflets, and cartoons.
On this point there existed on august first nineteen fourteen, a fairly definite body of principles by which nations were bound.
In the second place, it was agreed that "contraband of war" found on an enemy or neutral ship was a lawful prize; any ship suspected of carrying it was liable to search and if caught with forbidden goods was subject to seizure.
In the third place, international law prescribed that a peaceful merchant ship, whether belonging to an enemy or to a neutral country, should not be destroyed or sunk without provision for the safety of crew and passengers.
As to contraband of war Great Britain put such a broad interpretation upon the term as to include nearly every important article of commerce.
A new question arose in connection with American trade with the neutral countries surrounding Germany.
Great Britain early began to intercept ships carrying oil, gasoline, and copper-all war materials of prime importance-on the ground that they either were destined ultimately to Germany or would release goods for sale to Germans.
On november second nineteen fourteen, the English government announced that the Germans wore sowing mines in open waters and that therefore the whole of the North Sea was a military zone.
Ships bound for Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were ordered to come by the English Channel for inspection and sailing directions.
In effect, Americans were now licensed by Great Britain to trade in certain commodities and in certain amounts with neutral countries.
The German decree added that, as the British admiralty had ordered the use of neutral flags by English ships in time of distress, neutral vessels would be in danger of destruction if found in the forbidden area.
It was clear that Germany intended to employ submarines to destroy shipping.
A new factor was thus introduced into naval warfare, one not provided for in the accepted laws of war.
A warship overhauling a merchant vessel could easily take its crew and passengers on board for safe keeping as prescribed by international law; but a submarine ordinarily could do nothing of the sort.
Of necessity the lives and the ships of neutrals, as well as of belligerents, were put in mortal peril.
The response of the United States to the ominous German order was swift and direct.
On february tenth nineteen fifteen, it warned Germany that if her commanders destroyed American lives and ships in obedience to that decree, the action would "be very hard indeed to reconcile with the friendly relations happily subsisting between the two governments." The American note added that the German imperial government would be held to "strict accountability" and all necessary steps would be taken to safeguard American lives and American rights.
This was firm and clear language, but the only response which it evoked from Germany was a suggestion that, if Great Britain would allow food supplies to pass through the blockade, the submarine campaign would be dropped.
On the morning of may first nineteen fifteen, Americans were astounded to see in the newspapers an advertisement, signed by the German Imperial Embassy, warning travelers of the dangers in the war zone and notifying them that any who ventured on British ships into that area did so at their own risk.
A cry of horror ran through the country.
The German papers in America and a few American people argued that American citizens had been duly warned of the danger and had deliberately taken their lives into their own hands; but the terrible deed was almost universally condemned by public opinion.
It solemnly informed the German government that "no warning that an unlawful and inhumane act will be committed can possibly be accepted as an excuse or palliation for that act or as an abatement of the responsibility for its commission."
In a second note, made public on june eleventh, the position of the United States was again affirmed.
The German reply was still evasive and German naval commanders continued their course of sinking merchant ships.
In a third and final note of july twenty first nineteen fifteen, President Wilson made it clear to Germany that he meant what he said when he wrote that he would maintain the rights of American citizens.
On the Republican side everything seemed to depend upon the action of the Progressives.
If the breach created in nineteen twelve could be closed, victory was possible; if not, defeat was certain. A promise of unity lay in the fact that the conventions of the Republicans and Progressives were held simultaneously in Chicago.
The friends of Roosevelt hoped that both parties would select him as their candidate; but this hope was not realized.
The Republicans chose, and the Progressives accepted, Charles e Hughes, an associate justice of the federal Supreme Court who, as governor of New York, had won a national reputation by waging war on "machine politicians."
The Democrats, on their side, renominated President Wilson by acclamation, reviewed with pride the legislative achievements of the party, and commended "the splendid diplomatic victories of our great President who has preserved the vital interests of our government and its citizens and kept us out of war."
In the election which ensued President Wilson's popular vote exceeded that cast for mr Hughes by more than half a million, while his electoral vote stood two hundred seventy seven to two hundred fifty four.
He had received the largest vote yet cast for a presidential candidate.
The Progressive party practically disappeared, and the Socialists suffered a severe set back, falling far behind the vote of nineteen twelve.
On december sixteenth, the German Emperor proposed to the Allied Powers that they enter into peace negotiations, a suggestion that was treated as a mere political maneuver by the opposing governments.
On january twenty second nineteen seventeen, President Wilson in an address before the Senate, declared it to be a duty of the United States to take part in the establishment of a stable peace on the basis of certain principles.
These were, in short: "peace without victory"; the right of nationalities to freedom and self government; the independence of Poland; freedom of the seas; the reduction of armaments; and the abolition of entangling alliances.
THE UNITED STATES AT WAR
At the same time he explained to Congress that he desired no conflict with Germany and would await an "overt act" before taking further steps to preserve American rights.
"God grant," he concluded, "that we may not be challenged to defend them by acts of willful injustice on the part of the government of Germany." Yet the challenge came.
Between february twenty sixth and april second, six American merchant vessels were torpedoed, in most cases without any warning and without regard to the loss of American lives. President Wilson therefore called upon Congress to answer the German menace.
The reply of Congress on april sixth was a resolution, passed with only a few dissenting votes, declaring the existence of a state of war with Germany.
Austria Hungary at once severed diplomatic relations with the United States; but it was not until december seventh that Congress, acting on the President's advice, declared war also on that "vassal of the German government."
He first made it clear that it was a war of self defense.
"The military masters of Germany," he exclaimed, "denied us the right to be neutral." Proof of that lay on every hand. Agents of the German imperial government had destroyed American lives and American property on the high seas.
They had filled our communities with spies.
Though assailed in many ways and compelled to resort to war, the United States sought no material rewards.
"The world must be made safe for democracy.
Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.
We have no selfish ends to serve.
We desire no conquest, no dominion.
In a very remarkable message read to Congress on january eighth nineteen eighteen, President Wilson laid down his famous "fourteen points" summarizing the ideals for which we were fighting.
Democracy, the right of nations to determine their own fate, a covenant of enduring peace-these were the ideals for which the American people were to pour out their blood and treasure.
The powers against which we were arrayed had every able bodied man in service and all their resources, human and material, thrown into the scale.
For this reason, President Wilson summoned the whole people of the United States to make every sacrifice necessary for victory. Congress by law decreed that the national army should be chosen from all male citizens and males not enemy aliens who had declared their intention of becoming citizens.
By the first act of may eighteenth nineteen seventeen, it fixed the age limits at twenty one to thirty one inclusive.
Later, in August, nineteen eighteen, it extended them to eighteen and forty five.
"The whole nation," said the President, "must be a team in which each man shall play the part for which he is best fitted."
Some urged the "conscription of wealth as well as men," meaning the support of the war out of taxes upon great fortunes; but more conservative counsels prevailed.
Four great Liberty Loans were floated, all the agencies of modern publicity being employed to enlist popular interest.
The first loan had four and a half million subscribers; the fourth more than twenty million.
Combined with loans were heavy taxes.
A progressive tax was laid upon incomes beginning with four per cent on incomes in the lower ranges and rising to sixty three per cent of that part of any income above two million dollars.
A progressive tax was levied upon inheritances. An excess profits tax was laid upon all corporations and partnerships, rising in amount to sixty per cent of the net income in excess of thirty three per cent on the invested capital.
"This," said a distinguished economist, "is the high water mark in the history of taxation.
Never before in the annals of civilization has an attempt been made to take as much as two thirds of a man's income by taxation."
Between the declaration of war and the armistice, Congress enacted law after law relative to food supplies, raw materials, railways, mines, ships, forests, and industrial enterprises.
No power over the lives and property of citizens, deemed necessary to the prosecution of the armed conflict, was withheld from the government.
The farmer's wheat, the housewife's sugar, coal at the mines, labor in the factories, ships at the wharves, trade with friendly countries, the railways, banks, stores, private fortunes-all were mobilized and laid under whatever obligations the government deemed imperative.
Never was a nation more completely devoted to a single cause.
A law of august tenth nineteen seventeen, gave the President power to fix the prices of wheat and coal and to take almost any steps necessary to prevent monopoly and excessive prices.
By a series of measures, enlarging the principles of the shipping act of nineteen sixteen, ships and shipyards were brought under public control and the government was empowered to embark upon a great ship building program.
In December, nineteen seventeen, the government assumed for the period of the war the operation of the railways under a presidential proclamation which was elaborated in March, nineteen eighteen, by act of Congress.
In the summer of nineteen eighteen the express, telephone, and telegraph business of the entire country passed under government control.
By war risk insurance acts allowances were made for the families of enlisted men, compensation for injuries was provided, death benefits were instituted, and a system of national insurance was established in the interest of the men in service.
Never before in the history of the country had the government taken such a wise and humane view of its obligations to those who served on the field of battle or on the seas.
The Socialist party denounced the war as a capitalist quarrel; but all the protests combined were too slight to have much effect.
Labor was given representation on the important boards and commissions dealing with industrial questions. Trade union standards were accepted by the government and generally applied in industry.
Special effort was made to stimulate the production of "submarine chasers" and "scout cruisers" to be sent to the danger zone. Convoys were provided to accompany the transports conveying soldiers to France.
Before the end of the war more than three hundred American vessels and seventy five thousand officers and men were operating in European waters. Though the German fleet failed to come out and challenge the sea power of the Allies, the battleships of the United States were always ready to do their full duty in such an event.
Although American troops did not take part on a large scale until the last phase of the war in nineteen eighteen, several battalions of infantry were in the trenches by October, nineteen seventeen, and had their first severe encounter with the Germans early in November.
At Belleau Wood, at Chateau Thierry, and other points along the deep salient made by the Germans into the French lines, American soldiers distinguished themselves by heroic action.
They also played an important role in the counter attack that "smashed" the salient and drove the Germans back.
We are willing to accept modifications, but the scheme would work.
Arguments must be fostered and preserved.
Diplomacy is an evil game, chiefly because it has been so exclusive.
thirty two
ART FOR ARGUMENT'S SAKE
Reviewers look for motives.
How could symbolism be more perfect?
Always see the scab hit the striker.'"
"You see," he went on, "there are seven or eight other newspapers in town who will see it just the other way and I've got to keep the balance straight."
That is, not among umpires.
Holding a Baby
When Adam delved and Eve span, the fiction that man is incapable of housework was first established.
It would be interesting to figure out just how many foot pounds of energy men have saved themselves, since the creation of the world, by keeping up the pretense that a special knack is required for washing dishes and for dusting, and that the knack is wholly feminine.
The pretense of incapacity is impudent in its audacity, and yet it works.
To this declaration men gave immediate and eager assent and they have kept it up.
It is all part of a great scheme of sex propaganda.
At this point, interruption is inevitable.
At least all will do.
But to return to our quotation: "If Richard tried to take up the bundle, his fingers fell away like the legs of the brittle crab and the bundle collapsed, incalculable and helpless.
'How do you do it?' he would say. And he would right Annabel and try to still her protests.
"He doesn't seem to have the proper touch," she explained.
Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn.
As I ventured to suggest before, almost any firm grip will do.
Nature herself is cavalier.
It is pretty generally held that all a woman needs to do to know all about children is to have some. This wisdom is attributed to instinct.
Nature is the great teacher."
This simply isn't true.
Instinct is not what it used to be.
It has been convenient.
Perhaps it has been too convenient.
Like children in a toy shop, we have chosen to live with the most amusing of talking and walking dolls, without ever attempting to tear down the sign which says, "Do not touch." In fact we have helped to set it in place. That is a pity.
A dish is an unresponsive thing.
It gives back nothing.
It is a brand new world for the child.
Probably he will think that they are part of your own handiwork turned out for his pleasure.
No, there is nothing dull in feeding a child.
This seems to us laborious and rather tiresome, both for father and child.
He brought his technic into the home.
Even before her head had bumped, he would be hard at work. With him the thrill lay in the inspiration of the competitive spirit.
Her Own People
Miss Channing was the oldest teacher on the staff, and taught the fifth grade.
She was short and stout and jolly; nothing, not even the iciest reserve, ever daunted Miss Channing.
Isn't it good?"
"Rank heresy!
"I haven't any," said Constance wearily.
"It's worse than heresy," said Miss Channing briskly.
"No-no, I haven't anybody in the world.
You seem so reserved and-and, as if you didn't want to be asked about yourself."
"I know it.
It's the truth, and it hurts me, but I can't help it.
I'm nobody.
Father never would talk of her.
I struggled against it at first, but it has been too much for me.
There is nobody to care anything about me, whether I live or die."
"Oh, yes, there is One," said Miss Channing gently.
"God cares, Constance."
Constance gave a disagreeable little laugh.
There, I've shocked you in good earnest now.
She must help Constance, but Constance was not easily helped.
"Have you any particular place in view?
If you like, I'll give you the address of the family I boarded with."
"Yes, but listen to me, dear.
"Heartsease Farm," said mrs Hewitt promptly.
"Haven't they any children?" asked Constance indifferently.
Her interest was in the place, not in the people.
"no
They had a niece once, though.
They brought her up and they just worshipped her.
She ran away with a worthless fellow-I forget his name, if I ever knew it.
He was handsome and smooth tongued, but he was a scamp.
She died soon after and it just broke their hearts.
I keep it just as she left it, not a thing is changed.
Good night dearie, and I hope you'll have pleasant dreams."
"Oh," cried Constance excitedly.
"I must know, I must ask you.
But I have now, and it has led me to Him.
"I am not going back to Taunton.
Their Girl Josie
They had been too proud of Paul ... their only son and such a clever fellow ... and this was their punishment!
He had married an actress!
They could not be brought to see it in any other light.
At the end of that time Elinor Morgan, the mother of an hour, died; three months later Paul Morgan was killed in a railroad collision. After the funeral Cyrus Morgan brought home to his wife their son's little daughter, Joscelyn Morgan.
But the love came ... it had to.
Every smile was a caress, every gurgle of attempted speech a song.
Cyrus and Deborah were nothing if not thorough.
The girl was never allowed to visit her Aunt Annice, although frequently invited.
Yet they loved her and were proud of her.
"What company has Josie got?" she wondered, as she opened the hall door and paused for a moment on the threshold to listen.
"Cyrus, Josie is play acting in the room ... laughing and reciting and going on.
I heard her.
The old couple crept through the kitchen and across the hall to the open parlour door as if they were stalking a thief.
She spoke, moved, posed, gesticulated, with an inborn genius shining through every motion and tone like an illuminating lamp.
"Josie, what are you doing?"
It was Cyrus who spoke, advancing into the room like a stern, hard impersonation of judgment.
A moment before she had been a woman, splendid, unafraid; now she was again the schoolgirl, too confused and shamed to speak.
She lifted her head proudly.
"I have not been doing anything wrong, Grandfather."
"Wrong!
It's your mother's blood coming out in you, girl, in spite of all our care!
Where did you get that play?"
"Aunt Annice sent it to me," answered Joscelyn, casting a quick glance at the book on the table.
Don't take it away."
Please give me my book."
"No," was the stern reply.
"Go to your room, girl, and take off that rig.
"You are cruel and unjust, Grandfather.
I have done no wrong ... it is not doing wrong to develop the one gift I have.
It's the only thing I can do ... and I am going to do it.
My mother was an actress and a good woman.
So I mean to be."
"Oh, Josie, Josie," said her grandmother in a scared voice.
Joscelyn went but she left consternation behind her.
They talked the matter over bitterly at the kitchen hearth that night.
"We haven't been strict enough with the girl, Mother," said Cyrus angrily.
Did you hear how she defied me?
Mother, we'll have trouble with that girl yet."
"I ain't going to be harsh.
From that day Josie was watched and distrusted.
Joscelyn rebelled, but she did nothing secretly ... that was not her nature.
"Grandfather, this letter is from my aunt.
I told her I wished to do so. I am going."
"I know you despise the profession of an actress," the girl went on with heightened colour.
I must go ...
I must."
"Yes, you must," said Cyrus cruelly.
"It's in your blood ... your bad blood, girl."
"My blood isn't bad," cried Joscelyn proudly.
"My mother was a sweet, true, good woman.
You are unjust, Grandfather.
But I don't want you to be angry with me.
I wish that you could understand what...."
"This is all I have to say.
Go to your play acting aunt if you want to.
You can choose your own way and walk in it."
She clung to Deborah and wept at parting, but Cyrus did not even say goodbye to her.
She had all her mother's gifts, deepened by her inheritance of Morgan intensity and sincerity ... much, too, of the Morgan firmness of will. When Joscelyn Morgan was twenty two she was famous over two continents.
Deborah obeyed.
She thought her husband was right, albeit she might in her own heart deplore the necessity of such a decree.
Joscelyn had disgraced them; could that be forgiven?
Pauline was a quiet, docile maiden, industrious and commonplace-just such a girl as they had vainly striven to make of Joscelyn, to whom Pauline had always been held up as a model.
He got the scissors and cut it out carefully.
But I guess she can hold her own.
Let's go and dissipate for a week-what say?"
He bought a ticket apologetically and sneaked in to his seat.
The curtain went up and Cyrus rubbed his eyes.
Play acting hadn't spoiled her-couldn't spoil her.
Wasn't she Paul's daughter! And all this applause was for her-for Josie.
Wasn't our girl Josie splendid?"
Cyrus Morgan cleared his throat and said, "It was great, Mother, great.
She took the shine off the other play actors all right.
CHAPTER one
It is a busy, talking world.
--ROWE.
"I think I shall enjoy the fortnight we are to spend here, papa; it seems such a very pleasant place," Elsie remarked, in a tone of great satisfaction.
"I am glad you are pleased with it, daughter," returned mr Dinsmore, opening the morning paper, which john had just brought up.
They-mr
Dinsmore and Elsie, Rose and Edward Allison-were occupying very comfortable quarters in a large hotel at one of our fashionable watering places.
A bedroom for each, and a private parlor for the joint use of the party, had been secured in advance, and late the night before they had arrived and taken possession.
It was now early in the morning, Elsie and her papa were in his room, which was in the second story and opened upon a veranda, shaded by tall trees, and overlooking a large grassy yard at the side of the building.
Beyond were green fields, woods, and hills.
"Papa," said Elsie, gazing longingly upon them, as she stood by the open window, "can't we take a walk?"
"When Miss Rose is ready to go with us."
"May I run to her door and ask if she is?--and if she isn't, may I wait for her out here on the veranda?"
"Yes."
She skipped away, but was back again almost immediately.
"Papa, what do you think?
It's just too bad!"
"What is too bad, daughter?
I think I never before saw so cross a look on my little girl's face," he said, peering at her over the top of his newspaper.
"Come here, and tell me what it is all about."
She obeyed, hanging her head and blushing.
"I think I have some reason to be cross, papa," she said; "I thought we were going to have such a delightful time here, and now it is all spoiled.
You could never guess who has the rooms just opposite ours; on the other side of the hall."
"Miss Stevens?"
"Why, papa; did you know she was here?"
"I knew she was in the house, because I saw her name in the hotel book last night when I went to register ours."
"And it just spoils all our pleasure."
"I hope not, daughter.
I think she will hardly annoy you when you are close at my side; and that is pretty much all the time, isn't it?"
"Ah, now I have my own little girl again," he said, drawing her to his knee and returning her caresses with interest: "But there, I hear Miss Rose's step in the hall.
Run to mammy and have your hat put on."
Miss Stevens' presence proved scarcely less annoying to Elsie than the child had anticipated.
She tried to keep out of the lady's way, but it was quite impossible.
Then she would press all sorts of dainties upon the little girl in such a way that it was next to impossible to decline them, and occasionally even went so far as to suggest improvements, or rather alterations, in her dress, which she said was entirely too plain.
"You ought to have more flounces on your skirts, my dear," she remarked one day.
"Skirt flounced to the waist are so very pretty and dressy, and you would look sweetly in them, but I notice you don't wear them at all.
Do ask your papa to let you get a new dress and have it made so; I am sure he would consent, for any one can see that he is very fond of you.
He doesn't think of it; we can't expect gentlemen to notice such little matters; you ought to have a mamma to attend to such things for you.
Ah! if you were my child, I would dress you sweetly, you dear little thing!"
"Thank you, ma'am, I daresay you mean to be very kind," replied Elsie, trying not to look annoyed, "but I don't want a mamma, since my own dear mother has gone to heaven; papa is enough for me, and I like the way he dresses me.
He always buys my dresses himself and says how they are to be made.
The dressmaker wanted to put more flounces on, but papa didn't want them and neither did i He says he doesn't like to see little girls loaded with finery, and that my clothes shall be of the best material and nicely made, but neat and simple."
"Oh, yes; I know your dress is not cheap; I didn't mean that at all: it is quite expensive enough, and some of your white dresses are beautifully worked; but I would like a little more ornament.
You wear so little jewelry, and your father could afford to cover you with it if he chose.
A pair of gold bracelets, like mine for instance, would be very pretty, and look charming on your lovely white arms: those pearl ones you wear sometimes are very handsome-any one could tell that they are the real thing-but you ought to have gold ones too, with clasps set with diamonds.
Couldn't you persuade your papa to buy some for you?"
"Indeed, Miss Stevens, I don't want them!
I don't want anything but what papa chooses to buy for me of his own accord.
Elsie went in to get her hat, and Miss Stevens came towards Rose, saying, "I think I heard you say you were going to walk; and I believe, if you don't forbid me, I shall do myself the pleasure of accompanying you.
I have just been waiting for pleasant company.
I will be ready in one moment." And before Rose could recover from her astonishment sufficiently to reply she had disappeared through the hall door.
Elsie was out again in a moment, just as the gentlemen had joined Rose, who excited their surprise and disgust by a repetition of Miss Stevens' speech to her.
mr Dinsmore looked excessively annoyed, and Edward "pshawed, and wished her at the bottom of the sea."
"No, brother," said Rose, smiling, "you don't wish any such thing; on the contrary, you would be the very first to fly to the rescue if you saw her in danger of drowning."
But before there was time for anything more to be said Miss Stevens had returned, and walking straight up to mr Dinsmore, she put her arm through his, saying with a little laugh, and what was meant for a very arch expression, "You see I don't stand upon ceremony with old friends, mr Dinsmore.
It isn't my way."
"No, Miss Stevens, I think it never was," he replied, offering the other arm to Rose.
She was going to decline it on the plea that the path was too narrow for three, but something in his look made her change her mind and accept; and they moved on, while Elsie, almost ready to cry with vexation, fell behind with Edward Allison for an escort.
Edward tried to entertain his young companion, but was too much provoked at the turn things had taken to make himself very agreeable to any one; and altogether it was quite an uncomfortable walk: no one seeming to enjoy it but Miss Stevens, who laughed and talked incessantly; addressing nearly all her conversation to mr Dinsmore, he answering her with studied politeness, but nothing more.
Miss Stevens had, from the first, conceived a great antipathy to Rose, whom she considered a dangerous rival, and generally avoided, excepting when mr Dinsmore was with her; but she always interrupted a tete a tete between them when it was in her power to do so without being guilty of very great rudeness.
This, and the covert sneers with which she often addressed Miss Allison had not escaped mr Dinsmore's notice, and it frequently cost him quite an effort to treat Miss Stevens with the respectful politeness which he considered due to her sex and to the daughter of his father's old friend.
"Was it not too provoking, papa?" exclaimed Elsie, as she followed him into his room on their return from their walk.
"What, my dear?"
"Why, papa, I thought we were going to have such a nice time, and she just spoiled it all."
"She? who, daughter?"
"Why, papa, surely you know I mean Miss Stevens!"
"Then why did you not mention her name, instead of speaking of her as she?
That does not sound respectful in a child of your age, and I wish my little girl always to be respectful to those older than herself. I thought I heard you the other day mention some gentleman's name without the prefix of mr, and I intended to reprove you for it at the time.
Don't do it again."
"No, sir, I won't," Elsie answered with a blush.
"But, papa," she added the next moment, "Miss Stevens does that constantly."
"That makes no difference, my daughter," he said gravely.
"Miss Stevens is the very last person I would have you take for your model; the less you resemble her in dress, manners, or anything else, the better.
If you wish to copy any one let it be Miss Allison, for she is a perfect lady in every respect."
Elsie looked very much pleased.
"Yes, indeed, papa," she said, "I should be glad if I could be just like Miss Rose, she is always kind and gentle to everybody; even the servants, whom Miss Stevens orders about so crossly."
"Elsie!"
"What, papa?" she asked, blushing again, for his tone was reproving.
"Come here and sit on my knee; I want to talk to you.
I am afraid my little daughter is growing censorious," he said, with a very grave look as he drew her to his side.
"You forget that we ought not to speak of other people's faults."
"I will try not to do it any more, papa," she replied, the tears springing to her eyes; "but you don't know how very annoying Miss Stevens is.
I have been near telling her several times that I did wish she would let me alone."
"No, daughter, don't do that.
You must behave in a lady like manner whether she does or not.
We must expect annoyances in this world, my child; and must try to bear them with patience, remembering that God sends the little trials as well as the great, and that He has commanded us to 'let patience have her perfect work.' I fear it is a lack of the spirit of forgiveness that makes it so difficult for us to bear these trifling vexations with equanimity.
And you must remember too, dear, that the Bible bids us be courteous, and teaches us to treat others as we ourselves would wish to be treated."
"I think you always remember the command to be courteous, papa," she said, looking affectionately into his face.
"I was wondering all the time how you could be so very polite to Miss Stevens; for I was quite sure you would rather not have had her along.
And then, what right had she to take your arm without being asked?" and Elsie's face flushed with indignation.
Her father laughed a little.
"And thus deprive my little girl of her rights," he said, softly kissing the glowing cheek.
"Ah!
I doubt if you would have been angry had it been Miss Rose," he added, a little mischievously.
"Oh, papa, you know Miss Rose would never have done such a thing!" exclaimed the little girl warmly.
"Ah! well, dear," he said in a soothing tone; "we won't talk any more about it.
I acknowledge that I do not find Miss Stevens the most agreeable company in the world, but I must treat her politely, and show her a little attention sometimes; both because she is a lady and because her father once saved my father's life; for which I owe a debt of gratitude to him and his children."
"Did he, papa?
I am sure it was very good of him, and I will try to like Miss Stevens for that.
But won't you tell me about it?"
"It was when they were both quite young men," said mr Dinsmore, "before either of them was married: they were skating together and your grandfather broke through the ice, and would have been drowned, but for the courage and presence of mind of mr Stevens, who saved him only by very great exertion, and at the risk of his own life."
A few days after this, Elsie was playing on the veranda, with several other little girls.
"Do you think you shall like your new mamma, Elsie?" asked one of them in a careless tone, as she tied on an apron she had just been making for her doll, and turned it around to see how it fitted.
"My new mamma!" exclaimed Elsie, with unfeigned astonishment, dropping the scissors with which she had been cutting paper dolls for some of the little ones.
"What can you mean, Annie?
I am not going to have any new mamma."
"Yes, indeed, but you are though," asserted Annie positively; "for I heard my mother say so only yesterday; and it must be so, for she Miss Stevens told it herself."
"Miss Stevens! and what does she know about it?
what has she to do with my papa's affairs?" asked Elsie indignantly, the color rushing over face, neck, and arms.
"She isn't! it's false!
my"--but Elsie checked herself and shut her teeth hard to keep down the emotion that was swelling in her breast.
Elsie made no reply, but dropping scissors, paper, and everything, sprang up and ran swiftly along the veranda, through the hall, upstairs, and without pausing to take breath, rushed into her father's room, where he sat quietly reading.
"Why, Elsie, daughter, what is the matter?" he asked in a tone of surprise and concern, as he caught sight of her flushed and agitated face.
"Oh, papa, it's that hateful Miss Stevens; I can't bear her!" she cried, throwing herself upon his breast, and bursting into a fit of passionate weeping.
mr Dinsmore said nothing for a moment; but thinking tears would prove the best relief to her overwrought feelings, contented himself with simply stroking her hair in a soothing way, and once or twice pressing his lips gently to her forehead.
"You feel better now, dearest, do you not?" he asked presently, as she raised her head to wipe away her tears.
"Yes, papa."
"Now tell me what it was all about."
"Miss Stevens does say such hateful things, papa!"
He laid his finger upon her lips.
"Don't use that word again.
It does not sound at all like my usually gentle sweet tempered little girl."
"I won't, papa," she murmured, blushing and hanging her head.
Then hiding her face on his breast, she lay there for several minutes perfectly silent and still.
"What is my little girl thinking of?" he asked at length.
"How everybody talks about you, papa; last evening I was out on the veranda, and I heard john and Miss Stevens' maid, Phillis, talking together.
"Who?
Phillis?" asked mr Dinsmore, looking excessively amused.
"Well, dear, and what of it all?" he asked, soothingly.
"I don't think the silly nonsense of the servants need trouble you.
john is a sad fellow, I know; he courts all the pretty colored girls wherever he goes.
I shall have to read him a serious lecture on the subject.
But it is very kind of you to be so concerned for Phillis."
"Oh, papa, don't!" she said, turning away her face.
"Please don't tease me so.
You know I don't care for Phillis or john; but that isn't all." And then she repeated what had passed between Annie and herself.
He looked a good deal provoked as she went on with her story; then very grave indeed.
He was quite silent for a moment after she had done.
Then drawing her closer to him, he said tenderly, "My poor little girl, I am sorry you should be so annoyed; but you know it is not true, daughter, and why need you care what other people think and say?"
"I don't like them to talk so, papa!
I can't bear to have them say such things about you!" she exclaimed indignantly.
He was silent again for a little; then said kindly, "I think I had better take you away from these troublesome talkers.
What do you say to going home?"
"Oh, yes, papa, do take me home," she answered eagerly.
"I wish we were there now.
Let us start to morrow, papa; can't we?"
"But you know you will have to leave Miss Rose."
"No, my dear, it wouldn't do," he replied with a grave shake of the head.
"Why, papa?" she asked with a look of keen disappointment.
"You are too young to understand why," he said in the same grave tone, and then relapsed into silence; sitting there for some time stroking her hair in an absent way, with his eyes on the carpet.
At last he said, "Elsie!" in a soft, low tone that quite made the little girl start and look up into his face; for she, too, had been in a deep reverie.
"What, papa?" she asked, and she wondered to see how the color had spread over his face, and how bright his eyes looked.
"I have been thinking," he said, in a half hesitating way, "that though it would not do to invite Miss Rose to spend the winter with us, it might do very nicely to ask her to come and live at the Oaks."
Elsie looked at him for a moment with a bewildered expression; then suddenly comprehending, her face lighted up.
"Would you like it, dearest?" he asked; "or would you prefer to go on living just as we have been, you and I together?
I would consult your happiness before my own, for it lies very near my heart, my precious one.
I can never forgive myself for all I have made you suffer, and when you were restored to me almost from the grave, I made a vow to do all in my power to make your future life bright and happy."
His tones were full of deep feeling, and as he spoke he drew her closer and closer to him and kissed her tenderly again and again.
At last she spoke, and he bent down to catch the words.
"Dear papa," she whispered, "would it make you happy? and do you think mamma knows, and that she would like it?"
"Your mamma loves us both too well not to be pleased with anything that would add to our happiness," he replied gently.
"Dear papa, you won't be angry if I ask another question?'"'
"No, darling; ask as many as you wish."
"Then, papa, will I have to call her mamma? and do you think my own mamma would like it?"
"If Miss Allison consents to take a mother's place to you, I am sure your own mamma, if she could speak to you, would tell you she deserved to have the title; and it would hurt us both very much if you refused to give it.
Indeed, my daughter, I cannot ask her to come to us unless you will promise to do so, and to love and obey, her just as you do me.
"Do you think she will come, papa?" she asked anxiously.
"I don't know, daughter; I have not asked her yet.
But shall I tell her that it will add to your happiness if she will be your mamma?"
"Yes, sir; and that I will call her mamma, and obey her and love her dearly.
Oh, papa, ask her very soon, won't you?"
"Perhaps; but don't set your heart too much on it, for she may not be quite so willing to take such a troublesome charge as Miss Stevens seems to be," he said, returning to his playful tone.
Elsie looked troubled and anxious.
"I hope she will, papa," she said; "I think she might be very glad to come and live with you; and in such a beautiful home, too."
"Ah! but everyone does not appreciate my society as highly as you do," he replied, laughing and pinching her cheek; "and besides, you forget about the troublesome little girl.
I have heard ladies say they would not marry a man who had a child."
"But Miss Rose loves me, papa; I am sure she does," she said, flushing, and the tears starting to her eyes.
"Yes, darling, I know she does," he answered soothingly.
"I am only afraid she loves you better than she does me."
A large party of equestrians were setting out from the hotel that evening soon after tea, and Elsie, in company with several other little girls, went out upon the veranda to watch them mount and ride away.
She was absent but a few moments from the parlor, where she had left her father, but when she returned to it he was not there.
Miss Rose, too, was gone, she found upon further search, and though she had not much difficulty in conjecturing why she had thus, for the first time, been left behind, she could not help feeling rather lonely and desolate.
She felt no disposition to renew the afternoon's conversation with Annie Hart, so she went quietly upstairs to their private parlor and sat down to amuse herself with a book until Chloe came in from eating her supper.
Then the little girl brought a stool, and seating herself in the old posture with her head in her nurse's lap, she drew her mother's miniature from her bosom, and fixing her eyes lovingly upon it, said, as she had done hundreds of times before: "Now, mammy, please tell me about my dear, dear mamma."
If the whole Spanish monarchy should pass to the House of Bourbon, it was highly probable that in a few years England would cease to be great and free, and that Holland would be a mere province of France.
It has been said to have been unjust that three states should have combined to divide a fourth state without its own consent; and, in recent times, the partition of the Spanish monarchy which was meditated in sixteen ninety eight has been compared to the greatest political crime which stains the history of modern Europe, the partition of Poland.
It was an assemblage of distinct bodies, none of which had any strong sympathy with the rest, and some of which had a positive antipathy for each other.
The partition planned at Loo was therefore the very opposite of the partition of Poland.
One wound the partition would undoubtedly have inflicted, a wound on the Castilian pride.
Whether those terms were or were not too favourable to France is quite another question.
It has often been maintained that she would have gained more by permanently annexing to herself Guipuscoa, Naples and Sicily than by sending the Duke of Anjou or the Duke of Berry to reign at the Escurial. On this point, however, if on any point, respect is due to the opinion of William.
The truth is that they were so, and were well known to be so both by William and by Lewis.
But a glance at the map ought to have been sufficient to undeceive those who imagined that the great antagonist of the House of Bourbon could be so weak as to lay the liberties of Europe at the feet of that house.
A French army sent to them by land would have to force its way through the passes of the Alps, through Piedmont, through Tuscany, and through the Pontifical States, in opposition probably to great German armies.
Guipuscoa, though a small, was doubtless a valuable province, and was in a military point of view highly important.
Was it not certain that the contest would be long and terrible?
And would not the English and Dutch think themselves most fortunate if, after many bloody and costly campaigns, the French King could be compelled to sign a treaty, the same, word for word, with that which he was ready uncompelled to sign now?
If that opinion should be favourable, not a day must be lost.
He roused himself, however, and promptly communicated by writing with Shrewsbury and Orford. Montague and Vernon came down to Tunbridge Wells, and conferred fully with him.
It was, the Chancellor wrote, their duty to tell His Majesty that the recent elections had indicated the public feeling in a manner which had not been expected, but which could not be mistaken.
They had their fears that Lewis might be playing false.
But they had been reassured by the thought that their Sovereign thoroughly understood this department of politics, that he had fully considered all these things, that he had neglected no precaution, and that the concessions which he had made to France were the smallest which could have averted the calamities impending over Christendom.
But Somers gently hinted that it would be proper to fill those blanks with the names of persons who were English by naturalisation, if not by birth, and who would therefore be responsible to Parliament.
The peculiarity of the Batavian polity threw some difficulties in his way; but every difficulty gelded to his authority and to the dexterous management of Heinsius.
As to the blanks in the English powers, William had attended to his Chancellor's suggestion, and had inserted the names of Sir Joseph Williamson, minister at the Hague, a born Englishman, and of Portland, a naturalised Englishman.
The Emperor might have complained and threatened; but he must have submitted; for what could he do?
He had no fleet; and it was therefore impossible for him even to attempt to possess himself of Castile, of Arragon, of Sicily, of the Indies, in opposition to the united navies of the three greatest maritime powers in the world.
But they would have perceived that by resisting they were much more likely to lose the Indies than to preserve Guipuscoa.
The obedience of the Danes lasted no longer than the present terror. Provoked at the devastations of Edred, and even reduced by necessity to subsist on plunder, they broke into a new rebellion, and were again subdued; but the king, now instructed by experience, took greater precautions against their future revolt.
He fixed English garrisons in their most considerable towns, and placed over them an English governor, who might watch all their motions, and suppress any insurrection on its first appearance.
From the introduction of Christianity among the Saxons, there had been monasteries in England; and these establishments had extremely multiplied by the donations of the princes and nobles, whose superstition, derived from their ignorance and precarious life, and increased by remorses for the crimes into which they were so frequently betrayed, knew no other expedient for appeasing the Deity, than a profuse liberality towards the ecclesiastics.
But the monks had hitherto been a species of secular priests, who lived after the manner of the present canons or prebendaries, and were both intermingled, in some degree, with the world, and endeavored to render themselves useful to it.
Dunstan was born of noble parents in the west of England; and being educated under his uncle Aldhelm, then archbishop of Canterbury, had betaken himself to the ecclesiastical life, and had acquired some character in the court of Edmund.
Supported by the character obtained in his retreat, Dunstan appeared again in the world; and gained such an ascendent over Edred who had succeeded to the crown, as made him not only the director of that prince's conscience, but his counsellor in the most momentous affairs of government.
The minds of men were already well prepared for this innovation.
The monks knew how to avail themselves of all these popular topics, and to set off their own character to the best advantage.
The people were thrown into agitation; and few instances occur of more violent dissensions, excited by the most material differences in religion; or rather by the most frivolous; since it is a just remark, that the more affinity there is between theological parties, the greater commonly is their animosity.
The progress of the monks, which was become considerable, was somewhat retarded by the death of Edred, their partisan, who expired after a reign of nine years.
He left children; but as they were infants, his nephew Edwy, son of Edmund, was placed on the throne.
EDWY
As the austerity affected by the monks made them particularly violent on this occasion, Edwy entertained a strong prepossession against them; and seemed, on that account, determined not to second their project of expelling the seculars from all the convents, and of possessing themselves of those rich establishments.
That amiable princess being cured of her wounds, and having even obliterated the scars with which Odo had hoped to deface her beauty, returned into England, and was flying to the embraces of the king, whom she still regarded as her husband; when she fell into the hands of a party whom the primate had sent to intercept her.
Aladdin returned home in the order he had come, amidst the acclamations of the people, who wished him all happiness and prosperity.
As soon as he dismounted, he retired to his own chamber, took the lamp, and summoned the genie as usual, who professed his allegiance.
Let its walls be massive gold and silver bricks laid alternately.
Let there be also kitchens and storehouses, stables full of the finest horses, with their equerries and grooms, and hunting equipage, officers, attendants, and slaves, both men and women, to form a retinue for the princess and myself.
Go and execute my wishes."
When Aladdin gave these commands to the genie, the sun was set.
The genie led him through all the apartments, where he found officers and slaves, habited according to their rank and the services to which they were appointed.
The genie then showed him the treasury, which was opened by a treasurer, where Aladdin saw large vases of different sizes, piled up to the top with money, ranged all round the chamber.
When Aladdin had examined every portion of the palace, and particularly the hall with the four and twenty windows, and found it far to exceed his fondest expectations, he said, "Genie, there is one thing wanting, a fine carpet for the princess to walk upon from the sultan's palace to mine.
Lay one down immediately." The genie disappeared, and Aladdin saw what he desired executed in an instant.
The genie then returned, and carried him to his own home.
When the sultan's porters came to open the gates, they were amazed to find what had been an unoccupied garden filled up with a magnificent palace, and a splendid carpet extending to it all the way from the sultan's palace.
They told the strange tidings to the grand vizier, who informed the sultan, who exclaimed, "It must be Aladdin's palace, which I gave him leave to build for my daughter.
He has wished to surprise us, and let us see what wonders can be done in only one night."
Bands of music led the procession, followed by a hundred state ushers, and the like number of black mutes, in two files, with their officers at their head.
The vases, basins, and goblets were gold also, and of exquisite workmanship, and all the other ornaments and embellishments of the hall were answerable to this display.
The princess, dazzled to see so much riches collected in one place, said to Aladdin, "I thought, prince, that nothing in the world was so beautiful as the sultan my father's palace, but the sight of this hall alone is sufficient to show I was deceived."
The next morning the attendants of Aladdin presented themselves to dress him, and brought him another habit, as rich and magnificent as that worn the day before.
The sultan consented with pleasure, rose up immediately, and, preceded by the principal officers of his palace, and followed by all the great lords of his court, accompanied Aladdin.
But what most surprises me is, that a hall of this magnificence should be left with one of its windows incomplete and unfinished." "Sire," answered Aladdin, "the omission was by design, since I wished that you should have the glory of finishing this hall." "I take your intention kindly," said the sultan, "and will give orders about it immediately."
After the sultan had finished this magnificent entertainment, provided for him and for his court by Aladdin, he was informed that the jewellers and goldsmiths attended; upon which he returned to the hall, and showed them the window which was unfinished.
"I sent for you," said he, "to fit up this window in as great perfection as the rest.
When the sultan returned to his palace, he ordered his jewels to be brought out, and the jewellers took a great quantity, particularly those Aladdin had made him a present of, which they soon used, without making any great advance in their work.
They came again several times for more, and in a month's time had not finished half their work.
In short, they used all the jewels the sultan had, and borrowed of the vizier, but yet the work was not half done.
Aladdin, who knew that all the sultan's endeavours to make this window like the rest were in vain, sent for the jewellers and goldsmiths, and not only commanded them to desist from their work, but ordered them to undo what they had begun, and to carry all their jewels back to the sultan and to the vizier.
He took the lamp, which he carried about him, rubbed it, and presently the genie appeared.
Aladdin went out of the hall, and returning soon after, found the window, as he wished it to be, like the others.
He fancied at first that he was mistaken, and examined the two windows on each side, and afterward all the four and twenty; but when he was convinced that the window which several workmen had been so long about was finished in so short a time, he embraced Aladdin and kissed him between his eyes.
The sultan returned to the palace, and after this went frequently to the window to contemplate and admire the wonderful palace of his son in law.
Thus Aladdin, while he paid all respect to the sultan, won by his affable behaviour and liberality the affections of the people.
Aladdin had conducted himself in this manner several years, when the African magician, who had for some years dismissed him from his recollection, determined to inform himself with certainty whether he perished, as he supposed, in the subterranean cave or not.
On the very next day, the magician set out and travelled with the utmost haste to the capital of China, where, on his arrival, he took up his lodgings in a khan.
He then quickly learnt about the wealth, charities, happiness, and splendid palace of Prince Aladdin.
On his return he had recourse to an operation of geomancy to find out where the lamp was-whether Aladdin carried it about with him, or where he left it.
The result of his consultation informed him, to his great joy, that the lamp was in the palace.
"Well," said he, rubbing his hands in glee, "I shall have the lamp, and I shall make Aladdin return to his original mean condition."
The next day the magician learnt, from the chief superintendent of the khan where he lodged, that Aladdin had gone on a hunting expedition, which was to last for eight days, of which only three had expired.
He went to a coppersmith, and asked for a dozen copper lamps: the master of the shop told him he had not so many by him, but if he would have patience till the next day, he would have them ready.
The next day the magician called for the twelve lamps, paid the man his full price, put them into a basket hanging on his arm, and went directly to Aladdin's palace.
As he approached, he began crying, "Who will exchange old lamps for new ones?" As he went along, a crowd of children collected, who hooted, and thought him, as did all who chanced to be passing by, a madman or a fool, to offer to change new lamps for old ones.
He repeated this so often, walking backward and forward in front of the palace, that the princess, who was then in the hall with the four and twenty windows, hearing a man cry something, and seeing a great mob crowding about him, sent one of her women slaves to know what he cried.
The slave returned, laughing so heartily that the princess rebuked her. "Madam," answered the slave, laughing still, "who can forbear laughing, to see an old man with a basket on his arm, full of fine new lamps, asking to change them for old ones?
the children and mob crowding about him, so that he can hardly stir, make all the noise they can in derision of him."
If the princess chooses, she may have the pleasure of trying if this old man is so silly as to give a new lamp for an old one, without taking anything for the exchange."
The princess, who knew not the value of this lamp, and the interest that Aladdin had to keep it safe, entered into the pleasantry, and commanded a slave to take it and make the exchange.
The slave obeyed, went out of the hall, and no sooner got to the palace gates than he saw the African magician, called to him, and showing him the old lamp, said, "Give me a new lamp for this."
The slave picked out one and carried it to the princess; but the change was no sooner made than the place rung with the shouts of the children, deriding the magician's folly.
The African magician stayed no longer near the palace, nor cried any more, "New lamps for old ones," but made the best of his way to his khan.
"I command thee," replied the magician, "to transport me immediately, and the palace which thou and the other slaves of the lamp have built in this city, with all the people in it, to Africa." The genie made no reply, but with the assistance of the other genies, the slaves of the lamp, immediately transported him and the palace, entire, to the spot whither he had been desired to convey it.
Early the next morning, when the sultan, according to custom, went to contemplate and admire Aladdin's place, his amazement was unbounded to find that it could nowhere be seen.
In his perplexity he ordered the grand vizier to be sent for with expedition.
On his son in law being brought before him, he would not hear a word from him, but ordered him to be put to death.
I beg you to give me forty days, and if in that time I cannot restore it, I will offer my head to be disposed of at your pleasure." "I give you the time you ask, but at the end of the forty days, forget not to present yourself before me."
The lords who had courted him in the days of his splendour, now declined to have any communication with him.
To Bake a Rock Fish.
To Bake a Fresh Shad.
Make a stuffing of bread, butter, salt, pepper and parsley; fill a large shad with this, and bake it in a stove or oven.
To Stew Clams.
To Boil Salt Salmon.
A fat shad is very nice boiled, although rock and bass are preferred generally; when done, take it up on a fish dish, and cover it with egg sauce or drawn butter and parsley.
To Stew Terrapins.
Another Way.
Scolloped Oysters.
A Rich Oyster Pie.
Plain Oyster Pie.
Wash and drain the oysters, and put them in salt and water, that will bear an egg; let them scald till plump, and put them in a glass jar, with some cloves and whole peppers, and when cold cover them with vinegar.
A Dish of Poached Eggs.
Omelet.
"Saying your prayers!
"You weren't.
"Worth no more than that," repeated mr Cruncher.
Keep still!"
"Not dead!
CHAPTER two
KING'S DAGGER
mrs Darcy, who was sixty five years of age, had carried on the jewelry business of her husband, Mortimer Darcy, after his death, which preceded her more tragic one by about seven years.
Mortimer Darcy had been a diamond salesman for a large New York house in his younger days, and had come to be an expert in precious stones.
Many good wishes, and not a little trade, had gone to him from his former employers, and some of their customers bought of him when he went into business for himself in the thriving city of Colchester.
This man-Harrison Van Doren by name-had what was termed the best jewelry trade in Colchester.
The "old" families-not that any of them could trace their ancestry back very far-liked to say that "we get all our stuff at Van Doren's."
This name, on little white plush lined boxes, containing pins or sparkling rings, came to mean almost as much as some of the more expensive names in New York.
Young ladies counted it a point in the favor of their lovers if the engagement circlet came from Van Doren's. And Mortimer Darcy, knowing the value of that class of trade, had, when he purchased mr Van Doren's business fostered that spirit.
That is to say, those, aside from a casual trade with people who dropped in as they might have done to a grocery, to get what they really needed in the way of jewelry, came in gasolene or electric cars where their ancestors had come with horses and carriage.
So Darcy's jewelry store was known, and though a bit old-fashioned in a way, was favorably known, not only to the older members of the rich families of the place, but to the younger set as well.
The pretty girls and their well groomed companions of the "Assembly Ball" set liked to stop in there for their rings, brooches, scarf pins or cuff links, and very frequent were the rather languid orders:
"You may send it, charge."
It was to that class of trade that mrs Darcy catered.
She understood it, and it understood her.
That was enough.
This was the easier for her, since she owned the building in which her display was kept, and lived in a quiet and tastefully furnished apartment over the store.
On the death of her husband, she had sent for his second cousin, who at that time was in the employ of a well-known New York jewelry house, and he agreed to come to her.
Rather more than a repair man and clerk was james Darcy.
He was an expert jewelry designer and a setter of precious stones; and often, when some fastidious customer did not seem to care for what was shown from the glittering trays in the showcases, mrs Darcy or one of her clerks would say:
"We will have mr Darcy design something different for you."
"That's what I want," the customer would say-"something different-something you don't see everywhere."
And so the Darcy trade had grown and prospered.
"Well, let's hear what you have to say," said Carroll, after james Darcy had given what the detectives considered was, for the time, a sufficient history of himself and his relative, and had hastily gone over such of the stock as was kept outside the safe.
The latter had not been forced open-it did not take long to ascertain that.
"Is anything gone?"
"I can't say for sure," answered the young man-he was this side of thirty.
His long, artistic fingers were trembling, and he felt weak and faint.
"But if there has been a robbery they didn't get much.
The safe hasn't been opened, and the best of the goods-all the diamonds and other stones-are in that.
Nothing seems to be gone from the cases, though I'd have to make a better search, and go over the inventory, to make certain."
"Well, let that go for the time.
How'd you find things when you came downstairs?
What happened during the night?
Any of the doors or windows forced?" and the detective fairly shot these questions at Darcy,
"I think not.
The front door was locked, just as it is now.
I went out the side one.
That was locked with the spring catch from the inside."
"Wasn't it bolted?" came sharply from Thong.
You see, I was all excited like-"
"Yes," assented Thong.
"There's a bolt on the door!" Carroll snapped.
"Yes, but mrs Darcy may have slipped it back herself.
She was down first, though why, I can't say.
She seldom came down ahead of me, especially of late years.
I generally opened the store.
More knockings had sounded on the front door, and the faces of two young men peered in through the misty glass, the crowd having made a lane for them on learning that they worked in the place of death.
Darcy did so, Mulligan helping him keep back the crowd of curious ones.
"What's the matter?
"Dead!
Killed, I'm afraid!
The store won't open to day, but the police want to see every one.
Oh, Miss Brill, come in!" and he held out his hand to the one young woman clerk, who drew back in horrified fright as she saw the silent figure on the floor.
But when Miss Brill had been carried to a rear room and quieted, and when the shades had been drawn to keep the curious ones from peering in, the questioning of Darcy was resumed.
"Did you come directly down to the store from your room?" asked Thong.
"Yes.
As soon as I awakened."
"Where is your room?"
"In the rear, on the second floor-the one next above.
mrs Darcy has her rooms in front.
Then come those of her maid, Jane Metson.
Sallie Page sleeps on the top floor where the janitor's family lives, and he, of course, sleeps up there also."
"I see," murmured Carroll.
"Then you came downstairs and found mrs Darcy lying here-dead?"
"No question about that.
Did you hear anything?"
"Only the watch ticking in her hand.
First I thought it was her heart beating."
But of course she might have heard a noise if you didn't, and she might have come down to find out what it was about.
But if it was a burglar it's funny you didn't hear any noise-like a fall, or something.
How about that, mr Darcy?"
I went to bed about half past ten, after working at my table down here awhile."
"I couldn't say.
She had gone to her apartment, but I don't have to pass near that to get to my room.
I came straight up and went to bed."
"At ten o'clock, you say?"
"A little after.
It may have been a quarter to eleven."
"And you didn't hear anything all night?" Carroll shot this question at Darcy suddenly.
"What kind of talk is that?" demanded Thong roughly.
Now which was it?"
"Well, if you call a clock striking a noise, then it was one."
"Oh, a clock struck!" and Thong settled back in his chair more at his ease.
His manner seemed to indicate that he was on the track of something.
"Yes, a clock struck.
It was either three or four, I can't be sure which," Darcy replied.
"You know when you awaken in the night, and hear the strokes, you can't be sure you haven't missed some of the first ones.
I heard three, anyhow, I'm sure of that."
"Well, put it down as three," suggested Thong.
"Was it the striking of the clock that awakened you?"
"No, not exactly.
They were questioning Darcy in the living room of mrs Darcy's suite, the clerks being detained downstairs by Mulligan.
The county physician, who was also the coroner, had not yet arrived.
"Yes, at first I thought some one had been in my room, and then, after I thought about it, I wasn't quite sure.
All I know is I slept quite soundly-sounder than usual in fact, and, all at once, I heard a clock strike."
"Three or four," murmured Thong.
"Yes; three anyhow-maybe four.
Something awakened me suddenly; but what, I can't say.
I remember, at the time, it felt as though something had passed over my face."
"Like a hand?" suggested Carroll.
"Well, I couldn't be sure.
It may have been I dreamed it."
"Well, like a cloth brushing my face more than like a hand-or it may have been a hand with a glove on it.
Then I tried to arouse myself, but I heard the wind blowing and a sprinkle of rain, and, as my window was open, I thought the curtain might have blown across my face.
That would account for it I reasoned, so-"
"But what did you do?"
"Nothing.
I lay still a little while, and then I went to sleep again. I was only awake maybe two or three minutes."
"You didn't call mrs Darcy?"
"no"
"Nor the servant-what's her name?
Sallie?"
"no
There wasn't any use in that.
She's deaf."
"And you didn't call the janitor?"
"no
I wasn't very wide awake, and I didn't really attach any importance to it until after I saw her-dead."
"Um!
Yes," murmured Carroll.
"Well, then you went to sleep again. What did you do next?"
"I awakened with a sudden start just before six o'clock.
I had not set an alarm, though I wanted to get up early to do a little repair job I had promised for early this morning.
I was anxious to finish the repair job for a man who was to leave on an early train this morning.
He may be in any time now, and I haven't it ready for him."
"What sort of a repair job?" asked Carroll.
"On a watch."
"Where's the watch now?" and the detective flicked the ashes from a cigar the reporter had given him.
"The watch," murmured Darcy.
"It-it's in her hand," and he nodded in the direction of the silent figure downstairs.
"The watch that is still ticking?"
"Yes, but the funny part of it is that the watch wasn't going last night, when I planned to start work on it.
I forget just why I didn't do it," and Darcy seemed a bit confused, a point not lost sight of by Carroll.
Anyhow I didn't do anything to the Indian's watch more than look at it, and I made up my mind to rise early and hurry it through.
So I didn't even wind it.
I can't understand what makes it go, unless some one got in and wound it-and they wouldn't do that."
"Whose watch is it?" asked Thong.
"Singa Phut!" ejaculated Carroll.
"Crimps, what a name!
Who belongs to it?"
"He has a curio store down on Water Street.
We have bought some odd things from him for our customers, queer bead necklaces and the like.
He left the watch with my cousin, who told me to repair it.
It needed a new case spring and some of the screws were loose."
"That I couldn't say."
"He has not lived here very long, but I knew him in New York.
He has done business with me for some years."
"Is he all right-safe-not one of them gars-you know, the fellows that use a silk cord to strangle you with?" asked Thong, who had some imagination regarding garroters.
"Oh," said Carroll and Thong in unison.
There came another knock on the side door downstairs.
There was less of a crowd about now, and Mulligan did not have to keep back a rush as he opened the portal.
"dr Warren," reported the policeman, calling upstairs to Carroll and Thong.
"The county physician," explained Carroll.
"Better come down and meet him, mr Darcy.
He'll want to ask you some questions.
Then we'll have another go at you.
Got to ask a lot of questions in a case like this," he half apologized.
"Oh, sure," assented the jewelry worker.
"Doc Warren, eh," mused Thong to his partner, as Darcy preceded them downstairs.
Come on!"
"Second time this week you've got me out of bed before my time.
What's the matter, if they've got to have a murder, with doing it in the afternoon?
I like my sleep!"
He was smiling and cheerful, was dr Warren.
Murders and autopsies were all in the day's work with him.
quite an old lady," he mused as he took off his coat, which Carroll held for him.
The doctor rolled up his shirt sleeves and stooped down.
"Head's badly cut-let's see what we have here.
Let's have a light, it's too dark to see."
One of the clerks switched on more electric lights, and they glinted and sparkled on the silver and cut glass.
They flashed on the white, still face, and the gleams seemed to be swallowed up in that red blotch in the snowy hair.
"Um, yes!
Depressed fracture.
Bad place, too.
Might have been from a black jack?" and he glanced questioningly at the detectives.
"That'll crack a skull, but it won't draw blood-not if it's used right," and he brought from his hip pocket one of the weapons in question-a short, stout flexible reed, covered with leather, the end forming a pocket in which was a chunk of lead.
"Maybe not," assented the doctor.
"Let's look a bit further."
It was that of a hunter, standing as though he had just delivered a shot, and was peering to see the effect.
The butt of his gun projected behind him, and as dr Warren moved the statue into the light of the jewelry store chandeliers, they all saw, clinging to the stock of the gun, some straggling, white hairs.
"That's what did it!" exclaimed the county physician.
The burglar-or whoever it was-swung this statue as a club. It would make a deadly one, using the foot end for a handle," and dr Warren waved the ornament in the air over the dead woman's head to illustrate what he meant.
"Don't!" muttered Darcy in a strained voice.
"Don't what?" asked the physician sharply.
"Use the statue that way."
"Why not?"
But now- Oh, I never want to see it in the house!
I couldn't bear to look at it-nor could she!"
"She?
We?
What do you mean?" asked Carroll quickly.
"Say, do you know something about this killing that you're keeping back from us?"
He took a step nearer Darcy-a threatening step it would seem, from the fact that the jewelry worker drew back as if in alarm.
"The house I hope to live in with my wife-Miss Amy Mason," answered Darcy, and he spoke in calm contrast to his former excitement, "We are going to be married in the fall," he went on.
"I had asked mrs Darcy to set that statue aside for me.
Miss Mason admired it, and I planned to buy it.
We had the place all picked out where it would stand. But-now-"
"But are you sure it did, Doc?"
"Pretty sure, yes.
I never make a statement, though, until after the autopsy.
No telling what that may develop.
I'll get at it right away. I guess you remember that Murray case," he went on, to no one in particular.
"That wasn't your case, Doc," observed Carroll.
"No, it was before my time.
But I remember it.
That's why I'm saying nothing until I've made an examination.
Better 'phone the morgue keeper," he went on, "and have them come for the body."
"Have you-have you got to take her away?" faltered Darcy.
"Yes.
I'm sorry, but it wouldn't do-here," and the doctor motioned to the glittering array of cut glass and plate.
"You won't keep the store open?" he inquired.
"no
I'll put a notice in the door now," and Darcy wrote out one which a clerk affixed to the front door for him.
"Well, that's all I can do now," dr Warren said, after his very perfunctory examination.
"The rest will have to be at the morgue.
Got a place where I can wash my hands?" he asked.
Darcy indicated a little closet near his work bench.
dr Warren soon resumed his coat, accepted a cigarette from Daley, slipped into his still damp rain garment and was soon throbbing down the street in his automobile, having announced that he was going to breakfast and would perform the autopsy immediately afterward.
More reporters came, and Daley fraternized with them, the newspaper men aside from the police and Jim Holiday, a detective from Prosecutor Bardon's office, being the only people admitted to the shop, when the clerks had been sent home.
"What's up?" asked Thong quickly.
He had been strolling about the shop, and had come to a stop near Darcy's work table-a sort of bench against the wall, and behind one of the showcases.
The bench was fitted with a lathe, and on it were parts of watches, like the dead specimens preserved in alcohol in a doctor's office.
"What's up, Bill?"
"Look!" exclaimed Carroll, pointing.
The men from the morgue had the body raised in the air.
And then, in the gleam from the electric lights there was revealed underneath and in the left side of the dead woman a clean slit through her light dress-a slit the edges of which were stained with blood.
"Another wound!" exclaimed Daley, his newspaper instincts quickly aroused by this addition of evidence of mystery.
"This is getting interesting!"
"It's a cut-a deep one, too," murmured Carroll, as he drew nearer to look.
"Wonder what did it?"
"Shouldn't wonder but it was done with this!" and Thong held out, on the palm of his large hand, a slender dagger, on the otherwise bright blade of which were some dark stains.
"Where'd you get it?" demanded Carroll.
"Over on the watch repair table."
Darcy gasped.
"Is that your dagger?" snapped Carroll at the jewelry worker.
"It isn't a dagger-it's a paper cutter-a magazine knife."
"Well, whatever it is, who owns it?"
The words were as crisp as the steel of the stained blade.
Darcy stared at the keen knife, and then at the dead woman.
"I don't!
It was left here by-"
Place on fire?
Let me in.
I got something here.
'Svaluable, too!
"'Lo, Darcy!" went on a young man, who walked unsteadily into the jewelry store.
"Wheresh tha' paper cutter I left for you t' 'grave Pearl's name on?
Got take it home now.
Take wifely home li'l preshent-you know how 'tish.
Wheresh my gold mounted paper cutter, Darcy?"
"Harry King, and stewed to the gills again!" murmured Pete Daley. "Wow! he has some bun on!"
"Wheresh my paper cutter, Darcy?" went on King, smiling in a fashion meant to be merry, but which was fixed and glassy as to his eyes. "Wheresh my li'l preshent for wifely?
The detective held it out, and the red spots on it seemed to show brighter in the gleam of the electric lights.
"Is that your knife, Harry King?" demanded Thong.
"Sure thash mine!
Didn't have no name on it-brought it here for my ole fren', Darcy, t' engrave.
"My wife-she likes them things.
But gotta square wife somehow.
Take her home nice preshent.
Thatsh me-sure thash mine!" and carefully trying to balance himself, he reached forward as though to take the stained dagger from the hand of the detective.
"You got Pearl's name 'graved on it, Darcy, ole man?" asked King, thickly, licking his hot and feverish lips.
"No," answered the jewelry worker, hollowly.
Indeed, phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected-so entirely novel-so utterly at variance with preconceived opinions-as to leave no doubt on my mind that long ere this all Europe is in an uproar, all physics in a ferment, all reason and astronomy together by the ears.
The day was warm-unusually so for the season-there was hardly a breath of air stirring; and the multitude were in no bad humor at being now and then besprinkled with friendly showers of momentary duration, that fell from large white masses of cloud which chequered in a fitful manner the blue vault of the firmament.
Nevertheless, about noon, a slight but remarkable agitation became apparent in the assembly: the clattering of ten thousand tongues succeeded; and, in an instant afterward, ten thousand faces were upturned toward the heavens, ten thousand pipes descended simultaneously from the corners of ten thousand mouths, and a shout, which could be compared to nothing but the roaring of Niagara, resounded long, loudly, and furiously, through all the environs of Rotterdam.
From behind the huge bulk of one of those sharply defined masses of cloud already mentioned, was seen slowly to emerge into an open area of blue space, a queer, heterogeneous, but apparently solid substance, so oddly shaped, so whimsically put together, as not to be in any manner comprehended, and never to be sufficiently admired, by the host of sturdy burghers who stood open mouthed below.
What could it be?
In the meantime, however, lower and still lower toward the goodly city, came the object of so much curiosity, and the cause of so much smoke.
In a very few minutes it arrived near enough to be accurately discerned.
It appeared to be-yes! it was undoubtedly a species of balloon; but surely no such balloon had ever been seen in Rotterdam before.
For who, let me ask, ever heard of a balloon manufactured entirely of dirty newspapers? No man in Holland certainly; yet here, under the very noses of the people, or rather at some distance above their noses was the identical thing in question, and composed, I have it on the best authority, of the precise material which no one had ever before known to be used for a similar purpose.
And this similitude was regarded as by no means lessened when, upon nearer inspection, there was perceived a large tassel depending from its apex, and, around the upper rim or base of the cone, a circle of little instruments, resembling sheep bells, which kept up a continual tinkling to the tune of Betty Martin.
But still worse. Suspended by blue ribbons to the end of this fantastic machine, there hung, by way of car, an enormous drab beaver hat, with a brim superlatively broad, and a hemispherical crown with a black band and a silver buckle.
But to return.
The balloon (for such no doubt it was) had now descended to within a hundred feet of the earth, allowing the crowd below a sufficiently distinct view of the person of its occupant.
He could not have been more than two feet in height; but this altitude, little as it was, would have been sufficient to destroy his equilibrium, and tilt him over the edge of his tiny car, but for the intervention of a circular rim reaching as high as the breast, and rigged on to the cords of the balloon.
His hands were enormously large.
This odd little gentleman was dressed in a loose surtout of sky blue satin, with tight breeches to match, fastened with silver buckles at the knees.
His vest was of some bright yellow material; a white taffety cap was set jauntily on one side of his head; and, to complete his equipment, a blood red silk handkerchief enveloped his throat, and fell down, in a dainty manner, upon his bosom, in a fantastic bow knot of super eminent dimensions.
Having descended, as I said before, to about one hundred feet from the surface of the earth, the little old gentleman was suddenly seized with a fit of trepidation, and appeared disinclined to make any nearer approach to terra firma.
Throwing out, therefore, a quantity of sand from a canvas bag, which, he lifted with great difficulty, he became stationary in an instant.
He then proceeded, in a hurried and agitated manner, to extract from a side pocket in his surtout a large morocco pocket book.
His Excellency stooped to take it up.
In the meantime the balloon arose like a lark, and, soaring far away above the city, at length drifted quietly behind a cloud similar to that from which it had so oddly emerged, and was thus lost forever to the wondering eyes of the good citizens of Rotterdam.
It was accordingly opened by those dignitaries upon the spot, and found to contain the following extraordinary, and indeed very serious, communications.
To their Excellencies Von Underduk and Rub a dub, President and Vice President of the States' College of Astronomers, in the city of Rotterdam.
Credit was good, employment was never wanting, and on all hands there was no lack of either money or good will.
People who were formerly, the very best customers in the world, had now not a moment of time to think of us at all.
They had, so they said, as much as they could do to read about the revolutions, and keep up with the march of intellect and the spirit of the age.
This was a state of things not to be endured.
I soon grew as poor as a rat, and, having a wife and children to provide for, my burdens at length became intolerable, and I spent hour after hour in reflecting upon the most convenient method of putting an end to my life.
I thought it best, however, to dissemble my wrath, and to treat them with promises and fair words, until, by some good turn of fate, an opportunity of vengeance should be afforded me.
It proved to be a small pamphlet treatise on Speculative Astronomy, written either by Professor Encke of Berlin or by a Frenchman of somewhat similar name.
By this time it began to grow dark, and I directed my steps toward home.
In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found.
Nature herself seemed to afford me corroboration of these ideas.
In the contemplation of the heavenly bodies it struck me forcibly that I could not distinguish a star with nearly as much precision, when I gazed on it with earnest, direct and undeviating attention, as when I suffered my eye only to glance in its vicinity alone.
I was not, of course, at that time aware that this apparent paradox was occasioned by the center of the visual area being less susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the exterior portions of the retina.
This knowledge, and some of another kind, came afterwards in the course of an eventful five years, during which I have dropped the prejudices of my former humble situation in life, and forgotten the bellows mender in far different occupations.
But at the epoch of which I speak, the analogy which a casual observation of a star offered to the conclusions I had already drawn, struck me with the force of positive conformation, and I then finally made up my mind to the course which I afterwards pursued.
"It was late when I reached home, and I went immediately to bed.
In this I finally succeeded-partly by selling enough of my household furniture to satisfy a moiety of their claim, and partly by a promise of paying the balance upon completion of a little project which I told them I had in view, and for assistance in which I solicited their services.
With the means thus accruing I proceeded to procure at intervals, cambric muslin, very fine, in pieces of twelve yards each; twine; a lot of the varnish of caoutchouc; a large and deep basket of wicker work, made to order; and several other articles necessary in the construction and equipment of a balloon of extraordinary dimensions.
This I directed my wife to make up as soon as possible, and gave her all requisite information as to the particular method of proceeding.
In the meantime I worked up the twine into a net work of sufficient dimensions; rigged it with a hoop and the necessary cords; bought a quadrant, a compass, a spy glass, a common barometer with some important modifications, and two astronomical instruments not so generally known.
"On the spot which I intended each of the smaller casks to occupy respectively during the inflation of the balloon, I privately dug a hole two feet deep; the holes forming in this manner a circle twenty five feet in diameter.
In the centre of this circle, being the station designed for the large cask, I also dug a hole three feet in depth.
These-the keg and canisters-I connected in a proper manner with covered trains; and having let into one of the canisters the end of about four feet of slow match, I covered up the hole, and placed the cask over it, leaving the other end of the match protruding about an inch, and barely visible beyond the cask.
It had received three coats of varnish, and I found the cambric muslin to answer all the purposes of silk itself, quite as strong and a good deal less expensive.
Indeed I had no fear on her account.
She was what people call a notable woman, and could manage matters in the world without my assistance.
"It was the first of April.
The night, as I said before, was dark; there was not a star to be seen; and a drizzling rain, falling at intervals, rendered us very uncomfortable.
I therefore kept my three duns working with great diligence, pounding down ice around the central cask, and stirring the acid in the others.
I also secured in the car a pair of pigeons and a cat.
It was now nearly daybreak, and I thought it high time to take my departure.
Dropping a lighted cigar on the ground, as if by accident, I took the opportunity, in stooping to pick it up, of igniting privately the piece of slow match, whose end, as I said before, protruded a very little beyond the lower rim of one of the smaller casks.
"Scarcely, however, had I attained the height of fifty yards, when, roaring and rumbling up after me in the most horrible and tumultuous manner, came so dense a hurricane of fire, and smoke, and sulphur, and legs and arms, and gravel, and burning wood, and blazing metal, that my very heart sunk within me, and I fell down in the bottom of the car, trembling with unmitigated terror.
Indeed, I now perceived that I had entirely overdone the business, and that the main consequences of the shock were yet to be experienced.
When I afterward had time for reflection, I did not fail to attribute the extreme violence of the explosion, as regarded myself, to its proper cause-my situation directly above it, and in the line of its greatest power.
It is impossible-utterly impossible-to form any adequate idea of the horror of my situation.
I gasped convulsively for breath-a shudder resembling a fit of the ague agitated every nerve and muscle of my frame-I felt my eyes starting from their sockets-a horrible nausea overwhelmed me-and at length I fainted away.
I drew up to my eyes each of my hands, one after the other, and wondered what occurrence could have given rise to the swelling of the veins, and the horrible blackness of the fingernails.
Then, in a knowing manner, I felt in both my breeches pockets, and, missing therefrom a set of tablets and a toothpick case, endeavored to account for their disappearance, and not being able to do so, felt inexpressibly chagrined.
But, strange to say!
If I felt any emotion at all, it was a kind of chuckling satisfaction at the cleverness I was about to display in extricating myself from this dilemma; and I never, for a moment, looked upon my ultimate safety as a question susceptible of doubt.
For a few minutes I remained wrapped in the profoundest meditation.
This buckle had three teeth, which, being somewhat rusty, turned with great difficulty on their axis.
Holding the instrument thus obtained within my teeth, I now proceeded to untie the knot of my cravat.
I had to rest several times before I could accomplish this manoeuvre, but it was at length accomplished.
Drawing now my body upwards, with a prodigious exertion of muscular force, I succeeded, at the very first trial, in throwing the buckle over the car, and entangling it, as I had anticipated, in the circular rim of the wicker work.
"My body was now inclined towards the side of the car, at an angle of about forty five degrees; but it must not be understood that I was therefore only forty five degrees below the perpendicular.
So far from it, I still lay nearly level with the plane of the horizon; for the change of situation which I had acquired, had forced the bottom of the car considerably outwards from my position, which was accordingly one of the most imminent and deadly peril.
In fact, the blood so long accumulating in the vessels of my head and throat, and which had hitherto buoyed up my spirits with madness and delirium, had now begun to retire within their proper channels, and the distinctness which was thus added to my perception of the danger, merely served to deprive me of the self possession and courage to encounter it.
In good time came to my rescue the spirit of despair, and, with frantic cries and struggles, I jerked my way bodily upwards, till at length, clutching with a vise like grip the long desired rim, I writhed my person over it, and fell headlong and shuddering within the car.
I then, however, examined it with attention, and found it, to my great relief, uninjured.
My implements were all safe, and, fortunately, I had lost neither ballast nor provisions.
Indeed, I had so well secured them in their places, that such an accident was entirely out of the question. Looking at my watch, I found it six o'clock.
Immediately beneath me in the ocean, lay a small black object, slightly oblong in shape, seemingly about the size, and in every way bearing a great resemblance to one of those childish toys called a domino.
In this state of mind, wishing to live, yet wearied with life, the treatise at the stall of the bookseller opened a resource to my imagination.
I then finally made up my mind.
I determined to depart, yet live-to leave the world, yet continue to exist-in short, to drop enigmas, I resolved, let what would ensue, to force a passage, if I could, to the moon.
The former would simply be followed by the reflection: "A drove of mustangs." The latter conducts to a different train of thought, in which there is an ambiguity.
The practised eye of the prairie man would soon decide which.
If the horse browsed with a bit in his mouth, and a saddle on his shoulders, there would be no ambiguity-only the conjecture, as to how he had escaped from his rider.
Such a horse; and just such a rider, were seen upon the prairies of south-western Texas in the year of our Lord eighteen fifty something.
I am not certain as to the exact year-the unit of it-though I can with unquestionable certainty record the decade.
I can speak more precisely as to the place; though in this I must be allowed latitude.
But there were others who saw it elsewhere and on different occasions- hunters, herdsmen, and travellers-all alike awed, alike perplexed, by the apparition.
It had become the talk not only of the Leona settlement, but of others more distant.
No one doubted that such a thing had been seen.
To have done so would have been to ignore the evidence of two hundred pairs of eyes, all belonging to men willing to make affidavit of the fact-for it could not be pronounced a fancy.
No one denied that it had been seen.
The only question was, how to account for a spectacle so peculiar, as to give the lie to all the known laws of creation.
At least half a score of theories were started-more or less feasible- more or less absurd.
There were still further speculations, that related less to the apparition itself than to its connection with the other grand topic of the time-the murder of young Poindexter.
Most people believed there was some connection between the two mysteries; though no one could explain it.
He, whom everybody believed, could have thrown some light upon the subject, was still ridden by the night mare of delirium.
Rejecting many tales told of the Headless Horseman-most of them too grotesque to be recorded-one truthful episode must needs be given- since it forms an essential chapter of this strange history.
In the midst of the open, prairie there is a "motte"--a coppice, or clump of trees-of perhaps three or four acres in superficial extent.
A prairie man would call it an "island," and with your eyes upon the vast verdant sea that surrounds it, you could not help being struck with the resemblance.
The aboriginal of America might not perceive it.
By the timber island in question-about two hundred yards from its edge-a horse is quietly pasturing.
He is the same that carries the headless rider; and this weird equestrian is still bestriding him, with but little appearance of change, either in apparel or attitude, since first seen by the searchers.
Those who asserted that they saw a head, only told the truth.
There is a head; and, as also stated, with a hat upon it-a black sombrero, with bullion band as described.
At times too can a glimpse be obtained of the face.
Its features are well formed, but wearing a sad expression; the lips of livid colour, slightly parted, showing a double row of white teeth, set in a grim ghastly smile.
Hitherto he has been seen going alone.
It cannot be called agreeable;--consisting as it does of wolves-half a score of them squatting closely upon the plain, and at intervals loping around him.
By the horse they are certainly not liked; as is proved by the snorting and stamping of his hoof, when one of them ventures upon a too close proximity to his heels.
Three times one of the birds has alighted thus-first upon the right shoulder, then upon the left, and then midway between-upon the spot where the head should be!
Still continuing his fleet career, the Headless Horseman galloped on over the prairie-Zeb Stump following only with his eyes; and not until he had passed out of sight, behind some straggling groves of mezquite, did the backwoodsman abandon his kneeling position.
Then only for a second or two did he stand erect-taking council with himself as to what course he should pursue.
The episode-strange as unexpected-had caused some disarrangement in his ideas, and seemed to call for a change in his plans.
Should he continue along the trail he was already deciphering; or forsake it for that of the steed that had just swept by?
By keeping to the former, he might find out much; but by changing to the latter he might learn more?
While thus absorbed, in considering what course he had best take, he had forgotten the puff of smoke, and the report heard far off over the prairie.
They were things to be remembered; and he soon remembered them.
The old mare, relishing the recumbent attitude, had still kept to it; and there was no necessity for re disposing of her.
He showed no signs of having done so.
On the contrary, he was sitting stooped in the saddle, his breast bent down to the pommel, and his eyes actively engaged in reading the ground, over which he was guiding his horse.
There could be no difficulty in ascertaining his occupation.
Zeb Stump guessed it at a glance.
He was tracking the headless rider.
Zeb had not long to wait for the gratification of his wish.
As the trail was fresh, the strange horseman could take it up at a trot-in which pace he was approaching.
He was soon within identifying distance.
The last speech was an apostrophe to the "maar"--after which Zeb waxed silent, with his head among the spray of the acacias, and his eyes peering through the branches in acute scrutiny of him who was coming along.
This was a man, who, once seen, was not likely to be soon forgotten. Scarce thirty years old, he showed a countenance, scathed, less with care than the play of evil passions.
But there was care upon it now-a care that seemed to speak of apprehension-keen, prolonged, yet looking forward with a hope of being relieved from it.
Withal it was a handsome face: such as a gentleman need not have been ashamed of, but for that sinister expression that told of its belonging to a blackguard.
The blue cloth frock of semi military cut-the forage cap-the belt sustaining a bowie knife, with a brace of revolving pistols-all have been mentioned before as enveloping and equipping the person of Captain Cassius Calhoun.
It was he.
He remained in shadow, to have a better view of what was passing under the sunlight.
Still closely scrutinising the trail of the Headless Horseman, Calhoun trotted past.
The backwoodsman's brain having become the recipient of new thoughts, required a fresh exercise of its ingenuity.
If there was reason before for taking the trail of the Headless Horseman, it was redoubled now.
With but short time spent in consideration, so Zeb concluded; and commenced making preparations for a stalk after Cassius Calhoun.
These consisted in taking hold of the bridle, and giving the old mare a kick; that caused her to start instantaneously to her feet.
He had no thoughts of keeping the latter in view.
He needed no such guidance.
The two fresh trails would be sufficient for him; and he felt as sure of finding the direction in which both would lead, as if he had ridden alongside the horseman without a head, or him without a heart.
With this confidence he cleared out from among the acacias, and took the path just trodden by Calhoun.
For once in his life, Zeb Stump had made a mistake.
On rounding the mezquite grove, behind which both had made disappearance, he discovered he had done so.
Beyond, extended a tract of chalk prairie; over which one of the horsemen appeared to have passed-him without the head.
Zeb guessed so, by seeing the other, at some distance before him, riding to and fro, in transverse stretches, like a pointer quartering the stubble in search of a partridge.
He too had lost the trail, and was endeavouring to recover it.
The attempt terminated in a failure.
The chalk surface defied interpretation-at least by skill such as that of Cassius Calhoun.
But despite his superior attainments in the tracking craft, he was compelled to relinquish it.
Dazed almost to blindness, the backwoodsman determined upon turning late back; and once more devoting his attention to the trail from which he had been for a time seduced.
He had learnt enough to know that this last promised a rich reward for its exploration.
Nor did he lose any in following it up.
Once only did he make pause; at a point where the tracks of two horses converged with that he was following.
From this point the three coincided-at times parting and running parallel, for a score of yards or so, but again coming together and overlapping one another.
He did not stay to inquire which had gone first over the ground.
That was as clear to him, as if he had been a spectator at their passing. The stallion had been in the lead,--how far Zeb could not exactly tell; but certainly some distance beyond that of companionship.
The States horse had followed; and behind him, the roadster with the broken shoe- also an American.
All three had gone over the same ground, at separate times, and each by himself.
This Zeb Stump could tell with as much ease and certainty, as one might read the index of a dial, or thermometer.
Whatever may have been in his thoughts, he said nothing, beyond giving utterance to the simple exclamation "Good!" and, with satisfaction stamped upon his features, he moved on, the old mare appearing to mock him by an imitative stride!
"Wonder now what thet's for?" he continued, after standing awhile to consider.
With this apostrophe to his "critter," ending in a laugh at the conceit of her "tallow," the hunter turned off on the track of the third horse.
It led him along the edge of an extended tract of chapparal; which, following all three, he had approached at a point well known to him, as to the reader,--where it was parted by the open space already described.
The new trail skirted the timber only for a short distance.
Two hundred yards from the embouchure of the avenue, it ran into it; and fifty paces further on Zeb came to a spot where the horse had stood tied to a tree.
Zeb saw that the animal had proceeded no further: for there was another set of tracks showing where it had returned to the prairie-though not by the same path.
Leaving his critter to occupy the "stall" where broken shoe had for some time fretted himself, the old hunter glided off upon the footmarks of the dismounted rider.
He soon discovered two sets of them-one going-another coming back.
He followed the former.
He was not surprised at their bringing him out into the avenue-close to the pool of blood-by the coyotes long since licked dry.
He might have traced them right up to it, but for the hundreds of horse tracks that had trodden the ground like a sheep pen.
But before going so far, he was stayed by the discovery of some fresh "sign"--too interesting to be carelessly examined.
In a place where the underwood grew thick, he came upon a spot where a man had remained for some time.
There was no turf, and the loose mould was baked hard and smooth, evidently by the sole of a boot or shoe.
But upon the branches of a tree between, Zeb Stump saw something that had escaped the eyes not only of the searchers, but of their guide Spangler-a scrap of paper, blackened and half burnt-evidently the wadding of a discharged gun!
ANOTHER LINK.
"That ere's the backin' o' a letter," muttered he.
"Tells a goodish grist o' story; more'n war wrote inside, I reck'n.
"The writin' air in a sheemale hand," he continued, looking anew at the piece of paper.
It air somethin' to be tuk care o'."
So saying, he drew out a small skin wallet, which contained his tinder of "punk," along with his flint and steel; and, after carefully stowing away the scrap of paper, he returned the sack to his pocket.
Now thur ain't the ghost o' a chance.
With this grotesque apostrophe to himself, he commenced retracing the footmarks that had guided him to the edge of the opening.
Only in one or two places were the footprints at all distinct.
But Zeb scarce cared for their guidance.
Having already noted that the man who made them had returned to the place where the horse had been left, he knew the back track would lead him there.
There was one place, however, where the two trails did not go over the same ground.
There was a forking in the open list, through which the supposed murderer had made his way.
It was caused by an obstruction,--a patch of impenetrable thicket.
After a short examination, he observed a trail altogether distinct, and of a different character.
It was a well marked path entering the opening on one side, and going out on the other: in short, a cattle track.
Zeb saw that several shod horses had passed along it, some days before: and it was this that caused him to come back and examine it.
He had heard the whole story of that collateral investigation-how Spangler and his comrades had traced Henry Poindexter's horse to the place where the negro had caught it-on the outskirts of the plantation.
Zeb Stump did not seem to think so.
As he stood looking along it, his attitude showed indecision.
He had turned to go out of the glade, when a thought once more stayed him.
The ole maar kin wait till I kum back."
To the hoof marks of these he paid but slight attention; at times, none whatever.
His eye only sought those of Henry Poindexter's horse. Though the others were of an after time, and often destroyed the traces he was most anxious to examine, he had no difficulty in identifying the latter.
As he would have himself said, any greenhorn could do that. The young planter's horse had gone over the ground at a gallop.
The trackers had ridden slowly.
It was about three quarters of a mile from the edge of the venue.
It was not a halt the galloping horse had made, but only a slight departure from his direct course; as if something he had seen-wolf, jaguar, cougar, or other beast of prey-had caused him to shy.
Beyond he had continued his career; rapid and reckless as ever.
Beyond the party along with Spangler had proceeded-without staying to inquire why the horse had shied from his track.
Zeb Stump was more inquisitive, and paused upon this spot.
It was a sterile tract, without herbage, and covered with shingle and sand.
A huge tree overshadowed it, with limbs extending horizontally. One of these ran transversely to the path over which the horses had passed-so low that a horseman, to shun contact with it, would have to lower his head.
At this branch Zeb Stump stood gazing.
He observed an abrasion upon the bark; that, though very slight, must have been caused by contact with some substance, as hard, if not sounder, than itself.
"I thort so.
With an elastic step-his countenance radiant of triumph-the old hunter strode away from the tree, no longer upon the cattle path, but that taken by the man who had been so violently dismounted.
To one unaccustomed to the chapparal, he might have appeared going without a guide, and upon a path never before pressed by human foot.
A portion of it perhaps had not.
But Zeb was conducted by signs which, although obscure to the ordinary eye, were to him intelligible as the painted lettering upon a finger post.
The branch contorted to afford passage for a human form-the displaced tendrils of a creeping plant- the scratched surface of the earth-all told that a man had passed that way.
The sign signified more-that the man was disabled-had been crawling-a cripple!
Zeb Stump continued on, till he had traced this cripple to the banks of a running stream.
It was not necessary for him to go further.
He had made one more splice of the broken thread.
Another, and his clue would be complete!
ALL the inhabitants of the valley treated me with great kindness; but as to the household of Marheyo, with whom I was now permanently domiciled, nothing could surpass their efforts to minister to my comfort.
To the gratification of my palate they paid the most unwearied attention. They continually invited me to partake of food, and when after eating heartily I declined the viands they continued to offer me, they seemed to think that my appetite stood in need of some piquant stimulant to excite its activity.
After a whole day spent in this employment, he would return about nightfall with several cocoanut shells filled with different descriptions of kelp.
In preparing these for use he manifested all the ostentation of a professed cook, although the chief mystery of the affair appeared to consist in pouring water in judicious quantities upon the slimy contents of his cocoanut shells.
The first time he submitted one of these saline salads to my critical attention I naturally thought that anything collected at such pains must possess peculiar merits; but one mouthful was a complete dose; and great was the consternation of the old warrior at the rapidity with which I ejected his Epicurean treat.
How true it is, that the rarity of any particular article enhances its value amazingly.
In some part of the valley-I know not where, but probably in the neighbourhood of the sea-the girls were sometimes in the habit of procuring small quantities of salt, a thimble full or so being the result of the united labours of a party of five or six employed for the greater part of the day.
This precious commodity they brought to the house, enveloped in multitudinous folds of leaves; and as a special mark of the esteem in which they held me, would spread an immense leaf on the ground, and dropping one by one a few minute particles of the salt upon it, invite me to taste them.
From the extravagant value placed upon the article, I verily believe, that with a bushel of common Liverpool salt all the real estate in Typee might have been purchased.
The celebrity of the bread fruit tree, and the conspicuous place it occupies in a Typee bill of fare, induces me to give at some length a general description of the tree, and the various modes in which the fruit is prepared.
The bread fruit tree, in its glorious prime, is a grand and towering object, forming the same feature in a Marquesan landscape that the patriarchal elm does in New England scenery.
The latter tree it not a little resembles in height, in the wide spread of its stalwart branches, and in its venerable and imposing aspect.
The leaves of the bread fruit are of great size, and their edges are cut and scolloped as fantastically as those of a lady's lace collar.
The autumnal tints of our American forests, glorious as they are, sink into nothing in comparison with this tree.
The leaf, in one particular stage, when nearly all the prismatic colours are blended on its surface, is often converted by the natives into a superb and striking head dress.
The fruit somewhat resembles in magnitude and general appearance one of our citron melons of ordinary size; but, unlike the citron, it has no sectional lines drawn along the outside.
Its surface is dotted all over with little conical prominences, looking not unlike the knobs, on an antiquated church door.
The rind is perhaps an eighth of an inch in thickness; and denuded of this at the time when it is in the greatest perfection, the fruit presents a beautiful globe of white pulp, the whole of which may be eaten, with the exception of a slender core, which is easily removed.
The bread fruit, however, is never used, and is indeed altogether unfit to be eaten, until submitted in one form or other to the action of fire.
After the lapse of ten or fifteen minutes, the green rind embrowns and cracks, showing through the fissures in its sides the milk white interior.
As soon as it cools the rind drops off, and you then have the soft round pulp in its purest and most delicious state.
Thus eaten, it has a mild and pleasing flavour.
Sometimes after having been roasted in the fire, the natives snatch it briskly from the embers, and permitting it to slip out of the yielding rind into a vessel of cold water, stir up the mixture, which they call 'bo a sho'.
I never could endure this compound, and indeed the preparation is not greatly in vogue among the more polite Typees.
There is one form, however, in which the fruit is occasionally served, that renders it a dish fit for a king.
As soon as it is taken from the fire the exterior is removed, the core extracted, and the remaining part is placed in a sort of shallow stone mortar, and briskly worked with a pestle of the same substance.
This is done by means of a piece of mother of pearl shell, lashed firmly to the extreme end of a heavy stick, with its straight side accurately notched like a saw.
The stick is sometimes a grotesquely formed limb of a tree, with three or four branches twisting from its body like so many shapeless legs, and sustaining it two or three feet from the ground.
Having obtained a quantity sufficient for his purpose, he places it in a bag made of the net like fibrous substance attached to all cocoanut trees, and compressing it over the bread fruit, which being now sufficiently pounded, is put into a wooden bowl-extracts a thick creamy milk.
The delicious liquid soon bubbles round the fruit, and leaves it at last just peeping above its surface.
The hobby horse and the pestle and mortar were in great requisition during the time I remained in the house of Marheyo, and Kory Kory had frequent occasion to show his skill in their use.
The trees are stripped of their nodding burdens, which, easily freed from the rind and core, are gathered together in capacious wooden vessels, where the pulpy fruit is soon worked by a stone pestle, vigorously applied, into a blended mass of a doughy consistency, called by the natives 'Tutao'.
This is then divided into separate parcels, which, after being made up into stout packages, enveloped in successive folds of leaves, and bound round with thongs of bark, are stored away in large receptacles hollowed in the earth, from whence they are drawn as occasion may require.
In this condition the Tutao sometimes remains for years, and even is thought to improve by age.
Before it is fit to be eaten, however, it has to undergo an additional process.
A primitive oven is scooped in the ground, and its bottom being loosely covered with stones, a large fire is kindled within it.
As soon as the requisite degree of heat is attained, the embers are removed, and the surface of the stones being covered with thick layers of leaves, one of the large packages of Tutao is deposited upon them and overspread with another layer of leaves.
The whole is then quickly heaped up with earth, and forms a sloping mound.
The Amar is placed in a vessel, and mixed with water until it gains a proper pudding like consistency, when, without further preparation, it is in readiness for use.
This is the form in which the 'Tutao' is generally consumed.
Were it not that the bread fruit is thus capable of being preserved for a length of time, the natives might be reduced to a state of starvation; for owing to some unknown cause the trees sometimes fail to bear fruit; and on such occasions the islanders chiefly depend upon the supplies they have been enabled to store away.
This stately tree, which is rarely met with upon the Sandwich Islands, and then only of a very inferior quality, and at Tahiti does not abound to a degree that renders its fruit the principal article of food, attains its greatest excellence in the genial climate of the Marquesan group, where it grows to an enormous magnitude, and flourishes in the utmost abundance.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
SADLY discursive as I have already been, I must still further entreat the reader's patience, as I am about to string together, without any attempt at order, a few odds and ends of things not hitherto mentioned, but which are either curious in themselves or peculiar to the Typees.
There was one singular custom observed in old Marheyo's domestic establishment, which often excited my surprise.
What was the meaning or purpose of this custom, whether it was practiced merely as a diversion, or whether it was a religious exercise, a sort of family prayers, I never could discover.
The sounds produced by the natives on these occasions were of a most singular description; and had I not actually been present, I never would have believed that such curious noises could have been produced by human beings.
To savages generally is imputed a guttural articulation.
The labial melody with which the Typee girls carry on an ordinary conversation, giving a musical prolongation to the final syllable of every sentence, and chirping out some of the words with a liquid, bird like accent, was singularly pleasing.
The men however, are not quite so harmonious in their utterance, and when excited upon any subject, would work themselves up into a sort of wordy paroxysm, during which all descriptions of rough sided sounds were projected from their mouths, with a force and rapidity which was absolutely astonishing.
It was a stanza from the 'Bavarian broom seller'.
His Typeean majesty, with all his court, gazed upon me in amazement, as if I had displayed some preternatural faculty which Heaven had denied to them.
The King was delighted with the verse; but the chorus fairly transported him.
At his solicitation I sang it again and again, and nothing could be more ludicrous than his vain attempts to catch the air and the words.
The royal savage seemed to think that by screwing all the features of his face into the end of his nose he might possibly succeed in the undertaking, but it failed to answer the purpose; and in the end he gave it up, and consoled himself by listening to my repetition of the sounds fifty times over.
Besides the sticks and the drums, there are no other musical instruments among the Typees, except one which might appropriately be denominated a nasal flute.
The other nostril being closed by a peculiar movement of the muscles about the nose, the breath is forced into the tube, and produces a soft dulcet sound which is varied by the fingers running at random over the stops.
This is a favourite recreation with the females and one in which Fayaway greatly excelled.
Awkward as such an instrument may appear, it was, in Fayaway's delicate little hands, one of the most graceful I have ever seen.
A young lady, in the act of tormenting a guitar strung about her neck by a couple of yards of blue ribbon, is not half so engaging.
Sometimes when this sorely battered shadow retreated precipitately towards a group of the savages, and, following him up, I rushed among them dealing my blows right and left, they would disperse in all directions much to the enjoyment of Mehevi, the chiefs, and themselves.
One day, in company with Kory Kory, I had repaired to the stream for the purpose of bathing, when I observed a woman sitting upon a rock in the midst of the current, and watching with the liveliest interest the gambols of something, which at first I took to be an uncommonly large species of frog that was sporting in the water near her.
Attracted by the novelty of the sight, I waded towards the spot where she sat, and could hardly credit the evidence of my senses when I beheld a little infant, the period of whose birth could not have extended back many days, paddling about as if it had just risen to the surface, after being hatched into existence at the bottom.
At such times however, the mother snatched it up and by a process scarcely to be mentioned obliged it to eject the fluid.
For several weeks afterwards I observed this woman bringing her child down to the stream regularly every day, in the cool of the morning and evening and treating it to a bath.
No wonder that the South Sea Islanders are so amphibious a race, when they are thus launched into the water as soon as they see the light.
I am convinced that it is as natural for a human being to swim as it is for a duck.
And yet in civilized communities how many able bodied individuals die, like so many drowning kittens, from the occurrence of the most trivial accidents!
The long luxuriant and glossy tresses of the Typee damsels often attracted my admiration.
A fine head of hair is the pride and joy of every woman's heart.
The Typee girls devote much of their time to the dressing of their fair and redundant locks.
After bathing, as they sometimes do five or six times every day, the hair is carefully dried, and if they have been in the sea, invariably washed in fresh water, and anointed with a highly scented oil extracted from the meat of the cocoanut.
A large vessel of wood, with holes perforated in the bottom, is filled with the pounded meat, and exposed to the rays of the sun
As the oleaginous matter exudes, it falls in drops through the apertures into a wide mouthed calabash placed underneath.
These nuts are then hermetically sealed with a resinous gum, and the vegetable fragrance of their green rind soon imparts to the oil a delightful odour.
After the lapse of a few weeks the exterior shell of the nuts becomes quite dry and hard, and assumes a beautiful carnation tint; and when opened they are found to be about two thirds full of an ointment of a light yellow colour and diffusing the sweetest perfume.
This elegant little odorous globe would not be out of place even upon the toilette of a queen.
Its merits as a preparation for the hair are undeniable-it imparts to it a superb gloss and a silky fineness.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
As he drew near, I remembered with many misgivings the inauspicious termination of our former interview, and when he entered the house, I watched with intense anxiety the reception he met with from its inmates. To my joy, his appearance was hailed with the liveliest pleasure; and accosting me kindly, he seated himself by my side, and entered into conversation with the natives around him.
It soon appeared however, that on this occasion he had not any intelligence of importance to communicate.
He replied from Pueearka, his native valley, and that he intended to return to it the same day.
At once it struck me that, could I but reach that valley under his protection, I might easily from thence reach Nukuheva by water; and animated by the prospect which this plan held, out I disclosed it in a few brief words to the stranger, and asked him how it could be best accomplished.
My heart sunk within me, when in his broken English he answered me that it could never be effected.
'Kanaka no let you go nowhere,' he said; 'you taboo.
Suppose you no like this bay, why you come?
All white men afraid Typee, so no white men come.'
It would have been idle for me to have attempted resuming the interview so peremptorily terminated by Marnoo, who was evidently little disposed to compromise his own safety by any rash endeavour to ensure mine. But the plan he had suggested struck me as one which might possibly be accomplished, and I resolved to act upon it as speedily as possible.
A mode of escape was now presented to me, but how was I to avail myself of it?
I was continually surrounded by the savages; I could not stir from one house to another without being attended by some of them; and even during the hours devoted to slumber, the slightest movement which I made seemed to attract the notice of those who shared the mats with me. In spite of these obstacles, however, I determined forthwith to make the attempt.
It was also by night alone that I could hope to accomplish my object, and then only by adopting the utmost precaution.
The entrance to Marheyo's habitation was through a low narrow opening in its wicker work front.
This passage, for no conceivable reason that I could devise, was always closed after the household had retired to rest, by drawing a heavy slide across it, composed of a dozen or more bits of wood, ingeniously fastened together by seizings of sinnate.
When any of the inmates chose to go outside, the noise occasioned by the removing of this rude door awakened every body else; and on more than one occasion I had remarked that the islanders were nearly as irritable as more civilized beings under similar circumstances.
The difficulty thus placed in my way I, determined to obviate in the following manner.
On re entering I would purposely omit closing the passage after me, and trusting that the indolence of the savages would prevent them from repairing my neglect, would return to my mat, and waiting patiently until all were again asleep, I would then steal forth, and at once take the route to Pueearka.
The very night which followed Marnoo's departure, I proceeded to put this project into execution.
About midnight, as I imagined, I arose and drew the slide.
On hearing my reply they sank back again, and in a minute or two I returned to my mat, anxiously awaiting the result of the experiment.
This was a sad blow to me; but as it might have aroused the suspicions of the islanders to have made another attempt that night, I was reluctantly obliged to defer it until the next.
Several times after I repeated the same manoeuvre, but with as little success as before. As my pretence for withdrawing from the house was to allay my thirst, Kory Kory either suspecting some design on my part, or else prompted by a desire to please me, regularly every evening placed a calabash of water by my side.
For the present, therefore, I was obliged to abandon the attempt; but I endeavoured to console myself with the idea that by this mode I might yet effect my escape.
Shortly after Marnoo's visit I was reduced to such a state that it was with extreme difficulty I could walk, even with the assistance of a spear, and Kory Kory, as formerly, was obliged to carry me daily to the stream.
At my request my mats were always spread directly facing the door, opposite which, and at a little distance, was the hut of boughs that Marheyo was building.
Whenever my gentle Fayaway and Kory Kory, laying themselves down beside me, would leave me awhile to uninterrupted repose, I took a strange interest in the slightest movements of the eccentric old warrior.
All alone during the stillness of the tropical mid day, he would pursue his quiet work, sitting in the shade and weaving together the leaflets of his cocoanut branches, or rolling upon his knee the twisted fibres of bark to form the cords with which he tied together the thatching of his tiny house.
It is strange how inanimate objects will twine themselves into our affections, especially in the hour of affliction.
Even now, amidst all the bustle and stir of the proud and busy city in which I am dwelling, the image of those three trees seems to come as vividly before my eyes as if they were actually present, and I still feel the soothing quiet pleasure which I then had in watching hour after hour their topmost boughs waving gracefully in the breeze.
CHAPTER nineteen.
Oh, what a feeble fort's a woman's heart, Betrayed by nature, and besieged by art.
--FANE'S "LOVE IN THE DARK."
"Horace, will you bring her to see me again?"
"Yes, aunt, if she wants to come.
But don't ask me to leave her again."
I'd be happy, sir, at any time when you can make it convenient for me to see you here, with Horace and the child, or without them."
"Thank you, Miss Stanhope; and mother and I would be delighted to see you at Ion."
Daughter, put down your veil."
Egerton was at the depot, but could get neither a word with Elsie, nor so much as a sight of her face.
Her veil was not once lifted, and her father never left her side for a moment.
mr Travilla bought the tickets, and Simon attended to the checking of the baggage.
Then the train came thundering up, and the fair girl was hurried into it, mr Travilla, on one side, and her father on the other, effectually preventing any near approach to her person on the part of the baffled and disappointed fortune hunter.
He walked back to his boarding house, cursing his ill luck and Messrs. Dinsmore and Travilla, and gave notice to his landlady that his room would become vacant the next morning.
As the train sped onward, again Elsie laid her head down upon her father's shoulder and wept silently behind her veil.
Her feelings had been wrought up to a high pitch of excitement in the struggle to be perfectly submissive and obedient, and now the overstrained nerves claimed this relief.
And love's young dream, the first, and sweetest, was over and gone.
She could never hope to see again the man she still fondly imagined to be good and noble, and with a heart full of deep, passionate love for her.
Her father understood and sympathized with it all.
He passed his arm about her waist, drew her closer to him, and taking her hand in his, held it in a warm, loving clasp.
How it soothed and comforted her.
She could never be very wretched while thus tenderly loved, and cherished.
"You shall never go away again," said the little fellow, hugging her tight.
"No, son," answered mr Dinsmore, patting his rosy cheek, and softly stroking Elsie's hair, "and it is just the same with a man who has but one daughter."
"You don't look bright and merry, as you did when you went away," said the child, bending a gaze of keen, loving scrutiny upon the sweet face, paler, sadder, and more heavy eyed than he had ever seen it before.
"Sister is tired with her journey," said mamma tenderly; "we won't tease her to night."
"Yes, papa, and then she'll be all right to morrow, won't she?
But, mamma, I wasn't teasing her, not a bit; was I, Elsie?
And if anybody's been making her sorry, I'll kill him.
'cause she's my sister, and I've got to take care of her."
"But suppose papa was the one who had made her sorry; what then?" asked mr Dinsmore.
"But you wouldn't, papa," said the boy, shaking his head with an incredulous smile.
"You love her too much a great deal; you'd never make her sorry unless she'd be naughty; and she's never one bit naughty,--always minds you and mamma the minute you speak."
"That's true, my son; I do love her far too well ever to grieve her if it can be helped.
She shall never know a pang a father's love and care can save her from." And again his hand rested caressingly on Elsie's head.
She caught it in both of hers and laying her cheek lovingly against it, looked up at him with tears trembling in her eyes.
"I know it, papa," she murmured.
"I know you love your foolish little daughter very dearly; almost as dearly as she loves you."
"Almost, darling?
If there were any gauge by which to measure love, I know not whose would be found the greatest."
After tea the Allisons flocked in to bid her welcome.
All seemed glad of her coming, Richard, Harold, and Sophy especially so.
They were full of plans for giving her pleasure, and crowding the greatest possible amount of enjoyment into the four or five weeks of their expected sojourn on the island.
"It will be moonlight next week," said Sophy; "and we'll have some delightful drives and walks along the beach.
It will be altogether better for her health."
"Your system should become used to that before you take more."
"Yes, that is what some of the doctors here, and the oldest inhabitants, tell us," remarked mr Allison, "and I believe it is the better plan."
"And in the meantime we can take some rides and drives,--down to Diamond Beach, over to the light house, and elsewhere," said Edward Allison, his brother Richard adding, "and do a little fishing and boating."
mr Dinsmore was watching his daughter.
She was making an effort to be interested in the conversation, but looking worn, weary, and sad.
"You are greatly fatigued, my child," he said.
"We will excuse you and let you retire at once."
She was very glad to avail herself of the permission.
Rose followed her to her room, a pleasant, breezy apartment, opening on a veranda, and looking out upon the sea, whose dark waves, here and there tipped with foam, could be dimly seen rolling and tossing beneath the light of the stars and of a young moon that hung like a golden crescent just above the horizon.
Elsie walked to the window and looked out.
"How I love the sea," she said, sighing, "but, mamma, to night it makes me think of a text-'All Thy waves and Thy billows have gone over me.'"
"It is not so bad as that, I hope, dear," said Rose, folding her tenderly in her arms; "think how we all love you, especially your father.
I don't know how we could any of us do without you, darling.
"Mamma, I do feel it to be very, very sweet to be so loved and cared for.
I could not tell you how dear you and my little brother are to me, and as for papa-sometimes I am more than half afraid I make an idol of him; and yet-oh, mamma," she murmured, hiding her face in Rose's bosom, "why is it that I can no longer be in love with the loves that so fully satisfied me?"
Be patient, darling, and try to trust both your heavenly and your earthly father.
You know that no trial can come to you without your heavenly Father's will, and that He means this for your good.
Look to Him and he will help you to bear it, and send relief in His own good time and way.
You know He tells us it is through much tribulation we enter the kingdom of God; and that whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
And this seems to be really my only one, while my cup of blessings is full to overflowing.
I fear I am very wicked to feel so sad."
"Let us sit down on this couch while we talk; you are too tired to stand," said Rose, drawing her away from the window to a softly cushioned lounge.
"I do not think you can help grieving, darling, though I agree with you that it is your duty to try to be cheerful, as well as patient and submissive; and I trust you will find it easier as the days and weeks move on.
You are very young, and have plenty of time to wait; indeed, if all had gone right, you know your papa would not have allowed you to marry for several years yet."
"Yes, dear; papa told me; for you know you are my darling daughter too, and I have a very deep interest in all that concerns you."
A tender caress accompanied the words, and was returned with equal ardor.
"Thank you, best and kindest of mothers; I should never want anything kept from you."
From the first he seemed to be a perfect gentleman, educated, polished, and refined; and afterward he became-at least so I thought from the conversations we had together-truly converted, and a very earnest, devoted Christian.
He told me he had been, at one time, a little wild, but surely he ought not to be condemned for that, after he had repented and reformed."
"No, dear; and your father would agree with you in that.
But he believes you have been deceived in the man's character; and don't you think, daughter, that he is wiser than yourself, and more capable of finding out the truth about the matter?"
"I know papa is far wiser than I, but, oh, my heart will not believe what they say of-of him!" she cried with sudden, almost passionate vehemence.
"Well, dear, that is perfectly natural, but try to be entirely submissive to your father, and wait patiently; and hopefully too," she added with a smile; "for if mr Egerton is really good, no doubt it will be proved in time, and then your father will at once remove his interdict.
And if you are mistaken, you will one day discover it, and feel thankful, indeed, to your papa for taking just the course he has."
"I thought it was only permission, papa, not command," she answered, lifting her eyes to his face, and moving to make room for him by her side.
"Has she, darling?
Bless her for it!
I know you need comfort, my poor little pet," he said, taking the offered seat, and passing his arm round her waist.
"But you need rest too, and ought not to stay up any longer."
"But surely papa knows I cannot go to bed without my good night kiss when he is in the same house with me," she said, winding her arms about his neck.
"And didn't like to take it before folks?
Well, that was right, but take it now.
There, good night.
"The dear child; my heart aches for her," he remarked to his wife, as they went out together, "and I find it almost impossible yet to forgive either that scoundrel Jackson or my brother Arthur."
"You have no lingering doubts as to the identity and utter unworthiness of the man?"
"Not one; and if I could only convince Elsie of his true character she would detest him as thoroughly as I do.
If he had his deserts, he would be in the State's Prison; and to think of his daring to approach my child, and even aspire to her hand!"
Elsie lay all night in a profound slumber, and awoke at an early hour the next morning, feeling greatly refreshed and invigorated.
The gentle murmur of old ocean came pleasantly to her ear, and sweetly in her mind arose the thought of Him whom even the winds and the sea obey; of His never failing love to her, and of the many great and precious promises of His word.
Throwing on a dressing gown over her night dress, she sat down before the open window with her Bible in her hand.
She still loved, as of old, to spend the first hour of the day in the study of its pages, and in communion with Him whose word it is.
Chloe was just putting the finishing touches to her young lady's toilet when little Horace came running down the hall, and rapping on Elsie's door, called out, "Sister, papa says put on a short dress, and your walking shoes, and come take a stroll on the beach with us before breakfast."
"Yes, tell papa I will.
I'll be down in five minutes."
She came down looking sweet and fresh as the morning; a smile on the full red lips, and a faint tinge of rose color on the cheeks that had been so pale the night before.
"Thank you, mamma, I am very glad to be here; and I had such a good restful sleep.
How well you look."
"And feel too, I am thankful to be able to say.
But there, your father is calling to you from the sitting room."
"Come here, daughter," he said, "and tell me if you obeyed orders last night."
"Yes, papa, I did."
"I am writing a few lines to Aunt Wealthy, to tell her of our safe arrival.
Have you any message to send?" and laying down his pen he drew her to his knee.
"Only my love, papa, and-and that she must not be anxious about me, as she said that she should.
That I am very safe and happy in the hands of my heavenly Father-and those of the kind earthly one He has given me," she added in a whisper, putting her arms about his neck, and looking in his face with eyes brimful of filial tenderness and love.
"That is right, my darling," he said, "and you shall never want for love while your father lives.
How it rejoices my heart to see you looking so bright and well this morning."
"I have no fault to find with you on that score, my dear child," he said tenderly, "but if you can be cheerful, it will be for your own happiness, as well as ours."
She kept her promise faithfully, and had her reward in much real enjoyment of the many pleasures provided for her.
mr and mrs Dinsmore were still youthful in their feelings, and joined with great zest in the sports of the young people, going with them in all their excursions, taking an active part in all their pastimes, and contriving so many fresh entertainments, that during those few weeks life seemed like one long gala day.
mr Travilla was with them most of the time.
He had tarried behind in Philadelphia, as mr Dinsmore and his daughter passed through, but followed them to Cape Island a few days later.
The whole party left the shore about the last of September, the Allisons returning to their city residence, mr Travilla to his Southern home, and the Dinsmores travelling through Pennsylvania and New York, from one romantic and picturesque spot to another; finishing up with two or three weeks in Philadelphia, during which Rose and Elsie were much occupied with their fall and winter shopping.
mr Dinsmore took this opportunity to pay another flying visit to his two young brothers.
He found Arthur nearly recovered, and at once asked a full explanation of the affair of Tom Jackson, alias Bromly Egerton; his designs upon Elsie, and Arthur's participation in them.
"I know nothing about it," was the sullen rejoinder.
"You certainly were acquainted with Tom Jackson, and how, but through you, could he have gained any knowledge of Elsie and her whereabouts?"
"I don't deny that I've had some dealings with Jackson, but your Egerton I know nothing of whatever."
"You may as well speak the truth, sir; it will be much better for you in the end," said mr Dinsmore, sternly, his eyes flashing with indignant anger.
"And you may as well remember that it isn't Elsie you are dealing with.
I'm not afraid of you."
"Perhaps not, but you may well fear Him who has said, 'a lying tongue is but for a moment.' How do you reconcile such an assertion as you have just made with the fact of your having that letter in your possession?"
"I say it's a cowardly piece of business for you to give the lie to a fellow that hasn't the strength to knock you down for it."
"You would hardly attempt that if you were in perfect health, Arthur."
"I would."
"You have not answered my question about the letter.
"I wrote it myself."
"A likely story; it is in a very different hand from yours."
"I can adopt that hand on occasion, as I'll prove to your satisfaction."
He opened his desk, wrote a sentence on a scrap of paper, and handed it to mr Dinsmore.
The chirography was precisely that of the letter. While slowly convalescing, Arthur had prepared for this expected interview with Horace, by spending many a solitary hour in laboriously teaching himself to imitate Jackson's ordinary hand, in which most of the letters he had received from him were written.
"I don't believe a word of it," said mr Dinsmore, looking sternly at him.
"Arthur, you had better be frank and open with me.
I have no doubt that you sent that villain to Lansdale to try his arts upon Elsie; and for that you are richly deserving of my anger, and of any punishment it might be in my power to deal out to you.
"It has been no easy matter for me to forgive the suffering you have caused my child, Arthur; but I came here to day with kind feelings and intentions.
I hoped to find you penitent and ready to forsake your evil courses; and in that case, intended to help you to pay off your debts and begin anew, without paining father with the knowledge that his confidence in you has been again so shamefully abused.
But I must say that your persistent denial of your complicity with that scoundrel Jackson does not look much like contrition, or intended amendment."
Arthur listened in sullen silence, though his rapidly changing color showed that he felt the cutting rebuke keenly.
At one time he had resolved to confess everything, throw himself upon the mercy of his father and brother, and begin to lead an honest, upright life; but a threatening letter received that morning from Jackson had led him to change his purpose, and determine to close his lips for a time.
Walter looked at Arthur in surprise.
"Come, Art, speak, why don't you?" he said.
"Horace, don't look so stern and angry, I know he means to turn over a new leaf; for he told me so.
And you will help him, won't you?"
"I ask no favors from a man who throws the lie in my teeth," muttered Arthur angrily.
"But, Arthur, I give you one more chance, and for our father's sake I hope you will avail yourself of it.
If you go on as you have for the last three or four years, you will bring down his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.
I presume you have put yourself in Jackson's power; but if you will now make a full and free confession to me, and promise amendment, I will help you to get rid of the rascal's claims upon you, and start afresh.
Will you do it?"
"No, you've called me a liar, and what's the use of my telling you anything?
THE FALSE DAUPHINS IN FRANCE.
seventeen ninety three to eighteen fifty nine.
Had not these pages already proved to what an extent human credulity could go, it would be almost useless to offer the following most extraordinary details as matters of fact.
On the twenty seventh of march seventeen eighty five, Louis Charles, the second son of Louis the Sixteenth of France, was born at the Chateau de Versailles.
But his happy childish life was of short duration: the starving and infuriated populace of Paris, driven from one misery to another, deemed if they could only bring the king to the metropolis means would be discovered for overcoming their distress.
Under the influence of this infatuation, an enormous crowd, chiefly composed of women, marched from Paris, invaded the regal precincts of Versailles, and deputed a few of their number to see the king.
From that time until the thirteenth of August, seventeen ninety two, when the royal family were imprisoned in the Temple, the whole of its members had been under close surveillance, and had no fresh opportunity of escaping from the capital.
From the date of their incarceration in the Temple their doom was sealed, and nothing but death released any one save the Princess Marie Theresa from captivity.
Brutal and debasing as was Simon's regimen, it was not rapid enough in its process to satisfy "the Committee of Public Safety;" they, therefore, dismissed him from his post, and made different arrangements.
On the eighth of June he told one of his keepers, "I have something to tell you!" but the man waited in vain for the revelation, for whilst he listened the poor child's life had passed away.
When the dauphin died he was ten years and two months old.
The members of the Committee of Public Safety having concluded their day's sitting when the news was brought, it was deemed advisable to conceal the event until the morrow.
Supper was prepared for the child as usual, and Gomin, his attendant, took it up to the room.
"His eyes, which while suffering had half closed," he relates, "were now open, and shone as pure as the blue heaven, and his beautiful fair hair, which had not been cut for two months, fell like a frame round his face."
Chapter four.
Conspiracy.
Danglars followed Edmond and Mercedes with his eyes until the two lovers disappeared behind one of the angles of Fort Saint Nicolas, then turning round, he perceived Fernand, who had fallen, pale and trembling, into his chair, while Caderousse stammered out the words of a drinking song.
"Well, my dear sir," said Danglars to Fernand, "here is a marriage which does not appear to make everybody happy."
"It drives me to despair," said Fernand.
"Do you, then, love Mercedes?"
"I adore her!"
"For long?"
"As long as I have known her-always."
"And you sit there, tearing your hair, instead of seeking to remedy your condition; I did not think that was the way of your people."
"How do I know?
Is it my affair?
I am not in love with Mademoiselle Mercedes; but for you-in the words of the gospel, seek, and you shall find."
"I have found already."
"What?"
"I would stab the man, but the woman told me that if any misfortune happened to her betrothed, she would kill herself."
Women say those things, but never do them."
"You do not know Mercedes; what she threatens she will do."
"Before Mercedes should die," replied Fernand, with the accents of unshaken resolution, "I would die myself!"
"That's what I call love!" said Caderousse with a voice more tipsy than ever.
"That's love, or I don't know what love is."
"Come," said Danglars, "you appear to me a good sort of fellow, and hang me, I should like to help you, but"--
"Yes," said Caderousse, "but how?"
Drink then, and do not meddle with what we are discussing, for that requires all one's wit and cool judgment."
I could drink four more such bottles; they are no bigger than cologne flasks.
Pere Pamphile, more wine!" and Caderousse rattled his glass upon the table.
"You were saying, sir"--said Fernand, awaiting with great anxiety the end of this interrupted remark.
"What was I saying?
I forget.
This drunken Caderousse has made me lose the thread of my sentence."
"Yes; but I added, to help you it would be sufficient that Dantes did not marry her you love; and the marriage may easily be thwarted, methinks, and yet Dantes need not die."
"Death alone can separate them," remarked Fernand.
"You talk like a noodle, my friend," said Caderousse; "and here is Danglars, who is a wide awake, clever, deep fellow, who will prove to you that you are wrong.
I have answered for you.
Say there is no need why Dantes should die; it would, indeed, be a pity he should.
Dantes is a good fellow; I like Dantes.
Dantes, your health."
Fernand rose impatiently.
"Let him run on," said Danglars, restraining the young man; "drunk as he is, he is not much out in what he says. Absence severs as well as death, and if the walls of a prison were between Edmond and Mercedes they would be as effectually separated as if he lay under a tombstone."
"Yes; but one gets out of prison," said Caderousse, who, with what sense was left him, listened eagerly to the conversation, "and when one gets out and one's name is Edmond Dantes, one seeks revenge"--
"And why, I should like to know," persisted Caderousse, "should they put Dantes in prison?
he has not robbed or killed or murdered."
"I won't hold my tongue!" replied Caderousse; "I say I want to know why they should put Dantes in prison; I like Dantes; Dantes, your health!" and he swallowed another glass of wine.
Danglars saw in the muddled look of the tailor the progress of his intoxication, and turning towards Fernand, said, "Well, you understand there is no need to kill him."
"Certainly not, if, as you said just now, you have the means of having Dantes arrested.
Have you that means?"
"It is to be found for the searching.
it is no affair of mine."
None, on my word!
I saw you were unhappy, and your unhappiness interested me; that's all; but since you believe I act for my own account, adieu, my dear friend, get out of the affair as best you may;" and Danglars rose as if he meant to depart.
"No, no," said Fernand, restraining him, "stay!
I hate him!
I confess it openly.
I won't have him killed-I won't!
He's my friend, and this morning offered to share his money with me, as I shared mine with him.
I won't have Dantes killed-I won't!"
"But the means-the means?" said Fernand.
"No!--you undertook to do so."
"Do you invent, then," said Fernand impatiently.
"Pen, ink, and paper," muttered Fernand.
"Yes; I am a supercargo; pen, ink, and paper are my tools, and without my tools I am fit for nothing."
"Pen, ink, and paper, then," called Fernand loudly.
"There's what you want on that table," said the waiter.
"Bring them here." The waiter did as he was desired.
"When one thinks," said Caderousse, letting his hand drop on the paper, "there is here wherewithal to kill a man more sure than if we waited at the corner of a wood to assassinate him!
"Give him some more wine, Fernand." Fernand filled Caderousse's glass, who, like the confirmed toper he was, lifted his hand from the paper and seized the glass.
The Catalan watched him until Caderousse, almost overcome by this fresh assault on his senses, rested, or rather dropped, his glass upon the table.
"Well!" resumed the Catalan, as he saw the final glimmer of Caderousse's reason vanishing before the last glass of wine.
"Well, then, I should say, for instance," resumed Danglars, "that if after a voyage such as Dantes has just made, in which he touched at the Island of Elba, some one were to denounce him to the king's procureur as a Bonapartist agent"--
"I will denounce him!" exclaimed the young man hastily.
"Oh, I should wish nothing better than that he would come and seek a quarrel with me."
Mercedes, who will detest you if you have only the misfortune to scratch the skin of her dearly beloved Edmond!"
Proof of this crime will be found on arresting him, for the letter will be found upon him, or at his father's, or in his cabin on board the Pharaon."
"Yes, and that's all settled; only it will be an infamous shame;" and he stretched out his hand to reach the letter.
"All right!" said Caderousse.
"Dantes is my friend, and I won't have him ill used."
"In this case," replied Caderousse, "let's have some more wine.
"You have had too much already, drunkard," said Danglars; "and if you continue, you will be compelled to sleep here, because unable to stand on your legs."
"I?" said Caderousse, rising with all the offended dignity of a drunken man, "I can't keep on my legs?
"Done!" said Danglars, "I'll take your bet; but to morrow-to day it is time to return.
Give me your arm, and let us go."
"Very well, let us go," said Caderousse; "but I don't want your arm at all.
Come, Fernand, won't you return to Marseilles with us?"
"No," said Fernand; "I shall return to the Catalans."
"You're wrong.
Come with us to Marseilles-come along."
"I will not."
"What do you mean?
you will not?
Well, just as you like, my prince; there's liberty for all the world.
Come along, Danglars, and let the young gentleman return to the Catalans if he chooses."
Danglars took advantage of Caderousse's temper at the moment, to take him off towards Marseilles by the Porte Saint Victor, staggering as he went.
"Well," said Caderousse, "why, what a lie he told!
"Oh, you don't see straight," said Danglars; "he's gone right enough."
"Well," said Caderousse, "I should have said not-how treacherous wine is!"
DEAR SIR,
Though, in his own judgment, his disease was mortal and incurable, yet he allowed himself to be prevailed upon, by the entreaty of his friends, to try what might be the effects of a long journey.
A few days before he set out, he wrote that account of his own life, which, together with his other papers, he has left to your care.
My account, therefore, shall begin where his ends.
mr Home returned with him, and attended him during the whole of his stay in England, with that care and attention which might be expected from a temper so perfectly friendly and affectionate.
As I had written to my mother that she might expect me in Scotland, I was under the necessity of continuing my journey.
His disease seemed to yield to exercise and change of air; and when he arrived in London, he was apparently in much better health than when he left Edinburgh.
He was advised to go to Bath to drink the waters, which appeared for some time to have so good an effect upon him, that even he himself began to entertain, what he was not apt to do, a better opinion of his own health.
His symptoms, however, soon returned with their usual violence; and from that moment he gave up all thoughts of recovery, but submitted with the utmost cheerfulness, and the most perfect complacency and resignation.
Upon his return to Edinburgh, though he found himself much weaker, yet his cheerfulness never abated, and he continued to divert himself, as usual, with correcting his own works for a new edition, with reading books of amusement, with the conversation of his friends; and, sometimes in the evening, with a party at his favorite game of whist.
His cheerfulness was so great, and his conversation and amusements ran so much in their usual strain, that, notwithstanding all bad symptoms, many people could not believe he was dying.
mr Hume's magnanimity and firmness were such, that his most affectionate friends knew that they hazarded nothing in talking or writing to him as to a dying man, and that so far from being hurt by this frankness, he was rather pleased and flattered by it.
He answered, "Your hopes are groundless. An habitual diarrhoea of more than a year's standing, would be a very bad disease at any age; at my age it is a mortal one.
"I could not well imagine," said he, "what excuse I could make to Charon in order to obtain a little delay.
If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.' But Charon would then lose all temper and decency.
Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term?
Get into the boat this instant, you lazy, loitering rogue.'"
But, though mr Hume always talked of his approaching dissolution with great cheerfulness, he never affected to make any parade of his magnanimity.
The conversation which I mentioned above, and which passed on Thursday the eighth of August, was the last, except one, that I ever had with him.
On the twenty second of August, the doctor wrote me the following letter;--
"Since my last, mr Hume has passed his time pretty easily, but is much weaker.
He sits up, goes down stairs once a day, and amuses himself with reading, but seldom sees any body.
He finds that even the conversation of his most intimate friends fatigues and oppresses him; and it is happy that he does not need it, for he is quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books."
I received, the day after, a letter from mr Hume himself, of which the following is an extract:--
"MY DEAREST FRIEND,
"I am obliged to make use of my nephew's hand in writing to you, as I do not rise to day.
"I go very fast to decline, and last night had a small fever, which I hoped might put a quicker period to this tedious illness; but unluckily it has, in a great measure, gone off.
I cannot submit to your coming over here on my account, as it is possible for me to see you so small a part of the day; but dr Black can better inform you concerning the degree of strength which may from time to time remain with me.
Adieu, etc"
Three days after, I received the following letter from dr Black:--
"DEAR SIR,
"Yesterday, about four o'clock, afternoon, mr Hume expired. The near approach of his death became evident in the night between Thursday and Friday, when his disease became excessive, and soon weakened him so much, that he could no longer rise out of his bed He continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress.
He never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness.
When he became very weak, it cost him an effort to speak; and he died in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it."
Even in the lowest state of his fortune, his great and necessary frugality never hindered him from exercising, upon proper occasions, acts both of charity and generosity.
It was a frugality founded not upon avarice, but upon the love of independency.
The extreme gentleness of his nature never weakened either the firmness of his mind or the steadiness of his resolutions.
His constant pleasantry was the genuine effusion of good nature and good humor, tempered with delicacy and modesty, and without even the slightest tincture of malignity, so frequently the disagreeable source of what is called wit in other men. It never was the meaning of his raillery to mortify; and therefore, far from offending, it seldom failed to please and delight, even those who were the objects of it.
To his friends who were frequently the objects of it, there was not perhaps any one of all his great and amiable qualities which contributed more to endear his conversation.
And that gayety of temper, so agreeable in society, but which is so often accompanied with frivolous and superficial qualities, was in him certainly attended with the most severe application, the most extensive learning, the greatest depth of thought, and a capacity in every respect the most comprehensive.
CHAPTER thirteen
She saw a light under an office door.
She knocked.
To the person who opened she murmured, "Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?" She realized that it was Guy Pollock.
Won't you come in and wait for them?"
"I didn't know your office was up here."
They are a cot and a wash stand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked."
"Of course.
Please try this chair."
She glanced about the rusty office-gaunt stove, shelves of tan law books, desk chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness.
There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock.
He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent; a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache.
He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves.
She noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would have done.
Evangelize it to what?"
"To anything that's definite.
Seriousness or frivolousness or both.
Tell me, mr Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?"
"(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town."
Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli-or of factory smoke-are just as suspicious and righteous.
She asked impulsively, "You, why do you stay here?"
"It is.
I'm a perfect example.
From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School.
I went to symphonies twice a week.
I walked in Gramercy Park.
And I read, oh, everything.
I came here.
Julius got well.
I thought I was 'keeping up.' But I guess the Village Virus had me already.
At least, I am making you talk!
"Would you have a fireplace for me?"
How old are you, Carol?"
"Twenty six, Guy."
There's one thing that's the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling class (there is a ruling class, despite all our professions of democracy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute.
The widows themselves demand it!
Suppose I did dare to make love to-some exquisite married woman. I wouldn't admit it to myself.
I'm broken.
"Guy!
Really?"
"Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where Doctor-where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but----"
"No, REALLY!
But her mother, mrs Westlake-nobody could be sweeter."
"Yes, I'm sure she's very bland.
"I won't be cajoled!
His elbow brushed her shoulder.
He flitted over to the desk chair, his thin back stooped.
He picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher Prairie.
He stopped himself with a sharp, "Good Lord, Carol, you're not a jury.
Tell me your side.
What is Gopher Prairie to you?"
"A bore!"
"How could you?"
"I don't know.
It's like blood on the wing of a humming bird."
"I'm not a humming bird.
"Please stay and have some coffee with me."
"I'd like to.
I'm afraid of what people might say."
"Carol!
"Yes.
He's a dentist, just come to town.
They don't know much of anybody----"
And I've never thought to call.
He slipped out, came back with dr and mrs Dillon.
A LONELY RIDE
Perhaps I was out of spirits.
Was there any driver?
"Must have been asleep, sir.
Bully place for a nice quiet snooze-empty stage, sir!"
CHAPTER one
Rain, rain, rain!
How mercilessly it fell on the Fair field that Sunday afternoon!
How dismal the fair looked then!
But there were no lights now; there was nothing to cast a halo round the dirty, weather stained tents and the dingy caravans.
A little old man, with a rosy, good tempered face, was making his way across the sea of mud which divided the shows from each other.
He was evidently no idler in the fair; he had come into it that Sunday afternoon for a definite purpose, and he did not intend to leave it until it was accomplished.
After crossing an almost impassable place, he climbed the steps leading to one of the caravans and knocked at the door.
It was a curious door; the upper part of it, being used as a window, was filled with glass, behind which you could see two small muslin curtains, tied up with pink ribbon.
'Rap again, sir, rap again; there's a little lass in there; she went in a bit since.'
'Don't you wish you was her?' said one of the little boys to the other.
The old man laughed a hearty laugh at the children's talk, and rapped again at the caravan door.
This time a face appeared between the muslin curtains and peered cautiously out.
It was a very pretty little face, so pretty that the old man sighed to himself when he saw it.
Then the small head turned round, and seemed to be telling what it had seen to some one within, and asking leave to admit the visitor; for a minute afterwards the door was opened, and the owner of the pretty face stood before the old man.
She was a little girl about twelve years of age, very slender and delicate in appearance.
Her hair, which was of a rich auburn colour, was hanging down to her waist, and her eyes were the most beautiful the old man thought he had ever seen.
She was very poorly dressed, and she shivered as the damp, cold air rushed in through the open door.
'Good afternoon, my little dear,' said the old man.
The old man did not wait for a second invitation; he stepped inside the caravan, and the child closed the door.
It was a very small place; there was hardly room for him to stand.
At the end of the caravan was a narrow bed something like a berth on board ship, and on it a woman was lying who was evidently very ill.
She was the child's mother, the old man felt sure.
She had the same beautiful eyes and sunny hair, though her face was thin and wasted.
There was not room for much furniture in the small caravan; a tiny stove, the chimney of which went through the wooden roof, a few pans, a shelf containing cups and saucers, and two boxes which served as seats, completely filled it.
There was only just room for the old man to stand, and the fire was so near him that he was in danger of being scorched.
Rosalie had seated herself on one of the boxes close to her mother's bed.
'You must excuse my intruding, ma'am,' said the old man, with a polite bow; 'but I'm so fond of little folks, and I've brought this little girl of yours a picture, if she will accept it from me.'
A flush of pleasure came into the child's face as he brought out of his pocket his promised gift.
It was the picture of a shepherd, with a very kind and compassionate face, who was bearing home in his bosom a lost lamb.
The lamb's fleece was torn in several places, and there were marks of blood on its back, as if it had been roughly used by some cruel beast in a recent struggle.
But the shepherd seemed to have suffered more than the lamb, for he was wounded in many places, and his blood was falling in large drops on the ground.
Yet he did not seem to mind it; his face was full of love and full of joy as he looked at the lamb.
He had forgotten his sorrow in his joy that the lamb was saved.
In the distance were some of the shepherd's friends, who were coming to meet him, and underneath the picture were these words, printed in large letters-
'Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep which was lost.
There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.'
The little girl read the words aloud in a clear, distinct voice; and her mother gazed at the picture with tears in her eyes.
'Those are sweet words, ain't they?' said the old man.
The woman did not speak; a fit of coughing came on, and the old man stood looking at her with a very pitying expression.
'Yes, very ill,' gasped the woman bitterly; 'every one can see that but Augustus!'
'That's my father,' said the little girl.
'No; he doesn't see it,' repeated the woman; 'he thinks I ought to get up and act in the play, just as usual.
'You must be tired of moving about, ma'am,' said the old man compassionately.
'It's a weary time I have of it-a weary time.'
'Are you always on the move, ma'am?' asked the old man.
'All the summer time,' said the woman.
'We get into lodgings for a little time in the winter; and then we let ourselves out to some of the small town theatres; but all the rest of the year we're going from feast to feast and from fair to fair-no rest nor comfort, not a bit!'
poor thing!' said the old man; and then a choking sensation appeared to have seized him, for he cleared his throat vigorously many times, but seemed unable to say more.
The child had climbed on one of the boxes, and brought down a square red pincushion from the shelf which ran round the top of the caravan.
From this she took two pins, and fastened the picture on the wooden wall, so that her mother could see it as she was lying in bed.
'It does look pretty there,' said the little girl; 'mammie, you can look at it nicely now.'
He wants to find you, and take you up in His arms, and carry you home; and He won't mind the wounds it has cost Him, if you'll only let Him do it.
'Good day, ma'am,' said the old man; 'I shall, maybe, never see you again; but I would like the Good Shepherd to say those words of you.'
He went carefully down the steps of the caravan, and Rosalie stood at the window, watching him picking his way to the other shows, to which he was carrying the same message of peace.
She looked out from between the muslin curtains until he had quite disappeared to a distant part of the field, and then she turned to her mother and said eagerly-
'It's a very pretty picture, isn't it, mammie dear?'
But no answer came from the bed.
Rosalie thought her mother was asleep, and crept on tiptoe to her side, fearful of waking her.
But she found her mother's face buried in the pillow, on which large tears were falling.
And when the little girl sat down by her side, and tried to comfort her by stroking her hand very gently, and saying, 'Mammie dear, mammie dear, don't cry!
What's the matter, mammie dear?' her mother only wept the more.
By degrees her mother grew calmer, the sobs became less frequent, and, to the little girl's joy, she fell asleep.
Rosalie sat beside her without moving, lest she should awake her, and kept gazing at her picture till she knew every line of it.
And the first thing her mother heard when she awoke from sleep was Rosalie's voice saying softly-
'"Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep which was lost.
CHAPTER thirteen.
The months sped on, and now the anniversary of her father's birthday arrived.
Until then it had always been to Mary a day of great joy, but this time, when the day dawned, she was bathed in tears.
Previously she had had the pleasure and excitement of preparing something which she knew would please her father, but now, alas, this delightful occupation was rendered useless!
The country people round about their home used to beg flowers from her for the purpose of decorating the graves of their friends.
It had always been a pleasure to Mary to give her flowers for this purpose, and she now determined to decorate her father's tomb in the same manner.
Taking from a cupboard the beautiful basket which had been the first cause of all her unhappiness, she filled it with choice flowers of all colours, artistically interspersed with fresh green leaves, and carried it to Erlenbrunn before the hour of divine service, and laid it on her father's tomb, watering it at the same time with tears that could not be repressed.
Let me at least ornament your grave with them."
Mary left the basket on the grave, and went back to the misery of Pine Farm.
She had no fear that any one would dare to steal either the basket or the flowers.
Many of the country people who saw her offering were moved to tears, and, blessing the old gardener's pious daughter, they prayed for her prosperity.
The next day the labourers at the farm were busy taking in the hay from a large meadow just beyond the forest.
The farmer's wife had a large piece of fine linen spread out on the grass a few steps from the house, and in the evening this was found to have disappeared.
When Mary was returning from her work in the evening with a rake on her shoulder and a pitcher in her hand, along with the other servants, this passionate woman came out of the kitchen and met her with a torrent of abuse, and ordered her to give up the linen immediately.
This conjecture turned out to be the true one, but the farmer's wife was not to be turned from her conviction.
"Thief," she cried coarsely, "do you think I am ignorant of the theft of the ring, and what difficulty you had to escape the executioner's sword?
Begone as soon as possible.
There is no room in my house for creatures like you."
"It is too late," said her husband, "to send Mary away now.
Let her sup with us, as she has worked all day in the great heat.
Let her but remain this one night."
"Not even one hour," cried his wife passionately; and her husband, seeing that advice would only irritate her more, remained silent.
Mary made no further attempt to defend herself against the unjust accusation.
When she had put the little bundle under her arm, thanked the servants of Pine Farm for their kindness to her and protested once more her innocence, she asked permission to take leave of her friends, the old farmer and his wife.
It is evident death does not mean to rid me of them for some time."
However, they consoled her as well as they could, and gave her a little money to assist her on her journey.
"Go, good girl," said they to her, "and may God take care of you."
It was towards the close of the day when Mary set out with her little bundle under her arm, and began to climb up the mountain, following the narrow road to the woods.
She wished before leaving the neighbourhood to visit her father's grave once more.
When she came out of the forest the village clock struck seven, and before she arrived at the graveyard it was nearly dark; but she was not afraid, and went up to her father's grave, where she sat down and gave way to a burst of grief.
The full moon was shining through the trees, illumining with a silver light the roses on the grave and the basket of flowers.
The soft evening breeze murmured among the branches, making the rose trees planted on her father's grave tremble.
"Oh, my father," cried Mary, "would that you were still here, that I might pour my trouble into your ears!
You are now happy, and beyond the reach of grief.
When the moon shone into the prison which confined me you were then alive; when I was driven from the home which I loved so much you were left me.
I had in you a good father and protector and faithful friend.
Now I have no one.
Poor, forsaken, suspected of crime, I am alone in the world, a stranger, not knowing where to lay my head. The only little corner that remained to me on the earth I am driven from, and now I shall no longer have the consolation of coming here to weep by your grave!" At these words the tears rushed forth afresh.
"Alas," said she, "I dare not at this hour beg a lodging for the night. Indeed, if I tell why I was turned out of doors, no one perhaps will consent to receive me."
She looked around.
Against the wall, near her father's tomb, was a gravestone, very old and covered with moss.
As the inscription had been effaced by time, it was left there to be used as a seat.
It is perhaps the last time I shall ever be here.
CHAPTER fourteen.
A STRANGE MEETING.
Mary sat down on the stone near the wall shaded by the thick foliage of a tree which covered her with its dark branches.
Here she poured out her soul in fervent prayer to God.
Suddenly she heard a sweet voice calling her familiarly by her name, "Mary, Mary!"
The late hour of night and the solitude of the graveyard and her loneliness made Mary start with fear.
Looking up she saw the beautiful face and figure of a woman, dressed in a long flowing robe.
Frightened and trembling, Mary was about to fly.
God has heard your fervent prayers, and I have come to help you.
Look at me; is it possible you do not know me?"
The moon was shining brightly upon her face, and with an exclamation of surprise, Mary cried out, "Is it you, the Countess Amelia?
Oh, how did you get here-here in so lonely a place at this hour of the night, so far from your home?"
The Countess raised Mary gently from the ground, pressed her to her heart, and kissed her tenderly.
"Dear Mary," said she, "we have done you great injustice.
You have been ill rewarded for the pleasure which you gave me with the basket of flowers, but at last your innocence has been made known.
Can you ever forgive my parents and me?
We are ready to make amends as far as it lies in our power.
Forgive us, dear Mary."
Mary was distressed at these words, and begged the Countess not to talk of forgiveness.
"Considering the circumstances," she said, "you showed great indulgence towards me, and it never entered my mind to nourish the least resentment towards you.
I had grateful thoughts of all your kindness, and my only sorrow was that you and your dear parents should regard me as ungrateful enough to be guilty of stealing your ring.
My great desire was that you might one day be convinced of my innocence, and God has granted this desire.
May His name be praised!"
Oh, if we had only taken more precaution, if we had placed more confidence in an old servant who had always shown unimpeachable honesty and faithfulness, perhaps thou hadst still been living with us!"
"Believe me, good Countess," said Mary, "my father was far from feeling the least resentment towards you.
He prayed for you daily, as he was accustomed to do when he lived at Eichbourg, and at the hour of his death he blessed you all.
When that day comes, assure the Countess and Count and Amelia that my heart was full of respect and love and gratitude towards them till my last breath.' These, my dear Countess, were his last words."
The tears of the good Amelia flowed copiously.
"Come, Mary," said she, "and sit down here with me on the stone.
THE SAPPHIRE.
One morning, as Mary sat at her piano, Mewks was shown into the room. He brought the request from his master that she would go to him; he wanted particularly to see her.
She did not much like it, neither did she hesitate.
She was shown into the room mr Redmain called his study, which communicated by a dressing room with his bedroom.
He was seated, evidently waiting for her.
"You are very kind, sir," Mary answered.
"I am so glad!" she said, and took it in her hand.
"There's the point!" he returned.
"That is just why I sent for you!
Can you suggest any explanation of the fact that it was found, after all, in a corner of my wife's jewel box?
Who searched the box last?"
"I do not know, sir."
"Did you search it?"
"No, sir.
I offered to help mrs Redmain to look for the ring, but she said it was no use.
Who found it, sir?"
"I will tell you who found it, if you will tell me who put it there."
"I don't know what you mean, sir.
It must have been there all the time."
"That's the point again!
mrs Redmain swears it was not, and could not have been, there when she looked for it.
It is not like a small thing, you see.
There is something mysterious about it."
He looked hard at Mary.
Now, Mary had very much admired the ring, as any one must who had an eye for stones; and had often looked at it-into the heart of it-almost loving it; and while they were talking now, she kept gazing at it.
When mr Redmain ended, she stood silent.
She stood long, looking closely at it, moving it about a little, and changing the direction of the light; and, while her gaze was on the ring, mr Redmain's gaze was on her, watching her with equal attention.
At last, with a sigh, as if she waked from a reverie, she laid the ring on the table.
But mr Redmain still stared in her face.
"Now what is it you've got in your head?" he said at last.
"I have been watching you think for three minutes and a half, I do believe.
Come, out with it!"
"I was only plaguing myself between my recollection of the stone and the actual look of it.
It is so annoying to find what seemed a clear recollection prove a deceitful one!
It may appear a presumptuous thing to say, but my recollection seems of a finer color."
"You haven't the face to hint that the stone has been changed?"
Mary laughed.
"Such a thing never came into my head, sir; but now that you have put it there, I could almost believe it."
"Go along with you!" he cried, casting at her a strange look which she could not understand, and the same moment pulling the bell hard.
That done, he began to examine the ring intently, as Mary had been doing, and did not speak a word.
Mewks came.
"Show Miss Marston out," said his master; "and tell my coachman to bring the hansom round directly."
"For Miss Marston?" inquired Mewks, who had learned not a little cunning in the service.
"No!" roared mr Redmain; and Mewks darted from the room, followed more leisurely by Mary.
But Mary took no notice, and left the house.
For about a week she heard nothing.
In the meantime mr Redmain had been prosecuting certain inquiries he had some time ago begun, and another quite new one besides.
He was acquainted with many people of many different sorts, and had been to jewelers and pawnbrokers, gamblers and lodging house keepers, and had learned some things to his purpose.
She was less disinclined to go this time, however, for she felt not a little curious about the ring.
"I want you to come back to the house," he said, abruptly, the moment she entered his room.
For such a request Mary was not prepared.
Even since the ring was found, so long a time had passed that she never expected to hear from the house again.
But Tom was now so much better, and Letty so much like her former self, that, if mrs Redmain had asked her, she might perhaps have consented.
"mr Redmain," she answered, "you must see that I can not do so at your desire."
"Oh, rubbish!
humbug!" he returned, with annoyance.
But I have reasons for wanting to have you within call.
Go to mrs Perkin.
I won't take a refusal."
"I can not do it, mr Redmain," said Mary; "the thing is impossible." And she turned to leave the room.
"Stop, stop!" cried mr Redmain, and jumped from his chair to prevent her.
He would not have succeeded had not Mewks met her in the doorway full in the face.
She had to draw back to avoid him, and the man, perceiving at once how things were, closed the door the moment he entered, and stood with his back against it.
A scarcely perceptible sign of question was made by the master, and answered in kind by the man.
"Show him here directly," said mr Redmain.
Then turning to Mary, "Go out that way, Miss Marston, if you will go," he said, and pointed to the dressing room.
She turned, and knocked.
You must hear what passes: I want you for a witness."
Bewildered and annoyed, Mary stood motionless in the middle of the room, and presently heard a man, whose voice seemed not quite strange to her, greet mr Redmain like an old friend.
The latter made a slight apology for having sent for him to his study-claiming the privilege, he said, of an invalid, who could not for a time have the pleasure of meeting him either at the club or at his wife's parties.
The visitor answered agreeably, with a touch of merriment that seemed to indicate a soul at ease with itself and with the world.
But here Mary all at once came to herself, and was aware that she was in quite a false position.
She withdrew therefore to the farthest corner, sat down, closed her ears with the palms of her hands, and waited.
She raised her head, and saw the white, skin drawn face of mr Redmain grinning at her from the open door.
When he spoke again, his words sounded like thunder, for she had removed her hands from her ears.
"I fancy you've had a dose of it!" he said.
As he spoke, she rose to her feet, her countenance illumined both with righteous anger and the tender shine of prayer.
Her look went to what he had of a heart, and the slightest possible color rose to his face.
"Gone a step too far, damn it!" he murmured to himself.
"I see!" he said; "it's been a trifle too much for you, and I don't wonder!
You needn't believe a word I said about myself.
It was all hum to make the villain show his game."
"I have not heard a word, mr Redmain," she said with indignation.
"Oh, you needn't trouble yourself!" he returned.
A fine thing if your pretended squeamishness ruin my plot!
What do you think of yourself, hey?--But I don't believe it."
He looked at her keenly, expecting a response, but Mary made him none. For some moments he regarded her curiously, then turned away into the study, saying:
I did think I was past being taken in, but it seems possible for once again.
Of course, you will return to mrs Redmain now that all is cleared up."
"It is impossible," Mary answered.
"I can not live in a house where the lady mistrusts and the gentleman insults me."
She left the room, and mr Redmain did not try to prevent her.
As she left the house she burst into tears; and the fact Mewks carried to his master.
Till Sepia came, he had been conventionally faithful-faithful with the faith of a lackey, that is-but she had found no difficulty in making of him, in respect of her, a spy upon his master.
I will now relate what passed while Mary sat deaf in the corner.
mr Redmain asked his visitor what he would have, as if, although it was quite early, he must, as a matter of course, stand in need of refreshment.
A good deal of conversation followed about a disputed point in a late game of cards at one of the clubs.
The talk then veered in another direction-that of personal adventure, so guided by mr Redmain.
And whatever he told, his guest capped, narrating trick upon trick to which on different occasions he had had recourse.
At all of them mr Redmain laughed heartily, and applauded their cleverness extravagantly, though some of them were downright swindling.
I do not believe there was a word of truth in it.
But it was capped by the other with a narrative that seemed specially pleasing to the listener. In the midst of a burst of laughter, he rose and rang the bell.
Count Galofta thought it was to order something more in the way of "refreshment," and was not a little surprised when he heard his host desire the man to request the favor of Miss Yolland's presence.
But the Count had not studied non expression in vain, and had brought it to a degree of perfection not easily disturbed.
Casting a glance at him as he gave the message, mr Redmain could read nothing; but this was in itself suspicious to him-and justly, for the man ought to have been surprised at such a close to the conversation they had been having.
Sepia had been told that Galofta was in the study, and therefore received the summons thither-a thing that had never happened before-with the greater alarm.
She made, consequently, what preparation she could against surprise.
Thoroughly capable of managing her features, her anxiety was sufficient nevertheless to deprive her of power over her complexion, and she entered the room with the pallor peculiar to the dark skinned.
Having greeted the Count with the greatest composure, she turned to mr Redmain with question in her eyes.
"Count Galofta," said mr Redmain in reply, "has just been telling me a curious story of how a certain rascal got possession of a valuable jewel from a lady with whom he pretended to be in love, and I thought the opportunity a good one for showing you a strange discovery I have made with regard to the sapphire mrs Redmain missed for so long.
So saying, he took the ring from one drawer, and from another a bottle, from which he poured something into a crystal cup.
Then he took a file, and, looking at Galofta, in whose well drilled features he believed he read something that was not mere curiosity, said, "I am going to show you something very curious," and began to file asunder that part of the ring which immediately clasped the sapphire, the setting of which was open.
"What a pity!" cried Sepia; "you are destroying the ring!
What will Cousin Hesper say?"
mr Redmain filed away, heedless; then with the help of a pair of pincers freed the stone, and held it up in his hand.
"You see this?" he said.
"A splendid sapphire!" answered Count Galofta, taking it in his fingers, but, as mr Redmain saw, not looking at it closely.
"I have always heard it called a splendid stone," said Sepia, whose complexion, though not her features, passed through several changes while all this was going on: she was anxious.
Nor did her inquisitor fail to surprise the uneasy glances she threw, furtively though involuntarily, in the face of the Count-who never once looked in hers: tolerably sure of himself, he was not sure of her.
"That ring, when I bought it-the stone of it," said mr Redmain, "was a star sapphire, and worth seven hundred pounds; now, the whole affair is worth about ten."
"Of course," said the Count, "you will prosecute the jeweler."
"I will not prosecute the jeweler," answered mr Redmain; "but I have taken some trouble to find out who changed the stones."
When he turned, the Count was gone, as he had expected, and Sepia stood with eyes full of anger and fear.
Her face was set and colorless, and strange to look upon.
"Very odd-ain't it?" said mr Redmain, and, opening the door of his dressing room, called out:
"Miss Marston!"
When he turned, Sepia too was gone.
I would not have my reader take Sepia for an accomplice in the robbery. Even mr Redmain did not believe that: she was much too prudent!
If he was right in this theory of the affair, then the Count had certainly a hold upon her, and she dared not or would not expose him!
When he went out of the door of mr Redmain's study, he vanished from the house and from London.
Turning the first corner he came to, and the next and the next, he stepped into a mews, the court of which seemed empty, and slipped behind the gate.
Presently a man came out of the mews in a Scotch cap and a full beard.
What had become of him mr Redmain did not care.
It was enough he had found him out, proved his suspicion correct, and obtained evidence against Sepia.
He did not at once make up his mind how he would act on this last; while he lived, it did not matter so much; and he had besides a certain pleasure in watching his victim.
But Hesper, free, rich, and beautiful, and far from wise, with Sepia for counselor, was not an idea to be contemplated with equanimity.
Still he shrank from the outcry and scandal of sending her away; for certainly his wife, if it were but to oppose him, would refuse to believe a word against her cousin.
mr Redmain, who had pleasure in behaving handsomely so far as money was concerned, bought his wife the best sapphire he could find, and, for once, really pleased her.
But Sepia knew that mr Redmain had now to himself justified his dislike of her; and, as he said nothing, she was the more certain he meant something.
She lived, therefore, in constant dread of his sudden vengeance, against which she could take no precaution, for she had not even a conjecture as to what form it might assume.
Badly as he had himself behaved to Mary, he was now furious with his wife for having treated her so heartlessly that she could not return to her service; for he began to think she might be one to depend upon, and to desire her alliance in the matter of ousting Sepia from the confidence of his wife.
However indifferent a woman may be to the opinion of her husband, he can nevertheless in general manage to make her uncomfortable enough if he chooses; and mr Redmain did choose now, in the event of her opposition to his wishes: when he set himself to do a thing, he hated defeat even more than he loved success.
The moment Mary was out of the study, he walked into his wife's boudoir, and shut the door behind him.
His presence there was enough to make her angry, but she took no notice of it.
"I understand, mrs Redmain," he began, "that you wish to bring the fate of Sodom upon the house."
"I do not know what you mean," she answered, scarcely raising her eyes from her novel-and spoke the truth, for she knew next to nothing of the Bible, while the Old Testament was all the literature mr Redmain was "up in."
"You have turned out of it the only just person in it, and we shall all be in hell soon!"
"You'll hear worse before long, if you keep on at this rate.
"You have taught me to believe you capable of anything."
"You shall at least find me capable of a good deal.
Do you imagine, madam, I have found you a hair worse than I expected?"
"I never took the trouble to imagine anything about you."
"You need not.
You can best answer that question yourself."
"Then we understand each other."
"We do not, mr Redmain; and, if this occurs again, I shall go to Durnmelling."
He burst into a loud and almost merry laugh.
Why, you goose, if I send a telegram before you, they won't so much as open the door to you!
They know better which side their bread is buttered."
Hesper started up in a rage.
"mr Redmain, if you do not leave the room, I will."
"Oh, don't!" he cried, in a tone of pretended alarm.
His pleasure was great, for he had succeeded in stinging the impenetrable.
"You really ought to consider before you utter such an awful threat!
I will go myself a thousand times rather!--But will you not feel the want of pocket money when you come to pay a rough cabman?
The check I gave you yesterday will not last you long."
"The money is my own, mr Redmain."
"But you have not yet opened a banking account in your own name."
"Then you had better get into the habit; for I swear to you, madam, if you don't fetch that girl home within the week, I will, next Monday, discharge your coachman, and send every horse in the stable to Tattersall's!
Good morning."
She had no doubt he would do as he said; she knew mr Redmain would just enjoy selling her horses.
But she could not at once give in.
She had a week to think about it, and she would see!
During the interval, he took care not once to refer to his threat, for that would but weaken the impression of it, he knew.
On the Sunday, after service, she knocked at his door, and, being admitted, bade him good morning, but with no very gracious air-as, indeed, he would have been the last to expect.
"We have had a sermon on the forgiveness of injuries, mr Redmain," she said.
"By Jove!" interrupted her husband, "it would have been more to the purpose if I, or poor Mary Marston, had had it; for I swear you put our souls in peril!"
"And what, pray, was your foolish ring compared to the girl's character?"
But, as to her character, that of persons in her position is in constant peril.
They have to lay their account with that, and must get used to it.
How was I to know?
We can not read each other's hearts."
"Not where there is no heart in the reader."
She said nothing, and her husband resumed:
"So you came to forgive me?" he said.
"And Marston," she answered.
"Well, I will accept the condescension-that is, if the terms of it are to my mind."
"I will make no terms.
Marston may return when she pleases."
"You must write and ask her."
"Of course, mr Redmain.
"You must write so as to make it possible to accept your offer."
"You are not.
A man must be fair, even to his wife."
"I will show you the letter I write."
"If you please."
She had to show him half a score ere he was satisfied, declaring he would do it himself, if she could not make a better job of it.
At length one was dispatched, received, and answered: Mary would not return.
mrs Redmain carried the letter, with ill concealed triumph, to her husband; nor did he conceal his annoyance.
"You must have behaved to her very cruelly," he said.
"But you have done your best now-short of a Christian apology, which it would be folly to demand of you.
I fear we have seen the last of her."--"And there was I," he said to himself, "for the first time in my life, actually beginning to fancy I had perhaps thrown salt upon the tail of that rare bird, an honest woman!
Perhaps that will be taken into the account one day."
But Mary lay awake at night, and thought of many things she might have said and done better when she was with Hesper, and would gladly have given herself another chance; but she could no longer flatter herself she would ever be of any real good to her.
She believed there was more hope of mr Redmain even.
ANOTHER CHANGE.
For some time Tom made progress toward health, and was able to read a good part of the day.
When he had done with Joseph, or when he did not want him, Mary was always ready to give the latter a lesson; and, had he been a less gifted man than he was, he could not have failed to make progress with such a teacher.
The large hearted, delicate souled woman felt nothing strange in the presence of the workingman, but, on the contrary, was comfortably aware of a being like her own, less privileged but more gifted, whose nearness was strength.
And no teacher, not to say no woman, could have failed to be pleased at the thorough painstaking with which he followed the slightest of her hints, and the delight his flushed face would reveal when she praised the success he had achieved.
Mary's delight was great when first he brought her one of his compositions very fairly written out-after which others followed with a rapidity that astonished her.
They enabled her also to understand the man better and better; for to have a thing to brood over which we are capable of understanding must be more to us than even the master's playing of it.
To the first he brought her she contrived to put a poor little faulty accompaniment; and when she played his air to him so accompanied, his delight was touching, and not a little amusing.
Plainly he thought the accompaniment a triumph of human faculty, and beyond anything he could ever develop.
Never pupil was more humble, never pupil more obedient; thinking nothing of himself or of anything he had done or could do, his path was open to the swiftest and highest growth.
What the gift of such an instructor was to Joseph, my reader may be requested to imagine.
Under such an influence all that was gentlest and sweetest in his nature might well develop with rapidity, and every accidental roughness-and in him there was no other-by swift degrees vanish from both speech and manners.
The angels do not want tailors to make their clothes: their habits come out of themselves.
Of such a nobility, good Lord, deliver us from all envy!
She belonged to another world from his, a world which his world worshiped, waiting. He might miss her even to death; her absence might, for him, darken the universe as if the sun had withdrawn his brightness; but who thinks of falling in love with the sun, or dreams of climbing nearer to his radiance?
Nay, are there none such even now?
The day will come when a man, rather than build a great house for the overflow of a mighty hospitality, will give himself, in the personal labor of outgoing love, to build spiritual houses like saint Paul--a higher art than any of man's invention.
O my brother, what were it not for thee to have a hand in making thy brother beautiful!
It is left to a certain school of weak enthusiasts, who believe that such growth, such embellishment, such creation, is all God cares about; these enthusiasts can not indeed see, so blind have they become with their fixed idea, how God could care for anything else.
There soon came a change, however, and the lessons ceased altogether.
Tom had come down to his old quarters, and, in the arrogance of convalescence, had presumed on his imagined strength, and so caught cold.
An alarming relapse was the consequence, and there was no more playing; for now his condition began to draw to a change, of which, for some time, none of them had even thought, the patient had seemed so certainly recovering.
The cold settled on his lungs, and he sank rapidly.
Joseph, whose violin was useless now, was not the less in attendance. Every evening, when his work was over, he came knocking gently at the door of the parlor, and never left until Tom was settled for the night. The most silently helpful, undemonstrative being he was, that doctor could desire to wait upon patient.
When it was his turn to watch, he never closed an eye, but at daybreak-for it was now spring-would rouse Mary, and go off straight to his work, nor taste food until the hour for the mid day meal arrived.
Tom speedily became aware that his days were numbered-phrase of unbelief, for are they not numbered from the beginning?
Are our hairs numbered, and our days forgotten-till death gives a hint to the doctor?
He was sorry for his past life, and thoroughly ashamed of much of it, saying in all honesty he would rather die than fall for one solitary week into the old ways-not that he wished to die, for, with the confidence of youth, he did not believe he could fall into the old ways again.
After all, he had not been one of the worst of babies.
Indeed, all about its office had loved him, each after his faculty.
But the print of him was deep in the heart of Letty, and not shallow in the affection of Mary; nor were such as these, insignificant records for any one to leave behind him, as records go.
For what is the loudest praise of posterity to the quietest love of one's own generation?
But what was Mary to do now with Letty?
She was little more than a baby yet, not silly from youth, but young from silliness.
Children must learn to walk, but not by being turned out alone in Cheapside.
But mrs Wardour's letter was kind perhaps a little repentant; it is hard to say, for ten persons will repent of a sin for one who will confess it-I do not mean to the priest-that may be an easy matter, but to the only one who has a claim to the confession, namely, the person wronged.
The letter contained a poverty stricken expression of sympathy, and an invitation to spend the summer months with them at her old home.
It might, the letter said, prove but a dull place to her after the gayety to which she had of late been accustomed, but it might not the less suit her present sad situation, and possibly uncertain prospects.
Letty's heart felt one little throb of gladness at the thought of being again at Thornwick, and in peace.
With all the probable unpleasant accompaniments of the visit, nowhere else, she thought, could she feel the same sense of shelter as where her childhood had passed.
He had come to them mysteriously, alone in a ship, when an infant.]
Uncanny the place is: Thence upward ascendeth the surging of waters, Wan to the welkin, when the wind is stirring The weather unpleasing, till the air groweth gloomy, Then the heavens lower.
He is seized by the monster and carried to her cavern, where the combat ensues.]
The stranger perceived then The sword would not bite, her life would not injure, But the falchion failed the folk prince when straitened: Erst had it often onsets encountered, Oft cloven the helmet, the fated one's armor; 'twas the first time that ever the excellent jewel Had failed of its fame.
Firm mooded after, Not heedless of valor, but mindful of glory Was Higelac's kinsman; the hero chief angry Cast then his carved sword covered with jewels That it lay on the earth, hard and steel pointed; He hoped in his strength, his hand grapple sturdy. So any must act whenever he thinketh To gain him in battle glory unending, And is reckless of living.
With furious grapple She gave him requital early thereafter, And stretched out to grab him; the strongest of warriors Faint mooded stumbled, till he fell in his traces, Foot going champion.
[Fifty years have elapsed.
His body is burned, and a barrow erected.]
From 'The Frogs': Frere's Translation
Iacchus!
Iacchus!
Iacchus!
Iacchus!
Mighty Bacchus!
SEMI CHORUS
March! march! lead forth, Lead forth manfully, March in order all; Bustling, hustling, justling, As it may befall; Flocking, shouting, laughing, Mocking, flouting, quaffing, One and all; All have had a belly full Of breakfast brave and plentiful; Therefore Evermore With your voices and your bodies Serve the goddess, And raise Songs of praise; She shall save the country still, And save it against the traitor's will; So she says.
SEMI CHORUS
Ceres, holy patroness, Condescend to mark and bless, With benevolent regard, Both the Chorus and the Bard; Grant them for the present day Many things to sing and say, Follies intermixed with sense; Folly, but without offense. Grant them with the present play To bear the prize of verse away.
SEMI CHORUS
Now call again, and with a different measure, The power of mirth and pleasure; The florid, active Bacchus, bright and gay, To journey forth and join us on the way.
SEMI CHORUS
A PARODY OF EURIPIDES'S LYRIC VERSE
From 'The Frogs'
From 'The Frogs'
[The point of the following selection lies in the monotony of both narrative style and metre in Euripides's prologues, and especially his regular caesura after the fifth syllable of a line.
The burlesque tag used by Aristophanes to demonstrate this effect could not be applied in the same way to any of the fourteen extant plays of Sophocles and AEschylus.]
I'll show you.
Recite another prologue to him and let me see.
I'll fix him next time.
I've lots of prologues where he can't work 'em in.
Pelops the Tantalid to Pisa coming With speedy coursers
Who filched them?
Zeus, as the word of sooth declared of old-
For those smelling salts fit your prologues like a kid glove.
But go on and turn your attention to his lyrics.
While Athens was still only a small city there lived within its walls a man named Daedalus who was the most skillful worker in wood and stone and metal that had ever been known.
It was he who taught the people how to build better houses and how to hang their doors on hinges and how to support the roofs with pillars and posts.
He was the first to fasten things together with glue; he invented the plumb line and the auger; and he showed seamen how to put up masts in their ships and how to rig the sails to them with ropes.
He built a stone palace for AEgeus, the young king of Athens, and beautified the Temple of Athena which stood on the great rocky hill in the middle of the city.
Daedalus had a nephew named Perdix whom he had taken when a boy to teach the trade of builder.
But Perdix was a very apt learner, and soon surpassed his master in the knowledge of many things.
Walking one day by the sea, he picked up the backbone of a great fish, and from it he invented the saw.
Seeing how a certain bird carved holes in the trunks of trees, he learned how to make and use the chisel.
Then he invented the wheel which potters use in molding clay; and he made of a forked stick the first pair of compasses for drawing circles; and he studied out many other curious and useful things.
Daedalus was not pleased when he saw that the lad was so apt and wise, so ready to learn, and so eager to do.
Day after day, while at his work, Daedalus pondered over this matter, and soon his heart was filled with hatred towards young Perdix.
One morning when the two were putting up an ornament on the outer wall of Athena's temple, Daedalus bade his nephew go out on a narrow scaffold which hung high over the edge of the rocky cliff whereon the temple stood.
Then, when the lad obeyed, it was easy enough, with a blow of a hammer, to knock the scaffold from its fastenings.
Poor Perdix fell headlong through the air, and he would have been dashed in pieces upon the stones at the foot of the cliff had not kind Athena seen him and taken pity upon him.
While he was yet whirling through mid-air she changed him into a partridge, and he flitted away to the hills to live forever in the woods and fields which he loved so well.
As for Daedalus, when the people of Athens heard of his dastardly deed, they were filled with grief and rage-grief for young Perdix, whom all had learned to love; rage towards the wicked uncle, who loved only himself.
At first they were for punishing Daedalus with the death which he so richly deserved, but when they remembered what he had done to make their homes pleasanter and their lives easier, they allowed him to live; and yet they drove him out of Athens and bade him never return.
There was a ship in the harbor just ready to start on a voyage across the sea, and in it Daedalus embarked with all his precious tools and his young son Icarus.
Day after day the little vessel sailed slowly southward, keeping the shore of the mainland always upon the right.
It passed Troezen and the rocky coast of Argos, and then struck boldly out across the sea.
At last the famous Island of Crete was reached, and there Daedalus landed and made himself known; and the King of Crete, who had already heard of his wondrous skill, welcomed him to his kingdom, and gave him a home in his palace, and promised that he should be rewarded with great riches and honor if he would but stay and practice his craft there as he had done in Athens.
Now the name of the King of Crete was Minos.
His grandfather, whose name was also Minos, was the son of Europa, a young princess whom a white bull, it was said, had brought on his back across the sea from distant Asia.
This elder Minos had been accounted the wisest of men-so wise, indeed, that Jupiter chose him to be one of the judges of the Lower World.
So it was not hard for him to persuade Daedalus to make his home with him and be the chief of his artisans.
And Daedalus built for King Minos a most wonderful palace with floors of marble and pillars of granite; and in the palace he set up golden statues which had tongues and could talk; and for splendor and beauty there was no other building in all the wide earth that could be compared with it.
There lived in those days among the hills of Crete a terrible monster called the Minotaur, the like of which has never been seen from that time until now.
The people of Crete would not have killed him if they could; for they thought that the Mighty Folk who lived with Jupiter on the mountain top had sent him among them, and that these beings would be angry if any one should take his life.
He was the pest and terror of all the land. Where he was least expected, there he was sure to be; and almost every day some man, woman, or child was caught and devoured by him.
"Shall I kill him?" asked Daedalus.
"That would only bring greater misfortunes upon us."
"I will build a house for him then," said Daedalus, "and you can keep him in it as a prisoner."
"He shall have plenty of room to roam about," said Daedalus; "and if you will only now and then feed one of your enemies to him, I promise you that he shall live and thrive."
So the wonderful artisan brought together his workmen, and they built a marvelous house with so many rooms in it and so many winding ways that no one who went far into it could ever find his way out again; and Daedalus called it the Labyrinth, and cunningly persuaded the Minotaur to go inside of it.
ICARUS.
Not long after this it happened that Daedalus was guilty of a deed which angered the king very greatly; and had not Minos wished him to build other buildings for him, he would have put him to death and no doubt have served him right.
"Hitherto," said the king, "I have honored you for your skill and rewarded you for your labor.
Then he gave orders to the guards at the city gates that they should not let Daedalus pass out at any time, and he set soldiers to watch the ships that were in port so that he could not escape by sea.
But although the wonderful artisan was thus held as a prisoner, he did not build any more buildings for King Minos; he spent his time in planning how he might regain his freedom.
"All my inventions," he said to his son Icarus, "have hitherto been made to please other people; now I will invent something to please myself."
So, all through the day he pretended to be planning some great work for the king, but every night he locked himself up in his chamber and wrought secretly by candle light.
By and by he had made for himself a pair of strong wings, and for Icarus another pair of smaller ones; and then, one midnight, when everybody was asleep, the two went out to see if they could fly.
They could not fly very far at first, but they did so well that they felt sure of doing much better in time.
The next night Daedalus made some changes in the wings.
They flew up to the top of the king's palace, and then they sailed away over the walls of the city and alighted on the top of a hill.
But they were not ready to undertake a long journey yet; and so, just before daybreak, they flew back home. Every fair night after that they practiced with their wings, and at the end of a month they felt as safe in the air as on the ground, and could skim over the hilltops like birds.
All went well for a time, and the two bold flyers sped swiftly over the sea, skimming along only a little above the waves, and helped on their way by the brisk east wind.
Towards noon the sun shone very warm, and Daedalus called out to the boy who was a little behind and told him to keep his wings cool and not fly too high.
So he flew up higher and higher, but his father who was in front did not see him.
Pretty soon, however, the heat of the sun began to melt the wax with which the boy's wings were fastened.
He screamed to his father, but it was too late.
BY j t TROWBRIDGE
Burke, keep still! He's a climbin' out now-Of all the things! What's he got on?
The excellent mr Morris was an Englishman, and he lived in the days of Queen Victoria the Good.
He was one of those people who do everything that is right and proper and sensible with inevitable regularity.
Everything that it was right and proper for a man in his position to possess, he possessed; and everything that it was not right and proper for a man in his position to possess, he did not possess.
His boys went to good solid schools, and were put to respectable professions; his girls, in spite of a fantastic protest or so, were all married to suitable, steady, oldish young men with good prospects.
And when it was a fit and proper thing for him to do so, mr Morris died.
His tomb was of marble, and, without any art nonsense or laudatory inscription, quietly imposing-such being the fashion of his time.
He underwent various changes according to the accepted custom in these cases, and long before this story begins his bones even had become dust, and were scattered to the four quarters of heaven.
He had grave doubts, indeed, if there was any future for mankind after he was dead.
It seemed quite impossible and quite uninteresting to imagine anything happening after he was dead.
And, strange to tell, and much as mr Morris would have been angered if any one had foreshadowed it to him, all over the world there were scattered a multitude of people, filled with the breath of life, in whose veins the blood of mr Morris flowed.
It is doubtful which would have been the more shocked and pained to find himself in the clothing of the other.
His legs he encased in pleasant pink and amber garments of an air tight material, which with the help of an ingenious little pump he distended so as to suggest enormous muscles.
Over this he flung a scarlet cloak with its edge fantastically curved.
On his head, which had been skilfully deprived of every scrap of hair, he adjusted a pleasant little cap of bright scarlet, held on by suction and inflated with hydrogen, and curiously like the comb of a cock.
So his toilet was complete; and, conscious of being soberly and becomingly attired, he was ready to face his fellow beings with a tranquil eye.
He lived in a vast hotel near that part of London called Seventh Way, and had very large and comfortable apartments on the seventeenth floor.
When his toilet was completed he went towards one of the two doors of his apartment-there were doors at opposite ends, each marked with a huge arrow pointing one one way and one the other-touched a stud to open it, and emerged on a wide passage, the centre of which bore chairs and was moving at a steady pace to the left.
He nodded to an acquaintance-it was not in those days etiquette to talk before breakfast-and seated himself on one of these chairs, and in a few seconds he had been carried to the doors of a lift, by which he descended to the great and splendid hall in which his breakfast would be automatically served.
It was a very different meal from a Victorian breakfast.
Instead were pastes and cakes of agreeable and variegated design, without any suggestion in colour or form of the unfortunate animals from which their substance and juices were derived. They appeared on little dishes sliding out upon a rail from a little box at one side of the table.
The surface of the table, to judge by touch and eye, would have appeared to a nineteenth century person to be covered with fine white damask, but this was really an oxidised metallic surface, and could be cleaned instantly after a meal.
As this person, walking amidst the tables with measured steps, drew near, the pallid earnestness of his face and the unusual intensity of his eyes became apparent.
"I feared you would never come," he said.
"A prominent politician-ahem!--suffering from overwork." He glanced at the breakfast and seated himself.
"I have been awake for forty hours."
You hypnotists have your work to do."
The hypnotist helped himself to some attractive amber coloured jelly.
"I happen to be a good deal in request," he said modestly.
"The world did very well without us for some thousands of years.
Two hundred years ago even-not one!
In practice, that is.
Physicians by the thousand, of course-frightfully clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like sheep-but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there were none."
The hypnotist shook his head.
Life was so easy going then.
No competition worth speaking of-no pressure.
Then, you know, they clapped 'em away in what they called a lunatic asylum."
I don't know if you attend to that rubbish."
"I must confess I do," said the hypnotist.
I like a good swaggering story before all things.
Curious times they were, with their smutty railways and puffing old iron trains, their rum little houses and their horse vehicles.
I suppose you don't read books?"
Phonographs are good enough for me."
"Of course," said the hypnotist, "of course"; and surveyed the table for his next choice.
"You know," he said, helping himself to a dark blue confection that promised well, "in those days our business was scarcely thought of.
I daresay if any one had told them that in two hundred years' time a class of men would be entirely occupied in impressing things upon the memory, effacing unpleasant ideas, controlling and overcoming instinctive but undesirable impulses, and so forth, by means of hypnotism, they would have refused to believe the thing possible.
They used it-for painless dentistry and things like that!
The hypnotist turned an attentive eye upon him, and continued eating.
Well, you know I have given her-ah-every educational advantage.
"Yes," said the hypnotist, "go on.
How old is she?"
Excessively.
Even to the neglect of her philosophy.
Filled her mind with unutterable nonsense about soldiers who fight-what is it?--Etruscans?"
"Egyptians-very probably.
Hack about with swords and revolvers and things-bloodshed galore-horrible!--and about young men on torpedo catchers who blow up-Spaniards, I fancy-and all sorts of irregular adventurers.
And she has got it into her head that she must marry for Love, and that poor little Bindon-"
"I've met similar cases," said the hypnotist.
"Who is the other young man?"
"He is"--and his voice sank with shame-"a mere attendant upon the stage on which the flying machines from Paris alight.
He has-as they say in the romances-good looks.
And instead of communicating by telephone, like sensible people, they write and deliver-what is it?"
"Notes?"
"No-not notes....
Ah-poems."
The hypnotist raised his eyebrows.
"Tripped coming down from the flying machine from Paris-and fell into his arms.
The mischief was done in a moment!"
"Yes?"
"Well-that's all.
Things must be stopped.
That is what I want to consult you about.
Of course I'm not a hypnotist; my knowledge is limited.
But you-?"
"Hypnotism is not magic," said the man in green, putting both arms on the table.
"Oh, precisely!
"People cannot be hypnotised without their consent.
But if once she can be hypnotised-even by somebody else-the thing is done."
"You can-?"
"Oh, certainly!
"Precisely."
"But the problem is to get her hypnotised.
Of course no sort of proposal or suggestion must come from you-because no doubt she already distrusts you in the matter."
And, by the bye, is there any money in the affair?"
"There's a sum-in fact, a considerable sum-invested in the Patent Road Company.
From her mother.
That's what makes the thing so exasperating."
"Exactly," said the hypnotist.
It was a lengthy interview.
She loved the dream, but she feared the leap; and she put him off with "Some day, dearest one, some day," to all his pleading that it might be soon; and at last came a shrilling of whistles, and it was time for him to go back to his duties on the stage.
But the sunlight of the flying stage was in her heart, and the wisdom of all the best lecturers in the world seemed folly in that light.
The chaperone had a visitor that day, a man in green and yellow, with a white face and vivid eyes, who talked amazingly.
Among other things, he fell to praising a new historical romance that one of the great popular story tellers of the day had just put forth.
"These pithy sentences," he said, "are admirable.
They show at a glance those headlong, tumultuous times, when men and animals jostled in the filthy streets, and death might wait for one at every corner.
Life was life then!
Nowadays we have almost abolished wonder, we lead lives so trim and orderly that courage, endurance, faith, all the noble virtues seem fading from mankind."
At first Elizabeth did not join in the conversation, but after a time the subject became so interesting that she made a few shy interpolations.
He went on to describe a new method of entertaining people.
"It is practically an artificial dream.
Think!"
The chaperone was the first to be hypnotised, and the dream, she said, was wonderful, when she came to again.
The other two girls, encouraged by her enthusiasm, also placed themselves in the hands of the hypnotist and had plunges into the romantic past.
And so the mischief was done.
One day, when Denton went down to that quiet seat beneath the flying stage, Elizabeth was not in her wonted place.
He was disappointed, and a little angry.
The next day she did not come, and the next also.
He was afraid.
To hide his fear from himself, he set to work to write sonnets for her when she should come again....
There followed a week of misery.
And then he knew she was the only thing on earth worth having, and that he must seek her, however hopeless the search, until she was found once more.
He had some small private means of his own, and so he threw over his appointment on the flying stage, and set himself to find this girl who had become at last all the world to him.
Even in Victorian days London was a maze, that little London with its poor four millions of people; but the London he explored, the London of the twenty second century, was a London of thirty million souls.
At first he was energetic and headlong, taking time neither to eat nor sleep.
He sought for weeks and months, he went through every imaginable phase of fatigue and despair, over excitement and anger.
He was hungry; he had paid the inclusive fee and had gone into one of the gigantic dining places of the city; he was pushing his way among the tables and scrutinising by mere force of habit every group he passed.
He stood still, robbed of all power of motion, his eyes wide, his lips apart.
Elizabeth sat scarcely twenty yards away from him, looking straight at him.
She looked at him for a moment, and then her gaze passed beyond him.
For a moment Denton stood white and wild eyed; then came a terrible faintness, and he sat before one of the little tables.
He sat down with his back to her, and for a time he did not dare to look at her again. When at last he did, she and Bindon and two other people were standing up to go.
The others were her father and her chaperone.
He sat as if incapable of action until the four figures were remote and small, and then he rose up possessed with the one idea of pursuit.
For a space he feared he had lost them, and then he came upon Elizabeth and her chaperone again in one of the streets of moving platforms that intersected the city.
He could not control himself to patience.
He felt he must speak to her forthwith, or die.
His white face was convulsed with half hysterical excitement.
He laid his hand on her wrist.
"Elizabeth?" he said.
She turned in unfeigned astonishment.
Nothing but the fear of a strange man showed in her face.
She drew herself away from him.
"Do you know him, dear?"
"No, I do not know him.
"But-but ...
Not know me!
It is I-Denton.
Denton!
The little seat in the open air?
The verses-"
"No," cried Elizabeth,--"no
There is something....
All I know is that I do not know him." Her face was a face of infinite distress.
"You see?" she said, with the faint shadow of a smile.
"Of that I am sure."
"But, dear-the songs-the little verses-"
"She does not know you," said the chaperone.
"You must not....
You have made a mistake.
You must not go on talking to us after that.
You must not annoy us on the public ways."
"But-" said Denton, and for a moment his miserably haggard face appealed against fate.
"You must not persist, young man," protested the chaperone.
Her face was the face of one who is tormented.
"I do not know you," she cried, hand to brow.
"Oh, I do not know you!"
For an instant Denton sat stunned.
Then he stood up and groaned aloud.
He made a strange gesture of appeal towards the remote glass roof of the public way, then turned and went plunging recklessly from one moving platform to another, and vanished amidst the swarms of people going to and fro thereon.
The chaperone's eyes followed him, and then she looked at the curious faces about her.
"Dear," asked Elizabeth, clasping her hand, and too deeply moved to heed observation, "who was that man?
The chaperone raised her eyebrows.
She spoke in a clear, audible voice. "Some half witted creature.
"Never, dear.
Do not trouble your mind about a thing like this."
And soon after this the celebrated hypnotist who dressed in green and yellow had another client.
The young man paced his consulting room, pale and disordered.
"I want to forget," he cried.
The hypnotist watched him with quiet eyes, studied his face and clothes and bearing.
However, you know your own concern.
My fee is high."
"If only I can forget-"
"That's easy enough with you.
You wish it.
I've done much harder things. Quite recently.
I hardly expected to do it: the thing was done against the will of the hypnotised person.
A love affair too-like yours.
A girl.
So rest assured."
The young man came and sat beside the hypnotist.
His manner was a forced calm.
He looked into the hypnotist's eyes.
"I will tell you.
There was a girl.
Well ..."
He stopped.
In that instant he knew.
He stood up.
He seemed to dominate the seated figure by his side.
He gripped the shoulder of green and gold.
For a time he could not find words.
"Give her me back!"
"What do you mean?" gasped the hypnotist.
"Give her me back."
"Give whom?"
The hypnotist tried to free himself; he rose to his feet.
Denton's grip tightened.
"Let go!" cried the hypnotist, thrusting an arm against Denton's chest.
In a moment the two men were locked in a clumsy wrestle.
They fell together....
For a space Denton stood over him irresolute, trembling.
He turned towards the door.
"No," he said aloud, and came back to the middle of the room.
Overcoming the instinctive repugnance of one who had seen no act of violence in all his life before, he knelt down beside his antagonist and felt his heart.
Then he peered at the wound.
He rose quietly and looked about him.
He began to see more of the situation.
When presently the hypnotist recovered his senses, his head ached severely, his back was against Denton's knees and Denton was sponging his face.
The hypnotist did not speak.
"Let me get up," he said.
"Not yet," said Denton.
"You have assaulted me, you scoundrel!"
"We are alone," said Denton, "and the door is secure."
There was an interval of thought.
"You can go on sponging," said the hypnotist sulkily.
There was another pause.
"We might be in the Stone Age," said the hypnotist.
"Violence! Struggle!"
"In the Stone Age no man dared to come between man and woman," said Denton.
The hypnotist thought again.
I telephoned.
Then-"
"She will bring her chaperone."
"That is all right."
"But what-?
I don't see.
"I looked about for a weapon also.
It is an astonishing thing how few weapons there are nowadays.
I hit at last upon this lamp.
I have wrenched off the wires and things, and I hold it so." He extended it over the hypnotist's shoulders.
"With that I can quite easily smash your skull.
"Well?"
"You will tell that chaperone you are going to order the girl to marry that knobby little brute with the red hair and ferrety eyes.
I believe that's how things stand?"
"Yes-that's how things stand."
"And, pretending to do that, you will restore her memory of me."
"It's unprofessional."
"Look here!
If I cannot have that girl I would rather die than not.
I don't propose to respect your little fancies.
If anything goes wrong you shall not live five minutes.
This is a rude makeshift of a weapon, and it may quite conceivably be painful to kill you.
But I will.
It is unusual, I know, nowadays to do things like this-mainly because there is so little in life that is worth being violent about."
"The chaperone will see you directly she comes-"
Behind you."
The hypnotist thought.
"You are a determined young man," he said, "and only half civilised.
He may set forth in search of a fair lady who has been taken captive, or to obtain a magic herb or stone to relieve a sufferer, to cure diseases, and to prolong life.
The spirits are usually wild beasts or birds-the "fates" of immemorial folk belief-and they may either carry the hero on their backs, instruct him from time to time, or come to his aid when called upon.
Certain folk tales, and the folk beliefs on which they were based, seem to have been of hoary antiquity before the close of the Late Stone Age.
The floating legends with which they were associated were utilized and developed by the priests, when engaged in the process of systematizing and symbolizing religious beliefs, with purpose to unfold the secrets of creation and the Otherworld.
As Vishnu, the Indian god, rides on the back of Garuda, so does Etana ride on the back of the Babylonian Eagle.
In one fragmentary legend which was preserved in the tablet library of Ashur banipal, the Assyrian monarch, Etana obtained the assistance of the Eagle to go in quest of the Plant of Birth.
His wife was about to become a mother, and was accordingly in need of magical aid.
On this or another occasion Etana desired to ascend to highest heaven. He asked the Eagle to assist him, and the bird assented, saying: "Be glad, my friend.
Here the text becomes fragmentary.
Then some disaster happens, for further onwards the broken tablet narrates that the Eagle is falling.
My wings were burnt, but those of my brother were not....
Nimrod then built a tower so as to ascend to heaven "to see Abraham's god", and make war against Him, but the tower was overthrown.
He, however, persisted in his design.
Among the myths attached to his memory in the Ethiopic "history" is one which explains how "he knew and comprehended the length and breadth of the earth", and how he obtained knowledge regarding the seas and mountains he would have to cross.
"In the Country of Darkness" Alexander fed and tamed great birds which were larger than eagles.
The hero died, but, curiously enough, remained conscious of what was happening.
The hero proceeds: "Sleep came upon herself (the eagle) and she slept.
The sun was enlivening me pretty well though I was dead." Afterwards the eagle bathed in a healing well, and as it splashed in the water, drops fell on the hero and he came to life.
Nin Girsu, the god of Lagash, who was identified with Tammuz, was depicted as a lion headed eagle.
In Indian mythology Garuda, the eagle giant, which destroyed serpents like the Babylonian Etana eagle, issued from its egg like a flame of fire; its eyes flashed the lightning and its voice was the thunder.
It is also called "the steed necked incarnation of Vishnu", the "Preserver" of the Hindu trinity who rode on its back.
The hymn referred to lauds Garuda as "the bird of life, the presiding spirit of the animate and inanimate universe ... destroyer of all, creator of all".
Birds were not only fates, from whose movements in flight omens were drawn, but also spirits of fertility.
The burning of straw figures, representing gods of fertility, on May Day bonfires may have been a fertility rite, and perhaps explains the use of straw birth girdles.
They filled up a darksome pit With water to the brim, They heaved in john Barleycorn- There let him sink or swim.
They wasted o'er a scorching flame The marrow of his bones, But the miller used him worst of all, For he crushed him between two stones.
Mimic Adonis gardens were cultivated by women.
He was apparently of great antiquity, so that it is impossible to identify him with any forerunner of Sargon of Akkad, or Alexander the Great.
He travelled to distant places, and was informed regarding the flood and the primitive race which the gods destroyed; he also obtained the plant of life, which his enemy, the earth lion, in the form of a serpent or well demon, afterwards carried away.
Ultimately the people prayed to the goddess Aruru to create a liberator.
He was named Ea bani, which signifies "Ea is my creator".
Then the temptress pleaded with him to go with her to Erech, where Anu and Ishtar had their temples, and the mighty Gilgamesh lived in his palace.
Erech was thus freed from the oppression of its fierce enemy.
But in the hour of triumph a shadow falls.
I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gaped wide; And I awoke and found me here On the cold hill's side.
The goddess Ishtar appeared as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" before Gilgamesh and addressed him tenderly, saying: "Come, O Gilgamesh, and be my consort.
Gift thy strength unto me.
Ishtar's heart was filled with wrath when she heard the words which Gilgamesh had spoken, and she prevailed upon her father Anu to create a fierce bull which she sent against the lord of Erech.
Ishtar cursed Gilgamesh.
Ea bani then defied her and threatened to deal with her as he had dealt with the bull, with the result that he was cursed by the goddess also.
Gilgamesh dedicated the horns of the bull to Shamash and returned with his friend to Erech, where they were received with great rejoicings.
Then he cried upon the moon god, who took pity upon him, and under divine protection the hero pressed onward.
When Gilgamesh beheld them he swooned with terror.
When Gilgamesh revived, he realized that the monsters regarded him with eyes of sympathy.
Gilgamesh, however, resolved to encounter any peril, for he was no longer afraid, and he was allowed to go forward.
Passing many other wonderful trees, he came to a shoreland, and he knew that he was drawing nigh to the Sea of Death.
This is the philosophy of the Egyptian "Lay of the Harper".
The following quotations are from two separate versions:--
Jastrow contrasts the Babylonian poem with the following quotation from ecclesiastes:--
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart....
He asked her how he could reach p i r napishtim, his ancestor, saying he was prepared to cross the Sea of Death: if he could not cross it he would die of grief.
The way is full of peril.
When it was fixed on, the boat was launched and the voyage began.
p i r napishtim had perceived the vessel crossing the Sea of Death and marvelled greatly.
Nor could any man tell when his hour would come.
The god of destiny measured out the span of life: he fixed the day of death, but never revealed his secrets.
Gilgamesh then asked p i r napishtim how it chanced that he was still alive.
When the narrative was ended, p i r napishtim spoke sympathetically and said: "Who among the gods will restore thee to health, O Gilgamesh?
Gilgamesh sat in the ship, and sleep enveloped him like to a black storm cloud.
Sleep envelops him like to a black storm cloud."
Give him power to pass through the mighty door by which he entered."
Then p i r napishtim addressed his wife, saying: "His sufferings make me sad.
Prepare thou for him the magic food, and place it near his head."
Gilgamesh spake unto p i r napishtim and said: "I was suddenly overcome by sleep....
What hast thou done unto thy servant?"
The blemished skin fell from him, and he was made whole.
Thereafter Gilgamesh prepared to return to his own land.
So Gilgamesh and Arad Ea went on their way together, nor paused until they came to a well of pure water.
Stricken with terror, Gilgamesh uttered a curse.
The two travellers then resumed their journey, performing religious acts from time to time; chanting dirges and holding feasts for the dead, and at length Gilgamesh returned to Erech.
During the days which followed Gilgamesh sorrowed for his lost friend Ea bani, whose spirit was in the Underworld, the captive of the spirits of death.
Said Gilgamesh: "Let me sit down and weep, but tell me regarding the land of spirits."
His head is supported by his parents: beside him sits his wife.
So ends the story of Gilgamesh in the form which survives to us.
In another part of the narrative Alexander and his army arrive at a place of darkness "where the blackness is not like the darkness of night, but is like unto the mists and clouds which descend at the break of day".
Apparently he assumed the colour of supernatural beings.
This fortunate man kept his secret.
On the seashore Moses fell asleep, and the fish, which had been roasted, leapt out of the basket into the sea.
The Well of Life is found in Fingalian legends.
Give me a draught from thy palms, O Finn, Son of my king for my succour, For my life and my dwelling.
The quest of the plant, flower, or fruit of life is referred to in many folk tales.
When Bhima reaches the lotus lake he fights with demons.
Other heroes kill treasure protecting dragons of various kinds.
At length we beheld a great cavern.
And she gave us food and drink of various kinds.
We despaired of returning with our lives....
This great bird, which resembles the Etana eagle, expressed the opinion that Sita was in Lanka (Ceylon), whither she must have been carried by Ravana.
The sound of the pipes is heard for a time; then the music ceases suddenly, and shortly afterwards the dog returns without a hair upon its body.
The tunnel may run from a castle to the seashore, from a cave on one side of a hill to a cave on the other, or from a seashore cave to a distant island.
In Babylonia, as elsewhere, the priests utilized the floating material from which all mythologies were framed, and impressed upon it the stamp of their doctrines.
CHAPTER eleven
SOME IMPRESSIONS OF THE GREAT PEACE CONFERENCE
It is either universal peace or universal doom.
Either some plan to stop war or preparation for the final judgment.
Quit fighting or quit living.
Peace or death.
The late war revealed the possibilities of human genius.
Man's power to destroy has been discovered and across the sky can be seen in letters of blood the warning, "Abolish war or perish." Some say the war ended six months too soon, but had it continued that much longer, the probable results are too awful to contemplate.
The Angel of Destruction had the sword lifted over Germany, but it was as though divine providence stayed his hand.
American genius was just coming into play.
For instance, we are told that a gas had been discovered that is so deadly that a few bombs filled with it and dropped upon a city would all but wipe it out of existence. When the armistice was signed hundreds of tons of that gas were ready for use and on the way to the battle front.
Other inventions and discoveries have since been brought out that are too deadly to even talk about.
No one can describe the Peace Conference without giving great credit to our president, for without him it seemed that the leaders were unable to get anywhere.
A committee was at once appointed to work out a constitution for such an organization and President Wilson was made the chairman.
To abolish war would rejoice the heart of every mother who has gone into the jaws of death to give birth to a son.
It would bring gratitude from the heart of every wife and sweetheart whose face has been bathed with tears as the last good bys were on their lips.
It would thrill the heart of every lover of justice and mercy and would answer the heart longings of millions who have prayed without ceasing for the reign of peace on earth among men of good will.
No one knows how many are alive and well today who would have been sleeping in unknown and unmarked graves had the armistice been detained a single week.
The nineteen men who made up the committee belonged to fourteen nations. President Wilson, as chairman, called them together in this room.
The first meeting of this committee was held February third and was very brief.
In all, ten meetings were held and all were held in this room. President Wilson presided at all but one of them.
Each man brought his suggestions in writing so there would be no chance for misunderstanding. Full discussion of all points was always encouraged.
When the entire constitution was worked out it was agreed to unanimously and it was then ready to be presented to the Peace Conference.
Until the Peace Treaty was ready to sign all meetings of the great conference were held in the Foreign Ministry building in Paris.
The old Palace is there but the great Hall of Mirrors where the treaty was finally signed could not be comfortably heated in the winter time.
So for that as well as other reasons the meetings were held in Paris.
Through mr Ray Stannard Baker I received a pass to the Peace Conference.
These passes were only given to newspaper men and I represented People's Popular Monthly.
The great day was February fourteenth, nineteen nineteen.
On this date eighty four statesmen representing twenty seven nations, the combined population of which is more than twelve hundred million people, were seated around one table.
Clemenceau was the chairman of the conference and sat at the head of the table.
When he was introduced our president read the constitution, or covenant as it was called, and then made some remarks concerning it.
When he reached his homeland he no doubt told his people how the great American president championed a plan to abolish war and told the statesmen of the Peace Conference that the world is learning that all men on this earth are brothers, and the very hills of that black land echoed with praises for America.
In the villages of far away India, in the homes of the Sea Islanders and in fact wherever human beings have congregated they have talked of a world peace.
But it was the peoples of the downtrodden, war stricken nations especially who looked to our president as the great champion of liberty and freedom. They believed that he was the "Big Brother" and that the country that he represented would see that they were treated fairly.
Then the modest, dignified, unselfish bearing of our president among them turned gratitude into love and devotion.
Without a single effort on his part to put himself forward, he became the natural leader of all.
A single instance of his thoughtfulness will be given.
After hours of searching and miles of walking and inquiries galore, the place was found, but the door to the enclosure had to be unlocked with a silver key.
In memory of the great Lafayette from a fellow servant of liberty."
Then came the months of haggling, the work of selfish politicians both at home and abroad, and finally the rejection by our own people of the greatest piece of work since the beginning of the Christian era, all of which makes one who knows the real situation hang his head in shame.
Why any living mortal in America could oppose a plan that has for its object the abolition of war is simply amazing to the people of Europe.
People who looked upon America as the one great nation of the earth almost sneered when they mentioned our attitude toward the League of Nations.
They have almost lost confidence in us and it will be hard to regain it.
France is especially bitter. Perhaps the result of the Disarmament Conference, which is practically the same thing under another name, will help them to forget some things, but the French will be slow to take up with it.
A ballot was prepared containing fifty six subjects of scientific and mechanical achievement and blank spaces in which other subjects might be written.
Each man was asked to designate the seven he felt were entitled to a place on the list.
He, of course, was not confined to the printed list and could write in others that were better entitled to a place than those on the printed list.
About seventy per cent of these ballots were returned properly marked and the result was most interesting indeed.
It is not surprising, therefore, that wireless telegraphy should have the highest place on the list.
Guglielmo Marconi is far more worthy to be remembered than the king who built the great Pyramid in Egypt.
This brilliant Italian, when but fifteen years of age was reveling in the dreamland wonders of electricity and when but twenty had the theory practically worked out and his patience and enthusiasm were simply amazing.
Through it the seven seas have became great whispering galleries.
For three days and nights two great ocean liners raced across the deep and never came in sight of each other at all.
Yet every few hours we all knew just which ship was gaining and it was really a most exciting race.
The telephone was given second place in the list of modern wonders.
It is hard to realize that the telephone only dates back to eighteen seventy five.
mr Watson was in the basement with an instrument trying without success to talk with mr Bell in the room above.
Finally the latter made a little change in the instrument and spoke and mr Watson came rushing upstairs greatly excited, saying: "Why, mr Bell, I heard your voice distinctly and could almost understand what you were saying."
The next year the imperfect telephone was exhibited at the Centennial in Philadelphia, but for a time it was the laughing stock of most people and hardly anyone ever dreamed that it would ever be more than a mere plaything.
One day Dom Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, who knew mr Bell personally, came in.
With him was Sir William Thompson, the great English scientist.
The emperor was given the receiver and placed it to his ear and was suddenly startled, saying: "My God, it speaks." This amused all, but greatly interested the man of science and thus the telephone was brought into prominence.
Sitting within the sound of the waves of the Pacific, I was connected up with Atlantic City and heard the waves of the Atlantic.
The fourth place was given to Radium, the fifth to Antiseptics and Antitoxines, the sixth to Spectrum Analysis, and the seventh to the marvelous X Ray.
The one of real service was the Pharos, or lighthouse, at Alexandria, Egypt. This was a gigantic structure more than four hundred feet high on the top of which a great fire was kept burning at night, thus serving as a lighthouse.
There are seventy seven of these pyramids altogether. Three of them are located less than a dozen miles from Cairo, the others being up the river Nile a half day's journey.
The largest is known as the Pyramid of Cheops and is nearest Cairo.
It covers thirteen acres of ground and is four hundred and fifty feet high.
It was scientifically and mathematically constructed ages before modern science or mathematics were born.
It is said that in all the thousands of years since it was built not a single fact in astronomy or mathematics has been discovered to contradict the wisdom of those who constructed it.
On the north side of the pyramid, about fifty feet up, there is a narrow tunnel that runs down at an angle of twenty six degrees to the center of the field that forms its base.
The tunnel is so true that from the bottom one can see the star, that is near the North Star, which is supposed to have been directly in the north when the structure was built.
After you have descended eighty five feet in this tunnel there is another tunnel that runs up to the center of the structure where there are some large rooms or chambers.
In these rooms there are large mummy cases, but they are empty at the present time.
It was four hundred feet high and terraced on all sides and according to historians beautiful beyond description.
Not only were beautiful flowers and shrubbery kept growing, but large forest trees as well.
On approaching it this great mountain seemed to be suspended or hanging in the air-hence the name.
To please her the king accomplished this mighty work. Today the whole thing, in fact, the entire city of Babylon, is nothing but a pile of ruins.
The foundation was made earthquake proof.
The temple proper was supported by one hundred and twenty seven columns which were sixty feet high.
Each of these columns was a gift from a king.
They tell us that the great stairway was carved from a single grapevine and that the cypress wood doors were kept in glue a lifetime before they were hung on their hinges.
The treasures of nations and the spoil of kingdoms were brought here for safe keeping and criminals from all nations fled to this temple, for when they reached it no law could touch them.
Today this temple with the city itself is nothing but ruins.
It only took twelve years to build it and after standing fifty six years it was overthrown by an earthquake and after nearly a thousand years the metal was used for other purposes.
Both of these have long since passed out of existence.
Brute force is no longer the measure of power or influence.
The standard of measurement these days is the ability to serve.
We are learning that the Galilean carpenter told the truth when he said: "He who would be great among you let him be servant of all." Service is one of the greatest words in human language.
I ran to her, to drive her away, when behold, there appeared, at a breach of the wall, an old man and grey, whose eyes sparkled with angry ray, holding in his right a stone to throw and swaying to and fro, with a swing like a lion ready for a spring.
He cast the stone at my stallion, and it killed him for it struck a vital part.
So Gabriel descended and, saluting Bulukiya, opened the gate to him, saying, 'Enter this door, for Allah commandeth me to open to thee.' So he entered and Gabriel locked the gate behind him and flew back to heaven.
When Bulukiya found himself within the gate, he looked and beheld a vast ocean, half salt and half fresh, bounded on every side by mountain ranges of red ruby whereon he saw angels singing the praises of the Lord and hallowing Him.
When it was the Four Hundred and Ninety eighth Night,
How few things thou hast seen in thy life compared with mine.
Know, O Bulukiya, that unlike thyself I have looked upon our lord Solomon, in his life, and have seen things past count or reckoning.
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the Queen continued: "When Bulukiya ended his recount, the youth said, 'How few things of marvel hast thou seen in thy life, O unhappy!
Now I have looked upon our lord Solomon while he was yet living and I have witnessed wonders beyond compt and conception.' And he began to relate
Know that we have taken counsel with the astrologers and sages and mathematicians, and they tell us that we shall have boon of a boy child, and that by none other than thy daughter.
When it was the Five Hundredth Night,
They all ran at her to take her as their quarry, but she escaped from them and, throwing herself into the waves,"--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
When it was the Five Hundred and First Night,
Then they again embarked and taking with them the gazelle, set out to return homeward, but the murk of evening overtook them and they missed their way on the main.
Moreover a strong wind arose and crave the boat into mid ocean, so that when they awoke in the morning, they found themselves lost at sea.
Then he rose forthright and wrote letters and despatched them to all the islands of the sea.
But a stiff gale caught the Prince's craft which went spooning till they made a second island, where they landed and walked about.
Presently they came upon a spring of running water in the midst of the island and saw from afar a man sitting hard by it.
When the voyagers saw this, they turned and fled seawards; but the cannibals pursued them and caught and ate three of the slaves, leaving only three slaves who with Janshah reached the boat in safety; then launching her made for the water and sailed nights and days without knowing whither their ship went.
They killed the gazelle, and lived on her flesh, till the winds drove them to a third island which was full of trees and waters and flower gardens and orchards laden with all fashion of fruits: and streams strayed under the tree shade: brief, the place was a Garden of Eden.
The island pleased the Prince and he said to his companions, 'Which of you will land and explore?' Then said one of the slaves, 'That will I do'; but he replied, 'This thing may not be; you must all land and explore the place while I abide in the boat.' So he set them ashore,"-- And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.
When he heard their report, he cried, 'Needs must I solace myself with a sight of it;' so he landed and accompanied them to the palace, which he entered marvelling at the goodliness of the place.
And as they were thus sorrowing behold, they heard a mighty clamour, that came from seaward and looking in the direction of the clamour saw a multitude of apes, as they were swarming locusts.
The Prince and his followers came down from their seats and ate, and the apes ate with them, till they were satisfied, when the apes took away the meat and set on fruits of which they partook and praised Allah the most Highest.
Then Janshah asked the apes by signs what they were and to whom the palace belonged, and they answered him by signals, 'Know ye that this island belonged of yore to our lord Solomon, son of David (on both of whom be peace!), and he used to come hither once every year for his solace,'"--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
The Prince slept that night on the throne and his men on the stools about him, and on the morrow, at daybreak, the four Wazirs or Captains of the apes presented themselves before him, attended by their troops, who ranged themselves about him, rank after rank, until the place was crowded.
Then the Wazirs approached and exhorted him by signs to do justice amongst them and rule them righteously; after which the apes cried out to one another and went away, all save a small party which remained in presence to serve him.
So they mounted, marvelling at the greatness of the dogs, and rode forth, attended by the four Wazirs and a host of apes like swarming locusts, some riding on dogs and others afoot till they came to the sea shore.
So he turned to the apes and asked them, 'What are these Ghuls?' and they answered, 'Know, O King, that these Ghuls are our mortal foes and we come hither to do battle with them.' Janshah marvelled to see them riding horses, and was startled at the vastness of their bulk and the strangeness of their semblance; for some of them had heads like bulls and others like camels.
And while exploring the said mountain Janshah found a tablet of alabaster, whereon was written, 'O thou who enterest this land, know that thou wilt become Sultan over these apes and that from them there is no escape for thee, except by the passes that run east and west through the mountains.
When it was the Five Hundred and Fourth Night,
Better therefore lord it over the apes, for so long as thou shalt tarry amongst them they will be victorious over the Ghuls.
And know also that he who wrote this tablet was the lord Solomon, son of David (on both be peace!).' When Janshah read these words, he wept sore and repeated them to his men.
Then they mounted again and, surrounded by the army of the apes who were rejoicing in their victory, returned to the castle.
Here Janshah abode, Sultaning over them, for a year and a half.
When the apes awoke and missed Janshah and his men, they knew that they had fled.
So they mounted and pursued them, some taking the eastern pass and others that which led to the Wady of Emmets, nor was it long before the apes came in sight of the fugitives, as they were about to enter the valley, and hastened after them.
They devoured many of their foes, and these also slew many of the ants; but help came to the emmets: now an ant would go up to an ape and smite him and cut him in twain, whilst ten apes could hardly master one ant and bear him away and tear him in sunder.
The sore battle lasted till the evening but the emmets were victorious.
In the pauses of her painting she wondered if he thought of her, if he missed her.
He was a good looking, blond man, somewhat inclined to the poetical and melancholy type; his hair bristled, and he wore a close cut red beard; the moustache was long and silky; there was a gentle, pathetic look in his pale blue eyes; and a slight hesitation of speech, an inability to express himself in words, created a passing impression of a rather foolish, tiresome person.
But beneath this exterior there lay a deep, true nature, which found expression in twilit landscapes, the tenderness of cottage lights in the gloaming, vague silhouettes, and vague skies and fields.
Ralph Hoskin was very poor: his pathetic pictures did not find many purchasers, and he lived principally by teaching.
But he had not given Mildred her fourth lesson in landscape painting when he received an advantageous offer to copy two pictures by Turner in the National Gallery.
She was anxious to get away from Sutton, and the prospect of long days spent in London pleased her, and on the following Thursday Harold took her up to London by the ten minutes past nine.
For the first time she found something romantic in that train.
'I'm so frightened,' she said; 'I'm afraid I don't paint well enough.'
This way.
I've got your easel, and your place is taken.'
They went up to the galleries.
She glanced at the work, seeking eagerly for copies, worse than any she was likely to perpetrate.
He told her where she would find him, in the Turner room, and that she must not hesitate to come and fetch him whenever she was in difficulties.
'I should like you to see the drawing,' she said, 'before I begin to paint.'
It will take you at least a couple of days to get it right....
Don't be afraid,' he said, glancing round; 'lots of them can't do as well as you.
I shall be back about lunch time.'
She studied the delicate bloom of their cheeks, and wondered what mysterious proportions of white, ochre, and carmine she would have to use to obtain it.
Already she despaired.
But before she began to paint she would have to draw those heavenly faces in every feature.
It was more difficult than sketching from nature.
She could not follow the drawing, it seemed to escape her.
It did not exist in lines which she could measure, which she could follow.
The girl in front of her was making, it seemed to Mildred, a perfect copy.
This was a disappointment.
She grew absorbed in her work; she did not see the girl in front of her, nor the young man copying opposite; she did not notice their visits to each other's easels; she forgot everything in the passion of drawing.
Time went by without her perceiving it; she was startled by the sound of her master's voice and looked in glad surprise.
'No, not so badly.
Will you let me sit down?
Will you give me your charcoal?'
If you get them exactly right the rest will come easily.
Let me introduce you to Miss Laurence,' he said.
'You're doing an excellent copy, Miss Laurence.'
'I would give anything to paint like that,' said Mildred.
'You've only just begun painting,' said Miss Laurence.
'Only a few months,' said Mildred.
'You must tell me which you use.'
'mr Hoskin can tell you better than i You can't have a better master.'
'I paint portraits when I can get them to do; when I can't, I come here and copy....
It quickly disappeared, and he said, 'Will you take Miss Lawson to the refreshment room, Miss Laurence?
You're going there I suppose.'
The contrast between its twilight and the brightness of the courtyard is quite in his manner.'
The men turned to the left top to go to their room, the women turned to the right to go to theirs.
'This way,' said Miss Laurence, and she opened a glass door, and Mildred found herself in what looked like an eating house of the poorer sort.
But you don't know what it is to want money,' and in a rapid glance Miss Laurence roughly calculated the price of Mildred's clothes.
A tall, rather handsome girl, with dark coarse hair and a face lit up by round grey eyes, entered.
'So you are here, Elsie,' and she stared at Mildred.
'Let me introduce you to Miss Lawson.
Miss Lawson, Miss Cissy Clive.'
Is this your first day?'
'Yes, this is my first day.'
But Cissy had insisted, and he had put her and the picture into a little room off the main gallery, where she could pursue her nefarious work unperceived.
The girls laughed heartily.
Elsie asked for whom Cissy was making the copy.
'For a friend of Freddy's-a very rich fellow.
Freddy has just come back from Monte Carlo.
He has lost all his money....
He says he's "stony" and doesn't know how he'll pull through.'
'Was he here this morning?'
'He ran in for a moment to see me....
I'm dining with him to night.'
'No, I forgot to tell you, I'm staying with you, so be careful not to give me away if you should meet mother.
'I promised to go out with Walter to night.'
'You can put him off.
'Then he'd want to come round to the studio.
I don't like to put him off.'
'As you like....
Johnny and Herbert are coming.
He'll do anything I ask him.'
When lunch was over Cissy and Elsie took each other's arms and went upstairs together.
Mildred heard Cissy ask who she was.
Elsie whispered, 'A pupil of Ralph's.
You shouldn't have talked so openly before her.'
'So his name is Ralph,' Mildred said to herself, and thought that she liked the name.
mr Hare stood looking at his dead daughter; john Norton sat by the window.
He saw things moving, moving, but they were all far away.
He knew that Kitty had thrown herself out of the window and was dead.
She had walked with him on the hills, she had accompanied him as far as the burgh; she had waved her hand to him before they walked quite out of each other's sight.
Now she was dead.
Had he loved her?
He envied the hard sobbing father's grief, the father who held his dead daughter's hand, and showed a face on which was printed so deeply the terror of the soul's emotion, that john felt a supernatural awe creep upon him; felt that his presence was a sort of sacrilege.
He crept downstairs.
Only three days ago she had been sitting in that basket chair.
Shadow like is human life! one moment it is here, the next it is gone.
He would never read it now; or perhaps he should read it in memory of her, of her whom yesterday he had parted with on the hills-her little Puritan look, her external girlishness, her golden brown hair, and the sudden laugh so characteristic of her....
She had lent him this book-she who was now but clay.
He took up his hat and set forth to walk home across the downs, all the while thinking, thinking over what had happened.
She had consented, and, alarmed at the prospect of the new duties he had contracted, he had returned home.
He had exchanged it for the life of the hearth, of the family; that private life-private, and yet so entirely impersonal which he had hitherto loathed.
He had often said he had no pity for those who accepted burdens and then complained that they had not sufficient strength to carry them.
Such had been his theory; he must now make his theory and practice coincide.
He had walked up and down his study, his mind aflame; he had sat in his arm chair, facing the moonlight, considering a question, to him so important, so far reaching, that his mind at moments seemed as if like to snap, to break, but which was accepted by nine tenths of humanity without a second thought, as lightly as the most superficial detail of daily life.
But how others acted was not his concern; he must consider his own competence to bear the burden-the perilous burden he had asked, and which had been promised to him.
He must not adventure into a life he was not fitted for; he must not wreck another's life; in considering himself he was considering her; their interests were mutual, they were identical; there was no question of egotism.
A desire had come he knew not whence; and he asked himself if it were a passing weakness of the flesh, or if this passion abided in him, if it had come at last to claim satisfaction?
On this point he was uncertain, this was nature's secret.
And the work of the good and wise man is to use appearances according to Nature.
The contrary habit.'
A temptation of the flesh had come upon him; he had yielded to it instead of opposing it with the contrary habit of chastity.
For chastity had never afflicted him; it had ever been to him a source of strength and courage.
The last six months had been the unhappiest of his life.
A passing emotion of which I am ashamed, of which I would speak to no one.
But each time he thought, 'I shall be able to control it better than the last, and it will grow weaker and weaker until at last it will pass and to return no more.'
He had gone to bed hoping to find counsel in the night, and in the morning he had waked firm in his resolve, and had gone to Shoreham in the intention of breaking his engagement.
Perhaps it were better so; the reasons that prompted suicide were better unrevealed....
And now, as he returned home after the tragedy, about midway in his walk across the downs, the thought came upon him that the breaking off of his engagement might have been sufficient reason in an affected mind for suicide.
But this was not so.
He knew it was not so.
He had been spared that!
'She was here with me yesterday,' he said.
He sat down by the blown hawthorn bush that stands by the burgh.
But how had she become mad?
What had happened?
By what strange alienation of the brain, by what sudden snapping of the sense had madness come?
Something must have happened. Did madness fall like that?
like a bolt from the blue.
Had she guessed that when it came to the point that he would not, that he might not have been able to marry her?
If so, he was in a measure responsible.
'I'm not disturbing you, father?'
'No, dear: you never disturb me,' he said, getting up from the type writer and giving her his chair.
'Nothing, at least nothing in particular.
I got tired of the drawing room, and thought I'd like to come and sit with you.
But I've taken your chair.'
'It doesn't matter.
I can stand, I've been sitting so long.'
'But no, father, I can't take your chair.
I don't want to stop you from working.
I thought I'd like to sit and watch you.
Here, take your chair.'
'I can get another.
I can get one out of the butler's room.
He won't mind just for once.
He's a very particular man.
But I'll tell him I took it for you.'
The Major returned a moment after with a chair.
He gave it to Agnes and resumed his place at the machine.
'I shan't be many minutes before I finish this lot,' he said; 'then we shall be able to talk.
I promised to get them finished this evening.'
'I think I picked it up pretty quickly.
I can do seventy words a minute.
Some typists can do eighty, but my fingers are too old for that.
Still, seventy is a good average, and I have hardly any corrections to make.
They are very pleased with my work....
I'll teach you-you'd soon pick it up.'
'Will you, father?
We could sit together, you in that corner, I in this.
I could pay her back out of the money I earned, just like you.'
'Your mother would say you were wasting your time.
'I'm afraid she would.
Last night at Lord Chiselhurst's----'
'Yes; tell me about it.
You must have enjoyed yourself there.'
Agnes did not answer for a long while, at last she said,--
'There's something, father, dear, that I must speak to you about.... Mother thinks I ought to marry Lord Chiselhurst, that I ought to make up to him and catch him if I can.
But, father, I cannot marry him.
He is-no, I cannot marry him.
I do not like him, I'm only sixteen, and he's forty or fifty.
I don't want to marry any one, and mother doesn't seem to understand that.
She said if that were so, she really didn't see why I left the convent.'
She was too intent on what she was saying to notice the light which flashed in the Major's eyes.
I don't want to say anything against mother; she loves me, I'm sure: but we're so different, I shall never understand mother, I shall never get on in society.
I cannot, father, dear, I cannot, I feel so far away; I do not know what to say to the people I meet.
'But, father, you're not listening.
Listen to me, I've only you.'
'I'm thinking.'
'Of what?'
'Poor father, you have a great deal to think of, and I come interrupting your work.
How selfish I am.'
'No, dear, you're not selfish....
So you think you'll never get on in society.'
'I don't think I'm suited for society.'
'A great deal of it is my fault, dear.
When I lost my money I got disheartened, and little by little I lost control.
Your mother said, in reply to some question about me, that I was "merely an expense." I believe the phrase was considered very clever, it went the round of society, and eventually was put into a play.
And that is why I told you that money is everything, that it is difficult to be truthful, honourable, or respectable if you have no money, a little will do, but you must have a little, if you haven't you aren't respectable, you're nothing, you become like me, a mere expense.... I've borne it for your sake, dearest.'
'Never mind, best not to ask....
It took me a long while, but I have found the way-there it is,' he said, pointing to the type writing machine.
I'll tell you, Agnes, but you must not breathe a word of it to any one, if you did, they would take the machine from me: for they'd like me to remain a mere expense.
As long as I'm that, they can do what they like, but as soon as I gain an independence, as soon as I am able to pay for my meals,' he whispered, 'I mean to put my house in order But you mustn't breathe a word.'
'I shall be able to sweep out all those you don't like.
'Tell me, father, do you like Lord Chadwick?' The Major's face changed expression.
'No, dear.
You asked me if I liked Lord Chadwick.
I was thinking. Somehow it seems to me that I rather like him, though I have no reason to do so.
He thinks me crazy, but so do others; I know that my conversation bores him, he always tries to get away from me, yet somehow it seems to me that I do like him.'
'Is he a fast man, father, is he like Lord Chiselhurst?'
I don't think he's a bad man-no worse than other men.
Is he kind to you, dear; tell me that; do you like him?'
'Yes, father; he and mr saint Clare are the men I like best here.
But why is he here so much, father, he's no relation.'
'He has dined and lunched here every day for the last ten years.
He's been an expense too.'
'Mother said he is so poor that she has often to lend him money.'
When I've got together a little independence, when I can pay for my meals and my clothes, you shall see; none that you dislike shall ever come here, dearest.
I'll put my house in order.'
'But that will take a long time, father; in the meantime----'
'What, dear?'
'Mother will want me to marry.'
'They shall not force you to marry, they shall not ask you to do anything you do not like.
Lord Chiselhurst ought to be ashamed, a man of his age to want to marry a young girl like you.
I will go and tell him so.'
The Major stood up, he was pale, and Agnes noticed that his lips trembled.
'You shall not be persecuted by his attentions.'
Whatever his faults may be, I feel sure when he sees that I do not want him, that he will cease to think of me...
Lord Chiselhurst is not the worst.'
'Who, then, is the worst?
Who is it that you wish me to rid you of?'
'I don't wish you to be violent, father, but you might hint to mr Moulton that I do not wish----'
'That man-he, too, is merely an expense.'
'I am sure, father, that it is not right of him to put his arms round me-he tried to kiss me.
And he speaks in a way that I do not like-I don't know....
'Frightens you!
That fellow-that fellow!'
'Yes; he asks me questions.'
'Yes; but, father, you cannot speak to him now, there are people in the drawing room.'
'They think me a sheep, I have been a sheep too long, but they shall see that even the sheep will turn to save its lamb from the butcher. I'll go to them, yes, and in these clothes-Agnes, let me go.'
'I want you to speak to mr Moulton....
But not now, this is not the time.'
He only muttered that the time had come to put his house in order.
Agnes answered, 'Father, for my sake ... not now.' But he must obey the idea which pierced his brain, and before she could prevent him he slipped past her and opened the door.
'Oh, father, don't, for my sake, please.'
His lips moved but he did not speak.
'I will not make a scene,' he said at last.
'Father!'
'I will not make a scene, but I must do something....
I promise you that I will not make a scene, but I must go down to the drawing room in these clothes.
In these clothes,' he repeated.
She noticed that his step was heavy and irresolute and hoped he would refrain.
On The Relative Morality Of Catholic And Protestant Countries.
It has been gravely asserted that the confession of sin and the doctrine of absolution tend to the spread of crime and immorality.
As all our catechisms teach, and as every Catholic knows, there is no pardon of sin without sorrow of heart and purpose of amendment.
It is a great mistake to suppose that the most ignorant Catholic believes he can procure the pardon of his sins by simply confessing them without being truly sorry for them.
The estimate which so many Protestants set on the virtue of even the lower classes of Roman Catholics is clearly enough evinced in the preference which they constantly manifest in their employment of Catholics-practical Catholics-Catholics who go to confession.
I maintain, therefore, that confession, far from being an incentive to sin, as our adversaries have the hardihood to affirm, is a most powerful check on the depravity of men and a most effectual preventive of their criminal excesses.
But is it true that crimes, especially murder and illegitimacy, are more prevalent in Catholic than in Protestant countries?
I utterly deny the assertion, and also appeal to statistics in support of the denial.
Whence do our opponents derive their information?
M. Hobart Seymour's "Nights Among Romanists" and similar absolutely unreliable compilations, the false statements of which have been again and again refuted.
reverend Mr. Seymour gives the following list of the number of murders in England, France and Ireland:
Ireland: nineteen homicides to the million of inhabitants France: thirty one England: four
These figures, which are from authenticated sources, do not bear out our accusers in their assertion that murders are more prevalent in Catholic than in Protestant countries.
The statistics of this crime are limited, or they are not in very general circulation.
Here again we shall meet statistics with counter statistics to refute unjust declarations.
We do not wish to be understood as advocating the immaculateness of Catholic communities.
We frankly admit and heartily deplore the disorders which Catholics commit, but we deny that they are worse than their Protestant neighbors; and still more emphatically do we deny that the Church is responsible for their disorders.
The moral atmosphere of these countries, compared with England, must be as a healthful breeze to a pestilential marsh.
Percentage Of Illegitimacy In Protestant And Catholic Countries Of Europe.
Protestant.
And the same remark is applicable to Ireland.
"The proportion of illegitimate births to the total number of births is in Ireland three point eight per cent.; in England the proportion is six point four; in Scotland nine point nine; in other words, England is nearly twice, and Scotland nearly thrice worse, than Ireland.
Something worse has to be added, from which no consolation can be derived.
Taking Ireland according to the registration divisions, the proportion of illegitimate births varies from six point two to one point three.
The division showing this lowest figure is the western, being substantially the Province of Connaught, where about nineteen twentieths of the population are Celtic and Roman Catholic.
The division showing the highest proportion of illegitimacy is the north-eastern, which comprises, or almost consists of, the Province of Ulster, where the population is almost equally divided between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and where the great majority of Protestants are of Scotch blood and of the Presbyterian church.
The sum of the whole matter is, that semi Presbyterian and semi Scotch Ulster is fully three times more immoral than wholly Popish and wholly Irish Connaught-which corresponds with wonderful accuracy to the more general fact that Scotland, as a whole, is three times more immoral than Ireland as a whole."
It is worthy, too, of notice, that in the tabular statement above presented the percentage of illegitimacy in Holland and Switzerland, where there are large Catholic minorities, is lower than in any other Protestant country.
But we are not disposed to parade these monstrous vices, no matter by whom committed.
We certainly do not wish to excuse or palliate the evil deeds of Catholics, who, with all the blessed aids which their religion affords, ought to be much better than they are.
FOURTH CHARACTERISTIC
THEY who are animated by charity support patiently and in silence, in sentiments of humility and sweetness, as if they had neither eyes nor ears, the difficult, odd, and most inconstant humours of others, although they may find it very difficult at times to do so.
To be borne with, we must bear with others; to be loved, we must love; to be helped, we must help; to be joyful ourselves, we must make others so.
Surrounded as we are by so many different minds, characters, and interests, how can we live in peace for a single day if we are not condescending, accommodating, yielding, self denying, ready to renounce even a good project, and to take no notice of those faults and shortcomings which are beyond our power or duty to correct?
It never asks for exceptions or privileges for fear of exciting jealousy.
It fights antipathy and natural aversions so that they may never appear, and seeks even the company of those who might be the object of them.
It does not assume the office of reprehending or warning through a motive of bitter zeal.
It seeks to find in oneself the faults it notices in others, and perhaps greater ones, and tries to correct them.
We would willingly have others perfect, and yet we mend not our own defects.
We would have others strictly corrected, but are not fond of being corrected ourselves.
The large liberty of others displeases us, and yet we do not wish to be denied anything we ask for.
FIFTH CHARACTERISTIC
CHARITY is generous; it does everything it can.
When even it can do little, it wishes to be able to do more.
It never lets slip an opportunity of comforting, helping, and taking the most painful part, after the example of its Divine Model, Who came to serve, not to be served.
One religious, seemingly in pain, seeks comfort; another desires some book, instrument, etc; a third bends under a burden; while a fourth is afflicted.
In all these cases charity comes to the aid by consoling the one, procuring little gratifications for the other, and helping another.
"Does the hunter," says saint John Chrysostom, "who finds splendid game blame those who beat the brushwood before him?
Or does the traveller who finds a purse of gold on the road neglect to pick it up because others who preceded him took no notice of it?"
It would be a strange thing to find religious uselessly giving themselves to ardent desires of works of charity abroad, such as nursing in a hospital or carrying the Gospel into uncivilized lands, and at the same time in their own house and among their own brethren showing coldness, indifference, and want of condescension.
There is an art of giving as well as of refusing.
Several offend in giving because they do so with a bad grace; others in refusing do not offend because they know how to temper their refusal by sweetness of manner.
Charity possesses this art in a high degree, and, besides, raises a mere worldly art into a virtue and fruit of the Holy Ghost.
SIXTH CHARACTERISTIC
Would to God that this touching and edifying charity replaced the low and rampant vice of jealousy!
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SEVENTH CHARACTERISTIC
WE must pardon and do good for evil, as God has pardoned us and rendered good for evil in Jesus Christ.
It is vain to trample the violet, as it never resists, and he who crushes it only becomes aware of the fact by the sweetness of its perfume.
This is the image of charity.
Cassian makes mention of a religious who, having received a box on the ear from his abbot in presence of more than two hundred brethren, made no complaint, nor even changed colour.
saint Gregory praises another religious, who, having been struck several times with a stool by his abbot, attributed it not to the passion of the abbot, but to his own fault.
He adds that the humility and patience of the disciple was a lesson for the master.
This charity will have no small weight in the balance of Him Who weighs merit so exactly.
Charity gives no occasion to others to suffer, but suffers all patiently, not once, but all through life, every day and almost every hour.
It is most necessary for religious, as, not being able to seek comfort abroad, they are obliged to live in the same house, often in the same employment with characters less sympathetic than their own.
These little acts of charity count for little here below, and they are rather exacted than admired.
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EIGHTH CHARACTERISTIC
TELL TALES, nasty names, cold answers, lies, mockery, harsh words, etc, are all contrary to charity.
saint John Chrysostom says: "When anyone loads you with injuries, close your mouth, because if you open it you will only cause a tempest.
When in a room between two open doors through which a violent wind rushes and throws things in disorder, if you close one door the violence of the wind is checked and order is restored.
So it is when you are attacked by anyone with a bad tongue.
Your mouth and his are open doors.
Close yours, and the storm ceases.
If, unfortunately, you open yours, the storm will become furious, and no one can tell what the damage may be." If we have been guilty in this respect, let us humble ourselves before God.
In order to keep ourselves and others in a state of moderation, we must remember that all persons have some fad, mania, or fixed ideas which they permit no one to gainsay.
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NINTH CHARACTERISTIC
CHARITY lavishes care on the sick and infirm, on the old, on guests and new comers.
Charity pays honour to the aged in every respect, coincides with their sentiments, consults them, forestalls their desires, and attempts not to reform in them what cannot be reformed.
Charity receives fraternally all guests and new comers, and makes us treat them as we would wish to be treated under similar circumstances. It also causes us to lavish testimonies of affection on those who are setting out, and warns us to be very careful of saying or doing anything that may in the least degree offend even the most susceptible.
Religious must ever feel that they can bless, love, and thank religion as a good mother.
But religion is not an abstract matter; it is made up of individuals reciprocally bound together in and for each other.
Alas! how many times are the sick and the old made to consider themselves as an inconvenient burden, or like a useless piece of furniture!
In reality what are they doing?
Did our Divine Lord work less efficaciously for the Church when He hung on the Cross than when He preached?
fifteen
TENTH CHARACTERISTIC
"WE do not remember often enough our dear dead, our departed brethren," says saint Francis de Sales, "and the proof of it is that we speak so little of them.
We try to change the discourse as if it were hurtful.
In communities distinguished for fraternal charity and the family spirit the conversation frequently turns on the dead.
One talks of their virtues, another of their services, a third quotes some of their sayings, while a fourth adds some other edifying fact; and who is the religious that will not on such occasions breathe a silent prayer to God and apply some indulgence or other satisfactory work for the happy repose of their souls?
Charity also prays for those who want help most, and who are often known to God alone-those whose constancy is wavering, those who are led by violent temptations to the edge of the precipice.
It expands pent up souls by consolations or advice; it dissipates prejudices which tend to weaken the spirit of obedience; it is, in fine, a sort of instinct which embraces all those things suggested by zeal and devotion.
Can there be anything more agreeable to God, more useful to the Church, or more meritorious, than to foster thus amongst the well beloved children of God peace, joy, love of vocation, together with union amongst themselves and with their superiors?
sixteen
ELEVENTH CHARACTERISTIC
RELIGIOUS who have the family spirit wish to know everything which concerns the well-being of the different houses.
They willingly take their pens to contribute to the edification and satisfy the lawful curiosity of their brethren.
They bless God when they hear good news, and grieve at bad news, losses by death, and, above all, scandalous losses of vocation.
Charity, by uniting its good wishes and interest to the deeds of others, becomes associated at the same time in the merit.
seventeen
TWELFTH CHARACTERISTIC
BE edified at the sight of your brethren's virtues, and edify them by your own.
In other words, be alternately disciple and master.
By charity we store up in ourselves the gifts of grace enjoyed by every member of the community, in order to dispense them to all by a happy commerce and admirable exchange.
This spontaneity of virtues exercises on all the members a constant and sublime ministry of mutual edification and reciprocal sanctification.
ADDITIONS. FINAL ADVICE IN REGARD TO HOLY COMMUNION.
The faculty of willing is the only one we possess as our own, the only one we can use freely and at all times.
Hence it follows that it is by the will alone that we can in reality acquire merit or commit sin.
The natural virtues are gratuitous gifts of God.
God has placed them at the disposal of our will as means to an end, and we can make a good or bad use of them just as we can of all God's other gifts.
We may be deprived of these natural virtues and live by the will alone, spiritually dry and devoid of sentiment, and yet in a state of intimate union with God.
This explanation is intended to reassure such persons as are disposed to feel anxious when they find nothing in their hearts to correspond with the effusions of sensible love with which books of devotion abound in the preparation for Holy Communion.
These usually make the mistake of taking for granted the invariable existence of sentiment, and of addressing it exclusively.
How many souls do we not see who in consequence grow alarmed about their condition, believing they are devoid of grace notwithstanding their firm will to shun sin and to please God!
They should, however, not give way to anxiety, nor exhaust themselves by vain efforts to excite in their hearts a sensibility that God has not given them.
Thus we find Saint Francis de Sales, who possessed in such a high degree sensible love of God and all the natural virtues, making this positive declaration: "The greatest proof we can have in this life that we are in the grace of God, is not sensible love of Him, but the firm resolution never to consent to any sin great or small."
Pious persons can make use of the following prayers with profit when they are habitually or accidentally in the condition described above.
They will then see how the will alone, without the aid of feeling, can produce acts of all the christian virtues.
Act of Confidence.
Misery and infirmity are claims for admission to Thy Feast, but nothing can dispense from the nuptial garment.
I accept, O my God!--be it a well merited punishment or a salutary trial,--this privation of light and sensible devotion, this coldness and distraction, which accompany me even into Thy presence when all the faculties of my soul should be absorbed and confounded in sentiments of adoration and of love.
Faith, hope and charity seem to be extinct in my heart, but I know that Thou never withdrawest these virtues when we do not voluntarily renounce them.
Act of Faith.
Act of Hope.
Act of Love.
Act of Desire.
No, I am not indifferent, Thou knowest, O my God! that I am not indifferent to this Most Holy Sacrament which I approach unmoved by any sensible feeling: for Thou seest that although I find in Holy Communion neither relish nor consolation, I would yet make any sacrifice in order to receive it.
Act of Contrition.
If you have an ardent desire for the sensible love of God, a desire that cannot but be pleasing to Him provided you are at the same time resigned to be deprived of it, remember that according to Saint john Chrysostom it can be obtained only by fidelity to prayer.
Yes, this love is so great a good that God wishes to be the sole dispenser of it: He bestows it only in proportion as we ask it of Him, and ordinarily makes us wait for some time before He grants it.
There are few prayers better calculated to dispose the soul to receive this great grace than the sixteen. and seventeen. chapters of the fourth.
CHAPTER three.
IT WAS about three weeks after Ferdinand Armine had quitted Ducie that mr Temple entered the breakfast room one morning, with an open note in his hand, and told Henrietta to prepare for visitors, as her old friend, Lady Bellair, had written to apprise him of her intention to rest the night at Ducie, on her way to the North.
'She brings with her also the most charming woman in the world,' added mr Temple, with a smile.
'I have little doubt Lady Bellair deems her companion so at present,' said Miss Temple, 'whoever she may be; but, at any rate, I shall be glad to see her ladyship, who is certainly one of the most amusing women in the world.'
We shall all be well cross examined as to the state of the establishment; and so I advise you to be prepared.
Her ladyship is a rum one, and that's the truth.'
In due course of time, a handsome travelling chariot, emblazoned with a viscount's coronet, and carrying on the seat behind a portly man servant and a lady's maid, arrived at Ducie.
The green parrot, in its sparkling cage, followed next, and then came forth the prettiest, liveliest, smallest, best dressed, and, stranger than all, oldest little lady in the world.
Lady Bellair was of childlike stature, and quite erect, though ninety years of age; the tasteful simplicity of her costume, her little plain white silk bonnet, her grey silk dress, her apron, her grey mittens, and her Cinderella shoes, all admirably contrasted with the vast and flaunting splendour of her companion, not less than her ladyship's small yet exquisitely proportioned form, her highly finished extremities, and her keen sarcastic grey eye.
An arrival was an important moment that required all her practised circumspection; there was so much to arrange, so much to remember, and so much to observe.
The portly serving man had advanced, and, taking his little mistress in his arms, as he would a child, had planted her on the steps.
'Here! where's the butler?
I don't want you, stupid [addressing her own servant], but the butler of the house, Mister's butler; what is his name, mr Twoshoes' butler?
Oh! you are there, are you?
How is your master?
I don't want it.
Where's the lady?
Why don't you answer?
Why do you stare so?
Miss Temple!
no! not Miss Temple!
But she has got two names.
My dear,' continued Lady Bellair, addressing her travelling companion, 'I don't know your name.
Tell all these good people your name; your two names!
I like people with two names.
Tell them, my dear, tell them; tell them your name, mrs Thingabob, or whatever it is, mrs Thingabob Twoshoes.'
mrs Montgomery Floyd, though rather annoyed by this appeal, still contrived to comply with the request in the most dignified manner; and all the servants bowed to mrs Montgomery Floyd.
'Man, there's something wanting.
I had three things to take charge of. The parrot and my charming friend; that is only two.
There is a third. What is it?
You don't know!
Here, you man, who are you?
I knew your master when he was not as high as that cage.
What do you think of that?' continued her ladyship, with a triumphant smile. 'What do you laugh at, sir?
That I would wager you have not.
What do I want?
I want something.
Now, I knew a gentleman who made his fortune by once remembering what a very great man wanted.
I dare say if I were a minister of state, instead of an old woman ninety years of age, you would contrive somehow or other to find out what I wanted. Never mind, never mind.
Come, my charming friend, let me take your arm.
Now I will introduce you to the prettiest, the dearest, the most innocent and charming lady in the world.
She is my greatest favourite. She is always my favourite.
I always have two favourites: one for the moment, and one that I never change, and that is my sweet Henrietta Temple.
Gregory! run, Gregory!
It is the page!
There was no room for him behind, and I told him to lie under the seat.
Poor dear boy!
He must be smothered.
Has Miss Temple got a page?
Does her page wear a feather?
My page has not got a feather, but he shall have one, because he was not smothered.
Here! woman, who are you?
The housemaid.
I thought so.
You shall take care of my page.
Take him at once, and give him some milk and water; and, page, be very good, and never leave this good young woman, unless I send for you.
And, woman, good young woman, perhaps you may find an old feather of Miss Temple's page.
CHAPTER nineteen
GRIT WINS THE BATTLE
The lad appeared to strike the ground head on.
"Are you hurt?" asked Big foot, running to the boy and reaching out to assist him.
"I guess not," answered Tad, rubbing the sand from his eyes and blinking vigorously.
The skin had been scraped from his face in spots where the coarse sand had ground its way through.
His hair was filled with the dirt of the plain, and his clothes were torn.
You can't ride that critter!"
"I'll ride him-if he kills me!" answered the boy, his jaws setting stubbornly.
Tad hitched his belt tighter before making any move to approach the pony, which Stallings was now holding by main force.
While doing so, the lad watched the animal's buckings observantly.
"Foot slipped out of the stirrup."
"Think you can make it?"
"I'll try it, if you have the time to spare."
"It takes time to break a bronch.
Don't you worry about that.
I don't want you to be breaking your neck, however."
"My advice is that you keep off that animal," declared Professor Zepplin.
"You cannot manage him; that is plain."
"Please do not say that, Professor.
I must ride him now.
You wouldn't have me be a coward, would you?"
Stallings, realizing the boy's position, nodded slightly to the Professor.
"Very well, if mr Stallings thinks it is safe," agreed Professor Zepplin reluctantly.
Tad's face lighted up with a satisfied smile.
"Whoa, boy," he soothed, patting the animal gently on the neck.
Once more Tad petted him.
Don't know enough to know when he's well off.
Got your spurs on?"
"Yes."
Tad shook his head.
"Will you please coil up the stake rope and fasten it to the horn, mr Stallings?" asked Tad.
"I don't want to get tangled up with that thing."
"Yes, if you are sure you can stick on him."
"Leave that to me.
I know his tricks now."
Cautiously the rope was coiled and made fast to the saddle horn.
"I'm coming," said Tad in a quiet, tense voice.
The lad darted forward, running on his toes, his eyes fixed on the saddle.
Tad gave no heed to the pony.
It was that heavy bobbing saddle that he must safely make before the pony itself would enter into his considerations.
Lightly touching the saddle, he bounded into it, at the same time shoving both feet forward.
His sides, however, were being gripped by a muscular pair of legs, and his head was suddenly jerked up by a sharp tug at the rein.
"Yip!" answered Tad, though more to the pony than in answer to them.
Down went the pony's head between his forward legs, his hind hoofs beating a tattoo in the air.
The feet came down as suddenly as they had gone up.
Instantly the little animal began a series of stiff legged leaps into the air, his curving back making it a very uncomfortable place to sit on.
Tad's head was jerked back and forth until it seemed as though his neck would be broken.
"Look out for the side jump!" warned the foreman.
It came almost instantly, and with a quickness that nearly unhorsed the plucky lad.
Fortunately, the lad gripped the pommel with his right hand as he felt himself going, and little by little he pulled himself once more to an upright posture.
Tad's head swam.
As yet he had not seen fit to use the rowels.
There came a pause which was almost as disconcerting as had been the previous rapid movements.
"He's going to throw himself!
Don't get caught under him!" bellowed Big foot.
Tad was thankful for the suggestion, for he was not looking for that move at the moment.
The pony struck the ground on its left side with a bump that made the animal grunt.
Tad, however, forewarned, had freed his left foot from the stirrup and was standing easily over his fallen mount, eyes fixed on the beast's ears, ready to resume his position at the first sign of a quiver of those ears.
Like a flash the animal was on its feet again, but with Tad riding in the saddle, a satisfied smile on his face.
Once more the awful, nerve racking bucking began.
It did not seem as if a human being could survive that series of violent antics, and least of all a mere boy.
Tad knew instinctively what it meant.
Over went the broncho on its back, rolling to its side quickly.
Tad was on the ground beside it, standing in a half crouching position, with one foot on the saddle horn.
He had jerked the broncho's head clear of the ground with a strong tug on the reins, making the animal helpless to rise until the lad was ready for him to do so.
The cowboys uttered a yell of triumph.
"Great!
Great!" approved Bob Stallings.
"Tenderfoot, eh?" jeered Big foot Sanders.
"Hooray for the Pinto!"
Tad's companions gave a shrill cheer.
"Wait.
He ain't out of the woods yet," growled Lumpy Bates.
"Think you could do it better, hey?" snapped Curley Adams.
"Why, that cayuse would shake the blooming neck off you if you were in that saddle. I never did see such a whirlwind."
"Got springs in his feet, I reckon," grinned Big foot.
"Don't let his head down till you're ready for the get away," cautioned the foreman.
Tad suddenly allowed the head to touch the ground, after the pony had lain pinned at his feet, breathing hard for a full minute.
Boy and mount were in the air in a twinkling.
With a quick pause, as if in surprise, the beast shot its head back to fasten its teeth in the leg of the rider.
Tad had jerked his leg away as he saw the movement, with the result that only part of his leggin came away between the teeth of the savage animal.
Crack!
Down came the quirt again.
The broncho's head straightened out before him with amazing quickness. He was beginning to fear as well as hate the human being who so persistently sat his back and tortured him.
The pony sprang into the air.
"They're off!" shouted the cowboys.
With amazing quickness the animal lunged ahead, paused suddenly, then shot across the plain in a series of leaps and twists.
Tad shook out the rein, at the same time giving a gentle pressure to the rowels of his spurs.
Maddened almost beyond endurance, the pony started at a furious pace, not pausing until more than a mile had been covered.
When he did bring up it was with disconcerting suddenness.
Again the wide open mouth reached for the lad's left leg.
But this time Tad pressed in the spurs on the right side.
The pony tried to bite that way, whereat its rider spurred it on the left side.
This was continued until, at least, in sheer desperation, the animal started again to run.
However, when he sought to unseat his rider by brushing against the trunk of a large tree, he again felt the sting of the quirt on his flank.
Gradually Tad now began to work the animal around.
Tad's face was flushed with pride.
The lad's whole attention was centered on the pony under him.
He was determined to make a grand finish that, while exhibiting his horsemanship, would at the same time give the pony a lesson not soon to be forgotten.
"You've got him!" cried Ned Rector as Tad approached, now at a gallop, the animal's ears lying back angrily.
"Don't be too sure," answered Big foot.
That means more trouble."
It came almost before the words were out of the cowpuncher's mouth.
The broncho stiffened, its hoofs ploughing little trails in the soft dirt of the plain as it skidded to a stop.
Suddenly settling back on its haunches, the broncho rolled over on its side.
Tad, with a grin, stepped off a few paces, taking with him, however, the coil of rope, one end of which was still fastened around the beast's neck.
Tad moved swiftly to the right, so as not to get a tug on the rope over the back of the pony.
The coil was running out over his hands like a thing of life.
Grasping the end firmly, the lad shook out the rest of the rope, leaning back until it was almost taut.
Tad gave the rope a quick rolling motion just as it was being drawn taut.
The result was as surprising as it was sudden.
The animal's four feet were snipped from under it neatly, sending the broncho to earth with a disheartening bump.
Without giving it a chance to rise, Tad sprang upon it, and, when the pony rose, Tad Butler was sitting proudly in the saddle.
The little beast's head went down.
A great shout of approval went up from cowpunchers and Pony Riders.
They had never seen a breaking done more skillfully.
Tad's gloved hand patted the neck of the subdued animal affectionately.
"I'm sorry I had to be rough with you, old boy, but you shall have a lump of sugar.
CHAPTER twenty
DINNER AT THE OX BOW
"Welcome to the Ox Bow, young gentlemen," greeted Colonel McClure.
The rancher and his wife were waiting at the lower end of the lawn as the Pony Rider Boys, accompanied by Professor Zepplin, rode up on the following afternoon.
The lads wore their regulation plainsman's clothes, but for this occasion coats had been put on and hair combed, each desiring to look his best, as they were to meet the young ladies of the ranch.
"We owe you an apology, sir, for appearing in this condition," announced the Professor.
"Master Butler and myself have already settled that question," answered the rancher.
"As Henry Ward Beecher once said, 'Clothes don't make the man, but when he is made he looks very well dressed up.' I must say, however, that these young men are about as likely a lot of lads as I have ever seen."
Clear eyed, their faces tanned almost to a copper color, figures erect and shoulders well back, the Pony Rider Boys were indeed wholesome to look upon.
Perhaps Sadie and Margaret McClure were not blind to this, for they blushed very prettily, the boys thought, upon being presented to their guests.
ruth Brayton was in a sunny mood, laughing gayly as she chatted with the boys.
Tad glanced at her inquiringly.
She was not the same girl that he had met the day before.
There was a difference in the eyes, too.
Tad could not understand the change.
It perplexed him.
"I had so often wanted to take a trip through the Rockies on horseback," announced Miss Margaret.
"Yes; but you were driving cattle," objected mrs McClure.
"There probably is no harder work in the world.
We, down here, know something about that."
"I-I killed a bobcat up in the mountains," Stacy Brown informed them, with enthusiasm.
"He did.
And I fell off a mountain," laughed Walter Perkins.
"You see we have had quite a series of experiences."
"Indeed you have.
How long do you expect to remain with the herd?
Are you going through with them?"
"I believe not," answered Tad Butler.
"I think we shall be leaving very soon now.
We have a lot of traveling to do yet, as it has been planned that we shall see a good deal of the country before it is time to return to school this fall."
"Yes; I believe so."
"I should love it."
"We are getting to love it ourselves.
It will be hard to have to sleep indoors again."
Shortly afterwards all were summoned in to supper.
Stacy Brown's eyes sparkled with anticipation as he surveyed the table resplendent with silver and cut glass-loaded, too, with good things to eat.
Ned Rector observed the look in his companion's eyes.
"Now, don't forget that we are not eating off the tail board of the chuck wagon, Chunky," he whispered in passing.
"Be as near human as you can and satisfy your appetite."
"Take your advice to yourself," he muttered.
Colonel McClure proved an entertaining host, and the boys were led on to talk about themselves during most of the meal.
"Built by the Mexicans more than a hundred years ago."
"Yes, so I understand."
Almost the instant he caught it it was gone.
"I'm afraid you have been misinformed, Master Stacy," answered Colonel McClure.
"How about the trouble that the cattle men experience when near the place?" spoke up Ned Rector.
"Nothing at all-nothing at all.
Just a mere coincidence.
We live here and we have no more than the usual run of ill luck with our stock."
"Stampedes?" asked Tad.
"Seldom anything of that sort.
You see our stock is held by wire fences. If they want to stampede we let them-let them run until they are tired of it."
"I should like to explore the old church," said Tad, again referring to the subject uppermost in his mind.
"Nothing to hinder.
ruth, why can't you and the girls take the young men over there to morrow if the day is fine?
You know the place and its history.
"We should be delighted," answered Ned Rector promptly.
"We might make it a picnic," suggested Margaret McClure.
"And have things to eat?" asked Stacy, evincing a keen interest in the proposal.
"Of course," smiled mrs McClure.
I will send some of the servants over to serve the picnic lunch."
"Thank you," smiled Tad gratefully.
"It will be a happy afternoon for all of us if Miss Brayton can find the time to take us."
"Of course ruth will go," nodded mrs McClure.
"Yes," answered the young woman.
"What time shall we arrange to start, auntie?"
"Perfectly," answered Tad.
"You might first take a gallop to the Springs.
That will give you all an appetite."
"About seven miles to the eastward of the ranch.
A most picturesque place," answered Colonel McClure.
We can ride about the ranch if it would please you."
"I should be delighted."
"I was going to suggest, too, that it might be a pleasant relief for all of you to accept the hospitality of the Ox Bow ranch and remain here while you are in the vicinity.
We have room to spare and would be glad to have you."
"Not at all-not at all.
I understand you perfectly.
I shall not press the point.
But spend all the time you can with us.
The place is yours. Make yourselves at home."
"No; mr Stallings would not like it if we were to remain away over night.
You see, he expects us to do our share of night guard duty," explained Tad.
"We are earning our keep as it were."
"That is, some of us are," corrected Ned, with a sly glance at Stacy, who was eating industriously.
"Others are eating for their keep."
The Pony Rider Boys caught the hidden meaning in his words, but they tried not to let their hosts observe that it was a joke at the expense of one of them.
"Stallings," murmured Miss Brayton, her eyes staring vacantly at Tad Butler.
Miss Brayton excused herself rather abruptly and left the room.
They did not see her again that evening.
"My niece has been ailing of late," explained mrs McClure.
"Oh, yes, I wish her to.
It will do her good-it will take her mind from herself."
Tad Butler noted the last half of the sentence particularly.
For him it held a deeper meaning than it did for his companions.
No, I won't.
It's none of my business.
Still, it will do no harm to ask him, or to mention the name to him.
That surely would not be wrong."
After supper games were brought out and a happy evening followed.
Ten o'clock came, and Professor Zepplin, glancing at his watch, was about to propose a return to camp, when one of Colonel McClure's cowboys appeared in the doorway, hat in hand.
"Beg pardon; may I speak with you a moment?" asked the man.
After a little their host returned, but rather hurriedly, it seemed, and Tad's keen eyes noticed that he seemed disturbed.
mr McClure caught the lad's inquiring gaze fixed upon him.
He nodded.
"Is anything wrong?" asked the rancher's wife.
"Yes; I am afraid there is," he answered quietly.
"What is it?"
"I am not sure.
Perhaps I should not alarm you young gentlemen, but I think you should know."
"At the camp, you mean?" asked Tad.
"Yes."
"What's that?" demanded Professor Zepplin sharply.
"Something wrong at the camp?"
"My men think so.
They say they hear shooting off in that direction, and want to know if they shall ride out."
"A stampede?
Yes; I should not be surprised."
"We must go," announced the lad, rising promptly.
"Why go?" asked Margaret.
"We may be needed."
"But my men have started already," replied the rancher.
"They surely will be help enough."
"mr
Stallings will expect us.
We may be able to be of some assistance."
"Well, if you must.
Yes; you are right.
Business is business, even when one is out on a pleasure trip.
It's a good sign in a young man.
Tell your foreman that he may call upon us to any extent."
"Thank you, I will," replied Tad.
Bidding their hosts a hasty good night, and promising to be on hand at the appointed hour on the following day if the condition of the herd permitted, the Pony Rider Boys ran for their ponies.
They, too, were now able to hear the short, spiteful bark of the six shooters.
It was a significant sound.
They had heard it too many times before not to understand it.
In their minds they could see the hardy cowboys riding in front of the unreasoning animals, shooting into the ground in front of them, seeking to check the rush.
"What do you think about this business?" asked Tad Butler, drawing up beside Ned Rector.
"I think there is more in this spook story than Colonel McClure knows of, or, at least, will admit."
"So do I," answered Tad.
CHAPTER four
mrs KEBBY'S DISCOVERY
Also, he made him look out of the window into the yard itself, with its tall black fence dividing it from the other properties.
This exploration finished, and Lucian being convinced that himself and his host were the only two living beings in the house, Berwin conducted his half frozen guest back to the warm sitting room and poured out a glass of wine.
"Here, mr Denzil," said he in good-natured tones, "drink this and draw near the fire; you must be chilled to the bone after our Arctic expedition."
When Lucian stood up to take his departure, he addressed him directly:
I cannot explain what I saw to night, but as surely as you were out of this house, some people were in it.
Keep your own secrets, and go your own way.
I wish you good night, sir," and Lucian moved towards the door.
Berwin, who was holding a full tumbler of rich, strong port, drank the whole of it in one gulp.
I will have nothing to do with your business.
Besides," added Lucian, with a shrug, "they do not interest me."
"Yet they may interest the three kingdoms one day," said Berwin softly.
"Oh, if they deal with danger to society," said Denzil, thinking his strange neighbour spoke of anarchistic schemes, "I would----"
"They deal with danger to myself," interrupted Berwin.
"People with whom you have no concern," replied the man sullenly.
"That is true enough, mr Berwin, so I'll say good night!"
Berwin!
A very good name, Berwin, but not for me.
Oh, was there ever so unhappy a creature as I? False name, false friend, in disgrace, in hiding!
Curse everybody!
Go! go!
mr Denzil, and leave me to die here like a rat in its hole!"
"You are ill!" said Lucian, amazed by the man's fury.
"Good night, then," said Denzil, seeing that nothing could be done.
"I hope you will be better in the morning."
Berwin shook his head, and with a silent tongue, which contrasted strangely with his late outcry, ushered Denzil out of the house.
He could make nothing of Berwin-as he chose to call himself-he could see no meaning in his wild words and mad behaviour; but as he walked briskly back to his lodgings he came to the conclusion that the man was nothing worse than a tragic drunkard, haunted by terrors engendered by over indulgence in stimulants.
Henceforth I'll neither see nor think of this drunken lunatic," and with such resolve he dismissed all thoughts of his strange acquaintance from his mind, which, under the circumstances, was perhaps the wisest thing he could do.
But later on certain events took place which forced him to alter his determination.
Fate, with her own ends to bring about is not to be denied by her puppets; and of these Lucian was one, designed for an important part in the drama which was to be played.
mrs Margery Kebby, who attended to the domestic economy of Berwin's house, was a deaf old crone with a constant thirst, only to be assuaged by strong drink; and a filching hand which was usually in every pocket save her own.
She had neither kith nor kin, nor friends, nor even acquaintances; but, being something of a miser, scraped and screwed to amass money she had no need for, and dwelt in a wretched little apartment in a back slum, whence she daily issued to work little and pilfer much.
Usually at nine o'clock she brought in her employer's breakfast from the Nelson Hotel, which was outside the Square, and while he was enjoying it in bed, after his fashion, she cleaned out and made tidy the sitting room.
Berwin then dressed and went out for a walk, despite Miss Greeb's contention that he took the air only at night, like an owl, and during his absence mrs Kebby attended to the bedroom.
She then went about her own business, which was connected with the cleaning of various other apartments, and only returned at midday and at night to lay the table for Berwin's luncheon and dinner, or rather dinner and supper, which were also sent in from the hotel.
For these services Berwin paid her well, and only enjoined her to keep a quiet tongue about his private affairs, which mrs Kebby usually did until excited by too copious drams of gin, when she talked freely and unwisely to all the servants in the Square.
Also, she could tell fortunes by reading tea leaves and shuffling cards, and was not above aiding the maid servants in their small love affairs.
In short, mrs Kebby was a dangerous old witch, who, a century back, would have been burnt at the stake; and the worst possible person for Berwin to have in his house.
She had a firm idea that Berwin had, in her own emphatic phrase, "done something" for which he was wanted by the police, and was always on the look out to learn the secret of his isolated life, in order to betray him, or blackmail him, or get him in some way under her thumb.
As yet she had been unsuccessful.
Deeming her a weak, quiet old creature, Berwin, in spite of his suspicious nature, entrusted mrs Kebby with the key of the front door, so that she could enter for her morning's work without disturbing him. The sitting room door itself was not always locked, but Berwin usually bolted the portal of his bedroom, and had invariably to rise and admit mrs Kebby with his breakfast.
The same routine was observed each morning, and everything went smoothly.
The man was as great a mystery to mrs Kebby as he was to the square, in spite of her superior opportunities of learning the truth.
She laid the table, made up the fire, and before taking her leave asked mr Berwin if he wanted anything else.
"No, I think not," replied the man, who looked wretchedly ill.
"You can bring my breakfast to morrow."
"At nine, sir?"
"At the usual time," answered Berwin impatiently.
As she left the house eight o'clock chimed from the steeple of a near church, and mrs Kebby, clinking her newly received wages in her pocket, hurried out of the square to do her Christmas marketing.
As she went down the street which led to it, Blinders, a burly, ruddy faced policeman, who knew her well, stopped to make an observation.
"Is that good gentleman of yours home, mrs Kebby?" he asked, in the loud tones used to deaf people.
"I saw him an hour ago," explained Blinders, "and I thought he looked ill."
"So he do, like a corpse.
What of that?
We've all got to come to it some day.
Well, I don't care.
He's paid me up till to night.
"Don't you get drunk, mrs Kebby, or I'll lock you up."
"Garn!" grunted the old beldame.
"I'm taking the place of a sick comrade, and I'll be on duty all night. That's my Christmas."
"Well! well!
Here she began to celebrate the season, and afterwards went shopping; then she celebrated the season again, and later carried home her purchases to the miserable garret she occupied.
Next morning she woke in anything but an amiable mood, and had to fortify herself with an early drink before she was fit to go about her business.
It was almost nine when she reached the Nelson Hotel, and found the covered tray with mr Berwin's breakfast waiting for her; so she hurried with it to Geneva Square as speedily as possible, fearful of a scolding. Having admitted herself into the house, mrs Kebby took up the tray with both hands, and pushed open the sitting room door with her foot.
Here, at the sight which met her eyes, she dropped the tray with a crash, and let off a shrill yell.
CHAPTER five
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
To add to the wonderment of the public, it came out in the evidence of Lucian Denzil at the inquest that Berwin was not the real name of the victim; so here the authorities were confronted with a three fold problem.
Berwin-so called-was dead, his assassin had melted into thin air, and the Silent House had added a second legend to its already uncanny reputation.
Formerly it had been simply haunted, now it was also blood stained, and its last condition was worse than its first.
When she returned, shortly after nine, on Christmas morning, the man was dead and cold.
Search was immediately made for the murderer, but no trace could be found of him, nor could it be ascertained how he had entered the house. The doors were all locked, the windows were all barred, and neither at the back nor in the front was there any outlet left open whereby the man-if it was a man who had done the deed-could have escaped.
The policeman knew every one, even to the errand boys of the neighbourhood, who brought parcels of Christmas goods, and in many cases had exchanged greetings with the passers by; but he was prepared to swear, and, in fact, did swear at the inquest, that no stranger either came into or went out of Geneva Square.
He gave neither cheque nor notes, but paid always in gold; and beyond the fact that he called himself Mark Berwin, the landlord knew nothing about him.
The firm who had furnished the rooms made almost the same report, quite as meagre and unsatisfactory.
Berwin-so called-was dead; he was buried under his assumed name, and there, so far as the obtainable evidence went, was an end to the strange tenant of the Silent House.
Gordon Link, the detective charged with the conduct of the case, confessed as much to Denzil.
"I do not see the slightest chance of tracing Berwin's past," said he to the barrister.
"Are you sure there is no clue, mr Link?"
"Absolutely none; even the weapon with which the crime was committed cannot be found."
"You have searched the house?"
"Every inch of it, and with the result that I have found nothing.
"Which you did?"
"Yes, but found nothing; yet," said Lucian, with an air of conviction, "however the man and woman entered, they were in the house."
"No; I asked him," replied the detective, "but he stated that houses nowadays were not built with secret passages.
"Vengeance!" repeated Link, raising his eyebrows.
"Is not that word a trifle melodramatic?"
However, mr Link," added Lucian, "I have come to certain conclusions.
"Your third conclusion brings us round to the point whence we started," retorted Link.
"How am I to discover the man's past?"
And how is the business to be accomplished?"
"By advertisement."
"Advertisement!"
"Yes.
"In the newspapers, also?" asked Lucian, nettled by the detective's tone.
"No; it is not necessary."
"I don't agree with you.
"I'll think of it," said Link, too jealous of his dignity to give way at once.
"You know your own business best.
But if you succeed in identifying Berwin, will you let me know?"
Link looked keenly at the young man.
"Why do you wish to know about the matter?" he asked.
"Out of simple curiosity.
"Well," said Link, rather gratified by this tribute to his power, "I shall indulge your fancy."
Within the week he received a visit from the detective.
"Who is the lady?"
"A mrs Vrain, who writes from Bath."
"Can she identify the dead man?"
"She thinks she can, but, of course, she cannot be certain until she sees the body.
CHAPTER six
It seemed likely that mrs Vrain, who asserted herself to be the wife of the deceased, would be able to answer these questions in full; therefore, he was punctual in keeping the appointment at the office of Link.
He was rather astonished to find that mrs Vrain had arrived, and was deep in conversation with the detective, while a third person, who had evidently accompanied her, sat near at hand, silent, but attentive to what was being discussed.
As the dead man had been close on sixty years of age, and mrs Vrain claimed to be his wife, Denzil had quite expected to meet with an elderly woman.
In spite of her grief her demeanour was lively and engaging, and her smile particularly attractive, lighting up her whole face in the most fascinating manner.
Her hands and feet were small, her stature was that of a fairy, and her figure was perfect in every way.
But then, on occasions, he was disposed to be hyper critical.
"Say, now," said mrs Vrain, casting an approving glance on Lucian's face, "I'm right down glad to see you.
"I knew him as mr Berwin-Mark Berwin," replied Denzil, taking a seat.
"Let us continue.
And isn't his first name Mark?" pursued the pretty widow.
"Well, my husband was called Mark, too, so there you are-Mark Berwin."
"Is this all your proof?" asked Link calmly.
Then he lost part of his little finger-left hand finger-in an accident out West. What other proof do you want, mr Link?"
"The proofs you have given seem sufficient, mrs Vrain, but may I ask when your husband left his home?"
"Vrain!" struck in Lydia, the widow, "Mark Vrain."
"I beg your pardon!
Well, Mark Vrain took the house in Geneva Square six months back.
Where was he during the other four?"
"You did not get on well together?" said Link sharply.
If he hadn't left me, I'd have left him-that's an almighty truth."
"Was mr Berwin-I beg pardon, Vrain-was he married twice?"
"He was a widower with a grown up daughter when I took him to church.
Well, can I get this assurance money?"
"I suppose so," said Link, "provided you can prove your husband's death."
"Wasn't he murdered?"
"The man called Berwin was murdered."
"All your evidence goes to prove it, yet the assurance company may not be satisfied with the proof. I expect the grave will have to be opened, and the remains identified."
But you know your heart is better than your tongue."
"It was, to put up so long with mr Vrain," said Lydia resentfully; "but I'm honest, if I'm nothing else.
I guess I'm sorry that Vrain got stuck like a pig; but it wasn't my fault, and I've done my best to show respect by wearing black.
But it is no good going on in this way, poppa, for I've no call to excuse myself to strangers.
"I know nothing about it," retorted the widow.
"Have you any idea who killed him?"
"I guess not!
How should I?"
"He," said mrs Vrain, with supreme contempt, "why, he hadn't backbone enough for folks to get riz at him!
He was half baked!"
"Crazy, that is," remarked Clyne; "always thought the world was against him, and folks wanted to get quit of him."
"That's a frozen fact, sir," cried Clyne, "and both Lyddy and I want to lynch the reptile as did it; but we neither of us know who laid him out."
"If you want to know how he died," explained Link, "I can tell you.
He was stabbed."
"So the journals said; with a bowie!"
"No, not with a bowie," corrected Lucian, "but with some long, sharp instrument."
"A dagger?" suggested Clyne.
"I should say a stiletto-an Italian stiletto."
mr MacLeod, the member of Parliament from Scotland, and Lord Lansdowne happened to be calling when I arrived, and Tom and the Scotch lady were there.
The chef waiter was taking the coats of the gentlemen callers. I received the guests, acknowledged the introductions, and then, as I removed my own coat, I handed him the little package.
"In England," she said, "ladies never converse with their servants, particularly in the presence of guests."
"Ladies never make gifts to their servants," she added.
I was homesick for Wisconsin, homesick for real and simple people. I wanted to go home!
That night Tom and I had our first real quarrel, and it was over my dismissal of the Scotch lady of aristocratic birth. Life became intolerable for a while.
Life was a stage.
I was dumb with loneliness and sick with the fear of lost faith.
When we were together I felt tongue tied.
He had tried to be gentle with me; but I was strange in this world of his, and lonely and sensitive.
I confessed to a little homesickness.
Tom became very attentive. He took me sightseeing.
And I was thinking-Tom would n't fit into my world, and I could not belong to his.
"The fault is with you," he said.
He never did.
In all the years together, which he made so rich and happy, Tom never understood how hard and bitter a school was that first year of my married life.
But Tom did try to give me a good time in London.
He took me to interesting places and we were entertained by a number of people, mostly ponderous and stupid.
Tom did not suggest that we entertain in our turn.
I think he felt I was not ready for it, although even in after years, when we talked frankly about many things, he would never admit this.
I was not well, and Tom, manlike, felt sure the change, a trip down to Essex and new people, would do me good.
The thought of the country and a visit with some good simple country folk appealed to me too, so I packed the bags and met Tom at Victoria Station at eleven o'clock.
Liveried coachmen collected our baggage.
We were led to a handsome cart drawn by a fine tandem team, and Tom and I were alone for a minute.
After more of the same kind of talk, he began to cook up some yarn to tell the valet.
Tom went back to London on the next train, and reached the "farm" with our baggage before it was time to dress for the eight o'clock dinner.
I batted my eyes to keep them open.
I tried to say a few words now and then to wake myself.
I felt myself slipping. Once my head dropped and came up with a jerk.
I watched the great French clock.
I looked at Tom.
It "was n't done" in England.
"What do you do if you can't keep awake?" I asked.
"You slip out quietly, go to your room ask a maid to call you after you have had forty winks, then you go back and pretend you are having a good time," said Tom.
We loved each other.
She made me talk French with her. My first formal dinner in France was a pleasant surprise.
It was like a great family party-not dull and quiet like the English dinner, and ever so much more fun.
Everybody participated.
Nothing surprises you.
You are at ease anywhere in the world.
No one was critical.
Happiness came back to me.
There had been hours in England when only the knowledge that a woman's rarest gift was coming to me, and that Tom was proud and happy about it, kept me from running away-back to the simple life of my own United States.
I began to understand my mother and the glory in the character which never faltered, although she was alone and life had been hard.
I loved the French.
He never accepted intimacy.
The free winds of the prairie had swept it from mine.
My new friends in Paris discovered my happy secret.
Motherhood is the great and natural event in the life of a woman in France, and no one makes a secret of it.
Up to eleven o'clock certain attire was proper.
If your watch stopped you were sure to break a social law.
Then I laughed about it.
Finally I rebelled.
But I never loved the city.
I enjoyed its art, its fascinating shops, its picturesque streets and people, and its beautiful women.
So I was glad to return to England.
I saw mr Balfour, so handsome and gracious that I refused to believe there had ever been cause to call him "Bloody Balfour." There was something kingly about him-yet he was simply mr Balfour.
Irving was interesting and striking, though certainly not handsome; but he took the compliment to himself, smiled, bowed his thanks, and said:
mr Gladstone, too, could indulge in small talk.
"Oh," I explained happily, "it is n't that-I 'm not tired.
It was the last bad break I made.
In France one guest speaks to any or all of the others; all one's friends extend congratulations if a baby is coming; one shares all his joys with friends.
But in England nobody must know, and everybody must be surprised.
No one ever speaks of himself in England.
I learned the ways of Europe, of the Orient, and of South America.
CHAPTER sixteen.
The Yuzgat maiden of "sweet sixteen" is a coy, babyish creature, possessed of a certain doll like prettiness, but at twenty three is a rapidly fading flower, and at thirty is already beginning to get wrinkled and old.
Watching over this peaceful and gambolling flock of Armenian lambkins is a lone Circassian watchdog; he is of a stalwart, warlike appearance; and although wearing no arms — except a cavalry sword, a shorter broad sword, a dragoon revolver, a two foot horse pistol, and a double barrelled shot gun slung at his back — the Armenians seem to feel perfectly safe under his protection.
These people invite me to remain with them until to morrow; but of course I excuse myself from this, and, after spending a very agreeable hour in their company, take my departure.
The country develops into an undulating plateau, which is under general cultivation, as cultivation goes in Asiatic Turkey.
Eggs there are none; they are devoured, I fancy, almost before they are laid.
When properly played, it produces soft, melodious music that, to say nothing else, must exert a gentle soothing influence on the wild, turbulent souls of a herd of goats.
East of Yennikhan, the road develops into an excellent macadamized highway, on which I find plenty of genuine amusement by electrifying the natives whom I chance to meet or overtake. Creeping noiselessly up behind an unsuspecting donkey driver, until quite close, I suddenly reveal my presence.
Chapter nine
This accident, which appeared so very serious to Pencroft, produced different effects on the companions of the honest sailor.
As to the reporter, he simply replied,--
"But, I repeat, that we haven't any fire!"
"But I say, mr Spilett-"
"Isn't Cyrus here?" replied the reporter.
"With what?"
"With nothing."
"Cyrus is here!"
The supper must necessarily be very meager.
Besides, the couroucous which had been reserved had disappeared.
First of all, Cyrus Harding was carried into the central passage.
Night had closed in, and the temperature, which had modified when the wind shifted to the northwest, again became extremely cold.
The engineer's condition would, therefore, have been bad enough, if his companions had not carefully covered him with their coats and waistcoats.
The experiment, therefore, did not succeed.
After working an hour, Pencroft, who was in a complete state of perspiration, threw down the pieces of wood in disgust.
"I could sooner light my arms by rubbing them against each other!"
Herbert, Neb, and Pencroft did the same, while Top slept at his master's feet.
This was his uppermost thought.
"You don't know yet?"
"That's capital!" cried the sailor.
"I feel dreadfully weak," replied Harding.
"Alas! we have no fire," said Pencroft, "or rather, captain, we have it no longer!"
"Well?" asked the sailor.
"Well, we will make matches.
"Chemicals!"
All went out.
"No, captain," replied the boy.
"Yes," replied Pencroft.
"What?"
"We will make it, Pencroft," replied Harding.
"Yes," replied Spilett, "a mountain which must be rather high-"
"Yes, fire!" said the obstinate sailor again.
"But he will make us a fire!" replied Gideon Spilett, "only have a little patience, Pencroft!"
The seaman looked at Spilett in a way which seemed to say, "If it depended upon you to do it, we wouldn't taste roast meat very soon"; but he was silent.
For a few minutes he remained absorbed in thought; then again speaking,--
If the direction has been maintained from the northeast to the southwest, we have traversed the States of North Carolina, of South Carolina, of Georgia, the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico, itself, in its narrow part, then a part of the Pacific Ocean.
If the last hypothesis is correct, it will be easy enough to get home again.
"Never?" cried the reporter.
"Better to put things at the worst at first," replied the engineer, "and reserve the best for a surprise."
"If, on my return, I find a fire at the house, I shall believe that the thunder itself came to light it." All three climbed the bank; and arrived at the angle made by the river, the sailor, stopping, said to his two companions,--
This time, the hunters, instead of following the course of the river, plunged straight into the heart of the forest.
There were still the same trees, belonging, for the most part, to the pine family.
"It will blaze, since my master has said so."
The exploration, therefore, continued, and was usefully marked by a discovery which Herbert made of a tree whose fruit was edible.
"We mustn't complain," said Herbert.
"I am not complaining, my boy," replied Pencroft, "only I repeat, that meat is a little too much economized in this sort of meal."
"Top has found something!" cried Neb, who ran towards a thicket, in the midst of which the dog had disappeared, barking.
With Top's barking were mingled curious gruntings.
If there was game there this was not the time to discuss how it was to be cooked, but rather, how they were to get hold of it.
The hunters had scarcely entered the bushes when they saw Top engaged in a struggle with an animal which he was holding by the ear.
It stupidly rolled its eyes, deeply buried in a thick bed of fat.
Perhaps it saw men for the first time.
However, Neb having tightened his grasp on his stick, was just going to fell the pig, when the latter, tearing itself from Top's teeth, by which it was only held by the tip of its ear, uttered a vigorous grunt, rushed upon Herbert, almost overthrew him, and disappeared in the wood.
All three directly darted after Top, but at the moment when they joined him the animal had disappeared under the waters of a large pond shaded by venerable pines.
Neb, Herbert, and Pencroft stopped, motionless.
Top plunged into the water, but the capybara, hidden at the bottom of the pond, did not appear.
"Let us wait," said the boy, "for he will soon come to the surface to breathe."
An instant later the capybara, dragged to the bank, was killed by a blow from Neb's stick.
Pencroft soon made a raft of wood, as he had done before, though if there was no fire it would be a useless task, and the raft following the current, they returned towards the Chimneys.
But the sailor had not gone fifty paces when he stopped, and again uttering a tremendous hurrah, pointed towards the angle of the cliff,--
"Herbert!
Smoke was escaping and curling up among the rocks.
Chapter nine
However well built and supplied the corral house was, it could not be so comfortable as the healthy granite dwelling.
Besides, it did not offer the same security, and its tenants, notwithstanding their watchfulness, were here always in fear of some shot from the convicts.
There, on the contrary, in the middle of that impregnable and inaccessible cliff, they would have nothing to fear, and any attack on their persons would certainly fail.
They waited, therefore, although they were anxious to be reunited at Granite House.
Since Ayrton's disappearance they were only four against five, for Herbert could not yet be counted, and this was not the least care of the brave boy, who well understood the trouble of which he was the cause.
The question of knowing how, in their condition, they were to act against the pirates, was thoroughly discussed on the twenty ninth of November by Cyrus Harding, Gideon Spilett, and Pencroft, at a moment when Herbert was asleep and could not hear them.
"My friends," said the reporter, after they had talked of Neb and of the impossibility of communicating with him, "I think,--like you, that to venture on the road to the corral would be to risk receiving a gunshot without being able to return it.
"That is just what I was thinking," answered Pencroft.
"I believe we're not fellows to be afraid of a bullet, and as for me, if Captain Harding approves, I'm ready to dash into the forest!
"But is he equal to five?" asked the engineer.
"I will join Pencroft," said the reporter, "and both of us, well armed and accompanied by Top-"
"My dear Spilett, and you, Pencroft," answered Harding, "let us reason coolly.
If the convicts were hid in one spot of the island, if we knew that spot, and had only to dislodge them, I would undertake a direct attack; but is there not occasion to fear, on the contrary, that they are sure to fire the first shot?"
"Well, captain," cried Pencroft, "a bullet does not always reach its mark."
"That which struck Herbert did not miss, Pencroft," replied the engineer.
Do you imagine that the convicts will not see you leave it, that they will not allow you to enter the forest, and that they will not attack it during your absence, knowing that there is no one here but a wounded boy and a man?"
"You are right, captain," replied Pencroft, his chest swelling with sullen anger.
"You are right; they will do all they can to retake the corral, which they know to be well stored; and alone you could not hold it against them."
"Oh, if we were only at Granite House!"
But we are at the corral, and it is best to stay here until we can leave it together."
"If only Ayrton was still one of us!" said Gideon Spilett.
"Poor fellow! his return to social life will have been but of short duration."
"If he is dead," added Pencroft, in a peculiar tone.
"Yes, if they had any interest in doing so."
"And I also," added the reporter quickly.
"That is difficult to say, Cyrus," answered the reporter, "for any imprudence might involve terrible consequences.
But his convalescence is progressing, and if he continues to gain strength, in eight days from now-well, we shall see."
Eight days!
At this time two months of spring had already passed.
The weather was fine, and the heat began to be great.
The forests of the island were in full leaf, and the time was approaching when the usual crops ought to be gathered.
But if they were compelled to bow before necessity, they did not do so without impatience.
He met with no misadventure and found no suspicious traces.
However, on his second sortie, on the twenty seventh of November, Gideon Spilett, who had ventured a quarter of a mile into the woods, towards the south of the mountain, remarked that Top scented something.
Gideon Spilett followed Top, encouraged him, excited him by his voice, while keeping a sharp look out, his gun ready to fire, and sheltering himself behind the trees.
It was not probable that Top scented the presence of man, for in that case, he would have announced it by half uttered, sullen, angry barks.
Nearly five minutes passed thus, Top rummaging, the reporter following him prudently when, all at once, the dog rushed towards a thick bush, and drew out a rag.
There it was examined by the colonists, who found that it was a fragment of Ayrton's waistcoat, a piece of that felt, manufactured solely by the Granite House factory.
"No, captain," answered the sailor, "and I repented of my suspicion a long time ago!
But it seems to me that something may be learned from the incident."
"What is that?" asked the reporter.
Therefore, perhaps, he is still living!"
"Perhaps, indeed," replied the engineer, who remained thoughtful.
This was a hope, to which Ayrton's companions could still hold.
Indeed, they had before believed that, surprised in the corral, Ayrton had fallen by a bullet, as Herbert had fallen.
But if the convicts had not killed him at first, if they had brought him living to another part of the island, might it not be admitted that he was still their prisoner? Perhaps, even, one of them had found in Ayrton his old Australian companion Ben Joyce, the chief of the escaped convicts.
He would have been very useful to them, if they had been able to make him turn traitor!
This incident was, therefore, favorably interpreted at the corral, and it no longer appeared impossible that they should find Ayrton again. On his side, if he was only a prisoner, Ayrton would no doubt do all he could to escape from the hands of the villains, and this would be a powerful aid to the settlers!
Pencroft had become a thorough farmer, heartily attached to his crops. But it must be said that Herbert was more anxious than any to return to Granite House, for he knew how much the presence of the settlers was needed there.
Several times he pressed Gideon Spilett, but the latter, fearing, with good reason, that Herbert's wounds, half healed, might reopen on the way, did not give the order to start.
Top, at the foot of the palisade, was jumping, barking, but it was with pleasure, not anger.
"Yes."
"Neb, perhaps?"
"Or Ayrton?"
Cyrus Harding was not mistaken.
At Jup's neck hung a small bag, and in this bag was found a little note traced by Neb's hand.
"Neb."
What were they to do?
The convicts on Prospect Heights! that was disaster, devastation, ruin.
I must go."
Gideon Spilett approached Herbert; then, having looked at him,--
"Let us go, then!" said he.
Would they not, on the contrary, by employing the cart leave every arm free? Was it impossible to place the mattress on which Herbert was lying in it, and to advance with so much care that any jolt should be avoided?
The cart was brought.
Pencroft harnessed the onager.
The weather was fine.
The engineer and Pencroft, each armed with a double barreled gun, and Gideon Spilett carrying his rifle, had nothing to do but start.
The engineer felt his heart sink painfully.
The gate of the corral was opened.
Certainly, it would have been safer to have taken a different road than that which led straight from the corral to Granite House, but the cart would have met with great difficulties in moving under the trees.
However, it was not probable that the convicts would have yet left the plateau of Prospect Heights.
They would, therefore, be safe at that time, and if there was any occasion for firing, it would probably not be until they were in the neighborhood of Granite House. However, the colonists kept a strict watch.
It had left the corral at half past seven.
They approached the plateau.
Cyrus Harding expected to find it in its place; supposing that the convicts would have crossed it, and that, after having passed one of the streams which enclosed the plateau, they would have taken the precaution to lower it again, so as to keep open a retreat.
At that moment Pencroft stopped the onager, and in a hoarse voice,--
He heard, and ran to meet them.
The convicts had left the plateau nearly half an hour before, having devastated it!
"And mr Herbert?" asked Neb.
Gideon Spilett returned to the cart.
MAY.
WHAT though my words glance sideways from the thing Which I would utter in thine ear, my sire! Truth in the inward parts thou dost desire- Wise hunger, not a fitness fine of speech: The little child that clamouring fails to reach With upstretched hand the fringe of her attire, Yet meets the mother's hand down hurrying.
seven.
eight.
nine.
ten.
eleven.
twelve.
thirteen.
fourteen.
fifteen.
Afresh I seek thee.
sixteen.
seventeen.
eighteen.
nineteen.
twenty.
twenty four.
twenty seven.
twenty eight.
'tis heart on heart thou rulest.
JUNE.
But, like a virtuous medicine, self diffused Through all men's hearts thy love shall sink and float; Till every feeling false, and thought unwise, Selfish, and seeking, shall, sternly disused, Wither, and die, and shrivel up to nought; And Christ, whom they did hang 'twixt earth and skies, Up in the inner world of men arise.
eight.
No likeness?
Lo, the Christ!
ten.
twelve.
They will not, therefore cannot, do not know him. Nothing they could know, could be God.
thirteen.
fourteen.
fifteen.
sixteen.
eighteen.
nineteen.
twenty.
twenty four.
twenty six.
Make my forgiveness downright-such as I Should perish if I did not have from thee; I let the wrong go, withered up and dry, Cursed with divine forgetfulness in me. 'tis but self pity, pleasant, mean, and sly, Low whispering bids the paltry memory live:-- What am I brother for, but to forgive!
twenty seven.
twenty eight.
twenty nine.
thirty.
If we might sit until the darkness go, Possess our souls in patience perhaps we might; But there is always something to be done, And no heart left to do it.
To and fro The dull thought surges, as the driven waves fight In gulfy channels.
"Wake, thou that sleepest; rise up from the dead, And Christ will give thee light." I do not know What sleep is, what is death, or what is light; But I am waked enough to feel a woe, To rise and leave death.
Stumbling through the night, To my dim lattice, O calling Christ!
six.
Wilt thou not one day, Lord?
In all my wrong, Self love and weakness, laziness and fear, This one thing I can say: I am content To be and have what in thy heart I am meant To be and have.
In my best times I long After thy will, and think it glorious dear; Even in my worst, perforce my will to thine is bent.
ten.
eleven.
My Lord, I have no clothes to come to thee; My shoes are pierced and broken with the road; I am torn and weathered, wounded with the goad, And soiled with tugging at my weary load: The more I need thee!
twelve.
thirteen.
fourteen.
sixteen.
seventeen.
eighteen.
nineteen.
twenty six.
twenty eight.
She leaves, but not forsakes.
twenty nine.
CHAPTER two
SHADOWS ON THE BLIND
At present, Miss Julia Greeb was an unwedded damsel of forty summers, who, with the aid of art, was making desperate but ineffectual efforts to detain the youth which was slipping from her.
She pinched her waist, dyed her hair, powdered her face, and affected juvenile dress of the white frock and blue sash kind.
In the distance she looked a girlish twenty; close at hand various artifices aided her to pass for thirty; and it was only in the solitude of her own room that her real age was apparent.
But this was the worst and most frivolous side of her character, for she was really a good hearted, cheery little woman, with a brisk manner, and a flow of talk unequalled in Geneva Square.
Nevertheless, she continued to keep boarders, and to make attempts to captivate the hearts of such bachelors as she judged weak in character.
He was her god, her ideal of manhood, and to him she offered worship, and burnt incense after the manner of her kind.
Miss Greeb attended to his needs herself, and brought up his breakfast with her own fair hands, happy for the day if her admired lodger conversed with her for a few moments before reading the morning paper.
Poor brainless, silly, pitiful Miss Greeb; she would have made a good wife and a fond mother, but by some irony of fate she was destined to be neither; and the comedy of her husband hunting youth was now changing into the lonely tragedy of disappointed spinsterhood.
She was one of the world's unknown martyrs, and her fate merits tears rather than laughter.
On the morning after his meeting with Berwin, the young barrister sat at breakfast, with Miss Greeb in anxious attendance.
His first word made Miss Greeb flutter back to the table like a dove to its nest.
"Of course I do, mr Denzil.
There ain't a thing I don't know about that house.
Ghosts and vampires and crawling spectres live in it-that they do."
"No; nor nothing half so respectable.
"In what way is he a mystery?" demanded Denzil, approaching the matter with more particularity.
He's full of secrets and underhand goings on.
This question also puzzled the landlady, as she had no reasonable grounds for her wild statements.
"Why not?
"He has no right to behave so, in a respectable square," replied Miss Greeb, shaking her head.
"There's only two rooms of that large house furnished, and all the rest is given up to dust and ghosts.
Then he has his meals sent in from the Nelson Hotel round the corner, and eats them all alone.
Miss Greeb still shook her head.
"Perhaps not, mr Denzil; but where do those he sees come from?"
"Well! well!
What of that?" said Denzil impatiently.
"This much, mr Denzil, that Blinders has gone round the square, after seeing mr Berwin, and has seen shadows-two or three of them-on the sitting room blind.
"Perhaps by the back," conjectured Lucian.
Again Miss Greeb shook her head.
"I know the back of no thirteen as well as I know my own face," she declared.
"There's a yard and a fence, but no entrance.
"I thought of that myself, and as my duty to the square I have inquired-that I have.
On two occasions I've asked the day policeman, and he says no one passed."
"Just because I don't," replied the landlady, with feminine logic.
"Such as-"
"Oh, I don't know," cried Miss Greeb, tossing her head and gliding towards the door.
"It ain't for me to say what I think.
I am the last person in the world to meddle with what don't concern me-that I am." And thus ending the conversation, Miss Greeb vanished, with significant look and pursed up lips.
Nevertheless, he held that he had no right to pry into the secrets of the stranger, and honourably strove to dismiss the tenant of no thirteen and his tantalising environments from his mind.
But such dismissal of unworthy curiosity was more difficult to effect than he expected.
For the next week Lucian resolutely banished the subject from his thoughts, and declined to discuss the matter further with Miss Greeb. That little woman, all on fire with curiosity, made various inquiries of her gossips regarding the doings of mr Berwin, and in default of reporting the same to her lodger, occupied herself in discussing them with her neighbours.
But on both occasions he was unsuccessful.
On the third evening he was more fortunate, for having worked at his law books until late at night, he went out for a brisk walk before retiring to rest.
On coming to the house of Berwin, the barrister saw that the sitting room was lighted up and the curtains undrawn, so that the window presented a square of illuminated blind.
Even as he looked, two shadows darkened the white surface-the shadows of a man and a woman.
Curious to see the end of this shadow pantomime, Lucian stood still and looked intently at the window.
The two figures seemed to be arguing, for their heads nodded violently and their arms waved constantly.
They retreated out of the sphere of light, and again came into it, still continuing their furious gestures. Unexpectedly the male shadow seized the female by the throat and swung her like a feather to and fro.
The struggling figures reeled out of the radiance and Lucian heard a faint cry.
Thinking that something was wrong, he rushed up the steps and rang the bell violently.
Almost before the sound died away the light in the room was extinguished, and he could see nothing more.
Again and again he rang, but without attracting attention; so Lucian finally left the house and went in search of Blinders, the policeman, to narrate his experience.
"AND WHERE WAS I WHEN ALL THIS HAPPENED?"
With one accord, and without stopping to pick their way, they made for the open doorway, knocking the smaller pieces of furniture about and creating havoc generally.
"She stood there! the woman stood there and I saw her!
Where is she now?"
We did not like the looks of her, and so followed her in to prevent mischief."
He seemed to be trying to adjust himself to some mental experience he could neither share with others nor explain to himself.
"She was here, then?--a woman with a little child?
Stopping short, he gazed down from his great height upon the trembling little body of whose identity he had but a vague idea, and thundered out in great indignation:
"How dared you!
They are never open.
Bela sees to that."
Bela!
Dead!
Was that a sob?
No single arm could have knocked down Bela.
"You were not-quite-quite yourself," she softly explained, wondering at her own composure.
Then quickly, as she saw his thoughts revert to the dead friend at his feet, "Bela was not hurt here. He was down town when it happened; but he managed to struggle home and gain this place, which he tried to hold against the men who followed him.
He thought you were dead, you sat there so rigid and so white, and, before he quite gave up, he asked us all to promise not to let any one enter this room till your son Oliver came."
"I must have had an attack of some kind," he calmly remarked.
Then she saw that his faculties were now fully restored, and came a step forward.
But before she could begin her story, he added this searching question:
Was it he who unlocked my gates?"
Miss Weeks sighed and betrayed fluster.
A pebble had done it all,--a pebble placed in the gateway by Bela's hands.
Evidently this intrusive little body did not know Bela or his story, or-
Why should interruption come then?
The library again! but how changed!
Evening light now instead of blazing sunshine; and evening light so shaded that the corners seemed far and the many articles of furniture, cumbering the spaces between, larger for the shadows in which they stood hidden.
Perhaps the man who sat there in company with the judge regretted this.
These were slow in coming, and they were unexpected when they came.
"Sergeant, I have lost a faithful servant under circumstances which have called an unfortunate attention to my house.
I should like to have this place guarded-carefully guarded, you understand-from any and all intrusion till I can look about me and secure protection of my own.
"Two men are already detailed for the job, your honour.
I heard the order given just as I left Headquarters."
The judge showed small satisfaction.
This surprised Sergeant Doolittle and led him to attempt to read its cause in his host's countenance.
But the shade of the lamp intervened too completely, and he had to be content to wait till the judge chose to speak, which he presently did, though not in the exact tones the Sergeant expected.
Couldn't I have three?
The sergeant hesitated; he felt an emotion of wonder-a sense of something more nearly approaching the uncanny than was usual to his matter of fact mind.
"If two men are not enough to ensure you a quiet sleep, you shall have three or four or even more, Judge Ostrander.
Do you want one of them to stay inside?
That might do the business better than a dozen out."
"no
When he is buried, I may call upon you for a special to watch my room door.
Only, who is to protect me against your men?"
"What do you mean by that, your honour?"
"They are human, are they not?
They have instincts of curiosity like the rest of us.
"It would be a breach of trust which would greatly disturb me.
Has not my long life of solitude within these walls sufficiently proved this?
I want to feel that these men of yours would no more climb my fence than they would burst into my house without a warrant."
"Judge, I will be one of the men.
You can trust me."
"Thank you, sergeant; I appreciate the favour.
But I shall always suffer from regret that I was not in a condition to receive his last sigh.
He was a man in a thousand.
"He was a very powerfully built man.
It took a sixty horse power racing machine, going at a high rate of speed, to kill him."
A spasm of grief or unavailing regret crossed the judge's face as his head sank back again against the high back of his chair.
"Enough," said he; "tread softly when you go by the sofa on which he lies.
Will you fill your glass again, sergeant?"
The sergeant declined.
"Not if my watch is to be effective to night," he smiled, and rose to depart.
The judge, grown suddenly thoughtful, rapped with his finger tips on the table edge.
He had not yet risen to show his visitor out.
"You were not at the inquiry this afternoon, and may not know that just as Bela and the crowd about him turned this corner, they ran into a woman leading a small child, who stopped the whole throng in order to address him.
No one heard what she said; and no one could give any information as to who she was or in what direction she vanished.
She was in this house.
She was in this room.
She came as far as that open space just inside the doorway.
I can describe her, and will, if you will consent to look for her.
It is to be a money transaction, sergeant, and if she is found and no stir made and no talk started among the Force, I will pay all that you think it right to demand."
"Let me hear her description, your honour." The judge, who had withdrawn into the shadow, considered for a moment, then said:
"I cannot describe her features, for she was heavily veiled; neither can I describe her figure except to say that she is tall and slender.
But her dress I remember to the last detail, though I am not usually so observant.
She wore purple; not an old woman's purple, but a soft shade which did not take from her youth.
There was something floating round her shoulders of the same colour, and on her arms were long gloves such as you see our young ladies wear.
The child did not seem to belong to her, though she held her tightly by the hand.
In age it appeared to be about six-or that was the impression I received before-"
No, or if he had been witness to something of the kind, it was for a moment only; for the eyes which had gone blank had turned his way again, and only a disconnected expression which fell from the judge's lips, showed that his mind had been wandering.
"It's not the same but another one; that's all."
Inconsequent words, but the sergeant meant to remember them, for with their utterance, a change passed over the judge; and his manner, which had been constrained and hurried during his attempted description, became at once more natural, and therefore more courteous.
"Do you think you can find her with such insufficient data?
A woman dressed in purple, leading a little child without any hat?"
Do you remember the old tavern on the Rushville road?
The judge sat quiet, but the sergeant who dared not peer too closely, noticed a sudden constriction in the fingers of the hand with which his host fingered a paper cutter lying on the table between them.
"The one where-"
"I respect your hesitation, judge.
A gesture had stopped him.
He waited respectfully for the judge's next words.
They came quickly and with stern and solemn emphasis.
"For a hideous and wholly unprovoked crime.
"Because of something I have lately heard in its connection.
The proprietor's name is Yardley.
We have nothing against him; the place is highly respectable.
But it harbours a boarder, a permanent one, I believe, who has occasioned no little comment.
No one has ever seen her face; unless it is the landlord's wife.
Perhaps she's your visitor of to day. Hadn't I better find out?"
"Has she a child?
Is she a mother?"
The judge's hand withdrew from the table and for an instant the room was so quiet that you could hear some far off clock ticking out the minutes. Then Judge Ostrander rose and in a peremptory tone said:
"To morrow.
After you hear from me again.
Make no move to night.
Let me feel that all your energies are devoted to securing my privacy."
The sergeant, who had sprung to his feet at the same instant as the judge, cast a last look about him, curiosity burning in his heart and a sort of desperate desire to get all he could out of his present opportunity.
For he felt absolutely sure that he would never be allowed to enter this room again.
But the arrangement of light was such as to hold in shadow all but the central portion of the room; and this central portion held nothing out of the common-nothing to explain the mysteries of the dwelling or the apprehensions of its suspicious owner.
Unexpectedly to himself, the judge's intentions were in the direction of his own wishes.
He was led front; and, entering an old-fashioned hall dimly lighted, passed a staircase and two closed doors, both of which gave him the impression of having been shut upon a past it had pleasured no one to revive in many years.
Many years had passed since Judge Ostrander had played the host; but he had not lost a sense of its obligations.
It was for him to shoot the bolts and lift the bars; but he went about it so clumsily and with such evident aversion to the task, that the sergeant instinctively sprang to help him.
"I shall miss Bela at every turn," remarked the judge, turning with a sad smile as he finally pulled the door open.
"This is an unaccustomed effort for me.
Excuse my awkwardness."
The sergeant was so occupied by the mystery of the man and the mystery of the house that they had passed the first gate (which the judge had unlocked without much difficulty) before he realised that there still remained something of interest for him to see and to talk about later. The two dark openings on either side, raised questions which the most unimaginative mind would feel glad to hear explained.
Ere the second gate swung open and he found himself again in the street, he had built up more than one theory in explanation of this freak of parallel fences with the strip of gloom between.
He rode on briskly for a full hour, anxiously watching both sides of the road for a cabin or cabin smoke.
By that time night had come fully, though fortunately it was clear but very cold.
The smoke came from a strong double cabin, standing about four hundred yards from the road, and the sight of the heavy log walls made Dick all the more anxious to get inside them.
As he approached two yellow curs rushed forth and began to bark furiously, snapping at the horse's heels, the usual mountain welcome. But when a kick from the horse grazed the ear of one of them they kept at a respectful distance.
"Hello!
Hello!" called Dick loudly.
A man, elderly, but dark and strong, with the high cheek bones of an Indian stood in the door, the light of a fire blazing in the fireplace on the opposite side of the wall throwing him in relief.
His hair was coal black, long and coarse, increasing his resemblance to an Indian.
Dick rode close to the door, and, without hesitation, asked for a night's shelter and food.
The man sharply bade the dogs be silent and they retreated behind the house, their tails drooping.
"'Light, stranger, an' we'll put up your horse.
Mandy will have supper ready by the time we finish the job."
Dick sprang down gladly, but staggered a little at first from the stiffness of his legs.
"You've rid far, stranger," said the man, who Dick knew at once had a keen eye and a keen brain, "an' you're young, too."
"But not younger than many who have gone to the war," replied Dick.
He had spoken hastily and incautiously and he realized it at once.
The man's keen gaze was turned upon him again.
"You've seen the armies, then?" he said.
"Mebbe you're a sojer yourself?"
It was fought near a little place called Mill Spring, and resulted in a complete victory for the Northern forces under General Thomas."
"That was what I heard.
It will be good news to some, an' bad news to others.
"I never heard of one that did."
All we ask of people is to let us be.
Lots of us in the mountain feel that way.
The stable was a good one, better than usual in that country.
Dick saw stalls for four horses, but no horses.
"It'll make the fire an' supper all the better.
We're just plain mountain people, but you're welcome to the best we have.
Leffingwell's wife, a powerful woman, as large as her husband, and with a pleasant face, gave Dick a large hand and a friendly grasp.
"It's a good night to be indoors," she said.
"Supper's ready, Seth.
She had placed the pine table in the middle of the room, and Dick noticed that it was large enough for five or six persons.
He had seldom beheld a more cheerful scene.
In a great fireplace ten feet wide big logs roared and crackled.
Corn cakes, vegetables, and two kinds of meat were cooking over the coals and a great pot of coffee boiled and bubbled.
No candles had been lighted, but they were not needed.
The flames gave sufficient illumination.
Dick sat down gladly, and they fell to.
For a time the two masculine human beings ate and drank with so much vigor that there was no time for talk. Leffingwell was the first to break silence.
You've got a right to be hungry, an' you mustn't forget Ma's cookin' either.
"Shut up, Seth," said mrs Leffingwell, genially, "you'll make the young stranger think you're plum' foolish, which won't be wide of the mark either."
"I'm grateful," said Dick falling into the spirit of it, "but what pains me, mrs Leffingwell, is the fact that mr Leffingwell will only nibble at your food.
I don't understand it, as he looks like a healthy man."
The room in which they sat was large, apparently used for all purposes, kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and bedroom.
An old-fashioned squirrel rifle lay on hooks projecting from the wall, but there was no other sign of a weapon.
Dick surmised that this bed would be assigned to him.
Dick, although he had been unwilling to say so, was in fact very sleepy. The heavy supper and the heat of the room pulled so hard on his eyelids that he could scarcely keep them up.
He murmured his excuses and said he believed he would like to retire.
"Don't you be bashful about sayin' so," exclaimed Leffingwell heartily, "'cause I don't think I could keep up more'n a half hour longer."
Dick, used to primitive customs, said good night and retired within his alcove, taking his saddle bags.
The mountaineers liked hot rooms all the time, but he did not.
This window contained no glass, but was closed with a broad shutter.
The boy undressed and got into bed, placing his saddle bags on the foot of it, and the pistol that he carried in his belt under his head.
Nevertheless he awoke before midnight, and it was a very slight thing that caused him to come out of sleep.
Despite the languor produced by food and heat a certain nervous apprehension had been at work in the boy's mind, and it followed him into the unknown regions of sleep.
His body was dead for a time and his mind too, but this nervous power worked on, almost independently of him.
It had noted the sound of voices nearby, and awakened him, as if he had been shaken by a rough hand.
He sat up in his bed and became conscious of a hot and aching head.
He heard the hum of voices and sat up again.
A third signal of alarm was promptly registered on his brain.
The fire had died down except a few coals which cast but a faint light.
They were sitting fully clothed before the fireplace, and three other persons were with them.
As Dick stared his eyes grew more used to the half dusk and he saw clearly.
Now he understood about those empty stalls.
The third man, who had been sitting with his shoulder toward Dick, turned his face presently, and the boy with difficulty repressed an exclamation.
A fourth and conclusive signal of alarm was registered upon his brain.
The woman was pleading with them to let him go.
He was only a harmless lad, and while these were dark days, a crime committed now might yet be punished.
"I'd like to have that hoss of his," said the elder Leffingwell.
I noticed him at once, when Mason come ridin' up.
"A hoss like that would be knowed," protested the woman.
"I know places where sojers wouldn't find that hoss in a thousand years.
What do you say to that, Kerins?"
The Yanks whipped the Johnnies in a big battle at Mill Spring.
Me an' my pardners have been hangin' 'roun' in the woods, seein' what would happen.
He's got messages, dispatches of some kind that are worth a heap to somebody.
With all the armies gatherin' in the south an' west of the state it stands to reason that them dispatches mean a lot.
Stealin' hosses is bad enough, but if that boy has got the big dispatches you say he has, an' he's missin', don't you think that sojers will come after him?
Besides, he's a nice boy an' he spoke nice all the time to pap an' me."
But her words did not seem to make any impression upon the others, except her husband, who protested again that it would be enough to take the horse.
As for the dispatches it wasn't wise for them to fool with such things.
Meanwhile Dick had dressed with more rapidity than ever before in his life, fully alive to the great dangers that threatened.
But his fear was greatest lest he might lose the precious dispatches that he bore.
For a few moments he did not know what to do.
He might take his pistols and fight, but he could not fight them all with success.
Then that pleasant flood of cold air gave him the key.
While they were still talking he put his saddle bags over his arm, opened the shutter its full width, and dropped quietly to the ground outside, remembering to take the precaution of closing the shutter behind him, lest the sudden inrush of cold startle the Leffingwells and their friends.
It was an icy night, but Dick did not stop to notice it.
CHAPTER sixteen.
Those blinding flashes of flame no longer came from the forest before him, the shot and shell quit their horrible screaming, and the air was free from the unpleasant hiss of countless bullets.
He stretched himself a little and stood up.
The boy felt stiff and sore in every bone and muscle, and, although the cannon and rifles were silent, there was still a hollow roaring in his ears.
But the deep woods were silent and empty.
Coils and streamers of smoke floated about among the trees, and suddenly a gray squirrel hopped out on a bough and began to chatter wildly.
Dick, despite himself, laughed, but the laugh was hysterical.
He could appreciate the feelings of the squirrel, which probably had been imprisoned in a hollow of the tree all day long, listening to this tremendous battle, and squirrels were not used to such battles.
It was a trifle that made him laugh, but everything was out of proportion now.
The ordinary occupations were gone, and people spent most of their time trying to kill one another.
He rubbed his hands across his eyes and cleared them of the smoke.
The last rosy glow of the sun faded, and thick darkness enveloped the vast forest, in which twenty thousand men had fallen, and in which most of them yet lay, the wounded with the dead.
Dick saw Colonel Winchester going among his men, and pulling himself together he saluted his chief.
But they fought magnificently, Dick!
They had to, or be crushed!
It is only here that we have withstood the rush of the Southern army, and it is probable that we, too, would have gone had not night come to our help."
"Yes, Dick, we have been beaten, and beaten badly.
It was the surprise that did it.
Dick!
Dick, my boy, we'll have forty thousand new troops on the field at the next dawn, and before God we'll wipe out the disgrace of today!
Listen to the big guns from the boats as they speak at intervals! Why, I can understand the very words they speak!
They are saying to the Southern army: 'Look out!
Look out!
Colonel Winchester walked away to a council that had been called, and Dick turned to Pennington and Warner, who were not hurt, save for slight wounds.
"Dick," he said, "we're some distance from where we started this morning.
There's nothing like being shoved along when you don't want to go.
"How large do you suppose the Southern army was?" asked Pennington.
The last words were high pitched and excited.
But in a few seconds he recovered himself and looked rather ashamed.
"Boys," he said, "I apologize."
"There have been times today when I felt brave as a lion, and lots of other times I was scared most to death. It would have helped me a lot then, if I could have opened my mouth and yelled at the top of my voice."
I've been scared for myself, an' I've been scared for the regiment, an' I've been scared for the whole army, an' I've been scared on general principles, but here we are, alive an' kickin', an' we ought to feel powerful thankful for that."
"What is it, Dick?" asked Warner.
The Confederates broke up our breakfast.
We never had time to think of dinner, and now its nothing to eat."
"Me, too," said Pennington.
"If you were to hit me in the stomach I'd give back a hollow sound like a drum.
Why don't somebody ring the supper bell?"
They also talked much of the battle.
Regiment after regiment and brigade after brigade crossed.
Many thousands had fallen, and no new troops were coming to take their place.
Continual reinforcements came to the North throughout the night, not a soldier came to the South.
Beauregard, at dawn, would have to face twice his numbers, at least half of whom were fresh troops.
The others, however, summoned their courage anew, and passed the whole night arranging their forces, cheering the men, and preparing for the morn. Their scouts and skirmishers kept watch on the Northern camp, and the Southerners believed that while they had whipped only one army the day before, they could whip two on the morrow.
The nerves, drawn so tightly by the day's work, were not yet relaxed wholly.
The deep river, although it was on their flank, seemed to flow as a barrier against the foe, and it was, in fact, a barrier more and more, as without its command the second Union army could never have come to the relief of the first.
Dick, after a while, saw Colonel Winchester, and other officers near him.
They were talking of their losses.
Their pulses became stronger, and the blood flowed in a quickened torrent through their veins.
Grant, his face an expressionless mask, presided, and said but little.
The three men upon whom most rested were very taciturn that night, but it is likely that extraordinary thoughts were passing in the minds of every one of the three.
Grant, after a day in which any one of a dozen chances would have wrecked him, must have concluded that in very deed and truth he was the favorite child of Fortune.
Dick, not having slept any the night before, and having passed through a day of fierce battle, was overcome after midnight, and sank into a sleep that was mere lethargy.
He awoke once before dawn and remembered, but vaguely, all that had happened.
Yet he was conscious that there was much movement in the forest.
He was awakened by the call of a trumpet, and, as he rose, he saw the whole regiment or rather, what was left of it, rising with him.
Colonel Winchester beckoned to him.
"All right this morning, Dick?" he said.
"And you, too, Warner and Pennington?"
"Then keep close beside me.
Yet Beauregard and his generals were still sanguine of completing the victory.
Their scouts and skirmishers had failed to discover that the entire army of Buell also was now in front of them.
But as they moved forward to attack the Union troops came out to meet them. Nelson had occupied the high ground between Lick and Owl Creeks, and his and the Southern troops met in a fierce clash shortly after dawn.
Beauregard, drawn by the firing at that point, and noticing the courage and tenacity with which the Northern troops held their ground, sending in volley after volley, divined at once that these were not the beaten troops of the day before, but new men.
This swarthy general, volatile and dramatic, nevertheless had great penetration.
He understood on the instant a fact that his soldiers did not comprehend until later.
He knew that the whole army of Buell was now before him.
A long and furious combat ensued.
Buell led splendid troops that he had trained long and rigidly, and they had not been in the conflict the day before.
He and Grant had reckoned that the decimated brigades of the South could not stand at all before him, but just as on the first day they came on with the fierce rebel yell, hurling themselves upon superior numbers, taking the cannon of their enemy, losing them, and retaking them and losing them again, but never yielding.
The great conflict increased in violence.
Buell, a man of iron courage, saw that his soldiers must fight to the uttermost, not for victory only, but even to ward off defeat.
Nine o'clock came.
Another battery dashed up to the relief of the men in blue.
It was charged at once by the men in gray so fiercely that the gunners were glad to escape with their guns, and once more the wild rebel yell of triumph swelled through the southern forest.
Dick, standing with his comrades on one of the ridges that they had defended so well, listened to the roar of conflict on the wing, ever increasing in volume, and watched the vast clouds of smoke gathering over the forest.
He could see from where he stood the flash of rifle fire and the blaze of cannon, and both eye and ear told him that the battle was not moving back upon the South.
"Not that I can perceive," replied the colonel, "and yet with the rush of forty thousand fresh troops of ours upon the field I deemed victory quick and easy.
How the battle grows!
How the South fights!"
He walked up and down in front of his lines, saying little but seeing everything.
He, too, must have felt a singular thrill at that moment.
He must have known that his star was rising.
He had not been able to avert defeat, but he had prevented utter ruin.
His division alone had held together in the face of the Southern attack until night came.
Sherman must have recalled, too, how his statement that the North would need two hundred thousand troops in the west alone had been sneered at, and he had been called mad.
But he neither boasted nor predicted, continuing to watch intently the swelling battle.
"We'll win yet," said Dick hopefully, "but I don't think we can achieve any big victory.
Look, there's General Grant himself."
Grant was passing along his whole line.
He knew the remains of Grant's army were about to march upon the enemy, helping the Army of the Ohio to achieve the task that had proved so great.
Sherman, McClernand and other generals now passed among their troops, cheering them, telling them that the time had come to win back what they had lost the day before, and that victory was sure.
Sherman's whole division now raised itself up and rushed at the enemy, Dick and his comrades in the front of their own regiment.
Their decimated ranks could not withstand the charge of two armies.
The promises of their generals were coming true, and there is nothing sweeter than victory after defeat. Fortune, after frowning upon her so long, was now smiling upon the North.
The exultant cheer swept through the ranks again, and back came the defiant rebel yell.
Dick now knew that the North would recover the field, and that the South, cut down fearfully, though having performed prodigies of valor, must fight to save herself.
There was only one road by which Beauregard could retreat to Corinth.
The shock was terrific.
McClernand, too, reeled back, others were driven in also.
Whole brigades and regiments were cut to pieces or thrown in confusion.
The Southerners cut a wide gap in the Northern army, through which they rushed in triumph, holding the Corinth road against every attack and making their rear secure.
Sherman's division, after its momentary repulse, gathered itself anew, and, although knowing now that the Southern army could not be entrapped, drove again with all its might upon the positions around the church. They passed over the dead of the day before, and gathered increasing vigor, as they saw that the enemy was slowly drawing back.
Grant reformed his line, which had been shattered by the last fiery and successful attack of the South.
Despite the prodigies of valor performed by their men, the Southern generals saw that they could not longer hold the field.
The junction of Grant and Buell, after all, had proved too much for them.
The bugles sounded the retreat, and reluctantly they gave up the ground which they had won with so much courage and daring.
They retreated rather as victors than defeated men, presenting a bristling front to the enemy until their regiments were lost in the forest, and beating off every attempt of skirmishers or cavalry to molest them.
It was the middle of the afternoon when the last shot was fired, and the Southern army at its leisure resumed its march toward Corinth, protected on the flanks by its cavalry, and carrying with it the assurance that although not victorious over two armies it had been victorious over one, and had struck the most stunning blow yet known in American history.
When the last of the Southern regiments disappeared in the deep woods, Dick and many of those around him sank exhausted upon the ground.
Even had they been ordered to follow they would have been incapable of it. Complete nervous collapse followed such days and nights as those through which they had passed.
Nor did Grant and Buell wish to pursue.
Their armies had been too terribly shaken to make another attack.
The South had lost almost as many.
Nearly a third of her army had been killed or wounded in the battle, and yet they retired in good order, showing the desperate valor of these sons of hers.
The double army which had saved itself, but which had yet been unable to destroy its enemy, slept that night in the recovered camp.
The generals discussed in subdued tones their narrow escape, and the soldiers, who now understood very well what had happened, talked of it in the same way.
"We knew that it was going to be a big war," said Dick, "but it's going to be far bigger than we thought."
"And we won't make that easy parade down to the Gulf," said Warner.
"I'm thinking that a lot of lions are in the path."
"But we'll win!" said Dick.
Then after dreaming a little with his eyes open he fell asleep, gathering new strength for mighty campaigns yet to come.
However closely one may study the fair sex, there is no understanding them in the least.
Diana had never liked Lydia; when the American girl became her stepmother she hated her, and not only said as much but showed in her every action that she believed what she said.
The punishment would be no more than she deserved.
Yet when these things came to pass; when, by the discovery that Vrain yet lived, Lydia lost her liberty; and when, as connected with the conspiracy, she was arrested on a criminal warrant and put into prison, Diana was the only friend she had.
Miss Vrain declared that her stepmother was innocent, visited her in prison, and engaged a lawyer to defend her.
Lucian could not forbear pointing out the discrepancy between Diana's past sentiments and her present actions; but Miss Vrain was quite ready with an excuse.
"I am only doing my duty," she said.
"In herself I like Lydia as little as ever I did, but I think we have suspected her wrongly in being connected with this conspiracy, so I wish to help her if possible.
And after all," added Diana, "she is my father's wife," as if that fact extenuated all.
"He has reason to know it," replied Lucian bitterly.
"If it had not been for Lydia, your father would not have left his home for a lunatic asylum, nor would Clear have been murdered."
"Egad! that is true!" said Lucian, kissing her.
"It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good."
So Diana played the part of a Good Samaritan towards her stepmother, and helped her to bear the evil of being thrust into prison.
Lydia wrote to her father in Paris, but received no reply, and therefore was without a friend in the world save Diana.
Later on she was admitted to bail, and Diana took her to the hotel in Kensington, there to wait for the arrival of mr Clyne.
"I hope nothing is wrong with poppa," wept Lydia.
While she was thus waiting for her father, and Link in every way was seeking evidence against her, mrs Clear received an answer to her message.
Affairs were about to be brought to a crisis, and as Link was the moving spirit in the matter, his vanity was sufficiently gratified as to make him quite amiable.
"We've got him this time, mr Denzil," he said, with enthusiasm.
"You and I and a couple of policemen will go down to that house in Geneva Square-by the front, sir, by the front."
"mrs Clear, also?" questioned Lucian, wishing to be enlightened on all points.
"no
She'll come in by the back, down the cellarway, as Wrent expects her to come.
"But won't the two be seen climbing over that fence in the daytime?" asked the barrister doubtfully.
"Who said anything about the daytime, mr Denzil?
I did not, and Wrent knows too much to risk himself at a time that he can be seen from the windows of the adjacent houses.
No! no!
We'll give him rope enough to hang himself, sir, and then pounce out and nab him."
"Well, he won't show much fight if he is mr Vrain."
"I don't believe he is mr Vrain," retorted the detective bluntly.
"I am doubtful of that, also," admitted Lucian, "but you know Vrain is now out of the asylum, and, for the time being, has been left to his own devices.
Supposing, after all, this mysterious Wrent proves to be this unhappy man?"
"In that case, he'll have to pay for his whistle, sir."
"You mean in connection with the conspiracy?"
"Yes, and perhaps with the murder of Clear; but we don't know if the so-called Wrent committed the crime.
For such reason, mr Denzil, I wish to overhear what he says to mrs Clear.
It is as well to give him enough rope to hang himself with."
"Can you trust mrs Clear?"
"Absolutely.
She knows on which side her bread is buttered.
"Well, sir," said Link, putting his head on one side, and looking at Lucian with an odd expression, "you had better wait till the man's caught before I answer that question.
Then, maybe, you won't require an answer."
"It is very probable I won't," replied Lucian drily.
"I'll call for you at nine o'clock sharp, and we'll go across to the house at once.
I have the key in my pocket now.
Peacock gave it to me this morning.
"I hope it won't prove to be Vrain," said Lucian restlessly, for he thought how grieved Diana would be.
"I hope not," answered Link curtly, "but there's no knowing.
However, if the old man does get into trouble he can plead insanity.
His having been in the asylum of Jorce is a strong card for him to play.
Good day, mr Denzil.
"Good day," replied Lucian, and the pair parted for the time being.
In the first place, he did not wish to see Lydia, for whom he had no great love; and in the second, he was afraid to speak to Diana as to the possibility of her father being Wrent.
Diana, as a good daughter should, held firmly to the idea that her father could not behave in such a way; and as a sensible woman, she did not think that a man with so few of his senses about him could have acted the dual part with which he was credited without, in some measure, betraying himself.
Lucian was somewhat of this opinion himself, yet he had an uneasy feeling that Vrain might prove to be the culprit.
The fact of Vrain's being often away from mrs Clear's house in Bayswater, and Wrent absent in the same way from mrs Bensusan's house in Jersey Street, appeared strange, and argued a connection between the two.
Again, the resemblance between them was most extraordinary and unaccountable.
But only Link knew where the woman was to be found, and kept that information to himself-especially from Denzil.
Punctual to the minute, Link, in a state of subdued excitement, came to Lucian's rooms.
Already he had sent his two policemen over to the house, into which he had instructed them to enter in the quietest and most unostentatious manner, and now came to escort the barrister across.
Lucian put on his hat at once, and the two walked out into the dark night, for dark it was, with no moon, few stars, and a great many clouds.
A most satisfactory night for their purpose.
"All the better," said Link, casting a look round the deserted square; "all the better for our little game.
I wish to secure this fellow as quietly as possible.
Here's the door open-in with you, mr Denzil!"
According to instructions, a policeman had waited behind the closed door, and at the one sharp knock of his superior opened it at once so that the two slipped in as speedily as possible.
Link had a dark lantern, which he used carefully, so that no light could be seen from the window looking on to the square; and with his three companions he went into the back room which had formerly been used by Clear as a sleeping apartment.
Here the two policemen stationed themselves in one corner; and Link, with Lucian, waited near the door leading into the sitting room, so as to be ready for mrs Clear.
In a whisper he conversed with Link.
"Have you heard anything of that girl Rhoda?" he asked.
"We have traced her to Berkshire," whispered Link.
"She went back to her gypsy kinsfolk, you know.
"So do I, and I hope to make him confess as much to night.
Hush!"
Suddenly Link had laid his clasp on Lucian's wrist to command silence, and the next moment they heard the swish swish of a woman's dress coming along the passage.
She entered the sitting room cautiously, moving slowly in the darkness, and stole up to the door behind which Lucian and the detective were hiding.
The position of this she knew well, because it was opposite the window.
"Are you there?" whispered mrs Clear nervously.
"Yes," replied Link in the same tone.
"Myself, mr Denzil, and two policemen.
"He will, if he knows I've betrayed him."
"That will be all right," said Link in a low, impatient voice.
He'll see you!"
"He won't, mrs Clear.
We'll keep back in the darkness.
If he shows a light, we'll rush him before he can use a weapon or clear out.
Get back to the window!"
"I hope I'll get through with this all right," said mrs Clear nervously.
"It's an awful situation," and she moved stealthily across the floor to the window.
There was a faint gaslight outside, and the watchers could see her figure and profile black against the slight illumination.
All was still and silent as the grave when they began their dreary watch.
The minutes passed slowly in the darkness, and there was an unbroken silence save for the breathing of the watchers and the restless movements of mrs Clear near the window.
They saw her pass and repass the square of glass, when, unexpectedly, she paused, rigid and silent.
They paused at the door, and then moved towards the window where mrs Clear was standing.
"Yes.
"I am glad you have come."
"I am glad, also," said the voice harshly, "as I wish to know why you propose to betray me."
"Because you won't pay me the money," said mrs Clear boldly.
"And if you don't give it to me this very night I'll go straight and tell the police all about my husband."
"I'll kill you first!" cried the man with a snarl, and made a dash at the woman.
The next moment the four watchers were in the room wrestling with Wrent.
However, he could do little against his four adversaries, and, worn out with the struggle, collapsed suddenly on to the dusty floor with a motion of despair.
"Lost! lost!" he muttered.
"All lost!"
Out of the darkness started a pale face with white hair and long white beard.
Lucian uttered a cry.
"mr Vrain!" he said, shrinking back, "mr
Vrain!"
"Look again," said Link, passing his hand rapidly over the face and head of the prostrate man.
Denzil did look, and uttered a second cry more startling than the first.
Wig and beard and venerable looks were all gone, and he recognised at once who Wrent was.
"Jabez Clyne!--Jabez Clyne!" he exclaimed in astonishment.
CHAPTER twenty
"TWO LITTLE DARKY GIRLS"
"When will mr Lincoln be President?" Sylvia asked a few mornings after her father's announcement of his intention to return to Boston.
"He was inaugurated yesterday," replied her mother.
"Then can't Captain Carleton go north with us?" asked Sylvia, who had convinced herself that when mr Lincoln was in charge of the Government that all the troubles over Charleston's forts would end.
But mrs Fulton shook her head.
"Captain Carleton must stay and perhaps fight to defend the flag," she replied.
"I wish we could leave at once, but we must stay as long as we can."
Sylvia listened soberly.
She wondered what her mother would say if she knew of her promise to mrs Carleton to take a message to Fort Sumter if mrs Carleton should ask her to do so.
The warm days of early March made the southern city full of fragrance and beauty.
Many flowers were in bloom, the hedges were green, and the air soft and warm.
Sylvia and Grace often spoke of Flora, and wished that they could again visit the plantation.
Philip had brought Sylvia a letter from Flora, thanking her for the locket, and hoping that they would see each other again.
Philip had not come into the house.
He said that Ralph was in the Confederate army.
"I'd be a soldier if I was only a little older," he declared; and Sylvia did not even ask him about Dinkie, or the ponies. She wished that she could tell him that very soon she was going to Boston, but she knew that she must not; so she said good bye, and Philip walked down the path, and waved his cap to her as he reached the gate.
It had been many weeks since the Butterfly had sailed about Charleston harbor.
But the little boat was in the charge of an old negro who took good care of it.
Now and then he appeared at Aunt Connie's kitchen, and one warm day toward the last of March, when Sylvia was wandering about the garden, she saw Uncle peter going up the walk to the rear of the house.
Wait!" she called and ran to ask him about the boat.
He said that unless Major Anderson and his soldiers left Fort Sumter at once that all the forts, and the new batteries built by the Confederates, would open fire upon Sumter and destroy it.
"I hears a good deal, Missy, 'deed I does," he declared, "but I doan' let on as I hears.
"I wish I could have a sail in the Butterfly again," said Sylvia, a little wistfully.
"Do you, Missy?
Well, I reckons you can.
Sylvia knew that mrs Carleton was worried and unhappy.
It was known in Charleston that Fort Sumter was near the end of its food supplies, and that unless the Government at Washington sent reinforcements and provisions very soon by ships that the little garrison would be at the mercy of the Confederates, who were daily growing in strength.
"Perhaps she won't ask me.
But if I could go and see Captain Carleton, and tell him that she was going to Boston with us, and then bring her back a message, I know she'd be happier," thought the little girl.
And she thought, too, of the pleasure it would be to once more sail the Butterfly to Fort Sumter.
She sat down on the porch steps, and a moment later Estralla appeared bringing a plate of freshly baked sugar cookies from Aunt Connie.
"I'll go and thank her myself," said Sylvia, taking the plate, and offering one of the cookies to Estralla.
Sylvia sprang to her feet so quickly that she nearly upset the plate of cookies.
"Could we?
"But, Estralla, listen.
I could be black.
You could rub soot from the chimney all over my face and hands.
And I could pin my hair close on top of my head and twist one of your mammy's handkerchiefs tight over it.
Then nobody would know me." Sylvia had quite forgotten the fine cookies.
She was holding Estralla by the arm, and talking very rapidly. Estralla was almost frightened at Sylvia's eagerness.
If the men are hungry we could carry them something to eat.
But most of all I want to see Captain Carleton, and get some message for his wife.
She is so unhappy to go away without a word."
"Come 'long down in de garden," said Estralla, now as interested as Sylvia herself, "an' tells me more whar' nobody'll be hearin'," and the two little girls hurried off to a far corner of the pleasant garden.
"I'll come to your cabin and dress up there, and I will ask your mammy to give me some food for a poor man.
Some cookies and a cake," she said.
"We will start early to morrow morning.
And, Estralla, we will have to tell Uncle peter, or he won't let us have the boat."
But I reckon Uncle Pete won' let us.
But she was finally convinced that Missy Sylvia could carry out the plan, and agreed to have a large quantity of soot ready at her mother's cabin the next morning.
Sylvia was glad that she had eaten only one of the cookies.
She carried the remainder to her room and then went to the kitchen.
"It's a secret, Aunt Connie!
I want to give it away, and I don't want to tell even my mother until-well," and Sylvia hesitated a moment, and then continued, "until next week.
Then I will tell her, and you too."
"Dat's right, Missy.
It would give them all courage," said mrs Carleton.
Sylvia was for a moment tempted to tell her friend that she would carry the message, but she kept silent, thinking to herself that here was another reason for her to carry out her plan.
"If you could send a message to Captain Carleton what would you say?" questioned Sylvia, and mrs Carleton smiled at Sylvia's serious voice.
"Why, if I could only let him know that I was safe and well and going to Boston with you, in case Sumter really is attacked; I know that is what he wants to hear."
Sylvia realized that this kind friend was troubled, and wished with all her heart that she could say: "To morrow I will tell you all about Captain Carleton." But she knew that she must keep silent until she had carried out her plan.
Sylvia was the first one at the breakfast table the next morning, and was delighted when her mother said that she and mrs Carleton were invited to luncheon at the house of a friend.
But she made no reply, and soon hurried to the cabin where Estralla was waiting for her.
It was still early in the forenoon when two little negro girls, one carrying a large package wrapped in a newspaper, appeared at the wharf where the Butterfly was moored.
Uncle peter was not to be seen.
In a moment Sylvia had unfastened the rope, pushed the boat clear of the landing, and rudder in hand was steering the boat out toward the channel.
Two or three men in uniform watched the little "darkies," as they supposed both the girls to be, with amusement.
Negro children were always playing about, and no attention was paid to them.
But it happened that Uncle peter had been sent on an errand to a distant part of the town, and before he returned the Butterfly was well down the harbor.
Once or twice a guard boat passed them closely enough to make sure that there were only two colored children in the boat, and they came up under the walls of Fort Sumter without a hindrance.
The sentries at the fort had watched the little craft with anxious eyes, wondering if it could be bringing any message.
She is white."
And he was eager to hear all that she could tell him.
Estralla held the cake and cookies, which she had carefully wrapped in a newspaper, and the Captain seemed as much pleased with the paper as with the cake.
"You can write a letter to mrs Carleton and we will take it," suggested Sylvia, and then she told him Uncle Peter's news: that the President was sending ships to the aid of the fort.
"That is great news," said the Captain; "if it is only true we may keep the fort for the Union."
Within the hour of their arrival Sylvia and Estralla were on their way home.
The Captain had praised and thanked Sylvia for the loyal friendship that had prompted her visit.
"mrs Carleton and I will always remember your courage," he said, as he handed her the letter.
"I am so glad I thought about it; but it was really Estralla.
She said if I was black we could come," Sylvia had replied.
Then the boat swung clear and headed toward Charleston.
"I am not going to land at the big wharves," said Sylvia.
And then we'll tell Uncle peter where the Butterfly is."
"Missy wants a big pitcher of hot water," replied Estralla, dancing about just beyond Aunt Connie's reach.
CHAPTER twenty nine
A GLASS OF POISON
Margaret could do nothing but stare at the man before her.
"mr Styles-" she began, but he put his hand over her mouth.
"You are sick-out of your head," he interrupted.
"I know what is best, and you must do as I say.
Come on." And he pulled her forward by the hand.
"Where to?"
"Not very far."
"I-I do not wish to go to your home."
"I'll not take you there, don't fear."
"You are going to hand me over to the-the authorities."
"Never!
Come.
I won't hurt you."
He led the way through the woods, across a small stream and past a spot where some wild berries grew.
Then they struck a trail leading up a hillside.
The place was new to her.
"I want to know where you are taking me," she said presently, and came to a halt.
"To a place where you will be safe."
"That isn't answering the question."
Cannot you trust me, girl?
I'm not going to hurt you.
I love you, and I'll do all I can to help you.
Come!" And again he made her move on.
At last they came in sight of a tumbled down cottage on the edge of what had once been a clearing, but which was now overgrown with weeds and brushwood.
As they came up, Margaret's strength gave out, and suddenly she sank down on her knees.
"All in, are you?" he said, not unkindly, and, stooping, he picked her up bodily.
She tried to resist, but could not, and he took her into the cottage and placed her on a couch.
"I'll get you a nurse," he said, noting her extreme paleness.
"You need one."
"Yes."
"Thank you," she murmured, and then closed her eyes, for she was too far gone to say more, or to make a move.
She had administered some sort of drug-what, the girl did not know-and it had put her into a sound sleep.
When Margaret looked around again, she was surprised to see that it was morning.
She tried to think, but her mind was almost a blank.
Outside of the broken window a wild bird was singing gayly.
She looked around. The old woman was not in sight.
She had been put to bed, and sat there, trying to think for several minutes.
Then she gave a low call, and the old woman appeared in the doorway.
"Where am I?" asked Margaret feebly.
"You're safe enough, never fear."
Margaret said no more and the woman went about some little work. Presently the girl arose and dressed herself.
She felt much stronger than when at the home of Martha Sampson, in spite of what she had experienced in running away.
She sank down in a rocking chair, to think matters over.
How far was she from Sidham?
She knew she must have come a long distance, but could not tell if it was five miles or fifty.
She looked out of the window, but the scenery was strange to her.
As she sat there she reviewed what had passed, her mind becoming clearer as she thought.
She remembered the scene at the inquest, and remembered how she had fainted, and how Raymond had supported her and taken her to the nurse's house.
"Poor, dear father," she murmured.
"Who could have been so wicked as to take your life?"
An hour went by, and she prepared to leave the cottage, when a shadow fell across the window, and Matlock Styles appeared.
He spoke a few low words to the old woman, and the latter walked away.
As the man entered the room, Margaret arose and faced him.
The Englishman was well dressed, and newly shaven, and wore a rosebud in his buttonhole.
"I'm glad to see you up and looking so well," he said pleasantly.
"I was afraid your running away would hurt you."
"I-I must thank you for what you have done for me, mr Styles," she answered.
"Oh, that's all right, Miss Margaret.
"Well, I suppose it cannot be helped.
But I must be getting back soon. You will show me the road?"
"Don't be in a hurry to go.
You're not strong enough to go. Besides-" the Englishman paused impressively.
"What's the use of going back?
Don't you know things look beastly black for you?"
"Perhaps, but I am not afraid-now.
I am not guilty, mr Styles."
"Of course not!
Of course not!
I knew that from the start.
But things do look black, no use of talking.
I want to help you." He came closer, at which she retreated a step.
"Thank you, but I do not see what you can do.
I must go back and give myself up.
I-I was not myself when I ran away.
It was a very foolish thing to do."
"If you go back, do you know what they will do?
They will surely hang you?"
"Oh, merciful Heaven?
Do not say that!"
"I wouldn't if it wasn't so.
But I've been talking to the coroner and the chief of police, and they have all of the evidence as straight as a string."
"I feel that you are, and that is why I side with you.
Besides, you know my feeling for you.
I've loved you for a long time-I told you so before." He took hold of her arm.
"If you'll do what I wish, I'll see to it that you escape-that you are never bothered any more."
"How can you do that?"
"Never mind how it can be done.
Promise to give up Case, and be my wife, and I will attend to all of the rest.
And I'll promise you more than that.
Listen, do you know that I am immensely wealthy?
It is so, and I can easily prove it.
Look here." He drew a big roll of bank bills from his pocket, each bill of a large denomination.
"I have ten thousand dollars here.
It shall be yours for the taking-if you will marry me.
I can easily raise five times this amount in forty eight hours.
We can go to Europe, or Australia, or anywhere we wish.
Isn't that far better than to stay here, to be hung by a lot of country bumpkins, who don't understand the matter at all?"
She put up her hands, and waved him away.
Then she burst into tears.
"Don't speak so, please don't!
I-I cannot bear it, I have gone through so much already!"
"I am giving you everything I have, my wealth, my honor, everything!
Can a man do more than that?
I love you-love you more than Raymond Case ever did, or will."
She wrung her hands and his dark eyes seemed to pierce her very soul. She felt faint and sank on a bench.
"Come, will you accept, Margaret?"
"But think of what is before you."
"If I tried to escape, they would soon be on my track-"
"No, I can prevent that."
"How?"
"Because the world will know that you are innocent."
She gave a start and looked at him wildly, pleadingly.
"Then you know the real murderer?" she panted.
"If I answer that question, will you become my wife?"
Again she shrank back.
"You know the murderer," she repeated.
"Perhaps you committed the foul deeds yourself."
He took a step back as if struck a blow.
Then he recovered quickly and smiled a bitter smile.
"No, I was not near the place, I can prove it.
Besides, your folks and myself were on good terms.
There is somebody else, who was around the house when the affair happened-somebody you know well, a person who would know all about the drug with which your father and mrs Langmore were killed."
"Who was it?"
"Will you consent to marry me?"
"Tell me first."
"No, afterwards."
"You are fooling me."
"I swear I am not, Margaret.
Marry me, and I will clear you as surely as the sun is shining."
"And if I refuse?"
He came and caught her by the arm, his face blazing with sudden passion.
"Do not dare to do that!
Don't you understand the matter?
You are in my power-in my power absolutely.
I can hand you over to the police whenever I will."
"That will not be such a hardship.
I said I was going back."
"Bah!
If I tell them that I caught you, that you begged me to let you get away-that you even said you would marry me, if I would aid you, what then?
Everybody will think you guilty, and Raymond Case will never come near you again."
"You-you monster!"
"Perhaps I am a monster when aroused.
"I do not want to think it over.
My mind is made up.
I loathe and despise you!"
There was a moment of silence, and his dark face turned a sickly white and then red.
He breathed heavily through his set teeth.
"I do."
He glared at her steadily.
Then, in a burst of rage, he caught her by the throat and threw her backward to the floor.
She offered no resistance, and pausing in his madness he realized that she had swooned away.
"Fainted!" he hissed between his set teeth.
"I wish she was dead! Curse her and her beauty!"
He waited, and as she did not return to consciousness, he picked her up, and placed her on the bed.
Then he hurried outside:
"Go back to the house," he said to the old woman.
"You'll not be needed here any more.
And see that you keep your jaw closed over this," he added harshly.
And the woman slunk away as if struck, like a dog.
Once inside of the cottage, he took up a glass of water standing on the table, and to this added a powder taken from his pocket, stirring it up well.
Then he looked around to see that there was no other water around the building.
"When she rouses up she will be dry, and she will drink this," he muttered to himself.
"Half a glass will do the work and she will never bother me or anybody else any more."
He paused again and took from his pocket several sheets of paper, closely and carelessly written upon in pencil.
The first sheet was headed:
"A fine forgery, if I do say so myself," he mused.
"Mat, you always were a plum with the pen.
I'll add a line telling where she can be found and then send it to the coroner.
That will be better than leaving it around here.
She might find it before she drank that dose." He paused again.
I'll give her some of it now, and make sure."
He raised up the almost lifeless girl, and forced open her lips.
Then he took the glass, and poured half the contents down her throat.
BURTON'S ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY.
There was an air of mystery about this that piqued my languid curiosity, and I determined to attempt the passage of that strait, and to explore the unknown regions beyond.
The door yielded to my hand, with all that facility with which the portals of enchanted castles yield to the adventurous knight errant.
Now and then one of these personages would write something on a small slip of paper, and ring a bell, whereupon a familiar would appear, take the paper in profound silence, glide out of the room, and return shortly loaded with ponderous tomes, upon which the other would fall, tooth and nail, with famished voracity.
I found that these mysterious personages, whom I had mistaken for magi, were principally authors, and were in the very act of manufacturing books.
Being now in possession of the secret, I sat down in a corner, and watched the process of this book manufactory.
I noticed one lean, bilious looking wight, who sought none but the most worm eaten volumes, printed in black letter.
He was evidently constructing some work of profound erudition, that would be purchased by every man who wished to be thought learned, placed upon a conspicuous shelf of his library, or laid open upon his table-but never read.
I observed him, now and then, draw a large fragment of biscuit out of his pocket, and gnaw; whether it was his dinner, or whether he was endeavoring to keep off that exhaustion of the stomach, produced by much pondering over dry works, I leave to harder students than myself to determine.
There was one dapper little gentleman in bright colored clothes, with a chirping gossiping expression of countenance, who had all the appearance of an author on good terms with his bookseller.
After considering him attentively, I recognized in him a diligent getter up of miscellaneous works, which bustled off well with the trade.
He made more stir and show of business than any of the others; dipping into various books, fluttering over the leaves of manuscripts, taking a morsel out of one, a morsel out of another, "line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little." The contents of his book seemed to be as heterogeneous as those of the witches' cauldron in Macbeth.
In like manner, the beauties and fine thoughts of ancient and obsolete authors are caught up by these flights of predatory writers, and cast forth, again to flourish and bear fruit in a remote and distant tract of time.
What was formerly a ponderous history, revives in the shape of a romance-an old legend changes into a modern play-and a sober philosophical treatise furnishes the body for a whole series of bouncing and sparkling essays.
Thus it is in the clearing of our American woodlands; where we burn down a forest of stately pines, a progeny of dwarf oaks start up in their place; and we never see the prostrate trunk of a tree mouldering into soil, but it gives birth to a whole tribe of fungi.
Let us not then, lament over the decay and oblivion into which ancient writers descend; they do but submit to the great law of Nature, which declares that all sublunary shapes of matter shall be limited in their duration, but which decrees, also, that their element shall never perish.
Generation after generation, both in animal and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity, and the species continue to flourish.
Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them-and from whom they had stolen.
I dreamt that the chamber was still decorated with the portraits of ancient authors, but that the number was increased.
The long tables had disappeared, and, in place of the sage magi, I beheld a ragged, threadbare throng, such as may be seen plying about the great repository of cast off clothes, Monmouth Street.
Whenever they seized upon a book, by one of those incongruities common to dreams, methought it turned into a garment of foreign or antique fashion, with which they proceeded to equip themselves.
I noticed, however, that no one pretended to clothe himself from any particular suit, but took a sleeve from one, a cape from another, a skirt from a third, thus decking himself out piecemeal, while some of his original rags would peep out from among his borrowed finery.
There was a portly, rosy, well fed parson, whom I observed ogling several mouldy polemical writers through an eyeglass.
Some, too, seemed to contemplate the costumes of the old writers, merely to imbibe their principles of taste, and to catch their air and spirit; but I grieve to say, that too many were apt to array themselves, from top to toe, in the patchwork manner I have mentioned.
He had decked himself in wreaths and ribbons from all the old pastoral poets, and, hanging his head on one side, went about with a fantastical, lackadaisical air, "babbling about green field." But the personage that most struck my attention was a pragmatical old gentleman in clerical robes, with a remarkably large and square but bald head.
He entered the room wheezing and puffing, elbowed his way through the throng with a look of sturdy self confidence, and, having laid hands upon a thick Greek quarto, clapped it upon his head, and swept majestically away in a formidable frizzled wig.
In the height of this literary masquerade, a cry suddenly resounded from every side, of "Thieves! thieves!" I looked, and lo! the portraits about the walls became animated!
The old authors thrust out, first a head, then a shoulder, from the canvas, looked down curiously for an instant upon the motley throng, and then descended, with fury in their eyes, to claim their rifled property.
The scene of scampering and hubbub that ensued baffles all description.
The unhappy culprits endeavored in vain to escape with their plunder.
On one side might be seen half a dozen old monks, stripping a modern professor; on another, there was sad devastation carried into the ranks of modern dramatic writers.
Beaumont and Fletcher, side by side, raged round the field like Castor and Pollux, and sturdy Ben Jonson enacted more wonders than when a volunteer with the army in Flanders.
As to the dapper little compiler of farragos mentioned some time since, he had arrayed himself in as many patches and colors as harlequin, and there was as fierce a contention of claimants about him, as about the dead body of Patroclus.
They were close upon his haunches; in a twinkling off went his wig; at every turn some strip of raiment was peeled away, until in a few moments, from his domineering pomp, he shrunk into a little, pursy, "chopp'd bald shot," and made his exit with only a few tags and rags fluttering at his back.
There was something so ludicrous in the catastrophe of this learned Theban that I burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, which broke the whole illusion.
The tumult and the scuffle were at an end.
The old authors shrunk back into their picture frames, and hung in shadowy solemnity along the walls.
In short, I found myself wide awake in my corner, with the whole assemblage of hookworms gazing at me with astonishment.
Nothing of the dream had been real but my burst of laughter, a sound never before heard in that grave sanctuary, and so abhorrent to the ears of wisdom, as to electrify the fraternity.
At first I did not comprehend him, but I soon found that the library was a kind of literary "preserve," subject to game laws, and that no one must presume to hunt there without special license and permission.
It was early in the year, but as soon as the weather was auspicious, and that the spring began to melt into the verge of summer, we took rod in hand and sallied into the country, as stark mad as was ever Don Quixote from reading books of chivalry.
One of our party had equalled the Don in the fulness of his equipments, being attired cap a pie for the enterprise.
He wore a broad skirted fustian coat, perplexed with half a hundred pockets; a pair of stout shoes and leathern gaiters; a basket slung on one side for fish; a patent rod, a landing net, and a score of other inconveniences only to be found in the true angler's armory.
Thus harnessed for the field, he was as great a matter of stare and wonderment among the country folk, who had never seen a regular angler, as was the steel clad hero of La Mancha among the goatherds of the Sierra Morena.
Our first essay was along a mountain brook among the Highlands of the Hudson-a most unfortunate place for the execution of those piscatory tactics which had been invented along the velvet margins of quiet English rivulets.
It was one of those wild streams that lavish, among our romantic solitudes, unheeded beauties enough to fill the sketch book of a hunter of the picturesque.
Sometimes it would leap down rocky shelves, making small cascades, over which the trees threw their broad balancing sprays and long nameless weeds hung in fringes from the impending banks, dripping with diamond drops.
How smoothly would this vagrant brook glide at such times through some bosom of green meadowland among the mountains, where the quiet was only interrupted by the occasional tinkling of a bell from the lazy cattle among the clover or the sound of a woodcutter's axe from the neighboring forest!
For my part, I was always a bungler at all kinds of sport that required either patience or adroitness, and had not angled above half an hour before I had completely "satisfied the sentiment," and convinced myself of the truth of Izaak Walton's opinion, that angling is something like poetry-a man must be born to it.
I hooked myself instead of the fish, tangled my line in every tree, lost my bait, broke my rod, until I gave up the attempt in despair, and passed the day under the trees reading old Izaak, satisfied that it was his fascinating vein of honest simplicity and rural feeling that had bewitched me, and not the passion for angling.
I recollect also that, after toiling and watching and creeping about for the greater part of a day, with scarcely any success in spite of all our admirable apparatus, a lubberly country urchin came down from the hills with a rod made from a branch of a tree, a few yards of twine, and, as Heaven shall help me!
I believe a crooked pin for a hook, baited with a vile earthworm, and in half an hour caught more fish than we had nibbles throughout the day!
All this may appear like mere egotism, yet I cannot refrain from uttering these recollections, which are passing like a strain of music over my mind and have been called up by an agreeable scene which I witnessed not long since.
In the morning's stroll along the banks of the Alun, a beautiful little stream which flows down from the Welsh hills and throws itself into the Dee, my attention was attracted to a group seated on the margin. On approaching I found it to consist of a veteran angler and two rustic disciples.
The former was an old fellow with a wooden leg, with clothes very much but very carefully patched, betokening poverty honestly come by and decently maintained.
The other was a tall, awkward country lad, with a lounging gait, and apparently somewhat of a rustic beau.
The old man was busy in examining the maw of a trout which he had just killed, to discover by its contents what insects were seasonable for bait, and was lecturing on the subject to his companions, who appeared to listen with infinite deference.
I have a kind feeling towards all "brothers of the angle" ever since I read Izaak Walton.
In the meanwhile he was giving instructions to his two disciples, showing them the manner in which they should handle their rods, fix their flies, and play them along the surface of the stream.
The country around was of that pastoral kind which Walton is fond of describing.
It was a part of the great plain of Cheshire, close by the beautiful vale of Gessford, and just where the inferior Welsh hills begin to swell up from among fresh smelling meadows.
The day too, like that recorded in his work, was mild and sunshiny, with now and then a soft dropping shower that sowed the whole earth with diamonds.
I soon fell into conversation with the old angler, and was so much entertained that, under pretext of receiving instructions in his art, I kept company with him almost the whole day, wandering along the banks of the stream and listening to his talk.
He had afterwards experienced many ups and downs in life until he got into the navy, where his leg was carried away by a cannon ball at the battle of Camperdown.
This was the only stroke of real good fortune he had ever experienced, for it got him a pension, which, together with some small paternal property, brought him in a revenue of nearly forty pounds. On this he retired to his native village, where he lived quietly and independently, and devoted the remainder of his life to the "noble art of angling."
The lad that was receiving his instructions, I learnt, was the son and heir apparent of a fat old widow who kept the village inn, and of course a youth of some expectation, and much courted by the idle gentleman like personages of the place.
In taking him under his care, therefore, the old man had probably an eye to a privileged corner in the tap room and an occasional cup of cheerful ale free of expense.
There is certainly something in angling-if we could forget, which anglers are apt to do, the cruelties and tortures inflicted on worms and insects-that tends to produce a gentleness of spirit and a pure serenity of mind.
As the English are methodical even in their recreations, and are the most scientific of sportsmen, it has been reduced among them to perfect rule and system.
Indeed, it is an amusement peculiarly adapted to the mild and highly cultivated scenery of England, where every roughness has been softened away from the landscape.
"When I would beget content," says Izaak Walton, "and increase confidence in the power and wisdom and providence of Almighty God, I will walk the meadows by some gliding stream, and there contemplate the lilies that take no care, and those very many other little living creatures that are not only created, but fed (man knows not how) by the goodness of the God of Nature, and therefore trust in Him."
On parting with the old angler I inquired after his place of abode, and, happening to be in the neighborhood of the village a few evenings afterwards, I had the curiosity to seek him out.
I found him living in a small cottage containing only one room, but a perfect curiosity in its method and arrangement.
It was on the skirts of the village, on a green bank a little back from the road, with a small garden in front stocked with kitchen herbs and adorned with a few flowers.
On the top was a ship for a weathercock.
The interior was fitted up in a truly nautical style, his ideas of comfort and convenience having been acquired on the berth deck of a man of war.
A hammock was slung from the ceiling which in the daytime was lashed up so as to take but little room.
From the centre of the chamber hung a model of a ship, of his own workmanship.
Two or three chairs, a table, and a large sea chest formed the principal movables. About the wall were stuck up naval ballads, such as "Admiral Hosier's Ghost,"
"All in the Downs," and "Tom Bowling," intermingled with pictures of sea fights, among which the battle of Camperdown held a distinguished place.
The mantelpiece was decorated with sea shells, over which hung a quadrant, flanked by two wood cuts of most bitter looking naval commanders.
His implements for angling were carefully disposed on nails and hooks about the room.
On a shelf was arranged his library, containing a work on angling, much worn, a Bible covered with canvas, an odd volume or two of voyages, a nautical almanac, and a book of songs.
The establishment reminded me of that of the renowned Robinson Crusoe; it was kept in neat order, everything being "stowed away" with the regularity of a ship of war; and he informed me that he "scoured the deck every morning and swept it between meals."
I found him seated on a bench before the door, smoking his pipe in the soft evening sunshine.
His cat was purring soberly on the threshold, and his parrot describing some strange evolutions in an iron ring that swung in the centre of his cage.
How comforting it is to see a cheerful and contented old age, and to behold a poor fellow like this, after being tempest tost through life, safely moored in a snug and quiet harbor in the evening of his days!
His happiness, however, sprung from within himself and was independent of external circumstances, for he had that inexhaustible good nature which is the most precious gift of Heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
On inquiring further about him, I learnt that he was a universal favorite in the village and the oracle of the tap room, where he delighted the rustics with his songs, and, like Sindbad, astonished them with his stories of strange lands and shipwrecks and sea fights.
The whole tenor of his life was quiet and inoffensive, being principally passed about the neighboring streams when the weather and season were favorable; and at other times he employed himself at home, preparing his fishing tackle for the next campaign or manufacturing rods, nets, and flies for his patrons and pupils among the gentry.
He was a regular attendant at church on Sundays, though he generally fell asleep during the sermon.
I have formerly censured the French for their extreme attachment to theatrical exhibitions, because I thought that they tended to render them vain and unnatural characters; but I must acknowledge, especially as women of the town never appear in the Parisian as at our theatres, that the little saving of the week is more usefully expended there every Sunday than in porter or brandy, to intoxicate or stupify the mind.
The common people of France have a great superiority over that class in every other country on this very score.
It is merely the sobriety of the Parisians which renders their fetes more interesting, their gaiety never becoming disgusting or dangerous, as is always the case when liquor circulates.
Intoxication is the pleasure of savages, and of all those whose employments rather exhaust their animal spirits than exercise their faculties.
Is not this, in fact, the vice, both in England and the northern states of Europe, which appears to be the greatest impediment to general improvement?
Drinking is here the principal relaxation of the men, including smoking, but the women are very abstemious, though they have no public amusements as a substitute.
The play was founded on the story of the "Mock Doctor;" and, from the gestures of the servants, who were the best actors, I should imagine contained some humour.
The farce, termed ballet, was a kind of pantomime, the childish incidents of which were sufficient to show the state of the dramatic art in Denmark, and the gross taste of the audience.
The tinker, with the frying pan for a shield, renders them immovable, and blacks their cheeks.
Each laughs at the other, unconscious of his own appearance; meanwhile the women enter to enjoy the sport, "the rare fun," with other incidents of the same species.
I have likewise visited the public library and museum, as well as the palace of Rosembourg.
Every object carried me back to past times, and impressed the manners of the age forcibly on my mind.
The vacuum left by departed greatness was everywhere observable, whilst the battles and processions portrayed on the walls told you who had here excited revelry after retiring from slaughter, or dismissed pageantry in search of pleasure.
Could the thoughts, of which there remained so many vestiges, have vanished quite away?
It cannot be!--as easily could I believe that the large silver lions at the top of the banqueting room thought and reasoned.
But avaunt! ye waking dreams!
yet I cannot describe the curiosities to you.
There were cabinets full of baubles and gems, and swords which must have been wielded by giant's hand.
I have not visited any other palace, excepting Hirsholm, the gardens of which are laid out with taste, and command the finest views the country affords.
As they are in the modern and English style, I thought I was following the footsteps of Matilda, who wished to multiply around her the images of her beloved country.
I was also gratified by the sight of a Norwegian landscape in miniature, which with great propriety makes a part of the Danish King's garden.
The cottage is well imitated, and the whole has a pleasing effect, particularly so to me who love Norway-its peaceful farms and spacious wilds.
The public library consists of a collection much larger than I expected to see; and it is well arranged.
It might with propriety, perhaps, be termed the malady of genius; the cause of that characteristic melancholy which "grows with its growth, and strengthens with its strength."
There are some good pictures in the royal museum.
The good pictures were mixed indiscriminately with the bad ones, in order to assort the frames.
The same fault is conspicuous in the new splendid gallery forming at Paris; though it seems an obvious thought that a school for artists ought to be arranged in such a manner, as to show the progressive discoveries and improvements in the art.
There are some respectable men of science here, but few literary characters, and fewer artists.
Besides, the Prince Royal, determined to be economical, almost descends to parsimony; and perhaps depresses his subjects, by labouring not to oppress them; for his intentions always seem to be good-yet nothing can give a more forcible idea of the dulness which eats away all activity of mind, than the insipid routine of a court, without magnificence or elegance.
The Prince, from what I can now collect, has very moderate abilities; yet is so well disposed, that Count Bernstorff finds him as tractable as he could wish; for I consider the Count as the real sovereign, scarcely behind the curtain; the Prince having none of that obstinate self sufficiency of youth, so often the forerunner of decision of character.
The burning of the palace was, in fact, a fortunate circumstance, as it afforded a pretext for reducing the establishment of the household, which was far too great for the revenue of the Crown.
The Prince Royal, at present, runs into the opposite extreme; and the formality, if not the parsimony, of the court, seems to extend to all the other branches of society, which I had an opportunity of observing; though hospitality still characterises their intercourse with strangers.
But let me now stop; I may be a little partial, and view everything with the jaundiced eye of melancholy-for I am sad-and have cause.
God bless you!
At that time, Moreover, the first storm was overblown, And the strong hand of outward violence Locked up in quiet.
'twas in truth an hour Of universal ferment; mildest men Were agitated; and commotions, strife Of passion and opinion, filled the walls Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.
Such was the state of things.
A meeker man Than this lived never, nor a more benign, Meek though enthusiastic.
But, these things set apart, Was not this single confidence enough To animate the mind that ever turned A thought to human welfare?
Oh, happy time of youthful lovers, (thus The story might begin).
The Story of Deirdre
The man was a right good man, and he had a goodly share of this world's goods. He had a wife, but no family.
Whether it was that he was invited or that he came of himself, the soothsayer came to the house of Malcolm.
"Yes, I am doing a little.
"Well, I do not mind taking soothsaying from you, if you had soothsaying for me, and you would be willing to do it."
"Well, I am going out, and when I return I will tell you."
And the three most famous heroes that ever were found will lose their heads on her account."
He did not allow a living being to come to his house, only himself and the nurse.
He asked this woman, "Will you yourself bring up the child to keep her in hiding far away where eye will not see a sight of her nor ear hear a word about her?"
He caused there a hillock, round and green, to be dug out of the middle, and the hole thus made to be covered carefully over, so that a little company could dwell there together.
This was done.
Deirdre and her foster mother dwelt in the bothy mid the hills without the knowledge or the suspicion of any living person about them and without anything occurring, until Deirdre was sixteen years of age. Deirdre grew like the white sapling, straight and trim as the rash on the moss.
The woman that had charge of her gave Deirdre every information and skill of which she herself had knowledge and skill.
There was not a blade of grass growing from root, nor a bird singing in the wood, nor a star shining from heaven but Deirdre had a name for it.
But one thing, she did not wish her to have either part or parley with any single living man of the rest of the world.
But on a gloomy winter night, with black, scowling clouds, a hunter of game was wearily travelling the hills, and what happened but that he missed the trail of the hunt, and lost his course and companions.
There is no shelter or house for them here." "O foster mother, the bird asked to get inside for the sake of the God of the Elements, and you yourself tell me that anything that is asked in His name we ought to do.
If you will not allow the bird that is being benumbed with cold, and done to death with hunger, to be let in, I do not think much of your language or your faith.
She placed a seat in the place for sitting, food in the place for eating, and drink in the place for drinking for the man who came to the house.
"What men are these you refer to?" said Deirdre.
"Well, I did see her," said the hunter.
"But, if I did, no man else can see her unless he get directions from me as to where she is dwelling."
"And will you direct me to where she dwells? and the reward of your directing me will be as good as the reward of your message," said the king.
"Well, I will direct you, O king, although it is likely that this will not be what they want," said the hunter.
Connachar, king of Ulster, sent for his nearest kinsmen, and he told them of his intent.
Connachar with his band of kinsfolk went down to the green knoll where Deirdre dwelt and he knocked at the door of the bothy.
The nurse replied, "No less than a king's command and a king's army could put me out of my bothy to night.
And I should be obliged to you, were you to tell who it is that wants me to open my bothy door." "It is I, Connachar, king of Ulster." When the poor woman heard who was at the door, she rose with haste and let in the king and all that could get in of his retinue.
When the king saw the woman that was before him that he had been in quest of, he thought he never saw in the course of the day nor in the dream of night a creature so fair as Deirdre and he gave his full heart's weight of love to her.
Deirdre was raised on the topmost of the heroes' shoulders and she and her foster mother were brought to the Court of King Connachar of Ulster.
With the love that Connachar had for her, he wanted to marry Deirdre right off there and then, will she nill she marry him.
Deirdre was clever in maidenly duties and wifely understanding, and Connachar thought he never saw with bodily eye a creature that pleased him more.
Deirdre was looking at the men that were coming, and wondering at them.
She girded up her raiment and went after the men that went past the base of the knoll, leaving her women attendants there.
They perceived the woman coming, and called on one another to hasten their step as they had a long distance to travel, and the dusk of night was coming on. They did so.
"It isn't anything else but the wail of the wave swans of Connachar," said his brothers.
With the confusion that she was in, Deirdre went into a crimson blaze of fire, and her colour came and went as rapidly as the movement of the aspen by the stream side.
He reached the side of Loch Ness and made his habitation there.
By this time the end of the period came at which Deirdre had to marry Connachar, king of Ulster.
He sent word far and wide through Erin to all his kinspeople to come to the feast.
There came three white doves out of the South Flying over the sea, And drops of honey were in their mouth From the hive of the honey bee.
I saw three grey hawks out of the South Come flying over the sea, And the red drops they bare in their mouth They were dearer than life to me.
It is nought but the fear of woman's heart, And a dream of the night, Deirdre.
"The day that Connachar sent the invitation to his feast will be unlucky for us if we don't go, O Deirdre."
Deirdre wept tears in showers and she sang:
But there is a house down yonder where I keep strangers, and let them go down to it to day, and my house will be ready before them to morrow."
But he that was up in the palace felt it long that he was not getting word as to how matters were going on for those down in the house of the strangers.
"Go you, Gelban Grednach, son of Lochlin's King, go you down and bring me information as to whether her former hue and complexion are on Deirdre.
Now she that he gazed upon used to go into a crimson blaze of blushes when any one looked at her.
Connachar ordered three hundred active heroes to go down to the abode of the strangers, and to take Deirdre up with them and kill the rest. "The pursuit is coming," said Deirdre.
"Well, Connachar, we will not accept that offer from you, nor thank you for it.
Greater by far do we prefer to go home to our father and tell the deeds of heroism we have done, than accept anything on these terms from you.
Word came to the king that the company he was in pursuit of were gone.
"What is the good of that?
that will not do yet," said Connachar. "They are off without bending of their feet or stopping of their step, without heed or respect to me, and I am without power to keep up to them, or opportunity to turn them back this night."
"I will try another plan on them," said the druid; and he placed before them a grey sea instead of a green plain.
"Though that be good, O Duanan, it will not make the heroes return," said Connachar; "they are gone without regard for me, and without honor to me, and without power on my part to pursue them, or to force them to return this night."
"We shall try another method on them, since yon one did not stop them," said the druid.
Then Arden cried that he was getting tired, and nearly giving over.
Allen then cried out that he was getting faint and well nigh giving up.
"They are gone," said Duanan Gacha Druid to the king, "and I have done what you desired me.
"Blessings for that upon you and may the good results accrue to me, Duanan.
I count it no loss what I spent in the schooling and teaching of you.
Now dry up the flood and let me see if I can behold Deirdre," said Connachar.
On the other hand, the question how the imperative of morality is possible, is undoubtedly one, the only one, demanding a solution, as this is not at all hypothetical, and the objective necessity which it presents cannot rest on any hypothesis, as is the case with the hypothetical imperatives.
Only here we must never leave out of consideration that we cannot make out by any example, in other words empirically, whether there is such an imperative at all, but it is rather to be feared that all those which seem to be categorical may yet be at bottom hypothetical.
For it is always possible that fear of disgrace, perhaps also obscure dread of other dangers, may have a secret influence on the will.
Secondly, in the case of this categorical imperative or law of morality, the difficulty (of discerning its possibility) is a very profound one.
When I conceive a hypothetical imperative, in general I do not know beforehand what it will contain until I am given the condition. But when I conceive a categorical imperative, I know at once what it contains.
There is therefore but one categorical imperative, namely, this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Now if all imperatives of duty can be deduced from this one imperative as from their principle, then, although it should remain undecided what is called duty is not merely a vain notion, yet at least we shall be able to show what we understand by it and what this notion means.
Since the universality of the law according to which effects are produced constitutes what is properly called nature in the most general sense (as to form), that is the existence of things so far as it is determined by general laws, the imperative of duty may be expressed thus: Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature.
We will now enumerate a few duties, adopting the usual division of them into duties to ourselves and ourselves and to others, and into perfect and imperfect duties.
For the rest, I understand by a perfect duty one that admits no exception in favour of inclination and then I have not merely external but also internal perfect duties.
Then I see at once that it could never hold as a universal law of nature, but would necessarily contradict itself.
three.
A third finds in himself a talent which with the help of some culture might make him a useful man in many respects.
But he finds himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than to take pains in enlarging and improving his happy natural capacities.
He asks, however, whether his maxim of neglect of his natural gifts, besides agreeing with his inclination to indulgence, agrees also with what is called duty.
A fourth, who is in prosperity, while he sees that others have to contend with great wretchedness and that he could help them, thinks: "What concern is it of mine?
These are a few of the many actual duties, or at least what we regard as such, which obviously fall into two classes on the one principle that we have laid down.
This is the canon of the moral appreciation of the action generally.
Some actions are of such a character that their maxim cannot without contradiction be even conceived as a universal law of nature, far from it being possible that we should will that it should be so.
In others this intrinsic impossibility is not found, but still it is impossible to will that their maxim should be raised to the universality of a law of nature, since such a will would contradict itself It is easily seen that the former violate strict or rigorous (inflexible) duty; the latter only laxer (meritorious) duty.
Thus it has been completely shown how all duties depend as regards the nature of the obligation (not the object of the action) on the same principle.
Consequently if we considered all cases from one and the same point of view, namely, that of reason, we should find a contradiction in our own will, namely, that a certain principle should be objectively necessary as a universal law, and yet subjectively should not be universal, but admit of exceptions.
Now, although this cannot be justified in our own impartial judgement, yet it proves that we do really recognise the validity of the categorical imperative and (with all respect for it) only allow ourselves a few exceptions, which we think unimportant and forced from us.
We have thus established at least this much, that if duty is a conception which is to have any import and real legislative authority for our actions, it can only be expressed in categorical and not at all in hypothetical imperatives.
With the view of attaining to this, it is of extreme importance to remember that we must not allow ourselves to think of deducing the reality of this principle from the particular attributes of human nature.
Here then we see philosophy brought to a critical position, since it has to be firmly fixed, notwithstanding that it has nothing to support it in heaven or earth.
Here it must show its purity as absolute director of its own laws, not the herald of those which are whispered to it by an implanted sense or who knows what tutelary nature.
The will is conceived as a faculty of determining oneself to action in accordance with the conception of certain laws.
Now that which serves the will as the objective ground of its self determination is the end, and, if this is assigned by reason alone, it must hold for all rational beings.
On the other hand, that which merely contains the ground of possibility of the action of which the effect is the end, this is called the means.
Hence all these relative ends can give rise only to hypothetical imperatives.
Supposing, however, that there were something whose existence has in itself an absolute worth, something which, being an end in itself, could be a source of definite laws; then in this and this alone would lie the source of a possible categorical imperative, i e, a practical law.
Now I say: man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must be always regarded at the same time as an end.
But the inclinations, themselves being sources of want, are so far from having an absolute worth for which they should be desired that on the contrary it must be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them.
If then there is a supreme practical principle or, in respect of the human will, a categorical imperative, it must be one which, being drawn from the conception of that which is necessarily an end for everyone because it is an end in itself, constitutes an objective principle of will, and can therefore serve as a universal practical law.
The foundation of this principle is: rational nature exists as an end in itself.
Accordingly the practical imperative will be as follows: So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only.
To abide by the previous examples:
Firstly, under the head of necessary duty to oneself: He who contemplates suicide should ask himself whether his action can be consistent with the idea of humanity as an end in itself.
If he destroys himself in order to escape from painful circumstances, he uses a person merely as a mean to maintain a tolerable condition up to the end of life.
But a man is not a thing, that is to say, something which can be used merely as means, but must in all his actions be always considered as an end in himself.
I cannot, therefore, dispose in any way of a man in my own person so as to mutilate him, to damage or kill him. (It belongs to ethics proper to define this principle more precisely, so as to avoid all misunderstanding, e. g., as to the amputation of the limbs in order to preserve myself, as to exposing my life to danger with a view to preserve it, etc
This question is therefore omitted here.)
For he whom I propose by such a promise to use for my own purposes cannot possibly assent to my mode of acting towards him and, therefore, cannot himself contain the end of this action. This violation of the principle of humanity in other men is more obvious if we take in examples of attacks on the freedom and property of others.
For then it is clear that he who transgresses the rights of men intends to use the person of others merely as a means, without considering that as rational beings they ought always to be esteemed also as ends, that is, as beings who must be capable of containing in themselves the end of the very same action.
Thirdly, as regards contingent (meritorious) duties to oneself: It is not enough that the action does not violate humanity in our own person as an end in itself, it must also harmonize with it.
Now there are in humanity capacities of greater perfection, which belong to the end that nature has in view in regard to humanity in ourselves as the subject: to neglect these might perhaps be consistent with the maintenance of humanity as an end in itself, but not with the advancement of this end.
Fourthly, as regards meritorious duties towards others: The natural end which all men have is their own happiness.
Now humanity might indeed subsist, although no one should contribute anything to the happiness of others, provided he did not intentionally withdraw anything from it; but after all this would only harmonize negatively not positively with humanity as an end in itself, if every one does not also endeavour, as far as in him lies, to forward the ends of others.
For the ends of any subject which is an end in himself ought as far as possible to be my ends also, if that conception is to have its full effect with me.
In fact the objective principle of all practical legislation lies (according to the first principle) in the rule and its form of universality which makes it capable of being a law (say, e.
On this principle all maxims are rejected which are inconsistent with the will being itself universal legislator.
But we could not prove independently that there are practical propositions which command categorically, nor can it be proved in this section; one thing, however, could be done, namely, to indicate in the imperative itself, by some determinate expression, that in the case of volition from duty all interest is renounced, which is the specific criterion of categorical as distinguished from hypothetical imperatives.
This is done in the present (third) formula of the principle, namely, in the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will.
Now by this necessary consequence all the labour spent in finding a supreme principle of duty was irrevocably lost.
For men never elicited duty, but only a necessity of acting from a certain interest.
Whether this interest was private or otherwise, in any case the imperative must be conditional and could not by any means be capable of being a moral command.
I will therefore call this the principle of autonomy of the will, in contrast with every other which I accordingly reckon as heteronomy.
The conception of the will of every rational being as one which must consider itself as giving in all the maxims of its will universal laws, so as to judge itself and its actions from this point of view this conception leads to another which depends on it and is very fruitful, namely that of a kingdom of ends.
By a kingdom I understand the union of different rational beings in a system by common laws.
For all rational beings come under the law that each of them must treat itself and all others never merely as means, but in every case at the same time as ends in themselves.
Hence results a systematic union of rational being by common objective laws, i e, a kingdom which may be called a kingdom of ends, since what these laws have in view is just the relation of these beings to one another as ends and means.
He cannot, however, maintain the latter position merely by the maxims of his will, but only in case he is a completely independent being without wants and with unrestricted power adequate to his will.
Duty does not apply to the sovereign in the kingdom of ends, but it does to every member of it and to all in the same degree.
The practical necessity of acting on this principle, i e, duty, does not rest at all on feelings, impulses, or inclinations, but solely on the relation of rational beings to one another, a relation in which the will of a rational being must always be regarded as legislative, since otherwise it could not be conceived as an end in itself.
Thus morality, and humanity as capable of it, is that which alone has dignity.
Neither nature nor art contains anything which in default of these it could put in their place, for their worth consists not in the effects which spring from them, not in the use and advantage which they secure, but in the disposition of mind, that is, the maxims of the will which are ready to manifest themselves in such actions, even though they should not have the desired effect.
This estimation therefore shows that the worth of such a disposition is dignity, and places it infinitely above all value, with which it cannot for a moment be brought into comparison or competition without as it were violating its sanctity.
What then is it which justifies virtue or the morally good disposition, in making such lofty claims?
For nothing has any worth except what the law assigns it.
Now the legislation itself which assigns the worth of everything must for that very reason possess dignity, that is an unconditional incomparable worth; and the word respect alone supplies a becoming expression for the esteem which a rational being must have for it.
Autonomy then is the basis of the dignity of human and of every rational nature.
There is, however, a difference in them, but it is rather subjectively than objectively practical, intended namely to bring an idea of the reason nearer to intuition (by means of a certain analogy) and thereby nearer to feeling.
one.
three.
A complete characterization of all maxims by means of that formula, namely, that all maxims ought by their own legislation to harmonize with a possible kingdom of ends as with a kingdom of nature.
In forming our moral judgement of actions, it is better to proceed always on the strict method and start from the general formula of the categorical imperative: Act according to a maxim which can at the same time make itself a universal law.
In the first case, the kingdom of ends is a theoretical idea, adopted to explain what actually is.
We can now end where we started at the beginning, namely, with the conception of a will unconditionally good.
That will is absolutely good which cannot be evil in other words, whose maxim, if made a universal law, could never contradict itself.
This principle, then, is its supreme law: "Act always on such a maxim as thou canst at the same time will to be a universal law"; this is the sole condition under which a will can never contradict itself; and such an imperative is categorical.
Since the validity of the will as a universal law for possible actions is analogous to the universal connexion of the existence of things by general laws, which is the formal notion of nature in general, the categorical imperative can also be expressed thus: Act on maxims which can at the same time have for their object themselves as universal laws of nature.
Such then is the formula of an absolutely good will.
Rational nature is distinguished from the rest of nature by this, that it sets before itself an end.
This end would be the matter of every good will.
Now this end can be nothing but the subject of all possible ends, since this is also the subject of a possible absolutely good will; for such a will cannot without contradiction be postponed to any other object.
In this way a world of rational beings (mundus intelligibilis) is possible as a kingdom of ends, and this by virtue of the legislation proper to all persons as members.
The formal principle of these maxims is: "So act as if thy maxim were to serve likewise as the universal law (of all rational beings)." A kingdom of ends is thus only possible on the analogy of a kingdom of nature, the former however only by maxims, that is self imposed rules, the latter only by the laws of efficient causes acting under necessitation from without.
Nevertheless, although the system of nature is looked upon as a machine, yet so far as it has reference to rational beings as its ends, it is given on this account the name of a kingdom of nature.
Now such a kingdom of ends would be actually realized by means of maxims conforming to the canon which the categorical imperative prescribes to all rational beings, if they were universally followed.
For this sole absolute lawgiver must, notwithstanding this, be always conceived as estimating the worth of rational beings only by their disinterested behaviour, as prescribed to themselves from that idea [the dignity of man] alone.
Morality, then, is the relation of actions to the relation of actions will, that is, to the autonomy of potential universal legislation by its maxims.
An action that is consistent with the autonomy of the will is permitted; one that does not agree therewith is forbidden.
A will whose maxims necessarily coincide with the laws of autonomy is a holy will, good absolutely. The dependence of a will not absolutely good on the principle of autonomy (moral necessitation) is obligation.
This, then, cannot be applied to a holy being.
The objective necessity of actions from obligation is called duty.
From what has just been said, it is easy to see how it happens that, although the conception of duty implies subjection to the law, we yet ascribe a certain dignity and sublimity to the person who fulfils all his duties.
We have also shown above that neither fear nor inclination, but simply respect for the law, is the spring which can give actions a moral worth.
The Autonomy of the Will as the Supreme Principle of Morality
Autonomy of the will is that property of it by which it is a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition).
This matter, however, does not belong to the present section.
of Morality
If the will seeks the law which is to determine it anywhere else than in the fitness of its maxims to be universal laws of its own dictation, consequently if it goes out of itself and seeks this law in the character of any of its objects, there always results heteronomy.
The will in that case does not give itself the law, but it is given by the object through its relation to the will.
Thus, e g, I ought to endeavour to promote the happiness of others, not as if its realization involved any concern of mine (whether by immediate inclination or by any satisfaction indirectly gained through reason), but simply because a maxim which excludes it cannot be comprehended as a universal law in one and the same volition.
Classification of all Principles of Morality which can be
All principles which can be taken from this point of view are either empirical or rational.
The former, drawn from the principle of happiness, are built on physical or moral feelings; the latter, drawn from the principle of perfection, are built either on the rational conception of perfection as a possible effect, or on that of an independent perfection (the will of God) as the determining cause of our will.
Amongst the rational principles of morality, the ontological conception of perfection, notwithstanding its defects, is better than the theological conception which derives morality from a Divine absolutely perfect will.
For the influence which the conception of an object within the reach of our faculties can exercise on the will of the subject, in consequence of its natural properties, depends on the nature of the subject, either the sensibility (inclination and taste), or the understanding and reason, the employment of which is by the peculiar constitution of their nature attended with satisfaction.
It follows that the law would be, properly speaking, given by nature, and, as such, it must be known and proved by experience and would consequently be contingent and therefore incapable of being an apodeictic practical rule, such as the moral rule must be.
Whoever then holds morality to be anything real, and not a chimerical idea without any truth, must likewise admit the principle of it that is here assigned.
May no wolfe howle; no screech owle stir A wing about thy sepulchre! No boysterous winds or stormes come hither, To starve or wither Thy soft sweet earth!
but, like a spring, Love kept it ever flourishing. HERRICK.
IN the course of an excursion through one of the remote counties of England, I had struck into one of those cross roads that lead through the more secluded parts of the country, and stopped one afternoon at a village the situation of which was beautifully rural and retired.
There was an air of primitive simplicity about its inhabitants not to be found in the villages which lie on the great coach roads.
I determined to pass the night there, and, having taken an early dinner, strolled out to enjoy the neighboring scenery.
Indeed, it was an object of some curiosity, its old tower being completely overrun with ivy so that only here and there a jutting buttress, an angle of gray wall, or a fantastically carved ornament peered through the verdant covering.
The early part of the day had been dark and showery, but in the afternoon it had cleared up, and, though sullen clouds still hung overhead, yet there was a broad tract of golden sky in the west, from which the setting sun gleamed through the dripping leaves and lit up all Nature into a melancholy smile.
I had seated myself on a half sunken tombstone, and was musing, as one is apt to do at this sober thoughted hour, on past scenes and early friends-on those who were distant and those who were dead-and indulging in that kind of melancholy fancying which has in it something sweeter even than pleasure.
Every now and then the stroke of a bell from the neighboring tower fell on my ear; its tones were in unison with the scene, and, instead of jarring, chimed in with my feelings; and it was some time before I recollected that it must be tolling the knell of some new tenant of the tomb.
The corpse was followed by the parents.
The father seemed to repress his feelings, but his fixed eye, contracted brow, and deeply furrowed face showed the struggle that was passing within.
His wife hung on his arm, and wept aloud with the convulsive bursts of a mother's sorrow.
I followed the funeral into the church.
The bier was placed in the centre aisle, and the chaplet of white flowers, with a pair of white gloves, was hung over the seat which the deceased had occupied.
Every one knows the soul subduing pathos of the funeral service, for who is so fortunate as never to have followed some one he has loved to the tomb?
But when performed over the remains of innocence and beauty, thus laid low in the bloom of existence, what can be more affecting?
At that simple but most solemn consignment of the body to the grave "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust!"--the tears of the youthful companions of the deceased flowed unrestrained.
The father still seemed to struggle with his feelings, and to comfort himself with the assurance that the dead are blessed which die in the Lord; but the mother only thought of her child as a flower of the field cut down and withered in the midst of its sweetness; she was like Rachel, "mourning over her children, and would not be comforted."
On returning to the inn I learnt the whole story of the deceased.
It was a simple one, and such as has often been told.
Her father had once been an opulent farmer, but was reduced in circumstances.
She had been the pupil of the village pastor, the favorite lamb of his little flock.
She appeared like some tender plant of the garden blooming accidentally amid the hardier natives of the fields.
The superiority of her charms was felt and acknowledged by her companions, but without envy, for it was surpassed by the unassuming gentleness and winning kindness of her manners.
It might be truly said of her:
"This is the prettiest low born lass, that ever Ran on the green sward: nothing she does or seems But smacks of something greater than herself; Too noble for this place."
The village was one of those sequestered spots which still retain some vestiges of old English customs.
It had its rural festivals and holiday pastimes, and still kept up some faint observance of the once popular rites of May.
These, indeed, had been promoted by its present pastor, who was a lover of old customs and one of those simple Christians that think their mission fulfilled by promoting joy on earth and good will among mankind.
Under his auspices the May pole stood from year to year in the centre of the village green; on Mayday it was decorated with garlands and streamers, and a queen or lady of the May was appointed, as in former times, to preside at the sports and distribute the prizes and rewards.
He was charmed with the native taste that pervaded this village pageant, but, above all, with the dawning loveliness of the queen of May.
The artlessness of rural habits enabled him readily to make her acquaintance; he gradually won his way into her intimacy, and paid his court to her in that unthinking way in which young officers are too apt to trifle with rustic simplicity.
There was nothing in his advances to startle or alarm.
He never even talked of love, but there are modes of making it more eloquent than language, and which convey it subtilely and irresistibly to the heart. The beam of the eye, the tone of voice, the thousand tendernesses which emanate from every word and look and action,--these form the true eloquence of love, and can always be felt and understood, but never described.
Can we wonder that they should readily win a heart young, guileless, and susceptible?
As to her, she loved almost unconsciously; she scarcely inquired what was the growing passion that was absorbing every thought and feeling, or what were to be its consequences.
She, indeed, looked not to the future.
When present, his looks and words occupied her whole attention; when absent, she thought but of what had passed at their recent interview.
He taught her to see new beauties in Nature; he talked in the language of polite and cultivated life, and breathed into her ear the witcheries of romance and poetry.
The gallant figure of her youthful admirer and the splendor of his military attire might at first have charmed her eye, but it was not these that had captivated her heart.
Her attachment had something in it of idolatry.
She looked up to him as to a being of a superior order.
She felt in his society the enthusiasm of a mind naturally delicate and poetical, and now first awakened to a keen perception of the beautiful and grand.
Of the sordid distinctions of rank and fortune she thought nothing; it was the difference of intellect, of demeanor, of manners, from those of the rustic society to which she had been accustomed, that elevated him in her opinion.
She would listen to him with charmed ear and downcast look of mute delight, and her cheek would mantle with enthusiasm; or if ever she ventured a shy glance of timid admiration, it was as quickly withdrawn, and she would sigh and blush at the idea of her comparative unworthiness.
Her lover was equally impassioned, but his passion was mingled with feelings of a coarser nature.
He had begun the connection in levity, for he had often heard his brother officers boast of their village conquests, and thought some triumph of the kind necessary to his reputation as a man of spirit.
What was he to do?
In vain did he try to fortify himself by a thousand heartless examples of men of fashion, and to chill the glow of generous sentiment with that cold derisive levity with which he had heard them talk of female virtue: whenever he came into her presence she was still surrounded by that mysterious but impassive charm of virgin purity in whose hallowed sphere no guilty thought can live.
He remained for a short time in a state of the most painful irresolution; he hesitated to communicate the tidings until the day for marching was at hand, when he gave her the intelligence in the course of an evening ramble.
It broke in at once upon her dream of felicity; she looked upon it as a sudden and insurmountable evil, and wept with the guileless simplicity of a child. He drew her to his bosom and kissed the tears from her soft cheek; nor did he meet with a repulse, for there are moments of mingled sorrow and tenderness which hallow the caresses of affection.
He was naturally impetuous, and the sight of beauty apparently yielding in his arms, the confidence of his power over her, and the dread of losing her forever all conspired to overwhelm his better feelings: he ventured to propose that she should leave her home and be the companion of his fortunes.
He was quite a novice in seduction, and blushed and faltered at his own baseness; but so innocent of mind was his intended victim that she was at first at a loss to comprehend his meaning, and why she should leave her native village and the humble roof of her parents.
When at last the nature of his proposal flashed upon her pure mind, the effect was withering.
She did not weep; she did not break forth into reproach; she said not a word, but she shrunk back aghast as from a viper, gave him a look of anguish that pierced to his very soul, and, clasping her hands in agony, fled, as if for refuge, to her father's cottage.
The officer retired confounded, humiliated, and repentant.
Faintings and hysterics had at first shaken her tender frame, and were succeeded by a settled and pining melancholy.
She had beheld from her window the march of the departing troops.
She strained a last aching gaze after him as the morning sun glittered about his figure and his plume waved in the breeze; he passed away like a bright vision from her sight, and left her all in darkness.
It would be trite to dwell on the particulars of her after story.
It was, like other tales of love, melancholy.
She avoided society and wandered out alone in the walks she had most frequented with her lover. She sought, like the stricken deer, to weep in silence and loneliness and brood over the barbed sorrow that rankled in her soul.
Sometimes she would be seen late of an evening sitting in the porch of the village church, and the milk maids, returning from the fields, would now and then overhear her singing some plaintive ditty in the hawthorn walk.
She became fervent in her devotions at church, and as the old people saw her approach, so wasted away, yet with a hectic gloom and that hallowed air which melancholy diffuses round the form, they would make way for her as for something spiritual, and looking after her, would shake their heads in gloomy foreboding.
She felt a conviction that she was hastening to the tomb, but looked forward to it as a place of rest.
The silver cord that had bound her to existence was loosed, and there seemed to be no more pleasure under the sun
If ever her gentle bosom had entertained resentment against her lover, it was extinguished.
She was incapable of angry passions, and in a moment of saddened tenderness she penned him a farewell letter.
She even depicted the sufferings which she had experienced, but concluded with saying that she could not die in peace until she had sent him her forgiveness and her blessing.
She could only totter to the window, where, propped up in her chair, it was her enjoyment to sit all day and look out upon the landscape.
Still she uttered no complaint nor imparted to any one the malady that was preying on her heart.
She never even mentioned her lover's name, but would lay her head on her mother's bosom and weep in silence.
Her poor parents hung in mute anxiety over this fading blossom of their hopes, still flattering themselves that it might again revive to freshness and that the bright unearthly bloom which sometimes flushed her cheek might be the promise of returning health.
In this way she was seated between them one Sunday afternoon; her hands were clasped in theirs, the lattice was thrown open, and the soft air that stole in brought with it the fragrance of the clustering honeysuckle which her own hands had trained round the window.
Her father had just been reading a chapter in the Bible: it spoke of the vanity of worldly things and of the joys of heaven: it seemed to have diffused comfort and serenity through her bosom.
Her eye was fixed on the distant village church: the bell had tolled for the evening service; the last villager was lagging into the porch, and everything had sunk into that hallowed stillness peculiar to the day of rest.
Her parents were gazing on her with yearning hearts.
Sickness and sorrow, which pass so roughly over some faces, had given to hers the expression of a seraph's.
A tear trembled in her soft blue eye.
Was she thinking of her faithless lover? or were her thoughts wandering to that distant churchyard, into whose bosom she might soon be gathered?
She was too faint to rise-she attempted to extend her trembling hand-her lips moved as if she spoke, but no word was articulated; she looked down upon him with a smile of unutterable tenderness, and closed her eyes forever.
Such are the particulars which I gathered of this village story.
They are but scanty, and I am conscious have little novelty to recommend them.
In the present rage also for strange incident and high seasoned narrative they may appear trite and insignificant, but they interested me strongly at the time; and, taken in connection with the affecting ceremony which I had just witnessed, left a deeper impression on my mind than many circumstances of a more striking nature.
I have passed through the place since, and visited the church again from a better motive than mere curiosity.
It was a wintry evening: the trees were stripped of their foliage, the churchyard looked naked and mournful, and the wind rustled coldly through the dry grass.
Evergreens, however, had been planted about the grave of the village favorite, and osiers were bent over it to keep the turf uninjured.
The church door was open and I stepped in.
There hung the chaplet of flowers and the gloves, as on the day of the funeral: the flowers were withered, it is true, but care seemed to have been taken that no dust should soil their whiteness.
I have seen many monuments where art has exhausted its powers to awaken the sympathy of the spectator, but I have met with none that spoke more touchingly to my heart than this simple but delicate memento of departed innocence.
No men stopped us, for there were none about [-from ] the Palace of Corrective Detention, and the others knew nothing.
We saw nothing as we entered, save the sky in the great windows, blue and glowing.
All the heads of the Council turned to us as we entered.
These great and wise of the earth did not know what to think of us, and they looked upon us with wonder and curiosity, as if we were a miracle.
It is true that our tunic was torn and stained with brown stains which had been blood.
"Who are you, our brother?
"A Street Sweeper!
It is not to be believed!
"Our brothers!" we said.
We spoke of it, and of our long quest, and of our tunnel, and of our escape from the Palace of Corrective Detention.
And we stood still, our eyes upon the wire.
And slowly, slowly as a flush of blood, a red flame trembled in the wire.
Then the wire glowed.
But terror struck the men of the Council.
We looked upon them and we laughed and said:
"Fear nothing, our brothers.
We give it to you."
Still they would not move.
"We give you the power of the sky!" we cried.
"We give you the key to the earth!
Take it, and let us be one of you, the humblest among you.
Let us [-all ] work together, and harness this power, and make it ease the toil of men.
Let us throw away our candles and our torches.
Let us bring a new light to men!"
But they looked upon us, and suddenly we were afraid.
For their eyes were still, and small, and evil.
They moved to the table and the others followed.
No such crime has ever been committed, and it is not for us to judge.
Nor for any small Council.
We looked upon them and we pleaded:
"Our brothers!
You are right.
We do not care.
What will you do with the light?"
"No," we answered.
Therefore it cannot be destroyed by the whim of one."
"This thing," they said, "must be destroyed."
And all the others cried as one:
"It must be destroyed!"
We turned and we looked at them for the last time, and a rage, such as [-it ] is not fit for humans to know, choked our voice in our throat.
"You fools!
You thrice damned fools!"
We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands.
And the road seemed not to be flat before us, but as if it were leaping up to meet us, and we waited for the earth to rise and strike us in the face.
But we ran.
We knew not where we were going.
Then we knew suddenly that we were lying on a soft earth and that we had stopped.
We had not thought of coming here, but our legs had carried our wisdom, and our legs had brought us to the Uncharted Forest against our will.
Our glass box lay beside us.
We crawled to it, we fell upon it, our face in our arms, and we lay still.
It mattered not where we went.
The forest disposes of its own victims.
This gave us no fear either.
So we walked on, our box in our arms, our heart empty.
Whatever days are left to us, we shall spend them alone.
And we have heard of the corruption to be found in solitude.
We know these things, but we do not care.
We are tired.
Only the glass box in our arms is like a living heart that gives us strength.
We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth.
Why wonder about this?
"The name of the old man was De Lacey.
He was tried and condemned to death.
The injustice of his sentence was very flagrant; all Paris was indignant; and it was judged that his religion and wealth rather than the crime alleged against him had been the cause of his condemnation.
"Felix had accidentally been present at the trial; his horror and indignation were uncontrollable when he heard the decision of the court.
He made, at that moment, a solemn vow to deliver him and then looked around for the means.
Felix visited the grate at night and made known to the prisoner his intentions in his favour.
The Turk, amazed and delighted, endeavoured to kindle the zeal of his deliverer by promises of reward and wealth.
Before I depart I will give them to you; they will prove the truth of my tale; but at present, as the sun is already far declined, I shall only have time to repeat the substance of them to you.
"Safie related that her mother was a Christian Arab, seized and made a slave by the Turks; recommended by her beauty, she had won the heart of the father of Safie, who married her.
The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms of her mother, who, born in freedom, spurned the bondage to which she was now reduced.
She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion and taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female followers of Muhammad.
This lady died, but her lessons were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie, who sickened at the prospect of again returning to Asia and being immured within the walls of a harem, allowed only to occupy herself with infantile amusements, ill suited to the temper of her soul, now accustomed to grand ideas and a noble emulation for virtue.
The prospect of marrying a Christian and remaining in a country where women were allowed to take a rank in society was enchanting to her.
"The day for the execution of the Turk was fixed, but on the night previous to it he quitted his prison and before morning was distant many leagues from Paris.
Felix had procured passports in the name of his father, sister, and himself.
He had previously communicated his plan to the former, who aided the deceit by quitting his house, under the pretence of a journey and concealed himself, with his daughter, in an obscure part of Paris.
He revolved a thousand plans by which he should be enabled to prolong the deceit until it might be no longer necessary, and secretly to take his daughter with him when he departed.
His plans were facilitated by the news which arrived from Paris.
The plot of Felix was quickly discovered, and De Lacey and Agatha were thrown into prison.
The news reached Felix and roused him from his dream of pleasure.
This idea was torture to him.
"He did not succeed.
They remained confined for five months before the trial took place, the result of which deprived them of their fortune and condemned them to a perpetual exile from their native country.
Felix soon learned that the treacherous Turk, for whom he and his family endured such unheard of oppression, on discovering that his deliverer was thus reduced to poverty and ruin, became a traitor to good feeling and honour and had quitted Italy with his daughter, insultingly sending Felix a pittance of money to aid him, as he said, in some plan of future maintenance.
"Such were the events that preyed on the heart of Felix and rendered him, when I first saw him, the most miserable of his family.
He could have endured poverty, and while this distress had been the meed of his virtue, he gloried in it; but the ingratitude of the Turk and the loss of his beloved Safie were misfortunes more bitter and irreparable.
The generous nature of Safie was outraged by this command; she attempted to expostulate with her father, but he left her angrily, reiterating his tyrannical mandate.
She hesitated some time, but at length she formed her determination.
"She arrived in safety at a town about twenty leagues from the cottage of De Lacey, when her attendant fell dangerously ill.
Safie nursed her with the most devoted affection, but the poor girl died, and the Arabian was left alone, unacquainted with the language of the country and utterly ignorant of the customs of the world.
The being finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me in the expectation of a reply.
But I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas sufficiently to understand the full extent of his proposition.
He continued,
"I do refuse it," I replied; "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me.
Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world.
I have answered you; you may torture me, but I will never consent."
"You are in the wrong," replied the fiend; "and instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you.
Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?
Shall I respect man when he condemns me?
Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.
I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred.
A fiendish rage animated him as he said this; his face was wrinkled into contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold; but presently he calmed himself and proceeded-
"I intended to reason.
But I now indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realized.
Oh!
My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit!
Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!"
I was moved.
I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my consent, but I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale and the feelings he now expressed proved him to be a creature of fine sensations, and did I not as his maker owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow?
He saw my change of feeling and continued,
"If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again; I will go to the vast wilds of South America.
The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty.
How can you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile?
You will return and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their detestation; your evil passions will be renewed, and you will then have a companion to aid you in the task of destruction.
This may not be; cease to argue the point, for I cannot consent."
"How inconstant are your feelings!
My evil passions will have fled, for I shall meet with sympathy!
His words had a strange effect upon me.
I compassionated him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.
I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I could not sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow.
"You swear," I said, "to be harmless; but have you not already shown a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you?
May not even this be a feint that will increase your triumph by affording a wider scope for your revenge?"
"How is this?
If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence everyone will be ignorant.
After a long pause of reflection I concluded that the justice due both to him and my fellow creatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request.
Turning to him, therefore, I said,
"I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe forever, and every other place in the neighbourhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile."
"I swear," he cried, "by the sun, and by the blue sky of heaven, and by the fire of love that burns my heart, that if you grant my prayer, while they exist you shall never behold me again.
Saying this, he suddenly quitted me, fearful, perhaps, of any change in my sentiments.
I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle, and quickly lost among the undulations of the sea of ice.
Night was far advanced when I came to the halfway resting place and seated myself beside the fountain.
The stars shone at intervals as the clouds passed from over them; the dark pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground; it was a scene of wonderful solemnity and stirred strange thoughts within me.
I wept bitterly, and clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, "Oh!
Even in my own heart I could give no expression to my sensations-they weighed on me with a mountain's weight and their excess destroyed my agony beneath them. Thus I returned home, and entering the house, presented myself to the family.
My haggard and wild appearance awoke intense alarm, but I answered no question, scarcely did I speak.
I felt as if I were placed under a ban-as if I had no right to claim their sympathies-as if never more might I enjoy companionship with them.
Yet even thus I loved them to adoration; and to save them, I resolved to dedicate myself to my most abhorred task.
HE STEPPED into the smoking compartment of the Pullman, where I was sitting alone.
He had on a long fur lined coat, and he carried a fifty dollar suit case that he put down on the seat.
Then he saw me.
"Well! well!" he said, and recognition broke out all over his face like morning sunlight.
"By Jove!" he said, shaking hands vigorously, "who would have thought of seeing you?"
"Who, indeed," I thought to myself.
He looked at me more closely.
"You haven't changed a bit," he said.
"Yes," I said, "a little; but you're stouter yourself."
This of course would help to explain away any undue stoutness on my part.
"No," I continued boldly and firmly, "you look just about the same as ever."
And all the time I was wondering who he was.
I didn't know him from Adam; I couldn't recall him a bit.
I don't mean that my memory is weak. On the contrary, it is singularly tenacious.
But when it does happen that a name or face escapes me I never lose my presence of mind.
I know just how to deal with the situation.
It only needs coolness and intellect, and it all comes right.
My friend sat down.
"It's a long time since we met," he said.
"A long time," I repeated with something of a note of sadness.
I wanted him to feel that I, too, had suffered from it.
"But it has gone very quickly."
"Like a flash," I assented cheerfully.
"Strange," he said, "how life goes on and we lose track of people, and things alter.
I often think about it.
I sometimes wonder," he continued, "where all the old gang are gone to."
"Do you ever go back to the old place?" he asked.
"Never," I said, firmly and flatly.
This had to be absolute.
I felt that once and for all the "old place" must be ruled out of the discussion till I could discover where it was.
"No," he went on, "I suppose you'd hardly care to."
"Not now," I said very gently.
"I understand.
I beg your pardon," he said, and there was silence for a few moments.
So far I had scored the first point.
There was evidently an old place somewhere to which I would hardly care to go.
That was something to build on.
Presently he began again.
"Poor things," I thought, but I didn't say it.
I knew it was time now to make a bold stroke; so I used the method that I always employ.
I struck in with great animation.
"Say!" I said, "where's Billy?
Do you ever hear anything of Billy now?"
"Yes," said my friend, "sure-Billy is ranching out in Montana.
I saw him in Chicago last spring,--weighed about two hundred pounds,--you wouldn't know him."
"No, I certainly wouldn't," I murmured to myself.
"And where's Pete?" I said.
This was safe ground.
There is always a Pete.
"You mean Billy's brother," he said.
"Yes, yes, Billy's brother Pete.
I often think of him."
I started to laugh, too.
Under these circumstances it is always supposed to be very funny if a man has got married.
The notion of old peter (whoever he is) being married is presumed to be simply killing.
I kept on chuckling away quietly at the mere idea of it.
I was hoping that I might manage to keep on laughing till the train stopped.
I had only fifty miles more to go.
It's not hard to laugh for fifty miles if you know how.
But my friend wouldn't be content with it.
"I often meant to write to you," he said, his voice falling to a confidential tone, "especially when I heard of your loss."
I remained quiet.
What had I lost?
Was it money?
And if so, how much? And why had I lost it?
I wondered if it had ruined me or only partly ruined me.
"One can never get over a loss like that," he continued solemnly.
Evidently I was plumb ruined.
But I said nothing and remained under cover, waiting to draw his fire.
"Yes," the man went on, "death is always sad."
Death!
I almost hiccoughed with joy.
That was easy.
One has only to sit quiet and wait to find out who is dead.
"Yes," I murmured, "very sad.
But it has its other side, too."
"Very true, especially, of course, at that age."
"As you say at that age, and after such a life."
"What," he said, perplexed, "did your grandmother----"
That was it, was it?
As I said this I could hear the rattle and clatter of the train running past the semaphores and switch points and slacking to a stop.
My friend looked quickly out of the window.
His face was agitated.
"Great heavens!" he said, "that's the junction.
I've missed my stop.
I should have got out at the last station.
"She's late now, she's makin' up tahm!"
"Confound this lock-my money's in the suit case."
My one fear now was that he would fail to get off.
"Here," I said, pulling some money out of my pocket, "don't bother with the lock.
Here's money."
"Thanks," he said grabbing the roll of money out of my hand,--in his excitement he took all that I had.--"I'll just have time."
He sprang from the train.
I waited.
The porters were calling, "All abawd!
"Idiot," I thought, "he's missed it;" and there was his fifty dollar suit case lying on the seat.
Then presently I heard the porter's voice again.
Then his face, too, beamed all at once with recognition.
But it was not for me.
It was for the fifty dollar valise.
"Ah, there it is," he cried, seizing it and carrying it off.
I sank back in dismay.
The "old gang!" Pete's marriage!
Great heavens!
And my money!
I saw it all; the other man was "making talk," too, and making it with a purpose.
And next time that I fall into talk with a casual stranger in a car, I shall not try to be quite so extraordinarily clever.
I DREAMT one night not long ago that I was the editor of a great illustrated magazine.
I offer no apology for this: I have often dreamt even worse of myself than that.
But this was an accident.
The presidential election was drawing nearer every day and the market for reminiscences of Lincoln was extremely brisk, but, of course, might collapse any moment.
But it's a wearing occupation, full of disappointments, and needing the very keenest business instinct to watch every turn of the market.
I am afraid that this is a digression.
I knew at once in my dream where and what I was.
"I am an editor, and this is my editorial sanctum." Not that I have ever seen an editor or a sanctum.
A beautiful creature entered.
She has that indescribable beauty of effectiveness such as is given to hospital nurses.
This, I thought to myself, must be my private secretary.
"I hope I don't interrupt you, sir," said the girl.
Sit down.
You must be fatigued after your labours of the morning.
Let me ring for a club sandwich."
"I came to say, sir," the secretary went on, "that there's a person downstairs waiting to see you."
My manner changed at once.
"Is he a gentleman or a contributor?" I asked.
"He doesn't look exactly like a gentleman."
"Very good," I said.
"He's a contributor for sure.
Tell him to wait.
Ask the caretaker to lock him in the coal cellar, and kindly slip out and see if there's a policeman on the beat in case I need him."
"Very good, sir," said the secretary.
I waited for about an hour, wrote a few editorials advocating the rights of the people, smoked some Turkish cigarettes, drank a glass of sherry, and ate part of an anchovy sandwich.
Then I rang the bell.
"Bring that man here," I said.
Presently they brought him in.
He was a timid looking man with an embarrassed manner and all the low cunning of an author stamped on his features.
I could see a bundle of papers in his hand, and I knew that the scoundrel was carrying a manuscript.
"Now, sir," I said, "speak quickly.
What's your business?"
"I've got here a manuscript," he began.
"What!" I shouted at him.
"A manuscript!
Bringing manuscripts in here!
What sort of a place do you think this is?"
"It's the manuscript of a story," he faltered.
"A story!" I shrieked.
"What on earth do you think we'd want stories for!
Do you think we've nothing better to do than to print your idiotic ravings?
Have you any idea, you idiot, of the expense we're put to in setting up our fifty pages of illustrated advertising?
Can you form any idea of the time and thought that we have to spend on these things, and yet you dare to come in here with your miserable stories.
By heaven," I said, rising in my seat, "I've a notion to come over there and choke you: I'm entitled to do it by the law, and I think I will."
"Don't, don't," he pleaded.
"I'll go away.
I meant no harm.
I'll take it with me."
"No you don't," I interrupted; "none of your sharp tricks with this magazine.
If I don't like it, I shall prosecute you, and, I trust, obtain full reparation from the courts."
To tell the truth, it had occurred to me that perhaps I might need after all to buy the miserable stuff.
The present low state of public taste demands a certain amount of this kind of matter distributed among the advertising.
I rang the bell again.
"Please take this man away and shut him up again.
Have them keep a good eye on him.
He's an author."
"Very good, sir," said the secretary.
I called her back for one moment.
"Don't feed him anything," I said.
"No," said the girl.
The manuscript lay before me on the table.
It looked bulky.
I rang the bell again.
"Kindly ask the janitor to step this way."
He came in.
"Jones," I said, "can you read?"
"Yes, sir," he said, "some."
"Very good.
I want you to take this manuscript and read it.
Read it all through and then bring it back here."
The janitor took the manuscript and disappeared.
It had occurred to me that by arranging the picture matter in a neat device with verses from "Home Sweet Home" running through it in double leaded old English type, I could set up a page that would be the delight of all business readers and make this number of the magazine a conspicuous success.
"Yes, sir."
"And you find it all right-punctuation good, spelling all correct?"
"Very good indeed, sir."
I want you to answer me quite frankly, Jones,--there is nothing in it that would raise a smile, or even a laugh, is there?"
"And now tell me-for remember that the reputation of our magazine is at stake-does this story make a decided impression on you?
"I think it has," he said.
"Very well," I answered; "now bring the author to me."
In the interval of waiting, I hastily ran my eye through the pages of the manuscript.
Presently they brought the author back again.
He had assumed a look of depression.
"I have decided," I said, "to take your manuscript."
Joy broke upon his face.
He came nearer to me as if to lick my hand.
"Stop a minute," I said.
"I am willing to take your story, but there are certain things, certain small details which I want to change."
"Yes?" he said timidly.
"In the first place, I don't like your title.
"But surely," began the contributor, beginning to wring his hands----
"Don't interrupt me," I said.
"In the next place, the story is much too long." Here I reached for a large pair of tailor's scissors that lay on the table.
"This story contains nine thousand words.
We never care to use more than six thousand.
I must therefore cut some of it off." I measured the story carefully with a pocket tape that lay in front of me, cut off three thousand words and handed them back to the author.
"These words," I said, "you may keep.
You are at liberty to make any use of them that you like."
"But please," he said, "you have cut off all the end of the story: the whole conclusion is gone.
The readers can't possibly tell,----"
I smiled at him with something approaching kindness.
The end is of no consequence whatever.
The beginning, I admit, may be, but the end!
Come!
And in any case in our magazine we print the end of each story separately, distributed among the advertisements to break the type.
But just at present we have plenty of these on hand.
You see," I continued, for there was something in the man's manner that almost touched me, "all that is needed is that the last words printed must have a look of finality.
That's all.
Now, let me see," and I turned to the place where the story was cut, "what are the last words: here: 'Dorothea sank into a chair.
There we must leave her!' Excellent!
What better end could you want?
She sank into a chair and you leave her.
Nothing more natural."
The contributor seemed about to protest.
But I stopped him.
"There is one other small thing," I said.
"I see," I said, "that your story as written is laid largely in Spain in the summer.
I shall ask you to alter this to Switzerland and make it winter time to allow for the breaking of steam pipes.
Such things as these, however, are mere details; we can easily arrange them."
I reached out my hand.
"And now," I said, "I must wish you a good afternoon."
The contributor seemed to pluck up courage.
I waived the question gravely aside.
"You will, of course, be duly paid at our usual rate.
You receive a cheque two years after publication.
Good bye."
Then I sat down, while my mind was on it, and wrote the advance notice of the story.
It ran like this:
His style has a brio, a poise, a savoir faire, a je ne sais quoi, which stamps all his work with the cachet of literary superiority.
Spiggott and Fawcett's Home Plumbing Device Exposition which adorns the same number of the great review.
I wrote this out, rang the bell, and was just beginning to say to the secretary-
"My dear child,--pray pardon my forgetfulness.
You must be famished for lunch.
OF SOME VERBAL DISPUTES.
First, I do not find that in the English, or any other modern tongue, the boundaries are exactly fixed between virtues and talents, vices and defects, or that a precise definition can be given of the one as contradistinguished from the other.
Should we affirm that the qualities alone, which prompt us to act our part in society, are entitled to that honourable distinction; it must immediately occur that these are indeed the most valuable qualities, and are commonly denominated the SOCIAL virtues; but that this very epithet supposes that there are also virtues of another species.
It is fortunate, amidst all this seeming perplexity, that the question, being merely verbal, cannot possibly be of any importance.
A moral, philosophical discourse needs not enter into all these caprices of language, which are so variable in different dialects, and in different ages of the same dialect.
No time can efface the cruel ideas of a man's own foolish conduct, or of affronts, which cowardice or impudence has brought upon him.
They still haunt his solitary hours, damp his most aspiring thoughts, and show him, even to himself, in the most contemptible and most odious colours imaginable.
These we display with care, if not with ostentation; and we commonly show more ambition of excelling in them, than even in the social virtues themselves, which are, in reality, of such superior excellence.
It is hard to tell, whether you hurt a man's character most by calling him a knave or a coward, and whether a beastly glutton or drunkard be not as odious and contemptible, as a selfish, ungenerous miser.
The figure which a man makes in life, the reception which he meets with in company, the esteem paid him by his acquaintance; all these advantages depend as much upon his good sense and judgement, as upon any other part of his character.
What is it then we can here dispute about?
The one produces love, the other esteem: the one is amiable, the other awful: we should wish to meet the one character in a friend; the other we should be ambitious of in ourselves.
The qualities, which produce both, are such as communicate pleasures.
But where this pleasure is severe and serious; or where its object is great, and makes a strong impression, or where it produces any degree of humility and awe; in all these cases, the passion, which arises from the pleasure, is more properly denominated esteem than love.
Benevolence attends both; but is connected with love in a more eminent degree.
Most people, I believe, will naturally, without premeditation, assent to the definition of the elegant and judicious poet:
Virtue (for mere good nature is a fool) Is sense and spirit with humanity.
What pretensions has a man to our generous assistance or good offices, who has dissipated his wealth in profuse expenses, idle vanities, chimerical projects, dissolute pleasures or extravagant gaming?
These vices (for we scruple not to call them such) bring misery unpitied, and contempt on every one addicted to them.
Achaeus, a wise and prudent prince, fell into a fatal snare, which cost him his crown and life, after having used every reasonable precaution to guard himself against it.
In the same manner, says he, as want of cleanliness, decency, or discretion in a mistress are found to alienate our affections.
We need only peruse the titles of chapters in Aristotle's Ethics to be convinced that he ranks courage, temperance, magnificence, magnanimity, modesty, prudence, and a manly openness, among the virtues, as well as justice and friendship.
Epictetus has scarcely ever mentioned the sentiment of humanity and compassion, but in order to put his disciples on their guard against it. The virtue of the Stoics seems to consist chiefly in a firm temper and a sound understanding.
Where he compares the great men of Greece and Rome, he fairly sets in opposition all their blemishes and accomplishments of whatever kind, and omits nothing considerable, which can either depress or exalt their characters.
To none would Hasdrubal entrust more willingly the conduct of any dangerous enterprize; under none did the soldiers discover more courage and confidence.
Great boldness in facing danger; great prudence in the midst of it.
No labour could fatigue his body or subdue his mind.
Cold and heat were indifferent to him: meat and drink he sought as supplies to the necessities of nature, not as gratifications of his voluptuous appetites.
Waking or rest he used indiscriminately, by night or by day.--These great Virtues were balanced by great Vices; inhuman cruelty; perfidy more than punic; no truth, no faith, no regard to oaths, promises, or religion.
In this pope, says he, there was a singular capacity and judgement: admirable prudence; a wonderful talent of persuasion; and in all momentous enterprizes a diligence and dexterity incredible.
But these VIRTUES were infinitely overbalanced by his VICES; no faith, no religion, insatiable avarice, exorbitant ambition, and a more than barbarous cruelty.
They justly considered that cowardice, meanness, levity, anxiety, impatience, folly, and many other qualities of the mind, might appear ridiculous and deformed, contemptible and odious, though independent of the will.
Nor could it be supposed, at all times, in every man's power to attain every kind of mental more than of exterior beauty.
Every one may employ TERMS in what sense he pleases: but this, in the mean time, must be allowed, that SENTIMENTS are every day experienced of blame and praise, which have objects beyond the dominion of the will or choice, and of which it behoves us, if not as moralists, as speculative philosophers at least, to give some satisfactory theory and explication.
The explication of one will easily lead us into a just conception of the others; and it is of greater consequence to attend to things than to verbal appellations.
That we owe a duty to ourselves is confessed even in the most vulgar system of morals; and it must be of consequence to examine that duty, in order to see whether it bears any affinity to that which we owe to society.
Montresor put up his glasses and bestowed on him a few moments of scrutiny, during which the Minister's heavily marked face took on the wary, fighting aspect which his department and the House of Commons knew.
The statesman slipped in for an instant between the trifler coming and the trifler gone.
As for Wilfrid Bury, he was dazzled by the young man's good looks. "'Young Harry with his beaver up!'" he thought, admiring against his will, as the tall, slim soldier paid his respects to Lady Henry, and, with a smiling word or two to the rest of those present, took his place beside her in the circle.
"Then I fear you won't get it," said Lady Henry, throwing herself back in her chair.
"mr Montresor can do nothing but quarrel and contradict."
Montresor lifted his hands in wonder.
"Had I been AEsop," he said, slyly, "I would have added another touch to a certain tale.
Observe, please!--even after the Lamb has been devoured he is still the object of calumny on the part of the Wolf!
Tell me what new follies the Duchess has on foot."
But it was not easy.
Throughout, Sir Wilfrid perceived in her a strained attention directed towards the conversation on the other side of the room.
She could neither see it nor hear it, but she was jealously conscious of it.
Lady Henry had been thorny over much during the afternoon; even for her oldest friend she had passed bounds; he desired perhaps to bring it home to her.
Meanwhile, Julie Le Breton, after a first moment of reserve and depression, had been beguiled, carried away.
At last Lady Henry could bear it no longer.
"Mademoiselle, be so good as to return his father's letters to Captain Warkworth," she said, abruptly, in her coldest voice, just as Montresor, dropping his-head thrown back and knees crossed-was about to pour into the ears of his companion the whole confidential history of his appointment to office three years before.
Julie Le Breton rose at once.
Montresor, perhaps repenting himself a little, returned to Lady Henry; and though she received him with great coolness, the circle round her, now augmented by dr Meredith, and another politician or two, was reconstituted; and presently, with a conscious effort, visible at least to Bury, she exerted herself to hold it, and succeeded.
His smile stiffened on his lips.
Like an icy wave, a swift and tragic impression swept through him.
He turned away, ashamed of having seen, and hid himself, as it were, with relief, in the clamor of amusement awakened by his own remarks.
Merely, or mainly, a woman's face.
Young Warkworth stood beside the sofa, on which sat Lady Henry's companion, his hands in his pockets, his handsome head bent towards her.
They had been talking earnestly, wholly forgetting and apparently forgotten by the rest of the room.
He seemed to be choosing his words with difficulty, his eyes on the floor.
Julie Le Breton, on the contrary, was looking at him-looking with all her soul, her ardent, unhappy soul-unconscious of aught else in the wide world.
"Good God! she is in love with him!" was the thought that rushed through Sir Wilfrid's mind.
"Poor thing!
Poor thing!"
Sir Wilfrid outstayed his fellow guests.
By seven o'clock all were gone. Mademoiselle Le Breton had retired.
He and Lady Henry were left alone.
"I must have some private talk with you.
Well, I understand you walked home from the Crowboroughs' the other night with-that woman."
She turned sharply upon him.
The accent was indescribable.
"I am sorry to hear you speak so," he said, gravely, after a pause. "Yes, I talked with her.
I did my best as a peacemaker.
Lady Henry threw out her hand in disdain.
I told her, of course, that I would put up with nothing of the kind."
"I dare say," said Lady Henry.
"You see, I guessed that it was not spontaneous; that you had wrung it out of her."
"What else did you expect me to do?" cried Sir Wilfrid.
"Oh no
You were very kind.
And I dare say you might have done some good.
I was beginning to-to have some returns on myself, when the Duchess appeared on the scene."
"She came, of course, to beg and protest.
She offered me her valuable services for all sorts of superfluous things that I didn't want-if only I would spare her Julie for this ridiculous bazaar.
That alone would be sufficient to justify me in dismissing her.
"Oh yes," murmured Sir Wilfrid, "if you want to dismiss her."
"We shall come to that presently," said Lady Henry, shortly.
Who can say what absurdities may happen if it once gets out that she is Lady Rose's child?
I could name half a dozen people, who come here habitually, who would consider themselves insulted if they knew-what you and I know."
"Insulted?
Because her mother-"
"Because her mother broke the seventh commandment?
Oh, dear, no! That, in my opinion, doesn't touch people much nowadays.
Insulted because they had been kept in the dark-that's all.
Vanity, not morals."
"As far as I can ascertain," said Sir Wilfrid, meditatively, "only the Duchess, Delafield, Montresor, and myself are in the secret."
"Montresor!" cried Lady Henry, beside herself.
"Wait a little.
Have you had any talk with Jacob?"
"I should think not!
Evelyn, of course, brings him in perpetually-Jacob this and Jacob that.
Where Julie has found the time I can't imagine; I thought I had kept her pretty well occupied."
"So you don't know what Jacob thinks?"
"Why should I want to know?" said Lady Henry, disdainfully.
"A lad whom I sent to Eton and Oxford, when his father couldn't pay his bills-what does it matter to me what he thinks?"
"Women are strange folk," thought Sir Wilfrid.
Then, aloud:
"I thought you were afraid lest he should want to marry her?"
"What does it matter to me?"
"By the way, as to that"--he spoke as though feeling his way-"have you never had suspicions in quite another direction?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I hear a good deal in various quarters of the trouble Mademoiselle Le Breton is taking-on behalf of that young soldier who was here just now-Harry Warkworth."
Lady Henry laughed impatiently.
"I dare say.
She is always wanting to patronize or influence somebody. It's in her nature.
What can an old, blind creature like me do to stop it?"
"And as Jacob's wife-the wife perhaps of the head of the family-you still mean to quarrel with her?"
"No, no!
You are really unjust," said Sir Wilfrid, laying a kind hand upon her arm.
"That was not her fault."
No, no, Wilfrid, your first instinct was the true one.
I shall have to bring myself to it, whatever it costs.
She must take her departure, or I shall go to pieces, morally and physically.
"And you can't subdue the temper?" he asked, with a queer smile.
"No, I can't!
That's flat.
She gets on my nerves, and I'm not responsible.
"Well," he said, slowly, "I hope you understand what it means?"
At least," he entreated, "don't quarrel with everybody who may sympathize with her.
Let them take what view they please.
"On the contrary!" She was now white to the lips.
"Whoever goes with her gives me up.
"My dear friend, listen to reason."
And, drawing his chair close to her, he argued with her for half an hour.
Her look of exhaustion distressed him, and, for all her unreason, he felt himself astonishingly in sympathy with her.
The age in him held out secret hands to the age in her-as against encroaching and rebellious youth.
Perhaps it was the consciousness of this mood in him which at last partly appeased her.
"Well, I'll try again.
"That's a great pity," was his naive reply.
"Nothing would put you in a better position than to give her leave."
"I shall do nothing of the kind," she vowed.
Lady Henry sat alone in her brightly lighted drawing room for some time. She could neither read nor write nor sew, owing to her blindness, and in the reaction from her passion of the afternoon she felt herself very old and weary.
But at last the door opened and Julie Le Breton's light step approached.
"May I read to you?" she said, gently.
She had no sooner, however, begun to knit than her very acute sense of touch noticed something wrong with the wool she was using.
"This is not the wool I ordered," she said, fingering it carefully.
"You remember, I gave you a message about it on Thursday?
Julie laid down the newspaper and looked in perplexity at the ball of wool.
"I remember you gave me a message," she faltered.
"Well, what did they say?"
"I suppose that was all they had."
Something in the tone struck Lady Henry's quick ears.
"Did you ever go to Winton's at all?" she said, quickly.
"I am so sorry.
The Duchess's maid was going there," said Julie, hurriedly, "and she went for me.
"Hm," said Lady Henry, slowly.
"So you didn't go to Winton's.
Julie hesitated.
She had grown very white.
Suddenly her face settled and steadied.
"No," she said, calmly.
"I meant to have done all your commissions.
Lady Henry flushed deeply.
May I ask what you were doing there?"
"I was trying to help the Duchess in her plans for the bazaar."
"Indeed?
Was any one else there?
Answer me, mademoiselle."
Julie hesitated again, and again spoke with a kind of passionate composure.
"Yes.
mr Delafield was there."
Allow me to assure you, mademoiselle"--Lady Henry rose from her seat, leaning on her stick; surely no old face was ever more formidable, more withering-"that whatever ambitions you may cherish, Jacob Delafield is not altogether the simpleton you imagine.
He will take some time before he really makes up his mind to marry a woman of your disposition-and your history."
Julie Le Breton also rose.
"I shall not marry mr Delafield.
But it is because-I have refused him twice."
Lady Henry gasped.
She fell back into her chair, staring at her companion.
"You have-refused him?"
"A month ago, and last year.
But you forced me."
Feeling and excitement had blanched her no less than Lady Henry, but her fine head and delicate form breathed a will so proud, a dignity so passionate, that Lady Henry shrank before her.
"Why did you refuse him?"
Julie shrugged her shoulders.
"That, I think, is my affair.
But if-I had loved him-I should not have consulted your scruples, Lady Henry."
"That's frank," said Lady Henry.
"I like that better than anything you've said yet.
"I have several times heard you say so," said the other, coldly.
Various things that Wilfrid Bury had said recurred to her.
She thought of Captain Warkworth. She wondered.
I suppose I've been insulting you.
But-you have been playing tricks with me.
In a good many ways, we're quits.
Still, I confess, I admire you a good deal.
Anyway, I offer you my hand.
I apologize for my recent remarks.
Shall we bury the hatchet, and try and go on as before?"
Julie Le Breton turned slowly and took the hand-without unction.
"I make you angry," she said, and her voice trembled, "without knowing how or why."
Lady Henry gulped.
"Oh, it mayn't answer," she said, as their hands dropped.
"But we may as well have one more trial.
Julie shook her head.
"I don't think I have any heart for it," she said, sadly; and then, as Lady Henry sat silent, she approached.
"You look very tired.
But she shook off the spell.
"At once, please.
CHAPTER fourteen
IS THIS MADNESS?
She must have air," and he moved towards a window.
Raymond waited anxiously, and then applied his ear to her heart.
Doctor Bardon came forward, followed by Doctor Bird, and both looked at the unconscious one closely and critically.
There was no shamming here-the shock had been heavy-the bolt had struck home.
"She will-will come around all right?"
"What's that?" he questioned.
She did not answer, but continued to stare, turning from him to the nurse and then to the old doctor.
What struck me?
What have I done? Where am I? Have I been sick?"
"Margaret!" Raymond came closer and took her hand.
And the bottle-the handkerchief-"
"Margaret, Margaret!
It will all come out right.
The paroxysm lasted for several minutes and then she fainted once more.
"Besides," the old doctor paused.
"Oh, yes, I suppose that is right. But you can't take her to jail.
He saw the eyelids of the one he loved quiver slightly.
"With you, Raymond?
Where?"
"We thought it best to bring you here.
The doctor said you must be kept very quiet." He smoothed down her hair.
I don't remember it.
They found blood on it, blood!" And she shivered again.
But don't think of it, dear." He tried to brush back her hair, but she stopped him.
"Do not touch me!
Do not come near me!"
"No! no!
It is too late, too late!" Her voice sank to a hoarse whisper.
"But Margaret, dear-"
"No, I cannot listen!
Now the eight ships with their demon crews sailed away over the lake toward Maracaibo.
The money was paid, the cattle were put on board the ships, and to the unspeakable relief of the citizens, the pirate fleet sailed away from the harbor.
They did not go directly to Tortuga, but stopped at a little island near Hispaniola, which was inhabited by French buccaneers, and this delay was made entirely for the purpose of dividing the booty.
Before the regular allotment of shares was made, the claims of the wounded were fully satisfied according to their established code.
They robbed Indians, they robbed villages; they devastated little towns, taking everything that they cared for, and burning what they did not want, and treating the people they captured with viler cruelties than any in which the buccaneers had yet indulged.
If they could find nothing else, they might at least catch fish.
After a time the buccaneers got back to their fleet and remained on the coast about three months, waiting for some expected Spanish ships, which they hoped to capture.
Now L'Olonnois proposed to his men that they should sail for Guatemala, but he met with an unexpected obstacle; the buccaneers who had enlisted under him had expected to make great fortunes in this expedition, but their high hopes had not been realized.
This was a serious undertaking, but it was all they could do.
They could not swim away, and their ship was of no use to them as she was.
Chapter sixteen
Thus prepared, this able commander knew just what to do.
A TWILIGHT TEA PARTY
It was late when Grace and Sylvia awoke the following morning, but they were down stairs before the boys appeared.
mrs Hayes greeted them smilingly, but she said that Flora was not well and that Mammy would take her breakfast to her up stairs.
"After breakfast you must go up and stay with her a little while," said mrs Hayes.
"Why, Flora was never ill in her life," declared Ralph; "what's the matter?"
"Mammy doesn't seem to know just how it happened," she concluded.
"The moon was shining right where she stood.
I saw her just as plainly as I could see you when you sat up in bed," Sylvia declared.
Flora was bolstered up in bed, and had on a dainty dressing gown of pink muslin tied with white ribbons.
"Oh, girls!
It's too bad that I can't help you to have a good time to day," she said, "and all because I was so clumsy."
Both the girls assured her that it was a good time just to be at the Hayes plantation.
"Flora!
Just about midnight," said Sylvia.
For it wore a big hat, like the one in the picture, and its dress trailed all about it," replied Sylvia.
"I didn't see it," said Grace.
"And, truly, I believe Sylvia just dreamed it."
Flora sat up in bed suddenly.
"Sylvia did not dream it.
But I didn't," and Grace laughed good naturedly; but Flora turned her face from them and began to cry.
"After my being hurt, and-" she sobbed, but stopped quickly.
Sylvia and Grace looked at each other in amazement.
"It's because she is ill.
And she's disappointed because you didn't see Lady Caroline," Sylvia whispered.
In a moment Flora looked up with a little smile.
"You must forgive me.
"I begin to think she did," Grace owned laughingly.
She had happened to look toward the open closet and had seen certain things which made her quite ready to own that Flora might be right.
Of course Sylvia promised, but she was puzzled by Flora's request.
It was decided that Ralph and Philip should ride back to Charleston that afternoon when Uncle Chris drove the little visitors home, and that Flora should stay at the plantation with her mother for a day or two.
Nevertheless she was glad when the carriage stopped in front of her own home, and she saw Estralla, smiling and happy in the pink gingham dress, waiting to welcome her.
"Sylvia, I'm coming over to night.
I'll tell you after supper," Grace responded and ran on to her own home.
She told them about poor Dinkie, and what Philip had said: that Dinkie should not be sold away from her children, or whipped.
mr Fulton seemed greatly pleased with Sylvia's account of her visit. He said Philip was a fine boy, and that there were many like him in South Carolina.
"What is it, Grace?" Sylvia asked eagerly.
"I can't think what you want to tell me that makes you look so sober."
Grace looked all about the room and then closed the door, not seeing a little figure crouching in a shadowy corner.
"I wouldn't want anybody else to hear.
"I know all about it.
It was Flora herself!
Yes, it was!" she continued quickly.
They weren't there yesterday, for the door was open, just as it was to day."
"Well, what of that?" asked Sylvia.
"Flora dressed up in her mother's things, and then came up the stairs to our room.
She was determined to make us think she had a truly ghost in her house. Then when you called out, she got frightened and stumbled on the stairs.
Of course it was Flora.
Nobody seems to know how she got hurt.
The minute I saw that plumed hat I knew just the trick she had played.
"I don't think it was fair," she said slowly.
"Of course it wasn't fair.
I wouldn't have believed that a Charleston girl would do such a mean trick," declared Grace.
She thought it would make us laugh."
"Well, then why didn't she?" asked Grace.
Flora will tell us just as soon as we see her again."
There was a little note of entreaty in Sylvia's voice, as if she were pleading with Grace not to blame Flora.
"I know one thing, Sylvia.
As Grace spoke they both turned quickly, for there was a sudden noise of an overturned chair in the further corner of the room, and they could see a dark figure sprawling on the floor.
Before Sylvia could speak she heard the little wailing cry which Estralla always gave when in trouble, and then: "Don't be skeered, Missy!
Grace lit the candles on Sylvia's bureau, while Sylvia picked up her treasured dolls, "Molly" and "Polly," which her Grandmother Fulton had sent her on her last birthday.
I 'spec' now I'll get whipped."
"Keep still, Estralla.
"You ought to tell her mother to whip her.
She's no business up here," said Grace.
"Don't, Grace!" Sylvia exclaimed.
"We don't get whipped every time we make a mistake.
Just think, your Uncle Robert can sell her away from her own mother.
Estralla had scrambled to her feet and now stood looking at the little white girls with a half frightened look in her big eyes.
"Oh, Missy!
We will have a tea party for Molly and Polly, and you shall wait on them.
Run down and ask your mother to give us some little cakes."
Estralla was off in an instant, and while she was away Sylvia and Grace spread the little table, brought cushions from the window seats and advised Molly and Polly to forgive the disturbance.
When mrs Fulton came up stairs a little later to tell Grace that her black Mammy had come to take her home she found three very happy little girls.
Sylvia and Grace were being entertained at tea by Misses Molly and Polly, while Estralla with shining eyes and a wide smile carried tiny cups and little cakes to the guests, and chuckled delightedly over the clever things which Sylvia and Grace declared Molly and Polly had said.
Not a bit," replied Sylvia laughingly.
Estralla, who was carefully putting the little table in order, heard Sylvia's defense of her, and for a moment she stood very straight, holding one of the tiny cups in each hand.
CHAPTER fourteen
mr
ROBERT WAITE
"What's the matter, Estralla?" Sylvia called; for usually Estralla was all smiles, and had a good deal to say.
Estralla shook her head.
"Nuffin', Missy.
My mammy says how nobody can."
"Wait, Estralla!
What can I do?" and Sylvia was out of bed in a second, standing close beside the little colored girl.
I 'spec' dar ain't nuffin' you kin do.
But you has been mighty good to me," Estralla replied.
"Estralla, if you were earning wages for mr Robert Waite would he let you stay here?" Sylvia asked eagerly.
"You can't do that.
But don't be frightened, Estralla.
Yes, I will; and pay wages for you to mr Waite.
I'll go tell him so this very day," declared Sylvia, her face brightening, as she remembered the twenty dollars in gold which her Grandmother Fulton had given her when she had left Boston.
"You can do whatever you please with it," was what Grandmother Fulton had said.
Sylvia had thought that she would ask her mother to buy her a watch with the money, but she did not remember that now.
Twenty dollars was a good deal of money, she reflected.
If the northern soldiers would only come quickly and set the slaves free!
But even if they did not come for a long time the money would surely pay mr Waite wages for Estralla, so that he would not insist on selling her.
Estralla's face had brightened instantly at Sylvia's promise.
And when Sylvia explained that she had money of her very own, and even opened her writing desk and showed Estralla the shining gold pieces, the little darky's fears vanished.
"Yes," Sylvia responded.
And I please to pay it to mr Waite."
"If you want to go to the forts you must be on hand early."
"I'll ask them right away after breakfast, before they start for school," Sylvia promised eagerly.
It had seemed to mrs Fulton that her little daughter was tired, and not as well as usual, and she was glad that the sailing expedition would take her out for a long afternoon on the water.
Sylvia ate her breakfast hurriedly, and ran upstairs for her cape and hat, to find Estralla waiting just inside the door of her room.
"I think I will take the money," Sylvia said, not answering Estralla's question; "then mr Waite will be sure that I can pay him."
mrs Fulton saw Sylvia, closely followed by Estralla, running across the garden toward the house where Grace Waite lived.
"Poor little darky!
What will she do when Sylvia goes north?" she thought.
That meant of course that the Fultons would have to return to Boston, if that were possible, but all communication with northern states might be prevented.
"The Christmas holidays will soon be here, so a half day out of school will not matter," mrs Waite said smilingly, and gave Grace a note for Miss Patten.
"I'll walk to Flora's with you," said Grace.
"Now, Sylvia, own up that you think Charleston is nicer than Boston.
Why, it is all ice and snow and cold weather up there, and here it is warm and pleasant.
"No, but I could go sleighing," responded Sylvia.
As they came in sight of Flora's home they both exclaimed in surprise:
"Why, they are all going away!
Philip, evidently giving some directions to the negroes who were loading trunks and boxes into a cart, rode down the driveway just as Grace and Sylvia reached the entrance.
He greeted them smilingly, and stopped his horse to speak with them.
"Father thought it was best for the family to be out of the city.
Sylvia was sorry that Flora was going away, but that Philip should want the palmetto flag to take the place of the Stars and Stripes over Fort Sumter seemed a much greater misfortune.
"When he knows it stands for slavery," she thought, wondering if he had entirely forgotten about Dinkie.
"I'll have to run, or I'll be late for school," declared Grace.
Sylvia went up the flight of stone steps which led to mr Waite's door a little fearfully.
"A little white missy to see you, Massa Robert," he said, and in a moment Sylvia found herself standing before a smiling gentleman, whose red face and white whiskers made her think of the pictures of Santa Claus.
"Won't you be seated, young lady?" he said, very politely, waving his hand toward a low cushioned chair, and bowing "as if I were really grown up," thought Sylvia.
"I am Sylvia Fulton," she said, wondering why her voice sounded so faint.
"Yes, sir," said Sylvia meekly, wondering whether she would ever dare tell him her errand.
There was a little silence, and then mr Waite took a seat near his little visitor and said:
'Then to Sylvia let us sing,'" he hummed, beating time with his right hand.
"Oh, yes, I was named for that song.
And, if you please, mr Waite, would you let me pay you wages for Estralla?"
"For Estralla?
Now, of course, I ought to know all about Estralla.
"If you please, sir, she is Aunt Connie's little girl, and she lives with us, and I like her, and I thought-" began Sylvia, but mr Waite raised his hand, and she stopped suddenly.
"I see!
I must see that whatever you wish is carried out.
Yes, indeed!
Yes, indeed!" and mr Waite smiled and bowed, and seemed exactly like Santa Claus.
"I like Estralla."
Well!
And I hope you will come again, Miss Sylvia.
I am greatly pleased to have made your acquaintance," and the polite gentleman escorted her to the door, where he bade her good bye with such an elegant bow that Sylvia nearly fell backward in her effort to make as low a curtsey as seemed necessary.
Estralla had hidden herself behind some shrubbery, and joined Sylvia at the gate.
"Would he hire me out, Missy?" she asked eagerly.
I knowed it."
"Keep still, Estralla!
mr Waite says I may have you without paying him.
Oh, Estralla!
Sylvia hurried home, eager to tell her mother of her wonderful new friend, and of Flora's departure to the plantation.
mrs Fulton listened in surprise.
But when Sylvia finished her story of mr Waite's kindness, declaring that he was just like Santa Claus, she did not reprove her for going on such an errand without permission, but agreed with her little daughter that mr Robert Waite was a very kind and generous gentleman.
Aunt Connie was as delighted as it was possible for a mother to be who knows that her youngest child is safe under the same roof with herself. She tried to thank Sylvia for protecting Estralla, but Sylvia was too happy over her success to listen to her.
"Oh, that's just like Uncle Robert," she declared.
CHAPTER fifteen
Negroes were at work on the wharf loading bales of cotton on a big ship.
They were singing as they worked, and Sylvia resolved to remember the words of the song:
mr Fulton came to meet them and helped them on board the boat.
As the Butterfly made its way out into the channel the little girls looked back at the long water front, where lay many vessels from far off ports.
In the distance they could see the spire of saint Philip's, one of the historic churches of Charleston, and everywhere fluttered the palmetto flag.
Sylvia sat in the stern beside her father, and very soon the tiller was in her hand and she was shaping the boat's course toward the forts. Grace watched her admiringly.
"I believe you could steer in the dark," she declared.
"Of course she could if she had a compass and was familiar with the stars," said mr Fulton; and he called Grace's attention to the compass fastened securely near Sylvia's seat, and explained the rules of navigation.
"Is that the way the big ships know how to find their harbors?" asked Grace, when mr Fulton told her of the stars, and how the pilots set their course.
"Yes, and if Sylvia understood how to steer by the compass she could steer the Butterfly as well at night as she can now."
There had been many changes at Fort Moultrie since Sylvia's last visit. A deep ditch had been dug between the fort and the sand bars, and many workmen were busy in strengthening the defences, and Sylvia and Grace wondered why so many soldiers were stationed along the parapet.
Captain Carleton seemed very glad to welcome them, and sent a soldier to escort the girls to the officers' quarters, while mr Fulton went in search of Major Anderson.
Sylvia wondered if she would have a chance to tell mrs Carleton that she had safely delivered the message.
mrs Carleton was in her pleasant sitting room and declared that she had been wishing for company, and held up some strips of red and white bunting.
"I am making a new flag for Fort Sumter," she said.
"Yes, indeed!
One of the first stars on the flag was for South Carolina," replied mrs Carleton, "and this very fort was named for a defender of America's rights."
While Grace and Sylvia were so pleasantly occupied Estralla had wandered out, crossed the bridge which connected the officers' quarters with the fort, and now found herself near the landing place, so that when mrs Carleton made the girls a cup of hot chocolate and looked about to give Estralla her share, the little colored girl was not to be seen.
"I'll call her," said Sylvia, and ran out on the veranda.
No response came to her calls, so she went down the steps and along the walk which led to the sand bars, past the houses and barracks on Sullivan's island.
No one was in sight whom she could ask if Estralla had passed that way.
She climbed a small sand hill covered with stunted little trees and looked about, but could see no trace of the little darky.
It had not occurred to Sylvia that Estralla would go back to the fort.
"Oh, dear!
I wonder where she can be," thought Sylvia, calling "Estralla!
"Probably Estralla is there before this, and they will be looking for me," she thought, and climbed another sandy slope, expecting to see the houses and barracks directly in front of her.
But she found herself facing the open sea, and look which way she would there was only shore, sand heaps and blue water.
It was rather difficult walking.
"Of course I can't be lost, because I know exactly where I am.
She thought of the little compass on board the Butterfly, and wondered if a compass would help anyone find her way on land as well as on the sea.
At last she began to call aloud: "Estralla!
It was nearly dark before she gave up trying to find her way to the fort, and, shivering and half afraid, crawled under the scraggly branches of some stunted trees on a sheltered slope.
"My father will come and find me, I know he will," she said aloud, almost ready to cry. "I'll wait here, and keep calling 'Estralla,' so he will hear me."
"Tell Sylvia I won't be gone long," she had said to Grace.
Grace did not mind being alone until Sylvia returned.
She helped herself to the rich creamy chocolate and the little frosted cakes, and then curled up on a broad couch near the window with a book full of wonderful pictures.
The pictures were of a tall man on horseback, and a short, fat man on a donkey.
"The Adventures of Don Quixote," was the title of the book, and after Grace began to read she entirely forgot Sylvia, Estralla, and mrs Carleton.
"All ready to start!" said mr Fulton, "and it will be dusk before we reach home.
"Oh!" exclaimed Grace, looking up in surprise.
mrs Carleton has just gone to the next house."
"Well, put on your things and run after them, that's a good girl," said mr Fulton.
"Why, here is Estralla now," he added, as the little colored girl appeared at the door.
"Where is Sylvia?" echoed mrs Carleton, who came in at that moment. "Has she gone to the boat?"
"Why, I don't know.
Perhaps she has.
mr Fulton said for us to come right to the landing," said Grace, her thoughts still full of the faithful Sancho Panza of whom she had been reading.
"I will go to the wharf with you.
It was too bad to leave you.
Perhaps I may not be permitted to have visitors much longer," said mrs Carleton, and she and Grace left the pleasant room and, followed closely by Estralla, made their way over the bridge to the landing place.
"Where is Sylvia?" asked mr Fulton, looking at his watch.
"We really ought to have started an hour ago." For a moment the little group looked at each other in silence.
Then with a sudden cry Estralla darted off.
"She must be somewhere about the fort," declared Captain Carleton.
"Oh, yes," agreed mr Fulton, "but we had best lose no time in finding her."
While Captain Carleton questioned the soldiers, mr Fulton and mrs Carleton and Grace hastened back to the officers' quarters, and a thorough search for the little girl was begun at once.
CHAPTER four
The Green Silk Purse
She was all respectful gratitude to mrs Sedley; delighted beyond measure at the Bazaars; and in a whirl of wonder at the theatre, whither the good-natured lady took her.
One day, Amelia had a headache, and could not go upon some party of pleasure to which the two young people were invited: nothing could induce her friend to go without her.
Never!" and the green eyes looked up to Heaven and filled with tears; and mrs Sedley could not but own that her daughter's friend had a charming kind heart of her own.
As for mr Sedley's jokes, Rebecca laughed at them with a cordiality and perseverance which not a little pleased and softened that good-natured gentleman.
"My love!
"The poor child is all heart," said mrs Sedley.
"I wish she could stay with us another week," said Amelia.
"She's devilish like Miss Cutler that I used to meet at Dumdum, only fairer.
Do you know, Ma'am, that once Quintin, of the fourteenth, bet me-"
"O Joseph, we know that story," said Amelia, laughing.
"Never mind about telling that; but persuade Mamma to write to Sir Something Crawley for leave of absence for poor dear Rebecca: here she comes, her eyes red with weeping."
"How kind you all are to me!
"Yes; how could you be so cruel as to make me eat that horrid pepper dish at dinner, the first day I ever saw you?
You are not so good to me as dear Amelia."
"He doesn't know you so well," cried Amelia.
"And the chilis?"
"By Jove, how they made you cry out!" said Joe, caught by the ridicule of the circumstance, and exploding in a fit of laughter which ended quite suddenly, as usual.
"I shall take care how I let YOU choose for me another time," said Rebecca, as they went down again to dinner.
"I didn't think men were fond of putting poor harmless girls to pain."
It was an advance, and as such, perhaps, some ladies of indisputable correctness and gentility will condemn the action as immodest; but, you see, poor dear Rebecca had all this work to do for herself.
We can't resist them, if they do.
A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don't know their own power.
They would overcome us entirely if they did.
"Egad!" thought Joseph, entering the dining room, "I exactly begin to feel as I did at Dumdum with Miss Cutler." Many sweet little appeals, half tender, half jocular, did Miss Sharp make to him about the dishes at dinner; for by this time she was on a footing of considerable familiarity with the family, and as for the girls, they loved each other like sisters.
As if bent upon advancing Rebecca's plans in every way-what must Amelia do, but remind her brother of a promise made last Easter holidays-"When I was a girl at school," said she, laughing-a promise that he, Joseph, would take her to Vauxhall.
"O, delightful!" said Rebecca, going to clap her hands; but she recollected herself, and paused, like a modest creature, as she was.
"To night is not the night," said Joe.
"Well, to morrow."
"The children must have someone with them," cried mrs Sedley.
"Let Joe go," said his father, laughing.
"He's big enough." At which speech even mr Sambo at the sideboard burst out laughing, and poor fat Joe felt inclined to become a parricide almost.
Poor victim! carry him up; he's as light as a feather!"
"Order mr Jos's elephant, Sambo!" cried the father.
A goblet of Champagne restored Joseph's equanimity, and before the bottle was emptied, of which as an invalid he took two thirds, he had agreed to take the young ladies to Vauxhall.
"The girls must have a gentleman apiece," said the old gentleman.
At this, I don't know in the least for what reason, mrs Sedley looked at her husband and laughed.
"Amelia had better write a note," said her father; "and let George Osborne see what a beautiful handwriting we have brought back from Miss Pinkerton's.
"It was quite wicked of you, mr Sedley," said she, "to torment the poor boy so."
But, mark my words, the first woman who fishes for him, hooks him."
"She shall go off to morrow, the little artful creature," said mrs Sedley, with great energy.
The girl's a white face at any rate.
I don't care who marries him.
Let Joe please himself."
And presently the voices of the two speakers were hushed, or were replaced by the gentle but unromantic music of the nose; and save when the church bells tolled the hour and the watchman called it, all was silent at the house of john Sedley, Esquire, of Russell Square, and the Stock Exchange.
In a word, George was as familiar with the family as such daily acts of kindness and intercourse could make him.
Jos remembered this remarkable circumstance perfectly well, but vowed that he had totally forgotten it.
"Yes, and after I had cut the tassels of his boots too.
Boys never forget those tips at school, nor the givers."
"I shan't have time to do it here," said Rebecca.
"O that you could stay longer, dear Rebecca," said Amelia.
"Why?" answered the other, still more sadly.
George Osborne looked at the two young women with a touched curiosity; and Joseph Sedley heaved something very like a sigh out of his big chest, as he cast his eyes down towards his favourite Hessian boots.
But this arrangement left mr Joseph Sedley tete a tete with Rebecca, at the drawing room table, where the latter was occupied in knitting a green silk purse.
"There is no need to ask family secrets," said Miss Sharp.
"Those two have told theirs."
"As soon as he gets his company," said Joseph, "I believe the affair is settled.
George Osborne is a capital fellow."
When two unmarried persons get together, and talk upon such delicate subjects as the present, a great deal of confidence and intimacy is presently established between them.
As there was music in the next room, the talk was carried on, of course, in a low and becoming tone, though, for the matter of that, the couple in the next apartment would not have been disturbed had the talking been ever so loud, so occupied were they with their own pursuits.
Almost for the first time in his life, mr Sedley found himself talking, without the least timidity or hesitation, to a person of the other sex.
Miss Rebecca asked him a great number of questions about India, which gave him an opportunity of narrating many interesting anecdotes about that country and himself.
How delighted Miss Rebecca was at the Government balls, and how she laughed at the stories of the Scotch aides de camp, and called mr Sedley a sad wicked satirical creature; and how frightened she was at the story of the elephant!
"Pooh, pooh, Miss Sharp," said he, pulling up his shirt collars; "the danger makes the sport only the pleasanter." He had never been but once at a tiger hunt, when the accident in question occurred, and when he was half killed-not by the tiger, but by the fright.
And as he talked on, he grew quite bold, and actually had the audacity to ask Miss Rebecca for whom she was knitting the green silk purse?
He was quite surprised and delighted at his own graceful familiar manner.
"For any one who wants a purse," replied Miss Rebecca, looking at him in the most gentle winning way.
"Why, your friend has worked miracles."
"The more the better," said Miss Amelia; who, like almost all women who are worth a pin, was a match maker in her heart, and would have been delighted that Joseph should carry back a wife to India.
For the affection of young ladies is of as rapid growth as Jack's bean stalk, and reaches up to the sky in a night.
"You would not have listened to me," she said to mr Osborne (though she knew she was telling a fib), "had you heard Rebecca first."
"I give Miss Sharp warning, though," said Osborne, "that, right or wrong, I consider Miss Amelia Sedley the first singer in the world."
"You shall hear," said Amelia; and Joseph Sedley was actually polite enough to carry the candles to the piano.
Osborne hinted that he should like quite as well to sit in the dark; but Miss Sedley, laughing, declined to bear him company any farther, and the two accordingly followed mr Joseph.
Conversation of a sentimental sort, befitting the subject, was carried on between the songs, to which Sambo, after he had brought the tea, the delighted cook, and even mrs Blenkinsop, the housekeeper, condescended to listen on the landing place.
They mark'd him as he onward prest, With fainting heart and weary limb; Kind voices bade him turn and rest, And gentle faces welcomed him.
The dawn is up-the guest is gone, The cottage hearth is blazing still; Heaven pity all poor wanderers lone!
Hark to the wind upon the hill!
It was the sentiment of the before mentioned words, "When I'm gone," over again.
As she came to the last words, Miss Sharp's "deep toned voice faltered." Everybody felt the allusion to her departure, and to her hapless orphan state.
"Bravo, Jos!" said mr Sedley; on hearing the bantering of which well-known voice, Jos instantly relapsed into an alarmed silence, and quickly took his departure.
I might go farther, and fare worse, egad!" And in these meditations he fell asleep.
need not be told here.
Amelia, who was writing to her twelve dearest friends at Chiswick Mall), and Rebecca was employed upon her yesterday's work.
As Joe's buggy drove up, and while, after his usual thundering knock and pompous bustle at the door, the ex Collector of Boggley Wollah laboured up stairs to the drawing room, knowing glances were telegraphed between Osborne and Miss Sedley, and the pair, smiling archly, looked at Rebecca, who actually blushed as she bent her fair ringlets over her knitting.
How her heart beat as Joseph appeared-Joseph, puffing from the staircase in shining creaking boots-Joseph, in a new waistcoat, red with heat and nervousness, and blushing behind his wadded neckcloth.
It was a nervous moment for all; and as for Amelia, I think she was more frightened than even the people most concerned.
"Thank you, dear Joseph," said Amelia, quite ready to kiss her brother, if he were so minded. (And I think for a kiss from such a dear creature as Amelia, I would purchase all mr Lee's conservatories out of hand.)
Perhaps she just looked first into the bouquet, to see whether there was a billet doux hidden among the flowers; but there was no letter.
"Do they talk the language of flowers at Boggley Wollah, Sedley?" asked Osborne, laughing.
Let's have it for tiffin; very cool and nice this hot weather." Rebecca said she had never tasted a pine, and longed beyond everything to taste one.
I don't know on what pretext Osborne left the room, or why, presently, Amelia went away, perhaps to superintend the slicing of the pine apple; but Jos was left alone with Rebecca, who had resumed her work, and the green silk and the shining needles were quivering rapidly under her white slender fingers.
"It made me cry almost; 'pon my honour it did."
"Because you have a kind heart, mr Joseph; all the Sedleys have, I think."
Gollop, my doctor, came in at eleven (for I'm a sad invalid, you know, and see Gollop every day), and, 'gad! there I was, singing away like-a robin."
"O you droll creature!
Do let me hear you sing it."
"Me?
"My spirits are not equal to it; besides, I must finish the purse.
Will you help me, mr Sedley?" And before he had time to ask how, mr Joseph Sedley, of the East India Company's service, was actually seated tete a tete with a young lady, looking at her with a most killing expression; his arms stretched out before her in an imploring attitude, and his hands bound in a web of green silk, which she was unwinding.
The skein of silk was just wound round the card; but mr Jos had never spoken.
THE BAZAAR
The Wesleyan Bazaar, the greatest undertaking of its kind ever known in Bursley, gradually became a cloud which filled the entire social horizon.
mrs Sutton, organiser of the Sunday school stall, pressed all her friends into the service, and a fortnight after the death of Sarah Vodrey, Anna and even Agnes gave much of their spare time to the work, which was carried on under pressure increasing daily as the final moments approached.
This was well for Anna, in that it diverted her thoughts by keeping her energies fully engaged.
One morning, however, it occurred to mrs Sutton to reflect that Anna, at such a period of life, should be otherwise employed.
Anna had called at the Suttons' to deliver some finished garments.
'My dear,' she said, 'I am very much obliged to you for all this industry.
But I've been thinking that as you are to be married in February you ought to be preparing your things.'
'My things!' Anna repeated idly; and then she remembered Mynors' phrase, on the hill, 'Can you be ready by that time?'
'Yes,' said mrs Sutton; 'but possibly you've been getting forward with them on the quiet.'
'Tell me,' said Anna, with an air of interest; 'I've meant to ask you before: Is it the bride's place to provide all the house linen, and that sort of thing?'
'It was in my day; but those things alter so.
The bride took all the house linen to her husband, and as many clothes for herself as would last a year; that was the rule.
We used to stitch everything at home in those days-everything; and we had what we called a "bottom drawer" to store them in.
As soon as a girl passed her fifteenth birthday, she began to sew for the "bottom drawer." But all those things change so, I dare say it's different now.'
'How much will it cost to buy everything, do you think?' Anna asked.
Just then Beatrice entered the room.
What do you say?'
'Oh!' Beatrice replied, without any hesitation, 'a couple of hundred at least.'
mrs Sutton, reading Anna's face, smiled reassuringly.
'Nonsense, Bee! I dare say you could do it on a hundred with care, Anna.'
She had not spoken to him, save under necessity, since the evening spent at the Suttons'.
'What's afoot now?' he questioned savagely.
What clothes dost want?
A few pounds will cover them.'
'Yes, father, it is.'
'What business an' ye for go blabbing thy affairs all over Bosley?
Go and get dinner.
That evening, when Agnes had gone to bed, she resumed the struggle.
'Father, I must have that hundred pounds.
I mean it.'
What?'
'I mean I must have a hundred pounds.'
'But you needn't give it me all at once,' she pursued.
He gazed at her, glowering.
'Father, it isn't.' Her voice broke, but only for an instant.
'I'm asking you for my own money.
Her calm insistence maddened him.
Jumping up from his chair, he stamped out of the room, and she heard him strike a match in his office.
Presently he returned, and threw angrily on to the table in front of her a cheque book and pass book.
The deposit book she had always kept herself for convenience of paying into the bank.
The next evening Henry came up.
She observed that his face had a grave look, but intent on her own difficulties she did not remark on it, and proceeded at once to do what she resolved to do.
It was a cold night in November, yet the miser, wrathfully sullen, chose to sit in his office without a fire.
Agnes was working sums in the kitchen.
'Not about the wedding, I hope,' he said.
'It was about money.
'Why not?' he inquired.
'I've my own things to get,' she said, 'and I've all the house linen to buy.'
You buy the house linen, do you?' She saw that he was relieved by that information.
'Of course.
Henry's face broke into a laugh, and Anna was obliged to smile. 'Capital!' he said.
'Couldn't be better.'
He examined the three books.
'A very tidy bit,' he said; 'something over two hundred and fifty pounds.
So you can draw cheques at your ease.'
'Draw me a cheque for twenty pounds,' she said; and then, while he wrote: 'Henry, after we're married, I shall want you to take charge of all this.'
'Yes, of course; I will do that, dear.
Still, if your father says nothing, it is not for me to say anything.'
His countenance shone with delight.
'Surely not!' he protested formally.
Later in the evening he disclosed, perfunctorily, the matter which had been a serious weight on his mind when he entered the house, but which this revelation of vast wealth had diminished to a trifle.
titus Price had been the treasurer of the building fund which the bazaar was designed to assist.
'It's a dreadful thing for Willie, if it gets about,' he said; 'a tale of that sort would follow him to Australia.'
You must enter it in the books and say nothing.'
'I can't alter the accounts.
At least I can't alter the bank book and the vouchers.
The auditor would detect it in a minute.
He, at any rate, must know, and perhaps the stewards.'
'But you can urge them to say nothing.
Tell them that you will make it good.
I will write a cheque at once.'
'I had meant to find the fifty myself,' he said.
It was a peddling sum to him now.
'Let me pay half, then,' she asked.
'If you like,' he urged, smiling faintly at her eagerness.
'The thing is bound to be kept quiet-it would create such a frightful scandal. Poor old chap!' he added, carelessly, 'I suppose he was hard run, and meant to put it back-as they all do mean.'
She prayed wildly that he might never learn the full depth of his father's fall.
The miserable robbery of Sarah's wages was buried for evermore, and this new delinquency, which all would regard as flagrant sacrilege, must be buried also.
It was characteristic of Mynors' cautious prudence that, the first intoxication having passed, he made no further reference of any kind to Anna's fortune.
The arrangements for their married life were planned on a scale which ignored the fifty thousand pounds.
For both their sakes he wished to avoid all friction with the miser, at any rate until his status as Anna's husband would enable him to enforce her rights, if that should be necessary, with dignity and effectiveness.
He did not precisely anticipate trouble, but the fact had not escaped him that Ephraim still held the whole of Anna's securities.
He knew that there were twenty four hours in every day, three hundred and sixty five days in every year, and thirty good years in life still left to him; and therefore that there would be ample time, after the wedding, for the execution of his purposes in regard to that fifty thousand pounds.
His method was to buy a piece at a time, always second-hand, but always good.
It was decided between them that every article should be bought ready made and seamed, and that the first week of the New Year, if indeed mrs Sutton survived the bazaar, should be entirely and absolutely devoted to Anna's business.
But she never slept without thinking of Willie Price, and hoping that no further disaster might overtake him.
The incident of the embezzled fifty pounds had been closed, and she had given a cheque for twenty five pounds to Mynors.
He had acquainted the minister with the facts, and mr Banks had decided that the two circuit stewards must be informed.
Beyond these the scandalous secret was not to go.
But Anna wondered whether a secret shared by five persons could long remain a secret.
The bazaar was a triumphant and unparalleled success, and, of the seven stalls, the Sunday school stall stood first each night in the nightly returns.
The scene in the town hall, on the fourth and final night, a Saturday, was as delirious and gay as a carnival.
Four hundred and twenty pounds had been raised up to tea time, and it was the impassioned desire of everyone to achieve five hundred.
The price of admission had been reduced to threepence, in order that the artisan might enter and spend his wages in an excellent cause.
Bouquets were sold at a shilling each, and at the refreshment stall a glass of milk cost sixpence.
The noise rivalled that of a fair; there was no quiet anywhere, save in the farthest recess of each stall, where the lady in supreme charge of it, like a spider in the middle of its web, watched customers and cash box with equal cupidity.
But shortly afterwards she hurried back breathless to her place.
'See that, Anna?
It will be reckoned in our returns,' she said, exhibiting a piece of paper.
'She has the secret of persuading him,' thought Anna.
'Why have I never found it?'
Then Agnes, in a new white frock, came up with three shillings, proceeds of bouquets.
'But you must take that to the flower stall, my pet,' said mrs Sutton.
'Can't I give it to you?' the child pleaded.
'I want your stall to be the best.'
Mynors arrived next, with something concealed in tissue paper.
'I'll try to,' said mrs Sutton doubtfully-not in the secret.
'What's it meant for?'
'Well,' she laughed, 'what will you give?'
'A couple of sovereigns.'
'Make it guineas.'
He paid the money, and requested Anna to keep the plate for him.
At nine o'clock it was announced that, though raffling was forbidden, the bazaar would be enlivened by an auction.
A licensed auctioneer was brought, and the sale commenced.
During this episode Anna, who had been left alone in the stall, first noticed Willie Price in the room.
His ship sailed on the Monday, but steerage passengers had to be aboard on Sunday, and he was saying good bye to a few acquaintances.
He seemed quite cheerful, as he walked about with his hands in his pockets, chatting with this one and that; it was the false and hysterical gaiety that precedes a final separation.
As soon as he saw Anna he came towards her.
'Well, good bye, Miss Tellwright,' he said jauntily.
Wish me luck.'
Nothing more; no word, no accent, to recall the terrible but sublime past.
'I do,' she answered.
They shook hands.
Others approaching, he drifted away.
Her glance followed him like a beneficent influence.
For three days she had carried in her pocket an envelope containing a bank note for a hundred pounds, intending by some device to force it on him as a parting gift.
Now the last chance was lost, and she had not even attempted this difficult feat of charity.
Such futility, she reflected, self scorning, was of a piece with her life.
He hasn't really gone,' she kept repeating, and yet knew well that he had gone.
'Do you know what they are saying, Anna?' said Beatrice, when, after eleven o'clock, the bazaar was closed to the public, and the stall holders and their assistants were preparing to depart, their movements hastened by the stern aspect of the town hall keeper.
'no What?' said Anna; and in the same moment guessed.
'They say old titus Price embezzled fifty pounds from the building fund, and Henry made it up, privately, so that there shouldn't be a scandal.
Just fancy!
Do you believe it?'
The secret was abroad.
She looked round the room, and saw it in every face.
'Who says?' Anna demanded fiercely.
Miss Dickinson told me.'
There was clapping of hands, which died out suddenly.
'Now Agnes,' Anna called, 'come along, quick; you're as white as a sheet.
Good night, mrs Sutton; good night, Bee.'
Mynors was still occupied on the platform.
The town hall keeper extinguished some of the lights.
'You are not your father.'
Nothing else was possible.
AUNT JOANNA
It was thatched with heather, and possessed but a single chimney that rose but little above the apex of the roof, and had two slates set on the top to protect the rising smoke from being blown down the chimney into the cottage when the wind was from the west or from the east.
The woman who lived in the cottage was called by the people of the neighbourhood Aunt Joanna.
But dancing, though denounced, still drew the more independent spirits together.
It would be handy to have a little maid by you."
It's my opinion us ought to go and see."
"I reckon it's the old lady be down," replied her husband, and, throwing open the bedroom door, he said: "Sure enough, and no mistake-there her be, dead as a dried pilchard."
Rose sighed, and went away.
She had never been allowed to look at the treasures in the oak chest.
As far as she had been aware, Aunt Joanna had been extremely poor.
But she remembered that the old woman had at one time befriended her, and she was ready to forgive the harsh treatment to which she had finally been subjected.
In fact, she had repeatedly made overtures to her great aunt to be reconciled, but these overtures had been always rejected.
That was good enough to moulder in the grave.
Aunt Joanna was given an elm, and not a mean deal board coffin, such as is provided for paupers; and a handsome escutcheon of white metal was put on the lid.
During the night, at what time she did not know, mrs Hockin awoke with a start, and found that her husband was sitting up in bed listening. There was a moon that night, and no clouds in the sky.
"I reckon us had best go down together."
"What?"
She and her husband crept from bed, and, treading on tiptoe across the room, descended the stair.
There was no door at the bottom, but the staircase was boarded up at the side; it opened into the kitchen.
The moonlight poured in through the broad, low window.
There could be no mistaking it-it was that of Aunt Joanna, clothed in the tattered sheet that Elizabeth Hockin had allowed for her grave clothes.
Then they saw Aunt Joanna go to the cupboard, open it, and return with the silver spoons; she placed all six on the sheet, and with a lean finger counted them.
The Hockins saw the glint of the metal, and the shadow cast by each piece of money as it rolled.
The first coin lodged at the further left hand corner and the second rested near it; and so on, the pieces were rolled, and ranged themselves in order, ten in a row.
There was no sleep for them that night.
The moon was obscured by thick clouds, and neither of the two had the courage to descend to the kitchen.
Again sleep was impossible.
We've spent some pounds over her buryin'."
"What have it come to?"
The night was dark and stormy, with scudding clouds, so dense as to make deep night, when they did not part and allow the moon to peer forth.
They walked timorously, and side by side, looking about them as they proceeded, and on reaching the churchyard gate they halted to pluck up courage before opening and venturing within.
Together they heaped the articles that had belonged to Aunt Joanna upon the fresh grave, but as they did so the wind caught the linen and unfurled and flapped it, and they were forced to place stones upon it to hold it down.
Then, quaking with fear, they retreated to the church porch, and Jabez, uncorking the bottle, first took a long pull himself, and then presented it to his wife.
Elizabeth caught her husband by the arm and pointed.
They saw it drag the sheet by one corner, and then it went down underground, and the sheet followed, as though sucked down in a vortex; fold on fold it descended, till the entire sheet had disappeared.
Again the lean hand with long fingers appeared above the soil, and this was seen groping about the grass till it laid hold of the teapot.
Then it groped again, and gathered up the spoons, that flashed in the moonbeams.
THE FINGER ON THE WALL.
And it was characteristic of the forceful men, as well as the extreme nature of the conflict, that both were quiet in manner and speech-perhaps the mayor the more so, as he began the struggle by saying:
Without a droop of his eye, or a tremor in his voice, the answer came short, sharp and emphatic:
"True! yes, it is true.
But what does that truth involve for me?
Not two weeks, but seven years of torture, five of them devoted to grief for her, loss, and two to rage and bitter revulsion against her whole sex when I found her alive, and myself the despised victim of her deception."
"My political principles!" Oh, the irony of his voice, the triumph in his laugh!
I am an adept at the glorification of the party, of the man that it suits my present exigencies to promote, but it is a faculty which should have made you pause before you trusted me with the furtherance and final success of a campaign which may outlast those exigencies.
I have not always been of your party; I am not so now at heart."
"Do you mean to say, you, that your work is a traitor's work?
That the glorification you speak of is false?
That you may talk in my favor, but that when you come to the issue, you will vote according to your heart; that is, for Stanton?"
The mayor flushed; indignation gave him vehemence.
"Then," he cried, "I take back the word by which I qualified you a moment ago.
You are not a villain, you are a dastard."
Then slowly and with a short look at her: "The woman who has queened it so long in C---- society can not wish to undergo the charge of bigamy?"
"You will bring such a charge?"
At this alternative, uttered with icy deliberation, mrs Packard recoiled with a sharp cry; but the mayor thrust a sudden sarcastic query at his opponent:
"Which name?
Steele or Brainard?
"My real name is Brainard; therefore, it is also hers.
But I shall be content if she will take my present one of Steele.
"Never!"
"I?
Seven years ago I was twenty five.
I am thirty two now."
"So I have heard you say.
A man of twenty five is old enough to have made a record, mr Steele-" The mayor's tone hardened, so did his manner; and I saw why he had been such a power in the courts before he took up politics and an office.
"mr Steele, I do not mean you to disturb my house or to rob me of my wife.
What was your life before you met Olympia Brewster?"
"You have known for two years that this woman whom you called yours was within your reach, if not under your very eye, and you forbore to claim her. Has this delay had anything to do with the record of those years to which I have just alluded?"
Had the random shot told?
The secretary's eye did not falter, nor his figure lose an inch of its height, yet the impression made by his look and attitude were not the same; the fire had gone out of them; a blight had struck his soul-the flush of his triumph was gone.
Mayor Packard was merciless.
No answer from the sternly set lips.
"Insults!" broke from those set lips and nothing more.
"mr Steele, I practised law in that state for a period of three years. All the records of the office and of the prison register are open to me. Over which of them should I waste my time?"
"I shall never answer; the devil has whispered his own suggestions in your ear; the devil and nothing else."
"No, not the devil, but yourself.
mr Steele, you are both a villain and a bastard, and have no right in law to this woman.
Contradict me if you dare."
"I shall not give you even that satisfaction.
This woman who has gone through the ceremony of marriage with both of us shall never know to which of us she is the legal wife.
Perhaps it is as good a revenge as the other.
I looked to see the mayor spring and grasp him by the throat, but that was left for another hand.
It was but child's play for so strong a man as mr Steele to shake off so futile a grasp, and he did so with a rasping laugh.
But the next moment he was tottering, blanched and helpless, and while struggling to right himself and escape, yielded more and more to a sudden weakness sapping his life vigor, till he fell prone and apparently lifeless on the lounge toward which, with a final effort, he had thrown himself.
"Good!
Good!" rang thrilling through the room, as the old man reeled back from the wall against which he had been cast.
"God has finished what these old arms had only strength enough to begin.
He is dead this time, and it's a mercy!
Thank God, Miss Olympia! thank God as I do now on my knees!" But here catching the mayor's eye, he faltered to his feet again, saying humbly as he crept away:
"I couldn't help it, your Honor.
"The regiment!" they cried joyfully.
They knew everything.
Having talked to their hearts' content, they sent for the Military Commandant and the committee of the club, and instructed them at all costs to make arrangements for a dance.
Their wishes were carried out.
Among the husbands was Shalikov, the tax collector-a narrow, spiteful soul, given to drink, with a big, closely cropped head, and thick, protruding lips.
The tax collector watched, scowling with spite....
He was ill humoured-first, because the room was taken up with dancing and there was nowhere he could play a game of cards; secondly, because he could not endure the sound of wind instruments; and, thirdly, because he fancied the officers treated the civilians somewhat too casually and disdainfully.
"It makes me sick to look at her!" he muttered.
"Of course not!
Where do we poor country bumpkins come in!" sneered the tax collector.
"We are at a discount now....
We're clumsy seals, unpolished provincial bears, and she's the queen of the ball!
During the mazurka the tax collector's face twitched with spite.
The tax collector could endure it no longer; he felt a desire to jeer at that beatitude, to make Anna Pavlovna feel that she had forgotten herself, that life was by no means so delightful as she fancied now in her excitement....
"You wait; I'll teach you to smile so blissfully," he muttered.
An old fright ought to realise she is a fright!"
Waiting for the end of the mazurka, he went into the hall and walked up to his wife.
"Anyuta, let us go home," croaked the tax collector.
Seeing her husband standing before her, Anna Pavlovna started as though recalling the fact that she had a husband; then she flushed all over: she felt ashamed that she had such a sickly looking, ill humoured, ordinary husband.
"Why?
"I beg you to come home!" said the tax collector deliberately, with a spiteful expression.
"Why?
I wish it; that's enough, and without further talk, please."
"I wish it, and that's enough.
Come along, and that's all about it."
"All right; then I shall make a scene."
"Why do you want me at once?" asked his wife.
"I don't want you, but I wish you to be at home.
I wish it, that's all."
She began assuring him she would not stay long, only another ten minutes, only five minutes; but the tax collector stuck obstinately to his point.
"Stay if you like," he said, "but I'll make a scene if you do."
And as she talked to her husband Anna Pavlovna looked thinner, older, plainer.
"You are not going?" asked the ladies in surprise.
"Her head aches," said the tax collector for his wife.
The tax collector walked behind his wife, and watching her downcast, sorrowful, humiliated little figure, he recalled the look of beatitude which had so irritated him at the club, and the consciousness that the beatitude was gone filled his soul with triumph.
Oh, how awful it is!
And Anna Pavlovna could scarcely walk....
She was still under the influence of the dancing, the music, the talk, the lights, and the noise; she asked herself as she walked along why God had thus afflicted her.
She felt miserable, insulted, and choking with hate as she listened to her husband's heavy footsteps.
And meanwhile the band was playing and the darkness was full of the most rousing, intoxicating dance tunes.
CHAPTER seventy five
Lady Eustace did not leave the house during the Saturday and Sunday, and engaged herself exclusively with preparing for her journey.
They resulted in nothing. Lizzie was desirous of getting back the spoons and forks, and, if possible, some of her money.
The spoons and forks were out of mrs Carbuncle's power,--in Albemarle Street; and the money had of course been spent.
Lizzie might have saved herself the trouble, had it not been that it was a pleasure to her to insult her late friend, even though in doing so new insults were heaped upon her own head. As for the trumpery spoons, they,--so said mrs Carbuncle,--were the property of Miss Roanoke, having been made over to her unconditionally long before the wedding, as a part of a separate pecuniary transaction.
mrs Carbuncle had no power of disposing of Miss Roanoke's property.
But even were there anything due to Lady Eustace, mrs Carbuncle would decline to pay it, as she was informed that all moneys possessed by Lady Eustace were now confiscated to the Crown by reason of the PERJURIES,--the word was doubly scored in mrs Carbuncle's note,--which Lady Eustace had committed.
This, of course, was unpleasant; but mrs Carbuncle did not have the honours of the battle all to herself.
Lizzie also said some unpleasant things,--which, perhaps, were the more unpleasant because they were true.
"Goes to morrow, does she?" said Lord George to the servant.
The man, she thought, had behaved very badly to her,--had accepted very much from her hands, and had refused to give her anything in return; had become the first depository of her great secret, and had placed no mutual confidence in her.
He had been harsh to her, and unjust; and then, too, he had declined to be in love with her!
She was full of spite against Lord George, and would have been glad to injure him.
But, nevertheless, there would be some excitement in a farewell in which some mock affection might be displayed, and she would have an opportunity of abusing mrs Carbuncle.
She could have forgiven the want of deferential manner, had there been any devotion;--but Lord George was both impudent and indifferent.
What an experience I have had since I have been here!"
"No woman ever intended to show a more disinterested friendship than I have done; and what has been my return?"
"You mean to me?--disinterested friendship to me?" And Lord George tapped his breast lightly with his fingers.
"I was alluding particularly to mrs Carbuncle."
"Lady Eustace, I cannot take charge of mrs Carbuncle's friendships. I have enough to do to look after my own.
If you have any complaint to make against me,--I will at least listen to it."
"God knows I do not want to make complaints," said Lizzie, covering her face with her hands.
"They don't do much good;--do they?
They're a queer lot;--ain't they,--the sort of people one meets about in the world?"
"I don't know what you mean by that, Lord George."
"Just what you were saying, when you talked of your experiences. These experiences do surprise one.
I have knocked about the world a great deal, and would have almost said that nothing would surprise me.
You are no more than a child to me, but you have surprised me."
"I hope I have not injured you, Lord George."
That surprised me."
"Oh, Lord George, that was the happiest day of my life.
How little happiness there is for people!"
"And when Tewett got that girl to say she'd marry him, the coolness with which you bore all the abomination of it in your house,--for people who were nothing to you;--that surprised me!"
"I meant to be so kind to you all."
"And when I found that you always travelled with ten thousand pounds' worth of diamonds in a box, that surprised me very much.
I thought that you were a very dangerous companion."
"Pray don't talk about the horrid necklace."
Of course, we understand that now." On hearing this, Lizzie smiled, but did not say a word.
"Then I perceived that I-I was supposed to be the thief.
You-you yourself couldn't have suspected me of taking the diamonds, because-because you'd got them, you know, all safe in your pocket.
But you might as well own the truth now.
Didn't you think that it was I who stole the box?"
"All that surprised me.
Well; you-you were laughing at me in your sleeve all the time."
"Not laughing, Lord George."
"Yes, you were.
You had got the kernel yourself, and thought that I had taken all the trouble to crack the nut and had found myself with nothing but the shell.
Then, when you found you couldn't eat the kernel, that you couldn't get rid of the swag without assistance, you came to me to help you.
By Jove, I did!
"Oh, no," said Lizzie
"Unfortunately you didn't; but I thought you did.
And you thought that I had done it!
mr Benjamin was too clever for us both, and now he is going to have penal servitude for the rest of his life.
I hate the diamonds.
Of course I would not give them up, because they were my own."
What was the good of being so clever?"
"You need not come here to tease me, Lord George."
There's my poor friend, mrs Carbuncle, declares that all her credit is destroyed, and her niece unable to marry, and her house taken away from her,--all because of her connexion with you."
"mrs Carbuncle is-is-is- Oh, Lord George, don't you know what she is?"
I shouldn't have begrudged even Benjamin the pull, if he'd got it."
He stood there, still looking down upon her, speaking with a sarcastic subrisive tone, and, as she felt, intending to be severe to her.
She had sent for him, and now she didn't know what to say to him.
But with his jeering words, and sneering face, he was as hard to her as a rock.
He was now silent, but still looking down upon her as he stood motionless upon the rug,--so that she was compelled to speak again.
"I am going to Portray on Monday."
"And never coming back any more?
You'll be up here before the season is over, with fifty more wonderful schemes in your little head.
So Lord Fawn is done with, is he?"
"And cousin Frank?"
"My cousin attends me down to Scotland."
That makes it altogether another thing.
He attends you down to Scotland;--does he?
Does mr Emilius go too?"
"I believe you are trying to insult me, sir."
"Much you thought about it, Lord George."
"Well;--I did.
And I liked the idea of it very much." Lizzie pricked up her ears.
You are pretty, you know,--uncommonly pretty."
"Don't, Lord George."
I suppose that's real at any rate?"
"Well;--I hope so.
And so is the prettiness, Lord George;--if there is any."
"I never doubted that, Lady Eustace.
"Who wanted it to do?" said Lizzie.
I hope I may never see you again.
I believe you care more for that odious vulgar woman down stairs than you do for anybody else in the world."
"Ah, dear!
"Yes, I will.
If I may give you one bit of advice at parting, it is to caution you against being clever when there is nothing to get by it."
"I ain't clever at all," said Lizzie, beginning to whimper.
"Good bye, my dear."
"Good bye," said Lizzie.
SIR HENRY COLE.
He was an "Old Public Functionary" in the service of the British people.
When President Buchanan spoke of himself as an Old Public Functionary he was a good deal laughed at by some of the newspapers, and the phrase has since been frequently used in an opprobrious or satirical sense.
This is to be regretted, for there is no character more respectable, and there are few so useful, as an intelligent and patriotic man of long standing in the public service.
The son of an officer in the British army, he was educated at that famous Blue Coat School which is interesting to Americans because Lamb and Coleridge attended it.
At the age of fifteen he received an appointment as clerk in the office of Public Records.
In due time, having proved his capacity and peculiar fitness, he was promoted to the post of Assistant Keeper, which gave him a respectable position and some leisure.
He proved to be in an eminent sense the right man in the right place. Besides publishing, from time to time, curious and interesting documents which he discovered in his office, he called attention, by a series of vigorous pamphlets, to the chaotic condition in which the public records of Great Britain were kept.
The records were rearranged, catalogued, rendered safe, and made accessible to students.
This has already led to important corrections in history, and to a great increase in the sum of historical knowledge.
When the subject of cheap postage came up in eighteen forty, the government offered four prizes of a hundred pounds each for suggestions in aid of Sir Rowland Hill's plan.
One of these prizes was assigned to Henry Cole. He was one of the persons who first became converts to the idea of penny postage, and he lent the aid of his pen and influence to its adoption.
At length, about the year eighteen forty five, he entered upon the course of proceedings which rendered him one of the most influential and useful persons of his time.
He had long lamented the backward condition of arts of design in England, and the consequent ugliness of the various objects in the sight and use of which human beings pass their lives.
English furniture, wall papers, carpets, curtains, cutlery, garments, upholstery, ranged from the tolerable to the hideous, and were inferior to the manufactures of France and Germany.
He organized a series of exhibitions on a small scale, somewhat similar to those of the American Institute in New York, which has held a competitive exhibition of natural and manufactured objects every autumn for the last fifty years.
His exhibitions attracted attention, and they led at length to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of eighteen fifty one.
The merit of that scheme must be shared between Henry Cole and Prince Albert.
Yes, said Prince Albert, and let us also invite competition from foreign countries on equal terms with native products.
The Exhibition of eighteen fifty one was admirably managed, and had every kind of success.
It benefited England more than all other nations put together, because it revealed to her people their inferiority in many branches both of workmanship and design.
We all know how conceited people are apt to become who have no opportunity to compare themselves with superiors. john Bull, never over modest, surveyed the Exhibition of eighteen fifty one, and discovered, to his great surprise, that he was not the unapproachable Bull of the universe which he had fondly supposed.
He saw himself beaten in some things by the French, in some by the Germans, in others by the Italians, and in a few (O wonder!) by the Yankees.
Happily he had the candor to admit this humiliating fact to himself, and he put forth earnest and steadfast exertions to bring himself up to the level of modern times.
Henry Cole was the life and soul of the movement.
It was he who called attention to the obstacles placed in the way of improvement by the patent laws, and some of those obstacles, through him, were speedily removed.
During this series of services to his country, he remained in the office of Public Records.
They asked him to undertake the reconstruction of the schools of design, and they gave him an office which placed him practically at the head of the various institutions designed to promote the application of art to manufacture.
The chief of these now is the Museum of South Kensington, which is to many Americans the most interesting object in London.
It came to pass in this way: After the close of the Crystal Palace in eighteen fifty one, Parliament gave five thousand pounds for the purchase of the objects exhibited which were thought best calculated to raise the standard of taste in the nation.
These objects, chiefly selected by Cole, were arranged by him for exhibition in temporary buildings of such extreme and repulsive inconvenience as to bring opprobrium and ridicule upon the undertaking.
It was one of the most difficult things in the world to excite public interest in the exhibition.
But by that energy which comes of strong conviction and patriotic feeling, and of the opportunity given him by his public employment, Henry Cole wrung from a reluctant Parliament the annual grants necessary to make South Kensington Museum what it now is.
Magnificent buildings, filled with a vast collection of precious and interesting objects, greet the visitor.
There are collections of armor, relics, porcelain, enamel, fabrics, paintings, statues, carvings in wood and ivory, machines, models, and every conceivable object of use or beauty.
Some of the most celebrated pictures in the world are there, and there is an art library of thirty thousand volumes.
There are schools for instruction in every branch of art and science which can be supposed to enter into the products of industry.
The prizes which are offered for excellence in design and invention have attracted, in some years, as many as two hundred thousand objects.
During three days of every week admission to this superb assemblage of exhibitions is free, and on the other three days sixpence is charged.
The influence of this institution upon British manufactures has been in many branches revolutionary.
As the London "Times" said some time ago:--
The formation of this Museum, the chief work of Sir Henry Cole's useful life, was far from exhausting his energies.
He has borne a leading part in all the industrial exhibitions held in London during the last quarter of a century, and served as English commissioner at the Paris exhibitions of eighteen fifty five and eighteen sixty seven.
This man was enabled to render all this service to his country, to Europe, and to us, because he was not obliged to waste any of his energies in efforts to keep his place.
Administrations might change, and Parliaments might dissolve; but he was a fixture as long as he did his duty.
Henceforth he was called Sir Henry Cole, k c b
WILLIAM b ASTOR.
HOUSE OWNER.
In estimating the character and merits of such a man as the late mr Astor, we are apt to leave out of view the enormous harm he might have done if he had chosen to do it.
The rich fool who tosses a dollar to a waiter for some trifling service, debases the waiter, injures himself, and wrongs the public.
By acting in that manner in all the transactions of life, a rich man diffuses around him an atmosphere of corruption, and raises the scale of expense to a point which is oppressive to many, ruinous to some, and inconvenient to all.
The late mr Astor, with an income from invested property of nearly two millions a year, could have made life more difficult than it was to the whole body of people in New York who are able to live in a liberal manner.
He refrained from doing so.
He paid for everything which he consumed the market price-no more, no less-and he made his purchases with prudence and forethought.
As he lived for many years next door to the Astor Library, the frequenters of that noble institution had an opportunity of observing that he laid in his year's supply of coal in the month of June, when coal is cheapest.
There was nothing which he so much abhorred as waste.
It was both an instinct and a principle with him to avoid waste.
He did not have the gas turned down low in a temporarily vacated room because he would save two cents by doing so, but because he justly regarded waste as wicked. His example in this particular, in a city so given to careless and ostentatious profusion as New York, was most useful.
We needed such an example.
Nor did he appear to carry this principle to an extreme.
He was very far from being miserly, though keenly intent upon accumulation.
In the life of the Old World there is nothing so shocking to a republicanized mind as the awful contrast between the abodes of the poor and the establishments of the rich.
A magnificent park of a thousand acres of the richest land set apart and walled in for the exclusive use of one family, while all about it are the squalid hovels of the peasants to whom the use of a single acre to a family would be ease and comfort, is the most painful and shameful spectacle upon which the sun looks down this day.
Nothing can make it right.
It is monstrous.
The mere fact that the lord can look upon such a scene and not stir to mend it, is proof positive of a profound vulgarity.
I read some time ago of a wedding in Paris.
A thriving banker there, who is styled the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, having a daughter of seventeen to marry, appears to have set seriously to work to find out how much money a wedding could be made to cost.
In pursuing this inquiry, he caused the wedding festivals of Louis the fourteenth's court, once so famous, to seem poverty stricken and threadbare.
He began by a burst of ostentatious charity.
He subscribed money for the relief of the victims of recent inundations, and dowered a number of portionless girls; expending in these ways a quarter of a million francs.
He gave his daughter a portion of five millions of francs.
One of her painted fans cost five thousand francs.
He provided such enormous quantities of clothing for her little body, that his house, if it had not been exceedingly large, would not have conveniently held them.
For the conveyance of the wedding party from the house to the synagogue, he caused twenty five magnificent carriages to be made, such as monarchs use when they are going to be crowned, and these vehicles were drawn by horses imported from England for the purpose.
The bridal veil was composed of ineffable lace, made from an original design expressly for this bride.
And then what doings in the synagogue!
A choir of one hundred and ten trained voices, led by the best conductor in Europe-the first tenor of this generation engaged, who sang the prayer from "Moses in Egypt"--a crowd of rabbis, and assistant rabbis, with the grand rabbi of Paris at their head.
To complete the histrionic performance, eight young girls, each bearing a beautiful gold embroidered bag, and attended by a young gentleman, "took up a collection" for the poor, which yielded seven thousand francs.
mr Astor could, if he had chosen, have thrown his millions about in this style.
He was one of a score or two of men in North America who could have maintained establishments in town and country on the dastardly scale so common among rich people in Europe.
He, too, could have had his park, his half a dozen mansions, his thirty carriages, his hundred horses and his yacht as big as a man of war.
That he was above such atrocious vulgarity as this, was much to his credit and more to our advantage.
What he could have done safely, other men would have attempted to whom the attempt would have been destruction.
Some discredit also would have been cast upon those who live in moderate and modest ways.
Every quarter day mr Astor had nearly half a million dollars to invest in the industries of the country.
To invest his surplus income in the best and safest manner was the study of his life.
"William will never make money," his father used to say; "but he will take good care of what he has." And so it proved.
The consequence was, that all his life he invested money in the way that was at once best for himself and best for the country.
No useless or premature scheme had had any encouragement from him.
Here, again, we were lucky.
When we wanted houses more than we wanted coal, he built houses for us; and when we wanted coal more than we wanted houses, he set his money to digging coal; charging nothing for his trouble but the mere cost of his subsistence.
One fault he had as a public servant-for we may fairly regard in that light a man who wields so large a portion of our common estate.
He was one of the most timid of men.
He was even timorous.
His timidity was constitutional and physical.
He would take a great deal of trouble to avoid crossing a temporary bridge or scaffolding, though assured by an engineer that it was strong enough to bear ten elephants.
Nor can it be said that he was morally brave.
Year after year he saw a gang of thieves in the City Hall stealing his revenues under the name of taxes and assessments, but he never led an assault upon them nor gave the aid he ought to those who did.
Unless he is grossly belied, he preferred to compromise than fight, and did not always disdain to court the ruffians who plundered him.
This was a grave fault.
He who had the most immediate and the most obvious interest in exposing and resisting the scoundrels, ought to have taken the lead in putting them down.
This he could not do.
Nature had denied him the qualities required for such a contest.
He had his enormous estate, and he had mind enough to take care of it in ordinary ways; but he had nothing more.
"How greedily They snuff the fishy steam, that to each blade Rank scenting clings!
See! how the morning dews They sweep, that from their feet besprinkling drop Dispersed, and leave a track oblique behind. Now on firm land they range, then in the flood They plunge tumultuous; or through reedy pools Rustling they work their way; no holt escapes Their curious search.
With quick sensation now The fuming vapour stings; flutter their hearts, And joy redoubled bursts from every mouth In louder symphonies.
Yon hollow trunk, That with its hoary head incurv'd salutes The passing wave, must be the tyrant's fort And dread abode.
How these impatient climb, While others at the root incessant bay!-- They put him down."--SOMERVILLE.
The above is an animated and beautiful description of an otter hunt, an old English sport fast falling into disuse, and the breed of the real otter hound is either extinct or very nearly so.
In stating this, I am aware that there are still many dogs which are called otter hounds; but it may be doubted whether they possess that peculiar formation which belongs exclusively to the true breed.
Few things in nature are more curious and interesting than this formation, and it shows forcibly how beautifully everything has been arranged for the instincts and several habits of animals.
The Earl of Cadogan has, what his Lordship considers, the last of the breed of the true otter hound.
It was a present from Sir Walter Scott.
Lord Cadogan offered one hundred pounds for another dog of the same breed, but of a different sex; but I believe without being able to procure one with those true marks which are confined to the authentic breed.
A gipsy was, indeed, said to have possessed one, but he refused to part with it.
Those who saw the exhibition of pictures in the Royal Academy in eighteen forty four will recollect a large, interesting, and beautiful picture by Sir Edwin Landseer of a pack of otter hounds.
The picture describes the hunt at the time of the termination of the chase and the capture of the otter.
The animal is impaled on the huntsman's spear, while the rough, shaggy, and picturesque looking pack are represented with eyes intently fixed on the amphibious beast, and howling in uncouth chorus round their agonized and dying prey.
An otter hunt is a cheerful and inspiriting sport, and it is still carried on in some of the lakes of Cumberland.
Indeed, as lately as the year eighteen forty four, a pack of otter hounds was advertised in the newspapers to be sold by private contract.
The alleged cause of the owner's parting with them was in consequence of their having cleared the rivers of three counties (Staffordshire being one) of all the otters, and the number captured and killed in the last few years was mentioned.
The best time to find it is early in the morning.
It may frequently be traced by the dead fish and fish bones strewed along the banks of the river.
The otter preys during the night, and conceals himself in the daytime under the banks of lakes and rivers, where he generally forms a kind of subterraneous gallery, running for several yards parallel to the water's edge, so that if he should be assailed from one end, he flies to the other.
When he takes to the water, it is necessary that those who have otter spears should watch the bubbles, for he generally vents near them.
When the otter is seized, or upon the point of being caught by the hounds, he turns upon his pursuers with the utmost ferocity.
Instances are recorded of dogs having been drowned by otters, which they had seized under water, for they can sustain the want of respiration for a much longer time than the dog.
The sportsmen went on each side of the river, beating the banks and sedges with the dogs.
If one was found, the sportsmen viewed his track in the mud, to find which way he had taken.
"On the soft sand, See there his seal impress'd!
And on that bank Behold the glitt'ring spoils, half eaten fish, Scales, fins, and bones, the leavings of his feast."
The spears were used in aid of the dogs.
When an otter is wounded, he makes directly to land, where he maintains an obstinate defence:--
"Lo! to yon sedgy bank He creeps disconsolate; his numerous foes Surround him, hounds and men.
The male otter never makes any complaint when seized by the dogs, or even when transfixed with a spear, but the females emit a very shrill squeal.
In the year seventeen ninety six, near Bridgenorth, on the river Wherfe, four otters were killed.
One stood three, another four hours before the dogs, and was scarcely a minute out of sight.
It measured from the nose to the end of the tail, four feet ten inches, and weighed thirty four and a half pounds.
This animal was supposed to be eight years old, and to have destroyed for the last five years a ton of fish annually.
The destruction of fish by this animal is, indeed, very great, for he will eat none unless it be perfectly fresh, and what he takes himself.
By his mode of eating them he causes a still greater consumption, for so soon as an otter catches a fish he drags it on shore, devours it to the vent, and, unless pressed by extreme hunger, always leaves the remainder, and takes to the water in search of more.
In rivers it is always observed to swim against the stream, in order to meet its prey.
Otters bite very severely, and they will seize upon a dog with the utmost ferocity, and will shake it as a terrier does a rat.
The jaws of the otter are so constructed, that even when dead it is difficult to separate them, as they adhere with the utmost tenacity.
Otters are frequently found on the banks of the Thames, and a large one was caught in an eel basket, near Windsor, but the hunting of them is discontinued.
We are all born poets, mathematicians, philosophers, artists, artisans, or farmers, but we are not born equally endowed; and between one man and another in society, or between one faculty and another in the same individual, there is an infinite difference.
This difference of degree in the same faculties, this predominance of talent in certain directions, is, we have said, the very foundation of our society.
It is not so with societies of animals.
No animal, when free and healthy, expects or requires the aid of his neighbor; who, in his turn, is equally independent.
Associated animals live side by side without any intellectual intercourse or intimate communication,--all doing the same things, having nothing to learn or to remember; they see, feel, and come in contact with each other, but never penetrate each other.
Man continually exchanges with man ideas and feelings, products and services.
Every discovery and act in society is necessary to him.
But of this immense quantity of products and ideas, that which each one has to produce and acquire for himself is but an atom in the sun
Society, among the animals, is SIMPLE; with man it is COMPLEX.
Man is associated with man by the same instinct which associates animal with animal; but man is associated differently from the animal, and it is this difference in association which constitutes the difference in morality.
The fields of benevolence and love extend far beyond; and when economy has adjusted its balance, the mind begins to benefit by its own justice, and the heart expands in the boundlessness of its affection.
The social sentiment then takes on a new character, which varies with different persons.
In the strong, it becomes the pleasure of generosity; among equals, frank and cordial friendship; in the weak, the pleasure of admiration and gratitude.
Hercules destroying the monsters and punishing brigands for the safety of Greece, Orpheus teaching the rough and wild Pelasgians,--neither of them putting a price upon their services,--there we see the noblest creations of poetry, the loftiest expression of justice and virtue.
The joys of self sacrifice are ineffable.
Guided by them, they owe them nothing; they honor them, however, and lavish upon them praise and approbation.
Gratitude fills people with adoration and enthusiasm.
But equality delights my heart.
Benevolence degenerates into tyranny, and admiration into servility.
Friendship is the daughter of equality. O my friends! may I live in your midst without emulation, and without glory; let equality bring us together, and fate assign us our places. May I die without knowing to whom among you I owe the most esteem!
Friendship is precious to the hearts of the children of men.
It is the just distribution of social sympathy and universal love.
Now, this feeling is unknown among the beasts, who love and cling to each other, and show their preferences, but who cannot conceive of esteem, and who are incapable of generosity, admiration, or politeness.
This feeling does not spring from intelligence, which calculates, computes, and balances, but does not love; which sees, but does not feel.
This product-the third and last degree of human sociability-is determined by our complex mode of association; in which inequality, or rather the divergence of faculties, and the speciality of functions-tending of themselves to isolate laborers-demand a more active sociability.
That is why the force which oppresses while protecting is execrable; why the silly ignorance which views with the same eye the marvels of art, and the products of the rudest industry, excites unutterable contempt; why proud mediocrity, which glories in saying, "I have paid you-I owe you nothing," is especially odious.
These three degrees of sociability support and imply each other.
If, in order to reward talent, I take from one to give to another, in unjustly stripping the first, I do not esteem his talent as I ought; if, in society, I award more to myself than to my associate, we are not really associated.
Justice is sociability as manifested in the division of material things, susceptible of weight and measure; equite is justice accompanied by admiration and esteem,--things which cannot be measured.
From this several inferences may be drawn.
one.
By the same principle, inequality of wages cannot be admitted by law on the ground of inequality of talents; because the just distribution of wealth is the function of economy,--not of enthusiasm.
Finally, as regards donations, wills, and inheritance, society, careful both of the personal affections and its own rights, must never permit love and partiality to destroy justice.
If the two persons were equal, their respective shares would be arithmetically equal: Achilles would have six, Ajax six.
To avoid this injustice, the worth of the persons should be estimated, and the spoils divided accordingly. Suppose that the worth of Achilles is double that of Ajax: the former's share is eight, the latter four.
There is no arithmetical equality, but a proportional equality.
Settle that, and you settle the whole question.
If Achilles and Ajax, instead of being associated, are themselves in the service of Agamemnon who pays them, there is no objection to Aristotle's method.
The slave owner, who controls his slaves, may give a double allowance of brandy to him who does double work.
That is the law of despotism; the right of slavery.
What matters it that Achilles has a strength of four, while that of Ajax is only two? The latter may always answer that he is free; that if Achilles has a strength of four, five could kill him; finally, that in doing personal service he incurs as great a risk as Achilles.
If he is unable to fight, let him be cook, purveyor, or butler.
If he is good for nothing, put him in the hospital.
In no case wrong him, or impose upon him laws.
Man must live in one of two states: either in society, or out of it. In society, conditions are necessarily equal, except in the degree of esteem and consideration which each one may receive.
God can be regarded as just, equitable, and good, only to another God.
No: and if he saw fit to shear as much wool from a lamb six months old, as from a ram of two years; or, if he required as much work from a young dog as from an old one,--they would say, not that he was unjust, but that he was foolish.
Between man and beast there is no society, though there may be affection.
Man loves the animals as THINGS,--as SENTIENT THINGS, if you will,--but not as PERSONS.
If God should come down to earth, and dwell among us, we could not love him unless he became like us; nor give him any thing unless he produced something; nor listen to him unless he proved us mistaken; nor worship him unless he manifested his power.
Now, if kings are images of God, and executors of his will, they cannot receive love, wealth, obedience, and glory from us, unless they consent to labor and associate with us-produce as much as they consume, reason with their subjects, and do wonderful things.
Still more; if, as some pretend, kings are public functionaries, the love which is due them is measured by their personal amiability; our obligation to obey them, by the wisdom of their commands; and their civil list, by the total social production divided by the number of citizens.
Thus, jurisprudence, political economy, and psychology agree in admitting the law of equality.
Right and duty-the due reward of talent and labor-the outbursts of love and enthusiasm,--all are regulated in advance by an invariable standard; all depend upon number and balance. Equality of conditions is the law of society, and universal solidarity is the ratification of this law.
To that fact history bears perpetual testimony, and the course of events reveals it to us.
Society advances from equation to equation.
To the eyes of the economist, the revolutions of empires seem now like the reduction of algebraical quantities, which are inter deducible; now like the discovery of unknown quantities, induced by the inevitable influence of time.
Figures are the providence of history.
Undoubtedly there are other elements in human progress; but in the multitude of hidden causes which agitate nations, there is none more powerful or constant, none less obscure, than the periodical explosions of the proletariat against property.
Property, acting by exclusion and encroachment, while population was increasing, has been the life principle and definitive cause of all revolutions.
Religious wars, and wars of conquest, when they have stopped short of the extermination of races, have been only accidental disturbances, soon repaired by the mathematical progression of the life of nations.
The downfall and death of societies are due to the power of accumulation possessed by property.
Here my task should end.
I have proved the right of the poor; I have shown the usurpation of the rich.
I demand justice; it is not my business to execute the sentence.
If it should be argued-in order to prolong for a few years an illegitimate privilege-that it is not enough to demonstrate equality, that it is necessary also to organize it, and above all to establish it peacefully, I might reply: The welfare of the oppressed is of more importance than official composure.
Equality of conditions is a natural law upon which public economy and jurisprudence are based.
The right to labor, and the principle of equal distribution of wealth, cannot give way to the anxieties of power.
On the contrary, it is the duty of the civil and administrative power to reconstruct itself on the basis of political equality.
An evil, when known, should be condemned and destroyed.
The legislator cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for upholding a glaring iniquity.
Restitution should not be delayed. Justice, justice! recognition of right! reinstatement of the proletaire!--when these results are accomplished, then, judges and consuls, you may attend to your police, and provide a government for the Republic!
For the rest, I do not think that a single one of my readers accuses me of knowing how to destroy, but of not knowing how to construct.
In demonstrating the principle of equality, I have laid the foundation of the social structure I have done more.
I have given an example of the true method of solving political and legislative problems.
Of the science itself, I confess that I know nothing more than its principle; and I know of no one at present who can boast of having penetrated deeper.
Many people cry, "Come to me, and I will teach you the truth!" These people mistake for the truth their cherished opinion and ardent conviction, which is usually any thing but the truth.
The science of society-like all human sciences-will be for ever incomplete.
The depth and variety of the questions which it embraces are infinite.
A certain philological society decided linguistic questions by a plurality of votes.
The task of the true publicist, in the age in which we live, is to close the mouths of quacks and charlatans, and to teach the public to demand demonstrations, instead of being contented with symbols and programmes.
Before talking of the science itself, it is necessary to ascertain its object, and discover its method and principle.
The ground must be cleared of the prejudices which encumber it.
Such is the mission of the nineteenth century.
For my part, I have sworn fidelity to my work of demolition, and I will not cease to pursue the truth through the ruins and rubbish.
I hate to see a thing half done; and it will be believed without any assurance of mine, that, having dared to raise my hand against the Holy Ark, I shall not rest contented with the removal of the cover.
The mysteries of the sanctuary of iniquity must be unveiled, the tables of the old alliance broken, and all the objects of the ancient faith thrown in a heap to the swine.
A code has been written,--the pride of a conqueror, and the summary of ancient wisdom.
Well! of this charter and this code not one article shall be left standing upon another! The time has come for the wise to choose their course, and prepare for reconstruction.
But, since a destroyed error necessarily implies a counter truth, I will not finish this treatise without solving the first problem of political science,--that which receives the attention of all minds.
WHEN PROPERTY IS ABOLISHED, WHAT WILL BE THE FORM OF SOCIETY!
WILL IT BE COMMUNISM?
one.
Rutinius explains that it was not written down for a long time, but transmitted orally, kept secret, and used as a sort of password among the elect.
At times they display a divine simplicity.
Chapter four
The Fall of the Provisional Government
wednesday november seventh, I rose very late.
The noon cannon boomed from Peter Paul as I went down the Nevsky.
It was a raw, chill day. In front of the State Bank some soldiers with fixed bayonets were standing at the closed gates.
"What side do you belong to?" I asked.
"The Government?"
The street cars were running on the Nevsky, men, women and small boys hanging on every projection.
Shops were open, and there seemed even less uneasiness among the street crowds than there had been the day before.
A whole crop of new appeals against insurrection had blossomed out on the walls during the night-to the peasants, to the soldiers at the front, to the workmen of Petrograd.
FROM THE PETROGRAD MUNICIPAL DUMA:
Members of the Committee of Public Safety will be on duty in the building of the Municipal Duma.
november seventh nineteen seventeen.
Though I didn't realize it then, this was the Duma's declaration of war against the Bolsheviki.
PEACE!
BREAD!
LAND!" The leading article was signed "Zinoviev,"--Lenin's companion in hiding.
It began:
Every soldier, every worker, every real Socialist, every honest democrat realises that there are only two alternatives to the present situation.
Or-the power will be transferred to the hands of the revolutionary workers, soldiers and peasants; and in that case it will mean a complete abolition of landlord tyranny, immediate check of the capitalists, immediate proposal of a just peace.
Then the land is assured to the peasants, then control of industry is assured to the workers, then bread is assured to the hungry, then the end of this nonsensical war!...
They haven't the men to run a government.
Perhaps it's a good thing to let them try-that will furnish them...."
The Military Hotel at the corner of saint Isaac's Square was picketed by armed sailors.
In the lobby were many of the smart young officers, walking up and down or muttering together; the sailors wouldn't let them leave....
Suddenly came the sharp crack of a rifle outside, followed by a scattered burst of firing.
I ran out.
Something unusual was going on around the Marinsky Palace, where the Council of the Russian Republic met.
Diagonally across the wide square was drawn a line of soldiers, rifles ready, staring at the hotel roof.
A barricade had been heaped up across the mouth of Novaya Ulitza-boxes, barrels, an old bed spring, a wagon.
"Is there going to be any fighting?" I asked.
"Soon, soon," answered a soldier, nervously.
"Go away, comrade, you'll get hurt.
They will come from that direction," pointing toward the Admiralty.
"Who will?"
"That I couldn't tell you, brother," he answered, and spat.
Before the door of the Palace was a crowd of soldiers and sailors.
A sailor was telling of the end of the Council of the Russian Republic.
"We walked in there," he said, "and filled all the doors with comrades.
I went up to the counter revolutionist Kornilovitz who sat in the president's chair.
'No more Council,' I says.
There was laughter.
By waving assorted papers I managed to get around to the door of the press gallery.
There an enormous smiling sailor stopped me, and when I showed my pass, just said, "If you were Saint Michael himself, comrade, you couldn't pass here!" Through the glass of the door I made out the distorted face and gesticulating arms of a French correspondent, locked in....
Around in front stood a little, grey moustached man in the uniform of a general, the centre of a knot of soldiers.
He was very red in the face.
"As your superior officer and as a member of the Council of the Republic I demand to be allowed to pass!"
The guard scratched his head, looking uneasily out of the corner of his eye; he beckoned to an approaching officer, who grew very agitated when he saw who it was and saluted before he realised what he was doing.
An automobile came by, and I saw Gotz sitting inside, laughing apparently with great amusement.
A few minutes later another, with armed soldiers on the front seat, full of arrested members of the Provisional Government.
Peters, Lettish member of the Military Revolutionary Committee, came hurrying across the Square.
"I thought you bagged all those gentlemen last night," said I, pointing to them.
"Oh," he answered, with the expression of a disappointed small boy. "The damn fools let most of them go again before we made up our minds...."
We went toward the Winter Palace by way of the Admiralteisky.
All the entrances to the Palace Square were closed by sentries, and a cordon of troops stretched clear across the western end, besieged by an uneasy throng of citizens.
Except for far away soldiers who seemed to be carrying wood out of the Palace courtyard and piling it in front of the main gateway, everything was quiet.
We couldn't make out whether the sentries were pro Government or pro Soviet.
Our papers from Smolny had no effect, however, so we approached another part of the line with an important air and showed our American passports, saying "Official business!" and shouldered through.
In the dark, gloomy corridor, stripped of its tapestries, a few old attendants were lounging about, and in front of Kerensky's door a young officer paced up and down, gnawing his moustache.
We asked if we could interview the Minister president.
He bowed and clicked his heels.
"No, I am sorry," he replied in French.
"In fact, he is not here...."
"Where is he?"
"He has gone to the Front. (See App.
We had to send to the English Hospital and borrow some."
"They are meeting in some room-I don't know where.'
"Are the Bolsheviki coming?"
"Of course.
Certainly, they are coming.
I expect a telephone call every minute to say that they are coming.
But we are ready.
"Can we go in there?"
"no Certainly not.
It is not permitted." Abruptly he shook hands all around and walked away.
We turned to the forbidden door, set in a temporary partition dividing the hall and locked on the outside. On the other side were voices, and somebody laughing.
Except for that the vast spaces of the old Palace were silent as the grave.
"Why is the door locked?"
"To keep the soldiers in," he answered.
After a few minutes he said something about having a glass of tea and went back up the hall.
We unlocked the door.
Just inside a couple of soldiers stood on guard, but they said nothing.
On both sides of the parquetted floor lay rows of dirty mattresses and blankets, upon which occasional soldiers were stretched out; everywhere was a litter of cigarette butts, bits of bread, cloth, and empty bottles with expensive French labels.
One had a bottle of white Burgundy, evidently filched from the cellars of the Palace. They looked at us with astonishment as we marched past, through room after room, until at last we came out into a series of great state salons, fronting their long and dirty windows on the Square. The walls were covered with huge canvases in massive gilt frames-historical battle scenes....
One had a gash across the upper right hand corner.
The place was all a huge barrack, and evidently had been for weeks, from the look of the floor and walls.
Machine guns were mounted on window sills, rifles stacked between the mattresses.
Enchanted.
I am Stabs-Capitan Vladimir Artzibashev, absolutely at your service."
It did not seem to occur to him that there was anything unusual in four strangers, one a woman, wandering through the defences of an army awaiting attack.
He began to complain of the state of Russia.
"Not only these Bolsheviki," he said, "but the fine traditions of the Russian army are broken down.
Look around you.
Naturally there are many, many who are contaminated by the Revolution...."
Without consequence he changed the subject.
"I am very anxious to go away from Russia.
I have made up my mind to join the American army. Will you please go to your Consul and make arrangements?
I will give you my address." In spite of our protestations he wrote it on a piece of paper, and seemed to feel better at once.
"We had a review this morning early," he went on, as he guided us through the rooms and explained everything.
"The Women's Battalion decided to remain loyal to the Government."
"Are the women soldiers in the Palace?"
"Yes, they are in the back rooms, where they won't be hurt if any trouble comes." He sighed.
"It is a great responsibility," said he.
After a few minutes two of the companies shouldered arms with a clash, barked three sharp shouts, and went swinging off across the Square, disappearing through the Red Arch into the quiet city.
"They are going to capture the Telephone Exchange," said some one. Three cadets stood by us, and we fell into conversation.
They didn't seem to know what to do, as a matter of fact, and it was plain that they were not happy.
But soon they began to boast.
"If the Bolsheviki come we shall show them how to fight.
They do not dare to fight, they are cowards.
But if we should be overpowered, well, every man keeps one bullet for himself...."
At this point there was a burst of rifle fire not far off.
Inside all was uproar, soldiers running here and there, grabbing up guns, rifle belts and shouting, "Here they come!
Here they come!" ...
But in a few minutes it quieted down again.
It was getting late when we left the Palace.
The sentries in the Square had all disappeared.
The great semi circle of Government buildings seemed deserted.
We went into the Hotel France for dinner, and right in the middle of soup the waiter, very pale in the face, came up and insisted that we move to the main dining room at the back of the house, because they were going to put out the lights in the cafe.
"There will be much shooting," he said.
When we came out on the Morskaya again it was quite dark, except for one flickering street light on the corner of the Nevsky.
Under this stood a big armored automobile, with racing engine and oil smoke pouring out of it.
A small boy had climbed up the side of the thing and was looking down the barrel of a machine gun.
Soldiers and sailors stood around, evidently waiting for something.
We walked back up to the Red Arch, where a knot of soldiers was gathered staring at the brightly lighted Winter Palace and talking in loud tones.
"No, comrades," one was saying.
"How can we shoot at them?
The Women's Battalion is in there-they will say we have fired on Russian women."
As we reached the Nevsky again another armoured car came around the corner, and a man poked his head out of the turret top.
"Come on!" he yelled.
"Let's go on through and attack!"
The driver of the other car came over, and shouted so as to be heard above the roaring engine.
"The Committee says to wait.
They have got artillery behind the wood piles in there...."
Here the street cars had stopped running, few people passed, and there were no lights; but a few blocks away we could see the trams, the crowds, the lighted shop windows and the electric signs of the moving picture shows-life going on as usual.
We had tickets to the Ballet at the Marinsky Theatre-all theatres were open-but it was too exciting out of doors....
Men in various uniforms were coming and going in an aimless way, and doing a great deal of talking....
Up the Nevsky the whole city seemed to be out promenading.
At the Mikhailovsky a man appeared with an armful of newspapers, and was immediately stormed by frantic people, offering a rouble, five roubles, ten roubles, tearing at each other like animals.
On the corner of the Sadovaya about two thousand citizens had gathered, staring up at the roof of a tall building, where a tiny red spark glowed and waned.
"See!" said a tall peasant, pointing to it.
The massive facade of Smolny blazed with lights as we drove up, and from every street converged upon it streams of hurrying shapes dim in the gloom.
Automobiles and motorcycles came and went; an enormous elephant coloured armoured automobile, with two red flags flying from the turret, lumbered out with screaming siren.
It was cold, and at the outer gate the Red Guards had built themselves a bon fire.
At the inner gate, too, there was a blaze, by the light of which the sentries slowly spelled out our passes and looked us up and down. The canvas covers had been taken off the four rapid fire guns on each side of the doorway, and the ammunition belts hung snakelike from their breeches.
A dun herd of armoured cars stood under the trees in the court yard, engines going.
The long, bare, dimly illuminated halls roared with the thunder of feet, calling, shouting....
There was an atmosphere of recklessness.
The extraordinary meeting of the Petrograd Soviet was over.
The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, saluting the victorious Revolution of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison, particularly emphasises the unity, organisation, discipline, and complete cooperation shown by the masses in this rising; rarely has less blood been spilled, and rarely has an insurrection succeeded so well.
The Soviet expresses its firm conviction that the Workers' and Peasants' Government which, as the government of the Soviets, will be created by the Revolution, and which will assure the industrial proletariat of the support of the entire mass of poor peasants, will march firmly toward Socialism, the only means by which the country can be spared the miseries and unheard of horrors of war.
The new Workers' and Peasants' Government will propose immediately a just and democratic peace to all the belligerent countries.
It will suppress immediately the great landed property, and transfer the land to the peasants.
It will establish workmen's control over production and distribution of manufactured products, and will set up a general control over the banks, which it will transform into a state monopoly.
The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies calls upon the workers and the peasants of Russia to support with all their energy and all their devotion the Proletarian Revolution.
The Soviet expresses its conviction that the city workers, allies of the poor peasants, will assure complete revolutionary order, indispensable to the victory of Socialism.
The Soviet is convinced that the proletariat of the countries of Western Europe will aid us in conducting the cause of Socialism to a real and lasting victory.
"You consider it won then?"
He lifted his shoulders.
"There is much to do.
Horribly much.
It is just beginning...."
"It's insane!
Insane!" he shouted.
"The European working class won't move!
It had been a momentous session.
In the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee Trotzky had declared that the Provisional Government no longer existed.
"The characteristic of bourgeois governments," he said, "is to deceive the people.
We, the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, are going to try an experiment unique in history; we are going to found a power which will have no other aim but to satisfy the needs of the soldiers, workers, and peasants."
And Zinoviev, crying, "This day we have paid our debt to the international proletariat, and struck a terrible blow at the war, a terrible body blow at all the imperialists and particularly at Wilhelm the Executioner...."
Then Trotzky, that telegrams had been sent to the front announcing the victorious insurrection, but no reply had come.
Troops were said to be marching against Petrograd-a delegation must be sent to tell them the truth.
Cries, "You are anticipating the will of the All Russian Congress of Soviets!"
So we came into the great meeting hall, pushing through the clamorous mob at the door.
In the rows of seats, under the white chandeliers, packed immovably in the aisles and on the sides, perched on every window sill, and even the edge of the platform, the representatives of the workers and soldiers of all Russia waited in anxious silence or wild exultation the ringing of the chairman's bell.
There was no heat in the hall but the stifling heat of unwashed human bodies.
A foul blue cloud of cigarette smoke rose from the mass and hung in the thick air.
Occasionally some one in authority mounted the tribune and asked the comrades not to smoke; then everybody, smokers and all, took up the cry "Don't smoke, comrades!" and went on smoking.
Petrovsky, Anarchist delegate from the Obukhov factory, made a seat for me beside him.
Unshaven and filthy, he was reeling from three nights' sleepless work on the Military Revolutionary Committee.
It was the end of the first period of the Russian revolution, which these men had attempted to guide in careful ways....
Gotz sat there, Dan, Lieber, Bogdanov, Broido, Fillipovsky,--white faced, hollow eyed and indignant.
It was ten forty p m
Dan, a mild faced, baldish figure in a shapeless military surgeon's uniform, was ringing the bell.
Silence fell sharply, intense, broken by the scuffling and disputing of the people at the door....
"We have the power in our hands," he began sadly, stopped for a moment, and then went on in a low voice.
"Comrades!
"I declare the first session of the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies open!"
The election of the presidium took place amid stir and moving about. Avanessov announced that by agreement of the Bolsheviki, Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviki Internationalists, it was decided to base the presidium upon proportionality.
Several Mensheviki leaped to their feet protesting.
Hendelmann, for the right and centre Socialist Revolutionaries, said that they refused to take part in the presidium; the same from Kintchuk, for the Mensheviki; and from the Mensheviki Internationalists, that until the verification of certain circumstances, they too could not enter the presidium. Scattering applause and hoots.
One voice, "Renegades, you call yourselves Socialists!" A representative of the Ukrainean delegates demanded, and received, a place.
The hall rose, thundering.
How far they had soared, these Bolsheviki, from a despised and hunted sect less than four months ago, to this supreme place, the helm of great Russia in full tide of insurrection!
Martov, demanding the floor, croaked hoarsely, "The civil war is beginning, comrades!
The first question must be a peaceful settlement of the crisis.
On principle and from a political standpoint we must urgently discuss a means of averting civil war. Our brothers are being shot down in the streets!
At this moment, when before the opening of the Congress of Soviets the question of Power is being settled by means of a military plot organised by one of the revolutionary parties-" for a moment he could not make himself heard above the noise, "All of the revolutionary parties must face the fact!
We must create a power which will be recognised by the whole democracy.
If the Congress wishes to be the voice of the revolutionary democracy it must not sit with folded hands before the developing civil war, the result of which may be a dangerous outburst of counter revolution.... The possibility of a peaceful outcome lies in the formation of a united democratic authority....
We must elect a delegation to negotiate with the other Socialist parties and organisation...."
Always the methodical muffled boom of cannon through the windows, and the delegates, screaming at each other....
The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the United Social Democrats supported Martov's proposition.
It was accepted.
"Some delegates are present," he said.
"I move that they be given votes." Accepted.
"The political hypocrites who control this Congress," he shouted, "told us we were to settle the question of Power-and it is being settled behind our backs, before the Congress opens!
Followed him Gharra: "While we are here discussing propositions of peace, there is a battle on in the streets....
You lie!"...
The Army is imperfectly represented in this Congress, and furthermore, the Army does not consider the Congress of Soviets necessary at this time, only three weeks before the opening of the Constituent-" shouts and stamping, always growing more violent.
"The Army does not consider that the Congress of Soviets has the necessary authority-" Soldiers began to stand up all over the hall.
"Who are you speaking for?
What do you represent?" they cried.
You represent the officers, not the soldiers!
What do the soldiers say about it?" Jeers and hoots.
"We, the Front group, disclaim all responsibility for what has happened and is happening, and we consider it necessary to mobilise all self conscious revolutionary forces for the salvation of the Revolution!
The Front group will leave the Congress....
The place to fight is out on the streets!"
Immense bawling outcry.
"You speak for the Staff-not for the Army!"
"I appeal to all reasonable soldiers to leave this Congress!"
Provocator!" were hurled at him.
On behalf of the Mensheviki, Khintchuk then announced that the only possibility of a peaceful solution was to begin negotiations with the Provisional Government for the formation of a new Cabinet, which would find support in all strata of society.
He could not proceed for several minutes.
Raising his voice to a shout he read the Menshevik declaration:
"Because the Bolsheviki have made a military conspiracy with the aid of the Petrograd Soviet, without consulting the other factions and parties, we find it impossible to remain in the Congress, and therefore withdraw, inviting the other groups to follow us and to meet for discussion of the situation!"
"Deserter!"
At intervals in the almost continuous disturbance Hendelman, for the Socialist Revolutionaries, could be heard protesting against the bombardment of the Winter Palace....
"We are opposed to this kind of anarchy...."
Scarcely had he stepped down than a young, lean faced soldier, with flashing eyes, leaped to the platform, and dramatically lifted his hand:
"Comrades!" he cried and there was a hush.
I tell you now, the Lettish soldiers have many times said, 'No more resolutions!
No more talk!
We want deeds-the Power must be in our hands!' Let these impostor delegates leave the Congress!
The Army is not with them!"
The hall rocked with cheering.
In the first moments of the session, stunned by the rapidity of events, startled by the sound of cannon, the delegates had hesitated.
For an hour hammer blow after hammer blow had fallen from that tribune, welding them together but beating them down.
Did they stand then alone?
Was Russia rising against them?
LUCY'S GHOST
Kenneth had sent word to Tom Gates, asking the young man to come to Elmhurst, but it was not until two days after the lawn party that Tom appeared and asked permission to see mr Forbes.
Beth and Louise were with Kenneth at the time, and were eager to remain during the interview, so the young man was shown into the library.
Kenneth scrutinized him closely.
"What have you been up to, Tom?" he asked.
Where do you think she can be, sir?"
"Where have you searched?"
"Everywhere, sir, that she might be likely to go.
"It's strange," remarked Kenneth, thoughtfully, while the girls regarded the youth with silent sympathy.
"She was such a gentle, shrinking girl, as shy and retiring as a child.
But she was out of her head, sir, and didn't know what she was about.
And from the moment she left her home all trace of her was lost."
Did she take any clothing with her?"
"What was her dress like?" asked Beth, quickly.
"Does Lucy resemble her mother?" inquired Beth.
"Very much, miss.
"You might have known that," declared Kenneth.
"That is a poor excuse.
If you had waited Lucy would have proved her innocence."
It would have killed her."
"They wouldn't dare arrest her on suspicion."
I wouldn't mind my own punishment, but it drove my Lucy mad."
If Lucy is found do you want her to see you in this condition?"
"Can she be found, sir, do you think?"
"You have failed, it seems, and Will Rogers had failed.
"Oh, Kenneth!" exclaimed Beth.
But you may rest assured that what any man can do, Burke will do."
"I'll try, sir, now that there's something to hope for."
"There's a good deal to hope for.
Despair won't help you.
You must go to work."
"I need someone to assist me in my correspondence," said Kenneth.
"Yes, Tom.
I'll pay you twenty dollars a week to start with, and more if you serve me faithfully.
And you'll board here, of course."
Then Tom Gates broke down and began to cry like a child, although he tried hard to control himself.
"Then you must go to sleep now, and get a good rest." He turned to Beth. "Will you see Martha," he asked, "and have her give Tom Gates a room?"
She went on her errand at once, and gradually the young man recovered his composure.
"Just now you must have some sleep and get your strength back.
And don't worry about Lucy.
The Honorable Erastus still insisted upon making the anti sign fight the prominent issue of the campaign, and they must reply forcibly to the misleading statements made in his last hand bill.
He remembered that he was mr Forbes's secretary now, and that mr Forbes might want him.
So, greatly refreshed, and in a quieter mood than he had been for days, the young man dressed and entered the hall to find his way downstairs.
It happened that Beth, whose room was near this rear corridor, had just gone there to dress for dinner, and as she was closing her door she heard a wild, impassioned cry:
"Lucy!"
Quickly she sprang out into the hall and turned the corner in time to see a strange tableau.
Young Gates was standing with his arms outstretched toward Eliza Parsons, who, a few paces away, had her back to the door of her own chamber, from which she had evidently just stepped.
"Lucy! don't you know me?" he asked, his voice trembling with emotion.
And as we've not been properly introduced I really don't see why I should know you," she added, with a light laugh.
Tom Gates shrank away from her as if he had been struck.
"You can't be Lucy!" he murmured.
You must know me!
Look at me, dear-I'm Tom.
I'm your own Tom, Lucy!"
"Tell me, Tom, is she really like Lucy?"
He looked at her with a dazed expression, as if he scarcely comprehended her words.
"Could you have been mistaken?" persisted the questioner.
"Eliza Parsons is no ghost," declared Beth.
"No; only a few days."
"She may be acting," suggested Beth.
But he shook his head gloomily.
"No; Lucy couldn't act that way.
She's quick and impulsive, but she-she couldn't act.
I-I'm sure I was mistaken."
Beth sighed.
She was disappointed.
"Eliza Parsons."
"Thank you.
Can you tell me where I'll find mr Forbes?"
"He's getting ready for dinner, now, and won't need you at present."
"Then I'll go back to my room.
It-it was a great shock to me, that likeness, Miss DeGraf."
A WELL MATCHED SISTER AND BROTHER
"My dearest Catherine, have you settled what to wear on your head to night?
I am determined, at all events, to be dressed exactly like you.
"But it does not signify if they do," said Catherine, very innocently.
"Signify! oh, heavens!
I make it a rule never to mind what they say. They are very often amazingly impertinent, if you do not treat them with spirit, and make them keep their distance."
"Are they?
They always behave very well to me."
"Oh! they give themselves such airs.
By the by, though I have thought of it a hundred times, I have always forgot to ask you what is your favorite complexion in a man.
Do you like them best dark or fair?"
"I hardly know.
I never much thought about it.
Something between both, I think-brown: not fair, and not very dark."
"Very well, Catherine.
I have not forgot your description of mr Tilney: 'a brown skin, with dark eyes, and rather dark hair.' Well, my taste is different.
I prefer light eyes; and as to complexion, do you know, I like a sallow better than any other.
"Betray you!
What do you mean?"
"Nay, do not distress me.
I believe I have said too much.
Let us drop the subject."
They really put me quite out of countenance.
Let us go and look at the arrivals. They will hardly follow us there."
Away they walked to the book; and while Isabella examined the names, it was Catherine's employment to watch the proceedings of these alarming young men.
I hope they are not so impertinent as to follow us.
I am determined I will not look up."
"Well, I am amazingly glad I have got rid of them!
And now what say you to going to Edgar's Buildings with me, and looking at my new hat?
You said you should like to see it."
Catherine readily agreed.
"Oh! never mind that.
"I shall not pay them any such compliment, I assure you.
Catherine had nothing to oppose against such reasoning; and therefore, to show the independence of Miss Thorpe, and her resolution of humbling the sex, they set off immediately, as fast as they could walk, in pursuit of the two young men.
Half a minute conducted them through the Pump yard to the archway, opposite Union Passage; but here they were stopped.
"Oh, these odious gigs!" said Isabella, looking up, "how I detest them!" But this detestation, though so just, was of short duration, for she looked again, and exclaimed, "Delightful!
mr Morland and my brother!"
'tis james!" was uttered at the same moment by Catherine; and on catching the young men's eyes, the horse was immediately checked with a violence which almost threw him on his haunches; and the servant having now scampered up, the gentlemen jumped out, and the equipage was delivered to his care.
john Thorpe, who in the mean time had been giving orders about the horse, soon joined them, and from him she directly received the amends which were her due; for while he slightly and carelessly touched the hand of Isabella, on her he bestowed a whole scrape and half a short bow.
He was a stout young man, of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy.
"I know it must be five and twenty," said he, "by the time we have been doing it." "It is now half after one; we drove out of the inn yard at Tetbury as the town clock struck eleven; and I defy any man in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness; that makes it exactly twenty five."
"You have lost an hour," said Morland: "it was only ten o'clock when we came from Tetbury."
"Ten o'clock! it was eleven, upon my soul!
I counted every stroke.
Do but look at my horse: did you ever see an animal so made for speed in your life?" (The servant had just mounted the carriage and was driving off.) "Such true blood!
Look at that creature, and suppose it possible, if you can!"
What do you think of my gig, Miss Morland?
"Curricle hung, you see; seat, trunk, sword case, splashing board, lamps, silver molding, all, you see, complete; the ironwork as good as new, or better.
He asked fifty guineas: I closed with him directly, threw down the money, and the carriage was mine."
"That was very good-natured of you," said Catherine, quite pleased.
I would not sell my horse for a hundred.
Are you fond of an open carriage, Miss Morland?"
"Yes, very: I have hardly ever an opportunity of being in one; but I am particularly fond of it."
"I am glad of it: I will drive you out in mine every day."
"Thank you," said Catherine, in some distress, from a doubt of the propriety of accepting such an offer.
"I will drive you up Lansdown Hill to morrow."
"Thank you; but will not your horse want rest?"
"Shall you, indeed!" said Catherine, very seriously: "that will be forty miles a day."
"How delightful that will be!" cried Isabella, turning round; "my dearest Catherine, I quite envy you; but I am afraid, brother, you will not have room for a third."
"A third, indeed!
no, no; I did not come to Bath to drive my sisters about: that would be a good joke, faith!
Morland must take care of you."
This brought on a dialogue of civilities between the other two; but Catherine heard neither the particulars nor the result.
It was, "Have you ever read 'Udolpho,' mr Thorpe?"
"Not I, faith!
"'Udolpho' was written by mrs Radcliffe," said Catherine, with some hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
"No, sure; was it?
"Yes, that's the book: such unnatural stuff!
An old man playing at see saw: I took up the first volume once, and looked it over, but I soon found it would not do; indeed, I guessed what sort of stuff it must be before I saw it; as soon as I heard she had married an emigrant, I was sure I should never be able to get through it."
"I have never read it."
"You have no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine: there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see saw and learning Latin; upon my soul, there is not."
This critique, the justness of which was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine, brought them to the door of mrs Thorpe's lodgings, and the feelings of the discerning and unprejudiced reader of 'Camilla' gave way to the feelings of the dutiful and affectionate son, as they met mrs Thorpe, who had descried them from above, in the passage.
FAMILY DOCTORS
While they were thus comfortably occupied, mr Woodhouse was enjoying a full flow of happy regrets and tearful affection with his daughter.
"My poor, dear Isabella," said he, fondly taking her hand, and interrupting for a few moments her busy labors for some one of her five children, "how long it is, how terribly long since you were here!
You must go to bed early, my dear,--and I recommend a little gruel to you before you go.
You and I will have a nice basin of gruel together.
My dear Emma, suppose we all have a little gruel."
Emma could not suppose any such thing, knowing as she did that both the mr Knightleys were as unpersuadable on that article as herself, and two basins only were ordered.
After a little more discourse in praise of gruel, with some wondering at its not being taken every evening by everybody, he proceeded to say, with an air of grave reflection:--
"It was an awkward business, my dear, your spending the autumn at South End instead of coming here.
I never had much opinion of the sea air."
"mr Wingfield most strenuously recommended it, sir, or we should not have gone.
He recommended it for all the children, but particularly for the weakness in little Bella's throat,--both sea air and bathing."
"Come, come," cried Emma, feeling this to be an unsafe subject, "I must beg you not to talk of the sea.
South End is prohibited, if you please.
My dear Isabella, I have not heard you make one inquiry after mr Perry yet; and he never forgets you."
Poor Perry is bilious, and he has not time to take care of himself; he tells me he has not time to take care of himself-which is very sad-but he is always wanted all round the country.
But then, there is not so clever a man anywhere."
Do the children grow?
I have a great regard for mr Perry.
He will be so pleased to see my little ones."
And, my dear, whenever he comes, you had better let him look at little Bella's throat."
Either bathing has been of the greatest service to her, or else it is to be attributed to an excellent embrocation of mr Wingfield's, which we have been applying at times ever since August."
I hope they are quite well.
Good old mrs Bates.
They are always so pleased to see my children.
And that excellent Miss Bates!--such thorough worthy people!
How are they, sir?"
"Why, pretty well, my dear, upon the whole.
But poor mrs Bates had a bad cold about a month ago."
"How sorry I am! but colds were never so prevalent as they have been this autumn.
"That has been a good deal the case, my dear, but not to the degree you mention.
Perry says that colds have been very general, but not so heavy as he has very often known them in November.
Perry does not call it altogether a sickly season."
It is a dreadful thing to have you forced to live there;--so far off!--and the air so bad!"
Our part of London is so very superior to most others.
The neighborhood of Brunswick Square is very different from almost all the rest.
We are so very airy!
mr Wingfield thinks the vicinity of Brunswick Square decidedly the most favorable as to air."
Now, I cannot say that I think you are any of you looking well at present."
"I am sorry to hear you say so, sir; but I assure you, excepting those little nervous headaches and palpitations which I am never entirely free from anywhere, I am quite well myself; and if the children were rather pale before they went to bed, it was only because they were a little more tired than usual from their journey and the happiness of coming.
I hope you will think better of their looks to morrow; for I assure you mr Wingfield told me that he did not believe he had ever sent us off, altogether, in such good case.
I trust at least that you do not think mr Knightley looking ill," turning her eyes with affectionate anxiety toward her husband.
"Middling, my dear; I cannot compliment you.
I think mr john Knightley very far from looking well."
Did you speak to me?" cried mr john Knightley, hearing his own name.
"I am sorry to find, my love, that my father does not think you looking well; but I hope it is only from being a little fatigued.
"My dear Isabella," exclaimed he hastily, "pray do not concern yourself about my looks.
Be satisfied with doctoring and coddling yourself and the children, and let me look as I choose."
"I did not thoroughly understand what you were telling your brother," cried Emma, "about your friend mr Graham's intending to have a bailiff from Scotland to look after his new estate.
But will it answer?
Will not the old prejudice be too strong?"
And she talked in this way so long and successfully that, when forced to give her attention again to her father and sister, she had nothing worse to hear than Isabella's kind inquiry after Jane Fairfax; and Jane Fairfax, though no great favorite with her in general, she was at that moment very happy to assist in praising.
"That sweet, amiable Jane Fairfax!" said mrs john Knightley.
I always regret excessively, on dear Emma's account, that she cannot be more at Highbury; but now their daughter is married I suppose Colonel and mrs Campbell will not be able to part with her at all.
She would be such a delightful companion for Emma."
mr Woodhouse agreed to it all, but added:--
"Our little friend Harriet Smith, however, is just such another pretty kind of young person.
You will like Harriet.
This topic was discussed very happily, and others succeeded of similar moment, and passed away with similar harmony; but the evening did not close without a little return of agitation.
Often as she had wished for and ordered it, she had never been able to get anything tolerable.
It does not bear talking of." And for a little while she hoped he would not talk of it, and that a silent rumination might suffice to restore him to the relish of his own smooth gruel.
After an interval of some minutes, however, he began with-
"I shall always be very sorry that you went to the sea this autumn, instead of coming here."
"But why should you be sorry, sir?
I assure you it did the children a great deal of good."
"And moreover, if you must go to the sea, it had better not have been to South End.
Perry was surprised to hear you had fixed upon South End."
"I know there is such an idea with many people, but indeed it is quite a mistake, sir.
We all had our health perfectly well there, never found the least inconvenience from the mud, and mr Wingfield says it is entirely a mistake to suppose the place unhealthy; and I am sure he may be depended on, for he thoroughly understands the nature of the air, and his own brother and family have been there repeatedly."
"You should have gone to Cromer, my dear, if you went anywhere.
Perry was a week at Cromer once, and he holds it to be the best of all the sea bathing places.
And by what I understand, you might have had lodgings there quite away from the sea-a quarter of a mile off-very comfortable.
You should have consulted Perry."
"But my dear sir, the difference of the journey: only consider how great it would have been.
A hundred miles, perhaps, instead of forty."
Better not move at all, better stay in London altogether than travel forty miles to get into a worse air.
This is just what Perry said.
Emma's attempts to stop her father had been vain; and when he had reached such a point as this, she could not wonder at her brother-in-law's breaking out.
"mr Perry," said he, in a voice of very strong displeasure, "would do as well to keep his opinion till it is asked for.
I may be allowed, I hope, the use of my judgment as well as mr Perry.
I want his directions no more than his drugs." He paused, and growing cooler in a moment, added, with only sarcastic dryness, "If mr Perry can tell me how to convey a wife and five children a distance of a hundred and thirty miles with no greater expense or inconvenience than a distance of forty, I should be as willing to prefer Cromer to South End as he could himself."
"True, true," cried mr Knightley, with most ready interposition, "very true.
That's a consideration, indeed.
CHAPTER ten
AN AFFAIR OF THE HEART
There was a moment of silence.
"Briefly put, doctor, the case is this," said Adam Adams.
"A powder strong enough to kill a person?" The brow of the old physician contracted.
"No, not at all.
I mean a powder that could be held to a person's nose and mouth in the open, when it would make that person sick and give him cramps perhaps."
"And kill him?"
"Yes."
The old doctor rubbed his hands in thought.
"That is a subject for speculation.
Certain cyanide compounds might be powerful enough to do so under certain conditions.
Any real dry powder would choke a person if he got a big dose of it.
I heard of a boy who came near dying as the result of breathing in a quantity of extra dry licorice powder. But he was smothered and did not have cramps."
"Nothing in the shape of any foreign compound?
But I know of nothing- But hold!"
The doctor clapped his hands together.
That would do it, that and that only."
"What?"
"I had a sample of it given to me some six months ago.
"And that powder, what did it look like?"
"It was blue at first but on contact with the air quickly changed to brownish white and lost itself, it was so fine."
"Evaporated?"
"You can call it that if you wish.
It was intense.
I held it at arms' length, yet it made me sick and I had cramps for over an hour afterwards."
"It would have killed you if you had placed it to your mouth or nose?"
"Not the slightest doubt of it."
"May I ask where you got the stuff?"
"It was imported into this country by a drug firm merely as a curiosity.
They put it up in tiny vials which I suppose were sent around to different persons like myself.
It was a dangerous piece of business and I gave them no credit for doing it."
"I would not tell everybody, but I know I can trust you to keep a secret.
The firm was Alexander and Company, of Rochester, who stand very high in the trade.
Both died in less than two minutes, and each with cramps.
But after death neither animal showed the least trace of the poison."
He said he was a bit used to it.
I told him I didn't want to get used to it.
Have another glass of wine?"
"No, I prefer to smoke, thanks just the same.
Where can I get the stuff?"
I rather think they got afraid of it. Wait, I'll get the vial it was in.
Perhaps there is a whiff left in it."
"Thanks, but do you think I want to die?" queried the detective, and gave a laugh.
When the empty vial was produced he opened it and took a short sniff. Then he drew his breath in sharply.
A faint odor was perceptible, the same odor he had detected in the carpet on the upper hallway of the Langmore mansion.
"Do you smell it?" questioned the physician.
I don't think it will affect me much."
"I trust not, my dear Adams.
We cannot afford to lose you.
Now, what is it all about?"
"Another case, that's all.
I don't feel like talking about it just yet.
I'll give you the particulars some other time."
"And have I helped you?"
"Of course there are other powders-and there is chloroform-"
"I think we have struck a clue in this.
But I must be going."
"What, so soon!" Rudolph Calkey looked hurt.
"I was thinking you'd stay the day out.
We could chat over old times-I'll order an extra supper-"
"No, not to day.
When this case is settled, I'll come over and we'll make an evening of it." And then the detective had to fairly tear himself from the doctor and the house.
They were old friends and had worked on many a case together.
Once back in his office Adam Adams smiled grimly to himself.
"You were seen around the place at the time of the murder by Cephas Carboy, you left the bit of paper in the library, you quarrelled at one time with mr Langmore and also quarrelled with your mother. The murder was committed by means of that deadly Chinese powder, and you are one of the few persons in this country who knew of the heathenish compound.
"And it may be that I'll not be back to morrow."
"All right, Uncle Adam.
What shall I tell mr Capes?"
"Tell him that that bond matter must wait.
He'll have to get those numbers if he possibly can.
The other record was destroyed."
As Adam Adams spoke he drew closer to the desk at which his assistant was sitting.
He glanced down at an envelope lying there, and started slightly.
"Where did this come from, Letty?" he questioned.
The girl glanced at the envelope and then at her employer and blushed deeply.
"Oh, why that-that is a note from a friend of mine."
"Yes, Uncle Adam.
I met him last winter, at mrs Dally's reception. He is a traveling salesman for this house," she pointed to the notice on the envelope.
"He wants me to go to the theatre with him, and I expect to go.
"I know some parties connected with that firm.
What's the young man's name, Letty?"
"mr Tom Ostrello."
"Indeed!
And he has invited you to go to the theatre with him?"
"Yes.
Then you know him, Uncle Adam?
I didn't dream of that.
Don't you think he is-is rather nice?"
"Evidently you think so." For some reason the detective could scarcely steady his voice.
He was a bachelor, with only some distant relatives, and he thought a good deal of his protegee and her welfare.
"I-I do, Uncle Adam.
He treats me so nicely.
I-I-don't you approve of him?" she went on hastily, searching his face for the smile that usually rested there when he spoke to her.
"Why, I-er-I don't know him so well as all that, Letty." For the first time in his life he was visibly confused.
"You say he has called on you a number of times?"
"Yes, and he has taken me out, let me see, I guess it must be a dozen times all told.
I-I wanted to speak of this before, but I-well, I couldn't bring it around.
I hope you'll approve, Uncle Adam."
"Approve?
Of your going out with him?"
"Yes, and-and-"
The girl hesitated again.
"Oh! don't you understand, Uncle Adam?"
"He is very nice-I know you'll like him when you get to really know him.
Of course he hasn't much money, but I don't care for that.
He felt himself growing hot and cold by turns.
He caught the girl closer. Never had he loved his friend's daughter so much as now.
"I hoped you would approve," she went on, shyly.
"I-of course I didn't want to leave you-you've been so very good to me since papa and mamma died.
But-but Tom doesn't seem to want to wait.
He has asked me twice now and-and-I don't know how I am going to put him off.
He seems so miserable when I say wait."
"Asked you to marry him?"
"Yes."
"And he wants you to go to the theatre with him-now?"
"The invitation is for to night-he sent it last week.
He has been traveling out of town, but he said he would be back some time to day. I want you to meet him." She paused.
"Isn't it all right, Uncle Adam?"
He did not answer, and she gazed at him curiously.
Then the look in his face made her draw back, slowly and uncertainly.
At that moment he felt that the occupation of a detective was the most detestable in the world.
"You-you know something?" she gasped.
"Oh, Uncle Adam, what is it?"
CHAPTER eleven
AT THE CORONER'S INQUEST
Sidham was in a state of keen excitement.
No such mystery as the double tragedy had occurred in that neighborhood before, and all of the inhabitants were anxious to hear the latest news and learn what the coroner and the police were going to do.
A hundred theories were afloat, all centering on the one object-to find the murderer.
"Find him or her, and swing him or her to the nearest tree," was the verdict of many.
"The law is all well enough, but this dastardly crime demands an object lesson."
Coroner Jack Busby, who was a dealer in horses, had never had a murder case before, and was uncertain as to the method of procedure.
He felt that his own little office was altogether too small for the occasion and so arranged to bring off the affair in the general courtroom.
The place was soon crowded with people, and another crowd gathered outside.
The hour for opening the inquest was at hand and the majority of the witnesses were present.
The coroner, short, fat and bald headed, looked around anxiously and then turned to the chief of police, who was near at hand.
"I don't see Miss Langmore."
"Neither do I," answered the guardian of the law, with a shrug of his shoulders, as if it was none of his especial business,
"Yes, but-ahem! you are-ahem! responsible-"
"She'll be here, coroner, don't worry."
"You have had her properly guarded?"
"Yes.
I reckon she's coming now," and the chief of police nodded towards a side door of the courtroom.
There was a slight commotion, and Margaret entered, escorted by Raymond Case, and followed by one of the women and the policeman who had been on guard at the Langmore mansion.
The crowd arose to gaze at the girl and to pass various comments.
"Mighty pale, ain't she?"
Don't tell me!"
"He must know, if he's as slick at tryin' folks as he is in a hoss dicker," returned an old farmer who had made a trade of steeds which had proved unprofitable for him.
"Courage, Margaret," he whispered.
"It is bound to come out right in the end."
"I can scarcely see a friendly face," she faltered, taking a shy look around.
"They all think I am-" She could not finish, but had to bite her lip to keep the tears from flowing.
The coroner mounted the platform and rapped on a desk with his knuckles.
There was a final buzz and then the place became quiet, broken only by the ticking of a big round clock on the wall.
"We are gathered here-ahem! to inquire into the mysterious deaths of mr and mrs Barry Langmore," went on the coroner.
"That's so-an' we want plain facts," put in an old farmer, sitting well up front.
"Silence!" cried the coroner.
"We must have silence!"
"All right, Jack," replied the farmer.
"I won't say another word."
"Silence.
We cannot go on if there is not silence.
Margaret arose and bowed slightly.
Then the coroner swore her in as a witness and told her to relate her story.
She could scarcely stand and Raymond brought her chair forward.
"Everything," was Coroner Busby's answer.
Pausing for a moment to collect her thoughts, she plunged into the recital, her tale being merely a repetition of that given to Adam Adams.
When she came to tell how her father had been found her voice broke and it was fully a minute before she could go on.
When she had finished the courtroom was as still as a tomb, save for the ticking of the clock, now sounding louder than ever.
"Is that all?" asked the coroner, after a painful pause.
"Yes, sir."
"They say, Miss Langmore, that you were not on good terms with your stepmother."
"Who says so?"
"It is true, sir," answered Margaret, after another pause, during which the eyes of all in the courtroom were fixed upon the girl.
"It is said that you had violent quarrels," pursued the coroner.
"No very violent quarrels.
Sometimes we did not speak to each other for days."
"Then you admit that you did quarrel?"
"I do."
"And you also quarreled with your father?"
"What, not at all?" queried Coroner Busby, elevating his eyes in surprise, either real or affected.
"We held different opinions upon certain questions, but we did not quarrel."
"That is all for the present," he added, and Margaret moved back to where she had been first sitting.
Get you some water?"
"No, nothing," she answered, and dropped a veil over her face.
The next witness called was Mary Billings, the domestic employed at the Langmore mansion, and who had been about the place at the time of the tragedy.
As soon as she was sworn in she burst into tears.
"Nobody said you did," answered the coroner dryly, while a general smile went around the courtroom.
"Then why did yez bring me here, I dunno?
It was with difficulty that she was quieted and made to tell what she knew.
"Where were you from ten o'clock to twelve of the morning of the tragedy?" was the first question put to her.
"Were you in the kitchen first."
You mean you were doing the housework, eh?"
"Did you see or hear anything unusual going on while you were in the kitchen?"
The Irish girl scratched her head and shrugged her shoulders.
"What were they?"
"Oi heard mrs Langmore walkin' around upstairs, an' Oi heard Miss Margaret walkin' around, too.
Then Oi heard mrs Langmore call to Miss Margaret."
"Did Miss Margaret answer?"
"What else?"
"Did you see anybody come in or go out?"
"Did you hear anything after the slamming of the front door?"
"Till Miss Margaret came scr'amin' from the house.
Me father!
Now-er-you remained in the barn until you heard her cry out. Did you hear or see anything from the barn while you were down there?"
"Never mind the Leghorns.
If you saw or heard anything, what was it?"
"You didn't see anybody?"
"No, sur.
As Oi said before, thim Leghorns that Pat Callahan gave me-"
After you heard the strange noise how long was it before you heard Miss Langmore scream?"
Oi didn't look to the clock."
"What did you do then?"
"Sure, phat could Oi do?
"What happened next?"
"We all wint in the house, an' there we found poor mr Langmore dead in the library, in his chair.
There was a general laugh throughout the courtroom, at which the coroner rapped loudly on the desk.
"Silence.
Such-ahem! conduct at an inquest is not to be allowed.
If this happens again I shall clear the courtroom."
"What was done with the body of mrs Langmore?" continued the coroner to the servant girl.
"The docther said to lave it till you came."
"mrs Langmore was quite dead?"
Hivin rest her sowl!"
"And mr Langmore?"
"Now, tell me, how do you think the two were killed?"
"There were no marks of violence?"
"The victims had not been struck down?"
"How long have you lived with the Langmore family?"
"How many of the family lived at home?"
"The first year there was the mister and missus an' Miss Jennie an' Miss Margaret.
But Miss Jennie married an' moved away-she's travelin' now, they tell me."
"Then Miss Margaret was the only child home?"
"Was Miss Margaret on good terms with mrs Langmore?"
"She was not.
"Ah!
Then you quarreled also?"
If it hadn't been fer Miss Margaret Oi'd a lift me job long ago.
"Wait! wait!
When did they quarrel last?"
At this question the domestic pursed up her lips and looked at Margaret.
"Oi have nothin' to say about that," she answered coldly.
This reply was a surprise to all, including Raymond.
The coroner gazed at the witness sternly.
"You must answer," he said.
"It is my duty to get at the bottom of this awful affair."
"Oi'll not answer," was the stubborn return.
THE WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE
The next witness called was mrs Morse, who told briefly how she had been placed in charge of the upper part of the Langmore mansion shortly after the tragedy, and how she had been watching Margaret.
She said the girl had had only a few visitors, mentioning Raymond Case and a stranger from New York.
"Who was the stranger?" asked Coroner Busby.
"A mr Adams.
He's either a lawyer or a detective."
"Oh!"
"I brought mr Adams to see Miss Langmore," put in Raymond.
"Wasn't that all right?"
"Certainly-certainly," answered the coroner hastily.
"I have kept the best watch on Miss Langmore that I could," went on the woman.
"You told me to do it."
"Has Miss Langmore had anything to say about her father?"
"She seems to be very sorry that he is dead."
"What did she say about mrs Langmore?"
"She does not seem to care much about her stepmother."
"Have you discovered anything unusual, mrs Morse, that had to do with this tragedy?"
"Well, I don't know.
I have looked around a bit, and among other things I found this.
It was in Miss Langmore's dressing case."
As she spoke the woman held up a small bottle.
It was marked chloroform and was empty.
"Anything else?"
"With the empty bottle I found the half of a big silk handkerchief.
It was wrapped around the bottle and had Miss Langmore's monogram in the corner.
I went on hunting around the house and I found the other half of the handkerchief in a dark corner of the upper hallway, not far from where mrs Langmore's body was found."
At this announcement there was a buzz of excitement.
The girl had thrown aside her veil once more, and was standing up, with a face as pale as death itself.
"Yes."
"I bought that chloroform a month ago and used it to put a sick canary and a sick parrot out of their misery.
Mary Billings saw me chloroform the parrot."
"When did you do the chloroforming?"
"About a week ago, on the parrot.
The canary I chloroformed when I obtained the drug."
"Sure, and that's roight, sur," broke in the servant girl.
"Then you know all about using chloroform?" remarked the coroner dryly.
"The druggist told me."
"Did it take all you had for the birds?"
"What did you do with what remained?"
"I threw it away, for I had no further use for it."
"Did you see her throw the chloroform away?"
"But if she says she did, she did," she added stoutly.
"Now, mrs Morse, did you find anything else of value?"
"I did not, but mrs Gaspard, who was in charge downstairs, did."
"Very well, you may step down.
mrs Gaspard!" And the other woman came forward to face the coroner and his jury, and was sworn.
"mrs Morse says you found something of importance.
What was it?"
"It was this, mr Busby," and the woman held out a sheet of note paper. "I came across it on the stairs leading to Miss Langmore's room.
Shall I read it?" And as the coroner nodded, the woman read as follows:
"Since you refuse to open your room door to me, let me give you fair warning.
You must either obey your mother that now is, and me, or leave this house.
I have had enough of your willfulness and I shall not put up with it any longer."
As the woman finished reading she handed the paper to the coroner.
"Ahem!
mrs Gaspard, do you know who wrote this note?" asked the latter.
"The handwriting is exactly like mr Langmore's.
Again all eyes were bent upon Margaret.
She had again arisen and was swaying from side to side.
"My father-never-never sent me-never wrote such a note-" she gasped, and then sank back and would have fallen had not Raymond supported her.
"A glass of water, quick!" cried the young man, and it was handed to him, and also a bottle of smelling salts.
In a moment more Margaret revived.
"I am sorry, but that cannot be allowed," replied the coroner.
"It's an outrage!" exclaimed Raymond, his eyes flashing.
"Silence, young man, or I'll have you removed by an officer.
You have interrupted the proceedings several times.
I do not know what interest you have-"
I am engaged to this young lady.
I know she is innocent.
It is preposterous to imagine that she would kill her own father.
They loved each other too much."
"Yes, but this note-" piped in mrs Gaspard.
She was a strong believer in Margaret's guilt.
"I know nothing about that.
It may be a forgery.
I know Miss Langmore is innocent."
"To merely say a thing does not prove it," came from the coroner.
"I'm here to do my duty, regardless of you or anybody else.
I ain't going to shield anybody, rich or poor, high or low, known or unknown!
Now, you sit down, and let the inquest proceed." And Raymond sat down, but with a great and growing bitterness filling his heart.
He looked at Margaret and saw that she was trembling from head to foot.
There was an awkward pause.
"He said the two handwritings were exactly alike.
Here is a letter written and signed by mr Langmore.
You can compare the two, if you wish."
The letter was passed over and not only the coroner, but also his jury, looked at both documents carefully.
"Pretty much the same thing," whispered one man.
"Exactly the same," added another, and the rest nodded.
The coroner looked around the courtroom and then at the jury.
"If not we'll take a brief recess until Doctor Bardon returns."
One after another the jurors shook their heads.
Whatever the coroner did was sufficient for them.
The recess had lasted but a few minutes, when Doctor Bardon reappeared. His face wore a knowing look that was almost triumphant.
"You will please take the stand again, doctor," was the request.
"I wish to ask you if a person could be smothered by chloroform."
"Certainly, under certain conditions."
"Do you think it possible that mr and mrs Langmore could have been smothered in that way?"
"Possibly, yes, although I did not see any traces."
"Would there have been traces?"
"Yes and no-it would depend on circumstances."
Now about the diamond ring belonging to Miss Langmore, which I gave you a short while ago to examine?
"I have, and so has Doctor Soper.
We used a magnifying glass and made several tests."
"Did you find anything unusual?"
"We did.
In the first place two of the prongs which hold the diamond in place are bent out and up in such a fashion that each forms a sharp point.
We next looked under the stone and found there a substance which both of us are convinced is a bit of dried up blood."
"You are sure it is blood?"
"Yes.
I can illustrate it scientifically, if you desire."
"It will not be necessary just now.
When you say blood do you mean human blood?"
At this the young physician shrugged his shoulders.
"I am not prepared to go as far as that.
We should have to make another test.
The amount was so very small."
"Might be blood from a mosquito," muttered Raymond.
"There are enough around here."
"You may think as you please," said the young doctor.
"I am only stating the facts."
"Have you anything else to say, doctor?" came from the coroner.
"Nothing more.
Here is the ring.
We have kept what we found under the stone."
"Very well.
Miss Langmore, you may have the ring back." It was passed out and Raymond took it and slipped it back on Margaret's hand, which was cold and nerveless.
The girl was sitting as motionless as a marble statue.
There was another pause and then, one after another, several minor witnesses were brought up and examined.
At four o'clock the coroner began to sum up the evidence, to which the jury listened with close attention.
Then the jurors filed out into a side room, the door to which was tightly closed.
"Is-is it over?" faltered Margaret.
"We must wait for the finding of the jury, Margaret."
"How long will that take?"
"I don't know."
"mr
Adams did not show himself.
I thought he would help us in some way."
"He must have a good reason for staying away."
"What do you think the jury will do?"
At this direct question, the young man gave an inward groan.
"I don't know," he answered in an unnatural voice.
"We must hope for the best."
In less than an hour it was announced that the jury had arrived at a verdict.
The excitement was subdued, but plainly at a white heat. The coroner took his place at the desk.
"Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?" was the question put.
"We have," was the unanimous answer.
"Who will speak for you?"
"mr Blackwell, our foreman."
"Very well.
mr Blackwell, what is the verdict?"
The courtroom became intensely silent.
"We find that mr and mrs Barry Langmore came to their deaths either by being smothered, chloroformed, poisoned, or in some similar fashion, the direct means not yet being brought to light, and we find that the evidence points to Margaret Langmore as the one who committed the murders."
Hardly was the verdict rendered than a wild cry rang out through the courtroom.
QUESTION sixty seven
ON THE WORK OF DISTINCTION IN ITSELF (In Four Articles)
We must consider next the work of distinction in itself.
First, the work of the first day; secondly, the work of the second day; thirdly the work of the third day.
Under the first head there are four points of inquiry:
(two) Whether light, in corporeal things, is itself corporeal?
(three) Whether light is a quality?
Whether the Word "Light" Is Used in Its Proper Sense in Speaking of Spiritual Things?
Objection one: It would seem that "light" is used in its proper sense in spiritual things.
But such names are used in their proper sense in spiritual things.
Therefore light is used in its proper sense in spiritual matters.
Therefore also does light.
And thus it is with the word light.
In its primary meaning it signifies that which makes manifest to the sense of sight; afterwards it was extended to that which makes manifest to cognition of any kind.
But if taken in its common and extended use, as applied to manifestation of every kind, it may properly be applied to spiritual things.
Whether Light Is a Body?
Objection one: It would seem that light is a body.
Therefore light is a body.
But this is the case with light and air.
Therefore light is not a body.
For the place of any one body is different from that of any other, nor is it possible, naturally speaking, for any two bodies of whatever nature, to exist simultaneously in the same place; since contiguity requires distinction of place.
The second reason is from movement.
For if light were a body, its diffusion would be the local movement of a body.
Now no local movement of a body can be instantaneous, as everything that moves from one place to another must pass through the intervening space before reaching the end: whereas the diffusion of light is instantaneous.
Yet as soon as the sun is at the horizon, the whole hemisphere is illuminated from end to end.
It must also be borne in mind on the part of movement that whereas all bodies have their natural determinate movement, that of light is indifferent as regards direction, working equally in a circle as in a straight line.
Hence it appears that the diffusion of light is not the local movement of a body.
The third reason is from generation and corruption.
For if light were a body, it would follow that whenever the air is darkened by the absence of the luminary, the body of light would be corrupted, and its matter would receive a new form.
But unless we are to say that darkness is a body, this does not appear to be the case.
Neither does it appear from what matter a body can be daily generated large enough to fill the intervening hemisphere.
Also it would be absurd to say that a body of so great a bulk is corrupted by the mere absence of the luminary.
Since, therefore, these things are repugnant, not only to reason, but to common sense, we must conclude that light cannot be a body.
fifty five, we use terms belonging to local movement in speaking of alteration and movement of all kinds.
Whether Light Is a Quality?
Objection one: It would seem that light is not a quality.
Therefore light is not a quality.
But this is not the case with light since darkness is merely a privation of light.
Light therefore is not a sensible quality.
But the light of the heavenly bodies is a cause of substantial forms of earthly bodies, and also gives to colors their immaterial being, by making them actually visible.
Light, then, is not a sensible quality, but rather a substantial or spiritual form.
But this cannot be the case for two reasons.
First, because light gives a name to the air, since by it the air becomes actually luminous.
But color does not do this, for we do not speak of the air as colored.
Secondly, because light produces natural effects, for by the rays of the sun bodies are warmed, and natural changes cannot be brought about by mere intentions.
Others have said that light is the sun's substantial form, but this also seems impossible for two reasons.
In the second place, because it is impossible that what is the substantial form of one thing should be the accidental form of another; since substantial forms of their very nature constitute species: wherefore the substantial form always and everywhere accompanies the species.
But light is not the substantial form of air, for if it were, the air would be destroyed when light is withdrawn.
Hence it cannot be the substantial form of the sun
A proof of this is that the rays of different stars produce different effects according to the diverse natures of bodies.
For when matter receives its form perfectly, the qualities consequent upon the form are firm and enduring; as when, for instance, water is converted into fire.
When, however, substantial form is received imperfectly, so as to be, as it were, in process of being received, rather than fully impressed, the consequent quality lasts for a time but is not permanent; as may be seen when water which has been heated returns in time to its natural state.
But light is not produced by the transmutation of matter, as though matter were in receipt of a substantial form, and light were a certain inception of substantial form.
For this reason light disappears on the disappearance of its active cause.
Whether the Production of Light Is Fittingly Assigned to the First Day?
Objection one: It would seem that the production of light is not fittingly assigned to the first day.
But qualities are accidents, and as such should have, not the first, but a subordinate place.
The production of light, then, ought not to be assigned to the first day.
Therefore the production of light could not have been on the first day.
But movement of this kind is an attribute of the firmament, and we read that the firmament was made on the second day.
Therefore the production of light, dividing night from day, ought not to be assigned to the first day.
Therefore the production of light ought not to be assigned to the first day.
But there can be no day without light.
Therefore light must have been made on the first day.
The forming, therefore, of this spiritual nature is signified by the production of light, that is to say, of spiritual light.
For a spiritual nature receives its form by the enlightenment whereby it is led to adhere to the Word of God.
Other writers think that the production of spiritual creatures was purposely omitted by Moses, and give various reasons.
But mention is made of several kinds of formlessness, in regard to the corporeal creature.
The second reason is because light is a common quality.
For light is common to terrestrial and celestial bodies.
It was fitting, then, as an evidence of the Divine wisdom, that among the works of distinction the production of light should take first place, since light is a form of the primary body, and because it is more common quality.
And there is yet a fourth, already touched upon in the objections; that day cannot be unless light exists, which was made therefore on the first day.
But this cannot well be maintained, as in the beginning of genesis Holy Scripture records the institution of that order of nature which henceforth is to endure.
We cannot, then, say that what was made at that time afterwards ceased to exist.
Others, therefore, held that this luminous nebula continues in existence, but so closely attached to the sun as to be indistinguishable.
On this account it is held by some that the sun's body was made out of this nebula.
This, too, is impossible to those at least who believe that the sun is different in its nature from the four elements, and naturally incorruptible.
For in that case its matter cannot take on another form.
Thus, then, in the production of this light a triple distinction was made between light and darkness. First, as to the cause, forasmuch as in the substance of the sun we have the cause of light, and in the opaque nature of the earth the cause of darkness.
Nor does the nature of a luminous body seem to admit of the withdrawal of light, so long as the body is actually present; though this might be effected by a miracle.
We hold, then, that the movement of the heavens is twofold.
Of these movements, one is common to the entire heaven, and is the cause of day and night.
This, as it seems, had its beginning on the first day.
The other varies in proportion as it affects various bodies, and by its variations is the cause of the succession of days, months, and years.
Thus it is, that in the account of the first day the distinction between day and night alone is mentioned; this distinction being brought about by the common movement of the heavens.
The reading went on, not of course "for ever," like that harvest melody he spoke of, but for a considerable time.
The words, I concluded, were for the initiated, and not for me, and after a while I gave up trying to make out what it was all about.
Those last expressions I have quoted about the "august Mother of the house" were unintelligible, and appeared to me meaningless.
I had already come to the conclusion that however many of the ladies of the establishment might have experienced the pleasures and pains of maternity, there was really no mother of the house in the sense that there was a father of the house: that is to say, one possessing authority over the others and calling them all her children indiscriminately.
Yet this mysterious non-existent mother of the house was continually being spoken of, as I found now and afterwards when I listened to the talk around me.
After thinking the matter over, I came to the conclusion that "mother of the house" was merely a convenient fiction, and simply stood for the general sense of the women folk, or something of the sort.
It was perhaps stupid of me, but the story of Mistrelde, who died young, leaving only eight children, I had regarded as a mere legend or fable of antiquity.
Just as I had been absorbed before in that beautiful book without being able to read it, so now I listened to that melodious and majestic voice, experiencing a singular pleasure without properly understanding the sense.
In their rare physical beauty, the color of their eyes and hair, and in their fascinating dress, they had struck me as being utterly unlike any people ever seen by me.
But it was perhaps in their clear, sweet, penetrative voice, which sometimes reminded me of a tender toned wind instrument, that they most differed from others.
The reading, I have said, had struck me as almost of the nature of a religious service; nevertheless, everything went on as before-reading, working, and occasional conversation; but the subdued talking and moving about did not interfere with one's pleasure in the old man's musical speech any more than the soft murmur and flying about of honey bees would prevent one from enjoying the singing of a skylark.
Emboldened by what I saw the others doing, I left my seat and made my way across the floor to Yoletta's side, stealing through the gloom with great caution to avoid making a clatter with those abominable boots.
"May I sit down near you?" said I with some hesitation; but she encouraged me with a smile and placed a cushion for me.
I settled myself down in the most graceful position I could assume, which was not at all graceful, doubling my objectionable legs out of her sight; and then began my trouble, for I was greatly perplexed to know what to say to her.
Ellen Terry's acting, the Royal Academy Exhibition, private theatricals, and twenty things besides, but they all seemed unsuitable subjects to start conversation with in this case.
There was, I began to fear, no common ground on which we could meet and exchange thoughts, or, at any rate, words.
Then I remembered that ground, common and broad enough, of our human feelings, especially the sweet and important feeling of love.
But how was I to lead up to it?
The work she was engaged with at length suggested an opening, and the opportunity to make a pretty little speech.
"Oh, the light is good enough," she answered, taking no notice of the compliment.
"Besides, this is such easy work I could do it in the dark."
"It is very pretty work-may I look at it?"
"That would prevent me from working," she answered, with the utmost gravity.
"Oh, thank you," I exclaimed, delighted with the privilege; and then, to make the most of my precious "little while," I pressed it warmly, whereupon she cried out aloud: "Oh, Smith, you are squeezing too hard-you hurt my hand!"
"Oh, for goodness sake," I stammered, "please, do not make such an outcry!
You don't know what a hobble you'll get me into."
Fortunately, no notice was taken of the exclamation, though it was hard to believe that her words had not been overheard; and presently, recovering from my fright, I apologized for hurting her, and hoped she would forgive me.
"There is nothing to forgive," she returned gently.
"You did not really squeeze hard, only my hand hurts, because to day when I pressed it on the ground beside the grave I ran a small thorn into it." Then the remembrance of that scene at the burial brought a sudden mist of tears into her lovely eyes.
"I am so sorry I hurt you, Yoletta-may I call you Yoletta?" said I, all at once remembering that she had called me Smith, without the customary prefix.
"Why, that is my name-what else should you call me?" she returned, evidently with surprise.
"It is a pretty name, and so sweet on the lips that I should like to be repeating it continually," I answered.
"But it is only right that you should have a pretty name, because-well, if I may tell you, because you are so very beautiful."
"Yes; but is that strange-are not all people beautiful?"
"There are different kinds of beauty, I allow, and some people seem more beautiful to us than others, but that is only because we love them more.
The best loved are always the most beautiful."
This seemed to reverse the usual idea, that the more beautiful the person is the more he or she gets loved.
However, I was not going to disagree with her any more, and only said: "How sweetly you talk, Yoletta; you are as wise as you are beautiful.
I could wish for no greater pleasure than to sit here listening to you the whole evening."
"Ah, then, I am sorry I must leave you now," she answered, with a bright smile which made me think that perhaps my little speech had pleased her.
"Do you wonder why I smile?" she added, as if able to read my thoughts. "It is because I have often heard words like yours from one who is waiting for me now."
This speech caused me a jealous pang.
I did not ask her to tell me, nor did I ask myself, the reason of that change; and afterwards how often I noticed that same change in her, and in the others too-that sudden silence and clouding of the face, such as may be seen in one who freely expresses himself to a person who cannot hear, and then, all at once but too late, remembers the other's infirmity.
"Must you go?" I only said.
"Oh, you shall not be alone," she replied, and going away returned presently with another lady.
"This is Edra," she said simply.
"She will take my place by your side and talk with you."
I could not tell her that she had taken my words too literally, that being alone simply meant being separated from her; but there was no help for it, and some one, alas! some one I greatly hated was waiting for her.
I could only thank her and her friend for their kind intentions. But what in the name of goodness was I to say to this beautiful woman who was sitting by me?
She was certainly very beautiful, with a far more mature and perhaps a nobler beauty than Yoletta's, her age being about twenty seven or twenty eight; but the divine charm in the young girl's face could, for me, exist in no other.
Presently she opened the conversation by asking me if I disliked being alone.
"Well, no, perhaps not exactly that," I said; "but I think it much jollier-much more pleasant, I mean-to have some very nice person to talk to."
She assented, and, pleased at her ready intelligence, I added: "And it is particularly pleasant when you are understood.
But I have no fear that you, at any rate, will fail to understand anything I may say."
"You have had some trouble to day," she returned, with a charming smile. "I sometimes think that women can understand even more readily than men."
"There's not a doubt of it!" I returned warmly, glad to find that with Edra it was all plain sailing.
"It must be patent to every one that women have far quicker, finer intellects than men, although their brains are smaller; but then quality is more important than mere quantity.
And yet," I continued, "some people hold that women ought not to have the franchise, or suffrage, or whatever it is!
Not that I care two straws about the question myself, and I only hope they'll never get it; but then I think it is so illogical-don't you?"
"I am afraid I do not understand you, Smith," she returned, looking much distressed.
"Well, no, I suppose not, but what I said was of no consequence," I replied; then, wishing to make a fresh start, I added: "But I am so glad to hear you call me Smith.
It makes it so much more pleasant and homelike to be treated without formality.
It is very kind of you, I'm sure."
"But surely your name is Smith?" said she, looking very much surprised.
"Oh yes, my name is Smith: only of course-well, the tact is, I was just wondering what to call you."
"My name is Edra," she replied, looking more bewildered than ever; and from that moment the conversation, which had begun so favorably, was nothing but a series of entanglements, from which I could only escape in each case by breaking the threads of the subject under discussion, and introducing a new one.
Chapter seven
The moment of retiring, to which I had been looking forward with considerable interest as one likely to bring fresh surprises, arrived at last: it brought only extreme discomfort.
I was conducted (without a flat candlestick) along an obscure passage; then, at right angles with the first, a second broader, lighter passage, leading past a great many doors placed near together.
These, I ascertained later, were the dormitories, or sleeping cells, and were placed side by side in a row opening on the terrace at the back of the house.
Having reached the door of my box, my conductor pushed back the sliding panel, and when I had groped my way to the dark interior, closed it again behind me.
There was no light for me except the light of the stars; for directly opposite the door by which I had entered stood another, open wide to the night, which was apparently not intended ever to be closed.
The prospect was the one I had already seen-the wilderness sloping to the river, and the glassy surface of the broad water, reflecting the stars, and the black masses of large trees.
There was no sound save the hooting of an owl in the distance, and the wailing note of some mournful minded water fowl.
The night air blew in cold and moist, which made my bones ache, though they were not broken; and feeling very sleepy and miserable, I groped about until I Was rewarded by discovering a narrow bed, or cot of trellis work, on which was a hard straw pallet and a small straw pillow; also, folded small, a kind of woolen sleeping garment.
Too tired to keep out of even such an uninviting bed, I flung off my clothes, and with my moldy tweeds for only covering I laid me down, but not to sleep.
The misery of it! for although my body was warm-too warm, in fact-the wind blew on my face and bare feet and legs, and made it impossible to sleep.
About midnight, I was just falling into a doze when a sound as of a person coming with a series of jumps into the room disturbed me; and starting up I was horrified to see, sitting on the floor, a great beast much too big for a dog, with large, erect ears.
He was intently watching me, his round eyes shining like a pair of green phosphorescent globes. Having no weapon, I was at the brute's mercy, and was about to utter a loud shout to summon assistance, but as he sat so still I refrained, and began even to hope that he would go quietly away.
Then he stood up, went back to the door and sniffed audibly at it; and thinking that he was about to relieve me of his unwelcome presence, I dropped my head on the pillow and lay perfectly still.
Then he turned and glared at me again, and finally, advancing deliberately to my side, sniffed at my face.
It was all over with me now, I thought, and closing my eyes, and feeling my forehead growing remarkably moist in spite of the cold, I murmured a little prayer.
When I looked again the brute had vanished, to my inexpressible relief.
It seemed very astonishing that an animal like a wolf should come into the house; but I soon remembered that I had seen no dogs about, so that all kinds of savage, prowling beasts could come in with impunity.
It was getting beyond a joke: but then all this seemed only a fit ending to the perfectly absurd arrangement into which I had been induced to enter. "Goodness gracious!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright on my straw bed, "am I a rational being or an inebriated donkey, or what, to have consented to such a proposal?
I don't know much about plowing and that sort of thing, but I suppose any able bodied man can earn a pound a week, and that would be fifty two pounds for a suit of clothes.
Who ever heard of such a thing!
No, no, my venerable friend, that was all excellent acting about my extraordinary delusions, and the rest of it, but I am not going to be carried so far by them as to adhere to such an outrageously one sided bargain."
Those strange garments had looked so refreshingly picturesque, and I had conceived such an intense longing to wear them!
Was it a very contemptible ambition on my part?
Is it sinful to wish for any adornments other than wisdom and sobriety, a meek and loving spirit, good works, and other things of the kind?
Straight into my brain flashed the words of a sentence I had recently read-that is to say, just before my accident-in a biological work, and it comforted me as much as if an angel with shining face and rainbow colored wings had paid me a visit in my dusky cell: "Unto Adam also, and his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skin and clothed them.
This has become, as every one knows, a custom among the race of men, and shows at present no sign of becoming obsolete.
For the sake of respectability, perhaps, whatever that may mean.
Oh, then, a million curses take it-respectability, I mean; may it sink into the bottomless pit, and the smoke of its torment ascend for ever and ever!
And having thus, by taking thought, brought my mind into this temper, I once more finally determined to have the clothes, and religiously to observe the compact.
It made me quite happy to end it in this way.
The hard bed, the cold night wind blowing on me, my wolfish visitor, were all forgotten.
Once more I gave loose to my imagination, and saw myself (clothed and in my right mind) sitting at Yoletta's feet, learning the mystery of that sweet, tranquil life from her precious lips.
But her hand-ah, that was another matter.
What had I to give in return for such a boon as that? Only that strength concerning which my venerable host had spoken somewhat encouragingly.
He had also been so good as to mention my skill; but I could scarcely trade on that.
And if a whole year's labor was only sufficient to pay for a suit of clothing, how many years of toil would be required to win Yoletta's hand?
Naturally, at this juncture, I began to draw a parallel between my case and that of an ancient historical personage, whose name is familiar to most.
History repeats itself-with variations.
He taketh acquaintance of Rachel, here called Yoletta.
And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice and wept.
That is a touch of nature I can thoroughly appreciate-the kissing, I mean; but why he wept I cannot tell, unless it be because he was not an Englishman.
And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's brother.
Leah was considerably older than Rachel, and, like Edra, tender eyed.
I do not aspire or desire to marry both, especially if I should, like Jacob, have to begin with the wrong one, however tender eyed: but for divine Yoletta I could serve seven years; yea, and fourteen, if it comes to it.
Ancient Babylonia was for over four thousand years the garden of Western Asia.
Herodotus found it still flourishing and extremely fertile.
"This territory", he wrote, "is of all that we know the best by far for producing grain; it is so good that it returns as much as two hundredfold for the average, and, when it bears at its best, it produces three hundredfold.
This historic country is bounded on the east by Persia and on the west by the Arabian desert.
A day's journey separated the river mouths when Alexander the Great broke the power of the Persian Empire.
In the days of Babylonia's prosperity the Euphrates was hailed as "the soul of the land" and the Tigris as "the bestower of blessings". Skilful engineers had solved the problem of water distribution by irrigating sun parched areas and preventing the excessive flooding of those districts which are now rendered impassable swamps when the rivers overflow.
A network of canals was constructed throughout the country, which restricted the destructive tendencies of the Tigris and Euphrates and developed to a high degree their potentialities as fertilizing agencies.
The greatest of these canals appear to have been anciently river beds.
It is believed to mark the course followed in the early Sumerian period by the Euphrates river, which has moved steadily westward many miles beyond the sites of ancient cities that were erected on its banks.
Another important canal, the Shatt el Hai, crossed the plain from the Tigris to its sister river, which lies lower at this point, and does not run so fast.
Meanwhile the rivers are increasing in volume, being fed by the melting snows at their mountain sources far to the north.
The swift Tigris, which is one thousand one hundred forty six miles long, begins to rise early in March and reaches its highest level in May; before the end of June it again subsides.
More sluggish in movement, the Euphrates, which is one thousand seven hundred eighty miles long, shows signs of rising a fortnight later than the Tigris, and is in flood for a more extended period; it does not shrink to its lowest level until early in September.
By controlling the flow of these mighty rivers, preventing disastrous floods, and storing and distributing surplus water, the ancient Babylonians developed to the full the natural resources of their country, and made it-what it may once again become-one of the fairest and most habitable areas in the world.
Nature conferred upon them bountiful rewards for their labour; trade and industries flourished, and the cities increased in splendour and strength.
Babylonia is a treeless country, and timber had to be imported from the earliest times.
The date palm was probably introduced by man, as were certainly the vine and the fig tree, which were widely cultivated, especially in the north.
Stone, suitable for building, was very scarce, and limestone, alabaster, marble, and basalt had to be taken from northern Mesopotamia, where the mountains also yield copper and lead and iron.
Except Eridu, where ancient workers quarried sandstone from its sea shaped ridge, all the cities were built of brick, an excellent clay being found in abundance.
When brick walls were cemented with bitumen they were given great stability.
This resinous substance is found in the north and south.
It bubbles up through crevices of rocks on river banks and forms small ponds.
Two famous springs at modern Hit, on the Euphrates, have been drawn upon from time immemorial.
"From one", writes a traveller, "flows hot water black with bitumen, while the other discharges intermittently bitumen, or, after a rainstorm, bitumen and cold water....
It must, therefore, have had a brisk and flourishing foreign trade at an exceedingly remote period.
It does not follow, however, that the peasant class was greatly affected by periodic revolutions of this kind, which brought little more to them than a change of rulers.
The needs of the country necessitated the continuance of agricultural methods and the rigid observance of existing land laws; indeed, these constituted the basis of Sumerian prosperity.
Conquerors have ever sought reward not merely in spoil, but also the services of the conquered.
In northern Babylonia the invaders apparently found it necessary to conciliate and secure the continued allegiance of the tillers of the soil.
Law and religion being closely associated, they had to adapt their gods to suit the requirements of existing social and political organizations. A deity of pastoral nomads had to receive attributes which would give him an agricultural significance; one of rural character had to be changed to respond to the various calls of city life.
Besides, local gods could not be ignored on account of their popularity.
The petty kingdoms of Sumeria appear to have been tribal in origin. Each city was presided over by a deity who was the nominal owner of the surrounding arable land, farms were rented or purchased from the priesthood, and pasture was held in common.
The chief deity of a state was the central figure in a pantheon, which had its political aspect and influenced the growth of local theology.
This description recalls the familiar figures of Egyptian gods and priests attired in the skins of the sacred animals from whom their powers were derived, and the fairy lore about swan maids and men, and the seals and other animals who could divest themselves of their "skin coverings" and appear in human shape.
The Indian creative gods Brahma and Vishnu had fish forms.
It relates that when the fish was small and in danger of being swallowed by other fish in a stream it appealed to Manu for protection.
The sage at once lifted up the fish and placed it in a jar of water.
It gradually increased in bulk, and he transferred it next to a tank and then to the river Ganges.
In time the fish complained to Manu that the river was too small for it, so he carried it to the sea.
The growth of the fish suggests the growth of the river rising in flood.
In Celtic folk tales high tides and valley floods are accounted for by the presence of a "great beast" in sea, loch, or river.
The idea is that "where a god dies, that is, ceases to exist in human form, his life passes into the waters where he is buried; and this again is merely a theory to bring the divine water or the divine fish into harmony with anthropomorphic ideas.
Another Egyptian fish deity was the god Rem, whose name signifies "to weep"; he wept fertilizing tears, and corn was sown and reaped amidst lamentations.
The connection between a fish god and a corn god is not necessarily remote when we consider that in Babylonia and Egypt the harvest was the gift of the rivers.
The Euphrates, indeed, was hailed as a creator of all that grew on its banks.
He taught the people how to form and use alphabetic signs and instructed them in mathematics: he gave them their code of laws.
Ptah moulded the first man on his potter's wheel: he also moulded the sun and moon; he shaped the universe and hammered out the copper sky.
His word became the creative force; he named those things he desired to be, and they came into existence.
As rain fell from "the waters above the firmament", the god of waters was also a sky and earth god.
The Indian Varuna was similarly a sky as well as an ocean god before the theorizing and systematizing Brahmanic teachers relegated him to a permanent abode at the bottom of the sea.
His worship was certainly of great antiquity.
Our knowledge regarding him is derived mainly from the Bible.
He was a national rather than a city god.
Near the name is an ear of corn, and other symbols, such as the winged solar disc, a gazelle, and several stars, but there is no fish.
It may be, of course, that Baal dagon represents a fusion of deities.
The Philistines came from Crete, and if their Dagon was imported from that island, he may have had some connection with Poseidon, whose worship extended throughout Greece.
This god of the sea, who is somewhat like the Roman Neptune, carried a lightning trident and caused earthquakes.
He was a brother of Zeus, the sky and atmosphere deity, and had bull and horse forms.
In his train were the Tritons, half men, half fishes, and the water fairies, the Nereids.
Osiris and Isis of Egypt were associated with the Nile.
The connection between agriculture and the water supply was too obvious to escape the early symbolists, and many other proofs of this than those referred to could be given.
A suggestion of the Vedic Vritra and his horde of monsters.
It is possible that he was developed as an atmospheric god with solar and lunar attributes.
The seven demons, who were his messengers, recall the stormy Maruts, the followers of Indra.
They are referred to as
"Evil spirits", according to a Babylonian chant, were "the bitter venom of the gods".
Those attached to a deity as "attendants" appear to represent the original animistic group from which he evolved.
Associated with Bel Enlil was Beltis, later known as "Beltu-the lady".
In the later systematized theology of the Babylonians we seem to trace the fragments of a primitive mythology which was vague in outline, for the deities were not sharply defined, and existed in groups.
Enneads were formed in Egypt by placing a local god at the head of a group of eight elder deities.
We cannot say definitely what these various deities represent.
The others were phases of light and darkness and the forces of nature in activity and repose.
The attributes of this beneficent god reflect the progress, and the social and moral ideals of a people well advanced in civilization.
He rewarded mankind for the services they rendered to him; he was their leader and instructor; he achieved for them the victories over the destructive forces of nature.
We shall find these elder demons figuring in the Babylonian Creation myth, which receives treatment in a later chapter.
In its temple tower, built of brick, was a marble stairway, and evidences have been forthcoming that in the later Sumerian period the structure was lavishly adorned.
At the sacred city the first man was created: there the souls of the dead passed towards the great Deep.
The Egyptians obtained from that sacred land incense bearing trees which had magical potency.
In a fragmentary Babylonian charm there is a reference to a sacred tree or bush at Eridu.
Professor Sayce has suggested that it is the Biblical "Tree of Life" in the Garden of Eden.
If Eridu was not the "cradle" of the Sumerian race, it was possibly the cradle of Sumerian civilization.
Here, amidst the shifting rivers in early times, the agriculturists may have learned to control and distribute the water supply by utilizing dried up beds of streams to irrigate the land.
THE MUSSEL AND OYSTER.
It is a tug of war, your skill and strength against the muscles of the animal inside the tight shells.
You can imagine the Periwinkle's mantle as a tube enclosing the animal's body.
The mantle of the Mussel or the Oyster is in two pieces; and each half forms its own shell.
The Snail, and other one shelled molluscs, poke their heads out of the shell when feeding or moving.
Oysters and their two shelled cousins cannot do this, for the simple reason that they have no heads!
In dense black masses they cling to the rocks; and, though heavy waves bang them like so many hammers, they stick tight.
On the piers and groynes, and the woodwork of the harbour, you can see other clusters of Mussels; they are placed where the high tide covers them.
Have you noticed how the Mussel anchors himself?
He uses a bunch of threads, like so many cables or tiny ropes.
It is interesting to know how these threads are made.
He has a long, slender foot which can be pushed out of the shells.
Now the threads are fixed by the foot, just where the Mussel wishes to anchor himself.
They are made from a liquid which forms in the body of the creature.
Our ordinary Mussels do not make very long threads, but those of some kinds are so long that they can be woven into silky purses or stockings. The Mussel which makes such long anchor threads might be called "the silkworm of the sea."
If the Mussel is such a stay at home, how does he find his food?
The answer is, that the food comes to him, brought by the ever moving water. There are countless specks floating in the sea, mostly specks of vegetable stuff.
These settle on the floor of the sea, just as dust settles on our house floors; and the waves wash this "sea dust" hither and thither.
Our British Oysters were famous even in the time of the romans; they were carefully packed and sent to Rome, and, at the Roman feasts, surprising quantities of them were eaten.
Many sea animals have wonderfully large families, but the Oyster, with its millions and millions of eggs, beats most of them.
Strangely enough, its eggs are not sent into the sea at once, but are kept between the Oyster's shells until they hatch.
Needless to say, these babies are very small indeed, else their nursery could not contain them all Though so small that thousands of them together look more like a pinch of dust than anything else, yet each one has two thin shells; so that, if you eat the parent Oyster, they grate on your teeth like sand.
Oysters, at this time, are "out of season"--that is, unfit for food.
At the right moment, the Oyster gets rid of its numerous family.
It opens its shells, then shuts them rapidly; and, each time this happens, a cloud of young Oysters is puffed out like smoke.
They have no defence, and countless numbers of them are gobbled up by crabs, anemones, and others.
For a time, the baby Oysters-which are known as "spat"--are able to swim here and there.
In rough weather they are driven far into the deeps of the ocean, and lost.
The rest of them, before they have been free for two days, settle on the bed of the sea-sometimes on their own parents; and there they remain for life.
Only a very few out of each million become "grown ups"--the rest are eaten by enemies, or smothered in mud or sand.
In five years they are fine, fat grown up Oysters-that is to say, if they have not been dredged up from their bed and sent to market.
Their shells open and shut like a trap.
You may have seen a picture of an inquisitive mouse trapped by an Oyster.
Between the hinge of the two shells there is a pad, which acts like an elastic spring, and forces the shells open.
The Oyster can close them by means of a strong muscle.
They are its only defence, so it closes them at the least hint of danger.
Even these thick walls are sometimes of no avail, as we saw in our talk on "Five fingered Jack." We saw how the starfish forces the shells open with the help of its strong tube feet.
Sometimes the Oysters are stifled in their "beds" by other Oysters settling and growing over them.
Thick masses of Mussels may cling to them and suffocate them.
And grains of sand sometimes get in the hinges of their shells, so that they cannot close up the house when they wish.
Like the other animals which are useful as food, Oysters have been carefully studied and cultivated by man for many, many years.
Oysters feed in rather a strange way.
Trace the "beard" as far as the hinge of the shells, and you see the mouth with its white lips.
If you could watch the creature having its dinner, you would see a constant stream of water flowing over the gills and towards the mouth.
What makes the water move in that way?
There are so many of them that, as they keep moving, they force the water along, over the gills and towards the mouth.
In this way the Oyster breathes the air which is in the water; but not only that.
This is driven to the Oyster's mouth and swallowed.
The Oyster, fixed in its "bed," unable to hunt for food, thus makes its dinner come to it.
What a strange use for a "beard"!
It not only serves as lungs, but also helps the animal to catch its "daily bread"!
Where Cockles have buried themselves you will see spurts of water and sand, showing where they are busy down below in the wet sand.
Besides being so skilful at digging, the Cockle is a first rate jumper. If left on the beach, it jumps over the sand, towards the sea, in the funniest way.
It is strange to see a quiet looking shell suddenly take to hopping and jumping like an acrobat.
To perform this astonishing feat the Cockle makes use of its foot, which is worked by very strong muscles.
It is large and pointed, and bent: if the Cockle wishes to move quickly, it stretches out its foot from between the shells, as far as it will go.
Then, by using all its power, it leaps backwards or forwards in a surprising manner.
There are many other interesting molluscs, besides those we have looked at.
But this foot is a most wonderful boring tool, fitted with a hard file.
You will often see stones and rocks riddled by the Piddock as if they were as soft as cheese.
Chalk, sandstone, or oak, it is all the same to the Piddock, which rasps them away with its file.
When the points of this strange instrument are worn out with all this hard wear, a new set takes their place.
one.
How does the Mussel anchor itself?
Describe how the shells of the Oyster are opened and closed.
three.
What is the food of the Mussel?
Of what use is the "beard" of the Oyster?
five.
Why is the Oyster called a bi valve?
six.
Why is the Oyster sometimes unfit for use as food?
We see it with pleasure, because, in its way, it is genuine.
That class is a large one in our country villages, and these books reflect its thoughts and manners as half penny ballads do the life of the streets of London.
The ballads are not more true to the facts; but they give us, in a coarser form, far more of the spirit than we get from the same facts reflected in the intellect of a Dickens, for instance, or of any writer far enough above the scene to be properly its artist.
It is a current superstition that country people are more pure and healthy in mind and body than those who live in cities.
It may be so in countries of old established habits, where a genuine peasantry have inherited some of the practical wisdom and loyalty of the past, with most of its errors.
We have our doubts, though, from the stamp upon literature, always the nearest evidence of truth we can get, whether, even there, the difference between town and country life is as much in favor of the latter as is generally supposed.
There are exceptions, and not a few; but, in a very great proportion of country villages, the habits of the people, as to food, air, and even exercise, are ignorant and unhealthy to the last degree.
Their want of all pure faith, and appetite for coarse excitement, is shown by continued intrigues, calumnies, and crimes.
We have lived in a beautiful village, where, more favorably placed than any other person in it, both as to withdrawal from bad associations and nearness to good, we heard inevitably, from domestics, work people, and school children, more ill of human nature than we could possibly sift were we to elect such a task from all the newspapers of this city, in the same space of time.
We believe the amount of ill circulated by means of anonymous letters, as described in this book, to be as great as can be imported in all the French novels (and that is a bold word).
We know ourselves of two or three cases of morbid wickedness, displayed by means of anonymous letters, that may vie with what puzzled the best wits of France in a famous law suit not long since.
But what does this prove?
Only the need of a dissemination of all that is best, intellectually and morally, through the whole people.
Our people require a thoroughly diffused intellectual life, a religious aim, such as no people at large ever possessed before; else they must sink till they become dregs, rather than rise to become the cream of creation, which they are too apt to flatter themselves with the fancy of being already.
The most interesting fiction we have ever read in this coarse, homely, but genuine class, is one called "Metallek." It may be in circulation in this city; but we bought it in a country nook, and from a pedlar; and it seemed to belong to the country.
Had we met with it in any other way, it would probably have been to throw it aside again directly, for the author does not know how to write English, and the first chapters give no idea of his power of apprehending the poetry of life.
That such things are, private observation has made us sure; but the writers of books rarely seem to have seen them; rarely to have walked alone in an untrodden path long enough to hold commune with the spirit of the scene.
In this book you find the very life; the most vulgar prose, and the most exquisite poetry.
But when we come to the girl who is the presiding deity, or rather the tutelary angel of the scene, how are all discords harmonized; how all its latent music poured forth!
It is a portrait from the life-it has the mystic charm of fulfilled reality, how far beyond the fairest ideals ever born of thought!
She plays round the most vulgar and rude beings, gentle and caressing, yet unsullied; in her wildness there is nothing cold or savage; her elevation is soft and warm.
The lonely life of the girl after the death of her parents,--her fearlessness, her gay and sweet enjoyment of nature, her intercourse with the old people of the neighborhood, her sisterly conduct towards her "suitors,"--all seem painted from the life; but the death bed scene seems borrowed from some sermon, and is not in harmony with the rest.
At the time of that notice we had only looked into it here and there, and did no justice to a work full of genius, profound in its meaning, and of admirable fidelity to nature in its details.
A young girl could not sufficiently express her delight at the simple nature with which scenes of childhood are given, and especially at Margaret's first going to meeting.
Christi.
The ease with which she assimilates the city life when in it, making it a part of her imaginative tapestry, is a sign of the power to which she has grown.
We have much more to think and to say of the book, as a whole, and in parts; and should the mood and summer leisure ever permit a familiar and intimate acquaintance with it, we trust they will be both thought and said.
FOURTH BOOK.
THE WORLD AS WILL.
Second Aspect.
The Assertion And Denial Of The Will To Live, When Self Consciousness Has Been Attained.
section fifty three.
But, in my opinion, all philosophy is theoretical, because it is essential to it that it should retain a purely contemplative attitude, and should investigate, not prescribe.
To become, on the contrary, practical, to guide conduct, to transform character, are old claims, which with fuller insight it ought finally to give up.
For here, where the worth or worthlessness of an existence, where salvation or damnation are in question, the dead conceptions of philosophy do not decide the matter, but the inmost nature of man himself, the Daemon that guides him and that has not chosen him, but been chosen by him, as Plato would say; his intelligible character, as Kant expresses himself.
Virtue cannot be taught any more than genius; indeed, for it the concept is just as unfruitful as it is in art, and in both cases can only be used as an instrument.
It would, therefore, be just as absurd to expect that our moral systems and ethics will produce virtuous, noble, and holy men, as that our aesthetics will produce poets, painters, and musicians.
Philosophy can never do more than interpret and explain what is given.
It can only bring to distinct abstract knowledge of the reason the nature of the world which in the concrete, that is, as feeling, expresses itself comprehensibly to every one.
This, however, it does in every possible reference and from every point of view.
In considering it I shall faithfully adhere to the method I have hitherto followed, and shall support myself by presupposing all that has already been advanced.
There is, indeed, just one thought which forms the content of this whole work.
I shall then have done all that is in my power to communicate it as fully as possible.
The given point of view, and the method of treatment announced, are themselves sufficient to indicate that in this ethical book no precepts, no doctrine of duty must be looked for; still less will a general moral principle be given, an universal receipt, as it were, for the production of all the virtues.
In general, we shall not speak at all of "ought," for this is how one speaks to children and to nations still in their childhood, but not to those who have appropriated all the culture of a full grown age.
"Ought to will!"--wooden iron!
But it follows from the point of view of our system that the will is not only free, but almighty.
From it proceeds not only its action, but also its world; and as the will is, so does its action and its world become.
Both are the self knowledge of the will and nothing more.
Only thus is the will truly autonomous, and from every other point of view it is heteronomous.
This we shall do in connection with the preceding portion of our work, and in precisely the same way as we have hitherto explained the other phenomena of the world, and have sought to bring their inmost nature to distinct abstract knowledge.
Notwithstanding Kant's great doctrine, it will not attempt to use the forms of the phenomenon, the universal expression of which is the principle of sufficient reason, as a leaping pole to jump over the phenomenon itself, which alone gives meaning to these forms, and land in the boundless sphere of empty fictions.
But this actual world of experience, in which we are, and which is in us, remains both the material and the limits of our consideration: a world which is so rich in content that even the most searching investigation of which the human mind is capable could not exhaust it.
It is just the knowledge which belongs to the principle of sufficient reason, with which no one can penetrate to the inner nature of things, but endlessly pursues phenomena, moving without end or aim, like a squirrel in its wheel, till, tired out at last, he stops at some point or other arbitrarily chosen, and now desires to extort respect for it from others also.
There was once a very rich merchant, who had six children, three boys and three girls.
As he was himself a man of great sense, he spared no expense for their education, but provided them with all sorts of masters for their improvement.
The three daughters were all handsome, but particularly the youngest: indeed she was so very beautiful that in her childhood every one called her the Little Beauty, and being still the same when she was grown up, nobody called her by any other name, which made her sisters very jealous of her.
This youngest daughter was not only more handsome than her sisters, but was also better tempered.
The two eldest were vain of being rich, and spoke with pride to those they thought below them.
They went every day to balls, plays, and public walks, and always made game of their youngest sister for spending her time in reading, or other useful employments.
Beauty had quite as many offers as her sisters, but she always answered with the greatest civility, that she was much obliged to her lovers, but would rather live some years longer with her father, as she thought herself too young to marry.
At first Beauty could not help sometimes crying in secret for the hardships she was now obliged to suffer; but in a very short time she said to herself, "All the crying in the world will do me no good, so I will try to be happy without a fortune."
When they had removed to their cottage, the merchant and his three sons employed themselves in ploughing and sowing the fields, and working in the garden.
Beauty also did her part, for she got up by four o'clock every morning, lighted the fires, cleaned the house, and got the breakfast for the whole family.
But her two sisters were at a loss what to do to pass the time away: they had their breakfast in bed, and did not rise till ten o'clock.
After they had lived in this manner about a year, the merchant received a letter, which informed him that one of the richest ships, which he thought was lost, had just come into port.
This news made the two eldest sisters almost mad with joy; for they thought they should now leave the cottage, and have all their finery again.
When they found that their father must take a journey to the ship, the two eldest begged he would not fail to bring them back some new gowns, caps, rings, and all sorts of trinkets.
All at once, he now cast his eyes towards a long row of trees, and saw a light at the end of them, but it seemed a great way off.
He made the best of his way towards it, and found that it came from a fine palace, lighted all over.
He walked faster, and soon reached the gates, which he opened, and was very much surprised that he did not see a single person or creature in any of the yards.
His horse had followed him, and finding a stable with the door open, went into it at once; and here the poor beast, being nearly starved, helped himself to a good meal of oats and hay.
His master then tied him up, and walked towards the house, which he entered, but still without seeing a living creature.
He went on to a large hall, where he found a good fire, and a table covered with some very nice dishes, and only one plate with a knife and fork.
As the snow and rain had wetted him to the skin, he went up to the fire to dry himself.
He sat till the clock struck twelve, but did not see a single creature.
"To be sure," said he to himself, "this place belongs to some good fairy, who has taken pity on my ill luck." He looked out of the window, and, instead of snow, he saw the most charming arbours covered with all kinds of flowers.
He returned to the hall, where he had supped, and found a breakfast table, with some chocolate got ready for him.
At the same moment he heard a most shocking noise, and saw such a frightful beast coming towards him, that he was ready to drop with fear.
"Ungrateful man!" said the beast, in a terrible voice, "I have saved your life by letting you into my palace, and in return you steal my roses, which I value more than any thing else that belongs to me.
But you shall make amends for your fault with your life.
You shall die in a quarter of an hour." The merchant fell on his knees to the beast, and clasping his hands, said, "My lord, I humbly beg your pardon.
I did not think it would offend you to gather a rose for one of my daughters, who wished to have one." "I am not a lord, but a beast," replied the monster; "I do not like false compliments, but that people should say what they think: so do not fancy that you can coax me by any such ways.
You tell me that you have daughters; now I will pardon you, if one of them will agree to come and die instead of you.
Go; and if your daughters should refuse, promise me that you yourself will return in three months."
"But," said the beast, "I do not wish you to go back empty handed.
When the beast had said this, he went away; and the good merchant said to himself, "If I must die, yet I shall now have the comfort of leaving my children some riches," He returned to the room he had slept in, and found a great many pieces of gold.
The horse took a path across the forest of his own accord, and in a few hours they reached the merchant's house.
His children came running round him as he got off his horse; but the merchant, instead of kissing them with joy, could not help crying as he looked at them.
He held in his hand the bunch of roses, which he gave to Beauty, saying: "Take these roses, Beauty; but little do you think how dear they have cost your poor father;" and then he gave them an account of all that he had seen or heard in the palace of the beast.
The two eldest sisters now began to shed tears, and to lay the blame upon Beauty, who they said would be the cause of her father's death "See," said they, "what happens from the pride of the little wretch.
I am charmed with the kindness of Beauty, but I will not suffer her life to be lost.
I myself am old, and cannot expect to live much longer; so I shall but give up a few years of my life, and shall only grieve for the sake of my children." "Never, father," cried Beauty, "shall you go to the palace without me; for you cannot hinder my going after you.
The merchant was so grieved at the thoughts of losing his child, that he never once thought of the chest filled with gold; but at night, to his great surprise, he found it standing by his bedside.
He said nothing about his riches to his eldest daughters, for he knew very well it would at once make them want to return to town; but he told Beauty his secret, and she then said, that while he was away, two gentlemen had been on a visit to their cottage, who had fallen in love with her two sisters.
When the three months were past, the merchant and Beauty got ready to set out for the palace of the beast.
There was only Beauty who did not, for she thought that this would only make the matter worse.
They reached the palace in a very few hours, and the horse, without bidding, went into the same stable as before.
The merchant and Beauty walked towards the large hall, where they found a table covered with every dainty, and two plates laid ready.
When Beauty first saw his frightful form, she could not help being afraid; but she tried to hide her fear as much as she could.
She opened it in haste, and her eyes were all at once dazzled at the grandeur of the inside of the room.
What made her wonder more than all the rest was a large library filled with books, a harpsichord, and many other pieces of music.
"The beast takes care I shall not be at a loss how to amuse myself," said she.
She then thought that it was not likely such things would have been got ready for her, if she had but one day to live; and began to hope all would not turn out so bad as she and her father had feared.
She opened the library, and saw these verses written in letters of gold on the back of one of the books:
"Beauteous lady, dry your tears, Here's no cause for sighs or fears; Command as freely as you may, Enjoyment still shall mark your sway."
"Alas!" said she, sighing, "there is nothing I so much desire as to see my poor father and to know what he is doing at this moment," She said this to herself; but just then by chance, she cast her eyes on a looking glass that stood near her, and in the glass she saw her home, and her father riding up to the cottage in the deepest sorrow.
Her sisters came out to meet him, but for all they tried to look sorry, it was easy to see that in their hearts they were very glad.
But at supper, when she was going to seat herself at table, she heard the noise of the beast, and could not help trembling with fear.
"Beauty," said he, "will you give me leave to see you sup?" "That is as you please," answered she, very much afraid.
"Not in the least," said the beast; "you alone command in this place.
If you should not like my company, you need only to say so, and I will leave you that moment.
But tell me, Beauty, do you not think me very ugly?" "Why, yes," said she, "for I cannot tell a story; but then I think you are very good." "You are right," replied the beast; "and, besides being ugly, I am also very stupid: I know very well enough that I am but a beast."
At length she said, "No, beast." The beast made no reply, but sighed deeply, and went away.
When Beauty found herself alone, she began to feel pity for the poor beast.
"Dear!" said she, "what a sad thing it is that he should be so very frightful, since he is so good tempered!"
Beauty lived three months in this palace, very well pleased.
I shall always be your friend; so try to let that make you easy."
"I would promise you, with all my heart," said she, "never to leave you quite; but I long so much to see my father, that if you do not give me leave to visit him I shall die with grief."
"I would rather die myself, Beauty," answered the beast, "than make you fret; I will send you to your father's cottage, you shall stay there, and your poor beast shall die of sorrow." "No," said Beauty, crying, "I love you too well to be the cause of your death; I promise to return in a week.
Good bye, Beauty!"
When she awoke in the morning, she found herself in her father's cottage.
She then told the servant to put the rest away with a great deal of care, for she intended to give them to her sisters; but as soon as she had spoken these words the chest was gone out of sight in a moment.
Her father then said, perhaps the beast chose for her to keep them all for herself; and as soon as he had said this, they saw the chest standing again in the same place.
While Beauty was dressing herself, a servant brought word to her that her sisters were come with their husbands to pay her a visit.
The husband of the eldest was very handsome; but was so very proud of this, that he thought of nothing else from morning till night, and did not attend to the beauty of his wife.
The second had married a man of great learning; but he made no use of it, only to torment and affront all his friends, and his wife more than any of them.
The two sisters were ready to burst with spite when they saw Beauty dressed like a princess, and look so very charming.
All the kindness that she showed them was of no use; for they were vexed more than ever, when she told them how happy she lived at the palace of the beast.
The spiteful creatures went by themselves into the garden, where they cried to think of her good fortune.
When the week was ended, the two sisters began to pretend so much grief at the thoughts of her leaving them, that she agreed to stay a week more; but all that time Beauty could not help fretting for the sorrow that she knew her staying would give her poor beast; for she tenderly loved him, and much wished for his company again.
In the morning she with joy found herself in the palace of the beast.
She dressed herself very finely, that she might please him the better, and thought she had never known a day pass away so slow.
At last the clock struck nine, but the beast did not come.
Beauty then thought to be sure she had been the cause of his death in earnest.
She ran from room to room all over the palace, calling out his name, but still she saw nothing of him.
She threw herself upon his body, thinking nothing at all of his ugliness; and finding his heart still beat, she ran and fetched some water from a pond in the garden, and threw it on his face.
The beast then opened his eyes, and said: "You have forgot your promise, Beauty.
My grief for the loss of you has made me resolve to starve myself to death; but I shall die content, since I have had the pleasure of seeing you once more." "No, dear beast," replied Beauty, "you shall not die; you shall live to be my husband: from this moment I offer to marry you, and will be only yours. Oh!
The moment Beauty had spoken these words, the palace was suddenly lighted up, and music, fireworks, and all kinds of rejoicings, appeared round about them.
Yet Beauty took no notice of all this, but watched over her dear beast with the greatest tenderness.
Though this young prince deserved all her notice, she could not help asking him what was become of the beast.
A wicked fairy had condemned me to keep the form of a beast till a beautiful young lady should agree to marry me, and ordered me, on pain of death, not to show that I had any sense.
You shall become two statues; but under that form you shall still keep your reason, and shall be fixed at the gates of your sister's palace; and I will not pass any worse sentence on you than to see her happy.
At the same moment, the fairy, with a stroke of her wand, removed all who were present to the young prince's country, where he was received with the greatest joy by his subjects.
He married Beauty, and passed a long and happy life with her, because they still kept in the same course of goodness from which they had never departed.
CHAPTER eleven
Her feet were stretched out toward a small fire that smouldered in an open hearth.
She wore a simple calico gown, neat and well fitting, and her face bore traces of much beauty that time and care had been unable wholly to efface.
Suddenly she paused in her work, her head turned slightly to one side to listen.
"Come in, sir," she called in a soft but distinct voice; "come in, miss."
So Kenneth and Beth entered at the half open porch door and advanced into the room.
"Is this mrs Rogers?" asked Beth, looking at the woman curiously.
I am Elizabeth DeGraf."
"And your companion-is it mr Forbes?" the woman asked.
Will you please find seats?
"We have come to ask if you have heard anything of your daughter."
Her voice broke.
Will told you, didn't he?"
But it wasn't so bad, mrs Rogers; it wasn't a desperate condition, by any means."
"With poor Tom in prison for years-and just for trying to help her."
"Tom isn't in prison, you know, any more," said Beth quietly.
"He has been released."
"Last evening.
His fault has been forgiven, and he is now free."
The woman sat silent for a time.
"You have done this, mr Forbes?"
"Why, Miss DeGraf and I assisted, perhaps.
"He's honest and true, mr Forbes-he is, indeed!"
He had a bright future before him, sir, and that's why my child went mad when he ruined his life for her sake."
"Was she mad, do you think?" asked Beth, softly.
"Lucy was a sensible girl, and until this thing happened she was as bright and cheerful as the day is long.
But she is very sensitive-she inherited that from me, I think-and Tom's action drove her distracted.
"Let us hope for the best, mrs Rogers," said Beth.
"Have you?" asked the woman, earnestly.
"I shall be glad to know whatever you care to tell me," said Beth, simply.
"I am the wife of a poor farmer," began the woman, speaking softly and with some hesitation, but gaining strength as she proceeded.
We lived in Baltimore.
Then I fell in love with a young man who, after obtaining my promise to marry him, found some one he loved better and carelessly discarded me.
My mother had passed on long before, and there was nothing to keep me at home.
I came west and secured a position to teach school in this county, and for a time I was quite contented and succeeded in living down my disappointment.
I heard but once from my father.
He had married again and disinherited me. He forbade me to ever communicate with him again.
He was desperately in love with me, and at this period, when I seemed completely cut off from my old life and the future contained no promise, I thought it best to wear out the remainder of my existence in the seclusion of a farm house.
I put all the past behind me, and told Will Rogers I would marry him and be a faithful wife; but that my heart was dead.
He accepted me on that condition, and it was not until after we were married some time that my husband realized how impossible it would ever be to arouse my affection.
Then he lost courage, and became careless and reckless.
When our child came-our Lucy-Will was devoted to her, and the baby wakened in me all the old passionate capacity to love.
Lucy drew Will and me a little closer together, but he never recovered his youthful ambition.
He was a disappointed man, and went from bad to worse.
But he lost all hope of being loved as he loved me, and the disappointment broke him down.
He became an old man early in life, and his lack of energy kept us very poor.
I used to take in sewing before the accident to my eyes, and that helped a good deal to pay expenses.
But now I am helpless, and my husband devotes all his time to me, although I beg him to work the farm and try to earn some money.
I have had to bear so much in my life that I could even bear my child's death.
Kenneth and Beth remained silent for a time after mrs Rogers had finished her tragic story, for their hearts were full of sympathy for the poor woman.
It was hard to realize that a refined, beautiful and educated girl had made so sad a mistake of her life and suffered so many afflictions as a consequence.
The fault was not his.
"Was Lucy like you, or did she resemble her father?" asked Beth.
"I've been looking at the picture," said Kenneth.
"And you mustn't think of her as dead, mrs Rogers," said Beth, pleadingly.
"I'm sure she is alive, and that we shall find her.
We're going right to work, and everything possible shall be done to trace your daughter.
Don't worry, please.
Be as cheerful as you can, and leave the search to us."
"He can't sleep or rest till he finds her, for my husband loves her as well as I do.
I know what she suffers, for I suffered, myself; and life isn't worth living when despair and disappointment fills it."
"I cannot see why Lucy shouldn't yet be happy," protested Beth.
"Tom Gates is now free, and can begin life anew."
"Who will employ a bookkeeper, or even a clerk who has been guilty of forgery?"
"I think I shall give him employment," replied Kenneth.
"Yes.
I'm not afraid of a boy who became a criminal to save the girl he loved."
"The world forgets these things sooner than you suppose," he answered. "I need a secretary, and in that position Tom Gates will quickly be able to live down this unfortunate affair.
And if he turns out as well as I expect, he will soon be able to marry Lucy and give her a comfortable home.
So now nothing remains but to find your girl, and we'll try to do that, I assure you."
mrs Rogers was crying softly by this time, but it was from joy and relief.
When they left her she promised to be as cheerful as possible and to look on the bright side of life.
"I can't thank you," she said, "so I won't try.
You must know how grateful we are to you."
As Beth and Kenneth drove back to Elmhurst they were both rather silent, for they had been strongly affected by the scene at the farm house.
"And I'm sure he'll be true and grateful."
"I really need him, Beth," said the boy.
"There is getting to be too much correspondence for mr Watson to attend to, and I ought to relieve him of many other details.
It's a good arrangement, and I'm glad I thought of it."
They had almost reached Elmhurst when they met the Honorable Erastus Hopkins driving along the road.
On the seat beside him was a young girl, and as the vehicles passed each other Beth gave a start and clung to the boy's arm.
Did you see that?"
"Yes; it's my respected adversary."
"But the girl!
It's Lucy-I'm sure it's Lucy!
Stop-stop-and let's go back!"
"It can't be."
I'm sure it is!"
"She was laughing gaily and talking with the Honorable Erastus.
"And she wasn't unhappy a bit.
And there's another thing."
"Any companion of mr Hopkins can be easily traced."
"That's true," answered the girl, thoughtfully.
On a question being put to him by Lin Fang, a disciple, as to what was the radical idea upon which the Rules of Propriety were based, the Master exclaimed, "Ah! that is a large question.
As to some rules, where there is likelihood of extravagance, they would rather demand economy; in those which relate to mourning, and where there is likelihood of being easily satisfied, what is wanted is real sorrow."
Of "the superior man," the Master observed, "In him there is no contentiousness.
Say even that he does certainly contend with others, as in archery competitions; yet mark, in that case, how courteously he will bow and go up for the forfeit cup, and come down again and give it to his competitor.
"Dimples playing in witching smile, Beautiful eyes, so dark, so bright! Oh, and her face may be thought the while Colored by art, red rose on white!"
"Coloring," replied the Master, "requires a pure and clear background." "Then," said the other, "rules of ceremony require to have a background!" "Ah!" exclaimed the Master, "you are the man to catch the drift of my thought.
And why cannot they do so?
Because they have not documents enough, nor men learned enough.
Some one asked what was the purport of this great sacrifice, and the Master replied, "I cannot tell.
The position in the empire of him who could tell you is as evident as when you look at this"--pointing to the palm of his hand.
In offering to other spirits it was the same.
He would say, "If I do not myself take part in my offerings, it is all the same as if I did not offer them."
I follow Chow!"
On entering the grand temple he inquired about everything."
This remark coming to the Master's ears, he said, "What I did is part of the ceremonial!"
"In archery," he said, "the great point to be observed is not simply the perforation of the leather; for men have not all the same strength.
"To serve one's ruler nowadays," he remarked, "fully complying with the Rules of Propriety, is regarded by others as toadyism!"
Referring to the First of the Odes, he remarked that it was mirthful without being lewd, and sad also without being painful.
He has gone away without a word of censure."
"Was he miserly?" some one asked.
"He knew the Rules of Propriety, I suppose?"
"Judge:--Seeing that the feudal lords planted a screen at their gates, he too would have one at his!
If he knew the Rules of Propriety, who is there that does not know them?"
In a discourse to the Chief Preceptor of Music at the court of Lu, the Master said, "Music is an intelligible thing.
Characteristics of Confucius-An Incident
Said the Master:--
Once he exclaimed, "Alas!
"Concentrate the mind," said he, "upon the Good Way.
"Maintain firm hold upon Virtue.
"Rely upon Philanthropy.
On one day on which he had wept, on that day he would not sing.
Addressing his favorite disciple, he said, "To you only and myself it has been given to do this-to go when called to serve, and to go back into quiet retirement when released from office."
The Master answered:--
As to wealth, he remarked, "If wealth were an object that I could go in quest of, I should do so even if I had to take a whip and do grooms' work.
But seeing that it is not, I go after those objects for which I have a liking."
"Had they any feelings of resentment?" was the next question.
"Their aim and object," he answered, "was that of doing the duty which every man owes to his fellows, and they succeeded in doing it;--what room further for feelings of resentment?"
The questioner on coming out said, "The Master does not take his part."
"With a meal of coarse rice," said the Master, "and with water to drink, and my bent arm for my pillow-even thus I can find happiness.
The Master's regular subjects of discourse were the "Books of the Odes" and "History," and the up keeping of the Rules of Propriety.
"As I came not into life with any knowledge of it," he said, "and as my likings are for what is old, I busy myself in seeking knowledge there."
Strange occurrences, exploits of strength, deeds of lawlessness, references to spiritual beings-such like matters the Master avoided in conversation.
"Let there," he said, "be three men walking together: from that number I should be sure to find my instructors; for what is good in them I should choose out and follow, and what is not good I should modify."
On one occasion he exclaimed, "Heaven begat Virtue in me; what can man do unto me?"
To his disciples he once said, "Do you look upon me, my sons, as keeping anything secret from you?
That is so with me."
Four things there were which he kept in view in his teaching-scholarliness, conduct of life, honesty, faithfulness.
"It is not given to me," he said, "to meet with a sage; let me but behold a man of superior mind, and that will suffice.
Neither is it given to me to meet with a good man; let me but see a man of constancy, and it will suffice.
When the Master fished with hook and line, he did not also use a net. When out with his bow, he would never shoot at game in cover.
I am not of these.
"Why so much ado," said the Master, "at my merely permitting his approach, and not rather at my allowing him to draw back? If a man have cleansed himself in order to come and see me, I receive him as such; but I do not undertake for what he will do when he goes away."
He said, "I have heard that superior men show no partiality; are they, too, then, partial?
"Although in letters," he said, "I may have none to compare with me, yet in my personification of the 'superior man' I have not as yet been successful."
"'A Sage and a Philanthropist?' How should I have the ambition?" said he.
"Are such available?" asked the Master.
Better, however, the hard than the disorderly."
Again, "The man of superior mind is placidly composed; the small minded man is in a constant state of perturbation."
Answers on the Art of Governing-Consistency
"Lead the way in it," said the Master, "and work hard at it."
Requested to say more, he added, "And do not tire of it."
Chung kung, on being made first minister to the Chief of the Ki family, consulted the Master about government, and to him he said, "Let the heads of offices be heads.
Excuse small faults.
"But," he asked, "how am I to know the sagacious and talented, before promoting them?"
"Promote those whom you do know," said the Master.
"As to those of whom you are uncertain, will others omit to notice them?"
"One thing of necessity," he answered-"the rectification of terms."
Why such rectification?"
If terms be incorrect, language will be incongruous; and if language be incongruous, deeds will be imperfect.
Hence, a man of superior mind, certain first of his terms, is fitted to speak; and being certain of what he says can proceed upon it.
In the language of such a person there is nothing heedlessly irregular-and that is the sum of the matter."
Fan Ch'i requested that he might learn something of husbandry.
he asked.
"I am not equal to an old gardener." was the reply.
"A man of little mind, that!" said the Master, when Fan Ch'i had gone out.
"Let a leader," said he, "show rectitude in his own personal character, and even without directions from him things will go well.
If he be not personally upright, his directions will not be complied with."
Once he made the remark, "The governments of Lu and of Wei are in brotherhood."
Of King, a son of the Duke of Wei, he observed that "he managed his household matters well.
On his coming into possession, he thought, 'What a strange conglomeration!'--Coming to possess a little more, it was, 'Strange, such a result!' And when he became wealthy, 'Strange, such elegance!'"
The Master was on a journey to Wei, and Yen Yu was driving him.
"What multitudes of people!" he exclaimed.
"Enrich them," replied the Master.
"And after enriching them, what more would you do for them?"
"Instruct them."
Again, "Suppose the ruler to possess true kingly qualities, then surely after one generation there would be good will among men."
If he be unable to rectify himself, how is he to rectify others?"
Once when Yen Yu was leaving the Court, the Master accosted him.
"Why so late?" he asked.
"The details of it," suggested the Master; "had it been legislation, I should have been there to hear it, even though I am not in office."
Duke Ting asked if there were one sentence which, if acted upon, might have the effect of making a country prosperous.
Confucius answered, "A sentence could hardly be supposed to do so much as that.
But there is a proverb people use which says, 'To play the prince is hard, to play the minister not easy.' Assuming that it is understood that 'to play the prince is hard,' would it not be probable that with that one sentence the country should be made to prosper?"
Confucius again replied, "A sentence could hardly be supposed to do so much as that.
Do not look at trivial advantages.
If you wish for speedy results, they will not be far reaching; and if you regard trivial advantages you will not successfully deal with important affairs."
The Duke of Sheh in a conversation with Confucius said, "There are some straightforward persons in my neighborhood.
"Him who is spoken of by his kinsmen as a dutiful son, and whom the folks of his neighborhood call' good brother.'"
"Such as are sure to be true to their word, and effective in their work-who are given to hammering, as it were, upon one note-of inferior calibre indeed, but fit enough, I think, to be ranked next."
"The Southerners," said he, "have the proverb, 'The man who sticks not to rule will never make a charm worker or a medical man,' Good!--'Whoever is intermittent in his practise of virtue will live to be ashamed of it.' Without prognostication," he added, "that will indeed be so."
"The nobler minded man," he remarked, "will be agreeable even when he disagrees; the small minded man will agree and be disagreeable."
"That will scarcely do," he answered.
"What, then, if they all disliked him?"
"That, too," said he, "is scarcely enough.
Better if he were liked by the good folk in the village, and disliked by the bad."
"The superior man," he once observed, "is easy to serve, but difficult to please.
Try to please him by the adoption of wrong principles, and you will fail.
Also, when such a one employs others, he uses them according to their capacity.
The inferior man is, on the other hand, difficult to serve, but easy to please.
Try to please him by the adoption of wrong principles, and you will succeed.
And when he employs others he requires them to be fully prepared for everything."
Again, "The superior man can be high without being haughty.
"The firm, the unflinching, the plain and simple, the slow to speak," said he once, "are approximating towards their duty to their fellow men."
The master replied, "He who can properly be so-called will have in him a seriousness of purpose, a habit of controlling himself, and an agreeableness of manner: among his friends and associates the seriousness and the self control, and among his brethren the agreeableness of manner."
Section three
After failing to find any young couple that corresponded to young Verrall and Nettie, I presently discovered an unsatisfactory quartette of couples.
Any of these four couples might have been the one I sought; with regard to none of them was there conviction.
They had all arrived either on Wednesday or Thursday.
Two couples were still in occupation of their rooms, but neither of these were at home.
Late in the afternoon I reduced my list by eliminating a young man in drab, with side whiskers and long cuffs, accompanied by a lady, of thirty or more, of consciously ladylike type.
I stood outside in the meteor's livid light, hating them and cursing them for having delayed me so long.
I stood until it was evident they remarked me, a black shape of envy, silhouetted against the glare.
That finished Shaphambury.
The question I now had to debate was which of the remaining couples I had to pursue.
I walked back to the parade trying to reason my next step out, and muttering to myself, because there was something in that luminous wonderfulness that touched one's brain, and made one feel a little light headed.
One couple had gone to London; the other had gone to the Bungalow village at Bone Cliff.
Where, I wondered, was Bone Cliff?
I came upon my wooden legged man at the top of his steps.
"Hullo," said i
He pointed seaward with his pipe, his silver ring shone in the sky light.
"What is?" I asked.
"Search lights!
Smoke!
Ships going north!
If it wasn't for this blasted Milky Way gone green up there, we might see."
He was too intent to heed my questions for a time.
Then he vouchsafed over his shoulder-
"Know Bungalow village?--rather.
Nice goings on! Mixed bathing-something scandalous.
Yes."
"But where is it?" I said, suddenly exasperated.
"There!" he said.
"What's that flicker?
A gunflash-or I'm a lost soul!"
"You'd hear," I said, "long before it was near enough to see a flash."
He didn't answer.
Only by making it clear I would distract him until he told me what I wanted to know could I get him to turn from his absorbed contemplation of that phantom dance between the sea rim and the shine.
Indeed I gripped his arm and shook him.
Then he turned upon me cursing.
I answered with some foul insult by way of thanks, and so we parted, and I set off towards the bungalow village.
I found a policeman, standing star gazing, a little way beyond the end of the parade, and verified the wooden legged man's directions.
"It's a lonely road, you know," he called after me. . . .
I had an odd intuition that now at last I was on the right track. I left the dark masses of Shaphambury behind me, and pushed out into the dim pallor of that night, with the quiet assurance of a traveler who nears his end.
The incidents of that long tramp I do not recall in any orderly succession, the one progressive thing is my memory of a growing fatigue.
The sea was for the most part smooth and shining like a mirror, a great expanse of reflecting silver, barred by slow broad undulations, but at one time a little breeze breathed like a faint sigh and ruffled their long bodies into faint scaly ripples that never completely died out again.
At one place came grass, and ghostly great sheep looming up among the gray.
Then isolated pine witches would appear, and make their rigid gestures at me as I passed.
Grotesquely incongruous amidst these forms, I presently came on estate boards, appealing, "Houses can be built to suit purchaser," to the silence, to the shadows, and the glare.
Once I remember the persistent barking of a dog from somewhere inland of me, and several times I took out and examined my revolver very carefully.
I must, of course, have been full of my intention when I did that, I must have been thinking of Nettie and revenge, but I cannot now recall those emotions at all.
Only I see again very distinctly the greenish gleams that ran over lock and barrel as I turned the weapon in my hand.
Then there was the sky, the wonderful, luminous, starless, moonless sky, and the empty blue deeps of the edge of it, between the meteor and the sea.
And once-strange phantoms!--I saw far out upon the shine, and very small and distant, three long black warships, without masts, or sails, or smoke, or any lights, dark, deadly, furtive things, traveling very swiftly and keeping an equal distance. And when I looked again they were very small, and then the shine had swallowed them up.
Then once a flash and what I thought was a gun, until I looked up and saw a fading trail of greenish light still hanging in the sky.
Somewhere upon my way the road forked, but I do not remember whether that was near Shaphambury or near the end of my walk.
The hesitation between two rutted unmade roads alone remains clear in my mind.
At last I grew weary.
I came to piled heaps of decaying seaweed and cart tracks running this way and that, and then I had missed the road and was stumbling among sand hummocks quite close to the sea.
I came out on the edge of the dimly glittering sandy beach, and something phosphorescent drew me to the water's edge.
The meteor had now trailed its shining nets across the whole space of the sky and was beginning to set; in the east the blue was coming to its own again; the sea was an intense edge of blackness, and now, escaped from that great shine, and faint and still tremulously valiant, one weak elusive star could just be seen, hovering on the verge of the invisible.
How beautiful it was! how still and beautiful!
Peace! peace!--the peace that passeth understanding, robed in light descending! . . .
My heart swelled, and suddenly I was weeping.
There was something new and strange in my blood.
It came to me that indeed I did not want to kill.
I did not want to kill.
I did not want to be the servant of my passions any more.
A great desire had come to me to escape from life, from the daylight which is heat and conflict and desire, into that cool night of eternity-and rest.
I had played-I had done.
I stood upon the edge of the great ocean, and I was filled with an inarticulate spirit of prayer, and I desired greatly-peace from myself.
And presently, there in the east, would come again the red discoloring curtain over these mysteries, the finite world again, the gray and growing harsh certainties of dawn.
My resolve I knew would take up with me again.
This was a rest for me, an interlude, but to morrow I should be William Leadford once more, ill nourished, ill dressed, ill equipped and clumsy, a thief and shamed, a wound upon the face of life, a source of trouble and sorrow even to the mother I loved; no hope in life left for me now but revenge before my death.
Why this paltry thing, revenge?
It entered into my thoughts that I might end the matter now and let these others go.
To wade out into the sea, into this warm lapping that mingled the natures of water and light, to stand there breast high, to thrust my revolver barrel into my mouth------?
Why not?
I swung about with an effort.
I walked slowly up the beach thinking. . . .
I turned and looked back at the sea.
No!
Something within me said, "No!"
I must think.
It was troublesome to go further because the hummocks and the tangled bushes began.
I drew my revolver from my pocket and looked at it, and held it in my hand.
Life?
Or Death? . . .
I seemed to be probing the very deeps of being, but indeed imperceptibly I fell asleep, and sat dreaming.
Section four
Two people were bathing in the sea.
I had awakened.
It was still that white and wonderful night, and the blue band of clear sky was no wider than before.
These people must have come into sight as I fell asleep, and awakened me almost at once.
They waded breast deep in the water, emerging, coming shoreward, a woman, with her hair coiled about her head, and in pursuit of her a man, graceful figures of black and silver, with a bright green surge flowing off from them, a pattering of flashing wavelets about them.
He smote the water and splashed it toward her, she retaliated, and then they were knee deep, and then for an instant their feet broke the long silver margin of the sea.
Each wore a tightly fitting bathing dress that hid nothing of the shining, dripping beauty of their youthful forms.
She glanced over her shoulder and found him nearer than she thought, started, gesticulated, gave a little cry that pierced me to the heart, and fled up the beach obliquely toward me, running like the wind, and passed me, vanished amidst the black distorted bushes, and was gone-she and her pursuer, in a moment, over the ridge of sand.
I heard him shout between exhaustion and laughter. . . .
And, it blazed upon me, I might have died there by the sheer ebbing of my will-unavenged!
In another moment I was running and stumbling, revolver in hand, in quiet unsuspected pursuit of them, through the soft and noiseless sand.
I came up over the little ridge and discovered the bungalow village I had been seeking, nestling in a crescent lap of dunes.
A door slammed, the two runners had vanished, and I halted staring.
There was a group of three bungalows nearer to me than the others. Into one of these three they had gone, and I was too late to see which.
All had doors and windows carelessly open, and none showed a light.
This place, upon which I had at last happened, was a fruit of the reaction of artistic minded and carelessly living people against the costly and uncomfortable social stiffness of the more formal seaside resorts of that time.
It was, you must understand, the custom of the steam railway companies to sell their carriages after they had been obsolete for a sufficient length of years, and some genius had hit upon the possibility of turning these into little habitable cabins for the summer holiday.
The thing had become a fashion with a certain Bohemian spirited class; they added cabin to cabin, and these little improvised homes, gaily painted and with broad verandas and supplementary leantos added to their accommodation, made the brightest contrast conceivable to the dull rigidities of the decorous resorts.
Of course there were many discomforts in such camping that had to be faced cheerfully, and so this broad sandy beach was sacred to high spirits and the young.
Art muslin and banjoes, Chinese lanterns and frying, are leading "notes," I find, in the impression of those who once knew such places well.
But so far as I was concerned this odd settlement of pleasure squatters was a mystery as well as a surprise, enhanced rather than mitigated by an imaginative suggestion or so I had received from the wooden legged man at Shaphambury.
I saw the thing as no gathering of light hearts and gay idleness, but grimly-after the manner of poor men poisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy.
To the poor man, to the grimy workers, beauty and cleanness were absolutely denied; out of a life of greasy dirt, of muddied desires, they watched their happier fellows with a bitter envy and foul, tormenting suspicions.
Fancy a world in which the common people held love to be a sort of beastliness, own sister to being drunk! . . .
There was in the old time always something cruel at the bottom of this business of sexual love.
At least that is the impression I have brought with me across the gulf of the great Change.
I felt no sense of singularity that this thread of savagery should run through these emotions of mine and become now the whole strand of these emotions.
I believed, and I think I was right in believing, that the love of all true lovers was a sort of defiance then, that they closed a system in each other's arms and mocked the world without.
You loved against the world, and these two loved AT me. They had their business with one another, under the threat of a watchful fierceness.
A sword, a sharp sword, the keenest edge in life, lay among their roses.
Whatever may be true of this for others, for me and my imagination, at any rate, it was altogether true.
I was never for dalliance, I was never a jesting lover.
I wanted fiercely; I made love impatiently. Perhaps I had written irrelevant love letters for that very reason; because with this stark theme I could not play. . .
The thought of Nettie's shining form, of her shrinking bold abandon to her easy conqueror, gave me now a body of rage that was nearly too strong for my heart and nerves and the tense powers of my merely physical being.
I came down among the pale sand heaps slowly toward that queer village of careless sensuality, and now within my puny body I was coldly sharpset for pain and death, a darkly gleaming hate, a sword of evil, drawn.
Pray give me an alms.'
The Huntsman pitied the poor Old Woman, put his hand in his pocket, and made her a present according to his means.
Then he wanted to go on.
But the Old Woman held him back, and said: 'Hark ye, dear Huntsman, I will make you a present because of your good heart.
Go on your way, and you will come to a tree, on which nine birds are sitting.
They will have a cloak in their claws, over which they are fighting.
Take aim with your gun, and shoot into the middle of them.
They will drop the cloak, and one of the birds will fall down dead.
Take the cloak with you, it is a wishing cloak.
Take the heart out of the dead bird and swallow it whole, then you will find a gold coin under your pillow every single morning when you wake.'
The Huntsman thanked the Wise Woman, and thought: 'She promises fine things, if only they turn out as well.'
When he had gone about a hundred paces, he heard above him, in the branches of a tree, such a chattering and screaming that he looked up.
There he saw a flock of birds tearing a garment with their beaks and claws; snatching and tearing at it as if each one wanted to have it for himself.
'Well,' said the Huntsman, 'this is extraordinary, it is exactly what the Old Woman said.'
He put his gun to his shoulder, took aim and fired right into the middle of them, making the feathers fly about.
The birds took flight with a great noise, all except one, which fell down dead, and the cloak dropped at his feet.
He did as the Old Woman had told him, cut the heart out of the bird and swallowed it whole.
Then he took the cloak home with him.
When he woke in the morning, he remembered the Old Woman's promise, and looked under his pillow to see if it was true.
There, sure enough, lay the golden coin shining before him, and the next morning he found another, and the same every morning when he got up.
He collected quite a heap of gold, and at last he thought: 'What is the good of all my gold if I stay at home here?
I will go and look about me in the world.'
So he took leave of his parents, shouldered his gun, and started off into the world.
It so happened that one day he came to a thick forest, and when he got through it, he saw a fine castle lying in the plain beyond.
He saw an Old Woman standing in one of the windows looking out, with a beautiful Maiden beside her.
She told the girl how he had got it, and at last said: 'If you don't get it from him, it will be the worse for you.'
I have plenty of money.'
But the real reason was that he had caught sight of the pretty picture at the window.
He went in, and he was kindly received and hospitably treated.
The Old Woman said to the Maiden: 'Now we must get the bird's heart, he will never miss it.'
They concocted a potion, and when it was ready they put it into a goblet.
And the Maiden took it to him, and said: 'Now, my beloved, you must drink to me.'
The Maiden took it away secretly and swallowed it herself, for the Old Woman wanted to have it.
From this time the Huntsman found no more gold under his pillow; but the coin was always under the Maiden's instead, and the Old Woman used to fetch it away every morning.
But he was so much in love, that he thought of nothing but enjoying himself in the Maiden's company.
The Maiden said: 'Let us leave him that; we have taken away his wealth.'
The Old Woman was very angry, and said: 'A cloak like that is a very wonderful thing, and not often to be got.
Have it I must, and will!'
So she obeyed the Witch's orders, placed herself at the window, and looked sadly out at the distant hills.
'Alas! my love,' was her answer, 'over there are the garnet mountains, where the precious stones are found.
I long for them so much that I grow sad whenever I think of them.
But who could ever get them?
The birds which fly, perhaps; no mortal could ever reach them.'
'If that is all your trouble,' said the Huntsman, 'I can soon lift that load from your heart.'
Then he drew her under his cloak, and in a moment they were both sitting on the mountain.
The precious stones were glittering around them; their hearts rejoiced at the sight of them, and they soon gathered together some of the finest and largest.
So they sat down, and he laid his head on her lap and was soon fast asleep.
As soon as he was asleep, the Maiden slipped the cloak from his shoulders and put it on her own, loaded herself with the precious garnets, and wished herself at home.
He quickly lay down again and pretended to be fast asleep.
The first one, as he came along, stumbled against him, and said: 'What kind of earthworm is this?'
The second said: 'Tread on him and kill him.'
But the third said: 'It isn't worth the trouble.
Then they passed on, and as soon as they were gone, the Huntsman, who had heard all they said, got up and climbed up to the top of the mountain.
After he had sat there for a time, a cloud floated over him, and carried him away.
At first he was swept through the air, but then he was gently lowered and deposited within a large walled garden, upon a soft bed of lettuces and other herbs.
He looked around him and said: 'If only I had something to eat; I am so hungry.
And it will be difficult to get away from here.
I see neither apples nor pears, nor any other fruit, nothing but salad and herbs.'
He picked out a fine head of lettuce, and began eating it.
But he had hardly swallowed a little piece, when he began to feel very odd, and quite changed.
He felt four legs growing, a big head, and two long ears, and he saw to his horror that he was changed into an ass.
As he at the same time felt as hungry as ever, and the juicy salad was now very much to his taste, he went on eating greedily.
After this he lay down and slept off his fatigue.
He put the salad into his wallet, climbed over the wall, and went off to find the castle of his beloved.
After wandering about for a few days, he was fortunate enough to find it.
'I am so tired,' he said; 'I cannot go any further.'
The Witch said: 'Who are you, countryman, and what do you want?'
I have been lucky enough to find it, and I carry it with me.
But the sun is so burning, that I am afraid the tender plant will be withered, and I don't know if I shall be able to take it any further.'
When the Old Witch heard about the rare salad, she felt a great desire to have some, and said: 'Good countryman, let me try the wonderful salad!'
'I have two heads with me, and you shall have one.' So saying, he opened his sack, and handed her the bad one.
The Witch had no suspicions, and her mouth so watered for the new dish, that she went to the kitchen herself to prepare it.
When it was ready, she could not wait till it was put upon the table, but put a few leaves into her mouth at once.
Hardly had she swallowed them, when she lost her human shape, and ran out into the courtyard, as an old she ass.
Then the Maid came into the kitchen, saw the salad standing ready, and was about to put it on the table.
But on the way the fancy seized her to taste it, according to her usual habit, and she ate a few leaves.
The power of the salad at once became apparent, because she also turned into an ass, and ran out into the yard to join the Old Witch, while the dish of salad fell to the ground.
In the meantime the messenger was sitting with the beautiful Maiden, and as no one appeared with the salad, she also was seized with a desire to taste it, and said: 'I don't know what has become of the salad.'
But the Huntsman thought: 'The plant must have done its work,' and said: 'I will go into the kitchen and see.'
'This is all right!' he said; 'two of them are done for.'
Then he picked up the leaves, put them on a dish, and took them to the Maiden.
'I am bringing the precious food to you myself,' said he, 'so that you may not have to wait any longer.'
She ate some, and, like the others, was immediately changed into an ass, and ran out to them in the yard.
When the Huntsman had washed his face so that the transformed creatures might know him, he went into the courtyard, and said: 'Now, you shall be paid for your treachery.'
He tied them all together with a rope, and drove them along till he came to a mill.
He tapped at the window, and the Miller put his head out and asked what he wanted.
'I have three bad animals here,' he said, 'that I want to get rid of. If you will take them and feed them, and treat them as I wish, I will pay you what you like to ask.'
'Why not?' said the Miller.
'How do you want them treated?'
The Huntsman said he wanted the old she ass (the Witch) to be well beaten three times a day and fed once.
The younger one, which was the Maid, beaten once and fed three times.
The youngest of all, who was the beautiful Maiden, was to be fed three times, and not beaten at all; he could not find it in his heart to have her beaten.
Then he went back to the castle and found everything he wanted in it.
A few days later the Miller came and told him that the old ass which was to be beaten three times and fed once, was dead.
'The other two,' he said, 'which are to be fed three times, are not dead, but they are pining away, and won't last long.'
When they came he gave them some of the other salad to eat, so that they took their human shapes again.
My mother forced me to do it.
It was against my own will, for I love you dearly.
But he said: 'Keep it; it will be all the same, as I will take you to be my own true wife.'
CHAPTER thirty four
THE ODDS AND ENDS
Of Doctor Walker's sensational escape that night to South America, of the recovery of over a million dollars in cash and securities in the safe from the chimney room-the papers have kept the public well informed.
Of my share in discovering the secret chamber they have been singularly silent.
The inner history has never been told.
When Halsey learned the truth, he insisted on going the next morning, weak as he was, to Louise, and by night she was at Sunnyside, under Gertrude's particular care, while her mother had gone to Barbara Fitzhugh's.
What Halsey said to mrs Armstrong I never knew, but that he was considerate and chivalrous I feel confident.
He and Louise had no conversation together until that night.
Gertrude and Alex-I mean Jack-had gone for a walk, although it was nine o'clock, and anybody but a pair of young geese would have known that dew was falling, and that it is next to impossible to get rid of a summer cold.
At half after nine, growing weary of my own company, I went downstairs to find the young people.
At the door of the living room I paused. Gertrude and Jack had returned and were there, sitting together on a divan, with only one lamp lighted.
They did not see or hear me, and I beat a hasty retreat to the library.
But here again I was driven back. Louise was sitting in a deep chair, looking the happiest I had ever seen her, with Halsey on the arm of the chair, holding her close.
It was no place for an elderly spinster.
I retired to my upstairs sitting room and got out Eliza Klinefelter's lavender slippers.
Ah, well, the foster motherhood would soon have to be put away in camphor again.
The next day, by degrees, I got the whole story.
Paul Armstrong had a besetting evil-the love of money.
Common enough, but he loved money, not for what it would buy, but for its own sake. An examination of the books showed no irregularities in the past year since john had been cashier, but before that, in the time of Anderson, the old cashier, who had died, much strange juggling had been done with the records.
The railroad in New Mexico had apparently drained the banker's private fortune, and he determined to retrieve it by one stroke.
This was nothing less than the looting of the bank's securities, turning them into money, and making his escape.
But the law has long arms.
Paul Armstrong evidently studied the situation carefully.
Just as the only good Indian is a dead Indian, so the only safe defaulter is a dead defaulter.
He decided to die, to all appearances, and when the hue and cry subsided, he would be able to enjoy his money almost anywhere he wished.
The first necessity was an accomplice.
The connivance of Doctor Walker was suggested by his love for Louise.
The man was unscrupulous, and with the girl as a bait, Paul Armstrong soon had him fast.
The plan was apparently the acme of simplicity: a small town in the west, an attack of heart disease, a body from a medical college dissecting room shipped in a trunk to Doctor Walker by a colleague in San Francisco, and palmed off for the supposed dead banker.
What was simpler?
The woman, Nina Carrington, was the cog that slipped.
What she only suspected, what she really knew, we never learned.
She was a chambermaid in the hotel at C-, and it was evidently her intention to blackmail Doctor Walker.
He denied the whole thing, and she went to Halsey.
It was this that had taken Halsey to the doctor the night he disappeared.
He accused the doctor of the deception, and, crossing the lawn, had said something cruel to Louise.
Then, furious at her apparent connivance, he had started for the station.
Doctor Walker and Paul Armstrong-the latter still lame where I had shot him-hurried across to the embankment, certain only of one thing.
Halsey must not tell the detective what he suspected until the money had been removed from the chimney room.
They stepped into the road in front of the car to stop it, and fate played into their hands.
The car struck the train, and they had only to dispose of the unconscious figure in the road.
This they did as I have told.
For three days Halsey lay in the box car, tied hand and foot, suffering tortures of thirst, delirious at times, and discovered by a tramp at Johnsville only in time to save his life.
To go back to Paul Armstrong.
At the last moment his plans had been frustrated.
Sunnyside, with its hoard in the chimney room, had been rented without his knowledge!
Attempts to dislodge me having failed, he was driven to breaking into his own house.
The ladder in the chute, the burning of the stable and the entrance through the card room window-all were in the course of a desperate attempt to get into the chimney room.
Louise and her mother had, from the first, been the great stumbling blocks.
The plan had been to send Louise away until it was too late for her to interfere, but she came back to the hotel at C- just at the wrong time.
There was a terrible scene.
The girl was told that something of the kind was necessary, that the bank was about to close and her stepfather would either avoid arrest and disgrace in this way, or kill himself.
She had no love for her stepfather, but her devotion to her mother was entire, self sacrificing.
Forced into acquiescence by her mother's appeals, overwhelmed by the situation, the girl consented and fled.
From somewhere in Colorado she sent an anonymous telegram to Jack Bailey at the Traders' Bank.
Trapped as she was, she did not want to see an innocent man arrested.
The telegram, received on Thursday, had sent the cashier to the bank that night in a frenzy.
Louise arrived at Sunnyside and found the house rented.
Not knowing what to do, she sent for Arnold at the Greenwood Club, and told him a little, not all.
She told him that there was something wrong, and that the bank was about to close.
That his father was responsible.
Of the conspiracy she said nothing.
To her surprise, Arnold already knew, through Bailey that night, that things were not right.
Moreover, he suspected what Louise did not, that the money was hidden at Sunnyside. He had a scrap of paper that indicated a concealed room somewhere.
His inherited cupidity was aroused.
Bailey was almost desperate.
He decided to go west and find Paul Armstrong, and to force him to disgorge.
But the catastrophe at the bank occurred sooner than he had expected.
On the moment of starting west, at Andrews Station, where mr Jamieson had located the car, he read that the bank had closed, and, going back, surrendered himself.
john Bailey had known Paul Armstrong intimately.
He did not believe that the money was gone; in fact, it was hardly possible in the interval since the securities had been taken.
Where was it?
And from some chance remark let fall some months earlier by Arnold Armstrong at a dinner, Bailey felt sure there was a hidden room at Sunnyside.
His smooth upper lip had been sufficient disguise, with his change of clothes, and a hair cut by a country barber.
So it was Alex, Jack Bailey, who had been our ghost.
Not only had he alarmed-Louise and himself, he admitted-on the circular staircase, but he had dug the hole in the trunk room wall, and later sent Eliza into hysteria.
The note Liddy had found in Gertrude's scrap basket was from him, and it was he who had startled me into unconsciousness by the clothes chute, and, with Gertrude's help, had carried me to Louise's room.
Gertrude, I learned, had watched all night beside me, in an extremity of anxiety about me.
That old Thomas had seen his master, and thought he had seen the Sunnyside ghost, there could be no doubt.
Of that story of Thomas', about seeing Jack Bailey in the footpath between the club and Sunnyside, the night Liddy and I heard the noise on the circular staircase-that, too, was right.
On the night before Arnold Armstrong was murdered, Jack Bailey had made his first attempt to search for the secret room.
He secured Arnold's keys from his room at the club and got into the house, armed with a golf stick for sounding the walls.
He ran against the hamper at the head of the stairs, caught his cuff link in it, and dropped the golf stick with a crash.
He was glad enough to get away without an alarm being raised, and he took the "owl" train to town.
The oddest thing to me was that mr Jamieson had known for some time that Alex was Jack Bailey.
But the face of the pseudo gardener was very queer indeed, when that night, in the card room, the detective turned to him and said:
"How long are you and I going to play our little comedy, mr
BAILEY?"
Well, it is all over now.
Paul Armstrong rests in Casanova churchyard, and this time there is no mistake.
I went to the funeral, because I wanted to be sure he was really buried, and I looked at the step of the shaft where I had sat that night, and wondered if it was all real. Sunnyside is for sale-no, I shall not buy it.
Little Lucien Armstrong is living with his step grandmother, and she is recovering gradually from troubles that had extended over the entire period of her second marriage.
Thomas, the fourth victim of the conspiracy, is buried on the hill.
With Nina Carrington, five lives were sacrificed in the course of this grim conspiracy.
There will be two weddings before long, and Liddy has asked for my heliotrope poplin to wear to the church.
I knew she would.
She has wanted it for three years, and she was quite ugly the time I spilled coffee on it.
We are very quiet, just the two of us.
Liddy still clings to her ghost theory, and points to my wet and muddy boots in the trunk room as proof.
I am gray, I admit, but I haven't felt as well in a dozen years.
Sometimes, when I am bored, I ring for Liddy, and we talk things over.
When Warner married Rosie, Liddy sniffed and said what I took for faithfulness in Rosie had been nothing but mawkishness. I have not yet outlived Liddy's contempt because I gave them silver knives and forks as a wedding gift.
So we sit and talk, and sometimes Liddy threatens to leave, and often I discharge her, but we stay together somehow.
I am talking of renting a house next year, and Liddy says to be sure there is no ghost.
To be perfectly frank, I never really lived until that summer.
Time has passed since I began this story.
My neighbors are packing up for another summer.
These preparations are not volatile, so that there is not much fear of lung trouble.
In chronic cases death occurs from stricture of the oesophagus causing starvation.
Inflammation may have extended to larynx.
The salts give a yellow precipitate with platinum chloride, and a white precipitate with tartaric acid.
They are not dissipated by heat, and give a violet colour to the deoxidizing flame of the blowpipe.
Stains on dark clothing are red or brown.
Do not use the stomach tube.
The glottis may be inflamed, and if there is danger of asphyxia, tracheotomy may have to be performed.
It is also found as 'washing soda.'
The urgent symptoms are those of suffocation.
Inhalation of the fumes of strong ammonia may lead to death from capillary bronchitis or broncho pneumonia.
Death may result from inflammation of the larynx and lungs.
When swallowed in solution, the symptoms are similar to those of soda and potash.
Other treatment according to symptoms.
sixteen.--INORGANIC IRRITANTS
seventeen.--CHLORATE OF POTASSIUM, etc
Lungs congested.
Burnt on platinum foil, it gives a green colour to the flame.
The salts of barium are also cardiac poisons.
Stomach may be perforated.
nineteen.--IODINE-IODIDE OF POTASSIUM
It strikes blue with solution of starch, and stains the skin and intestines yellowish brown.
Liquid preparations, as the liniment or tincture, may be taken accidentally or suicidally.
Chronic poisoning (iodism) is characterized by coryza, salivation, and lachrymation, frontal headache, loss of appetite, marked mental depression, acne of the face and chest, and a petechial eruption on the limbs.
The iodine may be obtained on evaporation as a sublimate.
It will be recognized by the blue colour which it gives with starch.
It may also occur as the amorphous non poisonous variety, a red opaque infusible substance, insoluble in carbon disulphide.
Ordinary phosphorus is soluble in oil, alcohol, ether, chloroform, and carbon disulphide; insoluble in water. It is much used in rat poisons, made into a paste with flour, sugar, fat, and Prussian blue.
Yellow phosphorus is not allowed to be used in the manufacture of lucifer matches, and the importation of such is prohibited.
In 'safety' matches the amorphous phosphorus is on the box.
The earliest signs are a garlicky taste in the mouth and pain in the throat and stomach.
Vomited matter luminous in the dark, bile stained or bloody, with garlic like odour.
Great prostration, diarrhoea, with bloody stools.
Harsh, dry, yellow skin, purpuric spots with ecchymoses under the skin and mucous membranes, retention or suppression of urine, delirium, convulsions, coma, and death.
The inhalation of the fumes of phosphorus, as in making vermin killers, etc, gives rise to 'phossy jaw.'
Oil should not be given.
Sulphate and carbonate of magnesium, mucilaginous drinks.
Sulphate of copper is a valuable antidote, both as an emetic and as forming an insoluble compound with phosphorus.
Introduce the suspected material into a retort.
Acidulate with sulphuric acid to fix any ammonia present.
Distil in the dark, through a glass tube kept cool by a stream of water.
MY BLUE GUM GROVE.
The grove served a more utilitarian purpose, however.
The eucalyptus is an Australian tree, with narrow straight hanging leaves, and its rapid growth makes it useful for firewood.
In the photograph of a eucalyptus avenue near Los Angeles, the row of trees on the right have been cut near the ground and the branching trunks are the consequence.
My eucalyptus or blue gum grove was down near the big sycamore, and opposite the bare knoll where Romulus and the burrowing owls had their nightly battles.
On one side of it was a rustling cornfield always pleasant to look at.
After the bare yellow stubble and all the reds and browns of a California summer landscape, its rich dark green color and its stanch, strong stalks made it seem a very plain honest sort of field, and its greenness was most grateful to eyes unused to the bright colors and strong lights of California.
Opposite the little grove, in a small house perched on a hill, an old sea captain lived alone.
When I stopped to ask if he had seen anything noteworthy happen at the grove, he complained that it shut off his view and kept away the breeze from the ocean!
I was too much taken by surprise to apologize for my trees, but felt reproached; unwittingly I had destroyed the old captain's choicest pleasure.
It was always a relief to leave the hot beating sun and the glare of the yellow fields and enter the cool shade of the quiet grove.
I could let down the fence and put it up behind me; thus having my small forest all to myself; and used to enjoy riding up and down the fragrant blue avenues.
The eucalyptus trees, although thirty or forty feet high, were lithe and slender; some of them could be spanned by the hands.
The rows were planted ten feet apart, but the long branches interlaced, so one had to be on the alert, in riding down the lines, to bend low on the saddle or push aside the branches that obstructed the way.
The limbs were so slender and flexible that a touch was enough to bend back a green gate fifteen to twenty feet long, and Billy often pushed a branch aside with his nose.
In places, fallen trees barred our path, but Billy used to step carefully over them.
The eucalyptus trees change very curiously as they grow old.
When young they are covered with branches low to the ground, and their aromatic tender leaves are light bluish green; afterwards they lose their lower branches, while their leaves become stiff and sickle shaped, dull green and almost odorless.
The same changes are seen in the bark: first the trunks are smooth and green; then they are hung with shaggy shreds of bark; this in turn drops off so that the old trees are smooth again. Some of the young shoots have almost white stems, and their leaves have a pinkish tinge.
Indeed, a young blue gum is as pretty a sight as one often sees; it is a tree of exquisite delicacy of coloring.
Mountain Billy and I both liked to wander among the blue gums.
Billy liked it, perhaps, for association's sake, for we had ridden through the eucalyptus at his home in northern California.
I too had pleasant memories of the northern gums, but my first interest was in finding out who lived in my little woods.
A dog had once been seen driving a coyote wolf out of it, but that was merely in passing.
I did not expect to meet wolves there.
Though in the grove a great deal, I never ran into but one cobweb, and was conscious of the pleasant freedom from falling caterpillars.
Moreover, I never saw a lizard in the blue gums, though dozens of them were to be seen about the oaks and in the brush.
It was a surprise to find so many feathered folks living in the eucalyptus, and I took a personal interest in each one of the inhabitants.
The first time we started to go up and down the avenues we scared up a pair of turtle doves, beautiful, delicately tinted gentle creatures, fit tenants of the lovely grove.
They did not know my friendly interest in them, and flew to the ground trailing and trying to decoy me away in such a marked manner that when we passed a young dove a few yards farther on, it was easy to put two and two together.
There was one nest with a roof of shaggy bark, and I wondered if the birds thought it would be pleasant to live under a roof, or whether the bark had fallen down on them after they built.
I could get no trace of the owners of the nest, and it troubled me, not liking to have any little homes in my wood that I did not know all about.
As we went down one aisle, a big bird went blundering out ahead of us, probably an owl, for afterwards we stumbled on a skeleton and feathers of one of the family.
In one of the trees we came to an enormous nest made of the unusual materials that are sometimes chosen by that strange bird, the road runner.
To make sure about the nest, I spoke to my neighbor ranchman, and he told me that when he had been milking during the spring he had often seen the birds come out of the blue gums, and had also seen them perching there on the trees.
How exasperating!
If I had only come earlier!
Now they had gone, and my chance of a nest study was lost.
But my doll was not stuffed with sawdust, for all of that.
There was still much to enjoy, for a mourning dove flew from her nest of twigs almost over Billy's head, and it made me quite happy to know that the gentle bird was brooding her eggs in my woods.
Then it was delightful to see a lazuli bunting on her nest down another aisle.
It seemed odd, for there was her little cousin nesting out in the weeds in the bright sun, while she was raising her brood in the shady forest.
The two nests were as unlike as the sites.
The bird outside had used dull green weeds, while this one used beautiful shining oak stems.
I thought the pretty bird would surely be safe here, but one day when I called, expecting to see a growing family, I was shocked to find a pathetic little skeleton in the nest.
One afternoon in riding down the rows, I came face to face with two mites of hummingbirds seated on a branch.
Their grayish green suits toned in with the color of the blue gums.
It was a surprise when one of them turned to the other and fed it-the mother hummer was small enough to be taken for a nestling!
She sat beside her son and fed him in the conventional way, by plunging her bill down his open mouth.
When she had flown off, he stretched his wings, whirred them as if for practice, and then moved his bill as if still tasting the dainty he had had for supper.
He sat very unconcernedly on a low branch right out in the middle of the road, but Billy did not run over him.
One builder was the one the photographer was fortunate enough to catch brooding; her nest, the one so charmingly placed on a light blue branch between two straight spreading leaves, like the knot between two bows of stiff ribbon.
The second nest was on a drooping branch, and, to make it stand level, was deepened on the down side of the limb, making it the highest hummingbird's nest I had ever seen.
How one little home does make a place habitable!
From a bare silent woods it becomes a dwelling place. Everything seemed to centre around this little nest, then the only one in the grove; the tiny pinch of down became the most important thing in the woods.
It was the castle which the trees surrounded.
The hummer did not return my interest.
I would dismount and sit on the ground, leaning against a blue gum, while Billy stood by, in a bower of green leaves, with ears pricked forward thoughtfully, and a dreamy look of satisfaction in his eyes. Hummingbirds are such dainty things.
Once when this one alighted on the rim of her nest she whirred herself right down inside.
Soon she began to act so strangely for a brooding bird that, when she flew, I went to feel in the nest.
The tips of my fingers touched what felt like round balls, but, not satisfied, I pulled down the bough and found one round ball and one mite of a gray back with microscopic yellow hairs on each side of the spine.
The whole tiny body seemed to throb with its heart beats.
Often, while watching the nest, my thoughts wandered away to the grove itself.
The brown earth between the rows was barred by alternate lines of sunlight and shadow, and the vista of each avenue ended in blue sky. Sometimes cool ocean breezes would penetrate the forest.
Mourning doves cooed, and the sweet notes of yellow birds filled the sunny grove with suggestions of happiness.
A yellow butterfly wandered down the blue aisles.
Such a secure retreat!
I returned to it again and again, coming in out of the hot yellow world and closing behind me the doors of my 'rest house,' for the little wood had come to seem like a cool wayside chapel, a place of peace.
At midnight the cafe was crowded.
He spoke disrespectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his napkin.
Zip!
Presto!
"I know an Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a goat herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food puzzle competition.
"But it also seems that you would decry patriotism."
"A relic of the stone age," declared Coglan, warmly.
Those ideas don't suit me.
He was my discovery and I believed in him.
With the whole world for his-
Flowers and summer resort agents were blowing; the air and answers to Lawson were growing milder; hand organs, fountains and pinochle were playing everywhere.
At nine mr McCaskey came.
"Pig's face, is it?" said mrs McCaskey, and hurled a stewpan full of bacon and turnips at her lord.
He knew what should follow the entree.
On the table was a roast sirloin of pork, garnished with shamrocks.
Let cheap Bohemians consider coffee the end, if they would.
Finger bowls were not beyond the compass of his experience.
They were not to be had in the Pension Murphy; but their equivalent was at hand.
mrs McCaskey dodged in time.
But a loud, wailing scream downstairs caused both her and mr McCaskey to pause in a sort of involuntary armistice.
I will not.
Married folks they are; and few pleasures they have.
'Twill not last long.
Sure, they'll have to borrow more dishes to keep it up with."
"'tis probably the cat," said Policeman Cleary, and walked hastily in the other direction.
Bathos, truly; but mr Toomey sat down at the side of Miss Purdy, millinery, and their hands came together in sympathy.
The two old maids, Misses Walsh, who complained every day about the noise in the halls, inquired immediately if anybody had looked behind the clock.
Major Grigg, who sat by his fat wife on the top step, arose and buttoned his coat.
"I will scour the city." His wife never allowed him out after dark.
I may need carfares."
But it's lost he is, me little boy Mike.
But I've looked the house over from top to cellar, and it's gone he is.
They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava.
But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food.
"Perhaps," said Miss Purdy, "you should.
"'tis Pat he would be named, after me old father in Cantrim."
But he laid it around the nearing shoulder of his wife.
Forget it."
Long they sat thus.
Couriers came and went.
"By the deported snakes!" he exclaimed, "Jawn McCaskey and his lady have been fightin' for an hour and a quarter by the watch.
Her book of books is the Old Testament.
Three nights since when it was pretty late, and the moon very splendid, I saw her passing homewards close to the lake, and shouted down to her, meaning to say 'Good night'; but she thought that I had called her, and came: and sitting out on the top step we talked for hours, she without the yashmak.
We fell to talking about the Bible.
'He knocked him over,' I replied, liking sometimes to use such idioms, with the double object of teaching and perplexing her.
'Over what?' says she.
'I do not complehend!'
'He killed him, then.'
But how did Abel feel when he was killed?
'Well,' said I, 'you have seen bones all around you, and the bones of your mother, and you can feel the bones in your fingers.
'And the men and the butterfly feel the same after they are dead?'
'Ah!... so much the better: for it is possible that you may have to die a great deal sooner than you think.'
'Because they were all such shocking cowards.'
'Oh, not all!
not all!'
With every chance she is at it.)
'Nearly all,' said I: 'tell me one who was not afraid-'
'There was Isaac,' says she: 'when Ablaham laid him on the wood to kill him, he did not jump up and lun to hide.'
This, for several minutes, she did not answer, sitting with her back half toward me, cracking almonds, continually striking one step with the ball of her outstretched foot.
In the clarid gold of the platform I saw her fez and corals reflected as an elongated blotch of florid red.
She turned and drank some wine from the great gold Jarvan goblet which I had brought from the temple of Boro Budor, her head quite covered in by it. Then, the little hairs at her lip corners still wet, says she:
Always the same.
'Robberies of a hundred sorts, murders of ten hundred-'
'Their evil nature-their base souls.'
Her astounding shrewdness!
Right into the inmost heart of a matter does her simple wit seem to pierce!
'Ah, but then,' says she, 'it was not to their bad souls that the vices and climes were due, but only to this question of land.
The clear limelight of her intelligence!
She wriggled on her seat in her effort of argument.
'I am not going to argue the matter,' I said.
And there always must be on an earth where millions of men, with varying degrees of cunning, reside.'
I see it clearly, can't you?
But now, if some more men would spling, they would be taught-'
'There is no telling.
I sometimes feel as if they must, and shall.
'Clodagh,' I said after some minutes-'do you know why I called you Clodagh?'
Tell me?'
'Because once, long ago before the poison cloud, I had a lover called Clodagh: and she was a....'
'Well, by their faces....'
'But there must have been many faces-all alike-'
'Not all alike.
'Still, it must have been vely clever to tell.
'What was a goose like?'
'It was a thing like a butterfly, only larger, and it kept its toes always spread out, with a skin stretched between.'
'Leally?
How caplicious!
And am I like that?--but what were you saying that your lover, Clodagh, was?'
'What, girl?'
'Come, come, don't be a little maniac!' I went.
'Why did she poison?
Had she not enough dates and wine?'
'She had, yes: but she wanted more, more, more, the silly idiot.'
'By the others chiefly.'
'How was it?'
The vices and climes must have begun with those who lacked things, and then the others, always seeing vices and climes alound them, began to do them, too-as when one rotten olive is in a bottle, the whole mass soon becomes collupted: but originally they were not rotten, but only became so.
And all though a little carelessness at the first.
You understand, Clodagh, that originally the earth produced men by a long process, beginning with a very low type of creature, and continually developing it, until at last a man stood up.
Instead, go inside-stop, I will tell you a secret: to day in the wood I picked some musk roses and wound them into a wreath, meaning to give them you for your head when you came to morrow: and it is inside on the pearl tripod in the second room to the left: go, therefore, and put it on, and bring the harp, and play to me, my dear.'
She ran quick with a little cry, and coming again, sat crowned, incarnadine in the blushing depths of the gold.
CHAPTER twenty six.
CHECKMATED.
Constance Channing proceeded to her duties as usual at Lady Augusta Yorke's.
She drew her veil over her face, only to traverse the very short way that conveyed her thither, for the sense of shame was strong upon her; not shame for Arthur, but for Hamish.
It had half broken Constance's heart.
There are times in our every day lives when all things seem to wear a depressing aspect, turn which way we will.
They were wearing it that day to Constance.
Apart from home troubles, she felt particularly discouraged in the educational task she had undertaken.
You heard the promise made to her by Caroline Yorke, to be up and ready for her every morning at seven.
Caroline kept it for two mornings and then failed. This morning and the previous morning Constance had been there at seven, and returned home without seeing either of the children.
Both were ready for her when she entered now.
"How am I to deal with you?" she said to Caroline, in a sad but affectionate tone.
"I do not wish to force you to obey me; I would prefer that you should do it cheerfully."
"It is tiresome to get up early," responded Caroline.
"I can't wake when Martha comes."
"Whether Martha goes to you at seven, or at eight, or at nine, she has the same trouble to get you up."
"I don't see any good in getting up early," cried Caroline.
"Do you see any good in acquiring good habits, instead of bad ones?" asked Constance.
We are ladies. It's only the poor who need get up at unreasonable hours-those who have their living to earn."
"Is it only the poor who are accountable to God for waste of time, Caroline?"
Caroline paused.
She did not like to give up her argument.
I don't think real ladies ever do it."
"You think 'real ladies' wait until the sun has been up a few hours and warmed the earth for them?"
But it was not spoken very readily, for she had a suspicion that Miss Channing was laughing at her.
Caroline pouted.
"Don't you call Colonel Jolliffe's daughters ladies, Miss Channing?"
"Yes-in position."
"That's where we went yesterday, you know.
Mary Jolliffe says she never gets up until half past eight, and that it is not lady like to get up earlier.
Real ladies don't, Miss Channing."
"My dear, shall I relate to you an anecdote that I have heard?"
"Oh, yes!" replied Caroline, her listless mood changing to animation; anecdotes, or anything of that desultory kind, being far more acceptable to the young lady than lessons.
"Before I begin, will you tell me whether you condescend to admit that our good Queen is a 'real lady'?"
"Oh, Miss Channing, now you are laughing at me!
As if any one, in all England, could be so great a lady as the Queen."
"Very good.
When she was a little girl, a child of her own age, the daughter of one of the nobility, was brought to Kensington Palace to spend the day with her.
In talking together, the Princess Victoria mentioned something she had seen when out of doors that morning at seven o'clock.
'At seven o'clock!' exclaimed the young visitor; 'how early that is to be abroad!
I never get out of bed until eight.
We may be thankful to her admirable mother for making her in that, as in many other things, a pattern to us."
"Is it a true anecdote, Miss Channing?"
"It was related to my mother, many years ago, by a lady who was, at that time, very much at Kensington Palace.
I think there is little doubt of its truth.
One fact we all know, Caroline: the Queen retains her early habits, and implants them in her children.
What do you suppose would be her Majesty's surprise, were one of her daughters-say, the Princess Helena, or the Princess Louise-to decline to rise early for their morning studies with their governess, Miss Hildyard, on the plea that it was not 'lady like'?"
Caroline's objection appeared to be melting away under her.
"But it is a dreadful plague," she grumbled, "to be obliged to get up from one's nice warm bed, for the sake of some horrid old lessons!"
"Put that notion away from you at once and for ever, Caroline; there cannot be a more false one.
The higher we go in the scale of life, the more onerous become our duties in this world, and the greater is our responsibility to God.
He to whom five talents were intrusted, did not make them other five by wasting his days in idleness.
"I wish mamma had trained me to it when I was a child, as the Duchess of Kent trained the princess!
I might have learned to like it by this time."
"Long before this," said Constance.
"Do you remember the good old saying, 'Do what you ought, that you may do what you like'?
Habit is second nature.
Were I told that I might lie in bed every morning until nine or ten o'clock, as a great favour, I should consider it a great punishment."
"But I have not been trained to get up, Miss Channing; and it is nothing short of punishment to me to do so."
"The punishment of self denial we all have to bear, Caroline.
But I can tell you what will take away half its sting."
"What?" asked Caroline, eagerly.
Constance bent towards her.
"Jesus Christ said, 'If any will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.' When once we learn HOW to take it up cheerfully, bravely, for His sake, looking to Him to be helped, the sting is gone.
'No cross, no crown,' you know, my children."
"No cross, no crown!" Constance had sufficient cross to carry just then.
In the course of the morning Lady Augusta came into the room boisterously, her manner indicative of great surprise.
Some visitors have just called in upon me, and they say the town is ringing with the news."
It was one of the first of Constance Channing's bitter pills; they were to be her portion for many a day.
Her heart fluttered, her cheek varied, and her answer to Lady Augusta Yorke was low and timid.
"It is true that he was arrested yesterday on suspicion."
"What a shocking thing!
Is he in prison?"
"Oh no"
"Did he take the note?"
The question pained Constance worse than all.
"He did not take it," she replied, in a clear, soft tone.
"To those who know Arthur well, it would be impossible to think so."
"But he was before the magistrates yesterday, I hear, and is going up again to day."
"Yes, that is so."
"And Roland could not open his lips to tell me of this when I came home last night!" grumbled my lady.
"We were late, and he was the only one up; Gerald and Tod were in bed.
I shall ask him why he did not.
But, Miss Channing, this must be a dreadful blow for you all?"
"It would be far worse, Lady Augusta, if we believed him guilty," she replied from her aching heart.
"Oh, dear!
"It would be quite a dangerous thing, you know, for my Roland to be in the same office."
"Be at ease, Lady Augusta," returned Constance, with a tinge of irony she could not wholly suppress.
"Your son will incur no harm from the companionship of Arthur."
"What does Hamish say?--handsome Hamish!
He does not deserve that such a blow should come to him."
Constance felt her colour deepen.
She bent her face over the exercise she was correcting.
"Is he likely to be cleared of the charge?" perseveringly resumed Lady Augusta.
"Not by actual proof, I fear," answered Constance, pressing her hand upon her brow as she remembered that he could only be proved innocent by another's being proved guilty.
"The note seems to have been lost in so very mysterious a manner, that positive proof of his innocence will be difficult."
"Well, it is a dreadful thing!" concluded Lady Augusta.
Meanwhile, at the very moment her ladyship was speaking, the magistrates were in the town hall in full conclave-the case before them.
The news had spread-had excited interest far and wide; the bench was crowded, and the court was one dense sea of heads.
Arthur appeared, escorted by his brother Hamish and by Roland Yorke. Roland was in high feather, throwing his haughty glances everywhere, for he had an inkling of what was to be the termination of the affair, and did not conceal his triumph.
mr Galloway also was of their party.
mr Galloway was the first witness put forth by mr Butterby.
The latter gentleman was in high feather also, believing he saw his way clear to a triumphant conviction.
mr Galloway was questioned; and for some minutes it all went on swimmingly.
"On the afternoon of the loss, before you closed your letter, who were in your office?"
"My clerks-Roland Yorke and Arthur Channing."
"They saw the letter, I believe?"
"They did."
"And the bank note?"
"Most probably."
"It was the prisoner, Arthur Channing, who fetched the bank note from your private room to the other?
Did he see you put it into the letter?"
"I cannot say."
A halt.
"But he was in full possession of his eyes just then?"
"No doubt he was."
"Then what should hinder his seeing you put the note into the letter?"
"I will not swear that I put the note into the letter."
The magistrates pricked up their ears.
mr Butterby pricked up his, and looked at the witness.
"What do you say?"
"I will not swear that I put the bank note inside the letter," deliberately repeated mr Galloway.
"Not swear that you put the bank note into the letter?
What is it that you mean?"
"The meaning is plain enough," replied mr Galloway, calmly.
"Must I repeat it for the third time?
I will not swear that I put the note into the letter."
"I will not swear it," reiterated the witness.
"I have been checkmated," ejaculated the angry Butterby.
"Who said our office was going to be put down for a thief's!" uttered Roland.
"Old Galloway's a trump!
Here's your place, Arthur."
Arthur did not take it.
He had seen from the window the approach of mr Galloway, and delicacy prevented his assuming his old post until bade to do so.
mr Galloway came in, and motioned him into his own room.
"Arthur Channing," he said, "I have acted leniently in this unpleasant matter, for your father's sake; but, from my very heart, I believe you to be guilty."
"I thank you, sir," Arthur said, "for that and all other kindness.
I am not as guilty as you think me.
Do you wish me to leave?"
"If you can give me no better assurance of your innocence-if you can give me no explanation of the peculiar and most unsatisfactory manner in which you have met the charge-yes.
To give this explanation was impossible; neither dared Arthur assert more emphatically his innocence.
Once convince mr Galloway that he was not the guilty party, and that gentleman would forthwith issue fresh instructions to Butterby for the further investigation of the affair: of this Arthur felt convinced.
He could only be silent and remain under the stigma.
"Then-I had better-you would wish me, perhaps-to go at once?" hesitated Arthur.
"Yes," shortly replied mr Galloway.
He spoke a word of farewell, which mr Galloway replied to by a nod, and went into the front office.
There he began to collect together certain trifles that belonged to him.
"What's that for?" asked Roland Yorke.
"Going!" roared Roland, jumping to his feet, and dashing down his pen full of ink, with little regard to the deed he was copying.
"Galloway has never turned you off!"
"Yes, he has."
"Then I'll go too!" thundered Roland, who, truth to say, had flown into an uncontrollable passion, startling Jenkins and arousing mr Galloway. "I'll not stop in a place where that sort of injustice goes on!
He'll be turning me out next!
Catch me stopping for it!"
"Are you taken crazy, mr Roland Yorke?"
The question proceeded from his master, who came forth to make it. Roland turned to him, his temper unsubdued, and his colour rising.
"Channing never took the money, sir!
It is not just to turn him away."
"Did you help him to take it, pray, that you identify yourself with the affair so persistently and violently?" demanded mr Galloway, in a cynical tone.
And Roland answered with a hot and haughty word.
"If you cannot attend to your business a little better, you will get your dismissal from me; you won't require to dismiss yourself," said mr Galloway.
"Sit down, sir, and go on with your work."
"And that's all the thanks a fellow gets for taking up a cause of oppression!" muttered mr Roland Yorke, as he sullenly resumed his place at the desk.
CHAPTER forty.
mr
KETCH'S EVENING VISIT.
It were surely a breach of politeness on our part not to attend mr Ketch in his impromptu evening visit!
He shuffled along at the very top of his speed, his mouth watering, while the delicious odour of tripe and onions appeared to be borne on the air to his olfactory nerves: so strong is the force of fancy.
Arrived at his destination, he found the shop closed.
mr Ketch seized the knocker on the shop door-there was no other entrance to the house-and brought it down with a force that shook the first floor sitting room, and startled mr Harper, the lay clerk, almost out of his armchair, as he sat before the fire.
"Be I in time?" demanded Ketch, his voice shaking.
"In time for what?" responded the girl.
"Why, for supper," said Ketch, penetrating into the shop, which was lighted by a candle that stood on the counter, the one the girl had brought in her hand.
"Old Jenkins ain't here," said she.
"You had better go into the parlour, if you're come to supper."
Ketch went down the shop, sniffing curiously.
Sharp as fancy is, he could not say that he was regaled with the scent of onions, but he supposed the saucepan lid might be on.
Ketch entered the parlour, and sat down.
There was a fire in the grate, but no light, and there were not, so far as Ketch could see, any preparations yet for the entertainment.
"They're going to have it downstairs in the kitchen," soliloquized he.
"And that's a sight more comfortabler.
She's gone out to fetch it, I shouldn't wonder!" he continued, alluding to mrs Jenkins, and sniffing again strongly, but without result.
"That's right! she won't let 'em serve her with short onions, she won't; she has a tongue of her own.
Such a thing as a run on the delicacy had occurred more than once, to Ketch's certain knowledge, and tardy customers had been sent away disappointed, to wait in longing anticipations for the next tripe night.
He went into a cold perspiration at the bare idea.
And where was old Jenkins, all this time, that he had not come in?
And where was Joe?
A pretty thing to invite a gentleman out to an impromptu supper, and serve him in this way!
What could they mean by it?
He groped his way round the corner of the shop to where lay the kitchen stairs, whose position he pretty well knew, and called.
"Here, Sally, Betty-whatever your name is-ain't there nobody at home?"
The girl heard, and came forth, the same candle in hand.
"Who be you calling to, I'd like to know?
My name's Lidyar, if you please."
"Gone out for what tripe?" asked the girl.
"What be you talking of?"
"The tripe for supper," said Ketch.
"There ain't no tripe for supper," replied she.
"There is tripe for supper," persisted Ketch.
"And me and old Jenkins are going to have some of it.
There's tripe and onions."
The girl shook her head.
"I dun know nothing about it.
Missis is upstairs, fixing the mustard."
Oh come! this gave a promise of something.
Old Ketch thought mustard the greatest condiment that tripe could be accompanied by, in conjunction with onions.
But she must have been a long time "fixing" the mustard; whatever that might mean.
His spirits dropped again, and he grew rather exasperated.
"Go up and ask your missis how long I be to wait?" he growled.
The girl, possibly feeling a little curiosity herself, came up with her candle.
"He's gone to bed, and missis is putting him a plaster on his chest."
The words fell as ice on old Ketch.
"A mustard plaster?" shrieked he.
"What else but a mustard plaster!" she retorted.
"Did you think it was a pitch?
There's a fire lighted in his room, and she's making it there."
Nothing more certain.
Poor Jenkins, who had coughed more than usual the last two days, perhaps from the wet weather, and whose chest in consequence was very painful, had been ordered to bed this night by his wife when tea was over.
She had gone up herself, as soon as her shop was shut, to administer a mustard plaster.
Ketch was quite stunned with uncertainty.
A man in bed, with a plaster on his chest, was not likely to invite company to supper.
Before he had seen his way out of the shock, or the girl had done staring at him, mrs Jenkins descended the stairs and joined them, having been attracted by the conversation.
"He says he's come to supper: tripe and onions," said the girl, unceremoniously introducing mr Ketch and the subject to her wondering mistress.
mrs Jenkins, not much more famous for meekness in expressing her opinions than was Ketch, turned her gaze upon that gentleman.
"Why, I have come for supper, that's what I have come for," shrieked Ketch, trembling.
"Jenkins invited me to supper; tripe and onions; and I'd like to know what it all means, and where the supper is."
"You are going into your dotage," said mrs Jenkins, with an amount of scorn so great that it exasperated Ketch as much as the words themselves.
"You'll be wanting a lunatic asylum next.
Tripe and onions! If Jenkins was to hint at such a thing as a plate of tripe coming inside my house, I'd tripe him.
"Is this the way to treat a man?" foamed Ketch, disappointment and hunger driving him almost into the state hinted at by mrs Jenkins.
"Joe Jenkins sends me down a note an hour ago, to come here to supper with his old father, and it was to be tripe and onions!
"Here, Lydia, open the door and let him out," cried mrs Jenkins, waving her hand imperatively towards it.
"And what have you been at with your face again?" continued she, as the candle held by that damsel reflected its light.
"One can't see it for colly.
If I do put you into that mask I have threatened, you won't like it, girl.
Hold your tongue, old Ketch, or I'll call mr Harper down to you.
Write a note!
What else?
He has wrote no note; he has been too suffering the last few hours to think of notes, or of you either.
"I shall be drove one," sobbed Ketch.
"I was promised a treat of-"
There!
Take yourself off.
My goodness, me! disturbing my house with such a crazy errand!" And, taking old Ketch by the shoulders, who was rather feeble and tottering, from lumbago and age, mrs Jenkins politely marshalled him outside, and closed the door upon him.
"Insolent old fellow!" she exclaimed to her husband, to whom she went at once and related the occurrence.
"I wonder what he'll pretend he has next from you?
A note of invitation, indeed!"
"My dear," said Jenkins, revolving the news, and speaking as well as his chest would allow him, "it must have been a trick played him by the young college gentlemen.
We should not be too hard upon the poor old man.
He's not very agreeable or good tempered, I'm afraid it must be allowed; but-I'd not have sent him away without a bit of supper, my dear."
"I dare say you'd not," retorted mrs Jenkins.
"All the world knows you are soft enough for anything.
I have sent him away with a flea in his ear; that's what I have done."
mr Ketch had at length come to the same conclusion: the invitation must be the work of the college gentlemen.
Deceived, betrayed, fainting for supper, done out of the delicious tripe and onions, he leaned against the shutters, and gave vent to a prolonged and piteous howl.
It might have drawn tears from a stone.
In a frame of mind that was not enviable, he turned his steps homeward, clasping his hands upon his empty stomach, and vowing the most intense vengeance upon the college boys.
The occurrence naturally caused him to cast back his thoughts to that other trick the locking him into the cloisters, in which Jenkins had been a fellow victim-and he doubled his fists in impotent anger.
"This comes of their not having been flogged for that!" he groaned.
Engaged in these reflections of gall and bitterness, old Ketch gained his lodge, unlocked it, and entered.
No wonder that he turned his eyes upon the cloister keys, the reminiscence being so strong within him.
But, to say he turned his eyes upon the cloister keys, is a mere figure of speech.
No keys were there.
Ketch stood a statue transfixed, and stared as hard as the flickering blaze from his dying fire would allow him.
Seizing a match box, he struck a light and held it to the hook.
Ketch was no conjuror, and it never occurred to him to suspect that the keys had been removed before his own departure.
"How had them wicked ones got in?" he foamed.
"Had they forced his winder?--had they took a skeleton key to his door?--had they come down the chimbley?
He didn't think they'd mind a little fire.
It was that insolent Bywater!--or that young villain, Tod Yorke!--or that undaunted Tom Channing!--or perhaps all three leagued together!
He examined the window; he examined the door; he cast a glance up the chimney.
Nothing, however, appeared to have been touched or disturbed, and there was no soot on the floor.
Cutting himself a piece of bread and cheese, lamenting at its dryness, and eating it as he went along, he proceeded out again, locking up his lodge as before.
"There ain't a boy in the school but what'll come to be hung!" danced old Ketch in his rage.
He would have preferred not to find the keys; but to go to the head master with a story of their theft.
It was possible, it was just possible that, going, keys in hand, the master might refuse to believe his tale.
Away he hobbled, and arrived at the house of the head master.
The other masters lived at a distance, and Ketch's old legs were aching. What was he to do?
Make his complaint to some one, he was determined upon.
The new senior, Huntley, lived too far off for his lumbago; so he turned his steps to the next senior's, Tom Channing, and demanded to see him.
Tom heard the story, which was given him in detail.
He told Ketch-and with truth-that he knew nothing about it, but would make inquiries in the morning.
Ketch was fain to depart, and Tom returned to the sitting room, and threw himself into a chair in a burst of laughter.
"What is the matter?" they asked.
"The primest lark," returned Tom.
"Some of the fellows have been sending Ketch an invitation to sup at Jenkins's off tripe and onions, and when he arrived there he found it was a hoax, and mrs Jenkins turned him out again.
That's what Master Charley must have gone after."
Hamish turned round.
"Gone after it, there's no doubt," replied Tom.
"Here's his exercise, not finished yet, and his pen left inside the book.
Nature binds all creatures to love their young ones; a hen to preserve her brood will run upon a lion, a hind will fight with a bull, a sow with a bear, a silly sheep with a fox.
Fifty thousand Englishmen lost their lives willingly near Battle Abbey, in defence of their country.
Take this away, and take all pleasure, joy, comfort, happiness, and true content out of the world; 'tis the greatest tie, the surest indenture, strongest band, and, as our modern Maro decides it, is much to be preferred before the rest.
nineteen. perform those duties and exercises, even all the operations of a good Christian.
"Angelical souls, how blessed, how happy should we be, so loving, how might we triumph over the devil, and have another heaven upon earth!"
Poor Lazarus lies howling at his gates for a few crumbs, he only seeks chippings, offals; let him roar and howl, famish, and eat his own flesh, he respects him not.
If we had any sense or feeling of these things, surely we should not go on as we do, in such irregular courses, practise all manner of impieties; our whole carriage would not be so averse from God.
In dealing with the city cults of Sumer and Akkad, consideration must be given to the problems involved by the rival mythological systems. Pantheons not only varied in detail, but were presided over by different supreme gods.
One city's chief deity might be regarded as a secondary deity at another centre.
As has been indicated, a mythological system must have been strongly influenced by city politics.
Reference has been made to the introduction of strange deities by conquerors.
But these were not always imposed upon a community by violent means.
When they came as military allies to assist a city folk against a fierce enemy, they were naturally much admired and praised, honoured by the women and the bards, and rewarded by the rulers.
Ea bani was attracted to Erech by the gift of a fair woman for wife. The poet who lauded him no doubt mirrored public opinion.
Like the giant Alban, the eponymous ancestor of a people who invaded prehistoric Britain, Ea bani appears to have represented in Babylonian folk legends a certain type of foreign settlers in the land.
The teachings and example of Buddha, for instance, revolutionized Brahmanic religion in India.
The priests systematized existing folk beliefs and established an official religion.
The religious attitude of a particular community, therefore, must have been largely dependent on its needs and experiences.
The food supply was a first consideration.
At Eridu, as we have seen, it was assured by devotion to Ea and obedience to his commands as an instructor. Elsewhere it might happen, however, that Ea's gifts were restricted or withheld by an obstructing force-the raging storm god, or the parching, pestilence bringing deity of the sun
It was necessary, therefore, for the people to win the favour of the god or goddess who seemed most powerful, and was accordingly considered to be the greatest in a particular district.
A rain god presided over the destinies of one community, and a god of disease and death over another; a third exalted the war god, no doubt because raids were frequent and the city owed its strength and prosperity to its battles and conquests.
In accounting for the rise of distinctive and rival city deities, we should also consider the influence of divergent conceptions regarding the origin of life in mingled communities.
Each foreign element in a community had its own intellectual life and immemorial tribal traditions, which reflected ancient habits of life and perpetuated the doctrines of eponymous ancestors.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in Babylonia, as in Egypt, there were differences of opinion regarding the origin of life and the particular natural element which represented the vital principle.
One section of the people, who were represented by the worshippers of Ea, appear to have believed that the essence of life was contained in water.
The god of Eridu was the source of the "water of life".
He fertilized parched and sunburnt wastes through rivers and irrigating canals, and conferred upon man the sustaining "food of life".
Even the gods required water and food; they were immortal because they had drunk ambrosia and eaten from the plant of life.
The worship of rivers and wells which prevailed in many countries was connected with the belief that the principle of life was in moisture. In India, water was vitalized by the intoxicating juice of the Soma plant, which inspired priests to utter prophecies and filled their hearts with religious fervour.
Drinking customs had originally a religious significance.
The Teutonic gods also drank this mead, and poets were inspired by it.
Moon and water worship were therefore closely associated; the blood of animals and the sap of plants were vitalized by the water of life and under control of the moon.
Other Egyptian deities, including Osiris and Isis, wept creative tears.
The weeping ceremonies in connection with agricultural rites were no doubt believed to be of magical potency; they encouraged the god to weep creative tears.
Saliva, like tears, had creative and therefore curative qualities; it also expelled and injured demons and brought good luck.
Spitting ceremonies are referred to in the religious literature of Ancient Egypt.
When the Eye of Ra was blinded by Set, Thoth spat in it to restore vision.
Several African tribes spit to make compacts, declare friendship, and to curse.
Theocritus, Sophocles, and Plutarch testify to the ancient Grecian customs of spitting to cure and to curse, and also to bless when children were named.
Pliny has expressed belief in the efficacy of the fasting spittle for curing disease, and referred to the custom of spitting to avert witchcraft. In England, Scotland, and Ireland spitting customs are not yet obsolete.
When the Newcastle colliers held their earliest strikes they made compacts by spitting on a stone.
There are still "spitting stones" in the north of Scotland.
The first money taken each day by fishwives and other dealers is spat upon to ensure increased drawings.
We still call a hasty person a "spitfire", and a calumniator a "spit poison".
The life principle in trees, and c., as we have seen, was believed to have been derived from the tears of deities.
"Among the ancients", wrote Professor Robertson Smith, "blood is generally conceived as the principle or vehicle of life, and so the account often given of sacred waters is that the blood of the deity flows in them.
No doubt this theory was based on the fact that the human liver contains about a sixth of the blood in the body, the largest proportion required by any single organ.
Inspiration was derived by drinking blood as well as by drinking intoxicating liquors-the mead of the gods.
Similar customs were prevalent in Ancient Greece.
But while most Babylonians appear to have believed that the life principle was in blood, some were apparently of opinion that it was in breath-the air of life.
A man died when he ceased to breathe; his spirit, therefore, it was argued, was identical with the atmosphere-the moving wind-and was accordingly derived from the atmospheric or wind god.
When, in the Gilgamesh epic, the hero invokes the dead Ea bani, the ghost rises up like a "breath of wind".
It is possible that this conception was popularized by the Semites. Inspiration was perhaps derived from these deities by burning incense, which, if we follow evidence obtained elsewhere, induced a prophetic trance.
The gods were also invoked by incense.
Their origin is obscure. It is doubtful if their worshippers, like those of the Indian Agni, believed that fire, the "vital spark", was the principle of life which was manifested by bodily heat.
This practice, however, did not obtain among the fire worshippers of Persia, nor, as was once believed, in Sumer or Akkad either.
It destroyed demons, and put to flight the spirits of disease.
Human sacrifices might also have been offered up as burnt offerings.
Abraham, who came from the Sumerian city of Ur, was prepared to sacrifice Isaac, Sarah's first born.
The fire gods of Babylonia never achieved the ascendancy of the Indian Agni; they appear to have resembled him mainly in so far as he was connected with the sun
Nusku, like Agni, was also the "messenger of the gods".
When Merodach or Babylon was exalted as chief god of the pantheon his messages were carried to Ea by Nusku.
He may have therefore symbolized the sun rays, for Merodach had solar attributes.
It is possible that the belief obtained among even the water worshippers of Eridu that the sun and moon, which rose from the primordial deep, had their origin in the everlasting fire in Ea's domain at the bottom of the sea.
In the Indian god Varuna's ocean home an "Asura fire" (demon fire) burned constantly; it was "bound and confined", but could not be extinguished.
It is possible, of course, that fire was regarded as the vital principle by some city cults, which were influenced by imported ideas. If so, the belief never became prevalent.
Moon worship appears to have been as ancient as water worship, with which, as we have seen, it was closely associated.
It was widely prevalent throughout Babylonia.
The chief seat of the lunar deity, Nannar or Sin, was the ancient city of Ur, from which Abraham migrated to Harran, where the "Baal" (the lord) was also a moon god.
No doubt, like that city, it had its origin at an exceedingly remote period.
At any rate, the excavations conducted there have afforded proof that it flourished in the prehistoric period.
As in Arabia, Egypt, and throughout ancient Europe and elsewhere, the moon god of Sumeria was regarded as the "friend of man".
He controlled nature as a fertilizing agency; he caused grass, trees, and crops to grow; he increased flocks and herds, and gave human offspring.
The mountains of Sinai and the desert of Sin are called after this deity.
As Nannar, which Jastrow considers to be a variation of "Narnar", the "light producer", the moon god scattered darkness and reduced the terrors of night.
His spirit inhabited the lunar stone, so that moon and stone worship were closely associated; it also entered trees and crops, so that moon worship linked with earth worship, as both linked with water worship.
She links with Ishtar as Nin, as Isis of Egypt linked with other mother deities.
The twin children of the moon were Mashu and Mashtu, a brother and sister, like the lunar girl and boy of Teutonic mythology immortalized in nursery rhymes as Jack and Jill.
Sun worship was of great antiquity in Babylonia, but appears to have been seasonal in its earliest phases.
The spring sun was personified as Tammuz, the youthful shepherd, who was loved by the earth goddess Ishtar and her rival Eresh ki gal, goddess of death, the Babylonian Persephone.
He had much in common with Nin Girsu, a god of Lagash, who was in turn regarded as a form of Tammuz.
He was the king of death, husband of Eresh ki gal, queen of Hades.
He was the chief deity of the city of Cuthah, which, Jastrow suggests, was situated beside a burial place of great repute, like the Egyptian Abydos.
He was a god of Destiny, the lord of the living and the dead, and was exalted as the great Judge, the lawgiver, who upheld justice; he was the enemy of wrong, he loved righteousness and hated sin, he inspired his worshippers with rectitude and punished evildoers.
The sun god also illumined the world, and his rays penetrated every quarter: he saw all things, and read the thoughts of men; nothing could be concealed from Shamash.
These twin deities, Mitra and Varuna, measured out the span of human life.
This god was also worshipped by the military aristocracy of Mitanni, which held sway for a period over Assyria.
In Roman times the worship of Mithra spread into Europe from Persia.
Rain would therefore be gifted by him as a fertilizing deity.
The solar deity thus appears as a form of Anu, god of the sky and upper atmosphere, who controls the seasons and the various forces of nature.
Other rival chiefs of city pantheons, whether lunar, atmospheric, earth, or water deities, were similarly regarded as the supreme deities who ruled the Universe, and decreed when man should receive benefits or suffer from their acts of vengeance.
O Varuna, whatever the offence may be That we as men commit against the heavenly folk, When through our want of thought we violate thy laws, Chastise us not, O god, for that iniquity.
The grave was the "house of clay", as in Babylonia.
As Ma banda anna, "the boat of the sky", Shamash links with the Egyptian sun god Ra, whose barque sailed over the heavens by day and through the underworld of darkness and death during the night.
The consort of Shamash was Aa, and his attendants were Kittu and Mesharu, "Truth" and "Righteousness".
At Erech she had a shrine in the temple of the sky god Anu.
We can trace in Babylonia, as in Egypt, the early belief that life in the Universe had a female origin.
Nin sun links with Ishtar, whose Sumerian name is Nana.
Ishtar appears to be identical with the Egyptian Hathor, who, as Sekhet, slaughtered the enemies of the sun god Ra.
She was similarly the goddess of maternity, and is depicted in this character, like Isis and other goddesses of similar character, suckling a babe.
As a hammer god, he was imported by the Semites from the hills.
He was a wind and thunder deity, a rain bringer, a corn god, and a god of battle like Thor, Jupiter, Tarku, Indra, and others, who were all sons of the sky.
The prominence accorded to an individual deity depended on local conditions, experiences, and influences.
The Sumerians, like the Ancient Egyptians, developed their deities, who reflected the growth of culture, from vague spirit groups, which, like ghosts, were hostile to mankind.
When their women have brought forth children, they suckle and rear them in temples set apart for all.
After their sixth year they are taught natural science, and then the mechanical sciences.
Names are given to them by Metaphysicus, and that not by chance, but designedly, and according to each one's peculiarity, as was the custom among the ancient romans.
Certainly not.
And thus they distribute male and female breeders of the best natures according to philosophical rules.
Therefore, if any woman dyes her face, so that it may become beautiful, or uses high heeled boots so that she may appear tall, or garments with trains to cover her wooden shoes, she is condemned to capital punishment.
But if the women should even desire them they have no facility for doing these things.
By these means they lose their color and have pale complexions, and become feeble and small. For this reason they are without proper complexions, use high sandals, and become beautiful not from strength, but from slothful tenderness. And thus they ruin their own tempers and natures, and consequently those of their offspring.
Furthermore, if at any time a man is taken captive with ardent love for a certain woman, the two are allowed to converse and joke together and to give one another garlands of flowers or leaves, and to make verses.
Moreover, the love born of eager desire is not known among them; only that born of friendship.
They hate black as they do dung, and therefore they dislike the Japanese, who are fond of black.
Pride they consider the most execrable vice, and one who acts proudly is chastised with the most ruthless correction.
It is not the custom to keep slaves.
The rest become a prey to idleness, avarice, ill health, lasciviousness, usury, and other vices, and contaminate and corrupt very many families by holding them in servitude for their own use, by keeping them in poverty and slavishness, and by imparting to them their own vices.
Therefore public slavery ruins them; useful works, in the field, in military service, and in arts, except those which are debasing, are not cultivated, the few who do practise them doing so with much aversion.
And they defend themselves by the opinion of Socrates, of Cato, of Plato, and of saint Clement; but, as you say, they misunderstand the opinions of these thinkers.
Nevertheless, they send abroad to discover the customs of nations, and the best of these they always adopt.
Thus they agree with Plato, in whom I have read these same things.
The lame serve as guards, watching with the eyes which they possess.
The blind card wool with their hands, separating the down from the hairs, with which latter they stuff the couches and sofas; those who are without the use of eyes and hands give the use of their ears or their voice for the convenience of the State, and if one has only one sense he uses it in the farms.
WHAT ABOUT THE BABY'S SPEECH?
The hearing baby babbles because he gets some pleasure from the sounds, and also because he desires to imitate the sounds of speech he hears around him.
But during the first two or three years of the child's life the principal stress should be placed upon his learning to understand what is said to him, without bothering much about his speaking himself.
In the case of the hearing child, the understanding of language comes before he can himself utter it.
DEVELOPING THE MENTAL FACULTIES
As a matter of fact, we see and hear and taste and smell and feel with our brains.
The eye of a two year old child is practically as perfect an optical instrument as the eye of a boy of ten, and yet how much more the older boy seems to see.
Of course, where the instrument is found to be imperfect we can assist it by means of additional lenses, or perhaps by some one of the skillful operations now performed by oculists, and, as the sight is of such increased importance to a deaf child, the greatest care and watchfulness should be given to his eyes.
Do not let him sleep, or lie, facing the sun, or any other powerful light, but throughout his life be careful that all his use of eyesight be under conditions of ample and well directed light.
Supposing that the simple tests referred to heretofore have shown that the eyes, as optical instruments, are sufficiently perfect, our efforts need to be to train the brain to take cognizance of, and to interpret the impressions transmitted to it by the eyes.
We shall not be able to improve the working of the eye by our efforts, but we can educate the brain.
The duplicate set of worsted balls of the seven primal colors can be increased to include easily distinguishable shades.
When he can do this by sight without difficulty, have him shut his eyes, place an object in his little hands, teach him to feel it over carefully, take it from him, and, while his eyes are still closed, place it once more in the pile.
Let him then open his eyes and see if he can indicate the object he had previously held.
A set of wooden forms, such as spheres, cubes, pyramids, cones, cylinders, and similar, but truncated, forms, can be obtained at any school supply store.
The Montessori weighted forms are excellent for training his muscular recognition of difference of weight, and an excellent way is to put various quantities of birdshot into half a dozen exactly similar little rubber balls that can be purchased at any toy store for two cents apiece.
Then hand the boy one of the weighted balls, and after he has felt its weight put it back with the other similar appearing balls and see if he can again discover it.
If there is a guitar, or mandolin, or zither, or a piano, available, perhaps, by and by, the mother can teach the child to recognize the difference in the vibratory sensation perceived by his fingers touching the body of the instrument when a low note and a high note are struck alternately.
The next step, if she can take it, is to place his little hands upon her chest to feel the lowest notes of her voice, and upon both the chest and the top of her head to feel the highest, and endeavoring to get him to recognize the similarity in vibratory sensation between what he now feels and what he previously felt on the musical instruments.
The last step in this series of exercises to awaken a recognition of vibratory sensations is to lead him to feel in his own chest and head the vibrations set up by his own voice in shouting and laughing, crying or babbling.
Remember that the attention of a little child is like a constantly flitting butterfly that rests for only a moment or two on anything before dancing away to something else.
There are many little games with kindergarten materials that can be used to develop the powers of attention, observation, imitation, and obedience.
DEVELOPING THE LUNGS
The tendency of the deaf child is to grow up with less development of lungs and of the imagination than hearing children.
An especially good exercise for the gentle and long continued control of breath results from the toy blow pipes with conical wire bowls by means of which light, celluloid balls of bright colors are kept suspended in the air, dancing on the column of breath blown softly through the tube.
Blowing soap bubbles, especially trying to blow big ones, is very useful as well as interesting.
For physical development in which the lungs come in for their share and the sense of mechanical rhythm is fostered, an excellent exercise is marching in step to the stroke of the drum, proud in Boy Scout uniform. Dancing is a very desirable accomplishment for the deaf child.
seven
THE CULTIVATION OF CREATIVE IMAGINATION
A sand pile, or a large, shallow sand box, perhaps five feet square, with sides six inches high, and completely lined with enamel cloth to make it watertight, is a wonderful implement for constructive play on the part of the child. Whole villages of farms, fields, and forests, ponds and brooks, roads and railroads, can be made here in miniature.
Building blocks of wood or stone; the metal construction toy called "Mechano"; dolls, doll houses, furniture, and equipment, are valuable, but they should be simple, inexpensive and not fragile.
Cut up picture puzzles, painting books, tracing slates with large and simple designs cultivate observation and ingenuity.
eight
Then pat him twice, and make him hold up two fingers, then three times and have him put up three fingers.
Now return to one pat and one finger, repeat two pats and the holding up of two of his fingers, and three pats and three fingers.
Having established this system of response on his part to sensations perceived, it is not difficult to shift from the number of pats to the number of times he hears a noise.
This once accomplished, tests can be made with sounds of different kinds, different pitch, and different volume, varying the distance, the instruments, and the vowel when the articulate sounds are reached.
He can be shown a whistle, then, when it is blown behind his back, he will hold up as many fingers as the times it was blown, if he perceives the sound.
He can be asked to distinguish between a whistle, a little bell, and the clapping of the hands.
Using these sounds at different pitches, and with different intensities and distances, a sufficiently accurate estimate can be formed of the degree of his hearing power so far as his present needs are concerned.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF RESIDUAL HEARING
If any ability to perceive sounds is found, every effort should be made to lead the child to use it, and as the most essential use of hearing is in the comprehension of spoken language, the principal effort should be made along that line.
A little toy street car, a cap, and a toy sheep, would do nicely to begin with, as the three words, "car," "cap," and "sheep," are not easily confused.
Place two of the objects before him, the car and the sheep, and speak the name of one of them, "car," we will say, loudly and distinctly close to his ear, but in such a way that he cannot see your mouth.
Then show him the car.
Repeat it with "sheep" and show him the sheep.
Repeat "car," and take his little hand, put it on the car.
Then "sheep," and make him put his hand on the sheep.
Continue this process until he will indicate to you the object you name.
When he makes only occasional mistakes with two objects, add the cap.
When he can get the right one about ninety per cent. of the time, then take three new words, returning occasionally to the first three. Very soon his own name and those of others, with photographs to enable him to indicate which, will prove of interest to him.
When he has successfully learned to distinguish a few single words, a beginning can be made on short sentences.
The suggestions already made should be studiously followed throughout his whole childhood.
If his hearing is not too seriously impaired, he will begin to attempt to imitate spoken sounds by the time he is twenty four to thirty months old.
But his ability to imitate sounds is not an accurate measure of his ability to hear.
He may perceive the sounds much better than he is able to reproduce them.
Distinct utterance comes slowly to the child with normal hearing, and still more slowly and imperfectly to the child whose hearing is not good.
The question will naturally arise as to whether the child's hearing of speech can be aided by an electric or mechanical device.
But I have found that sometimes, in cases where the sound perception was not at first sufficient to enable the child to distinguish even the most dissimilar vowel sounds, although uttered loudly close to the ear, I could awaken the attention of the child to sound, and stimulate the dormant power by the use of an Acousticon.
By the use of the Acousticon, it then becomes possible to communicate by means of the ear without speaking at such short range.
DEVELOPING THE POWER OF LIP READING
In this effort to develop the hearing, however, the necessity must not be forgotten of also training the brain to associate ideas with what the eye sees on the lips when words are spoken.
She does not think of it as a teaching exercise, but it is a very important one.
If it is spoken when the baby is not looking, it does not help.
When he is sitting on the floor she picks him up, saying "up." When she puts him from her lap to the floor she says "down." If he is naughty she says "naughty," and perhaps spats his little hands, and so on through the day.
She must all this time remember, also, that the shades of feeling, pleasure, disappointment, approval, disapproval, doubt, certainty, love, anger, joy, which are largely conveyed to the hearing child by intonation of voice, must be conveyed to the deaf baby by facial expression and manner.
They become very keen at interpreting moods by the look.
The first indication of impatience, of being bored and weary, will destroy much of one's influence with the deaf child.
Do not be caught unawares.
Interest, cheerfulness, and patience are tremendous forces to help the little deaf child.
Story of Wali Dad the Simple Hearted
Once upon a time there lived a poor old man whose name was Wali Dad Gunjay, or Wali Dad the Bald.
He had no relations, but lived all by himself in a little mud hut some distance from any town, and made his living by cutting grass in the jungle, and selling it as fodder for horses.
He only earned by this five halfpence a day; but he was a simple old man, and needed so little out of it, that he saved up one halfpenny daily, and spent the rest upon such food and clothing as he required.
In this way he lived for many years until, one night, he thought that he would count the money he had hidden away in the great earthen pot under the floor of his hut.
So he set to work, and with much trouble he pulled the bag out on to the floor, and sat gazing in astonishment at the heap of coins which tumbled out of it.
What should he do with them all?
he wondered.
At last he threw all the money into an old sack, which he pushed under his bead, and then, rolled in his ragged old blanket, he went off to sleep.
With this carefully wrapped up in his cotton waistband he went to the house of a rich friend, who was a travelling merchant, and used to wander about with his camels and merchandise through many countries.
Wali Dad was lucky enough to find him at home, so he sat down, and after a little talk he asked the merchant who was the most virtuous and beautiful lady he had ever met with.
The merchant replied that the princess of Khaistan was renowned everywhere as well for the beauty of her person as for the kindness and generosity of her disposition.
'Then,' said Wali Dad, 'next time you go that way, give her this little bracelet, with the respectful compliments of one who admires virtue far more than he desires wealth.'
With that he pulled the bracelet from his waistband, and handed it to his friend.
As soon as he had opportunity he presented himself at the palace, and sent in the bracelet, neatly packed in a little perfumed box provided by himself, giving at the same time the message entrusted to him by Wali Dad.
The princess could not think who could have bestowed this present on her, but she bade her servant to tell the merchant that if he would return, after he had finished his business in the city, she would give him her reply.
In a few days, therefore, the merchant came back, and received from the princess a return present in the shape of a camel load or rich silks, besides a present of money for himself.
With these he set out on his journey.
Some months later he got home again from his journeyings, and proceeded to take Wali Dad the princess's present.
Great was the perplexity of the good man to find a camel load of silks tumbled at his door!
What was he to do with these costly things?
'Of course,' cried the merchant, greatly amused; 'from Delhi to Baghdad, and from Constantinople to Lucknow, I know them all; and there lives none worthier than the gallant and wealthy young prince of Nekabad.'
'Very well, then, take the silks to him, with the blessing of an old man,' said Wali Dad, much relieved to be rid of them.
When he was shown into his presence he produced the beautiful gift of silks that Wali Dad had sent, and begged the young man to accept them as a humble tribute to his worth and greatness.
As before, the merchant at last arrived at home; and next day, he set out for Wali Dad's house with the twelve horses.
When the old man saw them coming in the distance he said to himself: 'Here's luck! a troop of horses coming!
When he got back, with as much grass as he could possibly carry, he was greatly discomfited to find that the horses were all for himself.
The merchant departed, laughing.
But, true to his old friend's request, he took the horses with him on his next journey, and eventually presented them safely to the princess.
This time the princess sent for the merchant, and questioned him about the giver.
Now, the merchant was usually a most honest man, but he did not quite like to describe Wali Dad in his true light as an old man whose income was five halfpence a day, and who had hardly clothes to cover him.
So he told her that his friend had heard stories of her beauty and goodness, and had longed to lay the best he had at her feet.
The princess then took her father into her confidence, and begged him to advise her what courtesy she might return to one who persisted in making her such presents.
'Well, now,' cried Wali Dad, as he viewed all the wealth laid at his door, 'I can well repay that kind prince for his magnificent present of horses; but to be sure you have been put to great expenses!
The merchant felt handsomely repaid for his trouble, and wondered greatly how the matter would turn out.
This time the prince, too, was embarrassed, and questioned the merchant closely.
The merchant felt that his credit was at stake, and whilst inwardly determining that he would not carry the joke any further, could not help describing Wali Dad in such glowing terms that the old man would never have known himself had he heard them.
To take care of these animals the merchant hired a little army of men; and the troop made a great show as they travelled along.
When Wali Dad from a distance saw the cloud of dust which the caravan made, and the glitter of its appointments, he said to himself: 'By Allah! here's a grand crowd coming!
Elephants, too!
Grass will be selling well to day!' And with that he hurried off to the jungle and cut grass as fast as he could.
'Riches!' cried Wali Dad, 'what has an old man like me with one foot in the grave to do with riches?
That beautiful young princess, now!
Do you take for yourself two horses, two camels, and two elephants, with all their trappings, and present the rest to her.'
The merchant at first objected to these remarks, and pointed out to Wali Dad that he was beginning to feel these embassies a little awkward.
At length, however he consented to go once more, but he promised himself never to embark on another such enterprise.
There is nothing for it but that we go and pay him a visit in person.
The merchant, the king declared, was to guide the party.
Willingly would he have run away; but he was treated with so much hospitality as Wali Dad's representative, that he hardly got an instant's real peace, and never any opportunity of slipping away.
In fact, after a few days, despair possessed him to such a degree that he made up his mind that all that happened was fate, and that escape was impossible; but he hoped devoutly some turn of fortune would reveal to him a way out of the difficulties which he had, with the best intentions, drawn upon himself.
On the seventh day they all started, amidst thunderous salutes from the ramparts of the city, and much dust, and cheering, and blaring of trumpets.
Day after day they moved on, and every day the poor merchant felt more ill and miserable.
At last they were only one day's march from Wali Dad's little mud home. Here a great encampment was made, and the merchant was sent on to tell Wali Dad that the King and Princess of Khaistan had arrived and were seeking an interview.
When the merchant arrived he found the poor old man eating his evening meal of onions and dry bread, and when he told him of all that had happened he had not the heart to proceed to load him with the reproaches which rose to his tongue.
With tears he begged the merchant to detain them for one day by any kind of excuse he could think of, and to come in the morning to discuss what they should do.
As soon as the merchant was gone Wali Dad made up his mind that there was only one honourable way out of the shame and distress that he had created by his foolishness, and that was-to kill himself.
He COULD not do it!
An owl laughed 'Hoo! hoo!' almost in his face, as he peered over the edge of the gulf, and the old man threw himself back in a perspiration of horror.
He was afraid!
He drew back shuddering, and covering his face in his hands he wept aloud.
'I weep for shame,' replied he.
'What do you here?' questioned the other.
'I came here to die,' said Wali Dad.
And as they questioned him, he confessed all his story.
Then the first stepped forward and laid a hand upon his shoulder, and Wali Dad began to feel that something strange-what, he did not know-was happening to him.
His old cotton rags of clothes were changed to beautiful linen and embroidered cloth; on his hard, bare feet were warm, soft shoes, and on his head a great jewelled turban.
before him a noble gateway stood open.
And up an avenue of giant place trees the peris led him, dumb with amazement.
Its great porticoes and verandahs were occupied by hurrying servants, and guards paced to and fro and saluted him respectfully as he drew near, along mossy walks and through sweeping grassy lawns where fountains were playing and flowers scented the air. Wali Dad stood stunned and helpless.
'Fear not,' said one of the peris; 'go to your house, and learn that God rewards the simple hearted.'
With these words they both disappeared and left him.
He walked on, thinking still that he must be dreaming.
Very soon he retired to rest in a splendid room, far grander than anything he had ever dreamed of.
When morning dawned he woke, and found that the palace, and himself, and his servants were all real, and that he was not dreaming after all!
If he was dumbfounded, the merchant, who was ushered into his presence soon after sunrise, was much more so.
Then Wali Dad told the merchant all that had happened.
For three nights and days a great feast was held in honour of the royal guests.
Every evening the king and his nobles were served on golden plates and from golden cups; and the smaller people on silver plates and from silver cups; and each evening each guest was requested to keep the places and cups that they had used as a remembrance of the occasion. Never had anything so splendid been seen.
Besides the great dinners, there were sports and hunting, and dances, and amusements of all sorts.
On the fourth day the king of Khaistan took his host aside, and asked him whether it was true, as he had suspected, that he wished to marry his daughter.
The Knights of the Fish
Once upon a time there lived an old cobbler who worked hard at his trade from morning till night, and scarcely gave himself a moment to eat.
But, industrious as he was, he could hardly buy bread and cheese for himself and his wife, and they grew thinner and thinner daily.
For a long while whey pretended to each other that they had no appetite, and that a few blackberries from the hedges were a great deal nicer than a good strong bowl of soup.
But at length there came a day when the cobbler could bear it no longer, and he threw away his last, and borrowing a rod from a neighbour he went out to fish.
Now the cobbler was as patient about fishing as he had been about cobbling.
From dawn to dark he stood on the banks of the little stream, without hooking anything better than an eel, or a few old shoes, that even he, clever though he was, felt were not worth mending.
He had not cast his line for ten minutes the next morning before he drew from the river the most beautiful fish he had ever seen in his life. But he nearly fell into the water from surprise, when the fish began to speak to him, in a small, squeaky voice:
'Take me back to your hut and cook me; then cut me up, and sprinkle me over with pepper and salt.
Give two of the pieces to your wife, and bury two more in the garden.'
The cobbler did not know what to make of these strange words; but he was wiser than many people, and when he did not understand, he thought it was well to obey.
His children wanted to eat all the fish themselves, and begged their father to tell them what to do with the pieces he had put aside; but the cobbler only laughed, and told them it was no business of theirs.
And when they were safe in bed he stole out and buried the two pieces in the garden.
By and by two babies, exactly alike, lay in a cradle, and in the garden were two tall plants, with two brilliant shields on the top.
Years passed away, and the babies were almost men.
They were tired of living quietly at home, being mistaken for each other by everybody they saw, and determined to set off in different directions, to seek adventures.
So, one fine morning, the two brothers left the hut, and walked together to the place where the great road divided.
There they embraced and parted, promising that if anything remarkable had happened to either, he would return to the cross roads and wait till his brother came.
The youth who took the path that ran eastwards arrived presently at a large city, where he found everybody standing at the doors, wringing their hands and weeping bitterly.
'What is the matter?' asked he, pausing and looking round.
And a man replied, in a faltering voice, that each year a beautiful girl was chosen by lot to be offered up to a dreadful fiery dragon, who had a mother even worse than himself, and this year the lot had fallen on their peerless princess.
This time the Knight of the Fish did not stop to hear more, but ran off as fast as he could, and found the princess bathed in tears, and trembling from head to foot.
She turned as she heard the sound of his sword, and removed her handkerchief from his eyes.
'Fly,' she cried; 'fly while you have yet time, before that monster sees you.'
She said it, and she mean it; yet, when he had turned his back, she felt more forsaken than before.
But in reality it was not more than a few minutes before he came back, galloping furiously on a horse he had borrowed, and carrying a huge mirror across its neck.
'I am in time, then,' he cried, dismounting very carefully, and placing the mirror against the trunk of a tree.
'Give me your veil,' he said hastily to the princess.
And when she had unwound it from her head he covered the mirror with it.
'The moment the dragon comes near you, you must tear off the veil,' cried he; 'and be sure you hide behind the mirror.
Have no fear; I shall be at hand.'
He and his horse had scarcely found shelter amongst some rocks, when the flap of the dragon's wings could be plainly heard.
He tossed his head with delight at the sight of her, and approached slowly to the place where she stood, a little in front of the mirror.
The princess had not known, when she obeyed the orders of the Knight of the Fish, what she expected to happen.
Neither of these things occurred, but, instead, the dragon stopped short with surprise and rage when he saw a monster before him as big and strong as himself.
He shook his mane with rage and fury; the enemy in front did exactly the same.
He lashed his tail, and rolled his red eyes, and the dragon opposite was no whit behind him.
Opening his mouth to its very widest, he gave an awful roar; but the other dragon only roared back.
This was too much, and with another roar which made the princess shake in her shoes, he flung himself upon his foe.
In an instant the mirror lay at his feet broken into a thousand pieces, but as every piece reflected part of himself, the dragon thought that he too had been smashed into atoms.
Oh! what shouts of joy rang through the great city, when the youth came riding back with the princess sitting behind him, and dragging the horrible monster by a cord.
Everybody cried out that the king must give the victor the hand of the princess; and so he did, and no one had ever seen such balls and feasts and sports before.
And when they were all over the young couple went to the palace prepared for them, which was so large that it was three miles round.
The first wet day after their marriage the bridegroom begged the bride to show him all the rooms in the palace, and it was so big and took so long that the sun was shining brightly again before they stepped on to the roof to see the view.
'What castle is that out there,' asked the knight; 'it seems to be made of black marble?'
'It is called the castle of Albatroz,' answered the princess.
'It is enchanted, and no one that has tried to enter it has ever come back.'
But the Knight of the Fish knew no fear, and had never turned his back on an enemy; so he drew out his horn, and blew a blast.
The sound awoke all the sleeping echoes in the castle, and was repeated now loudly, now softly; now near, and now far.
But nobody stirred for all that.
'Is there anyone inside?' cried the young man in his loudest voice; 'anyone who will give a knight hospitality?
Neither governor, nor squire, not even a page?'
'Not even a page!' answered the echoes.
But the young man did not heed them, and only struck a furious blow at the gate.
Then a small grating opened, and there appeared the tip of a huge nose, which belonged to the ugliest old woman that ever was seen.
'What do you want?' said she.
'To enter,' he answered shortly.
'Can I rest here this night?
Yes or No?'
'No, No, No!' repeated the echoes.
Between the fierce sun and his anger at being kept waiting, the Knight of the Fish had grown so hot that he lifted his visor, and when the old woman saw how handsome he was, she began fumbling with the lock of the gate.
'Come in, come in,' said she, 'so fine a gentleman will do us no harm.'
'Harm!' repeated the echoes, but again the young man paid no heed.
'You must call me the Lady Berberisca,' she answered, sharply; 'and this is my castle, to which I bid you welcome.
You shall live here with me and be my husband.' But at these words the knight let his spear fall, so surprised was he.
'You are mad!
All I desire is to inspect the castle and then go.' As he spoke he heard the voices give a mocking laugh; but the old woman took no notice, and only bade the knight follow her.
Old though she was, it seemed impossible to tire her.
At length they came to a stone staircase, which was so dark that you could not see your hand if you held it up before your face.
'I have kept my most precious treasure till the last,' said the old woman; 'but let me go first, for the stairs are steep, and you might easily break your leg.' So on she went, now and then calling back to the young man in the darkness.
'So you would not marry me!' chuckled the old witch.
'Ha! ha!
Ha! ha!'
Meanwhile his brother had wandered far and wide, and at last he wandered back to the same great city where the other young knight had met with so many adventures.
At last it occurred to him that once more he had been taken for his brother.
'I had better say nothing,' thought he; 'perhaps I shall be able to help him after all.'
So he suffered himself to be borne in triumph to the palace, where the princess threw herself into his arms.
'And so you did go to the castle?' she asked.
'Yes, of course I did,' answered he.
'And what did you see there?'
'I am forbidden to tell you anything about it, until I have returned there once more,' replied he.
'Must you really go back to that dreadful place?' she asked wistfully. 'You are the only man who has ever come back from it.'
'I must,' was all he answered.
And the princess, who was a wise woman, only said: 'Well, go to bed now, for I am sure you must be very tired.'
But the knight shook his head.
Early next day the young man started for the castle, feeling sure that some terrible thing must have happened to his brother.
'Lady of all the ages,' cried the new comer, 'did you not give hospitality to a young knight but a short time ago?'
'A short time ago!' wailed the voices.
'And how have you ill treated him?' he went on.
'Ill treated him!' answered the voices.
The woman did not stop to hear more; she turned to fly; but the knight's sword entered her body.
'Where is my brother, cruel hag?' asked he sternly.
'I will tell you,' said she; 'but as I feel that I am going to die I shall keep that piece of news to myself, till you have brought me to life again.'
The young man laughed scornfully.
'How do you propose that I should work that miracle?'
'Oh, it is quite easy.
Go into the garden and gather the flowers of the everlasting plant and some of dragon's blood.
Crush them together and boil them in a large tub of water, and then put me into it.'
The knight did as the old witch bade him, and, sure enough, she came out quite whole, but uglier than ever.
She then told the young man what had become of his brother, and he went down into the dungeon, and brought up his body and the bodies of the other victims who lay there, and when they were all washed in the magic water their strength was restored to them.
And, besides these, he found in another cavern the bodies of the girls who had been sacrificed to the dragon, and brought them back to life also.
As to the old witch, in the end she died of rage at seeing her prey escape her; and at the moment she drew her last breath the castle of Albatroz fell into ruins with a great noise.
CHAPTER five
Our hopes when elevated to that standard of ambition which demands unison may fall asunder like an ancient ruin.
They are no longer fit for construction unless on an approved principle.
They smoulder away like the ashes of burnt embers, and are cast outwardly from their confined abode, never more to be found where once they existed only as smouldering serpents of scorned pride.
The little chat that Irene apparently enjoyed in the conservatory would gladly have become an act of forgetfulness on her part had not Sir john reminded her of its existence a few days afterwards.
It happened about three weeks preceding the day set apart for their holy union, on Sir john arriving at the castle, he was informed of Irene's recent exit, and gently turning away, he resolved to have a stroll in the tastefully laid out gardens with the sole object of meeting her.
Walking leisurely along, and stooping to pick up some fallen fruit, he suddenly heard a faint sound issue amongst the trees.
Boldly moving towards the spot whence the sound of music issued, how delightfully surprised was he to find a magnificently constructed little summer house, a charming pyramidal Gothic structure, robed internally with mossy mantles of nature, and brightened beyond conception with the instrument of humanity which gave origin to such pathetic and sweetened strains.
Irene held in her snowy palms a roll of Italian music, which she earnestly endeavoured to conceal from his penetrating stare, probably on account of the words contained therein, which for ever would be unknown to his varied sphere of knowledge, and which would undoubtedly have betrayed her feelings, never dreaming that they should strike other ears than those for whom they practically were intended.
Sir john chatted gaily until he gained good ground for delivering to her the message that instinct had so prompted him to utter.
"I must acquaint you, though it pains me deeply to do so, that lately you have not treated me with such respect or attention as you certainly lavished upon me before the announcement of our engagement, and for what reason or reasons I now wish to be apprised.
I promised to be at the castle last night, but unfortunately I felt indisposed, and only that I wished to have a thorough understanding relative to your recent conduct, and which has pained me acutely, I should not have ventured out of doors this evening either.
I was, in consequence, obliged to write you last night, asking a written reply, which you failed to give!
And this evening, instead of being doubly rejoiced at my presence, you, on the contrary, seem doubly annoyed!
She pondered whether or not honesty should take the place of deceit-too often practised in women-and concluded to adopt the latter weapon of defence.
Raising her hazel eyes to his, and clearing the weft of truth that had been mixing with the warp of falsehood to form an answer of plausible texture, fringed with different shades of love, she thus began:
"My dearest and much beloved, I assure you your remarks have astounded me not a little!
Your words sting like a wasp, though, I am quite convinced, unintentionally.
You are about to place me in a position which cannot fail to wring from jealousy and covetousness their flaming torch of abuse.
Yes, Sir john, on me you have not ceased to lavish every available treasure and token of your unbounded love.
You have been to me not only a loyal admirer, but a thoroughly upright and estimable example of life's purest treasures.
You have resolved to place me by your side as your equal, whilst wealth in boundless store is thirsting for your touch.
"I assure you your allusion to my verbal answer last night is very pronounced, and may be overlooked on the ground of pure disappointment. Our time of singleness is now short, and begging your forgiveness for my seeming neglect or indifference, I hope the tide, which until now has flown so gently, may not be stayed on the eve of entering the harbour of harmony, peace, and love."
There was once a king, who had lost his wife.
They had a family of thirteen-twelve gallant sons, and one daughter, who was exquisitely beautiful.
For twelve years after his wife's death the king grieved very much; he used to go daily to her tomb, and there weep, and pray, and give away alms to the poor.
He thought never to marry again; for he had promised his dying wife never to give her children a stepmother.
But before long he found out that he had made a great mistake.
One day, when the king was far away, at war against his enemies, the queen went into her stepchildren's apartments, and pronounced some magical words-on which every one of the twelve princes flew away in the shape of an eagle, and the princess was changed into a dove.
The queen looked out of the window, to see in what direction they would fly, when she saw right under the window an old man, with a beard as white as snow.
"What are you here for, old man?" she asked.
"To be witness of your deed," he answered.
"Then you saw it?"
"I saw it."
She whispered some magical words.
The old man disappeared in a blaze of sunshine; and the queen, as she stood there, dumb with terror, was changed into a basilisk.
The basilisk ran off in fright; trying to hide herself underground.
But her glance was so deadly, that it killed every one she looked at; so that all the people in the palace were soon dead, including her own son, whom she slew by merely looking at him.
And this once populous and happy royal residence quickly became an uninhabited ruin, which no one dared approach, for fear of the basilisk lurking in its underground vaults.
Meanwhile the princess, who had been changed into a dove, flew after her brothers the eagles, but not being able to overtake them, she rested under a wayside cross, and began cooing mournfully.
"What are you grieving for, pretty dove?" asked an old man, with a snow white beard, who just then came by.
I am grieving also for myself.
So saying he stroked the little dove, and she at once regained her natural shape.
"How can I ever thank you enough!
The old man gave her an ever growing loaf, and said:
Go towards the sunset, and weep your tears into this little bottle.
And when it is full...."
And the old man told her what else to do, blessed her, and disappeared.
"Stop, princess!" he said; "You can proceed no further, for you are not yet parted by death from your own world."
"But what am I to do?" she asked.
"Must I go back without my poor brothers?"
"Your brothers," said Death, "fly here every day in the guise of eagles. They want to reach the other side of this door, which leads into the other world; for they hate the one they live in; nevertheless they, and you also, must remain there, until your time be come.
Therefore every day I must compel them to go back, which they can do, because they are eagles.
But how are you going to get back yourself?--look there!"
The princess looked around her, and wept bitterly.
But remembering what the mysterious old man had said she took courage, and began to pray and weep, till she had filled the little bottle with her tears.
Soon she heard the sound of wings over her head, and saw twelve eagles flying.
The eagles dashed themselves against the iron portal, beating their wings upon it, and imploring Death to open it to them.
But Death only threatened them with his scythe, saying:
"Hence! ye enchanted princes!
you must fulfil your penance on earth, till I come for you myself."
The eagles were about to turn and fly, when all at once they perceived their sister.
They came round her, and caressed her hands lovingly with their beaks.
She at once began to sprinkle them with her tears from the lachrymatory; and in one moment the twelve eagles were changed back into the twelve princes, and joyfully embraced their sister.
But the princess knelt down and prayed:
"Bird of heavenly pity here, By each labour, prayer and tear, Come in thine unvanquished power, Come and aid us in this hour!"
And all at once there shot down from heaven to the depth of the abyss a ray of sunshine, on which descended a gigantic bird, with rainbow wings, a bright sparkling crest, and peacock's eyes all over his body, a golden tail, and silvery breast.
"What are your commands, princess?" asked the bird.
"Carry us from this threshold of eternity to our own world."
"I will, but you must know, princess, that before I can reach the top of this precipice with you on my back, three days and nights must pass; and I must have food on the way, or my strength will fail me, and I shall fall down with you to the bottom, and we shall all perish."
"I have an ever growing loaf, which will suffice both for you and ourselves," replied the princess.
"Then climb upon my back, and whenever I look round, give me some bread to eat."
The bird was so large that all the princes, and the princess in the midst of them, could easily find place on his back, and he began to fly upwards.
He flew higher and higher, and whenever he looked round at her, she gave him bits of the loaf, and he flew on, and upwards.
So they went on steadily for two nights and days; but upon the third day, when they were hoping in a short time to view the summit of the precipice, and to land upon the borders of this world, the bird looked round as usual for a piece of the loaf.
The princess was just going to break off some to give him, when a sudden violent gust of wind from the bottom of the abyss snatched the loaf from her hand, and sent it whistling downwards.
Not having received his usual meal the bird became sensibly weaker, and looked round once more.
The princess trembled with fear; she had nothing more to give him, and she felt that he was becoming exhausted.
In utter desperation she cut off a piece of her flesh, and gave it to him.
Having eaten this the bird recovered strength, and flew upwards faster than before; but after an hour or two he looked round once more.
So she cut off another piece of her flesh; the bird seized it greedily, and flew on so fast that in a few minutes he reached the ground at the top of the precipice.
"Princess, what were those two delicious morsels you gave me last?
I never ate anything so good before."
The bird breathed upon her wounds; and the flesh at once healed over, and grew again as before.
The princess and her brothers resumed their journey, this time towards the sunrise, and at last arrived in their own country, where they met their father, returning from the wars.
The king was coming back victorious over his enemies, and on his way home had first heard of the sudden disappearance of his children and of the queen, and how his palace was tenanted only by a basilisk with a death dealing glance.
The basilisk saw herself reflected in this mirror, and her own glance slew her immediately.
They gathered up the remains of the basilisk, and burnt them in a great fire in the courtyard, afterwards scattering the ashes to the four winds.
"Now, Constance, that we have a moment alone, what is this about you?" began mr Yorke, as they stood together in the garden.
"Annabel said the truth-that I do think of going out as daily governess," she replied, bending over a carnation to hide the blush which rose to her cheeks, a very rival to the blushing flower.
I must assume my share of the burden."
mr Yorke was silent.
Constance took it for granted that he was displeased.
He was of an excellent family, and she supposed he disliked the step she was about to take-deemed it would be derogatory to his future wife.
"Have you fully made up your mind?" he at length asked.
William, how could I reconcile it to my conscience not to help?" she continued.
"Think of papa! think of his strait!
It appears to be a plain duty thrown in my path."
"By yourself, Constance?"
"Not by myself," she whispered, lifting for a moment her large blue eyes.
"Oh, William, William, do not be displeased with me! do not forbid it!
Strive to see it in the right light."
"Let that carnation alone, Constance; give your attention to me.
What if I do forbid it?"
mr Yorke followed and stood before her.
"William, I must do my duty.
"A daily governess, I think you said?"
"Papa could not spare me to go out altogether; Annabel could not spare me either; and-"
"I would not spare you," he struck in, filling up her pause.
"Was that what you were about to say, Constance?"
The rosy hue stole over her face again, and a sweet smile to her lips: "Oh, William, if you will only sanction it!
I shall go about it then with the lightest heart!"
He looked at her with an expression she did not understand, and shook his head.
Constance thought it a negative shake, and her hopes fell again.
"You did not answer my question," said mr Yorke.
"What if I forbid it?"
"But it seems to be my duty," she urged from between her pale and parted lips.
"Constance, that is no answer."
"Oh, do not, do not!
"The temptation, as you call it, must be for a later consideration.
Why will you not answer me?
What would be your course if I forbade it?"
But, Oh, William, if you gave me up-"
She could not continue.
She turned away to hide her face from mr Yorke. He followed and obtained forcible view of it.
It was wet with tears.
"Nay, but I did not mean to carry it so far as to cause you real grief, my dearest," he said, in a changed tone.
"Though you brought it on yourself," he added, laughing, as he bent his face down.
"How did I bring it on myself?"
I saw you doubted me at the first, when Annabel spoke of it in the study.
"You will sanction the measure then?" she rejoined, her countenance lighting up.
"How could you doubt me?
I shall not love my wife the less, because she has had the courage to turn her talents to account.
What could you be thinking of, child?"
"Forgive me, William," she softly pleaded.
"But you looked so grave and were so silent."
mr Yorke smiled.
Lady Augusta is looking out for a daily governess."
"Is she?" exclaimed Constance.
Constance spoke hesitatingly.
Probably the same doubt had made one of the "disadvantages" hinted at by mr Yorke.
"I called there yesterday, and interrupted a 'scene' between Lady Augusta and Miss Caroline," he said.
"Unseemly anger on my lady's part, and rebellion on Carry's, forming, as usual, its chief features."
"But Lady Augusta is so indulgent to her children!" interrupted Constance.
"Perniciously indulgent, generally; and when the effects break out in insolence and disobedience, then there ensues a scene.
If you go there you will witness them occasionally, and I assure you they are not edifying.
You must endeavour to train the girls to something better than they have been trained to yet, Constance."
"If I do go."
Shall I ascertain particulars for you, Constance; touching salary and other matters?"
"If you please.
"Constance!" interrupted a voice at this juncture.
"Is mr Yorke there?"
"He is here, mamma," replied Constance, walking forward to mrs Channing, mr Yorke attending her.
The children have told you the tidings.
It is a great blow to their prospects."
"But they seem determined to bear it bravely," he answered, in a hearty tone.
"You may be proud to have such children, mrs Channing."
"Not proud," she softly said.
"Thankful!"
"True.
"Gone entirely, Judith.
Gone for good."
"For good!" groaned Judith; "I should say for ill.
Why does the Queen let there be a Lord Chancellor?"
"It is not the Lord Chancellor's fault, Judith.
He only administers the law."
Judith, with a pettish movement, returned to her kitchen; and at that moment Hamish came downstairs.
He had changed his dress, and had a pair of new white gloves in his hand.
"Are you going out to night, Hamish?"
There was a stress on the word "to night," and Hamish marked it.
"I promised, you know, Constance.
Fare you well, my pretty sister.
Before seven o'clock, the whole school, choristers and king's scholars, assembled in the cloisters.
"College boys!" cried his lordship, winking and blinking, as other less majestic mortals do when awakened suddenly out of their morning sleep.
It's the holiday they are asking for."
"Oh, ah, I recollect," cried his lordship-for it was not the first time he had been to Helstonleigh.
My compliments to the head master, and I beg he will grant the boys a holiday."
Roberts did as he was bid-he also had been to Helstonleigh before with his master-and delivered the card and message to Gaunt.
The consequence of which was, the school tore through the streets in triumph, shouting "Holiday!" in tones to be heard a mile off, and bringing people in white garments, from their beds to the windows.
The least they feared was, that the town had taken fire.
The servant met them at the door, and grinned dreadfully at the crowd.
"Won't you catch it, gentlemen!
The head master's gone into school, and is waiting for you; marking you all late, of course."
"Gone into school!" repeated Gaunt, haughtily, resenting the familiarity, as well as the information.
"What do you mean?"
"Why, I just mean that, sir," was the reply, upon which Gaunt felt uncommonly inclined to knock him down.
At this unexpected reply, the boys slunk away to the college schoolroom, their buoyant spirits sunk down to dust and ashes-figuratively speaking.
They could not understand it; they had not the most distant idea what their offence could have been.
Gaunt entered, and the rest trooped in after him.
"You are three quarters of an hour behind your time."
"We have been up to the judges, as usual, for holiday, sir," replied Gaunt, in a tone of deprecation.
"Holiday!" interrupted the master.
"Holiday!" he repeated, with emphasis, as if disbelieving his own ears.
"Do you consider that the school deserves it?
A pretty senior you must be, if you do."
"What has the school done, sir?" respectfully asked Gaunt.
"Your memory must be conveniently short," chafed the master.
"Have you forgotten the inked surplice?"
Gaunt paused.
"But that was not the act of the whole school, sir.
It was probably the act of only one."
"But, so long as that one does not confess, the whole school must bear it," returned the master, looking round on the assembly.
"Boys, understand me.
Will you confess now?--he who did it?"
"You may think-I speak now to the guilty boy, and let him take these words to himself-that you were quite alone when you did it; that no eye was watching.
There will be no holiday to day.
Prayers."
"Isn't it a stunning shame?" cried hot Tom Channing.
"The fault lies in the boy, not in the master," interrupted Gaunt.
"A sneak! a coward!
If he has a spark of manly honour in him, he'll speak up now."
"He saw it done!"
"Who says he did?" quickly asked Tom Channing.
"Some one said so; and that he was afraid to tell."
Gaunt lifted his finger, and made a sign to Charles to approach.
The master has called the seniors to his aid, and I order you to speak.
Did you see this mischief done?"
"No, I did not!" fearlessly replied little Channing.
"If he doesn't know, he suspects," persisted Hurst.
"Come, Miss Channing."
"We don't declare things upon suspicion, do we, mr Gaunt?" appealed Charles.
"I may suspect one; Hurst may suspect another; Bywater said he suspected two; the whole school may be suspicious, one of another. Where's the use of that?"
"You say you did not see the surplice damaged?"
"I did not; upon my word of honour."
"That's enough," said Gaunt.
When he gets found out, he had better not come within reach of the seniors; I warn him of that: they might not leave him a head on his shoulders, or a tooth in his mouth."
"Suppose it should turn out to have been a senior, mr Gaunt?" spoke Bywater.
"Baths and aqueducts," Miss Grammont compared.
"Rome of the Empire comes nearest to it...."
As soon as tea was over, dr Martineau realized, they meant to walk round and about Salisbury.
He foresaw that walk with the utmost clearness.
In front and keeping just a little beyond the range of his intervention, Sir Richmond would go with Miss Grammont; he himself and Miss Seyffert would bring up the rear.
"You said-?" asked Miss Seyffert.
"That I have some writing to do-before the post goes," said the doctor brightly.
He was, if one may put it in such a fashion, not looking at Miss Seyffert in the directest fashion when he said this.
"Impossible."
(With the unspoken addition of, "You try her for a bit.")
Miss Grammont stood up.
We can all go together as far as that.
It became clear to dr Martineau that Sir Richmond was to be let off Belinda.
He could think over his notes....
"It's a perfect little lady of a cathedral," said Sir Richmond.
"My friend, the philosopher," he had said, "will not have it that we are really the individuals we think we are.
You must talk to him-he is a very curious and subtle thinker.
We are-what does he call it?--Man on his Planet, taking control of life."
"Man and woman," she had amended.
"But the impulse was losing its force."
She looked up at the spire and then at him with a faintly quizzical expression.
We were already very clever engineers.
We squirted it up in all these spires and pinnacles.
The priest and his altar were just an excuse.
"Sky scrapers?" she conceded.
"And my sky scrapers?"
"And what do you think we are building now?
And what do you think you are building over here?"
I believe we have almost grown up.
For good...."
"But are we building anything at all?"
"I wish I could believe they were foundations."
"But can you doubt we are scrapping the old?..."
They were quietly but definitely dressed, pretty alterations had happened to their coiffure, a silver band and deep red stones lit the dusk of Miss Grammont's hair and a necklace of the same colourings kept the peace between her jolly sun burnt cheek and her soft untanned neck.
dr Martineau thought her evening throat much too confidential.
The conversation drifted from topic to topic.
She broke every thread that appeared.
"To think it was exactly where it is before there was a Cabot in America!"
Miss Grammont let her companion pull the talk about as she chose.
Who ought to be getting wages-sufficient...."
"Begging-from foreigners-is just a sport in Italy," said Sir Richmond. "It doesn't imply want.
"I've no doubt of it," said Miss Seyffert, and added amazingly: "I'm out for Birth Control all the time."
A brief but active pause ensued.
"Which amount to nothing.
And which help to use up the resources, the fuel and surplus energy of the world."
"Does that matter?
Twelve hundred, fifteen hundred millions perhaps."
"And in your world?"
It would be quite enough for this little planet, for a time, at any rate.
Don't you think so, doctor?"
At least, not from this angle."
"My native instinctive democracy-"
The rest never get a chance."
But is the movement of events?"
Miss Grammont smiled an enquiry at Miss Seyffert.
"If YOU are," said Belinda.
I can't imagine it.
Just for a moment they stood hand in hand, appreciatively....
But dr Martineau grunted.
The doctor thought for a moment or so.
"Birth Control!
"I think," said the doctor and paused.
"As you please," said Sir Richmond insincerely.
"Evidently."
An absurd, mischievous, irrelevant flirtation.
You may not like the word.
That is not the word.
You people eye one another.... Flirtation.
I give the affair its proper name.
Good night....
It would take her five minutes to reach the lodge gate.
She had, therefore, eight minutes to spare.
Graciously she accepted the invitation.
Her appointments were kept to the minute, and her appointment (self made on this occasion) was the welcoming of her uncle, the Archdeacon, on the threshold of Drane's Court.
She loved Drane's Court.
Save for the three years of her brother's short married life, it had been part of herself.
As for the name, he had used that of his wife, Viscountess Drane in her own right,--a notorious beauty of whom, so History recounts, he was senilely enamoured and on whose naughty account he was eventually run through the body by a young Mohawk of a paramour.
Ursula and her brother were proud of the romantic episode, and would relate it to guests and point out the scene of the duel.
This aspect of family history seldom presented itself to Ursula Winwood.
Ursula Winwood closed her eyes.
Miss Ursula Winwood fell asleep.
He was dark and handsome, and, by a trick of coincidence, was dressed in loose knickerbocker suit, just as he was when he had walked up that very avenue to say his last good bye.
She remained for a moment tense, passively awaiting co-ordination of her faculties.
Then clear awake, and sending scudding the dear ghosts of the past, she sat up, and catching the indignant spaniel by the collar, looked with a queer, sudden interest at the newcomer.
He was young, extraordinarily beautiful; but he staggered and reeled like a drunken man.
The spaniel barked his respectable disapproval.
But the trespasser did not hear.
He kept on advancing. Miss Winwood rose, disgusted, and drew herself up.
The young man threw out his hands towards her, tripped over the three inch high border of grass, and fell in a sprawling heap at her feet.
He lay very still.
Ursula Winwood looked down upon him.
The shiny brown spaniel took up a strategic position three yards away and growled, his chin between his paws.
For a moment or so she had a qualm of fear lest he might be dead.
So there he lay, a new Endymion, while the most modern of Dianas hung over him, stricken with great wonderment at his perfection.
She narrated what had occurred, and together they bent over the unconscious youth.
"I would suggest," said she, "that we put him into the carriage, drive him up to the house, and send for dr Fuller."
"I can only support your suggestion," said the Archdeacon.
The Archdeacon, his hands behind his back, paced the noiseless Turkey carpet.
"Poor fellow!" said the Archdeacon.
"Perhaps this may tell us," said the Archdeacon.
The Archdeacon took it up.
On the flyleaf, 'Paul Savelli.' An undergraduate, I should say, on a walking tour."
Miss Winwood took the book from his hands-a little cheap reprint.
"I'm glad," she said.
"Why, my dear Ursula?"
"I'm very fond of Sir Thomas Browne, myself," she replied.
He shook a grave head.
"Pneumonia.
Perhaps a touch of the sun as well." The housekeeper smiled discreetly.
Miss Winwood, a practical woman, was aware that the doctor gave wise counsel.
But she looked at Paul and hesitated.
Paul's destiny, though none knew it, hung in the balance.
"I disapprove altogether of the cottage hospital," she said.
"If I turned him out of my house, doctor, and anything happened to him, I should have to reckon with his people.
He stays here.
The red room, Wilkins,--no, the green-the one with the small oak bed.
You can't nurse people properly in four posters.
It has a south-east aspect"--she turned to the doctor-"and so gets the sun most of the day.
That's quite right, isn't it?"
"I like trouble," said Miss Winwood.
"You're certainly looking for it," replied the doctor glancing at Paul and stuffing his stethoscope into his pocket.
dr Fuller, rosy, fat and fifty, obeyed, like everyone else; but during the process of law making he had often, before now, played the part of an urbane and gently satirical leader of the opposition.
"Is he as bad as that?" she asked quickly.
"As bad as that," said the doctor, with grave significance.
"I was sure of it," said Miss Winwood.
"Of what?"
"Why are you sure?"
Ursula was very fond of her uncle.
"Just look at him.
It speaks for itself."
"I'm sorry to carry on a conversation so Socratically," said he.
"But what is 'it'?"
If he's not an aristocrat to the finger tips, I'll give up all my work, turn Catholic, and go into a nunnery-which will distress you exceedingly.
"Proves what?"
Laploshka was one of the meanest men I have ever met, and quite one of the most entertaining.
He said horrid things about other people in such a charming way that one forgave him for the equally horrid things he said about oneself behind one's back.
Hating anything in the way of ill natured gossip ourselves, we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well.
And Laploshka did it really well.
Naturally Laploshka had a large circle of acquaintances, and as he exercised some care in their selection it followed that an appreciable proportion were men whose bank balances enabled them to acquiesce indulgently in his rather one sided views on hospitality.
Thus, although possessed of only moderate means, he was able to live comfortably within his income, and still more comfortably within those of various tolerantly disposed associates.
But towards the poor or to those of the same limited resources as himself his attitude was one of watchful anxiety; he seemed to be haunted by a besetting fear lest some fraction of a shilling or franc, or whatever the prevailing coinage might be, should be diverted from his pocket or service into that of a hard up companion.
The knowledge of this amiable weakness offered a perpetual temptation to play upon Laploshka's fears of involuntary generosity.
To offer him a lift in a cab and pretend not to have enough money to pay the fair, to fluster him with a request for a sixpence when his hand was full of silver just received in change, these were a few of the petty torments that ingenuity prompted as occasion afforded.
He had the air of a man who had not slept.
"You owe me two francs from last night," was his breathless greeting.
I spoke evasively of the situation in Portugal, where more trouble seemed brewing.
But Laploshka listened with the abstraction of the deaf adder, and quickly returned to the subject of the two francs.
"I'm afraid I must owe it to you," I said lightly and brutally.
Laploshka said nothing, but his eyes bulged a little and his cheeks took on the mottled hues of an ethnographical map of the Balkan Peninsula. That same day, at sundown, he died.
There arose the problem of what to do with his two francs.
To have killed Laploshka was one thing; to have kept his beloved money would have argued a callousness of feeling of which I am not capable.
The ordinary solution, of giving it to the poor, would by no means fit the present situation, for nothing would have distressed the dead man more than such a misuse of his property.
On the other hand, the bestowal of two francs on the rich was an operation which called for some tact.
An easy way out of the difficulty seemed, however, to present itself the following Sunday, as I was wedged into the cosmopolitan crowd which filled the side aisle of one of the most popular Paris churches.
A collecting bag, for "the poor of Monsieur le Cure," was buffeting its tortuous way across the seemingly impenetrable human sea, and a German in front of me, who evidently did not wish his appreciation of the magnificent music to be marred by a suggestion of payment, made audible criticisms to his companion on the claims of the said charity.
"They do not want money," he said; "they have too much money.
They have no poor.
They are all pampered."
If that were really the case my way seemed clear.
Some three weeks later chance had taken me to Vienna, and I sat one evening regaling myself in a humble but excellent little Gasthaus up in the Wahringer quarter.
The appointments were primitive, but the Schnitzel, the beer, and the cheese could not have been improved on. Good cheer brought good custom, and with the exception of one small table near the door every place was occupied.
Poring over the bill of fare with the absorbed scrutiny of one who seeks the cheapest among the cheap was Laploshka. Once he looked across at me, with a comprehensive glance at my repast, as though to say, "It is my two francs you are eating," and then looked swiftly away.
Evidently the poor of Monsieur le Cure had been genuine poor.
I lunched next day at an expensive restaurant which I felt sure that the living Laploshka would never have entered on his own account, and I hoped that the dead Laploshka would observe the same barriers.
I was not mistaken, but as I came out I found him miserably studying the bill of fare stuck up on the portals.
Then he slowly made his way over to a milk hall.
For the first time in my experience I missed the charm and gaiety of Vienna life.
After that, in Paris or London or wherever I happened to be, I continued to see a good deal of Laploshka.
As I turned into my club on a rainy afternoon I would see him taking inadequate shelter in a doorway opposite.
Even if I indulged in the modest luxury of a penny chair in the Park he generally confronted me from one of the free benches, never staring at me, but always elaborately conscious of my presence.
My friends began to comment on my changed looks, and advised me to leave off heaps of things.
I should have liked to have left off Laploshka.
On a certain Sunday-it was probably Easter, for the crush was worse than ever-I was again wedged into the crowd listening to the music in the fashionable Paris church, and again the collection bag was buffeting its way across the human sea.
An English lady behind me was making ineffectual efforts to convey a coin into the still distant bag, so I took the money at her request and helped it forward to its destination. It was a two franc piece.
The delicate mission of bestowing the retrieved sum on the deserving rich still confronted me.
Again I trusted to the inspiration of accident, and again fortune favoured me.
It was now or never. Putting a strong American inflection into the French which I usually talked with an unmistakable British accent, I catechised the Baron as to the date of the church's building, its dimensions, and other details which an American tourist would be certain to want to know.
Having acquired such information as the Baron was able to impart on short notice, I solemnly placed the two franc piece in his hand, with the hearty assurance that it was "pour vous," and turned to go.
The Baron was slightly taken aback, but accepted the situation with a good grace. Walking over to a small box fixed in the wall, he dropped Laploshka's two francs into the slot.
That evening, at the crowded corner by the Cafe de la Paix, I caught a fleeting glimpse of Laploshka.
He smiled, slightly raised his hat, and vanished.
THE BAG
"The Major is coming in to tea," said mrs Hoopington to her niece. "He's just gone round to the stables with his horse.
Be as bright and lively as you can; the poor man's got a fit of the glooms."
Major Pallaby was a victim of circumstances, over which he had no control, and of his temper, over which he had very little.
The Major could plead reasonable excuse for his fit of the glooms.
In ranging herself as a partisan on the side of Major Pallaby mrs Hoopington had been largely influenced by the fact that she had made up her mind to marry him at an early date.
Against his notorious bad temper she set his three thousand a year, and his prospective succession to a baronetcy gave a casting vote in his favour.
The Major's plans on the subject of matrimony were not at present in such an advanced stage as mrs Hoopington's, but he was beginning to find his way over to Hoopington Hall with a frequency that was already being commented on.
"Why you didn't bring one or two hunting men down with you, instead of that stupid Russian boy, I can't think."
"Vladimir isn't stupid," protested her niece; "he's one of the most amusing boys I ever met.
Just compare him for a moment with some of your heavy hunting men-"
"Anyhow, my dear Norah, he can't ride."
"Russians never can; but he shoots."
"Yes; and what does he shoot?
Yesterday he brought home a woodpecker in his game bag."
"That's no excuse for including a woodpecker in his game bag."
A Grand Duke pots a vulture just as seriously as we should stalk a bustard.
Anyhow, I've explained to Vladimir that certain birds are beneath his dignity as a sportsman.
mrs Hoopington sniffed.
Most people with whom Vladimir came in contact found his high spirits infectious, but his present hostess was guaranteed immune against infection of that sort.
"I shall go and get ready for tea.
We're going to have it here in the hall.
Entertain the Major if he comes in before I'm down, and, above all, be bright."
That young gentleman, however, was supremely unconscious of any shortcomings, and burst into the hall, tired, and less sprucely groomed than usual, but distinctly radiant.
His game bag looked comfortably full.
"Guess what I have shot," he demanded.
"Pheasants, woodpigeons, rabbits," hazarded Norah.
"No; a large beast; I don't know what you call it in English.
Brown, with a darkish tail." Norah changed colour.
"Does it live in a tree and eat nuts?" she asked, hoping that the use of the adjective "large" might be an exaggeration.
Norah sat down suddenly, and hid her face in her hands.
"Merciful Heaven!" she wailed; "he's shot a fox!"
In a torrent of agitated words she tried to explain the horror of the situation.
The boy understood nothing, but was thoroughly alarmed.
"Hide it, hide it!" said Norah frantically, pointing to the still unopened bag.
"My aunt and the Major will be here in a moment.
Throw it on the top of that chest; they won't see it there."
Vladimir swung the bag with fair aim; but the strap caught in its flight on the outstanding point of an antler fixed in the wall, and the bag, with its terrible burden, remained suspended just above the alcove where tea would presently be laid.
At that moment mrs Hoopington and the Major entered the hall.
"The Major is going to draw our covers to morrow," announced the lady, with a certain heavy satisfaction.
"I'm sure I hope so; I hope so," said the Major moodily.
One hears so often that a fox has settled down as a tenant for life in certain covers, and then when you go to turn him out there isn't a trace of him.
I'm certain a fox was shot or trapped in Lady Widden's woods the very day before we drew them."
"Major, if any one tried that game on in my woods they'd get short shrift," said mrs Hoopington.
On one side of her loomed the morose countenance of the Major, on the other she was conscious of the scared, miserable eyes of Vladimir.
She dared not raise her eyes above the level of the tea table, and she almost expected to see a spot of accusing vulpine blood drip down and stain the whiteness of the cloth.
Her aunt's manner signalled to her the repeated message to "be bright"; for the present she was fully occupied in keeping her teeth from chattering.
"What did you shoot to day?" asked mrs Hoopington suddenly of the unusually silent Vladimir.
"Nothing-nothing worth speaking of," said the boy.
Norah's heart, which had stood still for a space, made up for lost time with a most disturbing bound.
"I wish you'd find something that was worth speaking about," said the hostess; "every one seems to have lost their tongues."
"Yesterday morning; a fine dog fox, with a dark brush," confided mrs Hoopington.
"Aha, we'll have a good gallop after that brush to morrow," said the Major, with a transient gleam of good humour.
"What is exciting him?" asked his mistress, as the dog suddenly broke into short angry barks, with a running accompaniment of tremulous whines.
"Why," she continued, "it's your game bag, Vladimir!
"By Gad," said the Major, who was now standing up; "there's a pretty warm scent!"
And then a simultaneous idea flashed on himself and mrs Hoopington. Their faces flushed to distinct but harmonious tones of purple, and with one accusing voice they screamed, "You've shot the fox!"
Norah tried hastily to palliate Vladimir's misdeed in their eyes, but it is doubtful whether they heard her.
The Major's fury clothed and reclothed itself in words as frantically as a woman up in town for one day's shopping tries on a succession of garments.
He reviled and railed at fate and the general scheme of things, he pitied himself with a strong, deep pity too poignent for tears, he condemned every one with whom he had ever come in contact to endless and abnormal punishments.
In fact, he conveyed the impression that if a destroying angel had been lent to him for a week it would have had very little time for private study. In the lulls of his outcry could be heard the querulous monotone of mrs Hoopington and the sharp staccato barking of the fox terrier.
His mind strayed back to the youth in the old Russian folk tale who shot an enchanted bird with dramatic results.
Meanwhile, the Major, roaming round the hall like an imprisoned cyclone, had caught sight of and joyfully pounced on the telephone apparatus, and lost no time in ringing up the hunt secretary and announcing his resignation of the Mastership.
A servant had by this time brought his horse round to the door, and in a few seconds mrs Hoopington's shrill monotone had the field to itself.
But after the Major's display her best efforts at vocal violence missed their full effect; it was as though one had come straight out from a Wagner opera into a rather tame thunderstorm.
"Bury it," said Norah.
"Just plain burial?" said Vladimir, rather relieved.
He had almost expected that some of the local clergy would have insisted on being present, or that a salute might have to be fired over the grave.
My Dear Helen:
I will begin where I left off in my last letter.
As you may imagine, I did not get any sleep that night, not even so much as a cat's nap, as people say, though how cat's naps differ from men's and women's naps, I don't know.
I shivered all night, and it hurt me terribly whenever I moved.
Don't you remember when you had that big double tooth pulled out, and he gave you five dollars, how he swore then?
Well, he took me up in his arms, and carried me into the dining room; it was quite cool; there was a nice wood fire on the hearth, and Mary was setting the table for breakfast.
He said to her in a very gruff voice, "Here you, Mary, you go up into the garret and bring down the cradle."
Sick as I was, I could not help laughing at the sight of her face.
It was enough to make any cat laugh.
"You do as I tell you," said he, in that most awful tone of his, which always makes you so afraid.
I felt afraid myself, though all the time he was stroking my head, and saying, "Poor pussy, there, poor pussy, lie still." In a few minutes Mary came down with the cradle, and set it down by the fire with such a bang that I wondered it did not break.
You know she always bangs things when she is cross, but I never could see what good it does.
Then your grandfather made up a nice bed in the cradle, out of Charlie's winter blanket and an old pillow, and laid me down in it, all rolled up as I was in your petticoat.
When your mother came into the room she laughed almost as hard as she did when she saw me in the soft soap barrel, and said, "Why, father, you are rather old to play cat's cradle!"
The old gentleman laughed at this, till the tears ran down his red cheeks.
After breakfast I tried to walk, but my right paw was entirely useless.
At first they thought it was broken, but finally decided that it was only sprained, and must be bandaged.
The bandages were wet with something which smelled so badly it made me feel very sick, for the first day or two.
For three days I had to lie all the time in the cradle: if your grandfather caught me out of it, he would swear at me, and put me back again.
Every morning he put the soft white stuff on my eyes, and changed the bandages on my leg.
And, oh, my dear Helen, such good things as I had to eat!
I had almost the same things for my dinner that the rest of them did: it must be a splendid thing to be a man or a woman!
I do not think I shall ever again be contented to eat in the shed, and have only the old pieces which nobody wants.
I suppose she thought it was only some common strolling cat who was hungry.
I have always noticed that people do not observe any difference between one cat's voice and another's; now they really are just as different as human voices.
Caesar has one of the finest, deepest toned voices I ever heard.
One day, after I got well enough to be in the kitchen, he slipped in, between the legs of the butcher's boy who was bringing in some meat; but before I had time to say one word to him, Mary flew at him with the broom, and drove him out.
However, he saw that I was alive, and that was something.
I am afraid it will be some days yet before I can see him again, for they do not let me go out at all, and the bandages are not taken off my leg.
The cradle is carried upstairs, and I sleep on Charlie's blanket behind the stove.
I heard your mother say to day that she really believed the cat had the rheumatism.
I do not know what that is, but I think I have got it: it hurts me all over when I walk, and I feel as if I looked like Bill Jacobs's old cat, who, they say, is older than the oldest man in town; but of course that must be a slander.
The thing I am most concerned about is my fur; it is coming off in spots: there is a bare spot on the back of my neck, on the place by which they lifted me up out of the soap barrel, half as large as your hand; and whenever I wash myself, I get my mouth full of hairs, which is very disagreeable.
I hope you will come home soon.
Your affectionate Pussy.
seven.
My Dear Helen:
I am so glad to know that you are coming home next week, that I cannot think of any thing else.
There is only one drawback to my pleasure, and that is, I am so ashamed to have you see me in such a plight.
I told you, in my last letter, that my fur was beginning to come off.
Your grandfather has tried several things of his, which are said to be good for hair; but they have not had the least effect.
However, he has been so good to me, that I let him do any thing he likes, and every day he rubs in some new kind of stuff, which smells a little worse than the last one.
I might as well fire off a gun to let them know I am coming, as to go about scented up so that they can smell me a great deal farther off than they can see me.
If it were not for this dreadful state of my fur, I should be perfectly happy, for I feel much better than I ever did before in my whole life, and am twice as fat as when you went away.
I try to be resigned to whatever may be in store for me, but it is very hard to look forward to being a fright all the rest of one's days.
I don't suppose such a thing was ever seen in the world as a cat without any fur.
This morning your grandfather sat looking at me for a long time and stroking his chin: at last he said, "Do you suppose it would do any good to shave the cat all over?" At this I could not resist the impulse to scream, and your mother said, "I do believe the creature knows whenever we speak about her." Of course I do!
Why in the world shouldn't I! People never seem to observe that cats have ears.
I often think how much more careful they would be if they did.
There are some houses in which I lived, before I came to live with you, about which I could tell strange stories if I chose.
You see I spend so much more time in the society of men and women than of cats, that I find myself constantly using expressions which sound queerly in a cat's mouth.
But you know me well enough to be sure that every thing I say is perfectly natural.
And now, my dear Helen, I hope I have prepared you to see me looking perfectly hideous.
I only trust that your love for me will not be entirely killed by my unfortunate appearance.
Chapter eight
From the top of a little hill outside the town could be seen the golden spires and many coloured cupolas, the sprawling grey immensity of the capital spread along the dreary plain, and beyond, the steely Gulf of Finland.
There was no battle.
But Kerensky made a fatal blunder.
The soldiers replied that they would remain neutral, but would not disarm.
A few minutes later Cossack artillery opened fire on the barracks, killing eight men.
Occasionally an automobile passed in and out, flying the Red Cross flag.
Albert Rhys Williams was in the Telephone Exchange.
Some sailors ambushed behind wood piles began shooting.
In the archway where Miss Bryant stood seven people were shot dead, among them two little boys.
The French Embassy promptly denied this, but one of the City Councillors told me that he himself had procured the officer's release from prison....
Even the moving picture shows, all outside lights dark, played to crowded houses.
Frenzied by defeat and their heaps of dead, the Soviet troops opened a tornado of steel and flame against the battered building.
A Commissar from Smolny named Kirilov tried to halt it; he was threatened with lynching.
The Red Guards' blood was up.
The rest, about two hundred, were taken to Peter Paul under escort, in small groups so as to avoid notice.
Several did not come back....
They will massacre us!" they cried, for many of them had given their word at the Winter Palace not to take up arms against the People.
Williams offered to mediate if Antonov were released.
Tired, bloody, triumphant, the sailors and workers swarmed into the switchboard room, and finding so many pretty girls, fell back in an embarrassed way and fumbled with awkward feet.
Not a girl was injured, not one insulted.
Frightened, they huddled in the corners, and then, finding themselves safe, gave vent to their spite.
"Ugh! The dirty, ignorant people!
The sailors and Red Guards were embarrassed.
"Brutes!
Pigs!" shrilled the girls, indignantly putting on their coats and hats.
These were just common workmen, peasants, "Dark People."...
The Commissar of the Military Revolutionary Committee, little Vishniak, tried to persuade the girls to remain.
He was effusively polite.
"You have been badly treated," he said.
You are paid sixty rubles a month, and have to work ten hours and more....
From now on all that will be changed.
The Government intends to put the telephones under control of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs. Your wages will be immediately raised to one hundred and fifty rubles, and your working hours reduced.
As members of the working class you should be happy-"
The employees of the building, the line men and labourers-they stayed.
But the switch boards must be operated-the telephone was vital....
The six girls scurried backward and forward, instructing, helping, scolding....
Late in the afternoon word of it spread through the city, and hundreds of bourgeois called up to scream, "Fools! Devils!
Wait till the Cossacks come!"
On the almost deserted Nevsky, swept by a bitter wind, a crowd had gathered before the Kazan Cathedral, continuing the endless debate; a few workmen, some soldiers and the rest shop keepers, clerks and the like.
To hell with Kerensky!
One read:
At this dangerous hour, when the Municipal Duma ought to use every means to calm the population, to assure it bread and other necessities, the Right Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cadets, forgetting their duty, have turned the Duma into a counter revolutionary meeting, trying to raise part of the population against the rest, so as to facilitate the victory of Kornilov Kerensky.
Instead of doing their duty, the Right Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cadets have transformed the Duma into an arena of political attack upon the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, against the revolutionary Government of peace, bread and liberty.
Citizens of Petrograd, we, the Bolshevik Municipal Councillors elected by you-we want you to know that the Right Socialist Revolutionaries and the Cadets are engaged in counter revolutionary action, have forgotten their duty, and are leading the population to famine, to civil war.
Far away still sounded occasional shots, but the city lay quiet, cold, as if exhausted by the violent spasms which had torn it.
In the Nicolai Hall the Duma session was coming to an end.
One after another the Commissars reported-capture of the Telephone Exchange, street fighting, the taking of the Vladimir school....
"The Duma," said Trupp, "is on the side of the democracy in its struggle against arbitrary violence; but in any case, whichever side wins, the Duma will always be against lynchings and torture...."
Here there was doubt and depression.
The counter revolution was being put down.
A courier reported that the Committee of Welcome sent to meet Kerensky at the railway station had been arrested.
Still Kerensky did not come...
The Socialist Revolutionary paper demanded a Cabinet without either Cadets or Bolsheviki.
Gorky was hopeful; Smolny had made concessions.
We ridicule these coalitions with political parties whose most prominent members are petty journalists of doubtful reputation; our "coalition" is that of the proletariat and the revolutionary Army with the poor peasants...
The conquerors of these riots, the saviours of the wreck of our country, these will be neither the Bolsheviki, nor the Committee for Salvation, nor the troops of Kerensky-but we, the Union of Railwaymen...
Red Guards are incapable of handling a complicated business like the railways; as for the Provisional Government, it has shown itself incapable of holding the power...
We refuse to lend our services to any party which does not act by authority of ... a Government based on the confidence of all the democracy....
Smolny thrilled with the boundless vitality of inexhaustible humanity in action.
They tried to send a mission to the Stavka, but we arrested them at Minsk....
Our branch has demanded an All Russian Convention, and they refuse to call it...."
One after another the various democratic organisations, all over Russia, were cracking and changing.
On the top floor the Military Revolutionary Committee was in full blast, striking and slacking not.
Men went in, fresh and vigorous; night and day and night and day they threw themselves into the terrible machine; and came out limp, blind with fatigue, hoarse and filthy, to fall on the floor and sleep....
Colonel Polkovnikov was in command of their forces, and the orders were signed by Gotz, former member of the Provisional Government, allowed at liberty on his word of honour....
The Soviet forces complied, and as they were leaving the Kremlin, were set upon and shot down.
Street fighting was slowly gathering way; all attempts at compromise had failed....
Smolny was almost deserted, except for the guards, who were busy at the hall windows, setting up machine guns to command the flanks of the building.
We have sent a committee to Kerensky to say that if he continues to march on Petrograd we will break his lines of communication...."
Kameniev answered discreetly.
The centre of gravity, however, lay not in composition of such a Government, but in its acceptance of the programme of the Congress of Soviets.
But now that blood has been spilled there is only one way-pitiless struggle.
The moment is decisive.
Everybody must cooperate with the Military Revolutionary Committee, report where there are stores of barbed wire, benzine, guns....
We've won the power; now we must keep it!"
The Menshevik Yoffe tried to read his party's declaration, but Trotzky refused to allow "a debate about principle."
"Our debates are now in the streets," he cried.
"The decisive step has been taken.
Then Trotzky again, fiery, indefatigable, giving orders, answering questions.
"The petty bourgeoisie, in order to defeat the workers, soldiers and peasants, would combine with the devil himself!" he said once.
Many cases of drunkenness had been remarked the last two days.
"No drinking, comrades!
No one must be on the streets after eight in the evening, except the regular guards.
"For each revolutionist killed," said Trotzky, "we shall kill five counter revolutionists!"
The Duma brilliantly illuminated and great crowds pouring in.
The gold and red epaulettes of officers were conspicuous, the familiar faces of the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary intellectuals, the hard eyes and bulky magnificence of bankers and diplomats, officials of the old regime, and well dressed women....
The telephone girls were testifying.
Girl after girl came to the tribune-over dressed, fashion aping little girls, with pinched faces and leaky shoes.
The Mayor said hopefully that the Petrograd regiments were ashamed of their actions; propaganda was making headway.
Revolutionary law and order.
A proclamation of the Finland Regiment, in December, nineteen seventeen, announcing desperate remedies for "wine pogroms." For translation see Appendix five.
"The Bolsheviki," said Trupp, "will be conquered by moral force, and not by bayonets....."
Meanwhile all was not well on the revolutionary front.
A Committee of five soldiers was elected to serve as General Staff, and in the small hours of the morning the regiments left their barracks in full battle array.... Going home I saw them pass, swinging along with the regular tread of veterans, bayonets in perfect alignment, through the deserted streets of the conquered city....
Abramovitch, for the centre Mensheviki, said that there should be neither conquerors nor conquered-that bygones should be bygones. ...In this were agreed all the left wing parties.
All that night the commission wrangled, and all the next day, and the next night.
In Moscow a truce had been declared; both sides parleyed, awaiting the result in the capital.
The result waited on the word from Petrograd....
Smolny was almost empty, but the Duma was thronged and noisy.
The peaceful population recognises this fact; the foreign Embassies recognise only such documents as are signed by the Mayor of the town.
"We are perfectly neutral.
At this there was ironic laughter from the Bolshevik benches, and imprecations from the right.
"The Mayor," he continued, "tells us that we must not make political meetings out of the Duma.
But this shall not be, for we respect the Duma.
Followed him Shingariov, Cadet, who said that there could be no common language with those who were liable to be brought before the Attorney General for indictment, and who must be tried on the charge of treason....
He proposed again that all Bolshevik members should be expelled from the Duma.
This was tabled, however, for there were no personal charges against the members, and they were active in the Municipal administration.
Then two Mensheviki Internationalists, declaring that the Appeal of the Bolshevik Councillors was a direct incitement to massacre.
"If everything that is against the Bolsheviki is counter revolutionary," said Pinkevitch, "then I do not know the difference between revolution and anarchy....
The Bolsheviki are depending upon the passions of the unbridled masses; we have nothing but moral force. We will protest against massacres and violence from both sides, as our task is to find a peaceful issue."
"The notice posted in the streets under the heading 'To the Pillory,' which calls upon the people to destroy the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries," said Nazariev, "is a crime which you, Bolsheviki, will not be able to wash away.
I have always tried to reconcile you with the other parties, but at present I feel for you nothing but contempt!"
"See!" they said.
They don't dare arrest the Duma!
It's only a few hours more, now. Even if Kerensky wouldn't come they haven't the men to run a Government.
Absurd!
A Socialist Revolutionary friend of mine drew me aside.
"Do you want to go and talk with them?"
By this time it was dusk.
The city had again settled down to normal-shop shutters up, lights shining, and on the streets great crowds of people slowly moving up and down and arguing....
There was a sound of scuffling; an inside door slammed; then the front door opened a crack and a woman's face appeared.
They were delighted to meet an American reporter.
They would not give me their names, but both were Socialist Revolutionaries....
"Why," I asked, "do you publish such lies in your newspapers?"
Without taking offence the officer replied, "Yes, I know; but what can we do?" He shrugged.
The other man interrupted.
"This is merely an adventure on the part of the Bolsheviki.
They have no intellectuals....
The Ministries won't work....
Russia is not a city, but a whole country....
Realising that they can only last a few days, we have decided to come to the aid of the strongest force opposed to them-Kerensky-and help to restore order."
"That is all very well," I said.
"But why do you combine with the Cadets?"
The pseudo workman smiled frankly.
We have no following-now.
The Cadets think they are using us; but it is really we who are using the Cadets.
He scratched his head.
"That's a problem," he admitted.
"And then, too," said the officer, "that brings up the question of admitting the Cadets into the new Government-and for the same reasons.
You know the Cadets do not really want the Constituent Assembly-not if the Bolsheviki can be destroyed now." He shook his head.
You Americans are born politicians; you have had politics all your lives.
"What do you think of Kerensky?" I asked.
"Oh, Kerensky is guilty of the sins of the Provisional Government," answered the other man.
"But didn't it amount to that anyway?"
"Yes, but how were we to know?
"In a week the Bolshevik Government will go to pieces; if the Socialist Revolutionaries could only stand aside and wait, the Government would fall into their hands.
"How about the Cossacks?"
The officer sighed.
"They did not move.
They said moreover that they had their men with Kerensky, and that they were doing their part....
There is no danger to us.
We remain neutral.'"
During this talk people were constantly entering and leaving-most of them officers, their shoulder straps torn off.
I recognised Colonel Polkovnikov, former commandant of Petrograd, for whose arrest the Military Revolutionary Committee would have paid a fortune.
"Our programme?" said the officer.
"This is it.
Land to be turned over to the Land Committees.
The Bolsheviki cannot keep their promises to the masses, even in the country itself.
We won't let them....
That is dishonest.
If they had waited for the Constituent Assembly-"
Kerensky made the great mistake.
The two men looked at one another.
"You will see in a few days.
If not, perhaps we shall be forced to...."
Meshkovsky, a neat, frail little man, was coming down the hall, looking worried.
For instance, the Council of People's Commissars had promised to publish the Secret Treaties; but Neratov, the functionary in charge, had disappeared, taking the documents with him.
Worst of all, however, was the strike in the banks.
"Without money," said Menzhinsky, "we are helpless.
"But Lenin has issued an order to dynamite the State Bank vaults, and there is a Decree just out, ordering the private banks to open to morrow, or we will open them ourselves!"
All available forces must be hurried there....
"From Moscow, bad news.
The result depends upon Petrograd.
Kerensky is flooding the trenches with tales of Petrograd burning and bloody, of women and children massacred by the Bolsheviki.
"I'm going now!" answered Trotzky, and left the platform.
Kameniev now spoke, describing the proceedings of the reconciliation conference.
The armistice conditions proposed by the Mensheviki, he said, had been contemptuously rejected.
"Now that we've won the power and are sweeping all Russia," he declared, "all they ask of us are three little things: one.
To surrender the power.
To make the soldiers continue the war.
three.
To make the peasants forget about the land...."
It is good enough for us...."
So the meeting roared on, leader after leader explaining, exhorting, arguing, soldier after soldier, workman after workman, standing up to speak his mind and his heart....
The audience flowed, changing and renewed continually.
From time to time men came in, yelling for the members of such and such a detachment, to go to the front; others, relieved, wounded, or coming to Smolny for arms and equipment, poured in....
"It's all right!" he shouted, grabbing my hands.
"Telegram from the front.
Kerensky is smashed!
Look at this!"
Pulkovo.
The attempt of Kerensky to move counter revolutionary troops against the capital of the Revolution has been decisively repulsed.
Kerensky is retreating, we are advancing.
The bourgeoisie tried to isolate the revolutionary army.
Kerensky attempted to break it by the force of the Cossacks.
Both plans met a pitiful defeat.
The Pulkovo detachment by its valorous blow has strengthened the cause of the Workers' and Peasants's Revolution.
There is no return to the past.
Before us are struggles, obstacles and sacrifices.
A week after the tea at the manse Diana Barry gave a party.
"Small and select," Anne assured Marilla.
"Just the girls in our class."
They had a very good time and nothing untoward happened until after tea, when they found themselves in the Barry garden, a little tired of all their games and ripe for any enticing form of mischief which might present itself.
It had begun among the boys, but soon spread to the girls, and all the silly things that were done in Avonlea that summer because the doers thereof were "dared" to do them would fill a book by themselves.
First of all Carrie Sloane dared Ruby Gillis to climb to a certain point in the huge old willow tree before the front door; which Ruby Gillis, albeit in mortal dread of the fat green caterpillars with which said tree was infested and with the fear of her mother before her eyes if she should tear her new muslin dress, nimbly did, to the discomfiture of the aforesaid Carrie Sloane.
But Josie Pye, if deficient in some qualities that make for popularity, had at least a natural and inborn gift, duly cultivated, for walking board fences.
Josie walked the Barry fence with an airy unconcern which seemed to imply that a little thing like that wasn't worth a "dare." Reluctant admiration greeted her exploit, for most of the other girls could appreciate it, having suffered many things themselves in their efforts to walk fences.
Josie descended from her perch, flushed with victory, and darted a defiant glance at Anne.
"I don't think it's such a very wonderful thing to walk a little, low, board fence," she said.
"I don't believe it," said Josie flatly.
"I don't believe anybody could walk a ridgepole.
YOU couldn't, anyhow."
"Couldn't I?" cried Anne rashly.
"Then I dare you to do it," said Josie defiantly.
"I dare you to climb up there and walk the ridgepole of mr Barry's kitchen roof."
All the fifth class girls said, "Oh!" partly in excitement, partly in dismay.
"You'll fall off and be killed.
Never mind Josie Pye.
"I shall walk that ridgepole, Diana, or perish in the attempt.
If I am killed you are to have my pearl bead ring."
Nevertheless, she managed to take several steps before the catastrophe came.
Then she swayed, lost her balance, stumbled, staggered, and fell, sliding down over the sun baked roof and crashing off it through the tangle of Virginia creeper beneath-all before the dismayed circle below could give a simultaneous, terrified shriek.
Fortunately she fell on the other side, where the roof extended down over the porch so nearly to the ground that a fall therefrom was a much less serious thing.
"Oh, Anne, dear Anne, speak just one word to me and tell me if you're killed."
"Where?" sobbed Carrie Sloane.
"Oh, where, Anne?" Before Anne could answer mrs Barry appeared on the scene.
"What's the matter?
"My ankle," gasped Anne.
"Oh, Diana, please find your father and ask him to take me home.
I know I can never walk there.
Marilla was out in the orchard picking a panful of summer apples when she saw mr Barry coming over the log bridge and up the slope, with mrs Barry beside him and a whole procession of little girls trailing after him.
At that moment Marilla had a revelation.
In the sudden stab of fear that pierced her very heart she realized what Anne had come to mean to her. She would have admitted that she liked Anne-nay, that she was very fond of Anne.
"mr Barry, what has happened to her?" she gasped, more white and shaken than the self-contained, sensible Marilla had been for many years.
"Don't be very frightened, Marilla.
I was walking the ridgepole and I fell off.
I expect I have sprained my ankle.
Let us look on the bright side of things."
Mercy me, the child has gone and fainted!"
It was quite true.
matthew, hastily summoned from the harvest field, was straightway dispatched for the doctor, who in due time came, to discover that the injury was more serious than they had supposed.
That night, when Marilla went up to the east gable, where a white faced girl was lying, a plaintive voice greeted her from the bed.
"It was your own fault," said Marilla, twitching down the blind and lighting a lamp.
"And that is just why you should be sorry for me," said Anne, "because the thought that it is all my own fault is what makes it so hard.
If I could blame it on anybody I would feel so much better.
But what would you have done, Marilla, if you had been dared to walk a ridgepole?"
"I'd have stayed on good firm ground and let them dare away.
Such absurdity!" said Marilla.
I haven't.
I just felt that I couldn't bear Josie Pye's scorn.
It's not a bit nice to faint, after all. And the doctor hurt me dreadfully when he was setting my ankle.
I won't be able to go around for six or seven weeks and I'll miss the new lady teacher.
She won't be new any more by the time I'm able to go to school. And Gil-everybody will get ahead of me in class.
Oh, I am an afflicted mortal.
But I'll try to bear it all bravely if only you won't be cross with me, Marilla."
"There, there, I'm not cross," said Marilla.
"You're an unlucky child, there's no doubt about that; but as you say, you'll have the suffering of it.
Here now, try and eat some supper."
"Isn't it fortunate I've got such an imagination?" said Anne.
"It will help me through splendidly, I expect.
What do people who haven't any imagination do when they break their bones, do you suppose, Marilla?"
But she was not solely dependent on it.
She had many visitors and not a day passed without one or more of the schoolgirls dropping in to bring her flowers and books and tell her all the happenings in the juvenile world of Avonlea.
Why, even Superintendent Bell came to see me, and he's really a very fine man.
Not a kindred spirit, of course; but still I like him and I'm awfully sorry I ever criticized his prayers.
He could get over that if he'd take a little trouble.
I gave him a good broad hint.
He told me all about the time he broke his ankle when he was a boy.
When I try to imagine him as a boy I see him with gray whiskers and spectacles, just as he looks in Sunday school, only small.
Isn't that something to be proud of, Marilla?
When a minister's wife has so many claims on her time!
She never tells you it's your own fault and she hopes you'll be a better girl on account of it.
Even Josie Pye came to see me.
I received her as politely as I could, because I think she was sorry she dared me to walk a ridgepole.
Diana has been a faithful friend.
She's been over every day to cheer my lonely pillow.
The girls all think she is perfectly sweet.
Oh, it's just glorious to think of it.
And the Friday afternoons they don't have recitations Miss Stacy takes them all to the woods for a 'field' day and they study ferns and flowers and birds.
THE IDEA OF GOD.
If we accept the definition that mythology is the idea of God expressed in symbol, figure, and narrative, and always struggling toward a clearer utterance, it is well not only to trace this idea in its very earliest embodiment in language, but also, for the sake of comparison, to ask what is its latest and most approved expression.
He has shown that our reason, dwelling on the facts of experience, constantly seeks the principles which connect them together, and only rests satisfied in the conviction that there is a highest and first principle which reconciles all their discrepancies and binds them into one.
It must be true, for it is evolved from the laws of reason, our only test of truth. Furthermore, the sense of personality and the voice of conscience, analyzed to their sources, can only be explained by the assumption of an infinite personality and an absolute standard of right.
In every heart was an altar to the Unknown God.
We are speaking of a people little capable of abstraction.
The exhibitions of force in nature seemed to them the manifestations of that mysterious power felt by their self consciousness; to combine these various manifestations and recognize them as the operations of one personality, was a step not easily taken.
Yet He is not far from every one of us.
Therefore a word is usually found in their languages analogous to none in any European tongue, a word comprehending all manifestations of the unseen world, yet conveying no sense of personal unity.
The heavens, the upper regions, are in every religion the supposed abode of the divine.
There the sun and bright stars sojourn, emblems of glory and stability.
Numerous languages bear trace of this.
The Latin Deus, the Greek Zeus, the Sanscrit Dyaus, the Chinese Tien, all originally meant the sky above, and our own word heaven is often employed synonymously with God.
There is at first no personification in these expressions.
They embrace all unseen agencies, they are void of personality, and yet to the illogical primitive man there is nothing contradictory in making them the object of his prayers.
This last expression leads to another train of thought.
As the philosopher, pondering on the workings of self consciousness, recognizes that various pathways lead up to God, so the primitive man, in forming his language, sometimes trod one, sometimes another.
This firm belief has left its impress on language in the names devised to express the supernal, the spiritual world.
Etymologically, in fact, ghosts and gusts, breaths and breezes, the Great Spirit and the Great Wind, are one and the same.
It is easy to guess the reason of this.
The soul is the life, the life is the breath.
Invisible, imponderable, quickening with vigorous motion, slackening in rest and sleep, passing quite away in death, it is the most obvious sign of life.
But the breath is nothing but wind. How easy, therefore, to look upon the wind that moves up and down and to and fro upon the earth, that carries the clouds, itself unseen, that calls forth the terrible tempests and the various seasons, as the breath, the spirit of God, as God himself?
Armed with these analogies, we turn to the primitive tongues of America, and find them there as distinct as in the Old World.
The descent is, indeed, almost imperceptible which leads to the personification of the wind as God, which merges this manifestation of life and power in one with its unseen, unknown cause.
As if man ever did or ever could draw the idea of God from nature!
In the identity of wind with breath, of breath with life, of life with soul, of soul with God, lies the far deeper and far truer reason, whose insensible development I have here traced, in outline indeed, but confirmed by the evidence of language itself.
Let none of these expressions, however, be construed to prove the distinct recognition of One Supreme Being.
Of monotheism either as displayed in the one personal definite God of the Semitic races, or in the dim pantheistic sense of the Brahmins, there was not a single instance on the American continent.
How could they expect it?
In most instances they are entirely of modern origin, coined at the suggestion of missionaries, applied to the white man's God.
Very rarely do they bring any conception of personality to the native mind, very rarely do they signify any object of worship, perhaps never did in the olden times.
Does he wish to express still more forcibly this sentiment, he doubles the word, or prefixes an adjective, or adds an affix, as the genius of his language may dictate.
But it still remains to him but an unapplied abstraction, a mere category of thought, a frame for the All.
It is never the object of veneration or sacrifice, no myth brings it down to his comprehension, it is not installed in his temples.
It is related that about the year fourteen forty, at a grand religious council held at the consecration of the newly built temple of the Sun at Cuzco, the Inca Yupanqui rose before the assembled multitude and spoke somewhat as follows:--
"Many say that the Sun is the Maker of all things.
Now many things happen when the Sun is absent; therefore he cannot be the universal creator.
And that he is alive at all is doubtful, for his trips do not tire him.
He is like a tethered beast who makes a daily round under the eye of a master; he is like an arrow, which must go whither it is sent, not whither it wishes.
No better success attended the attempt of Nezahuatl, lord of Tezcuco, which took place about the same time.
At length, in indignation and despair, the prince exclaimed, "Verily, these gods that I am adoring, what are they but idols of stone without speech or feeling?
They could not have made the beauty of the heaven, the sun, the moon, and the stars which adorn it, and which light the earth, with its countless streams, its fountains and waters, its trees and plants, and its various inhabitants.
In neither case, be it observed, was any attempt made to substitute another and purer religion for the popular one.
They prove something in regard to a consciousness of divinity hedging us about, but nothing at all in favor of a recognition of one God; they exemplify how profound is the conviction of a highest and first principle, but they do not offer the least reason to surmise that this was a living reality in doctrine or practice.
The confusion of these distinct ideas has led to much misconception of the native creeds.
This notion, which has its historical origin among the Parsees of ancient Iran, is unknown to savage nations.
This view, which has obtained without question in every work on the native religions of America, has arisen partly from habits of thought difficult to break, partly from mistranslations of native words, partly from the foolish axiom of the early missionaries, "The gods of the gentiles are devils." Yet their own writings furnish conclusive proof that no such distinction existed out of their own fancies.
A passage often quoted in support of this mistaken view is one in Winslow's "Good News from New England," written in sixteen twenty two.
So in many instances it turns out that what has been reported to be the evil divinity of a nation, to whom they pray to the neglect of a better one, is in reality the highest power they recognize.
Writers anxious to discover Jewish or Christian analogies, forcibly construed myths to suit their pet theories, and for indolent observers it was convenient to catalogue their gods in antithetical classes.
Perhaps no myth has been so often quoted in its confirmation as that of the ancient Iroquois, which narrates the conflict between the first two brothers of our race.
It is of undoubted native origin and venerable antiquity.
At length the Good Mind turned upon his brother in anger, and crushed him into the earth.
After a prolonged struggle, which brought on the general deluge and the destruction of the world, he won the victory.
They narrate the struggles between the rulers of the upper and the nether world, the descent of the former into Xibalba, the Realm of Phantoms, and their victory over its lords, One Death and Seven Deaths.
The writer adds of the latter, who clearly represent to his mind the Evil One and his adjutants, "in the old times they did not have much power; they were but annoyers and opposers of men, and in truth they were not regarded as gods.
But when they appeared it was terrible.
A little reflection will convince the most incredulous that any such dualism as has been fancied to exist in the native religions, could not have been of indigenous growth.
The gods of the primitive man are beings of thoroughly human physiognomy, painted with colors furnished by intercourse with his fellows.
These are his enemies or his friends, as he conciliates or insults them.
Personal, family, or national feuds render some more inimical than others, but always from a desire to guard their own interests, never out of a delight in evil for its own sake.
Moral dualism can only arise in minds where the ideas of good and evil are not synonymous with those of pleasure and pain, for the conception of a wholly good or a wholly evil nature requires the use of these terms in their higher, ethical sense.
Chapter two
Of Course mrs Arbuthnot was not miserable-how could she be, she asked herself, when God was taking care of her?--but she let that pass for the moment unrepudiated, because of her conviction that here was another fellow creature in urgent need of her help; and not just boots and blankets and better sanitary arrangements this time, but the more delicate help of comprehension, of finding the exact right words.
And what disturbed mrs Arbuthnot about this suggestion was that she did not make it solely to comfort mrs Wilkins; she made it because of her own strange longing for the mediaeval castle.
There she was, accustomed to direct, to lead, to advise, to support-except Frederick; she long since had learned to leave Frederick to God-being led herself, being influenced and thrown off her feet, by just an advertisement, by just an incoherent stranger.
They got up simultaneously-mrs
She appeared to have, apart from her need of help, an upsetting kind of character.
She had a curious infectiousness.
She led one on.
We have attained it, and we are unhappy.
Anybody may do that.
I think it quite likely we shall find the conditions impossible, and even if they were not, probably by to morrow we shall not want to go."
Certainly her customary clear expression of candor was not there, and its place was taken by a kind of suppressed and frightened pleasedness, which would have led a more worldly minded audience to the instant conviction of recent and probably impassioned lovemaking.
Though she couldn't approve of the way mrs Wilkins was introducing the idea of predestination into her immediate future, just as if she had no choice, just as if to struggle, or even to reflect, were useless, it yet influenced her.
Some people were like that, mrs Arbuthnot knew; and if mrs Wilkins had actually seen her at the mediaeval castle it did seem probable that struggling would be a waste of time.
"In February?" he called after her sarcastically.
She felt she ought really to ask, straight out and roundly, that the mediaeval castle should already have been taken by some one else and the whole thing thus be settled, but her courage failed her.
Suppose her prayer were to be answered?
And after all-she almost pointed this out to God-if she spent her present nest egg on a holiday she could quite soon accumulate another.
The poor were the filter through which the money was passed, to come out, mrs Arbuthnot hoped, purified.
She could do no more.
Their very boots were stout with sins.
But how difficult it had been.
mrs Arbuthnot, groping for guidance, prayed about it to exhaustion.
But then what about the parish's boots?
And at least her little house was not haunted by the loose lived ladies, for Frederick did his work away from home.
Then he would suddenly appear at breakfast, having let himself in with his latchkey the night before, very jovial and good-natured and free handed and glad if she would allow him to give her something-a well fed man, contented with the world; a jolly, full blooded, satisfied man.
Life, she often thought, however much one tabulated was yet a mystery.
In this way everything would be got nicely ready for the two who seemed, in spite of the equality of the sharing, yet to have something about them of guests.
There were disagreeable incidents towards the end of March, when mrs Wilkins, her heart in her mouth and her face a mixture of guilt, terror and determination, told her husband that she had been invited to Italy, and he declined to believe it.
Of course he declined to believe it.
There was no precedent.
He required proofs.
Indeed, the whole of March was filled with unpleasant, anxious moments.
mrs Arbuthnot's conscience, made super sensitive by years of pampering, could not reconcile what she was doing with its own high standard of what was right.
Would you not, frankly, be disappointed if that prayer were granted?"
One woman.
He did not know, nobody knew, what she was going to do, and from the very beginning she was unable to look anybody in the face.
How could she stand up and ask people for money when she herself was spending so much on her own selfish pleasure?
She gave it all immediately to the organization she worked with, and found herself more tangled in doubts than ever.
"Think how much nicer we shall be when we come back," she said to mrs Arbuthnot, encouraging that pale lady.
No, mrs Wilkins had no doubts, but she had fears; and March was for her too an anxious month, with the unconscious mr Wilkins coming back daily to his dinner and eating his fish in the silence of imagined security.
None came.
The silence in the room, except for the hail hitting the windows and the gay roar of the fire, was complete.
mrs Wilkins could not speak.
mr Wilkins, who had not been abroad since before the war, and was noticing with increasing disgust, as week followed week of wind and rain, the peculiar persistent vileness of the weather, and slowly conceived a desire to get away from England for Easter.
He could afford a trip.
There was a familiar sound about Easter in Italy. To Italy he would go; and as it would cause comment if he did not take his wife, take her he must-besides, she would be useful; a second person was always useful in a country whose language one did not speak for holding things, for waiting with the luggage.
He had expected an explosion of gratitude and excitement.
The absence of it was incredible.
He turned his head-their chairs were in front of the fire-and looked at her.
"I am thinking," he repeated, raising his clear, cultivated voice and speaking with acerbity, for inattention at such a moment was deplorable, "of taking you to Italy for Easter.
Did you not hear me?"
In fact mrs Wilkins, driven by terror, guilt and surprise, had been more incoherent if possible than usual.
It was a dreadful afternoon.
Mellersh, profoundly indignant, besides having his intended treat coming back on him like a blessing to roost, cross examined her with the utmost severity.
He demanded that, since she had so outrageously accepted it without consulting him, she should write and cancel her acceptance.
Finding himself up against an unsuspected, shocking rock of obstinacy in her, he then declined to believe she had been invited to Italy at all.
He could not but believe mrs Arbuthnot.
But that made no difference to her conscience, which knew and would not let her forget that she had given him an incomplete impression.
God sees none."
Both mrs Arbuthnot and mrs Wilkins were shattered; try as they would not to, both felt extraordinarily guilty; and when on the morning of the thirtieth they did finally get off there was no exhilaration about the departure, no holiday feeling at all.
"We've been too good-much too good," mrs Wilkins kept on murmuring as they walked up and down the platform at Victoria, having arrived there an hour before they need have, "and that's why we feel as though we're doing wrong.
We're brow beaten-we're not any longer real human beings.
mrs Wilkins meant their husbands, persisting in her assumption that Frederick was as indignant as Mellersh over the departure of his wife, whereas Frederick did not even know his wife had gone.
Frederick went too deep into her heart for her to talk about him.
He was having an extra bout of work finishing another of those dreadful books, and had been away practically continually the last few weeks, and was away when she left.
But after having been very sick, just to arrive at Calais and not be sick was happiness, and it was there that the real splendour of what they were doing first began to warm their benumbed spirits.
None of the French porters knew him; not a single official at Calais cared a fig for Mellersh.
Scrap wanted to know so much about her mother that Arundel had presently to invent.
He would talk about anything she wished if only he might be with her for a while and see her and hear her, but he knew very little of the Droitwiches and their friends really-beyond meeting them at those bigger functions where literature is also represented, and amusing them at luncheons and dinners, he knew very little of them really.
To them he had always remained mr Arundel; no one called him Ferdinand; and he only knew the gossip also available to the evening papers and the frequenters of clubs.
It was quite easy to fasten some of the entertaining things he was constantly thinking on to other people and pretend they were theirs.
Scrap, who had that affection for her parents which warms in absence, was athirst for news, and became more and more interested by the news he gradually imparted.
At first it was ordinary news.
She looked very well; she said so and so.
But presently the things Lady Droitwich had said took on an unusual quality: they became amusing.
"Mother said that?" Scrap interrupted, surprised.
"Mother did that?" Scrap inquired, wide eyed.
He fathered some of the most entertaining ideas he had lately had on to Lady Droitwich, and also any charming funny things that had been done-or might have been done, for he could imagine almost anything.
Why, but how funny---fancy mother.
Did she really do that?
How perfectly adorable of her.
And did she really say-but how wonderful of her to think of it.
What sort of a face did Lloyd George make?
She laughed and laughed, and had a great longing to hug her mother, and the time flew, and it grew quite dusk, and it grew nearly dark, and mr Arundel still went on amusing her, and it was a quarter to eight before she suddenly remembered dinner.
It's late," said Arundel.
He did not wish to arrive too hot, so had to go slowly.
Fortunately he was near the top, and Francesca came down the pergola to pilot him indoors, and having shown him where he could wash she put him in the empty drawing room to cool himself by the crackling wood fire.
He got as far away from the fire as he could, and stood in one of the deep window recesses looking out at the distant lights of Mezzago. The drawing room door was open, and the house was quiet with the hush that precedes dinner, when the inhabitants are all shut up in their rooms dressing.
Rose was quite aware of what had happened to mr Briggs.
"Your husband," said Lotty, swinging her feet, "might be here quite soon, perhaps to morrow evening if he starts at once, and there'll be a glorious final few days before we all go home refreshed for life.
It's in the air.
You have to get fond of people here."
If only it would come true as well about Frederick! For Rose, who between lunch and tea had left off thinking about Frederick, was now, between tea and dinner, thinking of him harder than ever.
She could see as well as any one the unusually, the unique loveliness of Lady Caroline.
They seemed to quicken unsuspected faculties into life.
For a brief space, she thought, she had been like a torpid fly brought back to gay buzzing by the lighting of a fire in a wintry room.
She still buzzed, she still tingled, just at the remembrance.
What fun it had been, having an admirer even for that little while.
She dressed with care, though she knew mr Briggs would no longer see her, but it gave her pleasure to see how pretty, while she was about it, she could make herself look; and very nearly she stuck a crimson camellia in her hair down by her ear.
She did hold it there for a minute, and it looked almost sinfully attractive and was exactly the colour of her mouth, but she took it out again with a smile and a sigh and put it in the proper place for flowers, which is water.
She mustn't be silly, she thought.
Think of the poor.
Soon she would be back with them again, and what would a camellia behind her ear seem like then?
Simply fantastic.
But on one thing she was determined: the first thing she would do when she got home would be to have it out with Frederick.
But now let him wound her as much as he chose, as much as he possibly could, she would still have it out with him.
For a person who wrote books, thought Rose, Frederick didn't seem to have much imagination.
Anyhow, she said to herself, getting up from the dressing table, things couldn't go on like this.
She would have it out with him.
This separate life, this freezing loneliness, she had had enough of it.
Why shouldn't she too be happy?
Why on earth-the energetic expression matched her mood of rebelliousness-shouldn't she too be loved and allowed to love?
She looked at her little clock.
Still ten minutes before dinner. Tired of staying in her bedroom she thought she would go on to mrs Fisher's battlements, which would be empty at this hour, and watch the moon rise out of the sea.
She went into the deserted upper hall with this intention, but was attracted on her way along it by the firelight shining through the open door of the drawing room.
How gay it looked.
The fire transformed the room.
A dark, ugly room in the daytime, it was transformed just as she had been transformed by the warmth of-no, she wouldn't be silly; she would think of the poor; the thought of them always brought her down to sobriety at once.
She peeped in.
Firelight and flowers; and outside the deep slits of windows hung the blue curtain of the night.
How pretty.
And that gorgeous lilac on the table- she must go and put her face in it . . .
But she never got to the lilac.
She went one step towards it, and then stood still, for she had seen the figure looking out of the window in the farthest corner, and it was Frederick.
She stood quite still.
He did not turn round.
She stood looking at him.
The miracle had happened, and he had come.
She stood holding her breath.
So he needed her, for he had come instantly.
Her heart, which had seemed to stop beating, was suffocating her now, the way it raced along.
Frederick did love her then-he must love her, or why had he come?
Her thoughts wouldn't go on.
Her mind stammered.
She couldn't think.
She could only see and feel.
She didn't know how it had happened.
It was a miracle.
God could do miracles.
God had done this one.
God could-God could-could-
Her mind stammered again, and broke off.
"Frederick-" she tried to say; but no sound came, or if it did the crackling of the fire covered it up.
She must go nearer.
She began to creep towards him-softly, softly.
He did not move.
He had not heard.
She stopped a moment, unable to breathe.
She was afraid. Suppose he-suppose he-oh, but he had come, he had come.
She went on again, close up to him, and her heart beat so loud that she thought he must hear it.
And couldn't he feel-didn't he know-
"Frederick," she whispered, hardly able even to whisper, choked by the beating of her heart.
He spun round on his heels.
"Rose!" he exclaimed, staring blankly.
I had been seated in the next chair to hers for at least two minutes. I felt that it was time to introduce myself.
"It's a fine evening."
She turned, she looked me up and down, then she looked straight in front of her again.
But I was not to be crushed; there was something about the shape of her that which suggested sociability.
"That is my misfortune, rather than my fault."
"I don't know nothing at all about that.
I do not speak to strangers as a rule.
Sometimes there's never no knowing who they are."
I felt that I was getting on-so I went on.
"What do you think of the band?"
"It's not loud enough for me.
I like a band as I can hear."
It struck me that the tale, as she told it, contained elements of tragedy.
"Bakers," she observed, "is what I like.
I have a sister who likes butchers.
To me there's always the smell of the meat about a butcher. But it's as you're made.
The worst of bakers is, they're such a thirsty lot."
"Possibly," I suggested, "that is in a measure owing to the nature of their occupation."
"That may be, but still there is a limit, and when a man is always drinking, I think it's time for him to stop."
I thought so too, but she went on:
"My young man, his name is Willyum Evans, is a baker, and him and me have been walking out together four years come next month.
So I said to him, 'Willyum, it's my day out, Tuesday.
So when he did come, I was a bit huffy.
"So there we sat, neither of us saying nothing, till I began to feel a little damp, because I had my thin things on, and it was beginning to come down heavy.
So I said, 'Well, Willyum, have you forgotten it's my day out?
I thought you was going to take me somewhere.' He said, 'So I am.' So I said, 'Where are you going to take me to?
It's getting on, and I'm likewise getting wet'--which I was.
So he said, 'What do you say to Battersea Park?' So I said, 'I say nothing.
"You must know that Willyum is that near about money that I never saw nothing like him; not that it's a bad thing in a man, though it may be carried too far and I must say I do think Willyum do carry it too far. He has never given me nothing which he didn't want me to pay for, not even half a pint of beer.
'We are both of us having a day out,' he said, 'and don't let no bad tempers spoil our pleasure.
I may have some money somewhere, unbeknown to myself, so I will look and see; though I must say I do think it hard that all the expenses should be borne by me!'
He held it out to me.
'No,' I said.
'I thank you.
I am particular about my vittles, and I never eat no scraps, and, still less, things what have been sat down upon.' 'Well,' he said, 'it's a pity it should be wasted, I'll eat it myself.' Which he did, and me standing in the rain there looking on.
That did put my back up.
'mr Evans,' I said, short and sharp, 'I wish you a good day.
I am going.' So I goes.
So I pulls up.
"That made me fairly wild it really did.
"I never said a word to him, but I walks right out of the park.
He being a married man, and with a comfortable home, he will be glad to see us.'
"Well, I didn't know what to do, not liking to have no quarrel with him in the street, so off we starts for his brother's.
Just now you was saying as how your brother would be glad to see us.
Do not let us spoil our day's pleasure by no disagreeable observations.
Now, Matilda, don't you let him start hitting me.' And he jumps behind me, so as to get into the shadow, as it were.
So I says, 'Willyum, whatever is the matter now? Your conduct do seem to me to be of the most extraordinary character.'
I've been looking for you for some time.
Oh, dear me, you never saw nothing like the mess that I was in!
And he grabs hold of Willyum by the collar, and he says, 'Hang me if I don't wipe down the street with you!' And he shouts out, ''Enrietta, here's Brother Willyum.
Oh dear!
oh dear!
No, I said, I should not.
A SUBSTITUTE.
THE STORY OF MY LAST CRICKET MATCH.
CHAPTER one
I a m APPOINTED CAPTAIN.
I have some idea of cricket-not much, perhaps, but I certainly have some.
I was not in the 'Varsity team, nor near it; but I played in the Freshman's match, and provided myself with spectacles.
I was nearly in the school team once.
That was when I carried my bat for forty five.
I must own that my performance was a surprise to everyone-and to myself among the rest.
But as I never repeated it-or anything like it-they left me, very wisely, out of the eleven.
Latchmere.
When they first asked me to play I thought they were mad. Storwell on Sea is a village on the south coast-I beg pardon; I believe it is called by the inhabitants a town.
It is a pretty place, and not unknown-in the locality.
And one day a deputation of the inhabitants called on me at my lodgings to ask if I would lead the local cricket club to, say, victory.
As I have said, my first impression was that they were mad; either that, or else that they were "playing it off" on the unprotected stranger.
I hinted so much to the deputation.
The deputation smiled.
The chief spokesman was the local barber; his name was Sapsworth.
I decided to crush the deputation before the thing went farther.
But the admission did not crush them: quite the other way.
It opened the floodgates of their eloquence.
"That's nothing," mr Sapsworth cried.
I glanced at mr Hedges, thus frankly referred to.
He would certainly have turned the scale at sixteen stone.
I felt that, to cricketers who intended to play mr Hedges, any objections which I might urge would appear quite trivial.
"When is the match to be?" I asked.
"To morrow," was the startling reply.
I was speechless.
It was altogether too preposterous.
The end of it was that I agreed to play.
No man knows to what a depth of folly he can sink until he tries.
CHAPTER three.
AND BATS.
We sat there, moping in a crowd, I among the rest, when mr Benyon, bustling up, reminded me of my duties as a captain.
"Now then, turn out.
Send your men into the field.
We can't stop here all day.
I'm first man in; soon I'll have to go, and I haven't had a smack at a cricket ball these twenty years!"
We looked at each other.
One part of his address gave us a certain gratification-that part in which he stated that he soon would have to go.
We turned out.
I suppose a more unpromising set of fieldsmen never yet took their places in the field.
The Latchmere men went slouching towards the tent; some of them, I noticed, instead of going in stole towards the rear.
"mr Trentham, I-I can't bowl," whispered mr Sapsworth to me as we moved across the turf.
He and I had agreed that we should start the bowling.
I confess that I felt no more inclined to act up to the letter of our agreement than he did.
But mr Benyon intervened.
"Now, Bob Sapsworth, you take the bowling one end, and let your captain take the other.
Captain, you take first over."
I obeyed without a murmur.
I do not think that our field was arranged on scientific principles; I may certainly claim that I had nothing to do with its arrangement.
There is a suspicion floating through my mind that at one or two points-two, or more-men were placed unusually close together. For instance, at deep mid off-very deep mid off-mr
Hawthorn and mr Hedges were not only doing their best to trample on each other's toes, but each was seeking for a place of security behind the other's back.
mr Barker shared with mr Benyon the honour of being first man in. The Latchmere captain, as a captain, had become quite as much a figurehead as I had.
His bearing was indicative of extreme depression. I think he had learned that to take, off hand, the first substitute who offered, was, now and then, unwise.
To enable him to bat with more advantage, mr Benyon had removed his waistcoat, which matched his trousers and his coat.
What he had done with it I cannot say; possibly it had vanished, with his other garments, into air.
Now he had on a bright red flannel shirt-his tastes in costume seemed a trifle lurid-the sleeves of which were turned up above the elbows.
His pose was almost as peculiar as his costume.
He stood bolt upright, his legs together, his feet drawn heel to heel; not at all in the fashion of a modern cricketer, who seeks to guard his wickets with his legs.
His bat he held straight down in front of him, the blade swinging gently in the air.
"Hurry up, sir!
Don't I tell you that soon I'll have to go?"
I hurried up.
I gave him an overhand full pitch which would have made a decent catch for point, if point had been close in, which he wasn't. However, in any case mr Benyon would have saved him the trouble.
He drove it over the hedge, and over the trees, and up to the skies, and out of sight.
"I don't think that's a bad little smack to start with," he observed. "I like your kind of bowling, mister.
I suppose that's a boundary." He called to the scorer-if there was one, which I doubt-"Put down Tom Benyon six!"
He turned again to me.
"It's no good wasting time looking for that ball.
I've another in my pocket you can have."
He put his hand into his trousers' pocket.
Those remarkable garments fitted him like eel skins.
I had certainly never supposed that he could by any possibility have such a thing as a cricket ball in one of the pockets.
He drew one out and threw it up to me.
My second ball was a colourable imitation of my first, only this time it was wide to leg.
To long leg mr Benyon sent it flying.
"Put down Tom Benyon another six!" he cried.
I've got another ball which you can have."
He produced a second ball from the same pocket from which the first had come.
I could scarcely believe my eyes.
But I was discovering, with Horatio, that there were more things in heaven and earth than had been contained in my philosophy.
Since mr Benyon professed such affection for the style of bowling which I favoured, I sent him down another sample.
He treated it as he had done the first-he drove it, with terrific force, right above my head.
"Never mind about the ball," he said.
"I've got another in my pocket."
He had-the third.
And in the same pocket from which the other two had come.
My fourth ball he treated to a swipe to square leg.
He seemed to have a partiality for swiping.
Quite unnecessarily he allowed that this was so.
"I do like a ball which I can get a smack at," he remarked as he produced a fourth ball from the same pocket of his tightly fitting trousers which had contained the other three.
"A swipe does warm me so.
It was kind of him to say so; though, to my thinking, his remark did not convey a compliment.
When he sent my fifth ball out of sight I wished that his love for swiping had been less, or my bowling of another kind.
The sixth, however, which he also produced from the same wondrous store contained in his breeches pocket, he contented himself with what he called "snicking."
"That's what I call a pretty snick," he said.
The "snick" in question was a tremendous drive to deep mid off.
It was stopped, quite involuntarily, by mr Hawthorn and mr Hedges.
Neither of them made the slightest attempt to return the ball.
"Run it out!" cried mr Benyon.
He and mr Barker began to run.
They ran four, and then they ran two more, and still the ball was not thrown in.
mr Benyon urged the fielders on.
"Hurry up, Bill Hedges!"
mr Hedges did not hurry up; he never could have hurried up, even if his manner of "fielding" the ball had not wholly deprived him of his wind.
But the ball was at last thrown in-when the pair had run eleven.
Forty one runs off his first over was a result calculated to take the conceit out of the average bowler.
He had.
I felt for mr Sapsworth.
But since I had suffered it was only fair that he should suffer too.
Crack-smack-whack went the balls out of sight in all directions.
And for each ball that disappeared mr Benyon produced another from his breeches pocket.
I felt that these things must be happening to me in a dream.
I was rapidly approaching the condition in which Alice must have been in Wonderland-prepared for anything.
Time went on.
mr Sapsworth and I bowled over after over.
mr Benyon was making a record in tall scoring.
No performance of "W.
g's" ever came within many miles of it.
And the balls he lost!
And the balls which he produced!
And the diabolical ingenuity with which he managed, at the close of every over, to change his end!
If mr Barker did no hitting, he did some running.
He never had a chance to make a stroke, but his partner took care to make him run an incredibly large odd number as a wind up to every over.
mr Benyon did not seem to be distressed by the exertion in the least; mr Barker emphatically did.
I suppose, at the outside, our innings had lasted half an hour.
I know that I bowled until I felt that I should either have to stop or drop.
By degrees one fact began to be impressed upon me.
It was this-that the number of spectators was growing smaller by degrees and beautifully less.
Originally there had been quite a crowd assembled.
In course of time this had dwindled to half a dozen stragglers.
And not only spectators but cricketers had disappeared.
If my eyes did not deceive me, there was not a member of the Latchmere team left on the ground.
What was more, some of our own team took courage, and leg bail.
I caught one of them-the lad Fenning-in the act of scrambling through the hedge.
But I had not the heart to stop him.
I only wished that I had been so fortunate as to have led the van.
So far as I could see, mr Hawthorn, mr Hedges, mr Sapsworth, and I were the only members of the Storwell team left on the ground.
And the reflection involuntarily crossed my mind-what fools we were to stay!
The perspiration was running off from us in streams-I had never had such a "sweater" before!
"I do like your kind of bowling, mister," mr Benyon would constantly remark.
If I had had an equal admiration for his kind of batting we should have been quits, but I had not; at least not then.
A little later, looking round the field, I found that mr Hawthorn had disappeared, and that mr Hedges, stuck in a hedge, was struggling gallantly to reach safety on the other side.
mr Benyon ran thirteen for a hit to leg.
He made mr Barker run them too-it was the proverbial last straw.
As mr Barker was running the thirteenth run, instead of going to his wicket he dropped his bat-the bat which he had never had a chance to utilise-and bolted off the field as though Satan was behind him.
mr Benyon called out to him, but mr Barker neither stopped nor stayed. It seemed that the match was going to resolve itself into a game of single wicket.
That over!
"I do like your kind of bowling, mister," he observed when, as usual, he sent my first ball out of sight.
"Never mind about the ball.
I've got one in my pocket you can have."
He had.
He produced it-always from the same pocket.
It was about the second thousand.
"It does warm me so to swipe."
Then a ball or two later on, "I call that a tidy smack." The "smack" in question had driven the ball, for anything I know to the contrary, a distance of some five miles or so.
The next ball I fielded.
It laid me on the ground.
I was alone in the field.
The opposite wicket was deserted.
The bat lay on the ground. And mr Benyon had gone!
CHAPTER eight
HOW WOLF BECAME THE COMPANION OF MEN
Twice that night Rod was awakened by Mukoki opening the cabin door.
The second time he raised himself upon his elbows and quietly watched the old warrior.
It was a brilliantly clear night and a flood of moonlight was pouring into the camp.
Mukoki was peering up into space.
The moon was directly above the cabin.
The sky was clear of clouds and so bright was the light that objects on the farther side of the lake were plainly visible.
Besides, it was bitter cold-so cold that his face began to tingle as he stood there.
These things he noticed, but he could see nothing to hold Mukoki's vision in the sky above unless it was the glorious beauty of the night.
"What is it, Mukoki?" he asked.
The old Indian looked silently at him for a moment, some mysterious, all absorbing joy revealed in every lineament of his face.
"Wolf night!" he whispered.
"Wolf night!" he repeated, and slipped like a shadow to the side of the unconscious young hunter.
Wolf night!"
The young Indian had joined Rod at the open door and together they watched Mukoki's gaunt figure as it sped swiftly across the lake, up the hill and over into the wilderness desolation beyond.
When he was done his face still bore traces of suppressed excitement.
He ran back to the door and whistled loudly.
Again he whistled, a dozen times, twenty, but there came no reply.
"Did Minnetaki ever tell you-anything-queer-about Mukoki, Rod?"
"Well, once in a great while Mukoki has-not exactly a fit, but a little mad spell!
But the Indians at the Post believe that at certain times he goes crazy over wolves."
"Wolves!" exclaimed Rod.
"Yes, wolves.
And he has good reason.
He was the happiest Indian at the Post, and one of the poorest.
One day Mukoki came to the Post with a little bundle of fur, and most of the things he got in exchange for it, mother says, were for the kid.
He reached the store at night and expected to leave for home the next noon, which would bring him to his camp before dark.
Well-"
And then, the people at the Post say, the mother must have slipped and hurt herself.
He calls this a 'wolf night.' No one can stop him from going out; no one can get him to talk; he will allow no one to accompany him when in such a mood.
But he will come back.
"What does Mukoki mean by 'wolf night'?" he asked.
He can catch them in every trap he sets, which no other trapper in the world can do; he can tell you a hundred different things about a certain wolf simply by its track, and because of his wonderful knowledge he can tell, by some instinct that is almost supernatural, when a 'wolf night' comes.
Something in the air to night, something in the sky-in the moon-in the very way the wilderness looks, tells him that stray wolves in the plains and hills are 'packing' or banding together to night, and that in the morning the sun will be shining, and they will be on the sunny sides of the mountains.
To morrow night, if Mukoki comes back by then, we shall have some exciting sport with the wolves, and then you will see how Wolf out there does his work!"
There followed several minutes of silence.
Rod took out his watch.
It lacked only ten minutes of midnight.
Yet neither seemed possessed with a desire to return to their interrupted sleep.
Wolf, as well as Mukoki, has good cause for what he does.
You might call it animal vengeance.
We caught Wolf in a lynx trap, Mukoki and i He wasn't much more than a whelp then-about six months old, Mukoki said. And while he was in the trap, helpless and unable to defend himself, three or four of his lovely tribe jumped upon him and tried to kill him for breakfast.
We hove in sight just in time to drive the cannibals off. We kept Wolf, sewed up his side and throat, tamed him-and to morrow night you will see how Mukoki has taught him to get even with his people."
It was two hours later when Rod and Wabigoon extinguished the candles and returned to their blankets.
And for another hour after that the former found it impossible to sleep.
When he finally fell asleep it was to dream of the Indian mother and her child; only after a little there was no child, and the woman changed into Minnetaki, and the ravenous wolves into men.
Rod looked, and caught his breath.
There was Mukoki-peeling potatoes!
"Hello, Muky!" he shouted.
The old Indian looked up with a grin.
His face bore no signs of his mad night on the trail.
He nodded cheerfully and proceeded with the preparation of breakfast as though he had just risen from his blankets after a long night's rest.
"Better get up," he advised.
"Big day's hunt.
Much fine sunshine to day. Find wolves on mountain-plenty wolves!"
The boys tumbled from their blankets and began dressing.
"What were you doing last night?" he questioned.
"Big moon-might get shot," grunted Mukoki.
See wolf tracks on red deer trail.
No shot."
"See if I'm not right.
He will choose the mountain trail." When their companion returned, he said: "We had better split up this morning, hadn't we, Muky?
What do you think of it?"
"You two go north-I take ridges."
"I'm going with you, Mukoki!"
Rod noticed that the captive wolf received no breakfast that morning, and he easily guessed the reason.
The sun was just beginning to show itself above the wilderness when the hunters left camp.
At the foot of this hill Mukoki and his companion struck the creek.
The snow on this log was beaten by tiny footprints.
Mukoki gazed a moment, cast an observant eye along the trail, and at once threw off his pack.
"Mink!" he explained.
Build trap house right here!"
"Build house to keep snow off traps.
No do that, be digging out traps all winter.
Smart fellow-lynx.
Wolf and fox, too."
"Is a mink worth much?"
Seven-eight dollar for good one."
During the next mile six other mink traps were set.
He spoke in whispers, and Rod followed his example.
Frequently the two would stop and scan the openings for signs of life.
"T'ree wolf!" continued the Indian jubilantly.
"Travel early this morning.
They followed now in the wolf trail.
Here Mukoki set another trap.
A little farther still they came across a fisher trail and another trap was laid.
Caribou and deer tracks crossed and recrossed the creek, but the Indian paid little attention to them.
A fourth wolf joined the pack, and a fifth, and half an hour later the trail of three other wolves cut at right angles across the one they were following and disappeared in the direction of the thickly timbered plains.
Mukoki's face was crinkled with joy.
"Many wolf near," he exclaimed.
Good place for night hunt."
Soon the creek swung out from the ridge and cut a circuitous channel through a small swamp.
In places the snow was literally packed with deer tracks.
Trails ran in every direction, the bark had been rubbed from scores of saplings, and every step gave fresh evidence of the near presence of game.
The stealth with which Mukoki now advanced was almost painful.
Every twig was pressed behind him noiselessly, and once when Rod struck his snow shoe against the butt of a small tree the old Indian held up his hands in mock horror.
Ten minutes, fifteen-twenty of them passed in this cautious, breathless trailing of the swamp.
Suddenly Mukoki stopped, and a hand was held out behind him warningly. He turned his face back, and Rod knew that he saw game.
Inch by inch he crouched upon his snow shoes, and beckoned for Rod to approach, slowly, quietly.
When the boy had come near enough he passed back his rifle, and his lips formed the almost noiseless word, "Shoot!"
With a powerful effort Rod steadied himself.
The buck was standing broadside, his head and neck stretched up, offering a beautiful shot at the vital spot behind his fore leg.
At this the young hunter aimed and fired.
With one spasmodic bound the animal dropped dead.
Hardly had Rod seen the effect of his shot before Mukoki was traveling swiftly toward the fallen game, unstrapping his pack as he ran.
When he had finished his task he held it up with an air of unbounded satisfaction.
Heem like blood.
Smell um-come make big shoot to night.
Mukoki no longer maintained his usual quiet, and it was evident to Rod that the Indian considered his mission for that day practically accomplished.
After taking the heart, liver and one of the hind quarters of the buck Mukoki drew a long rope of babeesh from his pack, tied one end of it around the animal's neck, flung the other end over a near limb, and with his companion's assistance hoisted the carcass until it was clear of the ground.
"If somethin' happen we no come back to night heem safe from wolf," he explained.
The two now continued through the swamp.
At its farther edge the ground rose gently from the creek toward the hills, and this sloping plain was covered with huge boulders and a thin growth of large spruce and birch. Just beyond the creek was a gigantic rock which immediately caught Mukoki's attention.
They could see, however, that the top of the, rock was flat, and Mukoki called attention to this fact with an exultant chuckle.
We call heem here.
Shoot from there!" He pointed to a clump of spruce a dozen rods away.
By Rod's watch it was now nearly noon and the two sat down to eat the sandwiches they had brought with them.
Several times Mukoki stopped and leaned perilously close to the dizzy edge of the mountain, peering down with critical eyes, and once when he pulled himself back cautiously by means of a small sapling he explained his interest by saying:
"Plenty bear there in spring!"
But Rod was not thinking of bears.
Perhaps that very chasm held the priceless secret that had died with its owners half a century ago.
The dark and gloomy silence that hung between those two walls of rock, the death like desolation, the stealthy windings of the creek-everything in that dim and mysterious world between the two mountains, unshattered by sound and impenetrable to the winter sun, seemed in his mind to link itself with the tragedy of long ago.
Did that chasm hold the secret of the dead men?
"Mukoki-the gold was found between those mountains!"
CHAPTER fourteen.
Afloat on the Napo.--Down the Rapids.--Santa Rosa and its mulish Alcalde.--Pratt on Discipline.--Forest Music.--Coca.--Our Craft and Crew.--Storm on the Napo.
We embarked november twentieth on our voyage down the river.
It is no easy matter to hire or cajole the Indians for any service.
Out of feast time they are out of town, and during the festival they are loth to leave, or are so full of chicha they do not know what they want.
They furnished three canoes, two for baggage and one covered with a palm leaf awning for ourselves.
The canoes were of red cedar, and flat bottomed; the paddles had oval blades, to which short, quick strokes were given perpendicularly to the water entering and leaving.
But there was little need of paddling on this trip.
The Napo starts off in furious haste, for the fall between Napo village and Santa Rosa, a distance of eighty miles, is three hundred and fifty feet.
We were about seven hours in the voyage down, and it takes seven days to pole back.
In four hours we were abreast the little village of Aguano; on the opposite bank we could see the tambos of the gold washers.
At five p m we reached the deserted site of Old Santa Rosa, the village having been removed a few years ago on account of its unhealthy location.
It is now overgrown with sour orange and calabash trees, the latter bearing large fruit shells so useful to the Indians in making pilches or cups.
In pitch darkness and in a drizzling rain we arrived at New Santa Rosa, and swung our hammocks in the Government House.
Santa Rosa, once the prosperous capital of the Provincia del Oriente, now contains about two hundred men, women, and children.
The town is pleasantly situated on the left bank of the river, about fifteen feet above the water level.
A little bamboo church, open only when the missionary from Archidona makes his annual visit, stood near our quarters.
The Indians were keeping one of their seven feasts in a hut near by, and their drumming was the last thing we heard as we turned into our hammocks, and the first in the morning.
It is embowered in a magnificent grove of plantains and papayas.
In one corner stands a table (the only one we remember seeing on the Napo); on the opposite side are heaped up jars, pots, kettles, hunting and fishing implements, paddles, bows and arrows.
Between the posts swing two chambiri hammocks.
When a stranger enters, he is invited to sit in a hammock; and at Santa Rosa we were always presented with a cup of guayusa; in Brazil with a cup of coffee.
Sandoval wore nothing but shirt and pantaloons; the dignity of the barefooted functionary was confined to his Spanish blood.
At Santa Rosa we procured Indians and canoes for the Maranon.
This was not easily done.
The Indians seemed reluctant to quit their feasts and go on such a long voyage, and the alcalde was unwilling they should go, and manufactured a host of lies and excuses.
He declared there was but one large canoe in town, and that we must send to Suno for another, and for men to man it.
After some time lost in word fighting, we tried the virtues of authority.
After this bombardment Sandoval was another man, and the two canoes and four Indians we wanted were forthcoming.
We had to wait, however, two days for the Indians to prepare their chicha for the journey and to cover the canoes with palm awnings.
Unfortunately we had only fifty varas left; but, through the influence of the now good-natured alcalde, we induced the Indians to take the balance in coin.
After many delays, we put our baggage into one canoe, and ourselves into the other, and pushed off into the rapid current of the Napo.
We had three styles of valediction on leaving.
Our Indian quartet, after several last drinks of chicha, bade their friends farewell by clasping hands, one kissing the joined hands, and then the other.
The Napo at Santa Rosa runs at least five miles an hour, and we were soon picking our way-now drifting, now paddling-through a labyrinth of islands and snags.
The Indians, so accustomed to brutal violence from the hands of the whites, had begged of us, before our departure, that we would not beat them.
But shortly after we left, one of them, who was literally filled with chicha, dropped his paddle and tumbled into a heap at the bottom of the canoe, dead drunk.
At once the liquor left the muddled brain of the astonished culprit, and, taking his paddle, he became from that hour the best of the crew.
None of them could speak Spanish, so we had provided ourselves with a vocabulary of Quichua.
Indeed, when we mixed up our Quichua with a little Anglo Saxon, they evidently thought the latter was a terrible anathema, for they sprang to their places without delay.
They gave us possession of their largest hut, in which they had been roasting a sea cow, and the stench was intolerable.
Nevertheless, one of our number bravely threw down his blanket within, and went to sleep; two swung their hammocks between the trees, and the rest slept in the canoe.
So far as our experience goes, we can say, with Bates, that the vampire, so common on the Amazon, is the most harmless of all bats.
It has, however, a most hideous physiognomy.
A full grown specimen will measure twenty eight inches in expanse of wing.
Bates found two species on the Amazon-one black, the other of a ruddy line, and both fruit eaters.
The nocturnal music of these forests is made by crickets and tree toads. The voice of the latter sounds like the cracking of wood.
Occasionally frogs, owls, and goat suckers croak, hoot, and wail.
Between midnight and three a m almost perfect silence reigns.
As the sun rises higher, one musician after another seeks the forest shade, and the morning concert ends at noon.
In the heat of the day there is an all pervading rustling sound, caused by the fluttering of myriad insects and the gliding of lizards and snakes.
At sunset parrots and monkeys resume their chatter for a season, and then give way to the noiseless flight of innumerable bats chasing the hawk moth and beetle.
There is scarcely a sound in a tropical forest which is joyous and cheering.
The birds are usually silent; those that have voices utter a plaintive song, or hoarse, shrill cry.
The most common birds on the Napo are macaws, parrots, toucans, and ciganas.
The parrots, like the majority in South America, are of the green type.
The toucan, peculiar to the New World, and distinguished by its enormous bill, is a quarrelsome, imperious bird.
It is clumsy in flight, but nimble in leaping from limb to limb.
The cigana or "gypsy" (in Peru called "chansu") resembles a pheasant.
The flesh has a musky odor, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that they exist in such numbers throughout the country.
The Indians never eat them.
The splendid metallic blue, and the yellow and transparent winged, are very abundant on the Napo; some rise high in the air; others, living in societies, look like fluttering clouds.
It is singular these Indians have no term for bees, but call them honey, and distinguish them by their color.
The black species is said to make the most honey, and the yellow the best. The quadrupeds of the Oriente are few and far between in the dry season. Not a sloth nor armadillo did we see.
But when the rains descend the wilderness is a menagerie of tigers and tapirs, pumas and bears, while a host of reptiles, led by the gigantic boa, creep forth from their hiding places.
The most ferocious carnivores are found in the mountains, and the most venomous serpents haunt the lowlands.
Darwin says that we ought not to expect any closer similarity between the organic beings on the opposite sides of the Andes than on the opposite shores of the ocean.
This little village, the last we shall see till we come within sight of the Amazon, is beautifully located on the right bank, twenty five feet above the river, and opposite the confluence of the Rio Coca.
This spot is memorable in history.
Pizarro having reached it from Quito by way of Baeza and the Coca, halted and built a raft or canoe (Prescott says a brig), in which Orellana was sent down the river to reconnoitre, but who never returned.
We remained here two days to construct a more comfortable craft for our voyage to the Amazon, a distance of at least five hundred miles.
The canoe is the only means of navigation known to the Indians. But the idea of spending fifteen days cooped, cribbed, and cramped in a narrow canoe, exposed to a tropical sun and furious rains, was intolerable.
Our Santa Rosa canoes were about thirty feet long.
These were placed about five feet apart and parallel, and then firmly secured by bamboo joists.
Over these we spread a flooring of split bamboo, and planted four stout chonta sticks to support a palm thatched roof.
A rudder (a novel idea to our red skinned companions), and a box of sand in the stern of one of the boats for a fire place, completed our rig.
The alcalde, with a hiccough, declared we would be forever going down the river in such a huge craft, and the Indians smiled ominously.
A little canoe, which we bought of the alcalde, floated alongside for a tender, and was very serviceable in hunting, gathering fuel, etc
On approaching any human habitation, the Indians blew horns to indicate that they came as friends.
At different points down the river they deposited pots of chicha for use on their return.
The mass breeds worms so rapidly, however, as Edwards informed us, that after the lapse of a month or two it is a jumble of yuca scraps and writhing articulates.
But the owner of the heap coolly separates the animal from the vegetable, adds a little water, and drinks his chicha without ceremony.
Not a note did they whistle or sing.
Yet they were always in good humor, and during the whole voyage we did not see the slightest approach to a quarrel.
At no time did we have the least fear of treachery or violence.
The Napos are not savages.
Their goodness, however, as Bates says of the Cucama tribe, consists more in the absence of active bad qualities than in the possession of good ones.
They strictly maintained a decent arrangement of such apparel as they possessed.
The girl was a graceful paddler, and had some well founded pretensions to beauty.
Her coarse, black hair was simply combed back, not braided into plaits as commonly done by the Andean women.
Pratt managed the helm (the governor could not work the Yankee notion) and the kitchen.
So we fared sumptuously every day.
We left Coca on Thanksgiving Day, november twenty eighth, and to imitate our distant friends, we sacrificed an extra meal-fricasseed chicken, jerked beef, boiled yucas, bananas, oranges, lemonade, and guayusa.
Favored by a powerful current and the rhythmic paddling of our Santa Rosans, we made this day sixty miles; but our average daily run was fifty miles.
The winds (doubtless the trades) were almost unchangeably from the east; but an occasional puff would come from the northwest, when we relieved our paddlers by hoisting a blanket for a sail.
Six o'clock was our usual hour of departure, and ten or twelve hours our traveling time, always tying up at a plaia or island, of which there are hosts in the Napo, but never to the main land, for fear of unfriendly Indians and the still more unwelcome tiger. Our crew encamped at a respectful though hailing distance.
On the second day from Coca we were caught in a squall, and to save our roof we ran ashore.
Nearly every afternoon we were treated to a shower, accompanied by a strong wind, but seldom by thunder and lightning, though at Coca we had a brilliant thunder storm at night.
They always came after a uniform fashion and at a regular hour, so that we learned when to expect them.
About noon the eastern horizon would become suddenly black, and when this had spread to the zenith we heard the rush of a mighty wind sweeping through the forest, and the crash of falling trees, and then down fell the deluge.
one.
Perhaps now also can be better appreciated what the influence of such a study might and should be on practical action.
At times economic students have gained the ear of statesmen and rulers, and have exercised much influence upon practical politics.
It is sometimes bemoaned that economists have to day so small a direct part in the government of our republic.
This test, however, is one that only astronomy can meet in any remarkable degree.
There are countless unmeasured factors in human action.
Such generalizations as are possible must be based on actions that appear and reappear with practical constancy.
Though a number of facts unite to suggest some conclusions as to the immediate future, the experience of the last century bids one beware of sweeping predictions.
The optimists, with faith in the perfectability of human nature and of society, believed that all social ills were due to bad government; if despotism were but overthrown, man's nature would develop, untrammeled, to perfection.
The pessimists-the communists, and socialists of that day-seeing the same evils, had other explanations to offer.
While the economists of that day believed the conditions of poverty and misery to be inevitable, the pessimists pronounced them unendurable, and advocated a radical social change as the only hope of saving the masses from starvation.
In such a variety of mutually contradictory views there must have been much error, but likewise much truth if it could be disentangled.
three.
It was not fully appreciated that a great change in social standards, controlling the growth of population, was in progress.
This was the panorama of the progress of society as seen by both the conservative economists and the socialists of less than a century ago: continued invention, an increasing population, low wages, scanty food, growing wealth for the few, and growing poverty and misery for the masses.
Supply in the economic sense means the amount available at the given time in the market; but despite the great areas since brought into the world markets, the false idea of a century ago still persists in the text books, and shapes economic reasoning.
It is vain to say that the circumstances have been unique and that the general principle is still valid.
Much of the so-called orthodox economic analysis was essentially erroneous as applied to the conditions of the past century; it is erroneous to day and will be so for years to come, if it ever fits the facts.
New continents are about to be opened.
Population in Christendom has increased more rapidly than ever before in the history of the world, but it has not overtaken the progress in resources.
The rate of increase of population is slackening.
Despite the problems and the abuses that every new change brings, the civilized world undoubtedly is more prosperous to day than ever before.
The greatest misery and discontent is in the more backward communities.
This is past and present; what of the economic future?
Is the present condition a normal one-is this prosperity likely to grow or to decline?
Thus far, surely, the economic student may question the oracles; for though the distant future is veiled from man's view, the role of economic theory is to show causal relations, to convert mystery into reason, and thus to give a lamp to the feet of the present.
one.
Living, he scratched the earth's surface, and dying, left his bones to fertilize the soil.
But to day, man exhausts the stores in the interior of the earth, burns the treasures of the carboniferous age, casts the fertilizing elements into the ocean, and leaves the world an empty shell.
Forests are being so rapidly cut off that the price of fuel wood and lumber in many parts of the United States has, within twenty years, been multiplied by three.
The world's store of iron ore is not yet fully known, but much of it has been measured, and of the deposits known to be within the United States over one half are said to be owned by one corporation, and they are enough to continue its present output no more than sixty years.
Many other natural products are in like manner gathered by civilized man from a stock created long ago.
While the supply of vegetable food promises to be ample, the supply of meat will be maintained with difficulty as population becomes denser.
The coal mines can be emptied, but so long as the sun shines and the rains fall, Niagara will remain as a source of light, heat, and power.
The tides flow on forever.
In every thunder storm enough force is dissipated to run thousands of factories.
The force in Mount Pelee, if chained and utilized, would run a million factories a million years.
Such a cheapening and diffusion of power would put a new face on many of the problems of industry.
It is reasonable to hope that before iron ore has become extremely scarce, a cheap and practicable method of extracting aluminium from clay will have been perfected.
Secure of these permanent sources, civilization will stand on a firmer foundation.
When the coal districts are heaps of slag and cinders, industry will be found near the water power.
Because of distance from raw materials, New England even now finds herself hard pushed in her rivalry with the Southern states in the manufacture of textiles.
The industrial map of our country will be greatly altered a hundred years hence.
three.
In order that a motive for saving may be present, there must be stable conditions.
The difficult problems of the concentrated control of industry and of the control of wealth must be solved in the interests of all.
Few thoughtful persons now hold the view that the race can be rapidly improved biologically by the process of educating the individual. Education is cumulative in so far as it builds up a better environment into which other children will be born, but the betterment is not due to the inheritance by the child of the acquired knowledge and skill of the parent.
Practically, selection is the only means of improving the innate capacity of any species in any large measure.
The weak, the ignorant, the incapable in primitive societies were ruthlessly killed off.
The strong, the sagacious, and the enterprising left the largest numbers of descendants.
five.
Large families were the rule among the capable pioneers of America; now they are rare except in the lower industrial ranks. Democracy and opportunity are favoring this process of increasing the mediocre and reducing the excellent strains of stock.
In a democracy, those of marked ability can more easily move into the better paid callings and professions.
That group of men, therefore, has left only three fourths enough descendants to maintain its numbers, and as the population has doubled within the same generation, that class represents only three eighths as large a proportion of the American stock as formerly.
If society were composed in equal parts of two distinct strains of stock, not intermarrying; if the total population kept intact from one generation to another (say each period of thirty years), but the superior strain contributed only three fourths of its own number, at the end of five generations it would have sunk from one half to a little more than one eighth of the population.
Progress is threatened unless social institutions can be so adjusted as to reverse the present process of multiplying the poorest, and of extinguishing the most capable families.
six.
In taking economic wants as the starting point of our study, it was not implied that men were entirely selfish.
Sympathy widens; economic wants include family, friends, and, in a growing measure, humanity.
The happiness of a truly socialized man consists in part in the happiness of his fellows. As social sympathy broadens, the sense of duty becomes a stronger economic force.
Individual wants and interests must, so far as can now be seen, continue to be among the stronger forces that move society.
Progress is made because to exceptional ability in general is now presented the hope of large rewards.
These dynamic forces making for progress are at present, however, threatened from two sides.
The avoidance of certain kinds of work which, by social convention, come to be regarded as degrading, takes much ability out of business.
The freedom of America to so great a degree from this disdain of honest labor has been a large factor in her progress, but it is endangered when men become timidly conservative of social position. Progress is threatened, secondly, by democracy, with its tendency to carry the notion of literal equality over into industry.
When democracy becomes envious, it denies to exceptional ability an exceptional reward. The line of growth must be the resultant of the positive forces in these two principles.
If this can be done, the economic outlook is for a great development of wealth and popular welfare.
One fine day the goat leaped down, and away to the cliff; he went straight up, and came where he never had been before.
Oeyvind did not see him when he came out after dinner, and thought immediately of the fox.
But beside the goat there kneeled a little girl.
"I have taken such a fancy to the goat.
He looked up at the girl.
"Here it is," she said, and threw it down.
He gathered up every bit with the utmost care; he could not help tasting the very smallest, and that was so good he had to taste another, and, before he knew it himself, he had eaten up the whole cake.
The boy stopped with the last bit in his mouth, the girl lay and laughed, and the goat stood by her side, with white breast and dark brown hair, looking sideways down.
Oeyvind looked up. She got up, and began pulling at the goat.
His mother came up humming from the beach, with wooden pans which she had scoured; she saw the boy sitting with his legs crossed under him on the grass, crying, and she went up to him.
"What are you crying about?"
"Oh, the goat, the goat!"
How could that happen?"
He would not confess immediately.
"What has become of the goat?"
"What! have you got back?"
"Is it you who have come with it?"
"They would not let me keep it; grandfather is sitting up there, waiting."
"Come, make haste!" said grandpapa, up on the hill; and Marit rose, and walked with reluctant feet upwards.
"You are not forgetting your garter?" Oeyvind cried after her.
"Thank you!"
"Oh, nothing to thank for!" she answered, but drew a long sigh, and walked on.
But then came the cock, with all the hens.
says the cock."
And she told him what they all said, down to the ant who crawled in the moss, and the worm who worked in the bark.
They all looked up as Oeyvind and his mother entered, and as he was going to find a seat they all wanted to make room for him.
She had covered her face with both hands, and sat peeping at him through her fingers.
"Is it always like this here?" he whispered to Marit.
"Yes, just like this; I have a goat now," she said.
"Why don't you come oftener up on the cliff?" said he.
"Grandpapa does too, you can believe."
"Grandpapa knows one about a dance.
"Yes, very much."
All the children stood with folded hands and sang.
Oeyvind and Marit also folded their hands, but they could not sing.
ABBIE FARWELL BROWN
At first he thought it was a rabbit; but it was too big for a rabbit, and besides, it did not hop.
So he screamed and struggled to get away from the big hunter, and he called to the wolves in their own language to come and help him.
So after following them for miles, the five wolves gradually dropped farther and farther behind.
But the hunter carried little Ailbe home with him on the horse's back. And he found a new mother there to receive him.
His second mother was the kind wolf.
But the Bishop himself was not with them.
It was Ailbe's wolf mother.
And the good Bishop was true to her.
Then the hunters came tearing up on their foaming horses.
He forbade them to touch the wolf.
And so it was.
And there, with her five children about her in a happy circle, the kind wolf mother sat and ate the good things which the Bishop's friends had sent him.
But the child she loved best was none of those in furry coats and fine whiskers that looked like her; it was the blue eyed Saint at the top of the table in his robes of purple and white.
A Basket of Fish
At the back of the clearing, beneath a solitary white birch tree just bursting into green, stood a squatter's log cabin, long deserted, its door and window gone, its roof of poles and bark half fallen in.
At length he stepped forth mincingly into full view, trotted up, and sniffed inquisitively.
It seemed easy enough to get them.
He shifted his fore paws to the back of the wagon, and studied the situation.
Why should he not climb up and help himself?
But what did he care for the disapproval of the sorrel horse?
And, anyhow, he saw that the horse was tethered to the tree.
He settled himself back upon his haunches to spring into the wagon.
He had once been nipped.
He was not to be caught again, not he.
But it was just here that the red prowler's cunning overreached itself. The basket in the wagon was full of trout, and there was no trap to be feared.
He might have feasted to his heart's content, and incurred no penalty more serious than the disapproval of the tethered horse, had he not been quite so amazingly clever.
The trout were there in the basket simply because the fishing had been so good.
Half a dozen of the finest fish he took out and strung upon a forked twig.
This he did not regard as stealing, but merely as the exaction of a small and reasonable tribute from a Society which had of late neglected to feed him any too well.
In any case, the attraction seldom fails.
Seeing nothing to take alarm at, it made a wide circuit, ran behind the cabin, and reappeared, as the fox had done, at the corner nearest the wagon.
Satisfied at length that there was no danger within range, the mink glided up to the wagon.
The horse it paid no heed to.
Thereupon-for the mink lacks the fox's hair splitting astuteness, and does not take long to make up its mind-it clambered nimbly up through one of the wheels and fell straightway upon the fish basket.
The mink was puzzled.
The hole in the top of the basket, though he might have squeezed his head through it, was not large enough to let him reach the fish.
Selecting a fish to his taste, he ate it at great leisure, leaving the head and the tail upon the grass.
He did not take time to look up and see what it was.
It was as if the touch of that shadow had loosed a powerful spring.
He simply shot from his place, at such speed that the eye could not distinguish how he did it, and in the minutest fraction of a second was curled within the empty fishing basket, which still lay on its side, half open.
As her talons clawed at the wickerwork, feeling for a hold, the head of the mink, on its long, snaky neck, darted forth, reached up, and struck its fine white fangs into her thigh.
But the great owl's armor of feathers, though it looked so soft and fluffy, was in fact amazingly resistant.
It was just at this point in the mink's adventure that the fox returned to the clearing.
Something of an expert in dealing with traps, he made up his mind that he would try to circumvent this one.
He halted to take it in thoroughly.
He saw the basket lying on the ground, and the angry owl clawing at it.
He concluded that they were still in the basket, and that the owl was trying to get at them.
This particular kind of owl, as he knew, was a most formidable antagonist; but with his substantial weight and his long, punishing jaws, he felt himself much more than a match for her.
They can catch the squeak of a mouse at a distance which, for ordinary ears, would make the sharp clucking of a chipmunk inaudible.
To the bird on the basket the coming of those velvet footsteps were like the scamper of a frightened sheep.
The fox was surprised to find the trout lying scattered about the grass, some of them bitten and mangled.
What, then, was in the basket?
What was the great owl trying to get at, when the precious fish were all spread out before her?
He drew back hastily and sat down on his tail, ears cocked and head tilted to one side, to consider.
But the fox did not want him to come out.
By all means, let the mink stay in there.
But never for an instant did he take his eyes off that slightly moving lid. He lay with his feet gathered under him, every muscle ready for action, expecting each moment to find himself involved in a desperate battle for the prize he was enjoying.
He could not imagine a fiery tempered personage like the mink tamely submitting to the rape of his banquet.
There is no peace counsellor like a contented belly.
The fox, having swallowed as much as he could hold, stood up, stretched himself, and licked his chaps.
The look which he kept upon the basket was no less vigilant than before, but there was now a tinge of scorn in it.
There were still some trout left, but he wanted to get away.
He snatched up the two biggest fish in his jaws and trotted off with them to the woods, glancing back over his shoulder as he went.
But the fox had no thought of returning.
The mink stuffed himself till he could not get another mouthful down. There were still a couple of trout untouched.
At a deliberate pace, quite unlike his usual eager and darting movements, he made off down the clearing toward the water.
Beneath the bank was an old musquash hole which he was well acquainted with.
CHAPTER one
HELEN LINGARD.
The hours between luncheon and tea are confessedly dull, but dulness is not inimical to a certain kind of comfort, and Helen liked to be that way comfortable.
For the author even knew it, only such was his reading of life, and such his theory of artistic duty, that what it was a disappointment to Helen to peruse, it seemed to have been a comfort to him to write.
True, Helen supposed she could think-like other people, because the thoughts of other people had passed through her in tolerable plenty, leaving many a phantom conclusion behind; but this was THEIR thinking, not hers.
So was the curate, but he did not count for much.
Neither was she weary of herself.
That, indeed, might be only a question of time, for the most complete egotist, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon Bonaparte, must at length get weary of his paltry self; but Helen, from the slow rate of her expansion, was not old enough yet.
Nor was she in any special sense wrapt up in herself: it was only that she had never yet broken the shell which continues to shut in so many human chickens, long after they imagine themselves citizens of the real world.
CHAPTER four.
He ate his dinner, quietly responding to Bascombe's sallies-which had usually more of vivacity than keenness, more of good spirits than wit-with a curious flickering smile, or a single word of agreement.
It might have seemed that he was humouring a younger man, but the truth was, the curate had not yet seen cause for opposing him.
"Ah, that is all you know of me, Miss Lingard!" returned Bascombe. "--And then," he resumed, turning again to Wingfold, "what is it they complain of?
"Or it may be only that it is their humour to be sad," said Wingfold. "But don't you think," he continued, "it is hardly worth while to be indignant with them?
"But," she added, with a smile, "would your silence be voluntary, or enforced?"
"What!" returned Bascombe, "you think I could not plain my woes to the moon?
I could roar you as 'twere any nightingale."
I am not in love with decay.
I remember a fellow at Trinity, the merriest of all our set at a wine party, who, alone with his ink pot, was for ever enacting the part of the unheeded poet, complaining of the hard hearts and tuneless ears of his generation.
He took a pull at the stout, laid his head on the table, and sobbed like a locomotive."
"No, not bad at all-for absolute nonsense," said Bascombe.
"Do you think poetry and common sense necessarily opposed to each other?" asked Wingfold.
"Unfortunately for me, you have mentioned the one poet for whom I have any respect.
But what I like in him is just his common sense.
He never cries over spilt milk, even if the jug be broken to the bargain.
But common sense would be just as good in prose as in verse."
"Possibly; but what we have of it in Horace would never have reached us but for the forms into which he has cast it.
How much more enticing acorns in the cup are!
I was watching two children picking them up to day."
You do not object to music in church, for instance?"
They were his own, a fact he would probably have allowed to creep out, had they met with more sympathy.
His voice was a full bass one, full of tone.
"Don't you think so?"
"no
Helen sat down to the piano.
Her time was perfect, and she never blundered a note.
The music she chose was good of its kind, but had more to do with the instrument than the feelings, and was more dependent upon execution than expression. Bascombe yawned behind his handkerchief, and Wingfold gazed at the profile of the player, wondering how, with such fine features and complexion, with such a fine shaped and well set head?
her face should be so far short of interesting.
A STAGGERING QUESTION.
It was time the curate should take his leave.
But aloft over its ridge the moon floated in the softest, loveliest blue, with just a cloud here and there to show how blue it was, and a sparkle where its blueness took fire in a star.
There was something in it all that made the curate feel there ought to be more-as if the night knew something he did not; and he yielded himself to its invasion.
"You have it," said his companion-rudely, indeed, but not quite offensively, and put his cigar in his mouth again.
"It must be some satisfaction, perhaps consolation to you."
"I like you," he went on, "for you seem reasonable; and besides, a man ought to speak out what he thinks.
And he in his turn pointed in the direction of the great tower.
"True; but of what sort?
"If they had found out the right way, why change it?"
You hardly know what your belief is.
Religion itself is the same way: as much as you like about the church, but don't mention Christ!
And that is why such things are not to be mentioned, because in their hearts they have no hope, and in their minds no courage to face the facts of existence.
We haven't the pluck of the old fellows, who, that they might look death himself in the face without dismay, accustomed themselves, even at their banquets, to the sight of his most loathsome handiwork, his most significant symbol-and enjoyed their wine the better for it!--your friend Horace, for instance."
Nor do I allow that it is fair."
"My dear sir, if there is one thing I pride myself upon, it is fair play, and I grant you at once she would not.
It did not occur to Wingfold that people generally speak from the surfaces, not the depths of their minds, even when those depths are moved; nor yet that possibly mrs Ramshorn was not the best type of a Christian, even in his soft walking congregation!
In fact, nothing came into his mind with which to meet what Bascombe said-the real force whereof he could not help feeling-and he answered nothing.
I am confident you have more good sense by a great deal."
But-come now-I do love open dealing-I am myself open as the day-did you not take to the church as a profession, in which you might eat a piece of bread-as somebody says in your own blessed Bible-dry enough bread it may be, for the old lady is not over generous to her younger children-still a gentlemanly sort of livelihood?"
Wingfold held his peace.
"Your silence is honesty, mr Wingfold, and I honour you for it," said Bascombe.
"It is an easy thing for a man in another profession to speak his mind, but silence such as yours, casting a shadow backward over your past, require courage: I honour you, sir."
He glanced at the church tower.
It still made its own strong, clear mark on the eternal blue!
"I must not allow you to mistake my silence, mr Bascombe," he answered the same moment.
But whatever my answer might be had I time to consider it, my silence must at least not be interpreted to mean that I do NOT believe as my profession indicates.
That, at all events, would be untrue."
"I decline to place myself between the horns of any such dilemma," returned Wingfold, who was now more than a little annoyed at his persistency in forcing his way within the precincts of another's personality.
Good night, mr Wingfold."
CHAPTER sixteen.
THE ATTIC.
But you must first hear my explanation, such as it is.
"It is a noble weakness, and far enough from common, I am sorry to think," returned Polwarth.
"But," he concluded, "since you set me about it, my judgment has capsized itself, and it now seems to me worse to use my uncle's sermons than to have used the bishop's, which anyone might discover to be what they are."
"I see no harm in either," said Polwarth, "provided only it be above board.
I believe some clergymen think the only evil lies in detection. I doubt if they ever escape it, and believe the amount of successful deception in that kind to be very small indeed.
Wingfold was silent, thoughtful, saying to himself-"How straight an honest bow can shoot!--But this involves something awful.
To stand up in that pulpit and speak about myself!
It's my office, is it-not me?
He can read the prayers well enough!"
"No," answered Wingfold; "I have nothing, never had anything worth giving to another; and it would seem to me very unreasonable to subject a helpless congregation to the blundering attempts of such a fellow to put into the forms of reasonable speech things he really knows nothing about."
"I cannot imagine that a man who looks things in the face as you do, the moment they confront you, has not lived at all, has never met with anything in his history which has taught him something other people need to be taught.
"I do not now see well how you are leading me," said Wingfold, considerably astonished at both the aptness and fluency with which a man in his host's position was able to express himself.
In other words, if he has nothing new in his own treasure, let him bring something old out of another man's.
"Yes, if he cannot do better.
But then I would have him read-not with his sermon in his eye, but with his people in his heart.
At this moment, Rachel entered with a small tea tray: she could carry only little things, and a few at a time.
But the little man smiled-such a sweet smile of re assurance, that her face returned at once to its prevailing expression of content.
Vavasor, as he sat alone in his room, after Fitzgerald had left him, began to think of the days in which he had before wished to assist his friend in his views with reference to Lady Glencora;--or rather he began to think of Alice's behaviour then, and of Alice's words. Alice had steadfastly refused to give any aid.
No less likely assistant for such a purpose could have been selected.
"He is a desperate spendthrift," Kate Vavasor had said to her.
"Then let her teach him to be otherwise," Alice had answered.
"That might have been a good reason for refusing his offer when he first made it; but it can be no excuse for untruth, now that she has told him that she loves him!"
There had grown upon him lately certain Bohemian propensities,--a love of absolute independence in his thoughts as well as actions,--which were antagonistic to marriage.
If he thoroughly respected any woman he respected her.
But that idea of tying himself down to a household was in itself distasteful to him.
The beasts of the field do not treat each other so badly.
And if he did it at all, he must do it now.
And now, at this moment, what was his outlook into life generally?
He was still a poor man, having been once nearly a rich man; but still so much of the result of his nearly acquired riches remained to him, that on the strength of them he might probably find his way into Parliament.
He had paid the cost of the last attempt, and might, in a great degree, carry on this present attempt on credit.
But how was he to bear the cost of this for the next year, or the next two years?
She should learn,--nay, she had already learned from his own lips,--how perilous was his enterprise.
"I needn't send it when it's written," he said to himself, "and the chances are that I won't." Then he took his paper, and wrote as follows:--
DEAR ALICE,
The time was when the privilege was mine of beginning my letters to you with a warmer show of love than the above word contains,--when I might and did call you dearest; but I lost that privilege through my own folly, and since that it has been accorded to another.
But you have found,--with a thorough honesty of purpose than which I know nothing greater,--that it has behoved you to withdraw that privilege also.
I need hardly say that I should not have written as I now write, had you not found it expedient to do as you have done.
I now once again ask you to be my wife.
Indeed I do not think that you ever doubted my love.
Then came the episode of mr Grey; and bitter as have been my feelings whilst that engagement lasted, I never made any attempt to come between you and the life you had chosen.
Whether you remember those few words I cannot tell; but certainly you would not have remembered them,--would not even have noticed them,--had your heart been at Nethercoats.
But all this is nothing.
Then personal love for each other was most in our thoughts.
For myself I know that there is much in my character and disposition to make me unfit to marry a woman of the common stamp.
I run great risk of failing.
If you were my wife to morrow I should expect to use your money, if it were needed, in struggling to obtain a seat in Parliament and a hearing there.
I will hardly stoop to tell you that I do not ask you to be my wife for the sake of this aid;--but if you were to become my wife I should expect all your cooperation;--with your money, possibly, but certainly with your warmest spirit.
And now, once again, Alice,--dearest Alice, will you be my wife?
You cannot accuse my love.
I am so anxious that you should think of it that I will not expect your reply till this day week.
It can hardly be your desire to go through life unmarried.
It is because I believe that in this respect we are fitted for each other, as man and woman seldom are fitted, that I once again ask you to be my wife.
I have told her nothing of my purpose in writing this letter.
He has misunderstood me and has ill used me. But I am ready to forgive that, if he will allow me to do so.
But, oh, Alice! do not let it be adverse.
I think you love me.
Your woman's pride towards me has been great and good and womanly; but it has had its way; and, if you love me, might now be taught to succumb.
Dear Alice, will you be my wife?
Yours, in any event, most affectionately,
But chance did not so decide, and the letter was put back upon the table at his elbow.
"Women are such out and out fools." Then he took his candle, and carrying his letter with him, went into his bedroom.
The next morning was the morning of Christmas Eve.
"Jem," he said to the boy, "there's half a crown lying there on the looking glass." Jem looked and acknowledged the presence of the half crown.
Jem scrutinized the coin, and declared that the uppermost surface showed a tail.
"Then take that letter and post it," said George Vavasor.
Whereupon Jem, asking no question and thinking but little of the circumstances under which the command was given, did take the letter and did post it.
"This will be brought to you by Stickling," the note said; but who Stickling was Vavasor did not know.
"I send the bill.
You're a trump; and will do the best you can.
Don't let that rogue off for less than a hundred and twenty.--Yours, b f" Vavasor, therefore, having nothing better to do, spent his Christmas morning in calling on mr Magruin.
"Time and tide wait for no man, mr Magruin, and my friend wants his money to morrow."
"Yes, to morrow.
If time and tide won't wait, neither will love. Come, mr Magruin, out with your cheque book, and don't let's have any nonsense."
"But is the lady sure, mr Vavasor?" asked mr Magruin, anxiously.
Are you going to give him the money?"
"Christmas day, mr Vavasor!
"Do tell him to be punctual," said mr Magruin, when Vavasor took his leave.
"I think he is," said George Vavasor, as he went away.
He at any rate did not so dare;--and after dinner he wandered about through the streets, wondering within his mind how he would endure the restraints of married life.
And the same dull monotony of his days was continued for a week, during which he waited, not impatiently, for an answer to his letter.
WHAT THE FROST GIANTS DID TO NANNIE'S RUN
THE FROST GIANTS
Do you believe in giants?
No, do you say?
Well, listen to my story, which is a really true one, and then answer my question.
Perhaps you will some day read about it all, but at present we have only to do with the Frost Giants; for I want to tell you, that, although no one now thinks of believing about the serpent or the flat earth or the rainbow bridge, yet the Frost Giants still live, and their home is really among the mountains.
Have you sometimes seen great boulder stones, as big as a small house, that stand alone by themselves in some field, or on some seashore, where no other rocks are near?
Sometimes they are sent to make a bridge over Niagara Falls, or to build a dam across a mountain torrent in an hour's time.
Now and then they have to rake off a steep mountain side as you might a garden bed; and sometimes to bury a whole village so quickly that the poor inhabitants do not know what strange hand brought such sudden destruction upon them.
Their deeds often seem to be cruel, and we cannot understand their meaning; but we shall some time know that the loving Father who sent them orders nothing for our hurt, but has always a loving purpose, though it may be hidden.
Now that you are introduced, you will perhaps like to join a Frost party that started out to work, one day in the early spring of eighteen sixty one, from their homes among the Olympic Mountains.
NANNIE'S RUN
Can you imagine a beautiful oval shaped bay, almost encircled by a long arm of sand stretching out from the mainland?
In its deep water the largest vessels might ride at anchor, but at the time of my story a lonelier place could scarcely be found.
It is indeed a very little settlement,--a few houses clustered together upon the sandy beach close to the blue water; behind the houses rises a cliff crowned with great fir trees, standing tall and dark in thick ranks, making a dense forest; and beyond this forest, cold, snow covered mountains lift their peaks against the sky,--a fitting home for the Frost Giants.
Three streams, straying from the far away mountains, and fed by their melted snows and hidden springs, find their way through the forest, leap and tumble over the cliff, and, passing through the little settlement, reach the sea.
The people who live here call these little streams RUNS, and one of them is Nannie's Run.
And, now, who is Nannie?
Why, Nannie is Nannie Dwight,--a little girl not yet five years old, who lives in the small square house standing under the cliff.
Her father and mother came here to live when she was but a baby, and before there was a single house built in the place; and it is out of compliment to her that one of the streams has been named Nannie's Run.
They have been working all winter, but not quite so busily as now; for since yesterday they have cracked that big rock in two, and dug the great cave under the hill, and now they are gathered in council on the mountain side that overlooks a dashing little stream.
We have not long to wait before we shall see, and hear too; for a great creaking and cracking begins, and, while we gaze astonished, the mountain side begins to slide, and presently, with a rush and a roar, dashes into the stream, and chokes it with a huge dam of earth and rocks and trees.
What will the stream do now?
For a moment the water leaps into the air, all foam and sparkle, as if it would jump over the barrier, and find its way to the sea at any rate.
But this proves entirely unsuccessful; and at last, after whirling and tumbling, trying to creep under; trying to leap over, it settles itself quietly in its prison, as if to think about the matter.
Now, if you will stay and watch it day after day, you will see what good result will come from this waiting; for every hour more and more water is running to its aid, and, as its forces increase, we begin to feel sure, that, although it can neither pass over nor under, it will some day be strong enough to break through the Frost Giants' dam.
And the day comes at last, when, summoning all its waters to the attack, it makes a breach in the great earth wall, and in a strong, grand column, as high as this room, marches away towards the sea.
Peep in at the window, and see how Nannie stands at the kitchen table, cutting out little cakes from a bit of dough that her mother has given her; she is all absorbed in her play, and her mother has gone to look into the oven at the nicely browning loaves.
Oh, don't we wish the house had been built up on the cliff among the fir trees, safe above the reach of the water!
But, alas! here it stands, just in the path that the torrent will take, and we have no power to tell of the danger that is approaching.
Five minutes afterwards, sitting breathless on the roots of an old tree, with her children safe beside her, she sees the whole shore covered with surging water, and the houses swept into the bay, tossing and drifting there like boats in a stormy sea.
And this is what the Frost Giants did to Nannie's Run.
THE INDIANS
What will Nannie do now?
Here in our New England towns it would seem hard enough to have one's house swept away before one's eyes; but then you know you could take the next train of cars, and go to your aunt in Boston, or your uncle in New York, to stay until a new house could be prepared for you.
But here is Nannie hundreds and thousands of miles away from any such help; for there are not only no railroads to travel upon, but not even common roads nor horses nor wagons; nevertheless, there are neighbors who will bring help.
You remember reading in your history, how, when our great great grandfathers came to this country to live, they found it occupied by Indians.
The Flatheads are Nannie's only neighbors, and perhaps you would consider them rather undesirable friends; but when I tell you how they came at once with blankets and food, and all sorts of friendly offers of shelter and help, you will think that some white people might well take a lesson from them.
Before many weeks have passed, some of the tall fir trees are cut down, and a new house is built, this time safely perched on top of the cliff; and, so far as I know, the Frost Giants have never succeeded in touching it.
FOREWARNED
Her ideas on life in general had been acquired through the medium of popular respectable novel writers, and modified or emphasised by such knowledge as her aunt, the vicar, and her aunt's housekeeper had put at her disposal.
And now, in her twenty ninth year, her aunt's death had left her, well provided for as regards income, but somewhat isolated in the matter of kith and kin and human companionship.
She could hardly remember ever having met them, but once or twice in the course of the last three or four years they had expressed a polite wish that she should pay them a visit; they had probably not been unduly depressed by the fact that her aunt's failing health had prevented her from accepting their invitation.
mrs Bludward was something of an invalid, and Robert was a young man who had been at Oxford and was going into Parliament.
Further than that Alethia's information did not go; her imagination, founded on her extensive knowledge of the people one met in novels, had to supply the gaps.
Robert was more of a problem.
It was probable, Alethia considered, that Robert came into the last category, in which case she was certain to enjoy the companionship of one or two excellent women, and might possibly catch glimpses of undesirable adventuresses or come face to face with reckless admiration seeking married women.
The train which carried Alethia towards her destination was a local one, with the wayside station habit strongly developed.
There was a certain scornful ring in his question.
"Robert Bludward?
An out an'-out rotter, that's what he is.
Ought to be ashamed to look any decent man in the face.
Send him to Parliament to represent us-not much!
Tells a pack of lies to get our votes, that's all that he's after, damn him.
Properly exposed him, hip and thigh, I tell you."
"He was hissed down at Shoalford yesterday," said one of the speakers.
Had it come to that?
There was something dramatically biblical in the idea of Robert Bludward's neighbours and acquaintances hissing him for very scorn.
In placid Saxon blooded England people did not demonstrate their feelings lightly and without some strong compelling cause.
What manner of evildoer was Robert Bludward?
The train stopped at another small station, and the two men got out.
Alethia pounced on it, in the expectation of finding a cultured literary endorsement of the censure which these rough farming men had expressed in their homely, honest way.
She had not far to look; "mr
Robert Bludward, Swanker," was the title of one of the principal articles in the paper.
And this monster was going to meet her at Derrelton Station in a few short minutes.
She would know him at once; he would have the dark beetling brows, the quick, furtive glance, the sneering, unsavoury smile that always characterised the Sir Jaspers of this world.
It was too late to escape; she must force herself to meet him with outward calm.
It was a considerable shock to her to find that Robert was fair, with a snub nose, merry eye, and rather a schoolboy manner.
"A serpent in duckling's plumage," was her private comment; merciful chance had revealed him to her in his true colours.
As they drove away from the station a dissipated looking man of the labouring class waved his hat in friendly salute.
"Good luck to you, mr Bludward," he shouted; "you'll come out on top!
We'll break old Chobham's neck for him."
"Who was that man?" asked Alethia quickly.
"Oh, one of my supporters," laughed Robert; "a bit of a poacher and a bit of a pub loafer, but he's on the right side."
So these were the sort of associates that Robert Bludward consorted with, thought Alethia.
"Who is the person he referred to as old Chobham?" she asked.
So there was an upright man, possibly a very Hugo in character, who was thwarting and defying the evildoer in his nefarious career, and there was a dastardly plot afoot to break his neck!
Possibly the attempt would be made within the next few hours.
He must certainly be warned.
The chances were that she would be watched.
Robert would come spurring after her and seize her bridle just as she was turning in at Sir John's gates.
He had the frank open countenance, neatly brushed hair and tidy clothes that betoken a clear conscience and a good mother.
He stared straight at the occupants of the car, and, after he had passed them, sang in his clear, boyish voice:
Robert merely laughed.
He had goaded them to desperation with his shameless depravity till they spoke openly of putting him to a violent death, and he laughed.
From her no help was to be expected.
Alethia locked her door that night, and placed such ramparts of furniture against it that the maid had great difficulty in breaking in with the early tea in the morning.
After breakfast Alethia, on the pretext of going to look at an outlying rose garden, slipped away to the village through which they had passed on the previous evening.
Suddenly she started, and began to read with breathless attention a prominently printed article, headed "A Little Limelight on Sir john Chobham." The colour ebbed away from her face, a look of frightened despair crept into her eyes.
Sir john, the Hugo of her imagination, was, if anything, rather more depraved and despicable than Robert Bludward.
He was mean, evasive, callously indifferent to his country's interests, a cheat, a man who habitually broke his word, and who was responsible, with his associates, for most of the poverty, misery, crime, and national degradation with which the country was afflicted.
He was also a candidate for Parliament, it seemed, and as there was only one seat in this particular locality, it was obvious that the success of either Robert or Sir john would mean a check to the ambitions of the other, hence, no doubt, the rivalry and enmity between these otherwise kindred souls.
One was seeking to have his enemy done to death, the other was apparently trying to stir up his supporters to an act of "Lynch law".
"I must go back to Webblehinton at once," Alethia informed her astonished hostess at lunch time; "I have had a telegram.
A friend is very seriously ill and I have been sent for."
It was dreadful to have to concoct lies, but it would be more dreadful to have to spend another night under that roof.
She had come unscathed through it, but what might have happened if she had gone unsuspectingly to visit Sir john Chobham and warn him of his danger?
What indeed!
When it was the Six Hundred and Ninth Night,
Then Judar sat watching and after awhile, his feet appeared above the water and the fisher said, "He is dead and damned!
"Whither went they?" enquired the Moor, and Judar replied, "I pinioned their hands behind them and cast them into the lake, where they were drowned, and the same fate is in store for thee." The Moor laughed and rejoined, saying, "O unhappy!
Then he waited awhile; presently the Moor thrust both hands forth of the water and called out to him, saying, "Ho, good fellow, cast out thy net!" So Judar threw the net over him and drew him ashore, and lo! in each hand he held a fish as red as coral.
Quoth the Moor, "Bring me the two caskets that are in the saddle bags." So Judar brought them and opened them to him, and he laid in each casket a fish and shut them up.
Then he pressed Judar to his bosom and kissed him on the right cheek and the left, saying, "Allah save thee from all stress!
When it was the Six Hundred and Tenth Night,
Our father was wont to make use of this book, of which we had some small matter by heart, and each of us desired to possess it, that he might acquaint himself with what was therein.
As for the brand, if its bearer draw it and brandish it against an army, the army will be put to the rout; and if he say the while, 'Slay yonder host,' there will come forth of that sword lightning and fire, that will kill the whole many.
When it was the Six Hundred and Eleventh Night,
"Nay," answered the Maghribi, "they are Ifrits in the guise of fish.
When it was the Six Hundred and Seventeenth Night,
If ye allow me aught to clothe me, 'twill be of your bounty, and each of you shall traffic with the folk for himself.
Ye are my sons and I am your mother; wherefore let us abide as we are, lest your brother come back and we be disgraced." But they accepted not her words and passed the night, wrangling with each other.
So he looked out and listening, heard all the angry words that passed between them and saw the division of the spoil.
After awhile, his master the merchant set out on a pilgrimage to Meccah, taking Judar with him, and when they reached the city, the Cairene repaired to the Haram temple, to circumambulate the Ka'abah.
When it was the Six Hundred and Eighteenth Night,
They swooned away for excess of fear, and when they recovered, they found themselves in their mother's house and saw Judar seated by her side.
Quoth he, "I salute you, O my brothers! you have cheered me by your presence." And they bowed their heads and burst into tears.
Then said he, "Weep not, for it was Satan and covetise that led you to do thus.
How could you sell me?
But I comfort myself with the thought of Joseph, whose brothers did with him even more than ye did with me, because they cast him into the pit."--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
When it was the Six Hundred and Nineteenth Night,
She continued, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that Judar said to his brothers, "How could you do with me thus?
But repent unto Allah and crave pardon of Him, and He will forgive you both, for He is the Most Forgiving, the Merciful.
As for me, I pardon you and welcome you: no harm shall befall you."
Then Judar brought forth food and they ate and took their ease and lay down to sleep.
Meanwhile, Al Ra'ad summoned his attendant Jinn and bade them build the palace.
Judar was delighted with it while he was passing along the highway and withal it had cost him nothing.
Moreover, he sent other four score, who fetched comely black girls, and forty others brought male chattels and carried them all to Judar's house, which they filled.
So he gave a great cry and fell down in a fit.
M
A staff of office signifying authority.
Popularly, a woman found out.
In England the word is pronounced Maudlin, whence maudlin, adjective, unpleasantly sentimental.
There are other arts serving the same high purpose, but the discreet lexicographer does not name them.
Something acted upon by magnetism.
Something acting upon a magnet.
A bird whose thievish disposition suggested to someone that it might be taught to talk.
Opoline Jones
The state and title of a king.
The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.
They were in a state of dull discomfort until the bodies from which they had exhaled were buried and burned; and they seem not to have been particularly happy afterward.
When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.
Important.
The personal pronoun in English has three cases, the dominative, the objectionable and the oppressive.
Each is all three.
Addicted to rhetoric.
An attribute beloved of detected offenders.
Less objectionable.
The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion.
In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game.
A child of two races, ashamed of both.
Whence comes it?
thirty eight
And with kind looks and laughter And nought to say beside We two went on together, I and my happy guide.
And like the cloudy shadows Across the country blown We two face on for ever, But not we two alone.
With lips that brim with laughter But never once respond, And feet that fly on feathers, And serpent circled wand.
THE IMMORTAL PART
"When shall this slough of sense be cast, This dust of thoughts be laid at last, The man of flesh and soul be slain And the man of bone remain?"
" 'tis long till eve and morn are gone: Slow the endless night comes on, And late to fulness grows the birth That shall last as long as earth."
"Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton."
Before this fire of sense decay, This smoke of thought blow clean away, And leave with ancient night alone The stedfast and enduring bone.
Turn safe to rest, no dreams, no waking; And here, man, here's the wreath I've made: 'tis not a gift that's worth the taking, But wear it and it will not fade.
THE CARPENTER'S SON
"Here the hangman stops his cart: Now the best of friends must part. Fare you well, for ill fare I: Live, lads, and I will die."
"Oh, at home had I but stayed 'Prenticed to my father's trade, Had I stuck to plane and adze, I had not been lost, my lads."
"Now, you see, they hang me high, And the people passing by Stop to shake their fists and curse; So 'tis come from ill to worse."
"Comrades all, that stand and gaze, Walk henceforth in other ways; See my neck and save your own: Comrades all, leave ill alone."
"Make some day a decent end, Shrewder fellows than your friend. Fare you well, for ill fare I: Live, lads, and I will die."
THE TRUE LOVER
THE DAY OF BATTLE
You smile upon your friend to day, To day his ills are over; You hearken to the lover's say, And happy is the lover.
When I came last to Ludlow Amidst the moonlight pale, Two friends kept step beside me, Two honest lads and hale.
THE ISLE OF PORTLAND
The star filled seas are smooth to night From France to England strown; Black towers above the Portland light The felon quarried stone.
CHAPTER five
THE PERSISTENCE OF RELIGION
LLEWELYN POWYS.
The theologians point to this as a proof of the existence of a supreme being.
Most of these are born, not with an active tuberculosis, but some as yet imperfectly understood tendency, a defect in their protoplasmic make-up that renders them an easy prey to the tubercle bacillus if they are exposed to it.
Similarly, generations of men have been born with a weakened mental vitality towards superstition; a weakened mental capacity that renders their minds an easy prey to that fear which manifests itself in superstition, creed, religion-the God idea.
It was Karl Marx who remarked that, "The tradition of all the generations of the past weighs down like an Alp upon the brain of the living."
The force of repetition is great; it is, in fact, taken by a vast majority of men as the equivalent of proof.
Most men have to accept their religions ready made.
The toil for bread is incessant, there is not sufficient leisure to verify the sources of their religious beliefs.
Moreover, the ecclesiastic's answers to the riddles of life are easier, by far, to grasp than the answers of science.
It is much easier and much more pleasant to give oneself passively to that delusion of grandeur, that delusion that pleasantly drugs the mind with the assumption that there is a supreme being who is personally interested in our well-being; a providence who, like a school master, at his pleasure dispenses rewards and punishments; as immortality, Heaven and Hell.
This will be shown in the subsequent chapters.
"We are told by the Church apologists that during the Middle Ages the priests and monks kept up the torch of learning, that, being the only literate people, they brought back the study of the classics. Historically speaking, this is about the most impudent statement that one could imagine.
Having gotten enormous tracts of the best land into their hands, so that the people were starving, they were willing to throw a bone occasionally to the latter.
They built enormous monasteries with well filled cellars, and lived on the fat of the land, while the people lived in wretched hovels, working their lives away for a crust of bread. The beasts, the domestic animals lived a more comfortable life than did the men, women, and children of the people.
CHAPTER six
RELIGION AND SCIENCE
MAYNARD SHIPLEY, "The War on Modern Science."
HORACE m KALLEN, "Why Religion?"
Some sixty years ago in the "Dogmatic Constitution of the Catholic Faith," the Church stated, "But never can reason be rendered capable of thoroughly understanding mysteries as it does those truths which form its proper subject.
We, therefore, pronounce false every assertion which is contrary to the enlightened truth of faith....
Hence, all the Christian faithful are not only forbidden to defend as legitimate conclusions of science those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith, especially when condemned by the Church, but are rather absolutely bound to hold them for errors wearing the deceitful appearance of truth.
Let him be anathema....
And only sixty years ago!
It is but the restatement of what the Church has uttered so many times and for so long-that all knowledge, material as well as spiritual, is to be found in the Bible as interpreted by the Church.
It was this myth which had stultified the mind of man for one thousand five hundred years (during the period in which the Church was dominant); it was this that had killed the urge to search and seek for the truth, which is the goal of all science, the means by which humanity is set on the road to progress.
Science, on the other hand, does not hesitate to tear down old conceptions, and has only one motive, the ultimate truth.
The true scientist is the man with the open mind, one who will discard the worthless and accept only the proven good.
The religionist closes his mind to all facts which he is unwilling to believe, everything which will endanger his creed.
Religion teaches the individual to place all hope, all desire, in a problematical hereafter. The stay on earth is so short compared to the everlasting life to come, that of what interest is this life; all things are vain.
Truth to the scientific mind is something provisional, a hypothesis that for the present moment best conforms to the recognized tests.
If the theory is adopted it must account for the facts known.
To the religionist, knowledge is something that is contained in an infallible and supernatural statement or insight. Religion exalts the transcendental; science manipulates only the material.
Science is the embodiment of the sense of control, religion yields the control to that power which moves in the shadow of the woods by night, and the glory of the morning hills....
"Science does not justify by faith, but by works.
It renounces authority, cuts athwart custom, violates the sacred, rejects the myths.
The two rival divisions of the Christian Church, Protestant and Catholic, have always been in accord on one point, that is, to tolerate no science except such as they considered to be agreeable to the Scriptures.
Thus declared the Church.
We understand why it was that Copernicus did not permit his book to be published until he was dying.
Bruno was burnt at the stake.
The attitude of the Church on geography was hostile to the truth, as witness the persecutions of those who dared to venture that the earth was round. Botany, mathematics, and geometry, as well as the natural sciences, slumbered.
Geology, which proved that the earth was more than six thousand years old, was anathematized; archeologists had the greatest difficulty to expound the truth concerning the antiquity of the human race.
CHAPTER eleven
RELIGION AND GEOLOGY, PHILOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
LLEWELYN POWYS.
Tertullian asserted that fossils resulted from the flood of Noah.
The theological faculty of Paris protested against the scientific doctrine as unscriptural, destroyed their treatises, and banished their authors from Paris.
In the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon, in France, produced a thesis attempting to state simple geological truths.
The theological faculty of the Sorbonne dismissed him from his high position and forced him to print a recantation stating, "I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of the Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact.
When the Egyptologists, Assyriologists, archeologists, and anthropologists showed that man had reached a far advanced stage of civilization long before the six thousand years given as the age of the earth, their efforts were ridiculed by the clergy, and these scientists were forced to bring their findings before the world in the face of the well known methods of ecclesiastical opposition.
Language was considered God given and complete.
The diversity of language was firmly held to be explained by the story of the Tower of Babel; and since the writers of the Bible were merely pens in the hand of God the conclusion was reached that not only the sense, but the words, letters, and even the punctuation proceeded from the Holy Spirit.
Babel thus takes its place quietly among the other myths of the Bible.
In a purely civil matter, the infallible Church from its inception had displayed a marked hostility to loans at interest.
From the earliest period the whole weight of the Church was brought to bear against the taking of interest for money.
Pope Leo the Great solemnly adjudged it a sin worthy of severe punishment.
Darwinism, which at first was declared by the clergy to be brutal, degrading, atheistic, and anti Christian, is now included as part of the Bible teaching.
In a similar manner, the Copernican theory, the theory of gravitation, the nebular hypothesis, the theory of uniformity in geology, and every scientific advance has been opposed on the same grounds; that is, that these are against the teachings of the Christian Church.
In eighteen seventy seven, an eminent French Catholic physician, dr Constantin james, published an elaborate answer to Darwin's book.
dr Duffield, both leading authorities at Princeton University.
dr Max Carl Otto, considering the implications of evolution, calls attention to the following: "Take the evolution of living forms.
There have been futile experiments without number; highly successful achievements have been thrown aside; one type of life after another has arisen and has pushed up a blind alley to extinction.
In this maelstrom, the human species, as Thomas Huxley said-'plashed and floundered amid the general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as best it might, and thinking neither of whence nor whither.' Many volumes have been written to give a purposive interpretation of the rise and evolutionary ramifications of living forms.
The course of evolution itself is their refutation."
Chapter one hundred seven.
The Lions' Den.
One division of La Force, in which the most dangerous and desperate prisoners are confined, is called the court of Saint Bernard.
The prisoners, in their expressive language, have named it the "Lions' Den," probably because the captives possess teeth which frequently gnaw the bars, and sometimes the keepers also.
It is a prison within a prison; the walls are double the thickness of the rest.
The gratings are every day carefully examined by jailers, whose herculean proportions and cold pitiless expression prove them to have been chosen to reign over their subjects for their superior activity and intelligence.
On this paved yard are to be seen,--pacing to and fro from morning till night, pale, careworn, and haggard, like so many shadows,--the men whom justice holds beneath the steel she is sharpening.
There, crouched against the side of the wall which attracts and retains the most heat, they may be seen sometimes talking to one another, but more frequently alone, watching the door, which sometimes opens to call forth one from the gloomy assemblage, or to throw in another outcast from society.
And yet, frightful though this spot may be, it is looked upon as a kind of paradise by the men whose days are numbered; it is so rare for them to leave the Lions' Den for any other place than the barrier Saint Jacques or the galleys!
In the court which we have attempted to describe, and from which a damp vapor was rising, a young man with his hands in his pockets, who had excited much curiosity among the inhabitants of the "Den," might be seen walking.
The cut of his clothes would have made him pass for an elegant man, if those clothes had not been torn to shreds; still they did not show signs of wear, and the fine cloth, beneath the careful hands of the prisoner, soon recovered its gloss in the parts which were still perfect, for the wearer tried his best to make it assume the appearance of a new coat.
He bestowed the same attention upon the cambric front of a shirt, which had considerably changed in color since his entrance into the prison, and he polished his varnished boots with the corner of a handkerchief embroidered with initials surmounted by a coronet.
Some of the inmates of the "Lions' Den" were watching the operations of the prisoner's toilet with considerable interest.
"See, the prince is pluming himself," said one of the thieves.
"He's a fine looking fellow," said another; "if he had only a comb and hair grease, he'd take the shine off the gentlemen in white kids."
And, then, to be here so young!
The keeper turned his back, and shrugged his shoulders; he did not even laugh at what would have caused any one else to do so; he had heard so many utter the same things,--indeed, he heard nothing else.
The prisoners then approached and formed a circle.
"Of course-of course," said the prisoners;--"any one can see he's a gentleman!"
"Well, then, lend him the twenty francs," said the keeper, leaning on the other shoulder; "surely you will not refuse a comrade!"
Some voices were heard to say that the gentleman was right; that he intended to be civil, in his way, and that they would set the example of liberty of conscience,--and the mob retired.
"Benedetto!" exclaimed an inspector.
The keeper relaxed his hold.
He has two means of extricating me from this dilemma,--the one by a mysterious escape, managed through bribery; the other by buying off my judges with gold.
He had borne with the public prison, and with privations of all sorts; still, by degrees nature, or rather custom, had prevailed, and he suffered from being naked, dirty, and hungry.
Andrea felt his heart leap with joy.
It was too soon for a visit from the examining magistrate, and too late for one from the director of the prison, or the doctor; it must, then, be the visitor he hoped for.
"You-you?" said the young man, looking fearfully around him.
"Silence,--be silent!" said Andrea, who knew the delicate sense of hearing possessed by the walls; "for heaven's sake, do not speak so loud!"
"Oh, yes."
"Read?" he said.
"What is that?" asked Andrea.
"Oh," cried Andrea, leaping with joy.
"You speak first."
"Oh, no
"Well, be it so.
You have continued your course of villany; you have robbed-you have assassinated."
I know all these things.
Let us talk of those, if you please.
Who sent you?"
Who sends you?"
"How did you know I was in prison?"
"Who, then, am I?"
"You, sir?--you are my adopted father.
Come, speak, my worthy Corsican, speak!"
"What do you wish me to say?"
"Well?"
"The Count of Monte Cristo?"
"Do not let us jest," gravely replied Bertuccio, "and dare not to utter that name again as you have pronounced it."
"Oh, these are fine words."
"Do you think you have to do with galley slaves, or novices in the world?
Benedetto, you are fallen into terrible hands; they are ready to open for you-make use of them.
Do not play with the thunderbolt they have laid aside for a moment, but which they can take up again instantly, if you attempt to intercept their movements."
"My father-I will know who my father is," said the obstinate youth; "I will perish if I must, but I will know it.
What does scandal signify to me?
You great people always lose something by scandal, notwithstanding your millions.
Come, who is my father?"
"Ah," cried Benedetto, his eyes sparkling with joy.
Just then the door opened, and the jailer, addressing himself to Bertuccio, said,--"Excuse me, sir, but the examining magistrate is waiting for the prisoner."
"I will return to morrow," said Bertuccio.
"Good!
Gendarmes, I am at your service.
"Can I be deceived?" he murmured, as he stepped into the oblong and grated vehicle which they call "the salad basket." "Never mind, we shall see!
Every one looked with astonishment on that grave and severe face, whose calm expression personal griefs had been unable to disturb, and the aspect of a man who was a stranger to all human emotions excited something very like terror.
"Gendarmes," said the president, "lead in the accused."
His features bore no sign of that deep emotion which stops the beating of the heart and blanches the cheek.
His hands, gracefully placed, one upon his hat, the other in the opening of his white waistcoat, were not at all tremulous; his eye was calm and even brilliant.
Scarcely had he entered the hall when he glanced at the whole body of magistrates and assistants; his eye rested longer on the president, and still more so on the king's attorney.
By the side of Andrea was stationed the lawyer who was to conduct his defence, and who had been appointed by the court, for Andrea disdained to pay any attention to those details, to which he appeared to attach no importance.
The lawyer was a young man with light hair whose face expressed a hundred times more emotion than that which characterized the prisoner.
Benedetto was thus forever condemned in public opinion before the sentence of the law could be pronounced.
"Accused," said the president, "your name and surname?" Andrea arose. "Excuse me, mr President," he said, in a clear voice, "but I see you are going to adopt a course of questions through which I cannot follow you.
I have an idea, which I will explain by and by, of making an exception to the usual form of accusation.
The whole assembly manifested great surprise, but Andrea appeared quite unmoved.
"Your age?" said the president; "will you answer that question?"
As for Benedetto, he gracefully wiped his lips with a fine cambric pocket handkerchief.
"Your profession?"
The judges themselves appeared to be stupefied, and the jury manifested tokens of disgust for cynicism so unexpected in a man of fashion.
"And now, prisoner, will you consent to tell your name?" said the president.
You appear to consider this a point of honor, and it may be for this reason, that you have delayed acknowledging your name.
The public astonishment had reached its height.
The audience felt that a startling revelation was to follow this ominous prelude.
"Well," said the president; "your name?"
"I cannot tell you my name, since I do not know it; but I know my father's, and can tell it to you."
A painful giddiness overwhelmed Villefort; great drops of acrid sweat fell from his face upon the papers which he held in his convulsed hand.
"Repeat your father's name," said the president.
Not a whisper, not a breath, was heard in that vast assembly; every one waited anxiously.
"My father is king's attorney," replied Andrea calmly.
In the midst of this tumult the voice of the president was heard to exclaim,--"Are you playing with justice, accused, and do you dare set your fellow citizens an example of disorder which even in these times has never been equalled?"
Order was re-established in the hall, except that a few people still moved about and whispered to one another.
During the scene of tumult, Andrea had turned his smiling face towards the assembly; then, leaning with one hand on the oaken rail of the dock, in the most graceful attitude possible, he said: "Gentlemen, I assure you I had no idea of insulting the court, or of making a useless disturbance in the presence of this honorable assembly.
They ask my age; I tell it.
They ask my name, I cannot give it, since my parents abandoned me.
But though I cannot give my own name, not possessing one, I can tell them my father's.
"Gentlemen," said Andrea, commanding silence by his voice and manner; "I owe you the proofs and explanations of what I have said."
"But," said the irritated president, "you called yourself Benedetto, declared yourself an orphan, and claimed Corsica as your country."
"I said anything I pleased, in order that the solemn declaration I have just made should not be withheld, which otherwise would certainly have been the case.
"I will tell you, mr President.
"But your mother?" asked the president.
"My mother thought me dead; she is not guilty.
"The proofs?" said Benedetto, laughing; "do you want proofs?"
"Yes."
"Father," said Benedetto, "I am asked for proofs, do you wish me to give them?"
We need no proofs; everything relating to this young man is true." A dull, gloomy silence, like that which precedes some awful phenomenon of nature, pervaded the assembly, who shuddered in dismay.
Come, recover."
"And moreover, it kills," said Beauchamp.
Chapter six.
The magistrates freely discussed their political views; the military part of the company talked unreservedly of Moscow and Leipsic, while the women commented on the divorce of Josephine.
It was not over the downfall of the man, but over the defeat of the Napoleonic idea, that they rejoiced, and in this they foresaw for themselves the bright and cheering prospect of a revivified political existence.
This toast, recalling at once the patient exile of Hartwell and the peace loving King of France, excited universal enthusiasm; glasses were elevated in the air a l'Anglais, and the ladies, snatching their bouquets from their fair bosoms, strewed the table with their floral treasures.
In a word, an almost poetical fervor prevailed.
"I beg your pardon, madame.
I really must pray you to excuse me, but-in truth-I was not attending to the conversation."
"Marquise, marquise!" interposed the old nobleman who had proposed the toast, "let the young people alone; let me tell you, on one's wedding day there are more agreeable subjects of conversation than dry politics."
"Never mind, Renee," replied the marquise, with a look of tenderness that seemed out of keeping with her harsh dry features; but, however all other feelings may be withered in a woman's nature, there is always one bright smiling spot in the desert of her heart, and that is the shrine of maternal love.
"I forgive you.
"They had, however, what supplied the place of those fine qualities," replied the young man, "and that was fanaticism.
Napoleon is the Mahomet of the West, and is worshipped by his commonplace but ambitions followers, not only as a leader and lawgiver, but also as the personification of equality."
"He!" cried the marquise: "Napoleon the type of equality!
Come, come, do not strip the latter of his just rights to bestow them on the Corsican, who, to my mind, has usurped quite enough."
The only difference consists in the opposite character of the equality advocated by these two men; one is the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that degrades; one brings a king within reach of the guillotine, the other elevates the people to a level with the throne.
"'tis true, madame," answered he, "that my father was a Girondin, but he was not among the number of those who voted for the king's death; he was an equal sufferer with yourself during the Reign of Terror, and had well nigh lost his head on the same scaffold on which your father perished."
"Dear mother," interposed Renee, "you know very well it was agreed that all these disagreeable reminiscences should forever be laid aside."
What avails recrimination over matters wholly past recall?
Come, now, I have hopes of obtaining what I have been for years endeavoring to persuade the marquise to promise; namely, a perfect amnesty and forgetfulness of the past."
"With all my heart," replied the marquise; "let the past be forever forgotten.
I promise you it affords me as little pleasure to revive it as it does you.
I have already successfully conducted several public prosecutions, and brought the offenders to merited punishment.
But we have not done with the thing yet."
"Do you, indeed, think so?" inquired the marquise.
Napoleon, in the Island of Elba, is too near France, and his proximity keeps up the hopes of his partisans. Marseilles is filled with half pay officers, who are daily, under one frivolous pretext or other, getting up quarrels with the royalists; from hence arise continual and fatal duels among the higher classes of persons, and assassinations in the lower."
"To Saint Helena."
"For heaven's sake, where is that?" asked the marquise.
"An island situated on the other side of the equator, at least two thousand leagues from here," replied the count.
"So much the better.
"Then all he has got to do is to endeavor to repair it."
"Nay, madame, the law is frequently powerless to effect this; all it can do is to avenge the wrong done."
"Amusing, certainly," replied the young man, "inasmuch as, instead of shedding tears as at the fictitious tale of woe produced at a theatre, you behold in a law court a case of real and genuine distress-a drama of life.
The prisoner whom you there see pale, agitated, and alarmed, instead of-as is the case when a curtain falls on a tragedy-going home to sup peacefully with his family, and then retiring to rest, that he may recommence his mimic woes on the morrow,--is removed from your sight merely to be reconducted to his prison and delivered up to the executioner.
I leave you to judge how far your nerves are calculated to bear you through such a scene.
Of this, however, be assured, that should any favorable opportunity present itself, I will not fail to offer you the choice of being present."
"What would you have?
'tis like a duel.
I have already recorded sentence of death, five or six times, against the movers of political conspiracies, and who can say how many daggers may be ready sharpened, and only waiting a favorable opportunity to be buried in my heart?"
Besides, one requires the excitement of being hateful in the eyes of the accused, in order to lash one's self into a state of sufficient vehemence and power. I would not choose to see the man against whom I pleaded smile, as though in mockery of my words.
No; my pride is to see the accused pale, agitated, and as though beaten out of all composure by the fire of my eloquence." Renee uttered a smothered exclamation.
"Bravo!" cried one of the guests; "that is what I call talking to some purpose."
"Just the person we require at a time like the present," said a second.
Upon my word, you killed him ere the executioner had laid his hand upon him."
"Why, that is the very worst offence they could possibly commit; for, don't you see, Renee, the king is the father of his people, and he who shall plot or contrive aught against the life and safety of the parent of thirty two millions of souls, is a parricide upon a fearfully great scale?"
Do you know I always felt a shudder at the idea of even a destroying angel?"
"And one which will go far to efface the recollection of his father's conduct," added the incorrigible marquise.
I should myself have recommended the match, had not the noble marquis anticipated my wishes by requesting my consent to it.'"
"That is true," answered the marquis.
"How much do I owe this gracious prince!
What is there I would not do to evince my earnest gratitude!"
"That is right," cried the marquise.
"I love to see you thus.
Now, then, were a conspirator to fall into your hands, he would be most welcome."
If you wish to see me the king's attorney, you must desire for me some of those violent and dangerous diseases from the cure of which so much honor redounds to the physician."
Renee regarded him with fond affection; and certainly his handsome features, lit up as they then were with more than usual fire and animation, seemed formed to excite the innocent admiration with which she gazed on her graceful and intelligent lover.
Well, I at least resemble the disciples of Esculapius in one thing-that of not being able to call a day my own, not even that of my betrothal."
"For a very serious matter, which bids fair to make work for the executioner."
"How dreadful!" exclaimed Renee, turning pale.
"Is it possible?" burst simultaneously from all who were near enough to the magistrate to hear his words.
"Why, if my information prove correct, a sort of Bonaparte conspiracy has just been discovered."
"Can I believe my ears?" cried the marquise.
Ample corroboration of this statement may be obtained by arresting the above mentioned Edmond Dantes, who either carries the letter for Paris about with him, or has it at his father's abode.
"But," said Renee, "this letter, which, after all, is but an anonymous scrawl, is not even addressed to you, but to the king's attorney."
"True; but that gentleman being absent, his secretary, by his orders, opened his letters; thinking this one of importance, he sent for me, but not finding me, took upon himself to give the necessary orders for arresting the accused party."
"Then the guilty person is absolutely in custody?" said the marquise.
You know we cannot yet pronounce him guilty."
"And where is the unfortunate being?" asked Renee.
"Come, come, my friend," interrupted the marquise, "do not neglect your duty to linger with us.
You are the king's servant, and must go wherever that service calls you."
The young man passed round to the side of the table where the fair pleader sat, and leaning over her chair said tenderly,--
"To give you pleasure, my sweet Renee, I promise to show all the lenity in my power; but if the charges brought against this Bonapartist hero prove correct, why, then, you really must give me leave to order his head to be cut off." Renee shuddered.
"These are mournful auspices to accompany a betrothal," sighed poor Renee.
"Upon my word, child!" exclaimed the angry marquise, "your folly exceeds all bounds.
I should be glad to know what connection there can possibly be between your sickly sentimentality and the affairs of the state!"
"O mother!" murmured Renee.
Chapter twenty eight.
The Prison Register.
The day after that in which the scene we have just described had taken place on the road between Bellegarde and Beaucaire, a man of about thirty or two and thirty, dressed in a bright blue frock coat, nankeen trousers, and a white waistcoat, having the appearance and accent of an Englishman, presented himself before the mayor of Marseilles.
"Sir," said he, "I am chief clerk of the house of Thomson and French, of Rome.
We have a hundred thousand francs or thereabouts loaned on their securities, and we are a little uneasy at reports that have reached us that the firm is on the brink of ruin.
I have come, therefore, express from Rome, to ask you for information."
"Sir," replied the mayor.
He has lost four or five vessels, and suffered by three or four bankruptcies; but it is not for me, although I am a creditor myself to the amount of ten thousand francs, to give any information as to the state of his finances.
"But," said the Englishman, "this looks very much like a suspension of payment."
The Englishman appeared to reflect a moment, and then said,--"From which it would appear, sir, that this credit inspires you with considerable apprehension?"
"To tell you the truth, I consider it lost."
"Well, then, I will buy it of you!"
"You?"
"Yes, I!"
"But at a tremendous discount, of course?"
"No, for two hundred thousand francs.
Our house," added the Englishman with a laugh, "does not do things in that way."
"And you will pay"--
"That's no affair of mine," replied the Englishman, "that is the affair of the house of Thomson and French, in whose name I act.
They have, perhaps, some motive to serve in hastening the ruin of a rival firm. But all I know, sir, is, that I am ready to hand you over this sum in exchange for your assignment of the debt.
I only ask a brokerage."
Whatever you say."
"Sir," replied the Englishman, laughing, "I am like my house, and do not do such things-no, the commission I ask is quite different."
"Name it, sir, I beg."
"You are the inspector of prisons?"
"I have been so these fourteen years."
"You keep the registers of entries and departures?"
"I do."
"There are special reports on every prisoner."
"Well, sir, I was educated at home by a poor devil of an abbe, who disappeared suddenly.
"What was his name?"
"The Abbe Faria."
"Oh, he was, decidedly."
"Very possibly; but what sort of madness was it?"
"He pretended to know of an immense treasure, and offered vast sums to the government if they would liberate him."
"Poor devil!--and he is dead?"
"Yes, sir, five or six months ago-last February."
"You have a good memory, sir, to recollect dates so well."
"I recollect this, because the poor devil's death was accompanied by a singular incident."
"Indeed!" said the Englishman.
That man made a deep impression on me; I shall never forget his countenance!"
The Englishman smiled imperceptibly.
"And you say, sir," he interposed, "that the two dungeons"--
"This dangerous man's name was"--
"Edmond Dantes.
It appears, sir, that this Edmond Dantes had procured tools, or made them, for they found a tunnel through which the prisoners held communication with one another."
"This tunnel was dug, no doubt, with an intention of escape?"
"No doubt; but unfortunately for the prisoners, the Abbe Faria had an attack of catalepsy, and died."
"That must have cut short the projects of escape."
"As I have already told you, sir, he was a very dangerous man; and, fortunately, by his own act disembarrassed the government of the fears it had on his account."
"How was that?"
"How?
Do you not comprehend?"
"no"
"The Chateau d'If has no cemetery, and they simply throw the dead into the sea, after fastening a thirty six pound cannon ball to their feet."
"Well," observed the Englishman as if he were slow of comprehension.
"Well, they fastened a thirty six pound ball to his feet, and threw him into the sea."
"Really!" exclaimed the Englishman.
"Yes, sir," continued the inspector of prisons.
I should like to have seen his face at that moment."
"That would have been difficult."
"So can I," said the Englishman, and he laughed too; but he laughed as the English do, "at the end of his teeth."
"And so," continued the Englishman who first gained his composure, "he was drowned?"
"Unquestionably."
"So that the governor got rid of the dangerous and the crazy prisoner at the same time?"
"Precisely."
"But some official document was drawn up as to this affair, I suppose?" inquired the Englishman.
"Yes, yes, the mortuary deposition.
You understand, Dantes' relations, if he had any, might have some interest in knowing if he were dead or alive."
"Oh, yes; and they may have the fact attested whenever they please."
"But to return to these registers."
"True, this story has diverted our attention from them.
Excuse me."
"Excuse you for what?
For the story?
Then he saw through the whole thing.
He was no longer astonished when he searched on to find in the register this note, placed in a bracket against his name:--
Edmond Dantes.
An inveterate Bonapartist; took an active part in the return from the Island of Elba.
To be kept in strict solitary confinement, and to be closely watched and guarded.
Beneath these lines was written in another hand: "See note above-nothing can be done." He compared the writing in the bracket with the writing of the certificate placed beneath Morrel's petition, and discovered that the note in the bracket was the same writing as the certificate-that is to say, was in Villefort's handwriting.
As we have said, the inspector, from discretion, and that he might not disturb the Abbe Faria's pupil in his researches, had seated himself in a corner, and was reading Le Drapeau Blanc.
"Thanks," said the latter, closing the register with a slam, "I have all I want; now it is for me to perform my promise.
This was tapped, and served regularly to all hands, which was much preferable to spirits, as it gave them strength without intoxication.
The exclusive trade of sandlewood was valuable and convenient to the Dutch; but, from the vast extent of territory lately acquired in India, we have plenty of that commodity without going to the Dutch market.
Close to the Dutch town is a Chinese town and temple.
They have a governor of their own nation, but pay large tribute to the Dutch.
One of the petty princes, in settling his account with a merchant of this place, was some dollars short of cash.
He went passenger in the ship with us to Batavia.
I could dwell with pleasure for an age in praise of this honest Dutchman; it is the tribute of a grateful heart, and his due.
This is the third time he has had an opportunity of extending his hospitality to shipwrecked Englishmen.
They drew bills on the British government, and were supplied with every necessary they stood in need of.
They had been supplied with a quadrant, a compass, a chart, and some small arms and ammunition, from a Dutch ship that lay there; and the expedition was conducted by the Governor's fisherman, whose time of transportation was expired.
They dragged along the coast of New South Wales; and as often as the hostile nature of the savage natives would permit, hauled their boat up at night, and slept on shore.
In many places of the coast of South Wales, they found very good coal; a circumstance that was not before known.
Our men were now beginning to regain their strength; and Captain Dadleberg of the Rembang Indiaman was making every possible dispatch with his ship to carry us to Batavia.
The Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and all the Europeans were invited.
Six months had been spent in preparations for this fete, at which an emperor and twenty five kings assisted and attended in person with all their body guards, standards, and standard bearers, were present.
The first toast after dinner was the dead king's health.
As he was preceded by music, and colours flying, every one turned out to see him. Amongst the rest was a captive king in chains, who was employed blowing the bellows to our armourer, whilst he was forging bolts and fetters for our prisoners and convicts.
That domestic strife serves likewise amply to supply the slave trade from the prisoners of both parties.
At stated periods it makes a noise exactly like a cuckoo clock.
The Governor, Mynheer Vanion, relates a circumstance that happened to him while hunting.
In crossing a shallow part of the river, his black boy was snapped up by an alligator; but the Governor immediately dismounted, rescued the boy out of his mouth, and slew him.
On the sixth of October, we embarked on board the Rembang Dutch Indiaman, taking with us the prisoners and convicts.
The Dutch seamen were struck with horror, and went below; and the ship was preserved from destruction by the manly exertion of our English tars, whose souls seemed to catch redoubled ardour from the tempest's rage.
On the twenty sixth, saw the island of Java; and on the thirtieth, anchored at Samarang.
Immediately on our coming to anchor, we were agreeably surprised to find our tender here which we had so long given up for lost.
Our seven barrelled pieces made great havoc amongst them.
The alternative was dreadful, as famine presented them on the one hand, and shipwreck on the other.
The town is regular and beautiful, and the houses are built in a style of architecture, which has given loose to the most sportive fancy.
Some dead bodies floating down the canal struck our boat, which had a very disagreeable effect on the minds of our brave fellows, whose nerves were reduced to a very weak state from sickness.
The compass of my work will not allow me to be particular; but I must instance one among many others.
In our passage from this to the Cape, before we left Java, one of the convicts had jumped over board in the night, and swam to the Dutch arsenal at Honroost.
We met nothing particular in passing the island of Sumatra, but experienced great death and sickness in going through the Straits of Sunda; and after a tedious passage, arrived at the Cape of Good Hope.
But should the piquet be negligent in their duty, and suffer the main body to be surprised, the delinquents are severely punished.
They have even contrived to carry canals to the top of a mountain.
The boors, or country farmers, are a species of the human race, so gigantic and superior to the rest of mankind, in point of size and constitution, that they may be called nondescripts.
PROFESSORS h AND t OFFER THEIR SERVICES-CAPTAINS b ALSO ARE ENLISTED-SLAVE TRADER GRASPING TIGHTLY HIS PREY, BUT SHE IS RESCUED-LONG CONFLICT, BUT GREAT TRIUMPH-ARRIVAL ON THANKSGIVING DAY, november twenty fifth eighteen fifty five.
It was the business of the Vigilance Committee, as it was clearly understood by the friends of the Slave, to assist all needy fugitives, who might in any way manage to reach Philadelphia, but, for various reasons, not to send agents South to incite slaves to run away, or to assist them in so doing.
Sometimes, however, this rule could not altogether be conformed to.
Cases, in some instances, would appeal so loudly and forcibly to humanity, civilization, and Christianity, that it would really seem as if the very stones would cry out, unless something was done.
As an illustration of this point, the story of the young girl, which is now to be related, will afford the most striking proof.
At the same time it may be seen how much anxiety, care, hazard, delay and material aid, were required in order to effect the deliverance of some who were in close places, and difficult of access.
It will be necessary to present a considerable amount of correspondence in this case, to bring to light the hidden mysteries of this narrative.
The first letter, in explanation, is the following:
WASHINGTON, d c, june twenty seventh eighteen fifty four.
mr
This child sleeps in the same apartment with its master and mistress, which adds to the difficulty of removal.
All this, I think, is now provided for with entire safety.
All the rest I leave to the experience and sagacity of the gentleman who maps out the enterprise.
Yours very respectfully,
J. BIGELOW.
While this letter clearly brought to light the situation of things, its author, however, had scarcely begun to conceive of the numberless difficulties which stood in the way of success before the work could be accomplished.
The information which mr Bigelow's letter contained of the painful situation of this young girl was submitted to different parties who could be trusted, with a view of finding a person who might possess sufficient courage to undertake to bring her away.
Amongst those consulted were two or three captains who had on former occasions done good service in the cause.
The impression made on mr Bigelow's mind may be seen from the following letter; it may also be seen that he was fully alive to the necessity of precautionary measures.
SECOND LETTER FROM LAWYER BIGELOW.
WASHINGTON, d c, september ninth eighteen fifty five.
mr
STILL, DEAR SIR:--I strongly hope the little matter of business so long pending and about which I have written you so many times, will take a move now.
I have the promise that the merchandize shall be delivered in this city to night.
Like so many other promises, this also may prove a failure, though I have reason to believe that it will not.
I shall, however, know before I mail this note.
You have never given me his name, nor am I anxious to know it.
Well, let him come.
I had an interesting call a week ago from two gentlemen, masters of vessels, and brothers, one of whom, I understand, you know as the "powder boy." I had a little light freight for them; but not finding enough other freight to ballast their craft, they went down the river looking for wheat, and promising to return soon. I hope to see them often.
The attempt was made on Sunday to forward the merchandize, but failed through no fault of any of the parties that I now know of.
It will be repeated soon, and you shall know the result.
"Whorra for Judge Kane." I feel so indignant at the man, that it is not easy to write the foregoing sentence, and yet who is helping our cause like Kane and Douglas, not forgetting Stringfellow.
I hope soon to know that this reaches you in safety.
[I wish here to caution you against the supposition that I would do any act, or say a word towards helping servants to escape. Although I hate slavery so much, I keep my hands clear of any such wicked or illegal act.]
Yours, very truly,
j b
You will find an example at the close of my letter.
Up to this time the chances seemed favorable of procuring the ready services of either of the above mentioned captains who visited Lawyer Bigelow for the removal of the merchandize to Philadelphia, providing the shipping master could have it in readiness to suit their convenience.
In this hopeful, although painfully indefinite position the matter remained for more than a year; but the correspondence and anxiety increased, and with them disappointments and difficulties multiplied.
The hope of Freedom, however, buoyed up the heart of the young slave girl during the long months of anxious waiting and daily expectation for the hour of deliverance to come.
Equally true and faithful also did mr Bigelow prove to the last; but at times he had some painfully dark seasons to encounter, as may be seen from the subjoined letter:
WASHINGTON, d c, october sixth eighteen fifty five.
mr
STILL, DEAR SIR:--I regret exceedingly to learn by your favor of fourth instant, that all things are not ready.
Such outrages are always common here, and no kind of property exposed to colored protection only, can be considered safe.
The property is not yet advertised, but will be, [and if we delay too long, may be sold and lost.]
It was a great misunderstanding, though not your fault, that so much delay would be necessary.
Section two
It was with some surprise that dr Martineau received a fresh appeal for aid from Sir Richmond.
It was late in October and Sir Richmond was already seriously ill.
But he was still going about his business as though he was perfectly well.
He had not mistaken his man.
dr Martineau received him as though there had never been a shadow of offence between them.
He came straight to the point.
"Martineau," he said, "I must have those drugs I asked you for when first I came to you now.
I must be bolstered up.
I can't last out unless I am.
I'm at the end of my energy.
The Commission can't go on now for more than another three weeks.
Whatever happens afterwards I must keep going until then."
The doctor did understand.
He made no vain objections.
He did what he could to patch up his friend for his last struggles with the opposition in the Committee.
"Pro forma," he said, stethoscope in hand, "I must order you to bed.
You won't go.
But I order you.
You must know that what you are doing is risking your life.
Your lungs are congested, the bronchial tubes already.
That may spread at any time.
If this open weather lasts you may go about and still pull through.
But at any time this may pass into pneumonia.
And there's not much in you just now to stand up against pneumonia...."
"I'll take all reasonable care."
"Is your wife at home!"
"She is in Wales with her people.
But the household is well trained.
I can manage."
"Go in a closed car from door to door.
Wrap up like a mummy.
I wish the Committee room wasn't down those abominable House of Commons corridors...."
They parted with an affectionate handshake.
Section three
Death approved of Sir Richmond's determination to see the Committee through.
Our universal creditor gave this particular debtor grace to the very last meeting.
Then he brushed a gust of chilly rain across the face of Sir Richmond as he stood waiting for his car outside the strangers' entrance to the House.
For a couple of days Sir Richmond felt almost intolerably tired, but scarcely noted the changed timbre of the wheezy notes in his throat.
He rose later each day and with ebbing vigour, jotted down notes and corrections upon the proofs of the Minority Report.
He found it increasingly difficult to make decisions; he would correct and alter back and then repeat the correction, perhaps half a dozen times.
On the evening of the second day his lungs became painful and his breathing difficult.
His skin was suddenly a detestable garment to wear.
He took his temperature with a little clinical thermometer he kept by him and found it was a hundred and one.
He telephoned hastily for dr Martineau and without waiting for his arrival took a hot bath and got into bed.
He was already thoroughly ill when the doctor arrived.
"Forgive my sending for you," he said.
"Not your line.
I know....
My wife's g p--an exasperating sort of ass.
No one else."
He was lying on a narrow little bed with a hard pillow that the doctor replaced by one from Lady Hardy's room.
He had twisted the bed clothes into a hopeless muddle, the sheet was on the floor.
Sir Richmond's bedroom was a large apartment in which sleep seemed to have been an admitted necessity rather than a principal purpose.
It bore witness to the nocturnal habits of a man who had long lived a life of irregular impulses to activity and dislocated hours and habits.
There was a desk and reading lamp for night work near the fireplace, an electric kettle for making tea at night, a silver biscuit tin; all the apparatus for the lonely intent industry of the small hours.
There was a bookcase of bluebooks, books of reference and suchlike material, and some files.
Over the mantelpiece was an enlarged photograph of Lady Hardy and a plain office calendar.
The desk was littered with the galley proofs of the Minority Report upon which Sir Richmond had been working up to the moment of his hasty retreat to bed. And lying among the proofs, as though it had been taken out and looked at quite recently was the photograph of a girl.
For a moment dr Martineau's mind hung in doubt and then he knew it for the young American of Stonehenge.
How that affair had ended he did not know.
And now it was not his business to know.
These various observations printed themselves on dr Martineau's mind after his first cursory examination of his patient and while he cast about for anything that would give this large industrious apartment a little more of the restfulness and comfort of a sick room.
"I must get in a night nurse at once," he said.
"We must find a small table somewhere to put near the bed.
"I am afraid you are very ill," he said, returning to the bedside.
"This is not, as you say, my sort of work.
Will you let me call in another man, a man we can trust thoroughly, to consult?"
"I'm in your hands, said Sir Richmond.
I want to pull through."
"He will know better where to get the right sort of nurse for the case-and everything."
The second doctor presently came, with the right sort of nurse hard on his heels.
He began to think what a decent chap dr Martineau was, how helpful and fine and forgiving his professional training had made him, how completely he had ignored the smothered incivilities of their parting at Salisbury.
All men ought to have some such training, Not a bad idea to put every boy and girl through a year or so of hospital service....
Sir Richmond must have dozed, for his next perception was of dr Martineau standing over him and saying "I am afraid, my dear Hardy, that you are very ill indeed. Much more so than I thought you were at first."
Sir Richmond's raised eyebrows conveyed that he accepted this fact.
"I think Lady Hardy ought to be sent for."
Sir Richmond shook his head with unexpected vigour.
"Don't want her about," he said, and after a pause, "Don't want anybody about."
"But if anything happens ?"
"Send then."
An expression of obstinate calm overspread Sir Richmond's face.
He seemed to regard the matter as settled.
He went to the window and turned to look again at the impassive figure on the bed.
Did Sir Richmond fully understand?
He made a step towards his patient and hesitated.
Sir Richmond opened his eyes and regarded him with a slight frown.
"A case of pneumonia," said the doctor, "after great exertion and fatigue, may take very rapid and unexpected turns."
Sir Richmond, cheek on pillow, seemed to assent.
If you don't want to take risks about that-...
One never knows in these cases.
Probably there is a night train."
Sir Richmond manifested no surprise at the warning.
But he stuck to his point.
His voice was faint but firm.
"Couldn't make up anything to say to her.
Anything she'd like."
dr Martineau rested on that for a little while.
Then he said: "If there is anyone else?"
"Not possible," said Sir Richmond, with his eyes on the ceiling.
Sir Richmond turned his head to dr Martineau.
His face puckered like a peevish child's.
"They'd want things said to them...Things to remember...I CAN'T.
I'm tired out."
"Don't trouble," whispered dr Martineau, suddenly remorseful.
But Sir Richmond was also remorseful.
"Give them my love," he said. "Best love...Old Martin.
Love."
dr Martineau was turning away when Sir Richmond spoke again in a whisper.
Then he made a great effort.
"I can't see them, Martineau, until I've something to say.
It's like that.
Perhaps I shall think of some kind things to say-after a sleep.
Hurt someone.
People exaggerate...People exaggerate-importance these occasions."
"Yes, yes," whispered dr Martineau.
"I quite understand."
Section four
Then he stirred and muttered.
"Second rate...
Poor at the best...
Love...
Work.
"It had been splendid work," said dr Martineau, and was not sure that Sir Richmond heard.
Always lose my damned grip.
Put their backs up....Silly....
"Never....
Never done anything-WELL....
"It's done.
Done.
Well or ill....
"Done."
His voice sank to the faintest whisper.
"Done for ever and ever... and ever... and ever."
dr Martineau stood up softly.
Something beyond reason told him that this was certainly a dying man.
He was reluctant to go and he had an absurd desire that someone, someone for whom Sir Richmond cared, should come and say good bye to him, and for Sir Richmond to say good bye to someone.
He hated this lonely launching from the shores of life of one who had sought intimacy so persistently and vainly.
It was extraordinary-he saw it now for the first time-he loved this man.
If it had been in his power, he would at that moment have anointed him with kindness.
The doctor found himself standing in front of the untidy writing desk, littered like a recent battlefield.
The photograph of the American girl drew his eyes.
What had happened?
He turned about as if to enquire of the dying man and found Sir Richmond's eyes open and regarding him.
In them he saw an expression he had seen there once or twice before, a faint but excessively irritating gleam of amusement.
"Oh!--WELL!" said dr Martineau and turned away.
He went to the window and stared out as his habit was.
Sir Richmond continued to smile dimly at the doctor's back until his eyes closed again.
It was their last exchange.
Sir Richmond died that night in the small hours, so quietly that for some time the night nurse did not observe what had happened.
We call him charming as Pater called Athens charming.
He is one of those authors whose books we love because they reveal a personality sensitive, affectionate, pitiful.
That is out of the question.
My friend, return to literary activity!
I can neither walk, nor eat, nor sleep.
It is wearisome even to repeat it all!
My friend-great writer of our Russian land, listen to my request!...
He was a man whom it was possible to disgust.
One can guess exactly the frame of mind he was in when, in the course of an argument with Dostoevsky, he said: "You see, I consider myself a German."
He had that sense of truth which always upsets the orthodox.
almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies. This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me.
This is bound to be the fate of every artist who takes his political party or his church, or any other propagandist group to which he belongs, as his subject.
In an access of self reproach he once declared that his character was comprised in one word-'poltroon!'" He showed neither timidity nor cowardice, however, in his devotion to truth.
He "simply did not know how to work otherwise," as he said.
He had always to draw from the life.
"I ought to confess," he once wrote, "that I never attempted to create a type without having, not an idea, but a living person, in whom the various elements were harmonized together, to work from.
It would be foolish, I know, to pretend to sum up Dostoevsky as a contortionist; but he has that element in him.
He was one of the first great novelists to endow his women with independence of soul. With the majority of novelists, women are sexual or sentimental accidents.
He is so obviously not a god.
He is a man and a medical doctor.
At the same time he is a theme that they were bound to treat.
There is bound to be a break in the meanest life.
He does not run sympathy as a "stunt" like so many popular novelists.
He has the most unbiassed attitude, I think, of any author in the world.
He portrays his characters instead of labelling them; but the portrait itself is the judgment.
His attitude to a large part of life might be described as one of good-natured disgust.
She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her coffee and lunch in bed.
She waked up every morning with the one thought of "pleasing." It was the aim and object of her life.
She wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy.
A few strokes of cruelty are added to the portrait:
A crow ...
Who's there?" she called suddenly, hearing my steps.
"It's i"
And in the winter they will probably go abroad," she added after a pause.
"'God sent ... the crow ... a piece ... of cheese....' Have you written it?"
But, though he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background.
'You're such a pretty dear!'"
He is a writer who desires above all things to see what men and women are really like-to extenuate nothing and to set down naught in malice.
As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is black without being bitter.
CHAPTER eleven
"Here, I'm being trailed."
mr Blair merely shook his head.
"He's-he's rather busy," began mr Blair.
"Someone's following me around again," he announced, "and I want to know whether it's you or them."
"Me or who?" queried Sir Lyster.
"Whether it's some of your boys, or the other lot."
"Well, you might suggest that it doesn't please me mightily.
I don't like being trailed in this fashion, so if it's any of your boys just you whistle 'em off."
"I doubt if you would be aware of the fact if we were having you shadowed, mr Dene," said Sir Lyster quietly, "and in any case it would be for your own safety."
"Your man had better be ready on Friday.
One of my boys'll pick him up, Jim Grant's his name."
"Sir Goliath Maggie has appointed Commander Ryles," said Sir Lyster.
Don't forget to call off your boys;" and with that john Dene was gone.
Ten minutes later Sir Bridgman North found the First Lord sitting at his table, apparently deep in thought.
Sir Lyster smiled feebly.
They'll probably appreciate him there.
It----" Sir Lyster paused; then, seeing that he was expected to finish his sentence, he added, "It will really be something of a relief.
"What happened?"
"Apparently he objected to being called a dancing lizard, and told to quit his funny work." Sir Lyster smiled as if finding consolation in the fact that another had suffered at the hands of john Dene.
"It's nothing to what he did to poor old Rayner," laughed Sir Bridgman. "A dear old chap, you know, but rather of the old blue water school."
With Sir Lyster he was always as technical in his language as a midshipman back from his first cruise.
"Frankly, I don't like john Dene."
"Don't like him!
Why?"
During his absence, Dorothy was to be at the office each day until lunch time to attend to any matters that might crop up.
The quality about john Dene that had most impressed Dorothy was his power of concentration.
A question addressed to him that was unrelated to what was in hand he would ignore, appearing not to have heard it; on the other hand a remark germane to the trend of his thoughts would produce an instant reply.
His quickness of decision and amazing vitality Dorothy found bewildering, accustomed as she was to the more methodical procedure of a Government department.
"I sleep on a bed, not on an idea," was another of his remarks that she remembered, and once when commenting upon the cautiousness of Sir Lyster Grayne he had said, "The man who takes risks makes dollars."
How blind British statesmen were to the fact that the eyes of many Canadians were turned anxiously towards the great republic upon their borders; how in the rapid growth of the u s a they saw a convincing argument in favour of a tightening of the bonds that bound the Dominion to the Old Country.
When on the subject he would stride restlessly up and down the room, snapping out short, sharp sentences of protest and criticism.
To him a Canada lost to the British Empire meant a British Empire lost to itself.
His great idea was to see the Old Country control the world by virtue of its power, its brain and its justice.
There were times when she felt, as she expressed it to her mother, as if she had been dining off beef essence and oxygen.
He was a small eater, seeming to regard meals as a waste of time, and he seldom drank anything but water.
At the end of the day Dorothy would feel more tired than she had ever felt before; but she had caught something of john Dene's enthusiasm, which seemed to carry her along and defy the fatigues of the body.
He had just been expressing his unmeasured contempt for mr Blair.
"You mustn't judge the whole British Navy by mr Blair," she said, looking up from her note book with a smile.
"So that if I prove a fool," continued Dorothy quietly, "it convicts you of being a fool also."
"But that's another transaction," he objected.
For some time john Dene had continued to dictate.
Presently he stopped in the middle of a letter.
His manner frequently puzzled Dorothy.
At times he seemed unaware of her existence; at others she would, on looking up from her work, find him regarding her intently.
For week after week they worked incessantly.
Indents for stores and equipment had to be prepared for the Admiralty, reports from Blake read and replied to, requisitions for materials required had to be confirmed, samples obtained, examined, and finally passed, and instructions sent to Blake.
"You see, what john Dene wants is managing," continued Dorothy sagely, "and no one understands how to do it except Sir Bridgman and me.
"Stand without what, dear," asked mrs West.
"Without hitching," laughed Dorothy.
"That's one of his phrases.
"Now, mother, no poaching," cried Dorothy.
"john Dene is mine for keeps, and if I let you come out with us and play gooseberry, you mustn't try and cut me out, because," looking critically at her mother, "you could if you liked.
The picnic had proved a great success, and Dorothy had been surprised at the change in john Dene's manner.
She was touched by the way in which he always looked after her mother, his gentleness and solicitude.
He'll dance soon; but, my dear, his boots," and the comical grimace that had accompanied the remark had caused Dorothy to laugh in spite of herself.
"If ever I marry a man," continued Marjorie, "it will be because of his boots.
"Marjorie, you're a little idiot," cried Dorothy.
"Did you?"
"Yes, and I stopped him."
"You didn't, Marjorie." There was incredulity in Dorothy's voice.
The downrightness of Marjorie Rogers was both notorious and embarrassing.
"Well," nonchalantly, "I just said that at the Admiralty men always kept their secretaries well supplied with flowers and chocolates."
"I should like to slap you."
Instead of appearing elated at the near approach of the fruition of his schemes, he sat at his table for fully half an hour looking straight in front of him.
When at last he spoke, it was to enquire of Dorothy if she liked men in uniform.
That afternoon he worked with unflagging industry.
As Dorothy left the office a few minutes after six he called her back.
"If I've forgotten anything you'd best remind me."
"Is he, dear?" said mrs West non committally.
"How do you mean, dear?" queried mrs West.
"Well, he'll sit sometimes for an hour looking at nothing.
It's not complimentary when I'm there," she added.
No; john Dene is a very remarkable man; but he'd be very trying as a husband."
Dorothy spoke lightly; but during the last few days she had been asking herself what she would do when john Dene was gone.
He was just her employer, and in a few months he would go back to Canada, and she would never see him again.
She was a little puzzled.
She made no remark, however, merely seating herself in her customary place and waited for letters.
Several times she glanced at him, and noted that he appeared to be reading from the manuscript rather than dictating; but she decided that he had probably written out rough drafts in order to assure accuracy.
His voice was very strange.
"Sleep well," he repeated, looking up at her, "I always sleep well."
Dorothy was startled.
There was something in the glance and the brusque tone that puzzled her.
Both were so unlike john Dene.
Apparently he sensed what was passing through her mind, for he turned to her again and said:
"I'm not feeling very well this morning, Miss West, I----"
"No, I'm afraid that's what it was," he acknowledged Dorothy's eyes opened just a little in surprise.
Had he been drugged?
The thought caused her to pause in her work and glance up at him.
To her surprise he picked up his hat and announced that he would not be back until five o'clock to sign the letters.
Dorothy was now convinced that something was wrong.
Once or twice she caught him looking at her furtively; but immediately she raised her eyes, he hastily shifted his, as if caught in some doubtful act.
At twelve o'clock lunch arrived, and Dorothy had to confess to herself that it was a lonely and unsatisfactory meal.
"When are you going away, mr Dene?" asked Dorothy.
"I don't know," he responded gruffly.
"I merely asked because two people on the telephone enquired when you were going away."
"Oh, I just said what you told me.
Dorothy had expected him to make some remark about these enquiries. She knew that john Dene had no friends in London, and the questions as to when he was going away had struck her as strange.
A few letters were dictated, a sheaf of documents handed to her to copy, and john Dene disappeared.
Again lunch was brought for her, which she ate alone, and at five o'clock he came in and signed the letters.
When he had signed the last letter she bluntly enquired if he felt better.
"Better?" he interrogated.
"I haven't been ill."
Still she had to confess to herself that the old pleasure in her work had departed.
If he trusted anyone, he did it implicitly; if he distrusted anyone, he did it uncompromisingly.
Where he liked, he liked to excess; where he disliked, he disliked to the elimination of all good qualities.
It was all very strange and very puzzling, she told herself.
His whole bearing seemed to have changed, as if he had decided to regard her merely as a piece of mechanism, just as he did the typewriter, or his office chair.
It was at this period of her reasoning that Dorothy discovered her dignity.
From that time her attitude was that of the injured woman, yet perfect secretary.
Her sense of humour had deserted her, and she arrived at the office and left it very much upon her dignity.
That evening, Dorothy was always paid on the Friday evening, she held her head very high when she left the office.
She seemed suddenly to have become imbued with all the qualities of the perfect secretary.
She worked harder than ever and, when she had finished the tasks john Dene set her, she manufactured others so that her time should be fully occupied.
She felt at the point of tears when he bade her good night and left the office, just as Big Ben was booming out the hour.
For a moment she thrilled.
No, he was looking in the opposite direction, apparently deep in thought.
She saw a taxi draw up beside him.
The driver, a little man with a grey moustache, Dorothy remembered to have seen him several times "crawling" about on the look out for fares.
Dorothy stood and watched.
For a moment john Dene seemed to hesitate, then with a word to the driver he opened the door and got in.
Impulsively she started forward, just as the taxi started and a moment later whizzed swiftly past her.
john Dene was evidently in a hurry.
Slowly Dorothy turned and pursued her way up Regent Street.
Blake was a man upon whom silence had descended as a blight; heavy of build, slow of thought, ponderous of movement, he absorbed all and apparently gave out nothing.
His most acute emotion he expressed by fingering the right-hand side of his ragged beard, whilst his eyes seemed to smoulder as his thoughts slowly took shape.
Nothing else mattered, because nothing else was.
It was to be her setting, just as a stage is the setting for a play.
As he puffed clouds of smoke for the breeze to pick up and scurry off with to the west, he thought lovingly of the work of the last two years, of the last month in particular.
It was "the Boss" for whom they worked.
They were his men, and this was their boat.
Every time john Dene wrote to Blake, there was always a message for "the boys." "I know the boys will show these Britishers what Canada can do," he would write, or, "see that the boys get all they want and plenty to smoke." Remembering was john Dene's long suit; and his men would do anything for "the Boss."
Blake had not spared himself.
When not engaged in the work of overseeing, he had thrown off his coat and worked with the most vigorous.
He seemed never to sleep or rest.
He had them merely for reference.
And now all was ready.
amidships, tapering to a point fore and aft.
guns; but these were in the nature of an auxiliary armament.
These fired small arrow headed missiles, rather like miniature torpedoes fitted with lance heads for cutting through nets.
They had sufficient power to penetrate the plates of a submarine, and were furnished with an automatic detonator, which caused the bursting charge to explode three seconds after impact.
These projectiles were rendered additionally deadly by the fact that their heads became automatically magnetic as they sped through the water.
Thus the target against which they were launched achieved its own destination.
They were fitted with small gyroscopes to keep them straight until the magnetic heads began to exert a dominating influence.
Amidships was the conning tower, with its four searchlights, so arranged as to be capable of being used singly or together.
Thus it was possible to illuminate the waters for half a mile in every direction.
Abaft the conning tower were the engines, a switchboard, and finally the berths of the engine room staff.
She possessed an endurance of fifteen hundred miles, and as for the most part she held a watching brief, this would mean that she could remain at sea for a month or more.
Her speed submerged was fourteen knots, which gave her a superiority over the fastest German craft, and she could remain submerged for two days.
She could then recharge her compressed air chambers without coming to the surface by means of a tube, through which fresh air could be sucked from the surface, and the foul discharged.
These were weighted and floated in various parts in such a manner that they could be thrown out in a diagonal direction.
Under water there were only two dangers capable of threatening her-mines and depth charges.
If he were forced to speech, he built up his phrases upon the foundation of a single word, "ruddy"; but apparently with entire unconsciousness that it had its uses as an oath.
He no more meant reproach to the Hun than to john Dene.
He tacitly accepted them both, the one as a power for evil, the other as a power for good.
Blake gazed upon the unprepossessing features of his subordinate, and tugging a cigar from his pocket, handed it to him.
He then proceeded to light the cigar.
The two men turned and made their way to the cabin allotted to them as a sort of office of works.
He would represent the Admiralty.
This was largely due to Sir Bridgman North's wise counsels.
"When," he remarked, "I have to choose between giving john Dene his head and being gingered up, I prefer the first.
It's infinitely less painful."
Sir Lyster had been inclined to expostulate with his colleague upon the manner in which he gave way to john Dene's demands.
I think the effect would be salutary."
"For us, undoubtedly," Sir Bridgman had said drily.
"Personally I object to being gingered up.
Look at poor Blair.
There you see the results of the process.
He ceased to be an Imperialist within twenty four hours of john Dene's coming upon the scene.
Now he goes about with a hunted look in his eyes, and a prayer in his heart that he may get through the day without being gingered up by the unspeakable john Dene."
"Blair and john Dene represent two epochs: Blair is the British Empire that was, john Dene is the British Empire that is to be.
It's like one of Nelson's old three deckers against a super dreadnought, and Blair ain't the dreadnought."
"He is certainly a remarkable man," Sir Lyster had admitted conventionally, referring to john Dene.
Ginger or no ginger, john Dene's a man worth meeting, Grayne, on my soul he is."
Presently Blake took from his pocket a large silver watch, gazed at it with deliberation, then raising his eyes nodded to his companion.
Without a word the man with the boat hook pushed off, the motor was started and the boat throbbed her way to the entrance to the little harbour.
From time to time Quinton gazed ahead through a pair of binoculars.
A few minutes later a cloud of white spray indicated the approach of a small craft travelling at a high rate of speed.
Quinton continued to watch the approaching boat until the humped shoulders of a submarine chaser were distinguishable through the spume.
As the boats neared each other he gave a quick command to the engineer, and the speed of the motor boat decreased.
At the same moment the curtain of spray that screened the on coming chaser died down, her fine and sinister lines becoming discernible.
Grant and Quinton continued to talk in undertones, Grant asking questions, Quinton answering with great economy of words and prodigious salivation.
The chaser, steering a south westerly course, was soon out of sight.
"Ready for the trial trip?" he enquired of Quinton.
"Sure," was the reply as he spat over the side.
"Jim there?"
As they reached her the two men nimbly climbed up the side and, Quinton leading, dived below to the office of works.
As they entered Blake was sitting exactly as Quinton had left him an hour and a half previously.
At the sight of Grant his eyes seemed to flash; but he made no movement except to hold out his hand, which Grant gripped.
"Through with everything?" he enquired, as he seated himself, and Quinton threw himself on a locker.
"Sure," replied Blake.
"I----" began Grant, then breaking off cast a swift look over his shoulder.
Blake nodded his head comprehendingly, whilst Quinton spat in the direction of the door as if to defy eavesdroppers.
From his pocket Grant drew a map, which he proceeded to unfold upon the table.
Quinton walked across and the three bent over, studying it with absorbed interest.
He anticipates rewards and punishments, and learns to solicit the former and deprecate the latter.
He bounds exultingly forth to accompany his master in his walks, rides, and sports of the field.
He acts as the faithful guardian of his property.
He is his fire side companion, evidently discerns days of household mirth or grief, and deports himself accordingly.
Hence, his energies and his sensibilities are all expanded, and what he feels he seeks to tell in various accents, and in different ways.
For instance, our little dog comes and pulls his mistress's gown and makes significant whines, if any one is in or about the premises whom he thinks has no right to be there.
They become instantly sensible that no punishment is intended to be inflicted, and I have seen them lick the hand of the operator, as if grateful for what he was doing.
Both the wild and domestic dog, however, appear to be possessed of and to exercise forethought.
They will bury or hide food, which they are unable to consume at once, and return for it.
But the domestic dog, perhaps, gives stronger proofs of forethought; and I will give an instance of it.
I had a dog, who, having once scalded his tongue, always afterwards, when I gave him his milk and water at breakfast, put his paw very cautiously into the saucer, to see if the liquid was too hot, before he would touch it with his tongue.
Dogs have frequently been known to hunt in couples; that is, to assist each other in securing their prey: thus associating together and admitting of no partnership.
At Palermo, in Sicily, there is an extraordinary quantity of dogs wandering about without owners.
Amongst the number, two more particularly distinguished themselves for their animosity to cats.
One day they were in pursuit of a cat, which, seeing no other place of refuge near, made her escape into a long earthen water pipe which was lying on the ground.
After they had stood a short time they divided, taking post at each end of the pipe, and began to back alternately, thus giving the cat reason to suppose that they were both at one end, in order to induce her to come out. This manoeuvre had a successful result, and the cheated cat left her hiding place.
The memory of dogs is quite extraordinary, and only equalled by that of the elephant.
mr Swainson, in his work on the instincts of animals, gives the following proof of this.
In my younger days I had a favourite dog, which always accompanied me to church.
My mother, seeing that he attracted too much of my attention, ordered the servant to shut him every Sunday morning.
This was done once, but never afterwards; for he concealed himself early every Sunday morning, and I was sure to find him either under my seat at church, or else at the church door.
That dogs clearly distinguish the return of Sunday cannot be doubted.
A still more extraordinary circumstance is upon record, of the late Colonel Hardy, who, having been sent for express to Bath, was accompanied by a favourite spaniel bitch in his chaise, which he never quitted till his arrival there.
One day a game cock attacked a small bantam, and they fought furiously, the bantam having, of course, the worst of it.
Some persons were standing about looking at the fight, when my informant's house dog suddenly darted out, snatched up the bantam in his mouth, and carried it into the house.
How few human beings would have acted as this dog had done!
Here is another curious anecdote from mr Davy's work.
He says that the cook in the house of a friend of his, a lady on whose accuracy he could rely, and from whom he had the anecdote, missed a marrow bone. Suspicion fell on a well behaved dog-a great favourite, and up to that time distinguished for his honesty.
In this mood he continued, till, to the amusement of the cook, he brought back the bone and laid it at her feet.
Then, with the restoration of her stolen property, he resumed his cheerful manner.
By acting in this manner, he never loses sight of his master.
A dog has been known to convey food to another of his species who was tied up and pining for want of it.
Repeated provocation will, however, excite and revenge.
For instance, a Newfoundland dog was quietly eating his mess of broth and broken scraps.
While so employed, a turkey endeavoured to share the meal with him.
The dog growled, and displayed his teeth.
The intruder retired for a moment, but quickly returned to the charge, and was again "warned off," with a like result.
After three or four attempts of the same kind, the dog became provoked, gave a sudden ferocious growl, bit off the delinquent's head, and then quietly finished his meal, without bestowing any further attention on his victim.
A little boy, the peasant's son, imagined that he perceived in the dog's voice an indistinct resemblance to certain words, and was, therefore, determined to teach him to speak distinctly.
For this purpose he spared neither time nor pains with his pupil, who was about three years old when his learned education commenced; and at length he made such progress in language, as to be able to articulate no less than thirty words.
It appears, however, that he was somewhat of a truant, and did not very willingly exert his talents, being rather pressed into the service of literature, and it was necessary that the words should be first pronounced to him each time before he spoke.
The French Academicians who mention this anecdote, add, that unless they had received the testimony of so great a man as Leibnitz, they should scarcely have dared to relate the circumstance.
An invalid gentleman, who resided for some years on Ham Common, in Surrey, had a dog which distinctly pronounced john, William, and two or three other words.
A medical friend of mine, who attended this gentleman, has frequently heard the animal utter these words; and a female relative of his, who was often on a visit at his house, assures me of the fact.
Indeed it need not be doubted.
These are the only two instances I have met with of talking dogs, but my brother had a beautiful little spaniel, named Doll, who was an indefatigable hunter after woodcocks and snipes.
Doll would come home in the evening after a hard day's sport, wet, tired and dirty, and then deposit herself on the rug before the fire.
Poor Doll!
If she was affronted she would come to me, at a distance of four miles, remain some time, and then return to her master.
A small cur, blind of one eye, lame, ugly, old, and somewhat selfish, yet possessed of great shrewdness, was usually fed with three large dogs.
Watching his opportunity, he generally contrived to seize the best bit of offal or bone, with which he retreated into a recess, the opening to which was so small that he knew the other dogs could not follow him into it, and where he enjoyed his repast without the fear of molestation.
Early habits predominate strongly in dogs, and indeed in other animals.
The fourth,--a sort of fox hound,--which, as a puppy, had belonged to a poor man, always seemed to recognise beggars and ill dressed passengers as old familiar friends, growling at well attired strangers, barking vehemently at gigs, and becoming almost frantic with rage at a four wheeled carriage.
We quote the following from the "Percy Anecdotes:"--
When the two had proceeded some distance from the spot, m Dumont called to his dog that he had lost something, and ordered him to seek it.
Caniche had just reached the spot in search of the lost piece when the stranger picked it up.
He followed the chaise, went into the inn, and stuck close to the traveller.
The traveller, supposing him to be some dog that had been lost or left behind by his master, regarded his different movements as marks of fondness; and as the animal was handsome, he determined to keep him.
He gave him a good supper, and on retiring to bed took him with him to his chamber.
The animal began to bark at the door, which the traveller opened, under the idea that the dog wanted to go out.
Caniche snatched up the breeches, and away he flew.
Anxiety for the fate of a purse full of gold Napoleons, of forty francs each, which was in one of the pockets, gave redoubled velocity to his steps.
Caniche ran full speed to his master's house, where the stranger arrived a moment afterwards, breathless and enraged.
He accused the dog of robbing him.
This is the cause of the robbery which he has committed upon you.' The stranger's rage now yielded to astonishment; he delivered the six livre piece to the owner, and could not forbear caressing the dog which had given him so much uneasiness, and such an unpleasant chase."
A gentleman in Cornwall possessed a dog, which seemed to set a value on white and shining pebble stones, of which he had made a large collection in a hole under an old tree.
This, I believe, is a fact by no means uncommon.
My retriever will carry an egg in his mouth to a great distance, and during a considerable length of time, without ever breaking or even cracking the shell.
One of the carriers of a New York paper called the "Advocate," having become indisposed, his son took his place; but not knowing the subscribers he was to supply, he took for his guide a dog which had usually attended his father.
The animal trotted on a head of the boy, and stopped at every door where the paper was in use to be left, without making a single omission or mistake.
The following is from a newspaper of this year:--
"A most extraordinary circumstance has just occurred at the Hawick toll bar, which is kept by two old women.
Their fears prevailed to such an extent, that, when a carrier whom they knew was passing by, they urgently requested him to remain with them all night, which, however, his duties would not permit him to do; but, in consideration of the alarm of the women, he consented to leave with them a large mastiff dog.
In the night the women were disturbed by the uneasiness of the dog, and heard a noise apparently like an attempt to force an entrance into the premises, upon which they escaped by the back door, and ran to a neighbouring house, which happened to be a blacksmith's shop.
They knocked at the door, and were answered from within by the smith's wife.
She said her husband was absent, but that she was willing to accompany the terrified women to their home.
On entering they saw the body of a man hanging half in and half out of their little window, whom the dog had seized by the throat, and was still worrying.
On examination, the man proved to be their neighbour the blacksmith, dreadfully torn about the throat, and quite dead."
The dog impatiently waited for his arrival, and he at last returned, weary and hungry.
After showing his pleasure at the arrival of his master, greeting him with his usual attention, the animal remained tolerably quiet until he conceived a reasonable time had elapsed for the preparation of the Doctor's dinner.
As it did not, however, make its appearance, the dog went into the kitchen, seized with his mouth a half broiled beefsteak, with which he hastened back to his master, placing it on the table cloth before him.
When the fire was got under, and I had leisure to look about me, I again observed the dog, which, with the firemen, appeared to be resting from the fatigues of duty, and was led to make some inquiries respecting him.
'Is this your dog, my friend?' said I to a fireman.
We call him the firemen's dog.' 'The firemen's dog!' I replied.
'Why so?
Has he no master?' 'No, sir,' rejoined the fireman; 'he calls none of us master, though we are all of us willing enough to give him a night's lodging and a pennyworth of meat.
But he won't stay long with any of us.
His delight is to be at all the fires in London; and, far or near, we generally find him on the road as we are going along, and sometimes, if it is out of town, we give him a lift.
I don't think there has been a fire for these two or three years past which he has not been at.'
None of them, however, were able to give any account of the early habits of the dog, or to offer any explanation of the circumstances which led to this singular propensity.
Still, he called no man master, disdained to receive bed or board from the same hand more than a night or two at a time, nor could the firemen trace out his resting place."
The magistrate said the dog must have an extraordinary predilection for fires.
He then asked what length of time he had been known to possess that propensity.
The fireman replied that he knew Tyke for the last nine years; and although he was getting old, yet the moment the engines were about, Tyke was to be seen as active as ever, running off in the direction of the fire.
The magistrate inquired whether the dog lived with any particular fireman.
The fireman replied that Tyke liked one fireman as well as another; he had no particular favourites, but passed his time amongst them, sometimes going to the house of one, and then to another, and off to a third when he was tired.
Day or night, it was all the same to him; if a fire broke out, there he was in the midst of the bustle, running from one engine to another, anxiously looking after the firemen; and, although pressed upon by crowds, yet, from his dexterity, he always escaped accidents, only now and then getting a ducking from the engines, which he rather liked than otherwise.
The magistrate said that Tyke was a most extraordinary animal; and having expressed a wish to see him, he was shortly after exhibited at the office, and some other peculiarities respecting him were related.
It was found necessary to use stratagem for the purpose.
A fireman commenced running.
ON THE FEEDING AND MANAGEMENT OF DOGS.
A few words may not be out of place here on the feeding and management of dogs.
The natural food of the dog is flesh, and it is found that those in a wild state prefer it to every other kind of nutriment, but as raw meat engenders ferocity, it should not be given too freely, especially to house dogs and such as are not actively exercised.
The dog can subsist on many kinds of food, and it is a curious fact, that when fed entirely on flesh he will sometimes get lean; because, as has been well observed, it is not on what animals eat that they thrive, but on what they digest.
The diet of sporting dogs in full work should, it is said by some, consist of at least two thirds of flesh, with a judicious mixture of farinaceous vegetables; but there is great diversity of opinion on this subject, and in France they are fed almost exclusively on soaked bread.
A piece of rock brimstone kept in the pan will be found useful.
Although the dog is naturally a voracious animal, he can endure hunger for a very great length of time, and be brought by habit to subsist on a very scanty meal.
In the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences it is stated, that a bitch which was forgotten in a country house, where she had access to no other nourishment, lived forty days on the wool of an old mattress which she had torn to pieces and digested.
An extraordinary instance of a similar kind occurred with a terrier bitch, named Gipsy.
One day, when following her master through a grass park near Gilmerton, it happened that she started a hare.
During the pursuit her master suddenly lost sight of her, and in a few days she was considered either killed or lost.
Six weeks afterwards a person happening to look down an old coal pit, was surprised to hear a dog howling.
He lost no time in returning to the village, and having procured a hand basket, let it down by a rope into the shaft; the dog immediately leapt into it, and on being brought to the surface, proved to be Gipsy, worn to perfect skin and bone.
Stag hounds, fox hounds, harriers, and beagles, are generally fed on oatmeal,--some add well boiled flesh to it once in two days,--and the older the meal is the better.
Store sufficient for twelve or eighteen months' consumption ought, therefore, always to be kept by those who have a pack; and before used should be well dried, and broken into grits, but not too fine.
It is best kept in bins in a granary, well trodden down.
Others are of opinion that oatmeal and barleymeal in equal proportions form a preferable food.
In either case the meal should be made into porridge, with the addition of a little milk, and occasionally the kitchen offal, such as remnants of butchers' meat, broth, and soups, the raspings and refuse of bakers' shops, or hard, coarse, sea biscuit (sold as dog biscuit), well soaked and boiled with bullocks' liver or horseflesh.
Well boiled greens-or mangel wurzel boiled to a jelly-are an excellent addition to the food of all dogs, and may be given twice a week; but they ought to be discontinued during the shooting season with pointers, setters, cockers, and greyhounds; and also during the hunting season with foxhounds, harriers, and beagles, as they are apt to render the bowels too open for hard work.
Flesh for dogs should be first thoroughly boiled and then taken out before the oatmeal is added to the broth, and left to cool.
Indeed, some feeders think that the food of a dog should always be perfectly cold.
Nothing is better than paunch, tripe, or good wholesome horse or cow flesh, boiled, and the liquor mixed well with oatmeal porridge; the quantity of each about equal.
If horse or cow flesh is not to be had, graves, in moderate quantity and well scalded, are a tolerable, though not very desirable, substitute.
Potatoes are also good, and although not so nutritious, or easy of digestion, as oatmeal, are less heating.
This meal should, however, never be given in the hunting season, as it is too heating, and occasions the dogs to be perpetually drinking.
Their food ought, as a general rule, to be given to them pretty thick, as thin porridge does not stay the stomach so well.
During the hunting season hounds should have sulphur mixed up with their mess once a week, in the proportion of three drachms to each.
The butchers' meat should be of the best quality, and not over fat, as greasy substances of all kinds are apt to render the body gross and the skin diseased.
The kennels of greyhounds should be kept comfortably warm and dry, be frequently replenished with dry and clean straw, and properly ventilated.
Indeed, nothing is more essential to the health and efficiency of all dogs than pure air and cleanliness.
Their beds should, if possible, be placed on a wooden bench, or at least on some dry position.
On attention to cleanliness depends, in some degree, the dog's exquisite sense of smelling; for, if accustomed to strong or disagreeable effluvia, he will be but ill adapted to trace the fall of a deer, or scent of a fox.
Indeed, even animal food too freely given is said to have a prejudicial effect upon the nose of a sporting dog.
A dog employed in watching premises should not be needlessly exposed to the damp or cutting night winds; but placed in as dry and sheltered a situation as possible.
If kept in the dwelling house he should have a place appropriated to his night's rest; this may be an open box, or a basket, with a piece of carpet or blanket, or clean straw at the bottom: if either of the former it should be often beaten, to free it from fleas or nits, which soon infest it, and frequently washed and dried.
Damp is exceedingly injurious to dogs, and is very likely to produce diseased lungs, rheumatism, and lameness in the shoulder and limbs.
Thomas Brown, Youatt, and Blaine, and to the practical information obtained from mr Herring of the New Road, and mr William George, an extensive dog fancier at Kensall New Town, may be appropriately subjoined a lively chapter from the recent work of mr Francis Butler, a leading American authority on the subject.
"I shall first throw out a few hints on the Management of Pets.
Whilst many are sacrificed for lack of necessary attendance, there are thousands who perish prematurely from overdoses of kindness.
Delicate breeds of dogs certainly require great care and attention in rearing; but overstrained tenderness is often more dangerous than culpable neglect.
The tenderly nursed pet is affected by every change of atmosphere, and subjected to a variety of diseases unknown to the dog that has been hardened from his birth.
I ask you, then, neither to stuff nor starve; neither to chill nor burn.
"A house pet should always have a sleeping place allotted to him, warm and comfortable, not near the fire, nor in the damp.
Anything round is best for an animal to lay in; such as a tastefully ornamented box.
He should never be fed to the full; neither excited to eat when he appears disinclined.
Lack of appetite, so common to pampered favourites, is generally the result of an overloaded stomach and disordered digestion.
This is easily cured by medicine, but more safely and simply without it.
Fast him for twenty four hours; after which, keep him on half his ordinary allowance.
If this agrees with him, and he keeps in fair condition, continue the regimen.
"Nursing in the lap is injurious; not in itself, but the animal is thereby subjected to constant chills, in emerging from a snoozy warmth to a cold carpet or chilly bed.
A dog accustomed to the lap is always shivering after it, and renders himself quite troublesome by his importunate addresses.
A moderate share of nursing is well enough, but should be indulged in only as an occasional treat.
Great care should be taken in the washing of delicate dogs.
Injudicious washing and bad drying are productive of running sore eyes, more especially visible in white poodles, where the hair is long and woolly, retaining the moisture.
"Once a fortnight is often enough to wash any dog but a white one. Washing has very little effect in the destruction of vermin.
Fleas can live some time under water; which I have often thought only makes them bite the harder and stick the closer, when reanimated from their temporary torpidity.
If 'Butler's Mange Liniment and Flea Exterminator' cannot be obtained, the animal may be well sodden with soft soap and washed about ten minutes after.
This cannot be done with safety, except in warm weather.
No flea will remain alive; the skin will be thoroughly cleansed, and the coat beautified.
I have seen animals literally worried to death by fleas, perfectly exhausted from incessant irritation, at last worn to a skeleton, and gradually extinguished by a creeping consumption.
Besides, who (for his own personal comfort), would not rid his immediate vicinity of a worthless mob of blood suckers awaiting the first favourable opportunity of regaling themselves on human blood?
If your dog lie on straw, burn it once a week, as fleas harbour and propagate in the tubes of the straw.
If the bed be carpet, or anything similar, let it be often cleansed or changed.
Vermin revel in filth, and their extirpation depends mainly on cleanliness.
"By attending to the general health of a dog, much disease may be avoided; indeed, this is far more essential than prescriptions for a cure.
It is very easy to carry off a slight indisposition by gentle purgatives and a reformed diet: whilst confirmed disease is often difficult to combat, as few of the canine race can have the advantages which are ofttimes essential to their restoration.
"If you are in the habit of keeping your dog on the chain, let him at least run a few minutes every day.
If he be kept indoors, he should also be allowed a little daily exercise outside.
"In summer, particularly, be careful to provide a supply of fresh water and a cool shelter from the sun
Never take your dog out during the intense heat of the day; this is very apt to produce fits, often resulting in sudden death.
Early in the morning is preferable for summer exercise.
"The kennel should be located in a shady spot during the summer; in winter it should be sheltered from the wind, and so placed as to enable the dog to enjoy the sunshine at will.
Above all things, never chain a dog where he cannot screen himself from the sun's rays.
He must have the option of sunshine or shade.
He should not be allowed to drink water that has been standing in the sun, or is otherwise damaged.
In summer an excavation, two or three feet in depth, should be made under it, and left open at both ends, that the animal may have a cool retreat during the heat.
Those who do not object to a trifling expense, may have the house posted on a large paving stone, with an excavation under it, as before recommended.
All burrowing animals seek the earth in hot weather.
Everything on the surface is heated; their own instinct dictates the most reasonable method of sheltering themselves from the heat, at the same time absorbing the cool exhalations from the ground.
In southern climates, especially, this method is all important.
In this manner I have kept dogs from the polar regions, in comparative comfort, whilst many native born and neglected have been scalded into fits, paralysis, rabies, or hydrophobia.
"In the hot season, with young dogs, raw meat should be avoided, except it be quite fresh, and then they should not be over fed, especially if debarred of abundant exercise, and excluded from their own natural medicine, grass.
The better plan is to ascertain his average consumption, and then allow him a little less.
Keep his digestion in good order, and disease will rarely trouble him.
His coat and ribs will generally indicate whether he be sufficiently cared for, whether he be sick or sound in his digestive organs; feed him always in the same place, and at the same hour: once a day is sufficient, if he be over six months old.
"Should you require your dog to be watchful at night, feed him in the morning; if you would have him quiet at night, feed him late, and don't leave him bones to gnaw.
They should only be lightly fed before training lessons, or on sporting days; on the latter occasions a little refreshment may be administered as occasion may require.
Those kept in doors should be allowed to run a little after meals, when they generally require an evacuation.
"If a dog be regularly exercised he will seldom even soil around his kennel, and a healthy house pet is rarely troublesome, except after eating.
If a dog be uncleanly in the house, he should decidedly be broken of it, although it would be useless to correct him unless he has a fair opportunity of avoiding it.
He should be invariably taken to the spot, be sufficiently twigged there, and unceremoniously scolded into the yard.
The punishment will be far more justly administered if the animal be let out at regular intervals; this being done he will not attempt to infringe the law, except in cases of dire necessity.
"I am satisfied as a general rule, that a well amalgamated mixture of animal and vegetable is the most healthful diet for dogs of all ages, breeds, and conditions.
[Sidenote: Primacy of nature over spirit.]
Natural society begins at home and radiates over the world, as more and more things become tributary to our personal being.
In marriage and the family, in industry, government, and war, attention is riveted on temporal existences, on the fortunes of particular bodies, natural or corporate.
Things could not be near or far, worse or better, unless a definite life were taken as a standard, a life lodged somewhere in space and time.
Reason is a principle of order appearing in a subject matter which in its subsistence and quantity must be an irrational datum.
Reason expresses purpose, purpose expresses impulse, and impulse expresses a natural body with self equilibrating powers.
At the same time, natural growths may be called achievements only because, when formed, they support a joyful and liberal experience. Nature's works first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke; mechanical processes have interesting climaxes only from the point of view of the life that expresses them, in which their ebb and flow grows impassioned and vehement.
Nature's values are imputed to her retroactively by spirit, which in its material dependence has a logical and moral primacy of its own.
In themselves events are perfectly mechanical, steady, and fluid, not stopping where we see a goal nor avoiding what we call failures.
And so they would always have remained in crude experience, if no cumulative reflection, no art, and no science had come to dominate and foreshorten that equable flow of substance, arresting it ideally in behalf of some rational interest.
Thus it comes to pass that rational interests have a certain ascendancy in the world, as well as an absolute authority over it; for they arise where an organic equilibrium has naturally established itself.
Such an equilibrium maintains itself by virtue of the same necessity that produced it; without arresting the flux or introducing any miracle, it sustains in being an ideal form.
This form is what consciousness corresponds to and raises to actual existence; so that significant thoughts are something which nature necessarily lingers upon and seems to serve.
The mind spreads and soars in proportion as the body feeds on the surrounding world.
Noble ideas, although rare and difficult to attain, are not naturally fugitive.
[Sidenote: All experience at bottom liberal.]
Consciousness is not ideal merely in its highest phases; it is ideal through and through.
It sees even nature from the point of view of ideal interests, and measures the flux of things by ideal standards.
It registers its own movement, like that of its objects, entirely in ideal terms, looking to fixed goals of its own imagining, and using nothing in the operation but concretions in discourse.
Primary mathematical notions, for instance, are evidences of a successful reactive method attained in the organism and translated in consciousness into a stable grammar which has wide applicability and great persistence, so that it has come to be elaborated ideally into prodigious abstract systems of thought.
Every experience of victory, eloquence, or beauty is a momentary success of the same kind, and if repeated and sustained becomes a spiritual possession.
At first it establishes affections between beings naturally conjoined in the world; later it grows sensitive to free and spiritual affinities, to oneness of mind and sympathetic purposes.
These ideal affinities, although grounded like the others on material relations (for sympathy presupposes communication), do not have those relations for their theme but rest on them merely as on a pedestal from which they look away to their own realm, as music, while sustained by vibrating instruments, looks away from them to its own universe of sound.
[Sidenote: The self an ideal.]
Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.
Its personages are all mythical, beginning with that brave protagonist who calls himself I and speaks all the soliloquies.
When most nearly material these personages are human souls-the ideal life of particular bodies-or floating mortal reputations-echoes of those ideal lives in one another.
From this relative substantiality they fade into notions of country, posterity, humanity, and the gods.
These figures all represent some circle of events or forces in the real world; but such representation, besides being mythical, is usually most inadequate.
The boundaries of that province which each spirit presides over are vaguely drawn, the spirit itself being correspondingly indefinite.
This ambiguity is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the most absorbing of the personages which a man constructs in this imaginative fashion-his idea of himself.
"There is society where none intrudes;" and for most men sympathy with their imaginary selves is a powerful and dominant emotion. True memory offers but a meagre and interrupted vista of past experience, yet even that picture is far too rich a term for mental discourse to bandy about; a name with a few physical and social connotations is what must represent the man to his own thinkings.
Or rather it is no memory, however eviscerated, that fulfils that office.
[Sidenote: Romantic egotism.]
The more reflective and self conscious a man is the more completely will his experience be subsumed and absorbed in his perennial "I." If philosophy has come to reinforce this reflective egotism, he may even regard all nature as nothing but his half voluntary dream and encourage himself thereby to give even to the physical world a dramatic and sentimental colour.
But the more successful he is in stuffing everything into his self consciousness, the more desolate will the void become which surrounds him.
For self is, after all, but one term in a primitive dichotomy and would lose its specific and intimate character were it no longer contrasted with anything else.
Sometimes, if his imagination is sensuous, his alter egos are incarnate in the landscape, and he creates a poetic mythology; sometimes, when the inner life predominates, they are projected into his own forgotten past or infinite future.
He will then say that all experience is really his own and that some inexplicable illusion has momentarily raised opaque partitions in his omniscient mind.
[Sidenote: Vanity.]
Philosophers less pretentious and more worldly than these have sometimes felt, in their way, the absorbing force of self consciousness.
Interest in one's own social figure is to some extent a material interest, for other men's love or aversion is a principle read into their acts; and a social animal like man is dependent on other men's acts for his happiness.
An individual's concern for the attitude society takes toward him is therefore in the first instance concern for his own practical welfare.
But imagination here refines upon worldly interest. What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere; for however persistent and passionate such prejudices may be, we know too well that they are woven of thin air.
A hostile word, by starting a contrary imaginative current, buffets them rudely and threatens to dissolve their being.
It is a passion easy to deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination almost impossible to eradicate.
The good opinion of posterity can have no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame.
The direct object of this passion-that a name should survive in men's mouths to which no adequate idea of its original can be attached-seems a thin and fantastic satisfaction, especially when we consider how little we should probably sympathise with the creatures that are to remember us.
What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him at school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from which everything he loved has departed?
Yet, beneath this desire for nominal longevity, apparently so inane, there may lurk an ideal ambition of which the ancients cannot have been unconscious when they set so high a value on fame.
They often identified fame with immortality, a subject on which they had far more rational sentiments than have since prevailed.
[Sidenote: The refracting human medium for ideas.]
Friendship may indeed come to exist without sensuous liking or comradeship to pave the way; but unless intellectual sympathy and moral appreciation are powerful enough to react on natural instinct and to produce in the end the personal affection which at first was wanting, friendship does not arise.
Recognition given to a man's talent or virtue is not properly friendship.
Friends must desire to live as much as possible together and to share their work, thoughts, and pleasures. Good fellowship and sensuous affinity are indispensable to give spiritual communion a personal accent; otherwise men would be indifferent vehicles for such thoughts and powers as emanated from them, and attention would not be in any way arrested or refracted by the human medium through which it beheld the good.
[Sidenote: Affection based on the refraction.]
No natural vehicle, however, is indifferent; no natural organ is or should be transparent.
Transparency is a virtue only in artificial instruments, organs in which no blood flows and whose intrinsic operation is not itself a portion of human life.
In looking through a field glass I do not wish to perceive the lenses nor to see rainbows about their rim; yet I should not wish the eye itself to lose its pigments and add no dyes to the bulks it discerns.
A man is sometimes a coloured and sometimes a clear medium for the energies he exerts.
When a thought conveyed or a work done enters alone into the observer's experience, no friendship is possible.
This is always the case when the master is dead; for if his reconstructed personality retains any charm, it is only as an explanation or conceived nexus for the work he performed.
That portion of a man's soul which he has not alienated and objectified is open only to those who know him otherwise than by his works and do not estimate him by his public attributions.
Such persons are his friends.
Estimation has been partly arrested at its medium and personal relations have added their homely accent to universal discourse.
Friendship might thus be called ideal sympathy refracted by a human medium, or comradeship and sensuous affinity colouring a spiritual light.
[Sidenote: The medium must also be transparent.]
If we approach friendship from above and compare it with more ideal loyalties, its characteristic is its animal warmth and its basis in chance conjunctions; if we approach it from below and contrast it with mere comradeship or liking, its essence seems to be the presence of common ideal interests.
That is a silly and effeminate friendship in which the parties are always thinking of the friendship itself and of how each stands in the other's eyes; a sentimental fancy of that sort, in which nothing tangible or ulterior brings people together, is rather a feeble form of love than properly a friendship.
All these sentimental feelings are at any rate mere preludes, but preludes in fortunate cases to more discriminating and solid interests, which such a tremulous overture may possibly pitch on a higher key.
[Sidenote: Common interests indispensable.]
The necessity of backing personal attachment with ideal interests is what makes true friendship so rare.
For friendship to flourish personal life would have to become more public and social life more simple and humane.
[Sidenote: Friendship between man and wife.]
The tie that in contemporary society most nearly resembles the ancient ideal of friendship is a well assorted marriage.
In spite of intellectual disparity and of divergence in occupation, man and wife are bound together by a common dwelling, common friends, common affection for children, and, what is of great importance, common financial interests.
These bonds often suffice for substantial and lasting unanimity, even when no ideal passion preceded; so that what is called a marriage of reason, if it is truly reasonable, may give a fair promise of happiness, since a normal married life can produce the sympathies it requires.
[Sidenote: Between master and disciple.]
When the common ideal interests needed to give friendship a noble strain become altogether predominant, so that comradeship and personal liking may be dispensed with, friendship passes into more and more political fellowships.
Without claiming any share in the master's private life, perhaps without having ever seen him, we may enjoy communion with his mind and feel his support and guidance in following the ideal which links us together.
Hero worship is an imaginative passion in which latent ideals assume picturesque shapes and take actual persons for their symbols.
Such companionship, perhaps wholly imaginary, is a very clear and simple example of ideal society. The unconscious hero, to be sure, happens to exist, but his existence is irrelevant to his function, provided only he be present to the idealising mind.
Certain capacities and tendencies in the worshipper are brought to a focus by the hero's image, who is thereby first discovered and deputed to be a hero.
He is an unmoved mover, like Aristotle's God and like every ideal to which thought or action is directed.
The devotion which was, in its origin, an ideal tendency grown conscious and expressed in fancy may thus become a mechanical force vitiating that ideal.
Discipleship and hero worship are not stable relations.
Since the meaning they embody is ideal and radiates from within outward, and since the image to which that meaning is attributed is controlled by a real external object, meaning and image, as time goes on, will necessarily fall apart.
[Sidenote: Automatic idealisation of heroes.]
A disembodied ideal, however, is unmanageable and vague; it cannot exercise the natural and material suasion proper to a model we are expected to imitate.
The more fruitful procedure is accordingly to idealise some historical figure or natural force, to ignore or minimise in it what does not seem acceptable, and to retain at the same time all the unobjectionable personal colour and all the graphic traits that can help to give that model a persuasive vitality.
This poetic process is all the more successful for being automatic.
It is in this way that heroes and gods have been created.
A legend or fable lying in the mind and continually repeated gained insensibly at each recurrence some new eloquence, some fresh congruity with the emotion it had already awakened, and was destined to awake again.
CHAPTER seven
Young Robin's father, the Sheriff, suffered very sadly from the loss of his son and his goods, and Robin's aunt came to Nottingham and wept bitterly over the loss of the little boy she loved dearly. For David, the old servant in whose charge Robin had been placed when he was going home, had done what too many weak people do, tried to hide one fault by committing another.
Robin was given into his charge to protect and take safely home to his father, and when the attack was made by the outlaw's men, instead of doing anything to protect the little fellow and save him from being injured by Robin Hood's people, he thought only of himself.
He threw his charge into the first bushes he came to, and galloped away, hardly stopping till he reached Nottingham town.
And then months passed and a year had gone by, and people looked solemn and said that it seemed as if the Sheriff would never hold up his head again.
But they thought that he should have gathered together a number of fighting men and gone and punished Robin Hood and his outlaws for carrying off that valuable set of loads of cloth.
But Robin's father cared nothing for the cloth or the mules; he could only think of the bright happy little fellow whom he loved so well, and whom he wept for in secret at night when there was no one near to see.
Robin's aunt when she came and tried to comfort him used to shake her head and wipe her eyes.
For one day a man came to the Sheriff's house and wanted him.
But the Sheriff would not see him, for he took no interest in anything now, and told his servant that the man must send word what his business was.
The servant went out, and came back directly.
"He says, sir, that he was taken prisoner by Robin Hood's men a week ago, and that he has just come from the camp under the greenwood tree, and has brought you news, master."
It was no beaten and wounded ruffian, but a hale and hearty fellow, who looked bright and happy, and before he could speak and tell his news the Sheriff began to question him.
"You have come from the outlaws' camp?" he said with his voice trembling.
"Yes, Master Sheriff."
"Oh! no, Master Sheriff; they took me before Robin Hood, and he asked me what I was doing there, and whether I was not afraid to cross his forest, and I up and told him plainly that I wasn't. Then he said how was that when I must have heard what a terrible robber he was."
"Yes, yes," cried the Sheriff, "and what did you say."
Then he laughed, and all his people laughed too, and he said I was a merry fellow.
'Give him plenty to eat and drink,' he said, 'for two or three days, and then send him on his way.' Yes, Master Sheriff, that he did, and a fine jolly time I had.
Why, I almost felt as if I should like to stay altogether."
"Speak out," he said; "you did not come to tell me only that.
What is it you are keeping back?
Why don't you speak?"
"Because, master," said the man softly, "I was afraid you couldn't bear it, for I was a father once and my son died, and though you never knew me, I knew you, and was sorry when the news came that your little boy was killed.
Can you bear to hear good news as well as bad?"
The Sheriff was silent for a few minutes, during which he closed his eyes and his lips moved, and he looked so strange that Robin's aunt crossed the room to where he sat, and took hold of his hand, as she whispered loving words.
"But you will not be angry with me if I am wrong, Master Sheriff?"
"That made me think all the more, and one day I managed to follow him but among the trees to where I found him feeding one of the wild deer, which followed him about like a dog."
"I waited a bit, and then stepped out to him, and what do you think he did?
He strung his bow, fitted an arrow to it before I knew where I was, and drew it to the head as if he was going to shoot me.
'Yes,' he said, 'of course.
'Then you go to my father,' he cried, 'and tell him to tell aunt that I'm quite well, and that some day I'm coming home."
The man stopped, for just then the Sheriff closed his eyes again and said something very softly, which Robin's aunt heard, and she sank upon her knees and covered her face with her hands.
Then the Sheriff sprang to his feet, looking quite a different man.
"Could you find your way back to the outlaws' camp in the forest?"
"Oh! yes, Master Sheriff, that I could, though they did bind a cloth over my face when they brought me away."
"I could, Master Sheriff," said the man, beginning slowly to lay the gold pieces back one by one upon the table; "but I can't do evil for good."
"What?" cried the Sheriff angrily.
"May be, Master Sheriff," said the man drily; "but I'm not going to fly at the throat of one who did nothing but good to me.
They tell me that Robin Hood's a noble earl who offended the King, and had to fly for his life.
What I say is, he's a noble kind hearted gentleman, and if it was my boy he had there, looking as happy as the day is long, I'd go to him without any fighting men."
"Just like a father should, master, and ask him for my boy like a man."
"That will do," said the Sheriff.
"You can go."
The man turned to leave the room, when the Sheriff said sharply:
"Stop!
"Yes, I can't take pay to lead anyone to fight against Robin Hood and his men."
"Those pieces were for the news you brought me," said the Sheriff. "Yes, take them, for you have behaved like an honest man."
So he gathered a strong body of crossbow men, and others with spears and swords, besides asking for the help of two gallant knights who came with their esquires mounted and in armour with their men.
In another month the Sheriff advanced again with a stronger force, but they were driven back more easily than the first, and the Sheriff was in despair.
But a couple of days later he had the man to whom he had given the gold pieces found, and sent him to the outlaws' camp with a letter written upon parchment, in which he ordered Robin Hood, in the King's name, to give up the little prisoner he held there contrary to the law and against his own will.
It was many weary anxious days before the messenger came back, but without the little prisoner.
"He said, master, that if you wanted the boy you must go and fetch him."
"Where I ought to have gone at first," he said humbly; "into the forest to fetch my boy."
"But you could never find your way," she said, sobbing.
CHAPTER TWENTIETH.
It was not easy to learn to live without the dear mother; they missed her constantly.
Nor did they suffer gloom to gather in their hearts or cloud their faces.
"Yes," he said, in moved tones.
"What do you intend to call your son?"
"What do you?" she asked, smiling up at him.
"Horace, for your father, if you like."
"And I had thought of Edward, for his father and yours.
Horace Edward. Will that do?"
But Edward would do for the next."
"But he may never come to claim it," she said, laughing.
"Is papa in the house?"
"Oh, bring him here and let me see the first meeting between them."
"Can you bear the excitement?"
mr Dinsmore came softly in, kissed very tenderly the pale face on the pillow, then took a long look at the tiny pink one nestling to her side.
But now I must leave you to rest and sleep. Try, my darling, for all our sakes, to be very prudent, very calm and quiet."
"I will, papa; and don't trouble about me.
You know I am in good hands. Ah, stay a moment! here is Edward bringing wee bit Elsie to take her first peep at her little brother."
"But she shall kiss her mamma, dear, precious little pet," Elsie said. "Please hold her close for a minute, papa, and let her kiss her mother."
He complied under protest, in which mr Dinsmore joined, that he feared it would be too much for her; and the soft baby hands patted the wan cheeks, the tiny rosebud mouth was pressed again and again to the pale lips with rapturous cooings, "Mamma, mamma!"
"There, pet, that will do," said her father.
"Look, mother's darling," Elsie said with a glad smile, exposing to view the tiny face by her side.
"Baby!" cried the little girl, with a joyous shout, clapping her chubby hands, "pretty baby Elsie take"; and the small arms were held out entreatingly.
The child availed herself of the permission, then gently patting the newcomer, repeated her glad cry, "Baby, pretty baby."
"Elsie's little brother," said her mamma, tenderly.
One more kiss, papa, before you go, and then I'll try to sleep."
Elsie did not recover so speedily and entirely as before, after the birth of her first babe; and those to whom she was so dear grew anxious and troubled about her.
"I think I do, papa," she answered, brightening.
"Edward took me for a short drive yesterday, and I felt better for it."
"Then, dearest, come home to your father's house and stay there as long as you can; bring babies and nurses and come.
"I shall go, if Edward doesn't object.
I'd like to start this minute.
Where is Travilla?"
"Thank you, mother's darling," Elsie said, accepting the gift and tenderly caressing the giver; "you and papa, too.
But see who is here?"
"Mamma?
"Oh, yes; yes indeed, mamma and papa too."
"Baby?"
"May Elsie, mamma?"
"Thank you; I think it would.
"Papa proposes taking me at once."
They formed but one family here as at the Oaks; each couple having their own private suite of apartments, while all other rooms were used in common and their meals taken together; an arrangement preferred by all; mr Dinsmore and his daughter especially rejoicing in it, as giving them almost as much of each other's society as before her marriage.
"Liberty!
Freedom! tyranny is dead! --Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets." --SHAKESPEARE'S JULIUS CAESAR.
"Our sufficiency is of God!"
"And He has promised wisdom to those who ask it.
What a comfort.
I should like to show this pretty one to Walter.
Where is he now, I wonder, poor fellow?"
Ah, though she knew it not, he was then lying cold in death upon the bloody field of Shiloh.
Richard Allison had recovered from his wound, and was again in the field.
Edward was with the army also; Harold, too, and Philip Ross.
Lucy was, like many others who had strong ties in both sections and their armies, well nigh distracted with grief and fear.
From their relatives in the South the last news received had been that of the death of Dick Percival, nor did any further news reach there until the next November.
Then they heard that Enna had been married again to another Confederate officer, about a year after her first husband's death; that Walter had fallen at Shiloh, that Arthur was killed in the battle of Luka, and that his mother, hearing of it just as she was convalescing from an attack of fever, had a relapse and died a few days after.
"Oh," cried Elsie, as she wept over Walter's loss, "what would I not give to know that he was ready for death!
But surely we may rejoice in the hope that he was; since we have offered so much united prayer for him."
"Yes," returned her father, "for 'If two of you shall agree on earth, as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven'; and God's promises are all 'yea and amen in Christ Jesus.'"
"Papa," said Horace, "how can it be that good Christian men are fighting and killing each other?"
"It is a very strange thing, my son; yet undoubtedly true that there are many true Christians on both sides.
They do not see alike, and each is defending what he believes a righteous cause."
"Richard is ill in the hospital at Washington, and May has gone on to nurse him.
She will be company for our May.
Don't worry about Ritchie; May writes that he is getting better fast."
"What is it, mamma?" asked Elsie.
"Why, Sister Elsie, how could Uncle Ritchie lose his heart?
did they shoot a hole so it might drop out?" queried Rosebud in wide eyed wonder.
"I hope the doctors will sew up the place quick 'fore it does fall out," she added, with a look of deep concern.
"Poor, dear Uncle Wal is killed," she sobbed; "and Uncle Art too, and I don't want all my uncles to die or to be killed."
"We will ask God to take care of them, dear daughter," said Rose, caressing the little weeper, "and we know that He is able to do it."
They returned with faces full of excitement.
"What news?" queried both ladies in a breath.
There was a momentary pause: then Rose said, "If it puts an end to this dreadful war, I shall not be sorry."
"Nor I," said Elsie.
"Perhaps you don't reflect that it takes a good deal out of our pockets," remarked her father.
"Yes, papa, I know; but we will not be very poor.
If I were only sure it would add to the happiness of my poor people, I should rejoice over it.
But I am sorely troubled to know what has, or will become of them.
It is more than two years now, since we have heard a word from Viamede."
"Are we poor now, papa?" asked Horace anxiously.
"No, son; your sister is still very wealthy, and we all have comfortable incomes."
"Yes, and it threw him into a transport of joy.
Bress de Lord!
"'And what will you do with your liberty, Uncle Joe?' I asked; then he looked half frightened.
"Well, dear, I hope you assured him that he had nothing to fear on that score."
"Certainly; I told him they were free to go or stay as they liked, and as long as they were with, or near us, we would see that they were made comfortable.
Chloe slid to her knees, and taking the soft white hand in both of hers, covered it with kisses and tears, while her whole frame shook with her bitter weeping.
"Mammy, dear mammy, what is it?" Elsie asked in real alarm, quite forgetting for the moment the news of the morning, which indeed she could never have expected to cause such distress.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVENTH.
"In peace, love tunes the shepherd's reed; In war, he mounts the warrior's steed; In halls, in gay attire is seen; In hamlets, dances on the green; Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, And men below and saints above; For love is heaven, and heaven is love." --SCOTT.
"Escaped prisoners from Andersonville, eh?" queried the guard gathering about them.
"Yes; and more than half starved; especially my friend here, Captain Allison of the----"
But the sentence was left unfinished; for at that instant Harold reeled, and would have fallen but for the strong arm of another officer quickly outstretched to save him.
They made a litter and carried him into camp, where restoratives were immediately applied.
He soon recovered from his faintness, but was found to be totally unfit for duty, and sent to the hospital at Washington, where he was placed in a bed adjoining that of his brother Richard, and allowed to share with him in the attentions of dr King, Miss Lottie, and his own sister May.
How they all wept over him-reduced almost to a skeleton, so wan, so weak, so aged, in those few short months.
He recognized his brother and sister with a faint smile, a murmured word or two, then sank into a state of semi stupor, from which he roused only when spoken to, relapsing into it again immediately.
Slowly, very slowly, medical skill and tender, careful nursing told upon his exhausted frame till at length he seemed to awake to new life, began to notice what was going on about him, was able to take part in a cheerful chat now and then, and became eager for news from home and of the progress of the war.
Months had passed away.
In the meantime Richard had returned to camp, and Harry Duncan, wounded in a late battle, now occupied his deserted bed in the hospital.
Harry was suffering, but in excellent spirits.
"Miss Lottie, I'm almost tempted to say it pays to be ill or wounded, that one may be tended by fair ladies' hands."
"None the less beautiful, Miss King," returned Duncan gallantly.
"Many a whiter hand is not half so shapely or so useful.
Now reward me for that pretty compliment by coaxing your father to get me well as fast as possible, that I may have a share in the taking of Richmond."
I presume it would not be necessary for me even to be at the trouble of dictating them?"
"Oh, no, certainly not!"
"Joking aside, I shall be greatly obliged if you will write to Aunt Wealthy to day for me."
"With pleasure; especially as I can tell her your wound is not a dangerous one, and you will not lose a limb.
But do tell me.
What did you poor fellows get to eat at Andersonville?"
"Hunger?"
"Yes; we'd plenty of that always.
In addition to the corn meal and meat, we had a half pint of peas full of bugs."
"Oh! you poor creatures!
I hope it was a little better the alternate week."
"Just the same, except, in lieu of the corn meal, we had three square inches of corn bread."
"Is it jest; or earnest?" asked Lottie, appealing to Harold.
"Dead earnest, Miss King; and for medicine we had sumac and white oak bark."
"No matter what ailed you?"
"Oh, yes; that made no difference."
To Harry's impatience the winter wore slowly away while he was confined within the hospital walls; yet the daily, almost hourly sight of May Allison's sweet face, and the sound of her musical voice, went far to reconcile him to this life of inactivity and "inglorious ease," as he termed it in his moments of restless longing to be again in the field.
By the last of March this ardent desire was granted, and he hurried away in fine spirits, leaving May pale and tearful, but with a ring on her finger that had not been there before.
"It is good of you," whispered May, laying her wet cheek on her friend's shoulder; "and I'm ever so glad you're to be my sister."
"And won't Aunt Wealthy rejoice over you as over a mine of gold!"
A familiar step drew near, and dr King laid his hand on the young man's shoulder.
"But you are not going to die just yet," returned the doctor, with assumed gayety; "and home and mother will do wonders for you."
"dr King," and the blue eyes looked up calmly and steadily into the physician's face, "please tell me exactly what you think of my case.
Is there any hope of recovery?"
"You may improve very much: I think you will when you get home; and, though there is little hope of the entire recovery of your former health and strength, you may live for years."
"But it is likely I shall not live another year?
do not be afraid to say so: I should rather welcome the news.
"Yes; I-I think you are nearing home, my dear boy; the land where 'the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick.'"
A moment's silence, and Harold said, "Thank you.
"But don't forget that there is still a possibility of recuperation; while there's life there's hope."
The doctor passed on to another patient, and Harold was again left to the companionship of his own thoughts.
But not for long; they were presently broken in upon by the appearance of May with a very bright face.
"See!" she cried joyously, holding up a package; "letters from home, and Naples too.
Rose writes to mamma, and she has enclosed the letter for our benefit."
"Then let us enjoy it together.
My eyes are rather weak, you know, and I see the ink is pale."
"But mamma's note to you?"
"Can wait its turn.
I always like to keep the best till the last."
Harold hardly acknowledged to himself that he was very eager to hear news from Elsie; even more than to read the loving words from his mother's pen.
After speaking of some other matters, Rose went on: "But I have kept my greatest piece till now.
Our family is growing; we have another grandson who arrived about two weeks ago; Harold Allison Travilla by name.
My husband and I are growing quite patriarchal.
"Elsie is the loveliest and the best of mothers, perfectly devoted to her children; so patient and so tender, so loving and gentle, and yet so firm. mr Travilla and she are of one mind in regard to their training, requiring as prompt and cheerful obedience as Horace always has; yet exceedingly indulgent wherever indulgence can do no harm.
"Tell our Harold-my poor dear brother-that we hope his name child will be an honor to him."
"Are you not pleased?" asked May, pausing to look up at him.
May had left the room, and Harold lay languid and weak upon his cot.
A Confederate officer, occupying the next, addressed him, rousing him out of the reverie into which he had fallen.
"Excuse me, sir, but I could not help hearing some parts of the letter read aloud by the lady-your sister, I believe----"
"Yes.
"So no need for apologies."
"But there is something else.
"Yes; knew and loved him!" exclaimed Harold, raising himself on his elbow, and turning a keenly interested, questioning gaze upon the stranger.
"Then it is, it must be the same family," said the latter, half to himself, half to Harold.
"Same as what, sir?"
Will you, sir, take charge of it, and see that it reaches the lady's hands?"
"With pleasure.
"Yes; the uncle a trifle younger than the niece."
"Dinsmore and I were together almost constantly during the last six months of his life, and became very intimate.
My haversack, Smith, if you please," addressing a nurse.
It was brought, opened, and a small package taken from it and given to Harold.
After we had all returned to Greenwich the princess and Brandon were together frequently.
Upon several occasions he was invited, with others, to her parlor for card playing.
But we spent two evenings, with only four of us present, prior to the disastrous events which changed everything, and of which I am soon to tell you.
During these two evenings the "Sailor Lass" was in constant demand.
This pair, who should have remained apart, met constantly in and about the palace, and every glance added fuel to the flame.
Notwithstanding these haughty moods, anyone with half an eye could see that the princess was gradually succumbing to the budding woman; that Brandon's stronger nature had dominated her with that half fear which every woman feels who loves a strong man-stronger than herself.
One day the rumor spread through the court that the old French king, Louis the twelfth, whose wife, Anne of Brittany, had just died, had asked Mary's hand in marriage.
This modern Ulysses made a masterful effort, but alas! had no ships to carry him away, and no wax with which to fill his ears.
Ships, too, are good, with masts to tie one's self to, and sails and rudder, and a gust of wind to waft one quickly past the island.
In fact, one cannot take too many precautions when in those enchanted waters.
Matters began to look dark to me.
In truth, it might, I hoped, die in the dawning, for my lady was as capricious as a May day; but it was love-love as plain as the sun at rising.
She sought Brandon upon all occasions, and made opportunities to meet him; not openly-at any rate, not with Brandon's knowledge, nor with any connivance on his part, but apparently caring little what he or any one else might see.
Love lying in her heart had made her a little more shy than formerly in seeking him, but her straightforward way of taking whatever she wanted made her transparent little attempts at concealment very pathetic.
But with Brandon's stronger nature the sun would go till noon and there would burn for life.
The sun, however, had not reached its noon with Brandon, either; since he had set his brain against his heart, and had done what he could to stay the all consuming orb at its dawning.
He knew the hopeless misery such a passion would bring him, and helped the good Lord, in so far as he could, to answer his prayer, and lead him not into temptation.
As I said, we had spent several evenings with Mary after we came home from Windsor, at all of which her preference was shown in every movement.
Some women are so expressive under strong emotion that every gesture, a turn of the head, a glance of the eyes, the lifting of a hand or the poise of the body, speaks with a tongue of eloquence, and such was Mary.
Her eyes would glow with a soft fire when they rested upon him, and her whole person told all too plainly what, in truth, it seemed she did not care to hide.
When others were present she would restrain herself somewhat, but with only Jane and myself, she could hardly maintain a seemly reserve.
During all this time Brandon remained cool and really seemed unconscious of his wonderful attraction for her.
It is hard to understand why he did not see it, but I really believe he did not.
Although he was quite at ease in her presence, too much so, Mary sometimes thought, and strangely enough sometimes told him in a fit of short-lived, quickly repented anger that always set him laughing, yet there was never a word or gesture that could hint of undue familiarity.
It would probably have met a rebuff from the princess part of her; for what a perversity, both royal and feminine, she wanted all the freedom for herself.
Brandon had contrived to have his duties, ostensibly at least, occupy his evenings, and did honestly what his judgment told him was the one thing to do; that is, remain away from a fire that could give no genial warmth, but was sure to burn him to the quick.
I saw this only too plainly, but never a word of it was spoken between us.
The more I saw of this man, the more I respected him, and this curbing of his affections added to my already high esteem.
The effort was doubly wise in Brandon's case.
His trouble, however, did not make a mope of him, and he retained a great deal of his brightness and sparkle undimmed by what must have been an ache in his heart.
Though he tried, without making it too marked, to see as little of Mary as possible, their meeting once in a while could not be avoided, especially when one of them was always seeking to bring it about.
Her manner, however, had no effect upon Brandon, who did not, or at least appeared not to notice it.
This the girl could not endure, and lacking strength to resist her heart, soon returned to the attack.
Brandon was sauntering along reading when they overtook him. Jane told me afterwards that Mary's conduct upon coming up to him was pretty and curious beyond the naming.
At first she was inclined to be distant, and say cutting things, but when Brandon began to grow restive under them and showed signs of turning back, she changed front in the twinkling of an eye and was all sweetness.
She laughed and smiled and dimpled, as only she could, and was full of bright glances and gracious words.
She tried a hundred little schemes to get him to herself for a moment-the hunting of a wild flower or a four leaved clover, or the exploration of some little nook in the forest toward which she would lead him-but Jane did not at first take the hint and kept close at her heels.
Jane did know, I am sorry for Mary's sake to say, how often the fair hand was given to such spasms; so with this emphasized hint she walked on ahead, half sulky at the indignity put upon her, and half amused at her whimsical mistress.
I thought at first I would simply let you go your way, and then I thought I-would not. Don't deny it.
With all your faults, you don't tell even little lies; not even to a woman-I believe.
Tell me now?" And she looked up at him, half in banter, half in doubt.
"My duties-," began Brandon.
"Oh! bother your duties.
Tell me the truth."
"I will, if you let me," returned Brandon, who had no intention whatever of doing anything of the sort.
"That will not do," interrupted Mary, who knew enough of a guardsman's duty to be sure it was not onerous.
"You might as well come to it and tell the truth; that you do not like our society." And she gave him a vicious little glance without a shadow of a smile.
"In God's name, Lady Mary, that is not it," answered Brandon, who was on the rack.
"Please do not think it.
"I cannot; I cannot.
I beg of you not to ask.
Leave me! or let me leave you.
I refuse to answer further."
The latter half of this sentence was uttered doggedly and sounded sullen and ill humored, although, of course, it was not so intended.
He had been so perilously near speaking words which would probably have lighted, to their destruction-to his, certainly-the smoldering flames within their breast that it frightened him, and the manner in which he spoke was but a tone giving utterance to the pain in his heart.
Mary took it as it sounded, and, in unfeigned surprise, exclaimed angrily: "Leave you?
"Your highness-" began Brandon; but she was gone before he could speak.
He did not follow her to explain, knowing how dangerous such an explanation would be, but felt that it was best for them both that she should remain offended, painful as the thought was to him.
Of course, Mary's womanly self esteem, to say nothing of her royal pride, was wounded to the quick, and no wonder.
Poor Brandon sat down upon a stone, and, as he longingly watched her retiring form, wished in his heart he were dead.
This was the first time he really knew how much he loved the girl, and he saw that, with him at least, it was a matter of bad to worse; and at that rate would soon be-worst.
Now that he had unintentionally offended her, and had permitted her to go without an explanation, she was dearer to him than ever, and, as he sat there with his face in his hands, he knew that if matters went on as they were going, the time would soon come when he would throw caution to the dogs and would try the impossible-to win her for his own.
Caution and judgment still sat enthroned, and they told him now what he knew full well they would not tell him after a short time-that failure was certain to follow the attempt, and disaster sure to follow failure.
First, the king would, in all probability, cut off his head upon an intimation of Mary's possible fondness for him; and, second, if he should be so fortunate as to keep his head, Mary could not, and certainly would not, marry him, even if she loved him with all her heart.
The distance between them was too great, and she knew too well what she owed to her position.
So Mary was angry this time; angry in earnest, and Jane felt the irritable palm more than once.
There was no living with her in peace.
Even the king fought shy of her, and the queen was almost afraid to speak.
She did not tell Jane the cause of her vexation, but only said she "verily hated Brandon," and that, of course, was the key to the whole situation.
Brandon, tired of this everlasting watchfulness to keep himself out of temptation, and, dreading at any moment that lapse from strength which is apt to come to the strongest of us, had resolved to quit his place at court and go to New Spain at once.
He had learned, upon inquiry, that a ship would sail from Bristol in about twenty days, and another six weeks later.
I am not much of a Joseph, and am very little given to running away from a beautiful woman, but in this case I am fleeing from death itself. And to think what a heaven it would be.
I am unable to tell how I feel toward her.
It sometimes seems that I can not live another hour without seeing her; yet, thank God, I have reason enough left to know that every sight of her only adds to an already incurable malady. What will it be when she is the wife of the king of France?
She had not before fully known that she loved him.
It needed but the thought that she was about to lose him to make her know her malady, and meet it face to face.
No one interrupted her until Jane went in to robe her for the night, and to retire.
Jane quietly prepared to retire, and lay down in her own bed.
After a short silence Jane heard a sob from the other bed, then another, and another.
"Mary, are you weeping?" she asked.
"Yes."
"What is the matter, dear?"
"Do you wish me to come to your bed?"
"Do you believe he will?"
"I know it;" and with this consolation Mary softly wept herself to sleep.
After this, for a few days, Mary was quiet enough.
Her irritable mood had vanished, but Jane could see that she was on the lookout for some one all the time, although she made the most pathetic little efforts to conceal her watchfulness.
Late one day Brandon had gone over to this quiet retreat, and having selected a volume, took his place in a secluded little alcove half hidden in arras draperies.
He had not been there long when in came Mary.
Brandon was on his feet in an instant, and with a low bow was backing himself out most deferentially, to leave her in sole possession if she wished to rest.
"Master Brandon, you need not go.
I would not disturb you." She spoke with a tremulous voice and a quick, uneasy glance, and started to move backward out of the alcove.
You know-you must know-oh!
I beg you-" But she interrupted him by taking his arm and drawing him to a seat beside her on the cushion.
"That's it; I don't know, but I want to know; and I want you to sit here beside me and tell me.
I am going to be reconciled with you, despite the way you treated me when last we met.
I am going to be friends with you whether you will or not.
Poor Brandon, usually so ready, had nothing "to say to that," but sat in helpless silence.
Was this the answer to all his prayers, "Lead me not into temptation"?
He had done his part, for he had done all he could.
Heaven had not helped him, since here was temptation thrust upon him when least expected, and when the way was so narrow he could not escape, but must meet it face to face.
Mary soon recovered her self possession-women are better skilled in this art than men-and continued:
"I am not intending to say one word about your treatment of me that day over in the forest, although it was very bad, and you have acted abominably ever since.
She was beginning to know her power over him, and it was never greater than at this moment.
Her beauty had its sweetest quality, for the princess was sunk and the woman was dominant, with flushed face and flashing eyes that caught a double luster from the glowing love that made her heart beat so fast.
Her gown, too, was the best she could have worn to show her charms.
She wore her favorite long flowing outer sleeve, without the close fitting inner one.
It was slit to the shoulder, and gave entrancing glimpses of her arms with every movement, leaving them almost bare when she lifted her hands, which was often, for she was as full of gestures as a Frenchwoman.
Her bodice was cut low, both back and front, showing her large perfectly molded throat and neck, like an alabaster pillar of beauty and strength, and disclosing her bosom just to its shadowy incurving, white and billowy as drifted snow.
Her hair was thrown back in an attempt at a coil, though, like her own rebellious nature, it could not brook restraint, and persistently escaped in a hundred little curls that fringed her face and lay upon the soft white nape of her neck like fluffy shreds of sun lit floss on new cut ivory.
He felt that his only hope lay in silence, so he sat beside her and said nothing.
He thought of the window, and that possibly he might break away through it, and then he thought of feigning illness, and a hundred other absurd schemes, but they all came to nothing, and he sat there to let events take their own course as they seemed determined to do in spite of him.
After a short silence, Mary continued, half banteringly: "Answer me, sir!
"Yes, I know all that; but I am not.
It can't be helped, and you shall answer me."
"There is no answer, dear lady-I beg you-oh, do you not see-"
"Yes, yes; but answer my question; am I not kind-more than you deserve?"
"Indeed, yes; a thousand times.
You have always been so kind, so gracious and so condescending to me that I can only thank you, thank you, thank you," answered Brandon, almost shyly; not daring to lift his eyes to hers.
Mary saw the manner quickly enough-what woman ever missed it, much less so keen eyed a girl as she-and it gave her confidence, and brought back the easy banter of her old time manner.
"How modest we have become!
Kind?
Have I always been so?
How about the first time I met you?
Was I kind then?
And as to condescension, don't-don't use that word between us."
"No," returned Brandon, who, in his turn, was recovering himself, "no, I can't say that you were very kind at first.
How you did fly out at me and surprise me.
It was so unexpected it almost took me off my feet," and they both laughed in remembering the scene of their first meeting.
"No, I can't say your kindness showed itself very strongly in that first interview, but it was there nevertheless, and when Lady Jane led me back, your real nature asserted itself, as it always does, and you were kind to me; kind as only you can be."
"You are easily satisfied if you call that good," laughingly returned Mary.
"I can be ever so much better than that if I try."
"Let me see you try," said Brandon.
"Why, I'm trying now," answered Mary with a distracting little pout. "Don't you know genuine out and out goodness when you see it?
I'm doing my very best now.
Can't you tell?"
"Yes, I think I recognize it; but-but-be bad again."
I will not be bad even to please you; I have determined not to be bad and I will not-not even to be good.
This," placing her hand over her heart, "is just full of 'good' to day," and her lips parted as she laughed at her own pleasantry.
"I am afraid you had better be bad-I give you fair warning," said Brandon huskily.
He felt her eyes upon him all the time, and his strength and good resolves were oozing out like wine from an ill coppered cask.
After a short silence Mary continued, regardless of the warning:
"But the position is reversed with us; at first I was unkind to you, and you were kind to me, but now I am kind to you and you are unkind to me."
"You don't know when I am kind to you.
I should be kinder to myself, at least, were I to leave you and take myself to the other side of the world."
Jane tells me you are going to New Spain?"
She was anxious to know, but asked the question partly to turn the conversation which was fast becoming perilous.
It was not to be thought of between people so far apart as they.
The brink was a delightful place, full of all the sweet ecstasies and thrilling joys of a seventh heaven, but over the brink-well! there should be no "over," for who was she?
And who was he?
Those two dreadfully stubborn facts could not be forgotten, and the gulf between them could not be spanned; she knew that only too well.
No one better.
Brandon answered her question: "I do not know about going; I think I shall.
It gave her a pang to hear that he was actually going, and her love pulsed higher; but she also felt a sense of relief, somewhat as a conscientious house breaker might feel upon finding the door securely locked against him.
It would take away a temptation which she could not resist, and yet dared not yield to much longer.
"I think there is no doubt that I mean it," replied Brandon.
I could have paid it with what I lost to Judson before I discovered him cheating." This was the first time he had ever alluded to the duel, and the thought of it, in Mary's mind, added a faint touch of fear to her feeling toward him.
She looked up with a light in her eyes and asked: "What is the debt? How much?
Please tell me how much it is and I will hand it to you.
Now tell me that I may.
Quickly." And she was alive with enthusiastic interest.
Be sure, I thank you, though I say it only once," and he looked into her eyes with a gaze she could not stand even for an instant.
Is that it?
Perhaps you are not so kind after all."
How much is it and to whom is it owing?
"Please do.
I beg-if I cannot command.
"Master Brandon!" she exclaimed sharply, and drew away her hand. Brandon dropped the hand and moved over on the seat.
Mary saw the eloquent movement away from her and his speaking attitude, with averted face; then the princess went into eclipse, and the imperial woman was ascendant once more.
She looked at him for a brief space with softening eyes, and, lifting her hand, put it back in his, saying:
The hand would not satisfy now; it must be all, all!
Not this time.
Mary mother, forgive me." Then her woman spirit fell before the whirlwind of his passion, and she was on his breast with her white arms around his neck, paying the same tribute to the little blind god that he would have exacted from the lowliest maiden of the land.
Just as though it were not the blood of fifty kings and queens that made so red and sweet, aye, sweet as nectar thrice distilled, those lips which now so freely paid their dues in coined bliss.
"Heaven help me!" he cried.
"Heaven help us both; for I love you!"
"Don't! don't!
Mary followed him nearly to the door of the room, but when he turned he saw that she had stopped, and was standing with her hands over her face, as if in tears.
It is all my fault.
I could not help it; I tried.
Oh!
I tried."
Mary's eyes were bent upon the floor, and tears were falling over her flushed cheeks, unheeded and unchecked.
"There is no fault in any one; neither could I help it," she murmured.
I shall never recover."
Her eyes were cast down in silence, and she was evidently thinking as she toyed with the lace of his doublet.
Brandon knew her varying expressions so well that he saw there was something wanting, so he asked:
She nodded her head slowly: "Yes."
"What is it?
Tell me and I will say it."
"What is it?
I cannot guess."
"Did you not like to hear me say that-that I-loved you?"
"Ah, yes; you know it.
But-oh!--do you wish to hear me say it?"
She nestled closer to him and hid her face on his breast.
"Now that I have said it, what is my reward?" he asked-and the fair face came up, red and rosy, with "rewards," any one of which was worth a king's ransom.
"But this is worse than insanity," cried Brandon, as he almost pushed her from him.
"We can never belong to each other; never."
"No," said Mary, with a despairing shake of the head, as the tears began to flow again; "no! never." And falling upon his knees, he caught both her hands in his, sprang to his feet and ran from the room.
Her words showed him the chasm anew.
Evidently it seemed farther looking down than looking up.
There was nothing left now but flight.
Why did I ever come to this court?
It was better, he thought, and wisely too, that there be no leave taking, but that he should go without meeting her.
"If I see her again," he said, "I shall have to kill some one, even if it is only myself."
But providence, or fate, or some one, ordered it differently, and there was plenty of trouble ahead.
three
A POINT OF INTERROGATION
The man from Scotland Yard had just surrendered hat, coat, and umbrella to the vestiaire and was turning through swinging doors to the dining room.
Again, embracing Lanyard, his glance seemed devoid of any sort of intelligible expression; and if its object needed all his self possession in that moment, it was to dissemble relief rather than dismay.
An accent of the fortuitous distinguished this second encounter too persuasively to excuse further misgivings.
Furthermore, before quitting the lobby, Roddy paused long enough to instruct the vestiaire to have a fire laid in his room.
This last disposed of; Lanyard surrendered himself to new impressions-of which the first proved a bit disheartening.
However impulsively, he hadn't resought Troyon's without definite intent, to wit, to gain some clue, however slender, to the mystery of that wretched child, Marcel.
But now it appeared he had procrastinated fatally: Time and Change had left little other than the shell of the Troyon's he remembered.
Papa Troyon was gone; Madame no longer occupied the desk of the caisse; enquiries, so discreetly worded as to be uncompromising, elicited from the maitre d'hotel the information that the house had been under new management these eighteen months; the old proprietor was dead, and his widow had sold out lock, stock and barrel, and retired to the country-it was not known exactly where.
And with the new administration had come fresh decorations and furnishings as well as a complete change of personnel: not even one of the old waiters remained.
"'All, all are gone, the old familiar faces,'" Lanyard quoted in vindictive melancholy-"damn 'em!"
Other impressions, less ultimate, proved puzzling, disconcerting, and paradoxically reassuring.
Lanyard commanded a fair view of Roddy across the waist of the room. The detective had ordered a meal that matched his aspect well-both of true British simplicity.
Now one doesn't read the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail with tense excitement.
Humanly speaking, it can't be done.
Where, then, was the object of this so sedulously dissembled interest?
Despite the lateness of the hour, which had by now turned ten o'clock, the restaurant had a dozen tables or so in the service of guests pleasantly engaged in lengthening out an agreeable evening with dessert, coffee, liqueurs and cigarettes.
The majority of these were in couples, but at a table one removed from Roddy's sat a party of three; and Lanyard noticed, or fancied, that the man from Scotland Yard turned his newspaper only during lulls in the conversation in this quarter.
For the instant they seemed to explore Lanyard's very soul with a look of remote and impersonal curiosity; then they fell away; and when next the adventurer looked, the man had turned to attend to some observation of one of his companions.
On his right sat a girl who might be his daughter; for not only was she, too, hall marked American, but she was far too young to be the other's wife.
A demure, old-fashioned type; well poised but unassuming; fetchingly gowned and with sufficient individuality of taste but not conspicuously; a girl with soft brown hair and soft brown eyes; pretty, not extravagantly so when her face was in repose, but with a slow smile that rendered her little less than beautiful: in all (Lanyard thought) the kind of woman that is predestined to comfort mankind, whose strongest instinct is the maternal.
If so, it would be a chase worth following-a diversion rendered the more exquisite to Lanyard by the spice of novelty, since for once he would figure as a dispassionate bystander.
The name of Comte Remy de Morbihan, although unrecorded in the Almanach de Gotha, was one to conjure with in the Paris of his day and generation.
He claimed the distinction of being at once the homeliest, one of the wealthiest, and the most liked man in France.
As to his looks, good or bad, they were said to prove infallibly fatal with women, while not a few men, perhaps for that reason, did their possessor the honour to imitate them.
Lanyard, for one, wouldn't have thought him the properest company or the best Parisian cicerone for an ailing American gentleman blessed with independent means and an attractive daughter.
But perhaps Lanyard was prejudiced by his partiality for Americans, a sentiment the outgrowth of the years spent in New York with Bourke.
He even fancied that between his spirit and theirs existed some subtle bond of sympathy.
For all he knew he might himself be American...
For some time Lanyard strained to catch something of the conversation that seemed to hold so much of interest for Roddy, but without success because of the hum of voices that filled the room.
In time, however, the gathering began to thin out, until at length there remained only this party of three, Lanyard enjoying a most delectable salad, and Roddy puffing a cigar (with such a show of enjoyment that Lanyard suspected him of the sin of smuggling) and slowly gulping down a second bottle of Bass.
Under these conditions the talk between De Morbihan and the Americans became public property.
The first remark overheard by Lanyard came from the elderly American, following a pause and a consultation of his watch.
"Quarter to eleven," he announced.
"Plenty of time," said De Morbihan cheerfully.
"That is," he amended, "if mademoiselle isn't bored ..."
The girl's reply, accompanied by a pretty inclination of her head toward the Frenchman, was lost in the accents of the first speaker-a strong and sonorous voice, in strange contrast with his ravaged appearance and distressing cough.
"Don't let that worry you," he advised cheerfully.
"Lucia's accustomed to keeping late hours with me; and who ever heard of a young and pretty woman being bored on the third day of her first visit to Paris?"
"To be sure," laughed the Frenchman; "one suspects it will be long before mademoiselle loses interest in the rue de la Paix."
"You may well, when such beautiful things come from it," said the girl. "See what we found there to day."
There followed silence for an instant, then an exclamation from the Frenchman:
"But it is superb!
Accept, mademoiselle, my compliments.
It is worthy even of you."
She flushed prettily as she nodded smiling acknowledgement.
"You fill us with envy: you have the souls of poets and the wealth of princes!"
"But we must come to Paris to find beautiful things for our women folk!"
"Take care, though, lest you go too far, Monsieur Bannon."
"How so-too far?"
"You might attract the attention of the Lone Wolf.
They say he's on the prowl once more."
The American laughed a trace contemptuously.
Lanyard's fingers tightened on his knife and fork; otherwise he made no sign.
The girl bent forward with a look of eager interest.
"The Lone Wolf?
Who is that?"
"You don't know him in America, mademoiselle?"
"no..."
Nobody knows anything definite about him, apparently, but he operates in a most individual way and keeps the police busy trying to guess where he'll strike next."
The girl breathed an incredulous exclamation.
"The rogue has had a wonderfully successful career, thanks to his dispensing with confederates and confining his depredations to jewels and similar valuables, portable and easy to convert into cash.
Yet," he added, nodding sagely, "one isn't afraid to predict his race is almost run." "You don't tell me!" the older man exclaimed.
"Have they picked up the scent-at last?"
"Known!" the American exclaimed.
"I didn't say that," De Morbihan laughed; "but the mystery is no more-in certain quarters."
"Who is he, then?"
Indeed, I may be indiscreet in saying as much as I do.
Yet, among friends..."
"But," the American persisted, "perhaps you can tell us how they got on his track?"
"It wasn't difficult," said De Morbihan: "indeed, quite simple.
He had been annoyed and distressed, had even spoken of handing in his resignation because of his inability to cope with this gentleman, the Lone Wolf.
And since he is my friend, I too was distressed on his behalf, and badgered my poor wits until they chanced upon an idea which led us to the light."
"Perhaps I shouldn't.
And yet-why not?
One made up one's mind the Lone Wolf must be a certain sort of man; the rest was simply sifting France for the man to fit the theory, and then watching him until he gave himself away."
"You don't imagine we're going to let you stop there?"
"No?
I must continue?
Very well: I confess to some little pride.
It was a feat.
He is cunning, that one!"
De Morbihan paused and shifted sideways in his chair, grinning like a mischievous child.
"Do go on-please!" the girl begged prettily.
"I can deny you nothing, mademoiselle....
Well, then!
From what little was known of this mysterious creature, one readily inferred he must be a bachelor, with no close friends.
That is clear, I trust?"
"Too deep for me, my friend," the elderly man confessed.
"Impenetrable reticence," the Count expounded, sententious-and enjoying himself hugely-"isn't possible in the human relations.
And a secret between two is-a prolific breeder of platitudes!
Granted this line of reasoning, the Lone Wolf is of necessity not only unmarried but practically friendless.
So far, good!
Him they sedulously watched, shadowing him across Europe and back again.
You have heard of Madame Omber, eh?" Now by Roddy's expression it was plain that, if Madame Omber's name wasn't strange in his hearing, at least he found this news about her most surprising.
He was frankly staring, with a slackened jaw and with stupefaction in his blank blue eyes.
Lanyard gently pinched the small end of a cigar, dipped it into his coffee, and lighted it with not so much as a suspicion of tremor.
For by now the news of the Omber affair must have thrilled many a Continental telegraph wire....
"Madame Omber-of course!" the American agreed thoughtfully.
"Everyone has heard of her wonderful jewels.
"Not precisely: but he left a clue-and London, to boot-with such haste as would seem to indicate he knew his cunning hand had, for once, slipped."
But now we must adjourn.
One is sorry.
It has been so very pleasant...."
A waiter conjured the bill from some recess of his waistcoat and served it on a clean plate to the American.
Another ran bawling for the vestiaire.
Roddy glued his gaze afresh to the Daily Mail.
The party rose.
"It is Monsieur Lanyard, who knows all about paintings!
But this is delightful, my friend-one grand pleasure!
You must know my friends....
But come!"
"And you are American, too.
The hand of the American, when Lanyard clasped it, was cold, as cold as ice; and as their eyes met that abominable cough laid hold of the man, as it were by the nape of his neck, and shook him viciously.
Before it had finished with him, his sensitively coloured face was purple, and he was gasping, breathless-and infuriated.
"Monsieur Bannon," De Morbihan explained disconnectedly-"it is most distressing-I tell him he should not stop in Paris at this season-"
"It is nothing!" the American interposed brusquely between paroxysms.
"But our winter climate, monsieur-it is not fit for those in the prime of health-"
Lanyard murmured some conventional expression of sympathy.
Through it all he was conscious of the regard of the girl.
Her soft brown eyes met his candidly, with a look cool in its composure, straightforward in its enquiry, neither bold nor mock demure.
And if they were the first to fall, it was with an effect of curiosity sated, without hint of discomfiture....
And somehow the adventurer felt himself measured, classified, filed away.
Between amusement and pique he continued to stare while the elderly American recovered his breath and De Morbihan jabbered on with unfailing vivacity; and he thought that this closer scrutiny discovered in her face contours suggesting maturity of thought beyond her apparent years-which were somewhat less than the sum of Lanyard's-and with this the suggestion of an elusive, provoking quality of wistful languor, a hint of patient melancholy....
Well, it will be amusing to show him what changes have taken place in all that time.
One regrets mademoiselle is too fatigued to accompany us.
But you, my friend-now if you would consent to make our third, it would be most amiable of you."
"I'm sorry," Lanyard excused himself; "but as you see, I am only just in from the railroad, a long and tiresome journey.
You are very good, but I-"
"Good!" De Morbihan exclaimed with violence.
"I?
You lead such a busy life, my friend, romping about Europe, here one day, God knows where the next, that one must make one's best of your spare moments.
You will join us, surely?"
"Really I cannot to night.
Another time perhaps, if you'll excuse me."
"'Another time, perhaps'--his invariable excuse!
"But should you change your mind-well, you'll have no trouble finding us.
"It will be an honour," Lanyard returned formally....
In his heart he was pondering several most excruciating methods of murdering the man.
What did he mean?
How much did he know?
Decidedly something must be done to silence this animal, should it turn out he really did know anything!
It would never do to fix the doubts of the detective by going elsewhere that night.
IN the early morning (it was the second morning after my recovery, and I believe the fourth after I was picked up), I awoke through an avenue of tumultuous dreams,--dreams of guns and howling mobs,--and became sensible of a hoarse shouting above me.
I jumped into my clothes and went on deck.
The poor brute seemed horribly scared, and crouched in the bottom of its little cage.
He stood in my way, so that I had perforce to tap his shoulder to come on deck.
He came round with a start, and staggered back a few paces to stare at me.
It needed no expert eye to tell that the man was still drunk.
"Prendick," said i
"Prendick be damned!" said he.
"Shut up,--that's your name. Mister Shut up."
It was no good answering the brute; but I certainly did not expect his next move.
He held out his hand to the gangway by which Montgomery stood talking to a massive grey haired man in dirty blue flannels, who had apparently just come aboard.
"That way, Mister Blasted Shut up! that way!" roared the captain.
Montgomery and his companion turned as he spoke.
"What do you mean?" I said.
"That way, Mister Blasted Shut up,--that's what I mean! Overboard, Mister Shut up,--and sharp!
I stared at him dumfounded.
Then it occurred to me that it was exactly the thing I wanted.
The lost prospect of a journey as sole passenger with this quarrelsome sot was not one to mourn over. I turned towards Montgomery.
"Can't have you," said Montgomery's companion, concisely.
He had the squarest and most resolute face I ever set eyes upon.
"Look here," I began, turning to the captain.
"This ship aint for beasts and cannibals and worse than beasts, any more.
If they can't have you, you goes overboard. But, anyhow, you go-with your friends.
I've had enough of it."
"But, Montgomery," I appealed.
He distorted his lower lip, and nodded his head hopelessly at the grey haired man beside him, to indicate his powerlessness to help me.
Then began a curious three cornered altercation. Alternately I appealed to one and another of the three men,--first to the grey haired man to let me land, and then to the drunken captain to keep me aboard.
I'm king here." At last I must confess my voice suddenly broke in the middle of a vigorous threat. I felt a gust of hysterical petulance, and went aft and stared dismally at nothing.
Neither Montgomery nor his companion took the slightest notice of me, but busied themselves in assisting and directing the four or five sailors who were unloading the goods. The captain went forward interfering rather than assisting. I was alternately despairful and desperate.
Presently that work was finished, and then came a struggle. I was hauled, resisting weakly enough, to the gangway. Even then I noticed the oddness of the brown faces of the men who were with Montgomery in the launch; but the launch was now fully laden, and was shoved off hastily.
A broadening gap of green water appeared under me, and I pushed back with all my strength to avoid falling headlong.
The hands in the launch shouted derisively, and I heard Montgomery curse at them; and then the captain, the mate, and one of the seamen helping him, ran me aft towards the stern.
The dingey of the "Lady Vain" had been towing behind; it was half full of water, had no oars, and was quite unvictualled. I refused to go aboard her, and flung myself full length on the deck. In the end, they swung me into her by a rope (for they had no stern ladder), and then they cut me adrift.
I drifted slowly from the schooner.
I did not turn my head to follow her.
At first I could scarcely believe what had happened.
I crouched in the bottom of the dingey, stunned, and staring blankly at the vacant, oily sea.
Then I realised that I was in that little hell of mine again, now half swamped; and looking back over the gunwale, I saw the schooner standing away from me, with the red haired captain mocking at me over the taffrail, and turning towards the island saw the launch growing smaller as she approached the beach.
The tears ran down my face.
In a passion of despair I struck with my fists at the water in the bottom of the boat, and kicked savagely at the gunwale.
BUT the islanders, seeing that I was really adrift, took pity on me. I drifted very slowly to the eastward, approaching the island slantingly; and presently I saw, with hysterical relief, the launch come round and return towards me.
There were three other men besides,--three strange brutish looking fellows, at whom the staghounds were snarling savagely. Montgomery, who was steering, brought the boat by me, and rising, caught and fastened my painter to the tiller to tow me, for there was no room aboard.
I had recovered from my hysterical phase by this time and answered his hail, as he approached, bravely enough. I told him the dingey was nearly swamped, and he reached me a piggin. I was jerked back as the rope tightened between the boats. For some time I was busy baling.
It was not until I had got the water under (for the water in the dingey had been shipped; the boat was perfectly sound) that I had leisure to look at the people in the launch again.
The white haired man I found was still regarding me steadfastly, but with an expression, as I now fancied, of some perplexity. When my eyes met his, he looked down at the staghound that sat between his knees.
He was a powerfully built man, as I have said, with a fine forehead and rather heavy features; but his eyes had that odd drooping of the skin above the lids which often comes with advancing years, and the fall of his heavy mouth at the corners gave him an expression of pugnacious resolution. He talked to Montgomery in a tone too low for me to hear.
As I stared at them, they met my gaze; and then first one and then another turned away from my direct stare, and looked at me in an odd, furtive manner.
It occurred to me that I was perhaps annoying them, and I turned my attention to the island we were approaching.
It was low, and covered with thick vegetation,--chiefly a kind of palm, that was new to me.
From one point a thin white thread of vapour rose slantingly to an immense height, and then frayed out like a down feather. We were now within the embrace of a broad bay flanked on either hand by a low promontory.
I fancied while we were still far off that I saw some other and very grotesque looking creatures scuttle into the bushes upon the slope; but I saw nothing of these as we drew nearer.
He had a large, almost lipless, mouth, extraordinary lank arms, long thin feet, and bow legs, and stood with his heavy face thrust forward staring at us. He was dressed like Montgomery and his white haired companion, in jacket and trousers of blue serge.
As we came still nearer, this individual began to run to and fro on the beach, making the most grotesque movements.
At a word of command from Montgomery, the four men in the launch sprang up, and with singularly awkward gestures struck the lugs. Montgomery steered us round and into a narrow little dock excavated in the beach.
I was struck especially by the curious movements of the legs of the three swathed and bandaged boatmen,--not stiff they were, but distorted in some odd way, almost as if they were jointed in the wrong place.
The dogs were still snarling, and strained at their chains after these men, as the white haired man landed with them.
Montgomery, having unshipped the rudder, landed likewise, and all set to work at unloading.
Presently the white haired man seemed to recollect my presence, and came up to me.
Now you are our guest, we must make you comfortable,--though you are uninvited, you know." He looked keenly into my face.
"Montgomery says you are an educated man, mr Prendick; says you know something of science.
May I ask what that signifies?"
I told him I had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some researches in biology under Huxley.
He raised his eyebrows slightly at that.
"As it happens, we are biologists here.
This is a biological station-of a sort." His eye rested on the men in white who were busily hauling the puma, on rollers, towards the walled yard.
"I and Montgomery, at least," he added.
Then, "When you will be able to get away, I can't say. We're off the track to anywhere.
He left me abruptly, and went up the beach past this group, and I think entered the enclosure.
That captain was a silly ass. He'd have made things lively for you."
"It was you," said I, "that saved me again."
"That depends.
You'll find this island an infernally rum place, I promise you.
"I wish you'd help me with these rabbits," he said.
His procedure with the rabbits was singular.
"Increase and multiply, my friends," said Montgomery. "Replenish the island.
Hitherto we've had a certain lack of meat here."
As I watched them disappearing, the white haired man returned with a brandy flask and some biscuits.
"Something to go on with, Prendick," said he, in a far more familiar tone than before.
I made no ado, but set to work on the biscuits at once, while the white haired man helped Montgomery to release about a score more of the rabbits. Three big hutches, however, went up to the house with the puma. The brandy I did not touch, for I have been an abstainer from my birth.
seven.
THE LOCKED DOOR.
I followed the llama up the beach, and was overtaken by Montgomery, who asked me not to enter the stone enclosure. I noticed then that the puma in its cage and the pile of packages had been placed outside the entrance to this quadrangle.
I turned and saw that the launch had now been unloaded, run out again, and was being beached, and the white haired man was walking towards us. He addressed Montgomery.
"And now comes the problem of this uninvited guest.
What are we to do with him?"
"He knows something of science," said Montgomery.
"I'm itching to get to work again-with this new stuff," said the white haired man, nodding towards the enclosure. His eyes grew brighter.
"I daresay you are," said Montgomery, in anything but a cordial tone.
"We can't send him over there, and we can't spare the time to build him a new shanty; and we certainly can't take him into our confidence just yet."
"I'm in your hands," said i I had no idea of what he meant by "over there."
"I've been thinking of the same things," Montgomery answered. "There's my room with the outer door-"
"That's it," said the elder man, promptly, looking at Montgomery; and all three of us went towards the enclosure.
"I'm sorry to make a mystery, mr Prendick; but you'll remember you're uninvited. Our little establishment here contains a secret or so, is a kind of Blue Beard's chamber, in fact.
Nothing very dreadful, really, to a sane man; but just now, as we don't know you-"
"Decidedly," said I, "I should be a fool to take offence at any want of confidence."
He twisted his heavy mouth into a faint smile-he was one of those saturnine people who smile with the corners of the mouth down,--and bowed his acknowledgment of my complaisance.
I followed him, and found myself in a small apartment, plainly but not uncomfortably furnished and with its inner door, which was slightly ajar, opening into a paved courtyard.
This inner door Montgomery at once closed. A hammock was slung across the darker corner of the room, and a small unglazed window defended by an iron bar looked out towards the sea.
"We usually have our meals in here," said Montgomery, and then, as if in doubt, went out after the other.
"Moreau!" I heard him call, and for the moment I do not think I noticed. Then as I handled the books on the shelf it came up in consciousness: Where had I heard the name of Moreau before?
I sat down before the window, took out the biscuits that still remained to me, and ate them with an excellent appetite.
Through the window I saw one of those unaccountable men in white, lugging a packing case along the beach.
From that my thoughts went to the indefinable queerness of the deformed man on the beach. I never saw such a gait, such odd motions as he pulled at the box. I recalled that none of these men had spoken to me, though most of them I had found looking at me at one time or another in a peculiarly furtive manner, quite unlike the frank stare of your unsophisticated savage.
Indeed, they had all seemed remarkably taciturn, and when they did speak, endowed with very uncanny voices. What was wrong with them?
Then I recalled the eyes of Montgomery's ungainly attendant.
Just as I was thinking of him he came in.
Then astonishment paralysed me.
Under his stringy black locks I saw his ear; it jumped upon me suddenly close to my face.
"Your breakfast, sair," he said.
I stared at his face without attempting to answer him.
He turned and went towards the door, regarding me oddly over his shoulder. I followed him out with my eyes; and as I did so, by some odd trick of unconscious cerebration, there came surging into my head the phrase, "The Moreau Hollows"--was it?
It sent my memory back ten years.
"The Moreau Horrors!"
The phrase drifted loose in my mind for a moment, and then I saw it in red lettering on a little buff coloured pamphlet, to read which made one shiver and creep. Then I remembered distinctly all about it.
That long forgotten pamphlet came back with startling vividness to my mind. I had been a mere lad then, and Moreau was, I suppose, about fifty,--a prominent and masterful physiologist, well-known in scientific circles for his extraordinary imagination and his brutal directness in discussion.
Was this the same Moreau?
He had to leave England. A journalist obtained access to his laboratory in the capacity of laboratory assistant, with the deliberate intention of making sensational exposures; and by the help of a shocking accident (if it was an accident), his gruesome pamphlet became notorious. On the day of its publication a wretched dog, flayed and otherwise mutilated, escaped from Moreau's house.
The doctor was simply howled out of the country. It may be that he deserved to be; but I still think that the tepid support of his fellow investigators and his desertion by the great body of scientific workers was a shameful thing.
Yet some of his experiments, by the journalist's account, were wantonly cruel. He might perhaps have purchased his social peace by abandoning his investigations; but he apparently preferred the latter, as most men would who have once fallen under the overmastering spell of research. He was unmarried, and had indeed nothing but his own interest to consider.
I felt convinced that this must be the same man.
Everything pointed to it.
It dawned upon me to what end the puma and the other animals-which had now been brought with other luggage into the enclosure behind the house-were destined; and a curious faint odour, the halitus of something familiar, an odour that had been in the background of my consciousness hitherto, suddenly came forward into the forefront of my thoughts.
It was the antiseptic odour of the dissecting room.
I heard the puma growling through the wall, and one of the dogs yelped as though it had been struck.
Yet surely, and especially to another scientific man, there was nothing so horrible in vivisection as to account for this secrecy; and by some odd leap in my thoughts the pointed ears and luminous eyes of Montgomery's attendant came back again before me with the sharpest definition.
I stared before me out at the green sea, frothing under a freshening breeze, and let these and other strange memories of the last few days chase one another through my mind.
What could it all mean?
CHAPTER six
"Whoa, Pink eye!" muttered the lad, stirring restlessly.
The darkness about him was deep and impenetrable and he was conscious of a heavy weight on his chest.
All at once he recollected.
"It was the bear," he murmured.
No, he could feel the ground under him, and a rock that his right hand rested on, felt cold and chilling.
But what of the pressure on his chest?
His fingers lightly touched it.
Tad could scarce repress a yell.
The boy was satisfied, however, that by exerting all his strength he would be able to pull himself away before the beast could awaken, even, providing it were still alive.
First he sought cautiously for his weapon, his fingers groping about over the ground at his right hand.
He could not find it.
Undoubtedly it had fallen underneath the bear.
There he stood listening intently for several minutes.
The leaves of the trees hung limp and lifeless, for no breeze was stirring.
"I wonder if he's dead," whispered the lad, almost afraid to trust his voice out loud.
"Maybe that shot finished him.
Tad searched his clothes for matches, finally finding his match safe.
Next he sought to gather some sticks with which to make a torch, but the only wood he was able to find was of oak and so green that it would not burn.
Lighting one he picked his way carefully toward the place where he had been lying, peering into the shadows ahead of him suspiciously as he went.
He could faintly make out the figure of the bear lying half on its side as it had been before, the only difference being that the animal's head was stretched out on the ground instead of on the lad's chest.
Mustering his courage, Tad continued his cautious approach, lighting match after match, shading the flame with his hands so that the light would not get into his eyes and prevent him from seeing anything ahead of him.
It required no little courage for a boy alone in the mountains to walk up to a bear, not knowing whether the animal were dead or alive.
Yet when Tad Butler made up his mind to do a certain thing, he persisted until he had accomplished it.
He reached the side of the animal, that is, close enough so that he could get a good view of it.
The bear never moved and Tad drew closer, walking on his toes that he might make no sound.
There seemed no other way to make certain except to stir the animal.
Cautiously lighting another match he drew back his left foot and administered a sound kick to the beast's side.
Thinking that the bear had moved under the blow, Tad whirled and ran tittering a loud "Oh!"
He waited, but could hear no sound.
I'm going back this time and make sure."
He did.
There was no movement other than a slight tremor caused by the impact of the kick.
"I know," he cried.
But where is that pony?"
All at once the realization came to him that the pony had thrown him off.
Tad whistled and called, listening after each attempt without the slightest result.
"He's gone.
The compass, however, was nowhere to be found.
The lad went through his pockets twice in search of it.
Tad picked up the weapon joyfully.
"I've got something to defend myself with, at least," he told himself.
The lad struck out confidently.
He had been lost in the wilderness before, and though he felt a slight uneasiness he had no doubt of his ability to find the camp eventually.
He walked vigorously for half an hour.
Then he halted.
The same impressive silence surrounded him.
He changed his course and plodded on methodically again.
The panic of the lost seized him and Tad ran this way and that, plunging ahead for some distance, then swerving to the right or to the left in a desperate attempt to free himself from the endless thicket, bruising his body from contact with the trunks of the trees and cutting his hands as they struck the rocks violently when he fell.
"Tad Butler, you stop this!" he commanded sternly, bringing himself up sharply.
"I didn't think you were such a silly kid as to be afraid of the dark." But in his innermost heart the lad knew that it was not the shadows that had so upset him.
It was the feeling of being lost in an unknown forest.
Instead of being in the foothills as he had supposed, he was penetrating the fastnesses of the Rosebud Mountains themselves.
"I'll sit down and wait for daylight.
That's all I can do.
I surely can find my way back to camp when the light comes again."
Tad remembered with a start that there were bears in the range.
Up this he clambered.
It would give him a good view in the morning anyway, besides protecting him from any prowling animals that might chance in that part of the forest.
Tad ensconced himself in a slight depression, and with a flat rock for a resting place, leaned back determined to make the best of his position.
A gentle breeze now stirred the foliage above his head and all about him until the sound became a restless murmur, as if Nature were holding council over the lad's predicament.
The lost boy did not so interpret the sounds, however.
He made a more practical application of them.
"It's going to rain," he decided wisely, casting a glance above him at the sky, which was becoming rapidly overcast.
"And I haven't any umbrella," he added, grinning at his own feeble joke.
"Well, I've been wet before.
I cannot well be any more so than I was last night.
I'll bet the rainwater will be warmer than the waters in the East Fork.
Fortunately he had worn his coat when he left the camp, else he would now have suffered from the cold.
As it was, he shivered, but more from nervousness than from the chill night air.
WINNING THROUGH PLUCK
Tad Butler had left the camp at daybreak.
He started off at a slow trot which he kept up over the rough, uneven ground until some time after sunrise, all the time keeping the mountain gorge in sight so that he might not lose his way.
He had eaten no breakfast, having simply taken a cup of sulphur water, believing that he could make better time on an empty stomach. However, he now sat down and munched on one of the three hard boiled eggs he had taken with him.
This he did, by stretching flat on his back, after having finished his scanty breakfast.
Sharp on the half hour by his watch, Tad sprang up, greatly refreshed. Leaning well forward he dropped into a long, easy lope, which carried him over the ground rapidly.
Hard as nails and spurred on by the need of his companions, the lad pushed on and on, blazing his trail as he went, not feeling any fatigue to speak of.
Now and then he would pause for a few moments to make sure that he was not straying from the river gorge, which occasional rocks and foliage hid from his view.
At noon Tad sat down and ate another egg.
"I must be getting near the place," he mused.
Still there was no trace of human habitation.
There remained nothing for him to do save to push on, which he did stubbornly.
When the sun went down he seemed no nearer to the object of his search than when he had set out at daybreak.
The lad, after looking about, came upon a tree which he climbed in order to get an unobstructed view of the country.
He argued that camp fires would be lighted for the evening meal.
Not a sign of smoke could he discover anywhere.
Tad's heart sank.
"I've got to stay out all night," he muttered.
There remaining about two hours before dark, he decided to push on as long as he could see.
Water there was none, so he had to do without it while he ate his last egg.
Then he lay down to sleep, refusing to allow himself to think very long at a time of his lonely position.
Late that night, the boy awakened, finding the moon shining brightly.
He got up and looked about him.
The camp fire had died out.
The light of the moon was so strong that he could make out the surroundings almost as well as in daylight.
"Perhaps I'll get somewhere in time for breakfast.
So he trudged on.
He did not run this time, for a little more care than he had been exercising was now necessary to avoid pitfalls in the shadows cast by rock and tree.
Daylight came, but still the weary boy kept on his way.
Hungry?
Yes, Tad was actually faint for want of food.
He tried the experiment of chewing some leaves that he knew were harmless.
At first this gave him some relief.
After a little it made him sick, so he did not try the experiment again.
He feared he was going to give out.
Halfway down the slope was a shack and off beyond it stood a man with his back turned toward him.
The man down there, startled by the cry, wheeled suddenly and descrying the figure of Tad Butler racing toward him, ran to his cabin, appearing a moment later with a rifle in his hands.
A moment more a second man dashed out, he too carrying a gun.
Both men stood facing the lad, until, when he got near enough, they discovered that it was a boy; then they laughed and lowered their weapons.
Tad fairly staggered up to them.
What's the excitement about?" demanded the first of the two men.
Tad explained as best he could between breaths, at which the men laughed more heartily than ever.
"I want something to eat first of all.
I'm half starved," he told them.
"Sorry, younker, but we ain't got more'n enough for ourselves.
It's a long ways to where we kin git more."
I must have food right now," protested Tad.
"So must we."
"Who are you?" demanded Tad indignantly.
"We're prospecting.
I reckon we know our business best.
"Why, that's the direction I came from," exclaimed the lad.
"I don't know.
Where is it?" asked Tad Butler.
It's a peak that looks red when the sun shines on it."
"No, I didn't pass the place.
Tell me how I can get to the mining camp, even if you won't let me have anything to eat," begged the boy. "My companions will starve before I can get back unless I get help to them soon."
"Got a compass?"
"Yes."
"Know anybody there?"
"mr Munson, Richard Munson."
"Dick Munson, eh?" returned the man, with increasing interest.
Much obliged for directing me, at least," said Tad, turning away and starting with compass in hand.
The men said something to each other in a low tone, but Tad paid no attention to them, hurrying away as fast as his weary limbs would carry him.
"Hey, young feller, come back here."
Tad did so reluctantly.
"Sorry we can't give ye anything to eat.
"The goat?"
"Yep.
The goat's our milk wagon-she gives milk for the outfit."
At first he thought they were joking, but Tad suddenly realized that the men were in earnest.
Browsing hereabouts, I reckon.
"Thank you.
I'll try."
Tad sought the draw and after some search came upon the goat rather unexpectedly.
While she was nibbling at his offering, Tad patted her and after a time managed to quiet her sufficiently to enable him to get around to one side.
He had milked cows, but this was his first experience at milking a goat.
"Gracious, that tastes good!" gasped the boy.
"I never knew goat's milk was anything like that.
He helped himself to another and still another cupful, until he felt that he could hold no more.
Help yourself if you wish any more."
Tad pulled down branch after branch which he piled up in front of the goat, and which she attacked with vigorous nibbles and tugs.
Very much refreshed, the boy ran back to the miners' shack.
"Well, here is twenty five cents.
I thank you very much," replied the lad, laying the money down in front of the door of the shack, because the miner refused to reach out his hand for it.
"You're welcome, kid.
I do not feel hungry now," he smiled. "How far is it to the Red Star the way you have directed me?"
"As the eagle flies, 'bout twelve miles.
"Thank you.
Hope I have a chance to return the favor some time," smiled Tad, swinging his hand in parting salute, as he started with renewed courage.
The fifteen miles of rough traveling did not discourage him in the least.
He reasoned that he ought to reach the mining camp by four or five o'clock that afternoon.
That would be in time for him to start back with food for the other boys, whom he had left in camp.
"My, but I'll bet Chunky is a walking skeleton by this time," smiled Tad, as the thought of his companion's appetite came humorously into his mind.
Talking to himself to keep up his courage, consulting his compass frequently, that he might not stray from the course in the least, the lad hurried on.
Reaching the draw that the miners had described, he recognized it at once, worked his way around it and came back.
Tad realized this.
He told himself that he could not afford to try any experiment, however.
His judgment was verified, when, shortly after four o'clock he was gratified by sighting several pillars of black smoke.
"That's the place.
With clothes in a sad state of disorder, eyes red and sunken, Tad Butler burst into the Red Star mining camp.
His sudden entrance caused the few people about to pause and gaze at him in astonishment.
"Where's mr Munson-mr
"What!
Not here?"
"no"
I must find him," expostulated the lad.
"Reckon you'll have a long run, then.
That's a good twenty miles from here, I reckon."
CHAPTER eight. -- Prescriptions.
It was Sunday, the second day after the dance.
Down in the blacksmith shop Chip was putting new rowels into his spurs and whistling softly to himself while he worked.
And they had laughed together over the juvenile seven and the subsequent indignation of the mothers who, with the exception of "Mary," had bundled up their offspring and gone home mad.
That was why he whistled.
As the voices drew nearer, the soft, smooth, hated tones of Dunk Whitaker untangled from the Little Doctor's laugh, and Chip stopped whistling.
Dunk was making a good, long stay of it this time; usually he came one day and went the next, and no one grieved at his departure.
And the Little Doctor answered him frankly and distinctly: "Oh, very well, considering all things.
They furnish me with some amusement, and I give them something quite new to talk about, so we are quits.
They are a good hearted lot, you know-but SO ignorant!
I don't suppose-"
The words trailed into an indistinct murmur, punctuated by Dunk's jarring cackle.
As a matter of fact, it was the Densons, and the Pilgreens, and the Beckmans that were under discussion, and not the Flying U cowboys, as Chip believed.
He no longer smiled sympathetically.
That's good!
He struck the rivet such a blow that he snapped one shank of his spur short off. This meant ten or twelve dollars for a new pair-though the cost of it troubled him little, just then.
It was something tangible upon which to pour profanity, however, and the atmosphere grew sulphurous in the vicinity of the blacksmith shop and remained so for several minutes, after which a tall, irate cow puncher with his hat pulled low over angry eyes left the shop and strode up the path to the deserted bunk house.
Della was looking from the window when Chip rode up the hill upon the "coulee trail," which passed close by the house.
She was tired of the platitudes of Dunk, who, trying to be both original and polished, fell far short of being either and only succeeded in being extremely tiresome.
"Oh, I wish I could go-I wonder if he'd care." The Little Doctor spoke impulsively as was her habit.
Hold on a minute!"
The Old Man stood waving his pipe in the doorway.
Chip jerked his horse to a stand still and half turned in the saddle.
"What?"
He felt that, if he met her eyes-with the laugh in them-he should do one of two undesirable things: he should either smile back at her, weakly overlooking the hypocrisy of her friendliness, or sneer in answer to her smile, which would be very rude and ungentlemanly.
"If you had mentioned wanting a ride I should have been glad to accompany you," remarked Dunk, reproachfully, when Chip had ridden, somewhat sullenly, back to the stable.
She was standing on the porch drawing on her gauntlets when Chip returned, leading Concho by the bridle.
"Let me help you," begged Dunk, at her elbow, hoping till the last that she would invite him to go with them.
"I expect she thinks I'll amuse her some more!" he thought, savagely, as they galloped away through the quivering sunlight.
For the first two miles the road was level, and Chip set the pace-which was, as he intended it should be, too swift for much speech.
Then it was that Chip's native chivalry and self mastery were put to test.
She was talking reminiscently of the dance.
Chip looked straight ahead.
The Little Doctor gave him a quick, surprised look and went on.
"I liked their playing so much.
"Yes, of course.
You know yourself, he plays beautifully."
"Cow punchers aren't expected to know all these things." Chip hated himself for replying so, but the temptation mastered him.
"Aren't they?
Chip closed his lips tightly to keep in something impolite.
The Little Doctor, puzzled as well as piqued, went straight to the point.
"Well, you-not exactly, but you implied that you did not."
The Little Doctor gave the reins an impatient twitch.
"Yes, yes-YES!"
No answer from Chip.
He could think of nothing to say that was not more or less profane.
"I like amiable young men."
Silence.
"He's going to come down here hunting next fall.
What does he expect to find?"
"Why, whatever there is to hunt.
At the next hill the Little Doctor looked her companion over critically.
"mr Bennett, you look positively bilious.
Shall I prescribe for you?"
"I'm not trying to add to my amusement."
"No?"
I like-"
Such as Dick Brown."
"I think you need a change of air, mr Bennett."
"Yes?
Miss Whitmore grew red as to cheeks and bright as to eyes.
"I think a few small doses of Eastern manners would improve you very much," she said, pointedly.
They'd have to be small, because the supply is very limited."
The Little Doctor grew white around the mouth.
She held Concho's rein so tight he almost stopped.
"If you didn't want me to come, why in the world didn't you have the courage to say so at the start?
I'm sorry I forced my presence upon you, and I promise you it won't occur again." She hesitated, and then fired a parting shot which certainly was spiteful in the extreme. "There's one good thing about it," she smiled, tartly, "I shall have something interesting to write to dr Cecil."
As Chip raced away over the prairie, he discovered a new and puzzling kink in his temper.
He had been angry with the Little Doctor for coming, but it was nothing to the rage he felt when she turned back!
He did not own to himself that he wanted her beside him to taunt and to hurt with his rudeness, but it was a fact, for all that.
eighteen.
THE FINDING OF MOREAU.
He was already more than half fuddled. I told him that some serious thing must have happened to Moreau by this time, or he would have returned before this, and that it behoved us to ascertain what that catastrophe was. Montgomery raised some feeble objections, and at last agreed. We had some food, and then all three of us started.
It is possibly due to the tension of my mind, at the time, but even now that start into the hot stillness of the tropical afternoon is a singularly vivid impression.
My left arm was in a sling (it was lucky it was my left), and I carried my revolver in my right. Soon we traced a narrow path through the wild luxuriance of the island, going northwestward; and presently M'ling stopped, and became rigid with watchfulness.
Montgomery almost staggered into him, and then stopped too.
Then, listening intently, we heard coming through the trees the sound of voices and footsteps approaching us.
"Hullo!" suddenly shouted Montgomery, "Hullo, there!"
"Confound you!" said I, and gripped my pistol.
For a space no one spoke.
Then Montgomery hiccoughed, "Who-said he was dead?"
"He is dead," said this monster.
"They saw."
There was nothing threatening about this detachment, at any rate. They seemed awestricken and puzzled.
"Where is he?" said Montgomery.
"Is there a Law now?" asked the Monkey man.
"Is it still to be this and that?
"Is there a Law, thou Other with the Whip?"
And they all stood watching us.
"Prendick," said Montgomery, turning his dull eyes to me. "He's dead, evidently."
I had been standing behind him during this colloquy. I began to see how things lay with them.
He is-there," I pointed upward, "where he can watch you.
You cannot see him, but he can see you. Fear the Law!"
I looked at them squarely.
They flinched.
"He is great, he is good," said the Ape man, peering fearfully upward among the dense trees.
"And the other Thing?" I demanded.
"The Other with the Whip-" began the grey Thing.
"Well?" said i
"Some," said I, "have broken the Law: they will die.
Some have died. Show us now where his old body lies,--the body he cast away because he had no more need of it."
"It is this way, Man who walked in the Sea," said the grey Thing.
And with these six creatures guiding us, we went through the tumult of ferns and creepers and tree stems towards the northwest. Then came a yelling, a crashing among the branches, and a little pink homunculus rushed by us shrieking.
The grey Thing leapt aside. M'ling, with a snarl, flew at it, and was struck aside.
Montgomery fired and missed, bowed his head, threw up his arm, and turned to run. I fired, and the Thing still came on; fired again, point blank, into its ugly face.
Yet it passed me, gripped Montgomery, and holding him, fell headlong beside him and pulled him sprawling upon itself in its death agony.
"See," said I, pointing to the dead brute, "is the Law not alive? This came of breaking the Law."
He peered at the body.
Montgomery turned him over. Resting at intervals, and with the help of the seven Beast People (for he was a heavy man), we carried Moreau back to the enclosure. The night was darkling.
Twice we heard unseen creatures howling and shrieking past our little band, and once the little pink sloth creature appeared and stared at us, and vanished again. But we were not attacked again.
ALONE WITH THE BEAST FOLK.
Among the chips scattered about the beach lay the two axes that had been used to chop up the boats. The tide was creeping in behind me.
There was nothing for it but courage.
I took half a dozen steps, picked up the blood stained whip that lay beneath the body of the Wolf man, and cracked it.
They stopped and stared at me.
"Salute!" said i "Bow down!"
They hesitated.
One bent his knees.
I repeated my command, with my heart in my mouth, and advanced upon them.
One knelt, then the other two.
I turned and walked towards the dead bodies, keeping my face towards the three kneeling Beast Men, very much as an actor passing up the stage faces the audience.
"They broke the Law," said I, putting my foot on the Sayer of the Law. "They have been slain,--even the Sayer of the Law; even the Other with the Whip.
Great is the Law!
Come and see."
"None escape," said one of them, advancing and peering.
"None escape," said i "Therefore hear and do as I command." They stood up, looking questioningly at one another.
"Stand there," said i
"Take him," said I, standing up again and pointing with the whip; "take him, and carry him out and cast him into the sea."
They came forward, evidently still afraid of Montgomery, but still more afraid of my cracking red whip lash; and after some fumbling and hesitation, some whip cracking and shouting, they lifted him gingerly, carried him down to the beach, and went splashing into the dazzling welter of the sea.
Carry him far."
They went in up to their armpits and stood regarding me.
"Good!" said I, with a break in my voice; and they came back, hurrying and fearful, to the margin of the water, leaving long wakes of black in the silver.
At the water's edge they stopped, turning and glaring into the sea as though they presently expected Montgomery to arise therefrom and exact vengeance.
"Now these," said I, pointing to the other bodies.
As I watched them disposing of the mangled remains of M'ling, I heard a light footfall behind me, and turning quickly saw the big Hyena swine perhaps a dozen yards away.
He stopped in this crouching attitude when I turned, his eyes a little averted.
For a moment we stood eye to eye.
I dropped the whip and snatched at the pistol in my pocket; for I meant to kill this brute, the most formidable of any left now upon the island, at the first excuse. It may seem treacherous, but so I was resolved.
I was far more afraid of him than of any other two of the Beast Folk. His continued life was I knew a threat against mine.
I was perhaps a dozen seconds collecting myself.
Then cried I, "Salute! Bow down!"
His teeth flashed upon me in a snarl.
Perhaps a little too spasmodically I drew my revolver, aimed quickly and fired.
I heard him yelp, saw him run sideways and turn, knew I had missed, and clicked back the cock with my thumb for the next shot. But he was already running headlong, jumping from side to side, and I dared not risk another miss.
Every now and then he looked back at me over his shoulder.
For some time I stood staring after him.
I turned to my three obedient Beast Folk again and signalled them to drop the body they still carried. Then I went back to the place by the fire where the bodies had fallen and kicked the sand until all the brown blood stains were absorbed and hidden.
I dismissed my three serfs with a wave of the hand, and went up the beach into the thickets.
I carried my pistol in my hand, my whip thrust with the hatchets in the sling of my arm. I was anxious to be alone, to think out the position in which I was now placed.
I went back to the beach, and turning eastward past the burning enclosure, made for a point where a shallow spit of coral sand ran out towards the reef.
"The stubborn beast flesh grows day by day back again." Then I came round to the Hyena swine.
I felt sure that if I did not kill that brute, he would kill me. The Sayer of the Law was dead: worse luck.
What was the Hyena swine telling them? My imagination was running away with me into a morass of unsubstantial fears.
I knew what that object was, but I had not the heart to go back and drive them off. I began walking along the beach in the opposite direction, designing to come round the eastward corner of the island and so approach the ravine of the huts, without traversing the possible ambuscades of the thickets.
I was now so nervous with my own imaginings that I immediately drew my revolver. Even the propitiatory gestures of the creature failed to disarm me. He hesitated as he approached.
"Go away!" cried i
"May I not come near you?" it said.
"No; go away," I insisted, and snapped my whip.
Then putting my whip in my teeth, I stooped for a stone, and with that threat drove the creature away.
Towards noon certain of them came and squatted basking in the hot sand. The imperious voices of hunger and thirst prevailed over my dread. I came out of the bushes, and, revolver in hand, walked down towards these seated figures.
One, a Wolf woman, turned her head and stared at me, and then the others.
None attempted to rise or salute me. I felt too faint and weary to insist, and I let the moment pass.
"I want food," said I, almost apologetically, and drawing near.
"There is food in the huts," said an Ox boar man, drowsily, and looking away from me.
twenty one.
When I awoke, it was dark about me.
My arm ached in its bandages.
I heard something breathing, saw something crouched together close beside me.
Then something soft and warm and moist passed across my hand.
All my muscles contracted.
I snatched my hand away.
"I-Master."
"Are you the one I met on the beach?" I asked.
"The same, Master."
"It is well," I said, extending my hand for another licking kiss.
I began to realise what its presence meant, and the tide of my courage flowed.
"Where are the others?" I asked.
"They are mad; they are fools," said the Dog man.
"Even now they talk together beyond there.
They say, 'The Master is dead. The Other with the Whip is dead.
That Other who walked in the Sea is as we are.
We have no Master, no Whips, no House of Pain, any more. There is an end.
We love the Law, and will keep it; but there is no Pain, no Master, no Whips for ever again.' So they say. But I know, Master, I know."
"It is well," I said again.
"Presently you will slay them all," said the Dog man.
"Presently," I answered, "I will slay them all,--after certain days and certain things have come to pass.
"What the Master wishes to kill, the Master kills," said the Dog man with a certain satisfaction in his voice.
"And that their sins may grow," I said, "let them live in their folly until their time is ripe.
Let them not know that I am the Master."
"The Master's will is sweet," said the Dog man, with the ready tact of his canine blood.
For a moment the opening of the hut was blackened by the exit of the Dog man.
The moon was just riding up on the edge of the ravine, and like a bar across its face drove the spire of vapour that was for ever streaming from the fumaroles of the island.
None about the fire attempted to salute me.
I looked round for the Hyena swine, but he was not there.
Altogether, perhaps twenty of the Beast Folk squatted, staring into the fire or talking to one another.
"He is not dead," said I, in a loud voice.
"Even now he watches us!"
"True, true!" said the Dog man.
They were staggered at my assurance.
An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
"The Man with the Bandaged Arm speaks a strange thing," said one of the Beast Folk.
Woe be to him who breaks the Law!"
They looked curiously at one another.
With an affectation of indifference I began to chop idly at the ground in front of me with my hatchet. They looked, I noticed, at the deep cuts I made in the turf.
I answered him.
Then one of the dappled things objected, and an animated discussion sprang up round the fire. Every moment I began to feel more convinced of my present security. I talked now without the catching in my breath, due to the intensity of my excitement, that had troubled me at first.
In the course of about an hour I had really convinced several of the Beast Folk of the truth of my assertions, and talked most of the others into a dubious state. I kept a sharp eye for my enemy the Hyena swine, but he never appeared. Every now and then a suspicious movement would startle me, but my confidence grew rapidly.
But from that night until the end came, there was but one thing happened to tell save a series of innumerable small unpleasant details and the fretting of an incessant uneasiness. So that I prefer to make no chronicle for that gap of time, to tell only one cardinal incident of the ten months I spent as an intimate of these half humanised brutes.
Indeed, I may say-without vanity, I hope-that I held something like pre eminence among them. One or two, whom in a rare access of high spirits I had scarred rather badly, bore me a grudge; but it vented itself chiefly behind my back, and at a safe distance from my missiles, in grimaces.
The Dog man scarcely dared to leave my side.
In the first month or so the Beast Folk, compared with their latter condition, were human enough, and for one or two besides my canine friend I even conceived a friendly tolerance. The little pink sloth creature displayed an odd affection for me, and took to following me about.
The Monkey man bored me, however; he assumed, on the strength of his five digits, that he was my equal, and was for ever jabbering at me,--jabbering the most arrant nonsense. One thing about him entertained me a little: he had a fantastic trick of coining new words.
This, I say, was in the earlier weeks of my solitude among these brutes. During that time they respected the usage established by the Law, and behaved with general decorum.
Once I found another rabbit torn to pieces,--by the Hyena swine, I am assured,--but that was all. It was about May when I first distinctly perceived a growing difference in their speech and carriage, a growing coarseness of articulation, a growing disinclination to talk.
They held things more clumsily; drinking by suction, feeding by gnawing, grew commoner every day. I realised more keenly than ever what Moreau had told me about the "stubborn beast flesh." They were reverting, and reverting very rapidly.
I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject.
My Dog man imperceptibly slipped back to the dog again; day by day he became dumb, quadrupedal, hairy.
As the carelessness and disorganisation increased from day to day, the lane of dwelling places, at no time very sweet, became so loathsome that I left it, and going across the island made myself a hovel of boughs amid the black ruins of Moreau's enclosure. Some memory of pain, I found, still made that place the safest from the Beast Folk.
For them and for me it came without any definite shock.
My clothes hung about me as yellow rags, through whose rents showed the tanned skin. My hair grew long, and became matted together.
I am told that even now my eyes have a strange brightness, a swift alertness of movement.
Five times I saw sails, and thrice smoke; but nothing ever touched the island.
I always had a bonfire ready, but no doubt the volcanic reputation of the island was taken to account for that.
It was only about September or October that I began to think of making a raft.
By that time my arm had healed, and both my hands were at my service again.
There came a season of thunder storms and heavy rain, which greatly retarded my work; but at last the raft was completed.
I was delighted with it.
But with a certain lack of practical sense which has always been my bane, I had made it a mile or more from the sea; and before I had dragged it down to the beach the thing had fallen to pieces.
Perhaps it is as well that I was saved from launching it; but at the time my misery at my failure was so acute that for some days I simply moped on the beach, and stared at the water and thought of death.
I did not, however, mean to die, and an incident occurred that warned me unmistakably of the folly of letting the days pass so,--for each fresh day was fraught with increasing danger from the Beast People.
At first I did not understand, but presently it occurred to me that he wished me to follow him; and this I did at last,--slowly, for the day was hot.
It was not afraid and not ashamed; the last vestige of the human taint had vanished.
At last I had him face to face.
The brute made no sign of retreat; but its ears went back, its hair bristled, and its body crouched together. I aimed between the eyes and fired.
As I did so, the Thing rose straight at me in a leap, and I was knocked over like a ninepin. It clutched at me with its crippled hand, and struck me in the face. Its spring carried it over me.
That danger at least was over; but this, I knew was only the first of the series of relapses that must come.
I burnt both of the bodies on a pyre of brushwood; but after that I saw that unless I left the island my death was only a question of time. The Beast People by that time had, with one or two exceptions, left the ravine and made themselves lairs according to their taste among the thickets of the island.
Few prowled by day, most of them slept, and the island might have seemed deserted to a new comer; but at night the air was hideous with their calls and howling. I had half a mind to make a massacre of them; to build traps, or fight them with my knife.
Had I possessed sufficient cartridges, I should not have hesitated to begin the killing.
After the death of this poor dog of mine, my last friend, I too adopted to some extent the practice of slumbering in the daytime in order to be on my guard at night. I rebuilt my den in the walls of the enclosure, with such a narrow opening that anything attempting to enter must necessarily make a considerable noise.
The creatures had lost the art of fire too, and recovered their fear of it.
I turned once more, almost passionately now, to hammering together stakes and branches to form a raft for my escape.
I found a thousand difficulties.
But I could think of nothing.
But it sailed strangely.
The head was not kept to the wind; it yawed and fell away.
As the day grew brighter, I began waving the last rag of my jacket to them; but they did not notice me, and sat still, facing each other.
Suddenly a great white bird flew up out of the boat, and neither of the men stirred nor noticed it; it circled round, and then came sweeping overhead with its strong wings outspread.
Then I stopped shouting, and sat down on the headland and rested my chin on my hands and stared.
I would have swum out to it, but something-a cold, vague fear-kept me back.
One of my spasms of disgust came upon me.
I turned my back upon them, struck the lug and began paddling out to sea.
I could not bring myself to look behind me.
Then, with such patience as I could command, I collected a quantity of fruit, and waylaid and killed two rabbits with my last three cartridges.
Chapter seventeen.
SPRING IN THE BIG WOODS
That visit to the lumber camp was memorable for Nan Sherwood in more ways than one.
Her adventure with the lynx she kept secret from her relatives, because of the reason given in the previous chapter.
But there was another incident that marked the occasion to the girl's mind, and that was the threat of Gedney Raffer, reported to her Uncle Henry.
Nan thought that such a bad man as Raffer appeared to be would undoubtedly carry out his threat.
He had offered money to have mr Sherwood beaten up, and the ruffians he had bribed would doubtless be only too eager to earn the reward.
To tell the truth, for weeks thereafter, Nan never saw a rough looking man approach the house on the outskirts of Pine Camp, without fearing that here was coming a ruffian bent on her uncle's injury.
That Uncle Henry seemed quite to have forgotten the threat only made Nan more keenly alive to his danger.
She dared not discuss the matter with Aunt Kate, for Nan feared to worry that good woman unnecessarily. Besides, having been used to hiding from her own mother all unpleasant things, the girl naturally displayed the same thoughtfulness for Aunt Kate.
For, despite mrs Henry Sherwood's bruskness and masculine appearance, Nan learned that there were certain matters over which her aunt showed extreme nervousness.
For instance, she was very careful of the lamps used in the house-she insisted upon cleaning and caring for them herself; she would not allow a candle to be used, because it might be overturned; and she saw to it herself that every fire, even the one in Nan's bedroom, was properly banked before the family retired at night.
Nan had always in mind what Uncle Henry said about mentioning fire to Aunt Kate; so the curious young girl kept her lips closed upon the subject.
But she certainly was desirous of knowing about that fire, so long ago, at Pale Lick, how it came about; if Aunt Kate had really got her great scar there; and if it was really true that two members of her uncle's family had met their death in the conflagration.
She tried not to think at all of Injun Pete.
That was too terrible!
With all her heart, Nan wished she might do something that would really help Uncle Henry solve his problem regarding the timber rights on the Perkins Tract.
The very judge who had granted the injunction forbidding mr Sherwood to cut timber on the tract was related to the present owners of the piece of timberland; and the tract had been the basis of a feud in the Perkins family for two generations.
Many people were more or less interested in the case and they came to the Sherwood home and talked excitedly about it in the big kitchen.
Some advised an utter disregard of the law.
Others were evidently minded to increase the trouble between Raffer and Uncle Henry by malicious tale bearing.
Toby was still a vigorous man save when that bane of the woodsman, rheumatism, laid him by the heels.
He had a bit of a farm in the tamarack swamp.
Once, being laid up by his arch enemy, with his joints stiffened and muscles throbbing with pain, Toby had seen the gaunt wolf of starvation, more terrible than any timber wolf, waiting at his doorstone.
His old wife and a crippled grandson were dependent on Toby, too.
It was a pitifully small sum Raffer would advance upon the little farm; but it was sufficient to put Toby in the usurer's power.
This was the story Nan learned regarding Toby.
And Uncle Henry believed that Toby, with his old time knowledge of land boundaries, could tell, if he would, which was right in the present contention between mr Sherwood and Gedney Raffer.
These, and many other subjects of thought, kept the mind of Nan Sherwood occupied during the first few weeks of her sojourn at Pine Camp.
She had, too, to keep up her diary that she had begun for Bess Harley's particular benefit.
Every week she sent off to Tillbury a bulky section of this report of her life in the Big woods.
It was quite wonderful how much there proved to be to write about.
Bess wrote back, enviously, that never did anything interesting, by any possibility, happen, now that Nan was away from Tillbury.
The town was "as dull as ditch water." She, Bess, lived only in hopes of meeting her chum at Lakeview Hall the next September.
This hope Nan shared.
But it all lay with the result of Momsey's and Papa Sherwood's visit to Scotland and Emberon Castle.
And, Nan thought, it seemed as though her parents never would even reach that far distant goal.
They had taken a slow ship for Momsey's benefit and the expected re telegraphed cablegram was looked for at the Forks for a week before it possibly could come.
It was a gala day marked on Nan's calendar when Uncle Henry, coming home from the railroad station behind the roan ponies, called to her to come out and get the message.
Momsey and Papa Sherwood had sent it from Glasgow, and were on their way to Edinburgh before Nan received the word.
Momsey had been very ill a part of the way across the ocean, but went ashore in improved health.
Nan was indeed happy at this juncture.
Her parents were safely over their voyage on the wintry ocean, so a part of her worry of mind was lifted.
Meanwhile spring was stealing upon Pine Camp without Nan's being really aware of the fact.
Uncle Henry had said, back in Chicago, that "the back of winter was broken"; but the extreme cold weather and the deep snow she had found in the Big Woods made Nan forget that March was passing and timid April was treading on his heels.
A rain lasting two days and a night washed the roads of snow and turned the fast disappearing drifts to a dirty yellow hue.
In sheltered fence corners and nooks in the wood, the grass lifted new, green blades, and queer little Margaret Llewellen showed Nan where the first anemones and violets hid under last year's drifted leaves.
The river ice went out with a rush after it had rained a few hours; after that the "drives" of logs were soon started.
Nan went down to the long, high bridge which spanned the river and watched the flood carry the logs through.
At first they came scatteringly, riding the foaming waves end on, and sometimes colliding with the stone piers of the bridge with sufficient force to split the unhewn timbers from end to end, some being laid open as neatly as though done with axe and wedge.
When the main body of the drive arrived, however, the logs were like herded cattle, milling in the eddies, stampeded by a cross current, bunching under the bridge arches like frightened steers in a chute.
And the drivers herded the logs with all the skill of cowboys on the range.
Each drive was attended by its own crew, who guarded the logs on either bank, launching those that shoaled on the numerous sandbars or in the shallows, keeping them from piling up in coves and in the mouths of estuaries, or creeks, some going ahead at the bends to fend off and break up any formation of the drifting timbers that promised to become a jam.
Behind the drive floated the square bowed and square sterned chuck boat, which carried cook and provisions for the men.
A "boom", logs chained together, end to end, was thrown out from one shore of the wide stream at night, and anchored at its outer end.
Behind this the logs were gathered in an orderly, compact mass and the men could generally get their sleep, save for the watchman; unless there came a sudden rise of water in the night.
It was a sight long to be remembered, Nan thought, when the boom was broken in the morning.
Sometimes an increasing current piled the logs up a good bit.
It was a fear compelling view the girl had of the river on one day when she went with Uncle Henry to see the first drive from Blackton's camp.
Tom was coming home with his team and was not engaged in the drive.
But reckless Rafe was considered, for his age, a very smart hand on a log drive.
The river had risen two feet at the Pine Camp bridge overnight.
It was a boiling brown flood, covered with drifting foam and debris.
The roar of the freshet awoke Nan in her bed before daybreak.
So she was not surprised to see the river in such a turmoil when, after a hasty breakfast, she and Uncle Henry walked beside the flood.
"They started their drive last night," Uncle Henry said, "and boomed her just below the campsite.
We'll go up to Dead Man's Bend and watch her come down.
There is no other drive betwixt us and Blackton's."
"Why is it called by such a horrid name, Uncle?" asked Nan.
"What, honey?" he responded.
"That bend in the river."
She's just called that.
Many a man's lost his life there since I came into this part of the country, that's a fact.
Chapter twenty six.
BUFFETED BY THE ELEMENTS
Nan knew she had never seen it rain so hard before.
The falling water was like a drop curtain, swept across the stage of the open tract of sawdust.
In a few minutes they were saturated to the skin.
Nan could not have been any wetter if she had gone in swimming.
"Oh!" she gasped into Tom's ear.
"It is the deluge!"
"I know.
That's this one," she agreed.
"But, it's awful."
"Say!
Can you point out that tree that smoked?" asked Tom.
It can't be smoking now," gasped Nan, stifled with rain and laughter.
"Don't know him," retorted her cousin.
"But it'd put most anybody out, I allow.
Still, fire isn't so easy to quench.
Where's the tree?"
"I can't see it, Tom," declared Nan, with her eyes tightly closed.
She really thought he was too stubborn.
Of course, if there had been any fire in that tree top, this rain would put it out in about ten seconds. So Nan believed.
"This is no funning.
If there's fire in this swamp."
"Goodness, gracious!" snapped Nan.
If there was a fire, this rain would smother it.
Oh!
Did it ever pelt one so before?"
Fortunately the rain was warm, and she was not much discomforted by being wet.
Tom still clung to the idea that she had started in his slow mind.
"Fire's no funning, I tell you," he growled.
"Sometimes it smoulders for days and days, and weeks and weeks; then it bursts out like a hurricane."
"But the rain"
"This sawdust is mighty hard packed, and feet deep," interrupted Tom. "The fire might be deep down."
"Why, Tom!
How ridiculously you talk!" cried the girl.
"Didn't I tell you I saw the smoke coming out of the top of a tree?
Fire couldn't be deep down in the sawdust and the smoke come out of the tree top."
"Couldn't, heh?" returned Tom.
"Dead tree, wasn't it?"
"Oh, yes."
"Hollow, too, of course?"
"Might be hollow clear through its length," Tom explained seriously. "The butt might be all rotted out.
"Oh, Tom!
I never thought of such a thing," gasped Nan.
"And you don't see the tree now?"
"Let me look!
Let me look!" cried Nan, conscience stricken.
In spite of the beating rain and wind she got to her knees, still clinging to her big cousin, and then stood upon the broad tongue of the wagon.
The horses stood still with their heads down, bearing the buffeting of the storm with the usual patience of dumb beasts.
A sheer wall of water seemed to separate them from every object out upon the open land.
Behind them the bulk of the forest loomed as another barrier.
Nan had really never believed that rain could fall so hard.
It almost took her breath.
Moreover, what Tom said about the smoking tree began to trouble the girl.
She thought of the fire at Pale Lick, of which she had received hints from several people.
That awful conflagration, in which she believed two children belonging to her uncle and aunt had lost their lives, had started in the sawdust.
Suddenly she cried aloud and seized Tom more tightly.
"Cracky!
Don't choke a fellow!" he coughed.
"Oh, Tom!"
"Well"
"I think I see it."
"The tree that smoked?" asked her cousin.
"Yes.
There!"
For the moment it seemed as though the downpour lightened.
Veiled by the still falling water a straight stick rose high in the air ahead of them. Tom chirruped to the horses and made them, though unwilling, go forward.
They dragged the heavy cart unevenly.
Through the heavy downpour the trail was hard to follow, and once in a while a rear wheel bumped over a stump, and Nan was glad to drop down upon the tongue again, and cling more tightly than ever to her cousin's collar.
"Sure that's it?" queried Tom, craning his neck to look up into the tall, straight tree.
"I, don't, see, any, smoke," drawled Tom, with his head still raised.
The rain had almost ceased, an intermission which would not be of long duration.
Nan saw that her cousin's prophecy had been true; the ground actually smoked after the downpour.
The sun heated sawdust steamed furiously.
They seemed to be crossing a heated cauldron.
Clouds of steam rose all about the timber cart.
"Why, Tommy!" Nan choked.
"It does seem as though there must be fire under this sawdust now."
Tom brought his own gaze down from the empty tree top with a jerk. "Hoo!" he shouted, and leaned forward suddenly to flick his off horse with the whiplash.
Just then the rear wheel on that side slumped down into what seemed a veritable volcano.
Flame and smoke spurted out around the broad wheel.
Nan screamed. The wind suddenly swooped down upon them, and a ball of fire, flaming sawdust was shot into the air and was tossed twenty feet by a puff of wind.
"We're over an oven!" gasped Tom, and laid the whip solidly across the backs of the frightened horses.
They plunged.
Another geyser of fire and smoke spurted from the hole into which the rear wheel had slumped.
Again and again the big horses flung themselves into the collars in an endeavor to get the wheel out.
"Oh, Tommy!" cried Nan.
"We'll be burned up!"
"Do as I say!" commanded Tom.
"Run!"
"Where, where'll I run to?" gasped the girl, leaping off the tongue, too, and away from the horses' heels.
"To the road.
Get toward home!" cried Tom, running around to the rear of the timber cart.
"And leave you here?" cried Nan.
"I guess not, mr Tom!" she murmured.
But he did not hear that.
He had seized his axe and was striding toward the edge of the forest.
But that would not be like Tom Sherwood!
At the edge of the forest he laid the axe to the root of a sapling about four inches through at the butt.
Three strokes, and the tree was down. In a minute he had lopped off the branches for twenty feet, then removed the top with a single blow.
As he turned, dragging the pole with him, up sprang the fire again from the hollow into which the wheel of the wagon had sunk.
It was a smoking furnace down there, and soon the felloe and spokes would be injured by the flames and heat.
Sparks flew on the wings of the wind from out of the mouth of the hole.
Some of them scattered about the horses and they plunged again, squealing.
It seemed to Nan impossible after the recent cloudburst that the fire could find anything to feed upon.
But underneath the packed surface of the sawdust, the heat of summer had been drying out the moisture for weeks.
And the fire had been smouldering for a long time.
Perhaps for yards and yards around, the interior of the sawdust heap was a glowing furnace.
Nan would not run away and Tom did not see her.
As he came plunging back to the stalled wagon, suddenly his foot slumped into the yielding sawdust and he fell upon his face.
He cried out with surprise or pain. Nan, horrified, saw the flames and smoke shooting out of the hole into which her cousin had stepped.
For the moment the girl felt as if her heart had stopped beating.
"Oh, Tom!
Oh, Tom!" she shrieked, and sprang toward him.
Tom was struggling to get up.
His right leg had gone into the yielding mass up to his hip, and despite his struggles he could not get it out. A long yellow flame shot out of the hole and almost licked his face.
It, indeed, scorched his hair on one side of his head.
But Nan did not scream again.
She needed her breath, all that she could get, for a more practical purpose.
Her cousin waved her back feebly, and tried to tell her to avoid the fire.
Nan rushed in, got behind him, and seized her cousin under the arms.
To lift him seemed a giant's task; but nevertheless she tried.
The church has aureoled and sainted the men and women who have fought the Cosmic Urge.
As the traveler journeys through Southern Italy, Sicily and certain parts of what was Ancient Greece, he will see broken arches, parts of viaducts, and now and again a beautiful column pointing to the sky. All about is the desert, or solitary pastures, and only this white milestone marking the path of the centuries and telling in its own silent, solemn and impressive way of a day that is dead.
And that he might live absolutely beyond reproach, always in public view, free from temptation, and free from the tongue of scandal, he decided to live in the world, and still not be of it.
To this end he climbed to the top of a marble column, sixty feet high, and there on the capstone he began to live a life beyond reproach.
Simeon was then twenty four years old.
The environment was circumscribed, but there were outlook, sunshine, ventilation-three good things.
The capstone was a little less than three feet square, so Simeon could not lie down.
He slept sitting, with his head bowed between his knees, and, indeed, in this posture he passed most of his time.
Any recklessness in movement, and he would have slipped from his perilous position and been dashed to death upon the stones beneath.
As the sun arose he stood up, just for a few moments, and held out his arms in greeting, blessing and in prayer.
Three times during the day did he thus stretch his cramped limbs, and pray with his face to the East.
At such times, those who stood near shared in his prayers, and went away blessed and refreshed.
How did Simeon get to the top of the column?
Well, his companions at the monastery, a mile away, said he was carried there in the night by a miraculous power; that he went to sleep in his stone cell and awoke on the pillar.
Other monks said that Simeon had gone to pay his respects to a fair lady, and in wrath God had caught him and placed him on high.
The probabilities are, however, Terese, as viewed by an unbeliever, that he shot a line over the column with a bow and arrow and then drew up a rope ladder and ascended with ease.
However, in the morning the simple people of the scattered village saw the man on the column.
All day he stayed there.
And the next day he was still there.
The days passed, with the scorching heat of the midday sun, and the cool winds of the night.
Still Simeon kept his place.
The rainy season came on.
When the nights were cold and dark, Simeon sat there with bowed head, and drew the folds of his single garment, a black robe, over his face.
Some prophesied he would be blown off, but the morning light revealed his form, naked from the waist up, standing with hands outstretched to greet the rising sun
Once each day, as darkness gathered, a monk came with a basket containing a bottle of goat's milk and a little loaf of black bread, and Simeon dropped down a rope and drew up the basket.
Simeon never spoke, for words are folly, and to the calls of saint or sinner he made no reply.
He lived in a perpetual attitude of adoration.
Did he suffer?
During those first weeks he must have suffered terribly and horribly.
There was no respite nor rest from the hard surface of the rock, and aching muscles could find no change from the cramped and perilous position.
If he fell, it was damnation for his soul-all were agreed as to this.
But man's body and mind accommodate themselves to almost any condition.
One thing at least, Simeon was free from economic responsibilities, free from social cares and intrusion.
Bores with sad stories of unappreciated lives and fond hopes unrealized, never broke in upon his peace.
He was not pressed for time.
No frivolous dame of tarnished fame sought to share with him his perilous perch.
The people on a slow schedule, ten minutes late, never irritated his temper.
His correspondence never got in a heap.
Simeon kept no track of the days, having no engagements to meet, nor offices to perform, beyond the prayers at morn, midday and night.
Memory died in him, the hurts became callouses, the world pain died out of his heart, and to cling became a habit.
Language was lost in disuse.
The food he ate was minimum in quantity; sensation ceased, and the dry, hot winds reduced bodily tissue to a dessicated something called a saint-loved, feared and reverenced for his fortitude.
This pillar, which had once graced the portal of a pagan temple, again became a place of pious pilgrimage, and people flocked to Simeon's rock, so that they might be near when he stretched out his black, bony hands to the East, and the spirit of Almighty God, for a space, hovered close around.
So much attention did the abnegation of Simeon attract that various other pillars, marking the ruins of art and greatness gone, in that vicinity, were crowned with pious monks.
The thought of these monks was to show how Christianity had triumphed over heathenism.
Imitators were numerous.
About then the Bishops in assembly asked, "Is Simeon sincere?" To test the matter of Simeon's pride, he was ordered to come down from his retreat.
The order was shouted up to him in a Bishop's voice-he must let down his rope, draw up a ladder, and descend.
Simeon lifted his hands in adoration and thankfulness and renewed his lease.
And so he lived on and on and on-he lived on the top of that pillar, never once descending for thirty years.
All his former companions grew aweary, and one by one died, and the monastery bells tolled their requiem as they were laid to rest.
Did Simeon hear the bells and say, "Soon it will be my turn"?
Probably not.
His senses had flown, for what good were they!
"He has always been there," the people said, and crossed themselves hurriedly.
But one evening when the young monk came with his basket, no line was dropped down from above.
He waited and then called aloud, but all in vain.
When sunrise came, there sat the monk, his face between his knees, the folds of his black robe drawn over his head.
But he did not rise and lift his hands in prayer.
All day he sat there, motionless.
The people watched in whispered silence.
Would he arise at sundown and pray, and with outstretched hands bless the assembled pilgrims?
EARLY HARDSHIPS
One of the earliest recollections of my adventurous childhood is the ride I had on a pony's side.
I was passive in the whole matter.
A little girl cousin of mine was put in a bag and suspended from the horn of an Indian saddle; but her weight must be balanced or the saddle would not remain on the animal's back.
Accordingly, I was put into another sack and made to keep the saddle and the girl in position!
I did not object, for I had a very pleasant game of peek a boo with the little girl, until we came to a big snow drift, where the poor beast was stuck fast and began to lie down.
Then it was not so nice!
This was the convenient and primitive way in which some mothers packed their children for winter journeys.
However cold the weather might be, the inmate of the fur lined sack was usually very comfortable-at least I used to think so.
I believe I was accustomed to all the precarious Indian conveyances, and, as a boy, I enjoyed the dog travaux ride as much as any.
The travaux consisted of a set of rawhide strips securely lashed to the tent poles, which were harnessed to the sides of the animal as if he stood between shafts, while the free ends were allowed to drag on the ground.
Both ponies and large dogs were used as beasts of burden, and they carried in this way the smaller children as well as the baggage.
This mode of travelling for children was possible only in the summer, and as the dogs were sometimes unreliable, the little ones were exposed to a certain amount of danger.
For instance, whenever a train of dogs had been travelling for a long time, almost perishing with the heat and their heavy loads, a glimpse of water would cause them to forget all their responsibilities.
Some of them, in spite of the screams of the women, would swim with their burdens into the cooling stream, and I was thus, on more than one occasion, made to partake of an unwilling bath.
I was a little over four years old at the time of the "Sioux massacre" in Minnesota.
In the general turmoil, we took flight into British Columbia, and the journey is still vividly remembered by all our family.
A yoke of oxen and a lumber wagon were taken from some white farmer and brought home for our conveyance.
It seemed almost like a living creature to me, this new vehicle with four legs, and the more so when we got out of axle grease and the wheels went along squealing like pigs!
My elder brothers soon became experts.
At last, I mustered up courage enough to join them in this sport.
I was sure they stepped on the wheel, so I cautiously placed my moccasined foot upon it.
Alas, before I could realize what had happened, I was under the wheels, and had it not been for the neighbor immediately behind us, I might have been run over by the next team as well.
This was my first experience with a civilized vehicle.
I cried out all possible reproaches on the white man's team and concluded that a dog travaux was good enough for me.
I was really rejoiced that we were moving away from the people who made the wagon that had almost ended my life, and it did not occur to me that I alone was to blame.
I could not be persuaded to ride in that wagon again and was glad when we finally left it beside the Missouri river.
The summer after the "Minnesota massacre," General Sibley pursued our people across this river.
Now the Missouri is considered one of the most treacherous rivers in the world.
Even a good modern boat is not safe upon its uncertain current.
We were forced to cross in buffalo skin boats-as round as tubs!
The Washechu (white men) were coming in great numbers with their big guns, and while most of our men were fighting them to gain time, the women and the old men made and equipped the temporary boats, braced with ribs of willow.
Some of these were towed by two or three women or men swimming in the water and some by ponies.
It was not an easy matter to keep them right side up, with their helpless freight of little children and such goods as we possessed.
In our flight, we little folks were strapped in the saddles or held in front of an older person, and in the long night marches to get away from the soldiers, we suffered from loss of sleep and insufficient food.
Our meals were eaten hastily, and sometimes in the saddle.
Water was not always to be found.
The people carried it with them in bags formed of tripe or the dried pericardium of animals.
Now we were compelled to trespass upon the country of hostile tribes and were harassed by them almost daily and nightly.
Only the strictest vigilance saved us.
It was a prairie fire.
We were surrounded.
Another fire was quickly made, which saved our lives.
One of the most thrilling experiences of the following winter was a blizzard, which overtook us in our wanderings.
Here and there, a family lay down in the snow, selecting a place where it was not likely to drift much.
For a day and a night we lay under the snow.
Uncle stuck a long pole beside us to tell us when the storm was over.
We had plenty of buffalo robes and the snow kept us warm, but we found it heavy. After a time, it became packed and hollowed out around our bodies, so that we were as comfortable as one can be under those circumstances.
The next day the storm ceased, and we discovered a large herd of buffaloes almost upon us.
We dug our way out, shot some of the buffaloes, made a fire and enjoyed a good dinner.
I was now an exile as well as motherless; yet I was not unhappy.
Our wanderings from place to place afforded us many pleasant experiences and quite as many hardships and misfortunes.
There were times of plenty and times of scarcity, and we had several narrow escapes from death.
In savage life, the early spring is the most trying time and almost all the famines occurred at this period of the year.
The Indians are a patient and a clannish people; their love for one another is stronger than that of any civilized people I know.
If this were not so, I believe there would have been tribes of cannibals among them.
White people have been known to kill and eat their companions in preference to starving; but Indians-never!
In times of famine, the adults often denied themselves in order to make the food last as long as possible for the children, who were not able to bear hunger as well as the old.
As a people, they can live without food much longer than any other nation.
I once passed through one of these hard springs when we had nothing to eat for several days.
I well remember the six small birds which constituted the breakfast for six families one morning; and then we had no dinner or supper to follow!
Soon after this, we came into a region where buffaloes were plenty, and hunger and scarcity were forgotten.
Such was the Indians' wild life!
When game was to be had and the sun shone, they easily forgot the bitter experiences of the winter before. Little preparation was made for the future.
They are children of Nature, and occasionally she whips them with the lashes of experience, yet they are forgetful and careless.
Much of their suffering might have been prevented by a little calculation.
During the summer, when Nature is at her best, and provides abundantly for the savage, it seems to me that no life is happier than his!
Food is free-lodging free-everything free!
The raids made upon our people by other tribes were frequent, and we had to be constantly on the watch.
I remember at one time a night attack was made upon our camp and all our ponies stampeded.
Only a few of them were recovered, and our journeys after this misfortune were effected mostly by means of the dog travaux.
The second winter after the massacre, my father and my two older brothers, with several others, were betrayed by a half breed at Winnipeg to the United States authorities.
As I was then living with my uncle in another part of the country, I became separated from them for ten years.
GAMES AND SPORTS
The Indian boy was a prince of the wilderness.
He had but very little work to do during the period of his boyhood.
His principal occupation was the practice of a few simple arts in warfare and the chase.
Aside from this, he was master of his time.
It is true that our savage life was a precarious one, and full of dreadful catastrophes; however, this never prevented us from enjoying our sports to the fullest extent.
As we left our teepees in the morning, we were never sure that our scalps would not dangle from a pole in the afternoon!
It was an uncertain life, to be sure.
Yet we observed that the fawns skipped and played happily while the gray wolves might be peeping forth from behind the hills, ready to tear them limb from limb.
Our sports were molded by the life and customs of our people; indeed, we practiced only what we expected to do when grown.
Our games were feats with the bow and arrow, foot and pony races, wrestling, swimming and imitation of the customs and habits of our fathers.
We had sham fights with mud balls and willow wands; we played lacrosse, made war upon bees, shot winter arrows (which were used only in that season), and coasted upon the ribs of animals and buffalo robes.
Before it fell to the ground a volley from the bows of the participants followed.
Each player was quick to note the direction and speed of the leading arrow and he tried to send his own at the same speed and at an equal height, so that when it fell it would be closer to the first than any of the others.
It was considered out of place to shoot by first sighting the object aimed at.
This was usually impracticable in actual life, because the object was almost always in motion, while the hunter himself was often upon the back of a pony at full gallop.
Therefore, it was the off hand shot that the Indian boy sought to master.
There was another game with arrows that was characterized by gambling, and was generally confined to the men.
At noon the boys were usually gathered by some pleasant sheet of water, and as soon as the ponies were watered, they were allowed to graze for an hour or two, while the boys stripped for their noonday sports.
A boy might say to some other whom he considered his equal:
"I can't run; but I will challenge you to fifty paces."
A former hero, when beaten, would often explain his defeat by saying: "I drank too much water."
Boys of all ages were paired for a "spin," and the little red men cheered on their favorites with spirit.
As soon as this was ended, the pony races followed.
All the speedy ponies were picked out and riders chosen.
If a boy declined to ride, there would be shouts of derision.
Last of all came the swimming.
A little urchin would hang to his pony's long tail, while the latter, with only his head above water, glided sportively along.
When there were fifty or a hundred players on each side, the battle became warm; but anything to arouse the bravery of Indian boys seemed to them a good and wholesome diversion.
It may seem odd, but wrestling was done by a great many boys at once-from ten to any number on a side.
It was really a battle, in which each one chose his opponent.
The rule was that if a boy sat down, he was let alone, but as long as he remained standing within the field, he was open to an attack.
No one struck with the hand, but all manner of tripping with legs and feet and butting with the knees was allowed.
Altogether it was an exhausting pastime-fully equal to the American game of football, and only the young athlete could really enjoy it.
One of our most curious sports was a war upon the nests of wild bees. We imagined ourselves about to make an attack upon the Ojibways or some tribal foe.
But it seemed that the bees were always on the alert and never entirely surprised, for they always raised quite as many scalps as did their bold assailants!
After the onslaught upon the nest was ended, we usually followed it by a pretended scalp dance.
On the occasion of my first experience in this mode of warfare, there were two other little boys who were also novices.
As it was the custom of our people, when they killed or wounded an enemy on the battle field, to announce the act in a loud voice, we did the same.
My friend, Little Wound (as I will call him, for I do not remember his name), being quite small, was unable to reach the nest until it had been well trampled upon and broken and the insects had made a counter charge with such vigor as to repulse and scatter our numbers in every direction.
However, he evidently did not want to retreat without any honors; so he bravely jumped upon the nest and yelled:
"I, the brave Little Wound, to day kill the only fierce enemy!"
Scarcely were the last words uttered when he screamed as if stabbed to the heart.
One of his older companions shouted:
"Dive into the water!
Dive into the water!" for there was a lake near by.
This advice he obeyed.
When we had reassembled and were indulging in our mimic dance, Little Wound was not allowed to dance.
He was considered not to be in existence-he had been killed by our enemies, the Bee tribe.
Poor little fellow!
His swollen face was sad and ashamed as he sat on a fallen log and watched the dance.
We had some quiet plays which we alternated with the more severe and warlike ones.
Among them were throwing wands and snow arrows.
In the winter we coasted much.
Sometimes a strip of bass wood bark, four feet long and about six inches wide, was used with considerable skill.
We stood on one end and held the other, using the slippery inside of the bark for the outside, and thus coasting down long hills with remarkable speed.
The spinning of tops was one of the all absorbing winter sports.
We made our tops heart shaped of wood, horn or bone.
We whipped them with a long thong of buckskin.
The handle was a stick about a foot long and sometimes we whittled the stick to make it spoon shaped at one end.
We played games with these tops-two to fifty boys at one time.
Each whips his top until it hums; then one takes the lead and the rest follow in a sort of obstacle race.
The top must spin all the way through.
There were bars of snow over which we must pilot our top in the spoon end of our whip; then again we would toss it in the air on to another open spot of ice or smooth snow crust from twenty to fifty paces away.
The top that holds out the longest is the winner.
We loved to play in the water.
When we had no ponies, we often had swimming matches of our own, and sometimes made rafts with which we crossed lakes and rivers.
It was a common thing to "duck" a young or timid boy or to carry him into deep water to struggle as best he might.
I remember a perilous ride with a companion on an unmanageable log, when we were both less than seven years old.
The older boys had put us on this uncertain bark and pushed us out into the swift current of the river.
I never knew how we managed to prevent a shipwreck on that voyage and to reach the shore.
We had many curious wild pets.
There were young foxes, bears, wolves, raccoons, fawns, buffalo calves and birds of all kinds, tamed by various boys.
My pets were different at different times, but I particularly remember one.
I once had a grizzly bear for a pet, and so far as he and I were concerned, our relations were charming and very close.
But I hardly know whether he made more enemies for me or I for him.
It was his habit to treat every boy unmercifully who injured me.
THE BIRD BOY
Suddenly, far, far up in the sky, she heard the weird cry of birds flying southward, and lifting her eyes, the Queen beheld bird after bird fly across the golden shield of the moon.
Now it came to pass that before the harvest moon rose again over the land, the Queen became the mother of a little boy who was born with wings on his shoulders.
So the Queen and her baby were taken to an old and gloomy tower on a great rock overlooking the northern sea; and after they had been there a day or two, the chief jailer came to the Queen's room to take the child and kill him.
But although she fought for her baby with all her might, the rude strength of the jailers prevailed, and the child was torn from its mother's arms.
Then, before anyone could prevent her, the poor Queen beat open the rotted fastening of an old casement window, sprang upon the ledge, and giving one last look of love and tenderness to her unhappy child, leaped down into the sea surging and pounding over the rocks hundreds of feet below.
She certainly would have been dashed to pieces, had not a good spirit of the ocean taken pity on her, and changed her into a great gray bird.
Crying mournfully, the bird circled the old tower thrice, and disappeared over the white capped waters.
So, instead of killing the bird boy, he carried him many leagues back into the dark forest which bordered the sea, and gave him to a family of charcoal burners.
And every year, on the boy's birthday, a great gray bird came flying over the forest from the distant ocean, circled thrice the charcoal burners' hut, and disappeared again, crying mournfully.
One midsummer day, with a great deal of merry hallooing and blowing of sweet voiced horns, the King of the country, accompanied by his young wife, came hunting through the wood.
There was a pretty spring near the door of the hut, and the party came to a halt at its edge.
And a wonderful sight it was, indeed, to see the horses tossing their jeweled bridles, the hooded falcons riding on the saddlebow, clutching the leather with their curving claws, the merry young pages in their dark suits, and all the gay company in rich attire.
Really, dear, I must have him for my page.
Besides, he will be a playmate for Rosabella."
So the bird boy became the best beloved playmate of the Queen's only child, her darling Rosabella.
Now, if the bird boy was the prettiest little boy in all the world, Rosabella was the prettiest little girl. Moreover, she had a sweet disposition, which is a gift even more precious than the gift of beauty.
It was a lovely picture to see the children building toy castles on the floor of the nursery in the castle tower, the sun streaming on the black brown hair and silver white wings of the little boy, and on the golden curls of Rosabella.
Twelve years passed.
Every year, on the bird boy's birthday, a great gray bird would fly in from over the sea, circle the castle thrice, and disappear, crying mournfully.
His enemy was no other than the wicked chamberlain Malefico, who had succeeded to the kingdom of the bird boy's father, when that Prince had died some years before. So the good King, who had been a real father to the bird boy, put on his shining armor, kissed his dear wife and child good bye, and rode off to the battlefield.
A month passed, an unhappy month in which there were no tidings from the King.
A great battle had been fought, the army of Rosabella's father had been completely defeated, and the troops of the wicked Malefico were hurrying toward the castle as fast as they could come.
When Malefico saw the bird boy, a look of surprise appeared on his face, for he had believed that the wonderful child was dead.
"If it were known that the winged child is alive," he thought, "the people would thrust me from my place, and restore him to his father's throne.
Now that the bird boy is in my hands, I will destroy him, and be sure of my power."
When it was over, he sent a soldier to tell the King and the bird boy that they were to be punished the following day.
And now dawned the unhappy day.
The morning was fresh and fair; a pleasant southwest wind was blowing.
The clock marked a quarter to twelve.
And even if it were to come, what could it do to save us from these cruel people?"
When the clock stood at five minutes to twelve, there was a confused noise below, and Malefico and the judges who shared with him the guilt of the unrighteous punishment took their places on a kind of platform which overlooked the place of execution.
"They will soon be coming to get us," said the King to the bird boy.
And sure enough, they heard the jangle of the jailer's keys at the foot of the stair.
The doom which Malefico had intended for another had overtaken him.
The King and the Queen, Rosabella and the bird boy, rushed down the stairs and out into the sunlight.
She took her son in her arms, and told them all his history and her misfortunes, and how she had watched over him year after year and gathered the birds to save him.
Thus it came to pass that, when the troops of Malefico saw their former Queen and heard her story, they acclaimed the bird boy as their rightful king, and carried him back in triumph into his own country.
The old enchanter liked this life of quiet and study, and doubtless would have been teaching in Fairyland to this very day, had he not been so unfortunate as to quarrel with the terrible sorcerer Zidoc, who was then Lord High Chancellor of the Fairies' College.
I have forgotten exactly what the quarrel was about, but I think that it had to do with the best spell for causing castles to fall to pieces in an instant.
At any rate, Zidoc, who considered himself quite the most wonderful enchanter in Fairyland, was furious at being opposed, and told the old enchanter, very angrily, that he was not to have his classes any more and must leave the college at once.
So the poor old gentleman packed up his magic books, put his enchanter's wand into its silver case, and went to the country one pleasant day in search of a house.
Thanks to the advice of a friendly chimney swift, it did not take him long to find one.
The dwelling was the property of the Fairy Jocapa.
It was very quiet.
Only the far away klingle klangle of a cow bell could be heard.
And he brought his possessions to the house.
Now, one autumnal morning, when a blue haze hung over the lonely fields from which the reapers had departed, and the golden leaves were wet underfoot, the old enchanter went for a walk down the lane, and finding the day agreeable, kept on until he found himself in the woods.
Arriving at the crest of a little hill in the woodland, he saw below him, almost at the foot of the slope, a countryman with a white puppy and a black kitten following at his heels.
"Give them to me," said the old enchanter, "I will bring them up." The countryman nodded his head.
Thus did the white puppy and black kitten change hands.
So he taught the cat and the dog all the known languages, then history, arithmetic, dancing, social deportment, and a variety of the best magic and spells. The cat, as was to be expected, was particularly good on anything that had 'cat' in it; he once catalogued all the principal catastrophes; while the dog, although a good student, had a fancy for writing doggerel.
For a long time the enchanter, who loved his charges very much indeed, resisted their request; but as they continued to press him, he came at length to yield.
Calling them before him, he said to them:--
"Well, dear pupils, if you must go, you must go.
I owe the Fairy Jocapa twelve months rent for this house.
So the white dog, who was the stronger of the two, took the purse with the twelve golden coins, and put it in a large wallet which he wore at his side, and then both the wonderful animals said good bye.
Both the cat and the dog were awarded countless honorary decorations.
Arriving in the twilight, they were somewhat surprised to find a number of torchbearers waiting for them in the castle courtyard.
With great respect, these attendants conducted the cat and the dog into a little ante room, and then retired, leaving them alone.
A few minutes later, a very old woman, who, the animals noticed, was stone blind, came to take them before the king.
"Very," whispered back the dog in his deeper tone.
The cat, who could see quite well in the dark, did not mind this, but the dog was not particularly pleased.
Beside the fireplace, in which a wood fire was cheerily burning, sat a gray haired lady, who was no other than the Fairy Jocapa, and in the centre of the room, reading a great book by the light of many candles, sat a young man, the King.
Listen, then, to my story and help me if you can.
It was she who caused this enchanted chamber to appear in the heart of the foundations of my castle; and in this chamber I have hidden since that terrible hour when the spell was put upon me.
The Lord Chancellor rules the kingdom in my stead.
But hearken to my story.
The driver of the chariot was a tall, elderly man, wearing a wizard's cap; his face was red as with anger, an evil light gleamed in his small malicious eyes.
You know the rest.
The dog's plan was to pretend to be but an everyday stray dog, and to this end, he rolled several times in a mud puddle; the cat, too, was to appear as a stray cat, and neglected his fine black coat in order to look the part.
When twilight came, the dog ran out and met the cat in the castle garden.
"Nothing whatever," replied the dog.
"I will try to morrow," said the cat.
"Very little," replied the cat.
Now Zidoc knew very well where the dog had concealed himself.
First, Zidoc locked the only door with a great key and then he said to Serponel,--
"And something tells me that it is time to let him feel your staff."
At the same moment he caused the locked door to fly open.
When the darkness cleared, the hearts of the true animals fell for fear lest the sorcerer's ruse be successful; but they met the challenge readily, and instead of fleeing, stood their ground; the true dog battling with the false dog, the real cat with the false cat.
Hardly had he reached a point above the dog's jaws when a voice said:--
Stop your quarreling this instant!"
The animals turned to look, and saw their master, the old enchanter.
He had been worried by their long absence and had gone forth to look for them.
Now, if you remember the first part of this story, you will recall that Zidoc quarreled with the old enchanter over the right spell for destroying castles.
"There, I told him so!" said the old enchanter.
He came to the castle gate to meet them, for Zidoc's overthrow had broken the spell which had so oddly disfigured him.
So the old enchanter gave his arm to the Fairy Jocapa, the Prince gave his to the white dog, and the cat followed all by himself.
The eagerness with which the first volume of Emily Dickinson's poems has been read shows very clearly that all our alleged modern artificiality does not prevent a prompt appreciation of the qualities of directness and simplicity in approaching the greatest themes,--life and love and death.
That "irresistible needle touch," as one of her best critics has called it, piercing at once the very core of a thought, has found a response as wide and sympathetic as it has been unexpected even to those who knew best her compelling power.
Although Emily Dickinson had been in the habit of sending occasional poems to friends and correspondents, the full extent of her writing was by no means imagined by them.
If such a thing should happen as that I should outlive you, I wish you would make me your literary legatee and executor.
Surely after you are what is called "dead" you will be willing that the poor ghosts you have left behind should be cheered and pleased by your verses, will you not?
You ought to be.
HELEN JACKSON.
The "portfolios" were found, shortly after Emily Dickinson's death, by her sister and only surviving housemate.
While many of them bear evidence of having been thrown off at white heat, still more had received thoughtful revision.
There is the frequent addition of rather perplexing foot notes, affording large choice of words and phrases.
And in the copies which she sent to friends, sometimes one form, sometimes another, is found to have been used.
Emily Dickinson appears to have written her first poems in the winter of eighteen sixty two.
The handwriting was at first somewhat like the delicate, running Italian hand of our elder gentlewomen; but as she advanced in breadth of thought, it grew bolder and more abrupt, until in her latest years each letter stood distinct and separate from its fellows.
In most of her poems, particularly the later ones, everything by way of punctuation was discarded, except numerous dashes; and all important words began with capitals.
The effect of a page of her more recent manuscript is exceedingly quaint and strong.
Although there is nowhere a date, the handwriting makes it possible to arrange the poems with general chronologic accuracy.
As a rule, the verses were without titles; but "A Country Burial," "A Thunder Storm," "The Humming Bird," and a few others were named by their author, frequently at the end,--sometimes only in the accompanying note, if sent to a friend.
In Emily Dickinson's exacting hands, the especial, intrinsic fitness of a particular order of words might not be sacrificed to anything virtually extrinsic; and her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music.
Lines are always daringly constructed, and the "thought rhyme" appears frequently,--appealing, indeed, to an unrecognized sense more elusive than hearing.
Emily Dickinson scrutinized everything with clear eyed frankness. Every subject was proper ground for legitimate study, even the sombre facts of death and burial, and the unknown life beyond.
She touches these themes sometimes lightly, sometimes almost humorously, more often with weird and peculiar power; but she is never by any chance frivolous or trivial.
And while, as one critic has said, she may exhibit toward God "an Emersonian self possession," it was because she looked upon all life with a candor as unprejudiced as it is rare.
She had tried society and the world, and found them lacking.
She was not an invalid, and she lived in seclusion from no love disappointment.
Her life was the normal blossoming of a nature introspective to a high degree, whose best thought could not exist in pretence.
Storm, wind, the wild March sky, sunsets and dawns; the birds and bees, butterflies and flowers of her garden, with a few trusted human friends, were sufficient companionship.
The coming of the first robin was a jubilee beyond crowning of monarch or birthday of pope; the first red leaf hurrying through "the altered air," an epoch.
MABEL LOOMIS TODD.
AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS, August, eighteen ninety one.
My nosegays are for captives; Dim, long expectant eyes, Fingers denied the plucking, Patient till paradise,
LOVE.
CHOICE.
Of all the souls that stand create I have elected one. When sense from spirit files away, And subterfuge is done;
When that which is and that which was Apart, intrinsic, stand, And this brief tragedy of flesh Is shifted like a sand;
When figures show their royal front And mists are carved away, -- Behold the atom I preferred To all the lists of clay!
I have no life but this, To lead it here; Nor any death, but lest Dispelled from there;
Nor tie to earths to come, Nor action new, Except through this extent, The realm of you.
three.
Your riches taught me poverty. Myself a millionnaire In little wealths, -- as girls could boast, -- Till broad as Buenos Ayre,
You drifted your dominions A different Peru; And I esteemed all poverty, For life's estate with you.
So much that, did I meet the queen, Her glory I should know: But this must be a different wealth, To miss it beggars so.
At least, it solaces to know That there exists a gold, Although I prove it just in time Its distance to behold!
THE CONTRACT.
I gave myself to him, And took himself for pay. The solemn contract of a life Was ratified this way.
The wealth might disappoint, Myself a poorer prove Than this great purchaser suspect, The daily own of Love
Depreciate the vision; But, till the merchant buy, Still fable, in the isles of spice, The subtle cargoes lie.
"GOING to him!
"Tell him it was n't a practised writer, You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled; You could hear the bodice tug, behind you, As if it held but the might of a child; You almost pitied it, you, it worked so. Tell him -- No, you may quibble there, For it would split his heart to know it, And then you and I were silenter.
And then I go the furthest off To counteract a knock; Then draw my little letter forth And softly pick its lock.
Then, glancing narrow at the wall, And narrow at the floor, For firm conviction of a mouse Not exorcised before,
Peruse how infinite I am To -- no one that you know! And sigh for lack of heaven, -- but not The heaven the creeds bestow.
seven.
Wild nights!
Wild nights!
Futile the winds To a heart in port, -- Done with the compass, Done with the chart.
eight.
AT HOME.
The night was wide, and furnished scant With but a single star, That often as a cloud it met Blew out itself for fear.
The wind pursued the little bush, And drove away the leaves November left; then clambered up And fretted in the eaves.
No squirrel went abroad; A dog's belated feet Like intermittent plush were heard Adown the empty street.
To feel if blinds be fast, And closer to the fire Her little rocking chair to draw, And shiver for the poor,
POSSESSION.
A charm invests a face Imperfectly beheld, -- The lady dare not lift her veil For fear it be dispelled.
THE LOVERS.
The rose did caper on her cheek, Her bodice rose and fell, Her pretty speech, like drunken men, Did stagger pitiful.
Her fingers fumbled at her work, -- Her needle would not go; What ailed so smart a little maid It puzzled me to know,
Till opposite I spied a cheek That bore another rose; Just opposite, another speech That like the drunkard goes;
thirteen.
The moon is distant from the sea, And yet with amber hands She leads him, docile as a boy, Along appointed sands.
He never misses a degree; Obedient to her eye, He comes just so far toward the town, Just so far goes away.
fourteen.
He put the belt around my life, -- I heard the buckle snap, And turned away, imperial, My lifetime folding up Deliberate, as a duke would do A kingdom's title deed, -- Henceforth a dedicated sort, A member of the cloud.
Yet not too far to come at call, And do the little toils That make the circuit of the rest, And deal occasional smiles To lives that stoop to notice mine And kindly ask it in, -- Whose invitation, knew you not For whom I must decline?
fifteen.
THE LOST JEWEL.
I woke and chid my honest fingers, -- The gem was gone; And now an amethyst remembrance Is all I own.
sixteen.
Let down the bars, O Death! The tired flocks come in Whose bleating ceases to repeat, Whose wandering is done.
-- How dim it sounds! And yet it will be done As sure as flocks go home at night Unto the shepherd's arm!
The smallest "robe" will fit me, And just a bit of "crown;" For you know we do not mind our dress When we are going home.
three.
At least to pray is left, is left. O Jesus! in the air I know not which thy chamber is, -- I 'm knocking everywhere.
Thou stirrest earthquake in the South, And maelstrom in the sea; Say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Hast thou no arm for me?
EPITAPH.
Step lightly on this narrow spot! The broadest land that grows Is not so ample as the breast These emerald seams enclose.
Step lofty; for this name is told As far as cannon dwell, Or flag subsist, or fame export Her deathless syllable.
Morns like these we parted; Noons like these she rose, Fluttering first, then firmer, To her fair repose.
Never did she lisp it, And 't was not for me; She was mute from transport, I, from agony!
Till the evening, nearing, One the shutters drew -- Quick! a sharper rustling! And this linnet flew!
A death blow is a life blow to some Who, till they died, did not alive become; Who, had they lived, had died, but when They died, vitality begun.
seven.
I read my sentence steadily, Reviewed it with my eyes, To see that I made no mistake In its extremest clause, --
The date, and manner of the shame; And then the pious form That "God have mercy" on the soul The jury voted him.
I made my soul familiar With her extremity, That at the last it should not be A novel agony,
But she and Death, acquainted, Meet tranquilly as friends, Salute and pass without a hint -- And there the matter ends.
eight.
I have not told my garden yet, Lest that should conquer me; I have not quite the strength now To break it to the bee.
I will not name it in the street, For shops would stare, that I, So shy, so very ignorant, Should have the face to die.
The hillsides must not know it, Where I have rambled so, Nor tell the loving forests The day that I shall go,
Nor lisp it at the table, Nor heedless by the way Hint that within the riddle One will walk to day!
THE BATTLE FIELD.
They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars, Like petals from a rose, When suddenly across the June A wind with fingers goes.
The only ghost I ever saw Was dressed in mechlin, -- so; He wore no sandal on his foot, And stepped like flakes of snow. His gait was soundless, like the bird, But rapid, like the roe; His fashions quaint, mosaic, Or, haply, mistletoe.
Some, too fragile for winter winds, The thoughtful grave encloses, -- Tenderly tucking them in from frost Before their feet are cold.
Never the treasures in her nest The cautious grave exposes, Building where schoolboy dare not look And sportsman is not bold.
twelve.
As by the dead we love to sit, Become so wondrous dear, As for the lost we grapple, Though all the rest are here, --
In broken mathematics We estimate our prize, Vast, in its fading ratio, To our penurious eyes!
thirteen.
MEMORIALS.
Death sets a thing significant The eye had hurried by, Except a perished creature Entreat us tenderly
To ponder little workmanships In crayon or in wool, With "This was last her fingers did," Industrious until
The thimble weighed too heavy, The stitches stopped themselves, And then 't was put among the dust Upon the closet shelves.
A book I have, a friend gave, Whose pencil, here and there, Had notched the place that pleased him, -- At rest his fingers are.
Now, when I read, I read not, For interrupting tears Obliterate the etchings Too costly for repairs.
fourteen.
I went to heaven, -- 'T was a small town, Lit with a ruby, Lathed with down. Stiller than the fields At the full dew, Beautiful as pictures No man drew. People like the moth, Of mechlin, frames, Duties of gossamer, And eider names. Almost contented I could be 'Mong such unique Society.
fifteen.
The house of supposition, The glimmering frontier That skirts the acres of perhaps, To me shows insecure.
Better than larger values, However true their show; This timid life of evidence Keeps pleading, "I don't know."
sixteen.
There is a shame of nobleness Confronting sudden pelf, -- A finer shame of ecstasy Convicted of itself.
A triumph when temptation's bribe Is slowly handed back, One eye upon the heaven renounced And one upon the rack.
eighteen.
nineteen.
I noticed people disappeared, When but a little child, -- Supposed they visited remote, Or settled regions wild.
FOLLOWING.
I had no cause to be awake, My best was gone to sleep, And morn a new politeness took, And failed to wake them up,
But called the others clear, And passed their curtains by. Sweet morning, when I over sleep, Knock, recollect, for me!
I looked at sunrise once, And then I looked at them, And wishfulness in me arose For circumstance the same.
So choosing but a gown And taking but a prayer, The only raiment I should need, I struggled, and was there.
twenty one.
Their costume, of a Sunday, Some manner of the hair, -- A prank nobody knew but them, Lost, in the sepulchre.
You asked the company to tea, Acquaintance, just a few, And chatted close with this grand thing That don't remember you?
Past bows and invitations, Past interview, and vow, Past what ourselves can estimate, -- That makes the quick of woe!
THE JOURNEY.
Our journey had advanced; Our feet were almost come To that odd fork in Being's road, Eternity by term.
Our pace took sudden awe, Our feet reluctant led. Before were cities, but between, The forest of the dead.
twenty three.
A COUNTRY BURIAL.
Be its mattress straight, Be its pillow round; Let no sunrise' yellow noise Interrupt this ground.
twenty four.
GOING.
On such a night, or such a night, Would anybody care If such a little figure Slipped quiet from its chair,
So quiet, oh, how quiet! That nobody might know But that the little figure Rocked softer, to and fro?
On such a dawn, or such a dawn, Would anybody sigh That such a little figure Too sound asleep did lie
For chanticleer to wake it, -- Or stirring house below, Or giddy bird in orchard, Or early task to do?
There was a little figure plump For every little knoll, Busy needles, and spools of thread, And trudging feet from school.
Playmates, and holidays, and nuts, And visions vast and small. Strange that the feet so precious charged Should reach so small a goal!
twenty five.
The general rose decays; But this, in lady's drawer, Makes summer when the lady lies In ceaseless rosemary.
twenty six.
I lived on dread; to those who know The stimulus there is In danger, other impetus Is numb and vital less.
twenty eight.
AT LENGTH.
Her final summer was it, And yet we guessed it not; If tenderer industriousness Pervaded her, we thought
A further force of life Developed from within, -- When Death lit all the shortness up, And made the hurry plain.
We wondered at our blindness, -- When nothing was to see But her Carrara guide post, -- At our stupidity,
When, duller than our dulness, The busy darling lay, So busy was she, finishing, So leisurely were we!
twenty nine.
One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place.
Far safer, of a midnight meeting External ghost, Than an interior confronting That whiter host.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop, The stones achase, Than, moonless, one's own self encounter In lonesome place.
Ourself, behind ourself concealed, Should startle most; Assassin, hid in our apartment, Be horror's least.
VANISHED.
She died, -- this was the way she died; And when her breath was done, Took up her simple wardrobe And started for the sun
Her little figure at the gate The angels must have spied, Since I could never find her Upon the mortal side.
thirty one.
PRECEDENCE.
Wait till the majesty of Death Invests so mean a brow! Almost a powdered footman Might dare to touch it now!
Wait till in everlasting robes This democrat is dressed, Then prate about "preferment" And "station" and the rest!
Around this quiet courtier Obsequious angels wait! Full royal is his retinue, Full purple is his state!
GONE.
Beguiling thus the wonder, The wondrous nearer drew; Hands bustled at the moorings -- The crowd respectful grew. Ascended from our vision To countenances new! A difference, a daisy, Is all the rest I knew!
thirty three.
REQUIEM.
Taken from men this morning, Carried by men to day, Met by the gods with banners Who marshalled her away.
One little maid from playmates, One little mind from school, -- There must be guests in Eden; All the rooms are full.
thirty four.
What inn is this Where for the night Peculiar traveller comes? Who is the landlord? Where the maids? Behold, what curious rooms! No ruddy fires on the hearth, No brimming tankards flow. Necromancer, landlord, Who are these below?
thirty five.
It was not death, for I stood up, And all the dead lie down; It was not night, for all the bells Put out their tongues, for noon.
It was not frost, for on my flesh I felt siroccos crawl, -- Nor fire, for just my marble feet Could keep a chancel cool.
And yet it tasted like them all; The figures I have seen Set orderly, for burial, Reminded me of mine,
As if my life were shaven And fitted to a frame, And could not breathe without a key; And 't was like midnight, some,
When everything that ticked has stopped, And space stares, all around, Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns, Repeal the beating ground.
But most like chaos, -- stopless, cool, -- Without a chance or spar, Or even a report of land To justify despair.
thirty six.
TILL THE END.
If I should disappoint the eyes That hunted, hunted so, to see, And could not bear to shut until They "noticed" me -- they noticed me;
My heart would wish it broke before, Since breaking then, since breaking then, Were useless as next morning's sun, Where midnight frosts had lain!
VOID.
Great streets of silence led away To neighborhoods of pause; Here was no notice, no dissent, No universe, no laws.
By clocks 't was morning, and for night The bells at distance called; But epoch had no basis here, For period exhaled.
thirty eight.
A throe upon the features A hurry in the breath, An ecstasy of parting Denominated "Death," --
thirty nine.
SAVED!
Of tribulation these are they Denoted by the white; The spangled gowns, a lesser rank Of victors designate.
All these did conquer; but the ones Who overcame most times Wear nothing commoner than snow, No ornament but palms.
Surrender is a sort unknown On this superior soil; Defeat, an outgrown anguish, Remembered as the mile
Our panting ankle barely gained When night devoured the road; But we stood whispering in the house, And all we said was "Saved"!
I think just how my shape will rise When I shall be forgiven, Till hair and eyes and timid head Are out of sight, in heaven.
I think just how my lips will weigh With shapeless, quivering prayer That you, so late, consider me, The sparrow of your care.
I mind me that of anguish sent, Some drifts were moved away Before my simple bosom broke, -- And why not this, if they?
And so, until delirious borne I con that thing, -- "forgiven," -- Till with long fright and longer trust I drop my heart, unshriven!
THE FORGOTTEN GRAVE.
After a hundred years Nobody knows the place, -- Agony, that enacted there, Motionless as peace.
Weeds triumphant ranged, Strangers strolled and spelled At the lone orthography Of the elder dead.
CHAPTER twelve
The great dining room at Hilcrest, the old Spencer homestead, was perhaps the pleasantest room in the house.
The house itself crowned the highest hill that overlooked the town, and its dining room windows and the veranda without, commanded a view of the river for miles, just where the valley was the greenest and the most beautiful.
On the other side of the veranda which ran around three sides of the house, one might see the town with its myriad roofs and tall chimneys; but although these same tall chimneys represented the wealth that made possible the great Spencer estate, yet it was the side of the veranda overlooking the green valley that was the most popular with the family.
It was said, to be sure, that old Jacob Spencer, who built the house, and who laid the foundations for the Spencer millions, had preferred the side that overlooked the town; and that he spent long hours gloating over the visible results of his thrift and enterprise.
This was, indeed, typical of the Spencer code-the farther away they could get from the oil that made the machinery of life run easily and noiselessly, the better pleased they were.
The dining room looked particularly pleasant this July evening.
A gentle breeze stirred the curtains at the open windows, and the setting sun peeped through the vines outside and glistened on the old family plate. Three generations of Spencers looked down from the walls on the two men and the woman sitting at the great mahogany table.
The two men and the woman, however, were not looking at the sunlight, the vines, or the swaying curtains; they were looking at each other, and their eyes were troubled and questioning.
"You say she is coming next week?" asked the younger man, glancing at the letter in the other's hand.
"Yes.
Tuesday afternoon."
"But, Frank, this is so-sudden," remonstrated the young fellow, laughing a little as he uttered the trite phrase.
Frank Spencer made an impatient gesture that showed how great was his perturbation.
"Come, come, Ned, don't be foolish," he protested.
"You know very well that your brother's stepdaughter has been my ward for a dozen years."
"Yes, but that is all I know," rejoined the young man, quietly.
"The boy is right," interposed the low voice of the woman across the table.
"Ned doesn't know anything about her.
He was a mere child himself when it all happened, and he's been away from home most of the time since.
For that matter, we don't know much about her ourselves."
"We certainly don't," sighed Frank Spencer; then he raised his head and squared his shoulders.
"See here, good people, this will never do in the world," he asserted with sudden authority.
"I have offered the hospitality of this house to a homeless, orphan girl, and she has accepted it.
There is nothing for us to do now but to try to make her happy.
After all, we needn't worry-it may turn out that she will make us happy."
How does she look?" catechized Ned.
His brother shook his head.
"I don't know," he replied simply.
"You don't know!
But, surely you have seen her!"
Frank paused, and looked at the letter in his hand.
After a minute he laid it gently down.
When he spoke his voice was not quite steady.
You were twelve years old when he married a widow by the name of Kendall who lived in Houghtonsville where he had been practising.
As it chanced, none of us went to the wedding.
You were taken suddenly ill, and neither Della nor myself would leave you, and father was in Bermuda that winter for his health.
mrs Kendall had a daughter, Margaret, about ten years old, who was at school somewhere in the Berkshires.
It was to that school that I went when the terrible news came that Harry and his new wife had lost their lives in that awful railroad accident.
That was the first time that I saw Margaret.
"The poor child was, of course, heartbroken and inconsolable; but her grief took a peculiar turn.
The mere sight of me drove her almost into hysterics.
She would have nothing whatever to do with me, or with any of her stepfather's people.
She reasoned that if her mother had not married, there would have been no wedding journey; and if there had been no wedding journey there would have been no accident, and that her mother would then have been alive, and well.
"Arguments, pleadings, and entreaties were in vain.
She would not listen to me, or even see me.
She held her hands before her face and screamed if I so much as came into the room.
She was nothing but a child, of course, and not even a normal one at that, for she had had a very strange life.
At five she was lost in New York City, and for four years she lived on the streets and in the sweat shops, enduring almost unbelievable poverty and hardships."
"By Jove!" exclaimed Ned under his breath.
"It was only seven or eight months before the wedding that she was found," went on Frank, "and of course the influence of the wild life she had led was still with her more or less, and made her not easily subject to control.
There was nothing for me to do but to leave the poor little thing where she was, particularly as there seemed to be no other place for her.
She would not come with me, and she had no people of her own to whom she could turn for love and sympathy.
"As you know, poor Harry was conscious for some hours after the accident, long enough to make his will and dictate the letter to me, leaving Margaret to my care-boy though I was.
I was only twenty, you see; but, really, there was no one else to whom he could leave her.
That was something over thirteen years ago.
Margaret must be about twenty three now."
"And you've not seen her since?" There was keen reproach in Ned's voice.
Frank smiled.
"Yes, I've seen her twice," he replied.
"And of course I've written to her many times, and have always kept in touch with those she was with. She stayed at the Berkshire school five years; then-with some fear and trembling, I own-I went to see her.
I found a grave eyed little miss who answered my questions with studied politeness, and who agreed without comment to the proposition that I place her in a school where she might remain until she was ready for college-should she elect to go to college."
"But her vacations-did she never come then?" questioned Ned.
"no
At first I did not ask her, of course.
It was out of the question, as she was feeling.
Some one of her teachers always looked out for her. They all pitied her, and naturally did everything they could for her, as did her mates at school.
She wrote me stiff little notes in which she informed me that she was to spend the holidays with some Blanche or Dorothy or Mabel of her acquaintance.
"She was nineteen when I saw her again.
I found now a charming, graceful girl, with peculiarly haunting blue eyes, and heavy coils of bronze gold hair that kinked and curled about her little pink ears in a most distracting fashion.
Even now, though, she would not come to my home. She was going abroad with friends.
The party included an irreproachable chaperon, so of course I had nothing to say; while as for money-she had all of her mother's not inconsiderable fortune besides everything that had been her stepfather's; so of course there was no question on that score.
When she came of age she specially requested me to make no change in her affairs, but to regard herself as my ward for the present, just as she had been.
So I still call myself her guardian.
This June was her graduation.
I had forgotten the fact until I received the little engraved invitation a week or two ago.
I thought of running down for it, but I couldn't get away very well, and-well, I didn't go, that's all. But I did write and ask her to make this house her home, and here is her reply.
She thanks me, and will come next Tuesday.
There! now you have it.
You know all that I do." And Frank Spencer leaned back in his chair with a long sigh.
"Neither do i"
"Oh, but you've seen her."
"Yes; and how?
Do you suppose that those two or three meetings were very illuminating?
no
I've been told this, however," he added.
She even carried her distress over their condition to such an extent that her mother really feared for her reason.
All her teachers, therefore, were instructed to keep from her all further knowledge of poverty and trouble; and particularly to instil into her mind the fact that there was really in the world a great deal of pleasure and happiness."
Over across the table mrs Merideth shivered a little.
"Dear me!" she sighed.
"I do hope the child is well over those notions. I shouldn't want her to mix up here with the mill people.
I never did quite like those settlement women, anyway, and only think what might happen with one in one's own family!"
"I don't think I should worry, sister sweet," laughed Frank.
"I haven't seen much of the young lady, but I think I have seen enough for that.
As near as I can judge, Miss Margaret Kendall does not resemble your dreaded 'settlement worker' in the least.
thirteen
HE DISCUSSES THE MUSIC CURE
"Good morning, Doctor," said the Idiot, as Capsule, m d, entered the dining room, "I am mighty glad you've come.
I've wanted for a long time to ask you about this music cure that everybody is talking about, and get you, if possible, to write me out a list of musical nostrums for every day use.
There's nothing but one quinine pill and a soda mint drop left in it, and if there's anything in the music cure, I don't think I'll have it filled again.
"You ought to submit your tongue to some scientific student of dynamics.
I am inclined to think, from my own observation of its ways, that it contains the germ of perpetual motion."
"I will consider your suggestion," replied the Idiot.
"Meanwhile, let us consult harmoniously together on the original point.
"And as for the music cure, I don't know anything about it; haven't heard everybody talking about it; and doubt the existence of any such thing outside of that mysterious realm which is bounded by the four corners of your own bright particular cerebellum.
What do you mean by the music cure?"
"Why, the papers have been full of it lately," explained the Idiot. "The claim is made that in music lies the panacea for all human ills.
It may not be able to perform a surgical operation like that which is required for the removal of a leg, and I don't believe even Wagner ever composed a measure that could be counted on successfully to eliminate one's vermiform appendix from its chief sphere of usefulness; but for other things, like measles, mumps, the snuffles, or indigestion, it is said to be wonderfully efficacious.
What I wanted to find out from you was just what composers were best for which specific troubles."
"You'll have to go to somebody else for the information," said the Doctor.
"I have seen a reference to it somewhere," put in mr Whitechoker, coming to the Idiot's rescue.
"As I recall the matter, some lady had been cured of a nervous affection by a scientific application of some musical poultice or other, and the general expectation seems to be that some day we shall find in music a cure for all our human ills, as the Idiot suggests."
"I saw that same item and several others besides, and I have only told the truth when I say that a large number of people are considering the possibilities of music as a substitute for drugs.
I am surprised that dr Capsule has neither heard nor thought about it, for I should think it would prove to be a pleasant and profitable field for speculation. Even I, who am only a dabbler in medicine and know no more about it than the effects of certain remedies upon my own symptoms, have noticed that music of a certain sort is a sure emollient for nervous conditions."
"For example?" said the Doctor.
"Of course, we don't doubt your word; but when a man makes a statement based upon personal observation it is profitable to ask him what his precise experience has been, merely for the purpose of adding to our own knowledge."
"Well," said the Idiot, "the first instance that I can recall is that of a Wagner opera and its effects upon me.
For a number of years I suffered a great deal from insomnia.
I could not get two hours of consecutive sleep, and the effect of my sufferings was to make me nervous and irritable.
Suddenly somebody presented me with a couple of tickets for a performance of 'Parsifal,' and I went.
It began at five o'clock in the afternoon.
I fell into a deep and refreshing slumber.
I rubbed my eyes, and looked about me.
It was true-the great auditorium was empty, and was gradually darkening.
I put on my hat and walked out refreshed, having slept from five twenty until twelve, or six hours and forty minutes straight.
The curtain had hardly risen before I retired to the little ante room of the box our party occupied and dozed off into a fathomless sleep.
I didn't wake up this time until nine o'clock the next day, the rest of the party having gone off without awakening me as a sort of joke.
Clearly Wagner, according to my way of thinking, then, deserves to rank among the most effective narcotics known to modern science.
And, best of all, there was no reaction: no splitting headache or shaky hand the next day, but just the calm, quiet, contented feeling that goes with the sense of having got completely rested up."
"You run a dreadful risk, however," said the Doctor, with a sarcastic smile.
"The Wagner habit is a terrible thing to acquire, mr Idiot."
"That may be," said the Idiot; "worse than the sulfonal habit by a great deal, I am told; but I am in no danger of becoming a victim to it while it costs from five to seven dollars a dose.
He had spent the day down at Asbury Park, and had eaten not wisely but too copiously.
At the second bar of the 'Lost Chord' the awful pain that was gradually gnawing away at his vitals seemed to lose its poignancy in the face of the greater suffering, and physical relief was instant.
As the musician proceeded, the internal disorder yielded gradually to the external and finally passed away, entirely leaving him so far from prostrate that by one a m he was out of bed and actually girding himself with a shot gun and an Indian club to go up stairs for a physical encounter with the cornetist."
"And you reason from this that Sullivan's 'Lost Chord' is a cure for cholera morbus, eh?" sneered the Doctor.
"It would seem so," said the Idiot.
Scientific experiment will demonstrate before long just what composition will cure specific ills.
Instead of dosing the kids with cod liver oil when they need a tonic, they will be set to work at a mechanical piano and braced up on 'Narcissus.' 'There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To night' will become an effective remedy for a sudden chill.
Tchaikowsky, to be well shaken before taken, will be an effective remedy for a torpid liver, and the man or woman who suffers from lassitude will doubtless find in the lively airs of our two step composers an efficient tonic to bring their vitality up to a high standard of activity.
"And the drug stores will be driven out of business, I presume," said the Doctor.
"No," said the Idiot.
"They will substitute music for drugs, that is all.
This alone will serve to popularize sickness, and, instead of being driven out of business, their trade will pick up."
"And the doctor, and the doctor's gig, and all the appurtenances of his profession-what becomes of them?" demanded the Doctor.
"And why, pray?" asked the Doctor.
"Because there are no more drugs, must the physician walk?"
"Not at all," said the Idiot.
CHAPTER three.
Shingis Old Town-The dynamiter-Yellow Creek.
It was then the seat of Barney Curran, an Indian trader-the same Curran whom Washington, three years later, employed in the mission to Venango.
But the smaller sister town of Beaver, on the lower side of the mouth,--or rather the western outskirts of Beaver a mile below the mouth,--has the most ancient history.
On account of a ford across the Beaver, about where is now a slack water dam, the neighborhood became of early importance to the French as a fur trading center.
During the French and Indian War, the place was prominent as a rendezvous for the enemies of American borderers; numerous bloody forays were planned here, and hither were brought to be adopted into the tribes, or to be cruelly tortured, according to savage whim, many of the captives whose tales have made lurid the history of the Ohio Valley.
The wide uplands at once become more rustic, especially those of the left bank, which no longer is threaded by a railway, as heretofore all the way from Brownsville.
The two ranges of undulating hills, some three hundred and fifty feet high, forming the rim of the basin, are about a half mile apart; while the river itself is perhaps a third of a mile in width, leaving narrow bottoms on alternate sides, as the stream in gentle curves rebounds from the rocky base of one hill to that of another.
When winding about such a base, there is at this stage of the water a sloping, stony beach, some ten to twenty yards in width, from which ascends the sharp steep, for the most part heavily tree clad-maples, birches, elms and oaks of goodly girth, the latter as yet in but half leaf.
On the "bottom side" of the river, the alluvial terrace presents a sheer wall of clay rising from eight to a dozen feet above the beach, which is often thick grown with willows, whose roots hold the soil from becoming too easy a prey to the encroaching current.
Sycamores now begin to appear in the bottoms, although of less size than we shall meet below.
Sometimes the little towns we see occupy a narrow and more or less rocky bench upon the hill side of the stream, but settlement is chiefly found upon the bottoms.
Shippingsport (thirty two miles), on the left bank, where we stopped this noon for eggs, butter, and fresh water, is on a narrow hill bench-a dry, woe begone hamlet, side tracked from the path of the world's progress. While I was on shore, negotiating with the sleepy storekeeper, Pilgrim and her crew waited alongside the flatboat which serves as the town ferry.
These cartridges, he explained, are dropped into oil or gas wells whose owners are desirous of accelerating the flow.
The cartridge, in exploding, enlarges the hole, and often the output of the well is at once increased by several hundred per cent.
The young fellow had the air of a self confident rustic, with little experience in the world. Indeed, it seemed from his elated manner as if this might be his first trip from home, and the blowing of oil wells an incidental speculation.
It was with some difficulty that he could comprehend the fact.
A hundred miles on the river was a great outing for this village lad; nine hundred was rather beyond his comprehension, although he finally compromised by "allowing" that we might be going as far as Cincinnati.
Wouldn't the Doctor go into partnership with him?
By the middle of the afternoon we reached the boundary line (forty miles) between Pennsylvania on the east and Ohio and West Virginia on the west.
Two high iron towers supporting the cable of a current ferry add dignity to the twin settlements.
A stone monument, six feet high, just observable through the willows on the right shore, marks the boundary; while upon the left bank, surmounting a high, rock strewn beach, is the dilapidated frame house of a West Virginia "cracker," through whose garden patch the line takes its way, unobserved and unthought of by pigs, chickens and children, which in hopeless promiscuity swarm the interstate premises.
For many days to come we are to have Ohio on the right bank and West Virginia on the left.
There is no perceptible change, of course, in the contour of the rugged hills which hem us in; yet somehow it stirs the blood to reflect that quite within the recollection of all of us in Pilgrim's crew, save the Boy, that left bank was the house of bondage, and that right the land of freedom, and this river of ours the highway between.
East Liverpool (forty four miles) and Wellsville (forty eight miles) are long stretches of pottery and tile making works, both of them on the Ohio shore. There is nothing there to lure us, however, and we determined to camp on the banks of Yellow Creek (fifty one miles), a peaceful little Ohio stream some two rods in width, its mouth crossed by two great iron spans, for railway and highway.
But although Yellow Creek winds most gracefully and is altogether a charming bit of rustic water, deep set amid picturesque slopes of field and wood, we fail to find upon its banks an appropriate camping place.
It is storied ground, this neighborhood of ours.
Over there at the mouth of Yellow Creek was, a hundred and twenty years ago, the camp of Logan, the Mingo chief; opposite, on the West Virginia shore, Baker's Bottom, where occurred the treacherous massacre of Logan's family.
The tragedy is interwoven with the history of the trans Alleghany border; and schoolboys have in many lands and tongues recited the pathetic defense of the poor Mingo, who, more sinned against than sinning, was crushed in the inevitable struggle between savagery and civilization. "Who is there to mourn for Logan?"
Above, just out of sight, are moored a brace of steam pile drivers engaged in strengthening the dam which unites us with Baker's Bottom.
There is a gentle tinkling of cowbells on the Ohio shore, and on both are human voices confused by distance.
All pervading is the deep, sullen roar of a great wing dam, a half mile or so down stream.
The camp is gypsy like.
Our washing lies spread on bushes, where it will catch the first peep of morning sun
Perishable provisions rest in notches of trees, where the cool evening breeze will strike them. Seated upon the "grub" box, I am writing up our log by aid of the lantern hung from a branch overhead, while W----, ever busy, sits by with her mending.
CHAPTER thirty.
At first I could hardly see anything.
My eyes, unaccustomed to the light, quickly closed.
When I was able to reopen them, I stood more stupefied even than surprised.
"The sea!" I cried.
"Yes," my uncle replied, "the Liedenbrock Sea; and I don't suppose any other discoverer will ever dispute my claim to name it after myself as its first discoverer."
The deeply indented shore was lined with a breadth of fine shining sand, softly lapped by the waves, and strewn with the small shells which had been inhabited by the first of created beings.
The waves broke on this shore with the hollow echoing murmur peculiar to vast inclosed spaces.
A light foam flew over the waves before the breath of a moderate breeze, and some of the spray fell upon my face. On this slightly inclining shore, about a hundred fathoms from the limit of the waves, came down the foot of a huge wall of vast cliffs, which rose majestically to an enormous height.
Farther on the eye discerned their massive outline sharply defined against the hazy distant horizon.
It was quite an ocean, with the irregular shores of earth, but desert and frightfully wild in appearance.
If my eyes were able to range afar over this great sea, it was because a peculiar light brought to view every detail of it.
It was not the light of the sun, with his dazzling shafts of brightness and the splendour of his rays; nor was it the pale and uncertain shimmer of the moonbeams, the dim reflection of a nobler body of light.
It was like an aurora borealis, a continuous cosmical phenomenon, filling a cavern of sufficient extent to contain an ocean.
The vault that spanned the space above, the sky, if it could be called so, seemed composed of vast plains of cloud, shifting and variable vapours, which by their condensation must at certain times fall in torrents of rain.
I should have thought that under so powerful a pressure of the atmosphere there could be no evaporation; and yet, under a law unknown to me, there were broad tracts of vapour suspended in the air.
Deep shadows reposed upon their lower wreaths; and often, between two separated fields of cloud, there glided down a ray of unspeakable lustre.
The general effect was sad, supremely melancholy.
As for its height, it must have been several leagues.
Where this vault rested upon its granite base no eye could tell; but there was a cloud hanging far above, the height of which we estimated at twelve thousand feet, a greater height than that of any terrestrial vapour, and no doubt due to the great density of the air.
The word cavern does not convey any idea of this immense space; words of human tongue are inadequate to describe the discoveries of him who ventures into the deep abysses of earth.
Besides I could not tell upon what geological theory to account for the existence of such an excavation.
Had the cooling of the globe produced it?
If the grotto of Guachara, in Colombia, visited by Humboldt, had not given up the whole of the secret of its depth to the philosopher, who investigated it to the depth of two thousand five hundred feet, it probably did not extend much farther.
But what were these cavities compared to that in which I stood with wonder and admiration, with its sky of luminous vapours, its bursts of electric light, and a vast sea filling its bed?
My imagination fell powerless before such immensity.
Words failed me to express my feelings.
I felt as if I was in some distant planet Uranus or Neptune-and in the presence of phenomena of which my terrestrial experience gave me no cognisance.
It will be easily conceived that after an imprisonment of forty seven days in a narrow gallery it was the height of physical enjoyment to breathe a moist air impregnated with saline particles.
My uncle, already familiar with these wonders, had ceased to feel surprise.
"Well, take my arm, Axel, and let us follow the windings of the shore."
I eagerly accepted, and we began to coast along this new sea.
On the left huge pyramids of rock, piled one upon another, produced a prodigious titanic effect.
Amongst these streams I recognised our faithful travelling companion, the Hansbach, coming to lose its little volume quietly in the mighty sea, just as if it had done nothing else since the beginning of the world.
"We shall see it no more," I said, with a sigh.
But at that moment my attention was drawn to an unexpected sight.
At a distance of five hundred paces, at the turn of a high promontory, appeared a high, tufted, dense forest.
It was composed of trees of moderate height, formed like umbrellas, with exact geometrical outlines.
The currents of wind seemed to have had no effect upon their shape, and in the midst of the windy blasts they stood unmoved and firm, just like a clump of petrified cedars.
I could not give any name to these singular creations.
Were they some of the two hundred thousand species of vegetables known hitherto, and did they claim a place of their own in the lacustrine flora?
No; when we arrived under their shade my surprise turned into admiration.
There stood before me productions of earth, but of gigantic stature, which my uncle immediately named.
"It is only a forest of mushrooms," said he.
And he was right.
There they stood in thousands.
No light could penetrate between their huge cones, and complete darkness reigned beneath those giants; they formed settlements of domes placed in close array like the round, thatched roofs of a central African city.
Yet I wanted to penetrate farther underneath, though a chill fell upon me as soon as I came under those cellular vaults.
But the subterranean vegetation was not confined to these fungi. Farther on rose groups of tall trees of colourless foliage and easy to recognise.
They were lowly shrubs of earth, here attaining gigantic size; lycopodiums, a hundred feet high; the huge sigillaria, found in our coal mines; tree ferns, as tall as our fir trees in northern latitudes; lepidodendra, with cylindrical forked stems, terminated by long leaves, and bristling with rough hairs like those of the cactus.
"Wonderful, magnificent, splendid!" cried my uncle.
"Here is the entire flora of the second period of the world-the transition period.
These, humble garden plants with us, were tall trees in the early ages.
Never had botanist such a feast as this!"
Providence seems to have preserved in this immense conservatory the antediluvian plants which the wisdom of philosophers has so sagaciously put together again."
"It is a conservatory, Axel; but is it not also a menagerie?"
"Yes; no doubt of it.
Look at that dust under your feet; see the bones scattered on the ground."
I had rushed upon these remains, formed of indestructible phosphates of lime, and without hesitation I named these monstrous bones, which lay scattered about like decayed trunks of trees.
"These are the molar teeth of the deinotherium; this femur must have belonged to the greatest of those beasts, the megatherium.
It certainly is a menagerie, for these remains were not brought here by a deluge.
Here are entire skeletons.
And yet I cannot understand the appearance of these quadrupeds in a granite cavern."
"Why?"
"Because animal life existed upon the earth only in the secondary period, when a sediment of soil had been deposited by the rivers, and taken the place of the incandescent rocks of the primitive period."
"No doubt; and there is a geological explanation of the fact.
Probably there were subsidences of the outer crust, when a portion of the sedimentary deposits was carried down sudden openings."
"That may be," I replied; "but if there have been creatures now extinct in these underground regions, why may not some of those monsters be now roaming through these gloomy forests, or hidden behind the steep crags?"
And as this unpleasant notion got hold of me, I surveyed with anxious scrutiny the open spaces before me; but no living creature appeared upon the barren strand.
I felt rather tired, and went to sit down at the end of a promontory, at the foot of which the waves came and beat themselves into spray. Thence my eye could sweep every part of the bay; within its extremity a little harbour was formed between the pyramidal cliffs, where the still waters slept untouched by the boisterous winds.
I almost fancied I should presently see some ship issue from it, full sail, and take to the open sea under the southern breeze.
But this illusion lasted a very short time.
We were the only living creatures in this subterranean world.
When the wind lulled, a deeper silence than that of the deserts fell upon the arid, naked rocks, and weighed upon the surface of the ocean.
Anxious queries arose to my lips.
Where did that sea terminate?
Where did it lead to?
My uncle made no doubt about it at all; I both desired and feared.
CHAPTER thirty one.
The next morning I awoke feeling perfectly well.
I came back to breakfast with a good appetite.
Hans was a good caterer for our little household; he had water and fire at his disposal, so that he was able to vary our bill of fare now and then. For dessert he gave us a few cups of coffee, and never was coffee so delicious.
"Now," said my uncle, "now is the time for high tide, and we must not lose the opportunity to study this phenomenon."
"What! the tide!" I cried.
"Can the influence of the sun and moon be felt down here?"
"Why not?
This mass of water cannot escape the general law.
And in spite of the heavy atmospheric pressure on the surface, you will see it rise like the Atlantic itself."
"Here is the tide rising," I cried.
"This is wonderful," I said.
Who would ever have imagined, under this terrestrial crust, an ocean with ebbing and flowing tides, with winds and storms?"
"Well," replied my uncle, "is there any scientific reason against it?"
"To be sure," said I; "and why should not these waters yield to us fishes of unknown species?"
"At any rate," he replied, "we have not seen any yet."
"We will try, Axel, for we must penetrate all secrets of these newly discovered regions."
"But where are we, uncle? for I have not yet asked you that question, and your instruments must be able to furnish the answer."
"Horizontally, three hundred and fifty leagues from Iceland."
"So much as that?"
"I am sure of not being a mile out of my reckoning."
"And does the compass still show south-east?"
"Would you then conclude," I said, "that the magnetic pole is somewhere between the surface of the globe and the point where we are?"
"Exactly so; and it is likely enough that if we were to reach the spot beneath the polar regions, about that seventy first degree where Sir james Ross has discovered the magnetic pole to be situated, we should see the needle point straight up.
Therefore that mysterious centre of attraction is at no great depth."
I remarked: "It is so; and here is a fact which science has scarcely suspected."
"Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth."
"What depth have we now reached?"
"We are thirty five leagues below the surface."
"Yes," answered the Professor laughing.
The great Architect has built it of the best materials; and never could man have given it so wide a stretch.
What are the finest arches of bridges and the arcades of cathedrals, compared with this far reaching vault, with a radius of three leagues, beneath which a wide and tempest tossed ocean may flow at its ease?"
"Oh, I am not afraid that it will fall down upon my head.
But now what are your plans?
Are you not thinking of returning to the surface now?"
"But how are we to get down below this liquid surface?"
"Oh, I am not going to dive head foremost.
But if all oceans are properly speaking but lakes, since they are encompassed by land, of course this internal sea will be surrounded by a coast of granite, and on the opposite shores we shall find fresh passages opening."
"How long do you suppose this sea to be?"
"Thirty or forty leagues; so that we have no time to lose, and we shall set sail to morrow."
"Set sail, shall we?
But I should like to see my boat first."
"It will not be a boat at all, but a good, well made raft."
"Why," I said, "a raft would be just as hard to make as a boat, and I don't see-"
"I know you don't see; but you might hear if you would listen.
Don't you hear the hammer at work?
Come, and you will see for yourself."
After half an hour's walking, on the other side of the promontory which formed the little natural harbour, I perceived Hans at work.
In a few more steps I was at his side.
To my great surprise a half finished raft was already lying on the sand, made of a peculiar kind of wood, and a great number of planks, straight and bent, and of frames, were covering the ground, enough almost for a little fleet.
"Uncle, what wood is this?" I cried.
"It is fir, pine, or birch, and other northern coniferae, mineralised by the action of the sea.
It is called surturbrand, a variety of brown coal or lignite, found chiefly in Iceland."
Just look," added my uncle, throwing into the sea one of those precious waifs.
The bit of wood, after disappearing, returned to the surface and oscillated to and fro with the waves.
"Are you convinced?" said my uncle.
"I am quite convinced, although it is incredible!"
By next evening, thanks to the industry and skill of our guide, the raft was made.
CHAPTER thirty two.
On the thirteenth of August we awoke early.
We were now to begin to adopt a mode of travelling both more expeditious and less fatiguing than hitherto.
A mast was made of two poles spliced together, a yard was made of a third, a blanket borrowed from our coverings made a tolerable sail. There was no want of cordage for the rigging, and everything was well and firmly made.
The provisions, the baggage, the instruments, the guns, and a good quantity of fresh water from the rocks around, all found their proper places on board; and at six the Professor gave the signal to embark. Hans had fitted up a rudder to steer his vessel.
He took the tiller, and unmoored; the sail was set, and we were soon afloat.
At the moment of leaving the harbour, my uncle, who was tenaciously fond of naming his new discoveries, wanted to give it a name, and proposed mine amongst others.
"But I have a better to propose," I said: "Grauben.
The wind was from the north-west.
We went with it at a high rate of speed.
The dense atmosphere acted with great force and impelled us swiftly on.
At this rate, he said, we shall make thirty leagues in twenty four hours, and we shall soon come in sight of the opposite shore.
I made no answer, but went and sat forward.
The eastern and western strands spread wide as if to bid us farewell.
Before our eyes lay far and wide a vast sea; shadows of great clouds swept heavily over its silver grey surface; the glistening bluish rays of electric light, here and there reflected by the dancing drops of spray, shot out little sheaves of light from the track we left in our rear.
Soon we entirely lost sight of land; no object was left for the eye to judge by, and but for the frothy track of the raft, I might have thought we were standing still.
I was aware of the great powers of vegetation that characterise these plants, which grow at a depth of twelve thousand feet, reproduce themselves under a pressure of four hundred atmospheres, and sometimes form barriers strong enough to impede the course of a ship.
Evening came, and, as on the previous day, I perceived no change in the luminous condition of the air.
It was a constant condition, the permanency of which might be relied upon.
After supper I laid myself down at the foot of the mast, and fell asleep in the midst of fantastic reveries.
Hans, keeping fast by the helm, let the raft run on, which, after all, needed no steering, the wind blowing directly aft.
I shall therefore reproduce here these daily notes, written, so to speak, as the course of events directed, in order to furnish an exact narrative of our passage.
Nothing in sight before us.
Intensity of light the same.
Weather fine; that is to say, that the clouds are flying high, are light, and bathed in a white atmosphere resembling silver in a state of fusion.
At noon Hans prepared a hook at the end of a line.
He baited it with a small piece of meat and flung it into the sea.
For two hours nothing was caught.
No, there's a pull at the line.
Hans draws it in and brings out a struggling fish.
"A sturgeon," I cried; "a small sturgeon."
The Professor eyes the creature attentively, and his opinion differs from mine.
The head of this fish was flat, but rounded in front, and the anterior part of its body was plated with bony, angular scales; it had no teeth, its pectoral fins were large, and of tail there was none.
The animal belonged to the same order as the sturgeon, but differed from that fish in many essential particulars.
"This fish belongs to an extinct family, of which only fossil traces are found in the devonian formations."
"What!" I cried.
To have in one's possession a living specimen is a happy event for a naturalist."
"But to what family does it belong?"
But this one displays a peculiarity confined to all fishes that inhabit subterranean waters.
I looked: nothing could be more certain.
But supposing it might be a solitary case, we baited afresh, and threw out our line.
This unhoped for catch recruited our stock of provisions.
Thus it is evident that this sea contains none but species known to us in their fossil state, in which fishes as well as reptiles are the less perfectly and completely organised the farther back their date of creation.
Perhaps we may yet meet with some of those saurians which science has reconstructed out of a bit of bone or cartilage.
I took up the telescope and scanned the whole horizon, and found it everywhere a desert sea.
I gaze upward in the air.
There are sufficient fish for their support.
I survey the whole space that stretches overhead; it is as desert as the shore was.
Though awake I fell into a dream.
I thought I could see floating on the surface of the waters enormous chelonia, pre adamite tortoises, resembling floating islands.
Higher up, the protopitheca-the first monkey that appeared on the globe-is climbing up the steep ascents.
In the uppermost regions of the air immense birds, more powerful than the cassowary, and larger than the ostrich, spread their vast breadth of wings and strike with their heads the granite vault that bounds the sky.
I return to the scriptural periods or ages of the world, conventionally called 'days,' long before the appearance of man, when the unfinished world was as yet unfitted for his support.
The mammals disappear, then the birds vanish, then the reptiles of the secondary period, and finally the fish, the crustaceans, molluscs, and articulated beings.
Then the zoophytes of the transition period also return to nothing.
Vegetation becomes accelerated.
And I myself am floating with wild caprice in the midst of this nebulous mass of fourteen hundred thousand times the volume of the earth into which it will one day be condensed, and carried forward amongst the planetary bodies.
My body is no longer firm and terrestrial; it is resolved into its constituent atoms, subtilised, volatilised.
But is it not a dream?
Whither is it carrying me?
My feverish hand has vainly attempted to describe upon paper its strange and wonderful details.
I have forgotten everything that surrounds me.
The Professor, the guide, the raft-are all gone out of my ken.
An illusion has laid hold upon me.
"What is the matter?" my uncle breaks in.
My staring eyes are fixed vacantly upon him.
At that moment I felt the sinewy hand of Hans seizing me vigorously. But for him, carried away by my dream, I should have thrown myself into the sea.
"Is he mad?" cried the Professor.
"What is it all about?" at last I cried, returning to myself.
"Do you feel ill?" my uncle asked.
Is all going on right?"
JESUS: AS GOD; AS A MAN
"These hereditary enemies of the Truth... have even had the heart to degrade this first preacher of the Mountain, the purest hero of Liberty; for, unable to deny that he was earth's greatest man, they have made of him heaven's smallest god."--Heine: Reisebilder.
The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus, which, in whatever relation regarded, is full of self contradictions and absurdities, is, above all, pernicious in its moral and spiritual results.
Most myths have a certain justification in their beauty, in their symbolism of high truth.
This one distorts the beauty, degrades the sublimity, stultifies the meaning of the facts and the character wherein it has been founded, taking away all true grandeur from Jesus, benumbing our love and reverence.
Jesus, as a man, commands my heart's best homage.
His words, as reported by the Evangelists, are ever flowing fountains of spiritual refreshments; and I feel that he was in himself even far more wise and good than he appears in the gospel.
What disciple could be expected to report perfectly the words of a teacher so mystically sublime?
When we find sentences of the purest beauty and wisdom in the records of a man's conversation, we may safely proportion the whole philosophical character of the speaker to such sentences.
They mark the altitude at which his spirit loved to dwell.
We are but completing the circle from the clearest fragment arc left.
Jesus as a man, whose words have been recorded by fallible men, is not lowered in my esteem by such contradictions as I find between his various speeches.
Every proverb has its antagonist proverb, each being true to a certain extent, or in certain relations.
Could we conceive an abstract intellect, we might conceive it dwelling continually in the sphere of abstract and absolute truth; but no man, however wise, dwells continually in this sphere.
The wise man finds himself surrounded and obstructed by certain concrete errors, and he attacks these errors with relative truths.
For a wise man only attacks the errors that are in his way; things which he never meets he can scarcely think of as obstructions.
Hannibal, whose business it is to get into Italy from Gaul, sets about blasting the Alps.
Stephenson, whose business it is to get from Manchester to Liverpool, sets about filling up Chat Moss.
The same man, who muffles himself in as many furs as he can get in Greenland, will strip himself to a linen robe in Jamaica.
Luther said that the human mind is like a drunken peasant on horseback: he is rolling off on the right, you push him up, he then rolls over on the left.
Exactly so; and because one sage, seeing him roll down to the right, has pushed him up on the right, while another sage, seeing him roll down to the left, has pushed him up on the left, are the two sages to be accounted antagonists?
When deity speaks and deity reports the speeches, all should be absolute truth transparently self consistent, else what advantage or gain have we by the substitution of God for Man?
Why bring in God to utter and record what could have been as well uttered and recorded by man?
Everything for which we love and venerate the man Jesus becomes a bitter and absurd mockery when attributed to the Lord Christ.
He went about doing good: if God, why did he not do all good at once?
He cured many sick: if God, why did he not give the whole world health?
He associated with publicans and sinners: if God, why did he make publicans and sinners at all?
He preached the kingdom of heaven: if God, why did he not bring the kingdom with him and make all mankind fit for it?
He loved the poor, he taught the ignorant: if God, why did he let any remain poor and ignorant?
He lived an example of holiness to us all: if God, how can our humanity imitate Deity?
And while one is grinding such chaff in the theological mill, he may as well have a turn at the Atonement, which is, in fact, the essence of the dogma of the Incarnation.
No wonder this poor Atonement has been attacked on all sides; it invites attack; one may say that in every aspect it piteously implores us to attack it and relieve it from the misery of its spectral existence.
It is so full of breaches that one does not know where to storm.
The whole scheme of the Atonement, as planned by God, is based upon a crime-a crime infinitely atrocious, the crime of murder and deicide, is essential to its success: if Judas had not betrayed, if the Jews had not insisted, if Pilate had not surrendered, if all these turpitudes had not been secured, the Atonement could not have been consummated.
Need one say more?
Sometimes, when musing upon this doctrine, I have a vision of the God man getting old upon the earth, horribly anxious and wretched, because no one will murder him.
The situation is desperate; he has again and again prayed his Father to despatch a special murderer to despatch him, yet none appears: shall he have to perish by old age or disease? may he be compelled to commit suicide?
must he go back to Heaven unsacrificed, foiled for want of an assassin?
Benjamin Disraeli attained the cynical sublime when he suggested a monument of gratitude to Judas.
But the world, even the religious world, has always been ungrateful to its most generous benefactors.
Is it not the worst of sacrilege, a foul profanation of our human nature, which for us, at least, should be holy and awful, when the heroic and saintly martyrdom of a true Man is thus falsified into the self schemed sham sacrifice, ineffectual, of a God?
Little matters whence we sprang; we are what we are.
But much matters to what we may attain.
It climbs to God by trampling on Man, it builds Heaven in contempt of Earth, its soul is a phosphorescence from the slain and rotting Body; its fervent faith vilifies us worse than the coldest sneer of Mephistopheles.
GREAT CHRIST IS DEAD
(eighteen seventy five.)
He is the good Pan, the great Shepherd.... at whose death were moanings, sighs, trepidations and lamentations in all the machine of the universe, heavens, earth, sea, hells.
With this my interpretation the time agrees.
The poets have chanted this momentous revolution according to their religion, their phantasy, or their mood.
Milton in his Hymn on the Nativity shouts harsh Puritanical scorn on the oracles stricken dumb, and the deities overthrown.
Heine in his.
"Gods of Greece," after declaring in his wild way that he has never loved the old deities, that to him the Greek are repugnant, and the romans thoroughly hateful, yet avows that when he considers how dastardly and windy are the gods who overcame them, the new reigning sorrowful gods, malignant in their sheep's, clothing of humility, he feels ready to fight for the former against these.
More than eighteen hundred years have passed since the death of the great god Pan was proclaimed; and now it is full time to proclaim the death of the great god Christ.
Fate, in the form of Science, has decreed the extinction of the gods.
Mary and her babe must join Venus and Love, Isis and Horus; living with them only in the world of art.
Jesus on his cross must dwindle to a point, even in the realms of legend under Prometheus on Caucasus.
For ages already the Father has been as spectral as Jupiter; for ages already the Holy Ghost has been but the shadow of a shade.
The Hebrew dynasty of the gods is no more; it has done much evil in its long sovranty, which we will try to forget now it ceases to reign; it has done some little good, whose remembrance we will cherish when it is sepulchred, Christ the Great is dead, but Pan the Great lives again, as mr Maccall told us in some lines published in this paper several years ago.
Pan lives, not as a God, but as the All, Nature, now that the oppression of the Supernatural is removed.
I may be told that Christianity is yet alive and flourishing, that its priesthood and its churches hold possession of Europe and America and Australia.
So the priesthood and the shrines of the Olympians kept possession of the Roman Empire centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus.
When the noblest hearts worship not at its altars, when the most vigorous intellects abandon its creeds, the knell of its doom has rung.
(eighteen seventy six.)
In reviewing mr r h Hutton's Essay on "Christian Evidences, Popular and Critical," I was obliged to follow his lead, joining issue on such pleas as he put forward.
Thus with regard to the resurrection of Jesus, as mr Hutton adduced what he thought confirmatory evidence only from the New Testament itself, I confined myself to showing or attempting to show that such evidence is unsubstantial.
But I could not consider this argument adequate or conclusive, for there are large general considerations of incomparably greater importance which it leaves out altogether.
Therefore, while confident that even on these grounds the case must go against the Christian believer, I wish to add a few words on its wider relations, in order that the decision may be established, not merely by the letter of the law, but also by the spirit of justice.
We leave thus the torturing of texts in the dim cells of the theological Inquisition, a process by which almost any confession required can be and has been wrung from the unfortunate victims, and emerge into the open daylight of common sense and reason.
And here I venture to assert that if the story of the resurrection and ascension were recorded of any other than Jesus in any other sacred book than the Bible, mr Hutton and all other intelligent Christians would not only disbelieve it, but would not even condescend to investigate it, condemning it offhand as too preposterous to be worthy of serious attention.
Thus, what Christian has ever deigned to examine critically the marvels affirmed in the Koran, such as Mohammed's visit to heaven; although the Koran can be traced far more surely to the Prophet of Islam than can the Gospels to their reputed authors, and this Prophet bears a far higher character for truthfulness than do the early Christians?
We have seen that it cannot be because of any superiority of evidence for the former, since the evidence for the latter is in many cases infinitely greater and better authenticated, and since he does not attempt to weigh evidence before either accepting or rejecting, though he may seek evidence and argument to confirm what he has already given himself to believe.
It is worth noting that while our Christian advocates insist with all their might, such as it is, upon the resurrection of Jesus, they willingly pass over as lightly as possible, if they do not altogether ignore, a similar miracle guaranteed by the very same authority.
"The sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets."
This prodigal multiplicity and superfluity of resurrections seems to have been not a little embarrassing to modern Christian champions, though doubtless it did not in the least trouble the primitive non scientific believers, to whom nothing was more natural than the unnatural, including the supernatural and the infranatural.
But the difficulties of the poor apologist are enormously increased if he must further contend that many bodies of the saints came out of their graves, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many, and still there is no external evidence.
Once in the imperial archives, the record of the miracle would have spread everywhere; all subsequent historians would have related it, all subsequent writers referred to it.
So it is no wonder that, recoiling from these manifold impossibilities, the Christian advocates prefer to dwell on the one resurrection as if it were unique, and avoid dwelling on the others that by the very same testimony immediately followed it.
It is very significant that neither in the Acts nor in the Epistles is there any allusion to these resurrections.
When peter and the others were preaching the resurrection of Christ, why did they not adduce and produce some of these many, risen saints, whose visible, tangible, living and speaking evidence would have been irresistible?
Just as the resurrection of Jesus could be accepted without misgiving by the non scientific early Christians, to whom miracles appeared among the most frequent occurrences of life, so could the ascension.
Their earth was a plane, vaulted by the sky, lamped by the little sun and moon and stars; above this vault was Heaven, where their God dwelt enthroned; they knew nothing of the law of gravitation; their Christ, standing in the flesh on the Mount of Olives, floated up through this vault to sit enthroned beside his Father in the most natural supernatural manner.
Where is the Heaven for its God? where the Hell for its Devil?
Why did their risen Lord only slink about among his own disciples, appearing to these but at flying instants: why did he not, with his well-known features and with the wounds of the nails and the spear in his body, confront the chief priests and Pilate and the whole of Jerusalem, and compel them to acknowledge and bear enduring witness to his resurrection?
Why did he not summon all the people from the highest to the lowest to the solemn spectacle of his ascension, securing multitudinous and permanently recorded evidence such as none of us could doubt?
We might go on asking Why? and Why? and Why? in this fashion on a hundred points, confident that to not one of our questions could the Christian apologist give a straightforward and satisfactory answer.
"Hello," said the boy.
"Hello," answered Trot, looking up surprised.
"Where did you come from?"
"Philadelphia," said he.
"Dear me," said Trot; "you're a long way from home, then."
"'bout as far as I can get, in this country," the boy replied, gazing out over the water.
"Isn't this the Pacific Ocean?"
"Of course."
"Because it's the biggest lot of water in all the world."
"How do you know?"
"Cap'n Bill told me," she said.
"Who's Cap'n Bill?"
He lives at my house, too-the white house you see over there on the bluff."
"Oh; is that your home?"
"Yes," said Trot, proudly.
"Haven't you any father?"
"Yes, 'n deed; Cap'n Griffith is my father; but he's gone, most of the time, sailin' on his ship.
Trot wasn't very big herself, but the boy was not quite as big as Trot. He was thin, with a rather pale complexion and his blue eyes were round and earnest.
He wore a blouse waist, a short jacket and knickerbockers. Under his arm he held an old umbrella that was as tall as he was.
It was of wood and carved to resemble an elephant's head.
The long trunk of the elephant was curved to make a crook for the handle.
The eyes of the beast were small red stones, and it had two tiny tusks of ivory.
The boy's dress was rich and expensive, even to his fine silk stockings and tan shoes; but the umbrella looked old and disreputable.
He shook his head, still gazing far out over the water.
"I don't b'lieve this is bigger than any other ocean," said he.
"I can't see any more of it than I can of the Atlantic."
"You'd find out, if you had to sail across it," she declared.
"When I was in Chicago I saw Lake Michigan," he went on dreamily, "and it looked just as big as this water does."
"Looks don't count, with oceans," she asserted.
"Then it doesn't make any difference how big an ocean is," he replied. "What are those buildings over there?" pointing to the right, along the shore of the bay.
"That's the town," said Trot.
The boy sat down beside her on the flat rock.
"Not very well," the boy replied.
They can't help being girls, of course.
"My 'sperience with boys is that they don't know much, but think they do."
"That's true," he answered.
"Much obliged," laughed Trot.
He nodded, rather absently, and tossed a pebble into the water.
"Yes.
"That's all.
"That's why he don't sailor any more.
I'm glad of it, 'cause Cap'n Bill knows ev'rything.
I s'pose he knows more than anyone else in all the world."
A one legged sailor can't know much."
"Why not?" asked Trot, a little indignantly.
"Folks don't learn things with their legs, do they?"
"No; but they can't get around, without legs, to find out things."
"What's a league?" asked the boy.
"What is it, then?"
"If you do you're pretty smart," said Trot.
"No; I'm not smart.
Some folks think I'm stupid.
I guess I am.
But I know a few things that are wonderful.
Say, what's your name?"
"Button Bright."
"How did it happen?"
"How did what happen?"
"Such a funny name."
The boy scowled a little.
"Just like your own nickname happened," he answered gloomily.
"My father once said I was bright as a button, an' it made ever'body laugh.
So they always call me Button Bright."
"What's your real name?" she inquired.
"Guess I'll call you Button Bright," said Trot, sighing.
"I don't try to," he said.
"Thank you," said Trot.
"Oh, here comes Cap'n Bill!" as she glanced over her shoulder.
Button Bright turned also and looked solemnly at the old sailor who came stumping along the path toward them.
He was old, not very tall, somewhat stout and chubby, with a round face, a bald head and a scraggly fringe of reddish whisker underneath his chin.
Button Bright liked the sailor's looks.
There was something very winning-something jolly and care free and honest and sociable-about the ancient seaman that made him everybody's friend; so the strange boy was glad to meet him.
"Well, well, Trot," he said, coming up, "is this the way you hurry to town?"
"No, for I'm on my way back," said she.
Cap'n Bill looked at the boy curiously.
"Guess as you're a stranger, my lad."
Button Bright nodded.
"No," said Button Bright.
The sailor glanced around him.
"No," said Button Bright.
Button Bright shook his head.
"No," said Button Bright; "I didn't come by water."
Trot laughed.
Button Bright nodded, very seriously.
"That's it," he said.
"I don't know," said Button Bright; "I've never seen one."
"'Riddlecum, riddlecum ree; What can the answer be?'"
Trot looked the boy over carefully.
The only queer thing about him was his big umbrella.
"Oh!" she said suddenly, clapping her hands together; "I know now."
"Shoot," said Cap'n Bill.
"They're called parashoots, mate; but why, I can't say.
Did you drop down in that way, my lad?" he asked the boy.
"Yes," said Button Bright; "that was the way."
"You had to get up in the air before you could drop down, an'--oh, Cap'n Bill! he says he's from Phillydelfy, which is a big city way at the other end of America."
Button Bright nodded again.
"I ought to tell you my story," he said, "and then you'd understand.
But I'm afraid you won't believe me, and-" he suddenly broke off and looked toward the white house in the distance-"Didn't you say you lived over there?" he inquired.
"Yes," said Trot.
"Won't you come home with us?"
"I'd like to," replied Button Bright.
"All right; let's go, then," said the girl, jumping up.
The three walked silently along the path.
The old sailorman had refilled his pipe and lighted it again, and he smoked thoughtfully as he pegged along beside the children.
"No one but you two," said the boy, following after Trot, with his umbrella tucked carefully underneath his arm.
Once upon a time a wicked nobleman rose in rebellion against his rightful king, and taking the royal forces by surprise, defeated them and seized the kingdom.
Into the dark forest which lay behind the palace ran the Queen, holding her baby daughter in her arms.
It was winter time, and a heavy snow had hidden the foot paths and the roads.
All afternoon, however, she trudged bravely on through the silence and the cold, her heart sinking as mile after mile revealed no sign of a house or a shelter.
But late in the afternoon, when the red shield of the sun could scarcely be seen through the tangle of the wild wood branches, she perceived a light coming from a little grove of cedars by the shore of a frozen lake.
The Queen made her way toward this light, and discovered a little thatched hut in the silent wood; it was the house of one of the dwarfs of the forest.
The dwarf took pity on the Queen, but his efforts were vain, for the poor woman was so weak and exhausted that she died without telling the dwarf anything about herself or the child she carried.
So the little dwarf, who was a good, kind old fellow, brought the little girl up as if she were his own child.
His brother, the dwarf of the mountain, made her the prettiest red leather shoes, and his cousins, the dwarfs of the pines, made the little girl dresses from cloth woven on fairy looms.
One spring morning a little yellow bird flew into the cedar grove, and gave the dwarf a letter which it held in its beak.
Alas, what are we to do?
To this Marianna replied, "Do not fear, dear father.
"Dear lady," said the peasant girl, pressing Marianna's hand to her lips, "how sweet and kind thou art!
Great is the debt I owe thee."
"Poor little bird," said Marianna, bending down and taking him up in her hands, "why criest thou so mournfully?
But the bird uttered only a forlorn little cry, and hid his head again under his wings.
"Someone has wounded him.
His wing is broken."
Scarcely had she done so, when the yellow bird burst into a joyous and golden song, and flying to the window, beat madly against the panes.
Then the peasant girl threw open the casement, and the yellow bird flew out into the streaming sun
"He is gone forever," said the peasant girl.
"Nay, he returns," said Marianna, gently, as the yellow bird flew back and perched in the sheltering bower of Marianna's arms.
When they reached the foot of the path, the peasant girl cried:--
This pleasant land, unknown to Marianna, was part of her father's kingdom, and she was really its queen because her father had been the last rightful king.
For some time he had enjoyed undisturbed the possession of his stolen throne; but as Desire grew taller and stronger every year, Garabin began to fear the day when he would be compelled to resign in favor of his nephew.
When the Prince reached his twentieth year, Garabin would certainly have killed him openly had he dared; but, fearing the people, he resolved to use secret methods, and bribed a cruel magician to afflict poor Desire with a deadly and mysterious malady.
Of this malady, Desire was slowly dying, for no medicine could cure him or even give him any relief from his constant pain.
Garabin had just returned from a visit to the Prince, who was rapidly failing, when the Captain of the Castle Guard came to him with the news that the wonderful Marianna had arrived in the kingdom.
The King gave orders that she be brought before him.
So Marianna, walking between two halberdiers and followed across the courtyard by crowds of curious people, was led before the King.
Had he not been very old and crafty, he would have started from his golden throne, for he knew that the little golden heart set with diamonds had been one of the crown jewels, and that therefore Marianna must be the missing Princess, and rightful queen of the kingdom.
What was he to do with Marianna, whose right to the throne was superior even to his nephew's?
Perplexed, and with fear in his heart, the King sought the cruel magician who had cast the spell on Desire.
The magician lived in a gloomy tower, and had an enchanted black dog that he fed with flaming coals.
He listened to Garabin's story, stirring a great cauldron all the while, and said, "Do not fear.
I will destroy both claimants to the throne at once."
Garabin rubbed his hands together with glee.
"To night I shall cast a spell of sleep on Marianna, steal the crystal flask, empty it of the water of healing, and refill it with a liquid which will cause death within a night and a day.
I shall then replace the flask before Marianna wakes.
You can then try Marianna for having killed the Prince, and condemn her to be thrown from the precipice."
So pleased was Garabin with this horrid plot, that he could have danced for joy.
That very night, the magician filled Marianna's flask with the poisonous water, and departed, thinking that nobody had noticed him.
"Welcome, thrice welcome, lovely maiden," said Garabin with the most dreadful hypocrisy.
Marianna replied that she would do her best to help the Prince; so the Court Chamberlain gave her his arm, and escorted her to the Prince's sick room.
Desire lay in a great old-fashioned bed, his face flushed with fever.
So weak was the poor Prince, that he could scarcely lift his head to look at his visitors.
Now just as Marianna bent over the Prince to touch his forehead with the water of healing, the yellow bird screamed and cried as madly as if he were caught in a net.
Marianna looked at the crystal flask.
Nothing seemed changed; the water within seemed as pure and diamond like as ever.
Alas, in a moment, so terrible was the magician's poison that the Prince turned white as the driven snow, and fell back on the pillows insensible.
The lookers on, who had expected to see him spring up entirely cured, began to murmur, and Marianna herself, terrified at what had happened, let fall the flask, which broke into a thousand sparkling pieces.
Suddenly, Garabin cried at the top of his voice, "Seize the witch; she has killed the Prince!"
Presently there was a great confusion, rough hands seized Marianna, and somebody caught the yellow bird.
At high noon, a trial was held, and since the doctors declared that the Prince was dying, Marianna was condemned to be thrown from the precipice.
When somebody asked about the yellow bird, Garabin laughed, and gave orders that the cook should wring its neck, and toss it to the cat.
So Marianna was hurried to a dark prison room and loaded with chains, and the yellow bird was taken to the castle kitchen, and given to the cook.
By great good fortune, the cook's helper was no other than the peasant girl whom Marianna had saved.
This girl recognized the yellow bird, and instead of wringing its neck, let it fly out of the window.
The yellow bird flew to the window of the magician's room.
The magician was in the chamber, stirring the giant cauldron.
The bird flew to the window of Prince Desire's room, and saw that he was still insensible.
First came a troop of soldiers, then Marianna, weighted down with chains, and last of all, a little group in which were Garabin, the magician, and some of Garabin's favorites.
The bell kept on sadly tolling and tolling.
It roused the Prince from his swoon, and with his last measure of strength, poor Desire dragged himself to the window.
The procession was then passing directly underneath the window, and Desire's eyes met the eyes of Marianna.
"Stop!
Stop!" cried the poor Prince, wildly; "I forbid-"
An instant later he sank fainting to the floor.
The procession went on.
It was empty.
Desire still lay in a heap by the window, and over him the yellow bird poured the contents of the phial.
He arrived at the cliff just as the poor maiden was about to be pushed off into space, and standing by her side, dared anyone to lay hands upon her.
Garabin, seeing his precious plot miscarry, grew mad with rage.
"Seize them," cried he, "and toss them both over the precipice!"
So the soldiers rushed at Marianna and the Prince, intending to carry out their wicked master's orders.
"Cruel King!" cried the dwarf sternly, "and thou, wicked and perfidious magician, the hour of thy punishment is at hand."
Immediately the sky grew black, the lightning crashed, and there arose a terrible, howling wind.
Three giant gusts drove fiercely by, the first one blowing the King and the magician head over heels over the precipice, the second carrying away the soldiers, and the third the rascally favorites.
When the sky cleared, only the dwarf, Marianna, and Desire were left of the company.
You, Marianna, are the rightful Queen of this country."
Most persons have an opportunity of becoming acquainted, if they will, with the lower classes of Irish, as they are so much employed among us in domestic service, and other kinds of labor.
We feel, say these persons, the justice of what has been said as to the duty and importance of improving these people.
We have sometimes tried; but the want of real gratitude which, in them, is associated with such warm and wordy expressions of regard, with their incorrigible habits of falsehood and evasion, have baffled and discouraged us.
We answer first with regard to those who have grown up in another land, and who, soon after arriving here, are engaged in our service.
First, as to ingratitude.
Gratitude!
Then, the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table might be received with gratitude, and, if any but the dogs came to tend the beggar's sores, such might be received as angels.
But the institutions which sustained such ideas have fallen to pieces.
It is understood, even In Europe, that
And you, O giver! how did you give?
Or, with affability and condescending sweetness, made easy by internal delight at thine own wondrous virtue, didst thou give five dollars to balance five hundred spent on thyself?
Did you say, "james, I shall expect you to do right in everything, and to attend to my concerns as I should myself; and, at the end of the quarter, I will give you my old clothes and a new pocket handkerchief, besides seeing that your mother is provided with fuel against Christmas?"
Line upon line, and precept upon precept, the tender parent expects from the teacher to whom he confides his child; vigilance unwearied, day and night, through long years.
If we look fairly into the history of their people, and the circumstances under which their own youth was trained, we cannot expect that anything short of the most steadfast patience and love can enlighten them as to the beauty and value of implicit truth, and, having done so, fortify and refine them in the practice of it.
Second, Dismiss from your minds all thought of gratitude.
Do what you do for them for God's sake, and as a debt to humanity-interest to the common creditor upon principal left in your care.
The priest, too, will have to learn the duties of an American citizen; he will live less and less for the church, and more for the people, till at last, if there be Catholicism still, it will be under Protestant influences, as begins to be the case in Germany.
Between employer and employed there is not sufficient pains taken on the part of the former to establish a mutual understanding.
People meet, in the relations of master and servant, who have lived in two different worlds.
In this respect we are much worse situated than the same parties have been in Europe.
It is shocking to think to what falsehoods human beings like ourselves will resort, to excuse a love of amusement, to hide ill health, while they see us indulging freely in the one, yielding lightly to the other; and yet we have, or ought to have, far more resources in either temptation than they.
He has now got some ground on which to stand for intercourse.
Offer your aid, as a faithful friend, to watch their lapses, and refine their sense of truth.
You will not speak in vain.
They are so fond of change, they will leave us." What then?
Why, let them go and carry the good seed elsewhere.
It is a simple duty we ask you to engage in; it is, also, a great patriotic work.
But this must be for another day.
We hear people blaming it in their servants, who can and do go to Niagara, to the South, to the Springs, to Europe, to the seaside; in short, who are always on the move whenever they feel the need of variety to reanimate mind, health, or spirits.
How natural that they should incline to it!
Once more; put yourself in their places, and then judge them gently from your own, if you would be just to them, if you would be of any use.
He stooped and felt on the ground in the darkness and rain, for a stick, by means of which to tighten it still more; for the bleeding, though considerably checked, was by no means stanched.
Here he again paused to search for the much needed stick, found one suited to his purpose, and by its aid succeeded in decreasing still more the drain upon his life current; yet could not stop the flow entirely.
Leaving the path, he plunged deeper into the woods, ran for some distance along the edge of a swamp, and leaping in up to his knees in mud and water, doubled on his track, then turned again, and penetrating farther and farther into the depths of the morass, finally climbed a tree, groaning with the pain the effort cost him, and concealed himself among the branches.
His pursuers came up to the spot where he had made his plunge into the water; here they paused, evidently at fault.
He could hear the sound of their footsteps and voices, and judge of their movements by the gleam of the torches many of them carried.
Some now took one direction, some another, and he perceived with joy that his stratagem had been at least partially successful.
One party, however, soon followed him into the swamp.
He could hear Spriggs urging them on and anathematizing him as "a scoundrel, robber, burglar, murderer, who ought to be swung up to the nearest tree."
Every thicket was undergoing a thorough search, heads were thrown back and torches held high that eager blacks eyes might scan the tree tops, and Jackson began to grow sick with the almost certainty of being taken, as several stout negroes drew nearer and nearer his chosen hiding place.
He uttered a low, breathed imprecation upon his useless right arm, and the man whose sure aim had made it so.
The search was kept up for some time longer, with no light but an occasional flash from the skies; but finally abandoned, as we have seen.
Jackson passed several hours most uncomfortably and painfully on his elevated perch, quaking with fear of both man and reptile, not daring to come down or to sleep in his precarious position, or able to do so for the pain of his wound, and growing hour by hour weaker from the bleeding which it was impossible to check entirely.
Perhaps he had now two new murders on his hands; he did not know, but he had at least attempted to take life, and the story would fly on the wings of the wind; such stories always did.
He must contrive a plausible story, and go to him; at break of day, before the news of the attack on Viamede would be likely to reach him.
It would be a risk, but what better could be done?
The storm had spent itself before the break of day, and descending from his perch with the first faint rays of light that penetrated the gloomy recesses of the swamp, he made his way out of it, slowly and toilsomely, with weary, aching limbs, suffering intensely from the gnawings of hunger and thirst, the pain of his injury, and the fear of being overtaken by the avengers of his innocent victims.
The man reeled as he walked, either from intoxication or weakness and fatigue.
With the assistance of Nap's strong arm, the man tottered in, then sank, half fainting, into a chair.
"A glass of wine, Nap, quick!" cried the doctor, sprinkling some water in his patient's face, and applying ammonia to his nostrils.
"Food, for the love of God," he gasped.
"I'm starving!"
"Bread, meat, coffee, anything that is on the table, Nap," said his master; "and don't let the grass grow under your feet."
You haven't strength for talk just now."
dr Balis had his own suspicions as he ripped up the coat sleeve, bared the swollen limb, and carefully dressed the wound; but kept them to himself.
The stranger's clothes, though much soiled and torn in several places by contact with thorns and briers, were of good material, fashionable cut, and not old or worn; his manners were gentlemanly, and his speech was that of an educated man.
"Is that mortification?" asked the sufferer, looking ruefully at the black, swollen hand and fore arm, and wincing under the doctor's touch as he took up the artery and tied it.
"Oh yes; neither the bone nor nerve has suffered injury; the ball has glanced from the bone, passed under the nerve, and cut the humeral artery. Your tourniquet has saved you from bleeding to death.
'tis well you knew enough to apply it.
The doctor's task was done.
Nap had set a plate of food within reach of the stranger's left hand, and he was devouring it like a hungry wolf.
I can't deny that things look suspicious.
"No; a party of us, from New Orleans last, came out to visit this beautiful region.
We were roaming through a forest yesterday, looking for game, when I somehow got separated from the rest, lost my way, darkness came on, and wondering hither and thither in the vain effort to find my comrades, tumbling over logs and fallen trees, scratched and torn by brambles, almost eaten up by mosquitos, I thought I was having a dreadful time of it.
The doctor listened in silence, his face telling nothing of his thoughts.
"A bad business," he said, rising and beginning to draw on his gloves. "You are not fit to travel, but are welcome to stay here for the present; had better lie down on the sofa there and take a nap while I am away visiting my patients.
Nap, clean the mud and blood from the gentleman's clothes; take his boots out and clean them too; and see that he doesn't want for attention while I am gone.
Good morning, sir; make yourself at home." And the doctor walked out, giving Nap a slight sign to follow him.
"Nap," he said, when they were out of ear shot of the stranger, "watch that man and keep him here if possible, till I come back."
Nap went back into the office while the doctor mounted and rode away.
have you been house breaking or some other mischief?" dr Balis was traveling in the direction of Viamede, intending to call there too, but having several patients to visit on the way, did not arrive until the late breakfast of its master and mistress was over.
They were seated together on the veranda, her hand in his, the other arm thrown lightly about her waist, talking earnestly, and so engrossed with each other and the subject of their conversation, that they did not at first observe the doctor's approach.
"No, uncle, what is it?"
"A murderer, sir; one whose object was to take my husband's life," Elsie answered with a shudder, and in low, tremulous tones, leaning on Edward's arm and gazing into his face with eyes swimming with tears of love and gratitude.
"My wife's also, I fear," mr Travilla said with emotion, fondly stroking her sunny hair.
"No; his ball passed over our heads, grazing mine so closely as to cut off a lock of my hair.
"A flash of lightning showed us to each other and we fired simultaneously, I aiming for his right arm.
"You had him pursued promptly, of course?"
"Yes; but they did not find him.
I expected to see them return with his corpse, thinking he must bleed to death in a very short time.
I'd better return at once, lest he should make his escape.
"I do; I can," replied mr Travilla.
"But, my little wife, how you are trembling!
"The man's name is Tom Jackson; he is a noted gambler and forger, has been convicted of manslaughter and other crimes, sent to the penitentiary and pardoned out.
"I must hurry home and prevent his escape.
Why, it's really dangerous to have him at large.
"But how could you tell where it entered or where it passed out, doctor?" inquired Elsie.
Why, where it goes in it makes merely a small hole; you see nothing but a blue mark; but a much larger opening in passing out, often tearing the flesh a good deal; as in this case.
"Don't take the trouble, doctor," said mr Travilla; "we will mount and follow you at once, to identify him if he is to be found.
Shall we not, wife?"
"Calm me, my God, and keep me calm While these hot breezes blow; Be like the night dew's cooling balm Upon earth's fevered brow." --H.
"Dear old auntie! to think how hard at work for her country she is, while I sit idle here," sighed Elsie, closing the letter after reading it aloud to the assembled family.
"Mamma, papa, Edward, is there nothing we can do?"
"I think you can," was the simultaneous reply; mr Travilla adding, "and we can help with the lint, and by running the sewing machines.
I'd be glad to add to the comfort of the poor fellows on both sides."
"And I can send that!" Elsie exclaimed joyously
Several busy weeks followed, and a large box was packed and sent off.
"Yes," he said, gently taking it from her, "but rather too valuable a plaything for my little pet.
"I gave her leave to look over the contents of my jewel box; she is a very careful little body, and mammy and I are both on the watch:" answered mamma.
"Let papa see where you put it, precious," he said, following her as she tripped across the room and seated herself on a cushion in front of the box.
"Dere, papa, dus where Elsie dot it," she said, laying it carefully back in its proper place.
"Little wife, your jewels alone are worth what to very many would be a handsome fortune."
"No, it is a good investment; especially as things are at present."
Mamma, may I, too?"
"Mammy, sit close to Elsie and keep a careful watch, lest she should drop something."
"I begin to think there's truth in the old saw, 'It's hard to teach old dogs new tricks,'" remarked mr Travilla, with a comically rueful face. "I've a mind to give it up.
"Oh, fighting's another thing, but I'll persevere as long as you do; unless I find I'm wearying my teacher."
"Ah! then I shall try harder than ever, to save your reputation; but take a recess now, for here comes my boy, reaching out his arms to papa.
Papa's own boy, he looks beautiful and as bright as the day."
"Papa!
Edward! she is dying!"
Quick, Aunt Chloe! a cloth dipped in spirits of turpentine, to lay over the stomach and bowels, and another to put between her shoulders.
"Thank God! she is still ours!" exclaimed the father, almost under his breath; then, a little louder, "Elsie, dear wife, I shall go at once for dr Channing, an English physician who has been highly recommended to me."
With a silent prayer for help to control her emotion, Elsie cleared her voice, and began in low, sweet tones the old, old story of Jesus and His love, His birth, His life, His death.
"Is it not, Edward?"
CHAPTER twenty
MOLLY PITCHER
In the days of the American Revolution a young woman lived as a servant in carlisle pennsylvania, with the family of General Irving, a retired British officer, who had fought in the French and Indian War and had seen a great deal of service.
This young woman was named Molly Ludwig Hays, and was the wife of a barber who had been well known in the village.
She was not only handsome, but as strong as a man, able to carry a heavy meal sack on her shoulder; and one of the hardest workers that the town knew.
She washed and scrubbed and scoured and baked from morning till night, and seemed to revel in the hard work that gave the needed exercise to her strong muscles.
Throughout her life Molly Hays had admired soldiers, and more than once she expressed herself in no undecided terms to the effect that she wished she were a man so that she could bear arms and wear a uniform, and be a soldier herself.
When she was still a very young woman the American Revolution for freedom from Great Britain broke out.
All the country was aflame, and rang with the stories of what happened at Lexington and Bunker Hill. Man after man from the village took his powder horn and musket and went off to enlist for the war, and Molly grew more and more restless as she saw them go.
At last her husband came to her, somewhat sheepishly, for he disliked to tell her the intention he had in his heart; but at length he made her understand that just because he was married was no reason why he should remain at home with the women; and he, too, intended to enlist that very day.
Molly consented with the utmost enthusiasm.
When her husband had departed Molly returned to the Irving household where she worked as well as she had before her marriage, trying to find relief in the heavy labor from the pain of having lost her husband and the aching desire to go and do her part beside him even though she were a woman.
Fate, thought Molly, had made a sad mistake, in making her a woman, for she knew that in spite of her petticoats she could soldier as well as the men,--and if she had only been a man she believed she could have risen to an important position in the army.
The tide of the struggle wavered and battles with the red coats were fought and won.
It was hard to get the newspapers in those times and news of the armies and their doings was often weeks behind the actual events.
Molly hoped and waited, but for weeks at a time she went without word from her husband and did not know whether he were alive or dead.
He had a letter from john Hays for Molly, and it not only told her that he was alive and well, but was in camp not far off from her former home in trenton new jersey, where her aged parents were still living.
The letter ended by telling her to come to Trenton and live with her parents, for he would be able without doubt to get leave from his command and see her often.
Soon the war itself was being fought in the neighborhood of her home. The Americans attacked the British near Princeton killing and capturing a large number.
And now Molly found that there was something that she could do-namely, go and care for the wounded who were still lying where they had fallen on the field of battle.
She studied the cannon carefully and it seemed to be aimed right at a group of the enemy that was approaching.
The brave girl dropped the pail of water that she had been carrying, picked up the fuse and applied it to the touch hole.
Molly had left and had taken with her a wounded American soldier whom she carried on her shoulder.
As it was they thought she was only some country girl who had perhaps lost some relative in the recent battle and was carrying his dead body back to her home.
And so they paid no attention to her.
On a hot day of July in the following summer it chanced that Washington's forces were again not far away from Molly's home, and she took a difficult journey on the chance of seeing her husband.
Her first step in soldiering had been taken when she fired the cannon at the British in the preceding year.
A far greater adventure lay before her, for she fell in with the American soldiers just as they commenced the severe battle of Monmouth.
This battle had considerable importance, as a comparatively large number of troops were engaged in it.
The English had been retreating from Philadelphia, across New Jersey, followed by Washington, and the American general had decided to launch an attack on the left wing of the retreating forces and General Lee was ordered by Washington to attack the English on the flank and hold them in battle until he himself could come up with the bulk of the American Army.
General Lee, however, proved to be a poor man for this task and his indecision and semi cowardice left Washington exposed to the brunt of the enemy's attack before he was prepared to meet it and against the intentions of the American commander.
The situation was saved by General Greene, who saw what had happened, changed his own plans and diverted the attack of the British to his own position from which he poured in a heavy artillery fire that caused them terrible losses.
john Hays was one of the cannoneers of Greene's artillery and he worked all day loading and firing his piece.
It was a terribly hot day and many men in both the British and the American armies fell exhausted and even died from the heat of the sun
All this time Molly Hays had been caring for the wounded and carrying water to the thirsty gunners, using for the purpose the bucket that was attached to her husband's cannon for cleaning purposes.
Tirelessly she continued her efforts to care for the wounded and comfort the fighting soldiers, heedless of the bullets that came her way or of the general turmoil of battle.
As the day wore on the men would greet her coming with: "Here comes Molly with her pitcher!" And gradually this was changed to "Here comes Molly Pitcher." And this was the name that history has adopted in regard to the brave woman for whom it was so used.
The sun had proved too much for him.
Molly stopped carrying water to care for her husband.
She bathed his head and moved him into the shade, returning to her duties just in time to hear General Knox give orders that the cannon be removed, because he had no other gunner cool enough and skilful enough to work it in its present exposed position.
At this Molly sprang forward crying out:
"Leave the gun where it is.
I can fire it.
I am a gunner's wife and know how to load and fire a cannon.
I'll take the place that my brave husband has left!" And running to the gun Molly commenced to load and fire so determinedly and skilfully that a gasp of amazement ran through the men that saw her.
For many weary hours she toiled at the gun, until the British were driven back and the battle was claimed as an American victory.
Before she left her cannon General Greene himself came over to where she stood and grasping her hand thanked her in the name of the American Army.
This was not all the triumph she received, however, for word was soon brought to her that General Washington himself wished to see her.
Washington praised her highly and before a large number of his officers and men, and more cheering reechoed through the ranks when he gave her the brevet rank of Captain in the American Army.
And not only the Americans did her honor, but the French as well, for the Marquis de Lafayette with his own hand presented her with a purse of golden crowns.
CHAPTER twenty five
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
She was born in eighteen twenty two in the city of Florence in Italy, and was named after the place where she first drew breath.
Her father was William Nightingale, an English gentleman, and her elder sister, Parthenope, also took her name from the place where she was born, for Parthenope is the ancient term for Naples.
The Nightingale family did not remain long in Italy, and soon after the birth of his youngest child William Nightingale, with his wife and two little daughters, returned to England where the two girls spent their childhood in a rambling old house in Derbyshire with many traditions and stories attached to it.
Here Florence conceived a love for nursing and used to tend sick animals in the neighborhood and when she grew older, to sit up with and cheer the sick among the cottagers.
Poor men used to come hat in hand to the old house requesting that Miss Florence spend a few hours with a sick wife or a young mother, and the Nightingales were kind enough and sensible enough to allow their daughter to do the work for which she had so evident an inclination.
Sick people were expected to be cared for by their relatives; hospitals were inefficient and badly run, and the comforts of the modern sickroom were unknown.
As Florence grew older she thought a great deal about these things, and finally decided that she would do something which at that time was regarded almost as strange as if she had declared her intention of visiting the North Pole-she said she was going to become a professional trained nurse, and went abroad to study nursing on the Continent which was far ahead of England in such matters.
This home, like many another benevolent institution in those times, was badly administered.
As it constantly showed a deficit, its friends had become discouraged in supporting it, and the subscriptions on which it lived had been falling off.
The ladies who were compelled to remain there did not receive the care that they should have had, and were unhappy and dispirited.
This was the state of affairs when Florence Nightingale became the Superintendent of the Home.
In a very short time the Home was completely changed.
Miss Nightingale had personally visited the former subscribers, and secured once more their help and patronage.
Then war broke out between England, France and Turkey on the one side and Russia on the other,--a war that was brought about among other reasons by the desire of the Russian Czar to seize and hold the port of Constantinople.
Great Britain and France supported the Turks and active fighting commenced.
The theater of war soon shifted to the Crimean Peninsula where the British and French laid siege to the town of Sebastopol which was Russia's most important fortress and chief base of supplies.
Before the walls of Sebastopol there took place severe fighting, which continued until bitter winter rendered further campaigning impossible.
While the war was going on thousands of sick and wounded British soldiers were pouring into the base hospitals at Scutari, where no provision for their care had been made.
With the constant flood of wounded men, and men who were dying of dysentery and cholera, with no medical supplies and little food, with no nurses and only a few doctors, the condition of the British wounded soon became terrible beyond description.
As there were no field dressing stations they had to be carried for days with their wounds undressed before they reached the hospital, and when they arrived it was often some time before the harassed doctors could care for them.
They were brought in with their uniforms covered with filth and blood, and were laid in long rows on the floors of the hospital where few cots were to be found.
Vermin crawled over the floors, over the walls and over the bodies of the helpless men.
Rats gnawed the fingers of the wounded who were too weak to drive them away.
There were no conveniences of any kind and many men died of exhaustion because no food adequate for the sick could be prepared.
All the food, we are told, consisted of beef and vegetables boiled together in one huge caldron, into which new supplies were thrown indiscriminately as fast as they were delivered.
The bread was moldy and the beef too tough even for well men to eat.
But owing to the inefficiency and red tape of the War Department, the supplies were not delivered, but lay rotting in warehouses and in the holds of vessels while men died for the want of them.
On one occasion, we are told, a consignment of shoes for the soldiers turned out to be in women's sizes.
Improper inspections resulted in high profits, for the army contractors made uniforms out of shoddy and leather accouterments from paper, filled the cores of hay bales with kale stocks and cheated the Government right and left without forbearance or conscience.
Then the newspapers began calling for English women to go to the Crimea and care for the sick, and Florence Nightingale heard the call.
She wrote a letter to Sydney Herbert who was Minister of War, volunteering to organize a body of nurses and go out to the Crimea to care for the wounded.
Right then a curious thing happened.
The War Department had already decided that Miss Nightingale was the one person who could take charge of the reorganization of the hospitals in the Crimea, and had written a letter requesting her services.
Offer and request crossed each other in the mails.
On the following day her appointment was officially announced, and she was overwhelmed with proffers of assistance from all sides.
A large number of patriotic women volunteered to aid her, but only a very few possessed the necessary qualifications for such a task.
Of all that offered to go Miss Nightingale was only able to accept thirty that she considered would be capable of performing the severe tasks that lay ahead, for she knew only too well the grim welcome she would receive at the Crimea.
Without farewells, quietly and at night, seen off only by a few intimate relatives, the little group of nurses started on their mission-the first one where women were to care for the soldiers who had fallen in war.
From there they made their way to the seat of the war, and Miss Nightingale looked for the first time on the hospital where she was so soon to acquire immortal fame.
It may well be thought that her heart sank when she saw the enormity of the task that lay before her, for she had been sent to bring order from chaos, plenty from want, comfort from torture and cleanliness from wholesale filth.
She had to contend not only with these awful conditions, but with the dislike and distrust of the medical officers with whom she was to work, who resented the fact that a woman had been sent out to reorganize what they considered a part of their department, and who doubted, because she was a woman, that she would be capable of doing so efficiently.
And when she arrived there was no time to spend in preliminary planning, for active fighting had been going on at the front and the wounded from recent battles were pouring in, adding to the confusion that already existed.
They were laid groaning in hallways and on the bare ground until such time as the doctors could look after them.
Then Florence Nightingale, hardly taking breath, plunged into the task that awaited her and sent her nurses to the quarters where they were most needed.
They visited the quartermasters and obtained the supplies that had been tied up through faulty administration and through army red tape, and in a short time they had established a diet kitchen where several hundred sick and wounded men could have the food they required, food that would save their lives.
The doctors who had been her opponents soon looked up to her and became her devoted friends, and the men who had been through such terrible sufferings thought she was indeed an angel from heaven, and, as she passed down the long wards would furtively kiss her shadow as it fell across their blankets.
Many a time she took charge of cases that had been given up by the doctors, who turned their attention always to those whom they believed had a fighting chance for life, and she nursed them back to life with a patience and a tenderness that the doctors could not spare.
From the ships and warehouses there commenced to appear the comforts that sick men demanded-sheets and nightgowns, socks and pillows; in the place of the nauseous beef stew, the wounded began to get broths and jellies.
And the wonders she performed were heard of back in England, where her name became national.
She had gone to Scutari in eighteen fifty four.
In May, eighteen fifty five, she visited other hospitals that were nearer the seat of war and went into the trenches themselves before Sebastopol.
One of her biographers tells us that when she entered the trenches she was warned by a sentinel to go no further, because the enemy had the place under close watch and would certainly open fire when they beheld a group of people at that particular point.
Then she fell ill with Crimean fever, and through the army the news was received with more consternation than a severe defeat.
Men broke down and cried like children when they heard that Miss Nightingale lay at the point of death, and the Commander in Chief, Lord Raglan, rode through sleet and mud for hours to visit her personally.
She did not die, however, but recovered to take up again her duties as chief nurse and organizer.
When the war was ended Miss Nightingale remained at the Crimea until the last soldiers were sent home, and then, and not till then, she followed them.
After most of the men had left and only a few remained she still worked faithfully to serve them, establishing "reading huts" and places of recreation such as the Red Cross and the y m c a established in France and Belgium in the course of the World War some sixty years later.
As a matter of fact the work performed by Miss Nightingale was indirectly responsible for the birth of the Red Cross which was organized in Switzerland some four years after she had finished her work at the Crimea, and certainly no name in the Red Cross, in spite of the host of noble men and women who have served there, has ever equaled the glory of her own.
She returned to England quietly as she had left, although a British Government placed a battleship at her service-and she lived in England engaged in useful and philanthropic work for a great many years.
With a fund of about two hundred fifty thousand dollars she founded the Nightingale Home for the proper training of nurses, a fund that she could have doubled or trebled had she so desired, or if the needs of the home had required it.
In the following years she was frequently consulted on hospital organization in the armies not only of Great Britain but of Continental nations as well.
The Sacred Milk of Koumongoe
Early in the morning and late in the evenings the parents worked hard in the fields, resting, when the sun was high, under the shade of some tree.
While they were absent the little girl kept house alone, for her brother always got up before the dawn, when the air was fresh and cool, and drove out the cattle to the sweetest patches of grass he could find.
Give me a drink from the tree Koumongoe, which has the best milk in the world.'
What would father say when he came home?
For he would be sure to know.'
She was afraid to disobey her parents, who would most likely beat her, yet the beasts would be sure to suffer if they were kept in, and she would perhaps be beaten for that too.
Go and get me three times as much!'
In an instant there poured forth such a stream of milk that it ran like a river into the hut.
The man saw a white stream a long way off, and guessed what had happened.
That is some mischief of the children's, I am sure.
I must go home and find out what is the matter.' And they both threw down their hoes and hurried to the side of Koumongoe.
Kneeling on the grass, the man and his wife made a cup of their hands and drank the milk from it.
Why did Koumongoe come to us in the fields instead of staying in the garden?'
So, as I did not know what else to do, I gave it to him.'
Instead, he went outside and brought in two sheepskins, which he stained red and sent for a blacksmith to forge some iron rings.
When all was ready, the man sent for his servants and said:
'I am going to get rid of Thakane.'
'Get rid of your only daughter?' they answered, in surprise.
'But why?'
'Because she has eaten what she ought not to have eaten.
They were passing along some fields where the corn was ripening, when a rabbit suddenly sprang out at their feet, and standing on its hind legs, it sang:
Why do you give to the ogre Your child, so fair, so fair?
'You had better ask her,' replied the man, 'she is old enough to give you an answer.'
Why do you give to the ogre Your child, so fair, so fair?
Then, in her turn, Thakane sang:
By this time it was nearly dark, and the father said they could travel no further that night, and must go to sleep where they were.
So, in spite of her dread of the ogre, she slept till dawn, when her father woke her, and told her roughly that he was ready to continue their journey.
Crossing the plain, the girl and her father passed a herd of gazelles feeding.
Why do you give to the ogre Your child, so fair, so fair?
'You had better ask her, replied the man, 'she is old enough to answer for herself.'
And the gazelles all cried: 'Wretched man! it is you whom the ogre should eat, and not your beautiful daughter.'
At last they arrived at the village where the ogre lived, and they went straight to his hut.
He ordered his servants to bring a pile of skins for Thakane to sit on, but told her father he must sit on the ground.
At first he did not know what to make of this strange feeling, for all his life he had hated women, and had refused several brides whom his parents had chosen for him.
But when her mother in law saw it was a girl, she wrung her hands and wept, saying:
'O miserable mother!
Miserable child!
Alas for you! why were you not a boy!'
'But it is not the customer in MY country!
There, when children die, they are buried in the earth.
No one shall take my baby from me.'
Here, hidden from everyone, she sat down on a stone and began to think what she should do to save her child.
Suddenly she heard a rustling among the willows, and an old woman appeared before her.
'What are you crying for, my dear?' said she.
'What you say is true,' replied the old woman.
'Give me your child, and let me take care of it.
And if you will fix a day to meet me here I will bring the baby.'
As soon as she got there, she crouched down among the willows, and sang softly:
Bring to me Dilah, Dilah the rejected one, Dilah, whom her father Masilo cast out!
At last she felt she must return to the village, lest she should be missed, and the child was handed back to the old woman, who vanished with her into the lake.
Her mother came to visit her whenever she was able, and one day, when they were sitting talking together, they were spied out by a man who had come to cut willows to weave into baskets.
He was so surprised to see how like the face of the girl was to Masilo, that he left his work and returned to the village.
'Masilo,' he said, as he entered the hut, 'I have just beheld your wife near the river with a girl who must be your daughter, she is so like you.
We have been deceived, for we all thought she was dead.'
'But what shall we do now?' asked he.
'Well, you can go,' answered he.
Bring to me Dilah, Dilah the rejected one, Dilah, whom her father Masilo cast out!
Then the old woman came out of the water, holding the girl, now tall and slender, by the hand.
And as Masilo looked, he saw that she was indeed his daughter, and he wept for joy that she was not lying dead in the bottom of the lake.
I will not leave the girl to day, but will take her back with me'; and sinking beneath the surface, she drew the girl after her.
All the rest of the day he sat in a corner weeping, and his mother who came in asked: 'Why are you weeping so bitterly, my son?'
'My head aches,' he answered; 'it aches very badly.' And his mother passed on, and left him alone.
In the evening he said to his wife: 'I have seen my daughter, in the place where you told me you had drowned her.
'I don't know what you are talking about,' replied Thakane. 'I buried my child under the sand on the beach.'
Then Masilo implored her to give the child back to him; but she would not listen, and only answered: 'If I were to give her back you would only obey the laws of your country and take her to your father, the ogre, and she would be eaten.'
But Masilo promised that he would never let his father see her, and that now she was a woman no one would try to hurt her; so Thakane's heart melted, and she went down to the lake to consult the old woman.
'What am I to do?' she asked, when, after clapping her hands, the old woman appeared before her.
'If I let her go he must pay me a thousand head of cattle in exchange,' replied the old woman.
'Why, I would gladly give her two thousand!' cried he, 'for she has saved my daughter.' And he bade messengers hasten to all the neighbouring villages, and tell his people to send him at once all the cattle he possessed.
When they were all assembled he chose a thousand of the finest bulls and cows, and drove them down to the river, followed by a great crowd wondering what would happen.
Bring to me Dilah, Dilah the rejected one, Dilah, whom her father Masilo cast out!
GRACE DARLING
The coast of Northumberland in England is rocky and severe with lofty flint ledged cliffs where great waves thunder, hurling the white foam high into the air.
It is a coast that is feared by vessels and many wrecks have taken place there.
As is usual in such a locality it is the home of brave fishermen and daring boatmen who have many thrilling rescues to remember and many stormy encounters with the utmost fury of the sea.
But of all the tales of daring that are talked of by the fisher folk, the bravest of all was performed by a girl whose name was Grace Darling,--a name that now is known not only in the places where she lived but all over the world.
Grace Horsley Darling was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper named William Darling, who tended a light on one of the Farne Islands as his father had done before him.
Grace, who was the seventh of nine children, was born in eighteen fifteen, in Bamborough, and when she was a little girl of eleven years her father was given charge of the new light on Longstone Rock, which was one of a series of dangerous reefs where no vessel ever built could live when a gale was blowing.
It was a wild spot, even in calm weather, but when a storm blew it became terrible.
Grace did not find the life at the lighthouse unpleasant.
Her father was an intelligent and kind hearted man who gave an eye to her education himself, and taught her how to read and write.
But the confinement of the life in the lighthouse was not good for the growing girl, and Grace never was strong and robust as would be expected from the daughter of fishermen.
Nor was she handsome.
But she possessed a kindly and winning nature, and, as will be seen, the ability to rise to heights of greatness when necessity called on her to do so.
When Grace was a young woman of twenty three a terrible storm burst suddenly upon the coast and in the twinkling of an eye the reefs about the lighthouse were a sea of churning foam, while the great waves racing in from the ocean thundered so mightily at its base that it seemed as though they must tear it from its foundations and sweep it away.
She was a fine new steamer, well and strongly built, but she had put to sea with her boilers in poor condition, and it had been intended to give them a thorough overhauling in Dundee.
When the steamer was off Flamborough Head the boilers commenced to leak, and the ship's fires were extinguished.
While pitching in the heavy seas the boilers leaked terribly, the fires were again put out and the ship became unmanageable.
Sails were hoisted, but were torn to ribbons by the wind.
Fog and rain made it impossible for the sailors to see until they were in the teeth of the breakers, and then the beam of the lighthouse showed them the wild rocks only a short distance away.
Nothing could save them from destruction.
The rest clung to what supports they could find and held on expecting instant death.
The after half of the vessel was swept away by the seas with many passengers and the captain and his wife.
On the forward part of the ship about twelve wretched persons remained in most desperate plight, the seas breaking over them and threatening to engulf the remaining portion of the vessel.
When day broke the wreck could be seen from the mainland, but the misery of the unfortunate persons who survived was even more plain to William Darling and his family.
Grace begged her father to launch a boat and go to their assistance, but Darling, brave sailor as he was, knew that there was little or no chance of his ever reaching the doomed ship, and shook his head.
Darling was no coward, and the prayers and entreaties of his daughter won the day.
He decided to risk launching a boat from the lighthouse.
With mrs Darling to help them in launching their boat, Grace and her father put forth from the lighthouse, running their boat into the sea in the lee of the rocks, and pulling strongly for the wreck.
Father and daughter both labored at the oars, unable to speak on account of the roar of the sea and wind, and blinded by the spray that whirled over them.
Their boat was tossed like a shuttlecock in the great waves, and they knew that unless the shipwrecked persons could aid them it would be impossible to return to the lighthouse.
They must succeed or die, and their chance of success was small.
Little by little they drew near the wreck.
As the rescuers drew near the reef, Darling leaped ashore, and Grace kept the frail rowboat from dashing itself to pieces against the rocks.
Then followed the difficult task of getting the survivors into the boat.
When the last person was aboard Darling clambered back, and with new hands at the oars the boat was rowed back to the lighthouse-a trip that required great strength and much time for the current was against them.
And when the light was reached, the shipwrecked people were soon made comfortable and cared for by Grace and mrs Darling, and nine lives were thus saved by the determination of a single girl.
Among them was Grace's brother, Brooks Darling, and the heroism of his achievement and that of the other fishermen was only exceeded by the marvelous feat of the girl herself and of her father.
In the course of a few days the fishermen succeeded in returning to the shore, taking with them the news.
All England rang with the fame of Grace's exploit, and letters and gifts poured in from every side.
Scores of people visited the lighthouse.
Grace was feted and admired, and a public subscription in her benefit resulted in a gift of seven hundred pounds, or about thirty five hundred dollars of our money.
She also received four medals, and a large sum of money in private gifts.
Grace and her family took their new prominence with great good sense and modesty, and disliked the publicity which came to them.
They were astonished at the commotion their exploit had caused, for to them it appeared little more than a part of the day's work that duty required them to perform.
But Grace did not live long after her exploit.
Her confined life at the lighthouse and the exposure she underwent there resulted in the disease of consumption from which she rapidly wasted away.
In spite of the best medical aid she steadily drooped, and two years after she had done her brave deed she died in the town of Bamborough where she had been born.
Again a subscription was collected and a monument was erected in her honor.
Her father and mother lived to a ripe old age, reaping benefits from the money that Grace had left them.
twelve
THE LIBRARY, SMOKING ROOM, AND "DEN"
In the days when furniture was defined as "that which may be carried about," the natural bookcase was a chest with a strong lock.
Long after the establishment of the printing press, books, except in the hands of the scholar, continued to be a kind of curiosity, like other objects of art: less an intellectual need than a treasure upon which rich men prided themselves.
It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that the taste for books became a taste for reading.
Beautiful bindings were still highly valued, and some of the most wonderful work produced in France belongs to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but as people began to buy books for the sake of what they contained, less exaggerated importance was attached to their exterior, so that bindings, though perfect as taste and skill could make them, were seldom as extravagantly enriched as in the two preceding centuries.
The substitution of the octavo for the folio, and certain modifications in binding which made it possible to stand books upright instead of laying one above the other with edges outward, gradually gave to the library a more modern aspect.
In France, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the library had come to be a recognized feature in private houses.
There is no doubt that this is not only the most practical, but the most decorative, way of housing any collection of books large enough to be so employed.
To adorn the walls of a library, and then conceal their ornamentation by expensive bookcases, is a waste, or rather a misapplication, of effects-always a sin against aesthetic principles.
To be decorative, a bookcase need not contain the productions of the master binders,--old volumes by Eve and Derome, or the work of Roger Payne and Sanderson,--unsurpassed as they are in color value.
The question of binding leads incidentally to that of editions, though the latter is hardly within the scope of this book.
People who have begun to notice the outside of their books naturally come to appreciate paper and type; and thus learn that the modern book is too often merely the cheapest possible vehicle for putting words into print.
The plain paper or buckram covers of a good publisher are, in fact, more decorative, because more artistic, than showy tree calf or "antique morocco."
The same principle applies to the library itself: plain shelves filled with good editions in good bindings are more truly decorative than ornate bookcases lined with tawdry books.
The best examples of this treatment are found in France.
It was natural that where books were few, small bookcases should be preferred to a room lined with shelves; and in the seventeenth century, according to john Evelyn, the "three nations of Great Britain" contained fewer books than Paris.
Almost all the old bookcases had one feature in common: that is, the lower cupboard with solid doors.
The bookcase proper rested upon this projecting cupboard, thus raising the books above the level of the furniture.
Architects are beginning to rediscover the forgotten fact that the stud of a room should be regulated by the dimensions of its floor space; so that in the newer houses the dwarf bookcase is no longer a necessity.
Fragile chairs, lace petticoat lamp shades and irrelevant bric a brac are consequently excluded; and the master's sense of comfort often expresses itself in a set of "office" furniture-a roller top desk, a revolving chair, and others of the puffy type already described as the accepted model of a luxurious seat.
Convenience was not sacrificed to beauty in either desk or chair; but both the old pieces, being designed by skilled cabinet makers, were as decorative as they were useful.
The walls should be free from pattern and light in color, since dark walls necessitate much artificial light, and have the disadvantage of making a room look small.
AN ADJUSTMENT OF NATURE
The painter was a young scrub out of the West named Kraft, who had a favourite food and a pet theory.
His theory was fixed around corned beef hash with poached egg.
There was a story behind the picture, so I went home and let it drip out of a fountain pen.
The idea of Kraft-but that is not the beginning of the story.
Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins (a poet), and I took our meals at Cypher's, on Eighth Avenue.
I say "took." When we had money, Cypher got it "off of" us, as he expressed it.
We had no credit; we went in, called for food and ate it.
We paid or we did not pay.
We had confidence in Cypher's sullenness and smouldering ferocity.
He sat at a worm eaten desk, covered with files of waiters' checks so old that I was sure the bottomest one was for clams that Hendrik Hudson had eaten and paid for. Cypher had the power, in common with Napoleon the third. and the goggle eyed perch, of throwing a film over his eyes, rendering opaque the windows of his soul.
Now and then we paid up back scores.
But the chief thing at Cypher's was Milly.
Milly was a waitress.
Pedestalled and in bronze she might have stood with the noblest of her heroic sisters as "Liver and Bacon Enlivening the World." She belonged to Cypher's.
You expected to see her colossal figure loom through that reeking blue cloud of smoke from frying fat just as you expect the Palisades to appear through a drifting Hudson River fog.
Her sleeves were always rolled above her elbows. She could have taken us three musketeers in her two hands and dropped us out of the window.
She had seen fewer years than any of us, but she was of such superb Evehood and simplicity that she mothered us from the beginning.
I never saw her but I thought of the Yosemite.
And yet, somehow, I could never think of her as existing outside of Cypher's.
There nature had placed her, and she had taken root and grown mightily.
It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held latently.
"She will go to night school and become refined?" I ventured anxiously.
"Caesar had his Brutus-the cotton has its bollworm, the chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has his poison ivy, the hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan, the rose has its-"
"Speak," I interrupted, much perturbed.
"You do not think that Milly will begin to lace?"
"One day," concluded Kraft, solemnly, "there will come to Cypher's for a plate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin, and he will marry Milly."
"Never!" exclaimed Judkins and I, in horror.
"A lumberman," repeated Kraft, hoarsely.
"And a millionaire lumberman!" I sighed, despairingly.
"From Wisconsin!" groaned Judkins.
We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her.
Few things were less improbable.
Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine woods, was made to catch the lumberman's eye.
Why, the alphabet itself connives.
The Sunday newspaper's headliner's work is cut for him.
"Winsome Waitress Wins Wealthy Wisconsin Woodsman."
We shuddered to think of Milly, with her voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee of a tree murderer.
No!
In Cypher's she belonged-in the bacon smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of hurled ironstone china and rattling casters.
But Alaska and not Wisconsin bore the burden of the visitation.
We embraced him as a specimen, and in three minutes we had all but died for one another as friends.
He had just come off the "trail," he said, at one of the North River ferries.
"Bank drafts for two millions," was his summing up, "and a thousand a day piling up from my claims.
And now I want some beef stew and canned peaches.
You gentlemen order what you want."
At last the bollworm had attacked the cotton-the poison ivy was reaching out its tendrils to entwine the summer boarder-the millionaire lumberman, thinly disguised as the Alaskan miner, was about to engulf our Milly and upset Nature's adjustment.
Kraft was the first to act.
He leaped up and pounded the Klondiker's back.
"Come out and drink," he shouted.
"Drink first and eat afterward." Judkins seized one arm and I the other.
There he rumbled a roughly good humoured protest.
"That's the girl for my money," he declared.
"She can eat out of my skillet the rest of her life.
I'm going back there and ask her to marry me.
"You'll take another whiskey and milk now," Kraft persuaded, with Satan's smile.
"I thought you up country fellows were better sports."
With his own guns we drove him from the field.
"He will never find Cypher's again," said Kraft.
"He will propose to the first white apron he sees in a dairy restaurant to morrow.
And Milly-I mean the Natural Adjustment-is saved!"
And back to Cypher's went we three, and, finding customers scarce, we joined hands and did an Indian dance with Milly in the centre.
This, I say, happened three years ago.
And about that time a little luck descended upon us three, and we were enabled to buy costlier and less wholesome food than Cypher's.
Our paths separated, and I saw Kraft no more and Judkins seldom.
But, as I said, I saw a painting the other day that was sold for five thousand dollars.
The title was "Boadicea," and the figure seemed to fill all out of doors.
But of all the picture's admirers who stood before it, I believe I was the only one who longed for Boadicea to stalk from her frame, bringing me corned beef hash with poached egg.
I hurried away to see Kraft.
His satanic eyes were the same, his hair was worse tangled, but his clothes had been made by a tailor.
"I didn't know," I said to him.
"Any evening at seven."
"Then," said I, "when you led us against the lumberman-the-Klondiker --it wasn't altogether on account of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature?"
HORACE GREELEY.
Among the hills of New Hampshire, in a lonely, unpainted house, Horace Greeley was born, february third eighteen eleven, the third of seven children.
His father was a plain farmer, hard-working, yet not very successful, but aided by a wife of uncommon energy and good spirits, notwithstanding her many cares.
Her first two children having died, this boy was especially dear.
mrs Greeley was a great reader of such books as she could obtain, and remembered all she read.
It requires no great discernment to see from whence Horace Greeley derived his intense love for reading, and his boundless energy.
He learned to read, one can scarcely tell how.
When two years old, he would pore over the Bible, as he lay on the floor, and ask questions about the letters; at three, he went to the "district school," often carried through the deep snow on the shoulders of one of his aunts, or on the back of an older boy.
He soon stood at the head of his little class in spelling and reading, "and took it so much to heart when he did happen to lose his place, that he would cry bitterly; so that some boys, when they had gained the right to get above him, declined the honor, because it hurt Horace's feelings so."
Before he was six years old he had read the Bible through, and "Pilgrim's Progress." Their home contained only about twenty books, and these he read and re read.
As he grew older, every book within seven miles was borrowed, and perused after the hard day's work of farming was over.
He gathered a stock of pine knots, and, lighting one each night, lay down by the hearth, and read, oblivious to all around him.
The neighbors came and made their friendly visits, and ate apples and drank cider, as was the fashion, but the lad never noticed their coming or their going.
When really forced to leave his precious books for bed, he would repeat the information he had learned, or the lessons for the next day, to his brother, who usually, most ungraciously, fell asleep before the conversation was half completed.
When Horace was nearly ten years old, his father, who had speculated in a small way in lumber, became a bankrupt; his house and furniture were sold by the sheriff, and he was obliged to flee from the State to avoid arrest.
Some of these debts were paid, thirty years afterward, by his noble son.
Going to Westhaven, vermont., mr Greeley obtained work on a farm, and moved his family thither.
They were very poor, the children sitting on the floor and eating their porridge together out of a tin pan; but they were happy in the midst of their hard work and plain food.
Everybody has troubles; and very wise are they who do not tell them, either in their faces or by their words.
Horace earned a few pennies all his own; sometimes by selling nuts, or bundles of the roots of pitch pine for kindling, which he carried on his back to the store.
From earliest childhood he had determined to be a printer; so, when eleven years of age, he walked nine miles to see the publisher of a newspaper, and obtain a situation.
The editor looked at the small, tow haired boy, shook his head, and said, "You are too young." With a heavy heart the child walked the long nine miles back again.
But he must do something; and, a little later, with seventy five cents in his pocket, and some food tied in a bundle, which he hung on the end of a stick, slung over his shoulder, he walked one hundred and twenty miles back to New Hampshire, to see his relatives.
After some weeks he returned, with a few more cents in his purse than when he started!
The father Greeley ought to have foreseen that such energy and will would produce results; but because Horace, in a fit of abstraction, tried to yoke the "off" ox on the "near" side, he said, "Ah! that boy will never get along in the world.
He'll never know more than enough to come in when it rains." Alas! for the blindness of Zaccheus Greeley, whose name even would not be remembered but for his illustrious son.
When Horace was fourteen, he read in a newspaper that an apprentice was wanted in a printing office eleven miles distant.
He hastened thither, and, though unprepossessing, from his thin voice, short pantaloons, lack of stockings, and worn hat, he was hired on trial.
The first day he worked at the types in silence.
Finally the boys began to tease him with saucy remarks, and threw type at him; but he paid no attention.
On the third day, one of the apprentices took a large black ball, used to put ink on the type, and remarking that Horace's hair was too light, daubed his head four times.
The pressman and editor both stopped their labors to witness a fight; but they were disappointed, for the boy never turned from his work.
He soon left his desk, spent an hour in washing the ink from his hair, and returned to his duties.
Seeing that he could not be irritated, and that he was determined to work, he became a great favorite.
When at his type, he would often compose paragraphs for the paper, setting up the words without writing them out.
He soon joined a debating society, composed of the best informed persons of the little town of East Poultney,--the minister, the doctor, the lawyer, the schoolteachers, and the like.
What was their surprise to find that the young printer knew almost every thing, and was always ready to speak, or read an essay.
Soon after he had learned his trade, the newspaper suspended, and he was thrown out of work.
The people with whom he boarded gave him a brown overcoat, not new, and with moistened eyes said good by to the poor youth whom they had learned to love as their own.
He remained a few weeks with his family, then walked fifty miles east to a town in New York State, where he found plenty of work, but no money, and in six weeks returned to the log cabin.
After trying various towns, he found a situation in Erie, taking the place of a workman who was ill, and for seven months he did not lose a day.
Putting fifteen dollars in his pocket, he took the balance of sixty three in a note, and gave it to his father.
A noble son indeed, who would not buy a single garment for himself, but carried the money home, so as to make the poor ones a trifle more comfortable!
Fortunately, though it was the almost universal custom to use liquors, Horace was a teetotaler, and despised chewing or smoking tobacco, which he regarded "as the vilest, most detestable abuse of his corrupted sensual appetites whereof depraved man is capable;" therefore he had no fear of temptation from these sources.
All day Friday and Saturday he walked the streets of New York, looking for work.
Late in the day, a friend who called upon the owner of the house, learning that the printer wanted work, said he had heard of a vacancy at mr West's, eighty five Chatham Street.
The next morning Horace was at the shop at half past five!
New York was scarcely awake; even the newsboys were asleep in front of the paper offices.
He waited for an hour and a half,--a day, it seemed to him,--when one of the journey men arrived, and, finding the door locked, sat down beside the stranger.
He took him to the foreman, who decided to try him on a Polyglot Testament, with marginal references, such close work that most of the men refused to do it.
"Yes; we need help, and he was the best I could get," said the foreman.
"Well, pay him off to night, and let him go about his business."
By beginning his labors before six in the morning, and not leaving his desk till nine in the evening, working by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, he could earn six dollars a week.
At first his fellow workmen called him "the ghost," from his white hair and complexion; but they soon found him friendly, and willing to lend money, which, as a rule, was never returned to him; they therefore voted him to be a great addition to the shop.
As usual, though always scrupulously clean, he wore his poor clothes, no stockings, and his wristbands tied together with twine.
Once he bought a second-hand black suit of a Jew, for five dollars, but it proved a bad bargain.
His earnings were sent, as before, to his parents.
After a year, business grew dull, and he was without a place.
For some months he worked on various papers, when a printer friend, mr Story, suggested that they start in business, their combined capital being one hundred and fifty dollars.
They did so, and their first work was the printing of a penny "Morning Post," which suspended in three weeks, they losing sixty dollars.
The partner was drowned shortly after, and his brother in law took his place.
Young Greeley, now twenty three, and deeply interested in politics, determined to start a weekly paper.
Fifteen of his friends promised to subscribe for it.
The "New Yorker" was begun, and so well conducted was it that three hundred papers throughout the country gave it complimentary notices.
It grew to a subscription list of nine thousand persons; but much of the business was done on trust, times were hard, and, after seven years, the enterprise had to be abandoned.
Years after this he wrote, "Through most of this time I was very poor, and for four years really bankrupt, though always paying my notes, and keeping my word, but living as poorly as possible. My embarrassments were sometimes dreadful; not that I feared destitution, but the fear of involving my friends in my misfortunes was very bitter....
I would rather be a convict in a State prison, a slave in a rice swamp, than to pass through life under the harrow of debt. Hunger, cold, rags, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach, are disagreeable, but debt is infinitely worse than them all.
Avoid pecuniary obligation as you would pestilence or famine.
If you have but fifty cents, and can get no more for a week, buy a peck of corn, parch it, and live on it, rather than owe any man a dollar."
Meantime the young editor had married Miss Mary y Cheney, a schoolteacher of unusual mind and strength of character.
It was, of course, a comfort to have some one to share his sorrows; but it pained his tender heart to make another help bear his burdens.
Beside editing the "New Yorker," he had also taken charge of the "Jeffersonian," a weekly campaign paper published at Albany, and the "Log Cabin," established to aid in the election of General Harrison to the Presidency.
The latter paper was a great success, the circulation running up to ninety thousand, though very little money was made; but it gave mr Greeley a reputation in all parts of the country for journalistic ability.
President Harrison died after having been a month in office; and seven days after his death, mr Greeley started, april tenth eighteen forty one, a new paper, the "New York Tribune," with the dying words of Harrison as its motto: "I desire you to understand the true principles of the government.
I wish them carried out.
Success did not come at first.
Of the five thousand copies published and to be sold at a cent each, mr Greeley says, "We found some difficulty in giving them away." The expenses for the first week were five hundred and twenty five dollars; receipts, ninety two.
But the boy who could walk nearly six hundred miles to see his parents, and be laughed at for poor clothes, while he saved his money for their use, was not to be overcome at thirty years of age, by the failure of one or of a dozen papers.
Some of the New York journals fought the new sheet; but it lived and grew till, on the seventh week, it had eleven thousand subscribers. A good business manager was obtained as partner.
mr Greeley worked sixteen hours a day.
He wrote four columns of editorial matter (his copy, wittily says Junius Henri Browne, "strangers mistook for diagrams of Boston"), dozens of letters, often forgot whether he had been to his meals, and was ready to see and advise with everybody.
When told that he was losing time by thus seeing people, he said, "I know it; but I'd rather be beset by loafers, and stopped in my work, than be cooped up where I couldn't be got at by men who really wanted to and had a right to see me." So warm as this were his sympathies with all humanity!
In eighteen forty two, when he was thirty one, he visited Washington, Niagara, and his parents in Pennsylvania, and wrote delightful letters back to his paper.
What did Zaccheus think now of his boy of whom he prophesied "would never know more than enough to come in when it rains"?
The years passed on.
Margaret Fuller came upon the editorial staff; for mr Greeley was ever the advocate of the fullest liberty for woman in any profession, and as much pay for her work as for that of men.
And now came a great sorrow, harder to bear than poverty.
His little son Pickie, called "the glorious boy with radiant beauty never equalled," died suddenly.
In eighteen forty eight he was elected to Congress for three months to fill out the unexpired term of a deceased member, and did most effective work with regard to the mileage system and the use of the public lands.
To a high position had come the printer boy.
At this time he was also prominently in the lecture field, speaking twice a week to large audiences all over the country.
In eighteen fifty his first book was published by the Harpers, "Hints toward Reform," composed of ten lectures and twenty essays.
The following year he visited England as one of the "jury" in the awarding of prizes; and while there made a close study of philanthropic and social questions.
In eighteen fifty five he again visited Europe; and four years later, California, where he was received with great demonstrations of honor and respect.
In eighteen sixty he was at the Chicago Convention, and helped to nominate Abraham Lincoln in preference to William h Seward.
His paper molded the opinions of hundreds of thousands.
He had fought against slavery with all the strength of his able pen; but he advocated buying the slaves for four hundred million dollars rather than going to war,--a cheaper method than our subsequent conflict, with enormous loss of life and money.
When he found the war inevitable, after General McClellan's defeat at the Chickahominy, he urged upon mr Lincoln immediate emancipation, which was soon adopted. The "New York World" said after his death, "mr
Greeley will hold the first place with posterity on the roll of emancipation."
In the draft riots in New York, in eighteen sixty three, the mob burst into the Tribune Building, smashing the furniture, and shouting, "Down with the old white coat!" mr Greeley always wore a coat and hat of this hue.
Had he been present, doubtless he would have been killed at once.
When urged to arm the office, he said, "No; all my life I have worked for the workingmen; if they would now burn my office and hang me, why, let them do it."
The same year he began his "History of the Civil War" for a Hartford publisher.
These volumes, dedicated to john Bright, have had a sale of several hundred thousand copies.
After the war mr Greeley, while advocating "impartial suffrage" for black as well as white, advocated also "universal amnesty." He believed nothing was to be gained by punishing a defeated portion of our nation, and wanted the past buried as quickly as possible.
He was opposed to the hanging of Jefferson Davis; and with Gerritt Smith, a well-known abolitionist, and about twenty others, he signed mr Davis's bail bond for one hundred thousand dollars, which released him from prison at Fortress Monroe, where he had been for two years.
At once the North was aflame with indignation.
No criticism was too scathing; but mr Greeley took the denunciations like a hero, because he had done what his conscience approved.
He said, "Seeing how passion cools and wrath abates, I confidently look forward to the time when thousands who have cursed will thank me for what I have done and dared in resistance to their own sanguinary impulses....
Out of a life earnestly devoted to the good of human kind, your children will select my going to Richmond and signing that bail bond as the wisest act."
In eighteen seventy two considerable disaffection having arisen in the Republican party at the course pursued by President Grant at the South, the "Liberal Republicans," headed by Sumner, Schurz, and Trumbull, held a convention at Cincinnati, and nominated Horace Greeley for President.
The Democratic party saw the hopelessness of nominating a man in opposition to Grant and Greeley, and accepted the latter as their own candidate. The contest was bitter and partisan in the extreme.
mr Greeley received nearly three million votes, while General Grant received a half million majority.
No doubt the defeat was a great disappointment to one who had served his country and the Republican party for so many years with very little political reward.
But just a month before the election came the crushing blow of his life, in the death of his noble wife.
He left his speech making, and for weeks attended her with the deepest devotion.
I have not slept one hour in twenty four for a month.
If she lasts, poor soul, another week, I shall go before her."
After her death he could not sleep at all, and brain fever soon set in. friday november twenty ninth, the end came.
At noon he said distinctly, his only remaining children, Ida and Gabriella, standing by his bedside, "I know that my Redeemer liveth;" and at half past three, "It is done." He was ready for the great change.
He had written only a short time before, "With an awe that is not fear, and a consciousness of demerit which does not exclude hope, I await the opening, before my steps, of the gates of the eternal world." Dead at sixty one!
Overworked, not having had "a good night's sleep in fifteen years!"
When his death became known, the whole nation mourned for him. Newspapers from Maine to Louisiana gave touching tributes to his greatness, his purity, and his far sightedness as a leader of the people.
The Union League Club, the Lotos, the Typographical Society, the Associated Press, German and colored clubs, and temperance organizations passed resolutions of sorrow.
saint Louis, Albany, Indianapolis, Nashville, and other cities held memorial meetings.
john Bright sent regrets over "our friend, Horace Greeley." Congress passed resolutions of respect for his "eminent services and personal purity and worth."
And then came the sad and impressive burial.
Can't you possibly let me in to have one last look?"
The man stood a moment by the open coffin, and then, pulling his hat low down to hide the tears, was lost in the crowd.
And then through an enormous concourse of people, Fifth Avenue being blocked for a mile, the body was borne to Greenwood Cemetery.
Stores were closed, and houses along the route were draped in black.
Flags on the shipping, in the harbor, were at half mast; and bells tolled from one to three o'clock.
Two hundred and fifty carriages, containing the President of the United States, governors, senators, and other friends, were in the procession.
By the side of his wife and their three little children the great man was laid to rest, the two daughters stepping into the vault, and laying flowers tenderly upon the coffin.
The following Sabbath clergymen all over the country preached about this wonderful life: its struggles succeeded by world-wide honor.
seventeen
SUGGESTION TO CHRISTMAS SHOPPERS
"By Jingo!" said the Idiot, as he wearily took his place at the breakfast table the other morning, "but I'm just regularly tuckered out."
"Not a late hour," returned the Idiot.
"Matter of fact, I went to bed last night at half after seven and never waked until nine this morning. In spite of all that sleep and rest I feel now as if I'd been put through a threshing machine.
Every bone in my body from the funny to the medulla aches like all possessed, and my joints creak like a new pair of shoes on a school boy in church, they are so stiff."
"Oh well," said the Doctor, "what of it?
The pace that kills is bound to have some symptoms preliminary to dissolution.
If you, like other young men of the age, burn the candle at both ends and in the middle, what can you expect?
You push nature into a corner and then growl like all possessed because she rebels."
"Not I," retorted the Idiot.
"mr Pedagog and the Poet and mr Bib may lead the strenuous life, but as for mine the simple life is the thing. I'm not striving after the unattainable.
The cold and clammy touch of dissipation is not writing letters of burning condemnation proceedings on my brow. Excesses in any form are utterly unknown to me, and from one end of the Subway to the other you won't find another man of my age who in general takes better care of himself.
No mother could watch over her offspring more tenderly than I watch over me, and-"
"Well, then, what in thunder is the matter with you?" cried the Lawyer, irritated.
"If this is all true, why on earth are you proclaiming yourself as a physical wreck?
There must be some cause for your condition."
"I went Christmas shopping yesterday without having previously trained for it, and this is the result.
I sometimes wonder, Doctor, that you gentlemen, who have the public health more or less in your hands, don't take the initiative and stave off nervous prostration and other ills attendant upon a run down physical condition instead of waiting for a fully developed case and trying to cure it after the fact.
"I'm not afraid to tackle almost any kind of fever known to medical science, but the shopping fever-well, it is incurable.
I grant you that it is as much of a disease as scarlet, typhoid, or any other, but the mind has not yet been discovered that can find a remedy for it short of abject poverty, and even that has been known to fail."
There are lots of diseases that our forefathers used to regard as necessarily fatal that nowadays we look upon as mere trifles, because people can be put physically into such a condition that they are practically immune to their ravages."
"Maybe so-but if people will shop they are going to be knocked out by it.
"Nonsense, Doctor.
"A college president might as well say that boys will play football, and that there's nothing they can do to stave off the inevitable consequences of playing the game to one who isn't prepared for it.
You know as well as anybody else that from november fifteenth to december twenty fourth every year an epidemic of shopping is going to break out in our midst.
You know that the men and women in your care, unless they have properly trained for the exigencies of the epidemic period, will be prostrated physically and nervously, racked in bone and body, aching from tip to toe, their energy exhausted and their spines as limp as a rag, and yet you claim you can do nothing.
What would we think of a football trainer who would try thus to account for the condition of his eleven at the end of a season?
We'd bounce him, that's what."
"Perhaps that gigantic intellect of yours has something to suggest," sneered the Doctor.
"Certainly," quoth the Idiot.
"To eradicate the shopping evil?" laughed the Doctor.
"Nay, nay," retorted the Idiot.
"The shopping inebriate is too much of a factor in our commercial prosperity to make such a thing as that popular.
"A what?" roared the Doctor.
Why not have a shopnasium in which to teach what we might call shopnastics?
"Very nice," said the Doctor.
"But how on earth can you train them? That's what I'd like to know."
"How?
Why, how on earth do you train a football team except by practice?" demanded the Idiot.
Take a couple of bargain counters for the goals.
Place one at one end of the shopnasium and one at the other.
"The women couldn't stand it," said the Doctor.
"They might as well be knocked out at the real thing as in the imitation."
"They wouldn't be knocked out if you gave them preliminary individual exercise with punching bags, dummies for tackle practice, and other things the football player uses to make himself tough and irresistible."
"Think of the glory of winning a goal which sustains the football player through the toughest of fights.
The knowledge that the nation will ring with its plaudits of his gallant achievement is half the backing of your quarter back."
"That's all right," said the Idiot, "but the make-up of the average woman is such that what pursuit of fame does for the gladiator, the chase after a bargain does for a woman.
I have known women so worn and weary that they couldn't get up for breakfast who had a lion's strength an hour later at a Monday marked down sale of laundry soap and Yeats's poems.
What the goal is to the man the bargain is to the woman, so on the question of incentive to action, mr Brief, the sexes are about even.
I really think, Doctor, there's a chance here for you and me to make a fortune.
dr Capsule's Shopnasium, opened every September for the training and development of expert shoppers in all branches of shopnastics, under the medical direction of yourself and my business management would be a winner.
Moreover, it would furnish a business opening for all those football players our colleges are turning out, for, as our institution grew and we established branches of it all over the country, we should, of course, have to have managers in every city, and who better to teach all these things than the expert footballist of the hour?"
"Oh, well," said the Doctor, "perhaps it isn't such a bad thing, after all; but I don't think I care to go into it.
"Very well," said the Idiot.
"That being the case, I will modify my suggestion somewhat and send the idea to President Taylor of Vassar and other heads of women's colleges.
That is the only way I can see for us to build up a woman of the future who will be able to cope with the strenuous life that is involved to day in the purchase of a cake of soap to send to one's grandmother at Christmas.
Chapter seven
Andy Tries a Trick
Without loss of time the young inventor and the aeronaut began to repair the damage done to the Red Cloud by colliding with the tower. The most important part to reconstruct was the propeller, and mr Sharp decided to make two, instead of one, in order to have an extra one in case of future accidents.
Tom's task was to arrange the mechanism so that, hereafter, the rudder could not become jammed, and so prevent the airship from steering properly.
This the lad accomplished by a simple but effective device which, when the balloonist saw it, caused him to compliment Tom.
"That's worth patenting," he declared.
"I advise you to take out papers on that."
"It seems such a simple thing," answered the youth.
"And I don't see much use of spending the money for a patent.
Airships aren't likely to be so numerous that I could make anything off that patent."
"You take my advice," insisted mr Sharp.
You get that device patented."
Tom did so, and, not many years afterward he was glad that he had, as it brought him quite an income.
It required several days' work on the Red Cloud before it was in shape for another trial.
During the hours when he was engaged in the big shed, helping mr Sharp, the young inventor spent many minutes calling to mind the memory of a certain fair face, and I think I need not mention any names to indicate whose face it was.
"She promised to go for a ride with me," mused the lad.
"I hope she doesn't back out.
But I'll want to learn more about managing the ship before I venture with her in it.
It won't do to have any accidents then.
There's Ned Newton, too.
I must take him for a skim in the clouds.
Guess I'll invite him over some afternoon, and give him a private view of the machine, when we get it in shape again."
About a week after the accident at the school mr Sharp remarked to Tom one afternoon:
"If the weather is good to morrow, we'll try another flight.
"He seems much engrossed in something.
It's unusual, too, for he most generally tells me what he is engaged upon.
However, I guess he will say something about it when he gets ready."
He might be nervous, and, while the ship is new, I don't want any nervous passengers aboard.
I can't give them my attention and look after the running of the machinery."
"I was going to propose bringing a friend of mine over to see us make the trip to morrow," went on the young inventor.
"Ned Newton, you know him.
"Oh, I guess Ned's all right.
Let him come along.
We won't go very high to morrow.
After a trial rise by means of the gas, I'm going to lower the ship to the ground, and try for an elevation by means of the planes.
Oh, yes, bring your friend along."
He got a half holiday from the bank, and, shortly after dinner went to Tom's house.
"Come on out in the shed and take a look at the Red Cloud," proposed the young inventor.
The big shed was deserted when the lads entered, and went to the loft where they were on a level with the big, red aluminum tank.
"Now we'll go down into the car or cabin," continued the young navigator of the air, "and I'll show you what we do when we're touring amid the clouds."
As they started to descend the flight of steps from the loft platform, a noise on the ground below attracted their attention.
"Guess that's mr Sharp coming," said Ned.
Tom leaned over and looked down.
"Take a look," whispered the young inventor.
"Andy Foger!" exclaimed Ned, peering over the railing.
They sneaked in when I left the door open.
Wonder what they want?"
They're talking."
The two lads on the loft listened intently.
Though the cronies on the ground below them did not speak loudly, their voices came plainly to the listeners.
"Let's poke a hole in their gas bag," proposed Sam.
"That will make them think they're not so smart as they pretend."
"Why not?" declared Pete.
"You're afraid," sneered Sam.
"I am not!
I'll punch your face if you say that again!
Besides the thing that holds the gas is made of aluminum, and we can't make a hole in it unless we take an axe, and that makes too much noise."
Tom shook his fist at the lads on the ground, but of course they did not see him.
"I have it!" came from Andy.
"What?" demanded his two cronies.
"We'll cut some of the guy wires from the planes and rudders.
That will make the airship collapse.
They'll think the wires broke from the strain.
Take out your knives and saw away at the wires.
Hurry, too, or they may catch us."
"You're caught now," whispered Ned to Tom.
"Come on down, and give 'em a trouncing."
Tom hesitated.
He looked quickly about the loft, and then a smile replaced the frown of righteous anger on his face.
"I have a better way," he said.
"What is it?"
"See that pile of dirt?" and he pointed to some refuse that had been swept up from the floor of the loft.
Ned nodded.
"It consists of a lot of shavings, sawdust and, what's more, a lot of soot and lampblack that we used in mixing some paint.
We'll sweep the whole pile down on their heads, and make them wish they'd stayed away from this place."
"Good!" exclaimed Ned, chuckling.
"Give me a broom.
There's another one for you."
The two lads in the loft peered down.
The red headed, squint eyed bully and his chums had their knives out, and were about to cut some of the important guy wires, when, at a signal from Tom, Ned, with a sweep of his broom, sent a big pile of the dirt, sawdust and lampblack down upon the heads of the conspirators.
The young inventor did the same thing, and for an instant the lower part of the shed looked as if a dirtstorm had taken place there.
The pile of refuse went straight down on the heads of the trio, and, as they were looking up, in order to see to cut the wires, they received considerable of it in their faces.
"Wow!
Who did that!"
"I'm blinded!
The shed is falling down!"
"Run fellows, run!" screamed Andy.
"There's been an explosion.
We'll be killed!"
At that moment the big doors of the shed were thrown open, and mr Sharp came in.
Andy Foger!" cried Tom.
Sam and Pete were wildly trying to wipe the stuff from their faces, but only made matters worse.
"Wish we had some more stuff to put on 'em," remarked Ned, who was holding his sides that ached from laughter.
"I have it!" cried Tom, and he caught up a bucket of red paint, that had been used to give the airship its brilliant hue.
Running to the end of the loft Tom stood for an instant over the trio of lads who were threatening and imploring by 'turns.
"Here's another souvenir of your visit," shouted the young inventor, as he dashed the bucket of red paint down on the conspirators.
They shed shavings, sawdust and lampblack at every step, and from their clothes and hands and faces dripped the carmine paint.
"Better have your pictures taken!" cried Ned, peering from an upper window.
"Yes, and send us one," added Tom, joining his chum.
Andy looked up at them.
He dug a mass of red paint from his left ear, removed a mass of soot from his right cheek, and, shaking his fist, which was alternately striped red and black, cried out in a rage:
"I'll get even with you yet, Tom Swift!"
"You only got what was coming to you," retorted the young inventor. "The next time you come sneaking around this airship, trying to damage it, you'll get worse, and I'll have you arrested.
You've had your lesson, and don't forget it."
The red haired bully, doubly red haired now, had nothing more to say. There was nothing he could say, and, accompanied by his companions, he made a bee line for the rear gate in the fence, and darted across the meadow.
Chapter eight
Winning a Prize
"Looks as if you had had an exciting time here."
"No, those fellows had all the excitement," declared Ned.
"We had the fun." And the two lads proceeded to relate what had taken place.
"Tried to damage the airship, eh?" asked mr Sharp.
"I wish I'd caught them at it; the scoundrels!
"I guess so," assented Tom.
"I must see if they did cut any of the wires."
A little later the airship was taken out of the shed, and made ready for a trip.
The gas ascension was first used, and Ned and mr Swift were passengers with Tom and mr Sharp.
The machine went about a thousand feet up in the air, and then was sent in various directions, to the no small delight of a large crowd that gathered in the meadow back of the Swift property; for it only required the sight of the airship looming its bulk above the fence and buildings, to attract a throng.
Although it was the first time mr Swift had ever been in an airship, he evinced no great astonishment.
In fact he seemed to be thinking deeply, and on some subject not connected with aeronautics.
Tom noticed the abstraction of his father, and shook his head.
As for Ned Newton his delight knew no bounds, At first he was a bit apprehensive as the big ship went higher and higher, and swung about, but he soon lost his fear, and enjoyed the experience as much as did Tom.
The young inventor was busy helping mr Sharp manage the machinery, rudders planes and motor.
A flight of several miles was made, and Tom was wishing they might pay another visit to the Rocksmond Seminary, but mr Sharp, after completing several evolutions, designed to test the steering qualities of the craft, put back home.
"We'll land in the meadow and try rising by the planes alone," he said. In this evolution it was deemed best for mr Swift and Ned to alight, as there was no telling just how the craft would behave.
Tom's father was very willing to get out, but Ned would have remained in, only for the desire of his friend.
With the two propellers whirring at a tremendous speed, and all the gas out of the aluminum container, the Red Cloud shot forward, running over the level ground of the meadow, where a starting course had been laid out.
"Clear the track!" cried mr Sharp, as he saw the crowd closing up in front of him.
Through this shot the craft, and then, when sufficient momentum had been obtained, Tom, at a command from the aeronaut, pulled the lever of the elevation rudder.
Up into the air shot the nose of the Red Cloud as the wind struck the slanting surface of the planes, and, a moment later it was sailing high above the heads of the throng.
"That's the stuff!" cried mr Sharp.
Higher and higher it went, and then, coming to a level keel, the craft was sent here and there, darting about like a bird, and going about in huge circles.
"Start the gas machine, and we'll come to rest in the air," said the balloonist, and Tom did so.
The propellers were stopped, and the Red Cloud floated two thousand feet in the air, only a little distance below some fleecy, white masses from which she took her name.
The demonstration was a great success.
The gas was again allowed to escape, the propellers set in motion, and purely as an aeroplane, the ship was again sent forward.
By means of the planes and rudders a perfect landing was made in the meadow, a short distance from where the start had been made.
The crowd cheered the plucky youth and mr Sharp.
"Now I'm ready to go on a long trip any time you are, Tom," said the aeronaut that night.
"We'll fit up the car and get ready," agreed the 'youth.
"Me?
Oh, well-er-that is, you see; well, I'll think about it," and mr Swift went to his own room, carrying with him a package of papers, containing intricate calculations.
Tom shook his head, but said nothing.
He could not understand his father's conduct.
Work was started the next day on fitting up the car, or cabin, of the airship, so that several persons could live, eat and sleep in it for two weeks, if necessary.
The third day after this task had been commenced the mail brought an unusual communication to Tom and mr Sharp.
It was from an aero club of Blakeville, a city distant about a hundred miles, and stated that a competition for aeroplanes and dirigible balloons was to be held in the course of two weeks.
The affair was designed to further interest in the sport, and also to demonstrate what progress had been made in the art of conquering the air.
Prizes were to be given, and the inventors of the Red Cloud, the achievements of which the committee of arrangements had heard, were invited to compete.
"I'm willing if you are."
"Then let's do it.
We'll see how our craft shows up alongside of others.
I know something of this club.
Once I gave a balloon exhibition for them.
Well, we'll have a try at it. Won't do us any harm to win a prize.
Then for a long trip!"
As it was not necessary to have the car, or cabin, completely fitted up in order to compete for the prize, work in that direction was suspended for the time being, and more attention was paid to the engine, the planes and rudders.
Some changes were made and, a week later the Red Cloud departed for Blakeville.
As the rules of the contest required three passengers, Ned Newton was taken along, mr Swift having arranged with the bank president so that the lad could have a few days off.
As the three navigators approached, they saw a small machine flying around the grounds.
"Look!" cried Ned excitedly.
"What a small airship."
"That's a monoplane," declared Tom, who was getting to be quite an expert.
"Yes, the same kind that was used to cross the English Channel," interjected mr Sharp.
"They're too uncertain for my purposes, though; they are all right under certain conditions."
Hardly had he spoken than a puff of wind caused the daring manipulator of the monoplane to swerve to one side.
He had to make a quick descent-so rapid was it, in fact, that the tips of one of his planes was smashed.
"It'll take him a day to repair that," commented the aeronaut dryly.
The Red Cloud created a sensation as she slowly settled down in front of the big tent assigned to her.
Tom's craft was easily the best one at the carnival, so far, though the managers said other machines were on the way.
The exhibition opened the next day, but no flights were to be attempted until the day following.
Two more crafts arrived, a large triplane, and a dirigible balloon.
There were many visitors to the ground, and Tom, Ned and mr Sharp were kept busy answering questions put by those who crowded into their tent.
Toward the close of the day a fussy little Frenchman entered, and, making his way to where Tom stood, asked:
"One of them," replied the lad.
"Ha! Sacre!
Zen I challenge you to a race.
I have a monoplane zat is ze swiftest evaire!
"Shall we take him up, mr Sharp?" asked Tom.
"We'll race with him, after we get through with the club entries," decided the aeronaut.
"But not for money.
It's against my principles, and I don't believe your father would like it.
Racing for prizes is a different thing."
That night was spent in getting the Red Cloud in shape for the contests of the next day.
She was "groomed" until every wire was taut and every cog, lever and valve working perfectly.
Ned Newton helped all he could. So much has appeared in the newspapers of the races at Blakeville that I will not devote much space here to them.
It was a closer contest with the large triplane, but Tom's airship won, and was given the prize, a fine silver cup.
As the carnival was a small one, no other craft in a class with the Red Cloud had been entered, so Tom and mr Sharp had to be content with the one race they won.
There were other contests among monoplanes and biplanes, and the little Frenchman won two races.
"I will in circles go around you, up and down, zis side zen ze ozzer, and presto!
"All right, wait and see," said Tom, easily.
But, though he showed much confidence he asked mr Sharp in private, just before the impromptu contest: "Do you think we can beat him?"
"Well," said the aeronaut, shrugging his shoulders, "you can't tell much about the air.
His machine certainly goes very fast, but too much wind will be the undoing of him, while it will only help us.
And I think," he added, "that we're going to get a breeze."
It was arranged that the Red Cloud would start from the ground, without the use of the gas, so as to make the machines more even.
At the signal off they started, the motors making a great racket.
The monoplane with the little Frenchman in the seat got up first.
"Ah, ha!" he cried gaily, "I leave you in ze rear!
Catch me if you can!"
"Don't let him beat us," implored Ned.
"Can't you speed her up any more?" inquired Tom of mr Sharp.
Like a flash the Red Cloud darted forward. But the Frenchman also increased his speed and did, actually, at first, circle around the bigger machine, for his affair was much lighter.
"That's the stuff!
We're winning!" yelled Tom, Ned joining in the shout.
Then came a puff of wind.
The monoplane had to descend, for it was in danger of turning turtle.
Still the navigator was not going to give up. He flew along at a lower level.
Then mr Sharp opened up the Red Cloud's engine at full speed, and it was the big machine which now sailed around the other.
"I protest!
I protest!" cried the Frenchman, above the explosions of his motor.
"Ze wind is too strong for me!"
mr Sharp said nothing, but, with a queer smile on his face he sent the airship down toward the earth.
A moment later he was directly under the monoplane.
Then, quickly rising, he fairly caught the Frenchman's machine on top of a square platform of the gas container, the bicycle wheels of the monoplane resting on the flat surface.
And, so swiftly did the Red Cloud fly along that it carried the monoplane with it, to the chagrin of the French navigator.
"A trick!
A trick!" he cried.
Then, dropping down, mr Sharp allowed the monoplane to proceed under its own power, while he raced on to the finish mark, winning, of course, by a large margin.
"Ha!
A trick!
"No, thanks," answered Tom.
"We've had enough.
I guess charity will be satisfied."
The little Frenchman was a good loser, and paid over the money, which was given to the Blakeville Hospital, the institution receiving it gladly.
At the request of the carnival committee, mr Sharp and Tom gave an exhibition of high and long flights the next day, and created no little astonishment by their daring feats.
"We won the first contest we were ever in, and beat that speedy monoplane, which was no small thing to do, as they are very fast."
"But wait until we go on our trip," added Tom, as he looked at the cup they had won.
w h Hadow has said some pertinent things about Chopin in "Studies in Modern Music." Yet we cannot accept unconditionally his statement that "in structure Chopin is a child playing with a few simple types, and almost helpless as soon as he advances beyond them; in phraseology he is a master whose felicitous perfection of style is one of the abiding treasures of the art."
Chopin then, according to Hadow, is no "builder of the lofty rhyme," but the poet of the single line, the maker of the phrase exquisite. This is hardly comprehensive.
With the more complex, classical types of the musical organism Chopin had little sympathy, but he contrived nevertheless to write two movements of a piano sonata that are excellent-the first half of the B flat minor Sonata.
The idealized dance forms he preferred; the Polonaise, Mazurka and Valse were already there for him to handle, but the Ballade was not.
Here he is not imitator, but creator.
In them he attains the acme of his power as an artist," remarks Niecks.
It is the Odyssey of Chopin's soul.
That 'cello like largo with its noiseless suspension stays us for a moment in the courtyard of Chopin's House Beautiful.
Then, told in his most dreamy tones, the legend begins.
There is the tall lily in the fountain that nods to the sun
It drips in cadenced monotone and its song is repeated on the lips of the slender hipped girl with the eyes of midnight-and so might I weave for you a story of what I see in the Ballade and you would be aghast or puzzled.
Only the Slav may hope to understand Chopin thoroughly.
They belong as much to the world as to Poland.
The G minor Ballade after "Konrad Wallenrod," is a logical, well knit and largely planned composition.
The closest parallelism may be detected in its composition of themes.
Its second theme in E flat is lovely in line, color and sentiment.
The return of the first theme in A minor and the quick answer in E of the second are evidences of Chopin's feeling for organic unity.
Development, as in strict cyclic forms, there is not a little.
It is fascinating.
The first questioning theme is heard again, and with a perpendicular roar the presto comes upon us.
For two pages the dynamic energy displayed by the composer is almost appalling.
A whirlwind I have called it elsewhere.
It is a storm of the emotions, muscular in its virility.
I remember de Pachmann-a close interpreter of certain sides of Chopin-playing this coda piano, pianissimo and prestissimo. The effect was strangely irritating to the nerves, and reminded me of a tornado seen from the wrong end of an opera glass.
According to his own lights the Russian virtuoso was right: his strength was not equal to the task, and so, imitating Chopin, he topsy turvied the shading.
This G minor Ballade was published in June, eighteen thirty six, and is dedicated to Baron Stockhausen.
The last bar of the introduction has caused some controversy.
Gutmann, Mikuli and other pupils declare for the E flat; Klindworth and Kullak use it.
Xaver Scharwenka has seen fit to edit Klindworth, and gives a D natural in the Augener edition.
That he is wrong internal testimony abundantly proves.
Even Willeby, who personally prefers the D natural, thinks Chopin intended the E flat, and quotes a similar effect twenty eight bars later.
He might have added that the entire composition contains examples-look at the first bar of the valse episode in the bass.
As Niecks thinks, "This dissonant E flat may be said to be the emotional keynote of the whole poem.
It is a questioning thought that, like a sudden pain, shoots through mind and body."
It was the property of Professor Lebert (Levy), since deceased, and in it, without any question, stands the much discussed E flat.
This testimony is final.
The D natural robs the bar of all meaning.
It is insipid, colorless.
Kullak gives sixty to the half note at the moderato.
On the third page, third bar, he uses F natural in the treble.
So does Klindworth, although F sharp may be found in some editions.
On the last page, second bar, first line, Kullak writes the passage beginning with E flat in eighth notes, Klindworth in sixteenths.
The close is very striking, full of the splendors of glancing scales and shrill octave progressions.
"Perhaps the most touching of all that Chopin has written is the tale of the F major Ballade.
I have witnessed children lay aside their games to listen thereto.
It appears like some fairy tale that has become music.
The four voiced part has such a clearness withal, it seems as if warm spring breezes were waving the lithe leaves of the palm tree.
How soft and sweet a breath steals over the senses and the heart!"
And how difficult it seems to be to write of Chopin except in terms of impassioned prose!
The second Ballade, although dedicated to Robert Schumann, did not excite his warmest praise.
"A less artistic work than the first," he wrote, "but equally fantastic and intellectual.
Its impassioned episodes seem to have been afterward inserted.
I recollect very well that when Chopin played this Ballade for me it finished in F major; it now closes in A minor." Willeby gives its key as F minor.
It is really in the keys of F major-A minor. Chopin's psychology was seldom at fault.
In truth they cannot.
"The second Ballade possesses beauties in no way inferior to those of the first," he continues.
"What can be finer than the simple strains of the opening section!
They sound as if they had been drawn from the people's store house of song.
The entrance of the presto surprises, and seems out of keeping with what precedes; but what we hear after the return of tempo primo-the development of those simple strains, or rather the cogitations on them-justifies the presence of the presto.
The second appearance of the latter leads to an urging, restless coda in A minor, which closes in the same key and pianissimo with a few bars of the simple, serene, now veiled first strain."
Rubinstein bore great love for this second Ballade.
I can find "no lack of affinity" between the andantino and presto.
Chopin's robust treatment of the first theme results in a strong piece of craftmanship. The episodical nature of this Ballade is the fruit of the esoteric moods of its composer.
It follows a hidden story, and has the quality-as the second Impromptu in F sharp-of great, unpremeditated art.
It shocks one by its abrupt but by no means fantastic transitions. The key color is changeful, and the fluctuating themes are well contrasted.
Presto con fuoco Chopin marks the second section.
Kullak gives eighty four to the quarter, and for the opening sixty six to the quarter.
He also wisely marks crescendos in the bass at the first thematic development.
He prefers the E-as does Klindworth-nine bars before the return of the presto.
At the eighth bar, after this return, Kullak adheres to the E instead of F at the beginning of the bar, treble clef.
Klindworth indicates both.
It is the schoolgirls' delight, who familiarly toy with its demon, seeing only favor and prettiness in its elegant measures.
Forsooth, it is aristocratic, gay, graceful, piquant, and also something more.
"A coquettish grace-if we accept by this expression that half unconscious toying with the power that charms and fires, that follows up confession with reluctance-seems the very essence of Chopin's being."
"It becomes a difficult task to transcribe the easy transitions, full of an irresistible charm, with which he portrays Love's game.
Who will not recall the memorable passage in the A flat Ballade, where the right hand alone takes up the dotted eighths after the sustained chord of the sixth of A flat?
Could a lover's confusion be more deliciously enhanced by silence and hesitation?" Ehlert above evidently sees a ballroom picture of brilliancy, with the regulation tender avowal.
The episodes of this Ballade are so attenuated of any grosser elements that none but psychical meanings should be read into them.
The disputed passage is on the fifth page of the Kullak edition, after the trills.
To my mind this repetition adds emphasis, although it is a formal blur.
And what an irresistible moment it is, this delightful territory, before the darker mood of the C sharp minor part is reached!
Niecks becomes enthusiastic over the insinuation and persuasion of this composition: "the composer showing himself in a fundamentally caressing mood." The ease with which the entire work is floated proves that Chopin in mental health was not daunted by larger forms.
There is moonlight in this music, and some sunlight, too.
Contrapuntal skill is shown in the working out section.
Chopin always wears his learning lightly; it does not oppress us.
The inverted dominant pedal in the C sharp minor episode reveals, with the massive coda, a great master.
Kullak suggests some variants.
He uses the transient shake in the third bar, instead of the appoggiatura which Klindworth prefers.
Klindworth attacks the trill on the second page with the upper tone-A flat.
Kullak and Mertke, in the Steingraber edition, play the passage in this manner:
Here is Klindworth:
[Musical score excerpt of the same passage in Klindworth's edition]
It is Chopin in his most reflective, yet lyric mood.
Lyrism is the keynote of the work, a passionate lyrism, with a note of self absorption, suppressed feeling-truly Slavic, this shyness!--and a concentration that is remarkable even for Chopin.
The narrative tone is missing after the first page, a rather moody and melancholic pondering usurping its place.
It is the mood of a man who examines with morbid, curious insistence the malady that is devouring his soul.
This Ballade is the companion of the Fantaisie Polonaise, but as a Ballade "fully worthy of its sisters," to quote Niecks.
It was published December, eighteen forty three.
The theme in F minor has the elusive charm of a slow, mournful valse, that returns twice, bejewelled, yet never overladen.
Here is the very apotheosis of the ornament; the figuration sets off the idea in dazzling relief.
How wonderfully the introduction comes in for its share of thoughtful treatment.
What a harmonist!
I select for especial admiration this modulatory passage:
[Musical score excerpt]
And what could be more evocative of dramatic suspense than the sixteen bars before the mad, terrifying coda!
How the solemn splendors of the half notes weave an atmosphere of mystic tragedy!
This soul suspension recalls Maeterlinck.
Here is the episode:
[Musical score excerpt]
A story of de Lenz that lends itself to quotation is about this piece:
It has three requirements: The comprehension of the programme as a whole,--for Chopin writes according to a programme, to the situations in life best known to, and understood by himself; and in an adequate manner; the conquest of the stupendous difficulties in complicated figures, winding harmonies and formidable passages.
The Ballade- andante con moto, six eighths-begins in the major key of the dominant; the seventh measure comes to a stand before a fermata on C major.
Rub the bloom from a peach or from a butterfly-what remains will belong to the kitchen, to natural history!
A little thread connects this with the chorale like introduction of the second theme.
Then followed a passage a tempo, in which the principal theme played hide and seek.
Of technical difficulties he knew literally nothing; the intricate and evasive parts were as easy as the easiest-I might say easier!
I admired the short trills in the left hand, which were trilled out quite independently, as if by a second player; the gliding ease of the cadence marked dolcissimo.
It swung itself into the higher register, where it came to a stop before A major, just as the introduction stopped before C major.
The coda, in modulated harp tones, came to a stop before a fermata which corresponded to those before mentioned, in order to cast anchor in the haven of the dominant, finishing with a witches' dance of triplets, doubled in thirds.
This piece winds up with extreme bravura.
The "lingering" mentioned by de Lenz is tempo rubato, so fatally misunderstood by most Chopin players.
De Lenz in a note quotes Meyerbeer as saying-Meyerbeer, who quarrelled with Chopin about the rhythm of a mazurka-"Can one reduce women to notation?
They would breed mischief, were they emancipated from the measure."
There is passion, refined and swelling, in the curves of this most eloquent composition.
It is Chopin at the supreme summit of his art, an art alembicated, personal and intoxicating.
I know of nothing in music like the F minor Ballade.
Its inaccessible position preserves it from rude and irreverent treatment.
She was, in my opinion, the most superb of creatures, Clodagh-that haughty neck which seemed always scorning something just behind her left shoulder.
Sometimes she frightened me.
She was at this date no longer young, being by five years my senior, as also, by five years, the senior of her nephew, born from the marriage of her sister with Peters of Taunton.
On that day of Clark's visit to me I had not been seated five minutes with Clodagh, when I said:
'dr
Clark-ha! ha!
He says that if anything happened to Peters, I should be the first man he would run to.
He has had an absurd dream...'
But I could no more help it than I could fly.
I saw her sharp cut, florid face in profile, steadily bent and smelling.
She said presently in her cold, rapid way:
'The man who first plants his foot on the North Pole will certainly be ennobled.
I say nothing of the many millions...
I only wish that I was a man!'
'I don't know that I have any special ambition that way,' I rejoined.
'I am very happy in my warm Eden with my Clodagh.
I don't like the outer Cold.'
'Don't let me think little of you!' she answered pettishly.
'Why should you, Clodagh?
I am not bound to desire to go to the North Pole, am I?'
'I might-I-doubt it.
There is our marriage....'
'Marriage indeed!
But there are many in an expedition.
'But why?
They say...'
She stopped, she stopped.
Her voice dropped:
'That peter takes atropine.'
She moved from the window, sat in a rocking chair, and turned the leaves of a book, without reading.
We were silent, she and I; I standing, looking at her, she drawing the thumb across the leaf edges, and beginning again, contemplatively.
Then she laughed dryly a little-a dry, mad laugh.
'Why did you start when I said that?' she asked, reading now at random.
I did not start, Clodagh!
What made you think that I started?
I did not start!
Who told you, Clodagh, that Peters takes atropine?'
But don't look dumbfoundered in that absurd fashion: I have no intention of poisoning him in order to see you a multimillionaire, and a Peer of the Realm....'
'My dearest Clodagh!'
'I easily might, however.
He will be here presently.
He is bringing mr Wilson for the evening.' (Wilson was going as electrician of the expedition.)
Women are no longer admired for doing such things.'
'Ha! ha!
Oh, my good Lord! let us change this talk....'
But now she could talk of nothing else.
She got from me that afternoon the history of all the Polar expeditions of late years, how far they reached, by what aids, and why they failed.
But now, suddenly, her mind seemed wholly possessed, my mention of Clark's visit apparently setting her well a burn with the Pole fever.
I went home with a pretty heavy heart.
The house of dr peter Peters was three doors from mine, on the opposite side of the street.
Toward one that night, his footman ran to knock me up with the news that Peters was very ill.
I hurried to his bed side, and knew by the first glance at his deliriums and his staring pupils that he was poisoned with atropine.
'What on earth is the matter?' he said to me.
'Poisoned,' I answered.
'Good God! what with?'
'Atropine.'
'Good Heavens!'
'Don't be frightened: I think he will recover.'
'Is that certain?'
'Yes, I think-that is, if he leaves off taking the drug, Wilson.'
I hesitated, I hesitated.
But I said:
I slept till eleven a m, and then hurried over again to Peters.
My beloved put her forefinger to her lips, whispering:
She came closer to my ear, saying:
'I heard the news early.
I am come to stay with him, till-the last....'
We looked at each other some time-eye to eye, steadily, she and I: but mine dropped before Clodagh's.
A word was on my mouth to say, but I said nothing.
The recovery of Peters was not so steady as I had expected.
At the end of the first week he was still prostrate.
It was then that I said to Clodagh:
'Clodagh, your presence at the bed side here somehow does not please me. It is so unnecessary.'
'Unnecessary certainly,' she replied: 'but I always had a genius for nursing, and a passion for watching the battles of the body.
I don't know.
This is a case that I dislike.
I have half a mind to throw it to the devil.'
'Then do so.'
'And you, too-go home, go home, Clodagh!'
In these days of "the corruption of the upper classes," and Roman decadence of everything, shouldn't every innocent whim be encouraged by you upright ones who strive against the tide?
Whims are the brakes of crimes: and this is mine.
And I want you to get into the habit at once of letting me have my little way----'
Now she touched my hair with a lofty playfulness that soothed me: but even then I looked upon the rumpled bed, and saw that the man there was really very sick.
I have still a nausea to write about it!
Lucrezia Borgia in her own age may have been heroic: but Lucrezia in this late century!
One could retch up the heart...
The second week passed, and only ten days remained before the start of the expedition.
At the end of that second week, Wilson, the electrician, was one evening sitting by Peter's bedside when I entered.
Meantime, Clark came each day.
The patient lay in a semi coma broken by passionate vomitings, and his condition puzzled us all.
I formally stated that he took atropine-had been originally poisoned by atropine: but we saw that his present symptoms were not atropine symptoms, but, it almost seemed, of some other vegetable poison, which we could not precisely name.
'Mysterious thing,' said Clark to me, when we were alone.
'Who are the two nurses?'
'Oh, highly recommended people of my own.'
It is clear that Peters is out of the running now.'
I shrugged.
'I now formally invite you to join the expedition,' said Clark: 'do you consent?'
I shrugged again.
'Well, if that means consent,' he said, 'let me remind you that you have only eight days, and all the world to do in them.'
This conversation occurred in the dining room of Peters' house: and as we passed through the door, I saw Clodagh gliding down the passage outside-rapidly-away from us.
Not a word I said to her that day about Clark's invitation.
Yet I asked myself repeatedly: Did she not know of it?
However that was, about midnight, to my great surprise, Peters opened his eyes, and smiled.
By noon the next day, his fine vitality, which so fitted him for an Arctic expedition, had re asserted itself.
He was then leaning on an elbow, talking to Wilson, and except his pallor, and strong stomach pains, there was now hardly a trace of his late approach to death.
For the pains I prescribed some quarter grain tablets of sulphate of morphia, and went away.
Now, David Wilson and I never greatly loved each other, and that very day he brought about a painful situation as between Peters and me, by telling Peters that I had taken his place in the expedition.
Peters, a touchy fellow, at once dictated a letter of protest to Clark; and Clark sent Peters' letter to me, marked with a big note of interrogation in blue pencil.
This decided it: Peters was to go, I stay.
Peters was now in an arm chair.
He was cheerful, but with a fevered pulse, and still the stomach pains.
I was giving him three quarter grains of morphia a day. That Friday night, at eleven p m, I visited him, and found Clodagh there, talking to him.
'Ah,' Clodagh said, 'I was waiting for you, Adam.
I didn't know whether I was to inject anything to night.
Is it Yes or No?'
'What do you think, Peters?' I said: 'any more pains?'
'Well, perhaps you had better give us another quarter,' he answered: 'there's still some trouble in the tummy off and on.'
'A quarter grain, then, Clodagh, 'I said.
As she opened the syringe box, she remarked with a pout:
'Our patient has been naughty!
He has taken some more atropine.'
I became angry at once.
'Peters,' I cried, 'you know you have no right to be doing things like that without consulting me!
Do that once more, and I swear I have nothing further to do with you!'
It was a mere flea bite.
I felt that I needed it.'
Her back was turned upon us, and she was a long time.
I was standing; Peters in his arm chair, smoking.
'Well, how is everything?'
With lightning swiftness I remembered an under look of mistrust which I had once seen on his face.
Clodagh went to meet Wilson with frank right hand, in the left being the fragile glass containing the injection.
My eyes were fastened on her face: it was full of reassurance, of free innocence.
I said to myself: 'I must surely be mad!'
An ordinary chat began, while Clodagh turned up Peters' sleeve, and, kneeling there, injected his fore arm.
As she rose, laughing at something said by Wilson, the drug glass dropped from her hand, and her heel, by an apparent accident, trod on it.
'Your friend has been naughty, mr Wilson,' she said again with that same pout: 'he has been taking more atropine.'
'Let me alone, the whole of you,' answered Peters: 'I ain't a child.'
These were the last intelligible words he ever spoke.
He died shortly before one a m
He had been poisoned by a powerful dose of atropine.
Only I remember the inquest, and how I was called upon to prove that Peters had himself injected himself with atropine.
This was corroborated by Wilson, and by Clodagh: and the verdict was in accordance.
And in all that chaotic hurry of preparation, three other things only, but those with clear distinctness now, I remember.
The first-and chief-is that tempest of words which I heard at Kensington from that big mouthed Mackay on the Sunday night.
Well, perhaps I know.
There I sat, and heard him: and most strangely have those words of his peroration planted themselves in my brain, when, rising to a passion of prophecy, he shouted: 'And as in the one case, transgression was followed by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, I warn the entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a lowering sky, and thundery weather.'
And this second thing I remember: that on reaching home, I walked into my disordered library (for I had had to hunt out some books), where I met my housekeeper in the act of rearranging things.
She had apparently lifted an old Bible by the front cover to fling it on the table, for as I threw myself into a chair my eye fell upon the open print near the beginning.
The print was very large, and a shaded lamp cast a light upon it.
I had been hearing Mackay's wild comparison of the Pole with the tree of Eden, and that no doubt was the reason why such a start convulsed me: for my listless eyes had chanced to rest upon some words.
'The woman gave me of the tree, and I did eat....'
They had in many cases some reddish discoloration, which may have been the traces of betel nut stains: for betel nuts abound there.
And I was so pleased with these people, that I took on board with the gig one of their little tree canoes: which was my foolishness: for gig and canoe were only three nights later washed from the decks into the middle of the sea.
I went from one to the other without any system whatever, searching for the ideal resting place, and often thinking that I had found it: but only wearying of it at the thought that there was a yet deeper and dreamier in the world.
But in this search I received a check, my God, which chilled me to the marrow, and set me flying from these places.
I was therefore very tired when I went down, lit the central chain lever lamp and my own two, washed and dressed in my bedroom, and sat to dinner in the dining hall corner.
I ate voraciously, with sweat, as usual, pouring down my eager brow, using knife or spoon in the right hand, but never the Western fork, licking the plates clean in the Mohammedan manner, and drinking pretty freely.
As I rose, I fell flat: and what I did thereafter I did in a state of existence whose acts, to the waking mind, appear unreal as dream.
I must at once, I think, have been conscious that here was the cause of the destruction of mankind; that it still surrounded its own neighbourhood with poisonous fumes; and that I was approaching it.
I must have somehow crawled, or dragged myself forward.
There is an impression on my mind that it was a purple land of pure porphyry; there is some faint memory, or dream, of hearing a long drawn booming of waves upon its crags: I do not know whence I have them.
I think that I remember retching with desperate jerks of the travailing intestines; also that I was on my face as I moved the regulator in the engine room: but any recollection of going down the stairs, or of coming up again, I have not.
Happily, the wheel was tied, the rudder hard to port, and as the ship moved, she must, therefore, have turned; and I must have been back to untie the wheel in good time, for when my senses came, I was lying there, my head against the under gimbal, one foot on a spoke of the wheel, no land in sight, and morning breaking.
Finally, by dint of throwing, I got the rope loop round a mast stump, drew myself up, and made fast the boat, my left hand cut by some cursed shell: and all for what?
the imperiousness of a whim.
The faint moonlight shewed an ample tract of deck, invisible in most parts under rolled beds of putrid seaweed, and no bodies, and nothing but a concave, large esplanade of seaweed.
Here I experienced a singular ghostly awe and timorousness, lest she should sink with me, or something: but striking matches, I saw an ordinary cabin, with some fungoids, skulls, bones and rags, but not one cohering skeleton.
In the second starboard berth was a small table, and on the floor a thick round ink pot, whose continual rolling on its side made me look down; and there I saw a flat square book with black covers, which curved half open of itself, for it had been wet and stained.
I follow the direction of his gaze to eastward!
It is affrighting, it is intolerable! the eyes can hardly bear to watch, the ears to hear!
it seems unholy travail, monstrous birth!
At the moment when that sublime emergence ceases, or seems to cease, the grand thought that smites me is this: "I, Albert Tissu, am immortalised: my name shall never perish from among men!" I rush down, I write it.
There is a great deal of running about on the decks-they are descending.
Chapter nineteen
London was our present point of rest; we determined to remain several months in this wonderful and celebrated city.
If this journey had taken place during my days of study and happiness, it would have afforded me inexpressible pleasure.
But a blight had come over my existence, and I only visited these people for the sake of the information they might give me on the subject in which my interest was so terribly profound.
Company was irksome to me; when alone, I could fill my mind with the sights of heaven and earth; the voice of Henry soothed me, and I could thus cheat myself into a transitory peace.
But busy, uninteresting, joyous faces brought back despair to my heart.
The difference of manners which he observed was to him an inexhaustible source of instruction and amusement.
His design was to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade.
In Britain only could he further the execution of his plan.
I tried to conceal this as much as possible, that I might not debar him from the pleasures natural to one who was entering on a new scene of life, undisturbed by any care or bitter recollection.
I often refused to accompany him, alleging another engagement, that I might remain alone.
I now also began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation, and this was to me like the torture of single drops of water continually falling on the head.
He mentioned the beauties of his native country and asked us if those were not sufficient allurements to induce us to prolong our journey as far north as Perth, where he resided.
We had arrived in England at the beginning of October, and it was now February.
We accordingly determined to commence our journey towards the north at the expiration of another month.
In this expedition we did not intend to follow the great road to Edinburgh, but to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the Cumberland lakes, resolving to arrive at the completion of this tour about the end of July.
We quitted London on the twenty seventh of March and remained a few days at Windsor, rambling in its beautiful forest.
This was a new scene to us mountaineers; the majestic oaks, the quantity of game, and the herds of stately deer were all novelties to us.
From thence we proceeded to Oxford.
It was here that Charles the first had collected his forces.
The spirit of elder days found a dwelling here, and we delighted to trace its footsteps.
I enjoyed this scene, and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of the past and the anticipation of the future.
I was formed for peaceful happiness.
But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be-a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.
For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self sacrifice of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers.
For an instant I dared to shake off my chains and look around me with a free and lofty spirit, but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.
We left Oxford with regret and proceeded to Matlock, which was our next place of rest.
The latter name made me tremble when pronounced by Henry, and I hastened to quit Matlock, with which that terrible scene was thus associated.
From Derby, still journeying northwards, we passed two months in Cumberland and Westmorland.
I could now almost fancy myself among the Swiss mountains.
Here also we made some acquaintances, who almost contrived to cheat me into happiness.
We had scarcely visited the various lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland and conceived an affection for some of the inhabitants when the period of our appointment with our Scotch friend approached, and we left them to travel on.
I had now neglected my promise for some time, and I feared the effects of the daemon's disappointment.
He might remain in Switzerland and wreak his vengeance on my relatives.
I waited for my letters with feverish impatience; if they were delayed I was miserable and overcome by a thousand fears; and when they arrived and I saw the superscription of Elizabeth or my father, I hardly dared to read and ascertain my fate.
Sometimes I thought that the fiend followed me and might expedite my remissness by murdering my companion. When these thoughts possessed me, I would not quit Henry for a moment, but followed him as his shadow, to protect him from the fancied rage of his destroyer.
I felt as if I had committed some great crime, the consciousness of which haunted me.
Clerval did not like it so well as Oxford, for the antiquity of the latter city was more pleasing to him.
But I was impatient to arrive at the termination of my journey.
"Do you," said I, "enjoy yourself, and let this be our rendezvous.
He entreated me to write often.
Having parted from my friend, I determined to visit some remote spot of Scotland and finish my work in solitude.
The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for its inhabitants, which consisted of five persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare.
Vegetables and bread, when they indulged in such luxuries, and even fresh water, was to be procured from the mainland, which was about five miles distant.
The thatch had fallen in, the walls were unplastered, and the door was off its hinges.
I ordered it to be repaired, bought some furniture, and took possession, an incident which would doubtless have occasioned some surprise had not all the senses of the cottagers been benumbed by want and squalid poverty.
As it was, I lived ungazed at and unmolested, hardly thanked for the pittance of food and clothes which I gave, so much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations of men.
In this retreat I devoted the morning to labour; but in the evening, when the weather permitted, I walked on the stony beach of the sea to listen to the waves as they roared and dashed at my feet.
It was a monotonous yet ever changing scene.
I thought of Switzerland; it was far different from this desolate and appalling landscape.
Its hills are covered with vines, and its cottages are scattered thickly in the plains.
In this manner I distributed my occupations when I first arrived, but as I proceeded in my labour, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me.
Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several days, and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work.
It was, indeed, a filthy process in which I was engaged.
During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the consummation of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings.
Thus situated, employed in the most detestable occupation, immersed in a solitude where nothing could for an instant call my attention from the actual scene in which I was engaged, my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and nervous.
Every moment I feared to meet my persecutor.
Sometimes I sat with my eyes fixed on the ground, fearing to raise them lest they should encounter the object which I so much dreaded to behold.
I feared to wander from the sight of my fellow creatures lest when alone he should come to claim his companion.
In the mean time I worked on, and my labour was already considerably advanced.
Chapter twenty
I sat one evening in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour for the night or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it.
I was now about to form another being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness.
Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?
I trembled and my heart failed within me, when, on looking up, I saw by the light of the moon the daemon at the casement.
A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to me.
As I looked on him, his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery.
I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged.
The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew.
Several hours passed, and I remained near my window gazing on the sea; it was almost motionless, for the winds were hushed, and all nature reposed under the eye of the quiet moon.
A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices as the fishermen called to one another.
I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its extreme profundity, until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars near the shore, and a person landed close to my house.
In a few minutes after, I heard the creaking of my door, as if some one endeavoured to open it softly.
Presently I heard the sound of footsteps along the passage; the door opened, and the wretch whom I dreaded appeared.
"Begone!
I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness."
"Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension.
Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you.
You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!"
Begone!
The monster saw my determination in my face and gnashed his teeth in the impotence of anger.
I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man!
You may hate, but beware!
You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains-revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food!
I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery.
"Devil, cease; and do not poison the air with these sounds of malice. I have declared my resolution to you, and I am no coward to bend beneath words.
Leave me; I am inexorable."
"It is well.
I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding night."
I started forward and exclaimed, "Villain!
I would have seized him, but he eluded me and quitted the house with precipitation.
In a few moments I saw him in his boat, which shot across the waters with an arrowy swiftness and was soon lost amidst the waves.
All was again silent, but his words rang in my ears.
I burned with rage to pursue the murderer of my peace and precipitate him into the ocean.
I walked up and down my room hastily and perturbed, while my imagination conjured up a thousand images to torment and sting me.
Why had I not followed him and closed with him in mortal strife?
But I had suffered him to depart, and he had directed his course towards the mainland.
I shuddered to think who might be the next victim sacrificed to his insatiate revenge.
And then I thought again of his words-"I WILL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT." That, then, was the period fixed for the fulfilment of my destiny.
In that hour I should die and at once satisfy and extinguish his malice.
The prospect did not move me to fear; yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth, of her tears and endless sorrow, when she should find her lover so barbarously snatched from her, tears, the first I had shed for many months, streamed from my eyes, and I resolved not to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle.
The night passed away, and the sun rose from the ocean; my feelings became calmer, if it may be called calmness when the violence of rage sinks into the depths of despair.
I desired that I might pass my life on that barren rock, wearily, it is true, but uninterrupted by any sudden shock of misery.
I walked about the isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved and miserable in the separation.
I had been awake the whole of the preceding night, my nerves were agitated, and my eyes inflamed by watching and misery.
He besought me, therefore, to leave my solitary isle and to meet him at Perth, that we might proceed southwards together.
This letter in a degree recalled me to life, and I determined to quit my island at the expiration of two days.
Yet, before I departed, there was a task to perform, on which I shuddered to reflect; I must pack up my chemical instruments, and for that purpose I must enter the room which had been the scene of my odious work, and I must handle those utensils the sight of which was sickening to me.
I paused to collect myself and then entered the chamber.
I had resolved in my own mind that to create another like the fiend I had first made would be an act of the basest and most atrocious selfishness, and I banished from my mind every thought that could lead to a different conclusion.
Between two and three in the morning the moon rose; and I then, putting my basket aboard a little skiff, sailed out about four miles from the shore.
I felt as if I was about the commission of a dreadful crime and avoided with shuddering anxiety any encounter with my fellow creatures.
The sky became clouded, but the air was pure, although chilled by the northeast breeze that was then rising.
But it refreshed me and filled me with such agreeable sensations that I resolved to prolong my stay on the water, and fixing the rudder in a direct position, stretched myself at the bottom of the boat.
Clouds hid the moon, everything was obscure, and I heard only the sound of the boat as its keel cut through the waves; the murmur lulled me, and in a short time I slept soundly.
Thus situated, my only resource was to drive before the wind.
I confess that I felt a few sensations of terror.
I had no compass with me and was so slenderly acquainted with the geography of this part of the world that the sun was of little benefit to me.
I might be driven into the wide Atlantic and feel all the tortures of starvation or be swallowed up in the immeasurable waters that roared and buffeted around me.
I had already been out many hours and felt the torment of a burning thirst, a prelude to my other sufferings.
Some hours passed thus; but by degrees, as the sun declined towards the horizon, the wind died away into a gentle breeze and the sea became free from breakers.
But these gave place to a heavy swell; I felt sick and hardly able to hold the rudder, when suddenly I saw a line of high land towards the south.
I constructed another sail with a part of my dress and eagerly steered my course towards the land. It had a wild and rocky appearance, but as I approached nearer I easily perceived the traces of cultivation.
I saw vessels near the shore and found myself suddenly transported back to the neighbourhood of civilized man.
Fortunately I had money with me.
As I turned the promontory I perceived a small neat town and a good harbour, which I entered, my heart bounding with joy at my unexpected escape.
As I was occupied in fixing the boat and arranging the sails, several people crowded towards the spot.
They seemed much surprised at my appearance, but instead of offering me any assistance, whispered together with gestures that at any other time might have produced in me a slight sensation of alarm.
As it was, I merely remarked that they spoke English, and I therefore addressed them in that language.
"Why do you answer me so roughly?" I replied.
"Surely it is not the custom of Englishmen to receive strangers so inhospitably."
"I do not know," said the man, "what the custom of the English may be, but it is the custom of the Irish to hate villains." While this strange dialogue continued, I perceived the crowd rapidly increase.
Their faces expressed a mixture of curiosity and anger, which annoyed and in some degree alarmed me.
I inquired the way to the inn, but no one replied.
I then moved forward, and a murmuring sound arose from the crowd as they followed and surrounded me, when an ill looking man approaching tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Come, sir, you must follow me to mr Kirwin's to give an account of yourself."
"Who is mr Kirwin?
Why am I to give an account of myself?
This answer startled me, but I presently recovered myself.
sixteen.
Whether, the same immaterial Substance remaining, there can be two Persons.
All those who hold pre existence are evidently of this mind; since they allow the soul to have no remaining consciousness of what it did in that pre existent state, either wholly separate from body, or informing any other body; and if they should not, it is plain experience would be against them.
So that personal identity, reaching no further than consciousness reaches, a pre existent spirit not having continued so many ages in a state of silence, must needs make different persons.
Can he be concerned in either of their actions?
attribute them to himself, or think them his own more than the actions of any other men that ever existed?
For this would no more make him the same person with Nestor, than if some of the particles of smaller that were once a part of Nestor were now a part of this man the same immaterial substance, without the same consciousness, no more making the same person, by being united to any body, than the same particle of matter, without consciousness, united to any body, makes the same person.
But let him once find himself conscious of any of the actions of Nestor, he then finds himself the same person with Nestor.
The body, as well as the soul, goes to the making of a Man.
And thus may we be able, without any difficulty, to conceive the same person at the resurrection, though in a body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here,--the same consciousness going along with the soul that inhabits it.
But yet the soul alone, in the change of bodies, would scarce to any one but to him that makes the soul the man, be enough to make the same man.
For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince's past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same PERSON with the prince, accountable only for the prince's actions: but who would say it was the same MAN?
The body too goes to the making the man, and would, I guess, to everybody determine the man in this case, wherein the soul, with all its princely thoughts about it, would not make another man: but he would be the same cobbler to every one besides himself.
And indeed every one will always have a liberty to speak as he pleases, and to apply what articulate sounds to what ideas he thinks fit, and change them as often as he pleases.
But yet, when we will inquire what makes the same SPIRIT, MAN, or PERSON, we must fix the ideas of spirit, man, or person in our minds; and having resolved with ourselves what we mean by them, it will not be hard to determine, in either of them, or the like, when it is the same, and when not.
eighteen.
Consciousness alone unites actions into the same Person.
nineteen.
Self depends on Consciousness, not on Substance.
SELF is that conscious thinking thing,--whatever substance made up of, (whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, it matters not)--which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.
Thus every one finds that, whilst comprehended under that consciousness, the little finger is as much a part of himself as what is most so.
Upon separation of this little finger, should this consciousness go along with the little finger, and leave the rest of the body, it is evident the little finger would be the person, the same person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the body.
As in this case it is the consciousness that goes along with the substance, when one part is separate from another, which makes the same person, and constitutes this inseparable self: so it is in reference to substances remote in time.
That with which the consciousness of this present thinking thing CAN join itself, makes the same person, and is one self with it, and with nothing else; and so attributes to itself, and owns all the actions of that thing, as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no further; as every one who reflects will perceive.
twenty.
In this personal identity is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment; happiness and misery being that for which every one is concerned for HIMSELF, and not mattering what becomes of any SUBSTANCE, not joined to, or affected with that consciousness.
For, as it is evident in the instance I gave but now, if the consciousness went along with the little finger when it was cut off, that would be the same self which was concerned for the whole body yesterday, as making part of itself, whose actions then it cannot but admit as its own now.
Though, if the same body should still live, and immediately from the separation of the little finger have its own peculiar consciousness, whereof the little finger knew nothing, it would not at all be concerned for it, as a part of itself, or could own any of its actions, or have any of them imputed to him.
Which shows wherein Personal identity consists.
This may show us wherein personal identity consists: not in the identity of substance, but, as I have said, in the identity of consciousness, wherein if Socrates and the present mayor of Queenborough agree, they are the same person: if the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same person.
And to punish Socrates waking for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of right, than to punish one twin for what his brother twin did, whereof he knew nothing, because their outsides were so like, that they could not be distinguished; for such twins have been seen.
But yet possibly it will still be objected,--Suppose I wholly lose the memory of some parts of my life, beyond a possibility of retrieving them, so that perhaps I shall never be conscious of them again; yet am I not the same person that did those actions, had those thoughts that I once was conscious of, though I have now forgot them?
And the same man being presumed to be the same person, I is easily here supposed to stand also for the same person.
twenty three.
Difference between Identity of Man and of Person.
But yet it is hard to conceive that Socrates, the same individual man, should be two persons.
To help us a little in this, we must consider what is meant by Socrates, or the same individual MAN.
First, it must be either the same individual, immaterial, thinking substance; in short, the same numerical soul, and nothing else.
Secondly, or the same animal, without any regard to an immaterial soul.
Thirdly, or the same immaterial spirit united to the same animal.
Now, take which of these suppositions you please, it is impossible to make personal identity to consist in anything but consciousness; or reach any further than that does.
A way of speaking which, whoever admits, must allow it possible for the same man to be two distinct persons, as any two that have lived in different ages without the knowledge of one another's thoughts.
But then they who place human identity in consciousness only, and not in something else, must consider how they will make the infant Socrates the same man with Socrates after the resurrection.
But whatsoever to some men makes a man, and consequently the same individual man, wherein perhaps few are agreed, personal identity can by us be placed in nothing but consciousness, (which is that alone which makes what we call SELF,) without involving us in great absurdities.
why else is he punished for the fact he commits when drunk, though he be never afterwards conscious of it?
Just as much the same person as a man that walks, and does other things in his sleep, is the same person, and is answerable for any mischief he shall do in it.
twenty five.
Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same person: the identity of substance will not do it; for whatever substance there is, however framed, without consciousness there is no person: and a carcass may be a person, as well as any sort of substance be so, without consciousness.
And whether, in the second case, there would not be one person in two distinct bodies, as much as one man is the same in two distinct clothings?
So that self is not determined by identity or diversity of substance, which it cannot be sure of, but only by identity of consciousness.
twenty six.
Not the substance with which the consciousness may be united.
In like manner it will be in reference to any immaterial substance, which is void of that consciousness whereby I am myself to myself: so that I cannot upon recollection join with that present consciousness whereby I am now myself, it is, in that part of its existence, no more MYSELF than any other immaterial being.
twenty seven.
I agree, the more probable opinion is, that this consciousness is annexed to, and the affection of, one individual immaterial substance.
But let men, according to their diverse hypotheses, resolve of that as they please.
In all which account of self, the same numerical SUBSTANCE is not considered a making the same self; but the same continued CONSCIOUSNESS, in which several substances may have been united, and again separated from it, which, whilst they continued in a vital union with that wherein this consciousness then resided, made a part of that same self.
twenty eight.
Person a forensic Term.
PERSON, as I take it, is the name for this self.
Wherever a man finds what he calls himself, there, I think, another may say is the same person.
It is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery.
This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness,--whereby it becomes concerned and accountable; owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it does the present.
All which is founded in a concern for happiness, the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness; that which is conscious of pleasure and pain, desiring that that self that is conscious should be happy.
And therefore whatever past actions it cannot reconcile or APPROPRIATE to that present self by consciousness, it can be no more concerned in than if they had never been done: and to receive pleasure or pain, i e reward or punishment, on the account of any such action, is all one as to be made happy or miserable in its first being, without any demerit at all.
For, supposing a MAN punished now for what he had done in another life, whereof he could be made to have no consciousness at all, what difference is there between that punishment and being CREATED miserable?
twenty nine.
Suppositions that look strange are pardonable in our ignorance.
I am apt enough to think I have, in treating of this subject, made some suppositions that will look strange to some readers, and possibly they are so in themselves.
The Difficulty from ill Use of Names.
thirty one.
For, supposing a rational spirit be the idea of a MAN, it is easy to know what is the same man, viz. the same spirit-whether separate or in a body-will be the SAME MAN.
Supposing a rational spirit vitally united to a body of a certain conformation of parts to make a man; whilst that rational spirit, with that vital conformation of parts, though continued in a fleeting successive body, remains, it will be the SAME MAN.
But if to any one the idea of a man be but the vital union of parts in a certain shape; as long as that vital union and shape remain in a concrete, no otherwise the same but by a continued succession of fleeting particles, it will be the SAME MAN.
For, whatever be the composition whereof the complex idea is made, whenever existence makes it one particular thing under any denomination, THE SAME EXISTENCE CONTINUED preserves it the SAME individual under the same denomination.
"In stock?"
"Yes."
What for?--that they may try, a month hence, to marry me again; and to whom?--M.
Debray, perhaps, as it was once proposed.
"Yes."
"Our passport?"
"M.
How did you get this passport?"
"But I cannot," said she; "I am not strong enough; do you shut it."
"Will you dress here?"
"Come and help me."
"What are you looking at?"
SEPTEMBER
Hardy Poppies should be sown even earlier; August is the best time.
Dahlias are now at their full growth.
It is a native plant, but not found in this neighbourhood; I brought it from Cornwall, where it is so plentiful in the chinks of the granite stone fences.
eight
OFF NANTUCKET
Upon the authors of that commotion Lanyard wasted no consideration whatever.
Let them knock and clamour; he had more urgent work in hand, and knew too well the penalty were he stupid enough to unbolt to them.
And all attempts would be futile to make them understand that, while they plagued him with futile questions, a murderer and spy and thief was making good his escape, being afforded ample opportunity to slough all traces of his recent work and resume unchallenged his place among them.
No; if by any freak of good fortune, any exertion of wit or daring, that one were to be apprehended, it must be within the next few minutes, it could only be through immediate pursuit.
With him, whose ways of life were ceaselessly beset by instant and mortal perils, each with its especial and imperative demand upon his readiness and ingenuity, action must ever press so hard upon the heels of thought as to make the two seem one.
For that matter, the whole transaction had been characterised by almost unbelievable rapidity.
Then, at the third shot, the automatic jammed upon a discharged shell.
Exasperated, the adventurer cast the weapon from him, shrugged hastily out of his unfastened coat and waistcoat, hitched tight his belt, and clambered through the port.
Dropping to the deck, he turned in time to see the fugitive dart round the shoulder of the superstructure.
As Lanyard gained the after rail of the promenade deck a man standing on the boat deck at the head of the companion ladder greeted him with pistol fire.
He dodged back, untouched, and instantaneously devised a stratagem to cope with this untoward development.
And the darkness in the shadow of the boat was dense, an excellent screen.
At the same time, "Karl" seemed mysteriously occupied with some object or objects in whose manipulation he was hampered to a degree by the necessity under which he laboured of holding his pistol ready and dividing his attention.
A man of good stature, broad at the shoulders, slender at the hips, he poised himself with athletic grace-the lower part of his face masked by what Lanyard took to be a dark silk handkerchief.
Then a brisk little spray of sparks jetted from the flint and steel of a patent cigar lighter in the hands of the spy.
The man leaned over the rail and cast a small black object to which the sputtering fuse was attached, down to the main deck.
As it struck midway between superstructure and stern it burst into brilliant flame, releasing upon the night an electric blue glare that must have been visible from any point within the compass of the horizon.
A yell of profane remonstrance saluted the light, and throughout the brief passage that followed Lanyard was conscious that pistols and rifles on the after deck below were making him and his antagonist their targets.
Before the German could face about, Lanyard, moving almost noiselessly in his bare feet, had covered more than half the intervening space.
But the distance was too great.
Twice the automatic blazed in his face as he closed in, the bullets clearing narrowly-or else he fancied that their deadly cold breath fanned his cheek.
Then the spy's weapon in turn went out of action.
Half blinded, Lanyard clipped the man round the body and hugged him tight, exerting all his skill and strength to effect a throw.
That effort failed; his onslaught was met with address and ability that all but matched his own.
For a moment Lanyard was able to accomplish no more than to smother resistance in a rib crushing embrace; no sooner did he relax it than all attempts to shift his hold were anticipated and met half way, forcing him back upon the defensive.
Yet he was given little chance to prove himself the master.
The first phase of the struggle was still in contest when the rear door of the smoking room opened and a man stepped out, paused, summed up the situation in a glance, seized Lanyard from behind.
Something in the brain of the adventurer seemed to let go; his head dropped weakly to one side.
The man who had struck him said quietly, "Loose the fool, Ed," and followed as Lanyard reeled away, striking him repeatedly.
He felt unutterably weary, and was weakened by a sensation of nausea.
Beneath him his knees buckled.
There fell one final blow, ruthless as the wrath of God.
He was falling backward into nothingness, into an everlasting gulf of night that yawned for him....
As he shot under the guard rope and into space between the edge of the deck and the keel of the lifeboat, the spy rounded smartly on a heel and darted to the smoking room door.
His confederate was in the act of stepping across the raised threshold.
He followed, closed the door.
The first officer, charging aft from the bridge, rounded the deck house and pulled up with a grunt of surprise to find the deck completely deserted....
The shock of icy immersion reanimated Lanyard.
He felt himself plunging headlong down, down, and down to inky depths unguessable.
The sheer habit of an accustomed swimmer alone bade him hold his breath.
Then came a pause: he was no more descending; for a time of indeterminate duration, an age of anguish, he seemed to float without motion, suspended in frigid purgatory.
His head felt swollen and enormous, on the point of bursting wide.
Instinctively he kept afloat with feeble strokes.
The cold was bitter, as sharp as the teeth of death; but his head was now clear, he was able to appreciate what had befallen him.
She seemed absurdly small.
Incredulity infected Lanyard's mind.
Then the cold began to bite into his marrow, and he struggled manfully to swim, taking long, slow strokes, at first comparatively powerful, by insensible degrees losing force.
Just why he took this trouble he did not know: for some dim reason it seemed desirable to live as long as possible.
Withal he was aware he could not live.
Even were an alarm to be given, were she to stop now and put out a boat, it would find him, if it found him at all, too late.
The cold was killing.
He felt very sleepy.
Drowsily he apprehended the beginning of the end. His senses, growing numb with cold, presently must cease to function altogether.
Then he would forget, and nothing would matter any more.
Yet the will to live persisted amazingly.
Had Lanyard wished it he could not have ceased to swim, at least to keep afloat.
Vaguely he wondered how people ever managed to commit suicide by drowning; it seemed to pass human power to resist that buoyancy which sustained one, to let go, let one's self go down.
Impossible to conceive how that was ever done....
No reading that riddle!...
On obscure impulse he gave up swimming, turned upon his back, floated face to the sky, derelict, resigning himself to the cradling arms of the sea. The gradual, slow rocking of the swells soothed his passion like a kindly opiate.
What must be, must....
For all that, life clutched at him with jealous hands.
Athwart the drab texture of consciousness wild fancies played like heat lightning in a still midsummer night.
Death's countenance was kind.
That wide field of stars, drooping low and lifting away with rhythmic motion, would sometime dip swiftly down to the very sea itself and, swinging back, take with it his soul to some remote bourne....
The heave of a swell enabled him to glance incuriously after the steamship. She seemed smaller, less genuine than ever, a shadow shape that boasted visibility solely through that unearthly light on her after deck.
Even as he that had been named Michael Lanyard was a lost light, a tiny flame that guttered toward its swift extinction....
Why live, when one might die and, dying, find endless rest?
This the one cogent reason why he must not, could not, die....
Unjust to require him to give up life while that one lived.
It must not be!...
Across the sea rolled a dull, brutish detonation.
It vanished instantly.
When his dazzled vision cleared, he could see no more of the ship.
He imagined a faint, wild rumour of panic voices, conjured up scenes of horror indescribable as that great fabric sank almost instantaneously, as if some gigantic hand plucked her under.
What had happened?
They had got what they sought, that accursed document, whatever it was, that page torn from the Book of Doom.
A target for what?...
A wave of pure fear flooded him, body, mind, and soul.
He heard a voice screaming thinly, and knew it was his own.
The impossible was happening to him, out there, alone and helpless on the face of the waters.
A shape of horror was rising out of the deep to engorge him.
He could feel distinctly the slow, irresistible heave of its bulk beneath him.
His feet touched and slipped upon its horrible sleek flanks.
His most desperate efforts were all unavailing.
He could not escape.
The thing came up too rapidly.
Following that first mad thrill of contact with it underfoot, he was lifted swiftly and irresistibly into the air.
Almost instantly he was floundering in knee deep waters that parted, cascading away on either hand.
His clawing hands clutched something solid and substantial, an upright bar of metal.
Incredulously Lanyard pawed the body of the monster beneath him.
His hands passed over a riveted joint of metal plates.
Looking up, he made out the truncated cone of a conning tower with its antennae like periscope tubes stencilled black upon the soft purple of the star strewn sky.
Slowly the truth came home: a submarine had risen beneath him.
He lay upon its after deck, grasping a stanchion that supported the small raised bridge round the conning tower.
But when he sought to drag himself up to the bridge, he could not, he was too weak and faint.
Ceasing to struggle, he rested in half stupour, panting.
With a harsh clang a hatch was thrown back.
Rousing, Lanyard saw several figures emerge from the conning tower.
Men uncouthly clothed in shapeless, shiny leather garments, straddled and stretched above him, filling their lungs with the sweet air.
He tried to call to them, but evoked a mere rattle from his throat.
A pang of despair shot through Lanyard when he heard them conferring together in the German tongue.
Death, then, was but a little delayed.
Thereafter he lay in dumb apathy, save that he shivered and his teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Through the torpor that rested like a black cloud upon his senses he caught broken phrases, snatches of sentences:
The crew on deck leaped to attention.
One leaned over the conning tower hatch and shouted to his mates below.
A hatch forward of the tower opened, and a quick firing gun on a disappearing carriage swung smoothly and silently up from its lair.
What's this?"
The first rejoined him.
"Impossible!"
"Have him up and see...."
"At the last gasp, but alive," one announced.
"How the devil did he get out here?"
"Impossible for any man to swim this far since our torpedo struck-"
"Then he must have gone overboard before it struck-or was thrown-"
"Hell's fury!
what's that searchlight?"
"A Yankee destroyer-in all probability the one we dodged yesterday afternoon."
Forward, there-house that gun! And get below-quickly!"
During a moment of apparent confusion, one of the men sustaining Lanyard caught the attention of an officer.
"What shall we do with this fellow, sir?" he enquired.
"On the Emperor's service-"
"What's that?"
The officer turned back sharply.
"Imperial Secret Service," Lanyard faltered-"Personal Division-Wilhelmstrasse Number twenty seven--"
A brilliant glare settled suddenly upon the deck of the submarine, and was welcomed by a panicky gust of oaths.
One officer had already popped through the conning tower hatch, followed by several of the crew.
"Take him below!" the latter ordered.
"He may be telling the truth.
If not...."
In the distance a gun boomed.
A shell shrieked over the submarine and dropped into the sea not a hundred yards to starboard.
The men rushed Lanyard toward the conning tower.
He tried feebly to help them.
JACQUELINE OF HOLLAND: THE GIRL OF THE LAND OF FOGS, a d fourteen fourteen.
Count William was a gallant and courtly knight, learned in all the ways of chivalry, the model of the younger cavaliers, handsome in person, noble in bearing, the surest lance in the tilting yard, and the stoutest arm in the foray.
Like "Jephtha, Judge of Israel," of whom the mock mad Hamlet sang to Polonius, Count William had
"One fair daughter, and no more, The which he loved passing well;"
As she sat, that day, in the great Hall of the Knights in the massive castle at The Hague, she could see, among all the knights and nobles who came from far and near to join in the festivities at Count William's court, not one that approached her father in nobility of bearing or manly strength-not even her husband.
Her husband?
Yes.
Other young people were there, too,--nobles and pages and little ladies in waiting; and there was much of the stately ceremonial and flowery talk that in those days of knighthood clothed alike the fears of cowards and the desires of heroes.
For there have always been heroes and cowards in the world.
Then uprose the young Lord of Arkell.
"This Hubert of Malsen is but a craven, sirs, if he doth say the merchants of Dort are rascal cowards.
Had they been fairly mated, he had no more dared to put his nose within the gates of Dort than dare one of you here to go down yonder amid Count William's lions!"
"I said nothing of him, madam," replied Count Otto.
"I did mean these young red hats here, who do no more dare to bait your father's lions than to face the Cods of Dort in fair and equal fight."
At this bold speech there was instant commotion.
For the nobles and merchants of Holland, four centuries and a half ago, were at open strife with one another.
So each faction had its leaders, its partisans, its badges, and its followers.
Certain of the younger nobles, however, who were opposed to the reigning house of Holland, of which Count William, young Jacqueline's father, was the head, had espoused the cause of the merchants, seeing in their success greater prosperity and wealth for Holland.
Among these had been the young Lord of Arkell, now a sort of half prisoner at Count William's court because of certain bold attempts to favor the Cods in his own castle of Arkell.
His defiant words therefore raised a storm of protests.
Face YOU the lions, lord count, and I will warrant me they will not prove as forbearing as did she."
So this fling of the Dauphin's cut deep.
But before the young Otto could return an angry answer, Jacqueline had interfered.
"Nay, nay, my lord," she said to her husband, the Dauphin; "'t is not a knightly act thus to impeach the honor of a noble guest."
But now the Lord of Arkell had found his tongue.
"My lord prince," he said, bowing low with stately courtesy, "if, as my lady mother and good Count William would force me, I am to be loyal vassal to you, my lieges here, I should but follow where you dare to lead.
Go YOU into the lions' den, lord prince, and I will follow you, though it were into old Hercules' very teeth."
It was a shrewd reply, and covered as good a "double dare" as ever one boy made to another.
Some of the manlier of the young courtiers indeed even dared to applaud.
But the Dauphin john was stronger in tongue than in heart.
See, Lord of Arkell, you who can prate so loudly of Cods and lions: here before all, I dare you to face Count William's lions yourself!"
But without a word, with scarce a look toward his challenger, he turned to his nearest neighbor, a brave Zealand lad, afterward noted in Dutch history-Francis von Borselen.
"Lend me your gabardine, friend Franz, will you not?" he said.
The young von Borselen took from the back of the settle, over which it was flung, his gabardine-the long, loose gray cloak that was a sort of overcoat in those days of queer costume.
"It is here, my Otto," he said.
The Lord of Arkell drew the loose gray cloak over his rich silk suit, and turned toward the door.
"Otto von Arkell lets no one call him fool or coward, lord prince," he said.
See, now: I will face Count William's lions!"
The Princess Jacqueline sprang up in protest.
"No, no; you shall not!" she cried.
"My lord prince did but jest, as did we all.
john," she said, turning appealingly to her young husband, who sat sullen and unmoved, "tell him you meant no such murderous test.
My father!" she cried, turning now toward Count William, whose attention had been drawn to the dispute, "the Lord of Arkell is pledged to face your lions!"
Count William of Holland dearly loved pluck and nerve.
"But, my father," persisted the gentle hearted girl, "spear and banner are not lions' jaws.
"Nay, madam, have no fear," the Lord of Arkell said, bending in courteous recognition of her interest; "that which I do of mine own free will is no murder, even should it fail."
A raised gallery looked down into the spacious inclosure in which Count William kept the living specimens of his own princely badge of the lion. And here the company gathered to see the sport.
With the gray gabardine drawn but loosely over his silken suit, so that he might, if need be, easily slip from it, Otto von Arkell boldly entered the inclosure.
"Soho, Juno!
up, Hercules; hollo, up, Ajax!" cried Count William, from the balcony.
Boldly and without hesitation, while all the watchers had eyes but for him alone, the young Lord of Arkell walked straight up to Hercules, the largest of the three, and laid his hand caressingly upon the shaggy mane.
But Ajax, fiercest of the three, took no notice of the lad.
Straight across his comrades he looked to where, scarce a rod behind the daring lad, came another figure, a light and graceful form in clinging robes of blue and undergown of cloth of gold-the Princess Jacqueline herself!
The watchers in the gallery followed the lion's stare, and saw, with horror, the advancing figure of this fair young girl.
A cry of terror broke from every lip.
The Dauphin john turned pale with fright, and Count William of Holland, calling out, "Down, Ajax! back, girl, back!" sprang to his feet as if he would have vaulted over the gallery rail.
But before he could act, Ajax himself had acted.
Ajax slowly rose and looked up into the girl's calm face.
Then the voice of Jacqueline rang out fresh and clear as, standing with her hand buried in the lion's tawny mane, she raised her face to the startled galleries.
"You who could dare and yet dared not to do!" she cried, "it shall not be said that in all Count William's court none save the rebel Lord of Arkell dared to face Count William's lions!"
The Lord of Arkell sprang to his comrade's side.
And it WAS a rash and foolish act.
But we must remember that those were days when such feats were esteemed as brave and valorous.
For the Princess Jaqueline of Holland was reared in the school of so-called chivalry and romance, which in her time was fast approaching its end.
She was, indeed, as one historian declares, the last heroine of knighthood.
Her very titles suggest the days of chivalry.
All girls admire bravery, even though not themselves personally courageous.
The dream of future power and greatness as Queen of France, in which the girl wife of the Dauphin had often indulged, was thus rudely dispelled, and Jacqueline returned to her father's court in Holland, no longer crown princess and heiress to a throne, but simply "Lady of Holland."
But in Holland, too, sorrow was in store for her.
Swiftly following the loss of her husband, the Dauphin, came the still heavier blow of her father's death.
The death of Count William showed the Cods a way toward greater liberty.
And chief among the rebellious spirits, as leader and counsellor among the Cods, appeared the brave lad who had once been the companion of the princess in danger, the young Lord of Arkell.
It was he who lifted the standard of revolt against her regency.
The stout citadel of the town, was, however, garrisoned with loyal troops.
This the Lord of Arkell beseiged, and, demanding its surrender, sent also a haughty challenge to the young countess, who was hastening to the relief of her beleaguered town.
Jacqueline's answer was swift and unmistakable.
Her doughty Dutch general, von Brederode, counselled immediate attack, but the girl countess, though full of enthusiasm and determination, hesitated.
From her station in the citadel she looked over the scene before her. Here, along the low bank of the river Maas, stretched the camp of her own followers, and the little gayly colored boats that had brought her army up the river from the red roofs of Rotterdam.
There, stretching out into the flat country beyond the straggling streets of Gorkum, lay the tents of the rebels.
And yet they were all her countrymen-rebels and retainers alike.
Hollanders all, they were ever ready to combine for the defence of their homeland when threatened by foreign foes or by the destroying ocean floods.
Jacqueline's eye caught the flutter of the broad banner of the house of Arkell that waved over the rebel camp.
Again she saw the brave lad who alone of all her father's court, save she, had dared to face Count William's lions; again the remembrance of how his daring had made him one of her heroes, filled her heart, and a dream of what might be possessed her.
But how much better, so she reasoned, that the name and might of her house as rulers of Holland should be upheld by a brave and fearless knight.
On the impulse of this thought she summoned a loyal and trusted vassal to her aid.
Thus says the Lady of Holland: 'Were it not better, Otto of Arkell, that we join hands in marriage before the altar, than that we spill the blood of faithful followers and vassals in a cruel fight?'"
It was a singular, and perhaps, to our modern ears, a most unladylike proposal; but it shows how, even in the heart of a sovereign countess and a girl general, warlike desires may give place to gentler thoughts.
To the Lord Arkell, however, this unexpected proposition came as an indication of weakness.
In that is greater glory and more of power than being husband to the Lady of Holland."
And so he returned a most ungracious answer:
"Tell the Countess Jacqueline," he said to the knight of Leyenburg, "that the honor of her hand I cannot accept.
I am her foe, and would rather die than marry her."
All the hot blood of her ancestors flamed in wrath as young Jacqueline heard this reply of the rebel lord.
"Crush we these rebel curs, von Brederode," she cried, pointing to the banner of Arkell; "for by my father's memory, they shall have neither mercy nor life from me."
Fast upon the curt refusal of the Lord of Arkell came his message of defiance.
"Hear ye, Countess of Holland," rang out the challenge of the herald of Arkell, as his trumpet blast sounded before the gate of the citadel, "the free Lord of Arkell here giveth you word and warning that he will fight against you on the morrow!"
And from the citadel came back this ringing reply, as the knight of Leyenburg made answer for his sovereign lady:
"Hear ye, sir Herald, and answer thus to the rebel Lord of Arkell: 'For the purpose of fighting him came we here, and fight him we will, until he and his rebels are beaten and dead.' Long live our Sovereign Lady of Holland!"
On the morrow, a murky December day, in the year fourteen seventeen, the battle was joined, as announced.
On the low plain beyond the city, knights and men at arms, archers and spearmen, closed in the shock of battle, and a stubborn and bloody fight it was.
The brave von Brederode fell pierced with wounds, and the day seemed lost, indeed, to the Lady of Holland.
Then Jacqueline the Countess, seeing her cause in danger-like another Joan of Arc, though she was indeed a younger and much more beautiful girl general,--seized the lion banner of her house, and, at the head of her reserve troops, charged through the open gate straight into the ranks of her victorious foes.
There was neither mercy nor gentleness in her heart then.
As when she had cowed with a look Ajax, the lion, so now, with defiance and wrath in her face, she dashed straight at the foe.
Her disheartened knights rallied around her, and, following the impetuous girl, they wielded axe and lance for the final struggle.
The result came quickly.
The ponderous battle axe of the knight of Leyenburg crashed through the helmet of the Lord of Arkell, and as the brave young leader fell to the ground, his panic stricken followers turned and fled. The troops of Jacqueline pursued them through the streets of Gorkum and out into the open country, and the vengeance of the countess was sharp and merciless.
But in the flush of victory wrath gave way to pity again, and the young conqueror is reported to have said, sadly and in tears:
But the knights and nobles who followed her banner loudly praised her valor and her fearlessness, and their highest and most knightly vow thereafter was to swear "By the courage of our Princess."
The brilliant victory of this girl of sixteen was not, however, to accomplish her desires.
Peace never came to her.
Harassed by rebellion at home, and persecuted by her relentless and perfidious uncles, Count john of Bavaria, rightly called "the Pitiless," and Duke Philip of Burgundy, falsely called "the Good," she, who had once been Crown Princess of France and Lady of Holland, died at the early age of thirty six, stripped of all her titles and estates.
It is, however, pleasant to think that she was happy in the love of her husband, the baron of the forests of the Duke of Burgundy, a plain Dutch gentleman, Francis von Borselen, the lad who, years before, had furnished the gray gabardine that had shielded Count William's daughter from her father's lions.
The story of Jacqueline of Holland is one of the most romantic that has come down to us from those romantic days of the knights.
Happy only in her earliest and latest years, she is, nevertheless, a bright and attractive figure against the dark background of feudal tyranny and crime.
The story of her womanhood should indeed be told, if we would study her life as a whole; but for us, who can in this paper deal only with her romantic girlhood, her young life is to be taken as a type of the stirring and extravagant days of chivalry.
And we cannot but think with sadness upon the power for good that she might have been in her land of fogs and floods if, instead of being made the tool of party hate and the ambitions of men, her frank and fearless girl nature had been trained to gentle ways and charitable deeds.
To be "the most picturesque figure in the history of Holland," as she has been called, is distinction indeed; but higher still must surely be that gentleness of character and nobility of soul that, in these days of ours, may be acquired by every girl and boy who reads this romantic story of the Countess Jacqueline, the fair young Lady of Holland.
The beginning of which epistle is as follows:
About this time, Mellitus, bishop of London, went to Rome, to confer with the Apostolic Pope Boniface about the necessary affairs of the English Church.
This pope was Boniface, the fourth after the blessed Gregory, bishop of the city of Rome.
Chap.
Among which, he set down first what satisfaction should be given by any one who should steal anything belonging to the Church, the bishop, or the other clergy, for he was resolved to give protection to those whom he had received along with their doctrine.
Nor did the unbelieving king escape without the scourge of Divine severity in chastisement and correction; for he was troubled with frequent fits of madness, and possessed by an unclean spirit.
The storm of this disturbance was increased by the death of Sabert, king of the East Saxons, who departing to the heavenly kingdom, left three sons, still pagans, to inherit his temporal crown.
They immediately began openly to give themselves up to idolatry, which, during their father's lifetime, they had seemed somewhat to abandon, and they granted free licence to their subjects to serve idols.
Mellitus and Justus accordingly went away first, and withdrew into the parts of Gaul, intending there to await the event.
Nevertheless, the people, having been once turned to wickedness, though the authors of it were destroyed, would not be corrected, nor return to the unity of faith and charity which is in Christ.
But he and his nation, after his conversion to the Lord, sought to obey the commandments of God.
seven.
How Bishop Mellitus by prayer quenched a fire in his city.
[six nineteen a d]
The bishop, being carried thither by his servants, weak as he was, set about averting by prayer the danger which the strong hands of active men had not been able to overcome with all their exertions.
Immediately the wind, which blowing from the south had spread the conflagration throughout the city, veered to the north, and thus prevented the destruction of those places that had been exposed to its full violence, then it ceased entirely and there was a calm, while the flames likewise sank and were extinguished.
eight.
How Pope Boniface sent the Pall and a letter to Justus, successor to Mellitus. [six twenty four a d]
Justus, bishop of the church of Rochester, immediately succeeded Mellitus in the archbishopric.
"God preserve you in safety, most dear brother!"
The king, in the presence of Bishop Paulinus, gave thanks to his gods for the birth of his daughter; and the bishop, on his part, began to give thanks to Christ, and to tell the king, that by his prayers to Him he had obtained that the queen should bring forth the child in safety, and without grievous pain.
The king, delighted with his words, promised, that if God would grant him life and victory over the king by whom the murderer who had wounded him had been sent, he would renounce his idols, and serve Christ; and as a pledge that he would perform his promise, he delivered up that same daughter to Bishop Paulinus, to be consecrated to Christ.
How King Edwin and his nation became Christians; and where Paulinus baptized them.
[six twenty seven a d]
In that city also he bestowed upon his instructor and bishop, Paulinus, his episcopal see.
Paulinus, for the space of six years from this time, that is, till the end of the king's reign, with his consent and favour, preached the Word of God in that country, and as many as were foreordained to eternal life believed and were baptized.
Nor were his good wishes in vain; for the pious labourer in the spiritual field reaped therein a great harvest of believers, delivering all that province (according to the inner signification of his name) from long iniquity and unhappiness, and bringing it to the faith and works of righteousness, and the gifts of everlasting happiness.
He likewise built, in that city, a stone church of beautiful workmanship; the roof of which has either fallen through long neglect, or been thrown down by enemies, but the walls are still to be seen standing, and every year miraculous cures are wrought in that place, for the benefit of those who have faith to seek them.
It is told that there was then such perfect peace in Britain, wheresoever the dominion of King Edwin extended, that, as is still proverbially said, a woman with her new born babe might walk throughout the island, from sea to sea, without receiving any harm.
How Edwin received letters of exhortation from Pope Honorius, who also sent the pall to Paulinus. [six thirty four a d]
At that time Honorius, successor to Boniface, was Bishop of the Apostolic see.
For the terms of your kingship you know to be this, that taught by orthodox preaching the knowledge of your King and Creator, you believe and worship God, and as far as man is able, pay Him the sincere devotion of your mind.
Employing yourself, therefore, in reading frequently the works of my lord Gregory, your Evangelist, of apostolic memory, keep before your eyes that love of his doctrine, which he zealously bestowed for the sake of your souls; that his prayers may exalt your kingdom and people, and present you faultless before Almighty God.
May God's grace preserve your Highness in safety!"
How Honorius, who succeeded Justus in the bishopric of Canterbury, received the pall and letters from Pope Honorius. [six thirty four a d]
Which letter we have also thought fit to insert in this our history:
God preserve you in safety, most dear brother!
[six forty a d]
The beginning of the epistle was as follows:
"And we have also learnt that the poison of the Pelagian heresy again springs up among you; we, therefore, exhort you, that you put away from your thoughts all such venomous and superstitious wickedness.
For you cannot be ignorant how that execrable heresy has been condemned; for it has not only been abolished these two hundred years, but it is also daily condemned by us and buried under our perpetual ban; and we exhort you not to rake up the ashes of those whose weapons have been burnt.
How Edwin being slain, Paulinus returned into Kent, and had the bishopric of Rochester conferred upon him.
[six thirty three a d]
Nor did he pay any respect to the Christian religion which had sprung up among them; it being to this day the custom of the Britons to despise the faith and religion of the English, and to have no part with them in anything any more than with pagans.
King Edwin's head was brought to York, and afterwards taken into the church of the blessed peter the Apostle, which he had begun, but which his successor Oswald finished, as has been said before.
I mean erysipelas of new born infants, which commences at the genital organs, thence spreads over the skin, and terminates in the induration and destruction of this organ.
Hence I content myself with offering this suggestion for further practical trials.
The American Provings likewise show that Apis may be of great use in scarlatina.
twelve thirty six: scarlatina does not come out, in the place of which the throat becomes ulcerated. twelve thirty seven: retrocession of scarlatina, violent fever, excessive heat, congestion of the head, reddened eyes, violent delirium.
Thanks to the curative powers of Apis, scarlatina has ceased to be a scourge to childhood.
The dangers to which children were usually exposed in scarlatina, have dwindled down to one, which fortunately is a comparatively rare phenomenon.
In all other cases, unless some strange mishap should interfere, the physician, who is familiar with Apis, need not fear any untoward results in his treatment of scarlatina.
In all lighter cases, where the disease sets in less tumultuously, and runs a mild course, it is proper, as soon as the disease has fairly broken out, to give a globule of Apis thirty, and to watch the effects of this dose without interference.
The sequelae especially are rendered less dangerous by this means.
To this end we dissolve a globule of Apis thirty, in seven dessert spoonfuls of water, by shaking the solution vigorously in a corked vial, and giving a dessert spoonful every three, six, or twelve hours as the case may require.
If this change takes place, it is proper to exhibit Apis in a more dynamic form, in order to assimilate it more harmoniously to the newly awakened reactive power of the organism.
If no improvement sets in after Apis has been used for three days, we may rest assured that a psoric miasm is in the way of a cure, which requires to be combated with some anti psoric remedy.
In this way I succeeded in developing the curative powers of Apis, so that in a few days a gradual improvement, however slight, became perceptible to the careful observer.
As soon as the improvement is well marked, all repetition of the medicine should cease, and the natural reaction of the organism should be permitted to complete the cure.
An invaluable blessing of Nature!
This treatment likewise keeps off dropsy and its dangers.
These are the only exceptions to the curative power of this drug.
Here we are told by our law of cure, that the sphere of Lachesis commences.
In
likewise, Apis will prove a curative agent.
After Apis, the cough speedily begins to become looser and milder, to loose its dubious character, and to gradually disappear without leaving a trace behind.
If, after using the Aconite, the eruption breaks out and the fever abates, no further medication is necessary.
In
Apis will likewise afford speedy and certain help.
These developments lead us to suspect that urticaria and pemphigus are identical in essence; this fact is richly substantiated by the hom[oe]opathic law which furnishes identical means of cure for either of these affections.
In the former case the medicine should be permitted to act still further; in the latter case, another dose of Apis thirty should be given, after which the result has to be carefully watched.
The best anti psoric under these circumstances, is Sulphur thirty, one pellet, provided this drug has not yet been abused; or Causticum thirty, one pellet, if such an abuse has taken place.
Syphilis may likewise complicate the disease, in which case Mercurius thirty, one pellet, may be given; or, if Mercury had been previously taken in excessive doses, Mercurius six thousand, one globule.
After one or the other of these remedies, the symptoms should be carefully observed without doing anything else, with a view of instituting whatever treatment may afterwards be necessary, we wind up the treatment with another dose of Apis thirty, one pellet, after which, the organic power is permitted to complete the cure.
are likewise cured by Apis in the speediest and easiest manner.
Apis has been a popular remedy for boils from time immemorial; the people have been in the habit of covering boils with honey, more particularly honey in which a bee had perished.
Apis, hom[oe]opathically prepared, is better adapted to such an end than honey.
No other remedial means are required, much less a surgical operation.
In
Sulphur seems to attack the evil at its very foundation, and we feel perfectly satisfied with its action, except that we would like to hasten the course of the disease still more, in order to abbreviate the tortures inherent in this malady.
This result is most certainly accomplished by means of Apis.
In all such cases Apis is of the best use to us; it is even sufficient to arrest the disorganizing process, and to bring about a satisfactorily progressing cure.
The curative indications contained in the "American Provings," have been confirmed by my own experience.
From all this we deduce the highly important practical rule: In a case of whitlow, first ascertain whether and how far Sulphur has been abused by the patient.
Unfortunately the non abuse of Sulphur is an exception to the rule, whereas the abuse of Sulphur is quite common even in our age.
Would that in this respect the ancient darkness might yield to the new light.
In case Sulphur had been abused by the patient, we mix a few drops of Apis three in twelve tablespoonfuls of water, giving a tablespoonful every hour, or every two or three hours, according as the pains are more or less violent.
In either case the medicine need not be repeated, and the organic reaction will be sufficient to complete a cure without the interference of surgery.
A simple bread and milk poultice may be used as soothing palliative, especially if the external skin is of a firm, hard texture. Resolution may be depended upon in every case, where Apis has been resorted to in time.
If the Sulphur miasm gains the ascendancy, there will be no marked improvement during the first days of the treatment.
In such a case we have at once to resort to a very high potency of Sulphur.
A single globule of Sulphur six thousand would frequently ameliorate the worst aspect of the case as by a miracle, after which a few more doses of Apis three, a drop morning and evening, would so improve the symptoms, as to render all further medication unnecessary.
These explanations likewise point out the true course to be pursued, in case we should at the outset find that a whitlow owes its existence to the psoric miasm.
DYSENTERY.
Who has not often felt embarrassed to select the right remedy among three or four that seemed indicated by the symptoms, and where it was nevertheless important, in view of the threatening danger, to select at once the right remedy?
Who has not been struck by the strange irregularity that in a disease which generally sets in as an epidemic, different remedies are often indicated by different groups of symptoms?
This truth is abundantly confirmed by experience.
All my previously obtained results in practice, testify to the correctness of this statement.
At the very commencement of the disease, a globule of Apis three is sufficient to cut short the disease so that the patient feels easy, and sleeps quietly.
Under these circumstances we repeat the medicine every hour, or every two or three hours, one globule at a time, until all further medication has become unnecessary.
As far as my personal observations go, I am disposed to affirm that the best mode of effecting a good result, is to give Apis three and Aconite three, in alternation, one drop of each preparation well shaken in a bottle containing twelve tablespoonfuls of water, and giving a tablespoonful every hour or three hours, if the danger is great, and in milder cases a full drop alternately morning and evening.
This end is not always attained with equal certainty and rapidity, if Apis is not given in alternation with Aconite.
In such a case, Apis alone often develops a powerful reaction, which is avoided by the alternate use of Aconite.
In most cases I have seen a few alternate doses give rise to a pleasant perspiration, speedily followed by quiet sleep and recovery on waking.
May we not expect the same result at the commencement of Asiatic cholera, and thus arrest the further development of the disease?
Scarcely has the little being seen the light of the world, when the process of purgation begins.
It is his habit, in after life, to combat every little costiveness, every digestive derangement, every incipient disease, by means of his cathartic mixture, and his skill is considered proportionate to the quantity of stuff which the bowels expel under the operation of his drugs.
Laxative pills, rhubarb, glauber salts, bitter waters, aloes, gin, etc, etc, are in every body's hands, and become an increasing necessity for millions.
Those who cannot afford to go to the springs, use artificial mineral water in order to accomplish similar purposes.
It is still a profitable business to sell patent purgatives, such as cider in which a little magnesia has been dissolved.
In spite of all this, long habit has secured to these pernicious customs a sort of prescriptive right.
The distress consequent upon them, increases in proportion as the reactive powers of the organism decrease, which is more particularly the case in the present generation.
Indeed, the old proverb is again verified: "Where need is greatest, there help is nearest."
The world is not only indebted to Hahnemann for a knowledge, but also for a natural corrective of this serious abuse.
Few men, if their attention has once been directed to this abuse, will feel disposed to deny its extent.
It should be considered a duty by every physician, to be acquainted with the new means of cure. The continued use of purgatives should be considered a crime against health.
CORNY'S CATAMOUNT
The other lad appeared to be absorbed in shaping an arrow from the slender stick in his hand, but he watched his neighbor with a grin, saying a few words occasionally which seemed to add to his irritation, though they were in a sympathizing tone.
"But I won't give up, and I never say 'Beat.' I'm not going to be laughed out of it, and I'll do what I said I would, if it takes all summer, Chris Warner."
"You'll have to be pretty spry, then, for there's only two more days to August," replied the whittler, shutting one eye to look along his arrow and see if it was true.
"I intend to be spry, and if you won't go and blab, I'll tell you a plan I made last night."
"They all failed, so there was nothing to tell.
"Don't seem to feel anxious a mite.
But I'll stand ready to pick up the pieces, if you come to grief."
"Now, Chris, it's mean of you to keep on making fun when I'm in dead earnest; and this may be the last thing you can do for me."
"Wait till I get out my handkerchief; if you're going to be affectin' I may want it.
Granite's cheap up here; just mention what you'd like on your tombstone and I'll see that it's done, if it takes my last cent."
The big boy in the blue overalls spoke with such a comical drawl that the slender city lad could not help laughing, and with a slap that nearly sent his neighbor off his perch, Corny said good naturedly:
"Come now, stop joking and lend a hand, and I'll do anything I can for you.
Mother won't let me go off far enough, so of course I don't do it, and then you all jeer at me.
To morrow we are going up the mountain, and I'm set on trying again, for Abner says the big woods are the place to find the 'varmint'.
Now you hold your tongue, and let me slip away when I think we've hit the right spot.
I'm not a bit afraid, and while the rest go poking to the top, I'll plunge into the woods and see what I can do."
"All right.
Better take old Buff; he'll bring you home when you get lost, and keep puss from clawing you.
You won't like that part of the fun as much as you expect to, maybe," said Chris, with a sly twinkle of the eye, as he glanced at Corny and then away to the vast forest that stretched far up the mighty mountain's side.
I shall take some lunch and plenty of shot, and have a glorious time, even if I don't meet that confounded beast.
I will keep dashing in and out of the woods as we go; then no one will miss me for a while, and when they do you just say, 'Oh, he's all right; he'll be along directly,' and go ahead, and let me alone."
Corny spoke so confidently, and looked so pleased with his plan, that honest Chris could not bear to tell him how much danger he would run in that pathless forest, where older hunters than he had been lost.
"No fear of that; I've tramped round all summer, and know my way like an Indian.
Keep the girls quiet, and let me have a good lark.
I'll turn up all right by sundown; so don't worry.
Not a word to mother, mind, or she won't let me go.
I'll make things straight with her after the fun is over."
"That ain't just square; but it's not my funeral, so I won't meddle. Hope you'll have first rate sport, and bag a brace of cats.
One thing you mind, don't get too nigh before you fire; and keep out of sight of the critters as much as you can."
If he had seen Chris dart behind the barn, and there roll upon the grass in convulsions of laughter, he would have been both surprised and hurt.
No deacon could have been more sober, however, than Chris when they met next morning, while the party of summer boarders at the old farm house were in a pleasant bustle of preparation for the long expected day on the mountain.
Three merry girls, a pair of small boys, two amiable mammas, Chris and Corny, made up the party, with Abner to drive the big wagon drawn by Milk and Molasses, the yellow span.
"All aboard!" shouted our young Nimrod, in a hurry to be off, as the lunch basket was handed up, and the small boys packed in the most uncomfortable corners, regardless of their arms and legs.
Away they rattled with a parting cheer, and peace fell upon the farm house for a few hours, to the great contentment of the good people left behind.
Corny's mother was one of them, and her last words were,--"A pleasant day, dear.
I wish you'd leave that gun at home; I'm so afraid you'll get hurt with it.'
"No fun without it.
Don't worry, mammy; I'm old enough to take care of myself."
"We are going to walk up, and leave the horses to rest; so I can choose my time.
See, I've got a bottle of cold tea in this pocket, and a lot of grub in the other.
No danger of my starving, is there?" whispered Corny, as he leaned over to Chris, who sat, apparently, on nothing, with his long legs dangling into space.
Hunting is mighty hard work on a hot day, and this is going to be a blazer," answered Chris, pulling his big straw hat lower over his eyes.
The ladies went more slowly, enjoying the grand beauty of the scene, while Chris carried the lunch basket, and Corny lingered in the rear, waiting for a good chance to "plunge."
"The very next path I see, I'll dive in and run; Chris can't leave the rest to follow, and if I once get a good start, they won't catch me in a hurry," thought the boy, longing to be free and alone in the wild woods that tempted him on either hand.
"Certainly ma'am," answered Corny, obeying at once, and inwardly resolving to deposit his fair burden on the first fallen log they came to, and make his escape.
But mrs Barker got on bravely, with the support of his strong arm, and chatted away so delightfully that Corny would really have enjoyed the walk, if his soul had not been yearning for catamounts.
He did his best, but when they passed opening after opening into the green recesses of the wood, and the granite boulders grew more and more plentiful, his patience gave out, and he began to plan what he could say to excuse himself.
"The hardest part is coming now, and we'd better rest a moment.
Here's a nice rock, and the last spring we are likely to see till we get to the top.
Come on, Chris, and give us the dipper.
mrs Barker wants a drink, and so do I," called the young hunter, driven to despair at last.
"I'll rest a bit, and then go along down, keeping a look out for puss by the way," thought Corny, feeling safe and free, and very happy, for he had his own way, at last, and a whole day to lead the life he loved.
So he bathed his hot face, took a cool drink, and lay on the moss, staring up into the green gloom of the pines, blissfully dreaming of the joys of a hunter's life,--till a peculiar cry startled him to his feet, and sent him creeping warily toward the sound.
Abner said they purred and snarled and gave a mewing sort of cry; but which it was now he could not tell, having unfortunately been half asleep.
On he went, looking up into the trees for a furry bunch, behind every log, and in every rocky hole, longing and hoping to discover his heart's desire.
But a hawk was all he saw above, an ugly snake was the only living thing he found among the logs, and a fat woodchuck's hind legs vanished down the most attractive hole.
He shot at all three and missed them, so pushed on, pretending that he did not care for such small game.
He sunk up to his knees, and with great difficulty got out by clinging to the tussocks that grew near.
In his struggles the lunch was lost, for the bottle broke and the pocket where the sandwiches were stored was full of mud.
"Here's a mess!" thought poor Corny, surveying himself with great disgust and feeling very helpless, as well as tired, hungry, and mad. "Luckily, my powder is dry and my gun safe; so my fun isn't spoiled, though I do look like a wallowing pig.
So he washed as well as he could, hoping the sun would dry him, picked out a few bits of bread unspoiled by the general wreck, and trudged on with less ardor, though by no means discouraged yet.
"I'm too high for any game but birds, and those I don't want.
I'll go slap down, and come out in the valley.
Abner said any brook would show the way, and this rascal that led me into a scrape shall lead me out," he said, as he followed the little stream that went tumbling over the stones, that increased as the ground sloped toward the deep ravine, where a waterfall shone like silver in the sun
My hands smart like fury, and I guess the mosquitoes have about eaten my face up.
Never saw such clouds of stingers before," said Corny, looking at his scratched hands, and rubbing his hot face in great discomfort,--for it was the gnat that drove the lion mad, you remember.
It was easy to say, "I'll follow the brook," but not so easy to do it; for the frolicsome stream went headlong over rocks, crept under fallen logs, and now and then hid itself so cleverly that one had to look and listen carefully to recover the trail.
It was long past noon when Corny came out near the waterfall, so tired and hungry that he heartily wished himself back among the party, who had lunched well and were now probably driving gayly homeward to a good supper.
No chance for a bath appeared, so he washed his burning face and took a rest, enjoying the splendid view far over valley and intervale through the gap in the mountain range.
He was desperately tired with these hours of rough travel, and very hungry; but would not own it, and sat considering what to do next, for he saw by the sun that the afternoon was half over.
There was time to go back the way he had come, and by following the path down the hill he could reach the hotel and get supper and a bed, or be driven home.
That was the wise thing to do, but his pride rebelled against returning empty handed after all his plans and boasts of great exploits.
"I won't go home, to be laughed at by Chris and Abner.
I'll shoot something, if I stay all night.
Who cares for hunger and mosquito bites? Not i Hunters can bear more than that, I guess.
The next live thing I see I'll shoot it, and make a fire and have a jolly supper.
Now which way will I go,--up or down?
A pretty hard prospect, either way."
The sight of an eagle soaring above him seemed to answer his question, and fill him with new strength and ardor.
To shoot the king of birds and take him home in triumph would cover the hunter with glory.
It should be done!
And away he went, climbing, tumbling, leaping from rock to rock, toward the place where the eagle had alighted.
More cuts and bruises, more vain shots, and all the reward of his eager struggles was a single feather that floated down as the great bird soared serenely away, leaving the boy exhausted and disappointed in a wilderness of granite boulders, with no sign of a path to show the way out.
Here he was, alone, without a guide, in this wild region where there was neither food nor shelter, and night coming on.
Utterly used up, he could not get home now if he had known the way; and suddenly all the tales he had ever heard of men lost in the mountains came into his head.
"The only thing to do now is to get down to the valley, if I can, before dark.
Abner said there was an old cabin, where the hunters used to sleep, somewhere round that way.
I can try for it, and perhaps shoot something on the way.
May break my bones, but I can't sit and starve up here, and I was a fool to come.
I'll keep the feather anyway, to prove that I really saw an eagle; that's better than nothing."
Coming to the ravine, he found the only road was down its precipitous side to the valley, that looked so safe and pleasant now.
Stunted pines grew in the fissures of the rocks, and their strong roots helped the clinging hands and feet as the boy painfully climbed, slipped, and swung along, fearing every minute to come to some impassable barrier in the dangerous path.
But he got on wonderfully well, and was feeling much encouraged, when his foot slipped, the root he held gave way, and down he went, rolling and bumping to his death on the rocks below, he thought, as a crash came, and he knew no more.
He seemed floating in the air, for he swayed to and fro on a soft bed, a pleasant murmur reached his ear, and when he looked down he saw what looked like clouds, misty and white, below him.
He lay a few minutes drowsily musing, for the fall had stunned him; then, as he moved his hand something pricked it, and he felt pine needles in the fingers that closed over them.
"Caught in a tree, by Jupiter!" and all visions of heaven vanished in a breath, as he sat up and stared about him, wide awake now, and conscious of many aching bones.
Yes, there he lay among the branches of one of the sturdy pines, into which he had fallen on his way down the precipice.
Blessed little tree! set there to save a life, and teach a lesson to a wilful young heart that never forgot that hour.
Holding fast, lest a rash motion should set him bounding further down, like a living ball, Corny took an observation as rapidly as possible, for the red light was fading, and the mist rising from the valley.
All he could see was a narrow ledge where the tree stood, and anxious to reach a safer bed for the night, he climbed cautiously down to drop on the rock, so full of gratitude for safety that he could only lie quite still for a little while, thinking of mother, and trying not to cry.
He was much shaken by the fall, his flesh bruised, his clothes torn, and his spirit cowed; for hunger, weariness, pain, and danger, showed him what a very feeble creature he was, after all.
He could do no more till morning, and resigned himself to a night on the mountain side, glad to be there alive, though doubtful what daylight would show him.
Too tired to move, he lay watching the western sky, where the sun set gloriously behind the purple hills.
All below was wrapped in mist, and not a sound reached him but the sigh of the pine, and the murmur of the waterfall.
"This is a first-class scrape.
Gun smashed in that confounded fall, so I can't even fire a shot to call help.
Nothing to eat or drink, and very likely a day or so to spend here till I'm found, if I ever am. Chris said, 'Yell, if you want us.' Much good that would do now!
I'll try, though." And getting up on his weary legs, Corny shouted till he was hoarse; but echo alone answered him, and after a few efforts he gave it up, trying to accept the situation like a man.
"The fellows we read about always come to grief in a place where they can shoot a bird, catch a fish, or knock over some handy beast for supper," he said, talking to himself for company.
"Even the old chap lost in the bush in Australia had a savage with him who dug a hole in a tree, and pulled out a nice fat worm to eat.
I'm not lucky enough even to find a sassafras bush to chew, or a bird's egg to suck.
Oh, well!
I'll pull through, I guess, and when it's all over, it will be a jolly good story to tell."
Then, hoping to forget his woes in sleep, he nestled under the low growing branches of the pine, and lay blinking drowsily at the twilight world outside.
A dream came, and he saw the old farm house in sad confusion, caused by his absence,--the women crying, the men sober, all anxious, and all making ready to come and look for him.
So vivid was it that he woke himself by crying out, "Here I am!" and nearly went over the ledge, stretching out his arms to Abner.
The start and the scare made it hard to go to sleep again, and he sat looking at the solemn sky, full of stars that seemed watching over him alone there, like a poor, lost child on the great mountain's stony breast.
But the splash of the waterfall, and the rush of the night wind deadened the sounds to his ear, and drowned his own reply.
I can't make them hear, and must wait till morning.
Poor Chris will get an awful scolding for letting me go.
Don't believe he told a word till he had to.
I'll make it up to him.
Chris is a capital fellow, and I just wish I had him here to make things jolly," thought the lonely lad.
Corny kept awake as long as he could, fearing to dream and fall; but by and by he dropped off, and slept soundly till the chill of dawn waked him.
He was stiff, and full of pain, but daylight and the hope of escape cheered him up, and gave him coolness and courage to see how best he could accomplish his end.
To reach it he must leap, at risk of his bones, or find some means to swing down ten or twelve feet.
Once there, it was pretty certain that by following the rough road he would come into the valley, from whence he could easily find his way home.
This he fastened firmly round the trunk of the pine, and finished his preparations by tying his handkerchief to one of the branches, that it might serve as a guide for him, a signal for others, and a trophy of his grand fall.
Then putting a little sprig of the evergreen tree in his jacket, with a grateful thought of all it had done for him, he swung himself off and landed safely below, not minding a few extra bumps after his late exploits at tumbling.
Feeling like a prisoner set free, he hurried as fast as bare feet and stiff legs would carry him along the bed of the stream, coming at last into the welcome shelter of the woods, which seemed more beautiful than ever, after the bleak region of granite in which he had been all night.
Anxious to report himself alive, and relieve his mother's anxiety, he pressed on till he struck the path, and soon saw, not far away, the old cabin Abner had spoken of.
Just before this happy moment he had heard a shot fired somewhere in the forest, and as he hurried toward the sound he saw an animal dart into the hut, as if for shelter.
Whether it was a rabbit, woodchuck or dog, he had not seen, as a turn in the path prevented a clear view; and hoping it was old Buff looking for him, he ran in, to find himself face to face with a catamount at last.
There she was, the big, fierce cat, crouched in a corner, with fiery eyes, growling and spitting at sight of an enemy, but too badly wounded to fight, as the blood that dripped from her neck, and the tremble of her limbs plainly showed.
"Now's my chance!
Don't care who shot her, I'll kill her, and have her too, if I pay my last dollar," thought Corny; and catching up a stout bit of timber fallen from the old roof, he struck one quick blow, which finished poor puss, who gave up the ghost with a savage snarl, and a vain effort to pounce on him.
"Wish I didn't look so like a scare crow; but perhaps my rags will add to the effect.
Won't the girls laugh at my swelled face, and scream at the cat.
Poor mammy will mourn over me and coddle me up as if I'd been to the wars.
Hope some house isn't very far off, for I don't believe I can lug this brute much farther, I'm so starved and shaky."
Just as he paused to take breath and shift his burden from one shoulder to the other, a loud shout startled him, and a moment after, several men came bursting through the wood, cheering like lunatics as they approached.
It was Abner, Chris, and some of the neighbors, setting out again on their search, after a night of vain wandering.
Corny could have hugged them all and cried like a girl; but pride kept him steady, though his face showed his joy as he nodded his hatless head with a cool-
The tale was soon told, and received with the most flattering signs of interest, wonder, sympathy, and admiration.
"That isn't a wild goose, is it?" proudly demanded Corny, pointing to the cat, which now lay on the ground, while he leaned against a tree to hide his weariness; for he felt ready to drop, now all the excitement was over.
Where did you shoot her?" asked Abner, stooping to examine the creature.
"Didn't shoot her; broke my gun when I took that header down the mountain.
I hit her a rap with a club, in the cabin where I found her," answered Corny, heartily wishing he need not share the prize with any one.
But he was honest, and added at once, "Some one else had put a bullet into her; I only finished her off."
"Chris did it; he fired a spell back and see the critter run, but we was too keen after you to stop for any other game.
Guess you've had enough of catamounts for one spell, hey?" and Abner laughed as he looked at poor Corny, who was a more sorry spectacle than he knew,--ragged and rough, hatless and shoeless, his face red and swelled with the poisoning and bites, his eyes heavy with weariness, and in his mouth a bit of wild cherry bark which he chewed ravenously.
"No, I haven't!
I said I'd kill one, and I did, and want to keep the skin; for I ought to have something to show after all this knocking about and turning somersaults half a mile long," answered Corny stoutly, as he tried to shoulder his load again.
"Here, give me the varmint, and you hang on to Chris, my boy, or we'll have to cart you home.
Right about face, neighbors, and home we go, to the tune of Hail Columby."
As Abner spoke, the procession set forth.
In this order they reached home, and Corny tumbled into his mother's arms, to be no more seen for some hours.
He made no more boasts of skill and courage that summer, set out on no more wild hunts, and gave up his own wishes so cheerfully that it was evident something had worked a helpful change in wilful Corny.
He liked to tell the story of that day and night when his friends were recounting adventures by sea and land; but he never said much about the hours on the ledge, always owned that Chris shot the beast, and usually ended by sagely advising his hearers to let their mothers know, when they went off on a lark of that kind.
Monsieur is Jealous of Guiche.
Monsieur entered the room abruptly, as persons do who mean well and think they confer pleasure, or as those who hope to surprise some secret, the terrible reward of jealous people.
The princess was dancing round him with a responsive smile, and the same air of alluring seductiveness.
The Comte de Guiche had no power to move; Madame remained in the middle of one of the figures and of an attitude, unable to utter a word.
The Chevalier de Lorraine, leaning his back against the doorway, smiled like a man in the very height of the frankest admiration.
The pallor of the prince, and the convulsive twitching of his hands and limbs, were the first symptoms that struck those present.
A dead silence succeeded the merry music of the dance. The Chevalier de Lorraine took advantage of this interval to salute Madame and De Guiche most respectfully, affecting to join them together in his reverences as though they were the master and mistress of the house.
Monsieur then approached them, saying, in a hoarse tone of voice, "I am delighted; I came here expecting to find you ill and low spirited, and I find you abandoning yourself to new amusements; really, it is most fortunate.
"And you are perfectly right," said the prince, coldly.
If you wish to dine without me you have your ladies.
Madame felt the reproach and the lesson, and the color rushed to her face.
"Monsieur," she replied, "I was not aware, when I came to the court of France, that princesses of my rank were to be regarded as the women in Turkey are.
This repartee, which made Montalais and De Guiche smile, rekindled the prince's anger, no inconsiderable portion of which had already evaporated in words.
"Come," replied the prince, as his only answer to the remark, hurrying him away, and turning round with so hasty a movement that he almost ran against Madame.
"Give me your opinion," exclaimed the prince.
"Upon what?"
"Upon what is taking place here."
"It is abominable!
I cannot live in this manner."
"We hoped to enjoy tranquillity after that madman Buckingham had left."
"Yes, yes," exclaimed the prince, exciting himself like a self willed child; "but I will not endure it any longer, I must learn what is really going on."
"Oh, monseigneur, an exposure-"
Wait for me here, chevalier, wait for me here." The prince disappeared in the neighboring apartment and inquired of the gentleman in attendance if the queen mother had returned from chapel.
Anne of Austria felt that her happiness was now complete; peace restored to her family, a nation delighted with the presence of a young monarch who had shown an aptitude for affairs of great importance; the revenues of the state increased; external peace assured; everything seemed to promise a tranquil future.
Her thoughts recurred, now and then, to the poor young nobleman whom she had received as a mother, and had driven away as a hard hearted step mother, and she sighed as she thought of him.
"Dear mother," he exclaimed hurriedly, closing the door, "things cannot go on as they are now."
Anne of Austria raised her beautiful eyes towards him, and with an unmoved suavity of manner, said, "What do you allude to?"
"I wish to speak of Madame."
"Your wife?"
"Yes, madame."
"I suppose that silly fellow Buckingham has been writing a farewell letter to her."
"Oh! yes, madame; of course, it is a question of Buckingham."
"Of whom else could it be, then? for that poor fellow was, wrongly enough, the object of your jealousy, and I thought-"
"My wife, madame, has already replaced the Duke of Buckingham."
You are speaking very heedlessly."
"No, no Madame has so managed matters, that I am still jealous."
"Is it possible you have not remarked it?
The queen clapped her hands together, and began to laugh.
"Philip," she said, "your jealousy is not merely a defect, it is a disease."
"Whether a defect or a disease, madame, I am the sufferer from it."
You wish it to be said you are right in being jealous, when there is no ground whatever for your jealousy."
"Of course, you will begin to say for this gentleman what you already said on the behalf of the other."
"Because, Philip," said the queen dryly, "what you did for the other, you are going to do for this one."
The prince bowed, slightly annoyed.
"If I give you facts," he said, "will you believe me?"
"If it regarded anything else but jealousy, I would believe you without your bringing facts forward; but as jealousy is the case, I promise nothing."
"It is just the same as if your majesty were to desire me to hold my tongue, and sent me away unheard."
"Far from it; you are my son, I owe you a mother's indulgence."
"Oh, say what you think; you owe me as much indulgence as a madman deserves."
"Do not exaggerate, Philip, and take care how you represent your wife to me as a woman of depraved mind-"
"But facts, mother, facts!"
"This morning at ten o'clock they were playing music in Madame's apartments."
"No harm in that, surely."
I forgot to tell you, that, during the last ten days, he has never left her side."
"Very good," exclaimed the duke, "I expected you to say that.
Pray remember with precision the words you have just uttered.
This morning I took them by surprise, and showed my dissatisfaction in a very marked manner."
"Rely upon it, that is quite sufficient; it was, perhaps, even a little too much.
These young women easily take offense.
"Very good, very good; but wait a minute.
Do not forget what you have just this moment said, that this morning's lesson ought to have been sufficient, and that if they had been doing what was wrong, they would have hidden themselves."
"Well, just now, repenting of my hastiness of the morning, and imagining that Guiche was sulking in his own apartments, I went to pay Madame a visit.
Can you guess what, or whom, I found there?
Another set of musicians; more dancing, and Guiche himself-he was concealed there."
Anne of Austria frowned.
"It was imprudent," she said.
"Nothing."
"And Guiche?"
"As much-oh, no! he muttered some impertinent remark or another."
"Well, what is your opinion, Philip?"
"That I have been made a fool of; that Buckingham was only a pretext, and that Guiche is the one who is really to blame in the matter."
"Well," she said, "what else?"
"I wish De Guiche to be dismissed from my household, as Buckingham was, and I shall ask the king, unless-"
"Unless what?"
"Unless you, my dear mother, who are so clever and so kind, will execute the commission yourself."
"I will not do it, Philip."
"What, madame?"
"He has displeased me."
"That is your own affair."
"Very well, I know what I shall do," said the prince, impetuously.
"I will have him drowned in my fish pond the very next time I find him in my apartments again." Having launched this terrible threat, the prince expected his mother would be frightened out of her senses; but the queen was unmoved.
"Do so," she said.
Philip was as weak as a woman, and began to cry out, "Every one betrays me,--no one cares for me; my mother, even, joins my enemies."
"Your mother, Philip, sees further in the matter than you do, and does not care about advising you, since you will not listen to her."
"I will go to the king."
"I was about to propose that to you.
I am now expecting his majesty; it is the hour he usually pays me a visit; explain the matter to him yourself."
She had hardly finished when Philip heard the door of the ante room open with some noise.
At the sound of the king's footsteps, which could be heard upon the carpet, the duke hurriedly made his escape.
Anne of Austria could not resist laughing, and was laughing still when the king entered.
He came very affectionately to inquire after the even now uncertain health of the queen mother, and to announce to her that the preparations for the journey to Fontainebleau were complete.
Seeing her laugh, his uneasiness on her account diminished, and he addressed her in a vivacious tone himself.
"Why, madame?"
"Because Spanish women are worth more than English women at least."
"Explain yourself."
"Since your marriage you have not, I believe, had a single reproach to make against the queen."
"Certainly not."
"And you, too, have been married some time.
Your brother, on the contrary, has been married but a fortnight."
"Well?"
"He is now finding fault with Madame a second time."
"What, Buckingham still?"
"No, another."
"Guiche."
"Really?
Madame is a coquette, then?"
"I fear so."
"You don't object to coquettes, it seems?"
"In Madame, certainly I do; but Madame is not a coquette at heart."
"That may be, but your brother is excessively angry about it."
"What does he want?"
"He wants to drown Guiche."
"That is a violent measure to resort to."
"Do not laugh; he is extremely irritated.
Think of what can be done."
"To save Guiche-certainly."
"Of, if your brother heard you, he would conspire against you as your uncle did against your father."
"No; Philip has too much affection for me for that, and I, on my side, have too great a regard for him; we shall live together on very good terms.
But what is the substance of his request?"
"That you will prevent Madame from being a coquette and Guiche from being amiable."
"Is that all?
My brother has an exalted idea of sovereign power.
To reform a man, not to speak about reforming a woman!"
"With a word to Guiche, who is a clever fellow, I will undertake to convince him."
"But Madame?"
"That is more difficult; a word will not be enough.
I will compose a homily and read it to her."
"There is no time to be lost."
"Oh, I will use the utmost diligence.
There is a repetition of the ballet this afternoon."
"You will read her a lecture while you are dancing?"
"Yes, madame."
"You promise to convert her?"
"I will root out the heresy altogether, either by convincing her, or by extreme measures."
"That is all right, then.
"The king, madame, will take all upon himself.
But let me reflect."
"What about?"
"It would be better, perhaps, if I were to go and see Madame in her own apartment."
"Would that not seem a somewhat serious step to take?"
"Yes; but seriousness is not unbecoming in preachers, and the music of the ballet would drown half my arguments.
Besides, the object is to prevent any violent measures on my brother's part, so that a little precipitation may be advisable.
Is Madame in her own apartment?"
"I believe so."
"What is my statement of grievances to consist of?"
"In a few words, of the following: music uninterruptedly; Guiche's assiduity; suspicions of treasonable plots and practices."
"And the proofs?"
"Very well; I will go at once to see Madame." The king turned to look in the mirrors at his costume, which was very rich, and his face, which was radiant as the morning.
"I suppose my brother is kept a little at a distance," said the king.
"That will do.
Permit me, madame, to kiss your hands, the most beautiful hands in France."
"May you be successful, sire, as the family peacemaker."
THE WINNING OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE
At a place that was called "The Ram's Couch" they fastened the Argo.
Then they marched to the field of Ares, where the king and the Colchian people were.
Jason, carrying his shield and spear, went before the king.
From the king's hand he took the gleaming helmet that held the dragon's teeth. This he put into the hands of Theseus, who went with him.
Then with the spear and shield in his hands, with his sword girt across his shoulders, and with his mantle stripped off, Jason looked across the field of Ares.
He followed the tracks until he came to the lair of the fire breathing bulls.
Out of that lair, which was underground, smoke and fire belched.
He set his feet firmly upon the ground and he held his shield before him.
He awaited the onset of the bulls.
They came clanging up with loud bellowing, breathing out fire.
They lowered their heads, and with mighty, iron tipped horns they came to gore and trample him.
Medea's charm had made him strong; Medea's charm had made his shield impregnable.
The rush of the bulls did not overthrow him.
His comrades shouted to see him standing firmly there, and in wonder the Colchians gazed upon him.
The bulls roared mightily.
Grasping the horns of the bull that was upon his right hand, Jason dragged him until he had brought him beside the yoke of bronze.
Striking the brazen knees of the bull suddenly with his foot he forced him down.
Then he smote the other bull as it rushed upon him, and it too he forced down upon its knees.
Castor and Polydeuces held the yoke to him.
Jason bound it upon the necks of the bulls.
He fastened the plow to the yoke.
Then he took his shield and set it upon his back, and grasping the handles of the plow he started to make the furrow.
Beside Jason Theseus went holding the helmet that held the dragon's teeth.
The hard ground was torn up by the plow of adamant, and the clods groaned as they were cast up.
Jason flung the teeth between the open sods, often turning his head in fear that the deadly crop of the Earth born Men were rising behind him.
By the time that a third of the day was finished the field of Ares had been plowed and sown.
As yet the furrows were free of the Earth born Men.
Jason went down to the river and filled his helmet full of water and drank deeply.
And his knees that were stiffened with the plowing he bent until they were made supple again.
He saw the field rising into mounds.
It seemed that there were graves all over the field of Ares.
Then he saw spears and shields and helmets rising up out of the earth.
Then armed warriors sprang up, a fierce battle cry upon their lips.
Jason remembered the counsel of Medea.
The Colchians shouted to see such a stone cast by the hands of one man.
Right into the middle of the Earth born Men the stone came.
They leaped upon it like hounds, striking at one another as they came together.
The Earth born Men, as fast as they arose, went down before the weapons in the hands of their brethren.
He slew some that had risen out of the earth only as far as the shoulders; he slew others whose feet were still in the earth; he slew others who were ready to spring upon him.
Soon all the Earth born Men were slain, and the furrows ran with their dark blood as channels run with water in springtime.
The Argonauts shouted loudly for Jason's victory.
The Colchians followed him.
Day faded, and Jason's contest was ended.
In the assembly place, with his son Apsyrtus beside him, and with the furious Colchians all around him, the king stood: on his breast was the gleaming corselet that Ares had given him, and on his head was that golden helmet with its four plumes that made him look as if he were truly the son of Helios, the sun
Lightnings flashed from his great eyes; he spoke fiercely to the Colchians, holding in his hand his bronze topped spear.
He would have them attack the strangers and burn the Argo.
So the king spoke, and the Colchians, hating all strangers, shouted around him.
Word of what her father had said was brought to Medea.
They would not go, she knew, without the Golden Fleece; then she, Medea, would have to show them how to gain the Fleece.
Forever afterward she would be dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Medea wept when she thought of all this.
The palace doors were all heavily bolted, but Medea did not have to pull back the bolts.
As she chanted her Magic Song the bolts softly drew back, the doors softly opened.
Swiftly she went along the ways that led to the river.
She called to them, and Phrontis, Chalciope's son, heard the cry and knew the voice.
To Jason he spoke, and Jason quickly went to where Medea stood.
She clasped Jason's hand and she drew him with her.
"The Golden Fleece," she said, "the time has come when you must pluck the Golden Fleece off the oak in the grove of Ares." When she said these words all Jason's being became taut like the string of a bow.
It was then the hour when huntsmen cast sleep from their eyes-huntsmen who never sleep away the end of the night, but who are ever ready to be up and away with their hounds before the beams of the sun efface the track and the scent of the quarry.
Along a path that went from the river Medea drew Jason.
They entered a grove.
Then Jason saw something that was like a cloud filled with the light of the rising sun
It hung from a great oak tree.
His hand let slip Medea's hand and he went to seize the Fleece.
As he did he heard a dreadful hiss.
And then he saw the guardian of the Golden Fleece.
Coiled all around the tree, with outstretched neck and keen and sleepless eyes, was a deadly serpent.
Its hiss ran all through the grove and the birds that were wakening up squawked in terror.
Like rings of smoke that rise one above the other, the coils of the serpent went around the tree-coils covered by hard and gleaming scales.
As she sang, the coils around the tree grew slack.
Like a dark, noiseless wave the serpent sank down on the ground.
But still its jaws were open, and those dreadful jaws threatened Jason.
Medea, with a newly cut spray of juniper dipped in a mystic brew, touched its deadly eyes.
And still she chanted her Magic Song.
The serpent's jaws closed; its eyes became deadened; far through the grove its length was stretched out.
Then Jason took the Golden Fleece.
As he raised his hands to it, its brightness was such as to make a flame on his face.
Medea called to him.
They came to the river and down to the place where the Argo was moored. The heroes who were aboard started up, astonished to see the Fleece that shone as with the lightning of Zeus.
Over Medea Jason cast it, and he lifted her aboard the Argo.
"O friends," he cried, "the quest on which we dared the gulfs of the sea and the wrath of kings is accomplished, thanks to the help of this maiden.
Then he drew his sword and cut the hawsers of the ship, calling upon the heroes to drive the Argo on.
Beside the mast Medea stood; the Golden Fleece had fallen at her feet, and her head and face were covered by her silver veil.
by
PREFACE
England still stands outside Europe.
Europe's voiceless tremors do not reach her.
But Europe is solid with herself.
They flourished together, they have rocked together in a war, which we, in spite of our enormous contributions and sacrifices (like though in a less degree than America), economically stood outside, and they may fall together.
There, at the nerve center of the European system, his British preoccupations must largely fall away and he must be haunted by other and more dreadful specters. Paris was a nightmare, and every one there was morbid.
Observe that all wide sight and self command Deserts these throngs now driven to demonry By the Immanent Unrecking.
Why prompts the Will so senseless shaped a doing?
Yet there in Paris the problems of Europe were terrible and clamant, and an occasional return to the vast unconcern of London a little disconcerting.
For in London these questions were very far away, and our own lesser problems alone troubling.
London believed that Paris was making a great confusion of its business, but remained uninterested.
Being now about three hundred forty miles from the Pole, we hoped to reach it in forty three days, then, turning south, and feeding living dogs with dead, make either Franz Josef Land or Spitzbergen, at which latter place we should very likely come up with a whaler.
Well, during the first days, progress was very slow, the ice being rough and laney, and the dogs behaving most badly, stopping dead at every difficulty, and leaping over the traces.
Clark led on ski, captaining a sledge with four hundred pounds.
But on the third day Clark had an attack of snow blindness, and Mew took his place.
Pretty soon our sufferings commenced, and they were bitter enough.
Our sleeping bags (Clark and Mew slept together in one, I in another) were soaking wet all the night, being thawed by our warmth; and our fingers, under wrappings of senne grass and wolf skin, were always bleeding. Sometimes our frail bamboo cane kayaks, lying across the sledges, would crash perilously against an ice ridge-and they were our one hope of reaching land.
But the dogs were the great difficulty: we lost six mortal hours a day in harnessing and tending them.
Our one secret thought now was food, food-our day long lust for the eating time.
Mew suffered from 'Arctic thirst.
Under these conditions, man becomes in a few days, not a savage only, but a mere beast, hardly a grade above the bear and walrus.
Ah, the ice! A long and sordid nightmare was that, God knows.
On we pressed, crawling our little way across the Vast, upon whose hoar silence, from Eternity until then, Bootes only, and that Great Bear, had watched.
After the eleventh day our rate of march improved: all lanes disappeared, and ridges became much less frequent.
Yet, as it were, his arm reached out and touched me, even there.
His disappearance had been explained by a hundred different guesses on the ship-all plausible enough.
One of Mew's dogs was sick: it was necessary to kill it: he asked me to do it.
'Oh,' said I, 'you kill your own dog, of course.'
'Well, I don't know,' he replied, catching fire at once, 'you ought to be used to killing, Jeffson.'
I rushed at once to Clark, who was stooping among the dogs, unharnessing: and savagely pushing his shoulder, I exclaimed:
'That beast accuses me of murdering David Wilson!'
'Well?' said Clark.
'I'd split his skull as clean----!'
'To the devil with you, man, say I, and let me be!' cried he: 'you know your own conscience best, I suppose.'
Before this insult I stood with grinding teeth, but impotent.
However, from that moment a deeper mood of brooding malice occupied my spirit. Indeed the humour of us all was one of dangerous, even murderous, fierceness.
Like the lower animals, we were stricken now with dumbness, and hardly once in a week spoke a word one to the other, but in selfish brutishness on through a real hell of cold we moved.
As we advanced, the ice every day became smoother; so that, from four miles a day, our rate increased to fifteen, and finally (as the sledges lightened) to twenty.
It was now that we began to encounter a succession of strange looking objects lying scattered over the ice, whose number continually increased as we proceeded.
They had the appearance of rocks, or pieces of iron, incrusted with glass fragments of various colours, and they were of every size.
Their incrustations we soon determined to be diamonds, and other precious stones.
Clark grumbled something about their being meteor stones, whose ferruginous substance had been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning in their fall by the frigidity of the air: and they quickly ceased to interest our sluggish minds, except in so far as they obstructed our way.
It lasted in its full power only an hour, but during that time snatched two of our sledges long distances, and compelled us to lie face downward.
We knew that the ice was in awful upheaval around us; we heard, as our eyelids sweetly closed, the slow booming of distant guns, and brittle cracklings of artillery.
This may have been a result of the tempest stirring up the ocean beneath the ice.
Whatever it was, we did not care: we slept deep.
We were within ten miles of the Pole.
I suppose it must have been about noon.
Instinctively, brutishly, as the Gadarean swine rushed down a steep place, I, rubbing my daft eyes, arose.
The first thing which my mind opened to perceive was that, while the tempest was less strong, the ice was now in extraordinary agitation.
As I stood, I plunged and staggered, and I found the dogs sprawling, with whimperings, on the heaving floor.
I did not care.
The sun shone with a clear, benign, but heatless shining: a ghostly, remote, yet quite limpid light, which seemed designed for the lighting of other planets and systems, and to strike here by happy chance.
Now, too, I noticed that, but for these stones, all roughness had disappeared, not a trace of the upheaval going on a little further south being here, for the ice lay positively as smooth as a table before me. It is my belief that this stretch of smooth ice has never, never felt one shock, or stir, or throe, and reaches right down to the bottom of the deep.
And now with a wild hilarity I flew.
The odometer measured nine miles from my start.
Forty more steps I took (slide I could not now for the meteorites)--perhaps sixty-perhaps eighty: and now, to my sudden horror, I stood by a circular clean cut lake.
One minute only, swaying and nodding there, I stood: and then I dropped down flat in swoon.
The fjord opened finally in a somewhat wider basin, shut in by quite steep, high towering mountains, which reflected themselves in the water to their last cloudy crag: and, at the end of this I saw ships, a quay, and a modest, homely old town.
I ran and stopped the engines, and, without anchoring, got down into an empty boat that lay at the ship's side when she stopped; and I paddled twenty yards toward the little quay.
They were there in the hope, and with the thought, to fly westward by boat.
And I asked myself this question: 'How came these foreign stragglers here in this obscure northern town?'
And my wild heart answered: 'There has been an impassioned stampede, northward and westward, of all the tribes of Man.
And this that I, Adam Jeffson, here see is but the far tossed spray of that monstrous, infuriate flood.'
Well, I passed up a street before me, careful, careful where I trod.
What then, my God, shall I do?
I felt, I felt, that in this townlet, save the water gnats of Norway, was no living thing; that the hum and the savour of Eternity filled, and wrapped, and embalmed it.
Glancing into one open casement near the ground, I saw an aged woman, stout and capped, lie on her face before a very large porcelain stove; but I paced on without stoppage, traversed several streets, and came out, as it became dark, upon a piece of grass land leading downward to a mountain gorge.
It was some distance along this gorge that I found myself sitting the next morning: and how, and in what trance, I passed that whole blank night is obliterated from my consciousness.
When I looked about with the return of light I saw majestic fir grown mountains on either hand, almost meeting overhead at some points, deeply shading the mossy gorge.
About three in the afternoon I was startled to find myself there, and turned back.
In that confined place fantastic qualms beset me; I mounted to the first landing, and tried the door, but it was locked; I mounted to the second: the door was open, and with a chill reluctance I took a step inward where all was pitch darkness, the window stores being drawn.
I hesitated: it was very dark.
Out to sea, then, I went again; and within the next few days I visited Bergen, and put in at Stavanger.
And I saw that Bergen and Stavanger were dead.
It was then, on the nineteenth of august, that I turned my bow toward my native land.
From Stavanger I steered a straight course for the Humber.
I had no sooner left behind me the Norway coast than I began to meet the ships, the ships-ship after ship; and by the time I entered the zone of the ordinary alternation of sunny day and sunless night, I was moving through the midst of an incredible number of craft, a mighty and wide spread fleet.
And so fair was the world about them, too: the brightest suavest autumn weather; all the still air aromatic with that vernal perfume of peach: yet not so utterly still, but if I passed close to the lee of any floating thing, the spicy stirrings of morning or evening wafted me faint puffs of the odour of mortality over ripe for the grave.
I could therefore have wired from Bergen or Stavanger, supposing the batteries not run down, to somewhere: but I would not: I was so afraid; afraid lest for ever from nowhere should come one answering click, or flash, or stirring....
For I was used to the silence of the ice: and I was used to the silence of the sea: but I was afraid of the silence of England.
LINKS WITH THE PAST
Although the people were then well established in the land and possessed a high degree of civilisation, their history, as we now know it, dates only from the reign of Menes, somewhere over five thousand years before the birth of Christ.
From that date down to the present time we have a continuous record, the whole course of which may be divided into three clearly distinguished periods.
The second period began in five twenty nine b c with the conquest of the country by Cambyses.
In it after nearly two hundred years of Persian rule, interrupted by a brief restoration of the native power, Egypt was for a little more than three and half centuries in the hands of the Greeks, from whom in the thirtieth year of the Christian Era it passed to the Roman Empire.
It was, indeed, during this time that the world famous cities of Alexandria and Cairo were built as well as the magnificent mosques that are the pride of all Islam, but these were all the work, not of the people themselves, but of the foreigners by whom they were held in thraldom, and are therefore monuments not of the country's glory but of its shame.
The third and present period began in seventeen ninety eight when the landing of Bonaparte was the first of the series of events that by the introduction and gradual development of European influence have brought about the now existing social and political condition of the country.
Not a single ruler, patriot, statesman, demagogue, artist or author, in short, no man or woman that lived before the dawn of the modern period, has been instrumental in the making of Egypt or the Egyptians what they now are.
These two events, with four that belong to the modern period, are indeed all that the whole history of the country presents to us as still clearly and prominently exerting an important and permanent influence upon both the character of the people and the existing circumstances and condition of their country.
Of these six events the two that belong to the second period are, the conquest of the land by the Arabs and its subsequent seizure by the Turks.
Each and all of these six events have played important parts in moulding the present day aspect of Egypt and its people, and the more closely do we study the existing conditions, the more strikingly do these six events stand out from all others as the great and dominating landmarks in the history of modern Egypt.
Now and again under some ruler of more humanity or of greater laxity than others their condition may be said to have for the time improved, but such changes were far too slight and their possible duration always far too uncertain for these benefits to be more to the people than as the grateful but passing pleasure a fleeting morning cloud brings to the traveller in a sunburnt desert.
Hence, such as the fellaheen or peasantry were when Cheops was building his pyramid, such they remained in almost all respects down to the arrival of the French.
The history of the country has, therefore, in the first two periods little to say of the people.
In the modern period the two stories touch each other more closely, for in it the people have begun to have a political existence.
To fully describe the importance of this event it would be necessary to enlarge upon the character and tendency of the Mahomedan religion at a length my limits forbid, and I must here therefore content myself with noting that, great as was the moral and mental revolution this conversion occasioned, it was by no means commensurate with that which followed the introduction of Islam into other countries.
The political condition of the people was little, if at all, affected by the change in their religion; and consequently, under the Caliphs and their successors, the Egyptian continued to be as he had been before-a man with no higher ambition than that of passing through life with the least possible trouble.
From year to year his one prayer was for an abundant Nile and a plentiful crop, not that he might thereby enrich himself, but that he might thereby secure a sufficiency for himself and his family and suffer less from the rapacious tyranny and heartless cruelty of those never resting oppressors, his rulers and all who, as officials or favourites, were lifted even a little above his own level.
It was, and is, of the essence of Islam that it appeals to freemen and favours that love of freedom that is the birthright of every man; but Islam brought no freedom to the Egyptians, save, indeed, the spiritual and moral one their rulers could not rob them of.
So such as he had been before, such he remained after the Arab conquest, but with a loftier sense of the dignity of manhood, a nobler conception of life and of its duties, and a stronger faith in a hereafter that should compensate him for all his sufferings and privations in this life.
If socially and otherwise the Egyptians profited but little from the establishment of the Caliphate, they gained still less from the domination of the Turks.
It left them practically under the same rulers, for though the system of government was modified, it placed the executive power, if not in the hands of the same men as before, at least in those of men of the same stamp, who ruled them as their predecessors had done, in the same manner, through the same agents, and with the same cruelty and wanton oppression.
Yet the Turkish, like the Arab, conquest wrought one important effect, the influence of which time has strengthened so that it is only second to that in the urgency of its bearing upon existing conditions.
Under the Arabs the Egyptians had been ruled by foreigners, but by foreigners who were in some degree allied to them.
Under the Turks their sovereign was, and is, not only a foreigner, but one of an utterly alien race, wholly separated from them by language, character, habits, by everything, indeed, save the bond of their common religion.
To Europeans this loyalty, which, it is worthy of mention here, is shared by the Moslems of India, has always appeared somewhat of an enigma.
No one, however, who knows the peoples of the two countries can doubt that, apart from the fact of the Sultan being the official head of their religion, their loyalty to him is largely due to the desire of peoples who have lost the place they once held in the comity of nations to associate themselves with such kindred peoples as have in some extent maintained their ancient status.
The Indian and the Egyptian Mahomedans alike look back to the time when Islam was the one dominant, unopposable power in their native lands, and, conscious of their own fallen condition, would fain relieve the darkness of their destiny by seeking a place, however humble, within the only radiance they can claim to share.
Were, therefore, the hopes of the large section of the Mahomedans which is filled with the desire for the restoration of an Arab Caliphate to be realised it would entirely depend upon circumstances that it is quite impossible to foresee-whether the Egyptians would or would not remain faithful to the Empire.
Meanwhile the revival of the Arabic power being a possibility too far removed from probability to take a place in the politics of the day, the loyalty of the Egyptians to the Turkish Empire must be accepted as a controlling feature in the affairs of the country.
But after making all proper allowances, he still appears to have been a weak prince, and unfit for government, less for want of natural parts and capacity, than of solid judgment and a good education.
On comparing the conduct and events of this reign with those of the preceding, we shall find equal reason to admire Edward and to blame Richard; but the circumstance of opposition, surely, will not lie in the strict regard paid by the former to national privileges, and the neglect of them by the latter.
But Richard, because he was detected in consulting and deliberating with the judges on the lawfulness of restoring the constitution, found his barons immediately in arms against him; was deprived of his liberty; saw his favorites, his ministers, his tutor, butchered before his face, or banished and attainted; and was obliged to give way to all this violence.
john Wickliffe, a secular priest, educated at Oxford, began in the latter end of Edward the third. to spread the doctrine of reformation by his discourses, sermons, and writings; and he made many disciples among men of all ranks and stations.
The French cardinals, as soon as they recovered their liberty, fled from Rome, and protesting against the forced election, chose Robert, son of the count of Geneva, who took the name of Clement the seventh., and resided at Avignon.
The court of France adhered to Clement, and was followed by its allies, the king of Castile and the king of Scotland: England of course was thrown into the other party, and declared for Urban.
But this circumstance, though it weakened the papal authority, had not so great an effect as might naturally be imagined.
This preamble contains a true picture of the state of the kingdom.
They wore public badges, by which their confederacy was distinguished.
Hence the perpetual turbulence, disorders, factions, and civil wars of those times: hence the small regard paid to a character, or the opinion of the public: hence the large discretionary prerogatives of the crown, and the danger which might have ensued from the too great limitation of them.
SIR MAGNUS MOUNTJOY.
It was the peculiarity of Florence Mountjoy that she did not expect other people to be as good as herself.
She had erected nothing.
Nor did she know that she attempted to live by grand rules.
These may be regarded as feminine virtues, and may be said to be sometimes tarnished, by faults which are equally feminine.
Unselfishness may become want of character; generosity essentially unjust; confidence may be weak, and purity insipid.
Here it was that the strength of Florence Mountjoy asserted itself.
She knew well what was due to herself, though she would not claim it.
She could trust to another, but in silence be quite sure of herself.
Though pure herself, she was rarely shocked by the ways of others.
In figure, form, and face she never demanded immediate homage by the sudden flash of her beauty.
But when her spell had once fallen on a man's spirit it was not often that he could escape from it quickly.
When she spoke a peculiar melody struck the hearer's ears.
Of this she was all unconscious, but was as chary with her fingers as though it seemed that she could ill spare her divinity.
In height she was a little above the common, but it was by the grace of her movements that the world was compelled to observe her figure.
There are women whose grace is so remarkable as to demand the attention of all.
They have studied their graces, and the result is there only too evident.
But Florence seemed to have studied nothing.
The beholder felt that she must have been as graceful when playing with her doll in the nursery.
And it was the same with her beauty.
Had you taken her face and measured it by certain rules, you would have found that her mouth was too large and her nose irregular.
But her eyes were more than ordinarily bright, and when she laughed there seemed to stream from them some heavenly delight. When she did laugh it was as though some spring had been opened from which ran for the time a stream of sweetest intimacy.
For the time you would then fancy that you had been let into the inner life of this girl, and would be proud of yourself that so much should have been granted you.
It was simply Florence Mountjoy's hair, and that made it perfect in the eyes of her male friends generally.
"She's not such a wonderful beauty, after all," once said of her a gentleman to whom it may be presumed that she had not taken the trouble to be peculiarly attractive.
"No," said another,--"no
I shouldn't like to have the altering of her." It was thus that men generally felt in regard to Florence Mountjoy.
When they came to reckon her up they did not see how any change was to be made for the better.
To Florence, as to most other girls, the question of her future life had been a great trouble.
and whom should she decline to marry?
To a girl, when it is proposed to her suddenly to change everything in life, to go altogether away and place herself under the custody of a new master, to find for herself a new home, new pursuits, new aspirations, and a strange companion, the change must be so complete as almost to frighten her by its awfulness.
And yet it has to be always thought of, and generally done.
But this change had been presented to Florence in a manner more than ordinarily burdensome.
Early in life, when naturally she would not have begun to think seriously of marriage, she had been told rather than asked to give herself to her cousin Mountjoy.
Mountjoy Scarborough had been so represented to her that she had considered it to be almost a duty to yield.
She had been subjected to what might be called cruel pressure.
In season and out of season her mother had represented as a duty this marriage with her cousin.
Why should she not marry her cousin?
It must be understood that these questions had been asked before any of the terrible facts of Captain Scarborough's life had been made known to her.
Because, it may be said, she did not love him.
But in these days she had loved no man, and was inclined to think so little of herself as to make her want of love no necessary bar to the accomplishment of the wish of others.
She did not quite know at first that she loved Harry Annesley, but was almost sure that it was impossible for her to become the wife of Mountjoy Scarborough.
He was a dark, handsome, military looking man, whose chief sin it was in the eyes of his cousin that he seemed to demand from her affection, worship, and obedience.
She did not analyse his character, but she felt it.
And when it came to pass that tidings of his debts at last reached her, she felt that she was glad of an excuse, though she knew that the excuse would not have prevailed with her had she liked him.
Then came his debts, and with the knowledge of them a keener perception of his imperiousness.
She could consent to become the wife of the man who had squandered his property and wasted his estate; but not of one who before his marriage demanded of her that submission which, as she thought, should be given by her freely after her marriage.
Harry Annesley glided into her heart after a manner very different from this.
It was not till he had come to acknowledge the trouble to which Mountjoy had subjected him that he had ever ventured to speak plainly of his own passion, and even then he had not asked for a reply.
Even now, when the captain had been declared not to be his father's heir, and when all the world knew that he had disappeared from the face of the earth, mrs Mountjoy did not altogether give him up.
She partly disbelieved her brother, and partly thought that circumstances could not be so bad as they were described.
To her feminine mind,--to her, living, not in the world of London, but in the very moderate fashion of Cheltenham,--it seemed to be impossible that an entail should be thus blighted in the bud.
Augustus, whom she had regarded always as quite a Mountjoy, because of his talent, and appearance, and habit of command, had whispered to her a word.
She did not like to be untrue to her gallant nephew. But as she came to turn it in her mind there were certain circumstances which recommended the change to her-should the change be necessary. Florence certainly had expressed an unintelligible objection to the elder brother.
Why should the younger not be more successful?
Another charmer had come, most objectionable in her sight, but to him no word of absolute encouragement had, as she thought, been yet spoken.
Augustus had already obtained for himself among his friends the character of an eloquent young lawyer.
"I think, my love," she said to her daughter one day, "that, under the immediate circumstances of the family, we should retire for a while into private life."
This occurred on the very day on which Septimus Jones had been vaguely informed of the iniquitous falsehood of Harry Annesley.
Your poor uncle is dying."
"I fear, nevertheless, that he is dying,--though it may, perhaps, take a long time.
And then poor Mountjoy has disappeared.
I think that we should see no one till the mystery about Mountjoy has been cleared up. And then the story is so very discreditable."
"We cannot help ourselves.
This making his eldest son out to be-oh, something so very different-is too horrible to be thought of.
I am told that nobody knows the truth."
"We at any rate are not implicated in that."
Poor Augustus is thrown into terrible difficulties."
"I am told that he is greatly pleased at finding that Tretton is to belong to him."
"Who tells you that?
You have no right to believe anything about such near relatives from any one.
Whoever told you so has been very wicked." mrs Mountjoy no doubt thought that this wicked communication had been made by Harry Annesley.
"I do not know that the family can have any honor left," said Florence, severely.
"My dear, you have no right to say that.
The Scarboroughs have always held their heads very high in Staffordshire, and more so of late than ever.
We'll go and spend six weeks with your uncle at Brussels.
He has always been pressing us to come."
"Oh, mamma, he does not want us."
"How can you say that?
How do you know?"
"I am sure Sir Magnus will not care for our coming now.
Besides, how could that be retiring into private life?
Sir Magnus, as ambassador, has his house always full of company."
"My dear, he is not ambassador.
He is minister plenipotentiary.
It is not quite the same thing.
And then he is our nearest relative,--our nearest, at least, since my own brother has made this great separation, of course.
We cannot go to him to be out of the way of himself."
"Why do you want to go anywhere, mamma?
Sir Magnus Mountjoy, the late general's elder brother, had been for the last four or five years the English minister at Brussels.
He had been minister somewhere for a very long time, so that the memory of man hardly ran back beyond it, and was said to have gained for himself very extensive popularity.
It had always been a point with successive governments to see that poor Sir Magnus got something, and Sir Magnus had never been left altogether in the cold.
He was not a man who would have been left out in the cold in silence, and perhaps the feeling that such was the case had been as efficacious on his behalf as his well attested popularity.
At any rate, poor Sir Magnus had always been well placed, and was now working out his last year or two before the blessed achievement of his pursuit should have been reached.
Sir Magnus had a wife of whom it was said at home that she was almost as popular as her husband; but the opinion of the world at Brussels on this subject was a good deal divided.
There were those who declared that Lady Mountjoy was of all women the most overbearing and impertinent.
But they were generally English residents at Brussels, who had come to live there as a place at which education for their children would be cheaper than at home.
Of these Lady Mountjoy had been heard to declare that she saw no reason why, because she was the minister's wife, she should be expected to entertain all the second class world of London.
You could not see her going along the boulevards in her carriage without being aware that a special personage was passing.
Of Sir Magnus it was hinted that he was afraid of his wife; but in truth he desired it to be understood that all the disagreeable things done at the Embassy were done by Lady Mountjoy, and not by him.
He did not refuse leave to the ladies to drop their cards at his hall door.
He could ask a few men to his table without referring the matter to his wife; but every one would understand that the asking of ladies was based on a different footing.
He knew well that as a rule it was not fitting that he should ask a married man without his wife; but there are occasions on which an excuse can be given, and upon the whole the men liked it.
He was a stout, tall, portly old gentleman, sixty years of age, but looking somewhat older, whom it was a difficulty to place on horseback, but who, when there, looked remarkably well.
He rarely rose to a trot during his two hours of exercise, which to the two attache's who were told off for the duty of accompanying him was the hardest part of their allotted work.
But other gentlemen would lay themselves out to meet Sir Magnus and to ride with him, and in this way he achieved that character for popularity which had been a better aid to him in life than all the diplomatic skill which he possessed.
"What do you think?" said he, walking off with mrs Mountjoy's letter into his wife's room.
"I don't think anything, my dear."
"You never do." Lady Mountjoy, who had not yet undergone her painting, looked cross and ill natured.
"At any rate, Sarah and her daughter are proposing to come here."
"Good gracious!
At once?"
"Yes, at once.
Of course, I've asked them over and over again, and something was said about this autumn, when we had come back from Pimperingen."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"Bother!
I did tell you.
"Anderson will know how to look after himself," said Sir Magnus.
"At any rate they must come.
They have never troubled us before, and we ought to put up with them once."
"But, my dear, what is all this about her brother?"
"She won't bring her brother with her."
"How can you be sure of that?" said the anxious lady.
"He is dying, and can't be moved."
"But that son of his-Mountjoy.
It's altogether a most distressing story.
What would you do if he were to turn up here?
The girl was engaged to him, you know, and has only thrown him off since his own father declared that he was not legitimate.
There never was such a mess about anything since London first began."
Then Sir Magnus declared that, let Mountjoy Scarborough and his father have misbehaved as they might, mr Scarborough's sister must be received at Brussels.
Sir Magnus had borrowed three thousand pounds from the general which had been settled on the general's widow, and the interest was not always paid with extreme punctuality.
To give mrs Mountjoy her due, it must be said that this had not entered into her consideration when she had written to her brother in law; but it was a burden to Sir Magnus, and had always tended to produce from him a reiteration of those invitations, which mrs Mountjoy had taken as an expression of brotherly love.
"Take her about in the carriage," said Sir Magnus, who was beginning to be a little angry with this interference.
"And the daughter?
Daughters are twice more troublesome than their mothers."
And for goodness' sake don't make so much trouble about things which need not be troublesome." Then Sir Magnus left his wife to ring for her chambermaid and go on with her painting, while he himself undertook the unwonted task of writing an affectionate letter to his sister in law.
The letter which Sir Magnus wrote was as follows:
MY DEAR SARAH,--Lady Mountjoy bids me say that we shall be delighted to receive you and my niece at the British Ministry on the first of October, and hope that you will stay with us till the end of the month.--Believe me, most affectionately yours, MAGNUS MOUNTJOY.
"I have a most kind letter from Sir Magnus," said mrs Mountjoy to her daughter.
"What does he say?"
"That he will be delighted to receive us on the first of October.
"Do you know her, mamma?" asked Florence.
"I did see her once; but I cannot say that I know her.
"I never saw him but that once," said Florence.
And so it was settled that she and her mother were to spend a month at Brussels.
CHAPTER fifteen.
Michel Voss had gone to his niece immediately upon his return from his walk, intending to obtain a renewed pledge from her that she would be true to her engagement.
He had been in such a tremor of passion that he had been unable to demand an answer.
After that, when George was gone, he kept away from her during the remainder of the morning.
Once or twice he said a few words to his wife, and she counselled him to take no farther outward notice of anything that George had said to him.
'Don't put it into her head that there is to be a doubt,' said Madame Voss.
Let the matter go on.
She will see the things bought for her wedding, and when she remembers that she has allowed them to come into the house without remonstrating, she will be quite unable to object.
'Speak softly to her, my dear,' said Madame Voss.
'Don't I always speak softly?' said he, turning sharply round upon his spouse.
He put his hand upon her shoulder, and smiled, and murmured some word of love.
Craft indeed was not the strong point of his character.
She knew that he was asking her to consent to the sacrifice, and he knew that she was imploring him to spare her.
This was not what Madame Voss had meant by speaking softly.
Could she have been allowed to dilate upon her own convictions, or had she been able adequately to express her own ideas, she would have begged that there might be no sentiment, no romance, no kissing of hands, no looking into each other's faces,--no half murmured tones of love.
But then her husband was, by nature, of a fervid temperament, given to the influence of unexpressed poetic emotions;--and thus subject, in spite of the strength of his will, to much weakness of purpose.
He would kiss Marie's hand, and press Marie's wrist, and hold dialogues by the eye with Marie.
But with his wife his speech was,--not exactly yea, yea, and nay, nay,--but yes, yes, and no, no It was not unnatural therefore that she should specially dislike this weakness of his which came from his emotional temperament.
'I would just let things go, as though there were nothing special at all,' she said again to him, before supper, in a whisper.
'And so I do.
What would you have me say?'
But he was unable to adopt that safe and golden mean, which his wife recommended.
He could not keep himself from interchanging a piteous glance or two with Marie at supper, and put a great deal too much unction into his caress to please Madame Voss, when Marie came to kiss him before she went to bed.
In the mean time Marie was quite aware that it was incumbent on her to determine what she would do.
When she was giving them their breakfast that morning her mind was fully made up.
But when she had learned the truth,--a truth so unexpected,--then such servitude became impossible to her.
Marie had thought of that also, and was aware that she must lose no time in making her purpose known, so that articles which would be unnecessary might not be purchased.
It was with difficulty that she had brought herself to do that,--telling herself, however, that as the linen was there, it must be hemmed; when there had come a question of marking the sheets, she had evaded the task,--not without raising suspicion in the bosom of Madame Voss.
But it was, as she knew, absolutely necessary that her uncle should be informed of her purpose.
Her mind, the reader must remember, was somewhat dark in the matter.
She was betrothed to the man, and she had always heard that a betrothal was half a marriage.
But Marie had been sharp enough to understand perfectly the gist of her aunt's manoeuvres and of the priest's incidental information.
But she did fear that if she simply told him that it must be done, he would have such a power over her that she would not succeed.
Much of the day after George's departure, and much of the night, was spent in the preparation of this letter.
It was a difficult thing for her to begin the letter, and a difficult thing for her to bring it to its end.
But the letter was written and sent.
Then it was necessary that she should show the copy to her uncle.
She had posted the letter between six and seven with her own hands, and had then come trembling back to the inn, fearful that her uncle should discover what she had done before her letter should be beyond his reach.
When that hour was passed, the conveyance of her letter was insured, and then she must show the copy to her uncle.
When pressed to do so by her uncle, she declared that she had eaten lately and was not hungry.
It was seldom that she would sit down to dinner, and this therefore gave rise to no special remark.
'If you will come, I will show you.'
'Show me!
What will you show me?'
It went this morning, and you must see it.'
'A letter to Urmand,' he said, as he took the paper suspiciously into his hands.
'Yes, Uncle Michel.
I was obliged to write it.
I am afraid you will be angry with me, and-turn me away; but I cannot help it.'
The letter was as follows:
I have promised to be your wife, but it cannot be.
I did not mean to be bad.
I hope that you will forget me, and try to forgive me.
No one knows better than I do how bad I have been.
'Your most humble servant, 'With the greatest respect, 'MARIE BROMAR.'
The letter had taken her long to write, and it took her uncle long to read, before he came to the end of it.
He is not deceived at all.' 'Trash-you are not fond of another man.
It is all nonsense.' 'You must do what your uncle wishes.
You must, now!
you must!
Of course, you will love him.
Why can't you let all that come as it does with others?' 'Letter gone;--yes indeed, and now I must go after it.' 'Trouble!--yes!
Why could you not tell me before you sent it?
You have been very good.
Of course he won't.
How should he? Are you not betrothed to him?
'Of course, it means nothing.'
'I say it means nothing.
'If I cannot do that, I shall at any rate see him before he gets it.
'But I don't repent it, Uncle Michel; I don't, indeed.
I can't repent it.
How can I repent it when I really mean it?
I shall never become his wife;--indeed I shall not.
There was an hour during which he could continue to exercise his eloquence upon his niece, and endeavour to induce her to authorise him to contradict her own letter.
He appealed first to her affection, and then to her duty; and after that, having failed in these appeals, he poured forth the full vials of his wrath upon her head.
She was ungrateful, obstinate, false, unwomanly, disobedient, irreligious, sacrilegious, and an idiot.
Though she had deserved all these bad things which he had spoken of her, yet she should be regarded as having deserved none of them, should again be accepted as having in all points done her duty, if she would only, even now, be obedient. But she was not to be shaken.
She had at last formed a resolution, and her uncle's words had no effect towards turning her from it. 'Uncle Michel,' she said at last, speaking with much seriousness of purpose, and a dignity of person that was by no means thrown away upon him, 'if I am what you say, I had better go away from your house.
I know I have been bad.
I will not defend myself.
But nothing on earth shall make me marry him.
You had better let me go away, and get a place as a servant among our friends at Epinal.' But Michel Voss, though he was heaping abuse upon her with the hope that he might thus achieve his purpose, had not the remotest idea of severing the connection which bound him and her together.
He wanted to do her good, not evil.
She was exquisitely dear to him.
If she would only let him have his way and provide for her welfare as he saw, in his wisdom, would be best, he would at once take her in his arms again and tell her that she was the apple of his eye.
If ye have, how can ye disbelieve on the Son of God?
And many did look and live.
But there were many who were so hardened that they would not look, therefore they perished.
And behold, it will become a tree, springing up in you unto everlasting life.
And then may God grant unto you that your burdens may be light, through the joy of his Son.
Amen.
Now, if a man murdereth, behold will our law, which is just, take the life of his brother?
Nay, ye cannot say this; for that same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in that eternal world.
Hence English and American merchants, who only see Japan from the business side, continually speak of the Japanese as dishonest, tricky, and altogether unreliable, and greatly prefer to deal with the Chinese, who have much of the business virtue that is characteristic of the English as a nation.
Their trade, conducted in a small way upon small means, is more of the nature of a game, in which one person is the winner and the other the loser, than a fair exchange, in which both parties obtain what they want.
With them, trade is a warfare between buyer and seller, in which every man must take all possible advantage for himself, and it is the lookout of the other party if he is cheated.
With infinite patience, he waits while the merits of each piece are examined and discussed, and if none of his stock proves satisfactory, he is willing to come again with a new set of wares, knowing that in the end purchases will be made sufficient to cover all his trouble.
Like all things else in Japan, shopping takes plenty of time.
The store appears, to the foreign eye, to be simply a roofed and matted platform upon which both clerks and customers sit.
This platform is screened from the street by dark blue cotton curtains or awnings hung from the low projecting eaves of the heavy roof.
When this is given, the work begins; the little boys are summoned, and are soon sent off to the great fire proof warehouse, which stands with heavy doors thrown open, on the other side of the platform, away from the street.
Through the doorway one can see endless piles of costly stuffs stored safely away, and from these piles the boys select the required fabric, loading themselves down with them so that they can barely stagger under the weights that they carry.
During her stay in the store, the foreign customer, making her first visit to the place, is frequently startled by loud shouts from the whole staff of clerks and small boys,--outcries so sudden, so simultaneous, and so stentorian, that she cannot rid herself of the idea that something terrible is happening every time that they occur.
There is less pomp and circumstance about the smaller stores, for all the goods are within easy reach, and the shops for household utensils and chinaware seem to have nearly the whole stock in trade piled up in front, or even in the street itself.
Many such little places are the homes of the people who keep them.
And at the back are rooms, which serve for dwelling rooms, opening upon well kept gardens.
The whole work of the store is often attended to by the proprietor, assisted by his wife and family, and perhaps one or two apprentices.
Each of the workers, in turn, takes an occasional holiday, for there is no day in the Japanese calendar when the shops are all closed; and even New Year's Day, the great festival of the year, finds most of the stores open.
The stranger visiting any of the great Japanese cities is surprised by the lack of large stores and manufactories, and often wonders where the beautiful lacquer work and porcelains are made, and where the gay silks and crepes are woven.
The delicate vases, the bronzes, and the silks are often made in humblest homes, the work of one or two laborers with rudest tools.
There are no great manufactories to be seen, and the bane of so many cities, the polluting factory smoke, never rises over the cities of Japan.
The hard, confining factory life, with its never ceasing roar of machinery, bewildering the minds and intellects of the men who come under its deadening influences, until they become scarcely more than machines themselves, is a thing as yet almost unknown in Japan.
On certain days in the month, in different sections of the city, are held night festivals near temples, and many shopkeepers take the opportunity to erect temporary booths, in which they so arrange their wares as to tempt the passers by as they go to and fro.
Very often there is a magnificent display of young trees, potted plants, and flowers, brought in from the country and ranged on both sides of the street.
Here the gardeners make lively sales, as the displays are often fine in themselves, and show to a special advantage in the flaring torchlight. The eager venders, who do all they can to call the attention of the crowd to their wares, make many good bargains.
You ask the price of a dwarf wistaria growing in a pot.
The man answers at once, "Two dollars." "Two dollars!" you answer in surprise, "it is not worth more than thirty or forty cents." "Seventy five, then," he will respond; and thus the buyer and seller approach nearer in price, until the bargain is struck somewhere near the first price offered.
The darkness is illuminated by torches, whose weird flames flare and smoke in the wind, and shine down upon the little sheds which line both sides of the road, and contain so tempting a display of cheap toys and trinkets that not only the children, but their elders, are attracted by them.
Some of the booths are devoted to dolls; others to toys of various kinds; still others to birds in cages, goldfish in globes, queer chirping insects in wicker baskets, pretty ornaments for the hair, fans, candies, and cakes of all sorts, roasted beans and peanuts, and other things too numerous to mention.
The long line of stalls ends with booths, or tents, in which shows of dancing, jugglery, educated animals, and monstrosities, natural or artificial, may be seen for the moderate admission fee of two sen
Each of these shows is well advertised by the beating of drums, by the shouting of doorkeepers, by wonderful pictures on the outside to entice the passer by, or even by an occasional brief lifting of the curtains which veil the scene from the crowd without, just long enough to afford a tantalizing glimpse of the wonders within.
The supposed object of the expedition, the visit to the temple, has occupied but a small share of time and attention, and the little hands are filled with the amusing toys and trifles bought, and the little minds with the merry sights seen.
By ten o'clock, when the crowds have dispersed and the purchasers have all gone home and gone to bed, the busy booth keepers take down their stalls, pack up their wares, and disappear, leaving no trace of the night's gayeties to greet the morning sun
The streets are gayly decorated with flags, and bright lanterns-all alike in design and color-are hung in rows from the low eaves of the houses.
It takes a day or two for the rejoicings to get fully under way, but by the second or third day the fun is at its height, and the streets are thronged with merrymakers.
An evening walk through one of these thoroughfares was a sight to be remembered for a lifetime.
Then slowly the great shell closed, once more the shouting crowds seized hold of the straining ropes, and the great bivalve with its fair freight was drawn slowly along through the gayly illuminated streets.
Jimmu Tenno and other heroes of Japanese legend or history, each upon its lofty platform, a white elephant, and countless other subjects were represented in the festival cars sent forth by all the districts of the city to celebrate the great event.
Upon such festival occasions the shopkeeper does not put up his shutters and leave his place of business, but the open shop fronts add much to the gay appearance of the street.
There are, however, occupations in the city for women, by which they may support themselves or their families.
The business of hotel keeping we have referred to in a previous chapter, and it is a well-known fact that unless a hotel keeper has a capable wife, his business will not succeed.
When this time comes, the labor is redistributed, the woman frequently taking upon herself the reception of the guests and the keeping of the accounts, while the hired help waits on the tables.
They are consulted on every important step by believing ones of all classes.
A man and his family were about to move from their residence to another part of the city.
As the family could not wait two years before moving, it was decided that the change of residence should be made at once, but that the son should live with his uncle until the next year.
The uncle's home was, however, inconveniently remote, and so the young man stayed as a visitor at his father's house for the remaining months of the year, after which he became once more a member of the household.
The brother himself, while not a Christian, had little belief in the old superstitions of his people; his wife was a professing Christian.
The old lady was quite sure that there was some witchcraft or art magic at work among her dear ones, and, after consulting the servants (for she knew that she could expect no sympathy in her plans from either her brother or his wife), she betook herself to a fortune teller to discover through his means the causes of the illness in the family.
The fortune teller revealed to her the fact that two occult forces were at work bringing evil upon the house.
The fortune teller hinted, moreover, that for a consideration he might be able to afford material aid in the search for the well.
At this information Go Inkyo Sama was much perturbed, for further aid for her afflicted family seemed to require the use of money, and of that commodity she had very little, being mainly dependent upon her brother for support.
She returned to her home and consulted the servants upon the matter; but though they quite agreed with her that something should be done, they had little capital to invest in the enterprises suggested by the fortune teller.
At last, the old lady went to her brother, but he only laughed at her well meant attempts to help his family, and refused to give her money for such a purpose.
She retired discouraged, but, urged by the servants, she decided to make a last appeal, this time to her sister in law, who must surely be moved by the evil that was threatening herself and her children.
Taking some of the head servants with her, she went to her sister and presented the case.
This was her last resort, and she clung to her forlorn hope longer than many would have done, the servants adding their arguments to her impassioned appeals, only to find out after all that the steadfast sister could not be moved, and that she would not propitiate the horse's spirit, or allow money to be used for such a purpose.
She gave it up then, and sat down to await the fate of her doomed house, doubtless wondering much and sighing often over the foolish skepticism of her near relatives, and wishing that the rationalistic tendencies of the time would take a less dangerous form than the neglecting of the plainest precautions for life and health.
When thoroughly taught, they form a valuable investment, and well repay the labor spent upon them, for a popular geisha commands a good price everywhere, and has her time overcrowded with engagements.
A Japanese entertainment is hardly regarded as complete without geishas in attendance, and their dancing, music, and graceful service at supper form a charming addition to an evening of enjoyment at a tea house.
The Japanese dances are charmingly graceful and modest; the swaying of the body and limbs, the artistic management of the flowing draperies, the variety of themes and costumes of the different dances, all go to make an entertainment by geishas one of the pleasantest of Japanese enjoyments.
The geishas unfortunately, though fair, are frail.
If the wives of the leaders in Japan are to come from among such a class of women, something must be done, and done quickly, for the sake of the future of Japan; either to raise the standards of the men in regard to women, or to change the old system of education for girls.
A liberal education, and more freedom in early life for women, has been suggested, and is now being tried, but the problem of the geisha and her fascination is a deep one in Japan.
The supervision that the government exercises over these places is extremely rigid; the effort is made, by licensing and regulating them, to minimize the evils that must flow from them.
A few may have sacrificed themselves freely but reluctantly for those whom they love, and by their revolting slavery may be earning the means to keep their dear ones from starvation or disgrace.
We have already mentioned incidentally the theatre as one of the favorite diversions of the people; and though it has never been regarded as a very refined amusement, it has done and is doing much for the education of the lower classes in the history and spirit of former times.
This alone, the most ancient and classical of Japanese theatrical performances, is considered worthy of the attention of the Emperor and the nobility, and takes the place with them of the more vulgar and realistic plays which delight common people.
In no case are the roles taken by both sexes upon one stage.
As the performances last all day, from ten or eleven in the forenoon until eight or nine in the evening, going to the theatre means much more than a few hours of entertainment after the day's work is over.
A lunch and dinner, with innumerable light edibles between, go to make up the usual bill of fare for a day at the play, and tea houses in the neighborhood of the theatre provide the necessary meals, a room to take them in, a resting place between the acts, and whatever tea, cakes, and other refreshments may be ordered.
Each gesture, and each modulation of the voice, is studied as carefully as are those of the actors.
Many charming tales are told of old Japan, and even Western stories have found their way to these assemblies.
A long story is often continued from night to night until finished.
Unfortunately, the class of people who patronize these places is low, and the moral tone of some of the stories is pitched accordingly; but the best of the story tellers-those who have talent and reputation-are often invited to come to entertainments given at private houses, to amuse a large company by their eloquence or mimicry.
Solemn and sad subjects are touched upon, as well as merry and bright things, and he never fails to make his audience weep or laugh, according to his theme, and well merits the applause he always receives at the end.
The river is crowded with picnic parties in boats.
Dango Zaka has its own peculiar attraction, the famous chrysanthemum dolls.
A roof of matting shields each group from the sun by day, and a slight sprinkling every night serves to keep the plants fresh for nearly a month, and the flowers continue their blooming during that time, as calmly as if in perfectly natural positions.
And so, amid the shopping, the festivals, the amusements of the great cities, the women find their lives varied in many ways.
Fairies and their like belong to every country and every age, and no doubt we should see plenty of them now-if we only knew how.
In a large town in Germany there lived, some couple of hundred years ago, a cobbler and his wife.
They were poor and hard-working.
The man sat all day in a little stall at the street corner and mended any shoes that were brought him.
His wife sold the fruit and vegetables they grew in their garden in the Market Place, and as she was always neat and clean and her goods were temptingly spread out she had plenty of customers.
The couple had one boy called Jem.
He used to sit by his mother in the market and would carry home what people bought from her, for which they often gave him a pretty flower, or a slice of cake, or even some small coin.
One day Jem and his mother sat as usual in the Market Place with plenty of nice herbs and vegetables spread out on the board, and in some smaller baskets early pears, apples, and apricots.
Jem cried his wares at the top of his voice:
'This way, gentlemen!
See these lovely cabbages and these fresh herbs! Early apples, ladies; early pears and apricots, and all cheap.
Come, buy, buy!'
As he cried an old woman came across the Market Place.
In this fashion she came along till she got to the stall where Jem and his mother were, and there she stopped.
'Are you Hannah the herb seller?' she asked in a croaky voice as her head shook to and fro.
'Yes, I am,' was the answer.
'Can I serve you?'
Let me look at those herbs.
I wonder if you've got what I want,' said the old woman as she thrust a pair of hideous brown hands into the herb basket, and began turning over all the neatly packed herbs with her skinny fingers, often holding them up to her nose and sniffing at them.
The cobbler's wife felt much disgusted at seeing her wares treated like this, but she dared not speak.
When the old hag had turned over the whole basket she muttered, 'Bad stuff, bad stuff; much better fifty years ago-all bad.'
This made Jem very angry
'You are a very rude old woman,' he cried out.
'First you mess all our nice herbs about with your horrid brown fingers and sniff at them with your long nose till no one else will care to buy them, and then you say it's all bad stuff, though the duke's cook himself buys all his herbs from us.'
The old woman looked sharply at the saucy boy, laughed unpleasantly, and said:
'So you don't like my long nose, sonny?
Well, you shall have one yourself, right down to your chin.'
As she spoke she shuffled towards the hamper of cabbages, took up one after another, squeezed them hard, and threw them back, muttering again, 'Bad stuff, bad stuff.'
'Your neck is as thin as a cabbage stalk, and it might easily break and your head fall into the basket, and then who would buy anything?'
'Then you sha'n't have any, but a head stuck close between your shoulders so that it may be quite sure not to fall off.'
'If you wish to buy, please make haste, as you are keeping other customers away.'
'Very well, I will do as you ask,' said the old woman, with an angry look.
'I will buy these six cabbages, but, as you see, I can only walk with my stick and can carry nothing.
Let your boy carry them home for me and I'll pay him for his trouble.'
The little fellow didn't like this, and began to cry, for he was afraid of the old woman, but his mother ordered him to go, for she thought it wrong not to help such a weakly old creature; so, still crying, he gathered the cabbages into a basket and followed the old woman across the Market Place.
She drew a rusty old hook from her pocket and stuck it into a little hole in the door, which suddenly flew open.
The house was splendidly furnished, the walls and ceiling of marble, the furniture of ebony inlaid with gold and precious stones, the floor of such smooth slippery glass that the little fellow tumbled down more than once.
The old woman took out a silver whistle and blew it till the sound rang through the house.
Immediately a lot of guinea pigs came running down the stairs, but Jem thought it rather odd that they all walked on their hind legs, wore nutshells for shoes, and men's clothes, whilst even their hats were put on in the newest fashion.
'Where are my slippers, lazy crew?' cried the old woman, and hit about with her stick.
She threw away her stick and walked briskly across the glass floor, drawing little Jem after her.
At last she paused in a room which looked almost like a kitchen, it was so full of pots and pans, but the tables were of mahogany and the sofas and chairs covered with the richest stuffs.
'Sit down,' said the old woman pleasantly, and she pushed Jem into a corner of a sofa and put a table close in front of him.
'Sit down, you've had a long walk and a heavy load to carry, and I must give you something for your trouble.
So saying, she whistled again.
First came in guinea pigs in men's clothing.
They had tied on large kitchen aprons, and in their belts were stuck carving knives and sauce ladles and such things.
They too walked on their hind legs, wore full Turkish trousers, and little green velvet caps on their heads.
They seemed to be the scullions, for they clambered up the walls and brought down pots and pans, eggs, flour, butter, and herbs, which they carried to the stove.
Here the old woman was bustling about, and Jem could see that she was cooking something very special for him.
At last the broth began to bubble and boil, and she drew off the saucepan and poured its contents into a silver bowl, which she set before Jem.
'There, my boy,' said she, 'eat this soup and then you'll have everything which pleased you so much about me.
And you shall be a clever cook too, but the real herb-no, the REAL herb you'll never find.
Why had your mother not got it in her basket?'
The child could not think what she was talking about, but he quite understood the soup, which tasted most delicious.
His mother had often given him nice things, but nothing had ever seemed so good as this.
The smell of the herbs and spices rose from the bowl, and the soup tasted both sweet and sharp at the same time, and was very strong.
As he was finishing it the guinea pigs lit some Arabian incense, which gradually filled the room with clouds of blue vapour.
They grew thicker and thicker and the scent nearly overpowered the boy.
He reminded himself that he must get back to his mother, but whenever he tried to rouse himself to go he sank back again drowsily, and at last he fell sound asleep in the corner of the sofa.
Strange dreams came to him.
He thought the old woman took off all his clothes and wrapped him up in a squirrel skin, and that he went about with the other squirrels and guinea pigs, who were all very pleasant and well mannered, and waited on the old woman.
First he learned to clean her cocoa nut shoes with oil and to rub them up.
In this way he passed from one kind of service to another, spending a year in each, till in the fourth year he was promoted to the kitchen. Here he worked his way up from under scullion to head pastrycook, and reached the greatest perfection.
He could make all the most difficult dishes, and two hundred different kinds of patties, soup flavoured with every sort of herb-he had learnt it all, and learnt it well and quickly.
When he had lived seven years with the old woman she ordered him one day, as she was going out, to kill and pluck a chicken, stuff it with herbs, and have it very nicely roasted by the time she got back.
He did this quite according to rule.
Then he went to fetch the herbs to stuff it with.
He peeped in and saw a lot of baskets from which came a strong and pleasant smell.
He opened one and found a very uncommon herb in it.
But the smell was so sharp that he began to sneeze again and again, and at last-he woke up!
There he lay on the old woman's sofa and stared about him in surprise. 'Well, what odd dreams one does have to be sure!' he said to himself. 'Why, I could have sworn I had been a squirrel, a companion of guinea pigs and such creatures, and had become a great cook, too.
But won't she scold me, though, for sleeping away here in a strange house, instead of helping her at market!'
He jumped up and prepared to go: all his limbs still seemed quite stiff with his long sleep, especially his neck, for he could not move his head easily, and he laughed at his own stupidity at being still so drowsy that he kept knocking his nose against the wall or cupboards.
The squirrels and guinea pigs ran whimpering after him, as though they would like to go too, and he begged them to come when he reached the door, but they all turned and ran quickly back into the house again.
The part of the town was out of the way, and Jem did not know the many narrow streets in it and was puzzled by their windings and by the crowd of people, who seemed excited about some show.
He was quite puzzled when he reached the market place.
There sat his mother, with a good deal of fruit still in her baskets, so he felt he could not have slept so very long, but it struck him that she was sad, for she did not call to the passers by, but sat with her head resting on her hand, and as he came nearer he thought she looked paler than usual.
He hesitated what to do, but at last he slipped behind her, laid a hand on her arm, and said: 'Mammy, what's the matter?
Are you angry with me?'
She turned round quickly and jumped up with a cry of horror.
'What do you want, you hideous dwarf?' she cried; 'get away; I can't bear such tricks.'
'You can't be well.
'I have said already, get away,' replied Hannah, quite angrily.
'How can I manage to get her home?
Can't you see I am your own son Jem?'
'Well, did you ever hear such impudence?' asked Hannah, turning to a neighbour.
'Just see that frightful dwarf-would you believe that he wants me to think he is my son Jem?'
Then all the market women came round and talked all together and scolded as hard as they could, and said what a shame it was to make game of mrs Hannah, who had never got over the loss of her beautiful boy, who had been stolen from her seven years ago, and they threatened to fall upon Jem and scratch him well if he did not go away at once.
Poor Jem did not know what to make of it all.
And they called him a horrid dwarf!
Why, what had happened to him?
When he found that his mother would really have nothing to do with him he turned away with tears in his eyes, and went sadly down the street towards his father's stall.
'I'll stand by the door and talk to him.'
When he got to the stall he stood in the doorway and looked in.
The cobbler was so busy at work that he did not see him for some time, but, happening to look up, he caught sight of his visitor, and letting shoes, thread, and everything fall to the ground, he cried with horror: 'Good heavens! what is that?'
'How do you do?'
'Very ill, little sir, replied the father, to Jem's surprise, for he did not seem to know him.
'Business does not go well.
I am all alone, and am getting old, and a workman is costly.'
'I had one: he was called Jem, and would have been a tall sturdy lad of twenty by this time, and able to help me well.
Why, when he was only twelve he was quite sharp and quick, and had learnt many little things, and a good looking boy too, and pleasant, so that customers were taken by him.
Well, well! so goes the world!'
'But where is your son?' asked Jem, with a trembling voice.
'Heaven only knows!' replied the man; 'seven years ago he was stolen from the market place, and we have heard no more of him.'
'SEVEN YEARS AGO!' cried Jem, with horror.
I always thought and said that something of the kind would happen.
Jem was a beautiful boy, and everyone made much of him, and my wife was so proud of him, and liked him to carry the vegetables and things to grand folks' houses, where he was petted and made much of.
'And that was seven years ago, you say?'
'Yes, seven years: we had him cried-we went from house to house.
Many knew the pretty boy, and were fond of him, but it was all in vain.
As his father spoke, things grew clearer to Jem's mind, and he saw now that he had not been dreaming, but had really served the old woman seven years in the shape of a squirrel.
As he thought it over rage filled his heart.
Seven years of his youth had been stolen from him, and what had he got in return?
To learn to rub up cocoa nuts, and to polish glass floors, and to be taught cooking by guinea pigs!
He stood there thinking, till at last his father asked him:
Shall I make you a pair of slippers, or perhaps' with a smile-'a case for your nose?'
'What have you to do with my nose?' asked Jem. 'And why should I want a case for it?'
Here is a nice piece; and think what a protection it would be to you.
As it is, you must be constantly knocking up against things.'
The lad was dumb with fright.
He felt his nose.
It was thick, and quite two hands long.
So, then, the old woman had changed his shape, and that was why his own mother did not know him, and called him a horrid dwarf!
'Master,' said he, 'have you got a glass that I could see myself in?'
'Young gentleman,' was the answer, 'your appearance is hardly one to be vain of, and there is no need to waste your time looking in a glass. Besides, I have none here, and if you must have one you had better ask Urban the barber, who lives over the way, to lend you his.
Good morning.'
So saying, he gently pushed Jem into the street, shut the door, and went back to his work.
Jem stepped across to the barber, whom he had known in old days.
'Good morning, Urban,' said he; 'may I look at myself in your glass for a moment?'
Meantime Jem had stepped up to the mirror, and stood gazing sadly at his reflection. Tears came to his eyes.
'No wonder you did not know your child again, dear mother,' thought he; 'he wasn't like this when you were so proud of his looks.'
He was no taller than he had been seven years ago, when he was not much more than twelve years old, but he made up in breadth, and his back and chest had grown into lumps like two great sacks.
His legs were small and spindly, but his arms were as large as those of a well grown man, with large brown hands, and long skinny fingers.
He determined to go again to his mother, and found her still in the market place.
At last she decided to go and talk to her husband about it.
She gathered up her baskets, told Jem to follow her, and went straight to the cobbler's stall.
'Look here,' said she, 'this creature says he is our lost son.
He has been telling me how he was stolen seven years ago, and bewitched by a fairy.'
'Indeed!' interrupted the cobbler angrily.
Wait a minute, you rascal!
Wait a bit, and I'll bewitch you!'
So saying, he caught up a bundle of straps, and hit out at Jem so hard that he ran off crying.
He woke next morning with the first rays of light, and began to think what he could do to earn a living.
Suddenly he remembered that he was an excellent cook, and he determined to look out for a place.
As soon as it was quite daylight he set out for the palace, for he knew that the grand duke who reigned over the country was fond of good things.
When he reached the palace all the servants crowded about him, and made fun of him, and at last their shouts and laughter grew so loud that the head steward rushed out, crying, 'For goodness sake, be quiet, can't you.
Don't you know his highness is still asleep?'
Some of the servants ran off at once, and others pointed out Jem.
Indeed, the steward found it hard to keep himself from laughing at the comic sight, but he ordered the servants off and led the dwarf into his own room.
I think you want to be the grand duke's dwarf, don't you?'
'No, sir,' replied Jem. 'I am an experienced cook, and if you will kindly take me to the head cook he may find me of some use.'
'Well, as you will; but believe me, you would have an easier place as the grand ducal dwarf.'
So saying, the head steward led him to the head cook's room.
The head cook looked him over from head to foot, and burst out laughing.
'You a cook!
Oh, my dear little fellow, whoever sent you to me wanted to make fun of you.'
'What matters an extra egg or two, or a little butter or flour and spice more or less, in such a house as this?' said he.
He said much more, and at last persuaded the head cook to give him a trial.
They went into the kitchen-a huge place with at least twenty fireplaces, always alight.
A little stream of clear water ran through the room, and live fish were kept at one end of it.
When the head cook came in with Jem everyone stood quite still.
'What has his highness ordered for luncheon?' asked the head cook.
'Sir, his highness has graciously ordered a Danish soup and red Hamburg dumplings.'
'Good,' said the head cook.
Not that you will be able to make the dumplings, for they are a secret receipt.'
'Is that all!' said Jem, who had often made both dishes.
Let me have some eggs, a piece of wild boar, and such and such roots and herbs for the soup; and as for the dumplings,' he added in a low voice to the head cook, 'I shall want four different kinds of meat, some wine, a duck's marrow, some ginger, and a herb called heal well.'
'Why,' cried the astonished cook, 'where did you learn cooking?
He could not nearly reach up to the kitchen range, but by putting a wide plank on two chairs he managed very well.
All the cooks stood round to look on, and could not help admiring the quick, clever way in which he set to work.
At last, when all was ready, Jem ordered the two dishes to be put on the fire till he gave the word.
Then he began to count: 'One, two, three,' till he got to five hundred when he cried, 'Now!' The saucepans were taken off, and he invited the head cook to taste.
The first cook took a golden spoon, washed and wiped it, and handed it to the head cook, who solemnly approached, tasted the dishes, and smacked his lips over them.
'First rate, indeed!' he exclaimed.
'You certainly are a master of the art, little fellow, and the herb heal well gives a particular relish.'
The head cook took Jem to his own room, but had hardly had time to question him before he was ordered to go at once to the grand duke.
He had emptied the dishes, and was wiping his mouth as the head cook came in.
'I must say your dumplings are always very good; but I don't think I ever tasted anything so delicious as they were to day. Who made them?'
Of course, Jem could not say he had been turned into a squirrel, but he said he was without parents and had been taught cooking by an old woman.
'If you will stay with me,' said the grand duke, 'you shall have fifty ducats a year, besides a new coat and a couple of pairs of trousers.
Jem bowed to the ground, and promised to obey his new master in all things.
He lost no time in setting to work, and everyone rejoiced at having him in the kitchen, for the duke was not a patient man, and had been known to throw plates and dishes at his cooks and servants if the things served were not quite to his taste.
Now all was changed.
He never even grumbled at anything, had five meals instead of three, thought everything delicious, and grew fatter daily.
And so Jem lived on for two years, much respected and considered, and only saddened when he thought of his parents.
One day passed much like another till the following incident happened.
Dwarf Long Nose-as he was always called-made a practice of doing his marketing as much as possible himself, and whenever time allowed went to the market to buy his poultry and fruit.
No one thought of laughing at his appearance now; he was known as the duke's special body cook, and every goose woman felt honoured if his nose turned her way.
He went up to her, felt and weighed her geese, and, finding them very good, bought three and the cage to put them in, hoisted them on his broad shoulders, and set off on his way back.
As he went, it struck him that two of the geese were gobbling and screaming as geese do, but the third sat quite still, only heaving a deep sigh now and then, like a human being.
But the goose answered him quite distinctly:
Quite frightened, the dwarf set down the cage, and the goose gazed at him with sad wise looking eyes and sighed again.
'Good gracious!' said Long Nose.
'So you can speak, Mistress Goose.
Well, don't be anxious.
I know better than to hurt so rare a bird.
But I could bet you were not always in this plumage-wasn't I a squirrel myself for a time?'
'You are right,' said the goose, 'in supposing I was not born in this horrid shape.
Ah! no one ever thought that Mimi, the daughter of the great Weatherbold, would be killed for the ducal table.'
The goose thanked him with tears in her eyes, and the dwarf kept his word.
He killed the other two geese for dinner, but built a little shed for Mimi in one of his rooms, under the pretence of fattening her under his own eye.
They confided their histories to each other, and Jem learnt that the goose was the daughter of the wizard Weatherbold, who lived on the island of Gothland.
He fell out with an old fairy, who got the better of him by cunning and treachery, and to revenge herself turned his daughter into a goose and carried her off to this distant place.
About this time the grand duke had a visit from a neighbouring prince, a friend of his.
He sent for Long Nose and said to him:
I would rather be a poor man than have to blush before him.'
From this time the little cook was hardly seen except in the kitchen, where, surrounded by his helpers, he gave orders, baked, stewed, flavoured and dished up all manner of dishes.
The prince had been a fortnight with the grand duke, and enjoyed himself mightily.
They ate five times a day, and the duke had every reason to be content with the dwarf's talents, for he saw how pleased his guest looked.
On the fifteenth day the duke sent for the dwarf and presented him to the prince.
'You are a wonderful cook,' said the prince, 'and you certainly know what is good.
All the time I have been here you have never repeated a dish, and all were excellent.
But tell me why you have never served the queen of all dishes, a Suzeraine Pasty?'
But he did not lose his presence of mind, and replied:
'Indeed,' laughed the grand duke; 'then I suppose you would have waited for the day of my death to treat me to it, for you have never sent it up to me yet.
However, you will have to invent some other farewell dish, for the pasty must be on my table to morrow.'
But it did not please HIM at all.
As he sat there lost in thought the goose Mimi, who was left free to walk about, came up to him and asked what was the matter?
When she heard she said:
I know the dish quite well: we often had it at home, and I can guess pretty well how it was made.' Then she told him what to put in, adding: 'I think that will be all right, and if some trifle is left out perhaps they won't find it out.'
Sure enough, next day a magnificent pasty all wreathed round with flowers was placed on the table.
As he entered the head carver was in the act of cutting up the pie and helping the duke and his guests.
The grand duke took a large mouthful and threw up his eyes as he swallowed it.
The prince took several small pieces, tasted and examined carefully, and then said with a mysterious and sarcastic smile:
'The dish is very nicely made, but the Suzeraine is not quite complete-as I expected.'
The grand duke flew into a rage.
'Dog of a cook,' he shouted; 'how dare you serve me so?
I've a good mind to chop off your great head as a punishment.'
I made the pasty according to the best rules; nothing has been left out.
The prince laughed.
Know, then, that a herb is wanting called Relish, which is not known in this country, but which gives the pasty its peculiar flavour, and without which your master will never taste it to perfection.'
'Either the pasty must be made properly to morrow or this rascal's head shall come off.
Go, scoundrel, I give you twenty four hours respite.'
The poor dwarf hurried back to his room, and poured out his grief to the goose.
'Oh, is that all,' said she, 'then I can help you, for my father taught me to know all plants and herbs.
Luckily this is a new moon just now, for the herb only springs up at such times.
But tell me, are there chestnut trees near the palace?'
'Because the herb only grows near the roots of chestnut trees,' replied Mimi; 'so let us lose no time in finding it.
He did as she bade, and as soon as they were in the garden put her on the ground, when she waddled off as fast as she could towards the lake, Jem hurrying after her with an anxious heart, for he knew that his life depended on her success.
Suddenly the dwarf noticed a big old tree standing alone on the other side of the lake.
The goose fluttered and skipped in front, and he ran after as fast as his little legs could carry him.
The tree cast a wide shadow, and it was almost dark beneath it, but suddenly the goose stood still, flapped her wings with joy, and plucked something, which she held out to her astonished friend, saying: 'There it is, and there is more growing here, so you will have no lack of it.'
The stems and leaves were a bluish green, and it bore a dark, bright red flower with a yellow edge.
'Not yet,' said the goose.
So they went back to Jem's rooms, and here he gathered together some fifty ducats he had saved, his clothes and shoes, and tied them all up in a bundle.
'Oh, how big and how beautiful you are!' she cried.
'Thank heaven, you are quite changed.'
'I owe you my life and my release,' he said, 'for without you I should never have regained my natural shape, and, indeed, would soon have been beheaded.
I will now take you back to your father, who will certainly know how to disenchant you.'
The goose accepted his offer with joy, and they managed to slip out of the palace unnoticed by anyone.
They got through the journey without accident, and the wizard soon released his daughter, and loaded Jem with thanks and valuable presents. He lost no time in hastening back to his native town, and his parents were very ready to recognise the handsome, well made young man as their long lost son.
I must not forget to mention that much disturbance was caused in the palace by Jem's sudden disappearance, for when the grand duke sent orders next day to behead the dwarf, if he had not found the necessary herbs, the dwarf was not to be found.
The prince hinted that the duke had allowed his cook to escape, and had therefore broken his word.
Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
The Nature of Experience.
The nature of experience can be understood only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element peculiarly combined.
On the active hand, experience is trying-a meaning which is made explicit in the connected term experiment.
On the passive, it is undergoing.
When we experience something we act upon it, we do something with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences.
We do something to the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is the peculiar combination.
The connection of these two phases of experience measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience.
Mere activity does not constitute experience.
It is dispersive, centrifugal, dissipating.
Experience as trying involves change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it.
When an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made by action is reflected back into a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with significance.
It is not experience when a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes in consequence. Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame means a burn.
Being burned is a mere physical change, like the burning of a stick of wood, if it is not perceived as a consequence of some other action.
Blind and capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another.
So far as this happens, everything is writ in water.
On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned.
There is no before or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and consequently no meaning.
We get nothing which may be carried over to foresee what is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves to what is coming-no added control.
To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.
Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction-discovery of the connection of things.
Two conclusions important for education follow. (one) Experience is primarily an active passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive.
But (two) the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which it leads up.
In schools, those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect.
The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly.
Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs of activity.
The former is then thought to be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an irrelevant and intruding physical factor.
The intimate union of activity and undergoing its consequences which leads to recognition of meaning is broken; instead we have two fragments: mere bodily action on one side, and meaning directly grasped by "spiritual" activity on the other.
It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which have flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to exaggerate them. Some of the more striking effects, may, however, be enumerated.
(a) In part bodily activity becomes an intruder.
Having nothing, so it is thought, to do with mental activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil to be contended with.
For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along with his mind.
And the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of energy; it has to do something.
But its activities, not being utilized in occupation with things which yield significant results, have to be frowned upon.
They lead the pupil away from the lesson with which his "mind" ought to be occupied; they are sources of mischief.
The chief source of the "problem of discipline" in schools is that the teacher has often to spend the larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take the mind away from its material.
A premium is put on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest.
The teachers' business is to hold the pupils up to these requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.
The nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and pupil are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning.
Callous indifference and explosions from strain alternate.
The neglected body, having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into equally meaningless fooling-both very different from the normal play of children.
Physically active children become restless and unruly; the more quiescent, so-called conscientious ones spend what energy they have in the negative task of keeping their instincts and active tendencies suppressed, instead of in a positive one of constructive planning and execution; they are thus educated not into responsibility for the significant and graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty not to give them free play.
It may be seriously asserted that a chief cause for the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that it was never misled by false notions into an attempted separation of mind and body.
(b) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned by the application of "mind," some bodily activities have to be used. The senses-especially the eye and ear-have to be employed to take in what the book, the map, the blackboard, and the teacher say.
The lips and vocal organs, and the hands, have to be used to reproduce in speech and writing what has been stowed away.
The senses are then regarded as a kind of mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from the external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways and avenues of knowledge.
To keep the eyes on the book and the ears open to the teacher's words is a mysterious source of intellectual grace. Moreover, reading, writing, and figuring-important school arts-demand muscular or motor training.
The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs accordingly have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge back out of the mind into external action.
The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which (in spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering character of the body in mental action) have to be employed more or less.
The boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite, and has to note the various pressures of the string on his hand.
His senses are avenues of knowledge not because external facts are somehow "conveyed" to the brain, but because they are used in doing something with a purpose.
It is such isolation of an act from a purpose which makes it mechanical.
It is customary for teachers to urge children to read with expression, so as to bring out the meaning.
But if they originally learned the sensory motor technique of reading-the ability to identify forms and to reproduce the sounds they stand for-by methods which did not call for attention to meaning, a mechanical habit was established which makes it difficult to read subsequently with intelligence.
Mathematics, even in its higher branches, when undue emphasis is put upon the technique of calculation, and science, when laboratory exercises are given for their own sake, suffer from the same evil.
(c) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from direct occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the expense of relations or connections.
It is altogether too common to separate perceptions and even ideas from judgments.
The latter are thought to come after the former in order to compare them.
It is alleged that the mind perceives things apart from relations; that it forms ideas of them in isolation from their connections-with what goes before and comes after.
Then judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated items of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection shall be brought out.
We do not really know a chair or have an idea of it by inventorying and enumerating its various isolated qualities, but only by bringing these qualities into connection with something else-the purpose which makes it a chair and not a table; or its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed to, or the "period" which it represents, and so on.
A wagon is not perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic connection of the parts which makes it a wagon.
And these connections are not those of mere physical juxtaposition; they involve connection with the animals that draw it, the things that are carried on it, and so on.
Judgment is employed in the perception; otherwise the perception is mere sensory excitation or else a recognition of the result of a prior judgment, as in the case of familiar objects.
There is no difference of opinion as to the theory of the matter.
The failure arises in supposing that relationships can become perceptible without experience-without that conjoint trying and undergoing of which we have spoken.
It is assumed that "mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that this attention may be given at will irrespective of the situation.
Hence the deluge of half observations, of verbal ideas, and unassimilated "knowledge" which afflicts the world.
An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance.
An experience, a very humble experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory.
It tends to become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to render thinking, or genuine theorizing, unnecessary and impossible.
Because of our education we use words, thinking they are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal being in reality simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us from seeing any longer the difficulty.
Reflection in Experience.
Thought or reflection, as we have already seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of the relation between what we try to do and what happens in consequence.
No experience having a meaning is possible without some element of thought.
But we may contrast two types of experience according to the proportion of reflection found in them.
We simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and keep on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then we adopt that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent procedure.
Some experiences have very little else in them than this hit and miss or succeed process.
We see that a certain way of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do not see how they are.
We do not see the details of the connection; the links are missing.
Our discernment is very gross.
In other cases we push our observation farther.
We analyze to see just what lies between so as to bind together cause and effect, activity and consequence.
This extension of our insight makes foresight more accurate and comprehensive.
The action which rests simply upon the trial and error method is at the mercy of circumstances; they may change so that the act performed does not operate in the way it was expected to.
But if we know in detail upon what the result depends, we can look to see whether the required conditions are there.
The method extends our practical control.
In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try experience is made explicit.
Its quantity increases so that its proportionate value is very different.
Hence the quality of the experience changes; the change is so significant that we may call this type of experience reflective-that is, reflective par excellence.
The deliberate cultivation of this phase of thought constitutes thinking as a distinctive experience.
Thinking, in other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous. Their isolation, and consequently their purely arbitrary going together, is canceled; a unified developing situation takes its place.
The occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is reasonable, as we say, that the thing should happen as it does.
Thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the intelligent element in our experience.
It makes it possible to act with an end in view.
It is the condition of our having aims.
As soon as an infant begins to expect he begins to use something which is now going on as a sign of something to follow; he is, in however simple a fashion, judging.
For he takes one thing as evidence of something else, and so recognizes a relationship.
The opposites, once more, to thoughtful action are routine and capricious behavior.
The former accepts what has been customary as a full measure of possibility and omits to take into account the connections of the particular things done.
The latter makes the momentary act a measure of value, and ignores the connections of our personal action with the energies of the environment.
It says, virtually, "things are to be just as I happen to like them at this instant," as routine says in effect "let things continue just as I have found them in the past." Both refuse to acknowledge responsibility for the future consequences which flow from present action.
Reflection is the acceptance of such responsibility.
The starting point of any process of thinking is something going on, something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled.
Its point, its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it is going to turn out.
As this is written, the world is filled with the clang of contending armies.
For an active participant in the war, it is clear that the momentous thing is the issue, the future consequences, of this and that happening.
He is identified, for the time at least, with the issue; his fate hangs upon the course things are taking.
But even for an onlooker in a neutral country, the significance of every move made, of every advance here and retreat there, lies in what it portends. To think upon the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see what is indicated as probable or possible regarding an outcome.
To fill our heads, like a scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and done for thing, is not to think.
It is to turn ourselves into a piece of registering apparatus.
To consider the bearing of the occurrence upon what may be, but is not yet, is to think.
Nor will the reflective experience be different in kind if we substitute distance in time for separation in space.
Imagine the war done with, and a future historian giving an account of it.
The episode is, by assumption, past.
But he cannot give a thoughtful account of the war save as he preserves the time sequence; the meaning of each occurrence, as he deals with it, lies in what was future for it, though not for the historian.
To take it by itself as a complete existence is to take it unreflectively. Reflection also implies concern with the issue-a certain sympathetic identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome of the course of events.
For the general in the war, or a common soldier, or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus to thinking is direct and urgent.
For neutrals, it is indirect and dependent upon imagination.
But the flagrant partisanship of human nature is evidence of the intensity of the tendency to identify ourselves with one possible course of events, and to reject the other as foreign.
If we cannot take sides in overt action, and throw in our little weight to help determine the final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively.
We desire this or that outcome.
One wholly indifferent to the outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all.
Born in partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain detached impartiality.
The general who allows his hopes and desires to affect his observations and interpretations of the existing situation will surely make a mistake in calculation.
The almost insurmountable difficulty of achieving this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in situations where the course of thinking is an actual part of the course of events and is designed to influence the result.
Only gradually and with a widening of the area of vision through a growth of social sympathies does thinking develop to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of great significance for education.
To say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which are still going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking occurs when things are uncertain or doubtful or problematic.
Only what is finished, completed, is wholly assured.
Where there is reflection there is suspense.
The object of thinking is to help reach a conclusion, to project a possible termination on the basis of what is already given.
Certain other facts about thinking accompany this feature.
Since the situation in which thinking occurs is a doubtful one, thinking is a process of inquiry, of looking into things, of investigating.
It is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand.
We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students.
But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
It also follows that all thinking involves a risk.
Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance.
The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance.
The conclusions of thinking, till confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less tentative or hypothetical.
Their dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of the issue, in fact.
The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we learn?
For either we know already what we are after, or else we do not know.
The dilemma makes no provision for coming to know, for learning; it assumes either complete knowledge or complete ignorance. Nevertheless the twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists.
The possibility of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is the fact which the Greek dilemma overlooked.
The perplexities of the situation suggest certain ways out.
We try these ways, and either push our way out, in which case we know we have found what we were looking for, or the situation gets darker and more confused-in which case, we know we are still ignorant.
Tentative means trying out, feeling one's way along provisionally.
Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice piece of formal logic.
But it is also true that as long as men kept a sharp disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science made only slow and accidental advance.
Systematic advance in invention and discovery began when men recognized that they could utilize doubt for purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to guide action in tentative explorations, whose development would confirm, refute, or modify the guiding conjecture.
To recur to our illustration.
A commanding general cannot base his actions upon either absolute certainty or absolute ignorance. He has a certain amount of information at hand which is, we will assume, reasonably trustworthy.
He then infers certain prospective movements, thus assigning meaning to the bare facts of the given situation.
His inference is more or less dubious and hypothetical.
But he acts upon it. He develops a plan of procedure, a method of dealing with the situation. The consequences which directly follow from his acting this way rather than that test and reveal the worth of his reflections.
But will this account apply in the case of the one in a neutral country who is thoughtfully following as best he can the progress of events?
In form, yes, though not of course in content.
That is not his problem.
But in the degree in which he is actively thinking, and not merely passively following the course of events, his tentative inferences will take effect in a method of procedure appropriate to his situation.
He will anticipate certain future moves, and will be on the alert to see whether they happen or not.
In the degree in which he is intellectually concerned, or thoughtful, he will be actively on the lookout; he will take steps which although they do not affect the campaign, modify in some degree his subsequent actions.
Otherwise his later "I told you so" has no intellectual quality at all; it does not mark any testing or verification of prior thinking, but only a coincidence that yields emotional satisfaction-and includes a large factor of self deception.
Apparatus is arranged; possibly an expedition is made to some far part of the globe.
In any case, some active steps are taken which actually change some physical conditions. And apart from such steps and the consequent modification of the situation, there is no completion of the act of thinking.
It remains suspended.
Knowledge, already attained knowledge, controls thinking and makes it fruitful.
So much for the general features of a reflective experience.
It is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which mark off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and error plane.
They make thinking itself into an experience.
Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to be tried in the world and thereby tried out.
And since it can never take into account all the connections, it can never cover with perfect accuracy all the consequences.
Yet a thoughtful survey of conditions is so careful, and the guessing at results so controlled, that we have a right to mark off the reflective experience from the grosser trial and error forms of action.
Summary.
In determining the place of thinking in experience we first noted that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with something which is undergone in consequence.
A separation of the active doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning of an experience.
Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.
It notes not only that they are connected, but the details of the connection.
It makes connecting links explicit in the form of relationships.
The stimulus to thinking is found when we wish to determine the significance of some act, performed or to be performed.
Then we anticipate consequences.
This implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us, incomplete and hence indeterminate.
The projection of consequences means a proposed or tentative solution.
To perfect this hypothesis, existing conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications of the hypothesis developed-an operation called reasoning.
Then the suggested solution-the idea or theory-has to be tested by acting upon it.
If it brings about certain consequences, certain determinate changes, in the world, it is accepted as valid.
Thinking includes all of these steps,--the sense of a problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active experimental testing.
While all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately the value of knowledge is subordinate to its use in thinking.
Chapter thirty.
No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.
Tempest.
It was the very next morning that several ladies and gentlemen were gathered on the piazza of the hotel at Montepoole, to brace minds or appetites with the sweet mountain air while waiting for breakfast.
"Whose are they?
Are they for sale?"
"Constance!" said mrs Evelyn from the piazza,--"don't take that!
I dare say they are for mr Sweet."
"Well, mamma!--" said Constance with great equanimity,--"mr
My taste leads me to prefer the simplicity of primitive arrangements this morning."
"Young man!" called out the landlady's reproving voice, "won't you never recollect to bring that basket round the back way?"
"Where do you get them?" said mrs Evelyn.
"How?--" said Philetus.
Are they fresh picked?"
"Just afore I started."
"Started from where?" said a gentleman standing by mrs Evelyn.
"From mr Rossitur's down to Queechy."
"mr Rossitur's!" said mrs Evelyn;--"does he send them here?"
"He doos not," said Philetus;--"he doosn't keep to hum for a long spell."
"Who doos?
It's Miss Fliddy Ringgan."
"Mamma!" exclaimed Constance looking up.
"What does she have to do with it?" said mrs Evelyn.
"Her and me was a picking 'em afore sunrise."
"All that basketful!"
"And does she send that too?"
"But hasn't she any help in taking care of the garden?" said Constance.
"But where is mr Hugh?"
"He's to hum."
does he leave it all to his cousin?"
"He's to the mill."
"She doos," said Philetus.
And receiving a gratuity which he accepted without demonstration of any kind whatever, the basket bearer at length released moved off.
"She's a very clever girl," said mrs Evelyn dismissing the subject.
"She's too lovely for anything!" said Constance.
"mr Carleton,--if you will just imagine we are in China, and introduct a pair of familiar chop sticks into this basket, I shall be repaid for the loss of a strawberry by the expression of ecstasy which will immediately spread itself over your features.
He smiled a little as he complied with the young lady's invitation, but the expression of ecstasy did not come.
"Are mr Rossitur's circumstances so much reduced?" he said, drawing nearer to mrs Evelyn.
"They are all broken to pieces," said mrs Evelyn, as mr Carleton's eye went back to her for his answer;--"mr
Rossitur failed and lost everything-bankrupt-a year or two after they came home."
They don't look like it.
He has gone down hill sadly since his misfortunes.
I am very sorry for them."
"And his niece takes care of his farm in the meantime?"
"Do you know her?" asked both the Miss Evelyns again.
"I can hardly say that," he replied.
"I had such a pleasure formerly.
"So she says."
"And so she acts," said Constance.
"I wish you had heard her yesterday.
It was beyond everything.
The manner still more than the matter of this speech was beyond the withstanding of any good-natured muscles, though the gentleman's smile was a grave one and quickly lost in gravity.
"And this has been her life ever since mr Rossitur lost his property?"
"Entirely,--sacrificed!--" said mrs Evelyn, with a compassionately resigned air;--"education, advantages and everything given up; and set down here where she has seen nobody from year's end to year's end but the country people about-very good people-but not the kind of people she ought to have been brought up among."
"Oh mamma!" said the eldest Miss Evelyn in a deprecatory tone,--"you shouldn't talk so-it isn't right-I am sure she is very nice-nicer now than anybody else I know; and clever too."
"Nice!" said Edith.
"And happy, mamma-Fleda don't look miserable-she seems perfectly happy and contented!"
She is a very good girl! but she might have been made something much better than a farmer's wife."
"You may set your mind at rest on that subject, mamma," said Constance, still using her chop sticks with great complacency;--"it's my opinion that the farmer is not in existence who is blessed with such a conjugal futurity.
I think Fleda's strong pastoral tastes are likely to develope themselves in a new direction."
"I don't know,--" said Constance, intent upon her basket,--"I feel a friend's distress for mr Thorn-it's all your doing, mamma,--you won't be able to look him in the face when we have Fleda next fall-I am sure I shall not want to look at his!
He'll be too savage for anything."
"mr
Thorn!" said mr Carleton.
"Yes," said mrs Evelyn in an indulgent tone,--"he was very attentive to her last winter when she was with us, but she went away before anything was decided.
I don't think he has forgotten her."
"I shouldn't think anybody could forget her," said Edith.
"I am confident he would be here at this moment," said Constance, "if he wasn't in London."
"But what is 'all mamma's doing,' Constance?" inquired her sister.
"The destruction of the peace of the whole family of Thorns-shouldn't sleep sound in my bed if I were she with such a reflection.
I look forward to heart rending scenes,--with a very disturbed state of mind."
"But what have I done, my child?" said mrs Evelyn.
"Didn't you introduce your favourite mr Olmney to Miss Ringgan last summer?
"Did you see him?" said mrs Evelyn.
"Only at that impracticable distance, mamma; but I introduced his name afterwards in my usual happy manner and I found that Miss Ringgan's cheeks were by no means indifferent to it.
I didn't dare go any further."
"I am very glad of it!
He is a charming young man and would make her very happy."
mr Carleton, did your ears receive a faint announcement of ham and eggs which went quite through and through mine just now?"
He bowed and handed the young lady in; but Constance declared that though he sat beside her and took care of her at breakfast he had on one of his intangible fits which drove her to the last extreme of impatience, and captivation.
The sun was not much more than two hours high the next morning when a rider was slowly approaching mr Rossitur's house from the bridge, walking his horse like a man who wished to look well at all he was passing.
He paused behind a clump of locusts and rose acacias in the corner of the courtyard as a figure bonneted and gloved came out of the house and began to be busy among the rose bushes.
Another figure presently appeared at the hall door and called out,
"Fleda!--"
"Well, Barby-"
This second voice was hardly raised, but it came from so much nearer that the words could be distinctly heard.
"mr Skillcorn wants to know if you're going to fix the flowers for him to carry?"
Sweet must send for them if he wants them.
Philetus must make haste back, for you know mr Douglass wants him to help in the barn meadow.
Lucas won't be here and now the weather is so fine I want to make haste with the hay."
"Well, will you have the samp for breakfast?"
"No-we'll keep that for dinner.
Thin, Barby."
The gentleman turned his horse and galloped back to Montepoole.
SOME TRAITS OF LIFE
It was the night Lady Glencore received; and, as usual, the street was crowded with equipages, which somehow seemed to have got into inextricable confusion,--some endeavoring to turn back, while others pressed forward,--the court of the palace being closely packed with carriages which the thronged street held in fast blockade.
As the apartments which faced the street were not ever used for these receptions, the dark unlighted windows suggested no remark; but they who had entered the courtyard were struck by the gloomy aspect of the vast building: not only that the entrance and the stairs were in darkness, but the whole suite of rooms, usually brilliant as the day, were now in deep gloom.
From every carriage window heads were protruded, wondering at this strange spectacle; and eager inquiries passed on every side for an explanation.
The explanation of "sudden illness" was rapidly disseminated, but as rapidly contradicted, and the reply given by the porter to all demands quickly repeated from mouth to mouth, "Her Ladyship will not receive."
Scaresby was, however, too busy in recounting his news to others to perceive the signals the old Princess held out; and it was only as her chasseur, six feet three of green and gold, bent down to give her Highness's message, that the Major hurried off, in all the importance of a momentary scandal, to the side of her carriage.
"Here I am, all impatience.
What is it, Scaresby?
"You can't mean that her fortune is in peril?"
"I suppose that must suffer also.
"All is very briefly related, then," said he.
"The charming Countess, you remember, ran away with a countryman of mine, young Glencore, of the eighth Hussars; I used to know his father intimately."
"Never mind his father."
He came over here and fell in love with the girl, and they ran off together; but they forgot to get married, Princess.
"I don't believe a word of it,--I'll never believe it," cried the Princess.
"That's exactly what I was recommending to the Mar quesa Guesteni.
I said, you need n't believe it.
Why, how do we go anywhere, nowadays, except by 'not believing' the evil stories that are told of our entertainers."
She, a Countess, of a family second to none in all Italy; her father a Grand d'Espagne.
"She'll not see you.
"What is to be done?" exclaimed the Princess, sorrowfully.
"Just what you suggested a few moments ago,--don't believe it.
Hang me, but good houses and good cooks are growing too scarce to make one credulous of the ills that can be said of their owners."
"I'll tell you, then.
You know as well as I, Princess, that social credit is as great a bubble as commercial; we should all of us be bankrupts if our books were seen.
Various were the sentiments expressed by the different speakers,--some sorrowfully deploring the disaster; others more eagerly inveighing against the infamy of the man who had proclaimed it.
Many declared that they had come to the determination to discredit the story.
Not one, however, sincerely professed that he disbelieved it.
At length the space slowly began to thin.
The next day Florence sat in committee over the lost Countess.
Witnesses were heard and evidence taken as to her case.
They all agreed it was a great hardship,--a terrible calamity; but still, if true, what could be done?
Never was there a society less ungenerously prudish, and yet there were cases-this, one of them-which transgressed all conventional rule. Like a crime which no statute had ever contemplated, it stood out self accused and self condemned.
A few might, perhaps, have been merciful, but they were overborne by numbers.
Lady Glencore's beauty and her vast fortune were now counts in the indictment against her, and many a jealous rival was not sorry at this hour of humiliation.
The despotism of beauty is not a very mild sway, after all; and perhaps the Countess had exercised her rule right royally.
They discussed and debated the question all day; but while they hesitated over the reprieve, the prisoner was beyond the law.
The gate of the palace, locked and barred all day, refused entrance to every one; at night, it opened to admit the exit of a travelling carriage.
The next morning large bills of sale, posted over the walls, declared that all the furniture and decorations were to be sold.
"I must really have those large Sevres jars," said one.
"And I, the small park phaeton," cried another.
"I hope she has not taken Horace with her; he was the best cook in Italy.
Splendid hock she had,--I wonder is there much of it left?"
"I wish we were certain of another bad reputation to replace her," grunted out Scaresby; "they are the only kind of people who give good dinners, and never ask for returns."
It may seem small minded and narrow to stigmatize such conduct as this. Some may say that for the ordinary courtesies of society no pledges of friendship are required, no real gratitude incurred.
Still, the revulsion, from habits of deference and respect, to disparagement, and even sarcasm, is a sorry evidence of human kindness; and the threshold, over which for years we had only passed as guests, might well suggest sadder thoughts as we tread it to behold desolation.
They are often well born, almost always well mannered, invariably well dressed.
They do not, at first blush, appear to discharge any very great or necessary function in life; but we must by no means, from that, infer their inutility.
Naturalists tell us that several varieties of insect existence we rashly set down as mere annoyances, have their peculiar spheres of usefulness and good; and, doubtless, these same loungers contribute in some mysterious manner to the welfare of that state which they only seem to burden.
Are they not invariably devouring and destroying some vermin a little smaller than themselves, and making thus a healthier atmosphere for their betters?
To the former he gave vent to all his sarcasm and bitterness; they liked it just because they would n't condescend to it themselves.
He, however, effected this much: he kept the memory of her who had gone, alive by daily calumnies.
The gay world, for so it likes to be called, has no greater element of enjoyment amongst all its high gifts than its precious power of forgetting.
It forgets not only all it owes to others,--gratitude, honor, and esteem,--but even the closer obligations it has contracted with itself.
The Palazzo della Torre was for a fortnight the resort of the curious and the idle.
CHAPTER twenty two.
British Legation, Naples.
Should it ever reach you, you will perceive how unjustly you have charged me with neglecting your wishes.
I have ordered the Sicilian wine for your friend; I have obtained the Royal leave for you to shoot in Calabria; and I assure you it is rather a rare incident in my life to have forgotten nothing required of me!
Important questions!
why, my dear friend, there is not a matter between this country and our own that rises above the capacity of a Colonel of Dragoons.
Meanwhile really great events are preparing in the East of Europe,--not that I am going to inflict them upon you, nor ask you to listen to speculations which even those in authority turn a deaf ear to.
It is very kind of you to think of my health.
I am still a sufferer; the old pains rather aggravated than relieved by this climate.
You are aware that, though warm, the weather here has some exciting property, some excess or other of a peculiar gas in the atmosphere, prejudicial to certain temperaments.
I feel it greatly; and though the season is midsummer, I am obliged to dress entirely in a light costume of buckskin, and take Marsalla baths, which refresh me, at least for the while.
I have also taken to smoke the leaves of the nux vomica, steeped in arrack, and think it agrees with me.
The King has most kindly placed a little villa at Ischia at my disposal; but I do not mean to avail myself of the politeness.
The Duke of San Giustino has also offered me his palace at Baia; but I don't fancy leaving this just now, where there is a doctor, a certain Luigi Buffeloni, who really seems to have hit off my case.
He calls it arterial arthriticis,--a kind of inflammatory action of one coat of the arterial system; his notion is highly ingenious, and wonderfully borne out by the symptoms.
I wish you would ask Brodie, or any of our best men, whether they have met with this affection; what class it affects, and what course it usually takes? My Italian doctor implies that it is the passing malady of men highly excitable, and largely endowed with mental gifts.
He may, or may not, be correct in this.
It is only nature makes the blunder of giving the sharpest swords the weakest scabbards.
What a pity the weapon cannot be worn naked!
I do, perhaps, as well as I should like anywhere.
There is a wonderful sameness over the world just now, preluding, I have very little doubt, some great outburst of nationality from all the countries of Europe,--just as periods of Puritanism succeed intervals of gross licentiousness.
There is really little peculiar to observe.
I don't perceive that there is more levity than elsewhere.
The difference is, perhaps, that there is less shame about it, since it is under the protection of the Church.
I go out very little; my notion is, that the Diplomatist, like the ancient Augur, must not suffer himself to be vulgarized by contact.
He can only lose, not gain, by that mixed intercourse with the world.
I have a few who come when I want them, and go in like manner.
They tell me "what is going on," far better and more truthfully than paid employees, and they cannot trace my intentions through my inquiries, and hasten off to retail them at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Of my colleagues I see as little as possible, though, when we do meet, I feel an unbounded affection for them.
A moonstruck, romantic youth at a German University.
Is it not painting the lily?
Let him "moon away," as you call it, my dear Harcourt.
It is wonderfully little consequence what any one does with his intellect till he be three or four and twenty.
Indeed, I half suspect that the soil might be left quietly to rear weeds till that time; and as to dreaminess, it signifies nothing if there be a strong "physique." With a weak frame, imagination will play the tyrant, and never cease till it dominates over all the other faculties; but where there is strength and activity, there is no fear of this.
The man is eminently remarkable,--with his opportunities, miraculous.
Imagine his delight as each day opened new stores of knowledge to him, surrounded as he was by all that could encourage zeal and reward research.
Poor lad, there is something very sad in his case.
You need not have taken such trouble about accounts and expenditure; of course, whatever you have done I perfectly approve of.
You say that the boy has no idea of money or its value.
There is both good and evil in this.
And now as to his future.
I should have no objection whatever to having him attached to my Legation here, and perhaps no great difficulty in effecting his appointment; but there is a serious obstacle in his position.
The young men who figure at embassies and missions are all "cognate numbers." They each of them know who and what the other is, whence he came, and so on.
Now, our poor boy could not stand this ordeal, nor would it be fair he should be exposed to it.
Besides this, it was never Glencore's wish, but the very opposite to it, that he should be brought prominently forward in life.
You have interested me much by what you say of the boy's progress.
His tastes, I infer, lie in the direction which, in a worldly sense, are least profitable; but, after all, Harcourt, every one has brains enough, and to spare, for any career.
If you really press the question of his coming to me, I will not refuse, seeing that I can take my own time to consider what steps subsequently should be adopted.
How is it that you know nothing of Glencore,--can he not be traced?
Lord Selby, whom you may remember in the Blues formerly, dined here yesterday, and mentioned a communication he had received from his lawyer with regard to some property entail, which, if Glencore should leave no heir male, devolved upon him.
I tried to find out the whereabouts and the amount of this heritage; but, with the admirable indifference that characterizes him, he did not know or care.
As to my Lady, I can give you no information whatever.
Her house at Florence is uninhabited, the furniture is sold off; but no one seems even to guess whither she has betaken herself.
The fast and loose of that pleasant city are, as I hear, actually houseless since her departure.
He has left three cards upon me, each duly returned; but I am resolved that our inter change of courtesies shall proceed no farther.
I trust I have omitted nothing in reply to your last despatch, except it be to say that I look for you here about September, or earlier, if as convenient to you; you will, of course, write to me, however, meanwhile.
I am, as I have the right to be, on the sick list, and it is as well my rest should remain undisturbed.
Horace Upton.
Whose Magnesia is it that contains essence of Bark?
Tripley's or Chipley's, I think.
I have got so accustomed to their stimulating power that I never write without one or two on my forehead.
LADY JANE GREY.
[BORN fifteen thirty seven.
DIED fifteen fifty four.]
HUME.
Her heart, full of this passion for literature and the elegant arts, and of tenderness towards her husband [Lord Guildford], who was deserving of her affections, had never opened itself to the flattering allurements of ambition, and the intelligence of her elevation to the throne was nowise agreeable to her.
She even refused to accept of the present; pleaded the preferable title of the two princesses; expressed her dread of the consequences attending an enterprise so dangerous, not to say criminal; and desired to remain in the private station in which she was born.
Overcome at length by the entreaties rather than the reasons of her father and father in law, and above all of her husband, she submitted to their will, and was prevailed on to relinquish her own judgment.
It was then usual for the kings of England, after their accession, to pass their first days in the Tower, and Northumberland thither conveyed the new sovereign.
All the councillors were obliged to attend her to that fortress, and by this means became in reality prisoners in the hands of Northumberland, whose will they were necessitated to obey. Orders were given by the council to proclaim Jane throughout the kingdom, but their orders were executed only in London and the neighbourhood.
No applause ensued.
The people heard the proclamation with silence and concern; some even expressed their scorn and contempt; and one Pot, a vintner's apprentice, was severely punished for this offence.
The Protestant teachers themselves, who were employed to convince the people of Jane's title, found their eloquence fruitless; and Ridley, Bishop of London, preached a sermon to that purpose, which wrought no effect upon his audience.
The queen's zeal, under colour of tender mercy to the prisoner's soul, induced her to send divines, who harassed her with perpetual disputations; and even a reprieve for three days was granted, in hopes that she should be persuaded during that time to pay, by a timely conversion, some regard to her eternal welfare.
The Lady Jane had presence of mind in those melancholy circumstances not only to defend her religion by all the topics then in use, but also to write a letter to her sister in the Greek language, in which, besides sending her a copy of the Scriptures in that tongue, she exhorted her to maintain in every feature a like steady perseverance.
It had been intended to execute the Lady Jane and Lord Guildford together on the same scaffold at Tower Hill; but the council, dreading the compassion of the people for their youth, beauty, innocence, and noble birth, changed their orders, and gave directions that she should be beheaded within the verge of the Tower.
She saw her husband led to execution, and, having given him from the window some token of remembrance, she waited with tranquillity till her own appointed hour should bring her to a like fate.
She even saw his headless body carried back in a cart, and found herself more confirmed by the reports which she heard of the constancy of his end, than shaken by so tender and melancholy a spectacle.
Sir john Gage, constable of the Tower, when he led her to execution, desired her to bestow on him some small present which he might keep as a perpetual memorial of her.
[BORN fifteen forty two.
DIED fifteen eighty seven.]
ROBERTSON.
To all the charms of beauty and the utmost elegance of external form, Mary added those accomplishments which render their impression irresistible.
Polite, affable, insinuating, sprightly, and capable of speaking and writing with equal ease and dignity.
Sudden, however, and violent in all her attachments, because her heart was warm and unsuspicious.
Impatient of contradiction, because she had been accustomed from her infancy to be treated as a queen.
No stranger, on some occasions, to dissimulation, which in that perfidious court where she received her education was reckoned among the necessary arts of government.
Not insensible to flattery, or unconscious of that pleasure with which almost every woman beholds the influence of her own beauty. Formed with the qualities which we love, not with the talents that we admire, she was an agreeable woman rather than an illustrious queen.
The vivacity of her spirit, not sufficiently tempered with sound judgment, and the warmth of her heart, which was not at all times under the restraint of discretion, betrayed her both into errors and into crimes. To say that she was always unfortunate will not account for that long and almost uninterrupted succession of calamities which befell her; we must likewise add, that she was often imprudent.
Her passion for Darnley was rash, youthful, and excessive; and though the sudden transition to the opposite extreme was the natural effect of her ill requited love, and of his ingratitude, insolence, and brutality, yet neither these nor Bothwell's artful address and important services can justify her attachments to that nobleman.
Even the manners of the age, licentious as they were, are no apology for this unhappy passion; nor can they induce us to look on that tragical and infamous scene which followed upon it with less abhorrence.
Humanity will draw a veil over this part of her character which it cannot approve, and may perhaps prompt some to impute her actions to her situation more than to her dispositions; and to lament the unhappiness of the former, rather than accuse the perverseness of the latter.
Mary's sufferings exceed, both in degree and duration, those tragical distresses which fancy has feigned to excite sorrow and commiseration; and while we survey them, we are apt altogether to forget her frailties: we think of her faults with less indignation, and approve of our tears, as if they were shed for a person who had attained much nearer to pure virtue.
With regard to the queen's person, a circumstance not to be omitted in writing the history of a female reign, all contemporary authors agree in ascribing to Mary the utmost beauty of countenance and elegance of shape of which the human form is capable.
Her hair was black, although, according to the fashion of that age, she frequently wore borrowed locks, and of different colours.
Her eyes were a dark grey, her complexion was exquisitely fine, and her hands and arms remarkably delicate, both as to shape and colour.
Her stature was of an height that rose to the majestic.
She danced, walked, and rode with equal grace. Her taste for music was just; and she both sung and played upon the lute with uncommon skill.
Towards the end of her life, long confinement, and the coldness of the houses in which she had been imprisoned, brought on a rheumatism which often deprived her of the use of her limbs.
META MOLLER.
[seventeen fifty.]
LETTERS.
Klopstock first beheld Meta Moeller in passing through Hamburg in april seventeen fifty one.
In a letter to one of his friends, written soon after this, he describes her as mistress of the French, English, and Italian languages, and even conversant with Greek and Latin literature.
Their marriage took place about three years afterwards.
Here is Meta's own narrative of the rise and course of their true love, given in one of her letters to Richardson, a narrative which will bear a hundred readings, and a hundred more after that, and still be as fresh and as touching as ever:--
"You will know all what concerns me.
Love, dear sir, is all what me concerns.
And love shall be all what I will tell you in this letter.
In one happy night I read my husband's poem, 'The Messiah.' I was extremely touched with it.
The next day I asked one of his friends who was the author of this poem, and this was the first time I heard Klopstock's name.
I believe I fell immediately in love with him.
At the least, my thoughts were ever with him filled, especially because his friend told me very much of his character.
But I had no hopes ever to see him, when quite unexpectedly I heard that he should pass through Hamburg.
I wrote immediately to the same friend, for procuring, by his means, that I might see the author of the 'Messiah' when in Hamburg.
He told him that a certain girl in Hamburg wished to see him, and for all recommendation showed him some letters in which I made bold to criticise Klopstock's verses.
Klopstock came, and came to me.
I must confess that, though greatly prepossessed of his qualities, I never thought him the amiable youth whom I found him.
This made its effect.
After having seen him for two hours I was obliged to pass the evening in a company which never had been so wearisome to me.
I could not speak.
I could not play.
"I saw him the next day, and the following, and we were very seriously friends.
But the fourth day he departed!
He wrote soon after, and from that time our correspondence began to be a very diligent one.
I sincerely believed my love to be friendship.
I spoke to my friends of nothing but Klopstock, and showed his letters.
They rallied me, and said I was in love.
I rallied them again, and said that they must have a very friendshipless heart if they had no idea of friendship to a man as well as to a woman.
Thus it continued eight months, in which time my friends found as much love in Klopstock's letters as in mine.
I perceived it likewise, but I would not believe it.
At the last, Klopstock said plainly that he loved; and I startled as for a wrong thing.
I answered that it was no love, but friendship, as it was what I felt for him; we had not seen one another enough to love (as if love must have more time than friendship).
This he did a year after we had seen one another for the first time.
We saw; we were friends; we loved; and we believed that we loved; and a short time after I could even tell Klopstock that I loved.
But we were obliged to part again, and wait two years for our wedding.
I could marry then without her consentment, as by the death of my father my fortune depended not upon her; but this was an horrible idea for me, and thank heaven I have prevailed by prayers.
At this time, knowing Klopstock, she loves him as her lifely son, and thanks God that she has not persisted.
We married, and I am the happiest wife in the world."
This was written in march seventeen fifty eight, after they had been about four years married.
Writing again in the beginning of May, she thus sketches the life they led together: "It will be a delightful occupation for me to make you more acquainted with my husband's poem.
Nobody can do it better than I, being the person who knows the most of that which is not yet published, being always present at the birth of the young verses, which begin always by fragments here and there of a subject of which his soul is just then filled.
He has many great fragments of the whole work ready.
You may think that persons who love as we do have no need of two chambers; we are always in the same.
I, with my little work, still only regarding sometimes my husband's sweet face, which is so venerable at that time with tears of devotion and all the sublimity of the subject, my husband reading me the young verses and suffering my criticism."
With this we may compare what Klopstock says, writing of her: "How perfect was her taste! how exquisitely fine her feelings! she observed everything even to the slightest turn of the thought.
I had only to look at her, and could see in her face when even a syllable pleased or displeased her; and when I led her to explain the reason of her remarks, no demonstration could be more true, more accurate, or more appropriate to the subject.
But, in general, this gave us very little trouble, for we understood each other when we had scarcely began to explain our ideas."
But all this happiness, too bright for earth, or for long endurance, was about to be suddenly extinguished.
It was the first time that they had been separated.
It is remarkable that she seems to have had more than a mere apprehension, almost an assured foreboding, of what awaited her.
The two following months they spent together at Hamburg.
From that place poor Meta was never to return.
ELIZABETH BLACKWELL.
[seventeen twenty.]
james BRUCE.
Elizabeth Blackwell was the daughter of a stocking merchant in Aberdeen, where she was born about the beginning of last century.
The first event of her life which is now known, was her secret marriage with Alexander Blackwell, and her elopement with him to London.
He had received a finished education, and was an accurate Greek and Latin scholar.
He had studied medicine under the famous Boerhaave, and, in travelling over the Continent, had lived in the best society, and had acquired an extensive knowledge of the modern languages.
He was, however, unsuccessful in his endeavours to secure a comfortable livelihood.
After having in vain attempted to get into practice as a physician, and having now a wife also to provide for, he applied for the situation of corrector of the press to a printer of the name of Wilkins, and for some time continued in that employment.
He then set up a printing establishment in the Strand, but became involved in debt, and was thrown into prison.
It was this circumstance that brought into practice the talents and virtues of Mrs Blackwell.
She resolved, by an unexampled labour for a woman, to effect the delivery of her husband.
She had in her girlish days practised the drawing and colouring of flowers, a suitable and amiable accomplishment of her sex.
She now engaged in a labour which is at once a noble and marvellous monument of her enthusiastic and untiring conjugal affection, and interesting evidence of the elegant and truly womanly nature of her own mind.
Having submitted her first drawings to Sir Hans Sloane and Dr Mead, these eminent physicians encouraged her to proceed with the work.
She also received the kindest countenance from Mr Philip Miller, a well-known writer on horticulture.
Amongst those who were honoured in patronising her labour of piety was Mr Rand of the Botanical Garden at Chelsea.
By his advice Mrs Blackwell took lodgings in the neighbourhood of this garden, from which she was furnished with all the flowers and plants which she required for her work.
Of these she made drawings, which she engraved on copper, and coloured with her own hands.
Her husband supplied the Latin names and the descriptions of the plants, which were taken principally from Miller's "Botanicum Officinale," with the author's permission.
Blackwell."
The profits which Mrs Blackwell received from this work enabled her to relieve her husband from prison.
The adventures of Blackwell after his release are well known.
He went there, leaving his wife in England.
He was received with honour at the court of Stockholm, where he lived with the prime minister, in the enjoyment of a salary from the government. During this period of prosperity he had continued to send large sums of money to his wife, who was now making arrangements to leave England with her only child and join her husband.
A conspiracy against the constitution of Sweden was formed by Count Tessin; and Blackwell, it is believed innocently, was suspected of being concerned in the plot.
Our Learned Friends
I do not know why the Bar has always seemed the most respectable of the professions, a profession which the hero of almost any novel could adopt without losing caste.
But so it is.
A schoolmaster can be referred to contemptuously as an usher; a doctor is regarded humorously as a licensed murderer; a solicitor is always retiring to gaol for making away with trust funds, and, in any case, is merely an attorney; while a civil servant sleeps from ten to four every day, and is only waked up at sixty in order to be given a pension.
But there is no humorous comment to be made upon the barrister-unless it is to call him "my learned friend." He has much more right than the actor to claim to be a member of the profession.
I don't know why.
Perhaps it is because he walks about the Temple in a top hat.
So many of one's acquaintances at some time or other have "eaten dinners" that one hardly dares to say anything against the profession.
Besides, one never knows when one may not want to be defended.
However, I shall take the risk, and put the barrister in the dock.
"Gentlemen of the jury, observe this well dressed gentleman before you.
What shall we say about him?"
Let us begin by asking ourselves what we expect from a profession.
In the first place, certainly, we expect a living, but I think we want something more than that.
If we were offered a thousand a year to walk from Charing Cross to Barnet every day, reasons of poverty might compel us to accept the offer, but we should hardly be proud of our new profession.
We should prefer to earn a thousand a year by doing some more useful work.
That is to say, he would have to persuade himself that he was walking, not only for himself, but also for the community.
It seems to me, then, that a profession is a noble or an ignoble one, according as it offers or denies to him who practises it the opportunity of working for some other end than his own advancement.
A doctor collects fees from his patients, but he is aiming at something more than pounds, shillings, and pence; he is out to put an end to suffering.
A schoolmaster earns a living by teaching, but he does not feel that he is fighting only for himself; he is a crusader on behalf of education.
The artist, whatever his medium, is giving a message to the world, expressing the truth as he sees it; for his own profit, perhaps, but not for that alone.
We enter them full of high resolves.
We tell ourselves that we will follow the light as it has been revealed to us; that our ideals shall never be lowered; that we will refuse to sacrifice our principles to our interests. We fail, of course.
The painter finds that "Mother's Darling" brings in the stuff, and he turns out Mother's Darlings mechanically.
The doctor neglects research and cultivates instead a bedside manner.
The schoolmaster drops all his theories of education and conforms hastily to those of his employers.
We fail, but it is not because the profession is an ignoble one; we had our chances.
Indeed, the light is still there for those who look.
It beckons to us.
Now what of the Bar?
Is the barrister after anything other than his own advancement?
He follows what gleam?
What are his ideals? Never mind whether he fails more often or less often than others to attain them; I am not bothering about that.
I only want to know what it is that he is after.
If a barrister ever has such a moment, what is his consolation?
It can only be that he is helping Justice to be administered.
If he is to be proud of his profession, and in that lonely moment tolerant of himself, he must feel that he is taking a noble part in the vindication of legal right, the punishment of legal wrong.
But he must do more than this.
Can he tell himself this?
I do not see how he can.
His increased expertness will be of increased service to himself, of increased service to his clients, but no ideal will be the better served by reason of it.
Counsel is briefed for Smith.
After examining the case he tells himself in effect this: "As far as I can see, the Law is all on the other side.
Luckily, however, sentiment is on our side.
Given an impressionable jury, there's just a chance that we might pull it off.
It's worth trying." He tries, and if he is sufficiently expert he pulls it off.
A triumph for himself, but what has happened to the ideal?
Did he even think, "Of course I'm bound to do the best for my client, but he's in the wrong, and I hope we lose?" I imagine not.
The whole teaching of the Bar is that he must not bother about justice, but only about his own victory. What ultimately, then, is he after?
What does the Bar offer its devotees-beyond material success?
I asked just now what were a barrister's ideals.
Suppose we ask instead, What is the ideal barrister?
If one spoke loosely of an ideal doctor, one would not necessarily mean a titled gentleman in Harley Street.
An ideal schoolmaster is not synonymous with the Headmaster of Eton or the owner of the most profitable preparatory school.
But can there be an ideal barrister other than a successful barrister?
The eager young writer, just beginning a literary career, might fix his eyes upon Francis Thompson rather than upon Sir Hall Caine; the eager young clergyman might dream dreams over the Life of Father Damien more often than over the Life of the Archbishop of Canterbury; but to what star can the eager young barrister hitch his wagon, save to the star of material success?
If he does not see himself as Sir Edward Carson, it is only because he thinks that perhaps after all Sir john Simon's manner is the more effective.
There may be other answers to the questions I have asked than the answers I have given, but it is no answer to ask me how the law can be administered without barristers.
I do not know; nor do I know how the roads can be swept without getting somebody to sweep them.
But that would not disqualify me from saying that road sweeping was an unattractive profession.
So also I am entitled to my opinion about the Bar, which is this.
The true explanation of this subject is very difficult.
Know that beings are of two kinds: material and spiritual, those perceptible to the senses and those intellectual.
Things which are sensible are those which are perceived by the five exterior senses; thus those outward existences which the eyes see are called sensible.
Intellectual things are those which have no outward existence but are conceptions of the mind.
For example, mind itself is an intellectual thing which has no outward existence.
All man's characteristics and qualities form an intellectual existence and are not sensible.
Briefly, the intellectual realities, such as all the qualities and admirable perfections of man, are purely good, and exist.
Evil is simply their nonexistence.
So ignorance is the want of knowledge; error is the want of guidance; forgetfulness is the want of memory; stupidity is the want of good sense.
All these things have no real existence.
In the same way, the sensible realities are absolutely good, and evil is due to their nonexistence-that is to say, blindness is the want of sight, deafness is the want of hearing, poverty is the want of wealth, illness is the want of health, death is the want of life, and weakness is the want of strength.
Nevertheless a doubt occurs to the mind-that is, scorpions and serpents are poisonous.
Are they good or evil, for they are existing beings?
Yes, a scorpion is evil in relation to man; a serpent is evil in relation to man; but in relation to themselves they are not evil, for their poison is their weapon, and by their sting they defend themselves.
But as the elements of their poison do not agree with our elements-that is to say, as there is antagonism between these different elements, therefore, this antagonism is evil; but in reality as regards themselves they are good.
The epitome of this discourse is that it is possible that one thing in relation to another may be evil, and at the same time within the limits of its proper being it may not be evil.
Then it is proved that there is no evil in existence; all that God created He created good.
This evil is nothingness; so death is the absence of life.
When man no longer receives life, he dies.
Darkness is the absence of light: when there is no light, there is darkness.
Light is an existing thing, but darkness is nonexistent.
Wealth is an existing thing, but poverty is nonexisting.
Then it is evident that all evils return to nonexistence.
For example, ignorance itself is a torment, but it is a subtile torment; indifference to God is itself a torment; so also are falsehood, cruelty and treachery. All the imperfections are torments, but they are subtile torments. Certainly for an intelligent man death is better than sin, and a cut tongue is better than lying or calumny.
The other kind of torment is gross-such as penalties, imprisonment, beating, expulsion and banishment.
But for the people of God separation from God is the greatest torment of all.
Know that to do justice is to give to everyone according to his deserts. For example, when a workman labors from morning until evening, justice requires that he shall be paid his wages; but when he has done no work and taken no trouble, he is given a gift: this is bounty.
If you give alms and gifts to a poor man although he has taken no trouble for you, nor done anything to deserve it, this is bounty.
So Christ besought forgiveness for his murderers: this is called bounty.
Now the question of the good or evil of things is determined by reason or by law.
Some believe that it is determined by law; such are the Jews, who, believing all the commandments of the Pentateuch to be absolutely obligatory, regard them as matters of law, not of reason.
Thus they say that one of the commandments of the Pentateuch is that it is unlawful to partake of meat and butter together because it is taref, and taref in Hebrew means unclean, as kosher means clean.
This, they say, is a question of law and not of reason.
But the theologians think that the good and evil of things depend upon both reason and law.
Every intelligent man comprehends that murder, theft, treachery, falsehood, hypocrisy and cruelty are evil and reprehensible; for if you prick a man with a thorn, he will cry out, complain and groan; so it is evident that he will understand that murder according to reason is evil and reprehensible.
If he commits a murder, he will be responsible, whether the renown of the Prophet has reached him or not; for it is reason that formulates the reprehensible character of the action.
When a man commits this bad action, he will surely be responsible.
Though they do not deserve mercy and beneficence, nevertheless, God treats them with mercy and forgives them.
Now vengeance, according to reason, is also blameworthy, because through vengeance no good result is gained by the avenger.
So if a man strikes another, and he who is struck takes revenge by returning the blow, what advantage will he gain?
Will this be a balm for his wound or a remedy for his pain?
No, God forbid!
In truth the two actions are the same: both are injuries; the only difference is that one occurred first, and the other afterward.
Therefore, if he who is struck forgives, nay, if he acts in a manner contrary to that which has been used toward him, this is laudable. The law of the community will punish the aggressor but will not take revenge.
This punishment has for its end to warn, to protect and to oppose cruelty and transgression so that other men may not be tyrannical.
But if he who has been struck pardons and forgives, he shows the greatest mercy.
This is worthy of admiration.
seventy seven: THE RIGHT METHOD OF TREATING CRIMINALS
Answer.--There are two sorts of retributory punishments.
One is vengeance, the other, chastisement.
Man has not the right to take vengeance, but the community has the right to punish the criminal; and this punishment is intended to warn and to prevent so that no other person will dare to commit a like crime.
This punishment is for the protection of man's rights, but it is not vengeance; vengeance appeases the anger of the heart by opposing one evil to another.
This is not allowable, for man has not the right to take vengeance.
But if criminals were entirely forgiven, the order of the world would be upset.
So punishment is one of the essential necessities for the safety of communities, but he who is oppressed by a transgressor has not the right to take vengeance.
On the contrary, he should forgive and pardon, for this is worthy of the world of man.
The communities must punish the oppressor, the murderer, the malefactor, so as to warn and restrain others from committing like crimes.
But the most essential thing is that the people must be educated in such a way that no crimes will be committed; for it is possible to educate the masses so effectively that they will avoid and shrink from perpetrating crimes, so that the crime itself will appear to them as the greatest chastisement, the utmost condemnation and torment.
Therefore, no crimes which require punishment will be committed.
We must speak of things that are possible of performance in this world. There are many theories and high ideas on this subject, but they are not practicable; consequently, we must speak of things that are feasible.
For example, if someone oppresses, injures and wrongs another, and the wronged man retaliates, this is vengeance and is censurable.
No, rather he must return good for evil, and not only forgive, but also, if possible, be of service to his oppressor.
This conduct is worthy of man: for what advantage does he gain by vengeance? The two actions are equivalent; if one action is reprehensible, both are reprehensible.
The only difference is that one was committed first, the other later.
But the community has the right of defense and of self protection; moreover, the community has no hatred nor animosity for the murderer: it imprisons or punishes him merely for the protection and security of others.
If the community and the inheritors of the murdered one were to forgive and return good for evil, the cruel would be continually ill treating others, and assassinations would continually occur.
Vicious people, like wolves, would destroy the sheep of God.
The community has no ill will and rancor in the infliction of punishment, and it does not desire to appease the anger of the heart; its purpose is by punishment to protect others so that no atrocious actions may be committed.
No, if Christ had known that a wolf had entered the fold and was about to destroy the sheep, most certainly He would have prevented it.
As forgiveness is one of the attributes of the Merciful One, so also justice is one of the attributes of the Lord.
The tent of existence is upheld upon the pillar of justice and not upon forgiveness.
The continuance of mankind depends upon justice and not upon forgiveness.
So if, at present, the law of pardon were practiced in all countries, in a short time the world would be disordered, and the foundations of human life would crumble.
For example, if the governments of Europe had not withstood the notorious Attila, he would not have left a single living man.
Some people are like bloodthirsty wolves: if they see no punishment forthcoming, they will kill men merely for pleasure and diversion.
One of the tyrants of Persia killed his tutor merely for the sake of making merry, for mere fun and sport.
To recapitulate: the constitution of the communities depends upon justice, not upon forgiveness.
Then what Christ meant by forgiveness and pardon is not that, when nations attack you, burn your homes, plunder your goods, assault your wives, children and relatives, and violate your honor, you should be submissive in the presence of these tyrannical foes and allow them to perform all their cruelties and oppressions.
But the communities must protect the rights of man.
So if someone assaults, injures, oppresses and wounds me, I will offer no resistance, and I will forgive him.
If at this moment a wild Arab were to enter this place with a drawn sword, wishing to assault, wound and kill you, most assuredly I would prevent him.
If I abandoned you to the Arab, that would not be justice but injustice.
But if he injure me personally, I would forgive him.
One thing remains to be said: it is that the communities are day and night occupied in making penal laws, and in preparing and organizing instruments and means of punishment.
They build prisons, make chains and fetters, arrange places of exile and banishment, and different kinds of hardships and tortures, and think by these means to discipline criminals, whereas, in reality, they are causing destruction of morals and perversion of characters.
The community, on the contrary, ought day and night to strive and endeavor with the utmost zeal and effort to accomplish the education of men, to cause them day by day to progress and to increase in science and knowledge, to acquire virtues, to gain good morals and to avoid vices, so that crimes may not occur.
At the present time the contrary prevails; the community is always thinking of enforcing the penal laws, and of preparing means of punishment, instruments of death and chastisement, places for imprisonment and banishment; and they expect crimes to be committed.
This has a demoralizing effect.
But if the community would endeavor to educate the masses, day by day knowledge and sciences would increase, the understanding would be broadened, the sensibilities developed, customs would become good, and morals normal; in one word, in all these classes of perfections there would be progress, and there would be fewer crimes.
It has been ascertained that among civilized peoples crime is less frequent than among uncivilized-that is to say, among those who have acquired the true civilization, which is divine civilization-the civilization of those who unite all the spiritual and material perfections.
As ignorance is the cause of crimes, the more knowledge and science increases, the more crimes will diminish.
Consider how often murder occurs among the barbarians of Africa; they even kill one another in order to eat each other's flesh and blood!
Why do not such savageries occur in Switzerland?
The reason is evident: it is because education and virtues prevent them.
I have.
"After the execution?" cried Franz.
"Before or after, whichever you please."
"Yes, there is something I wish to see."
"How attentively he looked at you."
CHAPTER two
one.
The first question to ask in the part of the study of economic society here undertaken is: What is its motive force?
The question merits long and careful study, but the general answer is so simple that it seems almost self evident: The motive force in economics is found in the feelings of men.
And so the environment shapes and affects the animal.
After the animal has been thus fitted, its desire is for those things normally to be found in its surroundings.
He feels the need of companionship, for it is only through association and mutual help that men, so weak as compared with many kinds of animals, are able to resist the enemies which beset them.
He needs clothing to protect him against the harsher climates of the lands to which he moves.
four.
As men become more the masters of circumstances, their desires anticipate mere physical wants; they seek a more varied food of finer flavor and more delicately prepared.
Dress is not limited by physical comfort, for one of the earliest of the esthetic wants to develop is the love of personal ornament.
They are the mainspring of economic progress.
In recent discussion of the control of the tropics, the too great contentedness of tropical peoples has been brought out prominently.
If only the desire for a two or three room cabin can be aroused, experience shows that family life and industrial qualities may be improved in many other ways.
Not only in America, but in most civilized lands to day, is seen a rapid growth of wants in the working classes.
Sec.
one.
CHAPTER thirty four
GROWTH OF TRUSTS AND COMBINATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES
one.
In popular discussion, however, the word frequently implies great wealth in a single hand, though this wealth may be invested in a large number of small industries.
Large production is the concentration of capital into large units of industry.
The capital may be the same as before, the ownership may or may not be widely diffused, but the control and management are unified.
Large factories may or may not have monopoly power; as factories grow in size, competition among them often becomes more, not less, complete and severe.
On the contrary, monopoly, as before defined, may exist where the industry is small, as the waterworks in a small town, or a small factory for making patented articles.
One billion people use only tools, and have no better source and means of power than domestic animals.
About two hundred million people live in the stage of simple machines and small factories.
These are found in eastern and southern Europe, small portions of South America, some parts even of the United States.
In this stage there is not enough manufacturing power in the community to supply much more than its own needs.
About two hundred million people in the United States and western Europe have reached the third and highest industrial plane, where the highest mechanical devices are employed and industry becomes highly specialized.
These differences are broadly stated; there are contrasts within every nation.
Three hundred miles from here, in the Alleghanies, people still can be found spinning and weaving and wearing homespun as in colonial days.
In a trip of twenty miles in Tyrol or Switzerland one can observe every one of these industrial stages.
The most striking development, if not the typical form, in America to day is large or concentrated industry.
three.
The early factories growing out of the household industry were small.
A family specialized in producing cloth and exchanged with its neighbors; so with shoes, candles, soap, canned goods, cured meats, etc
Since that time two counter forces have been at work to affect the ratio of manufacturing establishments to population.
The number of establishments has been increased by specialization of farming which has called for many industries to produce the things once made on farms, and by increasing wealth and invention, which has made possible many small industries supplying things before almost unknown.
The number of establishments has been diminished as the staple products that can be transported have come to be made in larger factories.
The resultant of these movements during the thirty years ending in nineteen hundred is somewhat surprising: the ratio of factories (with an output worth five hundred dollars) to population has somewhat increased.
In eighteen seventy there were two hundred and fifty two thousand establishments; in eighteen ninety, three hundred and fifty five thousand, and in nineteen hundred, five hundred and twelve thousand, a ratio to population of one to one hundred and sixty two, one hundred and seventy seven, and one hundred and forty four respectively.
The last date was one of great industrial prosperity, and doubtless many ephemeral enterprises had been called into existence, thus giving a somewhat abnormal result.
Moreover, there has been a large increase in the number of things made in factories which were formerly made in the homes, and which then did not appear at all in the census of manufactures.
The population meantime doubled.
This movement has been going on for seventy years, there being about the same number of mills in nineteen hundred as in eighteen thirty, though population had multiplied six fold.
There were twenty four thousand grist mills in eighteen eighty, eighteen thousand in eighteen ninety, and twenty five thousand in nineteen hundred, a change of ratio from two thousand one hundred to three thousand population per grist mill.
There were twenty six thousand sawmills in eighteen eighty, twenty two thousand in eighteen ninety, and thirty three thousand in nineteen hundred, a change from about one thousand nine hundred and twenty to two thousand two hundred and seventy persons per sawmill.
But while the number of establishments in these staple industries was decreasing, the number of employees per establishment in most cases was increasing.
The average in all industries, in eighteen seventy, was eight; in eighteen ninety, twelve; in nineteen hundred, ten and four tenths.
In cotton mills, in eighteen seventy, the average was one hundred and eighty four; in eighteen ninety, two hundred and forty four; in nineteen hundred, two hundred and eighty seven.
The grist mills, in eighteen eighty, had two and four tenths persons per establishment; in eighteen ninety, three and four tenths.
four.
We are told that in cotton mills, in eighteen thirty, the average capital invested was fifty thousand dollars; in eighteen ninety, nearly four hundred thousand dollars; in nineteen hundred, four hundred and forty thousand dollars.
It is easy to observe the large increase in investment of capital in flouring mills since the new processes came into use.
Consolidation took place on a great scale in railroads and in manufactures.
Much of this has been of such a kind that it does not appear at all in the figures showing the number of establishments and of employees.
Many discrepancies appear in the data regarding this movement given by different authorities, as there is no generally accepted rule by which to determine the selection of the companies to be included in the lists, and as the conditions are changing from day to day.
The number organized and the capital represented by this movement in the last of these decades are eight times as great as in the thirty years preceding.
In eighteen ninety three, the number was less, but the total nominal capital (preferred and common stocks and bonds) was still the greatest it had ever been in any year.
Then followed the period of the greatest formation of trust companies the world has ever seen, which extended from eighteen ninety eight to nineteen o one, and ended in nineteen o two.
one.
three.
four.
six.
The machinery in a large factory is thus more fully utilized.
In making plows, nine men working separately will average sixty six plows each per year, while one hundred and eighty men working together will average one hundred and ten each per year, the output per man being increased sixty six and two thirds per cent.
In a rifle factory with a daily output of fifty, eight men are needed for the same product that can be supplied by three men in a factory with an output of one thousand daily.
three.
The necessary inspection of the results is more rapid and easy.
The advertising of certain kinds of goods involves a large and inevitable outlay, which is relatively less for a larger business, as the greater the output the smaller the burden on each unit of the product.
Combination effects a great saving in the number of commercial travelers, a result partly due to the decrease in competition, but partly also to better organization. Each of twenty different factories must send its drummers into every part of the country to seek business.
In combination they can divide the territory, visit every merchant and get larger orders at smaller cost. Supplies can be purchased more cheaply in large amounts, and shipments in car load and train load lots make possible special (sometimes illegal) concessions from railroads and from carriers on waterways.
four.
When each man is working on the smallest possible subdivision of the product, doubling the number of employees will not increase his skill.
When the finest machinery can be kept constantly in use, economy in its use has reached the maximum. As large factories tend to create cities around them, land rises in value and higher wages must be paid the workmen.
The point is reached in the growth of establishments where oversight cannot be as perfect and complete; the eye of the master cannot be over all.
It is evident that most of these reasons apply to a single local factory with far greater force than to a federation of locally scattered plants. It was once believed that the growing disadvantages of large industry would set an early limit to consolidation.
While there is a truth in this thought not to be overlooked, the effects must now be recognized to be more distant than was supposed.
three. CAUSES OF INDUSTRIAL COMBINATIONS
one.
The old legal idea of a trust is the confidence imposed in a trustee.
The word trust is popularly used of any large industry, though usually there is connected with it the idea of some evil power to raise prices to the consumers.
A large number of the corporations called trusts have, however, little monopoly power, and some have none at all.
The cost of management, amount of stock carried, advertising, cost of selling the product, may all be smaller per unit of product.
A large aggregation can control credit better and escape loss from bad debts.
By regulating and equalizing the output in the different localities, it can run more nearly full time. Being acquainted with the entire situation, it can reduce the friction. A strong combination has advantages in shipment.
It can have a clearing house for orders and ship from the nearest source of supply. The least efficient factories can be first closed when demand falls off. Factories can be specialized to produce that for which each is best fitted.
The magnitude of the industry and its presence in different localities strengthens its influence with the railroads.
A railroad line across the continent owns its own steamers for shipping goods to Asia or Europe.
three.
But as this excessive competition usually is for the very purpose of forcing the combination, this explanation is a begging of the question.
It is fallacious also in that it ignores the marginal principle in the problem of profits.
When she had quenched her thirst, she came straight up to the queen, and said to her: 'Do not take it evil, noble lady, that I dare to speak to you, and do not be afraid of me, for it may be that I shall bring you good luck.'
'Under rough bark lies smooth wood and sweet kernel,' replied the old woman.
The queen held out her hand, and the old woman examined its lines closely.
Your happiness is spoilt because you have no children.' At these words the queen became scarlet, and tried to draw away her hand, but the old woman said:
'But who are you?' asked the queen, 'for you seem to be able to read my heart.'
'Never mind my name,' answered she, 'but rejoice that it is permitted to me to show you a way to lessen your grief.
'Oh, I will obey you exactly,' cried the queen, 'and if you can help me you shall have in return anything you ask for.'
The old woman stood thinking for a little: then she drew something from the folds of her dress, and, undoing a number of wrappings, brought out a tiny basket made of birch bark.
She held it out to the queen, saying, 'In the basket you will find a bird's egg.
The boy you will bring up yourself, but you must entrust the little girl to a nurse.
When the time comes to have them christened you will invite me to be godmother to the princess, and this is how you must send the invitation.
Hidden in the cradle, you will find a goose's wing: throw this out of the window, and I will be with you directly; but be sure you tell no one of all the things that have befallen you.'
Feeling a different being from the poor sad woman who had wandered into the garden so short a time before, she hastened to her room, and felt carefully in the basket for the egg. There it was, a tiny thing of soft blue with little green spots, and she took it out and kept it in her bosom, which was the warmest place she could think of.
At this proof that the old woman had spoken truth, the queen's heart bounded, for she now had fresh hopes that the rest of the prophecy might be fulfilled.
Three months passed, and, as the old woman had bidden her, the queen took the egg from her bosom, and laid it snugly amidst the warm woollen folds.
The next morning she went to look at it, and the first thing she saw was the broken eggshell, and a little doll lying among the pieces. Then she felt happy at last, and leaving the doll in peace to grow, waited, as she had been told, for a baby of her own to lay beside it.
In course of time, this came also, and the queen took the little girl out of the basket, and placed it with her son in a golden cradle which glittered with precious stones.
Next she sent for the king, who nearly went mad with joy at the sight of the children.
The boy was called Willem.
After the feast was over and the guests were going away, the godmother laid the baby in the cradle, and said to the queen, 'Whenever the baby goes to sleep, be sure you lay the basket beside her, and leave the eggshells in it.
As long as you do that, no evil can come to her; so guard this treasure as the apple of your eye, and teach your daughter to do so likewise.' Then, kissing the baby three times, she mounted her coach and drove away.
Every day the little girl seemed to grow prettier, and people used to say she would soon be as beautiful as her godmother, but no one knew, except the nurse, that at night, when the child slept, a strange and lovely lady bent over her.
At length she told the queen what she had seen, but they determined to keep it as a secret between themselves.
The twins were by this time nearly two years old, when the queen was taken suddenly ill.
All the best doctors in the country were sent for, but it was no use, for there is no cure for death.
To her, as her most faithful servant, she gave the lucky basket in charge, and besought her to treasure it carefully.
'When my daughter,' said the queen, 'is ten years old, you are to hand it over to her, but warn her solemnly that her whole future happiness depends on the way she guards it.
About my son, I have no fears.
After some years the king married again, but he did not love his second wife as he had done his first, and had only married her for reasons of ambition.
But if they ever strayed across the path of the queen, she would kick them out of her sight like dogs.
On Dotterine's tenth birthday her nurse handed her over the cradle, and repeated to her her mother's dying words; but the child was too young to understand the value of such a gift, and at first thought little about it.
Two more years slipped by, when one day during the king's absence the stepmother found Dotterine sitting under a lime tree.
Her nurse was not there, but suddenly, as she stood weeping, her eyes fell upon the golden case in which lay the precious basket.
She thought it might contain something to amuse her, and looked eagerly inside, but nothing was there save a handful of wool and two empty eggshells.
Very much disappointed, she lifted the wool, and there lay the goose's wing.
'What old rubbish,' said the child to herself, and, turning, threw the wing out of the open window.
In a moment a beautiful lady stood beside her.
'Do not be afraid,' said the lady, stroking Dotterine's head.
'I am your godmother, and have come to pay you a visit.
Your red eyes tell me that you are unhappy.
I know that your stepmother is very unkind to you, but be brave and patient, and better days will come.
But if you should happen to find yourself in any difficulty, and cannot tell what to do, take the goose's wing from the basket, and throw it out of the window, and in a moment I will come to help you.
Now come into the garden, that I may talk to you under the lime trees, where no one can hear us.'
When they had finished eating, the godmother led the child back, and on the way taught her the words she must say to the basket when she wanted it to give her something.
About this time a terrible war broke out, and the king and his army were beaten back and back, till at length they had to retire into the town, and make ready for a siege.
It lasted so long that food began to fail, and even in the palace there was not enough to eat.
'Do not cry so, dear child,' said the godmother.
'I will carry you away from all this, but the others I must leave to take their chance.' Then, bidding Dotterine follow her, she passed through the gates of the town, and through the army outside, and nobody stopped them, or seemed to see them.
The queen had already met her death from a spear carelessly thrown.
'When better times come,' her protectress said cheerfully, 'and you want to look like yourself again, you have only to whisper the words I have taught you into the basket, and say you would like to have your own face once more, and it will be all right in a moment.
At first the work she had to do seemed very difficult, but either she was wonderfully quick in learning, or else the basket may have secretly helped her.
'Would you not like to come and enter my service?' she asked.
'Very much,' replied Dotterine, 'if my present mistress will allow me.'
The girl was clever with her fingers, and was occupied all day with getting ready their smart clothes, but at night when she went to bed she always dreamed that her godmother bent over her and said, 'Dress your young ladies for the feast, and when they have started follow them yourself.
Nobody will be so fine as you.'
Then she seemed to hear a voice whisper to her, 'Look in your basket, and you will find in it everything that you need.'
Dotterine did not want to be told twice!
Up she jumped, seized her basket, and repeated the magic words, and behold! there lay a dress on the bed, shining as a star.
She put it on with fingers that trembled with joy, and, looking in the glass, was struck dumb at her own beauty. She went downstairs, and in front of the door stood a fine carriage, into which she stepped and was driven away like the wind.
The king's palace was a long way off, yet it seemed only a few minutes before Dotterine drew up at the great gates.
She was just going to alight, when she suddenly remembered she had left her basket behind her. What was she to do?
Go back and fetch it, lest some ill fortune should befall her, or enter the palace and trust to chance that nothing evil would happen?
But before she could decide, a little swallow flew up with the basket in its beak, and the girl was happy again.
Their hopes faded as they gazed, but their mothers whispered together, saying, 'Surely this is our lost princess!'
And at midnight a strange thing happened.
A thick cloud suddenly filled the hall, so that for a moment all was dark. Then the mist suddenly grew bright, and Dotterine's godmother was seen standing there.
'This,' she said, turning to the king, 'is the girl whom you have always believed to be your sister, and who vanished during the siege.
She is not your sister at all, but the daughter of the king of a neighbouring country, who was given to your mother to bring up, to save her from the hands of a wizard.'
CHAPTER five
MOHAMMED
Thousands of years ago the Arabs had a religion that was not entirely different from that of the Jews.
As the years passed, however, they began to turn away from the old beliefs and to worship stone idols. These idols were set up in their principal cities and villages, notably in the city of Mecca, where there also remained a temple, built in the time of the older religion, that the Arabs still held to be sacred.
This child was named Mohammed, and he was born five hundred and seventy years after the death of Christ.
His father, Abdallah, died soon after he was born, and Mohammed's mother, according to custom, gave the baby into the charge of a nurse who might rear him in the free, open air of the desert where Arabs believed that children became strong and vigorous.
When he was six years old his mother died and he was brought up by his grandfather, Abd al Muttalib, a poor man, but one who was greatly respected by everybody that knew him.
When he grew old enough, he watched the flocks of the people of Mecca, and gained a meager livelihood by doing this.
When Mohammed was twenty five years old there befell a change in his fortunes.
In this year he entered the service of a rich widow, whose name was Kadijah, and went with her to the great fairs and bazaars on which journeys, perhaps, he acted as her camel driver.
By marrying Kadijah Mohammed became rich.
He and Kadijah had six children, four girls and two boys, but both of the boys died in their infancy.
But Mohammed was soon marked as being different from other men.
When he was forty years old he went one day to a mountain called Hira which was not far from Mecca.
Now Mohammed knew not how to read or write, but to his amazement he found that the words on the scroll were quite plain to him, and he read a wonderful message that proclaimed the glory and the greatness of God, whom he called Allah.
Mohammed went back to Kadijah and told her what he had seen.
Kadijah was a true and faithful wife and loved Mohammed better than herself.
At first Mohammed did not try to preach his new faith to the people of Mecca, but contented himself with teaching the word of Allah to his nearest relatives.
After four years of teaching Mohammed had only converted to the new belief forty people, who were mostly men of low degree or slaves.
He then thought that Allah called upon him to go forth publicly and preach his new belief to the entire world.
And soon afterward Mohammed could have been seen in the market place preaching the word of Allah.
That is, it was much more like the religion of Christ than the worship of idols or the belief of the romans and Greeks in gods and goddesses, or the worship of fire or the stars.
Mohammed preached that there was one God only, and that this God was greater than all things.
If you died and had led a righteous life you went to Paradise; if you had been wicked you went to the lower regions to undergo eternal punishment.
And there were a great many things in Mohammed's religion that any one would do well to follow, for he preached that God was merciful and his people on earth must be merciful also, that cleanliness was next to Godliness and that all his followers must wash themselves before they prayed.
In many ways, however, the Mohammedan faith was not so pure as the Christian faith, for the Heaven that Mohammed believed in was a place of feasting and merriment, but little else, and Mohammed also believed that it was right to teach his religion by the sword.
To spread the faith Mohammed set about preparing a great book which was to be the bible of those who believed in his religion.
This book was called the Koran.
It is thought, however, that he was helped in preparing the Koran by one of his disciples who could read and write.
So it came to pass that the poor men who were Mohammedans, particularly the slaves, were made to suffer dreadful tortures.
Mohammed, however, indignantly refused, and went on preaching, and his uncle continued to protect him.
At last Mohammed's enemies became so afraid of the success he was gaining that they decided they must have his life at all costs, and a plot was hatched against him.
But a great misfortune fell upon him, for his faithful wife Kadijah, whom he had loved deeply, and who was the first person to believe in him as a prophet, died, and left him inconsolable.
And these spirits listened attentively to what Mohammed said and did him reverence.
This flight was called the "Hegira," and the date of it is very important to the Mohammedans, for their calendar dates from it, and for them is practically the beginning of time.
In Yathrib the faith of Mohammed spread quickly and he received attention and reverence wherever he went.
And when he had a large following he desired to put up a house of prayer, or a temple which he called a mosque.
This was done, but the first Mohammedan mosque was a very simple affair indeed and the roof was supported by trees that were not removed from the earth where they had been growing.
They must all face toward Mecca as they pray, for that is the sacred city; and Mohammed so considered it because of the mysterious temple or Kaabah that was in it, and because, before the days of the idolaters, this temple had been connected with the religion of Abraham.
"God is great; there is no god but the Lord.
Come unto prayer!
God is great.
There is no god but the Lord."
And in Medinah, as it was later called, Mohammed spent the rest of his life.
It was a wild fight, for the battle was fought in a furious storm of rain and wind that beat like whips upon the faces of the soldiers as they dashed against each other.
It was desperate, too, and lasted nearly all day-and it was one of the important battles of the world, although the numbers engaged in it were not large.
At first the fray went badly for the Mohammedans, for the enemy with their superior numbers forced them back.
Everywhere Mohammed himself might have been seen, encouraging his followers and urging them to greater efforts. Then, when it seemed as if his forces were breaking and that nothing could be done to hold them together any longer, he stooped to the ground and picking up a handful of gravel, hurled it against his foes.
The Meccans rallied and attacked him in front and the rear at the same time, and the day was lost.
However, the Meccans were too exhausted to pursue his men for a time and they believed that Mohammed himself had been slain, which was the first of their desires.
So they returned to Mecca.
This caused Mohammed great difficulty and might easily have brought about his defeat.
So, when the fight was over, he took a large number of soldiers and advanced against this tribe which had taken refuge in a stronghold in the mountains.
They found, however, that from that mercy they could expect nothing, for all the men were put to death, and the women and children were sold into slavery.
This was considered by Mohammed as a great triumph for his cause. Determined now to spread his faith to the uttermost ends of the earth, he sent messengers to the rulers of all the civilized kingdoms that he knew.
One went to Heraclius, Emperor of the romans, who was in Syria at the time; one to the Roman Governor of Egypt, one to the King of Abyssinia and one to each of the provinces of Gassan and Yamam that were also under Roman control.
Soon after this one desert tribe after another came under Mohammed's power, and finally all of Arabia had acknowledged him as God's prophet. He was planning to extend his religion still farther when a misfortune fell upon him that probably caused his death.
With one of his followers he had partaken of a dish that had been prepared for him by a Jewish girl who hated him and all of his sect.
The food was poisoned, and while Mohammed discovered it at once and ate but a single mouthful, the poison remained in his body.
"I think he's going to get well," she whispered.
Tom's heart felt better.
He looked around feebly.
"Yes, dad," was the eager answer
"They tell me you-you made a great trip to get dr Hendrix-broken bridge-came through the air with him.
Is that right?"
"Yes, dad.
But don't tire yourself.
You must get well and strong."
But tell me; did you go in-in the Humming Bird?"
"Yes, dad."
Over a hundred, and the motor wasn't at its best."
"That's good.
"Why not?" mr Swift spoke more strongly.
"I-because-well, I don't want to."
"Nonsense, Tom!
But listen to me.
Now promise me you'll go in it and-and-win!"
"I-I---," began Tom.
dr Hendrix made a hasty move toward the bed.
"I-I promise!" exclaimed Tom, and the aged inventor sank back with a smile of satisfaction on his pale face.
"Now you must go," said dr Gladby to Tom.
"He has talked long enough. He must sleep now, and get up his strength."
"We can't say for sure," was the answer.
"We have great hopes."
"No one can say for a certainty that he will recover," spoke the physician.
"You will have to hope for the best, that is all, Tom.
If I were you I'd go in the race.
The doctor thought for a moment.
Then he exclaimed:
"I will go to the meet.
I'll take the Humming Bird apart at once, and ship it to Eagle Park.
Unless dr Hendrix wants to go back in it," he added as an after thought.
By that time the bridge will have been repaired, and he can go back by train.
It would be just like him."
Have you heard from home to day, Tom?"
He listened a moment.
"Good news!" he exclaimed.
His face looks very familiar!"
"Bless my elevation rudder!" cried mr Damon.
"Andy's here at last!
Chapter Twenty Three
It will meet at once, and I'll let you know what they say."
My plans are missing, and I think he took them.
"Get the evidence against him, and we'll act quickly enough."
It was this:
That is, they need not bring them out until just before the races," he added.
No, I've either got to stop Andy before the race, or not at all.
I will try to think of a plan."
Meanwhile he and mr Damon, together with their machinist, were kept busy.
"Poor night, but doctor thinks day will show improvement.
Don't worry."
"Don't worry!
I wonder who could help it," mused poor Tom.
However, he was more interested in what Andy Foger would turn out.
Then came a flight for height; and while no records were broken, the crowd was well satisfied.
"Get ready to make your protest," advised mr Damon to the young inventor.
I hope you beat him!"
Would it prove to be a copy of his speedy Humming Bird?
He pushed his way through the crowd.
Andy caught sight of Tom Swift.
"I'm going to beat you!" the bully boasted, "and I haven't a machine like yours, after all.
"So I see," stammered Tom, hardly knowing what to think.
"I never had them!"
Tom started the propeller.
"How much thrust?" cried Tom to his machinist.
"Good!"
But the smoke of it leaped into the air.
His helper thrust the Humming Bird forward.
Over the smooth ground it rushed.
He felt his craft soar upward.
Chapter Twenty Four
"I don't believe he's going to make it," thought Tom.
He was right.
However, he must think of himself and his own craft now.
"A good start!" shouted mr Damon in his ear.
"Where's the Slugger?" called Tom to his friend.
For a moment Tom's heart misgave him.
"I'll catch him!" muttered Tom, and he opened the throttle a trifle wider, and went after Andy, passing him with ease.
"Well?" asked mr Damon, as Tom took off the receiver.
"Dad isn't quite so well," answered the lad.
"mr
But dad is game.
He sends me word to go on and win, and I'll do it, too, only-"
Tom paused, and choked back a sob.
"Of course you will!" cried mr Damon.
Tom glanced at the barograph.
He looked at the speed gage.
He looked down at the signals.
There was twenty miles yet to go.
Yet he would wait until five miles from the end, and then he felt that he could gain and maintain a lead.
"Andy seems to be doing well," said mr Damon.
"Yes, he has a good machine," conceded Tom.
Then another five.
Eagerly Tom waited for the right signal.
Quickly the young inventor clamped the receiver to his ear.
mr Damon saw him turn pale.
"dr Gladby says dad has a turn for the worse.
There is little hope," translated Tom.
"Will you-are you going to quit?" asked mr Damon.
Tom shook his head.
"My father has become unconscious, so mr Jackson says, but his last words were to me: 'Tell Tom to win the race!' And I'm going to do it!"
Tom suddenly changed his plans.
He would begin his final spurt, and if possible finish the hundred miles at his utmost speed, win the race and then hasten to his father's side.
She shot ahead like an eagle darting after his prey.
Tom opened up a big gap between his machine and the one nearest him, which, at that moment, was the Antoinette, with the Spaniard driving her.
"Now to win!" cried Tom, grimly.
Tom flashed through the air so quickly that his speed was almost incredible.
But Tom and mr Damon could not hear them.
They only heard the powerful song of the motor.
Faster and faster flew the Humming Bird.
Tom looked down, and saw the signal put up which meant that there were but three miles more to go. He felt that he could do it.
He was half a lap ahead of them all now. But he saw Andy Foger's machine pulling away from the bunch.
"He's going to try to catch me!" exulted Tom.
The motor of the Humming Bird suddenly slackened its speed, it missed explosions, and the trim little craft began to drop behind.
"What's the matter?" cried mr Damon.
"We're done for, I guess."
On came the other machines, Andy in the lead, then the Santos Dumont, then the Farman, and lastly the Wright.
They saw the plight of the Humming Bird and determined to beat her.
Tom cast a despairing look up at the motor.
He could not reach it in mid-air.
Then the Antoinette flashed by.
His heart was like lead.
mr Damon gazed blankly forward.
They were beaten. It did not seem possible.
There was but a single chance.
If Tom shut off all power, coasted for a moment, and then, ere the propeller had ceased revolving, if he could start the motor on the spark, the silent cylinders might pick up, with the others, and begin again.
He would try it.
They could be no worse off than they were.
"A mile behind!" gasped Tom.
"It's a long chance, but I'll take it."
He shut off the power.
And such a roar as it was!
"We did it!" yelled Tom.
Slowly he crept on them.
They looked back and saw him coming.
They tried to put on more speed, but it was impossible.
"I'll get him!" muttered Tom.
"I'll pass 'em all!"
And he did.
Then she crept up on Andy's Slugger.
In an instant more it was done, and, a good length in advance of the Foger craft, Tom shot over the finish line a winner, richer by ten thousand dollars, and, not only that, but he had picked up a mile that had been lost, and had snatched victory from almost certain defeat.
'Dear daddy, let the poor old men sleep here to night, do-to please me.'
The three old men stood in the middle of the loft, leaning on their sticks, with their long grey beards flowing down over their hands, and were talking together in low voices.
'What news is there?' asked the eldest.
What shall we name him, and what fortune shall we give him?' said the second.
Who can be got to stand godfather to such a little beggar boy?'
'Look here, my friend, you are a poor man.
How can you afford to bring up the boy?
Is that a bargain?'
When he had driven some miles he drew up, carried the child to the edge of a steep precipice and threw it over, muttering, 'There, now try to take my property!'
As they were passing near the precipice they heard a sound of crying, and on looking over they saw a little green meadow wedged in between two great heaps of snow, and on the meadow lay a baby amongst the flowers.
The merchants picked up the child, wrapped it up carefully, and drove on.
Mark guessed at once that the child must be his godson, asked to see him, and said:
If you will make him over to me, I will let you off your debt.'
At night Mark took the child, put it in a barrel, fastened the lid tight down, and threw it into the sea.
The barrel floated away to a great distance, and at last it floated close up to a monastery.
The monks were just spreading out their nets to dry on the shore, when they heard the sound of crying.
It seemed to come from the barrel which was bobbing about near the water's edge.
The boy lived on with the monks, and grew up to be a clever, gentle, and handsome young man.
Now, it happened about this time that the merchant, Mark, came to the monastery in the course of a journey.
When he went into the church the choir was singing, and one voice was so clear and beautiful, that he asked who it belonged to.
If he could only come to me I would make him overseer of all my business.
As you say, he is so good and clever.
Do spare him to me.
I will make his fortune, and will present your monastery with twenty thousand crowns.'
The abbot hesitated a good deal, but he consulted all the other monks, and at last they decided that they ought not to stand in the way of Vassili's good fortune.
On the way he met three beggars, who asked him: 'Where are you going, Vassili?'
'I am going to the house of Mark the Merchant, and have a letter for his wife,' replied Vassili.
They blew on it and gave it back to him, saying: 'Now go and give the letter to Mark's wife.
You will not be forsaken.'
Vassili reached the house and gave the letter.
When the mistress read it she could hardly believe her eyes and called for her daughter.
If you don't obey my orders I shall be very angry.'
In due time, Mark returned from his travels.
His wife, daughter, and son in law all went out to meet him.
Mark read it.
It certainly was his handwriting, but by no means his wishes.
Twelve years ago he built a castle on some land of mine.
As he tramped along he suddenly heard a voice saying: 'Vassili! where are you going?'
'I did; this old wide spreading oak.
'I am going to the Serpent King to receive twelve years' rent from him.'
'When the time comes, remember me and ask the king: "Rotten to the roots, half dead but still green, stands the old oak.
Is it to stand much longer on the earth?"'
'Very well,' said Vassili; 'I'll ask him.'
And he walked on.
As he stepped on it the whale said, 'Do tell me where you are going.'
'I am going to the Serpent King.'
'I will remember,' said Vassili, and he went on.
Vassili walked in, and went from one room to another astonished at all the splendour he saw.
As soon as she saw him she said: 'Oh, Vassili, what brings you to this accursed place?'
The girl said: 'You have not been sent here to collect rents, but for your own destruction, and that the serpent may devour you.'
Then she rose up to receive the Serpent King.
The monster rushed into the room, and threw itself panting on the bed, crying: 'I've flown half over the world.
I'm tired, VERY tired, and want to sleep-scratch my head.'
After you left, I had such a wonderful dream.
'Out with it then, quick!
'I dreamt I was walking on a wide road, and an oak tree said to me: "Ask the king this: Rotten at the roots, half dead, and yet green stands the old oak.
'It must stand till some one comes and pushes it down with his foot. Then it will fall, and under its roots will be found more gold and silver than even Mark the Rich has got.'
'That depends on himself.
'And at last I dreamt that I was walking over a bridge made of a whale's back, and the living bridge spoke to me and said: "Here have I been stretched out these three years, and men and horses have trampled my back down into my ribs.
Must I lie here much longer?"'
Then he may plunge back into the sea and heal his back.'
When he reached the strait the whale asked: 'Have you thought of me?'
The great fish heaved itself up and threw up all the twelve ships and their crews.
There, at the roots, was more gold and silver than even Mark the Rich had.
The sailors carried all the gold and silver into the ship, and then they set sail for home with Vassili on board.
Mark was more furious than ever.
He had his horses harnessed and drove off himself to see the Serpent King and to complain of the way in which he had been betrayed.
Vassili led a good and happy life with his dear wife, and his kind mother in law lived with them.
His face is wrinkled, his hair and beard are snow white, and his eyes are dim; but still he rows on.
But every morning the fruit was gone, and the boughs were bare of blossom, without anyone being able to discover who was the thief.
At last the emperor said to his eldest son, 'If only I could prevent those robbers from stealing my fruit, how happy I should be!'
And his son replied, 'I will sit up to night and watch the tree, and I shall soon see who it is!'
So directly it grew dark the young man went and hid himself near the apple tree to begin his watch, but the apples had scarcely begun to ripen before he fell asleep, and when he awoke at sunrise the apples were gone.
He felt very much ashamed of himself, and went with lagging feet to tell his father!
But no sooner had he lain himself down than his eyes grew heavy, and when the sunbeams roused him from his slumbers there was not an apple left on the tree.
Next came the turn of the youngest son, who made himself a comfortable bed under the apple tree, and prepared himself to sleep.
Towards midnight he awoke, and sat up to look at the tree.
And behold!
the apples were beginning to ripen, and lit up the whole palace with their brightness.
At the same moment nine golden pea hens flew swiftly through the air, and while eight alighted upon the boughs laden with fruit, the ninth fluttered to the ground where the prince lay, and instantly was changed into a beautiful maiden, more beautiful far than any lady in the emperor's court.
Then she changed herself back into a pea hen, and the whole nine flew away.
As soon as the sun rose the prince entered the palace, and held out the apple to his father, who was rejoiced to see it, and praised his youngest son heartily for his cleverness.
That evening the prince returned to the apple tree, and everything passed as before, and so it happened for several nights.
So, when the evening came, the old woman hid herself under the tree and waited for the prince.
Then the witch stretched out her hand, and cut off a lock of the maiden's hair, and in an instant the girl sprang up, a pea hen once more, spread her wings and flew away, while her sisters, who were busily stripping the boughs, flew after her.
When he had recovered from his surprise at the unexpected disappearance of the maiden, the prince exclaimed, 'What can be the matter?' and, looking about him, discovered the old witch hidden under the bed.
He dragged her out, and in his fury called his guards, and ordered them to put her to death as fast as possible.
But that did no good as far as the pea hens went.
They never came back any more, though the prince returned to the tree every night, and wept his heart out for his lost love.
This went on for some time, till the prince could bear it no longer, and made up his mind he would search the world through for her.
In vain his father tried to persuade him that his task was hopeless, and that other girls were to be found as beautiful as this one.
The prince would listen to nothing, and, accompanied by only one servant, set out on his quest.
After travelling for many days, he arrived at length before a large gate, and through the bars he could see the streets of a town, and even the palace.
The prince tried to pass in, but the way was barred by the keeper of the gate, who wanted to know who he was, why he was there, and how he had learnt the way, and he was not allowed to enter unless the empress herself came and gave him leave.
And she hastened to him, and took his hand, and drew him into the palace.
In a few days they were married, and the prince forgot his father and his brothers, and made up his mind that he would live and die in the castle.
The prince, who was left alone in the castle, soon got tired of being by himself, and began to look about for something to amuse him.
When he got to the twelfth he paused, but his curiosity was too much for him, and in another instant the key was turned and the cellar lay open before him.
It was empty, save for a large cask, bound with iron hoops, and out of the cask a voice was saying entreatingly, 'For goodness' sake, brother, fetch me some water; I am dying of thirst!'
The prince, who was very tender hearted, brought some water at once, and pushed it through a hole in the barrel; and as he did so one of the iron hoops burst.
He was turning away, when a voice cried the second time, 'Brother, for pity's sake fetch me some water; I'm dying of thirst!'
So the prince went back, and brought some more water, and again a hoop sprang.
'Oh, for pity's sake, my brother,' shrieked the little creature, 'help me, and put me back into the river, and I will repay you some day.
Take one of my scales, and when you are in danger twist it in your fingers, and I will come!'
The prince picked up the fish and threw it into the water; then he took off one of its scales, as he had been told, and put it in his pocket, carefully wrapped in a cloth.
Then he went on his way till, some miles further down the road, he found a fox caught in a trap.
'Oh! be a brother to me!' called the fox, 'and free me from this trap, and I will help you when you are in need.
So the prince unfastened the trap, pulled out one of the fox's hairs, and continued his journey.
And as he was going over the mountain he passed a wolf entangled in a snare, who begged to be set at liberty.
Take a lock of my fur, and when you need me twist it in your fingers.' And the prince undid the snare and let the wolf go.
'Oh, brother!' asked the prince, 'tell me, if you can, where the dragon emperor lives?'
When he entered the palace, to his great joy he found his wife sitting alone in a vast hall, and they began hastily to invent plans for her escape.
There was no time to waste, as the dragon might return directly, so they took two horses out of the stable, and rode away at lightning speed. Hardly were they out of sight of the palace than the dragon came home and found that his prisoner had flown.
He sent at once for his talking horse, and said to him:
'Give me your advice; what shall I do-have my supper as usual, or set out in pursuit of them?'
'Eat your supper with a free mind first,' answered the horse, 'and follow them afterwards.'
So the dragon ate till it was past mid day, and when he could eat no more he mounted his horse and set out after the fugitives.
In a short time he had come up with them, and as he snatched the empress out of her saddle he said to the prince:
'This time I will forgive you, because you brought me the water when I was in the cask; but beware how you return here, or you will pay for it with your life.'
Half mad with grief, the prince rode sadly on a little further, hardly knowing what he was doing.
Then he could bear it no longer and turned back to the palace, in spite of the dragon's threats.
Again the empress was sitting alone, and once more they began to think of a scheme by which they could escape the dragon's power.
'Ask the dragon when he comes home,' said the prince, 'where he got that wonderful horse from, and then you can tell me, and I will try to find another like it.'
Then, fearing to meet his enemy, he stole out of the castle.
Soon after the dragon came home, and the empress sat down near him, and began to coax and flatter him into a good humour, and at last she said:
Where did you get it from?'
And he answered:
And in one corner is a thin, wretched looking animal whom no one would glance at a second time, but he is in reality the best of the lot.
He is twin brother to my own horse, and can fly as high as the clouds themselves.
But no one can ever get this horse without first serving the old woman for three whole days. And besides the horses she has a foal and its mother, and the man who serves her must look after them for three whole days, and if he does not let them run away he will in the end get the choice of any horse as a present from the old woman.
But if he fails to keep the foal and its mother safe on any one of the three nights his head will pay.'
It was a long and steep climb, but at last he found her, and with a low bow he began:
What are you doing here?'
'I wish to become your servant,' answered he.
'So you shall,' said the old woman.
One post only was empty, and as they passed it cried out:
The old woman made no answer, but turned to the prince and said:
But the prince did not waver, and declared he would abide by his words.
He managed to keep his seat for a long time, in spite of all her efforts to throw him, but at length he grew so weary that he fell fast asleep, and when he woke he found himself sitting on a log, with the halter in his hands.
He jumped up in terror, but the mare was nowhere to be seen, and he started with a beating heart in search of her.
It had hardly touched his fingers when the fish appeared in the stream beside him.
'What is it, my brother?' asked the fish anxiously.
'The old woman's mare strayed last night, and I don't know where to look for her.'
But strike the water with the halter and say, "Come here, O mare of the mountain witch!" and she will come.'
The prince did as he was bid, and the mare and her foal stood before him.
'You should have gone among the fishes,' cried the old woman, striking the animal with a stick.
'Well, go among the foxes this time,' said she, and returned to the house, not knowing that the prince had overheard her.
So when it began to grow dark the prince mounted the mare for the second time and rode into the meadows, and the foal trotted behind its mother. Again he managed to stick on till midnight: then a sleep overtook him that he could not battle against, and when he woke up he found himself, as before, sitting on the log, with the halter in his hands.
He gave a shriek of dismay, and sprang up in search of the wanderers.
'What is it, my brother?' asked the fox, who instantly appeared before him.
'The old witch's mare has run away from me, and I do not know where to look for her.'
He mounted and rode back, and the old woman placed food on the table, and led the mare back to the stable.
'You should have gone to the foxes, as I told you,' said she, striking the mare with a stick.
'I did go to the foxes,' replied the mare, 'but they are no friends of mine and betrayed me.'
He tried hard to keep awake, but it was of no use, and in the morning there he was again on the log, grasping the halter.
'What is it, my brother?' asked the wolf as it stood before him.
The prince did as he was bid, and as the hair touched his fingers the wolf changed back into a mare, with the foal beside her.
'You should have gone among the wolves,' said she, striking her with a stick.
'So I did,' replied the mare, 'but they are no friends of mine and betrayed me.'
The old woman made no answer, and left the stable, but the prince was at the door waiting for her.
'I have served you well,' said he, 'and now for my reward.'
'What I promised that will I perform,' answered she.
'Give me, instead, that half starved creature in the corner,' asked the prince.
'You can't really mean what you say?' replied the woman.
'Yes, I do,' said the prince, and the old woman was forced to let him have his way.
So he took leave of her, and put the halter round his horse's neck and led him into the forest, where he rubbed him down till his skin was shining like gold.
Then he mounted, and they flew straight through the air to the dragon's palace.
The empress had been looking for him night and day, and stole out to meet him, and he swung her on to his saddle, and the horse flew off again.
Shall we eat and drink, or shall we follow the runaways?' and the horse replied, 'Whether you eat or don't eat, drink or don't drink, follow them or stay at home, matters nothing now, for you can never, never catch them.'
But the dragon made no reply to the horse's words, but sprang on his back and set off in chase of the fugitives.
Soon the dragon's horse was heard panting behind, and he cried out, 'Oh, my brother, do not go so fast!
I shall sink to the earth if I try to keep up with you.'
And the prince's horse answered, 'Why do you serve a monster like that? Kick him off, and let him break in pieces on the ground, and come and join us.'
And the dragon's horse plunged and reared, and the dragon fell on a rock, which broke him in pieces.
That I should do so was indeed so completely a foregone conclusion, that I was especially educated for it at Greenwich; upon leaving which, I had been bound apprentice to my father.
And under him I had faithfully served my time, and had risen to the position of second mate when death claimed him, and he passed away in my arms, commending my mother to my tenderest care with his last breath.
This I had successfully accomplished, arriving home only nine days after my own ship.
A claim for salvage had been duly made, and I calculated that when the settling day arrived, my own share would fall very little short of three thousand pounds, if, indeed, it did not fully reach that figure.
I have stated that when, upon the termination of an Australian voyage and the completion of my duties as chief mate, I returned to my ancestral home for the purpose of spending a brief holiday with my mother prior to my departure upon yet another journey to the antipodes, I had found her in dire trouble.
This trouble was the natural-and I may say inevitable-result of my father's mistaken idea that he was as good a man of business as he was a seaman.
Then arose the question of what was best to be done under our altered circumstances.
"Ah!" I responded, with a still more hopeless sigh, "if only we could! But I suppose there is about as much chance of that as there is of my becoming Lord High Admiral of Great Britain.
"Well, I really don't know, my boy; I am not prepared to say so much as that," answered my mother.
"Your dear father took the same view of the matter that you do, and never, to my knowledge, devoted a single hour to the search.
At length-in the year seventeen forty two, I think it was-it became whispered about among those restless spirits that a galleon had actually been captured, and that the captors had returned to England literally laden with wealth.
He then sought out the leader of the fortunate expedition, and having pledged himself to the strictest secrecy, obtained the fullest particulars relating to the adventure.
This done, his next step was to organise a company of adventurers, with himself as their head and leader, to sail in search of the next year's galleon.
The expedition was a failure, so far as the capture of the galleon was concerned, for she fell into the hands of Commodore Anson. In other respects, however, the voyage proved fairly profitable; for though they missed the great treasure ship, they fell in with and captured another Spanish vessel which had on board sufficient specie to well recompense the captors for the time and trouble devoted to the adventure.
Many, however, were so sorely hurt that they succumbed to their injuries, the English captain being among this number.
With this object in view, and not caring to subject their booty to the manifold risks attendant upon a cruise of an entire year, they had sought out a secluded spot, and had there carefully concealed the treasure by burying it in the earth.
Now, however, the poor man was dying, and could never hope to enjoy his share of the spoil, or even insure its possession to his relatives.
"Meanwhile, the consciousness gradually forced itself upon Richard Saint Leger that he was wounded unto death, and that time would soon be for him no more.
At length the stubborn courage of the English prevailed, and, despite their vast superiority in numbers, the Spaniards, who had boarded, were first driven back to their own deck and then below, when, further resistance being useless, they flung down their arms and surrendered.
But what you have related only strengthens my previous conviction, that the document or documents no longer exist.
"And have those relics never been examined since my ancestor Hugh abandoned the quest as hopeless?" I inquired.
"They may have been; I cannot say," answered my mother.
"But I do not believe that your dear father-or your grandfather either, for that matter-ever thought it worth while to subject them to a thoroughly exhaustive scrutiny.
"In the west attic, where they have always been kept," answered my mother.
Once upon a time there lived a poor woman who had only one child, and he was a little boy called Hassebu.
When he ceased to be a baby, and his mother thought it was time for him to learn to read, she sent him to school.
And, after he had done with school, he was put into a shop to learn how to make clothes, and did not learn; and he was put to do silversmith's work, and did not learn; and whatsoever he was taught, he did not learn it.
His mother never wished him to do anything he did not like, so she said: 'Well, stay at home, my son.' And he stayed at home, eating and sleeping.
One day the boy said to his mother: 'What was my father's business?'
'He was a very learned doctor,' answered she.
'Where, then, are his books?' asked Hassebu.
'Many days have passed, and I have thought nothing of them.
He was sitting at home one morning poring over the medicine book, when some neighbours came by and said to his mother: 'Give us this boy, that we may go together to cut wood.' For wood cutting was their trade, and they loaded several donkeys with the wood, and sold it in the town.
And his mother answered, 'Very well; to morrow I will buy him a donkey, and you can all go together.'
So the donkey was bought, and the neighbours came, and they worked hard all day, and in the evening they brought the wood back into the town, and sold it for a good sum of money.
And for six days they went and did the like, but on the seventh it rained, and the wood cutters ran and hid in the rocks, all but Hassebu, who did not mind wetting, and stayed where he was.
'Knock again!' cried they.
And he knocked and listened.
And they dug, and found a large pit like a well, filled with honey up to the brim.
The following day each man brought every bowl and vessel he could find at home, and Hassebu filled them all with honey.
And this he did every day for three months.
At the end of that time the honey was very nearly finished, and there was only a little left, quite at the bottom, and that was very deep down, so deep that it seemed as if it must be right in the middle of the earth.
Then they arose and went into the town and told his mother as they had agreed, and she wept much and made her mourning for many months.
And when the men were dividing the money, one said, 'Let us send a little to our friend's mother,' and they sent some to her; and every day one took her rice, and one oil; one took her meat, and one took her cloth, every day.
It did not take long for Hassebu to find out that his companions had left him to die in the pit, but he had a brave heart, and hoped that he might be able to find a way out for himself.
So he at once began to explore the pit and found it ran back a long way underground.
And by night he slept, and by day he took a little of the honey he had gathered and ate it; and so many days passed by.
One morning, while he was sitting on a rock having his breakfast, a large scorpion dropped down at his feet, and he took a stone and killed it, fearing it would sting him.
Perhaps there is a hole.
I will go and look for it,' and he felt all round the walls of the pit till he found a very little hole in the roof of the pit, with a tiny glimmer of light at the far end of it.
Then his heart felt glad, and he took out his knife and dug and dug, till the little hole became a big one, and he could wriggle himself through.
And when he had got outside, he saw a large open space in front of him, and a path leading out of it.
He went along the path, on and on, till he reached a large house, with a golden door standing open.
Inside was a great hall, and in the middle of the hall a throne set with precious stones and a sofa spread with the softest cushions.
And he went in and lay down on it, and fell fast asleep, for he had wandered far.
By and by there was a sound of people coming through the courtyard, and the measured tramp of soldiers.
This was the King of the Snakes coming in state to his palace.
The soldiers wished to kill him at once, but the king said, 'Leave him alone, put me on a chair,' and the soldiers who were carrying him knelt on the floor, and he slid from their shoulders on to a chair.
And they woke him, and he sat up and saw many snakes all round him, and one of them very beautiful, decked in royal robes.
'Who are you?' asked Hassebu.
'My name is Hassebu, but whence I come I know not, nor whither I go.'
'Then stay for a little with me,' said the king, and he bade his soldiers bring water from the spring and fruits from the forest, and to set them before the guest.
For some days Hassebu rested and feasted in the palace of the King of the Snakes, and then he began to long for his mother and his own country.
So he said to the King of the Snakes, 'Send me home, I pray.'
But the King of the Snakes answered, 'When you go home, you will do me evil!'
'I will do you no evil,' replied Hassebu; 'send me home, I pray.'
But the king said, 'I know it.
If I send you home, you will come back, and kill me.
I dare not do it.' But Hassebu begged so hard that at last the king said, 'Swear that when you get home you will not go to bathe where many people are gathered.' And Hassebu swore, and the king ordered his soldiers to take Hassebu in sight of his native city.
Then he went straight to his mother's house, and the heart of his mother was glad.
Now the Sultan of the city was very ill, and all the wise men said that the only thing to cure him was the flesh of the King of the Snakes, and that the only man who could get it was a man with a strange mark on his chest.
So the Vizir had set people to watch at the public baths, to see if such a man came there.
For three days Hassebu remembered his promise to the King of the Snakes, and did not go near the baths; then came a morning so hot he could hardly breathe, and he forgot all about it.
The moment he had slipped off his robe he was taken before the Vizir, who said to him, 'Lead us to the place where the King of the Snakes lives.'
'I do not know it!' answered he, but the Vizir did not believe him, and had him bound and beaten till his back was all torn.
Then Hassebu cried, 'Loose me, that I may take you.'
They went together a long, long way, till they reached the palace of the King of the Snakes.
And Hassebu said to the King: 'It was not I: look at my back and you will see how they drove me to it.'
'Who has beaten you like this?' asked the King.
'Then I am already dead,' said the King sadly, 'but you must carry me there yourself.'
So Hassebu carried him.
And on the way the King said, 'When I arrive, I shall be killed, and my flesh will be cooked.
But take some of the water that I am boiled in, and put it in a bottle and lay it on one side.
The Vizir will tell you to drink it, but be careful not to do so.
Then take some more of the water, and drink it, and you will become a great physician, and the third supply you will give to the Sultan.
And when the Vizir comes to you and asks, "Did you drink what I gave you?" you must answer, "I did, and this is for you," and he will drink it and die! and your soul will rest.'
And they went their way into the town, and all happened as the King of the Snakes had said.
And the Sultan loved Hassebu, who became a great physician, and cured many sick people.
But he was always sorry for the poor King of the Snakes.
Long, long ago there was born to a Roman knight and his wife Maja a little boy called Virgilius.
While he was still quite little, his father died, and the kinsmen, instead of being a help and protection to the child and his mother, robbed them of their lands and money, and the widow, fearing that they might take the boy's life also, sent him away to Spain, that he might study in the great University of Toledo.
But one afternoon, when the boys were given a holiday, he took a long walk, and found himself in a place where he had never been before.
In front of him was a cave, and, as no boy ever sees a cave without entering it, he went in.
'I do,' replied Virgilius.
'But who are you?' asked Virgilius, who never did anything in a hurry.
'I am an evil spirit,' said the voice, 'shut up here till Doomsday, unless a man sets me free.
Underneath was a small hole, and out of this the evil spirit gradually wriggled himself; but it took some time, for when at last he stood upon the ground he proved to be about three times as large as Virgilius himself, and coal black besides.
'Why, you can't have been as big as that when you were in the hole!' cried Virgilius.
'But I was!' replied the spirit.
'I don't believe it!' answered Virgilius.
'Well, I'll just get in and show you,' said the spirit, and after turning and twisting, and curling himself up, then he lay neatly packed into the hole.
But at the end of that time a messenger from his mother arrived in Toledo, begging him to come at once to Rome, as she had been ill, and could look after their affairs no longer.
Though sorry to leave Toledo, where he was much thought of as showing promise of great learning, Virgilius would willingly have set out at once, but there were many things he had first to see to.
So he entrusted to the messenger four pack horses laden with precious things, and a white palfrey on which she was to ride out every day.
Then he set about his own preparations, and, followed by a large train of scholars, he at length started for Rome, from which he had been absent twelve years.
His mother welcomed him back with tears in her eyes, and his poor kinsmen pressed round him, but the rich ones kept away, for they feared that they would no longer be able to rob their kinsman as they had done for many years past.
Of course, Virgilius paid no attention to this behaviour, though he noticed they looked with envy on the rich presents he bestowed on the poorer relations and on anyone who had been kind to his mother.
Soon after this had happened the season of tax gathering came round, and everyone who owned land was bound to present himself before the emperor. Like the rest, Virgilius went to court, and demanded justice from the emperor against the men who had robbed him.
But as these were kinsmen to the emperor he gained nothing, as the emperor told him he would think over the matter for the next four years, and then give judgment.
This reply naturally did not satisfy Virgilius, and, turning on his heel, he went back to his own home, and, gathering in his harvest, he stored it up in his various houses.
Coming forth from the castle so as to meet them face to face, he cast a spell over them of such power that they could not move, and then bade them defiance.
After which he lifted the spell, and the invading army slunk back to Rome, and reported what Virgilius had said to the emperor.
Now the emperor was accustomed to have his lightest word obeyed, almost before it was uttered, and he hardly knew how to believe his ears.
Things seemed getting desperate, when a magician arrived in the camp and offered to sell his services to the emperor.
His proposals were gladly accepted, and in a moment the whole of the garrison sank down as if they were dead, and Virgilius himself had much ado to keep awake.
He did not know how to fight the magician, but with a great effort struggled to open his Black Book, which told him what spells to use.
In an instant all his foes seemed turned to stone, and where each man was there he stayed.
Some were half way up the ladders, some had one foot over the wall, but wherever they might chance to be there every man remained, even the emperor and his sorcerer.
All day they stayed there like flies upon the wall, but during the night Virgilius stole softly to the emperor, and offered him his freedom, as long as he would do him justice.
The emperor, who by this time was thoroughly frightened, said he would agree to anything Virgilius desired.
So Virgilius took off his spells, and, after feasting the army and bestowing on every man a gift, bade them return to Rome.
Virgilius was enchanted at this quite unexpected favour, and stepped with glee into the basket.
The emperor, guessing that this was the work of Virgilius, besought him to break the spell.
And further, he bade every one to snatch fire from the maiden, and to suffer no neighbour to kindle it.
And when the maiden appeared, clad in her white smock, flames of fire curled about her, and the romans brought some torches, and some straw, and some shavings, and fires were kindled in Rome again.
But the emperor was wroth at the vengeance of Virgilius, and threw him into prison, vowing that he should be put to death.
And when everything was ready he was led out to the Viminal Hill, where he was to die.
He went quietly with his guards, but the day was hot, and on reaching his place of execution he begged for some water.
A pail was brought, and he, crying 'Emperor, all hail! seek for me in Sicily,' jumped headlong into the pail, and vanished from their sight.
Virgilius spent many days in deep thought, and at length invented a plan which was known to all as the 'Preservation of Rome.'
So the people chose three men who could be trusted, and, loading them with money, sent them to Rome, bidding them to pretend that they were diviners of dreams.
No sooner had the messengers reached the city than they stole out at night and buried a pot of gold far down in the earth, and let down another into the bed of the Tiber, just where a bridge spans the river.
Next day they went to the senate house, where the laws were made, and, bowing low, they said, 'Oh, noble lords, last night we dreamed that beneath the foot of a hill there lies buried a pot of gold.
Have we your leave to dig for it?' And leave having been given, the messengers took workmen and dug up the gold and made merry with it.
A few days later the diviners again appeared before the senate, and said, 'Oh, noble lords, grant us leave to seek out another treasure, which has been revealed to us in a dream as lying under the bridge over the river.'
And the senators gave leave, and the messengers hired boats and men, and let down ropes with hooks, and at length drew up the pot of gold, some of which they gave as presents to the senators.
Now, seeing that by your goodness we have been greatly enriched by our former dreams, we wish, in gratitude, to bestow this third treasure on you for your own profit; so give us workers, and we will begin to dig without delay.'
And receiving permission they began to dig, and when the messengers had almost undermined the Capitol they stole away as secretly as they had come.
From that day things went from bad to worse, and every morning crowds presented themselves before the emperor, complaining of the robberies, murders, and other crimes that were committed nightly in the streets.
The emperor, desiring nothing so much as the safety of his subjects, took counsel with Virgilius how this violence could be put down.
Virgilius thought hard for a long time, and then he spoke:
'Great prince,' said he, 'cause a copper horse and rider to be made, and stationed in front of the Capitol.
Then make a proclamation that at ten o'clock a bell will toll, and every man is to enter his house, and not leave it again.'
The emperor did as Virgilius advised, but thieves and murderers laughed at the horse, and went about their misdeeds as usual.
But at the last stroke of the bell the horse set off at full gallop through the streets of Rome, and by daylight men counted over two hundred corpses that it had trodden down.
Then the emperor commanded two copper dogs to be made that would run after the horse, and when the thieves, hanging from the walls, mocked and jeered at Virgilius and the emperor, the dogs leaped high after them and pulled them to the ground, and bit them to death.
Now about this time there came to be noised abroad the fame of the daughter of the sultan who ruled over the province of Babylon, and indeed she was said to be the most beautiful princess in the world.
The hours passed as if they were minutes, till the princess said that she could be no longer absent from her father.
When they were all seated at the feast the princess rose and presented the cup to Virgilius, who directly he had drunk fell into a deep sleep.
Then the sultan ordered his guards to bind him, and left him there till the following day.
The moment he appeared the sultan's passion broke forth, and he accused his captive of the crime of conveying the princess into distant lands without his leave.
'Not so!' cried the sultan, 'but a shameful death you shall die!' And the princess fell on her knees, and begged she might die with him.
'You are out in your reckoning, Sir Sultan!' said Virgilius, whose patience was at an end, and he cast a spell over the sultan and his lords, so that they believed that the great river of Babylon was flowing through the hall, and that they must swim for their lives.
So, leaving them to plunge and leap like frogs and fishes, Virgilius took the princess in his arms, and carried her over the airy bridge back to Rome.
Well, once upon a time there lived an emperor who had half a world all to himself to rule over, and in this world dwelt an old herd and his wife and their three daughters, Anna, Stana, and Laptitza.
'And if I,' said Stana, 'should be the one chosen, I would weave my husband a shirt which will keep him unscathed when he fights with dragons; when he goes through water he will never even be wet; or if through fire, it will not scorch him.'
'And I will have you,' 'And I you,' exclaimed two of his friends, and they all rode back to the palace together.
And then more days and nights passed, and this rumour was succeeded by another one-that Stana had procured some flax, and had dried it, and combed it, and spun it into linen, and sewed it herself into the shirt of which she had spoken over the strawberry beds.
Now the emperor had a stepmother, and she had a daughter by her first husband, who lived with her in the palace.
The girl's mother had always believed that her daughter would be empress, and not the 'Milkwhite Maiden,' the child of a mere shepherd.
At last, when everything else had failed, she managed to make her brother, who was king of the neighbouring country, declare war against the emperor, and besiege some of the frontier towns with a large army. This time her scheme was successful.
No words were needed; he saw with his own eyes that Laptitza had not kept the promise she had made at the strawberry beds, and, though it nearly broke his heart, he must give orders for her punishment.
Not many days after, the stepmother's wish was fulfilled.
In the place where they had been buried there sprang up two beautiful young aspens, and the stepmother, who hated the sight of the trees, which reminded her of her crime, gave orders that they should be uprooted.
In each day they added a year's growth, and each night they added a year's growth, and at dawn, when the stars faded out of the sky, they grew three years' growth in the twinkling of an eye, and their boughs swept across the palace windows.
What craft will not do soft words may attain, and if these do not succeed there still remains the resource of tears.
It was some time before the bait took, but at length-even emperors are only men!
'Well, well,' he said at last, 'have your way and cut down the trees; but out of one they shall make a bed for me, and out of the other, one for you!'
And with this the empress was forced to be content.
When the emperor was fast asleep, the bed began to crack loudly, and to the empress each crack had a meaning.
'Is it too heavy for you, little brother?' asked one of the beds.
By daybreak the empress had determined how to get rid of the beds.
She would have two others made exactly like them, and when the emperor had gone hunting they should be placed in his room.
This was done and the aspen beds were burnt in a large fire, till only a little heap of ashes was left.
But she had not seen that where the fire burnt brightest two sparks flew up, and, after floating in the air for a few moments, fell down into the great river that flows through the heart of the country.
'But what are we to do with you?' asked the fisherman.
And when he came back, what do you think he saw?
The boys grew fast.
In every day they grew a year's growth, and in every night another year's growth, but at dawn, when the stars were fading, they grew three years' growth in the twinkling of an eye.
And they grew in other things besides height, too.
Thrice in age, and thrice in wisdom, and thrice in knowledge.
And when three days and three nights had passed they were twelve years in age, twenty four in strength, and thirty six in wisdom.
'We wish to speak with the emperor,' said one of the boys.
'You must wait until he has finished his dinner,' replied the porter.
'No, while he is eating it,' said the second boy, stepping across the threshold.
'We desire to enter,' said one of the princes sharply to a servant who stood near the door.
'That is quite impossible,' replied the servant.
What boys are they?' said the emperor all in one breath.
The emperor, as he listened, grew red with anger.
'Set the dogs after them.'
'The emperor commands you to return,' panted he: 'the empress wishes to see you.'
'Take off your caps,' said one of the courtiers.
Where do you come from, and what do you want?'
'We are twins, two shoots from one stem, which has been broken, and half lies in the ground and half sits at the head of this table.
And a second cushion fell down.
'Let them take their silliness home,' said the empress.
When they reached the warlike expedition of the emperor three of the cushions fell down at once.
CHAPTER fifteen DOUBT
Marguerite Blakeney had watched the slight sable clad figure of Chauvelin, as he worked his way through the ball room.
Listlessly she sat in the small, still deserted boudoir, looking out through the curtained doorway on the dancing couples beyond: looking at them, yet seeing nothing, hearing the music, yet conscious of naught save a feeling of expectancy, of anxious, weary waiting.
Her mind conjured up before her the vision of what was, perhaps at this very moment, passing downstairs.
Ah! had Armand's life not been at stake! . . .
"Faith! your ladyship must have thought me very remiss," said a voice suddenly, close to her elbow.
"I had a deal of difficulty in delivering your message, for I could not find Blakeney anywhere at first . . ."
"I did find him at last," continued Lord Fancourt, "and gave him your message.
He said that he would give orders at once for the horses to be put to."
"Ah!" she said, still very absently, "you found my husband, and gave him my message?"
I could not manage to wake him up at first."
"Thank you very much," she said mechanically, trying to collect her thoughts.
Lord Fancourt was very attentive.
She scarcely heard what he said, and suddenly startled him by asking abruptly,--
"Lord Fancourt, did you perceive who was in the dining room just now besides Sir Percy Blakeney?"
"Why does your ladyship ask?"
"I know not . . .
Did you notice the time when you were there?"
"It must have been about five or ten minutes past one. . . .
I wonder what your ladyship is thinking about," he added, for evidently the fair lady's thoughts were very far away, and she had not been listening to his intellectual conversation.
But indeed her thoughts were not very far away: only one storey below, in this same house, in the dining room where sat Chauvelin still on the watch.
Had he failed?
For one instant that possibility rose before as a hope-the hope that the Scarlet Pimpernel had been warned by Sir Andrew, and that Chauvelin's trap had failed to catch his bird; but that hope soon gave way to fear.
Had he failed?
"Shall I find out if your ladyship's coach is ready," he said at last, tentatively.
But Lord Fancourt went, and still Chauvelin did not come.
Oh! what had happened?
Lord Grenville himself came presently to tell her that her coach was ready, and that Sir Percy was already waiting for her-ribbons in hand.
The crowd was very great, some of the Minister's guests were departing, others were leaning against the banisters watching the throng as it filed up and down the wide staircase.
"What has happened, dear lady?" he said, with affected surprise.
"Where? When?"
"You are torturing me, Chauvelin.
What happened in the dining room at one o'clock just now?"
She spoke in a whisper, trusting that in the general hubbub of the crowd her words would remain unheeded by all, save the man at her side.
"Nobody."
"Yes! we have failed-perhaps . . ."
"Chauvelin, I worked for you, sincerely, earnestly . . . remember . . ."
"Which means that a brave man's blood will be on my hands," she said, with a shudder.
Surely at the present moment you must hope, as I do, that the enigmatical Scarlet Pimpernel will start for Calais to day-"
"And that is?"
But Chauvelin remained urbane, sarcastic, mysterious; not a line betrayed to the poor, anxious woman whether she need fear or whether she dared to hope.
Downstairs on the landing she was soon surrounded.
"Give me some hope, my little Chauvelin," she pleaded.
"Pray heaven that the thread may not snap," he repeated, with his enigmatic smile.
But the islanders, while to the utmost of their power they repelled force with force, implored the assistance of the Divine mercy, and with constant imprecations invoked the vengeance of Heaven; and though such as curse cannot inherit the kingdom of God, yet it was believed, that those who were justly cursed on account of their impiety, soon suffered the penalty of their guilt at the avenging hand of God.
Chap. twenty seven.
Cuthbert, humbly submitting himself to this man's direction, from him received both a knowledge of the Scriptures, and an example of good works.
After he had departed to the Lord, Cuthbert became provost of that monastery, where he instructed many in the rule of monastic life, both by the authority of a master, and the example of his own behaviour.
In order to correct the error of both sorts, he often went forth from the monastery, sometimes on horseback, but oftener on foot, and went to the neighbouring townships, where he preached the way of truth to such as had gone astray; which Boisil also in his time had been wont to do.
It was then the custom of the English people, that when a clerk or priest came to a township, they all, at his summons, flocked together to hear the Word; willingly heard what was said, and still more willingly practised those things that they could hear and understand.
He was wont chiefly to resort to those places and preach in those villages which were situated afar off amid steep and wild mountains, so that others dreaded to go thither, and whereof the poverty and barbarity rendered them inaccessible to other teachers.
How the same saint Cuthbert, living the life of an Anchorite, by his prayers obtained a spring in a dry soil, and had a crop from seed sown by the labour of his hands out of season.
When, after expelling the enemy, he had, with the help of the brethren, built himself a narrow dwelling, with a mound about it, and the necessary cells in it, to wit, an oratory and a common living room, he ordered the brothers to dig a pit in the floor of the room, although the ground was hard and stony, and no hopes appeared of any spring.
When they had done this relying upon the faith and prayers of the servant of God, the next day it was found to be full of water, and to this day affords abundance of its heavenly bounty to all that resort thither.
He also desired that instruments for husbandry might be brought him, and some wheat; but having prepared the ground and sown the wheat at the proper season, no sign of a blade, not to speak of ears, had sprouted from it by the summer.
Following the example of the blessed Apostles, he adorned the episcopal dignity by his virtuous deeds; for he both protected the people committed to his charge by constant prayer, and roused them, by wholesome admonitions, to thoughts of Heaven.
He first showed in his own life what he taught others to do, a practice which greatly strengthens all teaching; for he was above all things inflamed with the fire of Divine charity, of sober mind and patient, most diligently intent on devout prayers, and kindly to all that came to him for comfort.
And when he offered up to God the Sacrifice of the saving Victim, he commended his prayer to the Lord, not with uplifted voice, but with tears drawn from the bottom of his heart.
There was a certain priest, called Herebert, a man of holy life, who had long been united with the man of God, Cuthbert, in the bonds of spiritual friendship.
Whilst they alternately entertained one another with draughts of the celestial life, the bishop, among other things, said, "Brother Herebert, remember at this time to ask me and speak to me concerning all whereof you have need to ask and speak; for, when we part, we shall never again see one another with bodily eyesight in this world.
The most reverend father died in the isle of Farne, earnestly entreating the brothers that he might also be buried there, where he had served no small time under the Lord's banner.
In order to show forth the great glory of the life after death of the man of God, Cuthbert, whereas the loftiness of his life before his death had been revealed by the testimony of many miracles, when he had been buried eleven years, Divine Providence put it into the minds of the brethren to take up his bones.
They thought to find them dry and all the rest of the body consumed and turned to dust, after the manner of the dead, and they desired to put them into a new coffin, and to lay them in the same place, but above the pavement, for the honour due to him.
They made known their resolve to Bishop Eadbert, and he consented to it, and bade them to be mindful to do it on the anniversary of his burial.
The miracles of healing, sometimes wrought in that place testify to the merits of them both; of some of these we have before preserved the memory in the book of his life.
But in this History we have thought fit to add some others which have lately come to our knowledge.
Of one that was cured of a palsy at his tomb.
When he got up, he felt one half of his body, from the head to the foot, struck with palsy, and with great trouble made his way home by the help of a staff.
He did accordingly as he had determined, and supporting his weak limbs with a staff, entered the church.
There prostrating himself before the body of the man of God, he prayed with pious earnestness, that, through his intercession, the Lord might be propitious to him.
As he prayed, he seemed to fall into a deep sleep, and, as he was afterwards wont to relate, felt a large and broad hand touch his head, where the pain lay, and likewise pass over all that part of his body which had been benumbed by the disease, down to his feet.
Gradually the pain departed and health returned.
Then he awoke, and rose up in perfect health, and returning thanks to the Lord for his recovery, told the brothers what had been done for him; and to the joy of them all, returned the more zealously, as if chastened by the trial of his affliction, to the service which he was wont before to perform with care.
Moreover, the very garments which had been on Cuthbert's body, dedicated to God, either while he was alive, or after his death, were not without the virtue of healing, as may be seen in the book of his life and miracles, by such as shall read it.
Chap. thirty two.
Of one who was lately cured of a disease in his eye at the relics of saint Cuthbert.
Nor is that cure to be passed over in silence, which was performed by his relics three years ago, and was told me lately by the brother himself, on whom it was wrought.
In that monastery was a youth whose eyelid was disfigured by an unsightly tumour, which growing daily greater, threatened the loss of the eye.
The physicians endeavoured to mitigate it by applying ointments, but in vain. Some said it ought to be cut off; others opposed this course, for fear of greater danger.
The brother having long laboured under this malady, when no human means availed to save his eye, but rather, it grew daily worse, on a sudden, through the grace of the mercy of God, it came to pass that he was cured by the relics of the holy father, Cuthbert.
For when the brethren found his body uncorrupted, after having been many years buried, they took some part of the hair, to give, as relics, to friends who asked for them, or to show, in testimony of the miracle.
One of the priests of the monastery, named Thruidred, who is now abbot there, had a small part of these relics by him at that time.
The priest, having given his friend as much as he thought fit, gave the rest to the youth to put back into its place.
INDIANA
Life had assumed a more settled and orderly course.
Thomas Lincoln, concluding that Kentucky was no country for a poor man, determined to seek his fortune in Indiana.
He had heard of rich and unoccupied lands in Perry County in that State, and thither he determined to go.
He met with only one accident on his way: his raft capsized in the Ohio River, but he fished up his kit of tools and most of the ardent spirits, and arrived safely at the place of a settler named Posey, with whom he left his odd invoice of household goods for the wilderness, while he started on foot to look for a home in the dense forest.
He selected a spot which pleased him in his first day's journey.
Insufficient bedding and clothing, a few pans and kettles, were their sole movable wealth.
They relied on Lincoln's kit of tools for their furniture, and on his rifle for their food.
At Posey's they hired a wagon and literally hewed a path through the wilderness to their new habitation near Little Pigeon Creek, a mile and a half east of Gentryville, in a rich and fertile forest country.
Thomas Lincoln, with the assistance of his wife and children, built a temporary shelter of the sort called in the frontier language "a half faced camp"; merely a shed of poles, which defended the inmates on three sides from foul weather, but left them open to its inclemency in front.
They moved into the latter before it was half completed; for by this time the Sparrows had followed the Lincolns from Kentucky, and the half faced camp was given up to them.
A few three legged stools; a bedstead made of poles stuck between the logs in the angle of the cabin, the outside corner supported by a crotched stick driven into the ground; the table, a huge hewed log standing on four legs; a pot, kettle, and skillet, and a few tin and pewter dishes were all the furniture.
The rank woods were full of malaria, and singular epidemics from time to time ravaged the settlements.
In many cases those who apparently recovered lingered for years with health seriously impaired.
Among the Pioneers of Pigeon Creek, so ill fed, ill housed, and uncared for, there was little prospect of recovery from such a grave disorder.
The Sparrows, husband and wife, died early in October, and Nancy Hanks Lincoln followed them after an interval of a few days. Thomas Lincoln made the coffins for his dead "out of green lumber cut with a whipsaw," and they were all buried, with scant ceremony, in a little clearing of the forest.
[Footnote: A stone has been placed over the site of the grave "by p e Studebaker, of south bend indiana." The stone bears the following inscription: "Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of President Lincoln, died october fifth, a d eighteen eighteen, aged thirty five years.
She had a store of household goods which filled a four horse wagon borrowed of Ralph Grume, Thomas Lincoln's brother in law, to transport the bride to Indiana.
The lack of doors and floors was at once corrected.
She dressed the children in warmer clothing and put them to sleep in comfortable beds.
With this slight addition to their resources the family were much improved in appearance, behavior, and self respect.
Thomas Lincoln joined the Baptist church at Little Pigeon in eighteen twenty three; his oldest child, Sarah, followed his example three years later.
They were known as active and consistent members of that communion.
Such a woman as Sarah Bush could not be careless of so important a matter as the education of her children, and they made the best use of the scanty opportunities the neighborhood afforded.
There were some schools so-called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond 'readin', writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three.' If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard.
There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education." But in the case of this ungainly boy there was no necessity of any external incentive.
He learned to write, first, that he might have an accomplishment his playmates had not; then that he might help his elders by writing their letters, and enjoy the feeling of usefulness which this gave him; and finally that he might copy what struck him in his reading and thus make it his own for future use.
Had it not been for that interior spur which kept his clear spirit at its task, his schools could have done little for him; for, counting his attendance under Riney and Hazel in Kentucky, and under Dorsey, Crawford, and Swaney in Indiana, it amounted to less than a year in all.
The schools were much alike.
After a few months of desultory instruction young Abraham knew all that these vagrant literati could teach him. His last school days were passed with one Swaney in eighteen twenty six, who taught at a distance of four and a half miles from the Lincoln cabin.
The nine miles of walking doubtless seemed to Thomas Lincoln a waste of time, and the lad was put at steady work and saw no more of school.
But it is questionable whether he lost anything by being deprived of the ministrations of the backwoods dominies.
When his tasks ended, his studies became the chief pleasure of his life.
In all the intervals of his work-in which he never took delight, knowing well enough that he was born for something better than that-he read, wrote, and ciphered incessantly.
But his voracity for anything printed was insatiable.
He would sit in the twilight and read a dictionary as long as he could see.
He could not afford to waste paper upon his original compositions.
He wrought his appointed tasks ungrudgingly, though without enthusiasm; but when his employer's day was over, his own began.
john Hanks says: "When Abe and I returned to the house from work he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread, take down a book, sit down, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read." The picture may be lacking in grace, but its truthfulness is beyond question.
The habit remained with him always.
Some of his greatest work in later years was done in this grotesque Western fashion,--"sitting on his shoulder blades."
Some of his comrades remember still his bursts of righteous wrath, when a boy, against the wanton murder of turtles and other creatures.
At home he was the life of the singularly assorted household, which consisted, besides his parents and himself, of his own sister, mrs Lincoln's two girls and boy, Dennis Hanks, the legacy of the dying Sparrow family, and john Hanks (son of the carpenter Joseph with whom Thomas Lincoln learned his trade), who came from Kentucky several years after the others.
It was a happy and united household: brothers and sisters and cousins living peacefully under the gentle rule of the good stepmother, but all acknowledging from a very early period the supremacy in goodness and cleverness of their big brother Abraham.
mrs Lincoln, not long before her death, gave striking testimony of his winning and loyal character.
She said to mr Herndon: "I can say, what scarcely one mother in a thousand can say, Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused in fact or appearance to do anything I asked him.
His mind and mine-what little I had-seemed to run together....
"We are making no claim of early saintship for him.
He was merely a good boy, with sufficient wickedness to prove his humanity.
It is also reported that he sometimes impeded the celerity of harvest operations by making burlesque speeches, or worse than that, comic sermons, from the top of some tempting stump, to the delight of the hired hands and the exasperation of the farmer.
His budding talents as a writer were not always used discreetly.
From this arose occasional heart burnings and feuds, in which Abraham bore his part according to the custom of the country.
Despite his Quaker ancestry and his natural love of peace, he was no non resistant, and when he once entered upon a quarrel the opponent usually had the worst of it.
But he was generous and placable, and some of his best friends were those with whom he had had differences, and had settled them in the way then prevalent,--in a ring of serious spectators, calmly and judicially ruminant, under the shade of some spreading oak, at the edge of the timber.
Before we close our sketch of this period of Lincoln's life, it may not be amiss to glance for a moment at the state of society among the people with whom his lot was cast in these important years.
Their houses were usually of one room, built of round logs with the bark on.
We have known a man to gain the sobriquet of "Split log Mitchell" by indulging in the luxury of building a cabin of square hewn timbers.
Their shoes were of the same, and a good Western authority calls a wet moccasin "a decent way of going barefoot." About the time, however, when Lincoln grew to manhood, garments of wool and of tow began to be worn, dyed with the juice of the butternut or white walnut, and the hides of neat cattle began to be tanned.
There was little public worship.
If a man was possessed of a wagon, the family rode luxuriously; but as a rule the men walked and the women went on horseback with the little children in their arms.
Arriving at the place of meeting, which was some log cabin if the weather was foul, or the shade of a tree if it was fair, the assembled worshipers threw their provisions into a common store and picnicked in neighborly companionship.
In these affairs the women naturally took no part; but weddings, which were entertainments scarcely less rude and boisterous, were their own peculiar province.
The guests assembled in the morning.
They were full of strange superstitions.
The belief in witchcraft had long ago passed away with the smoke of the fagots from old and New England, but it survived far into this century in Kentucky and the lower halves of Indiana and Illinois-touched with a peculiar tinge of African magic.
The pioneers believed in it for good and evil.
Their veterinary practice was mostly by charms and incantations; and when a person believed himself bewitched, a shot at the image of the witch with a bullet melted out of a half dollar was the favorite curative agency.
A dog crossing the hunter's path spoiled his day, unless he instantly hooked his little fingers together, and pulled till the animal disappeared.
The commonest occurrences were heralds of death and doom.
A bird lighting in a window, a dog baying at certain hours, the cough of a horse in the direction of a child, the sight, or worse still, the touch of a dead snake, heralded domestic woe.
They must fell trees for fence rails before noon, and in the waxing of the moon.
Among these people, and in all essential respects one of them, Abraham Lincoln passed his childhood and youth.
He was not remarkably precocious.
His mind was slow in acquisition, and his powers of reasoning and rhetoric improved constantly to the end of his life, at a rate of progress marvelously regular and sustained.
He occasionally astounded his companions by such glimpses of occult science as that the world is round and that the sun is relatively stationary.
He wrote, for his own amusement and edification, essays on politics, of which gentlemen of standing who had been favored with a perusal said with authority, at the cross roads grocery, "The world can't beat it." One or two of these compositions got into print and vastly increased the author's local fame.
But perhaps, after all, the thing which gained and fixed his mastery over his fellows was to a great degree his gigantic stature and strength.
He attained his full growth, six feet and four inches, two years before he came of age.
He rarely met with a man he could not easily handle.
His strength is still a tradition in Spencer County.
One aged man says that he has seen him pick up and carry away a chicken house weighing six hundred pounds.
At another time, seeing some men preparing a contrivance for lifting some large posts, Abe quickly shouldered the posts and took them where they were needed.
But there is evidence that he felt too large for the life of a farmhand on Pigeon Creek, and his thoughts naturally turned, after the manner of restless boys in the West, to the river, as the avenue of escape from the narrow life of the woods.
But in eighteen twenty eight an opportunity offered for a little glimpse of the world outside, and the boy gladly embraced it.
He was hired by mr Gentry, the proprietor of the neighboring village of Gentryville, to accompany his son with a flat boat of produce to New Orleans and intermediate landings.
The voyage was made successfully, and Abraham gained great credit for his management and sale of the cargo.
The next autumn, john Hanks, the steadiest and most trustworthy of his family, went to Illinois.
His daughter Sarah or Nancy, for she was called by both names, who married Aaron Grigsby a few years before, had died in childbirth. The emigrating family consisted of the Lincolns, john Johnston, mrs Lincoln's son, and her daughters, mrs Hall and mrs Hanks, with their husbands.
He met them with a frank and energetic welcome.
They numbered men enough to build without calling in their neighbors, and immediately put up a cabin on the north fork of the Sangamon River.
The family thus housed and sheltered, one more bit of filial work remained for Abraham before assuming his virile independence.
With the assistance of john Hanks he plowed fifteen acres, and split, from the tall walnut trees of the primeval forest, enough rails to surround them with a fence.
EARLY LAW PRACTICE
The suits consisted of actions of tort and assumpsit.
It may be true; if it must, let it.
Broken by it I, too, may be; bow to it, I never will.
It shall not deter me.
But if after all we should fail, be it so.
Douglas has not been here since you left.
Noah, I still think, will be elected very easily.
The very moment a speaker is elected, write me who he is.
You know I am never sanguine; but I believe we will carry the State.
Yesterday Douglas, having chosen to consider himself insulted by something in the 'Journal,' undertook to cane Francis in the street.
He sought a quarrel with the latter, during their canvass in eighteen thirty eight, in a grocery, with the usual result.
I was much, very much, wounded myself, at his being left out.
This demoralizing doctrine had been promulgated by Jackson, and acted upon for so many years that it was too much to expect of human nature that the Whigs should not adopt it, partially at least, when their turn came, But we are left in no doubt as to the way in which Lincoln regarded the unseemly scramble.
We give this remarkable letter entire, from the manuscript submitted to us by the late john t Stuart:
To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.
If I could be myself, I would rather remain at home with Judge Logan.
I can write no more.
As he was passing the house of Boo'koo, the big rat, that worthy gentleman invited him in.
So he went in, sat down, and remarked: "My father has died, and has left me a hive of honey.
I would like you to come and help me to eat it."
Of course Bookoo jumped at the offer, and he and the hare started off immediately.
In the midst of the feast, who should appear at the foot of the tree but Sim'ba, the lion?
Looking up, and seeing them eating, he asked, "Who are you?"
Speak, I tell you!"
This made Bookoo so scared that he blurted out, "It's only us!"
Upon this the hare said to him: "You just wrap me up in this straw, call to the lion to keep out of the way, and then throw me down.
After waiting a minute or two, Simba roared out, "Well, come down, I say!" and, there being no help for it, the big rat came down.
As soon as he was within reach, the lion caught hold of him, and asked, "Who was up there with you?"
Didn't you see him when I threw him down?"
"Of course I didn't see him," replied the lion, in an incredulous tone, and, without wasting further time, he ate the big rat, and then searched around for the hare, but could not find him.
"Whose honey?" inquired Kobay, cautiously.
"Oh, all right; I'm with you," said the tortoise, eagerly; and away they went.
When they arrived at the great calabash tree they climbed up with their straw, smoked out the bees, sat down, and began to eat.
Just then mr Simba, who owned the honey, came out again, and, looking up, inquired, "Who are you, up there?"
You told me this honey was yours; am I right in suspecting that it belongs to Simba?"
So, when the lion asked again, "Who are you?" he answered, "It's only us." The lion said, "Come down, then;" and the tortoise answered, "We're coming."
I'll wait for you below.
He can't hurt you, you know."
"All right," said Kobay; but while he was wrapping the hare up he said to himself: "This fellow wants to run away, and leave me to bear the lion's anger.
So the lion, being deceived, took him by the tail and whirled him around, but just as he was going to knock him on the ground he slipped out of his grasp and ran away, and Simba had the mortification of losing him again.
Angry and disappointed, he turned to the tree and called to Kobay, "You come down, too."
When the tortoise reached the ground, the lion said, "You're pretty hard; what can I do to make you eatable?"
"Oh, that's easy," laughed Kobay; "just put me in the mud and rub my back with your paw until my shell comes off."
Immediately on hearing this, Simba carried Kobay to the water, placed him in the mud, and began, as he supposed, to rub his back; but the tortoise had slipped away, and the lion continued rubbing on a piece of rock until his paws were raw.
When he glanced down at them he saw they were bleeding, and, realizing that he had again been outwitted, he said, "Well, the hare has done me to day, but I'll go hunting now until I find him."
Without loss of time the lion climbed the mountain, and soon arrived at the place indicated, only to find that there was no one at home.
Stopping at once, he said to mrs Soongoora: "You go back, my dear.
Simba, the lion, has passed this way, and I think he must be looking for me."
But she replied, "I will not go back; I will follow you, my husband."
Go back."
So he persuaded her, and she went back; but he kept on, following the footmarks, and saw-as he had suspected-that they went into his house.
Lion is inside, is he?" Then, cautiously going back a little way, he called out: "How d'ye do, house?
Then Soongoora burst out laughing, and shouted: "Oho, mr Simba!
"Oh, I think you'll have to do the waiting," cried the hare; and then he ran away, the lion following.
CHAPTER nineteen
Paul could not plead.
It was he who, in a way, had cast her off.
It was final, as far as he was concerned.
He could do nothing-not even beg his dearest lady to plead for him.
As in his first speech, so in his campaign, he failed.
He had been chosen for his youth, his joyousness, his magnetism, his radiant promise of great things to come.
He went about the constituency an anxious, haggard man, working himself to death without being able to awaken a spark of emotion in the heart of anybody.
On the other hand, Silas Finn, with his enthusiasms, and his aspect of an inspired prophet, made alarming progress.
He swept the multitude.
But hope reigned among his official supporters, whereas depression began to descend over Paul's brilliant host.
"They want stirring up a bit," said the Conservative agent despondently.
They nearly raised the roof off last night.
"I do my best," said Paul coldly, but the reproach cut deep.
Once on coming out of his headquarters he met Silas, who was walking up the street with two or three of his committee men.
This was the first time they had come together since the afternoon of revelation, and there was a moment of constraint during which Silas tugged at his streaked beard and looked with mournful wistfulness at his son.
"I see you're putting up an excellent fight."
"It's the Lord's battle.
If it weren't, do you think I would not let you win?"
The same old cry.
Through sheer repetition, Paul began almost to believe in it.
In his father's eyes he recognized, with a pang, the glow of a faith which he had lost.
"That's the advantage of a belief in the Almighty's personal interest," he answered, with a touch of irony: "whatever happens, one is not easily disillusioned."
"That is true, my son," said Silas.
"Jane is well?" Paul asked, after an instant's pause, breaking off the profitless discussion.
"Very well."
"And Barney Bill?"
"He upbraids me bitterly for what I have said."
Paul smiled at the curiously stilted phrase.
"Tell him from me not to do it.
My love to them both."
They shook hands again, and Paul drove off in the motor car that had been placed at his disposal during the election, and Silas continued his sober walk with his committee men up the muddy street.
Whereupon Paul conceived a sudden hatred for the car.
It was but the final artistic touch to this comedy of mockery of which he had been the victim....
He turned suddenly to his companion, the Conservative agent.
The agent, not being versed in speculations regarding the attributes of the Deity, stared; then, disinclined to commit himself, took refuge in platitude.
"That's rot," said Paul.
"If there's an Almighty, He must move in a common sense way; otherwise the whole of this planet would have busted up long ago.
"Certainly not," said the agent, fervently.
"Then if God supported it, it wouldn't be common sense on His part.
It would be merely mysterious?"
"Our opponent undoubtedly has been making free with the name of the Almighty in his speeches.
As a matter of fact he's rather crazy on the subject.
I don't think it would be a bad move to make a special reference to it.
It's all damned hypocrisy.
There's a chap in the old French play-what's his name?"
"That's it.
You can score tremendously.
I never thought of it before.
By George! you can get him in the neck if you like."
"But I don't like," said Paul.
"It's the difference between dirt and cleanliness," said Paul. "Besides, as I told you at the outset, mr Finn and I are close personal friends, and I have the highest regard for his character.
"It wasn't with mr Finn's cognizance.
That's a devilish good catch phrase," he added, starting forward in the joy of his newborn epigram: "Devilish good.
'The spoiled minion of the Almighty's ante chamber.' It'll become historical."
"If it does," said Paul, "it will be associated with the immediate retirement of the Conservative candidate."
It was Paul's turn to start forward.
"My dear Wilson," said he, "if you or anybody else thinks I'm a man to talk through his hat, I'll retire at once.
I don't care a damn about myself.
Not a little tuppenny damn. What the devil does it matter to me whether I get into Parliament or not?
Nothing.
Not a tuppenny damn.
You can't understand.
It's the party and the country.
For myself, personally, the whole thing can go to blazes.
"But while I'm candidate everything I say I mean.
I mean it intensely-with all my soul.
The agent watched the workings of his candidate's dark clear cut face. He was very proud of his candidate, and found it difficult to realize that there were presumably sane people who would not vote for him on sight.
A lingering memory of grammar school days flashed on him when he told his wife later of the conversation, and he likened Paul to a wrathful Apollo.
"It was the merest of suggestions, mr Savelli.
Heaven knows we don't want to descend to personalities, and your retirement would be an unqualifiable disaster.
But-you'll pardon my mentioning it-you began this discussion by asking me whether the Almighty had common sense."
"Well, has He or not?"
"Of course," said Wilson.
If he could have met enthusiasm with enthusiasm, all would have been well.
The awakener of England could have captivated hearts by glowing pictures of a great and glorious future.
It would have been a counter blaze to that lit by his opponent, which flamed in all the effulgence of a reckless reformer's promise, revealing a Utopia in which there would be no drunkenness, no crime, no poverty, and in which the rich, apparently, would have to work very hard in order to support the poor in comfortable idleness.
But beyond proving fallacies, Paul could do nothing-and even then, has there ever been a mob since the world began susceptible to logical argument?
So, all through the wintry days of the campaign, Silas Finn carried his fiery cross through the constituency, winning frenzied adherents, while Paul found it hard to rally the faithful round the drooping standard of saint George.
Paul addressed his last meeting on the eve of the poll.
By a supreme effort he regained some of his former fire and eloquence.
He drove home exhausted, and going straight to bed slept like a dog till morning.
The servant who woke him brought a newspaper to the bedside.
"Something to interest you, sir."
Paul looked at the headline indicated by the man.
"Hickney Heath Election.
Liberal Candidate's Confession.
The spectre of the prison had risen up against him.
Towards the end of Silas Finn's speech, at his last great meeting, a man, sitting in the body of the hall near the platform, got up and interrupted him.
"What about your own past life?
There was an angry tumult, and the interrupter would have fared badly, but for Silas Finn holding up his hand and imploring silence.
"I challenge the candidate to deny," said the man, as soon as he could be heard, "that his real name is Silas Kegworthy, and that he underwent three years' penal servitude for murderously assaulting his wife."
Then the candidate braced himself and said: "The bare facts are true. But I have lived stainlessly in the fear of God and in the service of humanity for thirty years.
I have sought absolution for a moment of mad anger under awful provocation in unremitting prayer and in trying to save the souls and raise the fortunes of my fellow men.
Is that all you have against me?"
"That's all," said the man.
"It is for you, electors of Hickney Heath, to judge me."
He sat down amid tumultuous cheers, and the man who had interrupted him, after some rough handling, managed to make his escape.
The chairman then put a vote of confidence in the candidate, which was carried by acclamation, and the meeting broke up.
Such were the essential facts in the somewhat highly coloured newspaper story which Paul read in stupefied horror.
He dressed quickly and went to his sitting room, where he rang up his father's house on the telephone.
Jane's voice met his ear.
"It's Paul speaking," he replied.
How is my father?"
"He's greatly upset," came the voice.
Oh, it was a cruel, cowardly blow."
"no Don't you?"
"I?
Does either of you think that I-?"
"No, no," came the voice, now curiously tearful.
"I didn't mean that.
I forgot you've not had time to find out."
"Were you at the meeting?"
"Yes.
Oh, Paul, it was splendid to see him face the audience.
He spoke so simply and with such sorrowful dignity.
But it has broken him.
"It's all that's damnable.
It's tragic.
He rang off.
Almost immediately Wilson was announced.
He came into the room radiant.
"You were right about the divine common sensicality," said he.
He was a chubby little man of forty, with coarse black hair and scrubby moustache, not of the type that readily appreciates the delicacies of a situation.
"I would give anything for it not to have happened," he said.
Wilson opened his eyes.
An ex convict-it's enough to damn any candidate.
But we want to make sure.
Now I've got an idea."
Paul turned on him angrily.
"I'll have no capital made out of it whatsoever.
It's a foul thing to bring such an accusation up against a man who has lived a spotless life for thirty years.
"There's nothing to be done, except to find out who put up the man to make the announcement."
"He did it on his own," Wilson replied warmly.
"None of our people would resort to a dirty trick like that."
"That's quite a different matter."
"I can't see much difference," said Paul.
But he could not eat.
He was both stricken with shame and moved to the depths by immense pity.
Each had made his way from the slum, each had been guided by an inner light-was Silas Finn's fantastic belief less of an ignis fatuus than his own?--each had sought to get away from a past, each was a child of Ishmael, each, in his own way, had lived romantically.
He was very near him.
The shame of the prison struck him as it had struck the old man.
He saw him bowed down under the blow, and he clenched his hands in a torture of anger and indignation.
And to crown all, came the intolerable conviction, in the formation of which Wilson's triumphant words had not been necessary, that if he won the election it would be due to this public dishonouring of his own father.
He walked about the room in despair, and at last halted before the mantelpiece on which still stood the photograph of the Princess in its silver frame.
Suddenly he remembered that he had not told her of this incident in his family history.
He saw her proud lips curl.
He tore the photograph from its frame and threw it into the fire and watched it burn.
He had far sterner things to do than shriek his heart out over a woman in an alien star.
He had his life to reconstruct in the darkness threatening and mocking; but at last he had truth for a foundation; on that he would build in defiance of the world.
In the midst of these fine thoughts it occurred to him that he had hidden the prison episode in his father's career from the Winwoods as well as from the Princess.
He went downstairs, and found the Colonel and Miss Winwood in the dining room.
Their faces were grave.
He came to them with outstretched arms-a familiar gesture, one doubtless inherited from his Sicilian ancestry.
I didn't tell you.
You must forgive me."
"I don't blame you, my boy," said Colonel Winwood.
You had no right to tell us."
He thanked them simply.
"It's hateful," said he, "to think I may win the election on account of this.
It's loathsome." He shuddered.
"I quite agree with you," said the Colonel.
"But in politics one has often to put up with hateful things in order to serve one's country. That's the sacrifice a high minded man is called upon to make."
"Besides," said Miss Winwood, "let us hope it won't affect votes.
All the papers say that the vote of confidence was passed amid scenes of enthusiasm."
They understood.
A little while later they drove off with him to his committee room in the motor car gay with his colours.
twelve
Symphony and Symphonic Poem
That adventurous spirit, Claudio Monteverde, who nearly three hundred years ago made himself responsible for the first feeble utterances of an orchestra that tried to say something for itself, divined the possibilities of expression in varying combinations of tone quality and gave vigorous impulse to the germ of the symphony already existing in the formless instrumental preludes and interludes of his predecessors among opera makers.
The prelude developed into the operatic overture whose business it became to prepare the spectator for what followed.
As the vocal aria was the result of the simple folk song combined with the intense craving of song's master molders for individual expression, so instrumental music striving to walk alone, without support from words, gained vital elements through the discovery that various phases of mental disposition might be indicated by alternating dance tunes differing in rhythm and movement, according to Nature's own law of contrasts.
That unity of purpose was essential to the effectiveness of the diversity was instinctively discerned.
These compositions were usually written for the harpsichord and perhaps three instruments of the viol order, the master himself playing the leading melody on the violin.
Absolute music was set once for all on the right path by them.
It ceased to be a mere grouping of dances, the name suite being applied to that, and struck out into independent excursions in the domain of fancy.
The prevailing melody of its monophonic style proved suitable to furnish a subject for the most animated discussion.
A German critic has jocosely remarked that the early writers meant the sonata to show first what they could do, second what they could feel, and third how glad they were to have finished.
Time vastly increased its importance.
Two subjects, a melody in the tonic, another usually in the dominant, came to set forth the exposition of the opening movement, leading to a free development, with various episodes, and an assured return to the original statement.
His thirty years of musical service to the house of Esterhazy, with an orchestra increasing from sixteen to twenty four pieces to experiment on, as the solo virtuoso experiments on piano or violin, brought him wholly under the spell of the instruments.
Their individual characteristics afforded him continually new suggestions in regard to tone coloring, and he rose often to audacity, for his time, in his harmonic devices.
Grace and spirit, originality of invention, joyous abandon, a fancy controlled by a studious mind, a profusion of quaint humor and a proper division of light and shade, combine to give the dominant note to his music.
His symphonies recall the fairy tale, with its sparkling "once upon a time," and yet like it are not without their mysterious shadows.
With Mozart, whose life work began after, but ended before that of Haydn, influencing and being influenced by the latter, the symphony broadened in scope and grew richer in warmth of melodious expression, definiteness of plan and completeness of form.
His profoundly poetic musical nature, with its high capacity for joy and sorrow and infinite longing, was reflected in all that he wrote.
By means of a generous employment of free counterpoint, in other words a kind of polyphony in which the various voices use different melodies in harmonious combination, he gained a potent auxiliary in his cunning workmanship, and emphasized the folly of rejecting the contrapuntal experiences, of, for instance, a Sebastian Bach. Musical instruments, as well as musical materials, were his servants in developing the glowing fancies of his marvelously constructive brain.
The crowning glory of his graceful perfection of outline and detail is the noble spirit of serenity which illumines all its beauty.
Beethoven further advanced the technique of the symphony, and proved its power to "strike fire from the soul of man." Varying his themes while repeating them, adding spice to his episodes and working out his entire scheme with consummate skill, he was able to construct from a motive of a few notes a mighty epic tone poem.
He translated into superb orchestral pages the dreams of the human heart, the soul's longing for liberty and all the holiest aspirations of the inner being.
He discussed in tones problems of man's life and destiny, ever displaying sublime faith that Fate, however cruel, is powerless to crush the spiritual being, the real individuality.
His conflicts never fail to end in triumph.
Twenty six years younger than Beethoven Schubert lived but a year after he had passed away and died in eighteen twenty eight, two years later than Weber, and felt the glow of the spirit of romanticism.
From the perennial fount of song within his breast there streamed fresh melodious strains through his symphonies, the ninth and last of which, the C major, ranks him with the great symphonists.
Ultra romanticism was foreign to the nature and repulsive to the tastes of the refined, elegant Mendelssohn, yet in spite of himself its influence crept gently into his polished works.
This brings us to Hector Berlioz, the famous French symphonist, the exponent par excellence of programme music, that is, music intended to illustrate a special story.
He lived from eighteen o three to eighteen sixty nine, and because of his audacity in using new and startling tonal effects was called the most flagrant musical heretic of the nineteenth century.
He was the first to impress on the world the idea of music as a definite language. His recurrent themes, called "fixed ideas," prefigured Wagner's "leading motives." His skill in combining instruments added new lustre to orchestration.
His four famous symphonic works are: "Fantastic Symphony," "Grand Funeral and Triumphal Symphony," "Harold in Italy" and "Romeo and Juliet." In a preface to the first he thus explains his ideas: "The plan of a musical drama without words, requires to be explained beforehand.
The programme (which is indispensable to the perfect comprehension of the work) ought therefore to be considered in the light of the spoken text of an opera, serving to lead up to the piece of music, and indicate the character and expression."
From programme music came the symphonic poem of which Franz Liszt was the creator.
Camille Saint Saens, without doubt the most original and intellectual modern French composer, who at sixty seven years of age is still in the midst of his activity, and who has made his own the spirit of the classic composers, owes to the symphonic poem a great part of his reputation, and has also written symphonies of great value.
His orchestration is distinguished by its clarity, power and exquisite coloring.
A strong national flavor is also felt in the work of Christian Sinding, the Norwegian, whose D minor symphony has been styled "a piece born of the gloomy romanticism of the North." Edward Grieg, known as the incarnation of the strong, vigorous, breezy spirit of the land of the midnight sun, has put some of his most characteristic work into symphonic poems and orchestral suites.
The first composer to convey a message from the North in tones to the European world was Gade, the Dane, known as the Symphony Master of the North, who was born in eighteen seventeen and died in eighteen ninety.
It is impossible to mention in a brief essay all the great workers in symphonic forms.
One Titanic spirit, Johannes Brahms, (eighteen thirty three to eighteen ninety seven) who succeeded in striking the dominant note of musical sublimity amid modern unrest, is reserved for our final consideration.
dr Riemann writes of him, "From Bach he inherited the depth, from Haydn, the humor, from Mozart, the charm, from Beethoven, the strength, from Schubert, the intimateness of his art.
Truly a wonderfully gifted nature that was able to absorb such a fulness of great gifts and still not lose the best of gifts-the strong individuality which makes the master."
Wonderful is the power of instrumental music, absolute music without words, that may convey impressions, deep and lasting, no words could give.
CHAPTER twenty
THE DRIFT OF POLITICS
The boasted finality was a broken reed; the life boat of compromise a hopeless wreck.
If the agreement of a generation could be thus annulled in a breath, was there any safety even in the Constitution itself?
Men were for or against the bill-every other political subject was left in abeyance.
The measure once passed, and the Compromise repealed, the first natural impulse was to combine, organize, and agitate for its restoration.
This was the ready made, common ground of cooperation.
If there were demagogues here and there among them, seeking merely to create a balance of power for bargain and sale, they were unimportant in number, and only of local influence, and soon became deserters. There was no mistaking the earnestness of the body of this faction.
A few fanatical men, who had made it the vehicle of violent expressions, had kept it under the ban of popular prejudice.
Despite objurgation and contempt, it had become since eighteen forty a constant and growing factor in politics.
This small party of antislavery veterans, over one hundred fifty eight thousand voters in the aggregate, and distributed in detachments of from three thousand to thirty thousand in twelve of the free States, now came to the front, and with its newspapers and speakers trained in the discussion of the subject, and its committees and affiliations already in action and correspondence, bore the brunt of the fight against the repeal.
Now, combining wisdom with opportunity, it became conciliatory, and, abating something of its abstractions, made itself the exponent of a demand for a present and practical reform-a simple return to the ancient faith and landmarks.
It labored specially to bring about the dissolution of the old party organizations and the formation of a new one, based upon the general policy of resisting the extension of slavery.
Since, however, the repeal had shaken but not obliterated old party lines, this effort succeeded only in favorable localities.
[Illustration: HISTORICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES IN eighteen fifty four SHOWING THE VARIOUS ACCESSIONS OF TERRITORY etc
For the present, party disintegration was slow; men were reluctant to abandon their old time principles and associations.
The united efforts of Douglas and the Administration held the body of the Northern Democrats to his fatal policy, though protests and defections became alarmingly frequent.
On the other hand, the great mass of Northern Whigs promptly opposed the repeal, and formed the bulk of the opposition, nevertheless losing perhaps as many pro slavery Whigs as they gained antislavery Democrats.
The real and effective gain, therefore, was the more or less thorough alliance of the Whig party and the Free soil party of the Northern States: wherever that was successful it gave immediate and available majorities to the opposition, which made their influence felt even in the very opening of the popular contest following the Congressional repeal.
It happened that this was a year for electing Congressmen.
The Nebraska bill did not pass till the end of May, and the political excitement was at once transferred from Washington to every district of the whole country.
It may be said with truth that the year eighteen fifty four formed one continuous and solid political campaign from January to November, rising in interest and earnestness from first to last, and engaging in the discussion more fully than had ever occurred in previous American history all the constituent elements of our population.
The Whig party, however, having carried two slave States for Scott in eighteen fifty two, and holding a strong minority in the remainder, was not so unanimous.
Seven Southern Representatives and two Southern Senators had voted against the Nebraska bill, and many individual voters condemned it as an act of bad faith-as the abandonment of the accepted "finality," and as the provocation of a dangerous antislavery reaction.
But public opinion in that part of the Union was fearfully tyrannical and intolerant; and opposition dared only to manifest itself to Democratic party organization-not to these Democratic party measures.
The Whigs of the South were therefore driven precipitately to division.
Those of extreme pro slavery views, like Dixon, of Kentucky,--who, when he introduced his amendment, declared, "Upon the question of slavery I know no Whiggery and no Democracy,"--went boldly and at once over into the Democratic camp, while those who retained their traditional party name and flag were sundered from their ancient allies in the Northern States by the impossibility of taking up the latter's antislavery war cry.
Operating in entire secrecy, the country was startled by the sudden appearance in one locality after another, on election day, of a potent and unsuspected political power, which in many instances pushed both the old organizations not only to disastrous but even to ridiculous defeat.
When, in the opening of the anti Nebraska contest, the Free soil leaders undertook the formation of a new party to supersede the old, they had, because of their generally democratic antecedents, with great unanimity proposed that it be called the "Republican" party, thus reviving the distinctive appellation by which the followers of Jefferson were known in the early days of the republic.
Considering the fact that Jefferson had originated the policy of slavery restriction in his draft of the ordinance of seventeen eighty four, the name became singularly appropriate, and wherever the Free soilers succeeded in forming a coalition it was adopted without question.
But the refusal of the Whigs in many States to surrender their name and organization, and more especially the abrupt appearance of the Know Nothings on the field of parties, retarded the general coalition between the Whigs and the Free soilers which so many influences favored.
As it turned out, a great variety of party names were retained or adopted in the Congressional and State campaigns of eighteen fifty four, the designation of "anti Nebraska" being perhaps the most common, and certainly for the moment the most serviceable, since denunciation of the Nebraska bill was the one all pervading bond of sympathy and agreement among men who differed very widely on almost all other political topics.
This affiliation, however, was confined exclusively to the free States.
Thus confronted, the Nebraska and anti Nebraska factions, or, more philosophically speaking, the pro slavery and antislavery sentiment of the several American States, battled for political supremacy with a zeal and determination only manifested on occasions of deep and vital concern to the welfare of the republic.
However languidly certain elements of American society may perform what they deem the drudgery of politics, they do not shrink from it when they hear warning of real danger.
The alarm of the nation on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was serious and startling.
All ranks and occupations therefore joined with a new energy in the contest it provoked. Particularly was the religious sentiment of the North profoundly moved by the moral question involved.
Perhaps for the first time in our modern politics, the pulpit vied with the press, and the Church with the campaign club, in the work of debate and propagandism.
The very inception of the struggle had provoked bitter words.
Douglas, seizing only too gladly the pretext to use denunciation instead of argument, replied in his opening speech, in turn stigmatizing them as "abolition confederates"
"assembled in secret conclave"
The gradual disruption of parties, and the new and radical attitudes assumed by men of independent thought, gave ample occasion to indulge in such epithets as "apostates," "renegades," and "traitors." Unusual acrimony grew out of the zeal of the Church and its ministers.
But they, on the other hand, persisted all the more earnestly in justifying their interference in moral questions wherever they appeared, and were clearly sustained by the public opinion of the North.
While the measure was yet under discussion in the House in March, New Hampshire led off by an election completely obliterating the eighty nine Democratic majority in her Legislature.
Connecticut followed in her footsteps early in April. Long before November it was evident that the political revolution among the people of the North was thorough, and that election day was anxiously awaited merely to record the popular verdict already decided.
The influence of this result upon parties, old and new, is perhaps best illustrated in the organization of the Thirty fourth Congress, chosen at these elections during the year eighteen fifty four, which witnessed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.
Each Congress, in ordinary course, meets for the first time about one year after its members are elected by the people, and the influence of politics during the interim needs always to be taken into account.
In the new Congress there were in the House, as nearly as the classification could be made, about one hundred eight anti Nebraska members, nearly forty Know Nothings, and about seventy five Democrats; the remaining members were undecided.
But as yet the new party was merely inchoate, its elements distrustful, jealous, and discordant; the feuds and battles of a quarter of a century were not easily forgotten or buried.
Of Revenge
For as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong, putteth the law out of office.
And Solomon, I am sure, saith, It is the glory of a man, to pass by an offence.
That which is past is gone, and irrevocable; and wise men have enough to do, with things present and to come; therefore they do but trifle with themselves, that labor in past matters.
There is no man doth a wrong, for the wrong's sake; but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honor, or the like.
Some, when they take revenge, are desirous, the party should know, whence it cometh.
For the delight seemeth to be, not so much in doing the hurt, as in making the party repent.
But base and crafty cowards, are like the arrow that flieth in the dark.
Cosmus, duke of Florence, had a desperate saying against perfidious or neglecting friends, as if those wrongs were unpardonable; You shall read (saith he) that we are commanded to forgive our enemies; but you never read, that we are commanded to forgive our friends.
But yet the spirit of Job was in a better tune: Shall we (saith he) take good at God's hands, and not be content to take evil also?
And so of friends in a proportion.
Public revenges are for the most part fortunate; as that for the death of Caesar; for the death of Pertinax; for the death of Henry the Third of France; and many more.
Bona rerum secundarum optabilia; adversarum mirabilia.
Certainly if miracles be the command over nature, they appear most in adversity.
It is yet a higher speech of his, than the other (much too high for a heathen), It is true greatness, to have in one the frailty of a man, and the security of a God.
But to speak in a mean.
The virtue of prosperity, is temperance; the virtue of adversity, is fortitude; which in morals is the more heroical virtue.
Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New; which carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer revelation of God's favor.
Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
We see in needle works and embroideries, it is more pleasing to have a lively work, upon a sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work, upon a lightsome ground: judge therefore of the pleasure of the heart, by the pleasure of the eye.
Therefore it is the weaker sort of politics, that are the great dissemblers.
Tacitus saith, Livia sorted well with the arts of her husband, and dissimulation of her son; attributing arts or policy to Augustus, and dissimulation to Tiberius.
These properties, of arts or policy, and dissimulation or closeness, are indeed habits and faculties several, and to be distinguished.
But if a man cannot obtain to that judgment, then it is left to him generally, to be close, and a dissembler.
The first, closeness, reservation, and secrecy; when a man leaveth himself without observation, or without hold to be taken, what he is.
And the third, simulation, in the affirmative; when a man industriously and expressly feigns and pretends to be, that he is not.
For the first of these, secrecy; it is indeed the virtue of a confessor. And assuredly, the secret man heareth many confessions.
For who will open himself, to a blab or a babbler?
But if a man be thought secret, it inviteth discovery; as the more close air sucketh in the more open; and as in confession, the revealing is not for worldly use, but for the ease of a man's heart, so secret men come to the knowledge of many things in that kind; while men rather discharge their minds, than impart their minds.
As for talkers and futile persons, they are commonly vain and credulous withal.
For he that talketh what he knoweth, will also talk what he knoweth not.
Therefore set it down, that an habit of secrecy, is both politic and moral.
And in this part, it is good that a man's face give his tongue leave to speak.
For the second, which is dissimulation; it followeth many times upon secrecy, by a necessity; so that he that will be secret, must be a dissembler in some degree.
As for equivocations, or oraculous speeches, they cannot hold out long.
So that no man can be secret, except he give himself a little scope of dissimulation; which is, as it were, but the skirts or train of secrecy.
But for the third degree, which is simulation, and false profession; that I hold more culpable, and less politic; except it be in great and rare matters.
First, to lay asleep opposition, and to surprise.
For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum, to call up all that are against them. The second is, to reserve to a man's self a fair retreat.
For if a man engage himself by a manifest declaration, he must go through or take a fall.
The third is, the better to discover the mind of another.
As if there were no way of discovery, but by simulation.
The first, that simulation and dissimulation commonly carry with them a show of fearfulness, which in any business, doth spoil the feathers, of round flying up to the mark.
The second, that it puzzleth and perplexeth the conceits of many, that perhaps would otherwise co-operate with him; and makes a man walk almost alone, to his own ends.
The third and greatest is, that it depriveth a man of one of the most principal instruments for action; which is trust and belief.
Of Parents And Children
Children sweeten labors; but they make misfortunes more bitter.
They increase the cares of life; but they mitigate the remembrance of death.
The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works, are proper to men.
So the care of posterity is most in them, that have no posterity.
They that are the first raisers of their houses, are most indulgent towards their children; beholding them as the continuance, not only of their kind, but of their work; and so both children and creatures.
A man shall see, where there is a house full of children, one or two of the eldest respected, and the youngest made wantons; but in the midst, some that are as it were forgotten, who many times, nevertheless, prove the best.
The illiberality of parents, in allowance towards their children, is an harmful error; makes them base; acquaints them with shifts; makes them sort with mean company; and makes them surfeit more when they come to plenty.
And therefore the proof is best, when men keep their authority towards the children, but not their purse.
Yet it were great reason that those that have children, should have greatest care of future times; unto which they know they must transmit their dearest pledges. Some there are, who though they lead a single life, yet their thoughts do end with themselves, and account future times impertinences.
Nay, there are some other, that account wife and children, but as bills of charges.
Nay more, there are some foolish rich covetous men, that take a pride, in having no children, because they may be thought so much the richer.
But the most ordinary cause of a single life, is liberty, especially in certain self pleasing and humorous minds, which are so sensible of every restraint, as they will go near to think their girdles and garters, to be bonds and shackles.
Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants; but not always best subjects; for they are light to run away; and almost all fugitives, are of that condition.
A single life doth well with churchmen; for charity will hardly water the ground, where it must first fill a pool.
It is indifferent for judges and magistrates; for if they be facile and corrupt, you shall have a servant, five times worse than a wife.
For soldiers, I find the generals commonly in their hortatives, put men in mind of their wives and children; and I think the despising of marriage amongst the Turks, maketh the vulgar soldier more base.
Grave natures, led by custom, and therefore constant, are commonly loving husbands, as was said of Ulysses, vetulam suam praetulit immortalitati. Chaste women are often proud and froward, as presuming upon the merit of their chastity.
It is often seen that bad husbands, have very good wives; whether it be, that it raiseth the price of their husband's kindness, when it comes; or that the wives take a pride in their patience.
Several quires, placed one over against another, and taking the voice by catches, anthem wise, give great pleasure.
Turning dances into figure, is a childish curiosity.
And generally let it be noted, that those things which I here set down, are such as do naturally take the sense, and not respect petty wonderments. It is true, the alterations of scenes, so it be quietly and without noise, are things of great beauty and pleasure; for they feed and relieve the eye, before it be full of the same object.
Let the music likewise be sharp and loud, and well placed.
As for rich embroidery, it is lost and not discerned.
Let the suits of the masquers be graceful, and such as become the person, when the vizors are off; not after examples of known attires; Turke, soldiers, mariners', and the like.
Let anti masques not be long; they have been commonly of fools, satyrs, baboons, wild men, antics, beasts, sprites, witches, Ethiops, pigmies, turquets, nymphs, rustics, Cupids, statuas moving, and the like.
But chiefly, let the music of them be recreative, and with some strange changes.
Some sweet odors suddenly coming forth, without any drops falling, are, in such a company as there is steam and heat, things of great pleasure and refreshment.
Double masques, one of men, another of ladies, addeth state and variety.
NATURE is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished.
Force, maketh nature more violent in the return; doctrine and discourse, maketh nature less importune; but custom only doth alter and subdue nature.
He that seeketh victory over his nature, let him not set himself too great, nor too small tasks; for the first will make him dejected by often failings; and the second will make him a small proceeder, though by often prevailings.
For it breeds great perfection, if the practice be harder than the use.
Let not a man force a habit upon himself, with a perpetual continuance, but with some intermission.
For both the pause reinforceth the new onset; and if a man that is not perfect, be ever in practice, he shall as well practise his errors, as his abilities, and induce one habit of both; and there is no means to help this, but by seasonable intermissions.
But let not a man trust his victory over his nature, too far; for nature will lay buried a great time, and yet revive, upon the occasion or temptation.
Therefore, let a man either avoid the occasion altogether; or put himself often to it, that he may be little moved with it.
A man's nature is best perceived in privateness, for there is no affectation; in passion, for that putteth a man out of his precepts; and in a new case or experiment, for there custom leaveth him.
In studies, whatsoever a man commandeth upon himself, let him set hours for it; but whatsoever is agreeable to his nature, let him take no care for any set times; for his thoughts will fly to it, of themselves; so as the spaces of other business, or studies, will suffice.
Of Custom And Education
MEN'S thoughts, are much according to their inclination; their discourse and speeches, according to their learning and infused opinions; but their deeds, are after as they have been accustomed.
And therefore, as Machiavel well noteth (though in an evil favored instance), there is no trusting to the force of nature, nor to the bravery of words, except it be corroborate by custom.
His instance is, that for the achieving of a desperate conspiracy, a man should not rest upon the fierceness of any man's nature, or his resolute undertakings; but take such an one, as hath had his hands formerly in blood.
Only superstition is now so well advanced, that men of the first blood, are as firm as butchers by occupation; and votary resolution, is made equipollent to custom, even in matter of blood.
The Indians (I mean the sect of their wise men) lay themselves quietly upon a stock of wood, and so sacrifice themselves by fire.
The lads of Sparta, of ancient time, were wont to be scourged upon the altar of Diana, without so much as queching.
There be monks in Russia, for penance, that will sit a whole night in a vessel of water, till they be engaged with hard ice.
Therefore, since custom is the principal magistrate of man's life, let men by all means endeavor, to obtain good customs. Certainly custom is most perfect, when it beginneth in young years: this we call education; which is, in effect, but an early custom.
So we see, in languages, the tongue is more pliant to all expressions and sounds, the joints are more supple, to all feats of activity and motions, in youth than afterwards.
For it is true, that late learners cannot so well take the ply; except it be in some minds, that have not suffered themselves to fix, but have kept themselves open, and prepared to receive continual amendment, which is exceeding rare.
But if the force of custom simple and separate, be great, the force of custom copulate and conjoined and collegiate, is far greater.
For there example teacheth, company comforteth, emulation quickeneth, glory raiseth: so as in such places the force of custom is in his exaltation.
Certainly the great multiplication of virtues upon human nature, resteth upon societies well ordained and disciplined.
IT CANNOT be denied, but outward accidents conduce much to fortune; favor, opportunity, death of others, occasion fitting virtue.
And the most frequent of external causes is, that the folly of one man, is the fortune of another.
For no man prospers so suddenly, as by others' errors.
Serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco.
Overt and apparent virtues, bring forth praise; but there be secret and hidden virtues, that bring forth fortune; certain deliveries of a man's self, which have no name.
The Spanish name, desemboltura, partly expresseth them; when there be not stonds nor restiveness in a man's nature; but that the wheels of his mind, keep way with the wheels of his fortune.
The way of fortune, is like the Milken Way in the sky; which is a meeting or knot of a number of small stars; not seen asunder, but giving light together.
So are there a number of little, and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.
And certainly there be not two more fortunate properties, than to have a little of the fool, and not too much of the honest.
Therefore extreme lovers of their country or masters, were never fortunate, neither can they be.
Fortune is to be honored and respected, and it be but for her daughters, Confidence and Reputation.
For those two, Felicity breedeth; the first within a man's self, the latter in others towards him.
So Sylla chose the name of Felix, and not of Magnus.
It is written that Timotheus the Athenian, after he had, in the account he gave to the state of his government, often interlaced this speech, and in this, Fortune had no part, never prospered in anything, he undertook afterwards.
It was filial tenderness that gave the name.
I make but a poor figure at composition, my head is much too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds' eggs, play and trifles till I get vexed with myself.
It almost seems a mistake, but it was not.
But still
"You are discreet, and you evidently desire a position.
You understand me?"
"Not even to me," she emphasized.
The difficulties will not be great to a discreet person.
I knew all the current gossip about mrs Packard before I had parted with Miss Davies.
In doing this she had walked into a fortune.
I have political enemies, of course men, who, influenced by party feeling, are not above attacking methods and possibly my official reputation; but personal ones-wretches willing to stab me in my home life and affections, that I can not believe.
"Well-yes.
"I doubt if mrs Packard more than knows of his presence.
His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales had promised to be present. He was coming on presently from the opera.
In his official capacity he had been received courteously by his English colleagues: mr Pitt had shaken him by the hand; Lord Grenville had entertained him more than once; but the more intimate circles of London society ignored him altogether; the women openly turned their backs upon him; the men who held no official position refused to shake his hand.
"His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and suite, Sir Percy Blakeney, Lady Blakeney."
"Ah! who is it?" asked the Prince.
"Oh, well," said his wife, carelessly, "put on your necktie-that'll keep it together."
The ranch house-a two room box structure-was on the rise of a gently swelling hill in the midst of a wilderness of high chaparral.
Only a few feet back of it began the thorny jungle.
At length he came out, ready for his ride.
This being a business trip of some importance, and the Chapman ranch being almost a small town in population and size, Sam had decided to "dress up" accordingly.
The tight white collar awkwardly constricted his muscular, mahogany colored neck.
He gave Randy, his three year old son, a pat on the head, and hurried out to where Mexico, his favorite saddle horse, was standing.
Sam climbed awkwardly into the saddle.
I live in the bresh here like a varmint, never seein' nor hearin' nothin', and what other 'musement kin I have?
He should have started three hours earlier.
He turned now to his right up a little hill, pebble covered, upon which grew only the tenacious and thorny prickly pear and chaparral.
Sam rode down the sloping hill and plunged into the great pear flat that lies between the Quintanilla and the Piedra.
In about two hours he discovered that he was lost.
At the moment his master's sureness of the route had failed his horse had divined the fact.
There were no hills now that they could climb to obtain a view of the country.
They came upon a few, but so dense and interlaced was the brush that scarcely could a rabbit penetrate the mass.
The thing often happened.
But in Sam's case it was different.
Marthy was afraid of the country-afraid of Mexicans, of snakes, of panthers, even of sheep.
If so he was now something like fifty miles from home.
Sam thought of roving, marauding Mexicans, of stealthy cougars that sometimes invaded the ranches, of rattlesnakes, centipedes, and a dozen possible dangers.
Still the interminable succession of stretches of brush, cactus, and mesquite.
The straight line is Art.
Nature moves in circles.
A straightforward man is more an artificial product than a diplomatist is.
Men lost in the snow travel in exact circles until they sink, exhausted, as their footprints have attested.
It was when Sam Webber was fullest of contrition and good resolves that Mexico, with a heavy sigh, subsided from his regular, brisk trot into a slow complacent walk.
Mexico gave a protesting grunt as if to say: "What's the use of that, now we're so near?" He quickened his gait into a languid trot. Rounding a great clump of black chaparral he stopped short.
Marthy, serene and comfortable, sat in her rocking chair before the door in the shade of the house, with her feet resting luxuriously upon the steps.
Randy, who was playing with a pair of spurs on the ground, looked up for a moment at his father and went on spinning the rowels and singing a little song.
Sam shook himself queerly, like a man coming out of a dream, and slowly dismounted.
He moistened his dry lips.
Sam had traveled round the circle and was himself again.
"The only times," said he, "that me and Andy Tucker ever had any hiatuses in our cordial intents was when we differed on the moral aspects of grafting.
Andy had his standards and I had mine.
I didn't approve of all of Andy's schemes for levying contributions from the public, and he thought I allowed my conscience to interfere too often for the financial good of the firm.
"'I don't know how you mean that, Andy,' says I, 'but we have been friends too long for me to take offense at a taunt that you will regret when you cool off.
I have yet,' says I, 'to shake hands with a subpoena server.'
"One summer me and Andy decided to rest up a spell in a fine little town in the mountains of Kentucky called Grassdale.
We was supposed to be horse drovers, and good decent citizens besides, taking a summer vacation.
The Grassdale people liked us, and me and Andy declared a cessation of hostilities, never so much as floating the fly leaf of a rubber concession prospectus or flashing a Brazilian diamond while we was there.
"One day the leading hardware merchant of Grassdale drops around to the hotel where me and Andy stopped, and smokes with us, sociable, on the side porch.
We knew him pretty well from pitching quoits in the afternoons in the court house yard.
He was a loud, red man, breathing hard, but fat and respectable beyond all reason.
"After we talk on all the notorious themes of the day, this Murkison- for such was his entitlements-takes a letter out of his coat pocket in a careful, careless way and hands it to us to read.
It was one of them old time typewritten green goods letters explaining how for one thousand dollars you could get five thousand dollars in bills that an expert couldn't tell from the genuine; and going on to tell how they were made from plates stolen by an employee of the Treasury at Washington.
"'Lot's of good men get 'em,' says Andy.
If you answer it they write again asking you to come on with your money and do business.'
"A few days later he drops around again.
"'Boys,' says he, 'I know you are all right or I wouldn't confide in you.
I wrote to them rascals again just for fun.
They answered and told me to come on to Chicago.
They said telegraph to j Smith when I would start.
When I get there I'm to wait on a certain street corner till a man in a gray suit comes along and drops a newspaper in front of me.
Then I am to ask him how the water is, and he knows it's me and I know it's him.'
"'Ah, yes,' says Andy, gaping, 'it's the same old game.
I've often read about it in the papers.
Then he conducts you to the private abattoir in the hotel, where mr Jones is already waiting.
Of course it's brown paper when you come to look at it afterward.'
"'I've always-I see by the papers that it always is,' says Andy.
"'Boys,' says Murkison, 'I've got it in my mind that them fellows can't fool me.
That's the kind of trader Bill Murkison is.
"Me and Andy tries to get this financial misquotation out of Murkison's head, but we might as well have tried to keep the man who rolls peanuts with a toothpick from betting on Bryan's election.
In our idle hours we always improved our higher selves by ratiocination and mental thought.
"'Jeff,' says Andy after a long time, 'quite unseldom I have seen fit to impugn your molars when you have been chewing the rag with me about your conscientious way of doing business.
There is but one way it can end.
Don't you think we would both feel better if we was to intervene in some way and prevent the doing of this deed?'
"I got up and shook Andy Tucker's hand hard and long.
"'Andy,' says I, 'I may have had one or two hard thoughts about the heartlessness of your corporation, but I retract 'em now.
You have a kind nucleus at the interior of your exterior after all.
It does you credit.
I was just thinking the same thing that you have expressed. It would not be honorable or praiseworthy,' says I, 'for us to let Murkison go on with this project he has taken up.
If he is determined to go let us go with him and prevent this swindle from coming off.'
"Andy agreed with me; and I was glad to see that he was in earnest about breaking up this green goods scheme.
"'I don't call myself a religious man,' says I, 'or a fanatic in moral bigotry, but I can't stand still and see a man who has built up his business by his own efforts and brains and risk be robbed by an unscrupulous trickster who is a menace to the public good.'
"'Right, Jeff,' says Andy. 'We'll stick right along with Murkison if he insists on going and block this funny business.
I'd hate to see any money dropped in it as bad as you would.'
"Well, we went to see Murkison.
"'No, boys,' says he.
'I can't consent to let the song of this Chicago siren waft by me on the summer breeze.
Maybe you could help some when it comes to cashing in the ticket to that five to one shot.
Yes, I'd really take it as a pastime and regalement if you boys would go along too.'
He wires j Smith that he will set foot in the spider web on a given date; and the three of us lights out for Chicago.
"On the way Murkison amuses himself with premonitions and advance pleasant recollections.
"Sometimes Murkison was serious and tried to talk himself out of his cogitations, whatever they was.
Five dollars for one-that's what j Smith offers, and he'll have to keep his contract if he does business with Bill Murkison.'
Murkison was to meet the gray man at half past nine.
"'Now, boys,' says Murkison, 'let's get our gumption together and inoculate a plan for defeating the enemy.
"'"Bring 'em along," he'll say, of course, "if they care to invest." Now, how does that scheme strike you?'
Obey with velocity,' says I, 'for otherwise alternatives are impending.
You come up here to rob these men of their money.
Does it excuse you?' I asks, 'that they were trying to skin you?
No, sir; you was going to rob peter to stand off Paul.
You are ten times worse,' says I, 'than that green goods man. You go to church at home and pretend to be a decent citizen, but you'll come to Chicago and commit larceny from men that have built up a sound and profitable business by dealing with such contemptible scoundrels as you have tried to be to day.
How do you know,' says I, 'that that green goods man hasn't a large family dependent upon his extortions?
It's you supposedly respectable citizens who are always on the lookout to get something for nothing,' says I, 'that support the lotteries and wild cat mines and stock exchanges and wire tappers of this country.
If it wasn't for you they'd go out of business. The green goods man you was going to rob,' says I, 'studied maybe for years to learn his trade.
You come up here all sanctified and vanoplied with respectability and a pleasing post office address to swindle him.
If he gets the money you can squeal to the police.
If you get it he hocks the gray suit to buy supper and says nothing.
"I put the two thousand, which was all in twenty dollars bills, in my inside pocket.
"'Now get out your watch,' says I to Murkison.
'No, I don't want it,' says i 'Lay it on the table and you sit in that chair till it ticks off an hour.
Then you can go.
I guess your high position there is worth more than two thousand dollars to you.'
"On the train Andy was a long time silent.
"'Why, certainly,' says i 'What else could it have been?
Wasn't it yours, too?'
"In about half an hour Andy spoke again.
I think there are times when Andy don't exactly understand my system of ethics and moral hygiene.
"'Jeff,' says he, 'some time when you have the leisure I wish you'd draw off a diagram and foot notes of that conscience of yours.
TEDDY'S BUTTON
CHAPTER one
An Antagonist
He stood in the centre of a little crowd of village boys; his golden head was bare in the blazing sun, but the crop of curls seemed thick enough to protect him from its rays, and he was far too engrossed in his occupation to heed any discomfort from the heat.
They were dancing and flashing with excitement now, and his whole frame was quivering with enthusiasm; with head thrown back, and tongue, hand, and foot all in motion, he seemed to have his audience completely spell bound, and they listened with open eyes and mouths to his oration.
With one hand he was fingering a large brass button, which figured conspicuously in the centre of his small waistcoat, and this button was the subject of his theme.
My father drew his sword-and no one could stand against him, no one!
He cut and he slashed, and heads and arms and legs rolled off as quick as lightning, one after the other.
He got up to the colours, and with a shout he plunged his sword right through the enemy's body that had stolen them!
The enemy fell stone dead.
He was alone! The other soldiers had been beaten back.
But was he in a funk?
No; he gave a loud "Hurrah!" picked up his sword, and fought his way back, the enemy hard after him.
It was a race for life, and he ran backwards the whole way; he wasn't going to turn his back to the enemy.
He pressed on, shouting "Hurrah!" till he got to his own side again, and then he reached his colonel.
The little orator paused as he sank his voice to a tragic whisper, then raising it again, he added triumphantly, 'And thirty bullets and six swords had gone through my father's body!
That was something like a soldier!'
'Oh, I say!' murmured a small sceptic from the crowd, 'it was twenty bullets last time; make it fifty, Teddy!'
'And that's the story of my button,' pursued the boy, ignoring with scorn this last remark.
'And did your father have only one button to his coat?'
She was not dressed as an ordinary village child, but in a little rough serge sailor suit, with a large hat to match, set well back on a quantity of loose dark hair.
A rosy cheeked square set little figure she was, and her brown eyes, fringed with long black lashes, looked straight at Teddy with something of defiance and scorn in their glance.
There was a round of applause at this, but the small maiden remained undaunted.
'Is that a true story you told?' she demanded, with severity in her tone.
'Of course it's true,' was the indignant shout of all.
'Then I tell you, boy, I don't believe a word of it!' And with set determined lips she turned on her heel and walked away, having sown seeds of anger and resentment in more than one boyish breast.
'Who is she?' asked Teddy as, tired and exhausted by his recital, he threw himself on the grass to rest.
One of the bigger boys answered him.
'I seed her come yesterday in a cab from the town to old Sol at the turnpike-she and her mother, I reckon.
They had two carpet bags and a box and a poll parrot in a cage.
'She didn't believe me,' murmured Teddy, chewing a wisp of grass meditatively.
'Gals is no good, never!
Teddy turned his face upwards to the speaker.
'No, I couldn't have fought her, Sam, if she'd been a boy.
I've promised my mother I won't fight again till she gives me leave.
You see, I fought four boys in one week last time, and she says she won't have it.
I don't see if it is right for soldiers to fight, why it isn't right for boys!'
'I don't think there's any fellers left for you to fight with, so you're pretty safe.
Besides, it was only Tom Larken, who set them on to try and get your button from you, and he's gone off to another part of the country now.'
I think it was six bullets and three sword cuts.
I forget when I tell it how many it was; but she said she didn't believe a word!'
Five o'clock struck by the old church clock close by.
Teddy was upon his feet in an instant, and with a wild whoop and shout he was scudding across the green, his curls flying in the wind, and his little feet hardly seeming to touch the ground.
There was none in the village so quick footed as Teddy, and for daring feats and downright pluck he held the foremost place.
There was something very restful in the scene.
Presiding at the tea tray was a stern, forbidding looking woman of sixty or more, opposite her was seated her son, the master of the farm, a heavy faced, sleepy looking man; and at his side, facing the door, sat Teddy's mother.
A sweet gentle faced young woman she was, with the same deep blue eyes as her little son; she bore no resemblance to the elder woman, and looked, as she indeed was, superior to her surroundings.
Two years ago she had come with her child to make her home amongst her husband's people, and though at first her mother in law, mrs Platt, was inclined to look upon her contemptuously as a poor, delicate, useless creature, time proved to her that for steady, quiet work no one could eclipse her daughter in law.
Young mrs john, as she was called, was now her right hand, and the dairy work of the farm was made over entirely to her.
'Late again, you young scamp!' was the stern greeting of his grandmother, as Teddy appeared on the scene.
The boy looked at her with a twinkle in his eye, put his little hand to his forehead, and gave her a military salute.
'Sorry,' was all he said as he slipped into the chair that was waiting for him.
'What have you been doing, sonny?' asked the young mother, whose eyes had brightened at the sight of him.
'Telling father's story,' replied Teddy with alacrity.
'Your father was never late for his meals,' the grandmother put in with asperity.
'Never, granny?
Not when he was a boy?
I shall be always in time when I'm a soldier.'
'Better begin now, then; bad habits, like weeds, grow apace!'
Then, whilst tea was being taken away by the women, he turned to his uncle, who, pulling out a pipe from his pocket, sat down by the open door to smoke.
'Uncle Jake!'
A grunt was the only response; but that was sufficient.
The two perfectly understood each other, and a minute after Teddy was perched on his knee.
'I'm wondering if I can't get an enemy!' the boy proceeded, folding his small arms and looking up at his uncle steadily; 'all good people had enemies in the Bible, and I haven't one, I should like to have a good right down enemy!'
'To fight?' asked his uncle.
'To carry on with, you know; he would lay traps for me, and I would for him, like David and Saul; we should have a fine time of it.
Don't you think that would be nice?'
'Fightin' ain't the only grand thing in this world; peace is grander,' was the slow response to this appeal.
'That's what mother says.
She made me learn this morning-"Blessed are the peacemakers!" but you must have an enemy to make peace with, and I haven't got one.'
There was silence; the uncle puffed away at his pipe; he was a good man, and had more brains than his appearance warranted, but Teddy's speeches were often a sore puzzle to him.
The boy continued in a slow, thoughtful tone, 'I saw some one to day that I feel might be an enemy, but she's a girl; men don't fight with women.'
'I'd rather tackle a man than a woman any day.
They be a powerful enemy sometimes, lad!
And what have this young maid done to you?'
And she laughed, and walked away.'
'That was coming it strong; and who is she, to talk so?'
'She's a stranger; Sam said she's come to live with old Sol at the turnpike.'
'That must be Grace's child,' said old mrs Platt, coming up and joining in the conversation.
I suppose her husband is at sea again.'
'What is her husband?' inquired Teddy's mother, as with work in hand she came out and took a seat in the old-fashioned porch.
'A sailor.
Grace was always a roving nature herself.
She was maid to our squire's lady then, and went to foreign parts with her; but folks say she's steadied down now wonderful.
First Victories
'Please, sir, may I speak to you?'
He smiled when he saw the boy.
'I want you to give me a name for my enemy, please, sir.'
mr Upton looked amused.
'Have you had any battles with him yet?'
'I think I had one yesterday.
Granny was very angry with me because I had made Uncle Jake's best handkerchief into a banner of love.
I didn't really think it was naughty.
I wrote "Love" in ink right across it; and I took such pains, for I wanted to show it to Nancy.
And when I got home granny was so angry that she took me by the collar and she locked me into the back kitchen; and mother was out, and I cried, I was so miserable.
And I was very happy then, and I jumped right out, and then I remembered, but I didn't want to go back again.'
'And then the fight began?' suggested the rector, as the boy paused.
Teddy nodded.
'I asked God to drive my enemy away, but I was an awful long time thinking it out.
Is thinking fighting?'
Was that being a soldier?'
'Yes, my boy.'
'And granny let me out soon after; and I kissed her and said I was sorry, but I told her how nearly I had run away, and asked her to see that the window was locked next time, so that I shouldn't have to fight so hard.'
'You will have plenty of fighting.
Don't shirk the hottest part of the field; that isn't being brave.'
'Will you give me a horrid, ugly name, please, sir?'
'I thought your enemy's name was Teddy.'
'No, that's mine; I must have a name for him-a different one, you know.'
'What funny names!
Will that be deserting to the enemy?'
'It will be sure and certain defeat.'
Not long after this, Teddy and his schoolfellows were having a delightful afternoon in the woods.
It was Saturday afternoon, and they were playing their favourite war game, Teddy, of course, being prime instigator of the whole affair.
Her respect for Teddy was gradually increasing, though nothing seemed to quench her self assertion and independence of thought and action.
At length Teddy announced his intention of going off on an expedition as a scout, and on Nancy's insisting that she should come too, the two children started, made their way out of the wood and down to the banks of the stream, which soon joined the river.
'What have we to do?' asked Nancy.
'It's great fun.
'And if we don't meet anybody?'
'That's why I came down this way: there are always a lot of people fishing in the river.
'But they won't.'
'You must make believe they will.' Teddy's tone was stern, and Nancy was too occupied in holding her hat on her head as they crept through some low bushes to advance any more sceptical opinions.
And then suddenly, a short time after, they came upon a fisherman.
It was only a burly farmer, who was evidently making a day of it, for he sat under the shade of a tree with the remnants of a substantial lunch around him; his fishing rod was in his hand, but the line was out of the water, and he, with head thrown back and mouth wide open, was fast asleep.
'Hush!' said Teddy, in an excited whisper.
'If he wakes, all is up with us; now let's get past him on tiptoe.'
This was accomplished safely; but having passed him Teddy stood still, and the spirit of mischief seized hold of him.
Turning to Nancy, he said, with sparkling eyes, 'What fun to take him prisoner and tie him up to the tree with his own fishing line!
He's an enemy; I really think it's our duty to do it.
You stay here and watch me.'
Dancing like an elf with the line in his hand, he spun round and round the tree till the line was wound round to its very last extremity, and the farmer looked like some big bluebottle fly entangled in the fine meshes of a spider's web.
What fun! how I should like to see him!'
'Come on quick.
He's Farmer Green, and he's an awful angry man; he gave Sam such a thrashing for tying an old saucepan to one of his pigs' tails. He won't know who has done it, and I did tie the knots awful tight.'
'What's the matter?' asked Nancy.
'Have you got a pain?'
The words were uttered almost in a whisper, and Nancy looked on with wonder.
'It isn't right,' he said, after a long pause.
'Oh, you mustn't!' cried Nancy.
'You'll wake him up, and then you'll catch it!
Let him undo himself!' Teddy shook his head, and then stole softly back to the tree, Nancy following him at a respectful distance.
It seemed a harder business to untie the knots than to tie them, but at length it was done, and the unwinding process began.
Farmer Green's nap was over, and with a hasty start he was roused to the full use of his faculties.
When he discovered his condition he swore a round oath, and turned upon Teddy in great wrath, as he vainly tried to extricate himself.
You're the plague of the parish, and a good thrashing is what you will get, sure as my name's Jonathan Green!'
And in another few minutes he had bound the boy securely to the tree, tying his hands together with his handkerchief; then, as Nancy stepped forward, indignant at this severe treatment, he turned upon her.
'There are two of you, are there?
Well, you shall share the same fate till I think fit to release you.
I'll teach you to stop playing such impish tricks on decent folk.'
'Why, he was undoing you when you woke up, which was very kind of him.
I wish he'd left you tied up, I do!'
'Button boy, did he hurt you?' asked Nancy anxiously; for all this time Teddy had not said a word.
He turned his head and looked at her.
'I feel shooken up dreadful, he's so awful strong; but I'm not very hurt, only I'm sorry, and I've been telling my Captain about it, and asking Him to forgive me.'
'Shall we stay here all the evening and all the night?'
'Oh no! he'll come and let us go soon.
It isn't fair on you, for you didn't do anything.'
'I laughed at him, and I wanted you to leave him tied up.
But I don't care, it doesn't hurt.
You haven't told me ever what I asked you about Jesus' sailors.
'I did ask mother, and she said sailors were soldiers, they were sea soldiers.
'Sailors fight, I know they do.
Grandfather read me about Nelson the other evening, and showed me a picture of sailors cutting the enemy's arms off, as they tried to scramble on board ship.
I shan't never change to soldiers.
And if sailors fight, I can be a sailor for Jesus.'
Their conversation was interrupted by voices and steps approaching, and in another moment two ladies and a gentleman appeared, evidently going home after a fishing excursion.
Teddy was the first to speak.
He recognised the newcomers to be the squire, Colonel Graham, and his wife, with a visitor staying with them. 'Please, sir, will you undo us?' he asked appealingly.
The colonel laughed heartily.
You wouldn't think it to look at him, would you?'
'And who is the little girl?
she looks a regular little gipsy!'
Neither of the children appreciated these remarks, but the colonel good naturedly put down his fishing basket and cut the piece of rope that bound them.
Having got his hands free, Teddy stood up bravely and told the story briefly and clearly, to the great amusement of his hearers.
'And he would never have been caught if he hadn't gone back to undo him,' put in Nancy; 'so he oughtn't to have been punished at all.'
'What made you go back, my boy?' asked mrs Graham gently.
'I went back when I remembered it was wrong to have done it,' he said simply.
'But you are not such a paragon of goodness generally,' said the colonel.
'Wasn't it you and some others who scared our dairymaid into fits one night last winter, by playing pranks, after dark, outside the dairy window?'
'Yes, sir,' said Teddy humbly.
'And why didn't you run away when the old man woke?' asked Lady Helen.
'I never run away from anybody,' said Teddy, his head more erect than ever.
'I'm a soldier's son.'
What regiment?'
'He's dead, sir.
May I tell you father's story?'
I remember now, though I'm not sure that I recollect the details,' said the colonel musingly.
'Your father was john Platt, who enlisted in one of the line regiments-the twenty fourth, wasn't it?
He told it as he always did, with enthusiastic effect, and when he offered to show the ladies his button they were charmed with him.
'What a sensitive, refined little face it is!'
'Too good to be spoilt by house service,' said Colonel Graham. 'His mother is a superior young woman, with a very good education, and the Platts are highly respected about here.'
The children ran back to their playfellows considerably sobered by their experience, and Teddy very soon made his way home, and told his mother all that had befallen him.
'It's dreadful difficult to remember in time, mother.
I'm not a very good soldier, am I? Do you think I ought to love old Farmer Green?
'I think you must wait a little, sonny.
You know it was very naughty of you to act so.
Found
It was winter time, and Teddy was back at school, full of health and spirits, yet, through all his boyish mirth, the loss of his button was never forgotten.
Daily he prayed for it to be found, and his hope and faith in God never failed him.
'Perhaps God will send it to me for a Christmas surprise.
Perhaps I shall find it in my stocking on Christmas morning,' he used to say to his mother; and she told him to pray on.
'The master wants you to let the youngster come up with me now and speak to him.'
'What about?' questioned mrs john, rather alarmed at this summons, and wondering if Teddy had been up to mischief.
'He won't keep him long.' Then, as excited Teddy began pulling on his great coat, he whispered something into his mother's ear, which had the effect of completely reassuring her, and bringing a pleased smile about her lips.
'I shall never be a footman,' he was asserting; 'I couldn't keep my legs so stiff.
You're always like the soldiers when they stand at Attention.
Don't you never kick your legs out in the kitchen, or have you got stiff knees?'
'Don't you think it's nicer to be a soldier?
Wouldn't you like to be one?'
'No; their grub is something shocking, and they live like cattle!'
'I say, just tell me, is the colonel angry?' asked Teddy, as looking into the large, brightly lighted hall, he suddenly felt his diminutive size.
'Not he.
Wipe your feet, and take your cap off.'
Teddy stepped in upon the soft rugs almost on tiptoe, and the colonel himself came out into the hall to meet him.
'Come in, my little man, and don't be frightened.'
Teddy held his head erect as he followed the colonel into a bright, cheery room, where a group of ladies and gentlemen were round the fire enjoying their cup of five o'clock tea.
mrs Graham came forward and gave him a kindly greeting.
'This is our would be soldier,' said Colonel Graham-'the "button boy," as I hear he is called.
Some of you remember his story told in our schoolroom to the regiment passing through in the summer, and we weren't surprised to hear of his narrow escape from death from trying to regain his button.
A button isn't worth much sorrow after the first pang of its loss is over.'
I'd rather have it back than anything else in the world!
'But it's at the bottom of the river, isn't it?'
'I don't know where it is, but God does, and I ask Him every day to send it back to me.
I'm quite sure He will, and I think it will be this Christmas.'
'"Fact is stranger than fiction," certainly,' said the colonel.
'Now, my boy, come here.'
He was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, and putting his hand into his pocket he drew out a small box and placed it in the child's hand.
'Open it, and tell me if you recognise the contents.'
'Oh, my button, my own button!
Oh, sir!'
And here the tears welled up in the blue eyes, and, utterly regardless of the place he was in, he flung himself down on the hearthrug and buried his head, face foremost, in his arms.
He lay there so still for a moment that mrs Graham bent forward to touch him, fearing that the excitement might be too much for him, but he was only trying to hide his emotion from those looking on.
In another minute he rose to his feet, and with a face perfectly radiant he turned to, the colonel, 'It's lovely, sir, it's lovely!'
'Now, my boy, I don't think you will ever guess how it came into our possession.
The other day I brought home a few fish, and in preparing one of these for table our cook discovered your button inside it-I wonder the fish had not come to an untimely end before from such an indigestible meal!
She told us of it, not recognising what a valuable treasure she had brought to light, and directly we saw it, we knew it was the redoubtable button that has been the means of causing such interest in our neighbourhood.'
Teddy listened eagerly.
'No wonder no one couldn't find it!' he said, fingering his adornment proudly.
'It's like the fish that brought peter some money once.'
'Now, major, what do you think of this youngster?
Would you like to take him as a drummer boy into your regiment?'
The major scanned the boy from head to foot, then answered emphatically, 'I wouldn't take a boy with a face like that for a good deal!'
'Why not?' asked mrs Graham.
'Because it's the ruination of them.
I shall never forget a pretty boy we had once; he was called the "cherub," and had been a chorister-sang divinely.
He was only four years in the regiment, and his case was brought to me before he was discharged.
When I see a fresh drummer brought in, I wonder how long he will keep his innocence, and sometimes wish his friends could see the life he is subjected to.
I give them a month generally, and then away flies their bloom and all their home training.'
'But, Major Tracy, you are giving us a shocking idea of the morals in the Service,' said one lady.
He shrugged his shoulders.
'I grant you, on the whole, they are better than they were, but the Service is no place for highly strung boys like this one.
The rougher, harder natures get on best.
When they get older, and have sense and strength enough to stick to their principles, then let them enlist.'
'But I have always heard,' said mrs Graham, 'that the drummer boys are well looked after now.
They have a room to themselves, and the chaplains have classes for them.'
'That may be.
I would only ask you to watch a boy, as I have, from the start, and see what kind of a man he grows into after having spent most of his early youth in the Service.
There are exceptions, I know, but precious few, as far as my experience goes.'
Teddy did not understand this conversation, but he gathered from the major's tone that he did not approve of him.
'Do you think I'm too small to be a soldier?' he asked.
The major laughed.
'Don't bother your head about your size,' he said; 'you'll grow, and there's plenty of time before you.'
'I don't want to be a drummer,' said Teddy earnestly; 'I'd rather wait and be a proper soldier-a soldier that fights.'
'A capital decision-stick to it, little chap, and you have my hearty approval.'
'You have your father's blood in your veins,' said the colonel, laughing; 'meanwhile, I suppose you try your hand on the village boys, to content your fighting propensities.'
'No,' said Teddy, a grave look coming into his sunny blue eyes.
'He's my own enemy; mr Upton told me about him.
You see, I belong to God's army.
He takes very little soldiers.
There was silence on the little company for a minute, then Major Tracy said with a laugh, 'What an original little oddity it is!--quite a character!'
And then Teddy was dismissed.
He flew down the avenue home as fast as he could go.
Snow was falling, but he heeded it not, and burst into the kitchen a little later in a breathless state of excitement.
His mother knew already, so was prepared for his news, but she was not prepared for the handsome adornment now on her boy's coat, and his grandmother and uncle were equally pleased and gratified at the colonel's kindness.
'O God, I do thank You.
I knew You would answer me, for You knew how dreadful it was to live without my button, and You knew how unhappy my heart was about it, though I tried to be brave, and not talk about it.
The next morning before breakfast, Teddy ran off to tell Nancy, and to show her the long lost treasure.
She was quite as delighted as he was, but said, a few minutes after, 'Button boy, do you remember telling me you couldn't live without your button?
'Yes, I thought I should; but as soon as I began to pray about it I knew it was coming back, and so I got better.'
I would take great care of it.'
'I meant it to be buried with me,' said Teddy, considering, 'but I don't mind altering my mind about it, and if you promise not to give it to any one else, I will let you have it.'
'And we'll always remember that soldiers and sailors are just as good as each other-they're quite even!'
'Yes,' nodded Nancy; 'sailors and soldiers are quite even, and my father is just as good as your father was!'
'And when you die, and I get the button, I shall wear it as a brooch!'
Is that wicked?
He does trouble me a lot now'
'Soldiers must never get tired of fighting, sonny, and you have your Captain to help you.'
'Yes; and I suppose when I get bigger and stronger it will be much easier, won't it?
Mother, do you have any fighting?
Have you got an enemy like me?'
'Yes, indeed I have, my boy.'
'But you're never beaten, are you?
You never do anything wrong!'
Teddy pondered over this.
'No, darling; there will be no fighting with sin there.'
Teddy smiled.
'There is a verse in the Bible that says, "He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city." Mother would rather have her little son fight God's battles than be the bravest soldier in the Queen's army.'
'But,' said Teddy, 'I mean to do both; and now, mother, just before I go to sleep, give me father's button to kiss!'
CHAPTER eleven.
Thurston did not go on the horse roundup.
That sounded all right as far as it went, but unfortunately it did not go far.
The boys winked at one another gravely behind his back and jerked their thumbs knowingly toward Milk River; by which pantomime they reminded one another-quite unnecessarily that Mona Stevens had come home.
The boys, it would seem, realized that it is against human nature for a man to declare openly to his fellows his intention of laying last, desperate siege to the heart of a girl who has already refused him three times, and to ask her for the fourth time if she will reconsider her former decisions and marry him.
That is really what kept Thurston at the Lazy Eight.
During the winter, when he did not see her, he could bring himself to think occasionally of other things; and it is a fact that the stories he wrote with no heroine at all hit the mark the straightest.
And since he was not a fool he realized the falling off and chafed against it and wondered why it was.
The wagons were out two weeks-which is quite long enough for a crisis to arise in the love affair of any man.
By the time the horse roundup was over, one Philip Thurston was in pessimistic mood and quite ready to follow the wagons, the farther the better.
His thoughts still ran to blue gray eyes and ripply hair, but he made no attempt to put them into a story.
He packed his trunk carefully with everything he would not need on the roundup, and his typewriter he put in the middle.
He wrote to Reeve Howard, the night before they were to start, and apologized gracefully for having neglected him during the past three weeks and told him he would certainly be home in another month.
He said that he was "in danger of being satiated with the Western tone" and would be glad to shake the hand of civilized man once more.
This was distinctly unfair, because he had no quarrel with the masculine portion of the West.
Yellow throated meadow larks perched swaying in the top of gray sage bushes and sang to him that the world was good. Sober gray curlews circled over his head, their long, funny bills thrust out straight as if to point the way for their bodies to follow and cried, "Kor r eck, kor r eck!"--which means just what the meadow larks sang.
The rattle of mess wagons, driven by the camp cook and followed by the bed wagon, was heard from all directions.
Park came along, saw what he was doing and laughed.
"When yuh can stand on this little hill and count fifty or sixty outfits camped within two or three miles uh here, yuh might begin taking pictures."
"I think you're loading me,"
Thurston retorted calmly, winding up the roll for another exposure.
"All right-suit yourself about it." Park walked off and left him peering into the view finder.
Still they came.
From Swift Current to the Cypress Hills the Canadian cattlemen sent their wagons to join the big meet.
For a day and a night the cowboys made merry in town while their foremen consulted and the captains appointed by the Association mapped out the different routes.
At times like these, foremen such as Park and Deacon Smith were shorn of their accustomed power, and worked under orders as strict as those they gave their men.
That meant day after day of "riding circle"--which is, being interpreted, riding out ten or twelve miles from camp, then turning and driving everything before them to a point near the center of the circle thus formed.
When they met the cattle were bunched, and all stock which belonged on that range was cut out, leaving only those which had crossed the river during the storms of winter.
These were driven on to the next camping place and held, which meant constant day herding and night guarding work which cowboys hate more than anything else.
But not all.
He is a sturdy, self reliant little rascal, is the range bred calf.
He would help take the herd home, he told Park, and then he intended to hit the trail for little, old New York.
CHAPTER twelve.
HIGH WATER
It was nearing the middle of June, and it was getting to be a very hot June at that.
Then the sky threatened for a day, and after that they plodded in the rain.
"Thank the Lord that's done with," sighed Park when he saw the last of the herd climb, all dripping, up the north bank of the Milk River. "To morrow we can turn 'em loose.
And I tell yuh, Bud, we didn't get across none too soon.
Yuh notice how the river's coming up?
A day later and we'd have had to hold the herd on the other side, no telling how long."
"It is higher than usual; I noticed that," Thurston agreed absently.
He could easily ride down there and find out. It wasn't far; not a quarter of a mile, but he assured himself that he wasn't going, and that he was not quite a fool, he hoped Even if she were at home, what good could that possibly do him?
Such nights were not pleasant, nor were the thoughts that caused them.
From where they were camped upon a ridge which bounded a broad coulee on the east, he could look down upon the Stevens ranch nestling in the bottomland, the house half hidden among the cottonwoods.
Through the last hours of the afternoon he watched it hungrily.
The big corral ran down to the water's edge, and he noted idly that three panels of the fence extended out into the river, and that the muddy water was creeping steadily up until at sundown the posts of the first panel barely showed above the water.
Park came up to him and looked down upon the little valley.
"There must be danger of it this year if ever," Thurston observed uneasily.
"The river is coming up pretty fast, it seems to me.
Where yuh going, Bud?"
"I'm going to ride down there," Thurston answered constrainedly.
"Well, I'll go along, if you'll hold on a minute.
Jack ain't got a lick uh sense.
I don't care if he is Mona's brother."
"Half brother," corrected Thurston, as he swung up into the saddle.
He had a poor opinion of Jack and resented even that slight relation to Mona.
When they galloped into the yard which sloped from the house gently down to the river fifty yards away, Mona's face appeared for a moment in the window.
Evidently she had been watching for some one, and Thurston's heart flopped in his chest as he wondered, fleetingly, if it could be himself.
When she opened the door her eyes greeted him with a certain wistful expression that he had never seen in them before.
He was guilty of wishing that Park had stayed in camp.
"Oh, I'm glad you rode over," she welcomed-but she was careful, after that first swift glance, to look at Park.
Park smiled vaguely.
He was afraid it would not be polite to agree with her as emphatically as he would like to have done.
But Thurston had no smile ready, polite or otherwise.
Instead he drew down his brows in a way not complimentary to Jack.
"Where is your mother?" he asked, almost peremptorily.
"Aunt Mary has typhoid fever-there seems to be so much of that this spring and they sent for mamma.
Thurston did know, but he passed over the subject.
"Certainly not; aren't you two here?" Mona could be very pert when she tried.
"Jack and I are holding down the ranch just now; the boys are all on roundup, of course.
Jack went to town today to see some one.
"Um m yes, of course."
It was Park, still trying to be polite and not commit himself on the subject of Jack.
The "some one" whom Jack went oftenest to see was the bartender in the Palace saloon, but it was not necessary to tell her that.
"The river's coming up pretty fast, Mona," he ventured.
"Don't yuh think yuh ought to pull out and go visiting?"
"No, I don't." Mona's tone was very decided.
"You can never tell what it might do," Park argued.
This hot weather we've been having lately, and then the rain, will bring it a whooping.
"No, I can't." Mona's chin went up perversely.
"I'm no coward, I hope, even if there was any danger which there isn't."
Thurston's chin went up also, and he sat a bit straighter.
Whether she meant it or not, he took her words as a covert stab at himself.
Probably she did not mean it; at any rate the blood flew consciously to her cheeks after she had spoken, and she caught her under lip sharply between her teeth.
And that did not help matters or make her temper more yielding.
"Anyway," she added hurriedly, "Jack will be here; he's likely to come any minute now."
He did not like even Park to be too familiar with Mona, though he knew there was a girl in Shellanne whose name Park sometimes spoke in his sleep.
She lifted the big glass lamp down from its place on the clock shelf and lighted it with fingers not quite steady.
"You men," she remarked, "think women ought to be wrapped in pink cotton and put in a glass cabinet.
"Would yuh?" Park grinned skeptically.
Then where'd yuh be at?"
"It won't get up here, though," Mona asserted coolly.
"No, and the Lazy Eight never had to work the Yellowstone range on spring roundup before either," Park told her meaningly.
Whereupon Mona got upon her pedestal and smiled her unpleasant smile, against which even Park had no argument ready.
They lingered till long after all good cowpunchers are supposed to be in their beds-unless they are standing night guard-but Jack failed to appear.
When the clock struck a wheezy nine Mona glanced at it significantly and smothered a yawn more than half affected.
It was a hint which no man with an atom of self respect could overlook.
"I guess we'll have to be going," Park said with some ceremony.
"I don't see why not; I'm not the least bit afraid," Mona said.
Her tone was impersonal and had in it a note of dismissal.
So, there being nothing else that they could do, they said good night and took themselves off.
"This is sure fierce," Park grumbled when they struck the lower ground. "Darn a man like Jack Stevens!
But no-it'd be awful if Jack had to cook his own grub for a week.
Say, the water has come up a lot, don't yuh think, Bud? If it raises much more Mona'll sure have a chance to 'cope with the situation.
It'd just about serve her right, too."
Thurston did not think so, but he was in too dispirited a mood to argue the point.
He cursed the conventions which forbade his staying and watching over the girl back there in the house which already stood upon an island, cut off from the safe, high land by a strip of backwater that was widening and deepening every minute, and, when it rose high enough to flow into the river below, would have a current that would make a nasty crossing.
On the first rise he stopped and looked back at the light which shone out from among the dripping cottonwoods.
Even then he was tempted to go back and brave her anger that he might feel assured of her safety.
"Oh, come on," Park cried impatiently.
I don't suppose the water will get clear up to the house; it'll likely do things to the sheds and corrals, though, and serve Jack right.
Come on, Bud.
She's got lots uh nerve; I guess she'll make out all right."
There was common sense in the argument, and Thurston recognized it and rode on to camp.
But instead of unsaddling, as he would naturally have done, he tied Sunfish to the bed wagon and threw his slicker over his back to protect him from the rain.
"I'll STAY-ALWAYS"
By and by the rain ceased and he could tell by the dim whiteness of the tent roof that the clouds must have been swept away from before the moon, then just past the full.
He studied critically the wide sweep of the river.
He might almost have thought it the Missouri itself, it stretched so far from bank to bank; indeed, it seemed to know no banks but the hills themselves.
He turned toward where the light had shone among the cottonwoods below; there was nothing but a great blot of shade that told him nothing.
A step sounded just behind.
A hand, the hand of Park, rested upon his shoulder.
Was yuh thinking about riding down there?"
"Yes," Thurston answered simply.
"Are you coming?"
"Sure," Park assented.
They got upon their horses and headed down the trail to the Stevens place.
Thurston would have put Sunfish to a run, but Park checked him.
"Go easy," he admonished.
Down the hill they stopped at the edge of a raging torrent and strained their eyes to see what lay on the other side.
While they looked, a light twinkled out from among the tree tops.
Thurston caught his breath sharply.
"She's upstairs," he said, and his voice sounded strained and unnatural. "It's just a loft where they store stuff." He started to ride into the flood.
"Come on back here, yuh chump!" Park roared.
A black, tar papered shack went scudding past, lodged upon a ridge where the water was shallower, and sat there swaying drunkenly.
"That's old Dutch Henry's house," Park shouted above the roar.
"I'll bet he's cussing things blue on some pinnacle up there." He laughed at the picture his imagination conjured, and rode out into the swirl.
He could not have helped Park, and he could very easily have drowned himself.
Though it was not thought of himself but of Mona that stayed his hand.
They landed at the gate.
Sunfish scrambled with his feet for secure footing, found it and waded up to the front door.
The water was a foot deep on the porch.
Thurston beat an imperative tattoo upon the door with the butt of his quirt, and shouted.
And Mona's voice, shorn of its customary assurance, answered faintly from the loft.
"You didn't 'cope with the situation,' after all," he remarked while she was settling herself firmly in the saddle.
"I went to sleep and didn't notice the water till it was coming in at the door," she explained.
"And then-"
She stopped abruptly.
"Then what?" he demanded maliciously.
"Were you afraid?"
"A little," she confessed reluctantly.
After that he could think of little else.
Thurston felt his laboring and clutched Mona still tighter.
And though the under current clutched him and the weight of Mona taxed his strength, he managed to keep them both afloat and to make a little headway until the deepest part lay behind them.
He stood a minute with his arm still around her, and coughed his voice clear.
"Park went down," he began, hardly knowing what it was he was saying.
"Park-"
"Park!
And from somewhere down the river came a faint reassuring whoop.
"Thank the Lord!" gasped Thurston, and leaned against her for a second. Then he straightened.
"Are you all right?" he asked, and drew her toward a rock near at hand-for in truth, the knees of him were shaking.
They sat down, and he looked more closely at her face and discovered that it was wet with something more than river water.
He laid a hand tenderly against her cheek and wondered if he dared feel so happy.
"Little girl-oh, little girl," he said softly, and stopped.
"Stay?
"Hank wanted to take me into the Lazy Eight, so now I'll buy an interest, and stay-always."
"You dear!" Mona snuggled close and learned how it feels to be kissed, if she had never known before.
Sunfish, having scrambled ashore a few yards farther down, came up to them and stood waiting, as if to be forgiven for his failure to carry them safe to land, but Thurston, after the first inattentive glance, ungratefully took no heed of him.
There was a sound of scrambling foot steps and Park came dripping up to them.
I'll rout out the cook and make him boil us some coffee."
Thurston turned joyfully toward him.
"Park, old fellow, I was afraid."
"Yuh better reform and quit being afraid," Park bantered.
I was poking around below there looking for him."
"Well, Mona, I see yuh was able to 'cope with the situation,' all right-but yuh needed Bud mighty bad, I reckon.
The chances is yuh won't have no house in the morning, so Bud'll have to get busy and rustle one for yuh.
I guess you'll own up, now, that the water can get through the gate." He laughed in his teasing way.
Mona stood up, and her shining eyes were turned to Thurston.
"I don't care," she asserted with reddened cheeks.
"I'm just glad it did get through."
"Same here," said Thurston with much emphasis.
Then, with Mona once more in the saddle, and with Thurston leading Sunfish by the bridle rein, they trailed damply and happily up the long ridge to where the white tents of the roundup gleamed sharply against the sky line.
CHAPTER one
THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY
THE year eighteen forty seven marked a period of great territorial acquisition by the American people, with incalculable additions to their actual and potential wealth.
By the rational compromise with England in the dispute over the Oregon region, President Polk had secured during eighteen forty six, for undisturbed settlement, three hundred thousand square miles of forest, fertile land, and fisheries, including the whole fair Columbia Valley. Our active "policy of the Pacific" dated from that hour.
With swift and clinching succession came the melodramatic Mexican War, and February, eighteen forty eight, saw another vast territory south of Oregon and west of the Rocky Mountains added by treaty to the United States.
Thus in about eighteen months there had been pieced into the national domain for quick development and exploitation a region as large as the entire Union of Thirteen States at the close of the War of Independence.
Equally momentous were the times in Europe, where the attempt to secure opportunities of expansion as well as larger liberty for the individual took quite different form.
The old absolutist system of government was fast breaking up, and ancient thrones were tottering.
But the retrospect indicates that many reforms and political changes were accomplished, although the process involved the exile of not a few ardent spirits to America, to become leading statesmen, inventors, journalists, and financiers.
In eighteen forty seven, too, Russia began her tremendous march eastward into Central Asia, just as France was solidifying her first gains on the littoral of northern Africa.
In England the fierce fervor of the Chartist movement, with its violent rhetoric as to the rights of man, was sobering down and passing pervasively into numerous practical schemes for social and political amelioration, constituting in their entirety a most profound change throughout every part of the national life.
Into such times Thomas Alva Edison was born, and his relations to them and to the events of the past sixty years are the subject of this narrative.
Aside from the personal interest that attaches to the picturesque career, so typically American, there is a broader aspect in which the work of the "Franklin of the Nineteenth Century" touches the welfare and progress of the race.
Viewed from the standpoint of inventive progress, the first half of the nineteenth century had passed very profitably when Edison appeared-every year marked by some notable achievement in the arts and sciences, with promise of its early and abundant fruition in commerce and industry.
The first photographs had been taken.
Chloroform, nitrous oxide gas, and ether had been placed at the service of the physician in saving life, and the revolver, guncotton, and nitroglycerine added to the agencies for slaughter.
The application of machinery in the harvest field had begun with the embryonic reaper, while both the bicycle and the automobile were heralded in primitive prototypes.
The gigantic expansion of the iron and steel industry was foreshadowed in the change from wood to coal in the smelting furnaces. The sewing machine had brought with it, like the friction match, one of the most profound influences in modifying domestic life, and making it different from that of all preceding time.
But it is when we turn to electricity that the rich virgin condition of an illimitable new kingdom of discovery is seen.
But these few appliances made up the meagre kit of tools with which the nineteenth century entered upon its task of acquiring the arts and conveniences now such an intimate part of "human nature's daily food" that the average American to day pays more for his electrical service than he does for bread.
For the first time man had command of a steady supply of electricity without toil or effort.
The useful results obtainable previously from the current of a frictional machine were not much greater than those to be derived from the flight of a rocket.
No art or trade could be founded on it; no diminution of daily work or increase of daily comfort could be secured with it.
But the little battery with its metal plates in a weak solution proved a perennial reservoir of electrical energy, safe and controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will.
That which was wild had become domesticated; regular crops took the place of haphazard gleanings from brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical starvation was forever left behind.
Almost all the electrical arts now employed made their beginnings in the next twenty five years, and while the more extensive of them depend to day on the dynamo for electrical energy, some of the most important still remain in loyal allegiance to the older source.
The battery itself soon underwent modifications, and new types were evolved-the storage, the double fluid, and the dry.
Various analogies next pointed to the use of heat, and the thermoelectric cell emerged, embodying the application of flame to the junction of two different metals.
"Hitch your wagon to a star," said Emerson.
To all the coal fields and all the waterfalls Faraday had directly hitched the wheels of industry.
Not only was it now possible to convert mechanical energy into electricity cheaply and in illimitable quantities, but electricity at once showed its ubiquitous availability as a motive power.
Boats were propelled by it, cars were hauled, and even papers printed.
Electroplating became an art, and telegraphy sprang into active being on both sides of the Atlantic.
At the time Edison was born, in eighteen forty seven, telegraphy, upon which he was to leave so indelible an imprint, had barely struggled into acceptance by the public.
In England, Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a ponderous magnetic needle telegraph.
Everything was crude and primitive.
The poles were two hundred feet apart and could barely hold up a wash line.
The slim, bare, copper wire snapped on the least provocation, and the circuit was "down" for thirty six days in the first six months.
The little glass knob insulators made seductive targets for ignorant sportsmen. Attempts to insulate the line wire were limited to coating it with tar or smearing it with wax for the benefit of all the bees in the neighborhood.
The farthest western reach of the telegraph lines in eighteen forty seven was Pittsburg, with three ply iron wire mounted on square glass insulators with a little wooden pentroof for protection.
In that office, where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy, the magnets in use to receive the signals sent with the aid of powerful nitric acid batteries weighed as much as seventy five pounds apiece.
But the business was fortunately small at the outset, until the new device, patronized chiefly by lottery men, had proved its utility.
Then came the great outburst of activity.
Within a score of years telegraph wires covered the whole occupied country with a network, and the first great electrical industry was a pronounced success, yielding to its pioneers the first great harvest of electrical fortunes.
Dairy and poultry yard, and herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed to lead by easy access into its wide flagged haven, where there was room for everything and where muddy boots left traces that were easily swept away.
The window nook made almost a little room in itself, quite the pleasantest room in the farm as far as situation and capabilities went.
Young mrs Ladbruk, whose husband had just come into the farm by way of inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner, and her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz curtains and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old china.
The musty farm parlour, looking out on to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls, was not a room that lent itself readily either to comfort or decoration.
"When we are more settled I shall work wonders in the way of making the kitchen habitable," said the young woman to her occasional visitors. There was an unspoken wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed as well as unspoken.
Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm; jointly with her husband she might have her say, and to a certain extent her way, in ordering its affairs.
But she was not mistress of the kitchen.
On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company with chipped sauce boats, pewter jugs, cheese graters, and paid bills, rested a worn and ragged Bible, on whose front page was the record, in faded ink, of a baptism dated ninety four years ago.
"Martha Crale" was the name written on that yellow page.
For longer than anyone could remember she had pattered to and fro between oven and wash house and dairy, and out to chicken run and garden, grumbling and muttering and scolding, but working unceasingly.
Emma Ladbruk, of whose coming she took as little notice as she would of a bee wandering in at a window on a summer's day, used at first to watch her with a kind of frightened curiosity.
She was so old and so much a part of the place, it was difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing.
Old Shep, the white nozzled, stiff limbed collie, waiting for his time to die, seemed almost more human than the withered, dried up old woman.
He had been a riotous, roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was already a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a blind, breathing carcase, nothing more, and she still worked with frail energy, still swept and baked and washed, fetched and carried.
If there were something in these wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with death, Emma used to think to herself, what generations of ghost dogs there must be out on those hills, that Martha had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last good bye word to in that old kitchen.
And what memories she must have of human generations that had passed away in her time.
It was difficult for anyone, let alone a stranger like Emma, to get her to talk of the days that had been; her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose feeding time was overdue, and the various little faults and lapses that chequer a farmhouse routine.
There had been a Palmerston, that had been a name down Tiverton way; Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow flies, but to Martha it was almost a foreign country.
And they always quarrelled and shouted as to who was right and who was wrong.
The one they quarrelled about most was a fine old gentleman with an angry face—she had seen his picture on the walls. She had seen it on the floor too, with a rotten apple squashed over it, for the farm had changed its politics from time to time.
Martha had never been on one side or the other; none of "they" had ever done the farm a stroke of good.
Such was her sweeping verdict, given with all a peasant's distrust of the outside world.
When the half frightened curiosity had somewhat faded away, Emma Ladbruk was uncomfortably conscious of another feeling towards the old woman. She was a quaint old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part and parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once pathetic and picturesque—but she was dreadfully in the way.
Emma had come to the farm full of plans for little reforms and improvements, in part the result of training in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of her own ideas and fancies.
Above all, the coveted window corner, that was to be a dainty, cheerful oasis in the gaunt old kitchen, stood now choked and lumbered with a litter of odds and ends that Emma, for all her nominal authority, would not have dared or cared to displace; over them seemed to be spun the protection of something that was like a human cobweb. Decidedly Martha was in the way.
It would have been an unworthy meanness to have wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened by a few paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was conscious that the wish was there, disowned though it might be, lurking at the back of her mind.
She felt the meanness of the wish come over her with a qualm of self reproach one day when she came into the kitchen and found an unaccustomed state of things in that usually busy quarter.
Old Martha was not working.
A basket of corn was on the floor by her side, and out in the yard the poultry were beginning to clamour a protest of overdue feeding time.
"Is anything the matter, Martha?" asked the young woman.
I knew it.
I knew it were a coming."
The young woman's eyes clouded with pity.
The old thing sitting there so white and shrunken had once been a merry, noisy child, playing about in lanes and hay lofts and farmhouse garrets; that had been eighty odd years ago, and now she was just a frail old body cowering under the approaching chill of the death that was coming at last to take her.
Her husband, she knew, was down at a tree felling some little distance off, but she might find some other intelligent soul who knew the old woman better than she did.
The farm, she soon found out, had that faculty common to farmyards of swallowing up and losing its human population.
The poultry followed her in interested fashion, and swine grunted interrogations at her from behind the bars of their styes, but barnyard and rickyard, orchard and stables and dairy, gave no reward to her search.
Then, as she retraced her steps towards the kitchen, she came suddenly on her cousin, young mr Jim, as every one called him, who divided his time between amateur horse dealing, rabbit shooting, and flirting with the farm maids.
"I'm afraid old Martha is dying," said Emma.
Jim was not the sort of person to whom one had to break news gently.
"Nonsense," he said; "Martha means to live to a hundred.
She told me so, and she'll do it."
"She may be actually dying at this moment, or it may just be the beginning of the break-up," persisted Emma, with a feeling of contempt for the slowness and dulness of the young man.
A grin spread over his good-natured features.
"It don't look like it," he said, nodding towards the yard.
Emma turned to catch the meaning of his remark.
Old Martha stood in the middle of a mob of poultry scattering handfuls of grain around her.
But she threw the grain deftly amid the wilderness of beaks, and her quavering voice carried as far as the two people who were watching her.
She was still harping on the theme of death coming to the farm.
"Who's dead, then, old Mother?" called out the young man.
"'tis young Mister Ladbruk," she shrilled back; "they've just a carried his body in.
And she turned to fling a handful of barley at a belated group of guinea fowl that came racing toward her.
The farm was a family property, and passed to the rabbit shooting cousin as the next of kin.
On a cold grey morning she stood waiting, with her boxes already stowed in the farm cart, till the last of the market produce should be ready, for the train she was to catch was of less importance than the chickens and butter and eggs that were to be offered for sale.
From where she stood she could see an angle of the long latticed window that was to have been cosy with curtains and gay with bowls of flowers.
Into her mind came the thought that for months, perhaps for years, long after she had been utterly forgotten, a white, unheeding face would be seen peering out through those latticed panes, and a weak muttering voice would be heard quavering up and down those flagged passages.
She made her way to a narrow barred casement that opened into the farm larder.
Mabel, seated in the gallery that evening behind the President's chair, had already glanced at her watch half a dozen times in the last hour, hoping each time that twenty one o'clock was nearer than she feared.
She knew well enough by now that the President of Europe would not be half a minute either before or after his time.
His supreme punctuality was famous all over the continent.
He had said Twenty One, so it was to be twenty one.
A sharp bell note impinged from beneath, and in a moment the drawling voice of the speaker stopped.
Once more she lifted her wrist, saw that it wanted five minutes of the hour; then she leaned forward from her corner and stared down into the House.
All down the long brown seats members were shifting and arranging themselves more decorously, uncrossing their legs, slipping their hats beneath the leather fringes.
As she looked, too, she saw the President of the House coming down the three steps from his chair, for Another would need it in a few moments.
The house was full from end to end; a late comer ran in from the twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full light before he saw his vacant place.
When that ceased she would know that he was come.
A month ago he had assented to a similar Bill in Germany, and had delivered a speech on the same subject at Turin.
To morrow he was to be in Spain.
A rumour had spread that his volor had been seen passing over Lake Como, and had been instantly contradicted.
No one knew either what he would say to night.
It might be three words or twenty thousand.
There were a few clauses in the Bill-notably those bearing on the point as to when the new worship was to be made compulsory on all subjects over the age of seven-it might be he would object and veto these.
Mabel herself was inclined to these clauses.
These penalties were not vindictive: on a first offence a week's detention only was to be given; on the second, one month's imprisonment; on the third, one year's; and on the fourth, perpetual imprisonment until the criminal yielded.
These four things were facts-they were the manifestations of what she called the Spirit of the World-and if others called that Power God, yet surely these ought to be considered as His functions.
Where then was the difficulty?
For herself the new worship was a crowning sign of the triumph of Humanity.
Her heart had yearned for some such thing as this-some public corporate profession of what all now believed.
She had so resented the dulness of folk who were content with action and never considered its springs.
Ah! these Christians had understood human nature, she had told herself a hundred times: it was true that they had degraded it, darkened light, poisoned thought, misinterpreted instinct; but they had understood that man must worship --must worship or sink.
For herself she intended to go at least once a week to the little old church half a mile away from her home, to kneel there before the sunlit sanctuary, to meditate on sweet mysteries, to present herself to That which she was yearning to love, and to drink, it might be, new draughts of life and power.
Ah! but the Bill must pass first....
She clenched her hands on the rail, and stared steadily before her on the ranks of heads, the open gangways, the great mace on the table, and heard, above the murmur of the crowd outside and the dying whispers within, her own heart beat.
He would come in from beneath through the door that none but He might use, straight into the seat beneath the canopy.
But she would hear His voice-that must be joy enough for her....
Ah! there was silence now outside; the soft roar had died.
He had come then.
And through swimming eyes she saw the long ridges of heads rise beneath her, and through drumming ears heard the murmur of many feet. All faces looked this way; and she watched them as a mirror to see the reflected light of His presence.
"Englishmen, I assent to the Bill of Worship."
"I know she is.
Have a nice dinner for her.
I don't think she ever has a nice dinner at home."
"And the three eldest girls are coming."
"Three!"
"You asked them yourself on Sunday."
They said their papa would be away on business."
It was understood that mr Carroll was never asked to the Manor house.
"Business!
"They must have their dinner, at any rate," said mr Grey.
"I don't think they should suffer because he drinks."
This had been a subject much discussed between them, but on the present occasion Miss Grey would not renew it.
She despatched her father in a cab, the cab having been procured because he was supposed to be a quarter of an hour late, and then went to work to order her dinner.
It has been said that Miss Grey hated the Carrolls; but she hated the daughters worse than the mother, and of all the people she hated in the world she hated Amelia Carroll the worst.
Amelia, the eldest, entertained an idea that she was more of a personage in the world's eyes than her cousin,--that she went to more parties, which certainly was true if she went to any,--that she wore finer clothes, which was also true, and that she had a lover, whereas Dolly Grey,--as she called her cousin behind her back,--had none.
This lover had something to do with horses, and had only been heard of, had never been seen, at the Manor house. Sophy was a good deal hated also, being a forward, flirting, tricky girl of seventeen, who had just left the school at which Uncle john had paid for her education.
Georgina, the third, was still at school under similar circumstances, and was pardoned her egregious noisiness and romping propensities under the score of youth.
She was sixteen, and was possessed of terrible vitality.
"I am sure they take after their father altogether," mr Grey had once said when the three left the Manor house together.
At half past six punctually they came.
Dolly heard a great clatter of four people leaving their clogs and cloaks in the hall, and would not move out of the unused drawing room, in which for the moment she was seated.
"Well, Aunt Carroll, how does the world use you?"
"Very badly.
"I haven't counted; but when I do come I don't often do any good.
How are Minna, and Brenda, and Potsey?"
"Poor Potsey has got a nasty boil under her arm."
"It comes from eating too much toffy," said Georgina.
"I told her it would."
"How very nasty you are!" said Miss Carroll.
"Do leave the child and her ailments alone!"
"Poor papa isn't very well, either," said Sophy, who was supposed to be her father's pet.
"I hope his state of health will not debar him from dining with his friends to night," said Miss Grey.
This came from his afflicted wife, who, in spite of all his misfortunes, would ever speak with some respect of her husband's employments.
"He wasn't at all in a fit state to go to night, but he had promised, and that was enough."
When they had waited three quarters of an hour Amelia began to complain,--certainly not without reason.
"I wonder why Uncle john always keeps us waiting in this way?"
"Papa has, unfortunately, something to do with his time, which is not altogether his own." There was not much in these words, but the tone in which they were uttered would have crushed any one more susceptible than Amelia Carroll.
But at that moment the cab arrived, and Dolly went down to meet her father.
"That girl up stairs is nearly famished."
"I won't be half a moment," said the repentant father, hastening up stairs to go through his ordinary dressing arrangement.
"I wouldn't hurry for her," said Dolly; "but of course you'll hurry. You always do, don't you, papa?" Then they sat down to dinner.
"Well, girls, what is your news?"
"We were out to day on the Brompton Road," said the eldest, "and there came up Prince Chitakov's drag with four roans."
I didn't know there was such a prince."
"Oh, dear, yes; with very stiff mustaches, turned up high at the corners, and pink cheeks, and a very sharp, nobby looking hat, with a light colored grey coat, and light gloves.
You must know the prince."
What did the prince do?"
"He was tooling his own drag, and he had a lady with him on the box.
I never saw anything more tasty than her dress,--dark red silk, with little fluffy fur ornaments all over it.
I wonder who she was?"
"mrs Chitakov, probably," said the attorney.
"I don't think the prince is a married man," said Sophy.
"It's the Princess of Wales."
"But it isn't the Princess of Christian, nor yet the Princess of Teck, nor the Princess of England.
"Papa, don't bamboozle her," said his daughter.
"But," continued the attorney, "why shouldn't the lady have been his wife?
Don't married ladies wear little fluffy fur ornaments?"
"It really isn't becoming."
"He did," said Sophy.
"It's the most impertinent thing I ever heard.
If my father had seen it he'd have had the prince off the box of the coach in no time."
That she should be sitting at table with a girl who could boast that a reprobate foreigner had kissed his hand to her from the box of a fashionable four horsed coach!
For it was in that light that Miss Grey regarded it. "And did you have any farther adventures besides this memorable encounter with the prince?"
"Nothing nearly so interesting," said Sophy.
"That was hardly to be expected," said the attorney.
"Jane, you will have a glass of port wine?
Girls, you must have a glass of port wine to support you after your disappointment with the prince."
"We were not disappointed in the least," said Amelia.
"That is because the prince did not kiss his hand to you," said Sophy. Then Miss Grey sunk again into silence, crushed beneath this last blow.
In the evening, when the dinner things had been taken away, a matter of business came up, and took the place of the prince and his mustaches. mrs Carroll was most anxious to know whether her brother could "lend" her a small sum of twenty pounds.
"He must have clothes, you know," said the poor woman, wailing.
The loan had to be arranged in full conclave, as otherwise mrs Carroll would have found it difficult to obtain access to her brother's ear.
But the one auditor whom she feared was her niece.
On the present occasion Miss Grey simply took up her book to show that the subject was one which had no interest for her; but she did undoubtedly listen to all that was said on the subject. "There was never anything settled about poor Patrick's clothes," said mrs Carroll, in a half whisper.
"I dare say something ought to be done at some time," said mr Grey, who knew that he would be told, when the evening was over, that he would give away all his substance to that man if he were asked.
"Papa has not had a new pair of trousers this year," said Sophy.
"Except those green ones he wore at the races," said Georgina.
"Hold your tongue, miss!" said her mother.
"That was a pair I made up for him and sent them to the man to get pressed."
Of course, papa is a trouble."
"Uncle john would not like not to have any clothes."
His "own" income consisted of what had been saved out of his wife's fortune, and was thus named as in opposition to the larger sum paid to mrs Carroll by mr Grey.
There was one hundred and fifty pounds a year coming from settled property, which had been preserved by the lawyer's care, and which was regarded in the family as "papa's own."
It was very necessary that she should do so, if the family was to be kept on its legs at all. "I don't think any good can come from discussing what my uncle does with the money."
This was Dolly's first speech.
"If he is to have it, let him have it, but let him have as little as possible."
"Your cousin Dorothy is very fortunate," said mrs Carroll.
"She does not know what it is to want for anything."
"It is Dolly's only fault that she won't."
"Because she has it all done for her," said Amelia.
Dolly had gone back to her book, and disdained to make any farther reply.
"He does want them very badly-for decency's sake," said the poor wife, thus winding up her plea.
Then mr Grey got out his check book and wrote the check for twenty pounds.
But he made it payable, not to mr but to mrs Carroll.
"I suppose, papa, nothing can be done about mr Carroll."
This was said by Dolly as soon as the family had withdrawn.
"In what way 'done,' my dear?"
"As to settling some farther sum for himself."
"He'd only spend it, my dear."
"That would be intended," said Dolly.
"And then he would come back just the same."
"But in that case he should have nothing more.
"My dear," said mr Grey, "you cannot get rid of the gnats of the world. They will buzz and sting and be a nuisance.
Poor Jane suffers worse from this gnat than you or i Put up with it; and understand in your own mind that when he comes for another twenty pounds he must have it.
You needn't tell him, but so it must be."
"If I had my way," said Dolly, after ten minutes' silence, "I would punish him.
He is an evil thing, and should be made to reap the proper reward.
It is not that I wish to avoid my share of the world's burdens, but that justice should be done.
I don't know which I hate the worst,--Uncle Carroll or mr Scarborough."
The next day was Sunday, and Dolly was very anxious before breakfast to induce her father to say that he would go to church with her; but he was inclined to be obstinate, and fell back upon his usual excuse, saying that there were Scarborough papers which it would be necessary that he should read before he started for Tretton on the following day.
That is the intention; but somehow it fails with me sometimes."
"Do you think that you hate people when you go to church as much as when you don't?"
"I am not sure that I hate anybody very much."
"I do."
"But if you don't hate them it is because you won't take the trouble, and that again is not right.
You'd hate Uncle Carroll's idleness and abominable self indulgence worse than you do."
"Then you certainly ought to go to church."
"I know you would, you dear, sweet, kind hearted, but most un Christian, father.
You must come to church, in order that some idea of what Christianity demands of you may make its way into your heart.
It is not what the clergyman may say of you, but that your mind will get away for two hours from that other reptile and his concerns." Then mr Grey, with a loud, long sigh, allowed his boots, and his gloves, and his church going hat, and his church going umbrella to be brought to him.
It was, in fact, his aversion to these articles that Dolly had to encounter.
I have got a frock which I will bring with me as a present for Potsey; and I will make her sew on the buttons for herself.
Tell Minna I will lend her that book I spoke of.
The discussion was held in the dining room, and may, therefore, be supposed to have been premeditated. Those at night in mr Grey's own bedroom were generally the result of sudden thought.
"I should lay down the law to him-" began Dolly.
"I don't mean the law in that sense.
If his son is willing to pay these money lenders what sums they have actually advanced, and if by any effort on his part the money can be raised, let it be done.
There seems to be some justice in repaying out of the property that which was lent to the property when by mr Scarborough's own doing the property was supposed to go into the eldest son's hands.
Go there prepared with your opinion.
But if either father or son will not accept it, then depart, and shake the dust from your feet."
"You propose it all as though it were the easiest thing in the world."
"Easy or difficult.
I would not discuss anything of which the justice may hereafter be disputed."
What was the result of the consultation on mr Grey's mind he did not declare, but he resolved to take his daughter's advice in all that she said to him.
CHAPTER twenty six THE JEW
When she realised what had happened, a curious mixture of joy and wonder filled her heart.
Chauvelin was still absolutely helpless, far more so than he could even have been under a blow from the fist, for now he could neither see, nor hear, nor speak, whilst his cunning adversary had quietly slipped through his fingers.
Blakeney was gone, obviously to try and join the fugitives at the Pere Blanchard's hut.
Every place was watched, and every stranger kept in sight.
How far could Percy go, thus arrayed in his gorgeous clothes, without being sighted and followed?
Now she blamed herself terribly for not having gone down to him sooner, and given him that word of warning and of love which, perhaps, after all, he needed.
Chauvelin had partially recovered; his sneezing had become less violent, and he had struggled to his feet.
"Here, man! through that door!
not five minutes ago."
"We saw nothing, citoyen!
"You did what I ordered you to do," said Chauvelin, with impatience. "I know that, but you were a precious long time about it.
Fortunately, there's not much harm done, or it had fared ill with you, Citoyen Desgas."
There was so much rage and hatred in his superior's whole attitude.
"The tall stranger, citoyen-" he stammered.
For obvious reasons, I dared not tackle him alone. Brogard is too big a fool, and that cursed Englishman appears to have the strength of a bullock, and so he slipped away under your very nose."
"He cannot go far without being sighted, citoyen."
He again assured me that the watch had been constant all day, and that no stranger could possibly get to the beach, or reach a boat, without being sighted."
"That's good.--Do the men know their work?" "They have had very clear orders, citoyen: and I myself spoke to those who were about to start. They are to shadow-as secretly as possible-any stranger they may see, especially if he be tall, or stoop as if he would disguise his height."
"That impudent Scarlet Pimpernel would slip through clumsy fingers.
We must let him get to the Pere Blanchard's hut now; there surround and capture him."
"That is right," said Chauvelin, rubbing his hands, well pleased.
"What is it?"
"A tall Englishman had a long conversation about three quarters of an hour ago with a Jew, Reuben by name, who lives not ten paces from here."
"Yes-and?" queried Chauvelin, impatiently.
"The conversation was all about a horse and cart, which the tall Englishman wished to hire, and which was to have been ready for him by eleven o'clock."
"It is past that now.
Where does that Reuben live?"
"A few minutes' walk from this door."
"Send one of the men to find out if the stranger has driven off in Reuben's cart."
"Yes, citoyen."
Desgas went to give the necessary orders to one of the men.
She had come all this way, and with such high hopes and firm determination to help her husband, and so far she had been able to do nothing, but to watch, with a heart breaking with anguish, the meshes of the deadly net closing round the daring Scarlet Pimpernel.
He could not now advance many steps, without spying eyes to track and denounce him.
Her own helplessness struck her with the terrible sense of utter disappointment.
The possibility of being the slightest use to her husband had become almost NIL, and her only hope rested in being allowed to share his fate, whatever it might ultimately be.
For the moment, even her chance of ever seeing the man she loved again, had become a remote one.
Still, she was determined to keep a close watch over his enemy, and a vague hope filled her heart, that whilst she kept Chauvelin in sight, Percy's fate might still be hanging in the balance.
Thus several minutes went by.
Chauvelin was evidently devoured with impatience.
Apparently he trusted no one: this last trick played upon him by the daring Scarlet Pimpernel had made him suddenly doubtful of success, unless he himself was there to watch, direct and superintend the capture of this impudent Englishman.
About five minutes later, Desgas returned, followed by an elderly Jew, in a dirty, threadbare gaberdine, worn greasy across the shoulders.
His red hair, which he wore after the fashion of the Polish Jews, with the corkscrew curls each side of his face, was plentifully sprinkled with grey-a general coating of grime, about his cheeks and his chin, gave him a peculiarly dirty and loathsome appearance.
Chauvelin, who had all the Frenchman's prejudice against the despised race, motioned to the fellow to keep at a respectful distance.
The group of the three men were standing just underneath the hanging oil lamp, and Marguerite had a clear view of them all.
"Is this the man?" asked Chauvelin.
"No, citoyen," replied Desgas, "Reuben could not be found, so presumably his cart has gone with the stranger; but this man here seems to know something, which he is willing to sell for a consideration."
The Jew, with characteristic patience, stood humbly on one side, leaning on the knotted staff, his greasy, broad brimmed hat casting a deep shadow over his grimy face, waiting for the noble Excellency to deign to put some questions to him.
"The citoyen tells me," said Chauvelin peremptorily to him, "that you know something of my friend, the tall Englishman, whom I desire to meet . . .
"Yes, your Excellency," replied the Jew, who spoke the language with that peculiar lisp which denotes Eastern origin, "I and Reuben Goldstein met a tall Englishman, on the road, close by here this evening."
"Did you speak to him?"
"He spoke to us, your Excellency.
"What did you say?"
"I did not say anything," said the Jew in an injured tone, "Reuben Goldstein, that accursed traitor, that son of Belial . . ."
"Cut that short, man," interrupted Chauvelin, roughly, "and go on with your story."
"He took the words out of my mouth, your Excellency: when I was about to offer the wealthy Englishman my horse and cart, to take him wheresoever he chose, Reuben had already spoken, and offered his half starved nag, and his broken down cart."
"And, of course, the horse and cart were ready?"
Reuben's nag was lame as usual; she refused to budge at first.
"Then they started?"
An Englishman too!--He ought to have known Reuben's nag was not fit to drive."
"But if he had no choice?"
He would not listen.
Reuben is such a liar, and has such insinuating ways. The stranger was deceived.
If he was in a hurry, he would have had better value for his money by taking my cart."
"Aye! that I have, your Excellency, and if your Excellency wants to drive . . ."
Thoughtfully the Jew rubbed his dirty chin.
Marguerite's heart was beating well nigh to bursting.
She had heard the peremptory question; she looked anxiously at the Jew, but could not read his face beneath the shadow of his broad brimmed hat.
He gazed at them thoughtfully, then remarked, in a quiet tone of voice,--
"Twenty francs, your Excellency," replied the Jew, "and I have been an honest man all my life."
"How many gold pieces are there in the palm of my hand?" he asked quietly.
Evidently he had no desire to terrorize the man, but to conciliate him, for his own purposes, for his manner was pleasant and suave.
No doubt he feared that threats of the guillotine, and various other persuasive methods of that type, might addle the old man's brains, and that he would be more likely to be useful through greed of gain, than through terror of death.
"At least five, I should say, your Excellency," he replied obsequiously.
"Enough, do you think, to loosen that honest tongue of yours?"
"Whether your horse and cart can take me to where I can find my friend the tall stranger, who has driven off in Reuben Goldstein's cart?"
"To a place called the Pere Blanchard's hut?"
"Your Honour has guessed?" said the Jew in astonishment.
"You know the place?
Which road leads to it?"
"You know the road?" repeated Chauvelin, roughly.
"Every stone, every blade of grass, your Honour," replied the Jew quietly.
Chauvelin without another word threw the five pieces of gold one by one before the Jew, who knelt down, and on his hands and knees struggled to collect them.
One rolled away, and he had some trouble to get it, for it had lodged underneath the dresser.
Chauvelin quietly waited while the old man scrambled on the floor, to find the piece of gold.
"How soon can your horse and cart be ready?"
"Where?"
"Not ten meters from this door.
Will your Excellency deign to look."
"I don't want to see it.
How far can you drive me in it?"
I am sure that, not two leagues from here, we shall come across that wily Reuben, his nag, his cart and the tall stranger all in a heap in the middle of the road."
"How far is the nearest village from here?"
"On the road which the Englishman took, Miquelon is the nearest village, not two leagues from here."
"He could-if he ever got so far."
"Can you?"
"That is my intention," said Chauvelin very quietly, "but remember, if you have deceived me, I shall tell off two of my most stalwart soldiers to give you such a beating, that your breath will perhaps leave your ugly body for ever.
But if we find my friend the tall Englishman, either on the road or at the Pere Blanchard's hut, there will be ten more gold pieces for you.
Do you accept the bargain?"
The Jew again thoughtfully rubbed his chin.
After a moment's pause, he said deliberately,--
"I accept."
With a final, most abject and cringing bow, the old Jew shuffled out of the room.
Chauvelin seemed pleased with his interview, for he rubbed his hands together, with that usual gesture of his, of malignant satisfaction.
There will be hot work presently, if I mistake not, in the Pere Blanchard's hut.
We shall corner our game there, I'll warrant, for this impudent Scarlet Pimpernel has had the audacity-or the stupidity, I hardly know which-to adhere to his original plans.
Some of our men will, I presume, be put HORS DE COMBAT.
These royalists are good swordsmen, and the Englishman is devilish cunning, and looks very powerful.
Still, we shall be five against one at least.
The Englishman is ahead of us, and not likely to look behind him."
Whilst he gave these curt and concise orders, he had completed his change of attire.
The Pere Blanchard's hut is-an I mistake not-a lonely spot upon the beach, and our men will enjoy a bit of rough sport there with the wounded fox.
Chapter twelve
To have been thus close to safety and then to have all hope snatched away by a cruel stroke of fate seemed unendurable.
He noted the remnants of the uniforms upon the blacks and immediately he demanded to know where were their officers.
"They cannot understand you," said the girl and so in the bastard tongue that is the medium of communication between the Germans and the blacks of their colony, she repeated the white man's question.
Usanga grinned.
"You know where they are, white woman," he replied. "They are dead, and if this white man does not do as I tell him, he, too, will be dead."
"What do you want of him?" asked the girl.
"I want him to teach me how to fly like a bird," replied Usanga.
Bertha Kircher looked her astonishment, but repeated the demand to the lieutenant.
The Englishman meditated for a moment.
"He wants to learn to fly, does he?" he repeated.
The girl put the question to Usanga, who, degraded, cunning, and entirely unprincipled, was always perfectly willing to promise anything whether he had any intentions of fulfilling his promises or not, and so immediately assented to the proposition.
"Let the white man teach me to fly," he said, "and I will take you back close to the settlements of your people, but in return for this I shall keep the great bird," and he waved a black hand in the direction of the aeroplane.
When Bertha Kircher had repeated Usanga's proposition to the aviator, the latter shrugged his shoulders and with a wry face finally agreed.
"I fancy there is no other way out of it," he said. "In any event the plane is lost to the British government.
If I refuse the black scoundrel's request, there is no doubt but what he will make short work of me with the result that the machine will lie here until it rots.
If I accept his offer it will at least be the means of assuring your safe return to civilization and that" he added, "is worth more to me than all the planes in the British Air Service."
The girl cast a quick glance at him.
She regretted that he had spoken as he had and he, too, regretted it almost instantly as he saw the shadow cross her face and realized that he had unwittingly added to the difficulties of her already almost unbearable situation.
"Forgive me," he said quickly.
"Please forget what that remark implied.
She smiled and thanked him, but the thing had been said and could never be unsaid, and Bertha Kircher knew even more surely than as though he had fallen upon his knees and protested undying devotion that the young English officer loved her.
The Englishman attempted to dissuade him, but immediately the black became threatening and abusive, since, like all those who are ignorant, he was suspicious that the intentions of others were always ulterior unless they perfectly coincided with his wishes.
"All right, old top," muttered the Englishman, "I will give you the lesson of your life," and then turning to the girl: "Persuade him to let you accompany us.
I shall be afraid to leave you here with these devilish scoundrels." But when she put the suggestion to Usanga the black immediately suspected some plan to thwart him-possibly to carry him against his will back to the German masters he had traitorously deserted, and glowering at her savagely, he obstinately refused to entertain the suggestion.
"The white woman will remain here with my people," he said.
"They will not harm her unless you fail to bring me back safely."
"Tell him," said the Englishman, "that if you are not standing in plain sight in this meadow when I return, I will not land, but will carry Usanga back to the British camp and have him hanged."
Usanga promised that the girl would be in evidence upon their return, and took immediate steps to impress upon his warriors that under penalty of death they must not harm her.
Once seated within what he already considered his new possession, the black's courage began to wane and when the motor was started and the great propeller commenced to whir, he screamed to the Englishman to stop the thing and permit him to alight, but the aviator could neither hear nor understand the black above the noise of the propeller and exhaust.
Then the plane rose from the ground and in a moment soared gracefully in a wide circle until it topped the trees.
The black sergeant was in a veritable collapse of terror.
He saw the earth dropping rapidly from beneath him.
He saw the trees and river and at a distance the little clearing with the thatched huts of Numabo's village.
He tried hard not to think of the results of a sudden fall to the rapidly receding ground below.
He attempted to concentrate his mind upon the twenty four wives which this great bird most assuredly would permit him to command.
"I said I'd give this beggar the lesson of his life," he murmured as he heard, even above the whir of the propeller, the shriek of the terrified Negro.
A moment later Smith Oldwick had righted the machine and was dropping rapidly toward the earth.
He circled slowly a few times above the meadow until he had assured himself that Bertha Kircher was there and apparently unharmed, then he dropped gently to the ground so that the machine came to a stop a short distance from where the girl and the warriors awaited them.
So jealous was the black of his new found toy that he would not return to the village of Numabo, but insisted on making camp close beside the plane, lest in some inconceivable fashion it should be stolen from him.
For two days they camped there, and constantly during daylight hours Usanga compelled the Englishman to instruct him in the art of flying.
Smith Oldwick, in recalling the long months of arduous training he had undergone himself before he had been considered sufficiently adept to be considered a finished flier, smiled at the conceit of the ignorant African who was already demanding that he be permitted to make a flight alone.
"If it was not for losing the machine," the Englishman explained to the girl, "I'd let the bounder take it up and break his fool neck as he would do inside of two minutes."
It was with these thoughts in mind that Usanga lay down to sleep in the evening of the second day.
Constantly, however, the thought of Naratu and her temper arose to take the keen edge from his pleasant imaginings.
The thought having taken form persisted, but always it was more than outweighed by the fact that the black sergeant was actually afraid of his woman, so much afraid of her in fact that he would not have dared to attempt to put her out of the way unless he could do so secretly while she slept.
However, as one plan after another was conjured by the strength of his desires, he at last hit upon one which came to him almost with the force of a blow and brought him sitting upright among his sleeping companions.
When morning dawned Usanga could scarce wait for an opportunity to put his scheme into execution, and the moment that he had eaten, he called several of his warriors aside and talked with them for some moments.
Several times, too, he saw the eyes of the Negroes turned upon him and once they flashed simultaneously toward the white girl.
Even the spear that he had had when captured had been taken away from him, so that now he was unarmed and absolutely at the mercy of the black sergeant and his followers.
Without a word of explanation the warriors seized the young officer and threw him to the ground upon his face.
When they had finally secured him to their satisfaction, they rolled him over on his side and then it was he saw Bertha Kircher had been similarly trussed.
Smith Oldwick lay in such a position that he could see nearly the entire expanse of meadow and the aeroplane a short distance away. Usanga was talking to the girl who was shaking her head in vehement negatives.
"What is he saying?" called the Englishman.
"God!" cried the man.
Anything that you want.
I have money, more money than that poor fool could imagine there was in the whole world.
With it he can buy anything that money will purchase, fine clothes and food and women, all the women he wants.
The girl shook her head.
"It is useless," she said.
"He would not understand and if he did understand, he would not trust you.
The blacks are so unprincipled themselves that they can imagine no such thing as principle or honor in others, and especially do these blacks distrust an Englishman whom the Germans have taught them to believe are the most treacherous and degraded of people.
No, it is better thus.
I am sorry that you cannot go with us, for if he goes high enough my death will be much easier than that which probably awaits you."
Usanga had been continually interrupting their brief conversation in an attempt to compel the girl to translate it to him, for he feared that they were concocting some plan to thwart him, and to quiet and appease him, she told him that the Englishman was merely bidding her farewell and wishing her good luck.
Suddenly she turned to the black.
"If I go willingly with you?"
"What is it you want?" he inquired.
"Tell your men to free the white man after we are gone.
He can never catch us.
That is all I ask of you.
If you will grant him his freedom and his life, I will go willingly with you.
"You will go with me anyway," growled Usanga.
"It is nothing to me whether you go willingly or not.
I am going to be a great king and you will do whatever I tell you to do."
He had in mind that he would start properly with this woman.
There should be no repetition of his harrowing experience with Naratu. This wife and the twenty four others should be carefully selected and well trained.
Bertha Kircher saw that it was useless to appeal to the brute and so she held her peace though she was filled with sorrow in contemplating the fate that awaited the young officer, scarce more than a boy, who had impulsively revealed his love for her.
The girl turned her eyes toward the Englishman.
She was very pale but her lips smiled bravely.
"Good bye!" she cried.
"Good bye, and God bless you!" he called back-his voice the least bit husky-and then: "The thing I wanted to say-may I say it now, we are so very near the end?"
Her lips moved but whether they voiced consent or refusal he did not know, for the words were drowned in the whir of the propeller.
The black had learned his lesson sufficiently well so that the motor was started without bungling and the machine was soon under way across the meadowland.
He saw the plane tilt and the machine rise from the ground.
It was a good take-off--as good as Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith Oldwick could make himself but he realized that it was only so by chance.
At any instant the machine might plunge to earth and even if, by some miracle of chance, the black could succeed in rising above the tree tops and make a successful flight, there was not one chance in one hundred thousand that he could ever land again without killing his fair captive and himself.
Chapter thirteen
Usanga's Reward
For two days Tarzan of the Apes had been hunting leisurely to the north, and swinging in a wide circle, he had returned to within a short distance of the clearing where he had left Bertha Kircher and the young lieutenant.
He had spent the night in a large tree that overhung the river only a short distance from the clearing, and now in the early morning hours he was crouching at the water's edge waiting for an opportunity to capture Pisah, the fish, thinking that he would take it back with him to the hut where the girl could cook it for herself and her companion.
Motionless as a bronze statue was the wily ape man, for well he knew how wary is Pisah, the fish.
The slightest movement would frighten him away and only by infinite patience might he be captured at all.
Tarzan depended upon his own quickness and the suddenness of his attack, for he had no bait or hook.
His knowledge of the ways of the denizens of the water told him where to wait for Pisah.
It might be a minute or it might be an hour before the fish would swim into the little pool above which he crouched, but sooner or later one would come.
The moment that he turned he saw that the author of the disturbance was Zu tag.
"What does Zu tag want?" asked the ape man.
"Zu tag comes to the water to drink," replied the ape.
"Where is the tribe?" asked Tarzan.
"They are hunting for pisangs and scimatines farther back in the forest," replied Zu tag.
"And the Tarmangani she and bull-" asked Tarzan, "are they safe?"
"They have gone away," replied Zu tag.
"Kudu has come out of his lair twice since they left."
"Did the tribe chase them away?" asked Tarzan.
"No," replied the ape.
"We did not see them go.
We do not know why they left."
Tarzan swung quickly through the trees toward the clearing.
The hut and boma were as he had left them, but there was no sign of either the man or the woman.
Crossing the clearing, he entered the boma and then the hut.
Both were empty, and his trained nostrils told him that they had been gone for at least two days.
As he was about to leave the hut he saw a paper pinned upon the wall with a sliver of wood and taking it down, he read:
After what you told me about Miss Kircher, and knowing that you dislike her, I feel that it is not fair to her and to you that we should impose longer upon you.
I know that our presence is keeping you from continuing your journey to the west coast, and so I have decided that it is better for us to try and reach the white settlements immediately without imposing further upon you.
We both thank you for your kindness and protection.
If there was any way that I might repay the obligation I feel, I should be only too glad to do so.
Tarzan shrugged his shoulders, crumpled the note in his hand and tossed it aside.
He felt a certain sense of relief from responsibility and was glad that they had taken the matter out of his hands.
They were gone and would forget, but somehow he could not forget.
He walked out across the boma and into the clearing.
He felt uneasy and restless.
Once he started toward the north in response to a sudden determination to continue his way to the west coast.
Upon the other side of the range he would search for a stream running downward toward the west coast, and thus following the rivers he would be sure of game and water in plenty.
But he did not go far.
A dozen steps, perhaps, and he came to a sudden stop.
"Tarzan of the Apes is a fool and a weak, old woman," and he turned back toward the south.
Manu, the monkey, had seen the two Tarmangani pass two days before. Chattering and scolding, he told Tarzan all about it.
An inexplicable urge spurred Tarzan to increasing, speed.
Tarzan's conscience was troubling him, which accounted for the fact that he compared himself to a weak, old woman, for the ape man, reared in savagery and inured to hardships and cruelty, disliked to admit any of the gentler traits that in reality were his birthright.
At last there came to the ears of the ape man a peculiar whirring, throbbing sound.
For an instant he paused, listening intently, "An aeroplane!" he muttered, and hastened forward at greatly increased speed.
When Tarzan of the Apes finally reached the edge of the meadowland where Smith Oldwick's plane had landed, he took in the entire scene in one quick glance and grasped the situation, although he could scarce give credence to the things he saw.
Bound and helpless, the English officer lay upon the ground at one side of the meadow, while around him stood a number of the black deserters from the German command.
Tarzan had seen these men before and knew who they were.
Coming toward him down the meadow was an aeroplane piloted by the black Usanga and in the seat behind the pilot was the white girl, Bertha Kircher.
His knowledge of Usanga, together with the position of the white man, told him that the black sergeant was attempting to carry off the white girl.
He had told them that he would take the captive to a sultan of the north and there obtain a great price for her and that when he returned they should have some of the spoils.
These things Tarzan did not know.
Already the machine was slowly leaving the ground.
In a moment more it would rise swiftly out of reach.
At first Tarzan thought of fitting an arrow to his bow and slaying Usanga, but as quickly he abandoned the idea because he knew that the moment the pilot was slain the machine, running wild, would dash the girl to death among the trees.
Usanga did not see him, being too intent upon the unaccustomed duties of a pilot, but the blacks across the meadow saw him and they ran forward with loud and savage cries and menacing rifles to intercept him.
They saw a giant white man leap from the branches of a tree to the turf and race rapidly toward the plane.
They saw him take a long grass rope from about his shoulders as he ran.
They saw the white girl in the machine glance down and discover him.
Twenty feet above the running ape man soared the huge plane.
Simultaneously Tarzan was dragged from his feet and the plane lurched sideways in response to the new strain.
Usanga clutched wildly at the control and the machine shot upward at a steep angle.
Dangling at the end of the rope the ape man swung pendulum like in space.
The Englishman, lying bound upon the ground, had been a witness of all these happenings. His heart stood still as he saw Tarzan's body hurtling through the air toward the tree tops among which it seemed he must inevitably crash; but the plane was rising rapidly, so that the beast man cleared the top most branches.
Then slowly, hand over hand, he climbed toward the fuselage.
The girl, clinging desperately to the noose, strained every muscle to hold the great weight dangling at the lower end of the rope.
Usanga, all unconscious of what was going on behind him, drove the plane higher and higher into the air.
Tarzan glanced downward.
It seemed to Bertha Kircher that the fingers of her hands were dead. The numbness was running up her arms to her elbows.
It seemed to her that those lifeless fingers must relax at any instant and then, when she had about given up hope, she saw a strong brown hand reach up and grasp the side of the fuselage.
Instantly the weight upon the rope was removed and a moment later Tarzan of the Apes raised his body above the side and threw a leg over the edge. He glanced forward at Usanga and then, placing his mouth close to the girl's ear he cried: "Have you ever piloted a plane?" The girl nodded a quick affirmative.
"Have you the courage to climb up there beside the black and seize the control while I take care of him?"
The girl looked toward Usanga and shuddered.
"Yes," she replied, "but my feet are bound."
Tarzan drew his hunting knife from its sheath and reaching down, severed the thongs that bound her ankles.
Then the girl unsnapped the strap that held her to her seat.
With one hand Tarzan grasped the girl's arm and steadied her as the two crawled slowly across the few feet which intervened between the two seats.
A single slight tip of the plane would have cast them both into eternity.
Tarzan realized that only through a miracle of chance could they reach Usanga and effect the change in pilots and yet he knew that that chance must be taken, for in the brief moments since he had first seen the plane, he had realized that the black was almost without experience as a pilot and that death surely awaited them in any event should the black sergeant remain at the control.
The first intimation Usanga had that all was not well with him was when the girl slipped suddenly to his side and grasped the control and at the same instant steel like fingers seized his throat.
Usanga clawed the air and shrieked but he was helpless as a babe.
Far below the watchers in the meadow could see the aeroplane careening in the sky, for with the change of control it had taken a sudden dive.
Turning and twisting in mid-air it fell with ever increasing velocity and the Englishman held his breath as the thing hurtled toward them.
Usanga had reaped his reward.
Again and again the plane circled above the meadow.
The blacks, at first dismayed at the death of their leader, were now worked to a frenzy of rage and a determination to be avenged.
Dead and dying they lay strewn for fifty feet along the turf.
"You saved yourself," he insisted, "for had you been unable to pilot the plane, I could not have helped you, and now," he said, "you two have the means of returning to the settlements.
The day is still young.
You can easily cover the distance in a few hours if you have sufficient petrol." He looked inquiringly toward the aviator.
Smith Oldwick nodded his head affirmatively.
"I have plenty," he replied.
"Neither of you belong in the jungle." A slight smile touched his lips as he spoke.
The girl and the Englishman smiled too.
"This jungle is no place for us at least," said Smith Oldwick, "and it is no place for any other white man.
Why don't you come back to civilization with us?"
Tarzan shook his head.
"I prefer the jungle," he said.
The aviator dug his toe into the ground and still looking down, blurted something which he evidently hated to say.
Tarzan laughed.
"No," he said.
"I know what you are trying to say. It is not that.
I was born in the jungle.
I have lived all my life in the jungle, and I shall die in the jungle.
I do not wish to live or die elsewhere."
The others shook their heads.
They could not understand him.
"The quicker you go, the quicker you will reach safety."
They walked to the plane together.
Smith Oldwick pressed the ape man's hand and clambered into the pilot's seat.
"Good bye," said the girl as she extended her hand to Tarzan.
"Before I go won't you tell me you don't hate me any more?" Tarzan's face clouded. Without a word he picked her up and lifted her to her place behind the Englishman.
An expression of pain crossed Bertha Kircher's face.
EARLY LESSONS IN THE LIFE OF FAITH
Soon all were joining in the chase after the bird, which flew or hopped in front or just above, and sometimes on the ground almost within reach.
It was as if God spoke the words directly to me.
This unexpected and timely draft proved to be a bonus, which did not occur again.
The time came when two diverse paths lay before me-one to England, as an artist; one to China, as a missionary.
Circumstances made a definite decision most difficult.
In "China's Spiritual Needs and Claims" the writer told many instances of God's gracious provision in answer to prayer.
The incidents related impressed me deeply.
The thought came-if you cannot trust God for this, when Hudson Taylor could trust for so much more, are you worthy to be a missionary?
It was my first experience of trusting quite alone for money.
But I was kept back from doing so; and though I had a week or more of severe testing, peace of mind and the assurance that God would supply my need, came at length.
Not for a moment did I think there was anything in the purse till my brother said: "You foolish girl, why don't you open it?" I opened the purse, and found it contained a check for fifty dollars!
This incident has ever remained peculiarly precious; for it seemed to us a seal of God upon the new life opening before us.
three
Some hours later he returned, his face beaming with joy.
They found themselves at last left alone, their lives spared, but everything gone.
His coming at such an opportune moment filled the hearts of their heathen enemies with fear.
Money and goods were returned, and from that time the violent opposition of the people ceased.
The people did not know what he could do, and moreover they were afraid to trust themselves into his hands.
We had heard of missionaries in India, China, and elsewhere, who had worked for many years without gaining converts; but we did not believe that this was God's will for us.
The experience of thirty years has confirmed this belief.
Space permits the mention of but two of these earliest converts.
The first was Wang Feng ao, who came with us into Honan as mr Goforth's personal teacher.
For many years his business had been that of a public story teller; but when mr Goforth came across him he was reduced to an utter wreck through opium smoking. He accepted the Gospel, but for a long time seemed too weak to break off the opium habit.
Again and again he tried to do so, but failed hopelessly each time.
So what could I do?
And as I lay there ill and weak, the temptation came to yield.
But, as I remembered dr Corbett's testimony, and my own clear call, I felt that to go back would be to go against my own conscience.
I therefore determined to do as dr Corbett had done-leave myself in the Lord's hands-whether for life or for death. This happened more than twenty years ago, and since then I have had very little trouble from that dread disease.
During our fourth year in China, when we were spending the hot season at the coast, our little son, eighteen months old, was taken very ill with dysentery.
After several days' fight for the child's life came the realization, one evening, that the angel of death was at hand.
Thinking my darling was gone, I hastened for a light, for it was dark; but on examining the child's face I found that he had sunk into a deep, sound, natural sleep, which lasted most of the night. The following day he was practically well of the dysentery.
TO HIS PRAISE!
"They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness."
Only two ways seemed open to us.
We decided on the latter course.
The day came when this child and myself took possession of our new home.
Tears stood in her eyes as my daughter gave the letter back, saying: "Mother, we don't trust God half enough!"
Were I to attempt to write the history of the months that followed, a long chapter would be required; but my testimony along this line is surely sufficient.
That is, so that I could stand up before an audience and not bring discredit to my Master.
Praise his name!
"There is nothing too great for his power, And nothing too small for his love!"
My boy did not know of this prayer.
Months later a call came for volunteers, to fill the great gaps made at the time of the first use of gas.
Just before they were to leave he was again sent for from Headquarters, and told he was to go to the Canadian Base in France as adjutant.
He had begun making arrangements for this step, when he had a fall from his horse, which caused him to be invalided home to Canada, where he was kept till the close of the war.
The request was a complicated one, including several definite details.
She wrote joyously, telling that she had received just what I had asked for, and in every detail as I had prayed.
On going there to get a site for our home, though we looked for more than a week, we could find no place.
And before we reached the station the assurance had come that we would get a place.
When he heard we had failed to get a site, he said:
I'll ask them to give it to you."
I am now writing these closing words in our God given home, built on this beautiful site, one of the most lovely spots to be found in China. So from this quiet mountain retreat, a monument of what God can give in answer to prayer, this little book of Prayer Testimonies is sent forth.
As the past has been reviewed, and God's wonderful faithfulness recalled, there has come a great sense of regret that I have not trusted God more, and asked more of him, both for my family and the Chinese. Yes, it is truly wonderful!
Conditions of Prevailing Prayer
one.
Causes of Failure in Prayer
one.
three.
"I consent to this Constitution," he declared, "because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best." Washington sought also to secure unanimity, and Hamilton declared:--
"I am anxious that every member should sign.
A few by refusing may do infinite mischief.
Such words had some weight, but not enough to secure unanimity.
All the states voted for the Constitution, but several delegates went on record against it, and Hamilton's two associates from New York were absent.
It was this alone which saved New York from being recorded against the Constitution.
Clinton was not absolutely opposed to union, but he attached to it so many reservations that for practical purposes he was an opponent of the new Constitution.
It was in this field that Hamilton fought the great fight with his pen which has left to posterity the fine exposition of the Constitution known as "The Federalist." A society was formed in the city of New York to resist the adoption of the Constitution, and articles soon began to appear in the local press criticising and opposing it.
"The Federalist," although a purely political argument, has survived the occasion which called it forth, as one of the master documents of political writing. That it has a distinct place in literature is admitted by so severe a critic as Professor Barrett Wendell in his recent "Literary History of America." It is worth while quoting his acute literary judgment of its merits:--
It was in some respects the hardest task ever set with any hope of success before a parliamentary leader.
It was generally recognized, moreover, that however strong the objections were to the Constitution, the choice lay practically between this Constitution and none,--between the proposed government and anarchy.
So strong was the sentiment that the Constitution must be accepted in some form, that its opponents in the state convention did not venture upon immediate rejection.
Fortunately, their course in fighting for delay only tended to make it clearer that New York would stand alone if she failed to ratify.
It was fortunate for the state and the country that the leader of the opposition to the Constitution in the New York convention was a man of a high order of ability, whose mind was open in an unusual degree to the influence of logical reasoning.
This result was only reached, however, after a long and sometimes acrimonious struggle, in which Hamilton was on his feet day after day explaining and defending each separate clause of the Constitution,--not only in its real meaning, but against all the distorted constructions put upon it by the most acute and jealous of critics.
But events had been fighting with Hamilton.
State after state had ratified the new document, and news of their action had reached New York.
Nine states, the number necessary to put the Constitution in force, were made up by the ratification of New Hampshire (june twenty first seventeen eighty eight).
Still New York hesitated, and Hamilton wrote to Madison: "Our chance of success depends upon you.
Symptoms of relaxation in some of the leaders authorize a gleam of hope if you do well, but certainly I think not otherwise." Virginia justified his hopes by a majority of eighty nine against seventy nine for ratification (june twenty fifth seventeen eighty eight).
The news reached New York on july third.
The opposition there, though showing signs of relenting, was still stubborn.
Conditional ratification, with a long string of amendments, was first proposed.
Jay firmly insisted that the word "conditional" must be erased.
Melancthon Smith then proposed ratification with the right to withdraw if the amendments should not be accepted.
Hamilton exposed the folly of such a project in a brilliant speech, which led Smith to admit that conditional ratification was an absurdity.
Other similar proposals were brought forward, but they were evidently equivalent to rejection by indirection, which would have left New York out of the new Union.
Finally, Samuel Jones, another broad minded member of the opposition, proposed ratification without conditions, but "in full confidence" that Congress would adopt all needed amendments.
With the support of Smith, this form of ratification was carried by the slender majority of three votes (july twenty sixth seventeen eighty eight).
By this narrow margin it was decided that New York should form a part of the Union, and that the great experiment in representative government should not begin with the two halves of the country separated by a hostile power, commanding the greatest seaport of the colonies.
Hamilton thus played an important part in winning the first great battle for the Constitution.
When he returned to New York, he was beaten for reelection to Congress, and Governor Clinton and his party retained such a firm grip upon the legislature that a deadlock occurred between the Federalist House and the opposition Senate.
The state elections which followed resulted in defeat for the Federalists in the election of the governor, but they carried the legislature and elected two senators,--General Schuyler and Rufus King.
King had recently come from Massachusetts, and Hamilton's insistence that he should be chosen caused a breach with the Livingstons, which contributed to the defeat of Schuyler two years later and the election of Aaron Burr.
He had endeavored to meet and disarm such opposition as far as possible in the careful and illuminating language of his report, but it soon became evident that against nearly all parts of it a bitter and persistent battle would be waged.
Rumors were already abroad that something was to be done to restore the national credit, but it was not until the reading of Hamilton's report in the House (january fourteenth seventeen ninety) that the full scope of his plans was made manifest.
This came about through the sudden rise in the public funds, and the promptness with which speculators bought them up from holders who were ignorant of their value.
The absence of a well organized stock market, with the ramifications of telegraphic quotations throughout the Union, put in the hands of the more daring of these speculators an opportunity to avail themselves of the ignorance of others to an extent which would not be possible to day.
Agents were soon scouring the country, buying up the certificates of the debt in all its varied forms, before the news of Hamilton's great report had reached the humble holders, some of whom were old soldiers or quiet farmers who had been compelled to furnish supplies for the army.
"Couriers and relay horses by land, and swift sailing pilot boats by sea, were flying in all directions.
Active partners and agents were associated and employed in every state, town, and county, and the paper bought up at five shillings, and even as low as two shillings in the pound, before the holder knew that Congress had already provided for its redemption at par."
Long and bitter were the debates in the House over this and other branches of Hamilton's project.
But it was so obvious that a distinction between the holders of the debt would run directly counter to its character as negotiable paper, and would be almost impossible of just execution, that the friends of the funding project easily had the best of the argument. Madison, although inclined to oppose Hamilton, was forced to admit that the debt must be funded at par without discrimination.
He brought forward a project to pay the original holders the difference between par and the price at which they had sold, and to pay to the present holders only what they had paid for the securities.
This was shown to be so impracticable that only thirteen votes were given for it in a House of forty nine members voting.
The advocates of the entire funding project carried it in committee of the whole (march ninth seventeen ninety) by a vote of thirty one to twenty six.
North Carolina had been late in accepting the Constitution, and her members had not been present on previous votes.
When, therefore, a motion to recommit the financial projects was made, it was carried by a vote of twenty nine to twenty seven.
Further debate took place, but without shaking the firmness of the opposition to the assumption of the state debts.
The project was rejected in committee (april twelfth) by a vote of thirty one to twenty nine.
The situation was a grave one.
Hamilton felt that the future of the Union was at stake.
The government at Washington would be as helpless as the Continental Congress and its committees had been.
This opinion was shared by all those who favored a vigorous central government, and practically by all the members of the party in Congress which was forming in support of the measures of Hamilton and looking to him as their leader.
While casting about for some means for meeting the emergency, Hamilton fell upon a plan which represents one of the few cases in which he had recourse to diplomacy in his public career.
It had already become involved with the assumption of the state debts.
A strong bid had been made by the opponents of assumption for the five votes of Pennsylvania by the offer to locate the capital for fifteen years at Philadelphia.
The importance of having Congress and its officials in a given city represented more at that time, in spite of the small size of the body and the relative insignificance of the interests before it, than would be the case to day with either of the great commercial cities of New York, Boston, or Philadelphia.
In the sarcastic language of Professor McMaster, "The state debts might remain unpaid, the credit of the nation might fall, but come what might, the patronage of Congress must be drawn from New York and distributed among the grog shops and taverns of Philadelphia."
The latter held to their position and rejected the bill, thirty five to twenty three.
It was while matters were in this acute stage, while threats were made on behalf of the North that the Union would be broken up if assumption were not carried, that Hamilton one day in front of the President's house met Thomas Jefferson.
What followed is best told in Jefferson's own words, because he afterwards claimed that he had been "duped" by Hamilton and acted without knowledge of the effect of what he was doing.
Jefferson's account of the matter is as follows:--
"As I was going to the President's one day, I met him (Hamilton) in the street.
I told him that I was really a stranger to the whole subject; that not having yet informed myself of the system of finance adopted, I knew not how far this was a necessary sequence; that undoubtedly, if its rejection endangered a dissolution of our Union at this incipient stage, I should deem that the most unfortunate of all consequences, to avert which all partial and temporary evils should be yielded.
The discussion took place.
Some two of the Potomac members (White and Lee, but White with a revulsion of stomach almost convulsive) agreed to change their votes, and Hamilton undertook to carry the other point.
In doing this, the influence he had established over the eastern members, with the agency of Robert Morris with those of the Middle States, effected his side of the engagement."
The bill to remove the capital was passed on july ninth seventeen ninety, by a majority of three, and the assumption of the state debts was carried soon after.
The form of the assumption differed somewhat from the proposal of Hamilton, but it accomplished the result at which he aimed.
A specific sum, twenty one million five hundred thousand dollars, was assumed by the government and distributed among the states in set proportions.
The project passed the Senate july twenty second, by a vote of fourteen to twelve, and the House on july twenty fourth, by a vote of thirty four to twenty eight.
The first night we camped on the south fork of Big Creek, four miles west of Hays City.
"All right, Colonel; send along a wagon or two to bring in the meat," I said.
"I am not in the habit of sending out my wagons until I know that there is something to be hauled in; kill your buffaloes first, and then I'll send out the wagons," was the Colonel's reply.
The following afternoon he again requested me to go out and get some fresh buffalo meat.
He came up rather angrily, and demanded an explanation.
"I can't allow any such business as this, Cody," said he.
It was hard to convince Pat, however, of the truth.
None of these, however, discovering Indians, they all returned to camp about the same time, finding it in a state of great excitement, it having been attacked a few hours previously by a party of Indians, who had succeeded in killing two men and in making off with sixty horses belonging to Company h
We fought them until dark, all the time driving them before us.
Major Brown declared it was a crack shot, because it broke the plate.
"Well, Cody, go ahead," said he; "I'll leave it to you; but remember that I don't want a dry camp."
"No danger of that," said I; and then I rode on, leaving him to return to the command.
I disentangled myself, and jumped behind the dead body.
Looking in the direction whence the shot had come I saw two Indians, and at once turned my gun loose on them, but in the excitement of the moment I missed my aim.
On the opposite side of the creek, going over the hill, I observed a few lodges moving rapidly away, and also some mounted warriors, who could see me, and who kept blazing away with their guns.
The two Indians who had fired at me, and had killed my horse, were retreating across the creek on a beaver dam.
The redskins whirled and made off.
It was eleven o'clock at night when I got back to the camp.
A light was still burning in the General's tent, he having remained awake, anxiously awaiting my return.
"Cody, we're in a nice fix now," said General Carr.
"Never you mind the train, General.
You say you are looking for a good camp.
How does that beautiful spot down in the valley suit you?" I asked him.
"That will do.
I can easily descend with the cavalry, but how to get the wagons down there is a puzzler to me," said he.
"By the time you are located in your camp, your wagons shall be there," said i
"All right, Cody, I'll leave it to you, as you seem to want to be boss," he replied, pleasantly.
The wagon train was a mile in the rear, and when it came up one of the drivers asked, "How are we going down there?"
"We can never do it; it's too steep; the wagons will run over the mules," said another wagon master.
I told Wilson, the chief wagon master, to bring on his mess wagon, which was at the head of the train, and I would try the experiment at least. Wilson drove the team and wagon to the brink of the hill, and following my directions he brought out some extra chains with which we locked the wheels on each side, and then rough locked them.
We now started the wagon down the hill.
Three other wagons immediately followed in the same way, and in half an hour every wagon was in camp, without the least accident having occurred.
"Where's your command?
The camp presented a pitiful sight, indeed.
He then picked out five hundred of the best men and horses, and, taking his pack train with him, started south for the Canadian River, leaving the rest of the troops at the supply camp.
seven
ROCKERBILT'S TIARA
Henriette had been unwontedly reserved for a whole week, a fact which was beginning to get sadly on my nerves when she broke an almost Sphinxlike silence with the extraordinary remark:
You must get married."
To say that I was shocked by the observation is putting it mildly.
As you must by this time have realized yourself, there was only one woman in the world that I could possibly bring myself to think fondly of, and that woman was none other than Henriette herself.
I could not believe, however, that this was at all the notion she had in mind, and what little poise I had was completely shattered by the suggestion.
I drew myself up with dignity, however, in a moment and answered her.
You must have banked enough by this time to be able to support me in the style to which I am accustomed."
"That is not what I meant, Bunny," she retorted, coldly, frowning at me.
"What I meant, my dear boy, was not a permanent affair but one of these Newport marriages.
Not necessarily for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith," she explained.
"I don't understand," said I, affecting denseness, for I understood only too well.
"Stupid!" cried Henriette.
"I fail to see the necessity for a maid of that kind," said i
"That's because you are a man, Bunny," said Henriette.
"There are splendid opportunities for acquiring the gems these Newport ladies wear by one who may be stationed in the dressing room.
There is mrs Rockerbilt's tiara, for instance.
It is at present the finest thing of its kind in existence and of priceless value.
"Well, I'll tell you one thing, Henriette," I returned, with more positiveness than I commonly show, "I will not marry a lady's maid, and that's all there is about it.
You forget that I am a gentleman."
"It's only a temporary arrangement, Bunny," she pleaded.
"It's done all the time in the smart set."
"Well, the morals of the smart set are not my morals," I retorted.
Besides, what's to prevent my wife from blabbing when we try to ship her?"
"I hadn't thought of that-it would be dangerous, wouldn't it?"
"Very," said i "The only safe way out of it would be to kill the young woman, and my religious scruples are strongly against anything of the sort.
"Then what shall we do, Bunny?" demanded mrs Van Raffles.
"That is a good idea," said Henriette; "only I hate amateur theatricals. I'll think it over."
"Pretty good," said i "Chiefly architectural drawings, however-details of facades and ornamental designs."
"Just the thing!" cried Henriette.
They adjoin ours.
She will wear her tiara, and I want you when she is in the gardens to hide behind some convenient bit of shrubbery and make an exact detail sketch of the tiara.
Understand?"
"I do," said i
Get the whole thing to a carat," she commanded.
"And then?" I asked, excitedly.
"Bring it to me; I'll attend to the rest," said she.
And I have always remembered dear old Raffles's remark, "Take everything in sight, Bunny," he used to say; "but, damn it, do it like a gentleman, not a professional."
"It is simply perfect, Bunny," she cried, delightedly, as she looked at it.
"You have even got the sparkle of that incomparable ruby in the front."
Next morning we went to New York, and Henriette, taking my design to a theatrical property man we knew on Union Square, left an order for its exact reproduction in gilt and paste.
"I am going to a little fancy dress dance, mr Sikes," she explained, "as Queen Catharine of Russia, and this tiara is a copy of the very famous lost negligee crown of that unhappy queen.
Do you think you can let me have it by Tuesday next?"
"Easily, madam," said Sikes.
"It is a beautiful thing and it will give me real pleasure to reproduce it.
It will cost you forty eight dollars.
"Agreed," said Henriette.
And Sikes was true to his word.
The following Tuesday afternoon brought to my New York apartment-for of course mrs Raffles did not give Sikes her right name-an absolutely faultless copy of mrs Rockerbilt's chiefest glory.
It was so like that none but an expert in gems could have told the copy from the original, and when I bore the package back to Newport and displayed its contents to my mistress she flew into an ecstasy of delight.
"We'll have the original in a week if you keep your nerve, Bunny," she cried.
"Theatricals?" said i
"No, indeed," said Henriette.
No, indeed-a dinner.
mrs Rockerbilt will sit at my left-Tommy Dare to the right.
At the moment you are passing the poisson I will throw the room into darkness, and you-"
Why, darn it all, she'd scream the minute I tried it," I protested.
All was as Henriette had foretold, mrs Rockerbilt's lovely blond locks were frightfully demoralized, and the famous tiara with it had slid aslant athwart her cheek.
"Dear me!" cried Henriette, rising hurriedly and full of warm sympathy. "How very awkward!"
"Oh, don't speak of it," laughed mrs Rockerbilt, amiably.
"It is nothing, dear mrs Van Raffles.
These electric lights are so very uncertain these days, and I am sure james is not at all to blame for hitting me as he has done; it's the most natural thing in the world, only-may I please run up stairs and fix my hair again?"
Tommy Dare gave three cheers for mrs Van Raffles, and mrs Gramercy Van Pelt, clad in a gorgeous red costume, stood up on a chair and toasted me in a bumper of champagne.
Meanwhile Henriette and mrs Rockerbilt had gone above.
"Isn't it a beauty, Bunny," said Henriette the next morning, as she held up the tiara to my admiring gaze, a flashing, coruscating bit of the jeweler's art that, I verily believe, would have tempted the soul of honor itself into rascally ways.
"Magnificent!" I asserted.
"But-which is this, the forty eight dollar one or the original?"
"The original," said Henriette, caressing the bauble.
The copy was in the table drawer, and while my right hand was apparently engaged in manipulating the refractory light, and my voice was laughingly calling down maledictions upon the electric lighting company for its wretched service, my left hand was occupied with the busiest effort of its career in substituting the spurious tiara for the other."
"And mrs Rockerbilt never even suspected?"
"No," said Henriette.
"In fact, she placed the bogus affair in her hair herself.
"Well, you're a wonder, Henriette," said I, with a sigh.
"She won't, Bunny," said Henriette.
"She'll never have occasion to test the genuineness of her tiara.
But, alas! later on Henriette made a discovery herself that for the time being turned her eyes red with weeping.
The Rockerbilt tiara itself was as bogus as our own copy.
There wasn't a real stone in the whole outfit, and the worst part of it was that under the circumstances Henriette could not tell anybody over the teacups that mrs Rockerbilt was, in vulgar parlance, "putting up a shine" on high society.
There was little need for the swart gipsies to explain, as they stood knee deep in the snow round the bailiff of the Abbey Farm, what it was that had sent them.
The unbroken whiteness of the uplands told that, and, even as they spoke, there came up the hill the dark figures of the farm men with shovels, on their way to dig out the sheep.
"The hares and foxes were down four days ago, and the liquid manure pumps like a snow man," the bailiff said....
Maybe you'll help us find our sheep too-"
Coming back again, they had had some ado to discover the spot where their three caravans made a hummock of white against a broken wall.
She stood in the latticed porch, dark and handsome against the whiteness, and then, advancing, put her head into the great hall kitchen.
"Has the lady any chairs for the gipsy woman to mend?" she asked in a soft and insinuating voice....
As she worked, she cast curious glances into the old hall kitchen.
In the ancient walnut chair by the hearth sat the old, old lady who had told them to bring the chairs.
It was a childish game of funerals at which the children played.
The hand of Death, hovering over the dolls, had singled out Flora, the articulations of whose sawdust body were seams and whose boots were painted on her calves of fibrous plaster.
The youngest of the children passed the high backed walnut chair in which the old lady sat
She stopped.
"Yes, dear?"
"Flora's dead!"
The old lady, when she smiled, did so less with her lips than with her faded cheeks.
So sweet was her face that you could not help wondering, when you looked on it, how many men had also looked upon it and loved it. Somehow, you never wondered how many of them had been loved in return.
"In a what, dear?"
"She means, Aunt Rachel,
Sabrina, the eldest, interpreted.
"Ah!...
"Yes, we will, presently, Aunt Rachel; gee up, horse!...
Shall we go and ask the chair woman if she's warm enough?"
"Do, dears."
Again the message was taken, and this time it seemed as if Annabel, the gipsy, was not warm enough, for she gathered up her loops of cane and brought the chair she was mending a little way into the hall kitchen itself.
She sat down on the square box they used to cover the sewing machine.
The gipsy woman beckoned to one of the children.
"Tell the lady, when she wakes, that I will tack a strip of felt to the rocker, and then it will make no noise at all," said the low and wheedling voice; and the child retired again.
The interment of Flora proceeded....
An hour later Flora had taken up the burden of Life again.
It was as Angela, the youngest, was chastising her for some offence, that Sabrina, the eldest, looked with wondering eyes on the babe in the gipsy's sling. She approached on tiptoe.
"May I look at it, please?" she asked timidly.
The gipsy set one shoulder forward, and Sabrina put the shawl gently aside, peering at the dusky brown morsel within.
"Sometime, perhaps-if I'm very careful-"
Before replying, the gipsy once more turned her almond eyes towards Aunt Rachel's chair.
Aunt Rachel had been awakened for the conclusion of Flora's funeral, but her eyes were closed again now, and once more her cheek was dropped in that tender suggestive little gesture, and she rocked.
But you could see that she was not properly asleep....
It was, somehow, less to Sabrina, still peering at the babe in the sling, than to Aunt Rachel, apparently asleep, that the gipsy seemed to reply.
"You'll know some day, little missis, that a wean knows its own pair of arms," her seductive voice came.
She opened her eyes with a start.
The little regular noise of the rocker ceased.
Though all the chairs were mended, Annabel still came daily to the farm, sat on the box they used to cover the sewing machine, and wove mats.
It was always the white haired lady who spoke first, and Annabel made all sorts of salutes and obeisances with her eyes before replying.
(The children at the other end of the apartment had converted a chest into an altar, and were solemnising the nuptials of the resurrected Flora and Jack, the raffish sailor doll.)
Annabel made roving play with her eyes.
"Is there anything Annabel can bid him do?"
"Nothing, thank you," said Aunt Rachel.
For a minute the gipsy watched Aunt Rachel, and then she got up from the sewing machine box and crossed the floor.
She leaned so close towards her that she had to put up a hand to steady the babe at her back.
"Lady dear," she murmured with irresistible softness, "your husband died, didn't he?"
It was a hoop of pearls.
"I have never had a husband," she said.
The gipsy glanced at the ring.
"Then that is-?"
"That is a betrothal ring," Aunt Rachel replied.
"Ah!..." said Annabel.
Then, after a minute, she drew still closer.
"Ah!...
Her eyes avoided those of the gipsy, sought them, and avoided them again.
"Did what die?" she asked slowly and guardedly....
The child at the gipsy's back did not need suck; nevertheless, Annabel's fingers worked at her bosom, and she moved the sling.
As the child settled, Annabel gave Aunt Rachel a long look.
"Why do you rock?" she asked slowly.
Aunt Rachel was trembling.
She did not reply.
In a voice soft as sliding water the gipsy continued:
"Lady dear, we are a strange folk to you, and even among us there are those who shuffle the pack of cards and read the palm when silver has been put upon it, knowing nothing...
It was more than a minute before Aunt Rachel spoke.
But the gipsy shook her head.
I speak of eyes-these eyes."
Aunt Rachel had given a little start, but had become quiet again.
When at last she spoke it was in a voice scarcely audible.
"That cannot be.
He died on the eve of his wedding.
For my bridal clothes they made me black garments instead.
It is long ago, and now I wear neither black nor white, but-" her hands made a gesture.
But there came a sudden note of masterfulness into the gipsy's voice.
"None except I have seen it.
The gipsy sat suddenly erect.
Keep still in your chair," she ordered, "and I will tell you when-"
It was a curious thing that followed.
The gipsy sat with her own hands folded over the mat on her knees.
Once more her head dropped.
Her hands moved.
Noiselessly on the rockers that the gipsy had padded with felt the chair began to rock.
Annabel lifted one hand.
"It is there."
Aunt Rachel did not appear to hear her.
With that ineffable smile still on her face, she rocked....
Then, after some minutes, there crossed her face such a look as visits the face of one who, waking from sleep, strains his faculties to recapture some blissful and vanishing vision....
Aunt Rachel opened her eyes again.
She repeated dully after Annabel:
"It is gone."
"Ghosts," the gipsy whispered presently, "are of the dead.
Therefore it must have lived."
But again Aunt Rachel shook her head.
"You were young, and beautiful?..."
Still the shake of the head.
"He died on the eve of his wedding.
They took my white garments away and gave me black ones.
How then could it have lived?"
"Without the kiss, no...
But sometimes a woman will lie through her life, and at the graveside still will lie....
Tell me the truth."
The gipsy's face became grave....
She broke another long silence.
"It is a new kind-but no more wonderful than the other.
The other I have seen, now I have seen this also.
Tell me, does it come to any other chair?"
"It was his chair; he died in it," said Aunt Rachel.
"And you-shall you die in it?"
"As God wills."
"Many years; but it is always small; it never grows."
"To their mothers babes never grow.
None other has ever seen it?"
"Except yourself, none.
I sit here; presently it creeps into my arms; it is small and warm; I rock, and then... it goes."
"Would it come to another chair?"
I think not.
It was his chair."
At the other end of the room Flora was now bestowed on Jack, the disreputable sailor.
The gipsy's eyes rested on the bridal party....
"None has."
"No; but yet....
The door does not always shut behind us suddenly. Perhaps one who has toddled but a step or two over the threshold might, by looking back, catch a glimpse....
"Angela."
"That means 'angel'...
Look, the doll who died yesterday is now being married....
It may be that Life has not yet sealed the little one's eyes. Will you let Annabel ask her if she sees what it is you hold in your arms?"
Again the voice was soft and wheedling....
"No, Annabel," said Aunt Rachel faintly.
"Will you rock again?"
"Rock..." urged the cajoling voice.
But Aunt Rachel only turned the betrothal ring on her finger.
Over at the altar Jack was leering at his new made bride, past decency; and little Angela held the wooden horse's head, which had parted from its body.
"Rock, and comfort yourself-" tempted the voice.
Then slowly Aunt Rachel rose from her chair.
"No, Annabel," she said gently.
"You should not have spoken.
It was not meant to be seen by another.
I no longer want it.
Please go."
The swarthy woman turned her almond eyes on her once more.
"You cannot live without it," she said as she also rose....
It was on the morning of Christmas Eve that they came down in a body to the Abbey Farm to express their thanks to those who had befriended them; but the bailiff was not there.
He and the farm men had ceased work, and were down at the church, practising the carols.
Only Aunt Rachel sat, still and knitting, in the black walnut chair; and the children played on the floor.
A night in the toy box had apparently bred discontent between Jack and Flora-or perhaps they sought to keep their countenances before the world; at any rate, they sat on opposite sides of the room, Jack keeping boon company with the lead soldiers, his spouse reposing, her lead balanced eyes closed, in the broken clockwork motor car.
In the intervals of kissing they told one another in whispers that Aunt Rachel was not very well, and Angela woke Flora to tell her that Aunt Rachel had Brown titus also.
She approached the chair in which Aunt Rachel sat
"Lady dear, you must rock or you cannot live."
Aunt Rachel did not look up from her work.
"All leave me."
"Annabel fears she has taken away your comfort."
"Only for a little while.
The door closes behind us, but it opens again."
"But for that little time, rock-"
Aunt Rachel shook her head.
"no
Another has seen....
Say good bye to your companions; they are very welcome to what they have had; and God speed you."
"They thank you, lady dear....
"No more."
Annabel stooped and kissed the hand that bore the betrothal hoop of pearls.
It trembled as it rested there, but the tremor passed, and Annabel, turning once at the porch, gave her a last look.
Then she departed with her companions.
That afternoon, Jack and Flora had shaken down to wedlock as married folk should, and sat together before the board spread with the dolls' tea things.
There was merry talk, but Aunt Rachel took no part in it.
The board was spread with ale and cheese and spiced loaf for the carol singers; and the time drew near for their coming.
When at midnight, faintly on the air from the church below, there came the chiming of Christmas morning, all bestirred themselves.
"They'll be here in a few minutes," they said; "somebody go and bring the children down;" and within a very little while subdued noises were heard outside, and the lifting of the latch of the yard gate.
The children were in their nightgowns, hardly fully awake; a low voice outside was heard giving orders; and then there arose on the night the carol.
It was the Cherry Tree Carol that rose outside, of how sweet Mary, the Queen of Galilee, besought Joseph to pluck the cherries for her Babe, and Joseph refused; and the voices of the singers, that had begun hesitatingly, grew strong and loud and free.
"... and Joseph wouldn't pluck the cherries," somebody was whispering to the tiny Angela....
The little Angela, within the arms that held her, murmured, "It's the gipsies, isn't it, mother?"
"No, darling.
It's the carol singers, singing because Jesus was born."
"Look where?"
The gipsy woman wouldn't go without her little baby, would she?"
THE WHITE FAWN
There was once upon a time a King and Queen who were perfectly happy, with one exception, and that was that they had no child.
One day when the Queen was staying in a watering place, some distance from home, she was sitting by a fountain alone, sadly thinking of the daughter she longed to have, when she perceived a crab coming in her direction, who, to the Queen's surprise, addressed her thus:
"Great Queen, if you will condescend to be conducted by a humble crab, I will lead you to a Fairies' palace and your wish shall be fulfilled."
"I would certainly come with you," replied the Queen, "but I am afraid that I cannot walk backwards."
The crab smiled, and transforming herself into a beautiful little old woman, said:
"Now, madam, it is not necessary to go backwards.
Come with me, and I beg of you to look upon me as your friend." She then escorted the Queen to the most magnificent palace that could possibly be imagined, it was built entirely of diamonds.
You have only to hold this bouquet, and mention each flower, thinking of us, and be assured that we shall at once appear in your chamber."
The Queen, transported with joy, and overcome with gratitude, threw herself upon their necks, and warmly embraced them; she then spent several hours admiring the wonders of the palace and its gardens, and it was not until evening that she returned to her attendants, who were in a serious state of anxiety at the prolonged absence of Her Majesty.
Not very long afterwards, when the Queen was once more at home in her Royal Palace, a baby Princess was born, whom she named Desiree.
Then taking the bouquet into her hand, the Queen, one by one, pronounced the names of the flowers, when there immediately appeared, flying through the air in elegant chariots drawn by different kinds of birds, the six Fairies who entered the apartment, bearing beautiful presents for the little baby.
Marvellously fine linen, but so strong that it could be worn a hundred years without going into holes, lace of the finest, with the history of the world worked into its pattern, toys of all descriptions that a child would love to play with, and a cradle ornamented with rubies and diamonds, and supported by four Cupids ready to rock it should the baby cry.
But, best of all, the Fairies endowed the little Princess with beauty, and virtue, and health, and every good thing that could be desired.
Then, with three waves of a wand, the Fairies caused a high tower to spring up; it had neither door nor window, an underground passage was made, through which everything necessary could be carried, and in this tower the little Princess was shut up and there she lived by candlelight, where never a glimpse of the sun could come.
When the Princess Desiree was fourteen years old, the Queen had her portrait painted, and copies of it were carried to all the Courts in the world.
"But where have you seen her?" enquired the King.
So the King despatched as ambassador a rich young lord named Becafigue.
Meanwhile once more Becafigue came to the capital where Desiree's father lived, and throwing himself at the King's feet, besought him in most touching words to let his daughter go with him at once to the Prince, who would surely die if he could not behold her.
When Princess Desiree heard of the Prince's illness, she suggested that she should set out without delay, but in a dark carriage, that only at night should be opened to give her food.
She placed the crown upon her head, the sceptre and orb she carried in her hands, so that all should take her for the Princess.
With her mother bearing her train she gravely walked in the direction of the town.
No one replied at first, and then one of the boldest said,
"Sir, you will see; apparently the fatigue of the journey has somewhat changed her." The Prince was surprised, but when he saw Longue Epine words fail to express what he felt.
She was frightfully thin, and her nose, which was more hooked than a parrot's beak, shone like a danger signal.
Then her teeth were black and uneven, and, in fact, she was as ugly as Desiree was beautiful.
At first the Prince could not speak a word, he simply gazed at her in amazement.
Then he said, turning to his father, "We have been deceived, that portrait was painted to mislead us.
It will be the death of me."
"It is not to be wondered at," remarked the King, "that your father kept such a treasure shut up for fifteen years."
Then he and the Prince turned towards the town, and the false Princess and the Lady in Waiting, without any ceremony, were mounted each behind a soldier and taken to be shut up in a castle.
After three or four days' journeying, the wanderers found themselves in a thick forest.
Quite wearied out, the Prince threw himself upon the ground, while Becafigue went on further in search of fruit wherewith to refresh his royal master.
It is a long time since we left the White Fawn, that is to say the charming Princess.
Very desolately she wept when in a stream she saw her figure reflected, and when night came she was in great fear, for she heard wild beasts about her, and sometimes forgetting she was a fawn she would try to climb a tree.
But with morning dawn she felt a little safer, and the sun appeared a marvellous sight to her from which she could hardly turn her eyes.
It did not take Giroflee long to discover that this was her dearly loved mistress, and she promised the White Fawn never to forsake her, for she found she could hear all that was said although she could not speak.
Towards night the fear of having no shelter made the two friends so dreadfully dismayed that the Fairy Tulip suddenly appeared before them.
"I am not going to scold you," she said, "although it is through not following my advice that you are in this misfortune, for it goes to my heart to see you thus.
Giroflee and the Fawn walked in the direction the Fairy had pointed out, and arrived at a neat little cottage where an old woman showed them a room which they could occupy.
He addressed her politely and asked for the things he required for his master.
She hastened to fill a basket, and gave it to him, saying, "I fear that if you pass a night without shelter some harm may come to you.
I can offer you a poor one, but at any rate it is secure from the lions."
Becafigue went back to the Prince and together they returned to the cottage, where they were led into the room next to that occupied by the Princess.
Next morning the Prince arose early and went out; he had not long been in the forest when he saw a beautiful little Fawn.
"It is no use talking thus, when I am a Fawn this room is stifling to me and I must depart from it."
The next day the young Prince sought in vain for the White Fawn, and finally tired out threw himself upon the grass and fell asleep.
Coming nearer and nearer she presently touched him and he awoke.
"Stay, dear little Fawn," he cried, "I would not hurt you for the world." But the wind carried off the words before they reached her ears.
"Beautiful Fawn," said he, "do not fear me, I shall lead you with me everywhere." Then he covered her with roses and fed her with the choicest leaves and grasses.
The next day for a long time she hid from the Prince, but at last he found her, and as she dashed off he shot an arrow which wounded her in the leg.
Sad that he should have done so cruel a thing, the Prince took herbs and laid them upon the wound, and at last he went to fetch Becafigue to help him carry her to the house.
He tied her to a tree.
Who would have thought that the most beautiful Princess in the world would be treated thus?
While she was straining at the ribbons trying to break them, Giroflee arrived, and was leading her away when the Prince met them and claimed the Fawn as his.
To be a Fawn all the day, to hear him speaking, and not to be able to tell him of my sad fate."
One can guess the astonishment of Becafigue and of the Prince. Guerrier would almost have died of pleasure had he not thought that it must be some enchantment, for did he not know that Desiree and her Lady in Waiting were shut up in the castle.
He went softly and knocked at the chamber door, which Giroflee opened, thinking it was the old woman, for she required help for the wounded arm.
Then it was found that it was the Fairy Tulip in disguise of the old woman who had provided that sheltering cottage in the forest.
And, in accordance with the wish of Princess Desiree, Longue Epine and her mother, the false Lady in Waiting, were set at liberty.
There was once a king who was such an honourable man that his subjects called him "The Good King."
One day while he was out hunting, a little rabbit that his dogs were about to kill, threw itself into his arms.
The King caressed the little creature, and said:
That night when he was alone in his room, there appeared a lovely lady.
She wore a robe as white as snow, and a wreath of white roses on her head.
"I am the Fairy Candide; I wished to see if you were as good as everybody declares you are, and for this reason I changed myself into the little rabbit, and ran to you in my distress, for I know that those who have pity for dumb creatures have still more pity for mankind.
"Willingly," responded the Fairy, "I will make your son the most handsome prince in the world, or the richest, or the most powerful; choose which you will for him."
All that I can promise is that I will give him good advice, and punish him for his faults, if he will not himself correct them."
And with this the father had to rest content.
"I promised your father to be your friend," she told him; "here is a little gold ring, take care of it, for it is worth more than diamonds. Every time that you are about to do any wrong action it will prick you.
If, in spite of the pricks, you continue your bad actions, you will lose my friendship and I shall become your enemy."
At that moment the ring pricked like a pin running into his finger.
"What is this?" he exclaimed: "the Fairy must be mocking me, surely I've done no great harm in kicking an animal that annoyed me.
What's the use of being ruler of a great empire if I may not treat my dog as I will?"
One day when he was out walking he saw a girl named Zelie, who was so beautiful that he resolved to marry her.
But Zelie was as good as she was beautiful, and said to him:
Great was his surprise, on entering the apartment, to find the captive had disappeared, for he carried the key of the door in his pocket.
"I promised your father," said she in a stern voice, "to give you good advice, and to punish you if you refused to follow it.
You have despised my counsels and your crimes have converted you into a monster, the horror of heaven and earth.
Now it is time to fulfill my promise of punishment.
I condemn you to take the resemblance of the beasts you are like in disposition-A lion, because of your fury-a wolf, on account of your greediness-a serpent, for destroying him who has been your second father-a bull, by reason of your brutality."
He had a lion's head, a bull's horns, the feet of a wolf, and the tail of a viper.
At the same moment he found himself in a forest, and there, after roaming about miserably for some time, he fell into a pit dug by hunters.
He was captured and led into the capital of his Kingdom.
One day he carried his little piece of bread into the garden to eat it there, but wandering with it in his mouth, still further on, he saw a young girl pale and thin, and almost fainting for want of food.
Just then he heard loud cries, and saw that it was the beautiful Zelie struggling to free herself from four men who were carrying her into a house near by.
Presently from a window was thrown a plateful of tempting looking food.
For several days he flew around hoping to catch sight of Zelie, and at last, seated by a hermit, outside a cave, he found her.
Fluttering down he alighted upon her shoulder.
The worthy Governor was delighted to behold his dear master, and gladly resigned the throne to him.
When he was four years old, his father moved to the town of Chatham, near the old city of Rochester.
Round about are chalk hills, green lanes, forests and marshes, and amid such scenes the little Charles's genius first began to show itself.
He did not like the rougher sports of his school fellows and preferred to amuse himself in his own way, or to wander about with his older sister, Fanny, whom he especially loved.
They loved to watch the stars together, and there was one particular star which they used to pretend was their own.
People called him a "very queer small boy" because he was always thinking or reading instead of playing.
He had a great affection for Chatham and Rochester, and after he began to write stories that were printed, he often used to put these places into them.
It is easy to see that the young Charles Dickens noted carefully and remembered everything he saw, and this habit was of great use to him all his life.
These happy years were not to last long.
When he was nine years old, his father became poor and the family was obliged to move to London, where it lived in a shabby house in a poor suburb.
Before another year had passed, his father was put into prison for debt-the same prison in which Little Dorrit, in the story of that name, grew up.
Better days, however, came at last.
This did not content him and he made up his mind to learn to write shorthand so as to become a reporter, in the Houses of Parliament, for a newspaper.
This was by no means an easy task.
But Dickens had great strength of will and a determination to do well whatever he did at all, and he succeeded, just as David Copperfield did in the story.
And like the latter, too, about this time Dickens fell in love.
He did not marry on this occasion, as did David, but how much he was in love one may see by the story of David's Dora.
The theater had always a great attraction for Dickens.
Throughout his life he loved to act in plays got up and often written, too, by himself and his friends.
Some of his early experiences of this kind he has told in the adventures of Nicholas Nickleby at mr Crummles's theater.
But his acting was for his own amusement, and it is doubtful if he ever thought seriously of adopting the stage as a profession.
If he did, his success as a reporter soon determined him otherwise.
When he was twenty one he saw his first printed sketch in a monthly magazine.
He had dropped it into a letter box with mingled hope and fear, and read it now through tears of joy and pride.
He followed this with others as successful, signed "Boz"--the child nickname of one of his younger brothers.
This was his beginning.
This was his first long story.
It became, almost at once, the most popular book of its day, perhaps, indeed, the most popular book ever published in England.
Soon after the appearance of its first chapters, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth, daughter of the editor of one of the London newspapers, who had helped him in his career.
Certainly its honest fun, its merriment, its quaintness, good humor and charity appealed to every reader.
More than all, it made people acquainted with a new company of characters, none of whom had ever existed, or could ever exist, and yet whose manners and appearance were pictured so really that they seemed to be actual persons whom one might meet and laugh with anywhere.
He was never content merely to tell an interesting story.
He wrote with a purpose.
It is good to learn that, as a result of this novel, an end was made of many such boys' schools.
True artist as he was, Dickens seldom wrote without having in his mind the thought of showing some defect in the law, or some wrong condition of affairs which might be righted.
Often, too, Dickens's stories are, in a sense, sermons against very human sins.
With his increasing wealth, Dickens had, of course, changed his manner of life.
He lived part of the time in the country near London, in Brighton, in Dover, and in France and Italy.
He liked best, however, a little English watering place called Broadstairs-a tiny fishing village, built on a cliff, with the sea rolling and dashing beneath it. In such a place he felt that he could write best, but he greatly missed his London friends.
He used to say that being without them was "like losing his arms and legs."
When he was less than thirty, Dickens was invited to visit Scotland, and there he received his first great national tribute.
A public banquet was given him in Edinburgh, and he was much sought after and entertained.
Up to this time he had never seen the United States; he decided now to visit this country and meet his American readers face to face.
He landed at Boston accompanied by his wife, in eighteen forty two, and visited many of the greater cities of the Eastern states.
Unfortunately, however, Dickens had taken a dislike to American ways, and this dislike appeared in many things he wrote after his return to England.
Dickens was a very active man, and his life was simple and full of work and exercise.
He rose early and almost every day might have been seen tramping for miles along the country roads, or riding horseback with his dogs racing after him.
He liked best to wander along the cliffs or across the downs by the sea.
When he was in London he often walked the streets half the night, thinking out his stories, or searching for the odd characters which he put in them.
It was not long before he withdrew also from this second venture.
In the meantime he had met with both joy and sorrow.
His much loved sister, his father, and his own little daughter, the youngest of his family, had died.
These sorrows made him throw himself into his work with greater earnestness.
One of these was performed before Queen Victoria.
People have often wondered how Dickens found time to accomplish so many different things.
One of the secrets of this, no doubt, was his love of order.
He was the most systematic of men.
Everything he did "went like clockwork," and he prided himself on his punctuality.
He could not work in a room unless everything in it was in its proper place.
As a consequence of this habit of regularity, he never wasted time.
His aim was to make it cheerful, useful and at the same time cheap, so that the poor could afford to buy it as well as the rich.
Dickens loved to encourage young writers, and would just as quickly accept a good story or poem from an unknown author as from the most famous.
This book brought Dickens to the height of his career.
He was now both famous and rich.
He bought a house on Gad's Hill-a place near Chatham, where he had spent the happiest part of his childhood-and settled down to a life of comfort and labor.
When he was a little boy his father had pointed out this fine house to him, and told him he might even come to live there some day, if he were very persevering and worked hard.
And so, indeed, it had proved.
Everyone, old and young throughout the neighborhood, liked him.
Children, dogs and horses were his friends.
His hand was open for charity, and he was always the champion of the poor, the helpless and the outcast.
Everyone, he thought, had some good in him, and in all he met he was on the lookout to find it.
So earnest was he in this that he was not pleased at all when a person praised one of his stories, unless the other showed that he had grasped the lesson that lay beneath it.
With such a tender heart for all the world, he was more than an affectionate father to his own children, and gave much thought to their happiness and education.
As the years went by, his letters to his oldest son told of his own work and plans. When his youngest son sailed away to live in Australia, he wrote: "Poor Plorn is gone.
It was a hard parting at the last.
But, however this may be, Dickens and his wife had not lived happily together, and now decided to part, and from that time, though they wrote to each other, he never saw her again.
It is sad to reflect that he who has painted so beautifully for others the joys and sorrows of perfect love and home, was himself destined to know neither.
The years that followed this separation were years of constant labor for Dickens.
His restlessness, perhaps also his lack of happiness, drove him to work without rest.
Much better to die doing." The idea of giving public readings from his stories suggested itself to him, and he was soon engaged in preparation.
He gave readings, not only in England, but also in Scotland and Ireland, and everywhere he met with enormous success.
The first series was hardly over, when he was at work on a new story, and this was scarcely completed when he was planning more readings.
A serious illness followed, and afterward he was troubled with an increasing lameness-the first real warning of the end.
In spite of his weakness, he decided on another trip to America, and here, in eighteen sixty seven, he began a series of readings which left him in a far worse condition.
Often at the close of an evening he would become so faint that he would have to lie down.
He was unable to sleep and his appetite entirely failed him.
A great banquet of farewell was given to him in New York and he returned to England bearing the admiration and love of the whole American people.
But he was too ill.
He found himself for the first time in his life feeling, as he said, "giddy, jarred, shaken, faint, uncertain of voice and sight, and tread and touch, and dull of spirit." He was obliged to discontinue the course and to rest.
This summer of eighteen sixty nine--the last summer of his life-was a contented and even a happy one.
He attempted one more series of readings, and with their close bade farewell for ever to his English audience.
He was seen in public but a few times more-once at the last dinner party he ever attended, to meet the Prince of Wales and the King of the Belgians, and once when the Queen invited him to Buckingham Palace.
Soon after, the end came.
One day as he entered the house at Gad's Hill, he seemed tired and silent.
As he sat down to dinner all present noticed that he looked very ill.
They begged him to lie down.
"Yes, on the ground," he said-these were the last words he ever uttered-and as he spoke he slipped down upon the floor.
He never fully recovered consciousness, and next day, june ninth eighteen seventy, Charles Dickens breathed his last.
Five days later he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, where are buried so many of the greatest of England's dead.
They all looked a merry, even a happy party, as they sat round the table; Sir Andrew Ffoulkes and Lord Antony Dewhurst, two typical good looking, well born and well bred Englishmen of that year of grace seventeen ninety two, and the aristocratic French comtesse with her two children, who had just escaped from such dire perils, and found a safe retreat at last on the shores of protecting England.
In the corner the two strangers had apparently finished their game; one of them arose, and standing with his back to the merry company at the table, he adjusted with much deliberation his large triple caped coat. As he did so, he gave one quick glance all around him.
The stranger then, with a loud "Good night," quietly walked out of the coffee room.
Not one of those at the supper table had noticed this curious and silent manoeuvre, but when the stranger finally closed the door of the coffee room behind him, they all instinctively sighed a sigh of relief.
"Alone, at last!" said Lord Antony, jovially.
"To His Majesty George Three of England.
God bless him for his hospitality to us all, poor exiles from France."
"His Majesty the King!" echoed Lord Antony and Sir Andrew as they drank loyally to the toast.
Everyone rose and drank this toast in silence.
The fate of the unfortunate King of France, then a prisoner of his own people, seemed to cast a gloom even over mr Jellyband's pleasant countenance.
"Aye, Madame!" here interposed Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, "trust in God by all means, but believe also a little in your English friends, who have sworn to bring the Count safely across the Channel, even as they have brought you to day."
The way some of my own friends have escaped from the clutches of that awful revolutionary tribunal was nothing short of a miracle-and all done by you and your friends-"
I was torn between my duty to him, and to them.
They refused to go without me . . . and you and your friends assured me so solemnly that my husband would be safe. But, oh!
now that I am here-amongst you all-in this beautiful, free England-I think of him, flying for his life, hunted like a poor beast . . . in such peril . . .
I should not have left him . . .
She was crying gently to herself, whilst Suzanne ran up to her and tried to kiss away her tears.
There was no doubt that they felt deeply for her; their very silence testified to that-but in every century, and ever since England has been what it is, an Englishman has always felt somewhat ashamed of his own emotion and of his own sympathy.
This was said with so much confidence, such unuttered hope and belief, that it seemed as if by magic to dry the mother's eyes, and to bring a smile upon everybody's lips.
"Nay!
You shame me, Mademoiselle," replied Sir Andrew; "though my life is at your service, I have been but a humble tool in the hands of our great leader, who organised and effected your escape."
He had spoken with so much warmth and vehemence that Suzanne's eyes fastened upon him in undisguised wonder.
"Your leader, Monsieur?" said the Comtesse, eagerly.
"Ah! of course, you must have a leader.
And I did not think of that before!
But tell me where is he?
"Alas, Madame!" said Lord Antony, "that is impossible."
"The Scarlet Pimpernel?" said Suzanne, with a merry laugh.
What is the Scarlet Pimpernel, Monsieur?"
She looked at Sir Andrew with eager curiosity.
The young man's face had become almost transfigured.
His eyes shone with enthusiasm; hero worship, love, admiration for his leader seemed literally to glow upon his face.
"Ah, yes," here interposed the young Vicomte, "I have heard speak of this Scarlet Pimpernel.
A little flower-red?--yes!
Yes?"
"Yes, that is so," assented Lord Antony.
"Then he will have received one such paper to day?"
"Undoubtedly."
"Oh!
"Why should you try, Madame?"
"But, tell me, why should your leader-why should you all-spend your money and risk your lives-for it is your lives you risk, Messieurs, when you set foot in France-and all for us French men and women, who are nothing to you?"
"Faith, Madame, I would like you to find it then . . . as for me, I vow, I love the game, for this is the finest sport I have yet encountered.--Hair breath escapes . . . the devil's own risks!--Tally ho!--and away we go!"
But the Comtesse shook her head, still incredulously.
To her it seemed preposterous that these young men and their great leader, all of them rich, probably wellborn, and young, should for no other motive than sport, run the terrible risks, which she knew they were constantly doing.
Their nationality, once they had set foot in France, would be no safeguard to them.
Anyone found harbouring or assisting suspected royalists would be ruthlessly condemned and summarily executed, whatever his nationality might be.
The Comtesse looked round at the quaint, old-fashioned English inn, the peace of this land of civil and religious liberty, and she closed her eyes to shut out the haunting vision of that West Barricade, and of the mob retreating panic stricken when the old hag spoke of the plague.
Every moment under that cart she expected recognition, arrest, herself and her children tried and condemned, and these young Englishmen, under the guidance of their brave and mysterious leader, had risked their lives to save them all, as they had already saved scores of other innocent people.
And all only for sport?
Impossible!
"Twenty all told, Mademoiselle," he replied, "one to command, and nineteen to obey.
All of us Englishmen, and all pledged to the same cause-to obey our leader and to rescue the innocent."
"It is wonderful to me, wonderful!--That you should all be so brave, so devoted to your fellowmen-yet you are English!--and in France treachery is rife-all in the name of liberty and fraternity."
"Yes!" replied the Comtesse, "surely you know her.
She was a leading actress of the Comedie Francaise, and she married an Englishman lately. You must know her-"
Of course, we all know Lady Blakeney."
Why should she have done such a thing?
Surely there must be some mistake-"
I assure you there is no mistake. . . .
You had not heard this story?"
Sir Percy Blakeney, her husband, is a very wealthy man, of high social position, the intimate friend of the Prince of Wales . . . and Lady Blakeney leads both fashion and society in London."
As for Lord Antony, he looked extremely uncomfortable, and glanced once or twice apprehensively towards Jellyband, who looked just as uncomfortable as himself.
"At what time do you expect Sir Percy and Lady Blakeney?" he contrived to whisper unobserved, to mine host.
"Any moment, my lord," whispered Jellyband in reply.
Even as he spoke, a distant clatter was heard of an approaching coach; louder and louder it grew, one or two shouts became distinguishable, then the rattle of horses' hoofs on the uneven cobble stones, and the next moment a stable boy had thrown open the coffee room door and rushed in excitedly.
"Sir Percy Blakeney and my lady," he shouted at the top of his voice, "they're just arriving."
I replied as best I could-as only a true lover can.
I spoke at length, and perseveringly of my devotion, of my passion-of her exceeding beauty, and of my own enthusiastic admiration.
In conclusion, I dwelt, with a convincing energy, upon the perils that encompass the course of love-that course of true love that never did run smooth-and thus deduced the manifest danger of rendering that course unnecessarily long.
This latter argument seemed finally to soften the rigor of her determination.
She relented; but there was yet an obstacle, she said, which she felt assured I had not properly considered.
This was a delicate point-for a woman to urge, especially so; in mentioning it, she saw that she must make a sacrifice of her feelings; still, for me, every sacrifice should be made.
She alluded to the topic of age.
Was I aware-was I fully aware of the discrepancy between us?
That the age of the husband, should surpass by a few years-even by fifteen or twenty-the age of the wife, was regarded by the world as admissible, and, indeed, as even proper, but she had always entertained the belief that the years of the wife should never exceed in number those of the husband.
A discrepancy of this unnatural kind gave rise, too frequently, alas! to a life of unhappiness.
Now she was aware that my own age did not exceed two and twenty; and I, on the contrary, perhaps, was not aware that the years of my Eugenie extended very considerably beyond that sum.
About all this there was a nobility of soul-a dignity of candor-which delighted-which enchanted me-which eternally riveted my chains.
I could scarcely restrain the excessive transport which possessed me.
Your years surpass in some measure my own.
But what then? The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.
To those who love as ourselves, in what respect differs a year from an hour?
I am twenty two, you say, granted: indeed, you may as well call me, at once, twenty three.
Here I paused for an instant, in the expectation that Madame Lalande would interrupt me by supplying her true age.
In the present instance, Eugenie, who for a few moments past had seemed to be searching for something in her bosom, at length let fall upon the grass a miniature, which I immediately picked up and presented to her.
"Keep it!" she said, with one of her most ravishing smiles.
"Keep it for my sake-for the sake of her whom it too flatteringly represents. Besides, upon the back of the trinket you may discover, perhaps, the very information you seem to desire.
It is now, to be sure, growing rather dark-but you can examine it at your leisure in the morning.
In the meantime, you shall be my escort home to night.
I can promise you, too, some good singing.
We French are not nearly so punctilious as you Americans, and I shall have no difficulty in smuggling you in, in the character of an old acquaintance."
With this, she took my arm, and I attended her home.
In about an hour after my arrival, to be sure, a single shaded solar lamp was lit in the principal drawing room; and this apartment, I could thus see, was arranged with unusual good taste and even splendor; but two other rooms of the suite, and in which the company chiefly assembled, remained, during the whole evening, in a very agreeable shadow.
This is a well conceived custom, giving the party at least a choice of light or shade, and one which our friends over the water could not do better than immediately adopt.
The evening thus spent was unquestionably the most delicious of my life. Madame Lalande had not overrated the musical abilities of her friends; and the singing I here heard I had never heard excelled in any private circle out of Vienna.
The instrumental performers were many and of superior talents.
The vocalists were chiefly ladies, and no individual sang less than well.
I would have escorted her myself, but felt that, under the circumstances of my introduction to the house, I had better remain unobserved where I was.
I was thus deprived of the pleasure of seeing, although not of hearing, her sing.
The impression she produced upon the company seemed electrical but the effect upon myself was something even more.
I know not how adequately to describe it.
Her voice embraced three complete octaves, extending from the contralto D to the D upper soprano, and, though sufficiently powerful to have filled the San Carlos, executed, with the minutest precision, every difficulty of vocal composition ascending and descending scales, cadences, or fiorituri.
In the final of the Somnambula, she brought about a most remarkable effect at the words:
Here, in imitation of Malibran, she modified the original phrase of Bellini, so as to let her voice descend to the tenor G, when, by a rapid transition, she struck the G above the treble stave, springing over an interval of two octaves.
Upon rising from the piano after these miracles of vocal execution, she resumed her seat by my side; when I expressed to her, in terms of the deepest enthusiasm, my delight at her performance.
Our conversation was now long, earnest, uninterrupted, and totally unreserved.
She made me relate many of the earlier passages of my life, and listened with breathless attention to every word of the narrative.
I concealed nothing-felt that I had a right to conceal nothing-from her confiding affection.
I even went so far as to speak of a slightly hectic cough with which, at one time, I had been troubled-of a chronic rheumatism-of a twinge of hereditary gout-and, in conclusion, of the disagreeable and inconvenient, but hitherto carefully concealed, weakness of my eyes.
By the by," she continued, "have you any recollection " and here I fancied that a blush, even through the gloom of the apartment, became distinctly visible upon her cheek-"have you any recollection, mon cher ami of this little ocular assistant, which now depends from my neck?"
As she spoke she twirled in her fingers the identical double eye glass which had so overwhelmed me with confusion at the opera.
They formed a complex and magnificent toy, richly chased and filigreed, and gleaming with jewels, which, even in the deficient light, I could not help perceiving were of high value.
"Eh bien! mon ami" she resumed with a certain empressment of manner that rather surprised me-"Eh bien! mon ami, you have earnestly besought of me a favor which you have been pleased to denominate priceless.
Should I yield to your entreaties-and, I may add, to the pleadings of my own bosom-would I not be entitled to demand of you a very-a very little boon in return?"
"Name it!" I exclaimed with an energy that had nearly drawn upon us the observation of the company, and restrained by their presence alone from throwing myself impetuously at her feet.
"Name it, my beloved, my Eugenie, my own!--name it!--but, alas! it is already yielded ere named."
You shall conquer, for my sake, this affectation which leads you, as you yourself acknowledge, to the tacit or implied denial of your infirmity of vision.
For, this infirmity you virtually deny, in refusing to employ the customary means for its relief.
You will understand me to say, then, that I wish you to wear spectacles;--ah, hush!--you have already consented to wear them, for my sake.
It is in the former mode, however, and habitually, that you have already consented to wear it for my sake."
This request-must I confess it?--confused me in no little degree.
But the condition with which it was coupled rendered hesitation, of course, a matter altogether out of the question.
"It is done!" I cried, with all the enthusiasm that I could muster at the moment.
"It is done-it is most cheerfully agreed.
I sacrifice every feeling for your sake.
To night I wear this dear eye glass, as an eye glass, and upon my heart; but with the earliest dawn of that morning which gives me the pleasure of calling you wife, I will place it upon my-upon my nose,--and there wear it ever afterward, in the less romantic, and less fashionable, but certainly in the more serviceable, form which you desire."
Our conversation now turned upon the details of our arrangements for the morrow.
Talbot, I learned from my betrothed, had just arrived in town. I was to see him at once, and procure a carriage.
The soiree would scarcely break up before two; and by this hour the vehicle was to be at the door, when, in the confusion occasioned by the departure of the company, Madame l could easily enter it unobserved.
Having planned all this, I immediately took leave, and went in search of Talbot, but, on the way, I could not refrain from stepping into a hotel, for the purpose of inspecting the miniature; and this I did by the powerful aid of the glasses.
The countenance was a surpassingly beautiful one!
Those large luminous eyes!--that proud Grecian nose!--those dark luxuriant curls!--"Ah!" said I, exultingly to myself, "this is indeed the speaking image of my beloved!" I turned the reverse, and discovered the words-"Eugenie Lalande-aged twenty seven years and seven months."
He professed excessive astonishment, of course, but congratulated me most cordially, and proffered every assistance in his power.
In a word, we carried out our arrangement to the letter, and, at two in the morning, just ten minutes after the ceremony, I found myself in a close carriage with Madame Lalande-with mrs Simpson, I should say-and driving at a great rate out of town, in a direction Northeast by North, half North.
It had been determined for us by Talbot, that, as we were to be up all night, we should make our first stop at C-, a village about twenty miles from the city, and there get an early breakfast and some repose, before proceeding upon our route.
At four precisely, therefore, the carriage drew up at the door of the principal inn.
I handed my adored wife out, and ordered breakfast forthwith.
It was now nearly if not altogether daylight; and, as I gazed, enraptured, at the angel by my side, the singular idea came, all at once, into my head, that this was really the very first moment since my acquaintance with the celebrated loveliness of Madame Lalande, that I had enjoyed a near inspection of that loveliness by daylight at all.
Ah! let me see!
Yes; full easily do I call to mind the precise words of the dear promise you made to Eugenie last night.
Listen!
You spoke thus: 'It is done!--it is most cheerfully agreed!
I sacrifice every feeling for your sake.
"Goodness gracious me!" I exclaimed, almost at the very instant that the rim of the spectacles had settled upon my nose-"My goodness gracious me!--why, what can be the matter with these glasses?" and taking them quickly off, I wiped them carefully with a silk handkerchief, and adjusted them again.
But if, in the first instance, there had occurred something which occasioned me surprise, in the second, this surprise became elevated into astonishment; and this astonishment was profound-was extreme-indeed I may say it was horrific.
What, in the name of everything hideous, did this mean?
Could I believe my eyes?--could I?--that was the question.
Was that-was that-was that rouge?
Jupiter, and every one of the gods and goddesses, little and big!
what-what-what-what had become of her teeth?
I dashed the spectacles violently to the ground, and, leaping to my feet, stood erect in the middle of the floor, confronting mrs Simpson, with my arms set a kimbo, and grinning and foaming, but, at the same time, utterly speechless with terror and with rage.
"You wretch!" said I, catching my breath-"you-you-you villainous old hag!"
Me not one single day more dan de eighty doo."
"Eighty two!" I ejaculated, staggering to the wall-"eighty two hundred thousand baboons!
"To be sure!--dat is so!--ver true! but den de portraite has been take for dese fifty five year.
"Moissart!" said i
"Yes, Moissart," said she, mimicking my pronunciation, which, to speak the truth, was none of the best,--"and vat den?
"Nothing, you old fright!--I know nothing about him at all; only I had an ancestor of that name, once upon a time."
"Moissart?" I exclaimed, "and Voissart!
"Froissart!" said I, beginning to faint, "why, surely you don't say Moissart, and Voissart, and Croissart, and Froissart?"
Meantime I sank aghast into the chair which she had vacated.
"Moissart and Voissart!" I repeated, thoughtfully, as she cut one of her pigeon wings, and "Croissart and Froissart!" as she completed another-"Moissart and Voissart and Croissart and Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart!--why, you ineffable old serpent, that's me-that's me-d'ye hear?
I am Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart! and if I havn't married my great, great, grandmother, I wish I may be everlastingly confounded!"
Madame Eugenie Lalande, quasi Simpson-formerly Moissart-was, in sober fact, my great, great, grandmother.
In her youth she had been beautiful, and even at eighty two, retained the majestic height, the sculptural contour of head, the fine eyes and the Grecian nose of her girlhood.
In this respect, indeed, she might have been regarded as little less than the equal of the celebrated Ninon De L'Enclos.
At the opera, my great, great, grandmother's attention was arrested by my notice; and, upon surveying me through her eye glass, she was struck with a certain family resemblance to herself.
Thus interested, and knowing that the heir she sought was actually in the city, she made inquiries of her party respecting me.
The information thus obtained induced her to renew her scrutiny; and this scrutiny it was which so emboldened me that I behaved in the absurd manner already detailed. She returned my bow, however, under the impression that, by some odd accident, I had discovered her identity.
When, deceived by my weakness of vision, and the arts of the toilet, in respect to the age and charms of the strange lady, I demanded so enthusiastically of Talbot who she was, he concluded that I meant the younger beauty, as a matter of course, and so informed me, with perfect truth, that she was "the celebrated widow, Madame Lalande."
By way of punishing me for this imprudence, she concocted with Talbot a plot.
He purposely kept out of my way to avoid giving me the introduction.
When "Madame Lalande" was called upon to sing, the younger lady was intended; and it was she who arose to obey the call; my great, great, grandmother, to further the deception, arising at the same moment and accompanying her to the piano in the main drawing room.
The eyeglass was presented by way of adding a reproof to the hoax-a sting to the epigram of the deception.
Its presentation afforded an opportunity for the lecture upon affectation with which I was so especially edified.
They suited me, in fact, to a t
The clergyman, who merely pretended to tie the fatal knot, was a boon companion of Talbot's, and no priest.
He was an excellent "whip," however; and having doffed his cassock to put on a great coat, he drove the hack which conveyed the "happy couple" out of town.
Talbot took a seat at his side.
I believe I shall be forced to call them both out.
Nevertheless, I am not the husband of my great, great, grandmother; and this is a reflection which affords me infinite relief,--but I am the husband of Madame Lalande-of Madame Stephanie Lalande-with whom my good old relative, besides making me her sole heir when she dies-if she ever does-has been at the trouble of concocting me a match.
OUT OF NAZARETH
Okochee, in Georgia, had a boom, and j Pinkney Bloom came out of it with a "wad." Okochee came out of it with a half million dollar debt, a two and a half per cent. city property tax, and a city council that showed a propensity for traveling the back streets of the town.
These things came about through a fatal resemblance of the river Cooloosa to the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern tourist.
Okochee felt that New York should not be allowed to consider itself the only alligator in the swamp, so to speak.
And then that harmless, but persistent, individual so numerous in the South-the man who is always clamoring for more cotton mills, and is ready to take a dollar's worth of stock, provided he can borrow the dollar-that man added his deadly work to the tourist's innocent praise, and Okochee fell.
Okochee rose, as it were, from its sunny seat on the post office stoop, hitched up its suspender, and threw a granite dam two hundred and forty feet long and sixty feet high across the Cooloosa one mile above the town.
Thereupon, a dimpling, sparkling lake backed up twenty miles among the little mountains.
Thus in the great game of municipal rivalry did Okochee match that famous drawing card, the Hudson.
It was conceded that nowhere could the Palisades be judged superior in the way of scenery and grandeur.
Fourteen thousand horsepower would this dam furnish.
Cotton mills, factories, and manufacturing plants would rise up as the green corn after a shower.
The spindle and the flywheel and turbine would sing the shrewd glory of Okochee.
Along the picturesque heights above the lake would rise in beauty the costly villas and the splendid summer residences of capital.
The naphtha launch of the millionaire would spit among the romantic coves; the verdured hills would take formal shapes of terrace, lawn, and park.
The fate of the good town is quickly told.
Capital decided not to invest.
Of all the great things promised, the scenery alone came to fulfilment.
The wooded peaks, the impressive promontories of solemn granite, the beautiful green slants of bank and ravine did all they could to reconcile Okochee to the delinquency of miserly gold.
The sunsets gilded the dreamy draws and coves with a minting that should charm away heart burning.
Okochee, true to the instinct of its blood and clime, was lulled by the spell.
In yachting caps and flowing neckties they pervaded the lake to its limits.
Girls wore silk waists embroidered with anchors in blue and pink.
The trousers of the young men widened at the bottom, and their hands were proudly calloused by the oft plied oar. Fishermen were under the spell of a deep and tolerant joy.
Sailboats and rowboats furrowed the lenient waves, popcorn and ice cream booths sprang up about the little wooden pier.
Needless to say j Pinkney was no product of Georgia soil.
He came out of that flushed and capable region known as the "North." He called himself a "promoter"; his enemies had spoken of him as a "grafter"; Okochee took a middle course, and held him to be no better nor no worse than a "Yank."
Far up the lake-eighteen miles above the town-the eye of this cheerful camp follower of booms had spied out a graft.
He purchased there a precipitous tract of five hundred acres at forty five cents per acre; and this he laid out and subdivided as the city of Skyland-the Queen City of the Switzerland of the South.
Streets and avenues were surveyed; parks designed; corners of central squares reserved for the "proposed" opera house, board of trade, lyceum, market, public schools, and "Exposition Hall." The price of lots ranged from five to five hundred dollars.
Positively, no lot would be priced higher than five hundred dollars.
Pinkney Bloom) returned to each a deed, duly placed on record, to the best lot, at the price, on hand that day.
tax, j Pinkney Bloom (unloving of checks and drafts and the cold interrogatories of bankers) strapped about his fifty two inch waist a soft leather belt containing eight thousand dollars in big bills, and said that all was very good.
One last trip he was making to Skyland before departing to other salad fields.
There was a little business there to be settled-the postmaster was to be paid off for his light but lonely services, and the "inhabitants" had to be furnished with another month's homely rations, as per agreement.
And then Skyland would know j Pinkney Bloom no more.
The work of the Skyland Real Estate Company was finished.
He stepped forward, with that translucent, child candid smile upon his fresh, pink countenance, with that air of unaffected sincerity that was redeemed from bluffness only by its exquisite calculation, with that promptitude and masterly decision of manner that so well suited his calling-with all his stock in trade well to the front; he stepped forward to receive Colonel and mrs Peyton Blaylock.
"Our home, sir," said Colonel Blaylock, removing his wide brimmed, rather shapeless black felt hat, "is in Holly Springs-Holly Springs, Georgia.
The Colonel smoothed back, with a sweeping gesture, his long, smooth, locks.
He looked rather to be an old courtier handed down from the reign of Charles, and re attired in a modern suit of fine, but raveling and seam worn, broadcloth.
"Yes, sir," said mr Bloom, in his heartiest prospectus voice, "things have been whizzing around Okochee.
Did you happen to squeeze in on the ground floor in any of the gilt edged grafts, Colonel?"
He has such a talent for financiering and markets and investments and those kind of things.
"Practical affairs," he said, with a wave of his hand toward the promoter, "are, if I may use the comparison, the garden walks upon which we tread through life, viewing upon either side of us the flowers which brighten that journey.
mrs Blaylock, sir, is one of those fortunate higher spirits whose mission it is to make the flowers grow.
It must be nice, though-quite nice."
My shawl, Peyton, if you please-the breeze comes a little chilly from yon verdured hills."
Very fair and stately they looked in the clear morning air.
They seemed to speak in familiar terms to the responsive spirit of Lorella.
"My native hills!" she murmured, dreamily.
"See how the foliage drinks the sunlight from the hollows and dells."
That is one portent reason for the change we are making.
mrs Blaylock turned a glance of speaking tenderness upon the Colonel, fingered for a moment the silvery curl that drooped upon her bosom, then looked again toward the mountains.
"That's great stuff, ma'am," said j Pinkney Bloom, enthusiastically, when the poetess had concluded.
"I wish I had looked up poetry more than I have.
I was raised in the pine hills myself."
"The mountains ever call to their children," murmured mrs Blaylock.
Peyton-a little taste of the currant wine, if you will be so good.
The journey, though delightful in the extreme, slightly fatigues me." Colonel Blaylock again visited the depths of his prolific coat, and produced a tightly corked, rough, black bottle. mr Bloom was on his feet in an instant.
"Let me bring a glass, ma'am.
You come along, Colonel-there's a little table we can bring, too.
Maybe we can scare up some fruit or a cup of tea on board.
I'll ask Mac."
mrs Blaylock reclined at ease.
It seemed (from the conversation of the Blaylocks) that the Springs was decadent.
A third of the population had moved away.
Business-and the Colonel was an authority on business-had dwindled to nothing.
I might give you a hunch as to whether you can make the game go or not."
They were so simple, impractical, and unsuspecting.
"No, sir," said Colonel Blaylock, pausing to arrange the queen's wrap. "I did not invest in Okochee.
The description was so pleasing, the future of the town set forth in such convincing arguments, and its increasing prosperity portrayed in such an attractive style that I decided to take advantage of the opportunity it offered.
I carefully selected a lot in the centre of the business district, although its price was the highest in the schedule-five hundred dollars-and made the purchase at once."
I consider the purchase a most fortuitous one.
It is my intention to erect a small building upon it at once, and open a modest book and stationery store.
Of course, mrs Blaylock would not personally serve behind the counter.
Again followed that wonderful bow, as the Colonel lightly touched the pale cheek of the poetess.
mrs Blaylock, blushing like a girl, shook her curl and gave the Colonel an arch, reproving tap.
Secret of eternal youth-where art thou?
Every second the answer comes-"Here, here, here." Listen to thine own heartbeats, O weary seeker after external miracles.
"Those years," said mrs Blaylock, "in Holly Springs were long, long, long.
Skyland!--a lovely name."
"Doubtless," said the Colonel, "we shall be able to secure comfortable accommodations at some modest hotel at reasonable rates.
Our trunks are in Okochee, to be forwarded when we shall have made permanent arrangements."
J. Pinkney Bloom excused himself, went forward, and stood by the captain at the wheel.
Now, you see that old babe in the wood over there? Well, he's the boy that drew the prize.
That was the only five hundred dollar lot that went.
The rest ranged from ten dollars to two hundred.
His wife writes poetry.
"And he thinks there's an open house up there."
Captain MacFarland released the wheel long enough to give his leg a roguish slap.
"You old fat rascal!" he chuckled, with a wink.
"Mac, you're a fool," said j Pinkney Bloom, coldly.
He went back and joined the Blaylocks, where he sat, less talkative, with that straight furrow between his brows that always stood as a signal of schemes being shaped within.
"There's a good many swindles connected with these booms," he said presently.
"What if this Skyland should turn out to be one-that is, suppose business should be sort of dull there, and no special sale for books?"
If I have been deceived again, still we may glean health and content, if not worldly profit.
My dear, can you recall those verses entitled 'He Giveth the Increase,' that you composed for the choir of our church in Holly Springs?"
They were written to the music composed by a dear friend."
"It's a fine rhyme, just the same," declared mr Bloom.
"It seems to ring the bell, all right.
mr Bloom strayed thoughtfully back to the captain, and stood meditating.
"Go to the devil," said mr Bloom, still pensive.
That was Cold Branch-no boom town, but the slow growth of many years.
Cold Branch lay on the edge of the grape and corn lands.
The big country road ran just back of the heights.
Cold Branch had nothing in common with the frisky ambition of Okochee with its impertinent lake.
"Mac," said j Pinkney suddenly, "I want you to stop at Cold Branch. There's a landing there that they made to use sometimes when the river was up."
"I've got the United States mails on board.
Right to day this boat's in the government service.
And the great city of Skyland, all disconsolate, waiting for its mail?
I'm ashamed of your extravagance, j p"
I hate to mention these things, but-"
"Oh, come now, j p," said the captain.
"You know I was just fooling. I'll put you off at Cold Branch, if you say so."
"The other passengers get off there, too," said mr Bloom.
Finally they entered the village of Cold Branch. Warmly both the Colonel and his wife praised it for its homelike and peaceful beauty.
J. Pinkney Bloom walked down Cold Branch's main street.
"Get your hat, son," said mr Bloom, in his breezy way, "and a blank deed, and come along.
It's a job for you."
"Now," he continued, when mr Cooly had responded with alacrity, "is there a bookstore in town?"
"One," said the lawyer.
"Get there," said mr Bloom.
"We're going to buy it."
Henry Williams was behind his counter.
His store was a small one, containing a mixture of books, stationery, and fancy rubbish.
Adjoining it was Henry's home-a decent cottage, vine embowered and cosy.
Henry was lank and soporific, and not inclined to rush his business.
"I want to buy your house and store," said mr Bloom.
"I haven't got time to dicker-name your price."
"It's worth eight hundred," said Henry, too much dazed to ask more than its value.
"Shut that door," said mr Bloom to the lawyer.
Then he tore off his coat and vest, and began to unbutton his shirt.
"All right, hunky-sail in and cut yer capers."
"Keep your clothes on," said mr Bloom.
"I'm only going down to the bank."
He drew eight one hundred dollar bills from his money belt and planked them down on the counter.
mr Cooly showed signs of future promise, for he already had the deed spread out, and was reaching across the counter for the ink bottle.
Never before or since was such quick action had in Cold Branch.
"Make it out to Peyton Blaylock," said mr Bloom.
"You'll find the party at the Pinetop Inn," said j Pinkney Bloom.
"Get it recorded, and take it down and give it to him.
Chapter thirty two.
Miss Westerfield.
She locked the door of her bedchamber, and threw off her walking dress; light as it was, she felt as if it would stifle her.
Her overburdened heart found no relief in tears.
One of the windows was open already; she threw up the other to get more air.
In the cooler atmosphere her memory recovered itself; she recollected the newspaper, that Herbert had taken from her.
Instantly she rang for the maid.
When her wish had been gratified, when she had read it from beginning to end, one vivid impression only was left on her mind.
She could think of nothing but what the judge had said, in speaking of mrs Linley.
A cruel reproof, and worse than cruel, a public reproof, administered to the generous friend, the true wife, the devoted mother-and for what?
For having been too ready to forgive the wretch who had taken her husband from her, and had repaid a hundred acts of kindness by unpardonable ingratitude.
"Oh, God, how can I give that woman back the happiness of which I have robbed her!"
The composing influence of prayer on a troubled mind was something that she had heard of.
It was not something that she experienced now.
An overpowering impatience to make the speediest and completest atonement possessed her.
Must she wait till Herbert Linley no longer concealed that he was weary of her, and cast her off?
No!
It should be her own act that parted them, and that did it at once.
Slowly and sadly she submitted, and went back to her room.
The Divorce, the merciless Divorce, answered:--No!
She paused, thinking of the marriage that was now a marriage no more. The toilet table was close to her; she looked absently at her haggard face in the glass.
What a lost wretch she saw!
The generous impulses which other women were free to feel were forbidden luxuries to her.
She was ashamed of her wickedness; she was eager to sacrifice herself, for the good of the once dear friend whom she had wronged.
Useless longings! Too late!
too late!
She regretted it bitterly.
Why?
Comparing mrs Linley's prospects with hers, was there anything to justify regret for the divorced wife?
While she held her place in the world as high as ever, what was the prospect before Sydney Westerfield?
If she had been a few years older, Herbert Linley might never again have seen her a living creature.
But she was too young to follow any train of repellent thought persistently to its end.
Even in his absence he pleaded with her to have some faith in him still.
He had been kind and considerate; he had listened to her little story of the relics of her father, found in the garret, as if her interests were his interests.
And yet, he might have found a kinder way of reproving a sensitive woman than looking into the street-as if he had forgotten her in the interest of watching the strangers passing by!
Perhaps he was not thinking of the strangers; perhaps his mind was dwelling fondly and regretfully on his wife?
Was there nothing she could find to do which would offer some other subject to occupy her mind than herself and her future?
Looking absently round the room, she noticed the packet of her father's letters placed on the table by her bedside.
They all related to race horses, and to cunningly devised bets which were certain to make the fortunes of the clever gamblers on the turf who laid them. Absolute indifference on the part of the winners to the ruin of the losers, who were not in the secret, was the one feeling in common, which her father's correspondents presented.
The next letter which she picked out from the little heap was of some length, and was written in a clear and steady hand.
By comparison with the blotted scrawls which she had just burned, it looked like the letter of a gentleman.
She turned to the signature.
The strange surname struck her; it was "Bennydeck."
Had she heard her father mention it at home in the time of her early childhood?
There were no associations with it that she could now call to mind.
She read the letter.
It addressed her father familiarly as "My dear Roderick," and it proceeded in these words:--
"The delay in the sailing of your ship offers me an opportunity of writing to you again.
My last letter told you of my father's death.
Prepare yourself to be surprised.
Our old moated house at Sandyseal, in which we have spent so many happy holidays when we were schoolfellows, is sold.
"I think I see you look up from my letter, with your big black eyes staring straight before you, and say and swear that this must be one of my mystifications.
Unfortunately (for I am fond of the old house in which I was born) it is only too true.
The instructions in my father's will, under which Sandyseal has been sold, are peremptory.
They are the result of a promise made, many years since, to his wife.
"You and I were both very young when my poor mother died; but I think you must remember that she, like the rest of her family, was a Roman Catholic.
"Having reminded you of this, I may next tell you that Sandyseal Place was my mother's property.
I am her only child.
My father was therefore dealing with his own property when he ordered the house to be sold.
I would rather have kept the house.
"But why did my mother make him promise to sell the place at his death?
In deference to my mother's wishes it was kept strictly a secret from me while my father lived.
It is needless to make this long letter longer by dwelling on the girl's miserable story.
You have heard it of other girls, over and over again.
She loved and trusted; she was deceived and deserted.
Alone and friendless in a foreign country; her fair fame blemished; her hope in the future utterly destroyed, she attempted to drown herself.
This took place in France.
The best of good women-a Sister of Charity-happened to be near enough to the river to rescue her.
She was sheltered; she was pitied; she was encouraged to return to her family.
The poor deserted creature absolutely refused; she could never forget that she had disgraced them.
The good Sister of Charity won her confidence.
That end was attained in a Priory of Benedictine Nuns, established in France.
"You will now understand how my mother's grateful remembrance associated her with the interests of more than one community of Nuns; and you will not need to be told what she had in mind when she obtained my father's promise at the time of her last illness.
My mother thanked him and refused.
Let it be sold.'
If I die first-oh, there is a chance of it!
We may have a naval war, perhaps, or I may turn out one of those incorrigible madmen who risk their lives in Arctic exploration.
In case of the worst, therefore, I shall leave the interests of my contemplated Home in your honest and capable hands.
For the present good by, and a prosperous voyage outward bound."
So the letter ended.
Sydney dwelt with reluctant attention on the latter half of it.
What religious consolations would encourage her penitence? What prayers, what hopes, would reconcile her, on her death bed, to the common doom?
"If my lot had fallen among good people," she thought, "perhaps I might have belonged to the Church which took care of that poor girl."
Her mind was still pursuing its own sad course of inquiry; she was wondering in what part of England Sandyseal might be; she was asking herself if the Nuns at the old moated house ever opened their doors to women, whose one claim on their common Christianity was the claim to be pitied-when she heard Linley's footsteps approaching the door.
Her long absence had alarmed him; he feared she might be ill.
"I was only thinking," she said.
For the men had rejected their lawful wives, loathing them, and had conceived a fierce passion for captive maids whom they themselves brought across the sea from their forays in Thrace; for the terrible wrath of Cypris came upon them, because for a long time they had grudged her the honours due.
O hapless women, and insatiate in jealousy to their own ruin!
Now for all the women to tend kine, to don armour of bronze, and to cleave with the plough share the wheat bearing fields, was easier than the works of Athena, with which they were busied aforetime.
And they streamed down speechless with dismay; such fear was wafted about them.
And I will tell out truly all our evil plight, that ye yourselves too may know it well.
For they hated their lawful wives, and, yielding to their own mad folly, drove them from their homes; and they took to their beds the captives of their spear, cruel ones.
Long in truth we endured it, if haply again, though late, they might change their purpose, but ever the bitter woe grew, twofold.
So they begged of us all the male children that were left in the city and went back to where even now they dwell on the snowy tilths of Thrace.
But just as they were in the assembly they made ready their departure in all haste, and the women came running towards them, when they knew their intent.
And they questioned one another in turn.
But there Heracles had been left behind with the younger heroes and he quickly bent his back springing bow against the monsters and brought them to earth one after another; and they in their turn raised huge ragged rocks and hurled them.
For these dread monsters too, I ween, the goddess Hera, bride of Zeus, had nurtured to be a trial for Heracles. And therewithal came the rest of the martial heroes returning to meet the foe before they reached the height of outlook, and they fell to the slaughter of the Earthborn, receiving them with arrows and spears until they slew them all as they rushed fiercely to battle.
And they stepped ashore that same night; and the rock is still called the Sacred Rock round which they threw the ship's hawsers in their haste.
Nor did anyone note with care that it was the same island; nor in the night did the Doliones clearly perceive that the heroes were returning; but they deemed that Pelasgian war men of the Macrians had landed.
Therefore they donned their armour and raised their hands against them.
For that no mortal may escape; but on every side a wide snare encompasses us.
And after them the son of Oeneus slew bold Itomeneus, and Artaceus, leader of men; all of whom the inhabitants still honour with the worship due to heroes.
And the rest gave way and fled in terror just as doves fly in terror before swift winged hawks. And with a din they rustled in a body to the gates; and quickly the city was filled with loud cries at the turning of the dolorous fight.
But at dawn both sides perceived the fatal and cureless error; and bitter grief seized the Minyan heroes when they saw before them Cyzicus son of Aeneus fallen in the midst of dust and blood.
But in the next night the rest of the chieftains, overcome by sleep, were resting during the latest period of the night, while Acastus and Mopsus the son of Ampyeus kept guard over their deep slumbers.
For by her power the winds and the sea and all the earth below and the snowy seat of Olympus are complete; and to her, when from the mountains she ascends the mighty heaven, Zeus himself, the son of Cronos, gives place.
And he arose from his bed with joy and woke all his comrades hurriedly and told them the prophecy of Mopsus the son of Ampycus.
And there appeared the misty mouth of Bosporus and the Mysian hills; and on the other side the stream of the river Aesepus and the city and Nepeian plain of Adrasteia.
Hence from that time forward the Phrygians propitiate Rhea with the wheel and the drum.
And the gracious goddess, I ween, inclined her heart to pious sacrifices; and favourable signs appeared.
The trees shed abundant fruit, and round their feet the earth of its own accord put forth flowers from the tender grass.
And the beasts of the wild wood left their lairs and thickets and came up fawning on them with their tails. And she caused yet another marvel; for hitherto there was no flow of water on Dindymum, but then for them an unceasing stream gushed forth from the thirsty peak just as it was, and the dwellers around in after times called that stream, the spring of Jason.
And then they made a feast in honour of the goddess on the Mount of Bears, singing the praises of Rhea most venerable; but at dawn the winds had ceased and they rowed away from the island.
And they, trusting in the calm, mightily drove the ship forward; and as she sped through the salt sea, not even the storm footed steeds of Poseidon would have overtaken her.
Nevertheless when the sea was stirred by violent blasts which were just rising from the rivers about evening, forspent with toil, they ceased.
But Heracles by the might of his arms pulled the weary rowers along all together, and made the strong knit timbers of the ship to quiver.
And he sat up in silence glaring round; for his hands were unaccustomed to be idle.
Hereupon some brought dried wood, others from the meadows leaves for beds which they gathered in abundance for strewing, whilst others were twirling sticks to get fire; others again were mixing wine in the bowl and making ready the feast, after sacrificing at nightfall to Apollo Ecbasius.
Wandering about he found a pine not burdened with many branches, nor too full of leaves, but like to the shaft of a tall poplar; so great was it both in length and thickness to look at.
And he loosened the pine from the ground with his bronze tipped club and grasped the trunk with both hands at the bottom, relying on his strength; and he pressed it against his broad shoulder with legs wide apart; and clinging close he raised it from the ground deep rooted though it was, together with clods of earth.
And at the same time he took up his bow and arrows, his lion skin and club, and started on his return.
For he desired to find some pretext for war against the Dryopians for their bane, since they dwelt there reckless of right.
But these tales would lead me far astray from my song.
For the full moon beaming from the sky smote him.
And Cypris made her heart faint, and in her confusion she could scarcely gather her spirit back to her.
Hylas has gone to the well and has not returned safe, but robbers have attacked and are carrying him off, or beasts are tearing him to pieces; I heard his cry."
And they embarked eagerly forthwith; and they drew up the ship's anchors and hauled the ropes astern.
And the sails were bellied out by the wind, and far from the coast were they joyfully borne past the Posideian headland.
But at the hour when gladsome dawn shines from heaven, rising from the east, and the paths stand out clearly, and the dewy plains shine with a bright gleam, then at length they were aware that unwittingly they had abandoned those men.
And a fierce quarrel fell upon them, and violent tumult, for that they had sailed and left behind the bravest of their comrades.
And wrath seized Telamon, and thus he spake:
But what pleasure is there in words?
For I will go, I only, with none of thy comrades, who have helped thee to plan this treachery."
Hapless ones, assuredly a bitter vengeance came upon them thereafter at the hands of Heracles, because they stayed the search for him.
For when they were returning from the games over Pelias dead he slew them in sea girt Tenos and heaped the earth round them, and placed two columns above, one of which, a great marvel for men to see, moves at the breath of the blustering north wind.
These things were thus to be accomplished in after times.
But to them appeared Glaucus from the depths of the sea, the wise interpreter of divine Nereus, and raising aloft his shaggy head and chest from his waist below, with sturdy hand he seized the ship's keel, and then cried to the eager crew:
At Argos it is his fate to labour for insolent Eurystheus and to accomplish full twelve toils and dwell with the immortals, if so be that he bring to fulfilment a few more yet; wherefore let there be no vain regret for him.
But a goddess nymph through love has made Hylas her husband, on whose account those two wandered and were left behind."
But let me give my fault to the winds and let our hearts be joined as before."
For it was not for flocks of sheep, no, nor for possessions that thou wast angered to fury, but for a man, thy comrade.
Henriette was visibly angry the other morning when I took to her the early mail and she discovered that mrs Van Varick Shadd had got ahead of her in the matter of Jockobinski, the monkey virtuoso.
"He's a whole orchestra in himself," said Tommy enthusiastically, "and is the only living creature that I know of who can tackle a whole symphony without the aid of a hired man."
better.
"I had quite set my heart on having Jockobinski here.
Not that I care particularly about the music end of it, but because there is nothing that gives a woman so assured a social position as being the hostess of an animal of his particular kind.
I confessed to having read something about such an incident in high society.
Of course mrs Shadd is doing this to retain her grip, but it irritates me more than I can say to have her get it just the same.
Heaven knows I was willing to pay for it if I had to abscond with a national bank to get the money."
"It isn't too late, is it?" I queried.
"Not too late?" echoed Henriette.
"Not too late with mrs Shadd's cards out and the whole thing published in the papers?"
"It's never too late for a woman of your resources to do anything she has a mind to do," said i "It seems to me that a person who could swipe a Carnegie library the way you did should have little difficulty in lifting a musicale.
Henriette was silent for a moment, and then her face lit up with one of her most charming smiles.
"Bunny, do you know that at times, in spite of your supreme stupidity, you are a source of positive inspiration to me?" she said, looking at me, fondly, I ventured to think.
Perhaps hid in the dull residuum of my poor but honest gray matter lies the seed of real genius that will sprout the loveliest blossoms of achievement."
"Well, anyhow, dear, you have started me thinking, and maybe we'll have Jockobinski at Bolivar Lodge yet," she murmured.
"I want to have him first, of course, or not at all.
To be second in doing a thing of that kind is worse than never doing it at all."
Wednesday night came, and, consumed by curiosity to learn just how the matter stood, I attempted to sound Henriette on the subject.
"Shut up, Bunny," she returned, abruptly.
Just take this note over to mrs Shadd this evening and leave it-mind you, don't wait for an answer but just leave it, that's all."
She arose from the table and handed me a daintily scented missive addressed to mrs Shadd, and I faithfully executed her errand.
An hour later Bunderby appeared at the back door and handed me a note addressed to my mistress, which I immediately delivered.
"Is Bunderby waiting?" asked Henriette as she read the note.
What it said was that she would be only too happy to oblige mrs Shadd, and was very sorry indeed to hear that her son had been injured in an automobile accident while running into Boston from Bar Harbor.
It closed with the line, "you must know, my dear Pauline, that there isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, come weal or come woe."
This I handed to Bunderby and he made off.
On my return Henriette was dressed for travel.
"You will have the music room prepared at once, Bunny.
mrs Shadd's musicale will be given here.
See?"
Henriette made off at once for Providence by motor car, and got the midnight train out of Boston for the city where, from what I learned afterwards, she must have put in a strenuous day on Thursday.
At any rate, a great sensation was sprung on Newport on Friday morning.
Every member of the smart set in the ten o'clock mail received a little engraved card stating that owing to sudden illness in the Shadd family the Shadd musicale for that evening would be held at Bolivar Lodge instead of in the Onyx House ballroom.
Friday afternoon Jockobinski's private and particular piano arrived at the Lodge and was set up promptly in the music room, and later when the caterers arrived with the supper for the four hundred odd guests bidden to the feast all was in readiness for them.
Everything was running smoothly, and, although Henriette had not yet arrived, I felt easy and secure of mind until nearing five thirty o'clock when mrs Shadd herself drove up to the front door.
She demanded rather than asked to see my mistress, with a hauteur born of the arctic snow.
"mrs Van Raffles went to New York Wednesday evening," said I, "and has not yet returned.
I am expecting her every minute, madame.
Won't you wait?"
"The musicale, indeed!
I must say I did not envy Henriette the meeting that was in prospect, for it was quite evident that mrs Shadd was mad all through.
In spite of my stupidity I rather thought I could divine the cause too.
She was not kept long in waiting, for ten minutes later the automobile, with Henriette in it, came thundering up the drive.
I tried as I let her in to give her a hint of what awaited her, but mrs Shadd forestalled me, only however to be forestalled herself.
"My son is not ill, mrs Van Raffles," said mrs Shadd, coldly.
"I have come to ask you what-"
"Not ill?" cried Henriette, interrupting her.
"That is precisely what I have come to find out," said mrs Shadd.
"Surely, you got my note saying that I would let Jockobinski play here to night instead of-"
"I did receive a very peculiar note from you saying that you would gladly do as I wished," said mrs Shadd, beginning herself to look less angry and more puzzled.
"In reply to your note of Wednesday evening," said Henriette.
About half past seven o'clock it was-Wednesday."
"Yes, Bunderby did carry a note to you from me on Wednesday," said mrs Shadd.
"But-"
"I?" said mrs Shadd, showing more surprise than was compatible with her high social position.
"And attend to all the details-your very words, my dear Pauline," said Henriette, with an admirably timed break in her voice.
Henriette was a perfect picture of despair.
"I don't suppose we can do anything now," said mrs Shadd, ruefully.
"It's too late.
The cards have gone to everybody.
You have all the supper-not a sandwich has come to my house-and I presume all of mr Jockobinski's instruments as well have come here."
Henriette turned to me.
"All, madame," said I, briefly.
"I don't understand it.
"You can read it for yourself.
What else could I do after that?"
Innocence on a monument could have appeared no freer of guile than Henriette at that moment.
"It certainly looks like it," said mrs Shadd.
Where could it have come from?"
"I supposed it came from Onyx House," said Henriette simply, glancing at the envelope.
"Well-it's a very mysterious affair," said mrs Shadd, rising, "and I-oh, well, my dear woman, I-I can't blame you-indeed, after all you have done I ought to be-and really am-very much obliged to you. Only-"
"Whom did you have at dinner Wednesday night, dear?" asked Henriette.
"Only the Duke and Duchess of Snarleyow and-mercy!
I wonder if he could have done it!"
"It wouldn't be unlike him, would it?"
"Not a bit, the naughty boy!" cried mrs Shadd.
"That's it, mrs Van Raffles, as certainly as we stand here.
"Splendid!" said Henriette, with enthusiasm.
"Never!" said mrs Shadd, rising and kissing Henriette good bye.
"That's the best way out of it.
If we did we'd be the laughing stock of all Newport.
And so it was agreed, and Henriette successfully landed mrs Shadd's musicale.
Incidentally, Jockobinski was very affable and the function went off well.
"Who wrote that letter, Henriette?" I asked late in the evening when the last guest had gone.
"Who do you suppose, Bunny, my boy?" she asked with a grin.
"Bunderby?"
"No," said i
"You've guessed right," said Henriette.
Even then I doubt if he realizes what a good one it was on-everybody.
"It is curious, Bunny," said Henriette the other morning after an unusually late breakfast, "to observe by what qualities certain of these Newport families have arrived, as the saying is.
The Gasters of course belong at the top by patent right.
Having invented American society, or at least the machine that at present controls it, they are entitled to all the royalties it brings in.
The Rockerbilts got there all of a sudden by the sheer lavishness of their entertainment and their ability to give bonds to keep it up.
"Bunny!" cried Henriette, with a silvery ripple of laughter.
"Do be careful.
An epigram from you?
My dear boy, you'll be down with brain fever if you don't watch out."
"Neither you nor my dear old friend Raffles ever gave me credit for any brains.
"Well, don't waste them here, Bunny," laughed Henriette.
But how do you suppose the Oliver Sloshingtons ever got in here?"
"He holds the divorce record I believe," said i "He's been married to four social leaders already, hasn't he?"
"Well, he got into the swim with each marriage-so he's got a four ply grip," said i
"And the Dedbroke Hickses?" asked Henriette.
"How do you account for them?"
By Jove! she's that easy with men that even I tremble with anxiety whenever she comes into the house."
"But how do they live?--they haven't a cent to their names," said Henriette.
"Simplicity itself," said i "He is dressed by his tailors and she by her dressmaker; and as for food, they take home a suit case full of it from every house party they attend.
"Well-I don't envy them in the least," said Henriette.
"Exactly; and with car fare and sandwiches, and the champagne supplied free by the importers, for the advertisement, it cost them exactly twelve dollars and was set down as the jolliest affair of the season," said i
"I call that genius of a pretty high order.
I wouldn't pity them if I were you.
They're happy."
"mrs Innitt, though-I envy her," said Henriette; "that is, in a way. She has no conversation at all, but her little dinners are the swellest things of the season.
Never more than ten people at a time and everything cooked to a turn."
"That's just it," said i
It's her cook, that's what does it.
If she lost her cook she'd be mrs Outofit.
There never were such pancakes, such purees, such made dishes as that woman gets up.
She turns hash into a confection and liver and bacon into a delicacy.
A woman with a cook like Norah Sullivan could rule an empire."
"What, mrs Innitt?" I asked.
"No-her cook," said Henriette.
I stood aghast.
Full of sympathy as I had always been with the projects of mrs Van Raffles, and never in the least objecting on moral grounds to any of her schemes of acquisition, I could not but think that this time she proposed to go too far.
"You'd better think twice on that proposition, Henriette," I advised with a gloomy shake of the head.
"It is not only a mean crime, but a dangerous one to boot.
mrs Innitt would never forgive you, and society at large-"
"Society at large would dine with me instead of with mrs Innitt, that's all," said Henriette.
"Well, I draw the line at stealing a cook," said I, coldly.
"I've robbed churches and I've made way with fresh air funds, and I've helped you in many another legitimate scheme, but in this, mrs Van Raffles, you'll have to go it alone."
"Oh, don't you be afraid, Bunny," she answered.
"It's worse than murder, for it is prohibited twice in the decalogue, while murder is only mentioned once."
"What!" cried Henrietta "What, pray, does the decalogue say about cooks, I'd like to know?"
"First, thou shalt not steal.
You propose to steal this woman.
Second, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's maid servant.
How many times does that make?" I asked.
Anybody'd know you were the son of a clergyman! Well, let me tell you, I sha'n't steal the woman, and I sha'n't covet her.
I'm just going to get her, that's all."
The Friday before Norah's arrival Henriette requested me to get her a rusty nail, a piece of gravel from the drive, two hair pins, and a steel nut from the automobile.
"What on earth-" I began, but she shut me off with an imperious gesture.
"Do as I tell you," she commanded.
"You are not in on this venture." And then apparently she relented.
"But I'm willing to tell you just one thing, Bunny"--here her eyes began to twinkle joyously-"I'm going to mrs Innitt's to dinner to morrow night-so look out for Norah by Monday."
I turned sulkily away.
"You know how I feel on that subject," said i "This business of going into another person's house as a guest and inducing their servants to leave is an infraction of the laws of hospitality.
How would you like it if mrs Gaster stole me away from you?"
Henriette's answer was a puzzling smile.
"You are free to better your condition, Bunny," she said.
"But I am not going to rob mrs Innitt, as I told you once before.
"I won out, Bunny-I won out!" she cried.
"mrs Innitt has discharged Norah, though I begged her not to," she fairly sang.
"On what grounds?"
"Several," said Henriette, unfastening her glove.
"To begin with, there was a rusty nail in my clam cocktail, and it nearly choked me to death. I tried hard to keep mrs Innitt from seeing what had happened, but she is watchful if not brainy, and all my efforts went for naught.
She was much mortified of course and apologized profusely.
All went well until the fish, when one of the two hair pins turned up in the pompano to the supreme disgust of my hostess, who was now beginning to look worried. Hair pin number two made its debut in my timbale.
This was too much for the watchful mrs Innitt, self poised though she always is, and despite my remonstrances she excused herself from the table for a moment, and I judge from the flushed appearance of her cheeks when she returned five minutes later that somebody had had the riot act read to her somewhere.
"'I don't understand it at all, mrs Van Raffles,' she said with a sheepish smile.
'Cook's perfectly sober.
If anything of the kind ever happens again she shall go.'"
"Even as mrs Innitt spoke I conveyed a luscious morsel of filet mignon with mushrooms to my mouth and nearly broke my tooth on a piece of gravel that went with it, and Norah was doomed, for although we all laughed heartily, the thing had come to be such a joke, it was plain from the expression of mrs Innitt's countenance that she was very, very angry.
'After all it is the little surprises that give zest to life.'"
"And you didn't have to use the automobile nut?" I asked, deeply impressed with the woman's ingenuity.
"Oh yes," said Henriette.
The Duke of Snarleyow got it and the climax was capped. mrs Innitt burst into a flood of tears and-well, to morrow, Bunny, Norah leaves.
With this Henriette retired and the next morning on her way to early church I waylaid Norah.
Her discharge was unrighteous; mrs Innitt was no lady; the butler was in a conspiracy to ruin her-and all that; indeed, her mood was most receptive to the furtherance of Henriette's plans.
"It's ruined I am unless somebody'll be good to me and give me a riference, which mrs Innitt, bad cess to her, won't do, at all, at all," she wailed, and then I left her.
She called that night, and two days later was installed in the Van Raffles's kitchen.
A new treasure was added to the stores of our loot, but somehow or other I have never been happy over the successful issue of the enterprise.
"A story that will just suit you, I think.
The hero is an Indian, and a brave one, as you will see.
With this very short preface, Aunt Elinor began to read, in her best manner, the story of
Long ago,--when hostile Indians haunted the great forests, and every settlement had its fort for the protection of the inhabitants,--in one of the towns on the Connecticut River, lived Parson Bain and his little son and daughter.
Even the friendly Indians, who sometimes came for food or powder, were regarded with suspicion by the people.
No man went to work without his gun near by.
On Sundays, when they trudged to the rude meeting house, all carried the trusty rifle on the shoulder; and while the pastor preached, a sentinel mounted guard at the door, to give warning if canoes came down the river or a dark face peered from the wood.
One autumn night, when the first heavy rains were falling and a cold wind whistled through the valley, a knock came at the minister's door, and, opening it, he found an Indian boy, ragged, hungry, and foot sore, who begged for food and shelter.
In his broken way, he told how he had fallen ill, and been left to die by enemies who had taken him from his own people, months before; how he had wandered for days till almost sinking; and that he had come now to ask for help, led by the hospitable light in the parsonage window.
"Send him away, master, or harm will come of it.
He is a spy, and we shall all be scalped by the murdering Injuns who are waiting in the wood," said old Becky, harshly; while little Eunice hid in the old servant's ample skirts, and twelve year old Reuben laid his hand on his cross bow, ready to defend his sister if need be.
But the good man drew the poor lad in, saying, with his friendly smile: "Shall not a Christian be as hospitable as a godless savage?
Come in, child, and be fed: you sorely need rest and shelter."
Leaving his face to express the gratitude he had no words to tell, the boy sat by the comfortable fire and ate like a famished wolf, while Becky muttered her forebodings and the children eyed the dark youth at a safe distance.
Something in his pinched face, wounded foot, and eyes full of dumb pain and patience, touched the little girl's tender heart, and, yielding to a pitiful impulse, she brought her own basin of new milk and, setting it beside the stranger, ran to hide behind her father, suddenly remembering that this was one of the dreaded Indians.
"That was well done, little daughter.
Thou shalt love thine enemies, and share thy bread with the needy.
See, he is smiling; that pleased him, and he wishes us to be his friends."
Reuben hid his fears better, and resolved to watch while others slept; but was off as soon as his curly head touched the pillow, and dreamed of tomahawks and war whoops till morning.
Next day, neighbors came to see the waif, and one and all advised sending him away as soon as possible, since he was doubtless a spy, as Becky said, and would bring trouble of some sort.
"When he is well, he may go whithersoever he will; but while he is too lame to walk, weak with hunger, and worn out with weariness, I will harbor him.
He cannot feign suffering and starvation like this.
I shall do my duty, and leave the consequences to the Lord," answered the parson, with such pious firmness that the neighbors said no more.
But they kept a close watch upon Onawandah, when he went among them, silent and submissive, but with the proud air of a captive prince, and sometimes a fierce flash in his black eyes when the other lads taunted him with his red skin.
The children were soon his friends, for with them he was always gentle, trying in his soft language and expressive gestures to show his good will and gratitude; for they defended him against their ruder playmates, and, following their father's example, trusted and cherished the homeless youth.
When he was able to walk, he taught the boy to shoot and trap the wild creatures of the wood, to find fish where others failed, and to guide himself in the wilderness by star and sun, wind and water.
To Eunice he brought little offerings of bark and feathers; taught her to make moccasins of skin, belts of shells, or pouches gay with porcupine quills and colored grass.
He would not work for old Becky,--who plainly showed her distrust,--saying: "A brave does not grind corn and bring wood; that is squaw's work.
Onawandah will hunt and fish and fight for you, but no more." And even the request of the parson could not win obedience in this, though the boy would have died for the good man.
"We can not tame an eagle as we can a barnyard fowl.
Let him remember only kindness of us, and so we turn a foe into a friend," said Parson Bain, stroking the sleek, dark head, that always bowed before him, with a docile reverence shown to no other living creature.
Winter came, and the settlers fared hardly through the long months, when the drifts rose to the eaves of their low cabins, and the stores, carefully harvested, failed to supply even their simple wants.
But the minister's family never lacked wild meat, for Onawandah proved himself a better hunter than any man in the town; and the boy of sixteen led the way on his snow shoes when they went to track a bear to its den, chase the deer for miles, or shoot the wolves that howled about their homes in the winter nights.
But he never joined in their games, and sat apart when the young folk made merry, as if he scorned such childish pastimes and longed to be a man in all things.
Why he stayed when he was well again, no one could tell, unless he waited for spring to make his way to his own people.
"I hope you mayn't find you've warmed a viper in your bosom, master."
In terror and confusion the whites flew to the fort; and, while the men fought bravely, the women held blankets to catch arrows and bullets, or bound up the hurts of their defenders.
It was all over by daylight, and the red men sped away up the river, with several prisoners, and such booty as they could plunder from the deserted houses.
Then it was discovered that Becky and the parson's children were gone, and great was the bewailing, for the good man was much beloved by all his flock.
"I am here, betwixt the beds.
Pull me out, neighbors, for I am half dead with fright and smothering."
The old woman was quickly extricated from her hiding place, and with much energy declared that she had seen Onawandah, disguised with war paint, among the Indians, and that he had torn away the children from her arms before she could fly from the house.
"He chose his time well, when they were defenceless, dear lambs!
Spite of all my warnings, master trusted him, and this is the thanks we get. Oh, my poor master!
How can I tell him this heavy news?"
There was no need to tell it; for, as Becky sat moaning and beating her breast on the fireless hearth, and the sympathizing neighbors stood about her, the sound of a horse's hoofs was heard, and the parson came down the hilly road like one riding for his life.
He had seen the smoke afar off, guessed the sad truth, and hurried on, to find his home in ruins, and to learn by his first glance at the faces around him that his children were gone.
When he had heard all there was to tell, he sat down upon his door stone with his head in his hands, praying for strength to bear a grief too deep for words.
Suddenly a stir went through the mournful group, as Onawandah came from the wood with a young deer upon his shoulders, and amazement in his face as he saw the desolation before him.
Dropping his burden, he stood an instant looking with eyes that kindled fiercely; then he came bounding toward them, undaunted by the hatred, suspicion, and surprise plainly written on the countenances before him.
He missed his playmates, and asked but one question:--
"The boy, the little squaw,--where gone?"
His answer was a rough one, for the men seized him and poured forth the tale, heaping reproaches upon him for such treachery and ingratitude.
He bore it all in proud silence till they pointed to the poor father, whose dumb sorrow was more eloquent than all their wrath.
Onawandah looked at him, and the fire died out of his eyes as if quenched by the tears he would not shed.
Shaking off the hands that held him, he went to his good friend, saying with passionate earnestness:--
Onawandah remembers!
Onawandah grateful! You believe?"
The poor parson looked up at him, and could not doubt his truth; for genuine love and sorrow ennobled the dark face, and he had never known the boy to lie.
"I believe and trust you still, but others will not.
Go, you are no longer safe here, and I have no home to offer you," said the parson, sadly, feeling that he cared for none, unless his children were restored to him.
"Onawandah has no fear.
He goes; but he comes again to bring the boy, the little squaw."
Few words, but they were so solemnly spoken that the most unbelieving were impressed; for the youth laid one hand on the gray head bowed before him, and lifted the other toward heaven, as if calling the Great Spirit to hear his vow.
A relenting murmur went through the crowd, but the boy paid no heed, as he turned away, and with no arms but his hunting knife and bow, no food but such as he could find, no guide but the sun by day, the stars by night, plunged into the pathless forest and was gone.
Then the people drew a long breath, and muttered to one another:--
"He will never do it, yet he is a brave lad for his years."
"Only a shift to get off with a whole skin, I warrant you.
These varlets are as cunning as foxes," added Becky, sourly.
Their captors were not cruel to them, for Reuben was a stout fellow, and, thanks to Onawandah, could hold his own with the boys who would have tormented him if he had been feeble or cowardly.
Eunice also was a hardy creature for her years, and when her first fright and fatigue were over, made herself useful in many ways among the squaws, who did not let the pretty child suffer greatly; though she was neglected, because they knew no better.
Life in a wigwam was not a life of ease, and fortunately the children were accustomed to simple habits and the hardships that all endured in those early times.
Their clothes grew ragged, their hair unkempt, their faces tanned by sun and wind.
One day, when Reuben was snaring birds in the wood,--for the Indians had no fear of such young children venturing to escape,--he heard the cry of a quail, and followed it deeper and deeper into the forest, till it ceased, and, with a sudden rustle, Onawandah rose up from the brakes, his finger on his lips to prevent any exclamation that might betray him to other ears and eyes.
"I come for you and little Laroka" (the name he gave Eunice, meaning "Wild Rose").
"I take you home.
Go and wait."
Lying hidden in the tall brakes they talked in whispers, while one told of the capture, and the other of a plan of escape; for, though a friendly tribe, these Indians were not Onawandah's people, and they must not suspect that he knew the children, else they might be separated at once.
"Little squaw betray me.
You watch her.
Tell her not to cry out, not speak me any time.
When I say come, we go-fast-in the night.
Not ready yet."
These were the orders Reuben received, and, when he could compose himself, he went back to the wigwams, leaving his friend in the wood, while he told the good news to Eunice, and prepared her for the part she must play.
Not till the next day did Onawandah make his appearance, and then he came limping into the village, weary, lame, and half starved, after his long wandering in the wilderness.
He was kindly welcomed, and his story believed; for he told only the first part, and said nothing of his life among the white men.
He hardly glanced at the children when they were pointed out to him by their captors, and scowled at poor Eunice, who forgot her part in her joy, and smiled as she met the dark eyes that till now had always looked kindly at her.
Onawandah took no further notice of them, but seemed to be very lame with the old wound in his foot, which prevented his being obliged to hunt with the men.
He was resting and slowly gathering strength for the hard task he had set himself, while he waited for a safe time to save the children.
They understood, but the suspense proved too much for little Eunice, and she pined with impatience to be gone.
She lost appetite and color, and cast such appealing glances at Onawandah, that he could not seem quite indifferent, and gave her a soft word now and then, or did such acts of kindness as he could perform unsuspected.
When she lay awake at night thinking of home, a cricket would chirp outside the wigwam, and a hand slip in a leaf full of berries, or a bark cup of fresh water for the feverish little mouth.
Sometimes it was only a caress or a whisper of encouragement, that re assured the childish heart, and sent her to sleep with a comfortable sense of love and protection, like a sheltering wing over a motherless bird.
At last, in the early autumn, all the men went off on the war path, leaving only boys and women behind.
Then Onawandah's eyes began to kindle, and Reuben's heart to beat fast, for both felt that their time for escape had come.
A cricket chirped shrilly outside the tent where the children slept with one old squaw.
Not a broken twig, a careless step, or a whispered word betrayed them, and they vanished as swiftly and silently as hunted deer flying for their lives.
Till dawn they hurried on, Onawandah carrying Eunice, whose strength soon failed, and Reuben manfully shouldering the hatchet and the pouch of food.
At sunrise they hid in a thicket by a spring and rested, while waiting for the friendly night to come again.
Then they pushed on, and fear gave wings to their feet, so that by another morning they were far enough away to venture to travel more slowly and sleep at night.
If the children had learned to love and trust the Indian boy in happier times, they adored him now, and came to regard him as an earthly Providence; so faithful, brave, and tender was he,--so forgetful of himself, so bent on saving them.
He never seemed to sleep, ate the poorest morsels, or went without any food when provision failed; let no danger daunt him, no hardship wring complaint from him, but went on through the wild forest, led by guides invisible to them, till they began to hope that home was near.
Twice he saved their lives.
Once, when he went in search of food, leaving Reuben to guard his sister, the children, being very hungry, ignorantly ate some poisonous berries which looked like wild cherries, and were deliciously sweet.
Not knowing what to do, he could only rub her hands and call wildly for Onawandah.
The name echoed through the silent wood, and, though far away, the keen ear of the Indian heard it, his fleet feet brought him back in time, and his knowledge of wild roots and herbs made it possible to save the child when no other help was at hand.
"Make fire.
Keep warm.
I soon come," he said, after hearing the story and examining Eunice, who could only lift her eyes to him, full of childish confidence and patience.
Then he was off again, scouring the woods like a hound on the scent, searching everywhere for the precious little herb that would counteract the poison.
"Eat, eat, while I make drink.
All safe now," cried Onawandah, as he came leaping toward them with his hands full of green leaves, and his dark face shining with joy.
The boy was soon relieved, but for hours they hung over the girl, who suffered sadly, till she grew unconscious and lay as if dead.
Reuben's courage failed then, and he cried bitterly, thinking how hard it would be to leave the dear little creature under the pines and go home alone to father.
Even Onawandah lost hope for a while, and sat like a bronze statue of despair, with his eyes fixed on his Wild Rose, who seemed fading away too soon.
Suddenly he rose, stretched his arms to the west, where the sun was setting splendidly, and in his own musical language prayed to the Great Spirit.
"He hears! he hears!" cried Onawandah, and for the first time Reuben saw tears in his keen eyes, as the Indian boy turned his face to the sky, full of a gratitude that no words were sweet enough to tell.
All night Eunice lay peacefully sleeping, and the moon lighted Onawandah's lonely watch, for Reuben was worn out with suspense, and slept beside his sister.
In the morning she was safe, and great was the rejoicing; but for two days the little invalid was not allowed to continue the journey, much as they longed to hurry on.
It was a pretty sight, the bed of hemlock boughs spread under a green tent of woven branches, and on the pillow of moss the pale child watching the flicker of sunshine through the leaves, listening to the babble of a brook close by, or sleeping tranquilly, lulled by the murmur of the pines.
Patient, loving, and grateful, it was a pleasure to serve her, and both the lads were faithful nurses.
Onawandah cooked birds for her to eat, and made a pleasant drink of the wild raspberry leaves to quench her thirst.
Reuben snared rabbits, that she might have nourishing food, and longed to shoot a deer for provision, that she might not suffer hunger again on their journey.
This boyish desire led him deeper into the wood than it was wise for him to go alone, for it was near nightfall, and wild creatures haunted the forest in those days.
"If I could only kill it alone, how proud Onawandah would be of me," thought Reuben, burning for the good opinion of his friend.
It would have been wiser to hurry on and give the beast no time to spring; but the boy was over bold, and, fitting an arrow to the string, aimed at the bright eye ball and let fly.
A sharp snarl showed that some harm was done, and, rather daunted by the savage sound, Reuben raced away, meaning to come back next day for the prize he hoped he had secured.
But soon he heard the creature bounding after him, and he uttered one ringing shout for help, feeling too late that he had been foolhardy. Fortunately, he was nearer camp than he thought.
Onawandah heard him, and was there in time to receive the beast, as, mad with the pain of the wound, it sprung at Reuben.
There was no time for words, and the boy could only watch in breathless interest and anxiety the fight which went on between the brute and the Indian.
It was sharp but short; for Onawandah had his knife, and as soon as he could get the snarling, struggling creature down, he killed it with a skilful stroke.
But not before it had torn and bitten him more dangerously than he knew; for the dusk hid the wounds, and excitement kept him from feeling them at first.
Onawandah made light of his scratches, as he called them, got their supper, and sent Reuben early to bed, for to morrow they were to start again.
Excited by his adventure, the boy slept lightly, and waking in the night, saw by the flicker of the fire Onawandah binding up a deep wound in his breast with wet moss and his own belt.
Next morning, they set out and pushed on as fast as Eunice's strength allowed.
But it was evident that Onawandah suffered much, though he would not rest, forbade the children to speak of his wounds, and pressed on with feverish haste, as if he feared that his strength might not hold out.
Reuben watched him anxiously, for there was a look in his face that troubled the boy and filled him with alarm, as well as with remorse and love.
Eunice would not let him carry her as before, but trudged bravely behind him, though her feet ached and her breath often failed as she tried to keep up; and both children did all they could to comfort and sustain their friend, who seemed glad to give his life for them.
He knew that it was past help now, and only cared to see the children safe; then, worn out but happy, he was proud to die, having paid his debt to the good parson, and proved that he was not a liar nor a traitor.
At last they saw the smoke from the cabins on the hillside, and, hastily mooring the canoe, all sprang out, eager to be at home after their long and perilous wandering.
But as his foot touched the land, Onawandah felt that he could do no more, and stretching his arms toward the parsonage, the windows of which glimmered as hospitably as they had done when he first saw them, he said, with a pathetic sort of triumph in his broken voice: "Go.
I cannot.
Tell the good father, Onawandah not lie, not forget.
He keep his promise."
Then he dropped upon the grass and lay as if dead, while Reuben, bidding Eunice keep watch, ran as fast as his tired legs could carry him to tell the tale and bring help.
But poor Onawandah had waited too long; now he could only look up into the dear, loving, little face bent over him, and whisper wistfully: "Wild Rose will remember Onawandah?" as the light went out of his eyes, and his last breath was a smile for her.
When the parson and his people came hurrying up full of wonder, joy, and good will, they found Eunice weeping bitterly, and the Indian boy lying like a young warrior smiling at death.
Let us imitate his virtues, and do honor to his memory," said the pastor, as he held his little daughter close and looked down at the pathetic figure at his feet, whose silence was more eloquent than any words.
All felt it, and even old Becky had a remorseful sigh for the boy who had kept his word so well and given back her darlings safe.
They buried him where he lay; and for years the lonely mound under the great oak was kept green by loving hands.
Wild roses bloomed there, and the murmur of the Long River of Pines was a fit lullaby for faithful Onawandah.
When it was the Six Hundred and Eighty fifth Night,
She continued, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that when Yunus the Scribe said to Walid, "Allah forbid I should repent over her!
Art thou content?"
"I am content," answered Yunus and kissed his hands, saying, "By Allah, thou hast filled my eyes and my hands and my heart!" Quoth Walid, "By Allah, I have as yet had no privacy of her nor have I taken my fill of her singing.
Bring her to me!" So she came and he bade her sit, then said to her, "Sing." And she sang these verses,
"O thou who dost comprise all Beauty's boons!
Then I abode with him in all content of case and rise of rank and mine affairs prospered and my wealth increased and goods and farms became mine, such as sufficed me and will suffice my heirs after me; nor did I cease to abide with Walid, till he was slain, the mercy of Almighty Allah be on him!" And men tell a tale concerning
HARUN AL RASHID AND THE ARAB GIRL.
As he drew near, one of them turned to her fellows and improvised these lines,
The Caliph marvelled at her elegance and eloquence.--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.
When it was the Six Hundred and Eighty sixth Night,
Quoth the Caliph, "This also is stolen"; and quoth she, "Nay, 'tis my very own." He said, "If it be indeed thine own, change the rhyme again and keep the sense." So she recited the following,
Quoth Al Rashid, "This too is stolen"; and quoth she, "Not, so, 'tis mine." He said, "If thy words be true change the rhyme once more." And she recited,
Furthermore, he bestowed on her father largesse such as succoured him among Arabs, till he was transported to the mercy of Almighty Allah.
The Caliph, hearing of his death, went in to her greatly troubled; and, when she saw him looking afflicted, she entered her chamber and doffing all that was upon her of rich raiment, donned mourning apparel and raised lament for her father.
The Caliph's eyes filled with tears and he condoled with her; but she ceased not to mourn for her father, till she followed him-Allah have mercy on the twain!
And a tale is also told of
The Commander of the Faithful Harun Al Rashid was exceeding restless one night and rising from his bed, paced from chamber to chamber, but could not compose himself to sleep.
I have heard great store of women's verses; but none pleased me save three sets of couplets I once heard from three girls."--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
When it was the Six Hundred and Eighty seventh Night,
However by looking right and left I came upon a porch swept and sprinkled, at the upper end whereof was a wooden bench under an open lattice window, whence exhaled a scent of musk.
Quoth the second,
Then said the youngest,
Then I gave scroll to the slave girl, who went upsatirs with it, and behold, I heard a noise of dancing and clapping of hands and Doomsday astir.
I ate of both and praised their fashion and would have ganged my gait; but she cried out, 'Sit down, O Asma'i!' Wherewith I raised my eyes to her and saw a rosy palm in a saffron sleeve, meseemed it was the full moon rising splendid in the cloudy East.
And I have heard a tale concerning
I was greatly vexed at his coming in to me and thought to turn away the doorkeepers; but he saluted me after the goodliest fashion and I returned his greeting and bade him be seated.
But Ivra did not stop to wonder.
Eric and the Wind Creatures followed.
Then came a young man in a stiff, funny hat, carrying a cane, beating up the snow flowers with it as he passed the flower beds.
And behind them walked-Helma, with her gaze on the ground.
That is why they did not know her at first, that and her very strange clothes.
She was saying, "No, never, never, never, in a thousand days and years will I ever be happy here.
Oh, how these heels bother!"
"Your place is where you were born in a fine house and wearing clothes like other people.
Did you expect them to do any thing else but bother?
Come, cheer up.
For a minute she looked steadily at them without believing, and then it was as though her pale face suddenly burst into song.
So there!"
They must keep happy and wait."
There's to be strawberry ice to day,--and goose to begin with of course.
Eric and the Wind Children sat cross legged and waited.
Soon she stopped and wiped her face on her sleeve.
And almost before the end the little story teller had fallen asleep with her head tipped back against the Tree Man's chest.
CHAPTER thirteen
NORA'S GRANDCHILDREN
One afternoon Eric and Ivra started out for the Forest Children's moss village to play with them.
But when they got there they found all the little houses deserted: not a Forest Child was to be found.
They must have gone into some other part of the forest to play.
Down in the pasture by the house half a dozen Snow Witches were dancing in a circle, now near, now far, all over the pasture, and sometimes right up to the farm house windows.
Ivra clapped her hands and bounded forward.
Eric did not follow.
He stood to watch.
For a minute she was lost in a cloud of blown snow, and then there she was dancing in their circle back and forth across the pasture, and then away, away, away!
"Come on," she called.
"We're going to slide on the brook below the cornfield."
But Eric did not follow.
He did not like the Snow Witches.
And just as Ivra and the Witches drifted out of sight, he thought he heard the Forest Children laughing.
So Eric ran to the door.
It was a big sliding door, and now stood open on a crack just large enough for a child to slip through.
Eric went in.
Ahead of him were two stalls, with a horse in one.
But Eric was most interested in the empty stall, for it was from there the laughter seemed to come.
She sat up, saw Eric and stared.
She was a little girl about his own age, freckle faced, snub nosed and red haired.
She had the jolliest, the nicest face in the world.
This was a boy.
He looked even jollier than the girl.
Before Eric had closed his mouth on his amazement, "Whoop!" and down came another boy.
This boy was red haired, freckle faced and snub nosed, and he looked jollier than the other two put together, if that were possible, for his red hair curled in saucy, tight little ringlets, and his mouth was wide with smiles.
"Eric,--who are you?"
"Nora's grandchildren, of course.
Come up.
We're having sport."
The three children ran across the barn to a ladder and scrambled up and disappeared through a trap door at the top.
Eric followed.
He found the hole in the stable ceiling and looked down.
"Look out down there!
Whoop!" cried Eric, and dropped, landing among them.
Then they played hide and go seek in the hay country, and after that Blind Man's Buff in the barn below.
By and by they played tag, just plain tag, and Eric liked that best of all.
Back and forth across the great room they raced,--up the ladder, over the hay, through the hole into the stable, round and round, in and out, up and down until they were too tired and hot for any more.
Then they lay up in the hay where there was a little window, looking far out across the meadows.
She must have heard their shouts and laughter.
He pointed her out to the other children.
"That is my playmate out there," he said.
"Let's open the window and call to her to come up.
She'll tell us stories."
"But there's nobody there," they said.
Eric laughed.
"No, look!" He pointed with his finger.
"Over there by the white birch.
Look!
She sees us." He waved.
"Quick, help me open the window."
He could not find the catch.
The window was draped with cobwebs and dusty with the dust of years.
The little red headed girl put her hand on his arm.
"There's no one by the white birch.
Of course she's there!" Eric was impatient.
Of course you see her!"
"Yes," said the jolliest of the boys.
We've seen it before too,--a kind of a shadow on the snow.
But father says it's nothing to mind.
Then Eric remembered all that Ivra had told him.
She was half fairy. People could see her if they looked hard enough.
But they were not apt to believe their own eyes when they had looked.
That was dreadful for her.
She had not said so, but he had guessed it from her face when she told him.
These were Earth Children, with shadows in their eyes.
But just now it was jolly and cozy here in the barn, and these Earth Children were good fun.
"If you do,--better not.
Grown ups will laugh at you."
"Oh, yes," said the jolliest boy.
"But she is queer.
We love her, and she's a fine grandmother, I can tell you.
And she tells the best stories.
But she's queer just the same, and she can't fool us."
"Let's go in and get some cookies from her," said the other boy.
"They must be done by now."
So up they hopped, and without another look towards the shadow out on the snow by the white birch, jumped down the hole, and ran out of the barn into the kitchen.
Nora was there knitting by a table, two big pans of cookies just out of the oven cooling in front of her.
How good they smelled!
Eric had never tasted hot ginger cookies before, and when Nora gave him one, a big round one all for his own, he almost danced with delight.
He perched on the edge of the table and ate that one and many another before he was done.
"This boy, grandma," began the red headed girl.
"His name is Eric," interrupted Nora, handing him another cookie.
"Well, he saw It while we were looking out of the barn window!
"Don't say 'It,'" said Nora.
"Her name is 'Ivra.' But of course you can't play with her.
She's a fairy.
So don't say anything about it to your father when he comes home to night.
It would make him cross."
"But it doesn't make you cross," laughed the jolliest boy.
"And so won't you tell us some stories about it now.
So Nora put down her knitting, and taking the cat on her lap, a great sleepy white fellow who had been purring by the stove, she began to tell them stories.
But Eric was lost in wonder.
And all the time Eric had only to turn his head to see Ivra walking out there around in the field, looking at the farm house, waiting for him. But gradually, as the stories went on the little figure out there grew more and more to look like just a blue shadow on the snow, paler and paler.
Finally he had to strain his eyes to see it at all.
He liked them,--oh, so much!
Yes.
"Take her some cookies," said Nora, filling his pockets.
The children laughed at the top of their voices.
"Yes, take some cookies to the fairy.
Nora laughed with them, and so after a minute Eric joined in.
He overtook her a long way in, walking rapidly.
"Why didn't you come, too?" she said
"Oh, it was too cold.
Nora's grandchildren are awfully good fun.
"Did they laugh at me?"
They thought I was a funny boy."
"To have me for a playmate?"
Then Eric began to think that Ivra was not very happy.
And it was like spring coming into winter.
"Yes, play with them all you like!
They don't think I'm real.
But they are awfully jolly.
You play with them and when you tell me about it afterwards I'll pretend I was there playing too."
THE JUNE MOON
The Forest teemed with new playmates for him and Ivra.
Hide and go seek was still the favorite game.
And that was strange, for when he first spied her he did not like her at all.
Her dress was a purple slip just to her knees, with a big rent in the skirt.
But he cried, "I spy!
You're It!" just the same.
She did not lift her eyes.
And he sprang forward as he laughed.
But she was quicker than he.
But Eric did not let his surprise delay him.
Eric sprang for her.
She dodged.
He sprang again.
He caught her by her bushy hair as she turned to fly.
Instead of Wild Thyme and the sunny field, he was looking at the sea.
No girl, even a fairy, likes to have her hair pulled.
So Wild Thyme was angry.
She pinched Eric's arm with all her strength.
"You'll play with us, won't you?" Eric asked.
Goody!
"And all come-come when the moon rises."
He had never been to a dance before, and just at first he did not think there would be much fun in it.
The dances were just whirling and skipping and jumping, each dancer by himself, but all in a circle.
Eric liked it as well as though it had been a new game.
Late that afternoon Helma and Ivra and Eric gathered ferns and flowers to deck themselves for the evening.
Helma made a girdle of brakes for herself, and a dandelion wreath for her hair.
She wove a dear little cap of star flowers for Ivra, and a chain of them for her neck.
Eric crowned himself with bloodroot and contrived grass sandals for his feet.
And she was plotting no ill.
Her face was sparkling with delight and she had utterly forgotten herself in the dance.
When the great moon hung just above them, and shadows were few and far between, the Tree Mother came walking through the Forest, quieter and more beautiful than the moon.
Wild Thyme jumped back into the dance and the Tree Mother stood alone. But although she stood as still as a moonbeam under the tree, she made Eric think of dancing more than all the others put together.
But Eric, after all, was only an Earth Child, and his legs got very tired in spite of the music and the moonlight.
So at last he slipped out of the circle, and stumbling with weariness and sleepiness went to Tree Mother.
She picked him up in her arms, and the minute his head touched her shoulder he was sound asleep, the music at last hushed in his head.
When he woke it was summer dawn.
He was alone, lying beneath a silver birch, his head among the star flowers.
A TALE OF THE RAGGED MOUNTAINS
This young gentleman was remarkable in every respect, and excited in me a profound interest and curiosity.
Of his family I could obtain no satisfactory account.
Whence he came, I never ascertained. Even about his age-although I call him a young gentleman-there was something which perplexed me in no little degree.
He certainly seemed young-and he made a point of speaking about his youth-yet there were moments when I should have had little trouble in imagining him a hundred years of age.
But in no regard was he more peculiar than in his personal appearance.
He was singularly tall and thin.
He stooped much.
His forehead was broad and low.
His complexion was absolutely bloodless.
It was one of profound melancholy-of a phaseless and unceasing gloom.
I soon, however, grew accustomed to it, and my uneasiness wore off.
It seemed to be his design rather to insinuate than directly to assert that, physically, he had not always been what he was-that a long series of neuralgic attacks had reduced him from a condition of more than usual personal beauty, to that which I saw.
For many years past he had been attended by a physician, named Templeton-an old gentleman, perhaps seventy years of age-whom he had first encountered at Saratoga, and from whose attention, while there, he either received, or fancied that he received, great benefit.
The result was that Bedloe, who was wealthy, had made an arrangement with dr Templeton, by which the latter, in consideration of a liberal annual allowance, had consented to devote his time and medical experience exclusively to the care of the invalid.
Doctor Templeton had been a traveller in his younger days, and at Paris had become a convert, in great measure, to the doctrines of Mesmer.
The Doctor, however, like all enthusiasts, had struggled hard to make a thorough convert of his pupil, and finally so far gained his point as to induce the sufferer to submit to numerous experiments.
By a frequent repetition of these, a result had arisen, which of late days has become so common as to attract little or no attention, but which, at the period of which I write, had very rarely been known in America.
I mean to say, that between Doctor Templeton and Bedloe there had grown up, little by little, a very distinct and strongly marked rapport, or magnetic relation.
I am not prepared to assert, however, that this rapport extended beyond the limits of the simple sleep producing power, but this power itself had attained great intensity.
At the first attempt to induce the magnetic somnolency, the mesmerist entirely failed.
In the fifth or sixth he succeeded very partially, and after long continued effort.
Only at the twelfth was the triumph complete.
After this the will of the patient succumbed rapidly to that of the physician, so that, when I first became acquainted with the two, sleep was brought about almost instantaneously by the mere volition of the operator, even when the invalid was unaware of his presence.
It is only now, in the year eighteen forty five, when similar miracles are witnessed daily by thousands, that I dare venture to record this apparent impossibility as a matter of serious fact.
The temperature of Bedloe was, in the highest degree sensitive, excitable, enthusiastic.
Upon a dim, warm, misty day, toward the close of November, and during the strange interregnum of the seasons which in America is termed the Indian Summer, mr Bedloe departed as usual for the hills.
The day passed, and still he did not return.
About eight o'clock at night, having become seriously alarmed at his protracted absence, we were about setting out in search of him, when he unexpectedly made his appearance, in health no worse than usual, and in rather more than ordinary spirits.
The account which he gave of his expedition, and of the events which had detained him, was a singular one indeed.
I bent my steps immediately to the mountains, and, about ten, entered a gorge which was entirely new to me.
The scenery which presented itself on all sides, although scarcely entitled to be called grand, had about it an indescribable and to me a delicious aspect of dreary desolation.
The solitude seemed absolutely virgin.
"The thick and peculiar mist, or smoke, which distinguishes the Indian Summer, and which now hung heavily over all objects, served, no doubt, to deepen the vague impressions which these objects created.
So dense was this pleasant fog that I could at no time see more than a dozen yards of the path before me.
This path was excessively sinuous, and as the sun could not be seen, I soon lost all idea of the direction in which I journeyed.
And now an indescribable uneasiness possessed me-a species of nervous hesitation and tremor.
I remembered, too, strange stories told about these Ragged Hills, and of the uncouth and fierce races of men who tenanted their groves and caverns.
"My amazement was, of course, extreme.
A drum in these hills was a thing unknown.
I could not have been more surprised at the sound of the trump of the Archangel.
He came so close to my person that I felt his hot breath upon my face.
Scarcely had he disappeared in the mist before, panting after him, with open mouth and glaring eyes, there darted a huge beast.
I could not be mistaken in its character.
It was a hyena.
"The sight of this monster rather relieved than heightened my terrors-for I now made sure that I dreamed, and endeavored to arouse myself to waking consciousness.
I stepped boldly and briskly forward. I rubbed my eyes.
I called aloud.
This seemed to dissipate the equivocal sensations which had hitherto annoyed me.
At this shadow I gazed wonderingly for many minutes.
Its character stupefied me with astonishment.
I looked upward.
The tree was a palm.
The heat became all at once intolerable.
A strange odor loaded the breeze.
A low, continuous murmur, like that arising from a full, but gently flowing river, came to my ears, intermingled with the peculiar hum of multitudinous human voices.
The streets seemed innumerable, and crossed each other irregularly in all directions, but were rather long winding alleys than streets, and absolutely swarmed with inhabitants.
From the swarming streets to the banks of the river, there descended innumerable flights of steps leading to bathing places, while the river itself seemed to force a passage with difficulty through the vast fleets of deeply-burthened ships that far and wide encountered its surface.
"You will say now, of course, that I dreamed; but not so.
All was rigorously self consistent.
At first, doubting that I was really awake, I entered into a series of tests, which soon convinced me that I really was. Now, when one dreams, and, in the dream, suspects that he dreams, the suspicion never fails to confirm itself, and the sleeper is almost immediately aroused.
Against the crowd which environed me, however, I experienced a deep sentiment of animosity.
I shrank from amid them, and, swiftly, by a circuitous path, reached and entered the city. Here all was the wildest tumult and contention.
I joined the weaker party, arming myself with the weapons of a fallen officer, and fighting I knew not whom with the nervous ferocity of despair.
Here we barricaded ourselves, and, for the present were secure.
"And now a new object took possession of my soul.
They retreated, at first, before us.
They rallied, fought madly, and retreated again.
The rabble pressed impetuously upon us, harrassing us with their spears, and overwhelming us with flights of arrows.
One of them struck me upon the right temple.
I reeled and fell.
An instantaneous and dreadful sickness seized me.
I struggled-I gasped-I died." "You will hardly persist now," said I smiling, "that the whole of your adventure was not a dream.
I looked toward Templeton.
He sat erect and rigid in his chair-his teeth chattered, and his eyes were starting from their sockets.
"For many minutes," continued the latter, "my sole sentiment-my sole feeling-was that of darkness and nonentity, with the consciousness of death.
At length there seemed to pass a violent and sudden shock through my soul, as if of electricity.
This latter I felt-not saw.
In an instant I seemed to rise from the ground.
The tumult had ceased.
The city was in comparative repose.
Beneath me lay my corpse, with the arrow in my temple, the whole head greatly swollen and disfigured.
But all these things I felt-not saw.
I took interest in nothing.
Even the corpse seemed a matter in which I had no concern.
Volition I had none, but appeared to be impelled into motion, and flitted buoyantly out of the city, retracing the circuitous path by which I had entered it.
I became my original self, and bent my steps eagerly homeward-but the past had not lost the vividness of the real-and not now, even for an instant, can I compel my understanding to regard it as a dream."
Let us content ourselves with this supposition.
For the rest I have some explanation to make.
We looked at the picture which he presented.
I saw nothing in it of an extraordinary character, but its effect upon Bedloe was prodigious.
He nearly fainted as he gazed.
And yet it was but a miniature portrait-a miraculously accurate one, to be sure-of his own very remarkable features.
At least this was my thought as I regarded it.
I was then only twenty years old.
"In your detail of the vision which presented itself to you amid the hills, you have described, with the minutest accuracy, the Indian city of Benares, upon the Holy River.
The party in the kiosk were sepoys and British officers, headed by Hastings.
That officer was my dearest friend.
"We have the painful duty of announcing the death of mr Augustus Bedlo, a gentleman whose amiable manners and many virtues have long endeared him to the citizens of Charlottesville.
The proximate cause was one of especial singularity.
To relieve this, dr Templeton resorted to topical bleeding.
Leeches were applied to the temples.
This creature fastened itself upon a small artery in the right temple.
Its close resemblance to the medicinal leech caused the mistake to be overlooked until too late.
The poisonous sangsue of Charlottesville may always be distinguished from the medicinal leech by its blackness, and especially by its writhing or vermicular motions, which very nearly resemble those of a snake."
I was speaking with the editor of the paper in question, upon the topic of this remarkable accident, when it occurred to me to ask how it happened that the name of the deceased had been given as Bedlo.
"I presume," I said, "you have authority for this spelling, but I have always supposed the name to be written with an e at the end."
"Authority?--no," he replied.
The name is Bedlo with an e, all the world over, and I never knew it to be spelt otherwise in my life."
"Then," said I mutteringly, as I turned upon my heel, "then indeed has it come to pass that one truth is stranger than any fiction-for Bedloe, without the e, what is it but Oldeb conversed!
And this man tells me that it is a typographical error."
CHAPTER ten
SHORTLY afterward an incident occurred which I am induced to look upon as more intensely productive of emotion, as far more replete with the extremes first of delight and then of horror, than even any of the thousand chances which afterward befell me in nine long years, crowded with events of the most startling and, in many cases, of the most unconceived and unconceivable character.
I turned my head, and shall never forget the ecstatic joy which thrilled through every particle of my frame, when I perceived a large brig bearing down upon us, and not more than a couple of miles off.
Peters and Parker were equally affected, although in different ways.
The former danced about the deck like a madman, uttering the most extravagant rhodomontades, intermingled with howls and imprecations, while the latter burst into tears, and continued for many minutes weeping like a child.
The vessel in sight was a large hermaphrodite brig, of a Dutch build, and painted black, with a tawdry gilt figure head.
When we first saw her, she was, as I have already said, about two miles off and to windward, bearing down upon us.
The breeze was very gentle, and what astonished us chiefly was, that she had no other sails set than her foremast and mainsail, with a flying jib-of course she came down but slowly, and our impatience amounted nearly to phrensy.
The awkward manner in which she steered, too, was remarked by all of us, even excited as we were.
She yawed about so considerably, that once or twice we thought it impossible she could see us, or imagined that, having seen us, and discovered no person on board, she was about to tack and make off in another direction.
No person was seen upon her decks until she arrived within about a quarter of a mile of us.
He seemed by his manner to be encouraging us to have patience, nodding to us in a cheerful although rather odd way, and smiling constantly, so as to display a set of the most brilliantly white teeth.
As his vessel drew nearer, we saw a red flannel cap which he had on fall from his head into the water; but of this he took little or no notice, continuing his odd smiles and gesticulations.
The brig came on slowly, and now more steadily than before, and-I cannot speak calmly of this event-our hearts leaped up wildly within us, and we poured out our whole souls in shouts and thanksgiving to God for the complete, unexpected, and glorious deliverance that was so palpably at hand.
Of a sudden, and all at once, there came wafted over the ocean from the strange vessel (which was now close upon us) a smell, a stench, such as the whole world has no name for-no conception of-hellish-utterly suffocating-insufferable, inconceivable.
But we had now no time left for question or surmise-the brig was within fifty feet of us, and it seemed to be her intention to run under our counter, that we might board her without putting out a boat.
Shall I ever forget the triple horror of that spectacle? Twenty five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction.
As our first loud yell of terror broke forth, it was replied to by something, from near the bowsprit of the stranger, so closely resembling the scream of a human voice that the nicest ear might have been startled and deceived.
At this instant another sudden yaw brought the region of the forecastle for a moment into view, and we beheld at once the origin of the sound.
We saw the tall stout figure still leaning on the bulwark, and still nodding his head to and fro, but his face was now turned from us so that we could not behold it.
His arms were extended over the rail, and the palms of his hands fell outward.
His knees were lodged upon a stout rope, tightly stretched, and reaching from the heel of the bowsprit to a cathead.
I sprang forward quickly, and, with a deep shudder, threw the frightful thing into the sea.
The body from which it had been taken, resting as it did upon the rope, had been easily swayed to and fro by the exertions of the carnivorous bird, and it was this motion which had at first impressed us with the belief of its being alive.
As the gull relieved it of its weight, it swung round and fell partially over, so that the face was fully discovered.
The eyes were gone, and the whole flesh around the mouth, leaving the teeth utterly naked.
This, then, was the smile which had cheered us on to hope!
this the-but I forbear.
The brig, as I have already told, passed under our stern, and made its way slowly but steadily to leeward.
With her and with her terrible crew went all our gay visions of deliverance and joy.
Deliberately as she went by, we might possibly have found means of boarding her, had not our sudden disappointment and the appalling nature of the discovery which accompanied it laid entirely prostrate every active faculty of mind and body.
We had seen and felt, but we could neither think nor act, until, alas! too late.
How much our intellects had been weakened by this incident may be estimated by the fact, that when the vessel had proceeded so far that we could perceive no more than the half of her hull, the proposition was seriously entertained of attempting to overtake her by swimming!
I have, since this period, vainly endeavoured to obtain some clew to the hideous uncertainty which enveloped the fate of the stranger.
Her build and general appearance, as I have before stated, led us to the belief that she was a Dutch trader, and the dresses of the crew also sustained this opinion.
We might have easily seen the name upon her stern, and, indeed, taken other observations, which would have guided us in making out her character; but the intense excitement of the moment blinded us to every thing of that nature.
If such were the case (and I know not what else to imagine), death, to judge from the positions of the bodies, must have come upon them in a manner awfully sudden and overwhelming, in a way totally distinct from that which generally characterizes even the most deadly pestilences with which mankind are acquainted.
CHAPTER eleven
WE spent the remainder of the day in a condition of stupid lethargy, gazing after the retreating vessel until the darkness, hiding her from our sight, recalled us in some measure to our senses.
The pangs of hunger and thirst then returned, absorbing all other cares and considerations.
Nothing, however, could be done until the morning, and, securing ourselves as well as possible, we endeavoured to snatch a little repose.
In this I succeeded beyond my expectations, sleeping until my companions, who had not been so fortunate, aroused me at daybreak to renew our attempts at getting up provisions from the hull.
It was now a dead calm, with the sea as smooth as have ever known it,--the weather warm and pleasant.
The brig was out of sight.
He succeeded very quickly in reaching the door, when, loosening one of the chains from his ankle, he made every exertion to force the passage with it, but in vain, the framework of the room being far stronger than was anticipated.
He was quite exhausted with his long stay under water, and it became absolutely necessary that some other one of us should take his place.
The condition of Augustus's wounded arm rendered it useless for him to attempt going down, as he would be unable to force the room open should he reach it, and it accordingly now devolved upon me to exert myself for our common deliverance.
In groping along the floor of the passage for this, I felt a hard substance, which I immediately grasped, not having time to ascertain what it was, but returning and ascending instantly to the surface.
Giving thanks to God for this timely and cheering assistance, we immediately drew the cork with my penknife, and, each taking a moderate sup, felt the most indescribable comfort from the warmth, strength, and spirits with which it inspired us.
We then carefully recorked the bottle, and, by means of a handkerchief, swung it in such a manner that there was no possibility of its getting broken.
Having rested a while after this fortunate discovery, I again descended, and now recovered the chain, with which I instantly came up.
I therefore returned in despair.
There seemed now to be no longer any room for hope, and I could perceive in the countenances of my companions that they had made up their minds to perish.
They talked incoherently, and about matters unconnected with our condition, Peters repeatedly asking me questions about Nantucket.
Augustus, too, I remember, approached me with a serious air, and requested me to lend him a pocket comb, as his hair was full of fish scales, and he wished to get them out before going on shore.
Parker appeared somewhat less affected, and urged me to dive at random into the cabin, and bring up any article which might come to hand.
To this I consented, and, in the first attempt, after staying under a full minute, brought up a small leather trunk belonging to Captain Barnard.
This was immediately opened in the faint hope that it might contain something to eat or drink.
We found nothing, however, except a box of razors and two linen shirts.
I now went down again, and returned without any success.
As my head came above water I heard a crash on deck, and, upon getting up, saw that my companions had ungratefully taken advantage of my absence to drink the remainder of the wine, having let the bottle fall in the endeavour to replace it before I saw them.
I remonstrated with them on the heartlessness of their conduct, when Augustus burst into tears.
The other two endeavoured to laugh the matter off as a joke, but I hope never again to behold laughter of such a species: the distortion of countenance was absolutely frightful.
Indeed, it was apparent that the stimulus, in the empty state of their stomachs, had taken instant and violent effect, and that they were all exceedingly intoxicated.
With great difficulty I prevailed upon them to lie down, when they fell very soon into a heavy slumber, accompanied with loud stertorous breathing.
No prospect offered itself to my view but a lingering death by famine, or, at the best, by being overwhelmed in the first gale which should spring up, for in our present exhausted condition we could have no hope of living through another.
The gnawing hunger which I now experienced was nearly insupportable, and I felt myself capable of going to any lengths in order to appease it.
With my knife I cut off a small portion of the leather trunk, and endeavoured to eat it, but found it utterly impossible to swallow a single morsel, although I fancied that some little alleviation of my suffering was obtained by chewing small pieces of it and spitting them out.
Their conduct, however, gave me great uneasiness and alarm; for it was evident that, unless some favourable change took place, they could afford me no assistance in providing for our common safety.
I had not yet abandoned all idea being able to get up something from below; but the attempt could not possibly be resumed until some one of them was sufficiently master of himself to aid me by holding the end of the rope while I went down.
Parker appeared to be somewhat more in possession of his senses than the others, and I endeavoured, by every means in my power, to rouse him.
I had good reason to congratulate myself upon having made this experiment; for he appeared much revived and invigorated, and, upon getting out, asked me, in a rational manner, why I had so served him.
Having explained my object, he expressed himself indebted to me, and said that he felt greatly better from the immersion, afterward conversing sensibly upon our situation.
We then resolved to treat Augustus and Peters in the same way, which we immediately did, when they both experienced much benefit from the shock.
Finding that I could now trust my companions to hold the end of the rope, I again made three or four plunges into the cabin, although it was now quite dark, and a gentle but long swell from the northward rendered the hulk somewhat unsteady.
In the course of these attempts I succeeded in bringing up two case knives, a three gallon jug, empty, and a blanket, but nothing which could serve us for food.
I continued my efforts, after getting these articles, until I was completely exhausted, but brought up nothing else.
During the night Parker and Peters occupied themselves by turns in the same manner; but nothing coming to hand, we now gave up this attempt in despair, concluding that we were exhausting ourselves in vain.
We passed the remainder of this night in a state of the most intense mental and bodily anguish that can possibly be imagined.
The morning of the sixteenth at length dawned, and we looked eagerly around the horizon for relief, but to no purpose.
Had I met them on shore in their present condition I should not have had the slightest suspicion that I had ever beheld them.
Parker, although sadly reduced, and so feeble that he could not raise his head from his bosom, was not so far gone as the other two.
He suffered with great patience, making no complaint, and endeavouring to inspire us with hope in every manner he could devise.
Peters and Augustus took little notice of what he said, being apparently wrapped up in moody contemplation.
Upon looking in the direction pointed out, I could not perceive the faintest appearance of the shore-indeed, I was too well aware that we were far from any land to indulge in a hope of that nature.
It was a long time, nevertheless, before I could convince Parker of his mistake.
He then burst into a flood of tears, weeping like a child, with loud cries and sobs, for two or three hours, when becoming exhausted, he fell asleep.
Peters and Augustus now made several ineffectual efforts to swallow portions of the leather.
I advised them to chew it and spit it out; but they were too excessively debilitated to be able to follow my advice.
She appeared to be a large ship, and was coming nearly athwart us, being probably twelve or fifteen miles distant.
None of my companions had as yet discovered her, and I forbore to tell them of her for the present, lest we might again be disappointed of relief.
At length upon her getting nearer, I saw distinctly that she was heading immediately for us, with her light sails filled.
I could now contain myself no longer, and pointed her out to my fellow sufferers. They immediately sprang to their feet, again indulging in the most extravagant demonstrations of joy, weeping, laughing in an idiotic manner, jumping, stamping upon the deck, tearing their hair, and praying and cursing by turns.
It was some time before I could induce my poor companions to believe that this sad reverse in our prospects had actually taken place.
They replied to all my assertions with a stare and a gesture implying that they were not to be deceived by such misrepresentations.
The conduct of Augustus most sensibly affected me.
In spite of all I could say or do to the contrary, he persisted in saying that the ship was rapidly nearing us, and in making preparations to go on board of her.
Some seaweed floating by the brig, he maintained that it was the ship's boat, and endeavoured to throw himself upon it, howling and shrieking in the most heartrending manner, when I forcibly restrained him from thus casting himself into the sea.
As soon as she was entirely gone, Parker turned suddenly toward me with an expression of countenance which made me shudder.
There was about him an air of self possession which I had not noticed in him until now, and before he opened his lips my heart told me what he would say.
He proposed, in a few words, that one of us should die to preserve the existence of the others.
CHAPTER eight
She was leaving it in Brett Street, of course.
What if Mr Verloc suddenly took it into his head to tell Stevie to take his blessed sticks somewhere out of that?
They went out at the shop door.
This last peculiarity caused some embarrassment.
She really couldn't trust herself.
The passionate expostulations of the big faced cabman seemed to be squeezed out of a blocked throat.
The policeman's testimony settled it.
Stevie climbed on the box.
"Don't whip."
They remained closed.
"You mustn't," stammered out Stevie violently.
Is that boy hurt?"
"Stevie!
"no
no Walk.
Must walk."
"The idea!
What next!
He won't be happy at all."
And I don't think you'll be. That I don't.
"My dear," screamed the old woman earnestly above the noise, "you've been the best of daughters to me.
As to Mr Verloc-there-"
It was a complexion, that under the influence of a blush would take on an orange tint.
"Mind!
Not think of it!
They agreed as to that.
It was too difficult!
"Here you are!"
The little stiff tail seemed to have been fitted in for a heartless joke; and at the other end the thin, flat neck, like a plank covered with old horse hide, drooped to the ground under the weight of an enormous bony head.
"You may well look!
Looking for fares.
Drunks."
"Bad!
Bad!"
He pouted in a scared way like a child. The cabman, short and broad, eyed him with his fierce little eyes that seemed to smart in a clear and corroding liquid.
"Poor!
"Poor!
He knew it from experience.
Mrs Verloc, his only sister, guardian, and protector, could not pretend to such depths of insight.
He hung back to utter it at once.
"Bad world for poor people."
Somebody, he felt, ought to be punished for it-punished with great severity.
"Beastly!" he added concisely.
It was clear to Mrs Verloc that he was greatly excited.
"Do come along.
He had liked all police constables tenderly, with a guileless trustfulness.
He was impressed and startled now, and his intelligence was very alert.
"Certainly not.
Stop that green 'bus."
Yet so it was.
Mr Verloc was sorry.
They had stood by each other.
I'm sure she couldn't have thought you had enough of her.
And why?
He renewed his stock from Paris and Brussels.
I Go to Bristol
Sitting by the fire in the housekeeper's room, I approached that island in my fancy from every possible direction; I explored every acre of its surface; I climbed a thousand times to that tall hill they call the Spy glass, and from the top enjoyed the most wonderful and changing prospects.
Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought, sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us, but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.
Dear Livesey-As I do not know whether you are at the hall or still in London, I send this in double to both places.
The ship is bought and fitted.
She lies at anchor, ready for sea.
You never imagined a sweeter schooner-a child might sail her-two hundred tons; name, HISPANIOLA.
I got her through my old friend, Blandly, who has proved himself throughout the most surprising trump.
"Redruth," said I, interrupting the letter, "dr Livesey will not like that.
The squire has been talking, after all."
"Well, who's a better right?" growled the gamekeeper.
"A pretty rum go if squire ain't to talk for dr Livesey, I should think."
At that I gave up all attempts at commentary and read straight on:
Blandly himself found the HISPANIOLA, and by the most admirable management got her for the merest trifle.
There is a class of men in Bristol monstrously prejudiced against Blandly.
They go the length of declaring that this honest creature would do anything for money, that the HISPANIOLA belonged to him, and that he sold it me absurdly high-the most transparent calumnies.
None of them dare, however, to deny the merits of the ship.
The workpeople, to be sure-riggers and what not-were most annoyingly slow; but time cured that.
It was the crew that troubled me.
I was standing on the dock, when, by the merest accident, I fell in talk with him.
I found he was an old sailor, kept a public house, knew all the seafaring men in Bristol, had lost his health ashore, and wanted a good berth as cook to get to sea again.
Long john Silver, he is called, and has lost a leg; but that I regarded as a recommendation, since he lost it in his country's service, under the immortal Hawke.
He has no pension, Livesey.
Well, sir, I thought I had only found a cook, but it was a crew I had discovered.
Between Silver and myself we got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable-not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit.
I declare we could fight a frigate.
He showed me in a moment that they were just the sort of fresh water swabs we had to fear in an adventure of importance.
I am in the most magnificent health and spirits, eating like a bull, sleeping like a tree, yet I shall not enjoy a moment till I hear my old tarpaulins tramping round the capstan.
Seaward, ho!
Hang the treasure!
So now, Livesey, come post; do not lose an hour, if you respect me.
Let young Hawkins go at once to see his mother, with Redruth for a guard; and then both come full speed to Bristol. john Trelawney
Postscript-I did not tell you that Blandly, who, by the way, is to send a consort after us if we don't turn up by the end of August, had found an admirable fellow for sailing master-a stiff man, which I regret, but in all other respects a treasure.
Long john Silver unearthed a very competent man for a mate, a man named Arrow.
I have a boatswain who pipes, Livesey; so things shall go man o'-war fashion on board the good ship HISPANIOLA.
I forgot to tell you that Silver is a man of substance; I know of my own knowledge that he has a banker's account, which has never been overdrawn.
He leaves his wife to manage the inn; and as she is a woman of colour, a pair of old bachelors like you and I may be excused for guessing that it is the wife, quite as much as the health, that sends him back to roving. j t
p p s--Hawkins may stay one night with his mother. j t
You can fancy the excitement into which that letter put me.
I was half beside myself with glee; and if ever I despised a man, it was old Tom Redruth, who could do nothing but grumble and lament.
Any of the under gamekeepers would gladly have changed places with him; but such was not the squire's pleasure, and the squire's pleasure was like law among them all.
Nobody but old Redruth would have dared so much as even to grumble.
The next morning he and I set out on foot for the Admiral Benbow, and there I found my mother in good health and spirits.
The captain, who had so long been a cause of so much discomfort, was gone where the wicked cease from troubling.
The squire had had everything repaired, and the public rooms and the sign repainted, and had added some furniture-above all a beautiful armchair for mother in the bar.
He had found her a boy as an apprentice also so that she should not want help while I was gone.
It was on seeing that boy that I understood, for the first time, my situation.
I am afraid I led that boy a dog's life, for as he was new to the work, I had a hundred opportunities of setting him right and putting him down, and I was not slow to profit by them.
The night passed, and the next day, after dinner, Redruth and I were afoot again and on the road.
One of my last thoughts was of the captain, who had so often strode along the beach with his cocked hat, his sabre cut cheek, and his old brass telescope. Next moment we had turned the corner and my home was out of sight.
The mail picked us up about dusk at the Royal George on the heath.
"Bristol," said Tom.
"Get down."
mr Trelawney had taken up his residence at an inn far down the docks to superintend the work upon the schooner.
Thither we had now to walk, and our way, to my great delight, lay along the quays and beside the great multitude of ships of all sizes and rigs and nations.
In one, sailors were singing at their work, in another there were men aloft, high over my head, hanging to threads that seemed no thicker than a spider's. Though I had lived by the shore all my life, I seemed never to have been near the sea till then.
And I was going to sea myself, to sea in a schooner, with a piping boatswain and pig tailed singing seamen, to sea, bound for an unknown island, and to seek for buried treasure!
While I was still in this delightful dream, we came suddenly in front of a large inn and met Squire Trelawney, all dressed out like a sea officer, in stout blue cloth, coming out of the door with a smile on his face and a capital imitation of a sailor's walk.
"Here you are," he cried, "and the doctor came last night from London. Bravo!
The ship's company complete!"
"Oh, sir," cried I, "when do we sail?"
"Sail!" says he.
eight
At the Sign of the Spy glass
WHEN I had done breakfasting the squire gave me a note addressed to john Silver, at the sign of the Spy glass, and told me I should easily find the place by following the line of the docks and keeping a bright lookout for a little tavern with a large brass telescope for sign.
I set off, overjoyed at this opportunity to see some more of the ships and seamen, and picked my way among a great crowd of people and carts and bales, for the dock was now at its busiest, until I found the tavern in question.
The sign was newly painted; the windows had neat red curtains; the floor was cleanly sanded.
There was a street on each side and an open door on both, which made the large, low room pretty clear to see in, in spite of clouds of tobacco smoke.
The customers were mostly seafaring men, and they talked so loudly that I hung at the door, almost afraid to enter.
As I was waiting, a man came out of a side room, and at a glance I was sure he must be Long john.
His left leg was cut off close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird.
Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits, whistling as he moved about among the tables, with a merry word or a slap on the shoulder for the more favoured of his guests.
Now, to tell you the truth, from the very first mention of Long john in Squire Trelawney's letter I had taken a fear in my mind that he might prove to be the very one legged sailor whom I had watched for so long at the old Benbow.
But one look at the man before me was enough.
I had seen the captain, and Black Dog, and the blind man, Pew, and I thought I knew what a buccaneer was like-a very different creature, according to me, from this clean and pleasant tempered landlord.
I plucked up courage at once, crossed the threshold, and walked right up to the man where he stood, propped on his crutch, talking to a customer.
"mr Silver, sir?" I asked, holding out the note.
And who may you be?" And then as he saw the squire's letter, he seemed to me to give something almost like a start.
"I see.
You are our new cabin boy; pleased I am to see you."
Just then one of the customers at the far side rose suddenly and made for the door.
It was close by him, and he was out in the street in a moment.
But his hurry had attracted my notice, and I recognized him at glance.
It was the tallow faced man, wanting two fingers, who had come first to the Admiral Benbow.
"Oh," I cried, "stop him!
It's Black Dog!"
"I don't care two coppers who he is," cried Silver.
"But he hasn't paid his score.
Harry, run and catch him."
One of the others who was nearest the door leaped up and started in pursuit.
"If he were Admiral Hawke he shall pay his score," cried Silver; and then, relinquishing my hand, "Who did you say he was?" he asked.
"Black what?"
"Dog, sir," said i "Has mr Trelawney not told you of the buccaneers? He was one of them."
"So?" cried Silver.
"In my house!
Ben, run and help Harry.
One of those swabs, was he?
Step up here."
"Now, Morgan," said Long john very sternly, "you never clapped your eyes on that Black-Black Dog before, did you, now?"
"Not I, sir," said Morgan with a salute.
"No, sir."
"If you had been mixed up with the like of that, you would never have put another foot in my house, you may lay to that.
And what was he saying to you?"
"Don't rightly know, don't you!
Perhaps you don't happen to rightly know who you was speaking to, perhaps?
Pipe up!
What was it?"
"We was a talkin' of keel hauling," answered Morgan.
And a mighty suitable thing, too, and you may lay to that.
Get back to your place for a lubber, Tom."
And now," he ran on again, aloud, "let's see-Black Dog?
No, I don't know the name, not i Yet I kind of think I've-yes, I've seen the swab.
"That he did, you may be sure," said i "I knew that blind man too.
His name was Pew."
Ah, he looked a shark, he did!
If we run down this Black Dog, now, there'll be news for Cap'n Trelawney!
He should run him down, hand over hand, by the powers!
He talked o' keel hauling, did he?
I'LL keel haul him!"
All the time he was jerking out these phrases he was stumping up and down the tavern on his crutch, slapping tables with his hand, and giving such a show of excitement as would have convinced an Old Bailey judge or a Bow Street runner.
My suspicions had been thoroughly reawakened on finding Black Dog at the Spy glass, and I watched the cook narrowly.
There's Cap'n Trelawney-what's he to think? Here I have this confounded son of a Dutchman sitting in my own house drinking of my own rum!
Here you comes and tells me of it plain; and here I let him give us all the slip before my blessed deadlights!
I see that when you first come in.
Now, here it is: What could I do, with this old timber I hobble on?
When I was an A B master mariner I'd have come up alongside of him, hand over hand, and broached him to in a brace of old shakes, I would; but now-"
And then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and his jaw dropped as though he had remembered something.
And falling on a bench, he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. I could not help joining, and we laughed together, peal after peal, until the tavern rang again.
"Why, what a precious old sea calf I am!" he said at last, wiping his cheeks.
"You and me should get on well, Hawkins, for I'll take my davy I should be rated ship's boy.
But come now, stand by to go about.
This won't do.
I'll put on my old cockerel hat, and step along of you to Cap'n Trelawney, and report this here affair. For mind you, it's serious, young Hawkins; and neither you nor me's come out of it with what I should make so bold as to call credit.
Nor you neither, says you; not smart-none of the pair of us smart.
But dash my buttons!
I began to see that here was one of the best of possible shipmates.
Long john told the story from first to last, with a great deal of spirit and the most perfect truth.
The two gentlemen regretted that Black Dog had got away, but we all agreed there was nothing to be done, and after he had been complimented, Long john took up his crutch and departed.
"All hands aboard by four this afternoon," shouted the squire after him.
"Aye, aye, sir," cried the cook, in the passage.
"The man's a perfect trump," declared the squire.
"And now," added the doctor, "Jim may come on board with us, may he not?"
"Take your hat, Hawkins, and we'll see the ship."
CHAPTER eighteen
Working on the soil that is at once their livelihood and their home, they do not consciously reckon the value of the labor they are putting upon it.
No money can buy that which to them is beyond price.
But, in our money economy, efforts are largely directed toward the increase of the capital sum.
Investment takes the form of putting in a sum of money in the hope of getting an income bearing a certain relation to it.
The first thought is of the value of the wealth invested, which has been carefully measured and expressed in dollars and cents.
Wealth looked at in the older way was valued for what it did immediately for its owner, for its concrete fruits; looked at in the modern way, it is valued as a marketable income bearer readily convertible into a multitude of other forms.
Thus investments come to be thought of in terms of general purchasing power, from which it is expected to realize an income of a given percentage.
two.
But they are undiminished only in a relative sense and in reference to present need.
The water in the Western rivers long flowed on, undiminished by the uses made of it.
But progressing civilization required more water for cities, for mining, and for irrigation, and now states and corporations are going to law over these formerly undiminished free goods.
Some kinds of goods are produced from such very common materials that it might seem possible, by the substitution of agents, to produce an unlimited supply.
How can bricks be limited in number, being made as they are from one of the commonest materials on the earth's surface?
But the largest clay banks are limited in size; a large proportion of the places where bricks are needed are not near a supply of clay of good quality; and after a brick yard has been used for a time there is increasing difficulty in getting out the material.
While, therefore, bricks are scarce and hard to get from the outset in some places, the scarcity grows more marked in many places at first well supplied.
This is true of clay, stone, water, and the commonest kinds of labor.
Progress, population, prosperity, are not primarily conditioned on their amount; limitation will be felt far earlier elsewhere.
three.
In the attempt to get some food products in greater quantity from a given area at a given time, increasing difficulty is met with at once.
Some replenishing agents will restore themselves if given time; the forest will grow up if left untouched by man; the field will recover its fertile quality if allowed to lie fallow.
But this self replenishing of agents is a slow process, and time is costly.
Man therefore tries in other ways to force more uses out of goods, until checked by the increasing difficulty.
But it can now be seen that the law may apply ultimately, though in differing degrees, to every kind of economic goods.
Indeed, the principle just discussed is no more than one phase of the law of economic diminishing returns, which has a universal application to the realm of values.
four.
The second part of the opening proposition expresses the view here held: the supply of no important class of goods is absolutely fixed, in any reasonable sense.
Most, if not all, belong to the class that is increasable, although it may be with much difficulty. Even when the exact thing cannot be duplicated, as a bust by an ancient sculptor or an autograph of a dead author, many substitutes serving the same or closely related wants, affect and limit the demand, and thus increase the supply.
one.
The word supply means the amount that is available at the moment or during the period spoken of. The land in Greenland is not, and probably never can be, a part of the supply of land in England.
The land in America for centuries was not, but now has become, for some purposes, a part of the supply in the same market as the land of England.
The existence of coal mines in Venus or Mars is of no economic importance to us, but coal mines on the earth, yet undiscovered, present a potential supply that at any moment may be realized.
two.
Undeveloped areas will be opened to the world, and new geologic realms will be explored.
Yet the notion criticized above is found in all the older text books.
three.
Subsoil ploughing annexes to agricultural land new layers of soil that are just as important as new acres added to the surface.
New trade routes and new means of transportation add to the supplies available in the older countries as effectively as if their areas were increased.
The building of railroads in western America had an effect on English rents identical in nature with that which would have been produced had an equal area of somewhat less fertile land touching England, risen out of the ocean.
Every country in Europe has repeatedly felt the shock of these great economic changes which have compelled the recapitalization on a lower plane, of nearly all kinds of their landed wealth.
Where the same agents have not been multiplied, substitutes have been found that are just as effective in meeting the economic need.
It is the result, the gratification, that man seeks: any particular good is but the means to an end.
four.
There are still great areas of fens, swamps, and marshlands, such as those on the Jersey coast in this country, which with moderate effort could be reclaimed.
The pioneer annexes new areas to the economic world and to the market in which he has lived.
This is recognized of late by writers that perhaps do not fully mark its significance to economic theory.
five.
Great areas on the edge of civilization still await the pioneer, the prospector, and the miner.
Here is a source of wealth and a field for enterprise.
The growth of society may cause some of the poorer agents in time to become the best.
When men crossed the ocean to settle on Manhattan Island, it was a wilderness; but the growth of commerce has caused the land in New York city to become more valuable than that in London.
Changes are still in progress, for of late the smaller ports to the south have increased their trade at a more rapid pace than New York has.
The difference in increasableness of the various forms of wealth is of importance in considering various social questions such as the effects of an increase of population, and the kinds of taxation most equitable and most favorable to the progress of society.
Account must be taken of the fact that the number of bricks can be increased more easily than the amount of land; but there must not be overlooked the possibility of increase in any of these forms of wealth, nor the limits to the increase of any one of them.
When one wishes to save or increase wealth, he turns to these great unappropriated fields, unused things or things imperfectly used, and tries to convert them into effective agents.
The different forms of wealth may be ranged on a scale according to the ease with which they can be increased by effort.
Some natural resources belong at one end, and some at the other end of this scale.
MACHINERY AND LABOR
one.
Tools are portions of matter, such as bone, wood, iron, which man guides and directs in applying his energy to things.
In many cases there is a clearly marked distinction between tool and machine.
A simple, single piece that can be taken into the hand, as a spade, a hammer, a knife, is a tool; a combination of wheels, levers, pulleys, etc, is a machine.
The drag develops into the cart, a simple machine.
The spinning stick, a tool used in ancient times, developed into the Saxon spinning wheel of the sixteenth century, the form used when America was colonized.
The use of power derived from nature, as that of wind and water and steam, while not the essential mark of machines, is the most characteristic feature of their modern development.
The great industrial changes in the Middle Ages generally grew out of political changes, or of changes of routes of trade whereby large industries were disturbed, or of changes in the use of land through new methods and the bringing into use of land in other places.
The industrial changes in England at the end of the eighteenth century on the contrary were due mainly to great mechanical inventions. The development of the textile machines for cotton and wool spinning and weaving mark the beginning of the movement.
Here for the first time were inventions in such numbers, of such a nature, and under such conditions, that they were rapidly and widely applied, affecting the lives of a great number of workers.
The steam engine at the same time opened up the long line of mechanical inventions by which wood and iron are shaped and wrought, and the iron industry underwent notable developments.
Since that time, have taken place in all Western countries that rapid expansion in the use of machines and those notable changes in industrial organization which distinguish our era from all others.
three.
It is especially adapted to the application of power.
In the United States, in eighteen seventy, in manufactures alone, two and one third million horse power were used; in nineteen hundred, eleven and one third million, the increase being five fold.
It is said that in the world, in eighteen seventy, three and one half million horse power was furnished by stationary engines, ten millions by locomotives.
Probably to day the total is four fold as great.
Machinery is applicable with especial advantage to industries that change the form of materials easily transported and widely used.
There must be a large output to justify the use of machinery.
In eighteen forty a man's work in spinning cotton was three hundred and twenty times as effective as in seventeen sixty nine, in eighteen fifty five it was seven hundred times; and though the rate of improvement is diminishing, to day the productivity of such labor is still greater.
Similar examples are found in the manufacture of shoes, and in all varieties of wood and iron work.
Machinery is most applicable where there is a compact plant; not so easily where the power has to be distributed over a wide area, unless a special track can be provided.
Machinery, therefore, has affected manufactures much more immediately and greatly than it has agriculture.
It has not as yet, for example, been found practicable to apply steam to ploughing to any great extent. As the profitable use of most farm machinery requires a level surface and a large area given to a single crop, it cannot be used as well east of the Alleghany Mountains as in the Mississippi Valley, and it is still uneconomical in large portions of the civilized world.
Despite this difficulty the methods of the farmer of to day contrast strongly with those of one hundred or fifty years ago.
Planters and seeders, reapers, harvesters, corn shellers, hay loaders, automatic unloading forks, elevators, water power, steam, and gasoline engines allow great economies.
The labor needed to produce food for one hundred people is a fraction of what it was one hundred years ago.
two. EFFECT OF MACHINERY ON THE WELFARE AND WAGES OF THE MASSES
one.
Men cannot quickly change their methods of working or their place of work.
If machines displace labor rapidly, men who cannot adjust themselves to the new conditions suffer, and there are always some who cannot adjust themselves, always some who suffer.
It is rarely possible for a man past middle life to shift over into a new trade where his efficiency will be as great and his pay as high as in the old.
New methods of puddling iron sent many old men into the poorhouses of Pennsylvania only a few years ago.
Even where the total employment increases, the individual sometimes suffers.
The increased demand resulting from the cheapening of a product may call for more workers than were employed before the new machinery came in, and yet some of the former workmen may be thrown out of employment.
As the machines are expensive and cannot be worked properly by men not highly expert, men past thirty five years of age have not been allowed to learn their use.
The change crushes hardest the man at the margin of employment.
The more skilled workman can hasten his pace and still earn a living wage in competition with a machine, while the less skilled can but drop out entirely, innocent victims of an economic change, sacrifices to the cause of industrial progress.
Happily such pathetic incidents are relatively not numerous.
Most machinery is introduced in commercial centers, and gradually spreads to other factories in such a way that most men can adapt themselves to the change.
The effect of machinery must not be judged by the extreme cases.
The notion is that there is exactly so much labor predetermined to be done; therefore, if machines are introduced, there is that much less for men to do.
The logical conclusion easily drawn is that every machine reduces wages.
Few, however, would go on to the further conclusion that in the aggregate the existing machinery, like an enormous vampire, is sucking the life blood of the working people,--though traces of such a notion frequently appear.
If extreme examples are taken, it may be made to appear either that an increase or that a decrease of employment results from machinery. Industries grade off from those that are capable of developing a greater and greater demand, to those at the other extreme that are capable of a very slight increase, as a result of a lowering of the price.
There seems to be practically no limit to the consumption of textiles, provided their price falls; the demand for dress alone is indefinitely expansible.
Queen Elizabeth, who had a different dress for every day in the year, has many potential imitators.
There is a constant increase relatively, as well as absolutely, in the number employed in transportation, as each census shows; there are more railroad men relatively than there were stage drivers and teamsters before the day of railroads.
The number of people now engaged in printing books and papers is larger by far than in the days when all the books of the world were written by the old monks in their cloisters.
In part the change is, however, the effect of the use of machinery and other improvements in agricultural processes.
The amount of raw food products required for each hundred persons is quite inelastic.
As it becomes possible to expend more for food, the change is made in quality, variety, flavor, rather than in quantity.
In other cases also, new industries are made possible as machines liberate energy from the production of the more necessary goods.
three.
If the workers can do nothing but blindly pursue the same tasks, it is to be expected that the wages of hand labor will fall in a particular trade into which machinery is suddenly introduced.
When, as sometimes happens, employers introduce machines for the immediate purpose of breaking a strike, the workmen are convinced that machinery is the enemy of labor.
Because the extensive introduction of machinery in England was at first accompanied by the unhappy result of a lengthening of the hours of labor in factories, this result was deemed to be necessary in all other cases.
It was in fact quite abnormal, and has not been seen elsewhere. The owners of factories wished to keep their machines employed as many hours as possible; the laboring classes of England, being at the same time demoralized and depressed by industrial and social influences that had no logical connection with machinery, had no power to resist this movement.
In all other countries of Europe and in America, where the introduction of machinery has been more gradual and normal, it has been followed immediately by a shortening of working hours, as eventually it was in England also.
The more perfect the economic environment, the higher the incomes even of those who own no part of the machinery.
A part of this benefit may appear in the form of higher money wages received, a part in the form of the lower price of things bought.
Real wages are the essential thing, and as a consumer the laborer shares with every other member of society in the benefits of improved machinery.
The benefits resulting from greater abundance are diffused, and as goods are brought from the high, or scarcity, end of the scale of value down toward the level of free goods, everybody gains by the abundance and cheapness.
The general, or average, gain is not to be judged by comparing the conditions of the lowest grade of society with those of fifty years ago, for while that grade may have been bettered only a little, it has been possible for large numbers to rise to higher grades because of the use of machinery.
The physical tasks are to day much lighter than ever before, and a larger proportion of society is engaged in industries that require skill and thought rather than physical labor.
That portion of the work is being more and more shifted upon machines.
It is important, though, to distinguish between classes of workers in judging of the benefits and evils of machines.
A machine is "an iron man," it has been said, and comes into competition with other men to lower their wages by outworking and underbidding them.
But this iron man can do only automatic tasks; it is not capable of exercising judgment.
Every intelligent laborer who can adjust, adapt, fit himself for more intelligent action will rise above the machine and profit by its presence.
But the crude physical labor which can compete only on the plane of automatic machines, must find its field of employment more and more hedged in.
If the wages of unskilled labor are not depressed, it is because of the enterprise of others who rise to more skilled employments and thus reduce the competitors of the lowest rank.
five.
Factories compel great numbers of laborers to live near each other and to work together.
The sudden crowding together of people into new social relations is usually bad for morals.
Men are moral under the eyes of their neighbors, acquaintances, and families; habits become adjusted to right standards, and the temptations in new conditions are always great.
Until of late, engineering science has not been able to deal with the problems that arise where population is densely crowded, and the early factories with their surroundings were most unsanitary. Under the degrading conditions that resulted in some places, especially in England, the effect of machinery on the intelligence of the workers was bad.
Whether this is its natural result is debatable, but the factory worker in general does not appear to be less intelligent than the agricultural worker.
The alertness of the city dweller is due doubtless to social contact more than to the immediate work he does. This work may or may not be less thought awakening than work with simple tools.
There is a general improvement along all the lines of intelligence, morals, and health.
The conditions in the cities as regards health and morals are approaching those of agricultural communities.
While many factory districts are forlorn, there may be seen around many factories more happy conditions, better buildings, better sanitation, increased leisure for workers, workmen's clubs, educational agencies, and many other evidences of civic and social progress.
six.
It is not yet evident how many can own a share in great factories, but the control drifts into few hands.
It is not yet clear what social effects great corporations will have on our democratic institutions.
Many problems of large industry remain to be solved in the near future.
The question in the old form, as to the effect of machinery on labor, is no longer open.
It has been clearly answered by experience and explained by theory: the economic effect of machinery is to lift the productiveness and efficiency of the average man.
The benefits are unequally distributed, but nearly all share in them to some degree.
Chapter sixteen
The Night Attack
"There is something out there in the darkness."
Hadn't you noticed it before?"
"Oh!" cried the girl, breathing a sigh of relief, "is it our lion?"
"He is," replied the ape man. Smith Oldwick fingered the grip of his pistol.
Tarzan saw the involuntary movement and shook his head.
"Leave that thing where it is, Lieutenant," he said.
The officer laughed nervously.
"I couldn't help it, you know, old man," he said; "instinct of self preservation and all that."
"It would prove an instinct of self destruction," said Tarzan. "There are at least three hunting lions out there watching us.
If we had a fire or the moon were up you would see their eyes plainly. Presently they may come after us but the chances are that they will not.
If you are very anxious that they should, fire your pistol and hit one of them."
"What if they do charge?" asked the girl; "there is no means of escape."
"What chance would we three have against them?" asked the girl.
"One must die sometime," he said.
What difference does it make which it is, or whether it comes tonight or next year or in ten years? After it is over it will be all the same."
The girl shuddered.
"Yes," she said in a dull, hopeless voice, "after it is over it will be all the same."
Smith Oldwick sat in the entrance and leaned against the cliff.
Tarzan squatted on the opposite side.
"May I smoke?" questioned the officer of Tarzan.
"I have been hoarding a few cigarettes and if it won't attract those bouncers out there I would like to have one last smoke before I cash in. Will you join me?" and he proffered the ape man a cigarette.
Smith Oldwick lighted his cigarette and sat puffing slowly upon it.
It was Smith Oldwick who broke the silence.
"Aren't they unusually quiet for lions?" he asked.
They are very quiet when they are stalking their quarry."
Just knowing that they are there and occasionally seeing something like a shadow in the darkness and the faint sounds that come to us from them are getting on my nerves. But I hope," he said, "that all three don't charge at once."
"Three?" said Tarzan.
"There are seven of them out there now."
"Good Lord! exclaimed Smith Oldwick.
A man is out there now with those lions."
"It is impossible!" exclaimed Smith Oldwick.
"They would tear him to pieces."
"What makes you think there is a man there?" asked the girl.
"I am afraid you would not understand," he replied.
"What do you mean by that?" asked the officer.
"Well," said Tarzan, "if you had been born without eyes you could not understand sense impressions that the eyes of others transmit to their brains, and as you have both been born without any sense of smell I am afraid you cannot understand how I can know that there is a man there."
"You mean that you scent a man?" asked the girl.
Tarzan nodded affirmatively.
"Yes," said Tarzan.
"No," he said, "I cannot understand."
I have a theory, but it is utterly preposterous."
"What is it?" asked the girl.
"We can't know," replied Tarzan, "and the chances are that the very place we are seeking is the place they don't wish us to trespass on."
"You mean the water?" asked the girl.
"Yes," replied Tarzan.
For some time they sat in silence which was broken only by an occasional sound of movement from the outer darkness.
Smith Oldwick was dozing against the rocky wall of the cavern entrance, while the girl, exhausted by the excitement and fatigue of the day, had fallen into deep slumber.
An instant after Tarzan arose, Smith Oldwick and the girl were aroused by a volley of thunderous roars and the noise of many padded feet rushing toward them.
Yet something held him there in futile self sacrifice.
The great Tarmangani had not even the satisfaction of striking a blow in self defense.
In falling his head struck the rocky surface of the cliff, stunning him.
The first dim impression borne to his awakening mind was a confusion of savage sounds which gradually resolved themselves into the growling of lions, and then, little by little, there came back to him the recollections of what had preceded the blow that had felled him.
Strong in his nostrils was the scent of Numa, the lion, and against one naked leg he could feel the coat of some animal.
Slowly Tarzan opened his eyes.
With the full return of his senses Tarzan's nose told him that the beast above him was Numa of the Wamabo pit.
Thus reassured, the ape man spoke to the lion and at the same time made a motion as though he would arise.
Immediately Numa stepped from above him.
And then Tarzan turned his eyes into the cave and saw that the girl and Smith Oldwick were gone.
His efforts had been for naught.
With an angry toss of his head, the ape man turned upon the two lions who had continued to pace back and forth a few yards from him.
"Come," said Tarzan suddenly and grasping the lion's mane with his left hand he moved toward the other lions, his companion pacing at his side.
To have attempted to meet the full shock of a lion's charge would have been suicidal even for the giant Tarmangani.
Instead he resorted to methods of agility and cunning, for quick as are the great cats, even quicker is Tarzan of the Apes.
With outspread, raking talons and bared fangs Numa sprang for the naked chest of the ape man.
With a final effort he threw himself from Numa's back and sought, by his quickness, to elude the frenzied beast for the fraction of an instant that would permit him to regain his feet and meet the animal again upon a more even footing.
But this time Numa was too quick for him and he was but partially up when a great paw struck him on the side of the head and bowled him over.
As he fell he saw a black streak shoot above him and another lion close upon his antagonist.
He of the black coat tremendously outclassed his adversary in point of size and strength as well as in ferocity.
As Numa rose from his second victim and shook himself, Tarzan could not but again note the wondrous proportions and symmetry of the beast.
The lions they had bested were splendid specimens themselves and in their coats Tarzan noted a suggestion of the black which was such a strongly marked characteristic of Numa of the pit.
Immediately Numa of the pit pricked up his ears and, regarding the ape man steadily for a moment, he answered the call of hunger and started briskly off toward the south, stopping occasionally to see if Tarzan was following.
The ape man was puzzled by the possibilities suggested by the tracks, but in the light of any previous experience he could not explain satisfactorily to himself what his perceptions indicated.
There was little change in the formation of the gorge; it still wound its erratic course between precipitous cliffs.
Presently the bottom of the gorge began to slope more rapidly.
Here and there were indications of ancient rapids and waterfalls.
The trail became more difficult but was well marked and showed indications of great antiquity, and, in places, the handiwork of man.
How far it extended east and west he could not see, but apparently it was no more than three or four miles across from north to south.
That it was a well watered valley was indicated by the wealth of vegetation that carpeted its floor from the rocky cliffs upon the north to the mountains on the south.
Preceded by the lion Tarzan descended into the valley, which, at this point, was forested with large trees.
Raucous voiced birds of brilliant plumage screamed among the branches while innumerable monkeys chattered and scolded above him.
It was as though he had been suddenly transported to another world and he felt a strange restlessness that might easily have been a premonition of danger.
Fruits were growing among the trees and some of these he saw that Manu, the monkey, ate.
Being hungry he swung to the lower branches and, amidst a great chattering of the monkeys, proceeded to eat such of the fruit as he saw the monkeys ate in safety.
There were places where the ape man alone might have negotiated the ascent but none where the others could hope successfully to reach the plateau, nor where Tarzan, powerful and agile as he was, could have ventured safely to carry them aloft.
Nor could he help but admire her fortitude and the uncomplaining effort she was making to push on.
"It's no use," he said to Tarzan.
"I can go no farther.
You will have to go on without me."
"No," said the girl, "we cannot do that.
We have all been through so much together and the chances of our escape are still so remote that whatever comes, let us remain together, unless," and she looked up at Tarzan, "you, who have done so much for us to whom you are under no obligations, will go on without us.
It must be as evident to you as it is to me that you cannot save us, for though you succeeded in dragging us from the path of our pursuers, even your great strength and endurance could never take one of us across the desert waste which lies between here and the nearest fertile country."
The ape man returned her serious look with a smile.
"You are not dead," he said to her, "nor is the lieutenant, nor Otobu, nor myself.
Because we remain here and rest is no indication that we shall die here.
So far we have found a way.
Let us take things as they come.
Let us rest now because you and Lieutenant Smith Oldwick need the rest, and when you are stronger we will go on again."
"Yes," he said, "they probably will.
But we need not be concerned with them until they come."
"I wish," said the girl, "that I possessed your philosophy but I am afraid it is beyond me."
"You were not born and reared in the jungle by wild beasts and among wild beasts, or you would possess, as I do, the fatalism of the jungle."
And so they moved to the side of the gorge beneath the shade of an overhanging rock and lay down in the hot sand to rest.
Numa wandered restlessly to and fro and finally, after sprawling for a moment close beside the ape man, rose and moved off up the gorge to be lost to view a moment later beyond the nearest turn.
For an hour the little party rested and then Tarzan suddenly rose and, motioning the others to silence, listened.
"What is it?" asked the girl.
"They are coming," he replied.
"They are yet some distance away, though not far, for the sandaled feet of the men and the pads of the lions make little noise upon the soft sands."
"What shall we do-try to go on?" asked Smith Oldwick.
"I believe I could make a go of it now for a short way.
I am much rested.
How about you Miss Kircher?"
"Oh, yes," she said, "I am much stronger.
Yes, surely I can go on."
Tarzan knew that neither of them quite spoke the truth, that people do not recover so quickly from utter exhaustion, but he saw no other way and there was always the hope that just beyond the next turn would be a way out of the gorge.
They had gone no great distance when the others of the party became aware of the sounds of pursuit, for now the lions were whining as though the fresh scent spoor of their quarry had reached their nostrils.
"I wish that your Numa would return," said the girl.
"Yes," said Tarzan, "but we shall have to do the best we can without him.
I should like to find some place where we can barricade ourselves against attack from all sides.
Possibly then we might hold them off.
Smith Oldwick is a good shot and if there are not too many men he might be able to dispose of them provided they can only come at him one at a time.
The lions don't bother me so much. Sometimes they are stupid animals, and I am sure that these that pursue us, and who are so dependent upon the masters that have raised and trained them, will be easily handled after the warriors are disposed of."
"We are still alive," was his only answer.
It was a jagged fragment of rock which rose some ten feet above the surface of the sand, leaving a narrow aperture between it and the cliff behind.
Toward this they directed their steps and when finally they reached their goal they found a space about two feet wide and ten feet long between the rock and the cliff.
To be sure it was open at both ends but at least they could not be attacked upon all sides at once.
Otobu had seen the monkey too.
"He will tell the parrots," said the black, "and the parrots will tell the madmen."
"It is all the same," replied Tarzan; "the lions would have found us here.
We could not hope to hide from them."
The minutes that dragged by seemed veritable eternities to Bertha Kircher and then at last, and almost with relief, she knew that the pursuers were upon them.
Then she heard footsteps running rapidly toward Smith Oldwick and, as his pistol spoke, there was a scream and the sound of a falling body.
Evidently disheartened by the failure of their first attempt the assaulters drew off, but only for a short time.
Again they came, this time a man opposing Tarzan and a lion seeking to overcome Smith Oldwick.
"Is this the end?" asked the girl.
In attempting to shield the girl, Tarzan received one of the shafts in the shoulder, and so heavily had the weapon been hurled that it bore him backward to the ground.
Smith Oldwick fired his pistol twice when he too was struck down, the weapon entering his right leg midway between hip and knee.
As he fell his pistol dropped from his fingers, and the girl, seeing, snatched it up.
Simultaneously there broke upon the astonished ears of both attackers and attacked a volley of shots from the gorge.
With the sweetness of the voice of an angel from heaven the Europeans heard the sharp barked commands of an English noncom.
Rolling the body of the warrior to one side Tarzan struggled to his feet, the spear still protruding from his shoulder.
"Don't shoot," she cried to the latter, "we are both friends."
"Hold up your hands, you, then," he commanded Tarzan.
At this juncture the British sergeant who had been in command of the advance guard approached and when Tarzan and the girl spoke to him in English, explaining their disguises, he accepted their word, since they were evidently not of the same race as the creatures which lay dead about them.
Smith Oldwick's wounds were dressed, as well as were those of the ape man, and in half an hour they were on their way to the camp of their rescuers.
That night it was arranged that the following day Smith Oldwick and Bertha Kircher should be transported to British headquarters near the coast by aeroplane, the two planes attached to the expeditionary force being requisitioned for the purpose.
Tarzan and Otobu declined the offers of the British captain to accompany his force overland on the return march as Tarzan explained that his country lay to the west, as did Otobu's, and that they would travel together as far as the country of the Wamabos.
"You are not going back with us, then?" asked the girl.
"No," replied the ape man.
I will continue my journey in that direction."
She cast appealing eyes toward him.
"You will go back into that terrible jungle?" she asked.
"We shall never see you again?"
He looked at her a moment in silence.
"Never," he said, and without another word turned and walked away.
In the morning Colonel Capell came from the base camp in one of the planes that was to carry Smith Oldwick and the girl to the east. Tarzan was standing some distance away as the ship landed and the officer descended to the ground.
He saw the colonel greet his junior in command of the advance detachment, and then he saw him turn toward Bertha Kircher who was standing a few paces behind the captain.
He saw Colonel Capell walk toward her with outstretched hands and smiling face and, although he could not hear the words of his greeting, he saw that it was friendly and cordial to a degree.
Tarzan turned away scowling, and if any had been close by they might have heard a low growl rumble from his chest.
He knew that his country was at war with Germany and that not only his duty to the land of his fathers, but also his personal grievance against the enemy people and his hatred of them, demanded that he expose the girl's perfidy, and yet he hesitated, and because he hesitated he growled-not at the German spy but at himself for his weakness.
The Tommies, their packs and accouterments slung, were waiting the summons to continue their return march.
"I wish you would come back with us, Greystoke," he said, "and if my appeal carries no inducement possibly that of Smith Oldwick and the young lady who just left us may.
They asked me to urge you to return to civilization."
"No;" said Tarzan, "I shall go my own way.
Miss Kircher and Lieutenant Smith Oldwick were only prompted by a sense of gratitude in considering my welfare."
It was beyond him to conceive that a British officer should thus laconically speak of an enemy spy whom he had had within his power and permitted to escape.
"Yes," he replied, "I knew that she was Bertha Kircher, the German spy?"
Look!
"The diary of Hauptmann Fritz Schneider!" repeated Tarzan in a constrained voice.
He is the man who murdered Lady Greystoke."
Capell looked at him questioningly.
"Can this be true?
Listen!" and he read an excerpt from the closely written page:
"'Played a little joke on the English pig.
"She lives!" cried Tarzan.
"And now?"
"I will return with you, of course.
How terribly I have wronged Miss Canby, but how could I know?
I even told Smith Oldwick, who loves her, that she was a German spy.
"Not only must I return to find my wife but I must right this wrong."
The evening was now at hand.
The sun was setting once more over the Virginia hills destined to be scarred so deeply by battle, but attack and defense went on.
As night came the thudding of cannon added to the tumult, and then the three boys saw the Rappahannock, a deep and wide stream flowing between high banks crested with timber.
Ahead of them Pope's army was crossing on the bridge and in boats, and masses of infantry supported by heavy batteries had turned to protect the crossing.
The Southern vanguard could not assail such a powerful force, and before the night was over the whole Union army passed to the Northern side of the Rappahannock.
Dick felt a mixture of chagrin and satisfaction as he crossed the river, chagrin that this great army should draw back, as McClellan's had been forced to draw back at the Seven Days, and satisfaction that they were safe for the time being and could prepare for a new start.
But the feeling of exultation soon passed and gave way wholly to chagrin.
They were retreating before an army not exceeding their own, in numbers, perhaps less.
They had another great force, the Army of the Potomac, which should have been there, and then they could have bade defiance to Lee and Jackson.
The North with its great numbers, its fine courage and its splendid patriotism should never be retreating.
They ought not to be hiding behind a river.
Long after darkness came the firing continued between skirmishers across the stream, but finally it, too, waned and Dick was permitted to throw himself upon the ground and sleep with the sleeping thousands.
Warner and Pennington slept near him and not far away was the brave sergeant. Even he was overpowered by fatigue and he slept like one dead, never stirring.
Dick was awakened next morning by the booming of cannon.
He had become so much used to such sounds that he would have slept on had not the crashes been so irregular.
He stood up, rubbed his eyes and then looked in the direction whence came the cannonade.
He saw from the crest of a hill great numbers of Confederate troops on the other side of the river, the August sun glittering over thousands of bayonets and rifle barrels, and along the somber batteries of great guns.
The firing, so far as he could determine, was merely to feel out or annoy the Northern army.
It was a strange sight to Dick, one that is not looked upon often, two great armies gazing across a river at each other, and, sure to meet, sooner or later, in mortal combat.
It was thrilling, awe inspiring, but it made his heart miss a beat or two at the thought of the wounds and death to come, all the more terrible because those who fought together were of the same blood, and the same nation.
Warner and Pennington joined him on the height where he stood, and they saw that in the early hours before dawn the Northern generals had not been idle.
The whole army of Pope was massed along the left bank of the river and every high point was crowned with heavy batteries of artillery.
There had been a long drought, and at some points the Rappahannock could be forded, but not in the face of such a defence as the North here offered.
Colonel Winchester himself came a moment or two later and joined them as they gazed at the two armies and the river between.
Both he and the boys used their glasses and they distinctly saw the Southern masses.
"Will they try to cross, sir?" asked Dick of the colonel.
"I don't think so, but if they do we ought to beat them back.
Meanwhile, Dick, my boy, every day's delay is a fresh card in our hand.
McClellan is landing his army at Aquia Creek, whence it can march in two days to a junction with us, when we would become overwhelming and irresistible. But I wish it didn't take so long to disembark an army!"
The note of anxiety in his voice did not escape Dick.
"You wish then to be sure of the junction between our two armies before Lee and Jackson strike?"
"Yes, Dick.
It gave us two chances, when we had but one before.
But, Dick, I'm afraid.
I wish I could divine what is in the mind of those two men, Lee and Jackson. They surely have a plan of some kind, but what is it?"
"Have we any definite news from the other side, sir?"
"Shepard came in this morning.
But little ever escapes him, and he says that the whole Southern army is up.
He says that they are all flushed with confidence in their own courage and fighting powers and the ability of their leaders.
Oh, if only the Army of the Potomac would come!
If we could only stave off battle long enough for it to reach us!"
"Don't you think we could do it, sir?
Couldn't General Pope retreat on Washington then, and, as they continued to follow us, we could turn and spring on them with both armies."
But Colonel Winchester shook his head.
"All Europe, eager to see the Union split, would then help the Confederacy in every possible manner.
The old monarchies would say that despite our superior numbers we're not able to maintain ourselves outside the defenses of Washington.
And these things would injure us in ways that we cannot afford.
Remember, Dick, my boy, that this republic is the hope of the world, and that we must save it."
"It will be done, sir," said Dick, almost in the tone of a young prophet.
"I know the spirit of the men.
No matter how many defeats are inflicted upon us by our own brethren we'll triumph in the end."
"It's my own feeling, Dick.
It cannot, it must not be any other way!"
Dick remained upborne by a confidence in the future rather than in the present, and throughout the morning he remained with his comrades, under arms, but doing little, save to hear the fitful firing which ran along a front of several miles.
But later in the day a heavy crash came from a ford further up the stream.
Under cover of a great artillery fire Stuart's cavalry dashed into the ford, and drove off the infantry and a battery posted to defend it.
Then they triumphantly placed heavy lines of pickets about the ford on the Union side.
They charged with so much impetuosity that Stuart's cavalry abandoned such dangerous ground.
Then came a silence and a great looking back and forth.
The threatening armies stared at each other across the water, but throughout the afternoon they lay idle.
The pitiless August sun burned on and the dust that had been trodden up by the scores of thousands hung in clouds low, but almost motionless.
Dick went down into a little creek, emptying into the Rappahannock, and bathed his face and hands.
The water brought a great relief.
Then he went back to Colonel Winchester and his comrades, and waited patiently with them until evening.
He remembered Colonel Winchester's words earlier in the day, and, as the darkness came, he began to wonder what Lee and Jackson were thinking.
He believed that two such redoubtable commanders must have formed a plan by this time, and, perhaps in the end, it would be worth a hundred thousand men to know it.
But he could only stare into the darkness and guess and guess.
The night seemed portentous to him.
It was full of sinister omens.
Dick was not wrong.
The Confederate commanders did have a plan and the omens which seemed sinister to him were sinister in fact.
Jackson with his forces was marching up his side of the Rappahannock and the great brain under the old slouch hat was working hard.
They would leave McClellan and the Army of the Potomac nearer to Richmond, their own capital, than they were.
Nevertheless Lee, full of daring despite his years, followed, and the dangers were growing thicker every hour around Pope.
Dick, with his regiment, moved the next morning up the river.
The enemy was in plain view beyond the stream, and Shepard and the other spies reported that the Southern army showed no signs of retiring.
But Shepard had said also that he would not be able to cross the river again.
The hostile scouts and sharpshooters had become too vigilant.
Yet he was sure that Lee and Jackson would attempt to force a passage higher up, where the drought had made good fords.
"It's well that we're showing vigilance," said Colonel Winchester to Dick.
He had fallen into the habit of talking much and confidentially to the boy, because he liked and trusted him, and for another reason which to Dick was yet in the background.
"Beyond a doubt.
They have every reason to strike before the Army of the Potomac can come.
Besides, it is in accord with the character of their generals.
Hear that booming ahead!
They're attacking one of the fords now!"
He confided at last to his favorite aide his belief that what lay behind the cannonade was more important than the cannonade itself.
"It must be a feint or a blind," he said.
"They fire a great deal, but they don't make any dash for the stream.
"Then what do you think they're up to, sir?"
"They must be sending a heavy force higher up the river to cross where there is no resistance.
And we must meet them there, with my regiment only, if we can obtain no other men."
The colonel obtained leave to go up the Rappahannock until nightfall, but only his own regiment, now reduced to less than four hundred men, was allotted to him.
In truth his division commander thought his purpose useless, but yielded to the insistence of Winchester who was known to be an officer of great merit.
It seemed to the Union generals that they must defend the fords where the Southern army lay massed before them.
Dick learned that there was a little place called Sulphur Springs some miles ahead, and that the river there was spanned by a bridge which the Union cavalry had wrecked the day before.
He divined at once that Colonel Winchester had that ford in mind, and he was glad to be with him on the march to it.
It was also late in the afternoon and Dick was quite sure that they would not reach Sulphur Springs before nightfall.
It makes your lungs work twice as hard as usual, and it's also a sign."
"Tell your sign, old weather sharp," said Warner.
"It's simple enough.
The sign may not be so strong here, but it applies just as it does on the great plains.
It means that a storm is coming. Anybody could tell that.
Look there, in the southwest.
See that cloud edging itself over the horizon.
Things will turn loose to night.
You've been out in my country."
Sergeant Whitley was standing near them regarding the cloud attentively.
"Yes, mr Pennington," he replied.
"I was out there a long time and I'd rather be there now fighting the Indians, instead of fighting our own people, although no other choice was left me.
I've seen some terrible hurricanes on the plains, winds that would cut the earth as if it was done with a ploughshare, and these armies are going to be rained on mighty hard to night."
Dick smiled a little at the sergeant's solemn tone, and formal words, but he saw that he was very much in earnest.
Nor was he one to underrate weather effects upon movements in war.
"What will it mean to the two armies, sergeant?" he asked.
"Depends upon what happens before she busts.
This, I take it, is the end of the drought, and a flood will come tumbling down from the mountains."
The sun now darkened and the clouds gathered heavily on the Western horizon.
Colonel Winchester's anxiety increased fast.
It became evident that the regiment could not reach Sulphur Springs until far into the night, and, still full of alarms, he resolved to take a small detachment, chiefly of his staff, and ride forward at the utmost speed.
He chose about twenty men, including Dick, Warner, Pennington, Sergeant Whitley, and another veteran who were mounted on the horses of junior officers left behind, and pressed forward with speed.
A West Virginian named Shattuck knew something of the country, and led them.
"What is this place, Sulphur Springs?" asked Colonel Winchester of Shattuck.
"Some big sulphur springs spout out of the bank and run down to the river.
They are fine and healthy to drink an' there's a lot of cottages built up by people who come there to stay a while.
But I guess them people have gone away.
It ain't no place for health just at this time."
"That's a certainty," said Colonel Winchester.
"Fortunately.
But can't we go a little faster, boys?"
There was a well defined road and Shattuck now led them at a gallop. As they approached the springs they checked their speed, owing to the increasing darkness.
But Dick's good ears soon told him that something was happening at the springs.
He heard faintly the sound of voices, and the clank and rattle which many men with weapons cannot keep from making now and then.
"I'm afraid, sir," he said to Colonel Winchester, "that they're already across."
The little troop stopped at the command of its leader and all listened intently.
"You're right, Dick," said Colonel Winchester, bitter mortification showing in his tone.
"They're there, and they're on our side of the river.
Oh, we might have known it!
They say that Stonewall Jackson never sleeps, and they make no mistake, when they call his infantry foot cavalry!"
Dick was silent.
"mr Shattuck," said Colonel Winchester, "how near do you think we can approach without being seen?"
"Then you lead us.
Now follow softly, lads!
All of you have hunted the 'coon and 'possum at night, and you should know how to step without making noise."
Shattuck advanced with certainty, and the others, true to their training, came behind him in single file, and without noise.
But as they advanced the sounds of an army ahead of them increased, and when they reached the edge of the covert they saw a great Confederate division on their side of the stream, in full possession of the cottages and occupying all the ground about them.
"There must be seven or eight thousand men here," said Dick, who did not miss the full significance of the fact.
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When it was the Six Hundred and Thirty seventh Night,
Peace on Abraham the Friend await!
But afterwards.
But an thou obey not my bidding, behold, I will hasten to thee and cut off thy head and lay waste thy dominions.
Verily, I give thee good counsel, and the Peace be on those who pace the path of salvation and obey the Most High King!" When Ajib read these words and knew the threat they contained, his eyes sank into the crown of his head and he gnashed his teeth and flew into a furious rage.
Ajib and his men also took horse and host charged down upon host.
-- And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.
When it was the Six Hundred and Thirty eighth Night,
Then ruled the Kazi of Battle, in whose ordinance is no wrong, for a seal is on his lips and he speaketh not; and the blood railed in rills and purfled earth with curious embroidery; heads grew gray and hotter waxed battle and fiercer.
Who is for jousting?
Let no sluggard come out nor weakling!" Whereupon there rushed at him a horseman of the Kafirs, as he were a flame of fire; but Sahim let him not stand long before him ere he overthrew him with a thrust.
Then a second came forth and he slew him also, and a third and he tare him in twain, and a fourth and he did him to death; nor did they cease sallying out to him and he left not slaying them, till it was noon, by which time he had laid low two hundred braves.
Then Ajib cried to his men, "Charge once more," and sturdy host on sturdy host down bore and great was the clash of arms and battle roar.
And it was thus.
If we prove the victors, we shall have power to him and, if we be beaten, his being alive in our hands will be a strength to us." And the Emirs said, "The Minister speaketh sooth"!
--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
When it was the Six Hundred and Thirty ninth Night,
Then dashed out the Ghul of the Mountain, with a club on his shoulder, two hundred pounds in weight, and wheeled and careered, saying, "Ho, worshippers of idols, come ye out and renown it this day, for 'tis a day of onslaught!
Whoso knoweth me hath enough of my mischief and whoso knoweth me not, I will make myself known to him.
Who is for jousting?
Who is for fighting? Let no faintheart come forth to me to day nor weakling." And there rushed upon him a Champion of the Infidels, as he were a flame of fire, and drove at him, but Sa'adan charged home at him and dealt him with his club a blow which broke his ribs and cast him lifeless to the earth.
So he entered and going up to the candles which burnt in the tent snuffed them and sprinkled levigated henbane on the wicks; after which he withdrew and waited without the marquee, till the smoke of the burning henbane reached Ajib and his Princes and they fell to the ground like dead men.
So he cried out at the guards, saying, "Woe to you!
Thereupon he loosed their bonds and collars, and when they saw him, they blessed him and rejoiced In him.
After this they went forth and took all the arms of the guards and Sahim said to them, "Go to your own camp;" while he re entered Ajib's pavilion and, wrapping him in his cloak, lifted him up and made for the Moslem encampment.
Victory!" And he blessed Sahim and bade him arouse Ajib.
So he made him smell the vinegar mixed with incense, and he opened his eyes and, finding himself bound and shackled, hung down his head earth wards.
THE LINCOLN STONE PROTEST
On the third of March, the day before the Legislature adjourned, mr Lincoln caused to be entered upon its records a paper which excited but little interest at the time, but which will probably be remembered long after the good and evil actions of the Vandalia Assembly have faded away from the minds of men.
It was the authentic record of the beginning of a great and momentous career.
Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed both branches of the General Assembly at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest against the passage of the same.
They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils.
They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power under the Constitution to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States.
They believe that the Congress of the United States has the power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but that the power ought not to be exercised, unless at the request of the people of the District.
The difference between these opinions and those contained in the above resolutions is their reason for entering this protest.
It may seem strange to those who shall read these pages that a protest so mild and cautious as this should ever have been considered either necessary or remarkable.
We have gone so far away from the habits of thought and feeling prevalent at that time that it is difficult to appreciate such acts at their true value.
But if we look a little carefully into the state of politics and public opinion in Illinois in the first half of this century, we shall see how much of inflexible conscience and reason there was in this simple protest.
The whole of the north-west territory had, it is true, been dedicated to freedom by the ordinance of seventeen eighty seven, but in spite of that famous prohibition, slavery existed in a modified form throughout that vast territory wherever there was any considerable population.
But this quasi toleration of the institution was not enough for the advocates of slavery.
Some of the leading politicians, exaggerating the extent of this desire, imagined they saw in it a means of personal advancement, and began to agitate the question of a convention to amend the Constitution.
At that time there was a considerable emigration setting through the State from Kentucky and Tennessee to Missouri.
When young bachelors came from Kentucky on trips of business or pleasure, they dazzled the eyes of the women and excited the envy of their male rivals with their black retainers.
The early Illinoisans were perplexed with a secret and singular sense of inferiority to even so new and raw a community as Missouri, because of its possession of slavery.
Governor Edwards, complaining so late as eighteen twenty nine of the superior mail facilities afforded to Missouri, says: "I can conceive of no reason for this preference, unless it be supposed that because the people of Missouri have negroes to work for them they are to be considered as gentlefolks entitled to higher consideration than us plain 'free State' folks who have to work for ourselves."
In the House of Representatives there was a contest for a seat upon the result of which the two thirds majority depended.
The seat was claimed by john Shaw and Nicholas Hansen, of Pike County.
The way in which the contest was decided affords a curious illustration of the moral sense of the advocates of slavery.
They wanted at this session to elect a senator and provide for the convention.
Hansen would vote for their senator and not for the convention.
Shaw would vote for the convention, but not for Thomas, their candidate for senator.
They were not more magnanimous in their victory than scrupulous in the means by which they had gained it.
They considered their success already assured; but they left out of view the value of the moral forces called into being by their insolent challenge.
The better class of people in the State, those heretofore unknown in politics, the schoolmasters, the ministers, immediately prepared for the contest, which became one of the severest the State has ever known.
They established three newspapers, and sustained them with money and contributions.
The Governor gave his entire salary for four years to the expenses of this contest, in which he had no personal interest whatever.
They spent their money mostly in printer's ink and in the payment of active and zealous colporteurs. The result was a decisive defeat for the slave party.
The convention was beaten by eighteen hundred majority, in a total vote of eleven thousand six hundred twelve, and the State saved forever from slavery.
But these supreme efforts of the advocates of public morals, uninfluenced by considerations of personal advantage, are of rare occurrence, and necessarily do not survive the exigencies that call them forth.
The apologists of slavery, beaten in the canvass, were more successful in the field of social opinion.
In the reaction which succeeded the triumph of the antislavery party, it seemed as if there had never been any antislavery sentiment in the State.
Any mention of the subject of slavery was thought in the worst possible taste, and no one could avow himself opposed to it without the risk of social ostracism.
Every town had its one or two abolitionists, who were regarded as harmless or dangerous lunatics, according to the energy with which they made their views known.
From this arose a singular prejudice against New England people.
Senator james a McDougall once told us that although he made no pretense of concealing his Eastern nativity, he never could keep his ardent friends in Pike County from denying the fact and fighting any one who asserted it.
The taint of slavery, the contagion of a plague they had not quite escaped, was on the people of Illinois.
They were strong enough to rise once in their might and say they would not have slavery among them.
But in the petty details of every day, in their ordinary talk, and in their routine legislation, their sympathies were still with the slave holders.
They would not enlist with them, but they would fight their battles in their own way.
Their readiness to do what came to be called later, in a famous speech, the "dirty work" of the South was seen in the tragic death of Rev.
Elijah p Lovejoy, in this very year of eighteen thirty seven.
He had for some years been publishing a religious newspaper in saint Louis, but finding the atmosphere of that city becoming dangerous to him on account of the freedom of his comments upon Southern institutions, he moved to Alton, in Illinois, twenty five miles further up the river.
Having thus expressed their determination to vindicate the law, they held a meeting, and cited him before it to declare his intentions.
He said they were altogether peaceful and legal; that he intended to publish a religious newspaper and not to meddle with politics.
But mr Lovejoy was a predestined martyr.
He felt there was a "woe" upon him if he held his peace against the wickedness across the river.
He wrote and published what was in his heart to say, and Alton was again vehemently moved.
A committee appointed itself to wait upon him; for this sort of outrage is usually accomplished with a curious formality which makes it seem to the participants legal and orderly.
The preacher met them with an undaunted front and told them he must do his duty as it appeared to him; that he was amenable to law, but nothing else; he even spoke in condemnation of mobs.
Such language "from a minister of the gospel" shocked and infuriated the committee and those whom they represented. "The people assembled," says Governor Ford, "and quietly took the press and types and threw them into the river." We venture to say that the word "quietly" never before found itself in such company.
It is not worth while to give the details of the bloody drama that now rapidly ran to its close.
There was a fruitless effort at compromise, which to Lovejoy meant merely surrender, and which he firmly rejected. The threats of the mob were answered by defiance; from the little band that surrounded the abolitionist.
They were there besieged by the infuriated crowd, and after a short interchange of shots Lovejoy was killed, his friends dispersed, and the press once more-and this time finally-thrown into the turbid flood.
These events took place in the autumn of eighteen thirty seven, but they indicate sufficiently the temper of the people of the State in the earlier part of the year.
The vehemence with which the early antislavery apostles were conducting their agitation in the East naturally roused a corresponding violence of expression in every other part of the country.
William Lloyd Garrison, the boldest and most aggressive non resistant that ever lived, had, since eighteen thirty one, been pouring forth once a week in the "Liberator" his earnest and eloquent denunciations of slavery, taking no account of the expedient or the possible, but demanding with all the fervor of an ancient prophet the immediate removal of the cause of offense.
Oliver Johnson attacked the national sin and wrong, in the "Standard," with zeal and energy equally hot and untiring.
Their words stung the slave holding States to something like frenzy.
The Georgia Legislature offered a reward of five thousand dollars to any one who should kidnap Garrison, or who should bring to conviction any one circulating the "Liberator" in the State.
Petitions to Congress, which were met by gag laws, constantly increasing in severity, brought the dreaded discussion more and more before the public.
But there was as yet little or no antislavery agitation in Illinois.
There was no sympathy with nor even toleration for any public expression of hostility to slavery.
A long and dragging debate ensued of which no record has been preserved; the resolutions, after numberless amendments had been voted upon, were finally passed, in the Senate, unanimously, in the House with none but Lincoln and five others in the negative.
There was no reason that Abraham Lincoln should take especial notice of these resolutions, more than another.
He had done his work at this session in effecting the removal of the capital.
He had only to shrug his shoulders at the violence and untruthfulness of the majority, vote against them, and go back to his admiring constituents, to his dinners and his toasts.
But his conscience and his reason forbade him to be silent; he felt a word must be said on the other side to redress the distorted balance.
He wrote his protest, saying not one word he was not ready to stand by then and thereafter, wasting not a syllable in rhetoric or feeling, keeping close to law and truth and justice.
When he had finished it he showed it to some of his colleagues for their adhesion; but one and all refused, except Dan Stone, who was not a candidate for reelection, having retired from politics to a seat on the bench.
The risk was too great for the rest to run.
Lincoln was twenty eight years old; after a youth, of singular privations and struggles he had arrived at an enviable position in the politics and the society of the State.
His intimate friends, those whom he loved and honored, were Browning, Butler, Logan, and Stuart-Kentuckians all, and strongly averse to any discussion of the question of slavery. The public opinion of his county, which was then little less than the breath of his life, was all the same way.
But all these considerations could not withhold him from performing a simple duty-a duty which no one could have blamed him for leaving undone.
He had many years of growth and development before him.
There was a long distance to be traversed between the guarded utterances of this protest and the heroic audacity which launched the proclamation of emancipation.
COLLAPSE OF THE SYSTEM
mr Lincoln had made thus far very little money-nothing more, in fact, than a subsistence of the most modest character.
But he had made some warm friends, and this meant much among the early Illinoisans.
In this way began mr Lincoln's residence in Springfield, where he was to remain until called to one of the highest of destinies intrusted to men, and where his ashes were to rest forever in monumental marble.
It had a population of fifteen hundred. The county contained nearly eighteen thousand souls, of whom seventy eight were free negroes, twenty registered indentured servants, and six slaves.
Scarcely a perceptible trace of color, one would say, yet we find in the Springfield paper a leading article beginning with the startling announcement, "Our State is threatened to be overrun with free negroes." The county was one of the richest in Illinois, possessed of a soil of inexhaustible fertility, and divided to the best advantage between prairie and forest.
It was settled early in the history of the State, and the country was held in high esteem by the aborigines.
There had been very little of what might be called pioneer life in Springfield.
Civilization came in with a reasonably full equipment at the beginning.
With a population like this, the town had, from the beginning, a more settled and orderly type than was usual in the South and West.
The taste for civilization had sometimes a whimsical manifestation. mr Stuart said the members of the Legislature bitterly complained of the amount of game-venison and grouse of the most delicious quality- which was served them at the taverns in Vandalia; they clamored for bacon-they were starving, they said, "for something civilized." There was plenty of civilized nourishment in Springfield.
Wheat was fifty cents a bushel, rye thirty three; corn and oats were twenty five, potatoes twenty five; butter was eight cents a pound, and eggs were eight cents a dozen; pork was two and a half cents a pound.
The town was built on the edge of the woods, the north side touching the timber, the south encroaching on the prairie.
The richness of the soil was seen in the mud of the streets, black as ink, and of an unfathomable depth in time of thaw.
Lincoln did not gain any immediate eminence at the bar.
His preliminary studies had been cursory and slight, and Stuart was then too much engrossed in politics to pay the unremitting attention to the law which that jealous mistress requires.
He had been a candidate for Congress the year before, and had been defeated by w l May.
He was a candidate again in eighteen thirty eight, and was elected over so agile an adversary as Stephen Arnold Douglas.
His paramount interest in these canvasses necessarily prevented him from setting to his junior partner the example which Lincoln so greatly needed, of close and steady devotion to their profession.
It was several years later that Lincoln found with Judge Logan the companionship and inspiration which he required, and began to be really a lawyer.
During the first year or two he is principally remembered in Springfield as an excellent talker, the life and soul of the little gatherings about the county offices, a story teller of the first rank, a good-natured, friendly fellow whom everybody liked and trusted.
Lincoln was not yet done with Vandalia, its dinners of game, and its political intrigue.
The archives of the State were not removed to Springfield until eighteen thirty nine, and Lincoln remained a member of the Legislature by successive reelections from eighteen thirty four to eighteen forty two.
His campaigns were carried on almost entirely without expense.
joshua Speed told the writers that on one occasion some of the Whigs contributed a purse of two hundred dollars which Speed handed to Lincoln to pay his personal expenses in the canvass.
After the election was over, the successful candidate handed Speed one hundred ninety nine dollars and twenty five cents, with the request that he return it to the subscribers.
"I did not need the money," he said.
"I made the canvass on my own horse; my entertainment, being at the houses of friends, cost me nothing; and my only outlay was seventy five cents for a barrel of cider, which some farm hands insisted I should treat them to." He was called down to Vandalia in the summer of eighteen thirty seven, by a special session of the Legislature.
The magnificent schemes of the foregoing winter required some repairing.
The banks throughout the United States had suspended specie payments in the spring, and as the State banks in Illinois were the fiscal agents of the railroads and canals, the Governor called upon the law makers to revise their own work, to legalize the suspension, and bring their improvement system within possible bounds.
They acted as might have been expected: complied with the former suggestion, but flatly refused to touch their masterpiece.
They had been glorifying their work too energetically to destroy it in its infancy.
The whole State was excited to the highest pitch of frenzy and expectation.
Money was as plenty as dirt. Industry, instead of being stimulated, actually languished.
We exported nothing," says Governor Ford, "and everything from abroad was paid for by the borrowed money expended among us." Not only upon the railroads, but on the canal as well, the work was begun on a magnificent scale.
Nine millions of dollars were thought to be a mere trifle in view of the colossal sum expected to be realized from the sale of canal lands, three hundred thousand acres of which had been given by the general Government.
There were rumors of coming trouble, and of an unhealthy condition of the banks; but it was considered disloyal to look too curiously into such matters.
But a year of baleful experience destroyed a great many illusions, and in the election of eighteen thirty eight the subject of internal improvements was treated with much more reserve by candidates.
The debt of the State, issued at a continually increasing discount, had already attained enormous proportions; the delirium of the last few years was ending, and sensible people began to be greatly disquieted.
Nevertheless, mr Cyrus Edwards boldly made his canvass for Governor as a supporter of the system of internal improvements, and his opponent, Thomas Carlin, was careful not to commit himself strongly on the other side.
Lincoln was a member of this body, and, being by that time the unquestioned leader of the Whig minority, was nominated for Speaker, and came within one vote of an election.
The Legislature was still stiff necked and perverse in regard to the system.
It refused to modify it in the least, and voted, as if in bravado, another eight hundred thousand dollars to extend it.
But this was the last paroxysm of a fever that was burnt out.
The market was glutted with Illinois bonds; one banker and one broker after another, to whose hands they had been recklessly confided in New York and London, failed, or made away with the proceeds of sales.
This work taxed the energies of the Legislature in eighteen thirty nine, and for some years after.
It was a dismal and disheartening task.
Many were the schemes devised for meeting these oppressive obligations without unduly taxing the voters; one of them, not especially wiser than the rest, was contributed by mr Lincoln.
It provided for the issue of bonds for the payment of the interest due by the State, and for the appropriation of a special portion of State taxes to meet the obligations thus incurred.
He supported his bill in a perfectly characteristic speech, making no effort to evade his share of the responsibility for the crisis, and submitting his views with diffidence to the approval of the Assembly.
There was even an undercurrent of sentiment in favor of repudiation.
Bonds were sold for this purpose at a heavy loss.
This session of the Legislature was enlivened by a singular contest between the Whigs and Democrats in relation to the State banks.
The Whigs, who were defending the banks, wished to prevent the adjournment of the special session until the regular session should begin, during the course of which they expected to renew the lease of life now held under sufferance by the banks-in which, it may be here said, they were finally successful.
"I think," says mr Joseph Gillespie, who was one of those who performed this feat of acrobatic politics, "mr Lincoln always regretted it, as he deprecated everything that savored of the revolutionary."
Nothing was left of the brilliant schemes of the historic Legislature of eighteen thirty six but a load of debt which crippled for many years the energies of the people, a few miles of embankments which the grass hastened to cover, and a few abutments which stood for years by the sides of leafy rivers, waiting for their long delaying bridges and trains.
There are those who can see only envy and jealousy in that strong dislike and disapproval with which mr Lincoln always regarded his famous rival.
He held it only long enough to secure a nomination to the Legislature in eighteen thirty six.
He held this place as a means of being nominated for Congress the next year; he was nominated and defeated.
In eighteen forty he was engaged in another scheme to which we will give a moment's attention, as it resulted in giving him a seat on the Supreme Bench of the State, which he used merely as a perch from which to get into Congress.
As the aliens were nearly all Democrats, that party insisted on their voting, and the Whigs objected.
The best lawyers in the State were Whigs, and so it happened that most of the judges were of that complexion.
This case was to come on at the June term in eighteen forty, and the Democratic counsel, chief among whom was mr Douglas, were in some anxiety, as an unfavorable decision would lose them about ten thousand alien votes in the Presidential election in November.
The circuit judges were turned out of office, and five new judges were added to the Supreme Court, who were to perform circuit duty also.
It was useless for the Whigs to try to prevent this degradation of the bench.
There was no resource but a protest, and here again Lincoln uttered the voice of the conscience of the party.
He was joined on this occasion by Edward d Baker [Footnote: Afterwards senator from Oregon, and as colonel of the seventy first Pennsylvania (called the first California) killed at Ball's Bluff.] and some others, who protested against the act because
first.
It violates the principles of free government by subjecting the Judiciary to the Legislature.
It is a fatal blow at the independence of the judges and the constitutional term of their offices.
It is a measure not asked for or wished for by the people.
fourth.
It will greatly increase the expense of our courts or else greatly diminish their utility.
fifth.
It will give our courts a political and partisan character, thereby impairing public confidence in their decisions.
sixth.
It will impair our standing with other States and the world.
seventh.
It is a party measure for party purposes from which no practical good to the people can possibly arise, but which may be the source of immeasurable evils.
The undersigned are well aware that this protest will be altogether unavailing with the majority of this body.
Many and most of the judges have had great personal popularity-so much so as to create complaint of so many of them being elected or appointed to other offices.
Clear running water filled the ditch, but the bottom was dull black, powdery mud.
It lay inches deep, layer upon layer of one tiny particle upon another, and so loose and light that a thick, opaque, smoke like column ascended at the slightest touch.
The entire monster measured scarcely a finger's length.
Her reddish brown colour with the tiger like transverse stripes made an excellent disguise.
Even the sharp eyed heron, which had dropped down unnoticed about a dozen yards off, and was now noiselessly, with slow, cautious steps, wading nearer and nearer, took her at the first glance for a stick.
The young pike peered upwards, and saw in the shelter of a tuft of rushes a collection of black, boat shaped whirligigs, showing like dots against the shining surface.
There was never any peace around her.
Air bubbles, too, were set free, and ascended quickly with a rotary motion.
Here two large tiger beetles were fighting with a poor water bug.
It must have been almost a pleasure to find oneself so neatly despatched!
It was tired now, and had just stretched itself out for a moment's rest, when the supposed pieces of stick upon which it lay seized it, and voracious heads with sharp jaws attacked its flesh.
It was within an ace of being made captive for ever, but at last succeeded in making its escape and pushing off, with two of its tormentors after it.
The young pike watched attentively the flight of the black leech.
It was not long before she had forgotten her recent peril, and once more became filled with the cruel passion of the hunter.
This was a very favourite lurking place; she could lie there with her back right up against the under surface of the leaf, and her snout on the very border of its shadow, ready to strike.
The silvery flash of small fish twinkled around her, and myriads of tiny shining crustaceans whisked about so close to her nose that at any moment she could have snapped them up by the score into her voracious mouth.
It was especially things that moved that had a magic attraction for Grim.
----Meanwhile, the keen eyed heron, wading up to its breast in the water, comes softly and silently trawling through the ditch.
Sedately it goes about its business, stalking along with slow, measured steps.
Sea crows and terns scream around it, and from time to time three or four of them unite in harrying their great rival.
Just as the heron has brought its beak close to the surface of the water, ready to seize its prey, the gulls dash upon it from behind.
With a hiss it curves its neck and turns the foil upwards, snapping and biting at its tormentors.
An irritating little flock of gulls may go on thus for a long time; and when at last, screaming and mocking, they take their departure, they have spoilt many a chance and wasted many precious minutes of the big, silent, patient fisher's time.
The gulls once gone, the heron applies itself with redoubled zeal to its business.
From various attacking positions its beak darts down into the water, but often without result, and it has to go farther afield; then at last it captures a little eel.
The eel twists, and refuses to be swallowed; so the bird has to reduce its liveliness by rolling up and down in its sharp edged beak.
Then it glides down.
This time, too, fortune is disposed to favour the young pike.
The heron, coming up behind her, cautiously bends its neck over the drifting piece of reed.
It sees there is something suspicious about it, but thinks it is mistaken, and is about to take another step forward. When only half-way, it pauses with its foot in the air; and the next moment the blow falls.
Grim only once moved her tail.
Then she was seized, something hard and sharp and strong held her fast, and she passed head foremost down into a warm, narrow channel.
There was a fearful crush of fish in the channel, and much elbowing with fins and twisting of tails.
Out on the lake lay a boat in which a man sat fishing.
Experience told the bird it was a fisherman, but here the bird was wrong.
Grim was among the fortunate ones.
A little later the stream gathered furious pace and carried her with it; she saw light and felt space round her; she was able to move her fins.
The very next day, however, little fish had begun to gather about those tufts; one day more, and there were swarms of them.
Out of one of these Grim had come.
She possessed a remarkable power of placing herself, and knew how to choose her position so as to disappear, as it were, in the water.
But in the daytime, she lay peacefully drowsing.
A little later it begins its soft little sawing song, which blends so well with the perpetual, monotonous whispering of the reeds.
It puts forth its greatest speed, making in a straight line for the shore.
Flash follows flash, each bigger and brighter than the other.
It is successful.
Moreover, you must remember that he has got to think of the danger from his comrades too. He's there at his post.
How could he explain leaving it?
But even if there were no obstacles to his freedom of action he would do nothing.
At present he hasn't enough moral energy to take a resolution of any sort. Permit me also to point out that if I had detained him we would have been committed to a course of action on which I wished to know your precise intentions first."
The great personage rose heavily, an imposing shadowy form in the greenish gloom of the room.
"I'll see the Attorney General to night, and will send for you to morrow morning.
Is there anything more you'd wish to tell me now?"
The Assistant Commissioner had stood up also, slender and flexible.
"I think not, Sir Ethelred, unless I were to enter into details which-"
No details, please."
The great shadowy form seemed to shrink away as if in physical dread of details; then came forward, expanded, enormous, and weighty, offering a large hand.
"And you say that this man has got a wife?"
"Yes, Sir Ethelred," said the Assistant Commissioner, pressing deferentially the extended hand.
Nothing could be more characteristic of the respectable bond than that," went on, with a touch of grimness, the Assistant Commissioner, whose own wife too had refused to hear of going abroad.
"Yes, a genuine wife.
And the victim was a genuine brother in law.
From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama."
The Assistant Commissioner laughed a little; but the great man's thoughts seemed to have wandered far away, perhaps to the questions of his country's domestic policy, the battle ground of his crusading valour against the paynim Cheeseman.
The Assistant Commissioner withdrew quietly, unnoticed, as if already forgotten.
This affair, which, in one way or another, disgusted Chief Inspector Heat, seemed to him a providentially given starting point for a crusade.
He had it much at heart to begin. He walked slowly home, meditating that enterprise on the way, and thinking over Mr Verloc's psychology in a composite mood of repugnance and satisfaction.
He walked all the way home.
Finding the drawing room dark, he went upstairs, and spent some time between the bedroom and the dressing room, changing his clothes, going to and fro with the air of a thoughtful somnambulist.
But he shook it off before going out again to join his wife at the house of the great lady patroness of Michaelis.
He knew he would be welcomed there.
On entering the smaller of the two drawing rooms he saw his wife in a small group near the piano.
Behind the screen the great lady had only two persons with her: a man and a woman, who sat side by side on arm chairs at the foot of her couch.
She extended her hand to the Assistant Commissioner.
"I never hoped to see you here to night.
Annie told me-"
"Yes.
I had no idea myself that my work would be over so soon."
The Assistant Commissioner added in a low tone: "I am glad to tell you that Michaelis is altogether clear of this-"
The patroness of the ex convict received this assurance indignantly.
"Why?
Were your people stupid enough to connect him with-"
"Not stupid," interrupted the Assistant Commissioner, contradicting deferentially.
"Clever enough-quite clever enough for that."
A silence fell.
The man at the foot of the couch had stopped speaking to the lady, and looked on with a faint smile.
Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner, introduced, acknowledged each other's existence with punctilious and guarded courtesy.
The Assistant Commissioner knew the lady.
"You do not look frightened," he pronounced, after surveying her conscientiously with his tired and equable gaze.
"Well, he tried to at least," amended the lady.
"Force of habit perhaps," said the Assistant Commissioner, moved by an irresistible inspiration.
"He has been threatening society with all sorts of horrors," continued the lady, whose enunciation was caressing and slow, "apropos of this explosion in Greenwich Park.
It appears we all ought to quake in our shoes at what's coming if those people are not suppressed all over the world.
I had no idea this was such a grave affair."
Mr Vladimir, affecting not to listen, leaned towards the couch, talking amiably in subdued tones, but he heard the Assistant Commissioner say:
"I've no doubt that Mr Vladimir has a very precise notion of the true importance of this affair."
"Theoretically.
BLUEBEARD
In the long ago times, in a splendid house, surrounded by fine gardens and a park, there lived a man who had riches in abundance, and everything to make him popular except one, and that was his beard, for his beard was neither black as a raven's wing, golden as the sunlight, nor just an ordinary every day colour, but it was blue, bright blue.
Of course had blue beards come into fashion his would have been considered beautiful beyond words, but, as far as we know, blue beards have never as yet been fashionable, nor are they likely to be so.
However, in spite of his blue beard this man had married several times, though what had become of his wives nobody could say.
Now, not far from Bluebeard's house there dwelt a widow with two very lovely daughters, and one of these Bluebeard wished to marry, but which he did not mind, they might settle that between themselves.
Neither of these girls had the least desire to have a husband with a blue beard, and also, not knowing the fate of the other wives, they did not like to risk disappearing from the world as those had done, but being very polite young women they would not refuse Bluebeard's proposals outright.
The younger said, "I would not for a moment take away Sister Anne's chance of marrying such a wealthy man," while Sister Anne declared that, although the elder, she would much prefer to give way to her sister.
Then Bluebeard invited the widow and her daughters to spend a week with him, and many of their neighbours he also invited.
Most sumptuous was the entertainment provided for them.
Hunting and fishing expeditions, picnics and balls went on from morning till night, and all the night through, so that there was not time even to think of sleep, only feasting and pleasure the whole week long.
So well, indeed, did the younger sister enjoy this, that by the end of the week she had begun to think perhaps after all her host's beard was not so very blue, and that it would be a fine thing to be the mistress of such a magnificent mansion, and the wife of such a rich husband.
And so, not long afterwards, there was a grand wedding, and the widow's younger daughter became mrs Bluebeard.
About a month later, Bluebeard told his wife that he must leave her for several weeks, having to travel on business.
Unlock rooms and chests and use freely what you will."
In fact, should you open that door, or even put this key into the lock, I should be dreadfully angry, indeed I should make you suffer for it in a terrible way."
As soon as mrs Bluebeard's friends and relations knew that her husband was away, they came flocking to visit her, for they longed to see all her splendid possessions, but had feared to come before.
They could not enough admire the magnificent apartments, and ran from one to another praising everything they beheld.
At last she could bear it no longer, but slipping away from her visitors, she ran along the passages and stairs, nearly falling down them, so great was her haste, until she came to that door at the end of the corridor.
Not pausing an instant, she thrust the key into the lock, and the door sprang open.
At first she could distinguish nothing, for the room was dark and gloomy, but then, all of a sudden, she knew what had become of Bluebeard's other wives, for there they lay, in a long, straight row, all dead.
She wiped it with her handkerchief, but alas! it was blood that would not be wiped away.
She washed the key and rubbed it, and scraped it and polished it, but all to no purpose, if she succeeded in cleansing one side, the mark came out on the other.
For the key was enchanted.
Next morning he called for the keys; his wife brought them to him, but not the little one; that she left behind.
Bluebeard noticed this directly and sent her to fetch it.
Trembling, and white as a sheet, she was forced to give it into his hand.
"Wretched woman!" shouted Bluebeard, "you have used this key, you have unlocked the door of that room at the end of the passage.
You shall die!!!"
In vain did his wife plead with him to spare her, kneeling before him with tears streaming from her eyes.
"You shall die!" he cried again, more savagely than before.
"Let me have a few moments alone, to prepare for death,"
The poor young woman hastened to a room at the foot of the turret stairs where was her Sister Anne, and called to her.
"Sister Anne, Sister Anne, look from the tower window.
Can you see no one coming?" And Sister Anne, looking out, answered:
"Alas!
No!
Nothing but the green grass, and the sun which shines upon it."
"Sister Anne, Sister Anne, look once again, can you see no one coming?" whispered the young wife wringing her hands.
Her brothers, she knew, were to visit her that day-if only they would come in time!
"Alas, No!" Sister Anne replied.
"I see a cloud of dust, but it is only a flock of sheep on the road."
"I see two horsemen afar off," cried Sister Anne.
He would not, however, give heed to her prayers, and was just brandishing his sword, so that it might come down straight and true upon her slender neck, when the door burst open and two young army officers came rushing in, whom Bluebeard recognised as the brothers of his wife.
He swiftly fled, but they speedily followed, and for his many crimes slew him then and there.
Sir-Agreeably to my promise, I now relate to you all the particulars of the lost man and child which I have been able to collect.
It is entirely owing to the humane interest you seemed to take in the report, that I have pursued the inquiry to the following result.
You may remember that business called me to Boston in the summer of eighteen twenty.
I sailed in the packet to Providence, and when I arrived there I learned that every seat in the stage was engaged.
I was thus obliged either to wait a few hours or accept a seat with the driver, who civilly offered me that accommodation.
Accordingly I took my seat by his side, and soon found him intelligent and communicative.
Soon after a small speck appeared in the road.
"There," said my companion, "comes the storm breeder; he always leaves a Scotch mist behind him.
By many a wet jacket do I remember him.
I suppose the poor fellow suffers much himself, much more than is known to the world." Presently a man with a child beside him, with a large black horse, and a weather beaten chair, once built for a chaise body, passed in great haste, apparently at the rate of twelve miles an hour. He seemed to grasp the reins of his horse with firmness, and appeared to anticipate his speed.
He seemed dejected, and looked anxiously at the passengers, particularly at the stage driver and myself.
In a moment after he passed us, the horses' ears were up and bent themselves forward so that they nearly met.
"I have never known him to stop anywhere longer than to inquire the way to Boston; and, let him be where he may, he will tell you he cannot stay a moment, for he must reach Boston that night."
"Do you look," said he, "in the direction whence the man came, that is the place to look; the storm never meets him, it follows him." We presently approached another hill, and when at the height, the driver pointed out in an eastern direction a little black speck as big as a hat.
The appearance of this cloud attracted the notice of all the passengers; for after it had spread itself to a great bulk, it suddenly became more limited in circumference, grew more compact, dark, and consolidated.
But in truth I saw no such thing.
The man's fancy was doubtless at fault.
It is a very common thing for the imagination to paint for the senses, both in the visible and invisible world.
In the meantime the distant thunder gave notice of a shower at hand, and just as we reached Polley's tavern the rain poured down in torrents.
It was soon over, the cloud passing in the direction of the turnpike toward Providence.
In a few moments after, a respectable looking man in a chaise stopped at the door.
He said he had met them; that the man seemed bewildered, and inquired the way to Boston; that he was driving at great speed, as though he expected to outstrip the tempest; that the moment he had passed him a thunderclap broke distinctly over the man's head and seemed to envelop both man and child, horse and carriage.
But that which excited his surprise most was the strange conduct of his horse, for that, long before he could distinguish the man in the chair, his own horse stood still in the road and flung back his ears.
"peter Rugg!" said I, "and who is peter Rugg?" "That," said the stranger, "is more than anyone can tell exactly.
How long would it take, in that case, to send a letter to Boston?
For peter has already, to my knowledge, been more than twenty years travelling to that place." "But," said I, "does the man never stop anywhere, does he never converse with anyone?
I saw the same man more than three years since, near Providence, and I heard a strange story about him. Pray, sir, give me some account of this man." "Sir," said the stranger, "those who know the most respecting that man say the least. I have heard it asserted that heaven sometimes sets a mark on a man, either for judgment or trial.
Under which peter Rugg now labours I cannot say; therefore I am rather inclined to pity than to judge." "You speak like a humane man," said I, "and if you have known him so long, I pray you will give me some account of him.
Has his appearance much altered in that time?"
It is cruel to deceive a traveller.
Accordingly.
I stepped into the street, and as the horse approached I made a feint of stopping him.
"In Middle Street." "When did you leave Boston?"
"I cannot tell precisely; it seems a considerable time." "But how did you and your child become so wet?
Is not this town Newburyport, and the river that I have been following the Merrimac?" "No, sir; this is Hartford, and the river the Connecticut." He wrung his hands and looked incredulous.
"Have the rivers, too, changed their courses as the cities have changed places?
His impatient horse leaped off, his hind flanks rising like wings-he seemed to devour all before him and to scorn all behind.
Soon after I was enabled to collect the following particulars from mrs Croft, an aged lady in Middle Street, who has resided in Boston during the last twenty years.
Her narration is this: The last summer a person, just at twilight, stopped at the door of the late mrs Rugg.
mrs Croft, on coming to the door, perceived a stranger, with a child by his side, in an old, weather beaten carriage, with a black horse.
The stranger asked for mrs Rugg, and was informed that mrs Rugg had died, at a good old age, more than twenty years before that time.
The stranger replied, "How can you deceive me so?
Indeed, everything here seems to be misplaced.
He went a long voyage; he is my kinsman. If I could see him, he could give me some account of mrs Rugg." "Sir," said mrs Croft, "I never heard of john Foy.
Where did he live?" "Just above here, in Orange Tree Lane." "There is no such place in this neighbourhood." "What do you tell me!
Are the streets gone? Orange Tree Lane is at the head of Hanover Street, near Pemberton's Hill." "There is no such lane now." "Madam! you cannot be serious.
But you doubtless know my brother, William Rugg.
He lives in Royal Exchange Lane, near King Street."
You may as well tell me there is no King George.
I must find a resting place.
But no such man as Hart has kept there these twenty years."
Here the stranger seemed disconcerted, and muttered to himself quite audibly: "Strange mistake!
How much this looks like the town of Boston!
I know of no other Boston." "City of Boston it may be, but it is not the Boston where I live.
I recollect now, I came over a bridge instead of a ferry.
It is a much finer city than the town of Boston.
It was evident that the generation to which peter Rugg belonged had passed away.
This was all the account of peter Rugg I could obtain from mrs Croft; but she directed me to an elderly man, mr james Felt, who lived near her, and who had kept a record of the principal occurrences for the last fifty years.
That peter Rugg is living is highly probable, as he was only ten years older than myself; and I was only eighty last March, and I am as likely to live twenty years longer as any man." Here I perceived that mr Felt was in his dotage, and I despaired of gaining any intelligence from him on which I could depend.
I took my leave of mrs Croft, and proceeded to my lodgings at the Marlborough Hotel.
If peter Rugg, thought I, has been travelling since the Boston Massacre, there is no reason why he should not travel to the end of time.
In the course of the evening I related my adventure in Middle Street. "Ha!" said one of the company, smiling, "do you really think you have seen peter Rugg?
On Rugg's declining to stop, mr Cutter urged him vehemently.
Others, of a different opinion, shook their heads and said nothing.
The toll gatherer asserted that sometimes, on the darkest and most stormy nights, when no object could be discerned about the time Rugg was missing, a horse and wheelcarriage, with a noise equal to a troop, would at midnight, in utter contempt of the rates of toll, pass over the bridge.
As the appearance passed, he threw the stool at the horse, but heard nothing except the noise of the stool skipping across the bridge.
And thus peter Rugg and his child, horse and carriage, remain a mystery to this day."
This, sir, is all that I could learn of peter Rugg in Boston....
THE STORY OF A STONE
By David Starr Jordan
Then, one morning, down among the sea weeds, she laid a whole lot of tiny eggs, transparent as crab apple jelly and much smaller than a dew drop on the end of a pine leaf.
Now she leaves the scene, and our story henceforth concerns only one of these eggs.
But none of these got the little fellow, else I should not have any story to tell.
At last, having paddled about long enough, he thought of settling in life.
So he looked around until he found a flat bit of shell that just suited him, when he sat down upon it, and grew fast, like old Holger Danske, in the Danish myth.
Only, unlike Holger, he didn't go to sleep, but proceeded to make himself at home.
So he made an opening in his upper side, and rigged for himself a mouth and a stomach, and put a whole row of feelers out, and began catching little worms and floating eggs and bits of jelly and bits of lime,--everything he could get,--and cramming them into his little stomach.
He kept taking them in and tried to wall himself up inside with them, as a person would stone a well or as though a man should swallow pebbles and stow them away in his feet and all around under the skin, till he had filled himself full.
Well, the old ones died or swam away or were walled up, and new ones filled their places, and the colony thrived for a long time, and had accumulated quite a stock of lime.
They didn't like the taste of iron, so they all died; but we know that their house was not spoiled, for we have it here.
So the rock house they were making was tumbled about in the dirt, and the rolling pebbles knocked the corners off, and the mud worked its way into the cracks and destroyed its beautiful whiteness.
There it lay for ages, till the earth gave a great, long heave, that raised the rest of Wisconsin out of the ocean, and the mud around our Favosites' house packed and dried into hard rock and closed it in; and so it became part of the dry land.
There it lay, imbedded in the rock for centuries and centuries.
Then, the time of the first fishes came, and the other animals looked on them in awe and wonder as the Indians eyed Columbus.
They were like the gar pike in our Western rivers, only much larger,--as big as a stove pipe,--and with a crust as hard as a turtle's shell. Then there came sharks, of strange forms, savage and ferocious, with teeth like bowie knives.
Then it would thaw a little, and streams of water would run over the snow; then it would freeze again, and pack it into solid ice.
So it kept on for about a million years, until once when the spring came and the south winds blew, it began to thaw up.
Ages after, a farmer in Grand Chote, Michigan, plowing up his clover field, to sow for winter wheat, picked up a curious bit of "petrified honeycomb," and gave it to the schoolboys to take to their teacher, to hear what he would say about it.
Southwest Wind, Esquire, was as good as his word.
"Suppose we turn goldsmiths?" said Schwartz to Hans, as they entered the large city.
The thought was agreed to be a very good one; they hired a furnace, and turned goldsmiths.
So they melted all their gold, without making money enough to buy more, and were at last reduced to one large drinking mug, which an uncle of his had given to little Gluck, and which he was very fond of, and would not have parted with for the world; though he never drank anything out of it but milk and water.
The mug was a very odd mug to look at.
When it came to the mug's turn to be made into spoons, it half broke poor little Gluck's heart: but the brothers only laughed at him, tossed the mug into the melting pot, and staggered out to the ale house: leaving him, as usual, to pour the gold into bars, when it was all ready.
When they were gone, Gluck took a farewell look at his old friend in the melting pot.
The flowing hair was all gone; nothing remained but the red nose, and the sparkling eyes, which looked more malicious than ever.
"And no wonder," thought Gluck, "after being treated in that way." He sauntered disconsolately to the window, and sat himself down to catch the fresh evening air, and escape the hot breath of the furnace.
Now this window commanded a direct view of the range of mountains, which, as I told before, overhung the Treasure Valley, and more especially of the peak from which fell the Golden River.
"No it wouldn't, Gluck," said a clear, metallic voice close at his ear.
"Bless me!
what's that?" exclaimed Gluck, jumping up.
There was nobody there.
"Not at all, my boy," said the same voice, louder than before.
He looked again into all the corners and cupboards, and then began turning round, and round, as fast as he could in the middle of the room, thinking there was somebody behind him, when the same voice struck again on his ear. It was singing now very merrily, "Lala lira la;" no words, only a soft running, effervescent melody, something like that of a kettle on the boil.
Gluck looked out of the window.
No, it was certainly in the house.
Upstairs, and downstairs.
He ran to the opening, and looked in: yes, he saw right; it seemed to be coming, not only out of the furnace, but out of the pot.
He uncovered it, and ran back in a great fright, for the pot was certainly singing!
Gluck made no answer.
Gluck, my boy," said the pot again.
Gluck summoned all his energies, walked straight up to the crucible, drew it out of the furnace, and looked in.
"Come, Gluck, my boy," said the voice out of the pot again, "I'm all right; pour me out."
Still Gluck couldn't move.
"I'm too hot."
"That's right!" said the dwarf, stretching out first his legs, and then his arms, and then shaking his head up and down, and as far round as it would go, for five minutes without stopping; apparently with the view of ascertaining if he were quite correctly put together, while Gluck stood contemplating him in speechless amazement.
The features of the face, however, were by no means finished with the same delicacy; they were rather coarse, slightly inclining to coppery in complexion, and indicative, in expression, of a very pertinacious and intractable disposition in their small proprietor.
When the dwarf had finished his self examination, he turned his small eyes full on Gluck, and stared at him deliberately for a minute or two.
"No, it wouldn't, Gluck, my boy," said the little man.
This was certainly rather an abrupt and unconnected mode of commencing conversation.
It might indeed be supposed to refer to the course of Gluck's thoughts, which had first produced the dwarf's observations out of the pot; but whatever it referred to, Gluck had no inclination to dispute the dictum.
"Wouldn't it, sir?" said Gluck, very mildly and submissively indeed.
"No," said the dwarf, conclusively.
This pause gave time for Gluck to collect his thoughts a little, and, seeing no great reason to view his diminutive visitor with dread, and feeling his curiosity overcome his amazement, he ventured on a question of peculiar delicacy.
"Pray, sir," said Gluck, rather hesitatingly, "were you my mug?"
On which the little man turned sharp round, walked straight up to Gluck, and drew himself up to his full height.
After which, he again walked up to Gluck and stood still, as if expecting some comment on his communication.
Gluck determined to say something at all events.
"I hope your Majesty is very well," said Gluck.
"Listen!" said the little man, deigning no reply to this polite inquiry.
"I am the King of what you mortals call the Golden River.
The shape you saw me in was owing to the malice of a stronger king, from whose enchantments you have this instant freed me.
What I have seen of you, and your conduct to your wicked brothers, renders me willing to serve you; therefore, attend to what I tell you.
His figure became red, white, transparent, dazzling-a blaze of intense light-rose, trembled, and disappeared.
The King of the Golden River had evaporated.
"Oh!" cried poor Gluck, running to look up the chimney after him; "oh dear, dear, dear me!
three.--HOW mr
HANS SET OFF ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE GOLDEN RIVER, AND HOW HE PROSPERED THEREIN
The King of the Golden River had hardly made the extraordinary exit related in the last chapter, before Hans and Schwartz came roaring into the house, very savagely drunk.
The discovery of the total loss of their last piece of plate had the effect of sobering them just enough to enable them to stand over Gluck, beating him very steadily for a quarter of an hour; at the expiration of which period they dropped into a couple of chairs, and requested to know what he had to say for himself.
Gluck told them his story, of which, of course, they did not believe a word.
They beat him again, till their arms were tired, and staggered to bed.
In the morning, however, the steadiness with which he adhered to his story obtained him some degree of credence; the immediate consequence of which was, that the two brothers, after wrangling a long time on the knotty question, which of them should try his fortune first, drew their swords and began fighting.
The noise of the fray alarmed the neighbours who, finding they could not pacify the combatants, sent for the constable.
Hans, on hearing this, contrived to escape, and hid himself; but Schwartz was taken before the magistrate, fined for breaking the peace, and, having drunk out his last penny the evening before, was thrown into prison till he should pay.
When Hans heard this, he was much delighted, and determined to set out immediately for the Golden River.
How to get the holy water was the question.
Next morning he got up before the sun rose, put the holy water into a strong flask, and two bottles of wine and some meat in a basket, slung them over his back, took his alpine staff in his hand, and set off for the mountains.
On his way out of the town he had to pass the prison, and as he looked in at the windows, whom should he see but Schwartz himself peeping out of the bars, and looking very disconsolate.
"Good morning, brother," said Hans; "have you any message for the King of the Golden River?"
It was, indeed, a morning that might have made anyone happy, even with no Golden River to seek for.
Level lines of dewy mist lay stretched along the valley, out of which rose the massy mountains-their lower cliffs in pale gray shadow, hardly distinguishable from the floating vapour, but gradually ascending till they caught the sunlight, which ran in sharp touches of ruddy colour along the angular crags, and pierced, in long level rays, through their fringes of spear like pine.
On this object, and on this alone, Hans's eyes and thoughts were fixed; forgetting the distance he had to traverse, he set off at an imprudent rate of walking, which greatly exhausted him before he had scaled the first range of the green and low hills.
He was, moreover, surprised, on surmounting them, to find that a large glacier, of whose existence, notwithstanding his previous knowledge of the mountains, he had been absolutely ignorant, lay between him and the source of the Golden River.
He entered on it with the boldness of a practised mountaineer; yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life.
The ice was excessively slippery, and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water; not monotonous or low; but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then breaking off into short melancholy tones, or sudden shrieks, resembling those of human voices in distress or pain.
He had been compelled to abandon his basket of food, which became a perilous incumbrance on the glacier, and had now no means of refreshing himself but by breaking off and eating some of the pieces of ice.
This, however, relieved his thirst; an hour's repose recruited his hardy frame, and, with the indomitable spirit of avarice, he resumed his laborious journey.
It was past noon, and the rays beat intensely upon the steep path, while the whole atmosphere was motionless, and penetrated with heat.
Intense thirst was soon added to the bodily fatigue with which Hans was now afflicted; glance after glance he cast on the flask of water which hung at his belt.
"Three drops are enough," at last thought he; "I may, at least, cool my lips with it."
He opened the flask, and was raising it to his lips, when his eye fell on an object lying on the rock beside him; he thought it moved.
It was a small dog, apparently in the last agony of death from thirst.
Its tongue was out, its jaws dry, its limbs extended lifelessly, and a swarm of black ants were crawling about its lips and throat.
Its eye moved to the bottle which Hans held in his hand.
He raised it, drank, spurned the animal with his foot, and passed on.
And he did not know how it was, but he thought that a strange shadow had suddenly come across the blue sky.
The path became steeper and more rugged every moment; and the high hill air, instead of refreshing him, seemed to throw his blood into a fever.
He stopped to open it, and again, as he did so, something moved in the path above him.
It was a fair child, stretched nearly lifeless on the rock, its breast heaving with thirst, its eyes closed, and its lips parched and burning.
Hans eyed it deliberately, drank, and passed on.
Hans struggled on.
The sun was sinking, but its descent seemed to bring no coolness; the leaden weight of the dead air pressed upon his brow and heart, but the goal was near.
He saw the cataract of the Golden River springing from the hillside, scarcely five hundred feet above him.
He paused for a moment to breathe, and sprang on to complete his task.
At this instant a faint cry fell on his ear.
He turned, and saw a gray haired old man extended on the rocks.
I am dying."
"I have none," replied Hans; "thou hast had thy share of life." He strode over the prostrate body, and darted on.
And a flash of blue lightning rose out of the east, shaped like a sword; it shook thrice over the whole heaven, and left it dark with one heavy, impenetrable shade.
The sun was setting; it plunged toward the horizon like a red hot ball.
He stood at the brink of the chasm through which it ran.
As he did so, an icy chill shot through his limbs: he staggered, shrieked, and fell.
The waters closed over his cry.
THE SHEATH.
He led the way to his room, and the curate followed.
Seated there, in the shadowy old attic, through the very walls of which the ivy grew, and into which, by the open window in the gable, from the infinite west, blew the evening air, carrying with it the precious scent of honeysuckle, to mingle with that of old books, Polwarth recounted and Wingfold listened to a strange adventure.
The trees hid the sky, and the little human nest was dark around them.
"I am going to make a confidant of you, mr Wingfold," said the dwarf, with troubled face, and almost whispered word.
"You will know how much I have already learned to trust you when I say that what I am about to confide to you plainly involves the secret of another."
His large face grew paler as he spoke, and something almost like fear grew in his eyes, but they looked straight into those of the curate, and his voice did not tremble.
"One night, some weeks ago-I can, if necessary, make myself certain of the date,--I was-no uncommon thing with me-unable to sleep.
I rose, dressed, and went out.
"It was a still, warm night, no moon, but plenty of star light, the wind blowing as now, gentle and sweet and cool-just the wind my lungs sighed for.
I got into the open park, avoiding the trees, and wandered on and on, without thinking where I was going.
The turf was soft under my feet, the dusk soft to my eyes, and the wind to my soul; I had breath and room and leisure and silence and loneliness, and everything to make me more than usually happy; and so I wandered on and on, neither caring nor looking whither I went: so long as the stars remained unclouded, I could find my way back when I pleased.
"I had been out perhaps an hour, when through the soft air came a cry, apparently from far off.
There was something in the tone that seemed to me unusually frightful.
The bare sound made me shudder before I had time to say to myself it was a cry.
I turned my face in the direction of it, so far as I could judge, and went on.
I cannot run, for, if I attempt it, I am in a moment unable even to walk-from palpitation and choking.
I stood and listened for a moment, but all seemed still as the grave.
I must go in, and see whether anyone was there in want of help.
You may well smile at the idea of my helping anyone, for what could I do if it came to a struggle?"
"On the contrary," interrupted Wingfold, "I was smiling with admiration of your pluck."
"At least," resumed Polwarth, "I have this advantage over some, that I cannot be fooled with the fancy that this poor miserable body of mine is worth thinking of beside the smallest suspicion of duty.
What is it but a cracked jug?
So down the slope I went, got into the garden, and made my way through the tangled bushes to the house.
I knew the place perfectly, for I had often wandered all over it, sometimes spending hours there.
Ere I could breathe again after it, the tall figure of a woman rushed past me, tearing its way through the bushes towards the door.
I followed instantly, saw her run up the steps, and heard her open and shut the door.
I cannot describe the horror of it.
I approached it softly, and finding that door inside a small closet, knew at once where I was. As I was in office on the ground, and it could hardly be any thing righteous that led to such an outcry in the house, which, although deserted, was still my master's, I felt justified in searching further into the matter.
Laying my ear therefore against the door, I heard what was plainly a lady's voice.
She soothed, she expostulated, she condoled, she coaxed.
I crept out of the house, and up to the higher ground.
But I had no longer any pleasure in the world.
I went straight home, and to bed again-but had brought little repose with me: I must do something-but what?
The only result certain to follow, was more trouble to the troubled already.
And the lady might be his wife, who had gone as soon as she could leave him to find help, but had failed.
There MUST be some simple explanation of the matter, however strange it showed!
I might, in the morning, be of service to them.
And partly comforted by the temporary conclusion, I got a little troubled sleep.
"As soon as I had had a cup of tea, I set out for the old house.
I heard the sounds of the workmen's hammers on the new one as I went.
All else was silence.
When I got into the garden I began to sing and knock the bushes about, then opened the door noisily, and clattered about in the hall and the lower rooms before going up the stair.
Along every passage and into every room I went, to give good warning ere I approached that in which I had heard the voices.
I knocked again.
Still no answer.
I opened it and peeped in.
There was no one there!
An old bedstead was all I saw.
"Would you mind taking care of it, mr Wingfold?" the gate keeper continued as the curate examined it; "I don't like having it.
I can't even bear to think of it even in the house, and yet I don't quite care to destroy it."
"I don't in the least mind taking charge of it," answered Wingfold.
Why should he think of her now?
Certainly he had never till then thought of her with the slightest interest, and why should she come up to him now?
Good heavens!
There was her brother ill!
And had not Faber said there seemed something unusual about the character of his illness?--What could it mean?--It was impossible of course-but yet-and yet-
"Do you think," he said, "we are in any way bound to inquire further into the affair?"
"If I had thought so, I should not have left it unmentioned till now," answered Polwarth.
Meantime I have the relief of the confessional."
Chapter nine.
Baskerville Hall, october fifteenth.
MY DEAR HOLMES: If I was compelled to leave you without much news during the early days of my mission you must acknowledge that I am making up for lost time, and that events are now crowding thick and fast upon us.
In my last report I ended upon my top note with Barrymore at the window, and now I have quite a budget already which will, unless I am much mistaken, considerably surprise you.
Things have taken a turn which I could not have anticipated.
In some ways they have within the last forty eight hours become much clearer and in some ways they have become more complicated.
But I will tell you all and you shall judge for yourself.
Before breakfast on the morning following my adventure I went down the corridor and examined the room in which Barrymore had been on the night before.
The western window through which he had stared so intently has, I noticed, one peculiarity above all other windows in the house-it commands the nearest outlook on to the moor.
It follows, therefore, that Barrymore, since only this window would serve the purpose, must have been looking out for something or somebody upon the moor.
The night was very dark, so that I can hardly imagine how he could have hoped to see anyone.
It had struck me that it was possible that some love intrigue was on foot.
That would have accounted for his stealthy movements and also for the uneasiness of his wife.
The man is a striking looking fellow, very well equipped to steal the heart of a country girl, so that this theory seemed to have something to support it.
That opening of the door which I had heard after I had returned to my room might mean that he had gone out to keep some clandestine appointment.
So I reasoned with myself in the morning, and I tell you the direction of my suspicions, however much the result may have shown that they were unfounded.
But whatever the true explanation of Barrymore's movements might be, I felt that the responsibility of keeping them to myself until I could explain them was more than I could bear.
He was less surprised than I had expected.
"I knew that Barrymore walked about nights, and I had a mind to speak to him about it," said he.
"Perhaps then he pays a visit every night to that particular window," I suggested.
"Perhaps he does.
I wonder what your friend Holmes would do if he were here."
"I believe that he would do exactly what you now suggest," said i "He would follow Barrymore and see what he did."
"But surely he would hear us."
"The man is rather deaf, and in any case we must take our chance of that.
We'll sit up in my room tonight and wait until he passes." Sir Henry rubbed his hands with pleasure, and it was evident that he hailed the adventure as a relief to his somewhat quiet life upon the moor.
The baronet has been in communication with the architect who prepared the plans for Sir Charles, and with a contractor from London, so that we may expect great changes to begin here soon.
There have been decorators and furnishers up from Plymouth, and it is evident that our friend has large ideas and means to spare no pains or expense to restore the grandeur of his family.
Between ourselves there are pretty clear signs that this will not be wanting if the lady is willing, for I have seldom seen a man more infatuated with a woman than he is with our beautiful neighbour, Miss Stapleton.
And yet the course of true love does not run quite as smoothly as one would under the circumstances expect.
Today, for example, its surface was broken by a very unexpected ripple, which has caused our friend considerable perplexity and annoyance.
After the conversation which I have quoted about Barrymore, Sir Henry put on his hat and prepared to go out.
As a matter of course I did the same.
"What, are you coming, Watson?" he asked, looking at me in a curious way.
"That depends on whether you are going on the moor," said i
"Yes, I am."
"Well, you know what my instructions are.
I am sorry to intrude, but you heard how earnestly Holmes insisted that I should not leave you, and especially that you should not go alone upon the moor."
Sir Henry put his hand upon my shoulder with a pleasant smile.
"My dear fellow," said he, "Holmes, with all his wisdom, did not foresee some things which have happened since I have been on the moor.
You understand me?
I am sure that you are the last man in the world who would wish to be a spoil sport.
I must go out alone."
It put me in a most awkward position.
I assure you my cheeks flushed at the very thought.
I hurried along the road at the top of my speed without seeing anything of Sir Henry, until I came to the point where the moor path branches off.
Thence I saw him at once.
It was clear that there was already an understanding between them and that they had met by appointment.
They were walking slowly along in deep conversation, and I saw her making quick little movements of her hands as if she were very earnest in what she was saying, while he listened intently, and once or twice shook his head in strong dissent.
I stood among the rocks watching them, very much puzzled as to what I should do next.
To follow them and break into their intimate conversation seemed to be an outrage, and yet my clear duty was never for an instant to let him out of my sight.
To act the spy upon a friend was a hateful task.
Still, I could see no better course than to observe him from the hill, and to clear my conscience by confessing to him afterwards what I had done.
Our friend, Sir Henry, and the lady had halted on the path and were standing deeply absorbed in their conversation, when I was suddenly aware that I was not the only witness of their interview.
A wisp of green floating in the air caught my eye, and another glance showed me that it was carried on a stick by a man who was moving among the broken ground.
It was Stapleton with his butterfly net.
He was very much closer to the pair than I was, and he appeared to be moving in their direction. At this instant Sir Henry suddenly drew Miss Stapleton to his side.
His arm was round her, but it seemed to me that she was straining away from him with her face averted.
He stooped his head to hers, and she raised one hand as if in protest.
Next moment I saw them spring apart and turn hurriedly round.
Stapleton was the cause of the interruption.
He was running wildly towards them, his absurd net dangling behind him.
He gesticulated and almost danced with excitement in front of the lovers. What the scene meant I could not imagine, but it seemed to me that Stapleton was abusing Sir Henry, who offered explanations, which became more angry as the other refused to accept them.
The lady stood by in haughty silence.
Finally Stapleton turned upon his heel and beckoned in a peremptory way to his sister, who, after an irresolute glance at Sir Henry, walked off by the side of her brother.
The naturalist's angry gestures showed that the lady was included in his displeasure.
I ran down the hill therefore and met the baronet at the bottom.
Where have you dropped from?" said he.
"You don't mean to say that you came after me in spite of all?"
I explained everything to him: how I had found it impossible to remain behind, how I had followed him, and how I had witnessed all that had occurred.
"I was on that hill."
"Quite in the back row, eh?
But her brother was well up to the front. Did you see him come out on us?"
"Yes, I did."
"I can't say that he ever did."
"I dare say not.
I always thought him sane enough until today, but you can take it from me that either he or I ought to be in a straitjacket. What's the matter with me, anyhow?
Tell me straight, now!
Is there anything that would prevent me from making a good husband to a woman that I loved?"
"I should say not."
"He can't object to my worldly position, so it must be myself that he has this down on.
And yet he would not so much as let me touch the tips of her fingers."
I tell you, Watson, I've only known her these few weeks, but from the first I just felt that she was made for me, and she, too-she was happy when she was with me, and that I'll swear. There's a light in a woman's eyes that speaks louder than words.
But he has never let us get together and it was only today for the first time that I saw a chance of having a few words with her alone.
She was glad to meet me, but when she did it was not love that she would talk about, and she wouldn't have let me talk about it either if she could have stopped it.
With that I offered in as many words to marry her, but before she could answer, down came this brother of hers, running at us with a face on him like a madman.
He was just white with rage, and those light eyes of his were blazing with fury.
What was I doing with the lady?
I tried one or two explanations, but, indeed, I was completely puzzled myself.
Our friend's title, his fortune, his age, his character, and his appearance are all in his favour, and I know nothing against him unless it be this dark fate which runs in his family.
However, our conjectures were set at rest by a visit from Stapleton himself that very afternoon.
He had come to offer apologies for his rudeness of the morning, and after a long private interview with Sir Henry in his study the upshot of their conversation was that the breach is quite healed, and that we are to dine at Merripit House next Friday as a sign of it.
"Did he give any explanation of his conduct?"
"His sister is everything in his life, he says.
That is natural enough, and I am glad that he should understand her value.
They have always been together, and according to his account he has been a very lonely man with only her as a companion, so that the thought of losing her was really terrible to him.
If she had to leave him he had rather it was to a neighbour like myself than to anyone else.
But in any case it was a blow to him and it would take him some time before he could prepare himself to meet it.
He would withdraw all opposition upon his part if I would promise for three months to let the matter rest and to be content with cultivating the lady's friendship during that time without claiming her love.
This I promised, and so the matter rests."
And now I pass on to another thread which I have extricated out of the tangled skein, the mystery of the sobs in the night, of the tear stained face of mrs Barrymore, of the secret journey of the butler to the western lattice window.
All these things have by one night's work been thoroughly cleared.
I have said "by one night's work," but, in truth, it was by two nights' work, for on the first we drew entirely blank.
I sat up with Sir Henry in his rooms until nearly three o'clock in the morning, but no sound of any sort did we hear except the chiming clock upon the stairs.
It was a most melancholy vigil and ended by each of us falling asleep in our chairs.
Fortunately we were not discouraged, and we determined to try again.
The next night we lowered the lamp and sat smoking cigarettes without making the least sound.
Very stealthily we heard it pass along until it died away in the distance.
Then the baronet gently opened his door and we set out in pursuit.
Softly we stole along until we had come into the other wing.
We were just in time to catch a glimpse of the tall, black bearded figure, his shoulders rounded as he tiptoed down the passage.
Then he passed through the same door as before, and the light of the candle framed it in the darkness and shot one single yellow beam across the gloom of the corridor.
We shuffled cautiously towards it, trying every plank before we dared to put our whole weight upon it.
We had taken the precaution of leaving our boots behind us, but, even so, the old boards snapped and creaked beneath our tread.
However, the man is fortunately rather deaf, and he was entirely preoccupied in that which he was doing.
When at last we reached the door and peeped through we found him crouching at the window, candle in hand, his white, intent face pressed against the pane, exactly as I had seen him two nights before.
We had arranged no plan of campaign, but the baronet is a man to whom the most direct way is always the most natural.
He walked into the room, and as he did so Barrymore sprang up from the window with a sharp hiss of his breath and stood, livid and trembling, before us.
His dark eyes, glaring out of the white mask of his face, were full of horror and astonishment as he gazed from Sir Henry to me.
I go round at night to see that they are fastened."
"On the second floor?"
"Look here, Barrymore," said Sir Henry sternly, "we have made up our minds to have the truth out of you, so it will save you trouble to tell it sooner rather than later.
Come, now!
No lies!
What were you doing at that window?"
I was holding a candle to the window."
"And why were you holding a candle to the window?"
"Don't ask me, Sir Henry-don't ask me!
If it concerned no one but myself I would not try to keep it from you."
And then I gave a cry of exultation, for a tiny pinpoint of yellow light had suddenly transfixed the dark veil, and glowed steadily in the centre of the black square framed by the window.
"There it is!" I cried.
"Move your light across the window, Watson!" cried the baronet.
"See, the other moves also!
Who is your confederate out yonder, and what is this conspiracy that is going on?"
The man's face became openly defiant.
"It is my business, and not yours. I will not tell."
"Very good, sir.
If I must I must."
"And you go in disgrace.
"No, no, sir; no, not against you!"
It was a woman's voice, and mrs Barrymore, paler and more horror struck than her husband, was standing at the door.
Her bulky figure in a shawl and skirt might have been comic were it not for the intensity of feeling upon her face.
"We have to go, Eliza.
This is the end of it.
You can pack our things," said the butler.
"Oh, john, john, have I brought you to this?
It is my doing, Sir Henry-all mine.
He has done nothing except for my sake and because I asked him."
"Speak out, then!
What does it mean?"
"My unhappy brother is starving on the moor.
We cannot let him perish at our very gates.
The light is a signal to him that food is ready for him, and his light out yonder is to show the spot to which to bring it."
"Then your brother is-"
"That's the truth, sir," said Barrymore.
"I said that it was not my secret and that I could not tell it to you.
But now you have heard it, and you will see that if there was a plot it was not against you."
This, then, was the explanation of the stealthy expeditions at night and the light at the window.
Sir Henry and I both stared at the woman in amazement.
Was it possible that this stolidly respectable person was of the same blood as one of the most notorious criminals in the country?
"Yes, sir, my name was Selden, and he is my younger brother.
From crime to crime he sank lower and lower until it is only the mercy of God which has snatched him from the scaffold; but to me, sir, he was always the little curly headed boy that I had nursed and played with as an elder sister would.
That was why he broke prison, sir.
He knew that I was here and that we could not refuse to help him.
When he dragged himself here one night, weary and starving, with the warders hard at his heels, what could we do?
We took him in and fed him and cared for him.
Then you returned, sir, and my brother thought he would be safer on the moor than anywhere else until the hue and cry was over, so he lay in hiding there. But every second night we made sure if he was still there by putting a light in the window, and if there was an answer my husband took out some bread and meat to him.
Every day we hoped that he was gone, but as long as he was there we could not desert him.
That is the whole truth, as I am an honest Christian woman and you will see that if there is blame in the matter it does not lie with my husband but with me, for whose sake he has done all that he has."
The woman's words came with an intense earnestness which carried conviction with them.
"Yes, Sir Henry.
Every word of it."
"Well, I cannot blame you for standing by your own wife.
Forget what I have said.
Go to your room, you two, and we shall talk further about this matter in the morning."
When they were gone we looked out of the window again.
Far away in the black distance there still glowed that one tiny point of yellow light.
"I wonder he dares," said Sir Henry.
"It may be so placed as to be only visible from here."
"Very likely.
How far do you think it is?"
"Not more than a mile or two off."
"Hardly that."
The same thought had crossed my own mind.
Their secret had been forced from them.
The man was a danger to the community, an unmitigated scoundrel for whom there was neither pity nor excuse.
Any night, for example, our neighbours the Stapletons might be attacked by him, and it may have been the thought of this which made Sir Henry so keen upon the adventure.
"I will come," said i
"Then get your revolver and put on your boots.
The sooner we start the better, as the fellow may put out his light and be off."
Now and again the moon peeped out for an instant, but clouds were driving over the face of the sky, and just as we came out on the moor a thin rain began to fall.
The light still burned steadily in front.
"Are you armed?" I asked.
"I have a hunting crop."
"We must close in on him rapidly, for he is said to be a desperate fellow.
We shall take him by surprise and have him at our mercy before he can resist."
"I say, Watson," said the baronet, "what would Holmes say to this?
How about that hour of darkness in which the power of evil is exalted?"
As if in answer to his words there rose suddenly out of the vast gloom of the moor that strange cry which I had already heard upon the borders of the great Grimpen Mire.
Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing.
The baronet caught my sleeve and his face glimmered white through the darkness.
"My God, what's that, Watson?"
"I don't know.
I heard it once before."
We stood straining our ears, but nothing came.
"Watson," said the baronet, "it was the cry of a hound."
My blood ran cold in my veins, for there was a break in his voice which told of the sudden horror which had seized him.
"Who?"
Why should you mind what they call it?"
"Tell me, Watson.
What do they say of it?"
I hesitated but could not escape the question.
He groaned and was silent for a few moments.
"It was hard to say whence it came."
"It rose and fell with the wind.
Isn't that the direction of the great Grimpen Mire?"
"Yes, it is."
"Well, it was up there.
Come now, Watson, didn't you think yourself that it was the cry of a hound?
I am not a child.
You need not fear to speak the truth."
"Stapleton was with me when I heard it last.
"No, no"
There was the footprint of the hound beside him as he lay.
It all fits together.
I don't think that I am a coward, Watson, but that sound seemed to freeze my very blood.
It was as cold as a block of marble.
"You'll be all right tomorrow."
"Shall we turn back?"
"No, by thunder; we have come out to get our man, and we will do it.
Come on!
We'll see it through if all the fiends of the pit were loose upon the moor."
We stumbled slowly along in the darkness, with the black loom of the craggy hills around us, and the yellow speck of light burning steadily in front.
It was strange to see this single candle burning there in the middle of the moor, with no sign of life near it-just the one straight yellow flame and the gleam of the rock on each side of it.
"What shall we do now?" whispered Sir Henry.
He must be near his light.
Let us see if we can get a glimpse of him."
The words were hardly out of my mouth when we both saw him.
Over the rocks, in the crevice of which the candle burned, there was thrust out an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions.
Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair, it might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillsides.
The light beneath him was reflected in his small, cunning eyes which peered fiercely to right and left through the darkness like a crafty and savage animal who has heard the steps of the hunters.
Something had evidently aroused his suspicions.
It may have been that Barrymore had some private signal which we had neglected to give, or the fellow may have had some other reason for thinking that all was not well, but I could read his fears upon his wicked face.
Any instant he might dash out the light and vanish in the darkness.
I sprang forward therefore, and Sir Henry did the same.
At the same moment the convict screamed out a curse at us and hurled a rock which splintered up against the boulder which had sheltered us.
I caught one glimpse of his short, squat, strongly built figure as he sprang to his feet and turned to run. At the same moment by a lucky chance the moon broke through the clouds. We rushed over the brow of the hill, and there was our man running with great speed down the other side, springing over the stones in his way with the activity of a mountain goat.
We were both swift runners and in fairly good training, but we soon found that we had no chance of overtaking him.
We ran and ran until we were completely blown, but the space between us grew ever wider. Finally we stopped and sat panting on two rocks, while we watched him disappearing in the distance.
And it was at this moment that there occurred a most strange and unexpected thing.
We had risen from our rocks and were turning to go home, having abandoned the hopeless chase.
There, outlined as black as an ebony statue on that shining background, I saw the figure of a man upon the tor.
Do not think that it was a delusion, Holmes.
I assure you that I have never in my life seen anything more clearly.
As far as I could judge, the figure was that of a tall, thin man.
He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him.
He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place. It was not the convict.
This man was far from the place where the latter had disappeared.
Besides, he was a much taller man.
With a cry of surprise I pointed him out to the baronet, but in the instant during which I had turned to grasp his arm the man was gone.
There was the sharp pinnacle of granite still cutting the lower edge of the moon, but its peak bore no trace of that silent and motionless figure.
The baronet's nerves were still quivering from that cry, which recalled the dark story of his family, and he was not in the mood for fresh adventures.
He had not seen this lonely man upon the tor and could not feel the thrill which his strange presence and his commanding attitude had given to me.
"A warder, no doubt," said he.
"The moor has been thick with them since this fellow escaped." Well, perhaps his explanation may be the right one, but I should like to have some further proof of it.
Such are the adventures of last night, and you must acknowledge, my dear Holmes, that I have done you very well in the matter of a report.
Much of what I tell you is no doubt quite irrelevant, but still I feel that it is best that I should let you have all the facts and leave you to select for yourself those which will be of most service to you in helping you to your conclusions.
We are certainly making some progress.
So far as the Barrymores go we have found the motive of their actions, and that has cleared up the situation very much.
But the moor with its mysteries and its strange inhabitants remains as inscrutable as ever.
Perhaps in my next I may be able to throw some light upon this also.
CHAPTER two
A great volume would not contain the record of them all.
The sight moved me as no great battle ever did afterward.
One half of the male population of Missouri was trying to kill the other half.
They were not opponents from different far off sections fighting, but near neighbors, and nothing seemed too awful or too cruel for them to do.
Now for months my regiment, with others, had chased up and down, and all over that unhappy old State of Missouri, trying to capture and punish these bands of murderers.
It was rare that we could catch them or have a real fight.
Their kind of war meant ambuscades and murder.
At last an end came to this dreadful guerrilla chasing business in Missouri so far as we were concerned, anyway.
We were to stop running after Price's ubiquitous army too.
The glad news came to my regiment that we were to be transferred to the South, where the real war was.
One morning we left the cold and snow, where we had lived and shivered in thin tents all the winter, left the thankless duty of patrolling railroads in the storm at midnight, and marched in the direction of saint Louis.
A long, cold, miserable march it was too, hurrying in the daytime and freezing in our bivouacs in the snow and woods at night.
Many a man we left to sicken and die at some farmhouse by the roadside.
Our destination was New Madrid, where we were to be a part of Pope's army in the siege and capture of that town.
As we were about to embark on boats at saint Louis we beheld in the snow and storm many steamers anchored out in the pitiless waters of the Mississippi River.
This army of prisoners taken in battle was his introduction to the world.
Shortly we were before New Madrid, and the siege conducted by General Pope commenced.
The town was defended by strong forts and many cannon, but its speedy capture by us helped to open up the Mississippi River.
It was a new experience to us, to have cannonballs come rolling right into our camp occasionally.
Yet few men were injured by them.
We were in more danger when a fool officer one day took our brigade of infantry down through a cornfield to assault a gunboat that lay in a creek close by.
The Rebel commander had expected us, and had his grape shot and his hot water hose, and such things all ready for us.
We went out of that cornfield faster than we went in.
I recall finding a dead Rebel officer, lying on a table in his tent, in full uniform.
A candle burned beside him, and his cold hands closed on a pencil note that said, "Kindly bury this unfortunate officer." His breakfast waited on a table in the tent, showing how unexpected was his taking off.
Our victory was a great one for the nation, and it put two stars on the shoulder straps of General Pope.
It made him, too, commander of the Eastern army.
A comrade in Company A of my regiment had been wounded a few days before and had died in the enemy's hands.
I now found his grave.
At its head stood a board with this curious inscription: "This man says he was a private in the Fifth Iowa Regiment.
He was killed while trying to attend to other people's business."
Our command was now hurried to the Shiloh battlefield, of course too late to be of any use.
But we took part in the long, wonderful, and ridiculous siege of Corinth, under Halleck, when our great army was held back by red tape, martinets, and the fear of a lot of wooden guns that sat on top of the enemy's breastworks, while that enemy, with all his men, and with all his guns, and bag and baggage, was escaping to the south.
Our deeds were no credit to anybody, though here and there we had a little fight.
One incident of great importance, however, happened to my regiment here. It was the death of our colonel.
The sentinel who did the killing declared that Rebels had been slipping up to his post all night, and when he would hail with "Who goes there?" they would fire at him and run into the darkness.
He resolved to stand behind a tree the next time and fire without hailing.
The bullet struck the colonel in the forehead, killing him instantly.
As he fell from his horse the adjutant sprang to the ground and cried, "Who shot the officer of the day?" "I fired," exclaimed the sentinel, and he then told of his experiences of the night.
He was arrested, tried, and acquitted.
Yet there were many among us who believed that the colonel had been intentionally murdered. He was one of the most competent colonels in the army, but among his soldiers he was fearfully unpopular.
He was, however, a splendid disciplinarian, but this was something the volunteers did not want.
In their minds the colonel had been only a petty tyrant, and not even wholly loyal.
With a different disposition he certainly would have been a distinguished soldier.
He was one of the most military looking men in the whole army, but friends he had none.
His body was brought into camp the next morning and lay in his tent in state.
After his death numbers of the men of the regiment were indignant, when they found among his papers warrants and commissions intended by the governor for them, commissions that had never been delivered.
Their promotions had never come about.
Now they knew why.
Worthington was succeeded by Colonel c l Matthies, one of the bravest, best, and most loved commanders of our army.
Later Matthies was made a general, and at the close of the war died of wounds received in battle.
Although I was quartermaster sergeant of the regiment, I was always careful that this should not keep me away from the command when enduring hard marches or when engagements were coming on.
I deserved no special credit for this.
I was only doing my duty.
We had muzzle loading Whitney rifles and bayonets.
The equipment and rations we carried in weight would have been a respectable load for a mule.
THE CACTUS
The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative.
That is what Trysdale was doing, standing by a table in his bachelor apartments.
On the table stood a singular looking green plant in a red earthen jar.
The plant was one of the species of cacti, and was provided with long, tentacular leaves that perpetually swayed with the slightest breeze with a peculiar beckoning motion.
Both men were in evening dress.
White favors like stars upon their coats shone through the gloom of the apartment.
As he slowly unbuttoned his gloves, there passed through Trysdale's mind a swift, scarifying retrospect of the last few hours.
It seemed that in his nostrils was still the scent of the flowers that had been banked in odorous masses about the church, and in his ears the lowpitched hum of a thousand well bred voices, the rustle of crisp garments, and, most insistently recurring, the drawling words of the minister irrevocably binding her to another.
From this last hopeless point of view he still strove, as if it had become a habit of his mind, to reach some conjecture as to why and how he had lost her.
Vanity and conceit?
These were the joints in his armor.
And how free from either she had always been-But why-
He had told himself that her paleness was from thoughts of another than the man to whom she was about to give herself.
But even that poor consolation had been wrenched from him.
For, when he saw that swift, limpid, upward look that she gave the man when he took her hand, he knew himself to be forgotten.
Once that same look had been raised to him, and he had gauged its meaning.
Indeed, his conceit had crumbled; its last prop was gone.
There had been no quarrel between them, nothing-
She had always insisted upon placing him upon a pedestal, and he had accepted her homage with royal grandeur.
As Trysdale grimly wrenched apart the seam of his last glove, the crowning instance of his fatuous and tardily mourned egoism came vividly back to him.
The scene was the night when he had asked her to come up on his pedestal with him and share his greatness.
He could not, now, for the pain of it, allow his mind to dwell upon the memory of her convincing beauty that night-the careless wave of her hair, the tenderness and virginal charm of her looks and words.
But they had been enough, and they had brought him to speak.
During their conversation she had said:
Why have you hidden this accomplishment from me?
Is there anything you do not know?"
Now, Carruthers was an idiot.
No doubt he (Trysdale) had been guilty (he sometimes did such things) of airing at the club some old, canting Castilian proverb dug from the hotchpotch at the back of dictionaries. Carruthers, who was one of his incontinent admirers, was the very man to have magnified this exhibition of doubtful erudition.
He allowed the imputation to pass without denial.
Without protest, he allowed her to twine about his brow this spurious bay of Spanish scholarship.
He let it grace his conquering head, and, among its soft convolutions, he did not feel the prick of the thorn that was to pierce him later.
He could have sworn, and he could swear now, that unmistakable consent was in her eyes, but, coyly, she would give him no direct answer.
"I will send you my answer to morrow," she said; and he, the indulgent, confident victor, smilingly granted the delay.
There was no note, no message, merely a tag upon the plant bearing a barbarous foreign or botanical name.
He waited until night, but her answer did not come.
His large pride and hurt vanity kept him from seeking her. Two evenings later they met at a dinner.
Their greetings were conventional, but she looked at him, breathless, wondering, eager.
He was courteous, adamant, waiting her explanation.
With womanly swiftness she took her cue from his manner, and turned to snow and ice. Thus, and wider from this on, they had drifted apart.
Where was his fault?
Who had been to blame?
Humbled now, he sought the answer amid the ruins of his self conceit.
If-
"I say, Trysdale, what the deuce is the matter with you?
You look unhappy as if you yourself had been married instead of having acted merely as an accomplice.
Look at me, another accessory, come two thousand miles on a garlicky, cockroachy banana steamer all the way from South America to connive at the sacrifice-please to observe how lightly my guilt rests upon my shoulders.
take something to ease your conscience."
"I don't drink just now, thanks," said Trysdale.
"Your brandy," resumed the other, coming over and joining him, "is abominable.
It's worth the trip. Hallo! here's an old acquaintance.
Wherever did you rake up this cactus, Trysdale?"
"A present," said Trysdale, "from a friend.
It's a tropical concern.
See hundreds of 'em around Punta every day.
Here's the name on this tag tied to it.
Know any Spanish, Trysdale?"
"No," said Trysdale, with the bitter wraith of a smile-"Is it Spanish?"
"Yes.
They call it by this name-Ventomarme.
JOSE THE BEAST SLAYER
He went to the Wise Man of the Forest to learn how best to bring her up, and this is what he was told:
You must give her meat which has no bones in it."
The king ordered a tower constructed in the deep forest.
It had no door, and only a little window.
Here the princess was placed.
The king himself took charge of this, so that he might be sure that there was no meat given her which had bones in it.
The years flew by, and at last the twelve year period was nearly up. Then the king went away one day and left the servants to carry food to the princess.
They were careless, and gave her meat which had a bone in it.
The little princess had grown very tired of being shut up in the tower of the forest.
"Ah," said she when she discovered the bone in her meat.
"At last I have something with which to make this little window larger.
I've tried in vain to make it bigger with my fingers."
She used the bone to dig away the wall each side of the window and soon the little opening had grown so large that the princess could lean her head out of it and look up at lofty trees.
That very day a duke passed that way on a hunting expedition and saw the beautiful princess in the tower.
Now that the princess had some one to help her make the hole larger it was an easy matter to make it big enough to escape.
That very night she ran away with the duke.
When the king returned from his journey he found the tower in the forest entirely empty.
He tried in vain to find out what had become of her, but there was no person who could tell him anything about her.
The princess had gone with the duke across a great river which no one else knew how to cross.
She lived in a big cave in the rocks, and after all the years in the tower it seemed a wonderful home indeed. She was never tired of admiring the trees and flowers of the forest and listening to the songs of the birds.
When at last her baby son was born she thought that she was the very happiest person in the whole world.
Now when the baby was two years old, the duke decided that they must take him to a hermitage to be baptized.
Then he returned for the princess, but on the way his foot slipped and he fell into the river.
The strong current bore him swiftly away, leaving the princess on one side of the river and her little son on the other.
"How shall I get across?" cried the princess when she saw what had happened.
"Don't worry, mother," replied the child.
"I'll come and get you."
To her amazement he crossed the great river in safety and bravely escorted his mother to the other bank in spite of her tears and cries of fear.
"You are indeed a son to be proud of!"
They went to a church and the boy was baptized.
The boy thrust in his arm and opened the door as if it had been his own.
"Walk in, mother dear," were his words.
Together they entered the house and together they explored the various rooms.
There was nobody there and there was nothing to eat. Accordingly, Jose went out begging.
He asked alms at the royal palace and there he was given money to buy food.
There was even enough left over to pay for a gun.
Now that he owned a gun there was no need of begging any more.
He shot plenty of game for his mother and what was left he carried to the royal palace to give to the king.
One day in the deep forest he entered a cave where the giant of the forest lived.
"What are you doing here, little penny chicken?" asked the huge giant as he frowned down at Jose.
"I may be a little penny chicken, but I'm not in the least afraid of giants," replied the boy boldly.
"What, a little penny chicken like you not afraid of me!" cried the giant as he picked him up roughly and set him on his neck.
Jose seized the giant's long beard and drew it around his neck so tightly that the giant fell to the floor dead.
"You must carry some of this to the king," said his mother when she saw it and had heard his story.
Accordingly, Jose carried the money as a gift to the king.
"A little lad," replied the king's servants.
"I'd like to see him."
Accordingly, the boy was led before the throne.
"What is your name, my lad?" asked the king kindly.
"I am called Jose the Beast Slayer, your majesty," replied the boy as he bowed low before the throne.
"Who are your parents?" asked the king.
"My father is dead," replied Jose, "and my mother is a princess who ran away from a tower in the forest."
It was the tale he liked best of all.
At the boy's words the king started and looked at him sharply.
"Tell me about this tower," he said eagerly.
"It was a tower in the deep forest," replied Jose.
This was because the Wise Man of the Forest had told her father that it was the best way to bring her up. One day her father went away and the servants gave her meat with a bone in it and-"
"I always suspected something like that," interrupted the king.
Jose looked at him in surprise.
The king nodded.
"Go on with your story, my boy," he said.
Jose told all the circumstances of his mother's escape from the tower, just as she had so often described them to him.
Tears were running down the king's cheeks when at last the story was ended.
"It is she who told me to carry the money to the king."
"Why did she never come to me?" asked the father.
"I think she was afraid she'd be punished for running away from the tower without any door," was Jose's reply.
When the princess was brought home to the royal palace there was a great feast held which lasted for three days and three nights.
They brought home so many bags of gold that it required the entire royal army to transport it.
And there, when they had taken their fill of food and drink, they kept awake all night waiting for the sons of Boreas.
I was infatuated aforetime, when in my folly I declared the will of Zeus in order and to the end.
For they are not firmly fixed with roots beneath, but constantly clash against one another to one point, and above a huge mass of salt water rises in a crest, boiling up, and loudly dashes upon the hard beach.
Wherefore now obey my counsel, if indeed with prudent mind and reverencing the blessed gods ye pursue your way; and perish not foolishly by a self sought death, or rush on following the guidance of youth.
First entrust the attempt to a dove when ye have sent her forth from the ship.
But if she flies onward and perishes midway, then do ye turn back; for it is better to yield to the immortals.
For ye could not escape an evil doom from the rocks, not even if Argo were of iron."
So high in the air does it rise turned towards the sea.
But what need is there that I should sin yet again declaring everything to the end by my prophetic art?
What shall I do, how shall I go over again such a long path through the sea, unskilled as I am, with unskilled comrades?
And Colchian Aea lies at the edge of Pontus and of the world."
But, my friends, take thought of the artful aid of the Cyprian goddess.
And further than this ask me not."
And quickly Aeson's son, with good will exceeding, addressed him:
But instead of that, may the god grant me death at once, and after death I shall take my share in perfect bliss."
To all alike, however poor he was that came, the aged man gave his oracles with good will, and freed many from their woes by his prophetic art; wherefore they visited and tended him.
The rest the old man pleased with words of wisdom and let them go; Paraebius only he bade remain there with the chiefs; and straightway he sent him and bade him bring back the choicest of his sheep.
Even as this man, loyal as he is, came hither to learn his fate.
But he was paying the sad penalty of his father's sin.
So to him the nymph thereafter made her death a curse, to him and to his children.
I indeed knew of the sin when he came; and I bid him build an altar to the Thynian nymph, and offer on it an atoning sacrifice, with prayer to escape his father's fate.
Here, ever since he escaped the god sent doom, never has he forgotten or neglected me; but sorely and against his will do I send him from my doors, so eager is he to remain with me in my affliction."
And up rose Jason and up rose the sons of Boreas at the bidding of the aged sire.
And quickly they called upon Apollo, lord of prophecy, and offered sacrifice upon the health as the day was just sinking.
And the younger comrades made ready a feast to their hearts' desire.
Thereupon having well feasted they turned themselves to rest, some near the ship's hawsers, others in groups throughout the mansion.
And afterwards they raised an altar to the blessed twelve on the sea beach opposite and laid offerings thereon and then entered their swift ship to row, nor did they forget to bear with them a trembling dove; but Euphemus seized her and brought her all quivering with fear, and they loosed the twin hawsers from the land.
Their spirit melted within them; and Euphemus sent forth the dove to dart forward in flight; and they all together raised their heads to look; but she flew between them, and the rocks again rushed together and crashed as they met face to face.
Next the current whirled the ship round.
For the rocks were again parting asunder.
But as they rowed they trembled, until the tide returning drove them back within the rocks.
Then most awful fear seized upon all; for over their head was destruction without escape.
For it seemed about to leap down upon the ship's whole length and to overwhelm them.
And the eddying current held her between the clashing rocks; and on each side they shook and thundered; and the ship's timbers were held fast. Then Athena with her left hand thrust back one mighty rock and with her right pushed the ship through; and she, like a winged arrow, sped through the air.
Nevertheless the rocks, ceaselessly clashing, shore off as she passed the extreme end of the stern ornament.
But Athena soared up to Olympus, when they had escaped unscathed.
And the rocks in one spot at that moment were rooted fast for ever to each other, which thing had been destined by the blessed gods, when a man in his ship should have passed between them alive.
For they deemed that they were saved from Hades; and Tiphys first of all began to speak:
Son of Aeson, no longer fear thou so much the hest of thy king, since a god hath granted us escape between the rocks; for Phineus, Agenor's son, said that our toils hereafter would be lightly accomplished."
And quickly they sighted and sailed past his shrine and the broad banks of the river and the plain, and deep flowing Calpe, and all the windless night and the day they bent to their tireless oars.
And even as ploughing oxen toil as they cleave the moist earth, and sweat streams in abundance from flank and neck; and from beneath the yoke their eyes roll askance, while the breath ever rushes from their mouths in hot gasps; and all day long they toil, planting their hoofs deep in the ground; like them the heroes kept dragging their oars through the sea.
Helpless amazement seized them as they looked; and no one dared to gaze face to face into the fair eyes of the god.
And now I bid you propitiate him with the steam of sacrifice and libations.
Be gracious, O king, be gracious in thy appearing."
And none but Leto, daughter of Coeus, strokes them with her dear hands.
Next, on the opposite side they saw and passed the mouth of the river Sangarius and the fertile land of the Mariandyni, and the stream of Lycus and the Anthemoeisian lake; and beneath the breeze the ropes and all the tackling quivered as they sped onward.
During the night the wind ceased and at dawn they gladly reached the haven of the Acherusian headland.
It rises aloft with steep cliffs, looking towards the Bithynian sea; and beneath it smooth rocks, ever washed by the sea, stand rooted firm; and round them the wave rolls and thunders loud, but above, wide spreading plane trees grow on the topmost point.
And from it towards the land a hollow glen slopes gradually away, where there is a cave of Hades overarched by wood and rocks.
From here an icy breath, unceasingly issuing from the chill recess, ever forms a glistening rime which melts again beneath the midday sun
And never does silence hold that grim headland, but there is a continual murmur from the sounding sea and the leaves that quiver in the winds from the cave.
For indeed the river saved them with their ships when they were caught in a violent tempest.
And so they went up all together into the city, and all that day with friendly feelings made ready a feast within the palace of Lycus and gladdened their souls with converse.
And with a sharp cry the hero fell to the ground; and as he was struck his comrades flocked together with answering cry.
For then a second time the heroes heaped up a barrow for a comrade dead.
The tale goes that Tiphys son of Hagnias died; nor was it his destiny thereafter to sail any further.
But him there on the spot a short sickness laid to rest far from his native land, when the company had paid due honours to the dead son of Abas.
And at the cruel woe they were seized with unbearable grief.
For when with due honours they had buried him also hard by the seer, they cast themselves down in helplessness on the sea shore silently, closely wrapped up, and took no thought for meat or drink; and their spirit drooped in grief, for all hope of return was gone.
Not so much for my prowess in war did Jason take me with him in quest of the fleece, far from Parthenia, as for my knowledge of ships.
Wherefore, I pray, let there be no fear for the ship.
But quickly tell forth all this and boldly urge them to call to mind their task."
Wherefore let us not delay our attempt, but rouse yourselves to the work and cast away your griefs."
For those whom we once deemed to be men of skill, they even more than I are bowed with vexation of heart.
And after him Erginus and Nauplius and Euphemus started up, eager to steer. But the others held them back, and many of his comrades granted it to Ancaeus.
And quickly with the oars they passed out through the river Acheron and, trusting to the wind, shook out their sails, and with canvas spread far and wide they were cleaving their passage through the waves in fair weather.
And for a time they went no further, for Persephone herself sent forth the spirit of Actor's son which craved with many tears to behold men like himself, even for a moment.
And mounting on the edge of the barrow he gazed upon the ship, such as he was when he went to war; and round his head a fair helm with four peaks gleamed with its blood red crest.
And again he entered the vast gloom; and they looked and marvelled; and Mopsus, son of Ampycus, with word of prophecy urged them to land and propitiate him with libations.
Quickly they drew in sail and threw out hawsers, and on the strand paid honour to the tomb of Sthenelus, and poured out drink offerings to him and sacrificed sheep as victims.
And besides the drink offerings they built an altar to Apollo, saviour of ships, and burnt thigh bones; and Orpheus dedicated his lyre; whence the place has the name of Lyra.
For he longed for her love, and he promised to grant her whatever her hearts desire might be.
And she in her craftiness asked of him virginity.
No river is like this, and none sends forth from itself such mighty streams over the land.
If a man should count every one he would lack but four of a hundred, but the real spring is only one.
This flows down to the plain from lofty mountains, which, men say, are called the Amazonian mountains.
For they dwelt not gathered together in one city, but scattered over the land, parted into three tribes.
The concurrence of these two national assemblies served, no doubt, to increase the king's power over the people, and raised him to an authority more absolute than any prince in a simple monarchy, even by means of military force, is ever able to attain.
But there are certain bounds, beyond which the most slavish submission cannot be extended.
It seemed unjust to abolish pious institutions for the faults, real or pretended, of individuals.
Even the most moderate and reasonable deemed it somewhat iniquitous, that men who had been invited into a course of life by all the laws, human and divine, which prevailed in their country, should be turned out of their possessions, and so little care be taken of their future subsistence.
As Cromwell's person was little acceptable to the ecclesiastics, the authority which he exercised, being so new, so absolute, so unlimited, inspired them with disgust and terror.
He published, in the king's name, without the consent either of parliament or convocation, an ordinance by which he retrenched many of the ancient holy days; prohibited several superstitions gainful to the clergy, such as pilgrimages, images, relics; and even ordered the incumbents in the parishes to set apart a considerable portion of their revenue for repairs and for the support of exhibitioners and the poor of their parish.
The secular priests, finding themselves thus reduced to a grievous servitude, instilled into the people those discontents which they had long harbored in their own bosoms.
The first rising was in Lincolnshire.
He sent forces against the rebels, under the command of the duke of Suffolk; and he returned them a very sharp answer to their petition.
There were some gentry whom the populace had constrained to take part with them, and who kept a secret correspondence with Suffolk. They informed him, that resentment against the king's reply was the chief cause which retained the malecontents in arms, and that a milder answer would probably suppress the rebellion.
This expedient had its effect: the populace was dispersed: Mackrel and some of their leaders fell into the king's hands, and were executed: the greater part of the multitude retired peaceably to their usual occupations: a few of the more obstinate fled to the north, where they joined the insurrection that was raised in those parts.
The northern rebels, as they were more numerous, were also on other accounts more formidable than those of Lincolnshire; because the people were there more accustomed to arms, and because of their vicinity to the Scots, who might make advantage of these disorders.
The earls of Huntingdon, Derby, and Rutland imitated his example.
The duke of Norfolk was appointed general of the king's forces against the northern rebels; and as he headed the party at court which supported the ancient religion, he was also suspected of bearing some favor to the cause which he was sent to oppose.
His prudent conduct, however, seems to acquit him of this imputation.
He encamped near Doncaster, together with the earl of Shrewsbury; and as his army was small, scarcely exceeding five thousand men, he made choice of a post where he had a river in front, the ford of which he purposed to defend against the rebels.
It was agreed that two gentlemen should be despatched to the king with proposals from the rebels; and Henry purposely delayed giving an answer, and allured them with hopes of entire satisfaction, in expectation that necessity would soon oblige them to disperse themselves.
Norfolk, therefore, soon found himself in the same difficulty as before; and he opened again a negotiation with the leaders of the multitude.
The demands of the rebels were so exorbitant, that Norfolk rejected them; and they prepared again to decide the contest by arms.
But while they were preparing to pass the ford, rain fell a second time in such abundance, as made it impracticable for them to execute their design; and the populace, partly reduced to necessity by want of provisions, partly struck with superstition at being thus again disappointed by the same accident, suddenly dispersed themselves.
He published, however, a manifesto against the rebels, and an answer to their complaints; in which he employed a very lofty style, suited to so haughty a monarch.
"And we," he added, "with our whole council, think it right strange that ye, who be but brutes and inexpert folk, do take upon you to appoint us who be meet or not for our council."
Every place was full of jealousy and complaints.
Lord Hussey was found guilty, as an accomplice in the insurrection of Lincolnshire, and was executed at Lincoln.
Lord Darcy, though he pleaded compulsion, and appealed for his justification to a long life spent in the service of the crown, was beheaded on Tower Hill.
Before his execution, he accused Norfolk of having secretly encouraged the rebels; but Henry, either sensible of that nobleman's services, and convinced of his fidelity or afraid to offend one of such extensive power and great capacity, rejected the information.
Soon after this prosperous success, an event happened which crowned Henry's joy-the birth of a son, who was baptized by the name of Edward.
The prince, not six days old, was created prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall, and earl of Chester.
Sir Edward Seymour, the queen's brother, formerly made Lord Beauchamp, was raised to the dignity of earl of Hertford.
Sir William Fitz Williams, high admiral, was created earl of Southampton; Sir William Paulet, Lord saint John; Sir john Russel, Lord Russel.
Henry continued desirous of cementing a union with the German Protestants; and for that purpose he sent Christopher Mount to a congress which they held at Brunswick; but that minister made no great progress in his negotiation.
Henry would by no means acknowledge any error in these particulars; and was displeased that they should pretend to prescribe rules to so great a monarch and theologian.
He found arguments and syllogisms enough to defend his cause; and he dismissed the ambassadors without coming to any conclusion.
There was only one particular in which Henry was quite decisive; because he was there impelled by his avarice, or, more properly speaking, his rapacity, the consequence of his profusion: this measure was the entire destruction of the monasteries.
Anew visitation was appointed of all the monasteries in England; and a pretence only being wanted for their suppression, it was easy for a prince, possessed of such unlimited power, and seconding the present humor of a great part of the nation, to find or feign one.
The abbots and monks knew the danger to which they were exposed; and having learned by the example of the lesser monasteries that nothing could withstand the king's will, they were most of them induced, in expectation of better treatment, to make a voluntary resignation of their houses.
Some, also, having secretly embraced the doctrine of the reformation, were glad to be freed from their vows; and on the whole, the design was conducted with such success, than in less than two years the king had got possession of all the monastic revenues.
The males of all ranks, if endowed with industry might be of service to the public; and none of them could want employment suited to his station and capacity.
THE CURTAIN FALLS.
FOR the rest of the day, and through the night, I was kept a close prisoner in my room, watched by a man on whose fidelity my father could depend.
The next morning I made an effort to escape, and was discovered before I had got free of the house.
Useless!
The woman was suspected and followed, and the letter was taken from her.
My father tore it up with his own hands.
Later in the day, my mother was permitted to see me.
She was quite unfit, poor soul, to intercede for me, or to serve my interests in any way.
My father had completely overwhelmed her by announcing that his wife and his son were to accompany him, when he returned to America.
He has raised money in London; he has let the house to some rich tradesman for seven years; he has sold the plate, and the jewels that came to me from his mother.
We have no home, George, and no choice but to go with him."
An hour afterward the post chaise was at the door.
My father himself took me to the carriage.
I broke away from him, with a desperation which not even his resolution could resist.
I ran, I flew, along the path that led to Dermody's cottage.
The door stood open; the parlor was empty.
I went into the kitchen; I went into the upper rooms. Solitude everywhere.
The bailiff had left the place; and his mother and his daughter had gone with him.
No friend or neighbor lingered near with a message; no letter lay waiting for me; no hint was left to tell me in what direction they had taken their departure.
After the insulting words which his master had spoken to him, Dermody's pride was concerned in leaving no trace of his whereabouts; my father might consider it as a trace purposely left with the object of reuniting Mary and me.
I had no keepsake to speak to me of my lost darling but the flag which she had embroidered with her own hand.
The furniture still remained in the cottage.
I sat down in our customary corner, by Mary's empty chair, and looked again at the pretty green flag, and burst out crying.
A light touch roused me.
"We shall not find Mary here, George," she said, gently.
Come with me."
I rose and silently gave her my hand.
Something low down on the clean white door post caught my eye as we passed it.
I stooped, and discovered some writing in pencil.
I looked closer-it was writing in Mary's hand! The unformed childish characters traced these last words of farewell:
"Good by, dear.
Don't forget Mary."
I knelt down and kissed the writing.
It comforted me-it was like a farewell touch from Mary's hand.
I followed my mother quietly to the carriage.
Late that night we were in London.
My good mother did all that the most compassionate kindness could do (in her position) to comfort me.
She privately wrote to the solicitors employed by her family, inclosing a description of Dermody and his mother and daughter and directing inquiries to be made at the various coach offices in London.
She also referred the lawyers to two of Dermody's relatives, who lived in the city, and who might know something of his movements after he left my father's service.
When she had done this, she had done all that lay in her power.
We neither of us possessed money enough to advertise in the newspapers.
A week afterward we sailed for the United States.
With this the first epoch in my love story comes to an end.
For ten long years afterward I never again met with my little Mary; I never even heard whether she had lived to grow to womanhood or not.
I still kept the green flag, with the dove worked on it.
For the rest, the waters of oblivion had closed over the old golden days at Greenwater Broad.
CHAPTER twenty seven
CLARA'S RETURN
This afternoon her pause on each landing was longer than usual, for a yellow fog, which mocked the pale glimmer of gas jets on the staircase, made her gasp asthmatically.
She reached the door at length, and being too much exhausted to search her pocket for the latchkey, knocked for admission. Amy Hewett opened to her, and she sank on a chair in the first room, where the other two Hewett children were bending over 'home lessons' with a studiousness not altogether natural.
mrs Eagles had a shrewd eye; having glanced at Annie and Tom with a discreet smile, she turned her look towards the elder girl, who was standing full in the lamplight.
'Come here, Amy,' she said after a moment's scrutiny.
'Why, I haven't touched a drop, mrs Eagles!'
You're a silly girl, that's what you are!'
Of late Amy Hewett had become the victim of a singular propensity; whenever she could obtain vinegar, she drank it as a toper does spirits.
Inadequate nourishment, and especially an unsatisfied palate, frequently have this result in female children among the poor; it is an anticipation of what will befall them as soon as they find their way to the publichouse.
Having administered a scolding, mrs Eagles went into the room which she and her husband occupied.
It was so encumbered with furniture that not more than eight or ten square feet of floor can have been available for movement.
On the bed sat mr Eagles, a spare, large headed, ugly, but very thoughtful looking man; he and Sidney Kirkwood had been acquaintances and fellow workmen for some years, but no close intimacy had arisen between them, owing to the difference of their tastes and views.
Long before there existed a 'Financial Reform Almanack,' Eagles practically represented that work in his own person.
'There it is in black and white!' But Sidney's faculties were quite unequal to calculations of this kind, and Eagles could never summon resolve to explain his schemes before an audience.
Indefatigably he worked on, and the work had to be its own reward.
He was busy in the usual way this afternoon, as he sat on the bed, coatless, a trade journal open on his knees.
His wife never disturbed him; she was a placid, ruminative woman, generally finding the details of her own weekly budget quite a sufficient occupation.
When she had taken off her bonnet and was turning out the contents of her bag, Eagles remarked quietly:
'They'll have a bad journey.'
'What a day for her to be travelling all that distance, poor thing!
The truth of the situation was, that john had received by post, from he knew not whom, a newspaper report of the inquest held on the body of Grace Danver, wherein, of course, was an account of what had happened to Clara Vale; in the margin was pencilled, 'Clara Vale's real name is Clara Hewett.' An hour after receiving this john encountered Sidney Kirkwood.
They read the report together.
Before the coroner it had been made public that the dead woman was in truth named Rudd; she who was injured refused to give any details concerning herself, and her history escaped the reporters.
Harbouring no doubt of the information thus mysteriously sent him-the handwriting seemed to be that of a man, but gave no further hint as to its origin-Hewett the next day journeyed down into Lancashire, Sidney supplying him with money.
One consolation alone offered itself in the course of Hewett's inquiries; Clara, if she recovered, would not have lost her eyesight.
The fluid had been thrown too low to effect the worst injury; the accident of a trembling hand, of a movement on her part, had kept her eyes untouched.
Necessity brought the father back to London almost at once, but the news sent him at brief intervals continued to be favourable.
Now that the girl could be removed from the infirmary, there was no retreat for her but her father's home.
The children were aware that an all but forgotten sister was returning to them, and that she had been very ill; they promised quietude.
Amy set the tea table in order, and kept the kettle ready. . . .
The knock for which they were waiting!
mrs Eagles withdrew into her own room; Amy went to the door.
A tall figure, so wrapped and veiled that nothing but the womanly outline could be discerned, entered, supported by john Hewett.
'Is there a light in the other room, Amy?' john inquired in a thick voice.
'Yes, father.'
He led the muffled form into the chamber where Amy and Annie slept.
The door closed, and for several minutes the three children stood regarding each other, alarmed, mute.
Then their father joined them.
He looked about in an absent way, slowly drew off his overcoat, and when Amy offered to take it, bent and kissed her cheek.
The girl was startled to hear him sob and to see tears starting from his eyes.
Turning suddenly away, he stood before the fire and made a pretence of warming himself; but his sobs overmastered him.
'Shall I pour out the tea, father?' Amy ventured to ask, when there was again perfect silence.
'Haven't you had yours?' he replied, half facing her.
'Get it, then-all of you.
Yes, you can pour me out a cup-and put another on the little tray.
Is this stuff in the saucepan ready?' 'mrs Eagles said it would be in five minutes.'.
'All right.
He went to mrs Eagles' room and talked there for a short time. Presently mrs Eagles herself came out and silently removed from the saucepan a mixture of broth and meat.
Having already taken the cup of tea to Clara, Hewett now returned to her with this food.
She was sitting by the fire, her face resting upon her hands.
The lamp was extinguished; she had said that the firelight was enough.
john deposited his burden on the table, then touched her shoulder gently and spoke in so soft a voice that one would not have recognised it as his.
Here's somethin' as has been made particular.
After travellin'--just a spoonful or two.'
Clara expressed reluctance.
'I don't feel hungry, father.
Presently, perhaps.'
'Well, well; it do want to cool a bit.
Do you feel able to sit up?'
'Yes.
Don't take so much trouble, father.
I'd rather you left me alone.'
The tone was not exactly impatient; it spoke a weary indifference to everything and every person.
'Yes, I'll go away, dear.
But you'll eat just a bit?
If you don't like this, you must tell me, and I'll get something you could fancy.'
'It'll do well enough.
I'll eat it presently; I promise you.'
john hesitated before going.
'Clara-shall you mind Amy and Annie comin' to sleep here?
If you'd rather, we'll manage it somehow else.'
'no
What does it matter?
They can come when they like, only they mustn't want me to talk to them.'
He went softly from the room, and joined the children at their tea.
Overcome at first by the dark aspect of this home coming, he now began to taste the joy of having Clara under his roof, rescued alike from those vague dangers of the past and from the recent peril.
Impossible to separate the sorrow he felt for her blighted life, her broken spirit, and the solace lurking in the thought that henceforth she could not abandon him.
Never a word to reproach her for the unalterable; it should be as though there were no gap between the old love and its renewal in the present.
For Clara used to love him, and already she had shown that his tenderness did not appeal to her in vain; during the journey she had once or twice pressed his hand in gratitude.
How well it was that he had this home in which to receive her!
Half a year ago, and what should he have done?
He would not admit to himself that there were any difficulties ahead; if it came to that, he would manage to get some extra work in the evening and on Saturday afternoons.
He would take Sidney into council.
But thereupon his face darkened again, and he lost himself in troubled musing.
Clara sat by the fireside, in her attitude of last night, hiding her face as far as she was able.
The beauty of her form would have impressed anyone who approached her, the grace of her bent head; but the countenance was no longer that of Clara Hewett; none must now look at her, unless to pity. Feeling herself thus utterly changed, she could not speak in her former natural voice; her utterance was oppressed, unmusical, monotonous.
When her father had taken a place near her she asked him, 'Have you got that piece of newspaper still?'
He had, and at her wish produced it.
Clara held it in the light of the fire, and regarded the pencilled words closely.
Hewett took her hand, and for a while they kept silence.
'Do you live comfortably here, father?' she said presently.
'We do, Clara.
It's a bit high up, but that don't matter much.'
'You've got new furniture.'
'Yes, some new things.
The old was all done for, you know.'
'And where did you live before you came here?'
'Oh, we had a place in King's Cross Road-it wasn't much of a place, but I suppose it might a' been worse.'
'And that was where-?'
'Yes-yes-it was there.'
'And how did you manage to buy this furniture?' Clara asked, after a pause.
'Well, my dear, to tell you the truth-it was a friend as-an old friend helped us a bit.'
'You wouldn't care to say who it was?'
john was gravely embarrassed.
Clara moved her head a little, so as to regard him, but at once turned away, shrinkingly, when she met his eyes.
'Why don't you like to tell me, father?
Was it mr Kirkwood?'
'Yes, my dear, it was.'
Neither spoke for a long time.
Clara's head sank lower; she drew her hand away from her father's, and used it to shield her face.
When she spoke, it was as if to herself.
'I suppose he's altered in some ways?'
'Not much; I don't see much change, myself, but then of course- No, he's pretty much the same.'
'He's married, isn't he?
Why, what made you think that.
Clara?
No, not he.
He had to move not long ago; his lodgin's is in Red Lion Street now.'
'And does he ever come here?'
'He has been-just now an' then.'
'Have you told him?'
'Why-yes, dear-I felt I had to.'
'There's no harm.
You couldn't keep it a secret.
But he mustn't come whilst I'm here; you understand that, father?'
He shall never come, if you don't wish it.'
'Only whilst I'm here.'
'Oh no! Do you think I'm going to burden you all the rest of my life?
I shall find some way of earning a living, and then I shall go and get a room for myself.'
'Now don't-now don't talk like that!' exclaimed her father, putting his hand on her.
'You shall do what else you like, my girl, but don't talk about goin' away from me.
That's the one thing as I couldn't bear. I ain't so young as I was, and I've had things as was hard to go through-I mean when the mother died and-and other things at that time.
Let you an' me stay by each other whilst we may, my girl.
You won't speak about goin' away?'
She remained mute.
Shadows from the firelight rose and fell upon the walls of the half darkened room.
'If you went,' he continued, huskily, 'I should be afraid myself.
I haven't told you.
I've broke myself off that; but if you was to leave me-I've had hard things to go through.
Do you know the Burial Club broke up just before she died?
I couldn't get not a ha'penny!
You may think how I felt, Clara, with her lyin' there, and I hadn't got as much as would pay for a coffin.
It was Sidney Kirkwood found the money-he did!
Things is better with me now, but I'd rather beg my bread in the streets than you should go away.
Don't be afraid, my dearest.
I promise you nobody shan't come near.
You won't mind mrs Eagles; she's very good to the children.
Edmund Drake his father, was one of those clergy who devote themselves to the education of the people.
His poverty was only equalled by the respect which was felt for his character.
Burdened with a family as he was, the father of Francis Drake found himself obliged from necessity to allow his son to embrace the maritime profession, for which he had an ardent longing, and to serve as cabin boy on board a coasting vessel which traded with Holland.
Industrious, active, self reliant, and saving, the young Francis Drake had soon acquired all the theoretical knowledge needed for the direction of a vessel.
When he had realized a small sum, which was increased by the sale of a vessel bequeathed to him by his first master, he made more extended voyages; he visited the Bay of Biscay and the Gulf of Guinea, and laid out all his capital in purchasing a cargo which he hoped to sell in the West Indies.
But no sooner had he arrived at Rio de la Hacha, than both ship and cargo were confiscated, we know not under what frivolous pretext. All the remonstrances of Drake, who thus saw himself ruined, were useless.
He vowed to avenge himself for such a piece of injustice, and he kept his word.
In fifteen sixty seven, two years after this adventure, a small fleet of six vessels, of which the largest was of seven hundred tons' burden, left Plymouth with the sanction of the Queen, to make an expedition to the Coasts of Mexico.
Drake was in command of a ship of fifty tons.
Then they besieged La Mina, where some more negroes were taken, which they sold at the Antilles.
Hawkins, doubtless by the advice of Drake, captured the town of Rio de la Hacha; after which he reached saint Jean d'Ulloa, having encountered a fearful storm.
But the harbour contained a numerous fleet, and was defended by formidable artillery. The English fleet was defeated, and Drake had much difficulty in regaining the English coast in January, fifteen sixty eight.
Drake afterwards made two expeditions to the West Indies for the purpose of studying the country.
The two vessels had as crew seventy three jack tars, who could be thoroughly depended on.
Unfortunately these enterprises were not carried out without much cruelty and many acts of violence which would make men of the present day blush.
But we will not dwell upon the scenes of piracy and barbarity which are only too frequently met with in the sixteenth century.
After assisting in the suppression of the rebellion in Ireland, Drake, whose name was beginning to be well known, was presented to Queen Elizabeth.
Francis Drake started from Plymouth on the fifteenth of november fifteen seventy seven.
They also had the face painted and diversified by several kinds of colours, and they each held a bow in the hand, from which every time they drew it, they discharged two arrows.
For this there is more than one good reason.
There exists in Patagonia more than one tribe, and the description here given by Drake of the savages whom he met, does not at all resemble that given by Pigafetta of the Patagonians of Port saint Julian.
On the following day he reached the harbour of saint Julian, where he found a gibbet erected of yore by Magellan for the punishment of some rebellious members of his crew.
Was his guilt thoroughly proved?
If Drake were accused upon his return to England-in spite of the moderation which he always evinced towards his men,--of having taken advantage of the opportunity to get rid of a rival whom he dreaded, it is difficult to conceive that the forty judges who pronounced the sentence should have concerted together to further the secret designs of their admiral and condemn an innocent man.
On the twentieth of August, the fleet, now reduced to three vessels-two of the ships having been so much damaged that they were at once destroyed by the admiral-entered the strait, which had not been traversed since the time of Magellan.
During a descent upon the island of Mocha, the English had two men killed and several wounded, while Drake himself, hit by two arrows on the head, found himself utterly unable to punish the Indians for their perfidy.
In the harbour of Valparaiso he captured a vessel richly laden with the wines of Chili, and with ingots of gold valued at thirty seven thousand ducats; afterwards he pillaged the town, which had been precipitately abandoned by its inhabitants.
At Coquimbo, the people were forewarned of his approach, so that he found there a strong force, which obliged him to re embark.
For this, there were three different routes open to him: he might again pass the Strait of Magellan, or he might cross the Southern Sea, and doubling the Cape of Good Hope might so return to the Atlantic Ocean, or he could sail up the coast of China and return by the Frozen Sea and the North Cape.
It was this last alternative, as being the safest of the three, which was adopted by Drake.
He therefore put out to sea, reached the thirty eight degrees of north latitude, and landed on the shore of the Bay of San Francisco, which had been discovered three years previously by Bodega.
It was now the month of June, the temperature was very low, and the ground covered with snow.
The details given by Drake of his reception by the natives, are curious enough: "When we arrived, the savages manifested great admiration at the sight of us, and thinking that we were gods, they received us with great humanity and reverence."
"As long as we remained, they continued to come and visit us, sometimes bringing us beautiful plumes made of feathers of divers colours, and sometimes petun (tobacco) which is a herb in general use among the Indians.
Then they made a long discourse after the manner of a harangue, and when they had finished, they laid aside their bows and arrows in that place, and approached us to offer their presents."
"The first time they came their women remained in the same place, and scratched and tore the skin and flesh of their cheeks, lamenting themselves in a wonderful manner, whereat we were much astonished. But we have since learnt that it was a kind of sacrifice which they offered to us."
The facts given by Drake with regard to the Indians of California are almost the only ones which he furnishes upon the manners and customs of the nations which he visited.
We would draw the reader's attention here, to that custom of long harangues which the traveller especially remarks, just as Cartier had observed upon it forty years earlier, and which is so noticeable amongst the Canadian Indians at the present day.
Drake did not advance farther north and gave up his project of returning by the Frozen Sea.
On the thirteenth of October, fifteen seventy nine, Drake arrived in latitude eight degrees north, at a group of islands of which the inhabitants had their ears much lengthened by the weight of the ornaments suspended to them; their nails were allowed to grow, and appeared to serve as defensive weapons, while their teeth, "black as ship's pitch," contracted this colour from the use of the betel nut.
On the morrow, some of the sailors who had landed, were present at a council.
"When the king arrived, a rich umbrella or parasol all embroidered in gold was borne before him.
He wore as an ornament upon the head, a kind of turban made of the same stuff, all worked in fine gold and enriched with jewels and tufts.
On his neck there hung a fine gold chain many times doubled, and formed of broad links.
On his fingers, he had six rings of very valuable stones, and his feet were encased in shoes of morocco leather."
After quitting this richly endowed island, Drake landed at Greater Java, where he was very warmly welcomed by the five kings amongst whom the island was partitioned, and by the inhabitants.
The reception which awaited him in England was at first extremely cold.
His having fallen by surprise both upon Spanish towns and ships, at a time when the two nations were at peace, rightly caused him to be regarded by a portion of society as a pirate, who tramples under foot the rights of nations.
For five months the Queen herself, under the pressure of diplomatic proprieties, pretended to be ignorant of his return.
But at the end of that time, either because circumstances had altered, or because she did not wish to show herself any longer severe towards the skilful sailor, she repaired to Deptford where Drake's ship was moored, went on board, and conferred the honour of knighthood upon the navigator.
From this period Drake's part as a discoverer is ended, and his after life as a warrior and as the implacable enemy of the Spaniards does not concern us.
To him pertains the honour of having been the second to pass through the Strait of Magellan, and to have visited Tierra del Fuego as far as the parts about Cape Horn.
He also ascended the coast of North America to a point higher than any his predecessors had attained, and he discovered several islands and archipelagos.
Being a very clever navigator, he made the transit through the Strait of Magellan with great rapidity.
If there are but very few discoveries due to him, this is probably either because he neglected to record them in his journal, or because he often mentions them in so inaccurate a manner that it is scarcely possible to recognize the places.
It was he who inaugurated that privateering warfare by which the English, and later on the Dutch, were destined to inflict much injury upon the Spaniards.
And the large profits accruing to him from it, encouraged his contemporaries, and gave birth in their minds to the love for long and hazardous voyages.
Among all those who took example by Drake, the most illustrious was undoubtedly Thomas Cavendish or Candish.
Cavendish joined the English marine service at a very early age; and passed a most stormy youth, during which he rapidly dissipated his modest fortune.
That which play had robbed him of, he resolved to recover from the Spaniards.
Having in fifteen eighty five obtained letters of mark, he made a cruise to the East Indies and returned with considerable booty.
Encouraged by his easy success as a highwayman on the great maritime roads, he thought that if he could acquire some honour and glory while engaged in making his fortune, so much the better would it be for him.
Setting sail on the twenty second of july fifteen eighty six, he passed by the Canaries, and landed at Sierra Leone, which town he attacked and plundered; then, sailing again, he crossed the Atlantic, sighted Cape Sebastian in Brazil, sailed along the coast of Patagonia, and arrived on the twenty seventh of november at Port Desire.
He found there an immense quantity of dog fish, very large, and so strong that four men could with difficulty kill them, and numbers of birds, which, having no wings, could not fly, and which fed upon fish.
They are classed under the general names of auks and penguins.
In this very secure harbour, the ships were drawn up on shore to be repaired. During his stay at this place Cavendish had some skirmishes with the Patagonians,--"men of gigantic size, and having feet eighteen inches long"--who wounded two of the sailors with arrows tipped with sharpened flints.
This town, which had been built to bar the passage through the strait, had possessed no fewer than four forts as well as several churches.
Cavendish could discern the fortress, then deserted and already falling into ruins.
Its inhabitants, who had been completely prevented by the continual attacks of the savages from gathering in their harvests, had died of hunger, or had perished in endeavouring to reach the Spanish settlements in Chili.
The Admiral, upon hearing this lamentable tale, changed the name of Philippeville into that of Port Famine, under which appellation the place is known at the present day.
Not far from thence a fine river fell into the sea, on the banks of which dwelt the anthropophagi who had fought so fiercely with the Spaniards, and who endeavoured, but in vain, to entice the Englishmen into the interior of the country.
This country, rich in gold and silver, had hitherto successfully resisted all Spanish attempts to subjugate it, and its inhabitants, fully determined to maintain their liberty, repulsed by force of arms every attempt to land.
It was necessary therefore to go to the island of saint Maria, where the Indians, who took the Englishmen for Spaniards, furnished them with abundance of maize, fowls, sweet potatoes, pigs, and other provisions.
A party of thirty musketeers advanced into the country and met with oxen, cows, wild horses, hares, and partridges in abundance.
The little troop was attacked by the Spaniards, and Cavendish was obliged to return to his ships after losing twelve of his men.
Then, "victorious and contented," Cavendish wished to secure the great spoils which he was conveying against any chance of danger.
At the end of two years after his return, of all the great fortune which he had brought back with him, there remained only a sum sufficient for the fitting out of a third, and as it proved, a last expedition.
Assailed by fearful hurricanes in the Strait of Magellan, Cavendish was obliged to go back, after having seen himself deserted by three of his ships. The want of fresh provisions, the cold, and the privations of all kinds which he underwent, and which had decimated his crew, forced him to return northwards along the coast of Brazil, where the Portuguese opposed every attempt at landing.
The commander in chief of this squadron was Oliver de Noort, a man at that time about thirty or thereabouts, and well known as having made several long cruising voyages.
His second in command and vice admiral was Jacob Claaz d'Ulpenda, and as pilot there was a certain Melis, a skilful sailor of English origin.
For this object, De Noort was to show his countrymen the route inaugurated by Magellan, and on the way to inflict as much injury as he could upon the Spaniards and Portuguese.
The route which was the least frequented by the enemy's ships was that by the Strait of Magellan, and this was the one which De Noort was ordered to follow.
De Noort, who was furious over this foul play, landed from his ships one hundred twenty men; but he found the Portuguese so well entrenched, that after a brisk skirmish in which seventeen more of his men were either killed or wounded, he was obliged to weigh anchor without having been able to avenge the wicked and cowardly perfidy to which his brother and twelve of his companions had fallen victims.
De Noort had scarcely cast anchor in the Bay of Rio Janeiro before he sent some sailors on shore to obtain water and buy provisions from the natives; but the Portuguese opposed the landing, and killed eleven men.
The putting into port at this place was marked by several disagreeable events.
The flag ship struck upon a rock with so much violence that had the sea been a little rougher, she must have been lost.
There were also some bloody and barbarous executions of mutinous sailors, notably that of a poor man, who having wounded a pilot with a knife thrust, was condemned to have his hand nailed to the mainmast.
The invalids, of whom there were many on board the fleet, were brought on shore, and nearly all were cured by the end of a fortnight.
The Dutch saw also, but at too great a distance to shoot them, buffalos, stags, and ostriches, and from a single nest they obtained ten ostrich eggs.
Captain Jacob Jansz Huy de Cooper, died during the stay at this place, and was interred at Port Desire.
Nevertheless, could anything be more cruel than to abandon a man in a desert country, without arms and without provisions, to put him on shore in a country peopled by ferocious cannibals, prepared to make a repast on his flesh; what was it but condemning him to a horrible death?
On the twenty ninth of February, sixteen hundred, De Noort, after having been ninety nine days in passing through the strait, came out on to the Pacific Ocean.
As for De Noort, who had now with him only one yacht besides his own vessel, he cast anchor at the island of Mocha, and, unlike the experience of his predecessors, he was very well received by the natives.
Afterwards he sailed along the coast of Chili, where he was able to obtain provisions in abundance in exchange for Nuremberg knives, hatchets, shirts, hats, and other articles of no great value.
After ravaging, plundering, and burning several towns on the Peruvian coast, after sinking all the vessels that he met with, and amassing a considerable booty, De Noort, hearing that a squadron commanded by the brother of the viceroy, Don Luis de Velasco, had been sent in pursuit of him, judged it time to make for the Ladrone Islands, where he anchored on the sixteenth of September.
One of them, having succeeded in climbing along a part of the rigging, had the audacity to enter a cabin and seize upon a sword, with which he threw himself into the sea.
The Spaniards lost more than two hundred men, for their flag ship caught fire and sank.
We have now to speak of a man who, endowed with eminent qualities and with at least equal defects, carried on his life's work in divers, sometimes even in opposing directions, and who after having reached the highest summit of honour to which a gentleman could aspire, at last laid his head upon a scaffold, accused of treason and felony.
This man is Sir Walter Raleigh.
If he have any claim to a place in this portrait gallery of great sailors, it is neither as founder of any English colony nor as a sailor; it is as a discoverer, and what we have to say of him is not to his credit.
At this period England was passing through a very grave economic crisis.
The practice of agriculture was undergoing a transformation; in all directions grazing was being substituted for tillage, and the number of agricultural labourers was greatly reduced by the change.
From thence arose general distress, and also such a surplussage of population as was fast becoming a matter of anxious concern.
At the same time, to long wars succeeds a peace, destined to endure throughout the reign of Elizabeth, so that a great number of adventurers know not how to find indulgence for their love of violent emotions.
At this moment, therefore, arises the necessity for such an emigration as may relieve the country of its population, may permit all the miserable people dying of hunger to provide for their own wants in a new country, and by that means may increase the influence and prosperity of the mother country.
But it is to the last named that belongs the credit of indicating the locality suitable for the establishing of colonies.
Raleigh only joined with his brothers in the scheme, following their lead, but he neither conceived nor began the carrying into execution-as he has been too often credited with doing-of this fruitful project, the colonization of the American shores of the Atlantic.
He gives up and sells his patent as soon as he perceives the inutility of his efforts, while he does not forget to reserve for himself the fifth part of any profit arising eventually from the colony.
To his mind, this is a gigantic enterprise of which the marvellous results are destined to draw upon him the attention of the whole world, and to restore to him the favour of his sovereign.
"They are," says this great traveller, "rocks of micaceous slate, and of sparkling talc, which are resplendent in the midst of a sheet of water, which acts as a reflector beneath the burning tropical sun" So are explained those massive domes of gold, those obelisks of silver, and all those marvels of which the boastful and enthusiastic minds of the Spaniards afforded them a glimpse.
Was he thoroughly convinced himself, or did he not yield to the illusions of a mind eager for glory?
What he took good care, however, not to confide to the public, was that all the information he received from his emissary was unfavourable to the enterprise.
After stopping four days at Fortaventura, one of the Canaries, to take in wood and water there, he reached Teneriffe, where Captain Brereton ought to have rejoined him.
Having waited for him in vain for eighty days, Raleigh sailed for Trinidad, where he met Whiddon.
The island of Trinidad was at that time governed by Don Antonio de Berreo, who, it is said, had obtained accurate information concerning Guiana.
The arrival of the English did not please him, and he immediately despatched emissaries to Cumana and to Margarita, with orders to gather together the troops to attack the Englishmen, while at the same time he forbade any Indians or Spaniards to hold intercourse with them under pain of death.
Raleigh, forewarned, determined to be beforehand with him.
At the same time arrived Captains Gifford and Knynin, from whom he had been separated upon the Spanish Coasts.
The account which Raleigh gives of his campaign is so fabulous, with the coolness of a Gascon transported to the banks of the Thames, he so heaps one falsehood upon the top of another, that one is almost tempted to class his narrative amongst the number of imaginary voyages.
He says that some Spaniards who had seen the town of Manoa, called El Dorado, told him that this town exceeds in size and wealth all the towns in the world, and everything which the "conquistadores" had seen in America.
"There is no winter there," he says; "a soil dry and fertile, with game, and birds of every species in great abundance, who filled the air with hitherto unknown notes; it was a real concert for us.
My captain, sent to search for mines, perceived veins both of gold and silver; but as he had no tool but his sword, he was unable to detach these metals to examine them in detail; however, he carried away several bits of them which he reserved for future examination.
Whiddon and Milechappe, our surgeon, brought back several stones which resembled sapphires.
He depicted these people as much civilized, as wearing clothes, and possessing great riches, especially in plates of gold; finally, he spoke to him of a mountain of pure gold.
Raleigh relates that he wished to approach this mountain, but, sad mischance, it was at that moment half submerged. "It had the form of a tower, and appeared to me rather white than yellow.
A torrent which precipitated itself from the mountain, swollen by the rains, made a tremendous noise, which could be heard at the distance of many miles, and which deafened our people.
I had, however, some doubt as to the value of these stones; their extraordinary whiteness, nevertheless surprised me.
If we put on one side all these figments of an imagination run mad, what gain has been derived for geography?
PART two.
OF PROPRIETY OF DEPORTMENT IN REGARD TO OUR SOCIAL RELATIONS.
CHAPTER one
They also, as they pass, ought to bow politely to you.
Further,--a young man of good breeding should promptly offer his hand to ladies, even if they are not acquaintances, when they pass such a place.
Any person, particularly a lady, who walks in this improper manner, whatever her education may be in other respects, will always appear awkward and clumsy.
With the right hand she should hold together the folds of her gown, and draw them towards the right side.
To raise the dress on both sides, and with both hands, is vulgar.
This ungraceful practice can be tolerated only for a moment, when the mud is very deep.
The direction being given us, we should thank them, at the same time bowing.
If you are a man, and a lady or distinguished person asks this favor of you, you should take off your hat while answering them.
This opinion, which obtains among some persons, is an error.
When we meet, in the street, a person of our acquaintance, we salute them by bowing and uncovering ourselves, if there is occasion.
During this interview, which should be very short, the speaker of least importance ought to take the lower part of the side walk, in order to keep the person with whom he is conversing, from the neighborhood of the carriages.
We will add, that at Paris, a young man ought to avoid approaching, and even saluting a young lady of his acquaintance, out of regard to the natural timidity of her sex.
This civility becomes a rigorous duty if they are accompanied by a lady.
CHAPTER thirty seven.
MARGARET'S LETTER.
He told his mother that he and his betrothed had parted; but he would tell no more.
"I have been cruelly disappointed, mother, and the subject is very bitter to me," he said; and mrs Austin had not the courage to ask any further questions.
But I can afford to be contented, Clement, so long as I have you with me."
Clement went back to London.
His life seemed to have altogether slipped away from him, and he felt like an old man who has lost all the bright chances of existence; the hope of domestic happiness and a pleasant home; the opportunity of a useful career and an honoured name; and who has nothing more to do but to wait patiently till the slow current of his empty life drops into the sea of death.
"I feel so old, mother," he said, sometimes; "I feel so old."
Clement Austin felt this, and yet he had no heart to begin life again, though tempting offers came to him from great commercial houses, whose chiefs were eager to secure the well-known cashier of Messrs.
Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby's establishment.
Poor Clement could not go into the world yet.
He wasted hour after hour, and day after day, in gloomy thoughts about the past.
This girl, who seemed the very incarnation of purity and candour, had her price, perhaps, as well as other people, and Henry Dunbar had bought the silence of his victim's daughter.
"It was the knowledge of this business that made her shrink away from me that night when she told me that she was a contaminated creature, unfit to be the associate of an honest man Oh, Margaret, Margaret!
poverty must indeed be a bitter school if it has prepared you for such degradation as this!"
The longer Clement thought of the subject, the more certainly he arrived at the conclusion that Margaret Wilmot had been, either bribed or frightened into silence by Henry Dunbar.
It might be that the banker had terrified this unhappy girl by some awful threat that had preyed upon her mind, and driven her from the man who loved her, whom she loved perhaps, in spite of those heartless words which she had spoken in the bitter hour of their parting.
Again and again he went over the same ground, trying to find some lurking circumstance, no matter how unlikely in its nature, which should explain and justify Margaret's conduct.
At last, by dint of going over the ground again and again, always pleading Margaret's cause against the stern witness of cruel facts, Clement came to look upon the girl's innocence as a settled thing.
There was a mystery, and Henry Dunbar was at the bottom of it.
"There will be no peace for us until the secret of the deed done in the grove near Winchester has been brought to light."
This thought, working night and day in Clement Austin's brain, gave rise to a fixed resolve.
Before he went back to the quiet routine of life, he set himself a task to accomplish, and that task was the solution of the Winchester mystery.
On the very day after this resolution took a definite form, Clement received a letter from Margaret Wilmot.
The sight of the well-known writing gave him a shock of mingled surprise and hope, and his fingers were faintly tremulous as they tore open the envelope.
The letter was carefully worded, and very brief.
Henry Dunbar was not the murderer of my father.
As Heaven is my witness, this is the truth, and I know it to be the truth.
Let this knowledge content you, and allow the secret of the murder to remain for ever a mystery upon earth, God knows the truth, and has doubtless punished the wretched sinner who was guilty of that crime, as He punishes every other sinner, sooner or later, in the course of His ineffable wisdom.
"MARGARET WILMOT."
"No, Margaret," he thought; "even your pleading shall not turn me from my purpose.
Besides, how can I tell in what manner this letter may have been written?
It may have been written at Henry Dunbar's dictation, and under coercion.
Be it as it may, the mystery of the Winchester murder shall be set at rest, if patience or intelligence can solve the enigma. No mystery shall separate me from the woman I love."
He was a man whose appearance was something between the aspect of a shabby genteel half pay captain and an unlucky stockbroker: but Clement liked the steady light of his small grey eyes, and the decided expression of his thin lips and prominent chin.
The detective business happened to be rather dull just now.
"I'll look up a file of newspapers, and run my eye over the details of the case," said the detective.
"I was away in Glasgow, hunting up the particulars of the great Scotch plaid robberies, all last summer, and I can't say I remember much of what was done in the Wilmot business.
mr Dunbar himself offered a reward for the apprehension of the guilty party, didn't he?"
"Yes; but that might be a blind."
You must always look at these sort of things from every point of view.
Start with a conviction of the man's guilt, and you'll go hunting up evidence to bolster that conviction.
My plan is to begin at the beginning; learn the alphabet of the case, and work up into the syntax and prosody."
"I should like to help you in this business," Clement Austin said, "for I have a vital interest in the issue of the case."
"You're rather more likely to hinder than help, sir," mr Carter answered, with a smile; "but you're welcome to have a finger in the pie if you like, as long as you'll engage to hold your tongue when I tell you."
The detective called upon him two days after the interview at Scotland Yard.
"I've read up the Wilmot case, sir," mr Carter said; "and I think the next best thing I can do is to see the scene of the murder.
"Then I'll go with you," Clement said, promptly.
"So be it, mr Austin.
"I can spare an hour-I can spare the whole morning, mr Powlett.
"Well, I thought I would just step over and speak to you," Hiram began, in a slow, puzzled sort of a way.
"You know what I was telling you the other day about my girl?"
"That's it; that's it," Hiram said, stroking his chin, thoughtfully, "that murder is at the bottom of it.
She came in yesterday afternoon as white as a sheet, and fainted right off at the door.
I shouldn't think so much of that, because she has often fainted since her illness, but that wasn't all. When her mother got her round she went upstairs to her room, and didn't come down again.
There is not much in that, you would say; after a girl has fainted she likes to lie quiet a bit; but she didn't lie quiet.
She is going about the house again this morning, but that white and still that it is cruel to look at her.
I feel that myself, but there is no one in the village I should like to open my mind to about ruth, and seeing that you are father of a girl about the same age, and that I feel you are a true sort of a man, I come to you.
If I did, I would cut my tongue out before I would speak a word.
She has always been a good girl: not one of your light sort, but earnest and steady.
I believe she has got some secret or other that is just wearing her out, and if we can't get to the bottom of it I don't believe ruth will see Christmas," and Hiram Powlett wiped his eyes violently.
Well, we shall see; we shall see.
I will be off back again to my work now; I feel all the better for having had this talk with you.
She found her quiet and pale.
Why, now, to look at you, I should have thought you could hardly have known what trouble meant, you always seem so bright and happy; that's what ruth has said, again and again."
"They tried to kill me, and I killed them.
"That cannot be all," ruth whispered; "there must be something more to tell, Mary."
"I will tell you another time, ruth," Mary said, in equally low tones, and then rising, put on her hat again, said good bye, and went out.
It quite made my flesh creep; didn't it yours?"
I never did hear such expressions!"
The two girls accordingly went back to the cottage.
ruth, who for a long time had scarcely taken up a needle, sat with her hands before her.
"Yes, but I can't help it.
Now, after what you said to me the other night, I don't know what to do.
The girl shook her head.
ruth Powlett did not speak for a minute or two, then she said, slowly:
"Oh, Mary, how terrible!" ruth said, pitifully, "how terrible!
ruth had given a little gasp as Mary Armstrong began, then she sat rigid and immovable.
"It was Captain Mervyn," she said, at last, in a low whisper.
"You shall not be," ruth said, more firmly than she had before spoken. "You shall not be, Mary.
And now, having told you this first, so that you should not think too hardly of me, I will tell you all."
"I firmly believe," ruth said, "he would have murdered me had he not heard people coming along the road." Then she told how she found the open knife stained with blood at Margaret Carne's bedside, and how she had hidden it.
"My love seemed to have been killed.
I would have told then, but I did not know who to tell it to, or what good it could do if told.
It has been dreadful," she said, wanly.
Who shall I go to first?"
I must speak to my father, and he will think it over, and perhaps he will write and ask Ronald how he would like it done.
"It was all wrong and wicked," ruth said, "and it will be quite right if they punish me; but that would be nothing to what I have suffered lately.
"You need not be afraid about that," Mary said, laying her hand assuringly on Ruth's shoulder.
"Why, child, you have been a benefactor to us both!
"What is it?" mr Armstrong asked in surprise.
"ruth Powlett nearly knocked me down in the passage, and rushed off without even the ordinary decency of apologising."
I am thankful, indeed, my child; how did it all come about?"
"Yes, there's no doubt about it this time," her father said.
"As you say, there could be no mistake about the knife, because she had given it to him herself, and had had his initials engraved upon it at Plymouth.
I don't think any reasonable man could have a doubt that the scoundrel did it; and now, my dear, what is to be done next?"
I think Ronald ought to be consulted."
"You think he knows a great deal better what ought to be done than I do?"
The Cape mail touched at Plymouth yesterday."
"Why did you not tell me of it before, father?" the girl said, reproachfully.
Besides, as this is the fourth that you have had since you have been here, it is not of such extreme importance."
"What is it, my dear; has he changed his mind and married a Kaffir woman?
"Well, my dear, that would be serious; at least I should have thought you would consider it so."
However, it cannot be helped.
This complicates matters a good deal."
Anyhow, we must go cautiously to work.
It is a grave question altogether, Mary, and at any rate we will wait.
"I think so too, father.
"I don't, my dear.
I came in an hour ago, expecting to find tea ready, and there are no signs of it visible.
And so three days afterwards a full account of all that ruth Powlett had said, and of the circumstances of the case, was despatched to "Sergeant Blunt, Cape Mounted Rifles, Kaffirland."
HOW THE ANCIENT IRISH EXCELLED IN MUSIC.
From the very earliest ages Irish musicians were celebrated for their skill, not only in their own country but all over Europe.
Our native literature, whether referring to pagan or Christian times, is full of references to music and to skilful musicians, who are always spoken of in terms of the utmost respect.
Everywhere through the Records we find evidences that the ancient Irish, both high and low, were passionately fond of music.
It was mixed up with their daily home life, and formed part of their amusements, meetings, and celebrations of every kind.
In the religious tales music is always one of the delights of heaven; and a chief function of the angels who attend on God is to chant music of ineffable sweetness to Him, which they generally do in the shape of beautiful white birds.
At a later time it was quite common among the Welsh bards to come over to Ireland to receive instruction from the Irish harpers.
Ireland was long the school for Scottish harpers also, who regularly came over, like those of Wales, to finish their musical education-a practice which continued down to about one hundred fifty years ago.
From that period, in spite of wars and troubles, music continued to be cultivated, and there was an unbroken succession of great professional harpers, till the end of the eighteenth century, when, for want of encouragement in the miserable condition of the country under the penal laws, the race died out.
The Harp is mentioned in the earliest Irish literature: it is constantly mixed up with our oldest legends; and it was in use from the remotest pagan times.
The old Irish harps were of a medium size, or rather small, the average height being about thirty inches: and some were not much more than half that height.
They had strings of brass wire which were tuned by a key, not very different from the present tuning key.
It had a body like a flat drum, to which at one side was attached a short neck: the strings were stretched across the flat face of the drum and along the neck: and were tuned and regulated by pins or keys and a bridge.
Harpers and timpanists were honoured in Ireland beyond all other musicians; and their rights and privileges were even laid down in the law. Kings had always harpers in their service, who resided in the palaces and were well paid for their services.
But the bagpipe was the great favourite of the common people.
The form in use was what we now call the Highland or Scotch pipes-slung from the shoulder: the bag inflated by the mouth.
On many of the great stone crosses are sculptured harp players and pipe players, from which we learn a great deal about the shapes and sizes of the several instruments.
In the National Museum in Dublin is a collection of twenty six ancient trumpets, varying in length from eight feet down to eighteen inches.
Among the household of every king and chief there was a band of trumpeters-as there were harpers-who were assigned their proper places at feasts and meetings.
Trumpets were used for various purposes:--in war; in hunting; for signals during meetings and banquets; as a mark of honour on the arrival of distinguished visitors; and such like.
For war purposes, trumpeters had different calls for directing movements-for battle, for unyoking, for marching, for halting, for retiring to sleep, for going into council, and so forth.
The musical branch figures much in Irish romantic literature.
The music of ancient Ireland consisted wholly of short airs, each with two strains or parts-seldom more.
Such airs are now known as lullabies, or nurse tunes, or cradle songs, of which numerous examples are preserved in collections of Irish music.
They were usually sung to put children to sleep.
There were special spinning wheel songs, which the women sang, with words, in chorus or in dialogue, when employed in spinning.
At milking time the girls were in the habit of chanting a particular sort of air, in a low gentle voice.
This practice was common down to fifty or sixty years ago; and I well remember seeing cows grow restless when the song was interrupted, and become again quiet and placid when it was resumed.
The same custom was common in the Highlands of Scotland.
While ploughmen were at their work they whistled a sweet, slow, and sad strain, which had as powerful an effect in soothing the horses at their hard labour as the milking songs had on the cows: and these Plough whistles also were quite usual till about half a century ago.
Special airs and songs were used during working time by smiths, by weavers, and by boatmen.
In most cases words suitable to the several occasions were sung with lullabies, laments, and occupation tunes.
Examples of all the preceding classes of melodies will be found in the collections of Irish airs by Bunting, Petrie, and Joyce.
The Irish had numerous war marches, which the pipers played at the head of the clansmen when marching to battle, and which inspired them with courage and dash for the fight.
The man who did most in modern times to draw attention to Irish music was Thomas Moore.
He composed his exquisite songs to old Irish airs.
Of the entire body of Irish airs that are preserved, we know the authors of only a very small proportion; and these were composed within the last two hundred years.
THE WANDERERS
That night they slept at a cottage where the people were kind to them, and all the next day they walked on and on.
At sunset they stopped to rest in a churchyard, where two men were sitting patching a Punch and Judy show booth, while the figures of Punch, the doctor, the executioner and the devil were lying on the grass waiting to be mended.
The men were mending the dolls very badly, so little Nell took a needle and sewed them all neatly.
It was the second day of the races before a chance came, and then, while the showmen's backs were turned, they slipped away in the crowd to the open fields again.
These alarms and the exposure had begun to affect the old man.
He seemed to understand that he was not wholly in his right mind.
The pale old schoolmaster sat smoking in the garden.
He made them sleep in the school room that night, and he begged them to stay longer next day, but little Nell was anxious to get as far as possible from London and from the dwarf, who she was all the time in fear might find them.
So they bade the schoolmaster good by and walked on.
They had almost reached another village when they came to a tiny painted house on wheels with horses to draw it.
As the wheels rattled on the old man fell asleep, and the stout lady made little Nell sit by her and talk.
But it was easy to see that they were not ordinary beggars, and she was kind hearted and wanted to help them.
So, after much thought, she asked little Nell if they would take a situation with her.
She explained that the child's duty would be to point out the wax figures to the visitors and tell their names, while her grandfather could help dust them.
They accepted this offer very thankfully (for almost all the money they had brought was now spent), and when the wagon arrived at the place of exhibition and the waxwork had been set up, mrs Jarley put a long wand in little Nell's hand and taught her to point out each figure and describe it:
"This, ladies and gentlemen," little Nell learned to say, "is Jasper Packlemerton, who murdered fourteen wives by tickling the soles of their feet," or, "this is Queen Elizabeth's maid of honor, who died from pricking her finger while sewing on Sunday."
She was quick to learn and soon became a great favorite with the visitors.
He made her give him the money she had earned from the waxwork, joined the gamblers and in a few hours had lost it all.
This she had to change into silver and to pay a part for their lodging.
When she was abed she could not sleep for fear of the wicked men she had seen gambling.
When at last she fell asleep she waked suddenly to see a figure in the room.
She was too frightened to scream, and lay very still and trembled. The robber searched her clothing, took the rest of the money and went out.
She was dreadfully afraid he might return to harm her.
If she could get to her grandfather, she thought, she would be safe.
She caught a view of his face and then she knew that the figure was her own grandfather, and that, crazed by the gambling scene, he himself had robbed her!
She knew, to be sure, that her grandfather was not a thief and that he did not know what he was doing when he stole her money; but she knew, too, that if people found out he was crazy they would take him away from her and shut him up where she could not be with him, and of this she could not bear to think.
This, she soon knew, he gambled away, for often he was out all night, and even seemed to shun her; so she was sad and took many long walks alone through the fields.
One, she saw, was her grandfather, and the others were the gamblers with whom he had played at the inn on the night of the storm.
Little Nell crept close.
They were tempting the poor daft old man to steal the money from mrs Jarley's strong box, and while she listened he consented.
She ran home in terrible grief.
She tried to sleep, but could not.
At last she could bear it no longer.
She went to the old man's room and wakened him.
I can not stay!
We must go."
He dressed himself in fear, and with her little basket on her arm she led him out of the house, on, away from the town, into the country, far away from mrs Jarley, who had been so kind to them, and from the new home they had found.
The place to which they finally came was a town of wretched workmen who toiled all day in iron furnaces for little wages, and were almost as miserable and hungry as the wanderers themselves.
They begged, but no one would help them.
The child's strength was almost gone, when they met a traveler who was reading in a book as he walked along.
He looked up as they came near.
When she saw him little Nell shrieked and fell unconscious at his feet.
The schoolmaster carried her to an inn near by, where she was put to bed and doctored under his care, for she was very weak.
She told him all the story of their wanderings, and he heard it with astonishment and wonder to find such a great heart and heroism in a child.
He had been appointed schoolmaster, he told her, in another town, to which he was then on his way, and he declared they should go with him and he would care for them.
The child sewed the tattered curtains and mended the worn carpet and the schoolmaster trimmed the long grass and trained the ivy before the door. In the evening a bright fire was kindled and they all three took their supper together, and then the schoolmaster said a prayer before they went gladly to bed.
They were very happy in this new home.
So the weeks passed into winter, and though she came soon to know that she was not long for earth, she thought of death without regret and of heaven with joy.
One of these was Quilp, the ugly dwarf.
He had loaned the grandfather more money than the shop would bring, and he made up his mind now that the old man had a secret hoard somewhere, which might be his if he could find it.
He soon learned that if Kit knew anything about it he would not tell, so he and his lawyer (a sleek, oily rascal named Brass) made many plans for finding them.
But for a long time Quilp could get no trace.
Another who tried to find them was a curious lodger who roomed in Brass's house.
He kept in his room a big box like trunk, in which was a silver stove that he used to cook his meals.
The stove had a lot of little openings. In one he would put an egg, in another some coffee, in another a piece of meat and in the fourth some water.
Then he would light a lamp that stood under it, and in five minutes the egg would be cooked, the coffee boiled and the meat done-all ready to eat.
He was the queerest sort of boarder!
The strangest habit he had was this: He seemed to be very fond of Punch and Judy shows, and whenever he heard one on the street he would run out without his hat, make the showmen perform in front of the house and then invite them to his rooms, where he would question them for a long time.
The younger had become a traveler in many countries and had never seen his brother since.
But he dreamed often of the days when they had been children and at last he forgot the thing that had driven them apart.
He had come back now to England, a rich man, to find the other had vanished with little Nell, his grandchild.
He had soon learned the story of their misfortune and how the fear of Quilp had driven them away.
After much inquiry he had discovered they had been seen with a Punch and Judy show and now he was trying to find the showmen.
And finally, in this way, he did find the very same pair the wanderers had met!
But he remembered that his brother, little Nell's grandfather, could not be expected to know him after all the years he had been gone, and as for little Nell herself, she had never seen him, and he was afraid if they heard a strange man had come for them they would take fright and run away again.
So he tried to find some one they had loved to go with him to show that he intended only kindness.
He was not long in hearing of Kit, who had found a situation as footman, and he gained his employer's leave to take the lad with him.
When Kit learned that The Stranger had discovered where little Nell was he was overjoyed; but he knew he himself was not the one to go, because before they disappeared she had told him he must never come to the Old Curiosity Shop again and that her grandfather blamed him as the cause of their misfortune.
But Kit promised the Stranger that his mother should go in his place, and went to tell her at once.
Kit took her home, packed her box and bundled her into the coach which the Stranger brought, and away they went to find the wanderers.
Now Quilp had all along suspected that Kit and his mother knew something of their whereabouts, and he had made it his business to watch either one or the other.
The dwarf, in fact, was in the church when Kit came for his mother, and he followed.
When she left with the Stranger he took another coach and pursued, feeling certain he was on the right track.
But they were all too late.
The part Kit had played in this made the dwarf hate him, if possible, more than ever, and he agreed to pay Brass, his rascally lawyer, to ruin the lad by making a false charge of theft against him.
One day, when Kit came to Brass's house to see the Stranger, who lodged up stairs, the lawyer cunningly hid a five pound note in the lad's hat and as soon as he left ran after him, seized him in the street and accused him of taking it from his office desk.
Kit was arrested, and the note, of course, was found on his person.
The evidence seemed so strong that the poor fellow was quickly tried, found guilty and sentenced to prison for a long time.
All might have gone wrong but for a little maid servant of Brass's, whom the lawyer had starved and mistreated for years.
He used to keep her locked in the moldy cellar and gave her so little to eat that she would creep into the office at night (she had found a key that fitted the door) to pick up the bits of bread that Dick Swiveller, Brass's clerk, had left when he ate his luncheon.
One night, while this little drudge was prowling about above stairs, she overheard Brass telling his sister, Sally (who was his partner and colder and crueler and more wicked even than he was), the trick he was going to play.
After Kit was arrested she ran away from Brass's house and told her story to Kit's employer, who had all along believed in his innocence.
Officers were sent at once to arrest Quilp at a dingy dwelling on a wharf in the river where he often slept with the object of terrifying his wife by his long absences.
Here he had set up the battered figurehead of a wrecked ship and, imagining that its face resembled that of Kit whom he so fiendishly hated, he used to amuse himself by screwing gimlets into its breast, sticking forks into its eyes and beating it with a poker.
A few minutes before the officers arrived the dwarf received warning from Sally Brass, but he had no time to get away.
He tried to cover the light of the fire, but only succeeded in upsetting the stove.
It was a black, foggy night, and he could not see a foot before him.
He thought he could climb over the wall to the next wharf and so escape, but in his fright he missed his way and fell over the edge of the platform into the swift flowing river.
He screamed in terror, but the water filled his throat and the knocking on the gates was so loud that no one heard him.
The water swept him close to a ship, but its keel was smooth and slippery and there was nothing to cling to.
He had been so wicked that he was afraid to die and he fought desperately, but the rapid tide smothered his cries and dragged him down-to death.
The waves threw his drowned body finally on the edge of a dismal swamp, in the red glare of the blazing ruin which the overturned stove that night made of the building in which he had framed his evil plots.
And this was the end of Quilp, the dwarf.
As for Kit, he found himself all at once not only free, but a hero.
A gentleman who lived in the village to which they were now bound, who had himself been kind to the child and to the old man whom the new schoolmaster had brought with him, had written of the pair to Kit's employer, and the letter had been the lost clue, so long sought, to their hiding place.
Snow began falling as the daylight wore away, and the coach wheels made no noise.
All night and all the next day, they rode, and it was midnight before they came to the town where the two wanderers had taken refuge.
The village was very still, and the air was frosty and cold.
Only a single light was to be seen, coming from a window beside a church.
They left the driver to take the horses to the inn and approached the building afoot.
They went quite close and looked through the window.
In the room an old man bent low over a fire crooning to himself, and Kit, seeing that it was his old master, opened the door, ran in, knelt by him and caught his hand.
The old grandfather did not recognize Kit.
He was much changed, and it seemed as if some great blow or grief had crazed him.
He had a dress of little Nell's in his hand and smoothed and patted it as he muttered that she had been asleep-asleep a long time now, and was marble cold and would not wake.
"And see here-these shoes-how worn they are!
You see where her feet went bare upon the ground.
They told me afterward that the stones had cut and bruised them.
She never told me that.
No, no, God bless her!
And I have remembered since how she walked behind me, that I might not see how lame she was, but yet she had my hand in hers and seemed to lead me still."
So he muttered on, and the cheeks of the others were wet with tears, for they had begun to understand the sad truth.
Say that you had a brother, long forgotten, who now at last came back to you to be what you were then to him.
Give me but one word, dear brother, to say you know me, and life will still be precious to us again."
Pushing them aside, he went into the next room, calling little Nell's name softly as he went.
They followed.
The schoolmaster told them of her last hours.
They had read and talked to her a while, and then she had sunk peacefully to sleep.
Opening her eyes at last, she begged that they would kiss her once again.
That done, she turned to the old man with a lovely smile on her face-such, he said, as he had never seen-and threw both arms about his neck.
They did not know at first that she was dead.
They laid little Nell to rest the next day in the churchyard where she had so often sat
One day he did not return at the usual hour and they went to look for him.
He was lying dead upon the stone.
They buried him beside the child he had loved, and there in the churchyard where they had often talked together they both lie side by side.
None of those who had known little Nell ever forgot her story.
After the death of the old man, his brother, the Stranger who had sought them so long, traveled in the footsteps of the two wanderers to search out and reward all who had been kind to them-mrs
Jarley of the waxwork, the Punch and Judy showmen, he found them all.
Even the rough canal boatmen were not forgotten.
Kit's story got abroad and he found himself with hosts of friends, who gave him a good position and secured his mother from want.
So that his greatest misfortune turned out, after all, to be his greatest good.
The little maid whose evidence cleared Kit of the terrible charge against him lived to marry Dick Swiveller, the clerk of Brass, the lawyer, while meek mrs Quilp, after her husband's drowning, married a clever young man and lived a pleasant life on the dead dwarf's money.
The fate of the others, whose wickedness has been a part of this story, was not so pleasant.
She has room for more fish, mountains of fish!
With a jerk of her body she comes nearer, and is now right in the whirlpool of bleak and perch.
Her eyes gleam, and her thin lips quiver with insatiable desire.
Snap!
Snap!
There goes a bleak right before her nose!
Just as the pike's attack is at its height, the Rasper suddenly raises his twelve spined dorsal fin.
She quickly takes a better hold, even letting her prehensile teeth come into play, and the long board like tongue warp in co-operation; but no matter what she does, or how wide she opens her mouth, her efforts are in vain: the high backed one refuses to move beyond a certain point.
Impossible!
She tries again.
Colours dance before her eyes as the gullet opens and closes, trying to draw in the perch's head.
So there is nothing to be done, but give it up!
The torture in the spiked barrel is over.
He is still in the pike's throat, and cannot get away, for he has his twelve stiffest dorsal spines bored into his enemy's palate; and the more he worries and works with his dangerous opponent, the deeper and more firmly do the spines fix themselves.
The spines begin to hurt her, and her mouthful on the whole to incommode her.
She cannot get sufficient water over her gills, and what does filter into her mouth in spite of the gag, is needed by the gag itself.
She can feel it breathing inside her mouth; incessantly, with every indication of excitement, its gill covers open and close, and take the lion's share of the water.
It is impossible for her to bear this suffocation any longer; she must have air; and in ungovernable rage she begins to lash out with her tail.
Thus the combat continues.
It is corpse weather today.
The angry waves stir up carrion from the bottom, or carry it out from bridge and bank.
Like a huge eel she wriggles up to the surface, where she lies in wait, slowly drifting with the current.
Now her flecked sides and black back make a distinct stripe in the water.
A cunning expression comes into Oa's little eyes.
The queer fish with two tails attracts her.
Involuntarily the angler's attention is attracted to them.
What a haul!
A pike that has gorged itself on a giant perch!
No throwing this one back again!
For the third time she was as it were in the heron's throat!
Life was once more coursing through her veins.
She was in water, and with a stroke of her tail she made for the bottom.
Oh!
She would be all right there-for the present!
She scowled at them, but although her stomach was empty, she felt no desire to eat.
She dares not venture up to the surface.
She must wait patiently until her perquisites descend.
She also hears the splashing of the bird, and shouts and strange thumps on the boat planks; and she keeps her blue black pupils fixed expectantly upon the great dark shadow up there.
Who knows, some day perhaps a young one might drop out!
He saw the pike throw up her head, and was glad to find her still as lively as ever.
And to think that Heaven should at last reward him for his magnanimity! For the mark on the dorsal fin showed distinctly that this fish had been in his hands before.
It was so natural for Grim to be once more splashing freely in the lake; it was so natural for her to be feeding on roach again.
She should have learned a lesson from her adventure in the air with the man, but the qualifications were lacking.
By this time she weighs about eighteen pounds, and measures the length of a grown man's leg from hip to heel; her dorsal fin measures more than two hand breadths, and it would take a large hand to span her back.
She loves peace and quiet, and feels very irritable under the influence of others.
She feels indisposed and ill, and remains motionless in her watery lair.
Day after day she stays thus, without feeling hunger, or any desire for action.
She sleeps and lets all her nerves and muscles rest; only her gills and fins keep working mechanically.
At such times the angler may try to tempt her with spoon or other artificial bait, or with live fish, but she will not touch them!
One tempting little decoy fish after another may whisk past her nose, but both palate and stomach easily withstand the temptations that are placed before her surfeited eyes.
But when the weather calms down and the waves once more grow less, she comes to life again, and is then well and rested.
The storm has cleared her blood; she needs food and exercise, and is biting madly.
He has anchored off his favourite bank, a narrow reef which, in the shelter of the wood, runs far out into the lake.
It was hard work getting out to it!
The boat quivered, and the angler started and let the main sail down, while the black wind from the frayed clouds raged under the heavens.
They are good Samaritans to all the half dead bait he from time to time throws overboard.
They want to hide because they feel weak; they do not want to go down into deep water to Oa.
Then the terns snap them up, and put them down their little red throats.
It reminds the fisherman of a heron he once shot at, and which sent out a shower of such half dead little fish.
He seizes the rod and lifts it.
The line is running out at full speed. He carefully checks it, making the resistance stronger and stronger, so as to prevent the fish from breaking the line with a sudden jerk.
Alas, it is another of those prickly fish, she notices at once, one of those confounded tit bits that are only to be looked at, but which neither teeth nor throat are ever glad to deal with; and she opens her mouth and chokes and spits.
She darts hither and thither, turning and twisting.
The reel shrieks and hums as if a giant grasshopper sat chirping in it.
All at once, Grim leaps out of the water high into the air, so that her golden, black streaked body, with the panther like spots and the trickling water drops, casts a gleam over the lake.
A little later a whirlpool appears on the seething water, and he catches a glimpse of a dorsal fin with the hinder point missing.
A marked fish, one of his oldest, perhaps his biggest!
His big body is perspiring with his exertions, and he has to stand with his legs wide apart and his feet firmly fixed whenever the mighty fish gives one of its sudden jerks.
He notes the smallest movement of his captive.
It is still in full vigour, and there are many water plants and stalks in the way.
Will he be able to draw it from the deep water with his fine, fragile line?
The angler chooses to let it go in the hope of picking it up on the other side.
The fight and nervous excitement recommence-the quick, exciting contest between man and fish.
They gleam, they sparkle, they flash; and great, heavy, September clouds drift over the lake.
No one sees the accident, and his heavy waders drag him quickly down.
And then, among the rocks of the reef, the line breaks; the angler's body drifts in among the reeds.
Towards evening the sky becomes overcast and the troubled water looks thick and muddy.
She blinks her cunning eyes, and their blue black pupils become large and round.
The years passed by and he did not marry, so one day his father called him before him and said:
The prince replied:
"I will wed no one except the daughter of the king of Naples."
"Do you know that the king of Naples has a daughter?" asked the father.
"No," answered the son.
"I do not know."
"That is good advice," replied the prince.
"I thank you."
There was no person to be found who knew anything about it.
"You'll have to go to Naples to obtain this information," advised the king.
It was a difficult, stormy voyage, but finally they arrived safely.
Then he asked: "Does any one know whether or not the king of Naples has a daughter?"
The old woman hastened to the royal palace.
It looked like an interesting diversion to talk with the old woman.
"What do you wish, good mother?" she asked.
"Are you the daughter of the king of Naples?" questioned the old woman.
"I am," replied the princess.
"May I come some day to sell you pretty things?" asked the old woman.
"The king of Naples has a daughter!" she cried.
"A very beautiful daughter, too!"
The old woman thanked him.
"I made an appointment to see the princess to morrow.
I am going to the palace at four o'clock to sell pretty things to her."
"Well done, good mother!" cried the prince, again thrusting his hand into his purse.
"Let me go in your place!"
The old woman gladly consented, and the prince dressed himself as a peddler.
The next afternoon at four o'clock he went to the palace of the king of Naples.
"Yes," said the princess.
"A peddler was to come to day at four o'clock with pretty things for me to buy."
The prince would not set a price.
"That will be splendid!" cried the princess.
"Come again to morrow at this hour."
The princess was so surprised that she turned pale.
He told her of the quest which had led him there, and she admired all the patience and diligence he had shown in finding out her existence. When he asked her to marry him at once, she readily consented.
All this sounded very romantic to the daughter of the king of Naples. She had never dreamed that a thing like this would ever happen.
She came straight up to him.
"I'm ready, beloved," were her words.
"Where is your boat?" asked the princess after they had ridden together for some time without speaking.
"Of course, I've seen him only twice," she told herself in an effort to gain assurance.
"Does my lady know with whom she is going away?" he asked.
"It is a bit awkward to lose my horse.
Then he sorrowfully returned to his waiting ship.
"I thought you were a pretty little maid," he said, "when I first saw you, but now I've changed my mind about you."
In the stillness of the night they heard a cry.
"Some one is in trouble outside, mother," said the daughter.
"Perhaps the pirates have come and by this cry are trying to lure us out," answered her mother cautiously.
There were often pirate ships which stopped there.
"No, mother," she insisted.
"I'm sure this is a girl's cry."
The two women opened their door and crept out in the darkness.
They lifted her tenderly and carried her home.
He stared hard at the princess.
Then he spoke in a voice which shook.
She blushed.
The prince she had recognized the very moment she had seen him.
"She is no king's daughter!" she cried.
We found her upon these very rocks.
MARIA OF THE FOREST
He and his favorite page became separated from the rest of the party and soon they realized that they were lost. As night approached they found the rude hut of a charcoal burner and begged for permission to pass the night there.
They were received most hospitably.
This is what it said:
"Here in this hut is born to night The maiden of your fate: You can't escape your lot, young king; Your fate for you will wait.
'tis fate-'tis fate-'tis fate."
The king turned over on his pillow and tried to sleep, but the strange voice kept ringing in his ears.
He rose early.
"At what time?" asked the king.
"It was just midnight," replied the charcoal burner.
"I refuse to wed any maid born in this poor hut," he said.
"What can I do about it?" asked the page, yawning.
"You must steal this babe this very day and put it to death," said the king sternly.
He carried her away into the deep forest, but he did not have the heart to put an innocent babe to death. He left her in a hollow tree, wrapped up in the bright red sash he wore.
The king was angry.
"Take me to the baby," he said.
"I'll do the deed myself."
They, of course, did not wish to return to the hut of the charcoal burner, and at length they found their way out of the deep forest.
The king agreed that it was quite impossible for the babe to escape death, but he could not forget the strange voice which had said:
"Here in this hut is born to night The maiden of your fate: You can't escape your lot, young king; Your fate for you will wait.
'tis fate-'tis fate-'tis fate."
Now it happened that very day that a woodcutter was working in the forest.
The cry continued, however, and it sounded very near, almost under the woodcutter's feet.
Her own mother has abandoned her.
My good wife will be a mother to her," he said.
It made Maria's dark eyes look even brighter than before.
He called her to him and examined it carefully.
The king ordered him again to steal her.
This time the king plotted her death by drowning.
"Here in this hut is born to night The maiden of your fate: You can't escape your lot, young king; Your fate for you will wait.
'tis fate-'tis fate-'tis fate."
The sailors rescued it and opened it with interest.
The king danced with her.
The page, however, was suspicious when he heard her name.
He reported his suspicions to the king.
CHAPTER eighteen
Truly, the church was a great institution-the solution of all the puzzles and problems of life.
Why should he continue selling liquor?
He must help Finnegan.
"I'm the assistant sexton at saint Matthew's Church."
"You don't say!
"What is it?"
The other stared at him.
"Gee!" he said, "are you going to take me up in your airship?"
"mr
Think what drink does to men?
Drink makes men cruel and selfish.
It takes away their self control.
It makes them unfit for their work.
I never touch the stuff myself."
"I do it," said Finnegan, "because I have to live.
"It seems such a terrible trade!" exclaimed the boy.
"But take notice, it ain't a princely one.
I'm on the job all day and a good part of the night, and standing up all the time.
So what's a man to do?"
"But it'd have to be a steady job," put in the other.
"I can take no chances with the baby."
"Do you carry 'em round in your pockets?"
And so, forthwith, he made his way to the doctor's house, and was ushered into the presence of the unhappy clergyman.
He stated his case; and the other threw up his hands in despair.
I can't find employment for everyone in Lockmanville."
"But, doctor!" protested Samuel, "I don't think you understand.
"I understand all that Samuel."
There was a pause.
"Yes," said the other, "but that's what Professor Stewart taught men. And you said it was wicked of him."
"It puts you right back with Herbert Spencer!
The boy waited.
"Don't you see that, dr Vince?" he persisted.
"Yes, I see that," said the doctor.
"And you told me that the only way to escape from that was to live for others-to serve them and help them.
And isn't that what I'm trying to do?"
"Why, doctor, aren't you the head of the church?
And the people come to you to be taught.
Only realize it-right at this very moment there are people starving to death-and here in Lockmanville!
They want to work, and there is no work for them! I could take you to see them, sir-girls who want a job in mr Wygant's cotton mill, and he won't give it to them!"
It's because there is too much cloth already."
"I've been thinking about that," said Samuel earnestly.
"And it doesn't sound right to me.
There are too many people who need good clothes.
But they haven't money to buy the cloth---"
There was no reply; and after a moment Samuel rushed on: "Surely it is selfish of mr Wygant to shut poor people out of his mill, just because they have no money.
Why couldn't he let them make cloth for themselves?"
"So much the better, doctor!
And if it's a question of there not being enough food, look at what's wasted in a place like Master Albert's!
"Doctor!" he exclaimed.
The doctor winced visibly.
"But think of the people who are suffering-nobody spares them!
And how can you be silent, doctor-how can the shepherd of Christ be silent while some of his flock are living in luxury and others are starving to death?"
dr Vince sat rigid, clutching the arms of his chair.
CHAPTER twenty five
Samuel rushed away into the darkness.
Then, as he waited, he saw an automobile draw up in front of the side entrance, and saw mr Wygant step out and enter.
The sight was like a blow in the face to him.
There was the proud rich man, defiant and unpunished, seated in the place of authority; while Samuel, the Seeker, was turned out of the door!
He would fight them-he would fight to the very end.
The church was not their church-it was the church of God!
And he had a right to belong to it-and to speak the truth in it, too!
dr Vince sprang to his feet in terror.
"Samuel Prescott!" he exclaimed.
"I have been ordered out of the church!" proclaimed Samuel.
"And I will not submit to it!
I have spoken the truth, and I will not permit the evil doers in saint Matthew's to silence me!"
mr Hickman had sprung up.
"Boy," he commanded, "leave this room!"
I have spoken the truth, and nothing but the truth!"
"What is the boy talking about?" demanded another of the vestrymen.
This was mr Hamerton, a young lawyer, whose pleasant face Samuel had often noticed.
And Samuel, seeing curiosity and interest in his look, sprang toward him.
"Don't let them turn me out without a hearing!" he cried.
"You corrupted the city council!" shrilled Samuel.
"You bribed it to beat the water bill!
It's true, and you know it's true, and you don't dare to deny it!"
mr Hickman was purple in the face with rage.
"I have talked with one of the men who got the money!" cried Samuel. "There was two thousand dollars paid to ten of the supervisors."
"Who is this man?" cried the other furiously.
"He told me in confidence."
"Aha!" laughed the other.
"dr Vince, you know that I am telling the truth.
"Anybody can find out about these things if he wants to.
"WHAT!" he shouted.
"Didn't you tell me this very afternoon?"
"I told you nothing of the sort!" declared the man.
"I submit that this is an outrage!" exclaimed mr Hickman.
"The poor people in this town are suffering and dying!" cried Samuel. "And they are being robbed and oppressed.
"But why not, sir?
The guilty men are high in the councils of this church.
They hold the church up to disgrace before all the world.
And this is the church of Christ, sir!"
"But yours is not the way to go about it, boy!" exclaimed mr Hamerton-who was alarmed because Samuel kept looking at him.
"Did not Christ drive out the money changers from the temple with whips?"
There was a pause after it, as if everyone were willing to let his neighbor speak first.
"Are we not taught to follow Christ's example, dr Vince?" asked the boy.
"Hardly in that sense, Samuel," said the terrified doctor.
"Christ was God.
And we can hardly be expected-"
And the rich men of His time despised Him and spit upon Him and crucified Him!"
"I may be an infidel, mr Curtis," replied the other, quickly; "but I never paid two hundred dollars to Slattery so that the police would let me block the sidewalks of the town."
You are crucifying Him again every day!"
"It is blasphemy!"
"It must stop instantly," put in mr Wygant.
"mr Hamerton, won't you help me?"
"What do you want us to do?" demanded mr Hamerton.
"I want the vestry to investigate these charges.
And if it is true, I want you to drive such men from the church!
They have no place in the church, sir!
They are the enemies the church exists to fight-"
But I tell you I will not give up without a fight.
I will expose you and denounce you to the world!
The people shall know you for what you are-cowards and hypocrites, faithless to your trust!
Plunderers of the public! Corrupters of the state!"
I have been among the lowest-I have been with saloon keepers and criminals-with publicans and harlots and thieves-but never yet have I met a man as merciless and as hard as you!
You a Christian-you might be the Roman soldier who spat in Jesus' face!"
For at least a couple of hours Samuel paced the streets of Lockmanville, to let his rage and grief subside.
"I went to see little Ethel," she replied.
"And what came of it?"
"She cried," said Sophie.
"She was terribly unhappy.
"She scolded me!
She was very angry with me.
She said I had no right to fill the child's mind with falsehoods about her uncle.
CHAPTER thirty
After supper that evening came Everley with Friederich Bremer, to take Samuel to the meeting of the local, where he was to tell his story.
The "local" met in an obscure hall, over a grocery shop.
There were present those whom Samuel had met the night before, and about a score of others.
Most of them were working men, but there were several who appeared to be well to do shopkeepers and clerks.
Samuel noticed that they all called one another "comrade"; and several of them addressed him thus, which gave him a queer feeling.
The boy stood upon his feet-and suddenly a deadly terror seized hold upon him.
Suppose he should not be able to make a speech after all!
What would they think of him?
The poor were suffering, and the truth was crying out for vindication!
And because he saw that these were people who understood, he found himself a case, and thinking no longer about himself.
He talked for nearly half an hour, and there was quite a sensation when he finished.
"Comrades," he said, "for the past year I have been urging that the local must make a fight for free speech in this town.
If we do not take up this fight, we might just as well give up."
"That's right," cried Beggs, the old carpenter.
"I took the liberty of ordering circulars," continued Everley.
"There was no time to be lost, and I felt sure that the comrades would back me. I now move that the local take charge of the meeting to morrow evening, and that the two thousand circulars I have here be given out secretly to night."
"I second that motion," said mrs Barton.
"It must be understood," added Everley, "that we can't expect help from the papers.
And our people ought to hear this story, as well as the members of the church."
"Now," said Everley, "I suggest that the local make this the occasion of a contest for the right to hold street meetings in Lockmanville.
As you know, the police have refused permits ever since the strike.
And I move that beginning with Thursday evening, we hold a meeting on the corner of Market and Main streets, and tell this story to the public.
And that we continue to hold a meeting every night thereafter until we have made good our right."
Everley launched into an impassioned speech.
Now they must make a stand.
"You realize that it will mean going to jail?" asked dr Barton.
"I realize it," said Everley.
"We shall probably have to go several times.
"That is the thing we must think of," said the woman in the chair.
"I am ready to do what I can," added the lawyer.
Samuel listened in breathless excitement to this discussion.
Wherever Capitalism had come, there men were uniting against it; and every day their power grew-there was nothing that could stop them.
They knew what they were facing at this moment; not only Chief McCullagh with his policemen and their clubs; not only the subsidized "Express" with its falsehoods and ridicule: but all the political and business power of the Hickmans and Wygants.
They were facing arrest and imprisonment, humiliation and disgrace-perhaps ruin and starvation. Only in this way could they reach the ears of the people.
And so I ask you to join with me in taking this pledge-that we will speak on the streets of Lockmanville next Saturday night, and that we will continue to speak there as often as need be until we have vindicated our rights as American citizens."
If I am arrested, I know that I will not get it.
"And I am in Wygant's cotton mill," said another.
But I will help."
"But I will speak also!"
Will you let me help?"
"No one's help will be refused in a crisis like this," said Everley.
"We must stand by our guns, for if they can crush us this time, it may be years before we can be heard."
Others took it up, until the walls of the building shook with a mighty chant.
"What is it?" whispered Samuel to Friedrich.
Hark to the thunder, hark to the tramp-a myriad army comes!
An army sprung from a hundred lands, speaking a hundred tongues!
And overhead a portent new, a blood red banner see!
We come in the right of our new born might to set the people free!
Masters, we left you a world to make, the planning was yours to do-
We have builded a temple with pillars white, ye have stained it with blood and tears!
We come in the right of our new born might to set the people free!
We come your dungeon walls to raze, your citadel to spoil!
Yours is the power of club and jail, yours is the axe and fire-
Ours the host, the marching host-hark to our battle song!
CHAPTER four
The table was set on the terrace; breakfast was served and the company was gathered.
There were four persons present, though there should have been five.
The two guests were an Englishman and his wife, whom the chances of travel had brought over night to Valedolmo.
This morning she was very business like in her short skirt, belted jacket, and green felt Alpine hat with a feather in the side.
Her father had finished his egg and hers too, before she appeared, as nonchalant and smiling as if she were out the earliest of all.
'I am sorry not to wear my own Alpine hat, Aunt Hazel; I look so deliciously German in it, but I simply can't afford to burn all the skin off my nose.'
'You can't make us believe that,' said her father.
'The reason is, that Lieutenant di Ferara and Captain Coroloni are going with us to day, and that this hat is more becoming than the other.'
'And the driver?'
There are two of him.'
I only ordered one.'
Constance eyed her father sharply.
There was something at once guilty and triumphant about his expression.
'Really?
'I don't know about his Italian, but he talks uncommonly good English.'
'English!' There was reproach, disgust, disillusionment, in her tone. 'Not really, father?'
'How simply horrible!'
'Very convenient, I should say.'
'If there's anything I detest, it's an Americanized Italian-and here in Valedolmo of all places, where you have a right to demand something unique and romantic and picturesque and real.
It's too bad of Gustavo!
I shall never place any faith in his judgment again.
Constance patted their shaggy mouse coloured noses, made the acquaintance of the boy, whose name was Beppo, and looked about for the driver proper.
He wore a loose white shirt-immaculately white-with a red silk handkerchief knotted about his throat, brown corduroy knee breeches, and a red cotton sash with the hilt of a knife conspicuously protruding.
His skin was dark-not too dark-just a good healthy out door tan: his brows level and heavy, his gaze candour itself.
Constance clasped her hands in an ecstasy of admiration.
'He's perfect!' she cried.
'My dear,' her father warned, 'he understands English.'
'What is your name?'
'I don't care if you do speak English; I prefer Italian-what is your name?' She repeated the question in Italian.
Constance looked after him, puzzled and suspicious.
The one insult which she could not brook was for an Italian to fail to understand her when she talked Italian.
She suppressed it quickly and turned away.
'The poor fellow is embarrassed,' apologized her father.
'His name is Tony,' he added-even he had understood that much Italian.
The man is scarcely to blame for his name.'
'I suppose not,' she agreed, 'though I should have included that in my order.'
Further discussion was precluded by the appearance of a station carriage which turned in at the gate and stopped before them.
He had not counted upon this addition to the party, and was as scowling as she could have wished.
Zat donk', signorina, he go all day and never one little stumble.'
Elizabetta appeared in the doorway with two rush covered flasks, and Tony hurried forward to receive them.
She stifled a laugh of prophetic triumph and sauntered over to Beppo.
'And who is Carlo?'
'He is the guide who owns them.'
'Oh, indeed!
He put forth this preposterous statement with a glance as grave and innocent as that of a little cherub.
'Is Tony a good guide?'
'But yes, of the best!'
He divined suspicion behind these persistent inquiries, and he knew that in case Tony were dismissed, his own munificent pay would stop.
'A word here, a word there; I learn it in school.'
'How long?'
Beppo considered.
'Really!
She drew from her pocket a handful of coppers and dropped them into his grimy little palm.
CHAPTER five
After some delay-owing to Tony's inability to balance the chafing dish on Cristoforo Colombo's back-they filed from the gateway, an imposing cavalcade.
He chased Fidilini over half the mountainside while the others were resting, and he carried the chafing dish for a couple of miles because it refused to adjust itself nicely to the pack.
The morning ended by his being left behind with a balking donkey, while the others completed the last ascent that led to their halting place for lunch.
It was owing to Beppo's knowledge of the mountain paths rather than Tony's which had guided them to this agreeable spot; though no one in the party except Constance appeared to have noted the fact.
But his moment was coming.
As they were about to start on, Constance spied high above their heads, where the stream burst from the rocks, a clump of starry white blossoms.
'Oh, I must have it-it's the first I ever saw growing; I hadn't supposed we were high enough.' She glanced at the officers.
It was very gracefully and easily done, and a burst of applause greeted his descent.
He divided his flowers into two equal parts, and sweeping off his hat, presented them with a bow, not to Constance, but to the officers, who somewhat sulkily passed them on.
She received them with a smile; for an instant her eyes met Tony's, and he fell back, rewarded.
He has been in the United States and speaks English, which is a great convenience.'
The two said nothing, but they looked at each other and shrugged.
The winding path was both stony and steep, and, from a donkey's standpoint, thoroughly objectionable.
Whether Constance pulled the wrong rein, or whether, as she affirmed, it was merely his natural badness, in any case, he suddenly veered from the path and took a cross cut down the rocky slope below them.
Leaping forward, he dropped over the precipice, a fall of ten feet, to a narrow ledge below.
It was not a dignified rescue, but at least it was effective; Fidilini came to a halt.
mr Wilder, quite pale with anxiety, came scrambling to her side. Constance sat up and laughed hysterically, while she examined a bleeding elbow.
Captain Coroloni and her father helped Constance to her feet while Lieutenant di Ferara recovered a side comb and the white sun hat.
Tony rejoined them somewhat short of breath, but leading a humbled Fidilini.
Chapter Ten: Interest and Discipline
one.
The Meaning of the Terms.
We have already noticed the difference in the attitude of a spectator and of an agent or participant.
The former is indifferent to what is going on; one result is just as good as another, since each is just something to look at.
The latter is bound up with what is going on; its outcome makes a difference to him.
His fortunes are more or less at stake in the issue of events.
Consequently he does whatever he can to influence the direction present occurrences take.
The other is like a man who has planned an outing for the next day which continuing rain will frustrate. He cannot, to be sure, by his present reactions affect to morrow's weather, but he may take some steps which will influence future happenings, if only to postpone the proposed picnic.
In many instances, he can intervene even more directly.
The attitude of a participant in the course of affairs is thus a double one: there is solicitude, anxiety concerning future consequences, and a tendency to act to assure better, and avert worse, consequences.
These words suggest that a person is bound up with the possibilities inhering in objects; that he is accordingly on the lookout for what they are likely to do to him; and that, on the basis of his expectation or foresight, he is eager to act so as to give things one turn rather than another. Interest and aims, concern and purpose, are necessarily connected.
Such words as interest, affection, concern, motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is foreseen upon the individual's fortunes, and his active desire to act to secure a possible result.
They take for granted the objective changes.
But the difference is but one of emphasis; the meaning that is shaded in one set of words is illuminated in the other.
But for an active being, a being who partakes of the consequences instead of standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a personal response. The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a present difference, which finds expression in solicitude and effort.
While such words as affection, concern, and motive indicate an attitude of personal preference, they are always attitudes toward objects-toward what is foreseen.
We may call the phase of objective foresight intellectual, and the phase of personal concern emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in the facts of the situation.
Such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran their course in a world by themselves.
But they are always responses to what is going on in the situation of which they are a part, and their successful or unsuccessful expression depends upon their interaction with other changes.
They are literally bound up with these changes; our desires, emotions, and affections are but various ways in which our doings are tied up with the doings of things and persons about us.
Instead of marking a purely personal or subjective realm, separated from the objective and impersonal, they indicate the non existence of such a separate world.
Interest, concern, mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a developing situation.
In some legal transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to have a standing at court.
He has to show that some proposed step concerns his affairs. A silent partner has an interest in a business, although he takes no active part in its conduct because its prosperity or decline affects his profits and liabilities.
To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried away by, some object.
To take an interest is to be on the alert, to care about, to be attentive.
We say of an interested person both that he has lost himself in some affair and that he has found himself in it.
Both terms express the engrossment of the self in an object.
When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is first exaggerated and then isolated.
Interest is taken to mean merely the effect of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage, success or failure.
Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain.
Educationally, it then follows that to attach importance to interest means to attach some feature of seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure attention and effort by offering a bribe of pleasure.
This procedure is properly stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup kitchen" theory of education.
But the objection is based upon the fact-or assumption-that the forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other words, they are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils.
If the material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary, semi coerced effort.
The fact that a process takes time to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit.
We overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between an initial stage of process and the completing period; that there is something intervening.
Only through them, in the literal time sense, will the initial activities reach a satisfactory consummation.
So much for the meaning of the term interest.
Where an activity takes time, where many means and obstacles lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation and persistence are required.
It is obvious that a very large part of the everyday meaning of will is precisely the deliberate or conscious disposition to persist and endure in a planned course of action in spite of difficulties and contrary solicitations.
His ability is executive; that is, he persistently and energetically strives to execute or carry out his aims.
A weak will is unstable as water.
Clearly there are two factors in will.
One has to do with the foresight of results, the other with the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has upon the person.
A man keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any clearly thought out purpose.
In fact, the obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that if he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not be worth while.
Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize ends which present themselves than it does in persistence and energy in use of means to achieve the end.
The people we called weak willed or self indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences of their acts.
They pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect all attendant circumstances.
That the primary difference between strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree of persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought out, cannot be over emphasized.
They are something to look at and for curiosity to play with rather than something to achieve.
There is no such thing as over intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one sided intellectuality.
A certain flabbiness of fiber prevents the contemplated object from gripping him and engaging him in action.
And most persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course of action by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by presentation of inducements to an action that is directly more agreeable.
A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined.
Add to this ability a power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in face of distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of discipline.
Discipline means power at command; mastery of the resources available for carrying through the action undertaken.
To know what one is to do and to move to do it promptly and by use of the requisite means is to be disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind. Discipline is positive.
It is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and discipline are connected, not opposed.
Parents and teachers often complain-and correctly-that children "do not want to hear, or want to understand." Their minds are not upon the subject precisely because it does not touch them; it does not enter into their concerns.
In the long run, its value is measured by whether it supplies a mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by the adult or whether it leads the child "to think"--that is, to reflect upon his acts and impregnate them with aims.
The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education.
Interest represents the moving force of objects-whether perceived or presented in imagination-in any experience having a purpose.
Attitudes and methods of approach and response vary with the specific appeal the same material makes, this appeal itself varying with difference of natural aptitude, of past experience, of plan of life, and so on.
Too frequently mind is set over the world of things and facts to be known; it is regarded as something existing in isolation, with mental states and operations that exist independently.
The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical.
Mind appears in experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a view to controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place.
The things, the subject matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as having a bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether assisting or retarding it.
An illustration may clear up their significance.
You are engaged in a certain occupation, say writing with a typewriter.
You attend to the keys, to what you have written, to your movements, to the ribbon or the mechanism of the machine.
You have to find out what your resources are, what conditions are at command, and what the difficulties and obstacles are.
This foresight and this survey with reference to what is foreseen constitute mind.
In neither case is it intelligent.
If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write, the case is the same.
There is an activity in process; one is taken up with the development of a theme.
The whole attitude is one of concern with what is to be, and with what is so far as the latter enters into the movement toward the end.
Leave out the direction which depends upon foresight of possible future results, and there is no intelligence in present behavior.
If this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something complete by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far as that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims, ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the attainment of aims.
Intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns; but a person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he plays a part have the qualities mentioned.
Nor are the activities in which a person engages, whether intelligently or not, exclusive properties of himself; they are something in which he engages and partakes.
Other things, the independent changes of other things and persons, cooperate and hinder.
The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic appliances but as conditions for the attainment of ends.
In historic practice the error has cut two ways.
By its nature, the allegation could not be checked up.
Even when discipline did not accrue as matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and lost power of intelligent self direction, the fault lay with him, not with the study or the methods of teaching.
His failure was but proof that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining the old methods.
The responsibility was transferred from the educator to the pupil because the material did not have to meet specific tests; it did not have to be shown that it fulfilled any particular need or served any specific end.
Identification of will, or effort, with mere strain, results when a mind is set up, endowed with powers that are only to be applied to existing material.
To attend to material because there is something to be done in which the person is concerned is not disciplinary in this view; not even if it results in a desirable increase of constructive power.
This is more likely to occur if the subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive (so it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or the value of discipline.
The logical result is expressed with literal truth in the words of an American humorist: "It makes no difference what you teach a boy so long as he doesn't like it."
Various branches of study represent so many independent branches, each having its principles of arrangement complete within itself.
History is one such group of facts; algebra another; geography another, and so on till we have run through the entire curriculum.
Having a ready made existence on their own account, their relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to acquire. This idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which the program of school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists of "studies" all marked off from one another, and each supposed to be complete by itself-for educational purposes at least.
Just as one "studies" his typewriter as part of the operation of putting it to use to effect results, so with any fact or truth.
It becomes an object of study-that is, of inquiry and reflection-when it figures as a factor to be reckoned with in the completion of a course of events in which one is engaged and by whose outcome one is affected.
Stated thus broadly, the formula may appear abstract.
Translated into details, it means that the act of learning or studying is artificial and ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely presented with a lesson to be learned.
While the theoretical errors of which we have been speaking have their expressions in the conduct of schools, they are themselves the outcome of conditions of social life. A change confined to the theoretical conviction of educators will not remove the difficulties, though it should render more effective efforts to modify social conditions.
Art is neither merely internal nor merely external; merely mental nor merely physical.
The changes made by some actions (those which by contrast may be called mechanical) are external; they are shifting things about.
No ideal reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies them.
Others contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external adornment and display.
Many of our existing social activities, industrial and political, fall in these two classes.
Neither the people who engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by them, are capable of full and free interest in their work.
Because of the lack of any purpose in the work for the one doing it, or because of the restricted character of its aim, intelligence is not adequately engaged.
The same conditions force many people back upon themselves. They take refuge in an inner play of sentiment and fancies.
Their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an inner landscape.
Even the pursuit of science may become an asylum of refuge from the hard conditions of life-not a temporary retreat for the sake of recuperation and clarification in future dealings with the world.
The very word art may become associated not with specific transformation of things, making them more significant for mind, but with stimulations of eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences.
Compare what was said in an earlier chapter about the one sided meanings which have come to attach to the ideas of efficiency and of culture.
This state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a basis of division between laboring classes and leisure classes.
Their pursuits are fixed by accident and necessity of circumstance; they are not the normal expression of their own powers interacting with the needs and resources of the environment.
This state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational traditions.
It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in different portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian character of most elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary or cultural character of most higher education.
It accounts for the tendency to isolate intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic, academic, and professionally technical, and for the widespread conviction that liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an education which shall count in the vocations of life.
But it should contribute through the type of intellectual and emotional disposition which it forms to the improvement of those conditions.
And just here the true conceptions of interest and discipline are full of significance.
Persons whose interests have been enlarged and intelligence trained by dealing with things and facts in active occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be those most likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice.
To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating them.
A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful activities is a slow work.
It can only be accomplished piecemeal, a step at a time.
It is a challenge to undertake the task of reorganization courageously and to keep at it persistently.
Interest means that one is identified with the objects which define the activity and which furnish the means and obstacles to its realization.
Any activity with an aim implies a distinction between an earlier incomplete phase and later completing phase; it implies also intermediate steps.
Discipline or development of power of continuous attention is its fruit.
It shows that mind and intelligent or purposeful engagement in a course of action into which things enter are identical.
Hence to develop and train mind is to provide an environment which induces such activity.
On the other side, it protects us from the notion that subject matter on its side is something isolated and independent.
QUESTION seventy six
We now consider the union of the soul with the body; and concerning this there are eight points of inquiry:
(one) Whether the intellectual principle is united to the body as its form?
(two) Whether the intellectual principle is multiplied numerically according to the number of bodies; or is there one intelligence for all men?
(three) Whether in the body the form of which is an intellectual principle, there is some other soul?
(four) Whether in the body there is any other substantial form?
(five) Of the qualities required in the body of which the intellectual principle is the form?
(six) Whether it be united to such a body by means of another body?
(seven) Whether by means of an accident?
Whether the Intellectual Principle Is United to the Body As Its Form?
Objection one: It seems that the intellectual principle is not united to the body as its form.
Therefore the intellect is not united to the body as its form.
But the form of the thing understood is not received into the intellect materially and individually, but rather immaterially and universally: otherwise the intellect would not be capable of the knowledge of immaterial and universal objects, but only of individuals, like the senses.
Therefore the intellect is not united to the body as its form.
Therefore it is not united to the body as its form.
But to be united to matter belongs to the form by reason of its nature; because form is the act of matter, not by an accidental quality, but by its own essence; otherwise matter and form would not make a thing substantially one, but only accidentally one. Therefore a form cannot be without its own proper matter.
Therefore the intellectual principle is not united to the body as its form.
But the difference which constitutes man is "rational," which is applied to man on account of his intellectual principle.
Therefore the intellectual principle is the form of man.
For that whereby primarily anything acts is a form of the thing to which the act is to be attributed: for instance, that whereby a body is primarily healed is health, and that whereby the soul knows primarily is knowledge; hence health is a form of the body, and knowledge is a form of the soul.
For the soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, and local movement; and likewise of our understanding.
Therefore this principle by which we primarily understand, whether it be called the intellect or the intellectual soul, is the form of the body.
But if anyone says that the intellectual soul is not the form of the body he must first explain how it is that this action of understanding is the action of this particular man; for each one is conscious that it is himself who understands.
We must therefore say either that Socrates understands by virtue of his whole self, as Plato maintained, holding that man is an intellectual soul; or that intelligence is a part of Socrates.
But one cannot sense without a body: therefore the body must be some part of man.
The Commentator held that this union is through the intelligible species, as having a double subject, in the possible intellect, and in the phantasms which are in the corporeal organs.
Thus through the intelligible species the possible intellect is linked to the body of this or that particular man.
But this link or union does not sufficiently explain the fact, that the act of the intellect is the act of Socrates.
Therefore, as the species of colors are in the sight, so are the species of phantasms in the possible intellect. Now it is clear that because the colors, the images of which are in the sight, are on a wall, the action of seeing is not attributed to the wall: for we do not say that the wall sees, but rather that it is seen.
Some, however, tried to maintain that the intellect is united to the body as its motor; and hence that the intellect and body form one thing so that the act of the intellect could be attributed to the whole.
This is, however, absurd for many reasons.
First, because the intellect does not move the body except through the appetite, the movement of which presupposes the operation of the intellect.
The reason therefore why Socrates understands is not because he is moved by his intellect, but rather, contrariwise, he is moved by his intellect because he understands.
Whereas the act of intellect remains in the agent, and does not pass into something else, as does the action of heating. Therefore the action of understanding cannot be attributed to Socrates for the reason that he is moved by his intellect.
Thirdly, because the action of a motor is never attributed to the thing moved, except as to an instrument; as the action of a carpenter to a saw.
Therefore if understanding is attributed to Socrates, as the action of what moves him, it follows that it is attributed to him as to an instrument.
There remains, therefore, no other explanation than that given by Aristotle-namely, that this particular man understands, because the intellectual principle is his form.
Thus from the very operation of the intellect it is made clear that the intellectual principle is united to the body as its form.
Now the proper operation of man as man is to understand; because he thereby surpasses all other animals.
Whence Aristotle concludes (Ethic.
Man must therefore derive his species from that which is the principle of this operation.
It follows therefore that the intellectual principle is the proper form of man.
And the higher we advance in the nobility of forms, the more we find that the power of the form excels the elementary matter; as the vegetative soul excels the form of the metal, and the sensitive soul excels the vegetative soul.
Now the human soul is the highest and noblest of forms.
This power is called the intellect.
It is well to remark that if anyone holds that the soul is composed of matter and form, it would follow that in no way could the soul be the form of the body.
For since the form is an act, and matter is only in potentiality, that which is composed of matter and form cannot be the form of another by virtue of itself as a whole.
He proves this from the fact that "man and the sun generate man from matter." It is separate indeed according to its intellectual power, because the intellectual power does not belong to a corporeal organ, as the power of seeing is the act of the eye; for understanding is an act which cannot be performed by a corporeal organ, like the act of seeing.
From this it is clear how to answer the Second and Third objections: since, in order that man may be able to understand all things by means of his intellect, and that his intellect may understand immaterial things and universals, it is sufficient that the intellectual power be not the act of the body.
Therefore there is nothing to prevent some power thereof not being the act of the body, although the soul is essentially the form of the body.
This is not the case with other non subsistent forms.
For this reason the human soul retains its own existence after the dissolution of the body; whereas it is not so with other forms.
Whether the Intellectual Principle Is Multiplied According to the Number of Bodies?
For an immaterial substance is not multiplied in number within one species.
Therefore there are not many human souls in one species.
But all men are of one species.
Therefore there is but one intellect in all men.
This is heretical; for it would do away with the distinction of rewards and punishments.
Now whatever is received into anything must be received according to the condition of the receiver.
Therefore the species of things would be received individually into my intellect, and also into yours: which is contrary to the nature of the intellect which knows universals.
If, therefore, my intellect is distinct from yours, what is understood by me must be distinct from what is understood by you; and consequently it will be reckoned as something individual, and be only potentially something understood; so that the common intention will have to be abstracted from both; since from things diverse something intelligible common to them may be abstracted.
But this is contrary to the nature of the intellect; for then the intellect would seem not to be distinct from the imagination.
It seems, therefore, to follow that there is one intellect in all men.
It seems, therefore, that the same individual knowledge which is in the master is communicated to the disciple; which cannot be, unless there is one intellect in both.
Seemingly, therefore, the intellect of the disciple and master is but one; and, consequently, the same applies to all men.
But it is impossible that a soul, one in species, should belong to animals of different species. Therefore it is impossible that one individual intellectual soul should belong to several individuals.
This is clear if, as Plato maintained, man is the intellect itself.
For it would follow that Socrates and Plato are one man; and that they are not distinct from each other, except by something outside the essence of each.
The distinction between Socrates and Plato would be no other than that of one man with a tunic and another with a cloak; which is quite absurd.
Again, this is clearly impossible, whatever one may hold as to the manner of the union of the intellect to this or that man.
For it is manifest that, supposing there is one principal agent, and two instruments, we can say that there is one agent absolutely, but several actions; as when one man touches several things with his two hands, there will be one who touches, but two contacts.
If, on the contrary, we suppose one instrument and several principal agents, we might say that there are several agents, but one act; for example, if there be many drawing a ship by means of a rope; there will be many drawing, but one pull.
If, however, there is one principal agent, and one instrument, we say that there is one agent and one action, as when the smith strikes with one hammer, there is one striker and one stroke.
Therefore, if we suppose two men to have several intellects and one sense-for instance, if two men had one eye-there would be several seers, but one sight.
But if there is one intellect, no matter how diverse may be all those things of which the intellect makes use as instruments, in no way is it possible to say that Socrates and Plato are otherwise than one understanding man.
And if to this we add that to understand, which is the act of the intellect, is not affected by any organ other than the intellect itself; it will further follow that there is but one agent and one action: that is to say that all men are but one "understander," and have but one act of understanding, in regard, that is, of one intelligible object.
But the phantasm itself is not a form of the possible intellect; it is the intelligible species abstracted from the phantasm that is a form.
Therefore, if there were one intellect for all men, the diversity of phantasms which are in this one and that one would not cause a diversity of intellectual operation in this man and that man.
It follows, therefore, that it is altogether impossible and unreasonable to maintain that there exists one intellect for all men.
But the materiality of the knower, and of the species whereby it knows, impedes the knowledge of the universal.
But if the species be abstracted from the conditions of individual matter, there will be a likeness of the nature without those things which make it distinct and multiplied; thus there will be knowledge of the universal.
Yet it is the stone which is understood, not the likeness of the stone; except by a reflection of the intellect on itself: otherwise, the objects of sciences would not be things, but only intelligible species.
And since knowledge is begotten according to the assimilation of the knower to the thing known, it follows that the same thing may happen to be known by several knowers; as is apparent in regard to the senses; for several see the same color, according to different likenesses.
For the common nature is understood as apart from the individuating principles; whereas such is not its mode of existence outside the soul.
But, according to the opinion of Plato, the thing understood exists outside the soul in the same condition as those under which it is understood; for he supposed that the natures of things exist separate from matter.
Whether Besides the Intellectual Soul There Are in Man Other Souls Essentially Different from One Another?
Objection one: It would seem that besides the intellectual soul there are in man other souls essentially different from one another, such as the sensitive soul and the nutritive soul.
For corruptible and incorruptible are not of the same substance.
But the sensitive soul in the horse, the lion, and other brute animals, is corruptible.
But "rational," which is the difference constituting man, is taken from the intellectual soul; while he is called "animal" by reason of his having a body animated by a sensitive soul.
Therefore the intellectual soul may be compared to the body animated by a sensitive soul, as form to matter.
Therefore in man the intellectual soul is not essentially the same as the sensitive soul, but presupposes it as a material subject.
Now this would not be the case if the various principles of the soul's operations were essentially different, and distributed in the various parts of the body.
But with regard to the intellectual part, he seems to leave it in doubt whether it be "only logically" distinct from the other parts of the soul, "or also locally."
If we suppose, however, that the soul is united to the body as its form, it is quite impossible for several essentially different souls to be in one body.
This can be made clear by three different reasons.
In the first place, an animal would not be absolutely one, in which there were several souls.
It cannot be said that they are united by the one body; because rather does the soul contain the body and make it one, than the reverse.
Secondly, this is proved to be impossible by the manner in which one thing is predicated of another.
But both of these consequences are clearly false: because "animal" is predicated of man essentially and not accidentally; and man is not part of the definition of an animal, but the other way about. Therefore of necessity by the same form a thing is animal and man; otherwise man would not really be the thing which is an animal, so that animal can be essentially predicated of man.
Thirdly, this is shown to be impossible by the fact that when one operation of the soul is intense it impedes another, which could never be the case unless the principle of action were essentially one.
We must therefore conclude that in man the sensitive soul, the intellectual soul, and the nutritive soul are numerically one soul. This can easily be explained, if we consider the differences of species and forms.
For we observe that the species and forms of things differ from one another, as the perfect and imperfect; as in the order of things, the animate are more perfect than the inanimate, and animals more perfect than plants, and man than brute animals; and in each of these genera there are various degrees.
Thus the intellectual soul contains virtually whatever belongs to the sensitive soul of brute animals, and to the nutritive souls of plants.
Therefore, as a surface which is of a pentagonal shape, is not tetragonal by one shape, and pentagonal by another-since a tetragonal shape would be superfluous as contained in the pentagonal-so neither is Socrates a man by one soul, and animal by another; but by one and the same soul he is both animal and man.
When, therefore, a soul is sensitive only, it is corruptible; but when with sensibility it has also intellectuality, it is incorruptible.
For although sensibility does not give incorruptibility, yet it cannot deprive intellectuality of its incorruptibility.
Now man is corruptible like other animals.
And so the difference of corruptible and incorruptible which is on the part of the forms does not involve a generic difference between man and the other animals.
Therefore since, as we have said, the intellectual soul contains virtually what belongs to the sensitive soul, and something more, reason can consider separately what belongs to the power of the sensitive soul, as something imperfect and material.
Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
To make the general ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of present social life.
one.
In social philosophy, the former connotation is almost always uppermost.
The qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of sympathy, are emphasized.
Gangs are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes.
Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life.
In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes.
But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually found.
Caution, circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission.
The real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated.
In evoking dread and hope of specific tangible reward-say comfort and ease-many other capacities are left untouched.
Or rather, they are affected, but in such a way as to pervert them.
Instead of operating on their own account they are reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
The evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less perceptible, but equally real.
Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.
Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with technical production and marketing of goods.
It springs from the fact that they have identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs. On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others, for such contact might dissolve custom.
It would certainly occasion reconstruction.
Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another.
The Democratic Ideal.
The two elements in our criterion both point to democracy.
And these two traits are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society.
The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact.
Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.
But there is a deeper explanation.
three.
The Platonic Educational Philosophy.
The first one to be considered is that of Plato.
Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world.
If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice.
We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out.
Each doing his own part, and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be maintained.
Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition. They become the citizen subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians in peace.
But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal.
The final end of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not even minor details are to be altered.
In reality its chief interest was in progress and in social progress.
The seeming antisocial philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society-toward cosmopolitanism.
Such limitation was both distorting and corrupting.
What was called social life, existing institutions, were too false and corrupt to be intrusted with this work.
five.
Education as National and as Social.
Private individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could not execute the work.
Two results should stand out from this brief historical survey.
Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can only be inconsistently applied.
Summary.
Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class rather than an individual the social unit.
Borne on a gentle breeze, a large crane fly comes sailing out of the wood.
It likes to cool its long legs, as it flies, by trailing them along the surface of the water.
The whirligigs are after it, but it easily avoids them.
Then comes a sudden surprise: a fish pops up its mouth, and closes its scissor jaws with a snap on the insect's legs, and it disappears in the centre of a rocking series of rings.
The lake is perfectly calm, its green black surface smooth and shining, and full of drifting summer clouds.
The reeds are reflected in it and look double their height, and the trees mirror their branches there, seeming twice as leafy; and a red house with a white flagstaff on one of the banks becomes quite a little submarine palace.
It is in one of the valleys in the submarine mountainous region that this shoal of thousands of bleak lies.
It covers the area of a market place, and makes the water alive for fathoms down.
In front and behind, the valley winds on between the hill sides until it widens out and finally loses itself in the barren, sandy desert.
Suddenly, at the end of the neighbouring valley, the water seethes and foams.
It is cleft incessantly from bottom to surface, bubbles rise and whirlpools are formed, and a long strip of lake foams and spurts.
It is not like a single large animal darting forward with rapidly twisting tail, and leaving a wake and waves behind it; but a general effervescence that makes the depths gleam with millions of scales.
They go together in a large company, like soldiers in an army, rows of them above, beside, and behind one another.
With their uppermost layer only a couple of inches below the surface of the water they hasten on.
Then all turn at once, changing from the long, narrow marching column into compact formation.
A fresh signal, inaudible, imperceptible to all but themselves, and once more, in a trice, the narrow, smoothly gliding hunting column is reformed.
Just as they twist and turn in the horizontal plane, so do they in the vertical.
They go suddenly and headlong from the surface to the depths, spinning out from their compact mass a long, living thread.
Now they are in the valley where it lies.
The lively little freshwater herring as yet suspect no danger; they are in constant motion, occupied in snapping up the fallen, half drowned insects.
Noses are pushed up, and little thimble like mouths open; the water streams in, and with it the food.
An eager interchange from bottom to surface goes on; for when the upper layer is satiated, it likes to enjoy its feeling of well-being in peace, until voracity once more makes them all rivals.
The splash of the waves on the surface lifts the gluttons up and down, while the ground swell rocks the satiated to rest.
The perch have quickened their pace; involuntarily the speed is increased; they already scent their prey.
Foremost of the company, with a dark golden, high backed leader at their head, swim a couple of hundred of the finest perch.
They lead, and with frolicsome eagerness push past one another, so as to be the first to arrive.
After them comes the great mass of the horde, big, heavily laden craft, their round backs and swelling bellies testifying to their success in their toil for material needs.
Sheaves of silvery gleaming rays flicker far out in their wake.
For the present the whole flock keeps to the bottom, darting along with dorsal fin erect, the stiff spines bristling menacingly.
It is as well to have bayonets fixed in case of the sudden appearance of a pike.
All at once the van slips away from the rest, and the latter have to exert themselves to catch up, twisting and turning their tails, and unfurling the stiff sail of their dorsal fin.
There must be nothing now to check their speed; fair weather sailing is over, and the privateering expedition has begun.
The certainty of booty fills them all.
All order among the assailants instantly ceases, and each member thinks only of its own mouth, and cares for nothing but getting it filled.
Like yellow flashes of water lightning the perch dart into the shoal of little fish, and like grain among a flock of chickens, masses of bleak disappear into their mouths.
They kill and devour-and it will be still worse when the rear guard comes up.
Now they arrive, and the alarm in the swarm of bleak below spreads with magical swiftness to the upper layers, where the bewildered little creatures make off at full speed.
Gleam after gleam flashes up as the little shining fish, uncertain of their way, twist and turn about.
Each makes itself as long and thin as it can, so as to show as little as possible, and disappear, as it were, in the water.
But now the fierce horde becomes still fiercer.
The rear guard overtakes the fugitives and cuts off their retreat; and smack after smack is heard after their charge.
The swarm of bleak scatters in wild panic.
They tumble over one another and try in their bewilderment which can leap highest and farthest.
They rise like flying fish out of the water with a flash, and once more disappear with a splash into the water.
There is a splash when they rise, and a splash when they again reach the surface of the water; making a sound like the falling of torrents of rain.
Hell is beneath them in the water!
The yellow devils not only menace them from the side; they come upon them from all directions.
When they descend in crowds from their flight into the air, they grow stiff with terror on finding themselves face to face with great, amber eyes that seem starting out of their sockets to go greedily hunting on their own account.
Then a mouth opens, shoots out a pair of concertina like lips, and changes into a funnel; and the poor little fish disappear into a chasm, like threads into a vacuum cleaner.
Above the spot a cloud of terns is circling.
They fly low with half extended legs and drooping wings, ready to dart down.
Sometimes they make a catch, sometimes miss their aim, but have the good fortune to take a fish that inadvertently appears close by; indeed the bleak often leap straight into the birds' open beak.
The birds hold them at all sorts of angles in their beak, and fly away with them, shrieking and screaming, pursued by their fellows.
Poor little bleak! they were so pretty to look at.
An emerald green colour extended from the back right over the head and nose; and the rims of their eyes when they blinked could sparkle and shine like the gem itself.
Their shining breast was whiter than a swan's, and their plump sides gleamed and sparkled like ice under a wintry moon.
A boat lay anchored a few hundred yards off.
In it was an elderly man.
An angler this.
He had been out since early morning, and had a delightful day.
Not a single bite.
But what did that matter?
He was lying now at the bottom of the boat, dreaming.
He was a regular visitor to the lake.
His ancestors' love of a free, out of door life had entered into his blood.
It is well known that it takes three generations to make a gentleman; but it would take three times as many to create, out of a race that ever since the morning of time had lived out of doors, a generation that did not care to handle either gun or rod.
In his youth his gun had been his best friend; but the chase demands much of legs and muscles and heart.
When a man is no longer in his prime, he should beware of paying ardent court to Dame Diana.
In her suite-it is useless to deny it-the old man is seldom looked upon with favour: he has had his day.
But Father Neptune clasps him rapturously in his wet embrace, and sets the fish around his boat leaping and playing.
It was thus in his later years that his fishing rod had become the old man's joy and companion.
Season after season he made his weekly journey from town by rail, and then drove out to the lake.
The weather to day, from a fisherman's point of view, is the worst possible.
The July sun is shining hotly, and sends its beams deep down into the water.
The lake slumbers.
There is a bottle green hue above the deep water, and a lilac shade in the shallows; but over the sandy bottom the colour is drab.
Far off a flock of wild ducks rising raise some little, gentle waves, that look so blue, so blue!
The angler, who is a big, sturdy man with large, black rimmed spectacles upon his voluminous nose, is in his customary fishing dress-an old straw hat with an elastic under the chin, his coat off, and no collar, on his legs a pair of thick, yellowish brown moleskin trousers, his feet in a pair of felt shoes, lined with straw.
He is now lying outstretched in midday drowsiness, enjoying the great peace that rests on the lake.
Suddenly he awakes with a start.
He hears a rushing sound like that of the paddles of a distant steamer striking and tearing the water; he sees the terns flocking, and the surface of the water broken again and again by bleak leaping high into the air.
He takes up his anchor, and rows up until he hears the smack, smack of the greedy perch all round him, and knows he is in the middle of the whirlpool of fish.
He gets four lines clear, and has enough to do in throwing them out and pulling them in.
At last he can do no more, and drops exhausted on to a thwart.
Then he opens his wallet, takes out the bottle containing clear liquid, and takes a nip.
This he is accustomed to do every time he catches a fish of any importance.
thirteen: A FIGHT WITH AN OTTER
The harrier was sitting on her newly hatched young, and the pair of crows were feeding theirs for the last time; it was the time of the owls-and the nightingales.
Silent and weary, the cuckoo came from the meadow land to the bog, where the twilight enveloped it and hid it on its branch.
The water began to sparkle with strong, bright colours, and patches of yellow, scarlet, and blue floated about, shot with brilliant flakes of emerald and purple, which gave darkened reflections of the birch tops.
Only a few moments before, all the sloping banks of the bog had been held by the sun; it shone upon the flowers of the wild chervil and upon a narrow strip of orange gravel that had been scraped out of one of the banks.
But now it was gone.
Suddenly the nightingale up in the thicket becomes silent, stops in the middle of its highest trill, and begins to snarl.
A large otter with low set ears cautiously raises its head above the strip of gravel.
It sniffs long and continuously, as it stretches its round, shaggy neck out over the ridge.
Above the distant banks on the other side of the bog, the first glow of the full moon peeps out.
Like a monster toadstool, it grows up out of the horizon, sending up a cloud of purple into the air.
For a moment the flower stands out perfect, large and round at the end of its slender, black stalk, and then the illusion is shattered: from a toadstool the poppy has turned into a moon!
Then the otter comes right up out of the earth, with body and tail and four legs, and shuffles down the slope.
A couple of herons, fishing at the edge of the bog, bend their necks and make off with hoarse, shrill trumpetings; and a herd of splashing heifers, scenting the approach of a beast of prey, begin to growl and snort.
The otter came to the bog every two or three months, when it was tired of hunting fish in the lake.
A rover's blood flowed in its veins.
Nature had endowed it with a peculiarly active power of assimilation, which was probably necessary if it was to keep warm in the cold water; it needed daily its own weight in fish, and therefore had to be incessantly changing its hunting ground.
It was timid and suspicious, but a great glutton.
Pike, which it used especially to catch in the bogs, were somewhat dry, it is true, but after all, one could not have salmon and trout every day!
After having labouriously shuffled over a piece of land, and reached the largest of the big pools, it allowed itself to glide noiselessly from its slip-a path trodden in the grass-into its true element.
A wild chase was going on in the depths, and where it passed the rushes bowed their sheaves and the flags their fans.
Black mud was stirred up in whirlpools; seething bubbles came to the surface and burst.
The otter, with a newly caught fish in its mouth, had been on its way out to a little island, intending to have its meal under a sallow, when it was suddenly attacked and robbed of its prey.
It caught a glimpse of the indistinct outline of a great fish, and exasperated at such audacity, determined to go in chase of the robber.
An attempt to get beneath Grim, in order to seize her round the gills or by the belly, was unsuccessful; at the decisive moment Grim had turned aside, so that the otter had to set its teeth where it could. And it needed a well placed grip to hold such a giant fish.
The instant it has taken hold-a little behind the neck-Grim darts into deep water with her assailant.
The otter backs, extends his fore and hind legs far out from his body, and spreads his web, so as to offer as much resistance as possible.
Grim soon sees that this pace is wearing out her strength, and pauses for a moment.
As she does so, she feels as if an eel were winding its pliant body round her chest.
She rolls round, unable to use her fins.
She quickly regains her balance, however, frees her body from the pressure, and sets off, with sudden twists, and leaps from the bottom to the surface, turning so suddenly that the fish snatcher's body swings out and hangs down in the water.
But the otter only keeps a firmer hold.
He is used to these desperate rallies, which always become fiercer and more violent as the quarry is on the point of giving in.
He takes care, however, in turning, not to let any of his legs hang in front of the pike's mouth; he is too well acquainted with the teeth of the fresh water shark!
Up and down, the two well matched opponents dive incessantly.
Whenever Grim goes to the surface, a puffing and growling is heard.
The otter hastily gasps for breath, and tightens his hold with his fore claws; but when they are on their way down to the depths, and air bubbles, like silver beads, roll through the water behind him, he has only to hold on and let himself go.
Once Grim is lucky.
An old snag sticks up in the water, and, in turning, the otter's body is dashed against it.
They lie fighting on the surface-a golden streaked, slimy, scaly fish twisted into a knot with a dark, hairy, furred body!
Once more there is a pause in the fighting.
Now Grim's strength returns once more.
With a powerful stroke of her tail, she disappears with lightning rapidity from the surface, and goes to the bottom with her rider, whose merry go round jaunt makes his head swim.
She is trying to get hold of his leg or body, and therefore twists round with him so that he flaps like a loose piece of strap on an axle; but she is not sufficiently supple to reach him.
Her back aches, her flexor muscles hurt.
At last she has met with an opponent who puts her judgment, her ingenuity, and her endurance to the extreme test.
Down on the bottom, sticking out from the bank, are the roots of the willow bushes on the edge.
In her mad rush down, Grim has come near these, and instinctively seeks shelter beneath them.
At full speed she runs her long body into the network and sticks fast, rapidly twisting her tail screw both ahead and astern.
The otter treads water now on the right, now on the left side of her, and tries, by utilizing the roots as steps, to lift her up with him. But in vain; he cannot even stir the huge fish!
But he makes tremendous exertions, whipping his tail in under the peat bank, while with his hind paws he seeks for support in clefts and cracks.
Suddenly he feels one of his feet seized.
The grasp tightens, so that his whole leg aches; he tries to draw in his foot, but it is held immovable.
A monster crayfish, that has become so stiff with age that it can scarcely manage to strike a proper blow with its tail, has made for itself, in fear of Grim, a reliable place of refuge in the hole.
For a long time it has patiently followed the battle through its feelers, and hoped that some morsel would fall to its hungry stomach; now, with gratitude to Providence, it closes its great claw upon the warm blooded fisher.
He had once been caught by the tip of one claw in an otter trap.
The trap was heavy, and had dragged him under water; and he had only escaped at the last moment. With the grasp on his leg, his lungs begin to warn him, his throat contracts, and his eyes seem on the point of bursting.
Up!
Up!
With or without his prey!
He has let go of Grim, and now makes his escape from the hole with so sudden a jerk that the old crayfish accompanies him; but the dread of water, which no living being that breathes with lungs can quite overcome, has taken possession of the otter.
With all possible speed he slips out from among the roots, and is already rising; and as he approaches the surface and finds the blessed light beating more and more strongly upon the mud about his eyes, he hastens his flight, until, with an eager sniff, he reaches the surface.
Grim is close behind him, and as the otter lands, there is a loud splash.
It would have been all over with the brown beast if the old crayfish, on its way down from the surface, where it had at last let go its hold, had not dropped like a stone straight into Grim's mouth.
Grim has now to content herself with sending her opponent a cold, dull, fishy glance, and let the Nipper continue its journey down into her draw bag.
The wound that the old giant pike had received was not a dangerous one. True, there were two rows of deep cuts made by a pair of thick, round toothed jaws in the flesh on one side of her back; but they healed like so many others that she had had in her time.
Her back, however, was tender for days after, and she found it a little difficult to leap.
The otter felt quite sure that it was only by good fortune that it had not been annihilated by its great, dangerous rival.
We shall, necessarily, have little to say on this head; there are, however, some little rules which are not to be neglected.
It is proper to vary the phraseology of these formal questions, as much as possible; and we must abstain from them entirely, towards a superior, or a person with whom we are but little acquainted, for such inquiries presuppose some degree of intimacy.
In the last case, there is a method of manifesting our interest, without violating etiquette; it consists in making these inquiries of the domestics, or of other persons of the house, and of saying afterwards when introduced; 'I am happy Sir, to hear that you are in good health.'
To put a corrective upon this mark of regard, a lady who addresses a gentleman, should be earnest in her inquiries of the health of his family, however little intimacy she may have with them.
Many persons ask this question mechanically, without waiting for the answer, or else hasten to reply, before they have received it.
We can put a general question, designating the most important members.
In case of the absence of near relations, we ask the person we are visiting, if they have heard from them lately, if the news is favorable.
They, on their part, ask the same of us.
Politeness infuses into visits of some little ceremony, a coloring of modesty, grace, and deference, which should be preserved with the greatest care.
The rules of politeness in this respect, are the same in speaking of the husband.
With these forms, they think they comply with the rules of politeness.
It is incivility with affectation.
If you strike against any one in the least, ask pardon for it immediately.
It is customary to employ the few moments of a visit of mere politeness, in looking at the portraits which adorn the fireplace, and even taking them down, if you are invited to do it.
It would moreover be improper to make long compliments; indirect, and ingenious praise, is all that is proper.
Questions are therefore necessary, but they demand infinite delicacy and tact, in order neither to fatigue nor ever wound the feelings.
Madame Necker ingeniously observes that these favorite and frequently repeated terms with which we fill our conversation, serve, ordinarily as a mark of people's character.
They embarrass and overwhelm our conversation, turn away the attention of those who listen to us, and render us importunate, and ridiculous, without our being able to perceive it.
SECTION three.
There are many conditions indispensable to the success of a narrative. These conditions are, first, novelty; the best stories weary when they are multiplied too much, because every one wishes to be an actor in his turn upon the stage of the world.
There are but too many people who discover the secret of wearying while telling very good things, on account of their too great eagerness to tell them.
The next thing is to take a suitable opportunity.
If your opinion is asked, give it frankly, and without wishing to appear better informed than the narrator himself.
Frequently, in the midst of a recital, the narrator, through forgetfulness, hesitates, and thinks that he can recall it.
Look at him attentively.
If he is in doubt, declare that you are altogether ignorant of the subject in question.
This delicate politeness is particularly to be observed towards old persons.
When your narrations have had success, keep a modest countenance; leave others to point out the striking parts which have pleased them.
The surest means of not having the approbation of others, in actions as well as other things, is to solicit it, whether it be by looks, or by words.
When arrived at this point, abstain from these kinds of analysis, which though indeed more correct, seem labored.
They have besides less freedom, appropriateness, and grace.
Know this, and remember it well, that every other preparation than thinking what you are about to say, will make you acquire two intolerable faults, affectation and stiffness.
Those who are less engaged in these things, should content themselves with simply and briefly explaining a subject, and of mentioning the emotion they felt; with speaking of some brilliant passage, and adding that they do not pretend to pronounce judgment.
The first degree of digression is the parenthesis; provided it is short, natural, and seldom repeated; and that you take care to announce it always; and finally, in order not to abuse it, you should make a skilful use of it.
This method of speaking in italics may be striking and artless; but it often becomes obscure and trivial; the habit is dangerous, and one should use this difficult digression only before intimate friends.
But if it is an affair of nothings succeeding nothings, let it flow on.
Lawyers, literary people, military men, travellers, invalids and aged ladies, ought to have a prudent and continual distrust of the abuse of digressions.
The two shoals to be avoided in this form of language are directly opposed to each other; the one is triviality, the other bombast.
They are not so used, if, in the course of a discussion, you suppose a respectable person to supply the place of a madman, an ill bred person, or a robber; or, if you suppose him to be in a situation disgraceful or even ridiculous.
If you do not bring over your opponent to your own opinion, you will at least gain his esteem.
But if you have to do with one of those people who, possessed with a mania of discussion, commence by contradicting before they hear, and who are always ready to sustain the contrary opinion, yield to him; you will have nothing to gain with him.
Be assured that the spirit of contradiction can be conquered only by silence.
Popular quotations and proverbs, as well as other quotations, require some care; and, except in familiar conversation, are altogether misplaced.
If they are frequent, conversation becomes a tedious gossipping; if introduced without a short previous remark, one of two things will take place, they will either prevent the speaker from being understood, or they will give him the air of Sancho Panza.
A proverb well applied, and placed at the end of a phrase, frequently makes a very happy conclusion.
I only speak to censure; I entreat my readers not to suffer themselves to be the manufacturers of puns, and to despise this talent of fools and childish means to excite a passing laugh.
What pleasure can we find in causing ladies to blush, and in meriting the name of a man of bad society?
It requires but a moment to lose those delicate shades of character which constitute a man of the world, and which cost us so much labor to acquire.
If we remain silent, we appear to be inhaling the incense with complacency; if we repel it, we only seem to excite it the more.
Thus we see, in such a case, and even among very clever persons too, those who reply by silly exclamations and by rude assertions.
This is a mistake, gentlemen, and I can with relation to this point, reveal to you what my sex prefers to these vulgar eulogiums.
But is it then necessary to proscribe eulogiums entirely?
I repeat, as I have often said, let there be moderation in everything.
It is much better to cause people to think more than we say, and not outrage language, and run the risk of going beyond what we ought to say.
Under any circumstances, complaining has always a bad grace.
Politeness is not less opposed to making excessive complaints to the first person you meet, than to the frequent and extravagant eulogiums which you bestow improperly upon those from whom you expect a favor in return.
By the word improprieties, we generally understand all violations of politeness.
We, however, give to this word a particular and limited sense.
It signifies a want of due regard to, and a forgetfulness of, the delicate attentions which seem to identify us with the situation of others.
CHAPTER nine.
SCRAPS
"A specter," her husband repeated with a suggestive glance at the brilliant sunshine in which we all stood.
"Yes." The tone was one of utter conviction.
"I had never believed in such things-never thought about them, but-it was a week ago-in the library-I have not seen a happy moment since-"
"My darling!"
I was sitting reading.
There was no mistaking their look.
As it burned into and through me, everything which had given reality to my life faded and seemed as far away and as unsubstantial as a dream.
Her husband, with a soothing touch on her arm, brought her back to the present.
"You speak of a form," he said, "a shadowy outline.
The form of what?
A man or a woman?"
In spite of himself and the sympathy he undoubtedly felt for her, an ejaculation of impatience left her husband's lips.
Do you wonder that my happiness vanished before it?
The mayor was a practical man; he kept close to the subject.
"You saw this form between you and the lighted lamp.
"I can not tell you.
One moment it was there and the next it was gone, and I found myself staring into vacancy.
I seem to be staring there still, waiting for the blow destined to shatter this household."
What we have to fear and all we have to fear is that I may lose my election.
And that won't kill me, whatever effect it may have on the party."
"Henry,"--her voice had changed to one more natural, also her manner. The confidence expressed in this outburst, the vitality, the masculine attitude he took were producing their effect.
"You don't believe in what I saw or in my fears.
Perhaps you are right.
I am ready to acknowledge this; I will try to look upon it all as a freak of my imagination if you will promise to forget these dreadful days, and if people, other people, will leave me alone and not print such things about me."
"I am ready to do my part," was his glad reply, "and as for the other people you mention, we shall soon bring them to book." Raising his voice, he called out his secretary's name.
"Find out who did that."
"It is calumny," fell from mrs Packard's lips as she watched him.
Two days or a week, it is all one.
mr Steele bowed.
"Certainly; most happy."
This conclusion was brought back to me with fresh insistence a few minutes later, when, on hearing the front door shut, I stepped to the balustrade and looked over to see if mrs Packard was coming up.
This scrap of I knew not what, but which had been the occasion of the enigmatic scene I had witnessed at the breakfast table, necessarily interested me very much and I could not help giving it a look.
I saw that it was inscribed with Hebraic looking characters as unlike as possible to the scrawl of a little child.
With no means of knowing whether they were legible or not, these characters made a surprising impression upon me, one, indeed, that was almost photographic.
I also noted that these shapes or characters, of which there were just seven, were written on the face of an empty envelope.
Carrying it back to mrs Packard, I handed it over with the remark that I had found it lying in the hall.
She cast a quick look at it, gave me another look and tossed the paper into the grate.
As it caught fire and flared up, the characters started vividly into view.
This second glimpse of them, added to the one already given me, fixed the whole indelibly in my mind.
This is the way they looked.
While I watched these cabalistic marks pass from red to black and finally vanish in a wild leap up the chimney, mrs Packard remarked:
"I wish I could destroy the memory of all my mistakes as completely as I can that old envelope."
"You are tired, mrs Packard," was my sympathetic observation.
"Will you not take a nap?
Now that I feel better, now that I have relieved my mind, I must look over my letters and try to take up the old threads again."
"Can I help you?" I asked.
"Possibly.
I was glad to obey this order.
I was met at the door by Ellen.
She wore a look of dismay which I felt fully accounted for when I looked inside.
Disorder reigned from one end of the room to the other, transcending any picture I may have formed in my own mind concerning its probable condition.
mrs Packard must have forgotten all this disarray, or at least had supposed it to have yielded to the efforts of the maid, when she proposed my awaiting her there. There were bureau drawers with their contents half on the floor, boxes with their covers off, cupboard doors ajar and even the closet shelves showing every mark of a frenzied search among them.
"It's as bad as the attic room up stairs.
I have a whole morning's work before me."
Here, there and everywhere above and below lay scraps of torn up paper; and on many, if not on all of them, could be seen the broken squares and inverted angles which had marked so curiously the surface of the envelope she had handed to mr Steele, and which I had afterward seen her burn.
"The baby!
Oh, the baby never did that.
She's too young."
How old is she?"
"Twenty months and such a darling!
Why, look at this!"
"What?" I demanded, hurrying to the closet, where Ellen stood bending over something invisible to me.
"Oh, nothing," she answered, coming quickly out.
Her bag is in there almost packed.
That accounts-" Stopping, she cast a glance around the room, ending with a shake of the head and a shrug.
HE'S THERE AGAIN!
LOOK!" the old man croaked, jabbing a calloused finger at the burial hill.
"Old Piper again!
Every year that way!"
"Ah?" The old man's leathery face rumpled into a maze of wrinkles.
"He's crazy, that's what.
Stands up there piping on his music from sunset until dawn."
The thin piping sounds squealed in the dusk, echoed back from the low hills, were lost in melancholy silence, fading.
The Piper was a tall, gaunt man, face as pale and wan as Martian moons, eyes electrical purple, standing against the soft of the dusking heaven, holding his pipe to his lips, playing.
The Piper-a silhouette-a symbol-a melody.
"Where did the Piper come from?" asked the Martian boy.
"From Venus." The old man took out his pipe and filled it.
I arrived on the same ship, coming from Earth, we shared a double seat together."
"What is his name?" Again the boyish, eager voice.
"I can't remember.
I don't think I ever knew, really."
A vague rustling sound came into existence.
From the darkness, across the star jewelled horizon, came mysterious shapes, creeping, creeping.
"Nothing ever happens of much gravity.
The Piper, I believe, is an exile."
The stars trembled like reflections in water, dancing with the music.
"Something like a leper.
They called him THE BRILLIANT.
He was the epitome of all Venerian culture until the Earthmen came with their greedy incorporations and licentious harlots. The Earthlings outlawed him, sent him here to Mars to live out his days."
"Mars is a dying world," repeated the boy.
"A dying world.
The old man chuckled.
"Where do they live?
I have never seen them."
"You are young.
You have much to see, much to learn."
"Where do they live?"
"Out there, beyond the mountains, beyond the dead sea bottoms, over the horizon and to the north, in the caves, far back in the subterrane."
"Why?"
"Why?
Now that's hard to say.
They were a brilliant race once upon a time.
But something happened to them, hybrided them.
"Does Earth own Mars?"
The little boy's eyes were riveted upon the glowing planet overhead, the green planet.
"Yes, all of Mars.
They are miners.
With their huge machines they rip open the bowels of our planet and dig out our precious life blood from the mineral arteries."
"Is that all?"
"That is all." The old man shook his head sadly.
"No culture, no art, no purpose.
Greedy, hopeless Earthlings."
"And the other two cities----where are they?"
"One is up the same cobbled road five miles, the third is further still by some five hundred miles."
"I am glad I live here with you, alone." The boy's head nodded sleepily. "I do not like the men from Terra.
They are despoilers."
"They have always been.
But someday," said the old man, "they will meet their doom.
They have blasphemed enough, have they.
Someday----!" His voice rose high, in tempo and pitch with the Piper's wild music.
Music to stir the savage into life.
Music to effect man's destiny!
"Wild eyed Piper on the hill, Crying out your rigadoons, Bring the savages to kill 'Neath the waning Martian moons!"
"What is that?" asked the boy.
"A poem," said the old man.
"A poem I have written in the last few days. I feel something is going to happen very soon.
The Piper's song is growing more insistent every night.
At first, twenty years ago, he played on only a few nights of every year, but now, for the last three years he has played until dawn every night of every autumn when the planet is dying."
"What savages?"
Along the star glimmered mountain tops a vast clustering herd of black, murmuring, advancing.
"Piper, pipe that song again! So he piped, I wept to hear."
"More of the poem?" asked the boy.
"Not my poem-but a poem from Earth some seventy years ago.
I learned it in school."
"Music is strange." The little boy's eyes were scintillant with thought. "It warms me inside.
This music makes me angry.
Why?"
"Because it is music with a purpose."
"What purpose?"
"Music is the language of all things-intelligent or not, savage or educated civilian.
This Piper knows his music as a god knows his heaven. For twenty years he has composed his hymn of action and hate and finally, tonight perhaps, the finale will be reached.
At first, many years ago, when he played, he received no answer from the subterrane, but the murmur of gibbering voices.
Tonight, for the first time, the herd of black will spill over the trails toward our hovel, toward the road, toward the cities of man!"
Music screaming, higher, faster, insanely, sending shock after macabre shock thru night air, loosening the stars from their riveted stations. The Piper stretched high, six feet or more, upon his hillock, swaying back and forth, his thin shape attired in brown cloth.
The black mass on the mountain came down like amoebic tentacles, met and coalesced, muttering and mumbling.
"You are young, you must live to propagate the new Mars.
Tonight is the end of the old, tomorrow begins the new!
It is death for the men of Earth!" Higher still and higher.
"Death!
They come to overrun the Earthlings, destroy their cities, take their projectiles.
Then-in the ships of man-to Earth!
Turnabout!
Revolution and Revenge!
A new civilization! When monsters usurp men and men's greediness crumbles at his demise!" Shriller, faster, higher, insanely tempoed.
"The Piper-The Brilliant One-He who has waited for years for this night.
The return of Art to humanity!"
"But they are savages, these unpure Martians," the boy cried.
"Men are savages.
I am ashamed of being a man," the old man said, tremblingly.
"Yes, these creatures are savages, but they will learn-these brutes-with music.
Music in many forms----music for peace, music for love-music for hate and music for death.
The Piper and his brood will set up a new cosmos.
He is immortal!" Now, hurrying, muttering up the road, the first cluster of black things reminiscent of men.
The Piper, from his hillock, walking down the road, over the cobbles, to the city.
"Piper, pipe that song again!" cried the old man.
"Go and kill and live again!
Bring us love and art again!
Piper, pipe the song!
I weep!" Then: "Hide, child, hide quickly!
Hurry!" And the child, crying, hurried to the small house and hid himself thru the night.
Swirling, jumping, running, leaping, gamboling, crying-the new humanity surged to man's cities, his rockets, his mines.
Stars shuddered.
Nightbirds sang no songs.
Echoes murmured only the voices of the ones who advanced, bringing new understanding.
The old man, caught in the whirlpool of ebon, was swept down, screaming.
Then up the road, by the awful thousands, vomiting out of hills, sprawling from caves, curling, huge fingers of beasts, around and about and down to the Man Cities.
Sighing, leaping up, voices and destruction!
Rockets across the sky!
Guns.
Death.
And finally, in the pale advancement of dawn, the memory, the echoing of the old man's voice.
And the little boy arose to start afresh a new world with a new mate.
Echoing, the old man's voice:
"Piper, pipe that song again!
So he piped, I wept to hear!"
A new day dawned.
The End
Chapter three A GREAT HOUSEHOLD
VINCENT remained two years in the house of Father de Berulle, in the hope of obtaining permanent work.
"This humble priest," he predicted one day to a friend, "will render great service to the Church and will work much for God's glory."
saint Francis de Sales, who made Vincent's acquaintance while he was with de Berulle, was of the same opinion.
"He will be the holiest priest of his time," he said one day as he watched him.
At last Vincent's desire seemed about to be fulfilled.
A friend of de Berulle's, cure of the country parish of Clichy, near Paris, announced his intention of entering the Oratory, and at de Berulle's request chose Vincent de Paul as his successor.
Here, amidst his beloved poor, Vincent was completely happy.
Nothing less than the resignation of his beloved Clichy was now asked of him by this friend to whom he owed so much.
De Berulle decided at once that Vincent de Paul was the man for the position and that, as he was evidently destined to do great work for God, it would be to his advantage to have powerful and influential friends.
Although the prospect of such a post filled the humble parish priest with consternation, he owed too much to de Berulle to refuse.
Setting out from Clichy with his worldly goods on a hand barrow, he arrived at the Oratory, from whence he was to proceed to his new abode.
The de Gondi children, unfortunately, did not take after their parents, and the two boys whose education Vincent was to undertake and whose character he was to form were described by their aunt as "regular little demons." The youngest of the family, the famous, or rather infamous, Cardinal de Retz, was not yet born, but Vincent's hands were sufficiently full without him.
"I should like my children to be saints rather than great noblemen," said Madame de Gondi when she presented the boys to their tutor, but the prospect seemed remote enough.
With the servants, and there were many of every grade, he was always cordial and polite, losing no chance of winning their confidence, that he might influence them for good.
Knowing enough of his humility to be certain that he would refuse such a request, she applied to Father de Berulle to use his influence in the matter, and thus obtained her desire.
At Vincent's suggestion she soon afterwards undertook certain works of charity, which were destined to be the seed of a great enterprise.
The Count, too, began to feel the effects of Vincent's presence in his household.
De Gondi was present at Mass in the morning and remained on afterwards in the chapel, praying, probably, that he might prevail over his enemy.
Vincent waited till everyone had gone out, and then approached him softly.
"Monsieur," he said, "I know that you intend to fight a duel; and I tell you, as a message from my Saviour, before whom you kneel, that if you do not renounce this intention His judgment will fall on you and yours." The Count, after a moment's silence, promised to give up his project, and faithfully kept his word.
But the influence of sanctity is strong, and the Count was noble; for him it was the beginning of a better life.
It happened one day that Vincent was sent to the bedside of a dying peasant who had always borne a good character and was considered an excellent Christian.
The man was conscious, and Vincent-moved, no doubt, by the direct inspiration of God-urged him to make a General Confession.
The incident made a lasting impression on both Vincent and the Countess.
How many others might be in like case!
It was a terrible thought.
"Ah, Monsieur Vincent," cried the great lady, "how many souls are being lost!
Can you do nothing to help them?"
Her words found an echo in Vincent's heart.
Next Sunday he preached a sermon in the parish church on the necessity of General Confession. It was the first of the famous mission sermons destined to do so much good in France.
While he spoke, Madame de Gondi prayed, and the result far surpassed their expectations.
So great were the crowds that flocked to Confession that Vincent was unable to cope with them and had to apply to the Jesuits at Amiens for help.
The other villages on the estate were visited in turn, with equal success. Vincent used to look back in later life to this first mission sermon as the beginning of his work for souls.
The result of all this for the preacher, however, was a certain prestige, and his humility took alarm.
The "little demons" were as headstrong and violent as ever; it was only on their parents that he had been able to make any impression.
Fearful of being caught in the snare of worldly honors, he resolved to seek safety in flight.
His work as a tutor had been a failure, he told him; he could do nothing with his pupils, and he was receiving honor which he in no way deserved. He ended by begging to be allowed to work for the poor in some humble and lonely place, and de Berulle decided to grant his wish.
The country parish of Chatillon was in need of workers, was the answer; let him go there and exercise his zeal for souls.
Only when he had been already established for some time in his new parish did it dawn on the de Gondis that his absence was not to be merely temporary.
They were in desperation.
He shall live exactly as he likes if he will only come back.
Get de Berulle to persuade him.
He then turned his attention to the clergy already there.
They were ignorant and easygoing men, for the most part, who thought a good deal more of their own amusement than of the needs of their flock, but they were not bad at heart.
Vincent's representations of what a priest's life ought to be astonished them at first and convinced them later-all the more so in that they saw in him the very ideal that he strove to set before them.
He was, moreover, half a heretic, and Vincent had been warned to have nothing to do with him.
But the new rector had his own ideas on the subject, and the ill assorted pair soon became very good friends.
His first step was to be reconciled to the Church, his second to begin to interest himself in the poor.
Gradually his bad companions dropped away, until one day Chatillon suddenly awoke to the fact that this most rackety of individuals was taking life seriously-was, in fact, a changed man. The whole town was in a stir.
Who was this priest who had so suddenly come among them, so self forgetful, so simple, so unassuming, yet whose influence was so strong with all classes?
It was a question that might well be asked in the light of what was yet to come.
And he kept his word.
One by one he sold his estates to find the wherewithal for Vincent's schemes of charity, and he would have stripped himself of all that he had, had not Vincent himself forbidden it.
His sword, which had served him in all his duels, and to which he was very much attached, he broke in pieces on a rock.
He died the death of a saint a few years later, amid the blessings of all the people whom he had helped.
Some of them, moved by curiosity, went to see the new preacher, who, receiving them with his usual kindness and courtesy, drew a touching picture of the suffering and poverty that surrounded them and begged them to think sometimes of their less fortunate brothers and sisters.
They were the forerunners of those "Sisters of Charity" who were in after years to carry help and comfort among the poor of every country.
One day, as Vincent was about to say Mass, one of these ladies begged him to speak to the congregation in favor of a poor family whose members were sick and starving.
So successful was his appeal that when he himself went a few hours later to see what could be done, he found the road thronged with people carrying food and necessaries.
This, Vincent at once realized, was not practical.
There would be far too much today and nothing tomorrow.
There was no want of charity, but it needed organization.
The work developed quickly; confraternities of charity were soon adopted in nearly all the parishes of France and have since extended over the whole Christian world.
The de Gondis, in the meantime, had discovered the place of Vincent's retreat and had written him several letters, piteously urging him to return.
Vincent was humble enough to believe that he might be in the wrong.
The next day Vincent returned to the Hotel de Gondi, where he promised to remain during the lifetime of the Countess.
Delighted to have him back at any price, Vincent's noble patrons asked for nothing better than to further all his schemes for the welfare of the poor and infirm.
Confraternities of charity like that of Chatillon were established on all the de Gondi estates, Madame de Gondi herself setting the example of what a perfect Lady of Charity should be. Neither dirt, discourtesy nor risk of infection could discourage this earnest disciple of Vincent.
In spite of weak health she gave freely of her time, her energy and her money.
Chained to their oars night and day, kept in order by cruel cuts of the lash on their bare shoulders, these men lived and died on the rowers' bench without spiritual help or assistance of any kind.
The conditions of service were such that many prisoners took their own lives rather than face the torments of such an existence.
As Vincent went about his works of charity in Paris it occurred to him to visit the dungeons where the men who had been condemned to the galleys were confined.
What he saw filled him with horror.
Huddled together in damp and filthy prisons, crawling with vermin, covered with sores and ulcers, brawling, blaspheming and fighting, the galley slaves made a picture suggestive only of Hell.
"These are your people, Monseigneur!" he cried; "you will have to answer for them before God." The General was aghast; it had never occurred to him to think of the condition of the men who rowed his ships, and he gladly gave Vincent a free hand to do whatever he could to relieve them.
Calling two other priests to his assistance, Vincent set to work at once to visit the convicts in the Paris prisons; but the men were so brutalized that it was difficult to know how to win them.
The first advances were met with cursing and blasphemy, but Vincent was not to be discouraged.
With his own gentle charity he performed the lowest offices for these poor wretches to whom his heart went out with such an ardent pity; he cleansed them from the vermin which infested them and dressed their neglected sores.
Gradually they were softened and would listen while he spoke to them of the Saviour who had died to save their souls.
This enabled Vincent to carry his mission farther afield, and he determined to visit all the convict prisons in the seaport towns, taking Marseilles as his first station.
Here, where the conditions were perhaps even worse than in Paris, Vincent met them in the same spirit and conquered by the same means. The fact that he had once been a slave himself gave him an insight into the sufferings of the galley slaves and a wonderful influence over them.
This strange new friend who went about among them, kissing their chains, sympathizing with their sufferings and attending to their lowest needs seemed to them like an Angel from Heaven; even the most hardened could not resist such treatment.
In the meantime, through the generosity of Vincent's friends, hospitals were being built and men and women were offering themselves to help in any capacity in this work of charity.
Many of these earnest Christians gave their very lives for the galley slaves; for fevers, plague and contagious diseases of every kind raged in the filthy convict prisons, and many priests and lay helpers died of the infection.
Chapter five MISSION WORK
It seemed to her that there was need to multiply such missions among the country poor, and no sooner had Vincent returned to her house than she offered him a large sum of money to endow a band of priests who would devote their lives to evangelizing the peasantry on her estates.
Vincent was delighted, but considering himself unfit to undertake the management of such an enterprise, he proposed that it should be put into the hands of the Jesuits or the Oratorians.
In every case some obstacle intervened, until the Countess was more than ever persuaded that her first instinct had been right.
Knowing Vincent's loyalty to Holy Church and his obedience to authority, she determined to have recourse to her brother in law, the Archbishop of Paris.
An old house called the College des Bons Enfants was at that moment vacant.
There was no longer room for hesitation; the will of God seemed plain; indeed, Vincent's love of the poor had been for some time struggling with his humility.
The new Congregation was to consist of a few good priests who, renouncing all thought of honor and worldly advancement, were to devote their lives to preaching in the villages and small towns of France.
In March, sixteen twenty five, the foundation was made, and Vincent de Paul was named the first superior.
It was stipulated, however, that he should remain, as he had already promised, in the house of the founders, a condition which seemed likely to doom the enterprise to failure.
Vincent could hardly fail to realize how necessary it was that the superior of a new Congregation should be in residence in his own house, but he confided the little company to God and awaited the development of events.
The solution was altogether unexpected.
Her broken hearted husband not only consented to Vincent's residence in the College des Bons Enfants, but shortly afterwards, leaving that world where he had shone so brilliantly, he himself became a postulant at the Oratory.
Before setting out on their mission journeys they used to give the key of the house to a neighbor; but as there was nothing in it to steal, there was little cause for anxiety. In the course of their travels other priests, realizing the greatness of the work, asked to be enrolled in the little company.
Its growth, nevertheless, was slow; ten years after the foundation the Congregation only numbered thirty three members; but Vincent had no desire that it should be otherwise.
In sixteen fifty two it was recognized by Pope Urban the eighth under the name of the Congregation of the Mission.
Vincent lavished the greatest care on the training of his priests. They were to be simple and frank in their relations with the poor, modest in manner, friendly and easy of access.
For "fine sermons" Vincent had the greatest contempt; he would use his merry wit to make fun of the pompous preachers whose only thought was to impress their audience with an idea of their own eloquence.
"Of what good is a display of rhetoric?" he would ask; "who is the better for it?
It serves no purpose but self advertisement."
The Mission Priests did good wherever they went; everybody wanted them, and it was hard to satisfy the appeals for missions which came from all over the country.
The religious wars had led to laxity and carelessness; drunkenness and vice were fearfully prevalent.
To Vincent, with his high ideals of the priesthood, this was a terrible revelation.
The old custom of giving a retreat to priests who were about to be ordained had fallen into disuse.
Here, in an atmosphere of prayer and recollection, those who were about to be ordained had every opportunity of realizing the greatness of the step that they were taking and of making resolutions for their future lives.
The Mission Priests were to help in this work more by example than by precept; they were to preach by humility and simplicity.
"It is not by knowledge that you will do them good," Vincent often repeated, "or by the fine things you say, for they are more learned than you-they have read or heard it all before.
It is by what they see of your lives that you will help them; if you yourselves are striving for perfection, God will use you to lead these gentlemen in the right way."
Many to whom they had been the turning point of a lifetime, felt the need of further help and instruction from the man who had awakened all that was noblest in their natures.
To meet this necessity Vincent inaugurated a kind of guild for young priests who desire to live worthy of their vocation.
It was not easy to belong to the "Conferences." Members were pledged to offer their lives completely to God and to renounce all self interest. Nevertheless, they increased rapidly in number, and the Conferences were attended by all the most influential priests in Paris.
The work thrived beyond all expectation.
The only difficulty was the expense entailed, for many of the retreatants could pay nothing toward their board and lodging, and Vincent would refuse nobody.
The Congregation of the Mission Priests was to inaugurate another good work for which there was an urgent necessity in the world of Vincent's day.
So the work of the Congregation increased and multiplied until it seemed almost too much for human capacity.
"How can we lead souls to God?
How can we stem the tide of wickedness among the people?
Human energy will only hinder it unless directed by God.
The most important point of all is that we should be in touch with Our Lord in prayer."
Dearest to his heart of all his undertakings was the first and chief work of the Congregation-the holding of missions for the poor.
By twos and threes he would send out his sons to their labors, bidding them travel to their destination in the cheapest possible way.
They were to accept neither free quarters nor gifts of any kind.
Two sermons were to be preached daily-simple instructions on the great truths-and those who had not yet made their First Communion were to be catechized.
The mission lasted ten or fourteen days, during which the Mission Priests were to have as much personal contact with the people as possible, visiting the sick and the infirm, reconciling enemies and showing themselves as the friends of all.
It meant self mastery, self renunciation, self forgetfulness total and complete.
"Unless the Congregation of the Mission is humble," said Vincent, "and realizes that it can accomplish nothing of any value, but that it is more apt to mar than to make, it will never be of much effect; but when it has this spirit it will be fit for the purposes of God."
Yet, in spite of all that such a vocation meant of self renunciation, year after year the Mission Priests increased in number.
Chapter eight AT COURT
Some remarks made by the King during his illness and certain other words of Vincent's were remembered by the Queen, Anne of Austria, who had been left Regent during the minority of her son.
She was a good-natured woman, quite ready to do right when it was not too inconvenient, and it was clear to her that of late years bishoprics and abbeys had been too often given to most unworthy persons.
In France the Crown was almost supreme in such matters; the Queen therefore determined to appoint a "Council of Conscience" consisting of five members, whose business it would be to help her with advice as to ecclesiastical preferment.
Well did Vincent know that he was no match for such a diplomatist; but having once realized that the duty must be undertaken, he determined that there should be no flinching.
He went to Court in the old cassock in which he went about his daily work, and which was probably the only one he had.
"Why not?" replied Vincent quietly; "it is neither stained nor torn."
"A nice clodhopper you are!" he said amiably to his own reflection, and passed on, smiling.
Nearly all the priests of Paris had passed through his hands at the ordination retreats and those who belonged to the "Tuesday Conferences" were intimately known to him.
Who could be better fitted to select those who were suitable for preferment?
Certain reforms on which Vincent insisted were not to his mind either, although he offered no opposition.
In the meantime it began to dawn upon the public that the Superior of st Lazare was for the moment a man of influence.
Vincent's reception of these proposals was disconcerting.
"God forbid!" he would cry indignantly.
Some would come with a recommendation from the Queen herself, which made things doubly embarrassing; but in spite of everything Vincent remained faithful to his first determination to choose for bishoprics no priests save those worthy of the position by reason of their virtue and learning.
"You are an old lunatic," said a young man who had been refused a benefice through Vincent's agency.
"You are quite right," was the only answer, accompanied by a good-natured smile.
Another day a gentleman who had come to recommend his son for a bishopric was so angry when Vincent explained that he did not see his way to grant his request that he answered the "impertinent peasant" with a blow.
Vincent, without the slightest allusion to this treatment, quietly escorted him downstairs and saw him into his carriage.
Catching her royal mistress in an unguarded moment, this lady succeeded in inducing the Queen to promise the bishopric of Poitiers to her son, a young man of very bad character.
Vincent, aghast, begged her to sit down and talk the matter over, but Madame declined curtly.
What was to be done?
To resist would only provoke; submission seemed the wisest, if not the only course.
The form is not drawn up at all!"
"Suppose you go and make my peace with her," she said pleasantly, despatching the unfortunate Vincent on this very disagreeable errand.
He was shown into the lady's presence and carried out his mission with the greatest possible tact, but the Duchess could not control her fury.
"Come on," said Vincent; "our business lies in another direction." "Is it not strange," he said, smiling, a few moments later, as he tried to staunch the blood with his handkerchief, "to what lengths the affection of a mother for her son will go!"
As time went on he resolved at any cost to rid the Court of the presence of this man, whose simple, straightforward conduct baffled the wily and defeated their plans; but an attempt to get him ejected from the Council met with such stormy opposition that the Prime Minister determined to change his tactics.
But the summoning of the Council rested with Mazarin, and the intervals between its meetings became longer and longer.
Anne of Austria's sudden spurt of energy-she was a thoroughly indolent woman by nature-began to die out as she became accustomed to her new responsibilities; she was only too glad to leave all matters of State to a man who declared that his only desire was to save her worry and trouble.
CHAPTER four.
Attention to one's person and reputation is also a duty.
If vanity, pride, or prudery, have frequently given to these attentions the names of coquetry, ambition, or folly, this is a still stronger reason, why we should endeavor to clear up these points.
Propriety requires that we should always be clothed in a cleanly and becoming manner, even in private, in leaving our bed, or in the presence of no one.
It requires that our clothing be in keeping with our sex, fortune, profession, age, and form, as well as with the season, the different hours of the day and our different occupations.
Let us now descend to the particulars of these general rules.
The dress for a man on his first rising, is a cap of cotton, or silk and cotton, a morning gown, or a vest with sleeves; for a lady, a small muslin cap, (bonnet de percale,) a camisole or common robe.
It is well that a half corset should precede the full corset, which last is used only when one is dressed; for it is bad taste for a lady not to be laced at all.
The hair papers, which cannot be removed on rising (because the hair would not keep in curl till evening,) should be concealed under a bandeau of lace or of the hair.
They should be removed as soon as may be.
In this dress, we can receive only intimate friends or persons, who call upon urgent or indispensable business; even then we ought to offer some apology for it.
To neglect to take off this morning dress as soon as possible, is to expose one's self to embarrassments often very painful, and to the appearance of a want of education.
Moreover, it is well to impose upon yourself a rule to be dressed at some particular hour (the earliest possible,) since occupations will present themselves to hinder your being ready for the day; and you will easily acquire the habit of this.
Such disorder of the toilet can be excused when it occurs rarely, or for a short time, as in such cases it seems evidently owing to a temporary embarrassment; but if it occur daily, or constantly; if it seems the result of negligence and slovenliness, it is unpardonable, particularly in ladies, whose dress seems less designed for clothing than ornament.
To suppose that great heat of weather will authorise this disorder of the toilet, and will permit us to go in slippers, or with our legs and arms bare, or to take nonchalant or improper attitudes, is an error of persons of a low class, or destitute of education.
Even the weather of dog days would not excuse this; and if we would remain thus dressed, we must give directions that we are not at home.
On the other hand, to think that cold and rainy weather excuses like liberties, is equally an error.
When you go to see any one, you cannot dispense with taking off your socks or clogs before you are introduced into the room.
For to make a noise in walking is entirely at variance with good manners.
Ladies should make morning calls in an elegant and simple neglige, all the details of which we cannot give, on account of their multiplicity and the numerous modification of fashion.
We shall only say that ladies generally should make these calls in the dress which they wear at home.
Gentlemen may call in an outside coat, in boots and pantaloons, as when they are on their ordinary business.
In short, this dress is proper for gentlemen's visits in the middle of the day.
With regard to ladies, it is necessary for them when visiting at this time, to arrange their toilet with more care.
Ceremonious visits, evening visits, and especially balls, require more attention to the dress of gentlemen, and a more brilliant costume for ladies.
Situation in the world determines among ladies, those differences, which though otherwise well marked, are becoming less so every day.
Costly cashmeres, very rich furs, and diamonds, as well as many other brilliant ornaments, are to be forbidden a young lady; and those who act in defiance of these rational marks of propriety make us believe that they are possessed of an unrestrained love of luxury, and deprive themselves of the pleasure of receiving these ornaments from the hand of the man of their choice.
All ladies cannot use indiscriminately the privilege which marriage confers upon them in this respect, and the toilet of those whose fortune is moderate should not pass the bounds of an elegant simplicity. Considerations of a more elevated nature, as of good domestic order, the dignity of a wife, and the duties of a mother, come in support of this law of propriety, for it concerns morality in all its branches.
We must beware of a shoal in this case; frequently a young lady of small fortune, desiring to appear decently in any splendid assembly, makes sacrifices in order to embellish her modest attire.
The toilet then wants harmony, which is the soul of elegance as well as of beauty.
Moreover, whatever be the opulence which you enjoy, luxury encroaches so much upon it, that no riches are able to satisfy its demands; but fortunately propriety, always in accordance with reason, encourages by this maxim social and sensible women.
Neither too high, nor too low; it is equally ridiculous either to pretend to be the most showy, or to display the meanest attire in an assembly.
The rigorous simplicity of the dress of men establishes but very little difference between that of young and old.
Men till lately were almost free from this obligation; they used to be constantly clothed in broadcloth in all seasons: but now, although this may form the basis of their toilet, they must select stuffs for winter or summer, as may be suitable.
It only belongs to septuagenarians and ecclesiastics to wear doublets or wadded outer coats.
To finish our instructions relative to the toilet, it only remains for us to make a few observations.
It is superlatively ridiculous for a lady to go on foot, when dressed in her hair, or attired for the drawing room or a ball.
If one dwells in a provincial town where it is not customary to use carriages, they should go in a chair.
Who does not perceive how laughable it is to see a lady who is clothed in satin lace, or velvet, laboriously travelling in the dust or mud.
Vary your toilet as much as possible, for fear that idlers and malignant wits, who are always a majority in the world, should amuse themselves by making your dress the description of your person.
Certain fashionables seek to gain a kind of reputation by the odd choice of their attire, and by their eagerness to seize upon the first caprices of the fashions.
Propriety with difficulty tolerates these fancies of a spoiled child: but it applauds a woman of sense and taste, who is not in a hurry to follow the fashions and asks how long they will probably last before adopting them; finally, who selects and modifies them with success according to her size and figure.
It would be extremely clownish to carry dirt into a decent house, especially if one makes a ceremonious visit; and, when there is much mud, or when we cannot walk with skill, it is proper to go in a carriage, or at least to put in requisition the services of a shoe black at a short distance from the house.
SECTION two.
Among the cares which propriety obliges us to take of our person, to please is but an accessary circumstance; the principal end is to indicate by cleanliness, and the suitableness of apparel, that good order, a sense of what is right, and politeness in all things, direct our thoughts and actions.
In this point of view, we see that a regard to reputation is the necessary consequence of the duties of propriety toward one's self.
To inspire esteem and consideration, is then the grand object of propriety of conduct; for without this treasure, the relations of society would be a humiliation and punishment.
They are obtained by the accomplishment of our obligations of family and of our profession; by our probity and good manners; by our fortune and situation in society.
Consideration is not acquired by words; an article so precious demands a real value; it demands also the assistance of discretion.
So that we must begin by fulfilling exactly our duties towards relations; but we must beware of making public those petty quarrels, and little differences of interest, of ill humor or opinion, which sometimes trouble families most closely united.
Probity, that powerful means of obtaining consideration, by its elevated and religious nature, is not within our investigation of the principles of politeness.
This is not the case with that consideration which is attached to purity of morals.
Ladies, to whom the advice contained in this paragraph is particularly addressed, know how the shadow of suspicion withers and torments them.
This shadow, it is necessary to avoid at all hazards, and on that account to submit to all the requirements of propriety.
Young married ladies are at liberty to visit by themselves their acquaintances, but they cannot present themselves in public without their husband, or an aged lady.
They are at liberty however to walk with young married ladies or unmarried ones, while the latter should never walk alone with their companions.
Neither should they show themselves except with a gentleman of their family, and then he should be a near relation or of respectable age.
Young widows have equal liberty with married ladies.
A lady ought not to present herself alone in a library, or a museum, unless she goes there to study or work as an artist.
A lady ought to have a modest and measured gait; too great hurry injures the grace which ought to characterize her.
She should not turn her head on one side and the other, especially in large towns, where this bad habit seems to be an invitation to the impertinent.
If such persons address her in any flattering or insignificant terms, she should take good care not to answer them a word.
If they persist, she should tell them in a brief and firm, though polite tone, that she desires to be left to herself.
If a man follow her in silence, she should pretend not to perceive him, and at the same time hasten a little her step.
Towards the close of the day, a young lady would conduct herself in an unbecoming manner, if she should go alone; and if she passes the evening with any one, she ought to see that a domestic comes to accompany her, if not, to request the person whom she is visiting, to allow some one to do so.
But however much this may be considered proper, and consequently an obligation, a married lady well educated will disregard it if circumstances prevent her being able, without trouble, to find a conductor.
If the master of the house wishes to accompany you himself, you must excuse yourself politely from giving him so much trouble, but finish however by accepting.
On arriving at your house, you should offer him your thanks.
The seeds of such an imputation, once sown, quickly come to maturity.
The care of the reputation of ladies further demands that they should have a modest deportment; should abstain from forward manners, and free speeches.
QUESTION seventy nine
The next question concerns the intellectual powers, under which head there are thirteen points of inquiry:
(one) Whether the intellect is a power of the soul, or its essence?
(two) If it be a power, whether it is a passive power?
(three) If it is a passive power, whether there is an active intellect?
(four) Whether it is something in the soul?
(seven) Whether the memory be distinct from the intellect?
(eight) Whether the reason is a distinct power from the intellect?
(nine) Whether the superior and inferior reason are distinct powers?
(ten) Whether the intelligence is distinct from the intellect?
(eleven) Whether the speculative and practical intellect are distinct powers?
(twelve) Whether "synderesis" is a power of the intellectual part?
Whether the Intellect Is a Power of the Soul?
Objection one: It would seem that the intellect is not a power of the soul, but the essence of the soul.
For the intellect seems to be the same as the mind.
Therefore the mind and intellect of man is of the very essence of the soul and not a power thereof.
But the soul is immaterial through its essence.
Therefore it seems that the soul must be intellectual through its essence.
Wherefore in God alone is His intellect His essence: while in other intellectual creatures, the intellect is a power.
And for this reason an angel is called a "mind" or an "intellect"; because his whole power consists in this.
But the soul has many other powers, such as the sensitive and nutritive powers, and therefore the comparison fails.
Whether the Intellect Is a Passive Power?
But the intellectual power results from the immateriality of the intelligent substance.
Therefore it seems that the intellect is not a passive power.
Therefore the intellectual power is not passive.
But all the powers of the vegetative part are active; yet they are the lowest among the powers of the soul.
Much more, therefore, all the intellectual powers, which are the highest, are active.
Firstly, in its most strict sense, when from a thing is taken something which belongs to it by virtue either of its nature, or of its proper inclination: as when water loses coolness by heating, and as when a man becomes ill or sad.
Secondly, less strictly, a thing is said to be passive, when something, whether suitable or unsuitable, is taken away from it.
Thirdly, in a wide sense a thing is said to be passive, from the very fact that what is in potentiality to something receives that to which it was in potentiality, without being deprived of anything.
And accordingly, whatever passes from potentiality to act, may be said to be passive, even when it is perfected.
And thus with us to understand is to be passive.
This is clear from the following reason.
We may therefore see whether the intellect be in act or potentiality by observing first of all the nature of the relation of the intellect to universal being.
For we find an intellect whose relation to universal being is that of the act of all being: and such is the Divine intellect, which is the Essence of God, in which originally and virtually, all being pre exists as in its first cause.
And therefore the Divine intellect is not in potentiality, but is pure act.
But no created intellect can be an act in relation to the whole universal being; otherwise it would needs be an infinite being.
Wherefore every created intellect is not the act of all things intelligible, by reason of its very existence; but is compared to these intelligible things as a potentiality to act.
Now, potentiality has a double relation to act.
And there is another potentiality which is not always in act, but proceeds from potentiality to act; as we observe in things that are corrupted and generated.
Wherefore the angelic intellect is always in act as regards those things which it can understand, by reason of its proximity to the first intellect, which is pure act, as we have said above.
This is made clear from the fact, that at first we are only in potentiality to understand, and afterwards we are made to understand actually.
And consequently the intellect is a passive power.
But in the third sense passion is in anything which is reduced from potentiality to act.
Hence it is incorruptible.
Now the intellect is a passive power in regard to the whole universal being: while the vegetative power is active in regard to some particular thing, namely, the body as united to the soul.
Whether There Is an Active Intellect?
Objection one: It would seem that there is no active intellect.
For as the senses are to things sensible, so is our intellect to things intelligible.
But because sense is in potentiality to things sensible, the sense is not said to be active, but only passive.
Therefore, since our intellect is in potentiality to things intelligible, it seems that we cannot say that the intellect is active, but only that it is passive.
But in the operation of the intellect there is no appointed medium that has to be brought into act.
Therefore there is no necessity for an active intellect.
But the passive intellect is an immaterial power.
Now a form is intelligible in act from the very fact that it is immaterial. Therefore there is no need for an active intellect to make the species actually intelligible.
For Plato supposed that the forms of natural things subsisted apart from matter, and consequently that they are intelligible: since a thing is actually intelligible from the very fact that it is immaterial.
But since Aristotle did not allow that forms of natural things exist apart from matter, and as forms existing in matter are not actually intelligible; it follows that the natures or forms of the sensible things which we understand are not actually intelligible.
Now nothing is reduced from potentiality to act except by something in act; as the senses as made actual by what is actually sensible.
We must therefore assign on the part of the intellect some power to make things actually intelligible, by abstraction of the species from material conditions.
Wherefore it is clear that in the nutritive part all the powers are active, whereas in the sensitive part all are passive: but in the intellectual part, there is something active and something passive.
For some say that light is required for sight, in order to make colors actually visible.
And according to this the active intellect is required for understanding, in like manner and for the same reason as light is required for seeing.
But if the agent does not pre exist, the disposition of the recipient has nothing to do with the matter.
Now the intelligible in act is not something existing in nature; if we consider the nature of things sensible, which do not subsist apart from matter.
Whether the Active Intellect Is Something in the Soul?
Objection one: It would seem that the active intellect is not something in the soul.
For the effect of the active intellect is to give light for the purpose of understanding.
If, therefore, the passive intellect, which is a passive power, is something belonging to the soul; and also the active intellect, which is an active power: it follows that a man would always be able to understand when he wished, which is clearly false.
Therefore the active intellect is not something in our soul.
If, therefore, the passive intellect, which is in potentiality to all things intelligible, is something in the soul, it seems impossible for the active intellect to be also something in our soul.
For it is neither a passion nor a habit; since habits and passions are not in the nature of agents in regard to the passivity of the soul; but rather passion is the very action of the passive power; while habit is something which results from acts.
But every power flows from the essence of the soul.
It would therefore follow that the active intellect flows from the essence of the soul. And thus it would not be in the soul by way of participation from some higher intellect: which is unfitting.
Therefore the active intellect is not something in our soul.
In order to make this evident, we must observe that above the intellectual soul of man we must needs suppose a superior intellect, from which the soul acquires the power of understanding.
For what is such by participation, and what is mobile, and what is imperfect always requires the pre existence of something essentially such, immovable and perfect.
Now the human soul is called intellectual by reason of a participation in intellectual power; a sign of which is that it is not wholly intellectual but only in part.
Again it has an imperfect understanding; both because it does not understand everything, and because, in those things which it does understand, it passes from potentiality to act.
Therefore there must needs be some higher intellect, by which the soul is helped to understand.
Wherefore some held that this intellect, substantially separate, is the active intellect, which by lighting up the phantasms as it were, makes them to be actually intelligible.
But, even supposing the existence of such a separate active intellect, it would still be necessary to assign to the human soul some power participating in that superior intellect, by which power the human soul makes things actually intelligible.
Just as in other perfect natural things, besides the universal active causes, each one is endowed with its proper powers derived from those universal causes: for the sun alone does not generate man; but in man is the power of begetting man: and in like manner with other perfect animals.
Wherefore we must say that in the soul is some power derived from a higher intellect, whereby it is able to light up the phantasms.
And we know this by experience, since we perceive that we abstract universal forms from their particular conditions, which is to make them actually intelligible.
Therefore the power which is the principle of this action must be something in the soul.
From this point of view it matters not whether the active intellect is something belonging to the soul, or something separate from the soul.
On the contrary, phantasms are actual images of certain species, but are immaterial in potentiality.
five]
Whether the Active Intellect Is One in All?
Objection one: It would seem that there is one active intellect in all. For what is separate from the body is not multiplied according to the number of bodies.
Therefore it is not multiplied in the many human bodies, but is one for all men.
But that which is the cause of unity is still more itself one.
Therefore the active intellect is the same in all.
Therefore the same active intellect is not in various men.
For if the active intellect were not something belonging to the soul, but were some separate substance, there would be one active intellect for all men.
And this is what they mean who hold that there is one active intellect for all.
And in the same sense the active intellect is also called "separate"; but not as a separate substance.
But for this purpose it need not be the same intellect in all intelligent beings; but it must be one in its relationship to all those things from which it abstracts the universal, with respect to which things the universal is one.
And this befits the active intellect inasmuch as it is immaterial.
Now to know the first intelligible principles is the action belonging to the human species.
Wherefore all men enjoy in common the power which is the principle of this action: and this power is the active intellect.
But there is no need for it to be identical in all.
Yet it must be derived by all from one principle.
six]
Whether Memory Is in the Intellectual Part of the Soul?
Objection one: It would seem that memory is not in the intellectual part of the soul.
But the past is said of something with regard to a fixed time.
Memory, therefore, knows a thing under a condition of a fixed time; which involves knowledge under the conditions of "here" and "now." But this is not the province of the intellect, but of the sense.
Therefore memory is not in the intellectual part, but only in the sensitive.
But this cannot happen in the intellect, because the intellect is reduced to act by the fact that the intelligible species are received into it.
For he admitted that this could happen in the sensitive part, as to some powers, inasmuch as they are acts of corporeal organs, in which certain species may be preserved apart from actual apprehension.
But in the intellect, which has no corporeal organ, nothing but what is intelligible exists.
Thus, therefore, according to him, as soon as we cease to understand something actually, the species of that thing ceases to be in our intellect, and if we wish to understand that thing anew, we must turn to the active intellect, which he held to be a separate substance, in order that the intelligible species may thence flow again into our passive intellect.
And from the practice and habit of turning to the active intellect there is formed, according to him, a certain aptitude in the passive intellect for turning to the active intellect; which aptitude he calls the habit of knowledge.
According, therefore, to this supposition, nothing is preserved in the intellectual part that is not actually understood: wherefore it would not be possible to admit memory in the intellectual part.
And, even then, it is in potentiality, but not in the same way as before learning and discovering." Now, the passive intellect is said to be each thing, inasmuch as it receives the intelligible species of each thing.
To the fact, therefore, that it receives the species of intelligible things it owes its being able to operate when it wills, but not so that it be always operating: for even then is it in potentiality in a certain sense, though otherwise than before the act of understanding-namely, in the sense that whoever has habitual knowledge is in potentiality to actual consideration.
The foregoing opinion is also opposed to reason.
But the intellect is of a more stable nature, and is more immovable than corporeal nature.
If, therefore, corporeal matter holds the forms which it receives, not only while it actually does something through them, but also after ceasing to act through them, much more cogent reason is there for the intellect to receive the species unchangeably and lastingly, whether it receive them from things sensible, or derive them from some superior intellect.
Thus, therefore, if we take memory only for the power of retaining species, we must say that it is in the intellectual part.
But if in the notion of memory we include its object as something past, then the memory is not in the intellectual, but only in the sensitive part, which apprehends individual things.
For past, as past, since it signifies being under a condition of fixed time, is something individual.
For species are not retained in the sensitive part of the soul only, but rather in the body and soul united: since the memorative power is the act of some organ.
But the intellect in itself is retentive of species, without the association of any corporeal organ.
These two are found together in the sensitive part, which apprehends something from the fact of its being immuted by a present sensible: wherefore at the same time an animal remembers to have sensed before in the past, and to have sensed some past sensible thing.
But as concerns the intellectual part, the past is accidental, and is not in itself a part of the object of the intellect.
For the intellect understands man, as man: and to man, as man, it is accidental that he exist in the present, past, or future.
But on the part of the act, the condition of past, even as such, may be understood to be in the intellect, as well as in the senses.
In this way, then, the notion of memory, in as far as it regards past events, is preserved in the intellect, forasmuch as it understands that it previously understood: but not in the sense that it understands the past as something "here" and "now."
Sometimes the intelligible species is in the intellect as regards the ultimate completion of the act, and then it understands in act.
And sometimes the intelligible species is in a middle state, between potentiality and act: and then we have habitual knowledge.
I ask my friend to read some extracts from the decision.
"The Territory being a part of the United States, the Government and the citizen both enter it under the authority of the Constitution, with their respective rights defined and marked out; and the Federal Government can exercise no power over his person or property beyond what that instrument confers, nor lawfully deny any right which it has reserved....
"The powers over person and property, of which we speak, are not only not granted to Congress, but are in express terms denied, and they are forbidden to exercise them.
And this prohibition is not confined to the States, but the words are general, and extend to the whole territory over which the Constitution gives it power to legislate, including those portions of it remaining under territorial government, as well as that covered by States.
And if Congress itself can not do this-if it is beyond the powers conferred on the Federal Government-it will be admitted, we presume, that it could not authorize a territorial government to exercise them.
"This is done in plain words-too plain to be misunderstood.
The only power conferred is the power coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner in his rights.
It was obligatory on those who selected the umpire and agreed to abide by the award.
In eighteen forty eight it made its appearance for good purposes.
It was ushered in by a great and good man.
I thought it a fallacy which would surely be exploded. I doubted then, and still more for some time afterward, when held to a dread responsibility for the position which I occupied.
This was the first fruit.
More deadly than the fatal upas, its effect was not limited to the mere spot of ground on which the dew fell from its leaves, but it spread throughout the United States; it kindled all which had been collected for years of inflammable material.
It was owing to the strength of our Government and the good sense of the quiet masses of the people that it did not wrap our country in one widespread conflagration.
Can this be a definition of sovereignty?
This is confounding the whole theory and the history of our Government.
The States were the grantors; they made the compact; they gave the Federal agent its powers; they inhibited themselves from doing certain things, and all else they retained to themselves.
This Federal agent got just so much as the States chose to give-no more.
Therefore its powers are not comparable to the powers of the State Legislature, because one is the creature of grant, and the other the exponent of sovereign power.
It seems to have been more malleable than gold; to have been hammered out to an extent that covers boundless regions undiscovered by those who proclaimed the doctrine.
Non intervention then meant, as the debates show, that Congress should neither prohibit nor establish slavery in the Territories.
That I hold to now.
Why, sir, the very acts which they passed at the time refute it.
"And that all laws, or parts of laws, usages, or customs, preexisting in the Territories acquired by the United States from Mexico, and which in said Territories restrict, abridge, or obstruct, the full enjoyment of any right of person or property of a citizen of the United States, as recognized or guaranteed by the Constitution or laws of the United States, are hereby declared and shall be held as repealed."
Upon that, mr Clay said:
"mr
That was the position taken by mr Clay, the leader.
A mere sentence will show with what view I regarded the dogma of non intervention when that amendment was offered.
I said:
"But what is non intervention seems to vary as often as the light and shade of every fleeting cloud.
It has different meanings in every State, in every county, in every town.
If non intervention means that we shall not have protection for our property in slaves, then I always was, and always shall be, opposed to it.
mr Downs, one of the Committee of Thirteen, and an advocate of the measures, said:
We differed radically then.
It has been sometimes assumed that this was the recognition of the power of the Territorial Legislature to exercise plenary legislation, as might that of a State.
That was all the difference.
It left Congress, as to its power, just where it was.
I find myself physically unable to go as fully into the subject as I intended, and therefore, omitting a reference to those acts, suffice it to say that here was the recognition of the obligation of Congress to interpose against a Territorial Legislature for the protection of personal right. That is what we ask of Congress now.
I am not disposed to ask this Congress to go into speculative legislation.
I am not one of those who would willingly see this Congress enact a code to be applied to all Territories and for all time to come.
That is the announcement of the fifth resolution.
I honor them, and I approve their conduct.
I think their bearing was worthy of the mother State which sent them there; and I doubt not she will receive them with joy and gratitude.
They have asserted and vindicated her equality of right.
By that asserted equality of right I doubt not she will stand.
The sixth resolution of the series declares at what time a State may form a Constitution and decide upon her domestic institutions.
I deny this right to the territorial condition, because the Territory belongs in common to the States.
Every citizen of the United States, as a joint owner of that Territory, has a right to go into it with any property which he may possess.
These territorial inhabitants require municipal law, police, and government.
They have no right within their municipal power to attempt to decide the rights of the people of the States.
The last resolution refers to a law founded on a provision of the Constitution, which contains an obligation of faith to every State of the Union; and that obligation of faith has been violated by thirteen States of the Confederacy-as many as originally fought the battles of the Revolution and established the Confederation.
Is it to be expected that a compact thus broken in part, violated in its important features, will be regarded as binding in all else?
We have a right to claim abstinence from interference with our rights from any Government on the earth.
It was first for political power, and directed against new States; now it has assumed a social form, is all prevailing, and has reached the point of revolution and civil war.
For it was only last fall that an overt act was committed by men who were sustained by arms and money, raised by extensive combination among the non slaveholding States, to carry treasonable war against the State of Virginia, because now, as before the Revolution, and ever since, she held the African in bondage.
This is part of the history and marks the necessity of the times.
The argument, then, or the reason on which this agitation commenced, has passed away; and yet we are asked, if a party hostile to our institutions shall gain possession of the Government, that we shall stand quietly by, and wait for an overt act.
Is not a declaration of war an overt act?
I can speak for myself-and I have no right to speak for others-when I say, that, if I belonged to a party organized on the basis of making war on any section or interest in the United States, if I know myself, I would instantly quit it.
We claim to have but the Constitution fairly and equally administered.
Among the great purposes declared in the preamble of the Constitution is one to provide for the general welfare.
Provision for the general welfare implies general fraternity.
This Union was not expected to be held together by coercion; the power of force as a means was denied. They sought, however, to bind it perpetually together with that which was stronger than triple bars of brass and steel-the ceaseless current of kind offices, renewing and renewed in an eternal flow, and gathering volume and velocity as it rolled.
It was a function intended not for the injury of any.
It declared its purpose to be the benefit of all. Concessions which were made between the different States in the Convention prove the motive.
We have tamed a wilderness; we have spanned a continent.
Higher than all this, we have achieved a moral triumph.
We have tampered with a question which has grown in magnitude by each year's delay.
But so long as we deal, like the Delphic oracle, in words of double meaning, so long as we attempt to escape from responsibility, and exhibit our fear to declare the truth by the fact that we do not act upon it, we must expect speculative theory to occupy the mind of the public, and error to increase as time rolls on.
DIVISION B-WEALTH AND RENT
WEALTH AND ITS INDIRECT USES
one.
If one wishing the hickory nut hanging above his head must first pick up a stick to throw at it, the nut is removed one step from desire.
But even among savages the processes are much more complicated.
The Indian with a crude knife fashions his bow and arrow, fastens the flint and cord which represent still other processes of industry, and shoots the bird which satisfies his hunger.
In modern conditions the relations are vastly more complicated; only at the end of a long series do men arrive at the thing which gratifies their wants.
No agent or influence intervening, a thing may yet be removed a long way from gratification.
A tree may not be fitted to bear fruit for ten years to come.
Meantime, there are many other possible uses for the tree: it may be used for fuel, or to make a canoe with which to catch fish, or to follow some other indirect method of production.
The number of steps has no necessary relation to the time.
A number of technical steps may be taken in half an hour, or a process of a single technical step may last a year.
Many goods of just the same form as the foregoing may not be affording current gratification (except that afforded by thrift and forethought), but are kept because later they will gratify a more intense want or gratify a want better.
Apples and potatoes are kept in a cellar so that their use is distributed throughout the winter; cider and wine are kept till they get a quality that appeals more to the palate.
Coal, wood, and stocks of goods, are thus kept in the form of enjoyable goods, destined to be physically destroyed when at length they yield a gratification. Evidently they must be storing up meantime a certain additional utility, for otherwise there would be no reason why they should be kept for the future.
Such goods as these are sometimes called unripened consumption goods, but until ripened they bear in part the character of durable agents.
Abiding sources of economic enjoyments are called durable agents.
The inhabited house is a source of continued gratification in each moment's shelter it affords; but, further, it is the durable source of a series of future uses, as yet unripened.
The hammer, the hoe, the tree, the field may all be considered as agents to secure consumption goods.
Some of these are but one step removed from direct gratification, as the hoe helping the gardener to get food for his own use.
Yet the classification is practical, corresponding as it does with thoughts which men have in the use of goods.
By repairs and other methods goods become, and are looked upon as, durable sources of a series of uses.
It is to be noted further that the enjoyable goods pass over into psychic income, that is, they are the stream of objective utilities that is each moment detaching itself as income from the great mass of wealth. The durable goods are those utilities which for the time remain, not yet ripened or ready to be converted into psychic income.
CONDITIONS OF ECONOMIC WEALTH
one.
Climate is itself a direct source of gratification.
As temperature must be adjusted to man's need, climate satisfies wants directly.
Health, energy, the beauty of noonday woods and of sunlit clouds are conditioned on the favor of nature.
Climate affects, further, the supply of material economic goods.
So civilization moved northward from Egypt and India to Greece and Rome, to northern Europe and America.
Soil conditions for vegetable life determine first the amount and kind of animal life.
Animal life from one point of view is a parasite, living on the vegetable; it is only the vegetable that has power to assimilate most inorganic compounds.
Man, therefore, depends on the resources of the soil directly or indirectly; a fertile soil furnishes him either directly a supply of vegetable food, or indirectly a supply of animal food.
Natural supplies of metals, of coal, and of timber are important consumption goods, but they are also indirectly the condition for a vast variety of other goods.
The industry that could exist without iron, copper, and coal would be of a very low grade.
The variety of flora and fauna, and their fitness for man's needs, largely condition the possible production.
If, in the course of evolution, it had chanced that wheat and corn, the horse and the cow, had been crowded out in the struggle for existence, we should have had a very different civilization.
The possibilities of civilization in Peru, and those of all the Indians on the American continent, were limited for lack of domestic animals.
Animals that are fit for domestication are a necessary intermediate agent by aid of which man can appropriate and turn to his use the fertile qualities of the soil.
Not content with the material world about him, even when it is at its best, man alters it in many ways.
He enriches the soil, improves the varieties of animals, he even in some slight degree affects the climate, and by the use of a multitude of artificial bits of matter called tools, works profound changes in the world in which he lives.
The outer world is to man the sole source of motive forces.
He can bring things together and they produce the result. Further, it may be said that nearly every kind of utility is conditioned on motion.
To secure this either he must move to get the goods, or he must cause goods to move toward him.
The law of "conservation of energy" helps to explain economic action; the supply of energy in the universe cannot be increased or diminished, but may take on new forms.
So a limited supply in man's control may take on various forms and so have different effects on gratifications.
One and the same source of energy may be converted into the different forms of heat, light, motion, electricity, etc
But there must be some source. Man's desire is directed to getting force at the right place and in the right degree.
If light or heat is too intense, it causes pain; the glare of the sun blinds instead of giving keener vision.
A moderate force applied to any of the senses gives the maximum clearness or pleasure. Man is constantly endeavoring to secure forces from the outer world and to adjust motion so that it will directly or indirectly best serve his purposes.
three.
There must be a source of energy likewise that mental action may go on, and the power of sunbeams, stored for a time in food, is liberated in the processes of thought.
Such a mode is "labor," which becomes at times painful and distasteful.
In the earliest societies known, some sorts of domestic animals are found supplementing man's efforts and acting upon the material world to alter it for man. The dog joining in the chase guards his master's safety, and helps to bear his burdens.
The draft beast in the field turns the heavy soil, and aids in the final harvest.
The trained elephant does the work of twenty men piling logs, loading ships, or carrying burdens.
Man further increases his control over the material world by making other men do his bidding.
Domestic slavery, where wife or child serves the father of the family, or chattel slavery, where the vanquished toils for the victor, are all but universal in early communities.
Such a method of increasing one's control over the forces of the world requires only superior strength, no special intelligence in mechanics, and is thus one of the first crude devices in a primitive civilization.
Fuel has been, up to the present time, perhaps the most important source of energy.
Fire in the hands of savage man gave him dominion over the forests and over the metals.
In this age of steam the liberation of the energy of the sun, stored up in coal in ages past, is still the indispensable condition of our developed industry.
To make use of the wind for sailing a boat, only the simplest arrangements are needed; a windmill fixed at one place requires more ingenuity and machinery.
If some means can be found for equalizing the flow and for storing the power of the wind, it may yet become a great agency of industry.
The force of falling water, long used in a petty way by the old water mills, is just beginning to be employed on a large scale at such points as Niagara.
But the constant motion of the tides offers, at some favored points, a source of power that will remain as long as the earth revolves upon its axis.
five.
As man grows in power of control over nature, he seeks to apply these forces in forms and at places he has selected.
He ceases to accept passively its conditions, and to live on its grudging gifts; he becomes its fashioner, in a sense its creator.
His intelligence and his wants are most important factors determining what the form of the physical world about him shall be.
But all the efforts of men in the most developed economy cannot make to disappear the differences in the quality of goods and agents.
Desirable goods to consume are limited in quantity, and they vary in quality; hence they have value and some higher than others.
Likewise, durable material agents and sources of power are limited in number and vary in convenience of location and efficiency.
As men seek to gratify their desires, they attach importance to these agents of power.
Each is valued for its service or its series of services.
When anything is seen to contain a series of uses, it becomes a rent bearer, and the economic problem of rent arises, one step more complex than the problem of valuing simple consumption goods.
CHAPTER eight
THE RENTING CONTRACT
The apple tree is valued because it bears fruit, and the orchard because the trees give promise of yielding a succession of crops for years to come.
There are thus two problems of value in connection with durable goods: that of the value of a temporary use for a brief period, as for a year; and that of the value of a thing itself, the use bearer, for a long series of years or in perpetuity.
To explain what fixes the value of the temporary use is the problem of rent; to explain what determines the value of long continued use or of permanent control and ownership of a use bearer is the problem of capitalization.
Rental is a collective term for a number of rents.
The total yield of an estate was called its rental or rent roll, and a list of the various sources of income, including all payments from tenants in money, produce or services, constituted its rental.
In the European languages the word is used more frequently in that sense.
This was put in contrast with interest for money and capital, and with wages of labor.
A wider meaning recently given to the word by many economists turns on the supposed relation of some portions of price to cost of production. Thus, frequent use is made of the expressions: consumer's rent, producer's rent, buyer's rent, seller's rent, etc
In the well founded opinion of some recent critics this usage rests on a mistaken reasoning. However, in the midst of this wide variety of usage the student must be forewarned and alert.
Doubtless agreement will at length be arrived at. Meantime, no economist can dictate what meaning is to be attached to the term, but one may suggest the definition that seems to him most expedient.
Throughout this work we shall endeavor to use the term rent uniformly and consistently as it is now to be defined.
Every economist since Ricardo's time has recognized this, and many excuses for the inaccuracy have been given.
It is only by a fiction that most indirect agents can be regarded as indestructible.
Things yielding rent are not indestructible, but generally they are preserved undestroyed.
five.
When this allowance has been made, the income may be considered as a net sum not due to the sale, or to the using up of any part of the thing rented.
This is the essential thought in typical rent-that it is the value of the surplus, or net product, of an economic agent leaving the agent itself unimpaired in efficiency.
The total product is sometimes called the "gross rent," but economic rent is "net rent."
This thought is made clearer by the following discussion.
Sec.
THE HISTORY OF CONTRACT RENT AND CHANGES IN IT
one.
The one is impersonal or economic; the other is personal or legal, being fixed by agreements between persons.
The rents usually spoken of are contract rents.
The two diverge more or less.
Contracts of long standing often bind the tenant or borrower to pay either more or less than the present competitive price.
If, after a time, the value of the use is greater than the contract rent, the tenant is fortunate in having his lease.
But he is the loser if he is bound by lease or agreement to pay rent in a locality where land has become less valuable.
Economic and contract rent usually diverge also because of the agreement that the owner, or lender, keep up the repairs and pay the taxes.
Here it is simply the difference between gross and net rent.
If the contract rent is less than the economic rent, evidently the borrower enjoys a part of the usufruct, without charge, and to that degree is in the position of an owner.
The usufruct in this case is divided between the two parties.
Such instances were numerous in the Middle Ages in the renting of land, and still are found in many countries.
Contract rent is based on economic rent and tends to conform to it whenever there is competition.
The existence of economic rent is the basis of the agreement to pay contract rent.
Prospective hirers of agents forecast what the use will be worth to them and make their bids accordingly.
Some provide that one party, some that the other party, shall keep up repairs.
If they count the gross product of an agent as rent, it is bad bookkeeping.
In many cases it is necessary, therefore, to follow the form of the renting contract in order to determine the net yield of indirect goods.
three.
But at a later stage, as in the Middle Ages in Europe, land and the things pertaining to it, as ditches, houses, mills, cattle, stock, and the few simple implements, constituted the larger portion of the wealth.
Land was granted to the tenant or serf in return for services.
The contract was pretty strictly drawn and all items were specified.
It was not hard to hold the tenant to his contract to keep the land in about the same condition.
There was a certain rotation of crops; the tenant was obliged to keep his stock up to standard; and, moreover, he had a certain interest in the land because his contract rent (as explained above) was less than the economic rent. The landlord, therefore, could count pretty surely on the undiminished power of his land and stock from one year to another.
At that time, truck and barter were the common modes of exchange, and rents were paid in products and services, not in money.
The fruits of the soil were consumed on the spot instead of being sold as now.
Land was rarely, if ever, sold outright, so that there was no occasion to estimate its total selling value.
Its yearly use was all that was subject to contract, sale, and exchange.
Many medieval estates were so tied up by legal conditions that they could not be sold outright; all that the owner could do was to sell or mortgage the annual rental.
Thus, in the Middle Ages, it was all but universal to look upon most indirect agents as exchangeable only under the renting contract, as subject to renting but not to complete transfer and sale.
He must agree to repay the loan in goods of the same kind and quality as those received, a contract most difficult to execute, and giving occasion to costly tests and countless disagreements.
With the growth of industry and commerce, wealth increased in towns, taking many forms, as those of ships, wagons, tools, and stocks of goods, that could not conveniently be rented.
It is a simple example of the association of ideas.
In the transfer or loan of movable goods, the rent contract was quite overshadowed by the other form of contract, that of a money loan.
According to this explanation the essential and primary difference between renting wealth and borrowing money at interest is not in the kind of wealth whose use is thus temporarily transferred, but in the nature of the contract.
But as forms of wealth differ in their fitness for transfer under the two forms of contract, there goes on a competition between them, as a result of which each becomes associated with certain groups of goods.
In the Middle Ages the renting contract was the dominant form, but it has been progressively displaced by loans in the money form, and its importance is still declining.
five.
Under the old, almost fixed, conditions in agriculture such a lease was equitable, but when prices are rapidly changing and when new methods are being introduced, it gives rise to great hardships.
About twenty five years ago, the great fall in the price of agricultural products brought ruin to many of the tenant farmers.
When the lease expired, the landlord could appropriate all the improvements that the tenant had made.
In America farms are let usually on shares, and from year to year, but the plan of a money rent is increasingly followed.
The difficulty of getting an equitable arrangement between landlord and tenant is recognized by all.
On the other hand, the tenant under the renting contract has little motive for improvement, and many occasions for discontent.
So in America, far more than in the older countries, land changes hands by sale, the purchaser going into debt for it, giving his note and paying interest on the loan rather than rent for the farm.
Many less durable goods are rented for brief periods.
Carriages are rented for the day, bicycles by the week or month.
Sewing machines, boats, guns, tents, and even diamond engagement rings, yield their joys under the renting contract.
People frequently hesitate between the renting and the purchase of a piano, and in some cases renting is the more convenient and desirable way of securing its use.
The purchase of a dress coat or of a masquerade suit to be worn but once, involves for some an excessive and needless sacrifice.
For a moderate sum its temporary use may be had, and it is then returned, little the worse for wear, to the accommodating clothier.
A final word of caution may be given.
Economic rent is not confined to the cases of contract rent.
The owner who uses a thing himself gets the advantage in the product as clearly as if he collected rent from a borrower.
The remainder of the day mr Booth spent in melancholy contemplation on his present condition.
He was destitute of the common necessaries of life, and consequently unable to subsist where he was; nor was there a single person in town to whom he could, with any reasonable hope, apply for his delivery.
Grief for some time banished the thoughts of food from his mind; but in the morning nature began to grow uneasy for want of her usual nourishment: for he had not eat a morsel during the last forty hours.
A penny loaf, which is, it seems, the ordinary allowance to the prisoners in Bridewell, was now delivered him; and while he was eating this a man brought him a little packet sealed up, informing him that it came by a messenger, who said it required no answer.
mr Booth now opened his packet, and, after unfolding several pieces of blank paper successively, at last discovered a guinea, wrapt with great care in the inmost paper.
He was vastly surprized at this sight, as he had few if any friends from whom he could expect such a favour, slight as it was; and not one of his friends, as he was apprized, knew of his confinement.
As there was no direction to the packet, nor a word of writing contained in it, he began to suspect that it was delivered to the wrong person; and being one of the most untainted honesty, he found out the man who gave it him, and again examined him concerning the person who brought it, and the message delivered with it.
The man assured Booth that he had made no mistake; saying, "If your name is Booth, sir, I am positive you are the gentleman to whom the parcel I gave you belongs."
The most scrupulous honesty would, perhaps, in such a situation, have been well enough satisfied in finding no owner for the guinea; especially when proclamation had been made in the prison that mr Booth had received a packet without any direction, to which, if any person had any claim, and would discover the contents, he was ready to deliver it to such claimant.
The first thing after redemption of the coat, which mr Booth, hungry as he was, thought of, was to supply himself with snuff, which he had long, to his great sorrow, been without.
On this occasion he presently missed that iron box which the methodist had so dexterously conveyed out of his pocket, as we mentioned in the last chapter.
Though mr Booth was, as we have hinted, a man of a very sweet disposition, yet was he rather overwarm.
Having, therefore, no doubt concerning the person of the thief, he eagerly sought him out, and very bluntly charged him with the fact.
The gambler, whom I think we should now call the philosopher, received this charge without the least visible emotion either of mind or muscle. After a short pause of a few moments, he answered, with great solemnity, as follows: "Young man, I am entirely unconcerned at your groundless suspicion.
He that censures a stranger, as I am to you, without any cause, makes a worse compliment to himself than to the stranger.
You know yourself, friend; you know not me.
It is true, indeed, you heard me accused of being a cheat and a gamester; but who is my accuser?
Look at my apparel, friend; do thieves and gamesters wear such cloaths as these? play is my folly, not my vice; it is my impulse, and I have been a martyr to it.
Booth was a little staggered at this defence.
Robinson answered, "If that be the case, you have nothing more to do but to signify your intention in the prison, and I am well convinced you will not be long without regaining the possession of your snuff box."
"Have I not heard you often say, the wickeder any man was the better, provided he was what you call a believer?" "You mistake me," cries Cooper (for that was the name of the methodist): "no man can be wicked after he is possessed by the spirit.
There is a wide difference between the days of sin and the days of grace.
"I care not," answered the other, "what an atheist believes.
Booth testified great compassion at this account; and, he having invited Robinson to dinner, they spent that day together.
In the afternoon Booth indulged his friend with a game at cards; at first for halfpence and afterwards for shillings, when fortune so favoured Robinson that he did not leave the other a single shilling in his pocket.
A surprizing run of luck in a gamester is often mistaken for somewhat else by persons who are not over zealous believers in the divinity of fortune.
And certain it is, that mr Booth, though of a temper very little inclined to suspicion, began to waver in his opinion whether the character given by mr Robinson of himself, or that which the others gave of him, was the truer.
And this experiments he thought, would confirm him either in a good or evil opinion of that gentleman.
To this demand Robinson answered, with great alacrity, that he should very gladly have complied, had not fortune played one of her jade tricks with him: "for since my winning of you," said he, "I have been stript not only of your money but my own." He was going to harangue farther; but Booth, with great indignation, turned from him.
This poor gentleman had very little time to reflect on his own misery, or the rascality, as it appeared to him, of the other, when the same person who had the day before delivered him the guinea from the unknown hand, again accosted him, and told him a lady in the house (so he expressed himself) desired the favour of his company.
Eight or nine years had past since any interview between mr Booth and Miss Matthews; and their meeting now in so extraordinary a place affected both of them with an equal surprize.
Booth made many handsome acknowledgments of her favour; and added that he very little wondered at the disorder of her spirits, concluding that he was heartily concerned at seeing her there; "but I hope, madam," said he-
Here he hesitated; upon which, bursting into an agony of tears, she cried out, "O captain!
captain! many extraordinary things have passed since last I saw you.
O gracious heaven! did I ever expect that this would be the next place of our meeting?"
She then flung herself into her chair, where she gave a loose to her passion, whilst he, in the most affectionate and tender manner, endeavoured to soothe and comfort her; but passion itself did probably more for its own relief than all his friendly consolations.
I have disgraced him, mr Booth, I am unworthy the name of his daughter."--Here passion again stopped her words, and discharged itself in tears.
To say the truth, these are, I believe, as critical discharges of nature as any of those which are so called by the physicians, and do more effectually relieve the mind than any remedies with which the whole materia medica of philosophy can supply it.
O, sir! you are a stranger to the cause of my sorrows."
perhaps the law calls it so.--Let it call it what it will, or punish me as it pleases.---Punish me!--no, no---that is not in the power of man-not of that monster man, mr Booth.
I am undone, am revenged, and have now no more business for life; let them take it from me when they will."
"What do you hear?" reiterated she.
You have heard, you say, of the murder; but do you know the cause, mr Booth?
Booth hesitated for an answer; indeed, he had heard some imperfect stories, not much to her advantage.
If these circumstances raise your curiosity, I will satisfy it."
Upon which, with very little previous ceremony, she began to relate what is written in the following chapter.
Or, if the critic be a Whig, and consequently dislikes such kind of similes, as being too favourable to Jacobitism, let him be contented with the following story:
One of the ladies, I remember, said to the other-"Did you ever see anything look so modest and so innocent as that girl over the way?
three
Most men were toiling at tasks which they did not like, by rules which they did not understand.
They never looked beyond the edge of their work.
The philosophical life was a spider's web-filmy threads of theory spun out of the inner consciousness-it touched the world only at certain chosen points of attachment.
There was nothing firm, nothing substantial in it.
Knowing did not come by speculating, theorising. Knowing came by seeing.
To see the world, the whole world, as it is, to look behind the scenes, to read human life like a book, that was the glorious thing-most satisfying, divine.
Thus he had talked as we climbed the hill.
Now, as we came by the place where we had first met, a new eagerness sounded in his voice.
I am planning to write a book-a book of knowledge, in the true sense-a great book about human life.
How much darker, how much smaller, and therefore how much more interesting and wonderful.
I might call it a 'Bionopsis.'"
"But surely," said I, "you have chosen a strange place to write it-the Hilltop School-this quiet and secluded region!
You must be in the full current and feel its force.
You must take part in the active life of mankind in order really to know it."
"A mistake!" he cried.
To know the world you must stand apart from it and above it; you must look down on it."
"Well, then," said I, "you will have to find some secret spring of inspiration, some point of vantage from which you can get your outlook and your insight."
He stopped short and looked me full in the face.
"And that," cried he, "is precisely what I have found!"
After a few minutes we came to a little stream, flowing through a grove of hemlocks.
"I promised to give you an explanation to day-to take you on one of my long walks.
It is always the same.
I have been doubtful, troubled, almost distracted.
But it could not be helped.
The risk was worth while.
I simply could not throw it away.
But you must judge fairly, without haste, without prejudice.
I ask you to make me one promise.
You will suspend judgment, you will say nothing, you will keep my secret, until you have been with me three times at the place where I am now taking you."
By this time it was clear to me that I had to do with a case lying far outside of the common routine of life; something subtle, abnormal, hard to measure, in which a clear and careful estimate would be necessary.
If Keene was labouring under some strange delusion, some disorder of mind, how could I estimate its nature or extent, without time and study, perhaps without expert advice?
To wait a little would be prudent, for his sake as well as for the sake of others.
If there was some extraordinary, reality behind his mysterious hints, it would need patience and skill to test it.
I gave him the promise for which he asked.
At once, as if relieved, he sprang up, and crying, "Come on, follow me!" began to make his way up the bed of the brook.
I could see, here and there, the track of his former journeys: broken branches of witch hazel and moose wood, ferns trampled down, a faint trail across some deeper bed of moss.
At mid day we rested for a half hour to eat lunch.
He swallowed it hastily, and stooping his face to the spring by which he had halted, drank long and eagerly.
"An Indian trick," said he, shaking the drops of water from his face. "On a walk, food is a hindrance, a delay.
But this tiny taste of bitter gum is a tonic; it spurs the courage and doubles the strength-if you are used to it.
Otherwise I should not recommend you to try it.
Faugh! the flavour is vile."
He rinsed his mouth again with water, and stood up, calling me to come on.
The way, now tangled among the nameless peaks and ranges, bore steadily southward, rising all the time, in spite of many brief downward curves where a steep gorge must be crossed.
Breasting a long slope, we reached the summit of a broad, smoothly rounding ridge covered with a dense growth of stunted spruce.
The trees rose above our heads, about twice the height of a man, and so thick that we could not see beyond them.
But, from glimpses here and there, and from the purity and lightness of the air, I judged that we were on far higher ground than any we had yet traversed, the central comb, perhaps, of the mountain system.
A few yards ahead of us, through the crowded trunks of the dwarf forest, I saw a gray mass, like the wall of a fortress, across our path.
It was a vast rock, rising from the crest of the ridge, lifting its top above the sea of foliage.
At its base there were heaps of shattered stones, and deep crevices almost like caves.
One side of the rock was broken by a slanting gully.
The snakes are in their winter quarters now, almost dormant, but they can still strike if you tread on them.
Step here!
Give me your hand-use that point of rock-hold fast by this bush; it is firmly rooted-so!
You have heard of it?
I thought so. Other people have heard of it, and imagine that they have found it-five miles east of us-on a lower ridge.
This earth holds no more perfect view point.
The prospect was indeed magnificent; it was strange what a vast enlargement of vision resulted from the slight elevation above the surrounding peaks.
It was like being lifted up so that we could look over the walls.
The horizon expanded as if by magic.
Every feature of the landscape seemed alive, quivering, pulsating with conscious beauty.
You could almost see the world breathe.
"Most wonderful!
Your eyes are new to it.
You have not learned the power of far sight, the secret of Spy Rock.
"Do you mean to say that you can look beyond it?"
And beyond any that you would dream possible-See! Your sight reaches to that dim cloud of smoke in the south?
And beneath it you can make out, perhaps, a vague blotch of shadow, or a tiny flash of brightness where the sun strikes it?
"It pleases you to call it so," he said, "but I only tell you my real experience.
There is no reason why the power of sight should not be cultivated, enlarged, expanded indefinitely."
"And the straight rays of light?" I asked.
"Who can prove that it may not be curved, under certain conditions, or refracted in some places in a way that is not possible elsewhere?
I tell you there is something extraordinary about this Spy Rock.
It is a seat of power-Nature's observatory.
More things are visible here than anywhere else-more than I have told you yet.
But come, we have little time left.
Then home again to the narrower outlook, the restricted life."
He glowed like a piece of phosphorus that has been drenched with light.
Graham took the first opportunity of speaking with me alone.
"Well?" said he.
But there is something very strange.
We must wait a few days.
It will do no harm to be patient.
Indeed, I have promised not to judge, not to speak of it, until a certain time.
Are you satisfied?"
"This is a curious story," said he, "and I am puzzled by it.
But I trust you, I agree to wait, though I am far from satisfied."
Our second expedition was appointed for the following Saturday.
Keene was hungry for it, and I was almost as eager, desiring to penetrate as quickly as possible into the heart of the affair.
Already a conviction in regard to it was pressing upon me, and I resolved to let him talk, this time, as freely as he would, without interruption or denial.
When we clambered up on Spy Rock, he was more subdued and reserved than he had been the first time.
Then he began to tell me stories of the places that we could see-strange stories of domestic calamity, and social conflict, and eccentric passion, and hidden crime.
Everyone has something to hide.
The surface of life is a mask.
The substance of life is a secret.
But it is not impenetrable.
Here, on Spy Rock, I have found it.
I have learned how to look through the veil.
I can see, not by the light rays only, but by the rays which are colourless, imperceptible, irresistible the rays of the unknown quantity, which penetrate everywhere.
I can see how the illusions of love appear and vanish, and how men and women swear that their dreams are eternal, even while they fade.
I can see how poor people blind themselves and deceive each other, calling selfishness devotion, and bondage contentment.
"Stop, before you say what can never be unsaid. You know it is not true.
"I think not," said he, "but I will come.
I will follow you in a quarter of an hour.
And remember we are to be here together once more!"
Yes, and then what must be done?
How was this strange case to be dealt with so as to save all the actors, as far as possible, from needless suffering?
That Keene's mind was disordered at least three of us suspected already.
But to me alone was the nature and seat of the disorder known.
How make the others understand it?
As yet, at least, he was no patient for a mad house: it would be unjust, probably it would be impossible to have him committed.
But on the other hand they might take it too lightly, as the result of overwork, or perhaps of the use of some narcotic.
It was the working out, in abnormal form, but with essential truth, of his chosen and cherished ideal of life.
The solitary trail that led thither was the symbol of his search for happiness-alone, forgetful of life's lowlier ties, looking down upon the world in the cold abstraction of scornful knowledge.
This was what perplexed and oppressed me.
I needed all the time until the next Saturday to think the question through, to decide what should be done.
But the matter was taken out of my hands.
After our latest expedition Keene's dark mood returned upon him with sombre intensity. Dull, restless, indifferent, half contemptuous, he seemed to withdraw into himself, observing those around him with half veiled glances, as if he had nothing better to do and yet found it a tiresome pastime.
Nothing pleased him.
He responded to nothing.
Graham controlled his indignation by a constant effort.
A dozen times he was on the point of speaking out.
But he restrained himself and played fair.
Her loyalty was strained to the breaking point.
Keene's restlessness increased.
The intervening Thursday was Thanksgiving Day; most of the boys had gone home; the school had holiday.
"Let us take our walk to day.
We have no work to do.
Come!
In this clear, frosty air, Spy Rock will be glorious!"
This is the home day.
Stay here and be happy with us all.
You owe this to love and friendship.
You owe it to Dorothy Ward."
"Owe it?" said he.
"Speaking of debts, I think each man is his own preferred creditor.
But of course you can do as you like about to day. Tomorrow or Saturday will answer just as well for our third walk together."
They talked together in low tones.
Then she stood up, with pale face and wide open eyes.
"Do not go, Edward.
"You will excuse me, Dorothy, I am sure.
I feel the need of exercise. Absolutely I must go; good by-until the evening."
There was a sense of disaster in the air.
Something irretrievable had fallen from our circle. But no one dared to name it.
All the stars were hidden.
The wind whimpered and then shouted.
The rain swept down in spiteful volleys, deepening at last into a fierce, steady discharge.
Nine o'clock, ten o'clock passed, and Keene did not return.
By midnight we were certain that some accident had befallen him.
But we could send down to the village for men to organise a search party and to bring the doctor.
At daybreak we set out-some of the men going with the Master along Black Brook, others in different directions to make sure of a complete search-Graham and the doctor and I following the secret trail that I knew only too well. Dorothy insisted that she must go.
She would bear no denial, declaring that it would be worse for her alone at home, than if we took her with us.
It was incredible how the path seemed to lengthen.
Graham watched the girl's every step, helping her over the difficult places, pushing aside the tangled branches, his eyes resting upon her as frankly, as tenderly as a mother looks at her child.
In single file we marched through the gray morning, clearing cold after the storm, and the silence was seldom broken, for we had little heart to talk.
There, on the back of it, with his right arm hanging over the edge, was the outline of Edward Keene's form.
We called to him but there was no answer.
The doctor climbed up with me, and we hurried to the spot where he was lying.
His face was turned to the sky, his eyes blindly staring; there was no pulse, no breath; he was already cold in death.
His right hand and arm, the side of his neck and face were horribly swollen and livid.
The doctor stooped down and examined the hand carefully.
"See!" he cried, pointing to a great bruise on his wrist, with two tiny punctures in the middle of it from which a few drops of blood had oozed, "a rattlesnake has struck him.
He must have fairly put his hand upon it, perhaps in the dark, when he was climbing.
And, look, what is this?"
He picked up a flat silver box, that lay open on the rock.
There were two olive green pellets of a resinous paste in it.
He lifted it to his face, and drew a long breath.
"Yes," he said, "it is Gunjab, the most powerful form of Hashish, the narcotic hemp of India.
There were tear marks on her face.
We have lost him."
Inferno: Canto sixteen
Now was I where was heard the reverberation Of water falling into the next round, Like to that humming which the beehives make,
When shadows three together started forth, Running, from out a company that passed Beneath the rain of the sharp martyrdom.
Towards us came they, and each one cried out: "Stop, thou; for by thy garb to us thou seemest To be some one of our depraved city."
Unto their cries my Teacher paused attentive; He turned his face towards me, and "Now wait," He said; "to these we should be courteous.
As soon as we stood still, they recommenced The old refrain, and when they overtook us, Formed of themselves a wheel, all three of them.
As champions stripped and oiled are wont to do, Watching for their advantage and their hold, Before they come to blows and thrusts between them,
Thus, wheeling round, did every one his visage Direct to me, so that in opposite wise His neck and feet continual journey made.
And, "If the misery of this soft place Bring in disdain ourselves and our entreaties," Began one, "and our aspect black and blistered,
Let the renown of us thy mind incline To tell us who thou art, who thus securely Thy living feet dost move along through Hell.
The other, who close by me treads the sand, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi is, whose fame Above there in the world should welcome be.
And I, who with them on the cross am placed, Jacopo Rusticucci was; and truly My savage wife, more than aught else, doth harm me."
Could I have been protected from the fire, Below I should have thrown myself among them, And think the Teacher would have suffered it;
But as I should have burned and baked myself, My terror overmastered my good will, Which made me greedy of embracing them.
As soon as this my Lord said unto me Words, on account of which I thought within me That people such as you are were approaching.
I of your city am; and evermore Your labours and your honourable names I with affection have retraced and heard.
I leave the gall, and go for the sweet fruits Promised to me by the veracious Leader; But to the centre first I needs must plunge."
Valour and courtesy, say if they dwell Within our city, as they used to do, Or if they wholly have gone out of it;
For Guglielmo Borsier, who is in torment With us of late, and goes there with his comrades, Doth greatly mortify us with his words."
In this wise I exclaimed with face uplifted; And the three, taking that for my reply, Looked at each other, as one looks at truth.
"If other times so little it doth cost thee," Replied they all, "to satisfy another, Happy art thou, thus speaking at thy will!
See that thou speak of us unto the people." Then they broke up the wheel, and in their flight It seemed as if their agile legs were wings.
Not an Amen could possibly be said So rapidly as they had disappeared; Wherefore the Master deemed best to depart.
I followed him, and little had we gone, Before the sound of water was so near us, That speaking we should hardly have been heard.
Which is above called Acquacheta, ere It down descendeth into its low bed, And at Forli is vacant of that name,
Reverberates there above San Benedetto From Alps, by falling at a single leap, Where for a thousand there were room enough;
Thus downward from a bank precipitate, We found resounding that dark tinted water, So that it soon the ear would have offended.
"It must needs be some novelty respond," I said within myself, "to the new signal The Master with his eye is following so."
Ah me! how very cautious men should be With those who not alone behold the act, But with their wisdom look into the thoughts!
He said to me: "Soon there will upward come What I await; and what thy thought is dreaming Must soon reveal itself unto thy sight."
Athwart that dense and darksome atmosphere I saw a figure swimming upward come, Marvellous unto every steadfast heart,
Even as he returns who goeth down Sometimes to clear an anchor, which has grappled Reef, or aught else that in the sea is hidden,
Inferno: Canto seventeen
"Behold the monster with the pointed tail, Who cleaves the hills, and breaketh walls and weapons, Behold him who infecteth all the world."
And that uncleanly image of deceit Came up and thrust ashore its head and bust, But on the border did not drag its tail.
The face was as the face of a just man, Its semblance outwardly was so benign, And of a serpent all the trunk beside.
Two paws it had, hairy unto the armpits; The back, and breast, and both the sides it had Depicted o'er with nooses and with shields.
With colours more, groundwork or broidery Never in cloth did Tartars make nor Turks, Nor were such tissues by Arachne laid.
His tail was wholly quivering in the void, Contorting upwards the envenomed fork, That in the guise of scorpion armed its point.
The Guide said: "Now perforce must turn aside Our way a little, even to that beast Malevolent, that yonder coucheth him."
We therefore on the right side descended, And made ten steps upon the outer verge, Completely to avoid the sand and flame;
And after we are come to him, I see A little farther off upon the sand A people sitting near the hollow place.
Then said to me the Master: "So that full Experience of this round thou bear away, Now go and see what their condition is.
There let thy conversation be concise; Till thou returnest I will speak with him, That he concede to us his stalwart shoulders."
Thus farther still upon the outermost Head of that seventh circle all alone I went, where sat the melancholy folk.
Out of their eyes was gushing forth their woe; This way, that way, they helped them with their hands Now from the flames and now from the hot soil.
Not otherwise in summer do the dogs, Now with the foot, now with the muzzle, when By fleas, or flies, or gadflies, they are bitten.
When I had turned mine eyes upon the faces Of some, on whom the dolorous fire is falling, Not one of them I knew; but I perceived
That from the neck of each there hung a pouch, Which certain colour had, and certain blazon; And thereupon it seems their eyes are feeding.
And as I gazing round me come among them, Upon a yellow pouch I azure saw That had the face and posture of a lion.
Proceeding then the current of my sight, Another of them saw I, red as blood, Display a goose more white than butter is.
And one, who with an azure sow and gravid Emblazoned had his little pouch of white, Said unto me: "What dost thou in this moat?
He who shall bring the satchel with three goats;'" Then twisted he his mouth, and forth he thrust His tongue, like to an ox that licks its nose.
And fearing lest my longer stay might vex Him who had warned me not to tarry long, Backward I turned me from those weary souls.
I found my Guide, who had already mounted Upon the back of that wild animal, And said to me: "Now be both strong and bold.
Now we descend by stairways such as these; Mount thou in front, for I will be midway, So that the tail may have no power to harm thee."
Such as he is who has so near the ague Of quartan that his nails are blue already, And trembles all, but looking at the shade;
Even such became I at those proffered words; But shame in me his menaces produced, Which maketh servant strong before good master.
But he, who other times had rescued me In other peril, soon as I had mounted, Within his arms encircled and sustained me,
Even as the little vessel shoves from shore, Backward, still backward, so he thence withdrew; And when he wholly felt himself afloat,
There where his breast had been he turned his tail, And that extended like an eel he moved, And with his paws drew to himself the air.
Onward he goeth, swimming slowly, slowly; Wheels and descends, but I perceive it only By wind upon my face and from below.
I heard already on the right the whirlpool Making a horrible crashing under us; Whence I thrust out my head with eyes cast downward.
Then was I still more fearful of the abyss; Because I fires beheld, and heard laments, Whereat I, trembling, all the closer cling.
I saw then, for before I had not seen it, The turning and descending, by great horrors That were approaching upon divers sides.
As falcon who has long been on the wing, Who, without seeing either lure or bird, Maketh the falconer say, "Ah me, thou stoopest,"
Even thus did Geryon place us on the bottom, Close to the bases of the rough hewn rock, And being disencumbered of our persons,
Inferno: Canto eighteen
There is a place in Hell called Malebolge, Wholly of stone and of an iron colour, As is the circle that around it turns.
Right in the middle of the field malign There yawns a well exceeding wide and deep, Of which its place the structure will recount.
As where for the protection of the walls Many and many moats surround the castles, The part in which they are a figure forms,
Just such an image those presented there; And as about such strongholds from their gates Unto the outer bank are little bridges,
So from the precipice's base did crags Project, which intersected dikes and moats, Unto the well that truncates and collects them.
Within this place, down shaken from the back Of Geryon, we found us; and the Poet Held to the left, and I moved on behind.
Upon my right hand I beheld new anguish, New torments, and new wielders of the lash, Wherewith the foremost Bolgia was replete.
Down at the bottom were the sinners naked; This side the middle came they facing us, Beyond it, with us, but with greater steps;
Even as the romans, for the mighty host, The year of Jubilee, upon the bridge, Have chosen a mode to pass the people over;
For all upon one side towards the Castle Their faces have, and go unto saint Peter's; On the other side they go towards the Mountain.
This side and that, along the livid stone Beheld I horned demons with great scourges, Who cruelly were beating them behind.
While I was going on, mine eyes by one Encountered were; and straight I said: "Already With sight of this one I am not unfed."
Therefore I stayed my feet to make him out, And with me the sweet Guide came to a stand, And to my going somewhat back assented;
And he, the scourged one, thought to hide himself, Lowering his face, but little it availed him; For said I: "Thou that castest down thine eyes,
And he to me: "Unwillingly I tell it; But forces me thine utterance distinct, Which makes me recollect the ancient world.
I was the one who the fair Ghisola Induced to grant the wishes of the Marquis, Howe'er the shameless story may be told.
Not the sole Bolognese am I who weeps here; Nay, rather is this place so full of them, That not so many tongues to day are taught
This very easily did we ascend, And turning to the right along its ridge, From those eternal circles we departed.
Still what a royal aspect he retains! That Jason is, who by his heart and cunning The Colchians of the Ram made destitute.
He by the isle of Lemnos passed along After the daring women pitiless Had unto death devoted all their males.
There with his tokens and with ornate words Did he deceive Hypsipyle, the maiden Who first, herself, had all the rest deceived.
There did he leave her pregnant and forlorn; Such sin unto such punishment condemns him, And also for Medea is vengeance done.
Thence we heard people, who are making moan In the next Bolgia, snorting with their muzzles, And with their palms beating upon themselves
The margins were incrusted with a mould By exhalation from below, that sticks there, And with the eyes and nostrils wages war.
And whilst below there with mine eye I search, I saw one with his head so foul with ordure, It was not clear if he were clerk or layman.
He screamed to me: "Wherefore art thou so eager To look at me more than the other foul ones?" And I to him: "Because, if I remember,
And he thereon, belabouring his pumpkin: "The flatteries have submerged me here below, Wherewith my tongue was never surfeited."
Inferno: Canto nineteen
O Simon Magus, O forlorn disciples, Ye who the things of God, which ought to be The brides of holiness, rapaciously
For silver and for gold do prostitute, Now it behoves for you the trumpet sound, Because in this third Bolgia ye abide.
We had already on the following tomb Ascended to that portion of the crag Which o'er the middle of the moat hangs plumb.
Wisdom supreme, O how great art thou showest In heaven, in earth, and in the evil world, And with what justice doth thy power distribute!
I saw upon the sides and on the bottom The livid stone with perforations filled, All of one size, and every one was round.
To me less ample seemed they not, nor greater Than those that in my beautiful Saint john Are fashioned for the place of the baptisers,
And one of which, not many years ago, I broke for some one, who was drowning in it; Be this a seal all men to undeceive.
Out of the mouth of each one there protruded The feet of a transgressor, and the legs Up to the calf, the rest within remained.
Even as the flame of unctuous things is wont To move upon the outer surface only, So likewise was it there from heel to point.
"Master, who is that one who writhes himself, More than his other comrades quivering," I said, "and whom a redder flame is sucking?"
And he to me: "If thou wilt have me bear thee Down there along that bank which lowest lies, From him thou'lt know his errors and himself."
And the good Master yet from off his haunch Deposed me not, till to the hole he brought me Of him who so lamented with his shanks.
"Whoe'er thou art, that standest upside down, O doleful soul, implanted like a stake," To say began I, "if thou canst, speak out."
I stood even as the friar who is confessing The false assassin, who, when he is fixed, Recalls him, so that death may be delayed.
Such I became, as people are who stand, Not comprehending what is answered them, As if bemocked, and know not how to answer.
Then said Virgilius: "Say to him straightway, 'I am not he, I am not he thou thinkest.'" And I replied as was imposed on me.
Whereat the spirit writhed with both his feet, Then, sighing, with a voice of lamentation Said to me: "Then what wantest thou of me?
And truly was I son of the She bear, So eager to advance the cubs, that wealth Above, and here myself, I pocketed.
Beneath my head the others are dragged down Who have preceded me in simony, Flattened along the fissure of the rock.
Below there I shall likewise fall, whenever That one shall come who I believed thou wast, What time the sudden question I proposed.
But longer I my feet already toast, And here have been in this way upside down, Than he will planted stay with reddened feet;
New Jason will he be, of whom we read In Maccabees; and as his king was pliant, So he who governs France shall be to this one."
I do not know if I were here too bold, That him I answered only in this metre: "I pray thee tell me now how great a treasure
Our Lord demanded of Saint peter first, Before he put the keys into his keeping? Truly he nothing asked but 'Follow me.'
Nor peter nor the rest asked of Matthias Silver or gold, when he by lot was chosen Unto the place the guilty soul had lost.
Therefore stay here, for thou art justly punished, And keep safe guard o'er the ill gotten money, Which caused thee to be valiant against Charles.
I would make use of words more grievous still; Because your avarice afflicts the world, Trampling the good and lifting the depraved.
The Evangelist you Pastors had in mind, When she who sitteth upon many waters To fornicate with kings by him was seen;
The same who with the seven heads was born, And power and strength from the ten horns received, So long as virtue to her spouse was pleasing.
Ye have made yourselves a god of gold and silver; And from the idolater how differ ye, Save that he one, and ye a hundred worship?
And while I sang to him such notes as these, Either that anger or that conscience stung him, He struggled violently with both his feet.
Therefore with both his arms he took me up, And when he had me all upon his breast, Remounted by the way where he descended.
Nor did he tire to have me clasped to him; But bore me to the summit of the arch Which from the fourth dike to the fifth is passage.
There tenderly he laid his burden down, Tenderly on the crag uneven and steep, That would have been hard passage for the goats:
Of a new pain behoves me to make verses And give material to the twentieth canto Of the first song, which is of the submerged.
I was already thoroughly disposed To peer down into the uncovered depth, Which bathed itself with tears of agony;
And people saw I through the circular valley, Silent and weeping, coming at the pace Which in this world the Litanies assume.
As lower down my sight descended on them, Wondrously each one seemed to be distorted From chin to the beginning of the chest;
Perchance indeed by violence of palsy Some one has been thus wholly turned awry; But I ne'er saw it, nor believe it can be.
As God may let thee, Reader, gather fruit From this thy reading, think now for thyself How I could ever keep my face unmoistened,
Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; Who is a greater reprobate than he Who feels compassion at the doom divine?
Amphiaraus?
Why dost leave the war?' And downward ceased he not to fall amain As far as Minos, who lays hold on all.
See, he has made a bosom of his shoulders! Because he wished to see too far before him Behind he looks, and backward goes his way:
Behold Tiresias, who his semblance changed, When from a male a female he became, His members being all of them transformed;
And afterwards was forced to strike once more The two entangled serpents with his rod, Ere he could have again his manly plumes.
Among the marbles white a cavern had For his abode; whence to behold the stars And sea, the view was not cut off from him.
Was Manto, who made quest through many lands, Afterwards tarried there where I was born; Whereof I would thou list to me a little.
After her father had from life departed, And the city of Bacchus had become enslaved, She a long season wandered through the world.
Above in beauteous Italy lies a lake At the Alp's foot that shuts in Germany Over Tyrol, and has the name Benaco.
By a thousand springs, I think, and more, is bathed, 'Twixt Garda and Val Camonica, Pennino, With water that grows stagnant in that lake.
There of necessity must fall whatever In bosom of Benaco cannot stay, And grows a river down through verdant pastures.
Soon as the water doth begin to run, No more Benaco is it called, but Mincio, Far as Governo, where it falls in Po.
Not far it runs before it finds a plain In which it spreads itself, and makes it marshy, And oft 'tis wont in summer to be sickly.
Passing that way the virgin pitiless Land in the middle of the fen descried, Untilled and naked of inhabitants;
There to escape all human intercourse, She with her servants stayed, her arts to practise And lived, and left her empty body there.
The men, thereafter, who were scattered round, Collected in that place, which was made strong By the lagoon it had on every side;
They built their city over those dead bones, And, after her who first the place selected, Mantua named it, without other omen.
Its people once within more crowded were, Ere the stupidity of Casalodi From Pinamonte had received deceit.
Therefore I caution thee, if e'er thou hearest Originate my city otherwise, No falsehood may the verity defraud."
And I: "My Master, thy discourses are To me so certain, and so take my faith, That unto me the rest would be spent coals.
But tell me of the people who are passing, If any one note worthy thou beholdest, For only unto that my mind reverts."
Eryphylus his name was, and so sings My lofty Tragedy in some part or other; That knowest thou well, who knowest the whole of it.
Behold Guido Bonatti, behold Asdente, Who now unto his leather and his thread Would fain have stuck, but he too late repents.
Behold the wretched ones, who left the needle, The spool and rock, and made them fortune tellers; They wrought their magic spells with herb and image.
But come now, for already holds the confines Of both the hemispheres, and under Seville Touches the ocean wave, Cain and the thorns,
And yesternight the moon was round already; Thou shouldst remember well it did not harm thee From time to time within the forest deep."
Thus spake he to me, and we walked the while.
CHAPTER six.
HOW IRELAND BECAME THE MOST LEARNED COUNTRY IN EUROPE.
In old pagan times, long before the arrival of saint Patrick, there were schools in Ireland taught by druids.
And when at last Christianity came, and was spreading rapidly over the land, those old schools were still held on; but they were no longer taught by druids, and they were no longer pagan, for teachers and scholars were now all Christians.
These were what are called monastic or ecclesiastical schools, for they were mostly taught by monks; while the older schools, being taught by laymen, were called lay schools.
In lay schools was taught what might be called the native learning-the learning that had grown up in the country in the course of ages.
In these last the professional men were educated.
These lay schools, being now within the Christian communion, were not abolished or discouraged in any way by saint Patrick or his successors.
They were simply let alone, to teach their own secular learning just as they pleased.
They continued on, and were to be found in every part of Ireland for fourteen centuries after saint Patrick's arrival, down to a period within our own memory; but of course greatly changed as time went on.
I was myself educated in some of those lay schools; and I remember with pleasure several of my old teachers: rough and unpolished men most of them, but excellent, solid scholars, and full of enthusiasm for learning-enthusiasm which they communicated to their pupils.
But the famine of eighteen forty seven broke up those schools, and in a very few years they nearly all disappeared.
But our business here is mainly with the early monastic schools, which became so celebrated all over Europe.
Before going farther it is well to remark that these schools also continued, and increased and multiplied as time went on.
They held their ground successfully-as the lay schools did-during the evil days of later ages, when determined attempts were made, under the penal laws, to suppress them; and at the present day they are working all over the country quite as vigorously as in days of yore.
To notice all the monastic schools of old that attained eminence would demand more space than can be afforded here.
Cork), and Derry.
Besides these, at least twenty five others, all eminent, are specially mentioned in our old books.
Many of the monastic colleges had very large numbers of students.
In Clonard there were three thousand, all residing in and around the college; and Bangor founded by saint Comgall, and Clonfert founded by saint Brendan the Navigator, had each as many.
The students were of all classes-rich and poor-from the sons of kings and chiefs down to the sons of farmers, tradesmen, and labourers; young laymen for general education, as well as ecclesiastical students for the priesthood.
All those who had the means paid their way in everything.
But most of even the poorest did their best to pay something; and in this respect it is interesting to compare the usages of those long past times with some features of the college life of our own days.
In some of the present American universities there is an excellent custom which enables very poor students to support themselves and pay their college fees.
They wait on their richer comrades, bring up the dishes, etc, from the kitchen for meals, and lay the tables: and when the meal is over, they remove everything, wash up dishes and plates, and put them all by in their proper places.
In fact, they perform most of the work expected from ordinary servants.
For this they receive food and some small payment, which renders them independent of charity.
And the pleasing feature of this arrangement is, that it is not attended with any sense of humiliation or loss of self respect.
During study and lecture hours these same young men, having put by aprons and napkins, and donned their ordinary dress, are received and treated on terms of perfect equality by those they have served, who take on no airs, and do not pose as superiors, but mix with them in free and kindly intercourse as fellow students and comrades.
All this was anticipated in Ireland more than a thousand years ago; for a similar custom existed in some of the old Irish colleges.
The greatest number of the students lived in houses built by themselves, or by hired workmen-some, mere huts, each for a single person; some, large houses, for several: and all around the central college buildings there were whole streets of these houses, often forming a good sized town.
Where there were large numbers great care was taken that there should be no confusion or disorder.
The Fer leginn was always some distinguished man-of course a great scholar.
He was generally a monk, but sometimes a layman; for those good monks selected the best man they could find, whether priest or layman.
I suppose those who are accustomed to the grand universities and colleges of the present day, with their palatial buildings, would feel inclined to laugh at the simple, rough and ready methods and appliances of the old Irish colleges.
There were no comfortable study rooms, well furnished with desks, seats, and rostrums: no spacious lecture halls.
The greater part of the work, indeed, was carried on in the open air when the weather at all permitted.
At study time the students went just where they pleased, and accommodated themselves as best they could.
Then the little handbell tinkled for some particular lecture, and the special students for this hurried to their places, and seated themselves as best they could-on chair, stool, form, stone, or bank, and opened their books.
These same books, too, were a motley collection-some large, some small, some fresh from the scribe, some tattered and brown with age: but all most carefully covered and preserved; for they were very expensive.
Then the master went over the text, translating and explaining it, and whenever he thought it necessary questioned his pupils, to draw them out. After this he had to stand the cross fire of the students' questions, who asked him to explain all sorts of difficulties: for this was one of the college regulations.
There were no grammars, no dictionaries, no simple introductory lesson books, such as we have now.
And in this rugged and difficult fashion they mastered the language.
The great Irish colleges were, in fact, universities in the full sense of the word, that is to say, schools which taught the whole circle of knowledge: they were, indeed, in a great measure the models on which our present universities were formed.
The Latin and Greek languages and literatures were studied and taught with success.
In science the Irish scholars were famous for their knowledge of Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music, Geography, and so forth.
And they were equally eminent in sacred learning-Theology, Divinity, and the Holy Scriptures.
The schools proved their mettle by the scholars they educated and sent forth: scholars who astonished all Europe in their day.
john Scotus Erigena ('john the Irish born Scot') of the ninth century taught in Paris; he was the greatest Greek scholar of his time, and was equally eminent in Theology.
These men, and scores of others that we cannot find space for here, spread the fame of their native country everywhere.
It was no wonder that the people of Great Britain and the Continent, when they met such scholars, all from Ireland, came to the conclusion that the schools which educated them were the best to be found anywhere.
Accordingly, students came from all parts of the known world, to place themselves under the masters of these schools.
From Germany, France, Italy, Egypt, came priests and laymen, princes, chiefs, and peasant students-all eagerly seeking to drink from the fountain of Irish learning.
But even in much greater numbers than these came students from Great Britain.
CHAPTER seven.
Towards the end of the sixth century the great body of the Irish were Christians, so that the holy men of Ireland were able to turn their attention to the conversion of other people.
Then arose an extraordinary zeal for spreading religion and learning in foreign lands; and hundreds of devoted and determined missionaries left our shores.
There was ample field for their noble ambition.
For these were the Dark Ages, when the civilisation and learning bequeathed by old Greece and Rome had been almost wiped out of existence by the barbarous northern hordes who overran Europe; and Christianity had not yet time to spread its softening influence among them.
To begin with the Irish missionary work in Great Britain.
In the seven kingdoms of England-the Heptarchy-the Anglo Saxons were the ruling race, rude and stubborn, and greatly attached to their gloomy northern pagan gods.
Aidan was an Irishman who entered the monastery of Iona, from which he was sent to preach to the Northumbrians on the invitation of their good king, Oswald.
He founded the monastery of Lindisfarne, which afterwards became so illustrious.
He was its first abbot; and for thirty years it was governed by him and by two other Irish abbots, Finan and Colman, in succession.
Whole crowds of ardent and learned Irishmen travelled on the Continent in the sixth, seventh, and succeeding centuries, spreading Christianity and secular knowledge everywhere among the people.
On this point we have the decisive testimony of an eminent French writer of the ninth century, Eric of Auxerre, who himself witnessed what he records.
In a letter written by him to Charles the Bald, king of France, he says:--"What shall I say of Ireland, who, despising the dangers of the deep, is migrating with almost her whole train of philosophers to our coasts?" And other foreign evidences of a like kind might be brought forward.
These men, on their first appearance on the Continent, caused much surprise, they were so startlingly different from those preachers the people had been accustomed to.
They travelled on foot towards their destination in small companies, generally of thirteen.
The long hair behind flowed down on the back: and the eyelids were painted or stained black.
Each had a long stout walking stick: and slung from the shoulder a leathern bottle for water, and a wallet containing his greatest treasure-a book or two and some relics.
They spoke a strange language among themselves, used Latin to those who understood it, and made use of an interpreter when preaching, until they had learned the language of the place.
Most of them were persons in good position, who might have lived in plenty and comfort at home.
Once on the Continent, they had to make their way, poor and friendless, through people whose language they did not understand, and who were in many places ten times more rude and dangerous in those ages than the inhabitants of these islands: and we know as a matter of history, that many were killed on the way.
But these stout hearted pilgrims were prepared for all this, and looking only to the service of their Master, never flinched.
They were confident, cheerful, and self helpful, faced privation with indifference, caring nothing for luxuries; and when other provisions failed them, they gathered wild fruit, trapped animals, and fished, with great dexterity and with any sort of next to hand rude appliances.
They were somewhat rough in outward appearance: but beneath all that they had solid sense and much learning.
Their simple ways, their unmistakable piety, and their intense earnestness in the cause of religion caught the people everywhere, so that they made converts in crowds.
They were to be found everywhere through Europe, even as far as Iceland and the Faroe and Shetland Islands.
Europe was too small for their missionary enterprise.
Many were to be found in Egypt; and as early as the seventh century, three learned Irish monks found their way to Carthage, where they laboured for a long time and with great success.
Wherever they went they made pilgrimages to holy places-places sanctified by memories of early saints-and whenever they found it practicable they were sure to make their way to Rome, to visit the shrines of the apostles, and obtain the blessing of the Pope.
The Irish "passion for pilgrimage and preaching" never died out: it is a characteristic of the race.
Irishmen were equally active in spreading secular knowledge.
Indeed the two functions were generally combined; for it was quite common to find a man a successful missionary, while at the same time acting as professor in a college, or as head of some great seminary for general education.
Irish professors and teachers were in those times held in such estimation that they were employed in most of the schools and colleges of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.
The revival of learning on the Continent was indeed due in no small degree to those Irish missionaries.
It was enough that the candidate for an appointment came from Ireland: he needed no other recommendation.
In Glastonbury especially, they taught with great success.
We are told by English writers that "they were skilled in every department of learning sacred and profane"; and that under them were educated many young English nobles, sent to Glastonbury with that object.
Among these students the most distinguished was saint Dunstan, who, according to all his biographers, received his education, both Scriptural and secular, from Irish masters there.
As for the numerous Continental schools and colleges in which Irishmen figured either as principals or professors, it would be impossible, with our limited space, to notice them here.
Observing how the merchants exhibited and drew attention to their wares, they acted in a similar fashion to force themselves into notice like the others.
This they repeated as they went from place to place, so that the people wondered very much; and some thought them to be nothing more than persons half crazed.
Strange rumours regarding them went round, and at length came to the ears of King Charles; on which he sent for the brothers, and had them brought to his presence.
Now at this very time King Charles was using his best efforts to restore learning, by opening schools throughout his dominions, but found it hard to procure a sufficient supply of qualified teachers.
And as he perceived that these brothers were evidently men of real learning, and of a superior cast in every way, he joyfully accepted their proposals.
Having kept them for some time on a visit in his palace, he finally opened a great school in some part of France-probably Paris-for the education of boys of all ranks of society, not only for the sons of the highest nobles, but also for those of the middle and low classes, at the head of which he placed Clement.
He also directed that all the scholars should be provided with food and suitable habitations: it was in fact a great free boarding school, founded and maintained at the expense of the king.
CHAPTER six THE FIRST VALLEY
Some of the voices sounded loud and shrill, others low and deep, but all rang with a happy tone that aroused the children's interest at once, and made them wonder what occasion could cause so much amusement.
Then, so suddenly that it quite startled the childish voyagers, the boat glided from the archway into the most beautiful country one could imagine.
It was a Valley, as the Watch Dog had said; but it was level and sunny and dotted with broad leaved trees; while soft, tender grasses, mingled with brilliant flowers, covered the ground in every direction.
On many of these raised and padded platforms, Dot and Tot saw groups of funny looking Clowns, all dressed in wide, baggy trousers, puffy jackets and soft, pointed caps.
Yet in their costumes was an endless variety of colorings and combinations of colors, making the groups look remarkably bright and pleasing.
These feats were greeted with shouts of laughter by other Clowns who were resting and looking on, and these spectators also cried out their approval or poked fun at the performers when they failed to accomplish the acts they were attempting.
As his lips seemed to move, she took away her fingers from her ears that she might hear what he was saying.
Then, with another bow, the leader addressed her, speaking in a sweet and most pleasing tone of voice, "Welcome, O King and Queen of Children, to the Valley of Clowns!
Then the leader of the Clowns again spoke, "If you will graciously consent to land in our country, where everything we have is at your service, we shall be delighted to amuse you to the best of our ability."
"You are very kind," answered Dot, "and as we are tired by sitting in the boat so long, we shall be glad to accept your invitation."
Then Dot and Tot stepped out upon land, and as they did so every Clown present turned a backward somersault and shouted, "Here we are again!"
The one who had first spoken to them now came forward and shook hands with both Dot and Tot in a very polite manner.
I beg you will allow me to escort you to my dwelling; but first I should like to know your names, and how you came here."
We've come in a boat, long, long ways off.
"We are delighted to have you with us, however you came here," replied the Clown; "and as for your getting home again, why, that is worry, and no one ever worries in the Valley of Clowns.
You are welcome to remain our guests as long as you please, and while you are with us you must consider us your slaves, for Clowns have always been the slaves of children." Then he turned to the others.
"Allow me to introduce you to our friends Dot and Tot, of the Big Round World.
Instantly every Clown stood upon his head and knocked his heels together in the air.
The Prince carried them to one of the prettiest platforms and set them gently upon its cushioned top.
"Welcome to my dwelling," he said.
Let us enter."
"Come on!" he cried, and jumping down the hole, disappeared from view.
Just beneath her was Flippityflop, holding out his arms.
"Come on!" he said again; "I'll catch you."
Dot did not hesitate, but dropped through the opening, and the Prince caught her safely in his arms.
CHAPTER seven THE CLOWN COUNTRY
Flippityflop's house proved to be one big room, built under the platform, and lighted by a soft glow from hidden electric lamps.
The walls were covered with bright yellow silk hangings and on the floor was a crimson carpet.
Therefore I am proud of them."
"They look very jolly," said Dot.
"They were jolly, and proved a comfort to thousands of children.
But you must be hungry, and I trust you will allow me to offer you some dinner.
What will you have?"
"What you got?" inquired Tot.
"Well, I have in my cupboard some fried goldfish, boiled buttercups and pickled shoelaces," he answered.
"These seem rather foolish things to eat," remarked Dot.
"Of course, they are foolish things," agreed Flippityflop, cheerfully.
"Everything we do here is foolish.
You certainly can't expect wisdom in a country of Clowns."
"Course not," said Tot.
"If you'll send to the boat for our basket, I think we will prefer to eat the things we brought with us," declared Dot.
"Certainly!" answered the Prince, and immediately sticking his head through the trapdoor, he asked a Clown who stood outside to fetch the basket.
It came in a remarkably short time, and then Flippityflop assisted Dot to lay the cloth on the blue and silver table, while the children proceeded to eat of the sandwiches, cake and apple tarts that remained in the basket.
"Wouldn't you like something to drink?" asked the Prince.
"But we have some excellent green paint, or, if you prefer it, I can give a bottle of red mucilage."
"No, thank you," said Dot; "we couldn't drink those.
Perhaps you will bring us some fresh water from the river."
"But the water is quite wet," exclaimed the Clown, "and is liable to make you damp.
"Oh, yes; we're accustomed to drinking water," said the girl.
So the water was sent for, and Dot and Tot took long and refreshing drinks, although their action alarmed Flippityflop, who urged them to eat a few handfuls of sawdust afterward to absorb the dampness.
"You see, we train them all very carefully, and every year one is selected to go into the world."
"At the upper edge of our Valley there is one place not so steep as the rest.
"I've seen 'em--in circuses."
Do they make the children laugh?"
"When they do not," said Flippityflop, gravely, "they are imitation Clowns, and were never trained in this Valley of Merryland.
The real Clowns are sure to make you laugh.
But come, it is time our people were gathering on the platforms for their evening practice.
Would you like to watch them?"
"Yes, indeed!" cried Dot, joyfully; and Tot clapped his hands and echoed: "'Deed, yes!"
So Flippityflop lifted them through the hole to the top of the padded platform, where they saw a strange and merry sight.
The trees were full of electric lights, which shed brilliant rays over the scene and enabled the children to see everything distinctly.
They left the Prince's platform and came to the next, where three gaily dressed Clowns were bounding into the air and whirling around before they came down again.
When this happened they were not hurt, for the platform was soft and yielding; so they sprang up at once and tried it over again, laughing at their own mishaps.
One of these placed a light ladder on his shoulders, and another ran up it and stood upon his head on the top rung.
They stopped to listen while he sang as follows:
After each verse another Clown cracked a long whip at the singer, which made him leap into the air and screw his face up in such a comical way that Dot and Tot were greatly amused, and applauded him rapturously.
This singer had so droll an expression on his face that Tot yelled with rapture, and Dot found herself laughing heartily.
Indeed, the whole performance was a delight to the children, and they were sorry when a bell rang and put a stop to the antics of the Clowns.
In less than a minute Dot and Tot were fast asleep, curled up side by side, with their arms entwined.
"That is my alarm clock," answered Flippityflop, who had been reclining upon a bench at the other side of the room.
"It's a queer alarm clock," said the girl.
"But a very good one," returned the Clown.
"It is really a big music box under the bench, which starts playing every morning at seven o'clock.
"I think it's a lovely clock," said Tot.
"Don't want 'em!" cried Tot.
"What peculiar tastes you children have!"
But he allowed them to breakfast from their own stock of food, and when the meal was finished Dot said, "We must be going now; but first I wish to thank you for the pleasant time we have had in your Valley. We enjoyed the Clowns very much indeed."
"Nice Clowns," declared Tot, with emphasis.
The carriage itself was of the kind that are sold in toy shops, and it was drawn by two horses standing upon wooden platforms with rollers underneath, so that instead of the horses themselves running, the wheels of the platforms whirled around, taking the carriage wherever the driver might direct.
This driver looked for all the world like a rag doll dressed in a coachman's uniform.
His neck was rather weak, and that caused his head to lean slightly to one side, giving him a somewhat broken down appearance; but he held the reins firmly in his stuffed hands and looked straight ahead, like a well trained servant.
Her silken hair was long and of a golden color, while her eyes were blue, and had in their depths a sweet and gentle expression.
As for her complexion, it was a dainty pink and white, delicately blended.
"We came in a boat," replied the girl; "and this is my friend, Tot Thompson, and I am Dot Freeland."
"This is private property, and I have placed guards to prevent anyone entering my Valleys."
"Are you the Queen?" asked the girl.
"It was we who disobeyed. But we really couldn't help it, for we had to go wherever the boat carried us."
After she had heard the story, the little lady looked puzzled for a moment and then said, "No one who enters my kingdom should ever be allowed to leave it again, for if they did the world should soon know all about me and my people.
If that happened, all our comfort and fun would be spoiled, for strangers would be coming here every day."
"Have strangers been here before?" asked Dot, timidly.
"Never," answered the Queen.
"Then what are you going to do with us?" inquired the girl.
You see, I am so perplexed that I have stopped smiling, and that will never do in the world; for should the weather change and cool my wax, I would remain solemn until it warmed up again, and my people would then think me unworthy to be the Queen of Merryland."
"I'm sorry to have caused you so much trouble," said Dot, softly. "I'd much rather be at home again, if I could, although your Valleys are so queer and delightful."
Then the Queen again smiled upon them.
Until then you must come to my palace and be treated as my guests."
"Thank you," said Dot and Tot together.
The Queen turned to the wooden Captain and commanded:
"Escort these strangers to my royal palace, and see that you treat them most politely; for although they are in reality my prisoners, they have been guilty of no intentional wrong and seem to be nice children."
Then the Queen stepped into her carriage, the rag coachman cracked his whip, and the wheels of the horses' platform began spinning around.
Then the Queen rode swiftly up the street to her royal palace.
Dot and Tot followed more slowly, for the Captain who escorted them was exceedingly small and walked stiffly, having no joints in his knees.
As they trudged along Tot asked the Captain:
"Why do the horses go on wheels?"
"Because they're made that way, I suppose," was the reply.
"It would tire them too much," answered the Captain.
"Being on platforms, the horses never get tired, you see, for the wheels do all the work."
"Oh!" said Tot, "I see." Then, after a pause, he asked:
"Cotton," answered the Captain.
"We keep them quite full of it all the time.
That's what makes them look so plump and healthy.
What do they feed horses on in your country?"
"We tried stuffing ours with hay once," remarked the Captain; "but it made their skins look lumpy, it was so coarse; so now we use cotton altogether."
"I see," said Tot again, in a rather bewildered voice.
Thereupon the gate opened slowly, and they passed into a beautiful flower garden, and walked along the green bordered paths until they came to the high arched doorway of the palace.
She touched a bell that stood upon a table near by, and at once there came into the room a little boy doll, dressed in a brown suit with brass buttons.
He was larger in size than any doll Tot had seen outside of Merryland, yet he was not so big as the Queen herself. When the children looked at him closely, they could see that his face and hands and feet were knitted from colored worsteds, while his eyes were two big black beads.
This curious doll walked straight up to the Queen and bowed before her, while she said, "Scollops, show this young man to the laughing chamber, and wait upon him while he arranges his toilet."
Scollops, as the knitted boy seemed named, bowed again and murmured, "Your Majesty shall be obeyed." Then, turning to Tot, he took his hand and led him from the room.
"To the laughing chamber," replied Scollops; and having reached the top of the stairs, they walked down a long hallway and entered a room so odd and pretty that Tot stopped short and gazed at it in astonishment.
But upon the wall were painted hundreds of heads of children-boys and girls of all countries, with light and dark hair, straight and curly hair, blue and black and brown and gray eyes, and all with laughing faces.
The posts of the bed were also carved into laughing baby faces; the chairs and the dresser showed a face upon every spot where there was a place for one, and every face throughout the whole room had a smile upon it.
To match the rest of the furniture, the carpet had woven upon it in bright colors all kinds of laughing children's faces, and the effect of the queer room was to make Tot himself laugh until the tears roll down his cheeks.
When the boy had looked the room over and seen all the faces, Scollops helped him to wash his hands and face, to comb his hair and to brush his clothes, and when this task was finished, the woolly doll said:
Softly his eyes closed, and in another moment he would have been sound asleep had not Scollops raised him to his feet and said:
"It is not time for sleep yet, for you haven't had your dinner.
But the laughing faces will make you slumber peacefully when the time comes, and give you pleasant dreams, too."
james MONROE.
The fifth president of the United States was a native of the grand Old Dominion, being born in Westmoreland county virginia, april twenty eighth seventeen fifty eight. Like his predecessor, Madison, he was the son of a planter.
Another strange incident:--Within sight of Blue Ridge in Virginia, lived three presidents of the United States, whose public career commenced in the revolutionary times and whose political faith was the same throughout a long series of years.
These were Thomas Jefferson, james Madison and james Monroe.
In early youthhood Monroe received a good education, but left school to join the army and soon after was commissioned a lieutenant.
He took an active part in the campaign on the Hudson, and in the attack on Trenton, at the head of a small detachment, he captured one of the British batteries.
On this occasion he received a ball in the shoulder, and was promoted to a captaincy.
As aide de camp to Lord Sterling, with the rank of major, he served in the campaign of seventeen seventy seven and seventeen seventy eight, and distinguished himself in the battles of Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth.
Leaving the army, he returned to Virginia and commenced the study of law under Thomas Jefferson, then Governor of the State.
When the British appeared soon afterward in the State, Monroe exerted himself to the utmost in organizing the militia of the lower counties; and when the enemy proceeded southward, Jefferson sent him as military commissioner to the army in South Carolina.
In seventeen eighty two, he was elected to the assembly of Virginia from the county of King George, and was appointed by that body, although but twenty three years of age, a member of the executive council.
The resolution was referred to a committee of which he was chairman, and a report was made in favor of the measure.
In seventeen eighty five he married a daughter of peter Kortright, a lady of refinement and culture.
In the Senate he became a strong representative of the anti Federal party, and acted with it until his term expired in seventeen ninety four.
On his return to America he published a 'View of the conduct of the Executive in the Foreign Affairs of the United States,' which widened the breach between him and the administration, but socially Monroe remained upon good terms with both Washington and Jay.
In the same year he was commissioned Minister Plenipotentiary to England, and endeavored to conclude a convention for the protection of neutral rights, and against the impressment of seamen.
In the midst of these negotiations he was directed to proceed to Madrid as Minister Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to adjust the difficulties between the United States and Spain, in relation to the boundaries of the new purchase of Louisiana.
On the last day of that year a treaty was concluded, but because of the omission of any provision against the impressment of seamen, and its doubtfulness in relation to other leading points the president sent it back for revisal.
The time was approaching for the election of a president, and a considerable body of the Republican party had brought Monroe forward as their candidate, but the preference of Jefferson for Madison was well known and of course had its influence.
Monroe believed that the rejection of the treaty and the predilection expressed for his rival indicated hostility on the part of the retiring President, and a correspondence on the subject ensued.
His attention was also directed to the defence of New Orleans, and finding the public credit completely prostrated, he pledged his private means as subsidary to the credit of the Government, and enabled the city to successfully oppose the forces of the enemy.
In that year he succeeded to the Presidency himself, by an electoral vote of one hundred eighty three out of two hundred seventeen, as the candidate of the party now generally known as Democratic.
On this tour he wore the undress uniform of a continental officer.
He was chosen a justice of the peace, and as such sat in the county court.
In eighteen twenty nine he became a member of the Virginia convention to revise the constitution, and was chosen to preside over the deliberations of that body but he was obliged, on account of ill health, to resign his position in that body and return to his home.
Although Monroe had received three hundred fifty thousand dollars for his public services alone, he was greatly harrassed with creditors toward the latter part of his life. Toward the last he made his home with his son in law, Samuel l Gouverneur of New York city, where he was originally buried, but in eighteen thirty he was removed to Richmond with great pomp and re interred in Holleywood Cemetery.
He encouraged the army, increased the navy, augmented the national defences, protected commerce, approved of the United States Bank, and infused vigor into every department of the public service.
His honesty, good faith, and simplicity were generally acknowledged, and disarmed the political rancor of the strongest opponents.
Madison thought the country had never fully appreciated the robust understanding of Monroe.
In person, Monroe was tall and well formed, with light complexion and blue eyes.
MOTTO FOR THE MOTHER
The first knight was called Sir Brian the Brave.
He had killed the great lion that came out of the forest to frighten the women and children, had slain a dragon, and had saved a princess from a burning castle; for he was afraid of nothing under the sun
The second knight was Gerald the Glad, who was so happy himself that he made everybody around him happy too; for his sweet smile and cheery words were so comforting that none could be sad or cross or angry when he was near.
Sir Kenneth the Kind was the third knight, and he won his name by his tender heart.
Even the creatures of the wood knew and loved him, for he never hurt anything that God had made.
The fourth knight had a face as beautiful as his name, and he was called Percival the Pure.
He thought beautiful thoughts, said beautiful words, and did beautiful deeds, for he kept his whole life as lovely as a garden full of flowers without a single weed.
Tristram the True was the last knight, and he was leader of them all.
The king of the country trusted these five knights; and one morning in the early spring time he called them to him and said:--
"My trusty knights, I am growing old, and I long to see in my kingdom many knights like you to take care of my people; and so I will send you through all my kingdom to choose for me a little boy who may live at my court and learn from you those things which a knight must know.
Only a good child can be chosen.
A good child is worth more than a kingdom.
And when you have found him, bring him, if he will come willingly, to me, and I shall be happy in my old age."
Now the knights were well pleased with the words of the king, and at the first peep of day they were ready for their journey, and rode down the king's highway with waving plumes and shining shields.
The parents' messages were so full of praises of their children that the knights scarcely knew where to go.
Some of the parents said that their sons were beautiful; some said theirs were smart; but as the knights cared nothing for a child who was not good, they did not hurry to see these children.
On the second day, however, as they rode along, they met a company of men in very fine clothes, who bowed down before them; and while the knights drew rein in astonishment, a little man stepped in front of the others to speak to them.
He was a fat little man, with a fat little voice; and he told the knights that he had come to invite them to the castle of the Baron Borribald, whose son Florimond was the most wonderful child in the world.
"Oh! there is nothing he cannot do," cried the fat little man whose name was Puff.
"You must hear him talk!
You must see him walk!"
So the knights followed him; and when they had reached the castle, Florimond ran to meet them.
He was a merry little fellow, with long fair curls and rosy cheeks; and when he saw the fine horses he clapped his hands with delight.
The baron and baroness, too, were well pleased with their visitors, and made a feast in their honor; but early the next morning, the knights were startled by a most awful sound which seemed to come from the hall below.
It sounded something like the howling of a dog; but as they listened, it grew louder and louder, until it sounded like the roaring of a lion.
His mamma and papa were begging him to be quiet.
Then the knights saw that they were not wanted, and they hurried upstairs to prepare for their journey.
The baron and baroness and fat little Puff all begged them to stay, and Florimond cried again when they left him; but the knights did not care to stay with a child who was not good.
North, south, east, and west, they searched; and at last, one afternoon, they halted under an oak tree, to talk, and they decided to part company.
"Greeting to you, little boy," said he.
"Greeting to you, fair sir," said the boy, looking up with eager eyes at the knight on his splendid horse, that stood so still when the knight bade it.
"What is your name?" asked the knight.
"And can you prove a trusty guide, little Gauvain, and lead me to a pleasant place where I may rest to night?" asked the knight.
Now little Gauvain wanted to help the good knight so much that he was sorry to say this; but Sir Tristram told him to run, and promised to wait patiently until his return; and before many moments Gauvain was back, bounding like a fawn through the wood, to lead the way to his own home.
When they came there the little dog ran out to meet them, and the cat rubbed up against Gauvain, and the mother called from the kitchen:--
"Is that my sunbeam coming home to roost?" which made Gauvain and the knight both laugh.
Sir Tristram was so glad of this that he could scarcely wait for the time to come when he should meet his comrades under the oak tree.
"I have found a child whom you must see," he said, as soon as they came together.
"And I," exclaimed Kenneth the Kind.
"And I," said Brian the Brave.
"And I," said Percival the Pure; and they looked at each other in astonishment.
"I do not know the child's name," continued Gerald the Glad; "but as I was riding in the forest I heard some one singing the merriest song!
"I rode by the highway," said Sir Brian the Brave, "and I came suddenly upon a crowd of great, rough fellows who were trying to torment a small black dog; and just as I saw them, a little boy ran up, as brave as a knight, and took the dog in his arms, and covered it with his coat.
The rest ran away when I rode up; but the child stayed, and told me his name-Gauvain."
I tarried all night at her cottage, and she told me of his kindness."
"I saw a lad at the spring near by," said Percival the Pure.
I should like to find his home and see him there."
"Come, and I will carry you to the child!" And when the knights followed him, he led them to the home where little Gauvain was working with his mother, as happy as a lark and as gentle as a dove.
"Greeting to you!
The king, our wise ruler, has sent us here to see your good child; for a good child is more precious than a kingdom.
And the king offers him his love and favor if you will let him ride with us to live at the king's court and learn to be a knight."
Little Gauvain and his mother were greatly astonished.
"I cannot spare my good child from my home.
The king's love is precious; but I love my child more than the whole world, and he is dearer to me than a thousand kingdoms."
All day and all night they rode, and it was the peep of day when they came to the king's highway.
Then they rode slowly, for they were sad because of their news; but the king rejoiced when he heard it, for he said: "Such a child, with such a mother, will grow into a knight at home."
The king's words were true; for when the king was an old, old man, Gauvain rode to his court and was knighted.
Gauvain had a beautiful name of his own then, for he was called "Gauvain the Good"; and he was brave, happy, kind, pure, and true.
It was the second day in Easter week.
The air was warm, the sky was blue, the sun was high, warm, bright, but my soul was very gloomy.
I sauntered behind the prison barracks.
This was the second day of the "holidays" in the prison; the convicts were not taken out to work, there were numbers of men drunk, loud abuse and quarrelling was springing up continually in every corner.
Several of the convicts who had been sentenced by their comrades, for special violence, to be beaten till they were half dead, were lying on the platform bed, covered with sheepskins till they should recover and come to themselves again; knives had already been drawn several times.
For these two days of holiday all this had been torturing me till it made me ill.
And indeed I could never endure without repulsion the noise and disorder of drunken people, and especially in this place.
At last a sudden fury flamed up in my heart.
A political prisoner called m met me; he looked at me gloomily, his eyes flashed and his lips quivered.
Now on returning I noticed on the bed in the furthest corner of the room Gazin lying unconscious, almost without sign of life.
But why describe my impressions; I sometimes dream even now of those times at night, and I have no dreams more agonising.
I may add by the way that since then, very many persons have supposed, and even now maintain, that I was sent to penal servitude for the murder of my wife.
Gradually I sank into forgetfulness and by degrees was lost in memories. During the whole course of my four years in prison I was continually recalling all my past, and seemed to live over again the whole of my life in recollection.
These memories rose up of themselves, it was not often that of my own will I summoned them.
It would begin from some point, some little thing, at times unnoticed, and then by degrees there would rise up a complete picture, some vivid and complete impression.
I used to analyse these impressions, give new features to what had happened long ago, and best of all, I used to correct it, correct it continually, that was my great amusement.
I remembered the month of August in our country house: a dry bright day but rather cold and windy; summer was waning and soon we should have to go to Moscow to be bored all the winter over French lessons, and I was so sorry to leave the country.
I walked past the threshing floor and, going down the ravine, I went up to the dense thicket of bushes that covered the further side of the ravine as far as the copse.
And I plunged right into the midst of the bushes, and heard a peasant ploughing alone on the clearing about thirty paces away.
I knew that he was ploughing up the steep hill and the horse was moving with effort, and from time to time the peasant's call "come up!" floated upwards to me.
I knew almost all our peasants, but I did not know which it was ploughing now, and I did not care who it was, I was absorbed in my own affairs.
I was busy, too; I was breaking off switches from the nut trees to whip the frogs with.
Nut sticks make such fine whips, but they do not last; while birch twigs are just the opposite.
I was interested, too, in beetles and other insects; I used to collect them, some were very ornamental.
There were not many mushrooms there.
It was our peasant Marey.
I don't know if there is such a name, but every one called him Marey-a thick set, rather well grown peasant of fifty, with a good many grey hairs in his dark brown, spreading beard.
He stopped his horse on hearing my cry, and when, breathless, I caught with one hand at his plough and with the other at his sleeve, he saw how frightened I was.
"There is a wolf!" I cried, panting.
He flung up his head, and could not help looking round for an instant, almost believing me.
"Where is the wolf?"
"A shout ... some one shouted: 'wolf' ..." I faltered out.
"Nonsense, nonsense!
A wolf?
Why, it was your fancy!
How could there be a wolf?" he muttered, reassuring me.
But I was trembling all over, and still kept tight hold of his smock frock, and I must have been quite pale.
He looked at me with an uneasy smile, evidently anxious and troubled over me.
"There, dear....
He stretched out his hand, and all at once stroked my cheek.
"Come, come, there; Christ be with you!
Cross yourself!"
But I did not cross myself.
The corners of my mouth were twitching, and I think that struck him particularly.
He put out his thick, black nailed, earth stained finger and softly touched my twitching lips.
There; come, come!"
Yet that shout had been so clear and distinct, but such shouts (not only about wolves) I had imagined once or twice before, and I was aware of that. (These hallucinations passed away later as I grew older.)
"Well, I will go then," I said, looking at him timidly and inquiringly.
"Well, do, and I'll keep watch on you as you go.
Come, run along then," and he made the sign of the cross over me and then over himself.
I walked away, looking back almost at every tenth step.
With Voltchok I felt quite safe, and I turned round to Marey for the last time; I could not see his face distinctly, but I felt that he was still nodding and smiling affectionately to me.
All this I recalled all at once, I don't know why, but with extraordinary minuteness of detail.
I suddenly roused myself and sat up on the platform bed, and, I remember, found myself still smiling quietly at my memories.
I brooded over them for another minute.
When I got home that day I told no one of my "adventure" with Marey.
And indeed it was hardly an adventure.
And in fact I soon forgot Marey.
When I met him now and then afterwards, I never even spoke to him about the wolf or anything else; and all at once now, twenty years afterwards in Siberia, I remembered this meeting with such distinctness to the smallest detail.
"There, there, you have had a fright, little one!" And I remembered particularly the thick earth stained finger with which he softly and with timid tenderness touched my quivering lips.
Of course any one would have reassured a child, but something quite different seemed to have happened in that solitary meeting; and if I had been his own son, he could not have looked at me with eyes shining with greater love.
And what made him like that?
He was our serf and I was his little master, after all.
No one would know that he had been kind to me and reward him for it.
Was he, perhaps, very fond of little children?
Some people are.
I walked about, looking into the faces that I met. That shaven peasant, branded on his face as a criminal, bawling his hoarse, drunken song, may be that very Marey; I cannot look into his heart.
I met m again that evening.
CHAPTER nine.
There is something exceedingly delusive in thus looking back, through the long vista of departed years, and catching a glimpse of the fairy realms of antiquity.
Like a landscape melting into distance, they receive a thousand charms from their very obscurity, and the fancy delights to fill up their outlines with graces and excellences of its own creation.
Thus loom on my imagination those happier days of our city, when as yet New Amsterdam was a mere pastoral town, shrouded in groves of sycamores and willows, and surrounded by trackless forests and wide spreading waters, that seemed to shut out all the cares and vanities of a wicked world.
And in this particular I greatly admire the wisdom and sound knowledge of human nature displayed by the sage Oloffe the Dreamer and his fellow legislators.
For my part, I have not so bad an opinion of mankind as many of my brother philosophers.
I do not think poor human nature so sorry a piece of workmanship as they would make it out to be; and as far as I have observed, I am fully satisfied that man, if left to himself, would about as readily go right as wrong.
Thus, having quietly settled themselves down, and provided for their own comfort, they bethought themselves of testifying their gratitude to the great and good saint Nicholas, for his protecting care in guiding them to this delectable abode.
To this end they built a fair and goodly chapel within the fort, which they consecrated to his name; whereupon he immediately took the town of New Amsterdam under his peculiar patronage, and he has even since been, and I devoutly hope will ever be, the tutelar saint of this excellent city.
At this early period was instituted that pious ceremony, still religiously observed in all our ancient families of the right breed, of hanging up a stocking in the chimney on saint Nicholas Eve; which stocking is always found in the morning miraculously filled; for the good saint Nicholas has ever been a great giver of gifts, particularly to children.
As however, in spite of the most diligent search, I cannot lay my hands upon this little book, I must confess that I entertain considerable doubt on the subject.
Thus benignly fostered by the good saint Nicholas, the infant city thrived apace.
Hordes of painted savages, it is true, still lurked about the unsettled parts of the island.
The hunter still pitched his bower of skins and bark beside the rills that ran through the cool and shady glens, while here and there might be seen, on some sunny knoll, a group of Indian wigwams whose smoke arose above the neighboring trees, and floated in the transparent atmosphere.
A mutual good will, however, existed between these wandering beings and the burghers of New Amsterdam.
The legend of this sylvan war was long current among the nurses, old wives, and other ancient chroniclers of the place; but time and improvement have almost obliterated both the tradition and the scene of battle; for what was once the blood stained valley is now in the center of this populous city, and known by the name of Dey Street.
I know not whether it was to this "Peach War," and the acquisitions of Indian land which may have grown out of it, that we may ascribe the first seeds of the spirit of "annexation" which now began to manifest themselves.
Shortly after the Peach War however, a restless spirit was observed among the New Amsterdammers, who began to cast wistful looks upon the wild lands of their Indian neighbors; for somehow or other wild Indian land always looks greener in the eyes of settlers than the land they occupy.
It is hinted that Oloffe the Dreamer encouraged these notions; having, as has been shown, the inherent spirit of a land speculator, which had been wonderfully quickened and expanded since he had become a landholder.
The result of these dreams were certain exploring expeditions sent forth in various directions to "sow the seeds of empire," as it was said.
He was accompanied by Mynheer Ten Breeches, as land measurer, in case of any dispute with the Indians.
What was the consequence of these exploring expeditions?
But as this opens a new era in the fortunes of New Amsterdam I will here put an end to this second book of my history, and will treat of the maternal policy of the mother country in my next.
He is five feet eight inches in height, and has brown hair and eyes.
He is of quick, nervous temperament.
Has an aversion from most outdoor sports, but a great esthetic attraction to nature.
Highly educated.
As far back as he can remember, he lived in a house from which his parents removed when he was four years old.
Before this removal, he remembers two distinctly sexual experiences.
A cousin five years older was in the bathroom, seated, and m o was feeling his sexual organs; his mother called him out.
They were lying on a carriage seat attempting intercourse.
The girl's older sister came in and found them.
She said: "I am going to tell mamma; you know she said for you not to do that any more." With each of these clear memories comes the strong impression that it was but one among many.
Five years ago m o met a man of his own age who had lived in that neighborhood at the same time. Comparing notes, they found that nearly all the small children in it had been given to such practices.
From it, m o removed to another of just about the same character, and lived there until he was eleven years old.
Of this period his memories are very fresh and abundant.
With a single exception, all the children between five and fourteen years of age appear to have indulged freely in promiscuous sexual play.
In little companies of from four to twelve they went where trees or long grass hid them from observation, and exhibited their persons to one another; sometimes, also, they handled one another, but not in the way of masturbation.
In m o's case there was eager sexual curiosity, and a more or less keen desire, but actual contact brought no great satisfaction.
In all these plays he is sure that girls took the initiative as often as boys did.
This was conventional among the children, and was fostered by the banter of older persons.
m o's sexual curiosity was certainly greater in regard to the opposite sex.
At this time, however, his homosexual interests appeared.
He and another boy were once in an abandoned garden, and they took off all their clothes, the better to examine each other.
The other boy then offered to kiss m o's fundament, and did so.
It caused a surprisingly keen and distinctly sexual sensation, the first sexual shock that he can remember experiencing.
He refused to reciprocate, however, when asked.
Toward the end of this period there was a new and increasing development of another sort, not recognized then as at all sexual in character.
He began to feel toward certain boys in a way very different and much keener than he had done thus far toward girls, although at the time he made no comparisons.
For instance there was a boy whom he considered very pretty.
They visited each other often and spent long times playing together.
In school they looked and looked at each other until delicious, uncontrollable giggling spells came on.
Sexual matters were never discussed or thought of.
m o is sure that with himself the main consideration was always the other boy's beauty.
From this time until the changes of puberty were well under way his sexual life contrasted strongly, in its solitude, with the former promiscuity.
He flirted, consciously flirted, with certain school girls, but never even suggested anything sexual to them.
He read a few family medical books.
He repeated the thing and before long produced emissions.
Masturbation soon followed. Certain days he would perform the act two or three times, but again he would avoid it for days.
He began at once to fight the tendency, and felt very guilty and very ashamed for indulging it. He prayed for help and at times wept over his failures to break the habit so quickly formed.
He lay for hours dreaming of this, and inventing thrilling situations. Suddenly, at church, he became acquainted with the very youth, Edmund, who seemed to satisfy all his longings.
Their parents may have been slightly uneasy at times, but the connection continued uninterruptedly for a year and a half or more.
In the meantime m o occasionally had relations with other boys, but never wavered in his real preference for Edmund.
Then m o and Edmund went to college at different places, but they met in vacations and wrote frequent and ardent love letters. Both had genuine attacks of love sickness and of jealousy.
As m o looks back on this first love passion he can by no means regret it.
It doubtless had great formative influence.
After the first year at college, Edmund transferred to another school farther away from m o and the opportunities for meeting became rarer, but their affection was maintained and the intercourse resumed whenever it was possible.
On the whole m o preferred boys a year or two younger than himself, but as he grew older the age difference increased.
m o is always unhappy unless his affections have fairly free course.
Life has been very disappointing to him in other respects.
His greatest joys have come to him in this way.
If he is able to consummate his present plan of union with the youth just referred to, he will feel that his life has been crowned by what is for him the best possible end; otherwise, he declares, he would not care to live at all.
Feminine beauty he perceives objectively, as he would any design of flowing curves and delicate coloring, but it has no sexual charm for him whatever. Women have put themselves in his way repeatedly, but he finds himself more and more irritated by their specifically feminine foibles.
The first literature that appealed to him was Plato's dialogues, first read at twenty years of age.
He read what he could of classic literature.
He enjoys Pater, appreciating his attitude toward his own sex.
Four or five years, later he came across Raffalovich's book, and ever since has felt a real debt of gratitude to its author.
m o has no wish to injure society at large.
As an individual he holds that he has the same right to be himself that anyone else has.
He thinks that while boys of from thirteen to fifteen might possibly be rendered inverts, those who reach sixteen without it cannot be bent that way.
m o feels strongly the poetic and elevated character of his principal homosexual relationships, but he shrinks from appearing too sentimental.
With regard to the traces of feminism in inverts he writes:--
"Somewhat later and until puberty, I took great delight in acting, but generally took female roles, wearing skirts, shawls, beads, wigs, head dresses.
When I was about thirteen my family began to make fun of me for it.
My feeling for them is much like my feeling for flowers.
"Before I reached puberty I was sometimes called a 'sissy' by my father.
Every one of them has been very emphatically of the opinion that my rational life is distinctively masculine, being logical, impartial, skeptical.
One or two have suggested that I have a finer discrimination than most men, and that I take care of my rooms somewhat as a woman might, though this does not extend to the style of decorations.
If trained for it early, I believe I would have made a good contortionist.
The dessert is always the best part of the meal.
These tastes I attribute largely to my sedentary life.
"My physical courage has never been put to the test, but I observe that others appear to count on it.
In moral courage I am either reckless or courageous, I do not know which.
"I am, perhaps, a better whistler than most men.
"When I was quite little my grandmother taught me to do certain kinds of fancy work, and I continued to do a little from time to time until I was twenty four.
Then I became irritated over a piece that troubled me, put it in the fire, and have not wanted to touch any since.
My estheticism is very pronounced as compared with most of the men with whom I associate, although I have never been able to give it much scope. It makes for cleanliness, order, and general good taste.
My dress is economical and by no means fastidious; yet it seems to be generally approved.
I have been complimented often on my ability to select appropriate presents, clothing, and to arrange a room."
m o states that he practises the love bite at times, though very gently.
He often wants to pinch one who interests him sexually.
Very few people, he says, are perfectly honest, and the more dangerous society makes it for a man to be so, the less likely he is to be.
The foregoing narrative was received eight years ago.
During this interval m o's health has very greatly improved.
There has been a marked increase in outdoor activities and interests.
Two years since m o consulted a prominent specialist who performed a thorough psychoanalysis.
m o had continued up to that age very affectionate toward his mother and dependent on her.
He can remember friends and neighbors commenting on it.
His greatest craving was for affection, and his greatest grief the fancied belief that no one cared for him.
At ten or eleven he attempted suicide for this reason.
Also as a result of the psychoanalysis, but trying to eliminate the influence of suggestion, he recollects and emphasizes more the attraction he felt toward girls before the age of twelve.
Had his sexual experiences subsequently proved normal, he doubts if those before twelve could be held to give evidence of homosexuality, but only of precocious nervous and sexual irritability, greatly heightened and directed by the secret practices of the children with whom he associated.
The psychoanalysis recalled to m o that during the period of early flirtation he had often kissed and embraced various girls, but likewise he recalled having observed at the same time, with some surprise, that no definitely sexual desire arose, though the way was probably open to gratify it.
Such interest as did exist ceased wholly or almost so as the relation with Edmund developed. There was no aversion from the company of girls and women, however; the intellectual friendships were mainly with them, while the emotional ones were with boys.
Very recently m o spent several days with Edmund, who has been married for several years.
Neither regrets anything of the past, but feels that the final outcome of their earlier relation has been good. Edmund's beauty is still pronounced, and is remarked by others.
Again, as to traces of feminism: Perhaps two years ago, all impulse to give the love bite disappeared suddenly.
With the improvement in general health, has come the changes that would be expected in food and other matters of daily life.
His physical relation with m o then ceased, but the friendship otherwise continues strong.
Shortly after the first break in this relation, m o became, through the force of quite unusual circumstances, very friendly and intimate with a young woman of considerable charm.
He confided to her his abnormality, and was not repulsed.
m o felt that in honor he must propose marriage to her.
They corresponded, but less and less often.
His relations with boys continued.
m o had no secrets from this woman.
After a full and prolonged consideration of all sides of the matter they married.
With her they are not passionate, but they are animated by the strong desire for children.
Of the parental instinct he had become aware several years before this.
APPENDIX a
HOMOSEXUALITY AMONG TRAMPS.
BY "JOSIAH FLYNT."
I have lived with the tramps there for eight consecutive months, besides passing numerous shorter periods in their company, and my acquaintance with them is nearly of ten years' standing.
This can only be done by becoming part and parcel of its manifestations.
The latter are the real tramps. They make a business of begging-a very good business too-and keep at it, as a rule, to the end of their days.
By smiles and flattering caresses they let him know that the stories are meant for him alone, and before long, if the boy is a suitable subject, he smiles back just as slyly.
In time he learns to think that he is the favorite of the tramp, who will take him on his travels, and he begins to plan secret meetings with the man.
They are also expected to beg in every town they come to, any laziness on their part receiving very severe punishment.
How the act of unnatural intercourse takes place is not entirely clear; the hoboes are not agreed.
In company with eight hoboes, I was in a freight car attached to a slowly moving train.
A colored boy succeeded in scrambling into the car, and when the train was well under way again he was tripped up and "seduced" (to use the hobo euphemism) by each of the tramps.
At first they do not submit, and are inclined to run away or fight, but the men fondle and pet them, and after awhile they do not seem to care.
What the pleasure consists in I cannot say.
Those who have passed the age of puberty seem to be satisfied in pretty much the same way that the men are.
Among the men the practice is decidedly one of passion.
One of the prisoners said he had known her before she was married and had lived with her.
On learning that she was still approachable, he looked her up immediately after his release, and succeeded in staying with her for nearly a month.
I asked him why he went with boys at all, and he replied: "'cause there ain't women enough.
If I can't get them I've got to have the other."
In the daytime the prisoners are let out into a long hall, and can do much as they please; at night they are shut up, two and even four in a cell.
If there are any boys in the crowd, they are made use of by all who care to have them.
In one of these places I once witnessed the fiercest fight I have ever seen among hoboes; a boy was the cause of it.
Two men said they loved him, and he seemed to return the affection of both with equal desire.
They slashed away for over half an hour, cutting each other terribly, and then their backers stopped them for fear of fatal results.
As a rule, the prushun is freed when he is able to protect himself.
This is the one reward held out to prushuns during their apprenticeship.
It is difficult to say how many tramps are sexually inverted.
I have stated in one of my papers on tramps that, counting the boys, there are between fifty and sixty thousand genuine hoboes in the United States.
A vagabond in Texas who saw this statement wrote me that he considered my estimate too low.
The newspapers have criticised it as too high, but they are unable to judge.
If my figures are, as I believe, at least approximately correct, the sexually perverted tramps may be estimated at between five and six thousand; this includes men and boys.
But from what I know of their disinclination to adopt the latter alternative, I am inclined to think that the passion may be dying out somewhat.
So much for my finding in the United States.
In their intercourse with boys they always take the active part.
That it is, however, a genuine liking, in altogether too many instances, I do not, in the least, doubt.
As such, and all the more because it is such, it deserves to be more thoroughly investigated and more reasonably treated.
"Josiah Flynt" who wrote the foregoing account of tramp life for the second edition of this volume, was well known as author, sociologist, and tramp.
His real name was f Willard and he was a nephew of Miss Frances Willard.
I am able to supplement his observations on tramps, so far as England is concerned, by the following passages from a detailed record sent to me by an English correspondent:--
"I am a male invert with complete feminine, sexual inclinations.
"As in the United States, there are two classes of tramps those who would work, such as harvesters, road makers, etc, and those who will not work, but make tramping a profession.
"Another one, who told me that he had been twenty five years on the road, said that he could not endure to sleep alone. (He was a pedlar, openly of cheap religious books and secretly of the vilest pamphlets and photographs).
He had 'done time' and he said the greatest punishment to him was not being able to have a 'make' who would submit to penetration, though he was not particular what form the sexual act took.
Another and very powerful influence in 'tramps' toward homosexuality is that, in the low lodging houses they are obliged to frequent, a single bed is perhaps double to one with a bedmate whom perhaps he has never seen before, and especially in hot weather, when the rule is nakedness.
The incident took place in a small seafaring town in Scotland one evening before a Fair was to be held.
A blind man came in led by an extremely pretty but effeminate looking youth of about seventeen, wearing a ragged kilt and with bare legs and feet.
He had long, curling, fair hair which reached to his shoulders and on it an old bonnet was perched.
He also wore an old velveteen shooting jacket.
All eyes were turned on the pair and they were quickly offered drinks.
The boy said, 'I will show you I am a laddie,' and pulled up his kilt, exposing his genitals and then his posterior. Boisterous laughter greeted this indecent exposure and suggestion, and more drinks were provided.
He was seized, kissed, and caressed by quite a number of men, some of whom endeavored to masturbate him, which he resisted, but performed it for them.
His terms are moderate, so much cash down when the goods are delivered, so much in blackmail afterwards.
He has a way with tapestry; you would scarcely notice that the edges had been cut.
mrs Eggins, the caretaker, glanced up the street, and then she let them in, and left them to wait in the drawing room amongst furniture all mysterious with sheets.
Five minutes before midnight Tommy Tonker, instructed by mr Nuth, who waited outside, came away with one pocketful of rings and shirt studs.
They did not speak of it there, and elsewhere it is unheard of.
"Oh, no, my child" (for such a question is childish).
With cobbled agates were its streets a glory.
Through small square panes of rose quartz the citizens looked from their houses.
To them as they looked abroad the World far off seemed happy.
Chapter four.
Sir Henry Baskerville
Our breakfast table was cleared early, and Holmes waited in his dressing gown for the promised interview.
Our clients were punctual to their appointment, for the clock had just struck ten when dr Mortimer was shown up, followed by the young baronet.
The latter was a small, alert, dark eyed man about thirty years of age, very sturdily built, with thick black eyebrows and a strong, pugnacious face.
"This is Sir Henry Baskerville," said dr Mortimer.
"Pray take a seat, Sir Henry.
"Nothing of much importance, mr Holmes.
He laid an envelope upon the table, and we all bent over it.
It was of common quality, grayish in colour.
The address, "Sir Henry Baskerville, Northumberland Hotel," was printed in rough characters; the post mark "Charing Cross," and the date of posting the preceding evening.
"No one could have known.
We only decided after I met dr Mortimer."
"But dr Mortimer was no doubt already stopping there?"
"No, I had been staying with a friend," said the doctor.
"There was no possible indication that we intended to go to this hotel."
Someone seems to be very deeply interested in your movements." Out of the envelope he took a half sheet of foolscap paper folded into four. This he opened and spread flat upon the table.
Across the middle of it a single sentence had been formed by the expedient of pasting printed words upon it.
It ran:
The word "moor" only was printed in ink.
"Now," said Sir Henry Baskerville, "perhaps you will tell me, mr Holmes, what in thunder is the meaning of that, and who it is that takes so much interest in my affairs?"
"What do you make of it, dr Mortimer?
You must allow that there is nothing supernatural about this, at any rate?"
"No, sir, but it might very well come from someone who was convinced that the business is supernatural."
"What business?" asked Sir Henry sharply.
"It seems to me that all you gentlemen know a great deal more than I do about my own affairs."
"You shall share our knowledge before you leave this room, Sir Henry.
I promise you that," said Sherlock Holmes.
"We will confine ourselves for the present with your permission to this very interesting document, which must have been put together and posted yesterday evening.
Have you yesterday's Times, Watson?"
"Might I trouble you for it-the inside page, please, with the leading articles?" He glanced swiftly over it, running his eyes up and down the columns.
"Capital article this on free trade.
Permit me to give you an extract from it.
"What do you think of that, Watson?" cried Holmes in high glee, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction.
"Don't you think that is an admirable sentiment?"
dr Mortimer looked at Holmes with an air of professional interest, and Sir Henry Baskerville turned a pair of puzzled dark eyes upon me.
"I don't know much about the tariff and things of that kind," said he, "but it seems to me we've got a bit off the trail so far as that note is concerned."
"On the contrary, I think we are particularly hot upon the trail, Sir Henry.
"No, I confess that I see no connection."
"And yet, my dear Watson, there is so very close a connection that the one is extracted out of the other.
Well, if that isn't smart!" cried Sir Henry.
"If any possible doubt remained it is settled by the fact that 'keep away' and 'from the' are cut out in one piece."
"Really, mr Holmes, this exceeds anything which I could have imagined," said dr Mortimer, gazing at my friend in amazement.
How did you do it?"
"I presume, Doctor, that you could tell the skull of a negro from that of an Esquimau?"
"But how?"
"Because that is my special hobby.
The supra orbital crest, the facial angle, the maxillary curve, the-"
"But this is my special hobby, and the differences are equally obvious. There is as much difference to my eyes between the leaded bourgeois type of a Times article and the slovenly print of an evening half penny paper as there could be between your negro and your Esquimau.
The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime, though I confess that once when I was very young I confused the Leeds Mercury with the Western Morning News.
As it was done yesterday the strong probability was that we should find the words in yesterday's issue."
"So far as I can follow you, then, mr Holmes," said Sir Henry Baskerville, "someone cut out this message with a scissors-"
"You can see that it was a very short bladed scissors, since the cutter had to take two snips over 'keep away.'"
"That is so.
"Gum," said Holmes.
But I want to know why the word 'moor' should have been written?"
"Because he could not find it in print.
The other words were all simple and might be found in any issue, but 'moor' would be less common."
"Why, of course, that would explain it.
Have you read anything else in this message, mr Holmes?"
"There are one or two indications, and yet the utmost pains have been taken to remove all clues.
The address, you observe is printed in rough characters.
But the Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated.
'Life,' for example is quite out of its proper place.
That may point to carelessness or it may point to agitation and hurry upon the part of the cutter.
Did the composer fear an interruption-and from whom?"
"We are coming now rather into the region of guesswork," said dr Mortimer.
"Say, rather, into the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely.
It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculation.
"How in the world can you say that?"
"If you examine it carefully you will see that both the pen and the ink have given the writer trouble.
Now, a private pen or ink bottle is seldom allowed to be in such a state, and the combination of the two must be quite rare.
But you know the hotel ink and the hotel pen, where it is rare to get anything else.
What's this?"
He was carefully examining the foolscap, upon which the words were pasted, holding it only an inch or two from his eyes.
"Nothing," said he, throwing it down.
"It is a blank half sheet of paper, without even a water mark upon it.
I think we have drawn as much as we can from this curious letter; and now, Sir Henry, has anything else of interest happened to you since you have been in London?"
I think not."
"I seem to have walked right into the thick of a dime novel," said our visitor.
"Why in thunder should anyone follow or watch me?"
"We are coming to that.
You have nothing else to report to us before we go into this matter?"
"Well, it depends upon what you think worth reporting."
"I think anything out of the ordinary routine of life well worth reporting."
Sir Henry smiled.
"I don't know much of British life yet, for I have spent nearly all my time in the States and in Canada.
But I hope that to lose one of your boots is not part of the ordinary routine of life over here."
"You have lost one of your boots?"
"My dear sir," cried dr Mortimer, "it is only mislaid.
You will find it when you return to the hotel.
What is the use of troubling mr Holmes with trifles of this kind?"
"Well, he asked me for anything outside the ordinary routine."
"Exactly," said Holmes, "however foolish the incident may seem.
You have lost one of your boots, you say?"
"Well, mislaid it, anyhow.
I put them both outside my door last night, and there was only one in the morning.
I could get no sense out of the chap who cleans them.
The worst of it is that I only bought the pair last night in the Strand, and I have never had them on."
"If you have never worn them, why did you put them out to be cleaned?"
That was why I put them out."
"Then I understand that on your arrival in London yesterday you went out at once and bought a pair of boots?"
"I did a good deal of shopping.
Among other things I bought these brown boots-gave six dollars for them-and had one stolen before ever I had them on my feet."
"It seems a singularly useless thing to steal," said Sherlock Holmes. "I confess that I share dr Mortimer's belief that it will not be long before the missing boot is found."
"And, now, gentlemen," said the baronet with decision, "it seems to me that I have spoken quite enough about the little that I know.
It is time that you kept your promise and gave me a full account of what we are all driving at."
"dr Mortimer, I think you could not do better than to tell your story as you told it to us."
Thus encouraged, our scientific friend drew his papers from his pocket and presented the whole case as he had done upon the morning before. Sir Henry Baskerville listened with the deepest attention and with an occasional exclamation of surprise.
"Of course, I've heard of the hound ever since I was in the nursery.
It's the pet story of the family, though I never thought of taking it seriously before.
But as to my uncle's death-well, it all seems boiling up in my head, and I can't get it clear yet.
"And now there's this affair of the letter to me at the hotel.
I suppose that fits into its place."
"It seems to show that someone knows more than we do about what goes on upon the moor," said dr Mortimer.
"And also," said Holmes, "that someone is not ill disposed towards you, since they warn you of danger."
"Or it may be that they wish, for their own purposes, to scare me away."
"Well, of course, that is possible also.
I am very much indebted to you, dr Mortimer, for introducing me to a problem which presents several interesting alternatives.
But the practical point which we now have to decide, Sir Henry, is whether it is or is not advisable for you to go to Baskerville Hall."
"Why should I not go?"
"There seems to be danger."
"Do you mean danger from this family fiend or do you mean danger from human beings?"
"Well, that is what we have to find out."
"Whichever it is, my answer is fixed.
There is no devil in hell, mr Holmes, and there is no man upon earth who can prevent me from going to the home of my own people, and you may take that to be my final answer." His dark brows knitted and his face flushed to a dusky red as he spoke. It was evident that the fiery temper of the Baskervilles was not extinct in this their last representative.
"Meanwhile," said he, "I have hardly had time to think over all that you have told me.
It's a big thing for a man to have to understand and to decide at one sitting.
I should like to have a quiet hour by myself to make up my mind.
Now, look here, mr Holmes, it's half past eleven now and I am going back right away to my hotel.
I'll be able to tell you more clearly then how this thing strikes me."
"Perfectly."
"Then you may expect us.
Shall I have a cab called?"
"Then we meet again at two o'clock.
"Your hat and boots, Watson, quick!
Not a moment to lose!"
He rushed into his room in his dressing gown and was back again in a few seconds in a frock coat.
We hurried together down the stairs and into the street.
dr Mortimer and Baskerville were still visible about two hundred yards ahead of us in the direction of Oxford Street.
"Shall I run on and stop them?"
"Not for the world, my dear Watson.
I am perfectly satisfied with your company if you will tolerate mine.
Our friends are wise, for it is certainly a very fine morning for a walk."
He quickened his pace until we had decreased the distance which divided us by about half.
Once our friends stopped and stared into a shop window, upon which Holmes did the same.
An instant afterwards he gave a little cry of satisfaction, and, following the direction of his eager eyes, I saw that a hansom cab with a man inside which had halted on the other side of the street was now proceeding slowly onward again.
"There's our man, Watson!
We'll have a good look at him, if we can do no more."
Holmes looked eagerly round for another, but no empty one was in sight.
"There now!" said Holmes bitterly as he emerged panting and white with vexation from the tide of vehicles.
"Was ever such bad luck and such bad management, too?
Watson, Watson, if you are an honest man you will record this also and set it against my successes!"
"Who was the man?"
"I have not an idea."
"A spy?"
"Well, it was evident from what we have heard that Baskerville has been very closely shadowed by someone since he has been in town.
How else could it be known so quickly that it was the Northumberland Hotel which he had chosen?
You may have observed that I twice strolled over to the window while dr Mortimer was reading his legend."
"Yes, I remember."
"I was looking out for loiterers in the street, but I saw none.
We are dealing with a clever man, Watson.
This matter cuts very deep, and though I have not finally made up my mind whether it is a benevolent or a malevolent agency which is in touch with us, I am conscious always of power and design.
His method had the additional advantage that if they were to take a cab he was all ready to follow them.
It has, however, one obvious disadvantage."
"What a pity we did not get the number!"
"My dear Watson, clumsy as I have been, you surely do not seriously imagine that I neglected to get the number?
But that is no use to us for the moment."
"I fail to see how you could have done more."
I should then at my leisure have hired a second cab and followed the first at a respectful distance, or, better still, have driven to the Northumberland Hotel and waited there.
When our unknown had followed Baskerville home we should have had the opportunity of playing his own game upon himself and seeing where he made for.
As it is, by an indiscreet eagerness, which was taken advantage of with extraordinary quickness and energy by our opponent, we have betrayed ourselves and lost our man."
"There is no object in our following them," said Holmes.
We must see what further cards we have in our hands and play them with decision.
Could you swear to that man's face within the cab?"
"I could swear only to the beard."
"And so could I-from which I gather that in all probability it was a false one.
A clever man upon so delicate an errand has no use for a beard save to conceal his features.
Come in here, Watson!"
He turned into one of the district messenger offices, where he was warmly greeted by the manager.
"Ah, Wilson, I see you have not forgotten the little case in which I had the good fortune to help you?"
"No, sir, indeed I have not.
You saved my good name, and perhaps my life."
"My dear fellow, you exaggerate.
I have some recollection, Wilson, that you had among your boys a lad named Cartwright, who showed some ability during the investigation."
"Yes, sir, he is still with us."
"Could you ring him up?--thank you!
And I should be glad to have change of this five pound note."
A lad of fourteen, with a bright, keen face, had obeyed the summons of the manager.
He stood now gazing with great reverence at the famous detective.
"Let me have the Hotel Directory," said Holmes.
"Thank you!
Now, Cartwright, there are the names of twenty three hotels here, all in the immediate neighbourhood of Charing Cross.
Do you see?"
"Yes, sir."
"You will visit each of these in turn."
"Yes, sir."
"You will begin in each case by giving the outside porter one shilling. Here are twenty three shillings."
"Yes, sir."
"You will tell him that you want to see the waste paper of yesterday. You will say that an important telegram has miscarried and that you are looking for it.
You understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"But what you are really looking for is the centre page of the Times with some holes cut in it with scissors.
Here is a copy of the Times.
It is this page.
You could easily recognize it, could you not?"
"Yes, sir."
Here are twenty three shillings.
There are ten shillings over in case of emergencies.
Let me have a report by wire at Baker Street before evening.
They waited until the cars had passed the spot where they stood and then quickly ran across the track before the engine came around again.
"It's almost like a side show!" cried Dot enthusiastically, as she seated herself upon a camel.
Tot bestrode a dapple gray horse, and the Queen sat upon a lion and took hold of its mane to steady herself.
"Oh, I shall be glad to make a change," she cried, and leaping off the camel's back she sprang upon the tiger, who thereupon dried his tears and smiled in a most delightful manner.
I don't see the good of a merry go round if it isn't used."
mr Split had spread a white cloth upon the grass close to one edge of the forest, and Dot and Tot and the Queen sat around this and ate of the delicious fruit the queer man had gathered.
There were melons, grapes, bananas, oranges, plums, strawberries, and pears and all were ripe and exquisitely flavored.
By the time they finished their meal it had become twilight, and the Queen declared it would soon be dark.
"I wonder where we can sleep," said Tot.
But Dot looked around and saw that mr Split was fastening three big hammocks between the trees at the edge of the forest.
These hammocks were lined with soft, silken cushions and looked very pleasant and cozy to the sleepy children.
The Queen and Dot and Tot each climbed into one of the hammocks and were covered over with silk quilted comfortables, after which mr Split turned a key at the end of each hammock and set them moving gently to and fro like the rocking of a cradle.
Before she went to sleep Dot looked over the edge of her hammock and saw that the merry go round and the tin train were now motionless, while all the animals seemed to have run down and were standing quite still waiting for morning, when mr Split would come and wind them up again.
The little girl was awakened next morning by a sharp clicking sound near by, and opening her eyes she saw a tin monkey running up and down a string fastened to a branch of the tree.
"Dear me!" she said, looking at him intently; "are you wound up so early in the morning?"
"Yes, indeed," replied the monkey, still busily climbing his string; "mr
Split was here some time ago.
Tot was already up and sitting near the railway track watching the tin train go round.
The Queen now joined Dot and they called Tot to breakfast, for mr Split had loaded the cloth with a variety of cool, fresh fruit and berries.
"He gathered those before he unhooked himself," said the Queen, "for then he had two arms to carry them.
But when it came to winding up the animals he had to separate in order that he might use each hand in a different place, and so get around quicker."
"mr Split's name suits him very well," said Dot, who was enjoying the fruit.
"Yes, it would be hard to call him anything else," replied the Queen.
"I suppose your own name fits you in the same way," ventured the girl.
"Certainly it does," answered the Queen.
Dot's heart now began to beat rapidly, for she thought she would at last discover what the Queen's name was.
Tot also looked interested, and forgot his slice of melon as he listened.
The little Queen laughed merrily.
"Isn't it funny," she exclaimed, "that I always forget to tell you?
There is no reason in the world why you should not know my name."
"Then," said Tot, sharply, "tell it!"
"Well," she said, "it's-"
Springing to their feet they saw the tin train lying upside down near the track, with its wheels whirling around like the wind, and near by was a wooden goat and cart, completely wrecked and splintered into many pieces.
It started to run again in its usual rushing way, but Dot noticed that the cow catcher was badly bent and that some of the paint had been knocked off.
But it is wrecked now, beyond repair, so there is nothing more to worry about."
"You are too late," said the Queen; "the trouble is all over."
"Then we may as well go back," said the officer, grumpily.
"Well," said the Queen, when the Patrol and the Fire Engine had gone back to their stables, "it is time for us to go."
They looked around for mr Split, but not seeing him they walked across the opening to the path that led through the forest to the river.
They each squeaked the Alligator when they came to him, and left him feeling joyful and contented.
The boat was lying where they had left it, and they at once stepped in and seated themselves.
"I'm sorry not to say good bye to mr Split," said Dot, as the boat glided out into the river.
"You brutes!
Don't you know you will be punished for your impudence?
"Of course it's Sky Island.
What else could it be?
"Glad to meet you, sir," said Cap'n Bill.
"But I'll punish you.
"Seems to me," said Trot, "you're actin' rather imperlite to strangers. If anyone comes to our country to visit us, we always treat 'em decent."
"Where in the Sky did you come from, then, and where is your country located?"
"We live on the Earth, when we're at home," replied the girl.
"The Earth?
I've heard of the Earth, my child, but it isn't inhabited.
"Oh, you're wrong about that," said Button Bright.
"You surely are," added Cap'n Bill.
"I don't believe it.
Aren't you sorry for yourselves?"
We'll go home, pretty soon."
I'm an ol' man, myself, but if you don't behave I'll spank you like I would a baby, an' it won't be any trouble at all to do it, thank'e.
"Sail away?
How?" asked the Boolooroo.
"Go ahead, then, and eat your lunch."
He retreated a little way to a marble seat beside the fountain, but watched the strangers carefully.
"Have you nearly finished?" he inquired.
"No," said Trot; "we've got to eat our apples yet."
"Apples-apples?
What are apples?" he asked.
Trot took some from the basket.
"They're awful good."
"Guess they don't grow anywhere but on the Earth," remarked Cap'n Bill.
"Are they good to eat?" asked the Boolooroo.
"Try it and see," answered Trot, biting into an apple herself.
The Magic Umbrella fell to the ground and Button Bright promptly seized it.
Then the sailor let go his hold and the King staggered to a seat, choking and coughing to get his breath back.
"I told you to let things alone," growled Cap'n Bill.
"If you don't behave, your Majesty, this Blue Island'll have to get another Boolooroo."
"Why?" asked the Blueskin.
"Kill me?
Why, he couldn't do that," observed the King, who was trying to rearrange the ruffle around his neck.
"Nothing can kill me."
"Why not?" asked Cap'n Bill.
"It's a fact," said the King.
When the final minute is up, we die; but we're obliged to live all of the six hundred years, whether we want to or not.
It can't be done."
"I'm no murderer, thank goodness, and I wouldn't kill you if I could-much as you deserve it."
"How long have you lived?" asked Button Bright.
The Boolooroo tells them whom to vote for, and if they don't obey they are severely punished.
It ought to be for life.
"Yes, you are.
"Well," said he, "let's go home.
"All right," agreed Trot, jumping up.
As the domestic cat in different parts of the world will breed occasionally with the wild races of the locality, and as cats are conveyed from country to country, it is probable that our cats are of somewhat compound pedigree.
It is considered probable that our fine English tabbies have a trace of the British wild cat blood in their veins, although it may be obscure.
It is not found very far north, and neither in Norway nor Sweden; there the lynx reigns supreme. The wild cat is a fine animal, of larger growth than the cat of our familiar acquaintance, and stands tall.
In country places, where rabbits are abundant,--and, we may add, the smaller, but not less destructive, rodents, and a variety of feathered game,--the barn door cat is sometimes tempted to abscond and take to a romantic and semi wild life in the woods.
Kittens born of such parents have no desire for the domestic hearth, and are wild and suspicions to a degree.
CHAPTER forty three
THE KILLER KILLED
A rough low cabin of logs, hastily thrown together, housed through the winter months of the Sierra foothills the two men who now, in the warm days of early June, sat by the primitive fireplace cooking a midday meal.
That his companion, younger, bearded, dressed also in buckskins, was Will Banion it would have taken closer scrutiny even of a friend to determine, so much had the passing of these few months altered him in appearance and in manner.
Once light of mien, now he smiled never at all.
He spoke at last to his ancient and faithful friend, kindly as ever, and with his own alertness and decision.
"Let's make it our last meal on the Trinity, Bill.
"Why?
What's eatin' ye, boy?
"Yes, I want to move."
"Most does."
"We've got enough, Bill.
The last month has been a crime.
The spring snows uncovered a fortune for us, and you know it!"
Why, rich?
But if you'll agree, I'll sell this claim to the company below us and let them have the rest.
They offer fifty thousand flat, and it's enough-more than enough.
I want two things-to get Jim Bridger his share safe and sound; and I want to go to Oregon."
The old man paused in the act of splitting off a deer rib from his roast.
"Well, go on and finish your meal in this plain fireplace of ours, Bill.
Moodily he walked along the side of the steep ravine to which the little structure clung.
Below him lay the ripped open slope where the little stream had been diverted.
Below again lay the bared bed of the exploited water course, floored with bowlders set in deep gravel, at times with seamy dams of flat rock lying under and across the gravel stretches; the bed rock, ages old, holding in its hidden fingers the rich secrets of immemorial time.
Here he and his partner had in a few months of strenuous labor taken from the narrow and unimportant rivulet more wealth than most could save in a lifetime of patient and thrifty toil.
The hillside now looked like any other hillside, innocent as a woman's eyes, yet covering how much!
Banion could not realize that now, young though he was, he was a rich man.
He climbed down the side of the ravine, the little stones rattling under his feet, until he stood on the bared floor of the bed rock which had proved so unbelievably prolific in coarse gold.
As he stood, half musing, Will Banion heard, on the ravine side around the bend, the tinkle of a falling stone, lazily rolling from one impediment to another.
It might be some deer or other animal, he thought.
He hastened to get view of the cause, whatever it might be.
And then fate, chance, the goddess of fortune which some men say does not exist, but which all wilderness goers know does exist, for one instant paused, with Will Banion's life and wealth and happiness lightly a balance in cold, disdainful fingers.
He turned the corner.
Almost level with his own, he looked into the eyes of a crawling man who-stooped, one hand steadying himself against the slant of the ravine, the other below, carrying a rifle-was peering frowningly ahead.
It was an evil face, bearded, aquiline, not unhandsome; but evil in its plain meaning now.
The eyes were narrowed, the full lips drawn close, as though some tense emotion now approached its climax.
The appearance was that of strain, of nerves stretched in some purpose long sustained.
And why not?
When a man would do murder, when that has been his steady and premeditated purpose for a year, waiting only for opportunity to serve his purpose, that purpose itself changes his very lineaments, alters his whole cast of countenance.
Other men avoid him, knowing unconsciously what is in his soul, because of what is written on his face.
His questions, his movements, his changes of locality showed that; and Woodhull was one of those who cannot avoid asseverance, needing it for their courage sake.
Now morose and brooding, now loudly profane, now laughing or now aloof, his errand in these unknown hills was plain.
Well, he was not alone among men whose depths were loosed. Some time his hour might come.
It had come!
He stared now full into the face of his enemy!
He at last had found him.
Here stood his enemy, unarmed, delivered into his hands.
For one instant the two stood, staring into one another's eyes.
Woodhull was taken as much unawares as he.
It had been Woodhull's purpose to get a stand above the sluices, hidden by the angle, where he could command the reach of the stream bed where Banion and Jackson last had been working.
He had studied the place before, and meant to take no chances.
His shot must be sure.
But now, in his climbing on the steep hillside, his rifle was in his left hand, downhill, and his footing, caught as he was with one foot half raised, was insecure.
At no time these last four hours had his opportunity been so close-or so poor-as precisely now!
He snarled, for he saw Banion stoop, unarmed.
There was time even to exult, and that was much better in a long deferred matter such as this.
"Now, damn you, I've got you!"
He gave Banion that much chance to see that he was now to die.
Half leaning, he raised the long rifle to its line and touched the trigger.
The report came; and Banion fell.
It was not more than the piece of rotten quartz he had picked up and planned to examine later.
He flung it straight at Woodhull's face-an act of chance, of instinct.
By a hair it saved him.
The rifle carried but the one shot.
He flung it down, reached for his heavy knife, raising an arm against the second piece of rock which Banion flung as he closed.
He felt his wrist caught in an iron grip, felt the blood gush where his temple was cut by the last missile.
And then once more, on the narrow bared floor that but now was patterned in parquetry traced in yellow, and soon must turn to red, it came to man and man between them-and it was free!
They fell and stumbled so that neither could much damage the other at first.
Banion knew he must keep the impounded hand back from the knife sheath or he was done.
Thus close, he could make no escape.
He fought fast and furiously, striving to throw, to bend, to beat back the body of a man almost as strong as himself, and now a maniac in rage and fear.
To Jackson, shaving off bits of sweet meat between thumb and knife blade, it meant the presence of a stranger, friend or foe, for he knew Banion had carried no weapon with him.
His own long rifle he snatched from its pegs.
His moccasined feet made no sound.
He saw no one in the creek bed or at the long turn.
It was Will Banion's voice.
The two struggling men grappled below him had no notion of how long they had fought.
It seemed an age, and the denouement yet another age deferred.
But to them came the sound of a voice:
Stand back!"
It was Jackson.
They both, still gripped, looked up the bank.
The long barrel of a rifle, foreshortened to a black point, above it a cold eye, fronted and followed them as they swayed.
The crooked arm of the rifleman was motionless, save as it just moved that deadly circle an inch this way, an inch back again.
For just one instant he looked up at the death staring down on him, then turned to run.
There was no place where he could run.
Sam Woodhull, look at me!"
He did turn, in horror, in fascination at sight of the Bright Angel.
The rifle barrel to his last gaze became a small, round circle, large as a bottle top, and around it shone a fringed aura of red and purple light. That might have been the eye.
"LITTLE MOTHER"
She was a clear eyed, fresh cheeked little maiden, living on the banks of the great Mississippi, the oldest of four children, and mother's "little woman" always.
They called her so because of her quiet, matronly care of the younger Mayfields-that was the father's name.
Her own name was the beautiful one of Elizabeth, but they shortened it to Bess.
"Be mother's little woman, dear," said mrs Mayfield as she kissed the rosy face.
Her husband added: "I leave the children in your care, Bess; be a little mother to them."
Bess waved her old sun bonnet vigorously, and held up the baby Rose, that she might watch them to the last.
Old Daddy Jim and Mammy had been detailed by mr Mayfield to keep an unsuspected watch on the little nestlings, and were to sleep at the house.
She put the little girls to bed and persuaded Rob to go; then seated herself by the table with her mother's work basket, in quaint imitation of mrs Mayfield's industry in the evening time.
But what was this?
Her feet touched something cold!
She bent down and felt around with her hand.
A pool of water was spreading over the floor.
What should she do?
"Oh, if I had a boat!" she exclaimed.
"But there isn't anything of the sort on the place." She ran wildly out to look for Mammy; and stumbled over something sitting near the edge of the porch. A sudden inspiration took her.
Here was her boat! a very large, old-fashioned, oblong tub.
The water was now several inches deep on the porch and she contrived to half float, half row the tub into the room.
Without frightening the children she got them dressed in the warmest clothes they had.
She lined the oblong tub with a blanket, and made ready bread and cold meat left from supper.
With Rob's assistance she dragged the tub upstairs.
There was a single large window in the room, and they set the tub directly by it, so that when the water rose the tub would float out.
There was no way for the children to reach the roof, which was a very steep, inclined one.
It did not seem long before the water had very nearly risen to the top of the stairs leading from below.
Bess flung the window open, and made Rob get into their novel boat; then she lifted in Kate, and finally baby Rose, who began to cry, was given into Rob's arms, and now the little mother, taking the basket of food, made ready to enter, too; but, lo! there was no room for her with safety to the rest.
Bess paused a moment, drew a long breath, and kissed the children quietly.
She explained to Rob that he must guard the basket, and that they must sit still.
"Goodbye, dears.
Say a prayer for sister, Rob.
If you ever see father and mother, tell them I took care of you." Then the water seized the insecure vessel, and out into the dark night it floated.
The next day mr Mayfield, who, with his neighbors, scoured the broad lake of eddying water that represented the Mississippi, discovered the tub lodged in the branches of a sycamore with the children weeping and chilled, but safe.
And Bess?
Ah, where was Bess, the "little mother," who in that brief moment resigned herself to death?
They found her later, floating on the water with her brave childish face turned to the sky; and as strong arms lifted her into the boat, the tears from every eye paid worthy tribute to the "little mother."
ROBBIE GOODMAN'S PRAYER
"What can be the matter with Walter," thought Mama Ellis as she sat sewing in her pleasant sitting room.
"He came in so very quietly, closed the door gently and I think I even heard him go to the closet to hang up his books.
Oh! dear.
I hope he isn't going to have another attack of 'Grippe,'" and mrs Ellis shivered as she glanced out at the snow covered landscape.
Little Walter was all that remained of four beautiful children, who, only a year ago, romped gaily through the large halls.
That dread disease, diphtheria, had stolen the older brother and laughing little sisters in one short week's time, so that now, as the sad anniversary came near to hand, mrs Ellis' heart ached for her lost birdlings and yearned more jealously than ever over her remaining little one.
Today his usually merry face was very grave and he looked very thoughtful as he gave his mother her kiss and allowed himself to be drawn upon her lap.
Is he sick?" she asked anxiously.
"No, Mother dear, I'm not sick, but I feel so sad at heart.
Of course I noticed it, for nearly everyone else was all bundled up; but I didn't say anything as I did not want to be impolite.
After awhile he said, 'My, I am so cold,' and I said: 'Where's your overcoat?' Then he told me it was too small and his papa can't buy him any this winter so he is afraid he will have to stop school.
Even that one is thin and patched.
"Tonight, Mother," continued Walter, "he had an awful cold and coughed just like our Harry did last year," and the long pent up tears flowed from the child's eyes.
As mother and son dried their tears, the child looked up with perfect confidence as he said, "The Lord will answer Robbie's prayer, won't he.
Mama?"
"Yes darling," said mrs Ellis; and sent the child off to the play room.
"By the way, my dear," remarked mrs Ellis as they sat chatting at the tea table after Walter had retired, "what has become of that preacher Goodman who preached for us once on trial?"
He looked very needy.
The man had wonderful talents and might have a rich congregation and improve himself; but he is persistent in his ideas concerning this holiness movement, and of course a large church like ours wants something to attract and interest instead of such egotistical discourses.
I, for one, go to sleep under them." And mr Ellis drew himself up with a pompous air as he went into the library, whither his wife presently followed.
He had picked up a newspaper and was apparently absorbed, but mrs Ellis had not had her say, so she continued "Walter was telling me about the little boy.
"Oh, yes," interrupted her husband, "he met me in the hall and poured out the whole story.
The child's nerves were all wrought up, too.
He wants me to give up buying him the fur trimmed overcoat and get a coat and shoes for Goodman's children, as they were praying so hard for them, but I have enough to do without clothing other people's children.
"But Paul," said mrs Ellis, "Surely you would not have mr Goodman sacrifice his convictions simply for money and praise, when you yourself, are convinced that his doctrines are sound?
Besides he must be doing a good work down among the poor classes of the city as it appears the rich don't want him."
"They do give far beyond their means but the Lord calls on such as us to give.
I know it has been an unusually hard year but the Lord has blessed us and He will hold us to an account.
I feel very sad as the anniversary of our darlings' departure draws near and I dread to think of any little ones suffering while we could so easily help them."
When the house is so quiet and I think of those white graves in the cemetery I confess I feel very bitter."
"Paul, my dear husband, don't feel that way.
Remember also that we have one left, to live for, to train.
And, Paul, let us train him for the Master and in such a way that we may never have the feeling that it were better if he, too, had departed when he was pure and innocent.
Let us encourage benevolence and gentleness and if he wishes to go without the fur trimmed coat, why not do as he asks?" mrs Ellis kissed her husband and quietly left the room.
Long and late, Paul Ellis sat there and many things, ghosts of the past, rose before him.
As the midnight chimes rang out he knelt and prayed. "Oh, Lord, forgive me.
I have been prejudiced.
It was my influence which turned the tide against Robert Goodman.
Now, if Thou wilt only forgive and help me I will walk in the light as Thou sendest it, even consenting to be called a 'holiness crank.'"
A few days afterward Robert Goodman received a large package from an unknown friend containing a warm overcoat and three pairs of shoes.
His father also received a present.
It came through the mail and was an honest confession of a wrong done him, also a check for one hundred dollars.
One year later this church gave a unanimous call to Brother Goodman and the revival which broke out that winter was unprecedented in the annals of that church.
His mother worked hard for their daily bread. "Please give me something to eat, for I am very hungry," he said to her one evening.
His mother let the work that she was sewing fall upon her knees, and drew Johnny toward her.
As she kissed him the tears fell fast on his face, while she said, "Johnny, my dear, I have not a penny in the world. There is not a morsel of bread in the house, and I cannot give you any tonight."
Johnny did not cry when he heard this.
He was only a little fellow but he had learned the lesson of trusting in God's promises.
He had great faith in the sweet words of Jesus when he said, "Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name he will give it you."
But you must sit here and sew, hungry and cold.
Poor mama!" he said, as he threw his arms around her neck and kissed her many times to comfort her.
Then he knelt down at his mother's knee to say his prayers after her. They said "Our Father," till they came to the petition, "Give us this day our daily bread." The way in which his mother said these words made Johnny's heart ache.
He stopped and looked at her, and repeated with his eyes full of tears.
"Give us this day our daily bread."
When they got through he looked at his mother and said, "Now mother, do not be afraid.
God is our Father.
Then he went to bed.
Before midnight he woke up, while his mother was still at work, and asked if the bread had come yet.
In the morning, before Johnny was awake, a gentleman called who wanted his mother to come to his house and take charge of his two motherless children.
She agreed to go.
He left some money with her.
She went out at once to buy some things for breakfast; and when Johnny awoke, the bread was there, and all that he needed!
Johnny is now a man, but he has never wanted bread from that day; and whenever he was afraid since then, he has remembered God's promises, and trusted in him.
TRIUMPHANT DEATH OF A LITTLE CHILD
Some years ago we knew a Brother and Sister G----, who told of the remarkable experience of their little girl, only seven years old, who had a short time ago gone home to heaven.
The parents were devoted Christians who had taught their children to love and honor God.
During little Ella's illness she manifested wonderful patience and told of her love for Jesus.
The morning she died she called her papa and mama to her side and said: "I have been in heaven all night.
My room is full of angels and Jesus is here.
I'm going to heaven." Then she asked them to promise to meet her there.
As soon as they could control their feelings they made her the promise.
Then she kissed them and called for her little brother and sister and other friends.
She talked with each one in turn, telling them in substance, the same she had told her papa and mama, asking each one to make her the same promise, and kissing each one good bye.
That was a touching scene.
Those who were there said it seemed more like heaven than earth to be in her presence.
In the midst of many tears all promised her they would surely meet her in that bright and beautiful home to which she was going.
Little Ella's death was glorious and she is not the only one that has left us such bright, joyous testimony.
We have ourselves known of many children and older ones who had quite similar experiences.
And though we may not all see, before we die, all that Ella saw, if we love Jesus and do what he asks us to, he will surely fulfill to each of us his promise: "I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there you may be also."
--Editor
Into her chamber went A little girl one day, And by a chair she knelt, And thus began to pray:--
"Jesus, my eyes I close, Thy form I cannot see; If Thou art near me, Lord, I pray Thee to speak to me."
A still, small voice she heard within her soul- "What is it child?
"The path of life is dark, I would not go astray; Oh, let me have Thy hand To lead me in the way."
"They tell me, Lord, that all The living pass away; The aged soon must die, And even children may.
"Oh, let my parents live Till I a woman grow; For if they die, what can A little orphan do?"
"Fear not, my child; whatever ill may come I'll not forsake thee till I bring thee home."
Her little prayer was said, And from her chamber now She passed forth with the light Of heaven upon her brow.
"Mother, I've seen the Lord, His hand in mine I felt, And, oh, I heard Him say, As by my chair I knelt-
Jimmy was lying on an old cot out in the orchard, getting some of the nice spring sunshine on his thin body.
kitty!
But Annette did not come.
His mother came and reminded him that Annette was very old indeed, and it might be that she would never come again.
"She was here yesterday, Mother," he answered her, and the big tears came to his eyes "She felt perfectly fine then."
"I know, but she's an old cat.
She never strays away of her own accord, and certainlv no one would steal an old blind cat."
He introduced himself as the new neighbor who just moved across the little creek.
He made inquiries as to where he could buy fresh vegetables and milk.
And just as he was about to leave he remarked, "I did a strange thing early this morning.
There was an old cat came over to my place.
One ear was almost gone and it was blind.
I'm not much of a hand to make way with things, but I felt so sorry for that poor old animal that I killed it."
"Oh!" With a strangled sob Jimmy quickly left the room.
He was very sorry, but of course that did not bring the cat back.
"When I saw it, I just banged it over the head with a stick and then buried it.
When he was gone, mother went out to find Jimmy and comfort him.
He was out in the orchard on his knees.
Quietly she went up and knelt beside him, slipping her arm about his shoulder.
He turned to her at once.
"Mother, there's something funny about Annette. I've been praying and I feel all happy inside.
"He does help us bear our burdens in a wonderful way."
"I'll say he does.
This morning I felt so bad I didn't know what to do, and then when that man said-he had killed Annette-I thought I just could not stand it.
And here I am happy as anything again.
And just because I took it all to Jesus.
"She was very old, son.
But Jimmy was running swiftly across the field toward an old blind cat that was staggering in his direction.
Apparently the new neighbor had only stunned the cat and she had dug her way out of the shallow hole and come home again.
It was years before she really died, and long before she presented Jimmy with a very tiny kitten with two whole ears and two very bright eyes.
HOW GOD ANSWERED DONALD'S PRAYER
Little children not only have a deep faith but a childlike trust in believing that God answers their prayers.
As years went by, I went into sin and shared in the common sins of worldly people.
I knew better than to do the things I did, but sin is a miry clay pulling its victims down deeper and deeper.
For ten years I never entered a church house except to attend my father's funeral.
Donald learned much of the Scriptures.
He would pray and ask God's blessings at the table.
In august nineteen thirty two we were living in Minneapolis.
One evening in particular I shall not forget.
Donald was then twelve years old.
He suffered over my sins and came to the door to call me. I promised him to come up soon, but I continued on for some hours with the drunken crowd.
When I did come up to our apartment I found Donald on his knees by his bed with his Testament and an old hymn book of my mother in law's.
The books were open on the bed.
He looked up through his tears and said, "Mother, I am praying for you." I looked at the Testament and hymnal which were wet with tears that he had shed for his ungodly mother.
On september fifteenth, following this experience I went to a mission.
When the song, "Lord, I'm coming home," was sung after the service I made my way to the altar.
While kneeling there I felt someone very close to my side.
It was Donald who was praying for his mother.
God heard my prayer to be saved.
He was merciful and washed away my sins.
God saved me for service.
I marvel at his grace and mercy toward me.
I cannot cease to thank Him for picking me up out of the miry clay.
I am thankful also for my little boy who never ceased to pray for his mother. Now, my life is in God's hands.
I want to help others find the Savior. I am especially burdened for others in the bondage of sin as I was.
But even more than that, I am burdened for children who have no opportunity of knowing Jesus as their personal Savior.
eight
"Ha! ha!
But you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you like," you will interpose with a chuckle.
Stay, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself I confess, I was rather frightened.
I was just going to say that the devil only knows what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing, but I remembered the teaching of science ... and pulled myself up.
And here you have begun upon it.
Indeed, if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices-that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula-then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to.
For who would want to choose by rule?
Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?
What do you think?
Let us reckon the chances-can such a thing happen or not?
We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.
And as all choice and reasoning can be really calculated-because there will some day be discovered the laws of our so-called free will-so, joking apart, there may one day be something like a table constructed of them, so that we really shall choose in accordance with it.
Then I should be able to calculate my whole life for thirty years beforehand.
In short, if this could be arranged there would be nothing left for us to do; anyway, we should have to understand that.
Gentlemen, you must excuse me for being over philosophical; it's the result of forty years underground! Allow me to indulge my fancy.
And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.
Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life.
Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.
I suspect, gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically.
I thoroughly agree, it can-by mathematics.
Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases.
And in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage-for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important-that is, our personality, our individuality.
Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in agreement with reason; and especially if this be not abused but kept within bounds.
It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy.
But very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason ... and ... and ... do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy?
Gentlemen, let us suppose that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful.
In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.
But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity, perpetual-from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig Holstein period. Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity.
Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the history of mankind.
What will you see?
Is it a grand spectacle? Grand, if you like.
Take the Colossus of Rhodes, for instance, that's worth something.
With good reason mr Anaevsky testifies of it that some say that it is the work of man's hands, while others maintain that it has been created by nature herself.
Is it many coloured?
May be it is many coloured, too: if one takes the dress uniforms, military and civilian, of all peoples in all ages-that alone is worth something, and if you take the undress uniforms you will never get to the end of it; no historian would be equal to the job.
Is it monotonous?
May be it's monotonous too: it's fighting and fighting; they are fighting now, they fought first and they fought last-you will admit, that it is almost too monotonous.
In short, one may say anything about the history of the world-anything that might enter the most disordered imagination.
The only thing one can't say is that it's rational.
The very word sticks in one's throat.
And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world.
And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one.
Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities?
He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.
It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself-as though that were so necessary-that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.
And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.
And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!
He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object-that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano key!
If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated-chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!
I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key!
It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism!
Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four?
Twice two makes four without my will.
As if free will meant that!
fourteen.
Mr Waller Appears in a New Light
The department into which Mike was sent was the Cash, or, to be more exact, that section of it which was known as Paying Cashier.
The important task of shooting doubloons across the counter did not belong to Mike himself, but to Mr Waller.
Mike's work was less ostentatious, and was performed with pen, ink, and ledgers in the background. Occasionally, when Mr Waller was out at lunch, Mike had to act as substitute for him, and cash cheques; but Mr Waller always went out at a slack time, when few customers came in, and Mike seldom had any very startling sum to hand over.
He enjoyed being in the Cash Department.
He liked Mr Waller.
The work was easy; and when he did happen to make mistakes, they were corrected patiently by the grey bearded one, and not used as levers for boosting him into the presence of Mr Bickersdyke, as they might have been in some departments.
The cashier seemed to have taken a fancy to Mike; and Mike, as was usually the way with him when people went out of their way to be friendly, was at his best.
Mike at his ease and unsuspicious of hostile intentions was a different person from Mike with his prickles out.
It was an unheard of thing, he said, depriving a man of his confidential secretary without so much as asking his leave.
'It has caused me the greatest inconvenience,' he told Mike, drifting round in a melancholy way to the Cash Department during a slack spell one afternoon.
'I miss you at every turn.
In the cart.
I evolved a slightly bright thought on life just now.
There was nobody to tell it to except the new man.
I tell you, Comrade Jackson, I feel like some lion that has been robbed of its cub.
We still talk brokenly about Manchester United-they got routed in the first round of the Cup yesterday and Comrade Rossiter is wearing black-but it is not the same.
I try work, but that is no good either.
From ledger to ledger they hurry me, to stifle my regret.
And when they win a smile from me, they think that I forget.
But I don't.
I am a broken man.
One of Nature's blighters.
Comrade Rossiter awaits me.'
His worst defect-which he could not help-was that he was not Mike.
His others-which he could-were numerous.
His clothes were cut in a way that harrowed Psmith's sensitive soul every time he looked at them.
The fact that he wore detachable cuffs, which he took off on beginning work and stacked in a glistening pile on the desk in front of him, was no proof of innate viciousness of disposition, but it prejudiced the Old Etonian against him.
It was part of Psmith's philosophy that a man who wore detachable cuffs had passed beyond the limit of human toleration.
Mike would sometimes stroll round to the Postage Department to listen to the conversations between the two.
Bristow was always friendliness itself.
It was this tolerance which sometimes got him into trouble with Mr Bickersdyke.
The manager did not often perambulate the office, but he did occasionally, and the interview which ensued upon his finding Hutchinson, the underling in the Cash Department at that time, with his stool tilted comfortably against the wall, reading the sporting news from a pink paper to a friend from the Outward Bills Department who lay luxuriously on the floor beside him, did not rank among Mr Waller's pleasantest memories.
But Mr Waller was too soft hearted to interfere with his assistants unless it was absolutely necessary.
The truth of the matter was that the New Asiatic Bank was over staffed.
There were too many men for the work.
The London branch of the bank was really only a nursery.
New men were constantly wanted in the Eastern branches, so they had to be put into the London branch to learn the business, whether there was any work for them to do or not.
It was after one of these visits of Psmith's that Mr Waller displayed a new and unsuspected side to his character.
The whisper is beginning to circulate, "Psmith's number is up-As a reformer he is merely among those present.
The moment I concentrate myself on Comrade Bickersdyke for a brief spell, and seem to be doing him a bit of good, what happens?
Why, Comrade Bristow sneaks off and buys a sort of woollen sunset.
I saw the thing unexpectedly.
I tell you I was shaken.
It is the suddenness of that waistcoat which hits you.
It's discouraging, this sort of thing.
I try always to think well of my fellow man.
Mr Waller intervened at this point.
'I think you must really let Jackson go on with his work, Smith,' he said.
'There seems to be too much talking.'
'Well, well, I will go back and do my best to face it, but it's a tough job.'
He tottered wearily away in the direction of the Postage Department.
'Oh, Jackson,' said Mr Waller, 'will you kindly take my place for a few minutes?
I shall be back very soon.'
Mike was becoming accustomed to deputizing for the cashier for short spaces of time.
It generally happened that he had to do so once or twice a day.
Strictly speaking, perhaps, Mr Waller was wrong to leave such an important task as the actual cashing of cheques to an inexperienced person of Mike's standing; but the New Asiatic Bank differed from most banks in that there was not a great deal of cross counter work.
People came in fairly frequently to cash cheques of two or three pounds, but it was rare that any very large dealings took place.
Having completed his business with the Inward Bills, Mr Waller made his way back by a circuitous route, taking in the Postage desk.
And yet I do not give way.'
'Oh-er-Smith,' said Mr Waller, 'when you were talking to Jackson just now-'
'It shall not occur again.
Why should I dislocate the work of your department in my efforts to win a sympathetic word?
I will bear Comrade Bristow like a man here.
After all, there are worse things at the Zoo.'
By all means pay us a visit now and then, if it does not interfere with your own work.
But I noticed just now that you spoke to Bristow as Comrade Bristow.'
He will be getting above himself.'
'And when you were speaking to Jackson, you spoke of yourself as a Socialist.'
Mr Waller's face grew animated.
He stammered in his eagerness.
'I am delighted,' he said.
I also-'
Mr Waller shook it with enthusiasm.
'I have never liked to speak of it to anybody in the office,' said Mr Waller, 'but I, too, am heart and soul in the movement.'
'Just so.
Just so.
Exactly.
'Hyde Park?'
'no
no
Clapham Common.
Now, as you are interested in the movement, I was thinking that perhaps you might care to come and hear me speak next Sunday.
Of course, if you have nothing better to do.'
'Excellent.
Bring Jackson with you, and both of you come to supper afterwards, if you will.'
'Thanks very much.'
'Perhaps you would speak yourself?'
I seldom speak.
But it would be a treat to listen to you.
Well, I am perhaps a little bitter-'
'Yes, yes.'
'A little mordant and ironical.'
'I shall look forward to Sunday with every fibre quivering.
And Comrade Jackson shall be at my side.'
'Excellent,' said Mr Waller.
It is not generally known that the newt, although one of the smallest of our North American animals, has an extremely happy home life.
It is just one of those facts which never get bruited about.
Since that time I have practically lived among newts, jotting down observations, making lantern slides, watching them in their work and in their play (and you may rest assured that the little rogues have their play-as who does not?) until, from much lying in a research posture on my stomach, over the inclosure in which they were confined, I found myself developing what I feared might be rudimentary creepers.
And so, late this autumn, I stood erect and walked into my house, where I immediately set about the compilation of the notes I had made.
So much for the non technical introduction.
The remainder of this article bids fair to be fairly scientific.
In studying the more intimate phases of newt life, one is chiefly impressed with the methods by means of which the males force their attentions upon the females, with matrimony as an object.
For the newt is, after all, only a newt, and has his weaknesses just as any of the rest of us.
And I, for one, would not have it different.
There is little enough fun in the world as it is.
The peculiar thing about a newt's courtship is its restraint.
It is carried on, at all times, with a minimum distance of fifty paces (newt measure) between the male and the female.
Some of the bolder males may now and then attempt to overstep the bounds of good sportsmanship and crowd in to forty five paces, but such tactics are frowned upon by the Rules Committee.
To the eye of an uninitiated observer, the pair might be dancing a few of the more open figures of the minuet.
The means employed by the males to draw the attention and win the affection of those of the opposite sex (females) are varied and extremely strategic.
But the little creature, true to her sex instinct, does not at once give evidence that her morale has been shattered.
She affects a coyness and lack of interest, by hitching herself sideways along the bottom of the aquarium, with her head turned over her right shoulder away from the swain.
A trained ear might even detect her whistling in an indifferent manner.
The male, in the meantime, is flashing his gleamer frantically two blocks away and is performing all sorts of attractive feats, calculated to bring the lady newt to terms.
I have seen a male, in the stress of his handicap courtship, stand on his fore feet, gesticulating in amorous fashion with his hind feet in the air.
In order to test the power of observation in the male during these manœuvers, I carefully removed the female, for whose benefit he was undulating, and put in her place, in slow succession, another (but less charming) female, a paper weight of bronze shaped like a newt, and, finally, a common rubber eraser.
From the distance at which the courtship was being carried on, the male (who was, it must be admitted, a bit near sighted congenitally) was unable to detect the change in personnel, and continued, even in the presence of the rubber eraser, to gyrate and undulate in a most conscientious manner, still under the impression that he was making a conquest.
Not I, for one....
In fact, the two cases are not at all analogous.
And now that we have seen how wonderfully Nature works in the fulfilment of her laws, even among her tiniest creatures, let us study for a minute a cross section of the community life of the newt.
It is a life full of all kinds of exciting adventure, from weaving nests to crawling about in the sun and catching insect larvæ and crustaceans. The newt's day is practically never done, largely because the insect larvæ multiply three million times as fast as the newt can possibly catch and eat them.
And it takes the closest kind of community team work in the newt colony to get things anywhere near cleaned up by nightfall.
It is early morning, and the workers are just appearing, hurrying to the old log which is to be the scene of their labors.
What a scampering!
What a bustle!
Ah, little scamperers!
Ah, little bustlers! How lucky you are, and how wise!
You work long hours, without pay, for the sheer love of working.
An ideal existence, I'll tell the scientific world.
Over here on the right of the log are the Master Draggers.
Of all the newt workers, they are the most futile, which is high praise indeed. Come, let us look closer and see what it is that they are doing.
The one in the lead is dragging a bit of gurry out from the water and up over the edge into the sunlight.
Following him, in single file, come the rest of the Master Draggers.
They are not dragging anything, but are sort of helping the leader by crowding against him and eating little pieces out of the filament of his tail.
And now they have reached the top.
The little workers, reaching the goal with their precious freight, are now giving it over to the Master Pushers, who have been waiting for them in the sun all this while.
The Master Pushers' work is soon accomplished, for it consists simply in pushing the piece of gurry over the other side of the log until it falls with a splash into the water, where it is lost.
Would that my own work were as clean cut and as satisfying.
And so it goes.
Day in and day out, the busy army of newts go on making the world a better place in which to live.
And, after all, what more has life to offer?
GARDENING NOTES
During the past month almost every paper, with the exception of the agricultural journals, has installed an agricultural department, containing short articles by Lord Northcliffe, or some one else in the office who had an unoccupied typewriter, telling the American citizen how to start and hold the interest of a small garden.
But all of these editorial suggestions appear to be conducted by professionals for the benefit of the layman, which seems to me to be a rather one sided way of going about the thing.
Obviously the suggestions should come from a layman himself, in the nature of warnings to others.
I am qualified to put forth such an article because of two weeks' service in my own back yard, doing my bit for peter Henderson and planting all sorts of things in the ground without the slightest expectation of ever seeing anything of any of them again.
In fact, I would take it as a personal favor, and would feel that anything that I might do in the future for Nature would be little enough in return for the special work she went to all the trouble of doing for me.
But all of this is on condition that something of mine grows into manhood.
Otherwise, Nature can go her way and I go mine, just as we have gone up till now.
However, although I am an amateur, I shall have to adopt, in my writing, the tone of a professional, or I shall never get any one to believe what I say.
This is one of the most important things that the young gardener is called upon to do.
In fact, a great many young gardeners never do anything further.
Some inherited weakness, something they never realized they had before, may crop out during this process: weak back, tendency of shoulder blades to ossification, misplacement of several important vertebræ, all are apt to be discovered for the first time during the course of one day's digging.
If, on the morning following the first attempt to prepare the ground for planting, you are able to walk in a semi erect position as far as the bathtub (and, without outside assistance, lift one foot into the water), you may flatter yourself that you are, joint for joint, in as perfect condition as the man in the rubber heels advertisements.
Authorities differ as to the best way of digging.
All agree that it is impossible to avoid walking about during the following week as if you were impersonating an old colored waiter with the lumbago; but there are two schools, each with its own theory, as to the less painful method.
One advocates bending over, without once raising up, until the whole row is dug.
The others, of whom I must confess that I am one, feel that it is better to draw the body to a more or less erect position after each shovelful.
The necessity for work of such a strenuous nature in the mere preliminaries of the process of planting a garden is due to the fact that the average back yard has, up till the present time, been behaving less like a garden than anything else in the world.
You might think that a back yard, possessed of an ordinary amount of decency and civic pride would, at some time during its career, have said to itself:
"Now look here!
I may some day be called upon to be a garden, and the least I can do is to get myself into some sort of shape, so that, when the time comes, I will be fairly ready to receive a seed or two."
But no! Year in and year out they have been drifting along in a fools' paradise, accumulating stones and queer, indistinguishable cans and things, until they were prepared to become anything, quarries, iron mines, notion counters,--anything but gardens.
I have saved in a box all the things that I have dug from my back yard, and, when I have them assembled, all I will need will be a good engine to make them into a pretty fairly decent runabout,--nothing elaborate, mind you, but good enough to run the family out in on Sunday afternoons.
And then there are lots of other things that wouldn't even fit into the runabout.
But there, I mustn't get sentimental.
If you have an empty and detached furnace boiler, you might bring that along to fill with the stones you will dig up.
If it is a small garden, you ought not to have to empty the boiler more than three or four times. Any neighbor who is building a stone house will be glad to contract with you for the stones, and those that are left over after he has got his house built can be sold to another neighbor who is building another stone house.
Your market is limited only by the number of neighbors who are building stone houses.
On the first day, when you find yourself confronted by a stretch of untouched ground which is to be turned over (technical phrase, meaning to "turn over"), you may be somewhat at a loss to know where to begin. Such indecision is only natural, and should cause no worry on the part of the young gardener.
It is something we all have to go through with.
You may feel that it would be futile and unsystematic to go about digging up a forkful here and a shovelful there, tossing the earth at random, in the hope that in due time you will get the place dug up.
And so it would.
The thing to do is to decide just where you want your garden, and what its dimensions are to be.
This will have necessitated a previous drawing up of a chart, showing just what is to be planted and where. As this chart will be the cause of considerable hard feeling in the family circle, usually precipitating a fist fight over the number of rows of onions to be set out, I will not touch on that in this article.
There are some things too intimate for even a professional agriculturist to write of.
I will say, however, that those in the family who are standing out for onions might much better save their time and feelings by pretending to give in, and then, later in the day, sneaking out and slipping the sprouts in by themselves in some spot where they will know where to find them again.
Having decided on the general plan and dimensions of the plot, gather the family about as if for a corner stone dedication, and then make a rather impressive ceremony of driving in the first stake by getting your little boy to sing the first twelve words of some patriotic air. (If he doesn't know the first twelve, any twelve will do.
The idea is to keep the music going during the driving of the stake.)
You will feel that at last you have something tangible. Now all that remains is to turn the ground over, harrow it, smooth it up nice and neat, plant your seeds, cultivate them, thin out your plants and pick the crops.
It may seem that I have spent most of my time in advice on preparing the ground for planting.
Such may well be the case, as that was as far as I got.
I then found a man who likes to do those things and whose doctor has told him that he ought to be out of doors all the time.
He is an Italian, and charges really very little when you consider what he accomplishes.
A PIECE OF ROAST BEEF
Personally, I class roast beef with watercress and vanilla cornstarch pudding as tasty articles of diet.
But for all that I can't seem to feel that I am having a good time while I am eating it.
It stimulates the same nerve centers in me that a lantern slide lecture on "Palestine-the Old and the New," does.
Roast beef is not the same price in all eating places.
What makes the difference?
To answer these questions I started out on a tour of the representative eating places of some of our best known strata of society, and, whatever my conclusions are, you may be sure that they are thoroughly inexpert.
First, I tried out what is known as the Bay State Lunch, so called because on Thursdays they have a fishcake special.
Here the roast beef shot through the Punch and Judy arrangement in the wall, a piece of meat about as large around as a man's size mitten, steeping in its own gravy and of a pale reddish hue.
The price was twenty cents, which included a dab of mashed potato dished out in an ice cream scoop, a generous allowance of tender peas, two hot tea biscuits and butter to match.
For the next experiment I went to a restaurant where business men are wont to gather for luncheon, men who pride themselves on their acumen and adherence to the principles of efficiency.
The place has a French name and its menus are printed on a card the size of a life insurance company's complimentary calendar, always an ominous sign.
The roast beef here was served cold, with a plate of escarole salad (when I was a boy I used to have to dig escarole out of the front lawn with a trowel so that the grass could have a chance) for seventy five cents.
The meat bulked a little larger than at the Bay State Lunch, but when the fat had been cut away and trimmed off the salvage was about the size of a boy's mitten.
As for the taste, the only difference that I could detect was that one had been hot and the other cold.
Beef and salad, plus tip, ninety cents.
I said to myself: "Look here!
This thing is getting the best of you." But before I knew it I was inside and seated at an oilcloth covered table, saying, in a hoarse voice, "Roast beef!"
The article itself was of the regulation size, cut somewhat thinner, perhaps, and bordering on the gray in hue, but undoubtedly roast beef.
It, too, had an affinity for its own gravy and hid itself modestly under an avalanche of mashed potatoes.
A cup of coffee was also included in the ten cents' initial expense, but I somehow wasn't coffee thirsty that night, and so didn't sample it.
But I did help myself to the plate piled high with fresh bread which was left in front of me.
All in all, it was what I should call a representative roast beef dinner.
And I got more than ten cents' worth of calories, I know.
But so far I had kept below the Fourteenth Street belt in my investigations.
Roast beef is a cosmopolitan habit, and knows no arbitrary boundaries; so I went uptown.
Here, I felt, would be the test.
Could roast beef come back?
Surrounded by glittering chandeliers and rich tapestries, snowy table linen and silver service, here was the chance for the ordinary roast beef to become a veritable dainty, with some character, some distinctive touch that should lift it above all that roast beef has ever meant before.
But apparently the hotel retainers weren't trained to look through a rough exterior and find the sterling qualities beneath.
They looked through my rough exterior all right, but they didn't stop at my sterling qualities.
They looked right through to the man behind me, and gave him the signal that there was a seat for him.
Not to be outdone, however, I got my place in the sun by cleverly tripping my rival as he passed me, so that he fell into the fountain arrangement, while I sat down in the seat pulled out for him by the head waiter.
And, once I was in, there was nothing for them to do but let me stay.
After I had been there a few minutes a waiter came and put on a fresh table cloth.
Five minutes later another man placed a knife and spoon at my plate.
Later in the evening a boy with a basket of rolls wandered by and deposited one on my table with a pair of pincers. Personally, I was rather glad that it was working out this way, for it would make my story all the better, but I might have really been in a hurry for my dinner.
It wasn't long, as the crow flies, before one of the third assistant waiters unloosened enough to drop round and see if there was anything else I wanted besides one roll and a knife and spoon.
I looked over the menu as if I were in a pretty captious mood, and then, with the air of an epicure who has tasted to the dregs all the condiments of Arabia and whose jaded palate refuses to thrill any longer, I ordered "roast beef."
The waiter wasn't very enthusiastic over my order, and something saved me from asking him if they threw in "a side" of mashed potatoes with the meat.
That cheered him up more than anything I had done that evening, and he really got quite fratty and said: "A little salad, sir?" Again I imitated a man who has had more experience with salads than any other three men put together and who has found them a miserable sham.
"No; that will be all for now," I said, and turned wearily away.
I wanted to tell him that I had a dinner coat at home that looked enough sight better than his, but there is no use in making a scene when it can be avoided.
During the next twenty minutes the orchestra played once and I ate my roll.
Then the roast beef came.
On a silver platter, with a silver cover, it was placed before me under the best possible scenic conditions.
But the thing that met my gaze when the cover was lifted might just as well have been the same property piece of roast beef that was keeping company with a dab of mashed potato in the Bay State Lunch.
It had a trifle more fat, was just a shade pinker, and perhaps a micrometer could have detected a bit more bulk; but, so far as I was concerned or so far as the calories were concerned, it was the same.
As a fitting garniture to such a dish, there was a corsage of watercress draped on the corner of the salver.
At any rate, it could be said for it that it was not intoxicating, and so could never cause any real misery in this world.
I nibbled at my roast beef, but my spirit was broken.
I had gone through a week of self denial, ordering roast beef when I craved edibles, eating at restaurants while my family waited for me at home, and here was the result of my researches: Roast beef is roast beef, and nothing can prevent it.
From the ten cent order of the Busy Home Restaurant, up through to the piece I was then eating, it was the same grim reality, the only justification for a difference in price being a silver salver or a waiter in a tuxedo.
This quite reconciled me, until my check was brought.
These investigations may not prove to be much of a contribution to modern science or economics.
We were to sail on the fifteenth of the month (June), weather permitting; and on the fourteenth, I went on board to arrange some matters in my state room.
I found that we were to have a great many passengers, including a more than usual number of ladies.
On the list were several of my acquaintances, and among other names, I was rejoiced to see that of mr Cornelius Wyatt, a young artist, for whom I entertained feelings of warm friendship.
He had been with me a fellow student at C- University, where we were very much together.
He had the ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy, sensibility, and enthusiasm. To these qualities he united the warmest and truest heart which ever beat in a human bosom.
I observed that his name was carded upon three state rooms; and, upon again referring to the list of passengers, I found that he had engaged passage for himself, wife, and two sisters-his own.
The state rooms were sufficiently roomy, and each had two berths, one above the other.
These berths, to be sure, were so exceedingly narrow as to be insufficient for more than one person; still, I could not comprehend why there were three state rooms for these four persons.
I was, just at that epoch, in one of those moody frames of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles: and I confess, with shame, that I busied myself in a variety of ill bred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the supernumerary state room.
It was no business of mine, to be sure, but with none the less pertinacity did I occupy myself in attempts to resolve the enigma.
"Oh, extra baggage, to be sure," I now said to myself-"something he wishes not to be put in the hold-something to be kept under his own eye-ah, I have it-a painting or so-and this is what he has been bargaining about with Nicolino, the Italian Jew." This idea satisfied me, and I dismissed my curiosity for the nonce.
Wyatt's two sisters I knew very well, and most amiable and clever girls they were.
I was, therefore, quite anxious to make her acquaintance.
On the day in which I visited the ship (the fourteenth), Wyatt and party were also to visit it-so the captain informed me-and I waited on board an hour longer than I had designed, in hope of being presented to the bride, but then an apology came.
"mrs w was a little indisposed, and would decline coming on board until to morrow, at the hour of sailing."
I did not receive the expected message from the captain for nearly a week.
It came at length, however, and I immediately went on board.
The ship was crowded with passengers, and every thing was in the bustle attendant upon making sail.
Wyatt's party arrived in about ten minutes after myself.
There were the two sisters, the bride, and the artist-the latter in one of his customary fits of moody misanthropy.
He did not even introduce me to his wife-this courtesy devolving, per force, upon his sister Marian-a very sweet and intelligent girl, who, in a few hurried words, made us acquainted.
mrs Wyatt had been closely veiled; and when she raised her veil, in acknowledging my bow, I confess that I was very profoundly astonished.
The truth is, I could not help regarding mrs Wyatt as a decidedly plain looking woman.
If not positively ugly, she was not, I think, very far from it.
She was dressed, however, in exquisite taste-and then I had no doubt that she had captivated my friend's heart by the more enduring graces of the intellect and soul.
She said very few words, and passed at once into her state room with mr w
My old inquisitiveness now returned.
There was no servant-that was a settled point.
I looked, therefore, for the extra baggage.
Immediately upon its arrival we made sail, and in a short time were safely over the bar and standing out to sea.
The box in question was, as I say, oblong.
It was about six feet in length by two and a half in breadth; I observed it attentively, and like to be precise.
This point, therefore, I considered as sufficiently settled.
I chuckled excessively when I thought of my acumen.
It was the first time I had ever known Wyatt to keep from me any of his artistical secrets; but here he evidently intended to steal a march upon me, and smuggle a fine picture to New York, under my very nose; expecting me to know nothing of the matter.
I resolved to quiz him well, now and hereafter.
One thing, however, annoyed me not a little.
The box did not go into the extra state room.
It was deposited in Wyatt's own; and there, too, it remained, occupying very nearly the whole of the floor-no doubt to the exceeding discomfort of the artist and his wife;--this the more especially as the tar or paint with which it was lettered in sprawling capitals, emitted a strong, disagreeable, and, to my fancy, a peculiarly disgusting odor.
On the lid were painted the words-"mrs
Adelaide Curtis, albany new york.
This side up. To be handled with care."
Now, I was aware that mrs Adelaide Curtis, of Albany, was the artist's wife's mother,--but then I looked upon the whole address as a mystification, intended especially for myself.
I made up my mind, of course, that the box and contents would never get farther north than the studio of my misanthropic friend, in Chambers Street, New York.
For the first three or four days we had fine weather, although the wind was dead ahead; having chopped round to the northward, immediately upon our losing sight of the coast.
The passengers were, consequently, in high spirits and disposed to be social.
I must except, however, Wyatt and his sisters, who behaved stiffly, and, I could not help thinking, uncourteously to the rest of the party.
Wyatt's conduct I did not so much regard.
He was gloomy, even beyond his usual habit-in fact he was morose-but in him I was prepared for eccentricity.
For the sisters, however, I could make no excuse.
They secluded themselves in their staterooms during the greater part of the passage, and absolutely refused, although I repeatedly urged them, to hold communication with any person on board.
mrs Wyatt herself was far more agreeable.
That is to say, she was chatty; and to be chatty is no slight recommendation at sea.
I say "amused"--and scarcely know how to explain myself.
The gentlemen said little about her; but the ladies, in a little while, pronounced her "a good hearted thing, rather indifferent looking, totally uneducated, and decidedly vulgar." The great wonder was, how Wyatt had been entrapped into such a match.
Wealth was the general solution-but this I knew to be no solution at all; for Wyatt had told me that she neither brought him a dollar nor had any expectations from any source whatever.
"He had married," he said, "for love, and for love only; and his bride was far more than worthy of his love." When I thought of these expressions, on the part of my friend, I confess that I felt indescribably puzzled.
Could it be possible that he was taking leave of his senses?
What else could I think?
He, so refined, so intellectual, so fastidious, with so exquisite a perception of the faulty, and so keen an appreciation of the beautiful!
I pitied him from the bottom of my heart-but could not, for that reason, quite forgive his incommunicativeness in the matter of the "Last Supper." For this I resolved to have my revenge.
One day he came upon deck, and, taking his arm as had been my wont, I sauntered with him backward and forward.
His gloom, however (which I considered quite natural under the circumstances), seemed entirely unabated.
He said little, and that moodily, and with evident effort.
I ventured a jest or two, and he made a sickening attempt at a smile.
Poor fellow!--as I thought of his wife, I wondered that he could have heart to put on even the semblance of mirth.
I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendoes, about the oblong box-just to let him perceive, gradually, that I was not altogether the butt, or victim, of his little bit of pleasant mystification.
My first observation was by way of opening a masked battery.
At first he stared at me as if he found it impossible to comprehend the witticism of my remark; but as its point seemed slowly to make its way into his brain, his eyes, in the same proportion, seemed protruding from their sockets.
Then he grew very red-then hideously pale-then, as if highly amused with what I had insinuated, he began a loud and boisterous laugh, which, to my astonishment, he kept up, with gradually increasing vigor, for ten minutes or more.
In conclusion, he fell flat and heavily upon the deck. When I ran to uplift him, to all appearance he was dead.
I called assistance, and, with much difficulty, we brought him to himself.
Upon reviving he spoke incoherently for some time.
At length we bled him and put him to bed.
The next morning he was quite recovered, so far as regarded his mere bodily health.
I avoided him during the rest of the passage, by advice of the captain, who seemed to coincide with me altogether in my views of his insanity, but cautioned me to say nothing on this head to any person on board.
Several circumstances occurred immediately after this fit of Wyatt which contributed to heighten the curiosity with which I was already possessed.
Wyatt's three rooms were in the after cabin, which was separated from the main one by a slight sliding door, never locked even at night.
As we were almost constantly on a wind, and the breeze was not a little stiff, the ship heeled to leeward very considerably; and whenever her starboard side was to leeward, the sliding door between the cabins slid open, and so remained, nobody taking the trouble to get up and shut it.
But my berth was in such a position, that when my own state room door was open, as well as the sliding door in question (and my own door was always open on account of the heat,) I could see into the after cabin quite distinctly, and just at that portion of it, too, where were situated the state rooms of mr Wyatt.
Well, during two nights (not consecutive) while I lay awake, I clearly saw mrs w, about eleven o'clock upon each night, steal cautiously from the state room of mr w, and enter the extra room, where she remained until daybreak, when she was called by her husband and went back.
That they were virtually separated was clear.
They had separate apartments-no doubt in contemplation of a more permanent divorce; and here, after all I thought was the mystery of the extra state room.
There was another circumstance, too, which interested me much. During the two wakeful nights in question, and immediately after the disappearance of mrs Wyatt into the extra state room, I was attracted by certain singular cautious, subdued noises in that of her husband. After listening to them for some time, with thoughtful attention, I at length succeeded perfectly in translating their import.
They were sounds occasioned by the artist in prying open the oblong box, by means of a chisel and mallet-the latter being apparently muffled, or deadened, by some soft woollen or cotton substance in which its head was enveloped.
After this there was a dead stillness, and I heard nothing more, upon either occasion, until nearly daybreak; unless, perhaps, I may mention a low sobbing, or murmuring sound, so very much suppressed as to be nearly inaudible-if, indeed, the whole of this latter noise were not rather produced by my own imagination.
He had opened his oblong box, in order to feast his eyes on the pictorial treasure within.
There was nothing in this, however, to make him sob. I repeat, therefore, that it must have been simply a freak of my own fancy, distempered by good Captain Hardy's green tea.
We were, in a measure, prepared for it, however, as the weather had been holding out threats for some time.
Every thing was made snug, alow and aloft; and as the wind steadily freshened, we lay to, at length, under spanker and foretopsail, both double reefed.
In this trim we rode safely enough for forty eight hours-the ship proving herself an excellent sea boat in many respects, and shipping no water of any consequence.
At the end of this period, however, the gale had freshened into a hurricane, and our after-sail split into ribbons, bringing us so much in the trough of the water that we shipped several prodigious seas, one immediately after the other.
Scarcely had we recovered our senses, before the foretopsail went into shreds, when we got up a storm stay-sail and with this did pretty well for some hours, the ship heading the sea much more steadily than before.
The gale still held on, however, and we saw no signs of its abating. The rigging was found to be ill fitted, and greatly strained; and on the third day of the blow, about five in the afternoon, our mizzen mast, in a heavy lurch to windward, went by the board.
For an hour or more, we tried in vain to get rid of it, on account of the prodigious rolling of the ship; and, before we had succeeded, the carpenter came aft and announced four feet of water in the hold.
To add to our dilemma, we found the pumps choked and nearly useless.
All was now confusion and despair-but an effort was made to lighten the ship by throwing overboard as much of her cargo as could be reached, and by cutting away the two masts that remained.
This we at last accomplished-but we were still unable to do any thing at the pumps; and, in the meantime, the leak gained on us very fast.
At sundown, the gale had sensibly diminished in violence, and as the sea went down with it, we still entertained faint hopes of saving ourselves in the boats.
At eight p m, the clouds broke away to windward, and we had the advantage of a full moon-a piece of good fortune which served wonderfully to cheer our drooping spirits.
After incredible labor we succeeded, at length, in getting the longboat over the side without material accident, and into this we crowded the whole of the crew and most of the passengers.
This party made off immediately, and, after undergoing much suffering, finally arrived, in safety, at Ocracoke Inlet, on the third day after the wreck.
Fourteen passengers, with the captain, remained on board, resolving to trust their fortunes to the jolly boat at the stern.
We lowered it without difficulty, although it was only by a miracle that we prevented it from swamping as it touched the water.
It contained, when afloat, the captain and his wife, mr Wyatt and party, a Mexican officer, wife, four children, and myself, with a negro valet.
We had no room, of course, for any thing except a few positively necessary instruments, some provisions, and the clothes upon our backs. No one had thought of even attempting to save any thing more.
What must have been the astonishment of all, then, when having proceeded a few fathoms from the ship, mr Wyatt stood up in the stern sheets, and coolly demanded of Captain Hardy that the boat should be put back for the purpose of taking in his oblong box!
"Sit down, mr Wyatt," replied the captain, somewhat sternly, "you will capsize us if you do not sit quite still.
"The box!" vociferated mr Wyatt, still standing-"the box, I say! Captain Hardy, you cannot, you will not refuse me.
Its weight will be but a trifle-it is nothing-mere nothing.
By the mother who bore you-for the love of Heaven-by your hope of salvation, I implore you to put back for the box!"
The captain, for a moment, seemed touched by the earnest appeal of the artist, but he regained his stern composure, and merely said:
"mr Wyatt, you are mad.
I cannot listen to you.
Sit down, I say, or you will swamp the boat.
Stay-hold him-seize him!--he is about to spring overboard!
There-I knew it-he is over!"
We saw at a glance that the doom of the unfortunate artist was sealed.
While we gazed in the extremity of astonishment, he passed, rapidly, several turns of a three inch rope, first around the box and then around his body.
In another instant both body and box were in the sea-disappearing suddenly, at once and forever.
We lingered awhile sadly upon our oars, with our eyes riveted upon the spot.
At length we pulled away.
The silence remained unbroken for an hour.
Finally, I hazarded a remark.
"Did you observe, captain, how suddenly they sank?
Was not that an exceedingly singular thing?
I confess that I entertained some feeble hope of his final deliverance, when I saw him lash himself to the box, and commit himself to the sea."
"They sank as a matter of course," replied the captain, "and that like a shot.
"The salt!" I ejaculated.
"We must talk of these things at some more appropriate time."
We landed, in fine, more dead than alive, after four days of intense distress, upon the beach opposite Roanoke Island.
We remained here a week, were not ill treated by the wreckers, and at length obtained a passage to New York.
About a month after the loss of the "Independence," I happened to meet Captain Hardy in Broadway.
Our conversation turned, naturally, upon the disaster, and especially upon the sad fate of poor Wyatt.
The artist had engaged passage for himself, wife, two sisters and a servant.
His wife was, indeed, as she had been represented, a most lovely, and most accomplished woman.
On the morning of the fourteenth of June (the day in which I first visited the ship), the lady suddenly sickened and died.
The young husband was frantic with grief-but circumstances imperatively forbade the deferring his voyage to New York. It was necessary to take to her mother the corpse of his adored wife, and, on the other hand, the universal prejudice which would prevent his doing so openly was well known.
In this state room the pseudo wife, slept, of course, every night.
In the daytime she performed, to the best of her ability, the part of her mistress-whose person, it had been carefully ascertained, was unknown to any of the passengers on board.
My own mistake arose, naturally enough, through too careless, too inquisitive, and too impulsive a temperament.
But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night.
There is a countenance which haunts me, turn as I will.
CHAPTER nine
HOLLYHOCK
The Emperor has at last abdicated his throne, as he has long intended, in favor of the Heir apparent, and the only child of the Princess Wistaria is made Heir apparent to the new Emperor.
The ex Emperor now lived in a private palace with this Princess in a less royal style; and the Niogo of Kokiden, to whom was given the honorary title of ex Empress, resided in the Imperial Palace with the Emperor, her son, and took up a conspicuous position.
The ex Emperor still felt some anxiety about the Heir apparent, and appointed Genji as his guardian, as he had not yet a suitable person for that office.
This change in the reigning Emperor, and the gradual advancement of Genji's position, gave the latter greater responsibility, and he had to restrain his wandering.
She was the favorite child of her mother as well as of her father, and the ceremonies for the day of consecration were arranged with especial splendor.
The number of persons who take a share in the procession on this occasion is defined by regulations; yet the selection of this number was most carefully made from the most fashionable of the nobles of the time, and their dresses and saddles were all chosen of beautiful appearance.
Genji was also directed by special order to take part in the ceremony.
As the occasion was expected to be magnificent, every class of the people showed great eagerness to witness the scene, and a great number of stands were erected all along the road.
The day thus looked forward to at last arrived.
Her attendants, however, suggested to her that she ought to go.
"It is a great pity," they said, "not to see it; people come from a long distance to see it." Her mother also said, "You seem better to day.
I think you had better go. Take these girls with you."
Being pressed in this way, she hastily made up her mind, and went with a train of carriages.
The lady so maltreated was of course extremely indignant, and she would fain have gone home without seeing the spectacle, but there was no passage for retiring.
Meanwhile the approach of the procession was announced, and only this calmed her a little.
There were several carriages along the roads on whose occupants his glance was cast; that of Lady Aoi, however, was the most striking, and as he passed by the attendants saluted him courteously, which act Genji acknowledged.
In due course the procession passed, and the exciting scene of the day was over.
The quarrels about the carriage naturally came to the ears of Genji.
He felt for the wounded lady, and hastened to see her; but she, under some pretext, refused to see him.
It caused her great suffering, and seemed not to be of a casual nature, but a permanent hostile influence.
Some imagined this to be the effect of fearful jealousy of some one who was intimately known to Genji and who had most influence over him; but the spirit gave no information to this effect.
This became stronger when she was told that the sufferings of the Lady Aoi were owing to some living spirit.
She thought that she never wished any evil to her; but, when she reflected, there were several times when she began to think that a wounded spirit, such as her own, might have some influence of the kind.
She had sometimes dreams, after weary thinking, between slumber and waking, in which she seemed to fly to some beautiful girl, apparently Lady Aoi, and to engage in bitter contention and struggle with her.
She became even terrified at these dreams; but yet they took place very often.
"Even in ordinary matters," she thought, "it is too common a practice, to say nothing of the good done by people, but to exaggerate the bad; and so, in such cases, if it should be rumored that mine was that living spirit which tormented Lady Aoi, how trying it would be to me!
It is no rare occurrence that one's disembodied spirit, after death, should wander about; but even that is not a very agreeable idea.
How much more, then, must it be disagreeable to have the repute that one's living spirit was inflicting pain upon another!"
These thoughts still preyed upon her mind, and made her listless and depressed.
In due course, the confinement of Lady Aoi approached.
At the same time, the jealous spirit still vexed her, and now more vigorous exorcising was employed.
She became much affected by it, and cried out, "Please release me a little; I have something to tell the Prince."
The curtain was dropped, and the mother of the lady left the room, as she thought her daughter might prefer to speak to him in private.
The lady was lying on her couch, dressed in a pure white garment, with her long tresses unfastened.
He approached her, and taking her hand, said: "What sad affliction you cause us!" She then lifted her heavy eyelids, and gazed on Genji for some minutes.
He tried to soothe her, and said, "Pray don't trouble yourself too much about matters.
Everything will come right.
Your illness, I think, will soon pass away.
Even supposing you quit this present world, there is another where we shall meet, and where I shall see you once more cheerful, and there will be a time when your mother and father will also join you."
"Ah! no I only come here to solicit you to give me a little rest.
I feel extremely disturbed.
I never thought of coming here in such a way; but it seems the spirit of one whose thoughts are much disconcerted wanders away unknown even to itself.
"You speak thus," said Genji, as if he was addressing the spirit, "but you do not tell me who you are.
On this, Genji was still more perplexed and anxious, and put a stop to the colloquy.
Presently she became very calm, and people thought that she was a little relieved.
Soon after this, the lady was safely delivered of a child.
They came in all haste, wiping off the perspiration from their faces as they journeyed; and, from the Emperor and Royal princes down to the ordinary nobles, all took an interest in the ceremony of Ub yashinai (first feeding), and the more so as the child was a boy.
To return to the Lady of Rokjio.
Some days passed, and the day of autumn appointments arrived.
When he said good by to her, there was a strange and unusual look in her eyes.
Sadaijin also went to Court, as well as his sons, who had some expectation of promotion, and there were few people left in the mansion.
It was in the evening of that day that Lady Aoi was suddenly attacked by a spasm, and before the news of this could be carried to the Court, she died.
These sad tidings soon reached the Court, and created great distress and confusion: even the arrangements for appointments and promotion were disturbed.
As it happened late in the evening there was no time to send for the head of the monastery, or any other distinguished priest.
Messengers of inquiry came one after another to the mansion, so numerous that it was almost impossible to return them all answers. We need not add how greatly affected were all her relations.
As the death took place from a malign spiritual influence, she was left untouched during two or three days, in the hope that she might revive; but no change took place, and now all hope was abandoned.
In due course the corpse was taken to the cemetery of Toribeno.
Numerous mourners and priests of different churches crowded to the spot, while representatives of the ex Emperor, Princess Wistaria, and the Heir apparent also were present.
The ceremony of burial was performed with all solemnity and pathos.
Thus the modest and virtuous Lady Aoi passed away forever.
It was on one of these occasions that a soft shower of rain was falling.
Genji was leaning out of a window, his cheek resting on his hand; and, looking out upon the half fading shrubberies, was humming-
This was soon responded to by Genji:--
"That cloudy shrine we view on high, Where my lost love may dwell unseen, Looks gloomy now to this sad eye That looks with tears on what has been."
Genji still felt lonely.
He wrote a letter to the Princess Momo zono (peach gardens).
He admired her, too.
In his letter he stated that she might have a little sympathy with him in his sorrow, and he also sent with it the following:--
There was, indeed, nothing serious between Genji and this princess; yet, as far as correspondence was concerned, they now and then exchanged letters, so she did not object to receiving this communication.
She felt for him much, and an answer was returned, in which she expressed her sympathy at his bereavement.
Now, in the mansion of Sadaijin every performance of requiem was celebrated.
The room was the same as before, and everything was unchanged; but his only daughter, the pride of his old days, was no more, and his son in law had gone too.
Among these papers he saw one on which the words "Old pillows and old quilts" were written, and close to these the following:--
"How much the soul departed, still May love to linger round this couch, My own heart tells me, even I Reluctant am to leave it now."
As Sadaijin was turning over these papers a withered flower, which seems to have marked some particular occasion, dropped from amongst them.
Return we now to Genji.
He went to the ex Emperor, to whom he still seemed thin and careworn.
He had some affectionate conversation with him, remained till evening, and then proceeded to his mansion at Nijio.
He went to the western wing to visit the young Violet.
All were habited in new winter apparel, and looked fresh and blooming.
Violet turned her glance a little aside.
She was apparently shy, which only increased her beauty.
He approached, and after having a little conversation, said, "I have many things to say to you, but now I must have a little rest," and returned to his own quarters.
At this time he confined himself more than usual to his own house, and for companionship he was constantly with Violet, who was now approaching womanhood.
The inmates of the house, who did not know what was the reason, were anxious about her, thinking she was indisposed.
About noon Genji came.
He entered the little room, saying, "Are you not quite well?
Perhaps you would like to play at Go again, like last night, for a change;" but she was more than ever shy.
"Why are you so shy?" he exclaimed; "be a little more cheerful-people may think it strange," said he, and stayed with her a long time trying to soothe her; but to no effect-she still continued silent and shy.
He called Koremitz before him and said, "To day is not a very opportune day; I would rather have them to morrow evening.
Up to this time nothing about Violet had been publicly known, and Genji thought it was time to inform her father about his daughter; but he considered he had better have the ceremony of Mogi first performed, and ordered preparations to be made with that object.
Let us here notice that the young daughter of Udaijin, after she saw Genji, was longing to see him again.
This inclination was perceived by her relations.
It seems that her father was not quite averse to this liking, and he told his eldest daughter, the reigning Emperor's mother, that Genji was recently bereaved of his good consort, and that he should not feel discontented if his daughter were to take the place of Lady Aoi; but this the royal mother did not approve.
OF THE INCONVENIENCE OF GREATNESS
Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge our selves by railing at it; and yet it is not absolutely railing against anything to proclaim its defects, because they are in all things to be found, how beautiful or how much to be coveted soever.
'tis, methinks, a virtue to which I, who am no conjuror, could without any great endeavour arrive.
Forasmuch as ambition never comports itself better, according to itself, than when it proceeds by obscure and unfrequented ways.
But if my heart be not great enough, 'tis open enough to make amends, at any one's request, freely to lay open its weakness.
But if I was to compare them with my own, I should then also say that the first is as much according to my capacity, and from desire, which I conform to my capacity, as the second is far beyond it; that I could not approach the last but with veneration, the other I could readily attain by use.
Let us return to our temporal greatness, from which we are digressed.
Superiority and inferiority, dominion and subjection are bound to a natural envy and contest, and must of necessity perpetually intrench upon one another.
running against Alexander, purposely missed his blow, and made a fault in his career; Alexander chid him for it, but he ought to have had him whipped.
Evil to man is in its turn good, and good evil.
Neither is pain always to be shunned, nor pleasure always to be pursued.
THE BUYER OF SORROWS
On an evening of singular sunset, about the rich beginning of May, the little market town of Beethorpe was startled by the sound of a trumpet.
Beethorpe was an ancient town, mysteriously sown, centuries ago, like a wandering thistle down of human life, amid the silence and the nibbling sheep of the great chalk downs.
It stood in a hollow of the long smooth billows of pale pasture that suavely melted into the sky on every side. The evening was so still that the little river running across the threshold of the town, and encircling what remained of its old walls, was the noisiest thing to be heard, dominating with its talkative murmur the bedtime hum of the High Street.
Again the trumpet blew, and then the braver of the young men of the town hastened up the hill to learn its meaning.
As they approached the horsemen, they perceived that the center of the three was a young man of great nobility of bearing, richly but somberly dressed, and with a dark, beautiful face filled with a proud melancholy. He kept his eyes on the fading sunset, sitting motionless upon his horse, apparently oblivious of the commotion his arrival had caused.
The horseman on his right hand was clad after the manner of a herald, and the horseman on his left hand was clad after the manner of a steward. And the three horsemen sat motionless, awaiting the bewildered ambassadors of Beethorpe.
When these had approached near enough the herald once more set the trumpet to his lips and blew; and then, unfolding a parchment scroll, read in a loud voice:
"To the Folk of Beethorpe-Greeting from the High and Mighty Lord, Mortimer of the Marches:
And when the herald had finished reading he blew again upon the trumpet three times; and the villagers looked at one another in bewilderment-but some ran down the hill to tell their neighbors of the strange proposal of their lord.
Thus, presently, nearly all the village of Beethorpe was making its way up the hill to where those three horsemen loomed against the evening sky.
Never was such a sorrowful company.
Up the hill they came, carrying their sorrows in their hands-sorrows for which, in excited haste, they had rummaged old drawers and forgotten cupboards, and even ran hurriedly into the churchyard.
Lord Mortimer of the Marches sat his horse with the same austere indifference, his melancholy profile against the fading sky.
Only those who stood near to him noted a kindly ironic flicker of a smile in his eyes, as he saw, apparently seeing nothing, the poor little raked up sorrows of his village of Beethorpe.
His heart had been broken in a very strange way.
Death and Pity were his closest friends.
He was so sad himself that he had come to realize that sorrow is the only sincerity of life.
Thus sorrow had become a kind of passion with him, even a kind of connoisseurship; and he had come, so to say, to be a collector of sorrows.
It was partly pity and partly an odd form of dilettanteism-for his own sad heart made him pitiful for and companionable with any other sad heart; but the sincerity of his sorrow made him jealous of the sanctity of sorrow, and at the same time sternly critical of, and sadly amused by, the hypocrisies of sorrow.
So, as he sat his horse and gazed at the sunset, he smiled sadly to himself as he heard, without seeming to hear, the small, insincere sorrows of his village of Beethorpe-sorrows forgotten long ago, but suddenly rediscovered in old drawers and unopened cupboards, at the sound of his lordship's trumpet and the promise of his strange proclamation.
Was there a sorrow in the world that no money could buy?
It was to find such a sorrow that Lord Mortimer thus fantastically rode from village to village of his estates, with herald and steward.
The unpurchasable sorrow-the sorrow no gold can gild, no jewel can buy!
Far and wide he had ridden over his estates, seeking so rare a sorrow; but as yet he had found no sorrow that could not be bought with a little bag of gold and silver coins.
So he sat his horse, while the villagers of Beethorpe were paid out of a great leathern bag by the steward-for the steward understood the mind of his master, and, without troubling him, paid each weeping and whimpering peasant as he thought fit.
In another great bag the steward had collected the sorrows of the Village of Beethorpe; and, by this, the moon was rising, and, with another blast of trumpet by way of farewell, the three horsemen took the road again to Lord Mortimer's castle.
When, out of the great leathern bag, in Lord Mortimer's cabinet they poured upon the table the sorrows of Beethorpe, the young lord smiled to himself, turning over one sorrow after the other, as though they had been precious stones-for there was not one genuine sorrow among them.
But, later, there came news to him that there was one real sorrow in Beethorpe; and he rode alone on horseback to the village, and found a beautiful girl laying flowers on a grave.
She was so beautiful that he forgot his ancient grief, and he thought that all his castles would be but a poor exchange for her face.
And the girl looked up at him from the grave, with eyes of forget me not, and said: "My lord, you mistake.
This is not sorrow.
THE FARMER AND THE CRANES
Some Cranes saw a farmer plowing a large field.
When the work of plowing was done, they patiently watched him sow the seed.
It was their feast, they thought.
So, as soon as the Farmer had finished planting and had gone home, down they flew to the field, and began to eat as fast as they could.
He had had experience with such birds before.
But he did not bring any stones with him.
He expected to scare the Cranes just by swinging the sling in the air, and shouting loudly at them.
They did not even hear the noise of stones whizzing through the air, and as for words, they would kill nobody.
At last they paid no attention whatever to the Farmer.
He wanted to save at least some of his grain.
So he loaded his sling with stones and killed several of the Cranes.
This had the effect the Farmer wanted, for from that day the Cranes visited his field no more.
THE FARMER AND HIS SONS
Do not on any account part with the estate that has belonged to our family for so many generations.
Somewhere on it is hidden a rich treasure.
I do not know the exact spot, but it is there, and you will surely find it.
Spare no energy and leave no spot unturned in your search."
The father died, and no sooner was he in his grave than the sons set to work digging with all their might, turning up every foot of ground with their spades, and going over the whole farm two or three times.
THE TWO POTS
Two Pots, one of brass and the other of clay, stood together on the hearthstone.
One day the Brass Pot proposed to the Earthen Pot that they go out into the world together.
But the Earthen Pot excused himself, saying that it would be wiser for him to stay in the corner by the fire.
"Don't let that keep you at home," urged the Brass Pot.
If we should happen to meet anything hard I will step between and save you."
The Earthen Pot could not survive that sort of companionship very long.
They had not gone ten paces before the Earthen Pot cracked, and at the next jolt he flew into a thousand pieces.
THE GOOSE AND THE GOLDEN EGG
There was once a Countryman who possessed the most wonderful Goose you can imagine, for every day when he visited the nest, the Goose had laid a beautiful, glittering, golden egg.
But it was not long before he grew impatient with the Goose because she gave him only a single golden egg a day.
He was not getting rich fast enough.
Then one day, after he had finished counting his money, the idea came to him that he could get all the golden eggs at once by killing the Goose and cutting it open.
But when the deed was done, not a single golden egg did he find, and his precious Goose was dead.
"So dear!
So dear!" crooned the Cardinal
She had taken possession of the sumac.
The location was her selection and he loudly applauded her choice.
She placed the first twig, and after examining it carefully, he spent the day carrying her others just as much alike as possible.
If she used a dried grass blade, he carried grass blades until she began dropping them on the ground.
If she worked in a bit of wild grape vine bark, he peeled grape vines until she would have no more.
She was not a skilled architect.
Her nest certainly was a loose ramshackle affair; but she had built it, and had allowed him to help her.
It was hers; and he improvised a paean in its praise.
Then she nestled them against her warm breast, and turned adoring eyes toward the Cardinal.
If he sang from the dogwood, she faced that way. If he rocked on the wild grape vine, she turned in her nest.
If he went to the corn field for grubs, she stood astride her eggs and peered down, watching his every movement with unconcealed anxiety.
The Cardinal forgot to be vain of his beauty; she delighted in it every hour of the day.
It was not enough that he brooded while she went to bathe and exercise.
The daintiest of every morsel he found was carried to her.
When she refused to swallow another particle, he perched on a twig close by the nest many times in a day; and with sleek feathers and lowered crest, gazed at her in silent worshipful adoration.
In the sumac he uttered not the faintest "Chip!" that might attract attention.
He was so anxious to be inconspicuous that he appeared only half his real size.
Always on leaving he gave her a tender little peck and ran his beak the length of her wing-a characteristic caress that he delighted to bestow on her.
If he felt that he was disturbing her too often, he perched on the dogwood and sang for life, and love, and happiness.
His music was in a minor key now.
So dear!"
The farmer leaned on his corn planter and listened to him intently.
"I swanny!
One night he said to his wife: "Maria, have you been noticin' the redbird of late?
I can't for the life of me make out what he's saying.
Maria felt flattered.
She always had believed that she had a musical ear.
Here was an opportunity to test it and please Abram at the same time.
She hastened her work the following morning, and very early slipped along the line fence.
Hiding behind the oak, with straining ear and throbbing heart, she eagerly listened.
"Clip, clip," came the sound of the planter, as Abram's dear old figure trudged up the hill. "Chip!
Chip!" came the warning of the Cardinal, as he flew to his mate.
As he trilled forth his tender caressing strain, the heart of the listening woman translated as did that of the brooding bird.
With shining eyes and flushed cheeks, she sped down the fence.
Panting and palpitating with excitement, she met Abram half-way on his return trip.
Forgetful of her habitual reserve, she threw her arms around his neck, and drawing his face to hers, she cried: "Oh, Abram!
Oh, Abram, my love!
My own!
So dear!"
"So dear!
So dear!" echoed the Cardinal.
The bewilderment in Abram's face melted into comprehension.
He swept Maria from her feet as he lifted his head.
You have got it, honey!
That's what he's saying, plain as gospel!
He gathered Maria in his arms, pressed her head against his breast with a trembling old hand, while the face he turned to the morning was beautiful.
So dear!"
After that Abram's devotion to his bird family became a mild mania.
He carried food to the top rail of the line fence every day, rain or shine, with the same regularity that he curried and fed Nancy in the barn.
He drove a stake to mark the spot where the killdeer hen brooded in the corn field, so that he would not drive Nancy over the nest.
Alders and sweetbriers grew in his fence corners undisturbed that spring if he discovered that they sheltered an anxious eyed little mother.
He left a square yard of clover unmowed, because it seemed to him that the lark, singing nearer the Throne than any other bird, was picking up stray notes dropped by the Invisible Choir, and with unequalled purity and tenderness, sending them ringing down to his brooding mate, whose home and happiness would be despoiled by the reaping of that spot of green.
He delayed burning the brush heap from the spring pruning, back of the orchard, until fall, when he found it housed a pair of fine thrushes; for the song of the thrush delighted him almost as much as that of the lark.
He left a hollow limb on the old red pearmain apple tree, because when he came to cut it there was a pair of bluebirds twittering around, frantic with anxiety.
His pockets were bulgy with wheat and crumbs, and his heart was big with happiness.
His very muscles seemed to relax, and new strength arose to meet the demands of his uplifted spirit.
Then he hunted a sign painter, and came home bearing a number of pine boards on which gleamed in big, shiny black letters:
Maria studied the signs meditatively.
Abram caught Maria, and planted a resounding smack on her cheek, where the roses of girlhood yet bloomed for him.
Then he filled his pockets with crumbs and grain, and strolled to the river to set the Cardinal's table.
He could hear the sharp incisive "Chip!" and the tender mellow love notes as he left the barn; and all the way to the sumac they rang in his ears.
The Cardinal met him at the corner of the field, and hopped over bushes and the fence only a few yards from him.
When Abram had scattered his store on the rail, the bird came tipping and tilting, daintily caught up a crumb, and carried it to the sumac.
His mate was pleased to take it; and he carried her one morsel after another until she refused to open her beak for more.
He made a light supper himself; and then swinging on the grape vine, he closed the day with an hour of music. He repeatedly turned a bright questioning eye toward Abram, but he never for a moment lost sight of the nest and the plump gray figure of his little mate.
So dear!"
He had overstayed his time, chasing a fat moth he particularly wanted for his mate, and she, growing thirsty past endurance, left the nest and went to the river.
Seeing her there, he made all possible haste to take his turn at brooding, so he arrived just in time to see a pilfering red squirrel starting away with an egg.
With a vicious scream the Cardinal struck him full force.
The Cardinal mournfully carried away the tell tale bits of shell, so that any one seeing them would not look up and discover his treasures.
three
THE SHADOW OF THE THUNDER OAK
Withered leaves still clung to the branches of the oak: torn and faded banners of the departed summer.
The bright crimson of autumn had long since disappeared, bleached away by the storms and the cold.
But to night these tattered remnants of glory were red again: ancient bloodstains against the dark blue sky.
Seen against that glowing background, it was but the silhouette of a crowd, vague, black, formless, mysterious.
The travellers paused for a moment at the edge of the thicket, and took counsel together.
"It is the assembly of the tribe," said one of the foresters, "the great night of the council.
I heard of it three days ago, as we passed through one of the villages.
All who swear by the old gods have been summoned.
It will be at the peril of our lives if we approach them.
At least we must hide the cross, if we would escape death."
I have seen it in a dream.
Here the cross must stand and be our rede."
They approached unnoticed, for all the multitude were looking intently towards the fire at the foot of the oak.
A stranger claims the warmth of your fire in the winter night."
The only figure untouched by the glow was the old priest, Hunrad, with his long, spectral robe, flowing hair and beard, and dead pale face, who stood with his back to the fire and advanced slowly to meet the strangers.
"Who are you?
Whence come you, and what seek you here?" His voice was heavy and toneless as a muffled bell.
Canst thou work miracles?"
The question came sharply, as if a sudden gleam of hope had flashed through the tangle of the old priest's mind.
"Stand still, then, thou common man," said Hunrad, scornfully, "and behold what the gods have called us hither to do.
This night is the hour of darkness and the power of winter, of sacrifice and mighty fear.
Thor!
The old priest stood silent for a moment.
His shaggy brows swept down over his eyes like ashes quenching flame.
Then he lifted his face and spoke.
"None of these things will please the god.
More costly is the offering that shall cleanse your sin, more precious the crimson dew that shall send new life into this holy tree of blood.
Thor claims your dearest and your noblest gift."
"Here," said the old man, with his voice vibrating as when a thick rope is strained by a ship swinging from her moorings, "here is the chosen one, the eldest son of the Chief, the darling of the people.
Hearken, Bernhard, wilt thou go to Valhalla, where the heroes dwell with the gods, to bear a message to Thor?"
The boy answered, swift and clear:
"Yes, priest, I will go if my father bids me.
Is it far away? Shall I run quickly?
Must I take my bow and arrows for the wolves?"
The other dragged at the silver chain about her neck until the rough links pierced her flesh, and the red drops fell unheeded on the snow of her breast.
"Yes, my Prince, both bow and spear shalt thou have, for the way is long, and thou art a brave huntsman.
But in darkness thou must journey for a little space, and with eyes blindfolded.
Fearest thou?"
"Naught fear I," said the boy, "neither darkness, nor the great bear, nor the were wolf.
Then the priest led the child in his raiment of lamb's wool to a broad stone in front of the fire.
He gave him his little bow tipped with silver, and his spear with shining head of steel.
He bound the child's eyes with a white cloth, and bade him kneel beside the stone with his face to the east.
Winfried moved noiselessly until he stood close behind the priest.
The old man stooped to lift a black hammer of stone from the ground,--the sacred hammer of the god Thor.
Summoning all the strength of his withered arms, he swung it high in the air.
It poised for an instant above the child's fair head-then turned to fall.
One keen cry shrilled out from where the women stood: "Me! take me!
not Bernhard!"
But swifter still was the hand of the deliverer.
Winfried's heavy staff thrust mightily against the hammer's handle as it fell.
Sideways it glanced from the old man's grasp, and the black stone, striking on the altar's edge, split in twain.
The branches of the oak shivered.
THE FELLING OF THE TREE
A swift mountain flood rolling down its channel; a huge rock tumbling from the hill side and falling in mid stream; the baffled waters broken and confused, pausing in their flow, dash high against the rock, foaming and murmuring, with divided impulse, uncertain whether to turn to the right or the left.
Even so Winfried's bold deed fell into the midst of the thoughts and passions of the council.
They were at a standstill.
The old priest crouched by the altar, silent.
Conflicting counsels troubled the air.
Let the sacrifice go forward; the gods must be appeased.
Not so, there is a better counsel yet; seize the stranger whom the gods have led hither as a victim and make his life pay the forfeit of his daring.
The angry voices clashed against each other and fell like opposing waves.
Then the chieftain Gundhar struck the earth with his spear and gave his decision.
"All have spoken, but none are agreed.
There is no voice of the council.
Keep silence now, and let the stranger speak.
His words shall give us judgment, whether he is to live or to die."
Winfried lifted himself high upon the altar, drew a roll of parchment from his bosom, and began to read.
A murmur of awe ran through the crowd.
There is magic in it.
Hearken to him in all things like a father.
Bow your hearts to his teaching.
He comes not for earthly gain, but for the gain of your souls.
Depart from evil works.
Worship not the false gods, for they are devils.
Offer no more bloody sacrifices, nor eat the flesh of horses, but do as our Brother Boniface commands you.
Build a house for him that he may dwell among you, and a church where you may offer your prayers to the only living God, the Almighty King of Heaven.'"
It was a splendid message: proud, strong, peaceful, loving.
The dignity of the words imposed mightily upon the hearts of the people.
They were quieted as men who have listened to a lofty strain of music.
"Tell us, then," said Gundhar, "what is the word that thou bringest to us from the Almighty.
Not a life shall be blotted out in the darkness tonight; but the great shadow of the tree which hides you from the light of heaven shall be swept away.
Since He has come to earth the bloody sacrifices must cease.
The dark Thor, on whom you vainly call, is dead.
His power in the world is broken.
Will you serve a helpless god?
See, my brothers, you call this tree his oak.
Does he dwell here?
Does he protect it?"
A troubled voice of assent rose from the throng.
The people stirred uneasily.
Women covered their eyes.
Hunrad lifted his head and muttered hoarsely, "Thor! take vengeance!
Thor!"
Winfried beckoned to Gregor.
"Bring the axes, thine and one for me.
Now, young woodsman, show thy craft!
The king tree of the forest must fall, and swiftly, or all is lost!"
The two men took their places facing each other, one on each side of the oak.
Firmly they grasped the axe helves and swung the shining blades.
"Tree god!" cried Winfried, "art thou angry?
Thus we fight thee!"
The axe heads glittered in their rhythmic flight, like fierce eagles circling about their quarry.
The broad flakes of wood flew from the deepening gashes in the sides of the oak.
Then the great wonder of Winfried's life came to pass.
Out of the stillness of the winter night, a mighty rushing noise sounded overhead.
A strong, whirling wind passed over the tree tops.
It gripped the oak by its branches and tore it from its roots.
Winfried let his axe drop, and bowed his head for a moment in the presence of almighty power.
Then he turned to the people, "Here is the timber," he cried, "already felled and split for your new building.
On this spot shall rise a chapel to the true God and his servant saint Peter.
Let us call it the tree of the Christ child.
Take it up and carry it to the chieftain's hall.
You shall go no more into the shadows of the forest to keep your feasts with secret rites of shame.
You shall keep them at home, with laughter and song and rites of love.
The horses tossed their heads and drew their load bravely, as if the new burden had made it lighter.
They kindled lights among the branches until it seemed to be tangled full of fire flies.
All the people listened, charmed into stillness.
"Mother," whispered the boy again, laying his finger on the stains upon her breast, "see, your dress is red!
What are these stains? Did some one hurt you?"
"Dear, be still, and listen!"
The boy obeyed.
His eyes were heavy with sleep.
But he heard the last words of Winfried as he spoke of the angelic messengers, flying over the hills of Judea and singing as they flew.
Suddenly his face grew bright. He put his lips close to Irma's cheek again.
"Oh, mother!" he whispered very low, "do not speak.
Do you hear them?
Those angels have come back again.
They are singing now behind the tree."
And some say that it was true; but others say that it was only Gregor and his companions at the lower end of the hall, chanting their Christmas hymn:
All glory be to God on high, And to the earth be peace! Good will, henceforth, from heaven to men Begin, and never cease.
CHAPTER four.
The cottages were prepared for the higher officers, but the men stacked arms in the open ground all about.
Colonel Winchester suppressed a groan.
Dick noticed that his face was pallid in the uncertain shadows, and he understood the agony of spirit that the brave man must suffer when he saw that they had been outflanked by their enemy.
Sergeant Whitley, moving forward a little, touched the colonel on the arm.
"All the clouds that we saw a little further back," he said, "have gathered together, an' the storm is about to bust.
"It's so, sergeant," said Colonel Winchester.
We've seen enough anyway and we'd better get back as fast as we can."
But the storm was upon them before they could reach their horses.
The last star was gone and the somber clouds covered the whole heavens.
Deep and sullen thunder began to mutter on the southwestern horizon.
Then came a mighty crash and a great blaze of lightning seemed to cleave the sky straight down the center.
The lightning and thunder made Dick jump, and for a few moments he was blinded by the electric glare.
"Are any of you hurt?"
"No," said Warner, who alone heard him, "but we're scared half to death.
When a drought breaks up I wish it wouldn't break up with such a terrible fuss.
Listen to that thunder again, won't you!"
Despite himself Dick shrank again.
The first bolt had struck a tree which had fallen within thirty feet of them, but the second left this bit of the woods unscathed.
The close, dense heat was swept away, and the first blasts of the rain were as cold as ice.
Dick heard Warner on his right, and he followed the sound of his voice.
He clapped his hand to the left side of his head, and felt there a big bump and a sharp ache. His weapons were still in his belt and he knew that his injuries were not serious, but he heard nothing save the drive and roar of the wind and rain.
There was no calling of voices and no beat of footsteps.
He divined at once that his comrades, wholly unaware of his fall, when no one could either see or hear it, had gone on without missing him. They might also mount their horses and gallop away wholly ignorant that he was not among them.
Although he was a little dazed, Dick had a good idea of direction and he plunged through the mud which was now growing deep toward the little ravine in which they had hitched their horses.
All were gone, including his own mount, and he had no doubt that the horse had broken or slipped the bridle in the darkness and followed the others.
He stood a while behind the trunk of a great tree, trying to shelter himself a little from the rain, and listened.
The storm was of uncommon fury.
He had never seen one fiercer, and knowing that he had little to dread from the Southerners while it raged he knew also that he must make his way on foot, and as best he could, to his own people.
He meant to keep close to the banks of the Rappahannock, and if he persisted he would surely come in time to Pope's army.
The rain did not abate.
Both armies were flooded that night, but they could find some measure of protection.
To the scouts and skirmishers and to Dick, wandering through the forest, nature was an unmitigated foe.
But nothing could stop the boy.
He was resolved to get back to the army with the news that a heavy Southern force was across the Rappahannock. Others might get there first with the fact, but one never knew.
He stumbled on.
He was able to keep his cartridges dry in his pouch, but that was all.
His wet, cold clothes flapped around him and he shivered to the bone.
He was compelled to stop a while and take refuge behind a big oak.
The Union and its fate, gigantic as they were, slipped away from his mind, and it took an effort of the will to bring them back.
But his will made the effort, and recalling his mission he struggled on again.
He had the river on his right, and it now became an unfailing guide.
The river swished high against its banks and once or twice, when he caught dim glimpses of it through the trees, he saw a yellow torrent bearing much brushwood upon its bosom.
He had very little idea of his progress.
It was impossible to judge of pace under such circumstances.
The army might be ten miles further on or it might be only two.
He grasped at weeds and bushes, but they slipped through his hands.
Then he shot into a creek, swollen by the flood, and went over his head.
He came up, gasping, struck out and reached the further shore.
But he had lost everything.
His belt had broken in his struggles, and pistols, small sword and ammunition were gone.
Then he laughed at the idea.
They were wrapped in cloaks, but cloaks and uniforms alike were sodden.
Dick looked at them attentively.
Just behind came three youths, and Dick's heart fairly leaped when he saw the last of the three.
He could not mistake the figure, and a turning of the head caused him to catch a faint glimpse of the face.
Dick was so sodden and cold and wretched that he was tempted to call out to them-the sight of Harry was like a light in the darkness-but the temptation was gone in an instant.
His way lay in another direction. What they wished he did not wish, and while they fought for the triumph of the South it was his business to endure and struggle on that he might do his own little part for the Union.
But despite the storm and his sufferings, he drew courage from nature itself.
While a portion of the Southern army was across it must be a minor portion, and certainly the major part could not span such a flood and attack.
The storm and time allied were now fighting for Pope.
The yellow torrent of the Rappahannock was now his only sure guide and he stuck to it.
He wondered why the rain and wind did not die down.
He became conscious after a while of a growing weakness, but he had recalled all the powers of his will and it was triumphant over his body. He trudged on on feet that were unconscious of sensation, and his face as if the flesh were paralyzed no longer felt the beat of the rain.
A mile or two further and in the swish of the storm he heard hoofbeats again.
Looking forth from the bushes he saw another line of horsemen, but now they were going in the direction of Pope's army.
Dick recognized these figures.
Shapeless as he might appear on his horse that was Colonel Winchester, and there were the broad shoulders of Sergeant Whitley and the figures of the others.
Colonel Winchester recognized the voice, but the light was so dim that he did not recognize him from whom it came.
"Colonel," cried Dick, "it is I, Richard Mason, whom you left behind!"
"So it is," said Sergeant Whitley, keener of eye than the others.
The whole troop set up a shout as Dick came forward, taking off his dripping cap.
Your horse must have broken loose in the storm. But here, you look as if you were nearly dead!
Jump up behind me!"
Dick made an effort, but his strength failed and he slipped back to the ground.
He had not realized that he was walking on his spirit and courage and that his strength was gone, so powerful had been the buffets of the wind and rain.
It's lucky we found you."
"It is, sir, and I not only look like a wreck but I feel like one.
But what a night!
What a night!
Not many men can be abroad at such a time.
"You have!
What did you see?"
"A mile or two back I passed a line of Southern horsemen, just as wet and bedraggled as ours."
"Might they not have been our own men?
It would be hard to tell blue and gray apart on such a night."
"One could make such a mistake, but in this case it was not possible. I saw my own cousin, Harry Kenton, riding with them.
I recognized them perfectly."
"Then that settles it.
But they must be few who dare to ride in such a storm."
"That's surely true, sir."
Earlier in the day Stuart, full of enterprise, and almost insensible to fatigue, had crossed the Rappahannock much higher up and at the head of a formidable body of his horsemen, unseen by scouts and spies, was riding around the Union right.
They galloped into Warrenton where the people, red hot as usual for the South, crowded around them cheering and laughing and many of the women crying with joy.
It was like Jackson and Stuart to drop from the clouds this way and to tell them, although the land had been occupied by the enemy, that their brave soldiers would come in time.
News, where a Northern force could not have obtained a word, was poured out for the South.
Stuart shook his plumed head until his long golden hair flew about his neck.
The Confederates, after the fierce fighting of the day before, had abandoned both gaps, and the way at last lay clear before the Army of the Potomac.
Dick was mounted again.
In fact his horse, after pulling the reins from his hands and fleeing from the Confederate fire, had been retaken by a member of his own regiment and returned to him.
It was another good omen.
But Dick said nothing to anybody of his duel with Harry Kenton.
He shuddered even now when he recalled it.
And yet there had been no guilt in either.
Again he was thankful.
"How did you stand that fighting yesterday afternoon, George?" Dick asked of Warner.
"First rate.
The open air agreed with me, and as no bullet sought me out I felt benefited.
I didn't get away from that hospital too soon.
"It's only eight miles from the gap," said Pennington, who had been making inquiries, "and as we have come three miles it must be only five miles away."
"Correct," said Warner, who was in an uncommonly fine humor.
"Your mathematical power grows every day, Frank.
Wonderful! wonderful! You'll soon have a great head on you, Frank."
"If some rebel cannoneer doesn't shoot it off in the coming battle.
By George, we're driving their skirmishers before us!
They don't seem to make any stand at all!"
Yet the Northern advance was slow.
"Why don't we hurry!" he exclaimed.
With Jackson tied up before Harper's Ferry, Lee's defeat is sure, unless he retreats across the Potomac, and that would be equivalent to a defeat.
Good Heavens, why don't we push on?"
"Do you know anything about the Antietam, colonel?" asked Dick.
"It's a narrow stream, but deep, and crossed by several stone bridges. It will be hard to force a crossing here, but further up it can be done with ease since we outnumber Lee so much that we can overlap him by far. I have my information from Shepard, and he makes no mistakes.
There is a church, too, on the upper part of the peninsula, a little church belonging to an order called the Dunkards."
"Ah," murmured Dick, "the little church of Shiloh!"
"What do you mean by that?"
It's another good omen.
We're bound to achieve a great victory, colonel."
"I hope and believe so.
We've the materials with which to do it.
But we've got to push and push hard."
The colonel raised his glasses and took a long look in front.
The whole country would have been heavy with forest had it not been for the tramp of war.
The glasses carried far.
Dick saw a line of trees which he surmised marked the course of the Antietam, and he saw small detachments of cavalry which he knew were watching the advance of the Army of the Potomac. Their purpose convinced him that Lee had not retreated across the Potomac, but that he would fight and surely lose.
Dick now believed that so many good omens could not fail.
A horseman galloped toward them.
It was Shepard again, dustier than ever, his face pale from weariness.
"What is it, mr Shepard?" asked Colonel Winchester.
"My God!
My God!" cried the colonel.
"Oh, that lost day!
What a day!
What a day!
Nothing can ever pay us back for the losing of it!"
Dick, too, felt a sinking of the heart, but despair was not written on his face as it was on that of his colonel.
Jackson might come, but it would only be with a part of his force, that which marched the swiftest, and the victory of the Army of the Potomac would be all the grander.
"Why, colonel!" he exclaimed, "we can beat them anyhow!"
"That's so, my lad, so we can!
And so we will!
It was childish of me to talk as I did.
Here, Johnson, blow your best on that trumpet.
I want our regiment to be the first to reach the Antietam."
Dick looked back, and he saw once more that vast billowing cloud of dust made by the marching army.
But in front he saw only quiet and peace, save for a few distant horsemen who seemed to be riding at random.
But he isn't going to cross without a battle, that's sure. The rebels are flushed with victory, they think they have the greatest leaders ever born and they believe, despite the disparity of numbers, that they can beat us."
"And I believe they can't," said Dick.
The regiment in its swift advance now came nearer to the Antietam, the narrow but deep creek between its high banks.
Great armies drawn up for battle were a spectacle that no boy could ever view calmly, and his heart beat so hard that it caused him actual physical pain.
He saw through the powerful glasses the walls of the little village of Sharpsburg, and to the north a roof which he believed was that of the Dunkard Church, of which Shepard spoke.
But his eyes came back from the church and rested on the country around Sharpsburg.
Beyond the peninsula he caught glimpses of the broad Potomac.
Jackson, even with his vanguard, could not arrive before night, and the main force certainly could not come from Harper's Ferry before the morrow.
Here was a full half day for the Army of the Potomac, enough in which to destroy a divided portion of the Army of Northern Virginia.
But Colonel Winchester raged again and again in vain.
There was no attack.
Brigade after brigade in blue came up and sat down before the Antietam.
The Winchester regiment was moved far to the north, where its officers hopefully believed that the first attack would be made.
Despite the delay, Dick and his comrades, thrilled at the great and terrible panorama spread before them.
But they did not hide the view of the armies, arrayed for battle, and with only a narrow river between.
Dick, through his own glasses saw Confederate officers watching them also.
He tried to imagine that this was Lee and that Longstreet, and that one of the Hills, and the one who wore a gorgeous uniform must surely be Stuart.
Why should they be allowed to ride about so calmly? His heart fairly ached for the attack.
McClellan said that fifty thousand men were there, and that Jackson was coming with fifty thousand more, but Shepard, who always knew, said that they did not number more than twenty thousand.
What a chance!
What a chance!
If he said anything at all he would have to say it in a guarded manner and to his best friends.
The Winchester regiment went into camp in a pleasant grove at the northern end of the Union line.
Dick and his two young comrades had no fault to find with their quarters.
They had dry grass, warm air and the open sky.
A more comfortable summer home for a night could not be asked. And there was plenty of food, too.
The Army of the Potomac never lacked it.
Heavenly aromas arose.
Dick and his comrades ate and drank, and then lay down in the grove.
If they must rest they would rest well.
Now and then they heard the booming of guns, and just before dark there had been a short artillery duel across the Antietam, but now the night was quiet, save for the murmur and movement of a great army.
Through the darkness came the sound of many voices and the clank of moving wheels.
Dick asked permission for his two comrades and himself to go down near the river and obtained it.
"But don't get shot," cautioned Colonel Winchester.
"The Confederate riflemen will certainly be on watch on the other side of the stream."
Dick promised and the three went forward very carefully among some bushes.
They were led on by curiosity and they did not believe that they would be in any great danger.
CHAPTER two.
Although I find a sad pleasure in lingering over these times, with such a history still impending, I cannot afford the indulgence.
Dear mother's simple funeral took me once more to my native place.
But difficulties, sore to encounter at such a time, would have met me on every side.
Moreover the kind act cheered and led me through despondency, like the hand and face of God.
Caring little what people might say or think, I could not stay at a distance.
Nature told me that it was my duty to go, and duty or not, I could not stay away.
So far away now, so hopelessly far away!
There it lies indeed, I can touch it, kiss it, and embrace it; but oh how small a part of mother! and even that part is not mine.
I can see it, but it never will know me again; I may die beside it, and it cannot weep.
The last last look of all on earth-they must have carried me away.
One of them brought me a bunch, then stared, and was afraid to offer them.
Some one from time to time gave out the words of a verse and then it was sung to a simple impressive tune. That ancient hymn, which has drowned so many sobs, I did not hear, but felt it.
We arrived at Vaughan saint Mary late in the afternoon of the second day. The whole of the journey was to me a long and tearful dream.
mr Huxtable came with us.
He had never before been further from home than Exeter; and his single visit to that city had formed the landmark of his life.
He never tried to comfort me as the others did.
The ignorant man knew better.
Alone I sat by my father's grave, with my mother's ready before my feet. They had cast the mould on the other side, so as not to move my father's coverlet.
The poor old pensioner had been true to her promise, and man's last garden was blooming like his first flower bed.
My mind (if any I had) seemed to have undergone some change.
Defiance, and pride, and savage delight in misery, were entirely gone; and depression had taken the place of dejection.
Death now seemed to me the usual and proper condition of things, and I felt it an impertinence that I should still be alive.
So I waited, with heavy composure, till she should be brought, who so often had walked there with me.
At length she was coming for good and all, and a space was left for me.
But I must not repose there yet; I had still my task before me.
The bell was tolling faster, and the shadows growing longer, and the children who had been playing at hide and seek, where soon themselves shall be sought in vain, had flitted away from sight, perhaps scared at my presence, perhaps gone home to tea, to enjoy the funeral afterwards. The evening wind had ceased from troubling the yews, and the short-lived songs of the birds were done.
The sun was setting behind me: suddenly a shadow eclipsed my own upon the red loam across the open grave.
Without a start, and dreamily (as I did all things now), I turned to see whence it came.
Within a yard of me stood mr Edgar Vaughan.
In a moment the old feeling was at my heart, and my wits were all awake.
I observed that he was paler than when I had seen him last, and the rigid look was wavering on his face, like steel reflected by water.
He lifted his hat to me.
I neither rose nor spoke, but turned and watched him.
I heard, with some surprise, his allusion to the Great Being, whom he was not wont to recognise; but I made him no reply.
"Very well," he resumed, with the ancient chill hardening over his features; "so then let it be.
I am not come to offer you condolence, which you would despise; nor do I mean to be present when you would account the sight of me an insult.
And yet I loved your mother, Clara; I loved her very truly."
This he said with such emotion, that a new thought broke upon me.
Quick as the thought, he asked, "Would you know who killed your father?"
"And my mother, too," I answered, "whose coffin I see coming."
He took his hat off, and the perspiration stood upon his forehead.
Betwixt suspense and terror, and the wildness of grief, I was obliged to lean on the headstone for support, and a giddiness came over me.
In vain I wiped them hurriedly and looked again.
mr Vaughan was gone; but on the grass at my feet lay a folded letter.
I seized it quickly, and broke the seal.
That moment a white figure appeared between the yew trees by the porch.
It was the aged minister leading my mother the last path of all. The book was in his hand, and his form was tall and stately, and his step so slow, that the white hair fell unruffled, while the grand words on his lips called majesty into his gaze.
Thrusting aside the letter, I followed into the Church, and stood behind the old font where I had been baptized; a dark and gloomy nook, fit for such an entrance.
She who had carried me there was carried past it now, and the pall waved in the damp cold air, and all the world seemed stone and mould.
CHAPTER six
"They're coming out of the ship." I spoke quietly, with my hand over my mouth, for fear they might hear me.
"One-two-three-four, five-six-seven-eight-nine.
That seems to be all.
"How are they armed?" I asked.
"Just knives," came the reply.
Afraid of accidents.
Have a ruling against it."
Abandon the ring target.
You, on the hilltops, all train on the repellors of the ships to the south.
Shoot at the word, but not before.
"Wilma, crawl over to your left where you can make a straight leap for the door in that ship.
These men are all walking around the wreck in a bunch.
I'll follow.
Maybe we won't be seen. We'll overpower the guard inside, but don't shoot.
They can't see over this wreck."
At last they were on the far side.
In a moment they would be picking their way into the wreck.
"Wilma, leap!" I almost whispered the order.
The distance between Wilma's hiding place and the door in the side of the Han ship was not more than fifteen feet.
She was already crouched with her feet braced against a metal beam.
Taking the lift of that wonderful inertron belt into her calculation, she dove headforemost, like a green projectile, through the door.
I followed in a split second, more clumsily, but no less speedily, bruising my shoulder painfully, as I ricocheted from the edge of the opening and brought up sliding against the unconscious girl; for she evidently had hit her head against the partition within the ship into which she had crashed.
We had made some noise within the ship.
"Any signs we have been observed?" I asked my men on the hillsides.
"Not yet," I heard the Boss reply.
"Ships overhead still standing.
No beams have been broken out.
Most of them have crawled into it out of sight."
"Good," I said quickly.
Knocked out.
We're not discovered yet.
I'll take care of them.
Stand a bit longer, but be ready."
I think my last words must have been heard by the man who was approaching, for he stopped suddenly.
I crouched at the far side of the compartment, motionless.
I would not draw my sword if there were only one of them.
Apparently reassured at the absence of any further sound, a man came around a sort of bulkhead-and I leaped.
And it was deserted.
I gazed at the mass of controls.
In the center of the compartment, on a massively braced universal joint mounting, was what I took for the repellor generator.
A dial on it glowed and a faint hum came from within its shielding metallic case.
But I had no time to study it.
Above all else, I was afraid that some automatic telephone apparatus existed in the room, through which I might be heard on the other ships. The risk of trying to jam the controls was too great.
I abandoned the idea and withdrew softly.
I ran back to the entrance compartment.
Wilma still lay where she had slumped down.
It was time to act.
I spoke.
"Are you boys all ready?" I asked, creeping to a position opposite the door and drawing my hand gun.
Again there was a chorus of assent.
I think my "three" was a bit weak.
I know it took all the courage I had to utter it.
For an agonizing instant nothing happened, except that the landing party from the ship strolled into my range of vision.
Then startled, they turned their eyes upward.
For an instant they stood frozen with horror at whatever they saw.
One hurled his knife at me.
It grazed my cheek.
Then a couple of them made a break for the doorway.
The rest followed.
But I fired pointblank with my hand gun, pressing the button as fast as I could and aiming at their feet to make sure my explosive rockets would make contact and do their work.
They had been fairly bunched, and I got them all.
Some eighth of a mile away I saw one of the ships crash to earth.
But it never reached it.
The other, farther away, drifted down diagonally, its disintegrator ray playing viciously over the ground below it.
His commands, sending out jumpers in pursuit of the descending ship, rang in my ears, but I paid no attention to them.
I leaped back into the compartment of the Han ship and knelt beside my Wilma.
"Oh, my head!" she groaned, coming to as I lifted her gently in my arms and strode out in the open with her.
"All but one crashed and that one is drifting down toward the south; we've captured this one we're in intact.
It was in the form of a public warning and news item, and read as follows:
So unless further evidence actually is developed, or the Heaven Born orders to the contrary, the Military will hold to a defensive policy.
The party debarked, leaving one man on board in the control cabin.
An instant later confused sounds reached the control room electrophone, such as might be made by a man falling heavily, and footsteps reapproached the control room, a figure entering and leaving the control room hurriedly.
The Base Captain now believes, and the stills of the photorecord support his belief, that this was not the crew member who had been left in the control room.
Before the Base Captain could speak to him he left the room, nor was any response given to the attention signal the Captain flashed throughout the ship.
"At this point projectoscope r b three of the ship now out of focus control, dimly showed the landing party walking back toward the ship.
Then the forward rep ray generator exploded, and all signals went dead.
"As its control room was shattered, verbal report from its Action Captain was precluded.
The projectoscope relays, swinging in wide arcs, recorded little of value except at the ends of their swings.
One of these, from a machine which happened to be set in telescopic focus, shows several views of great value in picturing the falls of the other ships, and all of the rear projectoscope records enable the reconstruction in detail of the pendulum and torsional movements of the ship, and its sag toward the earth.
CHAPTER seven
Incredible Treason
The synthetic fabrics plant had been partially wiped out, though the lower levels underground had not been reached by the dis ray.
The ammunition plant, and the rocket ship plant, which had just been about to start operation at the time of the raid, were intact, as were the other important plants.
During this period, a sharp check was kept upon Han messages, for the phone plant had been one of the first to be put in operation, and when it became evident that the Hans did not intend any immediate reprisals, the entire membership of the community was summoned back, and normal life was resumed.
On our return, we had a camp of our own, of course.
We were assigned to location ten seventeen.
And as might be expected, we had a great deal of banter over which one of us was Camp Boss.
I found myself a full fledged member of the Gang now, for I had elected to search no farther for a permanent alliance, much as I would have liked to familiarize myself with this twenty fifth Century life in other sections of the country.
The Wyomings had a high morale, and had prospered under the rule of Big Boss Hart for many years.
But many of the gangs, I found, were badly organized, lacked strong hands in authority, and were rife with intrigue.
On the whole, I thought I would be wise to stay with a group which had already proved its friendliness, and in which I seemed to have prospects of advancement.
Under these modern social and economic conditions, the kind of individual freedom to which I had been accustomed in the twentieth Century was impossible.
This entire modern life, it appeared to me, judging from my ancient viewpoint, was organized along what I called "political" lines.
As society was organized in the twentieth Century, I do not believe the system could have worked in anything but politics.
But owing to the centuries of desperate suffering the people had endured at the hands of the Hans, there developed a spirit of self sacrifice and consideration for the common good that made the scheme applicable and efficient in all forms of human co-operation.
The eternal cycle seems to be at work.
All this, however, is wandering afar from my story, which concerns our early battles against the Hans, and not our more modern problems of self control.
Our victory over the seven Han ships had set the country ablaze.
There was feverish activity in the ammunition plants, and the hunting of stray Han ships became an enthusiastic sport.
From the Pacific Coast came the report of a great transpacific liner of seventy five thousand tons "lift" being brought to earth from a position of invisibility above the clouds.
A dozen Sacramentos had caught the hazy outlines of its rep rays approaching them, head on, in the twilight, like ghostly pillars reaching into the sky.
They got one rep ray. The other was not strong enough to hold it up.
It floated to earth, nose down, and since it was unarmed and unarmored, they had no difficulty in shooting it to pieces and massacring its crew and passengers.
It seemed barbarous to me.
The Sand snipers, practically invisible in their sand colored clothing, and half buried along the beaches, lay in wait for days, risking the play of dis beams along the route, and finally registering four hits within a week.
"Tony," he said, "There are two things I want to talk to you about.
One of them will become public property in a few days, I think.
They're putting armor of great thickness in the hulls of their ships below the rep ray machines.
As near as we can gather from their reports, their laboratories have developed a new alloy of great tensile strength and elasticity which nevertheless lets the rep rays through like a sieve.
Our reports indicate that the Eries' rockets bounced off harmlessly.
I have been made Superboss of the Mid Atlantic Zone.
I'm thinking of developing a permanent field force, along the lines of the regular armies of the twentieth Century you told me about.
You know, a hundred and fifteen or twenty years ago there were certain of these people's ancestors who actually degraded themselves by mating with the Hans, sometimes even serving them as slaves, in the days before they brought all their service machinery to perfection.
But I hardly suspect the Pineys. There is little intelligence among them.
They wouldn't have the information to give the Hans, nor would they be capable of imparting it. They're absolute savages."
"Just what evidence is there that anybody has been clearing information to the Hans?" I asked.
"Well," he replied, "first of all there was that raid upon us.
That first Han ship knew the location of our plants exactly.
Then, the Hans quite obviously have learned that we are picking up their electrophone waves, for they've gone back to their old, but extremely accurate, system of directional control.
But they've been beaming those paths so hard, it looks as though they even had information of this strategy.
Finally, we've picked up three of their messages in which they discuss, with some nervousness, the existence of our 'mysterious' ultrophone."
"Then it's quite clear," I ventured, "that whoever is 'clearing' us to them is doing it piecemeal.
It sounds like a bit of occasional barter, rather than an out and out alliance.
The trick would be to locate the goods.
SUNDRY ARRIVALS IN eighteen fifty nine.
She stated that she had been very cruelly treated, that she was owned by a man named Joseph O'Neil, "a tax collector and a very bad man." Under said O'Neil she had been required to chop wood, curry horses, work in the field like a man, and all one winter she had been compelled to go barefooted.
Three weeks before Sarah fled, her mistress was called away by death; nevertheless Sarah could not forget how badly she had been treated by her while living.
According to Sarah's testimony the mistress was no better than her husband.
She was of a dark chestnut color, well formed, with a large and high forehead, indicative of intellect.
Fortunately, Caroline was a single woman.
Previous to being sold he was under a master by the name of Jonathan Bailey, who followed farming in the neighborhood of Laurel, Delaware, and, as a master, was considered a moderate man-was also well to do in the world; but the new master he could not endure, as he had already let the secret out that Levin was to be sent South.
William james Conner, his wife, child, and four brothers came next.
No very serious charges were made against Lewis, but on the contrary they said, that he had been looked upon as a "moderate slave holder;" they also said, that "he had been a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church for fifty years, and stood high in that body." Furthermore they stated, that he sold slaves occasionally.
Eight had been sold by him some time before this party escaped (two of them to Georgia); besides William james had been sold and barely found opportunity to escape.
Richard Williams gave a full account of himself, but only a meagre report was recorded.
He said that he came from Richmond, and left because he was on the point of being sold by john a Smith, who owned him.
He gave Smith credit for being a tolerable fair kind of a slave holder, but added, that "his wife was a notoriously hard woman;" she had made a very deep impression on Richard's mind by her treatment of him.
In finding himself on free ground, however, with cheering prospects ahead, he did not stop to brood over the ills that he had suffered, but rejoiced heartily.
He left his wife, Julia, who was free.
Henry could find no justification for such treatment.
He suffered greatly under the said Barnes, and finally his eyes were open to see that there was an Underground Rail Road for the benefit of all such slavery sick souls as himself.
So he got a ticket as soon as possible, and came through without accident, leaving amos Barnes to do the best he could for a living.
This candidate for Canada was twenty one years of age, and a likely looking boy.
Joseph Henry Hill.
The spirit of freedom in this passenger was truly the "one idea" notion.
Joseph was a fair specimen of a man physically and mentally, could read and write, and thereby keep the run of matters of interest on the Slavery question.
james Thomas junior, a tobacco merchant, in Richmond, had Joe down in his ledger as a marketable piece of property, or a handy machine to save labor, and make money.
To Joe's great joy he heard the sound of the Underground Rail Road bell in Richmond,--had a satisfactory interview with the conductor,--received a favorable response, and was soon a traveler on his way to Canada.
He left his mother, a free woman, and two sisters in chains.
He had been sold twice, but he never meant to be sold again.
ARRIVAL FROM RICHMOND, eighteen fifty nine.
FACE CANADA WARD FOR YEARS.
Quite an agreeable interview took place between Cornelius and the Committee.
He gave his experience of Slavery pretty fully, and the Committee enlightened him as to the workings of the Underground Rail Road, the value of freedom, and the safety of Canada as a refuge.
"Within the last four or five years, times have gone pretty hard with me.
My mistress, mrs Mary f Price, had lately put me in charge of her brother, Samuel m Bailey, a tobacco merchant of Richmond.
Both believed in nothing as they did in Slavery; they would sooner see a black man dead than free.
He and his sister own well on to one hundred head, though within the last few years he has been thinning off the number by sale.
On Christmas week he allowed me no board money, but made me a present of seventy five cents; my mistress added twenty five cents, which was the extent of their liberality.
I was well cared for.
If they did not get well as soon as he thought they should, he would order them to their work, and if they did not go he would beat them.
My cousin was badly beat last year in the presence of his wife, and he was right sick.
She let on to be very good."
My mother is now old, but is still in the service of Bailey.
He promised to take care of her in her old age, and not compel her to labor, so she is only required to cook and wash for a dozen slaves.
I believed that God would assist me if I would try.
I then made up my mind to put my case in the hands of God, and start for the Underground Rail Road.
But to bid good bye to my old mother in chains, was no easy job, and if my desire for freedom had not been as strong as my desire for life itself, I could never have stood it; but I felt that I could do her no good; could not help her if I staid.
As I was often threatened by my master, with the auction block, I felt I must give up all and escape for my life."
Section thirty five
The huge military machine was getting under way, the storm of public feeling was rising.
Congress had voted a huge loan, a country wide machine of propaganda was being organized, and the oratory of Four Minute Men was echoing from Maine to California.
The Reds had a religion, as you might call it; but this religion had failed to attract peter.
In the first place it was low; its devotees were wholly lacking in the graces of life, in prestige, and that ease which comes with assurance of power.
They were noisy in their fervors, and repelled peter as much as the Holy Rollers.
It was the fashion these days for orators and public men to vie with one another in expressing the extremes of patriotism, and peter would read these phrases, and cherish them; they came to seem a part of him, he felt as if he had invented them.
peter was so much of an American that the very sight of a foreigner filled him with a fighting impulse.
As for the Reds-well, peter groped for quite a time before he finally came upon a formula which expressed his feelings.
It was a famous clergyman who achieved it for him-saying that if he could have his way he would take all the Reds, and put them in a ship of stone with sails of lead, and send them forth with hell for their destination.
peter would ask this question of McGivney again and again, and McGivney would answer: "Keep your shirt on.
You're getting your pay every week.
What's the matter with you?"
"The matter is, I'm tired of listening to these fellows ranting," peter would say.
"I want to stop their mouths."
Yes, peter had come to take it as a personal affront that these radicals should go on denouncing the cause which peter had espoused. They all thought of peter as a comrade, they were most friendly to him; but peter had the knowledge of how they would regard him when they knew the real truth, and this imagined contempt burned him like an acid.
Sometimes there would be talk about spies and informers, and then these people would exhaust their vocabulary of abuse, and peter, of course, would apply every word of it to himself and become wild with anger.
"Well," said McGivney one day, "I've got something interesting for you now.
"These people are spending lots of money for printing," said McGivney, "and we hear this fellow Lackman is putting it up.
So peter was to meet a millionaire!
peter had never known one of these fortunate beings, but he was for them-he had always been for them.
He had read these stories as a child reads fairy tales.
They were his creatures of dreams, belonging to a world above reality, above pain and inconvenience.
The world had changed much since then, and for the worse; those who had power must take it as their task to restore beauty and splendor to the world, and to develop the gracious possibilities of being.
Now since peter had come to know the Reds, who wanted to blow up the palaces of the millionaires, he was more than ever on the side of his gods and goddesses.
His fervors for them increased every time he heard them assailed; he wanted to meet some of them, and passionately, yet respectfully, pour out to them his allegiance.
And now he was to meet one; it was to be a part of his job to cultivate one!
peter had met "Parlor Reds" at the home of the Todd sisters; the large shining ladies who came in large shining cars to hear him tell of his jail experiences.
But young Lackman was a real millionaire, McGivney positively assured him; and so peter was free to admire him in spite of all his freak ideas, which the rat faced man explained with intense amusement.
Young Lackman conducted a school for boys, and when one of the boys did wrong, the teacher would punish himself instead of the boy!
peter must pretend to be interested in this kind of "education," said McGivney, and he must learn at least the names of Lackman's books.
"But will he pay any attention to me?" demanded peter.
"That's the point-you've been in jail, you've really done something as a pacifist.
The address of young Lackman was the Hotel de Soto; and as he heard this, Peter's heart gave a leap.
peter had walked by the vast white structure, and seen the bronze doors swing outward, and the favored ones of the earth emerging to their magic chariots; but never had it occurred to him that he might pass thru those bronze doors, and gaze upon those hidden mysteries!
However, he would try it; McGivney must be right, for it was the same thing mrs james had impressed upon him many times.
You must watch what other people did, and practice by yourself, and then go in and do it as if you had never done anything else.
All life was a gigantic bluff, and you encouraged yourself in your bluffing by the certainty that everybody else was bluffing just as hard.
Section thirty nine
He had done his best, he declared; he had inquired at the desk, and waited and waited, but the hotel people had failed to notify him of Lackman's arrival.
All this was strictly true; but it did not pacify McGivney, who was in a black fury.
"It might have been worth thousands of dollars to you!" he declared.
"He's the biggest fish we'll ever get on our hook."
"Won't he come again?" asked grief stricken peter.
"No," declared the other.
"They'll get him at his home city."
"You damned fool!" was McGivney's response.
The rat faced man hadn't intended to tell peter so much, but in his rage he let it out.
He and a couple of his friends had planned to "get something" on this young millionaire, and scare the wits out of him, with the idea that he would put up a good many thousand dollars to be let off.
peter offered to follow the young man to his home city, and find some way to lure him back into McGivney's power.
After McGivney had stormed for a while, he decided that this might be possible.
peter read this news, and knew that he was in for another stormy hour with his boss.
"All right.
Meet me in the waiting room of Guggenheim's Department Store at two o'clock this afternoon.
But for God's sake forget Nell Doolin.
So here was peter dressed in his best clothes, as for his temporary honeymoon with the grass widow, and on the way to the rendezvous an hour ahead of time.
Nell wanted to know forthwith what was he doing; he answered that he could not tell, it was a secret of the most desperate import; he was under oath.
He told about the sums he had been making and was expecting to make; he told about Lackman, and showed Nell the newspaper with pictures of the young millionaire and his school.
"How do you mean?" asked peter, a little puzzled.
Could it be that Nell had any sympathy for these Reds?
"I mean," she answered, "that he'd have been worth more to you than all the rest put together."
They're getting the swag, and just giving you tips.
Peter's heart leaped.
"He'd cut my throat, and yours too, if he knew I was here.
But I'll try to get myself free, and then maybe-I won't promise, but I'll think over your problem, peter, and I'll certainly try to help, so that McGivney and Guffey and those fellows can't play you for a sucker any longer."
She would meet peter again the next day, and in a more private place than here.
She named a spot in the city park which would be easy to find, and yet sufficiently remote for a quiet conference.
Section forty
peter had been made so bold by Nell's flattery and what she had said about his importance, that he did not go back to McGivney to take his second scolding about the Lackman case.
peter walked the streets all day and a part of the night, thinking about Nell, and thrilling over the half promises she had made him.
They met next day in the park.
No one was following them, and they found a solitary place, and Nell let him kiss her several times, and in between the kisses she unfolded to him a terrifying plan.
peter had been doing the hard work, and these big fellows had been using him, handing him a tip now and then, and making fortunes out of the information he brought them.
What peter must do was to work up something of his own, and get the real money, and make himself one of the big fellows.
peter had the facts, he knew the people; he had watched in the Goober case exactly how a "frame up" was made, and now he must make one for himself, and one that would pay.
Nell had spent the night figuring over it, trying to pick out the right person.
She had hit on old "Nelse" Ackerman, the banker. Ackerman was enormously and incredibly wealthy; he was called the financial king of American City.
If peter had stood alone, would he have dared so perilous a dream as this?
Or was he a "piker"; a little fellow, the victim of his own fears and vanities?
So he said all right, he would go in on that plan; and proceeded to discuss with Nell the various personalities he might use.
"Mac," with his grim, set face and his silent, secretive habits, fitted perfectly to Peter's conception of a dynamiter.
Also "Mac" was Peter's personal enemy; "Mac" had just returned from his organizing trip in the oil fields, and had been denouncing peter and gossiping about him in the various radical groups.
"Mac" was the most dangerous Red of them all!
He must surely be one of the dynamiters!
He was the boldest and most defiant of all the Reds that peter had yet come upon.
It wasn't writing poems and passing resolutions that was wanted; it wasn't even men who would refuse to put on the uniform, but men who would take the guns that were offered to them, and drill themselves, and at the proper time face about and use the guns in the other direction.
There was once a King's daughter who was the most beautiful thing in the world, and as her hair was fair and reached to her feet she was called the Princess Goldenhair.
A handsome young King in the neighbourhood, although he had never seen this Princess, fell so deeply in love with her from what he had heard, that he could neither eat nor sleep.
When the King heard of her refusal he wept like a child.
He was as beautiful as the sun, and a more finely made fellow than any in the kingdom; everybody loved him except a few envious people, who were angry because the King favoured and confided in him, and in the presence of these, one day, Avenant incautiously remarked,
In this sad plight, Avenant exclaimed one day, "How have I offended his Majesty?
"It is true, sir," replied Avenant, "I did say so, for I would have represented your noble qualities in such a way, that she could not help being persuaded."
One day, alighting from his horse to write down some suitable words that had come into his mind, he saw a golden carp who, leaping from the water to catch flies, had thrown herself upon the river bank, and was now nearly dead.
Avenant pitied the poor thing, and put her carefully back into the water.
Recovering directly, the carp dived to the bottom, but returning to the edge of the river, said,
Another day as Avenant journeyed he noticed a raven who was pursued by an eagle.
The raven perched on a bough and cried.
"Avenant you have saved my life, I will not be ungrateful, I will repay you."
Not long after this, Avenant found an owl caught in a snare, he cut the strings, and freed the trembling captive.
"Avenant," said the owl, "you have saved my life, I will repay you."
When Avenant reached the Palace of the Princess Goldenhair, and saw the Princess seated upon her throne, she looked so lovely that at first all his fine speeches forsook him, and he could not utter a word; however, taking courage, he addressed her in exquisitely chosen language, begging her to become the King's bride.
They wandered down to the river, and there Avenant heard a voice calling him, and what should he see but the golden carp, with the Princess's ring in her mouth.
"Take it, dear Avenant," said she, "I promised to repay you for saving my life, and now I can fulfil my promise."
The Princess thought she must be dreaming when she saw the ring, but she set Avenant another task.
"Not far from here there is a prince named Galifron," said she; "he wishes to marry me, and threatens to ravish my kingdom if I refuse; but how can I accept him?
He is a giant, taller than my highest tower, he eats a man as a monkey would eat a chestnut, and when he speaks, his voice is so loud that it deafens those who hear him.
He will not take my refusal, but kills my subjects.
You must fight and bring me his head."
"Where are the children small, so small, With my teeth I will crush them all, On so many would I feed, feed, feed. The whole world can't supply my need."
He began striking out on all sides, but Avenant avoided his blows, and with his sword pierced him so many times that at last he fell to the ground.
Then Avenant cut off his head, and the raven, who had perched on a tree, said,
"I have not forgotten how you rescued me from the eagle; I promised to repay you, I think I have done so to day."
When he entered the town, crowds followed him crying, "Here is the brave Avenant who has slain the monster."
Avenant advanced to the Princess, and said, "Madam, your enemy is dead.
"Although it is so," answered the Princess, "I shall refuse him unless you will bring me some water from the Grotto of Darkness.
At the entrance there are two dragons, with fire in their eyes and mouths; inside the grotto there is a deep pit into which you must descend, it is full of toads, scorpions, and serpents.
At the bottom of this pit there is a little cave where flows the fountain of beauty and health. Positively I must possess the water; all who wash in it, if they are beautiful, continue so always, if they are ugly they become beautiful; if they are young they remain young, if they are old they regain their youth.
You cannot wonder, Avenant, that I will not leave my kingdom without taking it with me."
He was a frightful looking creature with a green and yellow body, and his tail was so long that it went into a hundred curves.
As he was speaking, a voice called, "Avenant, Avenant," and looking around he saw an owl.
"You saved my life from the fowlers," said the owl.
"I promised to repay you, the time has now come.
I will bring you the water of beauty."
And carrying the flask, the owl entered the grotto, unhindered, returning in less than a quarter of an hour with it full to the brim. Avenant thanked the owl heartily, and joyously started for the town, where he presented the flask to the Princess, who immediately gave orders to prepare for her departure.
But as she considered Avenant altogether charming, before she set out, she several times said to him: "If you wish, we need not go, for I will make you king of my country." But Avenant made reply:
The Congress, initiated by Virginia for the laudable purpose of endeavoring, by constitutional means, to adjust all the issues which threatened the peace of the country, failed to achieve anything that would cause or justify a reconsideration by the seceded States of their action to reclaim the grants they had made to the General Government, and to maintain for themselves a separate and independent existence.
The Commissioners sent by the Confederate Government, after having been shamefully deceived, as has been heretofore fully set forth, left the United States capital to report the result of their mission to the Confederate Government.
The bloodless bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter occurred on april thirteenth eighteen sixty one.
The garrison was generously permitted to retire with the honors of war.
Had there been delay, the more serious conflict between larger forces, land and naval, would scarcely have been bloodless, as the bombardment fortunately was.
The event, however, was seized upon to inflame the mind of the Northern people, and the disguise which had been worn in the communications with the Confederate Commissioners was now thrown off, and it was cunningly attempted to show that the South, which had been pleading for peace and still stood on the defensive, had by this bombardment inaugurated a war against the United States.
On the fifteenth day of the same month, President Lincoln, introducing his farce "of combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings," called forth the military of the several States to the number of seventy five thousand, and commanded "the persons composing the combinations" to disperse, etc
The levy of so large an army could only mean war; but the power to declare war did not reside in the President-it was delegated to the Congress only.
The authorities on this subject have been heretofore cited, and need not be referred to again.
To add that there could be no justification for the invasion of a State by an army of the United States, is but to repeat what has been said, on the absence of any authority in the General Government to coerce a State.
Two days had elapsed between the surrender of Fort Sumter and the proclamation of President Lincoln calling for seventy five thousand militia as before stated.
Two other days elapsed, and Virginia passed her ordinance of secession, and two days thereafter the citizens of Baltimore resisted the passage of troops through that city on their way to make war upon the Southern States.
Thus rapidly did the current of events bear us onward from peace to the desolating war which was soon to ensue.
The manly effort of the unorganized, unarmed citizens of Baltimore to resist the progress of armies for the invasion of her Southern sisters, was worthy of the fair fame of Maryland; becoming the descendants of the men who so gallantly fought for the freedom, independence, and sovereignty of the States.
The bold stand, then and thereafter taken, extorted a promise from the Executive authorities that no more troops should be sent through the city of Baltimore, which promise, however, was only observed until, by artifice, power had been gained to disregard it.
Virginia, as has been heretofore stated, passed her ordinance of secession on the seventeenth of April.
It was, however, subject to ratification by the people at an election to be held on the fourth Thursday of May. She was in the mean time, like her Southern sisters, the object of Northern hostilities, and, having a common cause with them, properly anticipated the election of May by forming an alliance with the Confederate States, which was ratified by the Convention on the twenty fifth of April.
To those who criticise South Carolina as having acted precipitately in withdrawing from the Union, it may be answered that intervening occurrences show that her delay could not have changed the result; and, further, that her prompt action had enabled her better to prepare for the contingency which it was found impossible to avert.
Referring to an application that had been made to him from Baltimore, I wrote: "Sustain Baltimore if practicable.
We will reenforce you." The universal feeling was that of a common cause and common destiny.
The early demonstrations of the enemy showed that Virginia was liable to invasion from the north, from the east, and from the west.
The narrow peninsula between the james and York Rivers had topographical features well adapted to defense.
CHAPTER fourteen
Genji well remembered the dream which he had dreamt at Suma, and in which his father, the late ex Emperor, had made a faint allusion to his fallen state.
He was always thinking of having solemn service performed for him, which might prove to be a remedy for evils.
He was now in the capital, and at liberty to do anything he wished.
In October, therefore, he ordered the grand ceremony of Mihakko to be performed for the repose of the dead.
Meanwhile the respect of the public towards Genji had now returned to its former state, and he himself had become a distinguished personage in the capital.
The Empress mother, though indisposed, regretted she had not ruined Genji altogether; while the Emperor, who had not forgotten the injunction of the late ex Emperor, felt satisfied with his recent disposition towards his half brother, which he believed to be an act of goodness.
He did not, however, believe he should be long on the throne, and when he found himself lonely, he often sent for Genji, and spent hours conversing with him, without any reserve, on public affairs.
At the end of the same month the Emperor abdicated the throne in favor of the Heir apparent, and his own son was made the Heir apparent to the new Emperor.
The new reign opened with several changes in public affairs.
Genji had been made Naidaijin.
He was to take an active part in the administration, but as he was not yet disposed to engage in the busy cares of official life, the ex Sadaijin, his father in law, was solicited to become the regent for the young Emperor.
He at first declined to accept the office, on the ground that he was advanced in age, that he had already retired from official life, and that the decline of his life left him insufficient energy.
Nor was it an unusual thing for a statesman who had retired from political scenes to assume again a place under another government.
So the ex Sadaijin did not persist in his refusal, but finally accepted the post of Dajiodaijin (the Premier).
He was now sixty three years of age.
His daughter by his wife, the fourth daughter of Udaijin, was now twelve years old, and was shortly expected to be presented at Court; while his son, who had sung the "high sand" at a summer day reunion at Genji's mansion, received a title.
The young Genji too, the son of the late Lady Aoi, was admitted to the Court of the Emperor and of the Heir apparent.
This he did with a notion of placing there some of his intimate friends, such as the younger one of the ladies in the "Villa of Falling Flowers."
Now the young maiden also, whom Genji had left behind at Akashi, and who had been in delicate health, did not pass away from his thoughts. He despatched a messenger there on the first of March, as he deemed the happy event would take place about that time.
When the messenger returned, he reported that she was safely delivered of a girl on the sixteenth of the month.
When he reflected on this prediction and on the series of events, he began thinking of the remarkable coincidences they betrayed; and as he thought of sending for her, as soon as the condition of the young mother's health would admit, he hurried forward the repairs of the eastern mansion.
He also thought that as there might not be a suitable nurse at Akashi for the child, he ought to send one from the capital.
Fortunately there was a lady there who had lately been delivered of a child.
Her mother, who had waited at Court when the late ex Emperor lived, and her father, who had been some time Court Chamberlain, were both dead.
She was now in miserable circumstances.
Genji sounded her, through a certain channel, whether she would not be willing to be useful to him.
This offer on his part she accepted without much hesitation, and was despatched with a confidential servant to attend on the new born child.
He also sent with her a sword and other presents.
She left the capital in a carriage, and proceeded by boat to the province of Settsu, and thence on horseback to Akashi.
The child was very healthy, and the nurse at once began to discharge her duties most faithfully.
Hitherto Genji did not confide the story of his relations with the maiden of Akashi to Violet, but he thought he had better do so, as the matter might naturally reach her ears.
He now, therefore, informed her of all the circumstances, and of the birth of the child, saying, "If you feel any unpleasantness about the matter, I cannot blame you in any way.
It was not the blessing which I desired.
How greatly do I regret that in the quarter where I wished to see the heavenly gift, there is none, but see it in another, where there was no expectation. The child is merely a girl too, and I almost think that I need pay no further attention.
But this would make me heartless towards my undoubted offspring.
Can you assure me you will be so?" At these words Violet's face became red as crimson, but she did not lose her temper, and quietly replied:
"Your saying this only makes me contemptible to myself, as I think my generosity may not yet be fully understood; but I should like to know when and where I could have learnt to be ungenerous."
"These words sound too hard to me," said he.
"How can you be so cruel to me?
He felt sorry for her, and continued, "In my anxious thoughts about this child, I have some intentions which may be agreeable to you also, only I will not tell you too hastily, since, if I do so now, they might not be taken in a favorable light.
The attractions of the mother seem only to have arisen from the position in which she was placed.
You must not think of the matter too seriously." He then briefly sketched her character and her skill in music.
But on the part of Violet she could not but think that it was cruel to her to give away part of his heart, while her thoughts were with no one but him, and she was quite cast down for some time.
Genji tried to console her.
The fifth of May was the fiftieth day of the birth of the child, so Genji sent a messenger to Akashi a few days before the time when he would be expected.
At Akashi the feast for the occasion was arranged with great pains, and the arrival of Genji's messenger was most opportune.
Let us now relate something about the Princess Wistaria.--Though she had become a nun, her title of ex Empress had never been lost; and now the change in the reigning sovereign gave her fresh honors.
She had been recognized as equivalent to an Empress regnant who had abdicated.
A liberal allowance was granted to her, and a becoming household was established for her private use.
She, however, still continued her devotion to religion, now and then coming to Court to see her son, where she was received with all cordiality; so that her rival, the mother of the ex Emperor, whose influence was overwhelming till lately, now began to feel like one to whom the world had become irksome.
In August, of this year, the daughter of Gon Chiunagon (formerly To no Chiujio) was introduced at Court.
She took up her abode in the Kokiden, which had been formerly occupied by her maternal aunt, and she was also styled from this time the Niogo of Kokiden.
What will he eventually do about this matter?
In the same autumn Genji went to the Temple of Sumiyoshi to fulfil his vows.
His party consisted of many young nobles and Court retainers, besides his own private attendants.
By a coincidence the maiden of Akashi, who had been prevented from coming to the Temple since the last year, happened to arrive there on the same day.
Her party travelled in a boat, and when it reached the beach they saw the procession of Genji's party crossing before them. They did not know what procession it was, and asked the bystanders about it, who, in return, asked them sarcastically, "Can there be anyone who does not know of the coming of Naidaijin, the Prince Genji, here to day to fulfil his vows?"
Most of the young nobles were on horseback, with beautifully made saddles; and others, including Ukon no Jio, Yoshikiyo, and Koremitz, in fine uniforms of different colors (blue, green, or scarlet), according to their different ranks, formed the procession, contrasting with the hue of the range of pine trees on both sides of the road.
Genji was in a carriage, which was followed by ten boy pages, granted by the Court in the same way as a late Sadaijin, Kawara, had been honored.
They were dressed in admirable taste, and their hair was twisted up in the form of a double knot, with ribbons of gorgeous purple.
The young Genji was also in the procession on horseback, and followed the carriage.
The maiden of Akashi witnessed the procession, but she avoided making herself known.
As to Genji, he knew nothing of the maiden being a spectator of the procession, and spent the whole night in the Temple with his party in performing services which might please the God.
On the morrow Genji and his party set off for their homes.
As they proceeded Genji hummed,
and he stopped, while contemplating the bay.
"Divinely led by love's bright flame, To this lone temple's shrine we come; And as yon beacon meets our eye, To dream, perchance, of days gone by."
Her health, however, began to fail, and she became a nun, and after some time died.
Before her death Genji visited her, and with her last breath she consigned her daughter to his care.
CHAPTER fifteen
OVERGROWN MUGWORT
When Genji was an exile on the sea coast, many people had been longing for his return.
Among these was the Princess Hitachi.
She was, as we have seen, the survivor of his Royal father, and the kindness which she had received from Genji was to her like the reflection of the broad starlit sky in a basin of water.
After Genji left the capital, however, no correspondence ever passed between them.
Several of her servants left her, and her residence became more lonely than ever.
One might imagine some mysterious "tree spirit" to reign there.
Nevertheless, such grounds as these, surrounded with lofty trees, are more tempting to those who desire to have a stylish dwelling.
Hence there were several Durios (local governors) who had become rich, and having returned from different provinces, sounded the Princess to see if she were inclined to part with her residence; but this she always refused to do, saying that, however unfortunate she might be, she was not able to give up a mansion inherited from her parents.
The mansion contained also a store of rare and antique articles. Several fashionable persons endeavored to induce the Princess to part with them; but such people appeared only contemptible to her, as she looked upon them as proposing such a thing solely because they knew she was poor.
Scarcely anyone paid a visit to her dwelling, her only occasional visitor being her brother, a priest, who came to see her when he came to the capital, but he was a man of eccentric character, and was not very flourishing in his circumstances.
The surrounding walls of massive earth broke down here and there and crumbled away, being trampled over by wandering cattle.
In spring and summer boys would sometimes play there.
Only one blessing remained there-no thief intruded into the enclosure, as no temptation was offered to them for their attack.
But never did the Princess lose her accustomed reserve, which her parents had instilled into her mind.
Society for her had no attractions.
This marriage had been considered an unequal match by the father of the Princess, and for this reason she was not very friendly with the family.
Jijiu, however, who was a daughter of the Princess's nurse, and who still remained with the Princess, used to go to her.
It seems to me that where a lady of ordinary degree is elevated to a higher position, she often acquires a refinement like one originally belonging to it; but there are other women, who when degraded from their rank spoil their taste and habits just like the lady in question.
She fondly hoped to revenge herself for having been formerly looked down upon, by showing an apparent kindness to the Princess Hitachi, and by wishing to take her into her home, and make her wait upon her daughters.
With this view she told Jijiu to tell her mistress to come to her, and Jijiu did so; but the Princess did not comply with this request.
About this time Genji returned, but for some while she heard nothing from him, and only the public rejoicing of many people, and the news about him from the outside world reached her ears.
It is not praiseworthy to display such self importance as you did in the lifetime of your father." And again she pressed her to go with her, but the Princess still clung to the hope that the time would come when Genji would remember her and renew his kindness.
Winter came!
One day, quite unexpectedly, the aunt arrived at the mansion, bringing as a present a dress for the Princess.
Her carriage dashed into the garden in a most pompous style, and drove right up to the southern front of the building.
"I must soon be leaving the capital," said the visitor.
"It is not my wish to leave you behind, but you would not listen to me, and now there is no help.
But this one, this Jijiu at least, I wish to take with me.
I have come to day to fetch her.
I cannot understand how you can be content with your present condition."
Here she manifested a certain sadness, but her delight at her husband's promotion was unmistakable, and she continued:--
"When your father was alive, I was looked down upon by him, which caused a coolness between us.
But nevertheless I at no time entertained any ill will towards you, only you were much favored by Prince Genji, as I heard, which made me abstain from visiting you often; but fortune is fickle, for those in a humble position often enjoy comfort, and those that are higher in station are not quite so well circumstanced.
I do really feel sorry to leave you behind."
The Princess said very little, but her answer was, "I really thank you for your kind attention, but I do not think I am now fit to move about in the world.
I shall be quite happy to bury myself under this roof."
"Well, you may think so, but it is simply foolish to abandon one's self, and to bury one's life under such a mass of dilapidation.
Had Prince Genji been kind enough to repair the place, it might have become transformed into a golden palace, and how joyous would it not be?
but this you cannot expect.
How, then, can you expect him to say that, because you have been faithful to him, he will therefore come to you again?"
These words touched the Princess, but she gave no vent to her feelings.
The visitor, therefore, hurried Jijiu to get ready, saying that they must leave before the dusk.
Thus I am puzzled between the two.
Let me, however, say this, I will only see the lady off to day."
Jijiu had been an attendant on the Princess for a very long time, besides, her mother (the nurse), before she died, told the Princess and her daughter that she hoped they might be long together; so the parting with Jijiu was very trying to the Princess who said to her that though she could not blame her for leaving, she still felt sorry to lose her.
To this Jijiu replied, that she never forgot the wishes of her mother, and was only too happy to share joy and sorrow with the Princess; yet she was sorry to say that circumstances obliged her to leave her for some time; but before she could say much, she was hurried away by the visitor.
It was one evening in April of the following year that Genji happened to be going to the villa of "the falling flowers," and passed by the mansion of the Princess.
A sigh of the evening breeze shook them as they hung in the silver moonlight, and scattered their rich fragrance towards the wayfarer.
He stopped his carriage, and said to Koremitz, who was with him as usual-
"Is this not the mansion of the Princess Hitachi?"
He then asked her about the Princess, and told her of Genji's intention.
To his inquiries he soon obtained a satisfactory answer, and duly reported it to Genji, who now felt a pang of remorse for his long negligence of one so badly circumstanced.
Inside, meanwhile, the Princess, though she felt very pleased, experienced a feeling of shyness.
She now took this out and put it on.
Genji was presently shown into the room.
The Princess, as usual, said very little, only thanking him for his visit.
This was about the time of the feast in the Temple of Kamo, and Genji received several presents under various pretexts.
He distributed these presents among his friends, such as those in the villa of "the falling flowers," and to the Princess.
He also sent his servant to the mansion of the latter to cut down the rampant mugwort, and he restored the grounds to proper order.
Moreover, he had a wooden enclosure placed all round the garden.
How was this?
it might have been preordained to be so.
CHAPTER twenty two
CONDITIONS FOR EFFICIENT LABOR
one.
In part it depends on the physical and mental powers of men; in part on things outside of the worker that either stimulate and strengthen him, or give him more favorable conditions in which to work.
These are respectively the subjective and the objective factors of efficiency.
In its broader sense, therefore, the phrase "efficiency of labor" implies any and every influence that makes for a larger and better supply of goods.
If resources were much more abundant than at present, many goods now scarce would become almost, or quite, free.
In the last chapter it was shown that an increase of the labor in a limited area or with a limited supply of indirect agents results in a decline in the relative bounty of the environment.
A certain part of the result is thought of as due to material agents, a certain part to labor.
"Efficiency of labor" is thought of in the narrower sense as the part of the product that is logically attributable to labor,--the laborer's contribution to the value of the product,--as apart from rent, the part attributable to material resources.
three.
The question arises: which is cause, which effect?
Some maintain that all that is needed to make workmen more efficient is to feed them well.
In some cases this is probably true.
The Porto Ricans enlisted in the American regular army are reported to have increased at once in strength, weight, and vigor; the Filipino recruits, thanks to the American army rations, soon outgrew their uniforms.
Some employers in Europe pay their workmen an extra sum on condition that it is spent for meat.
But if wages increase, it is by no means certain that more or better food will be bought or if it is that the workmen's powers will be increased.
There is some reason to believe that in America great numbers of our people, perhaps even many manual laborers, would be better off if they bought simpler and less costly food.
The maximum of health and vigor may be attained with moderate outlay, and beyond that point richer food doubtless does more harm than good.
Poor judgment in the selection of food is shown in many workers' families, and there is no appreciation of its influence on health.
A few years ago an experiment in the feeding of pigs was tried on the Cornell farm.
Four groups of six pigs each were put in four different pens and fed four different rations.
One group squealed more; another scratched more; another waxed fat faster.
They were given daily baths, special physical exercises, and were fed on a specially bountiful diet. Scientific philanthropy stopped there, but photographs "before and after," reproduced in the printed reports, show the great physical improvement that resulted, and a marked change occurred likewise in disposition and intelligence.
Many laboratory experiments have been made of late to test the chemical nature and the physiological effects of foods.
It is becoming more fully recognized that the quality and quantity of food, and the cooking of it, have a great influence on the economic quality of the worker.
The cost of clothing enough for comfort is, however, comparatively small, the amount spent for ornament is comparatively high.
Even more important in its effects on efficiency is housing.
As population grows more dense, these things become more difficult to secure; men are brought into unnatural conditions, the evils of slum and factory life develop, and the housing problem appears.
When the unsanitary conditions about each family are visited upon its neighbors, society must deal with them.
one.
There must be a close relation between work and the fruits of work.
We are accustomed to the thought that in an Asiatic despotism a worker beginning a task is uncertain whether he will reap the reward, as public officials may at any moment seize upon the fruits of his labor.
But in our own country similar evils are not entirely lacking.
Assessments often are unfair, and justice sometimes is bought. Men in high executive positions are able to make or mar the fortunes of their followers.
Sometimes a legislator from a country town goes to the state capital poor and returns rich.
Such things becoming generally known tend to break down the motives to industry.
Dishonesty in private business means the use of energy not to produce wealth, not to add to the sum for all to enjoy, but to get it from some one else.
Public corruption and commercial dishonesty alike entail on the industrious not only the immediate loss, but the far greater cost of weakened character, relaxed energy, and decreased efficiency of labor.
three.
It exists in some form throughout the world, and where it is not called by that name, the same caste spirit is at work.
Where slavery exists the master class at times feels its hardships.
"It is not so hard to live," says the hungry Creole daughter in "The Grandissimes," "but it is hard to be ladies....
We are compelled not to make a living.
Look at me: I can cook, but I must not cook; I am skilful with the needle, but I must not take in sewing; I could keep accounts; I could nurse the sick; but I must not." Nowhere in the world is there less caste than in America, but it is here.
The negro's low measure of industrial virtues is partly the cause of the prejudice against him, but in turn doubtless inherited class feeling is in some measure the cause of his inefficiency.
To close to a worker all but the menial occupations is to take from him the most powerful motives for effort.
The thought is paralyzing.
The race problem in America is in part one of caste sentiment, whatever can or cannot be done about it.
To Western eyes already the young men in the older East seem to be trammeled by social conventions.
In an older community there is less of hopeful ambition; one's position depends more on what his fathers achieved; in the new community, more on what he does himself.
If it is true, as wise students declare, that the frontier has been the nursery of our democratic ideas, we may well ask what effect the closing of the frontier will have on our national sentiment and on our material prosperity.
four.
The answer is determined by the balance of utility and disutility.
Does the pain of toil repel more than its fruits attract?
The use made of spare time differs according to climate, race, and temperament.
In the tropics the margin is converted usually into loafing, in the temperate zones largely into objective forms of enjoyment.
The prudent man, in the old maxims, makes hay while the sun shines and ploughs deep while sluggards sleep.
In the modern larger organization of industry, working hours are much the same for all workers in the establishment.
Individual preferences are still expressed, however, in irregularity of employment. In the South some manufacturers have found that on an average the negroes will work in a factory not more than five or six hours a day, working ten hours for four days and lying off two days a week.
A moderate change in that direction cannot but increase rather than diminish the efficiency of labor.
three. DIVISION OF LABOR
one.
Its full discussion would cover the whole field of political economy, but only its most essential aspects can here be touched upon.
The worker finds division of labor existing as a social institution and, according as he adapts himself to it wisely or foolishly, it increases more or less his efficiency.
two.
The natural advantages in another district must be large to enable it to start successfully against these acquired economies, and territorial division of labor thus tends to continue for long periods when once established.
three.
It is none too many, as every reason for the modern, as contrasted with the primitive, organization of industry should be included.
The phrase division of labor is but a synonym for specialization, a word that expresses all that is most characteristic of our complex industrial society.
The headings just given may serve, however, to suggest the leading phases of the subject.
In fact this fuller economic use of machinery and plant where a large product is turned out at one place, is a prime factor in the advantages of large production, a subject to be treated elsewhere much more fully than is here possible.
The most complex machines have been developed gradually by combinations and adaptations of simple tools, and the more a process is subdivided, the greater is the chance of hitting upon a device to repeat mechanically the few simple movements.
The world is filled with industrial misfits, "round men in square holes," good carpenters spoiled to make poor doctors.
Unreasoning imitation, family traditions, parental wishes, class pride, social prejudice, childish whim, are often decisive of the life career.
Happily in some cases, before too late, the man "finds himself," but too often the poverty of the family and the obstacles to education preclude the exercise of intelligent choice.
It is of importance to society as well as to the individual that talent should be discovered in time, that tasks should be fitted to aptitudes, that each member of society should attain to his highest efficiency.
REACTION OF CONSUMPTION ON PRODUCTION
one.
To take away the prospect of the enjoyment of goods is to take away all their value.
Food is consumed quickly, clothing more slowly, and houses wear out after many years.
The using up is, in some cases, due to the forces of nature, and is not hastened by enjoyment.
A house goes to ruin more rapidly if uninhabited than with a careful tenant; clothing is destroyed more quickly by moths than by wear.
The control of purchasing power means the potential control of industry to that degree. It was necessary in discussing the enterpriser to recognize that the buyer eventually dictates the direction of industry; the enterpriser seeks to produce that for which there is most demand.
A change of taste affects the value of natural agents.
Therefore, choosing vines or violets, pictures or pretzels, each with his nickel helps to determine what shall be produced.
The distribution of wealth thus affects the value of agents.
The wealthy spend relatively more for luxuries, the poor for food and other essentials.
If there were no rich men, the demand for vineyards producing fine wines would be less.
The very best qualities of goods take on the highest prices when there is a small, but very wealthy, class of purchasers.
Inventions often shift demand, and value follows.
The invention of the bicycle with pneumatic tires, coincident with the adoption of electric traction for street cars, reduced the price of horses between eighteen ninety and eighteen ninety five.
This change was sudden, extreme, and temporary, and there has since been a gradual adjustment and a return to the former values.
three.
Great herds of buffalo were slaughtered to get the hides, which were of comparatively slight value.
Rich land has been exhausted to get a few harvests.
The lender parts with his wealth and society uses it up.
An influence also is exerted from the side of goods upon the price of labor.
A low grade of labor that performs only simple tasks, and those but badly, is injured if demand shifts to better products.
Back of the sweat shop shirt is the problem of the inefficient worker.
Every buyer then determines in some degree the direction of industry. The market is a democracy where every penny gives a right of vote.
Undoubtedly there is here a great economic force which an enlightened public opinion, even without a formal association, can make in large measure effective.
Will he read a yellow journal or a pink or a white one?
He has a dollar; will he go to the theater or buy ten dishes of ice cream?
He decides to buy a book, and more type and paper are made, and more printers are employed; he subscribes to foreign missions and Christian workers penetrate farther into Africa.
Every purchase has far reaching consequences.
You may spend your monthly allowance as an agent of iniquity or of truth.
You cannot escape a choice even by burying the money, for that is either a demand for gold or a gift to the issuer of paper currency.
one.
In primitive society instinct and appetite must generally have been safe guides.
Food not merely appeased hunger and gratified the palate, but it gave strength.
In the struggle for existence the more efficient tribes survive, and those that develop many abnormal tastes must perish.
But the conditions of modern life are more complex, and temptations beset men on every side.
Food values are not measured by the pleasure afforded the palate.
The wide variety and greater choice now possible, even to the modest purse, make the chance of error much greater than in simpler conditions.
This subject, already touched upon in the sections on the efficiency of labor, deserves further notice.
From youth to age, the foolish choice of goods yields its harvest of ultimate misery.
When babies are fed on crackers dipped in coffee, or, as among the Italian immigrants, on stale bread dipped in sour wine, there is a poor foundation laid for a vigorous manhood.
Rich and poor cook too much for taste and too little for nutrition or digestion.
Much cooking is still done in ways fit only for our grandfathers who had cast iron stomachs and worked in the open air. Culinary methods have not been adapted as yet to a sedentary life.
Drinking tempts some men not only by taste, but by the appeal to sociability; to other coarser natures the joys of Bacchus offer the one hope of exhilaration.
The pleasure from alcoholic liquor may at the moment outweigh the cost in money, but a diseased appetite forbids any reckoning of the vast psychic cost that follows.
The coin paid for the drink is the beginning of the expense; misery, disgrace, degeneracy, and bestialty too often are the unreckoned items.
That was the historical order, and it is the logical order in most minds to day.
A mistake is made likewise by workers in physical tasks in imitating the dress of the wealthy and professional classes.
The dress of the higher classes often is chosen because of its unsuitableness for an active worker.
It serves thus to mark its wearer as one engaged in delicate tasks or as a person of leisure.
Possibly, therefore, because of their strong social ambitions, the manual workers in America more than elsewhere adopt a costume that is not sensible or sanitary.
three.
The choice of recreation reacts upon the nature of the man.
Will he read a book or play billiards?
In proper proportions both may be good, in excess both are evil.
Liking realism, does he read Howells or the blood curdling serial entitled "Piping the Mystery"?
Does he devote his spare hours to the "Scientific American" or to the "Police Gazette"?
At the moment there may be as much pleasure in one as in the other (and one might add, in Hibernian phrase, "Yes, and more too.").
Does he enjoy music, the theater, or the cheaper attractions of Coney Island and the Bowery?
Is his recreation permeated with a certain intellectual ambition?
Much depends on the natural bent; some natures incline to the healthy as the plant grows toward the sun
With most characters much depends on the influences of neighborhood life; thus the boy's clubs and college settlements of the cities, the schools and playgrounds of the villages, are tending to surround child life with healthier conditions, that will mould it into better social habits.
There are some moral qualities, however, that are closely connected with efficiency, while others are not.
Some individuals are corrupt in private personal relations, but "square" in business dealings.
But usually there is some connection between the two, and under modern conditions this is becoming closer.
Fitness for daily tasks is affected by the daily thoughts of the worker.
Sordid and foul thoughts, like an internal malady, sap the economic efficiency of the worker; clean, bright thoughts act as a tonic.
Drink, gambling, fast living, unfit men for positions of trust, while many pastimes leave the moral nature cleaner and stronger.
Few can live a double life-honorable, conscientious, and exact in one part of the day, and corrupt in another.
It is said that "A man is what his work makes him," but it is equally true that a man's work tends to become what he is.
A man fit for a higher kind of work rises to it in the usual order of things; but no matter how humble the task, it partakes of the worth and wholesomeness of its doer.
three. EFFECTS ON THE ABIDING WELFARE OF THE CONSUMER
one.
Momentary gratification is only a way station, not the journey's end.
Too often, in economic reasoning, things are looked at from the employer's point of view.
But, in the broader view, the welfare of men as men is the subject most worthy of economic study.
The workman's food is to gratify his hunger, primarily; not merely to make him a better working machine.
The use made of the income is itself a kind of production-its last stage.
Is the process, on the whole, worth while? This can only be judged by finding whether, on the whole, the welfare of man has been furthered.
The choice lies among many thousands of articles.
Utility varies not only according to the kinds of good, but according to the varying quantities of each.
Every moment, therefore, the conditions of a choice are changing.
The best use of income forbids the purchase of an additional unit of any good unless it affords the highest gratification obtainable, at the moment, at an equal price.
Various circumstances prevent the exact application of this rule.
Expenditure is a matter of habit, in large measure, rather than a matter of judgment.
The knowledge needed for a rational choice very often is lacking.
Appetites change, making unwise the old purchases, yet men go on buying the same things in the same proportions simply because a readjustment that would give greater gratification requires thought.
Finally, the best economic adjustment must conform to the abiding physical and moral welfare of the user, not to a temporary impulse; and such a choice is far more difficult than that of the temporary good.
three.
But old wants vary and new wants develop with prosperity.
Desire grows by what it feeds on.
Ambition passes on to other and higher peaks.
Wealth makes possible a new adjustment of life, a new character, both in the individual and in the society.
The thought that needs emphasis in this connection is that, while production and consumption are separable in thought and distinguishable in practice, they are not opposed in their ultimate purpose.
The highest fruits of production are in the lessons of sacrifice and discipline, and in its opportunities for experience and self expression.
Wealth, even in an economic view, is not the end of life, but merely the means to its realization.
An element added to the dress or to the diet heightens greatly the total gratification.
The result is a unit. Think of a dinner without butter, or a cranberry pie without sugar, or a dress suit without a linen collar.
Combinations of complementary goods enhance the enjoyment; inharmonious combinations decrease it.
That certain things "go together" is a fact that rests often in the nature of things. Complementary colors please the eye; well seasoned dishes please the palate.
Again, the harmony of goods is affected by the special nature of the occupation.
A farmer with his out of door life can use tobacco with far less danger than the sedentary worker.
A piano player cannot be a base ball player: the one requires soft and supple hands, the other hard and callous ones.
The young man must give up the piano or the game, or play both badly.
The harmony may rest on a still more complex social adjustment.
The loss to the man whose life is in the main on a higher plane is greater if he descends occasionally to a lower.
A ditch digger, looking at the question short sightedly, may deem "a good drunk" a very desirable form of enjoyment.
Wise consumption depends not alone on physical pleasures, but on the spiritual unity of the uses made of goods.
Happiness and character are akin in the qualities of simplicity and unity.
Happiness, so far as it depends on wealth, is a harmony of gratifications.
Character is a harmony of actions, a group of complementary deeds.
There can be no harmony, without a central, simple, guiding principle.
Life is a unity.
The results of the choice of goods are reflected in the health, intelligence, happiness, morality, and progress of society.
CHAPTER four
When the days grow cold and the nights are clear, There stalks abroad the spirit of fear.
It is sad but true.
But it shouldn't be.
It is the season when food is plentiful, and every one is fat and is, or ought to be, care free.
But instead of this, a grim, dark figure goes stalking over the Green Meadows and through the Green Forest, and it is called the Spirit of Fear.
It peers into every hiding place and wherever it finds one of the little people it sends little cold chills over him, little chills which jolly, round, bright mr Sun cannot chase away, though he shine his brightest.
It will not let them sleep.
It will not let them eat in peace.
It keeps them ever ready to fly or run at the slightest sound.
peter Rabbit was thinking of this as he sat at the edge of the dear Old Briar patch, looking over to the Green Forest.
The Purple Hills were more softly purple than at any other season of the year.
But peter had no thought for the beauty of it all, for the Spirit of Fear had visited even the dear Old Briar patch, and peter was afraid.
It wasn't fear of Reddy Fox, or Redtail the Hawk, or Hooty the Owl, or Old Man Coyote.
They were forever trying to catch him, but they did not strike terror to his heart because he felt quite smart enough to keep out of their clutches.
To be sure, they gave him sudden frights sometimes, when they happened to surprise him, but these frights lasted only until he reached the nearest bramble tangle or hollow log where they could not get at him.
It was even clutching at the hearts of Granny and Reddy Fox and of great, big Buster Bear.
It seemed to peter that no one was so big or so small that this terrible Spirit of Fear had not searched him out.
Far in the distance sounded a sudden bang.
peter jumped and shivered.
He knew that every one else who had heard that bang had jumped and shivered just as he had.
It was the season of hunters with terrible guns.
"I don't understand these men creatures," said peter to little mrs peter, as they stared fearfully out from the dear Old Briar patch.
"They seem to find pleasure, actually find pleasure, in trying to kill us.
Chapter thirteen
"Halt! halt!"
The rifle was lowered to a position of caution and the loud soldier came slowly forward.
I got shot, too."
"What?
Got shot?
His voice was anger toned.
"Who yeh talkin' to?
But his friend had interrupted hastily.
There was a faltering in his voice.
It's full 'a coffee.
He puckered his mouth with a critical air.
Still, I don't much think so.
The corporal went away.
From it swelled light smoke.
The youth contemplated his friend with grateful eyes.
The youth, with his manner of doglike obedience, got carefully down like a crone stooping.
He stretched out with a murmur of relief and comfort.
"Well, but hol' on a minnit," continued the youth.
After the reproof the youth said no more.
fourteen.
The Prince Who Acquired Wisdom.
The ploughman agreed and said.
"Listen attentively!
"The second maxim is this: You are the son of a Raja; whenever you go to bathe, do not bathe at the common bathing place, but at a place by yourself; give me my coin," and the Prince did so.
After this the prince set his face homewards as he had spent all his money; and he began to repent of having spent his gold pieces on advice that seemed worthless.
Her name was Pandora.
"My dear little Pandora," answered Epimetheus, "that is a secret, and you must be kind enough not to ask any questions about it.
"But who gave it to you?" asked Pandora.
"And where did it come from?"
Then, everybody was a child.
There needed no fathers and mothers to take care of the children; because there was no danger, nor trouble of any kind, and no clothes to be mended, and there was always plenty to eat and drink.
The truth is, those ugly little winged monsters, called Troubles, which are now almost as numerous as mosquitoes, had never yet been seen on the earth.
"And what in the world can be inside of it?"
"I wish, dear Pandora, you would try to talk of something else.
"Always talking about grapes and figs!" cried Pandora, pettishly.
"And, besides, I never do have any. This ugly box!
I am so taken up with thinking about it all the time.
"Pandora, what are you thinking of?" exclaimed Epimetheus.
Still, however, she could not help thinking and talking about the box.
"Oh, the most curious staff you ever saw!" cried Epimetheus.
"It was like two serpents twisting around a stick, and was carved so naturally that I, at first, thought the serpents were alive."
"I know him," said Pandora, thoughtfully.
"Nobody else has such a staff. It was Quicksilver; and he brought me hither, as well as the box.
"But until Quicksilver comes back and tells us so, we have neither of us any right to lift the lid of the box."
"What a dull boy he is!" muttered Pandora, as Epimetheus left the cottage.
Even Epimetheus would not blame me for that.
I need not open the box, and should not, of course, without the foolish boy's consent, even if the knot were untied."
When life is all sport, toil is the real play.
And then, for the rest of the day, there was the box!
It supplied her with such a variety of ideas to think of, and to talk about, whenever she had anybody to listen!
Or, if she chanced to be ill tempered, she could give it a push, or kick it with her naughty little foot.
And many a kick did the box-(but it was a mischievous box, as we shall see, and deserved all it got)--many a kick did it receive.
Do you think that you should be less curious than Pandora?
But you would not do it.
Oh, fie! No, no! Only, if you thought there were toys in it, it would be so very hard to let slip an opportunity of taking just one peep!
Ah, naughty Pandora!
Or was it merely the singing in Pandora's ears? Or could it be the beating of her heart?
The child could not quite satisfy herself whether she had heard anything or no But, at all events, her curiosity was stronger than ever.
As she drew back her head, her eyes fell upon the knot of gold cord.
I am resolved, at least, to find the two ends of the cord."
Pandora stopped to listen.
What a beautiful day it was!
"That face looks very mischievous," thought Pandora.
I have the greatest mind in the world to run away!"
But just then, by the merest accident, she gave the knot a kind of twist, which produced a wonderful result.
The gold cord untwined itself, as if by magic, and left the box without a fastening.
"What will Epimetheus say?
How shall I make him believe that I have not looked into the box?"
And so perhaps she might, if the enchanted face on the lid of the box had not looked so bewitchingly persuasive at her, and if she had not seemed to hear, more distinctly, than before, the murmur of small voices within.
"Let us out, dear Pandora-pray let us out!
Only let us out!"
He could not find a sweet grape or a ripe fig (if Epimetheus had a fault, it was a little too much fondness for figs); or, if ripe at all, they were overripe, and so sweet as to be cloying.
Neither did he himself know what ailed him, any better than they did.
The fingers of little girls, it has always appeared to me, are the fittest to twine flower wreaths; but boys could do it, in those days, rather better than they can now.
He entered softly, for he meant, if possible, to steal behind Pandora, and fling the wreath of flowers over her head, before she should be aware of his approach.
She was too intent upon her purpose.
Naughty Pandora! why have you opened this wicked box?"
She was crying bitterly, and sobbing as if her heart would break.
Suddenly there was a gentle little tap on the inside of the lid.
"What can that be?" cried Pandora, lifting her head.
But either Epimetheus had not heard the tap, or was too much out of humour to notice it.
At any rate, he made no answer.
Again the tap!
A sweet little voice spoke from within-
"No, no," answered Pandora, again beginning to sob, "I have had enough of lifting the lid!
You need never think that I shall be so foolish as to let you out!"
Come, come, my pretty Pandora!
"And what of it?"
"And, as the lid seems very heavy," cried Epimetheus, running across the room, "I will help you!"
"Pray, who are you, beautiful creature?" inquired Pandora.
Yes, my dear children, and I know something very good and beautiful that is to be given you hereafter!"
"Oh tell us," they exclaimed-"tell us what it is!"
Trust in my promise, for it is true."
But then that lovely and lightsome little figure of Hope!
What in the world could we do without her?
Why then give a date to this story I have to tell?
Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior of Hungary, a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis. Of the doctrines themselves-that is, of their falsity, or of their probability-I say nothing.
But there are some points in the Hungarian superstition which were fast verging to absurdity.
Never before were two houses so illustrious, mutually embittered by hostility so deadly.
The origin of this enmity seems to be found in the words of an ancient prophecy-"A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing."
To be sure the words themselves had little or no meaning.
Besides, the estates, which were contiguous, had long exercised a rival influence in the affairs of a busy government.
Moreover, near neighbors are seldom friends; and the inhabitants of the Castle Berlifitzing might look, from their lofty buttresses, into the very windows of the palace Metzengerstein.
Least of all had the more than feudal magnificence, thus discovered, a tendency to allay the irritable feelings of the less ancient and less wealthy Berlifitzings.
The prophecy seemed to imply-if it implied anything-a final triumph on the part of the already more powerful house; and was of course remembered with the more bitter animosity by the weaker and less influential.
Frederick, Baron Metzengerstein, was, on the other hand, not yet of age. His father, the Minister G-, died young.
His mother, the Lady Mary, followed him quickly after.
From some peculiar circumstances attending the administration of his father, the young Baron, at the decease of the former, entered immediately upon his vast possessions.
His castles were without number.
Upon the succession of a proprietor so young, with a character so well known, to a fortune so unparalleled, little speculation was afloat in regard to his probable course of conduct.
The horse itself, in the foreground of the design, stood motionless and statue like-while farther back, its discomfited rider perished by the dagger of a Metzengerstein.
On Frederick's lip arose a fiendish expression, as he became aware of the direction which his glance had, without his consciousness, assumed. Yet he did not remove it.
It was with difficulty that he reconciled his dreamy and incoherent feelings with the certainty of being awake.
The longer he gazed the more absorbing became the spell-the more impossible did it appear that he could ever withdraw his glance from the fascination of that tapestry.
The action, however, was but momentary, his gaze returned mechanically to the wall.
To his extreme horror and astonishment, the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its position.
The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended, at full length, in the direction of the Baron.
The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his gigantic and disgusting teeth.
Stupified with terror, the young nobleman tottered to the door.
As he threw it open, a flash of red light, streaming far into the chamber, flung his shadow with a clear outline against the quivering tapestry, and he shuddered to perceive that shadow-as he staggered awhile upon the threshold-assuming the exact position, and precisely filling up the contour, of the relentless and triumphant murderer of the Saracen Berlifitzing.
At the principal gate of the palace he encountered three equerries.
With much difficulty, and at the imminent peril of their lives, they were restraining the convulsive plunges of a gigantic and fiery colored horse.
"Whose horse?
We caught him flying, all smoking and foaming with rage, from the burning stables of the Castle Berlifitzing. Supposing him to have belonged to the old Count's stud of foreign horses, we led him back as an estray.
"The letters w v b are also branded very distinctly on his forehead," interrupted a second equerry, "I supposed them, of course, to be the initials of Wilhelm Von Berlifitzing-but all at the castle are positive in denying any knowledge of the horse."
"Extremely singular!" said the young Baron, with a musing air, and apparently unconscious of the meaning of his words.
"He is, as you say, a remarkable horse-a prodigious horse!
although, as you very justly observe, of a suspicious and untractable character, let him be mine, however," he added, after a pause, "perhaps a rider like Frederick of Metzengerstein, may tame even the devil from the stables of Berlifitzing."
If such had been the case, we know our duty better than to bring him into the presence of a noble of your family."
"True!" observed the Baron, dryly, and at that instant a page of the bedchamber came from the palace with a heightened color, and a precipitate step.
The young Frederick, during the conference, seemed agitated by a variety of emotions.
He soon, however, recovered his composure, and an expression of determined malignancy settled upon his countenance, as he gave peremptory orders that a certain chamber should be immediately locked up, and the key placed in his own possession.
A rapid smile shot over the countenance of the listener.
"How died he?"
"In his rash exertions to rescue a favorite portion of his hunting stud, he has himself perished miserably in the flames."
"Indeed;" repeated the vassal.
"Shocking!" said the youth, calmly, and turned quietly into the chateau.
From this date a marked alteration took place in the outward demeanor of the dissolute young Baron Frederick Von Metzengerstein.
Indeed, his behavior disappointed every expectation, and proved little in accordance with the views of many a manoeuvering mamma; while his habits and manner, still less than formerly, offered any thing congenial with those of the neighboring aristocracy.
He was never to be seen beyond the limits of his own domain, and, in this wide and social world, was utterly companionless-unless, indeed, that unnatural, impetuous, and fiery colored horse, which he henceforward continually bestrode, had any mysterious right to the title of his friend.
"Will the Baron honor our festivals with his presence?"
"Will the Baron join us in a hunting of the boar?"--"Metzengerstein does not hunt;" "Metzengerstein will not attend," were the haughty and laconic answers.
These repeated insults were not to be endured by an imperious nobility. Such invitations became less cordial-less frequent-in time they ceased altogether.
Some there were, indeed, who suggested a too haughty idea of self consequence and dignity.
Indeed, the Baron's perverse attachment to his lately acquired charger-an attachment which seemed to attain new strength from every fresh example of the animal's ferocious and demon like propensities-at length became, in the eyes of all reasonable men, a hideous and unnatural fervor.
In the glare of noon-at the dead hour of night-in sickness or in health-in calm or in tempest-the young Metzengerstein seemed rivetted to the saddle of that colossal horse, whose intractable audacities so well accorded with his own spirit.
There were circumstances, moreover, which coupled with late events, gave an unearthly and portentous character to the mania of the rider, and to the capabilities of the steed.
His stable, too, was appointed at a distance from the rest; and with regard to grooming and other necessary offices, none but the owner in person had ventured to officiate, or even to enter the enclosure of that particular stall.
Among all the retinue of the Baron, however, none were found to doubt the ardor of that extraordinary affection which existed on the part of the young nobleman for the fiery qualities of his horse; at least, none but an insignificant and misshapen little page, whose deformities were in everybody's way, and whose opinions were of the least possible importance.
One tempestuous night, Metzengerstein, awaking from a heavy slumber, descended like a maniac from his chamber, and, mounting in hot haste, bounded away into the mazes of the forest.
As the flames, when first seen, had already made so terrible a progress that all efforts to save any portion of the building were evidently futile, the astonished neighborhood stood idly around in silent and pathetic wonder.
But a new and fearful object soon rivetted the attention of the multitude, and proved how much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.
Up the long avenue of aged oaks which led from the forest to the main entrance of the Chateau Metzengerstein, a steed, bearing an unbonneted and disordered rider, was seen leaping with an impetuosity which outstripped the very Demon of the Tempest.
The career of the horseman was indisputably, on his own part, uncontrollable.
The agony of his countenance, the convulsive struggle of his frame, gave evidence of superhuman exertion: but no sound, save a solitary shriek, escaped from his lacerated lips, which were bitten through and through in the intensity of terror.
The fury of the tempest immediately died away, and a dead calm sullenly succeeded.
CHAPTER seventeen
One day, about a fortnight after the coroner's inquest had been held, and when the excitement of the terrible affair was calming down and Polk Street beginning to resume its monotonous routine, Old Grannis sat in his clean, well kept little room, in his cushioned armchair, his hands lying idly upon his knees.
It was evening; not quite time to light the lamps.
Old Grannis had drawn his chair close to the wall-so close, in fact, that he could hear Miss Baker's grenadine brushing against the other side of the thin partition, at his very elbow, while she rocked gently back and forth, a cup of tea in her hands.
Old Grannis's occupation was gone.
That morning the bookselling firm where he had bought his pamphlets had taken his little binding apparatus from him to use as a model.
The transaction had been concluded.
Old Grannis had received his check.
It was large enough, to be sure, but when all was over, he returned to his room and sat there sad and unoccupied, looking at the pattern in the carpet and counting the heads of the tacks in the zinc guard that was fastened to the wall behind his little stove.
It was five o'clock, the time when she was accustomed to make her cup of tea and "keep company" with him on her side of the partition.
The minutes passed; side by side, and separated by only a couple of inches of board, the two old people sat there together, while the afternoon grew darker.
There was nothing for him to do.
His hands lay idly in his lap.
His table, with its pile of pamphlets, was in a far corner of the room, and, from time to time, stirred with an uncertain trouble, he turned his head and looked at it sadly, reflecting that he would never use it again.
The absence of his accustomed work seemed to leave something out of his life.
It did not appear to him that he could be the same to Miss Baker now; their little habits were disarranged, their customs broken up.
He could no longer fancy himself so near to her.
They would drift apart now, and she would no longer make herself a cup of tea and "keep company" with him when she knew that he would never again sit before his table binding uncut pamphlets.
He had sold his happiness for money; he had bartered all his tardy romance for some miserable banknotes.
He had not foreseen that it would be like this.
A vast regret welled up within him.
What was that on the back of his hand?
Old Grannis leant his face in his hands.
Not only did an inexplicable regret stir within him, but a certain great tenderness came upon him. The tears that swam in his faded blue eyes were not altogether those of unhappiness.
For thirty years his eyes had not been wet, but tonight he felt as if he were young again.
He had never loved before, and there was still a part of him that was only twenty years of age.
He could not tell whether he was profoundly sad or deeply happy; but he was not ashamed of the tears that brought the smart to his eyes and the ache to his throat.
He did not hear the timid rapping on his door, and it was not until the door itself opened that he looked up quickly and saw the little retired dressmaker standing on the threshold, carrying a cup of tea on a tiny Japanese tray.
She held it toward him.
"I was making some tea," she said, "and I thought you would like to have a cup."
One moment she had been sitting quietly on her side of the partition, stirring her cup of tea with one of her Gorham spoons.
She was quiet, she was peaceful.
The evening was closing down tranquilly.
Her room was the picture of calmness and order.
The geraniums blooming in the starch boxes in the window, the aged goldfish occasionally turning his iridescent flank to catch a sudden glow of the setting sun
The next moment she had been all trepidation.
It seemed to her the most natural thing in the world to make a steaming cup of tea and carry it in to Old Grannis next door.
It seemed to her that he was wanting her, that she ought to go to him.
With the brusque resolve and intrepidity that sometimes seizes upon very timid people-the courage of the coward greater than all others-she had presented herself at the old Englishman's half open door, and, when he had not heeded her knock, had pushed it open, and at last, after all these years, stood upon the threshold of his room.
She had found courage enough to explain her intrusion.
"I was making some tea, and I thought you would like to have a cup."
Old Grannis dropped his hands upon either arm of his chair, and, leaning forward a little, looked at her blankly.
He did not speak.
The retired dressmaker's courage had carried her thus far; now it deserted her as abruptly as it had come.
Her cheeks became scarlet; her funny little false curls trembled with her agitation.
What she had done seemed to her indecorous beyond expression.
It was an enormity.
She had done this-she who could not pass him on the stairs without a qualm. What to do she did not know.
Helplessly, and with a little quaver in her voice, she repeated obstinately:
"I was making some tea, and I thought you would like to have a cup of tea." Her agitation betrayed itself in the repetition of the word.
She felt that she could not hold the tray out another instant.
Already she was trembling so that half the tea was spilled.
Old Grannis still kept silence, still bending forward, with wide eyes, his hands gripping the arms of his chair.
Then with the tea tray still held straight before her, the little dressmaker exclaimed tearfully:
"Oh, I didn't mean-I didn't mean-I didn't know it would seem like this.
I only meant to be kind and bring you some tea; and now it seems SO improper.
I-I-I'm SO ashamed!
I don't know what you will think of me.
I-" she caught her breath-"improper"--she managed to exclaim, "unlady like-you can never think well of me-I'll go.
I'll go." She turned about.
"Stop," cried Old Grannis, finding his voice at last.
Miss Baker paused, looking at him over her shoulder, her eyes very wide open, blinking through her tears, for all the world like a frightened child.
"Stop," exclaimed the old Englishman, rising to his feet.
"I didn't know it was you at first.
I hadn't dreamed-I couldn't believe you would be so good, so kind to me.
Oh," he cried, with a sudden sharp breath, "oh, you ARE kind.
I-I-you have-have made me very happy."
"No, no," exclaimed Miss Baker, ready to sob.
"It was unlady like.
You will-you must think ill of me." She stood in the hall.
The tears were running down her cheeks, and she had no free hand to dry them.
"Let me-I'll take the tray from you," cried Old Grannis, coming forward.
A tremulous joy came upon him.
Never in his life had he been so happy.
At last it had come-come when he had least expected it.
He felt his awkwardness leaving him.
He was almost certain that the little dressmaker loved him, and the thought gave him boldness.
He came toward her and took the tray from her hands, and, turning back into the room with it, made as if to set it upon his table. But the piles of his pamphlets were in the way.
Both of his hands were occupied with the tray; he could not make a place for it on the table. He stood for a moment uncertain, his embarrassment returning.
"Oh, won't you-won't you please-"
"Wait, I'll help you," she said.
She came into the room, up to the table, and moved the pamphlets to one side.
"Thanks, thanks," murmured Old Grannis, setting down the tray.
"Now-now-now I will go back," she exclaimed, hurriedly.
"No-no," returned the old Englishman.
"Don't go, don't go.
I've been so lonely to night-and last night too-all this year-all my life," he suddenly cried.
"I-I-I've forgotten the sugar."
"But I never take sugar in my tea."
"But it's rather cold, and I've spilled it-almost all of it."
"I'll drink it from the saucer." Old Grannis had drawn up his armchair for her.
"Oh, I shouldn't.
"Think ILL of you?" cried Old Grannis, "think ILL of you?
Why, you don't know-you have no idea-all these years-living so close to you, I-I-" he paused suddenly.
It seemed to him as if the beating of his heart was choking him.
"I thought you were binding your books to night," said Miss Baker, suddenly, "and you looked tired.
I thought you looked tired when I last saw you, and a cup of tea, you know, it-that-that does you so much good when you're tired.
But you weren't binding books."
"No, no," returned Old Grannis, drawing up a chair and sitting down. "No, I-the fact is, I've sold my apparatus; a firm of booksellers has bought the rights of it."
"I thought you always did about four o'clock.
I used to hear you when I was making tea."
It hardly seemed possible to Miss Baker that she was actually talking to Old Grannis, that the two were really chatting together, face to face, and without the dreadful embarrassment that used to overwhelm them both when they met on the stairs.
She had often dreamed of this, but had always put it off to some far distant day.
It was to come gradually, little by little, instead of, as now, abruptly and with no preparation. That she should permit herself the indiscretion of actually intruding herself into his room had never so much as occurred to her.
Yet here she was, IN HIS ROOM, and they were talking together, and little by little her embarrassment was wearing away.
"Yes, yes, I always heard you when you were making tea," returned the old Englishman; "I heard the tea things.
I used to pass the whole evening that way."
"And, yes-yes-I did too," she answered.
"I used to make tea just at that time and sit there for a whole hour."
"And didn't you sit close to the partition on your side?
I could even fancy that I could hear your dress brushing against the wall paper close beside me.
Didn't you sit close to the partition?"
Old Grannis shyly put out his hand and took hers as it lay upon her lap.
"Didn't you sit close to the partition on your side?" he insisted.
"No-I don't know-perhaps-sometimes.
Oh, yes," she exclaimed, with a little gasp, "Oh, yes, I often did."
Then Old Grannis put his arm about her, and kissed her faded cheek, that flushed to pink upon the instant.
After that they spoke but little.
The day lapsed slowly into twilight, and the two old people sat there in the gray evening, quietly, quietly, their hands in each other's hands, "keeping company," but now with nothing to separate them.
It had come at last.
After all these years they were together; they understood each other.
They stood at length in a little Elysium of their own creating.
THE END OF IT
Yes! and the bedpost was his own.
Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!
'The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.
O Jacob Marley!
Heaven and the Christmas Time be praised for this!
He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call.
He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.
'They are not torn down,' cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed curtains in his arms, 'They are not torn down, rings and all.
I know they will!'
His hands were busy with his garments all this time: turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.
'I don't know what to do!' cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath, and making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings. 'I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy, I am as giddy as a drunken man.
A merry Christmas to everybody!
A happy New Year to all the world!
Whoop!
Hallo!'
He had frisked into the sitting room, and was now standing there, perfectly winded.
'There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!' cried Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace.
'There's the door by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered!
There's the window where I saw the wandering Spirits!
It's all right, it's all true, it all happened.
Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.
'I don't know what day of the month it is,' said Scrooge. 'I don't know how long I have been among the Spirits.
I don't know anything.
I'm quite a baby.
Never mind.
I don't care.
Hallo!
Whoop! Hallo here!'
He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard.
Clash, clash, hammer; ding, dong, bell!
Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clash, clash!
Oh, glorious, glorious!
Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head.
No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; golden sunlight; heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells.
Glorious!
'EH?' returned the boy with all his might of wonder.
'What's to day, my fine fellow?' said Scrooge.
'It's Christmas Day!' said Scrooge to himself.
'I haven't missed it.
The Spirits have done it all in one night.
They can do anything they like. Of course they can.
Of course they can.
'Hallo!' returned the boy.
'Do you know the poulterer's in the next street but one, at the corner?' Scrooge inquired.
'I should hope I did,' replied the lad.
'An intelligent boy!' said Scrooge.
'A remarkable boy!
Do you know whether they've sold the prize turkey that was hanging up there?--Not the little prize turkey: the big one?'
'What a delightful boy!' said Scrooge. 'It's a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!'
'It's hanging there now,' replied the boy.
'Is it?' said Scrooge.
'Go and buy it.'
'Walk ER!' exclaimed the boy.
'No, no,' said Scrooge. 'I am in earnest.
Go and buy it, and tell 'em to bring it here, that I may give them the directions where to take it. Come back with the man, and I'll give you a shilling.
Come back with him in less than five minutes, and I'll give you half a crown!'
The boy was off like a shot.
He must have had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half as fast.
'I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's,' whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh.
'He shan't know who sends it.
It's twice the size of Tiny Tim.
Joe Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's will be!'
The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one; but write it he did, somehow, and went downstairs to open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's man.
As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker caught his eye.
'I shall love it as long as I live!' cried Scrooge, patting it with his hand.
'I scarcely ever looked at it before.
What an honest expression it has in its face!
It's a wonderful knocker!--Here's the turkey.
Hallo! Whoop!
How are you!
Merry Christmas!'
He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped 'em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing wax.
'Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town,' said Scrooge. 'You must have a cab.'
Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when you don't dance while you are at it.
But if he had cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of sticking plaster over it, and been quite satisfied.
He dressed himself 'all in his best,' and at last got out into the streets.
The people were by this time pouring forth, as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and, walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile.
He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good humoured fellows said, 'Good morning, sir!
A merry Christmas to you!' And Scrooge said often afterwards that, of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.
'My dear sir,' said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and taking the old gentleman by both his hands, 'how do you do?
I hope you succeeded yesterday.
It was very kind of you.
A merry Christmas to you, sir!'
'mr Scrooge?'
'Yes,' said Scrooge. 'That is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant to you.
Allow me to ask your pardon.
'If you please,' said Scrooge.
'Not a farthing less.
A great many back payments are included in it, I assure you.
Will you do me that favour?'
'My dear sir,' said the other, shaking hands with him, 'I don't know what to say to such munifi----'
'Don't say anything, please,' retorted Scrooge. 'Come and see me.
Will you come and see me?'
'I will!' cried the old gentleman.
And it was clear he meant to do it.
'Thankee,' said Scrooge. 'I am much obliged to you.
I thank you fifty times.
Bless you!'
He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows; and found that everything could yield him pleasure.
He had never dreamed that any walk-that anything-could give him so much happiness.
In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew's house.
He passed the door a dozen times before he had the courage to go up and knock.
But he made a dash and did it.
'Nice girl! Very.'
'Where is he, my love?' said Scrooge.
'He's in the dining room, sir, along with mistress.
I'll show you upstairs, if you please.'
'Thankee.
He knows me,' said Scrooge, with his hand already on the dining room lock.
'I'll go in here, my dear.'
He turned it gently, and sidled his face in round the door.
They were looking at the table (which was spread out in great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous on such points, and like to see that everything is right.
'Fred!' said Scrooge.
Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started!
Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn't have done it on any account.
'Why, bless my soul!' cried Fred, 'who's that?'
I have come to dinner.
It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off.
He was at home in five minutes.
But he was early at the office next morning.
Oh, he was early there!
If he could only be there first, and catch Bob Cratchit coming late!
That was the thing he had set his heart upon.
And he did it; yes, he did!
The clock struck nine.
No Bob.
A quarter past.
He was full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see him come into the tank.
His hat was off before he opened the door; his comforter too.
He was on his stool in a jiffy, driving away with his pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.
'You are!' repeated Scrooge.
'Yes, I think you are.
Step this way, sir, if you please.'
'It's only once a year, sir,' pleaded Bob, appearing from the tank.
'It shall not be repeated.
'Now, I'll tell you what, my friend,' said Scrooge.
'I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer.
And therefore,' he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the tank again-'and therefore I am about to raise your salary!'
He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it, holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait waistcoat.
'A merry Christmas, Bob!' said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back.
'A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year!
I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!
Make up the fires and buy another coal scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!'
He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.
His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.
He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle ever afterwards; and it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.
May that be truly said of us, and all of us!
CHAPTER twenty two
After the first few minutes of watching Tom click out the messages, the little throng of castaways that had gathered about the shack, moved away.
The matter had lost its novelty for them, though, of course, they were vitally interested in the success of Tom's undertaking.
"Any answer yet, mr Swift?" she would ask.
"We can hardly expect any so soon," and mrs Nestor would depart, with a sigh.
He consulted with his two friends on the subject, and mr Damon said:
"Well, the best plan, I think, would be only to send out the flashes over the wires at times when other wireless operators will be on the lookout, or, rather, listening.
We can't get any more here."
"That's true," admitted Tom, "but how can we pick out any certain time, when we can be sure that wireless operators, within a zone of a thousand miles, will be listening to catch clicks which call for help from the unknown?"
"We can't," decided mr Fenwick.
Tom shook his head.
"Have you any plan, then?" asked mr Damon.
"I thought of this," said Tom.
"I'll send out our call for help from nine to ten in the morning.
Then I'll wait, and send out another call from two to three in the afternoon.
"That ought to be sufficient," agreed mr Fenwick.
"Certainly we must save our gasolene, for there is no telling how long we may have to stay here, and call for help."
"I guess we all do," remarked mr Fenwick.
"But, Tom, here is another matter.
Have you thought about getting an answer from the unknown-from some ship or wireless station, that may reply to your calls?
How can you tell when that will come in?"
"I can't."
"Then won't you or some of us, have to be listening all the while?"
"No, for I think an answer will come only directly after I have sent out a call, and it has been picked up by some operator.
But to guard against that I will sleep with the telephone receiver clamped to my ear.
"Yes," answered Tom, simply.
"Yes," replied the young inventor, with a smile.
The latter listened a moment.
"All I can hear are some faint clicks," he said.
"But they are a message," spoke Tom.
"Wait, I'll translate," and he put the receiver to his ear.
"'STEAMSHIP "FALCON" REPORTS A SLIGHT FIRE IN HER FORWARD COMPARTMENT,'" said Tom, slowly.
"'IT IS UNDER CONTROL, AND WE WILL PROCEED.'"
"Bless my soul, I never can understand it!"
"I did not catch it all, nor to whom it was sent."
"Even if they have had a fire, it is out now, and they ought to be glad to save life."
"Yes, but sometimes it is easier to pick up messages than it is to send them.
There was a flooding rush of water, but no harm resulted.
"It is coming nearer," said mr Parker.
"What is?" demanded mr Hosbrook.
"The destruction of our island.
My theory will soon be confirmed," and the scientist actually seemed to take pleasure in it.
"Oh, you and your theory!" exclaimed the millionaire in disgust. "Don't let me hear you mention it again!
Haven't we troubles enough?" whereat mr Parker went off by himself, to look at the place where the cliff had fallen.
Each night Tom slept with the telephone receiver to his ear, but, though it clicked many times, there was not sounded the call he had adopted for his station-"E.
I."--Earthquake Island.
mrs Nestor came up the little hill to the shack where Tom was clicking away.
"None yet, but they may come any minute," and Tom tried to speak cheerfully.
"I certainly hope so," added Mary's mother, "But I came up more especially now, mr Swift, to inquire where you had stored the rest of the food."
"The rest of the food?"
"Yes, the supply you took from the wrecked airship.
"The reserve," murmured Tom.
Isn't there any more?"
Tom did not answer.
Their food was nearly gone, yet the castaways from the RESOLUTE thought there was still plenty.
As a matter of fact there was not another can, except those in the kitchen shack.
"Oh-all right," answered Tom, weakly.
His hand dropped from the key of the instrument.
Truly the situation was desperate.
Tom shook his head.
A REPLY IN THE DARK
The young inventor looked out of the wireless shack.
They were gathered in a group about mr Jenks, who seemed to be talking earnestly to them. The two ladies were over near the small building that served as a kitchen.
"Well, I don't know where any more is to come from.
We've stripped the WHIZZER bare." He glanced toward what remained of the airship.
But there came no answering clicks to the "E.
I." station-to Earthquake Island-and, after a little longer working of the key, Tom shut down the dynamo, and joined the group on the beach.
I have large interests at stake.
"What do you think about it, Tom?" asked mr Damon, turning to the young inventor.
"Think about what?"
He thinks we should leave the island."
I think it would be a good plan to make one, then anchor it some distance out from the island.
"Yes, that's a good idea, too," conceded Tom.
"And we must stock it well with provisions," said mr Damon.
"Put plenty of water and food aboard."
"We can't," spoke Tom, quietly.
"Why not?"
"Because we haven't plenty of provisions.
That's what I came down to speak about," and the lad related what mrs Nestor had said.
"Then there is but one thing to do," declared mr Fenwick.
"What?" asked Captain Mentor.
"We must go on half rations, or quarter rations, if need be.
That will make our supply last longer.
And another thing-we must not let the women folks know.
Just pretend that we're not hungry, but take only a quarter, or at most, not more than a half of what we have been in the habit of taking.
There is plenty of water, thank goodness, and we may be able to live until help comes."
"Then shall we build the raft?" asked mr Hosbrook.
A smaller raft, as a sort of ferry, was also made.
This occupied them all that day, and part of the next.
In the meanwhile, Tom continued to flash out his appeals for help, but no answers came.
The men cut down their rations, and when the two ladies joked them on their lack of appetite, they said nothing.
Tom was glad that mrs Nestor did not renew her request to him to get out the reserve food supply from what remained in the wreck of the airship.
Perhaps mr Nestor had hinted to her the real situation.
On board were put cans of water, which were lashed fast, but no food could be spared to stock the rude craft.
All the castaways could depend on, was to take with them, in the event of the island beginning to sink, what rations they had left when the final shock should come.
This done, they could only wait, and weary was that waiting.
He heard message after message flash through space, and click on his instrument, but none of them was in answer to his.
On his face there came a grim and hopeless look.
He caught some, by turning them over on their backs, and also located a number of nests of eggs under the warm sands.
Some fish were caught, and some clams were cast up by the tide, all of which eked out the scanty food supply that remained.
The two ladies suspected the truth now and they, too, cut down their allowance.
Tom, who had been sitting with the men in their sleeping shack, that evening, rose, as the hour of ten approached.
"Well, are you off?" asked mr Damon, kindly.
"I wish some of us could relieve you, Tom."
"Oh, I don't mind it," answered the lad "Perhaps the message may come to night."
Hardly had he spoken than there sounded the ominous rumble and shaking that presaged another earthquake.
The shack rocked, and threatened to come down about their heads.
"We must be doomed!" cried mr Parker.
"The island is about to sink! Make for the raft!"
"Wait and see how bad it is," counseled mr Hosbrook.
"It may be only a slight shock."
"I guess it's passed over," spoke mr Fenwick.
An instant later there came another tremor, but it was not like that of an earthquake shock.
It was more like the rumble and vibration of an approaching train.
"Look!" cried Tom, pointing to the left.
Their gaze went in that direction, and, under the light of a full moon they saw, sliding into the sea, a great portion of one of the rocky hills.
"A landslide!" cried Captain Mentor.
"The island is slowly breaking up."
"It confirms my theory!" said mr Parker, almost in triumph.
"Forget your theory for a while, Parker, please," begged mr Hosbrook.
They found that the earthquake shock had slightly disturbed the apparatus, and it took them half an hour to adjust it.
As there had been a delay on account of the landslide, it was eleven o'clock before Tom began sending out any flashes, and he kept it up until midnight.
But there came no replies, so he shut off the power, and prepared to get a little rest.
"It looks pretty hopeless; doesn't it?" said mr Fenwick, as he and mr Damon were on their way back to the sleeping shack.
"Yes, it does.
Our signal hasn't been seen, no ships have passed this way, and our wireless appeal isn't answered.
It does look hopeless but, do you know, I haven't given up yet."
"Why not?"
"Because I have faith in Tom Swift's luck!" declared the eccentric man.
"Perhaps, but here there doesn't seem to be anything to do.
"That's all right.
He'll get an answer yet, you see if he doesn't."
It was an hour past midnight.
The telephone receiver on his ear hurt him, and he could not sleep.
"Guess I'll start her up, and send out some calls," he murmured.
"I might just happen to catch some ship operator who is up late.
He tested the wireless apparatus.
It shot out great long sparks, which snapped viciously through the air.
Then, in the silence of the night, Tom clicked off his call for help for the castaways of Earthquake Island.
For half an hour he sent it away into space, none of the others in their shacks below him, awakening.
But what was this?
He listened.
It was not a jumble of dots and dashes, conveying through space a message that meant nothing to him.
No!
The call of his station-"e i"--Earthquake Island!
"WHERE ARE YOU?
WHAT'S WANTED?"
"I GET YOUR MESSAGE 'E.
DO I HEAR YOU RIGHT? REPEAT." Tom heard those questions in the silence of the night.
With trembling fingers Tom pressed his own key.
Out into the darkness went his call for help.
"WE ARE ON EARTHQUAKE ISLAND." He gave the longitude and latitude. "COME QUICKLY o r WE WILL BE ENGULFED IN THE SEA!
Came then this query:
"WHAT'S THAT ABOUT AIRSHIP?"
"NEVER MIND AIRSHIP," clicked Tom.
"SEND HELP QUICKLY!
JUST CAUGHT YOUR MESSAGE.
THOUGHT IT A FAKE."
"NO FAKE," Tom sent back.
HOW SOON CAN YOU COME?"
Then came the report:
He rushed from the shack, calling to the others.
"What's that?" demanded mr Hosbrook.
Tom briefly told of how the message had come to him in the night.
"Tell them to hurry," begged the rich yacht owner.
"Say that I will give twenty thousand dollars reward if we are taken off!"
"I must get to the place where-"
Then he seemed to recollect himself, and stopped suddenly. "Tell them to hurry," he begged Tom.
The whole crowd of castaways, save the women, were gathered about the wireless shack.
Suddenly the wireless instruments hummed.
"Another message," whispered Tom.
He listened.
FROM VIRGINIA, MARYLAND AND DELAWARE.
ARCHER BARLOW, ALIAS EMIT ROBINS.
This passenger arrived from norfolk virginia in eighteen fifty three.
For the last four years previous to escaping, he had been under the yoke of dr George Wilson.
Archer declared that he had been "very badly treated" by the Doctor, which he urged as his reason for leaving.
As Archer had been "sickly" most of the time, during the last year, he complained that there was "no reduction" in his hire on this account.
When a slave reached this decision, he was in a very hopeful state.
He was near the Underground Rail Road, and was sure to find it, sooner or later.
His arrival in Philadelphia, per one of the Richmond steamers, was greeted with joy by the Vigilance Committee, who extended to him the usual aid and care, and forwarded him on to freedom.
For a number of years, he has been a citizen of Boston.
This "piece of property" fled in the fall of eighteen fifty three.
As a specimen of this article of commerce, he evinced considerable intelligence.
He was a man of dark color, although not totally free from the admixture of the "superior" southern blood in his veins; in stature, he was only ordinary.
For leaving, he gave the following reasons: "I found that I was working for my master, for his advantage, and when I was sick, I had to pay just as much as if I were well-seven dollars a month.
But my master was cross, and said that he intended to sell me-to do better by me another year.
The man whom Samuel was compelled to call master was named Hoyle.
The Committee's interview with Samuel was quite satisfactory, and they cheerfully accorded to him brotherly kindness and material aid at the same time.
john SPENCER AND HIS SON WILLIAM, AND james ALBERT.
These individuals escaped from the eastern shore of Maryland, in the Spring of eighteen fifty three, but were led to conclude that they could enjoy the freedom they had aimed to find, in New Jersey.
They procured employment in the neighborhood of Haddonfield, some six or eight miles from camden new jersey, and were succeeding, as they thought, very well.
Things went on favorably for about three months, when to their alarm "slave hunters were discovered in the neighborhood," and sufficient evidence was obtained to make it quite plain that, john, William and james were the identical persons, for whom the hunters were in "hot pursuit." When brought to the Committee, they were pretty thoroughly alarmed and felt very anxious to be safely off to Canada.
While the Committee always rendered in such cases immediate protection and aid, they nevertheless, felt, in view of the imminent dangers existing under the fugitive slave law, that persons disposed to thus stop by the way, should be very plainly given to understand, that if they were captured they would have themselves the most to blame.
But the dread of Slavery was strong in the minds of these fugitives, and they very fully realized their folly in stopping in New Jersey.
The Committee procured their tickets, helped them to disguise themselves as much as possible, and admonished them not to stop short of Canada.
HETTY SCOTT ALIAS MARGARET DUNCANS AND DAUGHTER PRISCILLA.
The motive which prompted them to escape was the fact that their master had "threatened to sell" them.
She had three children of her own to bring, besides she was intimately acquainted with a young man and a young woman, both slaves, to whom she felt that it would be safe to confide her plans with a view of inviting them to accompany her.
The young couple were ready converts to the eloquent speech delivered to them by Hetty on Freedom, and were quite willing to accept her as their leader in the emergency.
For prudential reasons it was deemed desirable to separate the party, to send some one way and some another.
Thus safely, through the kind offices and aid of the friends at Quakertown, they were duly forwarded on to the Committee in Philadelphia.
Here similar acts of charity were extended to them, and they were directed on to Canada.
ROBERT FISHER.
THIS PASSENGER AVAILS HIMSELF OF HOLIDAY WEEK, BETWEEN CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR'S, TO MAKE HIS NORTHERN TRIP.
Robert was about thirty years of age, dark color, quite tall, and in talking with him a little while, it was soon discovered that Slavery had not crushed all the brains out of his head by a good deal.
Far from it.
The fact was, that he hated Slavery so decidedly and had such a clear common sense like view of the evils and misery of the system, that he declared he had as a matter of principle refrained from marrying, in order that he might have no reason to grieve over having added to the woes of slaves.
Nor did he wish to be encumbered, if the opportunity offered to escape.
According to law he was entitled to his freedom at the age of twenty five.
But what right had a negro, which white slave holders were "bound to respect?" Many who had been willed free, were held just as firmly in Slavery, as if no will had ever been made.
Robert had too much sense to suppose that he could gain anything by seeking legal redress.
This method, therefore, was considered out of the question.
But in the meantime he was growing very naturally in favor of the Underground Rail Road.
From his experience Robert did not hesitate to say that his master was "mean," "a very hard man," who would work his servants early and late, without allowing them food and clothing sufficient to shield them from the cold and hunger.
Robert certainly had unmistakable marks about him, of having been used roughly.
Nathan listened to the proposal, and was suddenly converted to freedom, and the two united during Christmas week, eighteen fifty four, and set out on the Underground Rail Road.
It is needless to say that they had trying difficulties to encounter.
These they expected, but all were overcome, and they reached the Vigilance Committee, in Philadelphia safely, and were cordially welcomed.
During the interview, a full interchange of thought resulted, the fugitives were well cared for, and in due time both were forwarded on, free of cost.
HANSEL WAPLES.
While Hansel did not really own himself, he had the reputation of having a wife and six children.
In June, some six months prior to her husband's arrival, Hansel's wife had been allowed by her mistress to go out on a begging expedition, to raise money to buy herself; but contrary to the expectation of her mistress she never returned.
Doubtless the mistress looked upon this course as a piece of the most highhanded stealing.
Hansel did not speak of his owner as being a hard man, but on the contrary he thought that he was about as "good" as the best that he was acquainted with.
While this was true, however, Hansel had quite good ground for believing that his master was about to sell him.
Dreading this fate he made up his mind to go in pursuit of his wife to a Free state.
Exactly where to look or how to find her he could not tell.
She fled from Isaac Tonnell of Georgetown, Delaware, in Christmas week, eighteen fifty three.
A young woman with a little boy of seven years of age accompanied Rose Anna.
Further than the simple fact of their having thus safely arrived, except the expense incurred by the Committee, no other particulars appear on the records.
Mary arrived with her two children in the early Spring of eighteen fifty four.
The mother was a woman of about thirty three years of age, quite tall, with a countenance and general appearance well fitted to awaken sympathy at first sight.
Her oldest child was a little girl seven years of age, named Lydia; the other was named Louisa Caroline, three years of age, both promising in appearance.
They were the so called property of john Ennis, of Georgetown, Delaware.
For their flight they chose the dead of Winter.
After leaving they made their way to West Chester, and there found friends and security for several weeks, up to the time they reached Philadelphia.
Probably the friends with whom they stopped thought the weather too inclement for a woman with children dependent on her support to travel.
Long before this mother escaped, thoughts of liberty filled her heart.
She was ever watching for an opportunity, that would encourage her to hope for safety, when once the attempt should be made.
Until, however, she was convinced that her two children were to be sold, she could not quite muster courage to set out on the journey.
This threat to sell proved in multitudes of instances, "the last straw on the camel's back." When nothing else would start them this would.
Mary and her children were the only slaves owned by this Ennis, consequently her duties were that of "Jack of all trades;" sometimes in the field and sometimes in the barn, as well as in the kitchen, by which, it is needless to say, that her life was rendered servile to the last degree.
AN IRISH GIRL'S DEVOTION TO FREEDOM.
"april twenty seventh eighteen fifty five.
john Hall arrived safely from richmond virginia, per schooner, (Captain B).
john had been sold several times, in consequence of which, he had possessed very good opportunities of experiencing the effect of change of owners.
Then, too, the personal examination made before sale, and the gratification afforded his master when he (john), brought a good price-left no very pleasing impressions on his mind.
By one of his owners, named Burke, john alleged that he had been "cruelly used." When quite young, both he and his sister, together with their mother, were sold by Burke.
From that time he had seen neither mother nor sister-they were sold separately.
For three or four years the desire to seek liberty had been fondly cherished, and nothing but the want of a favorable opportunity had deterred him from carrying out his designs.
He considered himself much "imposed upon" by his master, particularly as he was allowed "no choice about living" as he "desired." This was indeed ill treatment as john viewed the matter.
He was about thirty five years of age, light complexion-tall-rather handsome looking, intelligent, and of good manners.
The idea of having had a white father, in many instances, depreciated the pecuniary value of male slaves, if not of the other sex. john emphatically was one of this injured class; he evidently had blood in his veins which decidedly warred against submitting to the yoke.
In addition to the influence which such rebellious blood exerted over him, together with a considerable amount of intelligence, he was also under the influence and advice of a daughter of old Ireland.
She was heart and soul with john in all his plans which looked Canada ward.
This it was that "sent him away."
It is very certain, that this Irish girl was not annoyed by the kinks in John's hair.
Nor was she overly fastidious about the small percentage of colored blood visible in John's complexion.
It was, however, a strange occurrence and very hard to understand.
Not a stone was left unturned until john was safely on the Underground Rail Road.
Doubtless she helped to earn the money which was paid for his passage.
And when he was safe off, it is not too much to say, that john was not a whit more delighted than was his intended Irish lassie, Mary Weaver.
john had no sooner reached Canada than Mary's heart was there too.
Circumstances, however, required that she should remain in Richmond a number of months for the purpose of winding up some of her affairs.
As soon as the way opened for her, she followed him.
It was quite manifest, that she had not let a single opportunity slide, but seized the first chance and arrived partly by means of the Underground Rail Road and partly by the regular train. Many difficulties were surmounted before and after leaving Richmond, by which they earned their merited success.
At least two or three of these letters, bearing on particular phases of their escape, etc, are too valuable not to be published in this connection:
FIRST LETTER.
HAMILTON, march twenty fifth eighteen fifty six.
mr Still:--Sir and Friend-I take the liberty of addressing you with these few lines hoping that you will attend to what I shall request of you.
I have written to Virginia and have not received an answer yet. I want to know if you can get any one of your city to go to Richmond for me.
If you can, I will pay the expense of the whole.
The person that I want the messenger to see is a white girl.
I expect you know who I allude to, it is the girl that sent me away.
I will forward the money and a letter.
Please use your endeavors.
Yours Respectfuliy,
Direct yours to mr Hill.
SECOND LETTER.
HAMILTON, september fifteenth eighteen fifty six.
To mr Still, Dear Sir:--I take this opportunity of addressing these few lines to you hoping to find you in good health I am happy to inform you that Miss Weaver arrived here on Tuesday last, and I can assure you it was indeed a happy day.
As for your part that you done I will not attempt to tell you how thankful I am, but I hope that you can imagine what my feelings are to you.
I cannot find words sufficient to express my gratitude to you, I think the wedding will take place on Tuesday next, I have seen some of the bread from your house, and she says it is the best bread she has had since she has been in America.
He can be found out by seeing Fountain Tombs who belongs to mr Rutherford and if you should not see him, there is james Turner who lives at the Governors, Please to see Captain Bayliss and tell him to take these directions and go to john Hill, in Petersburgh, and he may find him.
C. Mayo, and please to send it as directed.
You will greatly oblige me by so doing.
In this letter I have enclosed a trifle for postage which you will please to keep on account of my letters I hope you wont think hard of me but I simply send it because I know you have done enough, and are now doing more, without imposing in the matter I have done it a great many more of our people who you have done so much fore.
john HALL, Norton's Hotel, Hamilton.
THIRD LETTER.
monday september twenty ninth fifty six.
I have told him not to pay for them but to send them to you so when you get them write me word what the cost of them are, and I will send you the money for them.
Mary desires you to give her love to mrs Still.
If any letters come for me please to send to me at Nortons Hotel, Please to let me know if you had a letter from me about twelve days ago.
You will please Direct the enclosed to mr w c
Mayo, richmond virginia
Let me know if you have heard anything of Willis Johnson mr and mrs Hill send their kind love to you, they are all well, no more at present from your affect.,
john HALL
FOURTH LETTER.
DEAR SIR:--I am happy to inform you that we are both enjoying good health and hope you are the same.
I have been expecting a letter from you for some time but I suppose your business has prevented you from writing.
I suppose you have not heard from any of my friends at Richmond.
I have been longing to hear some news from that part, you may think "Out of sight and out of mind," but I can assure you, no matter how far I may be, or in what distant land, I shall never forget you, if I can never reach you by letters you may be sure I shall always think of you.
I have found a great many friends in my life, but I must say you are the best one I ever met with, except one, you must know who that is, 'tis one who if I did not consider a friend, I could not consider any other person a friend, and that is mrs Hall.
Please to let me know if the navigation between New York and Richmond is closed.
Please to let me know whether it would be convenient to you to go to New York if it is please let me know what is the expense.
john HALL.
mr and mrs Hill desire their best respects to you and mrs Still.
It cannot be denied that this is a most extraordinary occurrence.
In some respects it is without a parallel.
It was, however, no uncommon thing for white men (slave holders) in the South to have colored wives and children whom, they did not hesitate to live with and acknowledge by their actions, with their means, and in their wills as the rightful heirs of their substance.
Probably there is not a state in the Union where such relations have not existed.
john fled from under the yoke of dr joshua r Nelson.
Until within two years of "Jack's" flight, the doctor "had been a very fine man," with whom Jack found no fault.
But suddenly his mode of treatment changed; he became very severe.
Nothing that Jack could do, met the approval of the doctor.
Jack was constantly looked upon with suspicion.
The very day that Jack fled, four men approached him (the doctor one of them), with line in hand; that sign was well understood, and Jack resolved that they should not get within tying distance of him.
"I dodged them," said Jack.
Never afterwards was Jack seen in that part of the country, at least as long as a fetter remained.
The day that he "dodged" he also took the Underground Rail Road, and although ignorant of letters, he battled his way out of Maryland, and succeeded in reaching Pennsylvania and the Committee.
His master evidently supposed that Jack would be mean enough to wish to see his wife, even in a free State, and that no slave, with such an unnatural desire, could be tolerated or trusted, that the sooner such "articles" were turned into cash the better.
In defense of his course, Jack referred to the treatment which he had received while in servitude under his old master, in something like the following words: "I served under my young master's father, thirty five years, and from him received kind treatment.
I was his head man on the place, and had everything to look after."
ARRIVAL FROM MARYLAND, eighteen fifty seven.
Although these three passengers arrived in Philadelphia at the same time, they did not come from Maryland together.
Susan Jane came from New Market, near Georgetown Cross Roads, where she had been held to unrequited labor by Hezekiah Masten, a farmer.
Whether they ever heard what became of their daughter is not known.
Amarian was twenty one years of age, a person of light color, medium size, with a prepossessing countenance and smart; she could read, write, and play on the piano.
From a child, Amarian had been owned by mrs Elizabeth Key Scott, who resided near Braceville, but at the time of her flight she was living at Westminster, in the family of a man named "Boile," said to be the clerk of the court.
In reference to treatment, Amarian said: "I have always been used very well; have had it good all my life, etc" This was a remarkable case, and, at first, somewhat staggered the faith of the Committee, but they could not dispute her testimony, consequently they gave her the benefit of the doubt.
She spoke of having a mother living in Hagerstown, by the name of Amarian Ballad, also three sisters who were slaves, and two who were free; she also had a brother in chains in Mississippi.
ARRIVAL FROM norfolk virginia eighteen fifty seven.
WILLIAM CARNEY AND ANDREW ALLEN.
He belonged to the estate of the late mrs Sarah Twyne, who bore the reputation of being a lady of wealth, and owned one hundred and twelve slaves.
Most of her slave property was kept on her plantation not far from Old Point Comfort.
According to William's testimony "of times mrs Twyne would meddle too freely with the cup, and when under its influence she was very desperate, and acted as though she wanted to kill some of the slaves."
After the evil spirit left her and she had regained her wonted composure, she would pretend that she loved her "negroes," and would make a great fuss over them.
Having license to do as they pleased, they would of course carry their cruelties to the most extreme verge of punishment.
If a slave was maimed or killed under their correction, it was no loss of theirs.
This system was organized and times were somewhat better.
William had been hired out almost his entire life.
In order to meet this demand he commonly resorted to oystering.
With full faith in her promises year by year the slaves awaited her demise with as much patience as possible, and often prayed that her time might be shortened for the general good of the oppressed.
In November, previous to William's escape, her long looked for dissolution took place.
In this sad case, the slaves could imagine no other fate than soon to be torn asunder and scattered. The fact was soon made known that the High Sheriff had administered on the estate of the late mistress; it was therefore obvious enough to William and the more intelligent slaves that the auction block was near at hand.
Without stopping to consider the danger, he immediately made up his mind that he would make a struggle, cost what it might.
William and one of the accommodating Captains running on the Richmond and Philadelphia Line, to the effect that he, William, should have a first class Underground Rail Road berth, so perfectly private that even the law officers could not find him.
It was no light matter to bid them farewell forever.
The separation from them was a trial such as rarely falls to the lot of mortals; but he nerved himself for the undertaking, and when the hour arrived his strength was sufficient for the occasion.
Andrew was about twenty four years of age, very tall, quite black, and bore himself manfully.
"My people seem to dislike strangers," said the Majordomo, thoughtfully, "and that surprises me because you are the first strangers they have ever seen.
"They needn't worry 'bout that," replied Trot; "the Snubnoses hate me worse than the people do."
"Or a necktie mixer," added Cap'n Bill.
The Majordomo found the Boolooroo in a bad temper.
Also his wife, the Queen, had made him angry by begging for gold to buy ribbons with.
But the umbrella, in his hands, proved just as common as any other umbrella might.
He opened it and closed it, and turned it this way and that, commanding it to do all sorts of things; but of course the Magic Umbrella would obey no one but a member of the family that rightfully owned it.
"No, your Majesty; I do not," was the reply.
Make the Whiteskins tell you, so that I can use it for my own amusement."
"You'll do more than that, or I'll have you patched!" roared the angry Boolooroo.
"Why can't I?"
The King looked at him with a sneer.
"Has anyone ever come out of that Arch alive?" he asked.
"Well, I'm going to try the experiment," declared the Boolooroo.
I really hope they'll come out of the Great Blue Grotto alive!"
He did not approve the way the strangers were being treated and thought it was wicked and cruel to try to destroy them.
During his absence the prisoners had been talking together very earnestly.
"No; I must surely manage to get my umbrella first," said Button Bright.
"Do it quick, then," urged Trot, "for I can't stand those snubnoses much longer."
"No; it won't be easy," Button Bright admitted.
There's a Blue Wolf in the Treasure Chamber!" exclaimed Trot.
"Yes; I know."
The boy nodded.
But their present position was a very serious one and even Cap'n Bill dared not advise Button Bright to give up the desperate attempt.
"You must be very careful not to anger the Boolooroo, or he may do you a mischief.
Cap'n Bill won't have anything to do, for I've ordered Tiggle to mix the nectar."
"Thank 'e, friend Sizzle," said Cap'n Bill.
"Now follow me and I will take you to your rooms."
"You're safer in the palace than anywhere else," said the Majordomo, "for there is no way you can escape from the island, and here the servants and soldiers dare not injure you for fear of the Boolooroo."
He placed Trot and her six pets-which followed her wherever she went-in one room, and Cap'n Bill in another, and took Button Bright away with him to show the boy the way to the King's bedchamber.
It was Jimfred Jinksjones, the double of the Fredjim Jonesjinks they had talked with in the servants' hall, and he bowed low before the Majordomo.
"I'm sorry for him," muttered Jimfred.
"The Boolooroo's afraid of me."
"You're the first person I ever knew that could scare our Boolooroo."
He had marked the place well, so he couldn't miss it when he wanted to find it again.
When they came to the King's apartments there was another guard before the door, this time a long necked soldier with a terrible scowl.
"All right," answered the guard.
It will go hard with this little short necked creature if he doesn't polish the shoes properly."
"Hi, there!
What are you doing here?" he roared, as he saw Button Bright.
"I've come for the shoes," said the boy.
While he polished the shoes he told his plans to Cap'n Bill and Trot, and asked them to be ready to fly with him as soon as he returned with the Magic Umbrella.
But the sleepy guard before the King's apartments was cross and surly.
"What are you doing here at this hour?" he demanded.
"I'm returning his Majesty's shoes," said Button Bright.
"Go back and wait till morning," commanded the guard.
This threat frightened the long necked guard, who did not know what orders the Boolooroo had given his Royal Bootblue.
"I'll be quiet," promised the boy.
The boy had taken off his own shoes after he passed the guard and now he tiptoed carefully into the room, set down the royal shoes very gently and then crept to the chair where his Majesty's clothes were piled.
He passed the long necked guard again, finding the man half asleep, and then made his way to the Treasure Chamber.
"I am to take your place," said Button Bright.
"Oh, very well," replied Jimfred; "this is a queer freak for our Boolooroo to indulge in, but he is always doing something absurd.
Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Button Bright.
He placed the key in the lock and the bolt turned with a sharp click. Button Bright did not hesitate.
He was afraid, to be sure, and his heart was beating fast with the excitement of the moment, but he knew he must regain the Magic Umbrella if he would save his comrades and himself from destruction, for without it they could never return to the Earth.
The terrible teeth came together and buried themselves in the pillow, and then mr Wolf found he could not pull them out again-because his mouth was stuffed full.
Of course he could not find it, as it was not there.
It was the voice of the Boolooroo, crying: "My Key-my Key!
Who has stolen my golden Key?" And then there followed shouts of soldiers and guards and servants and the rapid pattering of feet was heard throughout the palace.
"Quick!" cried the boy; "we must escape from here at once or we will be caught and patched."
"I don't know.
I can't find it.
Come, let's get away at once!"
"We must make for the open country and hide in the Fog Bank, or in the Arch of Phinis," replied the boy.
They'd tear us to pieces, if they could."
"Don't like that place, Cap'n," whispered Trot.
"No more do I, mate," he answered.
"I think I'd rather take a chance on the Fog Bank," said Button Bright.
"Where are you, Trot? As like as not I've been forgot!"
"Gee!
They were all astonished to hear the bird talk-and in poetry, too-but Cap'n Bill told Trot that some parrots he had known had possessed a pretty fair gift of language, and he added that this blue one seemed an unusually bright bird.
Rhymes come from your head, but real po'try from your heart, an' whether the blue parrot has a heart or not he's sure got a head."
The Blueskins fell back, horrified at the mad act of the strangers.
"That's the end of those short necked Yellowskins," said one, shaking his head.
THROUGH THE FOG BANK
It was rather moist in the Fog Bank.
"When it's a case of life 'n' death, clo's don't count for much.
I'm sort o' drippy myself."
"Floods and gushes fill our path- This is not my day for a bath! Shut it off, or fear my wrath."
"Had we better go to the other side?" asked Button Bright, anxiously.
"Why not?" returned Cap'n Bill.
"We don't know that, sir," said the boy.
"We can't say till we get there, mate," answered the sailor in a cheerful voice.
"Can't you dry up?" asked Cap'n Bill.
"Look out!" cried the parrot, sharply; and they all halted to find a monstrous frog obstructing their path.
"Oh, I'm glad to hear that!" cried Button Bright.
"I'm just a common frog; and a little wee tiny frog, too.
But I hope to grow, in time.
"Follow me," said the frog.
It's only about six jumps."
He turned around, made a mighty leap and disappeared in the gray mist.
"Brooks and creeks, How it leaks!"
"How can we jog To a frog in a fog?"
When at last they came up to him he made a second jump-out of sight, as before-and when they attempted to follow they found a huge lizard lying across the path.
Cap'n Bill thought it must be a giant alligator, at first, it was so big; but he looked at them sleepily and did not seem at all dangerous.
cried the parrot.
Did you ever taste a parsnip?"
"We're in a hurry, if it's the same to you, sir," said Cap'n Bill, politely.
"Then climb over me-or go around-I don't care which," murmured the lizard.
Then off it went again, its tremendous leap carrying it far into the fog.
Suddenly Cap'n Bill tripped and would have fallen flat had not Trot and Button Bright held him up.
"Oh; beg parding, I'm sure!" exclaimed Cap'n Bill backing away.
"Probably not," said the crab.
"If you don't mind, we'd like to pass on," said Button Bright.
They're rheumatic, it's so moist here."
Soon they had left the creature far behind.
"It isn't that," said Trot.
The frog chuckled and leaped again.
"Right you are, mate," he replied, and although he shook a bit with fear, the old man at once began to climb to the frog's back.
"Ding dong!" cried the parrot;
"All aboard! let 'er go! Jump the best jump that you know."
"Don't-don't!
And Lynceus the quick eyed saw him coming, while he was still many a mile away, and cried: "I see a hundred ships, like a flock of white swans, far in the east." And at that they rowed hard, like heroes; but the ships came nearer every hour.
But he sent on his sailors toward the westward, and bound them by a mighty curse: "Bring back to me that dark witch woman, that she may die a dreadful death.
But if you return without her, you shall die by the same death yourselves."
So the Argonauts escaped for that time; but Father Zeus saw that foul crime; and out of the heavens he sent a storm, and swept the ship far from her course.
Then out and spoke the magic bough which stood upon the Argo's beak: "Because Father Zeus is angry, all this has fallen on you; for a cruel crime has been done on board, and the sacred ship is foul with blood."
At that some of the heroes cried: "Medeia is the murderess.
Let the witch woman bear her sin, and die!"
And they seized Medeia, to hurl her into the sea and atone for the young boy's death; but the magic bough spoke again: "Let her live till her crimes are full.
Vengeance waits for her, slow and sure; but she must live, for you need her still.
Then all the heroes wept aloud when they heard the sentence of the oak; for they knew that a dark journey lay before them, and years of bitter toil.
And some upbraided the dark witch woman, and some said: "Nay, we are her debtors still; without her we should never have won the fleece." But most of them bit their lips in silence, for they feared the witch's spells.
And now the sea grew calmer, and the sun shone out once more, and the heroes thrust the ship off the sand bank, and rowed forward on their weary course, under the guiding of the dark witch maiden, into the wastes of the unknown sea.
But all these are but dreams and fables, and dim hints of unknown lands.
But all say that they came to a place where they had to drag their ship across the land nine days with ropes and rollers, till they came into an unknown sea.
So raise up the mast, and set the sail, and face what comes like men."
Better so, than to wander forever, disgraced by the guilt of my princes; for the blood of Absyrtus still tracks me, and woe follows hard upon woe.
And away they drove twelve nights, on the wide wild western sea, through the foam, and over the rollers, while they saw neither sun nor stars.
And they cried again: "We shall perish, for we know not where we are.
We are lost in the dreary damp darkness, and cannot tell north from south."
But Orpheus said: "Turn from them, for no living man can land there: there is no harbour on the coast, but steep walled cliffs all round."
And as they went inland, Circe met them, coming down toward the ship; and they trembled when they saw her; for her hair, and face, and robes, shone like flame.
And she came and looked at Medeia; and Medeia hid her face beneath her veil.
And Circe cried, "Ah, wretched girl, have you forgotten all your sins, that you come hither to my island, where the flowers bloom all the year round?
Where is your aged father, and the brother whom you killed? Little do I expect you to return in safety with these strangers whom you love.
And the heroes prayed her, but in vain, and cried, "Cleanse us from our guilt!" But she sent them away and said, "Go on to Malea, and there you may be cleansed, and return home."
Then a fair wind rose, and they sailed eastward, by Tartessus on the Iberian shore, till they came to the Pillars of Hercules, and the Mediterranean Sea.
And thence they sailed on through the deeps of Sardinia, and past the Ausonian Islands, and the capes of the Tyrrhenian shore, till they came to a flowery island, upon a still, bright summer's eve.
And as they neared it, slowly and wearily, they heard sweet songs upon the shore.
But when Medeia heard it, she started, and cried: "Beware, all heroes, for these are the rocks of the Sirens.
You must pass close by them, for there is no other channel; but those who listen to that song are lost."
Then Orpheus spoke, the king of all minstrels: "Let them match their song against mine.
And now they could see the Sirens, on Anthemousa, the flowery isle; three fair maidens sitting on the beach, beneath a red rock in the setting sun, among beds of crimson poppies and golden asphodel.
Slowly they sung and sleepily, with silver voices, mild and clear, which stole over the golden waters, and into the hearts of all the heroes, in spite of Orpheus's song.
And all things stayed around and listened; the gulls sat in white lines along the rocks; on the beach great seals lay basking, and kept time with lazy heads; while silver shoals of fish came up to hearken, and whispered as they broke the shining calm.
The Wind overhead hushed his whistling, as he shepherded his clouds toward the west; and the clouds stood in mid blue, and listened dreaming, like a flock of golden sheep.
And as the heroes listened, the oars fell from their hands, and their heads drooped on their breasts, and they closed their heavy eyes; and they dreamed of bright still gardens, and of slumbers under murmuring pines, till all their toil seemed foolishness, and they thought of their renown no more.
Then one lifted his head suddenly, and cried, "What use in wandering forever?
Let us stay here and rest awhile." And another, "Let us row to the shore, and hear the words they sing." And another, "I care not for the words, but for the music.
They shall sing me to sleep, that I may rest."
Then Medeia clapped her hands together, and cried, "Sing louder, Orpheus, sing a bolder strain; wake up these hapless sluggards, or none of them will see the land of Hellas more."
And he sung the song of Perseus, how the Gods led him over land and sea, and how he slew the loathly Gorgon, and won himself a peerless bride; and how he sits now with the Gods upon Olympus, a shining star in the sky, immortal with his immortal bride, and honoured by all men below.
So Orpheus sang, and the Sirens, answering each other across the golden sea, till Orpheus's voice drowned the Sirens, and the heroes caught their oars again.
And they cried: "We will be men like Perseus, and we will dare and suffer to the last.
Sing us his song again, brave Orpheus, that we may forget the Sirens and their spell."
And as Orpheus sang, they dashed their oars into the sea, and kept time to his music, as they fled fast away; and the Sirens' voices died behind them, in the hissing of the foam along their wake.
Then slowly rose up those three fair sisters, with a cruel smile upon their lips; and slowly they crept down toward him, like leopards who creep upon their prey; and their hands were like the talons of eagles, as they stept across the bones of their victims to enjoy their cruel feast.
And there Charybdis caught them in its fearful coils of wave, and rolled mast high about them, and spun them round and round; and they could go neither back nor forward, while the whirlpool sucked them in.
And while they struggled they saw near them, on the other side of the strait, a rock stand in the water, with a peak wrapt round in clouds; a rock which no man could climb, though he had twenty hands and feet, for the stone was smooth and slippery, as if polished by man's hand; and half way up a misty cave looked out toward the west.
And "Little will it help to us," he cried, "to escape the jaws of the whirlpool; for in that cave lives Scylla, the sea hag with a young whelp's voice; my mother warned me of her ere we sailed away from Hellas; she has six heads, and six long necks, and hides in that dark cleft.
And from her cave she fishes for all things which pass by, for sharks, and seals, and dolphins, and all the herds of Amphitrite.
And never ship's crew boasted that they came safe by her rock; for she bends her long necks down to them, and every mouth takes up a man And who will help us now?
Then out of the depths came Thetis, Peleus's silver footed bride, for love of her gallant husband, and all her nymphs around her; and they played like snow white dolphins, diving on from wave to wave, before the ship, and in her wake, and beside her, as dolphins play.
And they caught the ship, and guided her, and passed her on from hand to hand, and tossed her through the billows, as maidens toss the ball.
Then Thetis and her nymphs sank down to their gardens of green and purple, where live flowers of bloom all the year round; while the heroes went on rejoicing, yet dreading what might come next.
After that they rowed on steadily for many a weary day, till they saw a long high island, and beyond it a mountain land.
And they searched till they found a harbour, and there rowed boldly in.
But after awhile they stopped, and wondered; for there stood a great city on the shore, and temples and walls and gardens, and castles high in air upon the cliffs. And on either side they saw a harbour, with a narrow mouth, but wide within; and black ships without number, high and dry upon the shore.
I know all isles, and harbours, and the windings of all the seas; and this should be Corcyra, where a few wild goatherds dwell.
But Jason said: "They can be no savage people.
We will go in and take our chance."
And they wondered at that mighty city, with its roofs of burnished brass, and long and lofty walls of marble, with strong palisades above.
We keep our business to ourselves."
But Jason answered gently, with many a flattering word, and praised their city and their harbour, and their fleet of gallant ships.
"Surely you are the children of Poseidon, and the masters of the sea; and we are but poor wandering mariners, worn out with thirst and toil.
Give us but food and water, and we will go on our voyage in peace."
Then the sailors laughed and answered: "Stranger, you are no fool; you talk like an honest man, and you shall find us honest too.
We are the children of Poseidon, and the masters of the sea; but come ashore to us, and you shall have the best that we can give."
And one said; "These fellows are but raw sailors; they look as if they had been sea sick all the day." And another: "Their legs have grown crooked with much rowing, till they waddle in their walk like ducks."
At that Idas the rash would have struck them; but Jason held him back, till one of the merchant kings spoke to them, a tall and stately man.
"Do not be angry, strangers; the sailor boys must have their jest.
But we will treat you justly and kindly, for strangers and poor men come from God; and you seem no common sailors by your strength, and height, and weapons.
But Medeia hung back, and trembled, and whispered in Jason's ear, "We are betrayed, and are going to our ruin; for I see my countrymen among the crowd; dark eyed Colchi in steel mail shirts, such as they wear in my father's land."
"It is too late to turn," said Jason.
And he spoke to the merchant king: "What country is this, good sir; and what is this new built town?"
"This is the land of the Phaeaces, beloved by all the Immortals; for they come hither and feast like friends with us, and sit by our side in the hall.
Hither we came from Liburnia to escape the unrighteous Cyclopes; for they robbed us, peaceful merchants, of our hard earned wares and wealth.
And within, against the walls, stood thrones on either side, down the whole length of the hall, strewn with rich glossy shawls; and on them the merchant kings of those crafty sea roving Phaeaces sat eating and drinking in pride, and feasting there all the year round.
And boys of molten gold stood each on a polished altar, and held torches in their hands, to give light all night to the guests.
And round the house sat fifty maid servants, some grinding the meal in the mill, some turning the spindle, some weaving at the loom, while their hands twinkled as they passed the shuttle, like quivering aspen leaves.
And outside before the palace a great garden was walled round, filled full of stately fruit trees, with olives and sweet figs, and pomegranates, pears, and apples, which bore the whole year round.
For the rich southwest wind fed them, till pear grew ripe on pear, fig on fig, and grape on grape, all the winter and the spring.
Then Alcinous rose, and welcomed them, and bade them sit and eat; and the servants brought them tables, and bread, and meat, and wine.
"I am your guest, fair queen, and I entreat you be Zeus from whom prayers come.
Do not send me back to my father, to die some dreadful death; but let me go my way, and bear my burden.
Have I not had enough of punishment and shame?"
"Who are you, strange maiden?
and what is the meaning of your prayer?"
"We are the heroes of the Minuai," said Jason; "and this maiden has spoken truth.
We are the men who took the golden fleece, the men whose fame has run round every shore.
We went out many, and come back few, for many a noble comrade have we lost.
So let us go, as you should let your guests go, in peace; that the world may say, 'Alcinous is a just king.'"
But Alcinous frowned, and stood deep in thought; and at last he spoke:
"Let them choose out their champions, and we will fight them, man for man."
"No guest of ours shall fight upon our island; and if you go outside, they will outnumber you.
I will do justice between you; for I know and do what is right."
Then he turned to his kings, and said: "This may stand over till to morrow.
To night we will feast our guests, and hear the story of all their wanderings, and how they came hither out of the ocean."
And they were glad when they saw the warm water, for it was long since they had bathed.
And they washed off the sea salt from their limbs, and anointed themselves from head to foot with oil, and combed out their golden hair.
Then they came back again into the hall, while the merchant kings rose up to do them honour.
And each man said to his neighbour: "No wonder that these men won fame.
Then they went out to the garden; and the merchant princes said: "Heroes, run races with us.
Let us see whose feet are nimblest."
But do not think us cowards; if you wish to try our strength, we will shoot and box, and wrestle, against any men on earth."
And Alcinous smiled, and answered: "I believe you, gallant guests; with your long limbs and broad shoulders, we could never match you here.
For we care nothing here for boxing, or for shooting with the bow; but for feasts, and songs, and harping, and dancing, and running races, to stretch our limbs on shore."
So they danced there and ran races, the jolly merchant kings, till the night fell, and all went in.
And then they ate and drank, and comforted their weary souls, till Alcinous called a herald, and bade him go and fetch the harper.
The herald went out, and fetched the harper, and led him in by the hand; and Alcinous cut him a piece of meat from the fattest of the haunch, and sent it to him, and said: "Sing to us, noble harper, and rejoice the heroes' hearts."
So the harper played and sang, while the dancers danced strange figures; and after that the tumblers showed their tricks, till the heroes laughed again.
or heard such music and such singing?
We hold ours to be the best on earth."
"Such dancing we have never seen," said Orpheus; "and your singer is a happy man; for Phoebus himself must have taught him, or else he is the son of a Muse; as I am also, and have sung once or twice, though not so well as he."
Then he went on, and told their journey over the sluggish northern main, and through the shoreless outer ocean, to the fairy island of the West; and of the Sirens, and Scylla, and Charybdis, and all the wonders they had seen, till midnight passed, and the day dawned; but the kings never thought of sleep.
Each man sat still and listened, with his chin upon his hand.
And she said: "The Gods will punish her, not we.
After all, she is our guest and my suppliant, and prayers are the daughters of Zeus.
And who, too, dare part man and wife, after all they have endured together?"
And Alcinous smiled.
"The minstrel's song has charmed you; but I must remember what is right; for songs cannot alter justice; and I must be faithful to my name.
So next morning he sent a herald, and called the kings into the square, and said: "This is a puzzling matter; remember but one thing.
Which, then, of the two is it safer to offend, the men near us, or the men far off?"
The princes laughed, and praised his wisdom; and Alcinous called the heroes to the square, and the Colchi also; and they came and stood opposite each other; but Medeia stayed in the palace.
Then Alcinous spoke: "Heroes of the Colchi, what is your errand about this lady?"
"To carry her home with us, that she may die a shameful death; but if we return without her, we must die the death she should have died."
"I say," said the cunning Jason, "that they are come here on a bootless errand.
Do you think that you can make her follow you, heroes of the Colchi?
And why return home at all, brave heroes, and face the long seas again, and the Bosphorus, and the stormy Euxine, and double all your toil?
There is many a fair land round these coasts, which waits for gallant men like you.
Take her, since you are no wiser; and we will sail away toward the north."
Then Alcinous gave them food, and water, and garments, and rich presents of all sorts; and he gave the same to the Minuai, and sent them all away in peace.
So Jason kept the dark witch maiden to breed him woe and shame; and the Colchi went northward into the Adriatic, and settled, and built towns along the shore.
And they rowed till they were spent with struggling, through the darkness and the blinding rain, but where they were they could not tell, and they gave up all hope of life.
And at last they touched the ground, and when daylight came they waded to the shore; and saw nothing round but sand, and desolate salt pools; for they had come to the quicksands of the Syrtis, and the dreary treeless flats, which lie between Numidia and Cyrene, on the burning shore of Africa.
And there they wandered starving for many a weary day, ere they could launch their ship again, and gain the open sea.
And there Canthus was killed while he was trying to drive off sheep, by a stone which a herdsman threw.
And there, too, Mopsus died, the seer who knew the voices of all birds; but he could not foretell his own end, for he was bitten in the foot by a snake, one of those which sprang from the Gorgon's head when Perseus carried it across the sands.
At last they rowed away toward the northward, for many a weary day, till their water was spent, and their food eaten; and they were worn out with hunger and thirst.
But when they came nearer to the island they saw a wondrous sight upon the cliffs.
For on a cape to the westward stood a giant, taller than any mountain pine; who glittered aloft against the sky like a tower of burnished brass.
He turned and looked on all sides round him, till he saw the Argo and her crew; and when he saw them he came toward them, more swiftly than the swiftest horse, leaping across the glens at a bound, and striding at one step from down to down.
And when he came abreast of them he brandished his arms up and down, as a ship hoists and lowers her yards, and shouted with his brazen throat like a trumpet from off the hills: "You are pirates, you are robbers!
If you dare land here, you die."
We are all good men and true; and all we ask is food and water"; but the giant cried the more-
"You are robbers, you are pirates all; I know you; and if you land, you shall die the death."
Then he waved his arms again as a signal, and they saw the people flying inland, driving their flocks before them, while a great flame arose among the hills.
Then the giant ran up a valley and vanished; and the heroes lay on their oars in fear.
But Medeia stood watching all, from under her steep black brows, with a cunning smile upon her lips, and a cunning plot within her heart.
At last she spoke; "I know this giant.
Thrice a day he walks round the island, and never stops to sleep; and if strangers land he leaps into his furnace, which flames there among the hills; and when he is red hot he rushes on them, and burns them in his brazen hands."
Then all the heroes cried, "What shall we do, wise Medeia?
We must have water, or we die of thirst.
Flesh and blood we can face fairly; but who can face this red hot brass?"
"I can face red hot brass, if the tale I hear be true.
For they say that he has but one vein in all his body, filled with liquid fire; and that this vein is closed with a nail; but I know not where that nail is placed.
But if I can get it once into these hands, you shall water your ship here in peace."
Then she bade them put her on shore, and row off again, and wait what would befall.
And the heroes obeyed her unwillingly; for they were ashamed to leave her so alone; but Jason said, "She is dearer to me than to any of you, yet I will trust her freely on shore; she has more plots than we can dream of, in the windings of that fair and cunning head."
So they left the witch maiden on the shore; and she stood there in her beauty all alone, till the giant strode back red hot from head to heel, while the grass hissed and smoked beneath his tread.
And when he saw the maiden alone, he stopped; and she looked boldly up into his face without moving, and began her magic song:
"Life is short, though life is sweet; and even men of brass and fire must die.
The brass must rust, the fire must cool, for time gnaws all things in their turn.
Life is short, though life is sweet; but sweeter to live forever; sweeter to live ever youthful like the Gods, who have ichor in their veins; ichor which gives life, and youth, and joy, and a bounding heart."
Then Talus said, "Who are you, strange maiden; and where is this ichor of youth?"
Then Medeia held up a flask of crystal, and said, "Here is the ichor of youth.
I am Medeia the enchantress; my sister Circe gave me this, and said, 'Go and reward Talus the faithful servant, for his fame is gone out into all lands.' So come, and I will pour this into your veins, that you may live forever young."
Then that simple Talus dipped himself in the sea, till it hissed, and roared, and smoked; and came and knelt before Medeia, and showed her the secret nail.
And she drew the nail out gently; but she poured no ichor in; and instead the liquid fire spouted forth, like a stream of red hot iron. And Talus tried to leap up, crying, "You have betrayed me, false witch maiden!"
But she lifted up her hands before him, and sang, till he sank beneath her spell.
And as he sank, his brazen limbs clanked heavily, and the earth groaned beneath his weight; and the liquid fire ran from his heel, like a stream of lava to the sea; and Medeia laughed, and called to the heroes, "Come ashore, and water your ship in peace."
So they came, and found the giant lying dead; and they fell down, and kissed Medeia's feet; and watered their ship, and took sheep and oxen, and so left that inhospitable shore.
At last, after many more adventures, they came to the Cape of Malea, at the southwest point of the Peloponnese.
And there they offered sacrifices, and Orpheus purged them from their guilt.
And they ran the ship ashore; but they had no strength left to haul her up the beach; and they crawled out on the pebbles, and sat down, and wept till they could weep no more.
We went to fetch the golden fleece; and we have brought it, and grief therewith.
Then Jason went up with Medeia to the palace of his uncle Pelias.
And when he came in, Pelias sat by the hearth, crippled and blind with age; while opposite him sat AEson, Jason's father, crippled and blind likewise; and the two old men's heads shook together, as they tried to warm themselves before the fire.
And Jason fell down at his father's knees, and wept, and called him by his name.
And the old man stretched his hands out, and felt him, and said: "Do not mock me, young hero.
My son Jason is dead long ago at sea."
So now give me up the kingdom, Pelias my uncle, and fulfil your promise as I have fulfilled mine."
Then his father clung to him like a child, and wept, and would not let him go; and cried, "Now I shall not go down lonely to my grave.
Slowly and painfully, through waves of deadly nausea and with the surging of deep waters in her ears, Diana struggled back to consciousness.
The agony in her head was excruciating, and her limbs felt cramped and bruised.
Recollection was dulled in bodily pain, and, at first, thought was merged in physical suffering.
She remembered fragmentary incidents of what had gone before the oblivion from which she had just emerged.
Her own dread-not of the death that was imminent, but lest the mercy it offered should be snatched from her.
Then before the valet could effect his supreme devotion had come the hail of bullets, and he had fallen against her, the blood that poured from his wounds saturating her linen coat, and rolled over across her feet.
Her eyes were still shut; a leaden weight seemed fixed on them, and the effort to open them was beyond her strength.
But instead of his body or the dry hot sand her fingers had expected to encounter they closed over soft cushions, and with the shock she sat up with a jerk, her eyes staring wide, but, sick and faint, she fell back again, her arm flung across her face, shielding the light that pierced like daggers through her throbbing eye balls.
For a while she lay still, fighting against the weakness that overpowered her, and by degrees the horrible nausea passed and the agony in her head abated, leaving only a dull ache.
She moved her arm slightly from before her eyes so that she could see, and looked cautiously from under thick lashes, screened by the sleeve of her coat.
She was lying on a pile of cushions in one corner of a small tented apartment which was otherwise bare, except for the rug that covered the floor.
In the opposite corner of the tent an Arab woman crouched over a little brazier, and the smell of native coffee was heavy in the air.
She closed her eyes again with a shudder. The attempted devotion of Gaston had been useless.
She lay still, pressing closely down amongst the cushions, and clenching the sleeve of her jacket between her teeth to stifle the groan that rose to her lips.
A lump came into her throat as she thought of Gaston.
In those last moments all inequality of rank had been swept away in their common peril-they had been only a white man and a white woman together in their extremity.
All that he could do he had done, he had shielded her body with his own, it must have been over his lifeless body that they had taken her.
He had proved his faithfulness, sacrificing his life for his master's play thing.
Gaston was in all probability dead, but she was alive, and she must husband her strength for her own needs. She forced the threatening emotion down, and, with an effort, controlled the violent shivering in her limbs, and sat up slowly, looking at the Arab woman, who, hearing her move, turned to gaze at her.
Instantly Diana realised that there was no help or compassion to be expected from her.
And the feeling gave a necessary spur to the courage that was fast coming back to her.
Diana's muscles relaxed and she sat back easily on the cushions, the little passage of wills had restored her confidence in herself.
She moved her hand and it brushed against her jacket, coming away stained and sticky, and she noticed for the first time that all one side and sleeve were soaked with blood.
She ripped it off with a shudder and flung it from her, rubbing the red smear from her hands with a kind of horror.
Her sensitive lip curled with disgust, all her innate fastidiousness in revolt.
The heat aggravated a burning thirst that was parching her throat.
She crossed the tent to the side of the Arab woman.
Diana repeated the request in Arabic, one of the few sentences she knew without stumbling.
Diana hated the sweet, thick stuff, but it would do until she could get the water she wanted, and she put out her hand to take the little cup. But her eyes met the other's fixed on her, and something in their malignant stare made her pause.
What beyond the woman's expression made her think so she did not know, but she was sure of it.
She put the cup aside impatiently.
"no
Not coffee.
Before she realised what was happening the woman thrust a strong arm round her and forced the cup to her lips.
That confirmed Diana's suspicions and rage lent her additional strength.
The woman was strong, but Diana was stronger, younger and more active.
She dashed the cup to the floor, spilling its contents, and, with an effort, tore the clinging hands from her and sent the woman crashing on to the ground, rolling against the brazier, oversetting it, and scattering brass pots and cups over the rug.
And, in answer to her cries, a curtain at the side of the tent, that Diana had not noticed, slid aside and a gigantic Nubian came in. With outstretched hand shaking with rage, pointing at Diana, she burst into voluble abuse, punctuating every few words with the shrieks that had brought the negro.
The Nubian listened with white teeth flashing in a broad grin, and shook his head in response to some request urged with denunciatory fist.
He picked up the last remaining embers that had scattered on the rug, rubbing the smouldering patches till they were extinguished, and then turned to leave the room.
But Diana called him back.
She went a step forward, her head high, and looked him straight in the face.
He pointed to the coffee that the woman had recommenced to make, her back turned to them, but Diana stamped her foot.
"Water!
Bring me water!" she said again, more imperiously than before.
The thought of its condition made her hesitate for a moment, but only for a moment.
She picked up one of the clean coffee cups that had rolled to her feet, rinsed it several times, and then drank.
The water was warm and slightly brackish, but she needed it too much to mind.
In spite of being tepid it relieved the dry, suffocating feeling in her throat and refreshed her.
But her courage had risen with a bound; the fact that she was physically stronger than the woman who had been put to guard her, and also that she had gained her point with the burly negro, had a great moral effect on her, further restoring her confidence in herself.
Her position was an appalling one, but hope was strong within her.
She did not credit him with so much acumen.
If it could only be prolonged until Ahmed reached her.
If he only came in time! Hours had passed since the ambuscade had surprised them.
It had been early afternoon then.
Now the lighted lamp told her it was night.
How late she did not know.
Her watch had been broken some months before, and she had no means of even guessing the hour, but it must be well on in the evening.
By now the absence of herself and Gaston and their escort would be discovered.
He would know her peril and he would come to her.
Of that she had no doubt.
Although he had changed so strangely in the last few days, though the wonderful gentleness of the last two months had merged again into indifference and cruelty, still she never doubted.
He might discard her at his own pleasure, but no one would take her from him with impunity.
Her woman's intuition had sensed the jealousy that had actuated him during the unhappy days since Saint Hubert had come.
An inconsistent jealousy that had been unprovoked and unjustified, but for which she had suffered. She had known last night, when she winced under his sarcastic tongue, and later, when Saint Hubert had left them and his temper had suddenly boiled over, that she was paying for the unaccustomed strain that he was putting on his own feelings.
His curses had eaten into her heart, and she had fled from him to stifle the coward instinct that urged her to confess her love and beg his mercy.
And long after she knew from his even breathing that he was asleep she had lain wide eyed beside him, grasping at what happiness she could, living for the moment as she had schooled herself to live, trying to be content with just the fact of his nearness.
And the indifference of the night had been maintained when he had left her at dawn, his persistent silence pointing the continuance of his displeasure.
He would come!
He would come!
He would not let anything happen to her.
The reversal of the role he played in her life brought a quivering smile to her lips.
For the advent of the man who a few weeks before she had loathed for his brutal abduction of herself she now prayed with the desperation of despair.
He represented safety, salvation, everything that made life worth living.
But the sharp, guttural voice predominating over the other voices killed the wild hope that had sprung up in her by its utter dissimilarity to the soft low tones for which she longed.
Ibraheim Omair!
He had come first!
She stood rigid, one foot beating nervously into the soft rug.
The voices in the next room continued, until Diana almost prayed for the moment she was waiting for would come; suspense was worse than the ordeal for which she was nerving herself, It came at last.
The curtain slid aside again, and the same huge negro she had seen before entered. He came towards her, and her breath hissed in suddenly between her set teeth, but before he reached her the Arab woman intercepted him, blocking his way, and with wild eyes and passionate gestures poured out a stream of low, frenzied words.
The Nubian turned on her impatiently and thrust her roughly out of his way, and, coming to Diana, put out his hand as if to grasp her arm, but she stepped back with flashing eyes and a gesture that he obeyed.
Her heart was pounding, but she had herself under control.
Only her hands twitched, her long fingers curling and uncurling spasmodically, and she buried them deep in her breeches' pockets to hide them.
She walked slowly to the curtain and nodded to the Nubian to draw it aside, and slower still she passed into the other room.
Only a little larger than the one she had left, almost as bare, but her mind took in these things uncomprehendingly, for all her attention was focussed on the central figure in the room.
The hold she was exercising over herself was tremendous, her body was rigid with the effort, and her hands deep down in her pockets clenched till the nails bit into the palms.
Every instinct was rebelling against the calm she forced upon herself.
She longed to scream and make a dash for the opening that she guessed was behind her, and to take her chance in the darkness outside.
But she knew that such a chance was impossible; if she ever reached the open air she would never be allowed to get more than a few steps from the tent.
Her only course lay in the bravado that alone kept her from collapse.
She must convey the impression of fearlessness, though cold terror was knocking at her heart.
His heavy face lit up with a gleam of malicious satisfaction as Diana came towards him, his loose mouth broadened in a wicked smile.
She had seen him in cruel, even savage moods, but nothing that had ever approached the look of horrible pleasure that was on his face now.
It was a revelation of the real man with the thin layer of civilisation stripped from him, leaving only the primitive savage drunk with the lust of blood.
And she was afraid, with a shuddering horror, of the merciless, crimson stained hands that would touch her, of the smiling, cruel mouth that would be pressed on hers, and of the murderous light shining in his fierce eyes.
But for the dying wretch expiating his crimes so hideously she felt no pity, he was beyond all sympathy.
And the retribution was swift.
The noise outside the tent was growing louder as the fighting rolled back in its direction, and once or twice a bullet ripped through the hangings.
Agony leaped into her eyes.
The fear of him was wiped out in the fear for him.
He dropped the dead chief back into the tumbled cushions and looked up swiftly, and at the same moment Ibraheim Omair's men made a rush.
Without a word he thrust her behind the divan and turned to meet them.
Three times he fired and one of the negroes and two Arabs fell, but the rest hurled themselves on him, and Diana saw him surrounded.
His strength was abnormal, and for some minutes the struggling mass of men strained and heaved about him.
Diana was on her feet, swaying giddily, powerless to help him, cold with dread.
Diana tried to get to him, faint and stumbling, flung here and there by the fighting, struggling men, until a strong hand caught her and drew her aside.
She strained against the detaining arm, but it was one of Ahmed's men, and she gave in as a growing faintness came over her. Mistily she saw Saint Hubert clear a way to his friend's side, and then she fainted, but only for a few moments.
The camp of Ibraheim Omair had been wiped out, but Ahmed Ben Hassan's men looked only at the unconscious figure of their leader.
Saint Hubert glanced up hastily as Diana came to his side.
What did it matter about her?
"I don't know-but we must get away from here.
I need more appliances than I have with me, and we are too few to stay and risk a possible attack if there are others of Ibraheim Omair's men in the neighbourhood."
Diana looked down on the wounded man fearfully.
"But the ride-the jolting," she gasped.
"It has got to be risked," replied Saint Hubert abruptly.
It was an agony of dread and apprehension, of momentary waiting for some word or exclamation from the powerful Arab who was holding him, or from Saint Hubert, who was riding beside him, that would mean his death, and of momentary respites from fear and faint glimmerings of hope as the minutes dragged past and the word she was dreading did not come.
He must not die.
God would not be so cruel.
From time to time Saint Hubert spoke to her, and the quiet courage of his voice steadied her breaking nerves.
As they passed the scene of the ambuscade he told her of Gaston.
The dawn was breaking when they reached the camp.
Diana had a glimpse of rows of unusually silent men grouped beside the tent, but all her mind was concentrated on the long, limp figure that was being carefully lifted down from the sweating horse.
They carried him into the tent and laid him on the divan, beside which Henri had already put out all the implements that his master would need.
While Saint Hubert, with difficulty, cleared the tent of the Sheik's men Diana stood beside the divan and looked at him.
He was soaked in blood that had burst through the temporary bandages, and his whole body bore evidence of the terrible struggle that had gone before the blow that had felled him.
"Diane, you have been through enough," he said gently.
"Go and rest while I do what I can for Ahmed.
I will come and tell you as soon as I am finished."
She looked up fiercely.
"It's no good telling me to go away, because I won't.
I must help you.
I can help you.
I shall go mad if you don't let me do something.
See!
My hands are quite steady." She held them out as she spoke, and Saint Hubert gave in without opposition.
The weakness that had sent her trembling into his arms the day before had been the fear of danger to the man she loved, but in the face of actual need the courage that was so much a part of her nature did not fail her.
He made no more remonstrances, but set about his work quickly.
Her face was deadly pale, and dark lines showed below her eyes, but her hands did not shake, and her voice was low and even.
She suffered horribly.
She winced as if the hurt had been her own when Saint Hubert's gentle, dexterous fingers touched the Sheik's bruised head.
And when it was over and Raoul had turned aside to wash his hands, she slipped on to her knees beside him.
Would he live?
The courage that had kept her up so far had not extended to asking Saint Hubert again, and a few muttered words from Henri, to which the Vicomte had responded with only a shrug, had killed the words that were hovering on her lips.
She looked at him with anguished eyes.
Only a few hours before he had come to her in all the magnificence of his strength.
She looked at the long limbs lying now so still, so terribly, suggestively still, and her lips trembled again, but her pain filled eyes were dry.
She could not cry, only her throat ached and throbbed perpetually.
She leaned over him whispering his name, and a sudden hunger came to her to touch him, to convince herself that he was not dead.
She glanced back over her shoulder at Saint Hubert, but he had gone to the open doorway to speak to Yusef, and was standing out under the awning.
She bent lower over the unconscious man; his lips were parted slightly, and the usual sternness of his mouth was relaxed.
Then for a moment she dropped her bright head beside the bandaged one on the pillow, but when the Vicomte came back she was kneeling where he had left her, her hands clasped over one of the Sheik's and her face hidden against the cushions.
Saint Hubert put his hand on her shoulder.
"Diane, you are torturing yourself unnecessarily.
We cannot know for some time how it will go with him.
Try and get some sleep for a few hours.
You can do no good by staying here.
Henri and I will watch.
I will call you if there is any change, my word of honour."
She shook her head without looking up.
"I can't go.
I couldn't sleep."
Saint Hubert did not press it.
"Very well," he said quietly, "but if you are going to stay you must take off your riding boots and put on something more comfortable than those clothes."
She even had to admit to herself a certain sensation of relief after she had bathed her aching head and throat, and substituted a thin, silk wrap for the torn, stained riding suit.
Henri was pouring out coffee when she came back, and Saint Hubert turned to her with a cup in his outstretched hand.
"Please take it.
She took it unheeding, and, swallowing it hastily, went to the side of the divan again.
She slid down on to the rug where she had knelt before.
For a few moments she looked at him, then drowsily her eyes closed and her head fell forward on the cushions, and with a half sad smile of satisfaction Saint Hubert gathered her up into his arms.
He carried her into the bedroom, hesitating beside the couch before he put her down.
He would never have the torturing happiness of holding her in his arms again, would never again clasp her against the heart that was crying out for her with the same mad passion that had swept over him yesterday.
He looked down longingly on the pale face lying against his arm, and his features contracted at the sight of the cruel marks marring the whiteness of her delicate throat.
And yet as he looked at her with eyes filled with hopeless misery a demon of suggestion whispered within him, tempting him.
He knew his friend as no one else did.
To him, all his life, a thing desired had upon possession become valueless.
The pleasure of pursuit faded with ownership.
Her chance was slight, if any.
Ahmed in the full power of his strength again would be the man he had always been, implacable, cruel, merciless.
Saint Hubert's own longing, his passionate, Gallic temperament, were driving him as they had driven him the day before.
The longing to save her from misery was acute, that, and his own love, prompted by the urging of the desire within him.
Then he trembled, and a great fear of himself came over him.
Ahmed was his friend.
Who was he that he should judge him?
He could at least be honest with himself, he could own the truth.
He coveted what was not his, and masked his envy with a hypocrisy that now appeared contemptible.
The clasp of his arms around her seemed suddenly a profanation, and he laid her down very gently on the low couch, drawing the thin coverlet over her, and went back slowly to the other room.
He sent Henri away and sat down beside the divan to watch with a feeling of weariness that was not bodily.
He had need of all his calm, and he gripped himself resolutely.
For a time Ahmed Ben Hassan lay motionless, and then, as the day crept on and the early rays of the warm sun filled the tent, he moved uneasily, and began to mutter feverishly in confused Arabic and French.
And beside him, with his face buried in his hands, Raoul de Saint Hubert thanked God fervently that he had saved Diana the added torture of listening to the revelations of the past four months.
The first words were in Arabic, then the slow, soft voice lapsed into French, pure as the Vicomte's own.
"Two hours south of the oasis with the three broken palm trees by the well....
Lie still, you little fool, it is useless to struggle.
You cannot get away, I shall not let you go....
I will not spare you.
Give me what I want willingly and I will be kind to you, but fight me, and by Allah! you shall pay the cost!...
Shall I make you love me?...
For four months she has fought me.
Why does it give me no pleasure to have broken her at last?
I have tortured her to keep my vow, and still I want her....
Diane, Diane, how beautiful you are!... What devil makes me hate Raoul after twenty years?
Last night she only spoke to him, and when he went I cursed her till I saw the terror in her eyes.
I wanted to kill Raoul when he would not come with me, but for that I would have gone back to her....
Allah! how long the day has been....
Has it been long to her?
Where is Diane?...
Diane, Diane, how could I know how much you meant to me?
How could I know that I should love you?...
The tent is cold and dark without you....
Grant me time to get to her....
How the jackals are howling....
Grand Dieu!
Diane, Diane, it is all black.
I cannot see you, Diane, Diane...."
And hour after hour with weary hopelessness the tired voice went on-"Diane, Diane...."
The sumac seemed to fill his idea of a perfect location from the very first.
He perched on a limb, and between dressing his plumage and pecking at last year's sour dried berries, he sent abroad his prediction.
Old Mother Nature verified his wisdom by sending a dashing shower, but he cared not at all for a wetting.
He knew he would appear brighter when it was past, and he seemed to know, too, that every day of sunshine and shower would bring nearer his heart's desire.
He was a very Beau Brummel while he waited.
From morning until night he bathed, dressed his feathers, sunned himself, fluffed and flirted. He strutted and "chipped" incessantly.
He claimed that sumac for his very own, and stoutly battled for possession with many intruders.
Crowded around it were thickets of papaw, wild grape vines, thorn, dogwood, and red haw, that attracted bug and insect; and just across the old snake fence was a field of mellow mould sloping to the river, that soon would be plowed for corn, turning out numberless big fat grubs.
He was compelled almost hourly to wage battles for his location, for there was something fine about the old stag sumac that attracted homestead seekers.
He had little trouble with the robins.
The Cardinal was left boasting and strutting in the sumac, but in his heart he found it lonesome business.
Being the son of a king, he was much too dignified to beg for a mate, and besides, it took all his time to guard the sumac; but his eyes were wide open to all that went on around him, and he envied the blackbird his glossy, devoted little sweetheart, with all his might.
He almost strained his voice trying to rival the love song of a skylark that hung among the clouds above a meadow across the river, and poured down to his mate a story of adoring love and sympathy.
He screamed a "Chip" of such savage jealousy at a pair of killdeer lovers that he sent them scampering down the river bank without knowing that the crime of which they stood convicted was that of being mated when he was not.
The dove had no dignity; he was so effusive he was a nuisance.
He kept his dignified Quaker mate stuffed to discomfort; he clung to the side of the nest trying to help brood until he almost crowded her from the eggs.
He pestered her with caresses and cooed over his love song until every chipmunk on the line fence was familiar with his story.
The Cardinal's temper was worn to such a fine edge that he darted at the dove one day and pulled a big tuft of feathers from his back.
Every morning brought new arrivals-trim young females fresh from their long holiday, and big boastful males appearing their brightest and bravest, each singer almost splitting his throat in the effort to captivate the mate he coveted.
The heart of the Cardinal sank as he watched.
He pitied himself as he wondered if fate had in store for him the trials he saw others suffering.
Those dreadful feathered females!
How they coquetted!
How they flirted!
How they sleeked and flattened their plumage, and with half open beaks and sparkling eyes, hopped closer and closer as if charmed.
The Cardinal flew to the very top of the highest sycamore and looked across country toward the Limberlost.
It was not an endurable thought.
No bird beside the shining river had plumed, paraded, or made more music than he.
Was it all to be wasted?
By this time he confidently had expected results.
Only that morning he had swelled with pride as he heard mrs Jay tell her quarrelsome husband that she wished she could exchange him for the Cardinal.
No doubt she devoutly wished her plain pudgy husband wore a scarlet coat.
But it is praise from one's own sex that is praise indeed, and only an hour ago the lark had reported that from his lookout above cloud he saw no other singer anywhere so splendid as the Cardinal of the sumac.
Because of these things he held fast to his conviction that he was a prince indeed; and he decided to remain in his chosen location and with his physical and vocal attractions compel the finest little cardinal in the fields to seek him.
For several days he had boasted, he had bantered, he had challenged, he had on this last day almost condescended to coaxing, but not one little bright eyed cardinal female had come to offer herself.
The performance of a brown thrush drove him wild with envy.
The thrush came gliding up the river bank, a rusty coated, sneaking thing of the underbrush, and taking possession of a thorn bush just opposite the sumac, he sang for an hour in the open.
There was no way to improve that music.
With care and deliberation the brown thrush selected the most attractive, and she followed him to the thicket as if charmed.
It was the Cardinal's dream materialized for another before his very eyes, and it filled him with envy.
Should he, the proudest, most magnificent of cardinals, be compelled to go seeking a mate like any common bird?
Perish the thought!
He went to the river to bathe.
On the tip top antler of the old stag sumac, he perched and strained until his jetty whiskers appeared stubby.
He poured out a tumultuous cry vibrant with every passion raging in him.
He caught up his own rolling echoes and changed and varied them.
Wet year!"
He whistled and whistled until all birdland and even mankind heard, for the farmer paused at his kitchen door, with his pails of foaming milk, and called to his wife:
"Hear that, Maria!
I swanny, if that bird doesn't stop predictin' wet weather, I'll get so scared I won't durst put in my corn afore June.
Abram grinned sheepishly.
"I'm willin' to call it the bird if you are, Maria.
I'm really curious to set eyes on him.
"Bosh!" exclaimed Maria.
It's jest the old Wabash rollin' up the echoes.
I've knowed that for forty year.
As Abram opened the door, "Wet year!
He went out, closing the door softly, and with an utter disregard for the corn field, made a bee line for the musician.
"I don't jest rightly s'pose I should go; but I'm free to admit I'd as lief be dead as not to answer when I get a call, an' the fact is, I'm CALLED down beside the river."
Wet year!" rolled the Cardinal's prediction.
"Thanky, old fellow!
Glad to hear you!
Looks as if you might be stayin' round these parts!
Abram went peering and dodging beside the fence, peeping into the bushes, searching for the bird.
But it came nearer being a scared man than a frightened bird, for the Cardinal flashed straight toward him until only a few yards away, and then, swaying on a bush, it chipped, cheered, peeked, whistled broken notes, and manifested perfect delight at the sight of the white haired old man.
Abram stared in astonishment.
"Big as a blackbird, red as a live coal, an' a comin' right at me.
Settin' on a sawed stick in a little wire house takes all the ginger out of any bird, an' their feathers are always mussy.
Cage never touched you!
Leaning toward Abram, the Cardinal turned his head from side to side, and peered, "chipped," and waited for an answering "Chip" from a little golden haired child, but there was no way for the man to know that.
Abram lifted his old hat, and the raindrops glistened on his white hair.
He squared his shoulders and stood very erect.
Well, you never was more welcome any place in your life.
How do you like it?
Look at the grass a creepin' right down till it's a trailin' in the water!
Most anything you can name, you can find it 'long this ole Wabash, if you only know where to hunt for it.
Abram set a foot on the third rail and leaned his elbows on the top. The Cardinal chipped delightedly and hopped and tilted closer.
I've hung on to it like grim death, for it's jest that much o' Paradise I'm plumb sure of.
Man!
Well, you struck it all right, mr Redbird.
Feed you?
You bet I will!
You needn't even 'rastle for grubs if you don't want to.
Land's sake!
I haven't a scrap about me now.
Yes, I have, too!
he's fat as a young shoat now.
Abram took out his jack knife, and dotting a row of grains along the top rail, he split and shaved them down as fine as possible; and as he reached one end of the rail, the Cardinal, with a spasmodic "Chip!" dashed down and snatched a particle from the other, and flashed back to the bush, tested, approved, and chipped his thanks.
Well!
Look at that topknot a wavin' in the wind!
It's a dratted shame!
"Here!
Here!" whistled the Cardinal.
"Well, I'm mighty glad if you're sayin' you'll stay!
Lord! the Limberlost ain't to be compared with the river, mr Redbird.
You're foolish if you go!
But then you WARNED me, didn't you, old fellow?
Abram straightened and touched his hat brim in a trim half military salute.
"Well, good bye, mr Redbird.
See you in the mornin', right after breakfast, no count taken o' the weather."
Wet year!" called the Cardinal after his retreating figure.
The Cardinal went to the top rail and feasted on the sweet grains of corn until his craw was full, and then nestled in the sumac and went to sleep.
Early next morning he was abroad and in fine toilet, and with a full voice from the top of the sumac greeted the day-"Wet year!
Wet year!"
He located them, but it was only several staid old couples, a long time mated, and busy with their nest building.
He decided to prospect in the opposite direction, and taking wing, he started up the river.
Following the channel, he winged his flight for miles over the cool sparkling water, between the tangle of foliage bordering the banks.
He rounded curve after curve, and frequently stopping on a conspicuous perch, flung a ringing challenge in the face of the morning.
With every mile the way he followed grew more beautiful.
The river bed was limestone, and the swiftly flowing water, clear and limpid.
Startled, the Cardinal took wing.
The river circled in one great curve.
The Cardinal mounted to the tip top limb of the ash and looked around him.
The mist and shimmer of early spring were in the air.
Scattered around were mighty trees, but conspicuous above any, in the very center, was a giant sycamore, split at its base into three large trees, whose waving branches seemed to sweep the face of heaven, and whose roots, like miserly fingers, clutched deep into the black muck of Rainbow Bottom.
It was in this lovely spot that the rainbow at last materialized, and at its base, free to all humanity who cared to seek, the Great Alchemist had left His rarest treasures-the gold of sunshine, diamond water drops, emerald foliage, and sapphire sky.
Above all, the sycamore waved its majestic head.
Look this way!
Behold me!
Have you seen any other of so great size?
Have you any to equal my grace?
Who can whistle so loud, so clear, so compelling a note?
Who will fly to me for protection?
Who will come and be my mate?"
He flared his crest high, swelled his throat with rolling notes, and appeared so big and brilliant that among the many cardinals that had gathered to hear, there was not one to compare with him.
Black envy filled their hearts.
There were many unmated cardinals in Rainbow Bottom, and many jealous males.
The Cardinal, with a royal flourish, sprang in air to seek her; but her outraged mate was ahead of him, and with a scream she fled, leaving a tuft of feathers in her mate's beak.
In turn the Cardinal struck him like a flashing rocket, and then red war waged in Rainbow Bottom.
The females scattered for cover with all their might.
The Cardinal worked in a kiss on one poor little bird, too frightened to escape him; then the males closed in, and serious business began.
The Cardinal would have enjoyed a fight vastly with two or three opponents; but a half dozen made discretion better than valour.
He darted among them, scattering them right and left, and made for the sycamore.
The newly mated pair finally made up; the females speedily resumed their coquetting, and forgot the captivating stranger-all save the poor little one that had been kissed by accident.
She had been hatched from a fifth egg to begin with; and every one knows the disadvantage of beginning life with four sturdy older birds on top of one.
It was a meager egg, and a feeble baby that pipped its shell.
The remainder of the family stood and took nearly all the food so that she almost starved in the nest, and she never really knew the luxury of a hearty meal until her elders had flown.
Hunger driven, she climbed to the edge and exercised her wings until she managed some sort of flight to a neighbouring bush. She missed the twig and fell to the ground, where she lay cold and shivering.
She cried pitifully, and was almost dead when a brown faced, barefoot boy, with a fishing pole on his shoulder, passed and heard her.
"Poor little thing, you are almost dead," he said.
"I know what I'll do with you.
I'll take you over and set you in the bushes where I heard those other redbirds, and then your ma will feed you."
So her troubles continued.
She was left so badly frightened that she could not move for a long time.
All the tribulations of birdland fell to her lot.
She was so frail and weak she lost her family in migration, and followed with some strangers that were none too kind.
Life in the South had been full of trouble. Once a bullet grazed her so closely she lost two of her wing quills, and that made her more timid than ever.
She was such a shy, fearsome little body, the females all flouted her; and the males never seemed to notice that there was material in her for a very fine mate.
Every other female cardinal in Rainbow Bottom had several males courting her, but this poor, frightened, lonely one had never a suitor; and she needed love so badly!
Now she had been kissed by this magnificent stranger!
He had intended it for the bold creature that had answered his challenge, but since it came to her, it was hers, in a way, after all.
All day she hid and waited, and the following days were filled with longing, but he never came again.
For miles she sneaked through the underbrush, and watched and listened; until at last night came, and she returned to Rainbow Bottom.
From there she glided through the bushes and underbrush, trembling and quaking, yet pushing stoutly onward, straining her ears for some note of the brilliant stranger's.
She sprang into air, and fled a mile before she realized that she was flying.
Then she stopped and listened, and rolling with the river, she heard those bold true tones.
High in the sumac the Cardinal had sung until his throat was parched, and the fountain of hope was almost dry.
Yet no one had come to seek him.
Wet year!"
For with his eye he could not follow it So as to see aught else than flame alone, Even as a little cloud ascending upward,
And the Leader, who beheld me so attent, Exclaimed: "Within the fires the spirits are; Each swathes himself with that wherewith he burns."
Leave me to speak, because I have conceived That which thou wishest; for they might disdain Perchance, since they were Greeks, discourse of thine."
Thereafterward, the summit to and fro Moving as if it were the tongue that spake, It uttered forth a voice, and said: "When I
Joyful were we, and soon it turned to weeping; For out of the new land a whirlwind rose, And smote upon the fore part of the ship.
Three times it made her whirl with all the waters, At the fourth time it made the stern uplift, And the prow downward go, as pleased Another,
Already was the flame erect and quiet, To speak no more, and now departed from us With the permission of the gentle Poet;
But inasmuch as never from this depth Did any one return, if I hear true, Without the fear of infamy I answer,
Francis came afterward, when I was dead, For me; but one of the black Cherubim Said to him: 'Take him not; do me no wrong;
For who repents not cannot be absolved, Nor can one both repent and will at once, Because of the contradiction which consents not.'
Onward we passed, both I and my Conductor, Up o'er the crag above another arch, Which the moat covers, where is paid the fee
"Nor death hath reached him yet, nor guilt doth bring him," My Master made reply, "to be tormented; But to procure him full experience,
After one foot to go away he lifted, This word did Mahomet say unto me, Then to depart upon the ground he stretched it.
Staying to look in wonder with the others, Before the others did his gullet open, Which outwardly was red in every part,
But I remained to look upon the crowd; And saw a thing which I should be afraid, Without some further proof, even to recount,
When it was come close to the bridge's foot, It lifted high its arm with all the head, To bring more closely unto us its words,
When we were now right over the last cloister Of Malebolge, so that its lay brothers Could manifest themselves unto our sight,
I do not think a sadder sight to see Was in Aegina the whole people sick, (When was the air so full of pestilence,
Wholly to me did the good Master gather, Saying: "Say unto them whate'er thou wishest." And I began, since he would have it so:
And Niccolo, who the luxurious use Of cloves discovered earliest of all Within that garden where such seed takes root;
He cried: "Spread out the nets, that I may take The lioness and her whelps upon the passage;" And then extended his unpitying claws,
And he to me: "That is the ancient ghost Of the nefarious Myrrha, who became Beyond all rightful love her father's lover.
And after the two maniacs had passed On whom I held mine eye, I turned it back To look upon the other evil born.
The heavy dropsy, that so disproportions The limbs with humours, which it ill concocts, That the face corresponds not to the belly,
"I found them here," replied he, "when I rained Into this chasm, and since they have not turned, Nor do I think they will for evermore.
Such I became, not having power to speak, For to excuse myself I wished, and still Excused myself, and did not think I did it.
I transcribe it word for word:
After a short combat, the cavalry of the royalists gave way; and such of the infantry as stood next them were likewise borne down and put to flight.
Newcastle's regiment alone, resolute to conquer or to perish, obstinately kept their ground, and maintained, by their dead bodies, the same order in which they had at first been ranged.
In the other wing, Sir Thomas Fairfax and Colonel Lambert, with some troops, broke through the royalists; and, transported by the ardor of pursuit, soon reached their victorious friends, engaged also in pursuit of the enemy.
When ready to seize on their carriages and baggage, he perceived Cromwell, who was now returned from pursuit of the other wing.
Both sides were not a little surprised to find that they must again renew the combat for that victory which each of them thought they had already obtained.
The front of the battle was now exactly counterchanged; and each army occupied the ground which had been possessed by the enemy at the beginning of the day.
This second battle was equally furious and desperate with the first: but after the utmost efforts of courage by both parties, victory wholly turned to the side of the parliament.
This event was in itself a mighty blow to the king; but proved more fatal in its consequences.
The marquis of Newcastle was entirely lost to the royal cause.
That nobleman the ornament of the court and of his order, had been engaged, contrary to the natural bent of his disposition, into these military operations merely by a high sense of honor and a personal regard to his master.
The dangers of war were disregarded by his valor; but its fatigues were oppressive to his natural indolence.
When Prince Rupert, contrary to his advice, resolved on this battle, and issued all orders without communicating his intentions to him, he took the field, but, he said, merely as a volunteer; and, except by his personal courage, which shone out with lustre, he had no share in the action.
Next morning early, he sent word to the prince, that he was instantly to leave the kingdom; and without delay, he went to Scarborough, where he found a vessel, which carried him beyond sea.
During the ensuing years, till the restoration, he lived abroad in great necessity, and saw with indifference his opulent fortune sequestered by those who assumed the government of England.
Prince Rupert, with equal precipitation, drew off the remains of his army, and retired into Lancashire.
While these events passed in the north, the king's affairs in the south were conducted with more success and greater abilities.
Ruthven, a Scotchman, who had been created earl of Brentford, acted under the king as general.
The great zeal of the city facilitated this undertaking.
Many speeches were made to the citizens by the parliamentary leaders, in order to excite their ardor.
The two generals had orders to march with their combined armies towards Oxford; and, if the king retired into that city, to lay siege to it, and by one enterprise put a period to the war.
He marched towards Worcester; and Waller received orders from Essex to follow him and watch his motions, while he himself marched into the west, in quest of Prince Maurice.
Waller had approached within two miles of the royal camp, and was only separated from it by the Severn, when he received intelligence that the king was advanced to Bewdly, and had directed his course towards Shrewsbury.
In order to prevent him, Waller presently dislodged, and hastened by quick marches to that town while the king, suddenly returning upon his own footsteps reached Oxford; and having reenforced his army from that garrison, now in his turn marched out in quest of Waller.
The two armies faced each other at Cropredy Bridge, near Banbury; but the Charwell ran between them.
Next day, the king decamped, and marched towards Daventry.
Waller ordered a considerable detachment to pass the bridge, with an intention of falling on the rear of the royalists.
That general, having obliged Prince Maurice to raise the siege of Lyme, having taken Weymouth and Taunton, advanced still in his conquests, and met with no equal opposition.
The king followed him, and having reenforced his army from all quarters, appeared in the field with an army superior to the enemy.
Essex, retreating into Cornwall, informed the parliament of his danger, and desired them to send an army which might fall on the king's rear. General Middleton received a commission to execute that service; but came too late.
Essex, Robarts, and some of the principal officers escaped in a boat to Plymouth; Balfour with his horse passed the king's outposts in a thick mist, and got safely to the garrisons of his own party.
The foot under Skippon were obliged to surrender their arms, artillery, baggage, and ammunition; and being conducted to the parliament's quarters, were dismissed.
No sooner did this intelligence reach London, than the committee of the two kingdoms voted thanks to Essex for his fidelity, courage, and conduct; and this method of proceeding, no less politic than magnanimous, was preserved by the parliament throughout the whole course of the war.
Equally indulgent to their friends and rigorous to their enemies, they employed with success these two powerful engines of reward and punishment, in confirmation of their authority.
That the king might have less reason to exult in the advantages which he had obtained in the west, the parliament opposed to him very numerous forces.
Though the king's troops defended themselves with valor, they were overpowered by numbers; and the night came very seasonably to their relief, and prevented a total overthrow.
Charles, leaving his baggage and cannon in Dennington Castle, near Newbury, forthwith retreated to Wallingford, and thence to Oxford.
There had long prevailed in that party a secret distinction, which, though the dread of the king's power had hitherto suppressed it, yet, in proportion as the hopes of success became nearer and more immediate, began to discover itself with high contest and animosity.
The Independents, who had at first taken shelter and concealed themselves under the wings of the Presbyterians, now evidently appeared a distinct party, and betrayed very different views and pretensions.
We must here endeavor to explain the genius of this party, and of its leaders, who henceforth occupy the scene of action.
Every man, as prompted by the warmth of his temper, excited by emulation, or supported by his habits of hypocrisy, endeavored to distinguish himself beyond his fellows, and to arrive at a higher pitch of saintship and perfection.
In proportion to its degree of fanaticism, each sect became dangerous and destructive; and as the Independents went a note higher than the Presbyterians, they could less be restrained within any bounds of temper and moderation.
From this distinction, as from a first principle, were derived, by a necessary consequence, all the other differences of these two sects.
The Independents rejected all ecclesiastical establishments, and would admit of no spiritual courts, no government among pastors, no interposition of the magistrate in religious concerns, no fixed encouragement annexed to any system of doctrines or opinions.
According to their principles, each congregation, united voluntarily and by spiritual ties, composed within itself a separate church, and exercised a jurisdiction, but one destitute of temporal sanctions, over its own pastor and its own members.
The soldier, the merchant, the mechanic, indulging the fervors of zeal, and guided by the illapses of the spirit, resigned himself to an inward and superior direction, and was consecrated, in a manner, by an immediate intercourse and communication with heaven.
Of all Christian sects, this was the first which, during its prosperity as well as its adversity, always adopted the principle of toleration; and it is remarkable that so reasonable a doctrine owed its origin, not to reasoning, but to the height of extravagance and fanaticism.
Popery and prelacy alone, whose genius seemed to tend towards superstition, were treated by the Independents with rigor.
The doctrines too of fate or destiny were deemed by them essential to all religion. In these rigid opinions the whole sectaries, amidst all their other differences, unanimously concurred.
In consequence of this scheme, they were declared enemies to all proposals of peace, except on such terms as they knew it was impossible to obtain; and they adhered to that maxim, which is in the main prudent and political, that whoever draws the sword against his sovereign, should throw away the scabbard.
By terrifying others with the fear of vengeance from the offended prince, they had engaged greater numbers into the opposition against peace, than had adopted their other principles with regard to government and religion.
Sir Henry Vane, Oliver Cromwell, Nathaniel Fiennes, and Oliver saint John, the solicitor general, were regarded as the leaders of the Independents. The earl of Essex, disgusted with a war of which he began to foresee the pernicious consequences, adhered to the Presbyterians, and promoted every reasonable plan of accommodation.
These violent dissensions brought matters to extremity, and pushed the Independents to the execution of their designs.
The present generals, they thought, were more desirous of protracting than finishing the war; and having entertained a scheme for preserving still some balance in the constitution, they were afraid of entirely subduing the king, and reducing him to a condition where he should not be entitled to ask any concessions.
A new model alone of the army could bring complete victory to the parliament, and free the nation from those calamities under which it labored.
But how to effect this project was the difficulty. The authority, as well as merits, of Essex was very great with the parliament.
A fast, on the last Wednesday of every month, had been ordered by the parliament at the beginning of these commotions; and their preachers on that day were careful to keep alive, by their vehement declamations, the popular prejudices entertained against the king, against prelacy, and against Popery.
On that day, the preachers, after many political prayers, took care to treat of the reigning divisions in the parliament, and ascribed them entirely to the selfish ends pursued by the members.
In the hands of those members, they said, are lodged all the considerable commands of the army, all the lucrative offices in the civil administration: and while the nation is falling every day into poverty, and groans under an insupportable load of taxes, these men multiply possession on possession, and will in a little time be masters of all the wealth of the kingdom.
That such persons, who fatten on the calamities of their country, will ever embrace any effectual measure for bringing them to a period, or insuring final success to the war, cannot reasonably be expected.
Lingering expedients alone will be pursued; and operations in the field concurring in the same pernicious end with deliberations in the cabinet, civil commotions will forever be perpetuated in the nation.
On the day subsequent to these devout animadversions when the parliament met, a new spirit appeared in the looks of many.
The parliament, no doubt, continued he, had done wisely on the commencement of the war, in engaging several of its members in the most dangerous parts of it, and thereby satisfying the nation that they intended to share all hazards with the meanest of the people.
But affairs are now changed.
During the progress of military operations, there have arisen in the parliamentary armies many excellent officers, who are qualified for higher commands than they are now possessed of.
The army, indeed, he was sorry to say it, did not correspond by its discipline to the merit of the officers; nor were there any hopes, till the present vices and disorders which prevail among the soldiers were repressed by a new model that their forces would ever be attended with signal success in any undertaking.
In opposition to this reasoning of the Independents, many of the Presbyterians showed the inconvenience and danger of the projected alteration.
Notwithstanding these reasonings, a committee was chosen to frame what was called the "self denying ordinance," by which the members of both houses were excluded from all civil and military employments, except a few offices which were specified.
This ordinance was the subject of great debate, and for a long time rent the parliament and city into factions.
A pension of ten thousand pounds a year was settled on Essex.
He was saved by a subtlety, and by that political craft in which he was so eminent.
At the time when the other officers resigned their commissions, care was taken that he should be sent with a body of horse to relieve Taunton besieged by the royalists.
His absence being remarked orders were despatched for his immediate attendance in parliament; and the new general was directed to employ some other officer in that service.
Fairfax was a person equally eminent for courage and for humanity; and though strongly infected with prejudices, or principles derived from religious and party zeal, he seems never, in the course of his public conduct, to have been diverted by private interest or ambition from adhering strictly to these principles.
Cromwell, by whose sagacity and insinuation Fairfax was entirely governed, is one of the most eminent and most singular personages that occurs in history: the strokes of his character are as open and strongly marked, as the schemes of his conduct were, during the time, dark and impenetrable.
His extensive capacity enabled him to form the most enlarged projects: his enterprising genius was not dismayed with the boldest and most dangerous.
Carried by his natural temper to magnanimity, to grandeur, and to an imperious and domineering policy, he yet knew, when necessary, to employ the most profound dissimulation, the most oblique and refined artifice, the semblance of the greatest moderation and simplicity.
And by using well that authority which he had attained by fraud and violence, he has lessened, if not overpowered, our detestation of his enormities, by our admiration of his success and of his genius.
During this important transaction of the self denying ordinance, the negotiations for peace were likewise carried on, though with small hopes of success.
The advantages gained during the campaign and the great distresses of the royalists, had much elevated their hopes; and they were resolved to repose no trust in men inflamed with the highest animosity against them, and who, were they possessed of power, were fully authorized by law to punish all their opponents as rebels and traitors.
Had Charles been of a disposition to neglect all theological controversy, he yet had been obliged, in good policy, to adhere to episcopal jurisdiction; not only because it was favorable to monarchy, but because all its adherents were passionately devoted to it; and to abandon them, in what they regarded as so important an article, was forever to relinquish their friendship and assistance.
But Charles had never attained such enlarged principles.
He deemed bishops essential to the very being of a Christian church; and he thought himself bound, by more sacred ties than those of policy, or even of honor, to the support of that order.
These concessions, though considerable gave no satisfaction to the parliamentary commissioners; and, without abating any thing of their rigor on this head, they proceeded to their demands with regard to the militia.
The king's partisans had all along maintained, that the fears and jealousies of the parliament, after the securities so early and easily given to public liberty, were either feigned or groundless; and that no human institution could be better poised and adjusted than was now the government of England.
In this situation, surely the nation, governed by so virtuous a monarch, may for the present remain in tranquillity, and try whether it be not possible, by peaceful arts, to elude that danger with which it is pretended its liberties are still threatened.
But though the royalists insisted on these plausible topics before the commencement of war, they were obliged to own, that the progress of civil commotions had somewhat abated the force and evidence of this reasoning.
If the power of the militia, said the opposite party, be intrusted to the king, it would not now be difficult for him to abuse that authority.
Were the arms of the state, therefore, put entirely into such hands, what public security, it may be demanded, can be given to liberty, or what private security to those who, in opposition to the letter of the law, have so generously ventured their lives in its defence?
Whether there were any equity in securing only one party, and leaving the other, during the space of seven years, entirely at the mercy of their enemies?
Amidst such violent animosities, power alone could insure safety; and the power of one side was necessarily attended with danger to the other.
Few or no instances occur in history of an equal, peaceful, and durable accommodation that has been concluded between two factions which had been inflamed into civil war.
With regard to Ireland, there were no greater hopes of agreement between the parties.
What rendered an accommodation more desperate was, that the demands on these three heads, however exorbitant, were acknowledged, by the parliamentary commissioners, to be nothing but preliminaries.
After all these were granted, it would be necessary to proceed to the discussion of those other demands, still more exorbitant, which a little before had been transmitted to the king at Oxford.
Such ignominious terms were there insisted on, that worse could scarcely be demanded, were Charles totally vanquished, a prisoner, and in chains.
It was insisted that forty eight more, with all the members who had sitten in either house at Oxford, all lawyers and divines who had embraced the king's party, should be rendered incapable of any office, be forbidden the exercise of their profession, be prohibited from coming within the verge of the court, and forfeit the third of their estates to the parliament.
The Presbyterians, it must be confessed, after insisting on such conditions, differed only in words from the Independents, who required the establishment of a pure republic.
When the debates had been carried on to no purpose during twenty days among the commissioners, they separated, and returned; those of the king to Oxford, those of the parliament to London.
After the union with Scotland, the bigoted prejudices of that nation revived the like spirit in England; and the sectaries resolved to gratify their vengeance in the punishment of this prelate, who had so long, by his authority, and by the execution of penal laws, kept their zealous spirit under confinement.
He was accused of high treason, in endeavoring to subvert the fundamental laws, and of other high crimes and misdemeanors.
We shall not enter into a detail of this matter, which at present seems to admit of little controversy.
Notwithstanding the low condition into which the house of peers was fallen, there appeared some intention of rejecting this ordinance; and the popular leaders were again obliged to apply to the multitude, and to extinguish, by threats of new tumults, the small remains of liberty possessed by the upper house.
Seven peers alone voted in this important question.
Sincere he undoubtedly was, and, however misguided, actuated by pious motives in all his pursuits; and it is to be regretted that a man of such spirit, who conducted his enterprises with so much warmth and industry, had not entertained more enlarged views, and embraced principles more favorable to the general happiness of society.
The great and important advantage which the party gained by Strafford's death, may in some degree palliate the iniquity of the sentence pronounced against him: but the execution of this old, infirm prelate, who had so long remained an inoffensive prisoner, can be ascribed to nothing but vengeance and bigotry in those severe religionists by whom the parliament was entirely governed.
That he deserved a better fate was not questioned by any reasonable man: the degree of his merit in other respects was disputed.
Some accused him of recommending slavish doctrines, of promoting persecution, and of encouraging superstition; while others thought that his conduct in these three particulars would admit of apology and extenuation.
That the letter of the law, as much as the most flaming court sermon, inculcates passive obedience, is apparent; and though the spirit of a limited government seems to require, in extraordinary cases, some mitigation of so rigorous a doctrine, it must be confessed, that the presiding genius of the English constitution had rendered a mistake in this particular very natural and excusable.
To inflict death, at least, on those who depart from the exact line of truth in these nice questions, so far from being favorable to national liberty, savors strongly of the spirit of tyranny and proscription.
Toleration had hitherto been so little the principle of any Christian sect, that even the Catholics, the remnant of the religion professed by their forefathers, could not obtain from the English the least indulgence.
They openly challenged the superiority, and even menaced the established church with that persecution which they afterwards exercised against her with such severity.
Whatever ridicule, to a philosophical mind, may be thrown on pious ceremonies, it must be confessed that, during a very religious age, no institutions can be more advantageous to the rude multitude, and tend more to mollify that fierce and gloomy spirit of devotion to which they are subject.
Even the English church, though it had retained a share of Popish ceremonies, may justly be thought too naked and unadorned, and still to approach too near the abstract and spiritual religion of the Puritans.
Laud and his associates, by reviving a few primitive institutions of this nature, corrected the error of the first reformers, and presented to the affrightened and astonished mind some sensible, exterior observances, which might occupy it during its religious exercises, and abate the violence of its disappointed efforts.
The thought, no longer bent on that divine and mysterious essence, so superior to the narrow capacities of mankind, was able, by means of the new model of devotion, to relax itself in the contemplation of pictures, postures, vestments, buildings; and all the fine arts which minister to religion, thereby received additional encouragement.
But though the king was naturally the gainer by such a method of conducting war, and it was by favor of law that the train, bands were raised in Cornwall, it appeared that those maxims were now prejudicial to the royal party.
These troops could not legally, without their own consent, be carried out of the county; and consequently it was impossible to push into Devonshire the advantage which they had obtained.
The Cornish royalists, therefore, bethought themselves of levying a force which might be more serviceable.
Sir Bevil Granville, the most beloved man of that country, Sir Ralph Hopton, Sir Nicholas Slanning, Arundel, and Trevannion undertook as their own charges to raise an army for the king; and their great interest in Cornwall soon enabled them to effect their purpose.
The parliament, alarmed at this appearance of the royalists, gave a commission to Ruthven, a Scotchman, governor of Plymouth, to march with all the forces to Dorset.
Somerset, and Devon, and make an entire conquest of Cornwall.
The earl of Stamford followed him at some distance With a considerable supply.
The battle was fought on Bradoc Down; and the king's forces, though inferior in number, gave a total defeat to their enemies.
Ruthven, with a few broken troops, fled to Saltash; and when that town was taken, he escaped with some difficulty, and almost alone, into Plymouth.
Stamford retired, and distributed his forces into Plymouth and Exeter.
Notwithstanding these advantages, the extreme want both of money and ammunition under which the Cornish royalists labored, obliged them to enter into a convention of neutrality with the parliamentary party in Devonshire; and this neutrality held all the winter season.
In the spring, it was broken by the authority of the two houses; but war recommenced with great appearance of disadvantage to the king's party. Stamford, having assembled a strong body of near seven thousand men, well supplied with money, provisions, and ammunition, advanced upon the royalists, who were not half his number, and were oppressed by every kind of necessity.
Despair, joined to the natural gallantry of these troops, commanded by the prime gentry of the county, made them resolve by one vigorous effort, to overcome all these disadvantages.
Stamford being encamped on the top of a high hill near Stratum, they attacked him in four divisions, at five in the morning, having lain all night under arms.
The fight continued with doubtful success, till word was brought to the chief officers of the Cornish, that their ammunition was spent to less than four barrels of powder.
This defect, which they concealed from the soldiers, they resolved to supply by their valor. They agreed to advance without firing till they should reach the top of the hill, and could be on equal ground with the enemy.
After this success, the attention both of king and parliament was turned towards the west, as to a very important scene of action.
On the other hand, the parliament, having supplied Sir William Waller, in whom they much trusted, with a complete army, despatched him westwards, in order to check the progress of the royalists.
The royalists next attempted to march eastwards, and to join their forces to the king's at Oxford: but Waller hung on their rear, and infested their march till they reached the Devizes.
It was resolved that Hertford and Prince Maurice should proceed with the cavalry; and, having procured a reenforcement from the king, should hasten back to the relief of their friends.
Waller was so confident of taking this body of infantry, now abandoned by the horse, that he wrote to the parliament that their work was done, and that by the next post he would inform them of the number and quality of the prisoners.
After a sharp action, he was totally routed, and flying with a few horse, escaped to Bristol.
This important victory, following so quick after many other successes, struck great dismay into the parliament, and gave an alarm to their principal army, commanded by Essex.
Waller exclaimed loudly against that general, for allowing Wilmot to pass him, and proceed without any interruption to the succor of the distressed infantry at the Devizes. But Essex, finding that his army fell continually to decay after the siege of Reading, was resolved to remain upon the defensive; and the weakness of the king, and his want of all military stores, had also restrained the activity of the royal army.
Colonel Urrey, a Scotchman, who served in the parliamentary army, having received some disgust, came to Oxford and offered his services to the king.
In order to prove the sincerity of his conversion, he informed Prince Rupert of the loose disposition of the enemy's quarters, and exhorted him to form some attempt upon them.
The alarm being given, every one mounted on horseback, in order to pursue the prince, to recover the prisoners, and to repair the disgrace which the army had sustained.
Among the rest Hambden, who had a regiment of infantry that lay at a distance, joined the horse as a volunteer; and overtaking the royalists on Chalgrave field, entered into the thickest of the battle.
By the bravery and activity of Rupert, the king's troops were brought off, and a great booty, together with two hundred prisoners, was conveyed to Oxford.
But whether, in the pursuit of this violent enterprise, he was actuated by private ambition or by honest prejudices, derived from the former exorbitant powers of royalty, it belongs not to an historian of this age, scarcely even to an intimate friend, positively to determine.
Essex, discouraged by this event, dismayed by the total rout of Waller, was further informed, that the queen, who landed at Burlington Bay, had arrived at Oxford, and had brought from the north a reenforcement of three thousand foot and fifteen hundred horse.
Dislodging from Thame and Aylesbury, where he had hitherto lain, he thought proper to retreat nearer to London; and he showed to his friends his broken and disheartened forces, which a few months before he had led into the field in so flourishing a condition.
The king, freed from this enemy, sent his army westward under Prince Rupert; and, by their conjunction with the Cornish troops, a formidable force, for numbers as well as reputation and valor, was composed.
That an enterprise correspondent to men's expectations might be undertaken, the prince resolved to lay siege to Bristol, the second town for riches and greatness in the kingdom. Nathaniel Fiennes, son of Lord Say he himself, as well as his father, a great parliamentary leader was governor, and commanded a garrison of two thousand five hundred foot, and two regiments, one of horse, another of dragoons.
On the prince's side, the assault was conducted with equal courage, and almost with equal loss, but with better success.
One party, led by Lord Grandison, was indeed beaten off, and the commander himself mortally wounded: another, conducted by Colonel Bellasis, met with a like fate: but Washington, with a less party, finding a place in the curtain weaker than the rest, broke in, and quickly made room for the horse to follow.
Five hundred excellent soldiers perished.
Having joined the camp at Bristol, and sent Prince Maurice with a detachment into Devonshire, he deliberated how to employ the remaining forces in an enterprise of moment.
But this undertaking, by reason of the great number and force of the London militia, was thought by many to be attended with considerable difficulties.
The governor of Gloucester was one Massey, a soldier of fortune, who, before he engaged with the parliament, had offered his service to the king; and as he was free from the fumes of enthusiasm, by which most of the officers on that side were intoxicated, he would lend an ear, it was presumed, to proposals for accommodation.
The rapid progress of the royalists threatened the parliament with immediate subjection: the factions and discontents among themselves in the city, and throughout the neighboring counties, prognosticated some dangerous division or insurrection.
Those parliamentary leaders, it must be owned, who had introduced such mighty innovations into the English constitution, and who had projected so much greater, had not engaged in an enterprise which exceeded their courage and capacity.
Great vigor, from the beginning, as well as wisdom, they had displayed in all their counsels; and a furious, headstrong body, broken loose from the restraint of law, had hitherto been retained in subjection under their authority, and firmly united by zeal and passion, as by the most legal and established government.
In the beginning of this summer, a combination, formed against them in London, had obliged them to exert the plenitude of their authority.
Edward Waller, the first refiner of English versification, was a member of the lower house; a man of considerable fortune, and not more distinguished by his poetical genius than by his parliamentary talents, and by the politeness and elegance of his manners.
As full of keen satire and invective in his eloquence, as of tenderness and panegyric in his poetry, he caught the attention of his hearers, and exerted the utmost boldness in blaming those violent counsels by which the commons were governed.
While this affair was in agitation, and lists were making of such as they conceived to be well affected to their design, a servant of Tomkins, who had overheard their discourse, immediately carried intelligence to Pym.
They were all three condemned, and the two latter executed on gibbets erected before their own doors.
A covenant, as a test, was taken by the lords and commons, and imposed on their army, and on all who lived within their quarters.
Waller, as soon as imprisoned, sensible of the great danger into which he had fallen, was so seized with the dread of death, that all his former spirit deserted him; and he confessed whatever he knew, without sparing his most intimate friends, without regard to the confidence reposed in him, without distinguishing between the negligence of familiar conversation and the schemes of a regular conspiracy.
With the most profound dissimulation, he counterfeited such remorse of conscience, that his execution was put off, out of mere Christian compassion, till he might recover the use of his understanding.
But by the progress of the king's arms, the defeat of Sir William Waller, the taking of Bristol, the siege of Gloucester, a cry for peace was renewed, and with more violence than ever.
The upper house sent down terms of accommodation, more moderate than had hitherto been insisted on.
It even passed by a majority among the commons, that these proposals should be transmitted to the King.
The zealots took the alarm.
A petition against peace was framed in the city, and presented by Pennington, the factious mayor.
Massey, resolute to make a vigorous defence, and having under his command a city and garrison ambitious of the crown of martyrdom, had hitherto maintained the siege with courage and abilities, and had much retarded the advances of the king's army.
By continual sallies he infested them in their trenches, and gained sudden advantages over them: by disputing every inch of ground, he repressed the vigor and alacrity of their courage, elated by former successes.
His garrison, however, was reduced to the last extremity; and he failed not from time to time to inform the parliament that, unless speedily relieved, he should be necessitated, from the extreme want of provisions and ammunition, to open his gates to the enemy.
The parliament, in order to repair their broken condition, and put themselves in a posture of defence, now exerted to the utmost their power and authority.
Having associated in their cause the counties of Hertford, Essex, Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincoln, and Huntingdon, they gave the earl of Manchester a commission to be general of the association, and appointed an army to be levied under his command.
But, above all, they were intent that Essex's army, on which their whole fortune depended, should be put in a condition of marching against the king.
They excited afresh their preachers to furious declamations against the royal cause.
One barrel of powder was their whole stock of ammunition remaining; and their other provisions were in the same proportion.
The chief difficulty still remained.
Essex dreaded a battle with the king's army, on account of its great superiority in cavalry; and he resolved to return, if possible, without running that hazard.
He lay five days at Tewkesbury, which was his first stage after leaving Gloucester; and he feigned, by some preparations, to point towards Worcester.
On both sides the battle was fought with desperate valor and a steady bravery.
Essex's horse were several times broken by the king's, but his infantry maintained themselves in firm array; and, besides giving a continued fire, they presented an invincible rampart of pikes against the furious shock of Prince Rupert, and those gallant troops of gentry of which the royal cavalry was chiefly composed.
The militia of London especially, though utterly unacquainted with action, though drawn hut a few days before from their ordinary occupations, yet having learned all military exercises, and being animated with unconquerable zeal for the cause in which they were engaged, equalled on this occasion what could be expected from the most veteran forces.
While the armies were engaged with the utmost ardor, night put an end to the action and left the victory undecided.
Next morning, Essex proceeded on his march; and though his rear was once put in some disorder by an incursion of the king's horse, he reached London in safety, and received applause for his conduct and success in the whole enterprise.
Before assembling the present parliament, this man, devoted to the pursuits of learning and to the society of all the polite and elegant, had enjoyed himself in every pleasure which a fine genius, a generous disposition, and an opulent fortune could afford.
In excuse for the too free exposing of his person, which seemed unsuitable in a secretary of state, he alleged, that it became him to be more active than other men in all hazardous enterprises, lest his impatience for peace might bear the imputation of cowardice or pusillanimity.
From the commencement of the war, his natural cheerfulness and vivacity became clouded; and even his usual attention to dress, required by his birth and station gave way to a negligence which was easily observable.
The loss sustained on both sides in the battle of Newbury, and the advanced season, obliged the armies to retire into winter quarters.
In the north, during this summer, the great interest and popularity of the earl, now created marquis of Newcastle, had raised a considerable force for the king; and great hopes of success were entertained from that quarter.
There appeared, however, in opposition to him, two men on whom the event of the war finally depended, and who began about this time to be remarked for their valor and military conduct.
These were Sir Thomas Fairfax, son of the lord of that name, and Oliver Cromwell.
The former gained a considerable advantage at Wakefield over a detachment of royalists, and took General Goring prisoner: the latter obtained a victory at Gainsborough over a party commanded by the gallant Cavendish, who perished in the action.
After this victory, Newcastle, with an army of fifteen thousand men, sat down before Hull. Hotham was no longer governor of this place.
That gentleman and his son partly from a jealousy entertained of Lord Fairfax, partly repenting of their engagements against the king, had entered into a correspondence with Newcastle, and had expressed an intention of delivering Hull into his hands.
Newcastle, having carried on the attack of Hull for some time, was beat off by a sally of the garrison, and suffered so much that he thought proper to raise the siege.
About the same time, Manchester, who advanced from the eastern associated counties, having joined Cromwell and young Fairfax, obtained a considerable victory over the royalists at Horncastle; where the two officers last mentioned gained renown by their conduct and gallantry.
When the Scottish Covenanters obtained that end for which they so earnestly contended, the establishment of Presbyterian discipline in their own country, they were not satisfied, but indulged still in an ardent passion for propagating, by all methods, that mode of religion in the neighboring kingdoms.
Should the king, they said, be able by force of arms to prevail over the parliament of England, and reestablish his authority in that powerful kingdom, he will undoubtedly retract all those concessions which, with so many circumstances of violence and indignity, the Scots have extorted from him.
Does not the parliament consist of those very men who have ever opposed all war with Scotland, who have punished the authors of our oppressions, who have obtained us the redress of every grievance, and who, with many honorable expressions, have conferred on us an ample reward for our brotherly assistance?
And is not the court full of Papists, prelates, malignants; all of them zealous enemies to our religious model, and resolute to sacrifice their lives for their idolatrous establishments?
Not to mention our own necessary security can we better express our gratitude to Heaven for that pure light with which we are, above all nations, so eminently distinguished, than by conveying the same divine knowledge to our unhappy neighbors, who are wading through a sea of blood in order to attain it?
The commissioners were also empowered to press the king on the article of religion, and to recommend to him the Scottish model of ecclesiastic worship and discipline.
Under color of providing for national peace, endangered by the neighborhood of English armies, was a convention called; an assembly which though it meets with less solemnity, has the same authority as a parliament in raising money and levying forces.
Hamilton, and his brother the earl of Laneric, who had been sent into Scotland in order to oppose, these measures, wanted either authority or sincerity; and passively yielded to the torrent.
The general assembly of the church met at the same time with the convention; and exercising an authority almost absolute over the whole civil power, made every political consideration yield to their theological zeal and prejudices.
The English parliament was at that time fallen into great distress by the progress of the royal arms; and they gladly sent to Edinburgh commissioners, with ample powers to treat of a nearer union and confederacy with the Scottish nation.
In this negotiation, the man chiefly trusted was Vane, who, in eloquence, address, capacity, as well as in art and dissimulation, was not surpassed by any one even during that age, so famous for active talents.
The subscribers of the covenant vowed also to preserve the reformed religion established in the church of Scotland; but, by the artifice of Vane, no declaration more explicit was made with regard to England and Ireland, than that these kingdoms should be reformed according to the word of God and the example of the purest churches.
In the English parliament there remained some members who, though they had been induced, either by private ambition or by zeal for civil liberty, to concur with the majority, still retained an attachment to the hierarchy, and to the ancient modes of worship.
But in the present danger which threatened their cause, all scruples were laid aside; and the covenant, by whose means alone they could expect to obtain so considerable a reenforcement as the accession of the Scottish nation, was received without opposition.
The parliament, therefore, having first subscribed it themselves, ordered it to be received by all who lived under their authority.
And being determined that the sword should carry conviction to all refractory minds, they prepared themselves, with great vigilance and activity, for their military enterprises.
By means of a hundred thousand pounds, which they received from England; by the hopes of good pay and warm quarters; not to mention men's favorable disposition towards the cause; they soon completed their levies.
They had entered, indeed, into a contract with the Scots, for sending over an army of ten thousand men into Ireland; and in order to engage that nation in this undertaking, besides giving a promise of pay, they agreed to put Caricfergus into their hands, and to invest their general with an authority quite independent of the English government.
These troops, so long as they were allowed to remain, were useful, by diverting the force of the Irish rebels, and protecting in the north the small remnants of the British planters.
But except this contract with the Scottish nation, all the other measures of the parliament either were hitherto absolutely insignificant, or tended rather to the prejudice of the Protestant cause in Ireland.
By continuing their violent persecution, and still more violent menaces against priests and Papists, they confirmed the Irish Catholics in their rebellion, and cut off all hopes of indulgence and toleration.
But notwithstanding these successes, even the most common necessaries of life were wanting to the victorious armies.
The Irish, in their wild rage against the British planters, had laid waste the whole kingdom, and were themselves totally unfit, from their habitual sloth and ignorance, to raise any convenience of human life.
During the course of six months, no supplies had come from England, except the fourth part of one small vessel's lading.
Dublin, to save itself from starving, had been obliged to send the greater part of its inhabitants to England.
The army had little ammunition, scarcely exceeding forty barrels of gunpowder; not even shoes or clothes; and for want of food, the soldiers had been obliged to eat their own horses.
The justices and council of Ireland had been engaged, chiefly by the interest and authority of Ormond, to fall into an entire dependence on the king.
Parsons, Temple, Loftus, and Meredith, who favored the opposite party, had been removed; and Charles had supplied their place by others better affected to his service.
They even intercepted some small succors sent thither by the king.
A truce with the rebels, he thought, would enable his subjects in Ireland to provide for their own support, and would procure him the assistance of the army against the English parliament.
I do not glory of myself, but I glory in that which the Lord hath commanded me; yea, and this is my glory, that perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance; and this is my joy.
And may God grant that it may be done according to my words, even as I have spoken.
Amen.
Nevertheless, there was no law against a man's belief; therefore, a man was punished only for the crimes which he had done; therefore all men were on equal grounds.
Why do ye look for a Christ?
And he came over into the land of Gideon, and began to preach unto them also; and here he did not have much success, for he was taken and bound and carried before the high priest, and also the chief judge over the land.
Why do ye teach this people that there shall be no Christ, to interrupt their rejoicings?
Why do ye speak against all the prophecies of the holy prophets?
And Korihor said unto him: Because I do not teach the foolish traditions of your fathers, and because I do not teach this people to bind themselves down under the foolish ordinances and performances which are laid down by ancient priests, to usurp power and authority over them, to keep them in ignorance, that they may not lift up their heads, but be brought down according to thy words.
Behold, I say they are in bondage.
For behold, I say unto you, I know there is a God, and also that Christ shall come.
And he said unto me: There is no God; yea, and he taught me that which I should say.
And Korihor did go about from house to house, begging food for his support.
Amen.
Behold, O God, they cry unto thee with their mouths, while they are puffed up, even to greatness, with the vain things of the world.
O Lord, wilt thou give me strength, that I may bear with mine infirmities.
For I am infirm, and such wickedness among this people doth pain my soul.
Yea, wilt thou comfort their souls in Christ.
And behold, as he clapped his hands upon them, they were filled with the Holy Spirit.
Now this was according to the prayer of Alma; and this because he prayed in faith.
Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.
Behold, I say unto you, that it is on the one hand even as it is on the other; and it shall be unto every man according to his work.
Now this is not all; little children do have words given unto them many times which confound the wise and the learned.
Then he fared on into the valley.--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
But, on the third day as he was despairing he caught sight of an island steep and mountainous; so he swam for it and landing, walked on inland, where he rested a day and a Night, feeding on the growth of the ground.
Then she called him to her one day and said to him, "Wilt thou hearken to me?" And he signed to her with his head, "Yes." So she rejoiced and freed him from the enchantment.
When it was night she lay down and said to him, "Come, do thy business." He replied, " 'tis well;" and, mounting on her breast, seized her by the neck and brake it, nor did he arise from her till life had left her.
As soon as it was morning, he went forth and stood at the gate of the palace.
He abode Zalzal's guest six months, when he desired to depart; so Zalzal gave him rich presents and despatched three thousand Marids, who brought the spoils of Karaj city and added them to those of Jan Shah.
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the cause of this army coming upon Isbanir city was wondrous.
When he reached the age of fifteen, his spirit waxed big in him and he said to Fakhr Taj, "O my mamma, who is my papa?" She replied, "O my son, Gharib, King of Irak, is thy father and I am the King's daughter, of the Persians," and she told him her story.
Colonel Woodville had begun to swear.
It was not the torrent of loud imprecation that Dick had heard in Jackson, but subdued, and all the more fierce because it was so like the ferocious whine of a powerful and hurt wild animal.
Dick heard oaths, ripe and rich, entirely new to him, and he heard the old ones in new arrangements and with new inflections.
And yet there was no blasphemy about it.
They reached the door, the cut in the side of the ravine, and at once a wide portion of the battlefield sprang into the light, while the roar of the guns was redoubled.
Dick would have stepped back now, but Colonel Woodville's hand rested on his shoulder and his support was needed.
"My glasses, Margaret!" said the colonel.
"I must see!
I will see!
If I am but an old hound, lying here while the pack is in full cry, I will nevertheless see the chase!
And even if I am an old hound I could run with the best of them if that infernal Yankee bullet had not taken me in the leg!"
Dick saw only the field of battle, dark lines and blurs, the red flare of cannon and rifle fire, and towers and banks of smoke, but the colonel saw individual human beings, and, with his trained military eye, he knew what the movements meant.
Dick felt the hand upon his shoulder trembling with excitement.
He was excited himself.
Miss Woodville stood just behind them, and a faint tinge of color appeared in her pale face.
"The Yankees are getting ready to charge," said the colonel.
"At the point we see they will not yet rush forward.
But the woods and ravines are filled with their skirmishers, trying to clear the way.
I can see them in hundreds and hundreds, and their rifles make sheets of flame.
All the time the cannon are firing over their heads.
Heavens, what a bombardment!
I've never before listened to its like!"
"What are our troops doing, father?" asked Miss Woodville.
"Very little yet, and they should do little.
Pemberton is showing more judgment than I expected of him.
The defense should hold its fire until the enemy is well within range and that's what we're doing!"
The colonel leaned a little more heavily upon him, but Dick steadied himself.
The hills shook with the thunder of the cannon, and the brilliant sun, piercing through the smoke, lighted up the vast battle line.
"The attack of the skirmishers grows hotter," said the old man.
"The thickets blaze with the fire of their rifles.
Now they stop and lie on their arms.
They are awaiting the word from other parts of the field, and it shows with certainty that a grand attack is coming.
Two batteries of eight guns each have come nearer.
I did not think it possible for the fire of their cannon to increase, but it has done so.
Young sir, would you care to look through the glasses?"
"I believe not, Colonel.
I will trust to the naked eye and your report."
It was an odd feeling that made Dick decline the glasses.
If he looked he must tell to the others what he saw, and he wished to show neither exultation nor depression.
The colonel, the duty of courtesy discharged, resumed his own position of witness and herald.
"The columns of infantry are getting up again," he said.
"I see a man in what I take to be a general's uniform riding along their front.
He must be making a speech.
No doubt he knows the desperate nature of the attack, and would inspire them.
Now he is gone and other officers, colonels and majors are moving about."
"What are the skirmishers doing, Colonel?"
"Their fire is not so hot.
They must be drawing back.
They have made the prelude, and the importance of their role has passed.
The masses of infantry are drawing together again.
Now I see men on horseback with trumpets to their lips.
Yes, the charge is coming.
That burnt them!"
There was a terrific crash much nearer, and Dick knew that it was the Southern batteries opening fire.
The shoulder upon which the colonel's hand rested shook a little, but it was from excitement.
He said nothing and Colonel Woodville continued:
"The smoke is so heavy I can't see what damage was done!
Now it has cleared away!
There are gaps in the Yankee lines, but the men have closed up, and they come on at the double quick with their cannon still firing over their heads!"
In his excitement he took his hand off Dick's shoulder and leaned forward a little farther, supporting himself now against the earthen wall.
Dick stood just behind him, shielded from the sight of any one who might be passing in the ravine, although there was little danger now from searchers with a great battle going on.
Meanwhile he watched the combat with an eagerness fully equal to that of the old colonel.
The mighty crash of cannon and rifles together continued, but for a little while the smoke banked up in front so densely that the whole combat was hidden from them.
Then a wind slowly rolled the smoke away. The figures of the men began to appear like shadowy tracery, and then emerged, distinct and separate from the haze.
"They are nearer now," said the Colonel.
But our batteries are raking them horribly.
Their men are falling by the scores and hundreds."
Miss Woodville uttered a deep sigh and turned her face away.
But she looked again in a few moments.
The terrible spell was upon her, too.
Dick's nerves were quivering.
His heart was with the assailants and theirs with the assailed, but he would not speak aloud against the hopes of Colonel Woodville and his daughter, since he was in their house, such as it was, and, in a measure, under their protection.
"Their charge is splendid," continued the colonel, "and I hope Pemberton has made full use of the ground for defense!
He will need all the help he can get!
Oh, to be out of the battle on such a day!
The smoke is in the way again and I can see nothing.
Now it has passed and the enemy is still advancing, but our fire grows hotter and hotter!
They must go back!"
Nevertheless the blue lines came steadily toward the Southern earthworks.
Ah, you riflemen, your target is there!"
Never flinching, the men of the west and northwest hurled themselves upon the powerful fortified positions.
Some reached shelves of the plateau almost at the mouths of the guns and hung there, their comrades falling dead or dying around them, but now the rebel yell began to swell along the vast line, and reached the ears of those in the ravine.
"The omen of victory!" exclaimed the colonel exultantly.
"Our brave lads feel that they're about to triumph!
Grant can't break through our line! Why doesn't he call off his men?
It's slaughter!"
Dick's heart sank.
He knew that the colonel's words were true.
The Southern army, posted in its defenses, was breaking the ring of steel that sought to crush it to death.
Groups of men in blue who had seized ground in the very front of the defenses either died there or were gradually driven back.
The inner ring along its front of miles thundered incessantly on the outer ring, and repelled every attempt to crush it.
"They yield," said the colonel, after a long time.
"The Northern fire has sunk at many points, and there! and there!
they're retreating!
The attack has failed and the South has won a victory!"
"But Grant will come again," said Dick, speaking his opinion for the first time.
"No doubt of it," said Colonel Woodville, "but likely he will come to the same fate."
He spoke wholly without animosity.
The battle now died fast.
The men in gray had been invincible.
Many thousands had fallen and the Southern generals were exultant.
Johnston would come up, and Grant, having such heavy losses, would be unable to withstand the united Confederate armies.
When the last cannon shot echoed over the far hills Colonel Woodville turned away from the door of his hillside home.
"What I have seen rejoices me greatly, but I do not say it to taunt you.
"May I help you back to your bed, sir?" asked Dick.
"You may.
You are a good young man.
I'm glad I saved you from that scoundrel, Slade.
As the score between us is even I wish that you were out of Vicksburg and with your own people."
"I was thinking, too, sir, that I ought to go.
I may take a quick departure."
"Then if you do go I wish you a speedy and safe journey, but I tell you to beware of one, Slade, who has a malicious heart and a long memory."
Dick withdrew to his own cell, as he called it, and he passed bitter hours there.
The repulse had struck him a hard blow.
Was it possible that Grant could not win?
And if he could not win what terrible risks he would run in the heart of the Confederacy, with perhaps two armies to fight!
He felt that only the Mississippi, that life line connecting him with the North, could save him.
But as dusk came gradually in the ravine he resolved that he would go. His supper, as usual, was brought to him by Miss Woodville.
She was as taciturn as ever, speaking scarcely a half dozen words.
Dick was confident that nobody but Colonel Woodville, his daughter, and himself were in the cave home.
It was but a small place, and new callous places on her hands indicated that she was doing the cooking and all other work.
His resolve to risk everything and go was strengthened.
He had surrendered his holster and pistols to Colonel Woodville, and so he must issue forth unarmed, but it could not be helped.
He had several ten dollar gold pieces in his pocket, and he put one of them on the tiny table in his cell.
He knew that it would be most welcome, and he could not calculate how many hundreds in Confederacy currency it was worth.
He was glad that he could repay a little at least.
Then he stepped lightly toward the larger chamber in which Colonel Woodville lay.
The usual candle was burning on the table near his bed, but the great bald head lay motionless on the pillow, and the heavy white eyebrows drooped over closed lids.
Sound asleep!
Dick was glad of it.
The colonel, with his strong loyalty to the South, might seek to hold him, at least as his personal prisoner, and now the trouble was avoided.
He moved gently across the floor, and then passed toward the open door. How good that puff of fresh air and freedom felt on his face!
He did not know that Colonel Woodville raised his head on the pillow, glanced after him, and then let his head sink back and his eyes close again.
Dick stepped into the narrow path cut in the side of the ravine and inhaled more draughts of the fresh air.
How sweet and strong it was!
How it filled one's lungs and brought with it life, courage and confidence! One had to live in a hole in a hill before he could appreciate fully the blessed winds that blew about the world.
He knew that the path ran in front of other hollows dug in the earth, and he felt sorry for the people who were compelled to burrow in them.
He felt sorry, in truth, for all Vicksburg, because now that he was outside his fears for Grant disappeared, and he knew that he must win.
While he remained in the path a deep boom came from the direction of the Union army and a huge shell burst over the town.
It was followed in a moment by another and then by many others.
While the besieged rejoiced in victory the besiegers had begun anew the terrible bombardment, sending a warning that the iron ring still held.
Dick paused no longer, but ran rapidly along the path until he emerged upon the open plateau and proceeded toward the center of the town.
He judged that in the hours following a great battle, while there was yet much confusion, he would find his best chance.
He had reckoned rightly.
There was a great passing to and fro in Vicksburg, but its lights were dim.
He had concluded that "the longest way around was the shortest way through," and he directed his steps toward the river.
He had formed a clear plan at last, and he believed that it would succeed.
Twisting and turning, always keeping in the shadows, he made good progress, descended the bluff, and at last stood behind the ruins of an old warehouse near the stream.
Southern batteries were not far away from him and he heard the men talking.
Then, strengthening his resolution, he came from behind the ruins, flung himself almost flat on the ground, and crawled toward the river, pushing in front of him a board, which some Northern gun had shot from the warehouse.
He knew that his task was difficult and dangerous, though in the last resort he could rush to the water and spring in.
But he was almost at the edge before any sentinel saw the black shadow passing over the ground.
A hail came, and Dick flattened himself against the ground and lay perfectly still.
Evidently the sentinel was satisfied that his fancy had been making merry with him, as he did not look further at the shadow, and Dick, after waiting two or three minutes, resumed his slow creeping.
He reached the edge, shoved the board into it, and dropped gently into the water beside it, submerged to the head.
"Oh, have you really begun it?" cried Diana, all alight with eager interest in a moment.
"How much do you suppose you'll get for it?" asked Diana.
"How are you going to end it-happily or unhappily?"
"But you like to cry over stories?"
But I like everything to come right at last."
"Why did you kill MAURICE LENNOX?" she asked reproachfully.
"He had to be punished."
"That wouldn't have been romantic, and, besides, it would have made the story too long."
Have you got a title for it?"
I call it AVERIL'S ATONEMENT. Doesn't that sound nice and alliterative?
"But your folks ain't like real folks anywhere.
If he'd done that in real life she'd have pitched him."
"I don't believe it," said Anne flatly.
He was bad."
I can teach.
"Darn her," exploded Davy.
"He didn't," cried Davy indignantly.
I'm not going to Sunday School or church at all.
"You've got to," said Davy.
"I couldn't help it.
"The very idea of your being scared of those cows," scoffed Davy.
"They're bigger," said Dora.
This is great.
"We've come to go fishing," announced Davy.
"And they have far better times than we have.
"Were all your class in Sunday School today?"
"Did you put your collection in?"
"Was the Ladies' Aid announced for next week?"
"Was prayer meeting?"
"You look pale.
"You just shut up, Dora Keith."
"You bet!" said Davy emphatically.
Good night."
Go, now!"
Chapter twelve.
Waiting for Sydney to come into the bedroom as usual and wish her good night, Kitty was astonished by the appearance of her grandmother, entering on tiptoe from the corridor, with a small paper parcel in her hand.
"This is your birthday present.
You mustn't look at it till you wake to morrow morning." She pushed the parcel under the pillow-and, instead of saying good night, took a chair and sat down.
The present hidden under the paper wrapper was a sixpenny picture book. Kitty's grandmother disapproved of spending money lavishly on birthday gifts to children.
"Show it, of course; and take the greatest care of it," mrs Presty answered gravely.
"We will breakfast early, my precious child.
Sydney's heart ached when she thought of the separation that was to come with the next day; her despair forced its way to expression in words.
The child was still too drowsy to hear plainly.
Sydney laid her down again on the pillow, gave her a last kiss, and ran out of the room.
She went back to her bed chamber.
She hesitated; her tears dropped on the photographs.
"They're as good as spoiled now," she thought; "they're no longer fit for anybody but me." She paused, and abruptly took up the third and last photograph-the likeness of Herbert Linley.
Was it an offense, now, even to look at his portrait?
Her longing eyes stole a last look at him-a frenzy seized her-she pressed her lips to the photograph in a passion of hopeless love.
As yet, he had failed to find the opportunity of addressing to Sydney the only words of encouragement he could allow to pass his lips: he had asked for her earlier in the evening, and nobody could tell him where she was.
Chapter thirteen.
Kitty Keeps Her Birthday.
Then there came a pause.
"Now," the spoiled child declared, addressing the company present, "I'm going to play."
The reply only increased his perplexity.
"What is there to look at?" he inquired.
mrs Presty recovered the command of her temper.
"My indiscretion has deserved it.
Sit down, if you please.
She never once looked at her mother; her face, white and rigid, was turned toward Randal.
She refused to hear him.
She dropped into a chair.
Wondering what had become of her father and her governess, Kitty had asked the nursemaid to look for them.
"Yes, ma'am."
"In the shrubbery."
I might have been mistaken-"
The girl paused, and looked confused.
"I might have been mistaken," the maid repeated-"but I thought Miss Westerfield was crying."
The parasol caught her eye.
May I take the parasol?"
The servant looked at her with vague misgivings.
One by one the tourists disappeared under the portico of the front door.
The thoughts from which she recoiled forced their way back into her mind; the narrative of the nursemaid's discovery became a burden on her memory once more.
She looked round.
Artistic Japan
These are the recipes as he wrote them for us:
Select six nice fresh sand dabs.
Once upon a time there lived a king and queen, who had an only daughter.
Her incomparable beauty, sweetness, and intelligence caused her to be named Graciosa.
She was all her mother's joy.
Every day she had given her a different dress, of gold brocade, velvet, or satin; yet she was neither conceited nor boastful.
She had, however, plenty of play time, and sweetmeats without end, so that she was altogether the happiest princess alive.
Her hair was fiery red, her face fat and spotty, and she had but one eye.
Her mouth was so big that you might have thought she could eat you up, only she had no teeth to do it with; she was also humpbacked and lame.
Of course she could not help her ugliness, and nobody would have disliked her for that, if she had not been of such an unpleasant temper that she hated everything sweet and beautiful, and especially Graciosa.
She had also a very good opinion of herself, and when any one praised the princess, would say angrily, "That is a lie!
My little finger is worth her whole body."
In course of time the queen fell sick and died, and her daughter was almost broken hearted.
So was her husband for a year, and then he began to comfort himself by hunting.
One day, after a long chase, he came to a strange castle, which happened to be that of the Duchess Grognon.
She, informed of his approach, went out to meet him, and received him most respectfully.
As he was very hot with hunting, she took him into the coolest place in the palace, which was a vaulted cave, most elegantly furnished, where there were two hundred barrels arranged in long rows.
"Yes, sire, but I shall be most happy if you will condescend to taste their contents.
Which wine do you prefer-canary, hermitage, champagne?" and she ran over a long list, out of which his majesty made his choice.
Grognon took a little hammer, and struck "toc, toc," on the cask, from which there rolled out a handful of silver money.
"I never saw the like-what nonsense!" and she tried the third, out of which came a heap of pearls and diamonds, so that the floor of the cave was strewn with them.
"Sire," she exclaimed, "some one has robbed me of my good wine, and put this rubbish in its place."
Why, such rubbish would buy my whole kingdom."
The king, who was a great lover of money, replied eagerly, "Certainly, madam, I'll marry you to morrow if you will."
Grognon, highly delighted, made but one other condition-that she should have the Princess Graciosa entirely in her own rule and power, just as if she had been her real mother; to which the foolish king consented, for he thought much more of riches than he did of his child.
So he and Grognon departed hand in hand out of the cave, very well pleased.
When the king returned home, Graciosa ran out with joy to welcome her father, and asked him if he had had good sport in his hunting.
"Yes, my child," said he, "for I have taken a dove alive."
"Oh, give it me, and I will nourish and cherish it," cried the princess.
"That is impossible; for it is the Duchess Grognon, whom I have promised to marry."
"She a dove!--she is rather a hawk," sighed the princess in despair; but her father bade her hold her tongue, and promise to love her stepmother, who would have over her all the authority of a mother, and to whom he wished to present her that very day.
The obedient princess went to her apartment, where her nurse soon found out the sorrow in her face, and its cause.
"My child," said the good old woman, "princesses ought to show a good example to humbler women.
She may not be so bad after, all."
And the nurse gave so much good advice, that Graciosa began to smile, and dressed herself in her best attire, a green robe embroidered with gold; while her fair, loose falling hair was adorned, according to the fashion of the day, with a coronet of jasmine, of which the leaves were made of large emeralds.
Grognon, on her part, made the best of herself that was possible.
Meantime, Graciosa waited in fear the moment of her arrival, and, to pass the time away, she went all alone into a little wood, where she sobbed and wept in secret, until suddenly there appeared before her a young page, whom she had never seen before.
"Princess," said the page, bowing, "I am in no one's service but your own.
I have loved you long, and seen you often, for I have the fairy gift of making myself invisible.
I might longer have concealed myself from you, but for your present sorrow, in which, however, I hope to be of both comfort and assistance-a page and yet a prince, and your faithful lover."
They talked a little while together, and then returned to the palace, where the page assisted her to mount her horse; on which she looked so beautiful, that all the new queen's splendours faded into nothing in comparison, and not one of the courtiers had eyes for any except Graciosa.
As soon as Grognon saw it, "What!" cried she, "has this creature the impudence to be better mounted than myself!
Descend, Miss, and let me try your horse;--and your page, whom everybody thinks so much of, bid him come and hold my bridle."
Prince Percinet, who was the page, cast one look at his fair Graciosa and obeyed; but no sooner had the duchess mounted, than the horse ran away with her and dragged her over briers, stones, and mud, and finally threw her into a deep ditch.
Her head was cut in several places, and her arm fractured.
They picked her up in little pieces, like a broken wineglass; never was there a poor bride in worse plight. But in spite of her sufferings her malice remained.
She sent for the king:
"This is all Graciosa's fault; she wished to kill me.
I desire that your majesty will punish her, or leave me to do it-else I will certainly be revenged upon you both."
The king, afraid of losing his casks full of gold pieces, consented, and Graciosa was commanded to appear.
She came trembling and looking round vainly for Prince Percinet.
The cruel Grognon ordered four women, ugly as witches, to take her and strip off her fine clothes, and whip her with rods till her white shoulders were red with blood. But lo! as soon as the rods touched her, they turned into bundles of feathers, and the women tired themselves to death with whipping, without hurting Graciosa the least in the world!
"Ah! kind Percinet, what do I not owe you?
What should I do without you!" sighed the princess, when she was taken back to her own chamber and her nurse.
And then she saw the prince standing before her, in his green dress and his white plume, the most charming of pages.
Percinet advised her to pretend illness on account of the cruel treatment she was supposed to have received; which so delighted Grognon, that she got well all the sooner, and the marriage was celebrated with great splendour.
Soon after, the king, who knew that his wife's weak point was her vanity, gave a tournament, at which he ordered the six bravest knights of the court to proclaim that Queen Grognon was the fairest lady alive.
No knight ventured to dispute this fact, until there appeared one who carried a little box adorned with diamonds, and proclaimed aloud that Grognon was the ugliest woman in the universe, and that the most beautiful was she whose portrait was in the box.
He opened it, and behold the image of the Princess Graciosa!
The princess, who sat behind her stepmother, felt sure that the unknown knight was Percinet; but she dared say nothing.
Graciosa, in solitude and darkness, groped through the forest, sometimes falling against the trunks of trees, sometimes tearing herself with bushes and briers; at last, overcome with fear and grief, she sank on the ground, sobbing out, "Percinet, Percinet, have you forsaken me?"
She knew it was the doing of the fairy prince who loved her, and felt a joy mingled with fear.
She turned to fly, but saw him standing before her, more handsome and charming than ever.
"Princess," said he, "why are you afraid of me?
This is the palace of the fairy queen my mother, and the princesses my sisters, who will take care of you, and love you tenderly.
Enter this chariot, and I will convey you there."
"How is this?" she said.
"Prince, you know everything about me."
"Yes; and I wish to preserve everything concerning you," said he tenderly; whereupon Graciosa cast down her eyes.
She was only too happy, and afraid that she should learn to love the fairy prince too much.
She spent eight days in his palace-days full of every enjoyment; and Percinet tried all the arguments he could think of to induce her to marry him, and remain there for ever.
But the good and gentle Graciosa remembered her father who was once so kind to her, and she preferred rather to suffer than to be wanting in duty.
She entreated Percinet to use his fairy power to send her home again, and meantime to tell her what had become of her father.
"Come with me into the great tower there, and you shall see for yourself."
Thereupon he took her to the top of a tower, prodigiously high, put her little finger to his lips, and her foot upon his foot.
"She will not be much loss, sire; and as, when dead, she was far too frightful for you to look at, I have given orders to bury her at once."
The sight of her father's grief quite overcame Graciosa.
If you love me, take me home."
As they quitted the courtyard, they heard a great noise, and Graciosa saw the palace all falling to pieces with a great crash.
"What is this?" she cried, terrified.
"Princess, my palace, which you forsake, is among the things which are dead and gone.
You will enter it no more till after your burial."
"Prince, you are angry with me," said Graciosa sorrowfully; only she knew well that she suffered quite as much as he did in thus departing and quitting him.
Arrived in her father's presence, she had great difficulty in persuading him that she was not a ghost, until the coffin with the faggot inside it was taken up, and Grognon's malice discovered But even then, the king was so weak a man, that the queen soon made him believe he had been cheated, that the princess was really dead, and that this was a false Graciosa.
Without more ado, he abandoned his daughter to her stepmother's will.
Grognon, transported with joy, dragged her to a dark prison, took away her clothes, made her dress in rags, feed on bread and water, and sleep upon straw.
Forlorn and hopeless, Graciosa dared not now call upon Percinet; she doubted if he still loved her enough to come to her aid.
Meantime, Grognon had sent for a fairy, who was scarcely less malicious than herself.
"I have here," said she, "a little wretch of a girl for whom I wish to find all sorts of difficult tasks; pray assist me in giving her a new one every day."
The fairy promised to think of it, and soon brought a skein as thick as four persons, yet composed of thread so fine, that it broke if you only blew upon it, and so tangled that it had neither beginning nor end.
Grognon, delighted, sent for her poor prisoner.
"There, miss, teach your clumsy fingers to unwind this skein, and if you break a single thread I will flay you alive.
Begin when you like, but you must finish at sunset, or it will be the worse for you." Then she sent her to her miserable cell, and treble locked the door.
Graciosa stood dismayed, turning the skein over and over, and breaking hundreds of threads each time.
"Ah! Percinet," she cried in despair, "come and help me, or at least receive my last farewell."
Immediately Percinet stood beside her, having entered the cell as easily as if he carried the key in his pocket.
"Behold me, princess, ready to serve you, even though you forsook me." He touched the skein with his wand, and it untangled itself, and wound itself up in perfect order.
"Do you wish anything more, madam?" asked he coldly.
"Percinet, Percinet, do not reproach me; I am only too unhappy."
"It is your own fault.
Come with me, and make us both happy." But she said nothing, and the fairy prince disappeared.
At sunset, Grognon eagerly came to the prison door with her three keys, and found Graciosa smiling and fair, her task all done.
There was no complaint to make, yet Grognon exclaimed that the skein was dirty, and boxed the princess's ears till her rosy cheeks turned yellow and blue.
Then she left her, and overwhelmed the fairy with reproaches.
"Find me, by to morrow, something absolutely impossible for her to do."
The fairy brought a great basket full of feathers, plucked from every kind of bird-nightingales, canaries, linnets, larks, doves, thrushes, peacocks, ostriches, pheasants, partridges, magpies, eagles-in fact, if I told them all over, I should never come to an end; and all these feathers were so mixed up together, that they could not be distinguished.
Grognon jumped for joy, sent for the princess, and ordered her to take her task, and finish it, as before, by set of sun
Graciosa tried patiently, but she could see no difference in the feathers; she threw them all back again into the basket, and began to weep bitterly.
Percinet loves me no longer; if he did, he would already have been here."
"Here I am, my princess," cried a voice from under the basket; and the fairy prince appeared.
He gave three taps with his wand-the feathers flew by millions out of the basket, and arranged themselves in little heaps, each belonging to a different bird.
"What do I not owe you?" cried Graciosa.
When Grognon arrived, she found the task done.
She was furious at the fairy, who was as much astonished as herself at the result of their malicious contrivances.
But she promised to try once more; and for several days employed all her industry in inventing a box, which, she said, the prisoner must be forbidden on any account to open.
"Then," added the cunning fairy, "of course, being such a disobedient and wicked girl, as you say, she will open it, and the result will satisfy you to your heart's content."
She was dressed like any poor peasant, in a cotton gown, a woollen hood and wooden shoes; yet, as she walked along, people took her for a queen in disguise, so lovely were her looks and ways.
But being weak with imprisonment, she soon grew weary, and, sitting down upon the edge of a little wood, took the box upon her lap.
Suddenly a wonderful desire seized her to open it.
"I will take nothing out, I will touch nothing," said she to herself, "but I must see what is inside."
Without reflecting on the consequences, she lifted up the lid, and instantly there jumped out a number of little men and little women, carrying little tables and chairs, little dishes, and little musical instruments.
The whole company were so small, that the biggest giant among them was scarcely the height of a finger.
They leaped into the green meadow, separated into various bands, and began dancing and singing, eating and drinking, to Graciosa's wonder and delight.
Again, in her distress, she called upon Percinet, and again he appeared; and, with a single touch of his wand, sent all the little people back into the box.
Then, in his chariot, drawn by stags, he took her to the castle, where she did all that she had been commanded, and returned in safety, to her stepmother, who was more furious than ever.
If a fairy could be strangled, Grognon certainly would have done it in her rage.
At last, she resolved to ask help no more, but to work her own wicked will upon Graciosa.
She caused to be dug a large hole in the garden, and taking the princess there, showed her the stone which covered it.
"Underneath this stone lies a great treasure; lift it up, and you will see."
Graciosa obeyed; and while she was standing at the edge of the pit, Grognon pushed her in, and let the stone fall down again upon her, burying her alive.
After this, there seemed no more hope for the poor princess.
Still, death will be less bitter, if only you regret me a little."
While she spoke, she saw through the blank darkness a glimmer of light; it came through a little door.
She remembered what Percinet had said: that she would never return to the fairy palace, until after she was buried.
Perhaps this final cruelty of Grognon would be the end of her sorrows.
So she took courage, crept through the little door, and lo! she came out into a beautiful garden, with long alleys, fruit trees, and flower beds.
Well she knew it, and well she knew the glitter of the rock crystal walls.
And there, at the palace gate, stood Percinet, and the queen, his mother, and the princesses, his sisters.
"Welcome, Graciosa!" cried they all; and Graciosa, after all her sufferings, wept for joy.
The marriage was celebrated with great splendour; and all the fairies, for a thousand leagues round, attended it.
Some came in chariots drawn by dragons, or swans, or peacocks; some were mounted upon floating clouds, or globes of fire.
Among the rest, appeared the very fairy who had assisted Grognon to torment Graciosa.
When she discovered that Grognon's poor prisoner was now Prince Percinet's bride, she was overwhelmed with confusion, and entreated her to forget all that had passed, because she really was ignorant who she had been so cruelly afflicting.
"But I will make amends for all the evil that I have done," said the fairy; and, refusing to stay for the wedding dinner, she remounted her chariot, drawn by two terrible serpents, and flew to the palace of Graciosa's father.
There, before either king, or courtiers, or ladies in waiting could stop her-even had they wished to do it, which remains doubtful-she came behind the wicked Grognon, and twisted her neck, just as a cook does a barn door fowl.
Where is the young man, the son of yonder magnanimous King?" And quoth the Wazir, "O mighty King, thou didst command him be put to death." When the King heard this, he was clean distraught and cried out from his heart's core and in most of head, saying, "Woe to you!
Send for the midwives and let them examine her before thee.
Then the King threw his arms about Ardashir's neck and entreated him with all worship and honour, bidding his chief eunuchs bear him to the bath.
When he came out, he cast over his shoulders a costly robe and crowned him with a coronet of jewels; he also girt him with a girdle of silk, purfled with red gold and set with pearls and gems, and mounted him on one of his noblest mares, with selle and trappings of gold inlaid with pearls and jewels.
And all who had seen him selling stuffs in the linendrapers' bazar marvelled how his soul could have consented thereto, considering the nobility of his spirit and the loftiness of his dignity; but it was his love and inclination to the King's daughter that to this had constrained him.
Meanwhile, news of the multitude of her lover's troops came to Hayat al Nufus, who was still jailed by her sire's commandment, till they knew what he should order respecting her, whether pardon and release or death and burning; and she looked down from the terrace roof of the palace and, turning towards the mountains, saw even these covered with armed men.
When she beheld all those warriors and knew that they were the army of Ardashir's father, she feared lest he should be diverted from her by his sire and forget her and depart from her, whereupon her father would slay her.
So she called a handmaid that was with her in her apartment by way of service, and said to her, "Go to Ardashir, son of the Great King, and fear not.
When it was the Seven Hundred and Thirty seventh Night,
She continued, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the bondmaid sent by Hayat al Nufus made her way to Ardashir and delivered him her lady's message, which when he heard, he wept with sore weeping and said to her, "Know that Hayat al Nufus is my mistress and that I am her slave and the captive of her love.
So, if he send to her to consult her, let her make no opposition; for I will not return to my country without her." Then the handmaid returned to Hayat al Nufus; and, kissing her hands, delivered to her the message, which when she heard, she wept for very joy and returned thanks to Almighty Allah.
Such was her case; but as regards Ardashir, he was alone with his father that night and the Great King questioned him of his case, whereupon he told him all that had befallen him, first and last.
He rose up standing and received him with honour; but the Minister made haste to fall at his feet and kissing them cried, "Pardon, O King of the Age!
The like of thee should not rise to the like of me, for I am the least of servants' slaves.
When it was the Seven Hundred and Thirty eighth Night,
They spread the marriage feasts and banquets and lastly Ardashir went in unto the Princess and found her a jewel which had been hidden, an union pearl unthridden and a filly that none but he had ridden, so he notified this to his sire.
She carried with her all her waiting women and eunuchs, as well as the nurse, who had returned, after her flight, and resumed her office.
Then he went in to the Princess and embraced her; and she kissed his hands and they wept in the standing place of parting.
After this he returned to his capital and Ardashir and his company fared on, till they reached Shiraz, where they celebrated the marriage festivities anew.
And they abode in all comfort and solace and joyance of life, till there came to them the Destroyer of delights and Severer of societies; the Depopulator of palaces and the Garnerer of graveyards.
And men also relate the tale of
The merchant uncovered her face, whereupon the place was illumined by her beauty and her seven tresses hung down to her anklets like horses' tails.
She had Nature kohl'd eyes, heavy hips and thighs and waist of slenderest guise, her sight healed all maladies and quenched the fire of sighs, for she was even as the poet cries,
A Wolf, lurking near the Shepherd's hut, saw the Shepherd and his family feasting on a roasted lamb.
"Aha!" he muttered.
THE GOATHERD AND THE GOAT
A Goat strayed away from the flock, tempted by a patch of clover. The Goatherd tried to call it back, but in vain.
It would not obey him.
Then he picked up a stone and threw it, breaking the Goat's horn.
"Do not tell the master," he begged the Goat.
THE MISER
A Miser had buried his gold in a secret place in his garden. Every day he went to the spot, dug up the treasure and counted it piece by piece to make sure it was all there.
When the Miser discovered his loss, he was overcome with grief and despair.
He groaned and cried and tore his hair.
A passerby heard his cries and asked what had happened.
"My gold!
O my gold!" cried the Miser, wildly, "someone has robbed me!"
"Your gold!
Why did you put it there?
Why did you not keep it in the house where you could easily get it when you had to buy things?"
"Why, I never touched the gold.
I couldn't think of spending any of it."
The stranger picked up a large stone and threw it into the hole.
"If that is the case," he said, "cover up that stone.
It is worth just as much to you as the treasure you lost!"
THE WOLF AND THE HOUSE DOG
There was once a Wolf who got very little to eat because the Dogs of the village were so wide awake and watchful.
He was really nothing but skin and bones, and it made him very downhearted to think of it.
One night this Wolf happened to fall in with a fine fat House Dog who had wandered a little too far from home.
So the Wolf spoke very humbly to the Dog, complimenting him on his fine appearance.
Why, you have to fight hard for every bite you get.
"What must I do?" asked the Wolf.
"Hardly anything," answered the House Dog.
"Chase people who carry canes, bark at beggars, and fawn on the people of the house.
In return you will get tidbits of every kind, chicken bones, choice bits of meat, sugar, cake, and much more beside, not to speak of kind words and caresses."
The Wolf had such a beautiful vision of his coming happiness that he almost wept.
"What is that on your neck?"
"Nothing at all," replied the Dog.
"What! nothing!"
"But please tell me."
"Perhaps you see the mark of the collar to which my chain is fastened."
"What!
A chain!" cried the Wolf.
"Don't you go wherever you please?"
"Not always!
But what's the difference?" replied the Dog.
"All the difference in the world!
I don't care a rap for your feasts and I wouldn't take all the tender young lambs in the world at that price." And away ran the Wolf to the woods.
The Lightning Bolts of Captain Nemo
WITHOUT STANDING UP, we stared in the direction of the forest, my hand stopping halfway to my mouth, Ned Land's completing its assignment.
A second well polished stone removed a tasty ringdove leg from Conseil's hand, giving still greater relevance to his observation.
We all three stood up, rifles to our shoulders, ready to answer any attack.
"Apes maybe?" Ned Land exclaimed.
"Savages."
"Head for the skiff!" I said, moving toward the sea.
Indeed, it was essential to beat a retreat because some twenty natives, armed with bows and slings, appeared barely a hundred paces off, on the outskirts of a thicket that masked the horizon to our right.
The skiff was aground ten fathoms away from us.
The savages approached without running, but they favored us with a show of the greatest hostility.
Ned Land was unwilling to leave his provisions behind, and despite the impending danger, he clutched his pig on one side, his kangaroos on the other, and scampered off with respectable speed.
In two minutes we were on the strand.
We hadn't gone two cable lengths when a hundred savages, howling and gesticulating, entered the water up to their waists.
I looked to see if their appearance might draw some of the Nautilus's men onto the platform.
But no Lying well out, that enormous machine still seemed completely deserted.
The hatches were open. After mooring the skiff, we reentered the Nautilus's interior.
I went below to the lounge, from which some chords were wafting. Captain Nemo was there, leaning over the organ, deep in a musical trance.
"Captain!" I said to him.
He didn't hear me.
"Captain!" I went on, touching him with my hand.
He trembled, and turning around:
"Ah, it's you, professor!" he said to me.
"Well, did you have a happy hunt?
Was your herb gathering a success?"
"Yes, captain," I replied, "but unfortunately we've brought back a horde of bipeds whose proximity worries me."
"What sort of bipeds?"
"Savages."
"Savages!" Captain Nemo replied in an ironic tone.
"You set foot on one of the shores of this globe, professor, and you're surprised to find savages there?
Where aren't there savages? And besides, are they any worse than men elsewhere, these people you call savages?"
"But captain-"
"Speaking for myself, sir, I've encountered them everywhere."
"Well then," I replied, "if you don't want to welcome them aboard the Nautilus, you'd better take some precautions!"
"Easy, professor, no cause for alarm."
"What's your count?"
"At least a hundred."
The captain's fingers then ran over the instrument's keyboard, and I noticed that he touched only its black keys, which gave his melodies a basically Scottish color.
I climbed onto the platform.
Night had already fallen, because in this low latitude the sun sets quickly, without any twilight. I could see Gueboroa Island only dimly.
For several hours I was left to myself, sometimes musing on the islanders- but no longer fearing them because the captain's unflappable confidence had won me over-and sometimes forgetting them to marvel at the splendors of this tropical night.
The night passed without mishap.
No doubt the Papuans had been frightened off by the mere sight of this monster aground in the bay, because our hatches stayed open, offering easy access to the Nautilus's interior.
At six o'clock in the morning, january eighth, I climbed onto the platform. The morning shadows were lifting.
The island was soon on view through the dissolving mists, first its beaches, then its summits.
The islanders were still there, in greater numbers than on the day before, perhaps five hundred or six hundred of them.
Beneath their pierced, distended earlobes there dangled strings of beads made from bone. Generally these savages were naked.
I noted some women among them, dressed from hip to knee in grass skirts held up by belts made of vegetation.
One of these chieftains came fairly close to the Nautilus, examining it with care.
He must have been a "mado" of high rank, because he paraded in a mat of banana leaves that had ragged edges and was accented with bright colors.
I could easily have picked off this islander, he stood at such close range; but I thought it best to wait for an actual show of hostility. Between Europeans and savages, it's acceptable for Europeans to shoot back but not to attack first.
During this whole time of low tide, the islanders lurked near the Nautilus, but they weren't boisterous.
I often heard them repeat the word "assai," and from their gestures I understood they were inviting me to go ashore, an invitation I felt obliged to decline.
So the skiff didn't leave shipside that day, much to the displeasure of mr Land who couldn't complete his provisions. The adroit Canadian spent his time preparing the meat and flour products he had brought from Gueboroa Island.
However, I didn't see one local dugout canoe.
Besides, it was the last day the Nautilus would spend in these waterways, if, tomorrow, it still floated off to the open sea as Captain Nemo had promised.
"They're cannibals even so, my boy."
"A person can be both a cannibal and a decent man," Conseil replied, "just as a person can be both gluttonous and honorable. The one doesn't exclude the other."
However, I'm opposed to being devoured, even in all decency, so I'll keep on my guard, especially since the Nautilus's commander seems to be taking no precautions. And now let's get to work!"
For two hours our fishing proceeded energetically but without bringing up any rarities.
Our dragnet was filled with Midas abalone, harp shells, obelisk snails, and especially the finest hammer shells I had seen to that day.
"No, my boy, but I'd gladly have sacrificed a finger for such a find!"
"But that's simply an olive shell of the 'tent olive' species, genus Oliva, order Pectinibranchia, class Gastropoda, branch Mollusca-"
But instead of coiling from right to left, this olive shell rolls from left to right!"
"It can't be!" Conseil exclaimed.
"Yes, my boy, it's a left-handed shell!"
"A left-handed shell!" Conseil repeated, his heart pounding.
"Look at its spiral!"
And there was good reason to be excited!
In fact, as naturalists have ventured to observe, "dextrality" is a well-known law of nature. In their rotational and orbital movements, stars and their satellites go from right to left.
Man uses his right hand more often than his left, and consequently his various instruments and equipment (staircases, locks, watch springs, etc) are designed to be used in a right to left manner. Now then, nature has generally obeyed this law in coiling her shells. They're right handed with only rare exceptions, and when by chance a shell's spiral is left-handed, collectors will pay its weight in gold for it.
I gave a yell of despair!
Conseil pounced on his rifle and aimed at a savage swinging a sling just ten meters away from him. I tried to stop him, but his shot went off and shattered a bracelet of amulets dangling from the islander's arm.
What?
Didn't master see that this man eater initiated the attack?"
"A shell isn't worth a human life!" I told him.
"Oh, the rascal!" Conseil exclaimed.
"I'd rather he cracked my shoulder!"
Now some twenty dugout canoes were surrounding the Nautilus.
Hollowed from tree trunks, these dugouts were long, narrow, and well designed for speed, keeping their balance by means of two bamboo poles that floated on the surface of the water. They were maneuvered by skillful, half naked paddlers, and I viewed their advance with definite alarm.
Without thunderclaps, lightning bolts would be much less frightening, although the danger lies in the flash, not the noise.
Just then the dugout canoes drew nearer to the Nautilus, and a cloud of arrows burst over us.
"We've got to alert Captain Nemo," I said, reentering the hatch.
I went below to the lounge.
I found no one there.
I ventured a knock at the door opening into the captain's stateroom.
The word "Enter!" answered me.
I did so and found Captain Nemo busy with calculations in which there was no shortage of X and other algebraic signs.
"Am I disturbing you?" I said out of politeness.
"Correct, Professor Aronnax," the captain answered me. "But I imagine you have pressing reasons for looking me up?"
"Very pressing.
Native dugout canoes are surrounding us, and in a few minutes we're sure to be assaulted by several hundred savages."
"Ah!" Captain Nemo put in serenely.
"Well, sir, closing the hatches should do the trick."
"Precisely, and that's what I came to tell you-"
"Nothing easier," Captain Nemo said.
And he pressed an electric button, transmitting an order to the crew's quarters.
"There, sir, all under control!" he told me after a few moments. "The skiff is in place and the hatches are closed.
"No, captain, but one danger still remains."
"What's that, sir?"
"But if these Papuans are occupying the platform at that moment, I don't see how you can prevent them from entering."
"Then, sir, you assume they'll board the ship?"
"I'm certain of it."
"Well, sir, let them come aboard.
I see no reason to prevent them. Deep down they're just poor devils, these Papuans, and I don't want my visit to Gueboroa Island to cost the life of a single one of these unfortunate people!"
On this note I was about to withdraw; but Captain Nemo detained me and invited me to take a seat next to him.
He questioned me with interest on our excursions ashore and on our hunting, but seemed not to understand the Canadian's passionate craving for red meat. Then our conversation skimmed various subjects, and without being more forthcoming, Captain Nemo proved more affable.
Among other things, we came to talk of the Nautilus's circumstances, aground in the same strait where Captain Dumont d'Urville had nearly miscarried.
Then, pertinent to this:
"He was one of your great seamen," the captain told me, "one of your shrewdest navigators, that d'Urville!
He was the Frenchman's Captain Cook.
A man wise but unlucky! Braving the ice banks of the South Pole, the coral of Oceania, the cannibals of the Pacific, only to perish wretchedly in a train wreck! If that energetic man was able to think about his life in its last seconds, imagine what his final thoughts must have been!"
As he spoke, Captain Nemo seemed deeply moved, an emotion I felt was to his credit.
"What your d'Urville did on the surface of the sea," Captain Nemo told me, "I've done in the ocean's interior, but more easily, more completely than he.
"Even so, captain," I said, "there is one major similarity between Dumont d'Urville's sloops of war and the Nautilus."
"What's that, sir?"
"Like them, the Nautilus has run aground!"
"The Nautilus is not aground, sir," Captain Nemo replied icily. "The Nautilus was built to rest on the ocean floor, and I don't need to undertake the arduous labors, the maneuvers d'Urville had to attempt in order to float off his sloops of war. The Zealous and the new Astrolabe wellnigh perished, but my Nautilus is in no danger.
Tomorrow, on the day stated and at the hour stated, the tide will peacefully lift it off, and it will resume its navigating through the seas."
"Captain," I said, "I don't doubt-"
"Tomorrow," Captain Nemo added, standing up, "tomorrow at two forty in the afternoon, the Nautilus will float off and exit the Torres Strait undamaged."
Pronouncing these words in an extremely sharp tone, Captain Nemo gave me a curt bow.
This was my dismissal, and I reentered my stateroom.
"My boy," I replied, "when I expressed the belief that these Papuan natives were a threat to his Nautilus, the captain answered me with great irony.
So I've just one thing to say to you: have faith in him and sleep in peace."
"Master has no need for my services?"
"No, my friend.
What's Ned Land up to?"
"Begging master's indulgence," Conseil replied, "but our friend Ned is concocting a kangaroo pie that will be the eighth wonder!"
I got up at six o'clock in the morning.
The hatches weren't open. So the air inside hadn't been renewed; but the air tanks were kept full for any eventuality and would function appropriately to shoot a few cubic meters of oxygen into the Nautilus's thin atmosphere.
I worked in my stateroom until noon without seeing Captain Nemo even for an instant.
Nobody on board seemed to be making any preparations for departure.
I still waited for a while, then I made my way to the main lounge. Its timepiece marked two thirty.
In ten minutes the tide would reach its maximum elevation, and if Captain Nemo hadn't made a rash promise, the Nautilus would immediately break free.
If not, many months might pass before it could leave its coral bed.
But some preliminary vibrations could soon be felt over the boat's hull. I heard its plating grind against the limestone roughness of that coral base.
At two thirty five Captain Nemo appeared in the lounge.
"We're about to depart," he said.
"Ah!" I put in.
"I've given orders to open the hatches."
"What about the Papuans?"
"Won't they come inside the Nautilus?"
"How will they manage that?"
"By jumping down the hatches you're about to open."
"Professor Aronnax," Captain Nemo replied serenely, "the Nautilus's hatches aren't to be entered in that fashion even when they're open."
I gaped at the captain.
"Not in the least."
"Well, come along and you'll see!"
I headed to the central companionway.
The hatch lids fell back onto the outer plating. Twenty horrible faces appeared.
But when the first islander laid hands on the companionway railing, he was flung backward by some invisible power, lord knows what!
He ran off, howling in terror and wildly prancing around.
Ten of his companions followed him.
All ten met the same fate.
Carried away by his violent instincts, Ned Land leaped up the companionway.
But as soon as his hands seized the railing, he was thrown backward in his turn.
"Damnation!" he exclaimed.
"I've been struck by a lightning bolt!"
Anyone who touched it got a fearsome shock- and such a shock would have been fatal if Captain Nemo had thrown the full current from his equipment into this conducting cable! It could honestly be said that he had stretched between himself and his assailants a network of electricity no one could clear with impunity.
Meanwhile, crazed with terror, the unhinged Papuans beat a retreat. As for us, half laughing, we massaged and comforted poor Ned Land, who was swearing like one possessed.
At eleven o'clock the electric lights came back on.
I went into the lounge.
It was deserted.
By evening we had cleared two hundred leagues up the Atlantic.
I repaired to my stateroom.
I couldn't sleep.
Always at incalculable speed! Always amid the High Arctic mists!
"We're going to escape!"
I sat up.
"When?" I asked.
"Tonight.
"Yes.
Where are we?"
"What land is it?"
We'll escape tonight even if the sea swallows us up!"
"What's more," the Canadian added, "if they catch me, I'll defend myself, I'll fight to the death."
"Then we'll die together, Ned my friend."
I went out on the platform, where I could barely stand upright against the jolts of the billows. The skies were threatening, but land lay inside those dense mists, and we had to escape.
No!
It was best not to meet him face to face! Best to try and forget him!
And yet . . . !
At six o'clock I ate supper, but I had no appetite.
At six thirty Ned Land entered my stateroom.
He told me:
At ten o'clock the moon won't be up yet.
We'll take advantage of the darkness. Come to the skiff.
My heart was pounding mightily. I couldn't curb its pulsations.
What was he doing just then?
I listened at the door to his stateroom. I heard the sound of footsteps.
I no longer wanted to think. A half hour still to wait!
Then a sudden thought terrified me.
Captain Nemo had left his stateroom. He was in the same lounge I had to cross in order to escape. There I would encounter him one last time.
He would see me, perhaps speak to me!
Even so, ten o'clock was about to strike.
I opened it gently. The lounge was plunged in profound darkness.
"O almighty God!
Enough!"
"Let's go, let's go!" I exclaimed.
"Right away!" the Canadian replied.
What was it? Had they spotted our escape?
"Yes," I muttered, "we know how to die!"
The Canadian paused in his work.
"Maelstrom!
Maelstrom!" they were shouting.
The Maelstrom!
What a predicament!
We were rocking frightfully.
Its steel muscles were cracking. Sometimes it stood on end, the three of us along with it!
"We've got to hold on tight," Ned said, "and screw the nuts down again! If we can stay attached to the Nautilus, we can still make it . . . !"
CHAPTER twenty one
BACCHUS-ARIADNE
Heaving a sigh, she said, "I hope it will turn out so, but I can't help being afraid.
If he is indeed Jove, make him give some proof of it.
That will put the matter beyond a doubt." Semele was persuaded to try the experiment.
Then she made known her request.
The god would have stopped her as she spake, but she was too quick for him.
The words escaped, and he could neither unsay his promise nor her request.
Arrayed in this, he entered the chamber of Semele. Her mortal frame could not endure the splendors of the immortal radiance.
She was consumed to ashes.
When Bacchus grew up he discovered the culture of the vine and the mode of extracting its precious juice; but Juno struck him with madness, and drove him forth a wanderer through various parts of the earth.
Returning in triumph, he undertook to introduce his worship into Greece, but was opposed by some princes, who dreaded its introduction on account of the disorders and madness it brought with it.
But when it was known that Bacchus was advancing, men and women, but chiefly the latter, young and old, poured forth to meet him and to join his triumphal march.
mr Longfellow in his "Drinking Song" thus describes the march of Bacchus:
Pentheus, beholding him with wrathful countenance, said, "Fellow! you shall speedily be put to death, that your fate may be a warning to others; but though I grudge the delay of your punishment, speak, tell us who you are, and what are these new rites you presume to celebrate."
Next morning I sent the men for fresh water, and myself mounted the hill to observe the wind; when my men returned bringing with them a prize, as they thought, a boy of delicate appearance, whom they had found asleep.
I said to my men, 'What god there is concealed in that form I know not, but some one there certainly is.
"Then Bacchus (for it was indeed he), as if shaking off his drowsiness, exclaimed, 'What are you doing with me?
What is this fighting about?
Who brought me here?
Where are you going to carry me?' One of them replied, 'Fear nothing; tell us where you wish to go and we will take you there.' 'Naxos is my home,' said Bacchus; 'take me there and you shall be well rewarded.' They promised so to do, and told me to pilot the ship to Naxos.
I was confounded and said, 'Let some one else pilot the ship;' withdrawing myself from any further agency in their wickedness.
They cursed me, and one of them, exclaiming, 'Don't flatter yourself that we depend on you for our safety;' took any place as pilot, and bore away from Naxos.
"Then the god, pretending that he had just become aware of their treachery, looked out over the sea and said in a voice of weeping, 'Sailors, these are not the shores you promised to take me to; yonder island is not my home.
All at once-strange as it may seem, it is true,--the vessel stopped, in the mid sea, as fast as if it was fixed on the ground.
Trembling with fear, the god cheered me.
'Fear not,' said he; 'steer towards Naxos.' I obeyed, and when we arrived there, I kindled the altars and celebrated the sacred rites of Bacchus."
Pentheus here exclaimed, "We have wasted time enough on this silly story.
In vain he cries to his aunts to protect him from his mother.
Autonoe seized one arm, Ino the other, and between them he was torn to pieces, while his mother shouted, "Victory!
Victory! we have done it; the glory is ours!"
CHAPTER twenty nine.
ARIADNE
The island where Ariadne was left was the favorite island of Bacchus, the same that he wished the Tyrrhenian mariners to carry him to, when they so treacherously attempted to make prize of him. As Ariadne sat lamenting her fate, Bacchus found her, consoled her, and made her his wife.
THE QUEEN BEE
By Carl Ewald
The farmer opened his hive.
Get to work, and gather a good lot of honey for me to sell to the shopkeeper in the autumn.
'Many a streamlet makes a river,' and you know these are bad times for farmers."
But all the same they flew out; for they had been sitting all the winter in the hive, and they longed for a breath of fresh air.
They hummed and buzzed, they stretched their legs, they tried their wings.
They swarmed out in all directions; they crawled up and down the hive; they flew off to the flowers and bushes, or wandered all around on the ground.
Last of all came the Queen.
She was bigger than the others, and it was she who ruled the hive.
"Stop your nonsense, little children," she said, "and set to work and do something.
A good Bee does not idle, but turns to with a will and makes good use of its time."
So she divided them into parties and set them to work.
"You over there, fly out and see if there is any honey in the flowers.
The others can collect flower dust, and when you come home give it in smartly to the old Bees in the hive."
Away they flew at once.
But all the very young ones stayed behind. They made the last party, for they had never been out with the others.
"You! you must perspire," said the Queen.
"One, two, three!
Then we can begin our work." And they perspired as well as they had learned to, and the prettiest yellow wax came out of their bodies.
"Good!" said the Queen.
"Now we will begin to build." The old Bees took the wax, and began to build a number of little six sided cells, all alike and close up to one another.
All the time they were building, the others came flying in with flower dust and honey, which they laid at the Queen's feet.
"We can now knead the dough," she said.
"But first put a little honey in-that makes it taste so much better." They kneaded and kneaded, and before very long they had made some pretty little loaves of Bee bread, which they carried into the cells.
She sat down in the middle of the hive and began to lay her eggs.
She laid great heaps of them, and the Bees were kept very busy running with the little eggs in their mouths and carrying them into the new cells. Each egg had a little cell to itself; and when they had all been put in their places, the Queen gave orders to fix doors to all the cells and shut them fast.
"Good!" she said, when this was done.
The Bees had them ready in no time, and then the Queen laid ten pretty eggs, one in each of the big rooms, and the doors were fixed as before.
Every day the Bees flew in and out, gathering great heaps of honey and flower dust; but in the evening, when their work was done, they would open the doors just a crack and have a peep at the eggs.
"Take care," the Queen said one day.
"What funny creatures!" said the young Bees.
"They are Grubs," said the Queen.
One must be a Grub before one can become a Bee.
Be quick now, and give them something to eat." The Bees bestirred themselves to feed the little ones, but they were not equally kind to them all.
The ten, however, that lay in the large cells got as much to eat as ever they wanted, and every day a great quantity of honey was carried in to them.
"They are Princesses," said the Queen, "so you must treat them well.
The others you can stint; they are only working people, and they must accustom themselves to be content with what they can get." And every morning the poor little wretches got a little piece of Bee bread and nothing more, and with that they had to be satisfied, though they were ever so hungry.
She was the youngest of them all, and only just come out of the egg.
She could not see, but she could plainly hear the grown up Bees talking outside, and for a while she lay quite still and kept her thoughts to herself.
"You have had enough for to day," answered the old Bee who was appointed to be head Bee Nurse, creeping up and down in the passage outside.
"Maybe, but I am hungry!" shouted the little Grub.
"I will go into one of the Princesses' chambers; I have not room to stir here."
"Just listen to her!" said the old Bee mockingly.
You are born to toil and drudge, my little friend.
You are a mere working Bee, and you will never be anything else all your days."
"But I want to be Queen!" cried the Grub, and thumped on the door. Of course the old Bee did not answer such nonsense, but went on to the others.
From every side they were calling out for more food, and the little Grub could hear it all.
"It is hard, though," she thought, "that we should have to be so hungry." And then she knocked on the Princess' wall and called to her, "Give me a little of your honey.
Let me come into your chamber.
"Are you?
The head Bee Nurse came running up in an instant and opened the doors.
"What are your graces' orders?" she asked, dropping a curtsy and scraping the ground with her feet.
"More honey!" they shouted, all in one voice.
"But me first-me first.
"In a moment, in a moment, your graces," she answered, and ran off as fast as her six legs could carry her.
She soon came back with many other Bees.
They were dragging ever so much honey, which they crammed down the cross little Princesses' throats.
And then they got them to hold their tongues and lie still and rest.
But the little Grub lay awake, thinking over what had happened.
She longed so much for some honey that she began to shake the door again.
"Give me some honey!
I can't stand it any longer.
I am just as good as the others."
The old Bee tried to hush her.
"Hold your tongue, little bawler! The Queen's coming." And at the same moment the Queen Bee came.
For a long time she stood in silence before the Princesses' chambers.
"Now they are lying there asleep," she said at last. "From morning till evening they do nothing but eat and sleep, and they grow bigger and fatter every day.
In a few days they will be full grown, and will creep out of their cells.
Then my turn will be over.
I know that too well.
I have heard the Bees saying to one another that they would like to have a younger and more beautiful Queen, and they will chase me away in disgrace.
But I will not submit to it.
Then she went away.
But the little Grub had heard all she said.
"Dear me!" she thought; "it is really a pity about the little Princesses.
"You must mind what you are doing, my good Grub," she said.
"First listen to me," said the Grub, and she told her about the Queen's wicked design.
"Good gracious! is that true?" cried the old Nurse, and beat her wings in horror.
And without hearing a word more, she hurried off to tell the other Bees.
"I think I deserve a little honey for what I have done," said the little Grub.
"But I can now lie down and sleep with a good conscience."
The Grub could hear her talking aloud to herself.
But she was quite afraid of the wicked Queen, and dared not stir.
"I hope she won't kill the Princesses," she thought, and squeezed herself nearer to the door to hear what happened.
The Queen looked cautiously round on all sides, and then opened the first of the doors.
But at the same moment the Bees swarmed out from all directions, seized her by the legs and wings, and dragged her out.
"What is the matter?" she cried.
"Are you raising a rebellion?"
What would become of us in the autumn after your majesty's death?"
"Let me go!" cried the Queen, and tried to get away.
"I am Queen now anyway, and have the power to do what I like.
How do you know that I shall die in the autumn?" But the Bees held her fast, and dragged her outside the hive.
"You are disloyal subjects, who are not worth ruling over.
I won't stay here an hour longer, but I will go out into the world and build a new nest.
Are there any of you who will come with me?"
Some of the old Bees, who had been Grubs at the same time as the Queen, declared that they would follow her.
And soon after they flew away.
"Now we have no Queen," said the others, "we must take good care of the Princesses." And so they crammed them with honey from morning till night; and they grew, and grabbed, and squabbled, and made more noise each day than the day before.
As for the little Grub, no one gave a single thought to her.
One morning the doors of the Princesses' chambers flew open, and all ten of them stepped out, beautiful full grown Queen Bees.
The other Bees ran up and gazed at them in admiration.
"How pretty they are!" they said.
"It is hard to say which is the most beautiful."
"You make a mistake," said another, and stabbed her with her sting.
"You are rather conceited," shrieked a third.
We can't do with more than one."
At this the Bees formed round in a ring and looked on at the battle.
Wings and legs which had been bitten off were flying about in the air, and after some time eight of the Princesses lay dead upon the ground.
The two last were still fighting.
One of them had lost all her wings, and the other had only four legs left.
"We should have done better to have kept the old one." But she might have spared herself the remark, for in the same moment the Princesses gave each other such a stab with their stings that they both fell dead as a door nail.
"That is a pretty business!" called the Bees, and ran about among each other in dismay.
What shall we do?
What shall we do?"
In despair they crawled about the hive, and did not know which way to turn.
But the oldest and cleverest sat in a corner and held a council.
For a long time they talked this way and that as to what they should decide on doing in their unhappy circumstances.
But at last the head Bee Nurse got a hearing, and said,--"I can tell you how you can get out of the difficulty, if you will but follow my advice.
I remember that the same misfortune happened to us in this hive a long time ago.
I was then a Grub myself.
I lay in my cell, and distinctly heard what took place.
All the Princesses had killed one another, and the old Queen had gone out into the world: it was just as it is now.
But the Bees took one of us Grubs and laid her in one of the Princesses' cells.
They fed her every day with the finest and best honey in the whole hive; and when she was full grown, she was a charming and good Queen.
But we may do the same thing again.
I said we were well provided with food and fire arms, that she might feel quite safe from the brigands.
Now Coonskin called for me and said our evening meal was under way.
So, I bade mrs Green a good night.
"Gee!
Wouldn't I like to capture 'em, though!" he said enthusiastically.
Something tells me that we'll meet these outlaws."
Supper over and dishes washed, we retired.
Our bed, only separated from the earth by a single canvas, never was more comfortable.
Suddenly I heard Don, who was on guard, growl, then a sound of wheels and a horse's whinny.
"Will your dog bite, mr Pod?" called mr Green.
I rushed out barefoot and dispelled his fears, and, after shaking hands, questioned him how he knew who I was.
"Oh," he chuckled, "anybody would know you by your outfit; besides, everybody along the trail has been expecting you, even two desperadoes."
This was interesting.
But I explained that his wife had told me all, whereupon he invited us men to breakfast, and was escorted by Don to a point which he considered the limit of his master's domain.
"Griswold is the unfortunate man's name," said Green.
"The outlaws pretended to be friendly, lunched with him, and started off on their horses.
The poor fellow regained consciousness, and managed by morning to crawl six miles to a ranch.
Resolute men hurriedly saddled their horses, and soon thirty were after the outlaws.
I hear Griswold is with them, he having recovered.
But they say at Egan that some of the boys this afternoon gave up the chase, because it was getting too warm for them; they felt pretty near the game."
mr Green gave me a second handed description of the desperadoes and their outfit, and directing me on my route, wished us Godspeed.
We soon arrived at Egan, where we were kindly received.
The men showed us about the works, allowing me to take photographs, and gave me a more accurate description of the outlaws, and the long trail of a hundred miles to Eureka.
At three points only should we find water, at Nine Mile Spring, Thirty Mile and Pinto Creek, the latter being seventy miles away.
No habitation would we see; only an occasional coyote, or a band of wild horses, or possibly some prairie schooner, or the outlaws, or some of the posses.
By trailing through Egan Canyon we cut the backbone of the mountain range and now, at an altitude of several hundred feet above the plain, were climbing higher and higher the rugged plateau, until we reached Nine Mile, and unpacked.
The spring was in a grassy spot, and Coonskin first replenished our canteens, then released the donkeys.
It was noon.
Accustomed as we were to travel on two meals a day, I could set no regular hour for them.
It was twenty one miles to Thirty Mile Spring.
So we cooked here.
The desperadoes formed the chief topic of discussion, even Don showed the bloodhound in him, and, ever since leaving Egan, showed unusual excitement and was more vigilant.
I was relieved when I saw one of the riders wearing a bandage round his head; it must be Griswold.
The strangers left their steeds standing, each tying a rein to a stirrup, then introduced themselves.
They were affable fellows and resolute, but had set out hardly equipped for the chase.
One picked up a two quart canteen, saying good naturedly that he reckoned he would have to rustle it.
I said they were welcome to anything I could spare.
Before separating on our several missions, Coonskin photographed the party, and Griswold repeated his description of the outlaws. Couriers had been dispatched to Ely, Hamilton, Eureka, and other points; these men were bound for Hunter, seven miles over the mesa.
They also admonished me to hold up and shoot without considering an instant any two mounted men of the description given, else we two would never live to tell how it happened.
With this parting injunction, unofficial though it was, the riders loped away, and my nervous troop, at half past two, "hit the trail" in lively form.
I was glad the country was clear and open. Only an occasional dwarf cedar stood in dark relief against the sage.
I felt we must be near to Thirty Mile.
The idea of passing the spring and having to trace our steps next morning was not to be entertained.
And there we camped.
By ten o'clock next morning we had breakfasted, and were trailing toward the summit of the plateau.
The noon hour found us weary travelers reclining on a heap of blankets.
To the east, some fifty feet away, stood a tub, obscured by pussy willows, and brimming with cool water furnished by a cedar trough which reached from the bubbling spring.
"I'm afraid the fellows ain't going to bother us after all," said Coonskin disappointedly, at length.
"Jove!" he added, "I believe the outlaws are coming."
Assigning to my valet the shot gun and the Smith and Wesson double action revolver, I loaded two extra shells with buckshot, tested the locks of my Winchester and single action Colt revolver, gave Coonskin explicit instructions, and awaited events.
It was plain they were cinching their saddles, probably preparing to do some rough riding.
The dark horse appeared to be somewhat darker than the one described by Griswold, but I was cautioned that they might exchange a horse for one on the range in order to mislead their pursuers.
Don seemed to understand, and stationing himself some ten feet before us, watched the strangers eagerly.
"Don't let them corral us," I cautioned; "if they get us between them, the game is up."
Those were anxious moments for me, as well as for the young man who was ten years my junior.
I was seated on our packs, my Winchester lying across my knees, cocked; Coonskin sat on the ground at my right, with shot gun in hand.
Our revolvers were in our belts.
Our bearded and sun burned faces, long hair, and generally rough attire, added to our unfriendly attitude, must have puzzled the approaching horsemen.
When they had come to a hundred feet from us, I called roughly, "Helloa, boys! come in. You're just in time for grub."
Instantly Don leaped to his feet, and with tail straight out and body trembling from rage he uttered a savage growl of defiance.
He identified the desperadoes.
Instantly reining their steeds, one of them slung some simple questions at me, designed, no doubt, to throw us off guard.
"Purty nice lot of burros you've got," he began.
"Pretty fair," I replied disinterestedly.
"Which way you traveling?"
"West.
"Just lookin' round.
Which is the trail to Hamilton?"
I did not answer.
"No, better water our horses and go on," said the partner.
Instantly I rose to my feet, and trailing the rifle over my wrist strode, eyeing him defiantly, in a line at a right angle with the course of his horse, but the rogue did not go far before turning his steed in the direction of the tub.
There both men dismounted behind their steeds, took off the bridles with spade bits that their horses might drink, and regarded us tenderfeet with some respect and concern.
"Not exactly," I said with a faint smile.
"That so?" queried the outlaw, quite excitably.
"How long ago were they here?
"Oh just a little while ago.
They took in a few cans of water," I here pointed in their direction, and said: "They were going to cook over there behind that knoll."
At once, as I hoped they would, the desperadoes were thrown off their guard and looked behind them.
The outlaws turned their eyes upon us so quickly I think they must have overheard my whispered command.
I was in the mood to "jump" Coonskin for not aiding me to hold up the outlaws.
And think of the handsome reward," I said.
The thought of a forfeited reward seemed to stagger the boy.
I pinned a penciled message on paper to the tub before departing, for the benefit of the posse, and my caravan was on the move again.
About midnight we made a dry camp at a discreet distance from the trail, where without building a fire we made a cold lunch serve for our second meal that day, and retired.
By two o'clock we had crossed the Long Valley Mountains and were on the margin of a sage covered plain, still probably twenty miles to Pinto.
Several times we were puzzled by forking trails, and were in doubt whether we were on the right one to Eureka.
I judged the valley to be ten miles wide.
I decided to head for it.
They were mr Robinson, proprietor of Newark Mines, and his superintendent.
Both were very hospitable.
STORY twenty three
"Oh, dear!
"Ha! that sounds like some one who can't get out of bed," exclaimed the bunny uncle.
Perhaps I can help them."
I can't get up!
There was silence for a minute, and then the first voice said again:
"Trouble, eh?" cried Uncle Wiggily.
"Here is where I come in.
Oh, dear!" sighed the Woodland flower.
"Oh, don't worry about that!" cried Uncle Wiggily, in his jolly voice. "I'll lift the stone off your head for you," and he did, just as he once had helped a Jack in the pulpit flower to grow up, as I have told you in another story.
"There you are!" cried the bunny uncle.
"But you don't look much like a flower."
"Oh!
Then came the cold winter, and I went to sleep.
I don't know by whom.
"How will all that happen?" Uncle Wiggily asked.
"Thank you, Uncle Wiggily, for taking the stone off the leaves so I could shine on them," went on the sunbeam, who had known Uncle Wiggily for some time.
"Though I am strong I am not strong enough to lift stones, nor was the flower.
Then the sunbeam played about the little green plant, turning the pale leaves a darker color and swelling out the tiny buds.
"I want a loaf of bread, a yeast cake and three pounds of sugar," said Nurse Jane.
On his way home from the store with the sugar, bread and yeast cake, Uncle Wiggily thought he would hop past the place where he had lifted the stone off the head of the plant, to see how it was growing.
"You want to see me?" exclaimed Uncle Wiggily.
"I think you must be mistaken," he went on politely.
Eight, Nine and Ten.
They have numbers instead of names, you see."
I don't like it!"
"You can't always do as you like," barked the fox.
"Oh, throw it away!" growled the fox.
So Uncle Wiggily held out the bright yeast cake.
STORY twenty six
"Will you go to the store for me, Uncle Wiggily?" asked Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, the muskrat lady housekeeper, of the rabbit gentleman one day, as he sat out on the porch of his hollow stump bungalow in the woods.
"Indeed I will, Miss Fuzzy Wuzzy," said mr Longears, most politely. "What is it you want?"
"A loaf of bread and a pound of sugar," she answered, and Uncle Wiggily started off.
On his way to the store through the woods, the bunny uncle came to a big beech tree, which had nice, shiny white bark on it, and, to his surprise the rabbit gentleman saw a big black bear, standing up on his hind legs and scratching at the tree bark as hard as he could.
"Ha!
I must drive the bear away."
So Uncle Wiggily picked up a stone, and throwing it at the bear, hit him on the back, where the skin was so thick it hurt hardly at all.
"The hunter man with his gun must be after me.
He has shot me once, but the bullet did not hurt.
"Thank you, Uncle Wiggily," said the beech tree.
"You saved my life by not letting the bear scratch off all my bark."
"I am glad I did," spoke the rabbit, making a polite bow with his tall silk hat, for mr Longears was polite, even to a tree.
"The bear would not stop scratching my bark when I asked him to," went on the beech tree, "so I am glad you came along, and scared him.
"Thank you," spoke Uncle Wiggily, and then he hopped on to the store to get the loaf of bread and the pound of sugar for Nurse Jane.
It was on the way back from the store that an adventure happened to Uncle Wiggily.
"Ah, ha!" growled the bear, as soon as he saw Uncle Wiggily, "you can't fool me again, making believe a stone is a bullet, and that your 'Bang!' is a gun!
You can't fool me!
I know all about the trick you played on me.
I wanted to save the beech tree."
"Oh, I don't care!" cried the bear, saucy like and impolitely.
"I'm going to scratch as much as I like!"
"Oh, dear!
"First, I'll bite you," said the bear.
"No, I guess I'll first scratch you.
I'll scrite you!"
Ouch!
And away he ran from the shower of sharp beech nuts which didn't hurt Uncle Wiggily at all because he raised his umbrella and kept them off. Then he thanked the tree for having saved him from the bear and went safely home.
STORY twenty seven
"They seemed to get over them nicely, at least Peetie did, but then Jackie caught the epizootic, and he has to stay in bed a week longer, and take bitter medicine."
"Bitter medicine, eh?" exclaimed Uncle Wiggily.
"I am sorry to hear that, for I don't like bitter medicine myself."
"Why, not?" asked the rabbit gentleman.
"Because we can't get him to take a drop," said the puppy dog boy's mother.
"Of course he does," agreed Uncle Wiggily.
"But I'm glad to see you.
Where is it?"
"Oh, I'll do that for you, Uncle Wiggily, but I'll not take it," Jackie said.
"Never mind about that," laughed the bunny uncle.
Just hold the cup to your lips, but don't swallow any."
"It went down my throat!
And it wasn't so bad, after all."
STORY twenty eight
He had been looking all around for an adventure, which was something he liked to have happen to him, but he had seen nothing like one so far.
It was nice and warm in the woods, and, with the sun shining down upon him, Uncle Wiggily soon dozed off in a little sleep.
But when he awakened still no adventure had happened to him.
He could not move his back away from the pine tree against which he had leaned to rest.
"Oh, dear! what has happened," cried the bunny uncle.
Oh, dear!"
"I am holding you fast!"
"Who are you, if you please?" asked the rabbit gentleman.
"I am the pine tree against which you leaned your back.
It is that which is holding you fast," the tree answered.
"Why-why, it's just like sticky flypaper, isn't it?" asked Uncle Wiggily, trying again to get loose, but not doing so.
"And it is just like the time you held the bear fast for me."
Try to get loose yourself."
"I will," said Uncle Wiggily, and he did, but he could not get loose, though he almost pulled out all his fur.
"Help!
Then, all of a sudden, along through the woods came Neddie Stubtail, the little bear boy, and Neddie had some butter, which he had just bought at the store for his mother.
"Oh!" cried the pine tree.
Neddie did so, and soon the bunny uncle was free.
"As for having stuck me fast, that was my own fault.
I should have looked before I leaned back.
Oh, I wish I were a peach tree, or a rose bush!"
Don't feel so badly."
"Hush!" cried Uncle Wiggily.
"You must try to do the best you can for what you are!
And I have come to tell you how useful your pine cones were."
"Really?" asked the tree, in great surprise.
With others I built a little play house, and amused Lulu Wibblewobble, the duck girl, when she had the toothache.
And other cones I threw at a big bear that was chasing me.
And, if the roof of our house doesn't come down stairs to play with the kitchen floor and let the rain in on the gold fish, I'll tell you next about Uncle Wiggily and his torn coat.
THE RESURRECTION.
If he was one with the Father, the question cannot be argued, seeing that Jesus apart from the Father is not a conceivable idea.
All knew that the Lord had risen indeed: what matter whether some of them saw one or two angels in the tomb?
The first who came saw one angel outside and another inside the sepulchre.
One at a different time saw two inside.
What wonder then that one of the records should say of them all, that they saw two angels?
I do not care to set myself to the reconciliation of the differing reports.
Their trifling disagreement is to me even valuable from its truth to our human nature.
All I care to do is to suggest to any one anxious to understand the records the following arrangement of facts.
Perhaps something might yet be done to rescue the precious form, and lay it aside with all futile honours.
With peter and john she returned to the grave, whence, in the mean time, her former companions, having seen and conversed with the angel outside and the angel inside, had departed to find their friends.
As she wept, she stooped down into the sepulchre.
It is a lovely story that follows, full of marvel, as how should it not be?
"Woman, why weepest thou?" said the angels.
"Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him," answered Mary, and turning away, tear blinded, saw the gardener, as she thought.
"Woman, why weepest thou?" repeats the gardener.
"Whom seekest thou?"
Hopelessness had dulled every sense: not even a start at the sound of his voice!
"Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away."
"Mary!"
"Master!"
She had the first sight of him.
It would almost seem that, arrested by her misery, he had delayed his ascent, and shown himself sooner than his first intent.
"Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended." She was about to grasp him with the eager hands of reverent love: why did he refuse the touch?
Doubtless the tone of the words deprived them of any sting.
For the rest, we know so little of the new conditions of his bodily nature, that nothing is ours beyond conjecture.
If any one thinks this founded on too human a notion of the Saviour, I would only reply that I suspect a great part of our irreligion springs from our disbelief in the humanity of God.
There lie endless undiscovered treasures of grace.
After he had once ascended to the Father, he not only appeared to his disciples again and again, but their hands handled the word of life, and he ate in their presence.
Upon the body he inhabited, death could no longer lay his hands, and from the vantage ground he thus held, he could stretch down the arm of salvation to each and all.
For in regard of this glorified body of Jesus, we must note that it appeared and disappeared at the will of its owner; and it would seem also that other matter yielded and gave it way; yes, even that space itself was in some degree subjected to it.
Upon the first of these, the record is clear.
If any man say he cannot believe it, my only answer is that I can.
The wisdom of this world can believe that matter generates mind: what seems to me the wisdom from above can believe that mind generates matter-that matter is but the manifest mind.
On this supposition matter may well be subject to mind; much more, if Jesus be the Son of God, his own body must be subject to his will.
I doubt, indeed, if the condition of any man is perfect before the body he inhabits is altogether obedient to his will-before, through his own absolute obedience to the Father, the realm of his own rule is put under him perfectly.
It may be objected that although this might be credible of the glorified body of even the human resurrection, it is hard to believe that the body which suffered and died on the cross could become thus plastic to the will of the indwelling spirit.
But I do not see why that which was born of the spirit of the Father, should not be so inter penetrated and possessed by the spirit of the Son, that, without the loss of one of its former faculties, it should be endowed with many added gifts of obedience; amongst the rest such as are indicated in the narrative before us.
Why was this miracle needful?
Perhaps, for one thing, that men should not limit him, or themselves in him, to the known forms of humanity; and for another, that the best hope might be given them of a life beyond the grave; that their instinctive desires in that direction might thus be infinitely developed and assured.
I suspect, however, that it followed just as the natural consequence of all that preceded.
If Christ be risen, then is the grave of humanity itself empty.
Ever since the Lord lay down in the tomb, and behold it was but a couch whence he arose refreshed, we may say of every brother: He is not dead but sleepeth.
They can tell us little of this, and nothing of the glad safety beyond.
With any theory of the conditions of our resurrection, I have scarcely here to do.
It is to me a matter of positively no interest whether or not, in any sense, the matter of our bodies shall be raised from the earth.
Not to believe in mutual recognition beyond, seems to me a far more reprehensible unbelief than that in the resurrection itself.
I can well understand how a man should not believe in any life after death.
In truth I am ashamed of even combating such an essential falsehood.
Were it not that here and there a weak soul is paralysed by the presence of the monstrous lie, and we dare not allow sympathy to be swallowed up of even righteous disdain, a contemptuous denial would be enough.
What seemed to the disciples the final acme of disappointment and grief, the vanishing of his body itself, was in reality the first sign of the dawn of an illimitable joy.
He was not there because he had risen.
HERCULES
THE TWELVE LABORS OF HERCULES
The Fates were three, namely, Clotho who spun the thread of life, Lachesis who settled the lot of gods and mortals in life, and Atropos who cut the thread of life spun by Clotho.
All that was conceded to her was that Hercules should be put under the dominion of Eurystheus, King of Thebes, his eldest brother, a harsh and pitiless man.
In fact, Hercules was but a child, when Juno sent two enormous serpents against him.
These serpents, gliding into his cradle, were on the point of biting the child when he, with his own hands, seized them and strangled the life out of their slimy bodies.
But the hatred of Juno always pursued him.
When he came again to his sober senses, and learnt that he was the murderer of his own offspring he was filled with horror, and betook himself into exile so that he might hide his face from his fellow men. After a time he went to the oracle at Delphi to ask what he should do in atonement for his dreadful deed.
He was ordered to serve his brother Eurystheus-who, by the help of Juno, had robbed him of his kingdom-for twelve years.
He therefore resolved to banish him and to impose such tasks upon him as must certainly bring about his destruction.
Hence arose the famous twelve labors of Hercules.
Eurystheus first set Hercules to keep his sheep at Nemea and to kill the lion that ofttimes carried off the sheep, and sometimes the shepherd also.
Arming himself with a heavy club and with a bow and arrows, he went in search of the lion's lair and soon found it.
Finding that arrows and club made no impression upon the thick skin of the lion, the hero was constrained to trust entirely to his own thews and sinews.
Seizing the lion with both hands, he put forth all his mighty strength and strangled the beast just as he had strangled the serpents in his cradle.
Then, having despoiled the dead man eater of his skin, Hercules henceforth wore this trophy as a garment, and as a shield and buckler.
In those days, there was in Greece a monstrous serpent known as the Hydra of Lerna, because it haunted a marsh of that name whence it issued in search of prey.
As his second labor, Hercules was sent to slay this creature.
This reptile had nine heads of which the midmost was immortal.
When Hercules struck off one of these heads with his club, two others at once appeared in its place.
The third labor imposed upon Hercules by Eurystheus was the capture of the Arcadian Stag.
This remarkable beast had brazen feet and antlers of solid gold.
It proved no easy task to do this.
At length he shot at it and wounded it with an arrow-not, you may be sure, with one of the poisoned ones-and, having caught it thus wounded, he carried it on his shoulder to his brother and thus completed the third of his labors.
The stench was terrible and greatly troubled the health of the land.
Eurystheus set Hercules the task of cleaning out these Augean stables in a single day!
Such was the fifth labor of Hercules.
On an island in a lake near Stymphalus, in Arcadia, there nested in those days some remarkable and terrible birds-remarkable because their claws, wings and beaks were brazen, and terrible because they fed on human flesh and attacked with their terrible beaks and claws all who came near the lake.
To kill these dreadful birds was the sixth labor.
Minerva supplied Hercules with a brazen rattle with which he roused the birds from their nests, and then slew them with his poisoned arrows while they were on the wing.
He not only caught the monster, but tamed him, and bore him aloft on his shoulders, into the presence of the affrighted Eurystheus, who was at a loss to find a task impossible for Hercules to perform.
The taking of the mares of Diomedes was the eighth labor.
These horses were not ordinary horses, living on corn.
The scene of this labor was Thrace, an extensive region lying between the AEgean Sea, the Euxine or Black Sea, and the Danube.
Geryon was a three bodied monster whose cattle were kept by a giant and a two headed dog!
Hercules slew the giant, the two headed dog and Geryon himself, and in due course brought the oxen to Eurystheus.
Sometime afterwards, Eurystheus, having heard rumors of a wonderful tree which, in some unknown land, yielded golden apples, was moved with great greed to have some of this remarkable fruit.
He had been told that Atlas could give him news of the tree.
This means, perhaps, that in the kingdom of Atlas there were some mountains so high that their summits seemed to touch the sky.
These Hesperides were none other than the three daughters of Atlas, and it was their duty, in which they were helped by a dragon, to guard the golden apples.
Hercules killed the dragon and carried off the apples, but they were afterwards restored to their place by Minerva.
He is said to have been the great friend of mankind, and was chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus because he stole fire from heaven and gave it as a gift to the sons of man.
HERCULES IN THE NETHER WORLD
Theseus and Pirithous were two Athenians, who, after having been at enmity for a long time at last became the very best of friends.
This did not prevent them from forming a very foolish project.
This rashness brought about their ruin, for they were seized by Pluto and chained to a rock.
All this Hercules, who was the friend of Theseus, learnt while on one of his journeys, and he resolved to rescue Theseus from his eternal punishment.
As for Pirithous, the prime mover in the attempted outrage, him Hercules meant to leave to his fate.
When he found himself face to face with Cerberus he seized him, threw him down and chained him with strong chains.
This river had not always run under the vaults of Hades.
Formerly its course was upon the earth.
But when the Titans attempted to scale the heaven, this river had the ill luck to quench their thirst, and Jupiter to punish even the waters of the river for abetting his enemies, turned its course aside into the under world where its waves, slow moving and filthy, lost themselves in Styx, the largest of all the rivers of Hades, which ran round Pluto's gloomy kingdom no less than nine times.
Fierce Charon frowned when he beheld Hercules for he feared his light boat of bark would sink under his weight, it being only adapted for the light and airy spirits of the dead; but when the son of Jupiter told him his name he was mollified and allowed the hero to take his place at his side.
As soon as the boat had touched the shore, Hercules went towards the gloomy palace of Pluto where he with difficulty, on account of the darkness, saw Pluto seated upon an ebony throne by the side of his beloved Proserpina.
When Hercules announced himself, however, he gave him a permit to go round his kingdom and, in addition, acceded to his prayer for the release of Theseus.
At the foot of Pluto's throne Hercules saw Death the Reaper.
He was clothed in a black robe spotted with stars and his fleshless hand held the sharp sickle with which he is said to cut down mortals as the reaper cuts down corn.
During his progress he saw the shades of many people of whom, on earth, he had heard much talk.
He had been wandering about some time when, in a gloomy chamber, he saw three old sisters, wan and worn, spinning by the feeble light of a lamp.
They were the Fates, deities whose duty it was to thread the days of all mortals who appeared on earth, were it but for an instant.
Clotho, the spinner of the thread of life, was the eldest of the three.
She held in her hand a distaff, wound with black and white woollen yarn, with which were sparingly intermixed strands of silk and gold.
The wool stood for the humdrum everyday life of man: the silk and gold marked the days of mirth and gladness, always, alas! too few in number.
Lachesis, the second of the Fates, was quickly turning with her left hand a spindle, while her right hand was leading a fine thread which the third sister, Atropos by name, used to cut with a pair of sharp shears at the death of each mortal.
Hercules would have liked them to tell him how long they had yet to spin for him, but they had no time to answer questions and so the hero passed on.
They were Minos, AEacus and Rhadamanthus, the three judges of Hades, whose duty it was to punish the guilty by casting them into a dismal gulf, Tartarus, whence none might ever emerge, and to reward the innocent by transporting them to the Elysian Fields where delight followed delight in endless pleasure.
These judges could never be mistaken because Themis, the Goddess of Justice, held in front of them a pair of scales in which she weighed the actions of men.
three
BLACK TARTARUS AND THE ELYSIAN FIELDS
Immediately on quitting the presence of the three judges, Hercules saw them open out before him an immense gulf whence arose thick clouds of black smoke.
Not far remote from this rolled Cocytus, another endless stream, fed by the tears of the wretches doomed to Black Tartarus, in which place of eternal torment Hercules now found himself.
The rulers of these mournful regions were the Furies who, with unkempt hair and armed with whips, tormented the condemned without mercy by showing them continually in mirrors the images of their former crimes.
Into Tartarus were thrown, never to come out again, the shades or manes of traitors, ingrates, perjurers, unnatural children, murderers and hypocrites who had during their lives pretended to be upright and honorable in order to deceive the just.
There were to be seen great scoundrels who had startled the world with their frightful crimes.
For these Pluto and the Furies had invented special tortures.
Among the criminals so justly overtaken by the divine vengeance Hercules noticed Salmoneus, whom he had formerly met upon earth.
Sisyphus, the brother of Salmoneus, was no better than he.
Theseus, whom Hercules was bent on freeing from his torment, had met and killed this robber assassin, and Jupiter, for his sins, decreed that the malefactor should continually be rolling up a hill in Tartarus a heavy stone which, when with incredible pains he had brought nearly to the top, always rolled back again, and he had to begin over and over again the heart breaking ascent.
Some distance from Sisyphus Hercules came upon Tantalus, who, in the flesh, had been King of Phrygia, but who now, weak from hunger and parched with thirst, was made to stand to his chin in water with branches of tempting luscious fruit hanging ripe over his head.
When he essayed to drink the water it always went from him, and when he stretched out his hand to pluck the fruit, back the branches sprang out of reach.
For this he was "tantalized" with food and drink, which, seeming always to be within his reach, ever mocked his hopes by eluding his grasp.
One only of the fifty, to wit Hypermnestra, had the courage to disobey this unlawful command and so saved the life of Lynceus, her husband, with whom she fled.
To punish the forty nine Danaides, Jupiter cast them into the outer darkness of Black Tartarus, where they were ever engaged in the hopeless task of pouring water into a sieve.
Hypermnestra, on the contrary, was honored while alive, and also after her death, for loving goodness even more than she loved her father.
Glutted with horror Hercules at length quitted gloomy Tartarus and beheld in front of him still another river.
This was Lethe.
Across Lethe stretched the Elysian Fields where the shades of the blest dwelt in bliss without alloy.
Sunlit, yet never parched with torrid heat, everywhere their verdure charmed the delighted eye, and all things conspired to make the shades of the good and wise, who were privileged to dwell in these Elysian Fields, delightfully happy.
Having at length found and released Theseus, Hercules set out with him for the upper world.
The two left Hades by an ivory door, the key of which Pluto had confided to their care.
THE TUNIC OF NESSUS THE CENTAUR
They were called Centaurs, or Bull Slayers.
But many of them, although learned, were not good.
This offer Hercules gladly accepted.
He shot one of his poisoned arrows with so much force that it went right through the traitor Centaur, and wounded him even unto death.
So when Hercules put it on, which he did immediately upon receiving it, he was seized with frenzy and, in his madness, he uttered terrible cries and did dreadful deeds.
With his powerful hands he broke off huge pieces of rock, tore up pine trees by their roots and hurled them with resounding din into the valley.
He could not take off the fatal shirt, and as he tore off portions of it he tore, at the same time, his quivering flesh.
But at length the majesty and the courage of the hero asserted themselves, and, although still in agony, his madness left him.
Calling to his side his friend Philoctetes, he wished to embrace him once more before dying; but fearful lest he should, in so doing, infect his friend with the deadly poison that was consuming him, he cried in his agony: "Alas, I am not even permitted to embrace thee!"
Then he gathered together the trees he had uprooted and made a huge funeral pyre, such as was used by the ancients in burning their dead. Climbing to the top of the heap, he spread out the skin of the Nemean lion, and, supporting himself upon his club, gave the signal for Philoctetes to kindle the fire that was to reduce him to ashes.
In return for this service he gave Philoctetes a quiver full of those deadly arrows that had been dipped in the blood of the Hydra of Lerna.
He further enjoined his friend to let no man know of his departure from life, to the intent that the fear of his approach might prevent fresh monsters and new robbers from ravaging the earth.
Thus died Hercules, and after his death he was received as a god amongst the Immortals on Mount Olympus, where he married Hebe, Jove's cupbearer.
THE CABALLERO'S WAY
The Kid was twenty five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty six.
He killed for the love of it-because he was quick tempered- to avoid arrest-for his own amusement-any reason that came to his mind would suffice.
He had escaped capture because he could shoot five sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every cow path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to Matamoras.
The captain turned the colour of brick dust under his tan, and forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant Sandridge, camped at a water hole on the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order.
Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful /couleur de rose/ through his ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket, and chewed off the ends of his gamboge moustache.
It had been one of the Kid's pastimes to shoot Mexicans "to see them kick": if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him!
One and all they lounged with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with "/quien sabes/" and denials of the Kid's acquaintance.
But there was a man named Fink who kept a store at the Crossing-a man of many nationalities, tongues, interests, and ways of thinking.
"They're afraid to tell.
This /hombre/ they call the Kid-Goodall is his name, ain't it?--he's been in my store once or twice.
I have an idea you might run across him at-but I guess I don't keer to say, myself.
I'm two seconds later in pulling a gun than I used to be, and the difference is worth thinking about.
But this Kid's got a half Mexican girl at the Crossing that he comes to see.
Maybe she-no, I don't suppose she would, but that /jacal/ would be a good place to watch, anyway."
The sun was low, and the broad shade of the great pear thicket already covered the grass thatched hut.
The goats were enclosed for the night in a brush corral near by.
A few kids walked the top of it, nibbling the chaparral leaves.
The Cisco Kid was a vain person, as all eminent and successful assassins are, and his bosom would have been ruffled had he known that at a simple exchange of glances two persons, in whose minds he had been looming large, suddenly abandoned (at least for the time) all thought of him.
Never before had Tonia seen such a man as this.
The men she had known had been small and dark.
Even the Kid, in spite of his achievements, was a stripling no larger than herself, with black, straight hair and a cold, marble face that chilled the noonday.
As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy.
Her blue black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch.
Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the /gitanas/ of the Basque province.
As for the humming bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird.
The newly lighted sun god asked for a drink of water.
Tonia brought it from the red jar hanging under the brush shelter.
Which leads to a suspicion that the Kid's fences needed repairing, and that the adjutant general's sarcasm had fallen upon unproductive soil.
That sounded business like.
Twice a week he rode over to the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, and directed Tonia's slim, slightly lemon tinted fingers among the intricacies of the slowly growing lariata.
A six strand plait is hard to learn and easy to teach.
Thus he might bring down the kite and the humming bird with one stone.
While the sunny haired ornithologist was pursuing his studies the Cisco Kid was also attending to his professional duties.
He moodily shot up a saloon in a small cow village on Quintana Creek, killed the town marshal (plugging him neatly in the centre of his tin badge), and then rode away, morose and unsatisfied.
He wanted her to call his bloodthirstiness bravery and his cruelty devotion.
He wanted Tonia to bring him water from the red jar under the brush shelter, and tell him how the /chivo/ was thriving on the bottle.
The Kid turned the speckled roan's head up the ten mile pear flat that stretches along the Arroyo Hondo until it ends at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio.
The roan whickered; for he had a sense of locality and direction equal to that of a belt line street car horse; and he knew he would soon be nibbling the rich mesquite grass at the end of a forty foot stake rope while Ulysses rested his head in Circe's straw roofed hut.
With dismal monotony and startling variety the uncanny and multiform shapes of the cacti lift their twisted trunks, and fat, bristly hands to encumber the way.
The demon plant, appearing to live without soil or rain, seems to taunt the parched traveller with its lush grey greenness.
It warps itself a thousand times about what look to be open and inviting paths, only to lure the rider into blind and impassable spine defended "bottoms of the bag," leaving him to retreat, if he can, with the points of the compass whirling in his head.
To be lost in the pear is to die almost the death of the thief on the cross, pierced by nails and with grotesque shapes of all the fiends hovering about.
He knew but one tune and sang it, as he knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her.
He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang it.
Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl Or I'll tell you what I'll do-
As though he were in a circus ring the speckled roan wheeled and danced through the labyrinth of pear until at length his rider knew by certain landmarks that the Lone Wolf Crossing was close at hand.
A few yards farther the Kid stopped the roan and gazed intently through the prickly openings.
Then he dismounted, dropped the roan's reins, and proceeded on foot, stooping and silent, like an Indian.
The Kid crept noiselessly to the very edge of the pear thicket and reconnoitred between the leaves of a clump of cactus.
But if all must be told, there is to be added that her head reposed against the broad and comfortable chest of a tall red and yellow man, and that his arm was about her, guiding her nimble fingers that required so many lessons at the intricate six strand plait.
Sandridge glanced quickly at the dark mass of pear when he heard a slight squeaking sound that was not altogether unfamiliar.
A gun scabbard will make that sound when one grasps the handle of a six shooter suddenly.
But the sound was not repeated; and Tonia's fingers needed close attention.
And then, in the shadow of death, they began to talk of their love; and in the still July afternoon every word they uttered reached the ears of the Kid.
Soon he will be here.
A /vaquero/ at the /tienda/ said to day he saw him on the Guadalupe three days ago.
When he is that near he always comes.
"All right," said the stranger.
"And then what?"
"And then," said the girl, "you must bring your men here and kill him. If not, he will kill you."
"It's kill or be killed for the officer that goes up against mr Cisco Kid."
"He must die," said the girl.
Tonia dropped the lariat, twisted herself around, and curved a lemon tinted arm over the ranger's shoulder.
"But then," she murmured in liquid Spanish, "I had not beheld thee, thou great, red mountain of a man!
And thou art kind and good, as well as strong.
Let him die; for then I will not be filled with fear by day and night lest he hurt thee or me."
"When he comes," said Tonia, "he remains two days, sometimes three. Gregorio, the small son of old Luisa, the /lavendera/, has a swift pony.
And bring many men with thee, and have much care, oh, dear red one, for the rattlesnake is not quicker to strike than is '/El Chivato/,' as they call him, to send a ball from his /pistola/."
I'll get him by myself or not at all.
The Cap wrote one or two things to me that make me want to do the trick without any help.
"I will send you the message by the boy Gregorio," said the girl.
"I knew you were braver than that small slayer of men who never smiles. How could I ever have thought I cared for him?"
No sound or movement disturbed the serenity of the dense pear thicket ten yards away.
When the form of Sandridge had disappeared, loping his big dun down the steep banks of the Frio crossing, the Kid crept back to his own horse, mounted him, and rode back along the tortuous trail he had come.
But not far.
He stopped and waited in the silent depths of the pear until half an hour had passed.
He dismounted, and his girl sprang into his arms.
The Kid looked at her fondly.
His thick, black hair clung to his head like a wrinkled mat.
The meeting brought a slight ripple of some undercurrent of feeling to his smooth, dark face that was usually as motionless as a clay mask.
"How's my girl?" he asked, holding her close.
"My eyes are dim with always gazing into that devil's pincushion through which you come.
But you are here, beloved one, and I will not scold.
"Not if the court knows itself do I let a lady stake my horse for me," said he.
"But if you'll run in, /chica/, and throw a pot of coffee together while I attend to the /caballo/, I'll be a good deal obliged."
Besides his marksmanship the Kid had another attribute for which he admired himself greatly.
He was /muy caballero/, as the Mexicans express it, where the ladies were concerned.
He could not have spoken a harsh word to a woman.
He might ruthlessly slay their husbands and brothers, but he could not have laid the weight of a finger in anger upon a woman. Wherefore many of that interesting division of humanity who had come under the spell of his politeness declared their disbelief in the stories circulated about mr Kid.
One shouldn't believe everything one heard, they said.
When confronted by their indignant men folk with proof of the /caballero's/ deeds of infamy, they said maybe he had been driven to it, and that he knew how to treat a lady, anyhow.
Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the pride he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his hiding place in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the actors) must have been obscured by difficulties.
And yet one could not think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind.
Afterward, the ancestor, his flock corralled, smoked a cigarette and became a mummy in a grey blanket.
Tonia washed the few dishes while the Kid dried them with the flour sacking towel. Her eyes shone; she chatted volubly of the inconsequent happenings of her small world since the Kid's last visit; it was as all his other home comings had been.
"Do you love me just the same, old girl?" asked the Kid, hunting for his cigarette papers.
"Always the same, little one," said Tonia, her dark eyes lingering upon him.
"I must go over to Fink's," said the Kid, rising, "for some tobacco.
I thought I had another sack in my coat.
I'll be back in a quarter of an hour."
"Hasten," said Tonia, "and tell me-how long shall I call you my own this time?
Will you be gone again to morrow, leaving me to grieve, or will you be longer with your Tonia?"
"Oh, I might stay two or three days this trip," said the Kid, yawning. "I've been on the dodge for a month, and I'd like to rest up."
"It's funny," said the Kid, "how I feel.
I never had mullygrubs like them before.
The Guadalupe country is burning up about that old Dutchman I plugged down there."
"You are not afraid-no one could make my brave little one fear."
Somebody might get hurt that oughtn't to."
"Remain with your Tonia; no one will find you here."
The Kid looked keenly into the shadows up and down the arroyo and toward the dim lights of the Mexican village.
At midnight a horseman rode into the rangers' camp, blazing his way by noisy "halloes" to indicate a pacific mission.
Sandridge and one or two others turned out to investigate the row.
Old Luisa, the /lavendera/, had persuaded him to bring it, he said, her son Gregorio being too ill of a fever to ride.
Sandridge lighted the camp lantern and read the letter.
These were its words:
Hardly had you ridden away when he came out of the pear.
When he first talked he said he would stay three days or more.
Soon he said he must leave before daylight when it is dark and stillest.
And then he seemed to suspect that I be not true to him.
He looked at me so strange that I am frightened.
I swear to him that I love him, his own Tonia.
Last of all he said I must prove to him I am true.
To escape he says he will dress in my clothes, my red skirt and the blue waist I wear and the brown mantilla over the head, and thus ride away.
This before he goes, so he can tell if I am true and if men are hidden to shoot him.
It is a terrible thing.
An hour before daybreak this is to be.
Knowing all, you should do that.
It is dark in there.
He will wear my red skirt and blue waist and brown mantilla.
Sandridge quickly explained to his men the official part of the missive.
The rangers protested against his going alone.
"I'll get him easy enough," said the lieutenant.
"The girl's got him trapped.
And don't even think he'll get the drop on me."
Sandridge saddled his horse and rode to the Lone Wolf Crossing.
He tied his big dun in a clump of brush on the arroyo, took his Winchester from its scabbard, and carefully approached the Perez /jacal/.
There was only the half of a high moon drifted over by ragged, milk white gulf clouds.
The wagon shed was an excellent place for ambush; and the ranger got inside it safely.
And then the other figure, in skirt, waist, and mantilla over its head, stepped out into the faint moonlight, gazing after the rider.
Sandridge thought he would take his chance then before Tonia rode back.
"Throw up your hands," he ordered loudly, stepping out of the wagon shed with his Winchester at his shoulder.
There was a quick turn of the figure, but no movement to obey, so the ranger pumped in the bullets-one-two-three-and then twice more; for you never could be too sure of bringing down the Cisco Kid.
There was no danger of missing at ten paces, even in that half moonlight.
The old ancestor, asleep on his blanket, was awakened by the shots. Listening further, he heard a great cry from some man in mortal distress or anguish, and rose up grumbling at the disturbing ways of moderns.
"Who wrote it?"
Just then all that Sandridge could think of to do was to go outside and throw himself face downward in the dust by the side of his humming bird, of whom not a feather fluttered.
He was not a /caballero/ by instinct, and he could not understand the niceties of revenge.
A mile away the rider who had ridden past the wagon shed struck up a harsh, untuneful song, the words of which began:
Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl Or I'll tell you what I'll do-
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE BACK PARLOUR OF THE BANKING HOUSE.
Henry Dunbar arrived in London a couple of hours after mr Vernon left the Abbey.
He went straight to the Clarendon Hotel.
He had no servant with him, and his luggage consisted only of a portmanteau, a dressing case, and a despatch box; the same despatch box whose contents he had so carefully studied at the Winchester hotel, upon the night of the murder in the grove.
The day after his arrival was Sunday, and all that day the banker occupied himself in reading a morocco bound manuscript volume, which he took from the despatch box.
There was a black fog upon this November day, and the atmosphere out of doors was cold and bleak.
But the room in which Henry Dunbar sat looked the very picture of comfort and elegance.
He had drawn his chair close to the fire, and on a table near his elbow were arranged the open despatch box, a tall crystal jug of Burgundy, with a goblet shaped glass, on a salver, and a case of cigars.
Until long after dark that evening, Henry Dunbar sat by the fire, smoking and drinking, and reading the manuscript volume.
He only paused now and then to take pencil notes of its contents in a little memorandum book, which he carried in the breast pocket of his coat.
It was not till seven o'clock, when the liveried servant who waited upon him came to inform him that his dinner was served in an adjoining chamber, that mr Dunbar rose from his seat and put away the book in the despatch box.
He laid down the volume on the table while he replaced other papers in the box, and it fell open at the first page.
On that first page was written, in Henry Dunbar's bold, legible hand-
This was the book the banker had been studying all that winter's day.
It was by no means wonderful, then, that, after becoming possessor of the united fortunes of his father and his uncle, Henry Dunbar should keep aloof from a place that had always been obnoxious to him.
The business had gone on without him very well during his absence, and it went on without him now, for his place in India had been assumed by a very clever man, who for twenty years had acted as cashier in the Calcutta house.
All the width of thirty five years between the present hour and that day might not be wide enough to separate the memory of the past from the thoughts which were busy this morning in the mind of Henry Dunbar.
He was very pale as he rode citywards, in the comfortable brougham, from the Clarendon; and his face had a stern, fixed look, like a man who has nerved himself to meet some crisis, which he knows is near at hand.
There was a stoppage upon Ludgate Hill.
Great wooden barricades and mountains of uprooted paving stones, amidst which sturdy navigators disported themselves with spades and pickaxes, and wheelbarrows full of rubbish, blocked the way; so the brougham turned into Farringdon Street, and went up Snow Hill, and under the grim black walls of dreadful Newgate.
The vehicle travelled very slowly, for the traffic was concentrated in this quarter by reason of the stoppage on Ludgate Hill, and mr Dunbar was able to contemplate at his leisure the black prison walls, and the men and women selling dogs'-collars under their dismal shadows.
It may be that the banker's face grew a shade paler after that contemplation.
But he drew a long breath, and held his head proudly erect as he pushed open the doors and went in.
Never since the day of the discovery of the forged bills had that man entered the banking house.
Dark thoughts came back upon his mind, and the shadows deepened on his face as he gave one rapid glance round the familiar office.
He walked straight towards the private parlour in which that well remembered scene had occurred five and thirty years ago.
But before he arrived at the door leading from the public offices to the back of the house, he was stopped by a gentlemanly looking man, who came forward from a desk in some shadowy region, and intercepted the stranger.
This man was Clement Austin, the cashier.
"Do you wish to see mr Balderby, sir?" he asked.
"Yes.
I have an appointment with him at one o'clock.
My name is Dunbar."
The cashier bowed and opened the door.
The banker passed across the threshold, which he had not crossed for five and thirty years until to day.
But as mr Dunbar went towards the familiar parlour at the back of the banking house, he stopped for a minute, and looked at the cashier.
Clement Austin was scarcely less pale than Henry Dunbar himself.
Now that the meeting had come to pass, he looked at Henry Dunbar with an earnest, scrutinizing gaze, as if he would fain have discovered the secret of the man's guilt or innocence in his countenance.
The banker's gaze never flinched during that encounter.
It is taken as a strong proof of a man's innocence that he should look you full in the face with a steadfast gaze when you look at him with suspicion plainly visible in your eyes; but would he not be the poorest villain if he shirked that encounter of glances when he knows full surely that he is in that moment put to the test?
It is rather innocence whose eyelids drop when you peer too closely into its eyes, for innocence is appalled by the stern, accusing glances which it is unprepared to meet.
Clement Austin opened the door of mr Balderby's parlour; mr Dunbar went in unannounced.
The cashier closed the parlour door and returned to his desk in the public office.
The junior partner was sitting at an office table near the fire writing, but he rose as the banker entered the room, and went forward to meet him.
"You are very punctual, mr Dunbar," he said.
"Yes, I am generally punctual."
"It may seem late in the day to bid you welcome to the bank, mr Dunbar," said the junior partner, "but I do so, nevertheless-most heartily!"
Henry Dunbar did not return his partner's greeting.
He was looking round the room, and remembering the day upon which he had last seen it.
There was very little alteration in the appearance of the dismal city chamber. There was the same wire blind before the window, the same solitary tree, leafless, in the narrow courtyard without.
The morocco covered arm chairs had been re-covered, perhaps, during that five and thirty years; but if so, the covering had grown shabby again.
Even the Turkey carpet was in the very stage of dusky dinginess that had distinguished the carpet on which Henry Dunbar had stood five and thirty years before.
"I received your letter announcing your journey to London, and your desire for a private interview, on Saturday afternoon," mr Balderby said, after a pause.
"I have made arrangements to assure our being undisturbed so long as you may remain here.
If you wish to make any investigation of the affairs of the house, I----"
mr Dunbar waved his hand with a deprecatory air.
"Nothing is farther from my thoughts than any such design," he said. "No, mr Balderby, I have only been a man of business because all chance of another career, which I infinitely preferred, was closed upon me five and thirty years ago.
I am quite content to be a sleeping partner in the house of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby.
For ten years prior to my father's death he took no active part in the business.
The house got on very well without his aid; it will get on equally well without mine.
The business that brings me to London is an entirely personal matter.
I am a rich man, but I don't exactly know how rich I am, and I want to realize rather a large sum of money."
mr Balderby bowed, but his eyebrows went up a little, as if he found it impossible to control some slight evidence of his surprise.
So far so good.
Neither Laura nor her husband will have any reason for dissatisfaction.
But this is not quite enough, mr Balderby.
I am not a demonstrative man, and I have never made any great fuss about my love for my daughter; but I do love her, nevertheless."
mr Dunbar spoke very slowly here, and stopped once or twice to pass his handkerchief across his forehead, as he had done in the hotel at Winchester.
I want to give my daughter a diamond necklace as a wedding present, and I want it to be such as an Eastern prince or a Rothschild might offer to his only child.
You understand?"
"Oh, perfectly," answered mr Balderby; "I shall be most happy to be of any use to you in the matter."
"All I want is a large sum of money at my command.
I may go rather recklessly to work and make a large investment in this necklace; it will be something for Lady Jocelyn to bequeath to her children.
"I did, in concurrence with mr Lovell."
"Precisely; Lovell wrote me a letter to that effect.
My father kept two accounts here, I believe-a deposit and a drawing account?"
"He did."
"And those two accounts have gone on since my return in the same manner as during his lifetime?"
"Precisely.
The income which mr Percival Dunbar set aside for his own use was seven thousand a year.
He rarely, spent as much as that; sometimes he spent less than half.
The balance of this income, and his double share in the profits of the business, went to the credit of his deposit account, and various sums have been withdrawn from time to time, and duly invested under his order."
"Perhaps you can let me see the ledgers containing those two accounts?"
"Most certainly."
mr Balderby touched the spring of a handbell upon his table.
Clement Austin appeared five minutes afterwards, carrying two ponderous morocco bound volumes.
mr Balderby opened both ledgers, and placed them before his senior partner.
Henry Dunbar looked at the deposit account.
His eyes ran eagerly down the long row of figures before him until they came to the sum total.
Then his chest heaved, and he drew a long breath, like a man who feels almost stifled by some internal oppression.
The last figures in the page were these:
The twopence seemed a ridiculous anti climax; but business men are necessarily as exact in figures as calculating machines.
"How is this money invested?" asked Henry Dunbar, pointing to the page. His fingers trembled a little as he did so, and he dropped his hand suddenly upon the ledger.
"There's fifty thousand in India stock," mr Balderby answered, as indifferently as if fifty thousand pounds more or less was scarcely worth speaking of; "and there's five and twenty in railway debentures, Great Western.
Most of the remainder is floating in Exchequer bills."
"Then you can realize the Exchequer bills?"
mr Balderby winced as if some one had trodden upon one of his corns.
He was a banker heart and soul, and he did not at all relish the idea of any withdrawal of the bank's resources, however firm that establishment might stand.
"It's rather a large amount of capital to withdraw from the business," he said, rubbing his chin, thoughtfully.
"I suppose the bank can afford it!" mr Dunbar exclaimed, with a tone of surprise.
"Oh, yes; the bank can afford it well enough.
Our calls are sometimes heavy.
Lord Yarsfield-a very old customer-talks of buying an estate in Wales; he may come down upon us at any moment for a very stiff sum of money.
However, the capital is yours, mr Dunbar; and you've a right to dispose of it as you please.
The Exchequer bills shall be realized immediately."
"Good; and if you can dispose of the railway bonds to advantage, you may do so."
"You think of spending----"
"I think of reinvesting the money.
I have an offer of an estate north of the metropolis, which I think will realize cent per cent a few years hence: but that is an after consideration.
I shall buy the diamonds myself, direct from the merchant importers.
You will hold yourself ready after Wednesday, we'll say, to cash some very heavy cheques on my account?"
"Certainly, mr Dunbar."
"Then I think that is really all I have to say.
There was very little heartiness in the tone of this invitation; and mr Balderby perfectly understood that it was only a formula which mr Dunbar felt himself called upon to go through.
The junior partner murmured his acknowledgment of Henry Dunbar's politeness; and then the two men talked together for a few minutes on indifferent subjects.
Five minutes afterwards mr Dunbar rose to leave the room.
This passage was very dark; but the offices were well lighted by lofty plate glass windows.
Between the end of the passage and the outer doors of the bank, Henry Dunbar saw the figure of a woman sitting near one of the desks and talking to Clement Austin.
The banker stopped suddenly, and went back to the parlour.
He looked about him a little absently as he re-entered the room.
"I don't remember seeing one in your hand."
"Ah, then, I suppose I was mistaken."
He still lingered in the parlour, putting on his gloves very slowly, and looking out of the window into the dismal backyard, where there was a dingy little wooden door set deep in the stone wall.
While the banker loitered near the window, Clement Austin came into the room, to show some document to the junior partner.
Henry Dunbar turned round as the cashier was about to leave the parlour.
That's not very business like, is it, mr Austin?
Who is the woman?"
"She is a young lady, sir."
"A young lady?"
"Yes, sir."
"What brings her here?"
The cashier hesitated for a moment before he replied, "She-wishes to see you, mr Dunbar," he said, after that brief pause.
"What is her name?--who-who is she?"
"Shut that door, sir!" he said, impatiently, to the cashier; "the draught from the passage is strong enough to cut a man in two.
"The daughter of that unfortunate man, Joseph Wilmot, who was cruelly murdered at Winchester!" answered the cashier, very gravely.
He looked Henry Dunbar full in the face as he spoke.
I have suffered enough already on account of that hideous business at Winchester, and I shall most resolutely defend myself from any further persecution.
This young person can have no possible motive for wishing to see me.
If she is poor and wants money of me, I am ready and willing to assist her.
I have already offered to do so-I can do no more.
But if she is in distress----"
"She is not in distress, mr Dunbar," interrupted Clement Austin.
"She has friends who love her well enough to shield her from that."
"Indeed; and you are one of those friends, I suppose, mr Austin?"
"I am."
"Prove your friendship, then, by teaching Margaret Wilmot that she has a friend and not an enemy in me.
If you are-as I suspect from your manner-something more than a friend: if you love her, and she returns your love, marry her, and she shall have a dowry that no gentleman's wife need be ashamed to bring to her husband."
There was no anger, no impatience in the banker's voice now, but a tone of deep feeling.
Clement Austin locked at him, astonished by the change in his manner.
Henry Dunbar saw the look, and it seemed as if he endeavoured to answer it.
"You have no need to be surprised that I shrink from seeing Margaret Wilmot," he said.
I am an old man, and I have been thirty five years in India.
My health is shattered, and I have a horror of all tragic scenes.
I have not yet recovered from the shock of that horrible business at Winchester.
There was something very straightforward, very simple, in all this.
For a time, at least, Clement Austin's mind wavered.
Margaret was, perhaps, wrong, after all, and Henry Dunbar might be an innocent man.
Clement returned to the office, where he had left Margaret, in order to repeat to her mr Dunbar's message.
No sooner had the door of the parlour closed upon the cashier than Henry Dunbar turned abruptly to his junior partner.
He pointed to the dark little yard outside the window as he spoke.
"Yes, there is a door, I believe."
"Is it locked?"
"No; it is seldom locked till four o'clock; the clerks use it sometimes, when they go in and out."
"Then I shall go out that way," said mr Dunbar, who was almost breathless in his haste.
"You can send the carriage back to the Clarendon by and by.
I don't want to see that girl.
Good morning."
He hurried out of the parlour, and into a passage leading to the yard, followed by mr Balderby, who wondered at his senior partner's excitement.
The door in the yard was not locked.
Henry Dunbar opened it, went out into the court, and closed the door behind him.
GOING AWAY.
At one o'clock on the appointed Thursday morning, mr Dunbar presented himself in the diamond merchant's office.
Henry Dunbar was not alone.
He did not go straight back to the Clarendon, but pierced his way across Smithfield, and into a busy smoky street, where he stopped by and by at a dingy looking currier's shop.
He went in and selected a couple of chamois skins, very thick and strong.
At another shop he bought some large needles, half a dozen skeins of stout waxed thread, a pair of large scissors, a couple of strong steel buckles, and a tailor's thimble.
When he had made these purchases, he hailed the first empty cab that passed him, and went back to his hotel.
He dined, drank the best part of a bottle of Burgundy, and then ordered a cup of strong tea to be taken to his dressing room.
He had fires in his bedroom and dressing room every night.
To night he retired very early, dismissed the servant who attended upon him, and locked the door of the outer room, the only door communicating with the corridor of the hotel.
But he was not going to write; he pushed aside the writing materials, and took his purchases of the afternoon from his pocket.
He spread the chamois leather out upon the table, and cut the skins into two long strips, about a foot broad.
He measured these round his waist, and then began to stitch them together, slowly and laboriously.
It was past twelve o'clock when he had stitched both sides and one end of the double chamois leather belt; the other end he left open.
When he had completed the two sides and the end that was closed, he took four or five little canvas bags from his pocket.
Every one of these canvas bags was full of loose diamonds.
A thrill of rapture ran through the banker's veins as he plunged his fingers in amongst the glittering stones.
He filled his hands with the bright gems, and let them run from one hand to the other, like streams of liquid light.
Then, very slowly and carefully, he began to drop the diamonds into the open end of the chamois leather belt.
When he had dropped a few into the belt, he stitched the leather across and across, quilting in the stones.
This work took him so long, that it was four o'clock in the morning when he had quilted the last diamond into the belt.
He gave a long sigh of relief as he threw the waste scraps of leather upon the top of the low fire, and watched them slowly smoulder away into black ashes.
Then he put the chamois leather belt under his pillow, and went to bed.
He wore the chamois leather belt buckled tightly round his waist next to his inner shirt, and was able to defy the swell mob, had those gentry been aware of the treasures which he carried about with him.
But when the jeweller's agent came, two or three days afterwards, mr Dunbar could find no design that suited him; and the man returned to London without having received an order, and without having even seen the brilliants which the banker had bought.
"Tell your employer that I will retain two or three of these designs," mr Dunbar said, selecting the drawings as he spoke; "and if, upon consideration, I find that one of them will suit me, I will communicate with your establishment.
If not, I shall take the diamonds to Paris, and get them made up there."
The jeweller ventured to suggest the inferiority of Parisian workmanship as compared with that of a first rate English establishment; but mr Dunbar did not condescend to pay any attention to the young man's remonstrance.
"Good morning."
Major Vernon had returned to the Rose and Crown at Lisford.
The deed which transferred to him the possession of Woodbine Cottage was speedily executed, and he took up his abode there.
His establishment was composed of the old housekeeper, who had waited on the deceased admiral, and a young man of all work, who was nephew to the housekeeper, and who had also been in the service of the late owner of the cottage.
From his new abode mr Vernon was able to keep a tolerably sharp look out upon the two great houses in his neighbourhood-Maudesley Abbey and Jocelyn's Rock.
Nothing could have better pleased the new inhabitant of Woodbine Cottage, who was speedily on excellent terms with his housekeeper.
"You're a clever fellow, dear friend," he muttered, as he lighted his cigar; "you're a stupendous fellow, dear boy; but your friend can see through less transparent blinds than this diamond business.
And you've my best wishes, dear boy; but-you must pay for them-you must pay for them, Henry Dunbar."
This little conversation between the new tenant of Woodbine Cottage and his housekeeper occurred on the very evening on which Major Vernon took possession of his new abode.
The next day was Sunday-a cold wintry Sunday; for the snow had been falling all through the last three days and nights, and lay deep on the ground, hiding the low thatched roofs, and making feathery festoons about the leafless branches, until Lisford looked like a village upon the top of a twelfth cake.
But not towards the church.
Major Vernon was not going to church on this bright winter's morning.
He went the other way, tramping through the snow, towards the eastern gate of Maudesley Park.
He went in by the low iron gate, for there was a bridle path by this part of the park-that very bridle path by which Philip Jocelyn had ridden to Lisford so often in the autumn weather.
"So much the better," Major Vernon answered, coolly.
"You may bring up some fresh coffee, john; for I haven't made much of a breakfast myself; and if you'll tell the cook to devil the thigh of a turkey, with plenty of cayenne pepper and a squeeze of lemon, I shall be obliged.
You need'nt trouble yourself; I know my way."
Cold meats, raised pies, and other comestibles were laid out upon the carved oak sideboard.
"It's comfortable!" he exclaimed; "to say the least of it, it's very comfortable, dear boy!"
The dear boy did not look particularly pleased as he lifted his eyes to his visitor's face.
"I thought you were in London?" he said.
"Do you mean to say that you have bought property in this neighbourhood?"
"Yes!
I am leasehold proprietor of Woodbine Cottage, near Lisford and Shorncliffe."
"I do."
Henry Dunbar smiled to himself as his friend said this.
"You're welcome to do so," he said, "as far as I am concerned."
The Major looked at him sharply.
"Your sentiments are liberality itself, my dear friend.
But I must respectfully remind you that the expenses attendant upon taking possession of my humble abode have been very heavy.
What's a thousand or so, more or less, to the senior partner in the house of d, d, and b?
Make it two five, Prince of Maudesley!"
He did not leave Maudesley Abbey until he had succeeded in the object of his visit, and he carried away in his pocket book cheques to the amount of two thousand five hundred pounds.
"I flatter myself I was just in the nick of time," the Major thought, as he walked back to Woodbine Cottage, "for as sure as my name's what it is, my friend means a bolt.
He means a bolt; and the money I've had to day is the last I shall ever receive from that quarter."
Almost immediately after Major Vernon's departure, Henry Dunbar rang the bell for the servant who acted as his valet whenever he required the services of one, which was not often.
"I shall start for Paris to night, Jeffreys," he said to this man.
"I want to see what the French jewellers can do before I trust Lady Jocelyn's necklace into the hands of English workmen.
"Am I to go with you, sir?" the man asked.
Henry Dunbar looked at his watch, and seemed to reflect upon this question some moments before he answered.
"There's an express from the north stops at Rugby at six o'clock, sir. You might meet that, if you left Shorncliffe by the four thirty five train."
"I could do that," answered the banker; "it's only three o'clock.
No, I won't take you to Paris with me.
You can follow me in a day or two with some more things."
"Yes, sir."
There was no such thing as bustle and confusion in a household organized like that of mr Dunbar.
Round his waist he wore the chamois leather belt which he had made with his own hands at the Clarendon Hotel.
This belt had never quitted him since the night upon which he made it.
The carriage conveyed him to the Shorncliffe station.
He got out and went upon the platform.
Although it was not yet five o'clock, the wintry light was fading in the grey sky, and in the railway station it was already dark.
There were lamps here and there, but they only made separate splotches of light in the dusky atmosphere.
Henry Dunbar walked slowly up and down the platform.
"mr Dunbar," he said; "mr
Dunbar!"
The banker turned sharply round, and recognized Arthur Lovell.
"Ah! my dear Lovell, is that you?
You quite startled me."
"Are you going by the next train?
I was so anxious to see you."
"Why so?"
"Because there's some one here who very much wishes to see you; quite an old friend of yours, he says.
Who do you think it is?"
"I don't know, I can't guess-I've so many old friends.
I can't see any one, Lovell.
I'm very ill, I saw a physician while I was in London; and he told me that my heart is diseased, and that if I wish to live I must avoid any agitation, any sudden emotion, as I would avoid a deadly poison.
Who is it that wants to see me?"
"Lord Herriston, the great Anglo Indian statesman.
He is a friend of my father's, and he has been very kind to me-indeed, he offered me an appointment, which I found it wisest to decline.
He talked a great deal about you, when my father told him that you'd settled at Maudesley, and would have driven over to see you if he could have managed to spare the time, without losing his train.
You'll see him, wont you?"
"Where is he?"
"Here, in the station-in the waiting room.
You'll come and see him?"
"Yes, I shall be very glad; I----"
Henry Dunbar stopped suddenly, with his hand upon his side.
The train came into the station at this moment.
"I shan't be able to see Lord Herriston to night," mr Dunbar said, hurriedly; "I must go by this train, or I shall lose a day.
Good bye, Lovell.
Make my best compliments to Herriston; tell him I have been very ill.
Good bye."
Henry Dunbar got into the carriage.
At the moment of his doing so, an elderly gentleman came out of the waiting room.
"Is this my train, Lovell?" he asked.
"No, my Lord.
mr Dunbar is here; he goes by this train.
You'll have time to speak to him."
The train was moving.
Lord Herriston was an active old fellow.
He ran along the platform, looking into the carriages.
But the old man's sight was not as good as his legs were; he looked eagerly into the carriage windows, but he only saw a confusion of flickering lamplight, and strange faces, and newspapers unfurled in the hands of wakeful travellers, and the heads of sleepy passengers rolling and jolting against the padded sides of the carriage.
"My eyes are not what they used to be," he said, with a good tempered laugh, when he went back to Arthur Lovell.
"I didn't succeed in getting a glimpse of my old friend Henry Dunbar."
The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall
BY john KENDRICK BANGS
The owners of Harrowby Hall had done their utmost to rid themselves of the damp and dewy lady who rose up out of the best bedroom floor at midnight, but without avail.
They had tried stopping the clock, so that the ghost would not know when it was midnight; but she made her appearance just the same, with that fearful miasmatic personality of hers, and there she would stand until everything about her was thoroughly saturated.
And then he swooned away, and was found unconscious in his bed the next morning by his host, simply saturated with sea water and fright, from the combined effects of which he never recovered, dying four years later of pneumonia and nervous prostration at the age of seventy eight.
The next year the master of Harrowby Hall decided not to have the best spare bedroom opened at all, thinking that perhaps the ghost's thirst for making herself disagreeable would be satisfied by haunting the furniture, but the plan was as unavailing as the many that had preceded it.
Finding no one there, she immediately set out to learn the reason why, and she chose none other to haunt than the owner of the Harrowby himself.
She found him in his own cosey room drinking whiskey-whiskey undiluted-and felicitating himself upon having foiled her ghost ship, when all of a sudden the curl went out of his hair, his whiskey bottle filled and overflowed, and he was himself in a condition similar to that of a man who has fallen into a water butt.
The sight was so unexpected and so terrifying that he fainted, but immediately came to, because of the vast amount of water in his hair, which, trickling down over his face, restored his consciousness.
Now it so happened that the master of Harrowby was a brave man, and while he was not particularly fond of interviewing ghosts, especially such quenching ghosts as the one before him, he was not to be daunted by an apparition.
He would have liked to put on a dry suit of clothes first, but the apparition declined to leave him for an instant until her hour was up, and he was forced to deny himself that pleasure.
Every time he would move she would follow him, with the result that everything she came in contact with got a ducking.
In an effort to warm himself up he approached the fire, an unfortunate move as it turned out, because it brought the ghost directly over the fire, which immediately was extinguished.
The whiskey became utterly valueless as a comforter to his chilled system, because it was by this time diluted to a proportion of ninety per cent of water.
The only thing he could do to ward off the evil effects of his encounter he did, and that was to swallow ten two grain quinine pills, which he managed to put into his mouth before the ghost had time to interfere. Having done this, he turned with some asperity to the ghost, and said:
Go sit out on the lake, if you like that sort of thing; soak the water butt, if you wish; but do not, I implore you, come into a gentleman's house and saturate him and his possessions in this way.
It is damned disagreeable."
"Madam," returned the unhappy householder, "I wish that remark were strictly truthful.
I was talking about you.
"That is a bit of specious nonsense," returned the ghost, throwing a quart of indignation into the face of the master of Harrowby.
"No, I don't," returned the master of Harrowby.
"No doubt.
I'm never dry.
I have been the incumbent of this highly unpleasant office for two hundred years to night."
"How the deuce did you ever come to get elected?" asked the master.
"I am the ghost of that fair maiden whose picture hangs over the mantelpiece in the drawing room.
"But what induced you to get this house into such a predicament?"
"I was not to blame, sir," returned the lady.
"It was my father's fault. He it was who built Harrowby Hall, and the haunted chamber was to have been mine.
My father had it furnished in pink and yellow, knowing well that blue and gray formed the only combination of color I could tolerate.
He did it merely to spite me, and, with what I deem a proper spirit, I declined to live in the room; whereupon my father said I could live there or on the lawn, he didn't care which.
That night I ran from the house and jumped over the cliff into the sea."
"That was rash," said the master of Harrowby.
"So I've heard," returned the ghost.
"If I had known what the consequences were to be I should not have jumped; but I really never realized what I was doing until after I was drowned.
"I'll sell the place."
"That you cannot do, for it is also required of me that I shall appear as the deeds are to be delivered to any purchaser, and divulge to him the awful secret of the house."
"You have stated the case, Oglethorpe.
And what is more," said the water ghost, "it doesn't make the slightest difference where you are, if I find that room empty, wherever you may be I shall douse you with my spectral pres----"
Here the clock struck one, and immediately the apparition faded away.
It was perhaps more of a trickle than a fade, but as a disappearance it was complete.
"By saint George and his Dragon!" ejaculated the master of Harrowby, wringing his hands.
But the master of Harrowby would have lost his wager had there been anyone there to take him up, for when Christmas Eve came again he was in his grave, never having recovered from the cold contracted that awful night.
Harrowby Hall was closed, and the heir to the estate was in London, where to him in his chambers came the same experience that his father had gone through, saving only that, being younger and stronger, he survived the shock.
Everything in his rooms was ruined-his clocks were rusted in the works; a fine collection of water color drawings was entirely obliterated by the onslaught of the water ghost; and what was worse, the apartments below his were drenched with the water soaking through the floors, a damage for which he was compelled to pay, and which resulted in his being requested by his landlady to vacate the premises immediately.
So the heir of Harrowby Hall resolved, as his ancestors for several generations before him had resolved, that something must be done.
None of his friends would consent to sacrifice their personal comfort to his, nor was there to be found in all England a man so poor as to be willing to occupy the doomed chamber on Christmas Eve for pay.
Then the thought came to the heir to have the fireplace in the room enlarged, so that he might evaporate the ghost at its first appearance, and he was felicitating himself upon the ingenuity of his plan, when he remembered what his father had told him-how that no fire could withstand the lady's extremely contagious dampness.
And then he bethought him of steam pipes.
The water ghost appeared at the specified time, and found the heir of Harrowby prepared; but hot as the room was, it shortened her visit by no more than five minutes in the hour, during which time the nervous system of the young master was well nigh shattered, and the room itself was cracked and warped to an extent which required the outlay of a large sum of money to remedy.
And worse than this, as the last drop of the water ghost was slowly sizzling itself out on the floor, she whispered to her would be conqueror that his scheme would avail him nothing, because there was still water in great plenty where she came from, and that next year would find her rehabilitated and as exasperatingly saturating as ever.
It was then that the natural action of the mind, in going from one extreme to the other, suggested to the ingenious heir of Harrowby the means by which the water ghost was ultimately conquered, and happiness once more came within the grasp of the house of Oglethorpe.
The heir provided himself with a warm suit of fur under clothing. Donning this with the furry side in, he placed over it a rubber garment, tight fitting, which he wore just as a woman wears a jersey.
On top of this he placed another set of under clothing, this suit made of wool, and over this was a second rubber garment like the first.
Upon his head he placed a light and comfortable diving helmet, and so clad, on the following Christmas Eve he awaited the coming of his tormentor.
It was a bitterly cold night that brought to a close this twenty fourth day of December.
The air outside was still, but the temperature was below zero.
The clock clanged out the hour of twelve.
"May I ask where did you get that hat?"
"Certainly, madam," returned the master, courteously.
"That is my delectable fate," returned the lady.
"You can't get rid of me that way," returned the ghost.
"The water won't swallow me up; in fact, it will just add to my present bulk."
"Nevertheless," said the master, firmly, "we will go out on the lake."
"But, my dear sir," returned the ghost, with a pale reluctance, "it is fearfully cold out there.
Come!" This last in a tone of command that made the ghost ripple.
And they started.
They had not gone far before the water ghost showed signs of distress.
"You walk too slowly," she said.
"I am nearly frozen.
I beseech you to accelerate your step."
"I should like to oblige a lady," returned the master, courteously, "but my clothes are rather heavy, and a hundred yards an hour is about my speed.
Indeed, I think we would better sit down here on this snowdrift, and talk matters over."
"Do not!
Do not do so, I beg!" cried the ghost.
If we stop here, I shall be frozen stiff."
"That, madam," said the master slowly, and seating himself on an ice cake-"that is why I have brought you here.
We have been on this spot just ten minutes; we have fifty more.
Take your time about it, madam, but freeze, that is all I ask of you."
"Never, madam.
It cannot be.
I have you at last."
"Alas!" cried the ghost, a tear trickling down her frozen cheek.
"Help me, I beg.
I congeal!"
"You have drenched me and mine for two hundred and three years, madam.
To night you have had your last drench."
"Ah, but I shall thaw out again, and then you'll see.
Instead of the comfortably tepid, genial ghost I have been in my past, sir, I shall be iced water," cried the lady, threateningly.
"No, you won't, either," returned Oglethorpe; "for when you are frozen quite stiff, I shall send you to a cold storage warehouse, and there shall you remain an icy work of art forever more."
"But warehouses burn."
"So they do, but this warehouse cannot burn.
"For the last time let me beseech you.
I beg of you do not doo----"
There was a momentary tremor throughout the ice bound form, and the moon, coming out from behind a cloud, shone down on the rigid figure of a beautiful woman sculptured in clear, transparent ice.
There stood the ghost of Harrowby Hall, conquered by the cold, a prisoner for all time.
If it were found in the animal then, after having made its exit, I saw clearly that it must have been deposited by the person who found it.
The bloody shirt and handkerchief confirmed the idea suggested by the bullet; for the blood on examination proved to be capital claret, and no more. When I came to think of these things, and also of the late increase of liberality and expenditure on the part of mr Goodfellow, I entertained a suspicion which was none the less strong because I kept it altogether to myself.
In the meantime, I instituted a rigorous private search for the corpse of mr Shuttleworthy, and, for good reasons, searched in quarters as divergent as possible from those to which mr Goodfellow conducted his party.
The result was that, after some days, I came across an old dry well, the mouth of which was nearly hidden by brambles; and here, at the bottom, I discovered what I sought.
Upon this hint I acted.
I procured a stiff piece of whalebone, thrust it down the throat of the corpse, and deposited the latter in an old wine box taking care so to double the body up as to double the whalebone with it.
"DEAR b........
Believing only a portion of my former volume to be worthy a second edition that small portion I thought it as well to include in the present book as to republish by itself.
I have therefore herein combined 'Al Aaraaf' and 'Tamerlane' with other poems hitherto unprinted.
"It has been said that a good critique on a poem may be written by one who is no poet himself.
On this account, and because there are but few B 's in the world, I would be as much ashamed of the world's good opinion as proud of your own.
Another than yourself might here observe, 'Shakespeare is in possession of the world's good opinion, and yet Shakespeare is the greatest of poets.
A fool, for example, thinks Shakespeare a great poet yet the fool has never read Shakespeare.
"You are aware of the great barrier in the path of an American writer. He is read, if at all, in preference to the combined and established wit of the world.
Besides, one might suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel their having crossed the sea is, with us, so great a distinction.
Our antiquaries abandon time for distance; our very fops glance from the binding to the bottom of the title page, where the mystic characters which spell London, Paris, or Genoa, are precisely so many letters of recommendation.
I think the notion that no poet can form a correct estimate of his own writings is another.
I remarked before that in proportion to the poetical talent would be the justice of a critique upon poetry.
Perhaps an inadvertent word has descended to posterity.
But, in fact, the 'Paradise Regained' is little, if at all, inferior to the 'Paradise Lost,' and is only supposed so to be because men do not like epics, whatever they may say to the contrary, and, reading those of Milton in their natural order, are too much wearied with the first to derive any pleasure from the second.
"I dare say Milton preferred 'Comus' to either . if so justly.
"As I am speaking of poetry, it will not be amiss to touch slightly upon the most singular heresy in its modern history the heresy of what is called, very foolishly, the Lake School.
Some years ago I might have been induced, by an occasion like the present, to attempt a formal refutation of their doctrine; at present it would be a work of supererogation.
Therefore the end of instruction should be happiness; and happiness is another name for pleasure;-therefore the end of instruction should be pleasure: yet we see the above mentioned opinion implies precisely the reverse.
In such case I should no doubt be tempted to think of the devil in 'Melmoth.' who labors indefatigably, through three octavo volumes, to accomplish the destruction of one or two souls, while any common devil would have demolished one or two thousand.
"Against the subtleties which would make poetry a study not a passion it becomes the metaphysician to reason but the poet to protest. Yet Wordsworth and Coleridge are men in years; the one imbued in contemplation from his childhood; the other a giant in intellect and learning.
The diffidence, then, with which I venture to dispute their authority would be overwhelming did I not feel, from the bottom of my heart, that learning has little to do with the imagination intellect with the passions or age with poetry.
"'Trifles, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls must dive below,'
As regards the greater truths, men oftener err by seeking them at the bottom than at the top; Truth lies in the huge abysses where wisdom is sought not in the palpable palaces where she is found.
He who regards it directly and intensely sees, it is true, the star, but it is the star without a ray while he who surveys it less inquisitively is conscious of all for which the star is useful to us below its brilliancy and its beauty.
"As to Wordsworth, I have no faith in him.
"He was to blame in wearing away his youth in contemplation with the end of poetizing in his manhood.
With the increase of his judgment the light which should make it apparent has faded away.
His judgment consequently is too correct.
This may not be understood but the old Goths of Germany would have understood it, who used to debate matters of importance to their State twice, once when drunk, and once when sober sober that they might not be deficient in formality-drunk lest they should be destitute of vigor.
"Again, in estimating the merit of certain poems, whether they be Ossian's or Macpherson's can surely be of little consequence, yet, in order to prove their worthlessness, mr w has expended many pages in the controversy.
But worse still: that he may bear down every argument in favor of these poems, he triumphantly drags forward a passage, in his abomination with which he expects the reader to sympathize.
We shall see what better he, in his own person, has to offer.
Imprimis:
A few sad tears does Betty shed.... She pats the pony, where or when She knows not.... happy Betty Foy! Oh, Johnny, never mind the doctor!'
Secondly:
"Now, we have no doubt this is all true: we will believe it, indeed we will, mr w Is it sympathy for the sheep you wish to excite?
I love a sheep from the bottom of my heart.
"But there are occasions, dear B, there are occasions when even Wordsworth is reasonable.
Even Stamboul, it is said, shall have an end, and the most unlucky blunders must come to a conclusion.
Here is an extract from his preface:-
"Yet, let not mr w despair; he has given immortality to a wagon, and the bee Sophocles has transmitted to eternity a sore toe, and dignified a tragedy with a chorus of turkeys.
"Of Coleridge, I can not speak but with reverence.
His towering intellect! his gigantic power!
Shade of the immortal Shakespeare!
I imagine to myself the scowl of your spiritual eye upon the profanity of that scurrilous Ursa Major.
Think of poetry, dear B, think of poetry, and then think of dr Samuel Johnson!
Think of all that is airy and fairy like, and then of all that is hideous and unwieldy; think of his huge bulk, the Elephant! and then and then think of the 'Tempest'--the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'--Prospero Oberon-and Titania!
"To sum up this long rigmarole, I have, dear B-, what you, no doubt, perceive, for the metaphysical poets as poets, the most sovereign contempt.
That they have followers proves nothing
NOTES
If any one becomes too much interested in them, and sees them over much, he loses all interest in ordinary things.
A woman near Gort, in Galway, says: 'There is a boy, now, of the Cloran's; but I wouldn't for the world let them think I spoke of him; it's two years since he came from America, and since that time he never went to Mass, or to church, or to fairs, or to market, or to stand on the cross roads, or to hurling, or to nothing.
And if any one comes into the house, it's into the room he'll slip, not to see them; and as to work, he has the garden dug to bits, and the whole place smeared with cow dung; and such a crop as was never seen; and the alders all plaited till they look grand.
A doctor believes this boy to be mad.
Those that are at times 'away,' as it is called, know all things, but are afraid to speak.
When the king asked him who he was, he said, 'I am your candlestick.' I do not remember where I have read this story, and I have, maybe, half forgotten it.
The people of the waters have been in all ages beautiful and changeable and lascivious, or beautiful and wise and lonely, for water is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the fruitfulness of dreams.
I have used them in this book more as principles of the mind than as actual personages.
MONGAN THINKS OF HIS PAST GREATNESS.
The Rose has been for many centuries a symbol of spiritual love and supreme beauty.
I have read somewhere that a stone engraved with a Celtic god, who holds what looks like a rose in one hand, has been found somewhere in England; but I cannot find the reference, though I certainly made a note of it.
I have made the Seven Lights, the constellation of the Bear, lament for the theft of the Rose, and I have made the Dragon, the constellation Draco, the guardian of the Rose, because these constellations move about the pole of the heavens, the ancient Tree of Life in many countries, and are often associated with the Tree of Life in mythology.
Calliope Catesby was in his humours again.
Ennui was upon him.
This goodly promontory, the earth-particularly that portion of it known as Quicksand-was to him no more than a pestilent congregation of vapours.
Overtaken by the megrims, the philosopher may seek relief in soliloquy; my lady find solace in tears; the flaccid Easterner scold at the millinery bills of his women folk.
Such recourse was insufficient to the denizens of Quicksand.
Calliope, especially, was wont to express his ennui according to his lights.
Over night Calliope had hung out signals of approaching low spirits. He had kicked his own dog on the porch of the Occidental Hotel, and refused to apologise.
He had become capricious and fault finding in conversation.
While strolling about he reached often for twigs of mesquite and chewed the leaves fiercely.
That was always an ominous act.
Another symptom alarming to those who were familiar with the different stages of his doldrums was his increasing politeness and a tendency to use formal phrases.
A dangerous courtesy marked his manners.
Later, his smile became crooked, the left side of his mouth slanting upward, and Quicksand got ready to stand from under.
At this stage Calliope generally began to drink.
Finally, about midnight, he was seen going homeward, saluting those whom he met with exaggerated but inoffensive courtesy.
More magnanimous than Nero, he would thus give musical warning of the forthcoming municipal upheaval that Quicksand was scheduled to endure.
A quiet, amiable man was Calliope Catesby at other times-quiet to indolence, and amiable to worthlessness.
At best he was a loafer and a nuisance; at worst he was the Terror of Quicksand.
His ostensible occupation was something subordinate in the real estate line; he drove the beguiled Easterner in buckboards out to look over lots and ranch property.
Originally he came from one of the Gulf States, his lank six feet, slurring rhythm of speech, and sectional idioms giving evidence of his birthplace.
Inspired by his own barbarous melodies and the contents of his jug, he was ready primed to gather fresh laurels from the diffident brow of Quicksand.
Encircled and criss crossed with cartridge belts, abundantly garnished with revolvers, and copiously drunk, he poured forth into Quicksand's main street.
A yellow dog, the personal property of Colonel Swazey, the proprietor of the Occidental, fell feet upward in the dust with one farewell yelp.
The artillery was in trim.
Down the street went Calliope, shooting right and left.
The din was perforated at intervals by the /staccato/ of the Terror's guns, and was drowned periodically by the brazen screech that Quicksand knew so well.
But some four squares farther down lively preparations were being made to minister to mr Catesby's love for interchange of compliments and repartee.
The patience of that official, often strained in extending leniency toward the disturber's misdeeds, had been overtaxed.
Providing that the lives of the more useful citizens were not recklessly squandered, or too much property needlessly laid waste, the community sentiment was against a too strict enforcement of the law. But Calliope had raised the limit.
His outbursts had been too frequent and too violent to come within the classification of a normal and sanitary relaxation of spirit.
Buck Patterson had been expecting and awaiting in his little ten by twelve frame office that preliminary yell announcing that Calliope was feeling blue.
"Gather that fellow in," said Buck Patterson, setting forth the lines of the campaign.
"Don't have no talk, but shoot as soon as you can get a show.
It's up to Calliope to turn up his toes this time, I reckon.
Go to him all spraddled out, boys.
Buck Patterson, tall, muscular, and solemn faced, with his bright "City Marshal" badge shining on the breast of his blue flannel shirt, gave his posse directions for the onslaught upon Calliope.
The plan was to accomplish the downfall of the Quicksand Terror without loss to the attacking party, if possible.
The splenetic Calliope, unconscious of retributive plots, was steaming down the channel, cannonading on either side, when he suddenly became aware of breakers ahead.
The city marshal and one of the deputies rose up behind some dry goods boxes half a square to the front and opened fire.
At the same time the rest of the posse, divided, shelled him from two side streets up which they were cautiously manoeuvring from a well executed detour.
Feeling braced up by this unexpected tonic to his spiritual depression, Calliope executed a fortissimo note from his upper register, and returned the fire like an echo.
Choosing with a rapid eye the street from which the weakest and least accurate fire had come, he invaded it at a double quick, abandoning the unprotected middle of the street.
With rare cunning the opposing force in that direction-one of the deputies and two of the valorous volunteers- waited, concealed by beer barrels, until Calliope had passed their retreat, and then peppered him from the rear.
His eye fell upon a structure that seemed to hold out this promise, providing he could reach it.
Not far away was the little railroad station, its building a strong box house, ten by twenty feet, resting upon a platform four feet above ground.
Windows were in each of its walls.
Something like a fort it might become to a man thus sorely pressed by superior numbers.
Calliope made a bold and rapid spurt for it, the marshal's crowd "smoking" him as he ran.
He reached the haven in safety, the station agent leaving the building by a window, like a flying squirrel, as the garrison entered the door.
In the station was an unterrified desperado who was an excellent shot and carried an abundance of ammunition.
The city marshal was resolved.
He had decided that Calliope Catesby should no more wake the echoes of Quicksand with his strident whoop. He had so announced.
It played bad tunes.
Standing near was a hand truck used in the manipulation of small freight.
It stood by a shed full of sacked wool, a consignment from one of the sheep ranches.
On this truck the marshal and his men piled three heavy sacks of wool.
The posse, scattering broadly, stood ready to nip the besieged in case he should show himself in an effort to repel the juggernaut of justice that was creeping upon him.
Only once did Calliope make demonstration.
He fired from a window, and some tufts of wool spurted from the marshal's trustworthy bulwark.
The return shots from the posse pattered against the window frame of the fort.
No loss resulted on either side.
The marshal was too deeply engrossed in steering his protected battleship to be aware of the approach of the morning train until he was within a few feet of the platform.
He had only to step out the other door, mount the train, and away.
The members of the posse heard one shot fired inside, and then there was silence.
After a blank space he again could see and hear and feel and think.
A tall man with a perplexed countenance, wearing a big badge with "City Marshal" engraved upon it, stood over him.
A little old woman in black, with a wrinkled face and sparkling black eyes, was holding a wet handkerchief against one of his temples.
He was trying to get these facts fixed in his mind and connected with past events, when the old woman began to talk.
"There now, great, big, strong man!
You don't know me, I reckon, and 'tain't surprisin' that you shouldn't.
This is my son, sir."
Half turning, the old woman looked up at the standing man, her worn face lighting with a proud and wonderful smile.
She reached out one veined and calloused hand and took one of her son's.
One of my nephews, Elkanah Price, he's a conductor on one of them railroads and he got me a pass to come out here.
I can stay a whole week on it, and then it'll take me back again.
I reckon he thought his old mother'd be skeered about the danger he was in.
But, laws!
He met me at the door, and squeezes me 'most to death.
"I think I'll sit up now," said the concussion patient.
"I'm feeling pretty fair by this time."
He sat, somewhat weakly yet, leaning against the wall.
He was a rugged man, big boned and straight.
Don't you take it as meddlesome fer an old woman with a son as big as you to talk about it.
A officer has got to take up for the law-it's his duty-and them that acts bad and lives wrong has to suffer.
Don't blame my son any, sir-'tain't his fault.
He's always been a good boy-good when he was growin' up, and kind and 'bedient and well behaved.
Won't you let me advise you, sir, not to do so no more?
Be a good man, and leave liquor alone and live peaceably and goodly.
The black mitted hand of the old pleader gently touched the breast of the man she addressed.
"What does the marshal say?" he asked.
Suppose the marshal speaks up and says if the talk's all right?"
He fingered the badge on his breast for a moment, and then he put an arm around the old woman and drew her close to him.
I'll drop the tanglefoot and the gun play, and won't play hoss no more.
I'll be a good citizen and go to work and quit my foolishness.
So help me God!' That's what I'd say to you if you was marshal and I was in your place."
"Hear my son talkin'," said the old woman softly.
"Hear him, sir.
You promise to be good and he won't do you no harm.
I wouldn't have nothin' happen to them jars for a red apple."
I seen her through the window a comin' in.
The idea struck me sudden, and I just took your badge off and fastened it onto myself, and I fastened my reputation onto you.
You can take your badge back now, Buck."
"Easy there!" said Buck Patterson.
"You keep that badge right where it is, Calliope Catesby.
Don't you dare to take it off till the day your mother leaves this town.
"Shut up," said Buck.
Their father divided a small inheritance equally between them.
Ali Baba married a woman as poor as himself, and lived by cutting wood, and bringing it upon three asses into the town to sell.
He observed it with attention, and distinguished soon after a body of horsemen, whom he suspected might be robbers.
He determined to leave his asses to save himself.
He climbed up a large tree, planted on a high rock, whose branches were thick enough to conceal him, and yet enabled him to see all that passed without being discovered.
The troop, who were to the number of forty, all well mounted and armed, came to the foot of the rock on which the tree stood, and there dismounted.
Every man unbridled his horse, tied him to some shrub, and hung about his neck a bag of corn which they brought behind them.
The robbers stayed some time within the rock, during which Ali Baba, fearful of being caught, remained in the tree.
At last the door opened again, and as the captain went in last, so he came out first, and stood to see them all pass by him; when Ali Baba heard him make the door close by pronouncing these words, "Shut, Sesame!" Every man at once went and bridled his horse, fastened his wallet, and mounted again.
When the captain saw them all ready, he put himself at their head, and they returned the way they had come.
Ali Baba followed them with his eyes as far as he could see them, and afterward stayed a considerable time before he descended. Remembering the words the captain of the robbers used to cause the door to open and shut, he had the curiosity to try if his pronouncing them would have the same effect.
Accordingly, he went among the shrubs, and perceiving the door concealed behind them, stood before it and said, "Open, Sesame!"
The door instantly flew wide open.
Ali Baba, who expected a dark, dismal cavern, was surprised to see a well lighted and spacious chamber, which received the light from an opening at the top of the rock, and in which were all sorts of provisions, rich bales of silk, stuff, brocade, and valuable carpeting, piled upon one another, gold and silver ingots in great heaps, and money in bags.
The sight of all these riches made him suppose that this cave must have been occupied for ages by robbers, who had succeeded one another.
Ali Baba went boldly into the cave, and collected as much of the gold coin, which was in bags, as he thought his three asses could carry.
When he had loaded them with the bags, he laid wood over them in such a manner that they could not be seen.
He then made the best of his way to town.
When Ali Baba got home, he drove his asses into a little yard, shut the gates very carefully, threw off the wood that covered the panniers, carried the bags into the house, and ranged them in order before his wife.
He then emptied the bags, which raised such a great heap of gold as dazzled his wife's eyes, and then he told her the whole adventure from beginning to end, and, above all, recommended her to keep it secret.
The wife rejoiced greatly at their good fortune, and would count all the gold piece by piece.
"Wife," replied Ali Baba, "you do not know what you undertake, when you pretend to count the money; you will never have done.
I will dig a hole and bury it.
There is no time to be lost." "You are in the right, husband," replied she; "but let us know, as nigh as possible, how much we have.
I will borrow a small measure, and measure it while you dig the hole."
The other asked for a small one.
She bade her stay a little, and she would readily fetch one.
The sister in law did so, but as she knew Ali Baba's poverty, she was curious to know what sort of grain his wife wanted to measure, and, artfully putting some suet at the bottom of the measure, brought it to her, with the excuse that she was sorry that she had made her stay so long, but that she could not find it sooner.
Ali Baba's wife went home, set the measure upon the heap of gold, filled it, and emptied it often upon the sofa, till she had done, when she was very well satisfied to find the number of measures amounted to so many as they did, and went to tell her husband, who had almost finished digging the hole.
While Ali Baba was burying the gold, his wife, to show her exactness and diligence to her sister in law, carried the measure back again, but without taking notice that a piece of gold had stuck to the bottom.
"Sister," said she, giving it to her again, "you see that I have not kept your measure long.
I am obliged to you for it, and return it with thanks."
"What!" said she, "has Ali Baba gold so plentiful as to measure it?
Whence has he all this wealth?"
He does not count his money, but measures it." Cassim desired her to explain the riddle, which she did by telling him the stratagem she had used to make the discovery, and showed him the piece of money, which was so old that they could not tell in what prince's reign it was coined.
He could not sleep all that night, and went to him in the morning before sunrise.
"Ali Baba," said he, "I am surprised at you!
you pretend to be miserably poor, and yet you measure gold.
My wife found this at the bottom of the measure you borrowed yesterday."
Therefore, without showing the least surprise or trouble, he confessed all, and offered his brother part of his treasure to keep the secret.
"I expect as much," replied Cassim haughtily; "but I must know exactly where this treasure is, and how I may visit it myself when I choose; otherwise, I will go and inform against you, and then you will not only get no more, but will lose all you have, and I shall have a share for my information."
Ali Baba told him all he desired, even to the very words he was to use to gain admission into the cave.
Cassim rose the next morning long before the sun, and set out for the forest with ten mules bearing great chests, which he designed to fill, and followed the road which Ali Baba had pointed out to him.
It was not long before he reached the rock, and found out the place, by the tree and other marks which his brother had given him.
On examining the cave, he was in great admiration to find much more riches than he had expected from Ali Baba's relation.
He named several sorts of grain, but still the door would not open.
About noon the robbers visited their cave.
At some distance they saw Cassim's mules straggling about the rock, with great chests on their backs.
Alarmed at this, they galloped full speed to the cave.
They drove away the mules, who strayed through the forest so far that they were soon out of sight, and went directly, with their naked sabres in their hands, to the door, which, on their captain pronouncing the proper words, immediately opened.
He rushed to the door, and no sooner saw the door open, than he ran out and threw the leader down, but could not escape the other robbers, who with their cimeters soon deprived him of life.
They could not deny the fact of his being there; and to terrify any person or accomplice who should attempt the same thing, they agreed to cut Cassim's body into four quarters-to hang two on one side, and two on the other, within the door of the cave.
They mounted their horses, went to beat the roads again, and to attack the caravans they might meet.
In the meantime, Cassim's wife was very uneasy when night came, and her husband was not returned.
She went home again, and waited patiently till midnight.
Then her fear redoubled, and her grief was the more sensible because she was forced to keep it to herself.
She repented of her foolish curiosity, and cursed her desire of prying into the affairs of her brother and sister in law.
She spent all the night in weeping; and, as soon as it was day, went to them, telling them, by her tears, the cause of her coming.
He went to the forest, and when he came near the rock, having seen neither his brother nor the mules in his way, was seriously alarmed at finding some blood spilled near the door, which he took for an ill omen; but when he had pronounced the word, and the door had opened, he was struck with horror at the dismal sight of his brother's body.
He was not long in determining how he should pay the last dues to his brother; but without adverting to the little fraternal affection he had shown for him, went into the cave to find something to enshroud his remains; and having loaded one of his asses with them, covered them over with wood.
When he came home, he drove the two asses loaded with gold into his little yard, and left the care of unloading them to his wife, while he led the other to his sister in law's house.
Ali Baba knocked at the door, which was opened by Morgiana, a clever, intelligent slave, who was fruitful in inventions to meet the most difficult circumstances.
When he came into the court, he unloaded the ass, and taking Morgiana aside, said to her: "You must observe an inviolable secrecy.
We must bury him as if he had died a natural death.
I leave the matter to your wit and skilful devices."
The apothecary inquired who was ill.
She replied, with a sigh, Her good master, Cassim himself, and that he could neither eat nor speak.
In the evening Morgiana went to the same druggist's again, and with tears in her eyes, asked for an essence which they used to give to sick people only when at the last extremity.
"Alas!" said she, taking it from the apothecary, "I am afraid that this remedy will have no better effect than the lozenges; and that I shall lose my good master."
The next morning at daybreak, Morgiana went to an old cobbler whom she knew to be always early at his stall, and bidding him good morrow, put a piece of gold into his hand, saying, "Baba Mustapha, you must bring with you your sewing tackle, and come with me; but I must tell you, I shall blindfold you when you come to such a place."
Baba Mustapha seemed to hesitate a little at these words.
"Baba Mustapha," said she, "you must make haste and sew the parts of this body together; and when you have done, I will give you another piece of gold."
Not long after, the proper officer brought the bier, and when the attendants of the mosque, whose business it was to wash the dead, offered to perform their duty, she told them that it was done already.
Ali Baba came after with some neighbors, who often relieved the others in carrying the bier to the burying ground.
Morgiana, a slave to the deceased, followed in the procession, weeping, beating her breast, and tearing her hair. Cassim's wife stayed at home mourning, uttering lamentable cries with the women of the neighborhood, who came, according to custom, during the funeral, and, joining their lamentations with hers, filled the quarter far and near with sounds of sorrow.
In this manner Cassim's melancholy death was concealed, and hushed up between Ali Baba, his widow, and Morgiana, his slave, with so much contrivance that nobody in the city had the least knowledge or suspicion of the cause of it.
Three or four days after the funeral, Ali Baba removed his few goods openly to his sister in law's house, in which it was agreed that he should in future live; but the money he had taken from the robbers he conveyed thither by night.
As for Cassim's warehouse, he intrusted it entirely to the management of his eldest son.
While these things were being done, the forty robbers again visited their retreat in the forest.
Great, then, was their surprise to find Cassim's body taken away, with some of their bags of gold.
"We are certainly discovered," said the captain.
"The removal of the body and the loss of some of our money plainly show that the man whom we killed had an accomplice; and for our own lives' sake we must try and find him.
All the robbers unanimously approved of the captain's proposal.
"Well," said the captain, "one of you, the boldest and most skilful among you, must go into the town, disguised as a traveller and a stranger, to try if he can hear any talk of the man whom we have killed, and endeavor to find out who he was, and where he lived.
This is a matter of the first importance, and for fear of any treachery, I propose that whoever undertakes this business without success, even though the failure arises only from an error of judgment, shall suffer death."
Without waiting for the sentiments of his companions, one of the robbers started up, and said, "I submit to this condition, and think it an honor to expose my life to serve the troop."
After this robber had received great commendations from the captain and his comrades, he disguised himself so that nobody would take him for what he was; and taking his leave of the troop that night, went into the town just at daybreak, and walked up and down, till accidentally he came to Baba Mustapha's stall, which was always open before any of the shops.
Baba Mustapha was seated with an awl in his hand, just going to work.
The robber saluted him, bidding him good morrow; and, perceiving that he was old, said, "Honest man, you begin to work very early: is it possible that one of your age can see so well?
I question, even if it were somewhat lighter, whether you could see to stitch."
"You do not know me," replied Baba Mustapha; "for old as I am, I have extraordinary good eyes; and you will not doubt it when I tell you that I sewed the body of a dead man together in a place where I had not so much light as I have now."
"A dead body!" exclaimed the robber, with affected amazement. "Yes, yes," answered Baba Mustapha; "I see you want to have me speak out, but you shall know no more."
The robber felt sure that he had discovered what he sought.
He pulled out a piece of gold, and putting it into Baba Mustapha's hand, said to him, "I do not want to learn your secret, though I can assume you you might safely trust me with it.
The only thing I desire of you is to show me the house where you stitched up the dead body."
"If I were disposed to do you that favor," replied Baba Mustapha, "I assure you I cannot.
"Well," replied the robber, "you may, however, remember a little of the way that you were led blindfold.
Come, let me blind your eyes at the same place.
The two pieces of gold were great temptations to Baba Mustapha.
"It was here," said Baba Mustapha, "I was blindfolded; and I turned this way." The robber tied his handkerchief over his eyes, and walked by him till they stopped directly at Cassim's house, where Ali Baba then lived.
The thief, before he pulled off the band, marked the door with a piece of chalk, which he had ready in his hand, and then asked him if he knew whose house that was; to which Baba Mustapha replied, that as he did not live in that neighborhood he could not tell.
The robber, finding he could discover no more from Baba Mustapha, thanked him for the trouble he had taken, and left him to go back to his stall, while he returned to the forest, persuaded that he should be very well received.
A little after the robber and Baba Mustapha had parted, Morgiana went out of Ali Baba's house upon some errand, and upon her return, seeing the mark the robber had made, stopped to observe it.
"What can be the meaning of this mark?" said she to herself; "somebody intends my master no good: however, with whatever intention it was done, it is advisable to guard against the worst." Accordingly, she fetched a piece of chalk, and marked two or three doors on each side, in the same manner, without saying a word to her master or mistress.
In the meantime, the robber rejoined his troop in the forest, and recounted to them his success, expatiating upon his good fortune in meeting so soon with the only person who could inform him of what he wanted to know.
All the robbers listened to him with the utmost satisfaction; when the captain, after commending his diligence, addressing himself to them all, said, "Comrades, we have no time to lose: let us set off well armed, without its appearing who we are; but that we may not excite any suspicion, let only one or two go into the town together, and join at our rendezvous, which shall be the great square.
This speech and plan were approved of by all, and they were soon ready.
They filed off in parties of two each, after some interval of time, and got into the town without being in the least suspected.
The captain, and he who had visited the town in the morning as spy, came in the last.
He himself set them the example, and they all returned as they had come.
When the troop was all got together, the captain told them the reason of their returning; and presently the conductor was declared by all worthy of death.
He condemned himself, acknowledging that he ought to have taken better precaution, and prepared to receive the stroke from him who was appointed to cut off his head.
Not long after, Morgiana, whose eyes nothing could escape, went out, and seeing the red chalk, and arguing with herself as she had done before, marked the other neighbors' houses in the same place and manner.
The robber, at his return to his company, valued himself much on the precaution he had taken, which he looked upon as an infallible way of distinguishing Ali Baba's house from the others; and the captain and all of them thought it must succeed.
The captain, having lost two brave fellows of his troop, was afraid of diminishing it too much by pursuing this plan to get information of the residence of their plunderer.
He stopped his mules, addressed himself to him, and said, "I have brought some oil a great way to sell at to morrow's market; and it is now so late that I do not know where to lodge.
If I should not be troublesome to you, do me the favor to let me pass the night with you, and I shall be very much obliged by your hospitality."
At the same time he called to a slave, and ordered him, when the mules were unloaded, to put them into the stable, and to feed them; and then went to Morgiana to bid her to get a good supper for his guest.
After they had finished supper, Ali Baba, charging Morgiana afresh to take care of his guest, said to her, "To morrow morning I design to go to the bath before day; take care my bathing linen be ready, give them to Abdalla (which was the slave's name) and make me some good broth against I return." After this he went to bed.
In the meantime the captain of the robbers went into the yard, took off the lid of each jar, and gave his people orders what to do.
What to do she did not know, for the broth must be made.
Abdalla, seeing her very uneasy, said, "Do not fret and tease yourself, but go into the yard, and take some oil out of one of the jars."
Morgiana thanked Abdalla for his advice, took the oil pot, and went into the yard; when, as she came nigh the first jar, the robber within said softly, "Is it time?"
By this means Morgiana found that her master Ali Baba had admitted thirty eight robbers into his house, and that this pretended oil merchant was their captain.
She had not waited long before the captain of the robbers got up, opened the window, and finding no light, and hearing no noise, or any one stirring in the house, gave the appointed signal by throwing little stones, several of which hit the jars, as he doubted not by the sound they gave.
He then listened, but not hearing or perceiving anything whereby he could judge that his companions stirred, he began to grow very uneasy, threw stones a second and also a third time, and could not comprehend the reason that none of them should answer his signal.
Much alarmed, he went softly down into the yard, and going to the first jar, while asking the robber, whom he thought alive, if he was in readiness, smelled the hot boiled oil, which sent forth a steam out of the jar.
Hence he suspected that his plot to murder Ali Baba, and plunder his house, was discovered.
Examining all the jars, one after another, he found that all his gang were dead; and, enraged to despair at having failed in his design, he forced the lock of a door that led from the yard to the garden, and, climbing over the walls, made his escape.
When Morgiana saw him depart, she went to bed, satisfied and pleased to have succeeded so well in saving her master and family.
Ali Baba rose before day, and, followed by his slave, went to the baths, entirely ignorant of the important event which had happened at home.
When he returned from the baths, he was very much surprised to see the oil jars, and that the merchant was not gone with the mules. He asked Morgiana, who opened the door, the reason of it.
"My good master," answered she, "God preserve you and all your family.
You will be better informed of what you wish to know when you have seen what I have to show you, if you will follow me."
As soon as Morgiana had shut the door, Ali Baba followed her, when she requested him to look into the first jar, and see if there was any oil.
Ali Baba did so, and seeing a man, started back in alarm, and cried out.
"Do not be afraid," said Morgiana, "the man you see there can neither do you nor anybody else any harm.
Explain yourself."
"I will," replied Morgiana.
"Moderate your astonishment, and do not excite the curiosity of your neighbors; for it is of great importance to keep this affair secret.
Look into all the other jars."
Ali Baba examined all the other jars, one after another; and when he came to that which had the oil in, found it prodigiously sunk, and stood for some time motionless, sometimes looking at the jars, and sometimes at Morgiana, without saying a word, so great was his surprise.
At last, when he had recovered himself, he said, "And what is become of the merchant?"
"Merchant!" answered she; "he is as much one as I am.
On hearing of these brave deeds from the lips of Morgiana, Ali Baba said to her, "God, by your means, has delivered me from the snares these robbers laid for my destruction.
I owe, therefore, my life to you; and, for the first token of my acknowledgment, give you your liberty from this moment, till I can complete your recompense, as I intend."
Ali Baba's garden was very long, and shaded at the further end by a great number of large trees.
Near these he and the slave Abdalla dug a trench, long and wide enough to hold the bodies of the robbers; and as the earth was light, they were not long in doing it.
When this was done, Ali Baba hid the jars and weapons; and as he had no occasion for the mules, he sent them at different times to be sold in the market by his slave.
While Ali Baba took these measures, the captain of the forty robbers returned to the forest with inconceivable mortification. He did not stay long: the loneliness of the gloomy cavern became frightful to him.
He determined, however, to avenge the fate of his companions, and to accomplish the death of Ali Baba.
For this purpose he returned to the town and took a lodging in a khan, and disguised himself as a merchant in silks.
Two or three days after he was settled, Ali Baba came to see his son, and the captain of the robbers recognized him at once, and soon learned from his son who he was.
After this he increased his assiduities, caressed him in the most engaging manner, made him some small presents, and often asked him to dine and sup with him, when he treated him very handsomely.
He therefore acquainted his father, Ali Baba, with his wish to invite him in return.
Ali Baba with great pleasure took the treat upon himself.
"This, sir," said he, "is my father's house, who, from the account I have given him of your friendship, charged me to procure him the honor of your acquaintance; and I desire you to add this pleasure to those for which I am already indebted to you."
I will return immediately."
Morgiana, who was always ready to obey her master, could not help being surprised at his strange order.
"Who is this strange man," said she, "who eats no salt with his meat?
Your supper will be spoiled if I keep it back so long." "Do not be angry, Morgiana," replied Ali Baba; "he is an honest man, therefore do as I bid you."
Morgiana obeyed, though with no little reluctance, and had a curiosity to see this man who ate no salt.
Sometimes she presented the poniard to one breast, sometimes to another, and oftentimes seemed to strike her own.
Ali Baba and his son, shocked at this action, cried out aloud. "Unhappy woman!" exclaimed Ali Baba, "what have you done, to ruin me and my family?"
Look well at him, and you will find him to be both the fictitious oil merchant, and the captain of the gang of forty robbers.
Remember, too, that he would eat no salt with you; and what would you have more to persuade you of his wicked design? Before I saw him, I suspected him as soon as you told me you had such a guest.
I knew him, and you now find that my suspicion was not groundless."
Consider, that by marrying Morgiana you marry the preserver of my family and your own."
The son, far from showing any dislike, readily consented to the marriage; not only because he would not disobey his father, but also because it was agreeable to his inclination.
After this they thought of burying the captain of the robbers with his comrades, and did it so privately that nobody discovered their bones till many years after, when no one had any concern in the publication of this remarkable history.
A few days afterward Ali Baba celebrated the nuptials of his son and Morgiana with great solemnity, a sumptuous feast, and the usual dancing and spectacles; and had the satisfaction to see that his friends and neighbors, whom he invited, had no knowledge of the true motives of the marriage; but that those who were not unacquainted with Morgiana's good qualities, commended his generosity and goodness of heart.
Ali Baba did not visit the robbers' cave for a whole year, as he supposed the other two might be alive.
At the year's end, when he found they had not made any attempt to disturb him, he had the curiosity to make another journey.
He mounted his horse, and when he came to the cave he alighted, tied his horse to a tree, then approaching the entrance, and pronouncing the words, "Open, Sesame!" the door opened.
He entered the cavern and by the condition he found things in, judged that nobody had been there since the captain had fetched the goods for his shop.
From this time he believed he was the only person in the world who had the secret of opening the cave, and that all the treasure was at his sole disposal.
He put as much gold into his saddle bag as his horse could carry, and returned to town.
CHAPTER twelve.
The course pursued by the Government of the United States with regard to the forts had not passed without earnest remonstrance from the most intelligent and patriotic of its own friends during the period of the events which constitute the subject of the preceding chapter.
In the Senate of the United States, which continued in executive session for several weeks after the inauguration of mr Lincoln, it was the subject of discussion.
"We certainly can not justify the holding of forts there, much less the recapturing of those which have been taken, unless we intend to reduce those States themselves into subjection.
I take it for granted, no man will deny the proposition, that whoever permanently holds Charleston and South Carolina is entitled to the possession of Fort Sumter.
Whoever permanently holds Pensacola and Florida is entitled to the possession of Fort Pickens.
Whoever holds the States in whose limits those forts are placed is entitled to the forts themselves, unless there is something peculiar in the location of some particular fort that makes it important for us to hold it for the general defense of the whole country, its commerce and interests, instead of being useful only for the defense of a particular city or locality.
Not so with Moultrie, Johnson, Castle Pinckney, and Sumter, in Charleston Harbor; not so with Pulaski, on the Savannah River; not so with Morgan and other forts in Alabama; not so with those other forts that were intended to guard the entrance of a particular harbor for local defense....
We may regret it.
I proclaim boldly the policy of those with whom I act.
He knew that their continued occupation was virtually a declaration of war.
The General in Chief of the United States Army, also, it is well known, urgently advised the evacuation of the forts.
But the most striking protest against the coercive measures finally adopted was that of Major Anderson himself.
The letter in which his views were expressed has been carefully suppressed in the partisan narratives of that period and wellnigh lost sight of, although it does the highest honor to his patriotism and integrity.
I am preparing, by the side of my barbette guns, protection for our men from the shells which will be almost continually bursting over or in our work.
I trust that this matter will be at once put in a correct light, as a movement made now, when the South has been erroneously informed that none such would be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country.
It is, of course, now too late for me to give any advice in reference to the proposed scheme of Captain Fox.
Even with his boat at our walls, the loss of life (as I think I mentioned to mr Fox) in unloading her will more than pay for the good to be accomplished by the expedition, which keeps us, if I can maintain possession of this work, out of position, surrounded by strong works which must be carried to make this fort of the least value to the United States Government.
"We have not oil enough to keep a light in the lantern for one night.
"We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in this war, which I see is to be thus commenced. That God will still avert it, and cause us to resort to pacific means to maintain our rights, is my ardent prayer!
"I am, Colonel, very respectfully,
"Your obedient servant,
This frank and manly letter, although written with the reserve necessarily belonging to a communication from an officer to his military superiors, expressing dissatisfaction with orders, fully vindicates Major Anderson from all suspicion of complicity or sympathy with the bad faith of the Government which he was serving.
These facts became known to the Confederate Government, and it was obvious that no time was to be lost in preparing for, and if possible anticipating the impending assault.
"L.
"An authorized messenger from President Lincoln just informed Governor Pickens and myself that provisions will be sent to Fort Sumter peaceably, or otherwise by force.
(Signed) "G.
"If you have no doubt of the authorized character of the agent who communicated to you the intention of the Washington Government to supply Fort Sumter by force, you will at once demand its evacuation, and, if this is refused, proceed, in such a manner as you may determine, to reduce it.
Answer.
(Signed) "L.
"L.
(Signed) "L.
"L.
"The reasons are special for twelve o'clock.
(Signed) "G.
"Sir: The Government of the Confederate States has hitherto forborne from any hostile demonstration against Fort Sumter, in the hope that the Government of the United States, with a view to the amicable adjustment of all questions between the two Governments, and to avert the calamities of war, would voluntarily evacuate it.
"But the Confederate States can no longer delay assuming actual possession of a fortification commanding the entrance of one of their harbors, and necessary to its defense and security.
"I am ordered by the Government of the Confederate States to demand the evacuation of Fort Sumter.
My aides, Colonel Chesnut and Captain Lee, are authorized to make such demand of you.
All proper facilities will be afforded for the removal of yourself and command, together with company arms and property, and all private property, to any post in the United States which you may elect.
The flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances, may be saluted by you on taking it down.
"Colonel Chesnut and Captain Lee will, for a reasonable time, await your answer.
"I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
(Signed) "G.
"Thanking you for the fair, manly, and courteous terms proposed, and for the high compliment paid me,
You are thus to avoid the effusion of blood.
If this or its equivalent be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable.
(Signed) "L.
"If you will state the time at which you will evacuate Fort Sumter, and agree that in the mean time you will not use your guns against us, unless ours shall be employed against Fort Sumter, we will abstain from opening fire upon you.
You are therefore requested to communicate to them an open answer.
Inasmuch as it was known to the Confederate commander that the "controlling instructions" were already issued, and that the "additional supplies" were momentarily expected; inasmuch, also, as any attempt to introduce the supplies would compel the opening of fire upon the vessels bearing them under the flag of the United States-thereby releasing Major Anderson from his pledge-it is evident that his conditions could not be accepted.
His knife was on his belt.
That was true.
He spoke again:
"If you care not because some spoke against you, what is the trouble?
Let us hope this is a good fight."
Their packs bore tanned skins, fruit of the saguaro cactus, edible roots of the mescal plant, and other trade goods.
All these soldier police were mounted and armed, and their snapping black eyes were filled with hatred for Apaches.
You may enter."
His body was dirty.
"See, Senor Apache?
The peddler called anxiously, "Will you give me some mescal?"
"Some tobacco?" the eagle's captor wailed.
The amazed Apaches halted and gaped.
He took out his pouch of gold.
Geronimo dropped the still half filled pouch of gold into the dust and forgot it.
"This way."
And two girl children.
"I know not from where!
Harry left Madame Delaunay's house immediately after breakfast, still firm in his purpose to avoid Shepard, and went to the bank, on which he held drafts properly attested.
Not knowing what the future held, and inspired perhaps by some counsel of caution, he drew half of it in gold, intending to keep it about his person, risking the chance of robbery.
Then he went toward the bay, anxious to see the sea and those famous forts, Sumter, Moultrie and the others, of which he had heard so much.
"What is it, Arthur?" asked Harry.
That's Fort Sumter.
Yesterday, while we were enjoying our Christmas dinner and talking of the things that we would do, Major Anderson, who commanded the United States garrison in Fort Moultrie, quietly moved it over to Sumter, which is far stronger.
The wives and children of the soldiers and officers have been landed in the city with the request that we send them to their homes in the states, which, of course, we will do. But Major Anderson, who holds the fort in the name of the United States, refuses to give it up to South Carolina, which claims it."
Harry felt an extraordinary thrill, a thrill that was, in many ways, most painful.
Talk was one thing, action was another.
Sumter had one hundred and forty guns, most of which commanded the city, and the people of Charleston had thrown up great earthworks, mounting many cannon.
He was not one to sentimentalize, but the sight of the defiant flag, the most beautiful in all the world, stirred him in every fiber.
It was the flag under which both his father and Colonel Talbot had fought.
"I suppose so," said Harry.
"But look how the people gather!"
He recognized for the first time that they might not share the opinions of Charleston, and this name of Anderson was full of significance for him.
Major Anderson was a Kentuckian.
He had heard his father speak of him; they had served together, but it was now evident to Harry that Anderson would not go with South Carolina.
"I don't believe he'll do it," said Harry impulsively.
Some one touched him upon the shoulder, and turning quickly he saw Colonel Leonidas Talbot.
"I have just come into the city," said the colonel, "and I heard only a few minutes ago that Major Anderson had removed his garrison from Moultrie to Sumter."
"He is defiant.
"I had hoped that he would give up," said Colonel Talbot.
"It might help the way to a composition."
He pulled his long mustache and looked somberly at the flag.
The wind had risen a little, and it whipped about the staff.
Its fluttering motions seemed to Harry more significant than ever of defiance.
He, too, like the boy's father, had fought under that flag, the same flag that had led him up the flame swept slopes of Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec.
The small boat that he had predicted put out from Sumter and quickly landed at the Battery.
It contained three commissioners, prominent men of Charleston who had been sent to treat with Major Anderson, and his answer was quickly known to all the crowd.
Sumter was the property of the United States, not of South Carolina, and he would hold it for the Union.
At that moment the wind strengthened, and the flag stood straight out over the lofty walls of Sumter.
"I knew it would be so," said Colonel Talbot, with a sigh.
I am to help in building the fortifications, and as I am about to make a tour of inspection I will take you with me."
Strong works were going up along the mainland.
Circling batteries would soon threaten Sumter, and, however defiantly the flag there might snap in the breeze, it must come down.
He knew by his rigid attitude that he was looking intently at the battery and he knew, moreover, that it was Shepard.
He wished to avoid him, and he wished also that his companion would not see him. He started to draw Colonel Talbot away, but it was too late.
Shepard turned at that moment, and the colonel caught sight of his face.
"Come away, colonel!" said Harry hastily.
"We don't know anything against him!"
But Shepard himself acted first.
He came forward quickly, his hand extended, and his eyes expressing pleasure.
"I missed you this morning, mr Kenton," he said.
Harry took the outstretched hand-he could not keep from liking Shepard-but Colonel Talbot, by turning slightly, avoided it without giving the appearance of brusqueness.
"I did not expect to find events so far advanced in Charleston," said Shepard.
"With the Federal garrison concentrated in Sumter and the batteries going up everywhere, matters begin to look dangerous."
"Casual, not careful," returned Shepard, in his usual cheerful tones. "It is impossible, at such a time, to keep from looking at Sumter, the batteries and all the other preparations.
"You see truly," said Colonel Talbot, with some emphasis.
"A happy chance has put me at the same place as mr Kenton," continued Shepard easily.
We are likely to see much of each other."
"I'm already long overdue, but it will be forgiven at such a time as this.
"It is true, he doesn't, although I don't know just why," said Harry.
A slight air of constraint appeared and Harry was glad when the dinner was over.
The last thing Harry saw as he turned back toward Madame Delaunay's was that defiant flag of the Union, still waving above the dark and looming mass of old Sumter.
"I want to tell you good bye, mr Kenton," he said, "I thought we were to be together here at the inn for some time, but it is not to be so."
"What has happened?"
I was not informed of it when I came here, but Madame Delaunay has recalled the fact and I cannot doubt the word of a Charleston lady.
So, I go."
He did not seem at all discouraged, his tone being as cheerful as ever, and he held out his hand.
"Take good care of yourself, mr Shepard.
As I see it, the people of Charleston are not taking to you, and we do not know what is going to happen."
Nothing yet had been able to disturb his poise.
He looked down into a piazza and he saw two figures there, a man and a woman.
They were Colonel Talbot and Madame Delaunay.
He closed the blind promptly, feeling that unconsciously he had touched upon something hallowed, the thread of an old romance, a thread which, though slender, was nevertheless yet strong.
Several more days passed.
Harry found that he was taken into the city's heart, and its spell was very strong upon him.
A letter came from his father, to whom he had written at once of his purpose, giving his approval, and sending him more money. Colonel Kenton wrote that he would come South himself, but he was needed in Kentucky, where a powerful faction was opposing their plans.
He said that Harry's cousin, Dick Mason, had joined the home guards, raised in the interests of the old Union, and was drilling zealously.
The letter made the boy very thoughtful.
The news about his cousin opened his eyes.
His quickness and zeal caused him to be used as a messenger, and he was continually passing back and forth among the Confederate leaders in Charleston. He also came into contact with the Union officers in Fort Sumter.
Strict orders kept anyone from offering violence or insult to them.
He picked up a copy of the Mercury one morning and saw that a steamer, the Star of the West, was on its way to Charleston from a northern port with supplies for the garrison in Fort Sumter.
IN VIRGINIA
Affairs must be moving now in the great world in the east, and he wished to be at the heart of them.
Jarvis, Ike, and mrs Simmons gave him farewells which were full of feeling.
"Good bye, Aunt Susan," he said.
"I came a stranger, but this house has been made a home to me."
"Good bye, governor," she said, holding out a wrinkled and trembling hand.
You will come again, and you will be thin and pale and in rags, and you will fall at the door.
"Hush, Aunt Suse," exclaimed mrs Simmons.
"It is not Governor Ware, it is his great grandson, and you mustn't send him away tellin' of terrible things that will happen to him."
"I'm not afraid," said Harry, "and I hope that I'll see Aunt Susan and all of you again."
He lifted her hand and kissed it in the old-fashioned manner.
She smiled and he heard her murmur:
He kissed my hand like that once before, when I went to Frankfort on the lumber raft."
"Good bye, Harry," repeated Jarvis.
After that it's easy."
When Harry rode away something rose in his throat and choked him for a moment.
Then in vivid phrases he heard once more the old woman's prophecy: "You will come again, and you will be thin and pale and in rags, and you will fall at the door." For a moment it shadowed the sunlight.
No one could see into the future.
He was now across the valley and his path led along the base of the mountain.
He looked back and saw the four standing on the porch, Jarvis, Ike, mrs Simmons, and old Aunt Suse.
Could it be possible that he would come again, and in the manner that the old woman had predicted?
The path, in another minute, curved around the mountain, and the valley was shut from view.
The two days passed without event.
The weather remained fair, and no one interfered with him.
He slept the first night at a log cabin that Jarvis had named, having reached it in due time, and the second day he reached, also in due time, the old Wilderness Road.
The Virginians were less volatile than the South Carolinians, and they had long refused to go out, but now that they were out they were pouring into the Southern army, and they were animated by an extraordinary zeal.
He began to hear new or unfamiliar names, Early, and Ewell, and Jackson, and Lee, and Johnston, and Hill, and Stuart, and Ashby, names that he would never forget, but names that as yet meant little to him.
He had letters from his father and he expected to find his friends of Charleston in Richmond or at the front.
It was now early in June, and the country was at its best.
Then a shade smaller than Charleston, it, too, was a famous place in the South, and it was full of great associations.
Harry, like all the educated boys of the South, honored and admired its public men.
They were mighty names to him.
He was about to tread streets that had been trod by the famous Jefferson, by Madison, Monroe, Randolph of Roanoke, and many others.
The shades of the great Virginians rose in a host before him.
He arrived about noon, and, as he carried no baggage except his saddle bags and weapons, he was quickly within the city, his papers being in perfect order.
It was said that he was at the residence of President Davis, called the White House, after that other and more famous one at Washington, in which the lank, awkward man, Abraham Lincoln, now lived.
But Harry paused frequently on the way, as there was nothing to hurry him, and there was much to be seen.
If Charleston had been crowded, Richmond was more so.
Harry stopped a while to look at the ancient and noble state house, now the home also of the Confederate Congress, standing in Capitol Square, and the spire of the Bell Tower, on Shockoe Hill.
He was informed at the "White House" that General Beauregard was there, and sending in his card he was admitted promptly.
"Yes, sir," replied the boy, "I came chiefly by the river and the Wilderness Road."
"The Southern leaders did their best, but they could not move the state."
"If I may," returned Harry.
"In South Carolina I was with Colonel Leonidas Talbot.
I have had a letter from him here, and, if it is your pleasure and that of General Beauregard, I shall be glad to join his command."
General Beauregard laughed a little.
"You do well," he said.
Colonel Talbot is at the front, and you'll probably find him closer than any other officer to the Yankee army.
Be ready.
It will take you part of the way and you will march on for the rest."
mr Benjamin did not speak throughout the interview, but he watched Harry closely.
The boy's view of Richmond was in truth brief, as before night he saw its spires and roofs fading behind him.
Harry heard from some of the officers that the army was gathered at a place called Manassas Junction, where Beauregard had taken command on june first, and to which he would quickly return.
But Harry did not know any of these officers and he felt a little lonely.
Harry's heart leaped again.
The whole scene was inspiring in the extreme to the heart of youth. Far to the right he saw cavalry galloping back and forth, and to the left he saw infantry drilling.
"It's a mixed regiment," he said, "made up of Virginians, South Carolinians, North Carolinians, and a few Kentuckians and Tennesseeans, but it's already one of the best in the service.
They're mostly boys and already they call themselves 'The Invincibles.' You can see the tents of their commanding officers over there by that little creek."
Harry's eyes followed the pointing finger, and again his heart leaped. His friends were there, the two colonels for whom he had such a strong affection, and the two lads of his own age.
Theirs looked like a good camp, too.
It was arranged neatly, and by its side flowed the clear, cool waters of Young's Branch, a tributary of the little Manassas River. He walked briskly, crossed the brook, stepping from stone to stone, and entered the grounds of the Invincibles.
A tall youth rushed forward, seized his hand and shook it violently, meanwhile uttering cries of welcome in an unbroken stream.
"By all the powers, it's our own Harry!" he exclaimed, "the new Harry of the West, whom we were afraid we should never see again.
Everything is for the best, but we hardly hoped for this!
How did you get here, Harry?
CHAPTER three-A STRANGE STORY
"Well, mr Jenks," began Tom, when he had descended to the garden, and greeted the man who had acted so strangely on Earthquake Island, "this is rather an odd time for a visit."
"I realize that, Tom Swift," was the answer, and the lad noticed that the man spoke much more calmly than he had that evening at the jewelry shop.
"I realize that, but I have to be cautious in my movements."
"Why?"
"Because there are enemies on my track.
If they thought I was seeking aid to discover the secret of Phantom Mountain, my life might pay the forfeit."
"Are you in earnest, mr Jenks?"
"Oh, I don't mind being awakened," answered Tom, good naturedly, "but I will be frank with you, mr Jenks.
I hardly can believe what you have stated to me several times-that you know how diamonds can be made."
"I can prove it to you," was the quiet answer.
"Yes, I know.
But they have all been failures."
"All except this process-the process used at Phantom Mountain," insisted the queer man.
"Do you want to hear my story?"
"I have no objections."
"Then let me warn you," went on mr Jenks, "that if you do hear it, you will be so fascinated by it that I am sure you will want to cast your lot in with mine, and aid me to get my rights, and solve the mystery. And I also want to warn you that if you do, there is a certain amount of danger connected with it."
"I'm used to danger," answered Tom, quietly.
"Let me hear your story. But first explain how you came to come here, and why you acted so strangely at the jewelry store."
"Willingly.
I tried to attract your attention at the store, because I saw that you were going to buy a diamond, and I didn't want you to."
"Why not?"
"Because I want to present you with a beautiful stone, that will answer your purpose as well or better, than any one you could buy.
That will prove my story better than any amount of words or argument.
But I could not attract your attention without also attracting that of the jeweler. He became suspicious, gave chase, and I thought it best to vanish.
I hope no one was made to suffer for what may have been my imprudence."
"No, the lad whom mr Track caught was let go.
But how did you happen to come to Shopton?"
"To see you.
I got your address from the owner of the yacht Resolute.
I knew that if there was one person who could aid me to recover my rights, it would be you, Tom Swift.
Will you help me?
Will you come with me to discover the secret of Phantom Mountain?
If we go, it will have to be in an airship, for in no other way, I think, can we come upon the place, as it is closely guarded.
Will you come?
I will pay you well."
"Perhaps I had better hear your story," said the young inventor.
"But first let me suggest that we move farther away from the house.
My father, or mr Jackson, or the housekeeper, may hear us talking, and it may disturb them.
Come with me to my private shop," and Tom led the way to a small building where he did experimental work.
He unlocked the door with a key he carried, turned on the lights, which were run by a storage battery, and motioned mr Jenks to a seat.
"Now I'll hear your story," said Tom.
"I'll make it as short as possible," went on the queer man.
"To begin with, it is now several years ago since a poorly dressed stranger applied to me one night for money enough to get a meal and a bed to sleep in.
I was living in New York City at the time, and this was midnight, as I was returning home from my club.
"I was touched by the man's appearance, and gave him some money.
He asked for my card, saying he would repay me some day.
I gave it to him, little thinking I would hear from the man again.
But I did.
He called at my apartments about a week later, saying he had secured work as an expert setter of diamonds, and wanted to repay me.
I did not want to take his money, but the fact that such a sorry looking specimen of manhood as he had been when I aided him, was an expert handler of gems interested me.
I talked with the man, and he made a curious statement.
"This man, who gave his name as Enos Folwell, said he knew a place where diamonds could be made, partly in a scientific manner, and partly by the forces of nature.
I laughed at him, but he told me so many details that I began to believe him.
He said he and some other friends of his, who were diamond cutters, had a plant in the midst of the Rocky Mountains, where they had succeeded in making several small, but very perfect diamonds.
They had come to the end of their rope, though, so to speak, because they could not afford to buy the materials needed.
They had all agreed to go out into civilization, and work for enough funds to enable them to go on with their diamond making.
"I hardly knew whether to believe the man or not, but he offered proof. He had several small, but very perfect diamonds with him, and he gave them to me, to have tested in any way I desired.
"I promised to look into the matter, and, as I was quite wealthy, as, in fact I am now, and if I found that the stones he gave me were real, I said I might invest some money in the plant."
"They were-stones of the first water, though small.
An expert gem merchant, to whom I took them, said he had never seen any diamonds like them, and he wanted to know where I got them.
Of course I did not tell him.
"To make a long story short, I saw Folwell again, told him to communicate with his companions, and to tell them that I would agree to supply the cash needed, if I could share in the diamond making.
To this they agreed, and, after some weeks spent in preparation, a party of us set out for Phantom Mountain."
"Phantom Mountain?" interrupted Tom.
"Where is it?"
"I don't know, exactly-it's somewhere in the Rockies, but the exact location is a mystery.
That is why I need your help.
You will soon understand the reason.
Well, as I said, myself, Folwell and the others, who were not exactly prepossessing sort of men, started west.
When we got to a small town, called Indian Ridge, near Leadville, Colorado, the men insisted that I must now proceed in secret, and consent to be blindfolded, as they were not yet ready to reveal the secret of the place where they made the diamonds.
"I did not want to agree to this, but they insisted, and I gave in, foolishly perhaps.
After traveling for some distance I was led, still blindfolded, up a steep trail.
"When the bandage was taken off my eyes I saw that I was in a large cave.
The men were with me, and they apologized for the necessity that caused them to blindfold me.
I had to agree.
"Next they demanded that I give them a large sum, which I had promised when they showed me, conclusively, that they could make diamonds.
I refused to do this until I had seen some of the precious stones, and they agreed that this was fair, but said I would have to wait a few days.
"Well, I waited, and, all that while, I was virtually a prisoner in the cave.
"At last one night, during a terrific thunder storm, the leader of the diamond makers-Folwell-announced that I could now see the stones made. The men had been preparing their chemicals for some days previous.
I was taken into a small chamber of the cave, and there saw quite a complicated apparatus.
Part of it was a great steel box, with a lever on it.
"We will let you make some diamonds for yourself," Folwell said to me, and he directed me to pull the lever of the box, at a certain signal. The signal came, just as a terrific crash of thunder shook the very mountain inside of which we were.
mr Jenks held out one hand.
In the palm glittered a large stone-ostensibly a diamond.
In the rays of the moon it showed all the colors of the rainbow-a beautiful gem.
"That is one of the stones I made-or rather that I supposed I had made," went on mr Jenks.
"It is one of several I have, but they have not all been cut and polished as has this one.
"Naturally I was much impressed by what I saw, and, after I had made certain tests which convinced me that the stones in the steel box were diamonds, I paid over the money as I had promised.
That was my undoing."
"How?"
"As soon as the men got the cash, they had no further use for me.
The next I remember is eating a rude meal, while we discussed the future of making diamonds.
I knew nothing more until I found myself back in the small hotel at Indian Ridge, whence I had gone some time previous, with the men, to the cave in the mountain."
"What happened?" asked Tom, much surprised by the unexpected outcome of the affair.
"I had been tricked, that was all!
As soon as the men had my money they had no further use for me.
They did not want me to learn the secret of their diamond making, and they drugged me, carried me away from the cave, and left me in the hotel."
"Didn't you try to find the cave again?"
"I did, but without avail.
I spent some time in the Rockies, but no one could tell where Phantom Mountain was; in fact, few had heard of it, and I was nearly lost searching for it.
"I came back East, determined to get even.
Probably the stones are worth nearly as much as the money I invested, but I was cheated, for I was promised an equal share in the profits.
These were denied me, and I was tricked.
I determined to be revenged, or at least to discover the secret of making diamonds.
It is my right."
"I agree with you," spoke Tom.
"But, up to the time I met you on Earthquake Island, I could form no plan for discovering Phantom Mountain, and learning the secret of the diamond makers," went on mr Jenks.
But I knew I needed an airship in which to fly over the mountains, and pick out the location of the cave where the diamonds are made."
"But how can you locate it, if you were blindfolded when you were taken there, mr Jenks?"
"I forgot to tell you that, on our journey into the mountains, and just before I was carried into the cave, I managed to raise one corner of the bandage.
I caught a glimpse of a very peculiarly shaped cliff-it is like a great head, standing out in bold relief against the moonlight, when I saw it.
It may be the landmark by which we can locate Phantom Mountain."
"Perhaps," admitted the young inventor.
"What I want to know is this," went on mr Jenks.
"Will you go with me on this quest-go in your airship to discover the secret of the diamond makers?
If you will, I will share with you whatever diamonds we can discover, or make; besides paying all expenses.
Will you go, Tom Swift?"
The young inventor did not know what to answer.
How far was mr Jenks to be trusted?
Were the stones he had real diamonds?
Was his story, fantastical as it sounded-true?
Would it be safe for Tom to go?
The lad asked himself these questions.
mr Jenks saw his hesitation.
"Here," said the strange man, "I will prove what I say.
I intended it for you, anyhow, for what you did for me on Earthquake Island.
Take it, and-and give it to the person for whom you were about to purchase a diamond to night.
But, first of all, take it to a gem expert, and get his opinion.
CHAPTER four-ANDY FOGER GETS A FRIGHT
Tom Swift considered a few minutes.
On the face of it, the proposition appealed to him.
The search for the mysterious mountain, and the cave of the diamond makers, might offer a new field for him.
But there came to him a certain distrust of mr Jenks.
"I don't like to doubt your word," began Tom, slowly, "but you know, mr Jenks, that some of the greatest chemists have tried in vain to make diamonds; or, at best, they have made only tiny ones.
To think that any man, or set of men, made real diamonds as large as the ones you have, doesn't seem-well-" and Tom hesitated.
"You mean you can hardly believe me?" asked mr Jenks.
"I guess that's it," assented Tom.
"I don't blame you a bit!" exclaimed the odd man.
"In fact, I didn't believe it when they told me they could make diamonds.
But they proved it to me.
I'm ready now to prove it to you."
"I'll tell you what I'll do.
Here's this one stone, cut ready for setting.
Here's another, uncut," and mr Jenks drew from his pocket what looked like a piece of crystal.
"Take them to any jeweler," he resumed-"to the one in whose place I saw you to night.
I'll abide by the verdict you get, and I'll come here to morrow night, and hear what you have to say."
"Because my life might be in danger if I was seen talking to you, and showing you diamonds in the daytime-especially just now.
"Why at this particular time?"
"For the reason that the diamond makers are on my trail.
As long as I remained quiet, after their shabby treatment of me, and did not try to discover their secret, they were all right.
But, after I realized that I had been cheated out of my rights, and when I began to make an investigation, with a view to discovering their secret whereabouts, I received mysterious and anonymous warnings to stop."
"But I did not.
I came East, and tried to get help to discover the cave of the diamond makers, but I was unsuccessful.
I needed an airship, as I said, and no person who could operate one, would agree to go with me on the quest.
Again I received a warning to drop all search for the diamond makers, but I persisted, and about a week ago I found I was being shadowed."
"Shadowed; by whom?" asked Tom.
"Do you think he means you harm?"
"I'm sure of it.
I don't want those scoundrels to find out what I am about to do.
On my return from Earthquake Island, I again endeavored to interest an airship man in my plan, but he evidently thought me insane. Then I thought of you, as I had done before, but I was afraid you, too, would laugh at my proposition.
However, I decided to come here, and I did.
I took it as a good omen.
Now it remains with you.
May I call here to morrow night, and get your answer?"
Tom Swift made up his mind quickly.
After all it would be easy enough to find out if the diamonds were real.
If they were, he could then decide whether or not to go with mr Jenks on the mysterious quest.
So he answered:
"I'll consider the matter, mr Jenks.
I'll meet you here to morrow night.
In the meanwhile, for my own satisfaction, I'll let an expert look at these stones."
"Get the greatest diamond expert in the world, and he'll pronounce them perfect!" predicted the odd man.
"Now I'll bid you goodnight, and be going.
I'll be here at this time to morrow."
"Who's that?" asked the diamond man, in a hoarse whisper.
"Did you see that, Tom Swift?
Some one was here-listening to what I said!
Perhaps it was the man who has been shadowing me!"
"I think not.
I guess it was Eradicate Sampson, a colored man who does work for us," said Tom.
"Is that you, Rad?" he called.
"Where are you, Rad?" called the young inventor.
Sometimes he's restless, an' don't sleep laik he oughter."
"Then that wasn't you over in the orchard?" asked Tom, in some uneasiness.
"If it wasn't your man, it was some one else," said mr Jenks, decidedly.
"We'll have a look!" exclaimed Tom.
"Here, Rad, come over and scurry among those trees.
We just saw some one sneaking around."
"I don't believe it was any one after the mule," murmured mr Jenks, "but it certainly was some one-more likely some one after me."
The three made a hasty search among the trees, but the intruder had vanished, leaving no trace.
They went out into the road, which the moon threw into bold relief along its white stretch, but there was no figure scurrying away.
"Whoever it was, is gone," spoke Tom.
"You can go back to bed, Rad," for the colored man, of late, had been sleeping in a shack on the Swift premises.
"And I guess it's time for me to go, too," added mr Jenks.
"I'll be here to morrow night, Tom, and I hope your answer will be favorable."
Tom did not sleep well the remainder of the night, for his fitful slumbers were disturbed by dreams of enormous caves, filled with diamonds, with dark, shadowy figures trying to put him into a red hot steel box.
They had not been disturbed.
Tom made up his mind to find out if the stones were really diamonds, before saying anything to his father about the chance of going to seek Phantom Mountain.
"Though if this one proves to be a good gem, I'll have mr Track set it in a brooch, and give it to Mary for her birthday," decided the young inventor.
"Guess I'll take a run over to Chester in the Butterfly, and see what one of the jewelers there has to say."
In addition to his big airship, Red Cloud, Tom owned a small, swift monoplane, which he called Butterfly.
This had been damaged by Andy Foger just before Tom left on the trip that ended at Earthquake Island, but the monoplane had been repaired, and Andy had left town, not having returned since.
Telling his father that he was going off on a little business trip, which he often did in his aeroplane, Tom, with the aid of mr Jackson, the engineer, wheeled the Butterfly out of its shed.
Adjusting the mechanism, and seeing that it was in good shape, Tom took his place in one of the two seats, for the monoplane would carry two. mr Jackson then spun the propellers, and, with a crackle and roar the motor started.
Over the ground ran the dainty, little aeroplane, until, having momentum enough, Tom tilted the wing planes and the machine sailed up into the air.
Rising about a thousand feet, and circling about several times to test the wind currents, Tom headed his craft toward Chester, a city about fifty miles from Shopton.
In his pocket, snugly tucked away, were the two stones mr Jenks had given him.
It was not long before Tom saw, looming up in the distance the church spires and towering factory chimneys of Chester, for his machine was a speedy one, and could make ninety miles an hour when driven.
But now a slower speed satisfied our hero.
"I'll just drop down outside of the city," he reasoned, "for too much of a crowd gathers when I land in the street.
Besides I might frighten horses, and then, too, it's hard to get a good start from the street. I'll leave it in some barn until I want to go back."
Tom sent his craft down, in order to pick out a safe place for a landing.
"Looks like a good place there," he murmured.
"I'll shut off the motor, and vol plane down."
Suiting the action to the word, Tom shut off his power.
The little craft dipped toward the ground, but the lad threw up the forward planes, and caught a current of air that sent him skimming along horizontally.
Something about the figure struck Tom as being familiar, and he recognized the cyclist a moment later.
"It's Andy Foger!" said Tom, in a whisper.
Evidently he doesn't dare venture back to Shopton.
Well, here's where I give him a scare."
Tom's monoplane was making no more noise, now, than a soaring bird.
He was gliding swiftly toward the earth, and, with the plan in his mind of administering some sort of punishment to the bully, he aimed the machine directly at him.
Nearer and nearer shot the monoplane, as quietly as a sheet of paper might fall.
Andy pedaled on, never looking up nor behind him, A moment later, as Tom threw up his headplanes, to make his landing more easy, and just as he swooped down at one side of the cyclist, our hero let out a most alarming yell, right into Andy's ear.
"Now I've got you!" he shouted.
"I'll teach you to slash my aeroplane! Come with me!"
Andy gave one look at the white bird like apparatus that had flown up beside him so noiselessly, and, being too frightened to recognize Tom's voice, must have thought that he had been overtaken by some supernatural visitor.
Andy gave a yell like an Indian, about to do a stage scalping act, and fairly dived over the handlebars of his bicycle, sprawling in a heap on the dusty road.
For several minutes Andy Foger did not arise.
He remained prostrate in the dust, and Tom, observing him, thought perhaps the bully might have been seriously injured.
But, a little later, Andy cautiously raised his head, and inquired in a frightened voice:
"Is it-is it gone?"
"Is what gone?" asked Tom, grimly.
"Was that you, Tom Swift?" he demanded.
"Did you knock me off my wheel?"
"My monoplane and I together did," was the reply; "or, rather, we didn't.
It was the nervous reaction caused by your fright, and the knowledge that you had done wrong, that made you jump over the handlebars.
That's the scientific explanation."
"You-you did it!" stammered Andy, getting to his feet.
He wasn't hurt much, Tom thought.
"Have it your own way," resumed our hero.
"Did you think it was a hob goblin in a chariot of fire after you, Andy?"
"Huh!
Never mind what I thought!
I'll have you arrested for this!"
"Will you?
Delighted, as the boys say.
Hop in my airship and I'll take you right into town.
I've mended her up, however, so she goes better than ever, and I can take you to the police station in jig time.
Want to come, Andy?"
This was too much for the bully.
He knew that Tom would have a clear case against him, and he did not dare answer.
Instead he shuffled over to where his wheel lay, picked it up, and rode slowly off.
"Good riddance," murmured Tom.
He looked about, and saw that he was near a house, in the rear of which was a good sized barn.
"Guess I'll ask if I can leave the Butterfly there," he murmured, and, ringing the doorbell, he was greeted by a man.
"I'll pay you if you'll let me store my machine in the barn a little while, until I go into the city, and return," spoke the lad.
"Indeed, you're welcome to leave it there without pay," was the answer. "I'm interested in airships, and, I'll consider it a favor if you'll let me look yours over while it's here."
Tom readily agreed, and a few minutes later he had caught a trolley going into the city.
He was soon in one of the largest jewelry stores of Chester.
The young man disappeared into a private office with the stones, and Tom waited.
He wondered if he was going to have his trouble for his pains. Presently two elderly gentlemen came from the little room, on the glass door of which appeared the word "Diamonds."
"Who brought these stones in?" asked one of the men, evidently the proprietor, from the deference paid him by the clerk.
"Will you kindly step inside here?" requested the elderly man.
When the door was closed, Tom found himself in a room which was mostly taken up with a bench for the display of precious stones, a few chairs, and some lights arranged peculiarly; while various scales and instruments stood on a table.
"You wished an opinion on-on these?" queried the proprietor of the place.
Tom noticed at once that the word "diamonds" was not used.
"I wanted to find out if they were of any value," he said.
"Are they diamonds?"
"Would you mind stating where you got them?" asked the other of the two men.
"Is that necessary?" inquired the lad.
"Oh, it isn't that," the proprietor hastened to assure him.
"But these are diamonds of such a peculiar kind, so perfect and without a flaw, that I wondered from what part of the world they came."
"Then they are diamonds?" asked Tom, eagerly.
"The finest I have ever tested!" declared the other man, evidently mr Porter, the gem expert.
"They are a joy to look at, mr Roberts," he went on, turning to the proprietor.
"If it is possible to get a supply of them you would be justified in asking half as much again as we charge for African or Indian diamonds.
The Kimberly products are not to be compared to these," and he looked at the two stones in his hand-the one cut, and sparkling brilliantly, the other in a rough state.
"Do you care to state where these diamonds came from?" asked mr Roberts, looking critically at Tom.
"I had rather not," answered the lad.
"It is enough for me to know that they are diamonds.
How much is your charge?"
"Nothing," was the unexpected answer.
"We are very glad to have had the opportunity of seeing such stones.
Is there any chance of getting any more?"
"Perhaps," answered Tom, as he accepted the gems which the expert held out to him.
"Then might we speak for a supply?" went on mr Roberts, eagerly.
"We will pay you the full market price."
"What is the value of these stones?" asked Tom.
mr Roberts looked at his gem expert.
"They are so far superior to the usual run of diamonds, that I feel justified in saying that the cut one would bring fifteen hundred dollars, anywhere.
In fact, I would offer that for it.
The other is larger, though what it would lose in cutting would be hard to say.
I should say it was worth two thousand dollars as it is now."
"Thirty five hundred dollars for these two stones!" exclaimed Tom.
"They are worth every cent of it," declared mr Roberts.
"Do you want to sell?"
Tom shook his head.
He could scarcely believe the good news.
mr Jenks had told the truth.
Now the young inventor could go with him to seek the diamond makers.
"Can you get any more of these?" went on mr Roberts.
"I think so-that is I don't know-I am going to try," answered the lad.
"Then if you succeed I wish you would sell us some," fairly begged the proprietor of the store.
"I will," promised Tom, but he little knew what lay before him, or perhaps he would not have made that promise.
He thanked the diamond merchant for his kindness, and arranged to have the cut stone set in a pin for Miss Nestor.
The uncut gem Tom took away with him.
"I think I'll go with mr Jenks," he decided, as he prepared for a landing in the open space near his aeroplane shed.
"It will be a risky trip, perhaps, but I've taken risks before.
When mr Jenks comes to night I'll tell him I'll help him to get his rights, and discover the secret of the diamond makers."
As Tom was wheeling the Butterfly into the shed, Eradicate came out to help him.
"Who is it?"
"It isn't mr Damon; is it, Rad?
"No, Massa Tom, it ain't him.
"In the airship shed!
No strangers are allowed in there, Rad."
"I'll see about this," exclaimed Tom, striding to the large shed, where the Red Cloud was kept.
As he entered it he saw a man looking over the wonderful craft.
"I did, and I apologize for entering here, but I am interested in airships, and I thought you might want to hire a pilot.
I am in need of employment, and I have had considerable to do with balloons and aeroplanes, but never with an airship like this, which combines the two features.
"I was told that you did," was the rather surprising answer.
"Who told you?"
"mr Jenks told me!"
"mr Jenks?" Tom could not conceal his astonishment.
"Yes.
mr Barcoe Jenks.
But I did not come here to merely ask you for employment.
I would like to hire out to you, but the real object of my visit was to say this to you."
The man approached still closer to Tom, and, in a lower voice, and one that could scarcely be heard, he fairly hissed:
ARRIVAL FROM MARYLAND, eighteen fifty nine.
JIM KELL, CHARLES HEATH, WILLIAM CARLISLE, CHARLES RINGGOLD, THOMAS MAXWELL, AND SAMUEL SMITH.
Sam had been tied up and beat many times severely.
William had been stripped naked, and frequently and cruelly cowhided.
Jim had been whipped with clubs and switches times without number.
Charles had had five men on him at one time, with cowhides, his master in the lead.
The night we left, he had a woman tied up-God knows what he done.
He was always blustering, you could never do enough for him no how.
First thing in the morning and last thing at night, you would hear him cussing-he would cuss in bed.
He was a large farmer, all the time drunk.
He had a good deal of money but not much character.
He was a savage, bluff, red face looking concern." Thus, in the most earnest, as well as in an intelligent manner, Charles described the man (Aquila Cain), who had hitherto held him under the yoke.
james left his mother, Nancy Kell, two brothers, Robert and Henry, and two sisters, Mary and Annie; all living in the neighborhood whence he fled.
Besides these, he had eight brothers and sisters living in Baltimore and elsewhere, under the yoke.
He was twenty four years of age, of a jet color, but of a manly turn.
Charles Heath was twenty five years of age, medium size, full black, a very keen looking individual.
William was also of unmixed blood, shrewd and wide awake for his years,--had been ground down under the heel of Aquila Cain.
He left his mother and two sisters.
Charles Ringgold was eighteen years of age; no white blood showed itself in the least in this individual.
He fled from dr Jacob Preston, a member of the Episcopal Church, and a practical farmer with twenty head of slaves.
"He was not so bad, but his wife was said to be a 'stinger.'" Charles left his mother and father behind, also four sisters.
Thomas was of pure blood, with a very cheerful, healthy looking countenance,--twenty one years of age, and was to "come free" at twenty five, but he had too much good sense to rely upon the promises of slave holders in matters of this kind.
He too belonged to Cain who, he said, was constantly talking about selling, etc
He left his father and mother.
After being furnished with food, clothing, and free tickets, they were forwarded on in triumph and full of hope.
SUNDRY ARRIVALS, eighteen fifty nine.
john EDWARD LEE, john HILLIS, CHARLES ROSS, james RYAN, WILLIAM JOHNSTON, EDWARD WOOD, CORNELIUS FULLER AND HIS WIFE HARRIET, john PINKET, ANSAL CANNON, AND james BROWN.
john came from Maryland, and brought with him a good degree of pluck.
He satisfied the Committee that he fully believed in freedom, and had proved his faith by his works, as he came in contact with pursuers, whom he put to flight by the use of an ugly looking knife, which he plunged into one of them, producing quite a panic; the result was that he was left to pursue his Underground Rail Road journey without further molestation.
There was nothing in John's appearance which would lead one to suppose that he was a blood thirsty or bad man, although a man of uncommon muscular powers; six feet high, and quite black, with resolution stamped on his countenance.
john Hillis was a tiller of the ground under a widow lady (mrs Louisa Le Count), of the New Market District, Maryland.
He signified to the mistress, that he loved to follow the water, and that he would be just as safe on water as on land, and that he was discontented.
The widow heard John's plausible story, and saw nothing amiss in it, so she consented that he should work on a schooner.
The name of the craft was "Majestic." The hopeful john endeavored to do his utmost to please, and was doubly happy when he learned that the "Majestic" was to make a trip to Philadelphia.
On arriving John's eyes were opened to see that he owed mrs Le Count nothing, but that she was largely indebted to him for years of unrequited toil; he could not, therefore, consent to go back to her.
He was troubled to think of his poor wife and children, whom he had left in the hands of mrs Harriet Dean, three quarters of a mile from New Market; but it was easier for him to imagine plans by which he could get them off than to incur the hazard of going back to Maryland; therefore he remained in freedom.
Very good reasons were given by Charles for the charge which he made against Rodgers, and it went far towards establishing the fact, that "colored men had no rights which white men were bound to respect," in Maryland.
Although he was only twenty three years of age, he had fully weighed the matter of his freedom, and appeared firmly set against Slavery.
He left one brother and one sister; his mother was dead, and of his father's whereabouts he knew nothing.
William was nineteen years of age, brown color, smart and good looking.
Edward left a wife and three children, but the strong desire to be free, which had been a ruling passion of his being from early boyhood, rendered it impossible for him to stay, although the ties were very hard to break.
Slavery was crushing him hourly, and he felt that he could not submit any longer.
Cornelius Fuller, and his wife, Harriet, escaped together from Kent county, Maryland.
john Pinket and Ansal Cannon took the Underground Rail Road cars at New Market, Dorchester county, Maryland.
john was a tall young man, of twenty seven years of age, of an active turn of mind and of a fine black color.
He was the property of Mary Brown, a widow, firmly grounded in the love of Slavery; believing that a slave had no business to get tired or desire his freedom.
She sold one of John's sisters to Georgia, and before john fled, had still in her possession nine head of slaves.
She was a member of the Methodist church at East New Market.
From certain movements which looked very suspicious in John's eyes, he had been allotted to the Southern Market, he therefore resolved to look out for a habitation in Canada.
He had a first rate corn field education, but no book learning.
Up to the time of his escape, john had shunned entangling himself with a wife.
He escaped from Kitty Cannon, another widow, who owned nine chattels.
"Sometimes she treated her slaves pretty well," was the testimony of Ansal.
He ran away because he did not get pay for his services.
ARRIVAL FROM MARYLAND, eighteen fifty nine.
james BROWN.
He was six feet three inches high, and in every respect, a man of bone, sinew and muscle.
For one who had enjoyed only a field hand's privileges for improvement, he was not to be despised.
Jim owed service to Henry Jones; at least he admitted that said Jones claimed him, and had hired him out to himself for seven dollars per month.
Having heard of the Underground Rail Road running to Canada, he concluded to take a trip and see the country, for himself; so he arranged his affairs with this end in view, and left Henry Jones with one less to work for him for nothing.
The place that he fled from was called North Point, Baltimore county.
The number of fellow slaves left in the hands of his old master, was fifteen.
ARRIVAL FROM DELAWARE, eighteen fifty nine.
EDWARD, john, AND CHARLES HALL.
They were young; the eldest being about twenty, the youngest not far from seventeen years of age.
Charles resolved that when his brothers crossed the line dividing Delaware and Pennsylvania, he would not be far behind.
The mother of these boys was freed at the age of twenty eight, and lived in wilmington delaware.
It was owing to the fact that their mother had been freed that they entertained the vague notion that they too might be freed; but it was a well established fact that thousands lived and died in such a hope without ever realizing their expectations.
The boys, more shrewd and wide awake than many others, did not hearken to such "stuff." The two younger heard the views of the elder brother, and expressed a willingness to follow him.
Edward, becoming satisfied that what they meant to do must be done quickly, took the lead, and off they started for a free State.
john was owned by one james b Rodgers, a farmer, and "a most every kind of man," as john expressed himself; in fact john thought that his owner was such a strange, wicked, and cross character that he couldn't tell himself what he was.
Seeing that slaves were treated no better than dogs and hogs, john thought that he was none too young to be taking steps to get away.
ARRIVAL FROM VIRGINIA, eighteen fifty nine.
james TAYLOR, ALBERT GROSS, AND john GRINAGE.
To see mere lads, not twenty one years of age, smart enough to outwit the very shrewdest and wisest slave holders of Virginia was very gratifying.
The young men composing this arrival were of this keen sighted order.
james was only a little turned of twenty, of a yellow complexion, and intelligent.
He said that he had been used tolerable well, not so bad as many had been used.
james was learning the carpenter trade; but he was anxious to obtain his freedom, and finding his two companions true on the main question, in conjunction with them he contrived a plan of escape, and 'took out.' His father and mother, Harrison and Jane Taylor, were left at Fredericksburg to mourn the absence of their son.
Albert testified that he was a bad man.
john Grinage was only twenty, a sprightly, active young man, of a brown color.
He came from Middle Neck, Cecil county, where he had served under William Flintham, a farmer.
AND OTHER PLACES.
james ANDY WILKINS, and wife LUCINDA, with their little boy, CHARLES, CHARLES HENRY GROSS, A WOMAN with her TWO CHILDREN-one in her arms-john BROWN, john ROACH, and wife LAMBY, and HENRY SMALLWOOD.
The above named passengers did not all come from the same place, or exactly at the same time; but for the sake of convenience they are thus embraced under a general head.
james Andy Wilkins "gave the slip" to a farmer, by the name of George Biddle, who lived one mile from Cecil, Cecil county, Maryland.
While he hated Slavery, he took a favorable view of his master in some respects at least, as he said that he was a "moderate man in talk;" but "sly in action." His master provided him with two pairs of pantaloons in the summer, and one in the winter, also a winter jacket, no vest, no cap, or hat.
Lucinda, the companion of james, was twenty one years of age, good looking, well formed and of a brown color.
She spoke of a man named George Ford as her owner.
Once in a great while Lucinda was allowed to go to church, when she could be spared from her daily routine of cooking, washing, etc
Twice a week she was permitted the special favor of seeing her husband.
These simple privations not being of a grave character, no serious fault was found with them; yet Lucinda was not without a strong ground of complaint.
Not long before escaping, she had been threatened with the auction block; this fate she felt bound to avert, if possible, and the way she aimed to do it was by escaping on the Underground Rail Road.
Charley, a bright little fellow only three years of age, was "contented and happy" enough. Lucinda left her father, Moses Edgar Wright, and two brothers, both slaves.
Her mother, who was known by the name of Betsy Wright, escaped when she (Lucinda) was seven years of age.
Of her whereabouts nothing further had ever been heard.
Lucinda entertained strong hopes that she might find her in Canada.
Owing to hard treatment, Charles was induced to fly to Canada for refuge.
A woman with two children, one in her arms, and the other two years of age (names, etc, not recorded), came from the District of Columbia. Mother and children, appealed loudly for sympathy.
john Brown, being at the beck of a man filling the situation of a common clerk (in the shoe store of McGrunders), became dissatisfied.
He found an agent and soon had matters all fixed.
He left his father, mother and seven sisters and one brother, all slaves.
john was a man small of stature, dark, with homely features, but he was very determined to get away from oppression.
john was the so-called property of joshua O'Bear, "a fractious, hard swearing man, and when mad would hit one of his slaves with anything he could get in his hands." john and his companion made the long journey on foot.
The former had been trained to farm labor and the common drudgery of slave life.
While it was a fact, that his wife had already been sold, as above stated, the change of ownership was not to take place for some months, consequently john "took out in a hurry." His wife was the property of dr Shipley, of Seaford, who had occasion to raise some money for which he gave security in the shape of this wife and mother.
Horsey was the name of the gentleman from whom it was said that he obtained the favor; so when the time was up for the payment to be made, the dr was not prepared. Horsey, therefore, claimed the collateral (the wife) and thus she had to meet the issue, or make a timely escape to Canada with her husband.
No way but walking was open to them.
Deciding to come this way, they prosecuted their journey with uncommon perseverance and success.
Henry Smallwood saw that he was working every day for nothing, and thought that he would do better.
At this point Henry lost all trace of the rest.
He heard afterwards that two of them had been captured, but received no further tidings of the others.
Henry was a fine representative for Canada; a tall, dark, and manly looking individual, thirty six years of age.
He left his father and mother behind.
HENRY JONES AND TURNER FOSTER.
Henry was left free by the will of his mistress (Elizabeth Mann), but the heirs were making desperate efforts to overturn this instrument.
Of this, there was so much danger with a Richmond court, that Henry feared that the chances were against him; that the court was not honest enough to do him justice.
Again, he was not in the secret of the Underground Rail Road movement; he knew that many got off, but how they managed it he was ignorant.
If he could settle these two points satisfactorily, he thought that he would be willing to endure any sacrifice for the sake of his freedom.
He found an agent of the Underground Rail Road, and after surmounting various difficulties, this point was settled.
As good luck would have it, his wife, who was a free woman, although she heard the secret with great sorrow, had the good sense to regard his step for the best, and thus he was free to contend with all other dangers on the way.
He encountered the usual suffering, and on his arrival experienced the wonted pleasure.
He was a man of forty one years of age, spare made, with straight hair, and Indian complexion, with the Indian's aversion to Slavery.
He was about twenty one, a bright, smart, prepossessing young man.
Mosen, a lawyer, represented to be one of the first in the city, and a firm believer in Slavery.
Turner differed widely with his master with reference to this question, although, for prudential reasons, he chose not to give his opinion to said Mosen.
The appearance of these young mothers at first produced a sudden degree of pleasure, but their story of suffering quite as suddenly caused the most painful reflections.
It was hardly possible to listen to their tales of outrage and wrong with composure.
Anna and Sarah were respectively twenty four and twenty five years of age; Anna was of a dark chestnut color, while Sarah was two shades lighter; both had good manners, and a fair share of intelligence, which afforded a hopeful future for them in freedom.
Each had a babe in her arms.
Elizabeth's child was a girl, nineteen months old, and named Sarah Catharine Young.
Elizabeth had never been married.
They had lived with Massey five years up to the last March prior to their escape, having been bought out of the Baltimore slave pen, with the understanding that they were to be free at the expiration of five years' service under him.
Threats and fears were so horrifying to them, that they could not stand it; this was what prompted them to flee.
The last flogging I received from him, was about four weeks before last Christmas; he then tied me up to a locust tree standing before the door, and whipped me to his satisfaction."
Sarah had fared no better than Elizabeth, according to her testimony. "Three times," said she, "I have been tied up; the last time was in planting corn time, this year.
My clothing was all stripped off above my waist, and then he whipped me till the blood ran down to my heels." Her back was lacerated all over.
CHAPTER eight.
THE SWEET SINGER OF ISRAEL
"VERY well, then.
Let us go back to the days of long ago, long, even, before the destruction of our beloved city.
Let us seek David on the hillsides, tending his flocks with loving care.
"One day a visitor came to the house of Jesse, David's father.
This visitor was no other than the prophet Samuel.
He had received a command from the Lord telling him to take a vial of oil and seek the house of Jesse.
"'There,' said the Lord, 'you will find the new king who is to succeed Saul.'
"Samuel hastened to obey.
When he reached Jesse's house, he asked to see his sons.
One by one passed before him till the eighth son, David, appeared.
Then the voice of the Lord again spoke to Samuel.
It said:
"'Arise, anoint him, for this is he.'
"As soon as the prophet had anointed David with the oil, the young man was filled with the spirit and power of God.
At the same time, they left King Saul, who did many foolish and bad deeds after this.
Did he go out into the world and declare himself the future king of Israel?
Not so.
He continued to live his peaceful, quiet life as a shepherd.
He learned to sing, and play upon the harp.
He now showed himself indeed the 'Sweet Singer of Israel.'
"He began to show power in other ways, too.
Many times the fierce lions and savage bears came creeping upon his flocks.
Many times David met and overpowered them with the strength given to him by the Lord."
"It seems as though I can see him guarding his flocks," said Solomon, as Levi stopped talking to rest for a moment.
"His beautiful black eyes are looking out into the night and watching for danger.
Then he hears the sound of foes drawing near and springs to meet them."
Levi now went on with his story.
"While David was still tending his flocks, King Saul was waging war upon the Philistines, the bitter enemies of our people.
They became more and more daring, until at last they gathered on the side of a mountain right here in Israel.
"Three of David's brothers were fighting in Saul's army and went out to meet the Philistines.
David often went to the camp to visit his brothers.
He happened to be there once when a Philistine giant marched forth and dared any Israelite to fight with him.
"There was no one who felt able to say, 'I am not afraid; I accept your challenge.'
"'No one,' did I say?
At first, this was true, for every one in Saul's army kept silent.
But when David saw this, he felt the spirit of the Lord stir within him.
He arose, saying, 'I will meet you.'
"He was now led before Saul, and there, in the presence of the king, he said he had faith that God would save him from harm, even from the hand of the giant.
At first, Saul thought:
"'It is of no use for this young shepherd to go out alone to meet the giant.
"But when he heard what David said, he changed his mind.
He got out a strong suit of armour, and even helped him to put it on.
David was not used to such things.
He said:
"'It would be better for me to carry only such weapons as I know.
Let me take my shepherd's staff and the sling I have used so often in meeting the wild beasts.'
"He was allowed to do as he chose.
He went forth to meet the giant with nothing to help him save his staff and sling.
"And what did the giant, Goliath, say when he saw the young shepherd draw near?
He spoke in scornful words.
As soon as David saw the success of his shot, he rushed to the giant's side, seized his sword, and cut off his head.
"The watching Philistines were filled with fear.
They began to flee. But Saul's army followed and overtook them and killed great numbers.
"All Israel now began to praise David.
Saul, too, was filled with delight.
He declared he was willing David should marry his elder daughter after a while.
This was, perhaps, because he gave way to fits of bad temper.
When he learned of David's power to play and sing, he often asked the young shepherd to quiet his angry feelings with the sweet music of his harp and voice.
They said, 'Saul hath slain his thousands, but David his ten thousands.'
"His anger was now turned against the brave shepherd.
It was when the lad was playing on his harp. But Saul failed to do what his wicked heart desired.
The Lord was protecting the future king of Israel.
"Again he tried to kill David, and again he failed.
Saul must have thought that it was of no use, so now he sought to injure the young man in a different way.
He gave the daughter he had promised David to another lover.
"'You may have Michal if you will first kill one hundred Philistines.' He only said this because he hoped David would be killed by the enemy."
"I know what David did," exclaimed Solomon, who could keep still no longer.
"He went out and destroyed two hundred Philistines, instead of one hundred."
The king was now obliged to have David for a son in law. But he hated him as much as ever.
He did all in his power to make his father feel more kindly toward him.
He had almost succeeded, when Saul was seized with a new spirit of madness.
All his wicked feelings came back, and he hired some bad men to take David by surprise when he was asleep, and kill him.
But Michal did not stop here.
She made the shape of a man and placed it in David's bed.
In this way the bad men who came to kill him were deceived.
"Won't you go on and tell the children about David's flight?"
"Certainly," said his wife.
In her sweet, clear voice she made a picture of David hiding near Ramah.
He sent men there to take him prisoner.
A strange thing happened on their way.
They were overcome by the spirit of the Lord, and they did not dare seize David.
"When Saul was told how they had failed, he went himself in search of David.
But he, too, was overpowered by the spirit of the Lord.
And what do you think happened?
Instead of harming him, he asked David to come back to the palace.
"But David did not feel sure that Saul was a true friend.
He thought it would be the wisest thing for him to see Jonathan first and ask him to find out how his father really felt.
"Jonathan was a true friend.
It did not take him long to learn that Saul was as much an enemy as ever.
He must now let David know about it, and prevent his return to the palace.
He knew where David was hiding, but he did not dare seek him out.
"Instead of that, he started from the palace to go shooting.
He took a boy with him.
When he had come close to the place where his friend was hidden, he began to shoot.
He spoke to the boy from time to time.
He used such words as to let the listening David know that the king was no more his friend than ever."
When Rebecca had got thus far, Miriam looked a little perplexed.
"I don't see how David could understand what he meant," she said.
"He had agreed with Jonathan that certain words should mean certain things, my dear."
Go on with the story, please."
Rebecca smiled pleasantly, and went on.
"David prepared to flee at once.
But he had no arms or food.
He must have both.
"He went to the house of the High Priest.
When he had entered, he told him he had come with a message from the king.
He asked for the sword of Goliath, which was in the High Priest's keeping.
He also asked for five sacred loaves of shewbread, which no one dared to eat except the priests.
He had one adventure after another.
His brothers and a great many other Israelites joined him there.
"While he was hiding in the cave of Adullam, the prophet of God came to him, telling him to go into the land of Judah.
He started at once to obey the prophet's command.
Saul heard where he was and followed him. On his way, the king heard how David had been helped by the High Priest. He was so angry that he ordered not only the High Priest to be killed, but also his eighty five helpers, and all the people of the town in which he lived.
"The son of the High Priest managed to escape.
He fled to David and told him the sad story.
You can imagine how bad David felt when he learned what had happened through his own deceit.
But his mind was kept busy with plans to keep out of Saul's reach, for the king followed him from place to place.
"One night while David was hiding in a cave, the king stopped to rest at that very spot.
While he lay sleeping David crept to his side and cut off a piece of his cloak.
He might have killed Saul at this time, but he had too great a heart.
"The next day, just as the king was riding away in his chariot, David appeared in the mouth of the cave.
He held up the piece he had cut from Saul's cloak.
Then the king knew he had been in David's power.
He felt such shame that he determined to do the young man no more harm.
"David again showed him how generous he was.
He crept into Saul's tent one night.
The king's army was encamped all around him.
Only a servant went with David on this dangerous trip.
"No one saw them as they stole along.
No one heard them as David stepped to the side of the sleeping Saul and seized his spear and cup; then away they sped till they reached the hilltop opposite the one where Saul had taken his stand.
"David now cried out in a loud voice to wake the sleeping army.
He showed the cup and spear he had taken away from Saul's tent.
Saul saw that David had spared his life a second time.
He was again filled with gratitude.
"But David had learned not to trust him.
He sought a home among the Philistines and helped them in their wars.
They treated him with great kindness and their king became his true friend.
It was a sad day for the Israelites.
They were badly beaten and Saul's sons were killed.
Saul was overcome with sorrow.
He threw himself upon his sword and died by his own hand.
He mourned bitterly over the death of Jonathan.
But this could not be helped now, and there was much work to do for his people.
"The Israelites were in a pitiful state.
The Philistines had most of the country in their power.
A leader was needed.
That leader was at hand.
It was David, the hero, the Sweet Singer.
'How brave he is!' all cried.
At first, he lived in Hebron, but afterward he went to Jerusalem, where a beautiful palace was built for him and his family.
And now he went on and became great, for the Lord God of hosts was with him."
Rebecca bowed her head as she said these words.
"It is a good way to end our afternoon."
Rebecca began the words of the beautiful twenty third psalm.
Concerning the General Power of Taxation
HAMILTON
To the People of the State of New York:
IT HAS been already observed that the federal government ought to possess the power of providing for the support of the national forces; in which proposition was intended to be included the expense of raising troops, of building and equipping fleets, and all other expenses in any wise connected with military arrangements and operations.
But these are not the only objects to which the jurisdiction of the Union, in respect to revenue, must necessarily be empowered to extend.
It must embrace a provision for the support of the national civil list; for the payment of the national debts contracted, or that may be contracted; and, in general, for all those matters which will call for disbursements out of the national treasury.
The conclusion is, that there must be interwoven, in the frame of the government, a general power of taxation, in one shape or another.
Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic; as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions.
A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution.
In the Ottoman or Turkish empire, the sovereign, though in other respects absolute master of the lives and fortunes of his subjects, has no right to impose a new tax.
The consequence is that he permits the bashaws or governors of provinces to pillage the people without mercy; and, in turn, squeezes out of them the sums of which he stands in need, to satisfy his own exigencies and those of the state.
In America, from a like cause, the government of the Union has gradually dwindled into a state of decay, approaching nearly to annihilation.
Who can doubt, that the happiness of the people in both countries would be promoted by competent authorities in the proper hands, to provide the revenues which the necessities of the public might require?
The present Confederation, feeble as it is intended to repose in the United States, an unlimited power of providing for the pecuniary wants of the Union.
It is this which has chiefly contributed to reduce us to a situation, which affords ample cause both of mortification to ourselves, and of triumph to our enemies.
What remedy can there be for this situation, but in a change of the system which has produced it in a change of the fallacious and delusive system of quotas and requisitions?
The more intelligent adversaries of the new Constitution admit the force of this reasoning; but they qualify their admission by a distinction between what they call INTERNAL and EXTERNAL taxation.
The former they would reserve to the State governments; the latter, which they explain into commercial imposts, or rather duties on imported articles, they declare themselves willing to concede to the federal head.
This distinction, however, would violate the maxim of good sense and sound policy, which dictates that every POWER ought to be in proportion to its OBJECT; and would still leave the general government in a kind of tutelage to the State governments, inconsistent with every idea of vigor or efficiency.
Who can pretend that commercial imposts are, or would be, alone equal to the present and future exigencies of the Union?
I believe it may be regarded as a position warranted by the history of mankind, that, IN THE USUAL PROGRESS OF THINGS, THE NECESSITIES OF A NATION, IN EVERY STAGE OF ITS EXISTENCE, WILL BE FOUND AT LEAST EQUAL TO ITS RESOURCES.
To say that deficiencies may be provided for by requisitions upon the States, is on the one hand to acknowledge that this system cannot be depended upon, and on the other hand to depend upon it for every thing beyond a certain limit.
Those who have carefully attended to its vices and deformities as they have been exhibited by experience or delineated in the course of these papers, must feel invincible repugnancy to trusting the national interests in any degree to its operation.
Its inevitable tendency, whenever it is brought into activity, must be to enfeeble the Union, and sow the seeds of discord and contention between the federal head and its members, and between the members themselves. Can it be expected that the deficiencies would be better supplied in this mode than the total wants of the Union have heretofore been supplied in the same mode?
It ought to be recollected that if less will be required from the States, they will have proportionably less means to answer the demand.
How is it possible that a government half supplied and always necessitous, can fulfill the purposes of its institution, can provide for the security, advance the prosperity, or support the reputation of the commonwealth?
How can it ever possess either energy or stability, dignity or credit, confidence at home or respectability abroad?
How can its administration be any thing else than a succession of expedients temporizing, impotent, disgraceful?
How can it undertake or execute any liberal or enlarged plans of public good?
We will presume, for argument's sake, that the revenue arising from the impost duties answers the purposes of a provision for the public debt and of a peace establishment for the Union.
Thus circumstanced, a war breaks out.
What would be the probable conduct of the government in such an emergency? Taught by experience that proper dependence could not be placed on the success of requisitions, unable by its own authority to lay hold of fresh resources, and urged by considerations of national danger, would it not be driven to the expedient of diverting the funds already appropriated from their proper objects to the defense of the State?
It is not easy to see how a step of this kind could be avoided; and if it should be taken, it is evident that it would prove the destruction of public credit at the very moment that it was becoming essential to the public safety.
To imagine that at such a crisis credit might be dispensed with, would be the extreme of infatuation.
In the modern system of war, nations the most wealthy are obliged to have recourse to large loans.
A country so little opulent as ours must feel this necessity in a much stronger degree.
But who would lend to a government that prefaced its overtures for borrowing by an act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on the steadiness of its measures for paying?
The loans it might be able to procure would be as limited in their extent as burdensome in their conditions.
It may perhaps be imagined that, from the scantiness of the resources of the country, the necessity of diverting the established funds in the case supposed would exist, though the national government should possess an unrestrained power of taxation.
The power of creating new funds upon new objects of taxation, by its own authority, would enable the national government to borrow as far as its necessities might require.
Reflections of this kind may have trifling weight with men who hope to see realized in America the halcyon scenes of the poetic or fabulous age; but to those who believe we are likely to experience a common portion of the vicissitudes and calamities which have fallen to the lot of other nations, they must appear entitled to serious attention.
HAMILTON
To the People of the State of New York:
IN DISQUISITIONS of every kind, there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend. These contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind.
Where it produces not this effect, it must proceed either from some defect or disorder in the organs of perception, or from the influence of some strong interest, or passion, or prejudice.
And there are other truths in the two latter sciences which, if they cannot pretend to rank in the class of axioms, are yet such direct inferences from them, and so obvious in themselves, and so agreeable to the natural and unsophisticated dictates of common sense, that they challenge the assent of a sound and unbiased mind, with a degree of force and conviction almost equally irresistible.
The INFINITE DIVISIBILITY of matter, or, in other words, the INFINITE divisibility of a FINITE thing, extending even to the minutest atom, is a point agreed among geometricians, though not less incomprehensible to common sense than any of those mysteries in religion, against which the batteries of infidelity have been so industriously leveled.
But in the sciences of morals and politics, men are found far less tractable.
But this untractableness may be carried too far, and may degenerate into obstinacy, perverseness, or disingenuity. Though it cannot be pretended that the principles of moral and political knowledge have, in general, the same degree of certainty with those of the mathematics, yet they have much better claims in this respect than, to judge from the conduct of men in particular situations, we should be disposed to allow them.
The obscurity is much oftener in the passions and prejudices of the reasoner than in the subject.
Men, upon too many occasions, do not give their own understandings fair play; but, yielding to some untoward bias, they entangle themselves in words and confound themselves in subtleties.
They are in substance as follows:
A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care, and to the complete execution of the trusts for which it is responsible, free from every other control but a regard to the public good and to the sense of the people.
As the duties of superintending the national defense and of securing the public peace against foreign or domestic violence involve a provision for casualties and dangers to which no possible limits can be assigned, the power of making that provision ought to know no other bounds than the exigencies of the nation and the resources of the community.
As revenue is the essential engine by which the means of answering the national exigencies must be procured, the power of procuring that article in its full extent must necessarily be comprehended in that of providing for those exigencies.
As theory and practice conspire to prove that the power of procuring revenue is unavailing when exercised over the States in their collective capacities, the federal government must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes.
It may therefore be satisfactory to analyze the arguments with which they combat it.
Those of them which have been most labored with that view, seem in substance to amount to this: "It is not true, because the exigencies of the Union may not be susceptible of limitation, that its power of laying taxes ought to be unconfined.
Revenue is as requisite to the purposes of the local administrations as to those of the Union; and the former are at least of equal importance with the latter to the happiness of the people.
It is, therefore, as necessary that the State governments should be able to command the means of supplying their wants, as that the national government should possess the like faculty in respect to the wants of the Union.
But an indefinite power of taxation in the LATTER might, and probably would in time, deprive the FORMER of the means of providing for their own necessities; and would subject them entirely to the mercy of the national legislature.
It might allege a necessity of doing this in order to give efficacy to the national revenues.
And thus all the resources of taxation might by degrees become the subjects of federal monopoly, to the entire exclusion and destruction of the State governments."
This mode of reasoning appears sometimes to turn upon the supposition of usurpation in the national government; at other times it seems to be designed only as a deduction from the constitutional operation of its intended powers.
It is only in the latter light that it can be admitted to have any pretensions to fairness.
The moment we launch into conjectures about the usurpations of the federal government, we get into an unfathomable abyss, and fairly put ourselves out of the reach of all reasoning.
Imagination may range at pleasure till it gets bewildered amidst the labyrinths of an enchanted castle, and knows not on which side to turn to extricate itself from the perplexities into which it has so rashly adventured.
Whatever may be the limits or modifications of the powers of the Union, it is easy to imagine an endless train of possible dangers; and by indulging an excess of jealousy and timidity, we may bring ourselves to a state of absolute scepticism and irresolution.
I repeat here what I have observed in substance in another place, that all observations founded upon the danger of usurpation ought to be referred to the composition and structure of the government, not to the nature or extent of its powers.
The State governments, by their original constitutions, are invested with complete sovereignty.
In what does our security consist against usurpation from that quarter?
Doubtless in the manner of their formation, and in a due dependence of those who are to administer them upon the people.
If the proposed construction of the federal government be found, upon an impartial examination of it, to be such as to afford, to a proper extent, the same species of security, all apprehensions on the score of usurpation ought to be discarded.
It should not be forgotten that a disposition in the State governments to encroach upon the rights of the Union is quite as probable as a disposition in the Union to encroach upon the rights of the State governments.
What side would be likely to prevail in such a conflict, must depend on the means which the contending parties could employ toward insuring success.
But it is evident that all conjectures of this kind must be extremely vague and fallible: and that it is by far the safest course to lay them altogether aside, and to confine our attention wholly to the nature and extent of the powers as they are delineated in the Constitution.
Every thing beyond this must be left to the prudence and firmness of the people; who, as they will hold the scales in their own hands, it is to be hoped, will always take care to preserve the constitutional equilibrium between the general and the State governments.
In September, mr Young, having accomplished all that he had intended, informed his men that he was going to New Mexico.
The homeward route was through most of the country over which they had previously traveled.
Scattered over various parts of the dominion of Old Mexico are these Peublos, or Indian villages, called so because they are inhabited by Indians who bear that name.
These are the true descendants of the ancient Aztecs, who were once the subjects of the Montezumas.
They are usually a quiet and industrious race, and are most devout in their religious worship, according to the principles, forms, and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church.
They have not failed to inherit the superstition of their forefathers.
Former experience in a similar matter of official duty had taught those Mexicans that the American trappers were men of a peculiarly resolute nature.
Fair and legitimate means were therefore laid aside, and a foul policy adopted.
The treacherous Mexicans, however, continued annoying the commander of the trappers by gratuitously offering the men all the liquor they desired.
They would soon have fallen a complete prey to their enemies, had not a most singular circumstance put the Mexicans to flight.
One of the trappers, named james Higgins, without any provocation and without any excuse, except that he was intoxicated, shot a man named james Lawrence, inflicting a slight wound.
Such conduct so terrified the Mexicans that they took sudden and precipitous leave.
About dark, Young, by urging his half drunken men into a forced march, succeeded in overtaking Carson.
At the first supply of water, they went into camp.
A night of sleep soon set the brains of Young's trappers once more to rights.
The next day the party, most of them sufficiently ashamed of their drunken debauch, commenced with vigor the homeward march.
They continued nine days almost upon their former track, when outward bound.
On the ninth day, they once more stood on the banks of the Colorado River.
While encamped on this stream, a band of five hundred Indians made their appearance and entered the camp.
The rascals professed the greatest friendship for the trappers, but their actions not fully measuring their words, the white men looked to Carson for advice.
He had discovered that beneath their articles of dress their weapons were very carefully concealed; and from this circumstance it became quite clearly apparent the Indians intended to massacre the entire party. Here Carson's boldness proved, as it had before, and did many a time afterwards, the safety of himself and friends or associates.
At the time the Indians entered the camp, Carson, with only a few of the party, occupied it; the rest were out visiting their traps, which it was their general custom to set whenever they arrived at a suitable stream.
He found present among the warriors one who could speak the Spanish language.
Seeing that they would inevitably lose several of their braves if they made any hostile demonstration, they chose the discreet part of best policy, and departed.
As a general rule, no matter what the profit or urgent necessity which chance offers, these Indians will not hazard a contest when, to a certainty, they must expect their own killed will equal the number of scalps which they can obtain.
This rule, and doubtless some fearfulness on the part of the Indians, saved the lives of the entire band.
Not having forgotten their former troubles with these people, they determined to pay them off in their own coin by depriving them of the herd.
The entire herd fell into the possession of the trappers.
On the same evening, after the men had wrapped themselves up in their blankets and laid down for a sleep, and while enjoying their slumbers, a noise reached their ears which sounded very much like distant thunder; but a close application of the sense of hearing showed plainly that an enemy was near at hand.
Springing up, with rifle in hand-for generally in the mountains a man's gun rests in the same blanket with himself on all sleeping occasions-they sallied forth to reconnoitre, and discovered a few warriors driving along a band of at least two hundred horses.
The trappers comprehended instantly that the warriors had been to the Mexican settlements in Sonora on a thieving expedition, and that the horses had changed hands with only one party to the bargain.
The opportunity to instill a lesson on the savage marauders was too good to be lost.
They saluted the thieves with a volley from their rifles, which, with the bullet whizzing about their heads and bodies, so astonished them, that they seemed almost immediately to forget their stolen property, and to think only of a precipitous flight.
In a few moments, the whites found themselves masters of the field, and also of the property.
To return the animals to their owners was an impossibility; mr Young, therefore, selected as many of the best horses as he needed for himself and men, and game being very scarce, killed two and dried most of the meat for future use, turning the remainder loose.
Such either became wild mustangs or fell again into the clutches of the Indians.
The company then renewed their trapping, and continued it up the Gila to a point opposite the copper mines of New Mexico.
Here they left the river and proceeded to the copper mines, where they found mr Robert McKnight engaged in trading with the neighboring Indian tribes. These mines were not then, and ever since have not been, worked.
The holes which had many years before been made by the miners-but who they were is unknown-formed a safe hiding place for their skins.
The stock of beaver was therefore placed under the care of mr McKnight. Young and his men then renewed their march, and in due time arrived safely at Santa Fe.
Here they purchased licenses to trade with the Indians who live about the copper mines.
The deserted mines of New Mexico show incontrovertible signs of having been successfully and extensively worked, at some remote period, for various kinds of metals.
They have proved a knotty historical problem to many an investigating mind; for their authentic history has fallen, and probably will ever remain in oblivion.
The more probable hypothesis, however, is that the Indians themselves, many centuries in the past, were versed to some extent in the art of mining, and carried on the business in these mines; but from indolence or, to them, uselessness of the metals, the work was abandoned, and their descendants failed to obtain the knowledge which their ancestors possessed.
These mines, and those which exist nearer to the large towns, will some day render New Mexico a profitable and rich field for the learned antiquary.
The ruse which mr Young found absolutely necessary to employ, in order to blind the Mexican authorities, succeeded so well, that when the fur arrived at Santa Fe, every one considered the trappers had made a very good trade.
The amount of beaver thus brought in amounted to two thousand pounds.
The market price was twelve dollars the pound. The proceeds, therefore, of the entire trip were nearly twenty four thousand dollars.
It was during the month of April, eighteen thirty, that mr Young's party again reached the town of Taos.
Here they disbanded, having completed their enterprise.
Like as Jack, when he returns from his battles with old ocean, having a pocket well lined with hard earnings, fails not to plunge into excess, with the determination to make up for the pleasure lost by years of toil, the brave mountaineers courted merrymaking.
From their own accounts, they passed a short time gloriously.
These hardy trappers, like reliable old salts, proved to be as true to the bowl as they had been to their steel; for, most of the party, in a very brief space of time, were penniless and ready to be fitted out for another expedition.
Young Kit, at this period of his life, imitated the example set by his elders, for he wished to be considered by them as an equal and a friend.
He, however, passed through this terrible ordeal, which most frequently ruins its votary, and eventually came out brighter, clearer and more noble for the conscience polish which he received.
He contracted no bad habits, but learned the usefulness and happiness of resisting temptation, and became so well schooled that he was able, by the caution and advice of wisdom founded on experience, to prevent many a promising and skillful hand from grasping ruin in the same vortex.
The scenes of pleasure lasted until the fall of eighteen thirty.
Kit then joined his second trapping expedition.
This band had been formed for the purpose of trapping the principal streams of the Rocky Mountains.
mr Fitzpatrick, a trapper well known and respected by the mountaineers, had charge of the party.
He was, at that time, well acquainted by experience with the Rocky Mountains, and has, since then, gained an enviable fame as an Indian Agent.
From here they worked on until they reached the Green River.
Hence they journeyed to Jackson's Hole, which is a fork of the Great Columbia River.
After making a short stay at this point they started for the Salmon River.
Here they were joined by a band of their own party, who had left Taos some days in advance of the main body, and for whom they were then hunting.
The whole party, as now organized, remained where they were throughout the winter of eighteen thirty and eighteen thirty one, employed in killing only the amount of game necessary for their sustenance.
An unfortunate affair here happened to them.
In April of eighteen thirty one, they recommenced trapping, shaping their course for Bear River.
This is the principal stream that empties into GREAT SALT LAKE.
Kit Carson and four of his companions determined to join him.
For this purpose they started, and, after ten days of steady travel, found his party.
There are two of these natural Parks in the Rocky Mountains.
As their names imply, they are fair natural examples of the manufactured parks of civilization.
In some things nature has lavished upon them charms and beauties which no human skill can imitate.
Kit and his companions were graciously received by Gaunt; and, with him they trapped the streams in the vicinity of the New Park and the plains of Laramie to the South fork of the Platte.
Having finished here, they left for the Arkansas, remaining there while their captain went to Taos to dispose of their stock of furs and to make such purchases of necessaries as the men required.
Gaunt returned after an absence of two months; when, trapping operations were resumed on the Arkansas River, which they trapped until it froze over.
The party then went into Winter Quarters.
The business of trapping for beaver is no child's play.
A person unaccustomed to it may possibly look upon it as no very difficult task.
A single trial is usually sufficient to satisfy the uninitiated on this point; for, the beaver, above all other wild animals of America is endowed with an extraordinary amount of instinct.
During the winter the trappers had many very pleasant times, for they had little work beyond the task of making themselves comfortable. The snow fell to a great depth, which proved rather hard for their animals.
By dint of cutting down cottonwood trees and gathering the bark and branches for fodder, they managed to prevent them from dying of starvation.
The buffalo existed about there in great abundance; and, early in the winter, they had taken the precaution to kill and prepare a large supply of this kind of game, while it was in good condition.
In the month of January, the daily routine of their lives was rather unpleasantly disturbed.
A party of fifty Crow Indians made an unfriendly visit to their camp on one very dark night.
They succeeded in stealing nine of their loose animals, with which they escaped unperceived.
Kit Carson, with twelve of his companions, immediately saddled their horses and started in pursuit.
It was very difficult to follow the trail of the Indians from the fact that many herds of buffalo had crossed and repeatedly recrossed it during the night, making the tracks very indistinct.
Having traveled forty miles, their horses, which were very poor in flesh, became fatigued, causing them to think of making a halt.
With this object in view they traveled towards some timber which was near by.
On arriving at the woods, the advance of the party, to their surprise and not less to their satisfaction, discovered the smoke of their enemies' fires.
Their first care was to secure and provide for their animals.
The second was to prepare their arms.
As soon as it would do for them to move, they started, eager for the strife.
Their movements were made slowly and with great care in order not to alarm the savages.
Having obtained a position close enough to observe the strength of their enemies, they stopped to reconnoitre.
The men then crept for a long distance on their hands and knees until finally they obtained a full view of the Indians, which showed them that the savages had erected two rough forts and that they were now divided into two parties.
A dance was in progress in honor of the robbery so recently perpetrated, which proved conclusively, that they were without even a suspicion of danger.
Just outside one of the forts, the nine stolen animals were securely tied.
This sight did not tend to allay the wrath of the trappers.
They resolved that come what might the attempt to regain their property and punish the Indians should be made notwithstanding their strength.
To insure success in spite of their weakness, they determined to conceal themselves and wait quietly until the Indians had lain down for sleep.
During this time of suspense the trappers were subjected to great suffering for the weather was intensely cold and they possessed but a scanty allowance of clothing fit for such work.
But as there is an end to all things, there was an end to the dance and other festivities and the savages sought their rest.
At last the time for action arrived.
Kit Carson and five of his companions commenced crawling towards the stolen horses, which, on reaching, were easily set free by cutting their halters.
They then threw snow balls at them and by this means drove them away without disturbing the sleeping Indians.
The remainder, those who had lost no animals, wanted satisfaction for the trouble and hardship they had undergone while in pursuit of the thieves. Kit Carson and two others composed this latter party and thus were determined to punish the thieves, let the consequences of the attempt be ever so fatal.
The more peaceful party, seeing this earnestness, could not do otherwise than lend their aid in the fight and cheerfully did so.
There always existed such a feeling of brotherly love among the old trappers of the Rocky Mountains, that the hour of peril was never the hour for separation or desertion.
This instance affords a fair example how the minority could easily rule the majority when the minority held to the side of danger.
The whole band were now unanimous in favor of the attack.
Kit Carson, who had from the first acted as captain, ordered three men to take the recovered animals back to where they had secured their saddle horses.
Then, with his comrades, he marched directly for the Indian camp.
As soon as the occupants of the fort heard the noise they sprang to their feet, and thus became fair marks for the unerring rifles of the trappers.
The whites did not throw away a single shot; every ball struck a warrior in some vital spot.
Those who survived retreated to the fort occupied by their friends, and, as soon as possible, commenced returning the fire; but without execution, as the trappers, on discharging their first volley, had well concealed themselves behind trees, from whence they were shooting only when sure of an object.
It was now nearly daybreak; and as the savages discovered the weakness of the attacking party, they resolved to charge, feeling sure of success.
The remainder immediately retreated into the fort.
After considerable deliberation, the Indians decided once more to make a sortie.
On they came, and this time with such determination that the trappers could not withstand the assault, but were compelled to retreat.
They disputed, however, every inch of ground over which they trod, as they fell back from one tree to another, continually making their bullets tell with terrible effect on their foes.
They had heard the incessant firing and had become convinced that the fight was hotly contested and that their services were required.
On their joining, the whole party resolved to make one more stand, and as soon as the Indians saw this, they wavered and finally drew off.
Both sides had now, seemingly, had enough of fighting, and hostilities soon after entirely ceased, the savages marching back and leaving the whites masters of the field. Several of the trappers were slightly, but none dangerously, wounded. The Indians had paid dearly, in numbers killed, for their rascality. Finding the coast clear, Carson and his men set out and soon rejoined their comrades on the Arkansas River.
While on the south fork of the Platte, two of the party deserted, taking with them three of their best animals.
Suspecting their design, Gaunt sent Kit Carson and another man in pursuit of the fugitives, who had one day the start.
As was suspected, the two deserters had gone to the camp where the beaver fur was concealed and buried.
They had succeeded in digging it up and stealing about three hundred pounds of this valuable property, belonging to the company in general, share and share alike.
Carson and his companion failed entirely in their efforts to find the two men.
It is probable that they were killed by Indians, a fate which they, at least, richly merited.
This old camp, the reader will please bear in mind, was on the Arkansas River.
As has also been seen, they were unsuccessful.
It now remained for them to determine their future course.
The country was so infested with hostile Indians that it made their position, thus alone, very precarious.
To regain their commander's company was almost impracticable; at least, without a more important object to make the risk necessary, it was a foolhardy attempt.
Time in learning the loss was of no great importance either to their leader or their party. Sooner or later this, as a matter of course, would be fully shown.
Kit and his comrade, therefore, determined to remain where they were, in the old camp; and, to this end, immediately arranged everything so that they could make a successful defence in case they should be attacked by the savages.
They did not dare to venture out far from their fortifications; but, this was no great trial to them, as game existed in great plenty and came very near their fortifications.
While one slept, the other stood on guard.
It was their intention to await the return of their party; but, at the expiration of one month, they were quite happily relieved from their perilous position.
mr Blackwell, mr Gaunt's partner, arrived from the United States.
He was accompanied by fifteen men, and brought with him a complete outfit for the entire band.
Kit and his comrade had been expecting and were anxiously looking for this party.
They were also made quite happy in obtaining the articles of outfit which would render their wild life more agreeable and easy.
Shortly after this arrival, four men from the trapping party came into camp and brought the news as to the whereabouts of Gaunt and his men.
These Springs form the head waters of the south fork of the River Platte.
When four days' journey had been accomplished, and while they were partaking of their breakfast in camp, an alarm of Indians was given by one of the men.
He had accidentally discovered the red skin rascals as they were prowling about the camp.
A rush was instantly made by the trappers, with rifles in hand, to save their horses. Shots were fired and one Indian fell.
The rest of the band made off as empty handed as they came, with one exception.
One brave had succeeded in capturing and mounting a horse before the white men could reach him.
On the contrary, he galloped off; seemingly, quite proud of his trophy.
[Footnote four: These stampedes are a source of great profit to the Indians of the Plains.
The Camanches are particularly expert and daring in this kind of robbery.
When a camp is made which is nearly in range they turn their trained animals loose, who at once fly across the plain, penetrating and passing through the camp of their victims.
All of the picketed animals will endeavor to follow, and usually succeed in following, the trained horses.
Such are invariably led into the haunts of the thieves, who easily secure them. Young horses and mules are easily frightened; and, in the havoc which generally ensues, oftentimes great injury is done to the runaways themselves.
The sight of a stampede on a grand scale requires steady nerves to witness without tremor; and, woe to the footman who cannot get out of the way when the frightened animals come along.
Such, most frequently, is the fate of stampeded horses which have been bred in the States, not being trained by a prairie life experience to take care of themselves.
Instead of bravely stopping and fighting off the wolves, they run.
The whole pack are sure to leave the bolder animals and make for the runaways, which they seldom fail to overtake and dispatch.
This animal seldom fails to frighten the remainder, when away they all go with long ropes and picket pins dangling after them.
At other times, the limbs of the running horses get entangled in the ropes, when they are suddenly thrown.
Such seldom escape without broken legs or severe contusions, which are often incurable.
The experience of the day, however, had admonished them to be on their guard against surprise.
To make things sure as to their animals, they fastened them to stakes driven in the earth, sufficient rope being given them for grazing.
There are many of these charming little brooks which, emptying into, form this river. To the general traveler, however, they present one great drawback as eligible camping sites.
Their banks are usually pretty thickly lined with rattlesnakes.
Not so however with the mere visitor of, or casual traveller over, the Western Territories.
To them his rattlesnake ship is a formidable personage.
The rattlesnake rarely moves after sunset.
The night air is generally too chilling for him.
In the day time they are a noble enemy, always warning their antagonist of their hostile intentions by springing their rattles, thus giving a person warning of his danger.
By these two wise provisions of the Creator the power of this otherwise terrible reptile, is so limited or restrained, that the trapper rarely gives him a thought unless he comes in direct contact.
Although they are so numerous, it very seldom happens that either the Indian or the trapper is bitten by them.
The party had not been long at rest before their suspicions were aroused that hostile Indians were near them.
A faithful dog belonging to the camp kept up a furious barking, much more lustily than when wolves annoyed him.
An extra guard was therefore immediately posted, when the remainder of the party lay down; but, not for sleep.
They expected at every moment that their services would be needed to defend the camp.
Everything however passed as usual during the night; and, with the morning, all suspicion was laid aside.
Kit Carson, with three companions, proposed a visit to a fork of a river close by, to look for signs of beaver.
They had been informed that these animals were numerous in this particular stream.
The rascals succeeded in running off all of their loose animals.
A sharp skirmish ensued in which one of the warriors was killed, when the remainder fled, leaving the property once more in the hands of its rightful owners. The men however did not come off entirely safe.
One of them received a very severe wound; which, eventually, gave him considerable difficulty; but from the effects of which he finally recovered.
Kit and his companions in the mean time, in order to reach their destination, found it necessary, unless they should take a long and circuitous route, to cross one of those lofty peaks for which the Rocky Mountains are so famous.
The ascent was however commenced and successfully accomplished; but, not without labor and an occasional resting place being sought for breathing their animals.
In due time, they reached the desired stream; but, the beaver signs did not appear. Finding their errand had proved entirely useless, they started to return into camp.
Experience had taught them that the longest way round was, in this case, the quickest way home.
Taking therefore a circuitous route, they avoided recrossing the lofty mountain peak already alluded to.
As they were riding carelessly homeward, beguiling the time with anecdote and remark upon their future prospects, the scenery around them, with an occasional sight at some kind of game, what should appear ahead of them but four Indian warriors, remarkably well mounted, painted and decked with feathers, showing, conclusively, that they were out upon the war path.
The bullets from the rifles of the Indians flew about their ears thick and fast, for a heavy fire was opened upon them, as they passed, and incessantly kept up until they were out of their reach.
The trappers did not return a shot.
It would not have been according to their custom.
There is nothing they so much dread as being left on foot with an empty gun and no time to load, when perhaps a single shot might change defeat into victory; sure captivity into freedom, or a dead companion into a laughing, jolly and lovable help mate, ready for setting a trap or to engage in the next bloody skirmish.
This must inevitably happen if, after the rider has fired, among the score or so of passing bullets, one of them, perchance, took a peculiar fancy for a vital organ of his horse.
For some unaccountable reason the savages did not give chase.
As soon as Carson and his comrades had got out of the reach of the Indians they began to recall the suspicions concerning signs of Indians which their faithful dog had aroused.
Fears for the safety of their companions arose accordingly.
Therefore, giving spurs to their horses they pushed on with vigor to know the worst.
They had already surmised the reason why the Indians had thus set a trap for them.
Having been watching the camp during the night and finding the white men fully on the alert and carefully guarding against any surprise, they had quietly waited until suspicion of their proximity had been entirely laid aside.
The departure of Carson and his companions from camp was doubtless seen by the savages and afforded them a clear proof that the white men had forgotten their fears.
As Kit's departure with the men weakened the camp party the Indians had gathered together sufficient courage to make a bold charge for the coveted plunder.
The attack was skillfully planned and would undoubtedly have succeeded, but for the unexpected daring and promptitude displayed by Kit and his comrades.
Had such a skirmish taken place, nothing beyond an absolute miracle, or change of the laws of nature, could have saved the little band.
Kit and his friends had reason, therefore, to be very thankful for their safety.
They all felt that they had retained their scalps by a very close shave.
In consequence, the whole party was obliged to halt and again go into camp, having accomplished but a very short remove from their savage foes.
However, they succeeded in passing the night without further molestation.
If the poles are long they will act as springs, especially when the wood used is of a kind which has considerable elasticity.
It speaks more than would volumes of mere praise, concerning their character for true manhood.
When the wounded men had so far recovered that they could safely proceed, the whole party, now quite strong in its numerical power, as well as skill and mountaineer experience, departed for, and, in due time, arrived at the Old Park.
PART SECOND.
The Origin of Property.
The true form of human society cannot be determined until the following question has been solved:--
Property not being our natural condition, how did it gain a foothold? Why has the social instinct, so trustworthy among the animals, erred in the case of man?
I have said that human society is COMPLEX in its nature.
Though this expression is inaccurate, the fact to which it refers is none the less true; namely, the classification of talents and capacities.
Man, by his nature and his instinct, is predestined to society; but his personality, ever varying, is adverse to it.
A society of beasts is a collection of atoms, round, hooked, cubical, or triangular, but always perfectly identical.
The labors which animals perform, whether alone or in society, are exact reproductions of their character.
Just as the swarm of bees is composed of individual bees, alike in nature and equal in value, so the honeycomb is formed of individual cells, constantly and invariably repeated.
In the bee, the will is constant and uniform, because the instinct which guides it is invariable, and constitutes the animal's whole life and nature.
In man, talent varies, and the mind wavers; consequently, his will is multiform and vague.
He seeks society, but dislikes constraint and monotony; he is an imitator, but fond of his own ideas, and passionately in love with his works.
If, like the bees, every man were born possessed of talent, perfect knowledge of certain kinds, and, in a word, an innate acquaintance with the functions he has to perform, but destitute of reflective and reasoning faculties, society would organize itself.
We should see one man plowing a field, another building houses; this one forging metals, that one cutting clothes; and still others storing the products, and superintending their distribution.
Each one, without inquiring as to the object of his labor, and without troubling himself about the extent of his task, would obey orders, bring his product, receive his salary, and would then rest for a time; keeping meanwhile no accounts, envious of nobody, and satisfied with the distributor, who never would be unjust to any one.
But man acquires skill only by observation and experiment.
He reflects, then, since to observe and experiment is to reflect; he reasons, since he cannot help reasoning.
In reflecting, he becomes deluded; in reasoning, he makes mistakes, and, thinking himself right, persists in them.
He is wedded to his opinions; he esteems himself, and despises others.
Consequently, he isolates himself; for he could not submit to the majority without renouncing his will and his reason,--that is, without disowning himself, which is impossible.
A final illustration will make these facts still clearer.
If to the blind but convergent and harmonious instincts of a swarm of bees should be suddenly added reflection and judgment, the little society could not long exist.
In the first place, the bees would not fail to try some new industrial process; for instance, that of making their cells round or square.
Evil would be introduced into the honey producing republic by the power of reflection,--the very faculty which ought to constitute its glory.
Thus, moral evil, or, in this case, disorder in society, is naturally explained by our power of reflection.
Man, in his infancy, is neither criminal nor barbarous, but ignorant and inexperienced.
The difficulty of satisfying these various desires at the same time is the primary cause of the despotism of the will, and the appropriation which results from it.
On the other hand, man always needs a market for his products; unable to compare values of different kinds, he is satisfied to judge approximately, according to his passion and caprice; and he engages in dishonest commerce, which always results in wealth and poverty.
The practice of justice is a science which, when once discovered and diffused, will sooner or later put an end to social disorder, by teaching us our rights and duties.
This progressive and painful education of our instinct, this slow and imperceptible transformation of our spontaneous perceptions into deliberate knowledge, does not take place among the animals, whose instincts remain fixed, and never become enlightened.
But, in man, almost every thing is accomplished by intelligence; and intelligence supplements instinct.
Cuvier: Introduction to the Animal Kingdom.
Intelligence and instinct being common, then, though in different degrees, to animals and man, what is the distinguishing characteristic of the latter?
This lacks clearness, and requires an explanation.
If we grant intelligence to animals, we must also grant them, in some degree, reflection; for, the first cannot exist without the second, as f Cuvier himself has proved by numerous examples.
But notice that the learned observer defines the kind of reflection which distinguishes us from the animals as the POWER OF CONSIDERING OUR OWN MODIFICATIONS.
This I shall endeavour to interpret, by developing to the best of my ability the laconism of the philosophical naturalist.
The intelligence acquired by animals never modifies the operations which they perform by instinct: it is given them only as a provision against unexpected accidents which might disturb these operations.
This fact is one of the most curious and indisputable which philology has observed.
Man esteems only the products of reflection and of reason.
The most wonderful works of instinct are, in his eyes, only lucky GOD SENDS; he reserves the name DISCOVERY-I had almost said creation-for the works of intelligence.
Instinct is the source of passion and enthusiasm; it is intelligence which causes crime and virtue.
He keeps an account of his experience, and preserves the record; so that the race, as well as the individual, becomes more and more intelligent.
The animals do not transmit their knowledge; that which each individual accumulates dies with him.
Thus, evil-or error and its consequences-is the firstborn son of the union of two opposing faculties, instinct and reflection; good, or truth, must inevitably be the second child.
Property, born of the reasoning faculty, intrenches itself behind comparisons.
But, just as reflection and reason are subsequent to spontaneity, observation to sensation, and experience to instinct, so property is subsequent to communism.
Communism-or association in a simple form-is the necessary object and original aspiration of the social nature, the spontaneous movement by which it manifests and establishes itself.
It is the first phase of human civilization.
In this state of society,--which the jurists have called NEGATIVE COMMUNISM-man draws near to man, and shares with him the fruits of the field and the milk and flesh of animals.
To express this idea by an Hegelian formula, I will say:
Communism-the first expression of the social nature-is the first term of social development,--the THESIS; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term,--the ANTITHESIS.
When we have discovered the third term, the SYNTHESIS, we shall have the required solution.
Therefore it is necessary, by a final examination of their characteristics, to eliminate those features which are hostile to sociability.
The union of the two remainders will give us the true form of human association.
WHAT IS PROPERTY?
SECOND MEMOIR
PARIS, april first eighteen forty one.
MONSIEUR,--
Any one who, wishing to publish a treatise upon the constitution of the country, could not satisfy this threefold condition, would be obliged to procure the endorsement of a responsible patron possessing the requisite qualifications.
But we Frenchmen have the liberty of the press.
This grand right-the sword of thought, which elevates the virtuous citizen to the rank of legislator, and makes the malicious citizen an agent of discord-frees us from all preliminary responsibility to the law; but it does not release us from our internal obligation to render a public account of our sentiments and thoughts.
I have used, in all its fulness, and concerning an important question, the right which the charter grants us.
You have criticised in a kindly spirit-I had almost said with partiality for the writer-a work which teaches a doctrine that you thought it your duty to condemn.
Poets have sung of it in their hymns; philosophers have dreamed of it in their Utopias; priests teach it, but only for the spiritual world.
Like a stone thrown into a mass of serpents, the First Memoir on Property excited intense animosity, and aroused the passions of many. But, while some wished the author and his work to be publicly denounced, others found in them simply the solution of the fundamental problems of society; a few even basing evil speculations upon the new light which they had obtained.
It was not to be expected that a system of inductions abstractly gathered together, and still more abstractly expressed, would be understood with equal accuracy in its ensemble and in each of its parts.
But it is not my purpose here to pass upon the theory of the right of possession.
A flagrant violation of the right of property.
Naboth, and the miller of Sans Souci, would have protested against French law, as they protested against the caprice of their kings.
"It is the field of our fathers," they would have cried, "and we will not sell it!" Among the ancients, the refusal of the individual limited the powers of the State.
Man leaves his imprint, stamps his character, upon the objects of his handiwork. This plastic force of man, as the modern jurists say, is the seal which, set upon matter, makes it holy.
Soon, in the name of public utility, methods of cultivation and conditions of enjoyment will be prescribed; inspectors of agriculture and manufactures will be appointed; property will be taken away from unskilful hands, and entrusted to laborers who are more deserving of it; and a general superintendence of production will be established.
It is not two years since I saw a proprietor destroy a forest more than five hundred acres in extent.
If public utility had interfered, that forest-the only one for miles around-would still be standing.
But, it is said, expropriation on the ground of public utility is only an exception which confirms the principle, and bears testimony in favor of the right.
Very well; but from this exception we will pass to another, from that to a third, and so on from exceptions to exceptions, until we have reduced the rule to a pure abstraction.
How many supporters do you think, sir, can be claimed for the project of the conversion of the public funds?
Now, this so-called conversion is an extensive expropriation, and in this case with no indemnity whatever. The public funds are so much real estate, the income from which the proprietor counts upon with perfect safety, and which owes its value to the tacit promise of the government to pay interest upon it at the established rate, until the fund holder applies for redemption.
That such a measure may be justly executed, it must be generalized; that is, the law which provides for it must decree also that interest on sums lent on deposit or on mortgage throughout the realm, as well as house and farm rents, shall be reduced to three per cent.
See! If at the moment of conversion a piece of real estate yields an income of one thousand francs, after the new law takes effect it will yield only six hundred francs.
This last motive seems the most plausible one; for in spite of the clamors of interested parties, and the flagrant violation of certain rights, the public conscience is bound to fulfil its desire, and is no more affected when charged with attacking property, than when listening to the complaints of the bondholders.
In this case, instinctive justice belies legal justice.
Did they leave these two industries to themselves?
The native manufacturer was ruined by the colonist.
To maintain the beet root, the cane had to be taxed.
To protect the property of the one, it became necessary to violate the property of the other.
The most remarkable feature of this business was precisely that to which the least attention was paid; namely, that, in one way or another, property had to be violated.
Did they impose on each industry a proportional tax, so as to preserve a balance in the market?
They created a maximum PRICE for each variety of sugar; and, as this maximum PRICE was not the same, they attacked property in two ways,--on the one hand, interfering with the liberty of trade; on the other, disregarding the equality of proprietors.
Did they suppress the beet root by granting an indemnity to the manufacturer?
They sacrificed the property of the tax payer.
Finally, did they prefer to cultivate the two varieties of sugar at the nation's expense, just as different varieties of tobacco are cultivated?
They abolished, so far as the sugar industry was concerned, the right of property.
For a long time, a revision of the law concerning mortgages was clamored for; a process was demanded, in behalf of all kinds of credit and in the interest of even the debtors themselves, which would render the expropriation of real estate as prompt, as easy, and as effective as that which follows a commercial protest.
The Chamber of Deputies, in the early part of this year, eighteen forty one, discussed this project, and the law was passed almost unanimously.
There is nothing more just, nothing more reasonable, nothing more philosophical apparently, than the motives which gave rise to this reform.
Henceforth, the promptness of expropriation will save him from total ruin.
three.
These arguments, and others besides, you clearly stated, sir, in your first lectures of this academic year.
This certainly is not my plan for the abolition of property.
Far from mobilizing the soil, I would, if possible, immobilize even the functions of pure intelligence, so that society might be the fulfilment of the intentions of Nature, who gave us our first possession, the land.
Under the system of competition which is killing us, and whose necessary expression is a plundering and tyrannical government, the farmer will need always capital in order to repair his losses, and will be forced to contract loans.
Always depending upon the future for the payment of his debts, he will be deceived in his hope, and surprised by maturity.
I address this question to all whom this pitiless Nemesis pursues, and even troubles in their dreams.
Now, the debtor's sentence is irrevocable: he has but a few days of grace.
Lower interest on money!
But, as we have just seen, that is to limit property.
So the government thinks.
But it is a law of political economy that an increase of production augments the mass of available capital, consequently tends to raise wages, and finally to annihilate interest.
They formed a conspiracy against property! Their law to regulate the labor of children in factories will, without doubt, prevent the manufacturer from compelling a child to labor more than so many hours a day; but it will not force him to increase the pay of the child, nor that of its father.
But to fix their minimum wages is to compel the proprietor, is to force the master to accept his workman as an associate, which interferes with freedom and makes mutual insurance obligatory.
Little by little the government will become manufacturer, commission merchant, and retail dealer.
It will be the sole proprietor.
Even now the legislative power is asked, no longer simply to regulate the government of factories, but to create factories itself.
one.
TO CHECK THE CONTINUAL EMIGRATION OF LABORERS FROM THE COUNTRY INTO THE CITIES.
But, to keep the peasant in his village, his residence there must be made endurable: to be just to all, the proletaire of the country must be treated as well as the proletaire of the city.
What becomes, during this progressive invasion, of independent cultivation, exclusive domain, property?
I omit, for the sake of brevity, the numerous considerations which the professor adduces in support of what he calls, too modestly in my opinion, his Utopia.
three.
But, sir, the stoppage of private industry is the result of over production, and insufficient markets.
If, then, production continues in the national workshops, how will the crisis be terminated? Undoubtedly, by the general depreciation of merchandise, and, in the last analysis, by the conversion of private workshops into national workshops.
On the other hand, the government will need capital with which to pay its workmen; now, how will this capital be obtained?
By taxation.
And upon what will the tax be levied?
Upon property.
What, think you, will become, in this fatal circle, of the possibility of profit,--in a word, of property?
make haste to seize this glorious initiative; let the watchwords of equality, uttered from the heights of science and power, be repeated in the midst of the people; let them thrill the breasts of the proletaires, and carry dismay into the ranks of the last representatives of privilege!
The tendency of society in favor of compelling proprietors to support national workshops and public manufactories is so strong that for several years, under the name of ELECTORAL REFORM, it has been exclusively the question of the day.
What is, after all, this electoral reform which the people grasp at, as if it were a bait, and which so many ambitious persons either call for or denounce?
Already we have a minister of public works.
National workshops will follow; and soon, as a consequence, the excess of the proprietor's revenue over the workingman's wages will be swallowed up in the coffers of the laborers of the State.
There should be no secrets or reservations from peoples and powers.
He disgraces himself and fails in respect for his fellows, who, in publishing his opinions, employs evasion and cunning.
Before the people act, they need to know the whole truth.
Unhappy he who shall dare to trifle with them!
For the people are credulous, but they are strong.
There are thousands of documents, even official documents, to prove this, if necessary.
For the rest, the present system is only a continuation of the municipal system, which, in the middle ages, sprang up in connection with feudalism,--an oppressive, mischief making system, full of petty passions and base intrigues.
Yet the suggestion attracted Helen, too.
"Here we be!" he croaked.
Mary Cox pulled open the door and the first newcomer popped out as though she had been clinging to the handle when The Fox made the movement.
"We will lead the march."
We will take you to the office of the Preceptress."
"Yes!" agreed Sarah Fish, one of the Infants just arrived.
"Two of them came into our room at once-the girl they call The Fox, and Miss Steele.
I don't want either."
"I think it would be nicer for us Infants, as they call us, to keep together.
"Hear! hear!" cried Miss Fish.
I, for one, want to get into the real school society----"
It would look silly," cried Helen.
"We won't keep the older girls out of it, if they want to join," laughed Sarah.
Most of the girls laughed at that.
And the suggestion of a separate club for the Infants seemed to be well received.
"AUNT HANNAH MOORE."
If such were her calculations she was greatly mistaken.
For although Aunt Hannah was destitute of book learning she was nevertheless a woman of thought and natural ability, and while she wisely kept her counsel from her mistress she took care to make her wants known to an abolitionist.
The store keeper quickly made known her condition at the Anti slavery Office, and in double quick time j m
In the eyes of the mistress this procedure was so extraordinary that she became very much excited and for a moment threatened them with the "broomstick," but her raving had no effect on Messrs.
McKim and Wise, who did not rest contented until Aunt Hannah was safely in their hands.
It was prior to her coming into the possession of Moore that Aunt Hannah had been made to drink the bitter waters of oppression.
From this point, therefore, we shall present some of the incidents of her life, from infancy, and very nearly word for word as she related them:
"Moore bought me from a man named McCaully, who owned me about a year.
I fared dreadful bad under McCaully.
One day in a rage he undertook to beat me with the limb of a cherry tree; he began at me and tried in the first place to snatch my clothes off, but he did not succeed.
After that he beat the cherry tree limb all to pieces over me.
I crept out of doors and throwed up blood; some days I was hardly able to creep. With this beating I was laid up several weeks.
Another time Mistress McCaully got very angry.
One day she beat me as bad as he did.
She was a woman who would get very mad in a minute.
One day she began scolding and said the kitchen wasn't kept clean.
She soon ordered me to come in to her.
I went in as she ordered me; she met me with a mule rope, and ordered me to cross my hands.
I crossed my hands and she tied me to the bedstead.
He said to his wife she has begged and begged and you have whipped her enough.
The little girl was not able to do it; mr McCaully then untied me himself.
Both times that I was beat the blood run down from my head to my feet.
"They wouldn't give you anything to eat hardly.
He could tell all about how he was kidnapped, but could not find anybody to do anything for him, so he had to content himself.
He was afraid I was going to die, or he would lose me, and I would not be of any service to him, so he took and traded me off for a wagon.
I was something better when he traded me off; well enough to be about.
My health remained bad for about four years, and I never got my health until Moore bought me. Moore took me for a debt.
I was not born in Missouri but was born in Virginia.
From my earliest memory I was owned by Conrad Hackler; he lived in Grason County.
Hackler bought me from a man named William Scott.
I must go back by good rights to the beginning and tell all: Scott bought me first from a young man he met one day in the road, with a bundle in his arms.
Scott, wishing to know of the young man what he had in his bundle, was told that he had a baby.
'What are you going to do with it?' said Scott.
Scott offered the young man a horse for it, and the young man took him up.
This is the way I was told that Scott came by me.
I never knowed anything about my mother or father, but I have always believed that my mother was a white woman, and that I was put away to save her character; I have always thought this.
Under Hackler I was treated more like a brute than a human being.
A bed of straw and old rags was made for me in a big trough called the tan trough (a trough having been used for tanning purposes).
The cats about the place came and slept with me, and was all the company I had.
I had to work with the hoe in the field and help do everything in doors and out in all weathers.
After I growed up to be a woman my master thought nothing of taking my clothes off, and would whip me until the blood would run down to the ground.
After I was twenty five years old they did not treat me so bad; they both professed to get religion about that time; and my master said he would never lay the weight of his finger on me again. Once after that mistress wanted him to whip me, but he didn't do it, nor never whipped me any more.
After awhile my master died; if they had gone according to law I would have been hired out or sold, but my mistress wanted to keep me to carry on the place for her support.
So I was kept for seven or eight years after his death.
It was understood between my mistress, and her children, and her friends, who all met after master died, that I was to take care of mistress, and after mistress died I should not serve anybody else.
I done my best to keep my mistress from suffering.
After a few years they all became dissatisfied, and moved to Missouri.
Without means they lived as poor people commonly live, on small farms in the woods.
I still lived with my mistress.
Some of the heirs got dissatisfied, and sued for their rights or a settlement; then I was sold with my child, a boy."
The half of what she passed through in the way of suffering has scarcely been hinted at in this sketch.
Fifty seven years were passed in bondage before she reached Philadelphia.
Gillingham's), whose hearts had been in deep sympathy with the slave for many years.
Her mind was deeply imbued with religious feeling, and an unshaken confidence in God as her only trust; she connected herself with the a m e
Bethel Church, of Philadelphia, where she has walked, blameless and exemplary up to this day.
Probably there is not a member in that large congregation whose simple faith and whose walk and conversation are more commendable than Aunt Hannah's.
The name of the recipient of the good Quaker friend's bounty and Aunt Hannah's companion, was Thomas Todd.
CHAPTER eighteen: CANNAE
As the elephant tore down the road to the town many were the narrow escapes that, as they thought, those coming up had of being crushed or thrown into the air by the angry beast.
Some threw themselves on their faces, others got over the parapet and hung by their hands until he had passed, while some squeezed themselves against the wall; but the elephant passed on without doing harm to any.
On reaching the foot of the descent the mahout guided the animal to the left, and, avoiding the busy streets of the town, directed its course towards the more quiet roads of the opulent quarter of Megara.
The cries of the people at the approach of the elephant preceded its course, and all took refuge in gardens or houses.
The latter became less and less frequent, until, at a distance of two miles from the foot of the citadel, the mahout, on looking round, perceived no one in sight.
He brought the elephant suddenly to a standstill.
"Quick, my lord," he exclaimed, "now is the time."
Malchus threw off the sack, climbed out of the howdah, and slipped down by the elephant's tail, the usual plan for dismounting when an elephant is on its feet.
A minute or two later Malchus issued out and quietly followed it.
The scheme had been entirely successful.
Malchus had escaped from the citadel without the possibility of a suspicion arising that he had issued from its gates, and in his Arab garb he could now traverse the streets unsuspected.
Nessus and the Arab at once returned to the citadel.
It was agreed that the former had better continue his work as usual until the evening, and then ask for his discharge on the plea that he had received a message requiring his presence in his native village, for it was thought that suspicion might be excited were he to leave suddenly without drawing his pay, and possibly a search might be instituted in the city to discover his whereabouts.
"Hanno's faction is all powerful at present," he said, "and were Hannibal himself here I doubt whether his voice could stir the senate into taking action such as is needed.
I think it would be in the highest degree dangerous were we, as you propose, to introduce you suddenly to the senate as Hannibal's ambassador to them, and leave you to plead his cause.
You would, I am convinced, throw away your life for no good purpose, while your presence and your mysterious escape from prison would be made the pretense for a fresh series of persecutions of our partisans.
"To ask Carthage to make these sacrifices in her present mood is hopeless; we must await an opportunity.
I and my friends will prepare the way, will set our agents to work among the people, and when the news of another victory arrives and the people's hopes are aroused and excited, we will strike while the iron is hot, and call upon them to make one great effort to bring the struggle to a conclusion and to finish with Rome forever.
"Such is, in my opinion, the only possible mode of proceeding.
To move now would be to ensure a rejection of our demands, to bring fresh persecutions upon us, and so to weaken us that we should be powerless to turn to good account the opportunity which the news of another great victory would afford.
"In the meantime you must, for a short time, remain in concealment, while I arrange for a ship to carry you back to Italy."
"The sooner the better," Malchus said bitterly, "for Carthage with its hideous tyranny, its foul corruption, its forgetfulness of its glory, its honour, and even its safety, is utterly hateful to me.
I trust that never again shall I set foot within its walls.
She sees unmoved the heroic efforts which Hannibal and his army are making to save her, and she will not stretch out a hand to aid him.
She lives contentedly under the constant tyranny of Hanno's rule, satisfied to be wealthy, luxurious, and slothful, to carry on her trade, to keep her riches, caring nothing for the manly virtues, indifferent to valour, preparing herself slowly and surely to fall an easy prey to Rome.
A nation which can place a mere handful of its own citizens in the line of battle voluntarily dooms herself to destruction."
"Whether it comes in my time or not," Malchus said, "I will be no sharer in the fate of Carthage.
I have done with her; and if I do not fall in the battlefield I will, when the war is over, seek a refuge among the Gauls, where, if the life is rough, it is at least free and independent, where courage and manliness and honour count for much, and where the enervating influence of wealth is as yet unknown.
"I say nothing to dissuade you, Malchus," the old man replied, "such are the natural sentiments of your age; and methinks, were my own time to come over again, I too would choose such a life in preference to an existence in the polluted atmosphere of ungrateful Carthage.
And now, will you stop here with me, or will you return to the place where you are staying?
Let your follower come nightly to me for instructions; let him enter the gate and remain in the garden near it.
I will come down and see him; his visits, were they known, would excite suspicion.
Bid him on his return watch closely to see that he is not followed, and tell him to go by devious windings and to mix in the thickest crowds in order to throw any one who may be following off his track before he rejoins you.
Come again and see me before you leave.
Here is a bag of gold; you will need it to reward those who have assisted in your escape."
Suddenly Nessus stopped and listened, and then resumed his walk.
"I think we are followed, my lord," he said, "one of Hanno's spies in Manon's household is no doubt seeking to discover who are the Arabs who have paid his master a visit.
When we get to the next turning do you walk on and I will turn down the road.
If the man behind us be honest he will go straight on; if he be a spy, he will hesitate and stop at the corner to decide which of us he shall follow; then I shall know what to do."
Accordingly at the next crossroad they came to Nessus turned down and concealed himself a few paces away, while Malchus, without pausing, walked straight on.
A minute later Nessus saw a dark figure come stealthily along.
He stopped at the junction of the roads and stood for a few seconds in hesitation, then he followed Malchus.
Nessus issued from his hiding place, and, with steps as silent and stealthy as those of a tiger tracking his prey, followed the man.
When within a few paces of him he gave a sudden spring and flung himself upon him, burying his knife between his shoulders.
Nessus coolly wiped his knife upon the garments of the spy, and then proceeded at a rapid pace until he overtook Malchus.
After bidding farewell to the old noble, Malchus returned to the house of the Arab and prepared for his departure.
In the course of the day he had provided himself with the garments of a trader, the character which he was now about to assume.
On the sixth day after leaving Carthage the ship entered the port of Corinth.
We are ready, of course, to pay extra for the trouble."
He asked rather a high price for putting them ashore in a boat as they wished, and Malchus haggled over the sum for a considerable time, as a readiness to pay an exorbitant price might have given rise to doubts in the captain's mind as to the quality of his passengers.
Once or twice he made as if he would go ashore, and the captain at last abated his demands to a reasonable sum.
The Roman army was as before watching him at a short distance off.
Malchus at once sought the tent of the general, whose surprise at seeing him enter was great, for he had not expected that he would return until the spring.
He and his friends will doubtless work quietly to prepare the public mind, and I trust that ere very long some decisive victory will give them the opportunity for exciting a great demonstration on our behalf."
From first to last, through the long war, there was neither grumbling, nor discontent, nor insubordination among the troops.
They served willingly and cheerfully.
They had absolute confidence in their general, and were willing to undertake the most tremendous labours and to engage in the most arduous conflicts to please him, knowing that he, on his part, was unwearied in promoting their comfort and well being at all other times.
As the spring advanced the great magazines which Hannibal had brought with him became nearly exhausted, and no provisions could be obtained from the surrounding country, which had been completely ruined by the long presence of the two armies.
The romans possessed the great advantage over him of having magazines in their rear constantly replenished by their allies, and move where they might, they were sure of obtaining subsistence without difficulty.
Thus, upon the march, they were unembarrassed by the necessity of taking a great baggage train with them, and, when halted, their general could keep his army together in readiness to strike a blow whenever an opportunity offered; while Hannibal, on the other hand, was forced to scatter a considerable portion of the army in search of provisions.
The annual elections at Rome had just taken place, and Terentius Varro and Emilius Paulus had been chosen consuls.
Varro belonged to the popular party, and is described by the historians of the period as a coarse and brutal demagogue, the son of a butcher, and having himself been a butcher.
But he was unquestionably an able man, and possessed some great qualities.
The praetor Marcellus, who had slain a Gaulish king with his own hand in the last Gaulish war, was at Ostia with a legion.
Hannibal saw the opportunity, and when spring was passing into summer broke up his camp and marched straight to Cannae, where the vast magazines of the romans at once fell into his hands.
He thus not only obtained possession of his enemy's supplies, but interposed between the romans and the low lying district of Southern Apulia, where alone, at, this early season of the year, the corn was fully ripe.
The senate therefore, having largely reinforced the army, ordered the consuls to advance and give battle.
Varro wished to march against the enemy without delay, while Emilius was adverse to risking an engagement in a country which, being level and open, was favourable to the action of Hannibal's superior cavalry.
On the following day Varro, whose turn it was to command, marched towards the hostile camp.
Hannibal attacked the Roman advanced guard with his cavalry and light infantry, but Varro had supported his cavalry not only by his light troops, but by a strong body of his heavy armed infantry, and after an engagement, which lasted for several hours, he repulsed the Carthaginians with considerable loss.
The next morning Emilius, who was in command, detached a third of his force across the river, and encamped them there for the purpose of supporting the Roman foraging parties on that side and of interrupting those of the Carthaginians.
The next day passed quietly, but on the following morning Hannibal quitted his camp and formed his army in order of battle to tempt the romans to attack; but Emilius, sensible that the ground was against him, would not move, but contented himself with further strengthening his camps.
Hannibal, seeing that the romans would not fight, detached his Numidian cavalry across the river to cut off the Roman foraging parties and to surround and harass their smaller camp on that side of the river.
By thus doing he obtained a position which he could the better hold with his inferior forces, while the romans, deeming that he intended to attack their camp on that side of the river, would be likely to move their whole army across and to give battle.
This in fact Varro proceeded to do.
This had been skillfully chosen.
The river, whose general course was east and west, made a loop, and across this Hannibal had drawn up his army with both wings resting upon the river.
Thus the romans could not outflank him, and the effect of their vastly superior numbers in infantry would to some extent be neutralized.
The following was the disposition of his troops.
The Spaniards and Gauls occupied the centre of the line of infantry.
The Africans formed the two wings.
Varro placed his infantry in close and heavy order, so as to reduce their front to that of the Carthaginians.
The Roman cavalry, numbering two thousand four hundred men, was on his right wing, and was thus opposed to Hannibal's heavy cavalry, eight thousand strong.
Emilius commanded the Roman right, Varro the left.
While this contest was going on, Hannibal advanced his centre so as to form a salient angle projecting in front of his line.
The latter were instantly overthrown, and were driven from the field with great slaughter.
While the Carthaginian heavy horse were thus defeating the Roman cavalry, the Numidians maneuvered near the greatly superior cavalry of the Italian allies, and kept them occupied until the heavy horse, after destroying the Roman cavalry, swept round behind their infantry and fell upon the rear of the Italian horse, while the Numidians charged them fiercely in front.
Thus caught in a trap the Italian horse were completely annihilated, and so, before the heavy infantry of the two armies met each other, not a Roman cavalry soldier remained alive and unwounded on the field.
These resisted with great obstinacy.
The principes, who formed the second line of the Roman infantry, came forward and joined the spearmen, and even the triarii pressed forward and joined in the fight.
Fighting with extreme obstinacy the Carthaginian centre was forced gradually back until they were again in a line with the Africans on their flanks.
This was the moment for which Hannibal had waited.
He wheeled round both his flanks, and the Africans, who had hitherto not struck a blow, now fell in perfect order upon the flanks of the Roman mass, while Hasdrubal with his victorious cavalry charged down like a torrent upon their rear.
Then followed a slaughter unequalled in the records of history.
Unable to open out, to fight, or to fly, with no quarter asked or given, the romans and their Latin allies fell before the swords of their enemies, till, of the seventy thousand infantry which had advanced to the fight, forty thousand had fallen on the field.
All the troops in both camps were forced to surrender on the following morning, and thus only fifteen thousand scattered fugitives escaped of the eighty seven thousand two hundred infantry and cavalry under the command of the Roman consuls.
one.
Duration, time, and eternity, are, not without reason, thought to have something very abstruse in their nature.
three.
Nature and origin of the idea of Duration.
To understand TIME and ETERNITY aright, we ought with attention to consider what idea it is we have of DURATION, and how we came by it.
five.
The Idea of Duration applicable to Things whilst we sleep.
But if Adam and Eve, (when they were alone in the world,) instead of their ordinary night's sleep, had passed the whole twenty four hours in one continued sleep, the duration of that twenty four hours had been irrecoverably lost to them, and been for ever left out of their account of time.
six.
seven.
Very slow motions unperceived.
eight.
Very swift motions unperceived.
nine.
Hence I leave it to others to judge, whether it be not probable that our ideas do, whilst we are awake, succeed one another in our minds at certain distances; not much unlike the images in the inside of a lantern, turned round by the heat of a candle.
ten.
Real succession in swift motions without sense of succession.
eleven.
In slow motions.
twelve.
thirteen.
fourteen.
Proof.
fifteen.
seventeen.
This consideration of duration, as set out by certain periods and marked by certain measures or epochs, is that, I think, which most properly we call TIME.
eighteen.
'Before all time,' and 'When time shall be no more.'
nineteen.
The Revolutions of the Sun and Moon, the properest Measures of Time for mankind.
twenty.
But not by their Motion, but periodical Appearances.
No two Parts of Duration can be certainly known to be equal.
These yet, by their presumed and apparent equality, serve as well to reckon time by (though not to measure the parts of duration exactly) as if they could be proved to be exactly equal.
Time not the Measure of Motion
twenty three.
twenty four.
Our Measure of Time applicable to Duration before Time.
twenty five.
twenty six.
twenty seven.
Eternity.
twenty eight.
twenty nine.
thirty.
thirty one.
CHAPTER fifteen.
IDEAS OF DURATION AND EXPANSION, CONSIDERED TOGETHER.
one.
Expansion not bounded by Matter.
Just so is it in duration.
five.
Time to Duration is as Place to Expansion.
six.
seven.
eight.
They belong to all finite beings.
nine.
ten.
Their Parts inseparable.
twelve.
Finite or any magnitude holds not any proportion to infinite.
The cord didn't wind around the Pinkie, as he was too far off, but the weight hit him in the eye and made him howl lustily as he trotted back to his comrades at full speed.
After this experience the invaders were careful to keep a safe distance from the wall.
The Boolooroo, having made all preparations to receive the enemy, was annoyed because they held back.
He was himself so nervous and excited that he became desperate and after an hour of tedious waiting, during which time he pranced around impatiently, he decided to attack the hated Pinkies and rid the country of them.
"Their dreadful color makes me hysterical," he said to his soldiers, "so if I am to have any peace of mind we must charge the foe and drive them back into the Fog Bank.
But take all the prisoners you can, my brave men, and to morrow we will have a jolly time patching them.
Don't be afraid; those pink creatures have no blue blood in their veins and they'll run like rabbits when they see us coming."
Then he ordered the gate thrown open and immediately the Blueskins poured out into the open plain and began to run toward the Pinkies.
The Boolooroo went out, too, but he kept well behind his people, remembering the sharp sticks with which the enemy were armed.
The Pinkies did not run like rabbits, but formed a solid line and knelt down with their long, sharp sticks pointed directly toward the Blueskins, the other ends being set firmly upon the ground.
Of course the Blueskins couldn't run against these sharp points, so they halted a few feet away and began to swing their cord and weights.
The Blueskins hesitated until a few got pricked and began to yell with terror, when the whole of the Boolooroo's attacking party turned and ran back to the gate, their Ruler reaching it first of all.
The Pinkies tried to chase them, but their round, fat legs were no match for the long, thin legs of the Blueskins, who quickly gained the gate and shut themselves up in the City again.
"It is evident," panted the Boolooroo, facing his defeated soldiers wrathfully, "that you are a pack of cowards!"
"I merely ran back to the City to get a drink of water, for I was thirsty," declared the Boolooroo.
"So did we!
So did we!" cried the soldiers, eagerly.
"We were all thirsty."
"Your High and Mighty Spry and Flighty Majesty," remarked the Captain, respectfully, "it occurs to me that the weapons of the Pinkies are superior to our own.
What we need, in order to oppose them successfully, is a number of sharp sticks which are longer than their own."
"True-true!" exclaimed the Boolooroo, enthusiastically.
"Get to work at once and make yourselves long sharp sticks, and then we will attack the enemy again."
So the soldiers and citizens all set to work preparing long sharp sticks, and while they were doing this Rosalie the Witch had a vision in which she saw exactly what was going on inside the City wall.
Queen Trot and Cap'n Bill and Button Bright saw the vision, too, for they were all in the tent together, and the sight made them anxious.
"What can be done?" asked the girl.
"The Blueskins are bigger and stronger than the Pinkies, and if they have sharp sticks which are longer than ours they will surely defeat us."
"I have one magic charm," said Rosalie, thoughtfully, "that will save our army; but I am allowed to work only one magic charm every three days-not oftener-and perhaps I'll need the magic for other things."
"Strikes me, ma'am," returned the sailor, "that what we need most on this expedition is to capture the Blueskins.
If we don't, we'll need plenty of magic to help us back to the Pink Country; but if we do, we can take care of ourselves without magic."
"Very well," replied Rosalie; "I will take your advice, Cap'n, and enchant the weapons of the Pinkies."
She then went out and had all the Pinkies come before her, one by one, and she enchanted their sharp sticks by muttering some cabalistic words and making queer passes with her hands over the weapons.
"Now," she said to them, "you will be powerful enough to defeat the Blueskins, whatever they may do."
The Pinkies were overjoyed at this promise and it made them very brave indeed, since they now believed they would surely be victorious.
Their sticks were twice as long as those of the Pinkies and the Boolooroo chuckled with glee to think what fun they would have in punching holes in the round, fat bodies of his enemies.
Out from the gate they marched very boldly and pressed on to attack the Pinkies, who were drawn up in line of battle to receive them, with Cap'n Bill at their head.
When the opposing forces came together, however, and the Blueskins pushed their points against the Pinkies, the weapons which had been enchanted by Rosalie began to whirl in swift circles-so swift that the eye could scarcely follow the motion.
The result was that the lances of the Boolooroo's people could not touch the Pinkies, but were thrust aside with violence and either broken in two or sent hurling through the air in all directions.
Finding themselves so suddenly disarmed, the amazed Blueskins turned about and ran again, while Cap'n Bill, greatly excited by his victory, shouted to his followers to pursue the enemy, and hobbled after them as fast as he could make his wooden leg go, swinging his sharp stick as he advanced.
The Blues were in such a frightened, confused mass that they got in one another's way and could not make very good progress on the retreat, so the old sailor soon caught up with them and began jabbing at the crowd with his stick.
Unfortunately the Pinkies had not followed their commander, being for the moment dazed by their success, so that Cap'n Bill was all alone among the Blueskins when he stepped his wooden leg into a hole in the ground and tumbled full length, his sharp stick flying from his hand and pricking the Boolooroo in the leg as it fell.
At this the Ruler of the Blues stopped short in his flight to yell with terror, but seeing that only the sailorman was pursuing them and that this solitary foe had tumbled flat upon the ground, he issued a command and several of his people fell upon poor Cap'n Bill, seized him in their long arms and carried him struggling into the City, where he was fast bound.
Then a panic fell upon the Pinkies at the loss of their leader, and Trot and Button Bright called out in vain for them to rescue Cap'n Bill.
By the time the army recovered their wits and prepared to obey, it was too late.
And, although Trot ran with them, in her eagerness to save her friend, the gate was found to be fast barred and she knew it was impossible for them to force an entrance into the City.
So she went sorrowfully back to the camp, followed by the Pinkies, and asked Rosalie what could be done.
"I'm sure I do not know," replied the Witch.
"Three days is a long time," remarked Trot, dismally.
"The Boolooroo may decide to patch him at once," added Button Bright, with equal sadness, for he too mourned the sailor's loss.
"I am not a fairy, my dears, but merely a witch, and so my magic powers are limited.
We can only hope that the Boolooroo won't patch Cap'n Bill for three days."
The band tried to enliven them by playing the "Dead March," but it was not a success.
The Pinkies were despondent in spite of the fact that they had repulsed the attack of the Blues, for as yet they had not succeeded in gaining the City or finding the Magic Umbrella, and the blue dusk of this dread country-which was so different from their own land of sunsets-made them all very nervous.
They saw the moon rise for the first time in their lives, and its cold, silvery radiance made them shudder and prevented them from going to sleep.
Trot tried to interest them by telling them that on the Earth the people had both the sun and the moon, and loved them both; but nevertheless it is certain that had not the terrible Fog Bank stood between them and the Pink Land most of the invading army would have promptly deserted and gone back home.
Trot couldn't sleep, either, she was so worried over Cap'n Bill.
"We can make a rope ladder that will enable you to climb to the top of the wall, and then you can lower it to the other side and descend into the City.
But, if anyone should see you, you would be captured."
"I'll risk that," said the child, excited at the prospect of gaining the side of Cap'n Bill in this adventurous way.
"Please make the rope ladder at once, Rosalie!"
So the Witch took some ropes and knotted together a ladder long enough to reach to the top of the wall.
When it was finished, the three-Rosalie, Trot and Button Bright-stole out into the moonlight and crept unobserved into the shadow of the wall.
The Blueskins were not keeping a very close watch, as they were confident the Pinkies could not get into the City.
The hardest part of Rosalie's task was to toss up one end of the rope ladder until it would catch on some projection on top of the wall.
There were few such projections, but after creeping along the wall for a distance they saw the end of a broken flagstaff near the top edge.
The Witch tossed up the ladder, trying to catch it upon this point, and on the seventh attempt she succeeded.
"Good!" cried Trot; "now I can climb up."
"Don't you want me to go with you?" asked Button Bright, a little wistfully.
"No," said the girl; "you must stay to lead the army.
And, if you can think of a way, you must try to rescue us.
Perhaps I'll be able to save Cap'n Bill myself; but if I don't it's all up to you, Button Bright."
"I'll do my best," he promised.
"And here-keep my polly till I come back," added Trot, giving him the bird.
As the beautiful Witch kissed the little girl good bye she slipped upon her finger a curious ring.
At once Button Bright exclaimed:
"Why, where has she gone?"
"Can't you see me?"
"No," replied the boy, mystified.
"It's a magic ring I've loaned you, my dear," said she, "and as long as you wear it you will be invisible to all eyes-those of Blueskins and Pinkies alike.
If at any time you wish to be seen, take the ring from your finger; but as long as you wear it, no one can see you-not even Earth people."
"Oh, thank you!" cried Trot.
"That will be fine."
Where did you get it?"
"The Queen of the Mermaids gave it to me," answered Trot; "but Sky Island is so far away from the sea that the ring won't do me any good while I'm here.
It's only to call the mermaids to me if I need them, and they can't swim in the sky, you see."
Rosalie smiled and kissed her again.
"Be brave, my dear," she said, "and I am sure you will be able to find Cap'n Bill without getting in danger yourself.
But be careful not to let any Blueskin touch you, for while you are in contact with any person you will become visible.
Keep out of their way and you will be perfectly safe.
Don't lose the ring, for you must give it back to me when you return.
It is one of my witchcraft treasures and I need it in my business."
A little way off she found a bluestone seat, near to the inner edge, and attaching the ladder to this she easily descended it and found herself in the Blue City.
All the Blueskins except a few sentries had gone to bed and were sound asleep.
A blue gloom hung over the City, which was scarcely relieved by a few bluish, wavering lights here and there, but Trot knew the general direction in which the palace lay and she decided to go there first.
Once or twice the little girl lost her way, for the streets were very puzzling to one not accustomed to them, but finally she sighted the great palace and went up to the entrance.
There she found a double guard posted.
They were sitting on a bench outside the doorway and both stood up as she approached.
"We thought we heard footsteps," said one.
It was the first time the girl had seen them together and she marveled at the queer patching that had so strongly united them, yet so thoroughly separated them.
"You see," remarked Jimfred, as they seated themselves again upon the bench, "the Boolooroo has ordered the patching to take place to morrow morning after breakfast.
"We're sorry for anyone who has to be patched," replied Fredjim in a reflective tone, "for although it didn't hurt us as much as we expected, it's a terrible mix up to be in-until we become used to our strange combination.
You and we are about alike now, Jimfred, although we were so different before."
"Not so," said Jimfred; "we are really more intelligent than you are, for the left side of our brain was always the keenest before we were patched."
"That may be," admitted Fredjim, "but we are much the strongest, because our right arm was by far the best before we were patched."
"We are not sure of that," responded Jimfred, "for we have a right arm, too, and it is pretty strong."
"We will test it," suggested the other, "by all pulling upon one end of this bench with our right arms.
While they were tussling at the bench, dragging it first here and then there in the trial of strength, Trot opened the door of the palace and walked in.
It was pretty dark in the hall and only a few dim blue lights showed at intervals down the long corridors.
As the girl walked through these passages she could hear snores of various degrees coming from behind some of the closed doors and knew that all the regular inmates of the place were sound asleep.
So she mounted to the upper floor, and thinking she would be likely to find Cap'n Bill in the Room of the Great Knife she went there and tried the door.
It was locked, but the key had been left on the outside.
She waited until the sentry who was pacing the corridor had his back toward her and then she turned the key and slipped within, softly closing the door behind her.
After a moment's thought she began feeling her way to the window, stumbling over objects as she went.
Every time she made a noise some one groaned, and that made the child uneasy.
At last she found a window and managed to open the shutters and let the moonlight in.
In the center stood the Great Knife which the Boolooroo used to split people in two when he patched them, and at one side was a dark form huddled upon the floor and securely bound.
Trot hastened to this form and knelt beside it, but was disappointed to find it was only Tiggle.
"Oh, it's the Earth Child," said he.
"Are you condemned to be patched, too, little one?"
"No," answered Trot.
"Tell me where Cap'n Bill is."
"I can't," said Tiggle.
"The Boolooroo has hidden him until to morrow morning, when he's to be patched to me.
"Oh, that's worse than being patched!" cried Trot.
"Much worse," said Tiggle, with a groan.
But now an idea occurred to the girl.
"Would you like to escape?" she asked the captive.
"I would, indeed!" said he.
"If I get you out of the palace, can you hide yourself so that you won't be found?"
"I know a house where I can hide so snugly that all the Boolooroo's soldiers cannot find me."
"All right," said Trot; "I'll do it; for when you're gone the Boolooroo will have no one to patch Cap'n Bill to."
"He may find some one else," suggested the prisoner.
"But it will take him time to do that, and time is all I want," answered the child.
Even while she spoke Trot was busy with the knots in the cords, and presently she had unbound Tiggle, who soon got upon his feet.
"I'll do that, all right," promised the delighted Tiggle.
"You've made a friend of me, little girl, and if ever I can help you I'll do it with pleasure."
Then Trot started for the door and Tiggle could no longer see her because she was not now touching him.
The man was much surprised at her disappearance, but listened carefully and when he heard the girl make a noise at one end of the corridor he opened the door and ran in the opposite direction, as he had been told to do.
When Tiggle had safely escaped, the little girl wandered through the palace in search of Cap'n Bill, but soon decided such a quest in the dark was likely to fail and she must wait until morning.
She was tired, too, and thought she would find a vacant room-of which there were many in the big palace-and go to sleep until daylight.
She remembered there was a comfortable vacant room just opposite the suite of the Six Snubnosed Princesses, so she stole softly up to it and tried the door.
It was locked, but the key was outside, as the Blueskins seldom took a door key away from its place.
So she turned the key, opened the door, and walked in.
Looking out, he found that a few feet below the window was the broad wall that ran all around the palace gardens.
A little way to the right the wall joined the wall of the City, being on the same level with it.
It would be a dangerous leap, for as his arms were bound he might topple off the wall into the garden; but he resolved to take this chance.
When she finally opened the door he slipped off and let himself fall to the wall, where he doubled up in a heap.
The next minute, however, he had scrambled to his feet and was running swiftly along the garden wall.
More guards were yelling, now, running along the foot of the wall to keep the fugitive in sight, and people began to pour out of the houses and join in the chase.
If he leaped down into the City he would be seized at once.
Just then he came opposite the camp of the Pinkies and decided to trust himself to the mercies of his Earth friends rather than be made a prisoner by his own people, who would obey the commands of their detested but greatly feared Boolooroo.
So, suddenly he gave a mighty leap and came down into the field outside the City.
They soon gave up the chase and returned to the City, while the runaway Majordomo was captured by Captain Coralie and marched away to the tent of Rosalie the Witch, a prisoner of the Pinkies.
These were known by their coats and pantaloons of black or brown, made to sit comfortably, with white cravats and waistcoats, broad solid looking shoes, and thick hose or gaiters.--They had all slightly bald heads, from which the right ears, long used to pen holding, had an odd habit of standing off on end.
Theirs was the affectation of respectability;--if indeed there be an affectation so honorable.
The gamblers, of whom I descried not a few, were still more easily recognisable.
Still all were distinguished by a certain sodden swarthiness of complexion, a filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of lip.
They seem to prey upon the public in two battalions-that of the dandies and that of the military men.
Of the first grade the leading features are long locks and smiles; of the second frogged coats and frowns.
All was dark yet splendid-as that ebony to which has been likened the style of Tertullian.
I well remember that my first thought, upon beholding it, was that Retzch, had he viewed it, would have greatly preferred it to his own pictural incarnations of the fiend.
I felt singularly aroused, startled, fascinated.
"How wild a history," I said to myself, "is written within that bosom!" Then came a craving desire to keep the man in view-to know more of him.
Hurriedly putting on an overcoat, and seizing my hat and cane, I made my way into the street, and pushed through the crowd in the direction which I had seen him take; for he had already disappeared. With some little difficulty I at length came within sight of him, approached, and followed him closely, yet cautiously, so as not to attract his attention.
I had now a good opportunity of examining his person.
He was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble.
It was now fully night fall, and a thick humid fog hung over the city, soon ending in a settled and heavy rain.
For half an hour the old man held his way with difficulty along the great thoroughfare; and I here walked close at his elbow through fear of losing sight of him.
By and bye he passed into a cross street, which, although densely filled with people, was not quite so much thronged as the main one he had quitted.
Here a change in his demeanor became evident.
A second turn brought us into a square, brilliantly lighted, and overflowing with life.
He urged his way steadily and perseveringly.
The rain fell fast; the air grew cool; and the people were retiring to their homes.
At no moment did he see that I watched him.
It was the most noisome quarter of London, where every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime.
By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall, in directions so many and capricious that scarce the semblance of a passage was discernible between them. The paving stones lay at random, displaced from their beds by the rankly growing grass.
Horrible filth festered in the dammed up gutters. The whole atmosphere teemed with desolation.
Yet, as we proceeded, the sounds of human life revived by sure degrees, and at length large bands of the most abandoned of a London populace were seen reeling to and fro. The spirits of the old man again flickered up, as a lamp which is near its death hour.
Once more he strode onward with elastic tread.
Long and swiftly he fled, while I followed him in the wildest amazement, resolute not to abandon a scrutiny in which I now felt an interest all absorbing.
He refuses to be alone.
"Why, my dear colonel," said he, "would you not acquaint me with that secret which this letter hath disclosed?" james read the letter, at which his countenance changed more than once; and then, after a short silence, said, "mr
Booth, I have been to blame, I own it; and you upbraid me with justice.
I know what the impertinence of virtue is, and I can submit to it; but to be treated thus by a whore-You must forgive me, dear Booth, but your success was a kind of triumph over me, which I could not bear.
I own, I have not the least reason to conceive any anger against you; and yet, curse me if I should not have been less displeased at your lying with my own wife; nay, I could almost have parted with half my fortune to you more willingly than have suffered you to receive that trifle of my money which you received at her hands.
Booth exprest much astonishment at this declaration; he said he could not conceive how it was possible to have such an affection for a woman who did not shew the least inclination to return it.
Vanity is plainly her predominant passion, and, if you will administer to that, it will infallibly throw her into your arms.
To this I attribute my own unfortunate success.
While she relieved my wants and distresses she was daily feeding her own vanity; whereas, as every gift of yours asserted your superiority, it rather offended than pleased her.
Indeed, women generally love to be of the obliging side; and, if we examine their favourites, we shall find them to be much oftener such as they have conferred obligations on than such as they have received them from."
Damnation seize the proud insolent harlot! the devil take me if I don't love her more than I ever loved a woman!"
The rest of their conversation turned on Booth's affairs.
The colonel again reassumed the part of a friend, gave him the remainder of the money, and promised to take the first opportunity of laying his memorial before a great man.
Booth was greatly overjoyed at this success.
His fear, moreover, betrayed him into a meanness which he would have heartily despised on any other occasion. This was to order the maid to deliver him any letter directed to Amelia; at the same time strictly charging her not to acquaint her mistress with her having received any such orders.
A servant of any acuteness would have formed strange conjectures from such an injunction; but this poor girl was of perfect simplicity; so great, indeed, was her simplicity, that, had not Amelia been void of all suspicion of her husband, the maid would have soon after betrayed her master.
believe me, for my own sake, you ought not; for, as you cannot hide the consequences, you make me always suspect ten times worse than the reality.
While I have you and my children well before my eyes, I am capable of facing any news which can arrive; for what ill news can come (unless, indeed, it concerns my little babe in the country) which doth not relate to the badness of our circumstances? and those, I thank Heaven, we have now a fair prospect of retrieving.
nor could she, upon telling her name, obtain any admission.
Amelia, who had no suspicion that mrs james was really at home, and, as the phrase is, was denied, would have made a second visit the next morning, had she not been prevented by a cold which she herself now got, and which was attended with a slight fever.
This confined her several days to her house, during which Booth officiated as her nurse, and never stirred from her.
Poor Amelia, who was going to rush into her friend's arms, was struck motionless by this behaviour; but re collecting her spirits, as she had an excellent presence of mind, she presently understood what the lady meant, and resolved to treat her in her own way.
Down therefore the company sat, and silence prevailed for some time, during which mrs james surveyed the room with more attention than she would have bestowed on one much finer.
At length the conversation began, in which the weather and the diversions of the town were well canvassed.
After a visit of twenty minutes, during which not a word of any former occurrences was mentioned, nor indeed any subject of discourse started, except only those two above mentioned, mrs james rose from her chair and retired in the same formal manner in which she had approached.
We will pursue her for the sake of the contrast during the rest of the evening.
She went from Amelia directly to a rout, where she spent two hours in a croud of company, talked again and again over the diversions and news of the town, played two rubbers at whist, and then retired to her own apartment, where, having past another hour in undressing herself, she went to her own bed.
Booth and his wife, the moment their companion was gone, sat down to supper on a piece of cold meat, the remains of their dinner.
After which, over a pint of wine, they entertained themselves for a while with the ridiculous behaviour of their visitant.
The little actions of their children, the former scenes and future prospects of their life, furnished them with many pleasant ideas; and the contemplation of Amelia's recovery threw Booth into raptures.
At length they retired, happy in each other.
It is possible some readers may be no less surprized at the behaviour of mrs james than was Amelia herself, since they may have perhaps received so favourable an impression of that lady from the account given of her by mr Booth, that her present demeanour may seem unnatural and inconsistent with her former character.
And what was her present behaviour more than that of a fine lady who considered form and show as essential ingredients of human happiness, and imagined all friendship to consist in ceremony, courtesies, messages, and visits?
NURSING VAGARIES.
The cat, unlike most animals, seems singularly exempt from the pains of parturition.
"In sorrow shalt thou bring forth," was never meant to apply to pussy.
In fact about this time she always appears jollier than at any other, apparently looking upon the whole business as a capital lark-a rather enjoyable practical joke.
My own cat, Muffie, invariably gives due notice of the coming event, by some of the most wonderful specimens of cantation I ever listened to.
In fact she becomes a small opera in herself, chorus and all.
Her song, moreover, is interlarded with little hysterical squeaks, as if she were brim full of some strange joy, and running over.
At the same time she lavishes more caresses than usual upon Nero, who, not knowing what to make of it, looks very foolish indeed.
CATS EATING THEIR KITTENS.--Numerous instances might be cited of cats eating their kittens as soon as born.
She had the bite and was satisfied.
We trust the baker was.
Or the princess who had her husband killed; she ate part of him, and had the remainder salted for future consumption.
"But, in the name of goodness," said I, "what have you got in the pot? French missionary?"
"No," she said; exhibiting no sort of surprise at my question, for a dish of French missionary was by no means unknown in those parts.
Cats are greatly sensible of the honour of maternity, and when deprived of their kittens feel very wretched indeed.
Under these circumstances, they will nurse and suckle almost any creature.
CATS REARING DOGS.--A cat of mine, a few years ago, suckled and reared a beautiful Pomeranian dog.
I thought at the time this was rather surprising; but I should not be surprised now at anything a cat did.
A gentleman, the other day, had a very nice fox terrier bitch.
The poor thing died giving birth to a litter of four puppies.
She proved a good mother to them, and successfully reared every one of them.
I know of another similar instance, where a cat was house mate with a rather valuable bitch; this bitch brought forth a litter of seven pups. The cat had five kittens at the same time.
One day she gave birth to her kittens in an out house, and at once leaving them to shift for themselves, she entered the dwelling house and insisted on giving suck to the dog of her first adoption.
As he was now a full grown dog, and had a great regard for his own respectability, he didn't see the fun of it.
Pussy went after him nevertheless, lying down in front of him, and mewing piteously up in his face.
When, to get rid of her importunities, the dog went out, she even followed him to the street, and only ceased pestering him, when her kittens were discovered and brought to her.
The mother was of a quiet, domesticated turn of mind, and preferred fire side enjoyments to out of door sports; but the daughter was quite the reverse.
She was a mighty huntress, and it was no uncommon thing, to see her coming waddling across the fields with a rabbit as big as herself in her mouth.
Both these cats had kittens at the same time, but the daughter seemed determined, that nursing should not interfere with her hunting expeditions.
There being no chance of finding homes for so many, they were all drowned with the exception of three.
No one cat, they thought, could nurse and suckle ten kits, and it was equally evident that three kittens did not require the services of two cats.
This was accordingly done, and turned out to be a very satisfactory arrangement for all parties concerned; for either cat could now go abroad when she pleased, happy in the thought that nothing could go wrong at home.
NURSING A HARE.--A certain carpenter whom I knew had a cat which in due season,--as all cats will,--produced a litter of kittens which-very cruel and thoughtless was the action-were all drowned.
I'll seek the mountain, and be it what it may, I'll have something to love, something to suckle me."
NURSING SQUIRRELS.--This is by no means uncommon in cats.
Squirrels thus reared make most delightful little pets.
NURSING CHICKENS.--I know several instances of cats supplying the place of their lost kittens with a chicken.
One cat, for example, had had all her offspring,--it was her first litter,--drowned; she went at once out into the court yard, where a hen was gathering crumbs to a large brood of chickens.
One of these pussy, watching her chance, sprang upon and seized by the neck, and although hotly pursued by the enraged mother, managed to reach the house in safety, and went straight to her own bed.
So it became a sort of household pet, and when not eating, it was always cuddling down beside its funny foster mother.
I may mention here, that next time this same cat had kittens they were all drowned again; but this time she did a wiser thing. She found out that a cat, belonging to one of the neighbours, was the happy mother of three kittens which she had been allowed to keep.
Off goes puss to this neighbour's house, and having thrashed the mother to begin with, she kidnapped and carried home one of her family.
Several times was the kitten taken back, and each time pussy went and stole it again; and as she never failed to give the other cat a preliminary hiding, it was at last deemed most prudent to let her retain it.
Miss G---- is an old maid, and a great lover of cats and poultry.
Once she had a cat nursing a litter of kittens, and one of the chickens in the yard being rather deformed and not thriving, Miss g brought it and flung it to the cat, thinking it would be a great treat to her.
A gentleman in New Deer, also possessed a cat who reared a chicken to hen hood.
In this case the adopted chicken was nursed alone, pussy's kittens having been drowned.
We see, then, that chicken rearing by cats does not give that amount of satisfaction which is desired.
It might pay, though, if they could do the hatching; but cats at present cannot be taught to sit upon eggs.
I think the reader will now be prepared to hear of cats-
NURSING HEDGEHOGS.--Yes, three of those thorny little things were actually nursed, suckled, and reared lately by a cat belonging to a gentleman, who is very fond of trying experiments of this sort.
But three pairs of bright beady eyes were keeking at her from among the thorns; and before she had reached the fender, the little pigs were all unfolded and after her at the galop.
SUCKLING RATS.--Some years ago there was a cat in Scotland who, when three of her kittens were drowned, supplied their place by bringing in three young rats to make up the number.
But still another died, and probably she could not find any more, for she contented herself with nursing, and tending the two remaining ones, along with her own two kittens.
I never heard what eventually became of the rats.
I don't think she would have eaten them.
More probably they lived and grew, and went back as missionaries to their own people.
CHAPTER one
EDITH'S HOME ON THE THAMES
Miss Green smiled indulgently as she closed her book.
You may imagine it did not take Edith long to put away her books; then giving her good-natured governess a hug she skipped off for her hat and coat.
"There are Eleanor and Clarence waiting for us now," cried Edith, as she and Miss Green, who was carrying the tea basket, crossed the gardens. Running over the lawn, which stretched down to the river, she greeted her two little playmates from the vicarage.
All three were bubbling over with glee at the prospect of an outing this bright June afternoon upon the river Thames.
The children were soon seated on cushions in the neat little shallow punt.
Towser, the big collie dog, was already in the boat, for he knew he was a welcome companion on these trips.
This looks like an easy thing to do, but it takes a great deal of skill to handle a punt.
"Does not the river look gay?" said Eleanor.
Daintily fitted up rowboats with soft cushioned seats, the ladies in their bright summer dresses, with parasols of gay colours; the men in white flannel suits and straw hats.
There were many punts like their own.
Also tiny sailboats, some of them with bright red or blue sails; while every now and then a crew of young men from one of the colleges sculled past them, practising for the forthcoming boat race.
All made way for these swift racing boats, for one of the unwritten rules of the river is that boat crews must not be interfered with while practising.
Occasionally our party in the punt would get the effect of a gentle wave from an automobile boat or a steam launch as it rushed by.
In the midst of it all were to be seen the swans gliding in and out among the boats.
The Thames swans are as well known as the river itself. They are very privileged birds and directly under the protection of the government itself.
There are special keepers to look after them, and any person who injured a swan in any way would be punished.
But no harm ever happens to them, for the lovely white birds are great pets with every one, and the children especially like nothing better than to feed them.
Along the banks, under the shade of overhanging trees, were merry boat loads of family parties making a picnic of their afternoon tea, as our little party intended to do.
Presently the punt glided behind a clump of trees.
Then the tea basket was brought from the punt.
"Now, Clarence," said Miss Green, "you fill the teakettle while the girls help me."
Their kettle was especially constructed for these occasions with a hollow space in the bottom into which fits a small spirit lamp,--this so the wind cannot blow out the flame.
"My! we have got a jolly lot of cake; that's good," and Clarence looked very approvingly at the nice plum cake and the Madeira cake, which is a sort of sponge cake with slices of preserved citron on top of it,--a favourite cake for teas.
In a few minutes the water boiled in spite of everybody watching it attentively, and Miss Green filled the teapot.
Then they all gathered around the dainty cloth spread on the grass, and the slices of bread and butter, known as "cut bread and butter," and the lovely strawberry jam quickly disappeared.
"Why do we always eat more out of doors," said Edith, "than when we are indoors eating in the proper way?
"Perhaps the fresh air has more to do with it than anything else," laughed Miss Green, as she cut them the sixth piece of cake all around.
"Now you rest, Miss Green, and we will pack up everything," said Eleanor.
"Yes, and let's wash up the tea things.
It will be fun," said Edith, "and Betty will be surprised."
So the little girls amused themselves with their housekeeping, while Clarence and Towser ran races up and down the greensward until it was time to return.
The sun was setting when they pulled up at the steps of their boat landing where Colonel and mrs Howard, Edith's parents, were sitting in comfortable wicker garden chairs, waiting for them.
Oldham Manor, Edith's home, was a fine old house built in the "Tudor" style, of red brick with stone doorways and windows, and quaint, tall, ornamental chimneys, with the lower story entirely covered with ivy.
Colonel Howard was a retired army officer who had seen much service in far away India.
Tom, Edith's brother, was at school at Eton College, so Edith had a double share of petting, and led a very happy existence with plenty of work and plenty of play.
She had a pretty little room, with a little brass bed, and an old-fashioned chest of drawers for her clothes.
The chairs were covered with a bright, pretty pink, green, and white chintz, and the carpet was pale green with pink roses.
From the window of this delightful room, one overlooked the rose garden. Adjoining was the schoolroom, a big room where Miss Green and Edith spent much of their time.
Edith usually dressed quickly, for, when the weather was fine, she and her papa always took a walk around the gardens before breakfast.
Colonel Howard was very proud of his roses, and the rose garden of the manor was quite famous; many of the rose bushes were trained to form great arches over the walks.
Another hobby of Colonel Howard's was his fancy chickens and ducks, of which he had a great variety.
Edith had her pet chickens, too, and she and her papa could never agree as to whose chickens were the finest, when they went to feed them in the morning.
Edith would run each morning into the breakfast room, a bright faced little girl with sparkling blue eyes and golden brown hair tied up with a pink ribbon and waving loosely over her shoulders-as all English girls wear their hair until they are quite young ladies.
Her dress was very simply made, and around the neck was a pink ribbon-pink was her favourite colour-tied in a bow.
Always she finished with marmalade.
Thursday was a red letter day for Edith, for in the afternoon she always took tea with mamma and papa in state, in the drawing room.
"I take two lumps of sugar only, thank you." Rainy afternoons she often worked on fancy articles for the bazaars held by the Children's League of Mercy. Edith was a member, and the money from the sales was given to help the very poor children in their neighbourhood.
Breca ne'er yet, not one of you pair, in the play of war such daring deed has done at all with bloody brand, -- I boast not of it!
Lustily took he banquet and beaker, battle famed king.
Through the hall then went the Helmings' Lady, to younger and older everywhere carried the cup, till come the moment when the ring graced queen, the royal hearted, to Beowulf bore the beaker of mead. She greeted the Geats' lord, God she thanked, in wisdom's words, that her will was granted, that at last on a hero her hope could lean for comfort in terrors.
He spied in hall the hero band, kin and clansmen clustered asleep, hardy liegemen.
Then laughed his heart; for the monster was minded, ere morn should dawn, savage, to sever the soul of each, life from body, since lusty banquet waited his will!
Danes of the North with fear and frenzy were filled, each one, who from the wall that wailing heard, God's foe sounding his grisly song, cry of the conquered, clamorous pain from captive of hell.
twenty five
Be glad at banquet, warrior worthy!
twenty six
The wave roamer bode riding at anchor, its owner awaiting. As they hastened onward, Hrothgar's gift they lauded at length.
-- 'twas a lord unpeered, every way blameless, till age had broken -- it spareth no mortal -- his splendid might.
At the awful sight tottered that guest, and terror seized him; yet the wretched fugitive rallied anon from fright and fear ere he fled away, and took the cup from that treasure hoard. Of such besides there was store enough, heirlooms old, the earth below, which some earl forgotten, in ancient years, left the last of his lofty race, heedfully there had hidden away, dearest treasure.
Few words he spake: "Now hold thou, earth, since heroes may not, what earls have owned!
My brave are gone. And the helmet hard, all haughty with gold, shall part from its plating.
His hoard of bliss that old ill doer open found, who, blazing at twilight the barrows haunteth, naked foe dragon flying by night folded in fire: the folk of earth dread him sore.
So the barrow was plundered, borne off was booty.
The stark heart found footprint of foe who so far had gone in his hidden craft by the creature's head.
The barrow he entered, sought the cup, and discovered soon that some one of mortals had searched his treasure, his lordly gold.
thirty one
THEN the baleful fiend its fire belched out, and bright homes burned.
In its barrow it trusted, its battling and bulwarks: that boast was vain!
-- A good king he!
thirty two
thirty nine
-- Now haste is best, that we go to gaze on our Geatish lord, and bear the bountiful breaker of rings to the funeral pyre.
No fragments merely shall burn with the warrior.
Wealth of jewels, gold untold and gained in terror, treasure at last with his life obtained, all of that booty the brands shall take, fire shall eat it.
No earl must carry memorial jewel.
The fiery dragon, fearful fiend, with flame was scorched. Reckoned by feet, it was fifty measures in length as it lay.
Alive was he still, still wielding his wits.
The wise old man spake much in his sorrow, and sent you greetings and bade that ye build, when he breathed no more, on the place of his balefire a barrow high, memorial mighty.
The dragon they cast, the worm, o'er the wall for the wave to take, and surges swallowed that shepherd of gems. Then the woven gold on a wain was laden -- countless quite!
-- and the king was borne, hoary hero, to Hrones Ness.
Wood smoke rose black over blaze, and blent was the roar of flame with weeping (the wind was still), till the fire had broken the frame of bones, hot at the heart.
CHAPTER two.
YOUTH.
He spoke to George a bout it, and the boy was wild with joy.
But as the time drew near, her heart, which had been so strong and brave and full of pride, gave way and she felt that she could not part with her dear boy.
So they gave up the scheme, and George was sent back to school.
These neat ways, formed in his youth, were kept up through all his life, and what seems strange is that day books, and such books as you will find in great use now a days were not known at that time.
In fact he did not know their size or shape, but he had heard that men had sought out some of the best spots, and had built homes there, and laid out farms for which they paid no rent, and he thought it quite time to put a stop to such things.
He wrote down what was done from day to day, and by these notes we learn that he had quite a rough time of it, and yet found much that was to his taste.
One night, writes George, when they had been hard at work all day, they came to the house where they were to be fed and lodged.
They made up their minds to stay there for a day or two; went to see the Warm Springs, and at night camped out in the field.
The men crossed in birch bark boats, and rode all the next day in a rain storm to a place two score miles from where they had set out that morn.
On march twenty third, they fell in with a score or two of red men who had been off to war and brought home but one scalp, and they had a chance to see a war dance.
The red men cleared a large space, and built a fire in the midst of it, round which they all sat
One of the men then made a grand speech in which he told them how they were to dance.
When he had done, the one who could dance the best sprang up as if he had just been roused from sleep, and ran and jumped round the ring in a queer kind of way.
The rest soon joined him, and did just as he did. By this time the band made it self heard, and I shall have to tell you what a fine band it was.
There was a pot half full of water with a piece of deer skin stretched tight on the top, and a gourd with some shot in it, and a piece of horse's tail tied to it to make it look fine.
Late in the day of march twenty sixth, they came to a place where dwelt a man named Hedge, who was in the pay of King George as justice of the peace.
Here they camped, and at the meal that was spread there was not a knife nor a fork to eat with but such as the guests had brought with them.
On the night of the first of A pril the wind blew and the rain fell. The straw on which they lay took fire, and George was saved by one of the men, who woke him when it was in a blaze.
This rough kind of life, though he did not know it, was to fit him for the toils and ills of war, of which he may have dreamt in those days, as he still kept up his love for war like things.
He lived on a knoll, in a small house not more than twelve feet square.
Red men, half breeds, and wood men thronged the place, where they were sure they would get a good meal.
He had steeds of fine breed, and hounds of keen scent, for he was fond of the chase, and the woods and hills were full of game.
This wise friend lent George good books which he took with him to the woods and read with great care, and in this way stored his mind with rich thoughts.
A Dutch man, named Van Bra am, was one of these men, and he claimed to know a great deal of the art of war.
At sea he kept a log book, took notes of the course of the winds, and if the days were fair or foul, and learned all he could of the ways of a ship and how to sail one.
They had been but two weeks in Bar ba does when George fell ill with small pox, and this for a time put an end to all their sports.
But he had the best of care, and at the end of three weeks was so well that he could go out of doors.
Law rence soon tired of this place, and longed for a change of scene. They had to ride out by the first dawn of day, for by the time the sun was half an hour high it was as hot as at mid day.
Law rence did not gain in health, and ere his wife could join him he wrote her that he would start for home-"to his grave." He reached Mount Ver non in time to die 'neath his own roof, and with kind friends at his bed side.
It would need gold to buy these things, as well as to pay for fresh troops.
Gold was placed in the Gov er nor's hands to use as he pleased.
Our force was spread out in to ten bands, of one hundred men each.
This, of course, was more than he could bear, so he left the ar my at once, and with a sad heart.
Our men were full of joy, and thought the war would soon be at an end.
He rode in a fine turn out that he had bought of Gov er nor Sharpe, which he soon found out was not meant for use on rough roads.
But he had fought with dukes, and men of high rank, and was fond of show, and liked to put on a great deal of style.
He thought that this would make the troops look up to him, and would add much to his fame.
All the rules and forms of camp life were kept up.
One of the head men who died while in camp, was borne to the grave in this style: A guard marched in front of the corpse, the cap tain of it in the rear. Each man held his gun up side down, as a sign that the dead would war no more, and the drums beat the dead march.
When near the grave the guard formed two lines that stood face to face, let their guns rest on the ground, and leaned their heads on the butts.
The corpse was borne twixt these two rows of men with the sword and sash on the top of the box in which he lay, and in the rear of it the men of rank marched two and two.
When the corpse was put in the ground, the guard fired their guns three times, and then all the troops marched back to camp.
With them were White Thun der, who had charge of the "speech belts," and Sil ver Heels, who was swift of foot.
Half King was dead, and White Thun der reigned in his stead.
The red men had a camp to them selves, where they would sing, and dance, and howl and yell for half the night.
In the day time the red men and their squaws, rigged up in their plumes and war paint, hung round Brad dock's camp, and gazed spell bound at the troops as they went through their drills.
But this state of things did not last long, and strife rose twixt the red and white men, and some of the red skins left the camp.
They told Brad dock they would meet him on his march, but they did not keep their word.
The march was a hard one for man and beast.
They must push on at once.
While at this place Cap tain Jack, and his brave band of hunts men came in to camp.
They were fond of the chase, and were well armed with knives and guns, and looked quite like a tribe of red skins as they came out of the wood.
Brad dock met them in a stiff sort of way.
Cap tain Jack stepped in front of his band and said that he and his men were used to rough work, and knew how to deal with the red men, and would be glad to join the force.
Brad dock looked on him with a gaze of scorn, and spoke to him in a way that roused the ire of Cap tain Jack.
He told his men what had been said, and the whole band turned their backs on the camp, and went through the woods to their old haunts where they were known and prized at their true worth.
By that time he could move, but not with out much pain, for he was still quite weak.
It was his wish to join the troops in time for the great blow, and while yet too weak to mount his horse, he set off with his guards in a close cart, and reached Brad dock's camp on the eighth of Ju ly.
The plan was to ford the stream near the camp, march on the west bank of the stream for five miles or so, and then cross to the east side and push on to the fort.
At one o'clock the whole force had crossed the ford north of the fort, and were on their way up the bank, when they were met by a fierce and sharp fire from foes they could not see.
Wild war whoops and fierce yells rent the air.
Now and then one of the red men would dart out of the woods with a wild yell to scalp a red coat who had been shot down.
Wild fear seized Brad dock's men, who fired and took no aim.
Those in the front rank were killed by those in the rear.
When some of them took to the trees, Brad dock stormed at them, and called them hard names, and struck them with the flat of his sword.
He was in all parts of the field, a fine mark for the guns of the foe, and yet not a shot struck him to do him harm.
Four small shots went through his coat.
The fight raged on.
Death swept through the ranks of the red coats. The men at the guns were seized with fright.
But this act did not bring the men back to their guns.
Brad dock was on the field the whole day, and did his best to turn the tide.
At last a shot struck him in the right arm and went in to his lungs. He fell from his horse, and was borne from the field.
The troops took fright at once, and most of them fled.
"All is lost!" they cried.
"Brad dock is killed!"
But he was a proud man, and when he made up his mind to do a thing he would do it at all risks.
Through this fault he missed the fame he hoped to win, lost his life, and found a grave in a strange land.
The house stood on a knoll, and near it were wild woods and deep dells, haunts of the fox and the deer, and bright streams where fish could be found at all times.
His chief sport was the chase, and, at the right time of the year, he would go out two or three times a week, with dogs and horns and trained steeds, in search of the sly fox who would lead him and his friends a fine run.
Some times he would go out with his gun and shoot wild ducks, great flocks of which might be found on the streams close at hand.
A man who had a bad name and paid no heed to the laws that were made, was wont to make his way to the grounds near Mount Ver non and shoot just what game he chose.
He put spurs to his horse, dashed through bush and brake, and soon came up to the rogue who had just time to jump in his boat and push from shore.
They had a large force of slaves, and made great feasts for their friends.
This barge was rowed by six black men in check shirts and black vel vet caps.
He knew, too, just the kind of work each one was fit for, and which he could do the best.
In this way he found out just how much work four men could do in the course of a day-and take their ease.
The cares of home and state made such calls on his time and thoughts, that he could not be said to live quite at his ease, and he left his mark-a high one-on all that he did.
His crops were of the best, and he sought to cheat no one.
For these last he had to give size and height, name, and age, of those who were to wear them.
He was then thirty one years old.
They were five sweet years to him; full of peace, and rest, and joy.
He was fond of his home, and felt as much pride in Nel lie and john Parke Cus tis as if they had been his own boy and girl.
Nel lie was a frail child, and did not gain in strength, though she had the best of care.
But he died in the year seventeen eighty one, at the age of twenty eight.
Large tracts of wood land were laid waste; homes were burnt, and those who dwelt in them robbed and slain; and so sly and shrewd were the red skins that it was some time ere the white men could put a stop to their deeds of blood.
The trade was large, and in this way the king could add much to his wealth.
But the scheme did not work well.
They had come to this land to be free, and free they would be.
They would do with out tea and such things, and dress as well as they could in clothes made out of home-made goods.
The king next said that goods bought from Eng land must bear the king's stamp, for which a sum was to be paid more than the cost of the goods.
This was known as the Stamp Act.
They had not the means to pay this tax.
In New York, the Act-in clear print-was borne through the streets on a pole, on top of which was a death's head.
At night they took the form down, put it in a coach, and bore it back to Bow ling Green, where the whole thing-coach and all-was burnt right in range of the guns of the fort where the King's troops were.
But he made it known that he felt it to be his right as their king to tax them as he chose, and this hurt the pride of those who wished to make their own laws, and be in bonds to no one.
The band met with closed doors.
Each man wore a grave face.
They are all thrown down."
But what he said was of great weight as it came from a wise brain and a true heart.
George Fair fax-who had been his friend from boy hood-had gone to Eng land to live, and Bel voir took fire one night and was burnt to the ground.
It was of no use to plead with the king.
He told them that he thought there was but one thing to do.
PREFACE.
Such, however, is not the case.
To day this edition is only valuable on account of its comparative rarity.
THE LORD OF CHATEAU NOIR
Many a German trooper saw the sea for the first time when he rode his horse girth deep into the waves at Dieppe.
Black and bitter were the thoughts of Frenchmen when they saw this weal of dishonour slashed across the fair face of their country.
They had fought and they had been overborne.
That swarming cavalry, those countless footmen, the masterful guns-they had tried and tried to make head against them.
In battalions their invaders were not to be beaten, but man to man, or ten to ten, they were their equals.
Thus, unchronicled amid the battles and the sieges, there broke out another war, a war of individuals, with foul murder upon the one side and brutal reprisal on the other.
Colonel von Gramm, of the twenty fourth Posen Infantry, had suffered severely during this new development.
He commanded in the little Norman town of Les Andelys, and his outposts stretched amid the hamlets and farmhouses of the district round.
Then the colonel would go forth in his wrath, and farmsteadings would blaze and villages tremble; but next morning there was still that same dismal tale to be told.
Do what he might, he could not shake off his invisible enemies.
Gold might be more successful.
There was no response.
The peasants were incorruptible.
"You say that you know who did these crimes?" asked the Prussian colonel, eyeing with loathing the blue bloused, rat faced creature before him.
"Yes, colonel."
"Those thousand francs, colonel-"
Come!
"It is Count Eustace of Chateau Noir."
"You lie!" cried the colonel, angrily.
"A gentleman and a nobleman could not have done such crimes."
The peasant shrugged his shoulders.
"It is evident to me that you do not know the count.
It is this way, colonel.
What I tell you is the truth, and I am not afraid that you should test it.
The Count of Chateau Noir is a hard man, even at the best time he was a hard man. But of late he has been terrible.
It was his son's death, you know. His son was under Douay, and he was taken, and then in escaping from Germany he met his death.
It was the count's only child, and indeed we all think that it has driven him mad.
I do not know how many he has killed, but it is he who cut the cross upon the foreheads, for it is the badge of his house."
It was true.
The murdered sentries had each had a saltire cross slashed across their brows, as by a hunting knife.
The colonel bent his stiff back and ran his forefinger over the map which lay upon the table.
"Three and a kilometre, colonel."
"You know the place?"
"I used to work there."
Colonel von Gramm rang the bell.
"Give this man food and detain him," said he to the sergeant.
"Why detain me, colonel?
I can tell you no more."
"As guide?
But the count?
The Prussian commander waved him away.
"Send Captain Baumgarten to me at once," said he.
The colonel could trust him where a more dashing officer might be in danger.
"You will proceed to Chateau Noir to night, captain," said he.
"A guide has been provided.
You will arrest the count and bring him back. If there is an attempt at rescue, shoot him at once."
"How many men shall I take, colonel?"
"Well, we are surrounded by spies, and our only chance is to pounce upon him before he knows that we are on the way.
A large force will attract attention.
On the other hand, you must not risk being cut off."
"I might march north, colonel, as if to join General Goeben.
In that case, with twenty men-"
"Very good, captain.
I hope to see you with your prisoner to morrow morning."
It was a cold December night when Captain Baumgarten marched out of Les Andelys with his twenty Poseners, and took the main road to the north west.
Two miles out he turned suddenly down a narrow, deeply rutted track, and made swiftly for his man.
The captain walked first with Moser, a veteran sergeant, beside him.
The sergeant's wrist was fastened to that of the French peasant, and it had been whispered in his ear that in case of an ambush the first bullet fired would be through his head.
Behind them the twenty infantrymen plodded along through the darkness with their faces sunk to the rain, and their boots squeaking in the soft, wet clay. They knew where they were going, and why, and the thought upheld them, for they were bitter at the loss of their comrades.
At half past eleven their guide stopped at a place where two high pillars, crowned with some heraldic stonework, flanked a huge iron gate.
The wall in which it had been the opening had crumbled away, but the great gate still towered above the brambles and weeds which had overgrown its base.
At the top they halted and reconnoitred.
The moon had shone out between two rain clouds, and threw the old house into silver and shadow.
It was shaped like an L, with a low arched door in front, and lines of small windows like the open ports of a man of war.
Above was a dark roof, breaking at the corners into little round overhanging turrets, the whole lying silent in the moonshine, with a drift of ragged clouds blackening the heavens behind it.
A single light gleamed in one of the lower windows.
The captain whispered his orders to his men.
Some were to creep to the front door, some to the back.
Some were to watch the east, and some the west.
He and the sergeant stole on tiptoe to the lighted window.
It was a small room into which they looked, very meanly furnished. An elderly man, in the dress of a menial, was reading a tattered paper by the light of a guttering candle.
He leaned back in his wooden chair with his feet upon a box, while a bottle of white wine stood with a half filled tumbler upon a stool beside him.
The sergeant thrust his needle gun through the glass, and the man sprang to his feet with a shriek.
The house is surrounded, and you cannot escape.
Come round and open the door, or we will show you no mercy when we come in."
"For God's sake, don't shoot!
I will open it!
I will open it!" He rushed from the room with his paper still crumpled up in his hand. An instant later, with a groaning of old locks and a rasping of bars, the low door swung open, and the Prussians poured into the stone flagged passage.
"My master!
He is out, sir."
Your life for a lie!"
"It is true, sir.
"Where?"
"I do not know."
"Doing what?"
"I cannot tell.
No, it is no use your cocking your pistol, sir.
You may kill me, but you cannot make me tell you that which I do not know."
"Is he often out at this hour?"
"Frequently."
"Before daybreak."
Captain Baumgarten rasped out a German oath.
The man's answers were only too likely to be true.
It was what he might have expected.
Up above, in an attic, they found Marie, the elderly wife of the butler; but the owner kept no other servants, and of his own presence there was no trace.
It was long, however, before Captain Baumgarten had satisfied himself upon the point.
It was a difficult house to search.
Thin stairs, which only one man could ascend at a time, connected lines of tortuous corridors.
The walls were so thick that each room was cut off from its neighbour.
Captain Baumgarten stamped with his feet, tore down curtains, and struck with the pommel of his sword.
"Yes, captain."
"And you will place four men in ambush at the front and at the back.
It is likely enough that about daybreak our bird may return to the nest."
"And the others, captain?"
"Let them have their suppers in the kitchen.
"And yourself, captain?"
"I will take my supper up here in the dining hall.
You will call me if there is any alarm. What can you give me for supper-you?"
Let a guard go about with him, sergeant, and let him feel the end of a bayonet if he plays us any tricks."
Captain Baumgarten was an old campaigner.
In the Eastern provinces, and before that in Bohemia, he had learned the art of quartering himself upon the enemy.
While the butler brought his supper he occupied himself in making his preparations for a comfortable night.
The fire was already burning up, crackling merrily, and sending spurts of blue, pungent smoke into the room.
It was a sight which gave a zest to his comfortable quarters, and to the cold fowl and the bottle of wine which the butler had brought up for him.
He was tired and hungry after his long tramp, so he threw his sword, his helmet, and his revolver belt down upon a chair, and fell to eagerly upon his supper.
He sat within a small circle of brilliant light which gleamed upon his silver shoulder straps, and threw out his terra cotta face, his heavy eyebrows, and his yellow moustache.
Two sides were oak panelled and two were hung with faded tapestry, across which huntsmen and dogs and stags were still dimly streaming.
Above the fireplace were rows of heraldic shields with the blazonings of the family and of its alliances, the fatal saltire cross breaking out on each of them.
But the fire was hot, and the captain's eyes were heavy.
His chin sank slowly upon his chest, and the ten candles gleamed upon the broad, white scalp.
There, beside the table, and almost within arm's length of him, was standing a huge man, silent, motionless, with no sign of life save his fierce glinting eyes.
His cheeks were wrinkled like a last year's apple, but his sweep of shoulder, and bony, corded hands, told of a strength which was unsapped by age.
His arms were folded across his arching chest, and his mouth was set in a fixed smile.
"Pray do not trouble yourself to look for your weapons," he said, as the Prussian cast a swift glance at the empty chair in which they had been laid.
"You have been, if you will allow me to say so, a little indiscreet to make yourself so much at home in a house every wall of which is honeycombed with secret passages.
Ah! what then?"
"You have no cause to trouble about your men.
They have already been provided for.
"I am Captain Baumgarten of, the twenty fourth Posen Regiment."
"The Count of Chateau Noir."
"Precisely.
I have much to talk to you about."
Captain Baumgarten sat still in his chair.
Brave as he was, there was something in this man's manner which made his skin creep with apprehension.
The count had picked up the claret bottle and held it to the light.
I am ashamed to look you in the face, Captain Baumgarten.
We must improve upon this."
"Drink!" said he.
Drink, sir, and be happy!
There are cold joints below.
Will you not venture upon a second and more savoury supper?"
The German officer shook his head.
"There is nothing in my house which is not at your disposal.
You have but to say the word.
Well, then, you will allow me to tell you a story while you drink your wine.
It is about my son, my only child, Eustace, who was taken and died in escaping.
It is a curious little story, and I think that I can promise you that you will never forget it.
"You must know, then, that my boy was in the artillery-a fine young fellow, Captain Baumgarten, and the pride of his mother.
It was brought by a brother officer who was at his side throughout, and who escaped while my lad died.
I want to tell you all that he told me.
"Eustace was taken at Weissenburg on the fourth of August.
The prisoners were broken up into parties, and sent back into Germany by different routes.
Eustace was taken upon the fifth to a village called Lauterburg, where he met with kindness from the German officer in command. This good colonel had the hungry lad to supper, offered him the best he had, opened a bottle of good wine, as I have tried to do for you, and gave him a cigar from his own case.
"The colonel, as I say, was good to my boy.
But, unluckily, the prisoners were moved next day across the Rhine into Ettlingen. They were not equally fortunate there.
The officer who guarded them was a ruffian and a villain, Captain Baumgarten.
That night upon my son answering fiercely back to some taunt of his, he struck him in the eye, like this!"
"My boy was disfigured by the blow, and this villain made his appearance the object of his jeers.
By the way, you look a little comical yourself at the present moment, captain, and your colonel would certainly say that you had been getting into mischief.
To continue, however, my boy's youth and his destitution-for his pockets were empty-moved the pity of a kind hearted major, and he advanced him ten Napoleons from his own pocket without security of any kind.
Into your hands, Captain Baumgarten, I return these ten gold pieces, since I cannot learn the name of the lender.
I am grateful from my heart for this kindness shown to my boy.
He heaped every outrage upon my lad, because the spirit of the Chateau Noirs would not stoop to turn away his wrath by a feigned submission.
The German writhed and struggled.
When at last, blinded and half senseless, he staggered to his feet, it was only to be hurled back again into the great oaken chair.
He sobbed in his impotent anger and shame.
"You will understand me when I say that it is a bitter thing to be helpless in the hands of an insolent and remorseless enemy.
I regret to see that your eye is bleeding so.
Will you permit me to bind it with my silk handkerchief?"
"I am in your power, you monster!" he cried; "I can endure your brutalities, but not your hypocrisy."
Let me see, I had got as far as the young Bavarian at Carlsruhe.
I regret extremely that you will not permit me to use such slight skill in surgery as I possess.
That reminds me, captain, that you are not quite situated upon a bed of roses yourself, are you now?
Get back into the chair, you dog!
"Well, to continue my story-at the end of a fortnight my son and his friend escaped.
Suffice it that to disguise themselves they had to take the clothes of two peasants, whom they waylaid in a wood.
Hiding by day and travelling by night, they had got as far into France as Remilly, and were within a mile-a single mile, captain-of crossing the German lines when a patrol of Uhlans came right upon them.
Ah! it was hard, was it not, when they had come so far and were so near to safety?"
The count blew a double call upon his whistle, and three hard faced peasants entered the room.
"These must represent my Uhlans," said he.
The unfortunate soldier was dragged from his chair to where a noosed rope had been flung over one of the huge oaken rafters which spanned the room.
The three peasants seized the other end, and looked to the count for his orders.
The officer, pale, but firm, folded his arms and stared defiantly at the man who tortured him.
My son was also face to face with death, and he prayed, also.
The next day the curate called again on Leopold.
He might make him turn monk, or Socinian, or latter day saint, for what she knew!
That same afternoon, Wingfold took the draper to see Polwarth.
It is not often in real life that such conversations occur.
I shall attempt only a general impression of the result of their evening's intercourse, partly recording the utterances of Polwarth.
"Ah!
Shall I, to take a step farther, degrade the sanctity of the closet, hallowed in the words of Jesus, by shutting its door in the vain fancy of there doing something that God requires of me as a sacred OBSERVANCE?
"Yes, doubtless; but what would you think of a child who said, 'I am very useful to my father, for when I ask him for anything, or tell him I love him, it gives him-oh, such pleasure!'?"
It makes me so happy!' 'Come nearer still-come to my bosom, my child, and be yet happier.'--Talk not of public worship as divine service; it is a mockery.
"Very few."
He sat down suddenly, and a deep silence filled the room.
Still more majestic shalt thou rise, More dreadful from each foreign stroke; As the loud blast that tears the skies Serves but to root thy native oak.
Brittania rules the waves! Britons never shall be slaves!
J. THOMSON.
one hundred twenty three.
THE BARD.
What terrors round him wait! Amazement in his van, with Flight combined, And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind.
"Mighty Victor, mighty lord, Low on his funeral couch he lies! No pitying heart, no eye, afford A tear to grace his obsequies. Is the sable warrior fled? Thy son is gone.
He rests among the dead. The swarm that in thy noon tide beam were born? --Gone to salute the rising morn. Fair laughs the Morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly riding o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded Vessel goes: Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm: Regardless of the sweeping Whirlwind's sway, That hush'd in grim repose expects his evening prey.
Britannia's issue, hail!
T. GRAY.
one hundred twenty four.
How sleep the brave, who sink to rest By all their Country's wishes blest! When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, Returns to deck their hallow'd mould, She there shall dress a sweeter sod Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.
W. COLLINS.
one hundred twenty five.
LAMENT FOR CULLODEN.
R. BURNS.
one hundred twenty six.
LAMENT FOR FLODDEN.
I've heard them lilting at our ewe milking, Lasses a' lilting before dawn o' day; But now they are moaning on ilka green loaning- The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away.
J. ELLIOTT.
CHAPTER two.
LITTLE FLORENCE.
Wait a moment, girls, and boys too!
I advise you to read on, and see what came in this case of playing with dolls.
There were a good many thousands of boys in England at that time, in the Twenties and Thirties, who might have been badly off when the terrible Fifties came, if Florence Nightingale had not played with her dolls. Read on, and see for yourselves!
Florence Nightingale loved her dolls dearly, and took the greatest possible care of them; and yet they were always delicate and given to sudden and alarming illnesses.
A doll never knew when she might be told that she was very ill, and undressed and put to bed, though she might but just have got on her new frock.
Then Mamma Florence would wait upon her tenderly, smoothing her pillow, bathing her forehead or rubbing her poor back, and bringing her all kinds of good things in the doll house dishes.
The doll might feel very much better the next day, and think it was time to get up and put on the new frock again; but she was very apt to have a relapse and go back to bed and gruel again, once at least, before she was allowed to recover entirely.
The truth is, Florence was born to be a nurse, and a sick doll was dearer to her than a strong and healthy one.
These dolls were very unlucky, or else their mamma was very careless; you can call it whichever you like.
They were always tumbling down and breaking their heads, or losing arms and legs, or burning themselves at the nursery fire, or suffering from doll's consumption, that dreadful complaint otherwise known as loss of sawdust.
When these things happened, Aunt Florence was called in as a matter of course; and she set the fractures, and salved the burns, and stopped the flow of sawdust, and proved herself in every way a most skillful nursery surgeon and physician.
So it was that unconsciously, and in play, Florence began her training for her life work.
She was having lessons, of course; arithmetic, and all the other proper things.
Her mother, meantime, taught her all kinds of handiwork, and before she was twelve years old she could hemstitch, and seam and embroider.
These things were all good, and very good; without them she could not have accomplished all she did; but in the years that were to come all the other learning was going to help that wonderful learning that began with nursing the sick dolls.
Soon she was to take another step in her profession.
The little fingers grown so skillful by bandaging waxen and china arms and legs, were now to save a living, loving creature from death.
To every English child this story is a nursery tale.
No doubt it is to many American children also, yet it is one that no one can ever tire of hearing, so I shall tell it again.
Much as Florence loved dolls, she loved animals better, and in her country homes she was surrounded by them.
"Good morning, Peggy!" Florence would say.
"Would you like an apple?"
You may try any other way that looks to you more natural.)
"Then look for it!" Florence would reply.
At this Peggy would sniff and snuff, and hunt round with her soft velvety nose till she found Florence's pocket, then delicately take out the apple and crunch it up, and whinny again, the second whinny meaning at once "Thank you!" and "More, please!" Horse language is a simple one compared to English, and has no grammar.
They had the same tastes and feelings.
Here was another teacher.
I suppose everyone we know could teach us something good, if we were ready to learn.
As I said, Florence and the vicar were riding along on the green downs; and here I must stop again a moment to tell you what the downs are, for when I was a child I used to wonder.
They are great rounded hills, covered with close, thick turf, like a velvet carpet.
They spread in long smooth green billows, miles and miles of them, the slopes so gentle that it is delightful to drive or ride on them; only you must be careful not to go near the edge, where the green breaks off suddenly, and a white chalk cliff goes down, down, hundreds of feet, to the blue sea tossing and tumbling below.
These are the white cliffs of England that you have so often read about.
Am I never going on with the story?
Yes; have patience! there is plenty of time.
There were many sheep on the downs, and there was one special flock that Florence knew very well.
It belonged to old Roger, a shepherd, who had often worked for her father.
Roger and his good dog Cap were both friends of Florence's, and she was used to seeing them on the downs, the sheep in a more or less orderly compact flock, Cap guarding them and driving back any stragglers who went nibbling off toward the cliff edge.
But to day there seemed no order anywhere.
The sheep were scattered in twos and threes, straying hither and thither; and old Roger alone was trying to collect them, and apparently having a hard time of it.
The vicar saw his trouble, and rode up to him.
"What is the matter, Roger?" he asked kindly.
"Where is your dog?"
I shall have to take a bit of cord and put an end to his misery."
"Oh!" cried Florence, who had ridden up with the vicar.
"Poor Cap!
Are you sure his leg is broken, Roger?"
"Yes, Miss, it's broke sure enough.
Best put him out of his pain, I says."
"Not till we have tried to help him.
Where is he?"
Poor Cap's days is over.
Ah; he were a good dog.
Do everything but speak, he could, and went as near to that as a dumb beast could.
I'll never get another like him."
While the old man lamented, Florence was looking eagerly in the face of the clergyman.
He met her look with a smile and nod.
"We will go and see!" he said; and off they rode, leaving Roger shaking his head and calling to the sheep.
They soon reached the cottage.
The door was fastened, and when they tried to open it a furious barking was heard within.
A little boy came from the next cottage, bringing the key, which Roger had left there. They entered, and there lay Cap on the brick floor, helpless and weak, but still barking as hard as he could at what he supposed to be intruders.
When he saw Florence and the little boy he stopped barking, and wagged his tail feebly; then he crawled from under the table where he lay, dragged himself to Florence's feet and looked up pitifully in her face.
She knelt down by him, and soothed and petted and talked to him, while the good clergyman examined the injured leg.
It was dreadfully swollen, and every touch was painful; but Cap knew well enough that the hands that hurt were trying to help him, and though he moaned and winced, he licked the hands and made no effort to draw the leg away.
"No," said the vicar.
"No bones are broken.
There's no reason why Cap should not recover; all he needs is care and nursing."
Florence quietly laid down her riding whip and tucked up her sleeves. "What shall I do first?" she said.
"Well," said the vicar, "I think a hot compress is the thing." Florence looked puzzled; the dolls had never had hot compresses.
"What is it?" she asked.
Very simple, you see, Nurse Florence!
The first thing is to light the fire."
That was soon done, with the aid of the boy, who hovered about, interested, but ignorant of surgery.
Florence looked all about the room, but could see nothing save Roger's clean smock frock which hung against the door.
"This will do!" she cried.
The vicar nodded approval.
As the heat drew out the inflammation and pain, Cap looked up at the little helper, all his simple dog heart shining in his eyes; the look sank into the child's heart and deepened the tenderness already there. Another step, and a great one, was taken on the blessed road she was to travel.
He dropped down softly to the causeway.
It was the death keening of proud Atlantis, Queen of the Atlantic for fifty thousand years.
She was dying in darkness.
For, with the blinding of the Eye, all the soft lights within the city had gone out.
Dense, utter, impenetrable darkness reigned, and even the gibbous moon, floating overhead, seemed to give no light.
Jim dropped to the causeway and began running in the direction of the city.
But, feeling the drag of his wings, he unbuckled the strap and flung them away.
He might need them, but his one thought was to get to Lucille, if she were still alive.
And he felt that each moment lost might mean that he would be too late.
Through the blackness he raced forward, hearing that sobbing ululation within the walls.
But behind him he heard another sound, and shuddered at it, all his hopes suddenly reversed.
For that sound was the shouting of the Drilgoes as they rushed forward to conquest.
And now it seemed a monstrous thing that proud Atlantis should be at the mercy of these hordes.
He had let loose destruction upon the world.
But it was to save Lucille.
That was his consolation.
He must get to her before the Drilgoes entered.
And he ran faster, panting, gasping, till of a sudden the portals loomed before him, and he saw a crowd of frenzied Atlanteans struggling to pass through, and a file of soldiers struggling to keep them back.
He could distinguish nothing more than the confused struggle.
He hurled himself into the midst of the crowd and swept it back.
He was within the walls now, and struggling to pass through the mob of people that was swarming like homeless bees.
He fought them with flailing fists, he clove a pathway through them, until he found himself in a great shadowy space that he recognized as the central assembly of the city.
More by instinct than design he hit upon the narrow court that was the elevator.
But the court was filled with another mob of struggling people, and in the darkness there was no possibility of discovering the secret of raising it.
He blundered about, raging, forcing a path now here, now there.
He ran into blind alleys, into small threading streets about the court, which led him back into the central place of assembly.
It was like a nightmare, that blind search under the pale three quarter moon and the black, star blotched sky.
Suddenly Jim found himself wedged by the pressure of the crowd into a sort of recess leading off the elevator court.
So strong was the pressure here that he was unable to move an inch.
Wedged bolt upright, he could only wait and let the frenzied mob stream past him.
And louder above the sound of wailing came the roars of the Drilgoes swarming along the causeway.
Suddenly something gave behind him-a door, as it seemed, broken off its hinges by the mob pressure.
Jim was hurled backward, and fell heavily down a flight of stone stairs, bringing up against a stone balustrade.
He got up, unconscious of his bruises, ran to the top of the flight, and saw the dim square of palest twilight where the door had been.
That stairway must lead to the top of the building, and thence there should be some access to the amphitheatre.
Jim turned toward it.
Suddenly a tremendous uproar filled the streets, yells, the clicking grunts of the Drilgoes, the screams of the panic stricken populace. The invaders had arrived, and they were sweeping all before them.
No chance of recognition in that darkness.
Lucille!
But long before he reached the top he was ascending one by one, with straining limbs and laboring breath.
Red slaughter down below, a very inferno of sound; above, that shadowy stairway, still extending almost to the heavens.
Step after step, flight beyond flight!
Jim's lungs were bursting, and his heart hammering as if it would break his chest.
One flight more!
Another!
Suddenly he realized that his task was ended.
In place of the stairs stood a vast hall, and beyond that another hall, dim in the faint light that filtered through the glass above.
Jim thought he remembered where he was.
Beyond that next hall there should be the tongue of flooring, crossing the amphitheatre and joining the platform of the idols.
But he stopped suddenly as he emerged, not upon the tongue, but upon still another stairway.
He had gone astray, and out of his bursting lungs a cry of rage and despair went up.
For a moment he stood still.
What use to proceed further?
And then, amazingly, there came what might have been a sign from heaven.
Down through a small, square opening overhead, no larger than a ventilator, it came ... a glimmer of violet flame!
And Jim hurled himself like a madman against the stairs, and surmounted them with two bounds.
There were no more.
Instead, Jim found himself looking down into the amphitheatre.
The thick walls had cut off all sound from his ears, save a confused murmur, but now a hideous uproar assailed them.
The whole floor of the amphitheatre was a mass of moving shadows, of slayers and slain.
The Drilgoes had broken in and trapped the multitudes that had taken refuge there.
Their fearful stone tipped spears thrust in and out, to the accompaniment of their savage howls and the screams of the dying.
Never has such a shadow play been seen, perhaps, as that below, where death stalked in dense darkness, and the slayer did not even see his victim.
Only the thrust of spears, the soft, yielding flesh that they encountered, the scream, the wrench of stone from tissue, and the blended howl of triumph and scream of despair.
Yet only for a moment did Jim turn his eyes upon that sight.
For he knew where he was now.
He had emerged upon the other side of the amphitheatre, upon the platform where he had seen the priests and dignitaries gathered when he was led forward to be sacrificed.
There, in the rear, were the hideous, shadowy gods, looming up out of the darkness, their outstretched arms interlaced.
And there upon the platform was the Atom Smasher, a little thread of violet light seeping out of the central tube.
Beside it stood a group of figures, impossible to distinguish in the darkness, but of a sudden Lucille's scream rang out above the din below.
With three leaps Jim was at her side.
They were dragging them toward the idols, and Jim understood what that scene portended.
She knew him, turned toward him.
Then one of the priests, armed with a great stone headed club-for no metal is permitted within the precincts of the god Cruk-struck at him furiously.
Jim leaped aside, letting the club descend harmlessly upon the floor. He shot out his right with all his strength behind it, catching the priest upon the jaw, and the man crumpled.
Whirling the club around his head, he fought back the fanatics, all the while shouting to Tode to start the Atom Smasher.
In such a moment he only remembered that Tode was a white man, and of his own generation.
He struck down three of the priests; then he was seized around the knees from behind, and fell heavily.
As he stopped struggling for a moment, to gather his strength for a supreme effort, he heard a whir overhead, and saw the arms of the stone gods begin their horrible revolution.
The priests had started the machinery.
Jim saw him now, a figure poised upon a platform behind the arms, his own arms raised heavenward.
Jim was being dragged forward, with Lucille beside him, old Parrish following, still making a futile struggle for life, while pitiful screeches issued from his mouth.
Jim saw the revolving arms descend within a foot of his head.
One more fight-one more, the last.
Suddenly, with loud yells, a band of Drilgoes leaped forward from the head of the stairs and rushed upon the struggling priests and victims. And, dark as it was, Jim recognized their leader-Cain.
And Cain knew Lucille.
As the priests rallied for a desperate resistance, Cain hurled his great body through the air, landing squarely upon the shoulders of the priest nearest the revolving arms, and knocking him flat.
Then the arms caught priest and Drilgo, and the steel hooks dug deep into their flesh.
A screech of terror, a howl that reverberated through the amphitheatre, and nothing remained of either but a heap of macerated flesh.
But in that instant Jim had fought free again.
He caught Lucille and dragged her back toward the Atom Smasher.
Tode had already broken from his captors and was working at it frantically.
"Hold on!" screeched old Parrish.
"Hold on!"
They had a moment's leeway.
The Drilgoes had driven the priests back into the hooks.
With awful shrieks the fanatics were yielding up their lives, in the place of their selected victims.
But more Drilgoes were pouring up the stairs.
A moment's leeway, and no more, before the savage band would impale the four upon their stone pointed spears.
There was not the slightest chance that they would be able to make their identity known.
"For God's sake hurry!" Jim yelled in Tode's ear.
The wheels were revolving, a stream of violet light, leaping out of the central tunnel, cast a lurid illumination upon the scene.
But it was too late.
A score of Drilgoes, with leveled spears, were rushing on the four.
"Hold tight!" screeched Parrish.
He thrust his arm into his breast, and pulled out a little lever.
Jim recognized it and remembered.
It was the instrument of universal death-the uranium release of untold forces of cataclysmic depredation.
A roar that seemed to rend the heavens followed.
Roar upon roar, as the infinite momentum of the disintegrating uranium struck obstacle after obstacle.
The Drilgoes vanished, the amphitheatre melted away, walls and roof....
Overhead were the moon and stars.
And proud Atlantis was sinking into the depths of the sea....
Not as a ship sinks, but piecemeal, her walls and towers crumbling and toppling as a child's sand castle crumbles under the attack of the lapping waves.
Down they crashed, carrying their freight of black, clinging, human ants, while from the sea's depths a wave, a mile high, rose and battered the fragments to destruction.
From the crater of the volcano a huge wave of fire fanned forward, and where fire and water met a cloud of steam rose up.
A boiling chaos in which water and earth and fire were blended, spread over land and sea.
And then suddenly it was ended.
Where the last island of the Atlantean continent had been, only the ocean was to be seen, placid beneath the stars.
The Atom Smasher was vibrating at tremendous speed.
Jim, with one arm round Lucille, faced Tode at the instrument board.
Near by sat Parrish, watching him too.
"That took a whole year," said Tode.
"That pretty little scene of destruction we've just witnessed.
The good old Atom Smasher has been doing some lively stunts, or we'd have been engulfed too.
We're not likely to see anything so pretty in history again, unless we go to watch the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii by lava from Vesuvius.
But that would be quite tame in comparison with this."
Tode's jeering tone grated on Jim's ears immeasurably.
"I don't think any of us are craving any more experiments, Tode," he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
"Suppose you take us back to Peconic Bay.
We'll dump the Atom Smasher into the pond, and try to forget that we've had anything except a bad nightmare."
"Don't trust him, Jim," whispered Lucille.
Tode heard.
"Thank you," he answered, scowling.
"But seriously, Dent, we can't go back with nothing to show for all our trouble.
Those fools tried to betray me, and then the Eye went out.
Perhaps I have you to thank for that performance?
However, the sensible thing is to let bygones be bygones.
But we must make a little excursion.
How about picking up a little treasure from the hoards of Solomon or Genghis Khan?
A few pounds of precious stones would make a world of difference in our social status when we reach Long Island."
Jim felt a cold fury permeating him.
Tode saw his grim look and laughed malignantly.
"Well, Dent, I'm ready to be frank with you," he said.
"The game's still in my hands.
I want Lucille.
I'm willing to take you and Parrish back, provided you agree she shall be mine.
I'll have to trust you, but I shall have means of evening up if you play crooked."
"Why don't you ask my girl herself?" piped old Parrish.
"He needn't trouble.
He knows the answer!" cried Lucille scornfully.
"There's your answer," said Jim.
"Now, what's the alternative?"
"The alternative is, that I have already set the dial to eternity, Dent," grinned Tode.
"Eternity in the fifth dimension.
Didn't know I'd worked that out, did you?
A pleasant little surprise.
No, don't try to move.
My hand is on the lever.
I have only to press it, and we're there."
Jim stood stock still in horror.
Tode's voice rang true.
He believed Tode had the power he claimed.
"Yes, the fifth dimension, and eternity," said Tode, "where time and space reel into functionlessness.
Don't ask me what it's like there. I've never been there.
But my impression of it is that it's a fairly good representation of the place popularly known as hell.
"You fool, Dent," Tode's voice rang out with vicious, snarling emphasis, "I gave you your chance to come in with me.
Together we'd have made ourselves masters of Atlantis and brought back her plunder to our Twentieth Century world.
You refused because of a girl-a girl, Dent, who loved me long before you came upon the scene."
"That's a lie, Lucius," answered Lucille steadily.
"And you can do your worst.
There's one factor you haven't reckoned in your calculations, and that's called God."
"The dark blur on the spectral lines," old Parrish muttered.
"Come, make your choice, Dent," he mocked. "It's merely to press this lever.
You'll find yourself-well, we won't go into that.
I don't know where you'll find yourself.
You'll disappear.
I must have Lucille. Choose!" His voice rang out in maniac tones.
"Choose, all of you!"
"Lucille has answered you," Jim retorted.
"And how about you, old man?" called Tode to Parrish.
Parrish leased forward, making a swift movement with his hand.
"Go to your own hell, you dev-"
A blinding light, a frantic oscillation of the Atom Smasher, a sense of death, awful and indescribable-and stark unconsciousness rushed over Jim.
His last thought was that Lucille's arms were about him, and that he was holding her.
Nothing mattered, therefore, even though they two were plunged into that awful nothingness of the fifth dimension, where neither space nor time recognizably exists.
"He's coming around, Lucille.
Thank God for it!"
Jim opened his eyes.
For a few moments he looked about him without understanding.
Then the outlines of a room etched themselves against the clouded background.
And in the foreground Lucille's face.
The girl was bending over Jim, one hand soothing his forehead.
"Where am I?" Jim muttered.
"Back on earth, Jim, the good old earth, never again to leave it," answered Lucille, with a catch in her voice.
With an effort she composed herself.
"You mustn't talk," she said.
"But what place is this?"
But the first explanation came from Andy Lumm.
"Well, mr Dent, my wife and me sure were glad to be on the spot when you and Miss Parrish got bogged on the edge of the Black Pool," he said.
"Mean, treacherous place it is.
Thar was a cow got mired thar last month, up to her belly.
If us hadn't found her, and dragged her out with ropes, she'd have gone clear under.
Granpop Dawes says thar's underground springs around the edge, and that it runs straight down to hell, though that seems sorter far fetched to me.
Made me and my wife uneasy, that did.
'Andy,' she says.
'I got an inkling you oughter go to the Vanishing Place and see if she ain't there.' And there I found you two, mired to the waist, and mr Parrish dancing around and fretting, and his clothes burned to cinders.
The return of Parrish had been duly chronicled in the newspapers, and had provoked a mild interest, but fortunately the public mind was so occupied at the moment with the trial of a night club hostess that, after the first rush of newspaper men, the three were left alone.
Day after day, in the brilliant autumn weather, Jim and Lucille would roam the tinted woods, recharging themselves with the feel of Earth, until the memory of those dread experiences grew dim.
"Well, Jim, I reckon I'd better tell you and get it over," said old Parrish one morning-Parrish, quite his old, jaunty self again.
"Tode had got the dials pointing to the fifth dimension-eternity, he called it, though actually I believe it's nothing more than annihilation, a grand smash.
Well, he pressed that lever.
But something had gone wrong.
"You remember how poor Cain seemed to take great interest in the Atom Smasher.
There's no way of telling what had been going on in that brain of his, but it looks to me like he'd known that that lever meant death.
It was sealed up in wax, and Tode had got it free on the way out of Atlantis.
He'd pried loose one of the wires that hooked to the transformer, and short circuited it, not knowing, of course, just what he was doing.
The result was that when Tode pressed that lever, instead of blowing the whole contraption to pieces, he got a couple of billion volts of electricity through his body, combined with a larger amperage than has ever been imagined.
It burned him to a few grease spots.
He simply-vanished.
You don't remember what you did at the moment, boy?"
"I don't seem to remember anything," said Jim.
"Well, your response was an automatic one.
You jumped him.
Luckily you were too late, for Tode vanished like that!" Old Parrish snapped his fingers.
"But you must have got into the field of magnetic force-any way, you were almost electrocuted.
Lucille and I thought you were dead for hours.
"We laid you down and set a course for home.
I used those dial numberings Tode had given me.
He'd said they wouldn't work, but he'd lied.
They did work.
They brought us back to the Vanishing Place.
"We carried you out, and then I saw your eyelid twitch.
We worked over you with artificial respiration till it looked as if there was a chance for you.
Then I shut off the power and let the waters rush in over the Atom Smasher, and swam ashore.
"Let's think no more about him," said Lucille.
She had come up to them, and the two looked at each other and smiled.
Love is self centred; other things it forgets very quickly.
"To morrow we go back to New York," said Jim.
"I think so, Jim," said Lucille.
"No, Jim.
I was thinking of poor Cain.
He died for me."
"But that was twelve thousand years ago, my dear, and to day's to day," said Jim.
"And to morrow a new life begins for you and me."
He drew her closer to him.
No, he would never quite forget, but that was twelve thousand years ago ... and to morrow was his wedding day.
Under Vespasian and titus, Pliny, the naturalist, exclaimed: "Large estates have ruined Italy, and are ruining the provinces."
When the Senate sold captured lands at auction, it was in the interest of the treasury and of public welfare. When the patricians bought up possessions and property, they realized the purpose of the Senate's decrees; when they lent at high rates of interest, they took advantage of a legal privilege.
"The concentration of property," says m Laboulaye, "while causing extreme poverty, forced the emperors to feed and amuse the people, that they might forget their misery.
In the time of Caesar, three hundred and twenty thousand people were thus fed.
"The emperor shrank at the thought.
"While grain was gratuitous, agriculture was impossible.
Tillage gave way to pasturage, another cause of depopulation, even among slaves.
"Finally, luxury, carried further and further every day, covered the soil of Italy with elegant villas, which occupied whole cantons.
Gardens and groves replaced the fields, and the free population fled to the towns.
Husbandry disappeared almost entirely, and with husbandry the husbandman.
Africa furnished the wheat, and Greece the wine.
One day later, and three hundred thousand starving men walked the streets of Rome: that was a revolution.
"This decline of Italy and the provinces did not stop.
After the reign of Nero, depopulation commenced in towns as noted as Antium and Tarentum.
Senators were compelled to invest one third of their fortunes in real estate in Italy; but this measure served only to increase the evil which they wished to cure.
Let us now trace the revolutions in property among the Barbarians.
As long as the German tribes dwelt in their forests, it did not occur to them to divide and appropriate the soil.
The land was held in common: each individual could plow, sow, and reap.
But, when the empire was once invaded, they bethought themselves of sharing the land, just as they shared spoils after a victory.
This property, like that of the romans, was wholly individual, independent, exclusive, transferable, and consequently susceptible of accumulation and invasion.
The Roman wanted matter; the Barbarian wanted man.
Consequently, in the feudal ages, rents were almost nothing,--simply a hare, a partridge, a pie, a few pints of wine brought by a little girl, or a Maypole set up within the suzerain's reach.
In return, the vassal or incumbent had to follow the seignior to battle (a thing which happened almost every day), and equip and feed himself at his own expense.
The lands, like the men, were secured to a chief or seignior by a bond of mutual protection and fidelity.
This subjection was the labor of the German epoch which gave birth to feudalism.
By fair means or foul, every proprietor who could not be a chief was forced to be a vassal." (Laboulaye: History of Property.)
The times which paved the way for the advent of feudalism and the reappearance of large proprietors were times of carnage and the most frightful anarchy.
The tenth century, among others, if my memory serves me rightly, was called the CENTURY OF IRON.
His property, his life, and the honor of his wife and children always in danger the small proprietor made haste to do homage to his seignior, and to bestow something on the church of his freehold, that he might receive protection and security.
The Capitularies are full of repressive provisions; but the incessant reiteration of these threats only shows the perseverance of the evil and the impotency of the government.
Oppression, moreover, varies but little in its methods.
It is said that, whenever a poor man refused to give his estate to the bishop, the curate, the count, the judge, or the centurion, these immediately sought an opportunity to ruin him.
They made him serve in the army until, completely ruined, he was induced, by fair means or foul, to give up his freehold."--Laboulaye: History of Property.
How many small proprietors and manufacturers have not been ruined by large ones through chicanery, law suits, and competition?
Reduced to personal exploitation, it is property only potentially.
At its second term, it exists in its perfection; then it is truly property.
When property is concentrated, society, abusing itself, polluted, so to speak, grows corrupt, wears itself out-how shall I express this horrible idea?--plunges into long continued and fatal luxury.
When feudalism was established, society had to die of the same disease which killed it under the Caesars,--I mean accumulated property.
But humanity, created for an immortal destiny, is deathless; the revolutions which disturb it are purifying crises, invariably followed by more vigorous health.
In the fifth century, the invasion of the Barbarians partially restored the world to a state of natural equality.
In the twelfth century, a new spirit pervading all society gave the slave his rights, and through justice breathed new life into the heart of nations. It has been said, and often repeated, that Christianity regenerated the world.
That is true; but it seems to me that there is a mistake in the date.
The patrician families became extinct, as the feudal families did, and as all aristocracies must.
The destruction of feudalism, the conversion of the serf into the commoner, the emancipation of the communes, and the admission of the Third Estate to political power, were deeds accomplished by Christianity exclusively.
one.
Slavery among the romans.--"The Roman slave was, in the eyes of the law, only a thing,--no more than an ox or a horse.
He had neither property, family, nor personality; he was defenceless against his master's cruelty, folly, or cupidity.
Claudius was the first defender of this shameful practice."
"Discharge your old workman," says the economist of the proprietary school; "turn off that sick domestic, that toothless and worn out servant.
Put away the unserviceable beauty; to the hospital with the useless mouths!"
"As soon as the Church met in council, it launched an anathema against the masters who had exercised over their slaves this terrible right of life and death.
Constantine, who embodied in the laws the grand ideas of Christianity, valued the life of a slave as highly as that of a freeman, and declared the master, who had intentionally brought death upon his slave, guilty of murder.
In what did it differ from Roman slavery, and whence came this difference?
Let the same author answer.
Some are employed in the personal service of the master; others are charged with household cares.
The women spin the wool; the men grind the grain, make the bread, or practise, in the interest of the seignior, what little they know of the industrial arts. The master punishes them when he chooses, kills them with impunity, and sells them and theirs like so many cattle.
In all these particulars Germanic slavery and Roman servitude are alike."
This similarity is worthy of notice.
Slavery is always the same, whether in a Roman villa or on a Barbarian farm.
Why did his condition improve?
Always Christianity, always religion, though we should like to speak of the laws only.
Did the philanthropy of the Visigoths make its first appearance before or after the preaching of the Gospel?
This point must be cleared up.
They were rarely separated from their homes when their land was sold; they and all that they had became the property of the purchaser.
The law favored this realization of the serf, in not allowing him to be sold out of the country."
"The Barbarians," again says m Laboulaye, "were the first to recognize the slave's rights of family and property,--two rights which are incompatible with slavery."
Suppose that the Barbarians had remained Pagans in the midst of a Pagan world.
The Barbarians were less selfish, less imperious, less dissolute, and less cruel than the romans.
When, how, and by what title did they obtain this privilege?
"GRADUALLY their duties were regulated."
Whence came the regulations?
Who had the authority to introduce them?
"The master took a part of the labor of the serf,--three days, for instance,--and left the rest to him.
As for Sunday, that belonged to God."
But this law itself, on what did it bear?--what was its principle?--what was the philosophy of the councils and popes with reference to this matter?
The reply to all these questions, coming from me alone, would be distrusted.
The authority of m Laboulaye shall give credence to my words.
This holy philosophy, to which the slaves were indebted for every thing, this invocation of the Gospel, was an anathema against property.
The proprietors of small freeholds, that is, the freemen of the middle class, had fallen, in consequence of the tyranny of the nobles, into a worse condition than that of the tenants and serfs.
It was better to have a noble for a seignior than for a judge."
The honest tenant-the laborer who earns weekly a moderate but constant salary-is more to be envied than the independent but small farmer, or the poor licensed mechanic.
At that time, all were either seigniors or serfs, oppressors or oppressed.
"Then, under the protection of convents, or of the seigniorial turret, new societies were formed, which silently spread over the soil made fertile by their hands, and which derived their power from the annihilation of the free classes whom they enlisted in their behalf.
As fast as the social tempest abated, it became necessary to respect the union and heritage of these villeins, who by their labor had truly prescribed the soil for their own profit."
I ask how prescription could take effect where a contrary title and possession already existed?
M. Laboulaye is a lawyer.
Where, then, did he ever see the labor of the slave and the cultivation by the tenant prescribe the soil for their own profit, to the detriment of a recognized master daily acting as a proprietor?
Let us not disguise matters.
In doing these things they were perfectly right; for, in fact, their condition was intolerable.
But in law-I mean in Roman and Napoleonic law-their refusal to obey and pay tribute to their masters was illegitimate.
The seignior had attached the serf to the soil; religion granted the serf rights over the soil.
The seignior imposed duties upon the serf; religion fixed their limits.
The seignior could kill the serf with impunity, could deprive him of his wife, violate his daughter, pillage his house, and rob him of his savings; religion checked his invasions: it excommunicated the seignior.
Religion was the real cause of the ruin of feudal property.
Why should it not be bold enough to day to resolutely condemn capitalistic property?
Since the middle ages, there has been no change in social economy except in its forms; its relations remain unaltered.
There were sub associations, fraternities, tradesmen's associations in the communes, and colleges in the universities.
In France, the Revolution was much more gradual.
The communes, in taking refuge under the protection of the kings, had found them masters rather than protectors.
The nobles, the clergy, the commoners, the parliaments, every thing in short except a few seeming privileges, were controlled by the king; who, like his early predecessors, consumed regularly, and nearly always in advance, the revenues of his domain,--and that domain was France.
Finally, 'eighty nine arrived; liberty resumed its march; a century and a half had been required to wear out the last form of feudal property,--monarchy.
Have you heard the Taoist tale of the Taming of the Harp?
It reared its head to talk to the stars; its roots struck deep into the earth, mingling their bronzed coils with those of the silver dragon that slept beneath.
At last came Peiwoh, the prince of harpists.
Hark! a tiger roars,--the valley answers again.
It is autumn; in the desert night, sharp like a sword gleams the moon upon the frosted grass.
The forest swayed like an ardent swain deep lost in thought.
I left the harp to choose its theme, and knew not truly whether the harp had been Peiwoh or Peiwoh were the harp."
At the magic touch of the beautiful the secret chords of our being are awakened, we vibrate and thrill in response to its call.
Mind speaks to mind.
We listen to the unspoken, we gaze upon the unseen.
The master calls forth notes we know not of. Memories long forgotten all come back to us with a new significance. Hopes stifled by fear, yearnings that we dare not recognise, stand forth in new glory.
Several of his pupils submitted plays for his approval, but only one of the pieces appealed to him.
In art vanity is equally fatal to sympathetic feeling, whether on the part of the artist or the public.
At once he is and is not.
He catches a glimpse of Infinity, but words cannot voice his delight, for the eye has no tongue.
Rarely was the object exposed to view, and then only to the initiated.
The name of the artist is more important to them than the quality of the work.
As a Chinese critic complained many centuries ago, "People criticise a picture by their ear." It is this lack of genuine appreciation that is responsible for the pseudo classic horrors that to day greet us wherever we turn.
Another common mistake is that of confusing art with archaeology.
The mere fact that they have passed unscathed through centuries of criticism and come down to us still covered with glory commands our respect.
A collector is anxious to acquire specimens to illustrate a period or a school, and forgets that a single masterpiece can teach us more than any number of the mediocre products of a given period or school.
We classify too much and enjoy too little.
The art of to day is that which really belongs to us: it is our own reflection.
In condemning it we but condemn ourselves.
Flowers
We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them.
We dare not die without them.
We have worshipped with the lily, we have meditated with the lotus, we have charged in battle array with the rose and the chrysanthemum.
We have even attempted to speak in the language of flowers.
How could we live without them?
It frightens one to conceive of a world bereft of their presence.
What solace do they not bring to the bedside of the sick, what a light of bliss to the darkness of weary spirits?
We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him.
What atrocities do we not perpetrate in the name of culture and refinement!
To morrow a ruthless hand will close around your throats.
The wretch, she may be passing fair.
Tell me, will this be kindness?
He would call himself a Master of Flowers.
He would claim the rights of a doctor and you would instinctively hate him, for you know a doctor always seeks to prolong the troubles of his victims.
He would cut, bend, and twist you into those impossible positions which he thinks it proper that you should assume.
He would burn you with red hot coals to stop your bleeding, and thrust wires into you to assist your circulation.
Would you not have preferred to have been killed at once when you were first captured?
Beside this utter carelessness of life, the guilt of the Flower Master becomes insignificant.
He, at least, respects the economy of nature, selects his victims with careful foresight, and after death does honour to their remains.
In the West the display of flowers seems to be a part of the pageantry of wealth,--the fancy of a moment.
Why were the flowers born so beautiful and yet so hapless?
Insects can sting, and even the meekest of beasts will fight when brought to bay. The birds whose plumage is sought to deck some bonnet can fly from its pursuer, the furred animal whose coat you covet for your own may hide at your approach.
The only flower known to have wings is the butterfly; all others stand helpless before the destroyer.
The man of the pot is far more humane than he of the scissors.
In Japan, one of the most popular of the No dances, the Hachinoki, composed during the Ashikaga period, is based upon the story of an impoverished knight, who, on a freezing night, in lack of fuel for a fire, cuts his cherished plants in order to entertain a wandering friar.
However, let us not be too sentimental.
Let us be less luxurious but more magnificent.
Destruction below and above, destruction behind and before. Change is the only Eternal,--why not as welcome Death as Life?
They are but counterparts one of the other,--The Night and Day of Brahma.
We have worshipped Death, the relentless goddess of mercy, under many different names.
It was the shadow of the All devouring that the Gheburs greeted in the fire.
The mystic fire consumes our weakness, the sacred sword cleaves the bondage of desire.
From our ashes springs the phoenix of celestial hope, out of the freedom comes a higher realisation of manhood.
Why not destroy flowers if thereby we can evolve new forms ennobling the world idea?
Here we are apt to see only the flower stems, heads as it were, without body, stuck promiscuously into a vase.
Thus Sekishiu ordained that white plum blossoms should not be made use of when snow lay in the garden. "Noisy" flowers were relentlessly banished from the tea room.
The tea master deems his duty ended with the selection of the flowers, and leaves them to tell their own story.
Again, if you go into a noon tea on some irritatingly hot summer day, you may discover in the darkened coolness of the tokonoma a single lily in a hanging vase; dripping with dew, it seems to smile at the foolishness of life.
One of the guests has recorded that he felt in the whole composition the breath of waning autumn.
Flower stories are endless.
We shall recount but one more.
The fame of his convulvuli reached the ear of the Taiko, and he expressed a desire to see them, in consequence of which Rikiu invited him to a morning tea at his house.
They are not cowards, like men.
seven. Tea Masters
In religion the Future is behind us.
The cut and color of the dress, the poise of the body, and the manner of walking could all be made expressions of artistic personality.
These were matters not to be lightly ignored, for until one has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty. Thus the tea master strove to be something more than the artist,--art itself.
Rikiu loved to quote an old poem which says: "To those who long only for flowers, fain would I show the full blown spring which abides in the toiling buds of snow covered hills."
The Seven Kilns of Enshiu are well known to all students of Japanese pottery.
Many of our textile fabrics bear the names of tea masters who conceived their color or design.
One of the greatest schools of painting owes its origin to the tea master Honnami Koyetsu, famed also as a lacquer artist and potter.
The whole Korin school, as it is generally designated, is an expression of Teaism. In the broad lines of this school we seem to find the vitality of nature herself.
Great as has been the influence of the tea masters in the field of art, it is as nothing compared to that which they have exerted on the conduct of life.
Many of our delicate dishes, as well as our way of serving food, are their inventions.
They have instructed us in the proper spirit in which to approach flowers.
They have given emphasis to our natural love of simplicity, and shown us the beauty of humility.
We stagger in the attempt to keep our moral equilibrium, and see forerunners of the tempest in every cloud that floats on the horizon.
The last moments of the great tea masters were as full of exquisite refinement as had been their lives.
Seeking always to be in harmony with the great rhythm of the universe, they were ever prepared to enter the unknown. The "Last Tea of Rikiu" will stand forth forever as the acme of tragic grandeur.
Long had been the friendship between Rikiu and the Taiko Hideyoshi, and high the estimation in which the great warrior held the tea master.
But the friendship of a despot is ever a dangerous honour.
Taking advantage of the coldness which had for some time existed between the Taiko and Rikiu, the enemies of the latter accused him of being implicated in a conspiracy to poison the despot.
It was whispered to Hideyoshi that the fatal potion was to be administered to him with a cup of the green beverage prepared by the tea master.
On the day destined for his self immolation, Rikiu invited his chief disciples to a last tea ceremony.
Soon the host enters the room.
"Never again shall this cup, polluted by the lips of misfortune, be used by man." He speaks, and breaks the vessel into fragments.
One only, the nearest and dearest, is requested to remain and witness the end.
Rikiu then removes his tea gown and carefully folds it upon the mat, thereby disclosing the immaculate white death robe which it had hitherto concealed.
Tenderly he gazes on the shining blade of the fatal dagger, and in exquisite verse thus addresses it:
THE CLEARER SIGHT
BY ERNEST STARR
He held a steady hand on the lever, so that he might push it back instantly if he saw in the crucible too sudden a transformation.
As he watched, the dull saffron powder took on a deeper hue about the edge, the body of it remaining unchanged.
No further change appeared.
He leaned closer over it, regardless of the thin choking haze that spread about his face. In his attitude there was a rigidity of controlled excitement out of keeping with the seeming harmlessness of the experiment.
He was as a man attuned to a tremendous hazard, anticipation and mental endurance taut, all his force focused on one throbbing desire.
The deepened hue touched only the edge, following regularly the contour of the vessel; it made no advance toward the centre of the substance.
'It shall!' Noakes breathed; and as if conning an oft repeated formula, he said, 'The entire mass should deepen in color, regularly and evenly. Heat!
Heat!'
His glance shifted to the control switch under his hand.
Its metal knobs, marking the degrees of intensity of the current it controlled, caught the light and blinked like so many small, baleful eyes. Particularly one, that which would be capped next in the orbit of the lever, held him fascinated; the winking potentiality of it thralled him, as the troubled crystal devours the gaze of the Hindu magi.
He jerked back his head decisively; he would increase the current.
The thought burned before him like a live thing; and in the light of it he saw many pictures-heliographs of happenings in and about the laboratories: flame, smoke dense and turgid, splintered wood, metal hurtling through air, bleeding hands, lacerated breasts, sightless eyes.
'That's the trouble with high explosives,' he half groaned.
He turned away from the stand and went to the single window that lit the room.
Through it he saw shops, store houses, and small buildings similar to his own, all a part of the plant of Maxineff.
He thought of each small laboratory as a potential inferno, each experimenter a bondman to ecstasy, the whole frenzied, gasping scheme a furtherance of the fame and power of Henry Maxineff, already world known, inventor of the deadliest high explosives.
One of the buildings had been turned into a temporary hospital.
He thought of the pitiful occupant-his face scarred, one socket eyeless-and shivered.
'It isn't that I want to hedge,' he said.
'I shall take the chance; but having risked everything, I will go to her able and whole, offering it all without an apology.'
His gaze was drawn back to the crucible.
In the thin haze above it a face seemed to shine.
'Let me bring with an avowal all that you have now, more!--for in your life there can't be anything bigger than my love.
And it's that which makes the deal right.
Don't judge me yet!
He whispered to the face, and his breath made little swirls and eddies in the haze about it.
The filmy curves wafted toward him, bringing it close to his lips.
The lids fluttered.
The face vanished.
He started back, distraught.
A rushing recollection of Maxineff's tragedies came to him, more vivid even than the face.
Halsey, who jarred the nitro, had been annihilated. Ewell was mad from the violent termination of an experiment similar to that now in development.
'A year ago!' Noakes said, 'and still Ewell lives and raves!'
How alike the cases were!
If the mixture there were properly prepared, added heat would metamorphose it calmly from its present harmlessness into something new, wonderful, deadly.
It would become imbued with marvelous possibility, a thing for which royal military bureaus, imperial navies, would pay a great price.
A twist of the lever would do it.
Yet how alike- And Ewell was mad, injured gruesomely, living dead.
Again the blinking switch caught him, but he shrugged away its evil suggestiveness.
He sought to flee the strain of the moment, to make it seem natural and like the smaller risks of his daily occupation.
He assumed a tottering bravado, and as he put his hand to the lever, he smiled crookedly.
His hand left the lever as if it pricked him.
'You!'
'Am I a wraith?'
Noakes looked at her silently.
In the moment's abstraction her presence seemed a manifestation of some psychic conduction which he tried lamely to understand-here, now, in a moment of danger of which she unknowingly was the moving force.
'Then exorcise me quickly, but don't sprinkle me with acid; it would be fatal to my clothes.'
Noakes warmed to the aura of light and cheer about her.
'There isn't an alkali in the shop; I won't endanger you,' he replied easily.
'mrs
Max says you are confining yourself too closely.
I've been with her all morning.'
While she spoke she took off her hat and smoothed her hair.
'I'm blown to pieces.
I drove Cornish this morning; he got by everything on the way.
He knew that in her were no dim angles of cross grained purpose, no shadowy intersections of the lines of good and evil.
But see-'
She turned her back while she arranged her hair before the makeshift mirror.
Relieved from her direct gaze, he stepped quickly to the stand, and looked into the crucible.
He had expected none, but he could not be sure.
Maxineff himself could not be sure of this new mixture.
The suspense was unbearable.
'Well, Cagliostro!' she called.
'You alchemists are capable of the utterest abstraction, aren't you?'
'Why have you come?' he said quickly, frowning at her.
'To take you driving,' with an enticing smile.
'Will you not go?
Please, at once?'
Her manner lost something of its verve.
'And won't you come?'
'I cannot; not this morning.'
'Well,' she said, with a little sigh, as she thrust in her hat pins, 'mrs
Max will be disappointed.
On her command I came to break up this seclusion of yours.
'A week, seven days!'
'What are you doing?'
'Oh-I've been working out some ideas.'
'But you are so quiet about it!
What are the ideas?'
Noakes hesitated, and she laughed merrily as she went toward the door.
'We laity are hopeless, aren't we?
'No, I wasn't, because I scarcely understand myself.'
'Indeed, no,' he said.
'mr Max knows nothing about it-that is,' he continued hurriedly, 'it's the sort of thing- At any rate, I'll soon be through.'
She stood in the doorway, outlined against the bright incoming mid daylight, her face turned back to him.
'And then you will come out into the world again?
mrs Max and Cornish and I shall be honored.'
'Then I shall be free.'
He spoke the words with singular feeling.
'Truly, though, mr Noakes,' she said in a straightforward manner, 'you are too busy.
mrs Max says you are to break out, break out with the measles if nothing else will interrupt you, and you are to have tea with her this afternoon.'
Noakes looked doubtful.
She went down the steps and turned again.
'Oh, I almost forgot-here's a letter for you.'
'Where-'
'It came in the Maxineffs' mail this morning.
mrs Max suggested my bringing it to you.'
Noakes took the long, foreign stamped envelope.
The typed superscription was noncommittal, but at the Berlin postmark his eyes narrowed and the knuckles of the hand by his side whitened.
He drew a quick breath and looked keenly at the girl.
'Was mr Maxineff at home this morning?' he asked quietly.
'Oh!' he breathed.
'Thank you very much.'
He slipped the letter into his pocket.
'Well, I can't stay any longer.'
Noakes pressed her hand.
'And, Cagliostro, when the puzzle's solved, come to see me.
I'll sing away the worries, Good bye.'
'Good bye, Miss Becky.
Excuse my untractableness, won't you?'
He watched her a moment, then strode rapidly to the stand.
Looking through the faint haze, he saw her pass down the straight path which led to the great gate of the Maxineff work yard.
When she was close to it he grasped the switch lever with cramped fingers.
His face was colorless. He moved the lever forward with a jerk, and lifting his eyes, saw her pass out of the gate.
Beyond reach of time he waited.
Still he waited, fearfully wondering at the stability of this new thing.
He pushed back the lever, watched again, and waited.
He had succeeded; he had created a thing new to the world, an explosive which would be more powerful than the deadliest in existence; he had perfected the work of a week's exquisite danger; he had won.
'I am glad, glad!' he said faintly.
As he straightened up he found himself suddenly weak.
The strain had been galling, and the madness of gratification consumed his strength.
He moved toward the door, stepping very gently, for he knew not how slight a vibration might shatter the delicate affinity in his discovery.
He remembered the foreign letter, and taking it from his pocket, tore open the envelope.
He looked through the open door, conscious for the first time of the perfectness of the day.
It was good to be alive, he thought, free, something accomplished, with leave to tell a girl-
A tall man entered the gate and took the walk toward the laboratory. Noakes looked at him in a moment of amazement, almost of stupefaction. The necessity of instant action startled him to movement.
As quickly as he thought, he pushed the door three quarters shut, replaced the jars from which he had taken his materials, filled a second crucible with a harmless haphazard mixture, and placed it over a dead furnace in a stand in the corner behind the door.
He lifted the window sash.
With all his strength he hurled his priceless crucible.
By a marvel of speed he had the sash lowered, and was behind the door, when the building was shaken by an explosion.
'What is that, mr Noakes?' came in deep, calm tones from the door.
'Good morning, mr Maxineff,' said Noakes, turning slowly.
'The racket? Some half baked fulminate I put in the ditch out there an hour ago.'
'So long since?' said the older man, advancing toward the window.
I think the jarring of the wagon you see leaving the chemical house caused it.'
A hole several feet in diameter marked the spot where the crucible fell. The stuff had delayed not an instant in working its havoc.
Noakes was glad there was too little of it to cause a suspicious deal of damage.
Maxineff looked reflectively about the yard, while Noakes nervously eyed his chief's expressive profile.
His eyes wandered to the fine gray head of this tall, straight man.
He could not fail to be impressed afresh by the forceful exterior, significant of the inner attitude which had won for Henry Maxineff a name honored among nations.
'What of your work?' he said.
Noakes was glad those seeing eyes were not on him.
'I'm beat,' he said.
'I've gone at it every way I know, and I have been consistently and finally unsuccessful.'
In the ensuing pause Noakes realized that this was the first admission of failure he had ever made to his chief.
The surprise it called forth was grateful to him.
'What's the trouble?
But I think the trouble with you is that you have overreached yourself, Noakes.'
'Oh, no; the idea is a fine, tremendous one.
Sheer stupidity is my trouble, I think.'
His humility seemed real, and perhaps the unusualness of it brought a curious expression to Maxineff's face, and into his eyes a contemplative light that Noakes did not care to meet.
'I met Miss Hallam as I entered,' Maxineff said carelessly.
'Yes?
She came to tell me that mrs Max will permit me to have tea with her this afternoon.'
'You are coming, I hope?'
'Indeed, yes.
I understood the fulminate was running low, and spent my morning blundering over making some.
I couldn't do that even, familiar as I am with the process.'
'Well, leave it all and come with me over the yard.
I am inspecting this morning.
Be my secretary for a while.'
Five o'clock had passed when they emerged upon the New England town's stolid main street.
They walked beneath the venerable flanking trees toward the Maxineff villa, which surmounted a wooded continuation of the street.
In a high gray and white room they found mrs Maxineff.
She touched a bell as she said in an odd manner of inflecting, 'But you are late!'
Moving to one end of the spindle legged sofa, she made place at her side for Maxineff, and motioned Noakes to a chair near them.
'Ah, I see it: you will be a second Max-all science, all absence, and a woman waiting at home!
Immolation, you call it?' she continued, her hands moving quickly among the appurtenances of the tea table. 'That is what you prefer, my young mr Noakes.'
A servant brought in buttered rusks, and served the men with tea.
'Orders!
Then you are easily immolate!'
Over his cup Maxineff smiled encouragement to his wife.
'You are practical, my friend.
Confess now, there is a reason for your-your application?'
Noakes's attitude was uncompromising.
He placed his cup on the table before he spoke.
'So! Science has made your dark skin white; love for this business of killing men has kept you hid a week.'
'Of saving men,' Maxineff corrected, while his wife smiled as at the recurrence of a customary witticism.
'And you gave the orders, Max!
You are to be blamed for this display of energy.'
'Don't scold, dear.
It will be a wonderful thing!'
'A new explosive?' she interrupted.
'Do you remember the day we motored from Stoneham?
I first thought of it then.
'And I have made application to a home for the feeble minded, mrs Max,' Noakes said.
'mr Max will never commission me again.'
'I'll be with you to morrow, and we shall see wherein is the difficulty.'
'But, Max, another?
Now I see your scheme of universal peace quite puffed away!'
'This will bring it nearer!' Maxineff said enthusiastically.
'Stay to dinner, will you?' she said to Noakes.
'Thanks, but I couldn't with propriety.
I forgot to have luncheon to day, and your tea has given me a keen anticipation for dinner; my zest would be embarrassing to you, and past my control.
Besides, I shall take a half mile walk to night.'
'Lucky Becky!
Then come again soon.
Max, dear,' she said, turning to her husband, 'I cannot hear that again.
I shall be on the porch.'
Frequently he bent his head in acquiescence, and occasionally interjected a pertinent question under the guidance of his secondary mind; but his thoughts moved in a circle of smaller radius.
What to him was a policy of world peace?
Maxineff's argument was not new to him; when he gave it serious attention he doubted its practicability.
The older man's voice seemed far away, as it said, 'Each new explosive deals a blow at war,--war!'
Noakes had heard the same thing when his chief concluded with the government an agreement which secured to it the exclusive use of his latest product.
Granted then-'
Noakes was practical.
He placed before himself a definite goal.
He exerted every power to attain it, and used the means at his disposal.
If he encompassed it, he put it to the use for which it was intended.
He gave no thought to the extraneous influence it exerted on other phases upon which his life touched.
He had made a great discovery-not a fortunate accident like that of the man who discovered nitro.
With great danger to himself, he had followed a line of reasoning to its proximate end; the resulting discovery he would use to his individual advantage. He did not accord to himself the godlike privilege of casting discord among the nations, and he did not care what peaceful zoo the lion, the bear, and the various species of eagle found as common refuge.
The great man's argument was advanced step by step.
The light faded. Secure in the dusk, Noakes no longer maintained a semblance of attention.
A servant clicked soft light from the wall, and removed the tea table.
Noakes rose, uttered a commonplace, and bade his chief good night.
Soon he was descending the village street, keeping pace with his rapid thoughts.
From the exchange he dispatched a messenger to the house a half mile away.
He dressed quickly, the while reading repeatedly his foreign letter. When dressed, he sat on the bed, chin in his palms, and looked at the blank bedroom wall.
Later he sat before the shelves in his study, absently scanning the backs of the books.
'When?
In the morning Maxineff would come to search for that which he had found.
He might be there for weeks, from morning till night.
In that case the work must be delayed and misguided.
The proportions were finely calculated; the method could not be bettered.
He could duplicate it in an hour.
If only he could repeat the experiment before-
'To night!' he said, and left the room with a firm step.
He took the path by the side of the road which led in the opposite direction from the Maxineff place.
He lit his first pipe since morning. How good life was!
The town, the plant, Maxineff, were all behind him. Ahead was a goal toward which he bore with increasing lightness of heart.
Clearly defined decisions, unregretted, faded into the brightness of anticipation.
His pack of problems dropped from him.
One day more and he could speak-one evening of companionable friendship.
Her yard was a gnomish alternation of unsullied light and alluring shade.
Noakes traversed less rapidly the curved driveway, pausing where it was cut by a paved way to the door.
She came to the door to meet him.
'Will duty call you back before you have been with me just a little while?' she asked as they entered the room.
'No, duty has lost her voice at present.'
She dropped into a big arm chair.
He turned his back to the light, and sat facing her.
'Singing mostly.'
'Sing now, please.'
'No, let's talk first.'
'Well, how did Cornish behave on your way back?'
'Quite as well as if you had been with us, Noakes.'
He leaned forward quickly.
'Do you know, that's the first time you've called me "Noakes"?'
'It slipped.
mrs Max says it, you know; I am weak about taking on colloquialisms.'
'You do not seem to be overjoyed.'
'I am,' he said gently.
'Don't be hilarious over it.'
'I will; I wish-'
'Well, certainly; "Noakes" it shall be.'
'Thanks, Miss Beck.'
'Haven't you done anything but work these days?'
'I have thought more or less.'
'Strange; what about?'
'You, of course.'
'Steady!
Spring has passed.'
'And to night I heard a queer thing about you.'
'What?' she asked in an engaging manner of invitation to confidence.
'That you are to be married.
I have it on the word of my landlady.'
'I?'
'So it is rumored in the village.'
'I am glad my family is not so anxious to thrust me off as my friends are.'
'Married?
It is so very final, you know. A woman gives up everything.'
'Not necessarily.'
'Oh, yes she does: freedom, family, associations.'
'And in return?'
'From the right man she gets-a sort of compensation.'
'A true one; she knows she cares more than he does.'
'No, no!' Noakes spoke from a full heart.
'She does; and knowing it, she need not expect equal return-only part compensation.
But how good he ought to be!'
'Good?' he asked doubtfully.
'Noakes, you are disillusioning, and incorrect, and moreover traitorous to your kind.'
'Not a bit of it; you overpraise my kind.'
'But-let's be definite-you know he may be all-'
'And may not always have been; in which connection he may not be expected to enlighten the dreaming lady, may he?'
'I think he may.'
'But he may possess a certain masculine trait, a kind of secretiveness.'
'Secretive,' she mused.
'Then he is a bit of a coward, I think.'
'He would be a cad,' Noakes said quickly, 'to tell her things that would pain her.'
'It is better to become accustomed to a thing than have it come as a revelation.'
'I see,' Noakes said; 'like taking a tonic in midwinter to fend off spring fever.
You forget,' he continued in a different tone, looking at her speculatively, 'that understanding may never come.'
'Then he has put her on a lower intellectual plane; he has withheld from her, as he might from a child.'
'No, he has loved her too well to hurt her.'
'Loved her so ill that he has deceived her from the beginning.'
'To my mind there is something active in deception; this would be rather an omission.'
'Not at all!' Noakes spoke somewhat vehemently.
'Don't think I mean,' she said, 'that there should be a detailed interchange of trivial confidence.
That would be tiresome.
If, however, there were one big thing in his life that might influence her feeling toward him, he should tell it, and let her judge.'
'Not smooth over a disagreeable occurrence?'
'Never!
It would be cruel.'
Noakes sat very still.
'If I were the girl,--' she began, and checked the speech with a faint laugh.
'But we will not be dramatic, nor personal.'
Noakes told himself he had always known that this was her thought; she was too clear hearted to feel anything else.
The understanding of which she had half seriously spoken must never come, and the only means of avoiding it was to night's silence, the silence of all the days to follow.
Alive, aware of its possible fulfillment, he could not condemn himself to the sacrifice.
She had not asked it of him, and he would not face that which she might ask if he obeyed the weak voice which counseled a surrender to her judgment.
To the last intoxicating drop he would drink, in reverent loving thankfulness for the draught vouchsafed him.
He would care, not in fearful accumulation of credit against a day of reckoning, but in surrender to the brimming abundance of their store.
He would secure to her freedom from that possible pain by following the inevitable trend.
His regard was a compelling force with which he had lived and grown since he had known Becky.
He had not spoken of it to her, silenced by the piteous bane of insufficient income; but now almost he was free. When he spoke, the breadth and depth of the thing it was would induce her assent.
His failure to anticipate such a chance was by no means due to an under estimation of her powers of will, determination, or selection; rather to the feeling which, with the beat of his heart, knocked for freedom to go out, out, about the world, and with its sweeping lines converged again, to enter and permeate a heart attuned to reception and response.
He sat beside her on the piano bench, and placed before her the songs he liked best.
Her voice was a pure soprano, of an expressive sweetness which affected Noakes as nothing else he had known.
It seemed to him that her clarity of soul found expression in her exquisitely pure singing tones.
With hands tight clasped between his knees, fearing to look at her, Noakes listened while she sang him into a half visualized dream, as obsessing as it was immanent, which he clung to and enjoyed to the full in order that he might ignore the longing then to speak his thought.
His dream keyed him to a responsiveness which made his throat throb in sympathy with the vibration of her tones.
Presently he went away.
Alone in the silver splotched yard, the spell yet held him; but when the white road pointed a way back to what he had left behind, a fog of uncertainty encircled him, dissipating the glow of his dream, checking his anticipation, crushing his problem close to him in the narrow circle of his vision, so close that, although a thing solved and set aside, it loomed ominous and insistent.
He followed the road back to what he had left behind.
In the laboratory Noakes bent over a crucible.
The room was still.
He drew a deep breath that quivered through the room with startling distinctness.
He bent closer to the tiny quantity of powder in the bottom of the vessel.
Suddenly he stood erect and looked about him.
His glance slowly circled the room, and fell to the hand on the switch lever.
Then he advanced the lever.
It came as a burst of light taken up and radiated by clouds of fume and gas with which the air was instantly impregnated.
His eyes pained horribly.
He heard a crescendo roaring as of a billow breaking on the shore; as suddenly as it had come, the light went out. He was in darkness.
He trained his gaze into the void and succeeded only in augmenting the pain back of his eyes.
The darkness was impenetrable. He began to realize what had happened.
With a low moan he crumpled and sank to the floor.
Late in the afternoon of the next day, behind a livery horse, two men were covering the roadway between town and the Hallam place.
To one the way seemed long.
He leaned back wearily and pulled a soft hat down over his bandaged eyes.
'Where are we?' he asked.
'At the gate,' the driver replied.
Noakes stiffened.
The gate closed behind them, and the wheels rumbled on the driveway.
'Is-is any one in front?'
'Miss Hallam is on the porch, sir.'
The vehicle came to a stop.
'Afternoon, Miss Beck,' Noakes called.
He tried to make it sound pleasant and commonplace, and knew that he failed.
Grasping the side of the vehicle, he descended clumsily.
Becky took his hand and pressed it warmly.
She turned and took a step toward the house, still holding his hand.
He withdrew it.
'I-don't, please; I know the way.'
With the shuffling tread of the blind he ascended the walk, stopping uncertainly at the foot of the steps.
He heard Becky, at his side, draw a quick breath, as if about to speak.
'Do you know,' he said, as he paused at the top, 'I've never counted these steps before.
I didn't know there were so many.
Let's sit inside, if you don't mind.'
'It's this way, Noakes,' she said gently, as she guided him into the room in which they were the night before.
'Thank you.
It's a bit hard to be led,' Noakes said huskily.
They sat on a deep couch.
'Noakes, was it wise to come?
I am glad you are here, but won't it hurt you, retard your recovery?' Becky asked anxiously.
'I had to come.'
'mr Max told me-both he and the doctor telephoned me early this morning-that in spite of all they said to you, you insisted on coming.'
'I am fit, sound except for my eyes; that's the shame of it,' he said bitterly.
'They couldn't persuade me that I should rest now, rest to recover from a shock that will last a lifetime.'
'I thought-I was afraid you might add fresh danger by coming out so soon.'
'As for my eyes, the harm is done.'
'Is it irremediable?'
'But soon-some day, surely-'
'no
The doctor gives me banalities for answers.
I suppose he thinks I would go to pieces if he told me the truth.'
'Yes, perhaps he thinks you could not bear the truth,' Becky assented very gently.
Her low, feeling tones brought a lump to Noakes's throat.
He felt the sympathy which quivered in her voice, and it nearly unmanned him; but he misunderstood her meaning.
He thought that she felt with him the sting of being deprived of full knowledge of his condition, the hurt of their doubting his strength.
That Becky meant something far different, he might have known from her humble acquiescence, and the sudden touch of her hand on his arm.
'Don't!
'I didn't intend to speak so to you.
I haven't the right.
You must pardon me.' He was silent a moment.
'I came to say something else.'
He turned his head about impatiently, calling upon his bandaged eyes to perform their function.
'Is it dark yet?' he asked.
'We are in the gloaming,' Becky answered softly.
Noakes shut his lips, taking counsel of his powers of control before he spoke.
'Becky,' he began, and gave a tired little sigh.
'Let me call you "Becky" to day.'
'Yes,' she acquiesced quietly.
'Becky,' he continued, lingering over the word, thinking of the privilege of its use as an accolade conferred by her, 'you need not speak when I have finished; I'll go away then.'
'What is it?' Becky asked.
'Tell me.'
Noakes leaned forward, pressing his temples; then sat erect and turned his face toward her.
'I love you,' he said.
I could no more grow away from it than I could add a cubit to my stature by taking thought.
I kept silent because I was poor.
Don't think of this as a bit of sordidness creeping in.
My love would not ask of you any sacrifice.
I could not give you the things you are accustomed to, so I said nothing.
I planned and worked for a time when I would be privileged to speak.'
He heard an inarticulate sound at his side, and quickly continued:--
'Last night I thought the time was close at hand.
I thought in a few days I could come to you, and ask you for your love.
Success of a certain kind was about to crown an effort of a despicable kind.
Of that I must tell you.
To night I am confessing a wrong I have done you. That's what it is.
O, Becky, the explosion last night took away my sight, made me a useless blind man, but it opened my eyes too!
It is as if a scroll were outspread before me, on which is a record of all my tendencies and crucial acts.
I can see my failures at the crises of my life, and I can trace them back to causes, can see wherein a lightly taken determination has later borne bitter fruit.
Last night I thought I had reached the pinnacle of attainment; in reality I had fallen lower than ever before.
The success which was to be the beginning of all good things was stolen.
I robbed Maxineff of it.
He gave me an idea to work out.
I followed his instructions to a point where I knew a different treatment might bring about a fine result.
I saw great possibilities in the experiment and determined to keep for myself the benefits of it. From that point I followed my own ideas, and called the thing mine.
I opened correspondence with the representatives of a foreign government. They agreed to buy the secret in case of a successful test.
It was an excellent bargain I made-I put a high price on the betrayal of my benefactor!
The experiment was successful.
I was forced to destroy the result, why it is needless to say.
Last night, when I left you, I went back to repeat the experiment, intending to make a small quantity to be used in the test which would have taken place to morrow.
Something went wrong with the unstable stuff,--and you know the rest.'
In relief from the tension of his confession, his voice dropped lower as he said, 'Now you know me!'
He shifted his position, stretching out his hands toward her.
He touched her face, started, and drew back.
'And Becky, do you realize that it was after I left you last night that I went back?
After what you told me?
O Becky, I am glad I cannot see you now!'
His voice quivered off to a whisper.
'It is poor consolation that I know myself for what you judge me.
I know bitterly well; I see much now.
I could not come to the weakest agreement with the self I want to be, until I had told you of the wrong I have done you.
And let me think my love is not distasteful to you.
Won't you, Becky?'
He paused and listened.
He heard Becky's uneven breathing.
'I don't offer any excuse; there is none to offer.
I want only the comparative peace of the assurance that those I have wronged understand now.
I have talked with mr Maxineff.
He was with me afterwards, when the pain-He hushed me far too gently, but he will not forget.
If, though, you should ask me why, I would say again, I love you.
It is the only reason. I was thinking of you while I was making myself unfit for you to think of me.'
'Do you care so much?' Becky asked softly.
May I keep on caring?'
'To what good?'
'For the sake of the little good in me, which love of you will keep alive and growing.'
'You ask nothing of me.
What will you find in caring for me?'
'There will be a constant joy in knowing that you permit me to care.'
Becky was silent.
'If you won't let me, I am afraid it will make no difference, because I cannot help it, you know.
I don't want to help it; you don't mind my saying so?'
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Noakes rose.
'I-Becky, I thank you for hearing me out.'
'I'm going.'
She did not rise.
I know what you-'
'How do you know what I think?'
'I know; that's all.'
'Don't go, please,' Becky said.
'Hadn't I better?
I'm tired, and the doctor-A last acknowledgment: I am afraid to hear you.'
'But I don't want you to go,' she said softly.
Something in her tone made Noakes turn sharply.
'Becky!'
'Yes, Noakes?'
'You don't-'
'Yes!'
'You love me, and blind?'
'You are brave!'
Her hands were in his when he sat by her side.
'I talked with the doctor this morning,' she said.
'As I did.'
'no
He gave me a message for you.'
'A message from the doctor?'
'It was mr Max's notion that I should tell you.'
'What is it?' Noakes asked quickly.
'Your eyes-they will be well in time, if you are very careful.'
As Noakes breathed deep in relief and gratitude, one of his hands engaged two of Becky's, and he found a different use for the other.
'Noakes,' Becky said, 'I'll take care of the eyes.'
CHAPTER twenty three.
OF OUR COMPLEX IDEAS OF SUBSTANCES.
These, and the like fashions of speaking, intimate that the substance is supposed always SOMETHING BESIDES the extension, figure, solidity, motion, thinking, or other observable ideas, though we know not what it is.
No clear or distinct idea of Substance in general.
As clear an Idea of spiritual substance as of corporeal substance.
Whatever therefore be the secret abstract nature of substance in general, all the ideas we have of particular distinct sorts of substances are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas, co existing in such, though unknown, cause of their union, as makes the whole subsist of itself.
Thus, the idea of the sun,--what is it but an aggregate of those several simple ideas, bright, hot, roundish, having a constant regular motion, at a certain distance from us, and perhaps some other: as he who thinks and discourses of the sun has been more or less accurate in observing those sensible qualities, ideas, or properties, which are in that thing which he calls the sun
For he has the perfectest idea of any of the particular sorts of substances, who has gathered, and put together, most of those simple ideas which do exist in it; among which are to be reckoned its active powers, and passive capacities, which, though not simple ideas, yet in this respect, for brevity's sake, may conveniently enough be reckoned amongst them.
Thus, the power of drawing iron is one of the ideas of the complex one of that substance we call a loadstone; and a power to be so drawn is a part of the complex one we call iron: which powers pass for inherent qualities in those subjects.
First, the ideas of the primary qualities of things, which are discovered by our senses, and are in them even when we perceive them not; such are the bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion of the parts of bodies; which are really in them, whether we take notice of them or not.
POWERS therefore justly make a great part of our complex ideas of substances.
twelve.
The infinite wise Contriver of us, and all things about us, hath fitted our senses, faculties, and organs, to the conveniences of life, and the business we have to do here.
But were our senses altered, and made much quicker and acuter, the appearance and outward scheme of things would have quite another face to us; and, I am apt to think, would be inconsistent with our being, or at least wellbeing, in the part of the universe which we inhabit.
Conjecture about the corporeal organs of some Spirits.
fourteen.
Our Ideas of spiritual Substances, as clear as of bodily Substances.
For our idea of substance is equally obscure, or none at all, in both: it is but a supposed I know not what, to support those ideas we call accidents.
Every act of sensation, when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both parts of nature, the corporeal and spiritual.
No Idea of abstract Substance either in Body or Spirit.
Cohesion of solid parts and Impulse, the primary ideas peculiar to Body.
The primary ideas we have PECULIAR TO BODY, as contradistinguished to spirit, are the COHESION OF SOLID, AND CONSEQUENTLY SEPARABLE, PARTS, and a POWER OF COMMUNICATING MOTION BY IMPULSE.
These, I think, are the original ideas proper and peculiar to body; for figure is but the consequence of finite extension.
Thinking and Motivity
The ideas we have belonging and PECULIAR TO SPIRIT, are THINKING, and WILL, or A POWER OF PUTTING BODY INTO MOTION BY THOUGHT, AND, WHICH IS CONSEQUENT TO IT, LIBERTY.
For, as body cannot but communicate its motion by impulse to another body, which it meets with at rest, so the mind can put bodies into motion, or forbear to do so, as it pleases.
three.
And since any idea, whether simple or complex, may be the occasion why the mind thus brings two things together, and as it were takes a view of them at once, though still considered as distinct: therefore any of our ideas may be the foundation of relation.
These and the like relations, expressed by relative terms that have others answering them, with a reciprocal intimation, as father and son, bigger and less, cause and effect, are very obvious to every one, and everybody at first sight perceives the relation.
Some seemingly absolute Terms contain Relations.
g.
The nature therefore of relation consists in the referring or comparing two things one to another; from which comparison one of both comes to be denominated.
seven.
Secondly, This further may be considered concerning relation, that though it be not contained in the real existence of things, but something extraneous and superinduced, yet the ideas which relative words stand for are often clearer and more distinct than of those substances to which they do belong.
THE IDEAS, THEN, OF RELATIONS, ARE CAPABLE AT LEAST OF BEING MORE PERFECT AND DISTINCT IN OUR MINDS THAN THOSE OF SUBSTANCES.
Thirdly, Though there be a great number of considerations wherein things may be compared one with another, and so a multitude of relations, yet they all terminate in, and are concerned about those simple ideas, either of sensation or reflection, which I think to be the whole materials of all our knowledge.
OF CAUSE AND EFFECT, AND OTHER RELATIONS.
Whence the Ideas of cause and effect got.
First, When the thing is wholly made new, so that no part thereof did ever exist before; as when a new particle of matter doth begin to exist, IN RERUM NATURA, which had before no being, and this we call CREATION.
When the cause is extrinsical, and the effect produced by a sensible separation, or juxta position of discernible parts, we call it MAKING; and such are all artificial things.
three.
Relations of Time.
It was the third week in August; summer was dying, as a London summer dies, in days of feverish sunlight and breathless languor.
Everywhere there was the same torpor, the same wornout, desiccated life in death. It was in the streets with their sultry pallor, in the parks and squares where the dust lay like a grey blight on every green thing.
Everywhere the glare accentuated this toneless melancholy.
This lassitude is felt most by those who have shared least in the amusement, the workers who must stay behind in the great workshop because they are too busy or too poor to leave it.
For one thing, it gave him opportunity for cultivating Miss Craven's acquaintance.
Compared with this great work, all former efforts would seem to the taste they had created as so much literary trifling.
Hitherto he had been merely trying his instrument, running his fingers over the keys in his easy professional way; but these preliminary flourishes gave no idea of the constructive harmonies to follow.
And now, on a dull evening, some three weeks after Audrey's dinner party, he was alone in his study, smoking, as he leaned back in his easy chair, in one of those dreamy moods which with him meant fiction in the making, the tobacco smoke curling round his head the Pythian fumes of his inspiration.
The study was curiously suggestive of its owner's inconsistencies.
With its silk cushions, Oriental rugs, and velvet draperies, its lining of books, and writing table heaped with manuscripts and proofs, it witnessed to his impartial love of luxury and hard work.
It told other secrets too.
The cigar case on the table beside him was embroidered by a woman's hand, the initials l w worked with gold thread in a raised monogram.
To night he had left his proofs untouched on the writing table, and had settled himself comfortably to his pipe, with the voluptuous satisfaction of a man who has put off a disagreeable duty.
He felt that delicious turmoil of ideas which with him accompanied the building up of a story round its central character.
Not that he yet understood that character.
Wyndham had his intuitions, but he was not the man to trust them as such; it was his habit to verify them by a subsequent logic.
No action was too small, no emotion too insignificant, for his uncompromising realism.
He had applied the same method to his own experience.
Whatever came in his way, the tragedy or comedy of his daily life, his moods of passion and apathy, the aspirations of his better moments, all underwent the same disintegrating process.
He had the power of standing aloof from himself, of arresting the flight of his own sensations, and criticising his own actions as a disinterested spectator.
Thus he made no experiment on others that he had not first tried on his own person.
What he really prided himself on was his knowledge of other people, especially of women.
His work "took" because of its coarser qualities, the accentuated bitterness, the startling irony, the vigorous, characteristic phrase.
Those black strokes were not introduced to throw up the grey wash or pencilled shading; Wyndham's cynicism was no mere literary affectation, it was engrained in his very nature.
He had gone through many phases of disillusionment (including disgust at his own success) before that brief crisis of feeling which ended in his engagement to Miss Fraser.
Then, for the first time in his life, a woman's nature had been given to him to know.
It was a glorious opportunity for the born analyst; and for the first time in his life he let an opportunity go.
He loved Alison Fraser, and he found that love made understanding impossible.
He never wanted to understand her; the relentless passion for analysis was absorbed in a comprehensive enthusiasm which embraced the whole of Alison and took no count of the parts.
As Miss Gladys Armstrong had guessed (or as she would have put it, diagnosed), a detail of Wyndham's past life had come to Miss Fraser's knowledge, as these details always come, through a well meaning friend.
It was one which made it difficult for her to reconcile her marriage with Wyndham to her conscience.
And because she loved him, because the thought of him, so hard to other women, so tender to herself, fascinated her reason and paralysed her will-flattering the egoism inherent even in the very good-because she was weak and he was irresistibly strong, she cut herself from him deliberately, open eyed, and with one stroke.
She had just sufficient strength for the sudden breaking off of their engagement, none for explanation, and none, alas! to save her from regretting her act of supererogatory virtue.
Wyndham gave no sign of suffering.
He simply sank back into himself, and became the man he had been before, plus his experience of feeling, and minus the ingenuousness of his self knowledge.
He became if anything more intently, more remorselessly analytical, more absolutely the student of human nature.
He struck out into new paths; he was tired of his neutral washes, and striking effects in black and white.
He had begun to dream of glorious subtilties of design and colour.
Novels were lying in his head ten deep. He had whole note books full of germs and embryos, all neatly arranged in their separate pigeon holes.
In some he had jotted down a name and a date, or a word which stood for a whole train of ideas.
In others he had recorded some illustration as it occurred to him; or a single sentence stood flanked by a dozen variants-Wyndham being a careful worker and sensitive to niceties of language.
To night he was supremely happy.
In Audrey Craven he had found the indispensable thing-intimacy without love, or even, as he understood the word, friendship.
She was the type he had long desired, the feminine creature artless in perpetual artifice, for ever revealing herself in a succession of disguises.
He was beginning to adjust his latest impressions to his earlier idea of her.
He recalled the evening when he had first seen her-the hot, crowded drawing room, the heavy atmosphere, the dull faces coming and going, and the figure of Audrey flashing through it all.
She had irritated him then, for he had not yet classified her.
She dogged his thoughts with most unmaidenly insistence; her image lay in wait for him at every cross road of association; it was something vivid yet elusive, protean yet persistent. He recalled that other evening of her dinner party-their first recognised meeting.
Her whole person, which at first sight had impressed him with its emphatic individuality, now struck him as characterless and conventional.
And yet-what was she like?
She was like a chameleon.
No, she wasn't; he recollected that the change of colour was a vital process in that animal.
She was like an opal-all sparkle when you move it, and at rest dull, most undeniably dull.
After a moment's satisfaction with this last fancy, he became aware that he was being made the fool of metaphor.
To find out what lay at the bottom of this shifting personality, what elemental thoughts and feelings, if any, the real Audrey was composed of; to see for himself the play of circumstances on her plastic nature, and know what reaction it was capable of-in a word, to experimentalise in cold blood on the living nerve and brain tissue, was his plan of work for the year eighteen ninety six.
His life was passed like this.
As a rule he got up at eight o'clock in the morning, dressed, and drank his tea.
Then he sat down in his study to read, or went to the hospital.
At the hospital the out patients were sitting in the dark, narrow little corridor waiting to be seen by the doctor.
Andrey Yefimitch knew that such surroundings were torture to feverish, consumptive, and impressionable patients; but what could be done?
In the consulting room he was met by his assistant, Sergey Sergeyitch-a fat little man with a plump, well washed shaven face, with soft, smooth manners, wearing a new loosely cut suit, and looking more like a senator than a medical assistant.
He had an immense practice in the town, wore a white tie, and considered himself more proficient than the doctor, who had no practice.
The ikon had been put up at his expense; at his instructions some one of the patients read the hymns of praise in the consulting room on Sundays, and after the reading Sergey Sergeyitch himself went through the wards with a censer and burned incense.
There were a great many patients, but the time was short, and so the work was confined to the asking of a few brief questions and the administration of some drugs, such as castor oil or volatile ointment.
Andrey Yefimitch would sit with his cheek resting in his hand, lost in thought and asking questions mechanically.
Sergey Sergeyitch sat down too, rubbing his hands, and from time to time putting in his word.
"We suffer pain and poverty," he would say, "because we do not pray to the merciful God as we should.
Yes!"
When he had to open a child's mouth in order to look at its throat, and the child cried and tried to defend itself with its little hands, the noise in his ears made his head go round and brought tears to his eyes.
He would make haste to prescribe a drug, and motion to the woman to take the child away.
He was soon wearied by the timidity of the patients and their incoherence, by the proximity of the pious Sergey Sergeyitch, by the portraits on the walls, and by his own questions which he had asked over and over again for twenty years.
And he would go away after seeing five or six patients.
The rest would be seen by his assistant in his absence.
With the agreeable thought that, thank God, he had no private practice now, and that no one would interrupt him, Andrey Yefimitch sat down to the table immediately on reaching home and took up a book.
Half his salary went on buying books, and of the six rooms that made up his abode three were heaped up with books and old magazines.
He would always go on reading for several hours without a break and without being weary.
He did not read as rapidly and impulsively as Ivan d mitritch had done in the past, but slowly and with concentration, often pausing over a passage which he liked or did not find intelligible.
Near the books there always stood a decanter of vodka, and a salted cucumber or a pickled apple lay beside it, not on a plate, but on the baize table cloth. Every half hour he would pour himself out a glass of vodka and drink it without taking his eyes off the book.
Then without looking at it he would feel for the cucumber and bite off a bit.
At three o'clock he would go cautiously to the kitchen door; cough, and say, "Daryushka, what about dinner? . ."
After his dinner-a rather poor and untidily served one-Andrey Yefimitch would walk up and down his rooms with his arms folded, thinking.
The clock would strike four, then five, and still he would be walking up and down thinking.
Occasionally the kitchen door would creak, and the red and sleepy face of Daryushka would appear.
"Andrey Yefimitch, isn't it time for you to have your beer?" she would ask anxiously.
"No, it's not time yet . . ." he would answer.
He had a hale and hearty appearance, luxuriant grey whiskers, the manners of a well bred man, and a loud, pleasant voice.
He was good-natured and emotional, but hot tempered.
"Here I am," he would say, going in to Andrey Yefimitch.
"Good evening, my dear fellow!
"I am always glad to see you."
The friends would sit on the sofa in the study and for some time would smoke in silence.
"Daryushka, what about the beer?" Andrey Yefimitch would say.
The doctor was always the one to begin the conversation.
"What a pity," he would say quietly and slowly, not looking his friend in the face (he never looked anyone in the face)--"what a great pity it is that there are no people in our town who are capable of carrying on intelligent and interesting conversation, or care to do so.
It is an immense privation for us.
Even the educated class do not rise above vulgarity; the level of their development, I assure you, is not a bit higher than that of the lower orders."
I agree."
"You know, of course," the doctor went on quietly and deliberately, "that everything in this world is insignificant and uninteresting except the higher spiritual manifestations of the human mind. Intellect draws a sharp line between the animals and man, suggests the divinity of the latter, and to some extent even takes the place of the immortality which does not exist.
Consequently the intellect is the only possible source of enjoyment.
We have books, it is true, but that is not at all the same as living talk and converse.
If you will allow me to make a not quite apt comparison: books are the printed score, while talk is the singing."
"Perfectly true."
A silence would follow.
Daryushka would come out of the kitchen and with an expression of blank dejection would stand in the doorway to listen, with her face propped on her fist.
"To expect intelligence of this generation!"
And he would describe how wholesome, entertaining, and interesting life had been in the past.
How intelligent the educated class in Russia used to be, and what lofty ideas it had of honour and friendship; how they used to lend money without an i o u, and it was thought a disgrace not to give a helping hand to a comrade in need; and what campaigns, what adventures, what skirmishes, what comrades, what women!
The wife of a battalion commander, a queer woman, used to put on an officer's uniform and drive off into the mountains in the evening, alone, without a guide.
It was said that she had a love affair with some princeling in the native village.
"Queen of Heaven, Holy Mother..." Daryushka would sigh.
"And how we drank!
"I often dream of intellectual people and conversation with them," he said suddenly, interrupting Mihail Averyanitch.
"My father gave me an excellent education, but under the influence of the ideas of the sixties made me become a doctor.
I believe if I had not obeyed him then, by now I should have been in the very centre of the intellectual movement.
Most likely I should have become a member of some university.
Of course, intellect, too, is transient and not eternal, but you know why I cherish a partiality for it.
Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
Indeed, he is summoned without his choice by fortuitous circumstances from non existence into life . . . what for?
And so, just as in prison men held together by common misfortune feel more at ease when they are together, so one does not notice the trap in life when people with a bent for analysis and generalization meet together and pass their time in the interchange of proud and free ideas.
In that sense the intellect is the source of an enjoyment nothing can replace."
"Perfectly true."
"No, honoured Mihail Averyanitch; I do not believe it, and have no grounds for believing it."
"I must own I doubt it too.
And yet I have a feeling as though I should never die.
Oh, I think to myself: 'Old fogey, it is time you were dead!' But there is a little voice in my soul says: 'Don't believe it; you won't die.'"
Soon after nine o'clock Mihail Averyanitch would go away.
As he put on his fur coat in the entry he would say with a sigh:
What's most vexatious of all is to have to die here.
Lovely was the maid of Pohja, Famed on land, on water peerless, On the arch of air high seated, Brightly shining on the rainbow, Clad in robes of dazzling lustre, Clad in raiment white and shining. There she wove a golden fabric, Interwoven all with silver, And her shuttle was all golden, And her comb was all of silver.
From her hand flew swift the shuttle, In her hands the reel was turning, And the copper shafts they clattered, And the silver comb resounded, As the maiden wove the fabric, And with silver interwove it.
Vainamoinen, old and steadfast, Thundered on upon his journey, From the gloomy land of Pohja, Sariola for ever misty.
Thereupon his head he lifted, And he gazed aloft to heaven, And beheld a glorious rainbow; On the arch the maiden seated As she wove a golden fabric. As the silver comb resounded.
Vainamoinen, old and steadfast, Stayed his horse upon the instant. And he raised his voice, and speaking, In such words as these addressed her: "Come into my sledge, O maiden, In the sledge beside me seat thee."
Then the maiden gave him answer, And in words like these addressed him: "As I wandered through the bedstraws Tripping o'er the yellow meadows, Yesterday, in time of evening, As the sun was slowly sinking, In the bush a bird was singing, And I heard the fieldfare trilling, Singing of the whims of maidens, And the whims of new wed damsels.
"Thus the bird was speaking to me, And I questioned it in this wise:
'Tell me O thou little fieldfare, Sing thou, that my ears may hear it, Whether it indeed is better, Whether thou hast heard 'tis better, For a girl in father's dwelling, Or in household of a husband?'
But the maid gave crafty answer, And in words like these responded: "As a man I will esteem you, And as hero will regard you, If you can split up a horsehair With a blunt and pointless knife blade, And an egg in knots you tie me, Yet no knot is seen upon it."
Vainamoinen, old and steadfast, Did not find the task a hard one. From the stone the rind he severed, And a pile of ice he hewed her, But no splinters scattered from it, Nor the smallest fragment loosened. Then again he asked the maiden In the sledge to sit beside him.
At the boat with zeal he laboured, Toiling at the work unresting, Working thus one day, a second, On the third day likewise working, But the rocks his axe blade touched not, And upon the hill it rang not.
MISS KATY DID AND MISS CRICKET
Miss Katy did sat on the branch of a flowering azalea, in her best suit of fine green and silver, with wings of point lace from Mother Nature's finest web.
Miss Katy was in the very highest possible spirits, because her gallant cousin, Colonel Katy did, had looked in to make her a morning visit.
It was a fine morning, too, which goes for as much among the Katy dids as among men and women.
It was, in fact, a morning that Miss Katy thought must have been made on purpose for her to enjoy herself in.
"Certainly I am a pretty creature," she said to herself; and when the gallant colonel said something about being dazzled by her beauty, she only tossed her head and took it as quite a matter of course.
"The fact is, my dear colonel," she said, "I am thinking of giving a party, and you must help me to make out the lists."
"My dear, you make me the happiest of Katy dids."
"Now," said Miss Katy did, drawing an azalea leaf towards her, "let us see-whom shall we have?
The Fireflies, of course; everybody wants them, they are so brilliant,--a little unsteady, to be sure, but quite in the higher circles."
"Yes, we must have the Fireflies," echoed the colonel.
"Well, then, and the Butterflies and the Moths.
Now, there's a trouble.
There's such an everlasting tribe of those Moths; and if you invite dull people they're always sure all to come, every one of them.
Still, if you have the Butterflies, you can't leave out the Moths."
"Old mrs Moth has been laid up lately with a gastric fever, and that may keep two or three of the Misses Moth at home," said the colonel.
"Whatever could give the old lady such a turn?" said Miss Katy.
"I thought she never was sick."
"I suspect it's high living.
I understand she and her family ate up a whole ermine cape last month, and it disagreed with them."
"For my part, I can't conceive how the Moths can live as they do," said Miss Katy, with a face of disgust.
"Why, I could no more eat worsted and fur, as they do-"
"That is quite evident from the fairy like delicacy of your appearance," said the colonel.
"One can see that nothing so gross or material has ever entered into your system."
"I'm sure," said Miss Katy, "mamma says she don't know what does keep me alive; half a dewdrop and a little bit of the nicest part of a rose leaf, I assure you, often last me for a day.
But we are forgetting our list.
Let's see-the Fireflies, Butterflies, Moths. The Bees must come, I suppose."
"The Bees are a worthy family," said the colonel.
"Worthy enough, but dreadfully humdrum," said Miss Katy.
"Well, then, there are the Bumble Bees."
"Oh, I dote on them!
General Bumble is one of the most dashing, brilliant fellows of the day."
"I think he is shockingly corpulent," said Colonel Katy did, not at all pleased to hear him praised; "don't you?"
"I don't know but he IS a little stout," said Miss Katy; "but so distinguished and elegant in his manners-something quite martial and breezy about him."
"Well, if you invite the Bumble Bees, you must have the Hornets."
"Those spiteful Hornets!
I detest them!"
"Nevertheless, dear Miss Katy, one does not like to offend the Hornets."
"No, one can't.
There are those five Misses Hornet-dreadful old maids!--as full of spite as they can live.
You may be sure they will every one come, and be looking about to make spiteful remarks.
Put down the Hornets, though."
"How about the Mosquitoes!" said the colonel.
"Those horrid Mosquitoes-they are dreadfully plebeian!
"Well dear Miss Katy," said the colonel, "if you ask my candid opinion as a friend, I should say not.
There's young Mosquito, who graduated last year, has gone into literature, and is connected with some of our leading papers, and they say he carries the sharpest pen of all the writers.
It won't do to offend him."
"It is a pity," said the colonel; "but one must pay one's tax to society."
Just at this moment the conference was interrupted by a visitor, Miss Keziah Cricket, who came in with her work bag on her arm to ask a subscription for a poor family of Ants who had just had their house hoed up in clearing the garden walks.
"How stupid of them," said Katy, "not to know better than to put their house in the garden walk; that's just like those Ants."
"Well, they are in great trouble; all their stores destroyed, and their father killed-cut quite in two by a hoe."
I don't like to hear of such disagreeable things; it affects my nerves terribly.
Well, I'm sure I haven't anything to give.
Mamma said yesterday she was sure she didn't know how our bills were to be paid; and there's my green satin with point lace yet to come home." And Miss Katy did shrugged her shoulders and affected to be very busy with Colonel Katy did, in just the way that young ladies sometimes do when they wish to signify to visitors that they had better leave.
Little Miss Cricket perceived how the case stood, and so hopped briskly off, without giving herself even time to be offended.
"Pray, shall you invite the Crickets?" said Colonel Katy did.
"Who?
I?
Why, colonel, what a question!
Invite the Crickets?
Of what can you be thinking?"
"And shall you not ask the Locusts, and the Grasshoppers?"
"Certainly.
The Locusts, of course,--a very old and distinguished family; and the Grasshoppers are pretty well, and ought to be asked. But we must draw a line somewhere,--and the Crickets! why, it's shocking even to think of!"
"I thought they were nice, respectable people."
But then you must see the difficulty."
"My dear cousin, I am afraid you must explain."
"Why, their COLOUR, to be sure.
Don't you see?"
"Oh!" said the colonel.
"That's it, is it?
Excuse me, but I have been living in France, where these distinctions are wholly unknown, and I have not yet got myself in the train of fashionable ideas here."
"Well, then, let me teach you," said Miss Katy.
"You know we republicans go for no distinctions except those created by Nature herself, and we found our rank upon COLOUR, because that is clearly a thing that none has any hand in but our Maker.
You see?"
"Yes; but who decides what colour shall be the reigning colour?"
"I'm surprised to hear the question!
The only true colour-the only proper one-is OUR colour, to be sure.
A lovely pea green is the precise shade on which to found aristocratic distinction.
But then we are liberal;--we associate with the Moths, who are gray; with the Butterflies, who are blue and gold coloured; with the Grasshoppers, yellow and brown; and society would become dreadfully mixed if it were not fortunately ordered that the Crickets are black as jet.
The fact is, that a class to be looked down upon is necessary to all elegant society; and if the Crickets were not black, we could not keep them down, because, as everybody knows, they are often a great deal cleverer than we are.
They have a vast talent for music and dancing; they are very quick at learning, and would be getting to the very top of the ladder if we once allowed them to climb.
But their being black is a convenience; because, as long as we are green and they black, we have a superiority that can never be taken from us. Don't you see now?"
"Oh yes, I see exactly," said the colonel.
"Now that Keziah Cricket, who just came in here, is quite a musician, and her old father plays the violin beautifully;--by the way, we might engage him for our orchestra."
And so Miss Katy's ball came off, and the performers kept it up from sundown till daybreak, so that it seemed as if every leaf in the forest were alive.
The Katy dids and the Mosquitoes, and the Locusts, and a full orchestra of Crickets made the air perfectly vibrate, insomuch that old Parson Too Whit, who was preaching a Thursday evening lecture to a very small audience, announced to his hearers that he should certainly write a discourse against dancing for the next weekly occasion.
The good doctor was even with his word in the matter, and gave out some very sonorous discourses, without in the least stopping the round of gaieties kept up by these dissipated Katy dids, which ran on, night after night, till the celebrated Jack Frost epidemic, which occurred somewhere about the first of September.
Poor Miss Katy, with her flimsy green satin and point lace, was one of the first victims, and fell from the bough in company with a sad shower of last year's leaves.
The worthy Cricket family, however, avoided Jack Frost by emigrating in time to the chimney corner of a nice little cottage that had been built in the wood that summer.
There good old mr and mrs Cricket, with sprightly Miss Keziah and her brothers and sisters, found a warm and welcome home; and when the storm howled without, and lashed the poor naked trees, the Crickets on the warm hearth would chirp out cheery welcome to papa as he came in from the snowy path, or mamma as she sat at her work basket.
"Cheep, cheep, cheep!" little Freddy would say.
"Mamma, who is it says 'cheep'?"
CHAPTER one
ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FOREFATHERS
Lincoln's grandfather, for whom he was named Abraham, was a distant cousin to Daniel Boone.
The Boones and the Lincolns had intermarried for generations.
The Lincolns were of good old English stock.
When he was President, Abraham Lincoln, who had never given much attention to the family pedigree, said that the history of his family was well described by a single line in Gray's "Elegy":
"The short and simple annals of the poor."
Yet Grandfather Abraham was wealthy for his day.
He accompanied Boone from Virginia to Kentucky and lost his life there.
He had sacrificed part of his property to the pioneer spirit within him, and, with the killing of their father, his family lost the rest.
Grandfather Lincoln had built a solid log cabin and cleared a field or two around it, near the Falls of the Ohio, about where Louisville now stands.
But, in the Summer of seventeen eighty four, the tragic day dawned upon the Lincolns which has come to many a pioneer family in Kentucky and elsewhere.
His son Thomas told this story to his children:
HOW INDIANS KILLED "GRANDFATHER LINCOLN"
He was rich for them times, as he had property worth seventeen thousand dollars; but mr Boone he told Father he could make a good deal more by trappin' and tradin' with the Injuns for valuable pelts, or fur skins.
"You know, Dan'l Boone he had lived among the Injuns.
He was a sure shot with the rifle so's he could beat the redskins at their own game.
He was such a good fellow that them Injuns admired his shrewdness, and they let him do about what he pleased.
So he thought they'd let Father alone.
"Well, your grandfather was a Quaker, you see, and believed in treatin' them red devils well-like William Penn done, you know.
He was a man for peace and quiet, and everything was goin' smooth with the tribes of what we called the Beargrass Country, till one day, when he and my brothers, Mordecai-'Mord' was a big fellow for his age-and Josiah, a few years younger-was out in the clearin' with the oxen, haulin' logs down to the crick.
I went along too, but I didn't help much-for I was only six.
"Young as I was, I remember what happened that day like it was only yesterday.
It come like a bolt out of the blue.
"Injuns!" gasps Mord, and starts on the run for the house-to get his gun.
Josiah, he starts right off in the opposite direction to the Beargrass fort-we called it a fort, but it was nothin' but a stockade. The way we boys scattered was like a brood o' young turkeys, or pa'tridges, strikin' for cover when the old one is shot.
I knowed I'd ought to run too, but I didn't want to leave my father layin' there on the ground.
Seemed like I'd ought to woke him up so he could run too. Yet I didn't feel like touchin' him.
I think I must 'a' knowed he was dead.
I knowed what he was goin' to do-skelp my father!
I never think what the devil looks like without seein' that red demon with his snaky black eyes, grinnin' at me!
TOM LINCOLN CHASED BY INDIANS
"I was standin' there, kind o' dazed, watchin' another puff o' white smoke, comin' out between two logs in the side of our house.
Then I knowed 'Mord' had shot my Injun.
Waitin' till the ol' demon turns away, so's not to hit me, 'Mord' he aims at a silver dangler on mr Injun's breast and makes him drop in his tracks like I said.
It was like hell broke loose.
They had been watchin' an', of course, 'twas all right to kill Father, but when 'Mord' killed one o' their bucks, that made a big difference.
I had sense enough left to run for the house with them Injuns after me.
Seemed like I couldn't run half as fast as usual, but I must 'a' made purty good time, from what 'Mord' an' Mother said afterward.
That made the others mad an' they took after me, but 'Mord' he drops the head one jist when he's goin' to hit me.
"MORD" LINCOLN, INDIAN FIGHTER
"That was the breaking up of our family.
He was welcome to it too, for he was the only one of us that could take care of it.
'Mord' he wasn't satisfied with killin' a few Injuns that day to revenge Father's death.
He made a business of shootin' 'em on sight-a reg'lar Injun stalker!
He couldn't see that he was jist as savage as the worst Injun, to murder 'em without waitin' to see whether mr Injun was a friend or a foe.
Folks didn't mind his shootin' an' Injun or two, more or less, when he got the chancet.
Josiah he stayed with her, an' between him an' 'Mord,' they helped her along, but I had to git out and scratch for a livin'.
Little is known today of Mordecai Lincoln, and there would be less interest in poor Thomas if he had not become the father of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States.
Mordecai Lincoln was a joker and humorist.
One who knew him well said of him:
"He was a man of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him.
I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll look excited in me the disposition to laugh, and that was 'Artemus Ward.'
"Mordecai was quite a story teller, and in this Abe resembled his 'Uncle Mord,' as we called him.
He was an honest man, as tender hearted as a woman, and to the last degree charitable and benevolent.
"Abe Lincoln had a very high opinion of his uncle, and on one occasion remarked, 'I have often said that Uncle Mord had run off with all the talents of the family.'"
In a letter about his family history, just before he was nominated for the presidency, Abraham Lincoln wrote:
"My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families-second families, perhaps I should say.
My mother was of a family of the name of Hanks.
My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham county virginia, to Kentucky about seventeen eighty one or two, where, a year or two later, he was killed by Indians-not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest.
His ancestors, who were Quakers, went to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania.
An effort to identify them with the New England family of the same name ended in nothing more definite than a similarity of Christian names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi, Mordecai, Solomon, Abraham, and the like.
"My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age; and he grew up, literally without education."
CHAPTER two
ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FATHER AND MOTHER
While Thomas Lincoln was living with a farmer and doing odd jobs of carpentering, he met Nancy Hanks, a tall, slender woman, with dark skin, dark brown hair and small, deep set gray eyes.
She had a full forehead, a sharp, angular face and a sad expression.
Yet her disposition was generally cheerful.
For her backwoods advantages she was considered well educated.
She read well and could write, too.
It is stated that Nancy Hanks taught Thomas Lincoln to write his own name.
Thomas was twenty eight and Nancy twenty three when their wedding day came. Christopher Columbus Graham, when almost one hundred years old, gave the following description of the marriage feast of the Lincoln bride and groom:
I was hunting roots for my medicine and just went to the wedding to get a good supper and got it.
"Tom Lincoln was a carpenter, and a good one for those days, when a cabin was built mainly with the ax, and not a nail or a bolt or hinge in it, only leathers and pins to the doors, and no glass, except in watches and spectacles and bottles.
"Jesse Head, the good Methodist minister that married them, was also a carpenter or cabinet maker by trade, and as he was then a neighbor, they were good friends.
"While you pin me down to facts, I will say that I saw Nancy Hanks Lincoln at her wedding, a fresh looking girl, I should say over twenty. Tom was a respectable mechanic and could choose, and she was treated with respect.
"I was at the infare, too, given by john h Parrott, her guardian, and only girls with money had guardians appointed by the court.
Our table was of the puncheons cut from solid logs, and the next day they were the floor of the new cabin."
Thomas Lincoln took his bride to live in a little log cabin in a Kentucky settlement-not a village or hardly a hamlet-called Elizabethtown.
He evidently thought this place would be less lonesome for his wife, while he was away hunting and carpentering, than the lonely farm he had purchased in Hardin County, about fourteen miles away.
There was so little carpentering or cabinet making to do that he could make a better living by farming or hunting.
Thomas was very fond of shooting and as he was a fine marksman he could provide game for the table, and other things which are considered luxuries to day, such as furs and skins needed for the primitive wearing apparel of the pioneers.
A daughter was born to the young couple at Elizabethtown, whom they named Sarah.
Dennis Hanks, a cousin of Nancy, lived near the Lincolns in the early days of their married life, and gave mrs Eleanor Atkinson this description of their early life together:
"Looks didn't count them days, nohow.
They killed off the varmints an' made it safe fur other fellers to go into the woods with an ax.
"When Nancy married Tom he was workin' in a carpenter shop.
Thar was sca'cely any money in that kentry.
"Pore?
The Hankses was some smarter'n the Lincolns.
"NANCY'S BOY BABY"
Evidently Elizabethtown failed to furnish Thomas Lincoln a living wage from carpentering, for he moved with his young wife and his baby girl to a farm on Nolen Creek, fourteen miles away.
The chief attraction of the so-called farm was a fine spring of water bubbling up in the shade of a small grove.
From this spring the place came to be known as "Rock Spring Farm."
It was a barren spot and the cabin on it was a rude and primitive sort of home for a carpenter and joiner to occupy.
It contained but a single room, with only one window and one door.
There was a wide fireplace in the big chimney which was built outside.
But that rude hut became the home of "the greatest American."
Abraham Lincoln was born to poverty and privation, but he was never a pauper.
After his nomination to the presidency, mr Lincoln gave to mr Hicks, a portrait painter, this memorandum of his birth:
"I was born february twelfth eighteen o nine, in then Hardin county kentucky, at a point within the now county of Larue, a mile or a mile and a half from where Hodgen's mill now is.
My parents being dead, and my memory not serving, I know no means of identifying the precise locality. It was on Nolen Creek.
The exact spot was identified after his death, and the house was found standing many years later.
The logs were removed to Chicago, for the World's Columbian Exposition, in eighteen ninety three, and the cabin was reconstructed and exhibited there and elsewhere in the United States.
The materials were taken back to their original site, and a fine marble structure now encloses the precious relics of the birthplace of "the first American," as Lowell calls Lincoln in his great "Commemoration Ode."
Cousin Dennis Hanks gives the following quaint description of "Nancy's boy baby," as reported by mrs Eleanor Atkinson in her little book on "Lincoln's Boyhood."
"You bet I was tickled to death.
Babies wasn't as common as blackberries in the woods o' Kaintucky.
Nancy let me hold him purty soon.
Folks often ask me if Abe was a good lookin' baby.
Abe never was much fur looks.
I ricollect how Tom joked about Abe's long legs when he was toddlin' round the cabin.
"But he was mighty good comp'ny, solemn as a papoose, but interested in everything.
If he told us what he was laughin' at, half the time we couldn't see no joke.
"Abe never give Nancy no trouble after he could walk excep' to keep him in clothes.
Ever wear a wet buckskin glove?
When little Abe was four years old his father and mother moved from Rock Spring Farm to a better place on Knob Creek, a few miles to the northeast of the farm where he was born.
"A Cat may look at a king."
"When candles are out, all Cats are grey." Otherwise, "Joan is as good as my Lady in the dark."
"The wandering Cat gets many a rap."
Again:--
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INTRODUCTORY
three.
The word 'character' occurs only once in the New Testament, and that is in the passage in the prologue of the Epistle to the hebrews, where the original word is translated 'express image' in our version.
The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.
The Son is thus the Father's character stamped upon and set forth in human nature.
The Word was made flesh.
This is the highest and best use to which our so expressive word 'character' has ever been put, and the use to which it is put when we speak of Bunyan's Characters partakes of the same high sense and usage.
For it is of the outstanding good or evil in a man that we think when we speak of his character.
It is really either of his likeness or unlikeness to Jesus Christ we speak, and then, through Him, his likeness or unlikeness to God Himself.
And thus it is that the adjective 'moral' usually accompanies our word 'character'--moral or immoral.
A man's character does not have its seat or source in his body; character is not a physical thing: not even in his mind; it is not an intellectual thing.
Character comes up out of the will and out of the heart.
There are more clever people than good people; character,--high, spotless, saintly character,--is a far rarer thing in this world than talent or even genius.
Character is an infinitely better thing than either of these, and it is of corresponding rarity.
And yet so true is it that the world loves its own, that all men worship talent, and even bodily strength and bodily beauty, while only one here and one there either understands or values or pursues moral character, though it is the strength and the beauty and the sweetness of the soul.
We naturally turn to Bishop Butler when we think of moral character. Butler is an author who has drawn no characters of his own.
Butler's genius was not creative like Shakespeare's or Bunyan's.
Butler had not that splendid imagination which those two masters in character painting possessed, but he had very great gifts of his own, and he has done us very great service by means of his gifts.
Bishop Butler has helped many men in the intelligent formation of their character, and what higher praise could be given to any author?
Butler will lie on our table all winter beside Bunyan; the bishop beside the tinker, the philosopher beside the poet, the moralist beside the evangelical minister.
In seeking a solid bottom for our subject, then, we naturally turn to Butler.
Bunyan will people the house for us once it is built, but Butler lays bare for us the naked rock on which men like Bunyan build and beautify and people the dwelling place of God and man.
we ask the sagacious bishop.
Christian and Christiana, Obstinate and Pliable, mr Fearing and mr Feeblemind, Temporary and Talkative, mr By ends and mr Facing both ways, Simple, Sloth, Presumption, that brisk lad Ignorance, and the genuine mr Brisk himself.
But let us ask in this introductory lecture if we can find out any law or principle upon which all our own characters, good or bad, are formed.
Do our characters come to be what they are by chance, or have we anything to do in the formation of our own characters, and if so, in what way?
And here, again, Butler steps forward at our call with his key to our own and to all Bunyan's characters in his hand, and in three familiar and fruitful words he answers our question and gives us food for thought and solemn reflection for a lifetime.
There are but three steps, says Butler, from earth to heaven, or, if you will, from earth to hell-acts, habits, character.
All Butler's prophetic burden is bound up in these three great words-acts, habits, character. Remember and ponder these three words, and you will in due time become a moral philosopher.
Ponder and practise them, and you will become what is infinitely better-a moral man.
For acts, often repeated, gradually become habits, and habits, long enough continued, settle and harden and solidify into character.
And thus it is that the severe and laconic bishop has so often made us shudder as he demonstrated it to us that we are all with our own hands shaping our character not only for this world, but much more for the world to come, by every act we perform, by every word we speak, almost by every breath we draw.
Butler is one of the most terrible authors in the world.
He is indeed terrible, but it is with a terror that purifies the heart and keeps the life in the hour of temptation.
Paul sometimes arms himself with the same terror; only he composes in another style than that of Butler, and, with all his vivid intensity, he calls it the terror of the Lord.
Paul and Bunyan are of the same school of moralists and stylists; Butler went to school to the Stoics, to Aristotle, and to Plato.
Our Lord Himself came to be the express image He was and is by living and acting under this same universal law of human life-acts, habits, character.
He was made perfect on this same principle.
He learned obedience both by the things that He did, and the things that He suffered.
Butler says in one deep place, that benevolence and justice and veracity are the basis of all good character in God and in man, and thus also in the God man.
And those three foundation stones of our Lord's character settled deeper and grew stronger to bear and to suffer as He went on practising acts and speaking words of justice, goodness, and truth.
His forgiveness of injuries, and thus His splendid benevolence, had not yet come to its climax and crown till He said on the cross, 'Father, forgive them'.
And, as He was, so are we in this world.
This world's evil and ill desert made it but the better arena and theatre for the development and the display of His moral character; and the same instruments that fashioned Him into the perfect and express image He was and is, are still, happily, in full operation. Take that divinest and noblest of all instruments for the carving out and refining of moral character, the will of God.
It is not in the great tragedies of life only that character is tested and strengthened and consolidated.
And so of all the other forms and features of moral character; so of humility and meekness, so of purity and temperance, so of magnanimity and munificence, so of all self suppression and self extinction, and all corresponding exalting and magnifying and benefiting of other men.
Whatever other passing uses this present world, so full of trial and temptation and suffering, may have, this surely is the supreme and final use of it-to be a furnace, a graving house, a refining place for human character.
You do not put a pearl under the potter's wheel; you do not cast clay into a refining fire.
Abraham's character was not like David's, nor David's like Christ's, nor Christ's like Paul's.
As Butler says, there is 'a providential disposition of things' around every one of us, and it is as exactly suited to the flaws and excrescences, the faults and corruptions of our character as if Providence had had no other life to make a disposition of things for but one, and that one our own.
Have you discovered that in your life, or any measure of that?
Have you acknowledged to God that you have at last discovered the true key of your life?
Have you given Him the satisfaction to know that He is not making His providential dispositions around a stock or a stone, but that He has one under His hand who understands His hand, and responds to it, and rises up to meet and salute it?
And we cease to wonder so much at the care God takes of human character, and the cost He lays out upon it, when we think that it is the only work of His hands that shall last for ever.
It is fit, surely, that the ephemeral should minister to the eternal, and time to eternity, and all else in this world to the only thing in this world that shall endure and survive this world.
All else we possess and pursue shall fade and perish, our moral character shall alone survive.
Riches, honours, possessions, pleasures of all kinds: death, with one stroke of his desolating hand, shall one day strip us bare to a winding sheet and a coffin of all the things we are so mad to possess.
But the last enemy, with all his malice and all his resistless power, cannot touch our moral character-unless it be in some way utterly mysterious to us that he is made under God to refine and perfect it.
The Express Image carried up to His Father's House, not only the divine life He had brought hither with Him when He came to obey and submit and suffer among us; He carried back more than He brought, for He carried back a human heart, a human life, a human character, which was and is a new wonder in heaven.
He carried up to heaven all the love to God and angels and men He had learned and practised on earth, with all the earthly fruits of it.
He carried back His humility, His meekness, His humanity, His approachableness, and His sympathy.
And we see to our salvation some of the uses to which those parts of His moral character are at this moment being put in His Father's House; and what we see not now of all the ends and uses and employments of our Lord's glorified humanity we shall, mayhap, see hereafter.
And we also shall carry our moral character to heaven; it is the only thing we have worth carrying so far.
But, then, moral character is well worth achieving here and then carrying there, for it is nothing else and nothing less than the divine nature itself; it is the divine nature incarnate, incorporate, and made manifest in man.
PLIABLE
'He hath not root in himself.'--Our Lord.
We call the text a parable, but our Lord's parables are all portraits-portraits and groups of portraits, rather than ordinary parables.
Our Lord knew this man quite well who had no root in himself.
Our Lord had crowds of such men always running after Him, and He threw off this rapid portrait from hundreds of men and women who caused discredit to fall on His name and His work, and burdened His heart continually.
Our Lord's short preliminary description of Pliable goes, like all His descriptions, to the very bottom of the whole matter.
Our Lord in this passage is like one of those masterly artists who begin their portrait painting with the study of anatomy.
All the great artists in this walk build up their best portraits from the inside of their subjects.
'Without self knowledge,' says one of the greatest students of the human heart that ever lived, 'you have no real root in yourselves.
It is a deceit and a mischief to think that the Christian doctrines can either be understood or aright accepted by any outward means.
It is just in proportion as we search our own hearts and understand our own nature that we shall ever feel what a blessing the removal of sin will be; redemption, pardon, sanctification, are all otherwise mere words without meaning or power to us.
Honest, that is, with itself, and with God and man about itself.
As David says in his so honest psalm, 'Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part Thou shalt make me to know wisdom.' And, indeed, all the preachers and writers in Scripture, and all Scriptural preachers and writers outside of Scripture, are at one in this: that all true wisdom begins at home, and that it all begins at the heart.
And they all teach us that he is the wisest of men who has the worst opinion of his own heart, as he is the foolishest of men who does not know his own heart to be the worst heart that ever any man was cursed with in this world.
'Here is wisdom': not to know the number of the beast, but to know his mark, and to read it written so indelibly in our own heart.
And where this first and best of all wisdom is not, there, in our Lord's words, there is no deepness of earth, no root, and no fruit.
This was all the religion that poor Pliable ever had.
This poor creature had a certain slight root of something that looked like religion for a short season, but even that slight root was all outside of himself.
His root, what he had of a root, was all in Christian's companionship and impassioned appeals, and then in those impressive passages of Scripture that Christian read to him.
At your first attention to these things you would think that no possible root could be better planted than in the Bible and in earnest preaching.
But even the Bible, and, much more, the best preaching, is all really outside of a man till true religion once gets its piercing roots down into himself.
We have perhaps all heard of men, and men of no small eminence, who were brought up to believe the teaching of the Bible and the pulpit, but who, when some of their inherited and external ideas about some things connected with the Bible began to be shaken, straightway felt as if all the grounds of their faith were shaken, and all the roots of their faith pulled up.
But where that happened, all that was because such men's religion was all rooted outside of themselves; in the best things outside of themselves, indeed, but because, in our Lord's words, their religion was rooted in something outside of themselves and not inside, they were by and by offended, and threw off their faith.
There is another well known class of men all whose religion is rooted in their church, and in their church not as a member of the body of Christ, but as a social institution set up in this world.
They believe in their church.
They worship their church.
They suffer and make sacrifices for their church. They are proud of the size and the income of their church; her past contendings and sufferings, and present dangers, all endear their church to their heart.
But if tribulation and persecution arise, that is to say, if anything arises to vex or thwart or disappoint them with their church, they incontinently pull up their roots and their religion with it, and transplant both to any other church that for the time better pleases them, or to no church at all.
They love their earthly home with that supreme satisfaction and that all absorbing affection that truly religious men entertain for their heavenly home.
And thus it is that when anything happens to disturb or break up their earthly home their rootless religiosity goes with it.
Other men's religion, again, and all their interest in it, is rooted in their shop; you can make them anything or nothing in religion, according as you do or do not do business in their shop.
If they happen to fall in with godly lovers and friends, they are sincerely godly with them; but if their companions are indifferent or hostile to true religion, they gradually fall into the same temper and attitude.
We sometimes see students destined for the Christian ministry also with all their religion so without root in themselves that a session in an unsympathetic class, a sceptical book, sometimes just a sneer or a scoff, will wither all the promise of their coming service.
And so on through the whole of human life.
He that hath not the root of the matter in himself dureth for a while, but by and by, for one reason or another, he is sure to be offended.
So much, then,--not enough, nor good enough-for our Lord's swift stroke at the heart of His hearers.
But let us now pass on to Pliable, as he so soon and so completely discovers himself to us under john Bunyan's so skilful hand.
Look well at our author's speaking portrait of a well-known man in Bedford who had no root in himself, and who, as a consequence, was pliable to any influence, good or bad, that happened to come across him.
'Don't revile,' are the first words that come from Pliable's lips, and they are not unpromising words.
Pliable, at least, is a gentleman compared with Obstinate, and his gentlemanly feelings and his good manners make him at once take sides with Christian.
Obstinate's foul tongue has almost made Pliable a Christian.
Where men are in dead earnest about religion it always arouses the bad passions of bad men; and where earnest preachers and devoted workers are assailed with violence or with bad language, there is always enough love of fair play in the bystanders to compel them to take sides, for the time at least, with those who suffer for the truth.
And we are sometimes too apt to count all that love of common fairness, and that hatred of foul play, as a sure sign of some sympathy with the hated truth itself.
When an onlooker says 'Don't revile,' we are too ready to set down that expression of civility as at least the first beginning of true religion.
But the religion of Jesus Christ cuts far deeper into the heart of man than to the dividing asunder of justice and injustice, civility and incivility, ribaldry and good manners.
And it is always found in the long run that the cross of Christ and its crucifixion of the human heart goes quite as hard with the gentlemanly mannered man, the civil and urbane man, as it does with the man of bad behaviour and of brutish manners.
'Civil men,' says Thomas Goodwin, 'are this world's saints.' And poor Pliable was one of them.
'My heart really inclines to go with my neighbour,' said Pliable next.
'Yes,' he said, 'I begin to come to a point.
I really think I will go along with this good man.
Yes, I will cast in my lot with him.
Come, good neighbour, let us be going.'
The apocalyptic side of some men's imaginations is very easily worked upon.
No kind of book sells better among those of our people who have no root in themselves than just picture books about heaven.
Our missionaries make use of lantern slides to bring home the scenes in the Gospels to the dull minds of their village hearers, and with good success.
And at home a magic lantern filled with the splendours of the New Jerusalem would carry multitudes of rootless hearts quite captive for a time.
'Well said; and what else?
This is excellent; and what else?' Christian could not tell Pliable fast enough about the glories of heaven. 'There we shall be with seraphim and cherubim, creatures that will dazzle your eyes to look on them.
There also you shall meet with thousands and ten thousands who have gone before us to that place.
Elders with golden crowns, and holy virgins with golden harps, and all clothed with immortality as with a garment.' 'The hearing of all this,' cried Pliable, 'is enough to ravish one's heart.' 'An overly faith,' says old Thomas Shepard, 'is easily wrought.'
As the picture of a man's soul being pulled for rises before my mind, I can think of no better companion picture to that of Pliable than that of poor, hard beset Brodie of Brodie, as he lets us see the pull for his soul in the honest pages of his inward diary.
'The writer of this diary desires to be cast down under the facileness and plausibleness of his nature, by which he labours to please men more than God, and whence it comes that the wicked speak good of him . . .
The Lord pity the proneness of his heart to comply with the men who have the power . . .
Lord, he is unsound and double in his heart, politically crafty, selfish, not savouring nor discerning the things of God . . .
Let not self love, wit, craft, and timorousness corrupt his mind, but indue him with fortitude, patience, steadfastness, tenderness, mortification . . . Shall I expose myself and my family to danger at this time?
Came to Cuttiehillock.
I am neither cold nor hot.
I am not rightly principled as to the time.
Brodie's diary is one of the most humiliating, heart searching, and heart instructing books I ever read.
Let all public men tempted and afflicted with a facile, pliable, time serving heart have honest Brodie at their elbow.
Come on, let us mend our pace.' This is delightful, this is perfect.
How often have we ourselves heard these very words of challenge and reproof from the pliable frequenters of emotional meetings, and from the emotional members of an emotional but rootless ministry.
Come on, let us mend our pace!
We must open our hearts to our religion; we must have the inward soil broken up, freely and deeply its roots must penetrate our inner being.
Christian was bound to fall sooner or later into a slough filled with his own despondency about himself, his past guilt, his present sinfulness, and his anxious future.
But Pliable had not knowledge enough of himself to make him ever despond.
He had no burden on his back, and therefore no doubt in his heart.
But Christian had enough of both for any ten men, and it was Christian's overflowing despondency and doubt at this point of the road that suddenly filled his own slough, and, I suppose, overflowed into a slough for Pliable also.
Had Pliable only had a genuine and original slough of his own to so sink and be bedaubed in, he would have got out of it at the right side of it, and been a tender stepping pilgrim all his days.--'Is this the happiness you have told me all this while of?
Let us go home thinking about that.
THE PRODUCTION OF THE WOMAN (In Four Articles)
We must next consider the production of the woman.
Under this head there are four points of inquiry:
(one) Whether the woman should have been made in that first production of things?
(two) Whether the woman should have been made from man?
(three) Whether of man's rib?
Whether the Woman Should Have Been Made in the First Production of Things?
Objection one: It would seem that the woman should not have been made in the first production of things.
But God foresaw that the woman would be an occasion of sin to man.
Among perfect animals the active power of generation belongs to the male sex, and the passive power to the female.
But man is yet further ordered to a still nobler vital action, and that is intellectual operation. Therefore there was greater reason for the distinction of these two forces in man; so that the female should be produced separately from the male; although they are carnally united for generation.
On the other hand, as regards human nature in general, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature's intention as directed to the work of generation.
Now the general intention of nature depends on God, Who is the universal Author of nature.
Therefore, in producing nature, God formed not only the male but also the female.
One is servile, by virtue of which a superior makes use of a subject for his own benefit; and this kind of subjection began after sin.
There is another kind of subjection which is called economic or civil, whereby the superior makes use of his subjects for their own benefit and good; and this kind of subjection existed even before sin.
For sex belongs both to man and animals.
But in the other animals the female was not made from the male.
Therefore neither should it have been so with man.
Secondly, that man might love woman all the more, and cleave to her more closely, knowing her to be fashioned from himself.
Wherefore it was suitable for the woman to be made out of man, as out of her principle.
Fourthly, there is a sacramental reason for this.
For by this is signified that the Church takes her origin from Christ.
five thirty two): "This is a great sacrament; but I speak in Christ and in the Church."
On the other hand, the Divine Power, being infinite, can produce things of the same species out of any matter, such as a man from the slime of the earth, and a woman from out of man.
Objection one: It would seem that the woman should not have been formed from the rib of man.
Therefore a rib of Adam belonged to the integrity of his body.
So, if a rib was removed, his body remained imperfect; which is unreasonable to suppose.
But there was no pain before sin.
But this is quite impossible.
For such an increase of matter would either be by a change of the very substance of the matter itself, or by a change of its dimensions.
Wherefore multiplication of matter is quite unintelligible, as long as the matter itself remains the same without anything added to it; unless it receives greater dimensions.
Wherefore, as no rarefaction is apparent in such multiplication of matter, we must admit an addition of matter: either by creation, or which is more probable, by conversion.
Much more, therefore, was it possible that by the Divine power the body of the woman should be produced from the man's rib.
Objection one: It would seem that the woman was not formed immediately by God.
Therefore she was not made immediately by God.
But the woman's body was formed from corporeal matter.
Now God alone, the Author of nature, can produce an effect into existence outside the ordinary course of nature.
QUESTION ninety three
(two) Whether the image of God is in irrational creatures?
(four) Whether the image of God is in every man?
(five) Whether the image of God is in man by comparison with the Essence, or with all the Divine Persons, or with one of them?
(six) Whether the image of God is in man, as to his mind only?
Objection one: It would seem that the image of God is not in man.
seventy four): "Where an image exists, there forthwith is likeness; but where there is likeness, there is not necessarily an image." Hence it is clear that likeness is essential to an image; and that an image adds something to likeness-namely, that it is copied from something else.
For an "image" is so called because it is produced as an imitation of something else; wherefore, for instance, an egg, however much like and equal to another egg, is not called an image of the other egg, because it is not copied from it.
seventy four): "Where there is an image there is not necessarily equality," as we see in a person's image reflected in a glass.
Yet this is of the essence of a perfect image; for in a perfect image nothing is wanting that is to be found in that of which it is a copy.
Now it is manifest that in man there is some likeness to God, copied from God as from an exemplar; yet this likeness is not one of equality, for such an exemplar infinitely excels its copy. Therefore there is in man a likeness to God; not, indeed, a perfect likeness, but imperfect.
And Scripture implies the same when it says that man was made "to" God's likeness; for the preposition "to" signifies a certain approach, as of something at a distance.
Now a thing is said to be one not only numerically, specifically, or generically, but also according to a certain analogy or proportion.
Objection one: It would seem that the image of God is to be found in irrational creatures.
Therefore the whole universe is to the image of God, and not only man.
For instance, a worm, though from man it may originate, cannot be called man's image, merely because of the generic likeness.
Nor, if anything is made white like something else, can we say that it is the image of that thing; for whiteness is an accident belonging to many species.
But the nature of an image requires likeness in species; thus the image of the king exists in his son: or, at least, in some specific accident, and chiefly in the shape; thus, we speak of a man's image in copper. Whence Hilary says pointedly that "an image is of the same species."
Now it is manifest that specific likeness follows the ultimate difference.
fifty one) "approach so near to God in likeness, that among all creatures nothing comes nearer to Him." It is clear, therefore, that intellectual creatures alone, properly speaking, are made to God's image.
Therefore even what falls short of the nature of an image, so far as it possesses any sort of likeness to God, participates in some degree the nature of an image.
Or else we may say that a part is not rightly divided against the whole, but only against another part.
Thus every creature is an image of the exemplar type thereof in the Divine mind.
Objection one: It would seem that the angels are not more to the image of God than man is.
fifty one), "man is so much to God's image that God did not make any creature to be between Him and man: and therefore nothing is more akin to Him." But a creature is called God's image so far as it is akin to God.
But the intellectual nature does not admit of intensity or remissness; for it is not an accidental thing, since it is a substance.
First, we may consider in it that in which the image chiefly consists, that is, the intellectual nature.
Secondly, we may consider the image of God in man as regards its accidental qualities, so far as to observe in man a certain imitation of God, consisting in the fact that man proceeds from man, as God from God; and also in the fact that the whole human soul is in the whole body, and again, in every part, as God is in regard to the whole world.
But these do not of themselves belong to the nature of the Divine image in man, unless we presuppose the first likeness, which is in the intellectual nature; otherwise even brute animals would be to God's image.
Therefore, as in their intellectual nature, the angels are more to the image of God than man is, we must grant that, absolutely speaking, the angels are more to the image of God than man is, but that in some respects man is more like to God.
Objection one: It would seem that the image of God is not found in every man.
Therefore, as woman is an individual of the human species, it is clear that every individual is not an image of God.
Therefore all men have not the conformity of image.
But by sin man becomes unlike God.
Now the intellectual nature imitates God chiefly in this, that God understands and loves Himself.
First, inasmuch as man possesses a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men.
Secondly, inasmuch as man actually and habitually knows and loves God, though imperfectly; and this image consists in the conformity of grace.
But in a secondary sense the image of God is found in man, and not in woman: for man is the beginning and end of woman; as God is the beginning and end of every creature.
So when the Apostle had said that "man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man," he adds his reason for saying this: "For man is not of woman, but woman of man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man."
five]
Whether the Image of God Is in Man According to the Trinity of Persons?
Objection one: It would seem that the image of God does not exist in man as to the Trinity of Persons.
Now the mode of origin is not the same in all things, but in each thing is adapted to the nature thereof; animated things being produced in one way, and inanimate in another; animals in one way, and plants in another.
Wherefore it is manifest that the distinction of the Divine Persons is suitable to the Divine Nature; and therefore to be to the image of God by imitation of the Divine Nature does not exclude being to the same image by the representation of the Divine Persons: but rather one follows from the other.
We must, therefore, say that in man there exists the image of God, both as regards the Divine Nature and as regards the Trinity of Persons; for also in God Himself there is one Nature in Three Persons.
Thus it is clear how to solve the first two objections.
First, because as the Son is like to the Father by a likeness of essence, it would follow of necessity if man were made in likeness to the Son, that he is made to the likeness of the Father.
CHAPTER fourteen.
FISHING EXPLOITS.
Cats are, as a rule, averse to water in every shape.
Parsons might preach in peace, and actors rant undisturbed.
It would be a bad thing in a business way, however, as far as the medical profession and their friends the undertakers are concerned; for, if the former did not work with additional zeal, many of the latter would starve.
Did you ever observe a cat crossing the street on a rainy day?
How gingerly she treads, how carefully picks out the driest spots, lifting each fore paw and shaking it with an air of supreme disgust, and finally, for the last few yards, making a reckless bolt to the front door.
But let the occasion arise, either in the pursuit of game or in some case of necessity, and she at once throws all her scruples overboard, and goes overboard after them, wetting both feet and fur with a will.
This is told as a great curiosity; but I can assure the reader that such things are by no means rare.
I have known of hundreds of such cases; and they are occurring every day.
Joe, a nice she tabby, was a curious specimen of the feline fish catcher. Her master was a disciple of Walton's.
Anxiously she would watch the skimming fly, squaring her lips and emitting little excited screams of delight, whenever a fish rose to nibble.
Then, when a trout was landed, pussy at once threw herself upon it and despatched it.
At other times, she would spring into the stream, perhaps up to the neck, and commence fishing on her own account, by feeling with her paws below all the banks, working as hard and as eagerly as any bare legged school boy.
Gibbey was a fine, large, brindled Tom.
He was a noted fisherman and a daring and reckless poacher, so much so that the gamekeepers threatened to kill him, whenever they could catch him.
They did not mind, they said, his taking a good clean sea trout occasionally; but the beast fished in season and out of season.
In fact, Gibbey found the spawning time much more convenient than any other.
When the salmon came up the shallow streams to spawn in thousands, all waggling under his very nose, and to be had for the mere lifting out, he couldn't stand that.
It was not so much what he ate that the keepers grudged; but he was in the constant habit of carrying away large fish to hide for future use; and as he generally forgot where he had put them, he still went on hiding more.
Sometimes, in taking a walk through the wood, you would find yourself suddenly sprawling on all fours, having trampled on one of Gibbey's salmon.
Has the horse conceived?
Nay, the poor brute has eaten all his oats, but he could not stomach-one of Gibbey's salmon.
Something has been making its presence felt in your bed room for days.
Even the immortal Condy fails to lay the dread thing.
At last you peep below the bed, and with the tongs pull out-what?--only one of Gibbey's salmon.
At last, however, poor Gilbert was trapped and slain.
One day, when out shooting, I met a large white cat.
He was coming trotting along the foot path, and wore about his neck what I took to be a very tasteful thing in cravats.
I hate to be done.
Five minutes afterwards I was at the cottage door.
A pleasant little woman answered my knock.
"Might I trouble you for a glass of water?"
"Certainly, sir; but would you not come in, and have a drink of nice sweet whey?"
I would.
Tom was singing on the hearth, but he had laid aside the wrap-it was nowhere to be seen.
"That's a fine cat you've got," said I, when I had finished my whey.
"He is, sir; everybody admires our Tom."
"He has caught cold, I think?"
"Dear me!
no, sir."
"No, no, Tom was never better in his life."
"A cravat!" cried she.
It was pleasant, though I did not know what I was laughing at; only I had a slight inkling that somehow or other I had made a mighty fool of myself.
An eel, was it!
The cravat was an eel!
And I was "an awful gowk!" Well, I always guessed I was; but then she said it so pleasantly, and as soon as she said it off she went again.
I thought it was time I was going off too; so bidding her good morning, I did, and left her laughing-such a pleasant little woman!
I know an instance of a cat bred and reared at a flour mill: it was a universal custom with this pussy to watch by the dam side, where she might have been seen at any time either in winter or summer.
She was also great in catching water rats, which she seized and killed as eagerly and speedily as any English terrier would.
But not only can cats swim and fish, but they have been known to teach their offspring to do so; and a knowledge of the gentle art has been transmitted in some cat families down to the third and fourth generation.
This cat not only fished herself, but taught her children to do so too. The way in which she managed this was very amusing, and shows how extremely sagacious feline nature is.
When the kittens came of sufficient age, she would entice them down, some fine sunny day to a part of the stream, where the water was very clear and shallow.
Here the smaller trout fry and minnows would be gambolling; and, making a spring, pussy would seize one of these and bring it out alive.
After letting it jump about for some little time, to amuse the kittens and attract their undivided attention, she would kill and return it to the stream, jumping after it and playing with it in the water to entice a kitten in.
Thus, in course of time, the kittens could all swim and fish, and rivalled even their mother in quickness and daring.
I have a fine tom kitten which I intend training to catch fish.
CHAPTER sixteen.
HUNTING EXPLOITS.
Catching mice is, to a proper minded cat, a mere parlour pastime, only to be resorted to on rainy days, or of a night when too restless to sleep.
It stands to pussy in the same relation that indoor croquet, billiards, or reading a book in bed does to our noble selves.
Rat catching is only just one degree better, and principally enjoyed by cats who have not reached maturity in body and intellect-cats, in fact, in their hobble de hoy hood.
There is as much difference between the hunting of an animal of the cat kind and that of one of the canine order, as there is between the skilled tactics of German warfare, and the wild rush to battle of Arab cavalry.
There is more honesty in the one, more craft and cunning in the other.
A dog is singularly destitute in what is called in Scotland, "canniness." He also wants patience; but the cat, armed with this gift, combined with cunning, and skill gained from experience, is master for anything in the field which she considers game and chooses to square her moustache at.
The latter is pleasing, certainly, but the former is charming.
Pussy prefers the charming, while our friend the dog merely runs down his prey, and takes little pains to show skill even in that.
Leaving rats and mice along with blue bottle flies, in the category of mere kitten's play, pussy's game list includes hares, rabbits, stoats, weasels, water rats, and moles, besides everything that flies or has feathers, from the humble household sparrow to the black cock of the mountain.
At the time I write, she is over twenty years old; but hale and hearty, and as playful as a kitten.
When she spies a mole hill, she at once sets herself down to watch it; nor will she raise the siege for hours, until the little gentleman in velvet gives signs of his presence by casting up a few grains of earth.
Then is pussy's opportunity. She springs nimbly on the bank, and plunges her arms up to the shoulders into the earth, and never fails to bring poor molie to bank; and the daylight has hardly had time to dazzle his eyes before he is dead.
"The hare," says my informant, "fought with great vigour, and often floored her antagonist; but Pirnie sent in her claws and teeth, till blood flew like rain, and fur like drift (driven snow); and the hare soon becoming exhausted, Pirnie seized it by the throat, and its plaintive screams were presently hushed in death."
The battle was witnessed by Graysie's owners, and lasted the greater part of the afternoon, and ended triumphantly for pussy, in the defeat and death of the weasel.
A cat never springs on her prey unless sure of catching it, and her aim is most unerring.
I counted one day no less than three hundred fifty mice which a cat had killed single handed at the removal of a rick of oats in a farmer's yard.
He was a fine, noble, red tabby, and it was quite a sight to see the surprising strength and agility with which he worked.
He killed most of them with his paws, seldom putting a tooth in one.
Indeed, high bred cats seldom care to eat mice unless they are very hungry; they much prefer fish to anything else, and the flesh of birds they consider a greater luxury than even that of rabbits.
They are very wise too, and this wisdom is especially displayed in the number of doors they have in each of their dwellings; so that should an enemy, in the shape of a pussy, or a ferret, pop in at one door, Bunny would just pop out at the other.
Of course, Bunny by this time was scampering off to the opposite hole, and there at the door pussy would nab him just as he came out.
Cats almost invariably bring home their prey to be either leisurely eaten, given to their kittens, or presented to their owners.
A man in Banffshire rented a small farm from a game preserving laird.
This man was ruined by rabbits, and turned out of house and home by them.
They first ate up all his oats, his grass, and turnips, so that only potatoes could be grown on the place.
She also took a few youthful prisoners, whom she brought home to play with and amuse a fine family of kittens, which she had in the cottage garret.
These young rabbits lived and grew, and burrowed and made nests in the thatch.
It was the awful row this happy family used to make every night which first led to the discovery.
When the farmer found out one night the cause of the disturbance, he came down and awakened his wife and-
"Jane," said he, and he looked almost sublime as he stood on the cold damp floor with a penny candle in one hand, in rather scanty shirt tails and red Kilmarnock night cap-he was a study for a Rembrandt, "Jane, I've been a duffer too long.
Gamekeepers do all they can to destroy the life of poor pussy by setting traps for, and shooting her wherever met.
But some cats come to know all about the treacherous wires and how to avoid them.
They know too that hares and rabbits often fall into these snares, and accordingly they turn this knowledge to good account; and when they find a half strangled animal in the gin, they quietly despatch, and if possible carry it home.
Cats are great enemies to birds in the breeding season; but it is surprising with what terrible fierceness even the smallest birds will defend their nests from the inroads of predatory cats, whose evil intentions are thus often frustrated.
A poacher, the other day, was returning home in the grey light of early morning, when he observed a large fox coming in his direction, with what the man took to be a hare over his shoulder.
The man fired, and Reynard dropped.
His burden was a fine large cat.
"There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip;" and the poacher's gun brought matters to quite a different conclusion.
They were no doubt sitting cheek by jowl when pussy made the spring.
If I tell the reader of a cat that is so clever that she can catch swallows on the wing, I suppose I may be allowed to close this chapter in peace.
At the foot of a certain post master's garden, flows a stream in which his cat takes many a good salmon trout.
On this bridge crouches this sagacious cat, and often secures a swallow, as it skims out from under.
THE BOOK OF CATS.
One day, ever so long ago, it struck me that I should like to try and write a book about Cats.
I mentioned the idea to some of my friends: the first burst out laughing at the end of my opening sentence, so I refrained from entering into further details.
The third said, "Nobody would read it," and added, "Besides, what do you know of the subject?" and before I had time to begin to tell him, said he expected it was very little.
"Why not Dogs?" asked one friend of mine, hitting upon the notion as though by inspiration.
Somewhat disheartened by the reception my little project had met with, I gave up the idea for awhile, and went to work upon other things.
Again, nothing can be more unjust than to call Cats cruel.
But stay, little Robin, did you ever spare, A grub on the ground or a fly in the air? No, that you never did, I'll swear; So I won't kill the Cat, That's flat."
But all the cruel and unjust things that have been said about poor pussy I will tell you in another chapter.
In the first place, what is the meaning of the word "Cat." Let us look in the dictionary.
A Cat, according to dr Johnson, is "a domestick animal that catches mice." But the word has one or two other meanings, for instance:--
In thieves' slang the word "Cat" signifies a lady's muff, and "to free a cat" to steal a muff.
Cat harping is the name for a purchase of ropes employed to brace in the shrouds of the lower masts behind their yards.
Two little holes astern, above the Gun room ports, are called Cat holes.
A Cat's paw is a particular turn in the bight of a rope made to hook a tackle in; and the light air perceived in a calm by a rippling on the surface of the water, is known by the same name.
A kind of double tripod with six feet, intended to hold a plate before the fire and so constructed that, in whatever position it is placed, three of the legs rest on the ground, is called a Cat, from the belief that however a Cat may be thrown, she always falls on her feet.
Cat's eye or Sun stone of the Turks is a kind of gem found chiefly in Siberia.
It is very hard and semi transparent, and has different points from whence the light is reflected with a kind of yellowish radiation somewhat similar to the eyes of cats.
Catkins are imperfect flowers hanging from trees in the manner of a rope or cat's tail.
Cat silver is a fossil. Cat's tail is a seed or a long round substance growing on a nut tree.
Guanahani, or Cat Island, a small island of the Bahama group, in the West Indies, is supposed to be so called because wild Cats of large size used to infest it, but I can find no particulars upon the subject in the works of writers on the West Indies.
In the North of England, a common expression of contempt is to call a person Cat faced.
With little boys in the street a Cat is a dreadfully objectionable plaything, roughly cut out of a stick or piece of wood, and sharpened at each end.
In the North, however, the same game is called "Piggie." I learn by the newspaper that a young woman at Leeds nearly lost her eye sight by a blow from one of these piggies or cats, and the magistrates sent the boy who was the cause of it to an industrial school, ordering his father to pay half a crown a week for his maintenance.
The shrill whistle indulged in upon the first night of a pantomime by those young gentlemen with the figure six curls in the front row of the gallery are denominated cat calls.
Such a thing has been known before this, as a young costermonger having one of his front teeth pulled out to enable him to whistle well.
Let us hope that his talent was properly appreciated in the circles in which he moved.
Kemble made his appearance in the costume of 'Macbeth,' and, amid vollies of hissing, hooting, groans, and cat calls, seemed as though he meant to speak a steril and pointless address announced for the occasion."
The instrument was readily concealed within the mouth, and the perpetrator of the noise could not be detected.
George Rose, so well known in after life as the friend of Pitt, Clerk of the Parliament, Secretary of the Treasury, etc, and executor of the Earl of Marchmont, but then "a bashful young man," was one of the frequenters of this tavern.
It was once upon a time the trick of a countryman to bring a Cat to market in a bag, and substitute it for a sucking pig in another bag, which he sold to the unwary when he got the chance.
If the trick was discovered prematurely, it was called letting the cat out of the bag-if not-he that made the bad bargain was said to have bought a pig in a poke.
There is a kind of ship, too, called a Cat, a vessel formed on the Norwegian model, of about six hundred tons burthen.
Walter Scott
The Boy of the Canongate: seventeen seventy one to eighteen thirty two
A boy of fifteen sat on a high stool at an old oak desk, and watched the snow falling in the street.
He closed the book with a bang.
"Father."
"Yes, Walter, lad?"
The lawyer looked up from his writing, and smiled at the figure on the high stool.
"I'd best be going home; there's no more light here to see by."
Wrap yourself up warm, for the night is cold."
He was a sturdy, well built lad, with tousled yellow hair, frank eyes with a twinkle in them, and a mouth that was large and betokened humor.
Nobody who could help it was abroad, and Walter was glad when he reached the door of his father's house in George's Square and could find shelter from the cutting wind.
The Scotch evening meal was simple, soon over, and then came the time to sit before the blazing logs on the great open hearth and tell stories.
They sat in a circle about him, listening eagerly to story after story, forgetting everything but the boy's words, and showing their fondness and admiration for the romancer in each glance.
Walter was minstrel and prophet and historian to the boys of the Canongate by the winter fire, as he was to be later to the whole nation of Englishmen.
Walter Scott and his brothers belonged to a clan that made George's Square their headquarters, and their nearest and dearest enemies were the boys of the Crosscauseway, a poorer section of the city that lay not very far distant.
On the day the storm ceased Walter left his high stool and ponderous book early and joined his friends in solid array in their square.
While they waited for the enemy to come up from the side street, the boys built snow fortifications across the Square and stocked them with ammunition sufficient to stand a siege.
Still no enemy appeared, and, eager for a chance to try their aim, the boys of the Square boldly left their own haunts and proceeded down the Crosscauseway in search of the foe.
Slipping from door to door, from one point of vantage to the next, the boys made the whole distance of the enemy's land without sight of an enemy.
The invaders fired one round, then turned and fled before a fierce charge.
Back the way they came the boys retreated, and after them came the enemy pelting them without mercy and with good aim.
In the van of the pursuit ran a tall, fair haired boy, who wore the bright green breeches of a tailor's clerk, who was famous for his prowess in these schoolboy battles, and who, because of his clothes, had been given the picturesque nickname of "Green Breeks."
Young Scott and his friends ran back into their square, but the enemy were close upon their heels.
Green Breeks was now far in the lead of his forces, so far in the lead that he might have been cut off had not the pursued been panic stricken.
Over their own fortifications the boys fled and dropped behind them for safety.
Their banner, a flag given them by a lady of the Square, waved defiantly in Green Breeks' face.
He fell stunned, and the blood poured from a cut in his head.
He hurried over to the fallen Green Breeks, and the boys of both armies melted silently away.
Shortly after Green Breeks was in the hospital, his head bandaged, but otherwise little the worse for his mishap.
Thereupon Walter presented the old woman with a pound of snuff, and as soon as Green Breeks was out of the hospital made him one of his friends.
With the opening of spring Walter spent all his spare hours in his favorite pursuit, riding through the country on a search for old legends or curious tales of the neighborhood.
Stories of sprites and goblins, of witches and magicians, were eagerly sought by him.
Many an old woman was led to tell the lame boy with the eager eyes the tales she had heard as a schoolgirl, and was well repaid by the boy's rapt attention.
Every Saturday in fair weather, and more frequently during the vacations, his father allowed him a holiday from the office.
Walter and a boy friend named john Irving used to take two or three books from the public library of Edinburgh, and go out into the neighboring country, to Salisbury Crags, Arthur's Seat, or to a height called Blackford Hill, from which there was a splendid view of the Lowland country.
There they read the books together, Walter always a little ahead of his friend, and obliged to wait at the end of every two pages for him to catch up.
Although Walter spent considerable time in his father's office, he was still studying under a tutor with other boys, preparing for college.
At one time there was a certain boy who always stood at the top of Walter's class whom young Scott could not supplant, try as he would. Finally Walter noticed that whenever the master asked that boy a question the latter always fumbled with his fingers at a certain button on the lower part of his waistcoat.
Walter Scott thereupon determined to cut off that particular button, and see what would happen.
Then Walter waited with the greatest interest to see what would happen.
Walter came next, and, being able to answer the question, took the other boy's place, chuckling to himself. He did not hold it long.
In a thousand ways Walter showed his love of history and romance. Anything that was picturesque, whether it was a view or an old dirk, caught his attention at once.
For a short time he took lessons in oil painting from a German.
He soon found that he had not the eye nor the hand for the work, but it happened that the teacher's father had been a soldier in the army of Frederick the Great, and as soon as Walter found this out, he plied the man with questions.
Often in good weather the boys of George's Square would go on long excursions into the country, frequently staying away from home for several days at a time.
His father was not at all pleased with his long absence, and asked how he had managed with so little money.
Riding northward on this visit the vale of Perth first burst on his view.
He found a man who knew that rugged country well, and for seven successive years Walter Scott made a "raid," as he called it, into that country, following each stream to its source, and studying every ruined tower or castle from foundation stone to topmost battlement.
In course of time Scott was called to the bar as a lawyer, and took his place with the dozens of young men who hung about the Parliament House in Edinburgh waiting for briefs of cases to be argued.
There were lots of debating clubs in the Scotch capital at that time, and Scott was a member of several.
Here the young lawyer ruled supreme.
"Why," said Scott, with twinkling eyes, "I don't change stories.
I only put a cocked hat on their heads, and stick a cane into their hands-to make them fit for going into company."
Fifteen years passed and all England was reading eagerly the wonderful historical poems and romances written by a man who called himself the "Wizard of the North."
Even the narrow streets of Edinburgh and the old Canongate itself became historic ground under the Wizard's spell.
The Wizard was Walter Scott, and now he found the whole world as eager to hear the stories and poems he had to tell about his country as his boy friends had been years before.
He had not changed much as he grew up.
We think we have advanced too rapidly.
Let us go back a little.
But here again we digress from the history of the evolution of our knowledge, for as a matter of fact we become aware of dreams entirely free of distortion only after the consistent application of our method of interpretation and after complete analysis of the distorted dream.
But do not think that all children's dreams are like this.
Dream distortion makes its appearance very early in childhood, and dreams of children from five to eight years of age have been recorded that showed all the characteristics of later dreams.
But if you will limit yourselves to the age beginning with conscious psychic activity, up to the fourth or fifth year, you will discover a series of dreams that are of a so-called infantile character.
Even among adults, dreams that closely resemble the typically infantile ones occur under certain conditions.
one.
For the understanding of these dreams we need no analysis, no technical methods.
We need not question the child that is giving an account of his dream.
We shall now consider a few examples so that we may base our further deductions upon them.
A boy of twenty two months is to present a basket of cherries as a birthday gift.
A little girl of three and a quarter years makes her first trip across a lake.
At the landing she does not want to leave the boat and cries bitterly.
The time of the trip seems to her to have passed entirely too rapidly.
A boy of five and a quarter years is taken on an excursion into the Escherntal near Hallstatt.
The child had tried again and again to see it through the telescope, with what result no one knew.
He started on the excursion in a joyously expectant mood.
Whenever a new mountain came in sight the boy asked, "Is that the Dachstein?"
The oftener this question was answered in the negative, the more moody he became; later he became entirely silent and would not take part in a small climb to a waterfall.
The only detail he gave was one he had heard before, "you had to climb steps for six hours."
You will recall what I represented to you as the medical opinion concerning the dream, the simile of untrained fingers wandering aimlessly over the keys of the piano.
You cannot fail to see how decidedly these dreams of childhood are opposed to this conception.
Indeed, we have every reason to attribute the more normal and deeper sleep to the child.
three.
Dream distortion is lacking in these dreams, therefore they need no interpretation.
The manifest and latent dreams are merged.
But upon closer consideration we shall have to admit of a tiny bit of distortion, a certain differentiation between manifest dream content and latent dream thought, even in these dreams.
The child's dream is a reaction to an experience of the day, which has left behind it a regret, a longing or an unfulfilled desire.
We learned definite facts about this, but could only explain a very small number of dreams in this way.
In these children's dreams nothing points to the influence of such somatic stimuli; we cannot be mistaken, for the dreams are entirely intelligible and easy to survey. But we need not give up the theory of physical causation entirely on this account.
The dreamer does not wish to interrupt his life, but would rather continue his work with the things that occupy him, and for this reason he does not sleep.
The unfulfilled wish, to which he reacts by means of the dream, is the psychic sleep disturbing stimulus for the child.
The dream, as a reaction to the psychic stimulus, must have the value of a release of this stimulus which results in its elimination and in the continuation of sleep.
It is true, we think we would have slept better if we had not dreamt, but here we are wrong; as a matter of fact, we would not have slept at all without the help of the dream.
It could not help disturbing us slightly, just as the night watchman often cannot avoid making a little noise while he drives away the rioters who would awaken us with their noise.
six.
One main characteristic of the dream is that a wish is its source, and that the content of the dream is the gratification of this wish. Another equally constant feature is that the dream does not merely express a thought, but also represents the fulfillment of this wish in the form of a hallucinatory experience.
In the interpretation of the dream it is of utmost importance that this change be traced back.
Only extensive investigation can ascertain that the cause of the dream must always be a wish, and cannot also be an anxiety, a plan or a reproach; but this does not alter the other characteristic, that the dream does not simply reproduce the stimulus but by experiencing it anew, as it were, removes, expells and settles it.
seven.
The dream fits into the same scheme.
For the interfering tendency we substitute the psychic stimulus, the wish which strives for its fulfillment, let us say, for thus far we are not familiar with any other sleep disturbing psychic stimulus.
We sleep, and yet we experience the removal of a wish; we gratify the wish, but at the same time continue to sleep. Both are partly carried out and partly given up.
eight.
In this instance, therefore, the less firmly established of the two main characteristics of the dream holds, while the other proves itself entirely dependent upon the condition of sleep and impossible to the waking state.
In colloquial usage, therefore, there is a presentment of the fact that the fulfillment of a wish is a main characteristic of the dream.
For day dreaming is an activity closely bound up in gratification and is, indeed, pursued only for this reason.
Not only this but other colloquial usages also express the same feeling. well-known proverbs say, "The pig dreams of acorns, the goose of maize," or ask, "Of what does the hen dream?
Many turns of speech seem to point to the same thing-"dreamlike beauty,"
"I should never have dreamed of that," "in my wildest dreams I hadn't imagined that." This is open partisanship on the part of colloquial usage.
It is true that common usage recognizes "bad" dreams, but still the dream plainly connotates to it only the beautiful wish fulfillment.
There is indeed no proverb that tells us that the pig or the goose dreams of being slaughtered.
Indeed, this was very often the case, but none of them thought of acknowledging this characteristic as universal and of making it the basis of an explanation of the dream. We can easily imagine what may have deterred them and shall discuss it subsequently.
And we were almost able to forget that we are engaged in psychoanalysis.
Aside from its connection with errors our work has no specific connotation.
Any psychologist, who is entirely ignorant of the claims of psychoanalysis, could have given this explanation of children's dreams.
If there were only infantile dreams, our problem would be solved, our task accomplished, and that without questioning the dreamer, or approaching the unconscious, and without taking free association into consideration.
The continuation of our task plainly lies in this direction.
We have already repeatedly had the experience that characteristics that at first seemed universally true, have subsequently held good only for a certain kind and for a certain number of dreams.
It is therefore for us to decide whether the common characteristics which we have gathered from children's dreams can be applied universally, whether they also hold for those dreams that are not transparent, whose manifest content shows no connection with wishes left over from the previous day.
We also suspect that for the explanation of this distortion we shall need the psychoanalytic method which we could dispense with in the understanding of children's dreams.
It is those that are called up throughout life by the imperative needs of the body-hunger, thirst, sexual desire-hence wish fulfillments in reaction to internal physical stimuli.
For this reason, I have noted the dream of a young girl, that consisted of a menu following her name (Anna f....., strawberry, huckleberry, egg dish, pap), as a reaction to an enforced day of fasting on account of a spoiled stomach, which was directly traceable to the eating of the fruits twice mentioned in the dream.
"Very significant in determining the trend of our inmost thoughts were our dreams, which were never more vivid and numerous than just at this time.
All of them dealt with that outside world that now was so far away from us, but often they fitted into our present condition.
Food and drink were most often the pivots about which our dreams revolved.
One of us, who excelled in going to great dinners in his sleep, was most happy whenever he could tell us in the morning that he attended a dinner of three courses; another one dreamed of tobacco, whole mountains of tobacco; still another dreamed of a ship that came along on the open sea, under full sail.
It would surely be of great psychological interest if all these dreams were recorded.
"Mungo Park, who during a trip in Africa was almost exhausted, dreamed without interruption of the fertile valleys and fields of his home.
A man who feels great thirst at night after enjoying highly seasoned food for supper, often dreams that he is drinking.
It is of course impossible to satisfy a rather strong desire for food or drink by means of the dream; from such a dream one awakes thirsty and must now drink real water.
The effect of the dream is in this case practically trifling, but it is none the less clear that it was called up for the purpose of maintaining the sleep in spite of the urgent impulse to awake and to act.
In a like manner, under the influence of sexual stimuli, the dream brings about satisfaction that shows noteworthy peculiarities.
This peculiarity of the dream of pollution, as o Rank has observed, makes it a fruitful subject to pursue in the study of dream distortion.
Moreover, all dreams of desire of adults usually contain something besides satisfaction, something that has its origin in the sources of the purely psychic stimuli, and which requires interpretation to render it intelligible.
As, for example, in dreams of impatience, whenever a person has made preparations for a journey, for a theatrical performance, for a lecture or for a visit, and now dreams of the anticipated fulfillment of his expectations, and so arrives at his goal the night before the actual experience, in the theatre or in conversation with his host.
Or the well named dreams of comfort, when a person who likes to prolong his sleep, dreams that he is already up, is washing himself, or is already in school, while as a matter of fact he continues sleeping, hence would rather get up in a dream than in reality.
It is a very neat stroke that the release should be effected through the window, for the ray of light that awakens the prisoner comes through the same window.
In all other dreams except those of children and those of the infantile type, distortion, as we have said, blocks our way.
The entire range of Henriot's experience, read, imagined, dreamed, then fainted into unreality before the sheer wonder of what he saw.
But both were dim, dropped somewhere into a lesser scale.
For a tempest that seemed to toss loose stars about the sky swept round about him, pouring up the pillared avenue in front of the procession.
A blast of giant energy, of liberty, came through.
It came to the accurate out line of its form they had traced for it.
He held his mind steady enough to realise that it was akin to what men call a "descent" of some "spiritual movement" that wakens a body of believers into faith-a race, an entire nation; only that he experienced it in this brief, concentrated form before it has scattered down into ten thousand hearts.
It sought to warm them with the stress of its own irresistible life stream, to beat them into shape, and make pliable their obstinate resistance.
Through all things the impulse poured and spread, like fire at white heat.
Yet nothing visible came as yet, no alteration in the actual landscape, no sign of change in things familiar to his eyes, while impetus thus fought against inertia.
Calm and untouched himself, he lay outside the circle of evocation, watching, waiting, scarcely daring to breathe, yet well aware that any minute the scene would transfer itself from memory that was subjective to matter that was objective.
How or where he did not see, he could not tell.
He saw it, as he saw the hands he was holding stupidly up to shield his face. For this terrific release of force long held back, long stored up, latent for centuries, came pouring down the empty Wadi bed prepared for its reception.
Through stones and sand and boulders it came in an impetuous hurricane of power.
The liberation of its life appalled him. All that was free, untied, responded instantly like chaff; loose objects fled towards it; there was a yielding in the hills and precipices; and even in the mass of Desert which provided their foundation.
The hinges of the Sand went creaking in the night.
It shaped for itself a bodily outline.
Yet, most strangely, nothing definitely moved.
How could he express the violent contradiction?
For stubborn matter turned docile before the stress of this returning life, taught somewhere to be plastic.
The two officiating human beings, safe at the stationary centre, and himself, just outside the circle of operation, alone remained untouched and unaffected.
The stars themselves, it seemed, contributed some part of the terrific, flowing impulse that conquered matter and shaped itself this physical expression.
Then, before he was able to fashion any preconceived idea of what visible form this potent life might assume, he was aware of further change.
It came at the briefest possible interval after the beginning-this certainty that, to and fro about him, as yet however indeterminate, passed Magnitudes that were stupendous as the desert. There was beauty in them too, though a terrible beauty hardly of this earth at all.
A fragment of old Egypt had returned-a little portion of that vast Body of Belief that once was Egypt.
Yet only a portion came.
It stretched forth an arm.
Here was the beginning the woman had spoken of-little opening clue. Entire reconstruction lay perhaps beyond.
And Henriot next realised that these Magnitudes in which this group energy sought to clothe itself as visible form, were curiously familiar.
Booming softly as they dropped downwards through the sky, with a motion the size of them rendered delusive, they trooped up the Avenue towards the central point that summoned them.
He recognised them, cold in him of death, though the outlines reared higher than the pyramids, and towered up to hide whole groups of stars.
Yes, he recognised them in their partial revelation, though he never saw the monstrous host complete.
But, one of them, he realised, posing its eternal riddle to the sands, had of old been glimpsed sufficiently to seize its form in stone,--yet poorly seized, as a doll may stand for the dignity of a human being or a child's toy represent an engine that draws trains....
He forgot himself.
He merely watched.
The glory numbed him.
Block and pencil, as the reason of his presence there at all, no longer existed....
Yet one small link remained that held him to some kind of consciousness of earthly things: he never lost sight of this-that, being just outside the circle of evocation, he was safe, and that the man and woman, being stationary in its untouched centre, were also safe.
But-that a movement of six inches in any direction meant for any one of them instant death.
What was it, then, that suddenly strengthened this solitary link so that the chain tautened and he felt the pull of it?
Henriot could not say.
The chill breath of the Desert made him shiver.
But at first, so deeply had his soul been dipped in this fragment of ancient worship, he could remember nothing more.
Somewhere lay a little spot of streets and houses; its name escaped him.
He had once been there; there were many people, but insignificant people.
Who were they? And what had he to do with them?
All recent memories had been drowned in the tide that flooded him from an immeasurable Past.
Yet he remembered them; and, thus robbed of association that names bring, he saw them for an instant naked, and knew that one of them was evil.
Blackness touched the picture there.
The man, his name still out of reach, was sinister, impure and dark at the heart.
The admixture of an evil motive was the flaw that marred complete success.
The names then flashed upon him-Lady Statham-Richard Vance.
Vance!
With a horrid drop from splendour into something mean and sordid, Henriot felt the pain of it.
The motive of the man was so insignificant, his purpose so atrocious.
More and more, with the name, came back-his first repugnance, fear, suspicion.
And human terror caught him.
He shrieked.
The inner perception clouded and grew dark.
Outer and inner mingled in violent, inextricable confusion.
The wrench seemed almost physical.
It happened all at once, retreat and continuation for a moment somehow combined. And, if he did not definitely see the awful thing, at least he was aware that it had come to pass.
He witnessed it.
The supreme moment of evocation was close.
Life, through that awful sandy vortex, whirled and raged.
And the Group Soul caught and used it.
The actual accomplishment Henriot did not claim to see.
He was a witness, but a witness who could give no evidence.
Whether the woman was pushed of set intention, or whether some detail of sound and pattern was falsely used to effect the terrible result, he was helpless to determine.
He pretends no itemised account.
She went.
Sand took her.
There followed emptiness-a hush of unutterable silence, stillness, peace.
The moon had sunk into the Libyan wilderness; the eastern sky was red.
The Desert settled back to sleep, huge, unfathomable, charged to the brim with life that watches, waits, and yet conceals itself behind the ruins of apparent desolation.
And the Wadi, empty at his feet, filled slowly with the gentle little winds that bring the sunrise.
Then, across the pale glimmering of sand, Henriot saw a figure moving.
And the horror of the man's approach struck him like a hammer in the face. He closed his eyes, sinking back to hide.
But, before he swooned, there reached him the clatter of the murderer's tread as he began to climb over the splintered rocks, and the faint echo of his voice, calling him by name-falsely and in pretence-for help.
THE DREAM
We have learned to know the origin, nature and function of the dream from the study of children's dreams.
As to the others we know nothing as yet, nor do we understand them.
For the present, however, we have obtained a result whose significance we do not wish to under estimate.
Every time a dream is completely comprehensible to us, it proves to be an hallucinated wish fulfillment.
This coincidence cannot be accidental, nor is it an unimportant matter.
Our next task is the investigation and the understanding of this dream distortion.
Dream distortion is the thing which makes the dream seem strange and incomprehensible to us.
We want to know several things about it; firstly, whence it comes, its dynamics; secondly, what it does; and finally, how it does it.
We can say at this point that dream distortion is the product of the dream work, that is, of the mental functioning of which the dream itself is the conscious symptom.
Let us describe the dream work and trace it back to the forces which work upon it.
And now I shall ask you to listen to the following dream.
It was recorded by a lady of our profession, and according to her, originated with a highly cultivated and respected lady of advanced age.
No analysis of this dream was made.
Our informant remarks that to a psychoanalyst it needs no interpretation.
She stresses the word 'service,' so love services.
But instead of reaching the chief physician, she finds herself in a large somber room in which there are many officers and army doctors sitting and standing around a long table.
She turns with her proposal to a staff doctor who, after a few words, soon understands her.
The words of her speech in the dream are, 'I and numerous other women and girls of Vienna are ready for the soldiers, troops, and officers, without distinction....' Here in the dream follows a murmuring.
That the idea is, however, correctly understood by those present she sees from the semi embarrassed, somewhat malicious expressions of the officers.
The lady then continues, 'I know that our decision sounds strange, but we are in bitter earnest.
The soldier in the field is not asked either whether or not he wants to die.' A moment of painful silence follows.
The staff doctor puts his arm around her waist and says, 'Madame, let us assume that it really came to that ...' (murmurs).
At this she realizes with great dismay that she does not know his name.
In going up she hears an officer say, 'That is a tremendous decision irrespective of whether a woman is young or old; all honor to her!'
"With the feeling that she is merely doing her duty, she goes up an endless staircase."
This dream she repeats twice in the course of a few weeks, with-as the lady notices-quite insignificant and very senseless changes.
This dream corresponds in its structure to a day dream.
It has few gaps, and many of its individual points might have been elucidated as to content through inquiry, which, as you know, was omitted.
The conspicuous and interesting point for us, however, is that the dream shows several gaps, gaps not of recollection, but of original content. In three places the content is apparently obliterated, the speeches in which these gaps occur are interrupted by murmurs.
For example, the phrase "services of love," and above all the bits of speech which immediately precede the murmurs, demand a completion which can have but one meaning. If we interpolate these, then the phantasy yields as its content the idea that the dreamer is ready, as an act of patriotic duty, to offer her person for the satisfaction of the erotic desires of the army, officers as well as troops.
That certainly is exceedingly shocking, it is an impudent libidinous phantasy, but-it does not occur in the dream at all.
I hope you will recognize the inevitability of the conclusion that it is the shocking character of these places in the dream that was the motive for their suppression.
Yet where do you find a parallel for this state of affairs?
In these times you need not seek far.
Take up any political paper and you will find that the text is obliterated here and there, and that in its place shimmers the white of the paper.
You know that that is the work of the newspaper censor.
You think that it is a pity, that it probably was the most interesting part, it was "the best part."
In other places the censorship did not touch the completed sentence.
The author foresaw what parts might be expected to meet with the objection of the censor, and for that reason he softened them by way of prevention, modified them slightly, or contented himself with innuendo and allusion to what really wanted to flow from his pen.
Thus the sheet, it is true, has no blank spaces, but from certain circumlocutions and obscurities of expression you will be able to guess that thoughts of the censorship were the restraining motive.
Now let us keep to this parallel.
We say that the omitted dream speeches, which were disguised by a murmuring, were also sacrifices to a censorship.
Wherever there are gaps in the manifest dream, it is the fault of the dream censor.
Indeed, we should go further, and recognize each time as a manifestation of the dream censor, those places at which a dream element is especially faint, indefinitely and doubtfully recalled among other, more clearly delineated portions.
For a third type of dream censorship I know of no parallel in the practice of newspaper censorship, yet it is just this type that I can demonstrate by the only dream example which we have so far analyzed.
In the latter, going to the theatre and getting the tickets were shoved into the foreground.
This displacement of emphasis is a favorite device of the dream distortion and gives the dream that strangeness which makes the dreamer himself unwilling to recognize it as his own production.
The dream censorship itself is the author, or one of the authors, of the dream distortion whose investigation now occupies us.
After these remarks concerning the effects of the dream censor, let us now turn to their dynamics.
I hope you will not consider the expression too anthropomorphically, and picture the dream censor as a severe little manikin who lives in a little brain chamber and there performs his duties; nor should you attempt to localize him too much, to think of a brain center from which his censoring influence emanates, and which would cease with the injury or extirpation of this center.
For the present, the term "dream censor" is no more than a very convenient phrase for a dynamic relationship.
This phrase does not prevent us from asking by what tendencies such influence is exerted and upon which tendencies it works; nor will we be surprised to discover that we have already encountered the dream censor before, perhaps without recognizing him.
For such was actually the case.
You will remember that we had a surprising experience when we began to apply our technique of free association.
We then began to feel that some sort of a resistance blocked our efforts to proceed from the dream element to the unconscious element for which the former is the substitute.
This resistance, we said, may be of varying strength, enormous at one time, quite negligible at another.
In the latter case we need cross only a few intermediate steps in our work of interpretation.
But when the resistance is strong, then we must go through a long chain of associations, are taken far afield and must overcome all the difficulties which present themselves as critical objections to the association technique.
The resistance to interpretation is nothing but the objectivation of the dream censor.
The latter proves to us that the force of the censor has not spent itself in causing the dream distortion, has not since been extinguished, but that this censorship continues as a permanent institution with the purpose of preserving the distortion.
This question, which is fundamental to the understanding of the dream, indeed perhaps to human life, is easily answered if we look over a series of those dreams which have been analyzed.
The tendencies which the censorship exercises are those which are recognized by the waking judgment of the dreamer, those with which he feels himself in harmony.
You may rest assured that when you reject an accurate interpretation of a dream of your own, you do so with the same motives with which the dream censor works, the motives with which it produces the dream distortion and makes the interpretation necessary. Recall the dream of our fifty year old lady.
Without having interpreted it, she considers her dream abominable, would have been still more outraged if our informant had told her anything about the indubitable meaning; and it is just on account of this condemnation that the shocking spots in her dream were replaced by a murmur.
The tendencies, however, against which the dream censor directs itself, must now be described from the standpoint of this instance.
One can say only that these tendencies are of an objectionable nature throughout, that they are shocking from an ethical, aesthetic and social point of view, that they are things one does not dare even to think, or thinks of only with abhorrence.
These censored wishes which have attained to a distorted expression in the dream, are above all expressions of a boundless, reckless egoism.
And indeed, the personal ego occurs in every dream to play the major part in each of them, even if it can successfully disguise itself in the manifest content.
The ego which has been freed of all ethical restraints feels itself in accord with all the demands of the sexual striving, with those demands which have long since been condemned by our aesthetic rearing, demands of such a character that they resist all our moral demands for restraint.
The pleasure striving-the libido, as we term it-chooses its objects without inhibitions, and indeed, prefers those that are forbidden.
It chooses not only the wife of another, but, above all, those incestuous objects declared sacred by the agreement of mankind-the mother and sister in the man's case, the father and brother in the woman's.
Even the dream of our fifty year old lady is an incestuous one, its libido unmistakably directed toward her son.
Desires which we believe to be far from human nature show themselves strong enough to arouse dreams.
Hate, too, expends itself without restraint. Revenge and murderous wishes toward those standing closest to the dreamer are not unusual, toward those best beloved in daily life, toward parents, brothers and sisters, toward one's spouse and one's own children.
These censored wishes seem to arise from a veritable hell; no censorship seems too harsh to be applied against their waking interpretation.
But do not reproach the dream itself for this evil content.
You will not, I am sure, forget that the dream is charged with the harmless, indeed the useful function of guarding sleep from disturbance.
This evil content, then, does not lie in the nature of the dream.
You know also that there are dreams which can be recognized as the satisfaction of justified wishes and urgent bodily needs.
These, to be sure, undergo no dream distortion.
They need none.
They can satisfy their function without offending the ethical and aesthetic tendencies of the ego.
And will you also keep in mind the fact that the amount of dream distortion is proportional to two factors.
On the one hand, the worse the censorable wish, the greater the distortion; on the other hand, however, the stricter the censor himself is at any particular time the greater the distortion will be also.
A young, strictly reared and prudish girl will, by reason of those factors, disfigure with an inexorable censorship those dream impulses which we physicians, for example, and which the dreamer herself ten years later, would recognize as permissible, harmless, libidinous desires.
It is not at all difficult to "find a hitch" in it.
Our dream interpretations were made on the hypotheses we accepted a little while ago, that the dream has some meaning, that from the hypnotic to the normal sleep one may carry over the idea of the existence at such times of an unconscious psychic activity, and that all associations are predetermined.
If we had come to plausible results on the basis of these hypotheses, we would have been justified in concluding that the hypotheses were correct.
But what is to be done when the results are what I have just pictured them to be?
Then it surely is natural to say, "These results are impossible, foolish, at least very improbable, hence there must have been something wrong with the hypotheses.
Either the dream is no psychic phenomenon after all, or there is no such thing as unconscious mental activity in the normal condition, or our technique has a gap in it somewhere.
Is that not a simpler and more satisfying conclusion than the abominations which we pretend to have disclosed on the basis of our suppositions?"
Both, I answer.
It is a simpler as well as a more satisfying conclusion, but not necessarily more correct for that reason.
Let us take our time, the matter is not yet ripe for judgment.
Above all we can strengthen the criticism against our dream interpretation still further.
That its conclusions are so unpleasant and unpalatable is perhaps of secondary importance.
A stronger argument is the fact that the dreamers to whom we ascribe such wish tendencies from the interpretation of their dreams reject the interpretations most emphatically, and with good reason. "What," says the one, "you want to prove to me by this dream that I begrudged the sums which I spent for my sister's trousseau and my brother's education?
But indeed that can't be so.
Why I work only for my sister, I have no interest in life but to fulfill my duties toward her, as being the oldest child, I promised our blessed mother I would." Or a woman says of her dream, "You mean to say that I wish my husband were dead!
Why, that is simply revolting, nonsense.
It isn't only that we have the happiest possible married life, you probably won't believe me when I tell you so, but his death would deprive me of everything else that I own in the world." Or another will tell us, "You mean that I have sensual desires toward my sister?
That is ridiculous.
We don't get along and I haven't exchanged a word with her in years." We might perhaps ignore this sort of thing if the dreamers did not confirm or deny the tendencies ascribed to them; we could say that they are matters which the dreamers do not know about themselves.
But that the dreamers should feel the exact opposite of the ascribed wish, and should be able to prove to us the dominance of the opposite tendency-this fact must finally disconcert us.
Is it not time to lay aside the whole work of the dream interpretation as something whose results reduce it to absurdity?
Assuming that there are unconscious tendencies in the psychic life, nothing is proved by the ability of the subject to show that their opposites dominate his conscious life.
The first two objections raised against our work hold merely that the results of dream interpretation are not simple, and very unpleasant.
In answer to the first of these, one may say that for all your enthusiasm for the simple solution, you cannot thereby solve a single dream problem.
To do so you must make up your mind to accept the fact of complicated relationships.
"That doesn't prevent them from existing," as I used to hear my teacher Charcot say in similar cases, when I was a young doctor.
This prospect is too unpleasant." On the contrary, you will be silent until another physicist proves some error in the assumptions or calculations of the first.
If you reject the unpleasant, you are repeating the mechanism of dream construction instead of understanding and mastering it.
But does your own experience justify you in saying that?
I will not discuss the question of how you may estimate yourselves, but have you found so much good will among your superiors and rivals, so much chivalry among your enemies, so little envy in their company, that you feel yourselves in duty bound to enter a protest against the part played by the evil of egoism in human nature?
Are you ignorant of how uncontrolled and undependable the average human being is in all the affairs of sex life?
Or do you not know that all the immoralities and excesses of which we dream nightly are crimes committed daily by waking persons?
And now turn your attention from the individual case to the great war devastating Europe.
Think of the amount of brutality, the cruelty and the lies allowed to spread over the civilized world.
Do you really believe that a handful of conscienceless egoists and corruptionists could have succeeded in setting free all these evil spirits, if the millions of followers did not share in the guilt?
Do you dare under these circumstances to break a lance for the absence of evil from the psychic constitution of mankind?
It is not our intention to deny the noble strivings of human nature, nor have we ever done anything to deprecate their value.
On the contrary, I show you not only the censored evil dream wishes, but also the censor which suppresses them and renders them unrecognizable.
When, however, we give up this one sided ethical estimate, we shall surely be able to find a more accurate formula for the relationship of the evil to the good in human nature.
And thus the matter stands.
We need not give up the conclusions to which our labors in dream interpretation lead us even though we must consider those conclusions strange.
Perhaps we can approach their understanding later by another path.
For the present, let us repeat: dream distortion is a consequence of the censorship practised by accredited tendencies of the ego against those wish impulses that are in any way shocking, impulses which stir in us nightly during sleep.
Why these wish impulses come just at night, and whence they come-these are questions which will bear considerable investigation.
It would be a mistake, however, to omit to mention, with fitting emphasis, another result of these investigations.
The dream wishes which try to disturb our sleep are not known to us, in fact we learn of them first through the dream interpretation.
Therefore, they may be described as "at that time" unconscious in the sense above defined.
But we can go beyond this and say that they are more than merely "at that time" unconscious.
The dreamer to be sure denies their validity, as we have seen in so many cases, even after he has learned of their existence by means of the interpretation.
The situation is then repeated which we first encountered in the interpretation of the tongue slip "hiccough" where the toastmaster was outraged and assured us that neither then nor ever before had he been conscious of disrespectful impulse toward his chief.
This is repeated with every interpretation of a markedly distorted dream, and for that reason attains a significance for our conception.
We are now prepared to conclude that there are processes and tendencies in the psychic life of which one knows nothing at all, has known nothing for some time, might, in fact, perhaps never have known anything.
If any further evidence had been required to show that it was the determination of the Northern people not only to make no concessions to the grievances of the Southern States, but to increase them to the last extremity, it was furnished by the proclamation of President Lincoln, issued on april fifteenth eighteen sixty one.
This proclamation, which has already been mentioned, requires a further examination, as it was the official declaration, on the part of the Government of the United States, of the war which ensued.
In it the President called for seventy five thousand men to suppress "combinations" opposed to the laws, and obstructing their execution in seven sovereign States which had retired from the Union.
Seventy five thousand men organized and equipped are a powerful army, and, when raised to operate against these States, nothing else than war could be intended.
On november sixth eighteen sixty, the Legislature of South Carolina assembled and gave the vote of the State for electors of a President of the United States.
On the next day an act was passed calling a State Convention to assemble on december seventeenth, to determine the question of the withdrawal of the State from the United States.
All were in favor of secession.
The Convention assembled on december seventeenth, and on the twentieth passed "an ordinance to dissolve the union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled 'The Constitution of the United States of America.'" The ordinance began with these words: "We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain," etc
The State authorities immediately conformed to this action of the Convention, and the laws and authority of the United States ceased to be obeyed within the limits of the State.
About four months afterward, when the State, in union with others which had joined her, had possessed herself of the forts within her limits, which the United States Government had refused to evacuate, President Lincoln issued the above mentioned proclamation.
Though President Lincoln designated her as a "combination," it did not make her a combination.
Though he refused to recognize her as a State, it did not make her any less a State.
By assertion, he attempted to annihilate seven States; and the war which followed was to enforce the revolutionary edict, and to establish the supremacy of the General Government on the ruins of the blood bought independence of the States.
By designating the State as a "combination," and considering that under such a name it might be in a condition of insurrection, he assumed to have authority to raise a great military force and attack the State. Yet, even if the fact had been as assumed, if an insurrection had existed, the President could not lawfully have derived the power he exercised from such condition of affairs.
For a State or union of States to attack with military force another State, is to make war.
The answer to this question is very plain.
In the nature of things, no union can be formed except by separate, independent, and distinct parties.
A new union might subsequently be formed, but the original one could never by coercion be restored.
Any effort on the part of the others to force the seceding State to consent to come back is an attempt at subjugation.
It is a wrong which no lapse of time or combination of circumstances can ever make right.
A forced union is a political absurdity.
No less absurd is President Lincoln's effort to dissever the sovereignty of the people from that of the State; as if there could be a State without a people, or a sovereign people without a State.
But the question which mr Lincoln presents "to the whole family of man" deserves a further notice.
The answer which he seems to infer would be given "by the whole family of man" is that such a government as he supposes "can maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes." And, therefore, he concluded that he was right in the judgment of "the whole family of man" in commencing hostilities against us.
He says, "So viewing the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government." That is the power to make war against foreign nations, for the Government has no other war power.
Planting himself on this position, he commenced the devastation and bloodshed which followed to effect our subjugation.
Nothing could be more erroneous than such views.
The supposed case which he presents is entirely unlike the real case.
The Government of the United States is like no other government.
Neither is it a "government of the people by the same people"; but it is known and designated as "the Government of the United States." It is an anomaly among governments.
Its authority consists solely of certain powers delegated to it, as a common agent, by an association of sovereign and independent States.
These powers are to be exercised only for certain specified objects; and the purposes, declared in the beginning of the deed or instrument of delegation, were "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
All its powers are there expressed, defined, and limited.
It was only to that instrument mr Lincoln as President should have gone to learn his duties.
That was the chart which he had just solemnly pledged himself to the country faithfully to follow.
He soon deviated widely from it-and fatally erroneous was his course.
The administration of the affairs of a great people, at a most perilous period, is decided by the answer which it is assumed "the whole family of man" would give to a supposed condition of human affairs which did not exist and which could not exist.
This is the ground upon which the rectitude of his cause was placed.
He says, "No choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government, and so to resist force employed for its destruction by force for its preservation."
"Here," he says, "no choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government." For what purpose must he call out this war power?
The assertion is not only incorrect, in stating that force was employed by us, but also in declaring that it was for the destruction of the Government of the United States.
On the contrary, we wished to leave it alone.
Our separation did not involve its destruction.
To such fiction was mr Lincoln compelled to resort to give even apparent justice to his cause.
He now goes to the Constitution for the exercise of his war power, and here we have another fiction.
It further declared that all persons who should under their authority molest any vessel of the United States, or the persons or cargo on board, should be treated as pirates.
In their efforts to subjugate us, the destruction of our commerce was regarded by the authorities at Washington as a most efficient measure.
It was early seen that, although acts of Congress established ports of entry where commerce existed, they might be repealed, and the ports nominally closed or declared to be closed; yet such a declaration would be of no avail unless sustained by a naval force, as these ports were located in territory not subject to the United States.
An act was subsequently passed authorizing the President of the United States, in his discretion, to close our ports, but it was never executed.
The scheme of blockade was resorted to, and a falsehood was asserted on which to base it.
Under the laws of nations, separate governments when at war blockade each other's ports.
This is decided to be justifiable.
But the Government of the United States could not consent to justify its blockade of our ports on this ground, as it would be an admission that the Confederate States were a separate and distinct sovereignty, and that the war was prosecuted only for subjugation.
It, therefore, assumed that the withdrawal of the Southern States from the Union was an insurrection.
Was it an insurrection?
When certain sovereign and independent States form a union with limited powers for some general purposes, and any one or more of them, in the progress of time, suffer unjust and oppressive grievances for which there is no redress but in a withdrawal from the association, is such withdrawal an insurrection?
The ambitious and aggressive States obtain possession of the central authority which, having grown strong in the lapse of time, asserts its entire sovereignty over the States.
Whichever of them denies it and seeks to retire, is declared to be guilty of insurrection, its citizens are stigmatized as "rebels," as if they had revolted against a master, and a war of subjugation is begun.
Where is the value of constitutional liberty?
What strength is there in bills of rights-in limitations of power?
Such must be the verdict of mankind.
Men do not fight to make a fraternal union, neither do nations.
To be prepared for self defense, I called Congress together at Montgomery on april twenty ninth, and, in the message of that date, thus spoke of the proclamation of the President of the United States: "Apparently contradictory as are the terms of this singular document, one point is unmistakably evident.
The President of the United States calls for an army of seventy five thousand men, whose first service is to be the capture of our forts.
It is a plain declaration of war, which I am not at liberty to disregard, because of my knowledge that, under the Constitution of the United States, the President is usurping a power granted exclusively to Congress."
I then proceeded to say that I did not feel at liberty to disregard the fact that many of the States seemed quite content to submit to the exercise of the powers assumed by the President of the United States, and were actively engaged in levying troops for the purpose indicated in the proclamation.
Finally, that the intent of the President of the United States, already developed, to invade our soil, capture our forts, blockade our ports, and wage war against us, rendered it necessary to raise means to a much larger amount than had been done, to defray the expenses of maintaining independence and repelling invasion.
This we will, we must, resist to the direst extremity.
The moment that this pretension is abandoned, the sword will drop from our grasp, and we shall be ready to enter into treaties of amity and commerce that can not but be mutually beneficial.
So long as this pretension is maintained, with a firm reliance on that Divine Power which covers with its protection the just cause, we must continue to struggle for our inherent right to freedom, independence, and self government."
An act was also passed to provide revenue from imports; another, relative to prisoners of war; and such others as were necessary to complete the internal organization of the Government, and establish the administration of public affairs.
The gravity of age and the zeal of youth rivaled each other in the desire to be foremost in the public defense.
Volunteers were ordered to be enrolled and held in readiness in every part of the State.
Already the Northern officer in charge had evacuated Harper's Ferry, after having attempted to destroy the public buildings there.
His report says: "I gave the order to apply the torch.
In three minutes or less, both of the arsenal buildings, containing nearly fifteen thousand stand of arms, together with the carpenter's shop, which was at the upper end of a long and connected series of workshops of the armory proper, were in a blaze.
The great ship Pennsylvania was burned, and the frigates Merrimac and Columbus, and the Delaware, Raritan, Plymouth, and Germantown were sunk.
The value of the property destroyed was estimated at several millions of dollars.
This property thus destroyed had been accumulated and constructed with laborious care and skillful ingenuity during a course of years to fulfill one of the objects of the Constitution, which was expressed in these words, "To provide for the common defense" (see Preamble of the Constitution).
It had belonged to all the States in common, and to each one equally with the others.
How unreasonable, how blind with rage must have been that administration of affairs which so quickly brought the Government to the necessity of destroying its own means of defense in order, as it publicly declared, "to maintain its life"!
We should not omit to refer once more to the most prolific source of sectional strife and alienation, which is believed to have been the question of the tariff, or duties upon imports.
Its influence extended to and affected subjects with which it was not visibly connected, and finally assumed a form surely not contemplated in the original formation of the Union.
In the Articles of Confederation, the first Constitution of the United States, the theory was that of direct taxation, and the manner was to impose upon the States an amount which each was to furnish to the common Treasury to defray expenses for the common defense and general welfare.
During the period of our colonial existence, the policy of the British Government had been to suppress the growth of manufacturing industry.
In the Convention which framed the Constitution for a "more perfect Union," one of the greatest difficulties in agreeing upon its terms was found in the different interests of the States, but, among the compromises which were made, there prominently appears the purpose of a strict equality in the burdens to be borne, as well as the blessings to be enjoyed, by the people of the several States.
For a long time after the formation of the "more perfect Union," but little capital was invested in manufacturing establishments; and, though in the early part of the present century the amount had considerably increased, the products were yet quite insufficient for the necessary supplies of our armies in the War of eighteen twelve.
Government contracts, high prices, and to some extent, no doubt, patriotic impulses, led to the investment of capital in the articles required for the prosecution of the war.
The Congress of the United States, in eighteen sixteen, from motives at least to be commended for their generosity, enacted a law to protect from the threatened ruin those of their countrymen who had employed their capital for purposes demanded by the general welfare and common defense.
These good intentions, if it be conceded that the danger was real which it was designed to avert, were most unfortunate as the beginning of a policy the end of which was fraught with the greatest evils that have ever befallen the Union.
Not so with the tariff law of eighteen sixteen: though sustained by men from all sections of the Union, and notably by so strict a constructionist as mr Calhoun, there were not wanting those who saw in it a departure from the limitation of the Constitution, and sternly opposed it as the usurpation of a power to legislate for the benefit of a class.
The law derived much of its support from the assurance that it was only a temporary measure, and intended to shield those whose patriotism had exposed them to danger, thus presenting the not uncommon occurrence of a good case making a bad precedent.
For the first time a tariff law had protection for its object, and for the first time it produced discontent.
In the law there was nothing which necessarily gave to it or in its terms violated the obligation that duties should be uniform throughout the United States.
The fact that it affected the sections differently was due to physical causes-that is, geographical differences.
The streams of the Southern Atlantic States ran over wide plains into the sea; their last falls were remote from ocean navigation; and their people, almost exclusively agricultural, resided principally on this plain, and as near to the seaboard as circumstances would permit.
In the Northern Atlantic States the highlands approached more nearly to the sea, and the rivers made their last leap near to harbors of commerce.
Water power being relied on before the steam engine had been made, and ships the medium of commerce before railroads and locomotives were introduced, it followed that the staples of the Southern plains were economically sent to the water power of the North to be manufactured.
This remark, of course, applies to such articles as were not exported to foreign countries, and is intended to explain how the North became the seat of manufactures, and the South remained agricultural.
From this it followed that legislation for the benefit of manufacturers became a Northern policy.
It was not, as has been erroneously stated, because of the agricultural character of the Southern people, that they were opposed to the policy inaugurated by the tariff act of eighteen sixteen.
This is shown by the fact that anterior to that time they had been the friends of manufacturing industry, without reference to its location.
As long as duties were imposed for revenue, so that the object was to supply the common Treasury, it had been cheerfully borne, and the agriculture of one section and the manufacturing of another were properly regarded as handmaids, and not unfrequently referred to as the means of strengthening and perpetuating the bonds by which the States were united.
When duties were imposed, not for revenue, but as a bounty to a particular industry, it was regarded both as unjust and without warrant, expressed or implied, in the Constitution.
Then arose the controversy, quadrennially renewed and with increasing provocation, in eighteen twenty, in eighteen twenty four, and in eighteen twenty eight--each stage intensifying the discontent, arising more from the injustice than the weight of the burden borne.
It was not the stamp duty nor the tea tax, but the principle involved in taxation without representation, against which our colonial fathers took up arms.
So the tariff act in eighteen twenty eight, known at the time as "the bill of abominations," was resisted by Southern representatives, because it was the invasion of private rights in violation of the compact by which the States were united.
Those who had passed the bill refused to allow the opportunity to test the validity of a tax imposed for the protection of a particular industry.
Though the debates showed clearly enough the purpose to be to impose duties for protection, the phraseology of the law presented it as enacted to raise revenue, and therefore the victims of the discrimination were deprived of an appeal to the tribunal instituted to hear and decide on the constitutionality of a law.
South Carolina, oppressed by onerous duties and stung by the injustice of a refusal to allow her the ordinary remedy against unconstitutional legislation, asserted the right, as a sovereign State, to nullify the law.
Before an actual collision of arms occurred, Congress wisely adopted the compromise act of eighteen thirty three.
As the Southern representatives were mainly those who denied the constitutional power to make such expenditures, it naturally resulted that the mass of those appropriations were made for Northern works.
Now that direct taxes had in practice been so wholly abandoned as to be almost an obsolete idea, and now that the Treasury was supplied by the collection of duties upon imports, two golden streams flowed steadily to enrich the Northern and manufacturing region by the impoverishment of the Southern and agricultural section.
In the train of wealth and demand for labor followed immigration and the more rapid increase of population in the Northern than in the Southern States.
I do not deny the existence of other causes, such as the fertile region of the Northwest, the better harbors, the greater amount of shipping of the Northeastern States, and the prejudice of Europeans against contact with the negro race; but the causes I have first stated were, I think, the chief, and those only which are referable to the action of the General Government.
It was not found that the possession of power mitigated the injustice of its use by the North, and discontent therefore was steadily accumulating, and, as stated in the beginning of this chapter, I think was due to class legislation in the form of protective duties and its consequences more than to any or all other causes combined.
Turning from the consideration of this question in its sectional aspect, I now invite attention to its general effect upon the character of our institutions.
If the common Treasury of the States had, as under the Confederation, been supplied by direct taxation, who can doubt that a rigid economy would have been the rule of the Government; that representatives would have returned to their tax paying constituents to justify appropriations for which they had voted by showing that they were required for the general welfare, and were authorized by the Constitution under which they were acting?
When the money was obtained by indirect taxation, so that but few could see the source from which it was derived, it readily followed that a constituency would ask, not why the representative had voted for the expenditure of money, but how much he had got for his own district, and perhaps he might have to explain why he did not get more.
Is it doubtful that this would lead to extravagance, if not to corruption?
Nothing could be more fatal to the independence of the people and the liberties of the States than dependence for support upon the public Treasury, whether it be in the form of subsidies, of bounties, or restrictions on trade for the benefit of special interests.
In the decline of the Roman Empire, the epoch in which the hopelessness of renovation was made manifest was that in which the people accepted corn from the public granaries: it preceded but a little the time when the post of emperor became a matter of purchase.
Now that fanaticism can no longer inflame the prejudices of the uninformed, it may be hoped that our statesmen will review the past, and give to our country a future in accordance with its early history, and promotive of true liberty.
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
Cargan turned first, as usual, to the stock market reports.
His eye caught an explanatory note: the dividend on the preferred had been cut; the surplus was heavily reduced. His mind, searching rapidly over their business, fixed upon two marginal accounts-Jim Smith's and Waldron's.
In each case the collateral deposited had already been insufficient.
Drawing out his note book he swiftly figured.
Gotta sell Waldron out. Must have made a thousand dollars out of that account first and last. Too bad.' A momentary sense of Waldron's calamity swept over him, but quickly evaporated.
'Business is business,' he thought, and remembered, with a little angry satisfaction, Anita Waldron's coming out dance and how the Runkles, who were invited, kept talking about it all winter. 'Old Waldron won't be so darn particular next year.'
Give me a kiss, dear, and take your old shirt.' She was a graceful woman, stiffened by an obvious corset, and faintly powdered.
A long yellow feather dangled from her orange hat, big pearls were set in her ears, and her shoe buckles glittered as she walked.
He kissed her admiringly.
'Say, Martha, you look great,' he chuckled.
The train was starting; indeed he had just time to dash up the steps of his car.
'Good bye, dear,' she caroled.
A lurch of the train swung him heavily out among the chairs; to save himself he caught a shoulder and dropped into a seat.
It was Waldron.
Cargan offered him a cigar, but he put it aside quickly.
'No, thank you; no, thank you-Well-they cut the dividend.' He looked at Cargan with a wan smile.
'What'll I do, Cargan?
They told me I'd find you on the train, and I thought I'd ask your advice.'
'Sell, mr Waldron,' he answered earnestly, 'sell right off.
That Brogan crowd's runnin' the company now, and they're no good, sell quick.'
Waldron looked at him in doubt.
'How much do I lose?' he asked feebly.
The old man blinked rapidly, then conquered his pride.
With punctilious care he unbuttoned his gray cutaway, took out a wallet from under the button of the Society of Colonial Wars, drew forth a sheet of note paper, and with a pencil inscribed a broad o 'There's my collateral, mr Cargan,' he said whimsically.
The gentleman put his wallet back hurriedly as if some one had laughed at it, and cast a quick, hurt look at his broker.
'You haven't been thinking of selling me out-after all the business I've given you?'
Cargan nodded.
Incredulity, horror, resolve, passed over Waldron's face.
'You cannot! It's impossible!' he said firmly.
Different worlds of imagination revolved in the two men's minds. Theophilus Waldron thought of the children, and of his father the governor, and of the family pride.
'I didn't mean it that way,' he answered hurriedly.
I've borrowed money from my wife-and other places.'--He was too proud to add, 'This is confidential.'--'My boy's just entered college, my girl's just come out. It isn't just the money-' a gush of emotion reddened his face-'You've got to pull me through, Cargan.
It's impossible; it's out of the question for me to break now!'
'Business is business, mr Waldron,' he said curtly.
'Ab so lute ly, we won't take the risk.'
Waldron got up stiffly and carefully brushed the cinders from his coat.
'This is Bloomfield, I think,' he said coldly.
mr Cargan, there are considerations above business.' His voice failed a little.
Cargan had heard that bluff before.
'I mean,' he faltered, 'that I may not be able to stand up under it.' And then his voice resumed its desperate certainty.
'I mean, sir, that what you propose is impossible.
I mean that ab so lute ly you cannot sell me out.'
He bowed and felt his way down the corridor.
mrs Waldron followed.
She was a stiff woman, a little faded, quietly dressed.
Her face was troubled, and when they reached the motor, she caught her husband's elbow gently as if to ask him something, but he merely nodded and turned her glance toward Cargan's window.
Then the children hustled the old folks into the tonneau and they were off, just as the train started.
"It's impossible!" Nevertheless, in self defense he began to calculate what it might have cost to carry the account, until the appalling magnitude of the risk shut off the discussion.
'Eccentrics or hot box,' said the man who jumped off the step beside him.
What is it, Bill?'
'Walk then,' said the conductor stolidly.
There was no house in sight, no road, nothing but the dead train, the new land of endless shimmering prairies, and, beyond the ditch, a single horseman looking curiously at the long cars and the faces strained against the glass of the windows.
'Say, you!' Cargan called, 'can you get an auto anywhere here?'
The figure looked at him impassively, then shook its dusty head.
'Or a team?'
It shook its head again.
'Or a-horse?' Cargan hesitated.
He had never ridden a horse.
Say-do you want to?'
Cargan was tempted.
'What'll I do with my suit case?'
'Gimme it to take for you.
He walked his horse onward, not daring to trot, struck the dusty highway, rode on over an imperceptible roll of the plains, and was alone on a vast bare earth, naked as when born from the womb of time.
He had never before looked at the country except as real estate, never seen the plains, and a curious new sense of the bigness of the earth oppressed him.
He felt very small and very mean.
The sky was enormous; he was only a speck on the vast floor.
That face lingered.
He saw him looking vaguely out of the car window-saying that he couldn't stand up under it-that it was 'impossible.' He wondered if it was a bluff, after all.
The face faded away leaving a dull pity behind it, a struggling remorse.
He was alone with God.
God saw into his heart.
Cargan suddenly became conscious of his appearance-his serge suit, his straw hat, his awkward seat in the saddle.
'Maybe they'll think I stole this horse.
Guess I'll go round,' he said aloud.
He lost a stirrup, he slipped sidewise on the saddle; then in a panicky fright he began to shout and saw at the bit.
The speed sickened him.
The flat earth swung beneath, the sky swam dizzily.
He dared not pull on the reins; he could only hold on grimly and shut his eyes.
Once he slipped, and, screaming, saw for an instant a blur of grass before he could pull himself back to safety.
He did not note how far they ran; but at last came a slower motion, a gallop, and then a trot.
Flinging himself outward, he rolled over on the soft ground, and lay groaning on the prairie.
The well trained horse stopped and began to graze; he too was quivering with fatigue, but his fright was over.
The world again was empty, and this time there was no road.
A profound pity for himself stirred him.
Never had he so felt the need of humanity, of human aid.
It, too, was lost.
'Hello, is that Annie?' came faintly across the silence.
'Say, is Hamden near here?' he asked of a slim woman in a gingham dress who appeared at the door.
'And say, can I use your telephone?'
He called Cargan and Casey, then waited, fidgeting.
The clock ticked in a hush; the chickens droned in whispers; the woman herself worked over the stove with slow fingers, moving the kettles gently.
He could see her tiptoeing at their telephone.
'Martha,' he called quickly,--'tell Casey not to sell out Waldron-tell him right away.
The connection roared and failed.
He hung up the instrument.
He scarcely noticed the loiterers who stared at him, or thought of his streaked face, his trousers split at the knee, his hat lost on the wild ride.
But as he plodded onward the atmosphere of town had its effect.
There was a row of customers along the soda water counter, and through the open windows came scraps of conversation: two boys were teasing each other about a girl; a group of men were talking auctions, options, prices, real estate.
Then he slid inside the door, and ordered a chocolate soda.
He brushed furtively at the caked dust on his legs, remembering, irritably, the elegance of Waldron, whom he had saved.
In the mirror of the soda fountain he saw himself, torn, dirty, shrinking, and the sight filled him with disgust and anger.
'Gimme a cigar,' he called to the boy at the magazine counter; bit off the end, lit it, and began to think business.
The clerk, swirling a cataract of milk from glass to glass, revealed the inner sheet of the paper propped before him.
'Good gosh,' he gulped inwardly, 'what a chance!' It was a sure thing for the man with the money.
Except for Waldron he could have scooped it all in; but now four hundred was all he dared touch,--and perhaps not that.
Soft headed donkey!
The reaction was complete.
'Go ahead,' said the operator,--and, at the word, 'Hey there, Casey,' he yelled at the dim voice on the wires, 'I've gotta have five thousand quick!
Sell that Benningham Common-yes, Waldron's.' At the name his anger broke loose.
'The old high brow tried to bluff me.
What!!--' The connection failed and left him gasping.
'What!
Sold it!
He told you to!--No, I dunno anything about a court decision.
Up fifteen points on a merger!
Well what do you think-' He gulped down the sudden reversal and felt for words.
'Say, tell him,--' he licked his lips,--'tell him I'm sure glad I saved him.
I'm sure glad.'
'I'm sure glad,' he repeated more vigorously; 'carryin' him to day was what did it.' A vision of mrs Waldron's happy face rose to bless him; the exhilaration of the morning coursed back into his heart, with a comfortable feeling of good business about it.
He felt better and better.
From somewhere a saying floated into his head: 'Doing good unto others is the only happiness.' 'By heck, that's true,' he commented aloud, and sat smoking peacefully, his mind aglow with pleasant thoughts.
He saw that he had forgotten to replace the receiver, and putting it to his ear caught Casey's voice again:--
Montana Pacific's off two points more.
'Sell out the old gambler!
"'tis only fools speak evil of the clay- The very stars are made of clay like mine."
The mightiest and absurdest sleep walker on the planet!
Chained in the circle of his own imaginings, man is only too keen to forget his origin and to shame that flesh of his that bleeds like all flesh and that is good to eat.
Civilization (which is part of the circle of his imaginings) has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft shelled animal known as man.
The flesh and blood body of man has not changed in the last several thousand years.
Man has to day no concept that is too wide and deep and abstract for the mind of Plato or Aristotle to grasp.
Give to Plato or Aristotle the same fund of knowledge that man to day has access to, and Plato and Aristotle would reason as profoundly as the man of to day and would achieve very similar conclusions.
The raw animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in the crust of the earth.
As he persuades himself against the latter till it arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against the former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands undisguised, a brute like any other brute.
It is not necessary to call him a liar to touch his vanity.
Tell a plains Indian that he has failed to steal horses from the neighbouring tribe, or tell a man living in bourgeois society that he has failed to pay his bills at the neighbouring grocer's, and the results are the same. Each, plains Indian and bourgeois, is smeared with a slightly different veneer, that is all.
It requires a slightly different stick to scrape it off.
The raw animals beneath are identical.
But intrude not violently upon man, leave him alone in his somnambulism, and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life up which he has climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the universe, dreams sordidly about his own particular god, and maunders metaphysically about his own blessed immortality.
True, he lives in a real world, breathes real air, eats real food, and sleeps under real blankets, in order to keep real cold away.
And there's the rub.
The result of this admixture of the real and the unreal is confusion thrice confounded.
Prize fighting is terrible.
This is the dictum of the man who walks in his sleep.
He prates about it, and writes to the papers about it, and worries the legislators about it.
The man who walks in his sleep ignores the flesh and all its wonderful play of muscle, joint, and nerve.
With tremendous exercise of craft, deceit, and guile, he devotes his life godlike to this purpose.
As he succeeds, his somnambulism grows profound.
And the funniest thing about it is that this arch deceiver believes all that they tell him.
He reads only the newspapers and magazines that tell him what he wants to be told, listens only to the biologists who tell him that he is the finest product of the struggle for existence, and herds only with his own kind, where, like the monkey folk, they teeter up and down and tell one another how great they are.
In the course of his life godlike he ignores the flesh-until he gets to table.
He has a piece of cloth which he calls a napkin, with which he wipes from his lips, and from the hair on his lips, the greasy juices of the meat.
He is fastidiously nauseated at the thought of two prize fighters bruising each other with their fists; and at the same time, because it will cost him some money, he will refuse to protect the machines in his factory, though he is aware that the lack of such protection every year mangles, batters, and destroys out of all humanness thousands of working men, women, and children.
He will chatter about things refined and spiritual and godlike like himself, and he and the men who herd with him will calmly adulterate the commodities they put upon the market and which annually kill tens of thousands of babies and young children.
"Ah, but we do not stand for the commercial life," object the refined, scholarly, and professional men.
They do not stand for the commercial life, but neither do they stand against it with all their strength.
They develop classical economists who announce that the only possible way for men and women to get food and shelter is by the existing method.
They paint pictures for the commercial men, write books for them, sing songs for them, act plays for them, and dose them with various drugs when their bodies have grown gross or dyspeptic from overeating and lack of exercise.
But the good, kind people who don't do anything won't believe this, and the assertion will make them angry-for a moment.
They possess several magic phrases, which are like the incantations of a voodoo doctor driving devils away.
The phrases that the good, kind people repeat to themselves and to one another sound like "abstinence," "temperance," "thrift," "virtue." Sometimes they say them backward, when they sound like "prodigality," "drunkenness," "wastefulness," and "immorality." They do not really know the meaning of these phrases, but they think they do, and that is all that is necessary for somnambulists.
The world of graft!
The world of somnambulism, whose exalted and sensitive citizens are outraged by the knockouts of the prize ring, and who annually not merely knock out, but kill, thousands of babies and children by means of child labour and adulterated food.
Far better to have the front of one's face pushed in by the fist of an honest prize fighter than to have the lining of one's stomach corroded by the embalmed beef of a dishonest manufacturer.
In a prize fight men are classed.
Yet in the world of the somnambulists, where soar the sublimated spirits, there are no classes, and foul blows are continually struck and never disallowed.
Only they are not called foul blows.
The world of claw and fang and fist and club has passed away-so say the somnambulists.
A Wall Street raid is not a fang slash.
Dummy boards of directors and fake accountings are not foul blows of the fist under the belt.
A present of coal stock by a mine operator to a railroad official is not a claw rip to the bowels of a rival mine operator.
The man who walks in his sleep says it is not a club.
They gather together and solemnly and gloatingly make and repeat certain noises that sound like "discretion," "acumen," "initiative," "enterprise." These noises are especially gratifying when they are made backward.
They mean the same things, but they sound different.
And in either case, forward or backward, the spirit of the dream is not disturbed.
They are the foul blows of the spirit that have never been disbarred, as the foul blows of the prize ring have been disbarred. (Would it not be preferable for a man to strike one full on the mouth with his fist than for him to tell a lie about one, or malign those that are nearest and dearest?)
It is well enough to let the ape and tiger die, but it is hardly fair to kill off the natural and courageous apes and tigers and allow the spawn of cowardly apes and tigers to live.
The prize fighting apes and tigers will die all in good time in the course of natural evolution, but they will not die so long as the cowardly, somnambulistic apes and tigers club and scratch and slash.
This is not a brief for the prize fighter.
Strive as he will, he cannot escape it-unless he be a genius, one of those rare creations to whom alone is granted the privilege of doing entirely new and original things in entirely new and original ways.
But the common clay born man, possessing only talents, may do only what has been done before him.
At the best, if he work hard, and cherish himself exceedingly, he may duplicate any or all previous performances of his kind; he may even do some of them better; but there he stops, the composite hand of his whole ancestry bearing heavily upon him.
And he permits these things, and continues to permit them, for he cannot help them, and he is a slave. Out of his ideas he may weave cunning theories, beautiful ideals; but he is working with ropes of sand.
He is only a clay born; so he bends his neck.
In the watches of the night, we may assure ourselves that there is no such dignity; but jostling with our fellows in the white light of day, we find that it does exist, and that we ourselves measure ourselves by the dollars we happen to possess.
I remember once absenting myself from civilization for weary months. When I returned, it was to a strange city in another country.
A fur cap, soiled and singed by many camp fires, half sheltered the shaggy tendrils of my uncut hair.
My foot gear was of walrus hide, cunningly blended with seal gut. The remainder of my dress was as primal and uncouth.
I was a sight to give merriment to gods and men.
Olympus must have roared at my coming. The world, knowing me not, could judge me by my clothes alone.
But I refused to be so judged.
And I did these things, not that I was an egotist, not that I was impervious to the critical glances of my fellows, but because of a certain hogskin belt, plethoric and sweat bewrinkled, which buckled next the skin above the hips.
Oh, it's absurd, I grant, but had that belt not been so circumstanced, and so situated, I should have shrunk away into side streets and back alleys, walking humbly and avoiding all gregarious humans except those who were likewise abroad without belts.
Why?
I do not know, save that in such way did my fathers before me.
I was possessed of the arrogance of a Roman governor.
At last I knew what it was to be born to the purple, and I took my seat in the hotel carriage as though it were my chariot about to proceed with me to the imperial palace.
People discreetly dropped their eyes before my proud gaze, and into their hearts I know I forced the query, What manner of man can this mortal be?
I was superior to convention, and the very garb which otherwise would have damned me tended toward my elevation.
The sweat of months was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it was not a creation such as would appeal to the aesthetic mind; but it was plethoric.
I purchased a host of things from the tradespeople, and bought me such pleasures and diversions as befitted one who had long been denied.
And, because of these things I did, I demanded homage.
Nor was it refused.
I moved through wind swept groves of limber backs; across sunny glades, lighted by the beaming rays from a thousand obsequious eyes; and when I tired of this, basked on the greensward of popular approval.
Money was very good, I thought, and for the time was content.
But there rushed upon me the words of Erasmus, "When I get some money I shall buy me some Greek books, and afterwards some clothes," and a great shame wrapped me around.
But, luckily for my soul's welfare, I reflected and was saved. By the clearer vision vouchsafed me, I beheld Erasmus, fire flashing, heaven born, while I-I was merely a clay born, a son of earth.
For a giddy moment I had forgotten this, and tottered.
It was a very foolish thing to do.
I am sure it was.
Oh no, not for long.
They are again enshrined, as bright and polished as of yore, and my destiny is once more in their keeping.
Without the bitter one may not know the sweet.
The inexorable pendulum had swung the counter direction, and there was upon me an urgent need.
The hogskin belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird my loins.
From my window I could descry, at no great distance, a very ordinary mortal of a man, working industriously among his cabbages.
And as he stood there drearily, he became reproach incarnate.
I shrank back.
Then I waxed rebellious.
I refused to answer the question.
And a dignity entered into me, and my neck was stiffened, my head poised.
I gathered together certain certificates of goods and chattels, pointed my heel towards him and his cabbages, and journeyed townward.
There was naught in those certificates to be ashamed of.
But alack a day!
While my heels thrust the cabbage man beyond the horizon, my toes were drawing me, faltering, like a timid old beggar, into a roaring spate of humanity-men, women, and children without end.
They had no concern with me, nor I with them. I knew it; I felt it.
My feet were uncertain and heavy, and my soul became as a meal sack, limp with emptiness and tied in the middle.
People looked upon me scornfully, pitifully, reproachfully. (I can swear they did.) In every eye I read the question, Man, where are your cabbages?
So I avoided their looks, shrinking close to the kerbstone and by furtive glances directing my progress.
At last I came hard by the place, and peering stealthily to the right and left that none who knew might behold me, I entered hurriedly, in the manner of one committing an abomination. 'Fore God!
Why?
It is mentioned in exodus; so it must have been created soon after the foundations of the world; and despite the thunder of ecclesiastics and the mailed hand of kings and conquerors, it has endured even to this day.
Nor is it unfair to presume that the accounts of this most remarkable business will not be closed until the Trumps of Doom are sounded and all things brought to final balance.
Wherefore it was in fear and trembling, and with great modesty of spirit, that I entered the Presence.
To confess that I was shocked were to do my feelings an injustice.
Perhaps the blame may be shouldered upon Shylock, Fagin, and their ilk; but I had conceived an entirely different type of individual.
This man-why, he was clean to look at, his eyes were blue, with the tired look of scholarly lucubrations, and his skin had the normal pallor of sedentary existence.
My heart gave a great leap.
Here was hope!
I communed with myself: By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has been prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery.
He trades upon sorrow and draws a livelihood from misfortune. He transmutes tears into treasure, and from nakedness and hunger garbs himself in clean linen and develops the round of his belly.
He is a bloodsucker and a vampire.
Law and order upheld him, while I titubated, cabbageless, on the ragged edge.
Moreover, he was possessed of a formula whereby to extract juice from a flattened lemon, and he would do business with me.
Never had they appeared so insignificant and paltry as then, when he sniffed over them with the air of one disdainfully doing a disagreeable task.
It is said, "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury"; but he evidently was not my brother, for he demanded seventy per cent.
I put my signature to certain indentures, received my pottage, and fled from his presence.
Faugh!
I was glad to be quit of it.
How good the outside air was!
In people's eyes the cabbage question no longer brooded.
And there was a spring to my body, an elasticity of step as I covered the pavement.
Within me coursed an unwonted sap, and I felt as though I were about to burst out into leaves and buds and green things.
My brain was clear and refreshed.
My nerves were tingling and I was a pulse with the times.
I would go back and wreck the establishment.
But before fancy could father the act, I recollected myself and all which had passed.
"Foma Gordyeeff" is a big book-not only is the breadth of Russia in it, but the expanse of life.
For Gorky, the Bitter One, is essentially a Russian in his grasp on the facts of life and in his treatment.
And, like all his brother Russians, ardent, passionate protest impregnates his work.
There is a purpose to it.
From that clenched fist of his, light and airy romances, pretty and sweet and beguiling, do not flow, but realities-yes, big and brutal and repulsive, but real.
He raises the cry of the miserable and the despised, and in a masterly arraignment of commercialism, protests against social conditions, against the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self pollution of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power.
To them it will be inexplicable that this man, with his health and his millions, could not go on living as his class lived, keeping regular hours at desk and stock exchange, driving close contracts, underbidding his competitors, and exulting in the business disasters of his fellows.
"Why do you brag?" Foma, bursts out upon him.
Your daughter-what is she?
Come, now, you're clever, you know everything-tell me, why do you live?
It is without significance!
What is there underneath?
What is the meaning of that which is underneath?
And you must know that when a man complains about everything, and cries out and groans-he is not worth more than two kopeks, he is not worthy of pity, and will be of no use to you if you do help him."
Now comes Mayakin, speaking softly and without satire:
But men have so ordered their lives that it is utterly impossible for them to act in accordance with Christ's teaching, and Jesus Christ has become entirely superfluous to us.
Not once, but, in all probability, a thousand times, we have given Him over to be crucified, but still we cannot banish Him from our lives so long as His poor brethren sing His name in the streets and remind us of Him.
And so now we have hit upon the idea of shutting up the beggars in such special buildings, so that they may not roam about the streets and stir up our consciences."
But Foma will have none of it.
He is neither to be enticed nor cajoled. The cry of his nature is for light.
He must have light.
And in burning revolt he goes seeking the meaning of life.
"His thoughts embraced all those petty people who toiled at hard labour.
It was strange-why did they live?
What satisfaction was it to them to live on the earth?
All they did was to perform their dirty, arduous toil, eat poorly; they were miserably clad, addicted to drunkenness.
One was sixty years old, but he still toiled side by side with young men.
He becomes the living interrogation of life.
Why should men fetch and carry for him?
be slaves to him and his money?
"Work is not everything to a man," he says; "it is not true that justification lies in work . . .
Why is that?
And how will all the people who give their orders justify themselves?
But my idea is that everybody ought, without fail, to know solidly what he is living for.
Is it possible that a man is born to toil, accumulate money, build a house, beget children, and-die?
No; life means something in itself. . . .
All of us must consider why we are living, by God, we must!
There is no sense in our life-there is no sense at all.
But Foma can only be destructive.
He is not constructive.
He does not drink because liquor tastes good in his mouth.
In the vile companions who purvey to his baser appetites he finds no charm.
It is all utterly despicable and sordid, but thither his quest leads him and he follows the quest.
"You have not constructed life-you have made a cesspool!
You have disseminated filth and stifling exhalations by your deeds.
Have you any conscience?
Do you remember God?
A five kopek piece-that is your God!
But you have expelled your conscience!"
You shall perish-you shall be called to account for all!
For all-to the last little tear drop!"
Stunned by this puddle of life, unable to make sense of it, Foma questions, and questions vainly, whether of Sofya Medynsky in her drawing room of beauty, or in the foulest depths of the first chance courtesan's heart.
And so, wondering, pondering, perplexed, amazed, whirling through the mad whirlpool of life, dancing the dance of death, groping for the nameless, indefinite something, the magic formula, the essence, the intrinsic fact, the flash of light through the murk and dark-the rational sanction for existence, in short-Foma Gordyeeff goes down to madness and death.
It is not a pretty book, but it is a masterful interrogation of life-not of life universal, but of life particular, the social life of to day.
So fearful is its portrayal of social disease, so ruthless its stripping of the painted charms from vice, that its tendency cannot but be strongly for good.
But no story is told, nothing is finished, some one will object.
It was pregnant with possibilities.
Yet it was not finished, was not decisive. She left him to go with the son of a rich vodka maker.
She might have been a power for good in his life, she might have shed light into it and lifted him up to safety and honour and understanding.
Yet she went away next day, and he never saw her again.
No story is told, nothing is finished.
But it is a less tedious realism than that of Tolstoy or Turgenev.
He knows life, why and how it should be lived.
SENSATIONS AND IMAGES
The dualism of mind and matter, if we have been right so far, cannot be allowed as metaphysically valid.
Nevertheless, we seem to find a certain dualism, perhaps not ultimate, within the world as we observe it.
The dualism is not primarily as to the stuff of the world, but as to causal laws.
On this subject we may again quote William james.
"I make for myself an experience of blazing fire; I place it near my body; but it does not warm me in the least.
I lay a stick upon it and the stick either burns or remains green, as I please.
I call up water, and pour it on the fire, and absolutely no difference ensues.
I account for all such facts by calling this whole train of experiences unreal, a mental train.
Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily (though of course it may) put out even a mental fire....
This is, of course, not the case: they have their effects, just as much as physical phenomena do, but their effects follow different laws.
For example, dreams, as Freud has shown, are just as much subject to laws as are the motions of the planets.
But the laws are different: in a dream you may be transported from one place to another in a moment, or one person may turn into another under your eyes.
Such differences compel you to distinguish the world of dreams from the physical world.
If the two sorts of causal laws could be sharply distinguished, we could call an occurrence "physical" when it obeys causal laws appropriate to the physical world, and "mental" when it obeys causal laws appropriate to the mental world.
These definitions would have all the precision that could be desired if the distinction between physical and psychological causation were clear and sharp.
As a matter of fact, however, this distinction is, as yet, by no means sharp.
It is possible that, with fuller knowledge, it will be found to be no more ultimate than the distinction between the laws of gases and the laws of rigid bodies.
The law of habit, which is one of the most distinctive, may be fully explicable in terms of the peculiarities of nervous tissue, and these peculiarities, in turn, may be explicable by the laws of physics.
It seems, therefore, that we are driven to a different kind of definition.
It is for this reason that it was necessary to develop the definition of perception.
With this definition, we can define a sensation as the non mnemic elements in a perception.
When, following our definition, we try to decide what elements in our experience are of the nature of sensations, we find more difficulty than might have been expected.
Prima facie, everything is sensation that comes to us through the senses: the sights we see, the sounds we hear, the smells we smell, and so on; also such things as headache or the feeling of muscular strain.
In a foreign language, these inferences are more difficult, and we are more dependent upon actual sensation.
If we found ourselves in a foreign world, where tables looked like cushions and cushions like tables, we should similarly discover how much of what we think we see is really inference.
Every fairly familiar sensation is to us a sign of the things that usually go with it, and many of these things will seem to form part of the sensation.
I remember in the early days of motor cars being with a friend when a tyre burst with a loud report.
He thought it was a pistol, and supported his opinion by maintaining that he had seen the flash.
But of course there had been no flash.
Thus, although it may be difficult to determine what exactly is sensation in any given experience, it is clear that there is sensation, unless, like Leibniz, we deny all action of the outer world upon us.
It is of course undeniable that knowledge comes THROUGH the seeing, but I think it is a mistake to regard the mere seeing itself as knowledge.
If we are so to regard it, we must distinguish the seeing from what is seen: we must say that, when we see a patch of colour of a certain shape, the patch of colour is one thing and our seeing of it is another.
This view, however, demands the admission of the subject, or act, in the sense discussed in our first lecture.
If there is a subject, it can have a relation to the patch of colour, namely, the sort of relation which we might call awareness.
In that case the sensation, as a mental event, will consist of awareness of the colour, while the colour itself will remain wholly physical, and may be called the sense datum, to distinguish it from the sensation. The subject, however, appears to be a logical fiction, like mathematical points and instants.
It is introduced, not because observation reveals it, but because it is linguistically convenient and apparently demanded by grammar.
Nominal entities of this sort may or may not exist, but there is no good ground for assuming that they do.
If we are to avoid a perfectly gratuitous assumption, we must dispense with the subject as one of the actual ingredients of the world.
But when we do this, the possibility of distinguishing the sensation from the sense datum vanishes; at least I see no way of preserving the distinction.
A patch of colour is certainly not knowledge, and therefore we cannot say that pure sensation is cognitive.
But in itself the pure sensation is not cognitive.
The kind of argument which formerly made me accept Brentano's view in this case was exceedingly simple.
When I see a patch of colour, it seemed to me that the colour is not psychical, but physical, while my seeing is not physical, but psychical.
Hence I concluded that the colour is something other than my seeing of the colour.
This argument, to me historically, was directed against idealism: the emphatic part of it was the assertion that the colour is physical, not psychical.
I shall not trouble you now with the grounds for holding as against Berkeley that the patch of colour is physical; I have set them forth before, and I see no reason to modify them.
But it does not follow that the patch of colour is not also psychical, unless we assume that the physical and the psychical cannot overlap, which I no longer consider a valid assumption.
If we admit-as I think we should-that the patch of colour may be both physical and psychical, the reason for distinguishing the sense datum from the sensation disappears, and we may say that the patch of colour and our sensation in seeing it are identical.
This is the view of William james, Professor Dewey, and the American realists.
The stuff of the world, so far as we have experience of it, consists, on the view that I am advocating, of innumerable transient particulars such as occur in seeing, hearing, etc, together with images more or less resembling these, of which I shall speak shortly.
But this topic belongs to the philosophy of physics, and need not concern us in our present inquiry.
Sensations are what is common to the mental and physical worlds; they may be defined as the intersection of mind and matter.
The essence of sensation, according to the view I am advocating, is its independence of past experience.
It is a core in our actual experiences, never existing in isolation except possibly in very young infants.
It is not itself knowledge, but it supplies the data for our knowledge of the physical world, including our own bodies.
The distinction between images and sensations might seem at first sight by no means difficult.
When we shut our eyes and call up pictures of familiar scenes, we usually have no difficulty, so long as we remain awake, in discriminating between what we are imagining and what is really seen.
If we imagine some piece of music that we know, we can go through it in our mind from beginning to end without any discoverable tendency to suppose that we are really hearing it.
Hallucinations often begin as persistent images, and only gradually acquire that influence over belief that makes the patient regard them as sensations.
When we are listening for a faint sound-the striking of a distant clock, or a horse's hoofs on the road-we think we hear it many times before we really do, because expectation brings us the image, and we mistake it for sensation.
(one) By the less degree of vividness in images;
(two) By our absence of belief in their "physical reality";
(three) By the fact that their causes and effects are different from those of sensations.
Every one of himself will readily perceive the difference betwixt feeling and thinking.
The common degrees of these are easily distinguished, though it is not impossible but in particular instances they may very nearly approach to each other.
But by his own confession in the above passage, his criterion for distinguishing them is not always adequate.
But so far we have seen no reason to think that the difference between sensations and images is only one of degree.
Professor Stout, in his "Manual of Psychology," after discussing various ways of distinguishing sensations and images, arrives at a view which is a modification of Hume's.
"Our conclusion is that at bottom the distinction between image and percept, as respectively faint and vivid states, is based on a difference of quality.
The percept has an aggressiveness which does not belong to the image.
It strikes the mind with varying degrees of force or liveliness according to the varying intensity of the stimulus.
This degree of force or liveliness is part of what we ordinarily mean by the intensity of a sensation.
But I believe that this criterion fails in very much the same instances as those in which Hume's criterion fails in its original form.
The whistle of a steam engine could hardly have a stronger effect than this.
A very intense emotion will often bring with it-especially where some future action or some undecided issue is involved-powerful compelling images which may determine the whole course of life, sweeping aside all contrary solicitations to the will by their capacity for exclusively possessing the mind.
And in all cases where images, originally recognized as such, gradually pass into hallucinations, there must be just that "force or liveliness" which is supposed to be always absent from images.
The cases of dreams and fever delirium are as hard to adjust to Professor Stout's modified criterion as to Hume's.
I conclude therefore that the test of liveliness, however applicable in ordinary instances, cannot be used to define the differences between sensations and images.
What we call the "unreality" of images requires interpretation it cannot mean what would be expressed by saying "there's no such thing." Images are just as truly part of the actual world as sensations are.
But this means that the so-called "unreality" of images consists merely in their not obeying the laws of physics, and thus brings us back to the causal distinction between images and sensations.
Images cannot be defined by the FEELING of unreality, because when we falsely believe an image to be a sensation, as in the case of dreams, it FEELS just as real as if it were a sensation.
Our feeling of unreality results from our having already realized that we are dealing with an image, and cannot therefore be the definition of what we mean by an image.
As soon as an image begins to deceive us as to its status, it also deceives us as to its correlations, which are what we mean by its "reality."
(three) This brings us to the third mode of distinguishing images from sensations, namely, by their causes and effects.
It is caused by what we call a STIMULUS.
This is probably true, but it is an hypothesis, and for our purposes an unnecessary one.
It would seem to fit better with what we can immediately observe if we were to say that an image is occasioned, through association, by a sensation or another image, in other words that it has a mnemic cause-which does not prevent it from also having a physical cause.
When habit and past experience play this part, we are in the region of mnemic as opposed to ordinary physical causation.
And I think that, if we could regard as ultimately valid the difference between physical and mnemic causation, we could distinguish images from sensations as having mnemic causes, though they may also have physical causes.
Sensations, on the other hand, will only have physical causes.
However this may be, the practically effective distinction between sensations and images is that in the causation of sensations, but not of images, the stimulation of nerves carrying an effect into the brain, usually from the surface of the body, plays an essential part.
And this accounts for the fact that images and sensations cannot always be distinguished by their intrinsic nature.
Images also differ from sensations as regards their effects.
Sensations, as a rule, have both physical and mental effects.
As you watch the train you meant to catch leaving the station, there are both the successive positions of the train (physical effects) and the successive waves of fury and disappointment (mental effects).
Images, on the contrary, though they MAY produce bodily movements, do so according to mnemic laws, not according to the laws of physics.
All their effects, of whatever nature, follow mnemic laws.
Professor Watson, as a logical carrying out of his behaviourist theory, denies altogether that there are any observable phenomena such as images are supposed to be.
He replaces them all by faint sensations, and especially by pronunciation of words sotto voce.
It seems to me that in this matter he has been betrayed into denying plain facts in the interests of a theory, namely, the supposed impossibility of introspection.
Whether this is the case or not might even be decided experimentally.
If there were a delicate instrument for recording small movements in the mouth and throat, we might place such an instrument in a person's mouth and then tell him to recite a poem to himself, as far as possible only in imagination.
The point is important, because what is called "thought" consists mainly (though I think not wholly) of inner speech.
If Professor Watson is right as regards inner speech, this whole region is transferred from imagination to sensation.
But since the question is capable of experimental decision, it would be gratuitous rashness to offer an opinion while that decision is lacking.
But visual and auditory images are much more difficult to deal with in this way, because they lack the connection with physical events in the outer world which belongs to visual and auditory sensations.
Suppose, for example, that I am sitting in my room, in which there is an empty arm chair.
My friend reached the chair without coming in at the door in the usual way; subsequent inquiry will show that he was somewhere else at the moment.
If regarded as a sensation, my image has all the marks of the supernatural.
By saying that it is an event in me, we leave it possible that it may be PHYSIOLOGICALLY caused: its privacy may be only due to its connection with my body.
And it cannot, like inner speech, be regarded as a SMALL sensation, since it occupies just as large an area in my visual field as the actual sensation would do.
This view seems to me flatly to contradict experience.
I shall henceforth assume that the existence of images is admitted, and that they are to be distinguished from sensations by their causes, as well as, in a lesser degree, by their effects.
In their intrinsic nature, though they often differ from sensations by being more dim or vague or faint, yet they do not always or universally differ from sensations in any way that can be used for defining them.
Bodily sensations are admitted by even the most severe critics of introspection, although, like images, they can only be observed by one observer.
On this subject Hume is the classic.
He next explains the difference between simple and complex ideas, and explains that a complex idea may occur without any similar complex impression.
It is this fact, that images resemble antecedent sensations, which enables us to call them images "of" this or that.
For the understanding of memory, and of knowledge generally, the recognizable resemblance of images and sensations is of fundamental importance.
There are difficulties in establishing Hume's principles, and doubts as to whether it is exactly true.
I am by no means confident that the distinction between images and sensations is ultimately valid, and I should be glad to be convinced that images can be reduced to sensations of a peculiar kind.
I think it is clear, however, that, at any rate in the case of auditory and visual images, they do differ from ordinary auditory and visual sensations, and therefore form a recognizable class of occurrences, even if it should prove that they can be regarded as a sub class of sensations.
It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
I have on several occasions been to the Shakespeare country, approaching it from different directions, but each time I am set down at Leamington.
Perhaps this is by some Act of Parliament-I really do not know; anyway, I have ceased to kick against the pricks and now meekly accept my fate.
Leamington seems largely under subjection to that triumvirate of despots-the Butler, the Coachman and the Gardener.
You hear the jingle of keys, the flick of the whip and the rattle of the lawnmower; and a cold, secret fear takes possession of you-a sort of half frenzied impulse to flee, before smug modernity takes you captive and whisks you off to play tiddledywinks or to dance the racquet.
Warwick is worth our while.
For here we see scenes such as Shakespeare saw, and our delight is in the things that his eyes beheld.
At the foot of Mill Street are the ruins of the old Gothic bridge that leads off to Banbury.
Just beyond the bridge, settled snugly in a forest of waving branches, we see storied old Warwick Castle, with Caesar's Tower lifting itself from the mass of green.
All about are quaint old houses and shops, with red tiled roofs, and little windows, with diamond panes, hung on hinges, where maidens fair have looked down on brave men in coats of mail.
And again they came back when Will Shakespeare, a youth from Stratford, eight miles away, came here and waved his magic wand.
But practically it is the same.
It is the only castle in England where the portcullis is lowered at ten o'clock every night and raised in the morning (if the coast happens to be clear) to tap of drum.
It costs a shilling to visit the castle.
A fine old soldier in spotless uniform, with waxed white moustache and dangling sword, conducts the visitors.
The long line of battlements, the massive buttresses, the angular entrance cut through solid rock, crooked, abrupt, with places where fighting men can lie in ambush, all is as Shakespeare knew it.
There are the cedars of Lebanon, brought by Crusaders from the East, and the screaming peacocks in the paved courtway: and in the Great Hall are to be seen the sword and accouterments of the fabled Guy, the mace of the "Kingmaker," the helmet of Cromwell, and the armor of Lord Brooke, killed at Litchfield.
And that Shakespeare saw these things there is no doubt.
But he saw them as a countryman who came on certain fete days, and stared with open mouth.
We know this, because he has covered all with the glamour of his rich, boyish imagination that failed to perceive the cruel mockery of such selfish pageantry.
Had his view been from the inside he would not have made his kings noble nor his princes generous; for the stress of strife would have stilled his laughter, and from his brain the dazzling pictures would have fled.
Yet his fancies serve us better than the facts.
"This castle hath a pleasant seat: the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses. This guest of Summer, The temple haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed, and procreant cradle; Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed, The air is delicate."
Five miles from Warwick (ten, if you believe the cab drivers) are the ruins of Kenilworth Castle.
In Fifteen Hundred Seventy five, when Shakespeare was eleven years of age, Queen Elizabeth came to Kenilworth.
Whether her ticket was by way of Leamington I do not know.
But she remained from July Ninth to July Twenty seventh, and there were great doings 'most every day, to which the yeomanry were oft invited.
john Shakespeare was a worthy citizen of Warwickshire, and it is very probable that he received an invitation, and that he drove over with Mary Arden, his wife, sitting on the front seat holding the baby, and all the other seven children sitting on the straw behind.
And we may be sure that the eldest boy in that brood never forgot the day.
In fact, in "Midsummer Night's Dream" he has called on his memory for certain features of the show.
No doubt Kenilworth was stupendous in its magnificence, and it will pay you to take down from its shelf Sir Walter's novel and read about it.
But today it is all a crumbling heap; ivy, rooks and daws hold the place in fee, each pushing hard for sole possession.
It is eight miles from Warwick to Stratford by the direct road, but ten by the river.
I have walked both routes and consider the latter the shorter.
Two miles down the river is Barford, and a mile farther is Wasperton, with its quaint old stone church.
It is a good place to rest: for nothing is so soothing as a cool church where the dim light streams through colored windows, and out of sight somewhere an organ softly plays.
Soon after leaving the church a rustic swain hailed me and asked for a match. The pipe and the Virginia weed-they mean amity the world over.
If I had questions to ask, now was the time!
So I asked, and Rusticus informed me that Hampton Lucy was only a mile beyond and that Shakespeare never stole deer at all; so I hope we shall hear no more of that libelous accusation.
"But did Shakespeare run away?" I demanded.
And come to think of it Rusticus is right.
Indeed, it seems necessary that a man should have "run away" at least once, in order afterward to attain eminence.
Moses, Lot, Tarquin, Pericles, Demosthenes, Saint Paul, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Voltaire, Goldsmith, Hugo-but the list is too long to give.
But just suppose that Shakespeare had not run away!
And to whom do we owe it that he did leave-Justice Shallow or Ann Hathaway, or both?
I should say to Ann first and His Honor second.
No record is found of the marriage.
But we should think of her gratefully, for no doubt it was she who started the lad off for London.
The winding Avon, full to its banks, strays lazily through rich fields and across green meadows, past the bright red brick pile of Charlcote Mansion.
The river bank is lined with rushes, and in one place I saw the prongs of antlers shaking the elders.
I sent a shrill whistle and a stick that way, and out ran four fine deer that loped gracefully across the turf.
The sight brought my poacher instincts to the surface, but I bottled them, and trudged on until I came to the little church that stands at the entrance to the park.
All mansions, castles and prisons in England have chapels or churches attached.
And this is well, for in the good old days it seemed wise to keep in close communication with the other world.
So each estate hired its priests by the year, just as men with a taste for litigation hold attorneys in constant retainer.
In Charlcote Church is a memorial to Sir Thomas Lucy; and there is a glowing epitaph that quite upsets any of those taunting and defaming allusions in "The Merry Wives." At the foot of the monument is a line to the effect that the inscription thereon was written by the only one in possession of the facts, Sir Thomas himself.
"Farewell, proud, vain, false, treacherous world, We have seen enough of thee: We value not what thou canst say of we."
When the Charlcote Mansion was built, there was a housewarming, and Good Queen Bess (who was not so awful good) came in great state; so we see that she had various calling acquaintances in these parts.
Some hasty individual has put forth a statement to the effect that poets can only be bred in a mountainous country, where they could lift up their eyes to the hills.
Rock and ravine, beetling crag, singing cascade, and the heights where the lightning plays and the mists hover are certainly good timber for poetry-after you have caught your poet-but Nature eludes all formula.
Drayton before Shakespeare's time called Warwick "the heart of England," and the heart of England it is today-rich, luxuriant, slow.
Down toward Stratford there are flat islands covered with sedge, long rows of weeping willows, low hazel, hawthorn, and places where "Green Grow the Rushes, o" Then, if the farmer leaves a spot untilled, the dogrose pre empts the place and showers its petals on the vagrant winds.
The first glimpse we get of Stratford is the spire of Holy Trinity; then comes the tower of the new Memorial Theater, which, by the way, is exactly like the city hall at Dead Horse, Colorado.
Stratford is just another village of Niagara Falls.
In fact, a "cabby" just outside of New Place offered to take me to the Whirlpool and the Canada side for a dollar.
At least, this is what I thought he said.
Of course, it is barely possible that I was daydreaming, but I think the facts are that it was he who dozed, and waking suddenly as I passed gave me the wrong cue.
There is a Macbeth livery stable, a Falstaff bakery, and all the shops and stores keep Othello this and Hamlet that.
I saw briarwood pipes with Shakespeare's face carved on the bowl, all for one and six; feather fans with advice to the players printed across the folds; the "Seven Ages" on handkerchiefs; and souvenir spoons galore, all warranted Gorham's best.
The young ladies who perform this office are clever women with pleasant voices and big, starched, white aprons.
I was at Stratford four days and went just four times to the old curiosity shop.
Each day the same bright British damsel conducted me through, and told her tale, but it was always with animation, and a certain sweet satisfaction in her mission and starched apron that was very charming.
Judith married Thomas Quiney.
The only letter addressed to Shakespeare that can be found is one from the happy father of Thomas, mr Richard Quiney, wherein he asks for a loan of thirty pounds.
Whether he was accommodated we can not say; and if he was, did he pay it back, is a question that has caused much hot debate.
But it is worthy of note that, although considerable doubt as to authenticity has smooched the other Shakespearian relics, yet the fact of the poet having been "struck" for a loan by Richard Quiney stands out in a solemn way as the one undisputed thing in the master's career.
Little did mr Quiney think, when he wrote that letter, that he was writing for the ages.
Philanthropists have won all by giving money, but who save Quiney has reaped immortality by asking for it!
The inscription over Shakespeare's grave is an offer of reward if you do, and a threat of punishment if you don't, all in choice doggerel.
But I rather guess I know why his grave was not marked with his name.
He was a play actor, and the church people would have been outraged at the thought of burying a "strolling player" in that sacred chancel.
Then they hastily replaced the stones, and over the grave they placed the slab that they had brought:
"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here, Blest be the man who spares these stones, And cursed be he who moves my bones."
A threat from a ghost!
Under certain circumstances, if occasion demands, I might muster a sublime conceit; but considering the fact that ten thousand Americans visit Stratford every year, and all write descriptions of the place, I dare not in the face of Baedeker do it.
Further than that, in every library there are Washington Irving, Hawthorne, and William Winter's three lacrimose but charming volumes.
In England poets are relegated to a "Corner." The earth and the fulness thereof belongs to the men who can kill; on this rock have the English State and Church been built.
As the tourist approaches the city of London for the first time, there are four monuments that probably will attract his attention.
They lift themselves out of the fog and smoke and soot, and seem to struggle toward the blue.
One of these monuments is to commemorate a calamity-the conflagration of Sixteen Hundred Sixty six-and the others are in honor of deeds of war.
The finest memorial in Saint Paul's is to a certain eminent Irishman, Arthur Wellesley.
The mines and quarries of earth have been called on for their richest contributions; and talent and skill have given their all to produce this enduring work of beauty, that tells posterity of the mighty acts of this mighty man.
The rare richness and lavish beauty of the Wellington mausoleum are only surpassed by a certain tomb in France.
As an exploiter, the Corsican overdid the thing a bit-so the world arose and put him down; but safely dead, his shade can boast a grave so sumptuous that Englishmen in Paris refuse to look upon it.
Her land is spiked with glistening monuments to greatness gone.
And on these monuments one often gets the epitomized life of the man whose dust lies below.
On the carved marble to Lord Cornwallis I read that, "He defeated the Americans with great slaughter." And so, wherever in England I see a beautiful monument, I know that probably the inscription will tell how "he defeated" somebody.
And one grows to the belief that, while woman's glory is her hair, man's glory is to defeat some one.
And if he can "defeat with great slaughter" his monument is twice as high as if he had only visited on his brother man a plain undoing.
When I visited the site of the Globe Theater and found thereon a brewery, whose shares are warranted to make the owner rich beyond the dream of avarice, I was depressed.
But there is no park, and no monument, and no white haired old poet to give you welcome-only a brewery.
Yes, yes, I must be truthful-it is a big brewery, and there are four big bulldogs in the courtway; and there are big vats, and big workmen in big aprons.
And each of these workmen is allowed to drink six quarts of beer each day, without charge, which proves that kindliness is not dead.
Then there are big horses that draw the big wagons, and on the corner there is a big taproom where the thirsty are served with big glasses.
The founder of this brewery became rich; and if my statistical friend is right, the owners of these mighty vats have defeated mankind with "great slaughter."
We have seen that, although Napoleon, the defeated, has a more gorgeous tomb than Wellington, who defeated him, yet there is consolation in the thought that although England has no monument to Shakespeare he now has the freedom of Elysium; while the present address of the British worthies who have battened and fattened on poor humanity's thirst for strong drink, since Samuel Johnson was executor of Thrale's estate, is unknown.
We have this on the authority of a solid Englishman, who says: "The virtues essential and peculiar to the exalted station of British Worthy debar the unfortunate possessor from entering Paradise.
This is the only dignity beyond their reach."
The writer quoted is an honorable man, and I am sure he would not make this assertion if he did not have proof of the fact.
So, for the present, I will allow him to go on his own recognizance, believing that he will adduce his documents at the proper time.
But still, should not England have a fitting monument to Shakespeare?
His name is honored in every school or college of earth where books are prized.
There is no scholar in any clime who is not his debtor.
He was born in England; he never was out of England; his ashes rest in England.
But England's Budget has never been ballasted with a single pound to help preserve inviolate the memory of her one son to whom the world uncovers.
Victor Hugo has said something on this subject which runs about like this:
Why a monument to Shakespeare?
Shakespeare has no need of a pyramid; he has his work.
Malachite and alabaster are of no avail; jasper, serpentine, basalt, porphyry, granite: stones from Paros and marble from Carrara-they are all a waste of pains: genius can do without them.
What is as indestructible as these: "The Tempest," "The Winter's Tale," "Julius Caesar," "Coriolanus"?
What monument sublimer than "Lear," sterner than "The Merchant of Venice," more dazzling than "Romeo and Juliet," more amazing than "Richard the third"?
What moon could shed about the pile a light more mystic than that of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"?
What capital, were it even in London, could rumble around it as tumultuously as Macbeth's perturbed soul?
What framework of cedar or oak will last as long as "Othello"?
What bronze can equal the bronze of "Hamlet"?
What edifice can equal thought?
What architect has the skill to build a tower so high as the name of Shakespeare?
Add anything if you can to mind!
Then why a monument to Shakespeare?
I answer, not for the glory of Shakespeare, but for the honor of England!
CHAPTER thirteen.
HOSPITALITY UNDER THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
But the temperature was much lower.
I was cold and more hungry than cold.
It was a peasant's house, but in point of hospitality it was equal to a king's.
Therefore, we followed, as he bid us.
I was hardly expecting so much comfort; the only discomfort proceeded from the strong odour of dried fish, hung meat, and sour milk, of which my nose made bitter complaints.
My uncle lost no time in obeying the friendly call, nor was I slack in following.
After him his wife pronounced the same words, accompanied with the same ceremonial; then the two placing their hands upon their hearts, inclined profoundly before us.
My uncle and I treated this little tribe with kindness; and in a very short time we each had three or four of these brats on our shoulders, as many on our laps, and the rest between our knees.
This concert was brought to a close by the announcement of dinner.
Then calmly, automatically, and dispassionately he kissed the host, the hostess, and their nineteen children.
The luckiest had only two urchins upon their knees.
After this little pinch of warmth the different groups retired to their respective rooms.
At five next morning we bade our host farewell, my uncle with difficulty persuading him to accept a proper remuneration; and Hans signalled the start.
On our right the chain of mountains was indefinitely prolonged like an immense system of natural fortifications, of which we were following the counter scarp or lesser steep; often we were met by streams, which we had to ford with great care, not to wet our packages.
This word produced a repulsive effect.
The horrible disease of leprosy is too common in Iceland; it is not contagious, but hereditary, and lepers are forbidden to marry.
The last tufts of grass had disappeared from beneath our feet.
Not a tree was to be seen, unless we except a few dwarf birches as low as brushwood.
Sometimes we could see a hawk balancing himself on his wings under the grey cloud, and then darting away south with rapid flight.
We had to cross a few narrow fiords, and at last quite a wide gulf; the tide, then high, allowed us to pass over without delay, and to reach the hamlet of Alftanes, one mile beyond.
The ice king certainly held court here, and gave us all night long samples of what he could do.
No particular event marked the next day.
Bogs, dead levels, melancholy desert tracks, wherever we travelled.
Yet here and there were a few jets of steam from hot springs.
We had no time to watch these phenomena; we had to proceed on our way.
The horses did their duty well, no difficulties stopped them in their steady career.
I was getting tired; but my uncle was as firm and straight as he was at our first start.
I could not help admiring his persistency, as well as the hunter's, who treated our expedition like a mere promenade.
june twentieth.
At six p.m. we reached Buedir, a village on the sea shore; and the guide there claiming his due, my uncle settled with him.
The soil told of the neighbourhood of the mountain, whose granite foundations rose from the earth like the knotted roots of some huge oak.
We were rounding the immense base of the volcano.
The Professor hardly took his eyes off it.
It extends along the inner edge of a small fiord, inclosed between basaltic walls of the strangest construction.
Basalt is a brownish rock of igneous origin.
Here nature had done her work geometrically, with square and compass and plummet. Everywhere else her art consists alone in throwing down huge masses together in disorder.
I had heard of the Giant's Causeway in Ireland, and Fingal's Cave in Staffa, one of the Hebrides; but I had never yet seen a basaltic formation.
At Stapi I beheld this phenomenon in all its beauty.
The wall that confined the fiord, like all the coast of the peninsula, was composed of a series of vertical columns thirty feet high.
These straight shafts, of fair proportions, supported an architrave of horizontal slabs, the overhanging portion of which formed a semi arch over the sea.
At intervals, under this natural shelter, there spread out vaulted entrances in beautiful curves, into which the waves came dashing with foam and spray.
A few shafts of basalt, torn from their hold by the fury of tempests, lay along the soil like remains of an ancient temple, in ruins for ever fresh, and over which centuries passed without leaving a trace of age upon them.
This was our last stage upon the earth.
Hans had exhibited great intelligence, and it gave me some little comfort to think then that he was not going to leave us.
"The rector," repeated the Professor.
"It seems, Axel, that this good man is the rector."
I was in great alarm lest she should treat me to the Icelandic kiss; but there was no occasion to fear, nor did she do the honours at all too gracefully.
It was close, dirty, and evil smelling.
Very far from it.
Before the day was over I saw that we had to do with a blacksmith, a fisherman, a hunter, a joiner, but not at all with a minister of the Gospel.
Hence the necessity to work for their livelihood; but after fishing, hunting, and shoeing horses for any length of time, one soon gets into the ways and manners of fishermen, hunters, and farriers, and other rather rude and uncultivated people; and that evening I found out that temperance was not among the virtues that distinguished my host.
This was to be clearly understood.
Hans merely nodded.
For my own part the incidents of the journey had hitherto kept me amused, and made me forgetful of coming evils; but now my fears again were beginning to get the better of me.
But what could I do?
The place to resist the Professor would have been Hamburg, not the foot of Snaefell.
One thought, above all others, harassed and alarmed me; it was one calculated to shake firmer nerves than mine.
Now, thought I, here we are, about to climb Snaefell.
Very good.
We will explore the crater.
Very good, too, others have done as much without dying for it.
But that is not all.
Now, there is no proof that Snaefell is extinct.
Who can assure us that an eruption is not brewing at this very moment?
Does it follow that because the monster has slept since twelve twenty nine he must therefore never awake again?
And if he wakes up presently, where shall we be?
It was worth while debating this question, and I did debate it.
I could not sleep for dreaming about eruptions.
So, at last, when I could hold out no longer, I resolved to lay the case before my uncle, as prudently and as cautiously as possible, just under the form of an almost impossible hypothesis.
I went to him.
I communicated my fears to him, and drew back a step to give him room for the explosion which I knew must follow.
But I was mistaken.
"I was thinking of that," he replied with great simplicity.
What could those words mean?--Was he actually going to listen to reason?
This was too good to be true.
After a few moments' silence, during which I dared not question him, he resumed:
"I was thinking of that.
"No, indeed!" I replied with forcible emphasis.
I have therefore examined the natives, I have studied external appearances, and I can assure you, Axel, that there will be no eruption."
At this positive affirmation I stood amazed and speechless.
"You don't doubt my word?" said my uncle.
"Well, follow me."
I obeyed like an automaton.
Coming out from the priest's house, the Professor took a straight road, which, through an opening in the basaltic wall, led away from the sea.
We were soon in the open country, if one may give that name to a vast extent of mounds of volcanic products.
This tract seemed crushed under a rain of enormous ejected rocks of trap, basalt, granite, and all kinds of igneous rocks.
Here and there I could see puffs and jets of steam curling up into the air, called in Icelandic 'reykir,' issuing from thermal springs, and indicating by their motion the volcanic energy underneath.
This seemed to justify my fears: But I fell from the height of my new born hopes when my uncle said:
"You see all these volumes of steam, Axel; well, they demonstrate that we have nothing to fear from the fury of a volcanic eruption."
"Am I to believe that?" I cried.
"Understand this clearly," added the Professor.
"At the approach of an eruption these jets would redouble their activity, but disappear altogether during the period of the eruption.
"But-"
'No more; that is sufficient.
I returned to the parsonage, very crestfallen.
My uncle had beaten me with the weapons of science.
Still I had one hope left, and this was, that when we had reached the bottom of the crater it would be impossible, for want of a passage, to go deeper, in spite of all the Saknussemm's in Iceland.
I spent that whole night in one constant nightmare; in the heart of a volcano, and from the deepest depths of the earth I saw myself tossed up amongst the interplanetary spaces under the form of an eruptive rock.
The next day, june twenty third, Hans was awaiting us with his companions carrying provisions, tools, and instruments; two iron pointed sticks, two rifles, and two shot belts were for my uncle and myself.
Hans, as a cautious man, had added to our luggage a leathern bottle full of water, which, with that in our flasks, would ensure us a supply of water for eight days.
The priest and his tall Megaera were awaiting us at the door.
But the farewell was put in the unexpected form of a heavy bill, in which everything was charged, even to the very air we breathed in the pastoral house, infected as it was.
This worthy couple were fleecing us just as a Swiss innkeeper might have done, and estimated their imperfect hospitality at the highest price.
This point being settled, Hans gave the signal, and we soon left Stapi behind us.
CHAPTER fifteen.
Snaefell is five thousand feet high.
From our starting point we could see the two peaks boldly projected against the dark grey sky; I could see an enormous cap of snow coming low down upon the giant's brow.
We walked in single file, headed by the hunter, who ascended by narrow tracks, where two could not have gone abreast.
There was therefore no room for conversation.
After we had passed the basaltic wall of the fiord of Stapi we passed over a vegetable fibrous peat bog, left from the ancient vegetation of this peninsula.
As a true nephew of the Professor Liedenbrock, and in spite of my dismal prospects, I could not help observing with interest the mineralogical curiosities which lay about me as in a vast museum, and I constructed for myself a complete geological account of Iceland.
This most curious island has evidently been projected from the bottom of the sea at a comparatively recent date.
Possibly, it may still be subject to gradual elevation.
Therefore, in this case, the theory of Sir Humphry Davy, Saknussemm's document, and my uncle's theories would all go off in smoke.
This hypothesis led me to examine with more attention the appearance of the surface, and I soon arrived at a conclusion as to the nature of the forces which presided at its birth.
Before the volcanoes broke out it consisted of trap rocks slowly upraised to the level of the sea by the action of central forces.
The internal fires had not yet forced their way through.
No violence accompanied this change; the matter thrown out was in vast quantities, and the liquid material oozing out from the abysses of the earth slowly spread in extensive plains or in hillocky masses.
Therefore a time would come when the elastic and explosive forces of the imprisoned gases would upheave this ponderous cover and drive out for themselves openings through tall chimneys. Hence then the volcano would distend and lift up the crust, and then burst through a crater suddenly formed at the summit or thinnest part of the volcano.
To the eruption succeeded other volcanic phenomena.
We were moving over grey rocks of dense and massive formation, which in cooling had formed into hexagonal prisms.
Everywhere around us we saw truncated cones, formerly so many fiery mouths.
So I felt a little comforted as we advanced to the assault of Snaefell.
The way was growing more and more arduous, the ascent steeper and steeper; the loose fragments of rock trembled beneath us, and the utmost care was needed to avoid dangerous falls.
Hans went on as quietly as if he were on level ground; sometimes he disappeared altogether behind the huge blocks, then a shrill whistle would direct us on our way to him.
A very wise precaution in itself, but, as things turned out, quite useless.
There Hans bid us come to a halt, and a hasty breakfast was served out.
My uncle swallowed two mouthfuls at a time to get on faster.
But, whether he liked it or not, this was a rest as well as a breakfast hour and he had to wait till it pleased our guide to move on, which came to pass in an hour.
We were now beginning to scale the steep sides of Snaefell.
Its snowy summit, by an optical illusion not unfrequent in mountains, seemed close to us, and yet how many weary hours it took to reach it!
The stones, adhering by no soil or fibrous roots of vegetation, rolled away from under our feet, and rushed down the precipice below with the swiftness of an avalanche.
Then we helped each other with our sticks.
He himself seemed to possess an instinct for equilibrium, for he never stumbled.
The Icelanders, though burdened with our loads, climbed with the agility of mountaineers.
To judge by the distant appearance of the summit of Snaefell, it would have seemed too steep to ascend on our side.
It was formed by one of those torrents of stones flung up by the eruptions, called 'sting' by the Icelanders.
Such as it was, it did us good service.
The steepness increased, but these stone steps allowed us to rise with facility, and even with such rapidity that, having rested for a moment while my companions continued their ascent, I perceived them already reduced by distance to microscopic dimensions.
Three thousand two hundred feet below us stretched the sea.
The Professor saw that my limbs were refusing to perform their office, and in spite of his impatience he decided on stopping.
He therefore spoke to the hunter, who shook his head, saying:
"Look!" said my uncle.
I looked down upon the plain.
If that huge revolving pillar sloped down, it would involve us in its whirling eddies.
This phenomenon, which is not unfrequent when the wind blows from the glaciers, is called in Icelandic 'mistour.'
Without knowing Danish I understood at once that we must follow Hans at the top of our speed.
Happily we were on the opposite side, and sheltered from all harm.
Yet Hans did not think it prudent to spend the night upon the sides of the cone.
I was yielding to the effects of hunger and cold.
The rarefied air scarcely gave play to the action of my lungs.
THE DIARY
Before Miss Berengaria could communicate with Durham, he had left the castle for town.
We have accepted him as Bernard, and when you come down you can question him either in that character or as Michael.
To tell you the truth, I am sorry for the boy-he is only twenty one or thereabouts, and I think he has been misguided.
The servants-with the exception of my own especial maid, Maria Tait-know nothing of the man's presence in the turret chamber.
And you may be sure that I am taking care Jerry Moon learns nothing.
Nor do I wish Bernard to know.
With his impetuosity, he would probably come over at once, and run the chance of arrest. The whole matter is in your hands, Durham, so write and tell me what I am to do.
At all events I have a fast hold of Bernard's double, and you may be sure I shall not allow him to go until this mystery is cleared up."
In reply to this pressing epistle, Durham wrote, telling Miss Berengaria to wait for three or four days.
He was advertising for Tolomeo, and hoped to see him at his office.
The examination of Michael-which Durham proposed to make, would then be rendered much easier.
The lawyer, in conclusion, quite agreed with Miss Plantagenet that Conniston and Bernard should not be told.
"I hope to be with you by the end of the week," he finished.
"Deuce take the man," said Miss Berengaria, rubbing her nose.
"Does he think I can wait all that time?"
"And this poor creature is so weak, that I do not think he will be able to speak much for a few days.
"Oh, he is quite convinced of that," said Alice, quickly.
"I suppose he hoped I would think his altered looks might induce me to overlook any lack of resemblance to Bernard."
"Perhaps that is why he holds his tongue," said Alice, rising.
"I suppose we must," said Miss Berengaria, dolefully.
"Drat the whole business!
Was there ever such a coil?"
"Well then, aunt, will you leave it alone?"
"Certainly not.
I intend to see the thing through.
Owing to my reticence to Sir Simon about your parents, Alice, I am really responsible for the whole business, so I will keep working at it until Bernard is out of danger and married to you."
"Ah!" sighed Miss Malleson.
"And when will that be?"
"Sooner than you think, perhaps.
Every day brings a surprise."
She learned that Conniston loved her, though, to be sure, his frequent visits might have shown her how he was losing his heart.
She was glad of this as she admired Conniston exceedingly, and, moreover, wished to escape from her awkward position at the Hall.
When Bernard came back and married Alice, she would have to leave the Hall and live on the small income allotted to her by the generosity of the dead man.
It would be much better, as she truly thought, to marry Conniston, even though he was the poorest of peers.
One can do a lot with a title even without money, and Lucy was wise in her generation.
Moreover, she was truly in love with the young man, and thought, very rightly, that he would make her a good husband.
As usual, Conniston, having taken into his head that Lucy would be an ideal wife, pursued his suit with characteristic impetuosity.
He came over daily-or almost daily-to Gore Hall, and, finally, when Lucy broke off her engagement to Beryl, he told her of the whereabouts of Bernard. Lucy was overwhelmed and delighted.
"To think that he should be alive after all," she said.
"I am so pleased, so glad.
Dear Bernard, now he will be able to enjoy the fortune and the title, and marry Alice."
"You forget," said Conniston, a trifle dryly, "Bernard has yet to prove his innocence.
We are all trying to help him.
Lucy stared at him with widely open eyes.
"Of course I will, Lord Conniston," she said heartily.
"What do you wish me to do?"
"In the first place, tell me if you sent a boy to bring Bernard to Crimea Square?"
I know the boy you mean.
Julius found him selling matches in town, ragged and poor.
He helped him, and the other day he procured him a situation with Miss Berengaria."
"He is there now.
But he-we have reason to believe-is the boy who lured Bernard to Crimea Square."
"I know nothing about that," said Lucy, frankly.
"Why not ask the boy himself?
It would be easy."
"We will ask the boy shortly," replied Conniston, evasively, not wishing at this juncture to tell her that the great object of everyone was to prevent Jerry thinking he was suspected.
"Should you meet the boy say nothing to him."
"I will not, and I am not likely to meet the boy.
He is usually in Miss Plantagenet's poultry yard, and I rarely go round there." Lucy paused. "It is strange that the boy should act like that.
I wonder if Sir Simon sent him to fetch Bernard, and arranged the Red Window as a sign which house it was?"
"The Red Window.
mrs Webber saw the light, and----"
"And Julius afterwards didn't.
I know that.
It was my fault.
When I saw Bernard in the hall I was not astonished, for I thought he had come in answer to the light.
I went upstairs, and after attending to Sir Simon, I went to the window.
The lamp was before it, and stretched across the pane was a red bandanna handkerchief of Sir Simon's.
I took that away, so you see how it was Julius did not see the light."
"Why did you remove the handkerchief?" asked the puzzled Conniston.
"Well, I wanted to save Bernard if possible, and I thought if the Red Light which had drawn him were removed, he could make some excuse. Julius knew about the Red Light, and, as he hated Bernard, I fancied he would use it against him.
But really," added Miss Randolph, wrinkling her pretty brows, "I hardly knew what I was doing, save that in some vague way I fancied the removal of the handkerchief might help Bernard. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly clear," said Conniston, "and I am glad I know this.
May I tell Bernard and Durham?"
"Certainly.
I want to do all I can to help Bernard."
"I wonder if you could make a chap good?"
"I know a chap who----"
"Please stop, Lord Conniston," cried Lucy, starting up in confusion.
"I have heaps and heaps to do.
You prevent my working."
Her hurried flight prevented Conniston from putting the question on that occasion.
But he was not daunted.
He resolved to propose as soon as possible.
But Lucy thought he was making love too ardently, and by those arts known to women alone, she managed to keep him at arm's length.
She was anxious that Bernard should be cleared, that he should take up his rightful position, and should receive back the Hall from her, before Lord Conniston proposed.
Of course, Lucy was ready to accept him, but, sure of her fish, she played with him until such time as she felt disposed to accept his hand and heart and title and what remained of the West fortune.
Conniston, more determined than ever to win this adorable woman, came over regularly.
But Lucy skilfully kept him off the dangerous ground, whereby he fell deeper in love than ever.
"Fancy," said Lucy, running to meet Conniston one afternoon as soon as he appeared at the drawing room door, "I have found the diary of mrs Gilroy."
"That's a good thing," said Conniston, eagerly.
We must read her diary."
"Will that be honorable?" said Lucy, retaining her hold of the book.
"Perfectly.
One does not stand on ceremony when a man's neck is at stake.
mrs Gilroy's diary may save Bernard's life.
She knew too much about the murder, and fled because she thought Durham would come and question her."
"Oh! Was that why she ran away?"
"Yes!
A woman like mrs Gilroy does not take such a course for nothing. She's a clever woman."
"And a very disagreeable woman," said Lucy, emphatically.
"But what did she know?"
But, after some reflection, he decided to speak out.
"You are, of course, on Bernard's side," he said.
"Yes.
And against Julius, who hates Bernard.
I will do anything I can to help Bernard.
"I know-I know.
You are the truest and best woman in the world," said Conniston, eagerly, "but what I have to tell you is not my own secret. It concerns Bernard."
"Then don't tell me," said Lucy, coloring angrily.
"Yes, I will.
You have the diary and I want to read it.
To know why I do, it is necessary that you should learn all that we have discovered."
"What have you discovered?
Who killed Sir Simon?"
We are trying to hunt down the assassin.
And mrs Gilroy's diary may tell us."
"I don't see that."
"You will, when you learn what I have to say." And Conniston related everything concerning the false marriage and the half brother of young Gore.
"And now, you see," he finished triumphantly, "mrs Gilroy is fighting for her son.
It is probable that she has set down the events of that night in her diary."
"She would not be such a fool, if her son is guilty."
"Oh, people do all manner of queer things.
Criminals who are very secretive in speech sometimes give themselves away in writing.
You were at the theatre on that night?"
"Yes, with Julius; so neither of us had anything to do with the matter, if that is what you mean."
"I mean nothing of the sort," said Conniston, quickly.
"How can you think I should suspect you?"
"You might suspect Julius," said Lucy, suspiciously, "and although we have quarrelled I don't want to harm him."
"Would you rather have Bernard hanged?"
"Oh!" Lucy burst into tears and impulsively threw the book into Conniston's lap.
"Read it at once; I would rather save Bernard than Julius."
Conniston availed himself of this permission at once.
He took away the diary with Lucy's permission, and carried it in triumph to the castle. Here he and Bernard sat down to master its contents.
These astonished them considerably.
Conniston made out a short and concise account of the events of that fatal night, for the benefit of Durham.
They were as follows:
mrs Gilroy, it appears, thought that her son, Michael, was really and truly in America.
She had no suspicion that the lover of Jane Riordan was her son, but truly believed from the description that he was young Gore whom she hated-as she plainly stated in several pages.
When the presumed Bernard went away before six, he did not call again at ten o'clock.
He saw Sir Simon and after a stormy interview he departed.
"Wait a bit," said Conniston, who was reading his precis.
"This diary is meant for her eye alone.
Still, she may have thought it might fall into the hands of another person, and therefore made her son safe.
See! here's the bit," and he read, "Sir Simon was alive after mr Gore left the house."
"Go on," said Bernard.
"If I am innocent, why did she accuse me?"
"Because I believe her son is guilty.
He left Sir Simon dead.
mrs Gilroy found the body, knew what had occurred, and then ran out on hearing Jerry's whistle knowing she would meet you.
It's all plain."
"Very plain," said Gore, emphatically.
"A regular trap.
"Afterwards, and shortly before a quarter past ten, there came a ring at the door.
mrs Gilroy went, and there she found Signor Tolomeo, who asked to see Sir Simon.
She took him up the stairs, and left him to speak with Sir Simon.
What took place she did not know, but she was sitting below working, and heard the door close.
It was just before a quarter to eleven that she heard this."
"About the time I came," muttered Bernard.
mrs Gilroy-as appeared from the diary-ran up to see if the master was all right.
She found him strangled, and with the handkerchiefs tied over his mouth and round his neck.
Then she ran out and found Gore at the door.
He had come back again, and mrs Gilroy said she accused him.
She then stated in her diary that she looked upon Bernard as an accessory after the fact.
He had hired Guiseppe Tolomeo to kill his grandfather, and then came to see if the deed had been executed thoroughly.
mrs Gilroy ended her diary by stating that she would do her best to get both the Italian and his nephew hanged.
"Very much obliged to her," said Bernard, when Conniston concluded reading, and beginning to walk to and fro.
"Well, it seems my uncle is the guilty person, Conniston."
"I don't believe it," said Dick, firmly.
"mrs Gilroy is trying to shield her son.
I believe he killed him."
"If we could only find Michael," said Bernard, dolefully.
Things would soon be put right then," replied Conniston, and neither was aware that the man they wished to see was at that very moment lying in the turret chamber at the Bower, "or even mrs Gilroy. Could we see her, and show her the diary, she might put things straight."
"I believe she left the diary behind on purpose," said Gore, with some ill humor.
"I can't believe that Tolomeo killed Sir Simon."
"What kind of man is he?"
"A very decent chap in his own way.
His blood is hot, and he has a temper something like the one I have inherited from my mother, who was Guiseppe's sister.
But Tolomeo is not half bad.
He has the credit for being a scamp, but I don't think he deserves it."
"Can't you see him and show him the diary?"
I don't know his whereabouts.
However, Durham, at my request, has put an advertisement in the papers which may bring him to the office, then we can see how much of this story is true.
Certainly, mrs Gilroy may have seen him at the house on that night."
"What would he go for?"
"To ask my grandfather for money.
He was always hard up.
Sir Simon hated him, but if Guiseppe was hard up he wouldn't mind that.
I daresay Tolomeo did see Sir Simon, and did have a row, as both he and grandfather were hot blooded.
But I don't believe my uncle killed Sir Simon," said Bernard, striking the table.
Tolomeo, from your account of him, would not commit a murder without getting some money from doing it.
But the best thing to do, is to take this up to Durham and see what he thinks."
"I'll come too," said Gore, excitedly.
"I tell you, Dick, I'm dead tired of doing nothing.
It will be better to do what Miss Berengaria suggests and give myself up."
"Wait a bit," persuaded Dick.
"Let me take this up to Durham, and if he agrees you can be arrested."
CHAPTER twenty three
A YEAR LATER
It was midsummer, and Miss Berengaria's garden was a sight.
Such splendid colors, such magnificent blossoms, such triumphs of the floricultural art, had never been seen outside the walls of a flower show.
The weather was exceedingly warm, and on this particular day there was not a cloud in the sky.
And well she might be, for this was a red letter day with her.
She looked particularly pretty, and her face was a most becoming color.
"The train won't be here for another hour," he said, smiling.
"You will see Bernard soon enough, Miss Malleson."
"Oh, dear me," sighed Alice, "can I ever see him soon enough?
I wish he hadn't gone."
"Well," said Durham, following with his eyes the spare little figure of Miss Berengaria flitting about amongst the flowers, "I didn't approve of it at the time, and I told Conniston so.
But now I think it was just as well Bernard did keep to his original intention and go to the Front.
It is advisable there should be an interval between the new life and the old."
"The new life?" asked Alice, flushing.
"He is coming home to be married to you," said Durham.
"I shall have to nurse him back to health before we can marry."
"Miss Randolph will be occupied in the same pleasing task with Conniston," replied Durham, lazily, "and I envy both my friends."
"You needn't," laughed Miss Malleson, opening her sunshade which cast a delicate pink hue on her cheeks.
"Poor Bernard has been wounded and Lord Conniston has been down with enteric fever."
"I am glad they have got off so easily.
Alice shuddered and grew pale.
"Don't, mr Durham!"
"That was why I feared about his going out," said he.
"I thought it would be a pity, after all he passed through, that he should be killed by a Boer bullet.
"And Lord Conniston?"
"He is coming also to marry Miss Randolph.
Both weddings will take place on the same day, and Conniston has escaped the dangers of the war with a slight touch of fever.
But why tell you all this-you know it as well as I do."
"What's that?" asked Miss Berengaria, coming up to the pair.
"I was only discussing Miss Malleson's future life," said Durham.
"Ah," sighed the old lady, sitting down.
"What I shall do without her I don't know."
The Hall is within visiting distance."
"But Bernard will want you all to himself, and small blame to him.
What is the time?"
Alice glanced at her watch.
"Oh, I wish we could meet them."
"Not at all," rejoined Miss Berengaria, brusquely, "better wait here with Lucy.
I don't want a scene of kissing and weeping on the platform.
"Bernard at Gore Hall and Conniston at the castle."
"I hope he and Lucy won't live there," said the old lady, rubbing her nose.
"A dreadfully damp place.
I went over there the other day to tell mrs Moon about Jerry."
"Have you had good reports of him?"
"So, so.
The reformatory he was put into seems to be a good one, and the boys are well looked after.
But Jerry is a tree which will grow crooked. He seems to have been giving a lot of trouble."
"Yet he was lucky to get off as he did," said Durham.
"At least, Bernard seems to think so."
"I fancy Bernard is about right," replied Durham.
"The lad is a born criminal.
I wonder how he inherited such a tainted nature."
Miss Berengaria sat up briskly.
"I can tell you," she said.
"mrs Moon informed me that her son-Jerry's father-was a desperate scamp, and also that several of her husband's people had come to bad ends."
"To rope ends, I suppose, as Jerry will come," said Durham.
"However, he is safe for the next three years in his reformatory.
When he comes out, we will see what will happen.
"Michael Gilroy?"
"Yes.
Has he taken that name for good?"
"He has.
It's the only name he is entitled to.
How glad I am that the poor creature was acquitted after that dreadful trial.
I am sure there is good in him."
"So Bernard thought, and that was why he assisted him," said Alice.
"I think you put in a good word for him, Miss Malleson."
Alice assented.
"I was sorry for the poor fellow.
While I nursed him I saw much good in him.
And, remember, that he had intended to tell me who he was when he arrived, only he was so ill."
"Well, I don't think he was quite himself during that illness," said Alice, pensively.
"Had he been better, he would certainly have doubted the fact of aunty's and my beliefs.
A few questions from me, and he would have been exposed, even had I truly believed he was Bernard."
"And he must have wondered how you never put the questions."
"Perhaps.
However, he spoke up well at the trial, and quite explained Bernard's innocence."
Durham shrugged his shoulders.
"The serpent in the bamboo.
He was forced to be honest at the trial for his own sake."
"Don't be hard on him," said Miss Berengaria, suddenly.
"I received a letter from him yesterday.
He is doing very well in America, and with the money Bernard gave him he has bought a farm.
Also, he hopes to marry."
"I wonder will he tell his future wife anything of his past life."
"Not if he is wise," said Durham, looking at Alice, who had spoken.
"By the way, Miss Berengaria, does he mention his mother?"
"No," replied the old lady, promptly.
"Drat you, Durham! why should the boy mention his mother at this point?
She has been dead all these months.
Poor soul! her end was a sad one.
I never heard, though, of what poison she died."
"The gipsies use it to poison pigs."
"Why do they wish to poison pigs?"
"Because, if they kill a pig in that way, the farmer to whom it belongs, thinking the animal has died a natural death, gives it to the gipsies and they eat it."
"I'll look well after my own pigs.
So the poor creature killed herself with that drug?"
"I can't explain what it is.
She hinted that I would know what drows meant before the end of the day, and I did.
While I was telling Inspector Groom about her confession, she poisoned herself in my office.
I thought she was asleep, but she evidently was watching for her opportunity to make away with herself."
"I wonder you can bear to sit in that office after such an occurrence."
"How lucky it was that she signed that confession before she died," was the remark made by Alice.
"My dear young lady, she came especially to confess, so as to save her son.
"Oh, I think so," said Durham, reflectively.
"After all, her confession meant hanging to her.
She wished to escape the gallows."
"I am glad Bernard did," said Miss Berengaria, emphatically; "even at the risk of all that scandal."
"It couldn't be kept out of the papers," said Durham, with a shrug. "After all, Bernard's character had to be fully cleansed.
It was therefore necessary to tell the whole of Beryl's plot, to produce Michael as an example of what Nature can do in the way of resemblances, and to supplement the whole with mrs Gilroy's confession."
"And a nice trouble there was over it," said the old lady, annoyed.
"I believe Bernard had a man calling on him who wished to write a play about the affair-a new kind of 'Corsican Brothers.'"
"Or a new 'Comedy of Errors,'" said Alice, smiling.
"Well, the public learned everything and were sorry for Bernard.
They cheered him when he left the court."
"The man who should have suffered was that wretch Beryl."
"We couldn't catch him," said Durham.
"Victoria reached him on that very night, and he cleared without loss of time.
Of course, he was afraid of being accused of the crime, although he knew he was innocent, but, besides that, there was the conspiracy to get the estate by means of the false will.
Miss Berengaria nodded.
I understand she still believes in Jerry and will marry him when he comes out of the reformatory.
He will then be of a marriageable age, the brat!
But, regarding Beryl, what became of him?"
"I never could find out," confessed Durham.
"Then I can tell you, Durham.
Michael saw him in New York."
"Where?"
"In some low slum, very ragged and poor.
He didn't see Michael, or he might have troubled him.
He has taken to drink, I believe-Beryl I mean-so some day he will die, and a nice fate awaits him where he will go," said Miss Berengaria, grimly.
"Well," said he, looking down on the two ladies, "the whole case is over and ended.
I don't see why we should revive such very unpleasant memories.
The past is past, so let it rest.
Bernard has the title and the money and----"
"Dear girl, how sweet she looks!"
It was indeed Lucy tripping across the lawn in the lightest of summer frocks.
She looked charming, and greeted Alice with a kiss.
"I am so anxious," she whispered.
"The train will be in soon."
"You are anxious to see Conniston?" said Miss Berengaria.
"Yes.
Durham bowed.
"You have been an admirable Lady of the Manor," he said. "But soon you will be Lady Conniston."
"And Alice will be Lady of the Manor," laughed Lucy.
"Oh, by the way, mr Durham, I forgot to tell you that Signor Tolomeo called at the Hall yesterday.
He thought Bernard was back, and came to thank him for his allowing him an income."
"I thought he had gone back to Italy," said Durham.
"He is going next week, and talks of marriage."
"I don't envy his wife," said Miss Berengaria, rising.
"Girls, come into the house to see that everything is prepared for our heroes."
The girls laughed and tripped away.
Durham left the garden and drove to the station to fetch back Conniston and Bernard.
They did not come by that train, however, much to the disappointment of those at the Bower. It was seven before they arrived, and then the three ladies came out to meet them on the lawn.
"Dear Alice," said Bernard, who had his arm in a sling, but otherwise looked what Conniston called "fit!", "how glad I am to see you!"
"And you, Lucy," said Conniston, taking his sweetheart in his arms.
"Really," cried Miss Berengaria, while Durham stood by laughing, "it is most perplexing to assist at the meeting of a quartette of lovers.
Gore, how are you?
Conniston, your fever has pulled you down.
I hope you have both sown your wild oats and have come back to settle for good."
"With the most charming of wives," said Dick, bowing.
"We have."
Miss Berengaria took Durham's arm.
"I must look out a wife for you, sir," she said, leading him to the house.
"Come away and let the turtle doves coo alone.
I expect dinner will be late."
And dinner was late.
Conniston, with Lucy on his arm, strolled away in the twilight, but Bernard and Alice remained under the elm.
When it grew quite dusk a red light was seen shining from the window of the drawing room.
Gore pointed it out.
"That is the signal Lucy used to set in the window at the Hall to show that all was well," he said, putting his unwounded arm round the girl, "and now it gleams as a sign that there is a happy future for you and I, dearest."
"A red light is a danger signal," said Alice, laughing.
"This is the exception that proves the rule," said Gore.
"It once led me into trouble, but now it shines upon me with my arms around you.
Thank Heaven that, after all our trouble, we are at last in smooth waters. There's the gong for dinner."
Alice laughed.
"A prosaic ending to a pretty speech," she said.
JUDY'S NEWS.
Possibly, being by nature gifted, as I have certainly discovered, with more of hope than is usually mingled with the other elements composing the temperament of humanity, I did not suffer quite so much as some would have suffered during such an illness.
Within was a labyrinth of passages in the walls, and "long sounding corridors," and sudden galleries, whence I looked down into the great church aching with silence.
When all this vanished from me in the returning wave of health that spread through my weary brain, I was yet left anxious and thoughtful. There was no one from whom I could ask any information about the family at the Hall, so that I was just driven to the best thing-to try to cast my care upon Him who cared for my care.
We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go.
And then we learn that the storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, but into the desired haven; that we have been compelled, as to the last remaining, so to the best, the only, the central help, the causing cause of all the helps to which we had turned aside as nearer and better.
One day when, having considerably recovered from my second attack, I was sitting reading in my study, who should be announced but my friend Judy!
"I haven't had a chance of coming to see you before; though we've always managed-I mean auntie and I-to hear about you.
I would have come to nurse you, but it was no use thinking of it."
I smiled as I thanked her.
I am so sorry for you!"
"Mrs Pearson is a very kind woman, and an excellent nurse," I said; but she would not heed me.
I assure you. But now I want to hear how everybody is at the Hall."
"What, grannie, and the white wolf, and all?"
"As many as you please to tell me about."
"Well, grannie is gracious to everybody but auntie."
"Why isn't she gracious to auntie?"
"I don't know.
I only guess."
"Is your visitor gone?"
"Yes, long ago.
But he's very nice.
I don't QUITE like him-not so well as you by a whole half, Mr Walton.
I wish you would marry auntie; but that would never do.
It would drive grannie out of her wits."
To stop the strange girl, and hide some confusion, I said:
"Now tell me about the rest of them."
"Sarah comes next.
She's as white and as wolfy as ever.
Mr Walton, I hate that woman.
I am sure she is bad."
If you did, I think you would be so sorry for her, you could not hate her."
At the same time, knowing what I knew now, and remembering that impressions can date from farther back than the memory can reach, I was not surprised to hear that Judy hated Sarah, though I could not believe that in such a child the hatred was of the most deadly description.
"How is Mr Stoddart?"
"There now!
"Oh, yes, I told her.
Not grannie, you know.--You mustn't let it out."
"I shall be careful.
How is Mr Stoddart, then?"
"Not well at all.
"Thank you.
I believe that's just what auntie wanted.
He won't like it at first, I daresay.
But he'll come to, and you'll do him good.
You do everybody good you come near."
I fear it is not.
What good did I ever do you, Judy?"
"Do me!" she exclaimed, apparently half angry at the question.
And here the odd creature laughed, leaving me in absolute ignorance of how to interpret her.
But presently her eyes grew clearer, and I could see the slow film of a tear gathering.
"Mr Walton," she said, "I HAVE been trying not to be selfish.
You have done me that much good."
"I am very glad, Judy.
Don't forget who can do you ALL good.
There is One who can not only show you what is right, but can make you able to do and be what is right.
Judy did not answer, but sat looking fixedly at the carpet.
She was thinking, though, I saw.
"Who has played the organ, Judy, since your uncle was taken ill?" I asked, at length.
"Why, auntie, to be sure.
Didn't you hear?"
"No," I answered, turning almost sick at the idea of having been away from church for so many Sundays while she was giving voice and expression to the dear asthmatic old pipes.
Think of HER there, and me here!
And this child has just been telling me that I have taught her to try not to be selfish.
Certainly I should be ashamed of myself."
"When was your uncle taken ill?"
"I don't exactly remember.
But you will come and see him to morrow?
And then we shall see you too.
"I will come if Dr Duncan will let me.
Perhaps he will take me in his carriage."
Uncle can't bear doctors.
He never was ill in his life before, and he behaves to Dr Duncan just as if he had made him ill.
I wish I could send the carriage for you.
But I can't, you know."
"Never mind, Judy.
I shall manage somehow.--What is the name of the gentleman who was staying with you?"
"Don't you know?
Captain George Everard.
What a foolish pain, like a spear thrust, they sent through me-those words spoken in such a taken for granted way!
"He's a relation-on grannie's side mostly, I believe.
But I never could understand the explanation.
Captain Everard has what grandmamma calls a neat little property of his own from his mother, some where in Northumberland; for he IS only a third son, one of a class grannie does not in general feel very friendly to, I assure you, Mr Walton.
But his second brother is dead, and the eldest something the worse for the wear, as grannie says; so that the captain comes just within sight of the coronet of an old uncle who ought to have been dead long ago.
Just the match for auntie!"
"Oh! but you know that doesn't matter," returned Judy, with bitterness. "What will grannie care for that?
It's nothing to anybody but auntie, and she must get used to it.
Nobody makes anything of her."
It was only after she had gone that I thought how astounding it would have been to me to hear a girl of her age show such an acquaintance with worldliness and scheming, had I not been personally so much concerned about one of the objects of her remarks.
She certainly was a strange girl.
Evidently she had inherited her father's fearlessness; and if only it should turn out that she had likewise inherited her mother's firmness, she might render the best possible service to her aunt against the oppression of her wilful mother.
"How were you able to get here to day?" I asked, as she rose to go.
Auntie wouldn't leave uncle."
"They have been a good deal in London of late, have they not?"
"Yes.
As I sat in my study, in the twilight of that same day, the door was hurriedly opened, and Judy entered.
She looked about the room with a quick glance to see that we were alone, then caught my hand in both of hers, and burst out crying.
"Why, Judy!" I said, "what IS the matter?" But the sobs would not allow her to answer.
I was too frightened to put any more questions, and so stood silent-my chest feeling like an empty tomb that waited for death to fill it.
"They are killing auntie.
She looks like a ghost already," said the child, again bursting into tears.
"Tell me, Judy, what CAN I do for her?"
"You must find out, Mr Walton.
If you loved her as much as I do, you would find out what to do."
"But she will not let me do anything for her."
"Yes, she will.
She says you promised to help her some day."
"Did she send you, then?"
"no
"Then how-what-what can I do!"
Do get your hat, Mr Walton."
I will go at once.--Shall I see her?"
It was a still night, with an odour of damp earth, and a hint of green buds in it.
"I don't know what they are doing.
"Is she ill?"
"She is as white as a sheet, and will not leave her room.
Grannie must have frightened her dreadfully.
Everybody is frightened at her but me, and I begin to be frightened too.
"But what can her mother do to her?"
"I don't know.
Then there is no one allowed to wait on her but Sarah, and I know the very sight of her is enough to turn auntie sick almost.
What has become of Jane I don't know.
Auntie can't eat what Sarah brings her, I am sure; else I should almost fancy she was starving herself to death to keep clear of that Captain Everard."
"Is he still at the Hall?"
"Yes.
But I don't think it is altogether his fault.
Grannie won't let him go.
"Nothing can make her worth more than she is, Judy," I said, perhaps with some discontent in my tone.
"But, Judy, we must have some plan laid before we reach the Hall; else my coming will be of no use."
"Of course.
I know how much I can do, and you must arrange the rest with her.
I will take you to the little room up stairs-we call it the octagon.
That you know is just under auntie's room.
I will leave you there, and tell auntie that you want to see her."
"But, Judy,---"
"Don't you want to see her, Mr Walton?"
"Yes, I do; more than you can think."
"Then I will tell her so."
"But will she come to me?"
"I don't know.
We have to find that out."
"Very well.
All my dubitation and distress were gone, for I had something to do, although what I could not yet tell.
This was what I hoped to strengthen her to do.
As I have said before, she was clad in the mail of endurance, but was utterly without weapons.
In respect of this, I prayed heartily that I might help her.
The moon was now quite obscured, and I was under no apprehension of discovery.
I had not to wait long before the door opened behind me noiselessly, and I stepped into the dark house.
Judy took me by the hand, and led me along a passage, and then up a stair into the little drawing room.
There was no light.
She led me to a seat at the farther end, and opening a door close beside me, left me in the dark.
Castle after castle I built up; castle after castle fell to pieces in my hands.
Still she did not come, and partly from weakness, partly from hope deferred, I found myself beginning to tremble all over.
Nor could I control myself.
Before I could speak, a voice said brokenly, in a half whisper:--
And she moved to go, but I held her.
But ere I ceased came a revulsion of feeling.
"Forgive me," I said, "I am selfishness itself to speak to you thus now, to take advantage of your misery to make you listen to mine.
But, at least, it will make you sure that if all I am, all I have will save you-"
"But I am saved already," she interposed, "if you love me-for I love you."
And for some moments there were no words to speak.
I stood holding her hand, conscious only of God and her.
At last I said:
Will you come home to my sister?
Or I will take you wherever you please."
"I will go with you anywhere you think best.
"Put on your bonnet, then, and a warm cloak, and we will settle all about it as we go."
"No lights here!" she said.
"Sarah, bring candles, and tell Captain Everard, when he will join us, to come to the octagon room.
Where can that little Judy be?
The child gets more and more troublesome, I do think.
I had been in great perplexity how to let her know that I was there; for to announce yourself to a lady by a voice out of the darkness of her boudoir, or to wait for candles to discover you where she thought she was quite alone-neither is a pleasant way of presenting yourself to her consciousness.
But I was helped out of the beginning into the middle of my difficulties, once more by that blessed little Judy.
"Here I am, grannie," said her voice.
"But I won't be taken in hand by you or any one else.
I tell you that.
So mind.
Here Judy interrupted her.
"I beg your pardon, grannie, Mr Walton WAS wanted-very much wanted.
I went and fetched him."
"---and to be sitting in my room in the dark too!"
"That couldn't be helped, grannie.
"Sarah," said Mrs Oldcastle, "ask Captain Everard to be kind enough to step this way."
We could now see each other.
Knowing words to be but idle breath, I would not complicate matters by speech, but stood silent, regarding Mrs Oldcastle.
Whereupon she spoke, but to me.
"Mr Walton," she said, "will you explain to Captain Everard to what we owe the UNEXPECTED pleasure of a visit from you?"
To you, Mrs Oldcastle, I would have answered, had you asked me, that I was waiting for Miss Oldcastle."
"That is quite unnecessary.
Miss Oldcastle will be here presently," I said.
She was always white, as I have said: the change I can describe only by the word I have used, indicating a bluish darkening of the whiteness.
She walked towards the door beside me.
"Pardon me, Mrs Oldcastle.
That is the way to Miss Oldcastle's room.
I am here to protect her."
"Miss Oldcastle, go to your room instantly, I COMMAND you," said her mother; and she approached as if to remove her hand from my arm.
"No, Mrs Oldcastle," I said.
"At least," said that lady, "do not disgrace yourself, Ethelwyn, by leaving the house in this unaccountable manner at night and on foot.
If you WILL leave the protection of your mother's roof, wait at least till tomorrow."
You have been a strange mother to me-and Dorothy too!"
Ethelwyn smiled.--She was now as collected as I was, seeming to have cast off all her weakness.
My heart was uplifted more than I can say.--She knew her mother too well to be caught by the change in her tone.
But now she answered nothing, only looked at me, and I understood her, of course.
She made a spring at her daughter, and seized her by the arm.
"Then I forbid it," she screamed; "and I WILL be obeyed.
Go to your room, you minx."
How old are you, Ethelwyn?"
"Twenty seven," answered Miss Oldcastle.
Let her arm go."
But she kept her grasp.
"You hurt me, mother," said Miss Oldcastle.
"Hurt you?
I will hurt you then!"
But I took Mrs Oldcastle's arm in my hand, and she let go her hold.
"How dare you touch a woman?" she said.
"The riot act ought to be read, I think.
"Well put, Captain Everard," I said.
"Say on."
"This lady has jilted me."
"I have not."
And he strode a pace nearer.
"You presume on your cloth, but-" he said, lifting his hand.
Insult me as you will, and I will bear it.
Call me coward, and I will say nothing.
He turned on his heel.
"I really am not sufficiently interested in the affair to oppose you. You may take the girl for me.
I do not like brawling where one cannot fight. You shall hear from me before long, Mr Walton."
"No, Captain Everard, I shall not hear from you.
You know you dare not write to me.
I know that of you which, even on the code of the duellist, would justify any gentleman in refusing to meet you.
Stand out of my way!"
He drew back; and we left the room.
Mrs Oldcastle gave a scream, and sunk fainting on a chair.
Miss Oldcastle would have returned, but I would not permit her.
"No," I said; "she will be better without you.
Judy, ring the bell for Sarah."
Then assuming the heroic, she added, "From this moment she is no daughter of mine.
The moon was shining from the edge of a vaporous mountain, which gradually drew away from her, leaving her alone in the midst of a lake of blue.
But we had not gone many paces from the house when Miss Oldcastle began to tremble violently, and could scarcely get along with all the help I could give her.
Being the doggerel Itinerary of a Holiday in September, nineteen o eight
Where, oh! where?
When in other lands I roam And sing "There is no place like home." In this respect I must confess That no place has its ugliness. Here on my mother's granite breast We settled down and took our rest. On Saturday we ventured forth To push our journey to the North.
He had always suspected that Julius was in some way connected with the crime, although he had not thought him personally guilty.
"The whole thing was a plant.
What's to be done next?"
It was difficult to know why Beryl should pay a visit to an avowed enemy.
But Julius soon explained the reason for his call.
"I am not your legal adviser," said Durham, quickly.
"You are Bernard's."
"Bernard is supposed to be dead."
"Why did you not stop him?"
He walked on the other side of the street, and before I could cross over, which was difficult on account of the traffic, Bernard disappeared.
Now I am."
"Indeed?" said Durham, with a qualm, for he fancied Julius might have learned of Gore's whereabouts.
"Yes!
It was on the tip of Durham's tongue to say that no doubt Jerry had been placed as a spy at the Bower, but he suppressed this remark.
He thought it would be best to give the man rope enough to hang himself.
Miss Plantagenet-as I knew she would,--denied that he was there; but afterwards, when I threatened to bring the police on to the scene, she gave way and let me see Bernard."
"You are sure, then, that Bernard committed the crime?"
"Let us understand one another clearly.
"Bernard answered it for you.
He wondered if Julius really believed the man at the Bower to be Bernard Gore, or if he was trying to learn what he-Durham-thought himself.
"Yes," he said at length, throwing down his pen and taking up a position on the hearth rug.
"Why did you not tell me?" asked Julius, sharply.
Durham shrugged his shoulders.
To assist you to arrest him?"
His death is only a question of days.
Mind you"--Julius wagged his finger again-"I really believe he killed Sir Simon, but as he is dying, why, I shall do nothing.
I am not a vindictive man.
Durham was perplexed, and wondered what Julius was driving at, and how much he knew.
A clue came with the next words.
"And being friends with Bernard," went on Beryl, "he is sorry that we quarrelled.
However, Durham kept his temper under, and pretended to believe that Julius was speaking in all good faith.
"No," said Durham, returning to his seat.
"If Gore wishes to make a will, I suppose I am the man to draw it up.
"I have them with me," said Julius, bringing out a sealed letter.
The rest of the estate, real and personal, went to Julius Beryl.
Durham smiled inwardly as he read this document.
It was exactly the kind of will Julius wanted. Michael was simply his instrument, and Durham shrewdly suspected that from some knowledge of the forged check Beryl had obtained this extraordinary influence.
"Then mrs Gilroy," said Durham, pretending ignorance.
"I can't say.
Bernard will probably tell you himself.
For the sake of appearances Durham went on making objections.
Durham, for the sake of keeping up the deception, had to shake hands, although he loathed himself for doing so.
"And how confoundedly clever.
Of course, if the real Bernard were dead this will might stand.
However, Durham, true to his appointment, arrived at the station the next day and had the will in his pocket.
In it Durham told the whole of Beryl's scheme to get possession of the property.
But the letter prepared the minds of both ladies for the execution of the will.
Durham looked hard at the young scoundrel who was such a worthy instrument of Beryl's.
He would have liked to examine him then and there touching his luring of Bernard to Crimea Square, but the present moment was not propitious, so he passed on.
Julius, however, in a most benevolent way spoke to the boy-"I hope you are giving your good mistress satisfaction?"
"Oh yes, sir.
It was a very pretty comedy, but Durham was not to be taken in.
Durham guessed this and touched her hand.
As for Miss Berengaria, that indomitable old lady never turned a hair.
"So poor Bernard is going to make his will," she said briskly.
"I hope he has left Alice something."
"Indeed, mr Durham; and why to mrs Gilroy?"
I hope, however, she will reappear to claim her legacy."
Julius shook his head.
"dr Payne assures me he cannot live.
I am glad he has decided to make this will."
"Yes, you would be," said Miss Berengaria ironically, and she might have been rash enough to say more, but that Durham intervened.
"I hope none of the servants know that Bernard is here?"
"They all know by this time," said Miss Berengaria, calmly.
"We kept the matter from them as long as possible; and with Alice I waited on Bernard myself.
But Jerry told the servants as well as mr Beryl."
"I don't want Bernard arrested."
"I don't approve of having boys with long tongues in my house.
Jerry had no right to be hanging round the garden when Bernard arrived, much less to write and tell you that he was here."
"I daresay you are," said the old dame, "to see Bernard hanged."
"I wish him to die in peace."
"Well," she added sharply, "are we to go upstairs and witness this will?"
"Yes!
But you, Miss Plantagenet, and----"
"And yourself?"
"no
I am the executor."
I shall stay here.
"You go up with mr Durham, aunt."
"Come along then," said Miss Berengaria, hastening out of the room; "the sooner this is over the better.
At the foot of this stair she stopped.
I wish Julius Beryl to commit himself beyond recall."
"What will you do then?"
"I can't say.
One thing at a time.
"Yes," said Miss Berengaria, climbing the stairs with a briskness surprising in a woman of her years, "something will happen.
This poor foresworn wretch upstairs will die."
"I know I did.
I could help him back to life with careful nursing, and I wish to do so, since I think there is good in the rascal.
But Beryl, having had the will made, will-kill him.
Yes," added she, nodding, "there will be a repetition of the crime.
I believe Beryl himself killed Simon-the old-no, he is dead.
Let us be just."
"And if he tries anything of that sort on," thought Durham, "I'll have him arrested at once for the first murder.
The young man lying in bed was very weak.
He looked haggard and anxious, and started up when the door opened.
"We have come about the will."
Michael raised himself on his elbow.
"Have you got it?" he asked.
"Yes," said Durham, producing the document.
"Miss Plantagenet, will you please call up your maid to witness it?"
The whole deception was cleverly carried out.
Then Durham put the will into an envelope and prepared to go down.
Michael stopped him.
"Mark," he said, using the name Bernard usually called the lawyer by, "don't you think I am looking better?"
"I hope not.
With nursing you may get better."
Michael's face assumed an expression of terror.
"I won't die," he moaned, sinking back.
You will get well."
I daresay he will disappear.
"Beryl will now murder this poor reptile, and take all the money to himself."
This brings the exploration of the Pacific down to eighteen o six.
Take a look at the map!
Mackenzie had crossed overland from the Peace river to Bella Coola.
He had ascended that same Parsnip river, which Mackenzie had found so appalling, to a little emerald lake set like a jewel in the mountains.
john Stuart accompanied Fraser as lieutenant.
They thought the white men in smoking were emitting spirits with each breath.
When the traders offered soap to the squaws, the women at once began to devour it.
History does not record whether the women became as addicted to soap as the men to the fragrant weed.
It was four or five miles wide, and was gemmed with green islets; and all round, appearing through the clouds in jagged outline, were the opal summits of the snowy peaks.
No wonder the two Scotsmen named the new inland empire New Caledonia-after their native land.
This was forty miles south of Stuart Lake, at the headwaters of the Nechaco, the north fork of the Fraser.
Again a fort was erected and named Fort Fraser, making three forts in the interior of New Caledonia.
Fraser had sent a request to the directors of the north-west Company to be permitted to fit out an expedition down the great river, which he thought was the Columbia; and in the spring of eighteen o seven two canoes under Jules Quesnel were sent out with goods.
Fraser went down the river and strengthened British possession by building a fourth fort-Fort George at the mouth of the Nechaco.
On the third day they passed Mackenzie's farthest south-the site of the present Alexandria.
Below this the river was unexplored and unknown.
In sublime unconsciousness of heroism Fraser records:
I ordered the five best men of the crews into a canoe lightly loaded; and in a moment it was under way.
To continue by water would be certain destruction.
The bank was high and steep.
However, we cleared the bank before dark.
Indians warned the white men to desist from their undertaking.
Better, they advised, go overland eastward to a great peaceful river and descend that to the sea.
Fraser, of course, did not know that the peaceful river they spoke of was really the Columbia.
He thought the river he was following was the Columbia.
Beyond it several minor rapids were passed without difficulty; and then they came upon a series of great whirlpools which seemed impassable.
But the men unloaded the canoes and-'a desperate undertaking'--ran them down the rapids with light ballast.
They then came back overland for the packs.
This task [says Fraser] was as dangerous as going by water.
The men passed and repassed a declivity, on loose stones and gravel, which constantly gave way under foot.
One man, who lost the path, got in a most intricate and perilous position.
I crawled, not without great risk, to his assistance, and saved his life by cutting his pack so [that] it dropped back in the river.
Thus skimming along as fast as lightning, the crews, cool and determined, followed each other in awful silence; and when we arrived at the end, we stood gazing at each other in silent congratulation on our narrow escape from total destruction.
The natives here warned Fraser that it would be madness to go forward. At the same time they furnished him with a guide.
The Indians declared that the sea lay only ten 'sleeps' distant.
One of the chiefs said that he had himself seen white men, who were great 'tyees,' because 'they were well dressed and very proud and went about this way'--clapping his hands to his hips and strutting about with an air of vast importance. The Indians told Fraser of another great river that came in from the east and joined this one some distance below.
The voyageurs again embarked, and swept down the narrow bends of the turbulent floods at what are now Lytton, Yale, and Hope.
The return journey was fraught with danger.
Then he forced each voyageur to swear on the Cross: 'I do solemnly swear that I will sooner perish than forsake in distress any of our crew during the present voyage.' With renewed self respect they then paddled off, singing voyageurs' songs to keep up their courage. Imagine, for a moment, the scene!
Strange that the Spaniards should look on complaisantly while English traders from China-Meares and Hanna and Barkley and Douglas-were taking possession of Nootka.
The answer came unexpectedly.
Some of the names, however, were afterwards changed.
What is to day known as Esquimalt, Quimper called Valdes, and Victoria he named Cordoba.
Loop holes punctured the palisades of the fort, and cannon were above the gates.
On the morning of the twentieth the woods were seen to be alive with Indians.
Let us leave him for the present stealing furtively along the coast from Cape Flattery to Cape Disappointment.
It was the spring of seventeen ninety two.
It was a new river, with wonderful purple water-the purple of river silt blending with ocean blue.
The ragged starveling crew of Pilot Narvaez had found what are now known as Burrard Inlet, Vancouver City, Point Grey, Shaughnessy Heights, and the Fraser River.
Narvaez himself lay almost unconscious in his berth.
Yet they sang as they sailed their rickety death traps, and they laughed as they rowed; and when the tide rip caught them, they sank without a cry to any but the Virgin.
First were the Spaniards at every harbour gate; and yet to day, of all their deep-sea findings on that coast, not a rod, not a foot, does Spain own.
But if actual accomplishments count, these pilots with their ragged peon crews, half bloods of Aztec woman and Spanish adventurer, deserve higher rank in the roll of Pacific coast exploration than history has yet accorded them.
England, it may be believed, did not calmly submit to seeing the ships and forts of her traders seized at Nootka.
And as mistress of the seas, she could not tolerate as much as the seizure of a fishing smack.
For some time there were mutterings of war, but at length diplomacy prevailed. England demanded, among other things, the restoration of the buildings and the land, and full reparation for all losses.
This expedition was commanded by Captain George Vancouver, who had been on the Pacific with Cook.
The American told an astounding story.
He had found Bruno Heceta's River of the West.
Vancouver refused to credit the news; yet there was the ship's log; there were the details-landmarks, soundings, anchorages for twenty miles up the Columbia from its mouth.
Gray had, indeed, been up the river, and had crossed the bar and come out on the Pacific again.
In June the explorers passed up the Strait of Georgia.
Vancouver found the Spaniards occupying a fort on an island at the mouth of the harbour. On the main shore stood the Indian village of Chief Maquinna.
Spanish cannon thundered a welcome that shook the hills, and English guns made answer.
Don Quadra held that he had been instructed to relinquish only the land on which the fort stood-according to Vancouver, 'but little more than one hundred yards in extent any way.' No understanding could be arrived at, and Quadra at the end of September took his departure for Monterey, leaving Vancouver to follow a few days later.
Vancouver was anxious to be off on further exploration.
He spent most of October exploring this river.
Explorers in that day, as in this, were not fair judges of each other's feats.
Vancouver then visited the presidio at San Francisco, and thence proceeded to Monterey, where Quadra awaited him.
His lieutenant, Broughton, who had been in charge of the boats that explored the Columbia, here left him and accompanied Quadra to San Blas, whence he went overland to the Atlantic and sailed for England, bearing dispatches to the government.
Portland Canal, Jervis Inlet, Cook Inlet, Prince William Sound, Lynn Canal-all were traced to head waters by Vancouver.
CHAPTER fourteen.
JEALOUSY.
At the close of the game there was another boy on the field who was quite as glum and downcast as Hooker himself.
This was Phil Springer, who remained seated on the bench while his team mates and a portion of the enthusiastic crowd swarmed, cheering, around Grant and lifted him to their shoulders.
Presently he realized that this behavior on his part must attract attention the moment the excitement relaxed, and he got up with the intention of hurrying at once to the gymnasium.
Barely had he started, however, when something brought him to a halt, and beneath his breath he muttered:
"That won't do.
He was jealous-bitterly so; but he forced himself to join the cheering crowd and to make a half hearted pretense of rejoicing.
For Phil had long entertained the ambition of becoming the first pitcher on the academy nine, and this year he had been fully confident until the present hour that the goal he sought was his beyond dispute.
So many persons wished to shake hands with Rodney Grant that he laughingly protested, saying they would put his "wing out of commission." Suddenly perceiving Phil, the Texan pushed aside those between them, sprang forward and placed a hand on Springer's shoulder, crying:
"Here's my mentor.
Only for him, I'd never been able to do it.
I owe what little I know about pitching to Springer.
Let's give him a cheer, fellows."
They did so, but that cheer lacked the spontaneous enthusiasm and genuine admiration which had been thrown into the cheering for Grant, something which Springer did not fail to note.
"Oh, thanks," said Phil, weakly returning the warm grasp of Rod's strong hand.
"I didn't do anything-except blow up."
Under cover of the chatter, joking and laughter, while they were changing their clothes in the dressing room of the gymnasium, Grant, observing the dejection Springer could not hide to save himself, again uttered some friendly words of encouragement.
"Don't you feel so bad about it, old partner," he said.
"The best professional pitchers in the business get their bumps sometimes, and I might have got mine, all right, if I'd started the game on the slab, as you did.
You'll make up for that next time."
"You're very kind, Grant," was Springer's only response.
Phil got away from the others as soon as he could, and hurried home to brood over it.
It had been a hard blow, and he had stood up poorly beneath it.
Thinking the matter over in solitude, he was forced into a realization of the fact that he lacked, in a great measure, the confidence and steadiness characteristic of Rodney Grant, and he could not put aside the conviction that it was Grant, the fellow he had coached, who was destined to become the star pitcher of the nine.
In spite of himself, this thought, aided by other unpleasant contemplations, awoke in his heart a sensation of envious resentment toward Rodney.
He was sorry now that he had ever spent his time teaching the Texan to pitch, and it occurred to him that the same amount of coaching and encouragement bestowed upon Hooker would not have resulted in the training of a man to outdo him upon the slab and push him into the background.
When practice time came after school was over, he put on his suit and appeared upon the field, but soon complained that he was not feeling well, and departed.
When he arrived at school, a few minutes before time for the morning session to begin, Grant was waiting for him.
"What became of you after breakfast, partner?" questioned Rod.
"I piked over to your ranch looking for you, but you had disappeared. Your mother said you were around a few moments before, and she thought you must be somewhere about; all the same, I couldn't find hide or hair of you."
"I-I took a walk," faltered Phil, flushing.
"Got a cold, eh?" said Rodney sympathetically.
"You caught it sitting on the bench during the last four innings of that game, I reckon.
I remember now that you didn't even put on your sweater."
"Yes, I guess that's when I got it," agreed Phil.
"Well, you've got to shake it in time for the game with Clearport. That's when you'll even things up."
All that day Springer sought to avoid talking baseball with any of the fellows, for invariably they spoke of Grant's surprisingly successful performance; and when they did so something like a sickening poison seemed to bubble within the jealous youth, who told himself that he could not long continue to join in this praise, but must soon betray himself by bursting forth into a tirade against the Texan.
In a measure he did relieve his feelings by expressing his opinion of Herbert Rackliff, who was brazenly seeking to ignore the open disdain of his schoolmates.
He did not come out for practice that night, and Grant explained to the others that Phil was knocked out by a cold, whereupon Cooper chucklingly remarked that he thought it was Barville that had knocked Springer out.
Shortly before dark, Phil, chancing to take a cross cut from Middle Street to High Street, observed Roy Hooker pelting away with a baseball at the white shingle on the barn.
Drawing near, Phil asked Roy what he was doing, and the latter, startled and perspiring, looked round.
"Oh, is it you?" said Roy.
"I thought perhaps it was Rackliff.
I'm practicing a little by my lonesome."
"That's a hard way to practice," said Springer.
"You can't get much good out of that."
"Oh, I don't know.
I'm getting so I can hit that shingle once in a while, and use a curve, too.
I couldn't seem to hit it with a straight ball when I began."
"You haven't given up the idea of pitching?"
"Not quite.
After watching your performance Saturday-seeing you soak a batter in the ribs, and then hand out free passes enough to force a run-I came to realize what control means.
I'm trying to get it."
Phil felt his face burn.
"Control is necessary," he admitted; "but it isn't everything.
When I put the ball over, they pup pounded it."
"But they wouldn't if it hadn't been for----" Choking, as he realized what he had so nearly said, Hooker bit his tongue.
Then he hastened to make an observation that snapped Springer's self restraint.
"They didn't seem to pound Grant much, and he appeared able to put the ball just about where he wanted to."
"Grant!" snarled Phil furiously.
Grant, Grant, Grant!
It makes me tired!"
"It does, does it?
Well, say, didn't you realize what you were doing while you were coaching that fellow?
I knew what would happen.
I knew the time would come when you'd be mighty sore with yourself.
I'm going to talk plain to you.
This fellow Grant is practically an outsider; he doesn't belong in Oakdale. He's a presuming cub, too-always pushing himself forward.
You won't be in it hereafter; he'll be the whole show."
"He may get his some time."
"He may, and then again he may not; you can't be sure of it.
If you'd only spent your time with me, I would have been willing to act as second string pitcher, and you would not have been crowded out.
You put your foot in it, all right, old man."
"I suppose I did.
But let's not talk about it.
You weren't at school to day."
"How did that happen?"
"Working."
"Working?
How careless!
I didn't know you ever did such a thing."
"Well," said Roy slowly, "this was a case of necessity, you see."
"Lost it?"
"Yes; lost it, or-or something," Roy replied stumblingly.
"It wasn't much, but it was all she had.
She'd saved up a little at a time to buy material for a new dress."
"How did she happen to lul lose it?"
"I can't tell.
She doesn't quite know herself.
"That sounds like a robbery instead of a loss."
"But it couldn't be a robbery," protested Hooker quickly and earnestly. "Nobody would come into the house and take money out of that drawer-nobody around here.
You never hear of such a thing happening around this town.
Perhaps mother mislaid it somewhere.
Anyhow, it's gone, and I'm going to try to earn enough to replace it."
"Well, say, Hooker," exclaimed Phil, "you're all right!
I didn't suppose you'd stoop to work, even under such circumstances.
Do you know, lots of times we're liable to misjudge some one until something happens to show us just the sort of a person he is."
"Yes; I suppose that's right," said Roy.
But he did not look Phil in the eyes.
CHAPTER fifteen.
PLAIN TALK FROM ELIOT.
"How's your cold, Phil?"
It was Eliot who asked the question, and Springer, pausing with one foot on the academy steps, replied:
"Oh, it's some bub better, I think."
"Glad to hear it," said Roger, slipping his arm through Springer's. "Come on, let's walk over yonder to the fence.
I want to have a little chin with you.
It will be ten minutes yet before school begins."
Together they walked to the fence at the back of the yard, pausing beneath one of the tall old trees which was putting forth tender green leaves.
Leaning against the fence, the captain of the nine faced his companion.
"As a rule," he began, "you've been a great enthusiast over baseball, and I didn't think you'd let a slight cold keep you away from practice. Exercise is one of the best remedies for a cold, if a person takes care of himself when he's through exercising."
"I know that," said Phil, poking his toe into an ant's nest and declining to meet Roger's steady, level gaze; "but, really, I-I was feeling pretty rotten, you know, and I didn't have mum much heart for practice."
"Yes," said the captain, "I'm afraid that was the principal trouble-you didn't have much heart for it.
You lost heart in the game, and you haven't braced up yet.
I hardly thought it of you, Phil; I didn't expect you to play the baby."
"The baby!" exclaimed Springer resentfully.
"Yes; that's just what you've been doing.
I made up my mind to speak plainly to you, and I'm going to do so-for your own good.
You've been sulking, old fellow.
It doesn't pay, Phil; you're hurting yourself far more than any one else."
"I don't think you've got any right to call it sulking," objected Springer in a low tone.
"Is that the reason why you've been giving Rod Grant the cold shoulder?"
"I haven't been giving him---- What has he said to you, Eliot?
"Not a word."
"It was apparent to the dullest, Phil.
For some time before that game you and Grant were very chummy; you were nearly always together, so that everybody noticed it.
Weakly Springer sought to protest against this, but stopped in the midst of it, fully comprehending how feeble his words were.
"It's folly, Springer," said Eliot, "sheer childish folly.
We were all sorry to see you get your bumps and lose control, and I don't believe any one was any sorrier than Grant himself; for, somehow, I've come firmly to believe that he's on the square.
He was reluctant about going on to the slab when I called him."
"Perhaps that was because he was afraid he'd get his, too," muttered Springer.
"Now, that isn't generous, and you know it.
If the score had been heavy against us at the time, some fellows might have fancied Grant's reluctance was prompted by fear and a disinclination to shoulder another man's load in the first game he pitched.
I've not sized it up as anything of the sort.
You and he were close friends, and, knowing how you must feel to be batted out, he was loath to go in.
You must realize it was a mighty lucky thing for us that we had a pitcher to take your place.
Barville had you going, Phil, and you couldn't seem to steady down.
Even old stagers get into that condition sometimes when pitching, and it's not an infrequent occurrence that a slabman who is not thought so good steps in and stops the slaughter."
"Every bub body seems to think Grant is pretty good," mumbled Springer.
"He certainly did amazingly well, for which he generously gave you all the credit."
"I suppose he'll be the whole shooting match, now."
"Those words betray you, my boy.
You've been trapped by the green eyed monster.
The color mounted into Phil's cheeks and slowly receded, leaving him pale, and still with downcast eyes.
Eliot went on, steadily and earnestly:
"We need two pitchers-we must have them if we hope to make a decent showing in the series.
By and by we'll have to play two games a week, and some of those games come so close together that one pitcher alone, unless he has an arm of iron, can't do all the flinging.
You've been wonderfully successful in coaching Grant, and all the time you were training him to relieve you in a measure when the hardest work should come.
But if you continue to sulk, as you have for the past few days, you'll lose the sympathy of your teammates; but you won't hurt Grant-otherwise than his feelings."
"I don't believe it would hurt his feelings a great deal."
Roger was vexed, but he continued to maintain his calm manner.
"You ought to know him better than any one else around here; you ought to know whether he's at all sensitive or not.
I'll tell you honestly, if I were in his place to day, I'd feel it.
Now, I'm your friend, old fellow, and I want you to listen to me and take my advice.
You'll have plenty of chances to show the stuff you're made of."
"I don't suppose the fellows have much confidence in me now."
Unless they're chumps, they know every pitcher has his off days.
There'll be a practice game to night; we'll play against a picked up scrub team.
Now, I want to see you at the field in a suit and ready to do your part."
"All right," agreed Phil.
And Grant, having begun to feel piqued, made no further advances.
At noon that day Roy Hooker returned to school, bringing a written excuse from his mother.
Having a chance to speak privately with Springer, he said:
"I hear Eliot has expressed his estimation of you and Rod Grant."
Phil started.
"They say Eliot has said Grant will make a better pitcher than you, because you lack heart."
It was a blow below the belt, and, in spite of himself, Phil could not help showing the effect.
Nevertheless, he was so much disturbed that, in spite of his promise to Roger, he was not with the team when it took the field that night for the practice game.
For he himself had vainly sought to put aside the depressing and unnerving conviction that in steadiness, stamina and self confidence, Rodney Grant was his superior; something he had determined never to breathe to any one else, but which the keen judgment of the team captain had found out.
Nevertheless, when he reached home by a roundabout course, and found it impossible to dismiss thoughts of the boys engaged in that practice game, he eventually decided that he was a fool.
It did not take him long to shed his outer clothes and get into a baseball suit.
The game was in the second inning, with the regular team at bat and Hooker pitching for the scrub, which was made up partly of grammar school boys.
Everybody seemed to be watching Roy, and Phil walked on to the field and toward one of the benches without attracting attention.
"Look at Hook!" whooped Chipper Cooper.
"He's actually trying to strike Roger out!"
Eliot was at bat, and the umpire had just called the second strike on him.
There were no runners on the sacks.
"I guess that's got him puffed up some."
Apparently not at all discomposed by these remarks, Hooker continued steadily about his business, and presently, rousing a shout of surprise, he succeeded in fanning the captain of the nine.
Roger stepped back from the plate, after striking out, and stood there gazing at Roy, with one of his strange, rare smiles.
Crane followed.
A moment later Hooker pulled him handsomely on a wide one, and the first strike was called, Cooper being again awakened to a wondering, whooping state of merriment.
"Look out! look out!" shouted the little fellow.
"He'll get you if you don't.
Who said Hooky couldn't pitch?
There's more pitch in him than you can find in a big chew of spruce gum."
Crane, setting his teeth, made two fouls, and then sent Chipper into real convulsions by whiffing at a high one which Roy whistled across his shoulders with surprising accuracy.
"You wanted to see it," yelled Cooper.
"You got a look, all right. Oh, say!
Where did this new Christy Mathewson come from, anyhow?
Look out for him, Roddy, or he'll add you to his list.
List' to my warning."
Rodney Grant did not strike out, but, nevertheless, he failed to meet one of Hooker's shoots squarely, and the grammar school shortstop gathered in an easy grounder and threw to first for the third put out.
Roger Eliot lingered to speak a word to Hooker, and Springer, still unnoticed, plainly heard what he said.
"Perhaps we've made a mistake in sizing you up, Roy, old fellow.
It's your work alone that has prevented us from scoring in either of these innings.
You've always had speed and curves, but now you seem able to get the pill over.
Part Fourth
AT SHASTON
"Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before the Good of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or Protestant, or what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee."--J.
(as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions-all now ruthlessly swept away-throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel.
To this fair creation of the great Middle Age the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the death knell.
With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a general ruin: the Martyr's bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.
It has a unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp, rising on the north, south, and west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture-South, Mid, and Nether Wessex-being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller's eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs.
In front of the schools, which were extensive and stone built, grew two enormous beeches with smooth mouse coloured trunks, as such trees will only grow on chalk uplands.
Within the mullioned and transomed windows he could see the black, brown, and flaxen crowns of the scholars over the sills, and to pass the time away he walked down to the level terrace where the abbey gardens once had spread, his heart throbbing in spite of him.
The imposed hand was a little one he seemed to know, and he turned.
"Don't stop," said Sue.
"I like it.
They used to play it in the training school."
Play it for me."
"Oh well-I don't mind."
She, like him, was evidently touched-to her own surprise-by the recalled air; and when she had finished, and he moved his hand towards hers, it met his own half-way.
jude grasped it-just as he had done before her marriage.
"I am not that sort-quite."
"Not easily moved?"
"I didn't quite mean that."
She played on and suddenly turned round; and by an unpremeditated instinct each clasped the other's hand again.
"I wonder what we both did that for?"
"I suppose because we are both alike, as I said before."
Perhaps a little in our feelings."
"And they rule thoughts...
"What-you know him?"
"I went to see him."
Why did you?"
"Because we are not alike," he said drily.
It is no trouble to get the kettle and things brought in.
In a new place like these schools there is only your own life to support.
Sit down, and I'll tell Ada to bring the tea things across."
He waited in the light of the stove, the door of which she flung open before going out, and when she returned, followed by the maiden with tea, they sat down by the same light, assisted by the blue rays of a spirit lamp under the brass kettle on the stand.
"This is one of your wedding presents to me," she said, signifying the latter.
"Yes," said jude.
You don't read them in the school I suppose?"
"It is quite like the genuine article.
She regarded him curiously.
"Why do you look at me like that?" said jude.
"We won't get on to that now!" she coaxed.
"Yes, perhaps."
"no Don't come!"
"no"
"I didn't know that.
"No, I am not."
Now you must go.
I am sorry my husband is not at home."
"Are you?"
"When do you leave here to catch your train, jude?" she asked.
He looked up in some surprise.
"What will you do with yourself for the time?"
Stay there."
"Where?"
I can talk to you better like this than when you were inside...
You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear jude.
And a tragic Don Quixote.
Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!"
You must come to the house then."
"Yes!" said jude.
"When shall it be?"
"To morrow week.
Good bye-good bye!"
She stretched out her hand and stroked his forehead pitifully-just once.
jude said good bye, and went away into the darkness.
They were entirely in darkness.
A glimmering candlelight shone from a front window, the shutters being yet unclosed.
He could see the interior clearly-the floor sinking a couple of steps below the road without, which had become raised during the centuries since the house was built.
Sue, evidently just come in, was standing with her hat on in this front parlour or sitting room, whose walls were lined with wainscoting of panelled oak reaching from floor to ceiling, the latter being crossed by huge moulded beams only a little way above her head.
The mantelpiece was of the same heavy description, carved with Jacobean pilasters and scroll work.
It was too dark for her to see jude without, but he could see her face distinctly, and there was an unmistakable tearfulness about the dark, long lashed eyes.
"Whose photograph was she looking at?" he said.
He had once given her his; but she had others, he knew.
But he could not.
However, if God disposed not, woman did.
He replied:
I acquiesce.
You are right.
jude.
Come at once.
He threw down his tools and went.
"I can see in his face that she is dead," said jude.
"Poor Aunt Drusilla!"
He wrote in the briefest terms:
Aunt Drusilla is dead, having been taken almost suddenly. The funeral is on Friday afternoon.
She had not written, and that seemed to signify rather that she would come than that she would not.
And so-at the last moment-I came."
"Yes. Particularly for members of our family."
Sue was silent.
"Yes, I suppose.
"But even apart from that?
jude threw a troubled look at her.
He said, looking away: "It would be just one of those cases in which my experiences go contrary to my dogmas.
Sue, I believe you are not happy!"
"'Chose freely!'"
But I have to go back by the six o'clock train.
This house is gone now. Shall I go to the train with you?"
"I think not.
You may come part of the way."
"But stop-you can't go to night!
You must stay and go back to morrow.
"Very well," she said dubiously.
"No!
Why?"
"I can't tell you all my part of the gloom.
Your part is that you ought not to have married him.
I was wrong.
Her hand lay on the table, and jude put his upon it.
There, you may hold it as much as you like.
Is that good of me?"
"Yes; very."
"But I must tell him."
"Richard."
"That's news.
How has it come to be?"
She winced at the hit; then said curiously, "When did you see her?"
"When I was at Christminster."
"So she's come back; and you never told me!
"Of course-just as you live with your husband."
"What is it?" said jude, in a softened tone.
Of course it is not now!
"A special Providence, I suppose, helped it on its way."
"You are teasing me-that's all-because you think I am not happy!"
Do you think, jude, that a man ought to marry a woman his own age, or one younger than himself-eighteen years-as I am than he?"
jude could hardly speak, but he said, "I thought there was something wrong, Sue!
Don't-don't!"
"I told you not to, jude!"
jude did not follow her.
In the lonely room of his aunt's house, jude sat watching the cottage of the Widow Edlin as it disappeared behind the night shade. He knew that Sue was sitting within its walls equally lonely and disheartened; and again questioned his devotional motto that all was for the best.
It was the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin.
As was the little creature's habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and probably would not do so more than once or twice; but would remain bearing its torture till the morrow when the trapper would come and knock it on the head.
He reached the hedge bordering the widow's garden, when he stood still.
The faint click of the trap as dragged about by the writhing animal guided him now, and reaching the spot he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck with the side of his palm, and it stretched itself out dead.
"It is you-is it not?"
"Yes, dear!"
They ought not to be allowed to set these steel traps, ought they!"
"Did it keep you awake?" he said.
"No-I was awake."
"How was that?"
"I knew it-I knew it!
But-I am SO GLAD to see you!--and, oh, I didn't mean to see you again, now the last tie between us, Aunt Drusilla, is dead!"
jude seized her hand and kissed it.
"There is a stronger one left!" he said.
Let them go!
"Don't say it!--I know what you mean; but I can't admit so much as that.
There!
Guess what you like, but don't press me to answer questions!"
"I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!"
"I CAN'T be!
And I MUST tell somebody!
So I rushed on, when I had got into that training school scrape, with all the cock sureness of the fool that I was! ...
How I wish-I wish-"
"You must go in now!"
THE 'ARGONAUTS'
Early in eighteen forty nine the sleepy quiet of Victoria, Vancouver Island, was disturbed by the arrival of straggling groups of ragged nondescript wanderers, who were neither trappers nor settlers.
They carried blanket packs on their backs and leather bags belted securely round the waist close to their pistols.
They did not wear moccasins after the fashion of trappers, but heavy, knee high, hobnailed boots.
In place of guns over their shoulders, they had picks and hammers and such stout sticks as mountaineers use in climbing.
They did not forgather with the Indians.
They shunned the Indians and had little to say to any one.
They volunteered little information as to whence they had come or whither they were going.
They sought out Roderick Finlayson, chief trader for the Hudson's Bay Company.
They unstrapped those little leather bags round under their cartridge belts and produced in tiny gold nuggets the price of what they had bought.
Finlayson did not know exactly what to do.
The miner, wherever he went, sounded the knell of fur trading; and the trapper did not like to have his game preserve overrun by fellows who scared off all animals from traps, set fire going to clear away underbrush, and owned responsibility to no authority.
No doubt these men were 'argonauts' drifted up from the gold diggings of California; no doubt they were searching for new mines; but who had ever heard of gold in Vancouver Island, or in New Caledonia, as the mainland was named?
If there had been gold, would not the company have found it?
He handled their nuggets doubtfully.
Who knew for a certainty that it was gold anyhow?
Finlayson, smiling sceptically, did as he was told.
The nuggets flattened to a yellow leaf as fine and flexible as silk.
It proved sixteen dollars to the ounce.
Many of the company's servants drifted away to California in the wake of the 'Forty Niners,' and the company found it hard to keep its trappers from deserting all up and down the Pacific Coast.
The quest for gold had become a sort of yellow fever madness.
Men flung certainty to the winds and trekked recklessly to California, to Oregon, to the hinterland of the country round Colville and Okanagan.
Yet nothing occurred to cause any excitement in Victoria.
But the nugget was an isolated freak; the quartz could not be worked at a profit; and the movement suddenly died out.
Though Maclean, the chief factor at Kamloops, kept all the specks and flakes brought to his post as samples from eighteen fifty two to eighteen fifty six, he had less than would fill a half pint bottle.
If a half pint is counted as a half pound and the gold at the company's price of eleven dollars an ounce, it will be seen why four years of such discoveries did not set Victoria on fire.
It has been so with every discovery of gold in the history of the world.
Victoria went to sleep again.
When men drifted in to trade dust and nuggets for picks and flour, the fur traders smiled, and rightly surmised that the California diggings were playing out.
He was assisted in the administration by a council of three, nominated by himself-john Tod, james Cooper, and Roderick Finlayson.
Because California and Oregon had gone American, some small British warships lay at Esquimalt harbour.
The little fort had expanded beyond the stockade.
The governor's house was to the east of the stockade.
A new church had been built, and the Rev.
Edward Cridge, afterwards known as Bishop Cridge, was the rector.
Inside the fort were perhaps forty five employees.
Inside and outside lived some eight hundred people.
But grass grew in the roads.
Three hundred acres about the fort were worked by the company as a farm, which gave employment to about two dozen workmen, and on which were perhaps a hundred cattle and a score of brood mares.
The company also had a saw mill.
Buildings of huge, squared timbers flanked three sides of the inner stockades-the dining hall, the cook house, the bunk house, the store, the trader's house.
There were two bastions, and from each cannon pointed.
The fort was sound asleep, secure in an eternal certainty that the domain which it guarded would never be overrun by American settlers as California and Oregon had been.
The little Admiralty cruisers which lay at Esquimalt were guarantee that New Caledonia should never be stampeded into a republic by an inrush of aliens.
Then, as now, it was Victoria's boast that it was more English than England.
Then, in march eighteen fifty eight, just when Victoria felt most secure as the capital of a perpetual fur realm, something happened.
The Hudson's Bay men had thought nothing of this. Other treasure seekers had come to New Caledonia before and had gone back to San Francisco disappointed.
And with them came a mad rabble of gold crazy prospectors.
A city of tents sprang up overnight round Victoria.
The smithy was besieged for picks, for shovels, for iron ladles.
Men stood in long lines for their turn at the trading store.
By canoe, by dugout, by pack horse, and on foot, they planned to ascend the Fraser, and they mobbed the company for passage to Langley by the first steamer out from Victoria.
Goods were paid for in cash.
Before Finlayson could believe his own eyes, he had two million dollars in his safe, some of it for purchases, some of it on deposit for safe keeping. Though the company gave no guarantee to the depositors and simply sealed each man's leather pouch as it was placed in the safe, no complaint was ever made against it of dishonesty or unfair treatment.
Without waiting instructions from England and with poignant memory of Oregon, Governor Douglas at once clapped on a licence of twenty one shillings a month for mining privileges under the British crown.
Thus he obtained a rough registration of the men going to the up country; but thousands passed Victoria altogether and went in by pack train from Okanagan or rafted across from Puget Sound.
Another boat load of eight hundred and fifty came in April.
In four months sixty seven vessels, carrying from a hundred to a thousand men each, had come up from San Francisco to Victoria.
Crews deserted their ships, clerks deserted the company, trappers turned miners and took to the gold bars.
Before Victoria awoke to what it was all about, twenty thousand people were camped under tents outside the stockade, and the air was full of the wildest rumours of fabulous gold finds.
In the spring the Fraser rolled to the sea a swollen flood.
Against the turbid current worked tipsy rafts towed by wheezy steamers or leaky old sailing craft, and rickety row boats raced cockle shell canoes for the gold bars above.
Ashore, the banks of the river were lined with foot passengers toiling under heavy packs, wagons to which clung human forms on every foot of space, and long rows of pack horses bogged in the flood of the overflowing river.
Victoria was a ten hour trip from the mainland.
Whatcom and Townsend, on the American side, advertised the advantages of the Washington route to the Fraser river gold mines.
A mushroom boom in town lots had sprung up at these points before Victoria was well awake.
By the time speculators reached Victoria the best lots in that place had already been bought by the company's men; and some of the substantial fortunes of Victoria date from this period.
Though the river was so high that the richest bars could not be worked till late in August, five hundred thousand dollars in gold was taken from the bed of the Fraser during the first six months of 'fifty eight.
This amount, divided among the ten thousand men who were on the bars around Yale, would not average as much as they could have earned as junior clerks with the fur company, or as peanut pedlars in San Francisco; but not so does the mind of the miner work.
Later these tolls were disallowed by the home authorities.
The prompt action of Douglas, however, had the effect of keeping the mining movement in hand.
Though the miners were of the same class as the 'argonauts' of California, they never broke into the lawlessness that compelled vigilance committees in San Francisco.
Judge Howay gives the letter of a treasure seeker who reached the Fraser in April, the substance of which is as follows:
About a fourth of the canoes that attempt to come up are lost in the rapids which extend from Fort Yale nearly to the Forks.
A few days ago six men were drowned by their canoe upsetting.
There is more danger going down than coming up.
There can be no doubt about this country being immensely rich in gold.
Almost every bar on the river from Yale up will pay from three dollars to seven dollars a day to the man at the present stage of water.
When the river gets low, which will be about August, the bars will pay very well.
We only commenced work yesterday and we are satisfied that when we get fully under way we can make from five dollars to seven dollars a day each.
The prospect is better as we go up the river on the bars.
The gold is not any coarser, but there is more of it.
There are also in that region diggings of coarser gold on small streams that empty into the main river.
A few men have been there and proved the existence of rich diggings by bringing specimens back with them.
The Indians all along the river have gold in their possession that they say they dug themselves, but they will not tell where they get it, nor allow small parties to go up after it.
The Indians above are disposed to be troublesome and went into a camp twenty miles above us and forcibly took provisions and arms from a party of four men and cut two severely with their knives.
They came to our camp the same day and insisted that we should trade with them or leave the country.
We design to remain here until we can get a hundred men together, when we will move up above the falls and do just what we please without regard to the Indians.
We are at present the highest up of any white men on the river, and we must go higher to be satisfied.
There is a pack trail from Hope, but it cannot be travelled till the snow is off the mountains.
The prices of provisions are as follows: flour thirty five dollars per hundred weight, pork a dollar a pound, beans fifty cents a pound, and other things in proportion.
Every party that starts from the Sound should have their own supplies to last them three or four months, and they should bring the largest size chinook canoes, as small ones are very liable to swamp in the rapids.
Each canoe should be provided with thirty fathoms of strong line for towing over swift water, and every man well armed.
The Indians here can beat anything alive stealing. They will soon be able to steal a man's food after he has eaten it.
Within two miles of Yale eighty Indians and thirty white men were working the gold bars; and log boarding houses and saloons sprang up along the river bank as if by magic.
Naturally, the last comers of 'fifty eight were too late to get a place on the gold bars, and they went back to the coast in disgust, calling the gold stampede 'the Fraser River humbug.' Nevertheless, men were washing, sluicing, rocking, and digging gold as far as Lillooet.
That is the hope that draws the prospector from river to stream, from stream to dry gully bed, from dry gully to precipice edge, and often over the edge to death or fortune.
Exactly fifty six years from the first rush of 'fifty eight in the month of April, I sat on the banks of the Fraser at Yale and punted across the rapids in a flat bottomed boat and swirled in and out among the eddies of the famous bars.
Higher up could be seen some Chinamen, but whether they were fishing or washing we could not tell.
Two transcontinental railroads skirted the canyon, one on each side, and the tents of a thousand construction workers stood where once were the camps of the gold seekers banded together for protection.
When we came back across the river an old, old man met us and sat talking to us on the bank.
He had come to the Fraser in that first rush of 'fifty eight.
He had been one of the leaders against the murderous bands of Indians.
'But,' he said, pointing his trembling old hands at the two railways, 'if we prospectors hadn't blazed the trail of the canyon, you wouldn't have your railroads here to day.
They only followed the trail we first cut and then built.
We followed the "float" up and they followed us.'
What the trapper was to the fur trade, the prospector was to the mining era that ushered civilization into the wilds with a blare of dance halls and wine and wassail and greed.
CHAPTER four
THE OVERLANDERS
When the Cariboo fever reached the East, the public there had heard neither of the Indian massacres in Oregon nor that the Sioux were on the war path in Dakota.
Promoters who had never set foot west of Buffalo launched wild cat mining companies and parcel express devices and stages by routes that went up sheer walls and crossed unbridged rivers.
To such frauds there could be no certain check; for it took six months to get word in and out of Cariboo.
Eastern papers were full of advertisements of easy routes to the gold diggings.
Far off gold glittered the brighter for the distance. Cariboo became in popular imagination a land where nuggets grew on the side of the road and could be picked by the bushel basket.
Besides, times were so hard in the East that the majority of the youthful adventurers who were caught by the fever had nothing to lose except their lives.
A group of threescore young men from different parts of Canada, from Kingston, Niagara, and Montreal, having noticed advertisements of an easy stage route from saint Paul, set out for the gold diggings in may eighteen sixty two.
Tickets could be purchased in London, England, as well as in Canada, for when these young Canadians reached saint Paul, they found eighteen young men from England, like themselves, diligently searching the whereabouts of the stage route.
That was their first inkling that fraudulent practices were being carried on and that they had been deceived, that there was, in fact, no stage route from saint Paul to Cariboo.
A few of them turned back, but the majority, by ox cart and rickety stagecoach, pushed on to the Red River and went up to a point near the boundary of modern Manitoba, where lay the first steamboat to navigate that river, about to start on her maiden trip.
On the way to the vessel some of the Overlanders had narrowly escaped a massacre.
The story is told that as they slowly made their way in ox carts up the river bank, a band of horsemen swept over the horizon, and the travellers found themselves surrounded by Sioux warriors.
The old plainsman who acted as guide bethought him of a ruse: he hoisted a flag of the Hudson's Bay Company and waved it in the face of the Sioux without speaking.
The painted warriors drew together and conferred.
The oxen stood complacently chewing the cud. Indians never molested British fur traders.
Presently the raiders went off over the horizon as swiftly as they had come, and the gold seekers drove on, little realizing the fate from which they had been delivered.
There had been heavy rains that spring on the prairie, and trees came jouncing down the muddy flood of the Red River.
But everybody was jubilant.
This was the first navigation of the Red River by steam.
The Queen's Birthday, the twenty fourth of May, was celebrated on board the vessel pottle deep to the tune of the bagpipes played by the governor's Scottish piper.
The arrival of the steamer at Fort Garry (Winnipeg) was celebrated with great rejoicing.
Indians ran along the river bank firing off rifles in welcome, and opposite the flats where the fort gate opened, on what is now Main Street, the company's men came out and fired a royal salute. The people bound for Cariboo camped on the flats outside Fort Garry. Here was a strange world indeed.
Two wheeled ox carts, made wholly of wood, without iron or bolt, wound up to the fort from saint Paul in processions a mile long, with fat squaws and whole Indian families sitting squat inside the crib like structure of the cart.
Only a few stores stood along what is now Main Street, which ran northward towards the Selkirk Settlement.
With the Indians, who were camped everywhere in the woods along the Assiniboine, the Overlanders began to barter for carts, oxen, ponies, and dried deer meat or pemmican.
An ox and cart cost from forty to fifty dollars.
Ponies sold at twenty five dollars.
Pemmican cost sixteen cents a pound, and a pair of duffel Hudson's Bay blankets cost eight or ten dollars.
Instead of blankets, many of the travellers bought the cheaper buffalo robes.
These sold as low as a dollar each.
john Black, the Presbyterian 'apostle of the Red River,' preached special sermons on Sunday for the miners.
And on a beautiful June afternoon the Overlanders headed towards the setting sun in a procession of almost a hundred ox carts; and the fort waved them farewell.
One wonders whether, as the last ox cart creaked into the distance, the fur traders realized that the miner heralded the settler, and that the settler would fence off the hunter's game preserve into farms and cities.
The unfenced prairie billowed to the horizon a sea of green, diversified by the sky blue waters of slough and lake, and decked with the hues of gorgeous flowers-the prairie rose, fragrant, tender, elusive, and fragile as the English primrose; the blood red tiger lily; the brown windflower with its corn tassel; the heavy wax cups of the sedgy water lily, growing where wild duck flackered unafraid.
Game was superabundant.
Prairie chickens nestled along the single file trail. Deer bounded from the poplar thickets and shy coyotes barked all night in the offing.
Night in June on the northern prairie is but the shadowy twilight between two long days.
The sun sets between nine and ten, and rises between three and four, and the moonlight is clear enough on cloudless nights for campers to see the time on their watches.
A scout preceded the marchers, and at sundown camp was formed in a big triangle with the carts as a stockade, the animals tethered or hobbled inside.
Tents were pitched outside with six men doing sentry duty all night.
At two in the morning a halloo roused camp.
An hour was permitted for harnessing and breaking camp, and then the carts creaked out in line.
They halted at six for breakfast and marched again at seven.
On Sunday the procession rested and some one read divine service.
The oxen and ponies foraged for themselves.
By limiting camp to five hours, in spite of the slow pace of the oxen, forty to fifty miles a day could be made on a good trail in fair weather.
While the scout led the way, the captain and his lieutenants kept the long procession in line; and the travellers for the most part dozed lazily in their carts, dreaming of the fortunes awaiting them in Cariboo.
Some nights, when the captain permitted a longer halt than usual and when camp fires blazed before the tents, men played the violin and sang and danced.
In the company was one woman, with two children.
She was an Irishwoman; but she bore the name of Shubert, from which we may infer that her husband was not an Irishman.
Another week passed before they arrived at Fort Ellice.
Heavy rains came on now, and james M'Kay, chief trader at Fort Ellice, opened his doors to the gold seekers. Harness and carts repaired and more pemmican bought, the travellers crossed the Qu'Appelle river in a Hudson's Bay scow, paying toll of fifty cents a cart.
From the Qu'Appelle westward the journey grew more arduous.
From Fort Pitt westward the trail crossed a rough, wooded country, and there were no more scows to take the ox carts across the rivers.
Where the trees swerved to the current, some one would swim out and anchor them with ropes till the hundred carts had passed safely to the other side.
It was the twenty first of July when the travellers came out on the high banks of the North Saskatchewan, flowing broad and swift, opposite Fort Edmonton.
There had been floods and all the company's rafts had been carried away.
The arrival of the Overlanders is remembered at Edmonton by some old timers even to this day.
Salvoes of welcome were fired from the fort cannon by a half breed shooting his musket into the touch hole of the big gun.
Concerts were given, with bagpipes, concertinas, flutes, drums, and fiddles, in honour of the far travellers.
Pemmican bags were replenished from the company's stores.
Miners often uttered loud complaints against the charges made by the fur traders for provisions, forgetting what it cost to pack these provisions in by dog train and canoe.
Though the miner did everything to destroy the fur trade-started fires which ravaged the hunter's forest haunts, put up saloons which demoralized the Indians, built wagon roads where aforetime wandered only the shy creatures of the wilds-though the miner heralded the doom of the fur trade-yet with an unvarying courtesy, from Fort Garry to the Rockies, the Hudson's Bay men helped the Overlanders.
A few continued with oxen, and these oxen were to save their lives in the mountains.
'Why?' asked the amused trader.
'Why, now, when the huskies have chewed all you own but your instruments?
You are locking the stable door after your horse has been stolen.'
'No,' answered the prospectors.
'If those husky dogs last night could devour all our camp kit without disturbing us, to night they might swallow us before we'd waken.'
Afterwards many who failed in the mines drifted back to the plains and became farmers.
The same thing had happened in California, and was repeated at a later day in the rush to the Klondike.
Great seams of coal, too, were seen projecting from the banks of the Saskatchewan.
Later, when these belated Overlanders decided to follow on to Cariboo, they suffered terrible hardships.
The Overlanders were to enter the Rockies by the Yellowhead Pass, which had been discovered long ago by Jasper Hawse, of the Hudson's Bay Company.
This section of their trail is visible to the modern traveller from the windows of a Grand Trunk Pacific Railway train, just as the lower sections of the Cariboo Trail in the Fraser Canyon are to be seen from the trains of the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian Northern.
First came the fur trader, seeking adventure through these passes, pursuing the little beaver.
The miner came next, fevered to delirium, lured by the siren of an elusive yellow goddess.
The settler came third, prosaic and plodding, but dauntless too.
And then came the railroad, following the trail which had been beaten hard by the stumbling feet of pioneers.
And to the skirl of the bagpipes the procession wound away westward bound for the mountains.
Instead of the thirty miles a day which they had made farther east, the travellers were now glad to cover ten miles a day.
Three times in one day windfall and swamp forced the party to ford the stream for passage on the opposite side.
The oxen swam and the ox carts floated and the packs came up the bank dripping.
For eleven days in August every soul of the company, including Mrs Shubert's babies, travelled wet to the skin.
At night great log fires were kindled and the Overlanders sat round trying to dry themselves out.
Then the trail lifted to the foothills.
And on the evening of the fifteenth of August there pierced through the clouds the snowy, shining, serrated peaks of the Rockies.
Just beyond the shining mountains lay-Fortune.
What cared these argonauts, who had tramped across the width of the continent, that the lofty mountains raised a sheer wall between them and their treasure?
Cheer on cheer rang from the encampment.
But there were no faint hearts in the camp that night.
Even the Irishwoman's two little children came out and gazed at what they could not understand.
The party now crossed a ravine to the main stream of the Athabaska.
It was necessary to camp here for a week.
To the stern of this was attached a tree, the branch end dipping in the water, as a sweep and rudder to keep the craft to its course.
On this the Overlanders were ferried across the Athabaska.
And so they entered the Yellowhead Pass.
Thus, in this work of world-wide celebrity, is the feline race discussed.
I give the author's words as I find them:--
"The Cat is a faithless domestic, and only kept through necessity to oppose to another domestic which incommodes us still more, and which we cannot drive away; for we pay no respect to those, who, being fond of all beasts, keep Cats for amusement.
They are, naturally, inclined to theft, and the best education only converts them into servile and flattering robbers; for they have the same address, subtlety, and inclination for mischief or rapine.
In his opinion the cat "is a useful but deceitful domestic.
Constantly bent upon theft and rapine, though in a domestic state, it is full of cunning and dissimulation: it conceals all its designs, seizes every opportunity of doing mischief, and then flies from punishment.
In a word, the Cat is totally destitute of friendship."
"No!
That they want strength, both of body and instinct, are dependant, and ill educated?
No! their errors are thrust upon them; they become selfish per force, cowards from their tenacious regard for that personal neatness which they so labour to preserve.
Oh! that all females made such good use of their tongues!
Suppose they only fawn on us because we house and feed them, they have no nobler proofs of friendship with which to thank us; and if their very gratitude for this self interested hire be adduced as a crime, alas!
poor Pussies!
Had Minette been a Thomas, a whiskered fur collared Philander, he would most probably have surmounted that unmanly weakness, and received all favours as but his due.
I never see a mrs Mouser rubbing her soft coat against me, with round upturned eyes, but I translate her purr into words like these:--'I can't swim; I can neither fetch and carry, nor guard the house; I can only love you, mistress; pray accept all I have to offer.'"
An anonymous writer says: "We may learn some useful lessons from Cats, as indeed, from all animals.
In their delicate walking amidst the fragile articles on a table or mantel piece, is illustrated the tact and discrimination by which we should thread rather than force our way; and, in pursuit of our own ends, avoid the injuring of others.
In their noiseless tread and stealthy movements, we are reminded of the frequent importance of secresy and caution prior to action, while their promptitude at the right moment, warns us, on the other hand, against the evils of irresolution and delay.
The curiosity with which they spy into all places, and the thorough smelling which any new object invariably receives from them, commends to us the pursuit of knowledge, even under difficulties.
Cats, however, will never smell the same thing twice over, thereby showing a retentive as well as an acquiring faculty.
What Cat was ever awkward or clumsy?
A cat rolled up into a ball, or crouched with its paws folded underneath it, seems an emblem of repose and contentment.
You never get to the bottom of Cats.
Instances are frequent, I am happy to tell Cat haters, of illustrious persons who have been attached to the feline race, and of Cats who have merited such attachment.
It was at Damascus that the incident above related occurred to Mahomet.
His followers in this place ever afterwards paid a great respect to Cats, and supported the hospital in question by public subscriptions with much liberality.
On the bishop requesting one of the chaplains to help the Signora Desdemona, the butler stepped up to his lordship, and observed, 'My lord, La Signora Desdemona will prefer waiting for the roasts.'"
Gottfried Mind, the celebrated Swiss painter, was called the "Cat Raphael," from the excellence with which he painted that animal.
This peculiar talent was discovered and awakened by chance.
At the time when Frendenberger painted his picture of the "Peasant Clearing Wood," before his cottage, with his wife sitting by, and feeding her child out of a basin, round which a Cat is prowling, Mind, his new pupil, stared very hard at the sketch of this last figure, and Frendenberger asked with a smile whether he thought he could draw a better.
Mind offered to show what he could do, and did draw a Cat, which Frendenberger liked so much that he asked his pupil to elaborate the sketch, and the master copied the scholar's work, for it is Mind's Cat that is engraved in Frendenberger's plate.
It is said that Minette sometimes occupied his lap, while two or three kittens perched on his shoulders; and he was often known to remain for an hour together in almost the same attitude for fear of disturbing them; yet he was generally thought to be a passionate, sour tempered man.
There is a funny story told of Barrett, the painter, another lover of Cats.
He had for pets a Cat and a kitten, its progeny.
Barrett said it was for the Cats to go in and out.
"Why," replied his friend, "would not one do for both?"
"You silly man," answered the painter, "how could the big Cat get into the little hole?"
"But," said his friend, "could not the little one go through the big hole?"
"Dear me," cried Barrett, "so she could; well, I never thought of that."
How many times have her tender caresses made me forget my troubles, and consoled me in my misfortunes.
My beautiful companion at length perished.
You have heard, of course, of Doctor Johnson's feline favourite, and how it fell ill, and how he, thinking the servants might neglect it, himself turned Cat nurse, and having found out that the invalid had a fancy for oysters, daily administered them to poor Pussy until she had quite recovered.
I dare say now, in that tavern parlour where the lexicographer held forth so ably after sun set, he made but scant allusion to his nursing feats, lest some mad wit might have twitted him upon the subject, for you may be sure that the wits of those days, as of ours, could have been mighty satirical on such a theme.
During Madame Helvetius's last illness, the poor animal never quitted her chamber, and though it was removed after her death, it returned again next morning, and slowly and mournfully paced to and fro in the room, crying piteously all the time. Some days after its mistress's funeral, it was found stretched dead upon her grave, having, it would seem, died of grief.
As a strong instance of attachment, I can quote the case of a she Cat of my own, which always waited for me in the passage when I returned home of an evening, and mounted upon my shoulder to ride upstairs.
The Cat is reproached with treachery and cruelty, but Bigland argues that the artifices which it uses are the particular instincts which the all wise Creator has given it, in conformity with the purposes for which it was designed.
Being destined to prey upon a lively and active animal like the mouse, which possesses so many means of escape, it is requisite that it should be artful; and, indeed, the Cat, when well observed, exhibits the most evident proofs of a particular adaptation to a particular purpose, and the most striking example of a peculiar instinct suited to its destiny.
The fox leaves the legs and hinder parts of a hare or rabbit; the weasel and stoat eat the brains, and nibble about the head, and suck the blood; crows and magpies peck at the eyes; the dog tears his prey to pieces indiscriminately; the Cat always turns the skin inside out like a glove.
There was a story attached to each head.
One Cat was killed in such a wood; another in such a hedge row; some in traps, some shot, some knocked on the head with a stick; but what was most remarkable was the different expression of countenance observable in each individual head.
One had died fighting desperately to the last, and giving up its nine lives inch by inch.
Caught in a trap, it had lingered the night through in dreadful agony, the pain of its entrapped limb causing it to make furious efforts to free itself, each effort but lending another torment to the wound.
A third head belonged to a poor little Puss that had died before it had attained the age of cathood; her young life had been knocked out of her with a stick: her head still retained the kitten's playful look, and there was an appealing expression about it as though it had died quickly, wondering in what it had done wrong.
I find a writer upon Cats who speaks thus in their praise:--
"Authors seem to delight in exaggerating the good qualities of the Dog, while they depreciate those of the Cat; the latter, however, is not less useful, and certainly less mischievous, than the former."
He is slye and wittie, and seeth so sharpely that he overcommeth darkness of the nighte by the shyninge lyghte of his eyne.
I have noticed this often myself, and have seen them rush about in a half wild state just before windy weather.
This is a question I cannot say I have gone into deeply.
All Cats are fond of warmth.
A Cat's love of the sunshine is well known, and perhaps this story may not be unfamiliar to the reader:--
The Prince asked for an explanation of this apparent miracle.
"Your Royal Highness," said Fox, "chose, of course, the shady side of the way as most agreeable.
I knew that the sunny side would be left for me, and that Cats prefer the sunshine."
Cats usually, but not always, fall on their feet, because of the facility with which they balance themselves when springing from a height, which power of balancing is in some degree produced by the flexibility of the heel, the bones of which have no fewer than four joints.
Cats alight softly on their feet, because in the middle of the foot is a large ball or pad in five parts, formed of an elastic substance, and at the base of each toe is a similar pad.
A Cat, when falling with its head downwards, curls its body, so that the back forms an arch, while the legs remain extended.
It is a half bred Persian Cat, and its eyes are perfectly blue, with round pupils, not elongated, as those of Cats usually are.
Do you know why Cats always wash themselves after a meal?
A Cat caught a sparrow, and was about to devour it, but the sparrow said,
The Cat, struck with this remark, set the sparrow down, and began to wash his face with his paw, but the sparrow flew away.
This vexed Pussy extremely, and he said,
"As long as I live I will eat first and wash my face afterwards."
A French writer says, the three animals that waste most time over their toilet are cats, flies, and women.
A cat can look round pretty far behind it without moving its body, which might be apt to startle its prey. The spine of the Cat is very full and loose, in order that all its movements in all possible directions and circumstances may be free and unrestrained.
For this purpose, too, all the joints which connect its bones together are extremely loose and free.
The shape of the external ear, or rather cartilaginous portion, is admirably adapted to intercept sounds.
"'A May kitten makes a dirty Cat,' is a piece of Huntingdonshire folk lore," says mr Cuthbert Bede, "quoted to me in order to deter me from keeping a kitten that had been born in May."
Few, even amongst Pussy's most ardent admirers, who possess the faculty of hearing, and have heard the music of Cats, would desire the continuance of their "sweet voices"; yet a concert was exhibited at Paris, wherein Cats were the performers.
They were placed in rows, and a monkey beat time to them, as the Cats mewed; and the historian of the facts relates that the diversity of the tones which they emitted produced a very ludicrous effect.
This would seem to prove that Cats may be taught tricks, which is not generally believed, but is nevertheless the case.
The rete mirabile is much developed in the sheep, but scarcely perceptible in the Cat.
Being an animal which hunts both by day and night, the structure of its visual organs is adjusted for both.
The retina, or expansion of the optic nerve, is most sensitive to the stimulus of light; hence, a well marked ciliary muscle contracts the pupil to a mere vertical fissure during the day, while in the dark, the pupil dilates enormously, and lets in as much light as possible.
Hence, in common with most animals, the Cat is furnished with a nictitating membrane, which is, in fact, a third eyelid, sliding over the transparent cornea beneath the common eyelids.
When these rays reach the observer direct, he sees the lamps or luminiferous bodies themselves, but when he is out of their direct sight, the brightness of their illumination only becomes apparent, through the rays being collected and reflected by some appropriate substance.
The cornea of the eye of the Cat, and of many other animals, has a great power of concentrating the rays and reflecting them through the pupil. Professor Bohn, at Leipsic, made experiments proving that when the external light is wholly excluded, none can be seen in the Cat's eye.
When the animal is alarmed, or first disturbed, it naturally dilates the pupil, and the eye glares; when it is appeased or composed, the pupil contracts, and the light in the eye is no longer seen.
A German savant says, that at the end of each hair of a Cat's whiskers is a sort of bulb of nervous substance, which converts it into a most sensitive feeler.
"Every one must have observed what are usually called the "whiskers" on a Cat's upper lip.
They are organs of touch; they are attached to a bed of close glands under the skin; and each of these long and stiff hairs is connected with the nerves of the lip.
They stand out on each side in the lion, as well as in the common Cat; so that, from point to point, they are equal in width to the animal's body.
If we imagine, therefore, a lion stealing through a covert of wood in an imperfect light, we shall at once see the use of these long hairs.
The Reverend mr Wood expresses an opinion, that on account of the superabundance of electricity which is developed in the Cat, the animal is found very useful to paralysed persons, who instinctively encourage its approach, and from the touch derive some benefit.
The same gentleman, writing of a favourite Cat, says, that if a hair of her mistress's head were laid upon the animal's back it would writhe as though in agony, and rolling on the floor, would strive to free herself from the object of her fears.
It is difficult to account for the fondness of Cats for fish, as nature seems to have given them an appetite, which, with their great antipathy to water, they can rarely gratify unassisted.
Many instances have, however, been recorded of Cats catching fish.
A mr Moody, of Sesmond, near Newcastle upon Tyne, had a Cat in eighteen twenty nine which had been in his possession for some years, and caught fish with great assiduity, and frequently brought them home alive.
At other times they were seen at opposite sides of the river, not far from each other, on the look out for game.
She is now seven years old, and has long been a useful caterer.
The animal is certainly rare, as is also a Queen Anne's farthing; but it is not such a rarity as we are led to believe.
The she Cat goes with young from fifty five to fifty eight days, and generally has four or five kittens at a litter.
Those who wish their Cats to catch mice, I should advise not to neglect the Cat's food.
A good mouser does not eat the mouse.
I have a black Cat, which is very fat, but a wonderful huntsman, and surprisingly nimble at the chase.
It was clear that he had made me a present of the game; and, as we sometimes think, when we make anyone a present of something to eat, it would be more delicate for us to go away immediately, lest it might be supposed we desired to be asked to stop and partake of it, Tom thus departed, no doubt with a similar idea.
"No experiment," says an intelligent writer, "can be more beautiful than that of setting a kitten for the first time before a looking glass.
It again views itself, and tries to touch the image with its foot, suddenly looking at intervals behind the glass.
CHAPTER seven
LIFE AT THE MINES
The ordinary wage was ten dollars a day, and men who could be trusted, and who were brave enough to pack the gold out to the coast, received twenty and even as high as fifty dollars a day.
There is a letter, written by Sir matthew Begbie, describing how the mountain trails were infested that winter by desperadoes lying in wait for the miners who came staggering over the trail literally weighted down with gold.
The miners found what the great banks have always found, that the presence of unused gold is a nuisance and a curse.
In a mining camp there is no mercy for the crook.
If the trail could have told tales, there would have been many a story of dead men washed up on the bars, of sneak thieves given thirty nine lashes and like the scapegoat turned out into the mountain wilds-a rough and ready justice administered without judge or jury.
Mrs Cameron, wife of the famous Cariboo Cameron, lived with her husband on his claim till she died, and many other women lived in the camps with their husbands.
When the road opened, there was a rush of hurdy gurdy girls for dance halls; but that did not modify the rough chivalry of an unwritten law.
They danced a' nicht in dresses licht Fra' late until the early, O! But O, their hearts were hard as flint, Which vexed the laddies sairly, O!
The dollar was their only love, And that they loved fu' dearly, O! They dinna care a flea for men, Let them court hooe'er sincerely, O!
Cariboo was what the miners call a 'he camp.' Not unnaturally, the 'she camps' heard 'the call from Macedonia.' The bishop of Oxford, the bishop of London, the lord mayor of London, and a colonial society in England gathered up some industrious young women as suitable wives for the British Columbia miners.
Alack the day, there was no poet to send letters to the outside world on this handling of Cupid's bow and arrow! The comedy was pushed in the most business like fashion.
Threescore young girls came out under the auspices of the society and the Church, carefully shepherded by a clergyman and a stern matron.
They reached Victoria in September of 'sixty two and were housed in the barracks.
A man looking anything but respect would have been knocked down on the spot.
We laugh now! Victoria did not laugh then.
On the instant, every girl was offered some kind of situation, which she voluntarily and almost immediately exchanged for matrimony.
The disreputable also found their own places.
And the mining camp began to take on an appearance of domesticity and home.
matthew Begbie, later, like Douglas, given a title for his services to the Empire, had, as we have seen, first come out under direct appointment by the crown; and when parliamentary government was organized in British Columbia his position was confirmed as chief justice.
He stood for the rights of the poorest miner.
In private life he was fond of music, art, and literature; but in public life he was autocratic as a czar and sternly righteous as a prophet.
He was a vigilance committee in himself through sheer force of personality.
From hating and fearing him, the camp came almost to worship him.
Many are the stories of his circuits.
You deserve to be hanged.
Had the jury performed their duty, I might have the painful satisfaction of condemning you to death.
You, gentlemen of the jury, permit me to say that it would give me great pleasure to sentence you to be hanged each and every one of you, for bringing in a murderer guilty only of manslaughter.'
On his way down the prisoner escaped from the constable. This type of hair trigger gunmen at once fled the country when Begbie came.
Mr Alexander, one of the Overlanders of 'sixty two, tells how 'Begbie's decisions may not have been good law, but they were first-class justice.' His 'doctrine was that if a man were killed, some one had to be hanged for it; and the effect was salutary.' A man had been sandbagged in a Victoria saloon and thrown out to die.
His companion in the saloon was arrested and tried.
The circumstantial evidence was strong, and the judge so charged the jury.
But the jury acquitted the prisoner.
Dead silence fell in the court room.
The prisoner's counsel arose and requested the discharge of the man.
You can go, and I devoutly hope the next man you sandbag will be one of the jury.' On another occasion a man was found stabbed on the Cariboo Road.
Begbie adjourned the court with the pious wish that the murderer should go out and cut the throats of the jury.
But, in spite of his harsh manner towards the wrong doer, 'the old man,' as the miners affectionately called him, kept law and order.
In the early days gold commissioners not only settled all mining disputes, but acted as judge and jury.
The effect of sudden wealth on some of the hungry, ragged horde who infested Cariboo was of a sort to discount fiction.
A lunatic escaped from a madhouse could not have been more foolish.
He came to the best saloon of Barkerville.
There was still a basket of champagne left.
He danced the hurdy gurdy on that basket till he cut his feet.
The champagne was all gone, but he still had some gold nuggets.
The miner stood and proudly surveyed his own figure in the glass.
He gathered his last nuggets and hurled them in handfuls at the mirror, shattering it in countless pieces.
Then he went out in the night to sleep under the stars, penniless.
He settled down to work for the rest of his life in other men's mines.
I ken a body made a strike. He looked a little lord. He had a clan o' followers Amang a needy horde.
In Barkerville, which became the centre of Cariboo, saloons and dance halls grew up overnight.
Champagne in pint bottles sold at two ounces of gold.
Nails were cheap at a dollar a pound.
Milk was retailed frozen at a dollar a pound.
Boots still cost fifty dollars. Such luxuries as mirrors and stoves cost as high as seven hundred dollars each.
A newspaper was published in Barkerville.
Bull teams of twenty yokes, long lines of pack horses led by a bell mare, mule teams with a tinkling of bells and singing of the drivers, met the stage and passed with happy salute.
This does not mean that the camp had collapsed.
This meant shafts, tunnels, hydraulic machinery, stamp mills.
"Well?"
"There!
I found the tenant.
Night arrived; I allowed it to become quite dark.
I went to work.
They traced her to Chalons, and there they lost her."
"They lost her?"
"And this is all?" said she; "and you stopped there?"
"no"
"Yes, doubtless."
Do you keep a journal?"
So she took them to him and asked him to keep them till her child was born; and no one was present at the time but the headman's wife.
You must have had witnesses in such a business." And they drove her out.
Then the headman was dumbfounded and reluctantly brought out five gold pieces and gave them to the woman.
On the way he met a man who asked him where he was going and he answered that he was going to make a petition to Singh Chando.
"Then," said the man, "make a petition for me also.
The visitors left their carriage at the hotel, outside the precincts, and went to the gates of the monastery on foot.
Except Fyodor Pavlovitch, none of the party had ever seen the monastery, and Miuesov had probably not even been to church for thirty years.
He looked about him with curiosity, together with assumed ease.
The last of the worshippers were coming out of the church, bareheaded and crossing themselves.
Among the humbler people were a few of higher rank-two or three ladies and a very old general.
Yet no official personage met them.
His liberal irony was rapidly changing almost into anger.
"Who the devil is there to ask in this imbecile place?
All at once there came up a bald headed, elderly man with ingratiating little eyes, wearing a full, summer overcoat.
"I know it's the other side of the copse," observed Fyodor Pavlovitch, "but we don't remember the way.
"This way, by this gate, and straight across the copse ... the copse.
"That personage has granted us an audience, so to speak, and so, though we thank you for showing us the way, we cannot ask you to accompany us."
"I've been there.
But his incoherent talk was cut short by a very pale, wan looking monk of medium height, wearing a monk's cap, who overtook them.
The monk, with an extremely courteous, profound bow, announced:
"The Father Superior invites all of you gentlemen to dine with him after your visit to the hermitage.
"That I certainly will, without fail," cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, hugely delighted at the invitation.
And you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, will you go, too?"
"Yes, of course.
What have I come for but to study all the customs here? The only obstacle to me is your company...."
So we will come to dinner. Thank the Father Superior," he said to the monk.
"No, it is my duty now to conduct you to the elder," answered the monk.
But as you please-" the monk hesitated.
"Impertinent old man!" Miuesov observed aloud, while Maximov ran back to the monastery.
"He's like von Sohn," Fyodor Pavlovitch said suddenly.
"Is that all you can think of?...
In what way is he like von Sohn?
"I've seen his portrait.
It's not the features, but something indefinable. He's a second von Sohn.
I can always tell from the physiognomy."
But, look here, Fyodor Pavlovitch, you said just now that we had given our word to behave properly.
Remember it.
You see what a man he is"--he turned to the monk-"I'm afraid to go among decent people with him." A fine smile, not without a certain slyness, came on to the pale, bloodless lips of the monk, but he made no reply, and was evidently silent from a sense of his own dignity.
An outer show elaborated through centuries, and nothing but charlatanism and nonsense underneath," flashed through Miuesov's mind.
"The gates are shut."
And not one woman goes in at this gate.
That's what is remarkable.
And that really is so.
"Women of the people are here too now, lying in the portico there waiting. But for ladies of higher rank two rooms have been built adjoining the portico, but outside the precincts-you can see the windows-and the elder goes out to them by an inner passage when he is well enough.
There is a Harkov lady, Madame Hohlakov, waiting there now with her sick daughter.
They'll turn you out when I'm gone."
Look," he cried suddenly, stepping within the precincts, "what a vale of roses they live in!"
"And was it like this in the time of the last elder, Varsonofy?
They say he used to jump up and thrash even ladies with a stick," observed Fyodor Pavlovitch, as he went up the steps.
He never thrashed any one," answered the monk. "Now, gentlemen, if you will wait a minute I will announce you."
They say he can tell by one's eyes what one has come about.
Chapter six.
He did in fact find his father still at table.
Though there was a dining room in the house, the table was laid as usual in the drawing room, which was the largest room, and furnished with old-fashioned ostentation. The furniture was white and very old, upholstered in old, red, silky material.
In the spaces between the windows there were mirrors in elaborate white and gilt frames, of old-fashioned carving.
On the walls, covered with white paper, which was torn in many places, there hung two large portraits-one of some prince who had been governor of the district thirty years before, and the other of some bishop, also long since dead. In the corner opposite the door there were several ikons, before which a lamp was lighted at nightfall ... not so much for devotional purposes as to light the room.
Fyodor Pavlovitch used to go to bed very late, at three or four o'clock in the morning, and would wander about the room at night or sit in an arm chair, thinking.
When Alyosha came in, dinner was over, but coffee and preserves had been served.
Fyodor Pavlovitch liked sweet things with brandy after dinner. Ivan was also at table, sipping coffee.
Sit down.
I don't offer you brandy, you're keeping the fast.
But would you like some?
Smerdyakov, go to the cupboard, the second shelf on the right.
Here are the keys.
Look sharp!"
If you won't have it, we will," said Fyodor Pavlovitch, beaming.
"But stay-have you dined?"
"Though I should be pleased to have some hot coffee."
He'll have some coffee.
Does it want warming?
No, it's boiling.
It's capital coffee: Smerdyakov's making.
My Smerdyakov's an artist at coffee and at fish patties, and at fish soup, too.
You must come one day and have some fish soup.
Let me know beforehand....
But, stay; didn't I tell you this morning to come home with your mattress and pillow and all?
Have you brought your mattress?
There, my darling, I couldn't do anything to vex you.
Alyosha, let me give you my blessing-a father's blessing."
Alyosha rose, but Fyodor Pavlovitch had already changed his mind.
"I'll just make the sign of the cross over you, for now.
Sit still.
Now we've a treat for you, in your own line, too.
It'll make you laugh.
Balaam's ass has begun talking to us here-and how he talks!
How he talks!"
Not that he was shy or bashful.
On the contrary, he was conceited and seemed to despise everybody.
But we must pause to say a few words about him now.
He was brought up by Grigory and Marfa, but the boy grew up "with no sense of gratitude," as Grigory expressed it; he was an unfriendly boy, and seemed to look at the world mistrustfully.
In his childhood he was very fond of hanging cats, and burying them with great ceremony.
All this he did on the sly, with the greatest secrecy.
He shrank into a corner and sulked there for a week.
"He doesn't care for you or me, the monster," Grigory used to say to Marfa, "and he doesn't care for any one.
Are you a human being?" he said, addressing the boy directly.
Grigory taught him to read and write, and when he was twelve years old, began teaching him the Scriptures.
But this teaching came to nothing.
At the second or third lesson the boy suddenly grinned.
"What's that for?" asked Grigory, looking at him threateningly from under his spectacles.
God created light on the first day, and the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day.
Where did the light come from on the first day?"
Grigory was thunderstruck.
The boy looked sarcastically at his teacher. There was something positively condescending in his expression.
Grigory could not restrain himself.
"I'll show you where!" he cried, and gave the boy a violent slap on the cheek.
The boy took the slap without a word, but withdrew into his corner again for some days.
A week later he had his first attack of the disease to which he was subject all the rest of his life-epilepsy.
When Fyodor Pavlovitch heard of it, his attitude to the boy seemed changed at once.
Till then he had taken no notice of him, though he never scolded him, and always gave him a copeck when he met him. Sometimes, when he was in good humor, he would send the boy something sweet from his table.
But as soon as he heard of his illness, he showed an active interest in him, sent for a doctor, and tried remedies, but the disease turned out to be incurable.
The fits occurred, on an average, once a month, but at various intervals.
The fits varied too, in violence: some were light and some were very severe.
Fyodor Pavlovitch strictly forbade Grigory to use corporal punishment to the boy, and began allowing him to come upstairs to him.
He forbade him to be taught anything whatever for a time, too.
One day when the boy was about fifteen, Fyodor Pavlovitch noticed him lingering by the bookcase, and reading the titles through the glass.
You shall be my librarian.
He read a little but didn't like it.
He did not once smile, and ended by frowning.
"Why?
Isn't it funny?" asked Fyodor Pavlovitch.
Smerdyakov did not speak.
"Answer, stupid!"
"It's all untrue," mumbled the boy, with a grin.
"Then go to the devil!
You have the soul of a lackey.
That's all true.
Read that."
He thought it dull.
So the bookcase was closed again.
Shortly afterwards Marfa and Grigory reported to Fyodor Pavlovitch that Smerdyakov was gradually beginning to show an extraordinary fastidiousness.
He would sit before his soup, take up his spoon and look into the soup, bend over it, examine it, take a spoonful and hold it to the light.
A beetle?" Grigory would ask.
"A fly, perhaps," observed Marfa.
The squeamish youth never answered, but he did the same with his bread, his meat, and everything he ate.
He would hold a piece on his fork to the light, scrutinize it microscopically, and only after long deliberation decide to put it in his mouth.
What fine gentlemen's airs!" Grigory muttered, looking at him.
When Fyodor Pavlovitch heard of this development in Smerdyakov he determined to make him his cook, and sent him to Moscow to be trained.
He spent some years there and came back remarkably changed in appearance.
He looked extraordinarily old for his age.
His face had grown wrinkled, yellow, and strangely emasculate.
In character he seemed almost exactly the same as before he went away.
In Moscow, too, as we heard afterwards, he had always been silent.
Moscow itself had little interest for him; he saw very little there, and took scarcely any notice of anything.
On the other hand, he came back to us from Moscow well dressed, in a clean coat and clean linen.
He brushed his clothes most scrupulously twice a day invariably, and was very fond of cleaning his smart calf boots with a special English polish, so that they shone like mirrors.
He turned out a first rate cook.
Fyodor Pavlovitch paid him a salary, almost the whole of which Smerdyakov spent on clothes, pomade, perfumes, and such things.
But he seemed to have as much contempt for the female sex as for men; he was discreet, almost unapproachable, with them. Fyodor Pavlovitch began to regard him rather differently.
His fits were becoming more frequent, and on the days he was ill Marfa cooked, which did not suit Fyodor Pavlovitch at all.
"Why are your fits getting worse?" asked Fyodor Pavlovitch, looking askance at his new cook.
"Would you like to get married?
Shall I find you a wife?"
But Smerdyakov turned pale with anger, and made no reply.
Fyodor Pavlovitch left him with an impatient gesture.
The great thing was that he had absolute confidence in his honesty.
It happened once, when Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk, that he dropped in the muddy courtyard three hundred rouble notes which he had only just received.
He only missed them next day, and was just hastening to search his pockets when he saw the notes lying on the table.
Where had they come from?
Smerdyakov had picked them up and brought them in the day before.
"Well, my lad, I've never met any one like you," Fyodor Pavlovitch said shortly, and gave him ten roubles.
If it had occurred to any one to wonder at the time what the young man was interested in, and what was in his mind, it would have been impossible to tell by looking at him.
Yet he used sometimes to stop suddenly in the house, or even in the yard or street, and would stand still for ten minutes, lost in thought.
A physiognomist studying his face would have said that there was no thought in it, no reflection, but only a sort of contemplation.
He stands, as it were, lost in thought.
Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously.
He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his soul's salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native village, and perhaps do both.
Lobby
Feldman had set his legs the problem of heading for the great spaceport and escape from Earth, and he let them take him without further guidance.
His mind was wrapped up in a whirl of the past-his past and that of the whole planet.
Idealism!
Throughout history, some men had sought the ideal, and most had called it freedom.
Only fools expected absolute freedom, but wise men dreamed up many systems of relative freedom, including democracy. They had tried that in America, as the last fling of the dream.
It had been a good attempt, too.
The men who drew the Constitution had been pretty practical dreamers. They came to their task after a bitter war and a worse period of wild chaos, and they had learned where idealism stopped and idiocy began. They set up a republic with all the elements of democracy that they considered safe.
But the men who followed the framers of the new plan were a different sort, without the knowledge of practical limits.
The privileges their ancestors had earned in blood and care became automatic rights.
Practical men tried to explain that there were no such rights-that each generation had to pay for its rights with responsibility.
That kind of talk didn't get far.
People wanted to hear about rights, not about duties.
In a way, they got it.
They got the vote extended to everyone.
The man on subsidy or public dole could vote to demand more.
The man who read of nothing beyond sex crimes could vote on the great political issues of the world.
No ability was needed for his vote.
In fact, he was assured that voting alone was enough to make him a fine and noble citizen.
He became a great man by listing his unthought, hungry desire for someone to take care of him without responsibility.
So he went out and voted for the man who promised him most, or who looked most like what his limited dreams felt to be a father image or son image or hero image.
He never bothered later to see how the men he'd elected had handled the jobs he had given them.
Someone had to look, of course, and someone did.
Organized special interests stepped in where the mob had failed.
Lobbies grew up.
There had always been pressure groups, but now they developed into a third arm of the government.
The old Farm Lobby was unbeatable.
The big farmers shaped the laws they wanted.
They convinced the little farmers it was for the good of all, and they made the story stick well enough to swing the farm vote.
They made the laws when it came to food and crops.
The last of the great lobbies was Space, probably.
It was an accident that grew up so fast it never even knew it wasn't a real part of the government.
It developed during a period of chaos when another country called Russia got the first hunk of metal above the atmosphere and when the representatives who had been picked for everything but their grasp of science and government went into panic over a myth of national prestige.
The space effort was turned over to the aircraft industry, which had never been able to manage itself successfully except under the stimulus of war or a threat of war.
The failing airplane industry became the space combine overnight, and nobody kept track of how big it was, except a few sharp operators.
They worked out a system of subcontracts that spread the profits so wide that hardly a company of any size in the country wasn't getting a share. Thus a lot of patriotic, noble voters got their pay from companies in the lobby block and could be panicked by the lobby at the first mention of recession.
So Space Lobby took over completely in its own field.
It developed enough pressure to get whatever appropriations it wanted, even over Presidential veto.
It created the only space experts, which meant that the men placed in government agencies to regulate it came from its own ranks.
The other lobbies learned a lot from Space.
There had been a medical lobby long before, but it had been a conservative group, mostly concerned with protecting medical autonomy and ethics.
It also tried to prevent government control of treatment and payment, feeling that it couldn't trust the people to know where to stop.
But its history was a long series of retreats.
It fought what it called socialized medicine.
But the people wanted their troubles handled free-which meant by government spending, since that could be added to the national debt, and thus didn't seem to cost anything.
Then quantity of treatment paid, rather than quality.
Competence no longer mattered so much.
The Lobby lost, but didn't know it-because the lowered standards of competence in the profession lowered the caliber of men running the political aspects of that profession as exemplified by the Lobby.
It took a world-wide plague to turn the tide.
The plague began in old China; anything could start there, with more than a billion people huddled in one area and a few madmen planning to conquer the world.
It wiped out two billion people, depopulated Africa and most of Asia, and wrecked Europe, leaving only America comparatively safe to take over.
An obscure scientist in one of the laboratories run by the Medical Lobby found a cure before the first waves of the epidemic hit America. Rutherford Ryan, then head of the Lobby, made sure that Medical Lobby got all the credit.
By the time the world recovered, America ran it and the Medical Lobby was untouchable.
Ryan made a deal with Space Lobby, and the two effectively ran the world.
None of the smaller lobbies could buck them, and neither could the government.
There was still a president and a congress, as there had been a Senate under the Roman Caesars.
The real government had become a kind of oligarchy, as it always did after too much false democracy ruined the ideals of real and practical self rule.
A man belonged to his Lobby, just as a serf had belonged to his feudal landlord.
It was a safe world now.
Maybe progress had been halted at about the level of nineteen eighty, but so long as the citizens didn't break the rules of their lobbies, they had very little to worry about.
For that, for security and the right not to think, most people were willing to leave well enough alone.
Some rules seemed harsh, of course, such as the law that all operations had to be performed in Lobby hospitals.
But that could be justified; it was the only safe kind of surgery and the only way to make sure there was no unsupervised experimentation, such as that which supposedly caused the plague.
The rule was now an absolute ethic of medicine.
It also made for better fees.
Feldman's father had stuck by the rule but had questioned it.
Feldman learned not to question in medical school.
He scored second in Medical Ethics only to Christina Ryan.
He had never figured why she singled him out for her attentions, but he gloried in both those attentions and the results.
He became automatically a rising young man, the favorite of the daughter of the Lobby president.
He went through internship without a sign of trouble. Chris humored him in his desire to spend three years of practice in a poor section loaded with disease, and her father approved; such selfless dedication was the perfect image projection for a future son in law.
In return, he agreed to follow that period by becoming an administrator.
A doctor's doctor, as they put it.
They were married in April and his office was ready in May, complete with a staff of eighty.
The publicity releases had gone out, and the Public Relations Lobby that handled news and education was paid to begin the greatest build-up any young genius ever had.
They celebrated that, with a little party of some four hundred people and reporters at Ryan's lodge in Canada.
It was to be a gala weekend.
It was then that Baxter shot himself.
Baxter had been Feldman's closest friend in the Lobby.
He'd come along to handle press relations and had gotten romantic about the countryside, never having been out of a city before.
He hired a guide and went hunting, eighty miles beyond the last outpost of civilization.
Somehow, he got his hand on a gun, though only guides were supposed to touch them, managed to overcome its safety devices, and then pulled the trigger with the gun pointed the wrong way.
Chris, Feldman and Harnett from Public Relations had accompanied him on the trip.
They were sitting in a nearby car while Feldman enjoyed the scenery, Chris made further plans, and Harnett gathered material.
There was also a photographer and writer, but they hadn't been introduced by name.
Feldman reached Baxter first.
The man was moaning and scared, and he was bleeding profusely.
Only a miracle had saved him from instant death.
The bullet had struck a rib, been deflected and robbed of some of its energy, and had barely reached the heart.
But it had pierced the pericardium, as best Feldman could guess, and it could be fatal at any moment.
He'd reached for a probe without thinking.
Chris knocked his hand aside.
She was right, of course.
He couldn't operate outside a hospital.
But they had no phone in the lodge where the guide lived and no way to summon an ambulance.
They'd have to drive Baxter back in the car, which would almost certainly result in his death.
When Feldman seemed uncertain, Harnett had given his warning in a low but vehement voice.
"You touch him, Dan, and I'll spread it in every one of our media.
I'll have to.
There'd be a leak, with all the guides and others here, and we can't afford that.
I like you-you have color.
But touch that wound and I'll crucify you."
Chris added her own threats.
She'd spent years making him the outlet for all her ambitions, denied because women were still only second rate members of Medical Lobby.
She couldn't let it go now.
And she was probably genuinely shocked.
Baxter groaned again and started to bleed more profusely.
There wasn't much equipment.
Feldman operated with a pocketknife sterilized in a bottle of expensive Scotch and only anodyne tablets in place of anesthesia.
He got the bullet out and sewed up the wound with a bit of surgical thread he'd been using to tie up a torn good luck emblem.
Chris swore harshly and beat her fists against the bole of a tree.
But Baxter lived.
Execution
There were periods when fear clogged his throat and left him gasping with the need to scream and beat his cell walls.
There were also times when it didn't seem to matter, and when his only thoughts were for the villages and the plague.
They brought him the papers, where he was painted as a monster beside whom Jack the Ripper and Albrecht Delier were gentle amateurs.
They were trying to focus all fear and resentment on him.
Maybe it was working. There were screaming crowds outside the jail, and the noise of their hatred was strong enough to carry through even the atmosphere of Mars. But there were also signs that the Lobby was worried, as if afraid that some attempt might still be made to rescue him.
He'd looked forward to the trip to the airport as a way of judging public reaction.
But apparently the Lobby had no desire to test that. The guards led him up to the roof of the jail, where a rocket was waiting.
The landing space was too small for one of the station shuttles, but a little Northport Southport shuttle was parked there after what must have been a difficult set down.
The guards tested Doc's manacles and forced him into the shuttle.
Inside, Chris was waiting, carrying an official automatic.
There was also a young pilot, looking nervous and unhappy.
He was muttering under his breath as the guards locked Doc's legs to a seat and left.
"All right," Chris ordered.
"Up ship!"
"I tell you we're overweight with you.
I wasn't counting on three for the trip," the pilot protested.
"The only thing that will get this into orbit with the station is faith.
I'm loaded with every drop of fuel she'll hold and it still isn't enough."
"That's your problem," Chris told him firmly.
"You've got your orders, and so have i Up ship!"
Chris had never been afraid to do what she felt she should.
The pilot stared at her doubtfully and finally turned back to his controls, still muttering.
The shuttle lifted sluggishly, but there was no great difficulty.
Doc could see that there was even some fuel remaining when they slipped into the tube at the orbital station.
Chris went out, and other guards came in to free him.
"So long, dr Feldman," the pilot called softly as they led him out. Then the guards shoved him through the airlock into the station.
He grinned wryly.
He roamed the cabin until he found a little collapsible table.
He set the electron microscope up on that and plugged it in.
It seemed a shame that good equipment should be wasted along with his life.
He wondered if they would really throw it out into space with him.
Probably they would.
He pushed a button on the call board over the table and asked for the steward.
There was a long wait, as if the procedure were being checked with some authority, but finally he received a surly acknowledgement. "Steward.
"How's the chance of getting some food?"
"You're on first-class."
They could afford it, Doc decided.
He wouldn't cost them much, considering the distance he was going.
"Bring me two complete dinners-one Earth normal and one Mars normal."
"Okay, Feldman.
A sharp click interrupted him.
"That's enough, Steward.
Captain Everts speaking.
dr Feldman, you have my apologies.
Until you reach your destination, you are my passenger and entitled to every consideration of any other passenger except freedom of movement through the ship.
I am always available for legitimate complaints."
Feldman shook his head.
He'd heard of such men.
But he'd thought the species extinct.
The steward brought his food in a thoroughly chastened manner.
He managed to find space for it and came to attention.
For a moment, as the smell of real steak reached him, Doc regretted the fact that his metabolism had been switched.
Then he shrugged.
A little wouldn't hurt him, though there was no proper nourishment in it.
He squeezed some of the gravy and bits of meat into one of his bottles, sticking to his purpose; then he fell to on the rest.
But after a few bites, it was queerly unsatisfactory.
The seemingly unappealing Mars normal ragout suited his current tastes better, after all.
Once the steward had cleared away the dishes, Doc went to work.
It was better than wasting his time in dread.
He might even be able to leave some notes behind.
A gong sounded, and a red light warned him that acceleration was due.
He finished with his bottles, put them into the incubator, and piled into his bunk, swallowing one of the tablets of morphetal the ship furnished.
Acceleration had ended, and a simple breakfast was waiting when he awoke.
He flipped the switch while reaching for the coffee.
"Captain Everts," the speaker said.
"Come ahead," Feldman invited.
He cut off the switch and glanced at the clock on the wall.
There were less than eleven hours left to him.
There was neither friendliness nor hostility in his glance.
His words were courteous as Doc motioned toward the tray of breakfast.
"I've already eaten, thank you."
He accepted a chair.
His voice was apologetic when he began.
"This is a personal matter which I perhaps have no right to bring up.
But my wife is greatly worried about this plague.
The ship physician believes mrs Everts may have the plague, but isn't sure of the symptoms.
Doc wondered about the physician.
Apparently there was another man who placed his patients above anything else, though he was probably meticulous about obeying all actual rules.
There was no law against listening to a pariah, at least.
"When did she have Selznik's migraine?" he asked.
We went through it together, shortly after having our metabolism switched during the food shortage of 'eighty eight."
Doc felt carefully at the base of the Captain's skull; the swelling was there.
He asked a few questions, but there could be no doubt.
"Both of you must have it, Captain, though it won't mature for another year.
I'm sorry."
Doc studied the man.
But Everts wasn't the sort to dicker even for his life.
"Nothing that I've found, Captain.
I have a clue, but I'm still working on it.
Perhaps if I could leave a few notes for your physician-"
It was Everts' turn to shake his head.
"I'm sorry, dr Feldman.
I have orders to burn out your cabin when you leave.
But thank you." He got to his feet and left as quietly and erectly as he had entered.
Doc tore up his notes bitterly.
He paced his cabin slowly, reading out the hours while his eyes lingered on the little bottle of cultures.
There was half an hour left when he began opening the little bottles and making his films.
He was still not finished when steps echoed down the hall, but he was reasonably sure of his results.
The bug could not grow in Earth normal tissue.
Three men entered the room.
One of them, dressed in a spacesuit, held out another suit to him.
Doc forced his hands to steadiness with foolish pride and began climbing into the suit.
He reached for the helmet, but the man shook his head, pointing to the oxygen gauge.
There would be exactly one hour's supply of oxygen when he was thrown out and it still lacked five minutes of the deadline.
The spacesuited man climbed into it and began strapping down so that the rush of air would not sweep him outward when the other seal was released.
Doc had saved one bracky weed.
Now he raised it to his lips, fumbling for a light.
Everts stepped forward and flipped a lighter.
Doc inhaled deeply.
Then he caught himself.
"Better change your metabolism back to Earth normal, Captain Everts," he said, and his voice was so normal that he hardly recognized it.
Everts' eyes widened briefly.
The man bowed faintly.
"Thank you, dr Feldman."
It was ridiculous, impossible, and yet there was a curious relief at the formality of it.
It was like something from a play, too unreal to affect his life.
Everts nodded to the man holding the helmet.
Doc dropped his bracky weed and felt the helmet snap down.
A hiss of oxygen reached him and the suit ballooned out.
There was no gravity; the two men handed him up easily to the one in the airlock while the inner seal began to close.
There was still ten seconds to go, according to the big chronometer that had been installed in the lock.
The spaceman used it in tying the sack of possessions firmly to Doc's suit.
A red light went on.
The man caught Doc and held him against the outer seal.
The red light blinked.
Four seconds ... three ... two....
The spaceman's face swung around in surprise.
The red light blinked and stayed on.
The outer seal snapped open and the spaceman heaved.
Air exploded outwards, and Doc went with it.
He was alone in space, gliding away from the ship, with oxygen hissing softly through the valve and ticking away his life.
It was sheer stupidity, since nothing could have been more merciful than to lose this reality.
But the will to be himself was stronger than logic.
And bit by bit, he forced the fear and horror away from him until he could examine his situation.
He was spinning slowly, so that stars ahead of him seemed to crawl across his view.
The ship was retreating from him already hundreds of yards away.
Mars was a shrunken pill far away.
Then something blinked to one side.
He turned his head to stare.
A little ship was less than three hundred yards away.
He recognized it as a life raft.
Now his spin brought him around to face it, and he saw it was parallelling his course.
It meant someone was trying to save him.
He flailed his arms and beat his legs together, senselessly trying to force himself closer, while trying to guess who could have taken the chance.
There wasn't that much free money in the villages.
Something flashed a hot blue, and the little ship leaped forward. Whoever was handling it knew nothing about piloting.
It picked up too much speed at too great an angle.
Again blue spurts came, but this time matters were even worse.
Then there was a long wait before a third try was made.
He estimated the course.
It would miss him by a good hundred feet, but it was probably the best the amateur pilot could do.
The ship drifted closer, but to one side.
It would soon pass him completely.
A spacesuited figure suddenly appeared in the tiny airlock, holding a coil of rope.
The rope shot out, well thrown.
But it was too short.
It would pass within ten feet-and might as well have been ten miles for all the good it would do him.
Every film he had seen on space seemed to form a mad jumble in his mind, but he seized on the first idea he could remember.
He inhaled deeply and yanked the oxygen tank free.
An automatic seal on the suit cut off the connection.
He aimed the hissing bottle, fumbling for the manual valve.
It almost worked.
It kicked him toward the rope slightly, but most of the energy was wasted in setting him into a wilder spin.
He blinked, trying to spot the rope.
It was within five feet now.
This time he threw the bottle away from it.
It added spin to his vertical axis, but the rope came into view within arm's reach.
He grasped it, just as his lungs seemed about to burst.
He couldn't hold on long enough to tie the rope....
His lungs gave up suddenly, collapsing and then sucking in greedily. Clean air rushed in, letting his head clear.
He'd forgotten that the inflated suit held enough oxygen for several minutes.
His body struck the edge of the airlock and a hand jerked him inside. The outer seal was slammed shut and locked, and there was a hiss of air entering.
He threw back his helmet just as Chris Ryan jerked hers off.
Her voice shook almost hysterically.
"Thank God.
Dan, I almost gave up!"
"I liked the air out there better," he told her bitterly.
"If you'll open the lock again, I'll leave.
"I came along to see you killed, as you know very well.
Saving you wasn't in my orders."
He grunted and reached for the handle that would release the outer lock. "Better get back inside if you don't want to blow out with me."
"It's up to you, Dan," she told him, and there was all the sincerity in the world in her blue eyes.
"I'm on your side now."
He began counting on his fingers.
"Let's see.
"It was all true." Anger began to grow in her eyes.
If you don't care about me, you might consider the people dying of the plague who need you!"
She'd played her trump, and it took the round.
He followed her.
"All right," he said grudgingly.
"Spill your story."
She held out a copy of a space radiogram, addressed to mrs d e Everts, and signed by one of the best doctors on the Lobby Board of Directors.
Regret confirm diagnosis.
Topsecret.
Repeat topsecret. Martian fever incubates fourteen years, believed highly fatal.
No cure, research beginning immediately.
Penalty violation topsecret, death all concerned.
"mrs Everts rates a topsecret break?" Doc commented dryly.
"Come off it, Chris!"
"She's the daughter of Elmers of Space Lobby!" Chris answered.
She pointed to the message, underlining words with her finger.
I can see that now.
I can see a lot of things."
"You've got me beat then," he said.
"I can't see how such a reformed young noblewoman calmly walked over and stole a life raft.
I can't see how your brilliant mind concocted this whole scheme in almost no time. And to be honest, I can't even see why Medical Lobby decided to save me at the last minute and sent you to do the job.
You didn't have to spy out knowledge from me.
I've been trying all along to get it to your Research division."
She sighed and dropped onto a little seat.
"I can't prove my motives.
You'll just have to believe me.
But it wasn't hard to do what I've done.
That shuttle pilot was found in a routine check, stowed away on the life raft.
I was with Captain Everts when he was found, so I discovered how to get into the raft.
And I heard his whole confession.
He wasn't the real pilot.
He'd come from the villages to save you.
The whole scheme was his.
I just used it, hoping I could reach you."
As always her story had a convincing element she shouldn't have known. The pilot's farewell, addressing him as dr Feldman, had been too low for her to hear, but it was something that fitted her story.
It was probably a deliberate clue to give him hope, to assure him the villages were still trying.
It shook his confidence.
"And your motive-your real motive?" he insisted.
She swore at him, then began ripping off the spacesuit.
She turned her back, pulling a thin blouse down from her neck.
He stared, then reached out to touch the lump there.
And you've decided your precious Lobby won't save you?"
She dropped her eyes, then raised them to meet his defiantly.
"I'm not just scared and selfish.
Dad caught it, too, and it must be close to the time for him.
He switched to Mars normal when he was a liaison agent and never changed back.
Dan, are we all going to have to die?
Can't you save him?"
Feldman was out of his suit and at the control panel.
There was a manual lever, which Chris must have used before.
It might work out here where there was room to maneuver and nothing to hit.
But trying to make a landing was going to be different.
"Dan?" she repeated.
He shrugged.
"I don't know.
They've started research too late and they'll be under so much pressure that the real brains won't have a chance.
The topsecret stuff looks bad for research.
Maybe there's a cure.
It works in culture bottles, but it may fail in person.
When I'm convinced I'm safe with you, I may tell you about it."
"Oh." Her voice was low.
Then she sighed.
"I suppose I can understand why you hate me, Dan."
"I don't hate you.
I'm too mixed up.
Tomorrow maybe, but not now.
Shut up and let me see if I can figure out how to land this thing."
He found that the fuel tanks were nearly full, but that still didn't leave much margin.
He had to reach the wastelands away from any of the shuttle ports.
They had no aspirators, however, and they couldn't cover much territory in the spacesuits they would have to use.
He jockeyed the ship around by trial and error, studying the manual that was lying prominently on the control panel.
According to the booklet, the ship was simple to operate.
It was self leveling in an atmosphere, and automatic flare computers were supposed to make it possible for an amateur to judge the rate of descent near the surface.
It looked reassuring-and was probably written with that in mind.
Finally he reached for the control, hoping he'd figured his landing orbit reasonably well by simple logic.
He smoothed it out in the following hours as he watched the markings on Mars.
When they were near turnover point, he began cranking the little gyroscope to swing the ship.
It saved fuel to turn without power, and he wasn't sure he could have turned accurately by blasting.
He was gaining some proficiency, however, he felt.
But now he had to waste fuel and ruin his orbit again.
There was no way to practice maneuvering without actually doing so.
In the end, he compromised, leaving a small margin for a bad landing that would require a second attempt, but with less practice than he wanted.
He had located Jake's village through the little telescope when he finally reached for the main blast control.
The thin haze of Mars' atmosphere came rushing up, while the blast lashed out.
He turned to the flare computer and back to what he could see through the quartz viewport.
The computer seemed to work as it should.
The speed was within acceptable limits.
He gave up trying to see the ground and was forced to trust the machinery designed for amateur pilots.
The flare bloomed, and he yanked down on the little lever.
It could have been worse.
They hit the ground, bounced twice, and turned over.
The ship was a mess when Feldman freed himself from the elastic straps of the seat.
Chris had shrieked as they hit, but she was unbuckling herself now.
He threw her her spacesuit and one of the emergency bottles of oxygen from the rack.
"Hurry up with that.
We've sprung a leak and the pressure's dropping."
They were halfway to the village when a dozen tractors came racing up and Jake piled out of the lead one to drag the two in with him.
"Heard about it from the broadcasts and figured you might land around here.
Jake caught his look and nodded.
You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick tempered, or "touchy" disposition.
This compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics.
Its brand falls, without a challenge, upon the Prodigal.
But are we right?
"He was angry," we read, "and would not go in." Look at the effect upon the father, upon the servants, upon the happiness of the guests.
What is it made of?
BORN AGAIN,
A want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity, a want of courtesy, a want of unselfishness, are all instantaneously symbolized in one flash of Temper.
Hence it is not enough to deal with the Temper.
Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but by putting something in-a great Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit of Christ.
Christ, the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours, sweetens, purifies, transforms all.
Time does not change men.
I cannot help speaking urgently, for myself, for yourselves.
In an atmosphere of suspicion men shrivel up; but in that atmosphere they expand, and find encouragement and educative fellowship.
To be trusted is to be saved.
The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom.
And
Practice.
Practice.
What makes a man a good linguist, a good stenographer?
Practice.
Practice.
And the constituents of this great character are only to be built up by
What was Christ doing in the carpenter's shop?
It is growing more beautiful, though you see it not; and every touch of temptation may add to its perfection.
Therefore keep in the midst of life.
How?
And love is something more than all its elements-a palpitating, quivering, sensitive, living thing. By synthesis of all the colors, men can make whiteness, they cannot make light.
By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they cannot make love.
We try to copy those who have it.
We watch.
We cannot help it.
Stand before that mirror, reflect Christ's character, and you will be changed into the same image from tenderness to tenderness.
And so look at this Perfect Character, this Perfect Life.
Look at
"God loves me!
God loves me!"
And there is no other way to get it. There is no mystery about it.
WHAT YOKES ARE FOR.
There is still one doubt to clear up.
After the statement, "Learn of Me," Christ throws in the disconcerting qualification:
Is the Christian life, after all, what its enemies take it for-an additional weight to the already great woe of life, some extra punctiliousness about duty, some painful devotion to observances, some heavy restriction and trammeling of all that is joyous and free in the world?
Is life not hard and sorrowful enough without being fettered with yet another yoke?
Did you ever stop to ask what a yoke is really for?
Is it to be a burden to the animal which wears it?
It is just the opposite.
It is to make its burden light.
Attached to the oxen in any other way than by a yoke, the plough would be intolerable.
Worked by means of a yoke, it is light.
A yoke is not an instrument of torture; it is
It is not a malicious contrivance for making work hard; it is a gentle device to make hard labor light.
It is not meant to give pain, but to save pain.
For generations we have had homilies on "The Yoke of Christ"--some delighting in portraying its narrow exactions; some seeking in these exactions the marks of its divinity; others apologizing for it, and toning it down; still others assuring us that, although it be very bad, it is not to be compared with the positive blessings of Christianity.
How many, especially among the young, has this one mistaken phrase driven forever away from the kingdom of God?
It is the literal wooden yoke which He, with His own hands in the carpenter shop, had probably often made.
He knew the difference between a smooth yoke and a rough one, a bad fit and a good fit; the difference also it made to the patient animal which had to wear it. The rough yoke galled, and the burden was heavy; the smooth yoke caused no pain, and the load was lightly drawn.
And what was the "burden"?
It was what all men bear.
It was simply life, human life itself, the general burden of life which all must carry with them from the cradle to the grave.
Christ saw that men took life painfully.
How to carry this burden of life had been the whole world's problem.
It is still the whole world's problem.
Take life as I take it.
Look at it from My point of view.
Interpret it upon My principles.
Take My yoke and learn of Me, and you will find it easy.
That would be to absolve him from living, since it is life itself that is the burden.
What Christianity does propose is to make it tolerable.
is simply His secret for the alleviation of human life, His prescription for the best and happiest method of living.
The harness they put on is antiquated.
A rough, ill fitted collar at the best, they make its strain and friction past enduring, by placing it where the neck is most sensitive; and by mere continuous irritation this sensitiveness increases until the whole nature is quick and sore.
This is the origin, among other things, of a disease called "touchiness"--a disease which, in spite of its innocent name, is one of the gravest sources of restlessness in the world.
It has a perfectly miraculous gift of healing.
Without doing any violence to human nature it sets it right with life, harmonizing it with all surrounding things, and restoring those who are jaded with the fatigue and dust of the world to a new grace of living.
In the mere matter of altering the perspective of life and changing the proportions of things, its function in lightening the care of man is altogether its own.
Suppose the attraction of the earth were removed?
What was a ton yesterday is not half a ton today.
So without changing one's circumstances, merely by offering a wider horizon and a different standard, it alters the whole aspect of the world.
But let us be quite sure when we speak of Christianity that we mean Christ's Christianity.
Other versions are either caricatures, or exaggerations, or misunderstandings, or shortsighted and surface readings.
For the most part their attainment is hopeless and the results wretched.
Butter.
It is of the first importance that every thing connected with milk and butter should be kept clean; if the milk acquires an unpleasant taste, it communicates it to the butter.
Tin pans are best to keep milk in, and they should be painted on the outside to keep them from rusting when they are put in water.
In summer, milk should be kept as cool as possible; before it is strained, the pans and strainer should be rinsed with cold water, and the milk not covered until it is cold, as soon as the cream rises sufficiently, it should be skimmed, and put in a large tin bucket with a lid that fits down tight, and stirred every day.
Butter will be spoiled by neglecting to stir the cream, a yellow scum will form on it, which gives it an unpleasant taste.
If you have no way of keeping your cream cool in hot weather, it ought to be churned twice a week, the earlier in the morning the better. Always put cold water in your churn the night before you use it, and change it in the morning just before you put in the cream.
When the butter is gathering, take off the lid of the churn to let the heated air escape, and move it gently, have your butter ladle and pan scalded and cooled, take out the butter and work it till all the milk is out, scrape some lumps of salt, and work in, cover it up, and set away in a cool place till the next morning, when work it again.
The air of a well will keep butter sweet for several weeks in the hottest weather.
It can be kept in this way as firm and sweet as in an ice house.
If you print butter for home use, it is not necessary to weigh it, make it out in little lumps that will weigh about half a pound, scald the print and ladle, and put them in cold water, as you print each lump, lay it on a dish.
To put up Butter for Winter.
Work it well, and salt it rather more than for table use, and pack it in stone pans or jars, with a thin cloth on the top, and salt on it an inch thick, keep it in a cool place, and if it is sweet when made, it will keep good till spring.
It should be tied up with paper to exclude the air.
Sift these ingredients one above another, on a large sized sheet of paper, then mix them well together, keep this mixture covered up close in a nice jar, and placed in a dry closet.
When your butter is worked and salted in the usual way, and ready to put in the jars, use one ounce of this composition to every pound of butter, work it well into the mass.
Butter cured in this way, (it is said) will keep good for several years. I have never kept it longer than from the fall until late in the spring, it was then very sweet and good.
It will not do to use for a month, because earlier, the salts will not be sufficiently blended with it.
It should be kept in wooden vessels, or nice stone jars.
Earthen ware jars are not suitable for butter, as during the decomposition of the salts, they corrode the glazing; and the butter becomes rancid and unhealthy.
Thus in cities during warm weather butter is often cheap, a house keeper may then purchase her winter supply.
It is very important to keep the butter in a cool place."
A great deal depends on the butter being well worked.
A large churning may be more effectually cleared of the butter milk in a few minutes, than in the old way in an hour.
By doing it quickly, it does not get soft and oily in hot weather.
A Pickle for Butter.
If the butter is good when put up in the fall, it will keep till you can get grass butter, in the spring.
The jars for this purpose should not have been previously used for pickles.
Persons living in the country sometimes have more milk than they can use, of which cheese may be made.
Have a clean cloth in the vat, put in the curd, close it over and put on the cover; if you have no cheese press, a heavy stone will answer the purpose; press it very gently at first, to keep the richness from running out.
Cheese made in this way has a rich, mild taste, and most persons are fond of it.
If you get eight gallons of milk a day, you may make cheese twice a week, and still have butter for the family.
Pennsylvania Cream Cheese.
The cheese called by this name is not in reality made of cream.
In six or seven hours it will be ready to take out of the press, when rub it over with fine salt, set it in a dry dark place, change it from one plate to another twice a day, and it will be fit for use in less than a week.
To Prepare Rennet for making Whey or Cheese.
Cottage Cheese or Smearcase.
Roasting Coffee.
Pick out the stones and black grains from the coffee, and if it is green, let it dry in an oven, or on a stove, then roast it till it is a light brown, be careful that it does not burn, as a few burnt grains will spoil the flavor of the whole.
White coffee need not be dried before roasting, and will do in less time.
The whites of one or two eggs, well beaten, and stirred in the coffee when half cold, and well mixed through it, are sufficient to clear two pounds, and is the most economical way of using eggs.
It will answer either for summer or winter.
Many persons use coffee roasters,--but some old experienced housekeepers think that the fine flavor flies off more than when done in a dutch oven, and constantly stirred.
If you are careful, it can be done very well in the dripping pan of a stove.
Coffee may be roasted in a dripping pan in a brick oven.
After the bread is taken out, there will be heat sufficient, put about two pounds in a pan, stir it a few times-it will roast gradually, and if not sufficiently brown, finish in a stove or before the fire.
If you have a large family, by using several pans, six pounds of coffee can thus be roasted, and but little time spent on it.
Boiling Coffee.
If you boil coffee too long, the aromatic flavor flies off.
Always be sure that the kettle is boiling when you make tea, or the flavor will not be so good, scald the pot, and allow a tea spoonful for each person.
Persons with weak nerves should never drink strong tea and coffee.
Before pouring out tea, it should be stirred with a spoon that the strength of each cup may be alike.
Milk is the best drink for children, but if that cannot be had, sweetened water, with a little milk, will do.
A New Mode of Preparing Chocolate.
one.
The Master said, Love makes a spot beautiful: who chooses not to dwell in love, has he got wisdom?
The Master said, Loveless men cannot bear need long, they cannot bear fortune long.
three.
five.
six.
The Master said, A man and his faults are of a piece.
By watching his faults we learn whether love be his.
eight.
nine.
ten.
He follows right.
eleven.
twelve.
The Master said, The chase of gain is rich in hate.
thirteen.
The Master said, What is it to sway a kingdom by courteous yielding?
fourteen.
fifteen.
Yes, said Tseng tzu.
After the Master had left, the disciples asked what was meant.
sixteen.
eighteen.
nineteen.
If thou must travel, hold a set course.
twenty.
twenty one.
twenty three.
twenty four.
twenty five.
one.
three.
Tzu kung asked, And what of me?
Thou art a vessel, said the Master.
What kind of vessel?
A rich temple vessel.
four.
five.
six.
When Tzu lu heard this he was glad.
seven.
eight.
nine.
Why chide with Yue?
I righted this on Yue.
ten.
The Master said, I have met no firm man.
thirteen.
fourteen.
sixteen.
seventeen.
eighteen.
He was faithful, said the Master.
I do not know, said the Master: how should this amount to love?
On coming to another kingdom he said, 'Like my lord Ts'ui,' and left it.
I do not know, said the Master: how should this amount to love?
nineteen.
Chi Wen thought thrice before acting.
twenty.
twenty one.
twenty two.
twenty three.
twenty four.
twenty five.
In the course of a month or two after the receipt of the books jude had grown callous to the shabby trick played him by the dead languages.
In fact, his disappointment at the nature of those tongues had, after a while, been the means of still further glorifying the erudition of Christminster.
To acquire languages, departed or living in spite of such obstinacies as he now knew them inherently to possess, was a herculean performance which gradually led him on to a greater interest in it than in the presupposed patent process.
The mountain weight of material under which the ideas lay in those dusty volumes called the classics piqued him into a dogged, mouselike subtlety of attempt to move it piecemeal.
He had endeavoured to make his presence tolerable to his crusty maiden aunt by assisting her to the best of his ability, and the business of the little cottage bakery had grown in consequence.
An aged horse with a hanging head had been purchased for eight pounds at a sale, a creaking cart with a whity brown tilt obtained for a few pounds more, and in this turn out it became Jude's business thrice a week to carry loaves of bread to the villagers and solitary cotters immediately round Marygreen.
The only copies he had been able to lay hands on were old Delphin editions, because they were superseded, and therefore cheap.
The hampered and lonely itinerant conscientiously covered up the marginal readings, and used them merely on points of construction, as he would have used a comrade or tutor who should have happened to be passing by.
And though jude may have had little chance of becoming a scholar by these rough and ready means, he was in the way of getting into the groove he wished to follow.
He was frequently met in the lanes by pedestrians and others without his seeing them, and by degrees the people of the neighbourhood began to talk about his method of combining work and play (such they considered his reading to be), which, though probably convenient enough to himself, was not altogether a safe proceeding for other travellers along the same roads.
Then a private resident of an adjoining place informed the local policeman that the baker's boy should not be allowed to read while driving, and insisted that it was the constable's duty to catch him in the act, and take him to the police court at Alfredston, and get him fined for dangerous practices on the highway.
The policeman thereupon lay in wait for jude, and one day accosted him and cautioned him.
To do that official justice, he did not put himself much in the way of Jude's bread cart, considering that in such a lonely district the chief danger was to jude himself, and often on seeing the white tilt over the hedges he would move in another direction.
The sun was going down, and the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the woods in the opposite quarter.
He turned first to the shiny goddess, who seemed to look so softly and critically at his doings, then to the disappearing luminary on the other hand, as he began:
The horse stood still till he had finished the hymn, which jude repeated under the sway of a polytheistic fancy that he would never have thought of humouring in broad daylight.
Reaching home, he mused over his curious superstition, innate or acquired, in doing this, and the strange forgetfulness which had led to such a lapse from common sense and custom in one who wished, next to being a scholar, to be a Christian divine.
It had all come of reading heathen works exclusively.
The more he thought of it the more convinced he was of his inconsistency.
He began to wonder whether he could be reading quite the right books for his object in life.
Certainly there seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediaeval colleges at Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.
He had dabbled in Clarke's Homer, but had never yet worked much at the New Testament in the Greek, though he possessed a copy, obtained by post from a second-hand bookseller.
He abandoned the now familiar Ionic for a new dialect, and for a long time onward limited his reading almost entirely to the Gospels and Epistles in Griesbach's text.
Moreover, on going into Alfredston one day, he was introduced to patristic literature by finding at the bookseller's some volumes of the Fathers which had been left behind by an insolvent clergyman of the neighbourhood.
As another outcome of this change of groove he visited on Sundays all the churches within a walk, and deciphered the Latin inscriptions on fifteenth century brasses and tombs.
On one of these pilgrimages he met with a hunch backed old woman of great intelligence, who read everything she could lay her hands on, and she told him more yet of the romantic charms of the city of light and lore.
But how live in that city?
At present he had no income at all.
He had no trade or calling of any dignity or stability whatever on which he could subsist while carrying out an intellectual labour which might spread over many years.
What was most required by citizens?
Food, clothing, and shelter. An income from any work in preparing the first would be too meagre; for making the second he felt a distaste; the preparation of the third requisite he inclined to.
They built in a city; therefore he would learn to build.
He thought of his unknown uncle, his cousin Susanna's father, an ecclesiastical worker in metal, and somehow mediaeval art in any material was a trade for which he had rather a fancy.
He could not go far wrong in following his uncle's footsteps, and engaging himself awhile with the carcases that contained the scholar souls.
As a preliminary he obtained some small blocks of freestone, metal not being available, and suspending his studies awhile, occupied his spare half hours in copying the heads and capitals in his parish church.
There was a stone mason of a humble kind in Alfredston, and as soon as he had found a substitute for himself in his aunt's little business, he offered his services to this man for a trifling wage. Here jude had the opportunity of learning at least the rudiments of freestone working.
Some time later he went to a church builder in the same place, and under the architect's direction became handy at restoring the dilapidated masonries of several village churches round about.
Not forgetting that he was only following up this handicraft as a prop to lean on while he prepared those greater engines which he flattered himself would be better fitted for him, he yet was interested in his pursuit on its own account.
He now had lodgings during the week in the little town, whence he returned to Marygreen village every Saturday evening.
It being the end of the week he had left work early, and had come out of the town by a round about route which he did not usually frequent, having promised to call at a flour mill near Cresscombe to execute a commission for his aunt.
He was in an enthusiastic mood.
He seemed to see his way to living comfortably in Christminster in the course of a year or two, and knocking at the doors of one of those strongholds of learning of which he had dreamed so much.
He might, of course, have gone there now, in some capacity or other, but he preferred to enter the city with a little more assurance as to means than he could be said to feel at present.
A warm self content suffused him when he considered what he had already done.
Now and then as he went along he turned to face the peeps of country on either side of him.
"I have acquired quite an average student's power to read the common ancient classics, Latin in particular." This was true, jude possessing a facility in that language which enabled him with great ease to himself to beguile his lonely walks by imaginary conversations therein.
I wish there was only one dialect all the same.
"I have done some mathematics, including the first six and the eleventh and twelfth books of Euclid; and algebra as far as simple equations.
"I know something of the Fathers, and something of Roman and English history.
"These things are only a beginning.
Hence I must next concentrate all my energies on settling in Christminster. Once there I shall so advance, with the assistance I shall there get, that my present knowledge will appear to me but as childish ignorance.
I must save money, and I will; and one of those colleges shall open its doors to me-shall welcome whom now it would spurn, if I wait twenty years for the welcome.
And then he continued to dream, and thought he might become even a bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise, Christian life.
And what an example he would set!
Well, on second thoughts, a bishop was absurd.
Perhaps a man could be as good and as learned and as useful in the capacity of archdeacon as in that of bishop.
Yet he thought of the bishop again.
Hoity toity!"
The sounds were expressed in light voices on the other side of the hedge, but he did not notice them. His thoughts went on:
"Hoity toity!"
"--but I can work hard.
I have staying power in abundance, thank God! and it is that which tells....
Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I'll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased."
In his deep concentration on these transactions of the future Jude's walk had slackened, and he was now standing quite still, looking at the ground as though the future were thrown thereon by a magic lantern.
On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and had fallen at his feet.
A glance told him what it was-a piece of flesh, the characteristic part of a barrow pig, which the countrymen used for greasing their boots, as it was useless for any other purpose.
Pigs were rather plentiful hereabout, being bred and fattened in large numbers in certain parts of North Wessex.
On the other side of the hedge was a stream, whence, as he now for the first time realized, had come the slight sounds of voices and laughter that had mingled with his dreams.
He mounted the bank and looked over the fence.
On the further side of the stream stood a small homestead, having a garden and pig sties attached; in front of it, beside the brook, three young women were kneeling, with buckets and platters beside them containing heaps of pigs' chitterlings, which they were washing in the running water.
"Thank you!" said jude severely.
"I DIDN'T throw it, I tell you!" asserted one girl to her neighbour, as if unconscious of the young man's presence.
"Nor I," the second answered.
"Oh, Anny, how can you!" said the third.
"If I had thrown anything at all, it shouldn't have been THAT!"
I don't care for him!" And they laughed and continued their work, without looking up, still ostentatiously accusing each other.
jude grew sarcastic as he wiped his face, and caught their remarks.
"YOU didn't do it-oh no!" he said to the up stream one of the three.
She whom he addressed was a fine dark eyed girl, not exactly handsome, but capable of passing as such at a little distance, despite some coarseness of skin and fibre.
She had a round and prominent bosom, full lips, perfect teeth, and the rich complexion of a Cochin hen's egg.
"Whoever did it was wasteful of other people's property."
"Oh, that's nothing."
"But you want to speak to me, I suppose?"
"Oh yes; if you like to."
"Shall I clamber across, or will you come to the plank above here?"
Springing to her feet, she said: "Bring back what is lying there."
jude was now aware that no message on any matter connected with her father's business had prompted her signal to him.
He set down his basket of tools, picked up the scrap of offal, beat a pathway for himself with his stick, and got over the hedge.
They walked in parallel lines, one on each bank of the stream, towards the small plank bridge.
As the girl drew nearer to it, she gave without jude perceiving it, an adroit little suck to the interior of each of her cheeks in succession, by which curious and original manoeuvre she brought as by magic upon its smooth and rotund surface a perfect dimple, which she was able to retain there as long as she continued to smile.
This production of dimples at will was a not unknown operation, which many attempted, but only a few succeeded in accomplishing.
They met in the middle of the plank, and jude, tossing back her missile, seemed to expect her to explain why she had audaciously stopped him by this novel artillery instead of by hailing him.
"Oh no"
"We are doing this for my father, who naturally doesn't want anything thrown away.
He makes that into dubbin." She nodded towards the fragment on the grass.
"What made either of the others throw it, I wonder?" jude asked, politely accepting her assertion, though he had very large doubts as to its truth.
"Impudence.
Don't tell folk it was I, mind!"
"Do!"
"Arabella Donn.
I'm living here."
"I must have known it if I had often come this way.
But I mostly go straight along the high road."
"My father is a pig breeder, and these girls are helping me wash the innerds for black puddings and such like."
They talked a little more and a little more, as they stood regarding each other and leaning against the hand rail of the bridge.
The unvoiced call of woman to man, which was uttered very distinctly by Arabella's personality, held jude to the spot against his intention-almost against his will, and in a way new to his experience.
"What a nice looking girl you are!" he murmured, though the words had not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism.
"I don't suppose I could?" he answered
"That's for you to think on.
There's nobody after me just now, though there med be in a week or two." She had spoken this without a smile, and the dimples disappeared.
jude felt himself drifting strangely, but could not help it.
"Will you let me?"
"I don't mind."
By this time she had managed to get back one dimple by turning her face aside for a moment and repeating the odd little sucking operation before mentioned, jude being still unconscious of more than a general impression of her appearance.
"Next Sunday?" he hazarded. "To morrow, that is?"
"Yes."
"Shall I call?"
"Yes."
jude Fawley shouldered his tool basket and resumed his lonely way, filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze.
He had just inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere, which had evidently been hanging round him everywhere he went, for he knew not how long, but had somehow been divided from his actual breathing as by a sheet of glass.
The intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how.
It had been no vestal who chose THAT missile for opening her attack on him. He saw this with his intellectual eye, just for a short; fleeting while, as by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an inscription on a wall before being enshrouded in darkness.
And then this passing discriminative power was withdrawn, and jude was lost to all conditions of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure, that of having found a new channel for emotional interest hitherto unsuspected, though it had lain close beside him.
He was to meet this enkindling one of the other sex on the following Sunday.
Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions, and she silently resumed her flicking and sousing of the chitterlings in the pellucid stream.
"I don't know.
"Lord! he's nobody, though you med think so.
Since then he's been very stuck up, and always reading.
He wants to be a scholar, they say."
Don't you think it, my child!"
"Oh, don't ye!
Whether you do or whether you don't, he's as simple as a child.
It is dark here in the forest.
The moss is soft and warm.
We have no bed now, save the moss, and no future, save the beasts.
No men stopped us at the gate.
It is true that our tunic was torn and stained with brown stains which had been blood. We raised our right arm and we said:
"Who are you, our brother?
For you do not look like a Scholar."
Then it was as if a great wind had stricken the hall, for all the Scholars spoke at once, and they were angry and frightened.
"A Street Sweeper!
It is against all the rules and all the laws!"
We spoke of it, and of our long quest, and of our tunnel, and of our escape from the Palace of Corrective Detention.
Then we put the wires to the box, and they all bent forward and sat still, watching.
And slowly, slowly as a flush of blood, a red flame trembled in the wire. Then the wire glowed.
But terror struck the men of the Council.
It is yours.
We give it to you."
Still they would not move.
But they looked upon us, and suddenly we were afraid.
They moved to the table and the others followed.
We do not care.
But the light?
What will you do with the light?"
We cannot alter the Plans again so soon."
"It must be destroyed!"
"You fools!" we cried.
You thrice damned fools!"
We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands.
And the road seemed not to be flat before us, but as if it were leaping up to meet us, and we waited for the earth to rise and strike us in the face.
But we ran.
Then we knew.
We were in the Uncharted Forest.
We crawled to it, we fell upon it, our face in our arms, and we lay still.
We lay thus for a long time.
Then we rose, we took our box and walked on into the forest.
It mattered not where we went.
We had nothing to fear from them. The forest disposes of its own victims.
So we walked on, our box in our arms, our heart empty.
Whatever days are left to us, we shall spend them alone. And we have heard of the corruption to be found in solitude.
We know these things, but we do not care.
We care for nothing on earth. We are tired.
We have not built this box for the good of our brothers.
We built it for its own sake.
Then a blow of pain struck us, our first and our only.
We thought of the Golden One.
It is best.
We hid in the bushes, and we waited.
The steps came closer.
And then we saw the fold of a white tunic among the trees, and a gleam of gold.
And they could not speak.
But they whispered only:
Then they knelt, and bowed their golden head before us.
We had never thought of that which we did.
We bent to raise the Golden One to their feet, but when we touched them, it was as if madness had stricken us.
The Golden One breathed once, and their breath was a moan, and then their arms closed around us.
We stood together for a long time.
Fear nothing of the forest.
There is no danger in solitude.
Give us your hand.
We have walked for many days.
At night, we choose a clearing, and we build a ring of fires around it.
We sleep in the midst of that ring, and the beasts dare not attack us.
The fires smoulder as a crown of jewels around us, and smoke stands still in the air, in columns made blue by the moonlight.
We sleep together in the midst of the ring, the arms of the Golden One around us, their head upon our breast.
Some day, we shall stop and build a house, when we shall have gone far enough.
When questions come to puzzle us, we walk faster, then turn and forget all things as we watch the Golden One following. The shadows of leaves fall upon their arms, as they spread the branches apart, but their shoulders are in the sun
We watch the leaf which has fallen upon their shoulder, and it lies at the curve of their neck, and a drop of dew glistens upon it like a jewel.
They approach us, and they stop, laughing, knowing what we think, and they wait obediently, without questions, till it pleases us to turn and go on.
We go on and we bless the earth under our feet.
But questions come to us again, as we walk in silence.
If this is the great evil of being alone, then what is good and what is evil?
But we lived not, when we toiled for our brothers, we were only weary.
Thus do we wonder.
What is that error?
We do not know, but the knowledge struggles within us, struggles to be born.
They were silent, then they spoke slowly, and their words were halting, like the words of a child learning to speak for the first time:
We looked into each other's eyes and we knew that the breath of a miracle had touched us, and fled, and left us groping vainly.
I wept in deliverance and in pity for all mankind.
I understood why the best in me had been my sins and my transgressions; and why I had never felt guilt in my sins.
I understood that centuries of chains and lashes will not kill the spirit of man nor the sense of truth within him.
Then I called the Golden One, and I told her what I had read and what I had learned.
She looked at me and the first words she spoke were:
"I love you."
"My dearest one, it is not proper for men to be without names.
There was a time when each man had a name of his own to distinguish him from all other men.
And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer.
Her name was Gaea.
Let this be your name, my Golden One, for you are to be the mother of a new kind of gods."
Now I look ahead.
I have found the engine which produced this light. I shall learn how to repair it and how to make it work again.
I shall learn how to use the wires which carry this power.
For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers.
I have my mind.
Then here, on this mountaintop, with the world below me and nothing above me but the sun, I shall live my own truth.
Gaea is pregnant with my child.
He will be taught to say "I" and to bear the pride of it.
And as I stand here at the door of glory, I look behind me for the last time.
Freedom from what?
That is freedom.
But he broke their chains.
Then he was enslaved by the kings.
But he broke their chains.
He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race.
But he broke their chains.
He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right.
But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning.
What brought it to pass?
What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission?
Those men who survived those eager to obey, eager to live for one another, since they had nothing else to vindicate them-those men could neither carry on, nor preserve what they had received.
Thus did all thought, all science, all wisdom perish on earth.
But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate.
Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word.
What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest and in warning.
And they chose to perish, for they knew.
To them, I send my salute across the centuries, and my pity.
And I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope.
For that which they died to save can never perish.
Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth.
It may sleep, but it will awaken.
It may wear chains, but it will break through.
Man, not men.
And it will become as the heart of the earth, lost and hidden at first, but beating, beating louder each day.
And all my brothers, and the Councils of my brothers, will hear of it, but they will be impotent against me.
For the freedom of Man.
For his rights.
For his life.
For his honor.
And here, over the portals of my fort, I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner.
The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle.
The sacred word:
The monarch, after making some inquiry into the rank and character of his rival, despatched the informer with a present of a pair of purple slippers, to complete the magnificence of his Imperial habit.
But that youth was the son of Marcellus, the general of cavalry, who, in the first campaign of the Gallic war, had deserted the standard of the Caesar and the republic.
Without appearing to indulge his personal resentment, Julian might easily confound the crime of the son and of the father; but he was reconciled by the distress of Marcellus, and the liberality of the emperor endeavored to heal the wound which had been inflicted by the hand of justice.
The office, or rather the name, of consul, was cherished by a prince who contemplated with reverence the ruins of the republic; and the same behavior which had been assumed by the prudence of Augustus was adopted by Julian from choice and inclination.
On the calends of January, at break of day, the new consuls, Mamertinus and Nevitta, hastened to the palace to salute the emperor.
As soon as he was informed of their approach, he leaped from his throne, eagerly advanced to meet them, and compelled the blushing magistrates to receive the demonstrations of his affected humility.
From the palace they proceeded to the senate.
They fixed, by unquestionable tradition, the scene of each memorable event.
This minister, to whom Julian communicated, without reserve, his most careless levities, and his most serious counsels, received an extraordinary commission to restore, in its pristine beauty, the temple of Jerusalem; and the diligence of Alypius required and obtained the strenuous support of the governor of Palestine.
THE PROCESS OF COLONIZATION
It involved the use of capital to pay for their passage, to sustain them on the voyage, and to start them on the way of production.
Under this stern economic necessity, Puritans, Scotch Irish, Germans, and all were alike laid.
What proportion of the colonists were able to finance their voyage across the sea is a matter of pure conjecture. Undoubtedly a very considerable number could do so, for we can trace the family fortunes of many early settlers.
Henry Cabot Lodge is authority for the statement that "the settlers of New England were drawn from the country gentlemen, small farmers, and yeomanry of the mother country....
They did not belong to the classes from which emigration is usually supplied, for they all had a stake in the country they left behind." Though it would be interesting to know how accurate this statement is or how applicable to the other colonies, no study has as yet been made to gratify that interest.
For the present it is an unsolved problem just how many of the colonists were able to bear the cost of their own transfer to the New World.
The great barrier in the way of the poor who wanted to go to America was the cost of the sea voyage.
To overcome this difficulty a plan was worked out whereby shipowners and other persons of means furnished the passage money to immigrants in return for their promise, or bond, to work for a term of years to repay the sum advanced.
This system was called indentured servitude.
It is probable that the number of bond servants exceeded the original twenty thousand Puritans, the yeomen, the Virginia gentlemen, and the Huguenots combined.
All the way down the coast from Massachusetts to Georgia were to be found in the fields, kitchens, and workshops, men, women, and children serving out terms of bondage generally ranging from five to seven years.
In the proprietary colonies the proportion of bond servants was very high.
Hence the gates of the proprietary colonies were flung wide open. Every inducement was offered to immigrants in the form of cheap land, and special efforts were made to increase the population by importing servants.
In Pennsylvania, it was not uncommon to find a master with fifty bond servants on his estate.
The story of this traffic in white servants is one of the most striking things in the history of labor.
Bondmen differed from the serfs of the feudal age in that they were not bound to the soil but to the master. They likewise differed from the negro slaves in that their servitude had a time limit.
Still they were subject to many special disabilities.
A free citizen of Pennsylvania who indulged in horse racing and gambling was let off with a fine; a white servant guilty of the same unlawful conduct was whipped at the post and fined as well.
A bondman could not marry without his master's consent; nor engage in trade; nor refuse work assigned to him.
For an attempt to escape or indeed for any infraction of the law, the term of service was extended. The condition of white bondmen in Virginia, according to Lodge, "was little better than that of slaves.
Loose indentures and harsh laws put them at the mercy of their masters." It would not be unfair to add that such was their lot in all other colonies.
When their weary years of servitude were over, if they survived, they might obtain land of their own or settle as free mechanics in the towns.
For thousands, on the contrary, bondage proved to be a real avenue to freedom and prosperity.
Many of the victims of the practice were young children, for the traffic in them was highly profitable.
In this gruesome business there lurked many tragedies, and very few romances.
Parents were separated from their children and husbands from their wives.
Hundreds of skilled artisans-carpenters, smiths, and weavers-utterly disappeared as if swallowed up by death.
In one case a young man who was forcibly carried over the sea lived to make his way back to England and establish his claim to a peerage.
The Americans protested vigorously but ineffectually against this practice. Indeed, they exaggerated its evils, for many of the "criminals" were only mild offenders against unduly harsh and cruel laws.
Other transported offenders were "political criminals"; that is, persons who criticized or opposed the government.
This class included now Irish who revolted against British rule in Ireland; now Cavaliers who championed the king against the Puritan revolutionists; Puritans, in turn, dispatched after the monarchy was restored; and Scotch and English subjects in general who joined in political uprisings against the king.
When this form of bondage was first introduced into Virginia in sixteen nineteen, it was looked upon as a temporary necessity to be discarded with the increase of the white population.
Moreover it does not appear that those planters who first bought negroes at the auction block intended to establish a system of permanent bondage.
Only by a slow process did chattel slavery take firm root and become recognized as the leading source of the labor supply.
In sixteen fifty, thirty years after the introduction of slavery, there were only three hundred Africans in Virginia.
The great increase in later years was due in no small measure to the inordinate zeal for profits that seized slave traders both in Old and in New England.
Finding it relatively easy to secure negroes in Africa, they crowded the Southern ports with their vessels.
The English Royal African Company sent to America annually between seventeen thirteen and seventeen forty three from five to ten thousand slaves.
The ship owners of New England were not far behind their English brethren in pushing this extraordinary traffic.
This effort was futile, for the royal governor promptly vetoed it.
From time to time similar bills were passed, only to meet with royal disapproval.
South Carolina, in seventeen sixty, absolutely prohibited importation; but the measure was killed by the British crown.
As late as seventeen seventy two, Virginia, not daunted by a century of rebuffs, sent to George the third a petition in this vein: "The importation of slaves into the colonies from the coast of Africa hath long been considered as a trade of great inhumanity and under its present encouragement, we have too much reason to fear, will endanger the very existence of Your Majesty's American dominions....
Deeply impressed with these sentiments, we most humbly beseech Your Majesty to remove all those restraints on Your Majesty's governors of this colony which inhibit their assenting to such laws as might check so very pernicious a commerce."
All such protests were without avail.
The negro population grew by leaps and bounds, until on the eve of the Revolution it amounted to more than half a million.
In five states-Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia-the slaves nearly equalled or actually exceeded the whites in number.
In South Carolina they formed almost two thirds of the population.
To the North, the proportion of slaves steadily diminished although chattel servitude was on the same legal footing as in the South.
The climate, the soil, the commerce, and the industry of the North were all unfavorable to the growth of a servile population.
Still, slavery, though sectional, was a part of the national system of economy.
Northern ships carried slaves to the Southern colonies and the produce of the plantations to Europe.
"If the Northern states will consult their interest, they will not oppose the increase in slaves which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers," said john Rutledge, of South Carolina, in the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States.
Irruption of Northern people upon the Roman territories-Visigoths-Barbarians called in by Stilicho-Vandals in Africa-Franks and Burgundians give their names to France and Burgundy-The Huns-Angles give the name to England-Attila, king of the Huns, in Italy-Genseric takes Rome-The Lombards.
These migrating masses destroyed the Roman empire by the facilities for settlement which the country offered when the emperors abandoned Rome, the ancient seat of their dominion, and fixed their residence at Constantinople; for by this step they exposed the western empire to the rapine of both their ministers and their enemies, the remoteness of their position preventing them either from seeing or providing for its necessities.
To suffer the overthrow of such an extensive empire, established by the blood of so many brave and virtuous men, showed no less folly in the princes themselves than infidelity in their ministers; for not one irruption alone, but many, contributed to its ruin; and these barbarians exhibited much ability and perseverance in accomplishing their object.
The emperor Theodosius conquered them with great glory; and, being wholly reduced to his power, they no longer selected a sovereign of their own, but, satisfied with the terms which he granted them, lived and fought under his ensigns, and authority.
On the death of Theodosius, his sons Arcadius and Honorius, succeeded to the empire, but not to the talents and fortune of their father; and the times became changed with the princes.
Each of these, after the death of Theodosius, determined not to be governors merely, but to assume sovereign dominion over their respective provinces.
To make the Visigoths their enemies, he advised that the accustomed stipend allowed to this people should be withheld; and as he thought these enemies would not be sufficient alone to disturb the empire, he contrived that the Burgundians, Franks, Vandals, and Alans (a northern people in search of new habitations), should assail the Roman provinces.
After this victory, Alaric died, and his successor, Astolphus, having married Placidia, sister of the emperors, agreed with them to go to the relief of Gaul and Spain, which provinces had been assailed by the Vandals, Burgundians, Alans, and Franks, from the causes before mentioned.
At this time Theodosius, son of Arcadius, succeeded to the empire; and, bestowing little attention on the affairs of the west, caused those who had taken possession to think of securing their acquisitions.
Thus the Vandals ruled Africa; the Alans and Visigoths, Spain; while the Franks and Burgundians not only took Gaul, but each gave their name to the part they occupied; hence one is called France, the other Burgundy.
To these disorders it must be added, that the emperor, seeing himself attacked on so many sides, to lessen the number of his enemies, began to treat first with the Vandals, then with the Franks; a course which diminished his own power, and increased that of the barbarians.
He, a short time previously, in order to possess the entire monarchy, had murdered his brother Bleda; and having thus become very powerful, Andaric, king of the Zepidi, and Velamir, king of the Ostrogoths, became subject to him.
Attila, having entered Italy, laid siege to Aquileia, where he remained without any obstacle for two years, wasting the country round, and dispersing the inhabitants.
This, as will be related in its place, caused the origin of Venice.
Attila having left Italy, Valentinian, emperor of the west, thought of restoring the country; and, that he might be more ready to defend it against the barbarians, abandoned Rome, and removed the seat of government to Ravenna.
Tempted by the hope of booty, he came immediately, and finding Rome abandoned, plundered the city during fourteen days.
He also ravaged many other places in Italy, and then, loaded with wealth, withdrew to Africa.
The romans, having returned to their city, and Maximus being dead, elected Avitus, a Roman, as his successor.
CHAPTER four.
Then we discussed the food question.
George said:
We had taken up an oil stove once, but "never again." It had been like living in an oil shop that week.
We tried to get away from it at Marlow.
We left the boat by the bridge, and took a walk through the town to escape it, but it followed us.
The whole town was full of oil.
The High Street stunk of oil; we wondered how people could live in it.
And we walked miles upon miles out Birmingham way; but it was no use, the country was steeped in oil.
Therefore, in the present instance, we confined ourselves to methylated spirit.
Even that is bad enough.
You get methylated pie and methylated cake.
But methylated spirit is more wholesome when taken into the system in large quantities than paraffine oil.
For other breakfast things, George suggested eggs and bacon, which were easy to cook, cold meat, tea, bread and butter, and jam.
Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself.
It wants the whole boat to itself.
It goes through the hamper, and gives a cheesy flavour to everything else there.
You can't tell whether you are eating apple pie or German sausage, or strawberries and cream.
There is too much odour about cheese.
I remember a friend of mine, buying a couple of cheeses at Liverpool. Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards.
"Oh, with pleasure, dear boy," I replied, "with pleasure."
I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab.
There, the wind carried a whiff from the cheeses full on to our steed.
It woke him up, and, with a snort of terror, he dashed off at three miles an hour.
It took two porters as well as the driver to hold him in at the station; and I do not think they would have done it, even then, had not one of the men had the presence of mind to put a handkerchief over his nose, and to light a bit of brown paper.
I took my ticket, and marched proudly up the platform, with my cheeses, the people falling back respectfully on either side.
The train was crowded, and I had to get into a carriage where there were already seven other people.
One crusty old gentleman objected, but I got in, notwithstanding; and, putting my cheeses upon the rack, squeezed down with a pleasant smile, and said it was a warm day.
A few moments passed, and then the old gentleman began to fidget.
"Quite oppressive," said the man next him.
And then they both began sniffing, and, at the third sniff, they caught it right on the chest, and rose up without another word and went out. And then a stout lady got up, and said it was disgraceful that a respectable married woman should be harried about in this way, and gathered up a bag and eight parcels and went.
The remaining four passengers sat on for a while, until a solemn looking man in the corner, who, from his dress and general appearance, seemed to belong to the undertaker class, said it put him in mind of dead baby; and the other three passengers tried to get out of the door at the same time, and hurt themselves.
I smiled at the black gentleman, and said I thought we were going to have the carriage to ourselves; and he laughed pleasantly, and said that some people made such a fuss over a little thing.
He accepted, and we forced our way into the buffet, where we yelled, and stamped, and waved our umbrellas for a quarter of an hour; and then a young lady came, and asked us if we wanted anything.
"What's yours?" I said, turning to my friend.
"I'll have half a crown's worth of brandy, neat, if you please, miss," he responded.
From Crewe I had the compartment to myself, though the train was crowded. As we drew up at the different stations, the people, seeing my empty carriage, would rush for it.
And they would run along, carrying heavy bags, and fight round the door to get in first.
From Euston, I took the cheeses down to my friend's house.
When his wife came into the room she smelt round for an instant.
Then she said:
"What is it?
Tell me the worst."
I said:
"It's cheeses.
Tom bought them in Liverpool, and asked me to bring them up with me."
My friend was detained in Liverpool longer than he expected; and, three days later, as he hadn't returned home, his wife called on me.
She said:
"What did Tom say about those cheeses?"
I replied that he had directed they were to be kept in a moist place, and that nobody was to touch them.
She said:
"Nobody's likely to touch them.
Had he smelt them?"
"You think he would be upset," she queried, "if I gave a man a sovereign to take them away and bury them?"
"Do you mind keeping them for him?
Let me send them round to you."
"Madam," I replied, "for myself I like the smell of cheese, and the journey the other day with them from Liverpool I shall ever look back upon as a happy ending to a pleasant holiday.
But, in this world, we must consider others.
"Very well, then," said my friend's wife, rising, "all I have to say is, that I shall take the children and go to an hotel until those cheeses are eaten.
She kept her word, leaving the place in charge of the charwoman, who, when asked if she could stand the smell, replied, "What smell?" and who, when taken close to the cheeses and told to sniff hard, said she could detect a faint odour of melons.
They said it made them feel quite faint.
And, after that, he took them one dark night and left them in the parish mortuary.
But the coroner discovered them, and made a fearful fuss.
He said it was a plot to deprive him of his living by waking up the corpses.
My friend got rid of them, at last, by taking them down to a sea side town, and burying them on the beach.
It gained the place quite a reputation.
Visitors said they had never noticed before how strong the air was, and weak chested and consumptive people used to throng there for years afterwards.
Fond as I am of cheese, therefore, I hold that George was right in declining to take any.
Harris grew more cheerful.
George suggested meat and fruit pies, cold meat, tomatoes, fruit, and green stuff.
For drink, we took some wonderful sticky concoction of Harris's, which you mixed with water and called lemonade, plenty of tea, and a bottle of whisky, in case, as George said, we got upset.
It seemed to me that George harped too much on the getting upset idea. It seemed to me the wrong spirit to go about the trip in.
But I'm glad we took the whisky.
They are a mistake up the river.
They make you feel sleepy and heavy.
The next day, which was Friday, we got them all together, and met in the evening to pack.
We got a big Gladstone for the clothes, and a couple of hampers for the victuals and the cooking utensils.
I said I'd pack.
I rather pride myself on my packing.
George put on a pipe and spread himself over the easy chair, and Harris cocked his legs on the table and lit a cigar.
What I had meant, of course, was, that I should boss the job, and that Harris and George should potter about under my directions, I pushing them aside every now and then with, "Oh, you-!" "Here, let me do it." "There you are, simple enough!"--really teaching them, as you might say.
Their taking it in the way they did irritated me.
He said it made him feel that life was not an idle dream to be gaped and yawned through, but a noble task, full of duty and stern work.
It is my energetic nature. I can't help it.
However, I did not say anything, but started the packing.
"Ain't you going to put the boots in?" said Harris.
And I looked round, and found I had forgotten them.
That's just like Harris.
He couldn't have said a word until I'd got the bag shut and strapped, of course.
And George laughed-one of those irritating, senseless, chuckle headed, crack jawed laughs of his.
They do make me so wild.
I opened the bag and packed the boots in; and then, just as I was going to close it, a horrible idea occurred to me.
My tooth brush is a thing that haunts me when I'm travelling, and makes my life a misery.
I dream that I haven't packed it, and wake up in a cold perspiration, and get out of bed and hunt for it.
I rummaged the things up into much the same state that they must have been before the world was created, and when chaos reigned.
Of course, I found George's and Harris's eighteen times over, but I couldn't find my own.
I put the things back one by one, and held everything up and shook it.
Then I found it inside a boot. I repacked once more.
When I had finished, George asked if the soap was in.
I said I didn't care a hang whether the soap was in or whether it wasn't; and I slammed the bag to and strapped it, and found that I had packed my tobacco pouch in it, and had to re-open it.
They began in a light-hearted spirit, evidently intending to show me how to do it.
I made no comment; I only waited.
It did.
They started with breaking a cup.
Then Harris packed the strawberry jam on top of a tomato and squashed it, and they had to pick out the tomato with a teaspoon.
I felt that.
It made them nervous and excited, and they stepped on things, and put things behind them, and then couldn't find them when they wanted them; and they packed the pies at the bottom, and put heavy things on top, and smashed the pies in.
I never saw two men do more with one and twopence worth of butter in my whole life than they did.
After George had got it off his slipper, they tried to put it in the kettle.
"I'll take my oath I put it down on that chair," said George, staring at the empty seat.
"Most extraordinary thing I ever heard of," said George.
"So mysterious!" said Harris.
Then George got round at the back of Harris and saw it.
"Where?" cried Harris, spinning round.
"Stand still, can't you!" roared George, flying after him.
And they got it off, and packed it in the teapot.
Montmorency was in it all, of course.
If he can squirm in anywhere where he particularly is not wanted, and be a perfect nuisance, and make people mad, and have things thrown at his head, then he feels his day has not been wasted.
To get somebody to stumble over him, and curse him steadily for an hour, is his highest aim and object; and, when he has succeeded in accomplishing this, his conceit becomes quite unbearable.
He came and sat down on things, just when they were wanted to be packed; and he laboured under the fixed belief that, whenever Harris or George reached out their hand for anything, it was his cold, damp nose that they wanted.
Harris said I encouraged him.
A dog like that don't want any encouragement.
It's the natural, original sin that is born in him that makes him do things like that.
Harris was to sleep with us that night, and we went upstairs.
He said:
"Do you prefer the inside or the outside, j?"
George said:
Harris said:
"Seven."
"No-six," because I wanted to write some letters.
Harris and I had a bit of a row over it, but at last split the difference, and said half past six.
Kingston.--Instructive remarks on early English history.--Instructive observations on carved oak and life in general.--Sad case of Stivvings, junior.--Musings on antiquity.--I forget that I am steering.--Interesting result.--Hampton Court Maze.--Harris as a guide.
Perhaps, from the casement, standing hand in hand, they were watching the calm moonlight on the river, while from the distant halls the boisterous revelry floated in broken bursts of faint heard din and tumult.
Years later, to the crash of battle music, Saxon kings and Saxon revelry were buried side by side, and Kingston's greatness passed away for a time, to rise once more when Hampton Court became the palace of the Tudors and the Stuarts, and the royal barges strained at their moorings on the river's bank, and bright cloaked gallants swaggered down the water steps to cry: "What Ferry, ho!
Gadzooks, gramercy."
Speaking of oak staircases reminds me that there is a magnificent carved oak staircase in one of the houses in Kingston.
It is a shop now, in the market place, but it was evidently once the mansion of some great personage.
My friend said he would, and the shopman, thereupon, took him through the shop, and up the staircase of the house.
From the stairs, they went into the drawing room, which was a large, bright room, decorated with a somewhat startling though cheerful paper of a blue ground.
The proprietor went up to the paper, and tapped it.
It gave forth a wooden sound.
"Oak," he explained.
But the room looks cheerful now.
It would be like living in a church.
Married men have wives, and don't seem to want them; and young single fellows cry out that they can't get them.
Rich old couples, with no one to leave their money to, die childless.
It does not do to dwell on these things; it makes one so sad.
I believe he really liked study.
Well, that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that he couldn't go to school.
They put him under laughing gas one year, poor lad, and drew all his teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered so terribly with toothache; and then it turned to neuralgia and ear ache.
Will the prized treasures of to day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?
It is a white dog.
Its eyes blue.
Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.
We are too familiar with it.
So it is with that china dog.
I said, pleasantly enough:
"What's that for?
Why-"
But, there, I don't suppose I should really care for it when it came to actual practice.
It was a country cousin that Harris took in.
He said:
They said it was very kind of him, and fell behind, and followed.
They picked up various other people who wanted to get it over, as they went along, until they had absorbed all the persons in the maze.
That made Harris mad, and he produced his map, and explained his theory.
"The map may be all right enough," said one of the party, "if you know whereabouts in it we are now."
Harris didn't know, and suggested that the best thing to do would be to go back to the entrance, and begin again.
Anyhow, they had got something to start from then.
And three minutes later they were back in the centre again.
Whatever way they turned brought them back to the middle.
It became so regular at length, that some of the people stopped there, and waited for the others to take a walk round, and come back to them.
Harris drew out his map again, after a while, but the sight of it only infuriated the mob, and they told him to go and curl his hair with it.
"Manning!"
CHAPTER nine
Several weeks passed away in quiet retirement, and Emily's affliction began to soften into melancholy.
When her mind had recovered from the first shock of affliction, perceiving the danger of yielding to indolence, and that activity alone could restore its tone, she scrupulously endeavoured to pass all her hours in employment.
At length, she revived, and, looking feebly up at her niece, whose tears were falling over her, made an effort to speak, but her words were unintelligible, and Emily again apprehended she was dying.
Afterwards, however, she recovered her speech, and, being somewhat restored by a cordial, conversed for a considerable time, on the subject of her estates in France, with clearness and precision.
But her spirits were wakeful and agitated, and, finding it impossible to sleep, she determined to watch, once more, for the mysterious appearance, that had so much interested and alarmed her.
It was in one of these moments of obscurity, that she observed a small and lambent flame, moving at some distance on the terrace.
While she gazed, it disappeared, and, the moon again emerging from the lurid and heavy thunder clouds, she turned her attention to the heavens, where the vivid lightnings darted from cloud to cloud, and flashed silently on the woods below.
Emily, looking again upon the rampart, perceived the flame she had seen before; it moved onward; and, soon after, she thought she heard a footstep.
The light appeared and disappeared frequently, while, as she watched, it glided under her casements, and, at the same instant, she was certain, that a footstep passed, but the darkness did not permit her to distinguish any object except the flame.
It moved away, and then, by a gleam of lightning, she perceived some person on the terrace.
This person advanced, and the playing flame alternately appeared and vanished.
Emily wished to speak, to end her doubts, whether this figure were human or supernatural; but her courage failed as often as she attempted utterance, till the light moved again under the casement, and she faintly demanded, who passed.
'This light, lady,' said the soldier, 'has appeared to night as you see it, on the point of my lance, ever since I have been on watch; but what it means I cannot tell.'
'How does your comrade account for it?' said Emily.
'And what harm can it bode?' rejoined Emily.
'He knows not so much as that, lady.'
There are amongst us, who believe strange things.
Strange stories, too, have long been told of this castle, but it is no business of mine to repeat them; and, for my part, I have no reason to complain; our Chief does nobly by us.'
When he was gone, she opened it again, listened with a gloomy pleasure to the distant thunder, that began to murmur among the mountains, and watched the arrowy lightnings, which broke over the remoter scene.
The pealing thunder rolled onward, and then, reverbed by the mountains, other thunder seemed to answer from the opposite horizon; while the accumulating clouds, entirely concealing the moon, assumed a red sulphureous tinge, that foretold a violent storm.
She had continued thus for a considerable time, when, amidst the uproar of the storm, she thought she heard a voice, and, raising herself to listen, saw the chamber door open, and Annette enter with a countenance of wild affright.
When she entered, her aunt appeared to have fainted, for she was quite still, and insensible; and Emily with a strength of mind, that refused to yield to grief, while any duty required her activity, applied every means that seemed likely to restore her.
When Emily perceived, that all her efforts were ineffectual, she interrogated the terrified Annette, and learned, that Madame Montoni had fallen into a doze soon after Emily's departure, in which she had continued, until a few minutes before her death.
Emily, at this recital, shed tears.
She had no doubt but that the violent change in the air, which the tempest produced, had effected this fatal one, on the exhausted frame of Madame Montoni.
With Annette alone, therefore, whom she encouraged by her own example, she performed some of the last solemn offices for the dead, and compelled herself to watch during the night, by the body of her deceased aunt.
CHAPTER twenty
JANE REPORTS PROGRESS
Letter from the Honourable Jane Champion to Sir Deryck Brand.
My dear Deryck: My wires and post cards have not told you much beyond the fact of my safe arrival.
Having been here a fortnight, I think it is time I sent you a report.
And yet I wish I might, for once, borrow the pen of a ready writer; because I cannot help knowing that I have been passing through experiences such as do not often fall to the lot of a woman.
She is making herself indispensable to the patient, and he turns to her with a completeness of confidence which causes her heart to swell with professional pride.
And you, dear, clever doctor, are proved perfectly right in your diagnosis of the sentiment of the case.
But how to make him realise this, is the puzzle.
And behind come galloping the hosts of Pharaoh; chance, speeding on the wheels of circumstance.
Dear wise old Boy, dare you undertake the role of Moses!
As you may suppose, Jane grows haggard and thin in spite of old Margery's porridge-which is "put on" every day after lunch, for the next morning's breakfast, and anybody passing "gives it a stir." Did you know that was the right way to make porridge, Deryck?
I always thought it was made in five minutes, as wanted.
But what a syntactical digression!
By the way, I was quite unprepared to find him such a character.
I learn much from dr Mackenzie, and I love dr Rob, excepting on those occasions when I long to pick him up by the scruff of his fawn overcoat and drop him out of the window.
On the point of Nurse Rosemary's personal appearance, I found it best to be perfectly frank with the household.
Mercifully, the perfect training of an English man servant saved the situation, and he merely said: "Yessir; certainly sir," and looked upon, me, standing silently by, as a person who evidently delighted in giving unnecessary trouble.
He thought me small and slim; fair and very pretty; and it was most important, in order to avoid long explanations and mental confusion for him, that he should not at present be undeceived.
Simpson's expression of polite attention did not vary, and his only comment was: "Certainly, miss.
Well, to continue my report.
And a breath of the moors would be good for you. Also I have a little private plan, which depends largely for its fulfilment on your coming.
Oh, Boy-come!
Jeanette.
Wimpole Street.
My dear Jeanette: Certainly I will come.
Moreover, latest investigations have proved that the Israelites could not have crossed at the place you mention, but further north at the Bitter Lakes; a mere matter of detail, in no way affecting the extreme appositeness of your illustration, rather, adding to it; for I fear there are bitter waters ahead of you, my poor girl.
Still I am hopeful, nay, more than hopeful,--confident.
Often of late, in connection with you, I have thought of the promise about all things working together for good.
Any one can make GOOD things work together for good: but only the Heavenly Father can bring good out of evil; and, taking all our mistakes and failings and foolishnesses, cause them to work to our most perfect well-being.
The more intricate and involved this problem of human existence becomes, the greater the need to take as our own clear rule of life: "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths." Ancient marching orders, and simple; but true, and therefore eternal.
We must avert such a catastrophe.
And you so priceless!
Trust me to prove it to him,--to my own satisfaction and his,--if I get the chance.
Yours always devotedly,
Deryck Brand.
From Sir Deryck Brand to dr Robert Mackenzie.
Dear Mackenzie: Do you consider it to be advisable that I should shortly pay a visit to our patient at Gleneesh and give an opinion on his progress?
I find I can make it possible to come north this week end.
I hope you are satisfied with the nurse I sent up.
Yours very faithfully,
Deryck Brand.
From dr Robert Mackenzie to Sir Deryck Brand.
She may confide in you.
She cannot quite bring herself to trust in
CHAPTER twenty one
HARD ON THE SECRETARY
Nurse Rosemary sat with her patient in the sunny library at Gleneesh.
A small table was between them, upon which lay a pile of letters-his morning mail-ready for her to open, read to him, and pass across, should there chance to be one among them he wished to touch or to keep in his pocket.
They were seated close to the French window opening on to the terrace; the breeze, fragrant with the breath of spring flowers, blew about them, and the morning sun streamed in.
Garth, in white flannels, wearing a green tie and a button hole of primroses, lay back luxuriously, enjoying, with his rapidly quickening senses, the scent of the flowers and the touch of the sun beams.
Deryck was coming. He had not failed her.
"Quite right," said Nurse Rosemary.
"Because it was on one sheet.
Nurse Rosemary laughed.
"You are getting on so fast, mr Dalmain, that soon we shall be able to keep no secrets.
My letter was from-"
"Oh, don't tell me," cried Garth quickly, putting out his hand in protest.
"I had no idea of seeming curious as to your private correspondence, Miss Gray.
Only it is such a pleasure to report progress to you in the things I manage to find out without being told."
"But I meant to tell you anyway," said Nurse Rosemary.
"The letter is from Sir Deryck, and, amongst other things, he says he is coming up to see you next Saturday."
"Ah, good!" said Garth.
"And what a change he will find!
"No," said Nurse Rosemary, "not yet.
But, mr Dalmain, I was wanting to ask whether you could spare me just during forty eight hours; and dr Brand's visit would be an excellent opportunity.
dr Brand would read you Saturday's and Sunday's-Ah, I forgot; there is no Sunday post.
"I should have liked that we three should have talked together.
But no wonder you want a time off.
Shall you be going far?"
"No; I have friends near by.
"Yes," said Garth, reaching out his hand.
"Wait a minute.
I don't want that.
But kindly give me the rest."
Nurse Rosemary took out the newspaper; then pushed the pile along, until it touched his hand.
Garth took them.
"What a lot!" he said, smiling in pleasurable anticipation.
Kind old soul!
It is always best to avoid classical allusions, especially if sacred, unless one has them accurately.
He had been handling his letters, one by one; carefully fingering each, before laying it on the table beside him.
He had just come to one written on foreign paper, and sealed.
He broke off his sentence abruptly, held the letter silently for a moment, then passed his fingers slowly over the seal.
Nurse Rosemary watched him anxiously.
He made no remark, but after a moment laid it down and took up the next.
Then the usual order of proceedings commenced.
Garth lighted a cigarette-one of the first things he had learned to do for himself-and smoked contentedly, carefully placing his ash tray, and almost unfailingly locating the ash, in time and correctly.
Nurse Rosemary took up the first letter, read the postmark, and described the writing on the envelope.
Nurse Rosemary's fingers shook as she replaced the eighth in its envelope.
"Did I shoot straight, nurse?" he asked.
"Quite straight," she said.
"mr Dalmain, this letter has an Egyptian stamp, and the postmark is Cairo.
It is sealed with scarlet sealing wax, and the engraving on the seal is a plumed helmet with the visor closed."
"And the writing?" asked Garth, mechanically and very quietly.
"The handwriting is rather bold and very clear, with no twirls or flourishes.
It is written with a broad nib."
Nurse Rosemary fought with her throat, which threatened to close altogether and stifle her voice.
She opened the letter, turned to the last page, and found the signature.
"It is signed 'Jane Champion,' mr Dalmain," said Nurse Rosemary.
If I were with you, there would be so much I could say; but writing is so difficult, so impossible.
I hear you receive no visitors; but cannot you make just one exception, and let me come?
I was at the Great Pyramid when I heard.
I was sitting on the piazza after dinner.
The moonlight called up memories.
Would you have come, Garth?
And now, my friend, as you cannot come to me, may I come to you?
If you just say: "COME," I will come from any part of the world where I may chance to be when the message reaches me.
Never mind this Egyptian address.
Direct to me at my aunt's town house.
LET ME COME.
Believe me to be,
Yours, more than I can write,
Jane Champion.
Garth removed the hand which had been shielding his face.
"If you are not tired, Miss Gray, after reading so many letters, I should like to dictate my answer to that one immediately, while it is fresh in my mind.
Have you paper there?
Thank you.
May we begin?-- Dear Miss Champion ...
I am deeply touched by your kind letter of sympathy ...
A long pause.
"I am glad you did not give up the Nile trip but-"
An early bee hummed in from the hyacinths and buzzed against the pane. Otherwise the room was very still.
--"but of course, if you had sent for me I should have come."
The bee fought the window angrily, up and down, up and down, for several minutes; then found the open glass and whirled out into the sunshine, joyfully.
"It is more than kind of you to suggest coming to see me, but-"
Nurse Rosemary dropped her pen.
"Oh, mr Dalmain," she said, "let her come."
Garth turned upon her a face of blank surprise.
"I do not wish it," he said, in a tone of absolute finality.
"But think how hard it must be for any one to want so much to be near a-a friend in trouble, and to be kept away."
"It is only her wonderful kindness of heart makes her offer to come, Miss Gray.
It would greatly sadden her to see me thus."
Did I read it badly?
He spoke with quiet sternness, a frown bending his straight black brows.
"You read it quite well," he said, "but you do not do well to discuss it.
I must feel able to dictate my letters to my secretary, without having to explain them."
"I beg your pardon, sir," said Nurse Rosemary humbly.
Garth stretched his hand across the table, and left it there a moment; though no responsive hand was placed within it.
"Never mind," he said, with his winning smile, "my kind little mentor and guide.
You can direct me in most things, but not in this.
Now let us conclude.
Where were we?
Now let us go on ...
During the summer I shall be learning step by step to live this new life, in complete seclusion at Gleneesh.
I feel sure my friends will respect my wish in this matter.
I have with me one who most perfectly and patiently is helping-Ah, wait!" cried Garth suddenly.
"I will not say that.
She might think-she might misunderstand.
Had you begun to write it?
No? What was the last word?
Full stop after 'matter.' Now let me think."
Garth dropped his face into his hands, and sat for a long time absorbed in thought.
Nurse Rosemary waited.
Her right hand held the pen poised over the paper.
Her left was pressed against her breast.
At last Garth lifted his face.
"Yours very sincerely, Garth Dalmain;" he said.
Nightmare is caused by the nightmare man, a kind of evil spirit, struggling with one.
Sty, sty, go off my eye, Go on the first one that passes by.
To cure a sty repeat at a cross roads,--
Toothache may be cured by a written charm, sealed up and worn around the neck of the afflicted person.
The following is a copy of the charm:--
For toothache take an eyelash, an eyebrow, trimmings of the finger nails, and toe nails of the patient, bore a hole in a beech tree, and put them in.
WATER.
Rain water caught the first of June will cure freckles.
An Indian doctor used for inflammation of the eyes rain water caught on the third, fourth, and fifth of June.
A variant,--
Another custom is to steadily point a finger at the hiccougher, or to make him hold up his arm and shake it.
For nose bleed, put a key down the back.
For nose bleed, hold up the right arm.
For nose bleed, place a wad of paper between the upper lip and the gum.
CURES.
If you find an old bone in the field, rub the wart with it, then lay it down exactly as you found it.
Warts are cured by stealing pork from the family barrel of salted pork, rubbing the warts with it, and throwing it into the road.
Make a wart bleed, and put the blood on a penny, throw the latter away, and the finder will get the wart.
Roll them in paper and throw them away.
Go out of doors, count three, stop and pick up the stone nearest to your toe.
Wrap it up in a paper, and throw it away.
Take a potato and rub it over the wart, then wrap the potato in a piece of paper and throw it away.
Rub the wart with a cotton rag, spit on the rag and hide it under a water board (a wooden gutter used as a duct for rain water off the roof of a house), where the water will drip on it.
As the joints rot, the warts disappear.
If your left ear itches, some one is saying unpleasant things about you; but if your right ear, pleasant things.
Some say,--
If your nose itches, it is a sign of a present.
Itching in the palm is a sign of a fight, or of seeing a stranger.
An unexpected scratch denotes surprise.
APPAREL.
If you break your needle in making a dress, you will live to wear it out.
On cutting the finger nails:--
DOMESTIC LIFE.
Wet the finger and touch the "letter" on the candle.
Sweep the floor after dark, you'll see sickness before morning.
If, when a newly married couple go to housekeeping, she slyly takes her mother's dish cloth or dish wiper, she will never be homesick.
This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
PREFACE
This book is meant to be a companion to "Heretics," and to put the positive side in addition to the negative.
Many critics complained of the book called "Heretics" because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge.
While everything else may be different the motive in both cases is the same.
It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer.
It deals first with all the writer's own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed.
But if it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.
Gilbert k Chesterton.
THE only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge.
I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it.
There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool.
But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale.
What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again?
What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there?
What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book.
How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?
To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this; it is necessary to follow one path of argument; and this is the path that I here propose to follow.
For the very word "romance" has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome. Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute.
Beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove. The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired.
If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing.
But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.
We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is THIS achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.
But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England.
I do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull.
I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that mr Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes.
It is as easy as lying; because it is lying. The truth is, of course, that mr Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage.
I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it.
It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't. One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths.
And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.
I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century.
Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth.
And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine.
The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe.
I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
I add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note naturally should, at the beginning of the book.
These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics.
They are not intended to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed.
When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed.
I have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed; I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians, of where we ourselves got it.
This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography.
It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch.
But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.
Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about.
We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves.
But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think.
The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.
This difficulty occurs when the same long word is used in different connections to mean quite different things. Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric.
A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied to politics and society.
It is often suggested that all Liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free.
The thing is a mere accident of words.
In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself.
Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world.
For freeing the church now does not even mean freeing it in all directions.
In fact, it is a remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one comes to think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression. There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression-and that is orthodoxy.
I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
We concluded the last chapter with the discovery of one of them.
The doctrine seemingly most unpopular was found to be the only strength of the people. In short, we found that the only logical negation of oligarchy was in the affirmation of original sin.
I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles. For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them.
It is common to find trouble in a parish because the parish priest cannot admit that saint Peter walked on water; yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman says that his father walked on the Serpentine?
The only thing which is still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New Theology. But in truth this notion that it is "free" to deny miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them.
It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism. The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it.
Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth century man, uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was faith in their honest doubt.
There was indeed. Those words have a profound and even a horrible truth.
If you wish to feed the people, you may think that feeding them miraculously in the wilderness is impossible-but you cannot think it illiberal. If you really want poor children to go to the seaside, you cannot think it illiberal that they should go there on flying dragons; you can only think it unlikely.
A miracle only means the liberty of God. You may conscientiously deny either of them, but you cannot call your denial a triumph of the liberal idea.
The Catholic Church believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom. Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God. Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the Apocalypse chained the devil.
And those who assist this process are called the "liberal theologians."
But if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so; because they mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly, its control over the tyranny of circumstance.
Sometimes this truth is ignored in a singularly naive way, even by the ablest men. For instance, mr Bernard Shaw speaks with hearty old-fashioned contempt for the idea of miracles, as if they were a sort of breach of faith on the part of nature: he seems strangely unconscious that miracles are only the final flowers of his own favourite tree, the doctrine of the omnipotence of will.
Just in the same way he calls the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness, forgetting that he has just called the desire for life a healthy and heroic selfishness. How can it be noble to wish to make one's life infinite and yet mean to wish to make it immortal?
But I must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error; the notion that the "liberalising" of religion in some way helps the liberation of the world.
The second example of it can be found in the question of pantheism-or rather of a certain modern attitude which is often called immanentism, and which often is Buddhism. But this is so much more difficult a matter that I must approach it with rather more preparation.
The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue.
Here is a case. There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: "the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach."
You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella.
It is exactly the opposite. They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts.
Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns.
But in the case of the great religion of Gautama they feel sincerely a similarity.
Students of popular science, like mr Blatchford, are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.
This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it. The reasons were of two kinds: resemblances that meant nothing because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances which were not resemblances at all.
The author solemnly explained that the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike, or else he described them as alike in some point in which they are quite obviously different.
Thus, as a case of the first class, he said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the divine voice coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice to come out of the coal cellar.
You might as well say that it was a remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash.
It is rather like alluding to the obvious connection between the two ceremonies of the sword: when it taps a man's shoulder, and when it cuts off his head.
It is not at all similar for the man.
These scraps of puerile pedantry would indeed matter little if it were not also true that the alleged philosophical resemblances are also of these two kinds, either proving too much or not proving anything.
Most of humanity agrees that there is some way out. But as to what is the way out, I do not think that there are two institutions in the universe which contradict each other so flatly as Buddhism and Christianity.
Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.
The sight greatly staggered him, and he was so affected that his account of it was incoherent.
He had seen the abduction been in pursuit of the fairies.
He does not say if any of the wounded recovered.
Well, his grill has a plating of gold, And his twistings are greatly admired.
Each dropped one eyelid when before The throne he ventured, thinking 'Twould please the king.
That monarch swore He'd slay them all for winking.
They were not hot To hazard such disaster; They dared not close an eye-dared not See better than their master.
The court all wore the stuff, the flame Of royal anger dying. That's how court plaster got its name Unless I'm greatly lying.
A festival.
A person of greater enterprise than discretion, who in embracing an opportunity has formed an unfortunate attachment.
A lie that has not cut its teeth.
The iterated satiety of an enterprising affection.
A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
The Second Person of the secular Trinity.
He created patriotism and taught the nations war-founded theology, philosophy, law, medicine and Chicago.
Armit Huff Bettle
The frog is a diligent songster, having a good voice but no ear.
Jex Wopley
Mistress Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With dingle bells and cockle shells And cowslips, all in a row.
One spring, just as the grasses began to grow green upon the cliff and the trees were dressing their stiff, barren branches in robes of delicate foliage, the father and brothers bade good bye to Mary and her mother, for they were starting upon a voyage to the Black Sea.
"And how long will you be gone, papa?" asked Mary, who was perched upon her father's knee, where she could nestle her soft cheek against his bushy whiskers.
"How long?" he repeated, stroking her curls tenderly as he spoke; "well, well, my darling, it will be a long time indeed!
Do you know the cowslips that grow in the pastures, Mary?"
"Oh, yes; I watch for them every spring," she answered.
"And do you know the dingle bells that grow near the edge of the wood?" he asked again.
"And how about the cockle shells?"
"Them also I know," said Mary eagerly, for she was glad her father should find her so well acquainted with the field flowers; "there is nothing prettier than the big white flowers of the cockle shells.
But tell me, papa, what have the flowers to do with your coming home?"
So one more kiss, sweetheart, and then we must go, for our time is up."
The next morning, when Mary and her mother had dried their eyes, which had been wet with grief at the departure of their loved ones, the little girl asked earnestly,
"Mamma, may I make a flower garden?"
"I want to plant in it the cockle shells and the cowslips and the dingle bells," she answered.
And her mother, who had heard what the sailor had said to his little girl, knew at once what Mary meant; so she kissed her daughter and replied,
"Yes, Mary, you may have the flower garden, if you wish.
We will dig a nice little bed just at the side of the house, and you shall plant your flowers and care for them yourself."
"I think I 'd rather have the flowers at the front of the house," said Mary.
"But why?" enquired her mother; "they will be better sheltered at the side."
"I want them in front," persisted Mary, "for the sun shines stronger there."
"But I do n't want you to help," said Mary, "for this is to be my own little flower garden, and I want to do all the work myself."
Now I must tell you that this little girl, although very sweet in many ways, had one serious fault.
She was inclined to be a bit contrary, and put her own opinions and ideas before those of her elders.
So Mary made a long, narrow bed at the front of the house, and then she prepared to plant her flowers.
"If you scatter the seeds," said her mother, "the flower bed will look very pretty."
And in the end she planted the dingle bells all in one straight row, and the cockle shells in another straight row the length of the bed, and she finished by planting the cowslips in another long row at the back.
Her mother smiled, but said nothing; and now, as the days passed by, Mary watered and tended her garden with great care; and when the flowers began to sprout she plucked all the weeds that grew among them, and so in the mild spring weather the plants grew finely.
"When they have grown up big and strong," said Mary one morning, as she weeded the bed, "and when they have budded and blossomed and faded away again, then papa and my brothers will come home.
And now I feel as if the flowers were really my dear ones, and I must be very careful that they come to no harm!"
She was filled with joy when one morning she ran out to her flower garden after breakfast and found the dingle bells and cowslips were actually blossoming, while even the cockle shells were showing their white buds.
They looked rather comical, all standing in stiff, straight rows, one after the other; but Mary did not mind that.
While she was working she heard the tramp of a horse's hoofs, and looking up saw the big bluff Squire riding toward her.
The big Squire was very fond of children, and whenever he rode near the little white cottage he stopped to have a word with Mary.
He was old and bald headed, and he had side whiskers that were very red in color and very short and stubby; but there was ever a merry twinkle in his blue eyes, and Mary well knew him for her friend.
Now, when she looked up and saw him coming toward her flower garden, she nodded and smiled to him, and the big bluff Squire rode up to her side, and looked down with a smile at her flowers.
Then he said to her in rhyme (for it was a way of speaking the jolly Squire had),
"Mistress Mary, so contrary, How does your garden grow? With dingle bells and cockle shells And cowslips all in a row!"
And Mary, being a sharp little girl, and knowing the Squire's queer ways, replied to him likewise in rhyme, saying,
"I thank you, Squire, that you enquire How well the flowers are growing; The dingle bells and cockle shells And cowslips all are blowing!"
"That is a long story, Squire," said Mary; "but this much I may tell you,
"Oh, that 's the idea, is it?" asked the big bluff Squire, forgetting his poetry.
I shall come and see you again, little one, and watch the garden grow." And then he said "gee up" to his gray mare, and rode away.
The very next day, to Mary's great surprise and grief; she found the leaves of the dingle bells curling and beginning to wither.
"Oh, mamma," she called, "come quick!
Something is surely the matter with brother Hobart!"
"The dingle bells are dying," said her mother, after looking carefully at the flowers; "but the reason is that the cold winds from the sea swept right over your garden last night, and dingle bells are delicate flowers and grow best where they are sheltered by the woods.
If you had planted them at the side of the house, as I wished you to, the wind would not have killed them."
Mary did not reply to this, but sat down and began to weep, feeling at the same time that her mother was right and it was her own fault for being so contrary.
While she sat thus the Squire rode up, and called to her
"Fie, Mary, fie!
Why do you cry; And blind your eyes to knowing How dingle bells and cockle shells And cowslips all are growing?"
"Oh, Squire!" sobbed Mary, "I am in great trouble "Each dingle bell I loved so well Before my eyes is dying, And much I fear my brother dear In sickness now is lying!"
"Nonsense!" said the Squire; "because you named the flowers after your brother Hobart is no reason he should be affected by the fading of the dingle bells.
Dingle bells are delicate.
The weather now began to change, and the cold sea winds blew each night over Mary's garden.
She did not know this, for she was always lying snugly tucked up in her bed, and the warm morning sun usually drove away the winds; but her mother knew it, and feared Mary's garden would suffer.
One day Mary came into the house where her mother was at work and said, gleefully,
"Why do you think so?" asked her mother.
"Because the cockle shells and cowslips are both fading away and dying, just as the dingle bells did, and papa said when they faded and withered he and the boys would come back to us."
Mary's mother knew that the harsh winds had killed the flowers before their time, but she did not like to disappoint her darling, so she only said, with a sigh,
"I hope you are right, Mary, for we both shall be glad to welcome our dear ones home again."
"Pray tell me, dear, though much I fear The answer sad I know, How grow the sturdy cockle shells And cowslips, all in a row?"
And Mary looked up at him with her bright smile and answered,
See here, Mary, how would you like a little ride with me on my nag?"
"I would like it very much, sir," replied Mary.
"Then reach up your hand.
Then said the Squire,
"Take a look within that nook And tell me what is there."
And Mary exclaimed,
"A dingle bell, and truth to tell In full bloom, I declare!"
The Squire now clucked to his nag, and as they rode away he said,
"Now come with me and you shall see A field with cowslips bright And not a garden in the land Can show so fair a sight."
And so it was, for as they rode through the pastures the cowslips bloomed on every hand, and Mary's eyes grew bigger and bigger as she thought of her poor garden with its dead flowers.
And then the Squire took her toward the little brook that wandered through the meadows, flowing over the pebbles with a soft, gurgling sound that was very nearly as sweet as music; and when they reached it the big Squire said,
This was indeed true, and as Mary saw them she suddenly dropped her head and began to weep.
"What 's the matter, little one?" asked the Squire in his kind, bluff voice.
And Mary answered,
"Although the flowers I much admire, You know papa did say He won't be home again, Squire, Till all have passed away."
"You must be patient, my child," replied her friend; "and surely you would not have been thus disappointed had you not tried to make the field flowers grow where they do not belong.
Your father meant you to watch the flowers in the field; and if you will come and visit them each day, you will find the time waiting very short indeed."
Mary dried her eyes and thanked the kindly old Squire, and after that she visited the fields each day and watched the flowers grow.
And when it came nearer and had grown larger, both she and her mother saw that it was the "Skylark" come home again, and you can imagine how pleased and happy the sight of the pretty little ship made them.
And soon after, when Mary had been hugged by her two sunburned brothers and was clasped in her father's strong arms, she whispered,
"I knew you were coming soon, papa."
"And how did you know, sweetheart?" he asked, giving her an extra kiss.
And did you not say that, God willing, when this happened you would come back to us?"
"To be sure I did," answered her father, with a happy laugh; "and I must have spoken truly, sweetheart, for God in His goodness was willing, and here I am!"
CHAPTER two
When the hour of departure drew near, the maternal anxiety of mrs Morland will be naturally supposed to be most severe.
A thousand alarming presentiments of evil to her beloved Catherine from this terrific separation must oppress her heart with sadness, and drown her in tears for the last day or two of their being together; and advice of the most important and applicable nature must of course flow from her wise lips in their parting conference in her closet.
Cautions against the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farm house, must, at such a moment, relieve the fulness of her heart.
Who would not think so?
But mrs Morland knew so little of lords and baronets, that she entertained no notion of their general mischievousness, and was wholly unsuspicious of danger to her daughter from their machinations.
Her cautions were confined to the following points.
Sally, or rather Sarah (for what young lady of common gentility will reach the age of sixteen without altering her name as far as she can?), must from situation be at this time the intimate friend and confidante of her sister.
It is remarkable, however, that she neither insisted on Catherine's writing by every post, nor exacted her promise of transmitting the character of every new acquaintance, nor a detail of every interesting conversation that Bath might produce.
Everything indeed relative to this important journey was done, on the part of the Morlands, with a degree of moderation and composure, which seemed rather consistent with the common feelings of common life, than with the refined susceptibilities, the tender emotions which the first separation of a heroine from her family ought always to excite.
Under these unpromising auspices, the parting took place, and the journey began.
It was performed with suitable quietness and uneventful safety.
Neither robbers nor tempests befriended them, nor one lucky overturn to introduce them to the hero.
They arrived at Bath.
Catherine was all eager delight-her eyes were here, there, everywhere, as they approached its fine and striking environs, and afterwards drove through those streets which conducted them to the hotel.
She was come to be happy, and she felt happy already.
mrs Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them.
She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner.
The air of a gentlewoman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible, intelligent man like mr Allen.
In one respect she was admirably fitted to introduce a young lady into public, being as fond of going everywhere and seeing everything herself as any young lady could be.
Dress was her passion.
She had a most harmless delight in being fine; and our heroine's entree into life could not take place till after three or four days had been spent in learning what was mostly worn, and her chaperone was provided with a dress of the newest fashion.
Catherine too made some purchases herself, and when all these matters were arranged, the important evening came which was to usher her into the Upper Rooms.
Her hair was cut and dressed by the best hand, her clothes put on with care, and both mrs Allen and her maid declared she looked quite as she should do.
With such encouragement, Catherine hoped at least to pass uncensured through the crowd.
As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it came, but she did not depend on it.
The season was full, the room crowded, and the two ladies squeezed in as well as they could.
But this was far from being the case, and though by unwearied diligence they gained even the top of the room, their situation was just the same; they saw nothing of the dancers but the high feathers of some of the ladies.
Still they moved on-something better was yet in view; and by a continued exertion of strength and ingenuity they found themselves at last in the passage behind the highest bench.
It was a splendid sight, and she began, for the first time that evening, to feel herself at a ball: she longed to dance, but she had not an acquaintance in the room.
mrs Allen did all that she could do in such a case by saying very placidly, every now and then, "I wish you could dance, my dear-I wish you could get a partner." For some time her young friend felt obliged to her for these wishes; but they were repeated so often, and proved so totally ineffectual, that Catherine grew tired at last, and would thank her no more.
They were not long able, however, to enjoy the repose of the eminence they had so laboriously gained.
Everybody was shortly in motion for tea, and they must squeeze out like the rest.
They saw nothing of mr Allen; and after looking about them in vain for a more eligible situation, were obliged to sit down at the end of a table, at which a large party were already placed, without having anything to do there, or anybody to speak to, except each other.
mrs Allen congratulated herself, as soon as they were seated, on having preserved her gown from injury.
"How uncomfortable it is," whispered Catherine, "not to have a single acquaintance here!"
"Yes, my dear," replied mrs Allen, with perfect serenity, "it is very uncomfortable indeed."
"What shall we do?
The gentlemen and ladies at this table look as if they wondered why we came here-we seem forcing ourselves into their party."
"Aye, so we do.
I wish we had a large acquaintance here."
"I wish we had any-it would be somebody to go to."
"Very true, my dear; and if we knew anybody we would join them directly. The Skinners were here last year-I wish they were here now."
Here are no tea things for us, you see."
"No more there are, indeed.
How very provoking!
But I think we had better sit still, for one gets so tumbled in such a crowd!
Somebody gave me a push that has hurt it, I am afraid."
"No, indeed, it looks very nice.
I think you must know somebody."
"I don't, upon my word-I wish I did.
I wish I had a large acquaintance here with all my heart, and then I should get you a partner.
I should be so glad to have you dance.
How old-fashioned it is!
Look at the back."
After some time they received an offer of tea from one of their neighbours; it was thankfully accepted, and this introduced a light conversation with the gentleman who offered it, which was the only time that anybody spoke to them during the evening, till they were discovered and joined by mr Allen when the dance was over.
"Well, Miss Morland," said he, directly, "I hope you have had an agreeable ball."
"Very agreeable indeed," she replied, vainly endeavouring to hide a great yawn.
"I wish she had been able to dance," said his wife; "I wish we could have got a partner for her.
I have been saying how glad I should be if the Skinners were here this winter instead of last; or if the Parrys had come, as they talked of once, she might have danced with George Parry.
I am so sorry she has not had a partner!"
"We shall do better another evening I hope," was mr Allen's consolation.
Every five minutes, by removing some of the crowd, gave greater openings for her charms.
She was now seen by many young men who had not been near her before.
Not one, however, started with rapturous wonder on beholding her, no whisper of eager inquiry ran round the room, nor was she once called a divinity by anybody.
Yet Catherine was in very good looks, and had the company only seen her three years before, they would now have thought her exceedingly handsome.
She was looked at, however, and with some admiration; for, in her own hearing, two gentlemen pronounced her to be a pretty girl.